Brief holiday

Irrelevant cat in laundry photo

I will not be editing or reading e-mail for a few days; the usual super-moderators will be taking care of the forums and Bill will, as usual, be taking care of the news. If you contacted me over the weekend or today (Monday), I may not be able to get back to you until the end of the week.

I will also be taking some time off next week.

Dodge Challenger SRT8 stick-shift on the road

We’ve had a 2009 Dodge Challenger SRT-8 for a few days, and while we’ll be writing it up more thoroughly soon, a few high points quickly come to mind.

First, everyone stops and stares at this car - partly because it’s bright red with a big stripe down the hood. People want to know what it is. The general public still hasn’t discovered the Challenger, despite all the magazine covers, newspaper photos, and excitement. What’s funny is the range of spectators… young and old, men and women, import and domestic drivers. We’ve had numerous problems with other drivers hitting their brakes suddenly when they see us coming, wanting to get a better look, and drivers hanging out in the (huge) blind spots to keep us in vision. And, of course, we’ve gotten lots of thumbs ups.

The clutch is heavy, but not as heavy as in the old days; it’s not that far off 2.4 turbo clutches, with a small but predictable area of engagement. The shifter goes in easily, but takes a lot of getting used to, partly due to the six speeds (which makes 1st, 3rd, 5th, and Reverse, all of which are on the same plane, a little crowded). It’s also a bear of a car, with the 425 horsepower Hemi V8, a heavy feel familiar to other LX car drivers, and instant response if you’re in the right gear, which isn’t necessarily the case. To get surprisingly good highway mileage (at 65 mph, you can easily exceed 25 mpg), Dodge put in a serious overdrive sixth gear, which is a good thing, though you have to drop down a gear to get any serious acceleration at normal highway speeds. If you’re zooming along at 95, we assume it works out just fine.

The first gear is fairly low, so there’s a good spread, though most of that spread seems to be in the upper gears; first, second, and third shoot by quickly and often it makes more sense to skip a gear or two when acceleration hard. You can maximize your thrust by going through each and every gear, but for those times when you want to launch hard but then don’t need every last pony, skipping is a lot smoother and easier.

The engine is surprisingly loud and growly, so that even as you’re loafing at 1,500 rpm at 75 mph in sixth gear, you hear the engine at all times. To get into first smoothly requires a decent push on the gas pedal which vrooms the engine rather noticeably. This is not a subtle exhaust tuning. It’s sweet music when you can let it all out, which isn’t often and doesn’t last very long, not with 425 horses hooked up directly to the rear wheels. You can, however, drive very gently and smoothly if needed.

We have a lot more on this unique car (including numerous photos) in our full test report, which is close to its final form (and will be complete by the end of the week). If you want to comment on the article, feel free to do it here (oh, and please Digg this post or share the bookmark using the light gray icons below and to the left).

Dodge Royal Monaco…pickup truck

It has to be seen… for the full story and more photos, see http://www.allpar.com/cars/dodge/mystery-monaco.html … this precious pickup is in Germany. Thanks, Duc-Man, for sending us the photos.

Allpar’s meeting in New Jersey again

October 5, 2008, 10 am to 4 pm; rain date, October 12. Open to all Chrysler Corporation and AMC vehicles. See our 2007 show coverage!

This is a nice small show. There are some nice trophies and raffle prizes; last year, Eastwood and Applebees both provided vouchers, and just about everyone got some Meguiars stuff. (Meguiars Car Care Products generously donated over 3 dozen bottles of product for us to distribute to our Meet participants). There are ten registration categories, and new categories can be created for vehicles that don’t fit into any of them.

The meet has traditionally been held by the New Jersey/New York Slant Six club, but starting in 2007 it has been cosponsored by Allpar. In 2007, we had 33 cars, which was double the number for 2006; we’ll be trying to get at least 40 for 2008.

Food is not available on-site, but we’ll try to have enough beef hot dogs for everyone, and you can bring food and a small (table-top) gas grill if you like. The price to show your car is $8 per carload of people, waived for those who have Donor Level IIII status on the Allpar forums (just contact me in advance!). Half of the club’s net is donated to charity. There is a 50/50 raffle which in 2007 ran to over $70, and numerous prizes are raffled as “second chances.”

There are over ten registration categories; we may create another for you if you don’t fit into the existing categories (award in that case would be a certificate). Judging is by popular vote. All AMC and Chrysler products are eligible.

This is a nice, comfortable, low-pressure meet - ideal for first-timers.

Directions

The location will - we hope! - be the New Jersey Agricultural Museum, just off Route 1 South, in North Brunswick, off College Farm Road. From the Turnpike, take Route 18 West to Route 1 South and stay in the right lane. It’s past the Sears and Ryder’s Lane exits if you’re on Route 1 South. This is a pretty central location and it’s on major highways, but the show itself is far enough from the highway to be pleasant (you can’t hear the traffic), with indoor bathrooms in the Agricultural Museum. If you bring kids, we suggest taking them for a tour of the museum while you’re there.

This is a SMALL exit. Watch for it as soon as you pass Ryder’s Lane! We will have a sign posted if you aren’t early. Quite probably it will be the SAME sign.

If you’re coming from Route 1 North, turn around at Route 18 (get onto Route 18 west). Route 1 is a divided highway (so is Route 18 and for that matter 95, 287, and the Garden State Parkway.)

This area is convenient to the Parkway, Route 287, Route 78, and other local arteries; it’s not that far from Route 80 (about 1/2 hour).

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It’s time to nationalize the auto industry

You heard me.

I’m fed up with these dithering politicians. They’re watching Detroit sink under a combination of mismanagement, bad timing, shortsightedness, and changes in the world’s economies.

The White House, after having stated its opposition to bailouts for private industry and big government and such, has jumped in to rescue every gathering of wealthy, irresponsible bankers they could find. The old Keating Five scandal, which at least one presidential hopeful narrowly escaped being discredited in, ended up not with the Federal insurance companies paying off depositors, but with a much more expensive series of bank rescues that left taxpayers holding billions in debt.

The White House decided they needed to save investment banks as well, because it would hurt the market if we let overpaid financiers take responsibility for their actions.

Most recently, two fat and foolish quasi-governmental agencies were rescued and nationalized, so that the mortgage industry could continue to write bad mortgages and have someone buy them. Keep in mind nobody would lose their homes if Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac went under; their mortgages have already been written.

Congress was complicit, rubber-stamping every foolish rescue.

Now, though, the situation is different. Instead of the financial sector, the auto sector is in trouble, and has been for quite some time. Detroit, fighting foreign automakers and suppliers who benefit from their own governments’ subsidies (and, to be fair, subsidized by states, counties, and cities where they place or renovate their factories), is in danger of serious problems if they don’t get capital, and the bankers aren’t lending. Not to them, at least.

Could the leaders of Chrysler keep the company going through 2010 if they put in their own personal wealth? Quite probably, yes. Steven Feinberg has quite the little bundle. Frankly, I’m a little dismayed Bill Gates has chosen to just dominate Ford’s stereo options, instead of buying one of the Big Three outright. No, the Ford family isn’t selling, but GM stock is less than half of what it was in February.

In any case, the Big Three once again just need a little bridge to move from yesteryear to tomorrow. The markets changed very suddenly, just as they did in 1973. The difference is that today they’re much more ready. GM and Ford cleverly developed their Asian and European engineering talent so they’d have expertise in small cars, efficient engines, and diesels without needing to buy companies and import it. Chrysler was working on similar plans (except keeping expertise in a single American building) but then Daimler came, and you know what their plan was - Chrysler could make trucks and minivans and re-sell old Mercedes designs, with small cars provided by Honda — then Mitsubishi — then Hyundai — and finally Chery. Daimler never did like the Neon or the A and B cars that were being worked on; they hated the PT Cruiser, too, for that matter. None got five star crash tests (the PT eventually did) and none had that satisfying Mercedes “two ton” feel.

Anyway…

The point is, GM has great technologies in hand, including electric cars, small turbocharged engines, advanced platforms to put them in, direct injection, diesels, and lots more. They just don’t have the money to go as far as they want to now. Ford is moving to convert their truck factories to Ka-class vehicles. Chrysler has the Phoenix, automated-manual transmissions, and technologies I can’t tell you about, not to mention GEM’s technologies and whatever might be left of the TEVans and EPICs.

They just need some money, preferably loaned at less than 18% interest, to get them past this rough spot, and preferably some understanding of their contribution to the economy.

The problem is, for some reason the Millionaire’s Club in Washington, DC doesn’t understand that the financial world is not just a bunch of people pushing papers. At some point wealth has to be created by actual people making actual things, whether those things are new pharmaceuticals, computer software, or vehicles. That’s not something easy for the lawyers, accountants, CEOs, and professional politicians within the Beltway to figure out. (Once most people get to the CEO level, strange things tend to happen to their minds… there’s a body of research on that including some fun studies by David Kipnis at Temple University which anyone who wants to criticize this paragraph should at least be familiar with.)

So we have the White House coming out against $25 billion in short-term loans to the domestic industry - an amount that would be easy for a Japanese company to get without even having to go to the government - and the Congress grilling Detroit execs, and with some justification. After all, when they were flush, what did they do with the money? They didn’t invest it properly, and GM and Ford were not as forward-thinking as they should have been. When customers didn’t care about gas mileage, neither did the Big Three. Honda nursed its reputation for thrifty small cars while Ford and GM and Dodge went into a race to the bottom of the fuel economy pack. (Again, Daimler takes the rap for Chrysler’s fall, since they were working on all sorts of fuel-saving vehicles by 1998, mainly to make a real jab into EMEA and South America.)

The problem is, of course, that you know the auto industry is a lousy risk. The executives take unrealistically high salaries and bonuses. There’s something wrong about loaning taxpayer dollars to companies that pay their execs millions of dollars a year and then claim poverty when the UAW and CAW come knocking. Every time one of those private jets takes a GM commuting executive from Florida to Detroit for the week, a newspaper will be photographing it. The Republicans and Democrats could very well make it a campaign issue - the profligate “other party” rewarding spendthrift execs for their own stupidity. For some reason this didn’t come up with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but if I was Obama, I’d probably be yelling about it. (Perhaps he is and nobody’s reporting it, or I just haven’t tuned in at the right time.) I don’t know why, but paying Wagoner a few million per year in pay and bonus just seems worse to people than paying some Wall Street schmuck the same amount.

There’s also a lot of duplication of effort which hurts the automakers. I mean, look at the Big Three. Three similar (until now) pickups. Three completely different V8 engine series. There’s very little sharing.

Now, combine them all under government rule, and it’s a far different story. You can eliminate two marketing groups, three sets of terribly overpaid execs, and a whole host of other expenses. There’d be no overpaid execs flying around while taking out taxpayer loans, and the actual losses would be buried somewhere in the accounts, just like they will be for mortgage lenders. As long as all the brand names stay the same, the average Joe won’t notice much. Not only that, but then, when the economy turns around, we might actually make some money off the deal. As it stands with loan guarantees, the government doesn’t usually lose anything, but it doesn’t make anything, either.

What’s more, all those complaints about government regulation would go away, because they’d BE the government. Who complains about their own rules?

Besides, it would be consistent with the current political practice. All politicians say they’re for smaller government and against corporate welfare. That’s what makes nationalizing and subsidizing the auto industry seem like a natural fit: it’s exactly the opposite of their stated values.

Leasing alternatives for Chrysler buyers

guest column by Jason Lancaster of AccurateAutoAdvice.com

When Chrysler Financial recently decided to halt their leasing program, Jeep, Dodge, and Chrysler dealerships around the country uttered a collective sigh. Bank One and other independent lenders followed Chrysler Financial and dropped their own Chrysler leasing programs as well. Dealers, already struggling, said that Chrysler’s decision to halt leasing was going to hurt sales. After all, if lease customers can’t actually lease a new Jeep, Dodge, or Chrysler, won’t they be forced to go and lease something else?

Not necessarily. The truth is that leasing was declining in popularity in recent years, and for good reason. The alternatives to leasing are getting better every year. So, if you were interested in leasing a new Chrysler product and now you can’t, here are some solid alternatives available.

First of all, there are a large number of people that consider leasing because it offers them a way to drive a vehicle that they could not otherwise afford. If you are in this group, I’ve got great news for you. There has NEVER been a better time to buy a late-model used vehicle. You can find a one- or two-year-old version of the new Dodge, Jeep, or Chrysler you want for substantially less than a new vehicle. Even better, most of these late-model used cars are now certified by Chrysler. Certified used vehicles offer many of the same benefits as new vehicles – like warranties and special financing – but they cost substantially less than a new vehicle.

If you’re interested in leasing a new Chrysler for tax purposes, I’ve got some more good news for you. [NOTE: I’m no tax professional – please consult your accountant about tax questions before purchasing a vehicle.] Commercial TRAC leases are regaining popularity with business users for quite a few reasons. Basically, a TRAC lease is a “lease” in name only. The terms of the agreement are simple – you make lease payments for a pre-determined amount of time, then you agree to buy the vehicle at the end of the term. Since the leasing company has no intention of ever taking your vehicle back, they don’t care how many miles you use or what condition the vehicle is in. It’s just like buying a vehicle because you can do whatever you want with it. The difference is you get to write your expenses off each and every tax year.

Finally, if you lease because you’re the type of person that likes to have a new vehicle every few years, I’ve got some bad news for you. You’re wasting a lot of your hard-earned cash. No judgment – I’ve done it myself – but it’s time to break your “new car every two or three years” habit. While I won’t bore anyone with tedious math calculations, take my word for it: The financially responsible way to buy a vehicle is to spend no more than half of your annual salary, finance that amount for as short a time as possible (if you finance at all), and then drive the car you bought until the wheels fall off. In the long run, you’ll save thousands of dollars following this advice. It’s not as fun as leasing a new car every few years, but you’ll thank me when it’s time to retire.