World automakers' global race to get green on display
Daniel Howes
Beneath the gloom weighing on the Detroit auto show, there's a global race under way and it's powered by electricity.
Today, China's BYD Auto Co. Ltd will formally unveil two gas-electric hybrids as well as its lithium iron-powered E6 electric car, which the five-year-old automaker from Shenzhen expects to make available in the finicky U.S. market within two years. How and through what distribution channel remains to be seen.
"We think electric cars are a good choice to enter the U.S.," BYD Chairman Wang Chuan-fu told me Sunday through an interpreter, "... and there will be less competition."
I wouldn't be so sure. To walk the carpet of a noticeably subdued (and more spacious) North American International Auto Show is to see a global industry opening a new competitive front as it grapples with its present and future in more profound ways than at any time in a generation. Yet if there's one word you'd be hard pressed to hear anywhere, least of all among General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co., it's "surrender."
story continued
Beneath the gloom weighing on the Detroit auto show, there's a global race under way and it's powered by electricity.
Today, China's BYD Auto Co. Ltd will formally unveil two gas-electric hybrids as well as its lithium iron-powered E6 electric car, which the five-year-old automaker from Shenzhen expects to make available in the finicky U.S. market within two years. How and through what distribution channel remains to be seen.
"We think electric cars are a good choice to enter the U.S.," BYD Chairman Wang Chuan-fu told me Sunday through an interpreter, "... and there will be less competition."
I wouldn't be so sure. To walk the carpet of a noticeably subdued (and more spacious) North American International Auto Show is to see a global industry opening a new competitive front as it grapples with its present and future in more profound ways than at any time in a generation. Yet if there's one word you'd be hard pressed to hear anywhere, least of all among General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co., it's "surrender."
story continued
posted by anthony m, at Monday, January 12, 2009
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