Good news, everyone! A finance company whose risky investments in auto and real estate loans required it to beg for $6B in bailout cash is at the ready to teach you the secrets of smart financial planning. According to a release at PR Newswire, GMAC “has bolstered its effort to provide consumers with personal finance education with a $20,000 grant to InCharge® Education Foundation, Inc. (ICEF). The funding will be used to co-sponsor a series of financial literacy courses throughout the country in 2009. The courses, named ‘Smart Edge by GMAC,’ are designed to help people make better financial decisions by providing them with information about budgeting, real estate and automotive finance, insurance, credit reports, credit scoring, and other tools.” Lesson number one? Pay your CEO $11.6M even if you’ve been bleeding red ink all year. Lesson number two? Savagely screw over the people your business relies on.

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We knew, but we still weren’t ready for this.

Even though China is the largest car market in the world at the moment, Chinese car designers have a tough row to hoe. The Wall Street Journal’s China Journal blog explains that while there are plenty of well-educated Chinese industrial designers, the prevalent design philosophy keeps their best work in school. According to an unnamed Chinese auto exec, the competitive advantage for Chinese automakers vis-à-vis their foreign partnership competitors is that they never start engineering or designing from a blank sheet of paper. Rather, the standard practice is to “tell an outside engineering consultant which existing model they want to copy, and ask them to come up with a product counterfeited in a way that it won’t attract intellectual property lawsuits. In some cases that means companies combining styling ideas from two separate cars into one.”

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Bankruptcy is more than a financial reckoning. It’s a psychological way-point, from “we’re doing our best” to “re-do.” Let’s call that middle point “we blew it.” That’s not too harsh, is it? I mean, if Chrysler and GM didn’t blow it, they wouldn’t be bankrupt. Oh wait; they’re not bankrupt. Which means Chrysler and GM don’t have to face the otherwise inescapable fact that they NSFWed-up. Of course, they should face reality. You know: the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. But as long as they’re supported by enablers, they’re happy to stick with “we’re doing our best”– even though their best is nowhere near good enough. Uncle Sam’s support I get. But the media’s participation in this delusional denial is unconscionable. I speak specifically of, you guessed it, The Detroit News.

Chrysler’s Robert “Fed Cheddar” Nardelli knows his automaker needs $5B, but what about that other once-lucrative side business turned new economy shakedown, Chrysler Financial? Having copped $1.5B back in January, ChryFi’s been slamming record incentives ever since, and now the buzz is wearing off. Which has Nardelli sounding decidedly thuggish. “We have gone back to Treasury and said ‘we need to re-up that amount,’” he tells Bloomberg. “We saw the evidence of how that works.” For real, dawg? What about the fact that sales are down 50 percent since ChryFi took its last tasty hit of government cheese? Fuhgeddaboutit. See, if you look at Chrysler’s retail sales and compare them to declines in the broader market while getting high off your own supply, things don’t look so bad for the Pentastar Posse. Reportedly. The irony is that if Nardelli really was hustling hard drugs on the street corner, well, he’d be selling something.

In his farewell speech (the one about the military-industrial complex), President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned Americans, “As we peer into society’s future, we– you and I, and our government– must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow.” As any oil company CEO (cough, Dick Cheney, cough) will tell you, Eisenhower’s words point to personal virtue, but shareholders want profits today not resources tomorrow. Thankfully, some take Eisenhower’s words to heart. One such person is Josh Tickell, the creator, director, and protagonist of the impressive documentary film Fuel.

Although that rev segueway is seriously annoying.

Some cities are refusing to comply with a new Georgia law mandating a one-second increase in the duration of the yellow warning period at intersections equipped with red light cameras. At least seven cities that made the required timing increase in January experienced an immediate 80 percent decrease in the number of violations. Of these, Duluth, Lilburn, Norcross, Snellville and Suwanee put the brakes on their red light camera programs after the data made it clear that the programs would no longer make money. Rome is now leaning toward dropping its program as well.

In its perpetual quest to expand into new profitable fields that have little to do with its core business, Daimler is now running a used-car dealership. No, they wouldn’t call it that; it’s the “Mercedes Young Classics Store.” (Sorry, at the moment this news item only applies to European markets). The concept is interesting. Mercedes thinks its products have such a great heritage and are engineered so well that they’re both practical daily drivers and desirable collectables. The not-quite vintage (i.e., birthdate 1970-1990) vehicles can not only be purchased, but also rented via a website that demonstrates what happens when you apply German principles of over-engineering to HTML design. Although the supply yet is quite small, there are some pearls to be found (if you can actually find the “gallery” button which allows you to see the cars on sale).

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The Detroit News is reporting that Presidential Task Force on Automobiles (PTFOA) is ready to float some trial balloons—I mean, announce part of its master plan for “saving” the U.S. auto industry. The News reckons the PTFOA will place the cart before the horse, revealing its bailout strategy for the domestics’ suppliers sometime this week. Then they’ll unveil the new new bailout arrangement to fund GM’s new new new new new new new turnaround plan and, believe it or not, Chrysler’s mythological recovery strategy. Meanwhile, Saturn’s keepers are busy pre-stretching the limits of credibility.

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johnkr3 writes:

I have a question about a car that is hard to start. It’s a 1995 Olds 98 (52,000 miles) that I mainly drive on the weekends. It sometimes takes four or five cranks before it will start. Rarely does it start on the first try. This is annoying and embarrassing.

My suspicions lie with the key. It is the GM key with a security feature on it, a small black square with a metal slot in it.

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The 2009 750i is the car I was expecting from BMW back in 2002. That 7 turned out to be the poster child for automotive arrogance. It introduced flame surfacing [including the Bangle butt] and iDrive. The 2002 7-Series drove me right into the arms of Mercedes. Its controls were impossible to decipher, the ergonomics were infuriating and it was truly ugly. In the face of the criticism, BMW countered that their customers were too backwards to comprehend the brilliance and innovation inherent in the design. Sales continued– until they didn’t. The new 750i is a mechanical admission of corporate guilt that offers redemption for lovers of the pre-Bangle 7-Series.

Yes, I’m going to open this can of worms. Detroit News columnist Daniel Howes did so this morning—although his thoughts on Bonusgate somehow didn’t make it to the paper’s homepage. Howes’ main argument: how can the Obama administration claim that they had to pay $165M worth of executive bonuses because they were legally obliged to do so—when they’re happy to force Chrysler and GM to renegotiate legal contracts with the unions and bondholders as a precondition for double dipping at the bailout buffet? And you know what? He’s right, even if he somehow forgets the seven million [taxpayer] dollars ChrCyo and The General are spending for lobbying our legislators and, by extension, commander-in-chief.

Perpetuating this double standard — one set of rules for troubled Wall Street firms with a demonstrable record of fat campaign contributions and another for automakers with union labor and little clout in Washington — is arbitrary, indefensible and deserves the backlash buffeting Congress and the Obama administration.

And then, of course, Howes goes too far.

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