Automotive Concept Cars Don't Work

Well taking a cue from Great Britain's TopGear television magazine, the reason why no one wants American cars is because they tend to have very poor fit and finish, have cheaply configured and produced sub-assemblies, and have woefully antiquated engines.

It really is that simple.

If you like cars, expect them to last at least a decade, want minimal upkeep costs, and expect that the fit and finish of your car to be at a minimum an A- execution, then most American cars will not fit those parameters. The concept car of the future offered ever single year at the Detroit Automobile Show was always that---a concept for the future. Things like engine control, multivarible port injection, advanced drivetrains, active suspensions, integrated advanced safety, advanced fuel types, and even green technology implementation of car life-cycles were all something the Big 4 offered.

Except year after year, the concept vehicles never seemed to come into an recognizable existence. When they did you got vehicles like the Aztec which was a nightmarish amalgamation of plastic body panels glued on to a truncated truck chassis or it was something like a Prowler which is a great car that sold well but would never be more than a niche car with a cult following. You cannot maintain a company as a broad market competitor if most of its cars are ill-conceived to the point that few buy it because it serves no obvious purpose.

Why buy an Aztec? It isn't a passenger coup. It isn't a truck. It isn't an SUV. It doesn't go very fast either on or off road. It was just a very ugly car that people talked about after seeing it in concept at the auto show circuit. GM mistakenly thought that the "buzz" and "gravitas" surrounding the Aztec concept meant people would buy it. Obviously they didn't.

But the irony is that while Detroit dwindled from the Big 4 to the Big 3, to the Big 1 with two destitutes, the rest of the world manufacturers were doing something other than just building concept cars that caught people's interest. Detroit collectively saw concept cars as they had since the 1950's. A concept car was intended to bring image branding to the market perception. When Detroit built a concept car, it wasn't intended as a proof of concept that would indicate the future engineering and styling cues to be expected on production cars. Also compounding this problem was the simple fact that the Detroit automakers did not engage in competitive racing on multiple levels. Meaning the rate of innovation in American production cars was almost exclusively the result of a handful of American designers and engineers who had somehow managed to eek out small micro niches of competitive motorsport in the Detroit factories.

Oldsmobile, Corvette, and Chrysler Vipers were the only remaining venues of direct competion left where the world leading manufactures were pitted in true competitive racing. And for all you NASCAR fans, realize something. NASCAR is now a very staid formula competition where the only difference between the cars comes down to the stickers on the fender wells and what decals get put on the front end to signify a "manufacturer. Aside from engine blocks, NASCAR has little to do with development or unlimited competitive adaptation during racing. Meaning it became Detroit's favored venue of "competition".

Unfortunately for Detroit, this form of competition yielded nothing in terms of technology or reliability that could be diverted back to the manufacturing of passenger cars. Like the concept cars made by Detroit, the choice to virtually exclude itself from competitive racing resulted in a situation where there was little benefit aside from marketing penetration.

In 1998 Toyota made a conscious decision to become the #1 automobile maker in the world in three respects. The first was in total numbers of vehicles sold. The second was in total net sales volume. And the third was to be the ultimate manufacturer in Formula One. By some estimates Toyota Formula One Team Motorsports has spent no less than $1.2 Billion in the last 11 years.

What did they get?

Well for starters they did get the world's most advanced car design center in Germany, with the wind tunnels and super computers to go with it. They also became very advanced in composite engineering and manufacturing. Having gone from 10 cylinder to 8 cylinder engines to the now required 16,000 RPM limited 8 Cylinder engines that must last 4 races in a row, Toyota directly imparted the design and reliability lessons learned from racing to their current passenger cars. Electronic engine management and multivarible transmission shifting technology went straight from their race cars to their passenger cars. They also got laughed at for generally finishing at the back of the pack for 10 straight years.

Until this year. Toyotas are now the terror of the Formula One campaign. BMW, McClaren Mercedes, FIAT Ferrari, and Renault are all now witnessing the results of driving competitively with a goal of excellence no matter the cost. And it is also translating into Toyota becoming the leader in numbers of cars sold and getting close to eclipsing Porsche as the world's most profitable car maker.

When consumers look at cars, almost all of them are simply looking for a reliable cost effective means of transport that meets their expectation of durability and usability. There are some who demand far more in terms of the vehicle being a pinnacle of some sort. Be it pure speed like a Buggati, style of a Citroen, ruggedness of a Pinzaguar, or durability & practicality of a SEAT. But almost without exception, the leading manufacturers are very similar to what Enzo Ferrari maintained as the reason for making passenger cars.

Put simply, Enzo Ferrari built cars for sale to consumers so that he could afford to build and race cars competitively in the leading motorsports competitions around the world. If you doubt it consider the examples. Porsche-Volkswagen-Audi own Lemans, Gruppe B & GT racing. Fiat Ferrari owns formula One. BMW owns track racing. Citroen owns WRC racing. Mercedes owns DTM, Formula One, and Truck racing. Renault is a bit down on its luck in Formula One, but it still competes and wins in rally racing as well. Nissan competes in Asia in endurance, road course, and Lemans racing. Honda supplies engines for open wheel racing, rally competition in WRC, and dominates motorcycle racing. In short the World's leading automobile manufacturers all compete heavily- Toyota even going so far as to compete in NASCAR.

And Where are the American manufacturers?

Oldsmobile of course died several years ago. The Viper was bought out by its designers and is now sold for short endurnce track racing to privateers. And GM's Corvette will see the end of its racing in American Lemans this season as well as make its last stop in the 24 Hours of Lemans as well. Meaning that in 2010 there will be ZERO factory backed efforts in any F.I.A. sanctioned competitions anywhere in the world.

If you intend to be world class, should you not compete against world class rivals? Do you expect to innovate your cars for sale to the public simply by picking motes from the ether? If you want things like active suspension, ABS, engine management, KERS, carbon fiber brakes, ultra efficient exhaust systems, and reliability engine mapping- which all resulted from Formula One- to appear on your production cars, do you not need to have a competition platform?

The whole point is that the American consumer began realizing that American automakers weren't making even a fraction of what they presented to be plausible in the concept cars. When European cars all began coming standard with ABS systems that they had developed in Formula One, American automobile makers were offering hastily cobbled together 3rd part ABS systems and then only offering them as expensive options on their highest profile car models. It doesn't take a genius to realize ABS is a pretty good idea. And it wasn't as if Detroit hadn't offered concept cars with ABS on them since the early 1970's. But in a void of competition development, Detroit never actually had to make a working ABS for mass implementation in all product tiers. By 1993 even lowly Volkswagen was slapping ABS on all its models. Detroit was still offering it as an expensive upgrade to its mid-level offerings, made it standard on the flagship premium brands, and still didn't have it for its entry models.

In 1995 I bought a Volkswagen Jetta GL for $15,000 brand new off the showroom floor. It had a 6 cylinder engine. AC/PW/PD/sun roof/Premium CD system/ leather interior/ ABS/Airbags/Active Suspension/Hella light package/ Sport rims/ and half a dozen other features I cannot remember. The Pontiac Sunfire I looked at had a 4 cylinder engine and AC. Sunroof, PW/PD/ABS/and airbags were available options. Active suspension and lighting improvement package was not an available option. The Sunfire also cost $17,000.

It isn't the case that Detroit screwed up because they didn't offer hybid or electric cars that turned off consumer demand. What turned off consumer demand for passenger cars made in America was the reality that in order to get a comparable car to the mid level import, you had to pay a super premium price purchasing the additional equipment needed to make an American passenger car comparable. The only thing holding up Detroit was the truck and SUV. The rest of the world simply doesn't have the market for either vehicle.

Consider that the Ford F-150 is the world's number one selling car by volume. More of these are sold every year than any other car in the world. But there is an exceptional caveat to that figure. The Ford F-150 is sold only in the United States and Canada. It isn't directly exported anywhere else in the world. The American market is very absorbent in terms of trucks and SUV's. Toyota and Honda both brought out full size trucks over the last few years to compete for market share. But when fuel prices skyrocketed Honda nixed the Ridgeline and Toyota scaled back its fullsize truck- but they could afford to because their passenger cars sell very well.

Detroit has been living on trucks for 20 years. And with the combination of high fuel costs and the emergine concept that not everyone needs a truck to commute to work in, the sales of Detroit's mainstay has collapsed. Add to this the reality that their passenger cars are essentially junk compared with the competition on the market and you get 50% declines in American manufacturer sales year on year.

It really is time for Detroit to take its medicine. Offering concept cars of a future that never comes, will not solve their problems. Chopping off brands and car models simply to stave off red ink won't work either. The only thing that will work is if Detroit eschews marketing promotions and style trending and instead realizes what every other manufacturer of automobiles in the world already knows.

Compete in automobile racing, take the technologies you develop and put them into the passenger cars you build for sale to the public.

It really is that simple.

Leia Mais…

Pointing out the Obvious

Aside from the fact that they let the unions strong arm them for decades- especially the 1970's and 1980's, or even the fact that they mothballed production capacities in favor of spinning off internal supply chains into spun off barely independent companies, or using gimmick financing to enable them to charge inflated prices to their consumers < 72 month auto loans? give me a break>- the real problem is they build crap.

Seriously- they build crap. Their engines have barely developed in 30 years. Ford, aside from its Volvo and Jaguar acquired engines- date from the early 1980's. Aside from cosmetic changes to the front ends and roof lines none of the trucks or cars have substantially improved in terms of form & function. In a very real sense the Detroit of today is little different from the Detroit of the 1950's when it was taking pre-war chassis and engines and slapping fins and chrome on every possible surface.

Have there been some high spots? Sure cars like the Riviera, Thunderbird, and 300M were great. They also were essentially custom built, used as test beds for other simpler cars- and the abandoned. GM's Quad 4 engine and the Oldsmobile Aurora were a world class combination of form and function. Yet you can't buy an Olds anymore because GM wanted to streamline for marketing purposes. And the union agreed because in exchange for shutting down assembly plants like Fisher, the union got huge severance packages and garuntees for the now idled workers. Ford shut down its assembly plant in Atlanta and GM shut down its plant in Doraville. Never mind the former was home to the Taurus chassis lines and the later was home to the Uplander - a car that created the crossover class.

Even when they got things right as is the case with projects like the Prowler or GT40, the idiotic moves they made in terms of hamstringing their production, logistics, and supply always reflected an impact on the workers and marketing. Chrysler's launching of the cab forward Sebring line created pretty impressive numbers in terms of sales- to a point that Daimler Benz even bought them. Yet the reality is that even Daimler couldn't manage to run Chrysler at a profit. Whether or not the institutional legacy contributed to Chrysler's eventual decline is debatable.

The real point is that in terms of technology, innovation, and actual product availability to the consumer the Detroit companies out right fail in comparison to other makes. In short the offerings from Detroit fail in terms of chassis design one of the least modified or improved components in their inventory. Their engines are overweight, made in a manner little improved in the last 30 years, and are modern only insofar as the top end mechanical systems have included multiple cams and electronic engine management systems. While fit and finish have improved markedly, the durability of appearance items is pathetic. The paint is barely resistant to scratching of its clear coat. Plastic bumpers and front facia still tend to shed paint and spider. Interior grades of cloths and fabrics are almost universally inferior to those on even the cheapest imported cars. The tactile surfaces show wear in a matter of months, and often are made of inferior plastics that quickly shed their painted on finishes.

The cars are lacking in design based on reality. The cars look like they were cobbled together from parts bins. The era of great designers that ended with the 1970's gas crisis has only gotten worse. American cars are either small econo-boxes or leviathans on the order slab sided Hummers. The sense of style is very limited in terms of addressing the needs of consumers in terms of utility and mechanical efficiency. It is as if Detroit simply cant suffer any eye pleasing form factor or even be bothered with designing a car based on optimizing performance effiencies and user utility.

GM, Ford, and Chrysler may be selling gangbusters in Asia right now. The thing is, their cars sell there only because their vehicles are cheaper than the preferred cars in the market. In China, the number one car is Volkswagen. And it increases its share every year. GM and Ford may crow about how successful they are over there, but the reality is that their cars are bottom feeders. VW sells multiple brands that most of you wouldn't recognize, but the thing is VW will wind up selling a million cars this year. That is around 18-20% of the entire market. GM has around 15%, Ford somewhere similar. Chrysler even less. The Chinese buy VW or Toyota products when they can afford it. They still buy their state owned automobiles most. And what is further telling that in terms of GM's presence in China, it is a subsidiary of SAIC one of China's largest automotive groups. GM may have "sold" 1 million cars in China this year- but they weren't really GM cars for the most part. The reality is that Detroit is basically the bottom feeder in the Chinese market. They plan on selling most of their cars outside of the United States in the next decade. It seems their business model is to try and sell their cars in places where consumers don't realize the cars are crap.

Even in motorsport, Detroit can't compete. Give Toyota a few more years and NASCAR fans won't be watching Detroit plated cars. Aside from the Corvettes competing at LeMans every year and usually taking their class, Detroit is not a factor in racing. To those of you saying "So What?" I point you to Porsche AG. Porsche races in dozens of classes, wins in dozens of the harshest racing venues of the world and as a result is the most profitable automaker in the world because it takes racing technology, perfects it on the tracks of the world, and places them into its consumer cars.

What about the other major car manufacturers? Honda is all over motorsport. The same can be said for Volkswagen, FIAT, Renault, Nissan, and Toyota. One of the best indicators of healthy consumer car sales is whether or not a manufacturer competes in Formula One racing. Toyota, FIAT, BMW, and Renault do- and all of them are doing far better than their Detroit rivals. When it comes to technology development the only place Detroit can be competitive is NASCAR- and lets face it NASCAR is about as low tech as racing can get.

For whatever reason, Detroit offers inferior products. And what is worse is that the cars start out overpriced and lose their value rapidly once you buy it. Design sense and esthetics are not world class. They may be better built compared to Detroit's offering in the last decade, but the reality is that they are often very inferior compared to other automakers. People can blame the unions, or legacy costs, or incompetent management. The real problem is the cars simply suck.

After the fire, I had a brand new Pontiac G6 Coupe. The fit and finish was so bad that there were three separate controls that broke off in my hand. I pushed on a button in one case and it went through the dashboard. Granted it was a rental car but the ergonomics were straight out of the 1980's. Gas milage was hideous. The thing averaged 12 MPG. 12 MPG on a car that was less than 1 month old. The engine bay emitted so much heat that one person who was standing next to the driver side window talking to me actually complained about how much heat was flowing away from the engine compartment. The AC was so feeble that according to the interior cockpit temperature gauge the air temperature in the car only managed to drop 6 degrees after a 30 minute drive.

And that was a new redesigned forward to the future GM offerings that is supposed to take consumers along for the ride.

Now ask yourself if you would buy the following. It is a decades old chassis with minimal modifications. The front end is a plastic cowling with a grill that actually isn't functional and is purely cosmetic. The fit and finish of the interior is so poor that parts break off with little effort. Ergonomics of seating and layout of controls isn't. The AC is so poor it cannot cool a car off in the Summer time- and by cool off I mean get the temperature less than 85 degrees. It gets 12 MPG city and 14 MPG highway. The engine design is so inefficient that the entire engine bay radiates excessive heat.

I don't think you would either.

A very telling thing is that I have a used Porsche. It isn't a very common model. Only 2,200 or so made it into the country the year it was new. As it has sat at the construction site it has often been oogled by the workers. A game has developed between myself and my general contractor. When we see people gawking at it we ask them what year they think the car was made- and this is after one of us tell them that it is a used car. The average guess is 2002 model year. When I tell them it is a 1992 model car you can pretty much knock them over with a feather.

And that is the embodiment of the failings of Detroit.

My car is a decade old and more, yet it is pleasing to the eye, has modern features like anti lock breaks, 16 way power seats, power windows, multiple airbags, gets 20 something MPG, multiple airbags, and enough other stuff to convince the average person that it is a new car.

You put a 1992 model car from Detroit on my construction site and there isn't any question at all that it is a 1992 model car. Detroit hasn't changed that much so I suspect that in a decade people will be able to tell a 202 Model Detroit car is a piece of junk.

My Porsche? I suspect they will be thinking its a 2011 model year car.

Detroit's collapse is inevitable. It isn't the fault of the unions, but it also isn't a wise move to bail them out. Bankruptcy may be the only thing that might save them because it would require the removal of all the unsound business models that Detroit can't seem to overcome.

Leia Mais…

Cutting the Petroleum Knot

t current regulatory and infrastructure rates of change, yes, it would be fair to say that it is 10-20 years off. But in terms of technology being practically applied right now the cars exists, function, and are completely consumer ready. In terms of manufacturing, the German marques are all quite serious when they say they could be mass produced in the next available model year. Aside from my somehow ingrained cultural and genetic predisposition to things German that might be blinding me into thinking hydrogen is the superior future fuel, the issues that compromise the other alternatives seem to me to be the more likely ones to have unintended consequences.

For example, the cars that rely on a hybrid system of a gasoline primary engine coupled to an electrical storage/redistribution system have two problems. The first is obvious- it still uses gasoline as a primary fuel. If the goal is to reduce or eliminate the need for a fossil fuel, then any vehicle that still requires gasoline remains part of the long term problem even if such a vehicle seems better compared to a standard gasoline fueled vehicle. Sure it might boast of getting 30 MPG combined performance, but it would ultimately remain a problem in that even if every car was a gasoline/electric hybrid we would still need massive amounts of gasoline for such a fleet. Given that our population will continue growing, as will the numbers of households with automobiles, in a very short time of years we would again return to our current levels of consumption of oil. If oil is a scarce market commodity now, what is the likelihood that it will be plentiful in the future?

The second problem with the gasoline/electric hybrids is tied up in the added resource costs and ultimate disposal costs associated with such vehicles. In terms of manufacturing, the additional need to put larger DC alternators on gasoline engines so that they can additionally serve as an electric drive do not just grow on trees. The additional requirements for copper windings of larger diameters means that copper would become and even more stressed resource. In the case of hub-driven hybrids, instead of having a single alternator per-vehicle, you have five. Then there are the batteries themselves. In terms of efficiencies they have become better at holding a charge, delivering a charge, and returning to the pre-charge level. It is this development which has made it feasible to even make gasoline/electric hybrids.

The problem is that these new batteries are made from essentially exotic metals. Nickel, cadmium, lithium, & other exotic metals are not exactly materials that grow on trees and aren't better used in other tools. Imagine for a moment if we were now having to dispose of such batteries after their utility as
storage for a hybrid drive system has failed. Many cars never make it to junk yards. Do you want such metals decaying into your water table? Even if recycled, the recycling costs are almost as high as the original construction of such batteries. Plus there will be unrecyclable material that cannot be reused and cannot go into anything other than an inert landfill. Do we really have such an abundance of landfills that meet this qualification that we can absorb the yearly waste metal slurry from hundreds of thousands of batteries? We have enough problems with the waste left over from the yearly recycling of standard automobile batteries right now. Imagine if the waste was double or triple the amount, but instead of being plain old lead byproducts it is instead lithium or cadmium.

The other pollution component is a function of it still being a gas powered system. You still have exhaust gasses. Yes when the gasoline part of the engine is idled in favor of the electric side, the emissions are zero. But, the minute you turn it back on it still churns out noxious gasses that at the least effect the local environment. If the Global Warming nutcases are serious in their belief system, any automobile power plant that still releases noxious gases should be a problem due to the scale of numbers of such cars that would be on the road. Surely, such cars would likely cut in half the current automobile pollution levels from exhaust. But if Global Warming is such a dire disaster, the priority should be to replace cars that emit tons of noxious gases per hundred miles with cars that release pounds of non-noxious gases per hundred miles.

Environmentally the hydrogen cars are the better solution because in the short term, they can utilize the old petroleum based gasoline distribution system while the hydrogen distribution system is deployed. Meaning the upfront costs of deploying the fleet can be spread across a decade. Meaning we wouldn't have to destroy our economy with a massive emergency deployment. As more hydrogen cars come online, automobile emissions will decline rapidly. Within ten years, passenger car emissions of noxious gasses would drop to less than 10% of what it is today. In ten years of deployment of a hybrid based system, you would possibly drop it to only 30% of today's value- but eventually the numbers would start to climb as new population growth put more vehicles into service. At some point you would again face the same problem we do right now in terms of pollution and consumption requirements of fossil fuels.

I can't remeber the name of the General Motors all electric car that was leased to people in California. I think it was the Impulse. Alex is wanting to go play so I will just make my point quickly. The car was a response to a California legal regulation. It made it possible for General Motors to meet California zero emissions standards and allow it also to keep selling normal cars. Any way, the cars cost a fortune to make and GM lost around $4,000 on each car. You couldn't buy one but could only lease it for three years. Then the car would need to have its batteries removed and new ones installed, the car was supposed to be cosmetically refurbished, and then the car was supposed to be re-leased to a new person. They made something like 1000 of the cars- and they were ugly, small, practical only for a concentrated urban environment, and prone to battery failures/fires. As the first ones began being returned, GM discovered that the batteries were essentially unrecoverable and had to pay a fortune for each disposal. If GM had added the cost of disposal to its original finished good cost, the price would have increased by half. It became very obvious to GM that a car that cost that much to refurbish and required each car to need a sanitary secured disposal burial plot was an idea that made zero sense. Plus, after three years of trying to lease the things, they still hadn't managed to lease all of them.

In the end, GM collected all but a handful of the cars which went to a handful of museums. The rest, including the ones that it never managed to lease one time, were sent to a specially built landfill site. The cars were all crushed, deemed toxic waste, and buried.

The thing is companies in America including Ford, GM, and Chrysler all bet that electric cars would be legislated into viability by California and the infrastructure would be mandated legally. It didn't happen. Environmentally, the cars were supposed to be vastly superior to standard cars. They weren't since 99% of the entire material in the construction run is now toxic waste in a secured sanitary landfill. The only net positive that resulted from the failed product was that GM, Ford, & Chrysler all decided it would be better for them economically if they took a baby step into gasoline/electric hybrids.

And that is the real problem. American companies jumped on the gasoline/electric hybrid bandwagon with the Japanese manufacturers. Its really where most of their R&D investment has went for the last ten years. They knew about the Germans and their various duel fuel hydrogen systems. But they reasonably concluded that an incremental step would be regulatorilly neutral and remain compatible with the existing fuel delivery system in the country. Now that petroleum is pushing the futures markets at $120 a bbl, they see the potential to be able to have the public make their investment profitable.

They do not want to see the hydrogen cars come easily to market.

The benefit to Hydrogen system cars is obvious. They can run on either existing fuel sources or on hydrogen. They are essentially the exact same engine as a standard gasoline only engine. The canister bottle is almost indestructible and 100% recyclable. The hydrogen car is as recyclable as any standard car is. It holds the potential to ultimately derive all of its energy needs from non-fossil fuels. It has the potential to reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions from the national automobile fleet to levels not seen since the early 1900's. Additionally it has the potential to contribute only H₂O as an automobile derived greenhouse gas.

In short, the Germans invented the magic bullet. The American & Japanese makers gambled on an incremental step, the Germans succeeded on an evolutionary step.

If we expect to remove the Middle East oil flow from our considerations in the future, the only viable solutions are those which eliminate fossil fuels from the equations.

Leia Mais…