CARBIZ

There are residency issues with buying new or nearly new vehicles and then exporting them. If, as a tourist, you travel in the U.S. with your Canadian registered vehicle, you will have no warranty issues. However, as a Canadian resident with an American registered vehicle in Canada, you may have problems. These vehicles are considered "grey market" and you may be denied warranty in Canada. We had these problems a few years back when the Canadian dollar was about the value of a peso, and Americans would buy Suburbans, etc. up here and export them back. Now, the problem is reversing because cars are way over priced here in Canada. Be very careful with what you do. At our dealership, if a customer even BREATHES the possibility that they may be exporting the vehicle they get shown the door (in the nicest possible way, of course!)

I spent a bloody fortune on my computer last September to upgrade it. It works fine; however, I can't figure out how to copy, paste or post pictures on C&G - it just doesn't work Nor can I figure out why I have some pictures blocked and all of the emoticons, etc. My computer at work has none of those problems. Probably to do with my Norton settings. I threw my Lexmark computer down the garbage chute (satisfying crashing for 26 floors) last October when it continuously jammed. My HP printer is faster, better and uses half the ink. (shoulda smashed it sooner!)

I think it is pretty safe to say the worst days are behind GM. Delphi is still a bit of a question mark, but I dare say Wagoner and team have something up their sleeve on that one. The GM worker buyouts were pretty successful. New products are doing fairly well. Quality is still on the upswing. GM over seas is very strong. A new plant is going into Brazil, furthering GM's strength as #1 in that huge market. Also, Ford is where GM was a year ago, so the worst media venom will be redirected. And Toyota ain't looking too good these days, what with the delay of the Corolla, problems with the Avalon, Camry trannies, etc. All in all, I'd say GM is a great investment right now.

Captainbooyah, we do NOT need immigration to fuel our economy. That is a myth, plain and simple. Do we need cheap nannies and house keepers that badly? 25 years ago, all the taxi drivers were "Canadian." Now, they are all from West Africa, Sri Lanka, etc. Is that progress? Women from the Phillipines are indentured for 3-5 years in state-sponsored slavery, so that OUR women can be emancipated and have careers. If housing prices in Toronto/Vancouver are sky rocketing out of people's reach, is that progress? Why only these two cities? If External Affairs is spending hundreds of millions of dollars bailing out/investigating/supporting the thousands of "Canadians" who get into trouble over seas (read: Lebanon recently), who is footing the bill for that? Canada is a small country of only 34 million people, yet we spend like we are First World. We cannot compete with the likes of Great Britain, France, etc. on the world stage, yet we pretend we can. Read "Who Gets In," by Daniel Stoffman. A real eye opener of a book. This man took his Atkinson fellowship and spent 5 years studying the mess that our immigration system is. Ironically, it isn't entirely the Liberals fault - a lot of the mess was created during the Mulroney years when he really opened the flood gates. Anyway, a little off topic. Thought I would rant a little. I live in downtown Toronto, which is not the same Toronto I lived in 25 years ago and that is NOT good news. BTW, New York City would have engulfed most of New Jersey, Long Island and lower New YOrk state by now, if not for sky scrapers. Look to LA for the mess urban America would be without the sky scraper/urban density.

I think they should build two towers even taller than the WTC just to stick to those jealous bastards. Sigh. Unfortunately, the politics of lower Manhattan is even worse than the '60s when the original towers were designed! And, let's face it, once built, those jealous fantatics would be gunning to knock them down again.

You know, I gotta admire these Japanese. They are very, very clever at what they are doing. First, they make inroads into the market with cheap, disposable cars that were a bit fun to drive. Make a couple of models, build them cheap and dump them on the American market, with the full support of MITI in Japan and the complicity of Washington. Slowly expand your line up to include luxury cars and trucks, all the while enjoying protection at home. Avoid tarrifs by building production plants here. Convince Americans that you are American. I mean, how can you argue that your Accord is Japanese when it is built in Ohio, right? Once you have bloodied your enemy, build plants on their turf, re-hire their laid off employees and beat them at their own game. In fact, you can hire their brightest and best, thus assuring their inevitable collapse - and, get this, the government will even help you build your plants! Voila! Recipe for total annhilation of your enemy! We are witnessing history, boys and girls. When people look back at the last 25 years, business professors will use this as a textbook case of how to run your competition into the ground. The best part is, we are letting it happen! No other government on Earth is as stupid as this. And I am including Canada in this mess. WE are sewing the seeds of our own destruction and paying to have it happen.

There are rebates coming for those people who already took delivery of 2007s and paid for an extended warranty. Our business managers were wading through the miles of home office letters and forms yesterday. Contact your dealer and be patient. The paperwork will be endless and everyone has to first figure out what to do.

I am all for standard safety equipment, but there is a cost. At some point, a car could cost $200,000 and be perfectly safe but nobody could AFFORD to drive one. This is where the lawyers have to be held at bay. Every manufacturer has to trade off cost/benefit on safety items. GM tried putting this system on the Intrigue a few years back and it BOMBED. Customers didn't care, salespeople couldn't explain it and not enough people saw the benefits. It's probably a poor comparison, but if you look at a 1967 Dart or Chevelle and then look at a Malibu or Fusion today, safety equipment has added thousands to the cost of the vehicle. Cars 40 years ago barely had lap belts!

Yep, there is no limit to the stupidity thrust upon Detroit by the rabble that thinks they know about cars and selling them. Tyranny of the "Enthusiast."

Consumer groups go ape $h! over this type of thing, but the consumers themselves just YAWN. Do you know how hard it is to sell a Cobalt SS with side air bags because they are $395? We've had pictures of cancer victims, bad teeth and poisoned lungs on cigarettes up here for, like, 10 + years and people still smoke. Hell, it is now illegal to smoke any indoor public space ever, and people still crowd outside in the winter to have a puff. Crash tests are only valuable if you happen to drive into a brick wall at 45 mph. Any other type of accident and they are useless.

....you forgot adding Scion's sales to Toyota's so they could brag about outselling Chevrolet last year!

........oh, PUHLEAZE...like the demand for oil is ever going to go DOWN in North America! Population growth alone will push up demand, even if conservation measures are increased. Meanwhile, if they can bitch that "due to high gasoline demand over an unusually hot summer driving season, we have been unable to switch to heating oil refining in time, therefore, heating oil prices will rise" or "due to an unusually cold winter, we have been unable to switch to gasoline refining in time, therefore, gasoline prices will rise for the busy summer driving season." Take your pick, we hear it almost every year.

They also control the refinery capacity of North America, which is another choke point. There is a certain conflict of interest here because every year we hear there are shortages of heating oil/gasoline because of refinery capacity; yet, if they build new refineries (not cheap) their prices will naturally go down as capacity increases. If you were CEO of Exxon, Chevron, etc. would you spend a billion dollars on a new refinery if you knew your prices would drop afterward?

Now hold on, Buick has a 4/80 already, as does Cadillac. Chevy runs with a 3/60 on all their vehicles, but a 5/100 on the powertrain for the Cobalt/Pursuit and the Uplander atrocities. Oops, the above numbers are in km, not miles. Truthfully, it would be relatively cheap to upgrade the standard warranty to a 4/80. I suspect the resistance has come at the dealer level. Don't forget that many dealers are making damned little on the sale of the actual vehicle, so they are making the money in the business office. One of the reasons GM has enjoyed the best working relationship with the dealers, as opposed to Ford and Chrysler, is that they have allowed for these alternate profit centers. I do find it interesting that consumers are demanding more for less. I've been shopping for plasma TVs and you are lucky to get a 1 year warranty on those. I am concerned about spending $3,000 on something that will be worthless if a few of the "bulbs" start burning out and they only back them for a year! Yet, consumer pressure is demanding 4 and 5 year coverages on a machine with thousands of moving parts that are prone to abuse. You realize that those in the south and southwest are going to be subsidizing those who live in the north and northeast where more severe duty is experienced. For those of you who hate socialism, that is a reality of extending the coverage of warranties. They aren't free and the cost will be passed along.

I am glad this topic dropped back to reality. When GM sells nearly 900k of these trucks, the VAST majority are sold in the lower models - not the loaded LTZ. It is more representative to compare the base model to base model and when you do, clearly the GM trucks are WAY better looking than the Toyota.

Things must be different down south, because here WE sell directly to the rental agencies and we do sell them for $150-$300 over invoice. They get bought back through a GM auction.

Enzl, I would be worried about a dealer that can't sell a Cavalier in six months. Bad management or bad planning. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that the J-cars will be worth less because they still (collectively) outsold the Civic (in Canada) even in their last year - not bad for a vehicle that was 11 years old! Try and find a used 2000 Corolla or Civic and they will be scarce, yet J-cars will be in abundance. I suspect the pendulum will swing the other way in a couple of years when the market is awash in rusting Corollas and Civics and the Cobalt has become more scarce as a used vehicle. The dealers take advantage of this scarcity and really sock it to the consumer on used Toyotas/Hondas. We never have a problem selling used J-cars. We have no problems getting upside down customers bought. The problem, as I see it, isn't so much that GM products lose value as much as the persistence of 0% financing discourages people from putting money down in the first place. Any idiot would know that you can't finance a $20k car, all the taxes and fees, over 60 months with nothing down and expect to trade the car in after 3 years and have equity. But it is easier to blame GM's depreciation, isn't it?

O.C., how much money do you think GM loses on rental sales? Do some research and then flap about it. We sell hundreds of Impala's, etc. to fleets and they are usually sold for $150 to $300 above invoice, so I don't see GM losing any money on these. GM, in turn, gives the dealer a $1,000 fleet rebate. Big deal. The current 0% promotion will cost GM more than $1,000 per unit on the retail side. I fail to see how having a car used as a taxi, police car or rental will hurt sales. Frankly, as I've told customers many times, having a lot of Impala/Century taxis is a good thing - a testimony to the durability of the vehicle and the faith the taxi drivers have in the vehicle. Resale values is yet another matter, but nearly half our sales are leases anyway. And let me tell you, the Toyota store is going to stick it to you anyway on their used car lot. Their transaction profit is TRIPLE what they make in new cars.

OH, I thought your story was going to have a happy ending. About 15 years ago (when I was young and beautiful - okay, I was young!) a similar situation happened when a young man from across the way joined me in the rain to sit under our tarp. He complained about a wet tent. Mine was bone dry. I invited him to stay in my tent. Oh, so Brokeback Mountain!

Interesting that Ford and GM can get along this well. I read somewhere that the early '50s Lincolns actually had a GM automatic in them for a year or two until Ford could ready their own automatic. It is time Detroit realize the common enemy is across the Pacific and the Japanese car companies have been sharing technology for years.

The resale argument is a non-starter. More of the Japan Inc's kool aid. This is not anecdotal, okay. We own two Toyota stores and a Chevy store. A bad example would be a 2005 Cavalier that sold NEW (a/c, auto, Cd) for $12,999 last year WITH a 5 year power train warranty. A similarly equippped Corolla was selling for $18,400. When you add Canada's horrible taxes (15% in Ontario last year), the Corolla ends up costing even more. When you add finance charges on top of that, well, it gets ugly. So, just adding taxes (let's forget about cost of money, higher insurance, etc.) the Cavalier is $6,200 cheaper out the door. I am talking REAL numbers here, boys and girls, not the BS published. So, what is a 2000 Corolla worth in this market? Around $9 grand, traded in. How about a 2000 Cavalier? $3,000 or so, depending on the condition. OOPs, looks like they work out to be about the same. GASP! How can that be? Toyota's are better, right? It is too soon to see how well the Cobalt will fare and its transaction price is much closer to the Corolla's, so it will be an interesting contest to watch over the next couple years. As an aside, here, I'd like to point out one PROFESSIONAL observation here that seems to get lost in people's rush to defend Toyota and HOnda: if you are a customer and you shop a Chevy dealer and could get a Cavalier for $15k out the door, then went to a Toyota store and realized the Corolla would be over $21,000 out the door, yet you still deliberately spent $6,200 MORE because you were convinced the Toyota was a better car, don't you think this consumer would have the car maintained better, washed, waxed and cared for - after all, he bought a PREMIUM vehicle. You wouldn't believe the condition we see Cavaliers come back in. People drive with cracked windshields for years. Dog hair every where. Bald tires. Run into the ground. One guy went 45k km with no oil change in his Z24! When someone trades in a Toytoa, many of them pay to have it detailed first! Just an observation from someone who knows where all Toyota's bodies are buried, too.

Not to be negative (who? me?) but this guy is driving the top of the line Cobalt. The trouble with these reviewers is that if he had travelled in the LS Cobalt, (which is the bulk of what sells) he would have nit-picked everything about it, instead of noting that for $3,500 LESS the Cobalt is a good value. Yeah, the SS is fabulous, but in high insurance areas it isn't doing so well. His points in the beginning are well taken, though. If GM had spent a few extra dollars and make the seat material a little nicer (cloth is hideous) and put a decent arm rest in all the models (the first thing any Cavalier owners comments on is "where is the armrest? where am I going to put my Cds?" perhaps GM would have had a winner out of the gate. The engineers spent a lot of money on making the ecotec reliable, powerful and fuel efficient. They also made the ride and handling on the Cobalt second to none, but a few extra dollars spent on the touchy touchy feely things would have kept a lot of the GM haters off their backs and maybe a little less would need to have been spent on rebates (bribes.)

If the Japanese apologists would just take off their blinders, they would realize that a lof of Toyota's vehicles are not on par with their competition. Really take a Corolla for a drive, for example. It shakes, rattles and rolls. Has no power. Lackluster performance. Yet the media (CR especially) gushes over this POS. The Cobalt will drive circles around a Corolla. And we've discussed here before that the Prius just isn't worth the extra money. I am driving a 4 cylinder Malibu and I am getting about 31 mpg (Can gals) in city driving and I drive it hard. The Malibu LS is $15,000 less than a Prius in this market. That would buy a lot of gas.

SIGH. I am all sketchy from partying last night. I should KNOW better than read anything from TTAC. Thanks, Enzl! LOL. Farago, while GM is at it, why don't they just fax Toyota and Ford ALL of their plans for the 4th quarter and 2007? I mean, why keep up the suspense? Clearly, this clown knows nothing about running a popsicle stand, let alone one of the largest corporations on the planet! GM not telling the truth? Who would blame them? Sometimes the public just doesn't have a right to know. Next, he'll want all of Wagoner's emails posted to GM's website. THAT IS JUST ASININE!! GM's stock is rising. New products are doing okay. The market over all is soft. Gas prices are easing. I suspect the GMT-900s will start doing a little better. A year ago we were paying $1.30 a litre; now, it is .84. Big difference. I suppose that will only disappoint TTAC. Frankly, someone should sue them for their name: clearly fraud.

I will agree that the fit and finish on the Uplander isn't the best (the gap between the rear bumper and the rear quarter panel would fit a couple credit cards!), but up here in the land of $4.50 a gallon gas, we do well with these vans. I think GM doesn't market them south of the border. UP here, we are in a price war with Chrysler and the LS sells for $18,999. We are sold out and wish we had 20 more! The truth is, for all their flaws, a Sienna is more than $10,000 more. Although we would all like to see world class products from GM in every market segment, sometimes just being able to kick ass on price is awesome. I know this forces GM (and Chrysler) to the bottom of the food chain, but until the new vans are ready in two years, we are selling all we can get. Our dealership has sold 2 Tahoes this year, and sells at least 15 Uplanders a month!