psychological part of some drivers that are like, how soon can i give this up so i don t have to deal with it anymore? it depends on the the driver. i do think there s going to be this transition, and eddie s totally right, the technology isn t the issue. it s stringing together the legal and the technology across brands and types of cars. but individually, the cars that are coming out contain wind the cars, it s pretty much there, it s getting them to talk to each other, getting them to be aware of stop lights that are coming up and traffic flow, and that technology basically exists too. but having them all talk to each other, who s going to be liable when something breaks? that s pretty dicey. that s the fascinating thing. i m hearing from you guys basically the technology is there. you can see video right now on the internet of factories where there s basically self-driving vehicles zipping past each other with massively dangerous chemicals that they re holding and nothing ever go
electric car. we may now find ourselves on the threshold of that reality. joining me, eddie alterman, editor in chief of car and driver magazine. nathaniel green, director at the natural resources council. if you re shifting from oil in the tank of a car to an electric car that s powered on the grid, if that grid is powered by coal energy, are you actually getting a benefit from the per pecttive of the planet, from the perspective of carbon? well, right now, you plug in a car anywhere in this country and you re doing better than the average car on the road. so yes. even right now? right now. beginning now, the answer is yes? yes. these provide us a real benefit. if you plug in an estate where we start to make a switch to more renewable power, clean wind, solar power, you re doing better than the new cars coming out, the new hybrids. these electric vehicles provide a real benefit right now to us. the really cool thing about them is you plug them in now, they re doing the ben
kelly blue book. eddie, we have a tremendous amount of auto fatties in this country. there s about 32,000 highway deaths every year. compare that to rail, 759. aviation, which is 494. and zero commuter airline deaths. it s always amazing to me our risk tolerance for driving is so much higher. if you had subway fatalities that were anything like what cars are, even proportion or per capita, no one would go on the subway. the same is true of planes. yet we tolerate it from cars. one possible revolutionary technology would be removing human drivers and having computer-driven cars so that people can t get drunk behind the wheel, can t text behind the wheel, can t fall asleep. how close is that to a reality? that technology s already front loaded into the cars right now. i think the difference between rail and cars is in cars you have this feeling of control. that you re in command of this thing. you re not just on a plane, you re actually in charge of the
so, yeah, high prices hurt them at the beginning and also the technology wasn t familiar. and now high brilds, at least the toyota hybrids, pretty much drive like anything else. and that s where we have to get with electric cars for them to get big numbers. because i m a liberal caricature, i of course drive a prius myself, that s a great car, i love it. that doesn t come from any toyota sponsorship. eddie alterman, do you think this is hyper-re all? i think it s a little overhyped to some extent. i look at it as sort of a spectrum. we have to get to more electrification and that s going to happen. but i don t think it s going to happen all at once. you know, we re projecting that in 2014, there will be .3% of new cars sold that are battery electric vehicles. a very, very long way to go. but i think you really do have to look at it as a spectrum from pure internal combustion all the way to something like a fuel cell electric vehicle. here s what i thought was interesting. i read
0 homeowners back on their feet. and guess what, the banks hate it. we begin tonight with vacation! as of tonight, everyone s favorite congress is officially on lerecess. and there is nothing better than taking some well-deserved time off after you spent months and months working really hard. here s what congress has done this year. they ve passed and sent the president 22 bills. that sounds like a lot of progress for seven months? let me assure you it is not. here s how much congress had gotten done by the august recess going back to 2006 when democrats first took over. it used to be they were getting somewhere around three times as many bills passed in the same amount of time. but not anymore. now, of course, to be fair, john boehner famously told us all last week not to judge congress productivity based on how many bills they passed. that s crazy talk. should not be judged on how many new laws we create. we ought to be judged on how many laws we repeal. okay, speaker, let s g