Canada’s Derosiers Automotive Consultants had a think about the future of the North American new car market. You can read the results of their analysis here, for no money down, no money per month, for no months. To make a pretty pdf short, the Detroit Three still have “an inferior business model from most perspectives.” In fact, “[i]t is a huge leap of faith to believe that their strategy will work given historical precedent.” Uh-oh. “Unless the D-3 can turn around their market share losses then no amount of Government money can save all three of these companies. Best case is we end up with two Detroit based companies instead of three and there is a very real scenario where we end up with only one.” In other words, this could well be the most expensive game of musical chairs the Canadian and US government has ever played. OK, not ever. But in a long time.

The “hands off” Presidential Task Force on Automobiles has chosen Ed Whitacre Jr., formerly of Southwestern Bell, to become New GM’s New Chairman of the Board. The appointment is still go, despite Whitacre’s admission that “I know nothing about cars.” Anyone fearing for Whitacre’s ongoing ignorance of all things automotive can breathe a sigh of relief today, as the BOD jeffe told the San Antonio Business Journal that he has no intention of re-locating to Motown to oversee the men and women spending tens of billions of U.S. tax dollars to “reinvent” GM. “This is my city,” Whitacre told the local press. “I’m not moving.”

Yes, it’s triple VBW day at TTAC, thanks to Beth Lowery, GM Vice President, Environment, Energy & Safety Policy. Over at the Fastlane blog, Lowery is proving that the more things change at GM, the more things don’t change. She’s still talking about perception gaps. And here’s the spin re: the Volt’s financial sustainability. [BTW: Whatever happened to GMNext?]

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Can someone please straighten me out here? What is a Buick? I mean, what’s the point? I’m serious. I don’t get it. The brand’s manager, Susan Docherty, is no bloody help at all. “We’re working hard to change the perception of the brand and to let people know Buick may not be what they think it is,” Ms. Dohery pronounced in a recent web chat. May not be, but might? How do we parse the fact that the brand is sticking a four cylinder engine into its forthcoming sedan? Sure the Honda Accord has one. A mighty fine four pot, in fact. But how does this engine option square with Buick’s “entry level luxury” schtick? AutoWeek is forced to go for the historical angle. “The four-banger is thought to be the first in a Buick since the 1998 Skylark,” AW reports. “It’s from GM’s Ecotec family and makes 182 hp and 172 lb·ft of torque. It’s an inline setup and employs direct injection; look for it to get an estimated 20 mpg in the city and 30 mpg on the highway.” So who’s looking?

Ford had 1,683 suppliers last year. By the end of this year, that number will be down to 850. This is what Tony Brown, Ford’s group vice president of global purchasing, told reporters, one of them from Reuters. Ford is worried about disruptions by supplier bankruptcies, which are a daily occurrence. Triage time: Ford wants to shore up the healthier ones and leave the not so healthy by the wayside.
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The oil in the Honda Insight’s engine was overfilled by nearly half the length of the dipstick by the new car dealer. I was 40 miles away from there with a well deserved vacation on the horizon. So, I did what anyone in my neck of the woods would do and fixed the problem myself. Except the problem didn’t get fixed. It got worse. Boy, did it get worse.

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Will Chevrolet’s Volt ever be test-driven in range-extended mode? With pre-production underway, one hopes that the “we don’t want people to hear the engine turn on” excuse won’t be long for this world. Meanwhile, see if you can tell where in the podcast Farago and Niedermeyer switch into their own range-extended mode.

One of our Best and Brightest forwarded GM’s letter to the white collar workers targeted for elimination (by October), along with a pdf of the Retirement Package [download here]:

Dear U.S. Classified Salaried Employees:

On June 1, Fritz Henderson shared the company’s plans to reduce an additional 4,000 salaried employees from our U.S. workforce.  This news was particularly difficult to hear, considering we had just undergone a significant staffing reduction in May.  We can assure you that these organizational restructuring and reduction decisions were made after serious deliberation and necessitated by the unprecedented business realities facing GM.

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Robert,

Thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. Our website www.cashguzzlers.net has been following the story for months and of course we were concerned when our site was referenced along side of a website that looks like a phishing scam. Our website was created to provide information and clarity to consumers and also to help create a greater awareness of the program to sell more cars.

Your suggestions were very helpful because the goal of the website is to provide good information about the CARS program and to allow consumers to have the choice to have a local dealer contact them about buying a new car. We also have been answering hundreds of emails and calls for free to help consumers and also to help our automotive clients have a successful launch of this program. We are taking the following steps to ensure that the public is aware that our site is a consumer website and not a government website:

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GM spokesfolks confirm to Automotive News [sub] that the deadline to submit bids for the General Motors asset sale has passed. And surprise! Nobody has taken on the Treasury in the 363 sale’s bidding process. Sorry, America. But AP Services LLC, an affiliate of AlixPartners is having its $58.9 million in fees contested by the US Bankruptcy Trustee. In addition to a $20 million retainer and $16 million for services provided in May, AP Services stands to receive another $13 million upon the completion of the Section 363 sale. As RF’s General Motors Zombie Watch 7 reports, the consulting firm also “seeks a discretionary fee of an unknown but potentially unlimited amount that will be determined” at the sole discretion of GM. The US Trustee is also objecting to the $46.6 million in fees paid to Evercore Group LLC, another GM restructuring consultant.

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The Chevrolet Volt’s engineering team has given journos seat time in development mules. While this proves that the Volt exists, no car hack has been allowed to put the most important metrics to the test: range and recharge times. In fact, the makers of GM’s plug-in hybrid Hail Mary haven’t allowed a single scribe to drive the car in “range-extended mode.” For the euphemistically averse, that’s the bit where the Volt switches from battery operation to gasoline-powered battery operation. Writing in the Irish Times, automotive correspondent Chelsea Sexton (I’m female!) tried to rectify this sin of omission. She encountered little of CEO Fritz Henderson’s stack-o-bibles promise of transparency. In fact, this is genuinely funny stuff, in a “there goes a billion dollars of my tax money despite the PTFOA’s pre-C11 assertion that the Volt is a waste of money” kinda way.

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Hydrogen-fueled propulsion has been the Next Big Thing since the 1970s. Recently, it has also been assigned to the past, at least by US Energy Secretary Steven Chu, who said, “We’re going to be moving away from hydrogen-fuel cells for vehicles.” Thus, hydrogen propulsion seems to be one of those things that are everywhere in the time-space continuum except in the present. Some hydrofans are refusing to give up, though. VW’s evil genius boss of bosses, Ferdinand Piëch, has a nephew, Sebastian Piëch, who is a grandson of Ferdinand Porsche. Seb seems to be a smart, rich guy who speaks four languages, has an engineering and marketing background and lives in Shanghai and Tokyo. He’s a big name among big names at Riversimple, an alternative-car company which recently presented its first car in London. If Piëch had a monkey-man slogan, it’d be “ideas, ideas, ideas.”

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Dr. Lyle J. Dennis of GM-volt.com fame has a pronouncement for his flock: “I have seen the electric car promised land.” Dr. D is referring to his visit to “the pre-production operations (PPO) facility at a time where the first genuine Chevy Volts, called integration vehicles (IVers) were being assembled.” (There’s a joke in there somewhere about an IV drip, but it’s not for me to make it.) Unfortunately, Fritz Henderson’s sworn promise of transparency doesn’t apply to photographs of Volt mule assembly, ’cause God knows what Toyota what might do with the information revealed by snapshots of the process. But Dennis is nothing if not sycophantic—I mean resourceful. He offers the EV faithful this shot of “the actual garage door the first Volts will drive off into the world through.” Ending a sentence with a preposition is not something up with which TTAC would put, but we appreciate Dennis’, uh, zeal. “And so without any doubt [yea verily] the Volt has truly been born and its arrival into public production for launch in November 2010 appears at this point an absolute certainty.” Appears to be an absolute certainty, indeed.

Taxpayers will foot the bill for efforts to promote the tolling of roads throughout Texas after Governor Rick Perry (R) vetoed legislation that would have reined in public relations efforts at the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT). Only one member of the entire legislature voted against the proposed bill that would have amended existing law to clarify that pro-tolling advertising campaigns could no longer be bankrolled with state funds. “This section does not authorize the department to engage in marketing, advertising, or other activities for the purpose of influencing public opinion about the use of toll roads or the use of tolls as a financial mechanism,” House Bill 2142 stated.

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Frequent Piston Slap contributor Theodore writes:

I just put my 1992 Ford Thunderbird (V-6, stripper, ex-rental car) on craigslist, but I don’t know if I can really bring myself to part with it.

The automatic transmission is dying for the second time. Leaking badly, hesitates before going into gear, tries to downshift from fourth to third at 50-55mph, makes a weird sound that I can’t even describe except to say that it sounds like something is spinning way faster than it should. Its latest trick is a neat one: sometimes the whole front end will shudder while turning at low speed.

Is there any hope for the patient? Can the automatic be salvaged, or is a manual transplant possible? Practical? Sane?

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