Are we living in the era of AD – After Detroit?
While Americans try to make sense of General Motors’ humiliation, a giant brought down by the sort of hubris and miscalculation that led it to choose Hummers over hybrids, it’s worth considering what commentators in other countries have to say. Once you get past the annoying if inevitable schadenfreude, the views from a distance are painfully illuminating, such as Aditya Chakrabortty column in Britain’s Guardian, entitled, What’s Bad for General Motors is Good for the World.
He uses the sort of tough language rarely seen in the American press, calling the world’s “largest industrial failure” a fitting and empowering (for other countries, at least) epitaph to the close of the “American Century” of dominance that GM once defined. He suggests Detroit’s marketing might had been holding progress back, marrying the world to gas guzzling, climate-damaging vehicles. And in order to support this take, he cites the one area in which American car makers have been least able to dominate — the green cars (and trucks and buses and trains) of the future:
For Porsche, BMW and other luxury marques, Shanghai is already the second most important market in the world. And this year, for the first time ever, the Chinese are set to buy more cars than recession-hit Americans. But the developing countries of Asia are not just consuming more, they are closing the gap in manufacturing. In doing so, they are on a well-trodden path to industrialisation, following Japan and South Korea. Those countries pioneered cheaper, small cars; this time, the new frontiers of globalisation are leading the way on electric cars.
Yes, you read that right: the green auto, the will-o’-the-wisp of the motor industry, is already being made in smoke-belching Asia. The world’s bestselling plug-in car, the G-Wiz, was invented and built by an Indian firm, Reva. The company that has got the furthest in developing a battery-powered auto which can go for long distances is called BYD (short for Build Your Dreams) and is based in Shenzen, southern China. True, the little G-Wiz is a funny-looking thing, more milkfloat than motor. Then again, the Americans used to laugh at Toyota – and now it’s the world’s no 1. When pleading for Washington aid, GM execs made much of their new electric vehicle, the Volt – but that’s still years from going on sale. Such slow-footedness is hardly a surprise from a company whose vice-chair, Bob Lutz, last year reportedly described global warming as “a crock of shit”.
That GM and other American car makers are behind the curve on green technology is taken as a truism in Europe. When the London Times listed its take on the top ten “green cars” in the world, only one came from an American car maker, Ford — and even that was a vehicle sold only in Europe and China, the S-Max minivan.
Chakrabortty’s take is, in essence, that the American auto industry clung far too long to what he calls the “gasoline-industrial complex,” aided and abetted by short-sighted presidents and congresses who (under President George W. Bush) saw fit to grant a zero tax break to electric cars and a whopping $100,000 tax subsidy to Hummers. Hard to argue with Chakrabortty on that point, though in the interests of auto workers and the national economy, I hope he’s overstating matters with his ominous closing observation:
From this week, the car industry is living in the AD era: After Detroit.
Tags: BYD, electric cars, General Motors, GM Volt, green cars
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