crazy about automobiles

BERLIN – German Chancellor Angela Merkel and top executives of the country's main carmakers and energy companies are meeting in Berlin to launch a new initiative to develop electric vehicles.


The so-called "national platform for electric mobility" being started Monday comes after Merkel pledged to have one million electric vehicles on the road within the next decade.

Merkel says there needs to be greater independence from natural resources. She is pushing sustainable technologies that will help limit the effects of climate change.

BMW AG's chief executive Norbert Reithofer says Germany is well positioned to become a technology leader in that market.

He says: "To make this happen, our leaders in politics and industry have to be pulling in the same direction."

Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory will probe working batteries with new tools.



Gasoline beat out electricity as the prime power source for cars in the early 1900s. The problem was the battery. Electric cars are trying to make a comeback in the early 2000s. The problem is the battery.

Sure, batteries have gotten a lot better. Electric cars are here--but they are very expensive, like the Tesla Roadster, and they have a limited driving range, like the coming Nissan ( NSANY - news - people ) Leaf, which aims to last 100 miles before recharge. If batteries' improvements are compared with, say, the improvement in transistors, it looks like batteries have gone nowhere, fast.

TOKYO: For all the feel-good rhetoric about electric cars, the inconvenient truth is that drivers remain sceptical of battery technology that can carry them only 160 kilometres at a time.
However, an entrepreneurial venture to introduce a network of battery switching stations, introduced on a trial basis in Tokyo yesterday and due for Australia next year, may allay those doubts for some.
The pilot program between the Silicon Valley company Better Place and Nihon Kotsu, Tokyo's largest taxi company, is the first test of the technology before it is introduced in Israel and Denmark next year.

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