If you’re like me, you spent most of the weekend huddled under a blanket, half-watching television and praying for the flu agony to be over. And nobody who watched a considerable amount television this weekend could have avoided the latest flight of heavy-handed ads from Jeep and Chrysler’s new Ram brand. “My Name Is Ram” and the  E.E. Cummings-inspired “i am. Jeep” campaigns are blitzing airwaves across the country as the New, New Chrysler gears up to make its wildly optimistic sales goals. After five months of total silence coming out of bankruptcy, the ads are coming out in earnest, and they’ll be running non-stop in hopes of catching up with the $100 per retail sale ad spend goal for 2009.  Next year, Chrysler’s ad spending will go up to $170 per projected sale, peaking in 2011 at $210 per planned retail sale. And this increase in ad spending appears to explain why Chrysler’s sales projection charts swing wildly upwards after a dismal 2009. After all, if throwing upward of a billion bucks per year won’t change consumer perceptions, what will? Well, besides new product, anyway. There’s many a slip twixt the PowerPoint and the profit.

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Last week Toyota followed the lead of Renault, Honda and BMW and bid adieu to Formula 1 racing. The Financial Times pins Toyota’s decision not only on financial belt tightening, and on the notion that racing just doesn’t move the metal in times of increasing environmental concern. When Leonardo DiCapro becomes the inspiration for an electric car and NASCAR talks about moving from carburetors to fuel injection to save some gas , you know something is afoot. Automakers and part suppliers have been backing away from the racing for many months now. Earlier this year both Subaru and Suzuki exited World Rally Championship racing and Bridgestone recently announced it’s giving up being Formula 1’s exclusive tire supplier.

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A German court last month overturned a traffic citation after prosecutors failed to prove the accuracy of a new laser-based speed camera technology. The district court of Dillenburg heard testimony from four experts, each of whom cast doubt on the system. The judge concluded that the motorist accused by a Poliscan automated ticketing machine of driving 96km/h (60 MPH) in a 40 (25 MPH) zone was not guilty.

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Some politicians who supported the Cash for Clunkers program didn’t want to be seen promoting a billion dollar (or three) bailout for car dealers, what with car dealers rating just above sex offenders as “people who I’d like to support with my taxes.” So, not surprisingly, the C4C bill was wrapped in a mantle of green; structured to reward buyers who traded gas guzzlers for [marginally] more fuel efficient vehicles. In practice, the “program mostly involved swaps of old Ford or Chevrolet pickups for new ones that got only marginally better gas mileage, according to an analysis of new federal data by The Associated Press. The single most common swap — which occurred more than 8,200 times — involved Ford F150 pickup owners who took advantage of a government rebate to trade their old trucks for new Ford F150s. They were 17 times more likely to buy a new F150 than, say, a Toyota Prius. The fuel economy for the new trucks ranged from 15 mpg to 17 mpg based on engine size and other factors, an improvement of just 1 mpg to 3 mpg over the clunkers.” It gets worse . . .

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Get ready for GM leaving the country and moving to China for good. GM’s sales in the world’s largest auto market more than doubled in October from a year earlier. GM sold 166,911 vehicles in China last month, Reuters reports. From January to October, GM sales in China amounted to 1.46 million units and exceeded 1.5 million units as of Monday.

In the US, GM had sold 176,632 units in October, and 1.7 million units for the first ten months of the year. If this trend continues, GM will soon sell more cars in China than back home. Last September, they already did.
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The Chinese city of Shanghai is thinking of rewarding buyers of an eco-friendly alternative-energy car with a free license plate, Shanghai Daily reports via Gasgoo. Big deal, you say? In Shanghai, it is a big deal.
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Wasn’t losing their precious intellectual property to the Rooskies the biggest beef GM had with the Opel-Magna-Sperbank deal? Wasn’t it clear that Sperbank wanted to sell its shares to GAZ? Wasn’t GM trying to block this deal by inserting a buyback clause? Now that GM has decided to keep Opel, those fears have evaporated. In the so far strangest twist in the Opel soap, GM is busy trying to salvage exactly the oddest part of the deal: The Opel-Magna-Sberbank-GAZ deal.

The DetN, the unofficial in-house organ of GM, reports (without flinching) that GM officials “still hope to negotiate an agreement with Magna and Russian automaker GAZ. A source familiar with the situation said GM has already contacted Sberbank.” Exactly. The same bank that is owned by oligarch Oleg Deripaska who had his US visa canceled amidst allegations of money laundering and organized crime. And who had to cut a deal with the FBI to be allowed back into the country. And who, according to the New York Times, “has repeatedly denied media reports that he had acquired a major stake in U.S. car maker GM.”
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Jay Leno wasn’t present for the roast of Bob Lutz, but he did check in via video with a few jokes about Bob’s age. Luckily, former Car and Driver editor Csaba Csere decided to mine a richer vein of humor, digging into Lutz for his Merkur branding debacle and his distaste for flying commercial. Maybe retirement allowed Csere to loosen up and deliver some of the evening’s better zingers. Whatever it was, the contrast to Automobile Magazine’s Jean Jennings couldn’t have been greater: Jennings’ contribution was less roast and more abject fawning. She couldn’t have been more toothless if her press fleet access depended on it. Apparently she thought it did.

When GM’s Fritz Henderson called Magna chief Siegfried Wolf and told him that GM had an irreversible case of seller’s remorse, Wolf’s flabbergasted counter was: “Are you joking?” Fritz told him he’s dead serious. Opel will stay with GM. Now, all Wolf has left for GM is unsolicited advice: Give more freedom to Opel and tread carefully with the brand and the unions. “GM must now smooth things out and win back trust. That requires a lot of sensitivity and tact,” Wolf told the German newspaper Bild am Sonntag (via Reuters).

It doesn’t look like GM will be heeding the advice. New Opel Chairman Bob Lutz and new GM-E chief Nick Reilly are known for the sensitivity and tact of a Sherman tank. Supposedly, both are here on a temporary basis only until new outside managers are found. It could be a long search, if it is a real one at all.

On Monday, Fitz Henderson will come to Germany and try to smooth over things with the workers, Opel’s worker’s council chief Klaus Franz told German media. It will be a tough talk.
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The evening before Bob Lutz was named Chairman of Opel, he was roasted at an Arthritis Foundation benefit at the Ritz-Carlton in Dearborn. The lead-off hitter was none other than Lutz’s boss, Fritz Henderson, and the inherent awkwardness of a boss roasting his far more charismatic employee made Fritz’s jabs some of the evening’s best. Here is his tribute to a man called Maximum.

Inside baseball alert. If you’re more interested in Metamucil than meta memes, this post’s not for you (I recommend any of the 1,345,483 website dedicated to bowel health). Otherwise, check out Alex Taylor III’s “Readers revolt over Ford.” Fortune‘s carmudgeon apologizes for the grievous sin of suggesting that Ford’s product quality may be middling. “As I should have explained more fully in the [previous] column, the 2010 rankings averaged reports from CR readers on all the cars in a given company’s lineup. Ford’s results were pulled down by the poor performance of the F-250 pickup truck and the troubled all-wheel-drive systems on Ford passenger cars.” And that information should be excluded because . . . ? “While my column was technically accurate, it didn’t pass the smell test with readers who thought I showed bias against American cars.” Question: what the hell is going on here?

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I’ve just spent five fun-filled days looking after two flu-filled sprogs whilst suffering from the selfsame porcine virus. And on the sixth day, I took my wife to the ER to stop, well, you don’t want to know (nor does she want me to tell you). Although I’ve managed to avoid buying a “I just spent five fun-filled days looking after two flu-filled sprogs and all I got was this lousy T-shirt” t-shirt, my experience has piqued my interest in media coverage of the viral outbreak. The MSM has decided that this is big story because 150 children have died from the swine flu. One-hundred and fifty? As a father, my heart goes out to the kids’ families. That said, “On any given day nearly 700 children are harmed due to accidents on our roadways,” Seattle personal injury lawyer Christopher M. Davis writes. “Of the 250,000 kids injured each year, approximately 2,000 die from their injuries. Children make up about 5% of total fatalities due to car accidents. In fact, for children between the ages of 2 and 14, motor vehicle accidents are the leading cause of death. . . The failure to wear a seat belt or use a child safety seat is a contributing factor in more than half of the cases involving children who die in car accidents.” As the Dixie Chicks were wont to sing, there’s your trouble.

Among the 15,000 Maryland state employees who drive on area toll roads without paying are judges, lawmakers and powerful bureaucrats. The Maryland Politics Watch website used a freedom of information request in August to discover that 128 of 188 legislators took advantage of a perquisite giving officials a scrutiny and bill-free E-ZPass transponder—despite already receiving a $600 yearly travel expense allowance from taxpayers. After being exposed, the General Assembly leadership moved to limit the fallout by abruptly canceling the program on September 25.

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