GM will spend a lot of time and effort promoting its new hybrid technology. The problem is that cars built using the new tech won’t be out for a few years, if at all. GM has not decided if the technology will be available in production carsIt is also becoming increasingly unclear that people want hybrids now that gas prices are moving down. Also, hybrids cost about $3,000 more than their old-style gas counterparts.For a company trying to save $9 billion a year to get its North American operations back into the black, the effort would not appear to be well-spent. It actually appears to be a distraction. The new Consumer Reports survey of car reliability shows that, of the 45 least reliable cars, twelve were from GM. No other car company even came close.Maybe GM’s executives can forget the problems of their expenses, falling market share, poor quality ratings, and $9 billion-a-year cost cutting if they spend enough time talking about hybrids that they can’t sell yet to a market that may not want to buy them.Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at [email protected]. He does not own securities in companies that he writes about.
Detroit Ostrich Farm: GM Hybrid
Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
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