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The question is, will "O" be foiled by technology, or will he just glom the limelight for what are advances that are already in the works to feed his ego issues?

Ethanol Boosting Systems from a bunch of MIT guys may be a breakthrough IMHO. Downsized engines, tons of torque and better mileage. Ford is not just testing it, but so is engine house "Ricardo" with a host of partners.

An SAE paper has been presented on this and was talked about over on "Green Car Congress".

They posted the BMEP numbers and I converted them and backwards calculated the torque out of the said engine.

The numbers are shockingly good.

Do some research on the cutting edge technologies applied to Piston Engines during WWII for our fighters and Bombers, we may be revisting them by the wheel barrel full.

This ethanol boosting (E85) system is claiming to take Octane to 150 (from 90ish) while ADI (Anti Detonation Injection) only took that effective rating from 130/140 to 170 for our fighters. That "Delta T" is much greater for the Ethanol boost vs/ what was done during WWII That is significant.

And this isn't even visting the concept of "scaling up" a Series Hybrid drivetrain i.e. the Chevy Volt for Pick-up truck applications. (It has been done for airport shuttles running propane by a small Michigan based conversion company).

Do your research, the pickup may not be dead yet!!!

Alright let's look at this through the eyes of history. Alcohol(ethanol to all young people)has been used in engines for years. In the 1930s they started using it in racing engines, engines that were tuned to run alcohol and the mixture set up to get the maximum energy from it. Alcohol made an engine run hotter and faster, unlike the ethanol mix we use today. The engines were set up for it and it produced great power. The downside was that alcohol caused engines to burn out fast.

Let's take speedway motorcycles for example(a certain type of motorcycle racing)that use 500 CC engines, no oil tank, no brakes and only one gear. They started using alcohol in those engines back in the 1930s, burned the engines up after a few races, but that was ok, racing was expensive and that was one of the cost. They still use basically the same bike today in speedway, still burn up engines to get the power boost.

Drag racing, everyone knows about drag racing, and other types of car racing also use alcohol to boost power and efficiency but with the same cost. Engines do not last as long when the engine is tuned to run alcohol at it's most powerful and efficient mode.

There is a reason ethanol gets less mileage in cars today, because your car is not tuned to run it, therefore it runs less efficient and less power.

This boost thing they are working on is not new and it will do the same thing alcohol has always done in engines, burn them up fast! It will also not make wheat and corn and other foods grow any faster or in greater abundance so we can make alcohol for fuel and not use up our food supply doing it.

We have 100s, if not 1000s, of years of energy in the ground in the US, Saudi and other African countries have recently found new supplies. We don't need alcohol burning cars, we need to drill, we need the return of capitalism, we need to let free enterprise run.

Anyone who falls for the alcohol and electric car BS is a fool, plain and simple.

What you fail to understand is the FACT that Ethanol requires 1 gallon of fuel just to produce 1.2 gallons of Ethanol. A net gain of .2 gal., is dismal.

Not only that, it is also a fact that if every single acre of land used for agriculture in this country were converted over to nothing but Ethanol production, it would only provide less than 30% of our needs. The land cannot produce the demand. (We also have to eat, don't we?)

The technology you speak of is not cheap in any shape or form.

This ignorant notion that a barrel of oil is mostly, only fuel is quite annoying as well. Not one vehicle can or will be built without it. There is just no raw material on the planet that provides us with so many compounds, chemicals or manufacturing potentials as does oil. Just try building a car without it once, at the current demand, if you still think you have it all figured out.