It's Not All Gloom and Doom Around Here...

Some interesting reading on the BBC's website:

1. GM betting on a greener future
2. Test riding first hydrogen bike
3. Fuel cell cars to get test drive

It looks like the lumbering giant, GM, is starting to wake up to reality.

Unfortunately, Ford's new ad campaign, Bold Moves, is nothing more than that - an ad campaign. They continue to focus on trucks and muscle cars without making any real bold moves. Unless you count laying off workers as a bold move.

Why is Ford laying off yet more workers? The following exerpts from the link above pretty much sums it up:

GWEN IFILL

[...]Also, like General Motors, Ford has been losing market share to foreign automakers, Japan's Toyota in particular. This is the company's second wave of job cuts and plant closings in four years.

HARLEY SHAIKEN

The fact that Ford really did misjudge the market. But it isn't simply responding to the market. It's anticipating and creating a market, much the way that Apple did with the iPod or that Toyota did with the Prius, and then the Ford Motor Co. and GM and Chrysler are saddled with the legacy costs. That's a failure of government policy, not really a failure of Ford or the union. [...]

As far as I know, they have only one Hybrid offering - the Escape. 34 mpg hybrid and 20 mpg gas in the city. I guess 34 mpg is good for an SUV (even a small one), but this isn't exactly a bold move. Ford continues to pin it's hopes on large trucks (the F-Series) and muscle cars (like the Mustang).

A bold move would be to move away from these antiquated technologies and make a hybrid full sized truck. Why not make an electric car whose roof was solar panels in order to help with charging the batteries? If your car sits in a parking lot all day getting beaten by the sun, why not have it charge the battery completely off-grid?

You could even sell charging units to keep at home. Have a solar panel hooked to a battery that charges all day while you're at work. When you get home at night, hook your car to the charger - this draws all of the juice from the solar-charged (i.e. free) battery before pulling juice off the grid.

I'd stand in line to buy such a product.

Instead of paying some ad company to come up with a catch-phrase like "Bold Moves", why don't you actually make some? Ford, are you listening? Well, no - of course you aren't.