The quality, or lack thereof, of American-made automobiles has been bemoaned for decades. Quality issues have nearly always been a problem in the industry, but for the first 75 years or so that situation was considered normal; the forgiving public believed producing large and complex mechanical devices simply involves too many parts and processes for nothing to go wrong.Read more

On January 27th the Wall Street Journal ran an entertaining story, if you're into the outrageous, about certain companies that have failed and been forced into bankruptcy: Their CEOs and senior executives are demanding and receiving from the bankruptcy courts huge bonuses for "staying with" the firms they often drove into ruin.Read more

Recently I helped bring together an image campaign that our radio group is running for the DFW New Car Dealers Association. No one liked the idea of running ads screaming, "Gee, it's January, what a great time to buy a new car!" Instead, the concept I came up with was low-key message: We would remind everyone that new car dealers are a part of our community, and the growth of Texas over the past half century has benefited dealers and customers alike. To do that, I would record local car dealers telling their stories.Read more

To the average reader, one story McClatchy published on January 11 would seem like a minor one, with no "hot buttons" to keep it in circulation. The story concerned nothing more serious than the fact that the Environmental Protection Agency had agreed to allow Anchorage, Alaska, to drop its vehicle emissions-testing program, first put in place in 1985. That's when, according to the article, Anchorage - not unlike other cold weather climates with hundreds of thousands of vehicles - had failed the government standards only for carbon monoxide. Under the program Anchorage had reached standards attainment in 1997, yet continued the vehicle emission testing for another 15 years. Even that fact didn't seem to warrant any serious contemplation; no one asked, "Why?"Read more

"Today the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields." Read more

" Our markets have gone crazy and there is 200 times as much speculation as there is investing." - John Bogle, founder of the Vanguard Group; USA Today, December 23, 2011 Read more

Hope springs eternal: It's the automotive industry's greatest truism and at times its most endearing trait. Take a new car dealer who, during a major economic downturn, has for three or four months sold only a few new cars a day, far below what's considered reasonable. If for two days in a row his dealership sells 10 cars a day, that dealer will assert without hesitation, "I think we've turned the corner." Optimism like this is what makes dealers so much fun to be around.Read more

"At current demand levels, Exxon estimated that the world has enough oil to last 100 years."Read more

One drive back from Dallas on Interstate 30 is indelibly etched into my memory. I was in the center lane. And just forward of me in the right lane, a soft-top Jeep slowly started drifting across all three lanes of traffic, never slowing down. I honked my horn to alert the driver, but the Jeep left the highway and slammed into the first wooden pike in a crash barrier, throwing the vehicle's rear end so high that I thought it might flip over.Read more

Mitt Romney comes from storied stock. His mother once turned down a $50,000 (more than $6 million in today's dollars), three-year deal offer from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to be closer to her future husband. His father, on the other hand, was once called "either the smartest man in the automobile industry or the luckiest" by BusinessWeek magazine - and he went on to save Michigan from certain failure. More important, George Romney was a true visionary of America's future.Read more