Leadership Quote by Albert Wynn

“I was encouraged” is doing the real work here: it’s the cautious, public-facing verb of someone whose job is to signal momentum without staking his career on a technical claim. Albert Wynn isn’t praising a car so much as praising the idea of a car, specifically the hydrogen car as a politically convenient symbol of innovation, energy independence, and environmental seriousness. Encouragement costs little; it flatters industry, reassures constituents, and implies responsible oversight while leaving plenty of room to pivot if the timeline slips.

The namecheck of GM matters. A major automaker functions as a proxy for feasibility: if GM is “making progress,” then hydrogen stops sounding like a boutique science project and starts sounding like policy-ready infrastructure. It’s also an implicit nudge to competitors and regulators: keep up, fund this, clear the permitting, build the stations. In a single sentence, Wynn aligns himself with technological optimism and corporate capacity, a coalition-friendly posture in energy debates where everyone wants to be for the future.

The subtext is that “progress” is a malleable metric. In the hydrogen world, progress can mean a lab breakthrough, a concept vehicle, or a pilot fleet - none of which solves the hard parts: production emissions, distribution, storage, and consumer economics. The line’s real intent is agenda-setting. It’s a small rhetorical down payment on a narrative that industry and government are moving together, even when the finish line is still being negotiated.