GLG News by Mr. Jack Lifton, Co-founder and Director
GLG News is now G+ Insights
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Chrysler Would'a, Could'a, Should'a Been Like Toyota. Now It's Too Late
February 11, 2008
Turning Chrysler Into Toyota | www.businessweek.com
Lee Iacooca Restructured Chrysler just as he had restructured and saved Ford before that, and it worked for him and "the New Chrysler Corporation" again. Juergen Schremp sang (to the melody from My Fair Lady) "Why Can't A Chrysler Be More Like A Daimler" as he restructured the company to become an entry level vehicle maker for Daimler. That didn't work, because the agenda was never allowed to get off the ground, and it harmed both companies by drainig resources. Finally John Snow who impusively bought Chrysler from Daimler hired Bob Nardelli to restructure Chrysler with the idea, at first, that Chrysler could be made over into a Home Depot for cars. Now, since he can't think of what else to do, Nardelli is hiring Toyota marketing people to make Chrysler look like a Home Depot that operates and has made for it cars such as those made by Toyota. It isn't going to work. I hope the 2010 liquidators can unravel the mess and get some value out of the wreckage.
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February 8, 2008
Saying 'I Love You' With a Metal Alloy | online.wsj.com
The last time that gold reached an all time high price, prior to last week, was in 1980 when its price reached $847 per troy ounce. Since then inflation has taken the 1980 dollar to $2.67 in 2008 dollars; this means that for gold to sell today at the same price it reached in 1980 it would have to be priced at $2228 per troy ounce. Since gold, last week, only reached a price of less than $950 (2008) and has since dropped back to the $900 (2008) level it is clear that gold is not a hedge against inflation nor is it a store of value. It is, in fact, a jewelry manufacturing material, which is now already too expensive to be used in a pure state. It is possible that within a few generations gold will only be remembered as a once important means of exchange once used on account of a perceived and generally agreed upon and accepted intrinsic value
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February 7, 2008
Are Hybrids Pointless without Lithium? | www.hybridcarblog.com
It is technologically pointless to wait for the advent of safe reliable lithium technology based batteries before ramping up the production of hybrid vehicles. The main issues holding back the production of hybrids, plug-in hybrids, and battery powered, all electric, passenger and small cargo vehicles are the questions of how the car makers can back off from promises of totally unnecessary performance and how they can get their customers to pay for batteries of either type, nickel metal hydride or lithium, which are very much more expensive than any batteries the public has ever before been asked to buy.
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February 6, 2008
Chrysler rocked by war with supplier | www.freep.com
Is privately owned Chrysler acting out the role of champion for American OEM heavy industry in its battle with OEM automotive supplier, Plastech Engineering? Is Chrysler obligated to continue to do business, and lose money because of it, with an insolvent supplier due to social and political demands thinly disguised as legal obligations enabled by an interpretation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was never intended to bring this about? What part did affirmative action have in bringing down the OEM American automotive industry when that industry tried to compete with global car makers in the American domestic market?
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February 5, 2008
World's First Lithium-Ion Automotive Battery Plant Opens | blog.wired.com
SAFT is at it again. In 1996 the company had a lithium-ion battery production plant in Connecticut. The batteries made there never caught the public's fancy, so around that time, 1996, SAFT sold the plant and its equipment to a Chinese battery maker and moved out of the US market back to France. What's going to be different this time? Probably only that this experiment will be very costly and tie up scarce resources.
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February 4, 2008
Automakers debate $200 million Plastech bailout | home.autonews.com
Minority business enterprise development was most 'successful,' in terms of volume of dollars generated,in the OEM American automotive industry. The big question always was: Did minority suppliers make money for themselves and save money for the OEM American automotive industry? There is no central place to go to look at the financial results of minority business enterprise as it relates to the OEM American automotive industry. Is this because this segment of minority business enterprise has never made a profit?
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January 25, 2008
Renault-Nissan signs deal to develop mass-market electric vehicles in Israel | www.forbes.com
A US Company called Project Better Place has figured out a 'better place' to try out a total solution to the implementation of a battery powered electric car strategy than the US, Israel. Renault-Nissan, which recognizes that no large industrial nation such as the US or France is small enough to test out a total electric car support system has recognized that such a test in Israel could, if successful, well give Renault-Nissan the experience to take a commanding lead in the race to build a practical electric car manufacturing, fueling, sales and service system. A successful test will also give Renault-Nissan the opportunity to build 2 million cars just for the Israeli market. This could be nearly fifty billion dollars in initial sales.
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January 23, 2008
Russia's RUSAL, Norilsk discuss full merger -paper | www.reuters.com
The Red Army, along with the Soviet Air Force and Fleet (Navy) controlled more destructive power than any other military machine in history, but this force was unable to give the (former) Soviet union control of the world, or even to preserve the Soviet union as a political structure. Today, a very small group of men operating as ethnic Russians, who we call the 'Oligarchs,' i.e., the controllers of great wealth, have transformed the mismanaged former Soviet mining, smelting, refining, and fabricating industries into a Russian natural resources empire with far greater potential reach than any Czar or Chairman of the Council of Ministers could have ever dreamed. One of them, Oleg Deripaska, around forty years old, has risen to the top recently.
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January 22, 2008
Suppliers pushed on green initiatives | www.ft.com
Each time that first American and then European politicians succumb to pressure from small well organized pressure groups for social 'action,' they pass the costs of such action onto large, usually publicly owned, businesses, and usually also, specifically, exempt small, usually privately owned, businesses to avoid piling onto the small businesses the costs of mandatory compliance. But, as soon as the lights of the TV cameras and the laptops go dark, the newly regulated large, public, businesses immediately pass the new costs onto their supply bases while carefully taking the credit for compliance all to themselves.
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January 22, 2008
Federal mileage estimates to drop in a few years | www.contracostatimes.com
If you 'cannot' simply swap out the nickel metal hydride battery pack of an existing hybrid vehicle for one of the 'new' lithium technology battery packs 'when 'they become 'available' in 'about 3 to 5 years' then the hybrid car is a very strange machine.
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January 21, 2008
An Unconvincing Shade of Green | www.nytimes.com
The lead-acid battery was mass produced for more than twenty-five years, before it was ever used in a car. The lithium technology battery has been in development for mobile applications for nearly fifty years. The nickel metal hydride battery has been mass produced for fifteen years, and has been used in every hybrid car made by a mass producer for the last ten years. No one has any mass production experience of the safety, reliability, or ability of any lithium technology, other than lithium cobalt ion batteries, made for personal entertainment products, and those have been plagued by a perceived tendency to overheat and in laptop applications to have caused some recorded fires and perhaps deaths.
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January 18, 2008
The Rule of Iron: He Who Has the Iron Ore Makes the Rules | www.resourceinvestor.com
As the American dollar declines in value against the currencies of China, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Japan, and Europe it becomes much cheaper for those countries and/or their businesses to invest in the American domestic mining industry; to manufacture in the US using domestic American raw materials and labor; and to buy domestic American raw materials on long term contracts. Isn't this exactly what happened when foreign, mainly US, businessmen went to China for its low costs?
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The Cost of Minor Metals: The Real Driver Of Green Car Selling Prices and KIller Of Profits
January 16, 2008
Automakers offer greener cars but will buyers pay more? | www.freep.com
The very well compensated, well dressed, and well fed long serving executives of General Motors and Ford are lamenting at the North American (so-called) International Auto Show, in the economically and physically devastated (former and fading) Motor City of Detroit, that they are worried about the consumer reaction to the cost of going green. What they do not want to mention is that these costs are almost all based on their own malfeasance as managers. They ignored, until it was too late, the commodity metal supercycle as it was unfolding all around them plain as the dials on their Presidential model Rolexes. Also no one was considered a team player who questioned decisions made by financial managers on the development time for scientific and engineering breakthroughs, which the financial managers did not understand.
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What Rough Problem Of The Toyota Prius Is Slouching Toward Tokyo Waiting To be Born?
January 14, 2008
Toyota Touts Strength of Prius Brand | www.forbes.com
The Toyota Prius has turned out to be an exceptionally long lived reliable car. Why is this a problem?
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Destination Nowhere? The Hydrogen Highway in California.
January 14, 2008
It's a bumpy ride on the Hydrogen Highway | www.latimes.com
The public money so far spent on constructing a hydrogen fuel distribution infrastructure in California has been wasted. In fact it has resulted in fewer hydrogen fueling stations now than there were just two years ago.
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January 14, 2008
Chrysler and Nissan in Production Deal | www.nytimes.com
Chrysler now has multiple deals to sell cars and trucks designed and manufactured by other OEM automotive companies. None of these deals required its own in-house, fading, engineering or design skills, and so none of them added to Chrysler's American costs.
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January 14, 2008
Toyota lays down hybrid gauntlet | www.autonews.com
The automotive press is confused or just technologically illiterate. It should not be relied upon for analysis or technology. It is OK for reporting the results of test drives and repeating what public relations flacks tell it.
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Will GM Leave Detroit, Michigan, And The USA To Become A Foreign Company?
January 11, 2008
GM's Wagoner Expects 75% of Sales From Outside U.S. (Update5) | www.bloomberg.com
If General Motors plan to sell 75% of its cars and trucks outside of the US comes true it will no longer be either the largest American OEM domestic seller of cars and trucks, nor even an American company any longer, because in order to remain an American company it must repatriate accurately and truly its overseas profits to America and pay taxes on them.
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January 10, 2008
Inflationary threat looms as tide of cheap Chinese goods dries up | business.timesonline.co.uk
The era of the American OEM automotive industry being able to suppress raw material price increases is over. Car pricing increases are on the way. Michigan's recession in one state is already looking as if it will become a depression in one state
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Will The Ford Motor Company Abandon Michigan First, And Then, Ultimately, The United States?
January 10, 2008
Ford China Sales Rise 30 Pct. in '07 | www.forbes.com
Ford sold 216,000 cars in China in 2007 including a few thousand Jaguars, Land Rovers, and Aston Martins, brands it will shortly no longer own or manufacture. This number represents neither a large market share in China, some much smaller Chinese car companies have larger unit sales, nor any competition to General Motors, which sold almost 1 million cars in China in 2007. The interesting aspect of this story is that Ford now has 3 (admittedly, for the moment, joint venture) assembly plants in China, a design center, and, most importantly, a 'sourcing' operation.
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