RE: RNS and share price5 Aug 2018 20:02
The Saturn SL2 (and SL-1, SL-C from 1994) was a GM experiment to fight back against Japanese imports.
Instead of a monocoque shell, they went back to a chassis. Instead of a copper wiring loom, they went fibre optic.
It was a brilliant piece of engineering. The reduced use of copper made it lighter, cheaper and more reliable.
Saturn then produced the EV-1, which used metal hydride batteries, not lithium.
Depending on whom you ask, GM killed Saturn because it was so good, it made everybody else look bad.
Also, a car that is reliable means you can't make money on repairs and spare parts.
If everybody bought Saturn, who would buy the cwap the other marques are making?
In my opinion, the future is driverless Minicabs. How can people who live in apartment blocks park their own cars? I expect under floorpan inductive charging so the car just has to park above a charging plate to top up. I expect easy to hose down interriors that a combination of robot arms can clean: one has a brush attachment, with shampoo, one squirts water, and one blow dry. This means higher utilisation of the fleet, and fewer private cars sitting idle.
I am saying, there will be fewer cars, using less copper, but that doesn't mean the overall demand for copper will reduce. An old plumber told me that copper kills germs, which is why they used copper for water pipes traditionally. Waste pipes can be plastic all you like, but freshwater should come in copper.
We know cellulose is not water proof, so youghurt pots tend to have a plastic lining, which makes it a pain to recycle.
What if we coat cellulose containers with copper, or an alloy of copper?
Cellulose will decompose, and we can leach out the metal, or possibly directly electowin into Cathode plates.
If they, Dr, Welham et al, can work out a recycle sequence for containers, using leaching processes, that will be Nobel Prize material.
I rather fancy MasterLeach as a trade mark, for separating mining technology and municipal technology businesses. It makes a merger with TetraPak easier as well. AXM sells Masterleach to TetraPak, and still retains MetaLeach. In this particular dream, Tetrapak buys MasterLeach for £50billion, part cash and part equity. My share will be £1.5 billion.
I think we should give them some more options, if they can come up with MasterLeach.
Well, they would just set up another company, so we really should build a dungeon with a laboratory attached.
Just thinking like a capitalist.
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