The 100-mpg Car

Google.org, the philanthropic arm of Google, has already awarded $1 million in grants in the field of plug-in electric cars, and it's now dangling a $10 million carrot, saying it wants to help develop a car which gets 100 miles to the gallon.

The idea of cars which can be recharged at the mains does make a lot of sense:

"Since most Americans drive less than 35 miles per day, you easily could drive mostly on electricity with the gas tank as a safety net," Dan Reicher, director of Climate and Energy Initiatives for Google.org, wrote on the organization's Web site. "In preliminary results from our test fleet, on average the plug-in hybrid gas mileage was 30-plus mpg higher than that of the regular hybrids."

Still, I find this announcement to be a little disappointing: $10 million doesn't really sound like enough money to really add to or compete with big car companies. And it would have been more exciting if Google had structured this as a prize, rather than as a grant.

I do, however, think that this is a genuinely philanthropic move. I don't buy the ulterior-motive argument at all:

Renewable energy, unlike coal or nuclear, will likely come from thousands or tens of thousands of different locations. Analysts have long said that one of the big challenges will be managing that flow into and out of the nation's electric grid, and that companies that manage the flow of information are well placed to handle that task.

Even if Google is well-placed to enter this market, and I'm not at all convinced that's the case, I don't think that plug-in cars have anything at all to do with renewable energy. They get their electricity from the same grid as anybody else, which means that the vast majority of their electricity comes from non-renewable sources.