Don't think "arrogance" had anything whatsoever to do w/ the decision to close Olds--it just no longer made any sense whatsoever to keep all five lines as they overlapped so much and the middle ones (Olds, Pontiac, Buick) almost completely, particular since the time of the "entry-level" concept of Chevrolet is no longer.
It was the same decision as Chrysler made years ago to eliminate DeSoto and subsequently, Plymouth. It appeared Ford was going to do the same w/ Mercury for a while, but seem to have decided to reassert it recently.
Coal has the same if not worse problems ecologically as oil although we have plenty of high sulfur coal.. Nuke, hydro and wind are very hard to get built. We haven't built a big hydro dam since the 50s and a nuke plant since the 60s. I doubt there will be one in the US any time soon either. They are trying to take out dams and nuke plants. Wind is also taking a beating. None other than the Kennedys, Kerry, Romney and most of the rest of new england stopped a plant there. Too ugly. All of this "bio" stuff is only a pork barrel projerct for farmers. We have more than we can sell so burn food in your car and get subsidized for doing it. Where are all the rain forest people on this "Brazil miracle" weren't we trying to save the rain forest. Now the lefties are praising them for burning down the jungle to grow sugar cane, just to spite Exxon. Maybe they should talk to the environmentalists who are condemning sugar cane production in Florida. What a schitzo bunch we have over in the "save the planet" sect.
Oh, I think they talk to each other. The dirty little secret of the radical environmental movement is that they are only going to be satisfied when *no* new power is being generated or distributed (except of course the energy that *they* need). The rest of us are supposed to live in environmentally friendly mud huts, living in harmony with nature in a subsistence agrarian society.
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ If you're gonna be dumb, you better be tough
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Arrogance had all to do with their failure. Countless times I witnessed Oldsmobile reps denie the obvious that they built an inferior product. When you replace hundreds of the same part year after year with no attempt to improve because you are the leader in sales it eventually catches up with you. Oldsmobile had been dying off since the mid 80's. There were and are simply too many quality alternatives available. Regardless of overlap, if you build a quality product it will continue to sell. Look at Toyota and Lexus. Plenty of overlap there. Nisson and Infinity, there too. VW and Audi, well they are still fooling some people.
Monster Cable. That stuff is funny. You are buying magnifying insulation. It's funny how big Monster Cable looks inside the insulation. Follow the wire to the uninsulated end you end up with weiner sized wire.
These NiMh batteries are still not good for the environment and you don't replace 1 battery. You replace a bank of batteries that run in the $5K range every 60,000 to 80,000 miles.
I'm just glad that all the folks who claimed the automobile was a passing fancy turned out to be right...god only knows how those idiots like Daimler and Diesel and Ford et al thought that they could build and sell cars with no existing infrastructure in place...
It's almost a miracle that things like roads and the automotive fuel industry sprung up overnight to serve the needs of the people building the cars, we all know that could never happen again.
Seriously, you guys who continually bash ideas like alternatively fueled vehicles are fun to read, it's like a car crash, you know you shouldn't but you have to look.
It's a wonder that anything in the way of transportation or power production and transmission or the interstate highway system, etc.ever got built at all given the amount of ignorant pessimism that one reads on the internet.
As for thinking and buying with one's penis, how else does one explain the Hummer...? If that's not genital compensation, I don't know what is.
This was my thought also. People saying hydro is going to help solve our power needs should talk to the folks in Idaho who are continually wanting to tear down the dams here because of the effects on the environment, salmon and other upstream habitats. There are environmentalists all around Hite, Utah who are NOT big fans of hydro power...
Also, GM has 1000's of employees on full salary in job banks - some haven't been near a auto manufacturing line in years, but the union says they can't be fired even though GM needs to shed excess employees off the payroll. Any company that is not allowed to make it's own business decisions is doomed.
Hm...how to put this? You're wrong. Battery life expectancy is estimated at 8-10 years/150K miles *minimum*. They put a 2001 Prius to work as a taxi in Vancouver, BC. Put over 200,000 miles on it. Wanna guess what went out? The struts and the AC temp sensor.
See a short write-up (including the service records for the car) here:
formatting link
thing about the Prius, for one, is that its battery packs are modular - meaning if a single cell within the pack goes bad, you can replace it, as opposed to the entire pack. There are also lithium-ion batteries now in development, which will extend battery life even further.
Well, except for large hydro I think you're wrong on all the above.
There are active plans underway w/ several utilities as we speak to site and build new nuclear stations--see Power Engineering (June issue I believe, maybe May) for a summary story.
We're building new wind generation stations all over out here in the midwest--a new site went on line just last month with the first windmils and they're continuing to add an additional tower at roughly one-1/2 per week on average.
Hydro is the least likely for additional large generation owing to basically a lack of places to put them. There are at least a few pumped-storage facilities still in the background in the southeast that I'm aware of, but you're correct they probably won't be built in the short term.
I disagree totally here as well...commodity prices are not skyrocketing w/ the huge surge in ethanol. If there is a surplus of any commodity for a given use, why should there be a reason to not use it for something there is a use for, whether that use is energy or anything else? While there is a small tax incentive at present to spur investment in ethanol production, it will be phased out and unless world oil prices decline significantly ethanol and biodiesel production will be economically viable. No one has ever claimed they will completely replace fossil-supplied fuels, but there certainly is no reason not to extend existing supplies. ...
I listed current alternatives that don't consist of _burning_ oil for central station electricity production which was the claim that I read (and now re-reading realize isn't precisely what you meant, I see you were actually meaning at least some oil is required for electricity generation--that I'll agree with.
I never claimed any of the alternatives are free (or even cheap) -- although both coal and nuclear are certainly cost-competitive to oil or gas generation at current prices and will only get more so. As noted in another reply, there's active consideration of new nuclear generation and I expect a new plant to be online in a relatively short time.
I guess the key word there is time. Time is as damaging as miles. May users will simply not put 150K on in 8-10 years. My personal vehicle has
65K and is 10 years old. I drive it almost daily and is a perfect candidate for being replaced by a hybrid. If every one has a job a job driving a taxi and a shop that takes care of it on a daily basis I am sure that battery life will be extended. For the rest of the real world the life is not likely to go that far. Typically the vehicles in general that run up the most amount of miles are driven above average on a daily basis. It is easy and more likely to put
200K miles on a new vehicle than it is to put 200K on a 5 year old vehicle with low mileage to start with.
Well that was a rather unfair response I gave you here. Basically the American automobile builders had this arrogance that they felt that they were world leaders in automobile production. They WERE. Then the Japanese car builders began to really take hold and the American automobile builders continued to build the same quality. They simply thought that their larger percentage of sales in the US would dominate. To day we see what effect that has had. Oldsmobile just happened to be the weak one at the time that GM needed to drop a car line. Until the late 80's GM was still adding divisions. Saturn was one, so overlap was not so much a problem. Lack of sales from mediocre quality eventually lead to the Japanese taking control.
If you really buy into global warming, all fossil fuel is bad
So basically, you can build plants where there is nobody using electricity? Bear in mind you lose power in transmission lines as a fuinction opf the square of the distance they run. P=I2R
... and the environmental push to rip out the ones we have.
. Any real large scale production will show up in prices at the grocery store.
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.