"As new-car sales in America are expected to fall to ten million this year, down from sixteen million in recent years, and as Chrysler and G.M. struggle after sojourns in bankruptcy, the big automakers are, often reluctantly, developing E.V.s of their own. Ford plans to release the electric Focus in 2011, and Chrysler says it will have five hundred thousand electric cars on the road by 2013, under its new ENVI brand, aimed at “consumers who care about the planet’s future.” (For everyone else, there’s the Jeep Wrangler Unlimited.) Renault, Nissan, and Mitsubishi are soon to release electric models, and the Chinese government, in a bid for its manufacturers to dominate the market, is setting up battery-charging stations in some of its largest cities and offering fleet owners who buy E.V.s and hybrids subsidies of up to eighty-eight hundred dollars."