Drew Dowdell

If your regular 87 is $3.78 then $4.07 is a steal for diesel

I guess GM doesn't see the ROI in designing and building such product in-house. If they can't find the ROI in designing and building a global small delivery van, likely based off of Delta III, then they just need to pack it up and stop building cars.

I'm with Ninety-Eight in asking why GM shouldn't take the lead on something like this. Let Opel work on it (gives them something useful to do) and be the design supplied to Peugeot Citroen Isuzu Holden Vauxhaull Chevy and GMC.

VEBA needs to be free to make investment changes as much as they want to... the truth may be that ownership of Chrysler may not be in their best long term financial interests or having such a large chunk of their assets tied to a single entity may be considered high risk.

Not just Ram, Chevrolet, GMC... but Fiat, Opel, Citroen, Peugeot... and eventually Nissan.

Well the Peugeot Boxer is the same as the Fiat Ducato... or the Ram Promaster to us Yanks, and the smaller vans are all related to Opels or other Fiats (or both) Why couldn't GM just use Opel?

could just be a sticker package on the SRT-4

DING DONG THE 5-CYLINDER'S DEAD!

Green Hollywood types. Bill Gates. Warren Buffet. Al Gore.

One of the top end Holdens also uses it.

How many times can GM re-use that same design in numbers 5 and 9?

Again with the tin-foil hat... :tinfoil: VEBA is not managed by the UAW though the UAW is the primary beneficiary. VEBA is the vehicle to distribute contractual benefits to retirees and former employees of Chrysler and GM. It is not meant to be an indefinite fund and they do need the cash to pay those benefits. Selling those shares was planned from the start... the only reason this is news is because Fiat will be the largest purchaser.

Bleeding edge there Benz...

I choose to Disagree with you Drew All my travel to Europe has pounded into me a clear attitude of driving is for the well paid mass transit is for the rest or a solid moped. So this is my perception and take on spending 15-20% of my life at trade shows around Europe. For those that do drive, they accept compact or sub compact diesel and the high prices that go with it. That stated, in the US and this is probably colored by living in a state with high fuel tax's and a big Hi-tech industry that most people here in talking with them do not consider diesel in these two categories of cars. Due to a much higher than average income many have already moved up scale in the auto scene. In regards to my comment on the obese auto's and their nanny devices, I am not the only one here that has complained about the waist line of the auto's getting thicker and the crazy required electronic devices. But then it was just my personal take on what I see and interpet. Thanks for the UFO Blast as I do miss them not visiting me as often as they did back in the 90's. Well I'll knock down each sentence one by one with detailed explanations of why you're wrong. But your perceptions do not translate to fact. Yes it costs a lot to own a car in the EU, but that isn't dramatically different from the U.S. anymore. How many articles have we seen about how the younger generations no longer care about cars and one of the reasons cited is cost? However, Just because you see someone one a bike or moped or streetcar in the EU doesn't mean they cannot afford a car. None of those means of travel have a stigma attached to them like in the US, so there is no reason you can't see a banking executive on the trolly every morning or some well-to-do suburbanite riding a moped. The public transportation systems are so good over there that people don't feel the need to own a car. Why spend the money on a car when there are daily and hourly car rental places everywhere to pick up a car for those times that public transit won't do? I still have the desire to live there some day, I love cars, but even I admit that I wouldn't need to own one while living there. There is a Sixt Auto Rental place around the block from our (possibly future) house, an U-Bahn (Underground Train...subway) stop 2 blocks away, an S-Bahn stop 4 blocks away (Surface Regional Train... like NJ Transit) both of which will take me to the DeutscheBahn station (long distance rail) in under 30 minutes from where I can go to nearly any city in Europe. With infrastructure like that, many Europeans simply don't see the need to own cars regardless of how wealthy they are. My friends that live in Cologne; one is the Director of HR for a huge insurance company and the other is the manager of the helpdesk for Rhein Energie. Neither of them own cars though they certainly have the means. Hell, I even take the bus often here in the US and I still own a car... so just because you see someone on a bus or riding a bike in the US doesn't mean they can't afford one. You may not be able to see any change in perception about diesels only being frugal and instead more sporty simply because we have such a limited selection of such cars right now. At most, the best performing diesel cars currently sold in the US is the 535d. The Audis with the 3.0 diesel are mostly not here yet. Cars like this GTD and even the Cruze diesel (264 lb-ft of torque with 280 lb-ft overboost!!) will make good performing diesels available to to masses. We are literally just opening the door to this possibility in the US right now. Once people realize they can have performance and frugal driving at the same time, the perception will change rapidly. Electronic devices aren't the primary cause of the weight gain in cars. Most of it comes from crash safety requirements. Up until the latest generation of platforms, most manufacturers were simply throwing more iron on the car to make them hold up better in crashes instead of investing in metal alloys with greater strength. One of the best examples of this is at GM with the Epsilon platform that started with the lowly 2004 Chevrolet Malibu weighing in at a relatively light 3100lbs where by 2012 it was up to 3400lbs on a variant of the same platform and up to 4200lbs on the Cadillac XTS AWD. There is over an 1100lb difference between a 2004 Malibu and a 2013 XTS on related platforms.... rear parking sensors, side impact airbags (which were in the 2004 Malibu anyway), Stability control and LCD Screens don't weigh that much... Compare this growth to the Cadillac ATS which was built with weight in mind. It weighs in at 3300lbs and has all the "nannies" of the XTS, but is light-years away from the 2004 Malibu in crash safety due to the use of super high strength steel. So blaming the weight gain on these nannies instead of the metal is completely off base.

They used the name of the old Opel Monza https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8d/Opel_Monza_GSE_vl_white_TCE.jpg That looks like an old 80's Chevy. Forgot the name of the one but I clearly remember this car as a Chevy I think from the 80's. Interesting in that when I did a image search by google and Bing that neither ever brought this car up for me but the older Chevy Monza Prototypes. The no variants of Monza and Senator were ever sold here, but certain versions of them look like an '84 Ford LTD mated with a Plymouth Reliant.

July 7th, 2013 - State of the Site This will be less a "State of the Site" and more a "State of Drew". As you know, I haven't been around as much lately. Work has kept me on the road all year up until recently. From mid-February till late May I was battling constant colds and exhaustion to the point where my doctor told me that I had to knock off my work schedule or face more serious illness. From mid-May till the end of this week, I have been missing two of my staff at my day job who have been out for medical reasons (lucky them!). Since Mid-July, my work travel is done until end of August, so I finally have had the chance to catch up on things at home and recuperate a bit. Starting Monday, I will be back up to full staff at work and finally be able to clear out the backlog there while possibly coming home less exhausted than I do now. So enough about me and on to the state of C&G Operations Server - Our server was good until mid-May when a power outage cause drives to fail and a site rollback. Our server took another 36 hour power outage in June that did further damage. Our host has credited us with 2 months worth of service and will be moving us to a new data center on new, faster hardware. During the data-center move, there will be a short outage as IP Addresses change. I will try and put up a "We're Moving" page during this time. Software - We're now two revisions behind on our IP.Board software. I will be holding off on upgrades until after the datacenter move. Look and Feel - The new look is still on the drawing board but on hold until the new major version of IP Board 4.0 is released. We are currently on 3.4.3 Site Ranking In spite of the reduced posting lately, our traffic has not suffered dramatically outside of the outages we've had. We still rank fairly well in search terms and have maintained our status with the search engines. In the prior update I mentioned that I found that Google was reporting over 200k broken links to C&G. I installed a fix to address this issue and Google has now cleared up most of them. Auto Shows, Articles, Blogs It is only mid-July and here I am planning for the auto show season already. Frankfurt is just a few months away and this year I am going to attempt to time my normal Germany pilgrimage to match the show dates. I have also been invited to a Corvette tour at the Pittsburgh Vintage Grand Prix which I will both be covering and showing my own car in. I have a backlog of about 7 reviews to write and a whole bunch of Op-Ed style articles in the pipeline. I started writing again for the first time in months in a blog post here. I feel a bit out of practice and had to re-open that post for editing about a dozen times to fix things I found wrong. Consumer Guide did us a nice favor and posted a link to that blog post on their Facebook page. They're good people over there and I had a good time taking Tom to task for his list. I will be blogging in that style more often now, so watch those pages for updates. Comment on blogs often please.. or even start your own. I plan to write my Op-Ed pieces first before I start back on the reviews, but I see that William has submitted two reviews for approval this week, so that should hold you over. Advertising Something in the advertizing system is broken, it is no longer showing the right ads. That is on my to-do list for this week to fix. The Biggest News I started legal process to make Cheers and Gears its own company on June 1st. I am in the final stages with the lawyer there and hope to have a final announcement in a week or two. C&G will fall under my consulting business that I plan to expand in the coming months with the eventual intention of consulting and C&Ging full time. There will be potential for some paid, part-time positions with C&G once I have things finalized.

At 68% ownership, they have the controlling interest in the company... what does 100% get them that 68% does not? Car companies share platforms and technology with far lower owernship stakes. This makes me very suspicious of Fiat's intentions.....

again with the :tinfoil: :tinfoil: Dfelt. Not one sentence you typed there was correct.

much too flat for that.... at least one wearing the Riviera badge.

Given the approximately 25% take rate for TDIs that VW currently has across all models, I would guess that perceptions in the US are already changing.