OK, so I've never been a "car person" ... when I was a kid we lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and nobody had cars, so I never got that "wiring", and have never really owned a car (well, I nominally owned a couple of cars for a few months each, but I've never had one for day-to-day transportation). So, I've been surprised at how excited I've been about the idea of the new Chevy Volt, which is an ideal city car. If you keep it charged (at about $0.88/day of electricity) and don't drive it more than 40 miles at a go, you never need gas!The system is conceptually based on WWI submarines, which ran on batteries with a back-up gas engine. If you're running low on electrical charge you can run an internal combustion engine, but this is pretty much just a generator and not part of the drivetrain. A full 12-gallon tank of gas will let you go about 640 miles, which means that even if you're burning petrol, you're getting 53 miles per gallon.
I think this will be a great excuse to start building nuclear plants ... tell fucking OPEC that we have a "plan B" for running our cars! As much as I hate driving, this is something that I want.