Wow, Manny. You need to get with the program bro’. Dissing hybrids is not gonna make you any friends. Not in DC. And not with your hometown homies, who know that global warming is a crock of “I can’t believe it’s not Toyota” with which to butter their bailout bread. What are they gonna say when they read this? “They cost more than most people can — or will — pay; they provide fuel efficiency benefits only for specific and limited driving conditions; and the technology isn’t going to solve America’s oil issues. Sure, they’re still somewhat trendy, and select members of Congress as well as Hollywood hypocrites regularly remind people that they drive the so-called green machines. Good for them and for the few others in America who are all hopped up on hybrids, but they are the few and the proud. And the declining.” Yeah, we know that Manny. But what if gas prices go back up? You know; if there’s a sudden disruption of oil supplies due to tensions in the Middle East or another speculative bubble? It could happen. Not in Manny’s world. And the News’ Auto Editor wants to point out– again– that consumers are friggin’ hypocrites…

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When is buying a used car from an established new car dealer actually the receipt of stolen property? When the dealer didn’t pay off the previous owner’s loan. The New York Times has tales of the woe car buyers are facing thanks to now-shuttered houses of ill-repute. Vacaville Ford, for example, sold Diana Foley a used 2006 Lincoln Town Car taken in on trade. Ms. Foley was probably feeling smart for saving herself the massive initial depreciation on a Town Car. Lttle did she know that Vacaville Ford never paid off the prior owner’s loan balance and didn’t own the car it sold her. Now Diana has a car in her driveway she can’t register and doesn’t really own; the prior owner of the Town Car still owes money on a car they don’t have anymore and Vacaville Ford is boarded-up. “David Paulson, the Solano County district attorney, is prosecuting Vacaville Ford-Mercury for similar fraud involving an as-yet-undetermined number of consumers.” Thousands of miles away, the attorney general’s office in Arkansas has sued McKay Hyundai of Pine Bluff on “charges that the dealership violated consumer protection laws by not paying off loans or by selling nonexistent extended warranties to at least 40 people.”  

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If it sounds too good to be true, it’s on the internet. While there may be some benefit to the services offered by parkingticket.com, imaking paying/fighting a New York City parking ticket easier (and charging a fee for it) is a far cry from saying that you’re going to pay people to stick it to The Man. Why in God’s name would anyone do that– unless they were told by their neighbor’s dog that traffic wardens are the anti-Christ? (And we all know how that turned out.) Needless to say, the press release making this bold claim is utterly silent on this issue, saying only that “‘The City has hired 793 new ticket agents but the public doesn’t have the time to fight every unfair ticket. Because we want them to fight every unfair ticket and to make sure it’s worth people’s time we are going to pay them,’ says Glen Bolofsky, President of parkingticket.com.” So, over to the website and on to the fine print. “Parkingticket.com agrees to guarantee that Customer’s parking ticket will be dismissed or reduced and Customer agrees to pay a fee to parkingticket.com, hereinafter known as the Guaranteed Dismissal Fee, equal to half the price of the savings, which is equal to the original parking ticket base fine plus any accrued penalties, fines, interest or related charges.” So I’m thinking that, in this case, “getting paid” means a discount on the standard fee. [Subject to more fine print after the jump.] Memo to Glen: plenty of people were born on a Tuesday, but the ones that were born last Tuesday aren’t old enough to get a New York City parking ticket. Yet. 

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Once again, The Detroit News is giving free reign to D2.8 boosters to boost the D2.8 and, by extension, themselves. Today, we get an epistle from Congressman John Dingell (D-Dearborn), who feels obligated to come clean about his role in “enabling” Motown’s hometown heroes’ self-destruction and, perhaps, Uncle Sugar’s $33.4b “take the money and run it the way you always have” auto bailout buffet. (That’s excluding GMAC.) “Americans are angry about what has happened to our country. No one seems to be willing to take responsibility. I will take some. I should have held the automotive companies more accountable for their actions, or inactions, over the years. My colleagues voted to make another member, who views the auto industry in a much different way than I do, the chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. I find that some members voted against me because I was perceived to be sympathetic to the auto industry.” Translation: if loving you was wrong, I don’t want to be wrong. And I still love you. “I don’t regret fighting for millions of Americans who work in the auto industry, even if that fight might have hurt me. I will fight for those workers, the UAW and others in the industry until they kick me out of this place.” They? I know democracy is a difficult concept for a politician who’s been in Washington since 1955, but shouldn’t that be YOU, as in Michigan voters? Anyway, things are going to be different now…

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A short overview of what happened in other parts of the world while you were in bed. TTAC provides round-the-clock coverage of everything that has wheels. Or has its wheels coming off. WAS is being filed from Beijing.

Toyota asking workers to forego pay: In an unusual move, Toyota has begun negotiating with labor to treat some of the 11 additional days during which the company plans to suspend domestic operations as vacation days without pay, the Nikkei (sub) writes. Toyota aims to close all 12 of its domestic factories for six more days than planned in February and for five additional days in March. Extra factory closure days used to be treated as paid days off. Toyota seeks to stop this practice from next month to cut costs. Toyota hopes to reach an agreement with labor this month. The unions already balk.

Germany looks like bottoming out: Germany’s car buyers bought 6.6 percent less in last December than in the prior year. This is nowhere near the disaster called America. Germany’s November sales had been down 18 percent. Germany closes out the year 2008 with a minus of just 1.8 percent, Automobilwoche (sub) reports. Still, “Germany notched up yet another post-reunification low for the year, with just 3.09 million vehicles registered throughout 2008,”  Reuters writes. The big loser is Toyota with a loss of 27 percent for the year. Volkswagen sold 5.7 percent more than in 2007 and raised its market share to 19.9 percent. Opel lost 9.5 percent of sales, Porsche 8.2. The Smart gained 5.7 percent. Amazingly, SUVs gained 3 percent for the year, the high price of gas be damned. The share of diesel powered cars dropped 3.6 percent to now 44.1 percent.

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Pickuptrucks.com has learned that the Pontiac G8 ST has been canceled. Incidentally, Automobile Magazine is reporting that the Suzuki Kizashi has not been canceled, but will debut in production form at this year’s New York Auto Show.

As Martin Schwoerer has pointed out, Honda is in the midst of a green-oriented rebranding. Formula One efforts and the NSX “replacement” have already been canceled, as we’ce reported. According to Autocar, more enthusiast-oriented programs are being slashed as weak markets meet green branding initiative. Planned rear-drive Acura models, including development of a V8 engine are off the table due to poor demand for luxury models. These models were planned to compete with BMW’s 3,5 and 7 series. Honda has also canned plans for a S2000 replacement, leaving it without any kind of sports car in its portfolio. Though the eagerly-anticipated CR-Z coupe is still a go, a convertible roadster version will not be pursued. This isn’t great news for enthusiasts, who have long seen Honda as the most sporting of the Japanese big three. In reality, Honda has been steadily moving away from its enthusiast roots for years now.

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At first glance, this makes no sense: the head of the United Auto Workers (UAW) telling the world that GM and Chrysler are done feasting at the bailout buffet. “If we can get by without more money, that’s what we want to do,” Big Ron Gettelfinger told Automotive News [AN, sub] in an interview at Solidarity House. And if I could convince my Lexus dealer to give me a new IS-F with a handstand, that’s what I’d want to do. Clearly, Ron Gettelfinger is promising someone a rose garden– while he’s painted the ailing automakers into a corner. Ish. First, this is what car salesman call an “if then” close. Second, Ron told AN that “how well the money holds out will depend on sales volume this year.” Gettelfinger is hopeful that “sales will not dip more than 1 million units below 2008’s depressed 13.1 million.” So, IF U.S. new car sales DON’T dip below 12.1m per year, THEN GM and Chrysler recover without any more federal funding? Nonsense. Make no mistake: Ron’s statement is part of a calculated plan to avoid making any concessions during the federally-mandated negotiations to reduce his members’ pay and benefits. In other words, the UAW doesn’t need to make concessions because everything’s going to be alright. It is, in fact, Ron’s opening gambit. And it’s not bad. But shame on AN for swallowing the union boss’s bait; hook, line and sinker. I mean, what is this…

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Pop top worm can time. Yesterday’s QOTD (essentially) poised the question how a big a boot in Detroit’s ass will it take to get American back to building the best cars in the world? And your answer was (for the most part) that we never built the best cars in the world. Insert sound of car screeching to a halt here! Say what? Are you telling me my childhood was a lie? All my old man’s stories about his dad’s Buick Roadmasters and Cadillac Eldorados — they were fibs? That article about Zora Arkus-Duntov and the Corvette Gran Sports that all of us have read in one form another ninety billion times — it’s a lie? Hell, the articles I’ve written about Shelby’s Cobras — not true? And, am I blind? Cause I got Ken Steacy’s book Brightwork about classic American car ornamentation as a Hanukkah gift and I realized that more thought used to go into a single hood ornament than Buick has put into its entire lineup over the past twenty years. See, Alfred Sloane had the formula figured out — Post-War Americans only wanted three things when it came to cars. 1) Styling 2) Automatic transmissions 3) High compression, high output engines (aka POWA!). Obviously GM had no trouble with two and three, and Sloan brought in coach builder Harley Earl to address number one. And he was, to a very large extent, right. Go ahead, look at a 1954 Pontiac Star Chief and tell me I’m wrong.

There’s an eerie thread of optimism weaving through a number of post-bailout, post-December bloodbath stories lately. Sure, hope dies last and all that, but as Studs Terkel put it, “hope has never trickled down, it has always sprung up.” And most of this fresh-faced optimism seems to have trickled down directly from GM PR. Take the headline “‘Happy Days’ Return For Domestic Car Dealers” over at Dealersedge.com, for example. If the use of scare quotes in the headline isn’t enough to set your PR-friendly hackery alarm ringing, well, that’s why we’re here. The entire piece is based on quotes from employees and owners of three dealerships, two in New Hampshire, one in Michigan. These ecstatic, old-timey song-referencing folks spout anecdotal evidence of a new influx of floor traffic, offering no dissent from the opinion that “happy days” are indeed here again. And why wouldn’t they say that zero percent terms on Trailblazers and Saabs have Americans flooding the showrooms?

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A recent NY Times op ed gave plaudits to a Senate investigation held in the 1930’s to discover the causes of the Great Depression. But the power of congressional investigators is vastly overstated and overrated. They can be stymied by resourceful, deep-pocketed corporations. Considering the current attitudes of US automakers, it’s unrealistic to expect any voluntary disclosure to Congress, any meaningful disclosure to taxpayers. But, as the Bermie Maddoff liquidation shows, bankruptcy court is another matter entirely. The trustee in the Madoff liquidation/investigation can ask the bankruptcy court to authorize subpoenas, which can be used to compel production of documents and to compel witnesses to testify. The prospect literally scares GM and Chrysler witless.

You may recall that TTAC reacted to the plethora of top ten automotve lists proliferating on the web by running a list of the ten best cupholders. Now that Forbes Autos has gone to the big cache in the sky, the number of top ten lists-makers has dropped significantly. But they’re still out there, somewhere. And they’re still annoying. All-Stars? Pretty much says it all. So we turn again, from the ridiculous to the sublimely ridiculous. We ask you, our Best and Brightest to name the best Heating Ventilating and Air Conditioning (HVAC) controls of any car sold in America as new. Please send an email with a jpeg to robert.farago@thetruthaboutcars.com. Put “HVAC” in the subject bar. In the body of the email, please write your screen nic, which car’s climate controls I’m gazing upon and why they deserve to be honored as one of the ten best HVACuees. The winners will be chosen by Eddy and myself through the usual arbitrary process. Thanks for your help.

When I went car shopping in the early ‘90s, my priorities were fun-to-drive, reliability, and economy. Style— not so much, or so I thought. But the first time I saw a Saturn, I knew instantly what it was, although I’d never seen a photo, since the car was conspicuously absent from the ads. As soon as Consumer Reports gave Saturn a preliminary blessing for reliability, I gave it my consideration. Ultimately, I became so smitten that I didn’t bother to re-look at the Integra after I discovered to my great chagrin, in the dealer’s lot, that the turning circle was nearly as big as the namesake planet’s diameter.

According to the Daily Mail, you can now buy a microwave that plugs in to your car’s 12v socket. Because you need that hot pocket when you’re commuting. Because talking on your cell phone while driving is only so distracting. And because that cell phone only delivers minimal electromagnetic radiation risk. The $190 appliance made by Maplin Electronics is small enough to stash in the boot of car, features a robust steel construction with heavy duty handle and is operated by a LED touchscreen. According to a company rep, “you no longer have to worry about searching for places to eat as the microwave ensures you can plan your day as you want to and eat when you’re hungry. It gives you the flexibility and freedom to enjoy hot food wherever and whenever you wish.” Be still my fat-clogged, barely-beating heart.