Last week’s column about the coming shift to tax-by-the-mile devices in automobiles brought many interesting letters. One writer says he was working on this project way back in the 1980s when he was building special Buicks that would run on methanol for the Department of Energy, with on-board computers to control the car’s operation. By 1993, test cars in Colorado were controlled from Pontiac, Michigan. The popular “OnStar,” system, promoted by Government Motors, is an outgrowth of this work.
