Category: Sign of the Times
The rubber always hits the road sooner or later… [Americanthinker.com via Instapundit]
The Standard Of The World meets cold reality, as the prominent Detroit-area Cadillac dealer, Dalgleish Cadillac, calls it a night. The Detroit News, which eulogizes the dealership “with bitterness, hope and history bound together,” reports that the Dalgleish Cadillac building will become a high-tech business incubator run by Wayne State University’s Tech Town.
[Editor’s Note: The following was originally printed 13 years ago in the Corvallis Gazette-Times. It was written by Alexander “Sasha” Volokh of the highly excellent Volokh Conspiracy blog. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did.]
The private car is unpopular these days. When it isn’t blamed for congestion, it’s blamed for pollution. And, invariably, the proposed solutions are restrictions on driving, increased taxes for public transit and other punitive programs or regulations.
But the trouble with seeing driving as the enemy is that it’s too easy to lose sight of its benefits.
The Detroit News reports that the UAW has put its infamous Black Lake retreat on the market, as the “symbol of the union’s success” has become a financial liability. The money-losing retreat and golf resort became a symbol of UAW profligacy during last year’s lead-up to the auto industry bailout. Even within the union, the club had become seen as a white elephant, sucking down an estimated $23m over the last five years, while being kept alive on interest from the union’s strike fund. All during a period in which UAW membership has declined and the union has been forced into concessions. With the UAW’s financial solvency dependent on GM and Chrysler IPOs, perks like Black Lake had to go. The UAW has not yet publicized an asking price.
Honda has been getting flack on these pages for some time now for succumbing to size and weight bloating, a criticism that carries a special sting for an automaker that clawed its way into the mainstream by offering inexpensive, efficient models. And it seems that a little bashing may have helped. Automotive News [sub] reports that Honda has “torn up” its old product plan, and is refocusing on less expensive, more fuel-efficient offerings.Honda CEO Takanobu Ito explains:
We are taking more time to rethink the new Civic and all our models. We had to revisit our development work and planning to comply with the change in the environment
And Ito isn’t referring to changes in the polar icecap either, but rather to the post-credit crisis consumer environment. Prior to the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Ito says Honda was developing a V8, an RWD platform and a larger successor to the Civic. Now it seems that the financial crisis that has been blamed for everything from declining sales to the bankruptcies of GM and Chrysler is yielding the kind of results that a decade of plenty couldn’t.
After our post on the “1000-DAY BIG THREE PLAN” to save the domestic automakers, TTAC commentators have been wondering about the man behind the website supportthebigthree.com. I’ve just got off the blower with site founder Sid Taylor who, it turns out, is the CEO of an automotive supplier named Set Enterprises. Scanning the site, it turns out the campaigner who would have Americans buy only Chrysler, Ford and GM products has a contract with Toyota. When asked about the apparent contradiction, Mr. Turner said the money involved is so small as to render the contract meaningless. “If I didn’t have Toyota it wouldn’t have any impact on my business.” Besides . . .
Eagle-eyed, infinitely patient TTAC editor Jeff Puthuff spotted this story in the LA Times: “Less than two years ago, [porn star Savannah] Stern earned close to $150,000 annually, sometimes turned down work and drove a Mercedes-Benz CLK 350. Now she’s aggressively reaching out for jobs and making closer to $50,000 a year. As for that Mercedes? She’s replacing it with a used Chevy Trailblazer — from her parents. ‘The opportunities in this industry really are disappearing,’ Stern said. ‘It’s extremely stressful.'” Hey! I know a really good way to relieve stress! Anyway, it seems the Internet is doing to Silicone—I mean San Fernando Valley’s porn industry what Silicon Valley did to Armonk, New York’s computer industry. And you’ve got to give Ms. Stern credit for tightening her belt. So to speak. If only the feds could appreciate the benefits of austerity. * cough Gulstream jets cough *
Cruising through this morning’s autoblogoshpere, I clicked on an Automotive Aftermarket Industry Association (AAIA) report on telematics. In case you didn’t know, telematics is “the science of measuring, sending, receiving and storing information via telecommunication devices. In automotive terms—it is the ability to establish two-way connection with a moving vehicle.” Like, a cell phone? Yes, but better! “Did you ever drive your dad’s car somewhere you weren’t supposed to be, or faster than you were supposed to go? With skypatrol, your dad would have received an e-mail or text message telling him you were traveling outside of your assigned geofence [!] or moving faster than the speed limit . . . With skypatrol, you can use GPS travel histories to analyze your route planning to maximize your effectiveness.” Question: can we make a rule that the “you” in question is always the “you” who owns the vehicle—and no one else? Just askin’.
I can’t say that I’ve seen everything. But sometimes I feel as if I have. For example, the morning after we publish Bob Elton’s piece on Chrysler’s wanton destruction of its historical archives, the Detroit Free Press runs a piece on the future—or lack thereof—for feral cats hanging out on the grounds of Chrysler’s Sterling Heights factory. As a former English resident alien, I know what’s it’s like to live in a country where animal welfare gets more play than the challenges faced by humans. Still, this is one for the record books: “‘We try to help them out a little,’ said Claudia Valentine, 55, a veteran skilled trades worker on the night shift at the plant. She said workers feed the cats nightly and do such things as setting insulated crates outside in winter. But the cats have multiplied and are causing safety problems, a few being run over by workers or caught in the conveyor system.” We also learn, “Feral females spend most of their lives pregnant or nursing. In seven years, one female cat and her offspring can yield 420,000 cats.” In the same sense, I suppose, that Chrysler can become profitable. Just sayin’.
Cars.com tackles the tough question of domestic content in its latest “American Made Index,” and comes away with a surprising result: Toyota’s Camry is the most “American” car on the market. Of course, making these distinctions in a global industry is fraught with difficulty. Though percentage of domestic parts content is tracked by the NHTSA for American Automobile Labeling Act compliance (PDF), those numbers count US and Canadian parts as being “domestic”. So Cars.com has created its own list which requires US assembly, at least 75 percent US-sourced parts content, and factors in sales numbers because “they correlate to the number of U.S. autoworkers employed to build any given model and to build the parts that go into those same cars.” Taking out vehicles that are being canceled with no clear replacement, the following vehicles make up their top ten “most American” automobiles.
Photo courtesy David Holzman
From Despair Inc (via Jalopnik), comes a T-shirt that is sure to outsell the Aveo. Is it time to declare the death of the ironic T-shirt?
What do you do when your £50,000 ($82,000) Range Rover requires, in the span of 42,000 miles, the following repairs?
- Six front ball joints;
- Four front arm bushes [bushings?];
- One new seat base;
- Front and rear [near side?] struts;
- Air conditioning system;
- Anti-roll bar bushes; and
- A “full” suspension unit
Well, Ion Mihai Pacepa was. “When the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu decided in the mid-1960s that he wanted to have a car industry, he chose me to start the project rolling. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. I knew nothing about manufacturing cars, but neither did anyone else among Ceausescu’s top men. However, my father had spent most of his life running the service department of the General Motors affiliate in Bucharest.” Plus he was in charge of industrial espionage, which is also a good place to start. Pacepa wrote his recollections for the WSJ, because “the current takeover of General Motors by the U.S. government and United Auto Workers makes me think back to Romania’s catastrophic mismanagement [of its auto industry].” Though the differences between the US and Romania are legion, and not to be forgotten, the story makes for an interesting perspective.
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