Category: default || By jt3y

I've been going to the annual Pittsburgh Auto Show since I was a freshman in high school. And for the last several years, I have come home disgusted. Two years ago, you could have seen a wider variety of cars walking from dealership to dealership on West Liberty Avenue. Last year's show was slightly better, but still mediocre.

Well, the show may finally have hit rock bottom this year, which would be a good thing, I suppose, because there would be no place to go but up. As with 2003's auto show, there's an empty feeling at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center (motto: "Home of the $7 nachoes!"). The 2005 Pittsburgh Auto Show has very few concept cars and not even a particularly wide variety of current production cars for inspection.

This may come as a shock to some people, but most of the current cars at the auto show are taken straight out of the inventories of local dealers. I'm not naive. I know this. But one car still had a parking receipt stuck to its windshield, for goodness' sake!

(Also, I swear that one of the cars was taken straight out of a dealer's service bay. In fact, it still had a half-eaten doughnut on the dashboard, and I think I saw someone's feet sticking out from under the bumper. By the way, Mrs. Kowalski, the brakes on your Dodge will be done Friday. ... OK, now I'm exaggerating --- a little.)

It may be a measure of just how low the Pittsburgh market has sunk in importance that we now get concept cars that debuted two and three years earlier at auto shows in bigger cities. And damned few of them. For this I paid $7 to park and $6 admission? And that was with a discount --- the normal admission price is $8!

Maybe I'm just cranky because the quality of the swag has dropped so alarming over the past few shows. We used to get yardsticks, bandage dispensers, ballpoint pens and little fuzzy googly-eyed doo-dads with auto company logos on them. What were the giveaways this year? Trash bags from the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board and "Froggy 98" bumper stickers. Harrumph!

The only thing that redeemed the show was a chance meeting with a General Motors executive who didn't identify himself. We thought he was a low-level sales drone at first, but a friend and I did some careful questioning, and learned that the fellow was too well-informed. (I "Googled" him this morning, and I think I know who he was, but since I didn't identify myself as a writer, I'm not going to identify him. Suffice to say, he was legit.)

He said that GM is getting ready to move into alternative fuels vehicles in a big way. The company's experiment with pure electric cars --- the much ballyhooed EV1 --- was an expensive flop because consumers found them too slow and too inconvenient to recharge, he said.

And GM has decided that so-called "hybrid" vehicles --- half-gasoline, half-electric --- are not where it wants to be in the long-term. Instead, he said, GM wants to go directly into cars powered by hydrogen fuel cells. The company is already testing them in Europe, North America and Asia and is getting up to 350 miles on one fuel stop.

General Motors' president, he said, has promised to make gasoline engines "obsolete" by 2010, and while many inside the company say they're skeptical that they can meet that goal, it's where GM has decided it wants to be.

Even the company's current cars and trucks are compatible with alternative fuels, he said --- very quietly, GM has built 2 million cars and trucks that have engine computers and components that will run on a mix of up to 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline. GM is also heavily involved in producing diesel trucks that will run on so-called "biodiesel" fuel, made from soybeans.

Now, our source said, GM is trying to prod the oil companies into installing the infrastructure necessary to sell ethanol, biodiesel or hydrogen for those fuel cells. General Motors, he said, is particularly worried that if it doesn't move quickly, the Japanese will get a jump on the alternative fuels market.

Given that our current model of fueling vehicles --- purchasing oil from crazy dictators and people who blow themselves up --- is not sustainable for very much longer, this is good news. And it's also nice to hear that Detroit is finally trying to out-think the Japanese, rather than just reacting to them. But I remain skeptical that "Generic Motors" is really taking a long term view of things, and not just a view of the next quarterly earnings report.

Well, I'll believe it when I see it, but our source was very enthusiastic, and he's convinced that alternative fuels vehicles are coming to GM showrooms --- and fast. Talking with him almost made the admission fee worth it. Scratch that --- it did make it worth it.

Unfortunately, I can't promise you'll bump into this guy at the Pittsburgh Auto Show. So, here's my advice: Stay home this year.