Charged Up for Electric Cars

Charged Up for Electric Cars: "Car 2.0 and use the American workers we have [to build them].

If we wait, it will be like trying to save RCA while the others are building plasma TVs. We've lost the TV industry, the radio industry, the PC industry. They all went to Asia and never came back. You let the car industry go through the same cycle, and it's never coming back.

You've talked about making the purchase of automobiles more like buying cellphones. If motorists subscribe to your recharging service at a certain rate, you will give them cars for free or at a deep discount.

What you need is cross-dependence. Think of razors and blades. The car industry is selling razors and everyone else is selling blades. Or it's like Hewlett-Packard selling printers cheap and making money off the cartridges. What the auto companies need is to be in the blades business.

So what you need is a model where you're getting some revenue from the miles driven. If Ford got one cent per mile for every Ford car on the road, Ford would get $10 billion a year straight to the bottom line. That's more than the assistance check they're asking for now."