Eric Schmidt looks innocent enough, with his watercolor blue eyes and his tiny office full of toys and his Google campus stocked with volleyball courts and unlocked bikes and wheat-grass shots and cereal dispensers and Haribo Gummi Bears and heated toilet seats and herb gardens and parking lots with cords hanging to plug in electric cars.
Every day I get to 'Think' and work on everything from digitizing electric grids so they can accommodate renewable energy and enable mass adoption of electric cars, helping major cities reduce congestion and pollution, to developing new micro-finance programs that help tiny businesses get started in markets such as Brazil, India, Africa.
Yes, my grandfather worked with Thomas Edison on the electric car, and he sold electric cars at the 1900 World's Fair in Paris.
I don't believe in the electric cars, but I strongly believe in hybrids.
Electric cars are coal-powered cars. Their carbon emissions can be worse than gasoline-powered cars.
Electric cars aren't pollution-free; they have to get their energy from somewhere.
The time is right for electric cars - in fact the time is critical.
I really do encourage other manufacturers to bring electric cars to market. It's a good thing, and they need to bring it to market and keep iterating and improving and make better and better electric cars, and that's what going to result in humanity achieving a sustainable transport future. I wish it was growing faster than it is.
Electric cars are not going to take the market by storm, but it's going to be a gradual improvement.
Electric cars are really very cool. Air-source heat pumps are great.