Yeah... I read somewhere that the GM bailout should come with the requirement of replacing their current vehicles with a hybrid/electric/whatever lineup in X number of years.
I would be happier about a bailout with those sort of strings, but in general, reading that Executives at these car co's have been deriding climate change evidence and the need for hybrids/alternative fuels, makes me skeptical that refunding these companies is the best way to fix the car problem.
On another note, this stuff sucks. Everyone loses if we bail out poorly run companies, but there's a very high cost to letting them go under. Good luck, Mr President-Elect.
Sometimes a one time upfront cost is optimal than a high overhead for all your operations. Its like sorting an array of integers (O(nlogn) so you can rapidly search it with Binary Search (O(logn) rather than having to do a linear O(n) every time.
It sucks for the people in Detroit and Michigan as a whole. Their education system has not yet caught up to the fact that the name of the game is "value added".
Also, now that "peak credit" has hit (shortly after peak oil last december) I do not see the trend of American families buying a brand new car every 1 to 2 years continuing. Much more effort is going to have to be spent making your manufacturing base as efficient as possible -- simply because the car buying cycle will likely be an "every five-six years" trend from now on.
I would be happier about a bailout with those sort of strings, but in general, reading that Executives at these car co's have been deriding climate change evidence and the need for hybrids/alternative fuels, makes me skeptical that refunding these companies is the best way to fix the car problem.
On another note, this stuff sucks. Everyone loses if we bail out poorly run companies, but there's a very high cost to letting them go under. Good luck, Mr President-Elect.