"The high oil prices in particular could give rise to two or more revolutions in land transport during the first half of the 21st century. One would involve the replacement of internal combustion engines by electric motors. Another would involve widespread powering of these motors directly from the electric grid rather than from on-board fuel. Together, and with necessary organizational innovations, these transformations would allow considerable movement of people and freight by land in an era of severe energy constraints and concerns about carbon emissions."

"All belligerents in the Second World War limited civilian automobile production and restricted the use of cars, but the scale of motorization in the US going into the war put her effort to restrict the automobile in a class by itself.

"The industry’s claim that its manufacturing capacity could not be converted to military production was quickly disproved as the major manufacturers pulled car assembly lines apart, retrofitted as much as 75 per cent of this machinery to produce war materiel from anti-aircraft guns to heavy bombers, and literally threw the remaining material and equipment into scrap heaps.

"Petrol (gasoline) rationing began in 17 states along the East Coast from the middle of May 1942 and was extended nationwide by December of that year.

"The wartime experiment in putting the brakes on motorization revealed how quickly and dramatically the often characterized ‘love affair’ with the automobile could be set aside."

There are a lot of huge projects on the table such as complete fossil-free United States electric power in ten years as proposed by Al Gore which includes building a new national electric grid; and, retrofitting the built environment to greatly reduce our ecological footprint.

Reinventing transportation scaled more closely to real human and environmental needs should be another. Ending poverty is a third and speaks volumes to who we are and who we will be not to mention how effective we will be in mitigating global warming.

There's a lot of work to be done and it will not be the first time the automobile industry has been redirected toward more pressing matters.

No it wasn't that one but that does come close. If I could figure out how to browse their archives I could find it. NJ.com is not an easy website to browse and search. I love the Star-Ledger and am very upset that it is at the verge of folding (no pun intended) but maybe if their site was better like the NY Times, then they might not be in such a fix.

Hmmmm... Get's me thinking if the newspapers want a bailout too from Uncle Sam just like GM et al. If they could only produce a page by page online version in some sort of PDF format I think the papers could still be relevant. I've seen some Canadian papers go that route. Kinda' cool to flip through the same paper you could by but it's online.

Sorry for my digressions.

BTW I looked for his column (figured it out) but I couldn't find it. Damn!

http://www.freep.com/article/20081118/BUSINESS01/811180367

Try to save the auto companies as a subset of an overall Industrial Policy is one thing but as a substitute for industrial policy doomed to failure. Even that the Europeans have been doing for decades with limited success (see "Renault"). Ironically again, GM and Ford have done well in the European market when pitted against the national companies of France and Italy (Renault and FIAT (Fix It Again Tony)) respectively.

We need gm's infrastructure and workforce. We don't need gm cars.

Right on, Sean. I think we should use the bailout money to pay for yearly transit passes for every GM customer who promises to burn their SUVs. (Not really, because it would be wasteful and bad for the air, but still.)

Japanese and European auto executives are more like wise old men (& women) who are looking out over the 20 years and adapting their companies to future realities.

American auto executives are like testosterone drunk teenagers who's only interest is how to show off at this weekends party.

Well at least it was something like that.

Anyone who went to urban planning school knows that these are the same companies that muscled out rail and street cars in towns and cities all across America, not to mention developing and marketing dangerous SUV's as a way of avoiding the regulations on cars. The big three car companies have a track record of corporate ethics comparable with big tobacco or Wal-Mart - completely profit-oriented, deeply invested using analytical psychology to manipulate the consumer, only conforming to safety standards when legally required, and systematically and, at times violently, destroying all competition regardless of public good.

Now they are holding jobs hostage in a time of crisis. They employ millions of Americans and yet have fallen so far behind international competition that they are about to collapse. And their answer is to threaten economic doom and demand economic subsidy? Having proven to be irresponsible custodians of such a large portion of the American workforce, I would be very reluctant to add more fuel to the fire that is their unsustainable business model.

I have really mixed feelings about the general motors thing; my dad and quite a few people in my extended family worked for general motors, tho the last retired in the late 80s. I am not a big fan of cars, and haven't had one for about 6 or 7 years now.. I really don't think gm thought their retirees would live this long after retiring, and I am worried about my parents' pension and they have already lost their health insurance, which makes me worried for me, because I was sorta counting on that to take care of them.

Anyhow, even my mom can recognize that gm is full of idiots and keeps forwarding me nyt stories about how awful it is.

ok, back to whatever you were talking about!

This is naked blackmail and we should not give into it. Write your representatives!

No, we should give money to a company whose industrial infrastructure would be impossible to match over the course of the next few years.
I think the Backbone analogy is an apt one. The backbone of the auto industry connects to machine shops, paint suppliers... e.g. the hands and whatever other parts of the body. The brain, unfortunately, is Detroit. Instead of letting the brain self destruct, it should be taught new principles, and different ways of using it's very functional body parts. The op-ed and Stanley Crouch's piece from today's headlines have the right idea.
The notion of international companies coming in and swooping up the defunct factories is a nice one, but unlikely anytime soon. The percentage of US-made foreign cars is dwarfed by what the big three produce. Besides, nobody's really buying cars now.
The problem is that way more than the atrociously managed auto makers futures are at stake. It's tempting to say you've dug you're own hole, good luck. But that would erase years of accumulating realationships and know-how. The amount of time required to build up the industrial infrastructure already in place to support the massive car companies makes it worth saving them, albeit completely restructured to produce other products.

And I don't think any of the car manufacturers will just die and fade away. They will realize they nee to downsize (produce fewer cars with smaller overhead), begin to produce other things (I think we have enough rail infrastructure to fix to last us the next 50 years), and they will change. GM as we know it is dead with the bailout or not.

How many times have we been threatened by the big three in the last 30 years? The idea that GM/Ford/Chrysler is somehow an American corporation and Toyota et. al. is somehow foreign is ludicrous. GM is no more looking out for US interests than any other multinational corporation. It doesn't work that way, because it is not set up that way.

Pull the plug! It is time to move forward.