A new advertisement campaign criticising US automakers for backpedalling on their commitment to develop fuel-efficient vehicles debuted on US TV stations last week as environmental groups sought to increase pressure on Detroit's so-called 'Big Three' car firms: General Motors, Ford and Chrysler.
The ads berate US automakers for not speeding the introduction of alternate technologies that could reduce the fuel consumption of new vehicles, and thereby reduce American dependence on foreign oil.
"America needs a line of cars that can get us to work in the morning without sending us to war in the afternoon," says Ariana Huffington, spokesperson for the Detroit Project, a consumer advocacy group that jointly developed the campaign with the National Resources Defence Council.
"If today's vehicles averaged 40 mpg, we would save more oil than we import each year from the Persian Gulf. We have the technology to start fixing the problem, but the Big Three in Detroit and their friends in Congress and the White House are blocking the road." The ads follow last week's announcement by the Environmental Protection Agency that US fuel economy reached a 22-year low in 2002.
Meanwhile a survey of new car owners found that General Motors corporate rating suffered because of consumer dissatisfaction with the gas-mileage of its Hummer H2 sport-utility vehicle or SUV.
The H2, the most steroidal of SUVs, averages just 10 miles to the gallon, but regardless of these well-advertised facts, 22 per cent of the H2 owners marked down the rugged vehicle for "excessive fuel consumption."
The Hummer's poor performance led to a fifth-place finish for GM in the JD Power and Associates annual initial quality survey, which measures complaints in the first 90 days of ownership for all new models.
However, on a more environmentally friendly note, GM and Dow Chemicalhave agreed what will be the largest project to use fuel cell technology.
The development is the most visible sign yet that the automotive industry is pressing ahead with plans to develop fuel cell technology as an eventual replacement for the engines powered by carbon-based fuels.
It follows a commitment by the Bush administration to invest federal funds towards the development of fuel cells, in a bid to reduce the country's dependence on foreign sources of oil.
Fuel cells use an electro-chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen to create energy, with water as the only significant by-product.
Under the agreement, GM will provide fuel cell "stacks" to a Dow chemical plant in Texas that emits hydrogen as a by-product. The electricity generated by the stacks will be sold to Dow and could amount to 35 megawatts of power a year - enough for 25,000 homes.
Although many of the world's large carmakers have produced prototype fuel cell vehicles in recent years, none has yet built a vehicle that is commercially viable for the mass market.
GM says it does not expect to have a commercially viable fuel cell-powered vehicle on the market until the end of the decade. Fuel cells have been touted as the clean, green energy source of the future by no less a proponent than George W. Bush. However, many problems with the construction of such cells remain.
Fuel cells work by converting chemical energy directly into electrical energy with high efficiency and low emissions. Research has concentrated on hydrogen as the optimum fuel but it can be costly to extract and tricky to store. Therefore work also continues on high-temperature fuel cells using hydrocarbons such as methane or alcohols such as methanol, which will still be cleaner than today's conventional carbon-based fuels.