The chairman of General Motors, Rick Wagoner, once told me – over a Starbucks cappuccino and bran muffin in his office in Detroit – that his worst managerial mistake was to kill the EV1 electric car. ‘It didn’t affect profitability but it did affect image,’ said the boss now unkindly known as Red Ink Rick. GM handed the environmental initiative to Toyota and its Prius.
Perhaps. But a much bigger GM powertrain faux pas, done well before Wagoner’s watch, was killing diesel development following the debacle of America’s first production car diesel engine – it powered various big barges, including Cadillacs and Oldsmobiles, in the late Seventies and early Eighties. The engine was a dieselised version of an existing Oldsmobile gasoline V8 and was designed to help boost GM’s CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) figures. It was also utterly hopeless. But if GM had persisted with diesel, they – and the rest of the US industry, which would have followed suit – would not be in the straits they’re in now.
Diesel is perfect for Yank cars. American cars should be expansive, comfortable, stylish, distinctive and packed with muscle. The classic Yank engine is the V8: low revving, masses of low-end torque, big dollops of the big easy. The spiritual successor to the old Yank V8 is the big-chested tons-of-torque new-generation turbodiesel. There is one key difference. Instead of slurping fuel like a fighter jet, diesels sip like a teetotal miser.
If GM had persisted with diesel, Yanks could still today drive gloriously expansive big cars – which they want – and save a fortune at the pumps (reducing their dependence on the Middle East and their carbon emissions). Another reason for enthusiastically adopting diesel is that the Japanese, their main auto enemy, still aren’t terribly good at it (the Japanese don’t buy diesels). The Yanks in Europe, especially Ford with its PSA alliance, make some great diesel engines. Inexplicably, they don’t market any of them in America.
I read in many UK newspapers that the ‘Big Three’ have failed because they do not offer Americans the ‘small, fuel efficient cars they want’. This, as with so much automotive analysis from Fleet Street, is nonsense. They certainly want more fuel efficient cars. But they don’t want small cars. Yanks think big. With diesel, they could stay big but also enjoy small fuel bills.
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