USA vs. LAWS OF PHYSICS
Monday morning I attended a breakfast meeting where the speaker/guest
was David E. Cole, Chairman, Center for Automotive Research (CAR and
Professor at the Univ. of Michigan. You have all likely heard CAR
quoted, or referred to in the auto industry news lately.
Mr. Cole, who is an engineer by training, told many stories of the
difficulty of working with the folks that the Obama administration has
sent to save the auto industry. There have been many meetings where a
30+ year experience automotive expert has to listen to a newcomer to
the industry, someone with zero manufacturing experience, zero auto
industry experience, zero business experience, zero finance
experience, and zero engineering experience, tell them how to run
their business.
Mr Cole's favorite story is as follows:
There was a team of Obama people speaking to Mr. Cole (Engineer,
automotive experience 40+ years, Chairman of CAR). They were
explaining to Mr. Cole that the auto companies needed to make a car
that was electric and liquid natural gas (LNG) with enough combined
fuel to go 500 miles so we wouldn't "need" so many gas stations (A
whole other topic). They were quoting BTU's of LNG and battery life
that they had looked up on some website.
Mr. Cole explained that to do this you would need a trunk FULL of
batteries and a LNG tank at big as a car to make that happen and that
there were problems related to the laws of physics that prevented them
from...
The Obama person interrupted and said (and I am quoting here),
"These laws of physics? Who's rules are those? We need to change that."
[Some of the others wrote down the law name so they could look it up.]
"We have the congress and the administration.
We can repeal that law, amend it, or use an executive order to get rid of that problem.
That's why we are here, to fix these sort of issues".