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Lovins 6 (2:00)
Topic(s): Alt Vehicles / Efficiency / Foreign Oil
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I think the confluence of international security and geopolitical instability and climate change and a lot of other issues, just money out of pocket, is getting so many people to pay attention now to different ways of using oil or not having to use oil that we're seeing technical and institutional revolutions starting to converge nicely.

Here's the way the auto revolution could evolve, and I'm not even talking about other ways to get around or not need to like if we don't mandate and subsidize sprawl we'll have a lot less of it. Just a good hybrid like a Prius, if you drive it properly—not the way consumer reports tells you to - will roughly double its efficiency. If you then make it ultra-light, ultra-low drag, you'll double its efficiency again more or less so now you're using a quarter of the gasoline per mile that you were before. Now run it on E-85 by an ethanol 85 percent, gasoline 15 percent, now you're using a quarter again as much gasoline as you were before—sixteen times less per mile than you started with. Then go to a plug-in hybrid—we'll probably see those entering the market this year, certainly next year. Well, that's another at least factor too and for some people it will make money. Well, now you're down ninety-seven percent below where you were on gasoline per mile—that's before you even go to hydrogen—so there's a big menu of ways to get our cars off oil and even if our cars and light trucks in 2025 were only as efficient as the best hybrids already in show rooms a couple of years ago, that would still save twice the oil what we're getting from the Persian Gulf. That doesn't sound very hard.