A poll just finished by Consumer Reports shows that 7% of car buyers most likely to buy this year in the US would” very likely” purchase a plug in car right now. 2009, the worst year in actual numbers(not percent of population mind you) since 1982 saw approximately 11.5 Million cars sold in the US alone. We all know 2009 was a horible year but if the Chevy Volt hits 7% of that year it would sell 805,000 Volts. That’s just in the US! That’s a huge market. Some would even say GINORMUS! Multiply 805,000 by $30,000= $24,150,000,000! That’s over 24 BILLION dollars! Yeah I think GM wants some of that market. And remember that’s just in the US! What about the rest of world?

The only bad news here is I can’t go buy stock in GM.

Now, you seem to be OK with spending money on things like protecting ourselves, the military.

We’re spending billions upon billions in Iraq ($750 million a day?) and I doubt that many would argue that sending our military into that country was mostly about protecting “our” oil supplies. That’s the basic reason we have any involvement in the region – oil.

As oil gets more scarce, more expensive, we’re likely to be even more in the position of having to “protect our interests” in order to keep our cars running. Or we could get off oil.

Given that we know that we could generate all the electricity we need within our boarders, stop spending billions of dollars overseas to purchase oil, stop spending billions on maintaining military force in the region, and cut back on our CO2 emissions it makes sense to me to spend some of our money to jump start an replacement technology.

If we were to give the $7,500 supplement to 100,000 EV purchasers (probably a lot more than we need to hand out) we’d be investing $7.5 billion

What do we import a day in petroleum, 8-9 million barrels a day? $60 bucks a barrel, 9 million, and we’re shipping over a half billion of our dollars across our boarders every single day. In two weeks we spend that $7.5 on some black stuff that we just burn up and for which we get no residual value. (Or ten days in Iraq.)

Move from petroleum to electricity and each of our personal fuel costs drop to a quarter of what they now are and what money we spend to ‘tank up’ stays in the country. It creates jobs here manufacturing. installing, and maintaining renewable energy systems.

And it makes us more self-reliant. We wouldn’t have to kiss up to people we don’t like simply because we need their oil to keep ourselves moving.