GM's Vanity Fair
It started when I had an unpleasant encounter with a huge, new Cadillac Escalade at the intersection of Fountain and Highland. The Caddy was in front of me going eastbound across Highland. The driver, confused, decided to stop in the middle of the intersection and attempt to make a left turn onto northbound Highland. I decided to go around him to the right because I wasn't about to get trapped in the middle of that intersection on a Friday evening with hideous traffic everywhere from the closure of Hollywood Blvd from Orange to Highland to accommodate the preparations and security for the 79th Academy Awards®.
The driver of the Caddy decided that maybe what he was doing wasn't a good idea and he was pissing off not just me, but westbound traffic on Fountain trying to cross on the green light. At the moment I decided to go around him, the driver decided to continue on Fountain rather than turn onto Highland -- which was stopped like a vast six-lane parking lot.
He honked at ME because I punched it to make it out of the intersection and in front of him. Who would want to be behind him? On Fountain, the unofficial freeway between West Hollywood and Silver Lake, you are supposed to be a local driver (no tourists) who knows how to drive fast and dodge the cars trying to turn left where there is no left turn lane. It's Mr. Toad's Wild Ride -- but for real.
As I drove to his right side, there was a sticker on the passenger door proclaiming it the official vehicle for the Vanity Fair Academy Awards® party. At least the erratic behavior made sense now. The driver was a limo driver and not too familiar with the Hollywood area traffic problem
s. It also explained the Michigan manufacturer plates on the truck. But what really irked me was the sign it had on the dashboard: This Caddy was a flex-fuel truck that could run on ethanol and GM wanted to make sure the celebrities it was shuffling around knew that this "Ghetto Limo" (as it's called around here) had some "green credentials".
The whole ethanol craze has been exposed for the fraud it is many times. I guess GM hopes no one had read the countless articles that talk about the inefficiency of corn-based ethanol. E85 burns much less efficiently that regular gasoline or even sugar cane-based ethanol. So you end up burning more ethanol than gasoline which manages to cancel out the cost advantage of ethanol.
We don't grow sugar cane in the US, we grow corn. And the mega-corporation farmers like being the current pet of the Bush Administration that keeps whopping tariffs on sugar cane-based ethanol. The tariff on imported ethanol from Brazil and other countries keeps our corn farmers and their burgeoning ethanol plants safe from foreign competition. This is another glaring example of corporate welfare. Don't look for the Democrats to change those subsidies anytime soon either.
I wonder if GM brought in its own ethanol fueling tanks to fill up these massive beasts. In case you hadn't noticed, there aren't any ethanol fueling stations in Los Angeles. According to E85Refueling.com there are exactly four ethanol fueling stations in California. Three are government-run facilities: Lawrence-Berkeley National Laboratory (in Berkeley), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (in Livermore) and Vandenberg Air Force Base (in Lompoc). The only consumer filling station is at Pearson Ford Fuels in San Diego.
So even if some Hollywood celebrity or mogul wanted to buy a flex-fuel Cadillac truck, there would be no refueling station to fill it with E85. I wonder if GM explained that to its gratis riders?
GM really missed an opportunity to be "green" in Hollywood. This was the year that the Academy Awards® became a "green event" (whatever that is) and they gave two Oscars to the Al Gore documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. The documentary won Best Documentary Feature and Melissa Etheridge won for Best Music (Song) for "I need to wake up".
There are two big Oscars® parties in LA after the Academy Awards®. The biggest and glitziest is the Elton John AIDS Foundation party which was held at the Pacific Design Center. The other big event is the annual Vanity Fair party at Morton's restaurant. Both events are in West Hollywood, just a block away from each other.
GM's 2007 Cadillac Escalade was the official limo service for the Vanity Fair party. It was, as usual, a star-studded event. Ellen and Portia were there. So were Tom Cruise and Katy Holmes (Tomkat). So was Jennifer Hudson. GM's fleet of black Cadillac Escalades was everywhere in and around my hometown, and I had the misfortune of seeing way too many of them. In the gridlocked traffic around the Kodak Theater and the jammed streets from Hollywood to West Hollywood, these SUVs get their worst fuel economy. These Caddys would be lucky to get 10mpg during their service.
But GM needs to sell the big SUVs to make money. And if you can live with the false promise of ethanol or E85 as some sort of fantastic solution to our dependence on fossil fuels, then you are really willing to suspend disbelief and you belong in Hollywood. Despite its size and dismal economy, the new Cadillac Escalade still sells well here in LA. Many limo companies have added the new Escalade as a fleet vehicle and they are still used by many as a Beverly Hills mommy-mobile or a battle wagon for anonymous (you can't see inside) transportation (or "invasion" as some call it when you see a bunch of these things coming down the road).
But what GM may not know (outside the Detroit bubble) is that limo fleets are changing in LA. Sure, we still see the Lincoln Town Car everywhere, but as I've written in the past, the Audi A8L is in regular livery service as is the wildly-successful new Mercedes-Benz S-Class sedan. I've even seen several BMW 7-series with TCP (taxi cab permit) numbers tattooed on the back bumper.
I talked with an Audi A8 limo driver at the car wash the other day. He says that his company (CLS) has an exclusive contract with Audi for the A8 and that Audis are in high demand. Most of their business is with corporate accounts that need to chauffeur executives and celebrities around town, do airport pickup duty and the like. In LA, those accounts are primarily studio or production-related accounts. My limo driver car wash friend told me that the only drawback to the A8 was the trunk size and passenger capacity. If you pick up a party of five at the airport, there just isn't enough trunk space or even passenger capacity to carry everyone with luggage. So what's the solution? They just send another A8 -- not a Lincoln Town Car.
GM could have sent a DTS or STS to be the official car for the Vanity Fair party. Those sedans would have been the livery car of choice if Ford had abandoned the Lincoln Town Car. Maybe GM doesn't think that its Cadillac sedans can stand up to the German competition yet.
I think the so-called "Ghetto Limo" Escalade was a bad choice for GM. It c
ould have sent a fleet of black Saturn Vue Green Line hybrids to do the same thing. GM would have gotten much better "mileage" out of something different like that. Toyota does it with the Prius and we have Prius limousines/taxis here in LA. GM could have blacked out the windows of the Vue, dressed up the wheels with some bling and then bragged that it got double the fuel mileage of a traditional big SUV.
Alternatively, GM might have been better served by showcasing the all-new GMC Acadia. The Acadia doesn't create a shadow the size of a house; and in black trim, with black leather, blacked out windows and chrome wheels, it would have showcased a big crossover with lots of interior room and a more eco-friendly V6 engine under the hood. It's also much newer
product that is still scarce on the streets of LA.
Who advises GM on these things? Didn't someone tell the marketing guys high in the sky, in the GM-Renaissance Center Tubes, inside the Detroit Bubble, that Leo DiCaprio was going to tell the world that this was the first "green" event for The Academy Awards®? Or maybe that flex-fuel isn't an option in LA? Did the gurus not know that the Oscar® for Documentary Feature was going to Al Gore and his producers for "An Inconvenient Truth"? Next time around, GM needs to talk to someone actually living in Hollywood before the next Vanity Fair blunder.
