Start your engine, but plug it in first
Chrysler’s new vice-chairman and president, Jim Press, would do well to remember a maxim that comes to us from the hallowed days of vaudeville: Never follow an animal act. For a media event introducing its 2009 Dodge Ram pickup, Chrysler’s PR department wrangled -- or was it rustled? -- a herd of Texas longhorns in front of Cobo Center, site of last week’s 2008 North American International Auto Show, known universally as the Detroit Auto Show. As Press nattered on about Chrysler’s new product, one of the steers began to show his affection for another. Press, not surprisingly, had trouble recapturing the audience’s attention. “OK, OK, look at the truck,” he pleaded.
Hot steer-on-steer action notwithstanding, nobody cared.
This year’s show drew a line in that proverbial line-drawing sand, dividing the American car business as it was -- big trucks and SUVs, a gluttony of horsepower, and the jumbo-sized parochialism of the market -- from the car business as it soon will be: smaller, lighter, smarter, more globalized, vastly more fuel efficient and less reliant on gasoline.
There are many good reasons: First, obviously, are the revised Corporate Average Fuel Economy rules recently signed into law, requiring automakers to achieve a fleet-wide average of 35 miles per gallon by 2020. Just as obvious is $100 per barrel oil; carmakers are finally shaking off the denial that has paralyzed them for so long. Build more fuel-efficient cars and trucks, or die. Third, there is the very real prospect that carmakers will have to meet not only CAFE’s mileage requirements but also even tougher standards if, as seems likely, California and other states win their case against the federal government, allowing them to set their own vehicle emission standards on carbon dioxide.
Bottom line: Carmakers are swimming frantically to stay ahead of a regulatory tsunami that’s heading their way.
Five years ago, an urban sprite like the Mercedes-built Smart car would have been laughed off the floor. Four years ago, the notion of a luxury plug-in hybrid like the Fisker Karma (an electric vehicle with a range-extending internal-combustion engine) might have only crossed the minds of some electrical engineers at UC Davis. Three years ago, a California-legal diesel-electric hybrid powertrain (as in the Mercedes-Benz S300 Bluetec Hybrid concept) existed only as some whiteboard fantasy in Stuttgart. Two years ago, a Prius-like pickup truck (Toyota’s A-BAT concept) was the stuff of Toby Keith’s blackout nightmares.
Last week in Detroit, they were all there -- admittedly, with the whiff of vaporware still clinging to some of them. Even so, the foundations of the car business are changing fast. Those companies with a greener story to tell got the press. Those that didn’t found themselves out in the cold, with the cows.
Diesels: Diesel engines are roughly 30% more fuel efficient than gasoline engines; they are also more expensive to build and require more elaborate pollution control systems. After a long and unnecessary fight between the Environmental Protection Agency and the oil and trucking industry, the United States began getting ultra low sulfur diesel fuel in late 2006. This change made it possible -- though by no means easy -- for carmakers to meet California’s super-strict air quality rules.
This year, 50-state legal diesel cars and trucks will begin showing up at dealerships, and many of these were previewed at the show. BMW introduced its 335d coupe and X5 (xDrive35d), each with the same twin-turbo in-line six diesel engine (265 hp and 425 pound-feet of torque). Mercedes-Benz unveiled a near-production version of its new GLK Vision compact sport-ute with 2.2-liter, 168-hp turbo-diesel. Although the GLK is not slated for sale in the U.S. until 2009 and the diesel engine option is not confirmed, Daimler Chairman Dieter Zetsche said last week that diesels could make up 20% of Mercedes-Benz sales in the U.S. within a few years (the current take is about 5%).
Audi is another luxo-marque looking to sell more diesels in the U.S. To that end, it showed the lump-in-your-throat R8 V12 TDI, the company’s sleek mid-engine supercar with a 5.9-liter turbo-diesel V12 behind the seats, producing -- potentially -- 738 pound-feet of torque. This was obvious journo-bait; it seems unlikely the car will be produced, though the monster oil-burner will be shoe-horned into European-market Q7 SUVs. U.S. consumers will have to content themselves with a Q7 3.0-liter TDI, due later this year.
Meanwhile, Toyota President and Chief Executive Katsuaki Watanabe, as part of an all-out product and PR offensive, announced that the Tundra pickup and Sequoia SUV would be getting a diesel option “soon.” Subaru, VW and Acura (TSX) also announced plans to bring high-tech diesels to the U.S.
Hybrids and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles: The U.S. Department of Energy on Thursday announced a three-year, $60-million public-private partnership to foster plug-in hybrid-battery technology, taking as its benchmark a commercially viable PHEV with a 40-mile electric-only range by 2016. And that’s a good thing. However, GM is already in this game and its self-imposed deadline is much closer. Much of the talk at the Detroit show centered on the progress being made in the company’s audacious Volt program. The Volt is a pure EV -- electric motor only -- with a range-extending gas engine-generator onboard to re-charge the battery. Think of it as the EV2. GM has staked much of its credibility on being able to deliver the Volt by the end of 2010, but the technical challenges are considerable.
GM also showed off its more conventional PHEV concept of the Saturn Vue. This two-mode hybrid vehicle, due in the next two years, will also carry a lithium-ion battery pack; it will operate much like a Prius except that drivers will be able to recharge the battery overnight, giving them between “eight and 22” miles of “EV mode” range in city driving. Toyota announced that it too would test PHEV versions of the Prius in demonstration fleets by 2010. Toyota also announced that it would, as part of its goal to sell 1 million hybrids annually, reveal two new dedicated hybrids (not hybridized versions of conventional models) at next year’s show, one for Toyota and one for Lexus. Honda showed off a handsome concept of its new small sporty hybrid, code named CF-Z.
To be sure, the most outrageous -- and minimally believable -- plug-in proposal was offered by Henrik Fisker, who unveiled the Fisker Karma, an almost gorgeous luxury PHEV with running gear sourced from venture-partner Quantum Fuel Systems Technologies Worldwide. Fisker -- a star of car design who worked for BMW and Aston Martin before striking out on his own -- believes he can ramp up production of this $80,000 sparker beginning in the fourth quarter of 2009, with an ultimate production goal of 15,000 units. Fisker Coachworks hasn’t named a battery supplier, nor has it concluded where, in fact, it’s going to build the car. So there’s lots of vapor here. Still, it was easily one of the most talked-about cars of the show.
Meanwhile, BMW and Audi revealed two-mode hybrid systems for the X6 (BMW) and the A4 and Q7 (Audi). BMW, Mercedes-Benz and GM are all benefiting from a joint hybrid development program embarked upon three years ago.
Biofuel: It’s becoming obvious that early excitement over biofuels such as ethanol and biodiesel had not reckoned the upstream costs of these fuels (water, arable land depletion, increasing food costs), nor their effects downstream. Even so, carmakers like ethanol because it has a green image and it’s easy to modify existing vehicles to be ethanol-capable. That helps explain curiosities like the ethanol-capable Ferrari F430 and corn-burning Corvette race cars.
However, one announcement at the Detroit show was startling, and encouraging: GM has invested in a small Illinois company that claims to be able to produce ethanol from waste using conventional gasification and reactors filled with ethanol-producing bacteria. The firm, Coskata, says that it can produce ethanol for about $1 per gallon and that its technique uses only a fraction of the water required in other kinds of ethanol production.
In the face of all this dramatic and perilous change, all this news, I was amazed to hear commentators say the show was a mixed bag, a study in contrasts that, when all averaged out, merely meant business as usual. Hardly. Yes, there were new pickups rolled out (Ford unveiled its 2009 F-150 to near indifference). Yes, there was the 620-hp Corvette ZR1 and a few 500-hp luxury cars.
But that’s not where the action is, not anymore. Moo.
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