Croc

Several of the preceding posts.

I found it on the internet, I have no clue on the source.

Dude, wtf? YOU attempt the bacon explosion, or something?

I'm so sorry dude.

HUH? This makes no coherent sense. And "not green enough" may have been part of the rejection of the viability plan, but I promise you the part where GM's "Viability Plan" included barely breaking even and even then only under the best of circumstances is what doomed that plan.

Dude don't even bother trying to explain this to FOG. He has his head so far up the RenCen's ass it isn't even funny.

You wanna be a snide jackass, you get to be blocked.

I'm sorry, but this is rubbish. When you go to a bank for a loan, they want a business plan. If they don't like the business plan, you don't get the loan. The government is doing nothing differently than looking at the business plans (viability plans) and giving the yay or ney...but unlike a bank, the companies are getting some feedback on this. And hey, Wagoner didn't have to step down! He could have soldiered on, bleeding red ink all through the courthouse as GM goes through bankruptcy proceedings. This was the right decision, just too late.

No way dude, you can't project soldiers onto the age demographic at large. Soldiers by nature place a higher value on the USA brand, hence American manufacturing, American cars, etc. The hipsters are buying Scions, Mazdas, VWs, etc. while the more upwardly mobile are going for the BMWs, AUDIs, and Volvos.

For someone who never assumes, you sure were basing a few posts on faulty assumptions.

Yeah, except you're assuming there was ever much of that "midwest" in the boy in the first place...

Likes this.

No more power than a standard bank has in approving/denying loans. If the administration says "No money if this guy is in charge" then GM has a choice in accepting the money with those conditions, looking elsewhere for funding (good luck with that ), or filing for bankruptcy. How is it better? Because not ALL of the cars are in the POS category? Financially, GM is in pretty bad shape. Businesses do not exist to make superior product, but to make money. How in the hell am I underestimating him? He has a pretty impressive record of bad decisions, failures to capitalize, failures to react to changing market conditions, and a legacy of "too little, too late." The only thing he could be lauded on is saying "hey, I'm incompetent at product planning, so I'm going to make Bob Lutz the 'car czar'!" Ford only recently has fewer brands. GM's had the same problems for 30 years, and it's a problem with mentality, not much else. Lutz brought in some change, but he could not effect organizational change in his capacity. GM needs an outsider who will be able to look at things with fresh eyes and make the necessary organizational changes. Not really in agreement on this at all. Ford is multinational, just like GM. Ford has simply been successful at building a cohesive, unified company, while GM still, through its organizational structure, allows infighting to exist.

1. The government has very little power over the company. The government is just acting like a bank and looking over GM's business case and viability plan to determine if they should invest. That's basically it. 2. In the case of Rick Wagoner, I'm shocked that the level of incompetence inside GM extends to the Board of Directors, and that it took government intervention to get Red Ink Rick out. So no, Uncle Sam forcing my resignation is not a scary thought to me because unlike RIR, I'm not an incompetent fool who has pissed away billions over the past 8 years. 3. Maybe RIR just realized the jig was up and he's better off pursuing something corresponding to his skill set, like flipping burgers and pouring softserve at the local Dairy Queen--if he can pass his ServSafe certification, that is.

I know, right? Unleash the chimpanzees with dart boards and finger paint, and I think some better decisions would have been made. The man truly has abysmal instincts.

Why? I'm much less worried now that Red Ink Rick is gone. Hopefully we will get an outsider to GM, but someone who is familiar with the auto business--that would be ideal. And get a grip on your "fear"--it's pretty ridiculous, honestly. Either make peace with the unknown and yourself, or start reading a lot more and gaining information--those are the only productive ways of dealing with fear. Going off into fantasy land with these complex conspiracy theories that would make Rube Goldberg confused as hell is NOT optimal or rational.

I don't recall what they were called as this was years ago. I watched several epis of one series to humor my roommate, but it really just didn't make a good impression. Honestly, the argument you're making is analogous to "You can't say all minivans suck, you just didn't experience the right ones." But clearly what was open/accessible wasn't that great. There could very well be diamonds in the rough, but the whole genre is pretty negatively affected by all the crap out there. If I want imported culture, I'll go to Baliwood as that stuff is interesting as hell.

IT'S ABOUT FRACKING TIME!!

Exactly. GM seems like a company that divorced itself from reality nearly 3 decades ago when their business model needed alteration with the oil embargoes. Since then, they haven't gotten it together.

Yes. Yes. And the nosebleed thing is just f@#king weird. Really? Family Guy is aimed at children? South Park? Yea, such great kid shows. Ren & Stimpy was also not much of a kids' show. My roomate freshman year of college was obsessed with anime, and he convinced me to watch some of it. He had bootlegged Japanese anime (early bittorrent user), and allegedly the quality was very good. But...honestly I still came away from it with the same opinion: cheesy and lacking in substance, for very immature people. Now, the other thing that strikes me as interesting is you claim the plots are deeper, more complex, more interesting, etc. Not my takeaway, that's for sure--I thought Japanese culture was pretty damn pervasive, to the extent that without some decent knowledge of it you wouldn't really "get it." I found the plots fairly generic, but less accessible due to the cultural knowledge required to get it. And I find the shrill, shrieking, screaming style of voicing to be obnoxious.

It got excellent reviews? Hmmm...don't recall that, and for good reason: it doesn't deserve them. It's a halfassed product, styled terribly blandly, too close in size to the CTS, too expensive compared to CTS, too narrow for its segment, and a cheap cheap CHEAP interior. And then sales numbers. Now the Chinese SLS would be a different story, but the US-spec STS? Half-assed. And how exactly am I playing favorites with the SRX? It's won several comparos, and it drove like the 2003 CTS, while having lots of storage and passenger/cargo space. Best SUV I have driven, period. And if you want to talk sales numbers, they exploded (relatively speaking) after the restyled interior came out, and that's with no promotion or anything.

I think I made it pretty apparent that I wouldn't...?

Very rarely now. I'm not a Tweeting Twat who's obsessed with Twitter, so the new format is very off-putting to me. I was on the old site (the last iteration) frequently, though.

Crazy/senile/whatever, my point is that if she seems like she is NOT a credible source of information, but rather someone who goes on and on about something, random people would probably be less likely to go out and buy GM after talking to her. With all due respect to ocnblu, I know if I came across someone championing the GMT-355s with what I know about them, I'd seriously question their taste level and knowledge of vehicles on the market as a whole.