regfootball

craigslist is more of a pain when you get shot meeting the stranger to make the transaction.

if GM can make the numbers work, it doesn't hurt to have 20k of them in the US a year, just to keep an entry in the segment. it makes no sense to build it here though. as someone said, there will be an ongoing 'city car' niche that GM needs to remain represented in. to bad the spark is childish and ugly.

exactly. same thing with HCCi. which they said is coming at some point too. personally if GM develops a new DOHC v8 primarily for passenger cars, i think they will gradually work it into some of their 1/2 ton trucks too. even toyotas cam shredder gets lots of notoriety for its acceleration in truck tests. all toyota has to do is figure out how to make it stay together. and people like to look at acceleration numbers. like it or not, lots of folks need to acknowledge that toyotas v6 and v8 get really good acceleration times, and they basically use the same engine all over.

i have a feeling this makes a lot of folks perk up

it's a given that the ford cop car will be the taurus, and that many of them will be SHO spec. the cops will love it, especially in the winter states.

oddly enough, that problem would be cured by a 3 door or 5 door buick astra hatchback. cruze while i like it, has all the AURA of a Kia Forte to me. No surprise. this must be how Koreans are doing cars these days. the styling of the cruze does not have 'it' that will allow it to dominate the sales charts. At least the Regal will be there to help me mourn no astra hatch in the US. PCS still hasn't set up that nice steak dinner for me with Susan and MISTER Lutz yet. by the way, turbo, also please. like loi said.

NIGHT ROD ROCKS. one bike class i have always liked is the muscle bike power cruisers. the V Max, Kawasaki Eliminator (this bike is a great mix of cruiser and bruiser) type bikes. probably the honda magna was the precursor to these. and then there is bikes like the old honda sabre. i will say this, any of the V4 hondas used, the interceptor, magna, sabre, all good bikes. I ALMOST bought a used interceptor for cheap once, wish i had. My nephew has a 'naked Ninja' 1200. its a defaired version of the ninja 1200 or something. great bike. I have a buddy who's owned Aprilia and he had great use out of it, i think he has a Ducati now. FWIW, women FLOCK to Ducatis like women flock to money like men flock to internet porn. i always also thought like a first gen FJ1200 Yamaha would be a great bike. or even like their Fazer or Radian (this dates me obviously). I dug all the Viragos too. this sucks, all this talk about bikes. I haven't ridden in 20 years. I get bike lust just talking about bikes. Good think i kept my endorsement. Advice, TAKE RIDER SAFETY COURSES!

a fate deserved

just so those nice semi shiny metal accents on the door pull and shifter trim aren't changed to grey painted matte plastic when it starts getting made in oshawa.....

even though its just a honda, i (gulp) like (cough) the TSX's interior. it is 'techie' and 'cold' though. the tsx interior is what the honda interiors USED to be. i typically hate Japanese cars but the TSX is one car I could be happy with. the problem with the TSX is i think its kind of spendy now, and the four cylinder stick isn't exactly lightning fast. even with its exterior ugliness, if someone put a gun to my head, i would drive one. if you caught me on the right day, I might even tell you i would take the TSX before I took the VW CC. this is the beauty of the new Regal. You can compare it to these cars and it seems to meld a little of both. It has some obvious German influence as its an Opel, and yet there is a dynamic in the interior sort of like the TSX that makes it a little more lively than the CC's very nice but quite clinical interior. This is a nice problem to have. Here's the deal......I want to see how the new 9-5 turns out as well. Will there be any Saab dealers left to buy one? LOL

make you a deal. let's both get one and then meet up and compare. !

GM has to build corvettes in that volume to keep them alive. now, the part that gets interesting is what percent are base powertrains. if 2/3 of them are, then lets say at least 2/3 of them or maybe 25,000 of them are base models. unless they stick with the current motor, they will not develop an entirely new motor for it unless they plan to use it for like 8 years......8 x 25,000 = 200,000 and then in that case MAYBE they can do it. that still leaves you with 10k sales a year that are uplevel and then its a question are they just 'tuned' and 'forcefed' versions of the base motor? again, unless you think you can get 20k more cash vs the base model to pay for this.....I am already seeing ads for Z06 vettes new for 60k or 20k off sticker. Lutz hinting at a twin turbo 3.6 REALLY makes me wonder, if the TT isn't being considered for a SLEW of GM's uplevel niche products. Ford is applying the 3.5 ecoboost over several models. probably at least 8 models after all is said and done. if they sell 5k of each of those 8 models a year, that's 40k and do it for 5 years, that is 200k which pays for the ecoboost over the stock 3.5 and is much cheaper than developing an all new engine. where GM may go with a similar appraoch is to take their 3.6 and TT it and put it in the CTS, ATS, SRX, Camaro, (Corvette) some buick, a host of models. that might delay the need to develop a new v8. but i think at some point GM does do a new v8 for passenger use and then it becomes which vehicles do they put it in. I think it goes in the new flagship cadillac, and the corvette. if you think about it, just between those two cars they can make a business case for 40,000 engines a year base. if this is a base corvette and caddy flagship motor, it won't have to be ultra exotic. as an example, it probably just has to be a notch or two above the hyundai genesis in power. so perhaps a 380hp 8 cylinder in a lighter corvette and as a second level flagship caddy, i think they could make it work. and maybe it even does see duty in light passenger trucks. maybe it even makes it in the commodore / caprice in like 2014 also. Then, by adding a twin turbo setup, maybe the thing can be tuned to 520 hp or something without much fuss. maybe the next vette has an 'entry level' 340-350ho v6 (like a harley 883 is entry level) to compete with the boxster, and then the bulk of the cars get a typical v8, and the top end is the force fed v8. Does Lotus get a hand in GM's engine design these days still?

that interior pic is exactly how i would want it. mmmmmm 258 lb ft and 6 speed manual = i could be very happy with that car. take that, passat and CC. finally, something worth saving the GM balance for.

tdc had performance. gm should have invested more in seeing the progress of that through. anyone think the next vette gets AWD option? 500hp+featherweight = can't keep it on the track

the fogeys are dying off soon. their 401ks tanked and they will leaving the workforce and buying avalons anyways

think of Lotus Evora light.....with a standard toyota v6 it goes pretty well. imagine that with twin turbo. i see the lotus as sort of poster child of where sports cars are headed. a car midway between a kappa and current corvette.......actually if you are down to 2900 or 2800 pounds, why not just make a balls out inline engine, a four, if packaging is a primary driver? turbo the snot out of a 2.5 four and get the car down to 2500 pounds and lets see what happens. with an inline four, your package is much smaller than that 'small' v8.

funny you use the word 'break' when mentioning the twin dual cam...... my 89 SHO motor was far better than the twin dual cam. if i still had that car today, the engine would still be running flawlessly, burning no oil, no lost performance. when i think of 'break' with that engine, i think of breaking traction in lots of wheelspin. even bach then gm didn't make the superior v6.

GM halfassed the twin dual cam, everyone knows that. they took a pushrod block design and tried to convert to OHC. it was a cheap and ineffective approach thats only purpose to GM was to be able to have some manufacturing commonality. hyperv6, i am not exactly sure why you are assuming that GM has to develop an engine that will be shared in trucks and cars. that question should be asked. and even then, it doesn't necessarily automatically validate a pushrod approach either. trucks do not have the size restrictions or weight restrictions. in fact, the case could be argued that an iron block motor makes more sense in a pickup. but you certainly wouldn't want an iron block engine in a passenger car. it defeats the purpose of making it lighter for performance. the engine mission for a truck and corvette are vastly different. so its entirely appropriate to ask how the passenger car v8 at GM for the next 15 years will be different than the truck engine and how best to accommodate that. it also has to accommodate tech like HCCi etc. that GM is developing and wants to roll out this tech on all their engines on a modular basis. if engineering uses resources to design a new technology or system for all its powertrains globally, they will want to apply that tech to as many cars and engines with little adaptation as possible. example, notice the streamlined approach with ecoboost. the point about GLOBAL is the thing. how can GM justify any type of 'North America only' approach for any of its powertrain programs anymore since the B-day? remember the premise of the original northstar? 2 in line fours were supposed to make a v8, of course whether they followed through on that is not sure. all the design of the bore centers, bore stroke, heads, intake etc. can presumably be amortized commonly, along with new tech like DI, VVT, Hcci, all that. Now that GM is really forcing the global issue it becomes a question if the markets outside the US recognize the benefits of or even want to deal with large pushrod motors. Its entirely possible that GM will be forced to leave the CTSv and Corvette as the last bastion of pushrods and be forced to have bandaid engineering for the next ten years because they will want to spend their R&D budget on other global engine applications. or the reverse may be true, they may see the Vette is a way to get money to fund an all new line of v8's at which point you are back to, well then we need to use this in other products and those products do not want to be pushrod motors outside of north america either. as an example. lets say opel decides to offer a large RWD based sedan variant as a flagship model and to help co develop a new cadillac flagship. the germans won't accept a pushrod motor into their market and let it be successful.

the corvette sells to people with money. the appeal of the corvette to that bunch is the attributes of a race / performance car at a price they can justify as a toy.....spare car. these are the type of people that probably would love to have a ferrari. but like the rest of us ! they need to live frugal and frugal for them is 'chevy'. i don't think ferrari had any issues packaging a 460+ hp 4.3l v8 in its new California. the corvette has to emulate those cars in a way to appeal to the folks with money who actually buy the cars. i.e. the folks who spend their time crafting ponzi schemes. for the record, the 3800 had run its course by about 2000......if not even before. I think if GM saw it fruitful to invest a bunch in an all new pr engine they would have. the 3.9 and 3.5 evolutions were not clean sheet, they were stopgap revisions to keep factories and unions running with little cost. the other thing to keep in mind is GM is more and more global and has to sell engines with displacements that work in other countries where they tax displacement and discourage it. an engine developed by GM has to have the ability to be marketable on many continents. again, the LS may be wonderfully efficient at 75 mph in 6th, but which engine gets the better epa ratings in the test cycle. no one seems to want to acknowledge that this is driving a lot of GM's engine planning. its why your malibus are mostly 2.4 4's instead of the 3.5v6. interesting anecdote. my aztek is quiet inside. or at least it gives the IMPRESSION of having a smooth motor. its just drowned out with a lot of dampening and sound deadeners, and its programmed to shift before you reach the raspy zone. I drove i think it was an Alero one time with the same 3.4 and it was among the most miserable car tests I ever had. we can hold up the ZR1 as an amazing specimen of a motor....but remember it has what 6.2 litres of displacement and is force fed. isn't the Z06, like 7 litres? the ZR1 is 100 grand and uses all sorts of titanium and such in the engine selectively to actually be able to get it to make that hp. your rotating mass is getting up there compared to the amount of air they can get in and out of there with only the 2 big stiff valves. the base corvette can't afford all that exotic stuff like titanium valves etc. so if GM gets to the point where mpg and emissions regs mean they have to consider a new base engine, this means they will either have to downsize the displacement of the pushrod v8 which will result in lower hp, or they stuff in a DOHC v6 they can tune to the same level (i.e. 3.6 on steroids) or perhaps look at contracting out a new v8 OHC design. GM maxxed out the trickery they could to get the ZR1 engine to the level they could. it required a new supercharger design (the project would have been a failure without that eaton supercharger) and all the exotic material for the valves etc. at some point, developing a new engine they can spread out across many products (i.e. cadillac) begins to look like a more long reaching investment. ZR1 and CTSv command 20-25k premiums over their lesser models. if you think GM's cost of that extra 20-25k that went into the engine was at least 15k or more per unit, and globally they move say, at least 10k of those engines each year....that's a 150 million a year that could go into developing that v8 that could potentially see broader application in a clean sheet v8. so enjoy that zr1 and ctsv motor while its there because i don't think you will see money going into hopping up the pushrod 8 anymore. nissan 370 makes 350hp. so something like a 4.8 litre base vette motor with similar v8 architecture could make at least 450-460 hp. conversely the 370z weighs close to the same as the corvette. i am not familiar with the 0-60 of the 370z but i think the mpg on the epa cycle is possibly 2 better or something like that. throw a twin turbo on it and then what does it do. if GM wants to continue to sell the corvette in this regulatory greenweenie environment you can understand why they might have to look at options in this vein, if they decide they just can't get enough power out of the pushrod and downsizing it or getting the mileage up and leaving the power levels where they are.

hate Michigan, Ohio St., Gophers, Boston Red Sox, Yankees Raiders, Dallas Cowboys, Washington Redskins, Green Bay Packers, Chicago Bears, San Antonio Spurs, New York Knicks, New York Giants, Florida St. football, now Alabama football. Miami U football, Nebraska (ok I don't HATE nebraska)......wish I had more time........

i was upset there was never a turbo astra here in NA. seems like i dont need to get upset about a turbo 6 speed imported from europe gm car being available to me anymore. hopefully it will have a stage kit as well, like the cobalt and hhr

i was looking at some Cien photos earlier today. THAT is the mid engine car GM desperately needs to build. which btw, a cien would need a dohc v8 to be credible.

clubman and other mini variations of the original are results of marketing people grabbing at new straws. can you imagine a 4 seat miata?

this car just moved WAAYYYYYYY up on the charts. 4 cyl turbo 6 man? puhlease???????