Posted: August 4, 2008

“The panic has started in the boardrooms” of General Motors and Ford, Edmunds.com consumer automotive expert Phil Reed told EnergyTechStocks.com last week. Why? Because GM and Ford executives have realized that, having failed to anticipate the public’s switch to smaller more fuel-efficient cars, if they fail to capitalize on the car market’s next big change, bankruptcy is a definite possibility.

The big change that’s coming, according to Reed, is plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), cars and trucks fueled principally by electricity supplied through an ordinary electrical outlet. “They’re really, really coming,” Reed said, adding that he expects electric vehicles to be at the center of a home energy revolution that will include solar and other green options.

For GM, Reed said, “everything hinges” on whether its new PHEV, the Chevrolet Volt, arrives on time in late 2010 and is well received by the public. For Ford, which Reed noted has been working on electric vehicles since the 1990s, everything depends on getting some sort of PHEV model into dealer showrooms in order to compete not just with GM but with a slew of Japanese automakers whose PHEV models start arriving in 2009 and 2010.

There was an air of desperation among GM and Ford execs he recently spoke with, Reed said. However, if Detroit’s big two can deliver PHEVs the public likes, Reed anticipates both car companies benefiting from he expects will be “an absolute bonanza of incentives” for environmentally-friendly products authorized by the new American president and Congress.

EnergyTechStocks.com agrees with Reed’s assessment, which is why it ignored conventional wisdom last week and named GM one of eight contenders for the title “The Next Google.” (See Who’s The Next Google? Meet 8 Contenders (4 Public, 4 Private Firms) Last Two: GM (Honest) & Gridpoint)

Reed also forecast that GM and Ford will likely acquire a developer of the lithium-ion batteries that are expected to be the mainstay of PHEVs. “I could not see how (GM and Ford) could not buy one,” he said, noting that the Japanese carmakers have already established formidable joint ventures to develop lithium-ion car batteries. Reed is not a financial analyst and he didn’t name any possible acquisition candidates, but among the logical candidates would be A123 Systems and EEStor, two still-private companies working on lithium-ion and ultracapacitor technologies, respectively. Public companies in the car battery or ultracapacitor sector that logically might be candidates include: Ener1, Altair Nanotechnologies, Valence Technology, Lithium Technology and Maxwell Technologies.

For more on all this see EnergyTechStocks.com’s special archive of PHEV-related articles (ETS – Related Electric Car Archived Stories.)

And get ready for our new four-part series on how to build your own PHEV stock portfolio (since Wall Street won’t help you). It starts tomorrow.