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"So we are acting as reluctant shareholders, because that is the only way to help GM succeed. What we are not doing, what I have no interest in doing, is running GM."  - President Obama As I said a few days ago, those lips were moving when he said that. Given a chance to give taxpayers stock certificates for their share of the government's ownership stake in General Motors Co...

I always love it when the government thinks something completely through and has all the contingencies covered. Cash for clunkers, couldn't be simpler, right? Give an incentive to get people into higher mileage vehicles and stimulate car sales at the same time...

Read an interesting piece in today's NY Daily News about a guy who uses his Model T as his every day driver. He says he's getting 40 MPG and thinks Ford should put the Model T back in production. "Everyone is scratching their heads, looking for an environmentally friendly means of transportation when the answer has been sitting right under our noses for over a century," he said...

Don't you just love it when you can look at two things and just see that 2+2 does indeed equal 4? Consider these two headlines: Toyota Motor To Begin Talks With GM On Pull-Out From US Joint Venture Toyota Targets Profitability in North America by Next Fiscal Year Isn't that a remarkable coincidence?  

Meet Ron Bloom. He's the second head of the Automotive Task Force that's part of the government effort to not run General Motors. His predecessor, Steve Rattner, stepped down from the position last week after less than six months on the job to return to private life in New York...

Today is the day GM is going to emerge from bankruptcy and I expect there will be a lot of crowing from certain quarters about what a wonderful thing has been done to save an American company. I wouldn't be handing out cigars just yet. Given the government's reputation for efficiently running things and considering that the bailout money we threw at GM that was supposed to keep them out of bankruptcy seems to have been thrown down a hole and buried, any instant claim of success has to taken in with more than a grain of salt...

So I'm reading a story about how GM is getting ready to emerge from bankruptcy and that the "new" GM will come out of the chute with $48 billion in debts. Now I know this is going to take some high level mathematics and some cipherin' that would test Jethro Bodine's limits, but flash back to yesterday's blog entry and Ford's situation. The article in the NY times said: Ford, meantime, has some $26 billion of debt...

According to sources, a plug-in version of the Prius should hit the market in about 2012. Toyota plans to build 20,000-30,000 plug-in Priuses a year and intends to price them at about $48,000 - twice the price of a conventional Prius hybrid and about $8,000 more than the Chevrolet Volt, which will hit the market at the tail end of 2010. Just like the Volt, I don't think a $48K vehicle is likely to be a widespread commercial success...

As Winston Churchill said after the battle of El Alamein, "Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." There's still a long way to go in the recovery of the North American auto market, but there are honest-to-goodness bright spots now...

From the Wall Street Journal DETROIT (Dow Jones)--A Nissan North American executive said showroom traffic patterns over the past 60 days are showing signs of some stabilization in the U.S. auto sales market. "Given the past 60 days, we are looking optimistically at July, August and September," Al Castignetti, Nissan North America's vice president and general manager said in an interview Wednesday...