Henrik Fisker, the storied car designer who has shaped Aston Martins, Fords and BMWs, told the Reuters Autos Summit this week that he now wants a starring role in the green revolution.

But he also wants to make the world safe for sports cars for generations to come.

“Being a car enthusiast and loving cars, to be quite honest, I could not imagine a life without a beautiful, fast sports car,” Fisker said. “I needed to do something to make sure that I could drive one of those nice cars, my children could drive one of those beautiful, fast cars.”

So what was Fisker’s inspiration? What was the epiphany when he realized that the world was ready for the upcoming Fisker Karma, a $90,000 plug-in hybrid with 50 miles of all-electric fun?

Leonardo DiCaprio…in a Prius.

“A couple of years ago it started, by people who were maybe a little ahead of their time. You saw some movie starts like Leonardo DiCaprio buying a Prius.

“He could have bought any car in the world, and I remember seeing that on television and thinking to myself, you know, when you’ve got a guy who could buy any Ferrari or Rolls Royce and he’s buying a Prius, you know something is changing dramatically.”

(Henrik Fisker photo by Rebecca Cook of Reuters; Leonardo DiCaprio photo by Mario Anzuoni of Reuters.)

When it comes to competition in the auto business, it's the unknown that keeps the top U.S. Honda executive, John Mendel, up at night.

Mendel, speaking to the Reuters Auto Summit in Detroit, said he is always concerned about the conventional competitors. But what he is really afraid of is a company that "changes the game."

"What keeps me up regarding new competition is someone significantly changing the game," Mendel said.

People mention an autoseller taking up dealers dropped by General Motors, Chrysler or Saturn.

"What if they didn't have a dealer network," Mendel said. "What if they used big-box retailers and contracted with Jiffy Lube to have your car fixed?

"That could be a really new metric, which suddenly changes the whole cost structure for distribution significantly," said the Honda executive.

That has been tried before, by Sears, in the 1950s, but was killed by the complex state franchise laws that protect dealership networks.

Would such an idea work if tried by the Walmarts or the Costcos of the world? Should the U.S. state franchise laws be changed to allow it?

Mendel was a featured guest at this year's Reuters Autos Summit, which runs through Thursday in Paris and Detroit.

A few years ago, there was a book out called “Tuesdays with Morrie.” At Reuters, though, we spend our Tuesday mornings during Auto Summits with Ron.

It wouldn’t be a Reuters Autos Summit without our yearly visit from United Auto Workers head Ron Gettelfinger … at the crack of dawn.

Gettelfinger is not one to loaf around and show up at our summit at a leisurely hour of, say, sometime after the sun rises. Oh no. Gettelfinger was scheduled to kick off our Tuesday slate of guests at 7:00 am. But by now we know better.

In fact, when coming into the building this morning sometime after 6:00 am, Gettelfinger was already in the lobby of the Detroit Chamber of Commerce building doing a radio call-in program on his cell phone.

The sun would rise shortly thereafter.

But despite the hour, Gettelfinger is always an interesting person to interview, as he has his eye on all parts of the autos industry. And he didn’t disappoint this year, either.

After a year like this has been, there is a tendency to want to sit back a little and let all of the seismic events sink in. But Gettelfinger sees the real challenges to the autos industry to be down the road.

 (Click here to hear Ron Gettelfinger’s comments)

New technologies, new hiring patterns and new financings will all be the order of the day for the next 10 years. So while this has been a rough-and-tumble year, the fun hasn’t ended yet, he suspects.

The Reuters Autos Summit runs through Thursday in Detroit and Paris and features a global slate of guests from the big manufacturers, dealers and suppliers.

The U.S. government has pumped more than $100 billion into Detroit over the past year to keep automakers General Motors and Chrysler alive. But some of the sector’s remaining capitalists are having a hard time stomaching a $25 billion Department of Energy loan program intended to spark new developments in electric cars. 

Start-ups Fisker Automotive and Tesla Motors have won about $1 billion in combined funding, while longtime players Ford and Nissan have received substantially larger loans from Washington to work on vehicle electrification — a technology the White House and many in the industry hope will reduce the United States’ dependence on imported oil and lower emissions of carbon dioxide, a leading greenhouse gas. 

Funneling federal money to new entrants to the automaking world does not sit right with Tim Leuliette, chief executive of parts supplier Dura Automotive. 

“If there’s a real market for electric vehicles, the OEMs will do it,” Leuliette said, using industry jargon for automakers. “We don’t need to have people who have never built a car in their life take $1 billion of our tax money and say ‘I can do it too.’” 

Government funding muddles market signals, Leuliette argued at the Reuters Autos Summit in Detroit.

“When government writes a check, it says the smart money investors are hesitant to fund it,” Leuliette said. “When markets say it’s now wise enough … there’s more than enough money.” 

For his part, the founder of Fisker Automotive — which aims to build plug-in hybrid cars at a former GM plant in Wilmington, Delaware — said government funding is a logical way to kick start a technology that private U.S. companies have been slow to focus on. 

“Do we just sit and wait for the Chinese and the Japanese or Europeans to develop this and then we join later? Or do we actually this time around, try to take the lead?” said Henrik Fisker, whose plug-in hybrids would be able to travel for short distances on just the electricity stored in their batteries, which can be charged off the electric grid. 

“This is a moment in time, we cannot let this pass. We already let the hybrid pass - Toyota in the consumer’s mind, invented the hybrid and owns the hybrid - the average consumer doesn’t know that GM has more hybrids than Toyota,” Fisker said. “If an American company comes first with a plug-in hybrid, and we will be followed closely by the Chevy Volt in another segment, I think that is where America then has a chance in the consumer’s mind to take the lead, and not only in the U.S., but worldwide.”

Toyota Motor Europe President and CEO Tadashi Arashima talked to Reuters Financial Television during the Auto Summit in Paris. See here.

The U.S. auto industry has had one heck of a year.

Sales have fallen off, credit has been pretty much nonexistant and two of the major U.S. automakers were bankrupt. Other that all that, things were fine.

But Bill Diehl, chief executive of advisory firm BBK, said at the first day of this year’s Reuters Autos Summit, that one of the main concerns for 2010 (if it’s not THE main concern) is the industry’s overall exposure to commercial real estate.

We have been hearing about the problems with commercial real estate in many other sectors of the U.S. economy and Diehl gave the strongest statement so far about the auto side.

(To hear Diehl\’s comments, please click here)

The Reuters Autos Summit continues through Thursday in Detroit and Paris.

A few years ago, one of the guests at our annual Reuters Autos Summit — Tom Stallkamp from Ripplewood — pretty much stopped everyone dead in their tracks by predicting that auto sales in the United States was likely to fall to an obscenely low level of 14.5 million.

Those were the days.

Of course, Stallkamp was making that prediction at a time when U.S. car manufacturers were selling in the neighborhood of 16 to 17 million a year. If the number hits 14.5 million in 2010, people will be wild with enthusiasm as most now expect something in a range of 10 to 11 million.

That would be about flat to a little higher than sales this year.

On the first day of Reuters annual sojourn to Detroit for the Reuters Autos Summit, defining what the “new normal” is going to be for everything about the auto industry is much on everyone’s mind. What will happen with the big manufacturers, the dealerships, the suppliers.

It’s a lot to assess all at once.

Bob Carter, head of Toyota’s U.S. operations kicked things off for the summit by talking about what he sees for the coming year.

The Reuters Autos Summit runs through Thursday in Detroit and Paris. For an audio clip of Carter’s comments, please click this link (Toyota’s Bob Carter at the Reuters Autos Summit).

One of the big challenges for French carmaker Renault, which ranks third in the world with Japanese partner Nissan and Russian ally AvtoVAZ, is that it is too complex, chief operating officer Patrick Pelata told the Reuters Automotive Summit.

“Renault is a complicated company,” he said and explained how many carmakers had embraced a matrix organisation to deal with their international expansion. “We’re definitely more complicated than Nissan,” he said.

He should know, he worked several years with Carlos Ghosn at Nissan and found met his wife in Tokyo.

Pelata, who was born at the feet of the Pyrenees mountains in Les Pujols in 1955 before studying at the prestigeous Polytechnique and Ponts et Chaussees schools in Paris, is in charge of diminishing this complexity and eking out costs. 

But while fixed costs were reduced by 17-18 percent in the past few years, the car markets collapsed at the same rate and the company needs to find more cost reductions.

Not just in France, where the firm is making some adjustments to its plants around Paris, but also in Latin America and South Korea where benchmark studies — against Volkswagen for instance — showed that improvements can be made.

The alliance with Nissan — set to become the second-biggest car group in the world after Toyota if GM decides to sell Opel/Vauxhall later this week — is also a lever for further cost cuts and Renault and Nissan have changed the command structure in the alliance so that it becomes more difficult for managers in the two companies to stop or delay alliance efficiency measures.

“In the allliance there were a lot of brilliant ideas, but the implementation was sometimes problematic,” Pelata said.

Pelata interview with Reuters Financial TV

(Updated with more quotes)

If you’re losing the game, time to change the playing field. Yahoo is counting on exactly that.

Ari Balogh, Yahoo’s chief technology officer and product development czar, would be among the first to admit that Google reigns supreme in the search space.

“Search the way we know it, with 10 blue links, Google has clearly won that game. Saying anything other than that is just not stating the fact,” he told the Reuters Global Technology Summit.

But Balogh says that doesn’t mean Yahoo is giving up. Inviting comparisons to the automobile industry, now infamous for bankruptcy, ballooning debt and clunky design, Balogh says innovation in search is only just beginning, and it’s too early to declare a winner yet. Ford and its Model T was once the pre-eminent mass-consumer vehicle, but today the once mighty Detroit giant — the only one of the surviving Big Three that doesn’t appear to be flirting with corporate failure — has to fend off the likes of Toyota and Hyundai.

What’s important to understand though is this really is like the auto industry in 1910….At that time, in 1915 or 1920, it sure looked like it was going to be Ford.

Because of the rapid innovation that’s going on, because if you look at that search page, it is an anachronism. When has advertising ever been so ugly in the last 10, 15 years? When has the onus of sorting through a pile of stuff, that much of a pile of stuff, ever fallen on people to do themselves?

There is a long way to go.

So what will the next generation of search tools look like? Balogh says:

There will always be a search kind of like the 10 blue links, but how important that’s going to be in the 3.0, 4.0 versions of where the Web’s going really remains to be seen.

I believe search is going to be far richer. Search is going to be about getting that relevance in that intent flow — whatever it is you’re trying to do. And there’s a whole other round or two to go in the search game and that’s where we intend on playing.

Where else is Yahoo lacking? In social networking, Balogh says. But Yahoo is now ramping up both its look and its usability, focusing on helping users connect with news, with other people, and otherwise get things done.

That will entail remodeling its front page continuously, launching new features from fantasy sport applications to programs that aid movie selections, and making them useable on both the cellphone and the computer. The first features will be trotted out in the summer, Balogh says.

“We’re going for the long play here.”

When this is recession number seven for you, the state of the economy begins to drop into perspective — even if the pain is still real.

The chief financial officer of Corning glass, James Flaws, told the Reuters Global Technology Summit in New York that he read from the 158-year-old company’s official history and drew on his own experience to explain to younger managers what these downturns mean.

The first lesson is that economic predictions are hard.

“We don’t have an economist. We used to have one and he predicted eight out of the last four recessions,” Flaws said with dry humor.

The second lesson is that — at least at Corning — things have been tough before. This year, all merit increases were frozen.

“I actually worked here in the ’80s when we cut everybody’s pay,” he said. And during the recession of 1975, shortly after he joined the company, the company fired 25 percent of its management.

“Unfortunately they did that on a Friday night. It was really bad,” he said.

He touched on recessions in the 1990s and the tech crash of 2001, but said that this recession seems most to him like that of the early 1980s — which until now was always described as the worst downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

“That was a classic W,” he said in reference to the use of a letter to describe the roller coaster economy of the early 1980s.

“It was like this and then about six months later you had the second one. It was very widespread. Unemployment climbed above 10 percent and affected a lot of different industries.”

Flaws said that he is not predicting that this will be a double-dip recession — but his company is preparing, just in case.