Environmentally friendly and sustainable fuels are the future which almost all vehicle manufacturers are trying to work towards, especially now when everyone’s financial future is so unstable, it is those manufacturers who can hold their place for the long haul which will survive.
Holden are pushing the production of their ethanol fuelled car particularly hard, as they plan to be able to reuse household waste as a green fuel. GM-Holden plans to turn its current Commodore model into a new ethanol fuelled vehicle for the future. Their Managing Director, Mark Reuss has said ‘We are committed to having locally built Holdens running E85 on the market by 2010.’
For the Holden manufacturer, biofuels will become a lead alternative fuel for their vehicles, since ethanol is a renewable fuel and the costs to modify existing technologies and systems to make it viable are relatively low. Plus, ethanol has the unique ability to be produced from waste. The E85 fuel which the ethanol powered Holden is intended to run on is a mixture of 85% ethanol and 15% petrol. The Managing Director of GM Holden hopes the introduction of this alternative fuel will reduce the dependence of Australian motorists on foreign oil.
The development work for the E85 Commodore is already well on its way and the company are also in discussions with the US biofuel company Coskata, to enable them to build the first local cellulosic ethanol plant in Australia.
And, in contradiction to many of the other predictions currently circulating, Reuss also remains confident that 2009 will actually be a better year for the car industry, as well as having it mark a transformation of the Holden brand. He says that the key to success for manufacturers ‘will be innovation and an eye for using less foreign oil by increasing efficiency or replacing it altogether’.
The need to address climate change while at the same time capture what little of the car buying market are still buying requires a careful consideration of what people really want, as well as what they need and it is the manufacturers who are willing to change for the future, not just for the short term, who will ultimately survive.