Academic

MICKEY KAUS: Detroit?s new ?green? delusion. ?I could have saved him the 10 years, as could about ?

By Glenn Reynolds

MICKEY KAUS: Detroit’s new “green” delusion. “I could have saved him the 10 years, as could about 85% of the readers of Car and Driver, because it’s obvious why Saturn flopped: The company had built a popular brand as a sort of feel-good anti-car–vaguely tractor-like, noisy, but made of semi-indestructible plastic by dedicated Tennessee workers and–unique in nearly all of GM–actually reliable. GM threw all this away and filled Saturn showrooms with cars designed to appeal to totally different buyers: rebadged mainstream Opels. They were OK, but creepily overstyled and not so reliable. End of explanation. . . . Detroit cars will sell when they’re bulletproof, not when they’re green (or, in Lutz’s new spin, when they’re made by a company that also sells something ‘green’). But only one of the Big Three U.S. car manufacturers has made dramatic progress catching up to Japan on the bulletproof front–and it’s not Chrysler or GM. It’s the one that hasn’t gone broke.”

Full post as published by Instapundit.com on June 07, 2009 (boomark / email).