Shantanu

When did this board get so sensitive? It's hard to comment on an issue like this without mentioning politics, because it is nothing but politics

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Once you get from Cincinnati to Cleveland by train, WTF are you going to do then? You need a car to get around. In Europe, they take trains from city to city, and once they get there people walk or use public transportation. Here you deal with extremes of weather like 6 inches of snow that I'm seeing outside my window right now, and more importantly, incredibly vast distances. I don't think you guys realize how compactly built things are in the rest of the world.

The Daimler Chrysler deal made no sense whatsoever. Mercedes already had a successful presence in America, with its own dealerships. The major advantage to these kinds of deals is cost sharing. A platform might cost $4 billion. An engine might cost $2 billion. These development costs alone can make up thousands of dollars of the cost of a car. If you combine two car companies into one big company, you can cut many of these costs in half, which means more money. Unfortunately, Daimler never pursued this seriously as they didn't want overlapping technologies to damage their Mercedes brand. With Fiat, things will be different, assuming Chrysler is able to pull through the next 2 years, and some new products can be implemented.

I've always known that GM would survive, and that's not just because I'm a GM fan. I've also known that the core Jeep brand (Liberty, Wrangler, Grand Cherokee) would survive. But Chrysler as a whole I wasn't sure about. Wall St. was saying that it was done for. The government wanted to force a merger with GM. Compared to a) liquidation or b) merger with GM, this will preserve far more of the Chrysler identity and more importantly, jobs in the Detroit area. Fiat also has minimal global overlap with Chrysler, no dealerships in the U.S., and strength with small FWD cars. Which are all good things, because Chrysler still has good RWD, truck, SUV, and minivan offerings.

What you have to realize is that in the short term, unions can enhance their workers wages, but in the long term they hurt wages. We see this because places like Ohio, Michigan, and upstate New York had wages that were 10-20% higher than the national average about 30-40 years ago, but since then have fallen behind right to work states like Texas and Georgia, which used to be considered "backward". Even now, many people in the Midwest are convinced that if they passed a right to work law, everyone's wages would be automatically reduced to $5 an hour. What happens is that in the long term the companies shift employment away from heavily unionized places to places where unions aren't as strong. It's got as much to do with the wages the union demands, as it does with the other hassles like the threats, strikes, inability to crackdown on bad workers that come with a union. So in the long term, the union actually hurts the average income of a place, because companies shift away.

The remorse you would have felt if had bought the car, and not been 100% into the purchase, would be much worse than what you're feeling right now.

GM's cutting off their arms and legs. This is crazy.

I didn't like Dan Neil when he ripped on GM cars, and I don't like Dan Neil when he's raving about a GM car. I'm still disgusted by the article he wrote where talks about having his own kids aborted for convenience.

My guess is the Pontiac G6 sedan will end up being the fleet leader.

There's been some question in the past few years about the MT:COTY being sold or at least the manufacturer's marketing plans incorporating the award playing a large role in selection. I'll say this: The Cadillac CTS certainly didn't need this award. It's replacing a popular car, one that helped redeem Cadillac from the Catera. It's gotten excellent reviews already, and has been selling well. There's only so many CTS cars GM can build at their plant.

The Saturn Vue predated the Cadillac CTS. In other words, the Theta platform preceded the Sigma platform. So GM is going back to an older technology for the SRX replacement? Not to mention it's an economy, FWD platform. The SRX was the most critically acclaimed of Cadillac's Art & Science vehicles, even if it was never a huge sales success. I'm baffled why they didn't update the interior, exterior styling, and drivetrain choices for the future, because otherwise it's still an incredible competitor.

I've got your 55mpg right here: Yay! America! Now 100% more 3rd world!!!

Have even one of these idiots in Washington ever taken a Chemistry, Physics, or Engineering course? Where do they come up with these figures? To get 55 mpg, we would all have to drive Japanese minicars that seat 2 people and have a 400 mL engine. That's right. In the future, car engines in America will be measured in mililiters. Maybe it's time to move to a new country. Or split off and start a new country.

Also imagine where GM would be today, if they had some foresight and seriously developed foreign export markets for American made cars. They'd be making a killing right now, with the cheapest dollar in history.