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Technology Stocks : Energy Conversion Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Michael Latas who wrote (3479)	4/2/1999 8:51:00 AM
From: fred whitridge	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 8393

Today's NYTimes Automobile section carries an article on fuel cell developments. I've checked their website, but it is not up there yet. The monies being spent are staggering. The price of an automotive fuel cell is quoted as $30,000 (lower than I've heard until now). When one looks at the complexity and additional expense of the reformer (the article says another 25%), one wonders why they are bothering. While fuel cells wouldn't be GREAT for ECD they wouldn't be bad: 1)we do hydride storage of hydrogen 2) each fuel cell vehicle will need some battery for regen braking, startup of the cell, and to provide peak acceleration. 3) it further improves and cheapens the basic EV chassis. I found it most curious that Bob showed slides at the ECD annual meeting from the 1981 annual report, and talked about the company's fuel cell developments of that era. Are we restarting a fuel cell effort? Are we going to begin to trade like Ballard and attract strategic partner investment in Ballard sized globs (technical financial term)? My own belief is that we are pandering to the gasoline infrastructure and are hoping the oilies will support fuel cells since they will hope to distribute methanol, or, yoicks, hydrogen. I think that Del's conspiratorial belief that GM has a huge lot somewhere full of NiMh EV1's is aimed more at keeping Don Devlin quiet as GM shall have to ask him to put a cork in it when he gets his NiMh EV1 and begins telling the world how great it is. Perhaps they are worried he might popularize the EV in a major motion picture.

To: Michael Latas who wrote (3479)	4/2/1999 11:45:00 AM
From: fred whitridge	Respond to of 8393

Mike Latas: You wrote "You are correct. GM will receive their initial ten million dollar investment from the first profits of the joint venture, before ECD begins to receive its share." Do you have a reference for this? The last time we were offered a glimpse of operations of GM/O financially was in the 10Q for the period ended 9/96 at which point GM/O had racked up a shareholder deficit of $11.65 million and had a shareholder loan (solely from GM) of $16.802 mm. Wouldn't we have to repay all that loan (plus any subsequent borrowings) before we began to see an allocable share of the profits?