Tag Archives: gm

Station Wagon as Rocket Blast

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In the wet dream of Bob Lutz, the 2010 Cadillacs are a multi-stage rocket blasting across the salt flats under the watchful eye of the NASAesque GM launch team. The new CTS Sportwagon bursts forth as the first stage in a cycle that ends with a new coupe.

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Over the Thanksgiving holiday I had the please to read Chuck Closterman’s “Eating the Dinosaur“. In it he talks of how, as a culture, we’ve come to accept the lies that the advertising media presents us, and the fact that we don’t take things literally. The media business knows this, and presents products to us with the knowledge that we don’t take them seriously. Advertisers moved from presenting their clients products factually to evoking an impression to the subconscious of how a consumer will feel when they buy their product. We’re at a point now where we know it’s all lies, so advertisers can just present any hyperbolic scenario and know that we won’t think they’re presenting truth; it’s just stuff that looks cool blowing up! Therefore, we get a 264hp V6 station wagon being compared to a rocket burning hundreds of gallons of fuel each second to achieve earth orbit.

BONUS: The first few seconds of this Cadillac ad show a woman grinning as she drives a new SRX. I was pleasantly surprised to recognize Paula Merritt, a woman I knew briefly a couple years ago through a friend in Brooklyn. She used to play drums for Grandma’s Boy (now Bad Girlfriend) before moving to LA to further her modeling career. Looks like she’s doing well. Way to go Paula!

GM Finally Gets the Ear of Congress

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Robert Lutz, vice chair of GM, tosses off this nugget of revisionist history in a quote from Monday’s NY Times article about the bankruptcy of GM:

“…for the first time in our history, the American auto industry has the ear of the administration.”

Is he saying that in the entire history of the American auto industry, this is the first time they’ve had a hearing with the president and congress? That’s preposterous on its face. A little over 50 years ago the auto industry worked hand-in-hand with President Dwight D. Eisenhower to have the Interstate Highway System built with federal funds. Not to mention numerous times the auto industry successfully blocked safety regulations and fuel efficiency requirements.

Even if we limit his statement just to GM and the Obama administration it’s still ridiculous. According to Bloomberg News, General Motors spent $2.8 million lobbying congress in just the first three months of 2009. According in the Center for Media and Democracy GM spent $8.8 million lobbying congress in 2006. Are we supposed to believe they didn’t have the ear of the administration until this week? What they didn’t have until this week was a taxpayer injection of $50 billion.

GM got our money despite taxpayer sentiment in the US:

The disconnect between how the auto industry is perceived in Detroit and in the rest of the country was underscored in an April survey by CNN; it showed 76 percent of Americans favored allowing GM to fall into bankruptcy rather than extending further government aid.

Allison Kilkenny has a great post comparing GM to an abusive spouse:

Only in this country would a corporation’s executives have the nerve to close factories and relocate them to Mexico to exploit cheap labor, systematically work to suppress public mass transit and fuel-efficient vehicles, shelter its revenues from taxation in multiple offshore havens, and still crawl to the government weeping and crying when it needs money.

Not only that, but the government will hand GM another bailout check with taxpayer money without asking for anything in return, effectively socializing the investment’s risk whilst privatizing the profit…again.

Perhaps I just need to start saving $8 million a year so I can get the ear of this administration.

Image from Idiocracy