CSpec

Ouch, what a poor launch time.

Yes, it's not very good. However, GM should shout this survey from the rooftops.

Yeah I don't get that either--I would love to have a rear wiper on my 9-5.

Looks kinda chubby. Still, this is definitely better than a Suburban.

Wow, those are a big improvement over the cheap knockoffs.

I didn't know the Malibu was made at Orion with the G6...

I don't like the looks of the R8, but by all accounts it is a brilliant piece of engineering. The V10 should be even better.

I hope Obama doesn't spew the BS Hillary did about NAFTA being the worst thing to ever happen to the US. If he does, he will be lying because his (quite good) economic advisers have already told the Canadian government to not worry about his NAFTA "position" anyway.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121424094257797029.html GM Slates Sweeping Rebates As Toyota Closes In on No. 1 By JEFF BENNETT, NEAL E. BOUDETTE and SERENA NG, June 24th 2008 On the verge of ceding its crown as America's best-selling car company, General Motors Corp. announced further production cuts as well as sweeping new incentives on many 2008 models -- a reversal of recent strategy and a fresh sign of how badly rising gasoline prices are slamming auto makers. GM, Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler LLC have been trying for over two years to back away from heavy incentives, which eat into profit margins and tarnish brands in the eyes of some consumers. But a worsening of the slump in car and light-truck sales this month is forcing the Detroit companies to go all out to halt sales declines. Through the first half of June, normally a strong period, U.S. auto sales were running at an annualized rate of about 12.5 million vehicles, according to J.D. Power & Associates. It was the lowest level for June in decades and a huge drop from the year-ago rate of 16.3 million vehicles. For GM, the June swoon has an added peril: Without a sales surge in the next few days, it risks losing its U.S.-sales crown to Toyota Motor Corp. for the month. That would be a first and a powerful symbol of Detroit's long decline. GM's stock-market value now stands at just $7.8 billion, compared with Toyota's $154 billion. The GM figure reflects a further fall of 6.4% Monday. GM shares closed at $12.91 -- near a 33-year low, adjusted for stock splits -- in 4 p.m. trading on the New York Stock Exchange. While offering incentives on 2008 models, GM said it intends to raise prices on 2009 vehicles an average of 3.5% to help offset a surge in steel prices and rises in the costs of other materials. In hopes of spurring vehicle sales, GM said it would offer zero-percent loans for up to 72 months or cash rebates of up to $7,000. In a conference call, GM's top marketing executive for North America, Mark LaNeve, said the offers should help dealers move some of the pickups and SUVs they have in inventory, which have become hard to sell and are rapidly falling in value. "Zero percent seems to work," Mr. LaNeve said. He added that recent declines in the value of used trucks have left some customers driving vehicles worth less than is owed on them, making it hard for owners to trade them in on new models. "A lot of customers are out of equity, and zero percent helps [with] that issue," he said. A GM spokesman said the new round of incentives isn't aimed at keeping GM ahead of Toyota. Decades ago, GM controlled half of the U.S. market. By 2000, its share was down to 30%, but that was still triple the 9.3% Toyota had. In the past several years, Toyota has expanded its lineup, adding light trucks and luxury vehicles that have increased its market share. Even as fuel prices began rising, GM guessed that light trucks would remain big sellers. Last month, with sales of such vehicles in free-fall, GM's share of the U.S. vehicle market sank to 19.4%, according to Autodata Corp. -- the first time in a half century or more it was below 20%. Toyota, meanwhile, gained share on strong sales of its passenger cars. Toyota's market share in May reached a high of 18.6%, less than one percentage point behind GM's. In May, GM's U.S. sales of trucks and SUVs were 37% below those of May 2007, the biggest decline in the segment among the major auto makers. GM said Monday it plans to shutter assembly plants in Arlington, Texas; Fort Wayne, Ind.; Janesville, Wis.; Shreveport, La.; Silao, Mexico; and Oshawa, Ontario, for anywhere from one to 10 weeks from July through the remainder of the year. These shutdowns will be in addition to the usual two-week summer down-time schedule. Just a few weeks ago, GM announced it would close four plants permanently between now and 2010. Decades ago, GM controlled half of the U.S. market. By 2000, its share was down to 30%, but that was still triple the 9.3% Toyota had. In the past several years, Toyota has expanded its lineup, adding light trucks and luxury vehicles that have increased its market share. Even as fuel prices began rising, GM guessed that light trucks would remain big sellers. Last month, with sales of such vehicles in free-fall, GM's share of the U.S. vehicle market sank to 19.4%, according to Autodata Corp. -- the first time in a half century or more it was below 20%. Toyota, meanwhile, gained share on strong sales of its passenger cars. Toyota's market share in May reached a high of 18.6%, less than one percentage point behind GM's. In May, GM's U.S. sales of trucks and SUVs were 37% below those of May 2007, the biggest decline in the segment among the major auto makers. GM said Monday it plans to shutter assembly plants in Arlington, Texas; Fort Wayne, Ind.; Janesville, Wis.; Shreveport, La.; Silao, Mexico; and Oshawa, Ontario, for anywhere from one to 10 weeks from July through the remainder of the year. These shutdowns will be in addition to the usual two-week summer down-time schedule. Just a few weeks ago, GM announced it would close four plants permanently between now and 2010. The company said Monday it is adding shifts at car and crossover-vehicle (car-based SUVs) plants in Fairfax, Kan., and Lansing, Mich. GM now expects to produce 170,000 fewer light trucks -- a category that includes pickups and SUVs -- in the second half of this year than in the second half of 2007. It plans to increase car production by 47,000 from the total in the second half of 2007. Last week, Ford announced similar cuts in light-truck production. The new GM incentives could spur Ford and Chrysler to make similar offers. The Big Three typically match one another's incentives. Ford said it monitors incentives by competitors but has no plans at this time to match GM's. Chrysler said it doesn't plan to increase incentives. Toyota, which has pushed into trucks and SUVs in the past few years and has bloated inventories of those models, could also be forced to join the incentive game. The drop in pickup and SUV sales has raised concerns about whether GM, Ford and Chrysler have enough cash to keep them going through this difficult period. On Wall Street, the cost of insuring against a default in GM's bonds has soared to a high in recent weeks as fears of a bankruptcy-court filing have grown. An investor who wants to buy credit protection on $10 million in GM's bonds for five years currently has to pay $2.8 million upfront and $500,000 annually for that insurance, through what are called credit-default swaps. A year ago, that protection cost only $400,000 annually, with no upfront cost, according to Credit Derivatives Research LLC. The need for an upfront payment means the market regards GM as likely to default over the next few years. Based on market prices, debt investors currently see more than a 70% chance that GM will default on its obligations sometime in the next five years, said Boaz Weinstein, co-head of credit trading at Deutsche Bank AG. A spokesman for GM said it has sufficient liquidity for 2008. He declined to comment on 2009. The cost of insurance on GM's debt also spiked in mid-2005, when there were questions about the auto maker's solvency, but the cost fell sharply in 2006 after GM managed to raise a sizable cash cushion by selling assets. Trading in GM's credit-default swaps is still active, but as the cost of credit protection rises, investors who hold GM bonds have to pay significantly more to hedge their positions. The swaps also are traded by many hedge funds and others who don't own GM bonds but use the swaps simply to bet for or against a default at the company. In the past week or so, GM has halted development on its next generation of pickups and SUVs. It is trying to reassess what mix of cars, trucks and other vehicles is likely to appeal to consumers in a few years. GM is considering selling its Hummer brand. On Monday, the company said it had hired Citigroup to work on a possible sale.

I have one to London in late August. Land in Heathrow at 5:15 am local time, oh joy.

Buick Rainier

YES! That was my favorite show when I was like 4. He replaced Ringo Starr no?

Pontiac GTO

What about Skype?

Wow, Hummer is moving along quickly. Price increases were inevitable, given the price of steel nowadays.

Nothing that eathshattering here. I guess the BRX is going to be called SRX though?

Reliability does not necessarily equal desirability...

http://www.economist.com/specialreports/di...ory_id=11565627 NOTHING ages faster than the future. A few years ago there was general agreement that if the internal-combustion engine ever was replaced by something clean, that something would be the fuel cell. A fuel cell is a way of reacting hydrogen and oxygen together in a controlled way and extracting electricity from the process. It was to be the precursor of what was known as the hydrogen economy, in which that gas would replace fossil fuels and power almost everything. Leaving aside the problems of transporting and storing a light and leaky gas, what no one was very clear about was where the hydrogen itself would come from. You would have to make it from something else. That something would either be a mixture of fossil fuel and water (fuels can be reacted with steam to make hydrogen and carbon dioxide, but you still have to get rid of the carbon dioxide), or just water itself, via electrolysis. But why bother? Why not cut out the middleman and plug your car directly into the electricity mains instead? And that, it seems, is what may happen. You don't hear much about the hydrogen economy these days. Nor fuel cells. The buzz-phrase now is “plug-in hybrid”. Plug-ins should not be confused with existing hybrid vehicles, such as Toyota's Prius, which contains an internal-combustion engine as well as two electric ones. Either sort may drive the wheels. The electric motors kick in when they can do a more efficient job than the petrol engine, but even then the electricity comes ultimately, via batteries, from burning petrol. In a plug-in, the electricity comes from the mains, via an ordinary electrical socket. Some intermediate designs retain the idea of two sorts of engine, but the goal is that the car should be powered by electric motors alone. If the batteries run down, a petrol-powered generator will take over. (Existing batteries are too expensive to give such a car the range of a standard petrol-driven machine.) But most cars, most of the time, are used for short journeys. Gerbrand Ceder, a battery scientist at MIT, reckons that if the first 50km of an average car's daily range were provided by batteries rather than petrol, annual petrol consumption would be halved. Given that the electrical equivalent of a litre of petrol costs about 25 cents, that is an attractive reduction. The widespread adoption of plug-ins might also reduce carbon-dioxide emissions, depending on what sort of power station made the electricity in the first place. Even energy from a coal-fired station is less polluting than the serial explosions that drive an internal-combustion engine. If the energy comes from a source such as wind or nuclear, the gain is enormous. Beyond that, the rise of plug-ins has implications for the electricity industry itself. If they succeed, they will put an unanticipated load on the system. In fact, they may remake electricity as well as transport. Don't all recharge at once That is certainly the view of Peter Corsell of Gridpoint, a company based in Arlington, Virginia. His firm hopes to make its living selling the load-management technology required for "smart grids". There are several reasons why such technology is desirable. Mr Corsell goes one further: he reckons it will become essential if plug-ins arrive in force. At the moment, the grid would be unable to cope if a large number of commuters arriving home plugged in their cars more or less simultaneously to recharge them. Yet if those same cars were recharged at three o’clock in the morning, when demand is low, it would benefit both consumer (who would get cheap power) and producer (who would be able to sell otherwise wasted electricity). Such cars might even act as micro-peakers—reservoirs of electrical energy that a power company could draw on if a car were not on the road. Managing plug-ins, Mr Corsell thinks, will be the smart grid's killer application. In sunny climes, plug-ins might also provide another use for solar cells. Google is already experimenting with photovoltaic car parks. These have awnings covered in solar cells which will shade its employees' cars and simultaneously recharge them. That is an idea which could spread. Supermarkets, for example, might find that car parks with plugs would attract customers who wanted to top up their cars. And the more opportunities there are for stationary cars to be recharged, the more likely they are to be bought. Plug-ins are moving from idea to reality with amazing speed. General production of the Tesla, Elon Musk's new sports car, began in March (the firm is Californian, but the cars are built in Britain). The Tesla is not even a hybrid. It draws all of its power from lithium-ion batteries (the sort that power laptop computers), and it has a range of 350km. It can manage that because its price of $109,000 buys a lot of batteries; Tesla owners are not the sort who count their pennies. Nor is the Tesla the only sports car to go down this road. Electric motors may lack a throaty roar, but they actually do a better job than petrol engines in high-performance vehicles. They have higher torque at low revs which makes them accelerate faster. In Britain a new firm called the Lightning Car Company plans to revive the country's sports-car tradition with the Lightning GT. Mr Musk also faces competition in California, from Fisker Automotive, whose eponymous founder Henrik Fisker helped design the Tesla. (Tesla Motors is now suing Fisker for infringing its intellectual property.) Mass-production plug-ins are not far away either, and the rising price of petrol makes them look more attractive by the day. General Motors intends to launch a plug-in hybrid called the Volt by 2010, and Toyota plans a plug-in version of the Prius. Most of the other big car firms are making me-too noises. Only Honda and Mercedes seem to be sticking enthusiastically to fuel cells. It is all very encouraging. But what would really make a difference would be a breakthrough in battery technology. At the moment, lithium-ion batteries are the favoured variety. This kind of battery uses lithium in its ionic form (ie, with the atoms stripped of an electron to make them positive). When the battery is fully charged, these ions hang around one of its electrodes, the anode, which is usually made of graphite. During operation, the ions migrate within the battery from this electrode to the other one, the cathode, and electrons (which are negatively charged) pass between the electrodes through an external circuit. It is that current of electrons which drives the motor. The cathode may be made of a variety of materials. Cobalt oxide is traditional but expensive. Manganese oxide is becoming popular. But the future probably lies with iron phosphate, which has less of a tendency to overheat, a problem that has resulted in battery recalls in the past. Iron phosphate certainly will be the future if General Motors has anything to do with it. GM is collaborating with A123Systems, a firm started by Dr Ceder’s colleague Yet-Ming Chiang, to develop batteries with iron-phosphate cathodes for the Volt. A123's particular trick is that the iron phosphate in its cathodes comes in the form of precisely engineered nanoparticles. This increases the surface area available for the lithium ions to react with when the current is flowing, so such batteries can be charged and discharged rapidly. The Lightning, too, is making use of nanotechnology. Its batteries, developed by Altairnano of Reno, Nevada, replace the graphite anode with one made of lithium titanate nanoparticles. The firm claims that its batteries are not only safer (graphite can burn; lithium titanate cannot), but can also be recharged more rapidly. Using a 480-volt outlet, such as might be found in a roadside service station, the job should be done in ten minutes. Dr Ceder reckons he may be able to do even better than this. His version of an iron-phosphate battery can charge or discharge in ten seconds. It, too, could be recharged rapidly at a roadside filling station. He reckons the process would have to be controlled to stop overheating, but a safe refill would take only five minutes. And he thinks batteries might get better still. The 30,000-compound question At the moment the process of finding better electrode materials is haphazard, but Dr Ceder proposes to make it systematic. Over the centuries, chemists have discovered about 30,000 inorganic chemical compounds (those that are not based around carbon skeletons), almost any of which might theoretically be suitable material for an electrode. Examining the relevant properties of all of them in the laboratory is out of the question, but Dr Ceder thinks he has found a short cut. He is involved in something called the materials genome project, which takes the known properties of inorganic compounds and turns them into extremely sophisticated computer models. These models are able to calculate the quantum-mechanical properties of the chemicals they are mimicking—and they seem to get it right. When Dr Ceder has checked the predictions for hitherto untested materials by conducting real experiments, he has found that the results coincide. The materials genome project obviously has much wider applications than battery electrodes, but that is where Dr Ceder has started. His computer is now chewing its way through the chemical encyclopedia, looking for the likeliest candidates. Watch this space.

PCS, you wouldn't have some ulterior motive for staring this thread, would you? Like an homage to a dead brand?

Indeed it is. http://www.cheersandgears.com/forums/index...showtopic=24217

Isn't this the same photo that I posted last week?

I think what people say they will do if the brand is cut and what they will actually buy don't necessarily agree.

Wow it's been a while since I've seen that!

Yeah the Cobalt is a good option if you're looking at Fit money, but not Civic money.