CSpec

Cars don't drive trough the Chunnel--they're loaded into special trains and then drive off at either side of the channel.

Blue is RHD obviously. Also I think Sweden used to drive on the left but switched.

Have a good one!

My 9-5 is a manual and I wouldn't have it any other way.

I would guess that Ford would have gone through with that strategy if Saturn's attempt hadn't failed miserably...

Definitely Alfa.

_ End of the Road for Mercury After fevered speculation, Ford has confirmed that it will shutter the Mercury brand this year. Ford now joins its Big 3 rivals in shedding a brand in the past 10 years. Hit the jump for details. Ford press release confirms Mercury's demise

Ford To Expand Lincoln Lineup And Brand Emphasis; Mercury Production Ends In Fourth Quarter Of 2010 Ford is expanding its Lincoln lineup with seven all-new or significantly refreshed vehicles in the next four years – including its first-ever C-segment vehicle Lincoln’s plan accelerates with more investment and attention on standout product design, class-leading technology and powertrains delivering top performance and fuel efficiency Lincoln product development, marketing, sales and service resources expanding as the brand competes with Cadillac and Lexus in the marketplace Ford will end production of Mercury vehicles in the fourth quarter of this year to fully devote its financial, product development, production and marketing, sales and service resources toward further growing its core Ford brand while enhancing Lincoln Existing Mercury owners to receive continued access to parts and service support at Ford and Lincoln dealers; current Mercury vehicle warranties and Extended Service Plans will be honored; special offers available on new Mercury vehicles through the summer Affected dealers to receive specialized support during the transition, as the company continues its transformation to a more profitable dealer network DEARBORN, Mich., June 2, 2010 – Ford Motor Company will expand and enhance its Lincoln brand lineup with seven all-new or significantly refreshed vehicles in the next four years as part of an aggressive growth plan focused on standout product design, class-leading technology and new powertrains – all aimed at competing with Cadillac and Lexus in North America. Ford also will end production of Mercury vehicles in the fourth quarter of this year to fully devote its financial, product development, production and marketing, sales and service resources toward further growing its core Ford brand while enhancing the Lincoln brand. “We have made tremendous progress on profitably growing the Ford brand during the past few years. Now, it is time to do the same for Lincoln,” said Mark Fields, Ford’s president of The Americas. “The new Lincoln vehicles will transform luxury for North American premium customers through an unexpected blend of responsive driving enjoyment and warm, inviting comfort. We will also offer our customers a world-class retail experience through a vibrant retail network.” Lincoln’s hallmarks will be refined, modern design, the most fuel-efficient premium powertrains and industry-leading technology that create a unique driver experience both in the cabin and on the road. “Profitably growing Lincoln in North America is an important part of our One Ford plan,” said Alan Mulally, Ford president and CEO. “Our Ford brand is gaining momentum and winning customers around the world. Now, we are going to use the same laser focus to further strengthen Lincoln and deliver even more products luxury customers really want and value.” Foundation Set The future of Lincoln is building from a strong base that includes the all-new flagship MKS large sedan, the all-new MKT seven-passenger crossover and a significantly refreshed MKZ mid-size sedan – all now in showrooms. The hybrid version of the MKZ will reach showrooms later this year and is expected to be the most fuel efficient premium sedan on the market. Lincoln’s product actions continue later this year with the debut of the significantly refreshed 2011 MKX crossover, the first vehicle to feature MyLincoln Touch driver connect technology. This will be followed by another six all-new or significantly refreshed vehicles within four years developed with Lincoln’s DNA of standout design, precise and confident driving experience, class-leading technology and powertrains delivering top performance and fuel efficiency. Lincoln will be led by expanded product development and marketing, sales and service teams to support the brand’s growth plan and ensure it has a strong cadence of distinct products that are well positioned in the market. Plans for Lincoln include: Lincoln’s first-ever C-segment vehicle New Lincoln-exclusive powertrains, including an all-new V-6 engine and advanced fuel-efficient transmissions EcoBoost engines available in all Lincolns – from the Navigator full-size SUV to the new C-segment Lincoln Fuel economy leadership with each new vehicle – leading to Lincoln emerging as the most fuel-efficient luxury lineup on the market More useful technology and features than any other competitor – with a special focus on comfort and convenience. New advanced features include: fully retractable glass roofs; adaptive computer-controlled suspensions; electronic, push-button gear-selectors; active noise control; and exclusive MyLincoln Touch driver connect technology “Lincoln vehicles will reward drivers with smooth, effortless power complemented by agile handling and responsive steering,” said Derrick Kuzak, Ford’s group vice president, Global Product Development. “The cabin is a sanctuary with segment-leading quietness, genuine materials and intuitive, useful technology.” Lincoln has started gaining traction with customers, as evidenced by market share gains during the past five years. Lincoln’s share of the retail U.S. luxury vehicle market has grown from 4.5 percent in 2005 to 6.3 percent through the first quarter of 2010. In addition, Lincoln’s reputation with consumers has risen, with favorable opinion and purchase consideration reaching its highest level in the past five years. Lincoln’s long-term durability was second only to Porsche’s in the 2010 J.D. Power and Associates Vehicle Dependability Survey. Mercury Mercury originally was created as a premium offering to Ford and was an important source of incremental sales. However, the continued strength of the Ford brand – particularly during the past three years – has accelerated the migration from Mercury to Ford for many customers. Today, Mercury’s customer profile, pricing and margins are almost identical to Ford, but Mercury’s incremental sales have been declining. The majority of current Mercury sales are to fleet buyers and customers purchasing through employee, retiree and friends and family discounts, which Ford anticipates largely can be satisfied by Ford brand vehicles. Of Ford Motor Company’s 16 percent market share in the U.S., Mercury accounts for 0.8 percentage points, a level that has been flat or declining for the past several years. That contrasts with the Ford brand, which has increased market share by 2.2 percentage points so far this year on the strength of new products and improved quality, fuel efficiency, safety, smart design and value. Ford’s strengthening financial position – including the return to profitability and positive cash flow – allows the company to absorb short-term costs associated with the discontinuation of Mercury and to consolidate future product investments into Lincoln. Today, there are no stand-alone Mercury dealerships in North America. Ford is working closely with dealers to maintain properly located stand-alone Lincoln or Ford-Lincoln dealers, which will offer dealers and the company the greatest opportunity for long-term profitable growth. New operational standards developed with the company’s dealers will facilitate a Lincoln customer experience that exceeds the expectations of North American luxury customers. Personal Attention Ford will work closely with Mercury dealers and customers during the transition, including providing existing Mercury owners with continued access to parts and service support at Ford and Lincoln dealers and by honoring current warranties, including Ford’s Extended Service Plans. “We are 100 percent committed to supporting Mercury owners through Ford and Lincoln dealerships and working hard to keep them as valued customers in the future,” Fields said. “At the same time, we will work closely with our dealers to phase out Mercury franchises and continue to build a healthy, growing Lincoln with strong new products and a profitable dealer network that delivers a world-class customer experience.” Mercury owners will receive additional details in the coming days explaining the transition and assuring them that Ford and its dealers will continue to provide all necessary parts and service support for Mercury products. Ford has notified Mercury dealers of the decision and provided details of a financial package that includes payment in exchange for resigning the franchise. Ford today also informed dealers of special offers on new Mercury vehicles that will be available through the summer to support the sell down of current Mercury inventory and remaining Mercury vehicle production. “We are taking decisive action and moving into the future with the right plan to deliver profitable growth for all stakeholders,” Fields said. “These moves position us to continue building momentum through strong brands, great products and an unwavering focus on the customer.”

Any idea how this would work underwater?

Yet another GT-R on my drive home...

I took a stroll through Arlington Cemetery on Saturday. It was quite a sight to see every headstone adorned with a little American flag.

Saw a bright orange Murcielago yesterday.

"Tubagus Haryo Karbyanto, a member of the National Commission of Tobacco Control, said Indonesia must also address the social conditions that lead to smoking, such as family influence and peer pressure." This guy is a voice of reason.

The Economics of Immigration Are Not What You Think NDN Waves of new immigrants often spark economic anxiety and cultural discomfort, as well as occasional violence and wide-net crackdowns, on the Arizona model. Even here, a nation comprised almost entirely of immigrants and their descendants, we’ve seen these reactions not only in recent times but also a century ago, when waves of poor immigrants from Europe arrived here. With a hundred years’ distance, however, we can now see that those early waves of immigration were generally associated not with economic dislocation and national decline, but with extraordinary economic boom times and America’s emergence as the world’s leading economy. And for much the same reasons as a century ago, recent evidence indicates that the economic effects of the current waves of immigration are also largely positive. The New Policy Institute (NPI) asked me to review all of the available data and economic studies of recent U.S. immigration. With my colleague Jiwon Vellucci, we found, to start, that more than one-third of recent immigrants come from Europe and Asia, while less than 57 percent have come from Mexico and other Latin American nations. The popular portrait of recent immigrants is off-point in other respects as well. While more immigrants than native-born Americans lack high school diplomas, equivalent shares of both groups have college or post-college degrees. That finding should make it unsurprising that 28 percent of U.S. immigrants work as managers or professionals, including 38 percent of those who have become naturalized citizens or the same share as native-born Americans. Many Americans would probably acknowledge that their concerns about immigration lie principally with those who are undocumented. No one likes being reminded that the world’s most powerful nation hasn’t figured out how to effectively police its own borders. But the data also show that these undocumented people, who account for 30 percent of all recent immigrants, embody some traditional values much more than native-born Americans. For example, while undocumented male immigrants are generally low-skilled, they also have the country’s highest labor participation rate: Among working-age men, 94 percent of undocumented immigrants work or actively are seeking work, compared to 83 percent of the native born. One critical reason is that undocumented immigrants are more likely to support traditional families with children: 47 percent of undocumented immigrants today are part of couples with children, compared to just 21 percent of native-born Americans. The evidence regarding the impact of immigration on wages also turns up some surprising results. First, there’s simply no evidence that the recent waves of immigration have slowed the wage progress of average, native-born American workers. Overall, in fact, the studies show that immigration has increased the average wage of Americans modestly in the short-run, and by more over the long-term as capital investment rises to take account of the larger number of workers. Behind those results, however, lie winners and losers – although in both cases, the effects are modest. Among workers, the winners are generally higher-skilled Americans: For example, when a factory or hotel hires more low-skilled workers, demand also increases for the higher-skilled people who manage those workers or carry out other professional tasks for an enterprise that’s grown larger. The losers are generally the lower-skilled workers who have to compete for jobs with recent immigrants. But studies also show that immigration reform might well take care of most of those effects. Following the 1986 immigration reforms, for example, previously-undocumented immigrants experienced big pay boosts – as much as 15 or 20 percent – and immigrants who already had legal status saw hefty wage gains, too. But the reforms also led to higher wages for lower-skilled native-born Americans. One reason is that undocumented people who gain legal status can move more freely to places with greater demand for their skills, reducing their competition with native-born people with similar skills. More important, their new legal status confers certain protections such as minimum wage and overtime rules. Today, about one-fourth of low-skilled workers in large American cities are paid less than the minimum wage, including 16 percent of native-born workers, 26 percent of legal immigrants, and 38 percent of undocumented workers. Ending the ability of unscrupulous employers to recruit people to work for less than the minimum wage would not only raise the incomes of those currently paid less than the minimum wage. It also would ease downward pressures on the wages of other lower-skilled Americans, which comes from the below-minimum wage workers. This process is something we have referred to as "closing the 'trap-door' under the minimum wage." Looking again at immigrants generally, recent research also shows a strong entrepreneurial streak, with immigrants being 30 percent more likely than native-born Americans to start their own businesses. Nor are immigrants the fiscal drain that’s commonly supposed, at least not in the long term. In California and a few other states, immigrants today do entail a net, fiscal burden, principally reflecting the costs of public education for their children. But studies that use dynamic models to take account of the lifetime earnings of immigrants – most of whom arrive here post-school age and without elderly parents to claim Social Security and Medicare – show substantial net fiscal gains at the federal, state, and local levels. Political disputes are rarely settled by facts. Nevertheless, it’s reassuring to see that the humane and progressive approach to immigration is also a policy likely to produce good economic results for almost everyone.

Took me a little while to get Seat.

Notice how when millions of people have to agree to one curriculum, no one ends up happy? End collectivist education run by "education professionals", unions, and politicians.

A quick search at Health Affairs revealed the following: http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/full/25/5/w324 I've only done a quick ctrl+f, but this quote stands out: "Rates of uninsurance. By contrast, increases in uninsurance rates are unlikely to result in net increases in ED visit rates. Although uninsured people rely on EDs to a greater extent than insured people do because of a lack of access to other outpatient care, their actual use of hospital EDs is no greater than that of the privately insured, probably because fear of incurring the entire cost of an ED visit acts as a constraint on how frequently they visit EDs."

If you read the article, it doesn't talk about absolute numbers, which of course is pointless. "Among the under-65 population, the uninsured were no more likely than the insured to have had at least one emergency department visit in a 12-month period."

Who's packing ERs? Not the uninsured Reuters One in five people in the United States visit an emergency room every year, and most of them have health insurance of some kind, according to a U.S. government survey released on Wednesday. The survey contradicts a common perception that emergency rooms are packed with uninsured people and illegal immigrants. It also rejects some claims that people are using the emergency department for routine care -- just 10 percent of visits were for non-urgent causes. "In 2007, approximately one in five persons in the U.S. population had one or more emergency department visits in a 12-month period," the report from the National Center for Health Statistics reads. "Among the under-65 population, the uninsured were no more likely than the insured to have had at least one emergency department visit in a 12-month period." Tamyra Carroll Garcia and colleagues at the center used two large national surveys of healthcare use in 2007 for their study. "Since 1996, demand for emergency services in the United States has been rising," they wrote. "While the number of emergency departments (EDs) across the country has decreased, the number of ED visits has increased. As a result, EDs are experiencing higher patient volume and overcrowding, and patients seeking care are experiencing longer wait times," they added. "As national health care costs continue to rise and policymakers become increasingly interested in ways to make the health care system more efficient, it is important to understand the characteristics of those individuals who use EDs -- often in place of other sources of ambulatory care." They found that the more income people had, the less likely they were to ever visit an emergency room. People over 75 and blacks were the most likely to visit emergency rooms. The American College of Emergency Physicians published a survey this month showing that 61 percent of emergency doctors surveyed believe U.S. healthcare reform will send even more people to emergency departments. Only 1 percent of the 1,800 doctors surveyed thought visits would decrease. And 47 percent said the reforms signed into law in March would worsen overcrowding in emergency rooms. "It's important to note the report finds that having a usual source of medical care, such as a primary care provider, does not affect the number of times people under age 65 visit the emergency department," Dr. Angela Gardner, president of the American College of Emergency Physicians, said of Wednesday's report.

I did indeed. Better news, but by no means guaranteed.

CBO expects Treasury to lose $34B on the combined auto bailouts (as of March).

Last I checked Ford sold off the entire Jaguar and Land Rover operations no problem. Cerberus bought a crap product, an investment that didn't work out.

Who said anything about converting factories? I would assume she meant other companies (either straight up investment houses or another car maker) would buy profitable factories along with the rights to the cars themselves...

GM (Finally) Makes a Profit, But Some Worries Remain The Atlantic A year after the bailouts that I, among others, opposed, General Motors has announced its first real profit--$1 billion in positive cash flow, and $865 million in net income. At this pace, GM may emerge from bankruptcy and go public by the end of the year, which will allow the government to recoup some of its investment. This is great news for taxpayers, and for GM employees. The company didn't just achieve the profit by cutting costs, but also by improving the revenue side. However, there are still some dark spots on the record: 1. GM achieved its profits at a time when the number one Japanese carmaker was taking a giant hit to its reputation for quality. Yet The Truth About Cars points out that it still slightly lost market share compared to Q12009--which, you will recall, was not exactly a stellar moment for the firm. 2. The Truth About Cars also points out that percentage of fleet sales actually rose, to 31% of all vehicles, and 40% of cars. Fleet sales are often less profitable than retail sales, particularly to car rental firms, and they also depress the secondary market for your product--which in turn makes retail sales less profitable. 3. GM is looking to move back into the auto financing business. It was a truism for years that automakers were actually financial firms with an auto business on the side, and this was one of the reasons that they were hit so hard by the financial crisis. I'd like to see GM develop its core competency as an auto manufacturer again before it dips its toes back into the banking industry. 4. Europe is still struggling, while trucks are performing slightly better than the rest of the company. That means that GM is still having trouble in small cars, doing better on big ones . . . at a time when gas prices are probably headed upwards. But still, it's good news! Everyone should want to see GM do well. Bailouts are, on principle, a bad idea--they murder economic dynamism, and breed really unhealthy relations between corporations, labor unions, and the state. (Yes, unhealthier than what we have now, on the relevant dimensions) Doing this one will make it harder to avoid bailing out other struggling firms. Even if this one had been individually worthwhile, it would still be dangerous because of the precedent. That said, the cost-cutting that made this turnaround possible is an effect of bankruptcy, not of government bailouts. Arguably, the government interest in maximizing the number of UAW jobs has made things worse (though arguably, the financing terms have made things better). The taxpayer is still going to end up losing a giant amount of money on this thing. The notion that America could not have survived the collapse of GM is seriously overwrought. They basically relied on the assumption that if GM was liquidated, all of GM's manufacturing capacity would have disappeared, along with all of the buyers who bought GM cars. But of course, profitable lines would have been sold to other manufacturers, and those other manufacturers would have produced more cars to satisfy market demand, for which they would have purchased more stuff from suppliers. The dislocation would not have been zero, but it would not have rivaled, say, the construction industry. The civic cost of this was large. Rightly or wrongly, this was seen as a payoff to powerful Democratic interest groups in a large state. Not that this is exactly unheard of, but this was very public, and the price tag was very large. Though I think that government should do less stuff, I do not actually think it is a good thing when public trust in institutions erodes further; I want a government that is highly trusted to do the relatively few jobs for which it is uniquely suited.

Quite right SoCal. If people object to this law if police ask everyone for their papers, then it shouldn't be law.