Ford Expects Rules, Not Self, To Shift On Hybrid Issue - LAT

[hatrack]

"The saddest American businessmen I ever met were a couple of guys who had drawn the punitive assignment, in the mid-1980s, of marketing big Ford automobiles in Japan. They sat in a desolate Tokyo office, pondering whether it was a mistake to try to sell cars there with their steering wheels on the left, American-style, given that the Japanese drive on the other side of the road.

Ford Motor Co.'s expectation that an entire nation would adjust its habits to suit the company, rather than the other way around, came back to me when I read a letter William Clay Ford Jr. wrote recently to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Ford, chairman and chief executive of his namesake company, asked Schwarzenegger to veto a bill — passed this week by the state Senate and expected to win Assembly approval today — designed to open carpool lanes to fuel-efficient hybrid cars, even when they transport just one person.

What galls Ford is that the bill wouldn't apply to his company's hybrid approach, which is to install mixed gasoline-and-electric drivetrains not in light vehicles, but in vehicles such as SUVs. The bill allows the state DMV to issue up to 75,000 carpool passes to hybrids that achieve fuel efficiency of 45 miles per gallon, a standard comfortably met by Toyota Motor Corp.'s Prius and a couple of Honda Motor Co. models. Because the forthcoming Ford Escape Hybrid SUV will achieve only 36 mpg, Ford says the proposal "amounts to a 'Buy Japanese' bill."

EDIT

This is about the only tack he can take, given his company's treatment of hybrid technology over the years. Nothing prevented Ford or any other Detroit automaker from developing hybrids that matched Japan's for fuel efficiency. But while the Japanese started testing the U.S. market with hybrids in 1999, Detroit sat on its thumbs, lulled by the assumption that Americans would never pay a premium for green cars. The queues and jacked-up dealer margins that soon emerged for the Prius must have given the American manufacturers some doubts, so years later, here's the harvest: A flowering crop of hybrid SUVs."

EDIT

[demnan]

1. I looked up the info for Virginia:

This is what is allowed:

Vehicles powered exclusively by clean special fuel, including compressed natural gas, electricity, liquefied natural gas and solar energy and registered with clean special fuel license plates are permitted to use HOV lanes. Hybrid fuel vehicles (i.e., gasoline engines that are assisted with electricity) that are registered with clean special fuel license plates also qualify to use the HOV lanes.

http://virginiadot.org/comtravel/hov-rulesfaq.asp#faq

So it looks to me that the Ford hybrid vehicles will be allowed in the Express Lanes, at least through the deadline in 2006.

[phantom power]

2. This drama is all about access to carpool lanes???

I can't believe that Ford is getting upset about this. How many people are going to blow off buying a 35mpg SUV, just because they won't be able to get a car-pool pass? Hell, the upper bound on this number is by definition 75K. Big deal.

[hatrack]

3. Bad, BAD PR move by Ford, esp. in light of the article

It noted that carpool lanes in areas like SF are already near capacity, in large measure because there are so many hybrids already there.

[phantom power]

4. Maybe it's reflexive. Maybe opposition to all efficiency-related

legislation, no matter how trivial, is actually encoded in their spinal ganglia. Their brains never realized it was happening.

[hatrack]

5. Perhaps related to the reptilian cortex-based appeal of SUVs

You may be on to something here! ;-)