Apr 05 2009
Will’s cherry-picking his facts again, this time on cars
George Will’s recent unpleasant collision with the fact-based world in regard to global warming has hopefully encouraged the folks who think that he’s reliable because he’s on TV every week to start taking his scribblings with a boulder of sea salt.
Today’s column is all about the horrendous socialism of Obama firing GM CEO Rick Waggoner. Most of what he has to say is debatable at best, but I was struck by the deceptive weighting of this line:
In February, Toyota sold 13,600 Tundra and Tacoma pickups and 7,232 Priuses. It sells the Prius at a loss, which it can afford to do because it makes pots of money selling pickups.
Tundras and Tacomas are two different lines of pickup trucks. The Tundra is full-sized, like the F-150s and Silverados he mentions earlier. The Tacoma is midsized, like the Nissan Frontier and Dodge Dakota. So Will compared the sales of two lines of trucks to one line of hybrid cars, when Toyota also sells a hybrid Camry, a hybrid Highlander, and three hybrid Lexuses, the GS and LS sedans and the RX crossover wagon. A fourth hybrid Lexus is slated for 2010.
Meanwhile, Will makes a great play of the fact that the Ford F150 and Chevy Silverado are the two best-selling vehicles in the U.S. Actually, in March, the Toyota Camry was second and the Silverado third, but then Will uses February totals. Anyway, the March sales numbers are: F150, 32,728; Camry (hybrid and regular), 25,783; Silverado, 23,508. Toyota’s truck sales as quoted by Will, therefore, fall wildly short of the numbers posted by Ford and Chevy — which don’t include sales of their smaller Ranger and Colorado pickups, unlike the figures given by Will for Toyota — which gives the lie to his statement that pickup sales make up for the money Toyota loses by selling the Prius.
Actually, Toyota’s overall profitable sales (which are taking a hit in the current market, of course) are what is propping up any losses they are incurring with the Prius. It’s debatable how much Toyota’s losing on the Prius, anyway, as it’s been on the market for a decade now and, as we all know, new technology gets cheaper over time. It’s possible the revised 2010 Prius, hitting the streets shortly, might even squeeze out a bit of profit.
Meanwhile, in pickup truck land, Toyota is widely assumed in the auto biz to have stubbed its toe in the pickup truck market. The full-size Tundra has only barely met the sales goals Toyota set for it when it invested nearly a billion dollars in a new plant for it in San Antonio, Texas, and even then only with lots of incentives on the hood. Indeed, one might make a case that Toyota isn’t really making any money on pickup trucks at all.
The point Will’s trying to make is that the government wants more efficient vehicles and the public doesn’t. But the public typically takes its cue as to what it wants from the automakers’ own marketing. Sport utilities have been around ever since 1948, when Chevy built the first Suburban — a passenger-carrying version of its 1940s panel trucks with four doors instead of two — but they didn’t become popular until Ford began pushing the Explorer and Jeep its four-door version of the Cherokee around 1990 or thereabouts.
And the incentive the Big Three had to push SUVs and pickups is that those vehicles are less costly to engineer and build than cars. They’re bigger, so making them meet crash standards was easier. Their CAFE goals were lower because they were classed as trucks, so they didn’t have to work on squeezing more fuel mileage out of them. And gas stayed cheap throughout the SUV era — until spring of 2008, anyway, when all hell broke loose several months ahead of the Wall Street crash.
Anyway, the point I’m coming to is that Detroit spends hundreds of millions on marketing and advertising, so they can develop marketing and advertising strategies that emphasize the benefits of smaller and more fuel-efficient vehicles. One of the ways — see previous post on the new Ford Fiesta — is to make great small cars in the first place.
Meanwhile, they’re already making progress by emphasizing crossovers, which are SUVs based on car platforms instead of truck platforms. Right there is an average three to six mpg advantage for the Ford Edge and Flex vs. the Explorer, the Chevy Traverse vs. the Trailblazer, the Dodge Journey vs. the Durango, the Toyota Venza vs. the 4Runner, and so on. They could do even more by subtly getting buyers to question whether they really need a wagon-type vehicle in the first place, guiding more folks to mid-sized sedans, which get another three to six mpg better mileage than crossovers.
Will’s main argument that the government shouldn’t be running car companies — and it’s debatable whether that will be true — really falls apart when you consider how badly GM and Chrysler were run in the first place. The only reason we’re not letting them fall on their faces is that doing so will cost this strangled economy another 3 million lost jobs — jobs that will take years to replace. But Will’s in the seven-figure income category, so this doesn’t faze him, or most of the people who sit across from him on ABC’s “This Week,” at all.
