One can’t swing a dead cat in Washington these days without hitting someone who’s ranting about how plug-in hybrid vehicles (part gasoline engine, part battery-powered engine, but rechargeable like a wall appliance) are the wave of the future. Of course, if they really were the wave of the future, there would be no need for ranting in Washington - automobile manufacturers would be busy making them as we speak. It’s only when corporate America is cool to an idea that the prophets turn to the taxpayer or the regulator. This illustrates Taylor’s law - “the commercial merit of any particular technology is inversely related to the degree of political tub-thumping heard in Washington for said technology.”
Which brings us to plug-in hybrids. Noted automobile engineers James Woolsey, Frank Gaffney, and Gal Luft, among others, have been going into overdrive of late to demand federal action to compel the manufacture and sale of these sorts of cars, which they assure us perform so splendidly and can be so wildly profitable for both buyer and seller that only some sort of inexplicable insanity explains their absence from car lots all across America. This “Neo-Cons for Neo-Cars” alliance is picking up steam and is increasingly embraced by all sorts of smart opinion leaders who can barely program a VCR, much less design an engine.
An invaluable reality check, however, can be found in the Sunday New York Times. There, reporter Lindsay Brooke notes that, while automobile companies are busily developing plug-in prototypes, there remains one little problem - the battery necessary to make such a car go from here to there has yet to be invented. While the industry is optimistic that something will come along in the near future, industry executives confess when pressed that the cars would be so expensive to manufacture that they probably wouldn’t sell without government subsidies or consumption mandates.
Why are Neo-cons and other assorted hawks so obsessed with automotive powertrains? My guess is that they fear U.S. foreign policy is being terribly constrained by our need to import oil. Plug-in hybrids would liberate the country from worrying about how our actions play on the Arab street, freeing Uncle Sam to act even more uninhibitedly around thew world.
Look, if the auto industry wants to make these things and consumers want to buy them, fine with me. But before we start bossing Detroit or their customers around and turn over automobile manufacturing to the very same crowd that manufactured the war in Iraq, consider yourself warned.