GLG News by Mr. Jack Lifton, Co-founder and Director
GLG News is now G+ Insights
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Is Toyota's Prius Being Dumped On The US Market?
April 3, 2008
Jim Press: Prius was 100% subsidized by Japan | www.autonews.com
It has always been a mystery to OEM American automotive industry financial analysts how Toyota could afford to build and sell the Prius, and any other hybrids, without seemingly taking into account the escalating costs of the nickel metal hydride battery, NiMH, packs due to the commodity metal supercycle that has taken place entirely during the product life of the Prius. The raw materials for the NiMH battery pack used in the 1999 Prius, 60 lbs of nickel, 24 lbs of lanthanum, and 3 lbs of coablt cost a total of less than $400.00 then. The same battery today has a raw material cost of $1600.00. The added costs of manufacturing the components and assembling them, along with a built-in computer management system at least doubles the cost of the final 'battery.' Are the batteries recycled? If so, where? Perhaps the solution to these mysteries plus the answer to the question "How much were the development costs of the NiMH battery?" is simple; the answer,for Toyota, may be zero.
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April 2, 2008
Will lithium ion get replaced? Longer lasting, recyclable batteries due in laptops this summer | venturebeat.com
The lihtium-ion batteries that have the best performance characteristics for vehicular application are not safe or cheap enough for use in mass produced vehicles. Advances in nickel metal hydride and other technologies, including those based on silver-zinc and those based on magnesium in combination with various other metals, are overtaking lithium-ion systems.
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March 26, 2008
Fukui: Nickel battery is best bet for hybrid | www.autonews.com
Honda has more experience engineering, designing, and manufacturing internal combustion engines than anyone else on earth. It is thus, by default, the most experienced and successful at the quality control and servicing of OEM automotive power trains. Are these the reasons why it has chosen to use nickel metal hydride batteries for its entry into the market for designed-from-the-wheels-up hybrid cars?
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March 17, 2008
Local businessman charged with fraud | www.suntimes.com
Did General Motors' purchasing relax its standards for oversight and for credit allocation for FUCI Metals, because FUCI was set up as a minority business enterprise? Or, was GM in on it from the beginning, but lost control of it?
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March 17, 2008
Diesels make cents, but Detroit still slow to embrace them | www.detnews.com
How are the Detroit Three reacting to the multiplicity of power train types among which they must choose in order to satisfy political expediency? They must choose among the many chocies and the choices are dictated by economics more than they are by politics.
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The Plastech Cover Up; The Legacy of Wasted Effort By The American OEM Automotive Industry
March 10, 2008
Plastech Hopes To Resolve JCI Tiff | www.freep.com
Plastech Engineering, now in bankruptcy, was advertised as the largest minority owned and operated OEM automotive plastics supplier. In fact, it was a synthetic business, a money losing enterprise, created by the pressure, for minority content, which was generated by various Federal and State agencies that required any company holding or bidding on any state or federal contracts or services to meet arbitrarily imposed targets for percentages of their total outside purchases of parts and services by sourcing them from so-called minority businesses. Johnson Controls International, in turn, was pressured by its customers, OEM car makers, to 'mentor' Plastech Engineering; i.e., to become responsible for insuring that the big customer's minority content requirements were met. Its reward was to also count the production of Plastech towards its own minority content requirements. But raw materials price increases over the last 5 years, in particular, have destroyed any hope of continuing.
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March 10, 2008
Beware of These Strong Buys | www.fool.com
Silicon is one of the most common chemical elements in the earth's crust; it is also exteremely accessible, since the vast majority of the beach sands on this planet are fairly pure silicon dioxide which have been produced by eons of weathering of silicate rocks and quartz. Tellurium on the other hand, although relatively abundant, in the earth's crust is only accessible to us as a minor constituent of most copper (sulfide) ores, or as a minor constutent of some other less common metal ores such as some of those of silver, gold, palladium, and tungsten, for example. The ultra purification of silicon to the purity required for the manufacture of silicon solar cells is very expensive, but it is today commonly undertaken to produce the silicon used in manufacturing the bases for integrated circuits. Tellurium on the other hand is only produced as a byproduct of copper refining and then only 1 oz of tellurium is produced for each 500 pounds of copper.
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March 7, 2008
GM, Toyota Doubtful on Fuel Cells' Mass Use | online.wsj.com
Last week GM's most important 'car guy' let the cat out of the bag. GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz let it be known that for the first time the market is driving GM's decisions on which products to take forward on a green path. The public clearly does not want a car for which there is no fuel available today and no plan at all to ever make it, the hydrogen fuel, widely available. GM will therefore try to bring battery powered cars to the mass market along with diesel powered vehicles; its goal is to make those two power trains dominant in its product line by 2015. Some GM executives who aren't with this program will have to go.
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March 5, 2008
GM Announces New Hybrid System | www.forbes.com
The announcement by GM at the Geneva Motor Show that it will be offering for sale, next year, a high end SUV with a lithium iron phosphate battery equipped two mode hybrid power train followed the announcement the day before by Daimler of a high end Mercedes S-class hybrid to be introduced next year with, I believe the same lithium ion battery system. This leaves only BMW to be heard from with regard to whether or not it will offer a hybrid vehicle with the same type of battery. The three OEM car companies, GM, Daimler, and BMW have been running a(n), apparently, successful strategic development alliance based in suburban Detroit for the last few years to produce a safe(r), reliable, long lived, lithium technology battery. GM and Daimler are now voting with their checkbooks to bring the still very expensive battery, apparently developed far enough to be tested by consumers, to the market place. But these new hybrid cars and SUVs may still not yet be ready for the European market.
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Has Daimler Decided To Use A High End Lithium Utilizing Hybrid Mercedes To Head Off Tesla?
March 3, 2008
Conti's lithium-ion cell to power Mercedes hybrid | uk.reuters.com
Any new battery technology for use in a passenger or freight carrying vehicle will start out as very, very, expensive; its cost of development and prototype production will have to recovered somehow in the selling price of the cars. Assuming even that Daimler corporation has in hand, or is extremely confident that it has under way, some appropriately sized working 'lithium batteries' upon which it is willing to base some limited production then why, in opposition to Toyota's original introduction of nickel metal hydride batteries at the low to mid-level of vehicles, is Daimler going to release a 'flagship' model hybrid with the battery developed by Continental?
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It's Not The Cost Of Disposal, Stupid, It's The Recovery Of Raw Materials By Recycling For Re-use!
March 3, 2008
Car Makers Seek Battery That Keeps Going | www.forbes.com
James Carville famously said of political campaign issues, "It's the economy, stupid!" For OEM heavy manufacturing, "It's the raw materials availability, stupid!"
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February 22, 2008
South African PGM production woes brighten life for North American PGM mining, exploration | www.mineweb.com
The once every 7 years or so platinum group metals, PGMs, shortage panic is off and running. The producers and trading companies are also panicked. Costs of producing new platinum are skyrocketing and the producers and traders know that this will ignite a new emphasis on replacing PGMs with much cheaper metals and processes. In 2001 the electrical and electronics industry responded to the last panic by replacing palladium completely and sending the metal into a surplus condition which is still in existence. Unless the Chinese and Indian car industries mandate catalytic converters very soon the current panic could break the PGM market for good.
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Chrysler Is Moving To Reduce Its Michigan Operations To A Minimum; Is Chrysler Movin' On Out?
February 22, 2008
Chrysler hires Tata of India for data work | www.freep.com
Chrysler has informed its American document management contractors that it will be consolidating its Michigan operations into one location, it's Auburn Hills, Michigan, headquarters complex dominated by the 12 story building with the Pentastar symbol on its top front face and once upon a time called the Lee Iacocca Building. It has further informed those contractors that they must work with Tata IT in India until such time as their own services in the US, the exact time to be decided by Chrysler IT management, is no longer needed. Chryslers in-house IT group is completely demoralized, because they see the handwriting on their computer screens.
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February 18, 2008
Silicon Valley Starts to Turn Its Face to the Sun | www.nytimes.com
The global production of the semi-metal tellurium is less than 100 tons per year. The use of tellurium in thin-film solar cells is dissipative. It is most efficiently used in combination with the element cadmium. Cadmium is very toxic, and tellurium is also toxic although it may be less toxic than cadmium.
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February 18, 2008
Rough Road For Hybrids In China | www.businessweek.com
China's dominance in the producton of rare earth metals gives it the ability to blackmail Toyota, which has so far refused to make some hybrid components in China for reasons of competitive advantage. GM has already thrown in the towel on this issue by making all of the components for its Chinese Buick hybrid in China. Are Chinese battery researchers and manufacturers holding even a sharper Damoclean sword over the necks of foreign hybrid hopefuls?
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February 18, 2008
As Nuclear Waste Languishes, Expense To U.S. Rises | www.nytimes.com
The waste production of nuclear power plants is a function both of the frequency of removing waste products and of refueling. Many reactors currently in use and with many years of operation remaining could be retrofitted to utilize thorium in place of much of or all of their uranium. This would eliminate ultimately the production of weapons grade material at those retrofitted plants. Thus the US, and the world, would be a safer place. In addition the fuel refurbishing and replacement cycle for thorium reactors is much less frequent than for pure uranium reactors, so less waste is generated.
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February 14, 2008
Auto industry is death-bound: CAW | www.thestar.com
Is there one single common thread that weaves its way through the abysmal performance of the American OEM automotive industry in the twenty-first century? Yes, there is. It is ego and hubris, which manifests itself in a total lack of long term planning to manage the risks of things not going as the industry's 'leaders' say they are going to go. Canada's Canadian Auto Worker's union proposes that no company be allowed to sell more in Canada than it reciprocally buys. But the CAW leader does not realize that Canadian natural resources are buoying the Canadian economy at levels which simply drown any possible earning from manufactured goods. No Canadian government is going to interfere with Canada's massive earnings from the export of natural resources to save a few obsolete overpriced manufacturing jobs in foreign owned car plants.
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Are The OEM Automobile Companies Just Leaving Michigan Or Abandoning The US?
February 13, 2008
States of Opportunity | online.wsj.com
Last year two people moved out of Michigan for good for every one who settled in Michigan from another state or country. General Motors lost and wrote off a combined 37 billion dollars in 2007; the largest corporate loss in American history. Michigan has the highest official unemployment rate, nearly 8%, of any state in the union. General Motors has just this week offered a 'buyout' to all 74,000 of its hourly employees in the US so as to enable the company to replace them with much lower paid workers. This will bring to 500,000 the number of former auto workers 'terminated through buyouts' by the Detroit Three in the last 5 years most of whom continue to live unemployed and unemployable in Michigan. Is Michigan already in recession, and is Michigan finished as an industrial state?
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Has The Chevrolet Volt Program Been Short Circuited By Economic And Engineering Reality?
February 12, 2008
Tomorrow’s Whodunit: Who Might Kill the Chevrolet Volt | www.hybridcars.com
Has General Motors oversold itself, and the public, on the Chevrolet Volt lithium battery plug-in hybrid program? If so, why? And, also, if so, is GM going to wake up and cancel it before the program's cost escalate further?
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Palladium Flat Lined Years Ago, So Why Raise Future's Margins Now?
February 11, 2008
NYMEX to Change Margins for Palladium Futures Contracts | nymex.mediaroom.com
There has been no speculation in palladium since late 2001 when its price collapsed. What then caused the NYMEX to suddenly raise the margins on palladium futures as if a wave of speculation were about to begin?
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