The Truth About Cars has come a long way since it had zero readers and zero page views. In the last however many years, we’ve gradually gathered a group of the autoblogosphere’s best and brightest. It is your patronage and engaged, informed and passionate commentary that has kept us honest, and made this site a success. As we prepare for a seminal moment in both the history of this url and the automotive industry, I’d like to offer you some stats on our current status. Not to toot our own horn; but as a thank you to all our “stakeholders.” The readers, writers, editors, investors and techies dedicated to telling the truth about cars. (Not to mention our advertisers.) Suffice it to say, those of us on this side of the WordPress platform will continue to do our level best to stay true to the TTAC brand: providing no-holds-barred automotive news, rants and reviews. [Tweeting all the way.] At the risk of sounding ghoulish, the best is yet to come. 

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Folsom, CA (Yuppie-burb of Sacramento) is in my neck of the woods. I was browsing the online car ads of my local struggling newspaper, the Sacramento Bee, and was struck by the number of trucks for sale.

“We’ve got more trucks than ever before . . . ” Yes, over 1,000 is quite a lot. (Get it?)

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In California, weary road warriors who need a place to temporarily rest have few options if they’re traveling outside the reaches of its sprawling cities. The drive between the capital and L.A. is especially dreary: miles and miles of industrial farms, oleander and eucalyptus trees. Worse, rest stops are barely-maintained, glorified pit toilets. You’ll never forget the stench of an I-5 rest stop toilet hut.

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But as one door closes, another opens. With Pontiac dead, Automotive News [sub] reports that GM will use its NUMMI capacity for some other Corolla-based GM product. Because, as one Pontiac spokesman puts it, “there’s really nothing wrong with the Vibe. Its only problem right now is that it is a Pontiac.”

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Not everyone can weather an economic downturn with the grace of, say, a Ferrari. Even with Wall Street bonuses under fire from DC, The Scuderia’s North American boss tells Wall Street Journal that “our customer base is not mainly those people. Our people have serious money.” No, really. Giant, heaping piles of it. Which is nice for them, but we’re not all in that boat, ne’est-ce pas? For the “less insulated” portions of the economy struggling to make payments on our less “investment grade” vehicular assets, the new economy is here to make things more efficient. For the people to whom you owe money. The Journal explores the rise of vehicle disablers, small satelite-linked devices with which your loan holder can “turn off” your vehicle when you miss a payment. The logic goes that people miss fewer cell phone bills if they know they will instantly lose service. And if it comes to reposession, satellite tracking makes the job easier and less expensive. Some customers complain that the ever-present reminder of their indebtedness is unwelcome, but lenders and dealers are finding them harder to resist every day.

Apologists for business-as-usual in the car game often took to blaming unnaturally high gas prices for last year’s trends towards smaller car sales and fewer vehicle miles traveled. When gas prices go back down, went the argument, Americans will go right back to buying thirsty SUVs and Crossovers and driving more miles. Not true, it seems. The New York Times reports that vehicle miles traveled (VMT) has declined for 14 months in a row now, despite the fact that gas prices are now hovering at about half of their peak levels from last June. “When the decline in American driving was first identified in late 2007, fuel prices were beginning to increase. The prevailing wisdom at the time was that the drop was due to increased fuel prices,” says Doug Hecox of the Federal Highway Administration which monitors traffic on America’s roads. The FHA estimates that VMT has declined by 115 billion miles in the period between November 2007 and December 2008.

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No, not that! Anything but that! Oh, hang on; if you’re an environmentalist, that’s a good thing, right? Less carbon in the atmos. Less congestion. (Bonus! The remaining drivers can zip about faster!) But the majority party isn’t against cars per se, are they? They just want smaller, cleaner cars. And OK, yes, lots of busses and trains and people riding them (presumably), which would, ideally, mean less cars. But we can’t really have less cars ’cause then Detroit would go out of business and working class people would get the shaft (again). I know! Maybe we could have less smaller, cleaner cars—as long as all of them were built in Detroit. By union workers. But what about the people who work for the transplants? Um . . .

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What do you do when you’re out of time? Get rid of all your clocks! GM has already taken the humiliating measure of cutting clock maintenance from the RenCen budget, and Chrysler is now following suit. William Wolf of Chrysler Paint, Pilot and Facility Operations notes over at Chrysler Blog that “every little bit helps.” But Wolf wasn’t satisfied with the mere $10K in savings that cutting clocks yielded. Eliminating rooftop parking to save plowing costs will save over $300K, while halving the number of fluorescent bulbs at the Auburn Hills Chrysler Technical Center will yield $400K. And despite the bitter Michigan winter, Chrysler has dropped the temperature at the CTC by four degrees, saving $70K annually. And yet, somehow, not everyone’s happy.

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OK, so I don’t expect (most of) the B&B to be entertained by a Flash-based, Frogger-clone “driving game” for more than a few seconds, but if iMotor’s “Save Chrysler” game isn’t a sign of the times I don’t know what is. The gist? Choose from Chrysler’s best products (PT Cruiser, Sebring Convertible, Viper ACR or The General Lee) and hit the road to keep Chrysler afloat. Avoid other cars and hit bonus icons to earn “cash” and weeks of viability for the Cerburian dog. Best of all, when you hit a Fiat logo you get to hear “Mama Mia!” and when you hit a Terminator icon you can hear Arnie assure you that he’ll “be back.” Hilarity! Now if only revamping Chrysler were as easy as not crashing a PT Cruiser, we’d be getting somewhere. Sadly, mashing arrow keys has not yet been proven to have a salutory effect on failing businesses.