I want a car. Since I live in Boston, don’t have any money and know that Massachusetts auto insurance for an unmarried male under 30 would cost more than … um … something really expensive I’ll go with ‘tuition’ for now there’s not much chance of getting a car. Since I can’t have one, I’m free to dream up my great car free from restrictions of what I can actually afford.

So, the sky’s the limit. I want a sweet luxury car. I want a tested and known design, and I want good gas mileage. Hell, I want it to run without gas, and I want it to pump nothing harmful out the back. Too bad I don’t live in Germany because this car does exist.

The BMW 745h has an engine that runs on either gasoline or liquid hydrogen. You can buy liquid hydrogen at the Munich airport, you can buy gas everywhere else and if you run one tank empty on the highway, the car will switch to the other without missing a beat. You can take this big pimpin’ BMW 7-series up to 135 MPH, and when you’re running it on hydrogen, you can breathe the exhaust as easily as taking a huff off a humidifier. It’s not a prototype, it’s been driven 100,000 miles. It looks nothing like a Honda Insight.

The only problem with this car is the fuel. There aren’t a lot of places to buy liquid hydrogen, and it’s pretty clear why. Gasoline: finite supply, pollutes air when burned, found mostly in places where we don’t want to drill (Alaska) or someone else wants to drill us (Iraq), both a great reason to go to war and a great tool (napalm) during war. Hydrogen: most abundant element in the universe, burns in air to create water vapor, can be harvested wherever you can find water and efficiently enough to be harvested using solar power, blows up fast leaving you with scorched eyebrows instead of sticky burning gobs that would make Robert Duval proud.

Getting set up for hydrogen cars wouldn’t even be that hard. BMW already says that within a few years, most of their cars will use both gas and hydrogen. They also outline the most efficient way to distribute hydrogen: use solar power in the sunniest areas of the world to harvest it from water and then use takers and trucks to ship it around the world. So, basically all that’s needed is to swap all the gas in the tankers, trucks and filling stations with hydrogen. I think oil companies would be down for this, too. No matter what your feeling on the evil rating of oil companies, we all know they’re not stupid. I have solar panels on my house back home (bad idea by the way) and BP made them. They know that getting a handle on the energy of the future gets money in the future. With a little push to get them started, by the government maybe, one of them would be happy to be the first to sling hydrogen around the United States.

Meanwhile, President Bush just announced thousands of dollars worth of tax cuts if your business buys SUVs. Now, with this new BMW technology, there’s no reason why those gas guzzling beasts couldn’t run on hydrogen, but do you think that’s going to happen? He might as well offer scholarships for the kids who burn the most oil in their driveways. A few weeks ago, Congress was heatedly discussing just how the United States should seize and use the oil in Iraq once the country is occupied. I was never a kid to go yelling ‘oil war’ and ranting about evil governments, but come on, guys.

I’m not an environmentalist, I’m not an activist and I’m not a pacifist, but I just couldn’t let this story slip by because I’m also not a moron. I know a good deal when I see one. The technology behind the BMW 745h (oh, and they’ve got a MINI, too) seems like it’s a few steps short of cold fusion, especially these days when people who sit on oil are about to get shot. Even if Iraq were the land of peace and happiness right now, there is no reason why this car shouldn’t be pushed into production. The idea that we have something called the ‘Clean Air Act’ or Environmental Protection Agency, and they aren’t telling the world about this seems like a joke. If you’re like me, you’re not someone who’s willing to give up cool cars for electric go-karts, and now we don’t have to.