SAmadei

Car has been gone last few times I drove by. I assume someone bought it. Hope it got a good home, and not some idiot looking for an engine and a demo derby car. I'll be watching for it to reappear when money starts filling my pockets again... hopefully it didn't go too far away.

How are European standards stricter than ours? Their standards allow cars much smaller than ours, and allow gas guzzlers like the Pagani. Holden Zetas? Yeah, sold in Europe, no problem. The only regulations I can think of that Europe has that we do not (yet) are required amber rear signals and pedestrian crash safety features on the front of the car. Sure, Europe may regulate cars harsher once you own it, but at least you can own it, assuming you can afford to put it on the road.

There's east coast, then there's EAST COAST. Any eastward driving from my place results in severe water damage after about 15 seconds/1500ft. Unfortunately, I'm not a morning person, so I tend to be driving into the sun while going west. Bah!

Hows this for a crazy idea to get people plugged into political reality a bit more... in exchange for a reduction of your taxes, you volunteer to work for the government in some way that uses your talents. It puts you in contact with government people and their processes and might get people realizing in small parts, where things are truly broken.

Um, foreign companies deciding it's not worth the cost to bring all of their vehicles here has nothing to do with a lack of a free market. Heck, it has everything to do with us HAVING a free market! How so? From Wiki: A free market is a competitive market where prices are determined by supply and demand. However, the term is also commonly used for markets in which economic intervention and regulation by the state is limited to tax collection, and enforcement of private ownership and contracts. We obviously no longer have a 'free market' as far as automobiles go. You can't buy a Pagani... they tried, and the government felt it needed to interfere with it. You can't buy a Caprice, or the Holden zeta models because GM claims the costs to federalize it are too high. Its virtually impossible for a small company to enter the automobile market. Tesla and Fiskar have spent billions to get off the ground. Panoz, Mosler, Saleen and Shelby have to fight tons of government red tape to stay in business. According to Wiki, this is a regulated market or controlled market. Now, I'm all for reasonable safety, quality and clean air, but the government has gone off the deep end and over regulated the automotive market and their heavy handed approach has caused most cars to be uniformly boring and has raised the bar to enter too high. We can never have a truly free market for automobiles, but we need to take a step back from the crazy overregulation going on right now.

Glad I wasn't the only one to notice that. LOL.

I liked the Duster/Demon body style... but it came in a day late and a dollar short compared to the '68-'72 GM A and '68-'74 X bodies. Compared to those, the Duster came off as unfinished, especially below character line on the sides. They did some nice front and rear treatments, though. I still can't believe that Mopar built the 2 door Dart/Valiant alongside it, stuck in 1966, until 1976.

I guess so, to my knowledge neither have been exported from North America. I imagine SOME have been exported, but nowhere near enough to be a serious competitor to the Euro-vans. Consulting Wiki, apparently the Express/Savana is available in the Netherlands for civilian, ambulance and police use... but that seems to be it. Other than that, the only vans GM exported from North American where the Astro/Safari twins, which became somewhat popular in Japan as massive muscle trucks. I wonder if Sabine Schmitz could have beaten 9:59 minutes using a V8 Express van instead of a wussy Transit van. ;-) She could have used it, as her comment was "I could do that lap time in a van"... and the video clearly showed that power was the issue with the Transit.

Beautiful car... one minor complaint... Gold wheels with a red pinstripe? I'm wondering about the originality of that... but I suppose any dealer or painter may have added the pinstripe later.

Exactly. Was in D... OD stopped accelerating about 95.

Would be consistent with the strategy Ford and Chrysler are heading towards.. modern world vans for the US and European markets. Just because others leap off the cliff, doesn't mean you should. All the global vans have styling that is unexpectedly polarizing to American eyes and small powerplants. GM could do better by offering a modern American styled van with some smaller V6 engines, instead of alienating thousands of big van buyers with a rebadged Renault... its not even a global GM design... its a Renault! Its not like the Sprinter has set the world on fire.

Toro can hit 100mph, since my worn out 307 in the '86 Estate did... barely, took forever, but did. Had to use GPS to determine the speed, as the speedo stops at 85.

Not sure what kind of hidden treasures you are looking for. Stuff Yer Face in New Brunswick is an interesting place to eat.

The little snippet at the bottom where the Savana gets replaced (~2014) by a ugly Opel rebrand of a Renault van is the most disturbing part.

Well, since W=mg, where g=Earth's gravitational field strength, its only a interesting distinction _IF_ the ATS is leaving Earth's gravitational well. First Cadillac on Mars?

Funny, I had just seen a banner ad the other day claiming the Cruze was exclusively only at Avis. Makes me wonder what the deal is, if others have it too. Of course, I cannot find it now. Perhaps Avis has an exclusive on the Cruze Eco.

Even in private ownership? The NF plates are something of a mystery... took awhile before I figured out what NF was. If it was registered to be used as an ambulance or something related, I would imagine it would be. Plenty of private companies have NF plates for vans shuttling around senior citizens. But keep in mind, I know very little about the NF plates.

I like sporty as well as the next guy, but I want a car tuned to drive a lap around Manhattan, not the Nurburgring.

+1 Not in NJ you won't... but then there are parades that you could do that in Brock Yates and Hal Needham would disagree with you. The other neat thing about this ambulance is that in Jersey, it would get the NF99999 plates... No Fee.

No, it isn't. I would agree with SMK's opinion that sales will likely hit $3K for about a year before coming back down to DTS numbers... so that means GM is paying, what I'd guesstimate, 500 million (Though I would suspect its closer to 800 million) to create the XTS. They will sell 24K over what the DTS would have... 24000 x $45K, equal about 1 billion. Unless these cars are >50% profit (they are not), its a wash. Of course, this is without the possible sales bump the XTS/DTS might get from the Lucerne/STS/Town Car's demise. But that sales bump would have come without paying $500 million to build a whole new car. When you can say that last sentence without the FWD, GM will have done something special to FWD.

Well, it IS the Cadillac of minivans.

Well, doing it now is too late, considering the UAW is a one of the biggest shareholders. In a small car, ATS-sized or smaller, yes, I agree. NOT in a large car like the XTS. The weight difference between FWD and RWD is generally a rounding error, and RWD cars have already been demonstrated to get better mileage than similar FWD cars. Please stop continuing to use this myth to justify GM's half-baked ideas of FWD across the board.

Its still a problem brought on by GM. Disclaimer: I am not completely anti-Union, only anti-overbearing/greedy/destructive-union. GM should never had let the UAW get so powerful that they can dictate such constraints on GM's business processes. In many industries that took a massive hit from overseas competition, unions backed off or became less interfering... but that's not the case with GM... as overseas competition continued, GM let the UAW run them over. We say things will be different now, but now the UAW is a major owner and is still the union in charge... so GM's success will help to fill the union's bank accounts to help them keep pressure on GM. That said, I question... is GM unionized as a corporation, or on a plant-by-plant basis? If the latter, I have to question: perhaps it would have been easier to bulldoze plants and build new ones without unions than to build MY after MY of fleet vehicles at a loss... and at a loss of GM's resale value. A massive UAW fight and strike would have been a huge blow to GM, sure... but at some point GM would have face the music... and they did, in the form of a BK. But in the same way, at some point, the strikers would have to realize that OK pay is better than no pay... and that the crazy pay days of GM's heyday were long gone.

You mean a '81 Pontiac 2000. You know, I've called our Sunfire a Sunbird a thousand times, but I've never done the reverse. More incredibly, these both sat on a lot with the last of the '81 Firebirds and Trans Ams.

In my world? Honda and Toyota seem to be in my world... i.e., have run a business without these constraints GM has saddled themselves with. Its not like Honda and Toyota exist in a vacuum. GM has sent people to learn from them. I'm well aware of the issues GM faced closing plants... but this was all brought on by themselves, and it has far reaching consequences. WTF does that mean? I only clarified my position. If you think I joined that club, you have a serious problem with reading comprehension. I don't even look at the drivers because you can't necessarily tell squat from that to determine income level. Everyone pretends to be living better than they are. Oh, and the J-bodies started life off with a premium price, too. Flash forward to 2016 and lets talk about the rich and famous fighting each other to get a Cruze. I won plenty... including using the Browns. Peyton Hillis 2010 was a monster. Your insulting manner tells me you're arrogant and your inability to discuss oversteer versus understeer in the other thread indicates to me your thinking is about as deep as a goldfishes'. Again, your thought processes are misfiring wildly. Roth - 34 million albums with VH (VH1 - 10m, VH2 - 5m, W&CF - 3m, FW - 2m, DD - 4m, 1984 - 10m) Hagar - 16 million albums with VH. (5150 - 6m, OU812 - 4m, F.U.C.K. - 3m, Balance - 3m) Granted, in US sales... not counting worldwide since it is not going to change much... because, for example, CAN platinum is a lot less albums than US platinum. As for tours, well, a lot of that requires adjusting for inflation. Just watch to see how big the reunited tour brings in next year... I'm sure it'll be in the top 10. Honestly, after this part of your post, I'm just bored with your droning on about the same points from other threads without bring new information into play.