Man, sorry for the delay in posting - we’ve been lapsing in and out of food comas since Thursday afternoon, as is customary over Thanksgiving. But now that we’re back, we’re proud to announce that we now know who rounds out the top ten ethanol producing countries. The first two are the US and Brazil, so now we’re going to list off the remaining seven, including what crop they process into ethanol and a few tips for how they could become #1 someday.

3. China (corn). China’s population is both large in number and highly industrious, so it’s surprising that they came up short behind Americans, who are eternally distracted by television, and Brazilians, who are eternally distracted by each other; none of them seem to wear any clothes larger than a bikini for anything except maybe state funerals. But on the other hand, the Chinese only now getting cars on the road en masse, so the lag is understandable. And given recent quality control issues they’ve had, we’ll be happy if they manage to produce ethanol without toxic amounts of lead in it.

4. India (sugarcane). India is another populous, industrious country who should be higher on the list, but they have some of the same issues China does, plus much of their time is spent being yelled at by frustrated Americans calling customer service. Perhaps they should take a page from the West’s playbook and outsource their nightmarish phone bank jobs to an even poorer, less developed country (Myanmar, perhaps?), which would free them up enough to crank out more ethanol.

5. France (sugar beets). France found the perfect, and perhaps only, use for beets, since they’re too disgusting to eat. But they’re still lower than they should be. History suggests surrendering their processing facilities to Germany.

6. Germany (rye). Hey, speak of the devil. The Germans need to find a stock that doesn’t compete with their world-renowned breweries if they want to compete with everyone above them. We’d recommend using waste beer, but we’re pretty sure that doesn’t exist in Germany. Those people will drink anything.

7. Russia (wheat). The assertion that ethanol processing wastes otherwise edible crops might be bunk everywhere else on Earth, but Russia is usually in dire enough straits to run counter to that line of reasoning. Luckily, they have an inexhaustible natural resource - sorrow - that they’ve been exporting across the globe for decades now. If they can somehow distill tears into workable fuel, they’ll be at the top of this list by Valentine’s Day.

8. Canada (corn/wheat). Canada has some pretty sweet oil fields that are still lucrative enough for them to downplay alternative fuel sources. But that won’t last forever, and they’ll probably go through the same stupid alarmism over food prices and crop waste that we had. But with a good portion of their country being a frozen hinterland, they don’t have the same capacity for cellulosic ethanol that we do. Unless they use snow, in which case they’ll kick our Yankee asses.

9. Spain (wheat). Spain’s priorities are tuned more to the electric car - they plan to have a million of them on the road by 2014. That’s probably for the best; their cars can charge in the afternoon while they’re asleep, the lucky bastards.

10. South Africa (??). No one knows what South Africa turns into ethanol. We’re guessing it’s corpses. If so, then stay the course - that’s not a bad allocation of resources for them.

Once again the forces of industry are outdone by bored teenagers - Luke LaBorde, an 18-year-old boy in San Antonio, TX, converted a gas-powered Bradley kit car to run on electric power, for a mere $18,000 (which, in car money, is a drop in the bucket). The car can go about 40 miles per charge (each charge uses less than a dollar’s worth of electricity), at a top speed of 55 mph, and runs on “an electric motor driven by eight lead-acid batteries.” LaBorde figures that, all said, it took about 150 hours to complete, spread out over three months.

Bradley cars, for the uninitiated, included the GT, Scorpion and GT II,  and could be bought as parts to be assembled by the purchaser. LaBorde bought his on eBay, of course, and got help from his hydraulics-repairman dad, but had never built or converted a car before undertaking this project. In fact, he doesn’t see it as much more than a hobby. But hopefully the major automotive companies were paying attention to this, because it will be brought up the next time they complain about the cost or timeliness of electric vehicles.

We’ve said it before, but it’s still true that when people think of electric cars, they picture - with no offense intended to electric car hobbyists - hopeless tragedies like the dorkmobile to the right of this sentence. But the basic idea of a plug-in electric vehicle still has some promise; San Diego Gas & Electric conducted a yearlong study that, in the end, “confirmed the viability of electricity as a clean and low-cost transportation fuel.”

More specifically, the study showed impressive reductions in tailpipe emissions and in tailpipe emissions and overall fuel costs with a plug-in hybrid compared to a standard hybrid model. The study converted two 2007-model standard hybrid vehicles to run on lithium-ion batteries; the modified cars “achieved a 60% increase in gas mileage, a 37% decrease in carbon dioxide (CO2) tailpipe emissions, and an 18% reduction in fuel costs.” By the time these things hit showrooms in 2010, the efficiencies are projected to be even higher than they are now.

And that’s compared to a hybrid. You can imagine how it must look next to a regular car. Actually, you don’t have to, because the study shows that fuel cost savings can jump as high as 57% when compared to a standard gasoline-fueled vehicle.

This is exciting news for consumers; not only has hybrid vehicle technology resurrected the left-for-dead idea of the electric car, but the aesthetic advances made since the electric car’s heyday could change its stock image from that Easter egg up top to something like the Tesla Roadster, or even something from our list of suggestions (pts. I and II).