Monday Snippets
The posting rate may slow a little this week as I’ll be away on assignment for my day job. A bummer, but sometimes I have to actually work for a living.
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The pundits are squawking like never before about the talk of a merged GM and Chrysler.
AutoExtremist Pete DeLorenzo has even broken his midweek pattern of commentary for a weekend rant that’s worth reading (once you get past the “monumentally stupid” and “I told you so” bits).
When you have one company that has too many models, too many divisions and too many dealers, how could you possibly think that combining that company with another company that has too many models, too many divisions and too many dealers would be a good idea?
Jerry Flint has also broken out the writing slate for a piece on the matter:
General Motors needs more plants, more workers and more dealers like it needs to bring out a new Hummer model that gets five miles per gallon.
Robert Farago of The Truth About Cars decided to side-step the entire issue and just criticize former buddies at Jalopnik for their coverage. Actually, Farago’s been doing a lot of that lately, picking fights with other websites. It’s a huge waste of everyone’s time and I’m surprised his “best and brightest” haven’t told him it’s amongst the “worst and dullest” writing he could get in to.
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DeLorenzo closes his editorial with an interesting snippet that’s doing the rumour mill around Detroit. Given that the GM-Chrysler talks are now all but over and extinct, Pete mentions the following:
….word is that GM has already moved on to renewed, serious discussions with Carlos Ghosn about the possibility of merging GM’s global operations with Renault-Nissan.
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Articles like this always make me scratch my head. Why is it that I can’t get a medium-to-long term test vehicle from Saab, yet somewhere in the world there’s idiots like this that have them dropped at their door:
‘Daddy,” my daughter said, her voice pitched somewhere between amusement and bemusement, “there are two men in black at the door.” That’s not information you want to hear at 8.30 in the morning. CID? Debt collectors? Undertakers? There they stood on the doorstep, inscrutably cool, like Tommy Lee Jones in Men In Black.
After a brief conversation, it became clear that they were not on the trail of fugitive extraterrestrials. Or so they said. Instead, they were delivering a Saab 9-3 Turbo X.
And so it goes. This is from The Guardian in the UK, by the way, and the article contains a total of just two paragraphs that deal with actually driving the Turbo X. The rest of it is the author’s stupid deliberations over what the ‘X’ might mean and how he’d like it to be used as a taxi.
There is no justice.
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To honour their 10th birthday, Google have released a reproduction of their search website from the earliest web index they could load up - January 2001.
Do a search on this retro engine and it’ll bring up results that reflect how the web was at that time. There’s no Trollhattan Saab there, of course, but there’s plenty of Saab stuff on there and if you look for a particular model (say, the 9-3 Viggen) it brings up a lot of road tests, etc, that were quite fresh at the time.
It also includes links to those original archived pages, where available.
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I don’t think Chrysler has too many divisions. I think the Chrysler marque needs to be moved more upmarket (so it competes with Buick), but besides that, I don’t think they have too many.
As some observers in the financial world noted, at this point it may be cheaper for GM to gain market share though an acquisition rather than expansion. But I am still feeling cold towards a Chrysler purchase.
TTAC and Farago in particular are getting quite dull already. It was fun and amusing at the beginning, now it’s getting plaid stupid. I wonder if their GM Death Watch would go into four-digit territory. In fact, I could almost see GM being healthy and profitable 3 years from now, and Farago and his crew still insisting they file for Chapter 11 and blah-blah. The funny part is, they seem to have no clue about how this stuff works (finance and legal, you know), and they don’t seem to have much automotive knowledge either. I mean, all their reviews are like that 8 year old who always wanted a Maserati, got a winning lottery ticket as a present for his 18th birthday and ended up buying one. Seriously, what is Farago’s background other than blogger?
GM is trading now at $5 a share, which is so low that the market believes it is insolvent.
If GM does manage to survive without filing bankruptcy, that stock price will surge (once the market realizes that survival is in the cards).
So those of you who are into gambling, this is a high-risk, high-reward proposition on the table.
Ha! Greg, I was just discussing that with my girlfriend over dinner tonight.
At this potential rate of return, I believe it is a worthwhile gamble. If I only had the free cash.
DeLorenzo hit it spot on in his write up. GM merging with Chrysler of all companies – or maybe any company for that matter is a dreadful idea. Chrysler has some of the lamest products on the market today IMHO and they have a well earned reputation for poor reliability – even worse then GM and Ford.
GM has spent too much time and effort consolidating its Buick/Pontiac/GMC dealers into one channel just like it has been merging Cadillac and Saab into single dealers. Buying a group of underperforming Chrysler dealers and paying money to shut most of them down might just be the final nail in GM’s coffin - and the company’s stock price.
GM as a whole needs to focus on building reliable, fuel efficient competitive products and continue improving its dealer network if it intends to survive long term.
TTAC also recently changed their format so the awful, stilted armchair commentaries on the auto industry are front and center, making you pick through them to see the car reviews. Previously I enjoyed the website, but now the car reviewers are trying to out-simile each other to make up for a lack of skill with concise, succinct language, and that bile-spewing amateur Farago taints the whole website with his ill-informed, “how I see it as a blogger” diatribes. He’s really the Bill O’Reilly of automotive journalism.
Jalopnik, on the other hand, has a great sense of humor and is downright fun to read. Although they could, of course, stand to amp up their Saab coverage.
Steve C: That’s a good comparison, especially since the blog is called “The Truth About Cars” when it’s anything but.