balthazar

ocn- That always the outgoing message. At the same time, as Ringo Starr once said; 'It's just me face.' WMJ: I've gotten that a lot. Just for help keeping his name on people's minds, I should get at least a tiny kickback, no? 1/10th of 1/10 of 1/10th of a percent??

Let's get MSN's list in here: 10. "Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry" (1974) 9. "Duel" (1971) 8. "The Vanishing Point" (1971) 7. "Gone in 60 Seconds" (1974) 6. "The Driver" (1978) 5. "Le Mans" (1971) 4. "Bullitt" (1968) 3. "Smokey and the Bandit" (1977) 2. "Mad Max" (1979) 1. "Two-Lane Blacktop" (1971) I haven't seen #s 7, 5 and 1. The others are good picks, but the posts above point out that the list should be longer than 10. Christine comes to mind immediately for me, too. I would put Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry higher on the list.

>>"...isn't there a contract or something that states that GM must offer a Trans Am package if it builds a Firebird any year?"<< No, there's nothing at all like that.

I would have to agree with Hudson here. Used to be you could slap a set of spare plates on a vintage car and rip around with minimal fear; today the car is impounded, you are possibly jailed & the fines are towering. Not to mention what this does to your insurance. As a teenager, getting a car and getting it on the road is more regulated & expensive than ever. Add to that the fact that modern cars are nearly impossible to work on for the shade-tree mechanic, and where's the fun anymore? I once drove an uninsured, unregistered, uninspected, fiticious-plates car around for a day. There was a hole in the windshield where the inspection sticker went. Good memory, that one (got a number of similar ones!) Today, the loopholes are all sewn up, and that in itself limits enthusiasm to some degree.

'Competeing with each other' is extremely difficult to define with hard data. We're told GM's family cars do this in the middle ground, yet someone show me this in numbers between recent Olds & Buicks. I saw first year scion quarterly numbers and while they were of solid volume, the bulk of toyota car volume took a hit, some well into the double-digits- the prius was the big exception. How could anyone say a scion in the same showrom doesn't affect the volume of the corolla? And before someone posts numbers before and after, the long-term volume trend must also be considered...

sigh...I didn't miss your point; you are looking at it too closely. toyota HAD to create 'lexus' on the fly because it could not do whatever it wanted with 'toyota'. Same deal with scion- it was toyota's history that prevented success had those models been positioned under 'toyota'. Yes; now that these extra brands were 'made up on the fly' very recently, they themselves have no history. Needless to say. Still & further- any brand can be reinvented to mean something else and turn it's back on it's own history, if the product works. Has happened numerous times in the past.

Dude, the reason there's a "lexus" is BECAUSE of toyota's history. When a small company has aspirations to become a big one, multiple brands are a common practice. toyta has gone from 1 to 5; who's to say if they're done yet?

Obviously did not what?? Cool!: you posted links!.....uhhh, however... none of them even alluded to the contention that:

Mertz ('86-97) did not have the discretionary authority & divisional budget that earlier decades' GMs had. The point was that, not their job title. Division GMs have had 'VP' titles since '33. How'd I do, evok?

Pics from '77 I have of the SS II show a raised, chrome-edged, dark-background emblem. Maybe it was changed later? I am not challenging the '63 ID, BTW.

Circa '99 GMC had posted it's 7th in as many years of record sales. If the ROI only gets worse the higher the volume rises, then GMC should've been axed circa '92 and saved the Corp a lot of red ink.

I'm sorry... I have yet to encounter -- assuming such an event is possible-- a (pair of) 'writers' more professionally incompetent that these buffoons. Sure, as an occasional spotlight analysis on just how poor automotive 'journalism' has gotten, it can be an illustrative (if frustrating) sidebar. But the regular posting of their 'impressions' as if remotely relevent is puzzling, to say the very least.

As I posted once before- my local mitsu dealer replaced his building's corporate lettering with what looks like a sheet of painted/lettered plywood; ready to pull the plug the second the storm clouds roll in, and has shifted the bulk of his advertising to hyundai.

Nope; everything is hunky-dory and A-OK, Sixty-8. Steady the course... a thousand points of light. Lookin' good from here. I think another injection is in order. Grin grin, wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more. Don't question ANYTHING, trust in the company line. {puts finger to pursed lips and makes 'be-bub-be-bub-be-bub' sound, eyes pinwheeling} I vote for a bonus.

God that sucks. Hope you get a great dealer on an even nicer truck, and your buddy pulls thru in short order.

Circa '77 Monza Super Spyder II concept. Got an XP number on that one, Olds Guy??

>>"To see his article..."<< Now why would I ever want to do that? I actually had a decent day today. Ahhh, what the hell.... >>"Pontiac was in the dumps in the middle '50s, when Bunkie Knudsen--the son of a GM president and an impressive leader in his own right--took over. Knudsen was a GM vice president, which meant he actually had the power to change the cars. That was the beginning of Pontiac's great years."<< That's not it: Knudsen was Pontiac's General Manager, back when all GMs had authority, discretionary budgets and individual Engineering departments. >>"...how GM became the world's leader--by spreading a few platforms among its divisions and doing a great job of differentiating the look, power and handling of various models derived off these platforms."<< Again- that's not it. It was not "a few" platforms (nevermind that the term 'platform' is an anachronism with regards to the '50 & '60s), it was actually a great number of autonomous divisional chassis's. Which is also how the power was 'differentiated": autonomous engines. A Pontiac was Pontiac-designed, Pontiac-engineered, Pontiac-powered. It's what's needed again.

OK, I gotcha. I defaulted to the original definition knowing the horndog you seem to be at times. Just looking for a good story.

{waiting for the import humpers to continue to blindly deny media bias...} Reg- good post above but what jumped out at me is that you called your buddy's wife a milf. Want to unburden yourself in the Lounge on this issue (don't forget at least one pic!)?

Tho in the field of percentages, doubling your marketshare is relatively easy when you're in the low single digits, the above still seems like a lofty prediction. I really don't see nissan/toyota bringing anything new to the table... meanwhile both are still far from matching the leaders as far as choices and features are concerned.

It's not the facility... it's the history. Some of the greatest automotive creations known to man have run there.

Ahh- my first time in here. Any rules? No? Good. and

It still reflects extremely poorly on brand image.

No prob, esp. for a fellow Buick man! Looked for a bit more; saw in a GM blog that Milford has "over 100 miles" of road now!