God, Save Us From the Intelligent People

I just came across an article by a super smart brainiac in a Yale publication on how Detroit was failing, and why. His answer: because they weren't building enough fuel efficient cars. Detroit had to be forced to do the smart thing by smart politicians, or they would stupidly build the wrong cars and those cars would never sell.

He had, in other words, looked at a few months of sales data, ignored decades of data, assumed that Toyota was thriving because of a car that made up a small percentage of its sales, and assumed that government could fix it because he knew the future, and the future was hybrids.

A few choice quotes:

With much fanfare, the Clinton Administration in 1993 launched the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles, challenging Detroit’s size-obsessed Big Three to come up with 80-mile-per-gallon vehicles.... versions of them could have hit the market in time to give the Japanese hybrids – Toyota’s Prius and Honda’s Insight – some real competition. Instead, Detroit’s automakers abandoned their hybrids and plowed their research and development money back into the trucks and SUVs that were making them steady profits.

Ooh, there it is, the big bad "P" word - profit! Bane of companies all over America! Making them build the cars people want instead of the cars the Big Brain People know they should buy!

America’s auto industry is drifting toward unprecedented disaster, and its resistance to change is at the heart of the problem. Lawmakers rejecting a $25 billion industry bailout have been understandably skeptical that auto executives, many of whom had flown to the congressional hearings in private planes, had learned the proper lessons, not just about austerity but also about increasing consumer demand for fuel-efficient, low-emission vehicles.

“Their board rooms in my view have been devoid of vision,” said Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT). “The Big Three turned a blind eye to opportunities. They have promoted and often driven the demand for inefficient, gas-guzzling vehicles, and dismissed the threat of global warming.”

As Washington weighs whether to provide some form of assistance, some of the best ideas for saving Detroit are coming from environmental groups that would like to see any bailout or loan package coupled with a green realignment of the industry. Although the Big Three may regard that as a poison pill, it has the virtue of actually putting the automakers in line with the emerging market.

No mention of crushing union obligations there, just a prediction from Brain Man, that Americans are increasingly demanding more fuel efficient cars (and would continue to do so), I would like to refer you to a story I saw today. Mr. Intellect must be gleeful by now, to see that hybrids have grown into such popular and critical vehicles. Let's not even go into the fact that the American car companies already market hybrids - let's just believe, as he apparently believes, that American car companies are so stupid that they never even bothered to develop and market them. And now they are paying for their foolish slavery to their precious (*spit*) profits.

Hybrid car sales go from 60 to 0 at breakneck speed.

Just one quote here:

Last month, only 15,144 hybrids sold nationwide, down almost two-thirds from April, when the segment's sales peaked and gas averaged $3.57 a gallon. That's far larger than the drop in industry sales for the period and scarcely a better showing than January, when hybrid sales were at their lowest since early 2005.

God help us if we ever end up in the hands of these smart people.