• 1084 Days Ago
• 02/18/2009

Sad

It's most dissappointing that TR has sunk to this level....cheering the departure of an industry icon. Lutz's team designed what American consumers wanted, no more, and no less. Instead of cheap side jabs, ala your neocommunist friends at the NY Times, in regards to supposed Global Warming, why not create, once and for all, a forum for real science and discussion on this subject? Many of us in the real world cannot fathom how an increase of a few hundred ppm's of CO2 will turn the Earth into Venus.

• 1084 Days Ago
• 02/18/2009

Mr. Lutz may have retired from GM but he's probably going to be haunting the halls for a while longer. He officially leaves GM at the end of the year.

As for the why(s)
* maybe he doesn't need the money. His retirement packages from the Navy, Chrysler and Social Security will make him pretty comfy in his waning years
*maybe he doesnt want to work a a dollar a year like the Feds want him to
* maybe he feels that Global Warming is still a crock, but lets face it - the planet has been warming since the end of the last ice age. Alexander the Great's fabled sea port now sits under 50 feet of water, so the oceans have been rising for quite a while.
* Maybe the Volt was the capstone in a career that spanned a lot of years
* Maybe he's tired and wants to go fishing.
* Maybe Lutz is the sacrificial lamb for the rest of GM's management
* maybe (probably) we'll never really know the full answer.

• 1084 Days Ago
• 02/18/2009

GM could lead the way

The so called choice that the automakers have given to consumers has been appalling since the '70's when the first wake up calls to the problems of reliance on oil were felt directly by the public.  Electric Cars should have been fully integrated into our infrastructure by now.  If the American automakers had put the kind of advertising money to shifting public preference toward efficient and electric cars instead of what they put into their status quo but with new bodies and better cupholders, we might not have been in Iraq right now, our trade deficit might have been negative and our economy much stronger.  That is without any regard to the environment.

If you add to that the possibility that we could be adversely affecting the environment in a profound way, even not being sure about it, it makes the industry leaders of the last three decades look, at best, inane.

It is very safe to say and patently obvious that there has been no foresight and no vision in the American auto industry for over 3 decades.  If Mr. Lutz's departure represents the possibility of actual foresight becoming important to the auto industry, hooray.  It is about time.

• 1083 Days Ago
• 02/19/2009

Decline of TR

I mourn the descent of TR into a cheap religious tabloid.

• 1073 Days Ago
• 03/01/2009

TR says:  "Lutz added, according to D, that "my opinion doesn't matter." But how could that be, with GM gearing up to woo environmentally minded consumers with advanced vehicles such as the plug-in hybrid Chevy Volt?"

How can you say this?  Bob Lutz is the man who got GM to make the Volt, the first EV that actually makes sense (4 passenger/range extended).

Bob Lutz did this in spite of the fact GM is one of the most bureaucratic companies in the world.

If anything, Bob has made GM more modern, not less. 

Look, and while we're at it:  Bob Lutz also hit the nail on the head when he said that if we really want fuel efficient cars we should raise the gas tax. 

Take a good look around:  All manufacturers' cars are bigger now.  The current BMW 3-series is as big as the 5-series of the 80s, today's Honda Civic is bigger than a mid-80s Accord.  Toyotas have gotten bigger and bigger too.

Fuel efficiency will go up only if we are willing to make it a nationwide policy and pay for it through taxes and tax credits.