US President Barack Obama took to the wheel of a new electric car on Friday on a Detroit-area tour of the revitalized auto industry, touting his economic policies but urging the need to do more.
“Pretty smooth,” the president said as he drove a short distance at the wheel of the Chevrolet Volt — seen as a key to the future of General Motors — in a carefully staged photo-op outside the Hamtramck factory near Detroit.
Earlier on Friday Obama, speaking to workers at a Chrysler plant, said that four consecutive quarters of economic growth was a “welcome sign” of recovery, as he touted the benefits of a government bailout for US automakers.
PHOTO: AFP
Though the second quarter growth figure of 2.4 percent was slightly lower than expected, Obama pointed out that the economy was shrinking at a rate of 6 percent when he took office.
“So that means it’s now been growing again for one full year. Our economy is growing again instead of shrinking and that’s a welcome sign compared to where we were ... But we’ve got to keep on increasing that rate of growth and keep adding jobs so we can keep moving forward,” he said.
Obama, facing pressure ahead of the November congressional elections, is seeking to make the case that the auto sector survived a brutal recession because of his administration’s policies.
Just over a year since GM and Chrysler emerged from a bankruptcy process designed by Washington, Obama acknowledged the need to create jobs in an economy where unemployment stands at 9.5 percent.
However, he argued that his decision to make available US$60 billion in public money to prop up US automakers had saved close to a million jobs.
“Independent estimates suggest that more than one million jobs could have been lost if Chrysler and GM had liquidated,” Obama said.
“If we had done nothing, not only were your jobs gone, but supplier jobs were gone, and dealership jobs were gone and the communities that depend on them would have been wiped out,” he added.
He pointed out that GM, Chrysler and Ford — the only one of the big three US automaker not to take bailout money — are all profitable today, for the first time since 2004.
GM returned to profit at the beginning of this year, transforming last year’s losses of nearly US$6 billion dollars into a respectable profit of US$865 million in the first quarter.
The company is poised to re-list on the stock exchange, a move that could help it pay back the US$43 billion of US taxpayer money it still owes.
The company said on Friday that it is boosting production capacity for its new Chevrolet Volt due to strong public interest in the electric car that goes on sale this year. GM will now have a production capacity of 45,000 vehicles in 2012, up from its previous plans for 30,000 vehicles.
At Chrysler, the picture is slightly less rosy, but the firm is expected to report a profit this quarter.
As Obama visited the Chrysler plant on Friday, chief executive Sergio Marchionne announced that he would not proceed with the planned closure of a plant in Michigan, and would instead put a new team to work, creating 900 jobs over the next year.
The jobs will staff a second shift at Chrysler’s assembly plant in Sterling Heights, Michigan, just north of Detroit, which makes the slow-selling Dodge Avenger and Chrysler Sebring midsize sedans.
In the fall, the company plans to start selling new versions of the cars that it says will be updated from top to bottom. The second shift will begin in the first quarter of next year, Chrysler said.
The third US automaker, Ford, avoided bankruptcy during the crisis, and has reported five consecutive quarters of profit.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
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