Obama wants more electric cars by 2015 It will be interesting to see what happens with this. Will the large oil companies block this initiative? Eight years ago, President George W. Bush proposed a $1.2 billion program to help develop fuel-cell vehicles and hydrogen storage systems. Now, in 2011, the U.S. still has no hydrogen fuel cell cars in commercial production. At the State of the Union Address, President Barack Obama stated that his goal is to make the United States the first country with one million electric vehicles on the road by 2015. According to Michael Omotoso, director of global powertrain forecasting at J.D. Power and Associates in Troy, Mich., the limited market for short-range compact cars and the high cost of batteries could be real obstacles to reaching Obama’s goal. The first vehicles planned to be on the road will be the Chevy Volt and the Nissan Leaf. General Motors wants to expand its production to 120,000 Volt units by 2012. So far, a total of 19 Leafs and 326 Volts have been sold in the U.S. As the Energy Information Administration claims, automakers will sell about 281,000 light trucks and electric vehicles from 2011 through 2015. Posted by Victor M → February 13, 2011 at 7:42 PM under Alternative Energy Environment
