Two weeks ago, CEOs from Detroit’s “Big Three” car makers showed up in Washington begging for $25 billion in taxpayer bailout money for their cash-strapped companies. They got there in private jets. Yeah, that went over about as well as an Angelina Jolie keynote speech at a Promise Keepers convention.
So now the bailout-handout price tag has risen to $38 billion, and for that kind of money General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner was willing to drive himself to Washington. In what Wired called a “shameless” PR stunt, Wagoner’s peeps announced early this week that he would be driving a Chevy Volt, GM’s futuristic plug-in hybrid car.
My first reaction is, “My GOD, that is either a very tall man or a very tiny car.” OK, he’s 6-foot-4, but that did not look like it could have been a comfortable ride for the 525-mile trip from Detroit to Washington.
Oh, wait. Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank did a 1pm liveblog Q&A today about the Capitol Hill hearing that will be replayed at all the Toyota and Honda holiday parties this year.
Here’s one question and answer from Milbank’s session:
Question: You just did an excellent car review. The GM CEO drove down in a Tahoe or something, but he took the Volt to the capital, because the Volt can’t drive that far, but he wanted to show it off. That’s the problem with this car, which is supposed to be GM’s great savior: it has about a 40 mile limit on the battery. Who needs Road and Track?
Milbank’s Answer: Yes, word around here is they had to bring it over on a flatbed or some such.
That explains it! Wagoner didn’t drive that matchbox car more than about 10 or 12 blocks. Probably had a police escort and some Hollywood grips pushing it uphill, just out of camera range.
Here’s a pic of Wagoner getting out of the actual car he drove from Detroit, at his Washington hotel. It wasn’t actually a Tahoe. It was a Malibu hybrid, which is an actual production car — the kind GM keeps losing billions of dollars on, by the way.
I feel so used.
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So problem number 1 with the Volt, if you want to leave the city limits, you need to own another vehicle. Paying insurance for two cars has to be some sort of boost to the economy though.
How about producing a dependable, good looking vehicle that doesn’t cost the same as your house. Throw in a good gas milage and I bet people will line up to buy your product.
There, I just solved the Big 3’s problems, now give me my 20 million dollar bonus and I will start to fix the other problems we have today.
BTW, notice that on the Volt, hubcaps cost extra.
Now for my weekly automotive rant:
The Volt can go 40 miles before it needs a recharge.
Anyone want to ask Nancy Pelosi how she’s driving home?????
The 40 mile battery is a limit of current technology. Not just American technology, but world wide. Even Tesla, a company who is totally devoted to producing an electric vehicle can’t get much past the 40 mile barrier.
The Volt, Ford’s Think, and Chrysler’s EnVi are running on a Japanese batteries, designed in Japan, produced in Japan. GM (closest to production) is at the mercy of Japan to decide how many of these batteries Japan wants to produce for the US market and how many Japan really wants to sell us. Remember, Japan isn’t looking out for our benefit, they want to sell you their own electric cars.
Now ponder this for a moment, will ya?
This is the car D.C. says that YOU the customer want to purchase. Congress says that you’re dying for this car, that YOU the customer will be beating down Detroit’s door to get your hands on this car. This is the car they want to MANDATE that all the Big 3 produce to lift themselves out of this current economic mess.
How many of you really want to purchase a 40 mile car?
How many of you want to squeeze your entire family into this clown mobile?
How many of you want to own 2 cars, one for quick errands and one for ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING else?
How many of you are ready to pay higher electricity bills?
How many of your cities are ready for a couple million cars plugging in every night?
How many of you want to insure a feather light plastic car with tender technology under the hood against collision with a semi-truck?
How many of you want to spend $35,000 – $40,000 for this car?
Yes, I said $40,000. That’s AFTER a $7,000 tax rebate incentive. And that’s just the pre-production price estimate, long before we get an idea if the Japanese are going to sell us enough batteries at the price we plan to pay.
Let’s be honest. The Big 3 guys are willing to lick dirt to get this federal money. They’ll promise anything. They’re willing to impregnate Satan’s mother in law in order to survive this credit freeze.
Because current available bank car loans are scarcer than Gwyneth’s functioning synapses.
And congress (who created this happy credit crisis) is right now, at this very second, telling the Big 3 that the only way they’re going to give them a loan is if they produce more electric cars.
Is this the car YOU want?
Congress is speaking for you.
Is this really what you want?
Thanks for that perspective, Minnow. I would rather eat my own face than drive one of those…
There’s more than enough stupidity to go around when it comes to cars these days.
First, the Feds pretty much forced the big 3 to back the wrong horse, and technological advances over the last decade have proved it. In the 90’s, electric cars looked pretty promising, provided that certain core technologies kept evolving at the rate they were. You’ll get what I’m saying if you think back to the cell phone you carried in 1990 vs. the phone you carried in 1999 – the batteries were less than half the size and could hold 10 times the charge. But we’ve hit a few major snags with battery tech, and there is only so much juice you can cram into present technology. Not to mention the fact that NO ONE has addressed the serious issue of battery degradation (again, think cell phones: if you charge your phone all the time, after a while it won’t stay charged as long and you have to replace it).
Hydrogen fuel cells on the other hand didn’t look as promising in the 90’s, primarily because of all the infrastructure (fueling stations, refining plants, distribution networks) required to get the system off the ground. Now, I’m guessing the automakers are REALLY regretting not getting the word out about this technology while the green-freaks were all pushing electric cars.
Fuel cells are superior to electric cars in every way imaginable:
They can go a hell of a lot further than 40 miles on a tank.
They’re FAR more environmentally friendly. Electric cars may not produce emissions, but where does that electricity come from? Coal and oil burning plants that will have to increase the amount they burn in order to meet higher demand – so you’re still polluting as much, just in a different way. That also means we’re still reliant on foreign oil, which leads to my next point -
Hydrogen comes from water, which we have plenty of. The only byproduct of burning it? Water vapor.
You don’t suffer the same weight restrictions with hydrogen powered cars that you do with electric, so you can fit more than two full grown adults in the vehicle without having to make sure the rest are professional contortionists.
All that being said though, I still have no sympathy for the big 3. Minnow, I am SO not trying to pick on you, you state a very well thought out and reasoned argument time and time again – but can’t you see what it really all boils down to? “Don’t blame us, we’re just too scared of everyone to actually run a successful business.” It may not be exactly what they’re saying, but it’s what Americans are hearing, and why no one wants to bail them out if you believe the polls.
There were any number of times they could have put the government and the unions in their place if they’d really wanted to. We have a UAW transmission plant down the street from my house, and I swear to God that I have seen them picketing outside that plant more often than inside actually working. You’re telling me that it would really be MORE difficult to just fire them all and hire a new non-union workforce than to keep hemorrhaging cash like that year after year after year? You’re telling me that if three of the nation’s largest employers hadn’t flat out told the government that if things didn’t change they would pack up and leave the country, they wouldn’t have rushed to accommodate them? Perhaps they should have learned something about collective bargaining from the guys who apparently have their testicles mounted above their union headquarters’ fireplace.
“But it’s complicated, the unions can….”
Don’t care. People have a way of wising up when the company head walks out to the picket lines and explains that they go back to work right now or their jobs go to Japanese workers that don’t even have a translation for the word union. I’ve worked in plenty of American companies where even uttering the word union in the lunch room was grounds for being fired on the spot – so this isn’t out of the realm of responsibility. Unions are just like the organized crime thugs that support them, they have no real power if you don’t let them scare you into paralysis.
The big three are dinosaurs that deserve to die. Hopefully they’ll be replaced by a company more interested in making a profit than making everyone happy. Sure worked for Walmart.
“They’re FAR more environmentally friendly. Electric cars may not produce emissions, but where does that electricity come from? … Hydrogen comes from water, which we have plenty of.”
However, it takes electricity to produce hydrogen from water.
Fuel cells are far superior to batteries in range capability, but they aren’t inherently any more environmentally friendly than batteries; in fact, they’re actually slightly worse until you take the weight of the vehicle into account. The reason is simple; it takes more electricity to extract the hydrogen from water than the amount you get back from the fuel cell, and there’s no other economically (or chemically) feasible method to produce the hydrogen besides electrolysis. (Batteries don’t give back 100% of what’s put into them, either; precise comparisons of efficiency in this regard aren’t much good until we actually have production batteries and fuel cells to rate against each other.) Since the electricity to produce the hydrogen will come from the same sources as the electricity to charge a battery would, with current power generation technology you’re still polluting no matter what you do. Still, fuel cells make more sense than batteries (despite the hazardous fuel storage and fuel refill situation) precisely because they allow smaller, lighter vehicles to be built with the same amount of cargo capacity as a larger battery-powered model…and every pound that you shave off the weight produces a net reduction in energy requirements if everything else is equal.
For the US as a nation, the real problem is that we’ve painted ourselves into a corner. We ditched nearly all of our efficient public transport in the mad rush to promote the automobile in the middle of the 20th century, and in the process we built the majority of our cities (and the entire rural landscape) around a transportation system that’s not going to be supportable at all in the long run. Reversing this infrastructural error in any period of time shorter than a couple of decades would be impossible even if we could afford it…and we can’t.
We’re up against a nasty catch-22 situation here; we fundamentally need to reduce transportation energy usage by about 50%, and carbon dioxide production a lot more than that, but we’ve built a nation around the idea of cheap, easy transportation on demand to any point. This is a dilemma that’s not going to submit to any single, easy, cheap, or most likely satisfactory, solution.
Hey Scott, I’m right there with you on your evaluation. And while I’m defendin’ the Big 3 every chance I get, I agree with you on every point but the dinosaur.
I’m a Chrysler family. Our biggest hope when we married Daimler was that the Germans would have the balls to tell the unions that the hayride was over. They didn’t. Same thing when Cerberus stepped in, we needed the banker boys to hand Gettlefinger a dozen eggs to suck. But they haven’t.
Bottom line: every dollar spent propping up artificial wage levels is a dollar that isn’t spent developing consumer driven technology. That’s a serious handicap.
But it’s not just union contracts. Government is a big part of the problem too.
Congress likes to pass unfunded mandates. CAFE sounds nice until you figure out that it only hampers American cars, not imports or transplants. Until gas skyrocketed this summer, the American public didn’t want inky dinky putter cars. Congress wants us to want small cars, but sales figures don’t back that up.
And while I’m at heart a free trader, we can’t pretend that other countries are playing fair. We aren’t permitted to sell new cars to Saudi Arabia, we’re limited to 5,000 units/yr to S.Korea, and forget about sales to Japan with their tarrif system. That’s just 3 foreign markets off the top of my head…
Congress pretends that the reports submitted by the automotives this week are the first time these companies have ever considered a restructure. Ha! We’re on the 9th or 10th plan each, in just the last 5 years. Everytime the economy changes, plans change accordingly; nobody is sitting around picking their nose.
Every contract negotiation with the UAW whittles away a more waste, removes a few feathers from their pillow. And we’re getting rid of internal dead weight too. My husband was hired in when there were 100,000 employees at HQ (design, finance, engineering). They’re down to 35,000 now. That’s running extremely lean.
And Chrysler is only running behind because we’re still recovering from the Daimler pillage. Ford is a prime example of a company on the right track to viability. Change was happening in Detroit… until the economic crash.
We bailed out Wall Street and these banks have decided to sit on money instead of loosening credit. As a result, they’re killing off markets for major ticket items (houses and cars) which require a loan to purchase. We’re stuck contractually building cars which no one can purchase and we can’t get loans to cover the damn contractual obligations. It’s a vicious cycle. That’s something the B3 never could have planned for.
If we loose the Big 3, they’re taking down a couple million jobs and several states with them. I’m sitting here in an autotown; I can’t think of a single business in a 30 square mile radius that could survive if Chrysler went under. Everyone here is either auto or sells services or products to auto or it’s employees. Not retail, medical, education, financial… even McDonalds can’t survive without a customer base. And this is just one pocket in a 5 state area.
Best scenario in my mind: bridge loans to get through the credit crunch. Build in a bargaining body so that unions must renegotiate immediately, and go Dirty Harry all over the UAW’s ass. Foster a US supplier base rather than outsource to cheap bidders overseas. Government allows B3 to produce whatever we know will sell in the quantities the public demands (which means cutting back on CAFE tiers and niche market green mandates). Rethink trade policies with countries who play with currency value or restrict American products.
“Hopefully they’ll be replaced by a company more interested in making a profit than making everyone happy.” That’s what the current staff at GM, Ford and Chrysler are trying to do. Why start over from scratch when you’ve got the experience and capital base to work from?
To add on to Minnow and Scott F.
1. I have a laptop that gets a supposed 5 hours per full charge, regular use (word processing with the brightness all the way down) gives me about 4 1/2 hours. I’m thinking regular use on the Volt or any of these electric cars is probably closer to 30 miles per full charge. That’s not counting that these rechargeable batteries hold less of a charge each time you charge them and that you will have to replace them as they get worn down.
2. If I have learned anything from being infatuated with new gizmos and gadgets, it’s that new technologies especially first releases are for the adventurous and show-offs. It takes about 2 revisions for all the kinks to get worked out. So if the Volt is released in 2009, by the 2011 model it should be good to go.
3. My parents had a bread machine they used every other day for a month, then they got the electric bill. The bread machine has been sitting on a shelf ever since. So when you set this thing to charge overnight, by just how much is your bill going to jump by? And how much of a strain is that going to put on the electricity grid? And when a storm comes through and knocks out the power, what then?
4. And I just thought of this as I was typing the above, the assumption with this car is that you’re going to plug it in at night to charge. I park on the street, sometimes I can’t find a spot near where I live and I have to park down the block. Um, where do I plug this gizmo in?
If I might add a #5 to your list Rocko:
When the Volt first appeared as a concept car it looked far different than Wagoner’s wind-up car. It was a muscular, flat fronted, full throttle, strong lined, and masculine. Think Dodge Charger on steriods. The press raved, design awards were won, pre-orders flooded in.
But the production Volt is indistinguishable from the Prius.
Why?
Aerodynamics.
You can’t get 40 miles in a pretty car.
All electric cars will look identical. Everyone is going to be driving the same damn little bubble. No more cars which reflect your personality, your needs, your wants. They’re all going to be stepford wind tunnel wedges.
Geez Rocko they used their bread machine every other day for a month? Were they exporting the stuff or something? That’s a lot of bread.
Hydrogen-cells aren’t that good either, splitting water isn’t efficient approx 50% of the energy used to split it isn’t regenerated when it is used, so if you use anything other than solar or wind to power it then you are wasting power that can be used in other ways. Batteries may be viable at some point but not now. The best option I have heard of is algae biofuel, they basically convert mostly solar energy, produce clean oxygen, don’t raise the price, or lower supply, of food, without dedicating half the country to produce it( 1/7 the area used to grow corn currently ), is more effifient than the current biofuels, and can actually help treat waste water. It isn’t emission free but is very renewable and can be switched to much easier. I am a little disappointed that I hear virtually nothing in the media about it.
My Dad was making banana bread, pumpkin bread, sourdough, sometimes he would just mix whatever he could find. He loved using that thing. This was when I was in high school, so about 10 years ago, but we ate a lot of bread now that I think about it. A full size loaf, 6-pack of bagels, 6-pack of english muffins and usually italian or french bread lasts about a week. The english muffins last 1 1/2 weeks usually I’d say. But yea, that is a lot of bread.
Hello, my name is Rocko and I’m a yeast addict…
A one way commute for me is 50 miles….guess I ain’t buyin’ an electric car anytime soon. I just want a car that gets 40 mpg that isn’t ridiculous looking.