On the day Pope Benedict XVI was elected, Bob Lutz returns to the blogosphere with a bit of a homily for the faithful. In his post, entitled "The Sun Keeps Coming Up," Bob provides a cool, reasoned argument for why all the GM doomsayers are overwrought.
To me, his sermon comes off like, "all is well; the product's pretty good." No fire and brimstone. He doesn't scream about how insanely great any of the cars are. No panic. Stay the course. The Buick Lacrosse sounds like a nice old man's kind of car from the description; the GTO seems to have gotten off to a bad start (can't afford too many more of those, can we?) but has rebounded; and the Chevy Cobalt and Pontiac G6 are all doing perfectly respectably. Nice message.
Oh, that and, "if you're in the market for a car, come and give ours a look."
All well and good. No speaking in tongues, or dervish dancing, but something rock solid for the congregation to pin their hopes on.
But, meanwhile, we get the New York Times reporting (sub. req'd) GM's $1.1 b-b-b-billion loss in the first quarter, of which $839 million were from operating losses. Wow! We also have the UAW vowing not to give up any contracted benefits, particularly healthcare benefits. That's a $5.6 billion nut, this year alone! Praise the Lord!
These folks are in TROUBLE (which means, by the way, that we're all in some measure of that trouble).
In keeping with the religious metaphor, I respect a good Episcopal service as much as the next guy. Bob's doin' his best to keep his parish calm. I think that's a good thing for him to do.
But with a big storm brewin' and folks scared, it might soon be time for somebody to do a little testifyin' and layin' on of the hands to let us all know that the forces of darkness will not prevail in our land!
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