Cleantech Convergence: $4/Gallon Gas Prices Driving Global Consensus

Convergence is a factor in driving technology acceptance, DVD players, accounting standard changes and similar globally applicable economic value drivers. The increase in demand-driven commodity costs is forcing auto manufacturers to tackle the issue of operating costs for auto purchasers. The more that the likelihood of a global standard emerges, the greater the market impact. This market momentum, rather than patent ownership or differentiation may end up being the decisive factor in leading to the non-gasoline alternatives.

Dale Buss revs up in BrandChannel:


"As pressures have mounted globally on automakers to leapfrog gasoline-based internal-combustion engines to the next era of mobility, many companies have insisted that they’re taking an “all-of-the-above” approach to future powertrains: They promised to offer every type of alternative.

At first, the realities didn’t match the rhetoric. Japanese brands concentrated heavily on hybrids; American OEMs pretty much followed suit and then heeded federal-government incentives in electric-vehicle development; and the Germans focused on converting European-tested diesels into “clean-diesel” technology that would work in the U.S. market as well.

But now, they all seem to be pulling into roughly the same orbit around alternative propulsion. In other words, more auto brands actually are taking an all-of-the-above stab at developing and deploying the powertrains of the future.

Case in point: Word has leaked that General Motors may be planning, finally, to produce a clean-diesel version of a passenger car, the Chevrolet Cruze compact.

Decades after GM screwed things up with diesel models that were balky and dirty, U.S.-based automakers pretty much had stayed away from mainstreaming diesels, relying on them only in heavy-duty pick-up trucks.

Over the last few years, however, Audi, BMW and Mercedes have been demonstrating that there’s a big appetite among American car buyers for diesel’s huge fuel-economy edge over gasoline engines. So apparently, GM finally wants to enter the growing diesel derby by 2013.

At the same time, the German brands have only lately been trying to catch up with Japanese and American brands in hybrids and, most recently, all-electric cars. Now comes word that they haven’t been moving fast enough: The German government, a big funder of automotive research, wants the homegrown brands to “step on it” in terms of deploying “electromobility,” as Chancellor Angela Merkel recently put it.

“The world is not going to wait for German inventions,” she reminded them.

The biggest immediate beneficiary of this trend will be American consumers, who increasingly will have a broad array of powertrain options to choose from, among almost all of their favorite brands.

And do you think that $4-a-gallon gasoline will push automotive rivals even further in the same direction?