Australian professor proposes a way solar and hydrogen could fuel the world

BMW's hydrogen-powered car.

On any given day, humans blow through millions of gallons of gas, untold tons of coal and scads of electricity from nuclear plants, hydropower dams and various other power-producing operations.

The cost is tremendous and its perpetuation a main driver of the global economy.

All that energy equates to about 15 terawatts, give or take, per year. A terawatt is a trillion watts. And demand, while stymied somewhat by recession-aided stagnation, is expected to grow.

The problem is that we humans are burning, churning and polluting our way through a finite fuel source. What if, on the other hand, we got handed to us a viable energy source that doesn't stink up the place?

We did. Or we do. It's the sun and an element six times lighter than air -- hydrogen.

Sure, the statement's old new to anybody on the clean energy front. "Solar, solar, solar," the mantra drives oil industry execs to distraction.

But tapping into the sun for all the world's energy is possible, we just have to figure out how to pull it off, says Derek Abbott, who looked at energy problem as an engineer would, calculating out a potential solution without letting minor details get in the way.

In a six-part lecture posted on YouTube and viewed in most cases just several hundred times, Abbott, a professor at the University of Adelaide in Australia, spells out just what it would take to capture solar energy and provide enough to power the world's 15 terawatts. The sun, he says, produces enough energy to power about 10,000 of our planets, or 174,000 terawatts.

Imagine 500-by-500 square kilometers of parabolic mirrors used to capture the sun's rays and reflect it back to boil water used to create electricity. Abbott's concept is to limit "digging in the ground" for energy, thus going with mirrors rather than photovoltaic panels.

He says that is all it would take, should his figures prove correct, to crank up those 15 terawatts.

"That's the size of Victoria," says the Australian, referring to the southeastern state of his country that stares across the Bass Strait at Tasmania. "Would anybody miss Victorians?"

Possibly not New Zealanders, but that's incidental. (I'm hardly an expert in down-under razzes but a good example is the reference to Miss New Zealand in a couple of "Flight of the Conchords" episodes by Australians.)

Abbott proposes to solve the on-again, off-again nature of solar power by using it to produce hydrogen via electrolysis of water. The electricity created by solar energy would create the separation of the hydrogen and oxygen molecules. The hydrogen could be exported as fuel.

Abbott's concept involves garnering government support for research and some initial subsidies and is focused on what Australia can do. His university has as a motto: "Our students make an impact on the world."

Abbott points out that his theories require vetting and further research. But he also mentions that Henry Ford started building his wildly successful Model T prior to construction of many sealed roads and service stations. So it's a Frisbee. What the heck? I'm always up for a game.

As for the safety of hydrogen, Abbott says he was encouraged by a University of Miami study that showed how a puncture of a hydrogen tank on a vehicle compares with one in a gas-powered vehicle. One explodes, one doesn't. Suffice to say hydrogen cars, which have been embraced by the likes of Jay Leno, won't necessarily work for a Michael Bay film.

BMW offers its hydrogen powered series 7 car with an internal combustion engine. And as Leno says, "It's a fuel just like any other fuel." The fuel is maintained cold enough to be in a liquid state.

Leno says he suspects hydrogen as a fuel will move rapidly. Of course with the BMW, the driver can switch without any trouble to gasoline.

As BMW says, "The future is closer than you think."

Photo: Courtesy bmwcoop.com.

Why nobody should sympathize with Nazis or their ilk

Three little kids hiding in a small village.

There's this bulkhead on the Danube River, a big concrete staging area in the center of Budapest. It sits maybe a dozen feet below street level. My father took my sister and I to it when we were teenagers. He sat down. 

 

We had been walking most of the day so initially it made sense. But he remained when he would normally have moved along. "Right here," he said finally. Then he described a scene that he didn't see but was told later after the war. That bulkhead, pier or whatever it was served as the spot where a small contingent of Nazi soldiers lined up a bunch of Jews. Snow covered the ground, but the Jews often weren't wearing coats. 

 

They didn't need them where they were going. The soldiers tied three people together tightly. One group after another. Then the officer put a pistol to the head of the person in the center of this tightly bound cluster and shot. The soldiers with him pushed the trio into the churning waters below. The dead weight sucked them underwater immediately. "They didn't want to waste bullets," my father said.

Going to see the Dead, thumbing it down the Pacific Coast

The early days of Eneput Day Care Center.

Back when I was 14 and my sister was 11, mom got this great idea to see if the Grateful Dead would do a concert in Fairbanks, Alaska. Back then, the Dead would give a portion of the gate receipts to benefit nonprofits in the area.

Mom had inherited a bunch of money and like a good hippy used it all to create a foundation for a day care center and day camp that she called Eneput, which in Yupik means "our house." The place took care of scads of kids, mostly those of single mothers so they could get work in what was then a pretty godforsaken economy up North.

It always needed money. We had nothing. Mom was a true believer. We lived the life of the Last Whole Earth Catalog and Diet for a Small Planet. We raised our own food. We didn't have a car. We got cold and hitchhiked every day. Eneput always needed money. Mom was a fundraising fiend. She was into politics, and she helped write the Alaska Day Care Assistance Act, which subsidized day care for poor people.

But the Dead was a wild idea. Greg Herring was a friend of all the hippies who ran Eneput. Everybody called him Bigfoot. He was bearded and had the hair and persona of the day. He said he got to know the Dead following them around on tour.

He was an original Deadhead. He really did know them.

I didn't care. I was 14. However, one Friday after working all day as a camp counselor at mom's day camp — which had several hundred kids at Fairbanks' AlaskaLand — I found Bigfoot at the house. Not a good sign. Bigfoot always had big ideas. And he had no money. Neither did mom. I rode my bike home the 12 miles from AlaskaLand. I hated hitchhiking. Back then we mostly got picked up by people with trucks and rode in the back. That sucked in the cold.

"So," mom said. "Bigfoot will take us to meet the Grateful Dead."

"Oh?" I said, knowing that he was usually full of malarky. Then she explained. We would travel by plane to Seattle and thumb a ride at Sea-Tac. No big deal. It was 1975. Hitchhiking isn't legal on the freeways until Oregon but we wait at the on-ramps.

"It will be an adventure," mom said.

It was. We bought one-way tickets to Seattle from Fairbanks International, landed in Seattle with no cash. Of course the banks were closed. Mom had a check book and her voter registration card. Nobody took her checks. I had $20 I didn't tell her about until later.

We got a ride immediately from the airport. Some insurance salesman in a rental. He was nice. Loved the Dead story. Then we got stuck at every on-ramp on Interstate 5. One place had a line of us hitchhikers. One group had been there over night. It didn't look good.

He's the kind of cop who's been there and treats everyone with respect, even those he arrests

Henry Diaz in his squad car.

Editor's Note: After an absence from journalism of about five years working on clean energy for a nonprofit and then on getting clean trucks for California's roadways for an air district, I went back to writing at a weekly newspaper. This is one of my favorite stories so far. It appeared in the Sanger Herald April 30, 2015.

Henry Diaz is a throwback, the kind of cop who knows just about everybody on his beat.

He's a police officer who understands his town of Sanger, Calif., population about 25,000, because he's part of it. He is Sanger, which is generally poor and 80 percent nonwhite. He was raised in the notorious Chankla neighborhood, the son of a hard-working single immigrant mom who wanted the best for her children. He went to Jefferson Elementary. He graduated from Sanger High in 1994.

"He's the same guy, the same person I met years ago," said his wife, Maricela Diaz. "He's very humble. He likes people, and he's very friendly."

She said she was pleasantly surprised when she learned her husband of 17 years was named Officer of the Year by the Sanger Police Department in early April. Yet, she was a little concerned that the online posting of the news would generate snide comments, since police officers these days aren't often getting the greatest press.

She shouldn't have worried.

The initial Sanger Herald Facebook post about Henry Diaz receiving the honor in early April garnered 226 likes, 15 shares and a then-record more than 4,400 views. The brief post and photo about Diaz getting named Officer of the Year generated scads of comments like this one from Bobby and Denise Perez: "Congratulations Henry. You (are) a great role model for our Kids! Sanger is lucky to (have an) Officer like You."

And this from Jason Boust: "Very well deserved."

And this from Jessica Guerra: "Congratulations to my compadre Henry! Sanger is blessed to have an officer like Henry."

Diaz is the kind of officer who stands in stark contrast to the negative publicity given to police officers nationwide by the plethora of cell phone videos chronicling abuses against suspects. He's the counter argument — the guy people know and trust.

Apu's epitaph: The old Hungarian who went to Heaven for an Olde English 800

Me, Jennifer and Apu on the final road trip.

Editor's note: I wrote this the morning my father died. It's been some years now. The avowed socialist, anticommunist freedom fighter and Hungarian patriot was a stubborn sort. I still get sentimental thinking about him.

My dad was 71 when he died. He called me one night 2 1/2 years earlier saying the SS (the Shutzstaffel, the Nazi paramilitary corps) were on his doorstep with guns and were going to take him to the camps. My dad, Imre Antal Nemeth, had a Jewish mother and had been hidden in Hungary during World War II. He was raised Catholic and squirreled away with his maternal grandparents in a tiny village on the Croatian border. 

The SS Nazi  soldier reference was my first real clue we had any Jewish heritage. Then his friend Steve a month later called to say I had to do something. Luckily, Jennifer, my daughter, drove from Bellingham, Wash. to Seattle every night and slept over and went back to work (two hours each way). She spent weekends with him, too. She took leave for the final weeks, continuing for five or six. But he had clearly lost his mind. She could no longer distract his crazy plans with a cookie.

He was just months from retiring after decades welding big steel girders for commercial buildings as a union ironworker. Most people called him Red. Nobody could prononce his real name. He gave it to me, too. That's why I'm called Mike.

I flew up to Seattle and in three hours loaded up six boxes of his stuff and told him to get in his little Ford Escape. "You're coming with me," I said. He had been eating rotting meat, had nearly burned his house down and was seeing imaginary people. And he was angry others couldn't see it. He almost killed a woman in a car accident, so Jennifer had taken his keys. He berated her something awful, but she is tough. 

After I got him to Clovis, Calif., where I live, I tried to keep him at my house, but he flew into a rage and tried to beat me up. I stayed up all night the first night after driving 17 hours (he tried to escape once at a gas station). I had to keep him in the house. I put on double locking deadbolts that next day. 

For the first couple of months, he lived OK in assisted care at $1,500 a month. Then he ran off twice, once when it was 107 degrees. He found his way to an Indian casino. We found him a second time confused and sun burned. He had wandered near my house. Three cop agencies were out looking for him. He was the first ever to escape from the facility's memory care center, sneaking out a window and scaling an 8-foot gate. Dogs tracked him for nearly a dozen miles of weird wandering.

How my son Calvin smelled worse than a tiger with explosive bowels

Calvin in his tiger suit with sister Jennifer.

This is a simple story about the most explosive shit my son ever took. I was unprepared as usual. What did this kid eat? I asked at the time. How could anyone shit his pants so fully?

Here's how we get to that fateful day in the shadow of Seattle's Paramount Theater. I was a semi-young father, thinking I had an answer for things I didn't have a clue about.

It was Saturday, and Saturdays meant I had my son Calvin from about 5 a.m. until my wife finished delivering the mail in nearby Marysville, usually after 5 or 6 p.m. We lived on the west side of remote Camano Island near the beach. All the responsibilities she shouldered most of the previous week fell to me, and I wasn't all that great at dealing with them.

By responsibilities, I mean Calvin. He was a fussy kid. He needed a lot of distraction. I couldn't do anything else. No work, no projects. I once took him to my father's 5 acres on the south side of the island where we lived and did some maintenance. He was right next to me. The next thing I knew, he had wandered uphill to the highway and some older couple was escorting him back. The look the lady gave me was "what kind of inbred loser are you?"

Calvin was all or nothing. So those Saturdays, I kept him busy. I would bundle him up and head out running. I'd push him in the runner's stroller while Sajo, our black Lab, ran alongside. He loved it and would continue a running commentary of the trees, weeds, houses and the blasts of wind off Puget Sound. But that only took an hour. I ran just 5 miles.

California's high-speed rail makes inaugural voyage

Passengers traveled the first run of the expanded route.

Editor's note: This reflects an optimistic look forward at one of California's most capital-intensive transportation projects.

FRESNO, Calif. (Feb. 23, 2028) -- The sleek train pulled into the depot on H and Mariposa streets like it has the past several years.

The whistle blew. Passengers disembarked. Some met warmly with family, and a few others hurried to their destinations in this Central San Joaquin Valley city. But most remained aboard, smiling from the windows at the crowd gathered at the station.

A porter hefted baggage and answered questions, while the station manager quietly met with the train's passenger director and several high-ranking officials from the California High-Speed Rail Authority. Previous runs have been limited to Fresno and Bakersfield and more recently to Merced.

They wanted the trip to be flawless. It is the first time the train, which can reach speeds in excess of 200 mph, has taken passengers along its entire 520-mile length, from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

"Today is a significant milestone and caps 14 years of world-class construction," said Authority CEO Jeff Morales, who earlier this month signaled plans to retire. "We had some bumps along the way, but our design-build approach and top-flight contractors did a fantastic job. Their work won us a lot of believers."

Puck Schmuck makes his political debut in Fairbanks

A cheap imitation, but you get the idea.

Author's note: Back when I was in seventh-grade, my friend Torg Hinckley and I created a character we called Puck Schmuck. He was a politician of sorts. A Zorro type inspired by our love of comic books. We ran him for election at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and our junior high. We thought it was funny. Nobody else seemed to.

I'm writing a memoir I suspect nobody will ever read. But here's a chapter from it.

After the resignation of President Richard Milhous Nixon on Aug. 9, 1974, we were all affected. The hippies celebrated. The press ran the story for months. And when President Gerald Ford was named, the entire country appeared to relax a bit. To me, it wasn’t that Nixon was all bad. After all, he created the Environmental Protection Agency, oversaw the first Earth Day, supported the Clean Air Act and, most importantly, stopped the Vietnam War.

But what stuck out to Torg and I was the image of Nixon flashing his peace signs. He did it regularly, usually with a big grin on his face.

About this time, Torg and I had gotten somewhat involved politically. I don’t mean we actually paid attention to politics, but we did start messing around in elections. Both our parents were politically active. They voted and made their thoughts known. His parents were liberal. My mom fancied herself a bit of a radical.

Our interpretation involved comics. We created a character who we called Puck Schmuck. Both of us were really into Yiddish words. They were so descriptive and rebellious. I mean, schmuck. It means a variety of things. But we fixated on it referring to somebody being a jerk.

We’d make lists of put downs, slang for genitalia, insulting racial and ethnic slurs. We were not politically correct. And it wasn’t a politically correct time. So we were terrible. We also watched a lot of Mister Rogers Neighborhood, Electric Company and Sesame Street. Maybe for balance.

I don’t recall how Puck Schmuck came about. Most likely it was Torg. He was quick and brilliant when it came to ideas. I loved it. Schmuck looked like a ghost, the old sheet over the head type. Actually, he looked just like the little phantoms the Pac Man creature chases on the video game. That game appeared several years later. I recall Torg showing it to me in an obscure quick mart store.

So Schmuck just remained our joke. We’d draw him a lot. He made commentary on various things. After looking at some of the cartoons we drew of the guy, a thought hit me. I figured to engineer a major prank. Our best yet.

“Let’s run Puck Schmuck for campus president,” I said one afternoon.

“What?” asked Torg. “Too stupid.”

“No, really,” I said. “It will work. Nobody likes the guy running. We’ll make a bunch of posters and encourage a write-in campaign.”

Confessions of a Hungarian Revolutionary

Imre Nemeth, fourth from right, was a freedom fighter.

Writer’s note: I finally was able to extract the story of my father’s involvement in the Hungarian 1956 Revolution on a sunny day in our tiny beach house on Camano Island in Washington state. It was 1998. My daughter had been pestering him, and he finally relented. When he started talking, I got out my notebook. What follows is his story. He now sits in a box in my garage. One of these days, I’ll take some of his ashes to the Danube River and sprinkle them at his favorite swimming hole off Margaret Island in Budapest. I posted this because I’ve seen so little written about the war, at least in English. This is just one man’s story, but it’s a piece of history important to our small refugee community that originally formed up in Seattle.

Apprentice electrician Imre Nemeth had been wiring a light switch in a tiny apartment pantry with his uncle. It was a day like any other, or so he thought. Work, eat, sleep. Repeat.

But this day would change his life and millions of others in the little Eastern European country. It was on Oct. 23, 1956 that he learned Hungary decided to kick the Russians out and stick a knife in Iron Curtain.

It was time. The cry for freedom was strong. But it was mostly young people like Imre who would repeat that cry and take up arms against Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, a Cold War superpower that had occupied Hungary since the end of World War II.

Imre’s Uncle Istvan Nemeth, one of a dozen brothers in his oversized Catholic brood, was best known for being the one who got kicked out of the seminary for impregnating a woman he didn’t end up marrying. He was a humorous sort. Good for a laugh and a decent boss. He had begun taking Imre on side jobs for a couple of years.

The pair completed the small job and said their goodbyes. But as the 17-year-old Imre hopped off the streetcar to start his 2 kilometer walk home, somebody yelled: “Hallottad hogy tuntetnek radio?” Roughly translated it means: “Hey, did you see the demonstration by the radio station?”

Imre had no way of knowing what the next few hours would bring. While he and Istvan had been quietly working in another part of Budapest, the cultural and political center of Hungary, the seed of revolution caught fire.

Coming to a boil that day were the frustrations of a country that deftly avoided conflict in World War II until the waning days when its leaders no longer could stave off the rumblings of Russians on the east, the Allies in the west and the besieged Germans in the center. Hungary had arisen from that war beaten, poor and occupied by an emerging superpower bent on bending the rest of the world to a top-heavy derivative of Marxism.

Hungary had little choice but to sign a treaty with the Russians in 1945 that was supposed to last a decade. From Imre’s perspective and many others in the tiny Eastern European nation of about 10 million, by 1956 it was a year too long. They believed the Russians were sucking the factories and the country dry.

Grumbling had been going on for some time. In June of that year a half-dozen university students led by a member of the small Hungarian Air Force, a man named George Polyak, hijacked a Hungarian passenger plane, a well traveled DC-3, to West Germany and freedom. The news, although somewhat suppressed by the state-run media, sent a ripple through the Communist regime and the populace as the hijackers had hoped.

It was this creeping national discontent that spurred Nemeth that evening to act. A joke still on the lips of many Hungarians’ goes like this: “Hungary must be a really large country. The Russians still haven’t found a way out.”

Watch that next hurricane, super-heated Mother Nature may be angry

Miami used to be swampland. Could it return?

Disaster is waiting at every turn. As a kid, adults say the bad stuff is all in your head. The monster at the end of the hallway, in the basement or around the next turn in the dark alleyway isn't real.

Those kids grow up and may wish for that innocence back. The real world is far more harsh. Dreams of the high school and college graduate are often dashed when many realize their constant toil will never bring any of them closer.

The emerging threat of ecological disaster renders just about all those previous worries inert. What difference does it make if that dream home or job is out of reach when the ocean's expected to rise and wash out coastal communities and Pacific island nations and tear the world economy apart?

Really.

Goodnight Miami Beach

Rolling Stone writer Jeff Goodell takes a novel approach to illustrate the situation. In "Goodbye, Miami," he fast-forwards 17 years to 2030 after Hurricane Milo strikes. "Most of the damage occurred not from the hurricane's 175-mph winds, but from the 24-foot storm surge that overwhelmed the low-lying city," he says.

Prices for electric cars get more affordable

Nissan Leaf

Way back in the distant past, perhaps as long ago as last year, prices for electric cars appeared so high that they may have been just for rich people.

Or technologically savvy first adopters. Or both.

Strangely, that's no longer the case. Electric car prices have dropped. In the case of the Nissan Leaf, the decline has been precipitous. As in ka-boom. According to the link, the base model is $21,300 with an asterisk that says "net value after federal tax savings."

That federal tax savings could be as much as $7,500, depending on what model is purchased. Still, not bad.

J.Q. Public makes a call

I first heard of this by way of a caller I'll dub Nathan. His was a random inquiry to the front desk at the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District where I work as a grants processor. Normally, those I speak with want to know about grants to replace heavy-duty semi-trucks, the bread and butter of the Incentives Department at the Air District in Fresno, Calif.

But Nathan had something else on his mind.

Climate change: Indecision creates an increasingly dismal future

Photo courtesy bloguin.com

Looking into the future is a universal concept. While ancient man stared at the heavens for clues on what the seasons would bring, contemporary corporate man stares at the electronic equivalent of financial ticker tape, trying to discern future financial trends.

No matter what the era, those who picked right usually reaped some reward.

But from a climate scientist's perspective, every scenario looks pretty grim. Climate change is coming. It's just a matter of determining how dramatic it will be. Choosing the level of environmental impact due to rising levels of carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and other pollutants leading to global warming depends on how quickly society accepts the situation and reacts.

Change is coming

Changing direction is impossible. An analogy made by the California Air Resources Board likened the situation to a person rowing a boat into a dock. Because the boat already is moving forward, it can't come to an immediate stop. Pulling the oars from the water will help. But what's needed is immediate reversal. In other words, dip those oars in and start reversing course. The boat will still drift forward, but it will begin to slow and turn.

What we're doing now, the ARB says, is rowing forward as if there's nothing ahead to ram into.

Boom.

In November 2000, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was jointly established by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme, released a report on the climate scenarios facing the planet. The highly technical report says everything depends on stemming the increase in emissions and decoding "long-term uncertainties."

Natural gas overtakes solar and wind in clean energy race

Is fracking the clean energy future?

Several years ago, I was newly downsized from the newspaper industry that had been my life for the better part of the previous 25 years.

My options were hardly inspiring. My dad was slowly dying of Parkinson's and dementia, royally pissed off at the guy he considered his jailer -- me. The news business tanked. The jobs that remained had a bunch of us old veterans lining up. Salaries were 50 percent or less what we had made.

I had purchased a foreclosed house in terrible shape to rent and subsidize the cost of my father's care. On the positive side, it took six months to repair. I relearned a lot of construction skills.

Clean energy to the rescue

Then after seven months, I found another line of work. The American Reinvestment and Recovery Act was by then in full swing, and it covered my salary assisting cities and counties in California's San Joaquin Valley installing energy efficient lighting, cooling systems and even insulation. Not too sexy to be certain, but it offered insight into the entirely new realm of clean energy.

Clean energy at the time still had a lot of hurdles, but with federal stimulus money and constantly increasing costs for fossil fuels the holy grail of cost "parity" appeared attainable. A former co-worker and I started blogging about it, using news gathering talents honed over decades to debut the latest studies, technologies and breakthroughs.

Go ahead, do the Time Warp in the Tower

Cast of the Rocky Horror Show.

Winter forces people indoors, for better or worse.

Imagine being stuck in the same house as the two old but likable biddies in Frank Capra's 1944 "Arsenic and Old Lace." Not so bad if you're a woman, or Cary Grant. At one point in the film, in which the women kill elderly bachelors with poison-laced elderberry wine, Grant famously says, "This is developing into a very bad habit."



Maybe Elton John's "Elderberry Wine" song had metaphorical depth. Regardless, quaffing it from two murderers might not be such a good idea.

Rocky, what have you done?

In the wrong-place, wrong-time vein, perhaps a thunderstorm strands you in the middle of nowhere and your names are Janet and Brad. Perhaps you've passed a mansion some miles back after a tire has blown on your car. There is no cell phone reception, and the niceties of society appear unattainable without a 2-mile hike back to that spooky mansion.

Of course, the next step is doing the Time Warp ... again.



Things could be worse. Definitely. My wife took me to the live production of the obscurely aforementioned play in Fresno's Tower District. And it was mind-blowing. Like a lot of my generation, I saw the Tim Curry movie version of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" in theaters. It was one of those midnight events in Anchorage when the outdoor temperatures made doing anything inside preferable to sitting in a frozen car.

I loved it. At the time, the concept provided a natural segue from my obsession with Kiss records.

The doctor is in

Daniel Chavez Jr. directs the Fresno version of the "Rocky Horror Show" at the California Arts Academy's Severance Theater in Fresno's artsy Tower District. He also choreographs, designs the costumes and plays the role of Frank-N-Furter. With the platform heels, he stands a head taller than most of the cast.

Sustainable driving: 3 options from the car show

Ford Fusion hybrid with DB5 overtones.

Options for the green-minded once were limited to small under-powered cars.

While that's still true to some degree, consumers now have an interesting dilemma. Choose the hybrid, clean diesel, electric or really small?

Depends. Even the bigger vehicles now support increasingly efficient technologies such that the differences are less than the similarities. This is true for design and efficiency.

At the Central California Motor Trend Auto Show in downtown Fresno, Calif. in November 2012, nearly all manufacturers showed their latest. Gleaming and with doors open to the general public, these vehicles offered the best opportunity for Joe Motorist to ask the question: "What if this was mine?"

I asked it while sitting in a number of cars. One was the Dodge Challenger, a throwback muscle car that delivers 375 horsepower with the 5.7 liter Hemi. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's www.fueleconomy.gov site rates the Challenger SRT8 at a combined 17 city/highway miles per gallon. Not bad compared to my old Jeep Grand Wagoneer (10-12 mpg) but no good if you want to stay away from the corner Shell station.

I avoided reviewing any of the Toyota Prius family on purpose. If you like them, buy them. I can't stand the user unfriendly interface. Makes me want to take a sledgehammer to the dash. The design also  leaves me wanting something else.

Ford Fusion

This year Ford designers took a nod from James Bond 007 and crafted their Fusion with a grill reminiscent of an Austin Martin DB5. My friend calls the Fusion a shameless ripoff using less-kind language, but I like it. Muy macho.

The DB5 originally appeared in "Goldfinger" (1964) but makes a reappearance and heart-breaking exit in the latest Bond film "Skyfall." The baddy, played with strangely crazy vulnerability by Javier Bardem, unleashes on the car (but probably a cheap facsimile) with a 50 caliber from a helicopter.