Electric Avenue - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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the White House is standing behind a goal that could genuinely transform the nation’s automotive fleet: putting one million electric vehicles on the road by 2015.
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But many of the electric vehicles that will count toward President Obama’s goal won’t run on electricity alone. They will combine batteries, electric motors and internal-combustion engines to use as little gasoline as possible while still doing everything Americans expect their cars to do. Electrification is not an all-or-nothing proposition
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Department of Transportation statistics show that 78 percent of Americans commute 40 miles or fewer a day, so most people who drive a Volt won’t need to burn any gas on a normal day.
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Obama administration already supports incentives to encourage drivers to buy electric cars, and it has devoted $2.4 billion in stimulus money to the development of a domestic electric-car industry.
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If we gut domestic clean-energy research, scientists in China or Germany or Japan will finish this work. But it would be far better to stick with the program we’ve begun — financing research into better batteries while deploying vehicles that replace gasoline with electricity as much as possible — and prove that when it comes to energy, America can, in fact, learn from its mistakes.