Seriously. I am going to the Yukon to canoe down the Big Salmon River and do some fly fishing. I won’t be able to post or moderate comments until I get back in early August.
I appeared on Global TV’s Focus Ontario last week and argued that the Big Three American automakers “don’t have small fuel efficient vehicles people want.” I was thinking of the compact segment in particular, where the top cars are the Honda Civic, the Mazda3 and the Toyota Carolla. David Paterson, vice-president of corporate and environmental affairs with General Motors, took umbrage at that suggestion and called to tell me that if you group all of his company’s small cars together, GM actually outsells the Japanese carmakers. He then emailed me these stats:
2007 Small Car Segment Sales in Canada
* GM outsold Honda by more than 5,000 units (GM 75,951 vs Honda 70,838)
* GM outsold Mazda by more than 27,000 units (GM 75,951 vs Mazda 48,236)
* GM outsold Toyota by more than 35,000 units (GM 75,951 vs Toyota 40,474)
He added: “GM is the only one of the 3 domestics with subcompacts for sale in Canada. We introduced our Chevy Aveo and Pontiac Wave in 2002 to compete with Honda and Toyota. As a result, GM now outsells everyone except Toyota in the subcompact segment.”
Finally, he noted, “It can also be a bit misleading to cite just one (albeit very good) car in one segment (like say the Honda Civic) and draw broad conclusions about its competitors ‘not having cars people want.’ I mean, 75,951 people did seem
to want a GM small car enough to buy one over a Honda! That’s a lot of Canadians - more than fit in Rogers Centre with the roof open.”
Ford, the automaker that launched the SUV craze when it released the Explorer in 1990, is now going to focus on small cars. The company does not currently sell a subcompact in North America, but according to this New York Times story, “A large part of its future car lineup will be based on vehicles currently under development for the European market. By 2010, Ford plans to begin assembling six of its upcoming European car models in North America, starting with the Ford Fiesta subcompact.” Let’s hope the company stays committed to developing great small cars even if the price of oil drops again.
Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are still fifteen years away from being commercially viable, according to the 80beats blog at Discover magazine’s site.
Brooklyn resident Tom Vanderbilt, who has written about design, technology, science, and culture for Wired, Slate and the New York Times, has a new book called Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), which needless to say I am looking forward to reading. He’s generated lots of great advance buzz — and this blurb from James Surowiecki, the author of The Wisdom of Crowds and a must-read New Yorker columnist: “Tom Vanderbilt is one of our best and most interesting writers, with an extraordinary knack for looking at everyday life and explaining, in wonderful and entertaining detail, how it really works. That’s never been more true than with Traffic, where he takes a subject that we all deal with (and worry about), and lets us see it through new eyes. In the process, he helps us understand better not just the highway, but the world. It doesn’t matter whether you drive or take the bus–you’re going to want to read this book.”
Tom also has a excellent companion blog called How We Drive.
The Streets of Chicago blog has an interesting post about how evangelical Christians are giving some thought to our complicated affair with the automobile through a site called What Would Jesus Drive?
The Numbers Guy blog over at the Wall Street Journal has a look at the Walk Score site in a post called “How Walkable is Your Neighborhood?”
The site “allows users to type in an address and get a “walkability score” from 0 (must have car) to 100 (walker’s paradise). Thursday the site released a ranking of the nation’s top 40 cities, ranging from No. 1 San Francisco (86) to No. 40 Jacksonville (36), based on weighted averages of scores throughout the cities.” Here’s how it works: “Each address gets points for amenities — restaurants, grocery stores, libraries, parks, and more — found by a Google Local search within a mile “as the crow flies.” The closer the amenity, the more it boosts the walkability score.”
I plugged in my address and scored 73 out of 100 (very walkable). See what your walk score is and post it in comments.
Fans of Donald Shoup, the UCLA prof and expert on the high cost of free parking, call themselves Shoupistas. And they now have a Facebook group. (You can read more about Shoup in this excerpt from DRIVE: A Road Trip through Our Complicated Affair with the Automobile that ran in the Toronto Star.)
Some good news for automakers: buyers want small cars, which have smaller profit margins, but they want them with lots of luxury options (including leather seats, satellite radio and great sound systems), which goose the profit margins, according to this story in the New York Times.
This morning I taped a segment of Global TV’s Focus Ontario. If you want to see me in a suit, you can get your giggles this weekend (6:30pm Saturday, repeating Sunday at 7AM and 11:30pm).
I think The New Yorker’s satirical cover of the Obamas is brilliant, so I’ve been following the controversy over it with relish
Over at the Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan has served up several good posts about the controversy, including this one with a link to an online poll showing a majority think the cover is dangerously close to reality. Meanwhile, Poynter Online offers this look at satire’s place in journalism and D.B. Scott, who often writes about magazine covers, points out that the cartoonist, Barry Blitt, is a Canadian. And the New York Times has a story about how hard it is to make jokes about Obama and how the writers for late night comedians are hoping he picks an idiot as his running mate.
But, no surprise here, perhaps the smartest take I’ve seen so far is from Paul Wells: “Or — and this is crucial, and I see it about a hundred times a week in political circles — did more people tell themselves something that sounded a little more like, ‘Well, I get it — I see the joke, funny or lame — but I’m quite sure the simple folk, the ordinary voter who is far less sophisticated in these matters than I am… well, they can’t be expected to understand a joke! And therefore I am outraged on their behalf, for I am ever steadfast in my solidarity with the ordinary cretin who can’t be expected to reason things through for himself!’”
Apparently, the pitbulls in the ethanol lobby have had their way with the Toronto Star’s Tyler Hamilton. Normally a sensible writer, Hamilton defends not just ethanol, but government support for ethanol. If the politicians diverted a fraction of the support they give ethanol — and, needless to say, oil — to sensible alternative fuels, we might already be driving hydrogen or battery-electric vehicles.
Pitchfork reviews The Hold Steady’s brilliant new album Stay Positive, which comes out tomorrow (though it’s been available for a month on iTunes).
In a column called “Breaking up GM will be hard to do,” the Toronto Star’s David Olive offers his thoughts on the future of General Motors:
“It’s difficult to see a future for GM except after being stripped down to Chevrolet, which accounts for well more than half of GM’s total business, and a reviving Cadillac that could serve the same purpose that Lexus and Infinity do for Toyota and Nissan Motor Co., respectively.
It probably will take a wrenching bankruptcy to achieve that transformation, since buyers for most of GM’s assets are non-existent. Buick and Pontiac long ago lost their value as brands. And foreigners have twice been burned purchasing North American automaking assets – Renault SA with its acquisition of an ailing American Motors Corp., RIP; and the more recent Daimler-Benz AG disaster over nine years in trying to fix Chrysler, which served only to cut parent Daimler-Benz’s market value in half.
To pull itself back from the brink, GM needs to wholly commit itself to the costly task of replicating the Volt and becoming the undisputed leader in the small, fuel-efficient vehicles of a 21st-century market. It is a market in which vehicle sales will fall to a permanently lower level as climate change, energy security and urban traffic congestion compel more and more motorists to forsake their vehicles – or their current extensive use of them – in favour of cycling to jobs closer to home and making more use of public transit.”
Richard Florida has a good column about the end of suburbia in today’s Globe and Mail. He makes the point that the high price of oil isn’t the real reason suburbia is in decline: “Rising fuel costs are one thing, but in today’s idea-driven economy, it’s time costs that really matter. With the constant pressure to be more efficient and to innovate, it makes little sense to waste countless collective hours commuting. So the most efficient and productive regions are the ones in which people are thinking and working – not sitting in traffic.”
For a Canadian author, the Globe and Mail is THE review — the one that really matters — and every Saturday for the last two months I’ve woken up early and run down to grab the paper only to be disappointed. Not this morning. DRIVE is on the cover of the book review section and the review itself is pretty much a rave.
Ottawa XPress reviews DRIVE: “Tim Falconer’s Drive tests our fascination with the holy roller.”
Toronto filmmaker Andrew Munger attended the Towards Car Free Cities Conference in Portland and offers this report in the National Post.
Driven magazine reviewed DRIVE: A Road Trip through Our Complicated Affair with the Automobile and had this to say: “Hit the road from the comfort of your chaise lounge with a book about cars that will appeal to the die-hard motorhead and the rest of us. Tim Falconer steers his 1991 Nissan Maxima on an engaging and therapeutic journey of all things automotive, en route from Toronto to LA and back. The book is one part travelogue, one part social commentary and clearly outlines why we simply can’t live with — or without — our wheels.”
The Go on the Road blog reports on a new study called “Is Mobility As We Know It Sustainable?” that the number of vehicles on the world’s road could nearly quadruple to three billion by 2035, meaning “almost three to four times the demand for physical space, raw materials
and fuel that exists today, and 3 to 4 times the input to the
atmosphere of toxic and climate-changing emissions (assuming no change
in vehicle characteristics and similar annual distances travelled).”
According to the study by Phil Gott of Global Insight, “The sheer numbers are staggering, and the consequences boggle the mind. However, no other forecaster has been able to clearly state how and why such an economic demand will NOT occur. Projections of a fleet only half this size by 2050 are more readily accepted, and the consequences deemed manageable, albeit with much challenge.
“The danger comes in not recognizing the plausibility of this scenario, and taking the necessary steps to ensure that it does not occur. Every person with access to modern communications sees the freedom and extent of mobility available to people in the developed nations. Every one in emerging and developing nations aspires to similar levels of mobility. Clearly, applying our contemporary model of mobility to the rest of the world is not sustainable, yet most of the world clamours for just that.”