GLG News by Mr. Jack Lifton, Co-founder and Director
GLG News is now G+ Insights
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G+ is a community for professionals, academics and entrepreneurs to connect through online discussions and in-person meetings. You will continue to see G+ Insights (formerly GLG News) here as well as on the G+ website, where you can share and discuss the G+ Insights you read.
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December 17, 2008
Long-Lived, but Not Immortal: Fears Fade on Hybrid Batteries | www.nytimes.com
The success of the nickel metal hydride utilizing hybrid power train is one of the truly outstanding successes of Japanese automotive engineering, and it demonstrates clearly the short sightedness of American OEM automotive management. The nickel metal battery was invented in a suburban Detroit laboratory by a company, Energy Conversion Devices, Inc, which was at the time looking for a material to store hydrogen in the solid state. The idea was to create a safe hydrogen 'fuel tank' for vehicles. At that time the nickel cadmium rechargeable battery was being discontinued for reasons of he toxicity of cadmium. ECD decided to try a developmental hydrogen 'alloy' in place of the cadmium, and the rest is history. The new rechargeable battery was offered to GM, but it was not as capable as an electric car traction battery as lead-acid so GM lost interest. Toyota however had another idea, the hybrid battery electric/ internal combustion drive. The rest is also history.
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Why Has Toyota Slowed Down Its Agenda To Build Its Best Selling Prius In North America?
December 16, 2008
Toyota delays Mississippi assembly plant | www.forbes.com
The Prius line of best selling hybrids in the world is due to be expanded next month with the introduction of several new models at the Detroit 'International" Auto Show. Most of the Priuses made are now sold are sold in North America. The Prius is only built in Japan. The nickel metal hydride battery (NiMH), used for the Prius, based on a rare earth metal (lanthanum) alloy with nickel and cobalt, is made only in Japan by Toyota. Has Toyota been looking for an excuse not to build the Prius in North America? Was the genral sales slowdown too good an excuse not to use?
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Ford's Fusion Hybrid With Its Advanced Nickel Metal Hydride Battery May Crush The Chevrolet Volt
December 15, 2008
First Drive: 2010 Ford Fusion Hybrid | www.autoblog.com
While GM ignored the success of the Toyota Prius apparently for no other reason than that they wanted the public to believe that it wasn't invented here Ford decided to watch and learn. Ford has now reached the point where it about to challenge Toyota and Honda for a place in the hybrid sun. There is no longer much point to continuing the development of the Chevrolet Volt, or, for that matter, to continuing the existence of GM as an incompetent and bloated bureaucracy with far too much production capacity for making cars that no one wants to buy.
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December 12, 2008
Green Obama’s official limo is a gas guzzler | www.timesonline.co.uk
Battery powered utility vehicles such as industrial forklift trucks and the 'traction' motors that pull 100 ton+ airplanes into and out of their 'parking' slots at airports are very impressive. However, to put forward the idea that there is a comparison between and a possibility of utilizing them to replace any part of the huge fleet of diesel and gasoline engine powered freight carrying trucks that keep the commerce of the USA and the rest of the world flowing is very misleading. It's time to take a deep breath and to look at what electric vehicles and hybrids cannot do in our motorized society.
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Toyota's Business Model is The Reason That Detroit Should Not be Bailed Out
December 10, 2008
Toyota Tsusho Launches Rare Earth Business | www.toyota-tsusho.com
There is a simple reason that Toyota has grown steadily over the last 25 years from a maker of low quality inexpensive cars for the Japanese domestic market into the world's largest and most profitable-from the sale of vehicles-auto maker. The reason is long term planning coupled with continuous feedback sought from its customers on how to improve its products. No matter what is said about the management of General Motors it, the arrogant and self-absorbed and self perpetuating group that has run GM for more than 25 years has failed miserably to even notice how Toyota achieved its success. Now in league with politicians bought and paid for by union interests the pathetic management of GM having exhausted its right to a seat at the free market capitalist table will apparently simply continue on as a nationalized company until finally it cannot sell anything and simply disintegrates on the same day as its 3rd or 4th government handout is finally refused.
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Not All Metals Are Commodities. Critical Ones Must be Recycled No Matter What The Cost.
December 9, 2008
Back at junk value, recyclables are piling up | www.iht.com
As finite supplies of critical raw materials are used up or squandered in dissipative uses from which they cannot be economically recovered their supply becomes more and more price sensitive. Many minor metals are for this reason rapidly becoming more valuable even though this fact has been masked by the blind attempt of the investment community to class all metals as 'commodities" and to denigrate their value and to simplify ignorantly the amount of work necessary to restore their production.
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December 8, 2008
Short Supply: American-made Electric Car Batteries | www.evworld.com
General Motors has failed completely to support its local nickel metal hydride battery maker, COBASYS. Earlier this year when Chevron, one of the joint partners in (C) Chevron (O) Ovonic (BA) Battery (SYS) Systems said it would no longer fund the unbroken annual losses of COBASYS and that its partner, Energy Conversion Devices, Inc, was free to do so on its own, it looked as if COBASYS would soon be gone, since ECD admitted it did not have 88 million dollars to cover COBASYS' expected deficit for fiscal 2008-9. General Motors leaped into the fray and said that it would buy out Chevron and ECD's interest in COBASYS and that it, GM, would use the company ultimately as an intake center for lithium-ion batteries. This hasn't happened. COBASYS batteries for the 2007 model year of GM's hybrids were 100% recalled, so the idea of putting this failed company in charge of li-ion battery quality control seemed lame even to those who still believe GM's PR about the Chevrolet Volt.
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December 8, 2008
Revolutionary Wheel for Electric Cars Puts Guts Inside Wheel | gas2.org
One powered wheel and a battery of any type can make a motorbike, two powered wheels and a battery of any type can make a powered freight or passenger carrying cart, three or more powered wheels and a battery of any type can make a car, 8, or more, can make a truck, and with a third rail or an overhead wire connection 8 or more can make a bus, passenger carrying railcar, freight carrying railcar, subway car, etc. The size of the wheel and of its contained motors can be increased to make long haul freight or passenger carrying vehicles.
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November 10, 2008
Automakers struggle to survive past mistakes | www.forbes.com
Three years ago a former Chairman of an American OEM automotive company told me that the problem with GM, Ford, and Chrysler was that they all believed originally that the Japanese would never learn how to make cars that Americans would buy, and, then, after that turned out to be false they simply decided that there was nothing to be learned from the Japanese who must have been successful, they thought, simply by emulating them. These men, and they were and are all men, are myopic and incompetent. It is their fault as much as the fault of the monopolistic union that the domestic American OEM car companies and their supply base have failed. Let's please get rid of them immediately.
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November 10, 2008
Auto-Industry Crisis Tests Obama | online.wsj.com
The backbone of American manufacturing is made up of profitable, high-productivity companies in a variety of industries, which create or find a way to manufacture the latest and most relevant technologies for our health, safety, workplace productivity, or leisure. The backbone consists also of those companies whose workers income is directly related to their productivity and directly related to their employer's ability to mass produce innovative and important products. The backbone consists only of those companies that can give their workers benefits such as health care and pensions while the employer still makes a profit. Those companies that create wealth are the backbone of American industry not those that destroy wealth.
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November 10, 2008
Emanuel Urges Aid for Auto Industry | www.nytimes.com
Short term planning, or no planning at all, got the American owned and operated OEM Automotive industry into the predicament it is in today. Not only are the current managers of these companies not 'car-guys' they are also not manufacturing engineering or quality management 'guys.' You cannot decide to change over a vehicle line, and then change it again during the changeover, without risking total failure of both the car and its maker Designs need to be finalized, technologies need to be chosen, and supply contracts need to be put in final form years before 'new' cars can hit the road. The GM, Chrysler, and Ford managers have been playing politics for so long that they can no longer build cars without political content that may be impossible using technologies that are unproven and even untested. This is politically motivated BS of the type that drives the 'promise' to achieve lofty goals simply by spending huge amounts of public money with no real plan!
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November 7, 2008
Automakers and Union Seek Help From Pelosi | www.nytimes.com
It is incredible that anyone would consider financing the further operations of the American OEM automotive industry without insisting first that its current management be replaced as a precondition. The enabling legislation creating the facility to lend taxpayer originated funds include the following regulations that the Department of Energy is to follow: "before it can lend money, the Energy Department must conclude that the borrower has assets that exceed its liabilities, and is likely to be able to repay the principal and interest."
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November 6, 2008
Aboriginal chiefs pitch business deals to China | www.canada.com
The North American civil rights movement has assured native Americans of their property rights and their sovereignty over the natural resources on their lands. American environmentalism has at the same time made sure that every conceivable roadblock is put in place to prevent the development of those natural resources. Canadian native Americans have now decided to stop going hat in hand to Ottawa to beg for development and are asking Chinese investors to build roads and powerplants on their land and to be paid from the harvest of the wood on their lands and the metals and minerals to be found there. Native Americans have been bought off with casino licenses that get them roads only to the door of the casino. How long will it take them to emulate their Canadian relatives?
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November 6, 2008
Cerberus chief: Country can't let automakers fail | www.forbes.com
It seems that because he is too big for his own failure not to be noticed on Wall Street and at his alma mater's plush New York City 'club" John Snow is blathering about how he sees a 'bailout' of his Chrysler deal as a mandatory step that the US Treasury must take. Of course, it was his own miscalculation that brought Chrysler to this point; the exhausted car company should have failed 10 years ago when it was eviscerated of ideas by the very arrogant Juergen Schremp then the CEO of Daimler. The last solely Chrysler designed cars to go into production without input from Daimler were the PT-Cruiser and the 300. They were also the most successful of Chrysler's offerings in the DaimlerChrysler period.
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What Iceberg's Tip Is Emphasized By The Short Range Of The Chevrolet Volt?
November 5, 2008
Chevy Volt Inspires a New Language | wheels.blogs.nytimes.com
General Motor's admits that "The Volt...has a range of 40 miles (when all power equipment has been turned off, including air conditioner, stereo and headlights),...." General Motors apparently suffers from "We will build it, and they will buy it syndrome." Who now needs a short range, environmentally touchy, expensive small car for running around the empty subdivision or going to the empty mall or to the nearby unemployment office?
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Will Technologies Critically Dependent On "Minor Metals" Survive The Current Cull Of Junior Miners?
November 4, 2008
"Darwinian culling" in junior mining sector | network.nationalpost.com
The rush to analogy by the mainstream media has recently brought us such oversimplifications as the comparison of modern America to ancient Rome and of Barack Obama to John F. Kennedy, but the MSM may be on to something with a description of the disappearance of interest by investors in thinly capitalized junior (exploration oriented) mining companies as a Darwinian "culling, a destruction of the weakest."
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November 4, 2008
Credit crisis to hit mining projects- Credit Suisse | www.miningweekly.com
The critical metals for consumer electronics are all byproducts of the production of base metals. Any cut in base metal production is automatically a cut in byproduct metal production.
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For Lithium The Shortage Lies Not In Your Minerals But In Your Long Term Strategic Planning
November 3, 2008
Electric-car race could strain lithium battery supply | news.cnet.com
American OEM heavy industry is once more highlighting its worst shortcoming: A total lack of long term strategic planning to manage the risk of supply interruption of critical materials due to production limitations on natural resources. It's difficult to imagine just how urgent a company such as GM thinks it is to wean America off of dependence on foreign oil and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions when GM and its competitors don't seem to be concerned with whether or not they can securely get enough lithium to make enough batteries, if they indeed turn out to be practical and economical, to make enough cars to make a difference.
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October 31, 2008
2010 Ford Fusion Hybrid and Mercury Milan Hybrid Expected to Get 5 mpg Better than Toyota Camry Hybrid | hybridreview.blogspot.com
The Ford Motor Company is following the lead of Toyota and will market four hybrid models in its 2010 lineup, due out in less than 6 months at the end of the first quarter of 2009. The Ford Escape and Mercury Mariner for 2010 will be upgraded and joined by hybrid versions of the Ford Fusion and Mercury Milan all utilizing what Ford calls a state-of-the-art lighter weight nickel metal hydride battery to achieve up to 700 miles range on one tank of gasoline and excellent performance with no or low emisisons depending on whether the vehicle is in either electric or internal combustion mode.
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October 30, 2008
Tesla Motors Zaps Another C.E.O. and Lays Off Staff | bits.blogs.nytimes.com
No one has ever built a practical electric powered performance car with a range on a single charge of 250 miles and a top speed of 150+ mph. It certainly may be possible to make and select from thousands of lithium-ion batteries enough stable ones to build a battery pack large enough to give the performance Tesla has advertised. But to make hundreds or thousands of such cars a year, and to set up a parts and service operation for them, is not possible with currently mass producible battery technology unless the selling price of the car is open ended. The backers of the Tesla and their adoring fans have developed new silicon technologies and written revolutionary software to control these technologies, so they think that a battery powered car is just a toy that they can do in their sleep. I wonder if they are having nightmares about the tens of billions of dollars real car makers like Toyota and Honda have spent without even coming near to a car like the Tesla. Wake up, boys!
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