The 100 mpg "plug-in" hybrid which you can drive when gas hits $5-6 dollars/gallon, while your SUV-asaurus is locked up in the corral.

It took only fifteen years for cell phones to go from cumbersome and parochially focused to multi-functional and incredibly convenient.

 It has been 32 years since the first “Gas Crisis” and overall current conventional automobiles don’t get that much better fuel mileage than their 1970s ancestors.

There were several inventive automotive ideas posed to congress during the gas price hikes of the early 1980s. For unknown reasons they all seemed to fail muster and be forgotten like yesterdays newspaper.

 Saturn’s “electric” offering some 10+ years ago was only marketed on a “lease” program and when the term was up they offered no “buy-out” for the consumer to keep it if they really liked it. Except for a couple of museum pieces they were ALL sent to the car crushing machines.

 Nobody is going to defy nature and come up with a perpetual motion patent. Seeing however that Motorola, Samsung, Nokia etc have blown Captain Kirk’s two way
clam-shell communicator away; one really has to wonder why there isn’t such inventive creativity in automotive propulsion.  

like California's rolling black-outs, what effect would plugging-in several thousand of these cars cause?

Besides, I once crunched the numbers and concluded that 100 mpg plug-in vehicles caused more pollution per mile than a gas-guzzling SUV. The pollution doesn't come out of the tailpipe, it comes out of the electric utility's smokestack.