Political Science on Display

I got this e mail from a friend and cannot verify it but....whether this is true I do not know but it reflects a mindset, at this point an electric car makes no sense, the energy is produced by carbon fuel to re charge the battery anyway, the battery weighs too much, it takes too long to re charge unlike gasoline, there are no re charging stations, the environmental damage from making and disposing of all those batteries is horrendous, this reflects the idea that if it does not make noise it must be Okay, you can't see the pollution since it came thru the wire to re charge the car. Electric cars also reflect a big city east coast mindset where five miles is a huge distance, try driving from here to San angelo in an electric car.......

(From a senior level Chrysler person) 
  
Monday morning I attended a breakfast meeting where the speaker/guest 
was David E. Cole, Chairman Center for Automotive Research (CAR). You have all likely heard CAR quoted, or referred to in the auto industry 
news lately. 

  

Mr. Cole, who is an engineer by training, 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 a 
30+ year experience automotive expert has to listen to a newcomer to the 
industry, someone with zero manufacturing experience, zero auto industry 
experience, zero business experience, zero finance experience, and zero 
engineering experience, tell them how to run their business. 

  

My favorite story is as follows: 

  

There was a team of Obama people speaking to Mr. Cole (Engineer, 
automotive experience 40+ years, Chairman of CAR). 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 that they had 
looked up on some website. 

  

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? Who's rules are those, we need to change that. (Some of 
the others wrote down the law name 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". 

Comments

[Adam Dupnik]

These kind of decisions and assumptions are made all the time in business. For the most part people making the decisions do not look at the big picture, and if the outcome is feasible or not. This is a wasted cost.

[Dennis Elam]

Adam may have his finger on an important concept new to the discipline,

Wasted Costs

I would bet there are a lot of them!

Dennis

[Rani Lerma]

That is too funny. And exactly were the upcoming generation is headed. Political science on display shows that certain values in education have taken a back seat to what is believed to be more important in our current society.
About the automobile situation, the link below

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4563676/

is where our future needs to be going. Hydrogen.

And this Michael Jackson diversion...go figure.

Rani