Shantanu

When the Transformers come in from space and pick up their new (mostly GM) forms, is one of the best scenes in the movie. The emotion is kind of ruined by the little girl who asks Optimus if he is the tooth fairy, which few people in my theater laughed at. But that's one of my minor gripes. I'm going in for #4 this weekend.

I saw it for a 3rd time today. O_O I think I'm gonna go back and see it again next weekend with yet another group of friends.

I just saw Transformers... Twice. It's good to see GM being cast as the good guy by the media for once. It was very good, with my only complaints being some cheesy dialogue from Optimus Prime and occasional overacting on the part of Mr. LaBeauf. Let me tell you, when Bumblebee was reborn as the 2008 Chevrolet Camaro, the crowd started howling and there was loud applause - both times. And this was a normally staid upper middle class suburban Ohio crowd. Oh yes, I think GM has won a global legion of new fans.

How is Toledo Honda country? Toledo is one of the few places left in America where 90% of the cars on the road are domestics. It's the home of Jeep. The Big 3 have always operated factories in and around Toledo.

The biggest assett is that the automotive engineering talent (and not to mention the supply chains and a little thing called HISTORY) are centered around the Detroit area. GM recently put out the word that they are recruiting 400 engineers. They instantaneously got 7,000 applications, most of them from experienced automotive engineers. Can you get that kind of response anywhere else? I doubt it.

The whole PAG is a failure. Ford sunk tens of billions into companies that lost sales, lost prestige, and lost money. Maybe it has something to do with the harebrained idea of running a group of European automakers on the other side of the world in Los Angeles?

The difference between Michigan and California is that a middle class engineer or factory worker can actually afford a home in Michigan. You should ask the folks over at Nissan about that.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-...-opinion-center This article just made me sick. Wow, what a sick bastard. I wonder what he'll tell to his two daughters in the future. "Yeah, we had to kill two of you. I wanted the boys, and your Mom wanted girls, so we flipped a coin. You won! Don't you love us!"

LOL. LOL. LOL.

Well of course, you don't get something for nothing. Such a deal would serve a number of objectives: 1) Gives Chrysler dealers a full portfolio. They're not going to be happy if Chrysler pulls out of full size trucks. 2) Saves Chrysler investment money. 3) Gives GM additional volume. The full size SUV market has slackened as consumers have shifted to crossovers. If GM builds the SUVs for Chrysler, they can keep the plant at capacity. 4) GM makes money off it. Chrysler saves money, GM makes some money. Or Chrysler may just license the technology from GM and built it at one of their one plants. Again, similar story to above, except that GM collects a royalty fee everytime Chrysler builds a truck using their technology. This pays down development costs.

Chevrolet Ad = teh win

Israel has a lot of trade with Germany, but there are few German car dealers there and few Jewish people here in the states drive German cars. In the case of Volkswagen, MB, and BMW, it's not so much the national origin of the company, but specific atrocities that these companies themselves committed against Jews during WWII, that they never really apologized or made reparations for. And even if they did, it's a hard thing to forgive. That's not the point of this discussion though. What made me laugh is the utter hypocrisy of a Volkswagen forum of all places, accuses GM of being Nazi's for some tenuous link that they supposedly had, when VW itself exists because of Hitler.

http://forums.vwvortex.com/zerothread?id=3013016&page=1 Unbelievable. I wonder if they know that it was the Fuhrer himself who started VW, as the "people's car"? Ah, a car for the master race, no wonder VW's are so good. That and most Jewish people to this day will still not drive Mercedes and BMW's either, because these companies used slave laborers from the death camps. I don't even know how much of the above article is true, as it's widely known that the Germans stole Opel from GM during WWII, but were made to give it back after the war.

Has this car grown in size? That comes as a big surprise. Width grows by 2 inches, and 1 inches have been added to the front and back, making the length something like 192". I thought Cadillac was going to make the next CTS smaller, so that it's closer in size to its more nimble ~180" competitors like the 3-series, A4, G35, etc. ??? That and this thing is seriously encroaching on the STS's turf, if it had any turf.

We had a 2003 Cadillac CTS as a family car. No longer have it as the lease expired. To be honest with you, I think the original CTS was a better car in its time than its successor. The new CTS just doesn't do it for me. That and I can't stand Edmund's stupid comments, so I'm going to go to another source to try to read about the new car. But overall, good job GM.

My only complaint about this car is that it makes the poor Saturn Aura completely irrelevant. That was supposed to be GM's premium family sedan, with a DOHC V6 and 6-speed auto, and schweet brown interior, but now it's been matched or trumped on all counts. The G6 is just completely No reason to get one of those except for a convertible. This is the kind of thing that really makes me wonder if GM has too many brands.

Maybe GM should do less testing in the searing hot deserts of Arizona, and more testing in their own frozen backyard of Midwest winters. They shouldn't have missed this.

As people on other messageboards have commented (non-GM message boards, BTW) the Solstice interior looks fine in their own photographs. Yet they accuse it of massive panel misalignments and the like. The whole review just seems suspect.

Have you guys seen this commercial? It's brilliant, probably my favorite since the 2004 Chevrolet car carrier commercial. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32j__Xrftk8

Yeah probably, but none of the luxury makers really have anything on Cadillac these days with their campaigns.

It's very telling. In the 30 second spot, it jumps from the early 1980's Seville to the XLR, skipping about 20 years of Cadillacs. In the second spot, it shows the Allante in between. Confirming what we all know that the 1990's were an entirely forgettable decade for Cadillacs.

My guess is that the Aura will get navigation in next years model. Or at least it should.

I don't think so. Ford's legacy obligations are much less than GM. And Ford does well for itself in Europe and elsewhere. Also, Ford made insane amounts of $$$ during the late 1990's. I think one year they posted a profit of $20 billion or something insane like that. The analysts used to rip on GM constantly, because they didn't chase light trucks as aggressively as Ford and Chrysler in the 1990's, and consequently posted much more modest profits. GM's pretty consistently been 50/50 cars/light trucks, whereas Ford and Chrysler were 25/75 when SUVs were booming, and still skew towards that ratio. Now it's true that Ford blew much of their load on foolish acquisitions like Jaguar and Aston Martin and Land Rover, but they've still got a fair amount of cash socked away in the bank that will last them through many years of unprofitability.

Have you seen the advertisements/PR from Toyota lately. "WE ARE AN AMERICAN COMPANY, WE ARE RED, WHITE, AND BLUE. BASEBALL, HOT DOGS, APPLE PIE, TOYOTA." "OUR NEW TRUCK IS BEING BUILT IN TEXAS. THAT'S RIGHT BITCHES, WE BUILD TRUCKS IN TEXAS." With Toyota playing the Americanism theme so strongly and so ridiculously, what choice does GM have but to respond with highlightiing who the real American company is. And don't get me wrong, I bet Dodge and Ford will also be responding with their own red, white, and blue advertising by year end. This is one battle that Toyota quite frankly is not going to win. Any fight based on nationalism/patriotism isn't going to be won by a Japanese automaker, no matter how many advertising dollars they use. They will reap what they sow.

Damn Japanese, with their anime, and cars, and hacking of American car forums with their annoying anime.