Well, to find out more about the road ahead and what you might be driving, joining us for our MIX, Jeremy Anwyl, the CEO of car rating Web site edmunds.com. He's in Santa Monica, California.

And here with me in the studio is Mary Beth Stanek, Director of Environment and Energy at General Motors. Welcome to the MIX, both of you.

I'm going to start with Jeremy, and I'd like to ask you, based on that poll, really, and what you know, is the internal combustion engine being phased out, is it maxed out?

[ANWYL] Well, I was listening to those poll results and kind of scratching my head a little bit because I wonder, what is going to change between today and 2020 when people were hypothesizing what they'd be driving. Because today, electric vehicles are less than 1% of the market. And even if you throw in hybrids, you're talking about less than 5%, so there's a huge gap between what people are actually buying today versus what they think they might be buying in the future.

[ASSURAS] Mary Beth?

[STANEK] I think on an annualized basis, you'll see an increase in percentage, but I agree with Jeremy -- it's going to take a little more runway than 2020.

[ASSURAS] But people are saying electrics are the vehicle that are going to be the ones that I'm going to choose, and yet at the same time, we do see reluctance in terms of range anxiety, in terms of where is the charging station that I'm going to need, and price. And I want to come to that with the electric vehicle. Maybe I'm supporting your argument.

If you look at what the top-selling cars are in the country, internal combustion engines, they're somewhere $16,000, less than $20,000. And when you look at the top-selling electric vehicles, the Chevy Volt, for example, is at $40,000 -- double, in some cases. Is price going to matter? Is that what's going to keep it back?

[STANEK] A couple of things are happening at the same time. We have a lot of technology changes that are coming that are bringing the cost down. In addition, right now, with the Volt, there is a $7,500 credit. So that pulls that price down as well. There also are internal combustion engine offerings that are much more than that price. Again, it's the appointments you want, the performance you want. So, consumers are all different. And you have to assume that not everyone fits into that same space, so, there's products for everybody who would desire one.

[ASSURAS] Back to the first question, the internal combustion engine, what's going to happen there?

[ANWYL] I think a couple of things -- I think one reason why the poll results were so strong toward EVs is because that's what everybody's talking about these days, and I think that's a bit of the problem because a lot of progress has been made around improvements in the internal combustion engine. When CAFE was first introduced back in the '70s, the technology really didn't exist to deliver the kind of cars people wanted with the fuel efficiency that was being mandated. But today technology is pretty advanced and GM's got some engines, Ford's got some engines, like some V6's that deliver performance that used to be considered V8-type performance.

[ASSURAS] You're saying that the internal combustion engine can become quite efficient. Is it going to be efficient enough to deal with gas prices, though?

[ANWYL] Well, we have -- I think, frankly, we have a debate in this country that has yet to really have been aired out. We're just not really honest about this. On the one hand, we want cheap gas prices, but on the other hand, we're also saying that fuel is a precious resource and should be conserved and the two just don't match up. And at the end of the day, we need to make a choice. We either need to make the choice that fuel is plentiful, that emissions don't matter, and cheap gas is a good thing, or that fuel should be considered more precious, and if you buy into that, it should be more expensive.

[ASSURAS] Mary Beth, you know, car companies have to deal with those high gas prices, as well as government saying to you, make them more efficient.

[STANEK] What hasn't been mentioned up to this point is the volatility of the prices. The price at any given day is what we all know it to be.

[ASSURAS] The gas price.

[STANEK] The gas price. So we have to get out of that equation. So having these offerings, whether electrified through battery or hydrogen, or biofuel use, or CNG, this actually takes the energy debate out of the one option we have at the moment, so I think having the options will go a long way to solving that problem.

[ASSURAS] So, in terms of, you brought up other possibilities. What are the possibilities?

[STANEK] Not mentioned in your poll -- it might have been because it was a forced ranking -- but biofuels are going to be with us for a while at various blends, and that will stretch a gallon of gasoline fairly far. They're from renewables -- that cleans it up as well. You're also going to see a lot of variety of electrification. Not everything is going to be pure-EV. You'll see all sorts of hybridization. You might get 20% fuel economy savings, all the way to pure electric driven vehicles, both from batteries and hydrogen, so there's a lot of things coming our way.

[ASSURAS] You're going to be forced that way because of gas prices?

[STANEK] I think it's really because we have had a lot of shift changes with regard to technology. In the last 10 years, just looking at lithium ion, what's happened, it's really a threefold increase in density and performance. So we're seeing breakthroughs in materials; in composition, of how these things are being put together; costs are coming down; so we're able to bring things that were pretty much scientific to the consumer level where the price points are making more sense.

[ASSURAS] Jeremy, what do you say to that? And let's throw natural gas-powered vehicles into this. You talked about the electric vehicle being a fringe. What about the rest of these?

[ANWYL] Yeah, I think that's one of the issues, though, is that the government has made a bet on biofuels and EVs and that's where most of the energy is being applied. There is a blizzard of new technologies that could be applied to powering vehicles. And by placing specific bets, you're actually eliminating or reducing the incentive to invest in those alternatives. The best example is fuel cells, where three or four years ago, you'd go to auto shows and most car companies had demonstrations of fuel-cell technologies. Today, no one's even talking about that. So I think the best approach is a wide-open approach, where we're experimenting and pushing the envelope in a whole variety of technologies and really not placing our bets on just one or two, in case they don't pan out.

[ASSURAS] Including natural gas and diesel, as well?

[ANWYL] Natural gas has been around for decades. Back in the '70s when fuel prices spiked up, there were people converting vehicles to natural gas, and it's a plentiful resource in the United States so we don't have to worry about importing it. Sure, there's all sorts of alternatives we ought to be thinking about.

[ASSURAS] Mary Beth, the last word to you. There's going to be the mix, but what's going to make the difference to the person who's going into the showroom?

[STANEK] The person going into the showroom wants to make sure they can still have the performance and affordability that they have today. What they're going to want, though, is also zero-emission-free vehicles, so I have to disagree with Jeremy a little bit in the discussion with fuel cells. I think most auto companies are ready who are in this space. So, the big question is the big "I." We've got to get the infrastructure reconciled for biofuels, for hydrogen, and also for charging. So I think that's the next thing on the docket that as a nation we need to address.

[ASSURAS] Thanks for an interesting discussion. We'll have to see what we're all going to be driving in the next few years.