"One final thing. If you have a young one getting ready to graduate from high school and wondering what to major in, tell that young person battery technology. This will not be where all the action will be, but it will be hot for years."
The company who made my truck and my wife's car, the company who, not that many years ago, was at death's door, and needed to have a massive government bailout - has suddenly popped up on the President's radar - big time. Mary Barra, the CEO of GM, in the middle of the Trump red hot economy, caught just about everyone looking the other way. General Motors announced it was going to let 14,000 workers go, and shut down five plants in the US of A. That unexpected move went over like a gas pain in church with President Trump.
Or was it unexpected? Wall Street analysts should have seen this one coming as clearly as a low hanging fast ball. Why? GM has not been secretive about how they perceive the future. What they want to do. How they want to reshape the company. In fact in March of 2016, GM announced they were acquiring Cruise Automation of San Francisco for $1B. Why? They wanted a leg up on making new line of autonomous vehicles by 2025.
Step one for GM - let the dogs out. Get rid of them. Some of the models GM is getting rid of, are the Cruze, the Impala, and the Cadillac XTS. The biggest surprise to me however, was to see the Chevy Volt get the deep six. What happened with GM's first electric car? I mean, GM wants to expand its EV (electric vehicle) foot print. My view? It was to soon. The market and the technology were not ready for the Volt. It developed a reputation for being an expensive dog, and sales plummeted. So bye-bye Volt - you are about to be replaced with something better and more market ready.
A market guru might be looking at this situation and shrug shoulders. "So what? Many companies do some re-tooling to meet the future." True. So what is the big hairy deal then? Why is this a burr under the President's saddle? I mean, the Chevy Cruze has really been a dog looking for a home. Getting rid of the Cruise was a move whose time had come. But there is more to this story.
Trump is not a fan of the EV. Probably even less of a fan of the autonomous EV. Here we are, after suffering through eight years of Obama trying to kill our coal and oil industry, finally becoming a world exporter of energy. What could rain on our new parade with us now being the Saudi of North America? The EV. So the President is not a fan. He is also royally pissed that when the auto industry started going south in 2008, Ford was able to fix itself. GM however, was at the head of the line with its hand out for government help. Once help was given to "save all those jobs", many renamed GM to be "Government Motors".
Well here is the bottom line. I have addressed this before. We are coming to the sunset of the internal combustion engine. Just about every car manufacturer have an EV line on the drawing boards. I have said many times my Avalanche might be the last internal combustion vehicle I own. My young grand kids might not ever drive a car. The future is coming, and coming at blazing speed.
One final thing. If you have a young one getting ready to graduate from high school and wondering what to major in, tell that young person battery technology. This will not be where all the action will be, but it will be hot for years. How many years? Until we figure out go to market fuel cell solutions. Buckle up!
It would be helpful if Trump recognized that being president doesn’t make him economy czar.
ReplyDeleteHe can levy tariffs or otherwise badger CEOs, but he can’t force companies to continue to operate factories that aren’t profitable. Employers will do what’s best for their interests, because that’s how they stay in business and, not incidentally, how they pay competitive salaries to their workers.
The old business adage is true: What’s good for General Motors is good for the country.
Climate Change factoid of the day is a 2 edged sword.........
ReplyDeleteA new study, which appears in Nature, is the first to project how the melting of the Antarctic ice sheet will affect future climate, says first author Ben Bronselaer, adding that current climate models don’t include the effects of melting ice on the global climate.
The entire Earth will continue to warm, but the atmosphere will warm more slowly because more of the heat will be trapped in the ocean, he says.
“Warming won’t be as bad as fast as we thought, but sea level rise will be worse,” says Bronselaer, a postdoctoral research associate in the geosciences department at the University of Arizona.
"Arizona, center of US oceanography."
ReplyDeleteAs usual someone's trying to alarm us with a scary projection based on another shaky model.
"first to project..."
ReplyDelete"current climate models don't include..."
So, what do the tea leaves and chicken bones tell us?