Or just offshore all production, call it a GM product (buy USA!) and become a sales and marketing and financing outfit (as this example of the korean chevy seems to indicate).  Car salesmen run it already why not?  That's how they got into this trouble, putting car salesmen in the board rooms.

This is logo switching like your old friend at Ford thinks is a brillient new corporate strategery.

Used economy cars are very scarce too.  I have a spare Toyota stored, and I drive my Honda.

The Toyota maybe a good candidate for a plugin hybrid conversion.  Conversion kits would be a solution for us do-it-yourselfers.  

Why not convert that shuttered gas guzzler assembley plant in Kenosha to a plugin hybrid economy car (not the Volt with it's hundreds of unecessary hp) factory.  Real economy cars with real logos on them.  Made in america.

Not GM, car salesmen don't take sucker bets like that.  Betting on the american worker.  They respect us all about as much as workers as they do as car buyers.  As they do as soldiers, voters, cirizens, soldiers...and on and on.

We are expendable, merely suckers to feed the bottomline.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

Ooops, I forgot to add this bio-d.  My door handle broke too.  The rod it attaches to can be simply pulled forward to operate the lock.  

When the regular handle finally cracked all the way and fell off,I attached a piece of thick wire to the rod and applied some tape to make a nice smooth handle.  Hehey.

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The best and most efficient cars were created by Japan prior to 1990.   The Mazdas, Hondas and Nissans of that era are more valuable than vintage wine.

Reason is they struck the perfect balance of efficiecy and performance...Bauhausian in their sparseness and utility.

Perhaps someone there has the blueprints for the 323 and Sentras and they can be Jurassic-Parked back onto the roadway.

And I really mean it.

These are only my personal opinions.

I've driven the 3-door automatic for the last year, I put ten gallons in every 340 miles. Almost all city. ULEV, good safety profile, comfortable 5-seater. Consumer reports just ignored it in their roundup of good milage vehicles for reasons they did not disclose other than to say it "did not meet their standards". What's up with that?

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

  The radio has been bombarding me with adverts for this former cult vehicle, as a good high milage affordable vehicle. IIRC they are claiming about $18K and 38mpg. I had my Prius serviced today, the bad news is the dealer is now only getting 6 Priuses per delivery cycle -they used to get 20 to 22. He thought Toyota was conspiring with the oil companies. I think they are straining the supply chain -and probably also responding to demand from locations that previously weren't interested in the Prius. In any case, it now looks like hybrids are in serious short supply.

This shortage of hybrids is exactly why PHEV's won't solve Peak Oil, as Joe Romm and others on Grist seem to believe. That is, it's an issue of "rates" of production. The U.S. produces about 7 million cars/year (and falling!) I believe, which means it would take 30 odd years to replace the car fleet. But we are already in the "foothills" of peak oil (Chris Srebowski's phrase). Samuel Bodman seemed to acknowledge as much in today's news, that we are maxed out on production.

Unfortunately public transit won't solve the problem either (over 80% of commuters drive). We need a global policy on oil to divide it up and cap the cost to tide us over til we have electrified our transportation.

Cars replaced per year in the US.  It would take about 20 years at that pace, no problem.  That is fast enough.

Maybe 100 million could be replaced with plugin hybrid bikes, mass transit, and small golf cart sized electric local vehicles.  These are being legalized for restricted road use all over the place.

This transition doesn't need to be done next week, and it doesn't need to be to full sized electric vehicles for every car now in use.  Other alternatives will suffice.  Very light plugfin hybrid cars that cruise at 50 to 60 mph, with 20 hp engine/electric motors would do for most people.

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I was very lucky. Three years ago, during my last assignment before retiring, I found a house within walking distance of my place of work. There was a supermarket about a kilometer from my house. So I bought one of those little pull shopping carts. My dance studio was right on the bus line, and that was an easy walk as well. So I sold the car, and haven't owned one since. I walk to work, walk to shop, take the bus to dance, the train for longer trips.

Well, I did, until I retired and moved to Thailand. Wife is Thai, and we moved to Thailand. In Thailand possession of glitzy stuff is very important in marking your social status. MUCH more so than in the US. Hence a lot of people drive big, flashy pickups that they can't afford. My wife wanted one. I could afford it, but I said no. It's stupid. The price of gas is only going to go up. The writing is on the wall.

We use a "Tuk tuk" to haul stuff from our weekly shopping trips. It's cheap and easy. I get around the city and visit the in-laws on my Honda Shadow. Small engine, but sufficient for here. I tank about once a month for less than ten US dollars. It's also fun and a chick magnet.... for those of you who aren't gay.

You can't ride in the snow, but you can definitely ride in the rain. In the rainy season here, it RAINS. And I ride all the time. So I recommend a bike or scooter for those who do not have a highway commute or can avoid any meaningful stretches of highway driving in their route selection.

One drawback. Bikes are inherently dangerous. You don't have any protection. You get hit, you're going to get hurt or killed. But then, if you can't killed doing it, it probably ain't worth doing.

Victory in Pattani

  The transition to hybrids, and then to plugin hybrids is going to be too little too late. We collectively have dilly dallied for too long (unless peak oil really is more than a decade ago, and the current crisis is just a passing blip). But any wedge we can get from partial electrification of transport will help mitigate a lot. And at this point, the public is not ready for lifestyle changing solutions. We have to lead them there a little bit at a time.

to build small, cheap, resource- and materials-efficient transitional vehicles -- directly from the big-inside micros in europe and asia -- on a sufficient scale.

"we" just don't want people buying cars in "cash." can't finance the profit margin, can't grab the interest.

One gets used to thinking of the GHG battle as hopeless over the years, especially these bush years.  But it does seem that at least it is physically possible to see 90% of our gas guzzling curtailed over the next couple of decades bio-d.

Even the capital needed is there, given that long to get it done.  

Looking at the science and technology and mass production efficiencies, it even looks very profitable.

But then a gaggle of lobbyists, board room salesmen and politicians speak up, hehey.  Hopelessness returns.

Let us always remember and never forget, transportation is 27% of GHG,  cars a third of that,  heating cooling buildings is 36% of GHG.

While waiting on plugin hybrid mass production, we could concentrate on geo heat exchange conservation.  

Yep, those old SUVs and trucks will become cheap, affordable replacements for businesses that actually need the greater load capacity.  I think a good business will pop up for converting them to compressed natural gas.  It's a dollar per  gallon equivalent to gasoline.

Semis might go natural gas too.

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...certainly a big step up from the Pinto in safety, biod, just not as much as the Fit. Of course, you can get a Yaris for a few thousand dollars less than a Fit (though both are in short supply with gasoline at $4/gallon) and life always entails tradeoffs.

Looks like Honda will be the 1st to market with "a hatchback hybrid that gets over 40 mpg for less than 20 grand" when they start selling their new hybrid model--and that's less than a year from now, with the hybridized Fit to follow. I expect Toyota will not let Honda stand unchallenged in the "under $20,000" hybrid market for long, either, given their historic rivalry and Toyota's detemination to be the leader in hybrid technology. I know of no plans by any other automaker to sell a 40+ MPG hybrid for under $20,000.

"You can never get enough of what you do not really want." - Huston Smith

if you want to add more parts to my "oil hysteria" series (there are only two so far), be my guest -- besides, the original headline was put there by the Powers-That-Be.