GLG News by Mr. Jack Lifton, Co-founder and Director
GLG News is now G+ Insights
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June 5, 2008
Prius sales tank in May, Toyota blames battery supply | www.autoblog.com
Toyota and Honda have both announced in the last month that they will use nickel metal hydride batteries in their hybrid vehicles for the near term, at least for the next five years, and perhaps well beyond that. Toyota has also announced that it will dramatically ramp up nickel metal hydride battery production so that it can ramp up hybrid vehicle production. Toyota will be introducing a new more powerful Prius power train along with several new additions to the Prius 'family' of vehicles in january, 2009. Honda has announced that it will in 2009 be introducing its new nickel metal hydride powered Prius fighter small hybrid car in late 2009. Why then did Toyota say that the drop in Prius sales last month was due to a lack of batteries? Could Toyota purchasing have made such an error , or is something much bigger happening?
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June 3, 2008
British win orders back from China | www.ft.com
Quality, on time delivery, and price used to be the three factors to be judged, and in that order of descending importance, by OEM automotive buyers. Then the accountants took over and simply dismissed those with engineering and materials evaluation skills as commodities whose opinions and recommendations were of little value. In doing so they destroyed the American OEM automotive industry's ability to compete, probably permanently.
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June 2, 2008
Is there a Prius in the future for Nummi? GM, Toyota in talks to build hybrid at Fremont plant, Tokyo paper says | www.sfgate.com
Toyota only builds the Prius hybrid, the world's best selling hybrid, in Japan even though nearly 80% of the Prius production is sold in the USA. Why is this so? And, why, now that Toyota is committed to nearly tripling the production of Priuses worldwide by 2011, is it that the batteries and power trains for the Prius, as well as for every other hybrid Toyota, will be built only in Japan even if some of the hybrids are assembled outside of Japan, for example in California?
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Toyota Marginalizes GM's Volt By Announcing Plans To Ramp Up Nickel Metal Hydride Battery Capacity
May 27, 2008
Toyota, Matsushita to Build Hybrid-Battery Plants, Nikkei Says | www.bloomberg.com
Toyota is 1. Increasing the production capacity of its existing original joint venture plant with Matsushita (Panasonic) to make nickel metal hydride, NiMH, batteries for hybrid vehicles, 2. Building an additional new nickel metal hydride battery plant with Matsushita, which, when combined with the original one's expansion will give it a NiMH production capacity of 1 million units a year by 2011, and 3. Building a plant to make lithium-ion batteries for vehicles which by 2011 will have a capacity of "several tens of thousands" of such batteries a year.
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May 23, 2008
Cobasys' owners push for sale of battery maker | www.mlive.com
GM doesn't seem to understand battery technologies at all. Toyota's supplier of nickel metal hydride batteries has so far delivered more than 1 1/2 million of them for the Toyota hybrid fleet. Cobasys a joint venture between Chevron and Ovonic Materials-a spinoff of Energy Conversion Devices, which invented the nickel metal hydride battery-supplied GM's first hybrid models offered initially in the 2007 model year with batteries so poorly made that GM is recalling 100% of them. Cobasys took more than 5 years to achieve its level of complete incompetence and an investment of nearly $400 million dollars was totally wasted. Astoundingly GM is now believed to be ready to buy out Chevron and Ovonic from the failed j/v and, even more incredibly, to award a contract to test lithium batteries for the Chevrolet Volt to the dolts at Cobasys. But, to give GM credit, such a buyout would allow it to cover up this monumental failure of lost opportunities.
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May 22, 2008
Trade in raw materials and commodities- MEPs concerned about supply | www.europarl.europa.eu
The USA has reduced its production of natural resources to below self-sufficiency not because of a lack of ore bodies or oil, gas, and coal, or the technology to recover lower grade resources efficiently and economically, but because of a cultish adherence to an environmentalism that refuses to recognize technological improvements in health, safety, and conservation in the production of natural resources and ignores economic reality to look back at a fantasy age during which the human race was better because it did not use oil, gas, coal or metal. This nonsense does not pervade the societies of Asia.
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Are The Auto Insurance Underwriters Ready For Lithium Batteries?
May 22, 2008
MythBusters Hack Go-Kart in Extreme Electric vs. Gas Test | www.popularmechanics.com
Lithium cobalt oxide batteries in the sizes needed for laptop computers have been known to overheat and even burst into flame. Lithium iron phosphate batteries are known to develop internal high pressures. If the car companies are not going to tell us which technology they have chosen for lithium batteries then how will the insurance companies be able to assess safety and set rates?
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Chrysler Is Playing Catch-Up, But The Game's Already Over
May 21, 2008
Chrysler seeks 25% slash in parts prices | www.autonews.com
The American OEM automotive industry bankrupted its supply base by demanding ever increasing price concessions while absconding with the uncapitalized value of its supply bases's technology and using the stolen technology to buy low labor costs from outsourced suppliers. GM led the parade of short sighted OEMs until Ford caught on and joined in. DaimlerChrysler was no where near as brainless and focused its outsourcing on eastern Europe where quality control could be monitored from Stuttgart and nearby locations and raw materials could be hedged. Now that Daimler is gone Chrysler is simply operating on half of a brain and looking more like Home Depot each day and thinks it can simply catch up with GM and Ford by squeezing blood from the turnips left over from the OEM automotive industry's supply base.
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America Should Learn a Lesson About Domestic Mining From Great Britain
May 21, 2008
Mines Could Reopen As Prices Soar | news.bbc.co.uk
Some archaeologists believe that the mediterranean bronze age was cut short, and superceeded, prematurely, by the iron age, by the refusal of Greek and Phoenician traders to take the financial risk of obtaining tin from the distant and dangerous 'tin isles,' known now as the British Isles. Now those same tin islanders will shortly be resuming production because of a new risk, the risk of not prospering from being able to supply natural resources domestically, which otherwise would have to be imported from unfriendly and, some would say, dangerous places far away. Do you suppose that America would ever figure out that the only reason that it does not produce its abundant domestic resources of both major and minor metals, which it has, is because of an anti-mining bias that is illogical in the extreme?
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Is Upgraded Metallurgical Grade Silicon The Only Hope For Manufacturers of Photovoltaic Solar Cells?
May 20, 2008
Capital's glowing feeling | www.theaustralian.news.com.au
Until fairly recently the source of solar grade silicon for manufacturers of photovoltaic solar cells was excess polycrystalline silicon from processes intended to produce ultra pure silicon for the production of electronic integrated circuits (chips). This was because the processes to purify and produce silicon as ultrahigh purity (99.9999+) single crystal 'ingots,' for slicing into 'wafers' themselves to be the base upon which integrated circuit chips were formed and then removed by slicing and dicing, were complex and slow and yields were never 100%. The waste, i.e. either polycrystalline material or that of less than ultra high purity, was sold as 'solar grade.' Lately a number of makers of ferrosilicon have announced that they have solved the problem of turning their 99.7% metallurgical silicon directly into 'solar grade' silicon by the ton. If this is true then silicon PV solar cells may become competitive with thin film cadmium telluride PV solar cells.
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Are Massive Price Increases In Store For American Car and Truck Buyers? Yes.
May 20, 2008
Valeo CEO: Rising costs should be passed to buyers | www.autonews.com
The American OEM automotive industry has studiously ignored all of the market's warning signals and forced its supply base to absorb the raw material price increases stemming from huge Asian demand and a falling dollar. This was done out of fear of being priced out of their own domestic market as well as from short sighted attention only to their share prices. The day of reckoning cannot be put off any longer not only because of increased commodity prices and a weak dollar but also because the cash-strapped American OEM's cannot afford the burden of the hugely expensive new technologies, which they must implement beginning now to satisfy the arbitrary legal limits on emission and increased fuel economy forced upon them by politicians with no equal on earth for short sightedness and ignorance of economics and of the economic consequences of their actions.
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Has A Massive Inflation Due To Commodity Prices Begun? Probably, Yes.
May 15, 2008
U.S. Supplier Plans Commodity Surcharge | www.just-auto.com
The American OEM automotive industry bankrupted its supply base in the last decade by refusing to accept price increases for commodities and specialty metals caused by huge increases in the demand for them from Asia. The OEM American automotive industry then replaced its bankrupt suppliers by outsourcing their work to Asia where low labor rates, for a time, masked the increases in raw material prices. Now with rising Asian labor rates, strategic and critical metals monopolized by Chinese located or owned sources, and the quality of Chinese durable goods rising American OEM heavy industry sees its days of being able to compete with global competition, even in the US domestic market, vanishing. In order to be able to get commodities no longer produced in the US American OEM heavy industry will have to pay the full price directly. Prices formerly subsidized by losses on the balance sheets of suppliers now have to marked to market. Inflation is on the way.
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Will Large Passenger Aircraft Production Be Limited By A Lack Of Rhenium?
May 15, 2008
ANALYSIS-Aircraft demand to keep hi-tech metals high | uk.reuters.com
At a conference in Barcelona last month entitled "Metals in the Aerospace Industry" an industry analyst forecast a total demand for 800, 000, 000 lbs of metal to build between 8,000 and 12,000 multi-engine jet passenger aircraft by 2020. Although most of the metal to be consumed was identified as aluminum and its alloys it was also pointed out that up to 3% of 'other' metals would be needed inparticualr for constructing the high temperature 'superalloys' needed for jet engines. This 3% would be up to 24,000,000 pounds, 11,500 metric tons of 'other metals.' Just one metric ton or so per plane. One of the most critical metals to be needed is rhenium. The global supply of new rhenium annually is today at an all time high, 40 metric tons per annum. Will that be enough to construct engines for as many as 12,000 passenger aircraft as well as an unspecified number of military aircraft and rockets for the exploration of space, satellite placement, and weaponry? Certainly not.
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The Delaware Regulations For The Resale Of Scrap Metal Should Be Federally Mandated Or Rescinded
May 7, 2008
Scrap dealers protest new regulations for resale of metal | www.philly.com
If scrap dealers were made to account for the purchase of their wares; i.e., to affirm that their seller had leagl title to the goods, then the US scrap industry's small, family type businesses, would fail.
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May 6, 2008
Russia's Car Market Will Pass Germany's In Two Years Says Ghosn | goldsea.com
The first industrial revolution in the west highgraded out the world's then known and accessible metal ores and energy minerals. Extraction and refining technologies have since kept up with the declining grades of ores and minerals accessible with today's infrastructures and machinery. But finally, with the explosion of demand from Asia, the age of profligate mining of metals and energy minerals is over. Price alone cannot any longer dictate supply.
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Is GM's Bob Lutz, Nuts, About The Volt?
April 28, 2008
GM's Lutz Expresses 'Growing Confidence' In Chevy Volt Timetable | online.wsj.com
The CEO of Toyota, the one and only only global car company with experience at mass producing vehicles using hybrid, gasoline-electric, power trains said, just a month ago that the lithium-ion battery is not ready for mass production. GM has received, so far, after an investment of , perhaps, one billion dollars, just two 'prototype' lithium ion batteries for beta (actual, but not necessarily final version) testing in Volt simulacra, i.e. bodies, chases, and power trains that simulate a production vehicle) beginning this summer. The whole point is to be able to deliver a car which can run 40 miles only on its battery, after being charged fully, by being, for example, 'plugged in' to the household electric service (For how long??). The Volt will also have an on board a gasoline engine/ generator able to run the vehicle's electric motor. The same system would work with a lead-acid battery set. The car would be heavier though. So GM is waiting and spending and fretting.
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April 22, 2008
Beijing Pressures Automakers to Improve Efficiency | www.nytimes.com
The Chinese government's demand that auto makers produce electric and internal combustion-electric (hybrid) vehicles for the Chinese domestic market has created a conflict in the global demand for minor metals. All car makers need minor metals that are critical to the production of the power train of their vehicles, All non-Chinese car makers prefer to keep their best technology close to home, for competitive advantage, Most of the critical minor metals for car production are solely sourced from China, China has systematically reduced the export of such metals and allocated them for products made in China, When the demand for such metals in China equals the supply from China it will no longer be possible to make products critically dependent on such metals outside of China, If no commercial lithium ion battery system is in production within the next five years it will no longer be possible to produce a nickel metal hydride battery outside of China.
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April 9, 2008
The Last Days of Cheap Chinese | www.slate.com
GM's short sighted purchasing management, and probably Ford's as well, pinned its hopes for being able to make a profit primarily on reducing its costs of labor and materials by shifting as much as possible of its parts production to the People's republic of China. Just 3 years ago, in 2005, GM's global purchasing czar, Bo Andersson, told his subordinates that he expected to source 30% of his 'spend,' more than 30 billion dollars a year in the PRC by 2007! Ford's clueless descendant of the founder of industrial mass production, William Clay Ford, Jr, went even farther afield. He told an audience of Chinese in Shanghai last year that his 'vision' for Ford was a 60% dependence on Chinese sourcing! Both of these targeted agendas were made by men literally ignorant of the economics of the global economy, but neither of them hesitated for a moment to drive the OEM American automotive supply industry bankrupt leaving both of these clueless men without a backup plan.
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April 7, 2008
Why no one wants Delphi | www.247wallst.com
Delphi is on life-support with no health insurance, and General Motors wants the world to think that it is offering to pay some of Delphi's bills out of the goodness of its corporate heart, and for old times sake. The truth is that the sheer and massive incompetence of GM purchasing management has failed in 9 years to separate Delphi's fortunes from those of GM even though that was the actual reason that GM created Delphi nearly a decade ago.
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April 4, 2008
GM to managers: Volt is No. 1 priority | www.autonews.com
GM's requirement that only those who say yes to Rick Wagoner and Bob Lutz may advance to management has left it without any managers or engineers who have the moral strength to say that the company's program to bring the Chevrolet Volt to market by 2010 would have been better done, with a much higher chance of success, with a lead-acid/nickel metal hydride battery system, since both of those systems have been proven in actual, not simulated testing, over real, not virtual time. In addition it is clear that GM is building a smaller and lighter Volt than they were showing so as to get the maximum range and performance out of lithium batteries that are not living up to expectations.
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