Fiat boss Sergio Marchionne has been schmoozing with Automotive News Europe [sub]. “By the time we finish with this in the next 24 months, as far as mass-producers are concerned, we’re going to end up with one American house, one German of size; one French-Japanese, maybe with an extension in the U.S.; one in Japan; one in China and one other potential European player,” Sergio predicts. And now, the WQOTD: “Companies can only survive if they produce at least 5.5 million cars a year.” So, someone special, who will it be? Someone special like… “Toyota, General Motors, Volkswagen, Ford Motor and Renault-Nissan.” Note: we could have gone another way on this one. In the same article, the thoughts of Jürgen Pieper, analyst at Metzler Bank in Germany, gets major play. Herr Pieper opines “Size in the current situation is what matters.” Small and nimble gets subsumed by big and… stupid? Stimt. “Daimler has been scarred by its experience with Chrysler, BMW bought Rover but sold it again after high investments failed to pay off. Analysts say both episodes showed that synergies between premium and volume carmakers are elusive.” “Elusive” as in non-existent?

A contact who works for one of Chrysler’s tier 1 suppliers shared an interesting story…  “Production at the Newark Assembly Plant (Durango, Aspen) has been ramping down as the Dec. 31 plant closing approaches.  As usually occurs just before a model-year changeover, suppliers have been receiving “shortage” orders for their components as Chrysler tries to build out existing stock with a minimum of excess parts. But a recent and unexpected order for 2000 parts raised a few eyebrows.  It seems that the Iraqi government has placed an order for 2000 Dodge Durangos to be delivered early next year. The Newark plant is more than capable of building them in time, but some suppliers with longer delivery lead times or full production schedules have been asked to pull off nothing short of a miracle to fill their orders. For certain suppliers, not even overtime will be sufficient to meet their deadline, leading to some logistical nightmare scenarios.

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Please keep this email anonymous. I currently work for GM Holden in Australia. This is my second stint at Holden. As you may know Holden is an Iconic Australian brand that unfortunately has GM Cancer. Holden has always been successful in delivering pretty good rear wheel drive cars at good prices. Until, however we got caught up in the GM world with the GTO program. My first time at Holden was in 2000. It was a place were everybody was proud of what we did, knew what had to be done. Now it is a shell of its former self, with people totally beaten into submission. The last 18 months doing Camaro has really smashed Holden and its talented workforce. It replaced just about all of the Australian management with Americans with no experience in the Australian market, and could not be told they were wrong.

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Over the weekend, Washington Post carmudgeon Warren Brown framed the pro and anti-bailout debate as a form of class warfare, pitting wealthy college-educated selfish bastards (i.e. journalists, Wall Street, Washington) against UAW-protected American-dream-seeking assembly workers (i.e. Detroit). This morning, The Detroit News’ resident poverty and employment policy specialist picks-up Warren’s placard and mans the barricades. In “Washington’s whipping boys,” Amber Arellano bites the hand that’s about to feed. “While Wall Street was welcomed into the front door on a Sunday night and served a bail-out with hot cocoa, Michigan’s auto chiefs have been publicly humiliated before the national press so Congress and the Bush administration can show voters they’re finally holding someone accountable for this disaster of an era.” I said, “While Wall Street’s 1990s orgy of deregulation wrecks the economy and the Manhattan Brooks Brothers set gets a true bail-out of more than $170 billion, the Detroit Three automakers beg for a loan — and get mocked as if they’re janitors at an arrogant New Jersey country club.” You might not agree with Amber’s assertions (here’s hoping), but this girl’s got some spunk!

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Thanks to our new feature– What Wrong With This Picture (3WTP)– I am trained in the fine art of anomaly spotting. So when I saw this Autobloggreen (ABG) photo of Emmy Rossum filling-up her Blue Tec Merc with diesel, the cognitive dissonance nearly deafened me. First, check the posture. Emmy’s feet are way too close together for proper pumping. Second, the shoes. Have you ever tried driving an SUV in high heels? (Trust me, it’s not a good idea.) Third, why is she looking at the pump? I highly doubt she’s worried about the price. And if she was worried about nozzle blowback, she’d already be standing away from the vehicle. And then there’s the photog’s reflection. Only professional photogs assume that kind of contorted position, or use such a huge aperture (the camera). And so I read the text, which seemed to indicate that this is some kind of trend: celebs ditching Priora for Mercedes BlueTec diesel SUVs. Which makes no sense whatsoever. “Recently the likes of Naomi Watts, Kyle MacLachlan and Gary Oldman have been turning up driving Mercedes-Benz BlueTec diesels like the ML320 and E320. While these vehicles are not in the same green class as the Toyota, the do offer the other attributes of a Benz with much better fuel efficiency than gasoline-powered alternatives.” Which sounds an awful lot like PR copy to me…

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The nominations for TTAC’s Ten Worst Awards 2008 are now closed. I’ll keep the comments section underneath our two prior posts on this most TTAC of new car awards open, but that’s it: our list is complete. Frank Williams will, in due course, give you some insight into the vehicles selected and the comments used to justify the nominations. Meanwhile, I apologize for our site problems. I know that TTAC’s been as slow as Ford’s panther platform updates, and buggier than a Michigan windscreen on a hot August night. The speed issue is ongoing; we’re still trying to learn how to cope with traffic spikes [pictured]. The second seems ad-related. Any hints or geeky kvetches you can provide below will help our crack team of programmers and dev types, and probably, hopefully, make you feel better. Rest assured, I understand the need to provide our Best and Brightest with the best possible technical interface, and will stay on top of these issues until they’re resolved or the Moller Skycar takes wing. If you’d like to drop me an email about this or any other issue, please use robert.farago@thetruthaboutcars.com. I will reply personally, ASAP. Thanks for your patience, understanding and patronage.

If you think it’s a buyer’s market for new cars, oh man are you right. But you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Literally. “At the Long Beach port near Los Angeles,” Reuters reports. “Toyota Motor Corp vehicles including Prius hybrids, FJ Cruiser sport utility vehicles and Lexus IS 250 luxury sedans are being stored on a vast construction site that will one day be a new container terminal. The site became a gigantic parking lot when Toyota and Daimler AG’s Mercedes-Benz asked the port for space to store thousands of vehicles that dealerships have not been able to take on due to sluggish sales.” Imagine this. “The port has not counted how many additional cars were being stored, but Wong said Toyota has leased an additional 23 acres of space while Mercedes-Benz has leased about 20 more acres.” So, if the ports are choking on new cars, where are Motown’s unsold machines? Everywhere, our spies tell us. Everywhere. Import or domestic, their products don’t have an idefinite shelf life. There’s only so long the manufacturers can afford to keep these new cars off the market, propping-up new car prices. Bottom line: as predicted here, new car prices are headed for one Hell of a crash. And soon.

In his selfless campaign to save Detroit from, uh, Detroit, Senator Christopher Dodd launched a failure-seeking missile at GM. Needless to say, it had GM CEO Rick Wagoner’s name on it. “You’ve got to consider new leadership,” Dodd told “Face the Nation,” referring to GM not CBS (one presumes). Dodd said Red Ink Rick “has to move on.” Now get this: “GM spokesman Steve Harris said he didn’t interpret Dodd’s comments as making Wagoner’s exit a condition for aid, adding that the company management, employees and dealers ‘all feel like Rick is the right guy to lead us at difficult time.'” Is “difficult time” the opposite of “playtime?” And how else would you interpret Dodd’s remark? When the Senator said, “piss off Wagoner” he actually meant “please continue running GM into the ground so we can blow $15b+ of our taxpayers’ money on this doomed enterprise?” And if Harris really didn’t get the message– a completely fantastic proposition, but there you go– President elect Barack Obama offered NBC dark hints about Wagoner’s curtain call…

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From GM’s ad in Automotive News (Dec 8 edition):

“While we’re still the U.S. sales leader, we acknowledge we have disappointed you. At times we violated your trust by letting our quality fall below industry standards and our designs become lackluster. We have proliferated our brands and dealer network to the point where we lost adequate focus on our core U.S. market. We also biased our product mix toward pick-up trucks and SUVs. And, we made commitments to compensation plans that have proven to be unsustainable in today’s globally competitive industry. We have paid dearly for these decisions, learned from them and are working hard to correct them by restructuring our U.S. business to be viable for the long term.”

Warren Brown is a shameless Detroit cheerleader. The Washington Post’s carmudgeon’s inability to criticize Motown’s products, process or prognosis has provided TTAC grill mist for years. Recently, we chronicled WaPo Warren’s lame, lamentable attempt to play the race card on The Big 2.8’s behalf. “Reluctance to Help Detroit Reeks of Class Bias” takes a different– though equally fabulous– tack. Brown starts by suggesting that anti-bailout journalists are effete intellectual snobs. “The queries [against the bailout] often come from people who earn substantially more than the estimated $71,000 annually in wages and benefits paid to UAW members. They come from people who, having reached upper-middle-class status by virtue of their college educations and communication skills, certainly wouldn’t settle for earning less.” Does Warren know that the UAW has a freelance writers’ branch? Anyway, the main event: “There is a feeling in this country– apparent in the often condescending, dismissive way Detroit’s automobile companies have been treated on Capitol Hill– that people who work with their hands and the companies that employ them are inferior to those who work with their minds and plow profit from information. How else to explain the clearly disparate treatment given to companies such as Citigroup and General Motors?” How else indeed. More WTF after the jump.

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If there is one man responsible for GM’s successful semi-suckle on Uncle Sam’s teat, it’s Steve Harris. I reckon GM’s PR mastermind moved the Congressional bailout hearings from the beginning of the week to the end. Tuesday’s catastrophic new vehicle sales numbers highlighted the fact that SOMETHING HAD TO BE DONE. Friday’s unemployment stats added the critical word NOW. Once Congress convinced itself that it could convince the American public that really bad shit was about to go down, the bailout was a done deal. In truth, it’s just the start. Harris knows it, you know it, and the American people know it.

I don’t know how many times we’ve pointed out that the blame for GM’s descent into bankruptcy ultimately lies deeply and completely with the automakers’ Board of Bystanders. Yes, GM CEO (and Chairman of the Board) Rick Wagoner drove the artist formerly known as the world’s largest automaker into a wall. But the Board threw him the keys, patted him on the back, walked back inside the house and played Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction. To wit: “In an interview with The Detroit News, [BoD member] Kathryn Marinello ruled out the ‘fantasy’ of a prepackaged bankruptcy, which requires advance agreements with stakeholders before a filing, something that has never been attempted on such a large scale.” After reading our own Richard Tilton’s treatise on the matter,  I disagree completely. But hey, it sounds reasonable. This however… “She strongly defended GM Chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner, calling him ‘the mailman,’ because ‘he always delivers. He is the only person that can keep the automotive industry alive in America,” said Marinello, chairman and CEO of Ceridian Corp., an information services company based in Minneapolis. ‘Not just keep it alive, but make it the technology and green leader.'” That’s incredible.