GM’s grand experiment with Ebay will be over by the end of the month, reports Automotive News [sub]. GM had extended the program once, and was considering continuing it into October. So why didn’t they? Paging GM spokesfolks… we have a cleanup on aisle nine…

The need to roll eBay out nationally isn’t there as it was when we first rolled out the pilot. At the time we had no large, national marketing programs in the system, so that made sense at the time. What we’ve come up with since then are two large, national programs that are already in place.

In other words, failure was not an option… but only because there were no parameters for failure. Gosh that sounds exactly like what Mark LaNeve said when he was asked why the program was being extended despite generating what can only be described as weak sales. Come to think of it, how was the California-only Ebay experiment a substitute for a “large, national marketing program?” More importantly, did GM sell a single vehicle on Ebay?

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Before I leave TTAC, I will find and publish the list of GM dealers culled during the “transformation” from Old GM to New GM. In sworn Congressional testimony, GM’s CEO Fritz Henderson promised—begrudgingly—to provide the list of dead dealers trading to Senator Jay Rockefeller. This on the same occasion that Henderson pledged that New GM would be completely transparent to its new owners (the U.S. taxpayer). Post-hearing, Rockefeller’s office refuses to talk to me about the list; they no longer answer my calls. So either Rockefeller received the list of GM’s dead dealers from the nationalized automaker and suppressed it, or GM reneged on its promise to provide the 411. CNN’s Chris Isadore and others in the MSM couldn’t give a shit. They see the list as proprietary information critical to GM’s competitiveness. I see this as a travesty. GM and its political cronies are withholding critical information from consumers considering GM products. Consumers who own the company. So . . . I’m getting close.

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Jim Tarbox is not a man who suffers in silence. Since New Chrysler handed his Jeep dealership its walking papers, Tarbox has been a man on a mission. “I was a top performing dealer,” Tarbox told me. “The executives terminated my dealer out of spite.” Tarbox ain’t just whistling Dixie. The video above features audio from U.S. Bankruptcy Court testimony from Peter Grady, Chrysler Director of Dealer Operations. Tarbox’s lawyer, Len Bellavia, confronts Grady re:  a letter that says, in no uncertain terms, that New Chrysler shit-canned Tarbox because of a prior territorial beef. “He is a belligerent combative dealer who litigates and protests any new Jeep franchise in the Provo [Providence, Rhode Island] area. So management made decision to cut him. He has not operated in good faith.” Uh, what about selecting dealers to cull based on an objective, performance-related formula? Grady agrees to the idea, in principle. In practice . . .

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The National Auto Dealer’s Association is warning its members that a government audit of the $3b CARS program is imminent. “We expect that a high percentage of dealers will be audited,” NADA explains in a letter reported in Automotive News [sub]. “Please make sure that all transaction paperwork and trade-in vehicles are in order.” Widespread fraud has been reported in the German clunker rebate program, particularly in regards to vehicle disposal. Or, rather, the lack thereof. Apparently pretending to destroy a vehicle and then driving it to Poland (Mexico in our case) for sale on the black market is is not an approved disposal method. Anyway, investigating fraud seems like the prudent thing to do after spending $3b in a few short weeks, but try telling the dealers that.

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The Freep reports that final cash for clunker numbers show the program coming in under its $3bn budget. $2.877bn was spent on 690,114 deals, according to government data. The bad news? C4C did a mediocre job stimulating the domestic firms; according to the Detroit News. GM, Ford and Chrysler captured just 38.6 percent of all clunker sales, down considerably from their joint 45 percent market share in July. Toyota captured 19.4 percent, GM snagged 17.6 percent, while Ford only ended up with only 14.4 percent—just ahead of Honda which had 13 percent. Check out the NHTSA’s PDF postmortem press release on the program here. Though the Detroit Three didn’t do so well in the “cash” portion of cash for clunkers, it swept the clunker list. Ford alone had five of the top ten clunker trade-ins, with GM and Chrysler rounding out the list. Hit the jump for top ten buys and trade-ins by model.

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Our UK readers my be interested to learn that the Obama administration has introduced a rival to Postman Pat: Preliminary Pat. “The White House Council of Economic Advisers gave the [Cash for Clunkers] program a preliminary pat on the back Monday,” The Detroit News reports. “Saying it created or saved 21,000 jobs in its short, four-week life by forcing automakers to boost production and add shifts.” That, however, is not our money shot. A little wood, please, as the Council addresses the question of whether or not C4C simply bribed buyers to buy earlier than they would have. Stimulating new car sales but not actually increasing them. The Council admitted the possibility, but wasn’t fussed. “This time-shifting is valuable if the economy is in recession because the economy is likely to be closer to full employment in the future.” All the birds are singing, and the day is just beginning. Pat feels he’s a really happy man.

VW has dreams of moving 150,000 Porsches per year by 2012. Meanwhile, Stuttgart’s finest is struggling with a nightmare market. Porsche spokesman Tony Fouladapour told TTAC that the automaker’s franchised dealers are now holding more than a 100 days’ worth of 911s, Caymans and Boxsters. (That’s up from the 92-day supply reported by Automotive News for August 1.) Not to mention the 100 to 150 box-fresh units already heading stateside. Responding to the glut, Porsche’s pulled 2010 inventories from all their dealers’ websites; some 273 Porkers have disappeared into the ether. Or is that from the ether? Either way, Porsche’s hit delete on all but a few ’10 special editions (e.g., the GT3 and Cayenne S Transsyberia). When will the 2010s return to cyberspace (or any other marketing venue)? “When the inventory situation improves.” To that end, the brand’s launched “The Porsche Moment”: 1.9 percent financing. [Thanks to The Comedian for the heads-up.]

Just kidding. No zombie watch for the Cash for Clunkers (a.k.a. C.A.R.S.) program, even though it’s already burned through one life and two dealer deadlines. Automotive News [AN, sub] reports that Uncle Sam’s extended the dealer deadline again, thanks to ongoing computer problems. Transportation spokeswoman Jill Zuckman ”didn’t specify a particular time for the deadline, and said it depended on how long it would take the government to get the clunkers Web site up so that dealers could file claims.” While the boffins sort that out, more “issues” are arising. As of early Monday morning, dealers submitted 635,186 claims worth $2.65 billion in rebates. Although AN says the number puts the payout “close” to the $3 billion limit, C.A.R.S. may already be over budget. Add up the administrative costs and the rebate requests “stuck” in the system, and the question arises: what happens to those deals that may arrive once in a lifetime, after the money’s gone? Meanwhile, a group of dealers is keeping its “shadow” Cash for Clunkers plan going . . .

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Here’s a fun one: You’re a car dealer trying to get a bunch of clunker sales processed in the last, oh, five hours of the program when the government’s computer system crashes. Was it too busy insidiously taking over the private computers of American citizens and passing the information on to foreign governments? Automotive News [sub] won’t say.

“To better meet the high demand we’re experiencing, we have temporarily shut down the service so we can expand our capacity to more quickly serve your requests. Please visit the site at a later time. We apologize for any inconvenience,” is the website’s current position, according to dealers quoted in AN. Having endured the odd server meltdown here at TTAC, we sympathize. Popularity has its downsides.

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The Cash for Clunkers program is finishing its final weekend. By all accounts, the program has been a tremendous success, driving traffic back into tumbleweed-strewn showrooms, helping to cool the planet and reanimating idled automobile factories. Well, not by ALL accounts. The Wall Street Journal leaves no word unminced in its evisceration of the C.A.R.S. program: “The idea that a temporary subsidy program will launch the auto industry onto some new, higher sales and production plane defies logic.” As we shall see—or not—come September. Meanwhile, the media’s fixation with the NHTSA’s inability to send dealers rebate checks within a few weeks defies logic. For one thing, dealer ineptitude. For another, the NHTSA had three weeks to set up [what turned out to be] a $3 billion program. And lastly, it’s the federal government. What did anyone expect? Prediction: the dealers will get their money, the industry will gloat over August’s sales figures, and then it’ll be back to non-business as usual, until the housing market recovers. Whenever that is.