Will Someone Please Go Buy a Buick?

Take a look at this chart. GM stock owners are well aware of what has happened to their stock over the past year. Since February of ’08 GM stock has lost 92% of its value, from $25 per share to today’s $1.77.

That, friends and neighbors, is cheaper than the national average for a gallon of gas.

Which, by the way, is no different than conditions in October of ’08 when this news clip aired on CBS.

And the guy in the video is right. Right now is not the time for GM, or any auto manufacturer to be strapped for cash, which is why they are begging for more stimulation.

They need the money to retool.

So the real problem is that GM is making cars that no one wants to buy because a) the cars use too much gasoline, b) customers can’t be certain they will have a reliable supply of spare parts, and c) everyone is waiting for American car companies to make hybrids or battery-powered cars.

And they can’t make these new cars until they retool.

It’s a vicious circle.

So everyone go out right now and buy a Buick, OK?

And I’ll go out and buy some shares of GM stock at bargain basement prices. Heck, at these prices GM is worth more as a source of scrap metal.

The Shape of Things to Come

I was struck this morning at a news item in the Houston Chronicle, that Toyota Motors was temporarily closing its Tundra plant in San Antonio to be retooled and then it will be reopened in a move that “will consolidate all truck production in San Antonio.”

Another plant in Indiana that makes Toyota’s Sequoia truck will be retooled to produce the more fuel-efficient Highlander SUV.

But most strikingly, the same piece announced that Toyota’s hybrid car, the Prius, was to be built in a new plant being built in Mississippi. Currently, the Prius is produced only in Asia.

Times are changing and the Japanese, again, are right on top of it. But Texans, they think, will never give up the love affair that they have with trucks, and maybe that’s true. But I am thinking that at some point their adoration for all things fuel-sucking will give way to a new paradigm.

And the things we see on and along our highways now will be a thing of distant memory. Things like full serve service stations. Things like Winnebago cities in KOA Campgrounds.

The sights and scenes like this photo of rush hour traffic in Houston,

will be replaced with scenes like this, a typical day on a Singapore expressway. Is this photo actually a glimpse into our future?

It’s going to take some time, but we all just better get used to the idea of downsizing and fuel economy now. My guess is the high prices of gasoline in Singapore, currently around 6.35 USD/gallon, is hurting them, but think what that price would do to your family budget getting that big old Tahoe filled? So they are in considerably better shape to handle these prices than we are.

Hybrid Autos: Silent But Deadly?

My next automobile will be a hybrid. Of that I have no doubt. I’ve previously chased off that notion because of the extra added surcharges you get to pay when you take a hybrid in for servicing. But with gas here in Texas over $3.50 and oil futures making records with each and every passing day, it looks like buying a hybrid is not only cost effective right now, but for the foreseeable future.

I lean toward the Honda Prius because of all the rice burners I have ever owned, Honda has been the best. But now we come to hear about a new threat that these cars are to the unsuspecting: they’re too darned quiet.

Four generations of Americans have lived with automobile traffic. Sometimes human flesh and bone has mixed it up with chrome, steel and (now) plastics and composites; sometimes to a fatal end for human or auto (or both). One preventative measure we humans have adopted over the decades is to listen for oncoming traffic. And truly, for the legally blind, that is most certainly a primary deterrence to getting mashed to atoms by oncoming traffic.

But now, with the advent of quiet battery-driven hybrids that can steal about town in complete silence, the human race is faced with either solving the global warming pickle we find ourselves in, or becoming future road kill by muted stealth machines.

The video on this can be viewed at CNN.

Now it sounds to me like something’s got to give. If humans are unwilling to adapt to these quiet machines of death, they are going to have to put some kind of noise maker on the cars to warn people that one of these silent but deadly autos is in the neighborhood. It could be as easy as legislating that hybrid owners must cruise the neighborhoods with their drivers’ side window down and their left hand manipulating a pair of maracas. Or maybe a tambourine.

Who knows, it might make for some interesting jam sessions at long traffic lights.