You are 100% about financing. With as many people as we have defaulting on loans and worrying about depreciating housing costs, I don’t see a lot of people buying cars regardless of the availability of loans. I hope the U.S. takes this slow time to reevaluate its priorities and go back to its roots.

As much as you say the U.S. is innovative, the last cars the U.S. has produced have been less than innovative. This is a country that created the Ford GT, which back in the day, destroyed the Ferrari. We have to go back and focus on engineering the way we used to instead of always looking at the bottom line. It’s the only way we’ll survive globalization.

I would definitely agree that there are a lot of folks who will never go back to driving Hummers and Suburbans, so the decision to market those types of vehicles over the last few years was a great blunder that relied heavily on the idea that America will for the foreseeable future continue to have dirt cheap energy prices. But with that in mind, I know of a lot of people who have repeatedly mentioned considering the purchase of more economically sized domestic vehicles recently and simple can’t due to the financing issues.

Be it a big or small company, short term financing is what really greases the wheels of our economy. This is the big hold up in our system that is crippling many companies, and not just the Big 3 auto makers.

It can definitely be argued that throwing money at 3 companies who have had sustained losses for the last few quarters without proof that they can reverse those trends is a mistake. But I would also argue that throwing money at an industry that funds a company like Facebook with a 40+billion dollar valuation without concrete proof of its value is also risky business.

It boils down to the simple idea that throwing money at anything doesn’t solve any of its problems. It just helps the people who have to worry about them sleep a little more easily for a few more months.

No single industry will pull us out of the downward spiral that our economy is in and using the Big 3 as a scapegoat doesn’t help us either. There are a lot of people in a lot of industries at fault for our crisis. Ultimately to best solve our problem we need the most people employed in the most number of places. With improved consumer confidence comes improved consumer spending. With improved consumer spending you find improved business profits. With improved profits you find banks that aren’t freakin the hell out. When they’re not freakin the hell out, people can get back to work and promoting their big IT or Auto ideas. Innovation is what our country does best. There’s just a big kink in the hose that fills the capital pool right now. Until we can get the kink out, everyone is gonna hurt regardless of industry.

Jay B Saucedas last blog post..Rockers…

The type of fuel cells GM uses in cars, called PEM fuel cells, work on pure gaseous Hydrogen. But to equip a fueling station for them, you just need the same basic stuff as a gasoline station: a tank, a pump, and a dispenser. You can watch a fillup (albeit of one of our competitors’ vehicles) over here. The key difference is that the Hydrogen gas is stored at high pressure, so the equipment, the tank and the filler nozzle are different and more specialized.

It costs about $1M to put in a H2 filling station. The GM team that analyzes well-to-wheels energy solutions determined that it would take about $20B to put a Hydrogen station within 10 miles of 80% of the US population. Every major city already has a Hydrogen production facility, and there’s enough Hydrogen produced in this country already to run millions of cars annually. Considering the new stimulus bill probably allocated at least $20B to research on how to milk cats, the government – with its sudden resurgence of interest in infrastructure – ought to be able to bankroll a few filling stations. Meanwhile, we’ve got to get the cars on the road!

As you can see, it’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem. In my opinion, it might be a perfect candidate for some subtle encouragement from the public sector…

Alright, time for bed… Cheers!

It is true that popular vehicles like the Volkswagen Touareg TDI became hard to find when California and the Northeast banned new diesels from being imported in the middle of this decade due to NO2 emissions. But guess what? 2009 models are cleaner burning AND faster than ever. You can now purchase a 2009 Volkswagen Jetta TDI or a diesel BMW 335. 80/20 blends of diesel clean up this equation even more, and we can even start experimenting w 70/30 or even higher proportioned biodiesel blends.

FYI, Rudolph Diesel first exhibited the diesel engine in 1900:
http://www.cyberlipid.org/glycer/biodiesel.htm

The U.S. auto industry has a lot of trust issues it would have to overcome to be vibrant again. People just don’t trust their reliability, and after watching American cars become virtually useless after 80,000 miles in some cases, I don’t either.

In regards to hydrogen fuel cell, I am curious as to what we would have to do to equip fuel stations. How simple is the technology, since it would affect reliability?

I’d also think $40 billion a year Exxon would have something to say about it (bastards).

Unlike many in my field, I didn’t get my start working on fossil fuels in Detroit before transplanting to fuel cells – working for GM R&D was my first automotive job, but I’ve learned a lot about automotive engineering, and the car world, in the 3 years since. So I’ll give this my best shot!

GM’s Opel and Vauxhall divisions actually have a vast array of diesel powerplants, and they’re wildly successful in Europe. Saab, too (a GM brand until this year) is a diesel (and biodiesel) pioneer. On several business trips to Germany and Spain, I’ve had diesel-powered rental cars, and they all got phenomenal fuel economy. Unfortunately, they’re not terribly clean, and therein lies the rub.

The US has some of the most stringent passenger vehicle emissions laws in the world, and hardly any of the diesel engines used internationally will meet our standards for particulate output or NOx. Volkswagen is a notable exception, but their US diesels are tuned for emissions at the expense of their excellent fuel economy potential. Other companies have tried to meet US standards with complicated scrubbers and exhaust systems that would make Rube Goldberg proud – but they’ve all been too expensive and not reliable enough.

Sadly, diesel as a passenger fuel is also pretty stigmatized here in the ‘States. GM and other carmakers tried – and failed – to popularize diesel in the 70s, and it’s had a bad name ever since. Nonetheless, the BMW you cut your teeth on has brought back a diesel-powered 5-series to the US (yay!) and I don’t think Mercedes has ever stopped selling their diesel-powered E-class (though you can’t buy or drive them in NY or CA).

In order for diesel to succeed in the mainstream domestic auto market, I think two things need to happen: First, consumers need to realize that the diesels of today are nothing like those of three decades ago. They’re cleaner, quieter, smoother and more reliable. Second, the emissions laws need to be revamped to be less absolute. In engineering everything (and I mean everything) can be reduced to a tradeoff analysis, and our emissions laws refuse to scale with other important variables in the equation. If a 4-door sedan can get 50MPG (or more) on biodiesel, the emissions laws should cut it a break – because that fuel efficiency and biodiesel compatibility doesn’t come for free. (From Wikipedia: “…the 20–40% better fuel economy achieved by modern diesel-engined automobiles offsets the higher-per-litre emissions of greenhouse gases.” Hmm… Apparently not in as far as our congresscritters are concerned!)

I should point out that diesel engines have not been in common use in automobiles “for a century” – the first automotive diesel demonstration was in 1930, and diesel didn’t find wide use (even in large trucks and heavy equipment) until the ’60s and ’70s. This was largely due to advances in manufacturing that produced engines that stayed reliable despite the high pressures and more-dramatic temperature cycling of diesel engines.

Given my experiences with diesel in Europe, I’d love to own a diesel-powered car. A good friend and cycling buddy makes his own biodiesel here in upstate NY, and uses it to power his WV Jetta TDI – and you can bet if I had a diesel-powered car, I would be right there in the barn whipping the stuff up with him!

Please, keep on advocating biodiesel – it’s amazing how many people see blogs (even little crumby ones like mine) and we need to spread the message of alternative transportation fuels as much as we can. But please be careful not to spread the wrong message about all the good progress that is being made on our side of the pond!

Thank you for updating this post. It is always good to get news on what car makers are doing and I’m glad that GM is taking some proactive steps.

However, I’m actually a bigger proponent of biodiesel than anything else. Unlike BMW, Mercedes, Volkswagen, and Suburu, no American car company is pursuing this route. Diesels are more reliable, last longer, are simpler mechanically and have been used for a century. 80/20 blends of diesel/biodiesels are already on the market and can run your diesel with no modifications to the engine. I’ve sold diesels. Unlike electric cars, there is actually profit margin in them.

New diesels on the market are cleaner than ever. Please explain why American car companies are not pursuing technology that has been a staple in European markets for a century.

Your take on the business side of alternative fuels for transportation highlights an important truth (VCs are in business to make money, and bootstrapping alt energy in this country will take a longer time than they’ll tolerate to go cash-positive) but you need to adjust your stance that American car companies are “not innovating”, or “falling desperately behind” our foreign competitors. I work at the General Motors fuel cell powertrain R&D center in upstate NY, and I can assure you this is not the case.

As I type this, GM is operating the largest fleet of zero-emission fuel cell (i.e. Hydrogen) powered vehicles in the world. The cars aren’t operating in protected little bubbles, under the careful supervision of engineers – they’re “in the wild”, keys-to-customers vehicles that are being driven by everyone from celebrities to average consumers. You can check it out at the Project Driveway web site. There are plenty of YouTube videos out there, too.

I work with a phenomenally dedicated group of engineers, scientists and technicians who are moving as hard and fast as we possibly can to get mass-market fuel-cell powered vehicles onto showroom floors. I’d wager our operation doesn’t make a dime of profit for GM, but they fund us anyway – because the company’s leadership believes in our (and America’s) potential to take the automobile out of the environmental debate. Just as it did with gasoline infrastructure, and interstate highways, I believe our government has a role to play in funding a Hydrogen infrastructure, and in helping to fund innovation for the good of the public and the security of our nation – so we agree there.

Every time I talk to people about fuel cells, I hear their frustration that the technology isn’t coming fast enough. There are a lot of factors that contribute to whether a technology can cut the mustard in the automotive world – reliability, efficiency, safety, durability, and dozens of others – and it’s a tall order for the industry to meet in a decade what it’s taken over a century to achieve with the internal combustion engine. There’s still plenty of work to do before fuel cells, all-electrics and other exotic alt-fuel vehicles will make it in the mass market, but to say that America’s engineers and industries aren’t doing enough to make that happen is to do a very large disservice to all those who are working tirelessly to get you behind the wheel with these technologies under the hood.

Amelia Earhart once said, “Never interrupt someone doing something you said couldn’t be done.” If you’ll excuse me, I should probably get back to work now…

(PS- Kudos on the blog! The web needs more quality bloggers who speak their minds, do their research and can actually write well!)

Isabella Joness last blog post..A Healthier “US”, post #1

People somehow think that anything the government supports is just wasted money. It’s only wasted because we don’t demand that our politicians spend it wisely.