Letter to the editor of the New Times by Robert Pankhurst:

“On my drive home yesterday, an advertisement over my car radio told me how much the Cancer Society needed old cars donated to help them fight cancer. Then I remembered watching the Youtube video where cars were turned in for the government program called “Cash for Clunkers.”

“Hyundai Motor Co. and its affiliate Kia Motors Corp. sold a combined 1.1 million vehicles in China last year, becoming the second largest auto seller in Asia’s biggest car market, the companies said yesterday.”

This today in the Korea JoongAng Daily, and in case you’ve never heard of them, they are an associate of the Herald Tribune. Now why should this be a slap in the face of GM?

Now that Bob Lutz is lounging on the beach and catching early-bird specials (between Lotus board meetings and GM dog-and-pony shows), it’s good to know that there are still a few good men left to sprinkle The Detroit News with a few double-take-inspiring quotes. Jim Hall of 2953 Analytics is a reliable source of controversial gems, and thanks to one particularly context-free quotation, he’s provided the perfect place to kick off an age-old debate: Vette or Viper. But Hall wasn’t talking about either car’s performance, instead forwarding the thesis that:

You have to imagine that plenty of Lamborghini Gallardo owners have been hauled in front their local magistrate for daring to allow their Italian stallion to stretch its legs… but surely none of them were ever treated as well as Leone Antonino Magistro of Perth, Australia.

This is a company that could not tell you, on any given day, within five hundred million dollars, how much cash it had… not only were they not prepared, but Rick Wagoner had very specifically said he didn’t want to prepare… frankly, it’s an irresponsible position [for a CEO to take].

What do you do when you’ve overseen a divisive bailout and an investment scandal all within the last year? Writing a book goes without saying, but it doesn’t hurt to bash on the executives you ousted while “Overhauling” the industry. That way, people who were (ahem) bearish on GM leading up to the bailout can at least be vindicated in their pessimism (and have the pleasure of imagining what might of happened if Ron Gettelfinger had been fired as Wagoner’s sacrificial lamb). In any case, that’s just what former auto bailout czar Steve Rattner has done in an interview with CBS News, and despite Rattner’s relentless striving to appear respectable and brave, it’s worth a watch. Especially in hindsight, pre-bankruptcy GM makes even Rattner look good.

The core consumers would be interested in technology and kind of early adopters

Coda Automotive senior VP for sales and distribution Mike Jackson (yes, the former GM marketing whiz) describes the market for his firm’s forthcoming electric car. So what is Jackson’s “kind-of-early-adopter” Californian consumer looking to get out of the Coda? A redesigned Mitsubishi platform, built and bodied in China for one thing. Chinese lithium-ion batteries delivering “90-120” miles of range, and guaranteed for eight years or 100k miles (3 years, or 36k miles for everything else) for another. 134 HP and 221 lb-ft, good for a top speed of 80 MPH. An 8-inch navigation screen with real-time traffic updates. And for you, they’ll throw in 17-inch alloy wheels. But the Coda EV’s most striking feature (at least in terms of appealing to tech-oriented Californians) is best summed up in the measured prose of AutoWeek

It has fairly bland, universal styling and is roughly the size of a Chevrolet Cobalt.

Holy unfortunate comparisons, Batman!

Editor’s Note: With GM’s S-1 IPO filing hitting the web today, every IPO and auto industry analyst is weighing in on the offering, and the state of GM. Here’s a collection of some of today’s more notable comments.

It looks to me that GM should be worth no more than Ford. If that’s the case, then the taxpayers will lose about 50% on their investment.

Francis Gaskins, president of IPOdesktop.com, commenting in the WSJ [sub] on GM’s IPO. More analyst commentary on GM’s just-released S-1 filing after the jump.

When the New York Times asked me to write an editorial about the Chevrolet Volt, it never occurred to me that it would be published on the day that Barack Obama toured Michigan’s auto plants touting the success of the auto bailout. Because of this timing, however, my piece was apparently taken as a partisan attack on the White House… and it touched a nerve. How do I know? Because, according to the Washington Examiner, on the Air Force One flight back to Washington D.C., White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs joined a proud tradition that dates back to at least my first year of kindergarten: he made a Niedermeyer-based funny.

“Did you guys ever see ‘Animal House?’ Right?” Gibbs asked reporters on Air Force One. “Remember when they go, ‘Neidermeyer dead?’ I’d say his argument is largely there.”

I always feel a little trepidation about abandoning the internet for a weekend in order to focus on a new car review (2011 Jetta, coming soon), but never in my most paranoid moments did I imagine that I’d come back to find the White House press secretary comparing me to the villain of Animal House.

“The only reason we are not making money on the net is that I pay interest on the borrowings I took from the government and I have money in the bank to cover that debt. Actually, against the Treasury we owe them nothing. We have enough cash to pay it all off. But you can’t run a business without cash, so it’s just a function of our capital structure. If we had taken those funds as equity as GM did, we would have been making money, net, right now.”

When Chrysler’s CEO Sergio Marchionne took the stage over the weekend to honor Lee Iacocca with an induction into the Walter P. Chrysler Legacy circle, he admitted to feeling unworthy of honoring Chrysler’s most famous executive in recent memory, and called Ford’s Alan Mulally and the UAW’s Bob King to help share the honor. And being the business-obsessed type he is, Marchionne wasn’t about to let Mulally get on stage without at least a mention of Ford’s just-announced $2.6b profit. And though the recognition and ensuing awkward “moment” helped add to the usual Detroit gala hometown booster vibe, it also highlighted the fact that Chrysler still has yet to announce its Q2 results.

If you didn’t know, you might think it’s a Cobalt or a Camry. I don’t think there’s a lot of cachet in having the first one. It’s meant to be a people mover, not a people impresser. It’s not like when you pull into Bob’s Big Boy parking lot with the Volt, you’re going to open the hood.

I caught some flack from TTAC’s Best and Brightest for suggesting that Jay Leno was less than entirely impressed by the Chevy Volt when it showed up at his legendary garage back in December. Today though, Leno’s ambivalence towards GM’s wundercar hit the front page, when the auto-obsessed comic gave the Detroit News a withering reaction [above] to the extended-range electric car. Maybe next time GM will give Team Coco a try…

We have made a decision at the UAW that to do the best job taking care of our membership we’ve got to be out there in the streets fighting for social and economic justice

Newly-minted UAW President Bob King kicks off a “Jobs, Justice and Peace” campaign with Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, by feeding the Freep some seriously idealistic rhetoric at a news conference announcing a march commemorating Martin Luther King’s Freedom Walk. But, as King confirms to Automotive News [sub], the best way to live up to these high-minded ideals is to demonize Toyota.

If you’re reading this article, that means Fuhrer Schmitt has figured out under what moniker this article should be filed under. As far as I’m concerned it should be a “Question Of The Day”, but it could easily slot into “WTF” and “Wild Arse Rumor Of The Day”. So, here we go…

In what amounts to a landmark policy shift, NHTSA now recommends that customers take quality problems in their own hands, and perform recalls themselves. Take NHTSA Campaign ID number 10V305000.

Most employers have vigorously opposed unions with every means at their disposal. These pro-employer, anti-union forces continually attack unions and workers that want to form a union…

…Let’s be clear, the contempt for the UAW was so deep that some of them were willing to let the industry collapse in the hopes that they could destroy us. Even the former president recognized the insanity of what they were willing to do.

Ron Gettelfinger fires up the troops in his final address as UAW President, as quoted in the Detroit Free Press. It might have been a moment for reflection and self-examination, but Gettelfinger served up some old-school, union-hall fire-and-brimstone instead. Only Ron didn’t look in the mirror before giving out his enemies’ description. Gettelfinger’s paranoid take on the auto bailout is actually eerily similar to that of the far right wing, in that they both place the UAW at the center of the bailout.

Handling [GM’s] IPO assignment is something of a vanity project for the Wall Street banks, given the relatively small fees the banks will earn through the process. One person familiar with the offering said that the banks may earn less than 1% of the overall deal. At a valuation of $10 billion, that would equal a total fee pool of $100 million.

The Wall Street Journal [sub]’s take on the forthcoming GM IPO. Persons anonymous tell The Journal that Morgan Stanley and JPMorganChase are the frontrunners in the vanity project sweepstakes. But as charitable as the one-percent arrangement seems, the Wall Street mavens have their work cut out for them…

I understand the economic argument for the off-shoring of production, but I think the practice is reprehensible. U.S. automakers have benefitted greatly from federal largesse and should feel morally compelled to retain and create as many domestic jobs as possible.

As one of the strongest proponents of the Detroit Bailout, Rep John Dingell (D-MI) carries some weight when he makes statements like this. But how can Detroit rise again by ignoring the undeniably strong “economic argument” for outsourcing? In a Bloomberg BusinessWeek feature, Thomas Black shows why production numbers are on the rise in Mexico, and makes the case that the Detroit automakers will only increase their reliance on Mexican production when they are free from government ownership.

Yesterday, as predicted by TTAC on many occasions, Germany’s Economics Minister Rainer Brüderle denied state aid for Opel. Even before the announcement, his boss Angela Merkel called a pow-wow of the premiers of the Opel states to find out what can and should be done now. The pow-wow will take place today. Yesterday’s statements by Brüderle and his boss are quite telling. Here they are, unedited (German version courtesy of Automobilwoche [sub], translation by yours truly.)

We don’t need an aircraft carrier and “Mission Accomplished” banner, but isn’t it time to agree that the auto rescue has been a success?

Former auto czar-let Steve Rattner picks an unfortunate choice of metaphors to celebrate the possible success of the auto bailout in an op-ed for the Washington Post. Meanwhile, the latest Treasury estimates still show a projected $24.6b loss on the bailout, so yeah, let’s hold off on that carrier-based victory party.

This week marked another important step forward for the development of U.S. based automotive battery and electric vehicle manufacturing as Coda Automotive, Nissan and Ford announced plans to build batteries at plants in Ohio, Tennessee and Michigan respectively.

While these facilities only exist as blueprints today, our Brownstown Township battery pack assembly plant has been manufacturing advanced lithium-ion batteries since January, and our Detroit-Hamtramck assembly plant is currently producing pre-production Chevrolet Volts.

GM VP for global product development Jon Lauckner takes a petty swipe at the competition over at chevroletvoltage.com. First of all, Mr Lauckner, taking petty swipes is our job. Back off. Second of all, are you familiar with the adage that begins with “people in glass houses…”?

Look at this car, it’s horrible. How did this get through so many people?

We’ve all thought something along these lines when we first sat in a Chevy Cobalt, but few GM employees would ever say it out loud to a reporter. At least they wouldn’t until a much-improved replacement was waiting in the wings. But because the Cruze launches this year, GM execs like VP of global vehicle engineering Karl Stracke can bash on the old Cobalt to his heart’s content, knowing the Detroit News will dutifully report it as a sign that GM “gets it.”

Bob Lutz may have left GM, but TTAC’s not through with the man of Maximum just yet. One quote in particular, from an “exit interview” with gm-volt.com, exemplifies the kind of candor that seems likely to disappear from GM along with Lutz. Possibly for good reasons. Well, good PR reasons, anyway. After all, with Lutz unable to deny that GM will lose money and/or battle sticker shock with its forthcoming Volt EREV, he’s the kind of guy who will tell the unspeakable truth instead of playing coy like a good PR man. To wit:

How do we get the cost down without in any way diminishing the value of the car in the eyes of the customer? By just doing some more elegant engineering than we did the first time around where we inadvertently did some belt and suspenders stuff because we wanted to move fast. Now as we look back at the car we say ‘gee I wish we’d done his different,’ …’ gee I wish we’d done that different’ because this is a very expensive solution and we could have done that for a lot less money.

That faint sound you just heard was Ed Whitacre expelling fillet of rattlesnake out his nose after reading that little nugget. Meanwhile, you’ve heard it from the horse’s mouth: the Mk.1 Volt will be expensive, unprofitable, and unpolished. Or, to use a PR term, “belt and suspenders.”

Nissan does not condone the comments made by this particular employee. While seemingly well-intentioned, many of the remarks are regrettable and do not represent the company’s views. Nissan’s policy regarding internet commentary is that an employee’s personal opinion must be preceded by a disclaimer that identifies their remarks as such and not necessarily the views of the company.

Ruh Roh!

Fiat doesn’t need other partners. We have a strong relationship with Chrysler and that is what we are actively working on

Fiat’s new Chairman, John Elkann, told shareholder’s in his family company Exor, exactly what every good, newlywed husband would say. Then again, not every husband had, shall we say, the appetite for partners that pre-Chrysler Fiat had. Just ask GM. Or BMW. Or Tata. Or Sollers. Or Zastava. Or SEAT. Or, you get the picture. Literally.

Deutsche Straßen sind nicht der Nürburgring.

But there I go, quoting German Minister of Transportation Peter Ramsauer out of context, and in the original. Herr Ramsauer’s rebuke comes on news of a late-night crash involving a future Mercedes ML Class prototype, that resulted in the death of a 26-year old man over the weekend. The crash took place on a stretch of non-speed-limited autobahn between Singen and Stuttgart, favored by Mercedes and Porsche for high-speed testing. Apparently the victim had been involved in a minor accident and was trying to exit his vehicle (stalled in the left lane, according to Der Spiegel) when the Mercedes test mule slammed into his car, killing him instantly. The 52-year old test driver is under investigation for negligent homicide.

We’re right on the verge of having 12 million in vehicle sales

UAW boss Ron Gettelfinger waxes optimistic in a recent speech at Wayne State University [via The Freep]. “Not so fast,” says Automotive News [sub]’s delightfully cranky senior editor, John K. Teahen Jr., in a piece appropriately titled 12 million sales this year? Don’t hold your breath.

With weeks of recall coverage and with Lexus’s GX460 snagging a rare Consumer Reports “do not buy” warning, you’d think that at least one of CR’s recent “worst-made cars on the road” [via Forbes] would be made by Toyota. But you’d be wrong. Dodge Nitro, Jeep Wrangler, and Ford F-250 join four GM products (Cadillac Escalade, Chevy Aveo, Chevy Colorado and GMC Canyon) as the seven worst cars CR could come up with. And though this hometown sweep for Detroit goes a long way from separating facts from fiction, it’s nowhere near as instructive as the responses from each of the Detroit automakers to the charge of making crap vehicles. Let’s take a look, shall we?

I know that they have to cut the car open to take the engine out. To make an engine in that configuration, you know, it doesn’t go around corners. When we did the race in Abu Dhabi, we beat it off the line so many times that the film crew was getting frustrated because the outcome was supposed to be for the Bugatti to win. So we had to do that whole thing about ten times before it managed to get off the line cleanly and catch us up. Because every time they dropped the clutch it bogged down and we were gone.

McLaren’s Ron Dennis lays into the Bugatti Veyron at the Middle East launch of his firm’s new MP4-12C [ Arabian Business via Wired Autopia]. What Dennis leaves out is that the Bugatti has a (computerized, sequential-shift) automatic transmission, so it’s difficult to know what he means by “they dropped the clutch.” Besides, it sounds like the former Formula 1 boss is spewing bile, rather than objectively critiquing the Veyron… which there’s plenty of room for.

My first day back at the helm of TTAC has been accompanied by an embarrassment of riches, in the form of both a GAO report on GM and Chrysler’s pension obligations, and the release of GM’s first post-bankruptcy, GAAP-approved financial results. We will continue to mine these documents for the most revealing quotes and statistics, but for now let’s take a moment to consider the political tensions caused by the auto industry bailout. TTAC has long held that political conflicts over the government’s stewardship of GM and Chrysler is a pressing concern, nearly on par with the financial ramifications of the auto bailout, and today’s GAO report confirms our concerns. As the following quote reveals, Treasury is under constant pressure to accommodate political concerns over the management of its stakes in GM and Chrysler, and has received no fewer than 300 official letters from congressional representatives, eager to subordinate the long-term health of the bailed-out automakers to their local concerns.

As many of you have probably figured out by now, I’m a firm atheist. You die, you become worm food, and your relatives divide up your estate. Life goes on. However, when I was learning religious education at school, I was told about the many different Gods on offer. We have God, Allah, Buddha (not really a god, but you get the gist), Zeus, Apollo, Thor and loads of others. But at no point did my teacher mention a Japanese car company. Bob Lutz just did.

The “First Drive” is one of the perennial stumbling blocks of automotive journalism. In return for exclusive access to the latest, most-hyped automobiles that everyone wants to get their hands on, outlets like Edmunds Inside Line are asked to swath their “First Drive” write-up in the most glowing terms possible. Or, as we’ve put it before, the price of an exclusive story is a straight face. Unfortunately the results of this kind of compromise are difficult to read with straight face. We’ve seen no better example of this than I nside Line’s recent “First Drive” of the Honda CR-Z, which yielded such unfortunate lines as:

The CR-Z is like a Tesla Roadster, but without the $109,000 price tag.

You know, besides having a different powertrain driving different wheels, a huge performance disparity, and, well, everything else.

“Leading San Francisco product liability attorney, Mary Alexander states if you or a loved one has been injured or killed due to stuck accelerator pedals, break issues, or steering problems prompted by a defective Toyota vehicle, you may have a product liability claim that would entitle you to compensation for your injuries and damages.”

As an American citizen, it is tough on my part to pay tax dollars to an entity that can turn around and use those tax dollars to get my fellow American citizens to not do business with me. The government owns 60% of General Motors, and these American tax dollars are funding business activity for one company, with the express goal of negatively impacting another company

Paul Atkinson, President of Toyota’s National Dealer Council, manages to capture the central problem with government intervention in industry without resorting to the hyperbole that so often accompanies such lines of criticism [via Radio WAOI]. Examples?

A quiet Sunday. Time to fire up Google and put in “ Toyota AND [cause OR reason].” We come up with ample explanations why Toyota is not called Toyoda. Or why Peiping turned into Peking, and then into Beijing. What about the causes of sudden acceleration? Let’s see what we find. (If you have other things to do on a Sunday: We find a lot of questions and no answers.)

QOTD is a fairly irregular exercise for us, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t dust it off for today’s marathon hearings before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Needless to say, the ten-ish hour affair offered too rich a bounty of choice quotes to properly choose just one. And so we have two: the first and one of the last quotes of the day’s proceedings. The day opened with the following words from Chairman Edolphus Towns:

Good morning. I thank you all for being here. It is hard to imagine the horror of the event that took the lives of an entire family near San Diego, California on August the 28th, 2009. California highway patrolman, Mark Saylor, his wife, their 13 yr old daughter, and Mrs Saylor’s brother, Chris, were driving in a Toyota Lexus, a loaner car that the Toyota dealer provided while their car was being repaired. As they drove along the highway, suddenly the car… accelerating [sic] rapidly, he stood on the brakes, but nothing happened. No matter what he did, he could not stop the car from flying down the road, faster and faster. As this car reached top speed in just seconds, it was all he could do just to kep it under control. In a frantic call to 911, his brother-in-law, Chris, reported the gas pedal was stuck, the brakes did not work, and they were barreling down on an intersection. He yelled over the phone “hold one, hold on, hold on and pray. And those were his last words.”