From our inbox...
David Cole is the son of Ed Cole, who was the president of GM for a number of years. He is credited with the '55 Chevy, the small block Chev V8 of '55, the Corvair, and other GM innovations, some which were major flops (Vega).
Mr. Cole, Chairman of the Center for Automotive Research (CAR) is an engineer by training, told many stories of the difficulty of working with the folks that the Obama administration has sent to save the auto industry. There have been many meetings where a 30+ years of experience automotive expert has to listen to a newcomer to the industry, someone with *zero* manufacturing experience, *zero* auto industry experience,* zero* business experience, *zero* finance experience, and *zero * engineering experience, tell them how to run their business.
His favorite story is as follows:
There was a team of Obama people speaking to Mr Cole (Engineer, automotive experience 40+ years, Chairman of CAR). They were explaining to Mr. Cole that the auto companies needed to make a car that was electric and liquid natural gas (LNG) with enough combined fuel to go 500 miles so we wouldn't "need" so many gas stations (A whole other topic). They were quoting BTU's of LNG and battery life that they had looked up on some website.
Mr. Cole explained that to do this you would need a trunk FULL of batteries and a LNG tank as big as a car to make that happen and that there were problems related to the *laws of physics* that prevented them from...
*The Obama person interrupted and said (and I am quoting here) "These laws of physics? Who's rules are those, we need to change that. (Some of the others wrote down the law name so they could look it up) We have the congress and the administration. We can repeal that law, amend it, or use an **executive order** to get rid of that problem. That's why we are here, to fix these sort of issues".*
