Sorry Elon.....................

................but when he is right, he is right.

 

one of the great achievements.........

      During the early years of the automobile industry, the immediate goal of the engineers and inventors was simply reliability—to get a car to go somewhere and come back under its own power.  Many bright automotive ideas ended with a horse, a towline, and laughter.  Although progress was expensive, American motorists cheerfully paid the bills for it.  In their enthusiasm for individual transportation, they bought cars, reliable or unreliable, and thus provided the source of a substantial portion of the risk capital for experiment and production.  Not many industries have been so well favored by their customers.  In twenty years the reliability of the motorcar in relation to the street and road conditions of the time was pretty well established.  Individual mechanized transportation, one of the great achievements in the progress of mankind, was a commonplace fact of life, and everyone could enjoy it.

-Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., My Years With General Motors

There's a time or three...............

..................................when this would have made life easier.

via

On biglification..........................

We had this problem licked more than a century ago, when the overwhelming majority never went anywhere except on foot, and those with a need to travel grand distances could take the railway — which, incidentally, had baggage cars. Taking this Province for my example, and my wanderings through it for my research, I am constantly impressed to discover evidence of how well it was served by the railroads, back when it had a fraction of its present population, and incomes were much lower. One could get from almost any little place to almost any other along them.

The obliteration of our railroads did not happen by chance. Starting with Roosevelt, on this side of the Atlantic, and Hitler, on the other side, a grand concerted effort was made to promote the automotive and paving industries, and build autobahns, specifically at the expense of rail. Cars had already become too numerous by the 1920s, but the idea of what Trump and I might call “biglification” — the totalitarian impulse — was to choke the planet with “people’s” cars, trucks, and buses. It became the one big economic pseudo vision, as the Depression wore on. What had been fairly useful vehicles — very local extensions from the train stations — became the most awkward and wasteful mass-transport system imaginable. The intention of the captains and politicians of industry was, from the beginning, to compel everyone to buy and drive these voracious machines, and become permanently indebted thereby.

-David Warren, as cut and pasted from here

At last.............................................!

..................................Some really cool news from the LA Times.

On car payments......................

Will the next financial crisis come from a bubble in auto lending? Ehh, I don't know, I think it would be a little too cute to have two U.S. financial crises in a row that are both precipitated by securitized loans to consumers to finance durable-goods purchases. Financial crises usually show more creativity than that. The next crisis will probably be in something weird, like clearinghouse collateral or bond market illiquidity. But "the country’s auto debt hit a record in the fourth quarter of 2016, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, when a rush of year-end car shopping pushed vehicle loans to a dubious peak of $1.16 trillion," and "delinquencies among lower-rated borrowers have risen to the highest level since 2009," so if you want to worry about it go ahead.

While I have you here, though, I should say that a reader pointed out a glaring omission in my discussion of auto lending and smart contracts yesterday: self-driving cars! In the fairly near future, if you borrow money to buy a car, and you miss a payment, the car will just tootle on back to the dealer's lot. There'll be no GPS tracking or ignition override or anything messy like that; the car will just execute the contract itself. The future will be amazing, but also kind of tough.

-As culled from Matt Levine's wonderful blog

Crumple zones...............

................................the physics of car crashes.



thanks craig

Who can understand...................

..........................................................................California?

Can I get an Amen.............................?

The fact that so many past predictions missed the mark is a nice reminder that over-confident statements about the future are often a bad idea.
-as excerpted from this Vox post on the end of "peak car."   This handy chart tells much of the story:

thanks craig

Creative destruction is waiting.........

............to be unleashed by "autonomous cars."  If you fancy yourself prescient, ponder on this for a while:

"Autonomous cars will be commonplace by 2025 and have a near monopoly by 2030, and the sweeping change they bring will eclipse every other innovation our society has experienced. They will cause unprecedented job loss and a fundamental restructuring of our economy, solve large portions of our environmental problems, prevent tens of thousands of deaths per year, save millions of hours with increased productivity, and create entire new industries that we cannot even imagine from our current vantage point."
-Zack Kanter, as excerpted from here.

Color me doubtful about many of the claims.  

     The author cites a Pricewaterhousecooper study that suggests the number of vehicles in the U. S. of A. will drop from 245 million (The Oracle Google pegs the number at 254 million) to 2.4 million.  Really?  How is that even remotely possible?   
     In 2014 the Big Three automobile companies sold 1.7 million pick-up trucks.  My guess is that a significant percentage of those sales went to people who use the truck as part of their day job.  Think they will give them up?
     I queried my young son on the issue.  He opined that having a car (that was solely his) provided an undeniable sense of freedom (he also mentioned something about the glory of "muscle" cars, but I really didn't want to hear about it).  Maybe big city folks will be willing to cede that, but out here in the hinterlands, freedom of movement is still considered pretty important.
     The author quotes a study done by UC-Berkeley that shows that among the ride-sharing cohort, car ownership was cut in half.  One wonders if the participants of the study were college students.
      But, I'm just nit-picking.   Change is coming.  The free enterprise system cannot function without "creative destruction."  It is an intergral part of the deal.  We would all do well to ponder the opportunites and consequences (intended or otherwise) of autonomous cars and trucks.  

thanks glenn

Hey.....................................

Scott Adams elaborates on what makes a tweet go viral - here

Fifty years ago......................................

New cars...................................................

1965 Shelby Mustang

1965 Plymouth Fury III

1965 Rambler Marlin

1965 Ford Falcon

Color me doubtful............................

The headline reads:   How Uber’s Autonomous Cars Will Destroy 10 Million Jobs And Reshape The Economy by 2025.   

Full post is here.  A few cherry-picked quotes here::

The effects of the autonomous car movement will be staggering. PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts that the number of vehicles on the road will be reduced by 99%, estimating that the fleet will fall from 245 million to just 2.4 million vehicles.17

Ancillary industries such as the $198 billion automobile insurance market,18 $98 billion automotive finance market,19 $100 billion parking industry,20 and the $300 billion automotive aftermarket21 will collapse as demand for their services evaporates. We will see the obsolescence of rental car companies, public transportation systems, and, good riddance, parking and speeding tickets. 

The environmental impact of autonomous cars has the potential to reverse the trend of global warming and drastically reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. Passenger cars, SUVs, pickup trucks, and minivans account for 17.6% of greenhouse gas emissions26 – a 90% reduction of vehicles in operation would reduce our overall emissions by 15.9%. As most autonomous cars are likely to be electric, we would virtually eliminate the 134 billion of gasoline used each year in the US alone.

Like I said, color me doubtful.

Truth in marketing..............................

Fifty years ago..........................

The 1964 Ford Mustang unveiled..................................

Bet you didn't know this.................

     One central characteristic of the Model T now generally forgotten is that it was the first car of consequence to put the driver's seat on the left hand side.  Previously, nearly all manufacturers placed the driver on the outer, curb-side of the car so that an alighting driver could step out onto a grassy verge or dry sidewalk rather than into the mud of an unpaved road.  Ford reasoned that this convenience might be better appreciated by the lady of the house, and so arranged seating for her benefit.  The arrangement also gave the driver a better view down the road, and made it easier for passing drivers to stop and have a conversation out facing windows.  Ford was no great thinker, but he did understand human nature.  Such, in any case, was the popularity of Ford's seating plan for the Model T that it soon became the standard adopted by all cars.
-Bill Bryson,   One Summer:  America, 1927

Attitude........................

via

About the Edsel.........................

For those who care about such things, our friend Michael Kelly casts a shadow of doubt on Robert McNamara by linking him with the failed Edsel from Ford Motors.  Wikipedia, the fount on much knowledge and some disputed accuracy, tells the tale differently.  You can go here to read their version.  If you watch the video below, you may learn more about the Edsel than you ever thought you wanted to.

Fifty years ago.............................

1963 Corvettes..........................

Fifty years ago.........................

The 1963 Buick Riviera: