It is really disheartening to consider how many false starts the electric car has had in America. Some of the first vehicles on America’s roads were electric cars, but for one reason or another (but mostly cheap oil) the electric car has never managed to break into the American mainstream. The closest we ever got was with the GM EV-1, the Toyota RAV4 EV and other cars brought about by the short-lived 1990’s California EV mandate, and those cars didn’t exactly have a happy ending.
Now we’ve got a new President and new policies pushing for electric cars, but so does the rest of the world. One of our biggest rivals in the coming years will be China. The Chinese government has just initiated a new policy to help boost domestic production of electric vehicles. So could we be driving Chinese-built electric cars in coming years?