Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant - always yours

100 BRAND RELEVANCE
resulted in a dominant position in an attractive market, especially
six years later when the price of oil nearly doubled again.
But Detroit auto manufacturers, their customers, and legislators
have again and again been unwilling to face such contingencies.
In 1978 an auspicious technological development occurred
that was important to the hybrid ’ s future. When a car brakes,
power is dissipated into the air through heat and is thus lost. An
engineer, David Arthurs, developed a way to collect this power
and use it to recharge the batteries. Termed a regenerative braking
system, it did much (along with a host of other innovations)
to make the hybrids of today feasible.
A note about battery - powered cars needs to be inserted here,
because their development is linked to the hybrid in regard
to technology and politics. In 1990, infl uenced by a battery -
powered GM prototype car sponsored by GM ’ s then - CEO Roger
Smith, the California Air Resource Board (CARB), searching
for way to meet the state ’ s Clean Air Act, declared that automobile
companies doing business in the state would have to produce
zero - emission vehicles that made up 2 percent of California
auto sales by 1998, 5 percent by 2001, and 10 percent by 2003.
That regulation stimulated activity in battery - powered cars.
The most notable battery - powered car was the GM EV1 subcompact.
Just over one thousand cars were produced and leased
from 1996 to 1999 at a substantial price premium. However,
given the EV1 experience, particularly its high manufacturing
cost, GM did not have confi dence that a battery - powered car
was viable. GM cars and those of competitors were ultimately
used as evidence in court and in CARB hearings to successfully
argue that the CARB standards were unrealistic and needed to
be relaxed. When CARB relaxed the 1998 standards in a step
toward getting rid of them on the basis that the technology, particularly
in batteries, would not be ready, GM, Ford, and others
gratefully killed the products. GM, in fact, tried to destroy all
such cars on the road. Rick Wagoner, GM ’ s CEO from 2000 to
2009, opined late in 2006 that GM ’ s biggest blunder was to walk