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A sea of unwanted auto imports
Matt Richtel, International Herald Tribune
LONG BEACH, California: Gleaming new Mercedes cars roll one by one out of a huge container ship here and onto a pier. Ordinarily the cars would be loaded on trucks within hours, destined for dealerships around the United States. But these are not ordinary times.

For now, the port itself is the destination. Unwelcome by dealers and buyers, thousands of cars worth tens of millions of dollars are being warehoused on increasingly crowded port property.

And for the first time, Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, and Nissan have each asked to lease space from the port for these orphan vehicles. They are turning dozens of acres of the nation's second-largest container port into a parking lot, creating a vivid picture of a paralyzed auto business and an economy in peril.
(19 November 2008)

Moore: Automakers never listened to workers, consumers
Larry King, CNN
... CNN's Larry King talked Wednesday with Michael Moore, a filmmaker with deep ties to the auto industry. Moore's father worked for General Motors for 35 years.

In 1989, Moore became an international figure for his film, "Roger and Me," which centered on the declining auto industry in his hometown of Flint, Michigan and the ripple effect on the town's residents.

... Moore: Well, what really went wrong is that General Motors has had this philosophy from the beginning that what's good for General Motors is good for the country. So, their attitude was we'll build it and you buy it. We'll tell you what to buy. You just buy it.

Eventually, the consumer got smart and said, 'You know what, I'd like a car that gets a little better gas mileage. I'd like a car that's safer on the road,' so they started to buy other cars. General Motors still wouldn't change. They still kept building the wrong cars, and more and more people stopped buying them. Video Watch how Moore feels about auto bailout »

At a certain point, you know, General Motors lost such a large part of the market share that there probably was a point of no return.

Now, here we are on the verge of this collapse. If General Motors collapses, then there goes hundreds of thousands of jobs, if not millions of jobs of the ripple effect of this.

King: And the same is true of Ford and Chrysler?

Moore: Absolutely. I'll tell you, it was hilarious just watching these CEOs there (Tuesday) and (Wednesday) testifying in Congress, saying that, you know, that the problem wasn't theirs, you know, the cars they were building. It was the financial situation that we're in now. Video Watch automakers get grilled on Capitol Hill »

The problem is the cars they've been building. They've never listened to the consumers. They've just gone about it their own wrong way. I'll tell you, you know, I'm of mixed mind about this bailout, Larry, because I don't think these companies, with these management people, should be given a dime, because that's just going to be money going up in smoke or off to other countries.

GM is currently building a $300 million factory in Russia right now to build SUVs, right outside of St. Petersburg. That's where your money's going to go, no matter what they say.

King: Why (do you have) mixed feelings?

Moore: Well, because we can't let all these people lose their jobs because of the bad decisions, the stupid decisions made by the management of these auto companies. I think what has to happen here is that Congress needs to pass some legislation, and our president-elect needs to do what Roosevelt did
(20 November 2008)

Bill Rees blasts auto industry bailout talk
Matthew Burrows, Straight (Canada)
The purveyor of ecological-footprint analysis has little time for talk on bailing out the automobile sector.

In a phone interview on November 18, UBC’s cycling green keener Bill Rees said U.S. and Canadian lawmakers are only considering bailing out the faltering auto sector because “we are wedded to the status quo”.

“There is just so much employment associated with our auto sector,” Rees, a professor in the school of community and regional planning, said by phone. “Bailing that sector out after it’s made such incredibly naive, even stupid, assessments....Why is it that the North American auto industry--even though the global-climate-change writing has been on the wall for 20 years and peak oil has been emergent for the last decade--they continue to produce muscle cars for which there can be no market in five to seven years?”

... “We are seeing major economic restructuring occurring, but we don’t have in place the social safety nets, so that people can be eased with dignity and graciousness from one kind of job to another,” Rees said. “We should not be encouraging growth in the low-employment hydrocarbon sector, but rather encouraging job training to move those people from the extractive sectors into things like retrofitting homes and alternative energy jobs.”
(20 November 2008)

California officials unveil plans to turn San Francisco into electric car capital
Bobbie Johnson, The Guardian
Officials in California have unveiled ambitious plans to turn the San Francisco Bay Area into one of the leading centres of electric vehicles in the world.

If it succeeds, the strategy announced yesterday will see billions of dollars poured into a new power infrastructure that will turn the region away from fossil fuel and to renewable energy – and convince millions of people to switch to green technology.

The plan, which will see the Bay become the first region of California to switch its transport systems entirely away from traditional fuel, is being supported by local government as well as the state's governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger...
(21 November 2008)
Is replacing the current car fleet the way to go at this stage?-SO

Coming to a store near you: chainless bicycles
AP via CNN
Pedalers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.
Bicycle shop manager David Oakley looks over the carbon fiber belt drive of a Trek bike at his shop in Richmond.

If you've ever been riding down the street and had your pants cuff ripped asunder, there may be a revolution at hand.

Trek Bicycle is part of a movement to bury the finger-pinching, pants-munching, rust-prone sprocket and chain, and usher in an era of belt-driven bikes that might have the inventors of the self-propelled transportation Schwinning in their graves
(19 November 2008)