The electric car floodgates have been opened!

Wow!  Today Obama is announcing $2.4 billion in electric car funding to help the U.S. become a leader in plug-in vehicles.  You can read Jim Tankersley's whole story here, but in summary, $1.5 billion alone will go toward producing advanced batteries and an additional $500 million would fund drive train R&D for electric cars.  The remaining $400 million would purchase and support thousands of electric vehicles to serve as demo models.

They estimate this set of grants will blossom into tens of thousands of new manufacturing jobs right here in the good ol' US of A.

Now, I hope they give these grants to light weight, hungry, up-in-comers like Aptera and Tesla and not just blow it to cover bonuses for the CEOs at the old bailout shops (I'm talking to you GM and Chrysler... you've already gotten your $100+ billion in bailout money, so I'm already expecting something special from you.  How about a car that runs on carbon from the atmosphere and spits out ice-cold bottled water from the exhaust pipe?  Chop-chop!)