Last week the Model T turned 100.

Ford Motor Co. introduced the first affordable automobile on Oct. 1, 1908.

With a hand crank to start, a Model T 100 years ago sold for about $850.

The year the Model T was introduced, Americans drove a total of about 79,000 cars that bumped along muddy roads and horse paths. By 1927, the year the Model T ended its production run, more than 20 million Americans were driving cars.

As all of us who drive can attest, that was just the beginning of our obsession with wheels.

Today, our country counts about 250 million registered vehicles. Tennessee counts about 4.3 million registered vehicles - or slightly more than one set of wheels for everyone over 18. Mississippi counts 1.9 million, just under one vehicle for everyone over 18.

In other words, we're driving fools.

We don't walk. We don't take mass transit. We drive.

We drive to work. To vacation. To the movies. We drive to quiet places to kiss, to noisy places to shop, to far-off places to get away from it all.

Along the way we stop at the gas station and fill up.

We spend $200,000 a minute on fuel that originates on foreign soil, or rather beneath it. That's $700 billion a year - and rising.

Recently the Republican National Convention worked up a sweat with the notion that we could drill, baby, drill our way out of our driving and fuel addictions.

But we can't.

All the off shore oil reserves around America would, at most, satisfy 3 percent of our thirst. There has to be more to the answer.

Democrats might suggest we all go buy a Prius hybrid.

But we can't do that, either. Not one car out of 100 built or sold in this country is a hybrid. The cost of those vehicles today makes them a bad investment for most drivers.

On this 100th anniversary of the Model T let's think hard, for a moment, about the challenge of connecting political slogans and quick solutions to complex problems.

Both John McCain and Barack Obama talk about the need to break our dependence on foreign oil. They both talk about ramping up alternative energy sources. They implore our manufacturers to build more fuel-efficient cars.

It all sounds good.

But talk is cheap. Real cheap at this time in the election cycle.

Solutions to the looming problem of too much foreign oil and too few alternative fuels will take big-time money, and effort.

Oilman T. Boone Pickens gets that. You might think Pickens is running for president this year, given the number of times the 80- year-old Texan's face appears on TV touting wind power and cars fueled by natural gas. Here's a guy who made billions drilling for oil and who now says, "we can't drill our way out of this" energy crisis.

But even a guy with billions to play with confronts some truly intractable challenges.

Yeah, we have plenty of natural gas that could be used in all those cars and trucks. And currently, vehicles powered by natural gas can be fueled up at about $1.50 per gallon.

But we don't have any natural gas service stations.

We're short of pipelines and trucks to haul the gas.

Much of the natural gas lies underneath land that would be difficult to drill because of ownership or location.

And then there are the little questions of who would pay to convert existing cars and trucks to natural gas and who would build the new cars with natural gas-ready systems.

Look around you while driving in Memphis. Notice the hundreds of beaters zooming by, often with a dent and a broken taillight?

Will the owners of these old rigs be standing in line to pay to convert their vehicles to natural gas? And if they did, where would they get the fuel?

I drive a 14-year-old car, and I'm not anxious to trade up right now - until the auto companies have a good alternative for me.

The Big Three American auto companies all have plans for electric cars. But Chrysler has lost $400 million so far this year, and Ford is running out of cash. Both will be hard-pressed to ramp up to hybrids. The Chevrolet Volt and Cruze electric cars are two years away. While promising, they likely will account for less than 10 percent of the American car market in the coming five years.

Meanwhile, we go on spending our children's inheritances on foreign oil.

Today, 100 years after the Model T, we should be pushing both candidates for president for a revolutionary change in energy policy - something as big as the Model T was a century ago.

Chris Peck is editor of The Commercial Appeal. Contact him at 529- 2390 or at peck@commercialappeal.com.

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Solutions to the looming problem of too much foreign oil and too few alternative fuels will take big-time money, and effort.

Originally published by Chris Peck .

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