
The Department of Energy
announced it was throwing some money at the electric car dream yesterday. They'll spend "up to $30 million in funding over three years" on three projects they hope will produce a viable electric car by 2014. Wow, that's a whole $10 million a year!
The DOE is funding three projects they hope will produce an electric car that can go 40 miles on a charge, enough for 70% of daily commuters. They made the announcement at a conference on
Plug-in Electric Vehicles 2008: What Role for Washington? Apparently the Energy Department decided the role was to make a token amount of funding and let other countries take the lead. The plan is to split the cost 50-50 with industry.
General Motors (NYSE:
GM) is going to work on a Lithium-Ion battery.
Ford (NYSE:
F) will work on a way to speed up mass production of electric cars. And
General Electric (NYSE:
GE) will try to figure out a two-battery, 40-mile system.
I'm sure everyone's working on all sorts of other projects, but this one just seems tiny, especially in context of the current oil crisis and the
$40.1 billion requested Department of Transportation budget for FY2009. As
cNet's Elsa Wenzel helpfully points out,
Toyota (NYSE:
TM), working with
Matsushita Electric Industrial (NYSE:
MC), thinks it can mass market an electric car by 2010.