You’ve got to hand it to the head of Pininfarina, a plucky, can-do sort of Italian car company (which sounds something like an oxymoron given that Fiat is just an acronym meaning Fix It Again, Tony) that’s convinced that, despite its horrendous economic troubles, it will manage to get the Bluecar out to market by 2011, meaning that their electric car’s design is not merely a concept car, but rather a market vehicle.

Just to give you a quick rundown on the car, it offers lithium metal polymer batteries for power giving it a range of about 150 miles. Plus, the car can also gather fuel from brake presses and directly from sunlight thanks to a combination of reactive braking systems and some roof mounted solar panels.

It’s a worthwhile goal for Peninfarina, and hopefully it can manage to bring it off.  Video of the Bluecar is directly below, so enjoy it.

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What will fuel the cars of the future? Will the cars of 2025 run on electricity, hydrogen combustion engines, ethanol or bio-diesel, solar power, or some hybrid combination of any number of these? Ethanol was touted by the U.S. government very briefly for reasons that seem in retrospect to be more political than practical. Ethanol has lower emissions than gasoline and can be produced right here in the United States, but recently studies suggest that it actually takes more energy to produce than is contained in the fuel itself, making the environmental impact kind of self-defeating.

Ethanol costs about $2 per gallon, which is less than Petroleum based fuel, but cars using E85 (an 85% Ethanol blend) get 10-20% few miles per gallon that run on regular gas. On the up side, some cars specially made to run on Ethanol based fuels (like the Chrysler Sebring, Ford F150, and GMC Yukon) are already on the market and are no more expensive than regular models.

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