The Goodguys car show — hot rods, pickup trucks, station wagons, convertibles.

It’s not just the cars – and there are more than 2,500 of them to look at. The Goodguys auto show in Pleasanton, Calif., this weekend is a combination car show, exhibition hall, race track, and a place to sit on the grass, have a picnic, hang out and talk to like-minded people.

The overwhelming aspect of the whole thing is the cars, staged all over the Alameda County Fairgrounds, on the grass, parked on various streets, next to exhibition buildings and inside some of them.

There are dozens of different examples – hot rods, rat rods, pickup trucks, convertibles, coupes, sedans, motorcycles, few of them in their original factory condition. Customizing is the mantra here.

But there’s also a lot more than just the cars.

Back behind the buildings are race tracks for go-karts and other cars; huge tractor-trailer rigs belonging to such outfits as Edelbrock (manifolds and complete engines on display) and other purveyors of engine, transmission and exhaust parts; and behind the go-kart track, a vast field of row upon row of cars for sale.

Hydrogen-fueled cars face uncertain market in California

Cars that drive hundreds of miles on a tank of hydrogen and spew nothing from the tailpipe but water will hit the market this month in California.

But it wasn't customer demand that drove automakers to build fuel-cell cars - it was basic economics, with a nudge from regulation.

California and other states are pushing automakers to offer cars that don't contribute to global warming. Many companies turned to electric cars and plug-in hybrids in response.

However, executives at Hyundai, Toyota and several other automakers are convinced that fuel-cell cars, which can fill up in five minutes, are better suited to Americans' driving habits than electric cars will ever be.

And if the cars prove popular enough to make money someday, automakers that develop and build their own fuel cells may be able to keep a bigger slice of the profits than they can from electric cars.

The most expensive component of any plug-in vehicle is its battery, and while some electric car makers such as Tesla Motors and Nissan build their own battery packs, many don't.

"When you develop all the technology for yourself, and you don't have to pay any patents, you can reap the benefits down the road," said Derek Joyce, manager for product public relations for Hyundai.

Slow sales

His company spent more than 14 years developing and testing its own fuel cell. Next week, Southern California drivers will become the first in the nation to lease Hyundai's fuel-cell version of its Tucson sports utility vehicle. It will go for $499 per month - about double the price of leasing a gas-burning Tucson.

The company won't say how many people have signed up. But Hyundai plans to make about 600 of the cars by the end of 2015. For comparison, Nissan sold 954 electric Leaf hatchbacks and GM sold 1,529 Chevy Volts, an advanced plug-in hybrid, in their first year on the market.

Eco-minded drivers who spent years badgering the auto industry into building electric cars haven't done the same for fuel cells. Many of them even call the new technology a waste of time, requiring a whole new network of expensive fueling stations. Fuel-cell cars, as a result, will jump into the market without a safety net.

"Nobody wants them," said Felix Kramer, founder of CalCars, a plug-in vehicle advocacy group. "Nobody's asking for them. People who wanted a zero-emission car can now get any number of electric vehicles. I'm kind of bewildered about why Toyota and Honda and the others are hanging so much on it."

The car companies know they need to convince people - electric-vehicle fans and ordinary drivers alike - to give fuel cells a chance.

"I certainly won't argue with you that the awareness for fuel cells is very low compared to the awareness of EVs," said Craig Scott, manager of advanced vehicle technologies for Toyota Motor Sales, USA. "We have to do our job to make people aware that this is here, now, and it's not some kind of science project."

Fuel-cell cars operate much like electric cars, relying on an electric motor rather than an internal combustion engine to turn the wheels. But instead of drawing their electricity from a big, rechargeable battery pack, they produce it onboard. A fuel cell uses an electrochemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen to generate current.

California requirements

That reaction yields no carbon dioxide or smog-forming chemicals, only water. As a result, automakers can use fuel-cell cars to meet California's requirements that a small percentage of the vehicles they sell in the state produce no greenhouse gas emissions. The California Energy Commission last month agreed to spend $46.6 million building 28 hydrogen fueling stations in the Bay Area, the Los Angeles region and along the Interstate 5 corridor.

Google's vision upends notions of car and driver

Through five years and 700,000 miles of testing, Google left one big question about its self-driving car technology unresolved: How would it fit into the rest of the auto industry?

Finally last week, in the form of a cute-as-a-koala electric buggy, came an answer: It won't.

Everything about the new test program that Google co-founder Sergey Brin revealed last week, from the design of its two-seat prototypes to the decision to test them on city streets instead of highways, points toward a personal transportation system that directly challenges the driver-centered, ownership-based business model the auto industry has relied on for a century.

"If you look at a vehicle purchase today, it's the second largest purchase most people in America make, and it's a resource that basically sits idle for 95 percent of the time," Christopher Urmson, the director of Google's self-driving cars project, told reporters. "It's kind of a poor capital investment, in some senses."

Google's idea of a killer app, therefore, is not a more accurate map or sensor to assist the driver but rather a vehicle that targets a pressing need for urban mobility without the need for a driver or driving at all. It envisions a network of self-guided, battery-powered vehicles standing ready in urban areas, able to be summoned with a tap on a smartphone and capable of taking their passengers to any destination.

If that sounds a bit like Uber with no one at the wheel, that may well be the point. Last year, Google led a $258 million investment in the on-demand taxi service through its Google Ventures capital arm.

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick acknowledged the connection at a conference last week in California. "When there's no other dude in the car," the blog TechCrunch quoted him as saying, in reference to the driver, "the cost of taking an Uber anywhere becomes cheaper than owning a vehicle."

Google ultimately may try supplying its software and maps to the mainstream auto industry, but car-sharing could offer the company and its technology a more direct route to the marketplace.

"All along, we've all been speculating about Google," said consultant Richard Bishop, who led the U.S. Department of Transportation's vehicle automation program in the 1990s. "We've known they're building very capable technology, but the question has been: What are they going to do with it? Here's a concrete use case -- the autonomous taxi -- that has significant potential, whether Google is the one who does it or not."

To prepare its autonomous cars to handle all sorts of urban driving scenarios, Google has commissioned a fleet of about 100 custom-built prototypes, which Urmson said will appear on California's public roads by year end.

Though current testing regulations require that a driver sit behind the wheel, Google's vision -- as depicted in its publicity materials -- is for the cars eventually to have no steering wheel or pedals.

Automakers such as Daimler AG and Volvo also are aggressively pursuing autonomous vehicles to make cars safer, improve mobility for blind and elderly people and make traffic jams and commutes less tiresome.

But none of those automakers envisions eliminating the role of the driver altogether.

Google does. It says it isn't confident enough about the handoff of controls to maintain a role for the driver in a self-driving car. Human factors research suggests that once people gave up control of a vehicle, they would be too trusting, Urmson said, and wouldn't be prepared to retake the controls quickly when they were needed.

Rather than taking a shot at "debugging the human," Google decided to go for a fully autonomous car.

Autonomous, that is, within certain human-defined limits. Google's custom-built prototypes will be electronically limited to 25 mph and will never go on highways. They will be designed as "neighborhood" vehicles under U.S. regulations, exempting them from many crash-safety standards. And they will have emergency buttons for pulling over and shutting down.

"We've built in occupant protection and pedestrian protection and tried to tailor it to the environment we'll actually be operating in," said Ron Medford, the project's safety director, who was deputy administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration before joining Google in 2013.

Kara Kockelman, a transportation engineering professor at the University of Texas, said Google's decision to contain its experiment to cities makes sense. The risk of injuries there is lower because traffic moves slowly, she said, and the higher population density means self-driving vehicles could spend more time carrying passengers and less time sitting idle.

"In many ways," Kockelman said, "cities are where we expect to see them first."

Rather than partnering with a major automaker, Google signed up Roush Enterprises of suburban Detroit to build its prototypes, according to a report last week by Crain's Detroit Business, a sibling publication of Automotive News.

That's largely in line with Google's corporate ethos. Brin, the company's co-founder, acknowledged last week in an interview with The New York Times that car companies are working on partially autonomous driving features, but he suggested that the pace of change was too gradual for Google.