If you haven't noticed lately, the blogs have all been clamoring with pessimistic talk about how scared they all are that the slide into recession will kill promising green transportation concepts.
While this was a legitimate fear a decade ago (thanks C.A.R.B.) when oil was still $10-30 a barrel, the aberration of volatility that was 2008 has shaken the core of the auto industry.
As the Big 3 fly into D.C. on their G5 and leave with their pockets full they know they must throw a hail-mary pass by going back to their days in the Ivy league MBA classrooms and whip up a promising new business plan for Cars 2.0.
Detroit has resisted true innovation for... at least 50 years. The fallout from this is unemployment in the metro area hovering just over 10%.
Thomas Friedman couldn't have said it better when he noted that if the Big 3 fail, the government auto bailout will be viewed as a massive government handout to the typewriter industry at the dawn of the computer.
Whether the Big 3 succeed or fail, they will kill themselves trying (hopefully figuratively) and they will be well capitalized by the American taxpayer.
The Detroit corner offices have taken notice of the throngs of start-up auto manufacturers with promising pre-production vehicles that are radically differentiated from the heap of turd, inefficient, stylistically-bland products that the Trifecta has been stamping out for the past two decades.
Project Better Place, Aptera, Tesla, Fisker, Th!nk (someone please give them some money), Smart, Mini E. Each and every one of these companies has more swagger and a more promising business plan than any of the Detroit Trio.
GM is the trio's lead singer with the 2010 Chevy Volt, a Plug-in Hybrid with a 40 mile EV range. But if they don’t successfully mass market it and roll the technology out across all of their affiliates by 2015, they are up a creek without a paddle.
Unfortunately, they've already blown through $1B+ wasting time on hydrogen fuel cells, a technology so completely over-hyped that we all smelled a rat. Which is the same reason that corn-based ethanol will fall by the way side in 2009.
Ford has previously been leading with hybrids, but the brand is too closely tied to 15-mpg SUVs and trucks that made great sense when Bush was handing out $50,000 tax write-offs to small business owners to buy them. Even with the return of $2 gallons of gas, the public perceives driving an urban assault vehicle as wasteful and moronic, not to mention removed from reality.
The hope for Ford is that, although they are bleeding red ink just like the rest, their CEO had the presence of mind to pad the bank account upon his arrival by mortgaging the majority of their manufacturing facilities. That bought him 18 months, still not much of a runway.
Chrysler is a distant third with out of touch brands like Dodge and Jeep. The type of innovation it will take to save this company, without more federal handouts, has not been seen since the creation of the internal combustion engine.
If the suspender-wearing management at Cerberus had two wits about them they would buy Project Better Place. Seriously, they should buy PBP. But they won't, because they can't wrap their head around the subscription service business model for personal transportation.
I Hope Obama has the guts to rip the massive subsidies out of the corn ethanol farmers hands and then give it right back to them by placing an equally massive investment in green infrastructure. But he must pick technologies that aren’t filled with fatal flaws, which was Bush’s giant green mistake. Here’s my list in order of best bang for your buck: energy efficiency, solar, batteries, wind, smart grids, ocean, geothermal, and transmission period. Make your voice heard Secretary Chu, and make your pocketbook green.
Electricity is the only answer to foreign oil independence. The only rocket-science is in better batteries, which aren’t even a necessity for the industry to thrive, just an added bonus. We can already see the light at the end of this tunnel.
When the capital markets return, 2009 will be the year that the massive cleantech investment sector shifts wildly to Cars 2.0 start-ups, each with a different way to change the world all over again. The technology will leap frog with surprising speed. Have you seen the crazy ideas the guys at EEStor are cooking up? No one saw that coming, time will tell if it’s real.
With 2010 already being evangelized as the year of the commercialized Plug-In Hybrid, 2009 will see green feeding the green beast, which equals a whole lot of green. If you aren’t already dipping your toes in the automotive revolution, hop on board because this train is leaving the station.
Need some inspiration? Go watch the stirring documentary, “Who Killed The Electric Vehicle”. It worked for me.
Tis the season for New Year’s resolutions; mine is to start/help a non-profit tasked with evangelizing the electric vehicle to the uneducated mass market. Thesis statement: Check. What's yours? With any luck, we’ll be seeing green in no time at all.
Recent Comments