So, You Want to Buy a Green Car ... Or Do You?

If you're like me, and you are, you want a good, cheap, fast, safe and cute car that can take you to work and back, and out for fun, on little or no gas. You also need room to cart around your laptop, your nonfat latte, a pal and your four-piece silver-sparkle Ludwig drum set, which in my case is named Natasha J. Sparky.

Since we've got so much in common, it makes sense to share car-search secrets. I'll start. What I've learned about the latest electric, hybrid and just plain cuter- or cleaner-than-thou vehicles that you can buy or lease at this moment there are plenty of choices, combinations and features. Sorting them all out is confusing but not impossible.

The ones accessible to me as of presstime were the BMW Mini Cooper, the Honda Insight, the Honda Civic Hybrid, the Honda Civic GX natural-gas vehicle, the Toyota Prius, the Toyota Rav4 EV, the Corbin Sparrow, the Ford Th!nk, the Ford Ranger EV and the DaimlerChrysler GEM.

Idling Politics

Here's another thing I've learned. Despite all the chatter about fuel efficiency from the Legislature lately, and the attempts by various cities to get their fleets on a greener track, this has been a slow-going revolution with plenty of setbacks.

Witness last month's rise and fall of the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards: Senator John Kerry's (D-Mass.) proposal to require new vehicles to average a respectable 36 mpg of gas by 2015 did a giant belly flop. SUVs get to be an estimated 25 percent more polluting than other cars. Gasoline has drivers over an oil barrel, and so, as they do in any time of war with oil-producing nations, gas prices are going up.

Despite all this, a good clean car is still hard to find. It seems like we should have evolved more by now. For years, there's been hope that cars will become greener in the form of research on cleaner cars. The web is overflowing with information about "alternative fuel vehicles" from the U.S. Department of Energy and agencies like the Natural Resources Defense Council that push for fuel-efficiency legislation.

Car dealers, however, blame the public's disinterest for the Greenmobile's underwhelming entrance into the market. Almost no one pays any real attention to environmental ratings when buying a car, the dealers say. Not like, say, the kind of cup holders it has, or how the bike rack attaches or that all-important consumer issue: color.

And those fuel inefficient SUVs remain hugely popular, regardless of the fact that they are extraordinarily polluting. According to GreenerCars.com, SUVs pollute about twice as much as, say, my Civic, which on average discharges 2 tons a year more carbon dioxide badness than the Insight.

"Although engines in general are becoming more efficient, smoother and better-performing, the trend toward larger SUVs and pickups has contributed to the average fuel economy dipping to its lowest point in more than 20 years," notes Consumer Reports' 2002 auto trends report.

So that's the bad news, but there's hope.

Frankenfans

Existing green cars have their fans. According to a Department of Energy report, last year there were nearly 500,000 alternative-fuel vehicles on the roads in the United States. Of those half-million cars, 10,400 were electric.

Consumers dedicate websites to electric cars and half-gas, half-electric hybrids, or frankencars. One fan posted a diary all about his 1999 electric Sparrow on the Internet and has kept it up for three years. Another self-described electric-car enthusiast, Joseph Lado from Virginia (who doesn't actually drive an electric car, evidently is dissatisfied with the way they are charged and is trying to help start a company that sells better ones) summarizes alternatives to Old Man Combustion.

"We can manufacture a practical electric car NOW," Lado declares in a column he sent out for publication. Lado touts regenerative braking, used currently by the hybrids to recharge their batteries. He lauds solar power as another recharging source. Lado seems an appropriate representation of the electric-car industry. He sounds half-reasonable, half-kooky. Another recharging idea he lists in his column is the robot in the driveway: "It's either a robot arm or some other mechanical device that automatically pops up and connects your electric car to a source of electricity (i.e., an outlet)."