GLG News by Mr. Jack Lifton, Co-founder and Director
GLG News is now G+ Insights
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October 27, 2008
General Motors, Driven to the Brink | www.nytimes.com
The American owned and operated OEM automotive industry was only profitable when it had both a monopoly and credit was cheap. This situation can never again occur, because the OEM American owned and operated car industry's domestic market share is already below 50% and is still rapidly decreasing and the era of cheap consumer credit is now gone perhaps not to return for a very long time, if ever.
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October 27, 2008
Chrysler makes a poor fit for GM | www.freep.com
Is the American Government smart enough to see that the average American has already written off General motors, Ford, and Chrysler? The proposed bailout of any of these mismanaged train wrecks is nothing of the sort; it would be rather a stimulant to a dying industry intended to get an unrepresentative government past yet another election offering no change at all to the status quo. It is, as always with government programs, robbing the future to keep up the appearances of the present as a work-in-progress instead of a dead end.
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October 22, 2008
Revamped lead-acid battery could slash cost of hybrids | technology.newscientist.com
For reasons of economics, safety, reliability, and longevity we can now say bye-bye to the lithium-ion battery for mass production. The automotive press, taking its leads from a technologically ignorant automotive industry assumed that there would be a progressive advance going on in battery development for electric car power sources. This has turned out to be wrong if it meant that lead-acid batteries would be succeeded first by nickel-cadmium batteries, then by nickel metal hydride batteries, and then by lithium-ion batteries. The old reliable and safe lead-acid technology, now proven by the mass production of tens of billions of cells is once more poised to save the day.
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October 20, 2008
LA Preview: 204-hp lithium battery-powered MINI E revealed! | www.autoblog.com
BMW says it will soon lease 500 Mini-E, electric cars, possibly before the end of 2009, for a North American beta test. This is not a test of a practical model of the Mini Cooper, because the vehicle is just a 35 Kwh battery mated to a 150 H.P. low torque electric motor and this "power train' is set on a chasis in a body shell designated the Mini-E. What is BMW up to?
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October 16, 2008
Lithium Counterpoint: No Shortage For Electric Cars | gas2.org
If a smart Texas teenager can assemble an electric car with a 40 mile range for under $10,000 cannot a larger corporation build a car with the same performance for use by High School and College students to go back and among school, home, and the job they'll need to pay for it? Why not build these just for commuting and lease the batteries, so that when they are exhausted by frequent recharging they can be easily replaced and the worn out set recycled for its strategic raw materials thus reducing our need to mine or import new ones? Hello, Detroit and Washington clueless industrial and political leaders.
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October 13, 2008
G.M. and Chrysler Explore Merger | www.nytimes.com
The quality of the passenger carrying motor vehicles offered for sale in the USA has improving dramatically during the 30 years since the, predominantly transplanted Japanese, competition forced the industry to address value rather than size and performance as the key to marketing. In fact the main reason that both General Motors and Ford have now, for all purposes, failed, and are operating as undeclared bankrupts supported by thinly disguised subsidies from a national government paralyzed by its inability to comprehend the lessons of globalization, is that both of these companies are still run by 20th century managers who simply do not understand the need to build for, nor what to build for, the 21st century marketplace. Limitations on the production of raw materials and the wasting of the existing ones by needlessly short scrap cycles must now be recognized and taken into account if consumer goods are to be made globally available, it's as simple as that!
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Will Toyota Be Able To Produce Enough Priuses To Sustain a Separate Brand?
October 10, 2008
Prius Diary Extra: Toyota Considering a Separate Prius Brand | greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com
Toyota has had tow pleasant surprises in the competition to lead the OEM automotive industry into the era of green cars: 1.) It has had no competition while it has established its bestselling Prius hybrid, and 2.) Its largest current competitor is probably bankrupt allowing Toyota to expand the Prius into a brand while its only real competition, Honda, is just starting down the road to establish itself as a green car maker. However, Toyota may now be facing a serious shortage of the raw materials needed to ramp up production of the nickel metal hydride batteries it uses in the current Prius.
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Toyota And GM Are Both Going To Market Test Plug-in Hybrids. Will Both Of Them Survive That Test?
October 8, 2008
Power Outage | www.forbes.com
Toyota will have a limited production plug-in hybrid on the road probably as much as a year before GM's Volt. Toyota is test marketing a concept, the limited range, in full electric operation, commuter car. Toyota thinks that this is a niche market, and will approach it with a modified version of their best-in-class Prius hybrid. The Toyota plug-in will have a range of only 10 miles on a fully charged lithium ion type battery. Toyota will probably price this plug-in at least $10,000 less than the GM Chevrolet Volt, and can, and can afford to, absorb any cost overrun due to the expense of the limited production battery. Is this really a competition to which GM wants to dedicate precious resources of time and money?
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Billions of Dollars Of Research and Development Money Expended By GM And Other Majors Is Now At Risk
October 7, 2008
Plug-In Hybrids Aren't Coming — They're Here | blog.wired.com
It will only take one public lithium battery operating failure or, worse, one fire to wipe out all of the green goodwill so far generated by the hype machine on behalf of the plug-in hybrid idea.
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GM's Ordinary Share Price, In Real Terms, Is Probably At The Lowest Point In The Company's History
October 7, 2008
GM tumbles to 54-year low as overall market drops | www.forbes.com
GM is a zombie company; it is dead and being kept on life support by a reckless and feckless government.
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September 29, 2008
Volt reality check: Chevy Volt not so revolutionary | gristmill.grist.org
Last week I wrote here that the statements made by GM about the mode of operation of the shortly to be forthcoming Chevrolet Volt were nonsensical. GM said that the Volt would be an 'electric car,' but, based on the statements now made by GM spokesmen it could only be an electric car, which would have a range, at full performance, of 40 miles before needing a recharge. Such a Chevrolet would be a giant golf cart with a very limited use and a range of only 40 miles.
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September 22, 2008
From Bank Bailouts to Auto Bailouts? | townhall.com
The management of GM, Ford, and Chrysler are individually and collectively the worst set of managers that any American owned and operated heavy industry has ever had. Until this group of managers is gone there is no hope for GM, Ford, or Chrysler. There is no value in lending or subsidizing this pathetic group. Such action serve only to perpetuate incompetent planning and to enrich undeserving individuals at the expense of the middle and working class.
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The Volt isn't a Prius. It Is A Cobbled Together Overhyped Attempt To Re-Invent General Motors
September 19, 2008
The Volt Isn't A Prius. It Might Even Be Better | blog.wired.com
The Chevrolet Volt, if it is brought to market too early, will fail both in its intended use and in its operation.
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September 17, 2008
Power Plays | online.wsj.com
There are two non-silicon chemistries now being hyped as the bases for thin-film solar cells: 1. Cadmium telluride, and 2. Copper Indium Gallium Selenide Neither is practical at all.
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September 15, 2008
G.M. at 100: Is Its Future Electric? | www.nytimes.com
The future of the personal automobile is in the gasoline or kerosene(diesel) burning internal combustion engine. Future cars will be small, lightweight, and get 50 MPG and more. The Toyota prius hybrid already gets 50 MPG right off the showroom floor. This is why Toyota is increasing the production of the Prius to 3000 a day by 2011. But there is only so much lanthanum metal produced. If all of it produced today were used for manufacturing the nickel metal hydride batteries for the Prius then the production could go to 2,000,000 cars a year. This is around 2% of the world's 2010 projected car and truck combined production.
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Is This The Beginning Of The End For Chinese Domination Of The Production Of Rare Earths?
September 15, 2008
Chevron selling rare earth mining operations | www.bizjournals.com
Is a rare earth mining boomlet under way?
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September 8, 2008
Manufacturers turn to US | www.ft.com
Incredibly American states from which manufacturing jobs were lost by the hundreds of thousands over the last few years are bribing foreign heavy industry, the very industry that we were told by Wall Street was 'obsolete in the modern globalized American service economy, to set up manufacturing plants in the US. These bribes are referred to in the new economic doublespeak as "subsidies."
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Recalls: The True Costs of Outsouricng Both The Part And The Quality Control
September 1, 2008
GM recalling 944,000 vehicles | www.forbes.com
The Detroit Three followed the lead of Jacques Nasser at Ford in the early 1990s and began to eliminate internal supplier quality management and PPAP, production parts approval processes. After internal engineering supplier monitoring had been made into a supplier self approval regime came the outsourcing frenzy of the late 1990s. The result was that Chinese and Indian suppliers were self certifying and that has been a disaster.
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Bob Lutz Seems to Have Learned Doublespeak From George Orwell. Failure is Success, Says Lutz.
August 29, 2008
Carmakers Deserve Loan Guarantees, G.M. Official Says | www.nytimes.com
On what basis do OEM American carmakers deserve federal loan guarantees? Is it because their legacy costs weren't their own fault? Is it because they made lower quality vehicles than their foreign competitors? Is it because they sent American jobs overseas so that the unemployed workers they created could no longer afford to buy their overpriced cars? Is it because they use the money they earn overseas to fund further expansion overseas and thus move closer to no longer being American companies at all? Is it because they continue to employ and pay high salaries to legacy managers who have proven themselves completely inept and have cumulatively lost more than 100 billion dollars in just the last five year? It is for all of the above and many more reasons that the OEM American car companies must be allowed to go it on their own.
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Minor Metals Markets Are Not Transparent And Hedging Non Exchange Traded Metals Requires Great Skill
August 26, 2008
Can One Man’s Actions Take $6 Billion In Value Out Of A Minor Metal Market In A Month? | www.resourceinvestor.com
End users of minor metals for critical purposes, i.e., for purposes that are not economically or technologically possible without a particular minor metal, can hedge the required supply of metal by financing the producer's output, through offtake agreements, for example, and by being the buyer of last resort as well as the holder of a small strategic excess inventory to use as a barrier against a speculative corner. Contrary to that type of reasoning the unskilled and inexperienced trader in this story simply tried to extend his company's inventory out as far as he could as a way to manage supply interruption. He miscalculated badly and only achieved an enormous cost increase when he was actually trying to stabilize a supply.
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