The Detroit News reports: Credit Ford Motor Co. CEO Alan Mulally with saving the leader of the free world from self-immolation.
Mulally told journalists at the New York auto show that he intervened to prevent President Bush from plugging an electrical cord into the hydrogen tank of Ford's hydrogen-electric plug-in hybrid at the White House last week. Ford wanted to give the Commander-in-Chief an actual demonstration of the innovative vehicle, so the automaker arranged for an electrical outlet to be installed on the South Lawn and ran a charging cord to the hybrid. However, as Mulally followed Bush out to the car, he noticed someone had left the cord lying at the rear of the vehicle, near the fuel tank.
"I just thought, 'Oh my goodness!' So, I started walking faster, and the President walked faster and he got to the cord before I did. I violated all the protocols. I touched the President. I grabbed his arm and I moved him up to the front," Mulally said. "I wanted the president to make sure he plugged into the electricity, not into the hydrogen This is all off the record, right?" Via HuffPo, which reports the story with the headline "Bush Almost Blows Himself Up."
Just a kneejerk reaction, but I have my doubts about whether anything would have happened. I question whether the automobile's designers would have been so negligent to have allowed for such easy possibility of explosion. Plugging the electrical cord into the hydrogen socket seems like such an obvious potential for accident that I gotta believe the designers devised a safeguard. Maybe Mulally just wanted to prevent Bush from the embarrassment of making a stupid but harmless mistake - like looking through binoculars backwards. But even if no horrible accident was actually prevented, the story sure seems alarming anyway, so either way it ain't exactly good PR for the product. Now Ford has gotta try to convince people who might like to buy the car that it won't accidently blow up.
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