Supercar

I had this article bookmarked on a previous computer and lost it. Thinking about it recently, I tried to find it but to no avail. So I did what anyone would do and I wrote to the author, Sam Roe, asking him how I can find it. he was kind enough to provide the following link.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/special...7249692.special

Here's the intro:
On a crisp fall morning in 1993, President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore walked side by side out of the West Wing of the White House, past the Rose Garden, and onto a small stage on the South Lawn. There, they greeted three of the most powerful business leaders in the world: the chief executive officers of Ford, General Motors and Chrysler.

Before dozens of dignitaries, the president announced that America was embarking on a technological venture as ambitious as any the nation had ever attempted.

Over the next 10 years, the U.S. government and the American auto industry would combine the full weight of their resources—billions of dollars, the best scientific minds and previously secret Cold War technologies—to build an invention simple in concept yet critical in importance: a family car that achieved 80 miles per gallon.

This “Supercar” not only would be a tremendous boon to the environment, reducing pollution and slowing global warming, but it also would cut the nation’s reliance on oil imports from the volatile Middle East and inject new life into a stagnating domestic auto industry.

In short, Supercar would make America a cleaner, safer and more prosperous place in which to live. “We do not have the choice to do nothing,” Clinton told the crowd.

But nine years after it was born in pomp and splendor, Supercar is dead.

 

I've often said that the two good things that came from the Supercar program were the Honda Insight and the Toyota Prius.