Auto Show Blues - 2026 Edition

I haven't made a final decision, but I might not go to the New York auto show in a couple of weeks.

It should be easy for me to firmly decide not to go.  After all, Chevrolet and Ford have only one non-SUV passenger vehicle each - the Corvette and the Mustang, respectively.  Lincoln has nothing but SUVs.  So does Buick, and that brand won't even be there.  Honda - which still sells real cars, including an all-new Prelude that retuned that nameplate to the Honda lineup after a quarter-century absence - wont be there, either, and neither will be Mazda.  Sure, Volkswagen will be there - but I can see the latest VW models at my dealer when I take my own VW for service every June. 

So what's making hesitate before ruling out another auto show trip altogether?  BMW and Cadillac - two of my favorite luxury brands - are returning to the New York auto show for the first time in nearly a decade.  BMW always has great cars on display, having refused to give up on sedans and even coupes, and Cadillac, in addition to having traditional sports sedans, has introduced two new EVs with old-school land-yacht flair combined with sporty fastback styling.  So I'm intrigued.

I'm also suspicious.  I remember the Mercedes-Benz and Audi displays from last year.  Each brand had only two or three cars each behind velvet ropes.  Naturally, the cars were locked so you couldn't get in them.    I have a sneaky feeling that the BMW and Cadillac displays will be similarly token exhibits.   I won't know for certain until I see the 2026 New York auto shows floor plan, which hasn't been released yet.

Then again, even it BMW and Cadillac do have real displays that are worth the trip, would the rest of the show be worth it?  Having to skip the Ford display owing to lack of an interesting car to look at (sad to say, the current Mustang doesn't thrill me).  More exhibits aimed at amusement, like the indoor EV test-drive track, that makes the show more like a limpid world's fair?  Besides, after seeing Autostadt in Wolfsburg, Germany, I don't know why I would go to an American auto shoe to see even Volkswagen. 

I've always looked forward to the Easter season with the knowledge that the New York auto show was opening ever since the show's organizers moved it to the Jacob Javits Center and started scheduling it for Easter Week beginning in 1987.  But whether or not I go this year, I'm aware that it won't be the same as the shows of yore.  The nature of the product has changed, and they are changes I do not like. 

Unlucky 7

Volkswagen does it again.  By that, I mean the brand has screwed its North American enthusiasts.

I saw the brand-new Volkswagen ID.7 electric sedan at the 2024 New York Auto Show, and even though it was the European model and the ID.7 was not due to arrive in the United States and Canada until 2026, I was immediately taken with the Passat-sized automobile.  I got to sit in it.  It was very comfortable inside, with controls that felt and looked modern without seeming too futuristic in an off-putting, George Jetson way.  To be blunt, I loved it.  The only thing wrong, of course, was that, given that it was not an official U.S. model, there was no other ID.7 available to test-drive in the auto show's indoor test track.  Not that I minded all that much; I knew that it would be unlikely that  I would buy one, as it is bigger than the cars I have usually owned and its asking price was expected to average about $55,000.  Still, I reasoned, it would be  welcome edition to VW's North American lineup, which is increasingly dominated by SUVs and crossovers.   

The Volkswagen announced that plans for offering the ID.7 to American and Canadian consumers had been canceled.  Apart from exports to China, the new electric sedan will be for the European market only.

Volkswagen's explanation for this about-face was due to "the ongoing challenging EV climate" in the U.S.  In other words, electric vehicles aren't selling in the numbers the automakers expected despite growth in the EV market. 

I mentioned this last month in my post about EVs and climate change, noting also that Elon Musk wanted Trump to eliminate President Biden's $7,500 tax credits for electric-vehicle purchases to discourage competition for Tesla.  And sure enough, Volkswagen saw the electric-sedan market in the United States and feared that the ID.7 would be too expensive for Americans unable to get a tax credit, but even before the Democrats got their joyful posteriors kicked by the MAGA juggernaut on Election Day, VW was unsure of how the ID.7 could set itself apart in an midsize-electric-sedan market segment already dominated by the Hyundai Ioniq 6 and - you guessed it - the Tesla Model 3.  But then there's the other inconvenient truth - American buyers still prefer SUVs to conventional sedans and hatchbacks, and that preference crosses over (no pun intended) to electric vehicles.  After all, that's why VW decided to make its EV debut in the New World with the frumpy ID.4 crossover and not the Golf-sized ID.3 hatchback (which is still unavailable in North America and will likely remain so).  

I give up.  Volkswagen has disappointed me so many times by producing some really cool cars in Europe that ended up being forbidden fruit in North America, from the Polo to the Lupo, from the third-generation Scirocco to the incredible up! city car, and now this.  Canceling the ID.7 for American customers isn't the worst thing Volkswagen has ever done - for me, that will always be dropping the base Golf from the North American market starting with the eighth generation - but it's the latest blow to an enthusiast customer base that is (or was) attracted to Volkswagen because they appreciate (or appreciated) the Germanic flavor and character of VW's products.  Now, Volkswagen prefers to pander to mainstream American tastes with American-style SUVs and crossovers to attract more casual customers while alienating and offending the enthusiasts who kept VW alive on this continent in the early nineties, when it looked like the automaker might have to quit North America like Renault, Fiat, and Peugeot (which still isn't coming back) had done.  Cancel the ID.7?  Hah- some gratitude.

So, apart from the Jetta and the overpriced remnants of the Golf lineup, the performance-oriented GTI and R, what are we left with?   An auto-company division, Volkswagen of America, that would rather play down the Volkswagen part and play up the America part than remain true to the brand's heritage, a division whose parent company is all too happy to water down its products for gabardine-suited gents in Ohio and Stepford soccer moms on Long Island.  As for me, I will continue to be a Volkswagen customer, but only for parts and service to keep my 2012 Golf looking and performing as new as it did when I drove it off the lot some thirteen years ago.

No Focus. No Fiesta. WTF?

Back in 2018, then-Ford CEO Jim Hackett, who retired in 2020, decided to ax all of Ford's sedans and hatchbacks - including the fuel-efficient Focus and Fiesta - in the U.S. and Canada, and he did not spare the Lincoln brand from his decision.  This means that Ford dealers in North America only offer SUVs, pickup trucks and Mustangs and the Lincoln brand is all SUVs - without a single sport sedan in the lineup.

Since then, the Focus and the Fiesta have been redesigned for the European market.  The Focus remains as edgy as ever, as seen below (in hot ST form).

And the all-new Fiesta (below) is pretty slick too!

Would the Focus and the Fiesta ever come back to the New World?  Yes, said then-and-still-Ford executive chairman William Clay Ford, Jr., provided, of course, that the North American market changed and made compact cars popular again.  An Ford would be readily be able to adapt to such change.

All right.  So, gasoline in the U.S. is $4.76 per gallon.  It's the equivalent of $6.54 in Canada.  All of those SUVs are suddenly to big, too cumbersome too wasteful, and too stupid.  Even the compact ones.  Now is the time for the Focus and the Fiesta to come back to the New World.  So, Ford - what the f**k are you waiting for?

Oh, right, for North American buyers to stop buying these.

*💣💀##!!

A Necessary Change of Semantics

You know how Jesse Jackson got everyone referring to blacks as African-Americans and liberals as progressives?  Well, I'm instituting my own semantic rule.  From now on, sport utility vehicles, or "SUVs," are no longer going to be called either of those things on this blog.

Henceforth, I will call them "monster wagons."

For obvious reasons.

And I'll be calling crossovers the same thing as well, because just as Republicans think that African-American progressives are black liberals as far as they're concerned, well, as far as I'm concerned, a crossover is still an SUV.  I'm sorry - I mean, a monster wagon.

And I also call them monster wagons in part because - here's a shout-out to fans of "The Flintstones" - they remind me of Weirdly and Creepella Gruesome's hearse.

Also, please be sure to support my blog advocating for the sale of the base eighth-generation Volkswagen Golf - a car that's really sporty and utilitarian - in America.  My cause needs a hell of a start.  It could be made into a monster, if we all pull together as a team. ;-)

A Tale of Two Volkswagens

If you need any proof that the United States can never become a country like the nations of Europe, by all means consider the cultural, not political, differences between them.  Don't bother with the differences between private health insurance and single-payer health insurance.  Instead, consider football versus soccer.  Sugary cereal versus muesli.  Clown-suit fashion versus stylish leisurewear.  Blockbuster movies versus cerebral dramatic films. 

The Volkswagen ID.3 versus the Volkswagen Atlas Cross Sport.   

The Volkswagen ID.3 electric hatchback, which commenced production earlier this week in Zwickau, Germany, is designed to become for electric vehicles what the Beetle was to cars powered by aircooled internal-combustion engines and what the Golf and Rabbit have been to cars powered by watercooled internal-combustion engines.  It is meant to define and set the standard for motoring going into the 2020s and beyond.  Power from its battery is rated at 150 kilowatts producing 200 horsepower and 310 pound-feet of torque, on par with similarly sized gasoline-powered cars.  The transmission is a single-speed gearbox, and ranges are expected to be anywhere from 205 to 340 miles. This looks to be the world car that the Beetle and the Golf have been.

Except, of course, we Americans won't get it.

Volkswagen of America CEO Scott Keogh nixed the prospect of the ID.3 being sold in the United States, saying that there was no way for Volkswagen of America to make a decent profit from it.  Keogh says he thinks he made the right call; alas, this may be true.  Americans don't like to bother with smallness and efficiency when it comes to gas-powered compacts, so an electric compact priced at the equivalent of $33,000 is hardly going to get American car-buyers excited except us Europhile weirdos.  What's really galling is how the Germans see the ID.3 as a source of national pride and forward thinking - German Chancellor Angela Merkel was even on hand to witness the first ID.3s roll out of the Zwickau plant - while we wouldn't see such a similar American car as that.  If Ford or Fiat Chrysler ever comes up with a competitor for the Chevrolet Bolt, don't expect Donald Trump to be on hand for its debut.  (The Bolt debuted a month before Trump was elected President.)

Ironically, Trump would have felt right at home at the debut of a very different Volkswagen model that debuted at the firm's American factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee - the Atlas Cross Sport.

The Atlas Cross Sport is a smaller version of the standard Atlas sport utility vehicle, and it offers seating for five instead of seven.  Fuel economy with the two-liter turbo four is a respectable 22 miles per gallon (mpg) rating in combined city/highway driving. Don't let all of that fool you, though; the Atlas, whether in standard or Cross Sport form, is still a big, bulky SUV with a high-riding chassis, and its optional 3.6-liter VR6, which is likely to be a popular choice, delivers 19 mpg in combined city/highway driving. Despite the German brand name, this Volkswagen is very American - made, as Volkswagen of America and Keogh himself claim, by and for Americans.  Not for this American.  And, as I noted before, not for any American VW die-hard who prefers drivers' cars over monster wagons.  To me, the Atlas, whether in standard or Cross Sport form, feels and looks like an Explorer.  If you want an Explorer, you should go to Ford.

To be fair, Keogh is pushing electric vehicles as much as his boss in Germany, Volkswagen AG chairman Herbert Diess, is, as I've noted before; other electric vehicles are coming for America.  Also, Europeans are buying more SUVs, notably the Volkswagen Tiguan but also other VW models like the T-Roc and the T-Cross.  But the electric Volkswagen coming to our shores, the ID.4., is yet another bulky, cumbersome crossover with an awkward design that emphasizes size over agility, while the T-Roc and the T-Cross are SUVs that are smaller and, by sport-utility standards, more sensible - maybe too small and sensible for Americans.  The smaller SUVs Volkswagen has promised for this market look to be not so small and not so sensible.  

So, while Europeans look to a more practical motoring future, Americans seem to think the days of big, muscular, imposing highway cruisers - designed to carry bodies that are big, and, well, one out of three ain't bad - will go on forever.  (Size does matter!)  No progressive legislation proposed by Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren is going to change such a pathetic cultural attitude as our atrocious taste in cars.  And Volkswagen seems to be resigned to that.

*

You will notice that I haven't said anything specific about the upcoming Mark 8 Golf in this post.  I will bring it up on occasion in this space going forward, but for the bulk of my comments about the car and my ongoing efforts to get VW to send the base version of the car here, go to my new blog, "Bring The Base Mark 8 Golf To America!", where I'm drumming up support for the car to be added to VW's U.S. lineup.

To the Maxi

I was at a street fair in my hometown yesterday, and the local car dealerships - owned, of course, by a  single local dealership conglomerate - had some new cars on display . . . Subarus, Hondas, Toyotas, and Chevrolets.  Many of them were SUVs, though there were also sedans on display.  I got into several of them and was sickened by them.   The compact Honda Civic and Toyota Corolla on display had starting prices of $25,000, pretty exorbitant for cars in their class.  In all of these cars, the instrument panels were dominated by high-tech features as GPS and MapQuest-style directional screens.  There were more buttons on steering wheel columns than on dashboards.  As is to be expected, the infotainment systems were designed by people who think that no one listens to compact discs anymore.  The SUVs were priced as high as $40,000 and a Chevrolet Suburban on display cost $77,000.  I mention all of this because my own car stalled again, and it's undergoing what could be major work at the VW dealership.  I just might need another car.  And this is what awaits me in the new-car market - or even the used-car market, where vehicles are only marginally less expensive and tech-driven?

And as if that weren't all bad enough, I just found out something about Mini.

A month ago I wrote on this blog about the Mini Cooper and said that it "has been a fantastic success in the United States . . .. Mini thrives because, contrary to popular wisdom, Americans will buy a small car if it is unique, well-appointed, and fashionable."  I have since learned that that is no longer true.  Mini sales have been tanking of late for the same reason every other small car in the U.S. market is in danger of extinction - my fellow Americans, who are obvious morons, are buying way too many SUVs and crossovers.  Mini was the cool car of the early two thousand zeroes despite, not because of, its size and its hatchback configuration; Americans by and large have always disliked small hatchbacks, having only bought them in droves in the seventies because a bunch of vindictive Arabs and crazy Persians wrecked havoc on the oil supply.  If any small hatchback car could overcome the small-hatchback syndrome in times of cheap gasoline, the Mini was it.  Now its sales are down considerably from its 2013 peak, and if its sales decline any further . . . well, that will be it.

This is getting scary now.  I soon won't able to get the sort of car I want because other Americans have lousy taste in cars.  Miniature cars are giving way to cars of maximum size.  If I ever become an expatriate, it may be more for the opportunities to own the sort of car I want than for the increase of public transportation choices.

Unless there's another oil crisis.

As for all the tech in cars, that's not going to change.

Keep On Truckin'?

I recently finished reading Bill Vlasic's 2011 book "Once Upon a Car," about the the bankruptcies of General Motors and Chrysler and the painful restructuring of Ford in the late two thousand zeroes, and while this blog entry is not a review of that book, I feel compelled to recount some tidbits from it that, though this all happened only a decade or so ago, seem like a much more distant past.

There are accounts of President Obama talking with Ford scion William Clay Ford, Jr. about a future of motoring that envisioned all sorts of electric cars, Robert Lutz of General Motors waxing rhapsodic about the then-all-new Chevrolet Volt, then the most advanced hybrid vehicle in the world, and Fiat's Sergio Marchionne being eager to help Chrysler, which his firm had just absorbed, by designing fuel-efficient Dodges and Chryslers based on Fiat platforms.  All of this looked oh, so promising as the Big Three recovered from near-extinction.

Well, what a difference a decade makes.  Today, the Big Three are back to pushing sport utility vehicles - a strategy that got them into such much trouble in 2009 in the first place.  The Chevrolet Volt is gone, GM and Chrysler have pared their sedans and hatchbacks in North America to one or two, and Ford has pared its sedans and hatchbacks in North America to zero.  Even Sergio Marchionne, who died in 2018, decided to emphasize Fiat Chrysler Automobiles' Jeep brand (earning Donald Trump's admiration) over everything else, while the Fiat brand, which promised an array of small cars with Italian flair, has given us ugly crossovers based on its only car model in the U.S., the Fiat 500 - and, like the crossovers, has proven to be as reliable as the original Fiat 500.  Gasoline, once four dollars a gallon, has gone back down.  And even as Volkswagen plans to start making electric vehicles in Tennessee (not the Golf-sized I.D. 3, alas) while Tesla continues to charge along, Donald Trump, now President, has killed fuel economy standards and is aiming to get rid of electric-car tax credits that promote sales of cars like the Chevrolet Bolt (not to be confused with the Volt, of course) and the Tesla Model 3 (below) to discourage anyone from buying them.  ("Mr. President, Chuck and Dave Koch on line two, still no word on sister Vera!") 

And it's not just Fiat Chrysler, GM, and Ford that have turned their backs on a future of more sensible and practical trucks in favor of mothertruckin' SUVs, crossovers and pickups.  Foreign automakers are riding the SUV gravy train without apology.  I can watch two hours of television at a time and see numerous commercials for SUVs from Chevrolet or Ford and foreign brands like Volvo, Infiniti and Honda and, apart from a BMW commercial, not see one commercial for one of the few sedans remaining tin the U.S. market going into the 2020 model year.  Hatchbacks?  Well, you can still get a Volkswagen Golf, though probably not for much longer.  Also, the Honda Fit is still available, but you'd never know that from Honda's advertising because it keeps pushing its Passport SUV by showing it in a commercial depicting a family going out to the great wilderness to the tune of Wolfmother's "Vagabond."  About the only good thing I can say about this ad is that Wolfmother, an Australian rock band, is getting exposure on the air in America that they otherwise might not get.  Too bad "Vagabond" is from 2005.  

What's going on here? What happened to the new golden age of automobiles we were promised when GM and Chrysler got restructured and when Ford started giving us the exact same sort of cars that Europeans had been buying from Ford and enjoying for decades?  Apart from bringing Alfa Romeo back to the States, what good has the Fiat Group done for us?  Why are we buying more and more crossovers and putting up with their cumbersome handling?  And why do Americans keep falling in love with gas-guzzling SUVs for off-road capabilities they'll never need?  And why do I even bother asking?

 And why are Europeans picking up our disgusting habits?

At least in European countries, though, you still can buy a small car or a sensible sedan if you want to.  Or nothing at all; after all, there are plenty of mass-transit options.  In America, thanks to our pathetic mass-transit network, everyone is expected to own and drive a car whether they like it or not, and your only choice of car style is increasingly either an big ugly wagon or a big brutish truck.  And for someone like me, that's all far more than merely annoying.

Driverless cars?  Please, don't get me started . . ..      

(Update on the Golf: I wrote Volkswagen of America CEO Scott Keogh to beg him to please keep the base Golf model in the U.S.  Soon after that, a VW representative contacted me to acknowledge Keogh's receipt of my letter and to say that no decision has been made about it yet.  More about that later.)  

Auto Show Blues

Although I'm going to the 2019 New York International Auto Show this weekend, I'm not looking forward to being as wowed and excited as I've been by auto shows in the past.

Auto shows have been in decline lately, largely because the next wave in automotive development is based in ride sharing and in self-driving cars.  Because none of these trends are developing in Detroit, the city that long ago spawned the auto age in the first place, the North American International Auto Show there has gotten quite lame - so lame, in fact, that the 2020 show is scheduled not during the height of the car-model year in January, when previous Detroit shows were held, but in June, when the car-model year is winding down.  Kind of like Detroit itself.  This year's Detroit show was so lame that BMW, Volvo, Audi, Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, Jaguar, Land Rover, and Mitsubishi didn't show up. The former two brands aren't displaying their cars in New York this year, for that matter, and Tesla is never there.  And several manufacturers have skipped auto shows abroad, as well.  Meanwhile, more car companies are aiming to push their new products through the Internet with 3-D videos.  Although nothing short of driving a new car compares to sitting in one and getting the feel of it, cyber-marketing looks to be the wave of the future.

And then there's the product itself.  More and more manufacturers - especially the domestic ones - are pushing SUVs, crossovers and pickup trucks.  GM is thinning the ranks of its lineup of sedans and hatchbacks, and except for the Mustang and maybe the Lincoln Continental, Ford is getting rid of them altogether in North America.  So I'll be spending a lot less time in the domestic-brand exhibits - after the Fiesta and Fusion are gone, the Focus having already bitten the dust, I likely won't be setting foot into the Ford display at all. I simply don't like Mustangs enough to bother.    

Ahh, who cares?  I'll just spend more time in the German-brand displays, especially Volkswagen.  But even that is problematic, what with BMW a no-show this year and with even Volkswagen promoting trucks these days (it's displaying a compact pickup concept at this year's auto show).  Suffice to say, I'm happy with my Golf, and I hope VW keeps the Golf in its North American lineup.  One of these days I hope to see the permanent VW display at its Autostadt museum in Wolfsburg, the experience of which promises to blow away the experience of any auto show or car museum I've ever been to. :-)

Please note that I never commented on auto show spokesmodels, now known as "product specialists."  

An Angry Post About Cars and Climate Change

I should have known that something like this would happen.

After Trump promised workers at auto plants that their jobs were secure under his "America First" economic policy, General Motors announced it would be closing plants in Ohio, Michigan, and Maryland (and another in the Canadian province of Ontario), which mostly make sedans.  The ostensible reason for the plant closures was the set of tariffs that Trump imposed on raw materials from other countries, such as steel and aluminum.  Apparently, GM needed cheap imported steel and aluminum to make basic sedans to keep them profitable in an era - still, alas, very much in progress - when everyone in North America seems to want to buy sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks.  So GM is discontinuing no fewer than six sedan models, including the revolutionary Chevrolet Volt (below), the groundbreaking hybrid sedan that debuted for the 2011 model year and lasted two generations.  It's sort of become the Corvair of our time.  Underappreciated while in production, it may be a prized collectible fifty years from now.

And while the sedans GM is ditching are mostly larger cars, the small, economical Chevrolet Cruze is getting ditched too. 

GM CEO Mary Barra says that the company will now move toward developing electric vehicles and autonomous vehicles.  Buffalo bagels.  The company is now joining Ford and Fiat Chrysler in pushing more and more SUVs and pickup trucks to satisfy the unquenchable thirst for bigger, cruder, more obnoxious gas guzzlers.  Unless the foreign brands keep traditional cars in their U.S. and Canadian lineups, anyone in the New World who simply wants a regular, sensible car is going to be out of luck.

But not as much out of luck as the workers in those car factories who will soon be losing their jobs.  I almost feel sorry for Barra, the first woman to lead a car company in the United States.  She made this decision to make GM more competitive, yet Trump is now blaming her for laying off so many people - as many as 14,000 - even though it was his policies that caused it.  Not just the tariffs, but the rollback of fuel economy standards that would have required the automakers doing business in the U.S. to make more fuel-efficient, more sensible cars that you don't need a stepladder to get into.  And Trump also boasts about keeping gas prices low, which he in fact has nothing to do with - even though low gas prices have depressed sales of said sensible cars that most of these now laid-off workers were making in the first place.  And even though GM should be serious about developing electric cars, Trump may actually take away its electric-vehicle tax credits in reaction to GM's cutbacks.  Not that he cares about electric cars anyway.

Is this a total disaster?  Not entirely - as soon as Barra (below) made her announcement, GM stock prices soared.  And that's why I almost feel sorry for Barra . . . but don't.  She still has a job.  And she'll make out fine.

Needless to say, I'm ticked off at how SUVs, which I call BUWs - for "big ugly wagons" - are taking over the American auto market.  I hope to keep my humble little VW Golf for as long as I can, but with demand for small cars dropping like a rock, I may end up having to suffer the indignity of getting a Toyota C-HR, which may yet become the closest thing to a small car from any automaker.  With even Volkswagen emphasizing SUVs in America these days (its most recent ads highlight the Tiguan and the Atlas, with the Jetta thrown in as an afterthought  - but not one mention of the Golf!), even VW isn't asking Americans to think small anymore.   

Which ties in to the equally unpleasant subject of climate change.

The required quadrennial government report on climate change, the most recent edition of which came out a week or so ago, shows that it's getting worse than originally thought, with hurricanes and winter storms - there will still be winters as the planet warms - becoming more frequent and more extreme, diseases becoming more widespread, and economic losses of $160 billion in today's money by 2090.  And while more Americans and even more Republicans believe that climate change is happening, Trump does not.  So even if Congress tries to do something about it, don't expect any climate-change-fighting plan to get any traction with Trump in the White House.

One big reason climate change is happening, of course, is because Americans love their big ugly wagons and keep buying the hell out of them.  Autos accounted for nearly 29 percent of America's too-high carbon emissions in 2016.  More fuel efficiency and smaller cars, though, would mean that our cars would have less of an impact on the environment. Gas prices would have to go up to about six dollars a gallon to make people think small again, but asking Americans to give up their cheap gas is like asking the French to give up sex - and, incidentally, the French aren't exactly ready to pay a higher tax  on their petrol, either, as demonstrations in Paris proved.       

But at least already high fuel prices in France mean that the French get to have nice little cars like this Peugeot 208.  

Conclusion: The planet is doomed.  Even Europeans are buying SUVs (or BUWs) now.  Avoiding them is like avoiding the plague that's going to emerge as a result of global warming. >:-( 

Our only hope is to get Trump out of office in 2020 and replace him with a Democratic President who puts the automakers on notice by reinstating the higher fuel economy standards that Trump scuttled.  And the message will be this - start making more fuel-efficient cars and make more electric vehicles.  

Oh yeah, that will be easier said than done.  Although the job layoffs at General Motors are Trump's fault, he's likely going to blame GM and possibly foreign countries for mucking things up in the auto industry, and his supporters will believe him.  Many of them still believe him when he says that climate change isn't a problem. 

I'm sorry.  I can't take it anymore.  When Mikie Sherrill, my incoming congresswoman, holds her first constituents' meeting, I'm going to go and plead to her to bring up climate change and reforming our transportation policy - with an emphasis on mass transit as well as small cars - on the floor of the House of Representatives.  I'm ticked off now.  

Auto Company Overhauls

General Motors reached a deal to sell Saab to the Netherlands-based Spyker Cars NV, a speciality car firm. Many Saab fans are obviously happy about this, meaning that the storied brand will live on. It's likely it will compete with GM's Opel brand in Europe. For Saab, this is indeed a Dutch treat. :-)

With this sale finally out of the way, GM is investing in the future - sort of. The company insists n building more light trucks, but it hope to increase the corporate average fuel economy of its cars by making electric motors for its upcoming rear-wheel-drive hybrids, spending $246 million on a new plant to produce them. Ford, meanwhile, is moving production of the latest generation of its Explorer SUV to a newly redone plant in Chicago, while a factory that previously made the Explorer will build smaller cars. The good news is that the Chicago factory is hiring. The bad news is that new hires will only make fourteen dollars an hour. That's a good wage these days, but far less than autoworkers used to make.

It's a whole new ball game.