2012 Chevrolet Impala
300 Horsepower for $20,000?

I'm in the early stages of car shopping - dangerous for me. I'm mainly looking at small cars like the Chevrolet Cruze and the Ford Focus, but while I was looking at incentives on the Chevrolet Cruze (not much available), I saw shocking incentives on the 2012 Chevrolet Impala. The Impala is an old design, but this year it got a New engine, a 300 horsepower 3.6 liter V6, basically the same engine as the base Camaro. With the standard 6-speed automatic transmission, the Impala has EPA ratings of 19/29. As Adam Sandler would say, "not toooo shabby".

The Impala used to have many options, but they've cut it down to a 3 flavors deal with virtually no options. A reasonably equipped base LS model has a list price of around $25,000 or $26000 when you add the delivery etc. The incentives vary by area and trim level, but it appears that there is a $3500 general rebate and 3,000 in GM Employee Cash Allowance for the low trim levels (and $4000 GM employee cash for the LT and LTZ higher line models). These incentives can put a GM employee in the seat of a new Impala for around $20k, significantly cheaper than the price of a comparably equipped Cruze compact. If you are more into the Malibu, the Malibu looks to have 2-3k in incentives, but be advised, the redesigned 2013 Malibu is only a couple months away. The Eco version will debut in early 2012 with the remainder of the line set for a traditional late-summer introduction.

To check it out, go to www.gmfamilyfirst.com.

(Update: since I roughed this out, I talked to a salesman at a Chevy dealer who told me I was $1000 high on incentives for the $2012 Impala. GMFF's configurator confirms this, but GMFF's general incentive page tracks the $6500/$7500 total incentive figure that I provided in the post.)

Everything Old is New Again
- Return of the Home Organ

Home organs pretty much died in the United States by the early 1980s. They never died out in Japan but they died back. In Germany, home organs are enjoying something of a Renascence. Check out the crowd for Mambo Kurt



If you want to see the state of the art in German organs, check out the Wersi Scala doing the holiday classic Sleigh Ride.
They even stole Michael Iceberg's horse. If you want one of these, they MIGHT take your BMW 750 in an even trade.

RIP Ford Econoline

Hello Ford Transit

At the Chicago Auto Show, Ford is officially retiring the venerable Econoline and E-Series full-sized vans, and at the same time, the automaker will be introducing the Transit van to the United States. Ford already sells a smaller van, the Transit Connect, in the US. The Transit is a completely different vehicle, a full-sized van replacement. The Transit is said to get 25% better MPG than the Econoline. That means, if you are Daphne, Velma, Shaggy, Scooby and Fred, you can solve 25% more mysteries.

For a marginally-related video, how about this one from Top Gear Germany as Sabine Schmidt hauls a Ford Transit around the famous Nurburgring track

Occupy Wall Street Really Needs . . .

Billy Jack? Flying Car?

How about both?

Tom Laughlin, the "guy who played Billy Jack", is 80 years old now, and he's trying to make another Billy Jack movie. He wants to use Occupy Wall Street as a theme for the movie, and he wants to use the film as a platform to voice the call for a new bill of rights, economic rights. There's just one little problem: money. I'll let Tom tell you all about it.

Hey, I know, by know that Moller Skycar guy must have raised enough money to get the flying car thing going with money left over for an indy movie. Maybe these two guys can team up.

Billy Jack could be a natural for Occupy Wall Street. He did have a certain way of putting rich a-holes in their place.

2013 Dodge Dart

The Compact makes a Comeback

Ever since the demise of the Neon, Dodge and Chrysler have been without a true compact car. The Fiat takeover deal includes a provision that Fiat gets an additional 5% of Chrysler if Fiat can bring a US-produced car capable of 40 MPG highway. They think they have that in the 2012 Dodge Dart which will be officially introduced at the Detroit Auto Show in a few weeks. This week the Dart was teased to the media. Once again, the mail carrier misplaced my invitation.

The Dart will be union-made in the USA at Chrysler's Belvidere, Illinois Plant, which will get an expansion for the project. This is the plant that has been making the slow-selling Dodge Caliber. The Dart will use Fiat technology and will be based on the Alfa Romeo Guilietta, though Chrysler says the Dart will be longer and wider than the Alfa upon which the Dart is based. It has been a long time since Alfa has been sold in the US. What do US car buyer have to look forward to? Top Gear's Jeremy Clarkson is an Alfa Romeo fan, once stating:

You cannot be a true petrolhead until you've owned an Alfa ???- until you've experienced that rollercoaster of pain, disappointment, and agony for that brief moment when everything works and you're on a nice road"

and

Alfa's are designed to be the best a car can be.... briefly

The compact Dodge Dart will offer three engines to start in the US. It will have tweaked versions of the 2.0 and 2.4 engines that are now used in the Dodge Caliber, but the engine that has the attention of the car wonks is the Fiat 1.4 liter multi-air turbo engine. This engine, the same one as in the Fiat 500 Abarth, is expected to deliver around 150 to 160 hp in initial trim. Manual and dual-clutch automatic 6-speed transmissions will be initially available. An advanced automatic with more gears and a CVT might be available later.

The Chrysler fanboys at Allpar.com are so excited about the Dart that they started a new site dedicated to the Dart alone. The new site is http://www.dart-mouth.com/.

For a marginally-related video, I couldn't find any Top Gear roadtests of the Guilietta, but I did find one from Top Gear's poorer cousin, Fifth Gear.

I also found a video of Jay Leno's test of the Fiat 500 Abarth, which should be available in the US anytime now.

Average Home in Foreclosure is Delinquent By Almost 2 Years

Collections and Credit Risk reports that, according to Lenders Processing Service (a company that provides foreclosure-related services to lenders), the average home "in foreclosure" is delinquent 631 days. I put "in foreclosure" in quotes because the term is not used consistently, and it means different things to different people. For example it might mean 90 days delinquent or more or it could mean a case where a petition to foreclose has already been filed in court.

Banks are not going to find foreclosures any easier going forward, especially since more and more evidence is appearing of sloppy and corrupt practices at the mortgage companies and banks.

In a feature story last night on 60 Minutes titled Prosecuting Wall Street, a whistleblower at Countrywide (now part of Bank of America) said that Countrywide had recycling bins full of fragments of paper that included signatures cut off of forged documents. Another whistleblower, an examiner at Citibank explained how he had alerted upper management to irregularities in first 60 then 80% of the mortgages that Citibank held and processed through the secondary mortgage market.

This link will probably expire in a couple of weeks, but for now it's a more than marginally related video.

Aptera Not Apt Enough
Three-wheeler Maker Goes Bust

Aptera was going to revolutionize the car business with its three-wheeled car. It's not to be. The company didn't have the money to ride out the economic downturn and is filing for bankruptcy. Too bad, the vehicle looked pretty neat.

Image via engadget.com

Meet Zach Wahls
You'll be seeing him again

This video has been circulating for about 9 months, but only recently has it taken off, with twelve million views on Youtube. Nineteen year-old college student Zach Wahls talks about his family and the absurdity of Iowa's proposed state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. Thanks to Frankie J. for the link.

Website of the day:
Findthefraud.com

A big problem with the mortgage messis that on one hand, you can't trust the records, and on the other hand you can't tell how much you can't trust the records. One reason is that it has been hard to identify the scope of the fraud and cover-up of mortgage assignment irregularities. It is very time-consuming analyzing these records. The website findthefraud.com was designed to make it easier to analyze these documents using the technique of crowdsourcing. Briefly, anybody can sign up to help work on the analysis of mortgage documents. The first set of data involves mortgages in Palm Beach County, Florida, and to put it bluntly, the questionable mortgages predominate.

Findthefraud.com isn't perfect, but it shows promise and has the potential to get better with time. It's a website to watch.

Detroit 3's White Collar Wages to Exceed Blue Collar Wages in 2012

Autoblog.com reports on a Center for Automotive Research study saying that next year GM, Chrysler and Ford's total bill for white-collar salaries will exceed the cost of UAW blue-collar wages for the first time.

Sixty-six thousand white collar workers made an average salary of $122,500. One hundred fifteen thousand blue collar workers made $69,000 each. I was frankly surprised by these figures. First, judging by the blue collar figure, it appears that these figures only account for salary/wages and not "total compensation". Secondly, while you could expect the automakers to have some very well paid executives and well paid engineers; you could also expect them to have larger numbers lower level salaried workers who are paid less than UAW wages.

It appears that despite restructuring, or because of it, stratification of the American workforce is alive and well at the formerly big 3.

Marginally related video time.