Saving the US Auto Industry

[xoxoxoBruce]

Innovation.

"Conservatively," Goodwin muses, scratching his chin, "it'll get 60 miles to the gallon. With 2,000 foot-pounds of torque. You'll be able to smoke the tires. And it's going to be superefficient."
He laughs. "Think about it: a 5,000-pound vehicle that gets 60 miles to the gallon and does zero to 60 in five seconds!"

snip

Goodwin's work proves that a counterattack is possible, and maybe easier than many of us imagined. If the dream is a big, badass ride that's also clean, well, he's there already. As he points out, his conversions consist almost entirely of taking stock GM parts and snapping them together in clever new ways. "They could do all this stuff if they wanted to," he tells me, slapping on a visor and hunching over an arc welder. "The technology has been there forever. They make 90% of the components I use." He doesn't have an engineering degree; he didn't even go to high school: "I've just been messing around and seeing what I can do."

He may be a genius, he may be crazy, but he sure is fun.

[Griff]

I heard a GM "commercial" on NPR yesterday. They said something about Chevy Volt being ready to go... except a little thing called batteries.

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by Griff

I heard a GM "commercial" on NPR yesterday. They said something about Chevy Volt being ready to go... except a little thing called batteries.

Yea, ready to go in 2011.

[Griff]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

Innovation.He may be a genius, he may be crazy, but he sure is fun.

If Congress really wants to play at being industrialists they should break up GM and give Goodwin the keys to Chevy Inc.

Along the way, Goodwin also adopted two views common among Americans, but typically thought to be in conflict: a love of big cars and a concern about the environment. He is an avid, if somewhat nonideological, environmentalist. He believes global warming is a serious problem, that reliance on foreign oil is a mistake, and that butt-kicking fuel economy is just good for business. But Goodwin is also guiltlessly addicted to enormous, brawling rides, precisely the sort known to suck down Saudi gasoline. (I spied one lonely small sports car in the corner of his garage, but he confessed he has no plans to work on it right now.) When he picked me up from my hotel, he drove a four-door 2008 Cadillac Escalade XL that should have had its own tugboat. He parallel parked it in one try. He's a John Wayne muther-fucker. Get off your ass Detroit.