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GM Pledges to Make Plug-In Hybrid Vehicle
General Motors North America President Troy Clarke introduces the 2008 GMC Yukon Hybrid at the Los Angeles Auto Show.
(General Motors Via Bloomberg News)
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"The answer to that question is going to determine GM's competitiveness in the marketplace in the future," Hwang said. "We have seen so many times where GM has made announcements and they have not lived up to their word."
GM created an electric car, the EV1, in the 1990s but dropped it. The company's rejection of the technology was the subject of the recent film "Who Killed the Electric Car?"
In Los Angeles, Wagoner said GM will use the Saturn Vue Green Line, the automaker's only hybrid vehicle, as the basis of its plug-in hybrid. He also said that some Hummer models will operate on biofuels within three years and that GM plans to deliver fuel-cell-powered SUVs to consumers next fall as test vehicles.
In some of his strongest statements to date on energy issues, Wagoner said that since 2001, a variety of events -- including extraordinary growth in China and India, conflicts in the Middle East and global climate change -- suggest an "increasingly uncertain energy future on a global basis." He said it's "highly unlikely" that oil alone will fulfill all of the world's automotive fuel needs.
U.S. government support was evident in April when the Department of Energy hosted a conference to discuss the many technical challenges of plug-in hybrids. The conference was attended by auto companies, representatives from public utilities, oil companies, environmental groups, national laboratory scientists and officials from federal agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Transportation and the Department of Defense.
Don Hillebrand, director of the Center for Transportation Research at the government's Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago, said the Japanese government is spending more than $100 million to develop a plug-in battery.
Earlier this year, Hillebrand traveled to Tokyo to attend a Japanese industry event on plug-in hybrids. After giving his presentation, Hillebrand was struck by the depth of the interest during a question-and-answer period. He said it appeared to him that participants reviewed his presentation line by line.
"They brought me over to talk, not to learn," Hillebrand said. "They wanted to hear the U.S. position. There's a strong suspicion that the U.S. has a leg up."
