Your Car Questions

As you may (maybe) know, SEMA is right around the corner. As in next week (whoever scheduled it for November 4 needs their head examined). And what is SEMA you may be asking? Well, no one even remembers what “SEMA” stands for, but the show has come to represent all that’s wonderful and/or dreadful in [...]

TTAC called this the moment we heard that Uncle Sam was allocating your taxes– I mean your children’s children’s children’s taxes– to bail out the banker boyz from the sub-prime mess they created. Still, it’s strange to hear GMAC– the lender that poured tens of billions of dollars into GM’s coffers– admit they need to [...]

News flash! Automotive News [AN sub] finally talks to someone on the record! And it’s no less a personage than GM Marketing Maven Mark LaNeve, the man in charge of managing The General’s declining ad budget. To celebrate the occasion, AN’s crack reporters resort to the lazy journalist’s best friend: Q & A. The resulting [...]

Not far to go now. MarketWatch reports that “General Motors Corp.’s creditworthiness came under fire yet again on Monday, with Moody’s Investors Service slashing its debt even deeper into junk territory at Caa2, three rungs above the lowest possible rating.” Ready for some carefully-couched euphemistic double talk? You know you want it. “Moody’s cited its [...]

Automotive News [AN sub] reports that GM is giving workers an extra week off over the holiday period at its Detroit-Hamtramck (Cadillac DTS, Buick Lucerns) and Bowling Green, Ky. (Chrevrolet Corvette, Cadillac XLR) plants. And no wonder. “As of Oct. 1, GM had a 95-day supply of the Corvette and a 215-day supply of the [...]

According to Karey Wutkowski at Reuters, the “The Treasury Department is considering aid of at least $5 billion, which could include direct capital injections and government purchases of auto loans.” The usual anonymous source claimed the decision could be made this week. Wutkowski reports that GM and presumably Chrysler have been lobbying the Bush administration [...]

As bailout after bailout sucks the federal teat dry, the ethanol lobby is finally doing the patriotic thing by taking its insatiable greed for public money to China. Green Car Congress reports that General Motors and its cellulosic ethanol partner Coskata are making the pitch for US-style ethanol subsidies in the Happy Shiny Peoples Republic [...]

Toyota outsold GM globally last year. Of course, GM took the low road and claimed they were still number one by dint of their minority partnerships with Chinese automakers. This year, ToMoCo will lift the crown as the world’s largest automaker– joint ventures or no. Anyway, here in the real world, that gig’s been up [...]

The Detroit News reports that the White House wants the feds to cover GM, Ford and Chrysler’s bad paper. “White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said that GMAC, Ford Motor Credit and Chrysler Financial could be part of the Trouble Asset Relief Program — the $750 billion Wall Street rescue package approved by Congress. ‘It’s possible [...]