Fantastic Future Friday: Getting Closer

In a recent Fantastic Future Friday post I talked about the Aptera a two-seater car that gets roughly 300 mpg. It is a perfect car for me, and I’d talk more about it if Aptera would give me one, but in the comments people mentioned that unlike me sometimes they use their back seat.

A car company is coming closer to meeting their needs, oddly enough that company is KIA. KIA is generally thought of as the car company that makes knock offs of other popular cars. I test drove a KIA once and was surprised at how well it performed, even if it did look like a different car.

Their latest prototype is the KIA Ray. The Ray uses a lot of the same advanced technology for fuel saving as the Aptera does: light-weight materials, Hybrid technology, advanced aerodynamics, ect. But puts it in a more conventional looking vehicle. The result is about two-thirds the fuel savings of Aptera, it gets about 200 miles to the gallon as a plug-in hybrid.

If KIA puts the amount of care into the Ray as they do their other cars I’m sure people will be pleasantly surprised at how well it handles.

With two-seaters getting 300 mpg and four-seaters getting 200 mpg just around the corner it won’t be long before any vehicle, including my beloved Nissan Sentra, that gets under 100 mpg is considered a gas-guzzler.

With more plug-in hybrids hitting the market that get incredible fuel economy, it make a huge impact on our addiction to oil and lead to a Fantastic Future.