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What, in your mind, represents the most viable alternative energy source to gas, for cars?
Well, I think electricity, batteries. I think that technology is really emerging rapidly.
And you know, if we would get a policy behind it to really implement it more quickly...
For example, our government buys a half a million vehicles a year.
Well we should be as executive order, the president Obama should say,
"Let's all in the next five years buy only electric cars to give that real jump start."
My prescription would be that we just drive a little bit less.
I think the automobile has become this incredible addiction in America
and that we need to curtail some of our appetites.
Because it's the appetites that are killing us and a lot of them are excessive, in my opinion.
It's a plug-in hybrid because what we have to do is electrify transportation,
because even if you run a car on coal-fired electricity,
it still has a lower carbon footprint than a regular car, which is wildly inefficient.
So, the future of cars, I can tell you with a pretty high level of confidence,
is going to be electrification and the bridge to that will be plug-in hybrids.
I am amazed at the way that hybrid technology is taking over;
they are very smartly giving hybrid cars an advantage going across the Bay Bridge,
which itself has been a motivator for more than one person that I know
to make the decision to buy a hybrid car.
When we use electric cars there on the negative side, at least right now in a sense,
they're coal fired because that's our most abundant source of coal.
But I think that there are certain things that where the free market system doesn't work ideally.
You need to have some subsidies, you need to put a lot of energy into it,
and it needs to be a national policy, and then you get over the hump.