Suggesting nay Encouraging.. the fallacy that:
You CAN continue to throw all manner of resources into, create many new toxics while -- building 5000# + Living Rooms on Wheels, just like you always did
[cf. The 1959 Cadillac fin-with car attached.]

Hybrids indeed have their place in evolving experiments, as techno-illiterates imagine that throwing $$ at energy storage problems just m i g h t escape the Laws of physics (and chemistry.) Not to mention.. entropy. Methinks that , even as they are now: hybrids are ~ideal for taxi service (especially in a place like say, SF -- where regenerative braking can recapture a % of the up-hill energy expenditure.) And with a time-based warranty on that bettery pack; all those discharge cycles in a taxi's life -- get subsidized by Toyota, though probably that warranty will be nixwd for 'fleet service'. Oh Well.

That HumVee OTOH, with its drag-coefficient about like your screen door, m i g h t achieve 100 mpg at 30 mph on a flat road, toting all those batteries + its std. arrogant-Mass. F=MA; accelerating that mass around the very-same SF: compare with a Prius on same course. Let's see the SF + 60/70 mph figures. Any 'reporter' unacquainted with inertia, kinetic energy and similar HS-physics would have smelled a rat.

Etc. Disneyland physics is rampant amidst iggerant legislators, reporters like this -- and the gullible reader who is their (l)awful prey.
Hope Obama took some science courses along the way, but Mr. Chu, ex-LBL shall assuredly save him from fantasy-dead ends like, the Green Hummer;
Chu Knows about physics, and
... it's The Law.