In France, Italy and Spain, up to 70% of all executive cars sold have diesel engines, Mr Makowski said.
When working as chief executive for Jaguar cars in the 1970s, the ambitious young socialist befriended Madame Joska Bourgeois, who had the franchise for importing Jaguar cars into Belgium.
Yucaipa's two other nominees include StephenBollenbachStephen Bollenbach, chairman of KB Home, and Michael McQuary, chief executive of Wheego Electric Cars.
The episode ends with a vision of a future with flying cars where a network executive (an age-defying Kenneth) happily bankrolls a show like "30 Rock" from Lemon's great-granddaughter.
But ZENN Chief Executive Ian Clifford admits that current electric cars are still a "niche product, " and that his company has sold just 350 of the current model.
Rolls-Royce do not know how much the car would cost if they were to put it into production, though chief executive Torsten Muller-Otvos points out that electric cars that are currently for sale come with rather large price premiums.
When the company went public in 1995, Yost made sure executive perks didn't creep in:no company cars, no corporate planes, no golf tournaments.
Last year, Nissan's chief executive Carlos Ghosn underlined his company's commitment to its electric cars programme.
According to Kate Zhu, Executive Director of Morgan Stanley Research, 5.4 million passenger cars and 3.6 million commercial vehicles were sold during the first half of 2010, for a total of 9.0 million vehicles.
And despite Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt's hope that "self-driving cars should become the predominant mode of transportation in our lifetime", it could be that even a small risk could be too much for some people to be comfortable removing the driver completely.
Dan Akerson, GM's new chief executive, says the company is committed to electrification and has other electric cars under development.
Another auto executive in China shared with me statistics demonstrating why the tax breaks went to cars with engines of 1.6 liters or less.
Over the past few weeks, Tesla's chief executive, Elon Musk, has made a number of comments about making electric cars more affordable, which has been pushing the shares higher.
The relative high purchase price of electric cars comes from the cost of the lithium-ion batteries, which a Ford executive recently revealed can make up one-third of a car's price.
CNN: Hydrogen fuel-cell cars look to overtake electric autos
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