Fossil Fuel not going away

It was in the 60s that everyone figured not only will we have our moon colony by now, but everyone would be driving cars through the air. Unfortunately, a lot of humanity’s dreams haven’t come true. We don’t have flying cars, we don’t have a colony on the moon and most importantly we are still using Fossil Fuel to power our cars. Many of you might be thinking that Fossil Fuel is on the way out, that in 10 years time, most of the cars being sold will be using some sort of Hydrogen Engine or fully electrical engine system. Not so according to an article in the Washington Post which likes to remind us all that Petrol, Diesel and the like will still be in use for another 2 or 3 decades. Hard to believe? I don’t think so.

Internal combustion engines will rule the roost in the automotive world for decades to come despite the gradual rise of hydrogen-powered fuel cells that emit only water, industry experts say.

Seems like the way of the future is Hybrids. With the Toyota Prius passing the 500,000 cars sold a few months ago its seems almost obvious that we are going to still rely on Petrol to power our cars, just in connection with other technologies.

…sales of hybrids could rise to nearly 2 million vehicles a year by 2012

So what about fully electric cars powered by fuel cells? We have come so far that it would seem almost unbelievable that we wouldn’t have mass produced fully electrical cars in the next 10 years, however even that seems doubtful :

fuel cell cars would start to appear in real numbers by 2020, but then take 10 years to get a market share of 1 percent, 10 more years to reach a 10 percent share and 10 more to reach half the market for new cars.

From what Volkswagen reckons (above), cars powered by Fuel Cells are not going to be taken seriously for some 50 years, I guess we are going to have enough fuel to last that long.. right?