Felix Kramer is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and lifelong environmentalist. Concentrating on innovative ideas, events and businesses in energy and technology, he builds ambitious and "first-ever" projects and companies. He's been a journalist, Congressional speech-writer, run an energy conservation non-profit, pioneered in desktop publishing and wrote the first book on that business. He became one of the first online marketers in 1994. In 1997 he started and in 2001 sold eConstructors, a small Internet company. In 2002 he founded the non-profit California Cars Initiative (www.CalCars.org) to put plug-in hybrid vehicles on the map by technology demonstrations, advocacy and buyers demand. In April 2006 he became the world's first non-technical consumer owner of a plug-in hybrid.
The first thing he did was put his converted Toyota Prius on a plane and fly it to Washington, DC. (He couldn't risk the car driving 6,000 miles round-trip, or spare the time it would spend being shipped.) At a Congressional hearing, he showed up with his short standard 120-volt cable, saying, "Most alternative fuel vehicles need a new fueling infrastructure or new technology. This is all I need to connect to today's power grid, which has plenty of night-time power for tens of millions of plug-in cars." Since then, driving around the Bay Area in a car with giant "100+MPG" signs on it, he says peoples' questions have evolved from "What's that?" to "If they're such a good idea, why aren't the carmakers building these?" to "I want one. How do I get one?" and now to "I've heard these are coming. When can I get one from a car dealer?"
Felix says, "I envision millions of plug-in cars, charged off-peak, providing distributed storage for a power grid fueled by increasingly renewable sources. Local travel will be electric, and low-carbon biofuels or larger batteries will provide range extension. This is a great way to significantly reduce both greenhouse gases and use of imported oil. Now the next step for CalCars is as challenging as anything we've done so far. We're proving it's possible to convert tens of millions of large gas-guzzling pickups, SUVs and vans to run partly or entirely on electricity. Because it takes so long for new vehicles to make up a significant percentage of the world's fleet, unless we do this, plug-in cars won't have an impact on climate change and energy security in the next 20 years."
CalCars will be part of our Green Car Exhibit, on Concours Day, Sunday, May 3rd.
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