Drew Dowdell

I wonder how much of that is old Silverado and Sierra sales though.... I wish they would differentiate between model years.

There are 29 proud new owners of the 2012 Chevrolet Colorado this month though....

overall not bad... but it does show weakness the in their family sedan segments

Looks like the new Regals just hit the deck! I am curious what Buick's original sales goal for the Encore was... they're on pace to sell 43k annually (not this year since it got a late start, but still)

Somewhere out there is a single Chevrolet SS... I bet it is a press car. Tahoe and Suburban roaring along in their final months... but I bet there are a lot of incentives there.

Chevy moved more Corvettes in October than Buick moved Encores! And more than 50% of the Camaro total!

Cruze needs its update ... now.

I'm surprised to see Impala up that much with the price increase... I'm guessing it will taper off. (Are Impala Limited sales included in this?)

Lots of incentives on Malibu?

Wow at ~16,000 units GM cannot justify Avalanche and Escalade EXT, yet Audi can justify TT for a measely 1,800 units.

And that's even after GM removed so many options....

I wish they'd change the name though.... Call it the Chevrolet SCV (Sedan, Commercial Vehicle) or something.... but take the Impala name off!

I think he is referring to the commercial chassis?

The Malibu has many faults, your rear leg room fixation is among them, but relatively minor in comparison to the other faults on the list. Furthermore, if the wheelbase were to be extended, it would be from moving the rear wheels back, not the front wheels forward. I agree with you that the rear seat room is tight on the malibu... but you're not going to get an increase in rear seat room from the engine bay.

The All-Track was supposed to come here.... but haven't heard anything of it lately.

Except for the AWD, I think you can get all those elements in the Jetta wagon. Diesels are great...wouldn't mind having another someday..... though what I'd like see in a diesel is unlikely to happen.

I'd like something a bit larger than a Jetta though... and that is the old body jetta, not the new one.

Subaru doesn't in a diesel

I am very careful in the presence of automotive journalists to not describe myself as such. I feel it is somewhat disrespectful to those who do this job as their main career when I do it as more of a hobby that barely makes enough money to cover costs.

There is a running joke amongst the automotive journalist crowd that any car, no matter what it is, could be made better if it was made available in a wagon, with all-wheel-drive, a diesel, and a manual transmission... all in one package.

This week, my rental car was a new VW Passat. Driving between Pittsburgh and Columbus, I glanced down at the computer generated average mpg... I was pulling about 37mpg.

The rest of the story is my internal monologue while driving, but I'm sure you can see where this is going:

Hmm.. 37mpg, not too bad... but the diesel can get over 50mpg on this same drive...... maybe I should look at the Passat diesel again as a car for me....

.... but I'd still need some utility.... hey, weren't they going to build that Passat-Outback lookalike? That would work! .... I bet it would come with all-wheel drive too... Albert would insist on that....... hmmm an AWD diesel passat wagon.... Albert wouldn't let me get it in a manual though... that would be sweet though..... yeah a manual diesel passat wagon with AWD....

DOH! I have been assimilated!

I thought it was a GMC... but not being a bus person, I wasn't sure.

Are they tired of being accused of being biased do you think?

I could send Albert back to the Buick dealer so he can learn to use Intellilink....

I have pictures from my drive time with the Cherokee (and a debut of my better photo taking skills!)

If the CR-V cooperates this weekend, I should have the time to write some reviews finally.

That's gotta be worth a couple bucks on ebay right there!

Maybe on the 4-cylinder ATS, they could use the wasted space on either side of the engine for front seat hip room!

I never found the taxi rates in NYC to be completely unreasonable.... I don't mind the drivers making a little more money.

A bit disengenous of a statement though since there are already a large number of hybrid taxis running around NYC already. In my most recent trips, none of my taxis have been Crown Vics... They've always been a Toyota Hybrid or Ford Hybrid.

Maybe V6 Silverados could get an extra 5 inches in the bed!

My Local Jeep dealer just got a few Cherokees in.

That inefficiency is present in any vehicle on a platform that offers engines with variable number of cylinders. That same inefficiency is there in an Accord or Passat.... it is simply the nature of offering Inline engines and V engines in the same platform.

edit: Even true for BMWs... a Turbo-4 is shorter than an I-6... thus there is "wasted space" under the hood of every 4-cylinder BMW.

You can't just transfer that space to the rear seat passengers... the hardpoints for the engine and transmission and everything else are still there.

You mean like wood? By your reasoning, we would be using wood for electricity generation.

While coal as fuel may be cheap, the costs to burn it cleanly are high... as the standards for coal plant emissions increase, the cost effectiveness of burning the cheap fuel will decrease.

Additionally, the energy from natural gas can be extracted more completely. A gas turbine with a regenerator and heat capture is like two power plants in one. The exhaust gases from such a setup are released at temperatures similar to a hot Texas day. Coal simply cannot do that.

Coal plants are closing. Natural Gas plants are being built. Follow the trend line.

I said I work for an Energy company... but I don't work for a company that does generation (we have some wind farms in Texas for token "green" cred, and a few gas generation plants in Canada, but that's it)... we don't have a dog in this fight aside from wanting to being able to buy energy cheaply at wholesale and sell it higher at retail.

Don't see these out and about too often.... any of our old-timer bus fans able to identify?

Lambda was designed from the start to be so much more than what it is today. I was supposed to spawn mini-vans, and a sedan version of it was supposed to replace the DTS and Lucerne. There is hidden flexibility in this chassis that we simply haven't seen yet.... don't expect it to be an Acadia Denali with the badges scraped off.

We took a loss on the sales of the shares, but the gain of kept employment (and paid taxes by those employees) by the domestic auto industry is far greater than the stock sale loss.

As much as I appreciate your links from Cleancoalusa.org, coal is not our future. It will remain in our infrastructure, but it will be diminishing over time. But who are you going to believe... the coal industry lobby website or the guy that works for one of the larger energy companies in the country?