Aldo: Hi Mr. Posawatz. I will be buying a Volt and wanted to know if an extension cord could be used to increase the reach for recharging, or if we are going to be limited to the length of the cord that comes with the car. Thanks!

[Chevy Volt Vehicle Line Director] Tony Posawatz: The EVSE or charge cord will be about 25 feet and designed to all relevant codes. We do not recommend extension cords but rather that when you have your home inspection, you reposition your outlet/charging station approproiately [sic].

From a recent Fastlane livechat on the Chevrolet Volt, ironically titled “Making Electric Vehicles Attractive to Consumers.” Which would you prefer?

People have tried to be kind, saying that it’s challenging and that it’s unusual. But the simple fact of the matter is this: it’s as ugly as an inside-out monkey. It’s dreadful. Part Austin Maxi, it looks like someone with no talent at all was trying to describe what they wanted to a blind person, over the phone.

I tried one on a recent trip to Romania and I thought it was a very good car. But that’s like saying Ann Widdecombe has a heart of gold. It’s possibly true but it’s completely irrelevant. You still wouldn’t.

After two pages of digression and British pop culture references, Jeremy Clarkson finally decides to tell us what he really thinks of the Porsche Panamera. By digressing into British pop culture references. Which begs the question: who comes out of this looking worse? Or, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, tomorrow the Panamera will still be a fairly desirable car. Whether Clarkson will be able to offer anything resembling a credible or readable opinion in his next Times review is still very much an open question.

The public plan is 19 percent and change. That is what everything is being based on

GM board member Steven Girsky repeats Fritz Henderson’s assumption that GM’s market share will be stable and predictable . Of course, if that’s the case, someone’s got some ‘splainin to do about the last 30 years. Luckily though, we’ve got some good news for Messrs Girsky and Henderson. According to Autoobserver:

Edmunds.com, the premier online resource for automotive information, has preliminarily forecast General Motors (GM) retail market share for October to rise to 22.4 percent from the third-quarter retail average of 19.1 percent

Wait, Edmunds’ forecast is based on unique pageviews for GM models at Edmunds.com? Never mind then. Let’s go instead to TTAC’s unique sales forecasting and analysis department and see  if GM will hit 22.4 percent market share in October. Forecasters? Shakes vigorously. What’s that? “Signs point to no?” Aw, too bad.

Motor Trend Editor in Chief Angus MacKenzie LOLs on Twitter over the TTAC-Jalopnik Lutz Race drama. What Angus doesn’t realize is that our contract with GM obligates us to a minimum of one pre-stunt controversy. C’mon Angus, you run the most sold-out car rag on the planet. You should know how these things work!

At this point about 19 percent… We’ll finalize that, but I’m not interested in going down from that

GM’s Fritz Henderson in Automotive News [sub] on his “plans” for GM’s market share. As Evan Newmark dryly puts it over at the WSJ’s Mean Street blog, “if the Norwegians are giving out Nobel Prizes for aspirations and efforts, then surely Mr. Henderson is up for one.”

“What do you think the percentage likelihood is that, if we give this deal a chance, it will succeed?” Rattner didn’t make the decision any easier. “Fifty-one per cent,” he said. “But, Mr. President, in my experience, deals get worse, not better, over time.”

Ryan Lizza recounts the decision to bail out Chrysler in his epic New Yorker piece on Larry Summers and the president’s economic team [via Kausfiles]. This exchange came after the economic council split 4-4 on the automaker bailout, and Rattner was identified as the tie-breaking vote. Is it safe to say now that nobody expects Chrysler to survive?

It’s a sad day for the dealer body. I felt GM had its best chance with him. He was a great leader and inspirational. Hopefully the rest of management will stay intact.

A Buick dealer gives the only known positive post-mortem for the latest victim of GM’s cultural revolution [via Automotive News [sub]]. A more fitting eulogy might be found here.

One last General Motors-Condé Nast parallel worth pursing: Both companies have been badly run by executives who invested more effort in pursuing perks, status, and empire-building than chasing profits. Writing in a slightly different context, Condé Nast veteran Tina Brown summed up what ails the magazine company in an April post on the Daily Beast: “The court of the Sun King is a rats’ nest of competing favorites who jostle for the 81-year-old supremo’s [S.I. Newhouse] attention.”

Jack Shafer connects the dots between the failures of Condé Nast and General Motors over at Slate.

I actually think right now is the best time to pursue an automotive career because all of the domestic automobile companies have been through the cleansing fire of sharp retraction — getting ourselves competitive on wage cost, reducing capacity, getting rid of excess people and so forth … the UAW concessions on wages … etc. I see a genuine resurgence for the U.S. automobile companies, especially General Motors. So I think it’s a very good time to pursue a career.

Maximum Bob Lutz gives Northwood University students some of the worst career advice in recorded history [via MLive]. But to be fair, Lutz can imagine at least one scenario in which GM won’t regain its former glory…

Read More >

Hyundai is awesome. They are undoubtedly a threat because their products are cheap, and the quality is improving

Honda CEO Takanobu Ito in the Canadian Press. “Hyundai is the biggest threat for the Japanese automakers,” adds Nissan senior VP Shiro Nakamura. “We have to offer the equivalents of sushi, tempura and kaiseki to compete against Korean barbecue.” Now imagine the reaction these quotes would have received ten years ago.

Official fuel economy testing for all vehicles is conducted on chassis dynamometers, which are basically treadmills for cars and trucks. One subtlety of chassis dynamometer testing is that vehicle fuel economy measurements using decades-old standard speed profiles may be overly optimistic compared to today’s average on-road fuel use. Official methods exist to adjust the test cycle fuel economy of conventional vehicles to better estimate expected real-world fuel use, but a similar adjustment method has yet to be finalized for PHEVs.

From a National Renewable Energy Lab paper on plug-in hybrid efficiency testing [via Green Car Congress].

Read More >

The big blockbuster, peanut-butter-approach programs like zero-percent financing and employee discounts for everyone have all been done before

GM spokesman John McDonald in a Bloomberg story on the industry-wide drop in incentives and rising transaction prices. What about Truck Month? Surely we can all agree that has been “done before.”  And though the Detroit automakers have eased incentives by about 25 percent from their March peak, at $3,278 this August, they’re still higher than the industry-average of $2,474. And the brief respite from incentive-redlining could be ending soon. With inventories depleted by Cash For Clunkers, GM is adding shifts in hopes of increasing production by 20 percent in the fourth quarter. Throwing more cars into a clunker-hangover sales environment could be just the thing to bring incentives and “peanut-butter-approach programs” (can anyone explain that pejorative?) back in a big way. But don’t call it a comeback: they never really left.

In the past two years I have spent more time with (VW group CEO) Dr. Winterkorn than with my wife

So sayeth VW Group Design Boss Walter De Silva in Automotive News [sub]. “When I think about the Golf VII, I do not sleep at night,” he adds. Considering that, as head of styling for Audi, Bentley, Bugatti, Lamborghini, Seat, Skoda and Volkswagen, De Silva manages about 100 projects at a time, so it’s no wonder Mrs. De Silva takes second place to Herr Winterkorn.

Daniel Howes’ column for the Detroit News is based on an interview with GM CEO Fritz Henderson, while the latter was embarked on a national dealer handholding tour [your name suggestions below]. And here’s the first money shot: “It’s just really good to be back in the car business.” Howes reads TTAC; I’ve taken him to task many times for his transformation from kick-ass European correspondent to Motown pom-pom waver and, at best, chronic fence sitter. “Now, before all the cynics glom on to that single sentence as proof — proof, I tell you — that GM’s leadership is back to the bad ol’ days of denial, I’d offer this: There is more that’s changing inside GM today than staying the same, starting with the fact that the CEO and key leaders of his management team spend a whole lot more time talking about cars and trucks than the nonautomotive headache du jour.” This is all kinds of wrong.

Read More >

This is good — the money on the trucks. The money on the 2010 models is a nonevent because there aren’t any of them in stock . . . The incentives are good advertising to get people in the door, then we can sell them whatever we have in stock.

Tommy Brasher, owner of Brasher Motor Co. of Weimar, Texas, on GM’s decision to hold a “Truck Month” sale after all. Maybe we didn’t get the memo, but GM’s Bob Lutz said last week that GM would forgo the celebration of lost profits for fear it would hamstring the “May The Best Car Win” campaign. After all, the whole point of “May The Best Car Win” is to convince consumers that GM products are worth shopping even when they don’t have cash on the hood. But with trucks cramming the lots and in-demand models nowhere to be found, GM went ahead and sacrificed perception for what spokesfolks call a “competitive response” to Ford’s Truck Month. Old habits die hard.