The New York Times recently had an interview with GM's Bob Lutz about the Volt. Lutz is clearly not only focused on quarterly profits, and he seems to be committed to bringing the Volt to market - aiming for 2010, possibly will slip to 2011. Not 2009, as stated in the article.

However, when asked what the future at GM would look in terms of emphasis, what was his answer? It wasn't electric. It was ethanol.

Yes, Bob Lutz' vision of the future is more internal combustion engines. He's still solving last year's problem - oil dependency. Global warming hasn't lit up his radar yet. He sees the Volt as merely an internal combustion vehicle with some clever marketing potential. It's not a bridge vehicle to an electrical infrastructure; GM expects to keep churning out internal combustion engines indefinitely.

Ethanol is not an answer to global warming. Between the CO2 emitted producing it, and the CO2 emitted burning it, and the millions of acres of new farmland that will have to be cleared to produce enough of it (destruction of carbon sinks), ethanol is no better for global warming than just burning gasoline.

Lutz' vision of the future assumes that the buying public won't know or won't care that ethanol is not helping with global warming. It's not a safe bet.

It's also not safe to bet against all-electric vehicles. With battery technology such a hot development area, it's just a matter of time - and not much time - before electric vehicles outperform their ethanol-fueled counterparts in every respect: acceleration, range, operating and maintenance costs. Even recharging times are coming down.

And who will lead this parade, grab market share, position itself for advantage? Not GM. They'll be dragging their feet, lobbying regulators and legislators, looking for an angle that will let them hang on to their internal combustion empire.

It's a shame, really. Detroit has a chance here to reassert American technical know-how and dominate new markets world-wide, even to leap-frog the Japanese. Instead they'll be also-rans. Again.

The Voltis nothing more than promotional vaporware. GM is hopping on the ethanol bandwagon because it's it's easy and cheap to change existing internal combustion engines to ethanol. Even GM can't screw it up.

Ethanol is not a bad fuel- the problem is trying to produce ethanol from corn. As much or more energy is consumed in growing the corn and making the fuel as you get back from the fuel. It's a non-starter. The only reason we are even talking about it is because of the agri-biz lobby's propaganda.

<i>He's still solving last year's problem - oil dependency. Global warming hasn't lit up his radar yet.</i>

If you think oil dependency is "last year's problem" and solving global warming is far more important, try a google for "peak oil". I'd rather have both ice caps completely melt than face <i>that</i> nightmare scenario. And it's entirely plausible-- it just hasn't hit enough people's radar, yet.

And that flaw is coal. Coal makes up 50% of the electricity generation in the US. Unless we can make coal cleaner or replace it, replacing gas with electric will gain nothing.

Solar power is not yet utilized enough in the US, nor is it produced enough. Maybe if solar was 5% of the electricity generated in the US, and growing by 2% a year, it would make some sense to abandon ethanol.

Right now, it makes zero economic sense to abandon ethanol. The US grows 40% of the world's corn. Corn is what we got.

I love the argument that more CO2 is released makign and burning ethanol than gasoline. This is just another play on the ethanol takes more energy to make than it produces myth. The PR twist here is that since energy use with any carbonaceous fuel is roughly proportional to CO2 output, the oil companies are trying to mask pro-oil arguments appear as anti-global warming arguments.

Argonne National Lab did a study a few years ago and compared the net energy output of ethanol as by their calculations and by others. All of the studies showing net energy loss from ethanol use were by 3 different groups and used outdated or unsupported assumptions on crop yield, incorrect thermodynamics, or based on outdated processes.

The real problem with ethanol in the US is that the yield from corn is too small compared to beet sugar and cane sugar used in Europe and Brazil, respectively. That low yield translates into needing more land to displace the same amount of petroleum. I forget the exact numbers, but if all the corn-growing area in the US were to be used to produce fuel ethanol rather than corn for food, it would only displace something like 30% of the US daily use of petroleum. Hence the push for celluosic ethanol wherein fuel ethanol is produced from the whole corn plant or even switchgrass.

The reason ethanol makes more sense than hybrids is that using biomass to produce fuel can be carbon-neutral - that is the rate of CO2 emmisions from utilizign the biomass fuel is equal to the rate of CO2 fixation from the atmosphere by plant growth. With coal and oil, you are producing CO2 essentially from biomass that has collected over millions of years, but you release it in days and have no uptake of CO2 to renew your fuel source (unless you want to wait millions of years to charge your batteries.

Coal, and hence the electricity produced from it, can become cleaner by using high-efficiency power generation systems (IGCC, etc.) and including CO2 capture and carbon sequestration, though these have not been widely adopted yet.

didn't catch the NYT article but Smithsonian's mag ran one t. about the GM 'electric car.' the drift I concluded was that Toyota din't reach 1st place by sleight of hand.

that GM produced a good elec. car but decided it probably wouldn't 'succeed in the market.' that's code for 'we're not about to write off all that $$ for lobbyists and 'payola' so we could continue producing vehicles (P U's) w/o catalytic converters. that 's where the $$ is. they crank out the Corvette tho we're told they lose $$ on it, but there's nothing like the P U mkt,