By Barbara Hollingsworth
In his 2011 State of the Union address, President Obama predicted that the U.S. would have “a million electric vehicles on the road by 2015.”…
…But reality hasn’t even come close. Although Obama backed up his prediction four years ago with $2.4 billion in federal grants to companies producing lithium-ion batteries to power electric cars, there has been no major breakthroughs that make them economically competitive with gas- and diesel-fueled vehicles, which have become far more fuel-efficient in the meantime.
In fact, with new advances being made in the internal combustion engine, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) predicts that gasoline and diesel-powered vehicles will still make up 95 percent of all light duty vehicles sold in 2040.
“Taking the infrastructure we have, using engines we understand with no new costs—that is where we are going in the next 15 years and what is going to compete really effectively with electrics,” said Don Hillebrand, head of the advanced combustion unit at the federally-funded Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Ill…