Ethanol and other biofuel businesses are failing because corn and soy feedstocks have dramatically increased in price. Corn, like oil, is not a limitless resource.

The Volt is going to require a lot of electrical energy, which is ultimately converted to movement of the car and transport of its passengers. The electricity is going to have to come from somewhere. Power grids are stretched to the limit now and cannot service significant numbers of electric cars. The only power source that can begin to meet this demand, without adding significant amounts of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere is nuclear power. If this is the direction of transportation, those plants need to be under construction NOW. If not, we will see the same thing happen to electricity as happened to corn and soy--the price will skyrocket because it is also a limited resource. The price is likely to skyrocket anyway because nuclear power plants are not cheap.

My husband and I were just talking this weekend that the next car we buy will be either all-electric (if that's an option) or a hybrid. In his words, he wanted to "stick it to the oil companies" and I can't disagree with that.

Of course, we buy a new car about once every six years so we should be on schedule if the Volt steps up the plate. Getting past the American car label will be an issue; we started buying foreign cars after having a mechanic on retainer with our American ones.

In the mid-to-late 90's, I drove an all-electric Toyota RAV4 SUV in California. It was part of a test fleet - but it was a completely finished vehicle that could easily have been offered for sale. (It was also nicer than a gasoline RAV4 - quieter and quicker).

So Toyota had a functioning electric vehicle 10 years ago, and had a test-fleet program. All GM has is a great deal of advertising noise saying "me too". Pretty typical.

The Personal Automobile is the greatest legacy of the carbon economy. But they also represent an enormous amount of raw materials, from metals, ceramics, plastics (more carbon) and the enormous manufacturing and support base they require not to mention roads and parking lots. And that’s all on top of the fuel (currently oil) it takes to run them. Even if we eliminate the fuel part all of those other impacts still exist.

We would be better off investing in mass transit systems and finding ways to get people out of the individual automobile. We need to find ways to move people out the suburbs and ex-burbs (or whatever they’re calling them) and back into cities where more efficient/less resource intensive transportation systems can be used.

Yes, I get that it means changing our lifestyles and making real sacrifices, but we are out of options that don’t impose a cost. Saving the environment and ourselves will require ALL of society to pay a price. It requires long term sustained investment by government and the private sector. It requires leaders who are honest with us about what it take to save ourselves and a public willing to listen (yes I know we're doomed).

We’ve spent 100+ years building a system to support 1-person 1-auto, we can’t sustain that system in face global warming and resource shortages (well beyond just oil).

One of the things that seems to be ignored in the discussion of electric cars is the larger scale environmental impact. While its very true that an electric vehicle operates with little or no emissions, very few people seem to talk about the fact that electric cars require a huge number of high-tech batteries. Battery production has always been a horribly toxic exercise, and I've seen no indication that the new batteries are any more friendly to make than previous versions. Likewise in the area of disposal. Batteries will always have a limited lifespan, and disposal of batteries is a huge toxic nightmare.

When we start talking scale, it seems to me it looks even worse. On an individual basis, the problems seem potentially manageable, but when you start doing the napkin math on a national, or a global scale, things quickly spiral out of control. Its hard to get an accurate number, but the estimates I've seen put the number of passenger vehicles in the US at between 150 and 250 million, with 16 million new vehicles sold each year. Assuming we see a conversion to all electric vehicles at some point, that means there are 100's of millions of potential battery manufacture and disposal issues in the US alone. When we start to look globally, those numbers simply sky-rocket.

When environmentalists talk about emissions from electric vehicles, it seems they most often talk about the operating emissions from an already constructed electric vehicle, during its main sequence life. What is the environmental footprint of electric vehicles when we start to factor in battery manufacture and disposal for literally 100's of millions, or even BILLIONS of these vehicles? Certainly, the environmental damage from fossil fuels is hard to dispute, but are we looking to simply replace those emissions and drilling issues with giant piles of discarded batteries from billions of vehicles, combined with the manufacture of new batteries to replace them? Is that really a good trade-off? I've seen very little discussion of this side of the environmental equation for electric cars, so I don't have the answer, but I do know that in today's world, battery manufacture and disposal is a VERY dirty business. It strikes me that problem gets magnified by several orders of magnitude if we start to add 100's of millions, or billions of electric vehicles to the mix. Is that a good, environmental trade-off?

Someone I know bought a Saturn hybrid that is supposed to get good gas mileage. Turns out they do a few "unusual" things to help get that mileage -- like NOT PROVIDING A SPARE TIRE!!!

Last time I heard, Saturn was owned by GM. 'nough said.

I'm wondering why it will take until 2010 to put out an electric car. Seems to me I heard something about a car they made a few years ago, EV1, ring a bell? Maybe the author could have mentioned something about this, and how GM refused to let the owners keep the cars.