I rode from the hotel to Los Angeles airport (LAX) with Tony Bryant of TriMet (bryantt@trimet.org). TriMet is one of the few bus properties to have carried out long term testing of the New Flyer bus equipped with the new Allison hybrid drive (http://www.trimet- .org/environment/hybridbus.htm). Bryant is clearly enthralled with the results and talked of not only the reduced fuel consumption, but also the reduced brake wear and expectations of lower maintenance costs.

At LAX I finally rounded off the direct methanol fuel cell discussion with Mark Grist (mgrist@methanex.com) of Methanex. Grist was also enroute to Vancouver. Methanex is quite excited about the DMFC as a power source for small transportation applications, such as scooters. This is an application that could lead to development of a major new market for methanol. The easy availability of methanol may also give DMFC developers in small transportation markets a head start over other vehicle fuel cell technologies that are dependent on emergence of a larger automotive market to get practical supplies for hydrogen.

The conference was long and the interactions were many. The hot topics were the present reality of hybrids and whether the progress in Li-ion batteries would lead to pure electric vehicles or “Plug-in Hybrids” or both. Meanwhile, fuel cells are finding valuable niches and are being made easier to tackle with the addition of batteries as the DMFC (Parker/Methanex/Vectrix/Giner) and PEMFC (Hydrogenics/Deere) projects showed.

EVS20 was a great success, there were good exhibits, good papers, and the final mixing event on the Queen Mary broke down barriers and resulted in remarkable interactions. If your correspondent tinkled the ivories of a grand piano, then please be reassured that it was done to gain better access to the thoughts of some of the conference participants. My count of the main papers showed that 59 were related to hybrid vehicles or batteries for hybrids and 26 to fuel cells and hydrogen fueling. Here are some attendee statistics: there were 1,036 delegates, 543 exhibitor staff representing 107 companies, 83 people from the media for a total of 1,662 on site. There were 74 vehicles for which more than 2,000 members of the public paid $10 for rides. The delegates came from 32 countries in three major areas: 59% from the America’s, 21% from Asia-Pacific and 19% from Europe. Of note, 131 people came from Japan and 12 came from Nepal!

In the field of “electric drive” we are already entering a global village.