regfootball

I must spend far too much time on here with cars because i haven't the slightest frickin clue who this OSAMA dude is that everyone is talking about! Is OSAMA BIN LADEN running for president? WTF? Hilary for pres, i always figured it was the first part of the apocalypse, but after all these years with gypsum wall board as president, i figure Hilary is bound to be an upgrade, with all Bill's old buddies and Teddy Kenndy pulling the nationstrings for awhile. HUMMERS FOR BILL! "you can be my chief of my staff, Monica" The only thing that would really suck about this is Rosie O Donnell as vice president. Iwas ROTFLMAO the other day. They had an article about John Kerry asking a crowd if he should run again and there was deafening silence or something. I'm like, DUH! He's a RUBE!!!!!!!!!!

wow, i guess buickman will make even more dough now

how bout toyota. we suck.

my GAWD if i see anyone else use the "I HEART someone" bit I am gonna go all ANN COULTER'S VAGINA ON YOU sorry it had to be said. i see that heart thing on myspace way too much and a rare photo of Ann Coulter's BUSH

look at the cobalt's performance numbers and look at the cars it beats damn right its a sports car and if you want a two seater.....take the back seat out last i recall, didn't the 911 have rear seats? guess its not a sports car neither is a mustang then, or a camaro

we all need to remember that caddy needs to continue to build a car like this because it guarantees caddy stays in business.

IMO, the Gotta have it factor is a serious blow to the credibility of C/D. the intent of it is to amplify their own personal bias, rather than relying on the other ratings, which should be comprehensive enough. and, to have a tool to be able to swing comparo results the way the writers want if the numerical scoring doesn't initially pan out in their favor. It's their escape tool. What makes you 'gotta have' a car? powertrain? rear seat comfort? styling? isn't all that already covered before they do the 'how big was csere's check, er, gotta have it factor'? GTHI factor is redundant and just basically was created to allow bias to enter the occassion. fun to drive could also be considered a cumulative and redundant ranking, but that may be somewhat legit if it is referring to tactile things like the feel of a brake pedal or something. None of the cars in that test were bad cars so CMON PEOPLE a 6th place car is hardly CRAP compared to the #1 finisher that broke down. I once tested a CTS and BMW 3 on the same day and preferred the CTS. granted, neither was the sport version, but the cadillac was more exciting.

gotta admit, as much as its been good to us, I'd like to trade mine for a minivan or an Acadia.

oh jeez. the curse lives on. sorry to hear. i love berettas.

amazing. i need to grab a beer and start to party. first the tundra recall and now this. the eternal marraige of the clueless seems to be hitting some rough waters. Child seats are a major concern of women, who are a lot of CR's loyal follower lemmings. The fact that CR botched a test on this particular product SHOULD if all is right in the world prove to be a major blow to their credibility. Like toyota however they will make up some crap and get let off the hook by the press. this did make the first section of my local star and sickle however so maybe the media will grab this and go to the rack with it.

remember the story about when saab was to introduce the plug in hybrid a few months ago and then last minute they taped the plug shut? Well, look at all the positive press it gets for being a chevy. If it were a Saab, it wouldn't have done much for GM's image.

GM ought to ask for development dollars and engineering assistance for this from power companies and the government (hello state of california put your $$$ where your mouth is) and help from battery manufacturers, and to help get this thing to market in 23 months.

liberal writers with an agenda = lies

i saw some 06 tauri advertised for like 8 grand with less than 20k on them. BEST DEAL EVER. but the taurus is like the neighborhood Jezebel, everyone has had one.........

i guess that means she has a deep throat, then..........)

and, IT'S ALL GOOD! I LOVE THIS THREAD!

I WANT IN ON THAT!!!!!! I love the timing of this. Do you hear the sweet voice of Pavorotti in the background? Does the sun shine forever? You asked for it, you got it, Toyota. I just hope this gets plastered all over the media. I hope THIS puts big doubt in the mind of all the toyota lemmings. Hey, we all thought OJ was a fun loving athlete too.........I hope this puts a major bludgeon on the new Tundra's launch....MAJOR. Why are so many of Toyota's recalls steering related? those Asian makes always love to skimp on the heft of the chassis and suspension components.

what I have found is that where I end up buying my cars is a place that gives me a GOOD price, but also, a sales experience where they respect me and I end up appreciating their honest effort to provide great customer service. I find that even if I missed getting the absolute lowest price, I got it for really darn close, but I established a good relationship with whoever I dealt with. The place I bought my Prism from new, they called back often to see how I liked the car and also sent many cordial 'soft marketing' mail pieces. They concentrated on trying to earn repeat business and building a relationship with one saleman. The same thing occurs now with where I got my 500. Every time my salesman sees me crusing the lot just to browse, he runs out and says hi....or if i come in for an oil change, he always finds me and asks me how its going. I even get Christmas cards from the dealer. I got a great deal, but I do genuinely find they want my business long term and want to establish a good future realtionship. Same with where I got my Aztek. Even though the salesman was a family friend, he showed great patience working to find what I wanted exactly and continued to call periodically to see how it was turning out and making sure we were happy with it. Even the used lux car broker I bought from, they were a zero pressure dealer, with one price. thing was, they had low prices and great cars to pick from. Other friends bought cars from the same place and the level of respect all of us got from the dealer was unheard of good. Even now if i go back to test drive something they have, they always make sure to be very accomodating to what i am looking for. So I can see why a salesperson would get frustrated with buyers who act like they are on a safari hunt. Some buyers really need to try to deal on a human level. I usually decide within the first 2 minutes if the salesperson is worth my time. If I think they are a good person to deal with, then I try to cut through the crap and cut to the chase quick....this is what I want, this is what I think you can sell this to me for, am I close? If you throw a FAIR number out there that leaves a bit of negotiation room, and its not a ridiculous absurd offer, you'll find in a lot of cases you will get a person working hard on your side. You need to work with THEM as much as they work with you. And it also helps to not dick around with the sales manager. When you sense you are getting close to being together on price, when you get to meet the sales manager, MAKE IT CLEAR that you are there to write checks and buy cars NOW and they you feel you are VERY CLOSE on price. If they KNOW you are SERIOUS, its amazing how flexible those guys get to close the deal.

nah, i get his point here. that's kind of the essence of what he is saying. car 'buffs' need to GET that real folks pay big ass dollars to buy cars nowadays and most buyers place function and comfort at the top of the list of required attributes. Exactly. The Polo is a much more useful device. I would go one step further to say that in the USA, with its wide expanses of interstate, the Golf / Rabbit is the minimum useful car out there. Well, this is where the simple idea of DESIGN comes in. Each of the vehicles you mention have special and unique attempts at enhancing function. Only problem is, they left out the good looks on all those vehicles ('cept the Impala). The common assumption in a brain dead society like ours (that focuses mainly on short term gratification) is brilliant form and brilliant function cannot co-exist together. Its rare it does because no one exerts the effort these days to sweat the details so they do. That's ok, because time (i.e. quick to market, quick to develop) is more important to the financial health of companies than making an extremely thoughtful attractive thing but selling it for a higher price. It's the USA, its who we are. Decisions are made based mostly on quick turning of products and services that don't require much in the way of thought or design but DO ring the cash register. In the case of those cars, all of them, GM had great ideas but was not enabled to make them what they could be. They got cheapened, watered down, and ugleed. Like the Aztek that sits in my garage. The wife loves it, kid loves it, i like it a lot, and we have used to do things with a vehicle we have never been able to do before. Only a minivan would be more useful. Do we care that its ugly? Not that much, when it comes to putting the cash down, but we would think of it even higher still if it were attractive. But no one cares about the styling of their car when they are loading huge boxes in their vehicle (like for a full size metal headboard), in the IKEA parking lot. Or, have you ever been able to haul retaining wall block in the trunk of your 3 series? (and still have back seat room, well that didn't exist to start I guess). The Envoy XUV was something I told my dad to look at. I think it would be perfect for him. He wants a pickup to haul loads, but most of the time needs an SUV for long distance travel and cargo capacity. The Maxx is a good attempt at trying to bridge a car to the usefulness of a crossover. Its a shame they made it slightly ugly. Its a really nice package. The quad coupe concept is brilliant. But the Ion is too small and the plastic body panel gaps and GM's old school sloppy construction made the whole car seem junky, in addition to the bizarro dash. Had the quad coupe been done on say, the G6 coupe and done with great precision, i think it would have been a lot more successful. but at that point you might as well just get a 4 door i guess. I get his point, he is saying, guys, you still are not designing very much function into your cars and making them usable. I kind of think he is taking an unfair jab at the Volt though. If GM pulls that off, it will be huge. i do think the Volt can be a useful car. They just can't half ass the execution of it.

look at the cobalt's performance numbers and look at the cars it beats damn right its a sports car

i cannot remember seeing any fake vinyl roof cts's, and honestly almost none with dubs. all the boys around here looking for penis extensions are driving imports and chrysler 300's.

gotta keep those union plants runnin

the part toyota does not get is that with them trying to flood the market, their 'legendary' resale value will go in the toilet. Its one thing to have the colluj edunacated snob set buy toyotas in small numbers and overpay because they have the dough, but when whitebread middle class Amurcha with Bush era incomes starts buying way too many of them and buys them with many incentives, then the resale goes in the tank. I wonder if toyota is aware that this will happen. Once a bunch of neglected Camlees start flooding the auto auctions, etc. its not gonna mean squat how well they hold up. Supply and demand. Too many underpriced used Camry's will make it tougher to sell the new ones, unless they slap even more incentives on them.

drive one, and you will say yes. its not fair to vote, not having driven one.

I'm not sure I'm summing up my point sweetly enough. The 3 series is a fanstastic car. I just think it gets as many sales from reputation, and the poseur set, as it does from people who legitimately buy the car for performance, whereas the CTS has generated nearly all its cred and sales from the performance aspect alone. The CTS earns every sale it gets in spite of the fact its a GM product where the Bimmer gets far too many of its sales just because its a BMW and that's what style seekers buy and don't give 25 cents a care about the performance of the car. I guess when you talk 3 series sales, I tend to throw away half of those sales, just like I tend to discount half the camry sales. And then, I think the CTS for 2008 has so many more bases covered, I think it represents a greater value proposition over the 3 series in so many ways.