regfootball

the 300 is the biggest poseur car in the history of the universe. Now all that all the Lexus wannabes bought their 300's and dubs (because they couldn't afford their Lexus and hocking their Pings they bought with their credit card) that market is tapped out for awhile. And all the RWD fans have been saving their money for Camaros anyways.

remember the LaCrosse likely as absurd sticker prices that are likely higher the 300 and need market adjustment. I do think the Intrepid/Concorde/LHS/300 outsold the latest LX cars, but I would need to look that up again.

ethanol is a tax dump and is enormously subsidized. Its nice to have it as an alternative fuel, but it costs our taxpayers way too much to subsidize its production.

its a good looking rig, inside and out, i've seen it. I thought it would be FWD based, but its not apparently. So the 2wd version is rwd, and I think the 5 speed manual is only available on the RWD only. but who cares, its a nice piece! pictures and press release here

it apparently has more of a truck like chassis with more durable 4wd parts. http://www.media.suzuki.com/auto/06/grand_vitara/index.php photos and press release

sure as hell wasn't me. I'm occasionally funny, but I can't come up with ROTFLMAO $h! like that!

nope, they just throw you the keys and say 'tell me if you like it'.........

GM's badly needed upcoming crossovers (still too far away, should have been here by now) will mean much more the success of GM than some RWD coupes and sedans. Hey, I'll be giddy as long as they don't have to move the gas tank into the trunk like on the GTO. As far as what i need to learn about the business, that's easy enough to absorbing about 2-3 minutes from the dwindling sales reports each successive month, unless the corporate five finger discount is being revived again for the 4th month in a row. Hey, the Torana is a nice looking car. It looks like it might be a bit small in size for the US market. I think its great that GM will offer Zeta product here. But no one should count on Zeta to save the company, just that it will round out some product lines. It will not be bread and butter product that will buoy GM against the rice invaders that see near double digit increases all the time. Do I know about the business? That's enough to know to say, nice car, I hope it does well. Hope you got something else in the hopper in the big volume segments to save your corporate balance sheet. Nice car, thanks for posting it.

Ford's holding its own, considering how badly Jacques Nasser starved the car side of Ford for any new models for like 5 years. The Focus came out in 2000, the Taurus was 96/2000. Aside from that was the Crown Vic. Ford is not putting out sizzling product.......they are trying to Toyotafy themselves. Five years was too long without Ford getting any new cars.

I suppose all the hollywood stars will latch on to it then..... a hybrid smart would make great pub right now. They could (if they wanted to) sell the Smart as a motorcycle in the US right now. That would be how I would do it.

yeah that's good, but it needs to do about 20,000 + a month to match what the 05 sold. what made ME sick was that like 47,000 accords sold last month or some ridiculous figure. Damn, we need to blow up Honda.

hey guys, the new aztek has RWD and a v8!

those impala sales were still mostly 05's dude. and fleets. i know my friend would give away his left and right nut TODAY if his company would offer him a 500 as his company car. Instead I have to listen to him moan about how they took away his Taurus and gave him a current style MALIBU. If Ford did dump 500's into fleets, they could easily double their figures. The 06 Impala does deserve to sell well though, it will likely push 300k a year. I hope those come more at the expense of Camrys though.

how about a simple GOOD LOOKING mid-large sedan with a manual transmission option and 5/6 speed automatic std, front wheel drive, 240 horsepower overhead cam engine, decent sport tuned handling, four wheels ABS discs with trac control and stabilitrak standard, and multiple airbags standard with a better warranty. For under 25k. I heard nothing in Lutz' riff to address mainstream cars. Every G6 GTP manual I've researched at gmbuypower has been about 29 grand which is a big time rip off, espeically with a pushrod motor. The LaCrosse underwhelms vs other like priced products. The new Impala still has the old W body shortcomings. We haven't seen an all new competitive true midsize platform in far too many years (epsilon is not true midsize). The new 5.3v8 option is great but its tied to packages and is therefore too spendy. Hyundai has standard everything and huge warranty for less. GM needs some huge scores in the sedan market and nothing Lutz hints at makes me think anything else besides typical mediocre GM. Aura isn't going to do it. It lost its aggressive show car design and gained a pushrod motor. Yup, the honda and Toyo fans of the world will love that. I like the Lucerne, but look at how lame the base motor is. I hope GM doesn't get cuaght up into building so many image cars and leaving all their volume sellers to be dogmeat as usual, on 10 year product cycles.

Considering the bang up press the Fusion is getting this month in the buff books, I'd say its not at all a bad idea. Ford put a nice front end on their car and made it an equal to the Accord. GM puts a killer fish face on their car (Malibu) and other foibles and it takes almost 2 years for it to ramp up to popularity. Besides, it sounds like Opel and Daewoo are doing most of GM's engineering now these days.....so I'm not sure what your point is there. I'd rather have Volvo and Mazda engineering my cars than Hyundai, or Daewoo, or Chery or whoever GM has doing for them now. Thankfully GM is finally going global now, its a good thing we're not shipping all those pushrod v6's, bench seats, and rear drum brakes off to Europe. If we did, there'd be a revolt.

the 500 and Freestyle and fusion were cheap to design and build since its mostly the Volvo S80 and Mazda6 already. Those cars cost less to design and build than you think. BTW, Mazda 6 is up 60% and Mazda 3 continues to sell well. I am amazed at how the Mazda6 is increasing. The car had been out on the rest of the planet for like 2 years before it got HERE, and is already a tired desgin, but it has lots of rebate support now from Ford and its a great value now. Lesson, value still sells.

Planned capacity for the Fusion is like 300,000 units. The Five Hundred plus Fusion sales will more than make up for lost taurus sales. No car will be a huge volume leader anymore, at least until we rid the planet of those ghastly Camrys and Accords that the boomer loser crowd loves so much. Freestyle + 500 + Montego = 22156 Add Taurus and Sable to that and that's not at all shabby chic. And GM does well with the Impala/Malibu combo, although it takes lots of cash on the hood to move em.

the 500 and Freestyle + Montego sold over 22,000 units!!!!!!!! HOW IS THAT A FAILURE??????? like some auto journalists say? 22,000 UNITS! Freestar and Monterey sold over 9,000 units!

Altima badly needs a redo.

Magnum and 300 are both DOWN, but Magnum + Charger + 300 = better than last year's 300 + Magnum, so I'm not sure what to make of it other than these cars to me are 'large niche' products....and in my own mind its proof enough that killing the FWD Intrepid variant for Dodge was a huge mistake. Well, it was a good 18 months or so.

ONE per household.

disagree. Because of the upcoming gas crisis debacle, Pontiac needs the Pursuit, and fast. But, they should differentiate what they can versus the Cobalt as much as possible and go for sport tuned suspensions, larger wheels, and different interior colors, fabrics, and accents. Example, how about a 'G4' GXP sedan with a supercharged stage 1 or 2 ecotec and 6 speed manual, with charcoal interior (can't get that color interior on the Cobalt sedan) and other niceties............ HELL the G6 should get a stage 2 ecotec option on the base model with a sport package.

[quote name='HarleyEarl' date='Aug 28 2005, 08:30 PM'] Here's the Kia Grand Carnival.....suspicious, I think so...sounds like 'Grand Caravan' kind of. Very sneaky. well, it figures. Have we ever known an Asian carmaker to have an original thought? Damn Asians (automakers) couldn't come up with an original idea to save their lives. All they know how to do is copy from everyone else. It must give them an incredible sense of pride knowing they can't do anything on their own power. I hope Dodge takes them to task on that.

that's exactly why they do it. so they can single out drivers in traffic 'who bought the cheap ones'

at day care this morning, another mom i know said that when they bought their bravada, gas was 1.08 a gallon, they could afford the 15mpg. But now, its getting spendy for them. I think the low prices years ago set us all up for this.