johnkr3 writes:
I have a question about a car that is hard to start. It’s a 1995 Olds 98 (52,000 miles) that I mainly drive on the weekends. It sometimes takes four or five cranks before it will start. Rarely does it start on the first try. This is annoying and embarrassing.
My suspicions lie with the key. It is the GM key with a security feature on it, a small black square with a metal slot in it.
On Thursday, Audi of America president, Johan de Nysschen, will meet with journalists to explore the question “how has the international recession impacted Audi and the luxury segment?” The obvious answer: sinking sales. The not-so-obvious conundrum: what next? How does a luxury brand position itself for survival when class war is breaking out all over? Of course, the professional pundocrats aren’t using “C” word just yet. The euphemism du jour for the “where’s MY bailout” anger that may or may not be sweeping the nation—as taxpayer-owned AIG execs collect their bonuses and Bernie Madoff’s wife shelters in a penthouse funded by her husband’s ill-gotten gains—is “vengeful populism.” Whatever you call it, Audi and its luxury competitors are sitting in the cross-hairs of growing anti-conspicuous consumption. The recession/depression is going to kick the NSFW out of them.
Audi, BMW, Cadillac, Lexus and Mercedes have all poorly positioned themselves for these belt-tightening times. All five brands spent the last decade or more stretching their model range down into near-luxury and even non-luxury pricing territory. Not so long ago, none of these brands were available to average buyers (save on used car lots, where maintenance costs kept them clean of ten-foot pole marks). All five luxury brands couldn’t resist picking the low-hanging fruit, convincing themselves that they could democratize an exclusive brand.
Of course it worked. What aspirational car buyer wouldn’t prefer an up-market marque to a Ford, Hyundai, Toyota, Nissan, etc.? Thanks to a combination of affordable models and cheap credit, the “Big Five” have all experienced sales growth that makes Jack’s beanstalk seem like a redwood. BMW’s inexpensive leasing deals, in particular, created ultimate profits. But the move down market has created a vast flock of prodigal, homeward-seeking chickens.
For one thing, profits at Audi, BMW, Cadillac, Lexus and Mercedes are now dependent on relatively high sales volumes. In 2007, Mercedes-Benz NA sold 253,433 vehicles. Audi’s US sales jumped 11 percent, to 93,506 vehicles. Cadillac’s sales rose 13 percent. BMW’s ascended by 14 percent. Lexus took a hit that year, but they still managed to shift 342,000 units in North America. Compared to the mainstream manufacturers it’s small beer; but it still requires many pubs to serve it. All five luxury brands expanded their dealer networks. Which are now, or soon will be, struggling for survival. Last month, Lexus sales took a 35.8 percent year-on-year dip. Audi lost 25.4 percent of its previous year’s monthly totals. And so on, right on down the line.
Brand equity has also taken a huge hit. Although you might think the luxury car brands’ democratization makes them less vulnerable to a class-related backlash, nope. Let’s face it: it’s not a great time to be seen “splurging” on a luxury car. The car brands’ upmarket cachet has suddenly turned into a liability. Real world employees worried about their paychecks—and that’s all of them—are not going to stunt and floss in the company parking lot behind the wheel of a brand new Audi, BMW, Cadillac, Lexus or Mercedes. They know that rolling phat in a luxury-branded whip would be tantamount to wearing a little button emblazoned “overpaid.” Fuhgeddaboutit.
Even worse, the customers with real money, where profits fall like rain, have already left the building. They’ve opted for more genuinely exclusive marques. Audi and Mercedes recognized this problem before the axe fell; buying (Lamborghini), creating (AMG, S-Line) or resurrecting (Maybach, Bugatti) über-luxury off-shoots. But even if Audi and Mercedes managed to skim the cream off their own coffee, they face the same danger as their less brand-savvy luxury competitors: stagnation. Now that upmarket brands offer a wide range of models, cash-strapped or cash-aversive buyers can either stand pat (i.e., not trade-up) or, worse, opt for less expensive alternatives within the brand family.
So why would Mercedes create the GLK, when it already offers a full-size SUV AND a smaller alternative? Why would Mercedes market the GLK as a vehicle containing the same technological excellence as its bigger brothers, only in a smaller (read: cheaper) package? The Bama-built German “cute ute” represents a failure to communicate luxury brand values—and price points—within Mercedes’ corporate culture. It’s the same hubris that led to the Audi A3, BMW 1-Series, Cadillac CTS (sorry guys), Lexus IS250 and Mercedes C-Class. Short term greed over careful, long-term brand husbandry.
I know TTAC’s Best and Brightest have hashed this out many times. Many of you don’t see a price point as a brand barrier. But it’s petard hoisting time folks, and you’re about to see the brands reap what I said they’d sowed. In this suddenly, violently downsized, flash-aversive sales environment, brand-extended luxury automotive marques must either redefine “luxury” (as reliability, longevity, etc.), move back up-market (a slow, painful process) or die. And the longer the downturn lasts, the greater the chances that one or more of these brands will never recover.
As rumors filter in about GM’s Volt battery program, the faithful must be experiencing a certain amount of restless discomfort. After all, it’s not like this couldn’t be seen coming. Let’s just say that when I asked at SEMA last October the guys from A123 Systems (then bidding on the project) about the Volt battery development program, they took full advantage of the fact that SEC silent periods don’t forbid eye-rolling. Though non-verbal communication can (and in this case, did) speak volumes, we like to get our facts in writing. Which, thanks to the truth-proof wall surrounding the Volt’s development, usually means going through GM’s PR-exercise interviews with reliable Volt boosters and mining them for some kind of meaning. And hey, there’s an interview at Volt cheerleader HQ gm-volt.com which suggests that the Volt’s battery development is being rushed. And engineers are complaining to blogs? Fancy that!
GM-volt.com’s Lyle Dennis sat down with GM’s head Volt honcho Frank Weber for a sanitized-for-your-protection update on General’s moon-shot gambit. So what is happening right now, according to Weber?
We have been using the winter for winter tests . . . Now what’s happening is the true development work that you say OK this is the temperature of the battery, and this is the temperature of the system, and this is what happens when you are plugged in, etc. There are parameters that we call calibration, you have the basic software functionality on those cars defined, and then we start to calibrate it looking at the temperature and when to we start it, what is the true power of the battery at a certain temperature, etc.”
Any of this sounding intelligible or reassuring yet? This is supposed to be GM’s chance to thrill the credulous faithful, and the best Weber can come up with is “start to calibrate?” Don’t worry, it gets worse.
“What you know is what the behavior is for the cars that we are testing, and then you make an assumption for how a component will behave over time and how it will behave under the same situation in several years. This is what we call accelerated testing. This gives you some indication of durability. The piece that is tricky and interesting about the battery is to do a really accurate extrapolation of the true behavior. For a mechanical part this is very simple. For a mechanical part you can replicate its lifetime and find out when it will break. The battery is electrochemical and its more difficult to make those extrapolations. This is part of the learning we have to do, battery learning between the battery supplier LG and us. By the way this is still the element of risk. This is also why we are unable to get the car out any sooner. It is those things that have to be developed now with the components that are representative of the production vehicle. There is no way to do this any faster.”
If GM would just admit that the “late 2010” launch date is toast, this wouldn’t even qualify as spin. But then we don’t exactly live in a world where you can just say “it’s complicated, we don’t know when it will actually be done, now where’s my NSFWing bailout” is it? Or is it? I digress.
In a separate post, Lyle Dennis predicts public test drives this summer, putting faith first in spite of more damningly ambiguous talk, this time from GM’s John Lauckner. Saying “we need an experience where people say ‘Wow’ this is really something special,” Lauckner reveals that GM has “laid out all of the concepts that we want to use and written a lot of the preliminary code,” for the Volt’s “software-driven” driving experience.” Concepts. Preliminary. Wow. Lauckner continues:
“I would say that conceptually we’re most of the way there if not all of the way there, but there’s a lot of work to be done still to make sure that the whole thing operates seamlessly. [GM has to] love this thing a little bit to make sure that you not only get it that it actually works but you get it working in such a way that its completely intuitive. We need the time with the car and we need the time over a wide variety of conditions to simulate certain things, so that we can see just exactly how the car is going to behave and what sort of information the driver is going to get to make sure everything works in as seamless a way as we can possibly make it.”
Love your own product? Really? You’re only going to be asking $40 grand for the thing. And though both executives note its importance, time is the one thing GM doesn’t have. Weber reveals that the engineering freeze on the first true Volt prototypes or integration cars will occur “within days,” and that these integration models will be built and tested sometime later this year. If GM could simply let its executives just say what they hint at (conceptual, preliminary, this thing takes time) and let the “late 2010” date slip, their troops on the ground might not be grousing that the battery system is an “epic fail.” Instead it’s being rammed through and damn the torpedoes. This won’t end well.
It’s hard to look at this old Saab and not get choked up. And it’s not just because this once proud and spunky company is on the ropes. Old Saabs just have a way of stirring my emotions. This is going to be a Saab story. Read More >
Biologist Jared Diamond once wrote that the worst mistake in the history of the human race was adopting agriculture. It allowed a greater population compared to hunter-gatherers, but at the expense of increased vulnerability to disease, pests and warfare. Diamond underestimated humanity’s capacity for blunder, for an even bigger mistake was tying our transportation system to petroleum.
Whether we’re talking about wheat or oil, more energy means more people leading better lives. But in each case, it also means centralizing authority and becoming dependent upon a complex and easily disrupted infrastructure. Nuclear and aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin thinks it’s time we undo the damage and diversify humanity’s energy diet. Zubrin’s book Energy Victory: Winning the War on Terror By Breaking Free of Oil describes how we can get there.
The key to the problem, especially for us pistonheads, is compatible fuels. Electric power plants can burn coal, natural gas, wood, municipal garbage, or a variety of other things. Industrial applications have a similar suite of possible alternatives. But when it comes to cars, there’s no Tiger in the Tank quite like liquid hydrocarbons, and those come almost exclusively from oil.
Fortunately for oil-poor countries, such as the USA, dead dino juice is no longer essential to fuel our vehicles. All we need is carbon, water, some well-known chemistry, and a little ingenuity.
The centerpiece of Zubrin’s strategy is methanol; the undrinkable single-carbon IndyCar-fueling brother of ethanol. Ethanol does have its advantages, and Zubrin is in favor of appropriate ethanol production, but methanol can be made from a far wider variety of sources.
Any form of carbon (from coal, natural gas, garbage, biomass, etc.) can be reacted with steam to form a mixture of carbon monoxide (CO) and hydrogen called synthesis gas (syngas). Put the syngas under the proper conditions and the molecules combine to make methanol.
Methanol, in addition to being a fuel, is also a building block. Similar chemistry can be used to turn methanol into ethanol, dimethyl ether (a clean-burning diesel fuel), and ethylene (the basic molecule of plastics production). None of this involves extreme temperatures, high pressures or exotic catalysts.
The naysayers will quickly point out, “But we can’t run our cars on methanol . . . .” Sure we can. Zubrin documents that Ford was selling methanol-fueled Escorts to the California state government back in 1986. Methanol-compatible flexible-fuel vehicles (FFVs) were sold in the US up to 1999, and there are millions of FFVs in Brazil, the USA, and Canada that can run on gasoline-ethanol blends.
Recent developments in engine technologies make alcohol fuels even more attractive. We’ve come a long way since Ford modified its first-generation EFI system to be methanol-compatible. Imagine what can be done today with computer controls of direct fuel injection, variable valve timing, variable vane turbochargers, multi-stage intake manifolds and the like. These can all be tuned to take advantage of the 100+ octane rating of alcohol fuel blends without compromising the ability to run on regular gasoline.
Unfortunately, the US government has to date dropped the ball in the regulatory arena. Instead of mandating flex-fuel compatibility, thereby leveling the playing field for gasoline and alcohol blends, Congress has only provided a CAFE incentive for FFVs. Naturally, automakers have responded to this incentive by exploiting the CAFE credits while providing a minimal range of FFVs. In 2008, Congress did consider legislation which would have mandated car makers’ sales be 50% FFVs in 2012 and 80% FFVs in 2015, but they failed to pass legislation.
There are many reasons, as Zubrin argues, for implementing alcohol-based transportation fuels and few reasons to oppose it. It’s already working in countries like Brazil, the technology is available and inexpensive, and there are many economic, political, and environmental benefits.
Zubrin sees breaking OPEC’s economic and political influence as the primary benefit of alcohol fuels. Local production keeps money local, rather than flowing into OPEC’s coffers. Given that OPEC nations finance terrorist organizations, stopping this money stream implies defunding those organizations, which is the “energy victory” Zubrin seeks.
On the environmental front, Zubrin sees alcohol fuels as a way of increasing (yes, increasing) carbon dioxide (CO2) production. Getting the impoverished world out of poverty implies increasing its energy use, which implies more CO2. Doing so by American-style petroleum use means quintupling atmospheric CO2, while using alcohol fuels keeps global warming out of the picture.
Zubrin’s thesis is compelling, but he does occasionally gloss over some objections. For example, he focuses on alcohol chemistry but neglects known transportation and storage issues. Similarly, he discusses the energy potential of ethanol crops, but neglects the water, soil and fertilizer inputs required.
Finally, while the methanol-based economy may be a good short-term strategy, it’s only a way of stretching fossil fuels, not eliminating them altogether. In our next installment, we’ll consider another approach that may solve our long-term fuel issues.
TTAC reader Chris writes:
Regarding my 2007 Sonata 2.4L, 5-speed: can I use 0W-20 in place of 5W-20 and keep the warranty intact?
America is addicted to oil. I’m sure this revelation ranks with “Chrysler’s in a spot of bother” on the scale of surprises. Everyone from the Sierra Club to President George W. Bush has lectured the country about its dependence on oil in general and foreign oil in particular. Pistonhead, blame thyself! Transportation fuels make up between 25 and 30 percent of total US energy demand. Needless to say, nearly all of that fraction is petroleum. Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot and the Stanley twins may have powered their jalopies on steam (even then, the Stanley Steamer was kerosene-fired), but modern vehicles are all about the distillates, baby.
A number of highly profitable oil companies provide America its 20M barrels per day (bpd) “fix” of refinery products. We mainline about nine million bpd of gasoline and shoot up another four million bpd of diesel fuel. We chase that with a 150K bpd shot of lubricants, and our cars snort along lines of oil-derived asphalt to the tune of another 500K bpd.
The “high” from all this hydrocarbon huffing: the world’s most mobile society. Americans can go just about anywhere we want anytime we please, bus schedules be damned. And we do. We pack like lemmings into our combined 250 million shiny metal boxes and rack up three trillion miles per year. That’s over half a light-year.
Yet all is not well. Like any other addict, American society is developing resistance to its petroleum addiction. We’re consuming more and enjoying it less. Using statistics on fuel use, vehicle miles and time spent driving, the math tells us that the average American car travels at five mph and gets 15 mpg in the process. While these averages may be somewhat misleading, there is plenty of research to confirm what we’ve all observed: we’re driving longer, going slower and consuming more fuel in the process.
Furthermore, like any other drug, petroleum has numerous side effects, for both ourselves and our society. From oil spills to asthma, from funding terrorism to expanding our waistlines, from purchased politicians to suburban sprawl, our addiction has downsides both obvious and subtle.
The first step to dealing with any addiction is admitting you have a problem (done!). The next step is figuring out how you got there. With petroleum, cars were clearly the gateway drug to our dependence. While oil had been used on a small scale since Biblical times, it fit the internal combustion engine like cocaine on dopamine receptors.
And the first thing those engines wanted was more petroleum. Oil companies, like other drug dealers, were only too happy to keep supplying their addicts customers with their products, and at enormous profits.
The American automotive/petroleum party lasted nearly six decades, transforming our landscape, culture, and commerce. Only when party-pooper OPEC didn’t bring their stash in the 1970s did Americans realize that the buzz wouldn’t go on forever.
But America’s sobriety was short-lived. We rejected President Carter’s stern temperance lectures and embraced President Reagan’s Morning in America optimism. When downsized cars, fuel economy standards, lower speed limits and other efficiency measures caused oil prices to collapse in 1986, America partied until it was 1999 . . . and a few years beyond that. Even buzz-kill Middle Eastern wars and the events of 9/11 didn’t stop the music.
To the contrary, after substantial fuel economy gains from the 1970s to about 1990, US fuel economy fleet averages have leveled off at about 22 mpg for cars and 17 mpg for trucks/van/SUVs. Even that level-off is a minor miracle given America’s stoner-with-munchies appetite for ever larger, heavier and faster cars.
Compare, for example, a 2009 Honda Accord (4 cylinder) to a 1990 model. The new car has 10 inches, 600 lb, 2 EPA size classes, 70 horsepower, and 2.5 fewer seconds in 0 to 60 mph acceleration over its ancestor but with nearly identical fuel economy.
It wasn’t until oil prices more than tripled between 2003 and 2008 that Americans once again started coming down off of their happy horsepower binge. Hybrids replaced HUMMERs as the cool personal fashion statement, and even the truck-dependent Detroit 2.8 started touting fuel economy again.
Despite this cultural shift and our recent economic woes, America is still a petroleum junkie. Consumption is only slightly off from previous years and US oil imports remain at near-record levels. Economic uncertainty means fewer people buying newer fuel-efficient cars and less capital for developing the next generation of miserly models.
However, we are not necessarily doomed to a massive post-petroleum hangover. Petroleum may be the easiest (and until recently the cheapest) way of fueling America’s automotive habit. But it is not the only way. In our next installment, we’ll look at some 19th-century chemistry that may keep us rolling into an automotive future.
I’ve been been having a “difference of opinion” with my step-daughter’s fifth-grade teachers. For some reason, they’ve decided to give Sasha homework deadlines and let her sort out her own schedule. Unfortunately, no one taught her self-directed, off-site time management. Not surprisingly, except for the deadline itself, Sasha’s “planner” was empty: she had no idea how long assignments would take. She couldn’t prioritize her work or organize her home life. Mind you, she had goals: finish her homework, get good grades, make it to middle school. But she didn’t have a workable plan. Remind you of anyone?
Last week, GM announced increased production for the second financial quarter. The company’s spinmeisters claimed the jump relates to models that are selling well—as opposed to the tens of thousands of vehicles choking dealer lots or waiting to choke dealer lots. In truth, in today’s moribund new car market, nothing GM builds is selling well enough to justify a 45 percent production increase. So what, pray tell, is GM’s strategy?
Who knows? GM’s “viability plan” is like Sasha’s planner: big empty spaces leading up to large, laudable goals. GM knows it has to cut labor costs, swap debt for equity and cull and/or refocus brands. It knows it has to build cars that people will buy at a price that earns the company a profit. It knows it has to return to profitability to pay back its loans. But it doesn’t have a coherent, measurable plan for how to get there from here.
Any such plan would have to ape Sasha’s new homework system, with little tick boxes for every assigned task in every subject every day of the week. If GM wants us to believe the plug-in electric/gas hybrid Chevy Volt is The One, they must give us the way-points on the road to Damascus. How much, when, leading to what profit?
RenCen would never go for it, for one simple reason: the new system would introduce accountability. It’s a concept that’s entirely antithetical to GM’s modus operandi.
And so, true to form, GM is headless chickening out. The company is running around in random patterns, trying to achieve . . . something. Anything. They’re canceling and restarting development programs. Negotiating union concessions that aren’t. Building and not building and then building vehicles. Killing but not killing brands. Asking for a $2 billion advance on its next bailout bonanza, and then withdrawing the request. Pleading for Euro-bailout bucks while talking about spin-offs.
I half expect GM CEO Rick Wagoner to slap a Yellow Zowie on his head, lean into the cameras and say, “Somebody STOP me!”
But, no. Quite the opposite. The Presidential Task Force on Autos (PTFOA) seems hell-bent on enabling GM’s cultural predisposition to throw NSFW against the wall, run back to avoid the splatter, and then see what sticks. Otherwise, the PTFOA would have joined German and Swedish ministers and demanded that GM revise their turnaround plan, instead of journeying to Motown for Volt joy rides.
In today’s Boston Globe, scribe Jake Bennett uses GM’s fabled “29” pin—an inter-executive admonition to GM suits to recapture 29 percent of U.S. market share—to make the same point: goals without careful implementation and constant, rigorous monitoring are an excellent way to completely screw up everything. Ipso bloody facto. Last time I looked, the management style practiced by Rick Wagoner’s mob had led the American automaker straight onto federal welfare.
Still, it’s worth pausing to contemplate the possibility that CEO Jack Smith’s commitment to restoring General Motors’ US market share to 29 percent (already down from over 39 percent) helped drive the automaker towards high volume, low profit fleet sales; anyone-with-a-pulse financing, ill-advised hook-ups with foreign automakers and all the other Wagoner-led fiatscos. Perhaps GM’s road to hell had a little sign on the median reminding the Powers That Be that “the ends justify the means” (right next to “Kiss Ass and Cover. The Millions You Earn Will be Your Own.”).
I’d like to know when those “29” pins fell out of fashion at RenCen. When did they give up on that company-wide goal? Did the pins hit the bin when GM’s market share fell below 25 percent? Twenty-two? Twenty? At some point in GM’s decline and fall, did someone high up in the organization actually say “Take off that stupid pin Larry”? Or was it more of a group think deal, where Rick left his “29” pin in the dresser drawer and his boys got the message? Did anyone think to replace the pins with . . . something? Something specific?
I’d like to see an actual “29” pin (jpeg to robertfarago@thetruthaboutcars.com). Was it made of bronze or lead? Has it tarnished during the last nine years? Was the number inlayed? Where was it made, the US or China? As I try to teach Sasha, if you don’t respect your work, why should anyone else?
Aptera Motors has pushed its first street-ready prototype out of the cradle. Yes, it’s a tricycle, with a drive train à la Fisher Price PowerWheels, and a name that sounds like a one-year-old pointing out the cruise director on Love Boat, but the 2e might prove to be the car the Chevy electric/gas plug-in hybrid Volt and lithium-ion-powered Tesla long to be: the future.
Aptera itself is only a toddler, raised for the last three years by Google and others, now with a chance at the Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize. The contest from the X Prize Foundation challenges teams to “design viable, clean and super-efficient cars that people want to buy.” To stake a claim, Aptera claims the 2e achieves the equivalent of 200 mpg and 100 miles on a charge. They hope to have cars in Southern Californian driveways before November.
“Everything is progressing nicely as we ramp up for full production of the 2e beginning in October,” says chief marketing officer Marques McCammon. “We’re still on target to build an ultra-efficient, high-mileage vehicle without sacrificing comfort and safety, and once Californians get behind the wheel this fall, we expect to change the world of commuter transportation.”
Well ahead of Chevy Volt’s debut, the 2e is supposed to hit the street between $25,000 and $45,000, halving or quartering a Tesla’s price. Not that it’s a fair comparison. Tesla wants the mantle of true sports car. Chevy wants respectability. The 2e wants to win. Hearts, minds and 10 million large. It’s got a shot, if you believe corporations, which I do. Not what they’re saying, mind you, but what they’re doing. Aptera seems to be quietly making a car like no other.
The difference between the 2e and the rest of the world can be seen in any slideshow from the 2009 Detroit Auto Show. Eight companies lit up cars they say we’ll be plugging in come the next decade. They all look like cars. The 2e could have played Eva in Wall-E. The dove body with Cessna landing gear makes the Prius look like a brick.
The thing is so birdlike you can’t help but ask if it’s safe. Three-wheeled ATVs were outlawed because of the inherent instability. Aptera dumps a lot of answers on that question. First, they use composite materials for the exterior (“lighter than steel but three times as strong.”). They claim not one, but two elephants can stand on the 2e’s shell without hatching a mess. That shell wraps a Formula 1 style passenger cage and more airbags than a chop shop in Modesto.
All of which is great for the driver. For the car? It looks like an underwriter’s nightmare. The rear is one, big whale tail. The front wheels are on little spindles. The wonderfully sleek, nearly seamless body looks as though it could absorb a crash nicely with its totality. Resulting in a total. Eh, none of us want to drive Hummers anymore, right?
Lithium-ion batteries juice the 2e’s electric motor that, per company literature, urges the car from zero to 60 in less than 10 seconds, topping out at 90 mph. Even the guy in the Aveo laughs at you, but riding around for 100 miles on half a buck is a whole new kind of bragging right. Then you plug in. At a standard 110 volt outlet, you’re watching Lord of the Rings before you’re stuck in traffic again. All three disks.
At 55 mph, half a car’s energy is used to cut the air. With a coefficient of drag around 0.15, the 2e is a Ginsu. It’s only 1,700 pounds. Oh, and the tester has gull wing doors. Maybe they improve efficiency, maybe not, but they appear integral to the design. They might actually make it into the final product.
Aptera wanted a real car, though, so they stuck to their mandate of two people and two sets of golf clubs. The 2e is classified as a motorcycle by the California Department of Motor Vehicles. They had to call it something. Given the size of the C-pillars, I would’ve voted for panel truck.
Aptera says it’s taken 4,000 deposits for a car they promise will look and spec out really close to the prototype: front-wheel drive, solar powered climate control, do-it-yourself windows. Not what you’d call luxury but comfier than an Austin Healy, if that counts for anything.
It might. Industrial design is always about compromise. Aptera hasn’t created the fastest, biggest or softest EV concept, but they’re thinking about showrooms, while most others are thinking about shows. It’s too early to tell if 2e will grow up and become the future of the car. It certainly does look the part, though. We’ll check back around Halloween and see if it has anything more than a cool costume.
John writes:
How often should coolant hoses be replaced on older vehicles? And not just when they start to leak! Should it be based upon age, mileage, climate of operation, or what? For that matter, what about the other hoses conducting pressurized fluids, vapors and the like? We have guidelines for belts and serpentines, but hoses?
TTAC reader Mockard writes:
As a web-savvy car enthusiast and budget autocrosser, I try to do a lot of reading before pulling the trigger on a big purchase. With a set of R-compounds now hitting the $800 mark, I want to make the most of my investment. The consensus seems to be that shaving tires can make them perform better and last longer, but I remain skeptical… The cynic in me suspects that shaving is just a way to reduce tire life and pad the shaver’s wallet to the tune of $10 a tire. Why couldn’t tire manufacturers just build tires “shaved” from the beginning, if there was a real advantage?
My brother fixes industrial machinery for a living. The range of skills he needs—mechanical, electronic, hardware, software, CNC stuff, as well as troubleshooting abilities—makes that kind of work as technically demanding as just about any job there is. You can’t learn to do what he does in a university. So for-profit ventures like ITT Technical Institute, Universal Technical Institute, New Horizons computer training centers and others fill a needed role. It’s understandable also that during difficult economic times those schools would market themselves aggressively to people looking for new career opportunities. There’s a fine line, of course, between providing educational opportunity and exploiting people’s desperation about the economy.
Universal Technical Institute and its affiliated schools (e.g., Motorcycle Mechanics Institute, Marine Mechanic Institute, and NASCAR Technical Institute are reputable institutions. They have an A+ rating from the Better Business Bureau and I wasn’t able to find any consumer complaints online from disgruntled students. They provide certified technician training programs for major automobile and motorcycle companies like BMW, Honda, Mercedes-Benz, Ford and Porsche, so UTI is obviously not a schlock outfit.
UTI is also a major advertiser on the Fox-owned SpeedTV cable network. UTI advertises and arranges product placement on SpeedTV shows as well as buys big chunks of time for infomercials. During the Daytona 500 weekend and Speed Week coverage on SpeedTV, UTI ran an ad for their NASCAR Technical Institute in Mooresville, NC. UTI advertises that students get training on the latest technologies and up-to-date technical information from the auto companies with which UTI works. The NTI training may be up-to-date, but the ad that UTI is running is so out-of-date that it makes them look out of touch and incompetent.
UTI stresses successful job placement in their advertising. The NASCAR Technical Institute ad currently running on Speed, though, is oblivious to the changes in NASCAR due to the economic crisis. With all the team mergers, consolidations and technical partnerships, at least 1000 employees of NASCAR teams have been laid off. Jeremy Mayfield raced his way into the Daytona 500 this year with a team made up entirely of people laid off from other race teams. Meanwhile, NTI keeps talking about all the opportunity there is for entry level jobs with NASCAR teams.
The NTI ad features Kyle Petty talking about how Petty Enterprises has six graduates of NTI working for them. Now I like Kyle Petty. Growing up in the shadow of a legendary grandfather and a superstar father, he’s managed to be his own man and has done a lot of good with the Victory Junction Gang camps.
The ad had to have been filmed some time ago because Petty Enterprises no longer exists as a race team. One of the aforementioned mergers was a deal Richard Petty made with Gillett Evernham Racing, which is now known as Richard Petty Motorsports. The Petty race shop has been closed since the end of last year, all the employees have been laid off and the team’s assets have been liquidated. The racing team Lee Petty started is no longer and King Richard is leasing his face and name to George Gillett Jr., who has deep enough pockets to fund a competitive team.
Like I said, Kyle’s not the bad guy. Just like the six NTI graduates that used to work at Petty Enterprises, Kyle’s out of a NASCAR job. He’s not racing at Daytona for the first time in 30 years. I’m sure he doesn’t mind the residual payments from NTI for doing the ad, but it must be a little embarrassing for him to watch the ad while the Speed announcers keep mentioning the economic changes in NASCAR.
UTI isn’t a bad guy either. I spoke to Valerie Monaco, head of public relations for UTI and she said that she’d check with their advertising production team and get back to me. I made it clear that I didn’t think they were doing anything wrong, just that the situation had changed and the ad made NTI look silly. She pointed out that ad buys for events like Daytona Speed Week are made well in advance and as is advertising. I have to say that Monaco kept considerable good humor for someone who was just told that her employer looked foolish.
I’m sure the ad buys were done a long time ago. I’m also sure that UTI wants to keep ad production costs down, but considering how this ad undermines their credibility, I think they’d at least consider pulling it. UTI isn’t trying to be deceptive here, they’re just not on the ball. The people they are marketing NTI to are knowledgeable NASCAR fans and know what’s happened with Petty Enterprises so the ads aren’t doing NTI any good.
[The First Curbside Classic]
Rambling along the streets of Eugene, I encounter cars that unleash memories and musings. Today’s nostalgia comes courtesy of the 1971 Cadillac Coupe DeVille.
1971 was a very BIG year for Cadillac, as well as for US workers and me. And in a number of ways, things haven’t been quite the same for any of us since. When this 1971 Coupe DeVille first rolled off the assembly line, it was the biggest ever, a full nineteen feet long and almost seven feet wide. And it remains the high-water mark for American cars. The ’71 Caddy was the quintessential land barge. It floated along serenely and optimistically across America on the still youthful and un-crowded interstate system, its 7.7-liter V8 slurping a gallon of 39-cent gas every 12 blissfully isolated miles. Read More >
Mikey, TTAC’s personal window into the CAW, writes:
My 2001 Firebird 3800 V6 convertible will shear left hand motor mount bolts and break them off in the block. The first time it happened my mechanic replaced the original bolts with 8.8 hardness. It took 2 years and 15000 kms for them to shear again. This time he went to aircraft quality bolts: so far so good, but the car hasn’t moved 2000 kms since.
Today’s automotive industry stands on the cusp of great change. The automobile will remain but its powerplant will change and evolve. Within two to three decades, today’s hybrid systems will look like museum pieces, as engineering resources around the world are devoted to alt power propulsion. For the United States to participate fully in this coming technological revolution, it needs a healthy automotive industry. It must fix the fundamentals.
The Presidential Task Force on Automobiles is supposedly addressing Detroit’s structural problems. But one thing will not change: the automotive industry requires massive capital investment. The blistering pace of technological innovation forces every automaker to invest heavily in research and development, to prevent obsolescence and provide a marketing advantage. Rapidly evolving government safety and environmental regulations place enormous pressures on resources, in both the short (three to five years) and long term (ten years and beyond). And competition for consumer loyalty has never been more fierce—or expensive.
General Motors and Chrysler have reached the point of no returns: their capital bases are essentially non-existent. Even if the US government wrote GM a check for $100B and gave Chrysler $30B, it’s highly unlikely either company could regain profitability. It’s still not enough money. In fact, to paraphrase Don Henley, there’s not enough cash in the world to resurrect their fortunes.
It’s not all about money. Chrysler and GM’s de facto bankruptcies (and Ford’s potential C11) are not merely the result of the credit crisis (as they claim). Their plight reflects decades of philosophical weakness: management’s determined and misguided pursuit of short-term gains at the expense of long-term goals and sustainability.
Don’t blame Wall Street. Chrysler’s private equity owners have proven that Motown makes its own bed. As does history. For decades, Chrysler, Ford and GM have failed to address their own weaknesses and their competition’s strength in their core market. Instead, The Big Three have looked elsewhere for profits and growth. Sometimes this quest occurred within the industry (through acquisitions or global expansion), sometimes without (non-related industries with which they had no experience).
Unfortunately, it worked (right until it didn’t). The bottom line appeared healthy, even as Chrysler, Ford and GM surrendered US market share. Worse, risk avoidance and short termism at the top trickled down throughout the entire management system. Up and down the executive food chain, the message was the same: don’t rock the boat. Why would you? There was plenty of room—and money—for yes men.
Outside reformers never stood a chance, even when the need for root and branch reform became obvious. When GM acquired Ross Perot’s EDS—a business with solid margins and rapid growth though wholly unrelated to vehicle design and assembly—it acquired a proven entrepreneur with an instinct for action not discussion. Board Member Perot was paid to go away. In 2006, investor Kirk Kerkorian installed former Chrysler and IBM finance executive Jerry York on GM’s Board. York pleaded for GM to cull brands and address domestic woes. York and Captain Kirk were shown the door.
Instead, The Big Three embarked on countless, indeed endless rounds of restructuring, reorganizations and renegotiation. Every attempt at incremental change proved fruitless. Head counts were reduced, production curtailed, suppliers squeezed and labor contracts restructured. None of this mattered to consumers. Motown’s mission critical U.S. market share continued its inexorable march downwards.
To hit reset, The Big Three must refocus on their core operations. To start, they must mimic Michelangelo’s philosophy when creating David: they must remove the bits that aren’t David. GM’S foreign operations are, to them, a lost cause. They must abandon their dreams of global domination as unaffordable and, frankly, unattainable. Then they must slice brands, kill models and cull dealers.
Second, they must recapitalize. Whether it’s by government debtor-in-possession financing or Chapter 7 re-imagining, they must make return as much, MUCH smaller companies. Third, they must redefine their corporate culture; management rewards must be tagged to long term reinvestment and sustainable profits, not short term “boosts.” And lastly, a new generation of leaders must be installed: outsiders with fresh ideas and a track record of success in other industries.
Ford Motor Company provides a template for the future. Just a few years ago, Ford was no better off than its Detroit brethren. Bill Ford, Jr. threw in the towel and tapped Boeing exec Alan Mulally to run the family firm. Mulally’s focused Ford on a few key markets, forced commonality of platforms around the world, and eliminated distractions (e.g., Jaguar, Land Rover and, soon, Volvo). Equally important, Ford has continued to strategically invest in new technology for new products.
Lead, follow or get out of the way. The feds should force GM to follow Ford’s example. Chrysler should get out of the way. And then, with American talent and determination, our auto industry can once again be the envy of the world.
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