The roller coaster ride continues. Although it’s not making most of us feel as nauseated as it did this time last year, by now the drill is clear.Read more

It’s hard to pinpoint the date when Americans stopped thinking highly of the people who enable our freedom of travel. Certainly the public’s attitude toward those who sell us our vehicles has been less than admiring as long as I’ve been around the automobile industry, and that goes back to 1973. Then again, for the last 30 years we’ve been surveying customers’ satisfaction with the process of acquiring their last automobile. And, year after year, 85 percent of those surveyed say that the handling of their last car purchase was either satisfactory or very satisfactory.Read more

There’s better than even odds that we will soon hear positive financial news, not only out of Detroit but possibly worldwide, concerning the automotive companies’ financial statements. Some people will take this news as proof that the auto world has turned positive, but that’s premature; whether it’s a real and even semi-permanent turnaround is still up in the air.Read more

Just over a week ago the new General Motors was spun out of the old company – speaking of which, contrary to popular belief, the Old GM will stay in the bankruptcy courts for years to come. The good news is that as of today all American taxpayers have acquired 61 percent ownership of General Motors. The bad news is that if the new GM is successful enough to float an IPO and issue new stock, our majority ownership stake will not qualify us to receive any dividends. Bummer.Read more

Somewhere along the way Americans came to believe that only Detroit was in trouble, while companies like Toyota and Honda were the new paragons of automotive executive brilliance. Likewise, just six months ago the media covered some remarkable financial market moves that Porsche played perfectly; the German automaker’s resulting billions in profits made that firm the envy of hedge fund traders and earned market analysts’ applause. Going back 24 months, you may remember all the accolades heaped on Carlos Ghosn, the man who rescued Nissan and Renault and was widely considered the planet’s cleverest and most cunning auto executive. No, there was no doubt about it: Only Detroit was run by fools, trapped in their mid-century delusions about the American car market, incapable of change and permanently handicapped by outdated thinking. No wonder so many felt GM and Chrysler deserved their fate at the hands of federal bankruptcy judges.Read more

It is now humanly impossible to keep up with all the news delivered worldwide each day. In fact, the sheer volume of news in any developed country is probably why so many critical issues go unaddressed and unresolved. After all, looking at the news you’d think that one truly earth-shaking event, the bankruptcy of what for almost 80 years was the world’s most powerful manufacturing concern, was last year’s news.Read more

Twenty years ago I stopped using DOS-based computers and switched to Macintosh, when Apple introduced the first Mac Cx. It had one megabit of RAM and a 20-megabit hard drive (which lasted six whole months, and replacing the Apple drive cost over $3,000). That one computer, a 13-inch color monitor, an 8-bit scanner and a few pieces of key software cost $10,000 at the time. This past weekend, as I finished digitizing my collection of 300 DVD movies for playback on my Apple TV, it suddenly struck me just how far the computer industry has come since 1989.Read more

Elected officials support many enduring myths that sound not just good but economically reasonable. They oversimplify them in business logic that helps America’s financial future sound potentially exciting. Once you get past the ostensible intelligence of the sales pitch, though, the facts of the real world intrude. That they are myths may be scarier than anything in Grimm’s Fairy Tales, but they are – equally fanciful tales.Read more

On May 16th BusinessWeek published an article in which I revealed that ethanol has seriously damaged a large number of automobiles right here in the Metroplex. This has actually been happening since last summer; when gasoline prices spiked to over $4 a gallon, apparently one or more gasoline distributors started adding more than the mandatory 10 percent ethanol to make a few extra bucks. One critical point was the fact that repairing the damage ethanol does to an automobile costs between $800 and $1,200, an amount that could devastate a family’s monthly budget. But my research also showed that once the ethanol blend in gasoline rises above 10 percent, for many cars fuel system failures follow quickly.Read more

Manufacturers regularly audit their new car dealers across America. You may never have wondered how that super-sized rebate you got on your last new vehicle purchase worked, but the system is a bit more complex than you might think.Read more