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Can the Auto Industry Retool Itself To Build Rails?
knapper_tech writes "The scope of the auto industry troubles continues to increase in magnitude. The call to retool and develop new vehicles has been made several times already, but with all of the challenges from labor prices and foreign competition, how exactly can the industry retool itself to be more competitive? In light of superior competition facing losses, there doesn't seem to be enough room in the industry moving forward. In the context of finding a new place in the auto industry, the future isn't bright. Calls for no disorderly collapse of the cash-strapped big three and a reluctant congress can only point to an underlying lack of direction. However, consider two other standing economic challenges. The airlines have continued to struggle due to fuel prices and heightened security. Consumers backed off of SUV's due to high fuel prices, and while those prices have eased in the face of global recession, the trend will pick up again with growth in China and India leading the fight for resources. In short, things are moving less, and the industries that support the movement are in need of developing new products while consumers are in need of a cheaper method of transportation."
Read on for the rest of knapper_tech's thoughts.
knapper_tech continues:
"Looking abroad, it's clear the US has far less invested in local and regional rail systems. With regard to high-speed rail systems, the US is conspicuously behind. France's TGV is moving people at 574km/h. China operates the world's first commercial maglev line while the famous Japanese Shinkasen goes without mentioning. In the US there is only one line in operation between DC and Boston with a few more planned as a result of the 2008 election in California.
The traditional barrier to implementation of rail systems is the initial investment costs, but in the context of economic stimulus, such investment sinks are actually desirable. The auto industry has clearly taken note with proposals from companies like Caterpillar for huge new infrastructure projects.
A friend who recently bought a house observed that real-estate prices are on the rise nearer to city centers, where the fallout of mortgage problems and expensive, time-consuming drives from the suburbs can be avoided. Recalling the huge number of urban revitalization plans and efforts to increase the viability of older city centers, it seems as though many municipal governments would also be in line to gain from the added density of rail systems and increased activity they can support in downtown areas.
Putting it all together, it seems like now would be a good time to direct the industrial capacity of the automotive and supporting industries to developing local and regional, high-speed rail systems to provide a more efficient and effective infrastructure basis for US cities while essentially creating a new market where competition from foreign car manufacturers will not be a problem. At the same time, a huge labor force would be required. The task would call for engineers for development, factory workers for manufacturing, operators, and maintenance workers. Caterpillar still gets to sell construction equipment. The inevitable stream of stores popping up around stations would provide new commercial areas. Last-mile bus and taxi services would also have a new place. The list goes on.
Besides the savings in fuel, the US could also gain international prestige and possibly help lead China and India away from our mistakes, helping to stem the rising demand for oil globally and avoiding the attendant international tension. Climate change is yet another win in this scenario.
It seems like we're not exactly headed in that direction, and I'm curious to see what Slashdot readers think of all this. What pieces need to be in place to make the investments pay off? What are additional resources that are required? Can the industries really make such a change of direction? Do we have everything we need in the US? How would such systems work out long term? Would the initial investments be able to pick up fast enough to stimulate the economy?"
"Looking abroad, it's clear the US has far less invested in local and regional rail systems. With regard to high-speed rail systems, the US is conspicuously behind. France's TGV is moving people at 574km/h. China operates the world's first commercial maglev line while the famous Japanese Shinkasen goes without mentioning. In the US there is only one line in operation between DC and Boston with a few more planned as a result of the 2008 election in California.
The traditional barrier to implementation of rail systems is the initial investment costs, but in the context of economic stimulus, such investment sinks are actually desirable. The auto industry has clearly taken note with proposals from companies like Caterpillar for huge new infrastructure projects.
A friend who recently bought a house observed that real-estate prices are on the rise nearer to city centers, where the fallout of mortgage problems and expensive, time-consuming drives from the suburbs can be avoided. Recalling the huge number of urban revitalization plans and efforts to increase the viability of older city centers, it seems as though many municipal governments would also be in line to gain from the added density of rail systems and increased activity they can support in downtown areas.
Putting it all together, it seems like now would be a good time to direct the industrial capacity of the automotive and supporting industries to developing local and regional, high-speed rail systems to provide a more efficient and effective infrastructure basis for US cities while essentially creating a new market where competition from foreign car manufacturers will not be a problem. At the same time, a huge labor force would be required. The task would call for engineers for development, factory workers for manufacturing, operators, and maintenance workers. Caterpillar still gets to sell construction equipment. The inevitable stream of stores popping up around stations would provide new commercial areas. Last-mile bus and taxi services would also have a new place. The list goes on.
Besides the savings in fuel, the US could also gain international prestige and possibly help lead China and India away from our mistakes, helping to stem the rising demand for oil globally and avoiding the attendant international tension. Climate change is yet another win in this scenario.
It seems like we're not exactly headed in that direction, and I'm curious to see what Slashdot readers think of all this. What pieces need to be in place to make the investments pay off? What are additional resources that are required? Can the industries really make such a change of direction? Do we have everything we need in the US? How would such systems work out long term? Would the initial investments be able to pick up fast enough to stimulate the economy?"
I think that SUVs really say it all. An SUV is a gass-guzzling inefficient monstrosity of a car, yet its name "sports-utility vehicle" is meant to convey fun times and yet excellent functionality. Consumers were taken in for some time, but then they realised they'd been duped.
Now U.S. car companies are paying the price for trying to satisfy the market. The market has now moved on, and the car companies are are left with... SUVs.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Industries that are based on building 2000-10000 pound widgets have no particular reason to start building things that are several orders of magnitude heavier and more expensive. The neighborhood Dodge dealer is going to start selling switching engines?
I think not. You're better off asking Caterpillar to start building rail cars.
Besides, the big problem isn't building the individual rail cars. It's building the infrastructure.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
You should move to Africa, you would find a lot more people to hate.
Here is an artist's rendition of the new train currently being planned.
A major problem with electric vehicles is the weight of batteries. My suggestion is to build "electric lanes" on major highways. These would supply power to electric cars as they drive along, and so give them more range. Locally in cities, or at the home end of trips, you would use internal batteries.
If you can supply more power than the car is using, you can "charge while driving" and top off the internal batteries.
The way to transfer power to the cars (sliding contacts, induction coils buried in the road, etc), safety, and payment features are left as jobs for smart engineers.
GM used to make locomotives via its Electro-Motive Division (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electro-Motive_Diesel). They sold the division back in 2005, and I don't see them reentering that market anytime soon, since General Electric now dominates it.
Remember boys and girls - it wasn't the market crash that caused the great depression - it was the governments reaction to it (closing borders to imports and creating make work projects with the huge public work projects of the 30's) that created the great depression.
What do you want to happen. A short deep recession - or the lost decade of the 2010's (see Japan in the 90's or the USA of the 1930's). Lets see the most optimal use of resources - if it isn't, it won't help.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
Seeing that they killed the rails, why would they want to build them?
Seriously, Detroit and SE MI used to have trains, cable cars, etc. But they were killed off so that everyone would buy a car.
They wanted to make a world with only cars. They can flounder in the world they made. Let some new business spring up and seize the chance to build. Let the automakers die off.
Dont forget to tattoo that post,in the local language, to his forehead.
You have the cart before the horse. Customers define the market, not the business. First rule of business isn't starting with a good idea, it's doing market research and seeing what people will buy (how's that world-changing Segway selling?). If GM can't sell Americans what they want at a profit (cars) how the hell can they sell them something they don't want? The Big 3 should be emulating Honda, not Amrtrak.
The solution is not a bailout, by rewarding the same failed business model, but for the Big 3 to declare bankruptcy, shed their ridiculous labor costs (and spare me UAW's FUD and disinformation campaign, already heard it), and actually start making a profit per vehicle again - like all the other "American" auto companies (Toyota, Honda) have done in states outside of UAW's thumb.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Somehow this sounds like a bad idea...
Somebody should dress you up like a catholic schoolgirl, bind and gag you, and drop you into a biker bar about an hour before last call.
...but with all of the challenges from labor prices and foreign competition, how exactly can the industry retool itself to be more competitive?...
To me, the solution is and has always been simple and it's just one solution:
Build cars that people want to buy.
What are the metrics that will bring about this? Here is how: -
1: Build cars that are appealing to the eye. I mean, cars that are as beautiful to look at as they are beautiful to sit into.
2: Build cars that do not break just after their warranty mileage.
3: Build cars that are easy to repair...cars that even the Joe Six Pack will "understand."
4: Build cars that have excellent resale value. Not cars that lose 50% of their value in 1 year.
5: Build plants in USA. What these giants are doing is to close plants here while opening others in China in order to export to the USA. Absurd! Focusing on [short term] profits.
This is a quote from one auto industry insider GM/Ford and Chrysler were so short sighted! This is what they did: -
"...[They] created multiple versions of every product under a bunch of different brand names, hoping that if buyers shun one, they'll take a more favorable view of another..."
This is customers message to Detroit: "Consumers aren't that stupid. Give them a bit more credit, and you might have a future."
The rail industry regularly repairs/replaces cars and rails. They are in a better position to lay down new infrastructure. They already have the plans all laid out for new infrastructure, and it would be a viable investment for them if they had a little financial help from the government--the amount of financial help needed being much less than has been allocated to various industry loans.
And this is just for freight rails. We can start looking at passenger rails again when Amtrak starts making a profit.
The problem with the big auto companies, like GM, is that for every dollar they pay in salary to workers, they pay two for benefits and pension plans. Their labor costs are absolutely horrendous. The rest of their operations are similarly inefficient. They're going to have a real tough time competing no matter what they make.
Personally, I say let the big auto companies die. It's going to be a clusterfuck, but we can't just keep bailing them out year after year. Remember, the current dire state of affairs has come about after a decade of prosperity, and this isn't the first bunch of government cash they've asked for and gotten(in Canada at least)! The important thing is to find a way to keep workers employed and parts companies in business.
What is needed is not more of the same incompetence from the big 3. What is needed is for proven companies who know what they're doing in their respective industries to take over the auto plants. It's not very enticing though. These plants have the wrong equipment and the auto unions will probably make all sorts of trouble for them. This is where the money saved not bailing out the big 3 again and again can be used to offer incentives to lure these companies in. Likewise, parts companies that are run competently should receive short-term loans to help them transition to working with these new industries. Government intervention should be used like a surgeon's scalpel. Cut out the cancer and reroute blood to the healthy tissue.
This sounds like rambling Keynesianism mixed with dirigisme to me. Do you really want to combine the two most discredited (and overlapping) economic theories in an attempt to minimize a depression caused by the colluding ghosts of both?
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The auto-industry should completely retool to build rail systems!
Also, airline manufacturers should retool to build cars, and while we're at it, naval shipyards should retool to build cars, and train companies should build bicycles!
Seriously, has the OP actually thought about what he's saying?
yup, i agree more with your comments about the UAW, the UAW milked the big three for all its worth and now that the cow has run dry they are crying for the government to bail them out, i say fsck the UAW and force the big thee in to bankruptcy then they can wipe all those exorbitant union contracts away and then start from scratch without the UAW even being in the picture anymore, the workers can quit being UAW members and work for wages like the rest of the US workers get in other non-union factories...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
..and solve three problems at once: Zero emissions, doesn't require fossil fuels, and more people will get off their fat lazy butts and get the exercise they NEED to be a reasonable weight and otherwise healthy.
What do you have against bikers? You're so mean.
How about over head power like high speed rail and some bus systems?
And pound per pound, nothing's more efficient than moving large quantities of mass than rail. Anyone who thinks the era of happy motoring is going to last more than another decade or two has probably not been paying attention to the rate at which oil fields are declining. Oil is cheap *today*, but not tomorrow.
The auto companies would then ask for more tax money so they could retool but we already have a railroad money pit called Amtrak. It receives over $2 billion a year in federal money alone. Highways cost us $.01 per passenger mile while Amtrak costs $.22 per passenger mile, which one is more efficient use of tax dollars?
The auto industry has been pushing their weight around for years to prevent hybrids and alternative power for vehicles. Obviously they were unwilling to change their ways and try to help the environment. Hopefully new companies will emerge that will be more open to innovation.
California's high-speed rail system isn't expected to be completed for at least another 21 years with the first operational segment not going live until sometime between 2019 and 2021, and at a cost of somewhere between $45 billion and $81 billion, depending on whose estimates you use. If $20 from every ticket were used to repay the construction costs using the lower figure, and if the ridership were at the upper end of the estimates (95 million per year), it would take about 23 years to repay. Other estimates suggest as few as 23 million riders per year, and if the upper cost estimate were used, it would take 176 years to repay the costs. Odds are that it will come in somewhere in between, but that's a very wide range with which to contend.
Aside from that, judging by the list of potential stops, there won't be time to get the train up to anything resembling "high speed" for the most commonly-used stops.
I pay $160 for a monthly pass on the local commuter rail line (VRE in northern Virginia). They're increasing fares by 7% next month, and they're still heavily subsidized by both the state and federal governments.
The population distribution in most of the US is simply not geared toward passenger rail except possibly at the local level (i.e., subway/light rail). This isn't Europe, and you can't necessarily repeat the same things that work in Europe and expect them to work here also.
most SUV's are nothing more than 1970's style station wagons with kits to give it more room off the ground and larger wheels. when rednecks put those big wheels on their trucks the coastal people laughed at them and how stupid they were. the same people are buying station wagons with the same kits and big wheels and paying a huge premium for it and calling them "crossover" SUV's or some other stupid name.
Toyota makes a station wagon version of the Avalon. It's called a Lexus RX and people pay $40,000 and more for it.
Are you serious? No, really, I wonder if you mean what you say.
Fuel cells are a few engineering problems away from being a viable solution for electric driving.
1)Any problem with the fuel cell unit itself can be solved with the application of money for engineering. It's all solvable, it just needs an investment of effort which translates into money.
2)To the whiners who say "We don't have a hydrogen infrastructure" I reply with this: Hydrogen can be produced ANYWHERE there is water and electricity. Every gas station in the civilized world has WATER and ELECTRICITY. All we need to do is drop an electrolysis station in their parking lot. This can be containerized and done with tractor trailers.
The whole problem right now can be solved with an investment that is far less than the banks needed. Less than the big 3 automakers requested. It would place our nation in the forefront of the energy industry and make us financially and strategically secure for the next century.
Or we can sit on our asses.
The problems in the US are not just due to unwanted vehicle models. In fact, that isn't the real problem at all. Several US states have paid enormous subsidies to foreign can companies to open factories in the US. That caused overproduction. Finally, the credit crunch simply turned off the finance tap and nobody could buy cars because the banks would not provide car loans.
Have you noticed that even Toyota has made a loss of 1.7 billion dollars this quarter and that Japanese exports are down 30%?
Really this is another sad example of luddite regressive thinking. Trains are a dead technology no reasonable person wants to deal with the vast waste of sound real estate for endless miles of noisy track. Not to mention the terrible environmental damage they do running into everything from cars to deer. Trains are not the solution if you are a lover of the environment.
The solution is to innovate past the reliance on the so called fossil fueled transportation we have today. That one sentence wraps up the whole problem, that is American resistance to real substantial innovation.
As to the American car industry, as politely as I can put it: they can go screw themselves. The best thing that could happen is that everyone involved in this terrible marketing scam is that they end up either in jail or on welfare for the rest of their lives. That means everybody from the CEO on down to the grossly over paid floor sweeper. Preferably a meagerly financed welfare system at that. I've now had the displeasure of owning autos from all three of the big names in Detroit and let me tell you they are all junk. I went for the vehicles of the big three out of some sort of misguided patriotic duty, but it has become obvious that no one in the American automobile industry has any concern at all about quality. Not the unions, the worker nor the management teams so screw them all!!!! Oh the politicians that are so stupid to support this insanity should get their with a hot poker fresh from hell.
I don't disagree with the idea that the collapse of the auto industry will be hard to deal with but it needs to burn to the ground so that something fresh and rational can be built in its place. So take that to mean I don't support the bail out one iota. Rather I'd like to see these people be held accountable in a very public way especially the unions which play a significant role in the crap that comes out of Detroit!
Dave
But honestly, why? The US has demonstrated that there is little to no interest in pubic rail. Well, there may be interest, but when it comes down to the "money where your mouth is" part of the argument, rail measures have traditionally fallen short (and yes, sometimes at the hands of automakers trying to push their evil agenda of....selling their products). California and Hawaii have made gains on rail projects, but even those are years away from laying track.
Looking at this from the 500 mile view may make this absurd enough to clarify your point: You're saying that the Big 3, a group of companies that have either A. Inepted themselves to bankruptcy at the hands of idiotic management and/or greedy workers or B. collapsed as lines of credit disappeared and their customers easy access to the means to purchase their respective products vanished should.........completely leave the industry they created and rebuild themselves as the primary suppliers of a product that is:
1. Already dominated by foreign (or domestic. Hi GE!) suppliers who are already producing fine products
2. Outside the scope of what these companies have built in the last 50-ish years
3. So limited in demand there is a market for at most a few thousand of these items over the next decade, for companies that have been producing millions of a particular product,
4. Not a priority for a nation whose infrastructure is dominated by products these companies currently produce.
Yeah...Not gonna happen.
The Big 3 aren't the ones having problems. The AUTO INDUSTRY is having problems. Every manufacturer of automobiles has seen the sales numbers drop (at best) by 20% a month for the last three months. Even the industry's anointed "do-no-wrong, their shit smells like fresh cinnamon buns" companies Toyota and Honda are taking beatings. Hell, Toyota is going to take their first loss EVER. EVER. The Big 3 were in a bad spot because they were left holding the bag when gas prices skyrocketed. They were making what the public wanted, and were getting fat. Shame on them. Toyota and Honda benefited from their innovations, and the Big 3 have now gone into full chase mode. For the previous years, Toyota was chasing the Big 3 in the SUV and Truck market, and were getting their asses handed to them.
I do have to chuckle at the backlash against the UAW. The UAW is evil because they "bent the big three over the table during the fat years" by demanding profit sharing, and reaping fat bonuses for their workers. Meanwhile, Wal-Mart is evil because they don't provide benefits, make employees work unpaid overtime, and their management gets fat bonuses....
(I'm not too interested in the debate about wage disparity and the cost of labor vs the cost a car, I just find it funny that when a company doesn't provide something, the company sucks, but when a union bargins for that same thing for employees, they're being greedy assholes.)
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
Steve Jobs would disagree with you and he has the sucess to prove it.
I would as well. When making a breakthrough product, don't rely on too much market research. People tend to limit themselves to what they already know. Lots of people who crapped on the iPhone when it first appeared now own one. Market research is great for refining an existing product, but not for breakthrough product DESIGN.
By it's nature, breakthrough products are a gamble and not a science.
Whatever is decided, some industries will gain and others will lose. Those which see that the projects would cost them, either financially or in the strength of their influence, will attempt to change the plans to suit their needs. They will do this by attempting to sway the people making the choices, either with threats or rewards. Congress is their playing field, and they know very well how to manipulate its members. Therefore it seems to me that in order for any plan to stay on course we will also have to intervene in the cycle of manipulation of our government. Any suggestions on how to accomplish that?
I agree with the first paragraph... I have no desire to wait around for a train to show up. Of course, the submitter of the story wants us all to live in urban environments, but alas, this is not the case for most of the US.
The second paragraph is flame-bait. No links? Foreign car manufacturers even in the US are subsidized far more than US counterparts. That's not FUD, it's a simple fact. Inside the US, they are subsidized.
"Spare me?" Is that an argument? Mod this down.
I think if we could emulate the human circulatory system and think of cars as red blood cells and veins/arteries as rail system. We have the majority of basic infra structure in USA. The basics being -utilize the current system of highways to build a rail system above and in the middle of the highway that lets cars/trucks get on and off easily to the more efficient train. You would park your car on the train and have a lunch while you zoomed across America. You have freedom of choice by getting off the train with your own vehicle and doing what you will. You would still have the highway to accommodate the old style cars and trucks. Then there could be a reasonable functional-ability of a little battery car that will go 200 miles per charge. Big semi-trucks would only haul trailers from train depot to destination. The technology and engineering of the train would of course depend on the high speed chair lift mechanism and a couple straps of graphene.
I'm guessing that knapper_tech must live in a big city. The reason (in my uninformed opinion) that rails won't work for most of America is that there is too much space, things are too spread out, there are not enough "areas of concentration" to link together in any practical way, and that, in general, America is designed around the idea that everyone has a car. In addition, most places don't really seem to have much of a planning department; rather, development planning seems mostly left to (self-interested) developers, who generally care little for solving area-wide problems.
I think the solution to this problem (of reworking transportation away from inefficient personal cars) will have to be more forward-looking rather than coming from previous centuries. Perhaps cars may evolve into self-driven vehicles that can link themselves together into small "trains" (without rails, on mostly-normal roads).
Sure, it is difficult to think of a solution that isn't super-complex and therefore having lots of potential robustness issues. Engineering safeguards for all the potential kinks people can throw into a system is really difficult. But perhaps these problems may be more easily solved than trying to rework the whole country around a different transportation paradigm.
Than again, maybe I'm full of it. Perhaps "if you build it, they will come". Maybe rails will work in some areas if the existing transportation options are sucky enough (which may happen the next time gas prices spike).
Just some random thoughts from a flu-infected human.
This Fox News meme about "government programs causing the great depression" is ignorance in action. It only showed up recently as some Rovian talking point.
Fact is that it was a combination of poor free market regulation and then the Dust Bowl disaster that threw things into disarray.
Try getting facts from someplace other than the Morning Zoo Croo.
How about over head power like high speed rail and some bus systems?
Great idea. You could get ready built electric cars from a fair ground.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I always thought they should turn their attention to manufacturing windmills. They have the workers with the skills. They have the factories, if not quite the right machinery. They have at least some of the right suppliers. I suppose there are lots of reasons why they don't, but it's an idea.
The problem with trying to make money off of cars in a recession is that cars aren't scarce. If you really need a car you can pick a used one up for $2000 easily. If everyone usually buys a new car every 5 years and suddenly decides to put it off a year, you've lost 20% of your income. It's an obvious problem that they should have been prepared for.
Anyway. Windmills!
Sure, they can retool to make anything, but the Big Three's problem is not the product they manufacture. If they produced things more efficiently than other manufacturers, they could leverage their processes, work force, and facilities to compete. But they don't have a competitive advantage in those areas, in fact, those are their weaknesses. US automakers should learn to make cars better in a modern global market instead of applying their poor model in other sectors.
Greetings,
All we hear about commuter rail, commuter rail, I agree it's been tried and it hasn't worked. What we need is industrial rail or rail for places where you can't or it's not good to drive. For instance when my family went to the mall of america, the hotel had a bus, my dad said it was worth it to not have to drive.
sincerely,
steve
Where were all you people when we were bailing out Wall Street? What I don't get is why the middle class constantly attacks itself. Have we been sold that the American dream is to get rich and step on the little guy?
Shut the fuck up...I am sick of all of these right wing talking points about the UAW. Get your lazy ass up and work a 40 hour week with your hands on an assembly line and come back here bitching about the UAW... you sorry motherfucker. It is all about living wages.. You cant have an ecaonomy that is total sevice based...cry cleaning...yard and IT just wont cut it..you have to have a heavy industrial base... Would you like some fries with that? Bitch
Interestingly, at one time I seem to recall the Right claiming that pensions and employer provided health plans etc. were the 'right' way to do it. Supposedly, such plans negated the need for national health care and social security plans above the subsistence level.
Looks like that's not all that viable after all.
The next 'great idea' was to put retirement funds into mutual funds and other such investments. Ooops, wrong again! Please enjoy your Gains Burgers. Gotta polish the yacht now!
In American industry, the more unreasonable the request, the better the engineers and workers assigned to the problem like it. American White and Blue collar labor loves and lives for the "moon shot" - we don't know how we'll do it, the current state-of-the-art says we can't do it, and we've got an irrationally short timeframe to do it in. Out of our way, we'll freakin' do it.
This is reflected in the Aerospace industry, in Silicon Valley, and even in Detroit. Ford asked their engineers and UAW workers to build a hybrid. They built one, then two hybrids that beat the everloving hell out of the Japanese models.
Here's the deal, tho... if Ford didn't have an "outsider" CEO, a guy who came from Boeing, it would never have been done.
There is a class of employee in Detroit who refuses to see the writing on the wall. Who refuses to alter the way they've been doing things for decades, convinced of their inherent superiority.
Not the UAW line workers. Not the pencil-pusher engineers. The management. The MBA miracles who have, in concert, done their damndest to run the US auto industry into the ground.
The engineers love a challenge, and American engineering stands for itself - from the original Model T to the Apollo Program to the Apple II. The workers stand for themselves, Union or not - Ford (Union) and Honda (Not) get about the same productivity from their American factories, and at the same cost, and it's a hell of a lot better than even the Japanese factories. (The problem facing the Big Three is actually =overproduction= - their factories churn out too much product that no-one is buying, because the product is crap, as mandated by MBA Miracles.) The Unions take pride in their work... you don't hear much about "those shoddy Boeing Jets", despite being engineered and made by Union members.
The management, the "money-men" - they all suck. Universally. This is the same class of management pros who ran Wallstreet into the ground. Fire them all, and put an engineer or a union boss in charge - I can guarantee a better product at a lower cost.
There is no light rail system in the world that can compete with a hybrid car in terms of environmental friendliness. Take a look at Patrick Bedard's article "Save Energy, Take the Car" from the December Car and Driver. '"Most light-rail systems use as much or more energy per passenger mile as the average passenger car, several are worse than the average light truck, and none is as efficient as a Prius,â writes Randal Oâ(TM)Toole in a new study from the Cato Institute titled âoeDoes Rail Transit Save Energy or Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions?"' http://www.caranddriver.com/features/columns/c_d_staff/patrick_bedard/save_energy_take_the_car_column
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France's TGV is moving people at 574km/h.
Not quite; 574km/h was the maximum speed obtained on a special test run, using a train consisting solely of power cars (i.e., no passenger cars), with modified electrical systems and a special raised voltage, just to demonstrate the theoretical possibilities. The maximum speed day to day is 320km/h.
Not that that invalidates the rest of the article; passenger rail in the US is lagging behind the state of the art and, in many cases, behind the state of the practice (witness the state of Amtrak, which makes Britain's post-privatisation railways look like a model of efficiency).
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Light rail works very well, is cheap and easy to implement. Just needs all the outliers in the outer suburbs to move in a bit and you have a viable system. And walking (OMG a curse word) is good too..
I just made a weekend trip from western ma to buffalo. About 350 miles. Round trip was over $130 dollars round trip, travel time was 9 hours. Plus all the before and after time dealing with a station, taxi/parking, etc
Even in my Jeep Liberty getting ~22 mi/gal it ended up being less than $100 including tolls. And this was when gas was over $1 more than it is now. Travel time was a smidge over 5 hours. Plus, when I decided to sleep in an extra hour before my return leg it wasn't a big deal. And when I got there I didn't have to worry about how I was going to get around for the weekend.
And this was just for me. If I had another 2 or 3 people in the car the train would never be cheaper even at $10 gas and chances are someone would have a better travel car than I have.
Now don't get me wrong. I tried, and really wanted the train to work. But it simply didnt for me. And where the price to drive stays pretty much the same when adding passengers, trains just start to add up more.
And this isn't just a US thing. On my company trips to northern France we would have people from other plants in France meet us. The furthest being Dijon, a pretty good 6-8 hour drive. Across the board they almost always avoided taking the train and preferred to drive. Especially if it was 2 or more people. It was simply cheaper, faster, and simpler. Outside of Metro areas I simply think trains are overrated.
Actually, GM have a division which builds diesel locomotives.
Rail has been a popular environmentalist cure for traffic, pollution and fossil fuel use since at least the Arab oil embargo of 1972.
The issues which have prevented its universal adoption across the United States are still here.
Don't hold your breath on rail.
No, the traditional barrier to consumer rail is the airline industry, who's powerful lobby prevents any public funds from going towards those high initial investment costs. The airlines depend upon short hop feeder routes--Washington to New York, for example--because their consistent volume makes it easy to optimize those routes. Consumer rail would directly compete, especially now with air travel requiring hours at each end for security, only to leave you with a cab or bus ride to get into the city.
Until the airline industry in the U.S. stops actively blocking the development of rail, the U.S. will never get the rail system it deserves.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
The United States is experiencing a fundamental shift in demographics, this includes geographic migrations of people from areas A,B,C to areas X,Y,Z. How this will settle in 10-20 years is anyone's guess. My hope is that it will result in a massive rail system which will allow smaller communities to survive and allow said communities' residents to easily commute to large city centers without having to drive to them. In my dream world, hopefully this could help quell urban sprawl, which is really a significant factor bringing down the United States.
The entire North American infrastructure, housing, suburbs, malls and shopping centers were designed on the premise of people moving around in their own cars. North America had the space, did not have the restrictions of hundred years old city structures like in Europe. North America had the wealth to support all these ideas. The cars, driving on open wide highways are the very fabric of the image of how the world sees America.
It is impossible to change this overnight.
It's clear, North America needs cars.
North America needs cars to satisfy their customers, instead of the oil cartels.
North America needs cars, designed, built and consumed in North America, the car industry should be part of the North American economy, which is rebuilding the North American middle class.
Everybody should understand what Mr. Ford knew: there is no North American car industry without North American middle class. There is no North American middle class without North American middle class wages.
I mostly agree with your statements, except for this one:
Customers define the market, not the business.
In this case, I believe Detroit had quite an influential hand in creating the demand for cars we see today. Another exception to your statement:
Diamonds.
I think we need a computer analogy somewhere in here...
Let's not assume your craptastic American rail experience is representative of a REAL rail system.
The train system in the US doesn't work because it is only a half-assed system. A real train system incorporates end-to-end solutions. It should be faster, cheaper, and more efficient than your automobile.
Look at Switzerland for a real rail system example. MUCH better than driving.
We need a wholesale replacement of the automobile transportation infrastructure system with a rail-based system.
Your car is expensive. It costs you $1000/month to own a car, with depreciation, gas, insurance, and so on. A rail-based system is MUCH cheaper to you than that.
You have the cart before the horse. Customers define the market, not the business.
Not entirely true. Big Businesses have notorious records for shaping the market to limit consumer's choices or to mislead them. Yes, the Big 3 did do something to cut back on public transportation to boost their market. I forget the details, however. IBM, I am told, used to send in agents to impersonate their competitors and "sell" them faulty equipment that would break down, only to come in again as themselves with the "better" IBM solution.
And if you are not aware of what Microsoft has been doing over the decades to limit consumer choices, you must be living in a cave somewhere!
As far as the auto industry is concerned, I'd say let them crash and burn. Labor unions have raped this country of jobs and quality in the name of "protecting the worker". Now the results of their many decades of effort has come home to roost, and they need to be broken already. Likewise, the big 3 have operated inefficiently and tell me why we should keep such failures around? LET THEM CRASH AND BURN.
Besides, you didn't see any inclination of the government to come along and "rescue" the tech busts 8 or 9 years ago. Why should the auto industry get any better treatment?
Let evolution take its course already.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
Where were we when we were bailing out Wall Street?
Screaming at the top of our lungs to stop it, to no avail. Just like we're doing now.
Learn about Photography Basics.
For about a year I worked 7PM to 7AM Monday through Saturday, for $8.00 an hour stacking boxes. thats 60 hours a week and $500. I lived fine, hell I could have had kids, but I saved it for college. I'm with you on the living wage bit, it's just your a fucking idiot with an inflated sense of "give me," a living wage in this country is $5 an hour tops. And you know what? it makes me hate the UAW even more because I realize what over indulged asshole they are, assembly line isn't Hard work, it's low stress mindless repetition that a trained monkey or immigrant can do. Hard work is having to deal with massive stress, deadlines, and a constantly changing environment that requires specialty knowledge. Work of the mind is hundred of times more valuable, and thousands of times harder.
I'm really glad we didn't have a "living wage" law that would have kept me from being hired and give me the opportunity to go on to college.
Of course our economy is service based, assholes like you acting in the interests of the "Working Man" have driven the industry away. Thanks for your help, now could you please stop?
Are you fucking kidding? You seriously think people are buying Honda's because they're cheaper and that they'd really rather buy a Ford?
While a mass-transit train system works in many situations, America is not one of them. Much of America was developed around the idea of living in the suburbs, and driving many miles to the city where you do your work. It's not like Europe, where towns and cities are arranged from pre-industrial revolution days, or Japan, where cities where built, after World War Two, with the goal of placing modern westernized cities in a cramped island nation.
Unless you built train stations with only a few miles separating each, most commuters would rather drive their cars, not wanting to put up with the hassle and waiting. Trains are only feasible for cross-country trips (including freight), as an alternative to air travel, or as subways/light rail inside cities. Look at the northeastern US: despite investment in rail systems to accommodate the daily commuter, highways like I95 and the Long Island Expressway are still heavily used.
The only way to alleviate this problem of transportation would be to restructure the way Americans work and live, by being employed locally. For many people, this may mean a choice between a more desirable career, or a more desirable living environment. It's a waste of energy to transport yourself for hours between home and work everyday. This American ideal has only been sustained due to decades of relatively cheap energy. Now that other nations are starting to compete for what's left, things are gonna change, one way or another.
I live in Washington DC. I am a rail fan, but when I go to New York, I take the $25 Chinatown bus rather than pay $100-$250 to take Amtrak. (Both fairs one way ).
The train is already more comfortable and faster, I cannot justify the extra dollars.
It will take some amazing increase in rail speed for me to even think of taking the train at these prices.
Bookwormhole.net over 6600 published book reviews
I find it more than a little disheartening that an article that talks about the collapse of the ENTIRE auto industry is cited as an article about "superior competition". This person is obviously living in the 1980's. The product coming out of Detroit today (where I have lived most of my life) is as good as any product coming out of Japan or the Japanese US plants in any statistically meaningful way, gets as good or better (Ford) gas mileage and are generally safer (again Ford). I will agree that the past management of the auto industry is largely at fault for many, but not all, of their problems. 30 and out was a BIG mistake (Thanks Jack Smith), cradle to grave health care was another big mistake (thanks UAW) but these are benefits that many government employees still enjoy today. As to the folks that say let them go broke I have news for you. Any failure of one of the Detroit 3 will cause financial hardship like you have never seen in your lifetime. One in 10 jobs in this country depends directly on the auto industry. Think California is immune from it - what do you think is the most microprocessor intensive thing that you own? (Hint, it's not your PC or Mac) Its your car. Automobile manufacturing is nothing less than the most high-tech manufacturing industry in world. Moreover if you think that we should let all of our cars be built overseas you need to think back to that little conflagration from 1941 to 1945. If it weren't for Detroit you would be speaking either German or Japanese right now and if you weren't the right religion you wouldn't be speaking at all. Everyone in this country also needs to think about a little more recent issue we had with a couple of planes used as missiles on 9-11-2001. Did any of the tech companies answer the call to get the US out of the economic doldrums it was in? NO! It was GM and 0% financing that got the economy going again. The Detroit 3 have done a lot more for this country than to it and it is time that the rest of the country realizes that without a strong manufacturing base this country becomes a toothless tiger in a very dangerous would. I for one don't want to see that happen. I find it interesting that the very companies that once rebuilt Japan after WWII are the one's that are now paying the price for their success and many so-called American don't seem to care. Shame on you!
As someone who has worked on road crews digging ditches, cleaned offices of 3rd shift, ran a machine gluing cardboard boxes together, and a wide variety of assembly line work I still say fuck the UAW and the Big 3 management whose been willingly taking it up the ass for years. If they can't remain competitive they don't deserve to survive.
Also, for someone complaining I right wing talking points you should had a lot of left wing platitudes in your post.
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them
You know, as much as we've heard about the auto industry in the last few months, and their ailments, as well as endless ad nauseam fixes, there are a few things that *NOBODY* wants to talk about here, at least no one involved.
First off, tage a gander at CAFE regulations, or the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards set by the EPA in the US. This is something which, of course, was instituted after the Oil Crisis in 1972. In theory, its a nice noble set of standards for regulating better fuel economy in the US.
Now, in spite of the fact that these standards are something of a joke (they haven't changed a bit since 1992, and have only been increased a grand whopping total of 9.5 MPG since they were instituted over 30 years ago), there are a few peculiarities in the enforcement of these which, I think, are specifically causing or have caused the problems the Big 3 face today, and, in fact, were specifically caused by Congress and the Clinton Administration.
Now, buried within these standards is a little rule called the Two Fleet Rule. Essentially, what it says is that the foriegn produced cars imported by a company to the US are a different "fleet" from the domestically produced cars. It goes further to say that, in fact, if a car company (by default the Big 3) want to be considered "domestic" producers that the cars they produce in the US are, in fact, the only ones that count for their inclusion in the CAFE regulations.
Now, this has some nasty side effects, the biggest being that, in order to be considered "domestic" car producers, the Big 3 were actually forced to manufacture all of their vehicles in the US, regardless of whether or not they could actually afford to sell said vehicles at a profit. In other words, this "2 Fleet Fule" was a very specific sop directly to the Auto Unions and forced the Big 3 to produce and sell their economy cars a loss for 2 decades. Not only that, but since they were actually losing money on a huge percentage of sales, they were forced to concentrate production on the most profitable lines, namely SUV's and Minivans. Which worked great, sort of, for a decade or so. Until the public decided that a) gas was too expensive to spend in a gas guzzling vehicle, and b) the enviroment matters.
So, a downturn in large vehicle sales causes a double whammy against the Big 3, in that they can't afford not to make them, and the fact that they still have to produce a significant amount of small vehicles to sell at a loss since they can't make a profit anyway. Not only that, but they can't make a profit on increased sales of economically viable vehicles as those were already selling at a loss...
Sucks to be them.
So we need to blame government, specifically the Democrats but I believe the measure had decent bi-partisan support, for this mess. By giving a few people job security, they've endangered the well being of an entire industry.
Oh, and these are the same people we're trusting to solve the mess...
What could possibly go wrong?
Bill
Tourists like it though.
More people need to hear this message in the U.S. We are soooo far behind Europe and Asia in transportation habit it's not funny. I blame the big 3 relentlessly advertising their WWII truck platforms on tee vee (now with new improved CUPHOLDERS) for a quick easy ethics free buck.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
If you're going to build an infrastructure, how about this idea?
How about building an infrastructure which consists of two parts. (1) Have a large network of electrified rails which can transport (2) a new type of electric car which can either run on the street via batteries or use this new electrified rail for long distance "freeway" style movement? The vehicle could be something like this... but runs on electric and uses the power from the rails...
That way, the current battery issue for electric vehicles would be solved and this time we can design this infrastructure to prevent accidents with various technologies built in.
Well... it is in a global pollution sense, but it's not the problem with the auto industry.
The problem with the auto industry is that they're selling $40,000 rip-off SUVs and still not making a profit.
How is this possible? Where does all the money go? They should among be the richest companies in the world but they're constantly on the verge of bankruptcy.
No sig today...
I don't know why anyone thinks this is a potential solution. Passenger rail traffic has *NEVER* been a viable proposition, at last not for over 100 years, outside of a few commuter applications. Passenger service was subsidized by freight as a glamour operation for decades until interstate trucking started putting the pinch on freight. Finally, the losses on passenger service were just too much, and everyone flew on an airplane anyway, so it died. Amtrak is a financial disaster even with huge government subsidies and unbelievable fares for anything other than a coach seat. Anyone want to spend 53 hours one-way from Chicago to San Francisco in a coach seat?
Moreover, why in the world does anyone think Detroit can do a better job of it than existing rail car manufacturers? They haven't shown enough innovation to make a slightly different car - how in the hell are they going to be innovative enough to compete in a nearly unrelated industry?
Brett
there should be no concept like a certain "industry" actually.
as mankind progresses, its needs and ways also change. nothing stays the same. everything has to change in lockstep with the civilization.
remember carriage industry. a lot of people were dependent on them once upon a time, just 100 years ago.
a lot of the corporations went bankrupt, a high number of them moved to other fields, but a goodly number of them reinvented themselves to produce automobiles, automobile parts or supplies.
that is the way that it should be. there should be no stagnant industry that defines our living style, but, our changing living style should define industries.
what should current auto industry do ?
reinvent themselves to adapt to new transportation methods.
hybrid cars, alternative fuel cars are a good start. rail transportation contracts, is a good start. hell, even space transportation IS a start, as you can follow from the recent moves to open up space to free enterprise, and recent successes of some.
no sir. no stagnancy. you cant stand still and expect to be accommodated. if it was like that, carriage companies would have been accommodated.
reinvent yourself.
Read radical news here
Mass transit is neither cost-effective nor green. Per passenger-mile, it costs more to operate and generates more green-house gases than private automobiles. But don't believe me. Check out what the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, The Atlantic, and others have to say about it.
http://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/re/2004/c/pages/light_rail.html
Based solely on dollar cost, the annual light-rail subsidies could instead be used to buy an environmentally friendly hybrid Toyota Prius every five years for each poor rider and even to pay annual maintenance costs of $6,000. Increases in pollution would be minimal with the hybrid vehicle, and 7,700 new vehicles on the roadway would result in only a 0.5 percent increase in traffic congestion.3 And there would still be funds left overâ"about $49 million per year. These funds could be given to all other MetroLink riders (amounting to roughly $1,045 per person per year) and be used for cab fare, bus fare, etc.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/197910/197910
The received wisdom on this topic is easily stated: 1. It is self-evident that public transportation is vastly more energy-efficient than automobiles; 2. It is self-evident that investing money to improve transit facilities will attract many more passengers. Therefore, the national energy policy ought to give major attention to building new transit systems and revitalizing old ones. Unfortunately, both of these "self-evident" premises turn out to be false.
http://www.templetons.com/brad/transit-myth.html
Particularly disturbing were the numbers for some of the worst transit systems, including the light rail in San Jose, which I sometimes ride. That system takes twice as much energy per passenger than private cars do. It's not even the worst -- that's Cleveland, which also is part of a grid more dependent on fossil fuels than San Jose.
http://www.gregburch.net/cars/plans.html
From a purely utilitarian point of view, it would be cheaper to simply buy compact cars for the poorest of the poor, or even subsidize some kind of taxi cab service for poor people. But that idea is too "way out there" - much stranger than ripping up our cities for years and years while the planners implement their expensive dreams.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
Look, an auto company would have been a fool not to tap into the SUV fad--it was quick, easy money. The problem was only a fool would have seen SUV's for anything but a fad. A smart auto company would have pimped SUV's for as long as the fad lasted, but all the while plan for something else once the fad goes away.
The US automakers seemed to have thought SUV's would be a long-term trend and not a short term "cheap gas" fad. They put all their eggs in the SUV basket and forgot about the whole "long term" thing. Now they are Screwed with a capital S.
Maybe this business model doesn't work anymore. Maybe smart auto companies will engineer business processes that don't require 5 years of re-tooling between models.
Seeing as how they are making said cars on our soil, we just kick them out and re-purpose the plants to make stuff.
There are very good arguments for creating a "floor" to gas prices to a) stabilize oil prices and b) encourage domestic companies to create replacements.
The Morning Zoo Croo tells it like it is! Fox news can't lie, right? I mean, they are the only fair and unbalanced media out there, right?
COugh. Hack. Weeze.
Seriously, does anybody else have a problem with high-school football-team design style they use on their sets. Fox news has the most tacky set of any news outlet. I think there is a reason for it--any sophistication would turn off their viewers (after all, sophistication is a big-city, educated thing...).
This is ironic, considering I recently watched a PBS documentary that showed how GM conspired with a number of other companies and successfully dismantled reliably working trolley systems in various cities back in the 1930's to force people to use buses or cars.
More information can be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_Streetcar_Scandal
http://www.lovearth.net/gmdeliberatelydestroyed.htm
http://www.culturechange.org/issue10/taken-for-a-ride.htm
doing market research and seeing what people will buy
This is a great strategy for producing better and better wheels. But it's a terrible strategy for producing something that is better than a wheel.
In the course of every project, it will become necessary to shoot the scientists and begin production.
Sprawling expensive mass transit is hardly a breakthrough product, though.
Unknown to most of the people who've commented so far, freight rail in the US is making a big comeback. US rail traffic in ton-miles has doubled since 1980. LA opened the Alameda Corridor a few years ago, with three tracks in a trench, like a freeway, across LA from the port to connections to the rest of the US. Most major railroads are upgrading capacity. The work often isn't highly visible, because the upgrades are heavier rail, better ballast, better signaling systems, better locomotives, and better rolling stock. But it's happening.
Chicago is the bottleneck in the US rail system. A deal is about to close under which Canadian National will take over U.S. Steel's old railroad and upgrade it to route traffic around downtown Chicago. Suburban residents are bitching.
I call it red, white and blue color scheme faux patriotism and propaganda designed to get trick you. "Fair and balanced" means "those who disagree are idiots". Combine the two and you get the last eight years. That people willingly watch that crap is astounding.
Now excuse me, I need to eat my freedom fries. Cooked in pure american corn oil and driven home in my 10mpg H2 (fuck Hall Gore and his "Global Warming" myth). Saffola Oil sounds foreign and weird and anybody selling a spice rack with more than 12 spices must have a few duplicates. And "Oregano"??!! What the hell is that!?
But seriously. You cannot seriously say with a straight face the Fox News graphics are anything but tacky. Really? Seriously?
Pay more attention in the future.
Or shut up.
Either way...
Done. Now am I repeat the previous comment verbatim, or what?
The second paragraph is flame-bait. No links? Foreign car manufacturers even in the US are subsidized far more than US counterparts. That's not FUD, it's a simple fact. Inside the US, they are subsidized.
Nonsense, and expressing my opinion about whether I want my tax dollars spent on private companies' folly is not "flamebait." Have you read the moderation guidelines?
So a state kicks in $50 or $100 million incentive build a plant 10 or 15 years ago and that's a relevant subsidy? That's why Toyota and Honda kick GM's asses in a multi-billion dollar industry 2008? Do you have any idea how little money that is in the US car market?
You're going to have to do better than that weak link, brother. Look at UAW's ridiculous demands (that the stupid Big 3 admittedly gave in to). Why do you think GM wanted to buyout all 74,000 of its workers(and why can't it just lay them off like other companies)? What does that tell you about their labor costs? From my link:
UAW spokespeople have roundly condemned the estimate of labor costs in excess of $70 per current worker hour. They assert these figures include the cost of current retiree pension and health benefits. They have done so, however, without marshalling evidence to support their case.
The Detroit automakers explain in their SEC filings that their benefit expenses are for current workers, not former employees. This is because they follow generally accepted accounting principles in preparing these estimates. If the figures did include current retiree benefits, the average hourly amount would be much higher than they actually report.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
NOT to bail out these banks and Financial services industries. Do not reward failure, on Wall Street or in Detroit. This is why we have bankruptcy courts.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Most of the comments on here are likely from people that know nothing about the auto industry. I'm not here to say that everything in their past is all rosy, but it is quite a bit more complicated than most would suggest.
Everyone wants to say that they made a mistake with SUV's. If that is the case, then why did the Big 3 manage to sell millions of them per year? I guess there were millions of people that just bought something that they did not want. That would also explain why Toyota spent over 1,000,000,000 dollars to build a truck plant in Texas. The Big 3 have built fuel-efficient cars in the past, but the American public did not buy them or want them.
Beta-Max was considered better than VHS for many reason, but still lost out. The best product does not always win.
The problems of the auto industry are very complicated to say the least. Labor is only part of the problem. There are few companies around that are as old or as big as the Big 3. They have bureaucracies that are only rivaled by the US government. It would not surprise me if there are similar circumstances with the software industry in 80 years. It takes 3 years to take a car from idea to production, even more if it involves creating new technologies.
If it were easy to build a car that millions of people would buy, everyone would be doing it.
These companies have been making changes over the last decade, but it takes time to change the direction of such a large ship. Changes are already in motion, but will take a couple of years to reach fruition.
For everyone on here that is so quick to slam the US auto industry, when was the last time you gave them a chance?
Their labor costs are absolutely horrendous.
Labor costs are not really that much. It takes on average only 21 man hours to build an automobile at GM. ( http://www4.vindy.com/content/local_regional/340717933141399.php/
At even $100/hr, the labor cost that goes into a Escalade is only $2,100 out of a $50,000 vehicle.
Even on a $25,000 car, removing all labor costs would only lower the price to $23,000, hardly enough to get hundreds of thousands of consumers into the showroom to buy a new car.
Skip ------ See the latest from http://www.anArchyFortWorth.com
Rail-based infrastructures work better with higher population densities; otherwise, you're laying an awful lot of track to get from point A to point B.
I grew up in Tokyo, so I know a little something about population density. Higher-value real estate is congregated around rail stations. People want to live with good access to rail stations. They compete for jobs located near rail stations. You can ABSOLUTELY live out in the boonies and have a big yard, etc. in Japan. If you look at photos of Mt. Fuji, you'll see that there aren't pagodas crammed all up against it. There is PLENTY of room to live in Japan.
You argument is common in America. Yes, we have poorly planned cities throughout our country. Installing a rail system now will reorganize these communities and massively shift land values. The same effect will be felt when gas prices return to > $4.00 / gallon. You can choose to be proactive or reactive regarding our transportation system. I choose the former.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
But it's a terrible strategy for producing something that is better than a wheel.
I was in a hurry and rushed my post. Innovation is great, so long as it serves a need or want. But good luck raising venture capital for a "great idea" that has no market (and I paraphrase Guy Kawasaki here). Does that make more sense?
Yes, companies, to some degree, tell people what they want through good marketing (e.g., ipod). But it still has to be a good product and people ultimately still have to want it. If customers walk into an Apple store and they all have to listen to a communal music player (analogue to mass transit), I don't think even Steve Jobs could sell it, no matter how much reality distortion spells he casts.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Why didn't I think of it before? What the US auto industry needs is.....A genuine, Bona fide, Electrified, Six-car Monorail!
Miss Hoover: I hear those things are awfully loud...
Lyle Lanley: It glides as softly as a cloud.
Apu: Is there a chance the track could bend?
Lyle Lanley: Not on your life, my Hindu friend.
Barney: What about us brain-dead slobs?
Lyle Lanley: You'll be given cushy jobs.
Abe: Were you sent here by the devil?
Lyle Lanley: No, good sir, I'm on the level.
Wiggum: The ring came off my pudding can.
Lyle Lanley: Take my pen knife, my good man.
I swear it's Springfield's only choice...
Throw up your hands and raise your voice!
All: Monorail!
Lyle Lanley: What's it called?
All: Monorail!
Lyle Lanley: Once again...
All: Monorail!
Marge: But Main Street's still all cracked and broken...
Bart: Sorry, Mom, the mob has spoken!
All: Monorail!
Monorail!
Monorail!
[big finish]
Monorail!
Homer: Mono... D'oh!
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
Thus SUVs are monstrosities generally while trucks, locomotives and buses are generally efficient.
I just wanted to extend your example of rail efficiencies.
Trains also benefit from tracks that have been built as level as possible. Less energy is required to haul mass up hills or mountains. Roads take cars and semi trucks through many more elevation changes than trains encounter. A train also has very controlled and planned stops and starts. Trucks used to haul goods (and cars) are susceptible to traffic and must burn energy braking and accelerating repetitively throughout their routes. These are massive losses of energy that a train never suffers from.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
As an engineer, it drives me nuts to watch someone troubleshoot the wrong problem. American auto makers have no problems competing outside the USA. Why? Well, they are not subject to asinine CAFE standards, congressional regulations and miles and miles of red tape that have been added on to BIG EVIL AUTO MANUFACTURERS by the US Congress. Not to mention that each car made is heavily taxed at every level, from the top to the bottom. The feds, the state and local governments soak the BIG AUTO companies, they've been doing it for years, and now they've finally killed them.
It is also the Unions. Did you know that GM has roughly 90,000 workers, yet provides health coverage for nearly 10x that? Yes, nearly a MILLION people are getting lifetime health insurance benefits because of the Auto unions squeezing the tit of BIG AUTO, "those big evvvvvil auto bastards that make billions of dollars"... well, the auto unions should be jumping with glee, they've been working to kill the industry for decades just to prove that they hold all the power. Well, they proved their point and in doing so they have killed the goose - and we all know what that means; no more golden eggs. Today, GM is nothing more than an HMO health care provider that just so happens to have a side business of making cars. People blame the auto makers for signing the contracts allowing such generous compensation. However, what they do not realize is that the auto unions threatened massive amounts of immediate pain (strikes) for a labor contract that would meet with disaster in 10-20 years. The industry has had a gun to its head for the past 30-40 years, I just can't believe it took this long to kill them.
Every single other industry in America, when faced with similar treatment (Big EVVVVil oil, or evil [insert industry here]) they simply pulled up stumps and moved their industry overseas. It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to figure out when you're not wanted. Big auto doesn't have that luxury of moving away.
It is the foreign car makers that do not have to comply with CAFE standards, they're doing just fine. Nobody makes big, rugged hard working vehicles like the Americans can. People WANT to buy American vehicles, if they weren't so expensive due to regulations, taxes added to production costs, and union overhead added on to the sticker price of each vehicle.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
Road construction is not the only subsidy. Parking, for example, is never free. Regulations typically require developers to build a certain number of parking spaces. That's another significant cost. Parking spaces in turn increases distances, which then increases the costs of delivering other utilities and services (water, sewage, electricity, and so on). This may sound insignificant until you realize how much of the typical American city is paved - 25-30% I believe. Nor is the effect linear: you're increasing distances in two dimensions, and longer distances make alternative modes (mainly walking) impractical. Imagine how much road and parking space exists per car in a city, then compare that to the cost of land and you'll get an idea of the raw costs of roads and parking before anything is even built. It makes little difference that some of these costs are externalized to the private sector, while others are borne by the government.
Then on top of that you have traffic control and enforcement, never mind environmental and health externalities, loss of life (I believe traffic accidents are the leading cause of death for people under age 35), and so on. I have seen a claim of the public per-car subsidy in my area (Vancouver BC): I don't remember the exact number, but it was in the thousands. We're talking not less than $1500, probably more like $3500. Finally, the cost of owning a car amounts to what, $7000 per year on average? That's not an optional cost (indeed many families need two), given that our cities offer little alternative.
Because many costs of cars are externalized, while most costs of transit are not, cars look cheaper. They aren't. For the individual, the incentives are toward car ownership, but collectively this incurs high costs for all of us. A classic tragedy of the commons.
Will have to find something better than Amtrack to make that happen. After my 9 hour train ride from NYC to Boston I won't be using the acela "express" ever again. I know it is a sample of one trip, but in the last 7 years when I have been regularly fling or driving from Boston to NY and back I never had such a bad trip.
The day that I can't have my car is the day I find a new place to live.
-Jason
As an Apple stockholder.
But Steve himself couldn't make Apple profitable if it lost money on every ipod, as GM and Ford do on every car.
But more to your point, you are right about the ipod, but is its success really due to innovation? Is the ipod really better than other MP3 players? Or is it just great marketing by the best company in America who found a market and ran with it?
Isn't a Segway a much more innovative product? So yes, you need innovation, but the coolest gadget in the world won't sell if people don't want it (see also: Mac Cube, MacTV 1.0, Newton, cool gadgets that never took off). And even if you can, you have to make a profit on each one to stay in business - or get a government bailout.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Get your lazy ass up and work a 40 hour week with your hands on an assembly line and come back here bitching about the UAW...
I wish I could get $75K+ a year in pay and benefits for a job that requires zero previous education and experience. Sure those guys work hard. For the salaries they're bringing down, they oughta.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
What the hell? He calls grandparent "motherfucker" and tells him to "shut the fuck up" and he gets modded "insightful"? WTH?
Why do we even have a moderation system here if parent is modded up instead of down?
...have been in CANADA. Where they don't have to pay for crippling, expensive, private health insurance. The workforce in Indiana, Kentucky and Alabama are also of such poor quality there (low education level) that they have had to stoop to pictogram instructions at work stations. And Canada? High literacy rate, great quality workforce.
Time to get back to basics...invest in educating our populace and cease to be the last industrialized nation without some sort of guaranteed health care for all. Otherwise the rest of the world will continue to eat our lunch.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
This is an artist's rendering of the new mode of transit that is being imported from Japan to solve our dependence on foreign oil.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
That is /completely/ debatable.
Fact: We have far more space to cover than most countries, and we cover it with highway, not rail. The auto industry knew, and knows, this. The problem is simply that the means of propulsion is in transition. Peak oil (see chart) seems to have pretty clearly passed, and even if it hasn't, geopolitical issues are having the same effect. So motive power is really the key issue here.
What Detroit needs to do -- and what I think it will be forced to do -- is convert to long range electric vehicles, that's all. Light through heavy. That's what the environment needs, that's what petroleum product availability will require, and that's what works with the US infrastructure.
They can do this. It's all about the power sources. Batteries are getting close to what we might be able to put up with, and the promise of ultracaps is still somewhere over the horizon (and if it ever gets here, that'll pretty much be the end of batteries.)
As for rail, land is too expensive / valuable in the US for any real rail development. Look at the highline, an east-to-west rail passage that is extremely busy; but no amount of congestion has been able to get the rails or the government to invest in a second line so that they don't have to delay trains by side-tracking them to spurs to let one train pass by another. This is where they already own the right of way. Nothing is going to get them to open new right of way. Financially speaking, it is incomprehensible.
Electric is the coming thing. Petroleum, hydrogen, hybrid, ethanol, all these will fall by the wayside, because nothing can compete with the distribution system or the mass efficiency of large electricity generating stations. Even petroleum produces far more power in a central electric generation situation, even accounting for transmission losses (which are not as high as most think) than it does being consumed on a per-car basis. But that's not the kicker; the kicker is that we can transition to any mix of any type of generation we want once the transport system is electricity based, because any type of electricity generation system can add power to the entire grid. That means a measured transition to nuclear, solar, wind, wave, geothermal, anything reasonable that comes along.
The problem - as always - is getting US concerns, both political and corporate, to invest in systems and ideas that extend beyond the next quarter, or at most, fiscal year. Everything is about the next quarterly report or the next election. The obvious weight, horsepower, pollution and efficiency advantages of electric should have anyone with any sense investing their heads off. Detroit will get the message eventually. That, or they'll die. And in that case, we'll have a whole new industry springing up, good riddance to the old.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Which America was it where rail was still a viable and widely-used transportation method up until Reagan killed it? In your corner of America, people didn't drive places in 1979, but took trains everywhere?
In the actual US, rail was mostly killed in the 1940s and 50s.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
If GM can't sell Americans what they want at a profit (cars)
Then it stands to reason that Americans didn't want GM's cars. Market research is a great idea, shame that the "Big 3"s position on it has been and will probably always be "we'll tell the market to want what we're selling, because we're the Big 3." If surfing the SUV tsunami square into the $4-a-gallon wall wasn't a big enough clue as to their incapability to keep track of customer demand, take a look at their upcoming "solutions" to the fact that people stopped buying their SUVs: overpriced electric cars, which might have made sense a year ago but won't move an inch on today's $1.50 gas.
Amtrak is basically a rural subsidy, linking together far-flung towns across thousands of miles of track, stopping frequently, because serving those towns is its main point, and the main reason that, politically, it hasn't been killed off yet.
Britain's rail system, by contrast, serves a densely populated, geographically miniscule island, more akin to creating a regional-scale system like Acela than a continental-scale system like Amtrak.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I know this is off topic a bit, but it pisses me off so much to see the government throw fuel economy regulations on the auto companies. Number 1, they are already hurting bad enough. If it's in their best interest, they will do it without regulators. Number 2, any guideline that doesn't take into account efficencey per person/ton of towing weight is moronic. So if a smart car gets 45 MPG and a 15 seat van gets 10, is it more or less efficent for you to take 8 smart cars to carry those 15 people? Yet they are both judges the same by the eyes of the government in their regulations. Even comparing a 35mpg sedan to a SUV, a SUV can carry twice as many people (on a 7-8 passenger SUV) yet the MPG is about half. Seems fair. I know that often the SUVs are empty, and it's hard to take that kind of thing into consideration, but counting all vehicles even is stupid.
I just have this to say. Lets do if there is a good business plan that is in place where value can be added with out never ending subsidies to keep this service running. I get the feeling we want to do this to be green. I know I am playing the role of the evil capitalist, but I like being green only when I can make money doing it.
Actually EMD/GMD was sold to a private capital company several years back. I hate to say it, but they now suffer the same problem as their former parent - quality issues and turning out locomotives that don't reflect any attention to the users' requests (either the crews, the maintenance guys, or the railroad management). They're getting their pants handed to them by GE (who would be the equivalent of Honda in this example).
Don't worry, The New Deal II is just around the corner.
To add salt to the wound, our government still hasn't rectified the biggest ponzi scheme in the history of man-kind. That would be Social Security. This is going to be a fun century. Ohhhh ya...
Life is not for the lazy.
Its sad how discussions about hydrogen are always beat down like above. If you think batteries are more efficent than hydrogen than you are wrong and have been probably duped by auto and energy lobbyists. What you're missing is that you *don't* have electricity in the first place - it must be generated. Hydrogen can be produced *directly* by "cracking" all kinds of greens: - very efficiently - at small to large scales (the bigger the better, about 250 MW beeing the optimum) -
Do those same rednecks know how to capitalize letters that begin sentences? For someone claiming intellectual superiority over these "rednecks" your failing.
It's 'you're', not 'your'.
-- Cheers!
Given their track record, they couldn't even build Python.
The driver is listening to an iPod, CD, or cell phone. The driver is applying makeup or shaving. The driver is eating and drinking. ALL AT THE SAME TIME! You're lucky if the driver isn't also yelling at children, smoking, and even glancing at the morning news.
Given the above, poor steering doesn't matter. Good old Newtonian physics is what matters. Given a crash between two vehicles, you want to be in the heavier one. To a limited extent, it's even good to trade off quality for more mass.
Yeah, it's selfish. Kill the other guy and save yourself.
Even our safety testing assumes a completely passive driver. We do crash tests. We don't do scandinavian-style moose avoidance tests. When a European car is modified for the US market, the suspension is adjusted to make the car tall enough for a better score against the tall US crash test objects. (making the US market version have worse handling than the European market version) We even encourage/require safety devices that actively interfere with the driver, such as seat belts that tighten just when you most need to turn your body to quickly see behind you.
That list blurs many causes of death.
Large cars score worse simply because they can hold more people. You can't put 7 or 8 people in a subcompact.
Cheap cars score worse simply because they are affordable for young drivers.
Pick-ups actually are worse because of weight distribution, but that's far from the only explanation. They also attract young males who want to project a tough-guy image.
The ideal for such a list would be a vehicle that attracts rich 50-year-old women. Something from Mercedes would fit pretty well. Of course, this says nothing about the actual quality of the car.
The bus is in fact a fuel-guzzling monstrosity.
It's terribly wrong to run the numbers with an assumption that busses (and trains) are anywhere near full. Typically they are almost empty, especially outside of the predictable urban routes.
The retro-future style of GM's Aerotrain is something I always found fascinating. It was introduced in the 1950's with the hype that it would save the hurting railroad industry, but being low-cost had its downfalls: modded city busses didn't make the best passenger cars, and the locomotives were hard to maintain/repair.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerotrain_(GM)
I could see a second attempt failing for similar reasons...
You have to know thats not typical. According to http://www.amtrakdelays.com the average delay on the 8am Acela from NY to Boston over the past month has only been 6 minutes. Most trains taking just over 3.5 hours. I never once was delayed more than 10 minutes taking the Acela from DC to NY and back in the 2 years I lived there... it can happen, but its not typical. Outside the NEC, its a different story though..
Yay - someone on Slashdot at least gets some market information correct (do not know about your ideas outside of this post - I've known people who translate what you said into some strange form of a strong command economy).
I somewhat supported the bailout of the financial industry simply because of how much of our world runs on credit and the issue was mostly industry wide. However I also felt that we needed to re-examine things like out anti-trust laws. There were a few companies in there that were specifically targeted.
That is, I adhere to the following logic: any company that is so large it can not be allowed to fail is too large and need to be broken up. Our normal anti-trust laws adhere to competition, yet I think this is at least as important (and maybe even more so given than that, like some of the Auot manufacturers are talking of doing, they want the money and have no change in their business).
Of course that also leaves industry wide issues - like a decent portion of the financial industry bailout. Were this truly an industry issue instead of the fact that the industry is so dominated by three entities that they can do any stupid thing and expect to be bailed out then I would support said bailout.
This isn't so much an "auto industry bailout" as much as it is a "big three bailout" (well, IIRC Ford, while having problems, isn't taking part of the pie so I guess it is "big two bailout"), the former I support, the latter I do not.
Right now I would eve support a specific companies bailout if we were moving towards breaking them up to prevent this in the future - after all few really saw this coming. If they want bailout money then they are too large and need broken up, if they aren't so large that they can not fail then they can do what all others do - chapter 11 or chapter 7.
If these companies were given that choice I wonder how many would go to the govt teat and instead choose chapter 11 and what it was meant for? Same is true for the Financial industry - I would have *loved* to see that same idea there (even though my retirement was managed by AIG).
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
The heritage foundation is a right-wing think tank, you may as well link to the RNC or to anti-union activist sites.
here is the reality.
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Spare me the tired old "pay the rich only" right-wing lie about unions being the problem
As colbert says, "when the ship runs aground, we all know the barnacles are responsible"
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republican pundits: "unions are barnacles preventing the auto industry ship from working properly"
colbert:
"Because everyone knows: when the ship runs aground, it's the barnacles' fault"
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This is going to be a little random.
A brillant battery idea, but it's not mine: Swap the battery rather than charging it in place. Replaceable battery modules can be swapped out quickly and recharged at leisure. Charging stations can have the infrastructure in place to robotically swap batteries in about the time it takes to pump gas. GPS systems can be programmed to route to swapping stations with an available battery for your vehicle. With reliably present battery swapping stations, road trips of any length become possible. It doesn't take a large surplus of batteries to make this work out given the statistical variation - and charging your battery with 220V AC is a good default solution. Forget 110V. That's not going to work. You're going to need more current than your typical wall outlet will provide.
I'll throw in some more thoughts from other posts because I want to go to bed and I don't want to hunt them all down. They're in no particular order.
Obviously some battery standards would help. Hell, even battery attachment and marking standards would help.
Algae can turn farm waste and garbage into biofuel. If we decide to go that route, we need to not think small. We'll need a huge area near the ocean (for water) with good road and fuel lines, which also happens to be below sea level. Lake Okeechobee, New Orleans and Death Valley spring to mind. There will be environmental consequences. The environmental consequences of burning every last trace of fossil fuels will be greater.
Thomas Malthus was right. There are too many of us, and that problem will not only persist: It will grow. Eventually we have to solve the Malthusian problem or we're doomed.
Who are Cereberus' investors? They own Chrysler. They're a private investment group and don't have to give us details about who owns them, or where their money comes from. Is Chrysler even an American car company? We don't know. We do know that Toyota makes cars in the US, as do several other "foreign" manufacturers. The last time I bought a new GM vehicle I discovered some months later it was built in Canada. The "buy American" idea that got us through WWII isn't going to help us in a global economy where a lot of retirement funds own stock and bonds in foreign corporations that make their products in the US. The fuzzing of the "domestic" vs "foreign" argument would be lamentable if it were not spilt milk. It's done and it can't be undone. The global economy was always here, but now it's so entrenched that there's no telling whether you buy your durable goods from a local or global manufacturer, or whether the profits go to Song Kim in Taiwan or pay into the benefits for your disabled neighbour Tim. In the end it doesn't matter. We're all in the same boat, and if it sinks we all walk home or drown.
All the world's nations are looking to suffer the least through this difficulty, so many are looking to shield themselves by comparatively spending less than their peers. Each of us is doing likewise, hoarding what resources we can and hoping that everybody else isn't as wise. Economically that's very very bad, both systemically and individually. We're all doing it wrong. The market crashed. Jobs crashed. Those are bad things. The thing is, when the going gets tough, the tough get going. There's a lot of opportunity here to buy and hold at the bottom of the curve, to wheel and deal with your local car dealer or real estate seller, to get more for your money than was ever possible before. If, as many suspect, runaway inflation occurs in the near future, durable goods bought right now at a fixed interest rate and distressed market price are the best deal ever. If you're free from your job, now is the time to change direction and do what you'ld rather do; live where you'ld rather live - preferably in some career and place where the conditions are better.
In the depression the people who bought gold and silver and hid it in the walls of their homes didn't become wealthy.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
It may be worth looking at google, as they don't have the slant.
http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=acela+breakdown
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=acela+problems&btnG=Search
The trains seem to be of the quality of my old GMC.
When I was on the train we were sharing the track with a non high speed train. To start the delay. We were stalled for hours not going anyplace while they worked on "things". Communication wasn't forthcoming. Work still had to pay for the Acela ticket, as a refund nor a discount were provided.
-Jason
1: Build cars that are appealing to the eye. I mean, cars that are as beautiful to look at as they are beautiful to sit into.
Superficial. Give me something that will get me where I want to go (OK, I'll understand if it won't get me to the Moon). I care more about aerodynamics for fuel efficiency than visual appeal.
a. Nerd! You're not cool.
b. Most likely, you rationalize your buying decision like everybody else. After your animal instincts pick the attractive car, you find some way to argue that the car is your rational choice.
Rails are not much of the answer. It's too bad rails were put out of business and so many of them torn up, but they aren't coming back. Of course, we should take advantage of the rail rights-of-way that exist, and that can be part of the solution, but it can't be a very big part. We don't have the stomach to tear apart neighborhoods and cities to put the rails down afterward.
I believe the answer is the Jitney or Share Taxi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share_taxi). A large fleet of largish cars or smallish buses directed by a learning computer algorithm would be much more practical. You enter your destination via cell phone, the computer knows where you are, tells you where to go to meet a jitney and when to expect it. The jitney is told to pick up a few passengers at a few stops going in generally the same direction. Everyone gets where they're going in a reasonable time (much faster than transferring on a bus) and most of the time the jitneys are carrying at least two or three passengers, which is way ahead of the efficiency of a freeway with HOV lanes. You might transfer to larger vehicles for large distances, but the routes and rendezvous' would be timed rather than on a fixed schedule.
Note this is also a viable approach for using more of our airports to reduce the delays of the hub-and-spoke system.
The requirements of emissions regulations and fuel economy are such that the sensor suite and electronic control necessary are beyond the education level of most "Joe Sixpack" types. I frequently help people on a VW listserv with troubleshooting the mid 80's Digifant fuel injection system, and even that simple four sensor, no memory system is surprisingly tough to nail down when it acts up.
Easy part swap could be done, same as with a PC. I don't need to have a clue about how a video card works in order to swap out a broken one.
The real reason that repairs are difficult is that dealers make lots of money on repairs. If anybody could do the repairs without trouble, many people would do exactly that.
Yay, more "blame the unions".
how about you read more from others in this response column who have noted that, at triple the wage union workers have right now, the cost of labor would still only be about 2k per car.
for an economy car, that leaves about 8k left. .. now let's get down to reality, in which labor is only about 600, and even if they used slaves the difference in costs would be.. *fanfare*.. 600 bucks less!
Do keep blaming the unions though for corporate's incompetence at engineering small, light, fuel efficient cars. No, that doesn't mean sacrificing that american tradition of visceral driving either. Japanese sports cars run on in-line 4's and 6's, and go faster on half the gas through competent engineering.
Stop blaming the unions.
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The real problem which has come to bite the big 3 in the ass is their lobbyists successfully managed to get SUV's classified as "light trucks" in those standards, basically exempting them.
This is why they now make commercials cheering, hemming, and hawing about how their SUV's make an "amazing" 20 miles per gallon.
Whoopteedoo.
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Put all stations at airports, in the secured area. Make a station be just like another gate. (perhaps running underground while on airport property) Handle my luggage just the same as when I change planes.
Suppose I fly from LA to Boston, but get diverted to NY because of a storm. Put me on a train instead of putting me in a hotel for the night.
Make the train experience be plane-like, and it could work. Considering all the time a plane wastes on the ground and circling around to land, the train could even end up being faster for short trips.
If... you fire off an angry forum post in response to someone posting about so-called 'rednecks', and use the word 'your' in place of 'you're', only to then be corrected by some other smartass forum poster who caught your newbie mistake... you just might be a redneck forum poster.
What?
so the democrats made a law saying cars made in foreign countries are called "foreign" and cars made in the US are domestic?
Also as far as i can tell you're arguing that
a) the CAFE regulations are horribly outdated (read: it should be easy to make cars conform to these standards)
AND b) that CAFE regulations are causing the big three tons of greif because (and here im extrapolating) its costing them too much to make cars in the US that conform to regulations.
what???
Than why can companies in japan produce cars that are not only more reliable, but that (probably) just blow away these outdated CAFE regulations?
You can't just dismiss the source without addressing what the link says. That's an ad hominem attack. If Rush Limbaugh says it's December, just because you hate Rush doesn't make it April. And I was responding to a left-wing advocacy group in great-grandparent's post. Or is that OK, since you are a lefty? BTW, that factcheck.org ought to fact check itself, since it always leans left. And nice bibliography at the end - they actually cite UAW!
As if it matters if auto workers make $73/hour in wages or they cost $73/hour, same difference for GM. Of course, how much an employee costs per hour is in no way the full metric of labor costs, if you look at the laundry list of ludicrous UAW rules, how hard it is to lay off or fire employees, how they can take early retirement at 95% pay, the ridiculous labor pools where "laid off" employees still get paid to stand around, not to mention health care. Toyota and Honda do none of this.
The sad thing is I knew some bozo like yourself would come in and slam the link merely because Heritage is a conservative-leaning group. My response: So? Address and disprove their claims, or STFU.
No ad hominem attacks here, this is a thinking Website, not a feeling one. You can't call names, shriek, and run away.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
There's an often-missed angle on public transit: total transit time. has to go up with public transit, including trains, That means you're asking everybody taking them to spend possibly alot more time to go anywhere. My wife doesn't mind, but I do.
Money quote: "In NYC, it seems to take roughly 50 minutes to get anywhere by public transit, more like an hour by car, and the car costs more. Thus, in NYC, it makes sense to take transit. In the medium-size city where I live, it takes 20-30 minutes to drive places. Even if we had NYC-level transit, it'd take a lot longer to go that way."
I'm all in favor of public transit - I figured this stuff out by, well, taking alot of every kind of public transit, and it served me well within its limits. I just want to get one of those limits out in public a bit.
Like Paladin, that's made me also feel like transit rail has some realistic low-end density requirements to be of much help.
While I'm at it, notice that having 15-minute busses is alot cheaper than rail, because you already have lanes in place. And it'd prolly be easier to adapt Detroit to changing to. But you still need reasonable density or you just get lots of empty busses.
The standard railway gage is 4' 8.5". I hereby deed this post into the public domain. Are you happy now?
(And, this standard, like a lot of things, predates copyright and patent law. It was the distance between the wheels of Roman Chariots)
the submitter of the story wants us all to live in urban environments, but alas, this is not the case for most of India.
TFTFY
79 % of the US's population lives in urban environments, versus 27% for India.
BTW, India does have a well developed passenger rail infrastructure - one of the longest and most used in the world.
Okay, say it with me:
Hydrogen is a ENERGY CARRIER (battery), not a Power Source
Hydrogen is a ENERGY CARRIER (battery), not a Power Source
Hydrogen is a ENERGY CARRIER (battery), not a Power Source
Currently, the best energy carrier we have using hydrogen is Petroleum. The most energy efficient way we can extract hydrogen from water takes more energy in extraction than we recover burning it in fuel-cells. You cannot name solar/wind power because of unreliability and unavailability.
Unless you're fusing hydrogen so you're getting much more energy out of the process to be worth the cost and time, it's just a carrot dream with no real payoff.
The problems of storage, lack of energy density (CtoH bonds hold more energy than HtoH), unstable energy extraction in relation to environmental temperatures, etc will keep fuel-cells a fringe concept, and never a production reality.
Now that I think of it, a truly high-speed rail line running from the california valley would be able to rocket across neighboring Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming. The latter three states are quite flat, and that flatness would be appealing with a high-speed rail line linking the West Coast with the Midwest.
If a tunnel were to be bored through the Rocky Mountains (provided some liberal tree-humping group doesn't blndly throw a wrench into the works), even more territory could be linked together.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
The big tires are for the horrendous roads in some rural areas
after severe flooding.
You coastal ppl do know about flooding down there right ?
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Rail requires massive capital investment, which is the one thing that the US auto industry conspicuously lacks. Maybe *somebody* ought to invest in rail, but it's hard to see what GM et al can bring to that table.
The problem with wingnut bullshit is that it just doesn't stretch very well. The Big Three wanted to keep producing high margin gas guzzlers in the face of skyrocketing gas prices, just like in the 70's. And they had their lunch eaten by the Japanese, just like in the 70's. There is no there there with your "two fleet" misdirection: a Ford car made in a plant in China would be taxed at the same rate as a Toyota made in China. As it should be.
Don't worry, The New Deal II is just around the corner.
You should hope so.
To add salt to the wound, our government still hasn't rectified the biggest ponzi scheme in the history of man-kind. That would be Social Security.
You mean possibly the most successful government program ever created? The one that keeps the elderly and the disabled from starving to death in the streets? What about it?
In the US, the bigger question is whether or not the society can change to rails, and away from "every family member needs a car, every trip even if it's just around the corner, needs to be made by car".
For a country that was essentially created by the railway, and in your romantic history (i.e. the "western") the railway plays a huge role, it's astonishing how the railway has been abandoned.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
When you wrap your mind around all of this -- and more -- you will begin to understand how truly frelled we really are. Where you should focus your view is not on what the "talking heads" babble to you every day, but on the flow of money and the structure of the system, noting where assumptions are made without basis. Noting the points where the lack of transparency exists. Noting all the zero-sum instruments in finance that is billed as something other than what it really is. Noting that when governments print money, the actual value of the overall picture has a tendency to stay constant. Printing money is a panic reaction to a situation that our leaders have no understanding of. Printing money will only buy a short-term advantage, with a much bigger drop later.
Look for the lie in anything you hear over the major media outlets with regards to the market. They are most likely not telling you the truth so much as they are trying to influence and manage your behavioral dynamics in hopes they can stitch Humpty back together again.
Take what I state here with a grain of salt if you wish. Or do your own research and come up with the same conclusions that I have. And doing the research will not be easy because many of the players in the financial world actually believe the lies they spout on a daily basis. You must reach behind them to see the circuit boards for yourself, and follow the actual layout, not what they tell you what it is.
And most of all, embrace complexity, because the world is far from simple!
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
I post this only to enlighten slashdotters of other perspectives on the matter of these gas guzzlers, which, in principle I am completely against, but in my own reality I love and cherish. And in order to comprehend the mirth brought into life by such environmentally unfriendly modes of transportation one must grasp how ones native geography influentially sculpts its residences life perspectives.
I am a Montanan (burn slowly in hell Miley Cyrus! (youtube Montana if you want to feel my pain)), which means I come from a state about equal in size to Germany or Japan. For some reason, unlike these other two states, no one lives in MT, maybe its the -20 weather weve been having or the foot of snow we got lost night. None the less, with a population under one million you can imagine how sparsely populated the state is. For me to travel to the next town of more than 10,000 inhabitants involves at least an hour and a half journey, and any others requires at least 3 hours.
So what vehicle to use to traverse the tundra? 4 wheel drive isnt a must, but youre crazy to elect a vehicle without it. There are a handful of great 4x4 sedans that can get me from G-Funk to Boozeman, but the real question is what do I enjoy the most?
SUVs and trucks enable the ability to haul your entertainment with you. Whether it be 10 of you in a suburban drinking and cruising on the back roads or hooking up your snowmobiles for a weekend in the Little Belts with your half ton, you know you can bring enjoyment to nature where you go. Theres nothing I love more in the summer than loading my truck up with a raft, inner tubes, beer, people and tunes chilling on the river for a day. Or bringing my dirt bike up to abandoned logging roads and just cruising through the mountains without another soul on the road.
City dwellers find it illogical and impractical to own these un-economical autos, and I agree, they exemplify, nay, promote American greed and squalor. But I look past this and use them to indulge in, surprisingly, a lifestyle where I take full advantage of nature; even though by doing I help destroy what I love. And in America, I am glad I have the choice to drive what provides me with the most personal satisfaction.
Im sad to see these manufacturers go down
One man with a gun can control 100 without one
They have to build large cars like SUV's because they have enormous labor costs.
Nonsense. They made big cars because those had the largest short-term profits. The costs of the workers has nothing to do with it; they will always choose the product that maximizes short-term profits. It should surprise no one that this strategy has led the current sorry state of the automakers. If they can't pick up the slack then other companies (with the same labor costs) should displace them.
The Great American streetcar scandal (also known as the General Motors streetcar conspiracy and the National City Lines conspiracy) is a conspiracy in which streetcar systems throughout the United States were dismantled and replaced with buses in the mid-20th century as a result of illegal actions by a number of prominent companies, acting through National City Lines (NCL), Pacific City Lines (on the West Coast, starting in 1938), and American City Lines (in large cities, starting in 1943). National, which had been in operation since 1920, was reorganized into a holding company. General Motors, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California, Phillips Petroleum, Mack, and Federal Engineering Corporation made investments in the City Lines companies in return for exclusive supply contracts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_Streetcar_Scandal
See, in the real world, corporations are bent on destroying efficient infrastructure and government run public services, because they can't possibly compete with them. That is, here in America, where corruption is far less of a problem than elsewhere.
This is why privatized medicare companies are subsidized by the government so they can charge the same price as the government. They simply can't compete on efficiency.
Trains and trolleys are low maintenance, use far less fuel per passenger, and are more reliable than buses. That's why they were eliminated from mass transit and replaced with buses, which use more fuel, require more maintenance, and are less reliable. The other reason car, car parts, and fuel companies wanted to destroy urban mass transit is so everyone would buy a car.
Remember, the more inefficient a company can force people to be, the more profit they can make on the excess. That's why we're the most "productive," worst polluting, and one of the least satisfied populaces in the western world.
What's happening is there's a race between oncoming bankruptcy and the Obama administration's ability to pass the so-called "Card Check" legislation. Once that happens UAW goons will unionize the non-UAW car makers by any means necessary with Obamunist connivance and they'll all be in the same boat. Mind you the formerly non-Union operations won't have the 3 or 4 to 1 retiree to worker ratio that Detroit "enjoys". It is also clear that once any bailout money is available to Detroit any UAW noises about wage and benefit consessions will disappear. The UAW isn't even trying to conceal this part of their game plan. Of course if the GOP and Blue Dog Dhimmicraps can prevent Card Check the UAW is screwed.
As recently as 31 Dec 2007 both GM's and Chrysler's pension funds were "overfunded" http://www.pionline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081027/PRINTSUB/310279968/1031/TOC/. GM's was "overfunded" by $19 billion and Chrysler's was "overfunded" by $3.1 billion.
The UAW (Gettelfinger) has also said the UAW's own pension fund was "overfunded" by $2 billion http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/17/business/worldbusiness/17auto.html/.
Quite likely the automaker's pension funds were "overfunded" by much more in the past, but they've been siphoning off the "excess" for various non-pension purposes such as http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/17/business/worldbusiness/17auto.html/ Corporations have been allowed to siphon away pension funds for non-pension purposes for more than a decade because they could pretend they could continue to get 10-12% rates of return for the next 50+ years. After the last stock market downturn in 2001/2002 there were some calls for reform the fantasy accounting of pension funding http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2002/12/09/333483/index.htm/ including Warren Buffet's article in Fortune http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2001/12/10/314691/warning that companies which continued to play those games were "risking litigation for misleading investors".
No go. So now that we've had another stock market downturn and the auto companies fairy tale projections for the health of their pensions funds haven't turned out happily ever ...
You can't just dismiss the source without addressing what the link says.
I looked at your link and I can address it now: it's straight up right wing bullshit. Heritage engages in the usual sophistry of adding up all labor, health care and pension costs for current and retired employees and divides it by the number of active workers to reach the $70 an hour figure. And I'm shocked, shocked! (well, not that shocked) that they completely ignore one giant paycheck: the CEO's. Rick Wagoner has presided over a $70 billion loss for GM and not only still has his job, but has a private jet fleet and continues to make $16 million a year. But it's nice of the right wing to make it crystal clear just how much they hate the middle class and love extravagant CEO compensation, even if the CEO in question is grotesquely incompetent.
BTW, that factcheck.org ought to fact check itself, since it always leans left.
Reality has a well known liberal bias. Deal with it.
As someone who has worked on road crews digging ditches, cleaned offices of 3rd shift, ran a machine gluing cardboard boxes together, and a wide variety of assembly line work I still say fuck the UAW and the Big 3 management whose been willingly taking it up the ass for years.
Being anti-union makes a modicum of sense if you're a high level executive, because the union might interfere with with your 15% annual pay increase on top of your multi-million dollar salary. But being a worker and being against unions is like being black and opposed to the Civil Rights Act, or being a woman and opposed to the 19th amendment. It makes no fucking sense whatsoever.
Detroits problems have nothing to do with unions, who have taken cut after cut after cut. It has everything to do with top management that continues to make millions per year, regardless of performance. Rick Wagoner, the CEO of GM, presided over a $70 billion loss for the company and not only still has his job, but continues to make $16 million a year while running the company into the ground.
So you are: a worker + you hate unions + not a negative word for the incompetent managers of the company = you're a fucking idiot.
I've traveled by rail in Europe and it's great. The problems with rail in the US are political. When I lived in Texas, there was a push to develop high speed rail. Connecting San Antonio, Austin, and Dallas would have made a lot of sense. The route parallels US I-35 and is mostly unpopulated. The deal was ultimately killed by Southwest Airline which lobbied the legislature to prevent competition on some of their most profitable routes. In Ohio there was an attempt years ago to connect Cincinnati, Columbus, and Cleveland. This would have required the votes of representatives of smaller towns in between. And they all wanted rail stops in their districts. A high speed train would never have gotten up to speed, having to stop every few miles. High speed rail makes a lot of sense, but local politics seems to be an insurmountable obstacle.
[Insert pithy quote here]
a living wage in this country is $5 an hour tops. And you know what? it makes me hate the UAW even more because I realize what over indulged asshole they are, assembly line isn't Hard work, it's low stress mindless repetition that a trained monkey or immigrant can do.
No, it's quite clear that you are the fucking idiot in the room, by being a worker opposed to a decent living for workers. Oh, and $5 an hour my ass.
Screaming at the top of our lungs to stop it, to no avail. Just like we're doing now.
Not the 18 Republican Senators who voted for the Wall Street bailout but against the Detroit bailout. But it sure was nice of them to make it perfectly clear just how much they hate the middle class while loving the corporate cock. They're insatiable.
they are both guilty of milking the cow dry until it is almost dead, the UAW and those fat cats & CEOs with their multi-million dollar annual incomes...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
No, they aren't. UAW has taken cuts in pay and benefits. Whereas the CEO of GM has talked about taking a cut in it's $16 million salary, and only since getting castigated in Congress.
The link you provided confirms the GP comment instead of debunking it (although the comment should be that Big 3 labor costs are three times that of similar jobs in other industries).
"The automakers arrived at the $70+ figure by adding up all the costs associated with providing wages and benefits to current and retired workers and dividing the total by the number of hours worked by current employees."
You can't compare base wage to base wage and ignore all the other costs associated with UAW labor. What really hurts is the combination of "30 and out" with full pension and health care for workers who retire in their early fifties. No accountant in the world would let you ignore that as part of a company's labor cost.
The simple reason the Big 3 are in trouble now is that banks are a lot more hesitant to lend money, both to dealers (for inventory) and to consumers (To buy cars).
The other problems Detroit faces are real (i.e. quality control, building SUVs), but those are more long-term (i.e. not crisis-level) problems...
in the context of economic stimulus, such investment sinks are actually desirable
Says who, the monetary cranks?
So I typically don't look into it. Everybody thinks like me. Incredible as it may seem.
Anybody trying to prove me wrong are just eggheads in pretentious schools trying to get taxpayer grant money.
Only GPL can contain standards. And the distance between rails should be based what fits in an 80x20 console screen (80 characters wide is the distance between RMS's extended legs). Rail should be renamed GNR for GNR's not Rail. If you cannot pronounce GNR, you are a marketing weenie--names shouldn't matter when True Freedom is at stake.
The rail should be free to be modified. If one wants to increase the distance between the rails, that should be allowed provided they release their new standard and let others change the distance too. If one wants to use other materials, that should also be permitted as long of they too release their specifications. If the trains cannot use the new modified track, it is up to the community to fix the train. After all, the laws will dictate that by using the track, the train should become GPL'd as well. If you dont like this, you are free not to use it; but at the price of True Freedom.
So please dont kind yourself Bjorn, our railways are not standard. You are immoral for even promoting non-Free rail systems.
Alas, I must now end this conversation and have it emailed to my web-email gateway. Good day.
(and hey, I only took off where the AC finished. all that is needed now is to worry about Tivo'ization and Microsoft. one can dream, one can only dream ;-)
Dial down the "pompous ass" seems to translate to
"ignore the facts about SUVs being more dangerous and listen to our imaginary anecdotal stories."
PS: I own a Highlander hybrid and a RAV4-EV and I know they're dangerous. So do insurance companies, which is why I'd pay lower rates if I just owned a Prius... it's just that a Prius is not sufficient for me, my wife and 3 kids.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Moving freight has the same problem. Load it onto a truck, bring it the first mile to a rail yard, load it onto a train, unload it from train back onto a truck at the destination, then truck it the last mile. All that loading/unloading kills any savings from using a train.
Cities who want to promote bike use might start mandating cabs have bike racks on the back of their cars. That way you can just catch a cab on the off day you shop and need to carry bunch of stuff back to your place.
Does my idea exist? I've never seen it so there might be problems with it like interfering with the airport-bound using their trunk for luggage. I think we could engineer something though, I don't recall if the "cop car" they all use has a trailer hitch receiver.
As far as "parking", I guess it depends on the city. In Seattle, there are things like look like hand-rails in front of stores that you can tie your bike to. And by the way never "tie" your bike, always use those U-bold things. The flexible metal wires all can be cut with bolt cutters in about 10 seconds.
But your existing suburban grocery stores are far more expensive than urban ones already and usually have worse quality. It costs a lot of money (gas) to ship junk to the sticks.
As gas prices go back up (and they will, gas-tax or not... the weak economy is what is keeping them low), it will be more and more expensive to live away from urban areas. As long as you are willing and able to pay for the added expense, you can have it any way you like.
Dont be surprised if those in the urban areas vote to stop subsidizing your suburban transit infrastructure either (i.e. roads, roads, roads). Believe it or not, your lifestyle is heavily taxpayer subsidized.
Odd that your kind of logic doesn't get applied to, oh, say, drugs. Talk about a product that many people want. Well, why doesn't it? It doesn't because the cost of widespread drug use are too high.
Gas in the US should have been at $4/gal many years ago, in order to pay for all the actual costs necessary to keep the gas flowing, in addition to all the upkeep and other automobile related costs in America.
The only reason people can afford to buy SUVs is because SUVs and driving are being massively subsidized by tax dollars.
Half the benefit of rail travel is the stations are usually in the heart of the city you are traveling to, not a 30 mile cab ride away. The fact that you can catch a quick cab from your home in City A and take the train to City B and walk to your hotel is what makes it competitive with air travel.
Sure you might take an extra hour *moving* when you take the train, but typically you spend at least an hour on each end of flight. That extra hour doesn't exist in rail travel because you are *already in the city*, unlike an airport.
If you put the station at the airport, you might as well take the plane as you'll still need the hassle of a long expensive cab ride (and the associated traffic) on either end of the trip.
So no, I would vote a huge No on you idea of using airports for rail stations. That would make rail travel pointless!
The suburban lifestyle is what will have to change. Gas prices will force it. The days of 3.5 kids and a huge grass lawn in the country are over. It just isn't affordable.
So a mass transit system currently won't work for many peoples current lifestyle, but reality will soon force the lifestyle into something that works for mass transit.
Companies that do NOT figure out how to keep a large cushion of cash, can NOT put large chunks into development of new technology. With the collusion of all the parties in the unions at the big 3 auto makers, the excess cash was drained out into bennies for the workers, leaving nothing of substance for the companies to work with to weather downturns and technology development (they buy batteries as far as I know, and thus are not out there developing better batteries, or electric motors. Apple, on the other hand, concentrates only on profitable product markets, and has amassed a $20B plus reserve fund to allow it to keep funding R&D and acquisitions even in a recession. The Democrat party, in particular, sought to make sure the unions had enough power to get their way in negotiations, and get large numbers of voters to support the Democrat party candidates, and as such sealed the fate of the auto manufacturers. As such, the "Big 3" are virtually gone. There is so much excess auto production capacity in the automobile world, that the only thing which will make sense is a reduction in the number of plants. That means that one or more companies will go BK. Politicians will not like it, but they can't simply pour money into those failed economic business models forever, or there will be a voter revolution at some point. The alternative is to shove $100-$200 Billion into all 3 companies, Ford, GM & Chrysler, and hope they can both pay the unions big $s and innovate their way into the future. I do NOT think this will work. The whole mindset of entitlement that exists in the Detroit area from the Big 3 management, Unions & political leaders is unsustainable. There is no such thing as "entitlement". You either make a profit, and develop long term solutions out of that profit, or you fail. It is obvious where this who auto thing is going, and unless some serious recognition ocurrs along with a "bailout" they will fail anyway.
All of this was once done and settled until Reagan killed the railroads.
Amtrak: May 1, 1971 (Nixon)
Conrail: April 1, 1976 (Also Nixon)
Build cars that people want to buy.
Yeah, because that approach works so well for cigarettes and food, right?
The automobile market is not a free and efficient market; it is already heavily distorted by government subsidies and other factors. In addition, buyers do not have the information or expertise to make optimal decisions. And the automobile industry manages to influence choice strongly through advertising.
Besides, several of your choices are mutually incompatible: you can't have low purchase costs, cars that last a long time and are cheap to repair, and high resale value; it's economically impossible.
Your "solution" is as obvious as hoping that Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny will fix all of our problems.
I live in Seattle and we tried the monorail. We never built it. Why? Because it turns out that building a monorail with the same capacity as a light rail doesn't cost less.
First, no sane contractor will bid on it--only one company bid on constructing the monorail, and their bid way higher then the estimate.
Second, it isn't "proven" like rail transit--there are few vendors in existence who can service your monorail system. Worse, there is no "standard" for monorail, so every vendor will have their own system that doesn't inter-operate with the other guys.
Third, the biggest cost to any mass transit system isn't the actually construction cost, but the cost to acquire the right of way and mitigation costs. Monorail is only theoretically cheaper in construction, but it doesn't change the right-of-way cost or mitigation costs. Thus you cannot easily tunnel under a river or a bay, you have to go over the river (and you can't cross the bay). Sure somebody would invent a way to tunnel a monorail, but at that point why not just stick with rail?
Forth, Monorail isn't very flexible. Unlike other forms of mass transit, Monorail cannot be tunneled through hills or downtown areas like rail. It doesn't work on the surface like rail. The only way it works is elevated and rail can be elevated as well.
More generally, studies have shown that it is better to route your mass transit through your neighborhoods--ridership goes down when you follow the highway system (the "dense" bits are usually not next to the highway but further "inland"). Maybe for the long haul it makes sense to use the highway for cheap right of way, but the stations need to be located in the neighborhoods. However, I base this on a regional study and your mileage probably varies. The point is that it isn't always a good idea to follow the highway--it might be cheaper to build but if nobody can get to the stations, it is a waste of money.
Monorail is a pipe dream. The only reason it gets promoted is because it sounds theoretically cheaper to construct. In reality, it is just as expensive, if not more expensive than light rail. Worse, it is not nearly as flexible as light rail.
So yeah, as a Seattleite who voted to halt construction on the monorail, and as a Seattleite who has voted yes to every light-rail system on the ballot, I laugh. Been there, done that, all we got were car tabs with a monorail on them.
You also ignore other benefits. Union workers aren't just paid in salary. Health care benefits are something like $1600 per car. And let's keep in mind that Japanese automakers have far lower labor costs for a better quality product. So even whe US automakers turn a profit on a car, Japanese automakers will be raking it in and able to reinvest more. That means no matter what the situation, the US is operating at a significant competitive disadvantage.
I call BS. Japanese automakers had no problem making and selling economy cars in the US. It is only the big three who seem incapable of selling a quality economy car in America.
Heck, the European Ford Focus has been quite a success there, yet Ford HQ refused to sell it here. Currently it is slated to hit the dealerships in 2010, many years after being first introduced in Europe!
Raise your hand if your country, marred with the same history of racism and slavery as the United State, has evolved to the point where it can vote the son of a Kenyan goat herder to the highest office of the land. Anybody? Anybody? ... didn't think so.
What were you saying again?
You must have cornered the market on tinfoil in order to create that hat.
Oh, really? Then let's see you refute his positions. They all look entirely reasonable to me. But what would I know? I'm just a former econ major from a family of policy geeks who has actually researched all of these points.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
...which benefit from "socialized medicine".
Diverging from the subject, but within the issue of boosting the economy, it has to be said that the moniker "socialized medicine" has reduced economic activity and continues to do so.
Yup, hoorah for Capitalism! Lets do something counter to the purpose and reduce economic activity. This is ... socialism.
I had to drop my private health insurance in Texas and take a job when Aetna raised my family health-care premium from $450 a month to $1200 a month in four years despite no change in the health of my household. This meant I could not focus completely on my business. One less entrepreneur.
A regulated and fair health-insurance industry would boost economic activity. I don't have to wonder if it's too expensive to be alive because health-care is set up to bankrupt me should something go wrong.
There should be no link with an employer. Having to work somewhere to get the auto insurance to drive around makes as much sense as having to do the same to get health-insurance to stay healthy. Both put you in situations you may not want to be in, and therefore reduce productivity because "the job sucks but I need to stay here".
Unregulated "free markets" reduce the American spirit of individual free enterprise. Make it "free and fair markets" and watch the economy grow.
This just in... Bowing to pressure from environmentalist groups, the Big Three have decided to start production of a new personal transportation related device compatible with Barack Obama and Al Gore's vision of an environmentally sustainable America. The new device is called a "buggy whip".
Animal rights groups were initially against such a device, but later yielded after promises from the Obama administration that future buggies and plows won't be pulled by animals at all, but by teams of unemployed workers.
The Obama administration has projected the national unemployment rate will reach 90 percent after the 2012 ban of all fossil fuels, allowing an ample supply of manpower for propulsion. Workers utilized as buggy pullers will live in single room mud huts. Each mud hut will have one solar panel and battery which generates enough for one LED light bulb to run briefly during the evening hours. Due to the unsustainable nature of all meat, dairy, and seafood products workers will be fed a diet consisting of algae, fungi, soy and raw vegetables.
Critics of the plan contend that this is little more than the reinstitution of slavery in the name of halting global climate change to which president elect Obama has responded; "Throughout world history slavery was a form of involuntarily servitude based exclusively on race, sex, national origin or tribal affiliation. My plan takes none of these factors into consideration. Therefore it is not slavery."
Al gore is expected to be the first American politician to utilize this new power source. "People already placed me on a pedestal.", said Gore. "Now that pedestal will be mounted upon their shoulders and they get to move me around."
Several small manufacturers have recently moved from New England to the Deep South, hoping to save on labor costs, and then after a year or two moved back. Why? Because Southern workers are largely illiterate, while in New England you can't get beyond grade school without gaining basic literacy. The manufacturers found it cost them far more to train Southerners, and to cover the cost of their production mistakes, than to employ New Englanders with somewhat higher wage expectations.
It's not, however, public education that's the problem. Oh, there are plenty of problems with public education, even in New England. But public education is good enough to turn out a solid factory workforce, just as long as the families sending their children to it have an expectation that their children can and should learn. In the Deep South, where learning is viewed as a threat to a religion and culture of ignorance, there's a great premium placed on the kids learning sports, but not much else.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
All this with minimal maintenance.
Yes, because fleet-owned vehicles with maintenance staff and people who drive for a living are notoriously bad about spending money to keep their cars running, especially compared to everyday commuters who hop in their car and expect it to just go?
I'd say regular, comprehensive maintenance is a better phrase.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
The sky is falling! /.
Another nonsensical stringing together of buzzwords from the "experts" at
Please, leave the dramatization to professionals.
Bike riders and their bicycles should be licensed like vehicles. Bikes should be required to have a license plates as well. Even if they are only charged a token amount to get both a plate and an endorsement, it would make bikers less "anonymous" and provide a way for drivers and pedestrians (who also get mowed down by bikes) to report knuckleheads on two wheels. Bikers can get away with murder right now because they are anonymous. You can't call the cops and give them a plate number.
Obviously it wouldn't be politically well received by bikers, but in the long run it would make everybody happy. Plus if you required a VIN number like you do on a car, it would benefit the bike owner when their bike gets jacked.
The only issue that would need to be ironed out is how to handle "little jimmy" in his bike with training wheels. I'm sure we can figure that out though.
I also live in farm country -
- our family has been in this business in upstate New York for two hundred years now - and began in Massachusetts in 1690 -
and what I see are hard-used trucks, working-class vehicles, on the road day and night.
Lot of people drive a 12 mpg vehicle all the time so they tow a boat to the lake five or six times over the summer, haul their 4 wheeler out in the woods so they can go hunting.
But while anecdotes are interesting, numbers are better.
If, in fact, the truck, boat or RV sees significant use only on weekends its fuel consumption will be an insignificant fraction of the total.
ok, if pension plans are evil, how are *retired employees* are supposed to live? if these employees, who worked all their lives for the 'big 3', paid their share of taxes and whatnot, but especially made what these companies are today (big & powerful corporations -- a company is nothing without its employees), should no longer get pension for which they worked for all their lives (employees do contribute to the pension plans too), how are they get some money to carry them in their retirement?
as cliche as it sounds, it is *evil* to target the little guy who finally gets what he was promised all along, to target the little guy who gets just enough money to live a dignified retirement. this retirement money prevents the little guy ending up as a beggar, starving on {cat|dog}-food because {s}he can't afford anything else.
before targeting the average worker and the unions, we should look into how these companies are managed, the products they crank out and so forth. and if the current way the pensions plans are set up is unsustainable, we should not say 'cut the pension plans', but we should rather look into making it sustainable.
a big company providing a pension plan to its employees is not evil, nor is providing them with some form of medical insurance programme that makes sure they are not ruined for life because of one big illness.
i just hate seeing the right-wingers trying abuse the current crisis to roll back the usa (and other countries) back into the mid-19th century, trying to re-create the indian cast system elsewhere.
No.
It will take more than a depression to wean americans from their cars.
For at least four generations, they have been thoroughly brainwashed into having the perceived "freedom" a car gives them.
Public transportation is no longer in the collective psyche, and has been depicted by marketing agencies as for "losers".
People will sacrifice their health in order to pay for their car repairs, as it is virtually impossible to live without a car, unless one lives in a metropolis with a less than abysmal transit system.
However, several steps could be taken.
The first, of course, is to offer an alternative. No need for high-speed lines for a start, mere passenger service on existing rail lines would be a good start.
Those services could be run at an "intermediate" speed, on the order of 130 km/h (~80 mph -- simply because operation above 80 mph in the US requires expensive automatic train stop signalling).
But 80 mph operation on heavy freight lines is problematic, as the freight trains run at 60 mph, and unless you have double-track and extensive "high-speed" (that's 40 mph) crossovers and a very astute dispatcher that can weave the passenger trains around the freights, you will not be able to operate the passenger trains significantly faster than the freights.
The only case where a totally new high-speed (>120 mph) line is warranted is when the traffic density warrants it. France built their TGV network when their 4 track "imperial line" between Paris and Lyon was being totally saturated.
So, for the time being, one could only count on regional trains to meet the demand.
Then how will this be implemented? As of now, going the Amtrak route is the best option available, as only Amtrak has the legal power to force (private) railroads to let them use their tracks; it also has more than 35 years of experience in operating intercity trains (an art private railroads lost almost 50 years ago). Right now, individual states routinely contract with Amtrak to provide regional services.
The problem, however, is the lack of rolling stock, precluding the expansion that could be effected.
Right now, there is only one railcar builder that can offer north-american "track legal" passenger rolling stock, Bombardier (The european-built northwestern "Cascade Talgos" and the Ottawa "Talents" are not "track legal", and operate the first operates under a special FRA waver, and the second on a physically-enforced time-segregated rail line along with german train control INDUSI signalling. As of the Via Rail "Renaissance" chunnel cars, they have been expensively retrofitted to become "track-legal"), and they cannot easily ramp-up their production, as their facilities are already busy with the fulfilment of New-York City car orders.
You cannot realistically expect automakers to build trains, if only because the end product is significantly larger than autos. Carbuilding facilities are geared for small production runs (1000 cars is a **HUGE** order), and every production run is heavily customized, as various rail operators have different needs. Perhaps the only thing that can be reused form automakers is the workers, and that is doubtful, as carbulding is hardly an assembly line operation, calling for specialized trademen, so here you are calling for extensive manpower training. It is not for nothing that the last time an auto-builder tried to make a train, the effort was a fiasco...
No, the US has really painted itself in a corner with it's infatuation with automobiles. It cannot realistically bring back yesteryear's passenger rail system overnight, it simply does not have the necessary manufacturing capability.
It will take more than a recession to do so; perhaps nothing short of a revolution will do...
When Henry Ford was asked about this he said
"If I asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me a faster horse!".
Anyone, with half a brain who has ever done requirements gathering will tell you, most people have no idea what they want, they can barely tell you how they currently do things.
Does anyone really think if asked people would say they want an overpriced, bloated, unsecured computer OS?
This is delusional.
....And where are you going to put the rails?
The surviving rail lines are all owned by heavy freight, with the few passenger trains repeatedly being sidetracked for those heavy freights, which have priority and will continue to do so as long as the freight companies own the lines. And now you wish to increase passenger traffic back up to, say, pre-1945 levels? Can you say 'scalability problems?'
So, fine: Build more rails. But where? Most of the surviving lines were laid 'way back when land was far cheaper, the legal load was far less, and you could fill-in a frog pond without having to file a 150-page Environmental Impact study three years in advance.
Forget it: Unless you just happen to have a few dozen trillion smackers in your hip pocket, we're stuck with what we've built-up over the past sixty years, usually at the destructive expense of the rail lines. In other words, ROADS. Embed guidance wires in the pavement and aim for flow-controlled car and bus traffic (hm; wheeled bus/trains?), perhaps install LIGHT rail in the existing carpool lanes, and slowly squeeze petrol-based propulsion out of existence in favor of electric-hybrid followed by purely electric. Try anything else, and people will freak at the up-front price tag, and NOTHING will get done.
Regards;
A living wage in the country is certainly not $5.00. 5 * 40 * 50 = $10,000 to live on for a year. According to the 2008 federal poverty guidelines, single person household making less than $10,400 is living in poverty. I don't really feel like debating the validity of the fed's guidelines, but suffice it to say that I'm glad I don't have to live in those conditions.
Found On Railroad Dead?
They just don't sell them in the US.
The European Focus is bombproof and Opel/Vauxhall (GM Europe) are relatively reliable.
I just don't see why the US doesn't get the exported GM/Ford produce.
You are aware of the fact that General Motors used to build Electric locomotives? Rail technology had relied heavily upon General Motors products from the 1950's until the early 1980's. GM produced a product that worked. If a part failed in the -2, then you pulled it out. You simply put a new module in place of the failed part. Your shops could repair or obtain a new part while the locomotive was in operation. GM failed to bring any new TRACTION metholodogies to market during the 1990's. GE was a always a minor player. They slowly assumed dominance with the larger push to computerized consoles with computer controlled braking and power and AC traction. GM did not see how to improve fuel efficiency and meet the high EPA standards set during the BUSH administration. Their foreign sales were drying up as the new markets bought GE products. China was buying FRENCH and GERMAN high speed rail for passenger projects and not diesel electrics for slow freight products. They committed the same management failure in the train market as the car market. They failed to develop new products for the changing marketplace. Once they realized that people are not going to buy SD40's forever, they came out with the SD80 and the SD70. However, this is like buying a Chevy Astro Van today with is the same as the chevy Astro Van model of 15 years ago. They realized that the market place is not going to keep buying the stuff. So they sold out. One of the big plants in IL which made lots of train engines was razed several years back.
Heritage engages in the usual sophistry of adding up all labor, health care and pension costs for current and retired employees and divides it by the number of active workers to reach the $70 an hour figure.
Uh, no, as I put in bold in my previous post, it does not include retirees. You obviously didn't read my last post or the article (or you are being purposely dishonest), as Heritage has a big, bold heading about this:
Excludes Legacy Costs
The hourly benefit figures the Detroit automakers report covers the cost of current and future benefits earned by actively working employees. It does not include the cost of paying health benefits and pensions to current retirees.
So you're the one "engaging in sophistry." The whole point of my original post (that you called flamebait because you disagreed with it) was that UAW was FUDing this with BS statistics. This is one of them - this number does not include legacy costs.
Rick Wagoner has presided over a $70 billion loss for GM and not only still has his job, but has a private jet fleet and continues to make $16 million a year.
Well, now we are arguing in circles. Wagoner "presided" over that loss largely because of labor costs. So long as UAW bleeds GM, nobody could make them profitable. But yes, any CEO that has that kind of balance sheet should not be making that kind of money if I were a stockholder - or a taxpayer being asked to bail his company out.
But it's nice of the right wing to make it crystal clear just how much they hate the middle class and love extravagant CEO compensation, even if the CEO in question is grotesquely incompetent.
So GM's CEO makes a lot of money and this somehow implicates the right wing? How is that exactly? Nice logic. Republicans are the ones against the bailout. It's the Dems who apparently think the status quo is OK, just sent GM taxpayer money, and they will magically become profitable making green cars that nobody wants.
And some of the highest-paid CEOs in the country are Democrats. How do you think Wall Street got that huge bailout?
BTW, that factcheck.org ought to fact check itself, since it always leans left.
Reality has a well known liberal bias. Deal with it.
Thank you so much for being openly hypocritical. Most liberals pretend not to be, but there it is, right out in the open. So right-wing think tanks are illegitimate to cite, left-wings ones are okay.
Typical lib, "we are right, so it's OK when we break the rules." So fucking typical.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
blame that on the lack of universal health care, which every other industrialized nation which produces cars guarantees.
This means toyota, mercedes, bmw, volkswagon, they're all subsidized.
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For years I viewed the reluctance to retool and improve things like fuel economy as the industry leaders strictly being jackasses. While that is still a significant portion of the problem let's not forget to put a large chunk of the blame where it belongs: UAW. Taking into account all the wages and benefits (including full pay for not working) the average UAW member makes $65/hour; in the name of competitive wages.
If we don't protect the freedom of speech how will we know who the assholes are?
I'm glad I don't have to live in those conditions
Exactly, Live, because thats what you would do, sans flat-screen and car. But you would still live, as many hard working immigrants do today, Sharing rooms and taking mass transit. I'm fine with State welfare to keep people from starving and dying on the street. It is not good to use their power to give people what they think they deserve.
That doesn't make sense. If building cars in the US is unprofitable, how come Toyota, Honda, Subaru, Mercedes, BMW et al can manage it? You also rather missed the point that 'light trucks' are exempted from CAFE. CAFE is a waste of time, all you need for fuel economy to become a buying (and therefore design) issue is more expensive gas, as theevents of the recent past have amply demonstrated.
It has been interesting reading the domestic (American) perspective of the trials and tribulations of the "big three".
It seems there is an almost universally perceived lack of quality in the automobiles they produce, which scares away customers that allied to the enormous financial liabilities they have incurred means it was always going to be inevitable that they reach the point they find themselves now at.
What really annoys me is that Ford and Vauxhall/Opel (GM owned) make some excellent automobiles for the European market.
Ford has the Ka, Fiesta, Focus and Mondeo.
Vauxhall/Opel have the Corsa, Astra and (recently retired/replaced) Vectra.
These are all some of the most popular models around, OK granted some aren't as bullet proof as Japanese models, however, they are all pretty cheap to fix when things do go wrong.
Chevrolet does also have a presence here, but I think they look cheap and nasty, even their badge looks naff, I'd lump them in with "budget" manufacturers like Kia, Daewoo and SsangYong.
Anyway, I digress. If Ford and GM can get their markets here so right, how in the name of God has the US went to shit?
"Build good quality products that your customers want to buy".
Nickled and Dimed my ass. Have you read that book? or just post links to it? I have, and it's the saddest pile of crap ever. That book should be subtitled: On (Purposely) Failing to Get By in America. I honestly don't know what her and the others who push for the living wage expect to accomplish by basing their results on flawed methods, groupthink, and emotional rhetoric. The evidence is pretty straight forward, fixing wages above market values only results in a surplus of workers, AKA Unemployment. They are trying to hurt the people they want to help. That is insane subjective thinking over objective fact. Problems happen when the governments tries to ensure people get what they think they deserve, just look at what happened when the government started giving people houses they think they deserved.
A really big factor in the design of the American transportation system is the high value of personal time. The high value of personal time makes the private car cheapest in total personal cost.
In my blog I present data that show the effect. Simply because the travel time by car is much less than travel time by a bus or a train the personal car keeps winning the utility choice.
http://lessco2essay.blogspot.com/
Another rework of this microeconomic analysis is that personal vehicles need 45 miles per hour speeds to be a winning utility choice.
To dodge the stupidity forced on us by this microeconomic analysis I think we should go to autonomous vehicles for all non-personal transportation. Remove the personal time or driver's wage term from the total transportation cost. Then slow and extremely efficient transportation is practical.
If you can solve the occasional large object transportation problem for private car users then the path is clear for lighter and lower energy vehicles for individuals.
For freight transportation, I think it is attractive to look at retrofitting trucks for autonomous operation with a design speed of 7 miles per hour, using low energy engine and battery and solar panel. Scale the speed and energy down to the square root of present values.
Really. Check it out
American auto companies were losing sales -- and quickly -- long before the credit crisis. I think this is partly because they were *not* selling what people wanted to buy. They weren't clearing the 'technical hurdles'. Instead, the effort they should have been putting into fuel efficiency were instead squandered on 1) fighting fuel efficiency standards, 2) getting huge classes of larger vehicles exempted from fuel standards, 3) huge ad campaigns to convince Americans that they wanted big, muscular vehicles that got terrible mileage.
In other words, they went to the government and practically begged our legislators not to force them to make changes that would have made their products more desirable to Americans and legal to export. As gas prices inched higher and the public became increasingly aware of global warming, management sat on their butts and pretended that the pendulum would swing back their way.
The SUV is not a product of consumer demand. The SUV is a product of industrial overcapacity. The Big 3 would go broke if they actually sold as much car as people needed. You could probably build a car for $5000 that would serve 80% of people's needs 80% of the time. Car-sharing programs could easily handle the times when people need more car than that. But that would require slimming down an auto industry that is used to selling $20,000-$30,000 behemoths. They don't even make much of an effort with the smaller cars that they *do* sell. It's like they want us to subconsciously associate "small" with "crappy", so they can weasel us all into Hummers.
Whatever you may think of maglev trains, they're not the be all or end all of high-speed rail.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
What about airplanes? Mass transit. What they want is not cars, they want FASTER transit. The car is faster than most rail. That is why I keep saying that building an 80 mph train is WORTHLESS. Instead, a 200mph+ maglev between cities is what you want. In addition, this country needs to do an INTELLIGENT means of high speed cargo hauling. The smart thing is to build a track around the nation such that we have 4 NS tracks (coasts, west side of mississippi river and front range of Rockies) as well as 3 WE tracks (SD->ATL, SF->Wash, and most importantly, seattle -> nyc via minn, mlw, chi, dtrt, pitts, nyc). It sounds like BS, but if you put the trailers on the train and only have a stop ~1000 km (600 miles), it will mean the longest drive is 750 km (~500 miles). The one exception should be that northeast corridor (milw->nyc) and the west coast(SD->SF). Lots more stops in both. If we do that, we would drop our national import of oil, and speed up shipping items around.
Also General Atomic has a VERY clever design for a maglev. MUCH lower costs than any other design.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The rest of the world went metric in the 70's, around when your car industry screwed the pooch with Pintos and the like.
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The high value of personal time makes the private car cheapest in total personal cost.
If I take a train or bus to work, I don't need to *loose* the time I spend commuting. I can sit and read, work with pen and paper or on a laptop, listen to music... REALLY listen to it. I don't *lose* the commuting time.
With an automobile, it costs me an hour a day during which I have to actively pay attention to what I'm doing at risk of death or injury. That time is gone, dead, lost from my life.
I would rather spend twice as much time on public transport, but I don't have that option, because of people who don't understand that not all time spent commuting has to be lost.
> What do you pull your boat with?
What fraction of SUV owners own a boat? 0.1%?? I have a friend who a few years ago bought an SUV. Being an environmentalist I tried to talk him out of it. He responded that he needed it to pull his boat. Well, he still doesn't own a boat and as far as I can tell, there is no boat in sight. I'm not saying you don't have a boat but, I view destroying our planet's ecosphere, because of a selfish hobby, as antisocial. And yes, I walk or ride my bike, and I even let my driver's license expire many years ago. I think gas ought to be $10/gal and people would be more responsible in how they use it. Then it also would not be necessary for Bush, and other assholes to cozy up to evil dictators like the king of Saudi Arabia, and less money would leave the US to pay for a non-renewable resource helping to prop up undemocratic regimes.
Still there's no way that universal healthcare costs this much. The US has a pretty screwed up and expensive system, but something is very wrong when healthcare costs are larger than the salary costs. It isn't just the insurance companies loading up on the auto company buffet.
While this might be a good idea on paper, I would say that its not going to happen. We have a lot of problems in this country that we have successfully ignored for a while and huge investments in the infrastructure might help us short term in terms of dealing with depression and long term for the future. Instead of rails we should really be focusing on green technology and energy and hopefully we can then lead the world in something new again. Rail has a lot of problems - but the main 2 are NIMByism and special interests in general. Here in Los Angeles they fought subways and put in rail lines in locations that on the surface don't make sense but if you put them in more trafficed areas it would have meant tearing down some rich peoples houses or disrupting a stores business for 18 months. Now in the long run that store might be doing more business and people would spent less wasted time sitting in traffic but short sighted NIMBism is a powerful force to be reckoned with and should not be underestimated.
People in the US have no idea how convenient and pleasant a good rail system can be. For example, I live 70 miles north of Seattle on the I-5 corridor. There are only two trains a day from where I am to Seattle and the ride takes an hour and a half. There is one train in the morning and one in the evening. The schedule makes it impossible to use for commuting. If I drive, it can take anywhere from an hour to three hours each way depending on how backed up I-5 is.
Now compare the situation here in the US between Seattle, WA, and Portland, OR, and Fukuoka and Hiroshima Japan. The cities are similar in size and the distance between them is similar, 175-180 miles. In the US you can either drive, 3 hours minimum one way, take the train, 4 hours minimum one way, or shlep your way to the airport, 30 minutes, deal with security and walking out to the gate, another 30 minutes minimum, fly 30 minutes, and spend another 30 minutes to an hour getting back into town.
Between Fukuoka and Hiroshima there are some 150 high speed trains traveling each way every day and the trip takes 1 hour and 6 minutes to 1 hour and 10 minutes, so you are averaging about 160 mph with top speeds of 190 mph. You can leave your office in Fukuoka, be on the train in 15 minutes and be in Hiroshima in an hour and ten minutes. It's impossible to do anything like that between Seattle and Portland. In Japan you can make the trip in the morning and easily be back by lunch. Such speed is unimaginable in the US.
The railroads in Japan are constantly undergoing improvements. Trains speeds keep improving, the rolling stock is constantly being improved, service keeps getting upgraded. You can buy your ticket using your cel phone, and on some trains, the conductors won't even ask to see your ticket because their handheld computers tell them that your seat should be occupied.
Having such high speed, convenient rail travel between major cities that are not too far apart makes life so convenient. We have relatives near Portland, OR, and there are many times when it would be nice to be able to go there and back easily in a single day. It just is not possible unless you want to spend 8 to 10 hours driving in a single day! In Japan it's a cinch. There are many corridors in the US where 200+- mph train service would open up all kinds of new business opportunities.
One thing that many in the US would find incredible is that train schedules in Japan are so detailed that if a train arrives or leaves a minute or two earlier or later on certain days, that one or two minute difference is noted in the train schedules. There is no transportation system in the US that has the reliability of trains in Japan. There is no reason we can't have as good a transportation system as other countries. Somehow we've become a country that can't or won't do things anymore.
As per real world testing, the safest car is one that doesn't crash in the first place, and if you drive an SUV, accept the fact that if you get into a sticky situation, you're probably not going to be able to outdrive it.
Women could care less about your car. Insight follows. If a woman is with a guy that does the verbal equivalent of putting "I own an SUV." in front of everything, as you did above, then she'd make sure he knew how much his SUV meant to her, too. Even if it was a 3000 mile per year grocery-getter, she'd still let him know how sexy it was.
Wrists killing you? Not in 2 weeks. Learn Dvorak.
Take a look at the RUF -- it not only charges the car, it drives it for you, at 90MPH.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
GM actually used to build locomotives. Remember those old-school carbody diesels? The ones with the bulldog noses? Those F-Units were build by GM's Electro-Motive Division, or EMD. GM Sold EMD to PE firms in 2005. EMD I believe is now based in Canada. WMD mainly builds in Mexico, though this happened under GM's watch. Their major competitor is General Electric.
snow
Tell that to De Beers.
You sir are a pedantic idiot.
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
General Motors was founded in 1918 as a "Holding Company" by William Durant see [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_motors]. It came into existence by acquiring many smaller independent auto companies. There are many new car manufactures now coming in to being which are producing cars with technical advances that the larger companies can not compete with because of being in their old mind set. The Aptera [http://www.aptera.com/] and the Tesla [http://www.teslamotors.com/] come to mind. Although I can't remember the source I recently (within the past few days) read of a new super capacitor that has been developed which might boost energy storage capabilities far beyond that available by even the best battery technology today. If the auto companies are to survive, they have to look to their history and realize that innovation was the key to their success.
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
If I had mod points I would mod you +1 Funny. You made me LOL!
-- Cheers!
This is where investing in making maglev technology practical makes a LOT of sense.
In the USA, the very long distances between major city centers justifies the 310+ mph speeds of a maglev train. Imagine going from downtown Chicago to downtown St. Louis in well under an hour--who'd want to fly with that type of transit time via a maglev train? I'm sure the Disney and Universal Studios folks in Orlando, FL would love to have a maglev train from Miami that takes about 35-40 minutes for the transit time.
you're absolutely right that there's something wrong with healthcare costs larger than salary costs, and yet it's true.
I have crohn's disease (it's NOT a lifestyle disease), and a 30 day supply of the necessary medication costs about 2300 dollars (and I can't get insured because of "pre-existing condition")
Given the average person my age makes about 2500 a month, this means I either:
a - do without and endure horrible agony and bleeding
b - pass the hat around my entire extended family
That's pretty sad.
The need for universal healthcare and collective bargaining for medications is very pressing here in the US.
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Steel on steel is by far the least energy intensive way to move stuff on land -- but you need to have the tracks. Rail transport is expensive to set up and requires heavy use to be economically viable.
I live in Canada: The population of California spread out mostly in a strip 100 miles wide by 4000 miles long. Here, even as a freight transport rail is having trouble. Oh,the mainlines are still functional, but more and more of the branch lines are being cut off. Farmers used to truck their grain to the nearest elevator, which was the nearest town, usually under 12 miles away. Now they are having to drive many times further.
We still have passenger service on our mainline rails, but it costs 2-3 times as much as flying, and is promoted as a tourist thing. Freight traffic generally moves much more slowly than passenger traffic. On dual track lines, you can set it up for fast trains to pass slow trains, but it makes the scheduling much trickier. During the height of the grain shipping season, the CN mainline has a train roughly every 20 minutes. Typically 100-120 cars long. At 40 mph these trains are 15 miles apart. Since one of the rules the conservation of wheels, for every train going one way, there is one going the other way. Weaving an 80 mph passenger train between the freight trains is tricky.
Light rail is making some progress in cities. Edmonton started a network 30 years ago. There may be 20 miles of track now.
The Toronto metro area has pretty good commuter trains running parallel to the lake. If your destination is close to the rails, you can cut your commute time in 1/2. But Toronto metro has over 10% of our population.
The other extreme is the terratories north of latitude 60. An area sized on the order of the continental U.S. (depending on how you count water spaces between islands...) that has under 100,000 people. Of that 100,000 80% are in/around 5 towns. An awful lot of Canada has population densities that make Montana and Wyoming look crowded.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
Which is why we need free-market capitalists in Congress, instead of Democrats or Republicans. I tend to vote (R); not because of a party affiliation, but because they are typically the best candidate on the ballot in terms of economics and personal liberty.
I fully intend to run for office in a few years - there isn't anyone out there that stands up for what made us prosperous (who isn't a kook on other issues - Ron Paul, that means you!)
Learn about Photography Basics.
Why do market research when you can spend billions telling Americans what they want and need through commercials?
The reason everyone bought one of the fucking things is that they thought they would use it to take their families camping or drive it on some strange mountain road. Of course they don't have the disposable income to do such things, but the commercials let them believe it was possible.
People don't make decisions based on other people's opinions. They make it based on the manufacturer's marketing campaign. They tell us what we want, not the other way around.
It is very large, making a national rail system impractical. This pretty much means you're an idiot. Go stick your head in the ground.
but because they are typically the best candidate on the ballot in terms of economics and personal liberty.
History begs to differ with you. Republicans have been rotten at both since Eisenhower left office.
Nickled and Dimed my ass. Have you read that book? or just post links to it?
Yes, I have, and you're still a fucking idiot. The entire point of the book was the author getting by on service level wages, and how much life sucks balls when you're doing it. Maybe you've just gotten used to ball sucking and that's why you think it's such a great idea of everyone was in the same shitty boat.
The author purposely set herself up to fail so she could prove her point, she used flawed criteria, she used very flawed methodology, and very flawed examples. What do you hope to accomplish by using that as your ideological base? All you will get is flawed results, GIGO.
Life sucking is a relative term based on individual perception, it isn't Uncle Sam's job to give people what they think they deserve. Wages are based on much more than capitalists exploiting workers. They involve such things as productive output, human capitol and S&D. Paying people more for work that isn't productive at that price will result in many problems. Fixing wages is about as smart as fixing the price of bread or gas. I don't get your anger, the general facts are pretty clear. You are advocating a position that is about as accurate as alchemy.
It's painfully obvious you have never done any research on labor markets aside from reading biased books pushing an agenda. America needs facts, not flawed partisan objectives. Please stop trying to hurt this country.
Here in the UK, I've not heard of those Japanese SUVs. I think they build them for the US market. Americans like driving tanks with laughable fuel consumption, the car makers build to respond to that demand (and bring out new models to encourage demand in the profitable sectors).
In the UK Japanese manufacturers tend to make a wide range of saloon and mini cars, with a few utility vehicles. I think they manufacture for the market they are in. Alas here people are also buying into the whole American SUV love, though I don't think it will grow to the size of the US market because of the price of gas (approx 9 dollars a US gallon) and the road system is different here - you just can't park so easily in more traditional places with something that big, automobiles have to work in towns that were built sometime between 100 and 1000 years ago and were designed for horse and cart traffic.
Streetcars work in certain areas. I think the key is to think of different transportation means as complementary and not necessarily competitive.
Several major cities in Europe have streetcar systems and are indeed expanding them as auto congestion builds up (e.g. Manchester, UK, and Nice, France).
As for your argument about 'hardwired' transport links not working because demographics change in cities, I think a look at the world's major cities and their metro systems is a refutation of that argument. Few people would suggest that London's economic model is the same as it was 100 years ago yet the Underground still grows and gets busier. Try ripping out New York's subway system and see how that affects morning commutes.
Different transport systems work for differing (but sometimes complementary) environments. In London there's a mix of public buses, underground metro, urban light railways, private taxis, and private vehicles. It would be foolish to try to run the city using just one of these.
Nah..
He just meant your failing as in possessive, the object "failing" is yours. You are failing could work to but obviously, he didn't write that.
"If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse."
- Henry Ford
History begs to differ with you. Republicans have been rotten at both since Eisenhower left office.
While the (D) candidate for POTUS actively campaigned against my rights. I'll take flawed over evil any day.
Learn about Photography Basics.
First rule of business isn't starting with a good idea, it's doing market research and seeing what people will buy (how's that world-changing Segway selling?).
Good thing Henry Ford didn't take your advice -- all people wanted to buy at the time were faster horses.
Just Corollas and Priuses? Now who is fibbing to make a point?
You want high-end cars and trucks? Try BMW near Greenville, South Carolina or Mercedes at Tuscaloosa, Alabama or Volvo at Pulaski in the mountains of Virginia.
One more thing. The pictograms are ergonomic, not condescension. They are an ISO designed method for fast recognition.
I have one word for you: DeBeers.
But I do agree with your conclusion. A bailout is not the answer. The market (producers and consumers alike) should decide what will work. These grandiose plans always smack of a planned economy (read: thinly veiled socialism) to me. Honda and Toyota have proved that greater profitability is achievable without the need for a government bailout.
Tom Caudron
-Tom
I thought about your post a bit. Here's my take. Few people have an expensive "pre-existing condition", but if we live long enough, we eventually get on the medical care treadmill for a final run. That's probably what's hitting the car companies. All those retirees with expensive medical problems and final year care.
The need for universal healthcare and collective bargaining for medications is very pressing here in the US.
Something to note here is that universal healthcare already exists in a perverse form in the US. Anyone with a serious medical emergency can go to any emergency room and get treatment, even if they aren't insured and have no prayer of paying their bills.
You failed to prove anything.