The UAW Bailout

There's another problem in this one which nobody is talking about, which is a sort of a lethal combination of price and technological change: granted I can only speak for myself, but there is no way in the world I'm going to pay $20,000 or more for something which could very easily be totally outmoded two years from today.

The car I'd LIKE to have would be a lighter, simpler, less expensive and yet more technically advanced car than what I see now and I see that as easily possible with technology available now. You'd be looking at a car made largely of carbon fibre with either one of the new gen gas or diesel engines you read about, that Evinrude E-TEK 2-stroke or the AngelLabs engine, or an electric car using that EESTOR super capacitor, and I can't think of a reason why something like that should cost more than about $15,000, tops.

would you buy a car from a company in bankruptcy? and whod sell them any parts if the parts mfrs were already screwed by the bankruptcy ref.

The bridge loan to the car mfrs would be based upon

1steep concessions from the Unions, with no collective bargaining until at least 5 years after the companies are once again solvent.

2The managements of the companies need trimming and more creativity building.

The problems have been that noone wantes to buy Big 3 cars (they will buy trucks and SUVs) The poor quality perception is a myth (as seen by J D Powers ).
Americans have been the very tools of our own industrial destruction so maybe we should all suffer like gunga wants. Cause if the car companies go the way of bankruptcy, they will trickle down into a huge base industry and commercial health (not to forget that most of our stock based IRAs and 401 K's are still industrial based). My 401 has been almost halved in the present meltdown, if we go into a full depression we will all probably be penniless, and that will mostly be driven by lack of action., especially if this whole thing gets even more partisan.


The big kahoona for the "Monetization Act of 2000" has driven us to a brink, now the subordinate lenders , including the car company "banks" are teetering. We can thank Mr Gramm for birthing it and Bill Clinton for signing that piece of crap.

Some sort of govt. bailout is probably going to happen one way or another....

Assuming nothing else changes, is there any shot at forcing Chrysler to send somebody off to Japan or Germany for six months to learn how to make piston rings so their fricking cars can go more than 1500 miles without adding oil?

I would feel much better if the design and management were substituted by the same Germans or Koreans so that the US car companies can unlearn how to be dinosaurs.

The US car companies seem to be imbued with the same mentality that ran the Railroads in the mid 20th century.
When asked of the Pennsy Railroad what they di, the Pennsy president said "We run trains" , when actually the correct answere was that they MOVE **** AROUND THE COUNTRY. So the RAilroads birthed the trucking industry by not embracing it.

Car companies have that same mentality.

Did you ever take a look at the Excel file demo of that AngelLabs engine?

That would be:

http://www.angellabsllc.com/video/animation.xls

There ARE a few engineers and what not on A2K... Again this one strikes me as a good deal more than usually interesting:

http://www.angellabsllc.com/video/animation.xls

Anybody have any thoughts or comments?? Google searches on "massive yet tiny engine" turn up as much as you'd want on the idea.

I commented on this engine. It looks as a multi ignition form of the wankel. I dont know enough about it to make any comments that go beyond that.
I suppose that it could burn anything cause it looks high compression enough to be an efficient Diesel type.

This engine has pistons which follow each other around in a loop. A Wankel involves a triangular rotor walking around a circle on gears in a chamber which is basically just the shape/volume you get by walking a triangle around a circle on gears.

I can't see it as a good idea to bail out mismanaged businesses with systemic, self-inflicted problems. It will encourage other mismanaged businesses to ask for the same - something the taxpayer can't afford. I'm not unsympathetic, but the people who lent these companies money, and bought their stock and bonds did so as an investment, and knew that they were taking a risk in order to have a chance of making a profit. That's in the basic nature of investments. I am more concerned about the retirees from these companies, whose pensions and health benefits must, at all costs, be protected.

Not to mention all the suppliers and subcontractors who, for no fault of their own, would be systematically screwed were a Chapter 11 decision be allowed.(It seems that the GOP is gathering around a Chapt 11 scam).

As I stated before, Congress has closed the loops on personal bankruptcy but opened the door o0n continued corporate 11's.

The Nov 15 BARRONS has an excellect 8 point advice column to Obama. It includes a "bailout" but with strong provisos, including
1Only bailing out Ford and GM, Chrysler should be sold and divisions (like Jeep and the Minivans) sold to other companies, including a GM/Chrysler merger. The Union and Management will be under strict requirements .

Im hoping the bailout goes through, not because its a great idea, but that every other one is disastrous.

I guess I need some more info on this one. The timing (since all the arms and pistons are on one assembly) must be extremely critical. Is there some sort of computer that controls dead center timing for intake, combustion and exhaust?

Is this engine actually doing something in a pilot program?

This discussion is almost amazing. I read of major concessions from the UAW . This so called terrible wage package is $27 an hour for a non skilled employee plus $17 an hour paid which is for a pension of $3000 when one retires at this time plus $6 an hour for the medical plan based on the typical $10,000 yearly health insurance plan and dental plan and add $6 an hour for paid holiday and vacation. So this comes up to $56 an hour not including unemployment , SS and such Gov. items. Now new employees come in at $14 an hour. with low benefits. SO then everyone wants the people that are say 6o to 80 years old who worked 30 to 50 years to lose the income they worked all those years for to be able to retire and be regulated to what the Gov. will cover under a bankruptcy. These people never had 401k plans that they could invest in at the time. Around 1990 is when they became popular. So the old timers are left out in the cold. Then the so called Bailout which is actually a low interest rate loan no one thinks they need to pay help pays bills for the next few months would rather have the government loose 60bill. a year in taxes from them(www.cargroup.org). Now that makes real sense there. If this happens we will see a depression not just a recession. As for bad cars Didn't GM have the North American car of the year award with the Malibu and Motortrend Car of the year with the CTS. It funny if no one wants these cars they still sell more than anyone in the world.

The biggest problem as I see it is price; Detroit appears to have priced its products out of the real world and as I noted above, there is the further perception at this point that a buyer could be paying over $20,000 for a car which could easily be outmoded the day after it was purchased.

Somebody needs to be looking at the possibility of putting four or five of the kinds of technologies I noted above on some sort of a war footing.

The magical thing about the MYT engine appears to be the gearing which allows the pistons to follow eachother around the way they do. That engine would produce vastly more power for a given size than a Wankel would; videos of it being used as a simple pump (which is also what the Wankel started out as) show it moving collosal amounts of air around for the size. You have to assume even something like a Dodge Neon would look like mostly empty space under the hood.

It resembles the Wankel in using ports rather than valves and doing that in a manner which is basically efficient. The new Evinrude 2-stroke I mentioned above is efficient but does it via a computerized fuel injection system and could not generate anything like the power which the MYT engine does. It still uses the lower chamber of its engine to pump air and uses a certain amount of oil as I read it.

Both the new Evinrude and the MYT engines eliminate the use of power to operate cam shafts and move valves against springs but Angellabs claims a massive gain in efficiency which Evinrude/Bombardier do not claim for the Etek and which certainly nobody ever claimed for the Wankel.

Industry has been looking for a basically new IC engine and a lot of people felt they'd been burned with an attempt in that direction (the "split-cycle" engine) in the mid 90s which never made it for reasons which were not obvious at first but the MYT idea looks closer to being real.

The split-cycle engine was an attempt to gain efficiency for something which still involved pistons moving up and down more or less as they do now; even if it had worked, it would never have produced the overwhelming gain in power for a given size which the MYT appears to do.