[AT] OT - Re: lookee what I saw ...Now RR

[Chuck Bealke]

On 6/12/2012 12:41 PM, Roy Morgan wrote:
> Is this what happened to Rolls Royce?
> They made them so well, they never wore out, so now few folks want to
> buy a new one.
>
Roy,

Rolls, alive and well,  was bought by BMW a while back and lives on as a 
pretty much hand built 12-Cylinder car.  Last year they set a sales 
record - over 3500 cars. Have a friend whose dad owns a drop dead 
gorgeous one (not too recent a model).  When I asked her about about its 
maintenance a couple of months ago while visiting and drooling a bit 
over the car, she indicated reliability was not its strong point.

BMW seems to be a pretty innovative outfit.  They are planning an 
expensive line of electric cars (i-series) built in and for (at first) 
Europe with carbon fiber in place of hundreds of pounds of steel. The 
heavy CF use will whack the structure weight to help counter the weight 
gain from the batteries. The fiber is made in a plant in Moses Lake, 
Washington, and then shipped to Germany.  (The CF plant was built in the 
last couple of years to take advantage of Moses Lake area's low 
electricity rates.)  It is a more labor intensive and complex to build 
components from CF than it is to stamp out steel components,  but it 
makes for a MUCH lighter car.

Chuck  Bealke
Dallas