Bikes & Cars...

For the last week of May, the Sexiest Green Car Show returns to the Eden Project, the UK's "living theater of plants and people." Why would a place that features a million plants representing 5,000 species have a car show? The high-mileage and alternative-fuel cars on display May 23-31 are, in theory, even kinder to plants than vegans.

The sexiest car at the show this year by a green mile will be the Lotus Exige Tri-Fuel, which made its debut at the 2008 Geneva auto show. As the name implies, the sporty two-door can run on gasoline, bioethanol, or ethanol. Using any alternative fuels in sports cars is a step in the right direction; decide for yourself how beneficial ethanol, in the form of E10 or E85, is for the planet.

Morgan is bringing its Life Car, which is sexy in the way that piles of money are sexy. This silver bullet runs on hydrogen fuel and gets the equivalent of 150 mpg. Morgan teamed up with RiverSimple (no relation to RiverWired) to develop the system that powers four motors, one at each wheel, and stores braking energy in ultracapacitors rather than batteries.

New car company Axon Automotive will debut its fuel-efficient family sedan, the 2+2 Multipurpose Vehicle, at the Sexiest Green Car Show, but the extreme-close-up images available on the Web make it hard to rate its sexiness. The car uses conventional gasoline, but through aerodynamics and use of carbon fiber, gets better (though unspecified) mileage.

Other offerings at the show include small cars from Ford, Citroen, Peugeot, and others. Most of these tend toward the Easter-egg school of green design: cute but hardly sexy. But with barrels of oil at an all time high and only going higher, drivers will take what they can get, and the sooner, the better.