One of the more challenging jobs the auto industry has right now is explaining to consumers that the future isn’t going to be like the past. We desperately need to reduce vehicle carbon emissions in order to avoid turning the planet into a hellscape, and that means turning to cars with some kind of energy storage other than hydrocarbons we’ve dug up from the ground and then distilled.
That’s where people get confused and the message stalls, a problem laid out in a recent report from the National Academy of Sciences.For many decades cars have been simple things with internal combustion engines. They burned gasoline or sometimes diesel and occasionally even liquefied natural gas.
