You would almost have to be living in a cave these days to not know the dire condition the auto industry is in. For some of us, it seems as if this happened over night, but in reality this has been developing for decades. I could enumerate the causes such as we have seen of different news shows for the past few months - I choose not to. As the expression goes, "success has many fathers and failure is aways an orphan" - however in this case failure has had many benefactors.
To paraphrase my wife's family who states "it is what it is", I will say "we are were we are". I am not going to access blame on the unions, the management staff, the consumers, the environmentalists, the congress and so on. All are guilty to some degree. My purpose with this posting is to try and figure out where we go from here, because here is nowhere for all. Two out of three of the "big three" are now under new ownership (one foreign and the other government). Because of knee jerk reactions and billions of dollars which were spent foolishly, we might already be around the bend, but lets hope not.
There is talk on the street that GM might need one more bailout, as the mix of cars mandated is not what the consumer wants. For example, the Volt. This is a car which at some point in time will have a market - but not now. The battery technology is just not there yet. For example, the maximum charge will yield 40 miles. However, there are many variables. How cold it is, how much air conditioning or heat is used, how many charging cycles are on the battery and so on. The manufacturing process of these batteries have many negative externalities of production and the replacement cost of a battery is through the roof.
The question which begs to be asked, yet has not been addressed is "what kind of car does the American consumer want?" Not a hard question - basic marketing 101. However, not only has that question not been asked, we are being told what kind of car we should drive. According to some on capitol hill, we should all be driving cars that range in size from Mini Coopers to Smart Cars. Wow! I don't know about anyone else, but if a car the size of a Mini Cooper would fit my family's lifestyle, I would have bought one years ago.
Not to be deterred by what citizens want, our unelected bureaucrats in Emerald City have recently mandated that the new CAFE standards for 2025 will be an average of 54.5 mpg.
Keep in mind, many Americans want a vehicle that will pull a boat, a utility trailer, a vacation trailer or other. In addition, many with a family want a vehicle that will provide maximum safety in the event of an accident.
Since I have not yet been asked what type of vehicle I think we should build, I will give my answer anyway. The kind of car I want has the following features:
- Built in America by Americans
- Owned by profit motivated private industry
- Gets over 50 mpg using some kind of hybrid technology
- Greatly reduced carbon footprint
- Has towing capacity of 7,000 lbs
- Has enough room for 5 adults to ride comfortably
- Will not rust from road salt or sea air
- With proper maintenance, will last 20 years
- High degree of survivability for passengers in most highway crashes
That is it - end of story. Build a quality car with those features and I, along with many others in this country will buy it. My feeling is the two items which are in bold are the most important. There are some city dwellers which still might want a Smart Car - I am fine with that - it is their choice to do so. My choice is to have something different. I own one of the more than 850,000 pleasure boats which are licensed in the state of Minnesota. In addition, there are tens of thousands of pull behind trailers, fifth wheel trailers, utility trailers and so on. If you try pulling any of those with a Smart Car, you will find out it is not that smart.
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