Petrol engines will rule for at least another decade - top GM executive

The car industry may be all atwitter with talk of plug-in cars and hybrid engines. But there was a cold, hard assessment on the ongoing dominance of petrol today from Bob Lutz, the veteran vice-chairman for product design at General Motors.
Lutz, a top lieutenant to GM's chairman Ed Whitacre, predicted that more than 90% of the automotive industry's sales will continue to be petrol-driven vehicles for at least another decade - because the vast majority of motorists simply will not pay extra for the more expensive technology of eco-friendly cars.
"For the next ten years or so, we're going to be heavily dependant on the internal combustion engine," Lutz told a group of reporters, including The Guardian, at the Detroit motor show. "It's going to be years and years before [alternatively powered vehicles] even make up 10% of the US market."
Unless the cost of fuel at the pump rockets, Lutz said the cost of cars such as GM's own widely hyped Chevrolet Volt, which can generate its own electricity on the go, are simply going to be too high to snatch significant market share.
The problem, he argues, is straightforward economics - parts and components for electric vehicles are not being manufactured in sufficient volumes to make them competitive. If a manufacturer set out today to invent the internal combustion engine, Lutz said petrol-powered cars would initally cost "$200,000 each" because of a lack of large-scale factories to make, say, piston shafts.
"Other than the 5% of the public who will willingly make a sacrifice to buy green vehicles, the other 95% will ask 'what am I getting? What's the deal?'" said Lutz. "They're not going to spend an extra $5,000 to $6,000 on technology they don't need and don't particularly care about."
A 77-year-old industry authority who was a top figure at Chrysler during the 1990s, Lutz has never been one to hide his opinions - two years ago, he caused a raising of collective eyebrows by describing global warming as "a total crock of shit".
His views have since mellowed slightly - and curiously, he has some sympathy for a graduated tax on petrol to encourage the shift towards greener motoring. Although he stopped short of endorsing such a policy, he said a government commitment to increase fuel tax by, say, 25 cents per gallon annually, would create visibility both for consumers and carmakers.
"It would have the benefit of giving automobile companies a planning base and of giving families who own a vehicle a planning base," said Lutz, suggesting that carbuying couples might say "look, sweetheart, we'd better go one size down because we know what fuel prices are going to do".
That's a considerably more radical suggestion than the Democratic speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, is willing to countenance. Visiting the Detroit show, Pelosi waxed lyrical about using "the soil, the wind and the sun" as fuel, adding that green technology was "a moral issue if you believe, as we do, that this planet is God's creation".
But when asked about the possibility of raising petrol taxes, she was blunt: "There certainly is an advocacy for such a position. But it certainly doesn't have a majority in the United States Congress at this time."
Incidentally, there are those who feel that America's leading carmakers were short-sighted in the run-up to the global economic crisis in concentrating too hard on gas-guzzling trucks and sports utility vehicles, rather than moving faster towards smaller vehicles. Lutz, who is the top four executives at America's biggest carmaker, isn't having anything of it, pointing out that nobody anticipated the volatility of fuel prices over the past two years - and that the gestation period of a new model of car is at least 36 months.
"People say 'those dumb Detroit companies just didn't get it - they just kept building trucks as oil prices rose'," said Lutz. "Some of your colleagues think designing and producing new cars is like putting the evening's edition together and then printing it the next day."