The Roadster, a plug-in electric car
Is this a crazy idea? Oversimplified, maybe. Take The Google money and Silicon Valley brain power, that powers Tesla Motors, for example, and answer the Big Three Automakers' slow, dying plea. Their much publicized plug-in electric car, the Roadster, is in short-run production, and at $109K a pop, isn't exactly flying off the shelves.
General Motors' Chairman Rick Wagoner, who claims he's in awe of Tesla in a NewsHour interview tries to introduce the following reality check: "We had about 100 years of an auto industry in
which 98 percent of the energy to power the vehicles has come from oil.
We're really going to change that over the next time period, things
like battery development and applying batteries to cars, as we're
planning on doing with the Volt, is an important step, kind of, in the
next 100 years of the auto industry."
With all due respect Mr. Chairman, I mean....Netscape's browser proliferated Internet access in 1994. Think of how far we've come since then--mobile technology, countless web applications, gazillions of web site destinations, and just the mere penetration itself--all within a 15 year time frame. F*** a bailout! I vote for a Silicon Valley takeover of Motown. ASAPs.