In my opinion there are two significant obstacles to achieving this goal by 2016: manufacturing capability and fueling infrastructure.

The process to design and re-tool manufacturing facilities to build Agassi's "low-cost" vehicle would take a minimum of two to four years if everything was ready to go TODAY. That only leaves three to five years to build 10 million vehicles... about 7,000 vehicles to be built each day over a period of 365 days per year for four years. Not a small task, especially considering it's new technology and resources for the batteries (+20 million required to supply the battery changing stations) may not be available on such a large scale.

There is no mention of how the electricity to recharge the batteries would be generated or how the network of "battery stations" would be built-out. Again, building tens or hundreds of thousands of these battery changing facilities throughout major cities and along highway routes will take massive resources, labor and time that is likely to take much longer than seven years.

There is currently insufficient electricity generating, transmission and distribution capacity to serve the requirements of these battery stations. It's not simply a matter of using electricity at night when "nobody is using it" as that is not the case. The existing generation capacity is not located in areas where the demand would occur, and building new electric capacity (whether generation, transmission or distribution) is an expensive and onerous task. Our communities have moved from being NIMBYs (Not In My Back Yard) to BANANAs (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything), and the truth is that solar and wind, even at ten times their current contribution, are an insignificant contribution to this country's demand for electricity.

Bottom line... not likely to happen by 2016... if ever.

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