The Obama Administration’s dream of seeing 1 million electric vehicles on the road is laudable and necessary, but it’s going to require a Herculean effort if we’re to pull it off.

Think about it. There are roughly 251 million vehicles on the road in the United States, so a mere 1 million doesn’t sound like many — especially when Americans bought 12 million vehicles last year. But we’re talking about electric vehicles, and that’s a whole ‘nother ballgame because exactly two automakers sell mass-market EVs at the moment. General Motors sold 326 Chevrolet Volts last month, while Nissan sold 87 Leafs. (Yes, the plural is Leafs, says Nissan.)

Still, the Department of Energy, in a report released Tuesday (.pdf), said the president’s goal is totally doable.

“This is a race America can win — if we answer the President’s call to out-innovate, out-build, and out-compete the rest of the world,” said David Sandalow, the DOE’s assistant secretary for policy and international affairs (and a guy we’ve talked to at length about cars with cords).

That contradicts an auto industry report released last week (.pdf) that said automakers’ production plans are “currently insufficient” to meet Obama’s goal. Yeah, we might hit the goal, the panel that compiled the report said, but it’s unlikely if automakers don’t start cranking out the cars in big numbers. We also need aggressive efforts to expand charging infrastructure, bring down the cost of battery technology and offer consumers incentives to buy the vehicles.

“(It) will require an unusual degree of cooperation between industry and government, and a clear focus on the needs of consumers,” said Gurminder Bedi, a retired Ford exec and one of 13 people on the University of Indiana panel.

And then there’s the question of whether consumers want these vehicles.

EV advocates are convinced they do because people are tired of high gas prices, concerned about the environment and fed up with sending billions of dollars to oil-rich nations often hostile to our interests. But others aren’t so sure.

“After the early adopters, what is going to motivate the mainstream people to buy the vehicles?” Bedi told CNN. “Buying an electric vehicle, just by itself, because it’s better for gas mileage, will be a good factor. But that’s not going to be sufficient.”

It’s far more likely, Bedi and the rest of the panel said, that Obama’s goal could be reached by the end of the decade but not before.

Wrong, says the DOE. We can do it by 2015 if we follow an aggressive three-part strategy:

• Change the incentive: Rather than offering a $7,500 tax credit for buying an electric vehicle, Obama proposes offering a rebate of up to $7,500 at the time of sale. Beyond giving consumers an instantaneous break on the relatively high cost of EVs, it would reduce the fraud we’re seeing with the credits.
• Pump more money into EV R&D. Building on Recovery Act investments, Obama’s 2012 budget proposal will provide more money to develop EV technology. Considering the billions in tax breaks, credits and subsidies we give the petroleum industry each year, this is entirely reasonable.
• Provide grants to help communities invest in EV infrastructure. Obama proposes making the grants available to as many as 30 communities.

These suggestions jibe with those outlined in yet another report, this one from the Electric Drive Transportation Association that represents battery and EV infrastructure manufacturers.

In addition to calling for tax incentives to encourage consumers to buy the cars, the association wants large fleets, particularly municipal fleets and transit agencies, pushed to buy EVs whenever possible. At the least, the Obama Administration ought to put our money where its mouth is and start buying these cars.

Beyond that, the association wants to ensure the United States is a leader in EV tech and manufacturing by promoting funding to assist startups in the EV and clean energy sectors.

“While skeptics remain, we see first-hand the many initiatives currently underway by public and private organizations alike, which will brings costs down, enable a ramp in manufacturing, and make EVs increasingly attractive,” says Oliver Hazimeh, head of the e-mobility program at the consulting firm PRTM.

EV advocates sing the same tune. In a recent blog post, Chelsea Sexton — you know her if you’ve seen Who Killed the Electric Car — argues the technology is still in its infancy and the market only beginning to emerge and no one really has any idea where things are headed.

“So any assertions about what will happen several years from now are little more than a damp finger in the breeze,” she writes on her blog. “It’s safe to say that those of us who actually work with that market are far more confident about it.”

She raises some good points. GM is doubling Volt production for 2011 and 2012, Ford has said one of every four cars it sells by 2020 will be electrified in some way and Nissan boss Carlos Ghosn says with complete confidence electrics will comprise 10 percent of all vehicles sold worldwide within a decade. Just about everyone from Audi to Volkswagen is working on electrics, and even guys like Porsche are getting in on the act.

It’s also worth noting that a lot of the doubters aren’t considering the impact oil prices will play in this. Sure, there isn’t much incentive to buy an electric vehicle when gasoline costs an average of $3.13 a gallon. But prices will climb, and in all likelihood far faster than you think. Confidential cables to U.S. officials, leaked by Wikileaks, say Saudi Arabia has overstated its reserves by as much as 40 percent. More troubling, the country will not be able to pump enough oil to keep prices from escalating.

Even Saudi oil officials concede peak oil is upon us. That changes everything because, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, two-thirds of our oil is used in the transportation sector. Fully 96 percent of the vehicles on the road in the United States burn gasoline or diesel. We won’t run out of oil anytime soon, of course, but it’s time to aggressively develop alternatives.

Trouble is, a lot of people don’t know much about electric vehicle technology, and what they do know is often outdated or flat-out incorrect. We’ve seen all kinds of surveys on what people think about electric cars and how likely they are to buy one, and they tend to be all over the map. Suffice to say, a lot of people say they’re aware of the technology, but a lot of people say they won’t buy it because they don’t think it’s suitable for their needs.

We’ve driven the Nissan Leaf, the Chevrolet Volt and several other EVs, and they are, for the most part, excellent automobiles that will meet the needs of a great number of consumers. Not all consumers, but more than you might think.

Whether they’ll meet the needs of one million consumers within four years remains to be seen, and will depend upon how hard the government, the auto industry and the public are willing to work to make it happen.

Photo: Stuart Ramson / Ford. Bill Ford, executive chairman of the automaker that bears his name, plugs in a Ford Focus Electric. We’ll see the car in showrooms sometime next year.