Power Struggle As Hybrid Cars Gain Traction

Some time ago the "Tappet Brothers" of Car Talk said that the best car ever built was the first Toyota Corolla. The fresh, ambitious Toyota company had let its engineers design at the top of their art, and they came through, creating a bulletproof sedan that ran forever with trivial maintenance. Unfortunately for consumers, the car that wouldn't die also gave the company an unintended lesson in the lost profit potential of "planned obsolescence." Toyota has since wised up.

What a wiser Toyota doesn't do, however, is sacrifice everything to that single objective; Toyotas have a fair reputation for quality. But planned obsolescence is and always has been the SOLE corporate objective of U.S. manufacturers, and having owned two U.S. cars and experienced this corporate objective all too painfully with both of them, I am skeptical that any innovation coming out of the U.S. auto industry will be worth buying, however conceptually superior it might be to Asian or European engineering. A U.S. design might be more efficient, or more clever, but marketing will make the industry build it out of tinfoil to save production costs up front and reap replacement revenue at the back.

So I don't think GM has a prayer in this "battle" - at least, they haven't got a prayer with me.

Mark Baird
San Francisco Area (Alameda)

 

I thought it was a lightweight fluff piece and wouldn't have believed the article was worthy of inclusion in the WSJ, let alone the front page, except I saw it myself.

Much better reading was found on the editorial page, in a piece written about UAW concessions on retiree health benefits.

 

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity"

I don't think the abysmal quality out of Detroit is actually planned. I think they're just not capable of any better. Once in a while there is an exception though. The 4.0 I-6 and 4-speed automatic that've been in Jeeps since the mid-80s are an exception I'm familiar with. There are hundreds of these running around the Rockies and Sierras with 200,000+ miles on their original engines and transmissions. There are even a few with 300,000+ miles. Mine would be right at 200,000 miles on its original engine and transmission if I hadn't bought a Prius a year ago. Still runs fine, but only get driven on the weekends during the winter.

 

I disagree. US Engineers are capable of great things, but if the corporate agenda limits them, what you get is what Detroit puts on the streets today.

Best quote is from Steve Jobs in a recent article about innovation.
" They grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory!" - LOL

 

I agree that engineers usually don't set the parameters of their designs, marketing does. And when gas prices are low, capturing a good piece of the SUV market looks like a great move. However, just like a financial portfolio needs diversity to be able to weather various markets and market variables, a car company's offerings should be diverse enough to make sure they do well if gas prices were to go up. This however, requires vision and investment on the part of management.

I worked for AC Delco for a summer when I was in college, and believe me a lot of the engineers that I worked with were not happy with the parameters that they were given. Saving a nickle on a part to save a few million on the year's production is fine as long as you're not sacrificing quality and longevity as well.

-Roger

 

We have owned Hondas, Fords, Chevys and Toyotas. In that order of reliability.
Our Escape Hybrid is almost a year old, no problems. We have had the Prius 3 months and need
to take it in to find out why it displayed a wrench icon instead of starting last Tuesday night. It did start eventually, but....

 

I read that WSJ f ront page artical and thought it showed pretty good understandiing of the Prius system, except for the regenerative braking, of which the authors plainly had no understanding.

I'm not a devotee of "car" magazines, but so far, every author I've read in a newspaper or magazine has not understood the whole system!

 

I expect more than just correctness from the WSJ. I expect the writers to have insights that I don't have.

I recall the article made an analogy between the current hybrid situation and VHS vs. Betamax. I thought that was an especially poor analogy. Consumers won't be faced with incompatibility by choosing one hybrid implementation vs. the other. They all burn the same gasoline.

I was most disappointed when they wrote of the GM-DC collaboration as though it had already produced something beside press releases. I would have liked to seen the writers hammer DC and GM for still being years away from putting real hybrid technology onto showroom floors. Shutting down the engine at stop lights and providing a 110V outlet doesn't count.

 

Regarding the comparison to VHS and beta...

The media tech at our school said that beta was actually a superior system, better picture etc. Consumers and markets don't always pick the best when a winner emerges.

I think the Toyota HSD is superior to anything. But as history has shown, and not just with VHS/beta) the best doesn't always emerge as the winner.

I think Toyota has to continue to aggressively market the HSD as they are doing and keep the pressure on.

 

What it boiled down to was VHS came in longer capacity cassettes (2 hours). LP (4 hours) & SLP/EP (6 hours) came out rather quickly too. Beta was slow to follow either to not wanting to sacrifice quality, or the format didn't allow it. Also iirc, BetaMax (not BetaCam which did dominate professional tapes) had higher licensing fees than VHS for the equipment manufacturers.

So basically, the market choose the winner based on cheapest, highest capacity formula, although not quite the reason why the iPod won out. Almost the same reasons why Sony's mini-disc, and memory-stick are doomed for failure, at least in the US.

I'm really not sure how this relates to Hybrid vs Gas cars since by definition Hybrid combines Gas technology (or whatever else) with electric. Electric vs Gas, or Diesel vs Gas would be the more representative comparisions.

 

Does one have to emerge as the "winner"?

It was important for VHS vs. Beta, since movie studios did not want to produce pre-recorded tapes in both formats, and consumer electronic companies did not want to produce two different types of machines (nor did video rental stores want to stock movies in two formats).

There are no incompatibility issues for the end-user in choosing between hybrid systems. There are economies of scale which will be realized with standardization, but do you really think that it's impossible for two systems to coexist, and that Toyota won't realize the large part of those economies of scale if it goes it alone, and "only" produces a million hybrid vehicles per year?

If I was really cynical, I say that GM and DC had to collaborate in order for their suppliers to take them seriously. Heck, the way things are going, Toyota will outsell GM and DC combined in a few years. Ok, maybe more than a few, but it is just a few for Toyota to outsell GM.

 

i think one of the best statements i have ever heard about technology was from Larry Page at a tech conference in San Francisco two weeks ago...

you may know him as the co-founder of Google. not too much argument over the level of Google's success. but Page took no credit for it at all saying that the worst thing a company can do is rely on corporate management to make technology and product development decisions. at Google, all products were suggested and decided on by the engineers of the company and Page had not a clue as how to go about doing it but left it up to the tech heads to decide how to do it.

this is THE lesson that american corporate management needs to learn

 

I was thinking in terms of the competing hybrid technologies, not hybrid versus gas, diesel, hydrogen or anything else.

 

the article discusses various gas-electric hybrid options

 

... when using the VHS vs Betamax argument.

 

I don't think you understood what you heard. Do you have any experience at all in product development for a high-tech company?

Letting the developers make products decision is almost always a disaster. You end up developing really cool technology and features that no one wants and which doesn't actually address a real customer need. There are so many examples of failure with this approach that there's a name for it, "next bench syndrome", after the old HP practice of building products that the guy at the next bench loved, but no customers wanted.

Both marketing and engineering are part of each product development group at my employer. Most experienced developers realize that they aren't the ones talking to customers and performing the research to gather the market intelligence that helps them figure out what products need to do and what features are required. That's the domain of marketing, specifically the product managers.

Google is a unique company, with a lot of really smart people (they've poached several of our best people), working on very leading-edge stuff and inventing products and services that nobody has ever heard of before. So maybe they can work differently than a lot of other companies. But what you're advocating has a long and proven record of failure.

 

The problem is that in the past (like with the VHS vs. Betamax) the cheaper ends up beating the better. Will HSD lose out to GM's oversized starter?
:angry:

 

i am very sure of what i heard and am relaying information only. Google allows all its engineers to work on "pet projects" as a part of their assigned duties. that is projects of the engineers choice. it doesn't have to fit Googles main business goals as long as it is "cool". it is this latitude offered to its employees that Page contends that nearly ALL of Googles best ideas have come from.