Would you pay more for a green car?

Lee_Teschler — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 11:42:00 GMT

The Wall Street Journal recently carried an interview with GM's Bob Lutz that was interesting. One of his comments was on whether people are willing to pay more for cars labeled green. Lutz's take on it is that for most people, it's the economics that determine their car buying habits.

ROBERT A. LUTZ: What we're seeing is there is a portion, a very narrow portion of the population, that will make a financial sacrifice to be green. But I don't think we can count on the majority of the American public to make a financial sacrifice, or make an uneconomic decision. So I think even as gasoline goes to $4 a gallon, you're still going to see people doing the calculation. How much more do I have to pay for a hybrid system? Most people, not the ecologically committed, but most normal people are going to take a look at how much more am I paying for this fuel-saving technology and will I be able to amortize it over the life of the vehicle?

Where we're seeing we have reached the pain threshold is with the Duramax diesel engine, in the full-size pickup trucks. To meet the latest emission regulations, we are now forced to charge $11,000 for the diesel option, and that is putting a kink in diesel sales, and a lot of people are opting for the gas engine again.

To provide an economic incentive to people to buy these much higher-technology vehicles that are going to be required to meet the CAFE [Corporate Average Fuel Economy] mandates, the customer has to be put in the equation. That means that at some point, fuel prices have to rise. I think that without an economic incentive, we are not going to see a wholesale shift in demand of vehicles.

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Later on, he sheds some light on why GM is putting a lot of effort behind bioethanol. It still gets back to economics:

MR. LUTZ: We have the 35-mile-per-gallon standard, and General Motors obviously is confident that we can meet that standard technologically, but when you add a diesel engine plus a hybrid, you are adding thousands of dollars of cost.

Ever since CAFE legislation has been in effect, General Motors has improved the efficiency of its truck fleet by 60%, the fuel efficiency of its passenger-car fleet by 100%, and fuel use in the United States has done nothing but go up. So the idea that by legislating 35 miles per gallon, we're somehow going to use less fuel, it would be the first time that it ever worked, because it inevitably results in people taking their fuel budget and buying a larger car. That's why if the customer is not in the equation in terms of feeling pain in the wallet from paying the fuel bill, it's destined not to work.

Now, technology costs money, so what is a better way to get at the problem of getting the automobile out of the environmental equation, or at least out of the petroleum and CO2 equation? I think the only rational thing to do is put less technology in the car, which is the conversion to making cars E-85 capable, and burn E-85, which is a renewable fuel that could be done from biomass.

And if you can do that for $150 a car, as opposed to meeting a 35-mile-per-gallon standard at many thousands of dollars per car, which one do you pick? It's not a question of passing the buck; it's just look at what we have to do to the cars to attain CAFE, versus the much less we'd have to do to cars, with much less pain on the American driving public, if we had a concerted national E-85 effort.

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Orange More Important Than Green

Lee_Teschler — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 21:32:00 GMT

Ralph Grabowski writes a great free e-newsletter on CAD which I subscribe to. His latest issue has an interesting observation on CAD companies and the green movement, which I have reproduced here. You can get his newsletter at www.upfrontezine.com

. . . . .

Green is the marketing buzzword currently adopted by some CAD vendors. Earlier this month, one told me that they are also "going green." Why now? So that they wouldn't be seen as the last ones getting on the bandwagon. "Do you get a lot of feedback from your readers about green?" they asked me.

Zip.

The only reason some people might care about green, I explained, is to make money from it. Or to save money. Otherwise, it's a non-issue for most of the population.

(We got a new washing machine last week. It is energy efficient. Compared to the old one whose transmission broke down, the new one will pay for itself in less than 12 years through lower electrical, natural gas, and water bills. I'm excited.)

If green is unimportant to most people, then what is? To learn the answer, fly over your city, any city, late at night -- after doubling the cost of your airfare by paying carbon-offsets to someone to run an organization that might pay someone else to plant some trees that you can't be bothered planting yourself.

...all those streetlights illuminating sparsely-traveled roads. (When I see the thousands, millions of streetlight bulbs glowing orange, it makes me want to become a lightbulb manufacturer.) There is your answer: Security is more important than green.

Bruce Schneier writes: "The lack of a security mindset explains a lot of bad security out there: voting machines, electronic payment cards, medical devices, ID cards, internet protocols. The designers are so busy making these systems work that they don't stop to notice how they might fail or be made to fail, and then how those failures might be exploited."

The Autodesks, Dassaults, UGSs, and PTCs could consider adding security design assistants to their software. I wonder how hard that might be, because security involves thinking wrong in order to get it right.

Link: Inside the Twisted Mind of the Security Professional http://www.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securitymatters/2008/03/securitymatters_0320

from the editor's desk : green

Would you pay more for a green car?

Orange More Important Than Green