Back in the dark ages, when I was at Hot Rod Magazine, we did a lot of articles on some really disparate types of automotive power, and I figured out early in my years that there is really very little that can be considered new in the evolution of human invention.When it comes to history on this subject, I suspect the golden years were probably between l890 and l990. Even then, perhaps some fine tuning will show that the really fertile years were back early on in the last century.

I propose that it is mostly a matter of laziness.

I mean, if we hot rodders can’t go down to the junkyard and find a ready-made donor platform, we don’t seem to be interested. At least not enough to get off our collective asses and delve into the subject. In fact, if we can’t punch up the subject (along with phone numbers for parts suppliers) on Google, we fall back on a crate engine and trans from the magazine ads. And even those ads may be a thing of the past!

Why not a steam engine and CV transmission? Why not power cells available at your nearest hardware store? Why not direct sunlight conversion? Consider: We could fabricate a backyard fusion generation plant to handle all the energy needs of our home, as well as our most immediate transport factors. Such as we could get from true fusion. And I’ll lay you ten to one the technological breakthrough will come from some hot rodder who is willing to forsake the blue oval or GM nametag. Well, unless the general has been holding out on us until the market is really primed.

Through the years at Hot Rod Magazine, I had plenty of weird-o inventers through the front doors looking for validation of their ideas. Most all of them had to do with using water for fuel. Isn’t that what Hydrogen energy is doing? And that is mostly a matter of figuring out how to handle storage and delivery. It would not be too difficult to design a fusion system inside the parameters of a Deuce highboy. Actually, how about going with a fenderless hiboy ’29 that carries an electric power supply with a tiny on-board generator for the electric charge system. A wrecked Prius anyone?

The boys at the salt flats are already flagging record classes for such power systems. Whatever, I am bored to tears with the current crop of crate engines (motors?)