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Archive for the 'Cars and stuff' Category
August 5th, 2008 by Rob Mayercik
You could ram every conceivable safety device (and a few currently inconceivable ones) into a car, and it won’t change the fact that someone out there will figure out how to get themselves killed in it. No matter how hard you work to idiot-proof something, the only thing you’ll really achieve is an improved idiot. I’m sure there’s someone out there who could figure out how to kill themselves in Knight Rider’s K.I.T.T. when the car was driving it for them.
As nice as all these wonderful safety items are, despite all they’ve achieved in terms of saving lives, they’ve also served to increase the road-going I.Q. (Idiot Quotient). Remember what Einstein said - “The only difference between genius and stupidity is that genium has limits.” Ron White added his own corollary to this - “You can’t fix stupid.”
Now, I’m not against adding safety features - I’ve been buckling my own seat belt since I was strong enough to overcome the spring in the retractors, and I never leave the driveway without it on. ABS, airbags, TMPS, stability control, they’re all very clever and nice to have, but does that mean I think every car should be forced to include an electronic nanny?
You know, it used to be that folks actually knew how to drive, and could actually get around in bad weather in a rear-wheel-drive vehicle with little to no weight on the back end (like the 1978 Farimont wagon my mom had years ago - it fishtailed going in a straight line down a dirt road in the middle of summer). We didn’t NEED four wheel drive, front wheel drive, fancy traction control systems, or any of that. As my father used to say, just because you can GO in the snow, doesn’t mean you can STOP. Sadly, too many people are too stupid or oblivious to realize/remember this.
The two main problems these days are:
1. Driver education in the U.S. is a joke (I’d be willing to bet that anyone who actually took the time to read the owner’s manual for their car and pay attention to the signs when riding in the car with their parents could pass the licensing test in most states without taking any of the courses). Also, graduated licenses for teenagers don’t seem to be doing much except generating repeat business for the DMVs every time the kids change to a different license level. Why can’t the behind-the-wheel training and test be like the Bridgestone Ice Driving School and the Skip Barber Racing School? At least people would know how to handle their cars in bad weather.
I spent an entire quarter year in driver’s ed, and I could have just read the driver’s manual, cut class, and still passed the test. I also fervently disagree with the idea that a kid with a learner’s permit should be prevented from driving at night - rather, I think they be REQUIRED to take some of their behind-the-wheel training after dark. The first place I ever drove myself after getting my license was to an evening Jazz Band rehearsal in High School (rural area where it actually gets DARK at night), and let me tell you, it’s a whole different ballgame when you’re depending on those two bulbs on the front end of the car to see by instead of the big one in the sky.
2. The other big problem is people not staying off the roads when the weather is too bad to drive in, and that’s because their employers refuse to close. Where I work, they never close for engineering folks (like me). There have even been times when the state has been hit with a snowstorm severe enough to declare a state of emergency and a travel ban (meaning if they catch you on the roads, it’s an arrestable offense). The last time that happened, 50 people drove to work at my company. When coroporate policy is that “we don’t close. If you are not comfortable on the roads, you can stay home but it comes out of your vacation time”, people feel pressured to go in anyway, and then you get roads clogged not only with the weather, but people who can’t handle the conditions but are out there anyway, and the result is chaos.
July 22nd, 2008 by DaveAdmin
You read that headline correctly.
Utilities are in a tough spot, financially, when it comes to new power station. Generating stations are expensive and risky. Choose the wrong technology and you could get into trouble for it. Build a power station and if the demand doesn’t materialize, shareholders will call for blood. Especially if it’s a nuclear plant - those most expensive of powerhouses.
The problem is that power demand is not consistent. Commercial users tend to demand energy during the day, which is also the peak time for air conditioning during the summer as people fight the heat. During the winter, demand plummets. The result is that power companies have tremendously expensive assets sitting around idle, or nearly idle.
One solution is conservation, giving customers incentives to cut their power usage or to move it to the night time (which is why daytime power for industry is far more expensive than night-time power in many areas). That both avoids the need for new power plants and evens out usage a bit. Some utilities sign agreements with customers that cut their power levels slightly during peak times, a voluntary brownout which leaves most appliances working but still saves some energy.
But the ideal, as far as utilities are concerned, is probably simply having more capacity, but using it all the time. That’s where electric vehicles come in, and is no doubt the reason why 30 utilities are working with GM on plug-in cars. Having thousands of those things charging overnight would be a great boon to power companies that want to keep their expensive power plants operating at capacity both day and night, rather than running at capacity for nine hours and then dropping dramatically - or, worse, running peaking plants (generators that only run at peak times - sometimes the oldest, least efficient, and dirtiest ones) during selected days and having them sit idle for the rest of the year.
Some automotive writers have gotten nearly hysterical over how electric cars will destroy the electrical industry and cause widespread blackouts. In fact, as with many things hysterical auto writers claim, the opposite may be true. We may find that power companies are encouraging their customers to buy electric cars, on the condition that they charge them at night. Then the power companies will happily go out and build the new generating stations they’ve been coveting, perhaps even getting together to add the odd nuclear facility, now that there’s a way to pay for it.
After all, wouldn’t you prefer a nice, steady, year-round demand for your expensive new generator, over the possibility that you’ll only be able to use it during the day, for twenty days a year?
July 18th, 2008 by DaveAdmin
Though the Big Three have tried to cut back their inventories, a sudden economic squeeze (one could argue that through reckless spending and poor investment choices, it’s been building for years) has thrown sales off kilter, sabotaging efforts in an industry with long lead times. GM, Ford, and Chrysler would probably much rather be able to slash truck production right now; but contracts and other arrangements don’t allow for such sudden movements.
Chrysler remains one of the worst off in stockpiling; the Jeep Wrangler was very hot, and suddenly demand disappeared, leaving Jeep with the fifth highest inventory in the industry (according to Automotive News, as are all other figures cited here). Of mainstream brands, only GMC is worse, by a single day of supply. But Jeep’s average 106 days’ supply is nothing compared with the stock of pickups. There are 107,700 Rams floating around out there, good enough to support Chrysler for 160 days should they stop production right now. That’s a worry with the 2009s coming soon, but Ford and GM have their own troubles. The Silverado is in relatively good shape - more are out there but sales are higher so the total supply is just 117 days. The F-series has 215,000 copies out there - a 133 day supply. Toyota’s Tundra is not reported separately but Toyota trucks overall have just a 100 day supply - and there are 225,000 of them on lots.
Chrysler’s biggest “days’ supply” problems, aside from Rams, come from vehicles with relatively low stockpiles - the Pacifica (5,100 for around 400 days’ worth), Crossfire (1,300 of them), Nitro (15,400), and Aspen (8,600). The minivans are interesting to see - the Dodge version has a 42-day supply, the Chrysler a 96-day supply, as the market apparently changed gears suddenly and decided it wanted the Dodge. I suspect this is due to the perception that the Dodge is cheaper.
The LX cars are looking surprisingly good in days’ supply, other than the 300. Likewise, there’s just a month’s worth of PTs out there as production was switched to the Journey, which with 71 days’ supply, is no longer looking as though it has the bright future execs clearly assumed it would - it was meant to be Chrysler’s European entry vehicle, but unless the diesel-AMT version is much cooler than the gas-automatic version, it doesn’t look as though it’ll gain the traction it needs to justify dedicating Toluca to it. At this point, Chrysler would be better served by putting the minivan captains’ chairs back into the PT, putting the old air dam back on, and trying to get people to desire it more - again. (Throwing that 180 hp engine around more wouldn’t hurt, either.)
As for Jeep, it’s bad news everywhere but for the Patriot, which is probably benefitting from gas prices and financial squeezes. The Commander could stop production now and still last for around six months, the Grand Cherokee could go on for three months, and the Liberty and Wrangler are both at around 130 days’ supply. We don’t know if the Wrangler-based pickup will be pushed forward, because they need to do something with that assembly line, or whether it will be dropped as the manual transmissions are reportedly being dropped (according to the jk forums), to save money.
Daimler put their emphasis on the Chrysler brand, positioning it rather like Chevrolet, Ford, or Toyota. That appears now to have been a mistake. If I were to operate without market research, I’d say that Chrysler is probably positioned in most people’s minds in one of two ways: as a troubled automaker that was bailed out repeatedly and changed hands like Jeep, or as a formerly upmarket brand that never quite made it into luxury. Dodge appears to have a more solid rep as the everyman brand. Daimler’s attempts to essentially rename Plymouth have, I think, failed dismally. They would have been better off dropping Chrysler than dropping Plymouth, because if Plymouth did not have much in the way of connotations for the average younger buyer - or many older buyers - at least it did not have a lot of the negative baggage of Chrysler. (Also, it would make our job easier, because we could refer to “Chryslers” as “Dodge, Jeep, and Plymouth” without confusing people with the brand.)
Yes, I say it’s time for Plymouth to return. I know it’s expensive. I know it means sacrifice (though some more investment from the people who have more money than they could EVER spend would be helpful about now. Talk about patriotism is cheap - put your money where your mouths are, Steve and Bob.) But this is the time for down-to-earth, sold, frugal, and value-based auto investment by the average buyer, and that’s what Plymouth has always stood for.
May 5th, 2008 by Bill C
This entry is posted with Bill’s permission. It was written in 2002 but still applies.
When I was visiting a web site today, I hit one of those “pop-up” ads. This one reminded me that sales of illegal drugs help fund terrorism. Of course, they are also beginning once more to help bolster the real economy of the now-friendly Afghanistan, but we’ll pretend that doesn’t matter for the moment. Let’s just agree that a portion of the proceeds from the huge international drug trade does wind up in the hands of terrorists. That’s bad, right?
What no one, especially no one in our oil- industry- friendly Administration or Congress, is saying is that terrorists get a lot more money from oil. Isn’t that bad, too? I may be wrong, but I don’t think Osama bin Laden’s wealth is rooted in the drug trade.
During the recent hostilities between the Israelis and the Palestinians, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein offered $25,000 each to the families of the Palestinian suicide bombers. That’s a nice hunk of change. But Iraq has been under all sorts of embargoes and restrictions since the Gulf War. Their domestic economy is in ruins; many Iraqis are living under terrible hardships and the death rate among Iraqi children is skyrocketing. So where is Hussein getting the money?
A lot of it is coming from us.
The CIA World Factbook says Iraq’s exports include oil, oil products, fertilizer and sulfur. Oil accounts for 95% of the export total. According to the federal Energy Information Administration, Iraq’s current output is somewhere between 1.5 million and 2.3 million barrels a day. We take about a third of that. Last year, 8% of our total oil imports came from Iraq.
Yesterday, crude oil for June Delivery closed at $26.12 on the New York Mercantile Exchange. That’s down fifty cents from the previous day and the price is likely to decline further, now that Iraq has announced resumption of oil deliveries. If we multiply the lower production figure by 33%, the government’s own figures show we are consume about 495,000 barrels of oil daily from Iraq. Based on the May 7 closing price, that works out to $12,929,400 each day. We pay over $4.7 billion per year for Iraqi oil. Remember, that’s using the administration’s lower production figures.
Of course, because of the UN sanctions, Iraqi oil is exported in exchange for food and humanitarian supplies. But it has also been used to pay for things like the more than $73 million in drilling equipment purchased from the U.S. (Note: when those sales were made, Vice President Cheney owned stakes in the two companies that made them.) The sanctions haven’t stopped Saddam Hussein from accumulating cash do things like build new palaces, fund weapons development and give big bucks to suicide bombers and those who train and equip them.
As with many in the current administration, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice misses the connection. When she spoke about Iraq’s 30-day oil embargo at Texas A&M University in April, Ms. Rice said, “We ought to remind them that they’re going to have a hard time eating their oil.” While it’s a cute quip, she overlooks, or ignores, the problem that Americans have no trouble whatsoever “eating their oil.”
Our appetite for oil is higher than it was in the 1970s. That is not an opinion: it’s a fact. It is also a fact that a large percentage of the oil we import goes to fuel our vehicles, whose overall average fuel economy is lower than it was in the 1980s. Despite decades of lip service to decreasing American independence on foreign oil, we now consume far more oil from the Middle East than in the days of the Arab oil embargo.
Much of our increased appetite can be traced to the growing popularity of light trucks and sport-utility vehicles. Especially sport-utility vehicles. The majority of passenger cars sold in America today are smaller than the cars sold in the 1970s. While sales of “econo-boxes” make up only a small percentage of automobile sales, the best-selling models still have 6-cylinder engines and get reasonable mileage while serving the transportation needs of their owners.
It has been estimated that a five-percent improvement in the average fuel economy of American vehicles would reduce our imports of foreign oil to the point we could cut Iraq off completely.
Five percent? I have a way we can do that now. There is no need for a mass switch to Toyota Priuses or Honda Insights. Or abandoning SUVs. There is no need for government mandates, new gas taxes or increases in the CAFE standards. Detroit does not have to come up with any new technology and nobody is laid off. Moreover, almost everyone would be happy because there is no need to fight over drilling in the Alaskan National Wildlife Reserve. We can save that oil for when we might really need it. Oh yeah, air quality would improve, too.
And, get this: It saves money - your money.
What is this miracle? How will it work?
It’s simple: all that is needed is for all of us to make a better buying decision when it’s new vehicle time. There are more than fifty different sport utility vehicles on the market. A number of them perform just fine with a 6-cylinder engine. There are even some that can get by with a 4-cylinder engine. Buy one of those instead of a giant barge that is neither sporty nor particularly utilitarian. If you are one of the many pickup owners whose trucks never actually carry a load anywhere near their capacities, perhaps you could get a smaller truck or even a big truck with a smaller engine. If you really need the torque because you carry loads of sheetrock or tow a trailer, why not buy a diesel? If you carry lots of people frequently, buy a minivan. If enough people start to involve their heads in their personal vehicle decisions, we could chop our oil imports dramatically in five years without a major lifestyle change.
Think about it. You win because you are avoiding the vehicles with the huge profit margins, getting more value for your money. You win again by not paying extra for a bigger engine. You continue to win because you don’t have to fill the tank as often. On top of everything else, you help your country by keeping your money out of Saddam Hussein’s pockets.
It’s a winning situation for everyone except Iraq. And the terrorists. And the arms merchants. And Dick Cheney. But Cheney’s happiness is a small sacrifice; one I’m sure we’re all willing to make to win the war on terrorism.
But, I can hear you saying, what about the safety of that three-ton steel cocoon? Well, unless you can guarantee that all you’ll ever hit is a Honda, the truth is they’re not all that safe. In rollovers and collisions involving things like trees, Peterbilts and other three-ton cocoons, it seems your chances of injury or death may actually be higher.
Gee, getting the facts and using your head when selecting your next vehicle might not only be patriotic, it might even help you live longer. This program looks better and better all the time.
In a recent interview, Harry Longwell, executive vice president of ExxonMobil, said OPEC’s influence on the world’s oil supply is going to grow in the coming years. Oil production from non-member countries is expected to decline. This means we need to move quickly to safeguard our national interests. Iraq may not currently be an active participant in OPEC, but it is a member. And don’t forget about Libya. Qaddafi has provided a safe haven for terrorism for years. Remember Lockerbie? Osama bin Laden isn’t the only one with a fondness for doing bad things with airplanes.
It is time to start making public service ads linking Lincoln Navigators and Cadillac Escalades to the Al-Qaida. That guy sitting in his Chevrolet Avalanche needs to be reminded that it’s time for a real change: instead of just folding down the back seat, he should do his part to cut off the means for nutball tyrants to fund ruthless killers. Paint a 4-cylinder Jeep Liberty red, white and blue and make it a symbol of freedom from the threat of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. And, we should slap bumper stickers that say “I Help Support Worldwide Terrorism” on gas guzzlers, whether they are cars, trucks or SUVs.
We don’t need to spend billions invading Iraq. Let’s face it: Saddam Hussein doesn’t have that many friends. We have a chance, as individuals, to put a real crimp in his ability to buy more.
And save millions of dollars while we do it.
Can’t get much more All- American than that.
April 30th, 2008 by Stephane Dumas
After his lawsuit against DaimlerChrysler and his ill-fated idea of a tie-up between GM and Renault-Nissan in 2006, then his attempt to buy Chrysler from Daimler (which involved a huge amount of employee ownership; he lost to Cerberus, and quite probably was never seriously considered), “Captain Kirk” Kerkorian bought a stake of 5% of Ford, after seeing that Ford had begun a turnaround.
Will “Captain Kerk” do a call to another automaker for a tie-up with Ford? If that theory is true, before thinking then it could be Ghosn of Renault-Nissan. It could also be one then Ford have currently a joint-venture currently like Peugeot-Citroen for the diesel engines and Fiat (the next-gen European Ford Ka will use the Fiat 500 platform) or a new player like Tata, who they sold Jaguar and Land Rover to them (and besides, Tata might rename themselves Ford since in the French-Canadian slang, “tata” means idiot.”)
Do you think then Kirk’s arrival at Ford is good news?
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