Shantanu

Volkswagen lost $1.6 billion in the U.S. last year, and that's a lot on a per car basis. There's also talk of them pulling out of the U.S. or drastically scaling back their sales. There's a glut of too many cars being sold in America. Too many brands, especially far too many import brands. There's talk of Fiat, Alfa Romeo, and Renault wanting to come to America. And upstart Chinese and Indian brands will probably be entering sometime next decade. Something has to give!

You know, it's funny. If anyone says "I hope Toyota goes bankrupt", they'll be accused of being racist, including by some people here on thse forums. But say, "I hope GM goes out of business', and you'll be celebrated for your "progressive mindset".

I'm not talking about 20 years ago, I'm talking about now. You obviously know nothing of the auto industry. Ford is basically propped up by two products: F-150 and Explorer. And Chrysler gets its sales from vans/trucks/SUVs, though the 300 seems to make more hype than actual sales.

BUY 'MERCHAN!

Not true, you obviously don't know much about the auto industry. GM has always been the most car reliant of the Detroit automakers, cranking out about 50% cars 50% trucks until very recently, when Chrysler and Ford have been making 75% trucks for a number of years.

Well nobody said ethanol has to 100% replace gasoline to be worthwhile. Reducing gasoline consumption will have to be multi-pronged attack, i.e. more fuel efficient cars, conservation, and using alternatives like ethanol added in when possible. And even then the end result is not to not import any oil at all from the Middle East, just to reduce consumption of it a bit, which will help everyone by bringing down prices as demand decreases. And yes, if ethanol cuts gasoline usage by 7% that's billions of dollars. That's billions of dollars shaved off our trade deficit. And that's demand for gasoline being lowered by billions of dollars. That's that much less power OPEC has over the American economy. What makes you say that? Are you one of those assholes from California that hates "flyover country"? I live in the Midwest and I'd rather see jobs being created here than in Iraq.

What are you joking? America grows half the world's food. And we don't even use most of the land for farming. The vast majority of it gets exported, because as fat as Americans are, even Americans don't eat all that much. Food is the one thing that America still has a gigantic trade surplus in, perhaps the only thing other than jet airplanes. In fact the bigger problem is farmers always complaining that they don't have enough demand for their crops, and demanding the government pay them subsidies to not grow food! If corn can be used for ethanol + food, that increases the demand, which increases prices, which is good for farmers, and hopefully also good for American taxpayers if it can eliminate some of these subsidies. If you're so concerned about agricultural efficiency you should stop eating meat, because it takes hundreds of times as many acres to grow food for livestock as it does to just grow soy beans (in terms of the protein you get out of it in the end). A good chunk of the grains that are grown in the U.S. are actually fed to cattle and such, and not eaten by people.

Yeah but that thing also says the Prius gets 60mpg, which as we all know is an extreme crock of $h!.

The Vue Green Line is getting bad buzz in the usual envirowhacky circles (read: Hybrid forums). But I think that this may be the most significant hybrid since the second Toyota Prius. At this price range, no other product can compete with the Green Line. And according to some tests they've done, in real world performance it gets *almost* the same fuel economy as the Ford Escape Hybrid, a vehicle that costs much more. Basically GM has figured out a way to give you 80% of the benefits of hybrid technology at about 20% of the cost (as one lone dissenter on a Toyota Prius forum put it). That is significant.

QFT I read an article a while back that said that despite how big America's oil giants are, they have a difficult time competing for new gas fields with the gigantic state run oil companies of Russia, China, India, etc. So the U.S. government has to come in to secure access to oil overseas, because it can no longer be done by private sector companies alone. And then there's the fact of how many troops we always seem to have in the Middle East, "protecting American interests". Those are all real costs on the taxpayers.

Awesome, one less import brand in the U.S.

They're not very interesting, but it's the RWD platform that counts. Hopefully GM's North American divisions can do somethin interesting with the styling.

It depends upon how you define efficient. I would define efficiency as mechanical efficiency, i.e. how much work you get from an engine divided by the energy released. You're just looking at how potent the fuel is, because some fuels are inherently more potent than others.

Not going to happen for hundreds of years, if you extrapolate gasoline consumption increases and new deposits of oil being found through exploration.

Meh who cares about the NY Times. This is the same paper that a few days ago called for Toyota to take over GM, in the name of the safety of the American people.

I'm personally of the belief that the gasoline age has just begun and will likely last for several hundred years to come. I don't think ethanol, hybrid cars, hydrogen, or any of this other stuff will become big players in our lifetime because internal combustion is quite economically viable as it is.

The media seems hell bent on trying to "expose" the truth about ethanol. It's a pity they didn't engage in this kind of investigative journalism when it came to Toyota's hybrids, which didn't perform as advertised.

Do GM, and the whole country a favor, and please don't buy any NY Times. Also don't buy any papers that run drivel published by this moron Friedman. It seems to me that save America, we need to be putting uninformed bigots like him out of business, before their propaganda causes real damage.

If the demand was as huge as the media makes it out to be, Toyota would be shipping millions of Prius cars. There's no doubt there's been a slight shift in consumer preferences. Some of the really huge SUVs aren't selling that well. But the switch hasn't been to sub-compact cars, not by any means. Some of the more moderate sized and cross over SUVs are selling better now. That's all. Basically these jackasses like Tom Friedman are frustrated that the average American is not buying little sub-compact cars. But they can't rip the consumer for his preferences because that will piss off readers. So they attack GM for "forcing huge SUVs on the consumer", as if all GM makes is the Hummer H2 and there are no other automakers out there.

The basic fact is that at $3 a gallon, gasoline is not a high enough cost to deter that many Americans from buying the SUVs that they want. This has been a huge dissapointment for many in the media who have been enthusiastically predicting the death of the SUV when the next gasoline shock comes. So these frustrated journalists are ripping on GM instead for making these vehicles. And every villain story needs a hero, so they prop up Toyota whose Prius counts for an almost insignificant share of the company's overall sales.

You know I hate to say it but Thomas Friedman is Jewish, and like many Jewish Americans he sees foreign relations (including trade) through the prism of Israel. Money going to Middle Eastern oil producers creates tax revenues in those countries, which can be used to improve their armies. And the Arab armies have threatened Israel with annihilation before. But we need to seperate that with the notion that this money necessarily goes to terrorists, which I don't think is the case. You think the insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan is being fueled by oil money? The oil industry in Iraq is run by Americans now and Afghanistan has no oil. Thomas Friedman probably cares more about Israel than he does about America. He just doesn't want any money going to Arabs, and he's willing to sacrifice GM - in the misguided belief that they are driving the demand for "gas guzzlers".

I'll take two. I'll take one of the Mustang as well.

He's not calling for keeping it in the country, he's calling for Americans to buy Toyotas and a foreign company to make America's greatest industrial company its bitch. That and he throws in a lot of cliched, "NO BLOOD FOR OIL!!" type liberal ranting. I don't think Thomas Friedman will ever be confused for a Republican or any kind of conservative. Also keep in mind that we spend more money on imported cars and car parts than we spend on imported oil. So if we "want to keep it in the country" to me it would make more sense to encourage folks to buy more American cars, because we're spending about 2-3 times as much on Japanese and German cars as we do on Middle Eastern oil.

You know, Thomas Friedman is one of the more moderate writers at the NYT and what he writes usually is sensible and presents both sides of the story. But today he penned the most hysterical anti-GM editorial which has appeared in newspapers across the country. He says that GM is the most destructive company in America. He says that GM makes SUVs that consume lots of oil and send money to the Middle East. He said that GM's new plan to subsidize gasoline will send even more money to the Middle East and result in many Americans being killed. He has called for GM to be taken over by Toyota for the safety of the country. The whole thing was foaming-at-the-mouth hysterical. It's something you'd expect from a left-wing nutjob like Michael Moore. But I guess Friedman has showed his true colors.