TTAC burned a lot of metaphorical midnight oil trying to make heads or tails of plug-in EVs. Thankfully Ford's mouthpiece Mark Fields is here to set us straight about our energy independence, via the "It's important to note most battery supply is currently being developed in Asia," Fields told the Detroit News. "For those looking to plug-ins to answer our energy security concerns, we must ensure a domestic battery supply. Moving from imported oil to imported batteries clearly would not address this growing concern." I'm struggling to remember if that's a masked-man fallacy, a package deal fallacy of just plain old Ignoratio elenchi. Luckily (for Ford) politicians are completely immune to all forms of logic. If Fields keeps making arguments like this, Detroit might get the $500m of our tax dollars they so desperately crave for battery R&D. But, spades being spades, he's confusing the issue. At least.
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It’s the fatal battery gap! Must be fought against.
Fields should also look into where motive energy will come from. You sometimes get the impression that there’s nothing to worry about, the shortfall in hydrocarbons will be niftily replaced with electrical power.
Begging the question – electrical power coming from where? The grid is pretty starved as it is, and that damned energy>work equation doesn’t get any different whether you’re using gasoline or electricity for juice.
What Fields should get his head around is this: he, and the other car majors, should stop building heavy, brickshaped vehicles that require an enormous amount of energy in order to do fairly insignificant work across a surface. In an energy>work equation you’re keen on the relationship between usefully employed energy and wasted energy, and on the day of reckoning, Detroit honchos will be required to explain why the hell they wasted, and are wasting, such incredible amounts of energy on such a simple task as that of moving a vehicle along a surface.
Now there’s a national priority worth focusing on.
That would be fine and dandy if Congress wasn’t bound and determined to make electrical generation much more expensive than it is currently.
I am not going to comment on this issue for fear that blood may start to come out of my ears and that I will go completely and utterly feral….!
I guess Detroit should have invested in hybrids back in the day when they were profitable instead of laughing at Toyota. Ultimately it won’t make any difference in the long run. If one squanders the money when one originally had it, they tend to do so again the next time around.
Poor defenseless little old GM Ford and Chrysler, its not their fault really. How could they have known that they should have invested some of that SUV profit into little cars, hybrids etc instead of going on spending sprees (Jaguar, Saab Volvo, EDS, Hughs etc)
KatiePuckrik,
Aw come on, go for it. Seriously, you have written articulate, well organized posts in the past. I’m sure we can all learn something from you.
IMHO, this is Ford’s (and Fields) posturing on plug in hybrids. Fields is trying to establish a new “mission” and public perception of Ford. Hey public, see how responsible all of the sudden Ford has become? Oh by the way, let’s make US made batteries to appeal to the American public. While the F-150s slowly die and fade away, the plug-in hybrid is the “New Ford”.
The theory is that cars would charge at night – off-peak – where the utilities have to currently operate fairly inefficiently anyways (pumped storage with nuclear plants, for instance).
The reality is that without a battery breakthrough I don’t see coming, plug-in hybrids are going to be like your cell phone (and like what the liars tell you the current NiMH hybrids are): change the battery after 2-3 years. Nobody’s come up with a credible long-lived but high-power battery strategy yet – no, not even lithium. Long-life with low-power is the best we’ve got now (NiMH with Prius charge band) and it’s likely to best we’ll have in 2010 as well.
Mark Fields really has a Bob Lutz-ness to his statements, doesn’t he. It’s an interesting counterpoint to how like an Asian executive Alan Mullaly is.
I do worry about some of Ford’s up-and-comers and their effects on the company. They seem to have a little bit too much of the “Never Met a Mic They Didn’t Like” arrogance about them that could very easily lead to self-delusion.
Here’s an idea. How about Field’s moves himself and family near the office so he can use his travel budget to hire some folks to figure it out.
At least he could downgrade to something with decent mileage to commute across the country like a cabin class twin piston. Add a satellite system and he could work all the time he is in there.
Or wait, he isn’t really concerned about our country, he is just concerned that if his employer’s future starts to look bleak he might lose stock value and not be quite as insanely rich as he is now. Even worse, he might look bad. Yikes.
Do ANY of these guys understand how stupid they sound?
Never mind, that is a rhetorical question at this point.
Translation: “The American People won’t give us money voluntarily, so they should be forced to give us their money by government coercion”.
Well anyway no problem, we all know Ford will be selling 250,000 hybrids a year by 2010.
Oh, wait, no they won’t. Take down the billboard.
M1EK-Ignore Ford. Toyota won’t release a Li-ion Prius until they are sure the battery life is equal to the ones they have in their current Priuses-that is, ten years or more.
So Mark, where are your investment dollars?
How long ago did Ford dispose of the Autolite battery making factories as old, mature commodity businesses no longer of interest?
US companies have a horrible case of ADD, and once a field gets hot again they are already long gone.
RCA, Motorola, GE and others once led the world in television design and manufacturing, but then their MBAs figured these were no growth mature markets and let it all go to Asia. Now there isn’t a flat screen manufacturing plant in the US and billions of dollars have been made by others building the things.
So it goes. When you stop playing the game, don’t piss and moan about being left out.