GM's New Car You Can Plug In At Home

(CBS)  For American automakers, the Detroit Auto Show offers a fresh start after some rough road. Bill Ford admitted that "2006 was a difficult year for us, and 2007 will be a pivotal one."

Ford's sales plummeted 7.9 percent last year. GM's sales dropped even more: 8.7 percent.

Toyota meanwhile has hit the gas. The Japanese car giant is passing Ford in U.S. sales and is expected to surpass GM this year to become the world's largest automaker:

But General Motors tried to create some electricity today unveiling the Chevy Volt, a concept for a new battery-powered "electric" hybrid, reports CBS News correspondent Anthony Mason.

Csaba Csere, editor of Car & Driver magazine says he thinks GM is not trying to catch up to Toyota, but rather tying to "leapfrog" beyond it.

"If they could put this on the market today, this would be well beyond any existing hybrid. So they're trying to go to the next step rather than catch up," he says

The volt, says Csere, uses a gas engine to charge a battery that runs the car's electric motor. The motor gets its power from a huge battery that runs down the middle of the car.

"It's a lithium ion battery, much like a laptop," he says. "But it is 16 kilowatt hours. That's like 300 or 400 laptop batteries all put together."

The car could get 800 miles on a tank of gas or up to 40 miles on a single electric charge. And you can plug it in at home using an ordinary outlet.

The problem, Csere says, is that the battery is not yet economical.

"This today is a $5,000 to $10,000 battery and that has to come down, because you'd like to sell this car for maybe $25,000," he says.

So it could be years before a car like this is on the road. Perhaps not soon enough for American automakers, who are struggling not to fall further behind.