I like to take folks back to the turn of the century when people said 'gas cars can never replace horses because you can feed horses at your house, you get along with them, they're nice.'

In the case of all the carmakers, there's a certain amount of greenwash. Take Toyota: They were pushing the Prius while they were meanwhile marketing the hell out of the Sequoia and other models with terrible gas mileage.

Resistance to change is always the biggest obstacle.

I like to take folks back to the turn of the century when people said 'gas cars can never replace horses because you can feed horses at your house, you get along with them, they're nice.'

I think electric cars can help save Detroit. They reflect good decision-making, and there has been bad decision making in the auto industry for so long, in my view.

Solar, for example - which has typically been thought of as so expensive - is cheap when compared with, for example, the cost of cleaning up the Fukushima nuclear disaster and the Gulf.

Oil companies earned a permanent enemy in me when they messed with the electric car the first time around, and I think they continue to do a disservice in making it seem like fossil fuels are cheaper than they really are in terms of total cost.