were going to hit the 35.5 mile per gallon standard that's required by 2016. we made a commitment we were going to get there and we're already at 36.1 mile per gallon for our corporate average fleet. every one of these approaches is helping us accomplish our fuel commitments to the government. >> is hyundai profitable? your u.s. operations are they profitable? >> yes, we are. we have been in a favorable position in terms of significantly increasing volumes and market share. we have doubled both over the last four or five years. we have been able to reduce our incentive spending to where we are on the high end of the entire industry several years ago. and now we're the lowest volume incentive spenders. whenever you can reduce incentive spender and improve your margins that way, it has a positive impact. we're a very frugal company. we operate very lean here in the united states.

so we have a good business model. we're growing and as we continue to grow, we're going to continue to invest in this u.s. market which is extremely important for us. >> june in jacksonville, you are on with dave zuchowski of hyundai. >> caller: i love c-span and dave, you and your employees should be so proud to work for a wonderful company that produces a wonderful company. i own a 2011 sonata which i love. my girl friend in ohio has the same car. my girlfriend in orlando has the same car. same year. my other girlfriend has a used sonata. another girlfriend has a genesis. we all love our cars. and just as information, i traded in a 2003 honda civic hybrid which now i'm under a class action suit for not getting enough gas mileage. but also interesting, i drove last weekend 120 miles at 56 miles per hour and i got 44.1

mile per hour. now, if you go more than 56 miles per hour, you start losing that gas mileage. one more thing to me that's important, why can't i buy your stock in this country -- >> we got it, june. >> june, i love you. i love you and your friends and you're representative of what's happening to hyundai in this country. we have been added to a lot of shopping lists. we provide great value, great fuel economy and great performance. but one of the keys for us, one of the secret sauce for over the last couple of years we think you have on the a company, we think you have to have great styling and great package and great functionality. you ought to have great performance and great fuel economy. a lot of others have compromises and we figured out way where you don't have to make any compromises. i think people like you and your friends recognize that. we have changed our styling. at we were fairly conservative

in stifyling as we grew in this market. with our fluidic design sculpture, we have some of the most dramatically styled vehicles in the industry. and all of that is coming together to improve consideration of our brand and change people's opinion about our brand and i think you're a great example of what we're starting to see in the u.s. thank you. >> what about her question about not being able to buy stock in hyundai. >> it's not publicly traded here. and that's -- as an employee of the company we ask the same questions too. any time you see a great company with a great growth potential, you'd like to -- you'd like to buy into that and it's not available now. >> is it a public traded company in south korea? >> it is in south korea, yes. >> do you see it expanding to the u.s. market? >> not at this point in time. >> louisville, jeanette, good morning. >> caller: yes, good morning to both of you. i was just wondering because you

never see any retirees from these -- the hyundai or toyota plant. it's always the big three. so what -- how many retirees are on the hyundai rolls? >> well, obviously we're a younger company. we first came into the u.s. in terms of the manufacturing in 1986 with our plant in montgomery, alabama. excuse me, 2006. with our plant in montgomery, alabama. so we certainly aren't as mature as the domestic industry. we don't have the same amount of retirees and obviously that reduces our overall labor costs and provides an advantage, but it's just a matter of the time of the company. as we develop here and hire more folks and are in this market longer, and that'll change too. >> yeah. dave zuchowski is the executive vice president for sales for hyundai.

mr. sioux c-- zuchowski, thank you for joining us from the washington auto show. >> more from the washington auto show. up next, with mark reuss, president of gm north america. after this we go to the state department for a town hall meeting with secretary of state hillary clinton. then a discussion on unemployment among veterans from the wars in iraq and afghanistan. then later, a discussion from the u.s. conference of mayors on reintegrating combat veterans into civilian society. >> joining us is the president of gm north america, that is mark reuss on your screen. mr. reuss, thank you for being on the washington journal and taking calls from our viewers this morning. >> hi, peter, great to be here. number one, are we going to talk about vegetable oil and bonneville speed racing? that is really one of my -- i don't know if you have ever been

to bonneville, but it's spiritual, so great to see them doing that. >> i thought we'd talk to you about what the company is like and the -- and the chevy volt and some of the public policy issues that gm is currently facing. mr. reuss, how has your company changed since the bailout in 2009? >> i think the most important thing, and i have been on the company for probably 25 years here, so i have seen it before and after and i'm really happy with the focus on the customer and the products. so i would say the biggest change we have is the laser-like focus on delivering products that people really want to buy. i think you're seeing that in the marketplace here. so i think that's probably the single biggest thing that i see. >> how many employees does gm have and how many did it have? >> oh, geez, you know, i'd hate to give point estimates on that. but we have roughly 100,000 people that make our cars, you know, across the world. so -- you know, before and after

is kind of a tough -- there wasn't one point, you know, where i can draw the line and say, today it was this number and tomorrow it's this number. we have added about 16,000 people back here over the last months. and probably put $5.5 billion back into the u.s. economy. so we're opening our facilities that were either closed or not operational anymore. so we're doing a lot of that. it's not over. and so we're progressing the company and growing the company once again which has been, you know, decades since we have been able to do that. so the next question you asked me is how many people are actually working in those ranks before bankruptcy and i'd have trouble giving you a number on that too. so it's very tough for me to give those point numbers. >> mr. reuss, as president of gm north america, what are your responsibilities? >> i have responsibility for the markets in canada, mexico and the united states and then i have the product plans for that.

and then our dealer network customer retention and satisfaction service. pretty much those are the parameters that i have. and the manufacturing footprints in all those regions. >> are you based in detroit? >> i am based in detroit, but spend very little time in detroit. >> your boss was on capitol hill yesterday. don ackerson, general motors ceo. gm ramps up sales of volt as sales falter and gm recently wednesday had this full-page ad in a lot of the national newspapers. a few words about the volt saying that the news about the volt is wrong. >> yeah, i guess it's a paraphrase. you're not reading that from something. >> no. >> but you're referencing it from the "wall street journal," i think and then the full page ads were an open-page letter from dan ackerson who was here

giving testimony on the investigation of post crash fires with nhtsa. so that's what happened over the last day. i was very proud of the way -- so was everybody else in gm i think and our -- and our volt owners have gotten information from them and in the way that the company is operating. we can always be better. the volt was basically validated by every agency out there on crash tests when we went to production, five-star ratings and everything. so it clearly had safety leadership. what we have done with an extraordinary test that, you know, again, punctures the battery, dumps a ton of cool end on the battery and lets it set for quite a while and rotates it over a long period of time. not something we have ever seen in the real world, but we can make the cars and trucks better so we have. that's why there was really no recall per se, but rather an

action by gm very quickly to do something to make the car even safer. my kids drive the car. my two girls and my son, drive it every day. we put three gallons of gas in it a year. driven about 6,000 miles so it's a great car. it's technical leadership. i think it's the most advanced car out there. we're behind it and it's something we want to do and have to do to really, number one, show the world what we can do, but number two, this is where the industry is headed. we have got to get off of our alliance on foreign oil. we're excited about the car, but if you're an average person and you read headlines like you just did, we have to get the transparency out there around how the car operates. what really happened and, you know, how we made it even better. >> and in this full-page ad, dan

ackerson, the chairman and ceo of gm writes, no discernible defect exists and gm need not take any additional act. where is the volt built? >> it's built in our plant in detroit, michigan. about five minutes from my office. i can actually see it from where i sit. very, very nice area. >> would it be viable without federal subsidies? would it be viable to build the electric cars? >> for sure. i mean, i'm not sure what you -- i mean, the viability piece of it is it viable, yes, we did it. we did it, we showed the car first time i think in 2007 at the detroit auto show. and we're going to build it a year later. we did that. during that time, the company went through bankruptcy and a lot of the subsidies were put in place around tax credits and stuff. but that technology again, if

you don't start somewhere and you don't get scale into the technology around the battery and the drive systems, then you'll never get to the point where you can commercially offer a car like the volt and make money on it. so the industry and general motors has to take a leadership position to move the industry to what we think is the next type of vehicle that gets us out of reliance on the foreign oil and gets us into different kind of sustainability here in the united states and around the world. so that's what we have done. and we have to drive, you know, the costs down and take the costs out of those systems, but if you never build them and you never try to do that, then we'd be stuck in the stone ages of automobile and engine design which we -- the industry clearly isn't. you know, leaf blower put out more pollution and emissions than heavy-duty pickup truck these days. so the industry had come a tremendous way.

and that -- and the reason is because we have scale as an industry and we have to drive the technology into the scale. >> mark reuss, president of gm north america, and the vice president of the gm corporation. new castle, pennsylvania, go ahead, shirley, with your question or comment. >> caller: okay. good morning and thank you for taking my call. i just tuned in, so i don't know what all questions were asked, but what i'm concerned about, first of all, i think you realize that many, many, many people across this united states are very upset about the bailout. and, you know, ford motor did not need a bailout. they had very competent people running their company, they didn't need it, but gm and chrysler both did. now, did they keep the same people in that company, or did they get rid of them? because it was a fact that they certainly didn't know how to run the business. and number two, if they managed to get themselves into another dilemma like this, are they

expecting the government to bail them out? because the taxpayers are real fed up with it. >> mr. reuss? >> okay, i'll start with the question number one. and i think the question is, you know, i think -- personally, i have been in the company as an engineer for many years. i started as a -- as an engine engineer, i think '86. so i have seen the company all the way through all this. and your question on the bailout piece of it, you know, i'm not proud of that. i am grateful for the opportunity to add the jobs and the investment back into the united states which we're doing at a fairly good rate here. so this is a job recovery that's real for the industry i think in this country for a long, sustainable period of time. if you look at the people who are running the company today, there's no one in the leadership team that was here during those times. so in answer to your question,

the company is led by a completely different team and it was very public and it was ve very -- i must -- i might add humiliating for a lot of those people. but the company needed to get a new direction and new leadership into the company to be successful again and we're rebuilding that trust with our products and customer service, with new leadership. so that's the answer to the question number one. question number two, i think, you know, -- i think we're headed in the right direction. we have seen the company grow for the first time in decades. we are grateful again for the second chance that -- by the way, i'm a taxpayer too, so i'm an investor and a taxpayer in the company and, you know, it's not our proudest moment. but i think the worst thing we could have done is to abandon or leave or quit. we are here to make it work. we're here to make the taxpayers

including myself proud again. there's nothing that drives me every day harder than that. so i think that's really where we're at, and the transparency of how the company operates and what we do, i think there's a huge opportunity yesterday with the testimony around the volt that happened in the capital and i'm very proud of the way the company operates today. and i think it's a big difference. >> mr. reuss has served as vice president of engineering of chrysler -- of gm, sorry about this. >> that's all right. >> how many years have you been with gm and very quickly run through your progression up till president of gm-north america. >> i started as college intern in '86 in the engine dine amommer the lab and then i worked in the vehicle handle and

dynamics. after that, i took a leave and went back to graduate school and got a graduate degree and then worked in the assembly plants for four or five years. retooling body shops and programming robots. for about five or six years. and then had an opportunity to be chief engineer of some of our cars during that time period and then went over and for the most recent part of my career before this job was chairman and management director of holden, which is our brand in australia. so for a few years i was over in australia, before i came back, post-bankruptcy to general motors. and hopefully that gives -- it's not about me anyway, but that's my history. >> is it important, recent article about gm once again becoming the largest auto company in the world. >> well, you know, we're

grateful that the president mentioned that in his state of the union speech, but there's really so much more to do for us. that want to make the company strong again. and so, you know, we're not chasing a number one title per se. but we want to really satisfy our customers better than everybody else in the industry and that's where the focus is on customer service and providing the products that people really want. again, that's where the focus is and it's -- it sounds pretty fundamental, but i'm not sure we were doing that for a lot of years. >> indian river, michigan, bill, you're on with mark reuss. >> caller: yes, good morning. >> good morning. >> i'm a retiree. i worked 37 years at general motors, and i'm very proud to be an american. i'm very proud of general motors. i would like to miake a comment if i have the time. what happened with general

motors is they fielded a loan. it was a business that operated on capital and they couldn't get it. it was that simple. and when it fell through, the only thing that happened is that the republican party seen a chance to break the union. and that's what they fought general motors on. and the outcome was barack obama and the democrats invested in this country. there's 500,000 people that are retir retirees. my wife and i both have cancer. if that industry would have went dead, none of us would have had health insurance and we would not have been able to buy any because of pre-existing conditions. >> mr. reuss? >> first of all, i wanted to say thank you for your service of 37 years to both you and your wife and i'm proud that you called in, number one, as an employee of 26 years, and as an employee6

years. and it makes me very sad that you have cancer. so that's very sad. but i appreciate your comments. we -- we didn't -- we could not access capital. and there is some other companies that were able to access capital earlier before the global financial crisis, and they did. but if we're -- if it's implied that we're sitting around, waiting to see if the company fails or is successful, expecting some other sort of help, that's not what is happening here and i give a lot of credit to a lot of people for helping the auto industry survive this for people like yourself that have called in because you have given everything and you have given your life to the industry and the company. and we have a recovery that is happening with jobs. so that's the result. and i feel good about it, but

it's certainly no time to let up or lose focus or talk about any success until we have permanent and long-term sustainability, which, you know, that's why we come to work every day. so thank you for calling in. >> mr. reuss, what percentage of gm is still owned by the government? >> it's about a third on a stock basis. but, you know, the cass positions have been repaid. we can't control, just like any shareholder, when someone divests of the company. we work on the only thing that we can control, which is producing results and earnings and growth again, which we have done now for the last over two years. so we're on that track, and we just got to keep focused. >> do you see a schedule for divestment? >> no, i don't. the united states government and ultimately mine and your taxpayer dollars are really the investments in it that they care take. that's the way elook at it. so when they're ready to divest, they'll divest.

but i can't worry about the schedule. i have to worry about producing the results. >> when you hear the term "government motors," what do you think? >> well, again, a lot of things motive me every day to come into work and get the company back. and i think that's true for all of the gm employees out there. and that's not a proud title that any of us like or enjoy. but that's where we are, and that's what we have to change. >> baltimore, lewis. please go ahead with your question or comment for mark reuss. >> caller: yes, i am so happy to be able to speak to you this morning since you're the engineer and and president of the north american company, gm. over the years, i have listened to art bell, his program, and it's now run by george nouri. it's called coast-to-coast a.m. and over the years i've heard ideas for automotive improvement.

they're a group of san diego university who in their garage had a car that would give them 100 miles per gallon. there was another man who said he could run his car off of water, and all sorts of alternative systems. the reason i bring this up, have you ever thought of taking some of your empty plants in detroit and making them sort of an alternative research center where you can bring all of these ideas together and maybe you can access coast-to-coast a.m. with george nouri and ask him to give you a recount or a collection of all the ideas that come through. some seem to be fantastic, and some probably have been suppressed because of the competitive nature of the market. but it would be great if you could bring all of these people together. >> all right, lewis, i think we got the point. mr. reuss? >> lewis, again, thanks for calling in. and it's a pleasure to hear someone that is so enthusiastic about some of the alternative fuel ideas that are out there and energy sources. you know, i think if you look at -- by the way, we don't have

any empty plants left in detroit. if you look at what we have there, they're all full again. ours, including the whole industry. so i think detroit is on the verge of some great things in the state of michigan again. so it's happening. to your point on alternative fuels and some of the ideas that are out there, you know, we have produced a car like the volt. we've also produced and we have leadership in fuel cell technology. and it's because of some of the ideas that you mentioned. i'm not sure that we're going to produce a car that runs on water quite yet. i haven't seen that as an engineer. but we do have things like hydrogen fuel cells that have by-products like water. and the cost of those fuel cell stacks and the commercialization and high volume production of those is sort of what is next on the agenda. if you look at this as sort of the end game of fuel efficiency, co2 and emissions, fuel cells is still something that is there.

but the cost and the piece of that is very prohibitive is the infrastructure as well. so what we're doing around things like cng, we just introduced our new commercial van. i don't know if you have ever seen a big chevrolet express van that runs on regular gasoline, that a lot of people earn their living with in the commercial trades, we just introduced a compressed natural gas version of that. and so we're going to market with some of these things that you mentioned already. but we're driving the infrastructure that can supply that fuel like compressed natural gas from a fleet standpoint, because our commercial people that make a living with these are very concerned around the operating those really make a big diffen so that's the opportunity that we look at here. our r&d facility in warren, michigan takes all of those ideas that you mentioned and goes through all of those. we also have a new b

venture with john loughner under steve gersksi that vets, and general motors that can partner with them, so it's something we've never had in the country before. they're out there taking these chances. you're going power mat, charging mats that go into the cars without any cords, those type of things, alternative fuels, energy density that we haven't thought about before, all of those things we look at every day. and they come into our r&d center and our new capital venture group and we look at all of them. rest assured these aren't being wasted. >> winter park, colorado, doug, go ahead with your question for the gm of north american. he is again. sutherland, virginia. robert? >> good morning.

you know, i'm -- from way back. my pickup is a chevy and i wish everybody in the mots. and a lot of the foreign carmakers, we have diluted the market over here. we need more americans that want to buy american. and here is a little thought to you. i think these vehicles that you see people running around in the police departments and meter maids and stuff like that, the smaller vehicles like that not only could be running on alternative fuels, but i don't see why you couldn't develop a large spring that would be continuously when it runs down. stuff like that. but look, nice talking to you. have a good day. >> mr. reuss? >> thank you, robert. that's great. thanks for buying chevrolet, by the way. and, you know, that's just a terrific perspective on it. you know, the american auto industry, you know, went through some very tough times. and we're just happy to have people like robert that value the long-lasting and durability

of our chevrolet trucks. so thank you for that. i agree. the fleets that we see both on a police basis or, you know, smaller fleets, we see those as opportunities, again, to drive infrastructure. because there is a lot of towns and a lot of cities that have gone through this crisis that are very concerned about operational costs. so the faster we can help reduce those operational costs and those fleets with alternative energy and higher fuel economy and lower emissions, the more money that we can put into the people that actually operate those fleets, you know, the police, the fire departments, all those things. and then we can begin to see jobs grow again because the money that is around for those infrastructures and towns, you know, it's not getting any bigger yet. so we have to be able to grow again. >> mr. reuss, there was a recent report in n live.com that you

were concerned that the salary caps that are put on gm will chase away talent. >> that's right. do you want me to comment on that? >> yes, please. >> yeah, i mean, you know, there is salary caps on the companies around the t.a.r.p. piece of this, which i'm not sure -- i'm not going the enter a debate whether it's right or not, because frankly, they did what they had to do. and that's okay. but on a long-term basis, as we see, you know, talent concerned about that, then i'm concerned about it. i had one of my very best people who ran communications for me leave on a salary basis to go to australia and work for a great company in australia, which i wish them the best. but we're going to see those things happen, and we can't respond. and that's really what i'm worried about. >> next call from mark reuss. just a few minutes left. milwaukee. go ahead, barb. >> caller: