FROM THE EMAIL

Here’s a (forwarded) email I received recently. Supposedly it recounts the experience of a senior level Chrysler employee.

Monday morning I attended a breakfast meeting where the speaker/guest was David E. Cole, Chairman of the Center for Automotive Research (CAR), an Engineer with 40+ years automotive experience, full Professor at the Univ. of Michigan.

You have all likely heard CAR quoted, or referred to in the auto industry news lately. Mr. Cole 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 this very experienced automotive expert has had to listen to a newcomer to the industry; someone with zero manufacturing experience, zero auto industry experience, zero business experience, zero finance experience, zero engineering experience, and apparently zero brains tell them how to run their business.

Mr. Cole's favorite story is as follows: There was a team of Obama people speaking to Mr. Cole. 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 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 (quoting): "These laws of physics? Whose rules are those? We need to change that (while others wrote down the name of the law 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."

The contents of the email are almost certainly fabricated (I didn’t check Snopes) but given the Obama administration’s demonstrated competence, it wouldn’t surprise me if it were true.