One Near-Fatal Flaw to Obama’s Energy and Electric Car Plans: Snowstorms

Audrey Jones / January 31, 2011

Last week, The Washington Post pointed out one near-fatal flaw to Obama’s plans for subsidizing green energy and electric cars: snowstorms. On Wednesday a snowstorm hit D.C. commuters harder than usual, causing gridlock on the road and dragging a normally 20-minute commute into, in some cases, over six hours as people crowded the roads struggling to get home.

With current technology, electric cars typically have much shorter battery lives, especially in cold weather. In an instance where a regular combustion engine car would keep its occupants safe and warm while idling for hours, an electric car would have left them stranded. In his State of the Union address last week, President Obama expressed his desire to keep the U.S. one step ahead technologically and environmentally by embracing electric vehicles. However, a single snowstorm has shown, once again, that the market has always been and will always be better at spurring innovation and picking product winners and losers than the government could ever be. (more…)