“Chrysler Group has elevated the art of the striptease to a new level with the release of its first official image of the next-generation SRT Viper,” claims Automotive News [sub] . Not just the art of the striptease. Also the fine art practiced by the  bar maiden who purrs into your pricked ear: “If you come here more often, then maybe …”

On its driveSRT Facebook page, Chrysler asked Facebook users for virtual petting: “Like” the driveSRT page at least 10,000 times, and Chrysler will show you a picture of the next Viper.

On Monday evening, the Facebook page had 12,000 likes. Chrysler had to ante up. At midnight, hyperventilating Viper-aficionados were given the picture above.

See, that`s what you get when you hang out with bar girls.

According to AN, Chrysler is restarting its shuttered Conner Avenue Assembly plant to build the Viper later this year as a 2013 model. Production of the previous Viper ended in 2010.

I remember looking at the then brand new Ford Five Hundred and thinking to myself, “This would make one heck of a Volvo.”

Like the Volvos of yore this Ford offered a squarish conservative appearance. A high seating position which Volvo’s ‘safety oriented’ customers would have appreciated. Toss in a cavernous interior that had all the potential for a near-luxury family car, or even a wagon, and this car looked more ‘Volvo’ than ‘Ford’ to me with each passing day.

Something had to be done…

Hmmm… why not subtract ‘twenty’ from the Five Hundred name. Call it a 480, and put in a nice classic Volvo styled fascia on the front end. Throw in an interior inspired by the best of Swedish design and, Voila! Ford would have offered a Volvo that would have hit the square peg of the brand’s main customers… and maybe even a few others who were considering an upscale Camry or a Lexus ES.

Sadly Ford never made a Volvo version of the Five Hundred, or the Flex for that matter. Instead they mis-balanced the diverging priorities of competing simultaneously with BMW (S40′s, C30′s, S60′s) and conservative middle-aged Americans who valued luxury transport over driving dynamics (Xc90, XC60, C70).  The brand became a disaster.

I am starting to see the same ingredients mixed into other brands these days. Take for instance Scion.

Yes this brand will get a nice pop and halo in the form of the upcoming FR-S. Then again, halo sports cars that are shared with other brands tend to be short-lived. Just ask Pontiac and Saturn about the Solstice and the Sky.

So what would be the perfect car to put into Scion’s kinship?

Two years ago I would have strongly argued for making the CT200h a Scion. It didn’t have the luxury trappings of a Lexus. However it offered tons of sporting character and attracted the type of youthful and educated audience that Scion sorely needed at that point.

You know. The type of people that quickly walked away from Scion after they started marketing bloated SUV-like compacts that should have been marketed as… Toyotas… or Volvos. Who knows.

Wait a second. YOU know!

A lot of potentially great cars over the years have been marketed to the wrong brands for the wrong reasons.  So I ask the B&B, “What cars were given the wrong brand, and where should they have gone?”.

Like most marketing classes in modern day MBA-land there are no right answers. Just SWAG’s and opinions. Feel free to demote a Cadillac to a Chevy if you must. So long as you can defend it, let’s hear it.

In the comments section of yesterday’s post on the ongoing Chevy Volt fire investigation, I noted that GM might

retrofit Volts with crash protection that can maintain battery integrity in all crash conditions… Mary Barra has said that GM is

“continuing to work with NHTSA to investigate additional actions to reduce or eliminate the potential of a post-crash electrical fire.”

I think some kind of update on the battery integrity front is inevitable, but we shall see…

Sure enough, today Reuters is running an interview with GM CEO Dan Akerson, who says that European deliveries of Opel-branded Volts (called Ampera) would be delayed pending NHTSA’s investigation, and that maybe, just possibly, the Volt’s battery might have to be redesigned. Says Akerson:

We want to assure the safety of our customers, of our buyers, and so we’re just going to take a time out, if you will, in terms of redesigning the battery possibly

Unfortunately, Akerson’s mangled syntax makes it tough to know if GM is really going to redesign the Volt’s battery, or what the “time out” in question means. He does tell the AP [via The WSJ [sub]] that a recall or buyback are options as well. Though redesigning the Volt’s battery could be expensive and devastating for sales, GM’s current post-crash safety protocol is incredibly human resources-intensive, and likely very costly as well. And the fact that GM is even considering redesigning the Volt for safety a year after its release is going to create a huge sales and marketing challenge anyway. Volt production edged down by 199 units in November, and now GM’s sales boss Don Johnson tells the Detroit News that the Volt will miss its 10,000 unit 2011 sales goal. At this point, GM may just want to take a mulligan on the Volt’s first year, redesign the battery, and relaunch the thing.

TTAC has received the following protocol, developed by GM in the wake of the June Volt fire at a NHTSA facility in Wisconsin, from a GM source and has confirmed its legitimacy with a second GM source. Though the procedure may be refined based on the findings of NHTSA’s latest round of tests, it gives a good picture of what GM currently does to ensure the safety of Volt driver and passengers as well as rescue workers, towing company workers and salvage yards. And, I have to say, it puts some of my fears about this safety scare to rest. It hadn’t occurred to me that GM’s Onstar system could provide opportunities to respond to crashes in real time, and apparently the system provides a wide variety of data with which GM’s “corporate SWAT team” can tailor its response to any Volt crash event. Hit the jump for the full procedure.

• Chevy Volt sends Onstar message of just occurred crash event.
• Onstar team notified of Volt crash and immediately implements standard crash protocol to assist vehicle operator
• Onstar immediately pulls key crash criteria from crash notification, i.e. vehicle speed, vehicles conditions (rollover), etc
• Onstar team notifies Volt Battery Team Leader of crash event including key vehicle conditions
• Volt Battery team leader works with Onstar to ping Volt and check additional data if appropriate (higher severity crash events, battery data, etc)
• Volt Battery team Leader determines if high crash severity standards met for depowering or if there is any question about battery severity level.  If yes to either, Battery team representative is sent to crash site
• Volt Battery team works with Volt advisor to contact Vehicle Owner and/or determine vehicle location
• Volt Battery representative obtains approval from owner and then proceeds to investigate the crashed Volt and depowers battery if deemed necessary
• Post Crash Volt stable and ready for disposition

I caught hell from a number of TTAC’s Best and Brightest five days ago, when I blogged about the Chevrolet Volt fire at a NHTSA facility but failed to initially note GM’s response. At the time, GM’s Greg Martin said

GM has safety procedures for handling the Volt and its battery after an accident. Had those been followed, there wouldn’t have been a fire.

At the time, a number of readers accused me of bias for not including Martin’s response at first. Eventually I conceded that this was some worthwhile perspective for the story, but I cautioned that it only represented the opinion of one GM employee. Whether or not NHTSA actually followed those procedures remained an open question… until now. Automotive News [sub] is reporting that NHTSA couldn’t possibly have followed those procedures, nor indeed could anyone else, for the simple reason that GM failed to share them with anybody. So not only is the NHTSA fire being blamed on the fact that government regulators were not given the necessary safety procedures, but it turns out that rescue workers, salvage yards, towing companies and the like were not taught how to discharge the Volt’s battery either. In other words, this NHTSA crash was an important eye-opener for the Volt team.

GM had trained a number of rescue workers prior to the rollout, showing how to disconnect the Volt’s batteries and rescue occupants without running the risk of electrocution. But the NHTSA fire was caused because the Volt’s battery wasn’t fully drained before being put in storage, and this key safety step managed to escape the rescue training as well. Says GM’s Rob Peterson

We had a process [for draining the battery] internally but I don’t believe it was shared with anyone. The incident with NHTSA raised awareness that we had to develop a procedure and alert all stakeholders.

GM’s EV engineering honcho Jim Federico adds

The fire occurred because the battery wasn’t completely discharged after the test… GM developed its battery depowering process for the Volt after NHTSA’s test.

Though not as bad as a technical defect, this oversight is certainly a bit embarrassing to GM, which now has to endure the lectures of folks like Clarence Ditlow of the Naderite Center For Auto Safety, who rants

I can’t conceive that they didn’t have a standard operating procedure in place for handling a wrecked vehicle before the car went on sale. NHTSA and GM should have established protocols in place before it went on sale.

And you have to admit, he has a point…

MyFordTouch was supposed to build on the SYNC system’s momentum, extending Ford’s edge in mass-market infotainment gizmology. Instead, MyFord nearly killed the golden egg-laying goose, by earning Ford a sharp downgrade from Consumer Reports and widespread criticism. Ford has decided that 40-minute training sessions weren’t going to cut it as a response to the complaints that the system was balky and confusing, and The Blue Oval is now trumpeting the all-new for 2013 version of MyFordTouch. Because, in the words of Ford’s spokes-interior-designer-person

As you can see, with a software platform like SYNC, it’s easy to continuously improve and upgrade your system.

You know, in comparison to the all-new Ford Escape she’s sitting in. It’s still not quite as easy as a computer software update: instead of downloading the reflash, you have to go into a dealer to get the upgrade. Meanwhile, this is just the latest hurdle in the hot-hot in-car gizmo side of the business. The big one comes in 2014, when the government issue rules on distraction-mitigation in voice-activated in-car systems. That could make this minor public beta testing fiasco look like nothing…

Here’s hoping your weekend motoring has been a little bit safer than surfboard designer Roberto Ricci’s…

In hopes of escaping Chevrolet’s recent past as what he calls a “truck funded, Midwestern and Southern” business, GM’s Mark Reuss is leading a revamp of Chevy’s Southern California retail environment in order to establish a stronger presence in that key market. Now that Chevy offers higher-quality, more-efficient cars that can compete in the SoCal market, Reuss and company say it’s time to focus on the retail experience. The GM North American boss tells the LA Times

We are really going to have a go at California. This is not some half-baked plan. We will be putting a serious amount of money into this.

Serious money is good… but money alone won’t change the culture of a car dealer that’s always played second fiddle to import brands. So, how will GM tackle cultural shortcomings at its SoCal dealerships? Let’s just say that, for all the apparent seriousness with which this issue is being tackled, GM has come up with a Mickey Mouse plan… literally.

The LAT reports

Chevrolet dealers and their sales staffs are headed for classes at the Anaheim theme park and elsewhere designed to turn fast-talking car salesmen into personable Prince Charmings.

They will learn such rules as a prince or princess never smokes in public. That takes the magic out of the Magic Kingdom. They will also learn that sometimes it’s better to be a little bit like Dopey. The silent dwarf doesn’t have to say anything to make people feel good. When it comes to purchasing cars, customers remember less about what the sales staff said than they do about the experience they had at the dealership.

“Disney has created a culture where they talk about how they are always on stage with their customer. Sometimes we take the customer for granted,” said Alan Batey, Chevrolet’s vice president of sales and service.

The Disney training will teach dealership employees how to interact with customers and to do dozens of small things that Batey hopes will create repeat business.

Niceties such as washing a car when it comes in for routine service and placing a bottle of cold water in the cup holder when the owner takes back the vehicle can help change consumers’ perceptions of the car business, Batey said.

Don’t smoke in front of customers and give out bottled water? Let’s hope the Disney training isn’t taking up much of the $500,000-$1.5m that GM is giving 100-odd Californian Chevy stores. Especially when much of the consumer bias against American-brand cars has to do with a lingering reputation for poor quality rather than poor dealership experience. And although GM clearly wants to kick-start the Chevrolet brand that now represents the core of its global business, overcoming decades worth of poor reputation doesn’t get solved with advice from fairy godmothers or from hiding cigarette-smoking dealer staff. Rebuilding Chevrolet brand allegiance in the fickle, fashion-forward Southern Californian market is going to be a generational challenge.

Aftre just one year on the market, Opel is ditching its Lifetime Warranty, says Das Autohaus in Germany. I don’t know how many new customers that braggadocious warranty got Opel, but it definitely got Opel into hot water. Everybody, from consumer advocates to Germany’s umbrella organization of the car business ZDK, was against it.  Consumer advocates even brought suit.

Das Autohaus thinks that the lawsuit made Opel retract the offer. Also, Opel dealers already had to fund the warranty with  €150 per car. Opel wanted more, says Das Autohaus, and the dealers balked.

The party line at Opel is that the warranty is no longer needed to boost the confidence of presumptive Opel buyers, because the confidence has been resurrected. According to Das Autohaus, Opel will offer an extended warranty to current Lifetime customers – at prices of €10 per month on up. This will not restore confidence in a company that had offered a warranty for life, only to kill it after a year.

“Lifetime” was a huge stretch anyway. The warranty came with such a litany of fine print that you felt had even before the first warranty claim was denied.

One of most common complaints that traditional “car guys” have about the modern auto industry is that cars have become so complex and computerized that repairs and modifications have become too complex for their mechanical skillset. But, on the other end of the car guy spectrum, EV enthusiasts are taking over the mantle of the homebrew automotive modifications. The New York Times reports that Nissan Leaf owners are taking the lead to fix issues with the first mass-market electric car, creating more reliable state-of-charge indicators and rapid-chargers, tipping the balance of power from the manufacturer back to the savvy, hands-on consumer.  And as EV enthusiasts build communities, share their experiments and improve vehicles like the Leaf, automakers like Nissan are listening.

Despite the antipathy between old-school auto enthusiasts and their new-wave EV counterparts, these two groups have more in common than you might realize… which can only be good news for the larger automotive culture.

Three years ago I suggested that Detroit win back car buyers by doing something no one seemed to be doing: provide customer care deserving of the name. In a similar vein, Steve Lang recently asked readers whether manufacturers or the government should do more when a model commonly suffers from an expensive problem. Well, according to an article in Automotive News this week GM has strongly encouraged its dealers to pick up the tab on more out-of-warranty repairs to reward and create loyalty.

According to the article, the bottleneck hasn’t been GM—the customer care money has been there, but dealers have been too tight with it because of fears that GM would punish them if they spent it. Why did dealers have these fears in the first place? The article doesn’t say. The important thing isn’t how these fears came to exist, but that they’re currently unwarranted. One dealer calls the new “open pocketbook” approach to keeping customers happy a “seismic shift.” Problem solved?

Not so fast. Steve and I identified the problem: people are worried about having to pay big money because of faulty engineering or manufacturing on the part of the manufacturer. The solution I proposed: clearly state that repair costs will be covered whenever a problem reaches a certain threshold. I suggested two such thresholds, 10 percent before 100,000 miles and 20 percent before 120,000 miles (which is how far most people seem to now expect a car to go without expensive repairs). The specifics aren’t critical. They can be sorted out by market researchers and actuaries based on how common a problem has to become before it achieve “they all do that” status. (My latest, not yet expensive personal example: the aluminum hood on my 40,000-mile 2008 Ford Taurus X is corroding. I drop by the Ford dealer, and it turns out “they all do that, Expeditions too. To help we’ll refinish it at cost, $300.”) The key condition: the manufacturer would provide owners with complete confidence that they wouldn’t be stuck with the cost of fixing expensive common problems.

GM’s latest policy does not do this. Instead, it seems very similar to “customer care” as it has existed for years, though possibly with better odds. As before, it’s up to the dealer to decide whether or not a particular customer deserves the care. Didn’t buy the car new from them, or didn’t have all maintenance performed in their shop? Then you might be no more likely to receive “assistance” than you were before. This is what the article means about “rewarding loyalty.” The flipside is “punishing disloyalty.”
Nowhere does it say that GM is providing the care because they made a mistake at any point. In fact, the article strongly implies the opposite. Two cases are described. In one, a Chevrolet dealer covered the cost of replacing the door hinge on a ten-year-old pickup with 317,000 miles. In the other, the dealer picked up the cost of fixing a wheel that had suffered damage from an impact. These two cases share critical similarities, probably not by happenstance. In both GM was clearly NOT at fault. GM made no mistake. In both cases no reasonable customer would expect GM to pay for anything. GM did them a favor. Later they can return the favor by buying another GM car from this dealer.

Not mentioned: the Saturn VUE owners highlighted yesterday. Or, to give a more recent example, the Lambda crossover owners that have had to deal with persistent water leaks (though, to GM’s credit, it has bought back many affected vehicles). The problem Steve and I raised—common expensive repairs due to a fault in how the car was engineered or manufactured—is ignored. Addressing this problem would require that GM admit that it occasionally makes mistakes. And, for legal or other reasons, it’s still not willing to do this. No car manufacturer is.

I can see how the new policy, since it intensifies the traditional “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch your back” game, might further encourage people to get all of their service work done at dealerships. And it might help GM retain some existing customers who would otherwise defect to the manufacturer. But it won’t do much to help GM gain new customers. People who aren’t on close terms with a dealer have every reason to remain as wary of GM (and other manufacturers) as they have been. Without a clearly stated out-of-warranty assistance policy, one that doesn’t rely on the dealer to arbitrarily decide on a case-by-case basis who gets help and who does not, car owners could, and likely will, continue to get badly burned by the thousands.

Onstar may have been pressured by privacy activists into dropping changes to its terms of service, but the telematics service is still betting that people want to be more connected than ever. So much so that it’s going offer a service allowing you to rent your car out to strangers.

A GM press release explains

RelayRides allows vehicle owners to choose to rent out their idle vehicles, with the owner controlling the rates and availability of the car. RelayRides provides an online marketplace and a $1 million insurance policy to make the transaction safe and convenient.

Through innovative technology integration, RelayRides will leverage OnStar to allow RelayRides borrowers to unlock GM cars with their mobile phones. For vehicles that are not OnStar enabled, RelayRides must install a small device in the car to provide convenient access to borrowers. The integration makes all eligible OnStar vehicles immediately “RelayRides ready” without having to install additional hardware…

RelayRides will leverage OnStar technology through a mobile application to allow customers to check for available vehicles, make a online reservation online as well as check future reservations, locate their reserved vehicle via GPS and lock and unlock the vehicle, all through their smart phone.

And GM isn’t just mating its Onstar technology to the “peer-to-peer” car sharing program (which is still only available in San Francisco and Boston), its VC arm GM Ventures “is in advanced discussions with RelayRides about an investment in the company as part of GM’s overall commitment to addressing urban mobility issues.” Car sharing programs have become a big trend in the automotive industry, with Daimler, BMW, Toyota and others jumping on the bandwagon in some form or other. But as might be expected from the company that brought us the Volt, rather than surf the trend, GM is going one step further by leading the industry into the peer-to-peer rental space. And as with all of these investments, it’s tough to see how this makes sense in the long term. In the short term though, at least this might “get butts into seats,” something GM execs say is the key to overcoming what they call “outdated perceptions” of GM products.

It was Tamara’s first new car. A 2003 Saturn VUE AWD with a 4-cylinder and all the options. Out the door at $25,000.  Overjoyed to have finally afforded her very own new car, Tamara splurged and spoiled it. Saturn seat covers soon adorned the interior and a chrome grille guard was added to give her cute zonker yellow ride a bit more gravitas. The Vue would be her absolute pride and joy for the next seven years.

Until it died. Seven years, two transmissions and only 69k miles, Tamara got fed up with being one of many victims of an under-engineered CVT. Besides she couldn’t afford the $5000+ bill.

Yet she wasn’t alone. Far from it. Tamara is just one of thousands of folks who have been given the stiff arm by a manufacturer. All the major manufacturers do this to a degree and no, it’s not because they are evil and uncaring. You have to draw a line somewhere.

GM offered purchasers of their new VUE’s with the defective CVT’s a $5000 rebate towards a new vehicle… or 50% of the cost of a new tranny. It was good for 5 years or 75,000 miles, and there were many occasions where GM would go beyond that warranty.

Was that enough? Most owners would say no. Even in the dog days of the 1970’s a vehicle was expected to last longer than that. GM’s profit margins on these vehicles would likely tell a different story. On a purely personal note, it seems ridiculous that any well kept transmission shouldn’t last at least 10 years and 150k miles these days.

But there are a lot of exceptions to this rule.

Honda extended their CVT warranty to 8 years and 80,000 miles on the 1st generation Honda Civic hybrid which weighs about 2700 pounds. However the 1st generation Insight (2000 – 2004 models) with the exact same C VTtransmission and 900 fewer pounds gets a 10 year / 157,000 mile warranty.

Guess which one has the stronger enthusiast community?

Nissan extended their CVT warranty to 10 years and 120,000 miles on seven different models built between 2003 and 2010. Yet Chrysler who uses the same sourced transmission has not offered any warranty extension.

Volvo provided a 10 year / 200,000 mile warranty on thousands of defective Electronic Throttle Modules that were built between1999 through 2002. However Volvo also saw fit to not offer an extended warranty on their Aisin-Warner and GM 5-speed automatic transmissions that had high failure rates on their Volvo V70’s, XC70’s, and XC90’s. Those only get 5 years and 60,000 miles.

Toyota experienced engine sludge issues on ten models built between 1997 and 2002. After a long legal fight they settled on offering full compensation for new owners who had the issues occur within 8 years and unlimited miles.

Ford developed a V platform for their Ford Windstar, Ford Freestar and Mercury Monterey that used a highly unreliable 4F50N transmission. No warranty extension on them from the 3 year / 36,000 mile warranty. But Ford has recalled the Windstar for safety related rust issues as has Toyota.

In short every manufacturer has issues and deals with them in ways that reflect their core beliefs. When it comes to safety nearly everyone covers the well-being of the customer. Powertrain and electronics issues? It depends.

Whenever I see someone shift from reverse to drive on an automatic without breaking, I wince. I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels that way. As a dealer few things tick me off more than experiencing some loudmouth schmuck who ragged out a creme puff and then demands money for their abuse and neglect.

There are a lot more folks out there who fit that description than today’s media will ever admit to.

In the coming years you’re going to see an amazing array of new electronics systems and advanced powertrains. Cars should be more reliable than ever… but they also will likely become more  expensive to repair as well.  The line of expectations between what ‘should’ last and what ‘does’ last will continue to blur for customers and manufacturers.

So who should hold the mantle of responsibility? Is it sane for a manufacturer to offer only 36,000 miles of warranty coverage in an industry where cars are routinely expected to last 5 to 7 times longer? Should the free market rule? Or should the government intercede in cases when defect levels go beyond the pale?

It’s very hard to draw that line. Just ask Tamara.

[Editor's note: videos are from Youtube, and were not taken by the author]

“THE BETAS ARE COMING!” The mid-August e-mail from Tesla Motors breathlessly touted “the most exciting automotive event of the year:” an exclusive owners-only unveiling of the Model S. All 6,000 of us who’d put down $5K deposits on the electric sedan would be invited out to Tesla’s sprawling new plant in Fremont, Calif. to see, touch, and ride in the Beta version of the car, described as “over 90 percent production intent.”

A few weeks later came the e-mail invitation itself. I RSVPed the same day. Tesla had expected attendance in the hundreds, and had made initial plans for 1,000 just to be safe. But when 300 RSVPs came back in the first 23 minutes, they realized they had a tsunami of customer enthusiasm on their hands. In the end, about 2,000 owners showed up, including one guy from Kazakhstan.

Driving my rented Prius up I-880 toward Fremont on the big day, I passed a factory with huge letters on the side: SOLYNDRA. Not a good omen. The start-up Silicon Valley manufacturer of high-tech cutting-edge solar panels, the recipient of half a billion dollars in government loans, had lost hundreds of millions of dollars and just gone bankrupt amid cries of political favoritism and financial fraud.

A mile or so up the road, another sprawling factory festooned with giant letters: TESLA. A start-up Silicon Valley manufacturer of high-tech cutting edge automobiles, recipient of half a billion dollars in government loans, currently reporting annual losses of hundreds of millions of dollars….oh, never mind.

Dozens of BMWs in the parking lot, a Panamera here, a tricked-out Lotus there. Up by the door, a half-dozen Roadsters tethered to their charging stations. I join the stream of owners, chattering excitedly, as we walked up a literal red carpet to the factory entrance. The first thing we see inside: a Tesla boutique selling logoed shirts, jackets, and accessories. Business is brisk

Then down a long hallway formed by temporary white walls that mask the stunning vastness of the plant, the former NUMMI factory owned by Toyota and GM. Then, bang, we’re in the middle of it, shiny white floors that stretch out almost to the limits of vision, with bright red robotic machinery scattered about, and several Model S prototypes staged in various points of assembly. Over to the right a dark corner of the plant, maybe half a football field in size, has been set up like a night club–leather couches and tables, potted plants, open bars, hors d’oeuvres at every turn, dim blue and red lighting, pulsating club music.

Wine in hand, and resisting the entreaties of a black-clad waiter offering bacon-wrapped scallops, I chat with another owner, lamenting the fact that the earliest slot I could get for a ride was 10:30 p.m., five hours from now. He’s scheduled for a ride in a few minutes, and offers to let me stand in for his no-show guest.

Waiting in the ride line, we watch the three ride cars–one black, one white, one red–come and go with their cargoes of four riders. Each arrival looks like a NASCAR pit stop: the car screeches up, two Tesla employees attack the car with polishing rags while three others open the doors and shoo out the grinning passengers. Four new riders, carefully prepositioned for quick entry, are then ushered in, and the car tears off once more. Elapsed time, maybe 30 seconds.

At last, my turn. I get shotgun, and at 6 feet 2 I find the front seat a bit cramped because it’s pulled forward for more legroom in back. I’m barely buckled in and have just glanced at the huge center video screen before we race off into the empty back parking lot. First up is a short slalom course, to demonstrate the flat cornering, the result of the heavy, low-mounted battery. “Lowest c.g. in the business,” the driver intones. Then a couple of quick turns, and we line up for a quarter-mile straightaway.

We accelerate briskly to about 65 mph in almost total silence. I ask the driver to back off the accelerator abruptly at high speed, so I can get a feel for the regenerative braking. (In a brief test drive of the Roadster a couple of years back, I found its abruptly powerful trailing-throttle regen to be way too much for everyday driving. Hopefully the S would feel more like a normal car.) He obliges, and I’m relieved that, from the passenger’s point of view at least, it seems pretty normal. No lurch against the shoulder harness.

One more quick 180, another brief spurt, and we’re back at the start. The doors fly open, and the next four riders surge forward. Total elapsed time: 90 seconds.

I refill my wine glass, load up on Thai noodles, and start looking for Tesla engineers. There are dozens of them scattered around, each clad in a grey polo shirt, each eager to talk. By luck, one of the first I introduce myself to is Drew Baglino, who happens to be directly involved in setting up the Model S regen braking system.

He has some surprises for me. First, he tells that the regen profile of the Model S is precisely the same as the Roadster. So why did it feel different to me? For one thing, I tested the Roadster in New York City, and never exceeded 50 mph. On both cars, the regen is set to be stronger at low speeds, so I was comparing 40-mph regen on the Roadster to 65-mph regen on the Model S. Moreover, the extra 500 lbs of passengers in the S would have reduced the S’s deceleration.

He also countered my impression that the Model S’s braking system–in which the brake pedal actuates only the standard friction brakes–is less efficient than the blended system of the Toyota Prius, in which the brake pedal initially activates the regen system, resorting to the friction brakes only when additional brake force is needed in abrupt stops.

“Tesla’s brake system is just as efficient as Toyota’s, and we’ve done the dyno testing to prove it,” says Baglino. What’s not widely known, he says, is that the Toyota system does indeed apply the friction brakes slightly whenever the brake pedal is used. This smooths the transition to full friction braking when necessary.

When I pleaded for driver-adjustable regen on the Model S, he said this was under consideration. (Two days after the event, while writing up this report, on a whim I e-mailed Tesla boss Elon Musk and repeated my plea for driver-adjustable regen. Three hours later, I got this reply: “I totally agree that regen should be driver-adjustable and it will be on Model S.” The message was Cced to JB Straubel, Tesla CTO.)

Over by the info/nav/audio system display, a battery engineer tells me that the 300-mile version of the S will have a battery capacity of 85 kWh. But he won’t reveal the capacities of the shorter-range versions. But some simple math suggests that the 240-mile version will have 68 kWh and the 160-mile version about 45 kWh. Even the latter is nearly double the capacity of the Nissan Leaf.

There will be about a 220-pound weight penalty for each step up in battery capacity, I’m told. The higher-capacity batteries will have some combination of more cells and improved cell chemistry. Final specs have not yet been determined.

Over by the dessert bar (I can’t resist those mini-eclaires) a charging system engineer shows off the Model S charging plug, which will plug into either 120v or 240v outlets. At 240 volts, the car will charge at a rate of 9.6 kW, enough to completely charge the 300-mile battery in about nine hours. On the average, he tells me, I’ll add 30 miles of range for each hour of charging. An optional second built-in charger will double those charging rates.

As much fun as it is talking to the engineers, at around 8 o’clock, all conversations stop and everyone moves toward an elevated stage at the rear of the main factory bay.

Elon is coming!

Atop the platform, a Tesla marketing exec plays Ed McMahon to Musk’s Johnny Carson, whipping the crowd into a frenzy of anticipation. (Although he didn’t quite shout “Heeeeere’s Elon!) Musk makes his entrance at the wheel of the red Model S, as the crowd cheers and camera strobes flash. Four Tesla employees ride in the passenger seats. Wearing a tuxedo jacket over a checked sportshirt, Musk then walks around to the back of the car and opens the hatch to reveal his 7-year-old twin sons sitting in the rear-facing child seats.

As the seven bask in the cheers of the crowd, another guy climbs out from under the hood. Okay, we get the point: the Model S is pretty roomy.

It’s the first time I’ve seen Musk in person, and I’m surprised that he seems like a pretty normal guy, maybe even a little geeky, a bit hesitant and awkward amid all the fuss. His rock-star reception, it seems, is inspired not by personal charisma, but by the crowd’s understanding of his vision and accomplishments. Musk gives a short, stumbling speech, briefly demonstrates the entertainment system features–like the ability to surf the Internet, which will probably alone double the car’s accident rate–and walks off to thunderous applause.

Immediately, the crowd storms the stage to inspect the car up close. A squad of nervous-looking Tesla guys gently shepherd us off the platform. With the stage finally clear, Ed McMahon drags Musk back on stage. It seems that Elon forgot to make the most important announcement of the evening: that there will be a high-performance version of the Model S that will do zero-to-sixty in under five seconds. More wild applause.

It’s pushing 9 p.m., but there’s still time for a factory tour. Instead of the 15-minute rush job I expected, we get an hour-long dog-and-robot show of virtually the entire production process. (The one exception is the paint shop, which we’re told is a 40-minute walk away. The factory is that big.) What stands out for me are the robots: ranging in size from ostrich to giraffe, bobbing and weaving, clutching, punching, drilling, welding. “These are my toys,” one robotics engineer tells me proudly. “This one here does a fantastic job of welding aluminum, which is a lot harder than welding steel. It’s far better than anyone could do by hand. Every weld is perfect.”

While the production line is by no means complete, and the robotic gyrations we see this night are choreographed primarily to impress the rabble, to the layman’s eye it looks like they could start building cars next month. In my mind, there is little doubt that Tesla will make its production target of mid-2012.

Every Tesla employee I talk to seems to love the place. One production engineer had worked at the plant when it was run by the Toyota/GM patnership. “This was a dirty, nasty place under Toyota,” he tells me. “The floor was black with stuff. Tesla cleaned everything up. Look at the floor now. This place is more like an Intel chip plant than a car factory.”

He also raves about the Tesla operating style. “When I first got here, I was overwhelmed by the opportunities to innovate. It’s such a team-oriented place. Everybody is always bouncing ideas off each other.” Another engineer, the guy in charge of headlights, stells me, “Elon drops by my office to chat every few weeks. He likes to know what’s going on.”

Now it’s nearing 10:30, the time for my official ride. This time I sit in back, the right window seat. This driver seems more enthusiastic than the first one; he slams through the slalom course, chuckling “This should help you folks in back get to know each other better.” The acceleration run seems more aggressive, too, and we hit almost 80 mph as the floodlit cones approach in the windshield. A couple of the passengers actually scream in delight, as if riding a roller coaster.

Is it all too good to be true? Have I been hoodwinked by the shiny prototypes and the mini-eclaires and the rock-star CEO? Maybe. But I’ll be very surprised if Tesla meets the same fate as Solyndra just down the road. Despite the doubts of my wife and a few friends, I’m confident that my $5,000 deposit is in good hands. And I really, really want that car.

Quick, what’s the point of having a navigation system in your car? To get where you want to be going, right? Well, IBM has another idea: maybe instead of taking you where you want to go, navigation systems should be offering to take you where a paying advertiser wants you to go. Say, right past their shop, for example. Popular Science quotes from one of IBM’s patent applications

Conventional route planning systems determine optimal routes based on different preferred conditions, including minimizing travel time or minimizing the distance traveled. By focusing on optimal route determination, the known route planning systems fail to consider non-optimal routes whose presentation to travelers may have value to other parties.

So, it’s not quite to the point of your nav system saying “I can’t let you not pass a Starbucks, Dave,” but in the future your navigation could strongly suggest that, rather than going to the farmer’s market, you stop by the supermarket that happens to pay IBM the most.

PopSci explains

The system would work by collecting fees from retailers, which would then be used to assign a preferential weight for certain way points along a given route. IBM software would figure out a new route that incorporates that way point, and present it to the driver as the “recommended route.” This sub-optimal route couldn’t be too inconvenient — the patent application discusses limiting how far out of the way a recommended route could go — but it might not be the most direct route, nor the fastest. If the driver does actually take the fee-inspired route, then IBM could levy an additional fee for this successful misdirection.

Because sometimes it’s not best to focus on solely serving the end-user. Especially when “third party” firms will pay big money to redirect the hapless end-user to their products. It’s almost as if IBM has learned a thing or two from Automobile magazine…

Nobody in the auto retail business can possibly be unaware of the horrible reputation that car dealers have earned over decades of shady dealing. Heck, the internet has even created a pseudo-meme for the entire business, in the form of the passed-around image you see at the top of this post. But one industry’s horrendous reputation can be another another industry’s opportunity, and Kevin Hurst thought he had come up with a goldmine. By creating software that guides dealers through compliance with a number of federal regulations, he figured he could leverage the stereotype of the sleazy car dealer to get potential clients interested in demonstrating their commitment to walking the straight and narrow path. It’s a brilliant idea, and the kind of move that would show that market self-regulation and government regulation can work together to serve consumers. Unfortunately, Hurst made a fatal error of calculation: he assumed car dealers care about fixing their reputation and living up to national standards.

As Hurst tells WardsAuto, the auto retail industry has no such interest:

“Dealers are interested in selling cars and making money. Put simply, they don’t want to be bothered with government regulations or anything else that interferes with that selling activity.”

Many dealers choose not to comply with all those regulations “or are ignoring them altogether,” Hurst says. That puts them out of the market for Infinity’s software that systematically goes down the regulation checklist.

“We spent $1 million on codes and thought everything was in place,” he says. “We figured we had a slam-dunk product, because law requires compliance. But we didn’t anticipate the lack of interest at the level we’re seeing.”

Big dealerships, especially publicly owned chains, usually obey all the rules, he says. Some franchised dealers think they are doing that, but unwittingly aren’t. Still other dealers, particularly independent used-car lot owners, don’t even try.

“One guy told me the federal government doesn’t have the resources to catch a mouse running across his desk,” Hurst says. “Some are thumbing their noses at the laws.”

Hurst says the risks of non-compliance with federal regulations are just too low to get dealers to care. He compares it to people cheating on taxes in the hopes of getting lost in the shuffle, but notes that the risks of being busted for failure to follow federal rules on credit, money laundering, identity theft and more are even smaller. And until dealers begin to actually care about their reputations, or suffer the consequences of non-compliance at the hands of the government or the market, there’s no reason to expect them to clean up their acts. And though non-compliance with things like identity theft prevention laws may not seem like a huge deal, flouting even one law creates an atmosphere of impunity, which almost always translates into a poor customer experience.

And you’d think the car dealer community would know by now that, when it comes to reputation, they’re already fighting an uphill battle.

Editor’s note: When I wrote about OnStar’s latest round of privacy concerns, I didn’t realize that the chairman of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on privacy, technology and the law had voiced his own concerns in a letter published just the day before. Here is the letter, as published at Senator Franken’s website. OnStar has already said it will respond to specifically to the concerns of Senators Franken and Coons.

Ms. Linda Marshall, President
OnStar Corporation
400 Renaissance Center
Detroit, MI 48265

Dear Ms. Marshall:

We are writing to express our serious concern with OnStar’s announcement earlier this week that it would continue to track the GPS locations of its customers’ vehicles even if those customers have affirmatively ended their contractual plans with OnStar.  In this email announcement, OnStar informs its current and former subscribers that it reserves the right to track their locations “for any purpose, at any time.”  It appears that the only way to stop this tracking is to actually call OnStar and request that the data connection between OnStar and the vehicle be terminated; this service is not available online.  OnStar further reserves the right to share or sell location data with “credit card processors,” “data management companies,” OnStar’s “affiliates,” or “any third party” provided that OnStar is satisfied that the data cannot be traced back to individual customers.  See OnStar, Privacy Statement: Effective as of December 2011.  In a nutshell, OnStar is telling its current and former customers that it can track their location anywhere, anytime—even if they cancel their subscriptions—and then give or sell that information to anyone as long as OnStar deems it safe to do so.

OnStar’s actions appear to violate basic principles of privacy and fairness for OnStar’s approximately six million customers—especially for those customers who have already ended their relationships with your company.  OnStar’s assurances that it will protect its customers by “anonymizing” precise GPS records of their location are undermined by a broad body of research showing that it is extraordinarily difficult to successfully anonymize highly personal data like location.  See generally Paul Ohm, Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization, 5 UCLA Law Review 1701 (2010) and Marco Gruteser and Baik Hoh, On the Anonymity of Periodic Location Samples, in Second International Conference on Security in Pervasive Computing, Boppard, Germany (2005) at 179-192.  If a data set shows the exact location where a car starts every morning, the roads that car travels on its morning commute, the office where it is parked during business hours, and the schools where it stops on its way home, it is unnecessary for that data set to include a name or license plate for it to be connected to an individual and his or her family.

We urge you to reconsider these decisions.  We also urge you to better inform your customers of their ramifications.  To that end, we request that you provide answers to the following questions:

1.      Does OnStar believe that its actions comply with federal law?
2.      Will OnStar allow its customers to deactivate their data connections online?
3.      If a customer deactivates their data connection, will OnStar delete the existing location information they have gathered for that customer?  Or does OnStar reserve the right to store and sell that information regardless of deactivation?
4.      Has OnStar ever suffered a breach of its customers’ location data?
5.      Has OnStar ever suffered a breach of any of its customers’ private information?
6.      How will OnStar protect non-anonymized data on its servers in light of recent breaches at major institutions like Citibank, Sony and the International Monetary Fund?
7.      How exactly will OnStar anonymize its location data?
8.      Will OnStar seek its customers’ consent before sharing or selling their location data to third parties?  Does OnStar believe it is legally required to do so?
9.      Will OnStar inform its customers of the entities to whom it sells location data?
10.  Has OnStar already disclosed or sold any of its customers’ location data with third parties?  Which third parties?
11.  Will OnStar agree to stop the tracking, sharing, and sale of location data for customers that have ended their subscriptions to OnStar services?

We believe that OnStar’s actions underscore the urgent need for prompt congressional action to enact privacy laws that protect private, sensitive information like location.  In the meantime, we believe that it is the responsibility of corporate citizens like OnStar to take every step possible to safeguard the privacy of their customers.

We appreciate your prompt attention to this matter.

Sincerely,

Al Franken                                                                                          Christopher A. Coons
Chairman, Subcommittee on                                                               United States Senator
Privacy, Technology and the Law

Concerns over privacy have haunted GM’s OnStar business for as long as it’s been around, and responses like this video have become something of an annual routine for OnStar’s executives. The latest round of furor involves changes to OnStar’s policies, which the New York Times describes thusly

The first regards what happens when a customer cancels the service. Until now, when OnStar service stopped, so did the vehicle’s two-way communications system. As of Dec. 1, however, that will not necessarily be the case. Vehicles of owners who no longer subscribe could still be monitored via the system’s still-active two-way cellular link.

The second policy change concerns the potential use of the data collected by OnStar, which includes information like the vehicle’s speed and location, current odometer reading, driver seat-belt use and air-bag deployment. Under the new terms, OnStar reserves the right to share that information with other companies and organizations, even data culled from motorists who no longer subscribe to the service but who have left the two-way communications connection open.

Of course, OnStar says GM customers can opt out of the service, but it’s making the case that by only sharing anonymous data, it can limit meaningful privacy concerns. But OnStar doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and as it continues to sell Americans on the notion that security is worth sacrificing some sense of privacy for, it will find itself increasingly pulled into a national debate.

OnStar’s execs are clearly walking a line here, as there’s no doubt OnStar-provided data is used in a number of ways that they argue is intended to benefit the customer. Monitoring usage patterns in the Chevy Volt is one example. Allowing vehicle owners to spy on their kids and spouses is another. But by pushing these services, OnStar finds itself at the cutting edge of a profound national debate on the balance between privacy and security that has been simmering just below the national consciousness in the decade since 9/11.

OnStar is clearly aligning itself with the side of security, not only offering nanny services to its users, but now giving them nanny powers over people who use their cars as well. In the short term, this has been a strong play: history shows that OnStar has picked the winning side in the debate, as most security/privacy tradefoffs since 9/11 have been decided in favor of security. But as measures like pay-per-mile vehicle tracking gain political momentum (the talk in DC is that government tracking of every vehicle is “unavoidable” in the middle-to-long-term), a backlash may well be brewing.

The problem with picking any one side of a fundamental political tradeoff is that eventually your side overreaches, sparking a backlash. When pay-per-mile taxation becomes a serious policy proposal, a political near-inevitability in the next ten years, all of the slippery concessions to security-over-privacy that led up to government tracking of every vehicle in America will be seen in a very different light. OnStar (and its analogues, which are spreading throughout the industry) will clearly be identified as a poster boy for the tradeoff between privacy and security, and faced with mandatory government tracking, it’s hard to see Americans remaining in love with the idea of voluntary tracking. Already the backlash is brewing, and public responses to privacy concerns will be a fact of life for firms like OnStar. But then, that’s just a part of the cost of doing business when you’re selling services that prey on paranoia, and asks customers to trust your benevolent gaze more than the often-terrifying randomness of the universe.

Click here to view the embedded video.

[Ed: The above video is not intended as a specific example of the problems we faced, but a general illustration of the wider issue]

While on a junket for the Hyundai Veloster I was treated to yet another instance of The Most Infuriating Thing About New Cars – the lack of any decent way to connect your iPod to the in-car entertainment system.

As TTAC Editor-In-Chief Ed Niedermeyer and I toured Oregon’s various scenic byways in the newest Hyundai, our musical selections were repeatedly interrupted due various errors, whereby Ed’s iPhone was unable to sync, refused to completely sync, or randomly re-synced. Our attempts at listening to the new Bon Iver album, or Burn After Rolling (the listenable mixtape made by limp-dick rapper Wiz Khalifa) were interrupted by a blast from XM’s pop station, as the iPod integration took a giant shit on us. Nothing spoils the conversation like having your ambient rock or gangsta rap interrupted by Katy Perry or Lady Gaga.

In the pre-USB port days, there were two options – you could use an “iTrip”, a crude device that plugged into a cigarette lighter and used a small radio transmitter to broadcast your music over a dormant frequency. Tuning your radio to said frequency allowed you to have your own private radio station, although it was frequently interrupted by transmissions from competing commercial stations, especially on road trips where frequencies changed every so often.

The other option was the auxiliary port – a 3.5 mm audio jack that plugged into the car stereo and allowed you to control your iPod without any aural interruptions like an iTrip. The only problem is that these were extremely rare in the pre-USB era, and have failed to become ubiquitous.

My guess is that the USB/touch-screen integration is a response to fears of possible litigation via crashes caused by distracted drivers, who could ostensibly fiddle with their iPods while it’s plugged in to the auxiliary port. BMW once offered an iPod integration system that forced you to create pre-made playlists and didn’t allow for any browsing of the music library, which I suspect was done for this reason.

The big problem is that most iPod integration systems are varying degrees of garbage. Currently, Ford’s SYNC system is the worst, despite its ubiquity, and every Ford product I review, I try and bash it. I would stop, but I’ve yet to have a SYNC system that works properly, without being a massive distraction and malfunctioning on multiple occasions. None of my passengers, from my technologically savvy 18-year-old brother, to my own friends (who are supposed to be “connected”, “plugged-in” Gen-Y types) can figure it out, and if they do, they inevitably get frustrated with the confusing menus, lack of a “back” button (a crucial feature when your iPod has 10,000 songs and you don’t want to scroll through endless menus to find one damn song) and the occasional disconnection because “SYNC failed to connect to your portable audio device”.

For all the marketing pap about reaching out to a generation of buyers who care less and less about cars, the one thing the OEMs need to do is the one thing they are constantly fucking up. For Gen-Y, the most important part of the driving experience has nothing to do with dynamic. They just want to listen to music painlessly. And not get violated at the gas pump . Being able to drive something with a bit of panache isn’t a bad thing either.

Hyundai managed a gentleman’s C on those criteria. Let’s see who gets an A+.

When an American wants to attract attention to his car & dealer woes, the tech-savvy slighted customer sets up a [name_of_dealer]sucksrealbad.com, and protests from the privacy of his webserver. The traditional types take up position in front of said sales outlet with some placards.

In China, the preferred mode of protest is by farm animal. A Chinese man called bull on his car and dealer.

Carnewschina brings us the story of a man from of Hangzhou who is dissatisfied with his brand new Volvo XC60 SUV and the lack of dealer service. The man does not seem to be on the J.D.Power panel, so he used different means to voice his dissatisfaction. He had his troubled XC60 pulled through the city by an ox. Before you say “gee, Geely:” It was an imported, Made-in-Belgium Volvo.

The text on the placard describes the issues. Says Carnewschina: “The big red character is ‘niu’. It means ‘ox’ or ‘cow’ but also, like in many other countries, ‘stupid’.”

True. Also, any connotations with farmers are deeply demeaning amongst Chinese city-dwellers. Note that “niu” stands for anything bovine in Chinese, be it ox, bull, or female cow. The word needs to be used with care. Indiscriminate usage can cause a black eye, or worse, it can be understood as admiration: “Niu bi” literally means “cow pussy” in Chinese, but as the seminal text on the topic explains:

“Niubi is a term of approbation, perhaps the greatest such term in colloquial Chinese. Niubi is an attitude, a lifestyle: a complete lack of concern over what other people think of you, and the resulting freedom to do whatever you please. It is knowing exactly what you’re capable of, making the decision to act, and to hell with the consequences. It is the essence of ‘cool’, but taken to the nth degree, and with a dirty word thrown in.”

This is a big topic in China, so big that books are written about it.

To avoid confusion between criticism and acclaim, other Chinese use farm animals which are deeply insulting without even the slightest possibility of ambiguity. This man, also documented by Carnewschina, expressed his anger at Range Rover and its dealer with a pair of donkeys. This is how you handle things if you are a middle class Chinese, just affluent enough to afford an imported car that shows that you are not a farmer.

If you are really rich and totally niubi, then you settle your differences with Lamborghini and your Gallardo dealer like that. It will pulverize any chance of a warranty refund. But it makes for great YouTube.

TTAC commentator stephada writes:

Hello I drive a 2010 C4S, bought new, now with 42k miles and I am considering an Extended Warranty through a company called Protected Life, sold through the Porsche dealership. My service manager said they used to not offer this because they had trouble finding one that could cover things well enough, until they found Protected.

I’d like the Best and Brightest to weigh in on the specific example I’m facing. I’ve read the original B&B thread but it dealt with the issue philosophically and generally. I trust the B&B can help out again in my choices, as they did on the question of ”S or 4S?” [Ed: follow-up here].

The details in the agreement are numerous, but the highlights are, that in addition to (of course) not covering wear and tear like brakes, anything without a functional need is not covered, such as: upholstery, trim, paint, glass, belt, air bags, and exhaust emissions. Anything to do with a manual clutch is also not covered (but the PDK in my car would be covered).

They pay full rate for the high-dollar Porsche parts and labor. I would bring in the car and the experience would be the same as I now have under factory warranty, except with a $200 deductible.

The costs are +3 years/100k miles total for $5100, +4 years/100k miles for $6700, +5 years/100k miles for $7600.

This would include a tow service up to 25 miles (then mileage), tire repair, $75/day trip interruption expenses, and $50/day rental car.

What do you think? These aren’t cheap but neither is a new engine. If you just sneeze in the dealership service department, it’s a thousand bucks.

Volt owners gather before their parade down Woodward

Photos courtesy of Cars In Depth

As part of the festivities surrounding the Woodward Dream Cruise, GM organized a parade down Woodward and back up again made up of 50 Chevy Volts driven to the event by their owners, at their own expense, from around the country. As far as car company promotional events go it was fairly low key (I was asked not to publicize the pre-parade reception for the owners) but it was clearly a high priority item for GM. The Volt marketing team was out in force and they brought in NASCAR champions Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson, who are racing at Michigan International Speedway this weekend, to wave green flags at the start of the Volt parade. Gordon and Johnson both own Chevy dealerships and they both personally own Chevy Volts. They race for Rick Hendricks, who owns quite a few Chevy (and other GM) stores himself. There were news teams from at least two of the Detroit tv stations and a satellite truck that I believe was used for a national network or cable interview of the NASCAR drivers. GM also brought out a number of pace cars from their private stash of Camaros, Corvettes and even one Chevy SSR that paced races at Indianapolis and Daytona. There was also the ZR1 that set a lap record for production cars at the Nurburgring. Marketing being what it is, the parade also included 2 squadrons of Chevy’s most recent new product, the Camaro convertible and the subcompact Sonic. There were 100 cars in total, one for each year in Chevy’s current centennial.

There were t-shirts and baseball caps for the guests, and the Volt owners each got a nice die cast model of their car, but the Volt owners weren’t there for the swag or for autographs, though they eagerly accepted both. The Volt owners were there because they really, really, really like their cars.

Comments like “the best car I’ve ever owned” were not uncommon. Ear to ear grins were everywhere. These folks were bursting with pride. Sometimes people don’t want to talk to reporters and writers. Not in this case. These people were eager to tell all. I watched more than one Volt owner do more than one tv interview.  Understand, these are early adopters, and a number traveled across the country to buy a Volt and then drove the car home hundreds or thousands of miles after taking delivery. Likewise many drove hundreds of miles to come to this event. The chances of any of them driving to Detroit to complain were pretty small.

The sign on the side of that Volt reads "American Made - Solar Powered".

I don’t like to say I told you so, but I predicted that early adopters of the Volt would love it to pieces and want to tell everyone about it. That’s what early adopters do, isn’t it? There were a fair number of Apple enthusiasts in the crowd. iPhones and iPads aplenty. When I gave one owner my business card, which for this event had TTAC on one side and Cars In Depth, the 3D car culture site, on the other, he showed me his 3D HTC phone. If I were to make a snap judgment, the crowd was mostly white, about equally split male and female, well educated, and seemingly upper middle class. For some this was their first “green” car. One lady from Alabama traded in a Saab 9.5. Others were not new to alternative propulsion. One owner traded in a Prius. He said that his overall gas mileage with the Volt was higher than with the Prius and said that the even with the cost of recharging, it was still cheaper to run than his Toyota hybrid. It was not a homogeneous group of drivers in terms of how they were using there cars. Some were hypermilers, but most said they just drove their cars normally. Some had short commutes and could operate on battery power most of the time, others had 70 mile commutes or took their Volts on long trips. My favorite answer was the guy who had a 40 mile commute but couldn’t charge his car at work. Where does he work? The GM Tech Center in Warren. There are charging stations at the Tech Center, but not near his building and the shuttle buses don’t run on afternoon shift when he works.

With at least 50 Volts in attendance, this may be the largest gathering of privately owned Volts yet.

I asked each of the Volt owners that I spoke to the same questions: Do they hypermile or do they drive normally? How many gallons of gas have they used? What’s their overall gas mileage? What’s their gas mileage when on the range extender?

The satellite truck was for uplinking a network interview with Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson

Most drove normally, but some had short commutes. The champion gas miser had used a total of 2 gallons of liquid fuel since March, but he’s self employed and works at home. Others reported using as little as 8, 22 and 25 gallons of gasoline over months of service. One person said that charging their Volt was costing them about $1 per full charge. I think that most drivers wouldn’t mind paying only $1 to drive 40 miles. At the price of gasoline today, $3.65/gallon, you would have to get something in the neighborhood of 150mpg to get the same fuel cost. It takes about 12Kw-Hrs to completely recharge a Volt to get an idea of the cost based on your local electricity rates.

A Volt owner admires a '63 split-window Corvette

All of the Volt owners reported getting at least 40 miles per charge. One guy said he can sometimes get 50. The Volt owners that used the range extender regularly reported overall gasoline mileage of at least 65 miles per gallon, but many reported much higher numbers, double and quadruple that 65mpg. The reports on gas mileage while on the range extender were impressively uniform. All but one said “42 miles to the gallon”, and the one outlier said “42 to 45 miles per gallon”. One said that it was “consistently 42. 42 miles of range on the battery and 42 mpg on the range extender”. All were pleased with the level of fuel economy when the ICE was running. I asked if there was anything that displeased them, and one owner reported being less than thrilled with the navigation system. That was about the only complaint.

Gordon and Johnson schmooze while waiting for their satellite interview. For all the talk of any feud, the men are in business together. Gordon is a part-owner of Johnson's #48 team. Other than personally winning the championship they share interests.

I did bring up the question of hybrids and EVs being a false economy. One of them, a businessman from Ann Arbor, said that a $40,000 car is a $40,000 car and you don’t buy a car for that much for the purposes of saving money. He said that when his friends raise the issue of the Volt’s (or any hybrid’s, for the matter) false economy, he points out that their $300 smartphone and $120/month data plan for it is costing, not saving, them money. I didn’t get the impression that any of these people were starry-eyed idealists. They also didn’t seem smug, which is nice.

Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson, who are Volt owners themselves (and Chevy dealers too) wave green flags to start the parade of Volts.

Obviously, this is not a crowd that is going to be hypercritical of the Volt. There’s a lot of selection and self-selection going on here, so they’re not going to be average drivers, no matter how average their use of the car may or may not be. A few days ago the notion of GM emulating Apple was bandied about. I’d say that most people outside of GM scoffed at the notion. I’ve been around personal computers since the early Altair and Sol days and I remember something from when Apple was rolling out the original Macintosh after the computer they branded as Lisa was a dud in the market. The Lisa was not a bad computer. A solid advance over the Apple IIe, it had some innovations that later became standard issue on Macs and PCs, but the Lisa didn’t sell. Then there was the Macintosh, which had evangelists, literally. Guy Kawasaki was given the title of Chief Evangelist to go out there and spread the good word about the Mac.

Chevy Volts parading on north Woodward Avenue

I think that GM has indeed taken a page from Apple’s book in terms of how they are cultivating the people who are buying the Volt, using them as evangelists for the brand. I mentioned swag above. When people were gathering around Johnson and Gordon to get the NASCAR stars’ autographs, I noticed that a number of them were having some kind of book signed. I asked one of them about it, and they said it had come as part of a thank you package from GM when they took delivery of the car. Obviously it was a gesture, like Hyundai giving away iPads with the Genesis sedan (and Hyundai discontinuing that practice is a different kind of gesture to consumers), but it appears that the gesture was appreciated with these Volt owners. The success of the Volt is an open question that won’t be answered until the dealer network is fully supplied and we see if those dealers sell enough Volts to match the annual production capacity of 60,000 units. I think in the case of the early Volt buyers, GM can rely on them to spread positive things about the car, to be their brand evangelists.

Like every hotel that GM uses for Volt events, the Kingsley Radisson has charging stations. Those are not manufacturer's plates so most likely, a private owner was topping off before the parade.

The Volt is a special case with special attention, special marketing, and a special group of consumers. It’s a cutting edge, high tech product that appeals to both tech geeks and people concerned about the environment so you’re already, again, doing some selection for people that tend to be good evangelists for the products they buy. I don’t know if this kind of marketing would work with more mass market cars like the Cruze, but it is possible. The name that GM gave the event, Volt Homecoming, evokes memories of the two Saturn Homecomings that GM sponsored in Spring Hill, TN. Before the Saturn brand was dissipated through badge engineering and poor product planning, the 1994 and 1999 Saturn Homecomings drew 30,000 and 44,000 people to Spring Hill, respectively. Now those homecomings may just have been part of ad genius Hal Rainey’s overall touchy feely promotional campaign but they do show that you can generate some brand loyalty to a mass market car with something that looks and feels like a personal touch. Meanwhile, based on the Volt owners who attended this event that I spoke to, they have both responded to that personal touch  and are willing to extend it to others on behalf of a car that clearly has charmed them.

“New GM did not assume liability for old GM’s design choices, conduct or alleged breaches of liability under the warranty, and its terms expressly preclude money damages,” the response says.

The suit “is trying to saddle new GM with the alleged liability and conduct of old GM.”

The suit alleges that GM issued a service bulletin for police-fleet 2007-8 Impalas, which were eating through rear tires due to faulty spindle rods. In that bulletin, GM instructed its dealers to replace the rods as well as rear tires, where appropriate. But GM argues that police versions are different than civilian models, and has not issued a bulletin for regular-duty Impalas… and now, on top of it all, its arguing that the “new” post-bailout GM “only agreed to warranty obligations of cars assembled before 2009.” As many as 400,000 Impalas could be affected by the spindle rod issue (which GM says is a manufacturing problem, not a design defect), which could cause rear tires to wear out in as few as 6,000 miles. And despite the clear evidence that GM knew about the problem and fixed police-fleet versions, the bailout liability dump defense could just work: at least one lawsuit (regarding OnStar failure) has already been dismissed on the grounds that New GM is not liable for Old GM’s mistakes. The bailout, it seems, is the shafting that just keeps on shafting…

I didn’t mean to lump the “loser” brands off to the left there, but losers they pretty clearly are… at least according to the ACSI’s criteria. Kia is unsurprisingly towards the bottom of this rating, which ACSI admits favors premium vehicles, with Chevrolet next and Hyundai, GMC and BMW (!) tied up in the next tier. The big surprise according to AN [sub]‘s write-up, was Toyota which tied for first with Cadillac and Lexus. The highest-ranked mass-market brand, Toyota seems to have shaken off any effects the unintended acceleration scandal may have had in the minds of consumers. Of course, like fleet sales, incentives, this index is only one small part of what it takes to understand the market… but its results are certainly provocative.

The International Crime Complaint Center (IC3) warns that

Online vehicle shoppers are being victimized by fraudulent vehicle sales and false claims of vehicle protection (VPP) programs… Criminals also attempt to make their scams appear valid by misusing the names of reputable companies and programs. These criminals have no association with these companies and their schemes give buyers instructions which fail to adhere to the rules and restrictions of any legitimate program. For example, the eBay Motors Vehicle Protection Plan (VPP) is a reputable protection program whose name is commonly misused by these criminals. However, the VPP is not applicable to transactions that originate outside of eBay Motors, and it prohibits wire transfer payments. Nevertheless, criminals often promise eBay Motors VPP protections for non-eBay Motors purchases, and instruct victims to pay via Western Union or MoneyGram.

No wonder online new car sales have been struggling. Hit the jump for IC3′s list of warning signs.

According to the center’s release, buyers should beware

• Sellers who want to move the transaction from one platform to another (for example, Craigslist to eBay Motors).
• Sellers who claim that a buyer protection program offered by a major Internet company covers an auto transaction conducted outside that company’s site.
• Sellers who push for speedy completion of the transaction and request payments via quick wire transfer payment systems.
• Sellers who refuse to meet in person, or refuse to allow the buyer to physically inspect the vehicle before the purchase.
• Transactions where the seller and vehicle are in different locations. Criminals often claim to have been transferred for work reasons, deployed by the military, or moved because of a family circumstance, and could not take the vehicle with them.
• Vehicles advertised at well below their market value. Remember, if it looks too good to be true, it probably is.

The LA Times reports that scammers recently used and Edmunds.com lookalike page to defraud online car buyers. Keep a watchful eye on all online auto sellers, and be sure to report any attempts of fraud to local law enforcement, the IC3 and, if you want to take justice into your own hands, write up your experience for TTAC. To defeat scammers, we all need to pull together.