My personal belief:
They said what they needed to to get elected. Same thing as with Iraq. Obama promised to be out within a few months of getting elected. He got there, started realizing just how necessary those troops are, looked at classified information no one else had seen, and figured it was best to wait as long as possible. They promised economical cars would be fine, saw how out of it the technology was, and decided to stop the pretenses. Al Gore has a private jet, please, just come ON!! It doesn't work, they know it, so they don't bother. Electric cars aren't feasible in the major cities (New York, etc) so they don't use them. Then they turn and say they are doing better than urban livers because they use 'mass transport'. Well, if electric isn't feasible in their cramped cities, try being 20 minutes from the nearest mall, 10 from the school, and 15 from the grocery store? Out where it isn't all clustered together, they are absolutely useless. Unless the grocery store is 4 blocks away electric cars won't work well enough. Now, hybrids, that's a bit of a different story. The more technology in those fields advances, the more it can do, the more people will use it. But why will business owners who have to pull trailers filled with steel pieces to their work to be assembled bother with an 'economic' car, or even a truck with higher gas mileage. Because electric vehicles aren't powerful enough to do things like that. My dad owns a Ford F-150, gets nearly 15 miles a gallon, and still outputs more money and less of a carbon footprint than 'electric' car drivers who go to a computer desk job and type in order forms to be sent to CHINA. His company manufactures trailers that tell you the speed you are going in certain areas (popular in high-traffic areas, schools, and construction zones), therefore slowing down cars (who think it takes pictures of them lol fools) which then put off less gases, and sometimes saves lives at schools. Thousands of them, made possible by a truck with 15mpg. And, when we don't need a gas guzzler, we use economic cars such as my mom's Hyundai Sonata, with 35 miles a gallon. Americans are down-to-earth, and realize that, while not burning forests down, don't make it too hard to get the job done. Maybe thats why the F-150 was the BEST SELLING VEHICLE in the United States in 2008. Period. Past the Civic, Sonata, ALL of them.
Just food for thought lol.
And maybe I should've broken that down into paragraphs...