Tesla's Musk sees most new cars going electric by 2030

(July 2010) The never-shy Elon Musk, co-founder of Tesla Motors, is the subject of this week's "10 Questions for..." feature in Time magazine and the article starts off with a doozy.

A reader asks if Musk believes the electric car can ever replace the combustion engine and Musk responds not with a simple "someday' but with the bold prediction that "within 20 years, the majority of new cars manufactured will be pure electric."

He's talking globally, we imagine — we can't see it happening that soon in the U.S. unless the federal government decides oil is too precious to waste on private transportation and legislates that new cars cannot be built with internal combustion engines. That certainly would jump-start EV production.

But even on a global basis — unless China starts churning them out by the millions (a possibility) — we can't see battery-electric cars taking the lead quite that quickly.

Musk said "pure electric."

That means no hybrids, no Volt-like extended-range plug-ins. Just battery-electric cars
and trucks like the Tesla Roadster and upcoming Nissan Leaf (because in Musk's vision fuel-cell electric cars will never be marketable).

Someday electric-drive vehicles — including fuel cell cars — will take the lead, and we wish it would happen as rapidly as Musk believes it will, but we don't think 20 years is sufficient time unless there's a major battery chemistry or hydrogen fuel cell breakthrough.

We'll have to check back in 2030 to see who's right.

Musk was asked one other question relating to Tesla before the queries veered off into entrepreneurship and other arenas: what he sees as the biggest challenge Tesla faced in persuading consumers to go electric.

His answer is that Tesla doesn't have a problem persuading people that electric cars (in Tesla's case that's one car right now, the high-powered, two-seat Roadster) are the way to go, but rather in "convincing people to pay $100,000 for a car."

Does kindaa limit the market, doesn't it.

One other tidbit in the Q&A comes when Musk, responding to a question about creativity and technology, says he's spent a lot of time pondering — and thinks he could do it — a way to use aerospace engineering techniques to double-deck our freeways, effectively doubling the amount of highway and easing traffic congestion without eating up any more land, by using pre-fab, high-strength steel sections. They'd be  "dropped into place," he said, apparently with a crane or a really big helicopter n order to minimize construction disruption.

Now that's something the government ought to be loaning him money to work on!

John O'Dell, Senior Editor, Edmunds.com