Interestingly, BYD rose from the ashes of a bankrupt state-owned auto company it purchased in 2003; recession be damned, let the Big 3 fail if they must so that someday they, or their successors, might make something relevant. END OF POST
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The second attempt at a federal bailout for the Big 3 US automakers fell apart early this morning when their union refused to trim their workers' rather cushy benefits packages.
I say good riddance. Let the dinosaurs die. It's time for auto industry version 2.0.
One alternative getting a lot of attention recently is Better Place, a Silicon Valley start-up with a business model that could quickly turn the automotive industry on its head.
Basically, it's a refueling system for all-electric vehicles that, if successful, would lead to a complete gutting of the internal combustion engine.
Better Place doesn't sell cars; rather, it sets up a national grid of refueling stations, ideally powered by renewable energy. Drivers swap out their drained batteries for fresh ones at their stations in a matter of minutes and pay Better Place by the mile, like buying minutes for a cell phone.
Tom Friedman plugged this new model earlier this week - and dissed what was then a likely bailout for the Big 3 - in an editorial for the New York Times saying:
"Our bailout of Detroit will be remembered as the equivalent of pouring billions of dollars of taxpayer money into the mail-order-catalogue business on the eve of the birth of eBay... into the CD music business on the eve of the birth of the iPod and iTunes... into a book-store chain on the eve of the birth of Amazon.com and the Kindle... into improving typewriters on the eve of the birth of the PC and the Internet."
The Better Place model may be a part of the solution, but until heavy, steel-body autos go on a serious diet, battery-driven cars are going to be prohibitively expensive.
Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute gave a great talk at Harvard last week on Hypercars or ultralight vehicles made of advanced composites (that is, carbon fibre instead of steel) that, by virtue of their light weight, are 3-5 times more fuel-efficient.
Advanced composite car ideas have been batted around for years: GM did a one-off concept car back in 1992, but it seems no one has been able to get the economics right for mass production. Until, perhaps, now.
Last week I proposed giving the Big 3 whatever they asked for so long as the money was tied to significant CAFE standard increases. Now, I'm taking it back. The automotive industry is changing too quickly and GM, Ford, and Chrysler are too far behind.
I say if the US is going to compete in a new, fuel-efficient world, it will be with scrappy start-ups that aren't tied to 20th-century pensions. What do you think? (image: Wikimedia Commons) Click Here to Read More..
The eco-blogosphere is caught in an orgiastic frenzy over the pending announcement of Nobel laureate and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab director Steven Chu as US energy secretary.
So what's all the excitement about?
First, Chu would be the first person with a Nobel Prize in science to ever serve in the cabinet of a US president. The only other Nobel laureate in such a position was US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973.
But what makes Chu "hardcore" is the full-on assault he's launched against climate change since taking the helm of Lawrence Berkeley in 2004.
His homepage says he is on a "mission" to make the national lab "the world leader in alternative and renewable energy research, particularly the development of carbon-neutral sources of energy".
In the past four years, he's formed some cutting-edge energy science centres, including the Joint BioEnergy Institute and the Energy Biosciences Institute. One of them, Helios, will draw on synthetic biology, a discipline that aims to rewrite the basic operating instructions of living cells, to produce new sources of clean energy.
In 2007, Chu co-authored "Rising Above the Gathering Storm", a report put out by the National Academy of Sciences that called for an energy agency similar to the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) as a way to fund developments in renewable energy.
The same year, he co-chaired a report commissioned by the governments of China and Brazil outlining steps they could take toward a sustainable energy future. With Chu, who is a Chinese-American researcher and a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, heading the DOE, I wouldn't be surprised to see further collaborations on this front in the coming years.
The only possible blemish in Chu's eco-career was sealing the deal on a $500 million biofuel development handout from oil giant BP for the national lab, UC Berkeley and the University of Illinois that some felt would compromise the institutions' academic integrity.
[Some great historical perspective on the Big 3 Bailout by Elizabeth Kolbert in the Talk of The Town in this week's New Yorker. See the top of the story below. Kolbert gets after Obama for not taking a strong stand on the issue but then fails to do so herself. I say give the Big 3 everything they want, but this time break the boom-bust-cycle by tying the money to a significant CAFE standard increase.]
The Secretary of Transportation’s report to Congress begins on a dark note. “Over the past year, the domestic auto industry has experienced sharply reduced sales and profitability, large indefinite layoffs, and increased market penetration by imports,” it states. “The shift in consumer preferences towards smaller, more fuel-efficient passenger cars and light trucks . . . appears to be permanent, and the industry will spend massive amounts of money to retool to produce the motor vehicles that the public now wants.” The revenue to pay for this retooling, though, will have to come from sales of just the sort of cars that the public is no longer buying—a situation, the report observes, bound to produce “financial strain.”
“To improve the overall future prospects for the domestic motor vehicle manufacturers, a quality and price competitive motor vehicle must be produced,” the report warns. “If this is not accomplished, the long term outlook for the industry is bleak.”
New Blog Address! I've moved my blog to a new address. For all of my new posts from the People's Republics of Cambridge, MA and China, check out; Green PRCs. greenprcs.blogspot.com
I am freelance environmental writer based in the People's Republics of Cambridge, MA and China.
I'm a correspondent for New Scientist magazine and have written for the New York Times, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, Technology Review, Audubon, and National Wildlife magazine.
I completed my masters in science writing at MIT in 2006 where I was a John S. Hennessy Environmental Studies Fellow. In 2007-08, I was a Middlebury Environmental Journalism Fellow.
