Let’s return to the good old days of the horse and buggy. It’s 1900 and a new fangled machine called an horseless carriage is just starting to appear. It’s expensive, noisy, smelly, unreliable and it uses something called “gasoline” to make it go. And good luck finding a gas filling station. The taunts of “get a horse!!!” could be heard up and down the main street of town. Fast forward to the present. The American auto industry is one of the largest sectors of our economy–any way you measure its contribution. In other words, despite all the negatives and with an overall smaller economic base the auto industry not only survives but even dominates our landscape. Now we turn our attention to Electric Vehicles–cars and trucks. Listen to all the negatives and compare them to the horseless carriage transition era. See the similarities. But now there is a much bigger economic base to nurture such a transition from gas to electric. And even more reason to do so–when climate change and pollution are factored in. We made the big switch starting 122 years ago and we should have learned from that transition so we can shortcut some of the time and eliminate some of the mistakes from the past. Let’s hope our leaders can organize their resources, collaborate and shorten the time line to minimize the pain from this evolutionary process. We did it before; let’s do it again–more efficiently and effectively this time.
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