What got me thinking about alt-fueled "progress" was the recent media coverage of slumping sales trends for hybrid vehicles in the last months of 2006. Wall Street said hybrid sales decline seemed to track the drop in fuel prices at the pump, at least up until December, when the prices started rising again. The Big 3, awash in that previously mentioned "red ink" clearly tried to spin a positive impression about their efforts to produce vehicles that will reduce our demand for all that foreign oil.

The media lapped up the hype and tried to show that slower sales and public demand for alt-fueled vehicles are a reflection of ‘the public’s declining stress’ about gas supplies, and not about the fact that alt-fueled vehicles cost thousands more than other (gas) vehicles that get 30 mpg coupled with the fact that infrastructure for filling alt-fueled vehicles is sparse and even non-existent in rural areas.

Drowning in red ink, the automakers (and their stockholders) are asking why they should spend billions of dollars on alt-fueled vehicle research and tooling when less than 3% of the buying public is even interested and almost no market exists for used alt-fueled vehicles? Huge labor reduction programs are already costing billions so why invest those "red ink" dollars in hybrids or alt-fueled technologies when, at best, it’s a highly competitive market for a (future) pay-off that may never materialize?

It is true that GM will bring out hybrids in four of their models in ’07, including small-sized SUV’s with the popular marques of Yukon and Tahoe, but they are not price-competitively with the gasoline-fueled Toyota and Nissan models that get 30+ mpg and are thousands less to purchase. Even rising fuel prices won’t offset the initial price differences, let alone the used car trade-in values of alt-fueled "mileage" cars.

So, how can we sustain our efforts to push consumer demand for alternative energy transportation if the automakers won’t step up? One thing is to lobby the politicians to designate government subsidies (i.e. this is a national priority, after all) for infrastructure at existing gas stations for CNG and electrical charging stations for the few electric cars that need a charge every 46 miles. Another would be to offer free (government subsidized) batteries to replace those that come from the factory; GM found out replacing $2000 for batteries every 2 years in their EV-1 didn’t appeal to potential buyers, just one of the reasons that all- electric vehicles have not been produced since 2002—and another reason used electrics will be unpopular with the public.

On the other hand, all that research on battery technology should still be valuable in the quest to find "hybrid" combinations that will demand longer-lasting storage devices. Let’s not lose the lessons learned, even if the ultimate answer is "hybrid" and not totally "electric" because we need to continue to produce alt-fueled vehicles, even if our politicos don’t value the long-term results. Its ‘guns or butter’ mentality all over again, only this time, that means ‘defense dollars OR alt-fuel vehicle research’ — it is not quite so clear-cut as economist Samuelson’s equation.

So, while we continue to move the elephant in the room an inch at a time, our political leaders keep denying that our oil-driven economy is doomed. At the same time, Congress is asking for defense appropriations in the hundreds of billions to sustain our little war in the Middle East while our President asks Brazil to produce more ethanol—what’s wrong with this picture? What about more U.S. dollars for cellulose ethanol right here at home?

Imagine what we could have accomplished for those same defense dollars if they’d been appropriated for alt-fuels research and infrastructure. Imagine also, what awaits our leaders of tomorrow, if we don’t make alt-fueled vehicles attractive to the motoring public today, with the lame excuse that we needed the research dollars for maintaining our oil supplies yesterday? And, you probably guessed who those leaders of tomorrow will be who inherit this problem, right? Once again, it’s our children’s, children’s, children.