General Motors has always been long on talk about the future. The company that invented concept cars and pioneered planned obsolescence has always kept consumers focused on the next big thing(s), and that tradition is ever more important now that GM is a publicly-owned entity. Future products are the justification for current investments and subsidies, and GM knows it. Though details are sparse and largely sifted out of the murk of PR leaks, teases and hearsay, a picture of post-IPO GM’s 2012 lineup is beginning to form. The success of these vehicles depends on a number of difficult-to-predict factors, but assuming fairly conservative projections (steady increases in US economic growth, auto sales and gas prices), it’s not too hard to tease out a few early conclusions on GM’s strategy. So let’s hop in the time machine and set the dial for the Fall of 2011.

City/Mini Class

The Chevrolet Spark will be all-new for the 2012 model year, hitting dealerships just as our time machine arrives two years into the future. Based on the basic-by-third-world-standards Daewoo Matiz, the Spark is Geo Metro redux with a Chevy badge and styling. With a 1.2 liter engine and a goal of 50 mpg on the highway, Spark is clearly GM’s insurance policy against another sharp spike in fuel prices.  US production of about 25k-30k units annually (about current Aveo sales levels) is reportedly planned. Most of GM’s competitors plan on bringing more premium offerings to this segment (e.g. VW Up!, Toyota iQ), making Spark a potentially unique value (though probably less profitable).

Subcompact Class

GM will replace its unloved Aveo as a 2011 model, a year before our time machine lands. Chinese/Korean engineered on the new GM-Daewoo “Gamma II” platform and styled by GM’s Brazilian studio, the new Aveo is supposed to be built at Orion Township. Strangely though, Automotive News [sub] reports that Aveo will “likely” be produced at San Luis Potosi, Mexico. Styling and space should be improved compared to the outgoing model, but the model will probably struggle under the Aveo name thanks to its predecessor’s weak reputation. Name continuity is a good thing, but Bob Lutz’s apparent decision to keep the Aveo name may not have been the example for GM to start the habit with.

Both the Spark and Aveo will struggle to hide their developing-market roots and will likely do little to change the perception small cars are an afterthought for GM. The Spark in particular should face some trouble, given that most economists see economic recovery and rising gas prices arriving hand-in-hand. In that scenario (and considering GM’s desperate need to improve its small-car rep), Toyota and VW’s premium city car approach seems to be the better choice. And with the Aveo upsizing to near-Cobalt size, GM will also be selling it as a hatchback only for fear of cannibalizing the Cruze. This will further limit its appeal in the American market.

Compact Class

The Cruze will debut alongside the new Aveo in 2011, and will be built on the global Delta II platform in Lordstown, OH. Early reviews from Europe and Australia where local versions have already debuted are . . . mixed. Reviewers praise the space, styling and interior quality, while criticizing the car’s weight, engines and dull handling. All in all, though, it’s hard to conclude that the Cruze won’t be a huge improvement on the Cobalt. This should go a long way towards building some kind of reputation for GM in a segment where it has never really been competitive. Unfortunately, for every positive step there’s at least one regression.

A Delta II-based Buick is planned for model year 2012, which has been conceived as a way of returning lost Pontiac volume to the Buick-GMC dealer network. “Unique sheetmetal” is promised, but the model (like all Buicks going forward) will essentially be a tweaked Chinese-market offering built alongside the Cruze at Lordstown. GM’s level of cynicism in executing this model will be a defining choice. With the Cruze already offering a relatively high quality interior for the segment, differentiating the Buick compact will be tough. Especially if Buick-GMC dealers are counting on it for real volume.

In addition to badge-engineering, GM is also saddling its compact portfolio with its other age-old sin, the fleet special. Though the weary Cobalt will no longer be offered at retail when our time machine lands, GM is considering a fleet-only version of the Cobalt to soldier through 2010 and possibly into 2011. Though fleet specials are understood to have a negative effect on brand image, old habits die hard. And as we will see later, the Cobalt “Fleet” won’t be the only image-dragging holdover model in GM’s portfolio come 2011.

EREV

The Volt should be available at dealers when we arrive to witness GM’s 2012 lineup. 10,000 units of production are planned for 2012, with an MSRP of $43K and GM will lose money on every one. A Cadillac Converj version could be available by 2012, but the chances are not good. If it is available by 2012, expect either a rebadge of shocking cynicism or a super-limited halo car. Neither of which will help GM. As reality sinks in and hype fades, the Volt could well be the cause of a few GM PR headaches by 2012.

Compact MPV/CUV

Entering the magical world of crossover utility vehicles, GM’s 2012 product planning begins to show signs of yet another classic GM sin: overlap. Chevrolet’s Delta II-based Orlando looks to be a relatively solid contender as a cheap seven-seater in the Kia Rondo mold. But will those two extra seats be useful enough to tempt Americans away from GM’s slew of five-passenger vehicles? Given the limitations of the platform, the answer is probably no. Unless, of course, a gas price shock creates more interest in the micro-van segment.

A Gamma-II based five-seat CUV is planned for Buick, in yet another attempt to bring more volume into the Buick-GMC sales channel. As with the Buick Cruze rebadge, this weak motivation could easily tempt GM into the old cynical rebadge trap. Though GM-Shanghai’s Business concept shows the possibility of an attractive small Buick CUV, putting concept into practice could prove difficult. The challenge: attracting a premium over the upsized, five-door Aveo, without cutting into GM’s four Theta CUVs. Or a possible 2012 GMC “Sub-Terrain” CUV based on either the Gamma II or Delta II platform.

Given GM’s history and limited resources, expect the Buick CUV to be tough to distinguish from the Aveo and the GMC to be similar to the Orlando. Execution is everything with this much potential for overlap, and GM has only so much time to create meaningful differentiation in this cluster-NSFW.  And as we move into the meat of GM’s planned lineup, that problem appears everywhere. No way can GM make sense of all of it.

Midsize CUV

Here in 2009 this is one of the hottest segments in the market, as Americans downsize from Detroit SUVs into CRVs, Rav4s and Foresters. And GM is only a little bit late to the party, banking on the 2010 Equinox and Terrain to fight for the remainder of the cute-ute boom. But GM is already having difficulty explaining how consumers should choose between these offerings. For 2011, Buick will add to the confusion by offering what appears to be an only mildly rebadged version of the Saturn Vue, which will bridge the already-narrow gap to the “Theta Premium” Cadillac SRX. Further complicating the Theta competition will be the Saturn Vue and the Saab 9-4X, which will likely both be sold by the former GM divisions in 2011.

The problem with GM’s Compact CUV offerings isn’t that GM misunderstands the market; this segment should continue to sell well through 2012. The problem is that GM is set on flooding the segment with models that, while distinguishable to buffs and designers, will only serve to confuse consumers. The Buick Vue rebadge seems to be a particularly senseless and cynical decision, justified only by the 2012 option of a plug-in drivetrain that should really be an option on the SRX. Retaining the Equinox name could also keep one of GM’s most important products in the shadow of its (ironically) forgettable predecessor, while the Terrain will share lot space with the Buick Vue. For such a crucial segment, GM has some major (and sadly familiar) issues to sort out. Fast.

Fullsize CUV

Though one of its more-recent platforms, the Lambda is already one of GM’s most egregious examples of latter-day brand engineering. Pre-bankruptcy, GM had four poorly-differentiated versions of the platform. In 2011, GM will likely have four poorly-differentiated versions of the platform. Traverse will be soldier on unchanged, while the Buick Enclave and GMC Acadia are scheduled for a 2012 refresh. Though the Saturn Outlook will probably still be on sale at Penske’s Saturn dealers (just to keep things fun), the fourth GM model is likely a 2012 Cadillac Escalade replacement. Though there’s talk of stretching the platform for ‘sclade duty, don’t expect it. GM will either do a quick-and-dirty Lambdasclade or allow the old GMT 900 beast to live on (truck/SUV strategy, as we will see later, is in chaos).

Either way, the Lambda glut caps a potential eleven-model swath of CUVs in GM’s lineup, not counting the five-door Aveo or the CTS Wagon. Four-brand GM dealer lots will be a maze of the rounded-off wagon-utes, with salesfolks guiding bewildered shoppers through a seemingly infinite palette of family vehicles. The CUV segment is a melting-pot of automotive styles anyway, where lines are already blur into unfamiliar form (and bland looks). And despite the huge number of models, nowhere in this mix is a credible compact off-roader or a modern family/commercial van (ala Ford’s Transit Connect). In model year 2012, it seems, variety in the heart of GM’s lineup will still only be skin-deep.

Midsize Sedans

Chevy’s “perception-shifting” 2008 Malibu will not be updated until after the 2012 model year, and for 2013 it will actually be downsized (except for the trunk). Which is hard to understand, considering that the aging Impala has hung close to the ‘bu in sales, seemingly on the strength of its interior size alone. But that’s a concern for 2013; for the purposes of our time-traveling, the Malibu will remain unchanged. But will its sales still be consistent?

By Fall 2011, the Opel Insignia-based Buick Regal will have been on sale for about a year. By then it should be fairly clear if the new model drives the kind of volume that Buick dealers need to make up for the loss of Pontiac. GM expects the four-cylinder-only Regal to cost “a few thousand dollars” less than its platform-mate, the LaCrosse, and become Buick’s best-selling model. Though the Insignia has been well-received in Europe, it shows less promise for the US market. It will have to be positioned as “more sporty” than the LaCrosse while only offering a four-banger to avoid overlap. Stuffing the Regal between LaCrosse and Impala/Malibu means limiting options, a compromise that hurts its chances as a volume model. And it may be the motivating factor in the ill-advised 2013 Malibu downsize.

Fullsize/Premium Sedans

GM’s decision to allow the W-body 2006 Impala to soldier on until 2014 is perhaps one of GM’s greatest sins. Though the Impala currently sells at about the same levels as the Malibu, one can’t help but feel that by 2012 the Impala will be bought only by curious students of 20th century automotive technology. It seems that GM has almost completely given up on large FWD sedans as a competitive volume product, perhaps assuming that the segment will be abandoned for the CUVs that it has bet the farm on. This assumption is by no means a sure thing. Meanwhile, the Impala will be an inescapable reminder of the old, bad GM.

Worse still, anyone who wants a remotely competitive fullsize GM sedan will have to look at one of its luxury brands. Specifically, they will have to look at Buick or Cadillac’s flagships, the LaCrosse or the XTS. The 2010 LaCrosse is seven inches longer than its Regal stablemate will be, and offers V6 and AWD options. Does that make the LaCrosse a “flagship” as GM claims, or does it make the Regal a hamstrung, would-be cannibal?

Cadillac’s “flagship” similarly fails to generate any unique appeal. Though Cadillac is supposed to fight BMW as a high-tech, dynamically-driven line of vehicles, the XTS will be a bloated “Super Epsilon,” possibly with standard AWD. This compromise (born of the inability to develop a true Cadillac flagship) places pressure on the entire GM sedan range by dint of its placement so close to the LaCrosse (itself to close to the Regal, Impala and Malibu). Somewhat larger than the CTS, there’s little chance it will better embody the brand’s world-class dynamic ambitions. That would be the job of the Alpha-platformed ATS sedan, a long-rumored BMW 3 Series fighter. Which will be expensive to develop, and difficult to justify considering the CTS is due to be downsized for 2013 or 2014.

Trucks And SUVs

Once GM’s bread-and-butter, truck and SUV development is in chaos as GM grapples with upcoming CAFE standards, the fear of gas price shocks and a buying public that appears to be “over” the body-on-frame craze. Expect Tahoe, Yukon, Suburban and Yukon XL to soldier on until at least 2013, unless GM rushes out more Lambda clones in the meantime.

Long term, the only apparent plan is to remake the Avalanche in the mold of the Ridgeline, also on the Lambda platform (Acadia SUT anyone?). Silverado and Sierra are in a holding pattern until at least 2013. Colorado and Canyon will be discontinued in 2012, possibly to be replaced by a global small pickup developed by GM of Brazil. The fact that GM is seriously considering abandoning the compact pickup market speaks volumes about GM’s jaundiced view of the future of body-on-frame.

Conclusion

By 2012, GM’s offerings will have become more narrow in positioning, with the exception of the Spark at the low end and the Volt at the high end. Between the upsized five-door Aveo and the premium brand “flagships,” GM’s products will be more tightly positioned than they have been in years. Overlap and brand dilution are likely to be the result, as many of the planned models serve only to make up for lost Pontiac volume at Buick-GMC dealers. Ironically, this flood of Buick product is both starving and cannibalizing Cadillac, which no longer has the resources to properly differentiate itself from Buick (in terms of aspiration, if not dynamics and styling).

Reviving Buick also means that one of GM’s least competitive products, the Impala, will stick around long past its best-by date. This will be corrosive to the Chevrolet brand, which won’t be able to compete with Ford’s Taurus without threatening the Buick/Cadillac balancing act. How many Epsilons can you fit on the head of a pin anyway? And if the Impala is going to slouch towards ignominy, why not a post-Cruze fleet special Cobalt too? Or maybe squeezing a few more bucks out of the HHR wouldn’t hurt too much?

One bad habit leads inexorably to others, especially for institutions so steeped in bad habit-as-tradition. GM’s executive never miss an opportunity to insist that change is here, telling us that they’re not fans of rebadging, and that every product must be class-leading. But the tight positioning, slumming holdovers and acknowledged volume-chasing to support dealers for model year 2012 show that these executive statements are either misleading or just crazy. Unless we are about to see one of the greatest achievements in the history of product differentiation, GM’s bright dawn will remain just out of reach. Same as it ever was.

Regular readers will recall that this site’s denizens helped radio personality, car dealer and fellow commentator John Wolfe name his new CBS radio show. In exchange, Wolfe promised that he’d give me a guest shot. And . . . he’s given us permission to rip this glossary of dealer jargon from his “Real Deal” website. While you peruse the perfidy, I’m thinking turnabout is fair play. How about TTAC’s Best and Brightest invent some of its own terms for what car dealers do to us? Yeah, yeah, some dealers, not all dealers. Suggestions below please.

Hole in the Head

This is a sunroof package in an automobile. Also be referred to as a Sun, a Moon, or the Brains Blown Out.

Chicken Walk

Car dealer infomercial where the pitch man paces in front of the inventory.  Dealership employees witness the production of the commercial spot and refer to the speaker as doing ‘the chicken walk’ Tom Park and Clay Cooley are professional chicken walkers.

John Wayne or the Duke

This is all about the middle man paying the dealer/manager on the side for cars he normally would not have a shot at, also less than what they usually would bring elsewhere. He is a bad apple

Hand shaker / Bolt Action

This means it is a manual transmission. Also see: Hog Leg

A Horse

The horse is a seasoned vet salesman you can count on selling 25 plus cars month in and month out. These guys can get hired anywhere, anytime

Hog Leg

This is a manual transmission in a truck; the shifter is very long and crooked and comes from the floor. Aka John Holmes Edition

A Package

This is an aftermarket or custom additions to the factory options of an automobile. Body kits, custom wheels and paint would be considered a “package”. Lorinser, Regency, or Saleen are fine example of a package.

Ghetto Package: the distant cousin of “a package”, but with built with less quality material and often in poor taste.  Unfortunately half of the ghetto packages stall out in developmental stage and live their lives as half ghetto packages.

Half-Ghetto Package is an incomplete or unfinished ghetto package.

Urban Assault Vehicle

This is a version of the package but is exclusive to a gang member with gang art and colors. The low-rider has many variations, but demands the attention of a much smaller demographic.

Big Bad Bob

This customer is easily defused but can be tricky. He is on a mission for best price, demands he is being treated badly and needs the manager, then demands prices and attempts to confuse the dealer into a bargain. Dealers are prepared for BBB, use kindness skills to kill all of the tension he creates and sell him what he wants.

8:36 or Bill King

This is the customer we have all dealt with or have been at times. He will walk in at 8:36 knowing it is almost closing time and wants to browse through hours of time. The fact that sales staff have already been at the dealership for 13 hours already makes them very anxious to get on or get off  (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSO-Uss1h6E).

Japanese Cadillac

Car dealer vernacular for the Lexus or Infiniti brand plate

OTDB

This is a reporting number. Dealers count customers to know exactly their budget spend in advertising per customer. Opportunity To Due Business is also known as a fresh up.

Duck on the Pond

There is always a customer not being helped on the lot, he is a duck on the pond somewhat lost but trying to avoid the pack of salespeople even though he wants to be assisted. Seasoned Vets usually know when one lands.

Fresh Up

This is a customer that has never been to the dealership before or has not yet been helped upon arrival.

Green Peas

Lots of dealers refer to the new guys as Green Peas, Green Horns, or newbie. This means they do not have skills developed quite yet and will not know the product very well. The need for people will create these salesmen faster than you can say fire sale.

Brass Hat Car

This vehicle is what most dealers call a program car; it was a corporate demo or a factory reps demo.

Blind Bid

This is an auto appraisal that is over the phone or a value is placed by the description sight un-seen. Bid is good upon delivery if it matches the description. John Clay Wolfe Blind-Bids all the cars on the Real Deal radio show.

Wholesaler

These individuals are all over the map. They buy from auction and sell to dealers, they buy from dealers and sell at auction, and any combination of the two; including trading with each other.  98% of wholesalers are addicted to gambling, chain smoking, and have a problem with the IRS. Typically the wholesaler has a relative that is in the bail-bonds business.  They either look like Magnum PI, Dog the Bounty Hunter, or the $30,000 millionaire.

King Pin Wholesaler

A banker to the wholesaler.  The King Pin kept his money, paid his taxes, and finances the transaction of the wholesaler.  He makes his money from charging wholesalers a ‘draft fee’ and plays the role as the house.  The King Pin rides in the deepest ride, lives in a McMansion, playmate material as a wife, girlfriend or combination of the two.  Manheim and Adesa auctions have made drastic attempts to terminate the business model of the king pin.

Seasoned Vet

The rare group of professional salespeople that know exactly how to deal with customers and they have better product knowledge and very high salesmanship skills and ability to sale. They can also be referred to as a Horse.

Ole Car Dog

This is the older grumpier car salesman we all have come to know as very negative from years of up and down sales. They are looking for shortcuts, time off and reasons to complain why the business is so slow. We all know them and they amuse us more than annoy. Smoking is a must for this species.

Oddball Split

Often confused as a billiard term, but in car industry is a closing tactic. You have a difference figure between the price of the car and the counter offer from the customer. Example: sale price is $20,000 and the counter offer $19,000. The salesman says “why don’t we split the difference and just say $19,800.” The customer perks up” that’s not a split, $19,500 is a split.” “Okay so $19,500 and it’s a deal?” This is a perfect trap because 90% of the time the customer wants to split the split:  that would be $19,250 which is $250 less than where we placed them. The salesmen simply bump them with the oddball number.

Lot Stretcher

The lot stretcher is a joke often played on the newly hired green peas. A Vet tells the pea in a hurry to go back and get the lot stretcher; we need more room or straightening up the lot. Green Peas always fall for this, the service guys send them to parts, and then back again looking for the lot stretcher. Sometimes they send peas to other dealerships and they will spin circles trying to locate who had it last. They ask what it is and we just tell them to hurry up we are all waiting. Similar to snipe hunting.

Closing Tool

The closing tool is a fictional item associated with the lot stretcher. Newbies are told to find the closing tool, bc they can not use the lot stretcher without the closing tool.

T/O or A Turn

When a car deal needs help from the sales manager he will do what we call a turn over or a T/O to the manager or floor manager. This makes sure all customers are taken care of properly and do not make mistakes and miss a potential car deal.

Tommy Turner

Often times a salesperson will have trouble with a deal and we send in a closer. This can be a floor manager or a seasoned vet. Staff pages on the intercome Tommy Turner meaning “need to send in the closer for a turn.’

Mr. Green

A fictitious dealership employee who’s name is placed in newspaper ads for bad credit customers.   “Bad Credit, Divorce, Bankruptcy WE CAN HELP just ask for Mr Green”  When the receptionist pages Mr. Green that a code word for request a customer credit application before quoting the price of a car in case the lending bank charges an Americredit.

Americredit

Is a lender that specializes in poor credit customers.  When they approve a deal for financing, often their approval is contingient on charging the selling dealer a large fee, sometimes in excess of $3,000, plus Austin as the interest rate.

Austin Rate

Austin is the state capital of Texas, the term Austin Rate is slang for the state cap lending rate, which is 26.26%

The Closer

This is the man always greeting you before you leave. He has selling on his mind and is there to make sure we exhaust every effort in selling you today not tomorrow. He can handle any objection and is very persuasive; some dealers may apply extreme pressure before you leave the lot.

Whistle Pisser

The whistle pisser is a funny name for a funny act. I was selling Lexus and my manager said look at this whistle pisser. He gets out of his Buick, goes over and stands as far away from the window sticker as possible trying to see the MSRP. He then whistles shaking his head and mentally pisses his pants. (Kyle Casey)

A Rabbit

This is a name for the guy bouncing all over the auction lane bidding on his own vehicle. He runs up the bidding and hops right off once it is in the money.

In the Money

Term used when a used car is bought for at or below current market pricing.   Also reffered to as ‘on the money’ ‘worth the money’ or ‘stolen’

Blue Sky

The value of a franchised car dealership.  Also reffered to simply as ‘Blue’ meaning the good will dollar amount added to the price of an ongoing business.  For instance your local Ford dealer sells his business for ten million dollars. 6 million of that is real and hard assets plus 4 million of goodwill or ‘blue’.

Skins

Tires are an important part of the value on many models. The effect on the value on a Corvette for example could be $1500 for a set of new skins.

Trap Trader

This is a rouge move that creates problems on top of problems. The dealer sells off a car he owns well above current market for a value higher than its worth, he does this to exchange with another dealer to do the same and buy their car for more than what it is worth. Typically floorplanning banks/lenders have a days in stock deadline to sell inventory. So trap trading is  two dealers trade their problem inventory to one another to start the clock over on the freshly traded unit, but in reality just postponing their financial woes.

Floor or Floorplan

This is the lifeline of a car dealer new or used.  A Floor is the credit facility provided by a lender to pay for a dealers stock of automobile inventory.  Most lenders charge 2 points over prime as the floor rate of interest.  The amount of floor a dealer has dictates how large the business operation can be.  A huge auto dealership typically has in excess of 15-20 million on the floor line.  A small new car dealer typically carries 2 million, and a small used dealer normally operates around the $250,000 inventory level.

Out of Business

This occurs immediately when a dealer looses their floorplan

Sale Fees

These are fees overlooked by KBB and Edmunds. The auction trade in value does not include all of the reconditioning of a car before it goes to auction and then has hundreds of dollars of sale fees. The average is sale fee is about $250 per car plus reconditioning and transporting to the auction that could be $700 to $1500. The dealer spends more than the book shows you and you will always be surprised on appraised value.

Hand Signals Lock it Up/Slam Down/Cut Heads /Hit the Gas/Smoke em’

The auction is a very loud place with thousands of vehicles running through lanes at a fast pace. Professional buyers have many hand gestures and signals that are used to talk back and forth just like the stock exchange. The auction block and ring man will recognize these buyers and and communicate in return accordingly.

Shoot it in the Head

This term is for a vehicle going to sell for less than ever expected. You may have a unit in stock for months that refuses to sell so you take your loss to a wholesaler or auction sale and “Shoot it in the Head”

Houston we have Problem

The hurricanes from the Gulf Coast bring many issues with vehicles being involved in flood damage. Dealers can tell because the trunks and under the hood you find sand and water marks. The cars never smell right and although the title was not affected by an insurance claim: many still know ‘Houston we have a problem’  Especially the selling dealeship once the customer realizes they purchased a washed title flood car

Re-Entry Burn

You may recognize one of the famous space shuttle like vehicles from the paint on the hood and roof appearing to be burned right off.

Exercise Package or Richard Simmons

This is the extreme entry model car also know as, the exercise package. The name comes from manually shifting forward and back, in and out the clutch, rolling the windows up and down, and reaching over to lock the passenger side. Quite a workout.

Katrina Edition

This is a full blown flood car with a soon to be bad title. The insurance claim brands the title flood or reconditioned salvage and the next registrant will get a dirty salvage title.

Gay Nice

Men that live an alternative lifestyle typically have the nicest, cleanest used cars on the market.  Dealer to dealer conversation: “If it’s Gay nice, then I’ll pay $500 more”

Gray Guts

The car has gray interior so it is known as gray guts, same goes for black red, tan, etc…

Ride for Five

This is the 60 month lease (five years), also known as a roach motel because once you sign up on the ride for five, you cannot get out.

Draft

This is similar to a check printed on the outside of a white envelope. This is traditionally the financial instrument used in a dealer to dealer auto transaction.   Similar to an oil/gas draft.

ACV

This means the actual cash value for your trade. The dealer over allows $10,000 but the ACV may be only $8,500. The ACV is the real value. Always refer to this figure because the reality of the car deal is in the ACV

Overallow

The difference between ACV and trade allowance on the contract in a car deal.

The Road Show

Is a staffed event sale, staged liquidation sale, tent sale, or mailer sale and has his own hit team to sell them.  Typically leave a huge wake.  He sends out a mass direct mailer just days before arrival to lure customers to the dealership, and charges the dealer 25% of the gross profit.  Sometimes roadshow sales work and create many additional sales the dealer typically would not have without the promotion.  Unfortunately, too often he leaves the dealer asking themselves “why we did this again.” We call it the road show.

The Hit Team

The auto business has an unfortunate way of bringing bad habits to the dinner table. The hit team or squad is a traveling circus of salespeople we will hire for big events that we know we need extra salesman because of the huge turnout of customers. They sell many cars and make people angry including the hosting dealership’s salespeople and customers. Very similar to gypsies; they leave a bad taste in everyone’s mouth, and 9 times out of 10 have a substance abuse problem.  It is not uncommon for a member of a hit team to borrow money from customers or dealership staff members with a promise of immediate payback, never to be heard from again.  Hit team members are the always the stereotypical silver tongued devil salesmen.

Rats Roaches and Bandits

Customers credit fall into several categories. One of them is being a Rat, or a Roach and that means you will have trouble getting financed and may need a co-signer and an unusual amount of cash down.  ie “that guy was such a bandit he’d need a co-signer to pay cash”

Rocket Ship

If your credit score is over 750, you are known as a Rocket Ship, ready for immediate take off

Buried

When you owe much more on a car than it is worth, and you can not trade out until you pay down your loan.  Dealers can get buried in their inventory, just as customers get buried in their car loan.  This occurs more often in a trap trade scenario for both dealers and consumers.

Trade Difference

When you take the sale price and subtract the trade in value, you will have a trade difference. This is a way to negotiate but usually confuses customers. This figure does not include your payoff or T.T.&L.

Pencil

Is the written offer brought out from the managers office to the customer.   Salespeople hear customers always saying “tell him to sharpen his pencil”.  It’s called a pencil (versus a pen) because it is not a firm figure and can be erased and refigured.

Demo

Dealers call this the test drive, they also call the cars they drive home demos: usually only the managers get to drive inventory home and this would be considered a demo.  When a salesperson is landing a customer on the demo, too often they retreat to fibbing and claim “this demo was driven by the dealer wife, it was Mrs. Dealers personal car”

De-Horse Em’

This is when you are very close to your buying a car, there may be one thing needed such as show the wife or check with your bank. The dealer encourages you to take the new car overnight and keep the trade tucked away in back of the dealership. De horsing prevent the customer from effectively shopping  another dealership because the customer is without their trade in.

Kick the Trade

When you come to a deal and there is no way to roll in the negative equity of the trade because you are so buried, the Hail Mary closing tool is to convience the customer to  let trade-in repo and do the deal without it. Ugly but desperate customers and hyper aggressive dealers can cause this occurance.

Jumping the Trade

This occurs when customer gets so confused in the numbers, that the dealer literally trades for the customers car with at a zero value.  I have seen deals where trades are jumped with values upto ten thousand dollars.

TT&L

Tax, Title, and License of the car you’re buying.

The Ring man

The auction has auctioneers calling the numbers out; helping him with bidders down below in the lane you have the ring man. He corrals all the confusion into bids for the auctioneer. He is a very important part of the buying and selling and will know who is in or out with signals.

On the Block

The auction is in a warehouse with lanes running through one side to the other. The cars come in and stoop in front of a raised platform where the auctioneers and sellers will be watching the lanes activity. This is the auction block.

WAC

You will see this posted with any advertised payment or interest rate. An acronym for  “With Approved Credit”.

Tent Sale

The circus looking tents we place out in the parking lot to create a sense of excitement draws in crowds. I think if people would stop falling for this, dealers would stop doing it .

Slasher Sale

This is a fun sale and is not often used anymore. The prices will be placed on the windshields of all of the cars, then discount them on the windshield slashing the price lower and lower using a loud megaphone and it feels similar to an auction. Someone will raise there hand and buy the slashed price vehicle and pay the typical retail price in all the excitement

Fire Sale

When a dealer gets the news he is out of business, or the banks floor plan is full you will find a fire sale meaning everything is going, going, gone regardless of price or profit.

Smoking the Log

The log is an important part of keeping track of daily business and the pace outcome of the months profits and activity. There are a few weak managers that like to put deals that are not complete or not even real on the sales log to look better to the upper management. This is called Smoking the Log.

Accepting All Applications

You will see this advertised and it will sound like everyone will be approved. All it really means is we will accept your application for credit.

Re-Tread

Back in the days when tires had no tread left they would cut into the rubber and glue new tread back on the casing. Truckers still use these today. We call old car dogs re-treads because they leave and come back, again and again. Turnover is high because of inconsistent business and thus becomes a wheel of roaming salesman.

Pink Title Blue Title Brown Title

The color of a Texas title will be blue. The brown title will be a duplicate and is a good as the blue just reprinted. We always double check the brown titles for payoffs and liens they may have a loan placed against blue title. The pink title will be salvage. The green title usually is a re-conditioned salvage title or repaired wreckage.

Saab Story

The owners of a Saab will always have a sob story about the payoff being so high compared to the trade value. The lease was the Saab’s only way of keeping customers coming back, now they will have to figure out how to keep brand loyalty without the famous lease payment and security blanket of guaranteed lease end value.

Weasel Piss

The greasy shine placed on your tires after a dealer details your car is called weasel piss. You do not want to get it on you. Armor all is not the same this is the industrial grade.

Mop and Glow

This is the incredible new age wax that will protect your paint and interior, for the low, low price of $595. We also refer to this as snake oil. You buy a warranty with it so it does have some value. Many import dealers include this like it or not, pay up.

Sokhom writes:

I’m in the Army and I’ve moved to Korea for at least two years. I have a 2000 Honda S2000 that I left with my father in law in his garage. I’ve read advice from S2000 forums about slightly jacking up the car to “unspring” the suspension to spraying something into the cylinders to keep the piston rings from drying. There’s also a debate about whether it’s good to crank the car every so often or not. What is a guy to do?

Read More >

While General Motors has downsized physically and financially, the nationalized American automaker still suffers from a monumental mental disorder. Today’s F5 PR tornado made that point pellucid. In fact, it’s hard to know where to begin the diagnosis. We might as well start with the “big news” on the vehicle destined to become GM’s Edsel. The General would have you believe that the Chevrolet Volt will achieve 230 miles per gallon in city driving. Yes, well, the Volt is supposed to surmount the first forty-miles on battery power alone. So I make that . . . zero miles per gallon; you know; as it’s not using any liquid fuel. Hey! Anyone remember [former] Car Czar Bob Lutz’s hand-wringing re: the Volt’s gas supply fouling because owners would never use the internal combustion engine? Like that. Quick question: what drugs are these guys on? More accurately, why aren’t they taking their meds?

News flash: General Motors is bi-polar. The company’s currently in the midst of a prolonged manic episode. To wit: on this very day, GM trumpeted the Volt’s [literally] incredible mileage claims AND unveiled a two-year product plan involving twenty-five models AND promised a new Cadillac to best BMW’s 3-Series AND revealed plans for a new internet microsite for its Advanced Design studio (“The Lab”) AND told taxpayers it would increase its $1.81 billion ad spend AND unveiled two new concept cars. That’s after yesterday’s announcement that GM is launching four websites to sell new cars via eBay, albeit in California and not Cadillac. It’s a wonder GM CEO Fritz Henderson didn’t promise to change GM’s constipated corporate culture while he was at it. Oh, wait. He did.

Extreme manic episodes can lead to psychotic symptoms, such as delusions and hallucinations. As it has in this case. The necktie-challenged CEO—Good God, man! I don’t have time to tie a Windsor knot!—clearly believes that he’s going to “do” the cultural transformation thing. And he’s going to do it via . . . committee! Yes, Fritz has appointed an executive committee to wean GM from its reliance on executive committees. A committee that includes the aforementioned aspiring octogenarian, GM lifer and CFO Ray Young, and former Caddy killer and current dealer eliminator Mark LaNeve. Expecting this carefully selected cast of recently elevated (at least in GM time) careerists to reform the automaker is like asking an orthodox Jew to run a Louisiana rib shack.

A person in a manic state has a short attention span. GM may be new (as if), but this symptom is not. How many nameplates is it now, Fritz? Anyone want to dig out Rick Wagoner’s protege’s promise on that score? And while you’re rooting around in GM’s fevered imagination, how about sourcing the press release for the “new” Cadillac STS? HUMMER H3 SUT? Saab anything? How far back do you want to go? Chevy Vega? X-Cars? Always with the promises. Never with the results. Do we really need to analyze the inherent inanity of today’s roll call of make-believe hits to prove the point? OK, then . . .

GM says it’s going to position the new Chevrolet Spark below the Chevrolet Aveo. Is that even possible? What are the chances that Buick will find sales with a car based on the same platform as the Chevrolet Cruze, only more beautiful and slightly longer? Who in their right mind thinks Buick has a future as a full-line automaker, sporting six models (à la Lexus)? Cadillac’s “flagship” XTS is going to be the same size as a Mercedes E-Class? I see fish. They’re swimming in a barrel. My finger grows weary.

I used to believe that GM would end with a whimper. They’d downsize, and downsize some more, and then a bit more, and then, eventually, after a few more mega-suckles on the taxpayer teat, after their market share faded into gray, they’d disappear into some other automaker’s portfolio and die. Now, I’m not so sure. While today’s product announcements are either complete bullshit or the same old bullshit in a new wrapper, and we can discount reports of an increased advertising spend as JALCOS (Just Another Lutzian Crock of Shit), GM seems to be heading for a massive crash.

As always, cash burn is the key. Come September’s financials, we’ll have a rough idea how long GM’s $50 billion federal infusion will last. Obviously, as long GM takes in less money than it spends, the only way is down. Expanding the number of models within the remaining four GM brands will do nothing to delay the company’s next face plant, and much to hasten it. But don’t tell New GM’s executives that. They’re in the midst of a hypomanic episode, joyfully creating plans for reinvention, oblivious to the fact that they’re recycling previous patterns. On the other hand, GM is already living within the confines of institutional care. How great is that?

The CAR Allowance Rebate System—C.A.R.S—sounds like a ’70s Saturday morning cartoon about guys in striped jackets using trick vehicles to save the world. In fact, that would actually be preferable to the program currently airing, at cost of three billion and counting. Cash for Clunkers may be popular with a healthy segment of the population, but that group doesn’t include a lot of economists. In terms of economic policy, C4C would benefit from a little C4, if you know what I’m sayin’.

Warning. The following is not a right-wing diatribe. While there is very little in the public realm that can be cleansed of politics, attempting to look at the C.A.R.S plan unaligned does give one a different view. There are a few things about C4C that are not right. They’re not left, either. They’re wrong.

The most obvious case against the program is ideological: Keep government out of markets. Laissez-faire. Fair enough, except Uncle Sam sticks his fingers in many markets, frequently to the good of the nation. I like clean water, apples that don’t put me to sleep for 100 years and Amoxicillin that does what it reports to do (fix me up if the water or apples are bad). There are times when the federal government needs to intervene. Any point in the last 18 months can be considered one of those times. So, the laissez-faire agreement is weak.

My first real problem with C.A.R.S.: its effect on market timing. Putting a couple billion dollars on the barrel moves the market to act. The value added to older vehicles made some people move prematurely into the car market; people who might have considered dumping their POS before winter, or next spring. Extra sales made now will not be made later.

The announcement of the plan may very well have had a similar effect on potential customers in May and June. They waited for the C4C money to become available, putting their purchases off. The program creates an artificial buying season for no real reason. Other than to make this year’s data harder to use for predicting next year’s.

At the moment, there is no hard evidence that cash for clunkers increased the overall net business any car company was going to see this fiscal year. July numbers ticked upward, but that doesn’t mean sales came from customers who were otherwise out of the market.

Then there are the clunkers themselves. Once turned in the engines are filled with goo and run until useless. The destruction of a useable asset is waste. While some of the natural resources that went into that car can be reclaimed, the labor hours extinguish. It makes perfect sense for someone to turn in their Ford Explorer worth three large and take the Fed’s $4,500. The $3,000 in value the vehicle had is lost. The economy as a whole suffers.

Getting less fuel-efficient engines off the road has an environmental benefit. There’s also a huge environmental benefit in driving old cars into the ground. It takes a lot of fossil fuels to build cars in the first place, from the mining of the ore to assembly to shipping. Fouling the engine means these hulks need to shipped and processed again, using more energy. To the economy, waste is waste.

In terms of stimulus, three billion wouldn’t do a hell of a lot were it injected directly into people’s bank accounts. Current dollar gross domestic product last quarter was $14,149.8 billion, making C4C kind of a drop in the hot tub.

There is value in the perception that C4C generates. It is an understandable, and to many useful, stimulus package regardless of the final numbers. Its utility has been amplified by car dealers across the country. The recent meme that the program had run dry stoked the message even more.

In the end, though, C.A.R.S has interfered with a market finding a new equilibrium, one in which American’s buy 10 or 15 percent fewer vehicles per year. That’s actually better for the environment than the amount of hybrids sold in the next ten years. It can be painful to adjust to such market contractions, but that’s where government programs really do come in handy. Combating market forces is rarely the best use of public funds. If people want fewer cars, or want to get more life out of the ones they’ve already got, its tough to say that’s bad for America.

Fostering the growth of new markets—like renewable energy sources—and retraining a work force to fill needs in those new markets are constructive uses of tax dollars. They add to the GDP in a way junking a ’98 F-150 never will. This ain’t Saturday morning. C.A.R.S are not going to save the world.

After being trapped six weeks in a 1971 time warp, I had the controls of the Curbside Classics time machine all set for the mid-eighties. But once again, fate interceded. Running some errands, I had my first encounter with no less than two 2010 Camaros. Then, on the way home, something called out to me as I tooled down Franklin Boulevard. I found it parked behind the old boarded-up Chevy dealer, and it had an important message for you and me: “beauty is not in the eye of the beholder; it’s in the object itself.” Read More >

TTAC Commentator Nick R writes:

Two questions pertaining to the Thunderbird we previously discussed:

My dad waxed this thing almost every month.  However, those layers and layers of wax have now turn greyish.  I have tried to remove it with rubbing compound and this filthy grey coloured crap eventually comes off. However, it does come off to an adequate extent and it is VERY time consuming. I’d love to hear some tips on sloughing this crap off more quickly.

Some the plastic in the cabin is a bit faded. Can it be redyed or should I look for NOS parts (yes, I know, good luck with that)?

And now, two generic questions:

Read More >

The issue is whether the proper development of an advanced biofuel industry in the United States is feasible when: (a) independent ethanol producers in the U.S. are at the mercy of volatile commodities markets for feedstock; and (b) the price of ethanol is controlled by the oil companies.

Commodity Market Volatility
The corn-to-ethanol business is highly dependent on corn prices. The price paid for corn is determined by taking the Chicago Board of Trade futures price minus the basis, which is the difference between the local cash price and the futures price. The more corn-to-ethanol contributes to our nation’s energy supplies, the more it drives up corn feedstock prices and consequently its own cost.

While increased ethanol production is partially responsible for the increase in corn prices, the main driving factors in the run-up in corn prices are: rising demand for processed foods and meat in emerging markets such as China and India, droughts and adverse weather around the world, a decrease in the responsiveness of consumers to price increases, export restrictions by many exporting countries to reduce domestic food price inflation, the declining value of the dollar, skyrocketing oil prices, and commodity market speculation.

It is important to note that excessive speculation is not necessarily driving corn prices above fundamental values. Speculation can only be considered “excessive” relative to the level of hedging activity in the market.

The government’s announcement that it would resurvey corn acreage in several U.S. states launched a rally in Chicago Board of Trade corn on July 23, 2009, giving life to a market that appeared to be sinking toward $3 a bushel. September corn ended up 19 cents to $3.27 a bushel and December corn ended up 19 1/2 cents to $3.38 3/4 a bushel. Traders see the market moving toward the $3.50-$3.75 a bushel range in the December contract. Ethanol futures were also higher. August ethanol ended up $0.065 to $1.597 a gallon and September ethanol ended up $0.064 to $1.555.

Dr. David J. Peters, Assistant Professor of Sociology – College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Iowa State University, has developed a calculator to determine the long-term economic viability of proposed ethanol plants. Dr. Peters was surprised to learn how sensitive the bottom line is to small changes in corn and ethanol prices.

According to Dr. Peters, a typical 100 MGY corn ethanol plant built in 2005 (financing 60 percent of its capital costs at 8 percent interest per annum for 10 years, with debt and depreciation costs of $0.20 per gallon of ethanol produced, and labor and taxes at a cost of $0.06 per gallon) will lose money in the current market:

At $3.25 corn, the ethanol break even price is $1.76 per gallon.
At $3.50 corn, the ethanol break even price is $1.82 per gallon.
At $3.75 corn, the ethanol break even price is $1.88 per gallon.
At $4.00 corn, the ethanol break even price is $1.94 per gallon.

Oil Company Monopoly
U.S. oil companies are using ethanol merely as a blending component in gasoline (in the form of E10) rather than a true alternative transportation fuel (in the form of E85). The major obstacle to widespread ethanol usage continues to be the lack of fueling infrastructure.

Only 2,175 of the 161,768 retail gasoline stations in the United States (1.3%) offer E85. These E85 fueling stations are located primarily in the Midwest. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, each 2% increment of U.S. market share growth for E85 represents approximately 3 billion gallons per year of additional ethanol demand.

While alleging an oversupply of corn ethanol, U.S. oil companies, due to a loophole in the Caribbean Basin Initiative, are currently allowed to import thousands of barrels of advanced biofuel (“non-corn ethanol”) every month without having to pay the 54-cent-per-gallon tariff.

Oil companies, or affiliates of oil companies, currently have a monopoly on blending fuel ethanol with unblended gasoline. Many states, e.g., Florida, allow only oil companies and their affiliates to blend and receive the 45 cents-per-gallon blender’s tax credit.

This monopoly impairs fair and healthy competition in the marketing of ethanol blends. Independent U.S. ethanol producers have the legal right, and must be assured the availability of unblended gasoline, to blend fuel ethanol and unblended gasoline to receive the blender’s tax credit and be cost-competitive.

In short, independent U.S. ethanol producers do not have bargaining power on either end of the supply chain. Corn ethanol producers are price takers. A comprehensive advanced biofuel industry development initiative is required to disrupt the status quo and establish fair and healthy competition in the marketing of advanced biofuel blends in our nation.

The Louisiana Solution
Louisiana is the first state to enact alternative transportation fuel legislation that includes a variable blending pump pilot program and a hydrous advanced biofuel pilot program. On June 21, 2008, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal signed into law the Advanced Biofuel Industry Development Initiative (“Act 382”). Act 382, the most comprehensive and far-reaching state legislation in the U.S. enacted to develop a statewide advanced biofuel industry, is based upon the “Field-to-Pump” strategy.

It is the cost of the feedstock which ultimately determines the economic feasibility of an ethanol processing facility. “Field-to-Pump” does not allow an advanced biofuel producer to fall victim to rising feedstock costs. Non-corn feedstock is acquired under the terms of an agreement analogous to an oil & gas lease. It is not purchased as a commodity.

A link exists between the cost of feedstock and ethanol market conditions. Farmers/landowners receive a lease payment for their acreage and a royalty payment based on a percentage of the gross revenue generated from the sale of advanced biofuel. “Field-to-Pump” marks the first time that farmers/landowners share risk-free in the profits realized from the sale of value-added products made from their crops.

Smaller is better. “Field-to-Pump” establishes the first commercially viable large-scale decentralized network of small advanced biofuel manufacturing facilities (“SABMFs”) in the United States capable of operating 210 days out of the year. Each SABMF has a production capacity of 5 MGY.

As with most industrial processes, large ethanol plants typically enjoy better process efficiencies and economies of scale when compared to smaller plants. However, large ethanol plants face greater supply risk than smaller plants. Each SABMF utilizes feedstock from acreage adjacent to the facility. The distributed nature of a SABMF network reduces feedstock supply risk, does not burden local water supplies and provides broad-based economic development. The sweet sorghum bagasse is used for the production of steam. Vinasse, the left over liquid after alcohol is removed, contains nutrients such as nitrogen, potash, phosphate, sucrose, and yeast. The vinasse is applied to the sweet sorghum acreage as a fertilizer.

Act 382 focuses on growing ethanol demand beyond the 10% blend market. Each SABMF produces advanced biofuel, transports the advanced biofuel by tanker trucks to its storage tanks at its local gas stations and, via blending pumps, blends the advanced biofuel with unblended gasoline to offer its customers a choice of E10, E20, E30 and E85. Each SABMF captures the blender’s tax credit of 45-cents-per-gallon to guarantee sufficient royalty payments to its farmers/landowners and be cost-competitive.

In the U.S., the primary method for blending ethanol into gasoline is splash blending. The ethanol is “splashed” into the gasoline either in a tanker truck or sometimes into a storage tank of a retail station. The inaccuracy and manipulation of splash blending may be eliminated by precisely blending the advanced biofuel and unblended gasoline at the point of consumption, i.e., the point where the consumer puts E10, E20, E30 or E85 into his or her vehicle.

A variable blending pump ensures the consumer that E10 means the fuel entering the fuel tank of the consumer’s vehicle is 10 percent ethanol (rather than the current arbitrary range of 4 percent ethanol to at least 24% ethanol that the splash blending method provides) and 90% gasoline. Moreover, a recent study, co-sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy and the American Coalition for Ethanol, found E20 and E30 ethanol blends outperform unleaded gasoline in fuel economy tests for certain motor vehicles.

Hydrous advanced biofuel, which eliminates the need for the costly hydrous-to-anhydrous dehydration processing step, results in an energy savings of 35% during processing, a 4% product volume increase, higher mileage per gallon, a cleaner engine interior, and a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

On February 24, 2009, the U.S. EPA granted a first-of-its-kind waiver for the purpose of testing hydrous E10, E20, E30 & E85 ethanol blends in non-flex-fuel vehicles and flex-fuel vehicles in Louisiana. Under the test program, variable blending pumps, not splash blending, will be used to precisely dispense hydrous ethanol blends of E10, E20, E30, and E85 to test vehicles for the purpose of testing for blend optimization with respect to fuel economy, engine emissions, and vehicle drivability.

The Louisiana Department of Agriculture & Forestry Division of Weights and Measures will conduct the vehicle drivability phase of the test program. Fuel economy and engine emissions testing will be conducted by Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Sixty vehicles will be involved in the test program which will last for a period of 15 months.

Louisiana Act 382 ensures: (a) ethanol producers in the U.S. are no longer at the mercy of volatile commodities markets for feedstock; (b) farmers/landowners share risk-free in the profits realized from the sale of value-added products made from their crops (c) the price of ethanol is no longer controlled by the oil companies; (d) feedstock supply risk, the burden on local water supplies, and the amount of energy necessary to process advanced biofuel are minimized; and (e) rural development and job creation are maximized.

Furthermore, due to the advantages of producing advanced biofuel from sweet sorghum juice, the use of sweet sorghum bagasse for the production of steam in the SABMF, and the energy savings of processing hydrous advanced biofuel, the Louisiana solution reduces field-to-wheel lifecycle GHG emissions by 100%.

Copyright © 2009, NewsBlaze, Republished on TTAC with the copyright owner’s permission.

Brian J. Donovan is the CEO of Renergie, Inc.

About Renergie [from the author]:

Renergie was formed on March 22, 2006 for the purpose of raising capital to develop, construct, own and operate a network of ten ethanol plants in the parishes of the State of Louisiana which were devastated by hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Renergie’s “field-to-pump” strategy is to produce non-corn ethanol locally and directly market non-corn ethanol locally. On February 26, 2008, Renergie was one of 8 recipients, selected from 139 grant applicants, to share $12.5 million from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s Renewable Energy Technologies Grants Program. Renergie received $1,500,483 (partial funding) in grant money to design and build Florida’s first ethanol plant capable of producing fuel-grade ethanol solely from sweet sorghum juice. On April 2, 2008, Enterprise Florida, Inc., the state’s economic development organization, selected Renergie as one of Florida’s most innovative technology companies in the alternative energy sector.

The August 6, 2009, issue of the Edmonton Journal ran a story about the hormonal boost for young males provided by high end performance vehicles. A Concordia University study determined that “endowing [yes, endowing] the men with a vehicle few people could afford tripped an endocrinological response—measured using saliva samples—mimicking the one elicited during competition for female mates.” As a guy who used to be young, I could have saved the academics a few bucks. Of course hot cars raise testosterone levels. That’s a fundamental part of a guy’s reason for life. It’s the selfish gene on wheels: hot cars > better babes > better babies. But all is not exactly as it seems . . .

The eggheads handed over a $150,000 Porsche to a study group of university students (median age 24.7 years) for an hour’s worth of driving in two separate environments: urban and rural.

Now one would think that a young guy behind the wheel of a high end German legend would experience a significant hormonal overload in the city world where a bountiful crop of hot city women would fawn over the hot wheels. If you aren’t responsible enough to own a cute little puppy, at least be rich enough to own a Porsche in the honorable pursuit of women. Both car and dog will attract female attention, thus an increase in testosterone would seem imminent.

Here’s the kicker in the Concordia study: Even a drive in the country well out of range of available women made the subject males horny. The Porsche raised these guys’ hormone levels well into the naked Jennifer Aniston range without a naked Jennifer Aniston. Now that’s a car!

This aspect of the study intrigues. It suggests that male happiness is not a warm Colt Mark IV Series 70. Nor is it a toasty Marissa Miller. It’s a smoking hot supercar. While you can’t share a hot tub and margaritas with a Ferrari, the study suggests you’d be better off with a high-strung Italian car than a high-maintenance Italian babe.

That said, the Concordia study is full of holes. For one thing, it fails to take into account the exotic car’s role vis à vis the average male’s basic philosophy. He may have spent half of his time behind the wheel on a deserted road with no available women, but he was worked-up by the knowledge that the Porsche gave him the potential to meet hot women. Now that’s a car!

The other half of the experiment involved an equal amount of time behind the wheel of a Toyota Camry with 180,000 miles on it. You guessed it: the net result was “a slight deflation in testosterone.”

This finding probably won’t find its way into a new Toyota ad campaign, but it makes perfect sense. Toyota built the Camry’s reputation upon reliability and practicality. Men with high testosterone levels tend to view the Camry as the kind of car guys own when they get married. When the supermodel dream is dead and buried.

Yes BUT—there are plenty of men who wouldn’t want a supermodel. I’ve got five words for you: bulimia, cocaine, prima donna, money. Anyway, natural selection says that if all men wanted supermodels that much all women would be supermodels.

By the same token, there’s an entire population of women who don’t want a bad boy/show off/fast driver to father their children. Sensibly enough, they seek sensible men who can assure their progeny’s long term safety, security and prosperity.

Bottom line: the Camry offers that driver access to a different class of genetic material. It’s neither good nor bad. It just is.

The study assumes that high testosterone levels are inherently positive, when, clearly, they’re not. From a Darwinian point-of-view, the chances that a Camry driver will take themselves out of the genetic pool by dangerous driving are far less than the those of the Porker pilot. In other words, the bad boy only gets the hot girl if he lives long enough to do so.

In any case, the choice of a Porsche for this study is a problem in and of itself. On one hand, Porsches keep the supermodel dream alive: $150,000 two-seaters capable of kissing 200 mph say, “I want to get there insanely fast and in style,” and, “If I can afford this I can afford to put our [future] children through Yale.”

On the other hand, Porsches are reliable (enough), easy to park and built to withstand massive accidents. It’s not for nothing that the 911’s known (at least amongst high testosterone males) as the “practical supercar.”

So a Porsche is a highly evolved supercar that sends a mixed message that appeals to both sides of a female’s genetic needs: high achiever and high security. And succeeds.

Now that’s a car!

[Click here for more of Jim Sutherland’s work @ mystarcollectorcar.com]

TTAC spammer “ajara ali” writes:

My name is Mr Alfonso Perez the CEO of Shandon International Company LTD. And am located in France, am sorry if i have contacted the wrong Company for this order. I will like to make some orders from your Company to my Company and the product is Car Cover.

Please get back to me with the price per unit so that i will know the quantities to order. And also if you dont have this type, you can email me with the one that you have together with the price so that i can make some orders. Thank you very much and hope to hear from you soon. And also you can advice me on the type of payment you accept.

Best Regards

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Bob from The Land Down Under writes:

G’day Sajeev, here is a question for you. In my ML320 (2001) the accelerator pedal has broken and for the life of me I cannot remove the pedal assembly from the bulkhead of the car. I have undone the two bolts I can see but it refuses to budge. No one in the Mercedes Benz forums can/will answer my question. Plus the actual workshop manual is held by Mercedes Benz, who will not part with it unless an inordinate amount of money crosses their palms. (The last time I checked they wanted about $400 Australian for the manual on DVD and I thought movie DVD’s were expensive!)

Thanks for the help, oh master of the wrenches, mystic diviner of the oil sludge.

Bob (from Oz)

Read More >

I set out to write a book not so much about the varieties and comparative deficiencies of cars in the Soviet Union as what these objects meant to Soviet citizens. The structure and organizing principles of the book were among the first things to become clear. There would be three chapters on the “Soviet Detroits”—the places where automobiles were built, the people who built them, and how the cars and trucks they produced both embodied the state’s agendas and inspired popular identification.

I settled on Moscow’s AMO factory (later known as ZIS and still later ZIL) from where the first Soviet-made motor vehicles emanated in 1924; the Gor’kii Automobile Factory (GAZ) that began turning out Model A cars and trucks in the 1930s and later the Pobeda, Volga, and Chaika; and AvtoVAZ, the giant factory built on the banks of the Volga in the late 1960s and early 1970s to produce the Zhiguli, or as it became known abroad, the Lada.

These chapters would be followed by one on roads and their construction, the forms of labor relied upon to build and maintain them, and other dimensions of the struggle against “roadlessness.” The final two chapters would tell the story of how Soviet citizens experienced trucks and cars in their daily lives, how Communist ideology eventually accommodated the private automobile, but why cars required a lot of semi-legal or illegal activity to keep them on the road.

The book is structured around three axes: foreign and domestic, public and private, and continuity and change.

Contrary to Cold War-era assertions, the Soviet automobile industry was neither entirely dependent on nor completely autonomous from western technological developments. It did a lot of copying, mixing and matching, and innovating on the fly. In the 1930s, Soviet highway design and construction emulated Fascist Italy’s autostradas and Nazi Germany’s autobahns but for better or for worse otherwise depended on indigenous inspiration and approaches.

Foreign trucks and cars—the pre-revolutionary playthings of the aristocracy, the “Renochka” that the revolutionary poet Vladimir Maiakovskii bought as a gift for his mistress, the legendary Lend Lease Studebakers, the trophy cars that Red Army officers brought back from defeated Germany, Detroit’s finest on display at the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow—were icons of a world few Soviet citizens had seen. Yet, Soviet citizens took pride in “their own” luxury models (ZIS and ZIL limousines, Chaikas, etc.), thrilled to accounts of auto races and rallies in which Soviet drivers heroically overcame obstacles, and for the most part leapt at the opportunity to acquire even the most modest of Soviet models.

Actually, even the state’s property—trucks and, until the 1970s, the vast majority of cars—often was appropriated for private or personal purposes by drivers and officials in need of wheels. With the proliferation of privately owned cars in the 1970s and 80s, owners appropriated state supplies of parts and gasoline too. The mutuality of such relationships and the hybridity of forms they produced meant that occasional ruptures in the life of the Soviet automobile did not prevent the emergence over the long haul of a Soviet “automobility.” Many of its features survived the collapse of the USSR itself.

The book’s main argument is that the Soviet automobile had to adapt to Soviet circumstances as much as it provoked adaptation. If the particularities of Soviet socialism can better inform us about the history of cars and trucks, then the Soviet automobile can help teach us about Soviet socialism.

THE WIDE ANGLE

No contextual landscape for the book existed in the sense of a previous body of historical scholarship devoted to the subject. The Soviet automobile did figure in Cold War-era economists’ reckonings of the so-called “second economy.” And sociologists, anthropologists and historians have been producing an impressive number of articles and books on car and truck cultures in many parts of the world (although not the USSR or other former Soviet-bloc countries). But the twin inspirations for the writing the book came from elsewhere.

Visiting Moscow and other ex-Soviet cities during the 1990s, I could not help noticing the tremendous increase in the number of cars and the difficulties urban infrastructures had in accommodating their growth. This observation made me reflect on the intricate relationships among cars, cities, political systems and the choices they offered and constrained with respect to human mobility. It also made me start to notice the presence of cars and trucks in a lot of places previously hidden in full view—in Soviet novels, poetry, films, photographs, and songs, in the speeches by Soviet leaders, in memoirs and elsewhere. Soon my project was awash with material.

The other source of inspiration was my own weariness with the narrative of Soviet history that emphasized tears, state oppression, and violence—a narrative especially prominent in and appropriate to accounts of the Stalin era. This was the period in which most of my previous scholarship was situated. I longed for a subject that was more capacious, that would enable me to trace its arc through the entirety of the Soviet Union’s existence, and found it in the odd coupling of the automobile and Soviet communism.

Of course I encountered tears and shed a few of my own as I struggled to master the vocabulary of auto mechanics. But among the unexpected pleasures of writing this book were several discoveries among the myriad of sources: film comedies from the Soviet 1950s and 60s about a driver and his boss in a case of mistaken identity, about a would-be ice skating princess who settles for becoming the best gas station attendant by filling up the tanks on roller skates; a Stalin-prize winning novel from 1950 in which a truck driver rhapsodizes about the joy of the open road; and Ilya Ehrenburg’s 1929 dystopic novel about the devastating effects of the automobile on labor, the environment and pedestrians. From the latter, I derived the subtitle for my book.

A CLOSE-UP

The spatial requirements and landscape consequences of the automobile age—the roads, oil and gas refineries and stations, garages, tire and parts stores and junk yards, billboards and flashing neon signs, suburban tracts and shopping malls—hardly made their presence felt in the USSR. “Consequently,” wrote a Dutch-born writer in the late 1960s “the Westerner in his own car …moves in an odd way back through time” to “how [our world] once looked, how it was supposed to look.”

Still, already in 1960, Krokodil, the Soviet humor magazine, could print a cartoon of makeshift sheds disfiguring the courtyard of a new apartment bloc, and residents in Leningrad soon were lodging complaints about garages getting “in the way of people’s everyday lives.” The proliferation of private automobiles also had temporal consequences as car owners required considerable amounts of time to maintain and repair their vehicles.

Hence, car owners and car parts suppliers (both of whom were overwhelmingly male) appropriated courtyards, alleys, roadsides and fields for the predominantly masculine activities of car work and car talk. Garages, furnished with old chairs and perhaps a heater and a cot became sites of celebration—places to drink vodka and consume sausage and pickles. They and the interiors of the cars themselves served as alternative living rooms for men seeking privacy and male companionship. The essentially private activities in which they engaged thanks to the car and the infrastructural inadequacies of the centrally planned economy were beyond the surveillance not only of their wives but of the state that inadvertently had fostered them.

All of this was a long way from the vision of Valerian Osinskii, a prominent Bolshevik who did more to give life to the Soviet automobile than anyone else. In a series of articles that Pravda published in 1927, Osinskii called upon his comrades to adopt the “American automobile” instead of the “Russian cart” and thereby put “every worker and peasant in a car within not more than ten to fifteen years.” Osinskii also dreamed of a future in which a car trip from Moscow to the provincial town of Voronezh would mean traveling on an asphalt highway so smooth that the only sound heard would be the swish of tires. Only since the collapse of the USSR have such journeys become possible, but at the same time, the post-Soviet landscape is now littered with the detritus of the automobile age.

LASTLY

In the late 1950s, Nikita Khrushchev, who never had been a fan of the private car, proposed a rental system as an alternative route to automotive modernity. “We will use cars more rationally than the Americans,” he assured an audience in Vladivostok. But even before his ouster in 1964, the system that had lacked funding and provoked innumerable complaints was phased out. With it went the chance for the USSR to take advantage of its relatively late entry into the automobile age and improve on the record of its predecessors.

Cars for Comrades is about more than cars. It is about the chimera of overcoming the gap in technology between the capitalist (First) and socialist (Second) world. Even as Soviet and American engineers were installing an assembly line to turn out Model A trucks and cars in the late 1920s, Soviet journalists were conjuring up visions of a technological utopia, not just a factory out of which would rumble identical machines one after the other, but an entire city, the “City of Socialism” lit by electricity, heated by steam, and with rectangles everywhere. But the capitalist world’s technology was a moving target. By the time the techno-utopian “Soviet Detroit” of the future was actually built—in the early 1970s in Togliatti to complement the AvtoVAZ factory—the real Detroit was definitely showing signs of stress and decay from which it would not recover.

The book’s larger significance is about the intersection of technology, ideology, and material culture. I argue that Soviet socialism exchanged the possibility of an alternative modernity for one much more entangled with the material culture of the western world.

This process was difficult to predict. For much of its existence, the Soviet Union was defined by its leaders as a more rationally organized and socially just polity than any in the capitalist world. The preponderance of trucks—those workhorses among motor vehicles—and the rare privately owned car was consistent with such difference. But eventually the comrades and other middle-echelon personnel wanted to enhance their personal mobility, flexibility, and status. They wanted the wealth within what had become a vast empire to be shared with them not only in the form of access to first-rate educational institutions, vacations abroad, family apartments, and domestic appliances but that most representative of twentieth-century material objects—the car.

In the end, they got their way, sort of.

Joe writes:

Last Christmas, my wife bought me a 2006 Saleen Mustang Convertible s281. As it was winter in Idaho and the last week of the year, what with Saleen Corp announcing that it would be filing for bankruptcy, the dealership was very eager to remove this very beautiful car from their showroom.

I would like to think that the Saleen could be a decent long-term investment. That being said, it is just an S281 model, no supercharger. So do I hope I made a good investment and keep the car as built? (Really sucks that a kid in a 300zx can keep up with me.)

To protect the car’s collectibility, should I upgrade the power with very expensive Saleen parts, or forget about long term resale and go with other superchargers that provide more bang for the buck?

Read More >

Curbside Classics takes you back to 1971 for a virtual comparison test of six small cars, based (and partly borrowed) from a C/D test.

There it is, a golden yellow Vega, seductive and infinitely irresistible, hanging from the tree of automotive disappointment. Its serpent maker found plenty of smitten takers (especially among the motor press), because the bitter truth imparted was apparently in a time-release potion: “The best handling car ever sold in America” (Road &Track). Motor Trend’s COTY. C/D readers voted it the best economy car three years in a row. And it won this C/D six small car comparison. I (mentally) bit too, having spent idle hours in 1971 with a Vega catalogue specifying a yellow Kammback GT exactly like this one. But sure enough, the sweetness of that first bite evaporated all too quickly: the apple was rotten at the (engine) core. The Vega was GM’s Watergate/Waterloo, the beginning of its inevitable end. And yet here I am forty years later, totally smitten, seriously considering biting the apple again. Read More >

“When I first started in this job thirty years ago, police work was never about revenue enhancement,” Utica Police Chief Michael Reaves told the Detroit News. “But if you’re a chief now, you have to look at whether your department produces revenues. That’s just the reality nowadays.” Nothing produces bizarre behavior quite as reliably as an inappropriate economic incentive, whether we’re talking about the infamous “Sec 179” SUV tax deduction or every Aerosmith album after, and including, “Permanent Vacation.” Is it any surprise, therefore, that most police departments have, over time, shifted their focus away from crimes that don’t pay them in favor of those that do? Murder, rape, theft, vandalism, assault—all offenses that require considerably more effort than apprehending a 44-in-a-35, and none of them containing the kind of guaranteed municipal vigorish that can be garnished from a hapless motorist.

There’s a fine associated with virtually every criminal activity in the United States, from oral sodomy to aggravated murder. But the fines are rarely levied and even more rarely collected. It’s fairly difficult to wring ten grand out of someone who just got done serving a decade in prison, and even tougher to collect from someone sitting on Death Row. The motorist, by contrast, is an easy mark who almost always pays his fine and who can be cited with a trivial amount of effort. With the advent of Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) systems and red-light cameras, it’s no longer even necessary to have a cop present.

The fines generated by traffic citations, in addition to being vastly out of proportion to those generated from other avenues of law enforcement, are both regressive and punitive. It’s now common for a speeding ticket in Ohio to run in excess of two hundred dollars—utterly crippling for the working poor, particularly when the only “offense” involved is driving with the flow of traffic. Consider that the maximum fine for a fifth-degree felony in Ohio is $2,500. The ridiculousness of charging a tenth of that for driving “six over” becomes even more apparent.

The uneven incentive for enforcement associated with outrageous traffic fines has altered the behavior of even the most civic-minded police departments. It’s common to see shiny “freeway patrol” cruisers idling on the Midwest’s inner-city freeways while near-anarchy reigns in the under-patrolled streets beneath. Cops are following the money. It’s as simple as that.

There’s a simple solution to the problem. It’s one that has the potential to restore balance to law enforcement activities, restore the trust between police and citizens, and significantly affect the amount of non-traffic-related crime taking place in most communities. Moving violations should be punished with “points” or criminal penalties exclusively. There should be no fine whatsoever for any offense committed by a motorist outside of parking violations.

Taking the fiscal incentive out of traffic enforcement would force governments to accurately measure the true benefit to their communities of various enforcement priorities. It would get cops out of their air-conditioned glass palaces and into contact with the people they are hired to serve and protect. There would finally be a chance, and a reason, for an honest, analytical nationwide discussion about the actual benefits of traffic enforcement. The all-too-true stereotype of the “jackbooted thug” idling in his cruiser could be replaced by examples of real cops serving as a genuine deterrent in crime-ridden areas.

A nation without overzealous traffic enforcement would be a nation where children didn’t observe their parents lying to police officers. It would be a nation where people might be happy to see a cop walking around, not terrified of being “nicked” for a rolling stop. Last but not least, it would be a nation where citizens all bore a similar burden for supporting police services while having a greater say in how that support was put to use.

The alternative—a nation where the bulk of enforcement effort is seemingly determined by the available revenue from that enforcement—is already a reality in Britain. It isn’t working. Photo traffic enforcement is speeding the country towards Big Brother, while reducing respect for the rule of law.

Why bring that failed model to the United States? Why take cops off the streets and replace them with cameras? Why withdraw police from high crime areas at the same time that highway patrol departments are receiving shiny new laser guns?

Speeding may not be something that our society can ignore. But as a society, we are best served when it is treated as a crime like any other, not as a honeypot for governmental corruption, concupiscence, and stupidity.