I see your point vis a vis electric car vs hybrid. It may be more accurate to call it a plug in hybrid vs electric only, altho I would imagine 90%+ of its intended use would be all elec. This is contrasted to the prius and such that just uses a electric booster motor to the ICE. I'm not real up on all the designs, but if the ICE is solely used as a generator for back-up power, rather than direct drive, I'm not so sure its fair to call it a hybrid either. IDK.
RE: Alt fuels & Biofuels:
I agree that using food products for fuel source material is stupid, however, biofuels are still have lots of potential. What is really needed is more reasearch and investment to make cellulosic ethanol conversion inexpensive and scalable.
My bro in law is a Prof of ChemE at UMass-Amherst. His collegue actually was featured in last month's
Scientic American (much to my bro's chagrin lol) as he's been working on some novel methods to breakdown cellulose for biomass conversion and has had some good sucess so far.
Layman's Cliffs on Cellulose: Cellulose is basically a hardy sugar molecule comprised of smaller digestable sugar such as sucrose (ie table sugar.) Cellulose can be broken down into its component sugars, which can easily be fermented into ethanol or other liquid fuels. The trick is breaking down cellulose in an efficient way, as well as dealing with other fibers and other cellulose-like molecules & structures that make up plant materials (obviously, as wood and plants are very durable materials.)
Using corn kernals is a cheap and half-assed way to make ethanol as the sugars are already in more digestable forms. If we can solve the latter, than a whole range of previously unusable material can be used for fuel sources, such as grass clippings, farm waste (ie corn stalks, which are just burned now, not the edible parts) paper waste, etc etc etc.
When I was an undergrad and I met my wife, we were working in a lab that was trying to do this conversion enzymatically w. various genetically engineered organisms, but was running into trouble finding suitable enzymes that were conducive to scale-up as well as not easily inhibited by various pollutants you would see in non-pure stock materials. That was a while ago, and its been really interesting to see the attention and funding that is starting to availble for this. when we were working on it, there was
no money for any of this stuff, and it was very crippling. The research $ now is still a pitance compared to many other things, but its really grown in the last 5 yrs. So much that now my bro constantly chides my wife for not completing her PhD in this, and is himself thinking of moving away from his cancer research to explore this (now there is the research $ cash cow.)
Its not a pancea, I don't think any one non-petroleum source is, but there are a lot of things (nat gas, nuke, wind, solar, etc) we can do to improve our fuel sources away from foriegn oil and all the problems that come with its sole dependence.