Obama is so stupid that he failed to make fun of McCain for beings so lacking in ideas that he has to steal ideas from Democrats, and Obama is even dumber for failing to exploit the ideas of his fellow Democrats.

“Workforce Labor negotiations with unions.”

You see, Unions hate losing workers, but the fact is GM needs to shut-down. So Unions will dig in harder and cost GM more. But if GM can say, “We’ve arranged to have xx,xxx number of workers build Prius’ under contract at such and such factory. They’ll have to relocate, etc.

But this can be a major bargaining tool for GM in union negotiations. While maintaining a trained workforce which you’d otherwise have to let go, or even buy-off.

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I could pay every worker $11,000 lay-off bonus. Or have them build Prius’ for Toyota.

Prius has been out for 10 years and is quite popular as the poster-child-car of the better-fuel-efficiency / lower emissions/ alternative fuel movement (i.e. green cars). Whatever you think of Toyota, it really is immaterial to the argument. They and Honda led the pack in taking on considerable risk to market hybrid vehicles to a very fickle American consumer market. They are successful by any standard – but especially in name recognitiion and acceptance.

I too would love to see Chevy Volts on the road, but at this point it is NOT a better car than the Prius because it does not exist (as far as the consumer is concerned)! The public needs a fuel efficient car *today* as gasoline prices climb over $4.00 a gallon. The Volt is still a “vapor” car; the Hybrids have been available for years.

It is hardly the express role of the President of the U.S.A. to set the price of steel, yet JFK appealed to steel companies to lower their prices for the good of the nation. “jawboning” “using his Bully pulpit”

I can’t say I understand the Cobasys/Chevron versus Panasonic/Toyota situation as well as I would like to…I’m quite willing to entertain the possibility that it is as TED describes it. If so, I guess the prize for Chevron was the sale of lots and lots of gasoline that was burned inefficiently. and not so many batteries.

What if Whale Oil ‘R’ Us had patented the tungsten light bulb?

While I would agree in some instances, in this one I don’t. GM has it’s own hybrids and I just don’t believe they would ever sell a product that would pull the table cloth right out from under their own ramp-up of E-rev vehicles. I believe that even after the Gm-Volt waiting list has been satisfied, there will be a long waiting list for E-rev vehicles.

Instead of re-badging the Prius, GM should look to re-platform the Opel Corsa, a pure ICE vehicle that gets 58mpg highway, for sale here in the US as a Chevy. This vehicle outperforms the Smart car in every way including space. This would make much more sense and would leverage their own economies of scale. The money would stay with GM and it’s own development. The difference would be that there may very well be economy conscious people who would never consider a Hybrid or RE-BEV, and GM global has the product.

My 2 cents

Well you beat me to it there. I totally agree.

#80 Grizzly:

Ordinarily, I would tend to agree with you about “re-badged” products, although they seem to get away with the Vibe pretty well. But desperate times call for desperate measures. The only thing worse that selling “re-badged” products is to have nothing that people want to buy and closing the doors.

100,000 Volts a year alone are not going to be enough to save GM.

You want George W to authorize or be a part of stealing a legal patented process from a company. I guess when you don’t like a President’s policies its ok if they do something illegal if you think it is right. Give the man a break, everyone. We need to follow the law and see the Li-Ion batteries to full production. They are a much better solution for now. When the patent runs out and it is legal to produce large NiMH batteries, I am sure several companies will do so.