Lutz: GM to rethink product plans if 35 mpg CAFE passes

[regfootball]

a couple of thoughts here.

yes, social security, health care, wars, national security....everyone seems to take this stuff for granted but there are some major problems down the road with this stuff because of how badly the baby boom generation / fem. movement has screwed us, they created an economy that is out of whack vs the ozzie and harriet days and now their numbers retiring are far greater than the generations after that were culturally and economically forced into 'breeding responsibly'. Previous poster who advocated no more new children doesn't seem to get that those younguns will be pumping money into the health care and social security machines that the numerous boomers will be sucking upon en masse. Plus all the younguns we need to get working and filling needed jobs to support our blue haired and entitled population.....driving ambulances, cleaning up floors in the rest homes etc.

the 'anti-sprawl' / walk everywhere crownd, simply put, is fking clueless. mobility = freedom = what our country is based upon. It was the engine of our postwar greatness. I do feel mass transit is part of the solution but all the idiots seem to think one has to come at the expense of the other. Pull your heads out of your brainwashed liberal urban arses long enough to understand a few things. If you had no car and the bus and train was not running, how pray tell would you get a sick kid to the emergency room at 3 am. Walking in a cold zero degree night? How would anyone drive up to their precious fricking summer cabins in the middle of nowhere? How would families coexist in communal properties? Not very well. People always seem to forget with high density housing comes social costs (not gonna discuss those here) but building costs as well. If you think condo living means cheaper living, think again. Does your single family home in a nice suburb bear the cost of an expensive steel or concrete structure, fire sprinkling system, elevators, commercial mechanical system with elaborate pressurization, communal rooms, emergency generators, stories of exit stairs. Who pays for all that? What sort of resources were wasted making those elaborate structures when simple stick frame houses would do? Where does that expensive condo fee go every month? You gotta pay someone to maintain those big buildings. Window washing crews? You don't need to do that on your house. If maintenance slides, can you all agree on whether to pony up more bucks, or do advocate letting it slide? If the city comes knocking on your door and mandates that you need to spend 6,000 per resident to upgrade the mechanical to code, how do you feel about that? Still like living with the guy three stories up whose toilet you hear flushing through the floor? How bout that vietnamese family that stinks up the whole building with their spicy cooking? You wanna bear the smell of that all the time in many parts of the building? You like being trapped on floor 27 with only a tiny balcony and no connection to the earth? You think there is any incentive for large rental properties (especially low income ones) to be kept up? If resident 23 trips and breaks their leg because maintenance guy your association hired didn't mop the floor right and he sues the condo association, did you ever think that cost isn't gonna nail ya? Who's gonna pay the settlement and legal fees?

You think whitey worked his whole life to live in a cramped urban setting with other income groups? nuh uh. whitey wants the boat on the lake and no density. whitey writes the checks. Yes, whitey buys expensive condos too but you better bet he still doesn't want to walk and he defintely wants premier parking space for his SUV / suburban, even if he lives in a downtown condo. So get down off this 'walk everywhere' high horse. Our lifestyles are mobile and dynamic and requires mobility. How limited would you be if you had 3 kids and each one went to a different private or charter school and each was like 10 miles away. Oh yeah, WALKING your kid to school everyday like Laura fricking Ingalls Wilder would be productive. They don't build schools every four blocks these days. Kids would be walking 8 miles to school. Mom walking the kid to school, by the time she gets home by noon, she has to turn around and go back to pick them up and walk them back home. that doesn't leave empowered mom the freedom to look for a job, does it? Now mom is resentful because she lost her mobility and does not have the freedom to work if she chooses.

i think i said this in another thread. the govt would be better off to offer eye popping incentives to companies for pushing new tech and high mpg cars instead of CAFE. For example, waive a (US based) automakers need to comply will all CAFE if they sell x amount of qualifyiing innovative, hybrid, alt fuel or otherwise beneficial cars each year, and give them a 3-5k tax break per type car for doing so. IOW, let them sell all the suburbans they want, but if they build 50,000 bioethanol aveos (stipulation that it is designed and built here in US) a year in the US and sell them that get like 50/60 mpg and zero emissions, then waive cafe for their entire lineup and give them a huge tax break on each type of car like that they build. Or, GM builds 100k volts with zero emissions and can run on elec. waive cafe for the rest of the GM lineup. and let the public decide.

there is no benefit to reverting to tribal living (i.e. highly cramped forced living arrangments and no mobility). Mobility is one of our countries greatest assets. It keeps us on top. It makes us happy. We simply need to push more and newer techonolgies to facilitate that way of life.

One other thing that needs to happen. all the old boomer bosses in middle and upper mgmt and ceos need to change our work culture and arrangements so they don't feel like they need to have us chained in a cube 5-6 days a week. internet alone means we could work part week at home and by simply staying home 1-2 days a week, we could cut our energy expenditures a lot. But many people in charge can't function as bossmen unless they think they have watch over us like little kids. that is a culture/generational thing that needs to go away and get osme of these old folks to change their thinking.

Edited January 3, 2008 by regfootball

[siegen]

Last Point: How can we, as a society, get automakers to introduce new "alternatively" fueled cars into their line-ups?

We're already doing it. Oil prices go up, demand for more fuel efficient cars goes up, automakers build more fuel efficient cars. Oil goes up enough and the price of refueling off of natural gas or hydrogen becomes so inexpensive compared to gasoline, that automakers pursue alternative fuels heavily in response to consumer demand. The problem is, it's a slow process and there are too many doomsday theorists out there. Hence our government steps in and passes a bill.

Let's see, how do we get ourselves off of oil completely? Our government could invest fully in new technology such as hydrogen fuel cells, batteries, solar energy, electric motors (for EV and FC cars). No let's instead pass regulations to make our current oil/gas cars slightly more efficient over the next 10-15 years. Yes because that is going to get us off the oil.

Doesn't over 30% of new pollution and emissions come from industry? What if we were to use solar energy to power all of the equipment and electricity generating needs for the industrial sector? Then continue on to power all of our homes with that energy, and finally generate electricity and hydrogen for our EV and FC cars? Some automakers (GM included) are already voluntarily installing solar panels onto the roofs of their factories. Think of the sheer acreage of roof space available in the industrial sector in just the southern (sunny) states alone, and how much energy that could produce.

[A Horse With No Name]

For the sake of peace I hope that YellowJacket, GM4life, etc are all of about 12 years old and therefore not representative of the general adult population. The thought of a population "entitled" to a lifestyle that isn't sustainable is a scary thought. There is no magic bullet on energy. Oil is nature's one-time gift and it will be coming to end in our lifetimes. Politicians and government have nothing to do with natural resource depletion. This is not a matter of "surrender." It's a matter of understanding that there's no such thing as getting something for nothing. All the "alt fuels" are actually old news and have been around in one form or another since the beginning of the car business. About the only one that hasn't resurrected itself yet is steam. I'm sure the "news" media will be on that one as oil continues its rise. BTW, anyone look up from their comic books today to notice that oil hit $100/barrel for the first time? $200 and higher will be here sooner than you expect. Bank on it.

A parting thought: when I was a teenager Nissan made a big deal about how they were working on hydrogen and elecrtic-powered vehicles!!! The future is now - fuel economy and overall usage is even worse.

For your own sake, start thinking about a world where you walk instead of drive.

I haven't given up hope as Camino suggests, but I do believe the future of transport will be very, very different than what we think.

RWD vehicles with big V8's will go the way of the dinosaur in the next ten-20 years. Bank on it.

$200 per barrel plus for oil will be here. When it gets here the trade in Value of your Tahoe will be effectively Zero.

We will have other sources of energy, but what we really need/will get are mass transit, a national rail system with decent national passenger service, small cars like the Honda Fit, the Smart Car, etc.

This is coming no matter how hard the old school nay-sayers try to deny it.

It's nuts that CAFE is not higher RIGHT NOW. We should have made it higher back when Carter was president.

Chris

[A Horse With No Name]

a couple of thoughts here.

yes, social security, health care, wars, national security....everyone seems to take this stuff for granted but there are some major problems down the road with this stuff because of how badly the baby boom generation / fem. movement has screwed us, they created an economy that is out of whack vs the ozzie and harriet days and now their numbers retiring are far greater than the generations after that were culturally and economically forced into 'breeding responsibly'. Previous poster who advocated no more new children doesn't seem to get that those younguns will be pumping money into the health care and social security machines that the numerous boomers will be sucking upon en masse. Plus all the younguns we need to get working and filling needed jobs to support our blue haired and entitled population.....driving ambulances, cleaning up floors in the rest homes etc.

the 'anti-sprawl' / walk everywhere crownd, simply put, is fking clueless. mobility = freedom = what our country is based upon. It was the engine of our postwar greatness. I do feel mass transit is part of the solution but all the idiots seem to think one has to come at the expense of the other. Pull your heads out of your brainwashed liberal urban arses long enough to understand a few things. If you had no car and the bus and train was not running, how pray tell would you get a sick kid to the emergency room at 3 am. Walking in a cold zero degree night? How would anyone drive up to their precious fricking summer cabins in the middle of nowhere? How would families coexist in communal properties? Not very well. People always seem to forget with high density housing comes social costs (not gonna discuss those here) but building costs as well. If you think condo living means cheaper living, think again. Does your single family home in a nice suburb bear the cost of an expensive steel or concrete structure, fire sprinkling system, elevators, commercial mechanical system with elaborate pressurization, communal rooms, emergency generators, stories of exit stairs. Who pays for all that? What sort of resources were wasted making those elaborate structures when simple stick frame houses would do? Where does that expensive condo fee go every month? You gotta pay someone to maintain those big buildings. Window washing crews? You don't need to do that on your house. If maintenance slides, can you all agree on whether to pony up more bucks, or do advocate letting it slide? If the city comes knocking on your door and mandates that you need to spend 6,000 per resident to upgrade the mechanical to code, how do you feel about that? Still like living with the guy three stories up whose toilet you hear flushing through the floor? How bout that vietnamese family that stinks up the whole building with their spicy cooking? You wanna bear the smell of that all the time in many parts of the building? You like being trapped on floor 27 with only a tiny balcony and no connection to the earth? You think there is any incentive for large rental properties (especially low income ones) to be kept up? If resident 23 trips and breaks their leg because maintenance guy your association hired didn't mop the floor right and he sues the condo association, did you ever think that cost isn't gonna nail ya? Who's gonna pay the settlement and legal fees?

You think whitey worked his whole life to live in a cramped urban setting with other income groups? nuh uh. whitey wants the boat on the lake and no density. whitey writes the checks. Yes, whitey buys expensive condos too but you better bet he still doesn't want to walk and he defintely wants premier parking space for his SUV / suburban, even if he lives in a downtown condo. So get down off this 'walk everywhere' high horse. Our lifestyles are mobile and dynamic and requires mobility. How limited would you be if you had 3 kids and each one went to a different private or charter school and each was like 10 miles away. Oh yeah, WALKING your kid to school everyday like Laura fricking Ingalls Wilder would be productive. They don't build schools every four blocks these days. Kids would be walking 8 miles to school. Mom walking the kid to school, by the time she gets home by noon, she has to turn around and go back to pick them up and walk them back home. that doesn't leave empowered mom the freedom to look for a job, does it? Now mom is resentful because she lost her mobility and does not have the freedom to work if she chooses.

i think i said this in another thread. the govt would be better off to offer eye popping incentives to companies for pushing new tech and high mpg cars instead of CAFE. For example, waive a (US based) automakers need to comply will all CAFE if they sell x amount of qualifyiing innovative, hybrid, alt fuel or otherwise beneficial cars each year, and give them a 3-5k tax break per type car for doing so. IOW, let them sell all the suburbans they want, but if they build 50,000 bioethanol aveos (stipulation that it is designed and built here in US) a year in the US and sell them that get like 50/60 mpg and zero emissions, then waive cafe for their entire lineup and give them a huge tax break on each type of car like that they build. Or, GM builds 100k volts with zero emissions and can run on elec. waive cafe for the rest of the GM lineup. and let the public decide.

there is no benefit to reverting to tribal living (i.e. highly cramped forced living arrangments and no mobility). Mobility is one of our countries greatest assets. It keeps us on top. It makes us happy. We simply need to push more and newer techonolgies to facilitate that way of life.

One other thing that needs to happen. all the old boomer bosses in middle and upper mgmt and ceos need to change our work culture and arrangements so they don't feel like they need to have us chained in a cube 5-6 days a week. internet alone means we could work part week at home and by simply staying home 1-2 days a week, we could cut our energy expenditures a lot. But many people in charge can't function as bossmen unless they think they have watch over us like little kids. that is a culture/generational thing that needs to go away and get osme of these old folks to change their thinking.

I agree 100 percent with the change in thinking thing. Also agree that living in a 40 story condo would suck ass in a major sort of way.

However, a world where everyone commutes long distance in an SUV in un-sustainable. Methinks the answer is somewhere in the middle. But again we've got to start changing our behavior NOW so things don't come crshing down on our heads in the near future.

How many people have leased fuel inefficient vehicles that will be really screwed in a major sort of way if gas goes to $4.75 per gallon?

Chris

[GMTruckGuy74]

How many people have leased fuel inefficient vehicles that will be really screwed in a major sort of way if gas goes to $4.75 per gallon?

= 2005 GMC Envoy 4wd

Well, I'm not majorly screwed though, seeing as how the lease officially ends on August 18th. But I know that GMAC offers the "pull-ahead" program from time-to-time and if gas prices start going through the roof, hopefully one of those programs will help us out.

I don't want to say goodbye to the Envoy, but with the wife's 64-mile roundtrip commute everyday, her using the Envoy 2 or 3 times a week to travel to work just won't make good financial sense with higher gas prices, and her using the AURA solely will definitely consumer too many of our allowed lease miles (15k per year). So if it comes down to it, we'll just have to part earlier.

Now the problem is the wife wants to look into getting a VUE. While I like the fact that she'd have AWD for bad weather days on her long commute, I know the VUE is heavy and not sure it would be the best vehicle for her to have concerning rising gas prices. She likes the CTS and said she'd be happy with a base model, but again my concerns about her driving a RWD-based car in bad weather is making me hesitant to get her one (she's never had a RWD car in her life). There's not too much else out there that she likes, and we both don't want to go to a "tiny" micro car. The upcoming Philly Auto Show will be an interesting one this year, as it will likely narrow down our choices for us.

[thegriffon]

I haven't given up hope as Camino suggests, but I do believe the future of transport will be very, very different than what we think.

RWD vehicles with big V8's will go the way of the dinosaur in the next ten-20 years. Bank on it.

$200 per barrel plus for oil will be here. When it gets here the trade in Value of your Tahoe will be effectively Zero.

We will have other sources of energy, but what we really need/will get are mass transit, a national rail system with decent national passenger service, small cars like the Honda Fit, the Smart Car, etc.

This is coming no matter how hard the old school nay-sayers try to deny it.

It's nuts that CAFE is not higher RIGHT NOW. We should have made it higher back when Carter was president.

Chris

Wouldn't work. without higher fuel prices or other incentives, there is no reason people will buy more fuel-efficient vehicles. There are plenty of measures that could have been taken to reduce fuel consumption (proper finance for Amtrak for starters), but setting CAFE standards seems like a good idea that politicians can point to as direct action. It just doesn't work. Face it—countries where people do drive smaller, more fuel efficient vehicles don't have any fuel economy standards. What they have are higher taxes on larger vehicles, perks for drivers of the smallest classes of vehicles, and much higher fuel prices. CAFE doesn't work. Raising it won't make it work any better.

[thegriffon]

BTW, first victim of the higher CAFE standards—no replacement for the Northstar V8. DT7, Lucerne/Park Avenue, XLR etc will make do with the DOHC V6s (2.8, 2.8 Turbo, 3.6 DI). The only V8 offered in a passenger car or crossover will be a version of the Gen V small block for the Corvette and Camaro and hand-built GMPD engines for the G8, CT5, XLR etc.; and on the outside chance, a version of the 4.5 L diesel.

Edited January 3, 2008 by thegriffon

[Robert Hall]

BTW, first victim of the higher CAFE standards—no replacement for the Northstar V8. DT7, Lucerne/Park Avenue, XLR etc will make do with the DOHC V6s (2.8, 2.8 Turbo, 3.6 DI). The only V8 offered in a passenger car or crossover will be a version of the Gen V small block for the Corvette and Camaro and hand-built GMPD engines for the G8, CT5, XLR etc.; and on the outside chance, a version of the 4.5 L diesel.

Autoweek has an article on this...

Autoweek Article about NG NS V8 cancellation

Seems like a mistake for Cadillac, since the other premium brands (BMW, M-B, Audi, Lexus, etc) will still be offering DOHC V8s for the forseeable future..

[Camino LS6]

This news is 100% bad - nothing good in any of it.

The worst part is that it is all the product of stupidity.

[thegriffon]

Autoweek has an article on this...

Autoweek Article about NG NS V8 cancellation

Seems like a mistake for Cadillac, since the other premium brands (BMW, M-B, Audi, Lexus, etc) will still be offering DOHC V8s for the forseeable future..

Aside from the M3 and AMG models etc., maybe not. After all the 5-series is built with 2.0 L engines, the 7-series with a 3.0 L engine, and Mercedes will even start offering a 4-cylinder S-Class. Welcome to the future.

Anyway, there will be a DOHC gasoline V8 available, just not a high-volume engine.

[Drew Dowdell]

Autoweek has an article on this...

Autoweek Article about NG NS V8 cancellation

Seems like a mistake for Cadillac, since the other premium brands (BMW, M-B, Audi, Lexus, etc) will still be offering DOHC V8s for the forseeable future..

Is the Northstar going out of production? It's still good for 320hp without direct injection.

edit: This does mean no Enclave Super.

[Duncan]

Ask yourself this: Why do the European makers even offer big V8 and V12 engines?

For us, almost exclusively. (And for the occasional Middle Eastern trillionaire, but I don't count that.)

Remember that the vast majority of S-class and 7-series models throughout the rest of the world come with a six-cylinder.

With that in mind, I don't think Cadillac will suffer on the world stage if they offer a V6 (like the 3.6 DI) that's as powerful as a good V8:

From the AutoWeek article:

Cadillac spokesman Kevin Smith said, "We've really seen the V-6 become the predominant engine in sales on the (2008) STS because it's so close in power to the V-8."

He added that the V6 is about 150 to 200 pounds lighter [my emphasis].

Sure, I'd rather hear a V8 under the hood, but if all the power and torque are there along with the refinement - what's the real loss?

At least Cadillac's going about this the right way now, with vehicles fully engineered as Cadillacs - and not just Cimarron sequels.

Edited January 3, 2008 by Duncan

[Guest YellowJacket894]

No NG Northstar?

I want to cry.

[thegriffon]

No-one is buying them even now. You'll have to be happy with a DOHC 6.2 small block in V-Series models (perhaps).

[Duncan]

No-one is buying them even now. You'll have to be happy with a DOHC 6.2 small block in V-Series models (perhaps).

I could easily be happy with that.