A good piece on the state of the auto industry from the New York Times
Best quote:
“Lastly, somebody ought to call Steve Jobs, who doesn’t need to be bribed to do innovation, and ask him if he’d like to do national service and run a car company for a year. I’d bet it wouldn’t take him much longer than that to come up with the G.M. iCar.”
Every industry needs a “Steve Jobs”.
I agree with most of what he said, except drop all the crap about Flex Fuel. All that does is make people feel like they are doing something when in reality they are just creating other problems.
I hopped into a taxi today while going to between sites at work. It happened to be a Toyota Prius. Being the geek that I am I spent most of the trip watching the little screen to see how often it actually ran off the battery and didn’t use the gasoline engine. I was quite surprised to see that it spent about 80% of it’s time getting energy from the gasoline engine. The only time the engine seemed to be disenageged was when it was stopped or slowing down and the energy flowed back to the battery. Some times it seemed to take energy from both the engine and battery, but most of the it seemed to be running off the gasoline engine.
It was stop and go city driving and I have no idea how it was suposed to work, but it didn’t seem all that efficient to me. In my mind this begs the question, exactly how green are these cars after all?