GXT

As I understand it, if not for Lutz, GM wouldn't have even the few good vehicles that they have now. I sure hope Lutz gets to stay.

He is trying to help. For example he is trying to get the US universal health care so you can join the rest of the 1st world. When pretty much the entire freaking world saw what ignorant dicks the US was being about 9/11-Iraq and watching as the US media rubber stamped every stupid word that came out of Bushes' mouth Moore was one of the few with the courage to speak out. The problem is PEOPLE LIKE YOU that have no clue that criticism is the basis of a strong democracy.

I always enjoy hearing how "the previous" models were so bad and the current are so good. I've been hearing that for many years now. I don't recall what I was watching but they put together a nice clip of GM execs saying this very thing over many decades... right up to Lutz I believe. So I have to ask why it is in fact true this time? Talk about the "Boy who cried wolf". It might be true this time. But there sure is a whole lot of crap for the few bright spots. "It has the best lineup of cars and trucks, top to bottom, it has ever had. Honest to God." No doubt. It reminds me of elementary school when they gave the "most improved" award to the class idiot. He was still one of the worst students, but he sure had improved. "LOANS, not bailout money" When you give money with no reasonable expectation that it will be repaid it is a bailout, and a REALLY dumb one at that. I guess we will see the plans shortly. Poor Moore. He has consistently been on the right side of so many issues and he seems to get pretty much nothing but grief from the very people that he is trying to help.

I know how they can really impress Washington. Skip these cars that get average highway fuel economy in the 30MPG range. Why don't they drive one of their 45+ MPG highway cars there to show Washington how serious they are about fuel economy? Like the Prius or the Civic!?!?! Oh wait, what about one of their 40+ MPG highway cars like the Smart fortwo or the Jetta!?!? Oh wait... Why don't they drive the Volt they've been advertising for over a year? Oh wait... it isn't drivable and the fuel economy on the highway is probably pretty bad. I know, I know! GM has more average highway fuel economy cars than anyone else. How ever did the public get the wrong impression?

He's going to go away and 2000+ years later we will still be waiting for the volt. :AH-HA_wink:

People, we are looking at this the wrong way! These CEOs make obscene amounts of money! Their time is "worth" so much that if they save an hour or two by flying in their private jets they may very well be "saving" thousands of dollars. :AH-HA_wink:

They build very average cars. For some people that is fine. Some people want better than average. Where to start? 1) Quality is not Reliability. I'll write that one more time. Quality is not Reliability. That is even more true when you intentionally focus only on the FIRST 3 MONTHS OF OWNERSHIP. 2) J.D. Powers isn't independent. They exist based on the revenue they get for selling their studies. i.e. They exist because GM, Ford, etc. give them money. 3) The Ford study was created and paid for by Ford, for Ford. So it was definitely not independent. Plus it focused on initial quality not long term reliability. Plus Ford still lost to Honda and Toyota, just not statistically. I'd like you to read your post again. Highway. Highway. Highway. Highway. City is what matters. Focusing on highway is like focusing on 3 month Quality instead of long-term reliability. Ford/GM are focusing on the area where they are close to competitive regardless of the relative importance. That is because they can't seem to compete were it is important, likely because that is where their competitors are working on improving. Next time when you are making fuel economy claims please actually list the numbers. In the meantime, here are some real-world numbers for you: Model/City/Highway/Overall 2008 Cobalt 16/34/24 2009 Focus 18/35/26 2008 Civic 18/43/28 2009 Corolla 23/40/32 Since you mentioned it, the 2009 Ford Focus MT gets 20/37/29. It doesn't beat the Corolla AT. For some reason there is currently no 2009 Corolla MT, but if (when?) it does exist it should be >20% more efficient than the Focus MT. This is one of your shining examples? 4cyl Sedans: 2009 Fusion 15/32/23 2009 Malibu 15/34/23 2009 Accord 15/34/23 2009 Camry 16/36/24 2009 Altima 18/33/25 (CVT - only tranny offered with 4 cyl) So yes, congrats to Malibu for matching the Accord. But the Accord isn't the class leader in this area. Hybrids: Altima Hybrid 27/36/32 Camry Hybrid 28/41/34 Civic Hybrid 26/47/37 Prius Hybrid 35/50/44 No one seems to have a good comparison with the Aura or Malibu hybrid. I imagine GM isn't exactly encouraging testing. But from what I have seen claimed they only get a couple of MPG better than the non-hybrids so they wouldn't even be close to competitive anyways. It also looks like they have raised the price of the Malibu and Aura by 10%. The Malibu and Aura hybrids are now the same cost as the Camry hybrid!!!! Now they can't even try to justify their horrible performance by claiming they are cheap... er... inexpensive. So you'll have to cut the automotive media some slack if they give the imports credit for being more fuel efficient. Because it is true. And this is after GM, Ford, etc. have closed the gap as much as they have. Just two years ago it would have been that much worse. And I'm not even including the disaster that is Chrysler. Regarding cost to own: It is true that according to Edmunds the $11,950 aveo (according to GM it starts at 12,625, so I'm not sure why there is a $700 price difference here) has a true cost to own of ~$35,700 over five years and the $15,500 Honda civic DX $37,700. But the Civic has ABS, Side Head Curtain Airbags, power windows, rear heat ducts, more interior room, larger tires, anti-theft, a better crash NHTSA rating, an IIHS top pick (Good all around VS the Aveo's marginal and average scores), etc. Most importantly it isn't a piece of crap Aveo. So congrats to GM for making the cheapest car on the road. Not something I would be bragging about. Again, this is one of your shining examples? I don't think that is a common belief. Heck, GM has been advertising the 2011 Volt for over a year now. With their very low sales, I bet GM plays hundreds of hybrid ads for every hybrid they sell. If anything people should be surprised to see how few hybrids GM does sell. The "more models" comment is meaningless. I don't care if GM slaps some plastic on a chevy hybrid and sells a couple hundred a month as a pontiac. You have done a mighty job of spinning. Lutz would be proud. This reminds me of those horrible commercials where GM (others did this as well) cherry-picked the worst aspects of each of their competitors' vehicles and then said how their vehicle was better in that one aspect. e.g. The Chevy Colorado has more torque than the Nissan Titan, more towing capacity that the Ford F150, etc. It is as meaningless as my made up example. When you look at the WHOLE package most of GM's cars are most often average or worse. Many of the myths you mentioned are legitimate issues for GM and pretending and that they aren't might fool some people now but isn't going to help GM in the long run.

Revenue has been "unsustainably low" for GM for a long time. Much longer than this current financial crisis. Also GM doesn't make money off of vehicles even if they can afford to pay to have them built. That's been true for many years now. The trip is to get as much money off the tax payer as they can to buy them a few more months until they try again. In this case I suspect it is so they can survive until Obama is in power and they can try off him. The problem is, as far as I can tell the $2 Billion/month loss isn't telling the whole story. GM took a 13+ Billion VEBA write-down this Q. They can't do that next Q. Without that the loss on the Q would have been closer to 16 Billion on the Q or over 5 Billion/month. I doubt they are going to get down to 1 billion/month loss this Q... especially considering the much lower revenue numbers that are coming. It is possible they have another special charge they can use, but it don't think that changes the reality behind the numbers.

What $2 Billion costs? Did you mean monthly losses? Source?

To paraphrase the brilliant Statik from GM-Volt.com: "They may as well ask Wagoner to produce a unicorn." This will be a good read. But will it be a non-fiction work of horror or a fiction work of fantasy?

I'd be surprised if they could get more than the $25 billion. If they show the real cost the government will choke.

It doesn't take a genius to do some simple math, so please try to keep up. GM is losing ~2.5 Billion per month and it is getting worse. If GM gets 10-12 of the 25 Billion that buys them another ~4 months of <survival>, not retooling. As for the Volt, selling a vehicle at a loss is not the kind of thing that GM needs right now. It was a fun PR stunt, but they need to get real. If they had put that effort into the Cruze it could have been on sale in the US right away instead of the current plan for TWO years from now.

The problem is that any workable "plan" will involve many times the 25 Billion offered and would still involve tens of thousands of lost jobs big three jobs. And if the multiplier that the automakers have been pushing is true, that means perhaps a million jobs lost. Who wants to pay for that?

Good. Now we can move on to talking about the bailout required in April/May. I guess we will have to wait to see the details, but it sounds like the money that was meant for retooling for fuel efficient cars (if you believed that) has just been spent to survive another four months. I'd say that they just ate their future, but I'm pretty sure that happened a long time ago.

As I understand it you only get a certain percentage of the loss back, but the loss of value is real and permanent. Therefore you aren't going to make any money off the transaction you will only get a larger effective discount. So you are still paying more for a bigger vehicle. If they engaged in that then they did want the bigger vehicle to begin with.... or they or I don't understand the economics. Probably the same reason you bought a 500 instead of a civic. Convinced themselves they "needed" something bigger, that the extra cost was worth it, etc. But mostly I imagine it was a status thing.

There were tax credits for buying larger vehicles?

Americans were never guaranteed the things you claim have been lost. You were never guaranteed the car or the house that you wanted.... only the one you could actually AFFORD. Consumers were and are expected to 'make ends meet' on their salary. Consumers CHOSE to use credit because they HAD to HAVE <whatever>. Consumers could have saved money but they were to busy being consumers. A "luxury" is just that, a "luxury"… don’t expect it and don’t indulge in it if you can’t pay for it. We could have lived comfortable lives but some shyster sold us on some “American Dream” scam. Even though only 5% can afford it (on the backs of everyone else), the remaining 95% put it on credit. We have been living beyond our means and on the backs of our children for decades to pay for a bunch of crap that we didn’t need and have probably already lost or discarded for something new. It couldn't continue indefinitely. But instead of cutting back we kept spending. Now it is time to pay for our excesses and we are so spoiled that we can't handle it. As for the UAW buying GM, GM is currently worth negative 60 Billion and dropping. That works out to about $1 Million per hourly worker. Do you really expect the UAW members who have suffered everything you claim to now throw away $1 Million dollars each on a company that will be gone in a couple of months?

Pretty good summary, except for this: "That extra burden is estimated to be more than $2,000 per car. Think what that means: Ford, for example, needs to cut $2,000 worth of features and quality out of its Taurus to compete with Toyota’s Avalon. Of course the Avalon feels like a better product — it has $2,000 more put into it. Considering this disadvantage, Detroit has done a remarkable job of designing and engineering its cars. But if this cost penalty persists, any bailout will only delay the inevitable." Mitt is half right here. By my rough calculations GM's recent losses divided by cars sold works out to about $2,000. So yes, that $2,000 needs to be cut ouf of the features and quality of the car (to break even... $3,000-$4,000 for a reasonable profit). But no, it hasn't been done yet. So things are going to get that much worse if they are able to stay the course through bailouts.

Is it a loan when you lend money to someone who will never pay it back? "the $25 billion loan needed to bridge the current crisis" GM is expected to be out of cash by January without a bailout. GM would probably see about 10 Billion of that 25 Billion. They are burning ~2.5 Billion/month. Therefore this bailout would get them to ~May. What will have changed by then? Nothing. The economy is still headed down. Will you give them another 25 Billion in May to buy them another 4 months and then do it again? Will you question giving money to someone like Wagoner who has been so wrong in the past and is once again being intentionally misleading by understating the situation? Think about this, based on GM's market cap THOUSANDS of entities could buy them. But no one is willing to put their own money on it. Not even a rumour. But GM wants the government to put YOUR money on it.

Even if it is first to market, the Toyota solution will most likely be better as it is just an incremental improvement to the Prius. The battery will also be much smaller than the Volt's. When compared to the Volt this should result in a more reliable Plug-In Prius and perhaps a less-expensive one as well (but there are lots of variables here). Yes, the electric range will be shorter. But as the longer electric range costs extra money and will tend not to be used this is actually a very real advantage of the Prius. I also suspect that much of the benefit of the Volt has already been realized thanks to GMs frequent and early PR campaign. IIRC under the new agreement GM was going to be able to start hiring people at $15/hour and without as many benefits. Does anyone have the details?

Don't worry, GM will have the final say when they take it to 0 themselves.

If it wasn't bad enough that we were considering bailing out the big 3, now we are considering giving Honda/Toyota money as well! Let the insanity end.

It has been "Next year country" at GM for quite some time now. Remember how the now-known-to-be-mediocre Cobalt was going to be the greatest thing since sliced bread? GM has made strides, but they were miles behind and their competitors have not been standing still. GM is an average automaker and as such is good for probably no more than 10% of the US market. Even if they are bailed out they are probably still looking at huge layoffs to get down to the appropriate staffing levels. They need to get rid of most of their brands and a huge number of dealerships. Bailout VS no bailout the results will probably be largely the same... except that the billions in tax dollars that GM would have funneled straight to their overseas creditors could instead be given directly to the laid off workers or to attract the automakers that are taking share from the big three.

Who like higher taxes? Who likes their tax money being sent to China? Who likes welfare for those who have created their own poverty? Who likes trying to save jobs that were in actuality either lost long ago or will be lost in the near future? I always thought it would be good if the US became a little more socialist. But the US is to socialism like a fundamentalist teenager is to birthcontrol. It is a dirty concept which they have intentionally shunned, but they both have urges on which they are acting and it is too late to take Family Planning. The US is going to come out of this without the capitalist high ground, all the spending and taxes of socialism, and none of the benefits. It looks like GM needed to charge ~$2,000 more for each vehicle over the past few years to have broken even. They should immediately raise their prices by that much. Heck, they could just leave the prices where they are and just HALVE the incentives. Then all they have to do is sell their vehicles. If they can't even do that then they aren't even worth trying to save. If they can't even do that then the US consumer doesn't believe they should survive.