Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/extended-interview-general-motors-ceo-rick-wagoner Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript The NewsHour interviewed General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner in May about the company's plans for developing alternative fuel vehicles. Excerpts of the interview will air in the coming weeks as part of a report on a new generation of electric cars. Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. SPENCER MICHELS: With the situation with layoffs and the lack of profit … why would GM want to continue to pour money into a development project such as the Volt (electric car) or any other advanced car, and will you continue to do that?RICK WAGONER, CEO of General Motors: Taking your second question first. Yes, we certainly will continue it and the reason we're doing it is because — certainly we have to make some adjustments given current weak market conditions — but we're focused on the future and convinced that we're in a period of change in the auto industry. Things like battery development and applying batteries to cars, as we're planning on doing with the Volt, is important for the next 100 years of the auto industry. SPENCER MICHELS: You say 100 years. Is it sooner than that? Are you looking too far ahead maybe? RICK WAGONER: Well, hopefully we'll begin to build these in about two years, maybe a little more than two years. I guess what I'm trying to say is that we had about 100 years of an auto industry in which 98 percent of the energy to power the vehicles has come from oil. We're really going to change that over the next time period. Very different I think from a paradigm we've all grown up with.