By Warren Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 21, 2007; G02

I was reared in a household that celebrated the possible. It was a positive place in a world seemingly dedicated to making me accept limits based on race, perceptions of class or other extraneous foolishness.

I was encouraged to dream, explore, to ask "What if?"

For those and other reasons, I love science fairs, technological exhibits, and events such as the 2007 Washington Auto Show, which runs from Wednesday through next Sunday at the Washington Convention Center.

They are venues for dreaming, exploration and questioning assumptions. They also can be forums for hype and subterfuge -- practiced, detected, reported and elevated beyond their real importance by cynics and short-term opportunists. In that regard, science and technology are no different from religion or politics. There always are people ready to twist things out of context, willing to take advantage.

But dreaming, exploring and questioning are acts of faith powered by the belief that something wrong can be made right, that there is a better way. They are catalysts for beneficial change.

There will be dreams aplenty on display at the Washington Auto Show, which rapidly is becoming an international stage for discussions of sustainable mobility and all of the freedoms, responsibilities and costs attached to it. Car companies, their suppliers and the federal government that regulates their industry will be core exhibitors and participants.

At issue this year, as it has been recently and will continue to be for years to come, is the matter of energy and how we use it in our legions of personal and commercial vehicles.

Show exhibitors will offer several proposals to conserve energy in the hope of preserving personal mobility. They will present samples of and plans for plug-in electric hybrid vehicles, advanced diesel engines, bio-fuel models and vehicles powered by hydrogen.

This is where the dreaming comes in -- where belief yields conception and where conception turns to question and exploration. It is how progress is made.

Consider, for example, Ford's big "What if?"

What if you can have a car with excellent fuel economy and zero tailpipe emissions? What if you can wed hydrogen power to the plug-in electric concept? Can you twin those technologies to make a vehicle publicly acceptable and commercially viable?

Ford, in conjunction with the Energy Department, is spending in the neighborhood of $100 million to find out. Their combined efforts so far have yielded a fleet of 11 prototype plug-in hydrogen electrics -- Ford's HySeries Drive models. At least one of those vehicles, the Ford Edge HySeries, a tall wagon, will be presented at the Washington Show.

In the Edge configuration, the HySeries system would be powered by a 336-volt lithium-ion battery pack charged by plugging into a standard 110- to 120-volt house current. When fully charged, the Edge HySeries would be able to run 25 miles at 85 miles per hour on battery power alone. Once battery power falls to a 40 percent charge , the hydrogen-powered fuel cell, supplied by Ballard Power Systems of Burnaby, British Columbia, begins generating electricity to recharge the batteries, thus adding another 280 miles to electric-power drive range.

General Motors will present a similar model, the Chevrolet Volt, originally unveiled at the 2007 North America International Auto Show in Detroit, which closes tonight. The plug-in volt is powered by a lithium-ion battery and a three-cylinder gasoline engine. It and 29 other concept and market-ready cars presented in Detroit will be shipped to the Washington exhibit.

It has been suggested in some environmental circles that these presentations amount to a kind of corporate "green-wash" dutifully swallowed by a naive media -- that they are nothing more than ruses by companies bent on placating a public thirsting for fuel-efficient cars in a high-horsepower world.

My retort is that the complaining environmentalists are the naive victims of their own press releases.

The only time American consumers thirst for fuel-efficiency is when they feel pain at the pump, or when they are made to feel pain elsewhere in their pockets. And the dreams that have led to the plug-in electric concepts have more to do with business survival than they do with environmental compliance.

I applaud the car companies for facing a reality that far too many American consumers refuse to accept -- rapidly growing global demand for an overall diminishing resource, oil. I applaud them for dreaming up new ways -- be they electric cars or bio-fuel engines -- to keep the world rolling and to stay in business. I applaud them for celebrating the possible.