Take the ringer. I'll drive.

A member of the Bellman Nation just bought a late-model Ford Focus. A cute car in good repair, fairly described as a modestly priced receptacle. Nonetheless, there were two features that I hadn't experienced. One dashboard button activated cabin lights in the footwells and drink holders. The cool part is that the lights are in half a dozen colors, cycling to a new color each time the button is pressed. It's like a rave for your ankles.

The other feature of note is the car's bluetooth integration. After syncing a cell phone, a small text display on top of the dashboard will list caller ID information on inbound calls. It will also use a text-to-speech function to read incoming text messages through the stereo speakers. In that mode the radio tuning knob can be used to cycle through a list of canned responses.

It turns out the engineers did not include a reply for having the car robotically repeat "wax balls".

Mothers Against Drinking

I think it is past time that MADD stopped pretending that it is anything other than a temperance organization. They always blame the drink, and never blame the driving. Now they are even marketing their own brand of non-alcoholic beverages.

But the most damning segment of their official position page is their response--inadequate as it is--to the findings that so-called "distracted driving" is more deadly than drunk driving. Rather than finally acknowledging that automotive culture is a root problem, MADD actually endorses having mobile phones in vehicles... in order to report drunk drivers.

It's not just MADD, of course. Atrios recently blogged:

After taking the subway home from a show last night one of the first things I saw on the teevee was an anti-drunk driving ad. It occurred to me that in all the years I've been seeing these things I don't remember a single one (I could be wrong!) suggesting people take mass transit instead of driving.

Drinking and driving should not be combined, obviously. But if the collective energy brought to bear against drunk driving was instead focused on demphasizing driving as the main way to get around, we might save a lot of lives... even in situations where nobody's had a drop to drink.

Laser-guided sazz wagon

I just got back from putting a couple thousand miles on a new rental car. As owner of a vintage automobile, I don't really keep up with the newer automotive conveniences. I know that tire pressure sensors are now required. Seatback DVD players are old news. Even heartbeat sensors and cars that park themselves are out there.

But I was entirely surprised to find that the car I was driving had autonomous cruise control. For the uninitiated, this type of system will automatically reduce your car's cruise control speed if you come up behind a slower moving vehicle. It will even brake or bring you to a complete stop if another vehicle enters the lane or stops in front of you. It turns out variations of this feature have been available on some cars for more than 10 years.

This got me thinking about what other features we may see on the way to the self-guided hover cars that are in undoubtedly our future. I for one hope that frame mounted paintball cannons become factory standard. There are a lot of drivers out there that need to be marked to alert other motorists.

Do the Bellman visioneers have any other ideas for Detroit?

Also, each worker gets half an acre of swampland and a broken can opener

In the devastating slump that has forced two of Detroit’s automakers to the brink of bankruptcy, the United Automobile Workers union stands to become one of the industry’s few winners.

According to restructuring plans proposed this week, the union will have more than half the stock in Chrysler and a third of General Motors, meaning it will have tremendous influence, with the government, in determining the future of the companies. |NY Times|

... I want one so bad ...

Even more than the Tesla Roadster, I want the Model S Electric Sedan:


UPDATE: ... definitely a gadget.

Nobody could have predicted

Kevin Drum:

What to do? I mean, does anyone believe this is the end of the bailout requests? I certainly don't, and I doubt anyone else does either. On the other hand, the alternative is allowing GM and Chrysler to fail in the middle of a recession. Nobody wants that. But on the third hand, even if we bail them out, what are the odds that they can survive in the long term anyway?

In the end, I suppose we'll continue bailing. But this whole process shows up one of the big pitfalls of government action like this. My own guess — and this is obviously just a personal hunch — is that while GM is at least arguably salvagable, Chrysler is a hopeless basket case. So if we're going to do anything, we should probably bail out GM but let Chrysler go under. That would save the taxpayers some money and reduce overcapacity in the auto industry at the same time. Unfortunately, politics being what it is, the Obama administration probably feels like they can't pick winners and losers and needs to treat them both equally.

This is almost certainly dumb, but it's what's most likely going to happen. So the American public will end up pumping $10 or $20 billion into Chrysler in order to help it become, basically, the North American subsidiary of Fiat — a partnership that does the U.S. auto industry little good and will itself almost certainly crumble and fail before long in any case. What a mess.

Thoughts?

InstaUpdate:

In return, the two companies also promised to make further drastic cuts to all parts of their operations, in the hope that they can eventually strike a balance between their bloated cost structures and a dismal market for new car sales.

G.M., for example, said it would cut 47,000 more of its 244,000 workers worldwide; close five more plants in North America, leaving it with 33; and cut its lineup of brands in half, to just four: Chevrolet, Cadillac, GMC and Buick.

There’s a business case for big layoffs. GM is hardly the only firm undertaking them. But if spending tens of billions of dollars on a jobs program makes some sense, spending that kind of money to help keep the management and marketing infrastructure of the firms in place as they layoff and furlough their workforce doesn’t. But you sort of need to choose what you’re doing here—are taxpayers creating makework jobs to prevent the rust belt from becoming the new dust bowl, or are we trying to provide assistance to our “national champion” firms and help them compete? If it’s the jobs we care about, we’d probably be better off spending the money giving different jobs to auto workers—spend $14 billion+ on Detroit to Chicago high-speed rail or something (ditches, anything)—which would have the same beneficial employment effect, avoid bailing out shareholders and managers, and help reduce auto industry overcapacity thereby lending a helping hand to Ford and to U.S. production of “Japanese” cars. Otherwise, if every country around the world insists on sinking more and more money not into its nation’s car companies instead of into its people who work for car companies then we’ll have a situation where the whole industry just keeps shrinking and sinking slowly. | yglesias |

This too shall pass

The word on the radio when I woke up this morning was that there's finally an auto industry bailout deal in place. Naturally, the big three got less money than they'd asked for. Naturally, the money wasn't taken from the bloated TARP. Instead, the plan is to take the money from the Fuel Efficiency Research Program.

So we're going to save the auto industry by cannibalizing the subsidy for green auto technology. Perfect.

---

In other news:

Saving Citigroup; or, Too rich to fail

Y'see, it's worth $200 billion in loan guarantees and $20 billion in cash because Citigroup is run by financiers rather than auto-industry executives, and financiers, as we all know, are astute managers whose unquestioned competence insures that they won't skulk back to the public trough begging for another handout.

Speaking of the bailout

Jonathan Cohn takes an honest look at autoworker compensation.

The politics of distraction, continued

I think it's fair to say that this exchange is dominating coverage of the seemingly doomed auto industry bailout.

"There is a delicious irony in seeing private luxury jets flying into Washington, D.C., and people coming off of them with tin cups in their hand, saying that they're going to be trimming down and streamlining their businesses," Rep. Gary Ackerman, D-New York, told the chief executive officers of Ford, Chrysler and General Motors at a hearing of the House Financial Services Committee.

"It's almost like seeing a guy show up at the soup kitchen in high hat and tuxedo. It kind of makes you a little bit suspicious."

He added, "couldn't you all have downgraded to first class or jet-pooled or something to get here? It would have at least sent a message that you do get it."|CNN|

Yes, the executives heading up the big three automakers are chowder heads. This is not in dispute. Nor is it the issue.

On the plus side, there's always the possibility that the bailout will rise again, stronger than before. You might think, for instance, that any acceptable bailout must involve those jet-setting jerks tumbling ass over teakettle out the door. Well, political support for your version of the bailout just went up a notch.

By way of contrast:

President-Elect Obama has to say to them, yes, we're going to use this money to save these jobs, but we're not going to build these gas-guzzling, unsafe vehicles any longer.

We're going to put the companies into some sort of receivership and we, the government, are going to hold the reigns on these companies. They're to build mass transit. They're to build hybrid cars. They're to build cars that use little or no gasoline.

We're facing a national crisis, not just an economic crisis, but a crisis of the polar ice caps are melting. There's only so much oil left under the Earth. We're going to run out of that, if not in our children's time, our grandchildren's time.

There's got to be a plan set out to find other ways to transport ourselves in other ways than using fossil fuels. |CNN: Michael Moore|

Bad idea Friday

I give you the air car. It runs on air, and the only fuel it uses is for a small compressor. In order to make this work, tanks of compressed air are located under the floor of the car. Sounds promising, except that compressed air tanks have a tendency to explode, cars have a tendency to be involved in traffic accidents, and traffic accidents have a tendency to be made worse by explosions.

If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you

Now that the idea of crossing party lines to vote for Romney has gone mainstream, I'm beginning to have my doubts. Decisions, decisions. Not voting is looking better and better.

In other Michigan news, I've discovered that when Michiganders ask about your plans to go to the Detroit Auto Show this week they don't really know how to take it when you reveal that you have not, in fact, made any such plans.