Green Car Insurgency!

High oil prices are tough on consumers who might already be struggling, but I for one am just brimming with excitement over the effects $4 per gallon gasoline is having on the automobile industry. Last week, GM announced that it's closing 4 SUV manufacturing plants, and said in its press release that it believes cheap gasoline to be a thing of the past. GM, Ford, and Chrysler are fundamentally changing their businesses as a result. Apart from the potential demise of the Hummer brand (which I would find very satisfying), Ford is retooling F-150 producing plants to switch to small car manufacturing, and Chrysler is getting into the hybrid market. Their ridiculously large hybrid SUVs are not the answer to the climate problem (and in fact big, expensive hybrids with infinitesimal fuel efficiency gains are selling abysmally), but these signs of change are really, really exciting. A couple years ago the documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car" portrayed GM as a wicked corporate giant quashing the plucky little EV-1, in spite of its possible commercial feasibility (or maybe more accurately, in spite of the possible value of heading in that strategic direction - imagine if GM had beat Toyota's Prius to the gas-mileage punch?). Now, the giant is staggering under rapid changes in consumer behavior that it evidently thought impossible, and it's falling all over itself trying to beat Toyota to the market with a plug-in hybrid in 2010.

Just as exciting to me is the proliferation of impatient entrepreneurs trying to concoct plug-in electric MPG improvements (which may or may not result in a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, depending on the upstream energy source of your wall outlet). Hybrids-Plus, an outfit in Boulder, CO, is one of a handful of companies offering plug-in conversions on the Toyota Prius and Ford Escape hybrids. They are prohibitively expensive - upwards of $30,000 not including the car - but the mere fact that these companies exist is evidence of a market not being supplied by the major auto manufacturers. On a smaller scale, a guy named David Taylor in Lee County, NC seems to have converted his 2005 Dodge Ram pickup into a plug-in hybrid in his shop. From his video, it seems like he's ready to start converting cars for us, too. And there are other entrepreneurs who are innovating their way towards higher MPG's: Aptera is a California-based car company set to start selling their first vehicle in 2009, and it gets 300 MILES PER GALLON:



Cars are not the biggest producers of greenhouse gases in the world - according to Environmental Defense, they account for about 10% of global emissions - but as developing countries like China and India become wealthier, their new middle classes are buying cars, which will exacerbate the problem of tailpipe emissions. Plug-ins are far from 'clean', but moving the pollution from millions of tailpipes to a handful of power plants seems like a step in the right direction.

I can't wait to see what happens next.