The motorhome

  

Our car is very efficient.  We'd rather have an electric car, but trading in the efficient car we already have for a Tesla sedan doesn't come anywhere close to making financial sense.  (As a solution to that dilemma, we bought a share of Tesla stock and called it good.)

 

We watch for ways to minimize air conditioning.  Any water our yard needs is delivered by an efficient drip system.  We have a type of grass lawn (St. Augustine) that doesn't require supplemental water.  What we haven't been able to do anything about is the motorhome.  It's a big diesel-powered thing pushing itself down the road with just the two of us in it.  When we were living in the motorhome full-time, we could go through justifications/rationalizations about how much less of an environmental footprint we had by not being in a house with higher heating/air conditioning, infrastructure, and yard requirements; and how much time we spent stationary, to offset the times we were actually driving it and burning diesel.

 

Now, we're watching electrification take over the auto industry.  It could be mostly electrified in a decade.  The airline industry appears to be way behind the modernization curve, but I know there are companies working on short-flight electric solutions.  Hopefully the trucking and delivery industries will find short-haul solutions for vehicles that can return to home base for recharging every night, and keep working on long-haul solutions.

 

Meanwhile, we're hoping for technological advances to trickle down to the RV Industry; some way to, at the least, provide a more carbon-neutral boost to the steady beat of that diesel engine when we actually are driving.  (I'm thinking maybe at a minimum, regenerative braking that stores energy until there is an opportunity to feed it back in the form of an acceleration boost; a little bit of hybrid technology.)  Electric cars tend to put a motor at each drive wheel.  Providing multiple sources of power, internal combustion or electric motors, to the drive wheels of a bus might be pretty expensive but maybe there could be a way to minimize the extra cost with just a single separate electric motor that operates right on the drive shaft.  That's it.  Automatically clutch out of the loop until it's time to engage and help with the drive train that's already there.  Maybe I should invent that after-market technology.