GM shares fall to lowest price in 75 years
Carhead, Joie de vivre, Preapocalyptic technological dystopia, Slightly off-topic rant, imminent death of car-based culture March 7th, 2009
The looming death of this company may be the canary’s warning that our entire economy is swirling down the toilet, but we might as well gloat over it while we can.
Their arrogance, and their encouragement of arrogance on the part of their customers, against the scary, unsettling effects of global warming make it hard for me to shed many tears over their demise.
–Erik Ryberg
March 9th, 2009 at 10:19 am
This is the same company which created a fake company and then help destroy the street car. There were found guilty.
This is the same company who sold the electric vehicle and then pulled it because no reason at all. In fact customers were screaming at them to let them keep it. The cars were shipped off to the desert to be destroyed.
This is the same company who still runs tv ads on a Cadillac which costs tons of money and doesn’t get very very many mpg all the while they receive money from the government.
This is the same company that allowed a CEO to fly to Washington in a private jet to beg for money.
The Unions have ramped up pay so high they can’t compete with others.
on on on till their death
Good bye!
March 9th, 2009 at 2:34 pm
“This is the same company who sold the electric vehicle and then pulled it because no reason at all. In fact customers were screaming at them to let them keep it. The cars were shipped off to the desert to be destroyed.”
I certainly waste no love for GM, and their management may be guilty of all manner of malfeasance, but let’s not pretend that the failure of the coal-powered EV1 experiment was due to anything other than the fact that they couldn’t get anybody outside of a very small group of noisy political activists to actually pay more for the privilege of getting less. Chris Paine’s inflammatory attempt to make a buck notwithstanding, this isn’t even the first time that somebody wasted a whole lot of money developing and tooling up to manufacture an electric car for sale to the general public, only to fail to actually sell more than a token handful before giving up. I’ve personally witnessed about a half-dozen companies try and fail in my lifetime – there has to have been many more that I didn’t know about. The Reva and the Tesla are two of the latest floundering attempts since the EV1. Are they all in on the big conspiracy?
March 9th, 2009 at 2:58 pm
Hi Scott. The Tesla is floundering? I had high hopes for that one. It seemed like a pretty cool car (not that I read anything other than the company’s propaganda, of course). And you would need to cut the price by 90 percent.
Still, I thought that company was going to do alright.
EBR
March 9th, 2009 at 4:28 pm
So how many people do *you* know that are willing to part with over $100,000 to be put on a year + waiting list for a car that can’t practicably venture beyond the city limits? Their L. A. sales can only float them for so long before the “pretentious” market becomes saturated, these things no longer score bragging points, and everybody moves on to the next useless fad.
March 9th, 2009 at 4:39 pm
“I certainly waste no love for GM, and their management may be guilty of all manner of malfeasance, but let’s not pretend that the failure of the coal-powered EV1 experiment was due to anything other than the fact that they couldn’t get anybody outside of a very small group of noisy political activists to actually pay more for the privilege of getting less.”
@Scott
“According to the March 13, 2007, issue of Newsweek, “GM R&D chief Larry Burns . . . now wishes GM hadn’t killed the plug-in hybrid EV1 prototype his engineers had on the road a decade ago: ‘If we could turn back the hands of time,’ says Burns, ‘we could have had the Chevy Volt 10 years earlier.’”
March 9th, 2009 at 4:48 pm
Scott — I guess my observations of the pretentiousness market suggest it is big enough to float a company like Tesla for time immemorial, but I admit I don’t know a soul who could actually afford one of the things. I’m only operating on what my eyes see when I find myself in certain well-heeled zip codes.
And doesn’t the one year waiting list necessarily mean the company is selling more cars than it can make?
–EBR
March 9th, 2009 at 6:59 pm
BB – So the R&D guy was complaining that an R&D project got killed? So what? As an R&D guy myself I can tell you that this is pretty much the automatic lament for *every* R&D gamble that goes nowhere – we’d love to keep tinkering on every cool pet project, but if the money ain’t there, it just ain’t there. And believe me that lack of popular demand (i.e. potential $ale$) has killed many waaaaay better ideas than any coal burning (remember, that juice out of the wall has to come from somewhere), landfill choking (thousand or so pounds of battery hazmat per vehicle have to be completely replaced every couple of years) short-range sluggish excuse for a faux-green vehicle.
Eric – Selling more than you can make is not necessarily a measure of success, recouping your astronomical R&D and tool-up costs before your loans come due and your investors get tired of waiting for their return and pull out – that will be the measure of success of a company this new, and they’ve got a long way to go from here. Just ask John Delorean.
March 9th, 2009 at 7:07 pm
But Eric, you do have a point. Maybe I do underestimate the true depth of the pretentiousness market (pun fully intended) – after all, that’s the only thing that’s kept Harley Davidson alive since the late 70s. But then again a stock Harley typically costs less than $20,000, and you can ride one on the highway without having to stop every two hours for a four hour recharge.
March 10th, 2009 at 6:42 am
And while we’re on the subject of faux-green vehicles, did anyone else attend the so-called sustainability expo at the TCC over the weekend? Offering free admission to anyone who made use of the bicycle valet parking was a nice touch, but that’s pretty much the extent of the “pro-bikeness” of the whole event. Only one bike shop (Ajo) in all of Pima County sponsored a booth, and all they had on display was some lame battery-powered bike. However, Jim Click, Holmes Tuttle, etc. were all out in full force displaying the various lumbering SUVs and heavy pickups that they get to tout as “green” because they’ll burn either gas *or* propane in some cases, or diesel *or* biodiesel in others – and we all know just how much propane or biodiesel actually gets used in those things. Several battery cars too, as well as hybrids and plain-old gas cars that get to call themselves “green” because they get better than 20MPG, every last one of them just as green as my left foot. What a farce!
March 10th, 2009 at 11:04 am
Hey, that’s the illusion…the only effort you
have to make to be green is to BUY something
that is minuscully more efficient and throw out
what you have. It’s a travesty..A travesty of a
mockery…A travesty of a mockery of a sham!
March 10th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
I was trying to show that GM didn’t have the oversight to invest in technology that would make them a viable company. I was also trying to show that GM is still in bed with the oil companies which were part of the fake company(standard oil) in the forties so that they could sell buses. In effect I was trying to show we have an outdated company unwilling to break ties and create a sensible business plan that fit into the 21st consumer. Now they are being propped up by a socialistic government all the while they even still try to lobby the government against emission caps. It never ends.
March 10th, 2009 at 6:01 pm
Coghauler: It’s funny and sad all at once. It wasn’t that long ago that I left the house for work in the morning to find an unordered paper littering my front yard – as well as all my neighbors driveways and yards and many more hundreds all along my route to work. Some came open and were blowing all over the street – I saw many folks walk out, pick theirs up, and throw it unopened into their (non-recycle) garbage can. The paper? Tucson Green Times. I love irony.
I was caught by surprise this year – I heard about the expo late Friday night; but with advance warning it would’ve been cool to stand outside next to the parking lot entrance holding up a big sign that said:
“Just dusting off and using the old Schwinn you already have in the shed makes you greener than everybody inside put together! And it’s FREE”
March 11th, 2009 at 12:37 pm
Hi Scott,
Lauren used to deliver the Tucson Green Times on her cargo bike. Her job involved delivering new papers to the boxes around town, and taking the old papers that were still remaining to the recycle bin.
She told me that the size of her load going to the boxes was really not very different from the size of her load going away from them. She felt the publisher was printing many more copies than ever got read.
EBR
March 11th, 2009 at 6:06 pm
I’m not shocked. To be honest, I haven’t opened one since the issue that papered the town. (Fortunately they seem to have abandoned that particularly anti-green approach.) At the time it looked like it was just a “Penneysaver” type ad vehicle for local roof-solar and cistern companies with little useful content. I’ll have to pick one up on the ride home tonight and see if anything’s changed.
April 5th, 2009 at 9:50 am
I have a friend that might be considered a global denier. He thinks there is nothing now, to get off fossil fuels “the most efficient fuel source of today” ya right. He says if we did the “enviros” way of thinking, we could not receive any kinds of products and consumer goods across distances that makes this economy work, and have the conveniences we are used to everyday. Well I gave him a two-pronged solution that he didn’t respond to. My solution, instead of trucks, we can use bicyclist. We can line them up and have them pull the truck trailers (like chuck wagons). Plus, it would not cost anything, because bicyclist enjoy biking anyway. I think I just “served him”. I enjoyed that, and I look forward to changing minds of others too. Go Green!!!
May 7th, 2009 at 9:39 am
Look what happened when I accidently parked my Humvee at Reid Park Zoo’s preferred parking spaces for alternative fuel vehicles. It was probably a biker gang. See pic above.