Here's a link to a picture of the worst ICEing ever. On the way back to Reno from a V2G conference in San Francisco in 2009, we stopped to eat lunch off of I-80 at Dixon only to find this: http://electricnevada.org/pics/stinker.jpg

There's a place for government loan & grant programs but not at the scale we have seen under Obama. Also, the loans/grants should be targeted at pure (fundamental) & perhaps applied research, not end products. In the case of innovative end product start ups like Tesla, Solyndra, and so on the way government could help is by getting out of the way. In the case of cars: no crash testing necessary until the company has a marketshare equivalent to one percent of the smallest established manufacturer. Until that point, the company's cars are "experimental" and should be marked as such with a big yellow nonremovable placard in the middle of the dash. Government getting out of the way would also help level the playing field for the little guy/gal.