CARBIZ

Well, good for you Daddy Warbucks. Makes me wonder where you earned all that CASH to be able to afford to buy a $50k car with. Maybe a quick call to Revenue Canada is in order! Right now, for better or worse, GM is concentrating on the 90% of the people who lease or finance, because at 8-9% bank rates, nobody is going to be clamoring over the border for used or nearly new cars, I'm afraid. It kinda makes me laugh to the point of crying that the guy with deep pockets whose company makes its profits on this side of the border is the first to cry foul and skip over the border whenever it suits him. And good luck with importing a nearly new vehicle. Not only may the vehicle require inspection (daytime running lights, etc., odometers, etc) and costly upgrades to get insured here, there are also other factors (like a 6.1% duty on certain imported cars), the GST and PST having to be paid in CASH as well (that can be another $7k on a $50k vehicle). There are also 'green' levies that have to be paid at the border. $2,000 on a Denali. I hope you have an American Express Gold Card. Yeah, everyone targets the big, bad dealer, because after all, spending $50 a week too much on groceries at, say, Loblaws, when you can buy the same products at a NO Frills for a lot less is not the same thing.

Is she paying cash? I mean real CASH, not borrowed against a line of credit or something. If she's not, then a new one a 0% for 60 months and NO mileage would be a better deal, IMO. $16,300 (what that used car would be on the road, my guess) works out to be $3,756 interest at 8.5%, the prevailing bank rank. $2,829, even at 6.5%. You can't beat 0%.

Please, get your facts straight. Have you used turn-by-turn navigation? No, I thought not. The trouble is, having a nav screen makes the posers all happy. Look at me: I just spent $2,000 and can't read a map! Turn by turn is actually useful. And cheap. Buy a map for $5, if you must have a map. Seriously, nothing screams I JUST PAID TOO MUCH FOR MY CAR than a DVD nav screen.

Now you're getting the idea! Not only that, but now that Toyota is in the Big Leagues (as is Honda) they are finding it much harder to juggle 15-20 balls in the air, rather than the 4 or 5 that they were each juggling in the '80s. Toyota's recent troubles are (IMO) not a sign of any trends or anything sinister, but rather a fact of operating a huge, multinational corporation. It is easy to focus on 4 or 5 core models, but the challenges expand exponentially with the complexity of the vehicle (just as Mercedes and their last few years of lacklustre quality rankings) and the number of models.

And my point is that the moment the lab acheives their design goal, it is not posted on the internet 5 minutes later. Right now GM is feeding the media (and us tidbits) to keep the competition on the defensive and the media their 30 second sound bites. Even media 'leaks' make me suspicious. At the end of the day, we are told what Big Business wants us to hear. We will just have to wait until '10 to see what's what.

Well, isn't the world a different place than 2 years ago when GM was going bankrupt and Toyota was walking on water? Believe me, I am not dancing on anyone's grave here. My point is that NO corporation is perfect, and no one car company deserves the kind of free pass Toyota has enjoyed this past 15 years, nor GM the free pass it enjoyed the 15 years before that. The media is biased, jaded and corrupt. They herd like a pack of wild banshees, looking for the next carcass to feed on. The trouble is, what they don't appreciate is that they often help to decide who or what the next carcass will be. Whatever the media decides is the Next Big Thing becomes the Next Big Thing. GM makes a lot of very good cars. Where the problem lies is who determines what is World Class? World class in Brazil? In China? The U.K.? There is no such thing, my friend. Just more media doublespeak, but the media determines the agenda and the couch potatoes of America will buy what they are told to - or whatever's on sale.

As I have said before, GM is not going to tell the public (or us) what they are really up to. Their has got to be tons of data from the EV-1 program that turned out to be of some use. And to back up Oldsmoboi, I agree - two years is a very, very long time in technological circles.

...why is it that I hear a loud flushing sound every time I drive by a Toyota store these days?

RELAX. OnStar is standard in the '08 Malibu and the Directions and Connections Package (which includes Turn by Turn NAVIGATION) is only a $100 option. Compare that to $2,200 for the rip-off nav systems in the competition, and I think GM has a winning hand, for the 5% out there who actually bother with nav systems. I, for one, don't want idiots out there watching a blinking dot on a screen: I'd rather their eyes were on the road!!! Turn by turn navigation is a far superior, more user friendly (most people can't set the clocks on their car stereo!) and a damned BARGAIN at $100.

Maybe Europeans are smarter? Maybe Japan Inc hasn't gotten around to figuring out how to conquer (or has bothered yet) the varied market yet.

I used to know two sets of twin brothers who were gay. Homosexuality definitely runs in families. Any clown can tell it is genetic. If all gay people turned purple tomorrow morning, all this bull$h! would end. No more hiding, no more denials. No more groups for the 'cured.' No more getting married with kids and hiding it for 30 years. It would all just end.

Your revisons are funny, Fly, but trust me when I say that any 'visions' you have of Canada do not include Toronto. Toronto is not Canada any more.

It's an old con, I am afraid. Most crack dealers work that way. (So I hear.) Never, ever buy anything off the street. Sounds like you had a 'fun' night anyway. Maybe not the fun you were hoping for, but still, it was better than watching re-runs on TV.

EGAD! Can't they research the genetic markers of the HIV virus, or something useful? I could care less why I am gay. I just am and would never EVER change it.

This is me last week. How do you like my big, uh, submarine?

...well, he has the smouldering, 'come hither' look down pat

I think there were some early electronic problems with the Epica in '04 that were difficult to pin down in the begginning, but they were software related. Being a wholly new car line, I suspect the dealers and dealer equipment had a hard time dealing with them at first. I leased and sold a lot of them back then and with only 2 exceptions the people were happy. In fact, one customer just bought out his 4 year lease that he got from me and they are thrilled with the car. The Epica suffered from two problems: 1) it was underpowered (but very smooth) for a 6 cylinder and 2) salespeople were lazy, preferring to sell the more known and (at the time) equally known Malibu. The Aveo and Optra have sold in far bigger volumes than GM has ever had here with any previous (lackluster) attempts, like the Metro, and has brought an entirely new breed of customers to GM's door. For better or worse, there are bound to be teething problems, both from the design and build side, and the sales/service side.

....but Japan Inc. does not take the same interest in South America as they do here. After all, if they successfully kill off Detroit, then Europe and South America will be theirs by default. While GM and Ford have maintained steady growth everywhere EXCEPT North America, is it any wonder, considering the frontal assault that Japan Inc has employed for the past 20 years? Remember that Japan Inc did the same thing in the electronics business in the '60s and '70s, successfully killing off the TV and electronics business here in about 15 years. It has taken longer with Detroit, but they seem to unerringly be accomplishing the same thing. Are Japanese cars sold in North America superior to what they sell elsewhere in the world? No. Why is it that nowhere else in the world, except North America, do the Japanese enjoy such stellar sales? In Europe and South America none of the Japanese companies are even in the top 5 or 6 in sales.

I cannot even begin to imagine what you are both going through.......sometimes Life pulls us up short and forces us to take stock. I hope this can turn into one of those growing experiences for you two.

Much better than the Toyota concept, but wait a minute - didn't I see a GM concept van like this 35 years ago? This styling trend looks very familiar. I'll dig around my archives and see if I can find the pic, but there were cool 'future concepts' coming out of Detroit in the early '70s that looked just like this...........

The interior is very nice. I like it. Except they put the steering wheel on the wrong side, those silly Japanese! The profile is nice for a minivan (after all, how many sleek shapes can you make out of a bread box?), but I don't like Toyota's recent styling trend on the noses of their vehicles. Too Mazdaish and Mazda does it better, IMO.

Same here. Sounds worrisome, though. I had one customer cook their Aveo engine at 150k km because they had never had the timing belt looked at. I think GM has spoiled its customers with timing chains for many years (now that Honda and Toyota have finally caught up), so anyone who is used to driving GM products and has not looked in their owner's manual (which is all too common, I am afraid) is in for a shocker. This customer ragged on my head, but I pointed out that I had never sold him that vehicle (his wife had leased a Cobalt from me a year earlier) and GM was not to blame. The GM-DAT product has belts, so that may be a cause for a smoking engine if proper maintenance was never done.

You do realize that there is a big difference between the used and new car markets, don't you? Gas guzzlers like the Denali are not sold well up here, therefore, finding a good used one is rare and supply/demand dictates they will be more expensive up here than in the U.S. where gas prices are 20-30% less and big vehicles sell better. You guys crow about 'freedoms' and capitalism, which is what the used car market is all about. If 5 dealers show up at an auction (where most of the newer used vehicles are bought) and get into a bidding war over the 2 measly Denalis that are there, you would naturally expect the prices to be higher. I'll bet more Tahoes, Suburbans and Denalis are sold in California in a year than all of Canada.

For sure the market is becoming very, very interesting. Look at all the Toyota problems: executives fleeing, problems with the Tundra launch, Avalon 'teething problems' last year. A quick flip through the latest CR shows an awful lot of GM and Ford products on the 'recommended' list. I think GM is in the loop with the upcoming Volt and knows more than it is telling. With the UAW mess behind it, huge sales increases in Europe (after all, the Astra is the #1 car there and it is coming here), do you not see a general trend here? The only cloud on the horizon I see is that GM absolutely MUST get their marketing folks on a new tact. The upcoming Malibu launch has to be flawless, as with the Astra and others. I've always been a big supporter of the General and although I don't think there ever again will be a 30+% market share in the future, holding 25% is not beyond the realm of possibility..........

First of all, not everyone has the expertise, time or CASH to do what you just did. There are a lot of ramifications to licensing the vehicle up here, taxes to be paid, etc. There was a time, only a few years ago, where American used car dealers were coming up here and buying up everything. We were not allowed to sell a Suburban, Tahoe or Corvette to anyone who was paying cash, without a lot of serious checking because Americans were coming up here and buying those vehicles. I do understand that there are a lot of built in costs to marketing and distributing products in Canada: let's face it - California has a bigger population in a fifteenth the size of Canada. You would be amazed at what a difference of 5 degrees celsius will do to energy and production costs, for example. Still, the market will eventuallly take care of this. For the time being, it would appear that manufacturers are trying to recoup some of the monies they 'lost' back in the day when the our dollar was .65 U.S.