I doubt you will see ongoing exponential growth in hybrid sales. For example, Q1 2011 is seeing a 26% year on year drop, and a 37% drop from the previous quarter. Granted, Q1 looked nicer being a 52% increase on the same quarter in 2010, however 2010 totals were a 13% drop form 2009. That's not exponential.
Hybrids just represent too little ongoing savings to justify their up front cost.
I do wish they'd bring back the telecommuting requirement that the first bush put in the clean air act. I think it was the only non-suck thing of his entire presidency. It made life easier, spurred infrastructure investment, and didn't really cost that much when you factored in the long term benefits. Clinton fixed it though. Oddly enough BO hasn't brought it up despite it being a hell of a lot more effective than hybrids or building out mass transit.
Yeah, since we don't have the current infrastructure to support this author's flawed understanding of diversification we shouldn't do it at all.
With reasoning like that we'd still be living in caves.
Now, now, Vern, if God meant us to fly he would have given us wings, right?
Likewise, if He meant for us to drive hybrids he would have give us a more robust power grid and maybe even hydrogen fueling stations for those other kind of new tech cars.
The reality of the electric car, frankly any non petroleum based vehicle, is energy storage. something along the lines of supercapacitors would make fueling stations possible. That means you only need to build out the grid to them, not every single household. Which lowers the cost of infrastructure to support them by a vast amount. That problem may also be why the real electric car my be hydrogen. The efficiencies suck, but it allows rapid refueling while engaging in an endlessly repeatable cycle. All you need is a cheap source of energy.
The very fact that Hybrid cars and Pluggable Hybrid cars exist is enough to act as cap on oil prices. While they may not make sense at $1/gal gas they make a lot of sense above $4/gal gas.
stewartm0205
The article is wrong in a few place. One, the number of hybrid cars does not grow linear with time. It grows expotentially. So aver the next ten years the hybrids will be at least 30% of all cars. The number one goal for hybrids is to reduce America's dependency on oil an since electrical generation in this country is almost oil free that goal is doable. The other function of hybrids is to reduce oil demand and keep oil prices low.