Dear Auto Makers in Crisis,
Things are changing.. rapidly. The SUV is dying. Your sales are down. It's time to swallow your pride and get a hold of yourselves. If you didn't see this coming, fire your yes-men. Sit down with a web browser, drink some strong coffee, and get a hard dose of reality.
Gas is over 4$ a gallon and it will never come down. We the consumers have begrudgingly accepted this because, like everything else, we have no choice but to bend over and take it. You are already seeing the backlash and it won't get any better. Stop pretending that 31 miles per gallon is something to be proud of or hard to attain. And stop insulting us with bullshit gas subsidies. Your incentive options stink.
You are now paying for holding yourself back from innovation. We're not going to buy a new car when the cost to fill the tank exceeds the monthly finance payment. Sorry.
Here is my non-advice. Offer cheap electric cars.. now. Not 5 years from now. The market is here now. The technology has been around for a while. Yeah I know, batteries suck right now. Figure it out because we need your cars and you need our money. Oh, a shortage you say? Make more or use something else. It's your cars customers are interested in buying, not your excuses. Other manufacturers are picking up where you are failing. (Yes, GM, you're almost there, but the internet will never forget what you did to the EV1.) Necessity is the mother of innovation, right?
If you are intent on staying in the dark ages, you will fail and the consumers will collectively chortle. Your competitors know this and are already cashing in. Do you really want to be laughed at?
Look, this whole illusion of freedom thing works better when we have lots of choices and plumes of your smoke billowing from our rectums. Sure, it's taken us over a century but your lie has finally been figured out and now it has become unprofitable. Please feed us a new lie with new choices tomorrow, not next decade. We're not going to buy your crappy cars unless we're all good and fooled up.
Signed,
Average Nobody With Money
P.S. Sorry for the overly-abused picture from last decade at the top of this rant. We get it, gas prices are high.
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
Non-advice for Auto Makers in Crisis
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17 comments:
ANWM: may I suggest another approach? Take the responsibility yourself ... buy a cheap used car that gets good mileage. I bought my 2000 Suzuki Esteem wagon with 47k for $5gs. It consistently gets 37mpg with gentle driving and, except for regular maintenance, costs me $0/mo to own. Yeah it's weak in the prestige category, but an excellent way to blunt the impact of $4/gal gas (or was it $5, I didn't look today...)
Unfortunately, emmissions from older vehicles are a significant problem in trying to reduce pollutants in the air. When purchasing an older vehicle, be certain to purchase one that uses OBD-II diagnostics to meet current emissions standards.
That would be way too sensible... it's a whole lot easier to point at a unicorn and scream "gimme gimme gimme!!! i waaaaant it!"
People want strong/safe... that means heavy... that means less fuel efficient.
People want electric... that means roughly half a ton of batteries... that means more motor, which means more batteries, etc, etc.... that means expensive.
Electric is the future, and whoever cracks the code of building a battery with a ridiculously high power density is going to rule the world for the next 10-20 years. There are MANY people at work on it across the globe. It's a shiny golden ring and many people want to possess it.
So throwing a temper tantrum is... while adorable... just really silly.
wow, yeah I'm getting ripped up over my tone on reddit. I meant it all tongue-in-cheek.
It seems to have sparked decent conversation though. Great points being made by everyone. I guess it's a controversial topic.
Thank you all for your great comments and feel free to bash me at will. :)
Do people like you work? Have you worked in any type of manufacturing business? If you did, you would understand a few things.
1. The time to market for a automobile takes *years*. If Ford, Toyota, Honda, etc decided today, to build a brand new car, from scratch, it would take 3 to 5 years to bring to market.
2. 5 years ago, nobody cared about high mileage automobiles. In your world, do you always make a product with no market? Look at sales of the Prius BEFORE the current eco-hyped one came out. Or the Honda EV-1 sales. They SUCKED!
3. 32 MPG in a full size car, like a Camry, Sonata, Impala are AMAZING when you consider these car were 1200 pounds lighter 10 years ago. Why? Because consumers what safety cocoons, they want power-everything, heated/cooled everything, 14 speaker systems, etc.
So do a little research first before spouting off on a topic you clearly know little about.
Haha, Bob, I was just writing a lengthy rebuttal but I got some really ironic and fantastic news so I'll take a rain check.
Instead of blaming anyone including "people" or companies, you have to realize that we all make short-term survival/vanity decisions. We'll take shortcuts if that is required to get your next meal or we'll waste untold millions if it can feed our laziness or luxury in the name of satisfying our breeding instincts.
If there are hundreds thousands of cars on the road and the leading cause of death for your age group is car accidents, you might be better off in a 4000-lb SUV. But if those monsters are off the road, a smaller vehicle makes more sense. And driving slower. Using trains instead of tractor trailers for transporting cargo. This could reduce car fatalities by tens of thousands or more. And health care costs. And car insurance.
The great thing about higher gas prices is that it will force society to change at every level to reduce over-consumption. It will localize economies, rewarding the most efficient and simple lifestyles.
Face it; the overheated industrialized way of living is dangerous to our survival. It is about time it changes. But the improvements won't go away, instead it will force innovation and adoption of changes because our survival depends on it.
Bob Cumberford: the EV-1 did not go on sale, all of them were leased and all of them found customers and ALL were recalled when their contracts were up.
It's funny how American auto makers have been fighting MPG standards for all these years on behalf of their buddies in the oil industry, and now the oil industry is just bending the auto industry over. Makes me feel a tiny bit better.
Speaking of oil subsidies, check out HIDDEN oil subsidies:
Hidden Oil Subsidies: We Need to END Them
@Bob Cumberford - Getting electric vehicles to market would not require the "lengthy" development time you are implying, simply due to the fact that Chevy could drop an electric drivetrain in a Cobalt and have it on the road in a matter of months. This is what's currently happening with the hot-selling hybrids, such as Honda's Accord, Toyota's Camry, etc. Take a car you already manufacture body and chassis for, switch out the drivetrain, and presto - huge sales. I find sentiments like your more sad than anything else. GM had the electric technology years ago, as did Ford. While I understand that they can't simply head back into some mythical warehouse, dig it up and shoehorn it into a Focus tomorrow, there is no reason why it should take them too long to come up with the obvious (and long overdue) solution.
I really enjoyed this post. However, your reaction to criticism leaves something to be desired. If your ego can't handle it, don't put it out there in the first place.
ok, i see you guys havent heard of tesla yet.. yeah it costs lots now, but a $30k version coming soon..
@scott - batteries arent that heavy these days, espically the carbon fibres ones. As for strong/safe = heavy, have you ever seen an f1 car? weighs under 500kg, can hit a war at any point of the car at over 100mph and drivers survive? Please look things up before ranting it just makes you look stupid...
Electric cars are not yet the future, as strangely enough the electric has to come from somewhere & most power plants are fossil fuel burners, that needs solving first..
minx, I don't understand. My response was to thank everyone for their comments. As I said, I meant it tongue-in-cheek.
I have rather thick skin and don't mind a good ribbing.
If you are referring to my other comment to Bob, while he was asking me if I ever worked I was getting a phone call with a job offer. I found it ironic. :)
I will never get tired of posts like this from anyone. now, someone please inform my wife...
Well most of the automakers in crisis are the Detroit 3 (aka American manufacturers) and the thing is no, they cannot just drop an electric motor in a car and sell it to you.
Automobile manufacturing plants costs billions to build and retool and for the last few years Ford and GM have been betting big on SUV's. That is what their plants are tooled for. They cannot just snap their fingers and poof out electric cars . As for Ford or GM's supposed electric tech, it sucked balls then and they didn't feel they had a market, so they invested else where and now it's biting them in the ass.
As for gas not coming down, that may not be true depending on just how far that "never" goes. Once we start hitting more electric vehicles, gas will come down as demand decreases.
I will agree that 31 mpg is shitty, but the 50+ mpg cars are mostly diesels, and asides from tighter emissions standards, Americans are also notorious for not wanting to buy anything that has low hp.
Cheap electric cars are not coming any time soon. Yes there is a lot of research going on in it, but it isn't ready. Tesla's so called 30k electric car will not be ready for at least another 4 years, and you could almost say they're ahead of the game. Research is being done in everything from thermal control for lith-ion batts to completely new bat shit crazy battery tech that no one has ever heard of. But it is not ready .
Btw safety in a car is not always guaranteed in larger/heavier cars (response to one of thecomments). Even Smart cars can match the safety ratings of a normal sized sedan.
GM is banking heavily on the Volt. If it fails the Detroit 3 could very well become the Detroit 2. Ford has Kerkorian backing them so they might survive, albeit walking a lot smaller than they did before. Chrysler seems to be hunkering down for survival rather than anything amazing.
Honestly I think this country should be investing in a massive public transit system. Anyone who has ever lived in a place with effective public transportation would probably prefer it. You pay less than a quarter on gas, if that, and you will likely even save time. Then there is insurance and all the other overheads that is back in your pocket.
@kai - again, the argument about retooling entire factories is ridiculous. They already have factories manufacturing Focuses and Cobalts. Therefore, there is no retooling to do in the basic structure/architecture/chassis design. Same car, different engine. Detroit has done it for years. Chrysler makes a bevy of Jeep vehicles with multiple engine choices, including diesel (can't buy them in the states though, of course). The assertion that we are 3-5 years away from electric vehicles may be accurate, but solely based on the need for efficient, powerful electric motors on a large scale, and battery/power storage that is capable of providing the necessary power over longer distances. This is the main holdup for American buyers. Hardly any of us make a total daily commute of more than 100 miles. Period. But we all want to know that we could load up the kids and the dog and head off on the "Great American Roadtrip" if we so choose. There are far too many people still stuck on this.
And as far as that roadtrip ideal goes, there's no reason why Detroit can't, in the meantime, boost the efficiency of their current fleet. 30mpg is a joke. Touting a pickup that gets a "best in class 19mpg hwy" is a joke. I have no doubt that they've got the technology to crack 45mpg in a traditional internal combustion engine. the problem is that no one (*coughGOVERNMENTcough*) has made them do it in the last 8-10 years.
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