Just got off the phone with my copyright lawyer. “Bertel, how many times do I have to tell you that ideas are not copyrightable.”  “Yes, Sidney, I know, only the expression. But it’s a shame nonetheless.” There goes my last chance to get rich. What happened?

According to the pistonheads at Pistonheads.com, history goes into high RPMs again at Volkswagen. Due to the impending merger of Volkswagen and Porsche (which more and more looks like a takeover of Porsche by Piech) the company might need a new name. After all, Volkswagen-Porsche would sound unwieldy and would bring up memories of the ill-fated Volksporsche 914. Anyway, a holding company shouldn’t carry the name of one of its brands in its name (save for Ford, or Toyota, and many others.) The names of two brands in the name of one holding would be a bit too much. So someone floated a bright idea:

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Before landing a part-time gig as an automotive test monkey, I cut my teeth driving virtual cars on Gran Turismo 4 (GT4). Developer Polyphony Digital’s attention to detail was startling. You could/can feel subtle differences between ostensibly similar cars, such as an ’89 and a ’93 Mazda Miata (hint: chassis rigidity on the older car sucks). Sure, GT4’s artificial intelligence was a joke. And the lack of damage was mildly disappointing. But it was a great game, except for the understeer . . . the terminal bloody understeer.

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Putting the “continuous” in “continuous improvement,” Toyota plans on replacing 40 percent of its senior managers and half the board members while reorganizing its North American business according to the Financial Times. Akio Toyoda takes over as president of his grandfather’s company next month and clearly wants to set a new tone at the top. “Some people are calling this a revolution or even a coup d’état,” says Koji Endo, a Credit Suisse analyst. “The size of the [financial] loss is huge. Somebody has to take responsibility for that.” Toyoda reportedly wants to bring back former senior executive Yoshimi Inaba, to revive its US operations. That effort could include unifying Toyota’s California-based US sales operation and Kentucky-based manufacturing unit under a single management structure, possibly based in New York. Under outgoing president Katsuaki Watanabe’s leadership, Toyota lost nearly $5 billion last fiscal year despite commencing an $8.22 billion cost-cutting campaign. Toyota lost $7.87 billion last quarter, beating out even GM for the title of biggest loser.

Toyota’s third-generation Prius hybrid launches in Japan on Monday, with a European rollout scheduled for July, and already they firm has amassed 75k pre-orders worldwide. Of course, Toyota won’t confirm the number, which originated in a Nikkei report printed in Automotive News [sub]. Honda’s Insight has already become Japan’s top-selling car, the first hybrid to hold such a title. And all this despite oil and gas prices that are significantly weaker than a year ago. But, as GM is currently proving, pre-orders can sometimes be more trouble than they’re worth.

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Ford is basking in its “last man standing” status this week as it holds its annual shareholder meeting. Automotive News [sub] reports that Ford expects to break even or turn a profit by 2011 without the help of government bridge loans. So confident are stockholders in the success of Ford’s current strategy that they have voted down reforms that would wrest voting control from Ford family preferred stockholders for the fifth time in as many years. This despite a $14.7 billion loss last year, and a $1.43 billion loss in Q1 of 2009. The good news? Ford has restructured its debt, reached a deal with the UAW’s VEBA fund, raised $1.6 billion in its recent stock offering, and its retail market share has “stabilized.” But there’s still plenty of work to be done.

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Actor Tom Hanks recently defended himself against the New Yorker, who called him out on his appearance in “Who Killed the Electric Car?” Here’s his letter to the editor:

Peter J. Boyer, in his otherwise spot-on piece about the car industry, assumes that I once leased G.M.’s sadly fated EV1 electric car and, like other drivers of that twin-seat rocket of a vehicle, watched the emission-free car be wrested from my garage, towed away, and busted up into pieces of metal, glass, and rubber smaller than razor blades (“The Road Ahead,” April 27th). Luckily, I did not. The source of Boyer’s slight inaccuracy may have been the documentary film “Who Killed the Electric Car?,” which used a clip of a visit I made to the “Late Show with David Letterman,” during which I claimed to be saving America one electric car at a time. However, by the time I began shopping for an all-electric car, in 2003, the EV1 had already been yanked from showrooms as if the car had never existed. Instead, I found what was purported to be the very last electric car available for sale in the state of California—a Toyota EV. It had four doors, a rear hatch, room for my family, including a dog in the back, power windows, A/C, a great sound system, and the fastest, most effective windshield defroster known to mankind. When the car companies collectively, and, to some, diabolically, decided to take these cars back, the electric vehicles disappeared. But not mine. I have the pink slip. I own that car, and it is still driven every day, albeit by one of my crack staff of employees. My electric car recently crossed fifty thousand miles on the odometer with its original battery but without so much as a splash of gasoline.

Tom Hanks
Los Angeles, Calif.

It’s not news per se. After all, we knew that Wilmington was on GM’s “endangered plant” list. But the idea that GM will somehow attract a buyer for a factory that builds a dead-in-the-water sportscar is laughable. After all, Chrysler still hasn’t found a home for its Viper nameplate, a brand that carries far more heritage and prestige than the Skystice. So what to do with Wilmington?

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Such as they are. Japanese sales are set to fall below 5 million in 2009 for the first time in nearly thirty years. But even with Japan’s sales slump particularly affecting standard-sized cars, Honda moved 10,481 units of its new hybrid on the Japanese market last month. That makes it the best selling car in Japan just as Toyota brings its third-generation Prius to market. A hybrid as the best selling car? Government subsidies sure help! And with consumers in Japan clearly value-shopping their hybrids (Honda’s Insight is several thousand dollars cheaper than Prius), is it any suprise that we’ve heard rumblings of a Yaris-based hybrid? Meanwhile, German cars top Japan’s import brand sales. VW, BMW and Mercedes took the top three spots but sold fewer cars combined than the Insight.

The magic and deadly mystery of the Porsche 911 is simply this: take a wooden baseball bat, preferably one of those thirty-five-ounce Louisville Sluggers like McGwire might have swung, hold your palm out, place the thin end of the bat there, and balance it vertically by moving your hand back and forth. See how you have to move your hand quite a bit, at unpredictable and rapid intervals, to keep the heavy end from falling? The heavy end of the bat is the 911’s engine. The thin end, where you are working, is the steering. Got it? Now run.

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Some vehicles are doomed from the start. Take the Acura RDX: a not-inexpensive CUV with aesthetically challenging looks nestling amongst Honda’s “Huh?” brand. The RDX seems carefully designed to appeal to the few, the proud, the pistonheads. You know: enthusiasts who absolutely must have a willing engine, a chassis that’s a suitable dance partner and the elevated driving position of SUV—all at a price that’s significantly higher than more sensible (if dull) alternatives made by brands whose street cred didn’t die with the Integra. You see how that doesn’t work?

We now have two hybrids on our lot. It won’t last and, trust me, I know that. But I’ve always tried to buy low and sell high when it comes to cars, and non-Prius hybrids are actually reasonable these days. The car in question was a 2001 Honda Insight that was offered by a domestic dealership that had little experience with the product. The check engine light was on (recall related), the A/C was blaring ($35 of tint solved it), and the retail price was a bit prodigious ($6988 with 145k miles). They had a sealed bid sale and I got it for $4001.

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There are x+1 reasons GM is where it is today, with x being a very large number. Those reasons have been hacked and stacked here and elsewhere: a chief executive so hesitant it’s a wonder he didn’t daily swaddle himself in Cottonelle; a Board of Directors so frightened of change that they never swapped out the pine paneling and shag carpet in the board room; and a union stuck so far in the past that Bakelite seems to them unspeakably futuristic. To paraphrase JFK, while success may have a thousand fathers, GM’s defeat also has a thousand fathers—and a network of 6,200 dealers.

But to only blame the current crisis on management is to miss the broader picture: for more than a generation, with few exceptions, GM just hasn’t made cars that inspire people. While factors like fuel economy and build quality no doubt contributed to the slide, it’s been 30 years since GM had a stable of pulse-quickening, shorts-constricting cars. Consequently, GM failed to convert decades worth of excitable, reachable teens and young adults into the sort of loyalists and enthusiasts that sustained the company this long in the first place.

The more Geritol-ed among us remember a time when things were not thus. In the Harley-olithic Era, the good Lord saw fit to provide not just the ’53 Corvette (dayenu!), but also the Skylark, the Rocket 88, the ’57 Chevy, the ’59 Caddy and the Eldorado (dayenu times five!). Our bounty was, um, bountiful for the next ten or fifteen years, too, with the muscle car boom that gave us the GTO and Camaro. If you were lucky enough to come up then, GM was synonymous with sleek and sexy and bold and daring.

And then came the late ’70s, when GM brought us to the edge of the Great Mediocre Desert and, feeling the warmth of the sand, walked right in.

I was born in those lost years, and I’ve never known a time when GM wasn’t wandering the desert. My generation never got its GTO, its ’59 Caddy. We got Impalas, yes, but they were rusty and rickety, not cool and threatening. My friend’s creepy, chain-smoking dad drove the kind of Bonneville driven by creepy, chain-smoking dads. Our Olds were for the elderly.

Those cars thrummed exactly no one’s chords. Worse yet, they were as reliable as someone on Intervention.

In 1950, the Great and Powerful Earl said, “It is a matter of record that poor styling or improperly timed styling has proved financially disastrous to some automobile manufacturers.”

Now, I’m not the brightest rocket surgeon in the picnic shed, but it seems that was a lesson never learned. And during this Craptastic Period in came the Japanese. Honda and Toyota didn’t compete on design; they fought it out with quality. Perhaps their cars were less in—or aspirational—but at least you’d get out of the dealer’s driveway before your feet went through the floorboards. GM never fought that battle, and so when they all but gave up on design, too, the war was lost.

The proof is in the pudding, and the pudding is high school parking lots. Sure, you may still see some guys taking a Huggies to their babies, but you’ll definitely see row after row of Corollas, Elantras, and Whogivesashitimas. GM’s lost a generation of passionate brand loyalists—the sort of loyalists who popped their first boner over a ’58 Impala, not nakednymphs.net. To this generation, a car’s a car. A tranny with limited differential is just a guy in a dress who hasn’t cut off his nuts yet. The appliance-ification is basically complete.

Today’s Generals are certainly better than those of a few moons ago as far as reliability goes, but, man, Garrison Keillor is more exciting than the average Chevy. Were it not for the memory of those older, cooler cars—the fast and aggressive, the sleek and the styled, the innovative and inspirational—GM would not be around today.

That’s well worth noting, and quickly. GM makes a point of saying that their cars are now as reliable as anyone’s. But “as good” and “good enough” are not the same thing, and customers have 30 years of pent up distrust.  If GM is to get customers back into its (culled) showrooms, it needs to banish bland, or there won’t be another 30 years. A Malibu can’t be an Impala can’t be an Aveo can’t be a Cobalt. And this commitment can’t be just a Skystice here and a CTS there; if it’s true that the General’s motors earn them a tie with the imports, inspiring design running through their entire line should be what puts GM over the top.

Pretty will get customers in the door. Distinctive will earn GM another look. Erections will make people remember. If GM is to survive and (gulp) thrive, they have to set their designers free, and give them the freedom to live into Harley Earl’s legacy. They have to en-boner-fy or die.

Detroit apologists—who sincerely believe that GM was headed for turnaround town when gas prices ascended and the worldwide economic tsunami hit—will take pleasure in the fact that Toyota reckons it’ll spill $8.6 billion worth of red ink on the corporate carpet. No doubt, the Japanese automaker is “struggling” to cope with the loss of one million units from their worldwide balance sheet. During the January to March Japanese fourth quarter, the formerly unassailable automaker got assailed but good, losing $6.9 billion. As we’ve reported previously, the US and Japanese markets are ToMoCo’s big hole, switching from huge profits to equally enormous losses without much of anything in between. As Automotive News [sub] reports, the head of the ailing automaker had  a completely different response to the news of his employer’s sinking fortunes than, say, anyone who works for GM. [GM cheat sheet: the secret word is “accountability”.] “Of course the external environment doesn’t help,” Toyota president Katsuaki Watanabe told reporters. “But we were lacking in the scope and speed of dealing with various problems and issues, and for that I am sorry.” So . . . now what?

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Nante hazukashi! (How embarrassing!) Japanese car manufacturers show very bad manners and use red ink in their books.

Fuji Heavy, makers of Subaru, posted its first net loss in 15 years in the fiscal year ended March, the Nikkei [sub] says. Resposible? The usual suspects: Sluggish consumption, tighter conditions, a drop in vehicle sales in all major markets, and the yen’s rise.

Fuji Heavy posted a net loss of ¥69.93 billion in the fiscal year ended March 31, sharply down from a net profit of ¥18.48 billion a year earlier. Says the Nikkei: “For this fiscal year, Fuji Heavy, in which Toyota Motor Corp. owns a 16 percent stake, projects a net loss of ¥55 billion, operating loss of ¥35 billion and sales of ¥1.320 trillion, with auto demand likely to remain stagnant and the yen strong.”

Reuters reports that gunmen shot and killed a union leader at Toyota Motor Corp.’s Venezuelan unit on Tuesday, a few weeks after the Japanese automaker said it might leave the country because of chronic labor problems. “Labor disputes and strikes have become frequent in Venezuela. In January, two workers were shot to death as police broke up a protest at a vehicle assembly plant for Japan’s Mitsubishi Motors Corp. and South Korea’s Hyundai Motor Co.”