A Big Three magic-carpet ride
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The Big Three are going on a big road trip. One of them is driving a Ford, one a Chevy and one vaporware.
Last month, the chief executives of General Motors, Ford Motor and Chrysler ate a Chevy Suburban-size portion of humble pie after lawmakers discovered they had flown in private jets to Washington to ask for $25 billion in aid.
‘There’s a delicious irony in seeing private luxury jets flying into Washington, D.C., and people coming off of them with tin cups in their hands,’ said Rep. Gary L. Ackerman (D-N.Y.), not long before Congress sent the execs back to Detroit to come up with a better plan.
Now they’re heading back to Washington, but this time they’re driving. One report said that driving rather than flying private, once all the expenses are totted up, could save the automakers $15,000, which could help explain why the companies felt comfortable requesting $9 billion more this time around.
On Tuesday, Ford’s CEO, Alan Mulally, began his drive in a Ford Escape hybrid, taking time to give ...
... telephone interviews as he rode along (we trust he was using a hands-free device).
On Wednesday, GM Chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner is expected to saddle up a Chevy Malibu hybrid and make the nine-hour, 520-mile drive.
Not to be left out, Chrysler’s chairman and CEO, Bob Nardelli, will make the drive as well. Chrysler hasn’t revealed what vehicle it will be but said it’s a hybrid. Unless he’s making the trip in a Toyota Prius, the best bet is that it’s either a 2009 Dodge Durango hybrid or a 2009 Chrysler Aspen hybrid, the long-anticipated hybrids from the smallest of the American carmakers.
And therein lies the problem. Technically, those two Chrysler vehicles don’t exist. At least not in any practical sense. Only a few hybrids were built.
Turns out that before Chrysler ever delivered its first hybrid SUV to a dealership lot, the company decided to shutter the Delaware factory that was to produce the things in order to cut costs. The factory is staying open until the end of the year, but it’s cranking out only 2008 model-year vehicles -- i.e., no hybrids.
Of course, the few that were built were needed so the auto company could trot them out to auto shows and the like (they were on display at the L.A. Auto Show over the last few weeks).
So to the extent that Nardelli’s ride is in a hybrid, it serves less as a reminder of how American carmakers are working to deliver the cars of the future than as a rolling monument to, well, failure.
Talk about a delicious irony.
-- Ken Bensinger