My Dinner with Bob Lutz

So. I had dinner tonight at the Edgewater Hotel in Seattle with four General Motors executives--including Vice Chairman of Global Product Development Robert Lutz--and seven other bloggers as part of a "blogger's roundtable" set up by GM.

Now there is a perfectly legitimate question to ask at this point. "What exactly, Erik, were you doing in a room with bigwig executives of GM?" I wish I fully knew the answer.

Apparently I was spotted thanks to a post on ZestyEnterprise, when we went together to the Seattle Film Festival Opening Night in a hybrid GM Yukon. And I guess I've written enough about transit/energy/the environment that I got invited to the dinner.

Interestingly, when I got there I discovered that most of the other bloggers there were "gearheads" who ran car blogs or social networking sites about cars. So while they were talking about the 1969 sales of the Camaro, I was asking about the national gas tax, recycling cars, corn ethanol, and movies. (Specifically Transformers, which featured transforming GM cars, and Who Killed the Electric Car?)

I'm still trying to put my thoughts together on the night, my questions, his answers, and what exactly it is I want to write about it all. So I think I'll leave it at that for now. But it was a fascinating dinner and everything was entirely on the record, so you can bet I'll be getting something up soon.