Cheers – FF

I have owned Toyotas since 1968 and they have all been wonderful cars. The Prius that I have now is marvelous. While Lutz and his compatriots were building bigger and bigger, Toyota was building better and better.

Lutz’s “product view of the future” is more Corvettes and supercharged Camaros. The government should have let GM go bankrupt with no help from the government. Companies like GM do not deserve to survive.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/…..02212.html

Can you imagine putting a guy like Lutz in charge of anything to do with the greening of the auto industry????

no – none what so ever.

my comments are opinions only, and not necessarily well-informed ones, just opinions i hold.

as for hybrids, i think the prius is a sweet little car. i rode six hours in one a couple of years ago with three other adults and it was a very comfortable car. i love the design and engineering, the concept of gas/electrical. according to a recent article in the federal times, the navy is considering a similar concept with its big ships using some of the energy from a ship’s turbines to generate electricity.

my comment relates to the claim that the auto buying public (that’s never me; my wife and i have not bought a new car since our 1966 vw) wants suvs because they are big and big is “safe” – as long as you don’t turn or swerve too sharply.

if i recall correctly, one of the vp’s of gm said, AFTER last years fall and in the face of presidential and congressional attention to the industry, that the american people wanted suv’s.

i don’t know yeah or nay but but this guy seemed a believer.

Buying up other papers did not make the NYT stronger. If anything it has hastened the demise of the industry. The papers have been shedding workers for years but the massive debt service incurred from these mergers has made that seem like a band aid on an axe wound.

For the auto industry the perverse desire to merge starting with Daimler Chrysler has done virtually the same thing. One would think the auto industry learned something when GM started buying aircraft companies and payroll processing firms in the 80-’s, but they didn’t.

Another problem is the mindset of executives running both industries. Both think this is 1950 and they have no competition. By the time both realize how anachronistic they are, they will have gone the way of the dodo bird.

The way I see it, both the auto and journalism industries are facing radical structural changes in their industry. For autos, it’s globalization and the need to compete against newer, partly subsidized transplant auto companies.

also the fact that sometimes we are comparing living wages to below living wages, which is a government subsidy that’s not documented.

For the journalism industry, it’s the challenge of digital culture, both the rise of Internet competitors and the ability to copy content with little cost.

and that is also the fact that they have consolidated their ownership and do not compete for facts anymore, they make their own facts and people are tired of them

I would love to read a newspaper now but when I see on the front page how tiger might not make the cut I puke

now that they are corporate tools they don’t give us what we want from them, there is the real problem, digital information isn’t the problem it was the solution to the problem they brought on themselves

Such a shame — I often think they’re very good. I guess they’re insecure too, though. Well, CBC — they have reason.