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Defying the world economic downturn, Panama is spending $5.25bn in the first major expansion of its canal since it was opened in 1914.

It is a monumental undertaking that promises to shake up global trade routes, making it easier and cheaper to transport Asian goods to the eastern United States and giving China better access to Latin American oil and other commodities.

“The whole Panama Canal expansion will have a significant impact on the way business is done from the Far East into the Caribbean and into the US itself,” said Jay Brickman, a vice president at Crowley Maritime Corp, whose container shipping division services the Caribbean and eastern United States. “It changes the dynamics and it changes the economy.”
The canal, long dreamed of by Spanish colonial rulers as a 50-mile link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and finally built by the United States, risked obsolescence because many new cargo ships are too big to traverse it.

Widening the waterway will mean it can handle a huge new breed of container vessels known as post-Panamax ships. They can carry up to 12,600 cargo containers, almost three times the current number.

It will also be a boost for trade from Asia to the central and eastern United States, with the port of Houston likely to see a big increase in traffic.

At the site of the Pacific entrance locks just west of Panama City, excavators with buckets big enough to hold a large car dump rock and dirt into massive yellow trucks with wheels twice as tall as an average person.

Some 152 million cubic metres (5.37 billion cubic feet) of earth and rocks will be chiseled, blasted and dredged for the expansion that includes new locks at both ends of the canal, equivalent to three quarters of the material excavated during the original project.

“It’s got to be the highest profile construction contract, if not in the world, certainly in this hemisphere,” said Joe Reeder, who was chairman of the canal in the 1990s, before Washington handed over control to Panama in 1999.

The most lucrative contract, worth about $3bn, was won by a consortium led by Spain’s Sacyr Vallehermoso and Italy’s Impreglio.

For the whole world
Panamanians are excited about the project, after many skeptics doubted Panama would administer the waterway well.

“The canal is not just for Panama; it’s for the whole world, we’re very proud of that,” said Santiago Coronel, 50, as he rang a bell on his ice cream cart in a leafy park surrounded by skyscrapers on Panama City Bay. “The canal is at the heart of the world. It is the best route between the two oceans.”

When finished in 2014, the larger shipping lane will allow through tankers capable of carrying one million barrels of oil, liquefied natural gas carriers and so∞called Capesize bulk cargo vessels that transport coal, metals and other commodities, slashing weeks off transit times and shifting global trade patterns.

“The expanded canal gives us a lot of options we don’t have today,” said Peter Gyde, president of A.P. Moller-Maersk Group’s Caribbean Sea Cluster at Maersk Line, which moves containers by rail across Panama because much of its shipping fleet outgrew the canal years ago.

Energy-hungry Asian countries will find it cheaper to buy oil from traditional US suppliers such as Venezuela as shipping costs come down and the amount of crude stored in the Caribbean will likely increase as improved logistics allow traders to take advantage of more arbitrage opportunities.

Failed French attempt
Crossing the isthmus by boat was a dream from the early years of the Spanish conquest of the Americas but it wasn’t until 1881 that a French team led by Ferdinand de Lesseps, the famed builder of the Suez Canal, launched an ill-fated attempt to cut a sea-level canal through Panama.

The effort was a failure and an estimated 22,000 lives were lost to malaria, yellow fever and accidents.

The United States finished the project 33 years and another 5,600 lives later, helped by improved excavation technology and the discovery that malaria and yellow fever are transmitted by mosquitoes.

The completed canal cemented US hegemony in the Americas and forever altered global trade.
“The creation of a water passage across Panama was one of the supreme human achievements of all time,” wrote US historian David McCullough in his 1977 book, “The Path Between the Seas.”

While the canal expansion will boost trade, shipping companies are concerned that it could be financed
by increasing tolls, which are already seen as high.

“The one thing that concerns the users of the canal today is that the canal has gotten excessively expensive in the last few years,” said Maersk’s Gyde.

He said at least one shipper recently saved money by rerouting ships returning to Asia around South America, a trip that adds as much as 8,000 miles, in part because of the high tolls. “That’s how extreme the carriers are willing to look at this.”

It is widely acknowledged that there will be a continued and long-term growth in demand for energy. By 2050 it is predicted that there will be one billion – or double the current number – of cars on the road. This figure alone demonstrates the scale of the energy challenge facing the world.

To meet such demand – as well as to address the challenges of climate change – we will need energy from multiple sources: biofuels, gas, hydrogen, diesel, solar, nuclear and oil. Indeed, it is true that we are at the start of a fundamental shift in our energy system whereby we become increasingly powered by alternative energies and cleaner fossil fuel. It is also true that it is becoming increasingly difficult to access ‘easy’ oil: North Sea production has been in decline since 1999. Yet sourcing new supplies of oil and gas has a crucial role to play in both enabling the world to meet rising demand but also in securing a successful transition into a world which is less fossil fuel dependent.

Innovative technology
Pressure on the oil and gas industry to push the boundaries of technological advancement to locate and source new supplies has therefore never been greater. Recent finds of new supplies all share one of two common traits: they are in more remote and harder-to-reach places than ever before or subsurface conditions are too formidable to enable the resources to be extracted economically at today’s prices. Companies are attempting to drill in deeper water than previously thought possible and corporate scientists are tasked with devising and deploying increasingly sophisticated and innovative technology to make supplies accessible.

As the search for oil and gas takes the industry into new locations, offshore production facilities are now being developed in what specialists call the ultra-deepwater. Such extreme engineering can be found off the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, where Shell is using advanced technology to access previously unreachable oil and gas. 320km from the Texas coastline, the 45,000 ton Perdido floating oil rig can be found sitting alone on the ocean’s surface, attached to the sea floor by nine mooring lines that stretch for 3,000m. When the Perdido platform starts producing oil and gas – or as industry engineers would say, goes on-stream in early 2010, it will tap into three oil fields and will be the deepest offshore drilling and production facility on the planet.  

Perdido is expected to produce around 100,000 barrels of oil and 200,000 cubic ft of gas per day. It will operate in water which is about 2,380m deep and tap into oil and gas reservoirs that lie a further 2,380m beneath the seabed. It was only as recently as 1996 that the industry was able to operate in depths of between 610m and 914m of water. The size of the structure, the fact that the area is prone to devastating hurricanes, the depth of the water and even the pressure within the oil and gas reservoirs themselves have required cutting∞edge technology to make accessing the hydrocarbons possible.

Engineering feats
Assembly of the rig itself was the first challenge facing the engineers working on the project. The Perdido oil rig was floated to its remote ocean location. The vast assembly operation first involved flipping upright in the water the cylindrical spar that provides the rig’s buoyancy and then, seven months later, using a floating crane to lift the 10,000 ton upper deck into place.

A 50,000 ton, 170m long spar – or in layman’s terms, a giant floating cylinder – was then put in place and sits below the ocean’s surface. The spar had to be towed 13,200km from Finland via Texas, where it was fitted for offshore installation, before continuing its journey to its permanent location in the Gulf of Mexico. Here it was secured to the seafloor by the nine chain and polyester mooring lines, spanning an area of the seafloor roughly the size of downtown Houston. By adjusting the tension on the mooring lines, the spar can move around an area of water equivalent to the size of a football pitch and position itself directly above any of the site’s 22 individual wells from which the oil and gas is sourced beneath the facility. The ability to move the spar is critical as it also allows the platform to locate itself in the safest possible location during potentially damaging storm conditions.

Subsea separation
Once in position, the next technological hurdle to overcome was actually extracting the oil and gas from the reservoir, a task made more difficult due to the fact that the pressure within the oil and gas in the reservoir is low. To physically move the hydrocarbons to the surface required (or ‘requires’) the development of a subsea boosting system to supplement the low pressure and pump the oil and gas to the surface.  At the same time, the system employed also undertakes an initial processing of the resources on the seabed itself – something novel to the industry. This process separates out the wanted oil and gas from the unwanted water and other elements that are produced from each well meaning the efforts of the boosting system are not wasted. The oil and gas from the site’s 35 wells is sent to a sump 107m below the sea’s surface where another pump then sends it to the surface.

Robots on the seafloor
The final challenge lay in actually transporting the oil and gas back to land. To enable the oil and gas to be transported by pipelines back to the mainland, Shell deployed the groundbreaking technology of subsea robotics. These remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) – which are controlled by engineers at the surface – were able to carry out complex ‘manual’ tasks, such as securing nuts and bolts and using saws to cut sections from pipes. At Perdido, the ROVs were used to install materials that enabled the structure to connect to a pipeline 123km away at a depth of over 1,372m – from which the oil and gas was moved to dry ground.

Perdido is the deepest oil drilling and production platform in the world and boasts the deepest subsea well in the world. To meet the world’s energy demands, further world records will inevitably have to be broken in the years to come. Technological advance and innovation has always been an important pillar of a successful economy, but this sentiment rings truer now in the oil and gas industry than it ever has before. Oil and gas remain a vital part of the world’s energy mix, and only by pushing the boundaries of scientific innovation will a secure energy future be realised.

Keeping customers happy has always been an important part of business.

But in the new economy, where disgruntled customers can trash a company’s reputation with a few online comments, that’s even truer.

It’s a difficult problem, but the solution could be remarkably simple, according to researchers at Nottingham University: just say sorry. A sincere apology is even more effective than an offer of financial compensation, the study found.

In fact, people are more than twice as likely to forgive a company that says sorry than one that offers them cash instead, according to academics from the Nottingham School of Economics’ Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics.
    
The researchers set out to find whether customers who have been let down continue to do business after being offered an apology.

They worked with a firm responsible for around 10,000 sales a month on eBay, controlling its reaction to neutral or negative feedback.

Some customers were offered an apology in return for withdrawing their comments, while others were offered compensation of either £2.50 or £5.

The simple apology blamed the manufacturer for a delay in delivery, adding: “We are very sorry and want to apologise for this.”

Customers offered money were told: “As a goodwill gesture, we can offer you £5 if you would consider withdrawing your evaluation.”

Some 45 percent of participants withdrew their evaluation in light of the apology, while only 23 percent agreed in return for compensation.

Customers could have been forgiven for deciding that the apologies issued in the study were insincere: they came in an impersonal way from a large, anonymous company that had a clear commercial incentive to say sorry.
But none of that seems to have mattered.

The results prove that apologies are both powerful and cheap, said Dr Johannes Abeler, co∞author of the study.

“You might think that if the apology is costless then customers would ignore it as nothing but cheap talk – which is what it is.

“But this research shows apologies really do influence customers’ behaviour – surprisingly, much more so than a cash sweetener,” he said.

“It might be that saying sorry triggers in the customer an instinct to forgive – an instinct that’s hard to overcome rationally.”

The green lobby has taught us all to recycle our leftover product packaging, and companies have done their part by increasingly using recyclable materials.

But even greater environmental benefits could be gained if those companies rethought their ideas about the shape and size of the boxes their products come in.
    
That’s according to Renee Wever, a researcher at the TU Delft Faculty of Industrial Design.

Smaller boxes are easier to handle and transport: it’s a seemingly obvious point, but one that tends to get overlooked.
“In thinking about packaging and the environment, most people exclusively consider the amount of material used, and waste material produced,” said Wever.

“This is what people try to reduce. But my research reveals that true gains can be made by concentrating on the transport aspect.”

If companies choose smaller-sized packaging or packages that come in a more easily stackable shape, they can get more products in a container or truck, significantly reducing transport costs and the associated impact on the environment.

Focusing on size will get us further than the usual preoccupation with recycling packaging materials, Wever believes. He wants companies to make environmental assessment an integral part of their packaging design process.

“Marketing considerations sometimes lead to large, flashy boxes,” he said. “People think this will help draw huge attention to their product on the shelves, and distinguish them from the competition, leading to better sales. If you then calculate that maybe as much as one euro per product could be saved in transport costs by choosing a slightly smaller or handier packaging size, now, that attracts some serious attention.”

Wever’s study specifically targets consumer electronics, such as TV sets – he performed part of his fieldwork at Philips, the Dutch electronics giant. But his supplemental research suggests that his conclusions about packaging apply in other areas too, such as consumer goods, including toys and furniture.

“In general, you could say that companies have paid too little attention, or too late, to their packaging,” he said.

“It’s remarkable, given the enormous sums of money involved. There is a real need for specialised packaging designers.

“These experts should understand design and styling as well as the underlying technical packaging and distribution aspects. Such people are now quite few and far between.”

If anyone ever wanted to buy a new car – be it a small run-around or a luxury sports brand – now is the time to flash the cash, if you have it. While car manufacturing is always going to be inextricably linked to the vagaries of heavy industry, currency fluctuation and recession-hit economies, the current credit crunch has been the most fierce recession (or depression, depending on your viewpoint) to hit the auto industry for decades, so much so that one of the world’s biggest car manufacturers has gone to the wall and succumbed to government bail outs.

On June 1st, car giant General Motors filed for bankruptcy protection, marking the biggest failure of an industrial company in US history.

The move into bankruptcy protection was backed by the US government, which took a 60 percent stake in the company, and the Canadian government, which took a 12.5 percent stake. GM, which had already received $20bn of emergency loans since the end of last year, said in its bankruptcy filing that its debts totalled $173 billion.

Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection gives a US company time to restructure its finances while being protected from its creditors. The restructuring will drastically change GM, with some 20,000 US workers thought likely to lose their jobs as the firm streamlines its operations. GM’s main European business, Opel, and its UK brand Vauxhall, will not be affected by the bankruptcy protection move.

GM, once the largest company in the world, had been losing market share since the early 1980s with analysts saying that it had been driven to bankruptcy because of high production costs and by the collapse in credit markets and consumer spending. GM was also slow to move away from producing gas-guzzling SUVs when consumers were looking for more fuel-efficient vehicles.

When one of the world’s largest car companies fails, others are soon to follow, though none yet on the same scale. In the UK, van manufacturer LDV has applied to go into administration, and American “giants” like Chrysler are looking to merge. Experts say that it will be a long time before the car industry recovers – particularly in the US, where Detroit, the hub of the country’s car industry, is described by auto trade journalists as a “ghost town”.

Yet on the other side of the Atlantic in Europe, manufacturers are so far managing to keep their heads above water, but if sales continue to decline at the same rate as they have been since the start of the year, it is only a matter of time before some start asking for state aid.

Cash down the drain
European car sales in May fell at the slowest rate this year as government∞backed incentives helped reverse declines at leading car manufacturers such as Volkswagen and Fiat. New-car registrations slid 4.9 percent to 1.27 million, a 13th consecutive monthly drop, the Brussels-based European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association said. Sales for the first five months fell 14 percent to 5.96 million.

Declines of 39 percent in Spain and 25 percent in the UK led the European sales contraction. However, the slump was tempered by a 40 percent jump in Germany, the region’s largest market, and a 12 percent gain in France.

Experts say that some of the turnaround experienced in Germany, France and Italy is due to state funding and state-backed initiatives. For example, state-funded sales and trade-in subsidies have shifted European demand toward smaller and more fuel-efficient models. Germany is offering a €2,500 rebate for trade-ins of cars older than nine years, Europe’s most-generous offer. The Italian government is offering payments of as much as €5,000 a car, including a €1,500 bonus on trade-ins of autos at least 10 years old plus incentives for buying low-emission vehicles.

British dealers are hoping for a sales boost from the UK’s scrappage scheme launched in May offering £2,000 incentives to people who trade in a car more than 10 years old. UK government figures show that more than 60,000 orders for cars under the UK’s scrappage subsidy scheme had been placed since the initiative was announced. Under the scheme, car buyers are given a £2,000 discount on a new car if they scrap one that is at least 10 years old. It will run until March 2010 and to benefit from it, a buyer must have been the registered keeper, for at least 12 months, of the car that is due to be scrapped. Half the scheme’s cash is being paid for by the government, with manufacturers contributing the rest. The government has set aside £300m to pay for the scheme, which could benefit up to 300,000 customers.

The UK car industry is hopeful that it will work, as it has done so for some German and Italian brands. For example, since similar schemes were launched in Germany and Italy, global sales by Volkswagen, one of Europe’s biggest carmakers, rose for the first time in eight months in May, the company said on June 12th. Volkswagen sales in Europe rose 3.1 percent to 278,933 cars, with the namesake brand delivering 9.2 percent more vehicles and the Seat division increasing by 3.4 percent. Fiat, based in Turin, Italy, sold 116,243 cars in Europe, an increase of two percent, with demand climbing 2.8 percent at the Fiat brand and 1.4 percent at Lancia.

But the majority of European car manufacturers are not enjoying such good fortunes. PSA Peugeot Citroen, Europe’s second-largest carmaker, said sales fell 5.9 percent to 165,167 vehicles. Ford Motor Co’s deliveries shrank by five percent to 125,395, led by a 20 percent drop at its Volvo brand. General Motors Corp’s group sales dropped 11 percent to 118,602 cars. European deliveries by Munich-based Bayerische Motoren Werke AG, the world’s biggest maker of luxury models, fell 14 percent to 65,490 while second-ranked Daimler AG in Stuttgart posted an 8.9 percent drop to 61,714 vehicles.

Porsche has seen its nine-month unit sales slump by more than a quarter after demand for its cars was hit by the worldwide recession. Global sales at the German carmaker declined 28 percent to 53,635 vehicles between August 2008 and the end of
April, compared with a year earlier.

On a financial basis, its sales fell 15 percent to ¤4.6bn, though the figures do not include those of Volkswagen, in which Porsche increased its stake to 51 percent in January and has indicated that it wants to increase further.

On a model-by-model basis, Porsche’s nine-month decline in sales was most pronounced for its Boxster and Cayman models, which fell a combined 47 percent. Sales of its core 911 model shed 18 percent, while those of its Cayenne four-wheel drive vehicle were down 25 percent. Porsche said it had experienced falling demand across the world, but that the decline was most extensive in the US and Canada. “In the first nine months of the ongoing fiscal year, the Porsche subgroup could not avoid the downward trend that has overtaken the worldwide automobile industry,” said Porsche. Separately, Porsche is also continuing talks with the Qatar over a possible investment by the Qatar Investment Authority, the country’s state run sovereign wealth fund, in the firm. Reports have suggested that the Qatar government wishes to buy a 25 percent stake in the car manufacturer.

Plants drying up
US car giant Ford – if giant can be used to describe any auto manufacturer these days – has also had a bad time of it so far this year. It has announced that it is moving its headquarters in Asia, and that it has posted a record loss in 2008 in Australia of $274.4 million – triple the loss of the preceding year. In Europe the company has had to accept state aid to keep it operational in some markets. To give the company some breathing space and to protect thousands of Spanish workers’ jobs, on June 18th the European Commission gave its approval to ¤51.9m of Spanish state aid for US auto maker Ford to restructure its Almussafes, Valencia plant. “The Commission takes the view that the project, involving eligible investments of some €490m by Ford, will significantly contribute to the development of the region’s economy without unduly distorting competition,” it said. “The investment guarantees the continuity of activity at the Almussafes plant and will maintain some 5,000 direct jobs at the plant,” it added.

The motor industry in the UK – which has been creaking under continued international competition for decades – is also in a far from healthy shape. Commercial vehicle production fell 73.5 percent and the number of new cars made fell 43 percent in May from the same month a year earlier, according to the UK’s Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT). In the first five months of 2009, car production was down 54 percent at 319,022 compared with the same period last year.

In order to stay competitive, in business, and afloat, several firms this year have temporarily shut factories or cut back production to run down existing supplies after the downturn hit demand for new vehicles. Workers at Honda’s UK production plant returned to work at the beginning of June after a four-month layoff and a pay cut. The company had suspended production from February through May because of slow sales. Workers have voted to cut their pay by three percent for the next 10 months, and managers have taken a five percent cut as part of the deal. The work force at Honda’s plant in Swindon, in southern England, has been reduced to 3,400 after some 1,300 workers accepted the company’s offer of voluntary severances. Honda’s production target in the UK this year is 113,000 cars, barely more than half of its previous goal of 228,000 vehicles.

“Prompt action by manufacturers to realign supply with demand has been painful, but was necessary. There is now a direct link between demand in the marketplace and production volumes,” said Paul Everitt, SMMT chief executive. He added that “low business confidence” continued to blight demand for commercial vehicles – mainly vans and lorries. “Businesses across the economy are still holding back on new expenditure and will need to see better access to finance and stronger domestic demand.”

French revolution
Yet while the majority of car manufacturers have suffered their worst sales figures for a decade, few have suffered the indignity of having their investment rating fall to near “junk” levels like Renault. In mid-June Standard & Poor’s Ratings Service lowered its credit ratings on the French carmaker by two notches into junk territory on expectations weak European auto demand this year will continue next year. The two-notch downgrade to BB – two steps below investment grade – comes three months after S&P put the ratings at the brink of junk.

Renault has been cutting costs and aiming to strengthen its alliance with Japanese car firm Nissan to weather the global downturn. However, S&P said further downgrades or a change in outlook would be possible if Renault burns through a “significant amount” of cash this year or its debt grows. S&P said it views an upgrade or positive outlook revision as highly unlikely in the current environment.

S&P credit analyst Barbara Castellano said the downgrade reflects the rating firm’s expectations for very low demand next year and concerns about government incentive programmes this year to support the sector. S&P said in April that while European government programmes to revive demand in the ailing auto industry could provide some companies with short-term liquidity, that they could impede the industry’s long-term growth. At the time the credit rating firm said the government funds failed to address the industry’s structural problems such as overcapacity and a fixed-cost structure.

S&P said Renault had been hurt by a “large increase in debt in 2008,” leaving its credit quality weak, and that it expects its credit profile will worsen amid diminished demand forecasts for next year. The French government’s 15 percent ownership in the company, while contributing to the stable outlook, does not provide “any notches of enhancement” to Renault’s ratings, S&P said.

China warming up
But not every car producing market is suffering, it seems. Asia’s car sector – so far – seems to be performing much more steadily. Against a backdrop of slump car markets worldwide from January to May this year, the automotive market in China is the first to warm up and car sales have grown for five months in a row, overtaking the US as the world’s best-selling car market. If such sales continue, China’s auto sales will breach the 10 million target.

China has so far thrown in billions of yuan through stimulus measures, including car purchase tax cuts, subsidies for rural buyers and a programme of old-for-new car subsidies. The country’s car market has entered into a new, high-speed growth period, which has already seen a number of manufacturers raising their production quota.

Gas-guzzlers
Furthermore, some Chinese car manufacturing firms are on the hunt to pick up some of the assets that other firms are having to sell off to stay afloat. China’s Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery has agreed to buy Gerneral Motor’s Hummer brand for an undisclosed amount.

The disposal is part of GM’s plan to reinvent itself by concentrating on fewer brands following its bankruptcy filing. GM says it hopes the deal will save about 3,000 jobs in the US, where Hummer will remain based.

Tengzhong specialises in making equipment for the road, construction and energy industries. It is based in China’s Sichuan province. Hummers were originally built as military off-road vehicles by a company called AM General. GM bought
the Hummer brand in 1999. Its sales have suffered as the gas-guzzling performance and military image have become less popular.

When it began the sale process a year ago, GM had hoped to make more than $500m but analysts say that it is likely to have made about $100 million from the sale.

Elsewhere, Toyota’s gas-electric hybrid, Prius has surpassed the company’s expectations to achieve a record booking of 180,000 vehicles within a month of its launch on May 18th in the Japanese market. The record sales exceeded the company’s target of 10,000 units per month. The sale includes the 80,000 units booked during the pre-launch of the new Prius 2010.

Toyota’s Prius overtook its rival, Honda’s Insight, to make it to the top position as the top selling vehicle. Hybrid vehicles have been taking the top spot in auto sales mainly due to the government incentives given to the auto industry in the wake of the plummeting car sales on account of the global financial crisis, a strengthening yen and the US credit crunch. In May, the government approved a cash-back rebate for trading in cars above 13 years for greener cars, giving consumers an added incentive to buy green cars.

Significant saving
Thanks to the incentive, hybrids are now tax-free in Japan and a Prius buyer saves about $1,500 which has added to the demand for the vehicle.

The other main advantage with hybrids cars is the savings on petrol, especially for city driving where the constant stop-and-go traffic lowers the fuel efficiency of petrol-engines.

Sales of hybrid cars, which are powered by gasoline and electricity, have peaked for the second straight month in Japan in the midst of recession indicating the increasing demand for green cars. In May, Toyota decided to increase the production of its new Prius by around 20 percent from around 42,000 to about 50,000 units per month, requiring enhanced production timings for which the Japanese car maker introduced overtime at its two factories at Kariya and Toyota where the car is manufactured. Toyota also raised its full year production target for the new hybrid from 300,000 to 450,000-500,000 units in Japan for 2009 while its US target is 180,000 units for the full year.

Whether the emergence of the hybrid car as a “true alternative” really captures the hearts of the public remains to be seen. But what is evident – and was to every firm except GM – is that the “gas guzzler” is going the way of the dinosaur, and those manufacturers that fail to adapt and adopt green technologies into their car designs are unlikely to last much longer.

For Harald Blumauer, 66, a retired executive of Volvo trucks from Vienna, Austria, and tens of thousands of people around the world just like him, it’s no contest: they choose Brunnhilde.

“It’s always a new adventure,” said Blumauer, who had seen 10 versions of German romantic composer Richard Wagner’s 15-hour, four-opera cycle, plus countless performances of individual operas, before taking in another new cycle in a Budapest production.

“You found a real expert in Wagner here,” his wife Christa said helpfully, explaining her husband’s passion during intermission in the Hungarian capital’s Bela Bartok Concert Hall, alongside the Danube, sun blazing outside.

“He goes to the opera often, sometimes for just one act.”

Why would people trek the globe, like Wagner’s wandering god character Wotan, in search of the perfect “Ring”?

Maybe it’s similar to what drives “Da Vinci Code” tourists to poke around churches and museums in the footsteps of novelist Dan Brown’s fictional symbologist Robert Langdon. Or perhaps it’s like those Grateful Dead fans who, lore has it, attended every concert the San Francisco rock band ever gave.

For conductor Adam Fischer, 59, the guiding force behind Budapest’s “Ring”, it’s just great theatre and music and so when you mount a new “Ring”, audiences will come, from far and wide.

“If it’s boring, blame us”
“This is very exciting and very intense music and if it is boring – because you think 15 hours are boring – then it’s our fault,” he told Reuters in an interview.

Fischer has conducted the cycle three times in Bayreuth, Germany, the holy temple of Wagner which the composer purpose-built to stage his operas, so he gets Bayreuth singers to work in a production that takes a very distinct approach.

“There’s an expression in German, ‘spar flamme’ or ‘spare flame’,” Fischer said. “We don’t do ‘spar flamme’ here.”

Music takes centre stage in this staging, now in its second year, in a new hall with a “live” acoustic where every word and note comes through crystal clear, and often thunderously loud.

Although it is more than a century old, Fischer sees the “Ring” as a fable for our times:

“It’s about too much borrowed money, it’s the same story,” he said referring to the plot – such as it is – in which the downfall of the gods is assured when they get giants to build a new palace that chief god Wotan pays for with stolen Rhine gold.

“There’s a Hungarian expression which means ‘to build a house that even gods can’t afford’,” Fischer said. “That happens, and that is what everybody has in this country, and every second or third house in America.”

Hungary has been hit hard by the financial meltdown and its economy is expected to shrink by almost seven percent this year.

Although he is Jewish, Fischer is not too troubled by Wagner’s well documented anti-Semitism. Fischer notes that some of Wagner’s foremost champions today are Jewish conductors.

“So it’s a Jewish music,” he said with a laugh.

Dancers, puppets and video
The Austrian stage director, Hartmut Schorghofer, 45, re-interprets the work for a concert hall with a much smaller and less versatile stage than an opera house, making extensive use of video imagery and other modern effects.

“To make this total theatre we have singers, we have dancers, we have puppets, we have video – we have all this on stage, but in a really concentrated space,” he said.

It is meant to appeal to a generation at ease with video screens and possibly familiar with the puppetry in “The Lion King”, but it gives pride of place to the music and singing.

“What we do is ‘kammerspiel’, it is like a chamber work,” Schorghofer said. “You are really near the singers and they are as if naked on stage because they have no place to hide.”

Does it work for the opera’s real “gods” – the audience?
 
For Sophia Zubor, 17, from the western Hungarian city of Szombathely, attending with secondary school classmates who would seem to be in the target age group, it didn’t.

“The staging was strange, a bit too modern,” she said. “The music is quite good but I would have preferred a simpler thing, with traditional costumes.”

And what of the older generation, who might be put off by the video imagery and puppetry?

“It’s the first time I’ve seen it and it’s an absolute beauty, the music elevates the spirit,” said Balint Denes, 74, who fled Hungary after its failed 1956 revolution against Soviet rule and settled in Tucson, Arizona, where he worked for Bank of America until his retirement.

“This was the experience of a lifetime.”