GLG News by Jack Lifton, Managing Director
Analyses are solely the work of the authors and have not been edited or endorsed by GLG.
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January 19, 2009
Jack Lifton: The Technology Metals Age | seekingalpha.com
Recycling of municipal trash is today , in the Western world, is primarily just a political ploy focused on household trash, which when undifferentiated (unprepared as the scrap industry calls it) has no intrinsic value. In countries like the USA all of the big money in recycling such trash is made from the pickup, transportation, landfill, burning, or overseas shipping fees. Nothing at all is made from the recovery of metal values from such scrap. It is a gigantic scam perpetuated by those who collect all of the fees. Any special metals, either precious or technology, are recovered in low labor cost countries, if at all, by processses which are uneconomical and dangerous under Western rules and regulations. Industrial recycling is by contrast often and mostly too narrowly focused. Ferrous scrap, for example, is processed almost solely for its iron (steel) content, and the value of contained minor metals is usually overlooked or, worse, wasted. This cannot continue. -
More Public Relations Double Talk About Lithium Ion Battery Production in Michigan
January 13, 2009
GM unveils battery plan, may need more loans | www.forbes.com
We are now to believe that the greatest destroyer of corporate wealth in American business history, The General Motors Corporation, will, without any money or technology of its own, be singlehandedly creating the core of an "American" lithium ion battery industry by inviting the Korean Electronics Company, LG, to make lithium ion battery cells in Korea and bring them to Michigan for assembly into 'packs' large enough to power a Chevrolet Volt. Michigan's governor can hardly contain her enthusiasm and neither can the Corporate Wealth Destroyer All-Time-Champion, "GM's Rick Wagoner, who on his watch has overseen GM's market capitalization decline by 95% while he also ignored completely the electrification of cars until just recently when he devised a plan to jump start GM's alternate energy power train agenda by going two steps ahead of Toyota without the background, experience, or skill of that competitor. Is the result to be the further erosion of American industry? -
Absolute Nonsense From Korea About The Global Lithium Supply
January 12, 2009
Lithium for Second Battery Will Dry Up in 16 Years | english.etnews.co.kr
The claim that there is insufficient lithium accessible to support the electrification of small passenger carrying vehicles is false. The claim is made most likely for the purpose of affecting the price of shares in lithium mining ventures or the price of lithium metal or lithium chemicals. -
January 12, 2009
Toyota to Sell Tiny U.S. ‘Urban Commuter’ Battery Car by 2012 | www.bloomberg.com
Toyota's engineers believe that at its present state of development the lithium ion battery can only be scaled up from laptop powering size to, at most, a size that will safely power a 2 passenger car for a 50 mile run before needing a recharge. Today the state-of-the-lithium-ion-battery development is such that it is only useful in a limited temperature and load (weight carrying) range. Toyota has therefore decided only for marketing reasons to introduce now a small passenger carrying commuter vehicle powered by the safest most durable and long lived lithium-ion batteries it, itself, Toyota, has so far developed. Toyota's caution highlights GM's desperation. -
January 9, 2009
Battery Makers Target Forklift Market | www.greentechmedia.com
There are necessary steps to scaling up a technology. The passenger car makers either do not know what they are doing or are competing with each other in hypocrisy. In either case it will be years before any lithium ion battery technology is proven to be durable, rugged, safe, and long lived in applications requiring cells larger than those used today for laptop computers. Accelerated testing is notoriously unreliable for battery technology testing, because too many unknown factors and their interactions can only be measured in real time by prototype production units. The scale up of nickel metal hydride batteries with only small variations in their chemistry has now been going on for a decade. Nickel metal hydride batteries have performed very well. No single lithium ion battery chemistry has yet been tested in real time for more than a year in vehicle size prototype. Kawasaki is concerned with known failure modes, and has chosen NiMH batteries to minimize its risk. -
January 7, 2009
Auto Industry Growth at Dead End | www.thebigmoney.com
It is not at all surprising that the American owned and operated OEM automotive industry has declined domestically nor should it be a surprise that the foreign owned segment of that industry is now also declining. There is no point at all to manufacturing purposely short-lived durable assets in the USA. Ruthless competition for raw materials and energy coupled with a surplus of low cost labor overseas have propelled unit costs of producing durable goods in the USA to an all time high. The OEM American automotive industry has not had an easy let-down; it has had shocks from the withdrawal of easy credit to the foolish consumer class that finally had to be drawn from the totally unqualified just to keep up the fantasy of open ended growth. Now comes the reconciliation of what we can do with the resources we have modified by what should we do. Government can only address the second part of the question. The laws of supply and demand will give the answer to the first part. -
December 29, 2008
Toyota delays Mississippi assembly plant | www.msnbc.msn.com
Toyota has both manufacturing and financial flexibility perhaps more so than any other OEM automotive assembler on earth. But even Toyota cannot afford to continue a marketing strategy laid low by external factors it did not foresee. The American credit market has been stopped dead in its tracks by greed, short sightedness, unethical, and illegal behavior. If the American economy is to be brought back to an even keel in a way to insure that it remains there then it will be necessary to reduce both the size and power of cars made in America no matter who owns the companies that make them. Oil is going to be more expensive in dollar terms in the future than it has ever before been in American history. Foreign demand for oil and oil products, such as plastics, will rapidly erode America's per capita domination of oil-use statistics, and the first statistic that will have to change is average miles per gallon for noncommercial use. The age of the small car has arrived. -
December 22, 2008
Platinum Falls to Gold's Level | online.wsj.com
The global OEM automotive industry is going to double in size by 2015. The electrification of cars will develop slowly, if at all. Therefore the demand for platinum group metals for exhaust emission catalysis will also double by 2015. The prinicpal power train growth will be in diesel and turbodiesel. Unless there is a game-changing innovation in exhaust emission catalysis this will demand much more platinum that is in use today. -
December 17, 2008
Long-Lived, but Not Immortal: Fears Fade on Hybrid Batteries | www.nytimes.com
The success of the nickel metal hydride utilizing hybrid power train is one of the truly outstanding successes of Japanese automotive engineering, and it demonstrates clearly the short sightedness of American OEM automotive management. The nickel metal battery was invented in a suburban Detroit laboratory by a company, Energy Conversion Devices, Inc, which was at the time looking for a material to store hydrogen in the solid state. The idea was to create a safe hydrogen 'fuel tank' for vehicles. At that time the nickel cadmium rechargeable battery was being discontinued for reasons of he toxicity of cadmium. ECD decided to try a developmental hydrogen 'alloy' in place of the cadmium, and the rest is history. The new rechargeable battery was offered to GM, but it was not as capable as an electric car traction battery as lead-acid so GM lost interest. Toyota however had another idea, the hybrid battery electric/ internal combustion drive. The rest is also history. -
Why Has Toyota Slowed Down Its Agenda To Build Its Best Selling Prius In North America?
December 16, 2008
Toyota delays Mississippi assembly plant | www.forbes.com
The Prius line of best selling hybrids in the world is due to be expanded next month with the introduction of several new models at the Detroit 'International" Auto Show. Most of the Priuses made are now sold are sold in North America. The Prius is only built in Japan. The nickel metal hydride battery (NiMH), used for the Prius, based on a rare earth metal (lanthanum) alloy with nickel and cobalt, is made only in Japan by Toyota. Has Toyota been looking for an excuse not to build the Prius in North America? Was the genral sales slowdown too good an excuse not to use? -
Ford's Fusion Hybrid With Its Advanced Nickel Metal Hydride Battery May Crush The Chevrolet Volt
December 15, 2008
First Drive: 2010 Ford Fusion Hybrid | www.autoblog.com
While GM ignored the success of the Toyota Prius apparently for no other reason than that they wanted the public to believe that it wasn't invented here Ford decided to watch and learn. Ford has now reached the point where it about to challenge Toyota and Honda for a place in the hybrid sun. There is no longer much point to continuing the development of the Chevrolet Volt, or, for that matter, to continuing the existence of GM as an incompetent and bloated bureaucracy with far too much production capacity for making cars that no one wants to buy. -
December 12, 2008
Green Obama’s official limo is a gas guzzler | www.timesonline.co.uk
Battery powered utility vehicles such as industrial forklift trucks and the 'traction' motors that pull 100 ton+ airplanes into and out of their 'parking' slots at airports are very impressive. However, to put forward the idea that there is a comparison between and a possibility of utilizing them to replace any part of the huge fleet of diesel and gasoline engine powered freight carrying trucks that keep the commerce of the USA and the rest of the world flowing is very misleading. It's time to take a deep breath and to look at what electric vehicles and hybrids cannot do in our motorized society. -
Toyota's Business Model is The Reason That Detroit Should Not be Bailed Out
December 10, 2008
Toyota Tsusho Launches Rare Earth Business | www.toyota-tsusho.com
There is a simple reason that Toyota has grown steadily over the last 25 years from a maker of low quality inexpensive cars for the Japanese domestic market into the world's largest and most profitable-from the sale of vehicles-auto maker. The reason is long term planning coupled with continuous feedback sought from its customers on how to improve its products. No matter what is said about the management of General Motors it, the arrogant and self-absorbed and self perpetuating group that has run GM for more than 25 years has failed miserably to even notice how Toyota achieved its success. Now in league with politicians bought and paid for by union interests the pathetic management of GM having exhausted its right to a seat at the free market capitalist table will apparently simply continue on as a nationalized company until finally it cannot sell anything and simply disintegrates on the same day as its 3rd or 4th government handout is finally refused. -
Not All Metals Are Commodities. Critical Ones Must be Recycled No Matter What The Cost.
December 9, 2008
Back at junk value, recyclables are piling up | www.iht.com
As finite supplies of critical raw materials are used up or squandered in dissipative uses from which they cannot be economically recovered their supply becomes more and more price sensitive. Many minor metals are for this reason rapidly becoming more valuable even though this fact has been masked by the blind attempt of the investment community to class all metals as 'commodities" and to denigrate their value and to simplify ignorantly the amount of work necessary to restore their production. -
December 8, 2008
Short Supply: American-made Electric Car Batteries | www.evworld.com
General Motors has failed completely to support its local nickel metal hydride battery maker, COBASYS. Earlier this year when Chevron, one of the joint partners in (C) Chevron (O) Ovonic (BA) Battery (SYS) Systems said it would no longer fund the unbroken annual losses of COBASYS and that its partner, Energy Conversion Devices, Inc, was free to do so on its own, it looked as if COBASYS would soon be gone, since ECD admitted it did not have 88 million dollars to cover COBASYS' expected deficit for fiscal 2008-9. General Motors leaped into the fray and said that it would buy out Chevron and ECD's interest in COBASYS and that it, GM, would use the company ultimately as an intake center for lithium-ion batteries. This hasn't happened. COBASYS batteries for the 2007 model year of GM's hybrids were 100% recalled, so the idea of putting this failed company in charge of li-ion battery quality control seemed lame even to those who still believe GM's PR about the Chevrolet Volt. -
December 8, 2008
Revolutionary Wheel for Electric Cars Puts Guts Inside Wheel | gas2.org
One powered wheel and a battery of any type can make a motorbike, two powered wheels and a battery of any type can make a powered freight or passenger carrying cart, three or more powered wheels and a battery of any type can make a car, 8, or more, can make a truck, and with a third rail or an overhead wire connection 8 or more can make a bus, passenger carrying railcar, freight carrying railcar, subway car, etc. The size of the wheel and of its contained motors can be increased to make long haul freight or passenger carrying vehicles. -
November 10, 2008
Automakers struggle to survive past mistakes | www.forbes.com
Three years ago a former Chairman of an American OEM automotive company told me that the problem with GM, Ford, and Chrysler was that they all believed originally that the Japanese would never learn how to make cars that Americans would buy, and, then, after that turned out to be false they simply decided that there was nothing to be learned from the Japanese who must have been successful, they thought, simply by emulating them. These men, and they were and are all men, are myopic and incompetent. It is their fault as much as the fault of the monopolistic union that the domestic American OEM car companies and their supply base have failed. Let's please get rid of them immediately. -
November 10, 2008
Auto-Industry Crisis Tests Obama | online.wsj.com
The backbone of American manufacturing is made up of profitable, high-productivity companies in a variety of industries, which create or find a way to manufacture the latest and most relevant technologies for our health, safety, workplace productivity, or leisure. The backbone consists also of those companies whose workers income is directly related to their productivity and directly related to their employer's ability to mass produce innovative and important products. The backbone consists only of those companies that can give their workers benefits such as health care and pensions while the employer still makes a profit. Those companies that create wealth are the backbone of American industry not those that destroy wealth. -
November 10, 2008
Emanuel Urges Aid for Auto Industry | www.nytimes.com
Short term planning, or no planning at all, got the American owned and operated OEM Automotive industry into the predicament it is in today. Not only are the current managers of these companies not 'car-guys' they are also not manufacturing engineering or quality management 'guys.' You cannot decide to change over a vehicle line, and then change it again during the changeover, without risking total failure of both the car and its maker Designs need to be finalized, technologies need to be chosen, and supply contracts need to be put in final form years before 'new' cars can hit the road. The GM, Chrysler, and Ford managers have been playing politics for so long that they can no longer build cars without political content that may be impossible using technologies that are unproven and even untested. This is politically motivated BS of the type that drives the 'promise' to achieve lofty goals simply by spending huge amounts of public money with no real plan! -
November 7, 2008
Automakers and Union Seek Help From Pelosi | www.nytimes.com
It is incredible that anyone would consider financing the further operations of the American OEM automotive industry without insisting first that its current management be replaced as a precondition. The enabling legislation creating the facility to lend taxpayer originated funds include the following regulations that the Department of Energy is to follow: "before it can lend money, the Energy Department must conclude that the borrower has assets that exceed its liabilities, and is likely to be able to repay the principal and interest."
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