Even though the technology isn’t there, Congress is pushing it and we will be stuck with expensive, substandard cars:

Many members of Congress believe they know what the car company of the future should look like.
“A business model based on gas — a gas-guzzling past — is unacceptable,” Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said last week. “We need a business model based on cars of the future, and we already know what that future is: the plug-in hybrid electric car.”
But the car company Schumer and other lawmakers envision for the future could turn out to be a money-losing operation, not part of a “sustainable U.S. auto industry” that President-elect Barack Obama and most members of Congress say they want to create.
That’s because car manufacturers still haven’t figured out how to produce hybrid and plug-in vehicles cheaply enough to make money on them. After a decade of relative success with its hybrid Prius, Toyota has sold about a million of the cars and is still widely believed by analysts to be losing money on each one sold. General Motors has touted plans for a plug-in hybrid vehicle called the Volt, but the costly battery will prevent it from turning a profit on the vehicle for several years, at least.

The battery adds $8,000 to the cost of the car. Obama’s $7,500 tax credit won’t even cover it (half of the American public wouldn’t even quality for the credit). And what about the cost of the replacement battery? Anyone with a laptop is going to be leery of a battery that doesn’t come with a lifetime warranty (you can bet they won’t be issuing any of those).