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?]
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?
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.
Thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. Our website www.cashguzzlers.nethas 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:
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.
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.
I can’t decide whether GM’s “reinvention” will fail through government action or inaction. On one hand, I share the commonly held belief that GM’s product portfolio will be skewed towards small cars, to satisfy the Obama administration’s love of all things green and beautiful. Even without express orders to do so, GM’s craven executives will seek to please their elected overlords’ politically-driven desires. On the other hand, paralysis. The last thing GM’s cumbersome, dysfunctional management needs is another layer of command and control—especially one where accountability is measured in votes and patronage, rather than dollars and cents. The tendency to do nothing slowly, as is the way of all government, is great. If I had to guess which way this is going to go, I’d say both.
TTAC just got a call from the Department of Transportation (DOT). The agency in charge of implementing the Cash for Clunkers program gave us a heads-up that the Car Allowance Rebate System is already attracting “unauthorized identity appropriation.” To wit: cashforclunkersheadquarters.com and cashforguzzlers.net, which sucker surfers into “pre-registering” for the program. “There are a number of people out there who are implying that dealers and/or consumers need to register with them to be eligible for the CARS program,” DOT spokesman Rae Tyson reveals, leaving aside questions about what these sites may do with the information. “This is completely untrue.”
The Department of Transportation (DOT) has fired-up its Cash4Clunkers website. I would have thought the bill’s nickname would have been ideal for the job, but then I’m not a public servant. And so the feds present its brand new website with a new name: CARS (Car Allowance Rebate System). Definitely a case of not leaving well enough alone. To wit: a button on cars.gov asking “How will CARS work”. Apropos of nothing, the site also has a strange FAQ: “I don’t drive an American car but I would like to trade in my old car for a newer, more fuel efficient one. Is this program only for American cars?” Now why would anyone think that? More CARS after the jump.
On Thursday the bipartisan leadership of the US House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee introduced its $500 billion blueprint for federal transportation programs over the next six years. In addition to creating new rail and transit subsidies, the proposal introduces new roadblocks for state looking to convert existing free roads into toll roads. Committee Chairman James L. Oberstar (D-Minnesota) and Ranking Member John L. Mica (R-Florida) agreed that legislative consideration of the proposal should move forward this Wednesday. Oberstar’s proposal represents a 53 percent increase in spending over the previous authorization level and will require significant increases in revenue generated. Oberstar lashed out at a suggestion from Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood that Congress should hold off on action so that the expected vote on raising gas taxes would be delayed until after the midterm congressional elections.
From Bloomberg’s irony-free (Saturn Aura, geddit?) article entitled “Car Buyers Spurn GM, Ford as Japan Brands Retain Aura”:
“It is very hard to open minds and get people to consider a domestic vehicle again, no matter how good,” GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz said. “The product and fuel economy deficit, reliability deficit, styling deficit — all those deficits have been erased. What has yet to be erased and is going to be the biggest challenge of all is erasing the reputational deficit.”
Anyone remember energy independence? You know: oil addiction? Freeing America from the oppressive yoke of foreign oil importation? I guess the yoke’s on us, isn’t it children? You know, at one time, energy independence was, as Paris Hilton used to say, hot. The issue was used to justify spending billions of federal tax dollars to help our nice agribusinesspeople brew ethanol from corn. Hands up those of you who’ve heard your Mommy or Daddy saying “no one ever died defending a corn field?” Well, times change. Although the E85 federal subsidies and mandates are still there, and our corn growers are doing all they can do to ruin engines with mandatory E15 gasoline blends, you just don’t hear so much about energy independence as you used to. That’s all going to change now! I know: isn’t it exciting? And you’ll never guess who’s going to ping the people? Audi. Yes, Katy, truth in engineering. Only now it’s truth in TDI Clean Diesel!
Over the years, I’ve become inured to the mainstream automotive press’s mindless Motown cheerleading and irrational optimism. But every now and then, they really get my goat. The Detroit News ran a feature today by Bryce J. Hoffman clunkily entitled “How would Henry Ford react to today’s automakers?” It’s bad enough that Detroit’s zombies have suckered the federal government into endless subsidies by re-writing recent history. (We were doing GREAT until the economy tanked!) But for a journalist to raise an important historical question and then let Detroit apologists spin it without question is, uh, enervating.
Recent Comments