THE CAR OF THE FUTURE - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 109

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THE CAR OF THE FUTURE
h ere are many cars that scream conspicuous consumption, but none
quite like the Hummer. A beast weighing in at as much as six thousand
pounds and delivering as lit le as nine miles to a gallon of gasoline, by
the mid-2000s, it had come to symbolize the American addiction to
oil. 1 When U.S. Hummer sales broke thirty thousand in 2003, people
noticed; when they climbed over seventy thousand in 2006 despite ris-
ing oil prices, many were appalled. 2
h ose days are looking increasingly ancient. Fewer than ten thou-
sand Hummers were sold in 2009, and at er an aborted at empt to sell
the brand to China's Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery
Company that year, General Motors announced it would be shut ing the
brand down. 3 For a time it seemed as if the American automobile indus-
try would go the same way. In 2009, GM and Chrysler both i led for
bankruptcy; later, they turned to Washington for bailouts. Meanwhile,
revenues from U.S. automobile sales plunged, crashing from a pace of
$110 billion a year in mid-2008 to a mere $40 billion only six months
later. 4
Yet the death of the American automobile industry never material-
ized. Instead a second revolution is under way in American energy that