G. David Felt

Interesting read, I actually think this will hurt long term PSA more than it will hurt GM. I see this as positive for GM no matter what.

Jeep & Ram are the only two things I can see VW wanting from FCA.

Let Lexus continue in their Buick, Lincoln, Acura battle for mid luxury level auto's. Cadillac should stay focused on defining themselves as an upper level Luxury line. No need to go below the ATS / CT3 and XT4.

Take a Cadillac and support America over this Garbage back in the States!

Simple, the XTS does not meet the future long term plans of Cadillac and their product line. Many other products can cover the XTS sales plus the CT# product line will take over for this any way. ATS, CTS, XTS are all dead in the near term replaced by the much better planned CT# product line which will have a much more uniform marketing plan.

Awesome achievement, keep at it and while your out and about, take a new BOLT for a test drive and tell us what you think!

Awesome write up, thanks for sharing. Too bad a new car put out for test driving has such a black eye out of the box. BROKEN PANORAMIC SUNROOF. Right there it shows their history of building piss poor auto's and why they will fail. The first cars should be perfect coming back into a market where the majority of people who remember Alfa and have driven them, worked on them, etc. know what garbage they are. Wait and see, but I bet this car is eaten alive by Consumers Reports and everyone else in the auto world that did not take marketing money from Alfa. Hate to say it but I do not expect them to succeed. History is against them. Sergio should have never wasted the Billions taken from the American nameplates. IF he was Smart, he would have reinvested that money in them and made them better rather than trying to bring back a dead name plate.

If Cadillac was to kill off a big car, I would say the XTS would go as they bring in more CUVs. ATS & CTS will stay and become a CT#, CT6 is here to stay also. You right CAST cost way too much money! Thanks for the laugh as I really needed it this morning for HUMP Day!

Marination

I love the idea and I think Buick needs to embrace the off road wagon concept more than a street only version. Give it a lift, some burly shoulders and allow it to do the awesome job that the Eagle used to do in wagon form.

Congrats on getting married and thank you for confirming what I always thought about the Infinity cars.

G. David Felt - Staff Writer Alternative Energy - www.cheersandgears.com Eggshells and Tomato skins, Could this be your next Tire? The Ohio State University took up a big challenge, how to replace a core component in tire manufacturing, Carbon Black! This important component of tire manufacturing was in surplus up till 10 years ago when the Chinese market for auto's took off. A reason tire prices have increased is due to a dwindling supply of carbon black. The Ohio State University took on this challenge to find a replacement that would accomplish 3 things: sustainability, reduced foreign oil and reduction of waste from landfills. Their website states that the food industry uses 100 Billions eggs a year and over 13 million tons of tomatoes. This would give them a new market to sell the waste into rather than a landfill. Tire companies would buy their eggshells and tomato skins from a known source. Quoting the web site: “Fillers generally make rubber stronger, but they also make it less flexible,” Barrera said. “We found that replacing different portions of carbon black with ground eggshells and tomato peels caused synergistic effects—for instance, enabling strong rubber to retain flexibility.” Katrina Cornish (left) and Cindy Barrera (right) examin ground tomato skins and eggshells, as well as samples of rubber. Photos by Kenneth Chamberlain courtesy of The Ohio State University. Original Story Here

G. David Felt - Staff Writer Alternative Energy - www.cheersandgears.com Taxi EV standard for London! Autoblog has pictures of the cameo covered TX5, the next version of taxi to get you around London. London has choosen to move their taxi fleet to the EV world. Story Here True to the concept pictured above, the production versions have kept the Suicide doors and seem to be on track for production by the end of this year. According to the story, they pulled heavily from parent company Geely in using the extended Volvo XC90 underpinnings.

And they are not done yet. With the MIT study showing increase in health issues and death world wide, I expect countries to go after VW in court. I expect additional payouts and they just might need to tie up with FCA to find a way to spread the cost around.

G. David Felt - Staff Writer Alternative Energy - www.cheersandgears.com Study Suggests VW Emissions will lead to 1200 premature deaths in Europe alone! This study covers the effects around the Globe that VW diesel emissions scandal will cause. The US is equally affected but on a lower number of 60 expected deaths. This is based on the number of autos old sold, 482,000 TDI in the US versusus 2.6 millions. Plenty of interesting information but end result is an increase in the emissions from VW TDi directly affects health and the length of life world wide. Pretty amazing read at MIT News. Study Here

The following states have no sales tax: Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire, Oregon The following states have sales tax but you do not pay when you buy an EV. Washington, California, New York, Florida, Arizona, Oklahoma, New Jersey, Colorado, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia Amazing how many states allow you to buy an EV and not pay sales tax plus have plenty of other incentives. Full list of incentives here: http://www.ncsl.org/research/energy/state-electric-vehicle-incentives-state-chart.aspx

I question how relaxed they would be, I actually expect them to stay the same but have the time to meet the higher numbers pushed out. NY is doing free 220V home charger, no sales tax and $2K rebate for buying an EV. The push is on as I expect more states to push to get people out of ICE and into EV.

Nice write up, since I never watch tv, I do not get the Seinfeld quote. Truck is butt ugly Side and back are OK, but the front end of this is just It seems like a good truck for the weekend flowerbed green thumb person. I would expect it to sell just slightly better than the first generation.

This is good news, cut profit losing departments, scale down and consolidate the cars. Improve the CUV and SUV / Trucks are fine for GM. Build and grow a Wrangler competitor and bring back a few hot SUV/CUV's like the Trailblazer SS, Syclone and Typhoon.

History is how you view all companies and all companies have had dark episodes in their history. For Fiat / Alfa, they have always been dark on reliability no matter the process in their plants, or the technology they try to use. The bigger issue is their unionized work force and the lack of desire to build quality products and put in an honest hard days work. The US auto Unions were getting just as bad till bankruptcy hit and it forced them to change which the Union members did by kicking out the old way of thinking leadership and make many other changes including taking actual ownership in GM as one example and they had to bring in better educated people to manage the money and lead the union and one of the changes was to work with GM rather than against it. In Italy, the Unions are known to fight the companies and the history points to the bad attitude of the workers towards Fiat and Alfa. They demand jobs, benefits and plenty of time off and yet do not change even on new models to put in an honest days work with a focus on quality. The reviews of the Guiliana have already proven to be very buggy auto's and at this time the history leads one to expect this new product line to not be any better than other existing products. Sadly there is nothing one can do to change history, you can only change the way you do the job and build up a reputation for quality over Time, something the American auto companies for the most part are doing versus Fiat / Alfa that has not done that. Business as usual is what will lead to the Death of Fiat / Alfa in a global market. Yes they will sell to the uninformed, but to those that know their history, they will be shunned.

That is very cool and amazing how technology has changed the size of things.

Interesting history lesson here to go along with wondering if the change over to EV's could just repeat this.

Bringing the full family of trucks, CUVs, SUVs and cars to Aussie as rebadge Holdens should help GM move up on this list and sell more I think.