"Talking in circles" must be an executive training course at GM. You'll find a perfect example at GMNext, where GM's chief of American sales operations, defends GM against charges of greenwashing. To that end, Brent Dewar held an on-line question and answer session– make that an "evade the question" session– with no less than 50 online journos (TTAC's invitation got lost in the email). Even the condensed version is dizzying. When asked when we'd be seeing E85 available across the country, Dewar launched into a tale of his six year stint in Brazil– without answering the question. One participant asked Dewar point-blank about GM exploiting the E85 loophole in the CAFE standards. His response? "As I just mentioned it is a huge opportunity now. The problem is we are often American centric. This is not a CAFE loophole, but a solution. We did this in Brazil. Cafe in south america means coffee…" The complete transcript is on line, if obsfucation is your cup of cafe tea.
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Should Tony Snow or other former WH press secretaries need a job – apply at GM.
Wow! I looked over the transcript, and he managed to shake off tough questions like an NFL running back.
Which one of you guys is kevin legrand3285?
This is a “conversation around GM’s environmental policies and actions.” GM’s policy is that ethanol is a renewable energy solution. You can’t expect the GM spokesperson to say, “Well, actually, I know that ethanol isn’t a good solution”, even if we know it isn’t. So when asked this:
jeffreyd00:
Why is GM continually pushing E85 Vehicles and with that exploiting the CAFE loop hole?
Brent’s response was completely natural. According to GM policy, it isn’t a loophole, it’s part of the solution.
A lot of people on TTAC complain that amazing Euro diesels don’t make it to the US, like:
Marty Jerome:
Ed Peper recently initimated that Chevrolet was rethinking its commitment to bringing clean diesels to its U.S. fleet. Why does GM resist this technology?
This is because the US has stricter emissions regulations, and the expense of making them compliant makes it such that consumers don’t want them. Period. Come on, members of the auto industry, you guys know this.
Stuff like this:
Njmagel:
Lets talk greenwashing, the plans in GM’s future are nice..I’m not talking E85 vehiclies that rarely, if ever even use ethonol. i’m talking real SOLUTIONS not concepts!
Oh yeah. In 2009, GM is going to spend $100 trillion giving everyone on the planet a fuel cell car with infrastructure to match. There are no solutions, only concepts. The best Toyota has is the Prius. All anybody has are concepts, because the problem of high gas prices is recent.
Don’t judge the GM guy arbitrarily. You actually have to think about what the expected response is as compared to his answer. In many cases he was going around in circles because people were asking irrelevent questions or leading ones to the negative (e.g. “How do you feel you can position the company as being committed to the environment when you create vehicles that have no regard for it?”)
tree:
All anybody has are concepts, because the problem of high gas prices is recent.
You must have missed the Arab Oil Embargo and all that kerfuffle. And when did this gas price spike start, you know, compared to the introduction of the Prius, Honda Accord, Camry and other popular, fuel efficient cars?
The embargo occurred and the government responded with CAFE, and then if I’m not mistaken we had cheap oil throughout the 80s and 90s. The Camry gets about 25 mpg overall (CR), which is good, but not exceptional, and Accord is around there. The Prius was a PR move by Toyota that turned out to be a great idea, from a fuel efficiency standpoint. We’ve only had high gas prices since, what, the beginning of the Iraq war?
To elaborate a bit more, because my last post doesn’t address the question much, SUV sales have increased since the introduction of of the Explorer because of cheap oil and SUVs are what people want, and only decreased recently because of oil prices. The embargo is a nice thought, but it isn’t that relevant to our situation, where the problem is too much demand and not enough immediate supply. Do you really expect that when gas was 70 cents a gallon in 199x any automaker was thinking, “We need to cooperate with politicians, oil companies, and each other to have a hydrogen car and infrastructure ready by 2020?” This is a long term problem, and it _should_ take 5 years to make a working prototype and 40 to get the whole thing going because this is a shift comparable to the invention of the automobile, which took years and years. At least back then we had government support and no existing infrastructure; now we have to rip it all out and start over.
Right now there is a Auto Show on in Toronto and just heard the VP of GM Canada telling the reporter on CFRB that GM has the best of any “Green” fleet bar none, he cited the Tahoe and the coming Silverado(its being built in Oshawa, Ontario)as being the best in the World, it made me sick to listen to this guy, such langauge!
tree,
Let me tell you what a flack is SUPPOSED to do when the company line is ridiculous. He is supposed to push for change, and then, if necessary, quit. If we don’t hold spokespersons responsible, then the company can continue to hide behind them ad nauseum. Only when they get tired of having to hire and train more Kool Aid drinkers will they change.
Therefore, it IS fair to call out the speaker for his words. That’s why they get the big bucks.
Furthermore, even if you think it is unfair to blame GM for not yet having a solution, it is not unfair to press for a deadline that they WILL have one. GM brings all this on because they decided that the Toyota strategy was greenwashing and instead of beating it, they are trying to one up them with even MORE greenwashing. Could we not ask them to be more original and build something that will make money for the stockholders?
Tree,
Of course you’re correct when you say “SUV sales have increased since the introduction of of the Explorer because of cheap oil and SUVs are what people want, and only decreased recently because of oil prices.”
However, that’s just one slice of history…
Warnng number one:
1973 – OAPEC oil embargo
(OAPEC = Arab members of OPEC, plus Egypt and Syria).
Warning number two:
1979 – oil crisis two, when Iranian revolution impacted their oil output; & 1980 – Iraq invades Iran
Oil prices go down for the next six years.
Warning number three:
Oil crises of 1990 – the Gulf war/oil-field fires in Kuwait; Oil = $40 a barrel.
1991 – Ford Explorer introduced.
*SUV sales go from 750k per year in 1990, to 3m by 2003.
The price of oil is back down to $25 a barrel in 2005.
Warning number four:
Oil goes from $92 to $99 at the end of 2007, and to $101 in early 2008.
(Oil closed at $101.01 a barrel today.)
We were shocked in 1973, 1979, 1990, and 2007/2008.
See any history that might prompt a car-maker to do some long-term planning on the efficiency front?
Perhaps GM should be pushing the government to have a 20 year plan to increase federal fuel taxes $0.25/year. Then by the time GM needs to make 35 MPG the public will actually desire to buy vehicles that get good mileage.
Landcrusher:
Let me tell you what a flack is SUPPOSED to do when the company line is ridiculous. He is supposed to push for change, and then, if necessary, quit. If we don’t hold spokespersons responsible, then the company can continue to hide behind them ad nauseum.
Ok then. We as autobloggers failed, because we didn’t make him look ridiculous. If you accept his basic tenets of E85, hybrids, and fuel efficiency as intermediaries and hydrogen as the ultimate solution, everything he said makes sense. If we don’t accept those, (not you/us specifically as we/I weren’t/wasn’t invited) then we should have said something. The things that were said like:
i’m talking real SOLUTIONS not concepts!
Why is GM continually pushing E85 Vehicles and with that exploiting the CAFE loop hole?
et cetera
don’t accept his tenets, so he can bat them away, and he does. It would take minutes to explain that ethanol is an net-energy-loss fuel, and this town hall meeting thing is not the kind of place for that. How many cases can you find where he lied about something or said something that we, the auto enthusiasts, found deceptive and unexpected(e.g. the Provoq question doesn’t count because we and they know it doesn’t have an engine. Brent said it was a future design direction, true, and it “showed a hydrogen engine”, true for our purposes. Can you buy one? of course not)?
Glenn,
I gather from your analysis that gas prices periodically spike and fall. Therefore, it is not prudent to make fuel efficient vehicles because gas prices will fall after 2007/2008.
tree,
I respect your position. :-)
That said, my money is on a company like Honda, which makes fuel-efficient cars– no matter what the price of oil.
All I’m advocating is that the Big 2.8 at least keep a competent small car (or two) on the market, you know, just in case the price of oil does rise (again).
Plan for the worst (we need a competitive small car), hope for the best (SUV’s make us a lot of money).
Tree,
Perhaps I misunderstood your OP? You disagreed with the thrust of the article that accused this guy of talking in circles and greenwashing (with a strong implication that those things are bad.)
You claim that talking in circles was justified because people kept asking the same or similar questions which would have forced Dewar to counter the company line to answer any differently. You say we should have expected his responses. You say he is SUPPOSED to say E85 is an essential step. You say that this meeting was no place to have an ethanol debate.
While I agree the hall was no place for an ethanol debate, I disagree with the rest. Dewar needs to stop repeating nonsense, and do something about it.
The Emperor has no clothes, and he does not need another lieutenant to tell everyone the official line. You seem to think it is fine for Dewar to defend the new clothes? Sure, if we accept the premise of the invisible clothes, then Dewar did a fine job. Since the meeting was no place to debate the whole invisible clothes issue, we should just move on without comment?
Is this analogy a misrepresentation of your argument?
Thanks, Glenn. I have a lot of respect for Honda, as well. They’ll do well in the next few years, and if gas prices don’t fall, they’ll have an easy transition into a 35 MPG future.
Landcrusher,
I agree with what you said, except for the definition of “Emperor”. The purpose of a corporation is to return value to its shareholders. “Corporate responsibility” and all those new-age concepts created by us and them cloud that simple fact. It is in the interest of the GM spokesman to speak highly of GM. We need to show that the GM spokesman is the emperor and has no clothes, and therefore that GM has none. We realize that we can’t do that in this 1 hour 50 journalist discussion. You don’t think we should have expected his responses? If you expected honesty and candor, considering this is 2008, it would have been nice, but it runs against the purpose of a corporation.
It does not run counter to the purpose of a corporation at all. Quite the contrary. I have been very successful using candor, much to the advantage of the people I worked for.
While the last large company I worked for was losing sales and customers all over the map, I was steadily growing my territory. Guys like Dewar were getting promoted, making more money for themselves, and sinking the ship. I took a package.
Was the corporation better off with their methods or mine?
I think the modern corporation has decided against its own best interests, and consistently makes the same mistakes by promoting the same sort of people over and over. I have faith that if the government would stay out of it, the market would fix it. The press has a job to keep pointing out the emperor is naked. Go TTAC.