Electric Vehicles

When President Barack Obama, in his 2011 State of the Union address, set a goal of putting 1 million all-electric vehicles on America's roadways by 2015 (the first country that would achieve that milestone), comparisons were inevitably drawn to President John F. Kennedy's bold clarion call nearly a half century earlier to land a man safely on the moon.

As with Kennedy's electrifying challenge, Obama's call for national support for electric vehicles created an urgency to realize a broad vision in which technology and science would achieve a landmark that would, in turn, become a manifestation of American pride and achievement. As part of his challenge, Obama pledged $2.4 billion to research and development of electric vehicles as well as large tax credits to vehicle buyers.

Much as Kennedy's challenge appeared at the time a pipe dream, Obama's vision was almost immediately dismissed as unattainable—although there existed a promising market for hybrid cars (cars that use gas as well as electricity), all-electric vehicles had accounted for fewer than 1 percent of cars sold that year; even hybrids fared only slightly better (roughly 3 percent). Industry analysts cautiously projected perhaps by 2020 the million car mark might be achieved. But like Kennedy's challenge, Obama's call is perhaps more doable than it might at first appear, more calculated, and far more modest than it might seem. After all, 1.6 million electric vehicles had been sold in the six years before the State of the Union address, of which just under a half million were still in use, and if the vehicles could maintain a modest 1.7 percent of the overall sales of lighter vehicles (which average 15 million units per year in the age of the downsized automobiles and steadily escalating fuel prices), the million vehicles on America's roads was eminently attainable at least near Obama's target year.

In fact, it might be the greater challenge to overcome public misperceptions about the vehicles' range and expense and the usual uneasiness of consumers being introduced to any radically new kind of technology (similar resistance met by personal computers less than a generation earlier). Strident advocates of electric vehicle technology, in fact, considered Obama's national goal, if anything, too timid (European automotive analysts project that by 2025 all vehicles sold in Europe will be electric or minimally hybrid cars). These vocal proponents argue that America must embrace electric vehicles sooner rather than later and, in turn, move decisively toward asserting energy independence at least in the transportation sector and, in so doing, start to bring under control the greenhouse gas emissions from conventional gasoline engines, levels that had, over the last decade, reached alarming, unprecedented levels.