It’s time to stop being so stuck in the past when it comes to cars. Cars and trucks are pretty old ideas at this point, and they need some serious modernization. T. Boone Pickens is still sending out email campaigns, still pushing natural gas as a transportation fuel, as are some members of Congress. They might as well be living in the 1970s because that’s where his ideas are coming from. A bygone era.  Vehicles of the future will be electric, (including trucks) and the biggest challenges are to make those vehicles  affordable and to make the electricity that will power them clean energy, from wind or solar.   Electric vehicle companies are starting to advertise by appealing to people’s growing distaste for wars for oil and gas, the kind of wars our country is all too familiar with.

The Hill reports that, “The latest ad from the Electrification Coalition comes ahead of Senate debate on far-reaching energy legislation that Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) plans to bring to the floor before the August congressional recess.   The coalition formed last year includes Nissan Motor Co. — which is rolling out a plug-in car called the Leaf — as well as NRG Energy Inc., PG&E Corp., lithium ion battery company A123Systems Inc., FedEx Corp. and GridPoint Inc., which provides software to enable a “smart” power grid.”

Non-personal transportation is becoming more attractive to a lot of people too, as Pres. Obama talks about high-speech rail more and more.  There is so much freedom to not having to drive a car yourself, but leaving the driving to others, that people who haven’t experienced it have a hard time imagining it. Well, it’s like flying — you can sit back and relax.

The future of cars is electric, that much is clear.  We need clean energy cars with no emissions to reduce CO2 and start to draw down climate change.  To that end, I was very happy last week when I saw that President Obama was visiting an electric car company in Kansas City called “Smith Electric Vehicles”.  They started out as a UK company and are now making cars in the United States.

Update correction:  Smith makes vehicles, but not cars.  According to the comment below, Smith makes “all-electric trucks vans and small buses. Vehicles which operate on predictable routes and return to base at the end of each day. I can recommend visiting the Case Studies page within the ‘Rest Of The World’ section of the company website at http://www.smithelectricvehicles.com to see examples of hundreds in daily use.”

It’s great to see the president supporting electric cars vehicles with a visit.  (See his video on page 2).

Now if he’d only stipulate to our car makers a couple of things.  First, that they need to stop moving their jobs to Mexico, as GM and Ford are starting to do.  Second, that in the interest of national security (climate change being a national security threat) GM and [...]