regfootball

ford has a future and a plan. ford will not fail. gm might.

Saab is so toast unless it gets autonomy from the swedish whatever. saab cannot exist alone without techlogical allegiance to some sort of large borg. flipside. you cannot give the NA brands autonomy. it would be making bad situation worse. GM someday will be just chevy and cadillac and a niche middle brand. I want to see opel fill that role. i like buick, i like pontiac, but i think the public has moved on and the GME has so much to offer GM as a whole.

Look at how fast Nissan high tailed it out of there. I want someone to clarify exactly how many auto related jobs are in CA....what i want to know is HOW MANY AUTO ASSEMBLY PLANTS are in california. I don't need to know if some doofus has his feet up in his office in the Lexus or Mazda building, or if some subservient American is taking whippings in the dark room from the guys sent over from Kia in Korea when they didn't meet sales targets. I know GM has the NUMMI plant where they build the chick wagons (Vibe/Matrix). CA is 'the largest auto market'. What I want to know is, what percentage of the cars they consume are MADE IN CALFORNIA. Seems rather stupid from a business perspective to consume all those cars and not build any of them there. That is an imbalance that the Pelosis of the world should feel embarassed and negligent about.

the accord i drove recently had a crap interior and honestly was not that solid of a car. plus, its ugly. if you consider that top of class, be my guest. The accord is not that great of a car. A couple seasons of winter potholes and its flimsy chassis will be mush, if you haven't vomited from the style excessively by then. g8 actually can perform on extremely close to on par with the BMW's. the only reason the v6 is currently unrefined is its application which is much smoothers in other GM vehicles, needs some NVH tuning and a better transmission in the v6 version. I have no doubt that a 6 speed DI v6 with some additional NVH tuning for 2010 will address this stuff. Praise has already been heaped on the v6 in the Zeta Camaro predrives. Sonata's interior prior to this year was a joke. Now its simply mid pack. the styling is geriatric and themed off a nineties version ford escort sedan. You love to heap praise on Hyundai, a brand that has made its living off of fleeting most of their product for the last couple years, because the homeland mafia doesn't believe in moderating production...........aided by a warranty that is all tagline and not much real benefit to most customers. You talk about all these great cars that are supposedly prestigious and then you use Hyundai as an example. Hyundai is still faux. The Genesis is the only model they have put out that has any chance of redefining the brand to anything other than what it is. Cheap knockoffs. And the Genesis is merely 'Lexus' 20 years later.

that makes sense then. the 2.4/6 malibu came in at 8.6 0-60 at CD.

door handles are ungodly large and tacky interior is dull and plain and lifeless exterior is ok. upcoming astra is much nicer. exteriors aren't much different but the new astra interior is pretty nice. i also tend to agree this fiat is a bit of a ford clone. the next focus is what i wanna see. that should be the bomb. i'd be looking at the similar peuguot before i'd get on board with the dull interior in this thing. new megane is pretty stylish too.

yup. there are things about 'normal' kids that don't even seem to be a part of my daughter's pysche. She doesn't like to be mean to others, she doesn't get materialistic, she doesn't obsess about material possessions and she doesn't ever seek out chances to hurt other kids. She might live her life on a simpler naive scale, but she isn't the brat that a lot of kids are today. She's sometimes to me like she's already grown up in a lot of ways. And once you learn what makes her tick, all the little routines and repetitions she relies on to get through the day, and you learn how to talk to her, it fun even if its different than how others talk to their kids.

yep. i've read about that too. thats why minerals are added to bottled water.

wife cooked only 6 slices of bacon the other night. i let the pan sit out overnight. OMG all the fat in the pan from only 6 slices. Dear God. EWE. But bacon is so worth it, IMHO.

i wonder if the elephant appreciates his penis baked. or would rotisserie keep it juicier?

hyundai sells because it is cheap. veracruz feels cheap inside. sonata is third tier. the warranty is a come on. its a tag line and people don't read the actual fine print. the reason the genesis works so far is because it sells as a budget lexus. the g8 makes no such pretense. it compares it performance to a BMW, but make no pretense of being a poser car like the genesis is. the G8's only flaws are no available RWD, unrefine v6 powertrain (which is fixed in 2010) and it probably should have an OHC v8 option. the g8's interior should be a little nicer, but its not trying to be a lexus replacement.

GM should be readying the plan for a fully funded remake of a new Malibu for 2012 model year. The new design and cheap interior will become big flaws in the market in not too long. New Impala should be 2010-11. Cruze will help but its too late too. Even the trucks need an interior complete redo.

fleet sales are fine. what GM effed on was fleeting out cars that were 5,6,7 years into production without updates. i.e. GM totally sucks at keeping products fresh. people thought fleeting was what killed resale. UM NO. its old product that reduces showroom demand that kills resale. If I were running GM I would be pounding pavement to make big fleet sales right now to keep unit volumes up and possibly be increasing share. Few carmakers will be profitable in the next year, so its better to gain share with losing some dough than it is to not sell cars. The current demand for used cars will drive the used car prices up eventually, it already has, and resales are holding pretty well or going up on many cars out there. So fleeting and taking market from Toyo and Hyundai and Kia with some Cobalts and G6's and LaCrosses I hardly find a problem.

if half the households in America werent afraid of losing their jobs, people would buy.

Gm's incentives weren't very good last month on most of its models. If they want to clear inventory in a bad economy, they'll have to decide if cutting prices or sacrificing volume is the answer. Note: VW and Subaru, both offer aggressive leasing and look at their sales. Not that affected. Take a hint GM. When you pulled leasing off the table, that's why a lot of your business went away.

i hope the fiat 500 comes here, if for no other reason than to kill mini sales.

yeah, but the water......

'grain of salt' 'salt is bad for you too'...LOL

that car has to rank up there with the funniest things on wheels I've seen.

I've never hunted for elephant penis before. Why do they cut them, I would think they would want to leave as much there to offset the front wheel drive like weight imbalance of the snout in the front.

HYPERBOLE THY NAME IS SHADOWDOG!!!!! you don't have to eat THE WHOLE THING!!!!!!!!!!!

they actually build any cars (besides the vibe) in california? For all that they consume, you'd think they ought to figure out how to build a few of them there. same can be said about their electricity, gasoline, water supply.......

yum, that looks great. how was it tasting?

really is a great car. awesome. i love the old slider hvac controls and that stereo had to have been put in MILLIONS of GM products, with the equalizer. ah the good old days.

well its currently a fuzzy diagnosis. which emphasizes a couple things, one, that the word 'spectrum' is involved and the term autism encompasses many levels on the 'spectrum'. in the case of my daughter, she does not have the traits of what some say are heavily autistic. She is pretty mainstreamed and normal, most folks would just find lots of what she does sometimes as bizarre and she has communication and socialization issues. Recently the school district as part of her status in the special ed program did a new reevaluation and by their multiperson observation they do not feel she falls under a full autism diagnosis. My bet is if i took her back to the independent group for a new evaluation they would still say that she is. But with the services she gets right now, its enough to improve what she needs improving on the most and they won't dumb her education down and treat her like a mental patient or helpless individual. She's pretty much fully integrated and mainstreamed in every way, just gets some individual speech and social coaching. We are in this weird area where they had to evaluate her this year but then in like 15 months is the next change in the way school services are structured so I am waiting till then to see what happens and I will get her re-evaluated again by outsiders if i see fit to keep her education plan where i think it needs to be. This is where $h! like Jenny McCarthy saying her kid is 'cured' or all this parents who seem to seek to 'cure' their kids, bothers the snot out of me. Hello, can I make this easier for you. THIS IS WHAT YOUR KID IS MADE OF. THIS IS NOT 'CURABLE'. It is 'treatable'....that is, you do the things you need to do so they can learn and grow and function and survive and mingle in a world that seems abnormal to them as much as we think how they behave is abnormal to us. Its a neurological thing, these are kids who are just simply wired in a different way. Now, my daughter is a happy and crazy kid. Some autistic kids I do admit have the behavioral things of extra aggression and that and again, that is treatable and has to managed, it can't be 'cured'. My daughter has social issues like not really recognizing other people's moods or being respectful of what others are doing. So for example, a therapy would be suggested to help her learn how to recognize that whereas most of us just pick that up through growing up and culture. Mercury has been blamed as has other toxic chemicals for the incidence of this in our kids. This HFCS study is stirring the pot on the mercury thing and i am not sure why. Are we trying to start a lawsuit? In my mind, there is no way the autism mystery will never be understood in my lifetime. The Autism societies have officially stated that contaminated vaccines and all of that are not responsible, and that it is all neurological and perhaps genetic and causes are not yet found. Yet many parents are convinced they can see an exact moment when 'their child was taken away from them'. Its all crazy. I have even read things that says too much TV makes your kid autistic. If the feds knew what caused it, you better believe that they probably would not tell us the truth for fear of rampant lawsuits on so many levels. And yet how can they all say there is no warrant to investigating contimination as part of cause or being a factor? All i know is I have seen and heard enough stories alrady about the pain this causes so many parents (tenfold issues compared to me) and all you want is to say 'God why can't we figure this out and please if there is some way to cure this please do so so these parents can stop feeling all the guilt and pain and lack of patience and all this other anxiety. So yeah, reasons like this are why people are so sensitive on the mercury thing. They don't want anything taking away their kid from them. No one wants to feel like they have a 'damaged child'. That is the first thing you have to get past when you have a kid that you discover is 'not normal'. That's why articles like this are so powerful, they strike fear and emotion into so many parents. And then, they go eat all sorts of fish and don't think twice about the mercury. Go figure.