(V): "Like the 12V system used to run the lights, stereo, air con, etc that's attached to the car battery?"

We've learned how to tap into the cars own inertia and convert that back into electricity, but it's not like a perpetual motion machine... inertia can only give back a small part of the energy used to run the car.

I was talking about the power needed to get the fuel for running the car. These cars don't run on water, they run on the hydrogen we get from water. It takes power to separate the hydrogen from water, that's how we get the fuel for powering the car. The cars engine causes hydrogen to bond to oxygen (converting it back into water) which creates enough energy for powering the car. In a worse case scenario you would need to burn coal to power the turbines that make the electricity used to extract the hydrogen from water. Getting the juice from a hydroelectric plant is more environmentally friendly, but last time I checked you have to pay for that power. No one is going to give it away for free... people who work for the power companies need to eat too.

My point is we don't need to use energy to create fossil fuels because they already exist. It's less expensive to get that fuel and process it than to create a fuel like hydrogen. In the future, if technology is allowed to progress naturally, I don't doubt we will have sources of energy that make fossil fuels obsolete. But we don't live in the future... not yet. <(:op