Motor Trend‘s Angus MacKenzie recently got some seat time in the new Shelby GT500, and calls it “a pretty impressive piece — fast, loud, and blessed with the best steering ever in an American Car.” “But,” writes MacKenzie, “the thing that annoys me most about the GT500 — about the whole 2010 Mustang range, for that matter — is the live rear axle. It’s the wrong technology, done for the wrong reasons; emblematic of the cynical ‘near enough is good enough’ attitude from Motown management that helped drive Detroit’s automakers into a ditch.” And thereby restarted a squabble that makes the global warming debate look like a lover’s spat.
The Detroit News covers the report by the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute (because TRI texts are behind a password lock). Authors Walter McManus and Ron Kleinbaum write,
Story after story frames the issue of a struggling industry that will not survive tough fuel economy standards. However, there is substantial evidence that the domestic auto industry has ignored customers’ demands for fuel economy, and has consistently undervalued the impact of fuel economy on their profit potential.
Plus,
Our view is that GM is still not prepared to change enough, fast enough to achieve the transformation it needs to make.
There’s a nasty, drag-out fight going on between current Tesla Chairman and CEO Elon Musk and his predecessor, Martin Eberhard, over who deserves credit for birthing the electric roadster. Musk has posted a lengthy defense of his position at the Tesla Motors blog, and according to him, Eberhard is the bad guy. Lots of e-mails attached. Ugly stuff.
“With progressed Saturn in a partile (exact to the degree and minute of arc) opposition with the GM Sun, the company’s day of reckoning has come. According to news reports, General Motors will send termination notices to 1,100 of its car dealers, about 20% of its 6,000 U.S. dealerships. The transit of Pluto in 2010 in square to the GM Sun will allow the company to emerge from Chapter 11 bankruptcy and to rebuild and reinvent itself.”
Of course, if you read mountainastrologer.com regularly, you knew this a month ago! Hey, and 2010 is just months away! I’m feeling better already!
In an interview with gm-volt.com, The General’s global product honcho, John Lauckner, reveals the impossible: the Volt is somehow under-budget. According to Lauckner, “. . . were [sic] very pleased that were [sic] on time on target and under budget.” After all, “you can’t ask for more than that when your running a program the size of the Volt and with the amount of technology that we’re [See? It’s not that hard] designing developing and implementing largely on the fly.” Yes, but what does “under budget” mean when you’re talking about a $40K bailout-baby green halo car?
The daily podcasts keep coming, as Farago and Niedermeyer learn that the Chrysler Sebring replacement is screwed, Bob Lutz should keep quiet and that the Germans care about our energy independence. Plus the usual daily reminder that this is a car website.
“A new order is emerging where the Detroit companies may no longer be the volume leaders in their home market,” says GT’s Kim Rodriguez in a release [via PRNewswire] which spins the news as an opportunity for US suppliers. The upshot is that even if the Detroit firms return to profitability by 2012 (hello, Vegas?), suppliers will have to diversify because expansion in US production is coming from the transplants. VW and BMW plan on doubling their US production capacity in that timeframe (to 1m units) while Toyota, Honda, Nissan and Hyundai will collectively add another million units. GT expects other firms to add another 200,000 units of production to the US mix by 2012 as well. Meanwhile, Chrysler and GM are shuttering plants and shedding capacity while taxpayers bail them out in the name of the “American automotive industry and manufacturing base.”
The NY Times has an interactive widget that shows all domestically-produced vehicles, their point of assembly, whether they’re union-assembled, and where their engine and transmission were produced. What, no parts-content-origin-percentages? Oh well, the message is clear: Americans build tons of hugely popular automobiles.
The saga of Chrysler’s Sebring/Avenger replacement has been the proverbial long and winding road. After losing its project chief and “contemplating” stuffing the whole development thing for an Altima rebadge, Chrysler’s “Project D” is finally starting to get some traction. Only it isn’t. Automotive News [sub] reports that Chrysler’s “something better than the world’s worst car for the mid-size segment” (as Farago put it) is going to look like the 200C concept. As and when, of course. But what about the actual car bits?
After the GSA and Nancy Pelosi’s office turned down TTAC’s request for a breakdown of the vehicles purchased under the Recovery Act’s Energy-Efficient Federal Motor Vehicle Fleet Procurement program, we went all FOIA. The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) has now released the info to us (as it should, transparency for the program is promised here). We’ve published the list after the jump, formatting the data by model, number purchased, country of assembly and fuel economy. Exactly 11,319 of the 17,205 vehicles purchased were assembled in the USA. [NB: I’ve provided fuel economy numbers for base versions with automatic transmissions, as per typical fleet practice.]
The Freep reports that Chrysler will cancel a planned two-week furlough for workers this summer. “The company found savings in the [bankruptcy] process that rendered the furloughs unnecessary,” say Chrysler spokesfolks. “It’s another reason why it’s good news to have bankruptcy in our rear-view mirror.” The canceled furlough will cost $32 million. But is saving money during bankruptcy a reason to not save money outside of bankruptcy? Or is there still no sense of urgency to pay back those taxpayer “loans”?
GM Prius, Buick woes, car personality and the Task Force on Auto Advertising all get what’s coming to them on the continually-improving TTAC daily podcast. Meanwhile, we’ve got to give away a copy of the Taschenwörterbuch der Kraftfahrzeugtechnik (German-English technical dictionary), so give us your favorite German automotive phrase in the comments section. We’ll pick our favorite, and the lucky winner will be able to impress their local Porsche club with their new-found understanding of compound, car-related words.
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