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Toyota: Examining the Solar-Car Rumors

Technical problems are only one obstacle to developing solar and other alternate energy cars. The other problem, and possibly the biggest, is overcoming the media and political obstacles. The oil and energy industries worldwide do not want alternate energy for ANYTHING for obvious self preservation reasons. So, GM's decision to further develop the Volt electric plug-in hybrid (after dumping the whole idea several years ago) is smart. It divides the energy industry against itself, because the electric utility industry will sell more power while the oil industry will sell less. Divide and conquer is the only way progress will be made on alternate energy. The result may be that GM actually proceeds to build the cars. Once electric cars overcome the negative feed of information from oil sources (assuming they do overcome it) it could open the way toward eventual partially powered solar electric cars.