Andy Grove wants more electric cars

by billso on Tuesday, 1 July 2008

Andrew Grove, a co-founder of Intel and the man who coined one of my favorite con­cepts, the strate­gic inflec­tion point (SIP), is ral­ly­ing cor­po­rate and gov­ern­ment sup­port for elec­tric cars in the US. He real­izes that Amer­i­cans are reluc­tant to buy an all-electric vehi­cle, however:

While car mak­ers have been devel­op­ing plug-ins, Grove says the nation should con­sider ways of retro­fitting the 80 mil­lion low-mileage pick­ups, sport util­ity vehi­cles and vans on the road to make them capa­ble of run­ning on both gaso­line and elec­tric power.

Giv­ing these vehi­cles “dual fuel” func­tions would be sim­i­lar to changes made in other tech­nolo­gies. DVD play­ers, for exam­ple, were often com­bined with VCR tape play­ers when they were first intro­duced to help con­sumers make the transition.

See this Asso­ci­ated Press arti­cle titled Ex-Intel head pushes elec­tric cars for more details.

Related arti­cles and pages on billso.com

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Tagged as: car, economy, electric, environment, fuel, gas, government, inflection, Intel, point, power, sip, strategic, strategy, USA

  • http://dpeters1.myopenid.com Daniel Peters

    The embrac­ing of elec­tric cars is only a mat­ter of time, or so I hope. Some peo­ple are already try­ing to work out some good concepts:

    http://www.engadget.com/2008/06/30/tesla-motors-elon-musk-promises-sub-30k-all-electric-car-in-le/

    Car’s gonna be cool with a name like Tesla. I can only assume that it won’t be allowed to shoot out death rays, but still… good word association/recognition there for the brand name.

    Fully elec­tric vehi­cles seem to be to be the best bet in going green because it offers the large energy cor­po­ra­tions a chance to switch over to bet­ter meth­ods of cre­at­ing elec­tric­ity. Ask­ing every cit­i­zen to switch to CFC bulbs is a good idea, but it’s not enforce­able. The largest pos­si­ble changes in eco­log­i­cally sound life prac­tices are those that can be done by cor­po­ra­tions. If the gov­ern­ment were to ban pol­lut­ing meth­ods of cre­at­ing energy the play­ing field would be level across the board, mak­ing it fea­si­ble for all energy util­i­ties to embrace cleaner ways of cre­at­ing electricity.

    Or… that’s how the dream plays out anyway.

  • http://billso.com billso

    The Tesla Road­ster is a sweet look­ing vehi­cle! The HTSA would prob­a­bly nix the death rays, though.

    Aus­tralia is going to ban incan­des­cent bulbs by 2010, accord­ing to the BBC.

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