RealDealPolitics.com

Monday morning I attended a breakfast meeting where the speaker and guest was David E. Cole, Chairman Center for Automotive Research (CAR) and Professor at the University of Michigan . You have all likely heard CAR quoted, or referred to in the auto industry news lately.

Mr. Cole, who is an engineer by training, told many stories of the difficulty of working with the folks that the Obama administration has sent to save the auto industry. There have been many meetings where a 30+ year experience automotive expert has to listen to a newcomer to the industry, someone with zero manufacturing experience, zero auto industry experience, zero business experience, zero finance experience, and zero engineering experience, tell them how to run their business.

Mr. Cole’s favorite story is as follows:

There was a team of Obama people speaking to Mr. Cole (Engineer, automotive experience 40+ years, and Chairman of CAR). They were explaining to Mr. Cole that the auto companies needed to make a car that was electric and/or run on liquid natural gas (LNG) with enough combined fuel to go 500 miles so we wouldn’t ‘need’ so many gas stations. (A whole other topic). They were quoting BTU’s of LNG and battery life that they had looked up on some Internet website.

Mr. Cole explained that to do this you would need a trunk FULL of batteries and a LNG tank as big as a car to make that happen and that there were problems related to the laws of physics that prevented them from…

The Obama person interrupted and said (and I am quoting here) “These laws of physics? Who’s rules are those? We need to change that. We have the Congress and the Administration. We can repeal that law, amend it, or use an executive order to get rid of that problem. That’s why we are here, to fix these sorts of issues.”