Convert Pontiac into the First True Green ‘Muscle-car’ Maker

We are witnessing the systematic implosion of the American auto industry. The situation is so grave that instead of seeking to reinvent, or spin off or sell off its Pontiac division, GM is simply closing it down and laying people off. No attempt to fix problems or to take advantage of the opportunity to comprehensively reinvent a company already fitted with major industrial manufacturing capacity, just the unilateral shuttering of major plants and an entire company.

But Pres. Obama has pledged to spend $150 billion over 5 years to promote the greening of American industry. Why is GM not taking more decisive and aggressive action to court some of that investment? Pontiac, if it is found to be a failed company by its parent, GM, affords a brilliant opportunity to reinvent the American auto industry. Scale it back to one model, the Pontiac, and use the Pontiac infrastructure to build an unprecedented “green muscle car”. It could be an advanced plug-in hybrid or a green diesel capable of 100 mpg.

Volkswagen has said for a few years now it is producing a future diesel car that will get over 100 mpg. But electric affords the best hope for real innovation. By the account of Shai Agassi, an American-Israeli entrepreneur building a global infrastructure for regular battery switch-out “re-fueling” of electric cars —his firm is called Better Place—, the electricity to move a car costs 1/16 as much as the gasoline it takes to go the same distance.

What is needed is the technology (batteries, energy re-cycling, self-recharging, and battery switch-out points) to enable existing electric car technology to expand both range and drive power. Pontiac’s history as a company that makes “muscle cars”, fast, heavy roadsters and no-nonsense sports cars, could allow it to be positioned as the model for green car power.

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GM’s restructuring plan is, of necessity, focused on saving money. But it may be a grave and historic miscalculation to put saving money (i.e. not spending) ahead of the smartest possible investment (i.e. spending) of available capital. It might be said that closing Pontiac is less costly in the short-term than selling it, but GM will retain contractual obligations for severance, benefits and pensions for Pontiac workers that it might be able to reduce the cost of, were it to successfully spin off or sell off the brand.

At the very least, it is clear that winning substantial green subsidies for the defunct brand would be preferable to winning government financing conditions related to the rest of GM with no fiscal improvement emerging from the Pontiac closure / reinvention. It would be instructive if GM would publish information about why it chose not to seek aggressive reinvention of the brand, due to its name-recognition and existing infrastructure, including a workforce GM cannot so easily disown.

What would a green muscle-car look like? Well, the the real “muscle” is in performance, not necessarily in noise pollution or high emissions, so GM could re-engineer Pontiac’s manufacturing facilities to fit the goal of high fuel-efficiency, high-performance sporty cars. These could be lightweight or not, and could rely on a range of innovative fuel technologies, such as multi-hybridization (supplementing plug-in hybrids with bio-flex fueling and solar-voltaic “in-flight” recharging) or “green diesel” — “green” because of low emissions and high fuel efficiency.

We don’t know if GM has attempted to adopt any of these bolder, more complex strategies for navigating the volatility of a comprehensive energy-infrastructure paradigm shift, but we know this is coming. It would be wisest for GM to look at greening subsidies as the necessary funding for a comprehensive restructuring, retooling and rebranding, which are necessary anyway even before ecological considerations are taken into account.

Eventually, the goal of major auto manufacturers will have to be the achievement of highly efficient, lower-cost state of the art vehicles that require zero combustion and emit zero harmful gases —whether those gases are toxic contaminants or greenhouse-inducing accumulants—, so starting down that road is the smartest way to plan for the shift in profit strategy from the planned obsolescence of internal-combustion-reliant vehicles (worn by years of combustion and exhaust strain) to the zero combustion era.

Pontiac is inviable in its present form, under its present management and with GM’s present contractual infrastructure. But that can all be changed if an intelligent plan of action is implemented, oriented toward producing the best-quality, high-performance clean energy vehicles, eligible for the best incentives in terms of government research spending and tax credits. At least, it’s worth considering, before consigning a major industrial operation to the scrap-heap.