Summer Plug-In Hybrid Conference in San Jose, California Breaks Records

When we received the invitation from our friends at the Institute for Transportation Studies at UC Davis to attend a conference on plug-in hybrids last summer, we expected a couple of hundred folks to attend.

A plug-in hybrid, by the way, is a hybrid car that you plug in to a wall socket when convenient. It uses regular electric current to charge the battery and therefore needs to use the gasoline engine a lot less. How much less?

Well, the prototype Toyota Priuses at the conference were getting 100+ mpg. Anyway, about 650 people attended the conference including many from the major auto manufacturers, several of which are promising that we will be able to buy plug-in hybrids very soon. Check out the article and photos here.

GM is among those supposedly on track to offer its plug-in hybrid starting with the 2010 model year (that's in less than a year, since the model year starts in August of the year before). But given GM's financial woes, its almost pathological opposition to fuel efficiency, the near-impossibility of obtaining one of its hybrid SUV models now and its history of first stifling its visionary EV1, then repossessing it from enraged owners as documented in Who Killed the Electric Car?, seeing's believing.

But the popularity of the San Jose conference is really encouraging. It feels as though plug-in hybrids are around the corner. Even if these cars are not available in large numbers at first, this huge leap in fuel efficiency will force the auto industry to accelerate the move toward fuel efficiency. When it's possible to buy a 100 mpg car, it won't be easy to sell a 15 mpg one.

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