GM Reps Green Up Launch Party for Eco TV Network
By Scott Doggett May 30, 2008
Celebrity poses with man in tree costume at launch party for green TV network.
By Scott Doggett, Contributor
The launch party for Planet Green, a 24-hour eco-lifestyle cable TV network that will displace the Home channel starting June 4, was anything but green.
The celebrities who attended Wednesday night 's event at L.A.'s Greek Theater mostly arrived in stretch limousines and gas-snorting SUVs. At least two – Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee and rapper Ludacris – arrived in personal buses.
The tabloid darlings strolled a green plastic carpet to a man in a tree costume to pose for paparazzi, oblivious to the live majestic oaks mere steps away.
Minutes later the celebrities were treated to cocktails "made from organic vodka" served in plastic cups and hors d'oeuvres made from macaroni and cheese served on plastic plates.Oddly, the greenest VIPs at the event that we're aware of seemed to be the two men from General Motors Corp., who brought with them a fuel-cell vehicle and some positive automotive news.
General Motors is the network's sole automotive sponsor.
The loftier of the two men in the GM hierarchy – Mark LaNeve, vice president of sales and marketing for GM North America – seemed only too pleased to be pulled away from the Hollywood crowd and hired entertainment that included the Blue Man Group – odd choice, huh, for a green event – to discuss the automaker's hybrid-vehicle plans with Green Car Advisor.
LaNeve said that while hybrid vehicles account for only 1 percent of GM's sales today, the automaker is "ramping up production" on its gasoline-electric hybrids.
In a meeting with Edmunds.com editors Thursday, LaNeve told Green Car Advisor that GM "is going to have to ramp up" its hybrid production – and the number of hybrids offered by its various brands "year after year."
Announcements Coming
The company will be "making some announcements soon" about further hybrid plans, he said.
General Motors has five hybrid models available now – the Saturn Vue Green Line, Saturn Aura Green Line, Saturn Malibu Hybrid, Chevy Tahoe Hybrid and GMC Yukon Hybrid – and will release four more in the near future.
Just as importantly, LaNeve noted, is that in March, April and May, fully 50 percent of GM's sales were vehicles achieving more than 30 miles per gallon in the EPA's combined city and highway cycle.
"A lot of people don't think of GM as having those vehicles, but we've got 17 vehicles that get over 30 miles per gallon," he said. "We just did a special edition of our Chevy Cobalt that gets better fuel economy than the Honda Civic." The civic is rated at 36 mpg in the combined cycle.
Hot Truck
One of the vehicles LaNeve was most excited about is Chevy's HHR, a retro-styled compact station wagon-cum-panel truck that gets 31 mpg combined.
"It's got the same basic flexibility, space and utility as an SUV. People are saying, 'I'm gonna get out of a truck-based SUV like a Dodge Durango and get into an HHR. My payment goes down, my fuel costs are cut more than in
half, and I've still got basically the same space.' We've got lots of vehicles like that are really good alternatives," LaNeve said.
The other GM representative at Wednesday night's bash was Dave Barthmuss (right), head of the company’s Western Region communications office and chief spokesman for environmental issues.
Green Car Advisor
said "hi" by means of a question he likely didn't expect: Isn't GM sponsoring a green network a little like Hershey's Chocolates sponsoring a weight-loss network?
The perception of General Motors' environmental performance doesn't match reality, Barthmuss replied without hesitation.
Like a Camry
He was quick to note that the Chevy Hybrid Tahoe – a full-size SUV packing a 5.3-liter V-8 – gets the same fuel economy (about 21 mpg in the city) as the Toyota Camry, "so you get the big vehicle with the same fuel economy" as the sedan. Score one for GM.
Barthmuss said America's largest automaker by volume of sales is putting more fuel-cell vehicles on the road than anybody else – more than 100 in California, New York and Washington, D.C. – and he said that the extended-range electric Chevy Volt and a plug-in Saturn Vue will be ready by the end of 2010.
(Honda Motor Co. is about to make that claim obsolete: it has said it will begin leasing its FCX Clarity fuel-cell car in three areas of Southern California next month and will ultimately have about 200 of the cars on the road.)
For its part, GM is "in the midst right now of a major transformation," Barthmuss said. "We are moving from a company that for the last 100 years was based on mechanically driven products to one that for the next hundred years will be based on electrically driven products."
Survival Mode
General Motors realizes it must make products as fuel efficient and as pollution- and petroleum-free as possible, he said, or life as we know it will cease.
Citing China and India, which are gobbling energy as never before as they grow their economies, Barthmuss said that decision-makers at GM "know we cannot plop our North American model of transportation down on those countries and expect the world to survive, so we have to find alternative sources of energy to power our alternative technologies.
"And we are doing more, I think, than any other automaker in terms of vehicle electrification, but not a lot of people know about it. I think what we have to do now is do things like this – sponsoring Planet Green – and put these vehicles on the road to prove that they work, that they are reliable, that they aren't science experiments."
Long-Term Thinking
Despite all of the efforts being made by companies worldwide to produce biofuels, Barthmuss said he has doubts about their long-term viability.
The quickest way to displace petroleum right now at the lowest cost to everybody, he said, is to have a vehicle that can run on advanced biofuels, whether it's biodiesel or cellulosic versions of ethanol that aren't brewed from plants used for food for humans or animals.
"But you don’t see many pumps out there for E85 ethanol," he said. "That's why we think that there's a great potential and future in plug-in electric-vehicle technology."
That said, he noted that GM is making more than 400,000 flex-fuel vehicles a year and that half of the automaker's vehicles will be flex-fuel capable before the end of this decade.
So, if you choose to tune into Planet Green, expect to see some of these nifty vehicles, because GM will no doubt be advertising them there.
Also, expect to see Caterpillar commercials, because the tractor maker is also a Planet Green sponsor. And we all know how well tractors and green things such as rainforests get along.
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