interview
>
greene
> greene 15
Greene 15 (1:38)
Topic(s): Electric & Hybrid / Future Transport
User Comments
© WGBH Educational Foundation
Please watch the clip first. If you plan to use it, review
the Rules of Use, then click on the download button.
This clip is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution
Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Video Transcript
Well, I think the Prius and the Honda Insight (which came
first in the US but second in the world), those are a huge
breakthrough in automotive technology. I think hybrid vehicles
are because even in 2002, when the National Academy looked at
fuel economy, they said, "We don't think the hybrid vehicles
can make it in the market. They're just going to be way too
expensive and too complex, and they won't work that well.
People will find that the battery runs down, and the—
all of that was wrong. The Prius and the Insight prove that
all of that was wrong- that you can make an economic hybrid
vehicle, that it can perform the way the customer wants. I
think one of the manufacturers said, "No compromise." I think
that's what they delivered, a vehicle with no compromise. It
costs more, but you get more in the fuel savings.
And this has introduced electricity into transportation.
That's what I think is the real breakthrough. Now we have the
first, the beginning of electrified transportation. Electric
cars didn't make it. Battery-powered electric cars didn't make
it. Some day they might. I don't know, but now we have
electricity in transportation, and we're finding the synergies
of that. And we're developing better batteries as a result;
we're developing cheaper and better motors and controllers. So
we're developing the technology that I think we're going to
need in the long run, whether we go to hydrogen or whether we
go to plug-in hybrid vehicles, or whether eventually we get to
battery electric vehicles. The hybrid is a key technology in
that step forward into the future.
