In the stifling heat of Death Valley and with a falling fuel gauge, Andrew Hamilton put his faith in the latest hybrid
We are in a landscape as awesome as the Old Testament, a place of hellish summer heat where man and beast can perish in temperatures reaching over 50 degrees.
It's in the top ten of the world's most inhospitable places. Even its name is frightening enough.
Death Valley in California is a vista of endless dunes and endless jagged peaks. The mountain ranges which flank the valley don't come with comforting names either - to the north the Last Chance range and to the east the Funeral Mountains.
Death Valley is a favourite testing location for car-makers anxious to see how engine management systems and air conditioning units cope with extreme temperatures, but we're on no such mission.
It's spring in the valley. There's beautiful bright sunshine and the air is crisp and clear. Our steed is Toyota's latest hybrid, the Highlander SUV. It's so new it hasn't yet gone on sale in the US.
There's only a handful of well-paved tarred roads but even the dry and dusty tracks which proliferate here pose little challenge. It's reassuring to have all-wheel-drive but many of the dirt roads are accessible by regular car.
It's hardly surprisingly that most of the traffic we meet is of the SUV variety, enjoying "adventure" away from the prim boulevards and shopping malls of Los Angeles or San Diego.
The Highlander brings us to all kinds of oddly-named spots. One is Twenty Mule Team Canyon, a winding one-way loop through an ancient lake bed. "It will make you feel like an ant in a quarry," says the Lonely Planet guide. We do indeed feel like an ant.
Golden Canyon gives us the most theatrically stunning sunset. And then there's the eerie silence of the Devil's Golf Course where the valley floor is littered with huge balls of crystallised salt. In the middle of it all is the deepest part of the Death Valley, nearly 300 feet below sea level.
Time to pow-wow with the locals. The Shoshone have hunted and fished in Death Valley for centuries. Like a lot of their ilk across North America, their work is more sedentary now, making baskets and carved wood items.
The Shoshone are mostly located around Furnace Creek where the valley's main visitor centre dispenses all kinds of essential information - most important being distances between gas stations.
Our main Shoshone contact is Jim - he wants to be called Big Jim - who tells us that he's an electrician. A hefty man with a penchant for jewellery, he points proudly to his Ford F150 pick-up filled with electrical paraphernalia. "That's my workshop, my office, my life," he exclaims with loud passion.
Our 1,000-mile round trip from LA back to LA goes off almost without incident - almost, because we come within a whisker of running out of fuel.
We are bound from Palm Springs for Las Vegas and decide to forsake the freeway for the more scenic route across the Mojave Desert. Ominous signs warn of "no gas for 80 miles".
About 40 miles later, the Highlander's fuel light flickers menacingly. The next place to fill-up is Baker where we rejoin Interstate 15 for Las Vegas.
Coming into Baker with relief from the Mojave, we are somehow funnelled into the Interstate going east towards the gambling mecca. There's no turning back - and a sign indicates no services for 40 miles.
We limp along for about 15 miles, many of them in ultra-slow electric mode - so it's fair to say the frugality of the hybrid technology helps in hours of need.
Eventually finding a turn-off allowing us to return to Baker, a mean one-sided township huddled on the LA and westward side of the freeway. Relief is tangible as fuel cascades into the empty tank.
It's on then to Las Vegas. If there's a more kitsch city in the world, we haven't come across it. Still, the sight of the Eiffel Tower and singing Venetian gondoliers make us homesick for old Europe.
You don't associate Vegas with museums or history, but we find one right in our Imperial Palace hotel. It houses around 350 vintage cars including some used by world leaders and dictators - Adolf Hitler is represented.
The crass vulgarity of Las Vegas is everywhere. There are permanent traffic jams and rude bad-tempered drivers. This is in marked contrast to everywhere else - Palm Springs, Hollywood, even downtown LA.
In Vegas, it's best to keep the car in the parking lot and use the monorail, which gives a splendid elevated view of all the kitsch.
In hybrid form the Highlander uses the same 3.3-litre 268bhp petrol engine as the Lexus RX 400h and the same 0-60mph time of 7.3 seconds is quoted by Toyota in the US. But, in humbler Toyota garb, the Highlander will come much cheaper, around $33,680 compared with an estimated $49,000 for the 400h.
The Highlander hybrid boasts oodles of low-end torque and cargo-hauling capacity. It comes with not one but two electric motors as well as the V6 petrol mill.
Official US figures suggest we should have got 32mpg in the city and 27mpg on the highway. Our overall return for 1,022 miles was a bit better, 34.6 mpg. Without the hybrid assistance and the two electric motors, consumption probably would have been around 20 or 21mpg.
By the middle of this year, eight hybrids will be fighting for the attention of economically minded (maybe even green-minded) American motorists.
The darling of the hybrids still has to be the Toyota Prius which has now found favour with over 120,000 US buyers. It has a US sticker price of $20,875 which makes it seems ridiculously cheap by Irish standards, less than €16,000. Actual Irish price including the 50 per cent VRT rebate is €29,495.
As we leave the Sunshine State, the headlines are saying that Californians are paying more and more for their petrol, with an average of $2.53 a gallon. Car-makers, and Toyota principally, are showing that there's a way to ease the pain. It's called hybrid.