I heard once that "our lives are subsidized by oil" ...i am coming to believe this to be more true every day, and every time i go to the pump.
i agree with what CoyoteMesc said, higher octane fuel will give you better mileage. i also use 89 octane when i can, my car requires at least 88 so 87 is outta the question. but also we should be conservative drivers not defensive drivers. put your car in neutral on hills. dont let your engine rev high, keep pressure in your tires, roll down you windows and turn off the a/c,
but yeah retrofitting existing cars will be a good market for people. biodiesels and waste veggie cars will help offset that. but what is ethanol and methanol other than highly distilled vegetable oil?
i think that honda, toyota, mazda, vw have been pretty innovated thus far.
hybrids and lightweight compacts should be the norm for people who are just moving their fat ass from point a to point b, why do you need the excursion to drive to work and back? (image).
we can make better combustion engines and we should have them in every car. variable timing (shuts of certain cylinders that are in use while driving), reclaiming the heat from engines and exhaust, rotary engines, even the layout of your cylinders and the placement of the engine can drastically effect efficiency.
electric cars, still got to plug it in and recharge it. and recharge what? those old heavy obsolete type batteries that will have to be disposed of soon anyway. why not lithium battery banks?
the tesla motor weighs 150 lbs, when you brake it stores energy, can go 220 miles and 0-60mph in 4 seconds
why cant all cars have that car's engine?
other options i heard were:
the bicycle (needs tires, tube, and lube)
the horse (needs water, land and grass)
getting out of the city - thats where we go to get the money to afford our gas
gardening - well this could save you money if you know how to do it right
biodiesel - diesel is still diesel, diesels may be more efficient, but to make it, it aint.
hydrogen - good if you had a free source of energy to make it from (wind, solar, tides, geothermal, etc)
recaptured methane - well it aint going into the atmosphere, thats a plus, and it can be made to replace natural gas and propane appliances, a plus for the rural peoples since it can be made from waste. search: biodigester, this methane could be used to make hydrogen or to distill biofuels, or to run our vast acreage fossil fuel farms.
forget ethanol from corn since the price of food is dependent on the supply of our corn. but i guess if the middle east closed down tomorrow we'd have to a lot more of it. since we are the world's top producer of corn maybe we can bend some political might to those who depend on our low corn prices. they raise fuel, we raise corn.
first the infrastructure needs to change. so one way is taxes, lower income taxes, make incentives for alternative energy, charge higher for fossil energy taxes. mass transit, diesel trains and buses converted to electromag trains and electric trollies. mpg limit set at 100mpg. all farms, waste treatment, and landfills all made to capture methane. building design changed completely to sustainble models (long list here). community design, no sprawl, mass transit integrated. our planes need new engines, plain and simple, and probably a whole new design. large ships with reactors (the Navy does it). wind farms across siberia, the sahara, antarctic, northern canada, greenland, gobi desert, the oceans!
solar farms in similar locales (possibly right under the wind farms).
tides = very powerful, core of the earth = very hot.
but for now i am going to use my two feet run by locally grown food. we vote with dollars, with our dollars we can change the world!