campaign, “Detroit’s plug-in electric car, the Chevrolet Volt,” said one political observer, had become “a must-have prop for U.S. presidential candidates.” Despite GM’s crushing economic problems, candidates Barack Obama and John McCain could not get close enough to the vehicle. McCain proudly announced that “the eyes of the world are now on the Volt.” For his part, Barack Obama promised during the campaign to have a million such plug-in hybrids and electric cars on the road by 2015.10
THE ROAD MAP
Since then, policy support both for plug-ins and pure electric vehicles has grown significantly around the world, as has a great wave of energy-associated innovation, a good deal of it supported by government policies and mandates. This wave has been powered as well by scientific and technological curiosity and by the economic prospects.
In the United States, policy entrepreneurs, supported by NGOs, have had a strong impact in making the case. The Electrification Coalition, established in 2009, laid out a “road map” for the electric car that was adopted by both Democrats and Republicans alike.
The coalition’s chairman, Frederick Smith, founder and CEO of FedEx, made clear that FedEx itself was very interested in moving toward electric vehicles to deliver its parcels. But Smith saw much more than that. “We cannot let electric vehicles turn into another niche product,” he said. “We cannot allow their use to be limited to environmentalists and technological enthusiasts. To make our nation’s investment worthwhile—and, more importantly, to truly combat our oil dependence—we must put ourselves on the pathway toward millions, then tens of millions, and then hundreds of millions of electric cars and trucks.”
As Fred Smith saw it, meeting the needs exclusively with oil in a world in which the number of automobiles was going to double would be challenging and risky. That made diversifying fuel sources critical, and electricity, with improving batteries, looked like the most practical way. The need for charging was not such a great obstacle. “You have to plug in the car, but I plug in my BlackBerry every night because of the value I get from the BlackBerry.”11
The bankruptcies of General Motors and Chrysler and the multibillion-dollar bailouts by the federal government put the Obama administration in a strong position to advance the electric car. It applied the recession-battling stimulus spending to that same end. A road map had already been laid out by David Sandalow in two books he had written prior to becoming assistant secretary of energy in the Obama administration—Freedom from Oil and Plug-in Electric Vehicles: What Role for Washington. The legislation that came out of Congress to promote the adoption of the electric car followed the map closely. It included tax credits for manufacturing electric cars, tax credits for buyers of electric cars, tax credits for recharging stations—at home and in public spaces.
In the new century, CARB, now much more focused on global warming, returned with an order requiring automakers to introduce zero-emission vehicles on a revised schedule: by 2012 automakers would be required to begin introducing ZEVs into the California market. The initial target was small and it would include fuel-cell vehicles, but the number was slated to ramp up very fast. This fueled a new urgency for automakers to find their way to deploy an all-electric car.
But there was still the problem of the battery, which had defeated the ZEV the first time.
The core of electric vehicles is the battery. The move toward electric cars would require a major technological advance in batteries. The basic lead-acid battery goes back to the second half of the nineteenth century. Other types of batteries were introduced subsequently, but the lead-acid battery remained the mainstay of the auto industry.
However, in the 1970s and 1980s, researchers, beginning in an Exxon laboratory, were figuring out how lithium, the lightest of metals, could provide the basis for a new rechargeable battery. The oil crises of the 1970s and the fear of a lasting shortage of petroleum had sparked interest in reviving the electric car. In 1976, Congress approved funding for “Electric and Hybrid” research. That same year, Forbes reported that “the electric car’s rebirth is as sure as the need to end our dependence on imported oil.” A number of automobile companies were working on electric vehicles. In 1979, in the middle of the Iranian oil crisis, Fortune announced, “Here Come the Electrics.” But then the price of oil went down, it turned out that the world was amply supplied with petroleum, and the interest in electric cars once again faded away.
But the