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Technology Stocks : Advanced Engine Technologies (AENG) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sword who wrote (733)	6/14/1998 12:40:00 AM
From: Robert L. Ray	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3383

Yep, The OE market cap is about half the AENG market cap. Dennis Miller is a comedian currently appearing on his own show "Dennis Miller Live" every Friday night at 11:30 PM on HBO. Previously he was the news anchor guy on Saturday Night Live and the Host of his own Late Night talk show which bombed horribly.. He seems to have found his niche on Friday night's HBO show though, as a no nonsense opinionated topical humor type of comic. Although you didn't ask I'll go ahead here and weigh in as being negative on AENG. I just feel the odds against their sucess are enormous. I really can't see the U.S. automakers hardly giving them a second glance. By most accounts OE's engine was a pretty well developed engine and the automakers wound up passing on it. I remember reading some reports on it in either Car and Driver or Motor Trend and it seemed that OE's engine was almost a shoo in to make it into mass production with at least one or two of the Big 3 and the other automaker (perhaps Chrysler?) instead opted to develop their own advanced 2 stroke. Course neither Chrysler's nor OE's motor wound up making it. I never really heard why. For one thing I'm not sure there's a lot of incentive for the automakers to change their ways. The internal combustion engine as it now is has had 90-100 years of refinement. Even if the AENG engine is a workable design at it's core, it would take a huge amount of development work to get it ready to go into cars and be reliable enough for a car company to take a chance on. Add to this the fact that the U.S. automakers are notorious for their inertia. This is not a group of companies that jumps headlong into radical new designs... especially if they didn't invent them themselves:) I know it's perhaps not fair but I usually take a show me approach to investing. A person has to look at past history to avoid stepping on any of the multitude of investing land mines out there, and history shows that a bet on alternative engines is......... Well to put it as tactfully as possible... it's against the odds. The OE which was a pretty highly developed engine seemingly on the threshhold of making it didn't make it. I used to occasionaly read positive stuff about the Stirling engine and it never made it. I don't know much about the Rand Cam engine except I know it's not made it. Which brings us to the only alternative motor to have any degree of sucess at all... The Wankel/Rotary. I would suppose if it weren't for high fuel consumption it would be with us in a fair number of auto's today. I know that GM at one point wound up Licensing the design from Mazda and did some development work on it and then just let it die. Mazda of course wound up refining it to a very high level with years and years of incremental improvements, but a while back quit importing the RX-7, so the Rotary is no longer in any U.S. car. I've been trying to remember the details of GM's licensing agreement with Mazda but I can't. It was a fairly hefty fee though as well as I can recall. So this experience would for sure make GM extra cautious about any licensing agreements for other alternative motors. I'm not one of those who is going to outright call AENG a scam. It may be and it may not be. But in the end I don't think it makes any difference. I just think it's a lose/lose proposition. If it's a scam it goes to 0. And if it's not a scam it (IMHO:) goes to 0 at a slower rate. Another thing is this is just the type of story that Barrons seems to like to get ahold of and run with for all it's worth. Can you imagine what would happen to the stock price on a given Monday morning if Barron's ever did a hatchet job on AENG? Well I've spent too much time on this already so I'll just close by saying it would be nice if AENG's motor were a sucess but I'll believe it when I see it and not before. I have neither a long nor a short position in this stock.