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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: bentway who wrote (485628)	6/9/2009 5:48:00 PM
From: TimF	2 Recommendations Respond to of 1573682

Detroit's New 'Green' Delusion ... Lutz can't possibly be enough of a moron to believe that the Prius and its "halo effect" are a primary reason for Toyota's ascendancy. Toyota has been ascendant for at least three decades, and GM declining, for a simple reason: Toyota built cars that worked ("bulletproof," as they say) at a time when GM built cars that didn't work. That's what was "drawing people to Toyota lots" a generation before the Prius was conceived. Even today, when GM suffers "under the perception that they [are] saddled with cars of inferior quality," you only have to look at the Consumer Reports reliability ratings to see that the reason GM is saddled with this perception is that the perception is accurate. (The Cadillac CTS that Lutz boasts about, for example, may be a great performer. But it's still so unreliable that Consumer Reports can't recommend it. The beautiful Pontiac Solstice, which Lutz championed, has a true crap record. The Prius, meanwhile, is spectacularly reliable.) For those three decades of Japanese market surge, much of the talk of Detroit executives has been an attempt to dance around the central issue of reliability and 'build quality,' and the inability of Detroit to provide it. For most of Lutz's career, he played down the importance of Japanese reliability by talking up the "romance" of the Euro-style sports cars and American muscle cars he (rightly) liked. Now he plays down the importance of Japanese reliability by talking up the "halo effect" that a cutting-edge "green" car can create with bicoastal elites (whom he doesn't like) and the media. Environmentalism has become the latest distraction and delusion for Detroit. Chrysler admits that small, fuel efficient FIAT models aren't going to sell in large numbers--but hey, they're going to have a "halo effect" that will "burnish" the entire Chrysler line! Chevrolet will only sell a few thousand Volts--but the bicoastal elite appeal of green will suck media-addled buyers into the "reinvented" GM. No. Detroit cars will sell when they're bulletproof, not when they're green (or, in Lutz's new spin, when they're made by a company that also sells something "green"). But only one of the Big Three U.S. car manufacturers has made dramatic progress catching up to Japan on the bulletproof front--and it's not Chrysler or GM. It's the one that hasn't gone broke. ... 2:32 P.M. slate.com consumerreports.org