They say that when you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail… which is why, after writing about the dangers of “automotive nationalism,” this video made left me more impressed with Ferrari’s pride in the global development of its new FF Grand Tourer than with the pure eyecandy of the spectacle. Although, to be fair, the sheer sexiness of Ferrari’s new shooting brake-style tourer left me fairly riled up as well.

Senator Debbie Stabenow has introduced S. 3715, known as the Charging America Forward Act, which would extend tax credits for plug-in vehicles until 2014 and “front load” the credits, to create a dealership-level discount, among other provisions. Though inspired by President Obama’s call to put a million plug-in vehicles on the road by 2015, Stabenow’s website plays up a single, all-important angle to the bill

Michigan is already a leader in emerging hi-tech battery and electric car production. Other countries are acting to develop their own advanced vehicle markets because they realize the tremendous economic potential this new technology represents.  These initiatives will allow Michigan innovators to continue to out-compete the world and create new jobs here

Though the full text of the bill hasn’t hit Govtrack yet, the DetN reports that it’s chock full of plug-in subsidies, so it seems that Stabenow’s proposa is considerably more dramatic than the recent plug-in credit extension introduced by Rep Sander Levin. And that’s not necessarily a good thing…

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According to TrueCar’s newly-launched Clearbook site, I did… a little. If you want to make sure you don’t overpay for your next car, you should consider making Clearbook one of the stops on your pre-purchase web-research tour. The site analyzes over 3.6m nation-wide listings and shows, by model and location, what the car you’re looking for sells for on average… a valuable tool, provided you already know what car you’re looking for. If you don’t know what you want the next addition to your garage to be, TTAC recommends you contact our own car-buying gurus Sajeev Mehta and Steve Lang, who lend their expertise to our readers every Tuesday and Thursday in their advice column “New or Used?” Whatever you do, do not just crack open a beer and start surfing Craigslist… you will definitely regret it. Remember, information is power!

Fiat/Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne has earned our last several quotes of the day with recent controversial statements, so today we present him with the honor for a few choice words that have nothing to do with the United States government. Volkswagen has been sniffing around Fiat’s Alfa-Romeo brand for some time, as Herr Piech reportedly has the hots for the Italian brand. VW CEO Martin Winterkorn even said recently that

Alfa’s a beautiful brand but there are quality issues with the engines and suspension systems for example. I’m quite sure we could make a beautiful brand out of Alfa again.

For a while it looked like Fiat might be playing along with the interest, but recently Marchionne shot down talk of selling Alfa to VW. And he did so with the kind of acid-edged verbal shanking that makes TTAC smile and nod approvingly, saying

As long as I am CEO of Chrysler and Fiat, Mr [Ferdinand] Piech will never have Alfa Romeo. It’s hands-off. I told him. I will call him and I will email him. I’m not the one who bought Seat. He’s the one who bought it. I don’t know if he can [fix it], but he needs to try.

What do you do when a much larger firm comes sniffing around your prized (if troubled) brand? Kick them right in their own struggling brand, and in this case, Marchionne went straight for VW’s “Spanish Pontiac.” The jury is still very much out on Fiat’s grand Chrysler alliance experiment, but if it fails, it won’t be because Sergio Marchionne was scared of a fight.The guy’s talent for confrontation couldn’t be more obvious.

Chrysler’s Super Bowl ad starring the city of Detroit and its new 200 sedan may have captured the imagination of American industry-watchers, but its timing was highly inauspicious. As the ad was launched, Chrysler was being thrust into a kind of transnational custody battle between US taxpayers and the Italian government, a battle that underscores the ambiguous benefits of national bailouts of multinational companies. At the same time, Chrysler workers have once again made news by getting caught partaking in controlled substances during a lunch break, an awkward representation of the culture of the city that Chrysler is so desperate to re-inspire faith in. And even outside of the controversies swirling around America’s most challenged domestic automaker, there are signs that the phenomenon that can be termed “automotive nationalism” is outliving its usefulness. Chrysler may argue that “what we make makes us,” but appeals to the national or regional character of a car are not simply misleading… they’re downright dangerous.
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CEO Sergio Marchionne certainly suggested as much in a speech at the NADA convention over the weekend, in which he said

Who knows? In the next two or three years, we could be looking at one entity. It could be based here

From the perspective of the American taxpayer, this would certainly be the favorable outcome. After all, Fiat didn’t put a single Euro into the restructured Chrysler, and national bailouts don’t usually result in the expatriation of the bailed-out firm. But the US Treasury department isn’t the only master Fiat has to serve, and Marchionne’s suggestion that the Fiat-Chrysler alliance has touched off something of a “firestorm.” The Financial Times reports that

Pierluigi Bersani, leader of the [Italian] opposition Democratic party, demanding an explanation from Mr Marchionne said it was unacceptable for “Turin and the country to become a suburb of Detroit”.

Industry Minister Paolo Romani adds [via the Montreal Gazette]

The head of the carmaker must remain in Turin

And with Italian backlash against a possible Detroit headquartering of the Fiat-Chrysler alliance building, Marchionne is backpedaling furiously.
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Chrysler’s extended Super Bowl ad for its 200 sedan is making waves in the American auto business, for “bringing back the pride” in America’s automakers and the city that hosts them. But, as with most things Detroitean, there’s a cruel irony lurking just below the veneer of pride reborn. The Detroit News reports

Three workers from Chrysler Group LLC’s Jefferson North plant were arrested recently for alleged drug use during their lunch break after police were tipped off by the automaker.

The workers were arrested on Jan. 24 but have not been formally charged, said Det. Lt. Robert Honey, of the Michigan State Police’s County of Macomb Enforcement Team.

This is the second time in the last six months that workers at Chrysler’s Jefferson North plant have been caught indulging in overly celebratory lunch breaks. Despite all the feel-good Chrysler advertisements about Detroit Pride and quality craftsmanship, workers assembling the new much-lauded Grand Cherokee can’t seem to build the thing while sober. But there’s more to this than sheer irony: we don’t have details on the latest round of arrests, but a Chrysler-employed TTAC commenter has told us that the previous round of arrests came after second-tier workers turned in union brothers out of apparent resentment of the fact that their colleagues were making twice their second-tier wage while drinking and smoking their way through the work day. Which raises an interesting question: if Chrysler didn’t have a two-tier wage system, would Jefferson North’s 24 hour party people have been caught? Is it possible that the shop-floor tensions brought on by two-tier wages actually help curb UAW worker excesses?

Ford’s been fixing Lincoln for so long now, it’s almost surprising that things on the dealership level are still so broken. But, as Ford told its dealers at last weekend’s NADA convention [via Automotive News [sub]], it’s time to put up or become a former Lincoln dealership. By the end of this year, every Lincoln dealer must comply with a few of Ford’s “more than reasonable” expectations, to wit:

• Offering what Lincoln calls “owner privileges.” That includes providing a free car wash and loaner vehicle to owners who come in for service
• Having a dedicated service manager and dedicated sales staff for Lincoln, Bokich said. That applies specifically to Lincoln dealers paired with Ford stores.
• Having only the word “Lincoln” appear on all franchise signage, not Mercury. Ford discontinued the Mercury brand as of Dec. 31.
• Having at least 30 percent of used-vehicle inventory be certified pre-owned vehicles.

You know, those do sound like reasonable standards for a luxury brand dealer network… and if a Lincoln dealer doesn’t like them, well, Ford is looking to trim the network by 100 stores or so anyway. Still, isn’t Lincoln’s problem pretty conclusively product-related? There’s no word from Ford’s boffins on that front, which means some dealers may be happy to leave the Mercury sign up and become one of those used car lots that still has an Oldsmobile sign up. Yes, Lincoln needs a top-notch dealer experience (and an own-brand sales manager to keep marks away from the Taurus) to make Lincoln viable, but demanding it without even hinting at future product is to ask Lincoln dealers to make an incredible leap of faith.

Kurt Wiley writes in:

Having been a long time reader of TTAC, I now pose a question to the Best and Brightest:

Should one who likes the driving experience offered by German brands, but abhors their reliability and maintenance expense, seek safety with an extended warranty? Or will purchasing one of those warranties be an utter waste of money?

Considering I’m about to embark on a weekend roadtrip in a 12-year-old M Coupe, I’m hoping the answer to this question is “no.” At the same time, I’m willing to admit that I bought the car I wanted and that a little bit of risk was part of the deal. But then, I’m just a callow youth with no kids to worry about… I’ll let TTAC’s Best and Brightest bring their wealth of experience to this question while I pray that Mr M doesn’t blow a gasket this weekend.

Ars Technica has a fascinating interview with Kaveh Hushyar, CEO of Telemetria Telephony, who argues

I believe in 2020, the car will drive itself. The infrastructure will be in place, and that infrastructure will be very significant and hefty. But in that target environment, you and I don’t have to be sitting behind the wheel. In that environment, everyone will be a passenger, and you want to have full connectivity with full access to any media, or any person anywhere via the best videoconferencing available. So you need a rich media experience in the car.

At the same time, there will be a significant amount of safety applications that will be running in the car, making sure that the car is fully protected and is communicating through the infrastructure to other cars. That would be the nature of how I see the driving experience transforming in ten years plus.

Obviously, as CEO of an in-car connectivity solution firm, Mr Hushayr is heavily invested in a driver-free future… but is his vision the product of more than just wishful thinking? I certainly have some difficulty imagining giving up driving before I turn 40… but then, I’m not sure that most of my peers would. Surf over to AT and read the whole interview before letting us know what you think.

You want the good news or the bad news first? OK, the good news is that Fiat/Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne told attendees at NADA’s annual convention that Fiat and Chrysler “may” be merged into a single company, possibly headquartered in the US. Which means the federal bailout may not have simply been a transfer of the firm to Italian ownership, news that many taxpayers likely find at least a little bit comforting. Now, about that bad news… while saying that he planned to “work his [rear end] off” to pay back taxpayers, Marchionne let slip a bit of the resentment he clearly feels at government ownership of Chrysler, saying

I am paying shyster rates. We had no choice… I am going to pay the shyster loans.

Jalopnik does a good job of covering the roots and associations of Marchionne’s choice of words (and clearly he could have chosen better), but we’re mostly irked by the victim complex embraced by executives of the bailed-out automakers, especially in Marchionne’s case. The Fiat CEO was given 15 percent in Chrysler for no cash down, and will be able to take control of the automaker for a tiny fraction of its actual value. All this was possible only because the government guided Chrysler through bankruptcy, crammed down its bondholders, demanded union concessions and injected tens of billions into the company… and now Marchionne wants to employ slurs to complain about the fact that some of that money must be paid back?

These comments cloak Marchionne in the gravitas and respectability of someone who believes he should be able to receive unemployment benefits without actually looking for a job. Especially considering that only yesterday Marchionne was slamming GM for turning down DOE loans, saying

I have neither the arrogance nor the cash to show any disdain toward the DOE process. It would be wiser to Chrysler to continue to try to secure that funding.

Given that public support for the bailout is still quite low, Marchionne’s comments could hardly have been more poorly chosen.

The outgoing Ford Focus fell several spots in the C-Segment last month, and the Kia Forte bumped the Mazda3 down a bit… but as new products like the 2011 Elantra and Corolla, and the 2012 Focus hit the market, this crucial segment will see yet more turmoil.

Mahindra’s abortive plans to bring its rugged diesel-powered pickups to the US began back in 2007, just as gas prices were starting to run out of control. Now, after years of delays, steadily-increasing prices and general neglect of the compact pickup market have served only to whet our appetite for efficient little developing world-style trucks. Throughout the the last several years, Mahindra has battled with its US distributor, pulled out of other US efforts and generally failed to deliver… all while dangling the dream of a 30 MPG diesel pickup at hopeful enthusiasts. But, as it turns out, Mahindra’s problems don’t end with distribution: though its diesel engine was approved by the EPA, we hadn’t seen EPA confirmation for the long-held 30 MPG goal. Well, the EPA just released the window sticker for the Mahindra TR40 [via MahindraPlanet], a 4X4 four-door version of its 2.2 liter diesel pickup… and it gets nowhere close to 30 MPG.

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Most foreign-based automakers see the United States as a market first and a production center second: If sales are good enough, production will follow. Mitsubishi, on the other hand, seems to be taking the opposite approach. The Japanese automaker has announced [via Automotive News [sub]] that it will replace production its weak-selling midsized offerings (Galant, Endeavor, Eclipse) at its Normal, Il factory with one model: the Outlander Sport compact crossover. The Outlander Sport (known elsewhere as RVR and ASX) is Mitsu’s newest vehicle, but the firm still envisions only abput half of Normal’s planned 50k units of production to be sold in North American markets (a safe estimate considering it’s still not outselling the Lancer). The other half will be exported to Russia, Latin America and the Middle East. That’s right, Mitsubishi is keeping its only UAW-represented workforce in order to build compact crossovers for export.

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So, what really happened when two of the three hydrogen fuel-cell cars on Mercedes’s F-Cell World Tour ran out of fuel on an early leg? Previously we’d only heard the German perspective on events (not to mention Daimler’s non-telling of the story in the video above), but now TTAC Alum Jonny Lieberman has posted his extended take on the trip over at Motor Trend. Yes, you’ll have to give MT ten page-clicks to read the whole thing, but Lieberman goes into far more detail than any account of the mini PR fiasco yet published. Do give it a look.