Gourmet restaurants and McDonalds both serve salads. Both establishments offer greens, vegetables and some kind of dressing. Setting aside Mickey D's portion-controlled, polymer-intensive presentation, I doubt anyone would confuse the two salads based on appearance or taste. But what of a "proper" premium sedan and the Kia Amanti? It's an intriguing idea: an upmarket midsize sedan at a family sedan price. Cutting out a badge-related price premium is always tempting… but seldom worth it.

TTAC has its General Motors Death Watch Series and innumerable daily blogs on The General's fall and fall, but CNBC has it's own GM's Up Shit Creek website. In anticipation of next Wednesday's documentary "Saving GM," the peakcock people have added a new url to their e-arsenal: insidegm.cnbc.com. Of course, the title of this magnum opus and the fact that GM advertises heavily on NBC will have alerted TTAC's Best and Brightest that a major PR job is in the offing. (I'm thinking that if you downed a shot of Jack Daniels a everytime your heard the word "embattled," "beleaguered," "challenge" or similar, you'd be wasted by the first commercial break.) The program's strapline tells the tale: "In this original documentary, CNBC's Phil LeBeau goes inside GM [it was raining at the time] and reports on the company's dramatic struggle to transform its tarnished image and sagging fortunes." Even without whiskey, there's some funny shit coming down. In a clip from the show, Phil says, without irony, that Car Czar Maximum Bob Lutz' first job was getting his employer out of denial. And yet… "The quality gap only remains in the public's awareness," Maximum Bob asserts. "It's gone." Well something's gone; like CNBC's credibility. Wait, did they ever have any?