This is a story all about how my life got flipped turn up side down.

Captains of industry tell us all how wise and powerful they are and how we should trust then because they are business people and know best.

But these same Captains of industry perform as though they are the most incompetent, incapable, mixed up can’t do morons in town.

Just because our political leaders continue to get away with it does not mean these industrial leaders can also have it both ways.

If they are crappy business people, who make lousy decisions over and over, they should be shown the door, without a golden parachute.

If they are the crooks they appear to be and are screwing America because it makes them some bucks, they should be shown a door with bars on it, from the inside.

yeah, man….the land of 12c/gallon, sweet home venezuela

The thing to look for is whether or not the automakers are actually going to tooling-up expenditure. This is something which is not really an issue for computers and electronics, but it is an issue for automaking.

Fully functional prototype automobiles are made by highly skilled craftsmen, and therefore they cost a lot of money, about what a Formula I racing car costs, a million dollars, or two million dollars, or five million dollars. Limited production runs, such as the 1100 or so EV1’s which were manufactured, still involve a lot of hand labor. Depending on what kind of accounting you use, each EV1 might have cost GM anywhere from a hundred thousand dollars to a million dollars, or a total of anywhere from a hundred million dollars to a billion dollars. The costs were so intermingled with things like labor buy-out payments that it is impossible to be precise about the actual costs. The EV!’s were leased out for about four hundred dollars a month, typically for a couple of years, and counting the incidental expenses of customer support, I doubt that GM made as much as ten thousand dollars each, before the costs of production were taken into account. In short, the EV1 was a complete financial loss, from the first to the last, and each EV1 was practically a free gift to its lessee. Of course, at GM’s level, given the way Roger Smith was throwing money around on all kinds of unprofitable projects, that was merely petty cash.

To make a car at a price which people can afford to buy requires an enormous amount of tool and die work, reducing every operation to the point where it can be done by a suitably motivated chimpanzee. That means that a series of massive stamping dies have to be made for each sheet-metal part. And some of these dies will weigh many tons. It may be necessary to build new and special stamping presses. Nontrivial sums will have to be spent on custom racks and boxes, to move parts around without their getting banged up. The list goes on and on. Are there enough railroad tracks to deliver the parts where they need to be, in good time? Someone will have to check and make sure. At that level of planning to the last detail, a new model of conventional design costs a couple of billion dollars. A serious commitment to the electric car might very well cost twenty or thirty billion dollars for GM alone, by the time all the different models had been accounted for. It remains to be seen whether GM is going to spend that kind of money.