Even as Opel looks set to leave GM’s cratering corporate mothership, the German division has scooped top honors in the European Car of the Year (ECOTY, although UK buff book EVO also claims that acronym). Oops! Did I say Opel? I mean Vauxhall. The British brand under which GM products are sold in the UK. Other than Chevrolet and Cadillac, which are also sold throughout Europe, although, in the UK, not so much that you’d require more than your two hands to count them. Anyway, the methodology used to bang the gong (and get it on) is beyond question. ECOTY is judged by a panel of 59 swag-scarfing, press car luxuriating journos members, representing 23 European countries. The Motor Authority reports that “National representation on the panel is related to the size of the country’s car market and its importance in car manufacturing, with France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy and Spain topping the list with six members each… Of the total 59 judges, 20 gave the Insignia top points, while 19 put the Fiesta in first place.” And Sweden showed it no love at all. See the votes by judge here.
Posts By: Robert Farago
BMW’s re-launch of the MINI brand stateside was a marketing meisterstück. From focused billboards to user-friendly showrooms to a “cheeky” website– MINI never put a foot wrong. Their timing was impeccable, launching the anti-SUV just as SUVs became showroom anti-matter. Needless to say, the brand is now showing signs of losing the plot. A MINI Clubfoot? What’s that all about? A MINI SUV? Just as SUVs get stuck in the tarpit of a market meltdown? Now you might think that a EV MINI couldn’t miss. Well, it missed the gas price bubble. And it also missed the lesson of GM’s EV1– a product killed by a lack of range, a lack of interior space and long recharge times. On MINIspace, MINI’s mini MINI site, MINI’s Head of Project i (why not iMINI instead of the awkward MINI-E?) spills the beans. Ulrich Kranz reveals the hard facts about the 500 EV mules for which bleeding edge environmentalists will surrender their left testicle. “[Drivers will achieve] 240 kilometres if you drive at a moderate pace or 200 kilometres using the motor’s full output.” All this in a small car– without rear seats. (those belong to the li-on batteries). That’s 0 for 2. Recharge time? “The fastest way of charging the battery fully is using a wallbox supplied to all 500 MINI E drivers. The wallbox is installed in the driver’s garage and enables a higher amperage, which ensures extremely short charging times. Indeed, the wallbox takes no more than two and a half hours to charge up the battery.” So how long without the “did the lights just go dim again?” box? Crickets chirping. EV fans may line-up around the block, but I reckon they’ll eventually form a circle.
From the “with friends like these” department… The Detroit News reports that Michigan Senator Carl Levin met the press and announced his willingness to sacrifice GM CEO Rick Wagoner to get The General the bailout billions it needs thanks to Red Ink Rick’s myopia, intransigence and incompetence. “I’d be happy to tell (GM CEO) Rick Wagoner that he ought to consider resigning if that is the difference between getting this kind of support and not,” Levin said. So far, so good. And then… “The Detroit Democrat said the government ‘should have more than a say’ in management through an oversight board that would oversee the $25 billion in loans…” That’s just what GM needs to be more competitive: an oversight board beholden to politicians. Imagine what Toyota could do with one of those! Meanwhile, GM spokesman Greg Martin “declined to comment directly” on Levin’s remarks. “The global economic crisis that has put this industry in its current precarious position far exceeds any one individual.” Uh. Greg, you missed a few words there. Anyone care to help him out?
And now, a few decades and several tens of billions of dollars later, we have southern politicians with automotive manufacturing facilities in their backyards. And, for some reason, they’re not feeling a particularly strong desire to spend federal taxpayers’ money on bailing out Detroit. As The Atlanta Journal Constitution puts it, “For behind the philosophical back-and-forth over government intervention, scheduled to begin Monday in the U.S. Senate, is a cut-throat, economic reality: the South has ambitions of becoming Detroit’s rival. And a federal dollar that artificially props up manufacturing on the northern end of I-75 is a dollar that hinders the creation of new economic models downstream, some Southern politicians maintain.” Par example? “Georgia’s Kia plant is scheduled to open next November, employing as many as 2,500 workers. The site is located within U.S. Rep. Lynn Westmoreland’s 3rd District. Westmoreland, like other House Republicans, voted against the $700 Wall Street bailout. He’ll vote against a Detroit rescue as well – on the grounds that it would create a slanted field of play for the workers he’ll soon represent. ‘One of the things we have constantly said is we can’t compete with some of these foreign businesses because the government has intervened in those businesses, and it makes an unfair advantage,’ Westmoreland said. ‘What we’re doing here with the auto industry is basically the same thing.'” Fine words. And the way the AJC takes him to task is classic…
Holman W. Jenkins Jr. is not a happy camper. The Wall Street Journal columnist begins his broadside by taking on the Hail Mary-shaped plug-in hybrid gas – electric Chevrolet Volt. Jenkins reckons it’s what the Brits call a “non-starter.” “Even as GM teeters toward bankruptcy and wheedles for billions in public aid, its forthcoming plug-in hybrid continues to absorb a big chunk of the company’s product development budget. This is a car that, by GM’s own admission, won’t make money. It’s a car that can’t possibly provide a buyer with value commensurate with the resources and labor needed to build it. It’s a car that will be unsalable without multiple handouts from government.” While Jenkins’ anti-Volt tirade isn’t especially accurate (you could even call it inaccurate), at least his rhetoric is a moving target, as he changes targets.
Back in the day, I wrote one General Motors Death Watch a week and that was pretty much that. Now that GM’s hit the buffers, begging for bailout billions with loquacious (if louche) lobbying, you can’t click on a news source without encountering an editorial or news piece on Motown’s meltdown. And it IS an important and fascinating story, the first real litmus test of politics-as-usual versus America’s bedrock belief system. [NB: I’ve promised some of our Best and Brightest that I’d alternate bailout articles with car stuff.] One of the most amazing aspects of these revolting developments: how GM’s lobbying campaign has unleashed a wave of anti-bailout pistonheads. Normally, the GM FastLane blog is home to home team boosterism of the most sycophantic “Top of the morning Guv’nor!” variety. But now, after Christopher “You Guys Hate Us” Barger (a.k.a. Director, GM Global Communications Technology) posted the Peter Hart study claiming America supports a GM bailout (debunked here), the shit has hit the fans. While there are still GM gadflies flitting about, there are a LOT of pissed-off posters. If anti-bailout posters have stormed this bastion of BS, GM’s claim on the public purse is, shall we say, “challenged.” I suggest you head over there before Barger tidies it up.
It pains me to write this. The Dallas Morning News scribe Terry Box has long been one of my favorite automotive journalists. He may not return my phone calls, but, unlike a number of reporters, he doesn’t hang up when he hears my voice. He’s been known to take automakers behind the woodshed for their failures, both administrative and vehicular. And I’m told he’s armed (as in fire-armed). But mine is not to question why; it’s to ask WTF? When I read the headline of Terry’s piece, I nearly ejected Clover coffee on my keyboard: “Enclave could ride to GM’s rescue.” Surely Box means an Enclave in the foil hat wearing sense of the word; you know, like Dan Qualye, John Snow, Nancy Pelosi, Rick Wagoner and some Rothschild or another. Nope. Buick. “I don’t know that the Enclave can save GM, which as you know is in deep, deep, uh, distress. But the Enclave and its jeans-wearing cousin, the ’09 Chevrolet Traverse, may be two of GM’s best shots at driving out of the ditch it’s in.” Uh, I think we’ve already past that point, Terry. A loooooong time ago. Anyway, his rational: the Buick Enclave and its twin-under-the-skin Chevy Traverse are better than the GMC Yukon. It’s this automotive relativism that’s got GM where it isn’t today. I’m surprised to see Mr. Box living in same.
Washington Post automotive reviewer and Detroit apologist Warren Brown is black. While I couldn’t care less about Warren’s skin color, his latest appeal on behalf of his benefactors’ bailout billions is beyond the pale. It focuses exclusively on his ethnicity, suggesting that The Big 2.8 deserve federal money because they’ve put Warren’s “people” on the “road to success.” “I am a black child of the Deep South who watched legions of neighbors and relatives flee economic apartheid in pursuit of opportunity in the automobile factories of Michigan and Ohio and in the steel plants of Pennsylvania and Indiana… The American Three — General Motors, Ford and Chrysler — largely have been responsible for the development of a black middle class in this country. Many children of factory workers followed their parents onto automobile assembly lines. But many others went to colleges and universities, medical and technical schools, thanks to good UAW salaries and educational benefits.” His point being? “People make mistakes. But redemption is found in the good that they do, and the domestic automobile industry has done a lot of tangible good for this nation.” And now, the close: a suggestion that not bailing out Detroit would lead to class warfare (implied: a return to racism). “An America that manufactures nothing, or an America that owns nothing it manufactures, is an America with a frightfully vulnerable middle class — an America that threatens to become a society starkly divided between haves and have-nots, a throwback to the Deep South of my segregated youth. That is not the America I want.”
Did we miss something? After repeating the inherently suspicious Center for Automotive Research stats on the impact of a Motown meltdown, and sharing the history of the federally-sponsored Chrysler comeback, AutoLine Detroit apologist and Autoblog columnist John McElroy is ready to share the upside of another federal bailout for Detroit. “Most people seem to miss the fact that they are on the verge of a massive turnaround. If the Big Three get a government bailout this time, I see history repeating itself. Most people seem to miss the fact that they are on the verge of a massive turnaround. I’m not trying to be a rah-rah cheerleader here [as if!]. I’m persuaded simply by the facts.” McElroy is laboring under the impression that the eventual savings from the last United Auto Workers’ contract is The One. Less cost, less over-production– less means more! “That means they’ll be able to slash their incentives. Every $1,000 that General Motors cuts from incentives will drop roughly $4 billion to the bottom line. And GM has an average of $3,500 in incentives!” Huzzah! Where do I sign? “What this means is that when the economy finally starts to recover and the car market begins to grow again, GM, Ford and Chrysler will be in an extremely competitive position, one they haven’t been in for more than 40 years. And that’s why those who say giving them a bailout is just throwing good money after bad are dead wrong. The Big Three are not only on the verge of a roaring comeback, I predict that in the next decade they’ll go on to hit record profits.” I wonder if John’s a betting man?
Recent Comments