That’s an awful lot of money for a car that can only go 50 miles before you have to turn around and go back home to recharge.

At that rate, it would take a week to go from Kansas City, MO to Denver CO.—-assuming you could find places to recharge perfectly placed, and you didn’t have to wait in line to recharge.

The pony express took ten days to go from St. Joseph MO to Sacramento CA, about 3 times as far in ten days. And that was 150 years ago.

We are really making progress.

1)The battery needs to be very large for a significant driving range.
2)The battery costs are then to big.
3)Relying on electricity only is a strategic mistake in case of power grid failure (due to storm, war or natural catastrophe).
4)An onboard generator is also useful as a cogen unit for heating.

Those are, for the moment, the main reasons why plug-in hybrids make more sense.

American CEO’s would gladly manufacture products in Hell if it would add to their bonus pay, American marketers (like Wal-Mart) would gladly sell them if they could add to their profit line, and American consumers would gladly buy them if they were a couple of cents cheaper.

Yes. let’s export our battery and car manufacturing/technology to China, where we don’t have to worry about environmental or labor laws, and where they are still dumb enough to accept dollars for now. Pollute somebody else’s environment. While we’re at it, let’s feel self-righteous about this, too.

The way to do this is to make a market for hybrid/electric cars by taxing fuel more heavily (and returning that money to income tax filers). Then we could afford to MAKE THEM HERE profitably and make the US a center of fuel-efficient technologies the world would come to. It isn’t lack of engineering talent-we have better engineers in America than anywhere. It’s lack of political will to produce the right market.

My is still that GM employs 3 times more Americans than Toyota for every car they sell in America.

1) farming,
2) mining, and
3) manufacturing.

Everything else is a service industry that creates nothing (think about what computers do – they only manipulate or makes other things more efficient). Every service job is there to support one of the above three industries, or to receive money from someone who is employed by one of those three industries.

America is close to losing the ability to make its own products. Our trade deficit is giving huge control of America to China, a very dishonest country, and to Japan (no so honest), who has manipulated their currency and used illegal trade practices to kill off American industries (like electronics).

Shines, your argument is why I put it in terms of American jobs. Rather than worrying about what percentage of each component is made where. What matters is that Toyota only hires 1/3 as many Americans per car sold in America. Contrary to their ads, that doesn’t sound very American to me.