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General Motors chased Ralph Nader with private detectives and hookers AND admitted same in an apology before the US Congress because GM has a history of stifling innovation - as Nader demonstrated in "Unsafe at Any Speed". GM chose to lower all engine performance and decrease gasoline mileage by about 1/2 rather than make cars that polluted less. They continued this throughout the early 1970s by, for example, getting a myopic public to believe all those hoses under the hood were anti-pollution components and blaming government for its lowered performance engines.

IOW GM routinely stifled innovation which only lowered the American standard of living, decreased wealth, and destroyed jobs while demanding anti-Free Market concepts such as tarriffs and import restrictions. GM possessed technologies to dominate the world markets on every continent. But instead GM used MBA school philosophies to downsize and to blame everyone else - the Europeans, Japan, government regulation, the unions, tax structure, the American education system. Even Hp per liter demonstrates this trend.

From Popular Science of Mar 1990 page 82:
""General Motors, which demonstrated the benefits of variable valve timing 15 years ago [1975], has yet to commit a system to production ... "We were getting about 50 Horsepower per liter of displacement with pushrods," says Rgoer Heimbuch, executive engineer for power train systems at GM. "Then 60 Horsepower per liter with overhead cams, seventy to seventy-five Hp per liter with four valve per cylinder, and 85 to 90 Hp per liter with tuned port induction. Then you add variable valve timing, and you can push to 100 horsepower per liter or so." He adds that the payoff is being able to make the engine, transmission, and structure smaller to improve the car's efficiency.""


1) GM had technology in 1970 so that 4 cylinder engines could match the horsepower of GM's 1960 technology V-8s. Why did they not use the technology to dominate world markets? It was a time period when all R&D was stifled by MBA cost control mentalities. The last GM corporate engineers - Estes, Cole, and DeLorean - were gone. With only MBAs management, GM made inferior products AND then blamed everyone else. What was Ken Starr's job before he was hired to chase Clinton's penis? He removed all documentation from GM engineers files so that GM could claim they knew nothing about Chevy Malibu passengers who burned to death - in 1990. That is the "Mark of Excellence"? GM is a classic example of companies you strongly dislike as indicated by the stifled higher performance technolgoy.

2) Obviously the executive engineer for power-train system must not know engineering since Russotto tells us, "Horsepower per liter doesn't measure anything particularly interesting in terms of performance." This engineer also says higher HP/l results in an "engine, transmission, and structure smaller to improve the car's efficiency" whereas Russotto tells us this this higher performance does not signficantly reduce engine size.

I saved this damning quote since I was interested in seeing how far Russotto would take his claims in contrast to so much contrary information. Hp per liter does measure performance. Even engine designers, directly quoted here, say so.

3) GM chased Nader with hookers, stifled pollution control technologies, decrease gas mileage so grossly that America was easy victims to both gas shortages, and made products so inferior as to not be exportable. In short, GM did everything it could to enrich their top management while destroying American jobs and exportable products. Horsepower per liter is just another numerical example of why GM cars are not exportable, why they cost more to build, why they are less reliable, and why this is a company that every reader should strongly dislike. Horsepower per liter not only quantifies performance, but it also suggest which companies make the most anti-American and anti-humanity products.