I think electric is the way to go, but we need to think up better technologies before they take off. Petrol cars are a disaster, terribly inefficient, noisy, bad for the environment and causing territory wars for the land in which we pull oil out of. the only question is where to?
Fuel cells are interesting, combining hydrogen from compressed canisters and oxygen from the air to produce electricity and steam. Awesome. Except that fuel cells are almost as inefficient as petrol cars at the moment and we still use oil to make the hydrogen, by striping carbon from the chains. Electrolysis could be used to split hydrogen and oxygen from water, but a tremendous amount of power is required for this. We'd have to look at using nuclear options before this became viable.
Solar Power is good, but again, inefficient and heavy. To power a car we'd need to build them incredibly lightweight, cover the entire car in panels and still stock batteries for night and cloudy days. It will probably be the way to go once we manage to get the transfer from light to electricity way better than what we have. We are heading that way thankfully and many isolated communities now rely 100% on solar power.
Battery cars are pretty good, but suffer from the many problems that batteries have - heavy, low storage, expensive and dangerous chemicals used in them and limited lifespan/rechargablity. As technology advances though we can make better batteries which are longer lasting, lighter and better at storage. In fact Lithium Ion batteries didn't exist 20 years ago, but now they are used in 90% of portable electronics. It will be good to see what we come up with in the next 20 years.
Nuclear Fission is an okay idea, but we'd have to solve the twin problems of waste storage and mining uranium. I think this will be a dead end just due to the fact that even the best solutions for both of these problems are not desirable in the long run.
Nuclear Fusion is almost the panacea of generation. Using multiple types of hydrogen, which are very ubundant, fuse them together to create energy, and the inert gas helium. Cold fusion has been worked on for the last 50 years and everyone has pretty much proved it's not possible. Hot fusion however is getting closer to breaking even, where the energy gained from the reaction is more than energy required to start and maintain it. I'm not sure what will happen when we finally can generate lots of fairly cheap power, but it will be interesting when it does happen.
Wind Farms are a good idea in theory, but they need huge areas of land with lots of wind, plus a high amount of maintenance and upkeep. Engineering breakthroughs could reduce the space and manhours required, but may be a long time in coming.
Lastly: Fossil Fuels were great in the 1900s, magnificent technology a hundred years ago, but the amount we use today is causing massive problems. Greenhouse gasses, acidic rains, stock depletion, oil spills and vast mining operations make this the least favourable option.
That's my take and knowledge of current possible electricity/car technology. If I had to say where it's going to head, probably electric motor/battery based cars with electric fueling stations in the local garage. Range of about 200 miles in the batteries would also encourage current gas stations to start supplying outlets, or in some cases battery swaps.
I'd definately buy an electric car if they had them here.
