Coming back from Topeka one afternoon, I approached the West Lawrence exit tollbooth with no car either in front or behind me. The usually superefficient toll collector was looking down engrossed in something, counting money perhaps. She didn’t even notice me. This was highly unusual. My window was rolled down, my ticket in hand. Moments went by. She still didn’t notice me.

What should I do, clear my throat, say hello? As I was contemplating the most polite way of summoning her attention, she glanced up and jumped. Literally jumped.

“Oh, you hybrids, just sneaking up on me. I’m so sorry. I didn’t hear you.”

She was right. My car is quiet. It was on auto stop. And the engine may have switched off as I was coasting to a stop. That was the hardest thing to get used to when I first picked up my new Honda Civic hybrid – it literally turns itself off any time I pause at a stoplight. At first, I had to constantly fight the tendency to turn the key.

I didn’t buy a hybrid to save the world. And I don’t think hybrid technology is the answer to the dilemma of a world running out of fossil fuel – or global warming. I bought it for selfish reasons. Right now, I’m just trying to save money on gas. I know it’s only a matter of time – and not very much time – before gas is $5 a gallon on its way up to $10. It’s inevitable as demand skyrockets around the globe and supplies dwindle. If the Middle East blows up and catapults us into World War III – and I know it will eventually happen – then foreign oil will stop flowing and America produces only a fraction of what it normally consumes. Well then, even my hybrid will be of no use. It needs oil, even if less.

Driving a hybrid is merely stopgap. Its technology is dated – the first hybrid was actually built in 1901 – and likely to be replaced with something better. I predict that when I’m ready to get rid of it – I usually hang onto a car for seven or eight years – no one will even want to buy it because it burns too much gasoline. By then, CNGs (compressed natural gas), hydrogen fuel cell vehicles and who knows what other new techno-wonder will be standard. By then, people will be using air and water to power their automobiles. Anyway, that’s what I hope. Honda has already announced its sleek new hydrogen car, the Clarity, will hit Los Angeles dealerships next summer. All it would take is for a few fleets to place orders – FedEx, UPS, Post Office – and mass production would be off and running, bringing down prices. We can’t expect government help. Congress hasn’t even tightened fuel efficiency standards in more than 30 years.

Actually I wish I’d been able to buy an all-electric car rather than a partial one. That would have been so nicely old-fashioned. I could have done that if I had been in the market for an automobile in 1897. Most of the first horseless carriages were, in fact, electric. The first vehicle to break the mile a minute speed record was an electric car driven by French racer Camille Jenatzy in 1899. In the early years of the 1900s, thousands of clean, quiet, electric taxis, cars and trucks coursed through the city streets of America. A whole fleet of electric taxis serviced New York with a central battery swapping station on 39th Street, a swap that took a mere 75 seconds. Battery-charging devices designed by General Electric were to be installed throughout cities like parking meters, dubbed the Electrant. The electric cars were expensive and made one at a time by a variety of manufacturers. Steam engine cars and internal combustion gas-burning cars – also expensive to produce – were locked in a fight against electric for supremacy. All had their strengths and drawbacks, but in the final analysis, whatever automobile was mass-produced first was the technology that would win out.

Internal combustion won out early on – gasoline was lighter than lead batteries and dirt cheap for a while. When gasoline prices jumped 75 percent in 1912, a resurgence of interest in electric cars occurred. Thomas Edison and Henry Ford got together and hatched a little-known grand scheme to mass-produce electric cars and install charging stations all across America. A striking advertisement ran in a 1914 Saturday Evening Post with the two men posing beside their stylish electric cars with the headline: How Would You Like to Have these Master Minds Help You Choose Your Electric Car?

The story of why it didn’t happen, and why internal combustion went on to become the automobile of choice, is complicated. It involved corporate corruption and a lot of dirty tricks. But a major market force was also key: “the Vroom Factor.”

Electric cars were too quiet and too clean. The gasoline proponents derisively called them “ladies cars.”

The Vroom Factor is still a driving force today. How else can you explain the popularity of SUVs on steroids, Hummers and huge macho pickups as personal transportation? Their emergence came well after the oil embargo and gas lines of the ’70s, and at a time when the Middle East was in increasing turmoil amidst worries about oil supplies running out, and when global warming concerns were already heating up. The Vroom Factor outweighed it all. Look at the current season’s TV car ads aimed squarely at the macho “mine is bigger than yours” crowd. The automobiles are filmed looking up from ground level to make the machines look even more fearsome, with fronts and grills like the sinister grinning mouths of monsters. Vroom, Vroom, Vroom.

Am I offended by these gas guzzlers? Yes. What business is it of mine? There’s a finite amount of gas left, and they’re using up more than their share. But then maybe that’s good. The sooner we run out of it, the sooner we’ll come to our senses on alternatives. So go ahead, guzzle away. I’ll stick with my hybrid even though my wee attempt to do the right thing doesn’t do much good in the overall scheme of things – a virtual drop in the giant bucket of our planet’s impending crisis. But it sure is quiet and pleasant.

I’ll stick with my ladies car, thank you very much.