CSpec

Or China?

I think this is worryingly like Old GM, where they focused too much on competing with themselves rather than competitors who were eating their lunch. As empowah said, what does this car compete with exactly?

This is the kind of thing that fluctuates in preproduction before the factory starts cranking them out. I bet there will be a few more subtle changes between now and production.

Me too! Usually Americanized sedans of small hatches look ridiculous (see Fiesta and Versa as good examples), but I think this one actually looks pretty good.

Cheers to bobo and Mrs. bobo for the birth of their daughter!

Hydrogen fuel cell with an electric motor for each wheel.

I think this may be a CAFE move.

The trend is strongly in favor of the "one world car". One Focus, one Cruze, etc. You'll have to learn to live with bland designs that are appealing in all cultures. Verano fits that bill nicely.

Pedestrian crash regulations dictate a raised hood to create air between the hood and engine block. My knowledge of this is rusty, but I believe this results in the base of the windshield (where the hood meets it) to be pushed out and up, to create a nice smooth transition when you roll up the hood and onto the windshield. This then pushes the A pillar further out in front of the front wheels, and the door won't line up with it properly. Can anyone verify this?

I have a feeling I'll be most interested in seeing whatever has just been unveiled. The DC auto show is in early Feb and we get a decent number of new models, so I can take some pics as well potentially.

This is a great point and I think more and more car buyers are thinking this way. Having a big engine and a tuned chassis is nice and all on a mountain road, but I don't see how the extra cost is justifiable for most people who just go to work and back. It seems like there was a "horsepower bubble" along with the housing bubble and it's coming back down to earth. I'm sure this car has a higher top speed than you will ever need.

I think it's from crash safety regulations (probably for pedestrian impact). More and more small cars have them, and I would bet you no designer likes them. Empowah might have more to say here.

It has. The economic way of thinking isn't voiced very often in the media and it doesn't have the raw, emotional appeal of alarmism.

Yep, exactly. Japan went through the same process.

And that's the zero-sum thinking I've been on trying to dispel here for months.

I used the term "landed gentry" because every member of this site is waaaaaaay richer than the global median. So relative to an aspiring immigrant in Oaxaca Mexico, we are all extremely well off.

China owns 6% of the world supply of US debt. And yes, China is a stone age society compared to the US. Google some images.

I'm not writing a thesis on the history of racial tensions in Cleveland, Ohio. I was merely linking to a chart that happened to be available demonstrating that Cleveland had a very high immigrant population in the 20s. Using some outside knowledge many of these immigrants were of Eastern European origin. They were most likely working in pretty miserable factories, six days a week. The parallel with Latin American immigrants picking fruit in horrendous conditions is clear. Then I linked to some historical facts about blatant racism against Eastern Europeans, starting with the President of the United States. The President declared that such people were genetically inferior to people who already lived here (what a nice coincidence). Thank God no one talks like that anymore (at least openly). Guess what? Those folks have assimilated completely into American culture. More than that, they helped shape the fluid culture that is "American". The same happens in Spanish households--the "home language" disappears very quickly, to the point that it's very rare for the grandkids to speak it. And guess what else? Those are people. They are people with beating hearts, emotions, and aspirations. They came to this country because it offered opportunity. To the landed gentry (the readers of this forum), they are doing work that we would never consider. They left everything behind, lugged their meager possessions across the ocean (or desert) and landed in a completely mysterious land, just for the chance to work hard to give their children a better life. That's what made America great: the work ethic and entrepreneurial zeal of those who had the initiative and gumption to leave it all behind to come here. As I linked above, there has always been a pernicious movement to cap immigration throughout the history of this country. If the Immigration Restriction League had succeeded in 1890, how many people on this forum would be in Belarus or Sicily or some other backwater, if they were even lucky enough to survive the Bloodlands of the Second World War? We evolved to be suspicious of foreigners, for the vast majority of human history was spent in hunter-gatherer tribes with a fixed allotment food, and other tribes were the enemy. We must fight the urge of this base instinct.

Sheesh. I suspect Cadillac is working on replacing the 2.8t with something else.

On a per capita GDP basis, China is where the US was in about 1925.

Fixed.

Really, balthazar? Really? Some random excerpts from Wikipedia: Irish and German Catholic immigration was opposed in the 1850s by the Nativist/Know Nothing movement, originating in New York in 1843 as the American Republican Party. It was empowered by popular fears that the country was being overwhelmed by Catholic immigrants, who were often regarded as hostile to American values and controlled by the Pope in Rome. By the 1890s, many Americans, particularly from the ranks of the well-off, white, native-born, considered immigration to pose a serious danger to the nation’s health and security. In 1893 a group of them formed the Immigration Restriction League, and it, along with other similarly inclined organizations, began to press Congress for severe curtailment of foreign immigration. In 1938, there was an immigration that never happened. The immigration of the oppressed from Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler's policies was limited to only a small fraction of those who wanted to leave Germany. Due in part to anti-Semitism, isolationism, the Depression and xenophobia, the immigration policy of the Roosevelt Administration made it very difficult for refugees to obtain entry visas. And more: In the Pacific States, racism was primarily directed against the resident Asian immigrants. Several immigration laws discriminated against the Asians, and at different points the ethnic Chinese or other groups were banned from entering the United States. The San Francisco Vigilance Movement, although ostensibly a response to crime and corruption, also systematically victimized Irish immigrants, and later this was transformed into mob violence against Chinese immigrants. Anti-Chinese sentiment was also rife in early Los Angeles, culminating in a notorious 1871 riot in which a mob comprising every other nationality then resident in the city. Legal discrimination of Asian minorities was furthered with the passages of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned the entrance of virtually all ethnic Chinese immigrants into the United States until 1943. The 20th century saw racism against immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe (notably Italian-Americans and Polish Americans), partly from anti-Catholic sentiment (as against Irish-Americans), and partly from Nordicism, which considered Southern Europeans and Eastern Europeans inferior. I was mainly referring to Nordicism when I said that the Cleveland immigrants were probably reviled. Want to know more about repugnant government policies that would make Hitler proud? [Eugenicist Madison] Grant used the theory as justification for immigration policies of the 1920s, arguing immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe represented a lesser type of European and their numbers in the United States should not be increased. Grant and others urged this as well as the complete restriction of non-Europeans, such as the Chinese and Japanese. Grant argued the Nordic race had been responsible for most of humanity's great achievements, and admixture was "race suicide" and unless eugenic policies were enacted, the Nordic race would be supplanted by inferior races. Future president Calvin Coolidge agreed, stating "Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides." The Immigration Act of 1924 was signed into law by President Coolidge. This was designed to reduce the number of Eastern and Southern European immigrants, exclude Asian immigrants altogether, and favor immigration from Northern and Western European countries such as Britain, Ireland and Germany. How many people on this forum are what we consider "white" today, but racists in the 20s would not? How would you feel if you had to grow up in the Soviet Union, if you were even born?

This. I also seem to remember that American cars broke down all the time before China's little brother started sending us their evil wares.

My point was that there were many reviled immigrants in the 20s as well. I would assume they ended up in Cleveland to do dirty manufacturing work. Yep. It's very difficult to conceptualize how much richer we are now than even 20 years ago.