Fixing Detroit: Experts have wide range of ideas

This is a consumer-based economy, and right now we’re seeing what happens when people stop consuming. A restoration of consumer confidence will not only help the automakers, it will also help other parts of the industry — car dealerships will benefit, and suppliers to the automakers will see increased production. It’s all about selling cars, and if people aren’t buying cars a bailout will only tide the industry over.

Until the confidence of the consumer is restored and people start buying cars again, the auto industry will need bailout after bailout.

Gary Starr, founder of ZAP (short for Zero Air Pollution),  a publicly owned U.S. company that makes and markets electric vehicles

History shows that 100 years ago none of the stagecoach manufacturers saw the advantages of the horseless carriage, as the first cars were known, so they disappeared. Similarly, modern conventional automakers have fought electric cars and fuel efficiency standards for decades. Now almost all foreign manufactures have higher-mileage vehicles than U.S. manufactures.

To stay in businesses, the Big Three U.S. automakers now need to team up with the nation's new breed of innovative car manufacturers to make our transportation sustainable, not dependent of foreign oil and safer for the environment.

President-elect Obama’s plan to put 1 million plug-in hybrid cars — cars that can get up to 150 miles per gallon — on the road by 2015 is a good start to putting the U.S. automotive industry on the road to recovery.

But we can go further. We should also make the White House fleet all-electric, mandate all federal fleets are either plug-in hybrid electric vehicles or 100 percent electric and provide tax incentives for consumers to purchase these vehicles. We need to ensure that all manufacturers’ electric vehicles qualify for the tax credits and loan programs, not just a select few.

Reuters file Former Chrysler exec Jerry York.

And why not a job program to retrofit gas vehicles and build new electric vehicles for the nation, just like we had a job program to build ships during World War II, or an Apollo-type program when we mandated that we would put a man on the moon?

Jerry York, former chief financial officer at Chrysler, current chairman, president and chief executive at private equity firm Harwinton Capital (CNBC interview, Nov. 19)

What I see as the best solution now is a small amount of bridging money for General Motors and Chrysler, as they are nip and tuck with their minimum cash requirements right now, and then sometime in 2009 they’d need to come up with a recovery plan [for the whole industry].

[To get a bailout] the automakers should be required to provide business plans with the steps they plan to take — that’s what we had to do at Chrysler in 1979 and 1980, and it worked very well.

Chrysler is simply not viable in its current configuration. Most of the growth in the automotive sector on a worldwide basis will be in emerging markets, and Chrysler has almost no position in these markets. Chrysler needs to merge with a foreign automaker that has a position in those markets [with or without financing].

A merger with General Motors not the solution. I have talked to 50 or 60 people since talk started about a GM merger, and I have yet to meet one that thinks it’s a good idea.

AP file Filmmaker Michael Moore.

Ford — on the liquidity front they made a smart move a few years ago and borrowed $26 billion. So they’re the only one of the Detroit Three that has cash in excess of their debt.”

Michael Moore, Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker (interviewed on CNN’s Larry King Live, Nov. 23)

I think what has to happen here is that Congress needs to pass some legislation, and our president-elect needs to do what [President Franklin] Roosevelt did.

When Roosevelt came in and when World War II faced the country, Roosevelt said to General Motors and Ford, 'You’re not going to build cars anymore. You’re going to build airplanes and tanks and guns and the things that we need for this war because we have a national crisis.' And so General Motors had to do what Roosevelt told them they had to do.

The same thing has to happen now.

President-elect Obama has to say to them, yes, we’re going to use this [bailout] money to save these jobs. But we’re not going to build these gas-guzzling, unsafe vehicles any longer.

We’re going to put the companies into some sort of receivership and we, the government, are going to hold the reins on these companies. And they are to build mass transit. They’re to build hybrid cars. They’re to build cars that use little or no gasoline.

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