Laws of Physics
From a senior level Chrysler person: Monday morning I
attended a breakfast meeting where the speaker/guest was
David E. Cole, Chairman of the Center for Automotive
Research (CAR), an Engineer with 40+ years automotive
experience, full Professor at the Univ. of Michigan.
You have all likely heard CAR quoted, or referred to in
the auto industry news lately. Mr. Cole told many stories of
the difficulty of working with the folks that the Obama
administration has sent to save the auto industry.
There have been many meetings where this very experienced
automotive expert has had to listen to a newcomer to the
industry; someone with zero manufacturing experience, zero
auto industry experience, zero business experience, zero
finance experience, zero engineering experience, and
apparently zero brains tell them how to run their business.
Mr. Cole's favorite story is as follows: There was a team
of Obama people speaking to Mr. Cole. They were explaining
to Mr. Cole that the auto companies needed to make a car
that was electric and liquid natural gas (LNG) with enough
combined fuel to go 500 miles, so we wouldn't "need" so many
gas stations (A whole other topic). They were quoting BTU's
of LNG and battery life they had looked up on some web site.
Mr. Cole explained that to do this you would need a trunk
FULL of batteries, and a LNG tank as big as a car to make
that happen. And that there were problems related to the
laws of physics that prevented them from...
The Obama person interrupted and said (and I am quoting
here),
"These laws of physics? Whose rules are those? We need to
change that (while others wrote down the name of the law so
they could look it up). We have the Congress, and the
administration. We can repeal that law, amend it, or use an
executive order to get rid of that problem. That's why we
are here, to fix these sort of issues."
My friends ... we are screwed.
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