This Curbside Classic took the same trajectory as the Blazer. It started as a legitimate nod of acknowledgment to the S-10 Blazer as the trailblazer of the compact SUV market. But as I got further along, I realized just how badly GM bungled the huge opportunity for the baby Blazer in a segment that became a monster money machine for Jeep and Ford. With the mistakes being all so prototypical GM, I just had to re-write it as a Deadly Sin, even though it would have been easier to just leave it as it was. Which is exactly what GM’s Deadly Sin was: leave it as it was, forever. Well I’m not ready just yet to have someone document my Deadly Journalistic Sins, so here goes: Blazer, take Two.

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No one’s going to accuse me of not having a nostalgic streak, especially when it comes to cars. That’s what motivated me to write the Auto-biography, my time travel through words. How about the real thing, in steel, glass, rubber and wool? One of my main motivations for starting Curbside Classics was to document and re-experience the cars from those early years, and few were as influential as the original Olds 88. Most of the time, the reliving is somewhat vicarious, but once in a while, I get lucky, and it’s the real thing. So let’s literally open the door to the past, and hop in for a ride with me in this beautiful 1951 Super 88. And if it gets a bit crowded, good; that’ll make it all the more authentic. (Read More…)

GM’s first post-bankruptcy financial data has arrived, underscoring in red ink the folly of the government “investment” in the shambling zombie once known as General Motors. Bankruptcy-driven improvements in cost structure have not prevented GM from turning a non-GAAP-certified loss since emerging from Chapter 11, and GM is already warning that 4th quarter results will be even less attractive. More importantly, beneath all of the interpretation of this latest batch of weak results, rests the biggest lie of all: GM will be paying back the taxpayers. GM has simply defined the terms of its debt as $6.7b, or about half the amount remaining in its $16b bankruptcy-present escrow account. The plan is to have the taxpayers pay off GM’s debt to the taxpayers, and collect the remaining $6b or so for operating cash.  When called on the ruse, GM CEO Fritz Henderson has only one defense: Taxpayers will receive their just reward only when GM’s IPO relieves them of their 60 percent equity stake. But even with the goalposts moving up in hopes of a PR win, there’s little evidence that GM will come close to paying off their full bailout bill.

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Passenger pigeons were the most common bird found in North America. So common that flocks numbering 2 billion were up to a mile wide and 300 miles long. In other words, the average North American in the 18th and 19th Century saw a lot of these pigeons. You could easily argue that a passenger pigeon sighting in 1812 was something on the same scale today as seeing mind-numbing crap on TV. Not a particularly noteworthy or unique experience. So what took the passenger pigeon down? It was a combination of things but the biggest factor was that these pigeons tasted pretty good (a lot like chicken) and they were plentiful-hence a cheap source of food.bThey were wiped out at the pace of millions per year, so the last documented passenger pigeon named Martha died on September 1st 1914. In other words, something the average American had seen every day was extinct in a matter of a few decades. Quick extinction of a very common species is not a phenomenon exclusive to Mother Nature because cars can disappear overnight too. Here are a few that will soon be joining that “whatever happened to…” list.
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For politicians, the sphere of the personal shrinks as that of the political swells, until for some, the personal all but disappears. Then, even the choice of car becomes political. During the recent elections, one car loomed so large in the fleets of presidential aspirants that the manufacturer actually touted it as “The Candidates’ Choice” in advertisements that ran in Capitol Hill publications, such as Roll Call. Even more tellingly, the particular vehicle was unique to the left side of the aisle, and all were 2007 models, purchased after election season had begun.

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Not long after Fortune’s long time auto writer Alex Taylor III finished his apology to Ford he went on to write a love letter to Sergio Marchionne. Taylor starts with parallels to Ghosn’s myth making success at Nissan, then ups the ante: “The other day in Auburn Hills, Mich., Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne took a page out of the Ghosn playbook — and then improved upon it.” The impetus for Taylor’s piece was the legendary Power Point Rumble in the Detroit Jungle TTAC’s Edward Niedermeyer reported on with, um, slightly less enthusiasm last week .

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Oregonians have long treasured the random little collectable objects that Japan’s artisans inadvertently send our way. Usually that takes the form of beautiful hand-blown glass fishing floats that spend years or decades bobbing in the Pacific before a storm washes them on our shores. But occasionally another form of distinctly Japanese objet d’art finds its way ashore, like this Nissan Pao. (Read More…)

Look at this car and what do you see: Eleanor, star of the original 1974 “Gone in 60 Seconds” movie? All the worst excess and ugliness of the early seventies folded up into one bloated pile? A long stripe of black rubber burned into a country road? The destruction of an American icon? Nostalgia for a simpler and more innocent time? Nothing at all, if you’re trying to look out the back window? Put me down for all of the above, as well as a couple of lasting lessons this Mustang taught me.

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On Tuesday, twenty years after the fall of the wall that separated the two Germanies, German Chancellor Angela Merkel went to Washington. For the first time since Germany’s Chancellor Adenauer in 1957, the topmost German addressed Congress—to roaring applause.

There was another wall. A wall of silence. Nobody in the US government—owner of General Motors—supposedly had heard a whisper that their most expensive ward of the state had changed their mind, decided to keep Opel, and go home alone. Before the speech, Angela chatted with Barack about high finance and the crock of shit also known as global warming. Not a peep about Opel.
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Hybrids are big in Eugene, but some are just plain huge. The Prius is the official new car here, having dethroned Subaru. But here’s a hybrid of a different color: instead of a marriage of two drive systems, it’s a cross between two brands, the engine of one transplanted into another. Back in the day, when these were popular, the goal was speed, not better mileage. And the resulting names of these cross-species hybrids were more colorful than Prius or Insight: Fordillac, Studillac, Fordick, Fordolet. Well, here’s a new one: a Chevmobile. (Read More…)