The Gold In Automotive Green

For decades Forbes has chronicled the auto industry’s efforts to build cleaner machines. Big ideas, crackpot schemes, furious debates between industry types and environmentalists–we’ve seen it all.

But the elusive “green car” isn’t a topic that leaves us jaded. No, there’s opportunity here for an industry to reinvent itself. In the process, entrepreneurs, companies, and investors will make significant profits.


Whether world “peak oil” comes within a decade or several, traditional petroleum production will eventually not meet demand, especially with economies such as China and India in the early stages of an auto boom. It is becoming increasingly difficult and costly to retrieve marginal oil, and many deposits, such as the oil sands in Canada, pose formidable environmental challenges.

Biofuels can supply only a fraction of our needs, grain prices have already climbed sharply, water resources are not unlimited, and there is controversy over whether all the steps involved in growing, harvesting, producing and combusting biofuels creates more carbon dioxide than conventional petroleum production and usage do.

Forbes