General Motors dropped from DOW today as it filled for bankruptcy this morning. The Obama administration is to purchase the remains of the suffering company for $30 billion, with the Canadian government chipping in an additional 9.5 billion for the Canadian branch of the company. Together the two governments and the remaining GM staffers will have an arduous task of restructuring the giant company in to a leaner organization in the hopes that it can again rise to be a profitable employer to thousands.
GM put an inferior battery in the first edition of the EV1, even though the owned a controlling interest in a company that had a patent for a far superior battery invented by Stan Oshinsky . Sadly GM only released 200 second generation EV1’s that included the superior battery, and later GM sold it’s shares to Cheveron/Texaco who were free to suppress the innovative technology.
When GM squashed the EV1 they choose greed over innovation. This was a massive mistake. Our world is riddled with massive problems, and GM had a solution to a hand-full of them, and tossed it in the garbage, to the detriment of the company’s profits, it’s some 250,000 American employees, and most importantly the greater good. The EV1 was positioned to help with:
- The pollution problem
LA Smog
- Dependence on foreign oil
Desert Storm
- Rising gas prices harming industry and families
Rising gas prices
Innovation should not be squandered! Google did not earn $22 billion last year because they choose to ignore innovation. Innovation brings greater wealth than clinging on to old ideas ever will. Seems to me that GM learned this the hard way… well, lets hope they have learned this!
In the documentary Wally E. Rippel, a research engineer, points out that there is still about a trillion barrels of oil in the earth. “At $100 a barrel, that’s $100 trillion of business left in the ground”. The fat cat oil companies have so much to gain from prohibiting new technologies from taking over our current consuption of oil and gas, and they have the power to make it happen. Their pressure on the government, and the car companies, including GM, ensured that the EV1 would not survive. Under these pressures GM chose the gas gusseling Hummer over the EV1. Ironically now, GM owes over $1 million for every Hummer on the road.
There are many lessons to be learned here. Lessons that are not new. Lessons that we all learned back in grade school from Dr. Seuss and Sesame Street. Mainly: greed does not pay in the long run. Society and technology will continue to innovate and progress as we move into the future, because it has to. Our population is growing, and our resources are finite. We have to come up with innovative ideas to survive in the long run. Setbacks such as the demise of the EV1 only slow progress and innovation, to the detriment of our future generations. I hope the governments inheriting the remains of the once mighty American company will have the foresight and wisdom to remove this hindrance on progress and revive the Electric Vehicle project.
Check out Who Killed the Electric Car? the trailer is available above.
There Are 2 Comments
Interesting post. I tend to be a bit more pessimistic… I know we need innovation to progress, I think you’re right about that. But lately I wonder if we haven’t already gone too far in terms of over-consumption of resources like oil. I recall listening to a talk by David Suzuki a few years back in which he described exponential growth, like that which we are seeing today. He compared the growth of the human population to that of bacteria that grows exponentially each minute in a test tube. He said something like, “the thing about exponential growth is that one minute before the test tube begins to overflow, it’s only half full, so there appears to be lots of room to expand…” that’s the concern about our current rate of growth (population growth, urban growth, etc) it appears that we have space and time to fix the problems we’ve created by doing things like developing new greener technologies, but it may be that because we’re growing so fast, we’re one minute away from crisis without even realizing it!
That’s a good point Erin. The power of exponential growth is tremendous, and scary. Even living up in spacious Canada we can see the effects of our planet’s ever growing population. It is hard to judge how close to the breaking point we are. Though, I don’t think this is any reason to give up! This is the only place we have, and we have to do the best we can. Each of us must do our part. From all the work done by David Suzuki to help change our world for the better, it seems that he hasn’t given up, and judging from your efforts to raise your beautiful daughter in an eco-friendly way (as documented in your blog) I suspect you haven’t quite given up either!