Gliding down Electric Avenue

Among the sights at this year’s North American International Auto Show in Detroit — Look! There’s Nancy Pelosi! — is the Electric Avenue exhibition, where all-electric vehicles are being shown and demonstrated. Yes, because these vehicles don’t have internal combustion engines, they are being driven around a special indoor course within the Cobo Center.

Electric Avenue is sponsored by Dow Chemical, which mostly makes plastics and other products for automotive applications through its Dow Automotive unit, but it also makes resins for the batteries that power these electric vehicles.

With hybrid gas-electric vehicles becoming more commonplace in many countries, the next step is the all-electric vehicle. Nissan Motor is among the exhibitors on Electric Avenue. The company last year unveiled the LEAF, an all-electric vehicle powered by lithium-ion batteries, which is scheduled for rollout in Europe, Japan, and the US late this year.

Late 2010 is supposed to see the rollout of the Chevrolet Volt, General Motors‘ much-vaunted entry in the electric vehicle market. GM was late in entering the hybrid market and still is struggling to catch up with Toyota Motor in that category.

Also promising to market an all-electric car in the US by the end of this year is BYD, a Chinese company that has Warren Buffett as an investor. BYD makes gas-powered and hybrid cars for the Chinese market, and now they’re claiming they’ll be the first Chinese automaker to bring a car to the US market, and an electric vehicle at that. There is much skepticism about BYD’s prospects for meeting that goal. Chinese vehicle manufacturers were expected to export cars to the US for years now, but those vehicles are yet to arrive on these shores. Of course, with China overtaking the US as the largest automotive market in the world during 2009, it is just a matter of time before those freighters coming across the Pacific Ocean are filled with cars made in the People’s Republic of China.

Whether BYD, Chevy, or Nissan get their electric vehicles on US roadways this year or in 2011, it will be a positive development and a big step toward ending the era of emission-belching transportation in this country.

~Photo by Jay Clark, used under a CC-Share Alike license.