General motor crisis

[Tideland Prius]

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(AlbertoC67 @ Oct 6 2006, 01:53 PM) [snapback]329153[/snapback]</div>

Hi Guys,
I have a two questions in my mind:
Why a great company like GM has gone so down with the best technology on hydrogen in the drawer?
Why they goes on producing guzzlers looking at Toyota growing up producing hybrid cars?
I don't understand.

AlbertoC67
from Italy

[/b]

1. petrol in US is cheap
2. roads are wide and far
3. face it, they do require larger cars, not because they have to go off-road or fit a family of 6. It's for the.. umm.. extra doughnut if you catch my drift.

GM did build an electric car you know (Saturn GM EV1) and it was the Japanese that followed (Honda EV Plus and Toyota RAV4 EV). I suggest watching "Who Killed the Electric Car?"

GM still believes hydrogen is the future and I don't disagree with them. While GM (and the other companies dream), Honda and Toyota are thinking about the present. What can we do while the fuel cell is being developed? You can't possibly be stagnant and just hope for the dream to come true.

Note that hybrid technology can be carried over to hydrogen (e.g. we can have hydrogen ICE with a hybrid system. In addition, fuel cell cars ARE hybrids).

[Jonnycat26]

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(sl7vk @ Oct 9 2006, 05:43 PM) [snapback]330242[/snapback]</div>

Have you been shorting Toyota stock, or what is your deal with the company?
[/b]

I'm sorry, I didn't realize I wasn't supposed to point out that Toyota produces a lot of gas guzzlers just like everyone else. My bad.

[sl7vk]

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Jonnycat26 @ Oct 9 2006, 09:49 PM) [snapback]330373[/snapback]</div>

I'm sorry, I didn't realize I wasn't supposed to point out that Toyota produces a lot of gas guzzlers just like everyone else. My bad.
[/b]

No. Not at all. It is valid, but you seem to have a rather high "bitterness" factor vis-a-vis Toyota. The fact is simply that Honda's fleet is the most fuel effecient in the world. Second is Toyota. The big 3 are laggin way behind, and now they are paying the price...... As is Toyota on the smaller percentage of gas guzzlers as you put it..... that they produce.

[darelldd]

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Tideland Prius @ Oct 9 2006, 05:16 PM) [snapback]330332[/snapback]</div>

GM did build an electric car you know (Saturn GM EV1) [/b]

Just a technicality for whatever is is worth. The EV1 was the ONLY "GM" branded vehilce that GM has ever put on the road. It was handled through Saturn dealerships, but was never under the Saturn label. GM only. Officially it was the GM EV1.


<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Jonnycat26 @ Oct 9 2006, 06:49 PM) [snapback]330373[/snapback]</div>

I'm sorry, I didn't realize I wasn't supposed to point out that Toyota produces a lot of gas guzzlers just like everyone else. My bad.
[/b]

I guess it is just the WAY you say stuff... not as much what it is you're saying. If I can borrow from your avatar... it is sort of like petting a cat backwards. You're still petting, but the cat isn't loving it.

[Ron Dupuy]

ALL car companies build what they can sell. As long as people buy the Ford Mountain of Metal and the Chevy Behemoth (and the Toyota Sequoia), they will be built. It worked great until recently. We (socirty in general) need to stop buying them!

[dipper]

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Ron Dupuy @ Oct 9 2006, 08:18 PM) [snapback]330416[/snapback]</div>

ALL car companies build what they can sell. As long as people buy the Ford Mountain of Metal and the Chevy Behemoth (and the Toyota Sequoia), they will be built. It worked great until recently. We (socirty in general) need to stop buying them!
[/b]

Well.... It has already started. You know people are moving to fuel sippers when Texas are sold out of Corollas and Civics.

[molgrips]

It's kinda cute that you think the two trucks are in the same league. One is soft and a Toy... one is a Silverado 2500. Granted not a lot of people use the silverado as it's meant to be used... but it's a workhorse. Not a toy.[/b]

Interesting to note that in the UK Toyota make what is reputedly the best most respected work-horse truck, the Hilux, and it's been that way over many years and generationsof the vehicle. I think it's got a different name in the US, maybe it's the Tundra?

Er, anyway.. right on everyone else on the thread!

If the world needs cheap hydrogen, then why don't Iceland and other places with limitless free geothermal power start producing it and shipping it around the world? I mean, it'd just be like Saudia Arabia with oil...? I remember reading somewhere that Iceland could generate enough electricity to power the entire world or some silly statistic like that.

Ok so you'd need a lot of tankers, since you'd probably need more volume of H2 than you do of crude oil... But perhaps we could solidify it or maybe convert it to its metalic allotrope.

[chogan]

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(AlbertoC67 @ Oct 6 2006, 04:53 PM) [snapback]329153[/snapback]</div>

Hi Guys,
I have a two questions in my mind:
Why a great company like GM has gone so down with the best technology on hydrogen in the drawer?
Why they goes on producing guzzlers looking at Toyota growing up producing hybrid cars?
I don't understand.

AlbertoC67
from Italy

[/b]

In addition to the factors mentioned above, a funny little secret about SUVs is that for more than two decades there has been a roughly 25% tariff imposed on light trucks imported into the US, providing a partially sheltered market for domestic manufacture of light trucks (including SUVs) as opposed to cars. Google "light truck chicken tax" to read the history there. So, domestic manufacturers face less intense competition from foreign vehicle production (and foreign labor) in the light truck/SUV segment than in the car segment.

A second factor not mentioned here is the CAFE (fuel economy) standards. The CAFE rules date to the 1970s oil shocks. Two things have happened. First, there isn't one CAFE standard, there are separate standards for cars and light trucks. So, as the anti-CAFE crowd argues, why build a gas-guzzling station wagon (under the car standard) when you can build an even-more-gas-guzzling SUV (under the loooser truck standard). If you want to appeal to the gas-guzzler buyer, and you worry about hitting the CAFE target, then do it with an SUV. When the standards were passed, SUVs hardly existed. Whether or not CAFE played any significant role in their growth is not clear, but it may have. Of course, the point of a regulatory fix like that is to force decisions that would not otherwise be made via market signals. So, to the extent that CAFE was effective, it should have had this effect.

But second, of late, whatever is left of the CAFE fuel economy standards has been turned into a joke by the rules regarding flexible fuel vehicles. Basically, the rules assume that if a car is built to burn ethanol, then you can count the (petroleum-based) gasoline mileage as if the car burned E85 half the time. So a 15 MPG guzzler, if it can burn E85, counts as roughly a 30 MPG vehicle for calculation of the CAFE standards. It doesn't matter that almost nobody actually burns E85. So the guess is that CAFE with the flex-fuel loophole simply ceases to be effective.

A third point is that you need to look at what's happening to Ford to see how this pro-SUV dynamic plays out. Ford has the equivalent of the HSD, and put it into an SUV. It's not selling well. Toyota put it into a super-economy car, and it is selling well. Which company made the mistake, and why? Where do you think the market is? All the marketing studies that I've seen summaries of, regarding car owners by type of vehicle, basically say that SUV owner, ON AVERAGE, don't much care about gas mileage or the environmental impact of their choice of vehicle. So Ford effectively wasted the engineering on a market that will be marginal at best. I can't even guess why they did that.

My fourth point, and what I worry about the most, is why US manufacturers appear to have made such bad decisions, and appear incapable of serving the market for fuel-efficient vehicles. I mean, why does it take a foreign company (again! think VW Beetle) to show that you can sell fuel-efficient cars in the US. All the comments re gas prices, Amercan's tastes, other than those regarding cost of manufacture, would apply equally to Toyota as to GM. I'm afraid it's systemic -- that the hair-trigger reflexes of the US stock market force attention to current quarter profits, and obviously a lot of top-level compensation is tied to stock price. So, at some level, you have to speculate and fear that the pervasiveness of seemingly short-sighted managment decisionmaking might occur because the markets and typical compensation schemes demand that. GM and Ford decisionmaking reflect their economic environment. A manager suggesting sacrificing current profit to invest in future market share would be displaced by a manager suggesting the reverse -- as long as the present discounted value of the future decline in market share doesn't register with investors who are determining the stock price.

Around here, all you have to do is observe who's driving what to get really worried about the future of US auto companies. My guess is that the typical middle-aged Toyota SUV buyer was probably once a younger Corolla driver. But in Northern Virginia, I'd say under 20% of younger drivers are in American-badged cars. Gives me the feeling that we still have a domestic car industy because old people buy US cars. That Detroit in general is heading where Oldsmobile has already gone.

My final comment (and apology to Pinto Girl here), returing to the 1970s oil shocks, is some early US efforts at small cars were just the pits, and that has left its market on popular culture and American attitudes. American manufacturers' reputations never recovered from the post-1973 scramble to produce smaller cars in response to the oil shocks. From GM in particular, the Chevy Vega (aluminum engine that wouldn't last 50K miles) and the Chevy Chevette (pr. shove-it), were examples of what not to do. Combined with the mandate for catalytic converters starting in 1974, I'd have to say that 1974 represents the absolute all-time nadir of American automotive manufacturing. It was pretty much into the 1990s before American small cars became vehicles you might care to buy. And the echoes of the oil shock cars continue to produce a lot of negative popular culture regarding small American-built cars. Even today, you will see movies use these cars as iconographic symbols of shoddy workmanship (e.g., the 2003 Looney Tunes Back in Action used an AMC Gremlin for comic effect. Certainly no kids in the audience would recognize it, but a lot their parents recognized it and at some level understood it) So, in addition to the issues of profit and loss, gas price, and others, I'd say that the American phyche was scarred by mid-1970s small cars and has never fully recovered.

[AlbertoC67]

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(TonyPSchaefer @ Oct 7 2006, 05:26 AM) [snapback]329308[/snapback]</div>

Keep in mind, guys, that the Alberto might not have the background in understanding American Capitalism and short-sightedness that you have. Therefore, a little more explaining is in order. And I'm not the correct person to do the explanation justice, but I'll give it a kick-start.

About the Hydrogen:
There are those who believe that GM's efforts in the hydrogen arena are a waste of time and money. One thing to consider is the creation of hydrogen. The most recent numbers I've heard is that it takes three times the amount of energy to create the hydrogen than the amount of energy you can get out of it. I realize that's vague, but it's sort of the same as rechargeable batteries. Someone might claim that rechargeable batteries provide pollution-free energy but they neglect the fact that coal was burned to generate the electricity that was used to charge them. Not a very good analogy, but it's all I've got right now.

Now Iceland is extremely lucky in that they have an abundance of geothermal energy they can use to generate hydrogen; we are not so lucky. In 2004, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, 51% of the electricity generated in the United States was done through the burning of coal. With the three-to-one ratio, you can imagine ho much more coal would be burned to power our cars.

Then there are those who insist that if all the hydrogen were created using Green Power we wouldn't have to worry about burning more coal. That's a very nice pipe dream, but again, from the EPA, Renewable Energy accounted for 9% of the U.S.'s energy in 2004. 9%! That's it. To meet the needs of the drivers on the road, we would need a whole lot more renewable energy and they don't seem to be cropping up fast enough.

And I haven't even gotten into distribution and all that fun stuff.

About Gas Guzzlers:
That's just pure economics and ego.

I heard some time ago that the cost of manufacturing an SUV is not much more than the cost of producing an economy car. On the other hand, you can sell an SUV for up to three times what you can sell an economy car. So their Return on Investment and pure profit is considerably higher. And this is true for all car manufacturers.

About ego, Americans have been trained to lust for big, flashy, overly-hyper-consuming tendencies. As long as that is the societal norm, there will be manufacturers looking to take advantage of it. Of course, that's not to say that some of the sellers aren't perpetuating the beliefs.

Well, that's my two-minute take on it. There is layer upon layer of detail and argument about both topics. I'm sure others will concur with me or rip my thoughts to threads. Either way, I hope I've gotten the ball rolling.
[/b]

Hi guys, let this ball roll…
first of all It’s necessary remind that the most dangerous exhaust gas is the carbon dioxide.
It’s the main cause of global warming, a very dangerous thing for the humanity survival on the earth.
If we burn all the oil, gas and coal on earth we’ll obtain the same weather of jurassic age (because these resources of energy are the result of the decay of animals and vegetables): hot, high moisture, storms and hurricanes .
The poles melting will increase the level of the sea reducing the dry lands and the fading of the glaciers will stop the age of clean water all the year.
I can’t imagine a future like this for my children!

The only solution is to produce less CO2 than the nature can absorb.

Imagine for just a minute that all these problems don’t exist:
we know the oil is not endless and probably it’s ending: this can be the reason why the oil companies don’t want to spend money to build new refineries…
Also the coal is not endless, but we have a lot f it: about for 200 years, but 200 years are not so many as they seem, remember that humanity is on the earth since thousands of years.
At the actual consumes, and imagining an increase of them, we can say that the sons of our grandsons will live without these energetic resources.
So how they could move?
Walking?
By bicycle?
Upon an horse or a donkey?
Surely not, because there are a lot of system to produce energy and many of them like cold fusion (it’s a reality) are very very efficient and completely clean.
And so why we don’t start to use these new systems now?
The most popular (and censored from TV and radio) comic showman we have in Italy, Beppe Grillo (www.beppegrillo.it) sometimes says:” The stone age has not ended because of the end of the stones, and therefore why must we wait for the end of oil to finish the oil age?”.
There are a lot of systems to produce clean energy, we have to use them, an example:
a research made by the university of Toronto tells us that the solar energy is 10000 times more than all the world needs at moment; and another research made by the university of Stanford (CA) states that the wind energy utilizable is 40 times more than all the world needs.
Oh boy! How many square miles we need to build up a solar power station?
Let’s count how many square miles is the surface of all the roofs of the houses of a town, let’s cover them with panels!
Oh boy! What is the cost of all these panels?
Let’s count how many billions dollars we are burning in wars for oil!
So it’s simple to say we must use these energies to produce hydrogen and to hope in a future with the peace.
Another interesting discuss can be done on elecrical cars:
in my opinion we must introduce the concept of “efficient vehicle” based on less consume and emissions.
A normal gasoline car has an efficiency of 20-22%, this means that the 78-80% of the gas used (and bought) is wasted.
That’s unacceptable.
Let’s do some calculations:
The efficiency of a modern power station using coal is about 40%
The effiiciency of an electric line is about 80%
The efficiency of the charge-discharge of a battery is more than 80%
The efficiency of an electrical motor is about 90%.
So the total efficiency of an electrical car is about:
0,4 (PS)x 0,8 (lines)x 0,8 (battery)x 0,90 (motor) = 0,23 about the same!
But we can use modern PS using natural gas in combinated cycle and obtain a 50%,
working on batteries we can increase the efficiency up to 85% (using the new Ni-NaCl batteries)
we can also increase everything working, instead of waste time and money in wars.
In Italy, the most important scientist we have, Carlo Rubbia, has developed and built a power station using solar energy to improve the efficiency of a normal thermoelectic power station,
the Archimede project: solar energy concentrated with a particular shape of panels to rise up the temperature of the water before the burners of the PS.
The result in that plant is the saving of 12500 tons of oil and the saving of a huge amount of CO2 per year producing power for 20000 people at a competitive price.
And this is just the beginning.
To conclude: the work always pays.
So we must let this ball roll…a complete information is the first step to the future.
Never give up.

How can I say about the over-consuming tendencies of our society?
Think about who gains… a writer here in Italy has written in one of his books:”.. hey man, after so many years of economic rise, …where’s your Ferrari?”.
Here in Italy the politicians always talk about economic rise but the factories are closing to go to China, Russia, …. What can we expect by the future?
After 40 years of economic rise we have a house, some money… but we’re not rich.
Most of us gain 1000-1500 euro (1250-1900 $) each month, we have a public debt of 1600 bilions euro (2000 bilions $) and the rent (or the instalment) of the house to pay.
Taxes and cost of life are rising fast… and we cannot sell our Ferrari…

Sorry for my english,
Alberto
From Italy

[Three60guy]

Alberto,

Your english did just fine. You got your points across very well. It makes no difference what country we live in. We need to get rolling on this or our children and their children will pay the consequences. We may get by (barely) but we are not rich, as Alberto says, after 40 years of economic improvement. We must stop thinking that bigger is better. It is not. We must conserve and use our heads to improve things. I am ashamed that the United States of America is one of the two countries who have not approved the kyoto protocols. I am ashamed that we use so much energy compared to other countries. I am ashamed that our government only uses fear to control us. Hydrogen is not the answer until we have a free source of energy to obtain hydrogen. Too bad our government here in America does not understand this. Does our government know something we dont? Is fusion on the horizon?

Those are my 2 pennies worth of comments. Thanks to the others for theirs.

Cheers and good luck to us all.