While Detroit Slept

What an utterly flawed analogy! To even attempt to compare mail order catalogs, CD discs or books from Amazon.com with the far more complex and energy intensive affair of assembling automobiles is ridiculous. What Detroit needs is visionary leadership of the caliber that Toyota, Apple, Intel and Boeing have demonstrated in their respective businesses. That cannot be realized with the current management at GM or Chrysler; I do think that Ford has the necessary management and engineering talent to prevail, but not without some relief from the burdens that the UAW have placed on them with their past contracts.

 

Tom Freidman is part of the problem in this country. A pompous poorly-informed hypocrite. He knows next to nothing about the auto business yet continues to pontificate like he has been in the auto business his entire life. He pontificates about markets he knows nothing about.
The internet has changed the music business, but until you can somehow download an automobile and get it serviced over the internet his point is meaningless.

Take his babbling about the startups in the US. Pretend GM, Ford and Chrysler are toast and you are the head of of the start-ups, you are going to find tens of billions of dollars from a commercial lender and your business plan is going to be that you are going to compete in the us and the world with Toyota? I am sure all of you bankers in the room would love to make that loan with no collateral. The entry fee in the auto industry makes it utterly cost-prohibitive to start a new company.

Freidman also loves to preach about the environment and how to be green. This coming from a man who lives in a 12,000 sq ft home on the chesapeak and a 5-6,000 sq ft apartment in NYC. I am sure the last time he was in detroit he drove his prius or flew coach........ the guy is pathetic. Actually he kind of reminds me of another preacher on the environment......I wonder if Friedman has a 200 ft house boat moored on the hudson river somewhere?

 

I think the point of the analogy was to show how the benefit and ingenuity of future technologies/processes are sometimes ignored in the present. It wasn't about how complex the process was, it was seeing brilliant opportunities right in front of you, yet choosing to ignore them or not realise their potential.

In 90 years time when all "cars" as they are known today, cease to exist, except in museums and some poorer developing countries (like the UK and USA??), one will look back and say how archaic they were. "Couldn't they see that the future was (xxxxxxxxx - insert your own techology solution here) ?"

That's what this analogy is all about.

 

+1 on priusuk2008's comments.

I agree, Freidman is saying something important. His mention of Denmark
and Tel Aviv is telling.

IIRC Denmark is where the Think OX EV is being developed, and it looks to
be one EV that will actually be on the market in 2010. I may be wrong, but I
believe that Think was once owned by Ford. Tel Aviv -- and Hawaii -- is one
of the first adopters of the Better World concept of developing a network of
public EV recharging stations ultimately involving the rapid change-out of
whole battery packs for rapid "recharging."

These are forward thinking ideas. These are the kinds of things that the Not-
Anymore-Big 3 need to be looking at for their new endeavors. The times
they are a changin, the big question remains, but can the Detroit 3 change
their corporate philosophy and react.

Like many others here, I am just waiting for the introduction of an EV that
can meet my modest needs; true 40+ mi range, summer or winter, 4 seats,
ability to get up to 55 MPH for short hiway runs. When it appears -- there is
a good chance it will the Think Ox -- I will be one of the first in line.

And I believe that once these cars are on the street, demand will skyrocket.
Many of my neighbors need cars like this, but they don't know it yet. When
they see one, ride in one, and can see the $$ savings, those that can will
change over.

This is the sea-state change that Friedman is cautioning about. Basically, he
implicitly asks the question, "Will the Detroit 3 catch the wave, or once
again will they be left floundering and sputtering as the wave passes them
by?" If they can't, the bailout money then becomes a cosmic folly that could
be anticipated should the Detroit 3 continue with business as usual.

 

Tesla Motors?

 

Courageous effort, but I suspect Tesla Motors will be taken over or down for the count by the middle of 2009. I think Aptera stands a better chance of surviving the current economic maelstrom.

 

I'm not sure why that conclusion is drawn so quickly. Selling everything you make for premium prices and having all the intensive capital cost of getting certified behind them is a great position. What's going to cause them to go belly up? The Union? The market downturn? (which does not appear to have affected Tesla's niche market) As far as I can tell, they will go belly up if they cannot make a profit on the Sportster at full volume. Does not look to be the case. It is a very small car with a very long waiting list.

Now undertaking the next step of building a US plant is risky (right now), but Tesla looks to be adjusting their stategy to handle this.

 

Do you really expect to be looking back in 90 years time and saying "how archaic they were"?! Looking forward even 5 years from now is fraught with uncertainty; predicting anything 90 years from now is an exercise in pure fantasy.

 

I disagree with your opinion, though you are of course entitled to it. Most of the time I happen to agree with Tom Friedman's commentaries. Its just in this case that while his fundamental ideas on innovation in the digital age have merit, the external sources of energy required to implement them are trivial compared to initiating automobile manufacture, assembly and delivery.

The fundamental problem with EVs lies with the specific energy that can be packed into a given weight or volume of electrical storage devices (i.e. batteries, ultra-capacitors et al), compared to that contained in the equivalent weight or volume of gasoline. Which is why the Prius, while an excellent engineering innovation, is still only a small step ahead. Its traction battery occupies more volume than the fuel tank, and is rated at 1.31 kWh. Compare that with 10 USG of gasoline in the fuel tank, equivalent to 363 kWh of energy. Li-Ion batteries improve on this ratio, but have a long way to go regarding durability and safety.

I am not saying that electric storage technology will not progress; just that it has a long way to go (unfortunately) to be comparable to the utility of gasoline or other derivatives of hydrocarbons. After all, it took hundreds of millions of years for solar energy to create the chemistry packed into the fossil fuels we currently extract from the Earth's crust to occur.

 

That's what dreams are made of. It's also amazing how dreams become reality too. We won't be around to see it, but it will happen, because the only thing that remains constant in our lives is change.

 

Yes I do, look back 90 years today and the pace of change is still accelerating.

 

When I look back today I run into something tomorrow. I need to keep my eyes on the road.

Tom

 

Well yes Pat, you're talking about the first 100 years of the cheap oil era. During that time the internal combustion engine has changed very little ... it is still the old "suck-squeeze-bang-blow" routine, but with significant technological refinements. In aviation there have been great advances in speed; but surmounting the sonic barrier has proven to be physically possible only at the expense of humongous energy consumption (60% of the weight of Concorde at takeoff was fuel). Other areas have seen tremendous change, especially in electronics and medicine.

The next 100 years are going to be very difficult, especially for aviation; as all the sources of cheap oil we have relied on in the past become depleted, change will certainly occur, not necessarily to our benefit. If climate change is increasingly affected by man-made fossil fuel emissions, finding an effective replacement for oil is the key to the future; I just hope somehow we get lucky.

 

Unlike you, who "knows" that open-ended corporate welfare is just what the country needs so that your lousy dealership does not go under.

 

friedman may not be so far off as you think. in all his analogies , he refers to legacy business models becoming obsolete because of primarily the internet or the computer. iow, the advancement of technology.

the tried and true method of the super long supply chain tied to oil, the ole boy network, etc is not working, has not been working for quite some time and will not work NO MATTER WHAT in the future. sure give them money, make everyone feel good, after all it is Christmas BUT... it wont help a DAMN bit.

the only thing standing in the way of battery technology is price. cant say it wont do this, etc, because the Tesla points out very well that given enough money, batteries will do what you need it to do.

 

I thought the Th!nk is a Norweigan car, not a Danish car. The Scandinavians sure have their heads screwed on straight.

Never mind that, though. Once again, the Giant is overcome by Goliath... little Denmark, the size of the state of Connecticut, is on the cutting edge in world matters and the U.S. can't seem to get it together. Just goes to show that you don't only need the motivation of money to get companies to innovate and lead (frequently the argument to keeping the capitalistic model and avoiding the socialistic).

By the way, according to this article, Agassi is from Silicon Valley. So, in order to make a difference, he had to go outside of the U.S. Sounds familiar... I think a solar panel company did that just recently, striking up a major deal with Germany, giving another small country yet another edge over the U.S. in leading the way. When will we learn? We gave away our manufacturing, then outsourced our engineering, and now we are losing businesses left and right.... tsk, tsk.

 

That's true if you're talking about what was known in regards in supersonic flight back in the late 1950's when the basic design work for what became the Concorde began at Hawker Siddeley in the UK and Sud Aviation in France. But since then, the arrival of the supercomputer has made possible to study how sonic booms are generated through computational fluid dynamics, and aerodynamicists discovered that by dissipating the pressure wave buildup with the proper shape of the airplane they could minimize or eliminate the sonic boom.

Indeed, Gulfstream has done serious research into such an SST, a plane that could travel at Mach 1.65 and still have no sonic boom over land at altitude. Why the Mach 1.65 limit? Three reasons: 1) it means the engines don't have to run on constant afterburner (reheat) mode, which means substantially lower fuel consumption, 2) It means lower pressure wave buildup, so easing the task of designing the shape of the plane to eliminate the sonic boom and 3) limiting top speed to Mach 1.65 means much lower structural heating from air friction compared to the Mach 2-plus speed of the Concorde, which will allow much more extensive use of weight-saving composite materials such as carbon fiber.

But getting back on topic, I believe the next advance in automobiles will be plug-in hybrids using improved, safer advanced lithium-ion batteries or ultracapacitor battery packs. This will allow the car to travel as far as 80 km (50 miles) on a full charge, which means for most commuting work you use very little from the attached internal combustion engine. I believe that the 2010 Prius' drivetrain is designed to take advantage of these advanced battery packs so it could become a true PHEV.

 

Our "brain drain" has been supporting the development of a renewable energy institute in the Middle East for a couple of years now as seen by the MIT cooperative effort in forming the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology.

 

Unlike GM, that knows everything about the auto business.

Slamming folks who wants to get away from a failed business model is like the person who slams the successful competitor, and sees that put down as a cure . . . you know the type . . . "Toyota is what's wrong with this country ..." or, "Well, Toyota makes gas hogs too" they'll tell you. The notion that more credit (via printing baseless paper money) and more land barges (as the cure to U.S. manufacturing) to fix the global economy drone doesnt' wash. The drone about fossil fuel NOT being in its twilite era because "it's just speculators" ... and therefor "we can continue to keep making 19mpg Escelades" doesn't wash.

Everybody knows the global economy is in a giant mess. Why not post YOUR wonderful secret solution? Please show us how much smarter YOU are, than Mr. Friedman, rather than continuing on, same ol' M.O. year after year, with excuses and alabis for GM.