In the state of California, the ugly yellow sticker you see here was, for a time, one of the most sought-after automotive accessories around. People would buy a car specifically to get one, or pay a couple thousand more on the used market for a car that already had one.
What’s so special? If you were lucky enough to have one affixed to your car, you could drive solo in the carpool lane. The idea was to kickstart hybrid sales, which at the time were languishing because gas was cheap and, I’ll bet, a bit of technophobia on the part of the general public. In chronically congested California, the idea of zipping along in the carpool lane without Bob from accounting nattering in your ear the whole time was too good to resist, and the 85,000 stickers were snapped up quickly, with the last one issued in February, 2007. The stickers even added between $1,000 and $2,000 to the used car value of your hybrid (most often a Prius or Civic Hybrid) if you were lucky enough to get one.
However, the program’s days were numbered from the start. Initially supposed to expire in 2008, the deadline was moved to 2011. Now that deadline is fast approaching, and the subject of extending it until 2016 is under consideration. Opponents say that the work is done, and they make a great point. The Prius hardly needs help selling these days, and hybrids with similar or better mileage than the original Prius are all over these days. Besides, hybrids are most efficient when they’re stuck in traffic anyhow, using all those great electrons stored in the batteries instead of that nasty gasoline they consume at high speeds. Diesels like the Jetta TDI are generally more efficient at steady-state highway speeds than most hybrids anyhow, so why don’t they get a sticker? In addition, the carpool lanes are so crowded these days that kicking all these hybrid people out makes sense.
The effort to extend the program won’t even cover current hybrid owners. One version under consideration would only offer the stickers to pure electric or alternative fuel vehicles (which currently get a white sticker that does the same thing as the yellow one), and another would give the hybrid sticker to vehicles with a combined city/highway mpg rating of 65 or higher, something no car currently available achieves. Either way, it looks like Prius owners will have to commute with the rest of us schlubs in the regular ol’ lanes starting in 2011.
How many times have we heard an old-timer saying something along the lines of “Back in my day cars were cars made of tough stuff, not these flimsy little tin cans we have today!” As their eyes get misty, they wax on about how solidly built cars of yore were, and how they’d much rather be in a big vintage American boat than anything modern. Those sure were the days.
Yeah, right.
To celebrate 50 years of smashing things, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety put money to mouth, crashing a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air – about as big and heavy as they come, mind you – into a 2009 Chevrolet Malibu. The results speak for themselves.
Wow. I mean…wow. The windshield on the Malibu doesn’t even crack. The Bel Air, however, folds faster than Superman on laundry day. So you can have your nostalgia. I’ll take the one that’ll save my life.
When GM filed its history-making Chapter 11 bankruptcy back in June, a new plan was immediately announced that would eliminate four of the company’s eight brands, restructure with a ton of government assistance, and so on and so forth. At the time, I wrote that while the new GM was definitely a step in the right direction, the new company didn’t shed enough brands, and should have ditched GMC and Buick as well.
Not everyone agreed, and my friend and colleague Rich Truesdell at Automotive Traveler noted a conversation he had with AutoPacific’s Stephanie Brinley, who thinks the new GM is just the right size, with the right number of brands.
On the other hand, last week Advertising Age threw down on my side of the argument. According to consultant Maryann Keller, Susan Jacobs of Jacobs & Associates and AutoPacific president George Peterson, the article reaches the same basic conclusion that I did, that there are too many brands, even now, and that GM’s limited resources would be better spent on making Cadillac and Chevrolet great, rather than trying to keep GMC and Buick around for dubious reasons.
Peterson in particular points out GM’s marketing foibles, especially with regards to the Chevy Malibu and the Chevy Camaro. The Malibu hasn’t gotten much advertising love since its 2007 debut, and the Camaro has relied mostly on good press in buff books. The basic question is that if the Malibu is an anchor for the Chevy brand, why not advertise it? And with a traffic-driver like the Camaro on the floor, why not lift the whole brand with an aggressive ad campaign?
I guess it’s true: The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Well, so much for that. Only days after announcing that the Pontiac G8 would return to the U.S. market as a Chevrolet Caprice, General Motors vice chairman Bob Lutz has announced that the rear-drive sport sedan is well and truly dead for the U.S. market after all. Sounds like the right hand gave the left one a smackdown, if you ask me.
Posting on GM’s Fast Lane blog, Lutz said that with his new “marketing hat” on, he couldn’t make the case for a high-level sedan for Chevrolet, considering that the company is in a cost-cutting and fuel-efficiency-enhancing mode.
In the meantime, if you’re a fan of the Pontiac G8 GXP, you’d better get one quickly. According to Jalopnik, Pontiac marketing chief Cheryl Catton has said that only 2000 of the sport sedans will be built, along with 2000 examples of the Pontiac Solstice Coupe GXP. If you like hot Pontiacs (and maybe want to gamble on a future classic), you’d better get one pronto.
This just in: the Pontiac Vibe, a car that should have sold better than it did, will no longer be produced after August, 2009. In a statement just released, GM declared, “As part of its long-term viability plan and recent decision to phase out the Pontiac brand, General Motors has decided to discontinue production of the Pontiac Vibe.” This is a somewhat abrupt — but not wholly unexpected — turnaround, considering that other sources had indicated that the Vibe would last through the 2010 model year.
The Vibe was produced in Fremont, Calif. at the New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. plant, better known as NUMMI. This joint venture between GM and Toyota was established in the 1980s and has since then concentrated largely on producing rebadged Toyota Corollas and Matrixes (Matrices?) for the Chevrolet and Pontiac divisions, respectively. At the time, GM CEO Roger Smith had hoped to get a peek under the veil of what made Toyotas so darn good; he thought it was robots, but it turned out that Toyota was simply better at using ordinary people to put cars together. GM, having failed to learn the lesson it had hoped to, instead learned almost nothing from the NUMMI plant. Toyota, meanwhile, found a neat way to skirt “voluntary” import restrictions.
Anyhow, so much for the Vibe. If you want this nifty looking, practical and inexpensive five-door hatchback, you’d better get one quick.
A couple days ago, rumors surfaced that the tiny Swedish supercar maker Koenigsegg was in negotiations to buy Saab from GM. This David buying Goliath scenario is almost laughable on the face of it, I mean, how could a tiny manufacturer of million dollar exotic sports cars — albeit very good million dollar supercars — possibly have the money to buy a mainline manufacturer like Saab?
Turns out they don’t have the money, so they asked the European Investment Bank for $600 million to get the job done.
As part of the agreement, Koenigsegg — and by extension, the EIB — will get full control of Saab, including its upcoming product lineup which includes a new 9-5, 9-3, and a rumored crossover based on the same highly touted chassis that’s now doing service in the Saturn Vue, Cadillac SRX, GMC Terrain and the upcoming Chevy Equinox. It will also get a company with significantly squandered brand value that hasn’t turned a profit in a decade, and one that will have to struggle along with mediocre GM knockoffs until the new wondercars are ready.
So, has Koenigsegg bitten off more than it can chew, as the graphic above suggests? Time will tell, but I maintain that a small niche manufacturer like Koenigsegg is just what Saab needs. Let’s face it: Koenigsegg is nothing if not focused on making excellent cars that blow away expectations. If it can bring that kind of sensibility to Saab, the brand could witness a resurgence the likes of which are unrivaled.
On the other hand, it could be a $600 million dollar boondoggle. Thoughts? Sound off in the poll below!
You may have noticed things working a little slowly the past day or so. I recently upgraded to the newest version of Wordpress, and it seems to have made a few things go kablooey somewhere under the hood. I’m working to resolve the issue, but in the meantime, I ask for a little patience, and for you to check back frequently. I’ll update this post once the issue — whatever it is — is finally resolved. In the meantime, if you are a Wordpress blogger yourself and have run into a similar issue (severe slowdowns), drop me a line.
Update: Well, things seem to be back to normal…for now. Of course, having said that, I’m sure that I’ve jinxed it and probably made it much, much worse. So if the Internet has completely collapsed tomorrow with the resulting international chaos, well, sorry about that folks.
After months of buildup, loans, headlines, anticipation and more speculation about the what-ifs than one could ever have predicted, General Motors, the 102-year-old preeminent U.S. automaker, once holder of more than half of all U.S. domestic marketshare, innovator of countless technologies, has filed for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11.
It’s about time.
While bankruptcy talk has been in the mainstream media for the past several months, a colleague of mine once quipped that GM had been going bankrupt for the past 30 years. At the time, I was quite a bit younger, and thought she was just being a smartass. However, over the years I realized that she was absolutely correct.
GM posted its first loss for 59 years in 1980, after the dismal decade of the 70s tanked car sales and left the company with an uncompetitive lineup of cars. During the 80s, its market share plummeted from 45 percent to less than 35 percent thanks to lousy products like the Chevy Citation and its offspring, the Pontiac Fiero, craptacular minivans and tons of other woefully uncompetitive products. At the same time, the company wasted billions launching Saturn, a wholly redundant car company that was in many ways an admission that GM’s existing five divisions were so hidebound in the way they did things that they were incapable of building a decent small car.
Of course, that’s all history. One can talk about lousy GM cars until the end of time; the Corvair, the Vega, the Fiero, the Aztek, and countless other flops. Tons of pundits are weighing in of course, and the New York Times has a great timeline of GM’s success, and failures, along with relevant articles.
However, despite all the talk of “Government Motors,” the death of capitalism, taxpayers on the hook and tons of other doomsday scenarios, I think GM’s bankruptcy is the best news to come out of the company in decades. The company will be smaller, leaner, have a new board of directors and the best of its current product lineup. Problem is, it doesn’t go far enough. read more from "GM Finally Declares Bankruptcy; New GM Doesn’t Go Far Enough"
One would think that, in this day and age of modern technology, that the age-old practice of grinding axes would have gone the way of blacksmithing. However, Jeremy Clarkson — host and chief bombasticator of the terrific BBC show Top Gear — has proved that there’s still a place for it in his recent review of the 2010 Honda Insight. Calling the car “biblically terrible,” he goes on to say, for example, that the only way to truly appreciate the engine noise is to sit a dog on a meat slicer.
Yow. Hyperbole much, Jeremy?
Now, he can love or hate whatever car he wants, obviously. He’s a big boy, and as one of automotive journalism’s most respected voices, his opinion carries some weight. However, it’s clear from the tone of the article that he has come to the Insight with a preconceived notion about hybrids and their overall impact in the world, and then goes on and cites multiple reasons about why they’re a net negative on the environment because of the materials that are shipped overseas, such as the nickel for its batteries coming from Canada.
Automotive News is reporting that Chrysler will eliminate 789 of its dealerships by June 9 according to bankruptcy court filings. This represents 25 percent of Chrysler’s current dealerships, and thousands of jobs. Furthermore, Chrysler will not be buying back the vehicles, parts or tools, but will instead find dealerships that are remaining open to buy the inventory. The more than 4 million customers of these dealerships will be notified on June 9, when the stores close. While the rejected dealers won’t get new cars, they will still sell the cars they have until June 9, and any incentives and warranties will remain intact.
The impact on employment numbers is potentially big as well. AN quotes Steven Landry, Chrysler’s executive vice president of sales, as saying that the majority of the dealerships will continue on, either as used car stores or selling a competing product, and Chrysler co-president Jim Press says that many of the targeted dealerships are below the national average of 48 employees per dealership. However, if even 10 percent of the dealerships close outright, that’s potentially thousands of jobs lost.
Why these dealers? AN reports that 658 of the dealers — more than 80 percent — already sell more used vehicles than new ones. In addition, 345 of them are under the same roof as a competitive dealership that is stronger than the Chrysler one. Many of them don’t conform to Project Genesis, a consolidation process to put all three Chrysler brands (Chrysler, Dodge and Jeep) under one roof. Landry says that many of them sell fewer than 100 new vehicles a year.
Is your local dealership affected? If you can’t wait for the June 9 letter, the full list is below in PDF format.
In the state of California, the ugly yellow sticker you see here was, for a time, one of the most sought-after automotive accessories around. People would buy a car specifically to get one, or pay a couple thousand more on the used market for a car that already had one.
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