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ON June
2 this year, General Motors said it would stop making
pickup trucks and SUVs at four of its North American
plants.
Bewitched? Bothered? Bewildered?
Think
again, fellers.
The
motoring world wasn’t stunned one bit by the GM move.
The times called for it. Seemingly unending oil price
hikes in the world market demand drastic measures to
keep one afloat. And even the giants like GM need to
swim or sink altogether.
GM said
the truck plant blowup, which amounts to about 35
percent in the company’s pickup (truck) production,
would save the company $1 billion per year (about P42
billion). Projected side-by-side with earlier
cost-cutting measures, it will save $15 billion by 2011
over its 2005 costs.
That’s a
lot of savings and, perhaps, that’s probably more than
enough to finance the yearly supply of oil in America,
whose consumption of 20.6 million barrels of oil a day
makes it the largest oil consumer in the world.
Hummer,
too
But
listen. GM, for decades the world’s industry leader
before yielding that lofty position to Toyota just a
while back, is also considering selling its Hummer
brand, an emblem of the megavehicle on US highways.
While
some might even applaud GM’s move of extinguishing much
of its certified gas-guzzlers in these trying times, it
had come at a high, if not cruel, price: some 8,350 jobs
would be cut at the four affected factories.
In
explaining the unprecedented decision, Rick Wagoner, GM
chairman, said the company was now shifting toward “more
efficient cars.”
Said
Wagoner: “We at GM don’t think this is a spike or
temporary shift. We believe that it is, by and large,
permanent.”
What
Wagoner meant by “more efficient cars” was, that GM
would start concentrating on building cars in the
$15,000 (P600,000) to $20,000 (P800,000) range. That’s
less than half the price of GM’s high-profit SUVs and
pickup trucks.
Civic,
Corolla do well
A quick
flashback: Since the 1990s, the Americans had been
accustomed to driving the Ford F-series and similar
pickup trucks. But last May, sales of the Honda Civic
and Accord, as well as the Toyota Corolla and Camry,
broke the market stranglehold of the F-series and its
truck brothers. It marked the first time since
December 1992 that a car—not a pickup—was America’s
top-selling vehicle.
The
reason is obvious: Go small and you go big in slashing
that gas consumption of yours. Not only in America but
also in the Philippines as well.
Suddenly, the power of the smaller car’s latent capacity
for fuel efficiency is being recognized worldwide with
uncompromising vitality. And that’s a natural result of
soaring world prices of oil: Hard times spawn practical
solutions.
Buying
habits
Actually, the unabated surge of oil prices has not only
forced our car manufacturers to refocus their approaches
to car production, it also radically affected the
buying, if not the driving, habits of Americans—and,
yes, Filipinos, too, for that matter.
Notice
that more and more people—not just the Americans,
really—are feeling the car crunch worldwide in relation
to a car owner’s gasoline budget.
With
fuel prices rising faster than Al Gore’s global warming
alert, people might one day wake up to find a liter of
gasoline in this country selling at P100 (P52+ at the
moment). In America, it’s now nearly $4 (P160) a gallon
(a gallon consists of nearly three liters). It’s now $7
to a gallon in Belgium and in most parts of Europe.
During
April, May and June, sales of bigger vehicles in America
have gone down drastically in favor of the smaller cars.
Pickup
trucks became the fad in America in the 1990s, when gas
didn’t cost much more than $1 a gallon.
When it
became $3.98 a gallon 18 years later, all the good vibes
of the F-250 and a fully loaded F-150 and the like had
turned utterly ugly.
Cushioning the blow
Jake
Fisher of US Consumer Reports, in a talk with The New
York Times’ David Leonhardt, said:
“While
the F-250 costs $100,000 and a fully loaded F-150 costs
about $70,000, a Ford Focus still costs less than
$40,000 over five years. A Honda Civic Hybrid does,
too. A Toyota Prius costs only a little more. A Subaru
Outback station wagon runs $50,000 or so.
“To put
this in perspective, the difference between a Focus and
an F-250 over five years is $60,000 [P2.4 million
approximately at P40 to a dollar]. The annual pretax
income of a typical family in this country [US] is also
about $60,000. So choosing an F-250 over a Focus is like
volunteering for a 20-percent pay cut. The relative
resale value might cushion the blow a little, but not
much.”
‘Small
ones’
Now one
more minor flashback: The V8 vehicles from America and
Europe used to dominate Philippine roads from the 1950s
to the 1960s, when the Corollas and the Civics, and the
Lancers and the Sentras were as alien to us as
Spielberg’s ET.
But when
the “small ones” from Japan started making their inroads
to the country in the 1970s, life had never been the
same again for the Filipino car buff. It meant smaller
cars meant smaller gas budget from then on. It meant a
life of ease.
With the
odious oil ouch, America has rediscovered—or was forced
to rediscover?—the zing of the “small one.”
“The new
economics of car buying is, ‘Don’t overbuy,’” Fisher
said. “Buy something you’re going to need most of the
time.”
Even as
the average Filipinos have been used to driving the
“small one” practically in the last 30 years or so,
that’d still be perfect advice from Fisher as we’ve been
reminded once more of the tremendous economic benefits
derived from driving a car with a small engine.
In this
country, whose middle-income segment is nearly half the
country’s population of 85 million, Japan has always had
a field day flooding the market with their “small
ones.” Most recently, in fact, manufacturers of small
cars from Korea (Hyundai) and China (Chery)—and, for a
little while, Malaysia was also into it with its
Proton—have joined the bandwagon.
Suicidal
Simple
logic says that if you buy a vehicle with a bigger
engine, you spend more gas when you use it. Thus,
driving a big vehicle has become suicidal these days
amid fears of more price increases of oil in the months
to come.
More gas
in your car means more cut in your salary. The missus
and the kids would surely whine seeing a big chunk of
the family budget pie going to Saudi Arabia, Russia and
the US, which, surprisingly, are now the world’s chief
producers of oil.
Thus,
the car that Fisher said we need most of the time is
definitely and absolutely the “small one.” The Japanese
carmakers had been mostly providing us that—with killing
efficiency—the last 30 years or so.
Cure-all?
But is
it the cure-all? Will the “small one” thoroughly fix
the motorist’s budget so as to keep the family happy and
humming smoothly the whole year through?
Not
exactly, really.
At the
very least, the “small one” would simply cushion the
impact every now and then of ever-perilous dents to the
take-home pay of the eight-to-five employee.
Take
America. Over there, an average motorist would need at
least $30,000 (P1.2 million) a year in gas budget at $4
(P160) to a gallon as of May 2008, compared with only
$10,000 (P40,000) in the 1990s.
A whole
lot of spendin’ goin’ on over there, huh?
Hybrid
car
Is there
a relief in sight?
Yes,
there is, but it’s not forthcoming. It will take more
time before man becomes finally freed from the
greed-clutches of nations that control oil, to include
Iran, Brunei and Qatar.
It might
probably take more years before your car’s dependence on
gas would virtually come to a halt—but happily, though,
the signs are already there. Man’s race in pursuit of
untying oil’s lynch on your car has seen the dawn in the
wondrous form of the hybrid car that was invented by
Japan’s Toyota a dozen years or so ago.
For,
indeed, the determined bid to discover the nonfossil
fuel to run our vehicles should be man’s ultimate goal
amid a perennially ugly backdrop of oil being under the
sole control of a greedy few.
The
seeds of discovery—and recovery—seem to be now in place.
Days
numbered
With the
hybrid car now part of the global agenda in the
automaker’s mind, the days of us being haplessly held
hostage by gas-powered vehicles could be virtually
numbered.
So, will
that car be gas-free 20, 30 years from now?
Are we
still going to talk about that tiger in your tank years
or decades from now?
Who
knows that by 2030 maybe, a liquid-free car would roam
the street and not even tap water is needed to run it?
Tank-less, thankless
Will a
tank-less car tomorrow then be in order?
If so,
never thankless would be the job of the one who comes up
with it.
By then,
when the race for relief is over, everybody could
happily let out a big collective sigh of relief.
But
until that time of salvation is here, until that day is
come, let’s do our own bit of helping everybody get past
that hump of a pump: Cut trips to the mall, ride the
public transport, plan trips, reduce eating-out sprees.
In
short, start making it a habit to save on gas by
spending your time mostly at home and, in the process,
ease the pain at the gas pump. Better yet, be a
homebody from hereon—and be a buddy once more to your
family and neighbors as well.
That is
a task not as daunting and as thankless as guzzling up
gas on that car sitting prettily at the garage—no matter
how small that thing may seem.
That
“small one” will still be terribly impossible, even
messy, when handled improperly. |
