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The event and the campaign it was designed to support were the brainchildren of Austin Energy, a power-generating utility owned by the city of Austin, Texas. Austin Energy’s campaign has already won the endorsement of dozens of cities and towns, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Denver, as well as Austin itself, and also more than one hundred utility companies. It planned to collect millions of signatures from individuals requesting that big car firms start making plug-in hybrids. The idea behind collecting all of these “soft orders” is to prove there is vast market potential for ultra efficient cars-and to make sure that Detroit cannot claim, as it did after killing the first generation of electric cars, like GM’s EV1, that nobody wanted to buy them. 

Enthusiasts love plug-in technology because it would dramatically reduce oil use (which is why the national-security types are interested) and also curb greenhouse-gas emissions (which is why the environmentalists are interested). If it came to pass, it would radically restructure America’s energy economics by shifting demand from the corner gasoline station to the power station. And who knows, it might even shift the global balance of another sort of power – the political variety. 

Excerpted from Page 301-302 of ‘Zoom: The Global Race to fuel the car of the future’ by Iain Carson and V Vaitheeswaran