Cars, Clean Energy | featured news

Barack Obama will use a visit to a Chicago-area lab on Friday to call on Congress to set aside $2bn over the next decade to fund research into a next generation of electric cars. The White House said the Energy Security Trust, which Obama first proposed in his state of the union address, would use royalties from offshore oil and gas drilling in public waters and would not add to the deficit.

After more than $400 million in outlays and months behind schedule, dozens of electric cars have hit the road in Israel, the test site Agassi chose for his Better Place venture. Four stations where the cars can get a new dose of juice when their batteries run out are operating, and the plan is to ramp that number up within months.

Paris, in its latest bid to be an innovator of the City of Tomorrow, is launching an electric car-sharing program to cut air and noise pollution on the city's medieval cobblestone streets and beyond.

Ford uses the Texas State Fair to serve up its own brand of vegetable-powered pickup trucks.

Industry officials may be quick to talk up the newest in electric transportation. They’ll also admit it’s not going to be easy abandoning the time-tested internal combustion engine.