TTAC Commentator Riz writes:

I’ve just got my first “commuter” car – 2009 Civic DX-G and I’ve been surprised at the amount of dew on all the windows most mornings and how much ‘crud’ dries on after rain. Compared to any of the cars/minivans we’ve owned or our current family driver (’06 Mazda 5) it’s really annoying. And it’s not just the front / back (although the lack of rear wiper is lamentable) – side windows are also an issue. So what’s the ideal product – RainX or another brand? And any concerns for application (like don’t get any on the non painted side mirror covers or that sort of thing)? And how long does it last? Note – this product needs to also deal with frost and snow as I live in Calgary.

Also – is this common on Honda’s? We’re looking at a new minivan next year, and if the Odyssey is more likely to do this than the Sienna then I’d like to plan for it.

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How often does a truly revolutionary car appear? Let’s disqualify uranium powered flying cars on the cover of Popular Science and other quirky eccentrics from consideration, but focus on mass production cars that profoundly and permanently changed the autosphere. Narrow the field further to the small-size end of the US market post WWII, and the number of candidates is all of…two. The VW Beetle completely turned the US car market (and careless drivers) on its head, both in its technical specifications and in creating a mass small-car market. The Beetle had a brilliant twenty-year run, and just as it was running out of compression, it handed the baton to that other revolutionary, the Honda Civic.

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It’s been year since we blogged Chinese press reports that China’s SAIC might buy GM. It turned out to be one of many Chinese rumors that followed. We became the target of hate mongering—some idiots even accused us of driving down GM’s and Chrysler’s stock price. Duh, buyout rumors usually drive prices up. At the time, the GM stock was worth at least a little money: the market cap of GM was less than Mattel.  Months later, the stock was worthless. GM and Chrysler went bankrupt. Instead of the Chinese owning GM and Chrysler, the American taxpayer ended up holding the barf bag.

It took a year and six days to dawn on CNN Money that a Chinese-owned GM might not be such an outlandish idea after all. “A Chinese-owned GM, it could happen,” headlines CNN Money today.
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Think everything will be hunky-dory by, well, 2012? (Watch the  movie.) Fitch Ratings thinks the U.S. auto industry won’t get back on its feet anytime soon. Worse, the industry may be caught in an “airline-style” cycle of repetitive bankruptcies because of weak sales and a glut of production capacity. It is unusual for a U.S. airline (and many elsewhere) to not be in bankruptcy or not have been at some point.

Amongst the rating agencies, Fitch is the only halfway good one. They were the lone voice that had warned against the dangers of the collateralized debt obligations that brought the world to the brink of disaster.

In a report cited by Reuters, Fitch says that high fixed costs, the lengthy periods required to develop new products and chronic overcapacity will leave the industry “littered with failures—plants, product lines, brands and companies.”
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TTAC Commentator jpcavanaugh writes:

A friend has a 2005 Acura TL which he bought as a certified used car at about 2 yrs and 40K miles on it. He bought the extended warranty to 100K. I recall thinking “its an Acura, why waste the money on an extended warranty?” It turns out he was right: at about 60K, he noticed an occasional judder during transmission shifts. The dealer informs him that the transmission is shot, and that it will be replaced under his extended warranty. After a couple of days, he gets the car back (he did enjoy the RL he got as a loaner) and the car is fine. Until now.

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No, General Motors is not paying back the taxpayers, nor will it ever fully… it’s more like a partial refund. That’s not exactly fresh news around here, but the Grey Lady called wanting the breakdown. So here it is. Just don’t ask how they misspelled the byline.

The weekend of October 24-25 was the third running of the 24 Hours of LeMons at Motorsport Ranch in Houston, TX. TTAC was there for the insanity.  And it was the fourth time our LeMons race car, a 1972 Datsun 240Z hit the track.  I was an honorary “penalty” judge this time ’round (props to Autoblog’s Jonny Lieberman and LeMon’s Founder Jay Lamm for that), so I did the best I could for my teammates when they got black flagged. But I’m no crooked judge, Jonny said I was too nice to other teams, too. No matter, it wasn’t enough for us to come close to victory. Then again, the Datsun Z is the butt of many a LeMon’s joke. What’s up with that?

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This Curbside Classic took the same trajectory as the Blazer. It started as a legitimate nod of acknowledgment to the S-10 Blazer as the trailblazer of the compact SUV market. But as I got further along, I realized just how badly GM bungled the huge opportunity for the baby Blazer in a segment that became a monster money machine for Jeep and Ford. With the mistakes being all so prototypical GM, I just had to re-write it as a Deadly Sin, even though it would have been easier to just leave it as it was. Which is exactly what GM’s Deadly Sin was: leave it as it was, forever. Well I’m not ready just yet to have someone document my Deadly Journalistic Sins, so here goes: Blazer, take Two.

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TTAC Commentator Karl_Donina writes:

Hi, Sajeev. I want to know why it’s so fashionable for automakers to provide obnoxiously labyrinthine automatic shifter gates. It seems to have started with Jaguar’s innocuous J-shaped gates of the ’80s, but these days it seems to have become passé to provide a simple, easy-to-use linear gate — push button or hold lever to one side to move in a straight line out of park and through the gears, or back the other direction.  Now every shift, whether from 1 to 2 or N to R or whatever, requires inconsistent and annoying fore-aft and transverse movements. The gates on Subarus I’ve driven lately are ridiculous, as is the one in the Yaris I rented last week. And there are many more. Thanks for whatever enlightenment you can provide.

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No one’s going to accuse me of not having a nostalgic streak, especially when it comes to cars. That’s what motivated me to write the Auto-biography, my time travel through words. How about the real thing, in steel, glass, rubber and wool? One of my main motivations for starting Curbside Classics was to document and re-experience the cars from those early years, and few were as influential as the original Olds 88. Most of the time, the reliving is somewhat vicarious, but once in a while, I get lucky, and it’s the real thing. So let’s literally open the door to the past, and hop in for a ride with me in this beautiful 1951 Super 88. And if it gets a bit crowded, good; that’ll make it all the more authentic. Read More >

GM’s first post-bankruptcy financial data has arrived, underscoring in red ink the folly of the government “investment” in the shambling zombie once known as General Motors. Bankruptcy-driven improvements in cost structure have not prevented GM from turning a non-GAAP-certified loss since emerging from Chapter 11, and GM is already warning that 4th quarter results will be even less attractive. More importantly, beneath all of the interpretation of this latest batch of weak results, rests the biggest lie of all: GM will be paying back the taxpayers. GM has simply defined the terms of its debt as $6.7b, or about half the amount remaining in its $16b bankruptcy-present escrow account. The plan is to have the taxpayers pay off GM’s debt to the taxpayers, and collect the remaining $6b or so for operating cash.  When called on the ruse, GM CEO Fritz Henderson has only one defense: Taxpayers will receive their just reward only when GM’s IPO relieves them of their 60 percent equity stake. But even with the goalposts moving up in hopes of a PR win, there’s little evidence that GM will come close to paying off their full bailout bill.

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TTAC Commentator edgett writes:

What is the correlation between driver’s training and safety? Articles suggest that improved driver training does not improve highway safety are simply counterintuitive. Granted that nothing supplants experience on the road, but surely having some idea of the braking and handling characteristics of your vehicle, before “experience” requires it, is of more than passing value. And how can we expect someone who is competent to drive a Honda Civic to drive competently when put behind the wheel of a Suburban or 15 passenger van?

If the Air Force ensures that pilots start off in small, light single-seat aircraft and lots of simulator time before getting a seat in an F15, doesn’t this suggest that education is worthwhile? This one has been hinted at in a variety of posts, but I don’t recall seeing anything where the issue has been covered in depth.

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Passenger pigeons were the most common bird found in North America. So common that flocks numbering 2 billion were up to a mile wide and 300 miles long. In other words, the average North American in the 18th and 19th Century saw a lot of these pigeons. You could easily argue that a passenger pigeon sighting in 1812 was something on the same scale today as seeing mind-numbing crap on TV. Not a particularly noteworthy or unique experience. So what took the passenger pigeon down? It was a combination of things but the biggest factor was that these pigeons tasted pretty good (a lot like chicken) and they were plentiful-hence a cheap source of food.bThey were wiped out at the pace of millions per year, so the last documented passenger pigeon named Martha died on September 1st 1914. In other words, something the average American had seen every day was extinct in a matter of a few decades. Quick extinction of a very common species is not a phenomenon exclusive to Mother Nature because cars can disappear overnight too. Here are a few that will soon be joining that “whatever happened to…” list.
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For politicians, the sphere of the personal shrinks as that of the political swells, until for some, the personal all but disappears. Then, even the choice of car becomes political. During the recent elections, one car loomed so large in the fleets of presidential aspirants that the manufacturer actually touted it as “The Candidates’ Choice” in advertisements that ran in Capitol Hill publications, such as Roll Call. Even more tellingly, the particular vehicle was unique to the left side of the aisle, and all were 2007 models, purchased after election season had begun.

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Not long after Fortune’s long time auto writer Alex Taylor III finished his apology to Ford he went on to write a love letter to Sergio Marchionne. Taylor starts with parallels to Ghosn’s myth making success at Nissan, then ups the ante: “The other day in Auburn Hills, Mich., Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne took a page out of the Ghosn playbook — and then improved upon it.” The impetus for Taylor’s piece was the legendary Power Point Rumble in the Detroit Jungle TTAC’s Edward Niedermeyer reported on with, um, slightly less enthusiasm last week .

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