The economic climate is right for redefining the automobile industry, Elizabeth Lowery, vice president for environment, energy, and safety policy at General Motors said last week at the Aspen Environment Forum.

Electric cars are the short-term solution to wean the world off of gas and oil and in return reduce the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions that are driving climate change, according to a panel at the Forum on the future of transportation.

GM's electric Volt is expected on the market in 2010 and will allow a driver to go 40 miles on a lithium-ion battery, with range–extension beyond that fueled by gas or other fuels.

Prototypes have been around since the early 1900s, so why aren't electric cars on the road en masse now?

The cost of batteries, and their relatively short lifespan, as well as a lack of urgency to go gas free, according to the panelists.

Most batteries have a 10-year lifespan, according to R. James Woolsey, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency and a clean technology venture capitalist with VantagePoint Venture Partners.

"The stimulus should narrow the gap between electric and other [cars], because of money for new manufacturing and research," Woolsey said.

With batteries, it is critical to get the costs down and reliability up, he added.

John Heywood, director of the Sloan Automobile Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and co-director of MIT's Center for 21st Century Energy, predicts that in 2020, out of the 55 million cars in production, 11 million will be hybrids, and 3 million will be plug in or battery vehicles. In order to tackle the problem of carbon emissions, the production of electric needs to grow at a 30 percent annual growth rate. But all big innovations in the past, such as diesel engines, have grown at a 10 percent rate.

Responding to the question of waste and pollution from electric, Woolsey said the new generation of batteries contain no heavy metals or other potentially harmful substances.

And once we put more solar and wind into the grid, plugging your car in will not, as some worry, be just another way of burning coal, he added.

Regardless, the cars will produce cleaner emissions than traditional internal combustion engines, at a much cheaper cost, according to Lowery. "For some it will be an extra refrigerator on their bill."

Customers will be encouraged to switch to electric with a $7,500 government incentive, Lowery said.

"It's really important for this new technology to have the federal government providing some of these incentives."

But cars can't be the entire solution to our transportation woes. "Nine billion people, nine billion cars. It cannot happen," said Heywood. "There aren't the resources and there isn't the space. We need to find something else."

"We lack a vision for how this works out," he added.

Photograph of the Volt concept courtesy General Motors.

The Aspen Forum is sponsored by the Aspen Institute, the National Geographic Society, Shell, Duke Energy, and General Motors.

—Tasha Eichenseher

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