http://www.aftermarketleads.com/2011/12/maruti-alto-delivers...
I suspect the problem is partly American attitude towards small cars. Japanese, Europeans and South Americans have much more efficient cars for daily commute.
US gallon is 3.78 Liters, UK gallon is 4.54 Liters.
US gallons: 50 MPG = 21.26 km/liter UK gallons: 50 MPG = 17.70 km/liter
50 MPG (UK) is 41.6 MPG (US).
In my Hyundai Accent (Korean) I get 34 - 36 MPG (US) depending on how I drive it. It is not nearly as efficient as a Renault Twingo or my grandma's Toyota Aigo (awesome little car).
It seems the Twingo figure was in UK mpg, so US mpg would be closer to 40 mpg (US).
Same for the Maruti figure, it would actually be 50 to 60 mpg (US).
From what I read, both are still way more efficient than your average American car.
I'd like to get an Accent, but they're close to 30.000 dollars after (humungous) taxes here in Uruguay.
There are huge variations in how much vehicles consume on a per-passenger basis. And there's no reason that alternative energy / electric must approach the energy density of petroleum - that assumption only holds if you're assuming that a vehicle must carry all of its power with it (and many existing ones don't.) Looks at catenary-powered buses commonly in use in many metro areas - low energy consumption per passenger, off-vehicle power source. I'm not saying they're a solution, but just that you can't get to a good new solution by assuming it has to look like the current dominant option.
On the contrary, thinking like this is what spurs real innovation.
Look how many comments in this thread are about trivial changes like cutting the size of cars by half, or doubling fuel mileage, or cutting speeds in half. Likewise, think how many people assume you can make an appreciable change in global warming by recycling a bit more, driving a bit less, or buying the right brand of milk. What these all have in common is that they seem much easier to implement and, crucially, they make you feel like you're doing something.
In fact, we need major innovations. The point of my back-of-the-envelope argument isn't to assume that new solutions look like old ones. (I mean, I take it as obvious that, e.g., if we have ways to wireless beam energy to moving cars then this is an awesome solution and brilliantly defeats my argument.) The point of the argument is that you can't make minor changes; they have to be ambitious.
That seems utterly faulty to me, as I pointed out - there are multiple ways to solve the problem, none of which would necessarily require increasing the energy density of alternative power sources. All you have to do is reduce the amount of energy that needs to be stored in the vehicle, either by reducing use or required range between charges.
For what it's worth, there are already ways to beam energy to moving cars. http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/101581-inductive-car-char...
But do we really need to go 60 mph? Vehicles seem to be optimized for less-common use cases (e.g. 5 people in the car traveling 60 mph) instead of their more common uses (e.g. one person commuting at 30-40 mph). I, for one, would like to see smaller vehicles - NOT SmartCars and the like but an actual rethinking of the car that would be optimized for the single person commute.
Some cities are just not planned for cars (European cities like Vienna for example, where you cannot enter the downtown, or some South American cities like Montevideo).
I used to have a Maruti car and it was plenty for 99% of the time, and I'd buy a low-range electric/hydrogen/whatever car if it was cheap and offered me a better mileage equivalent.