Perhaps I'm cynical, but I don't think that people are going to cut down on their gas usage until there is an alternative that people really want.
A colleague was telling me that he doesn't look at gas prices when he buys gas. Since he
needs that gas to get to work, and the prices between pumps is not that different anyway, so he just buys gas at the first pump he sees when he's empty. (Perhaps he's a minority, since websites like GasBuddy work so well
because so many people are interested in lower gas prices.)
Down in Florida, where I live, I am a little amazed that BP still has gas stations, given the huge mess that they caused on our west coast. Even more amazing is that their gas is usually more expensive that surrounding stations, and yet people still go there.
Is there anything that a gas company
cannot get away with? Environmental disasters, monster profits while everyone else is in recession, pollution, ... nobody seems to care.
Clearly you're not going to get people away from their addiction to gas, unless you can get them addicted to
something else. Sell them on the advantages of electric that people are really excited about; "100% torque at 0 mph" seems to be a much better selling point than "less noise, less pollution, less maintenance, less war, save the planet."
Otherwise, the next time the price of gas drops down to $1.60 (
which it did in late 2008), people will just go right back to gas.
