America will get its first "green" luxury SUV next month when General Motors Corp. rolls out its new Cadillac Escalade hybrid, while sales of the original version have plummeted 29 percent this year.

   When I started the Planes, Trains, and Automobiles series I did it with the full intent to start exploring the various rail services in my area. Little did I know it would take a full thirteen days before a trip I could actually take a rail trip.

    Even more surprising to me was the route – Springfield, Massachusetts (SPG) to New York’s City’s Penn Station (NYP), hop the A train down to the 14th street station, and then a quick stroll over to 11th Avenue and 18th street ... to board a yacht for a cruise around the southern tip of Manhattan.

    I’ve been seeking visibility and power along many lines including the financial, but hooking up with a whole yacht load of investment bankers and hedge fund managers on the spur of the moment was a pleasant surprise.

Greetings folks, welcome to another edition of Manufacturing Monday.  Sorry about last week, it's normally my goal to have a new edition out on the first day of the week, but sometimes life can be unpredictable and throw you a curve ball. Well, several interesting things this week ranging from manufacturing activity to California looking to gain Tesla's plants.  Plus the Financial Times reports on China dethroning the US from it's Manufacturing title.

Watching Click and Clack (The Tappet Brothers) talking about the new car of the future got me thinking:

What we really need is someone who makes converter kits for conventional (i.e. the one in your driveway) cars that makes them greener, cleaner and less dependent on oil.

What was the first car you ever had?

I got the idea for this after reading a spate of stories over at Jalopnik about teenagers and the automobiles their parents bought for them. For example, the image to the right is of what's left of a BMW M3 that parents bought for a 19-year-old.

Potential idiot parents take note — the 2008 BMW M3 is a finely crafted, high-performance, German-engineered rocket sled. It is not a present to buy for your LA-area 19-year-old. When parents like you buy cars like M3s for your kids, things like this happen — they pile a couple of guys in the car, then take it out for high-speed foolishness. At the peak of teenage testosterone, they will hit the "M button," rocket up a hill, lose control, jump a curb and bash into a house.

So was anyone else lucky enough to have parents that shelled out $50,000 for Bavarian ///M Power, or were you making due with a piece of shit beater?

Global oil production peaked in May of 2005 and while there is now a book cooking happening in terms of reported numbers such that there is a claim that December of 2007 equaled the previous amount, counting ethanol amongst all liquids seems more than a little ... funny, at least to me. If oil didn’t peak 5/2005 it will any day now and debating it is akin to pondering the weight of the ice that ended up on the deck of the Titanic after it became known that five compartments had been breeched; the direction the ship will tip as it slides beneath the waves is hardly relevant.

  Our world is changing dramatically on three different planes – economy, energy, and environment. I’ve been covering energy, specifically concerns regarding fossil fuel produced nitrogen fertilizers, and recently the impending bank mess has drawn my eye, but I’m content to turn away from it now that many people are beginning to call it for what it is.

  I haven’t said much about it yet, but how we get ourselves and our goods from one place to another has greatly occupied my mind these last few months ...

Some conservatives have been smart enough to embrace Wall-E as their own and some have not.  Similarly its easy from the Pickens plan preamble to have the idea that its a step in the right direction even though its a step here.  What Wall-E, which is garden of Eden for dyslexics, and Pickens plan have in common is a great statement of the issues and then an unwillingness to address the core problem.  This is conservative sustainability - intense anger at where we are but but little realistic thought to how we got there or how we can get out.

With gas prices going through the roof and regulators requiring cars to be ever more miserly, Volkswagen is bringing new meaning to the term "fuel efficiency" with a bullet-shaped microcar that gets a stunning 235 mpg.

Link

The article goes on to explain how VW maximizes mileage via aerodynamics, a super-light carbon fiber chassis, and a diesel-hybrid drive-train.

The economic slowdown & rising gas prices were expected to take their toll on car sales, and it did. With people either losing their jobs or losing a chunk of their disposable income to $4 gas, sales of automobiles in the United States showed their worst half-year performance since 1993, including a more than 18% sales plunge for the month of June compared to the same time last year, and June 2007 wasn't exactly a good month for the auto industry either. It's also double the sales drop experienced in the wake of the September 11th attacks.

Detroit automakers were hit hard. Ford Motor was down 28 percent in June, General Motors was off 18 percent, and Chrysler dropped 36 percent.

Despite its sharp decline, G.M’s results were better than expected, which industry analysts attributed to a sales blitz with offers of zero-interest, long-term financing deals. The cut-rate loans helped G.M. retain its historic position as the top-selling United States automaker over Toyota, whose sales fell 21 percent.

Soon many workers won't be able to afford to drive a car:

And most of them don't have telecommute jobs:

And thanks in part to the great american streetcar scandal we can't count on public transportation filling the gap.  We need to subsidize electric cars in a big way and the money should come from redirecting our current oil policy:

Oil consumption per day still predicted to continue to increase one million barrels through 2009.  A price bubble is supposed to decrease demand:
Since demand is still increasing even though oil prices are going up our only hope of lower prices seems to be that oil producers both have spare capacity and are willing to step on each other's toes instead of colluding.  This contrasts with 1970 when price increases dramatically affected consumption:  
Obama understands the situation but he needs to come out and say the government will help subsidize electric cars:
So far even McCain's incredibly weak $300 million prize is competing with Obama's vague $15 billion a year "energy" policy.

I've spent the last couple of days dealing with car trouble. A car's failing alternator, & having to deal with the dealership trying to find a part, has delayed work & publishing of all things "Irrelevant & Crap" until tomorrow night.

While wasting moments of my life in a dealership waiting room, I decided to spend the time talking to my Mother on the cell. So with all that's happening & all the issues in the world, she wanted to talk about the price of gas, other drivers, and roads. It's an issue that probably resonates more on a local level, but if you wanna get "Mama Rimjob" pissed off, just ask her about the quality of roads. My home state of Tennessee is the only place I've ever lived where the solution to a pothole was to put a 5 inch thick metal plate on the problem for vehicles to drive over at 60 mph, so TDOT (Tennessee Department of Transportation) can take their sweet ass time to fix it.

So with that in mind, it gave me an idea for a topic. Which state has the worst drivers and/or roads?

The Republican message on gas prices is simple - war and drilling.  Our message must also be simple - No Gas!.  In 2010 America rolls out electric cars, public transportation, non-food bio-fuels, bicycle lanes, legacy car technology gas conservation programs, tele-commuting using the same tried and true methods that got us highways, electric power lines, water systems, and inexpensive computer chips - government spending.  If you have a problem with government spending then maybe you're un-American cause that's been our way for a hundred years of success.  Republicans message the No Zone; we message McCain's no technology help:

For too long, we have let history outrun our government's ability to keep up with it. The right change will stop impeding Americans from doing what they have always done: overcome every obstacle to our progress, turn challenges into opportunities, and by our own industry, imagination and courage make a better country and a safer world than we inherited.

It's a New Orleans response for a peak oil storm while our soldiers die in Iraq for oil.

From a person named Armory Lovins, here is an idea Kevin is highlighting:

For cars, the most effective thing would be a "feebate": In the showroom, less-efficient models would have a corresponding fee, while the more-efficient ones would get a rebate paid for by the fees. That way when choosing what model you want you would pay attention to fuel savings over its whole life, not just the first year or two. It turns out that the automakers can actually make more money this way because they will want to get their cars from the fee zone into the rebate zone by putting in more technology. The technology has a higher profit margin than the rest of the vehicle.

Welcome to herding cats 101.  Lack of coherent oil policy endangers the election; Obama's $15 billion a year makes Republicans the party that spends trillions while we vaguely lump global warming and oil dependence in one year 2020 fuzzy solution.  Even McCain says, "No problem is more urgent today than America's dependence on foreign oil."  Republicans are right about the magnitude of the problem - worth spending trillions of dollars.  Republicans are right about the immediacy of the problem - America is consuming one in four barrels of world oil production while already amazingly deep in international debt.  Republicans were and are very wrong that this is a problem for the military and drilling.  Progressives must show "the better angels of our nature".    

A fleet of electric cars will reach the market around 2010.  America must have a policy in place immediately to support our switch from oil powered transportation.  Making Republicans the party that spends trillions while we vaguely lump global warming and oil dependence in one year 2020 fuzzy solution is the wrong thing to do.  To not have a coherent oil policy (not energy) now is like not having an opinion on slavery before the civil war.

Oil independence needs our support

General Motors expects its gasoline-electric Chevrolet Volt to come to market in 2010 priced close to $40,000, say sources close to the project. ... Company insiders now predict 10,000 to 30,000 Volt sales in the first year, with volume growing as it hits full production. GM is counting on the Volt to be a high-volume seller after the first few years. GM expects to bring the Volt to market by November 2010, sources say.

Jonathan Soli is a high school senior from Albert Lea, MN.  For two years he has been working on a device that electrolyzes water and injects the separated hydrogen and oxygen gases into the air intake of an internal combustion engine.  This results in a 27.7% increase in fuel efficiency and a 28.6% decrease in CO2.  So far he's tested it only on lawnmower engines but he is also building a small vehicle which he estimates will get over 800 miles per gallon and hopes to experiment on an automobile engine if he can find one he can afford.

Here's his video presentation from the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair:
http://intelpr.feedroom.com/...

Here's his local TV station's report on his work:
http://kaaltv.com/...

One high school student, Daniel Burd, figures out how to accelerate the decomposition of plastics and now another is making high efficiency internal combustion engines.  Will high school science save us?

Most cities in this country were built around the automobile, and in many places public transportion is now almost non-existent, even in large cities.

Public transportion that existed prior to the automobile were dismantled by the emergent automobile industry in a move that came to be known as the Great American Streetcar Scandal; General Motors managed to remove over 100 streetcar systems nationwide by 1950. By the time antitrust investigators could go to work, the deed was done. American mass-transit was "dead".

Great American Streetcar Scandal