Alternatively fuelled vehicles are nothing new. In fact they’ve been around longer than anyone alive today. The early days of motoring saw a number of fuel sources vying for supremacy, including gasoline, steam and even electricity.

It was of course gasoline that won, and it’s only now – over a century later – that we’re beginning to understand the environmental cost of this technological choice, and make any sort of progress to cleaner mobility.

Previous bloggee Norton74 is takes us back to the start of motoring, long before concerns of global warming and air pollution, with this magnificent steampunk Ford T-Bucket hot rod. We’re not aware that Ford’s Model-T could be had with anything other than a gasoline internal combustion engine, but some of its long-forgotten rivals could be powered by all sorts of things, steam included. It’s not too much of a stretch then to imagine that the hot rodding world could indeed merge a Model T with a steam-car.

Norton’s gloriously strange steampunk T-Bucket is just for show though – underneath all that copper is a typical small-block V8 gasoline engine, there’s no water tank and no furnace – but it looks fantastic. There’s lots more to see on Flickr at Norton’s photostream – click the link above to jump back in time.