Evaluation of Rhetorical Situations

Gage Skidmore "John Boehner" February 9, 2012 via Flickr
re-use with attribution

In this blog post I will analyse three rhetorical sources from my discipline (mechanical engineering) that apply to any of my research questions.

Sergio Marchionne on Electric Cars

Sergio Marchionne is the chief executive officer of Fiat-Chrysler Cars (FCA). He is very well known for being outspoken and brash about his opinions as this is a rare thing in the automotive industry. This article refers to some quite well known comments of his regarding electric cars.

Marchionne's direct audience is the attendees of the conference that he is speaking at. However, his more important audience, the indirect audience is the US Government. His message is that he dislikes mandates such as the California Zero Emissions mandates etc. He stated he would strongly prefer to simply be given goals and to have to meet them however he can.

The context for this discussion is the recent release of the Fiat 500e electric vehicle. Even though it sells for nearly double the price of the base Fiat 500 Pop at around $32,000 for the e, FCA looses more than $14,000 on each one they sell. Marchionne quite literally asks people not to buy them and says that as soon as he has sold as many as he needs to, no more will be available.

Michael Horn on VAG Diesel Scandal

Michael Horn is the President and CEO of Volkswagen America. He is a German executive who took over the reins at Volkswagen Group of America (VWGOA) in January of 2014.

Horn has many audiences in this speech. He is speaking directly to an assembly of reporters who are anxious to hear something about the enormous scandal that surrounds Volkswagen cheating on their emissions testing. He is also essentially offering an apology to the US government for Volkswagen's actions though he does nothing to actually explain why the company did this in the first place. His address is also the first step in contrition to the American public in order to slowly regain people's trust as people will not buy a vehicle from a brand that they don't trust. Finally, he is trying to be in the right place in regard to the Volkswagen supervisory board back in Germany as they surely want executive "heads to roll" and Horn surely does not want to be fired.

The context of Horn's address is that three days earlier, the EPA and a group of independent researchers released data that Volkswagen had systematically cheated their emissions testing by writing a protocol that could recognize an emissions test based on things like locked-straight steering and traction control turned off and then drastically modifies the engine programming to lower the nitrous oxide emissions to legal levels.

Bob Lutz Volkswagen Comments

Bob Lutz is a retired auto industry executive. He has worked at Ford, Chrysler, BMW, and General Motors as well as a number of other companies. He is somewhat of a legend in the automotive world.

His audience in this rhetorical speech is mostly the media. Lutz describes how the severe culture at Volkswagen could have resulted in people simply cheating as they did instead of failing to meet the requirements. He also discusses how he asked his engineers at General Motors how it was possible for Volkswagen to produce such powerful diesel engines that still passed emissions. The could not explain it. Lutz' final comment is that the onerous rules for diesel cars are essentially legislating them out of existence while diesel trucks have essentially optional regulations.

The context of Lutz' comments to the media are the same emissions cheating scandal I discussed in the analysis of Michael Horn's presentation.


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I read Evan and Swati's analyses of rhetorical sources. Both had very interesting topics and chose some very good topics (Evan's articles were about outsourcing and Swati's were about medical controversies). I think I worked very hard on my original post and that I certainly spent an appropriate amount of time composing it. However, I wish I had somewhat better rhetorical acts in the first place. I think Sergio Marchionne was the best I could find because it was a particularly surprising thing to see a high level auto executive say. Perhaps other interesting rhetorical acts could be things that have been said by Aston Martin CEO Andy Palmer as he is also notoriously outspoken.