General Motors

There are so many developments in the Electric Vehicle arena currently going on that it's become hard to keep track of it all. An explosion of small shops and garages has taken place with Electric Vehicle projects, although these are mostly "small guys". That said, it may be the grassroots movement necessary to topple General Motors from its pedestal - a monolithic institution that keeps pumping out the Internal Combustion Engines that are poisoning life on our planet, and tried to kill the electric car.

Speaking of General Motors, the company has reported their biggest loss ever: a whopping $38.7 billion in year 2007, an amount that is hard to imagine. At this rate it's fair to say that General Motors is quickly disappearing: they'll likely stay around for a long time, but they will be just another company and no longer a major component in the engine that moves the American economy. Their direct response seems to be to replace assembly workers with people who are willing to work for half the standard wages they were paying. How this will affect the quality of their products has yet to be measured.

GM loss largest ever in industry

If you ask me, I think GM should have produced the EV1 and made the switch to EV technology when they were at the forefront (developing it with the brightest minds) with the EV1 prototype. Developing and offering EVs might have compromised their main line of cars, but as we can see that is an inevitable outcome. And that is because developing and offering EVs was the right thing to do for customers, for society and for the world.



The point here is not so much to blame GM for not doing the right thing when they were (and still are) in a powerful position to develop, produce and deliver products - cars and trucks - that are part of a solution and not part of the problem. It seems that the whole automobile industry is already being affected by the phenomena of Peak Oil and Global Warming. If Peak Oil is real (and I believe it is), then the rapid decline of oil production combined with the constant increase in worldwide demand for oil will cause major economic slowdown worldwide (in all countries that depend on oil, that is, virtually all countries in the world).