Stop worrying and love your car

By Kevin Krolicki

DETROIT (Reuters) - A major automaker teeters on the brink of bankruptcy. Its major union strikes over demands for unprecedented concessions.

But it emerges from the crisis with a more flexible manufacturing base and a seemingly unstoppable ambition to lead the industry into a green future of environmentally friendly cars and record profits.

The game plan for General Motors Corp. (GM.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) in 2007 has an unexpected precedent: the history of arch-rival Toyota Motor Corp.(7203.T: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) circa 1950.

And as Iain Carson and Vijay Vaitheeswaran argue in "Zoom: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future" ($27.99, Twelve), the high-stakes game is still very much on -- pitting giant incumbents like Toyota and GM against a scrappy band of upstarts and entrepreneurs.

The prize: the chance to develop clean-energy technologies including a new generation of hybrids, biofuels, electric cars and fuel-cell vehicles that could power the automotive industry into a second century.

Carson and Vaitheeswaran, both correspondents for The Economist, make the case that while the auto industry is often dismissed as the problem when it comes to global warming and energy policy, it should be seen as the part of the solution.

For one thing, auto manufacturers remain the biggest spenders in the world on research, with more and more of that investment targeted on ways to produce cleaner cars.

"Since even America has woken up to the threats of climate change caused by the rising emissions of global-warming gases, the car industry is in the front line of the battle against carbon," they write.