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August 29th, 2008:You may like to have a look at the progress on Caddie Trunk #3,... This is the first one having all new lumber. The hardware is what just naturally transformed into being a part of it. The legs are made from an old weight lifting bench I found in a scrap pile. The Rustolum gloss blue sure produced a shinny finish on the legs and side rail hardware. I'm going to put a coat of stain to the old side boards I made out of some scrape several years ago. We'll call it fowe finish, but hey they do the job. I think it's pretty neat. Like a portable pick up I can roll about in my one car garage.
If you do decide to buy a new automobile, I hope it's a decision that you have thought about for a while. Just as you may want to think about how short amount of time a few months would be to custom order it direct from the factory. For one thing, you'll save around $1,000.oo alone for not paying the advertising fees,
a car
on the car lot will have attached to it. And - Oprah never gave way 250 cars; General Motors did. Those Pesky Germans My Advice to the Big Three Auto manufactures. South to detroit: Drop Dead. Oct. 21,'08: I found this thread over at CR4, a place where engineers hang out. I have to say I agree with these guys for the most part. The interesting thing about it is that it clears up a lot of mis-conceptions about the Hydrogen Car. They know of the problems associated with it. Like one thing I didn't realize is the thay tend to leak out
the hysrogen. So the storage tank may not stay as full as you left it for one thing. And another thing is that the energy needed to make the hydrogen, can end up polluting more than a car driven on Natural Gas. By the way, I read today Oct. 21 in the WSJ that people in Thailand are scarffing up car that run on natural gas. (Brazil and Pakistan are right behind.) Funny thing about all this is even though Honda offers a natural gas Civic in the US, they only manage to sell a few thousand of then each year. But no way; OPEC is just going to cut production to make it go back up. And for those who think we should become independent upon oil from other counties. You don't know what you are talking about, because I did the math. If the US used only US oil, the US would run out of oil in less than three years. So I say buy it up from other countries, as much as we can get at no matter what the price, because in a long run, who ever has oil in the end wins. We
shouldn't even be burning petroleum in are vehicles and we should be saving the oil for plastics and rubber. Hybrid tax credit shock March 2008: Get this: Ford's own internal research shows its approval rating at just 44%, GM's Chevrolet brand at 49% and Toyota is at 74%
Ford and Roush are being sued over rarity of Mustangs. Basicly the two companies came up with the idea of selling a customized version of the Mustang. They told the buyers that they were only going to build 100 of the Roush Stage 3 BlackJack editions when they put them on sale in 2007 for $58,846.25; but then they turned
around and built another 100 to sell in 2008. A buyers such as Drew Connor of Bardonia NY who bought the one with the #2 identity plate, have filed a class action suit against the two companies claiming the second hundred that Roush modified and Ford sold at their dealerships, drasticly reduced the value of the first 100 sold.
Have you bought a The truth be told, they can sell you a lemon and treat it as if they leased it to you for $.25 per mile and they will drag the whole process out until the last few days before it goes to a court, (at which they would have to label it as a lemon unless they take it to a state where there is no lemon law.)
And when they finally buy it back (before the court hearing,) they won't even have to label it as a lemon when they put it back on the same car lot you bought it from. I guess I should post another segment from my book about how that game plays out. It's as if the auto makers had their hands in on the legislation written into the lemon laws. Still, the $15.00 it cost to register the van for the lemon law was the best $15.00 I ever spent.
January 4, 2008: I rans across some stuff on Yahoo/Forbes: which
I think is a bunch of hog wash. It's about the five most over priced cars. All it talks about is inscentives, and to me, it feels like a ploy just to get a person to go out there thinking they have some advantge car shopping from reading it.
You may be wondering what I think of all this. Well I never thought Daimler should have been buying Chrysler in the first place. Chrysler was a company which had more employees that Daimler and Chrysler was making more profit per employee.
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November 25th, 2008: My advice to the Big Three auto makers: is that you better learn how to line the pockets of the politicians before the next round of your whining. November 1st, 2008:
June 3, 2008:GM announced the closing of four truck plants and the interest of spinning off the Hummer brand; and to build more small cars. The folks in Canada are not going to let it happen as fast as GM wants to (by 2010) because they just negotiated last month on a
three
year deal. However, the smartest thing GM has come up with is the plan of building a plug-in electric car through the Chevrolet brand called the Volt. It has a small engine and a generator on board for travels that will go over 40 miles. I happen to wonder what kind of batteries they plan to use. I happen to thing staying with gel-cell is the better option than lith-ion.
We'll see. May 17, 2008: Negotiators for the UAW and American Axle & Negotiators for the UAW and American Axle & Manufacturing Inc. have come to a tenitive agreement by an 84% vote, that would end a strike that began Feb. 26th and I guess GM won. March 8, 2008: Negotiators for the UAW and American Axle & Negotiators for the UAW and American Axle & Manufacturing Inc. expect to continue talks today, as the two sides try to reach a contract that would end a strike, now nearly two weeks old, at the Detroit-based auto supplier. The strike at American Axle, which counts General Motors Corp. as its largest customer, has forced the automaker to shut down seven assembly plants. By Monday, the strike is expected to impact, through production cuts or shut downs, as many as 29 GM factories, including engine plants in Romulus and Flint. The UAW brought 3,650 of its members at American Axle on strike early Feb. 26, after negotiations collapsed and the contract between the UAW and the supplier expired. At the time, the two sides were far apart on issues including wages, buyouts and pensions. The company had proposed cutting the wage of production workers by about half to $14.50 an hour, saying that it needs the savings to compete with companies that already have cut their labor costs. The union has said that American Axle hasn't proven that it needs cuts as steep as it had proposed. For the latist information on this story as of More on this @ Freep.com Febuary 4, 2008: DETROIT (AP) -- For all the good in GM's 2007 results -- the near-record worldwide sales, the reduction in labor costs and in retiree health obligations -- there is no getting around the $38.7 billion in red ink. Boy, nothing has made me feel better in a long time. Oct. 29,'07: Funny how Ford can claim that they are losing $5.000.00 per vehicle and others say they are losing $1,000.00 - $1,500.00 per vehicle in the US.
My old 75 Ford F-250 had a 360 V-8 which was a good boat anchor because the 390's at least had a four barrel that actually got better mileage and had a lot more torque. The 4 speed got old real quick. The twin I-beam front suspension was great if you were a farmer and you need to off road the thing, but the tracked like hell down the paved road. Another thing I should mention: My buddy who installs windshields for a living told me, that for the first two years of a model, they have to buy the windshields from the dealers who mark them up an arm and a leg. I'm sure the insurance companies know that and it's probably another good reason to buy used. Plus a new auto depreciates 24% the first week you own it. Kinna screws you right there. June 28, 2007: General Motors announced earlier this morning that it has agreed to sell Allison Transmission to two private equity firms. The Carlyle Group and Onex Corp. will purchase both the commercial and military ends of Allison, all for the bargain price of $5.6 billion. Naturally, the regulators and the unions will want to have their say first, so don't expect anything solid until later in the third quarter of 2007. April 11th, '07: Ford put together a commercial promoting their F-450. Stating that they made the springs 8 inches longer so that it could handle more weight. Then the lower something that looks heavy into the tin can on back. They make a clicking noise to make it sound like something giggled the truck. The funny thing is the truck doesn't sit any lower afterward. Like who's fooling who? Hell they even build the F-550 with coil spring front suspensions now days. Give them three years and the bushings inside the links will loosen up and there goes the handling. The steering geometry will change when you put the brakes on. You should see how the front axial twists under my truck when hold the brakes and go from forward to reverse. It's junk folks. Feb.'07: The the cake was in my yahoo and on TV, but the funny part about it is that it looks like pie in the face to me. (Update: Funny how they pulled that one real fast.) Jan 5th '07: At Blacks Beach I saw a guy sitting outside his polished-up new Lexus crossover vehical. I think the whole design thing is about making a car uggly as possible, so that people will notice it when everyone hasn't gotten one yet. Between the ones on the street and the hundreds of times we are forced to look at them on our TV set. The public grows tired of them fast and just wants to look at something new. It doesn't matter if it's ugly or not, just as long as it's something they haven't seen a zillion times. Can you image that you are about to witness $100,000,000.00 launch of the new Toyota Tundra. We're going to have their dam commercials coming out of our ears. I get
a kick out of that commercial of the two idiots driving one of the ugly
Avalanches down a dirt road. They think that switching the piece of rattle box
junk to an open truck is a good idea. But they don’t show all the dust that
swirls around the back and into the cab as they drive off at the end of the
commercial. I had to laugh when Ford came out with SUV commercial where the little girl asks her mother if the piece of junk goes potty. Boy, how stupid do they think we are?
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