Next-generation Corvette to feature split-window design

The retro styling trend continues for American car companies, and General Motors seems to be embracing the movement in full. The company has just revealed plans to resurrect the split-window design from the original 1963 Sting Ray and incorporate it into the next-generation Corvette, internally called the C7.

The controversial design feature lasted just one year. Though it was replaced with a more standard window in 1964, the split windows made an distinct impact among Corvette aficionados. For the 2009 Chicago Auto Show, the feature was revisited through the Corvette Stingray concept to promote the movie "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen," in which it appeared. It was at that same show that GM executives first hinted that an element of the look would be put into production.

Putting any rumors to rest, the C7 will also retain the front-engine, rear-wheel drive setup despite lengthy testing of mid-engine models. There has been no official word on when the C7 will debut, but here's hoping it has a backup camera.

-- Alison Lakin

Lakin is a staff writer at DriverSide.com.

Photo: The Corvette Stingray concept. Credit: General Motors

Two weeks after its announcement, Buick crossover is canceled

The fast-paced product scrambling taking place at General Motors Co. these days means one fewer Buick will make it to the street. In the case of a small crossover that was announced only two weeks ago, an executive committee decision was made to eliminate this "potential underperformer" after the product was criticized by automotive experts and consumers.

GM Vice Chairman Tom Stephens wrote in the company's FastLane Blog that large parts of all the audiences who saw the crossover thought it "didn’t fit the premium characteristics that customers have come to expect from Buick."

In the blog post, Stephens expressed surprise about the quick decision to oust the Buick from the lineup. "What gives me pause is how quickly we made a decision and carried it out. In the past this would have been a several-month process involving meeting after meeting of the APB, ASB, and various other acronyms, and also many 'offline' follow-up discussions before a decision was reached and enacted. This happened in one day."

Not yet named, the Buick crossover product was to feature both a traditional combustion engine and a plug-in hybrid version. GM says the hybrid technology, originally developed for the Saturn brand, will still be used on another vehicle. The crossover was one of several new products presented at a showcase a week ago at the GM design studio and Milford Proving Grounds in Detroit.

Although the crossover failed to impress the audience of consumers, analysts and automotive news media there, other products including three compacts from Chevrolet -- the Spark, Aveo and Cruze -- "drew great praise," Stephens wrote.

-- Joni Gray 

Photo: A teaser of the Buick crossover. Credit: GM

Pontiac G8 — Now you see it, pretty soon you won’t

Turns out reports of the Pontiac G8’s death weren’t exaggerated after all.

General Motors, you may recall, had consigned the Australian-built G8 to the scrap heap when it decided to kill off the Pontiac brand next year. But the rear-wheel-drive sedan seemed poised to make like Lazarus when GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz said last week that it might live on under the Chevrolet brand. Or not.

Lutz wrote in his Fast Lane blog this week that the G8 wasn’t going to make it.

“Not in today’s market, in this economy, and with fuel regulations what they are and will be,” Lutz wrote. (The eight-cylinder version of the G8 gets a combined 18 mpg.)

“I know that we’ll get a lot of complaints from G8 lovers, because I’m one of them. And the product guy in me is complaining as loudly as anyone. But the marketing guy says there’s no case. With budgets being what they are for the time being, the resources must be allocated elsewhere.”

Even so, Lutz stressed that GM had no plans to back away from performance or rear-wheel-drive models.

“Look no further for proof than the Corvette, the Camaro, the CTS or many other present and future Cadillacs. We have a strong lineup of RWD vehicles already and we will continue to have it.”

—Martin Zimmerman

Photo: 2009 Pontiac G8 GXP

Credit: GM

Auto News Roundup 6-26-09: GM's Detroit-area plant to build subcompact, Tata Motors takes a hit, Michael Jackson car memorabilia

-- Orion, Mich., assembly plant beats out the Janesville, Wis., and Spring Hill, Tenn., plants to build GM's next subcompact. Edmunds

-- Tata Motors loses $520 million after purchase of Jaguar and Land Rover. Bloomberg

-- Michael Jackson's death could create a boom for memorabilia hunters and sellers. Edmunds

-- Ford to boost production as sales stabilize. Leftlanenews.com

-- Joni Gray

Rocker Evan Dando takes on GM

It’s a shame, really.

Evan Dando, the founder of the fleetingly popular alt-rock band the Lemonheads, is suing General Motors over what the musician claims is the unauthorized copying of one of his songs for two car ads.

According to the Associated Press, Dando filed the suit in federal court in Los Angeles last week. He is seeking damages and a slice of the profits from the 2008 ad campaigns for GM’s Buick and Chevrolet brands, which the suit claims violates Dando’s copyright on the Lemonheads’ 1992 song “It’s a Shame About Ray.”

GM had no comment today on the suit.

The Lemonheads enjoyed considerable success in the early to mid-1990s with songs such as “Ray,” “Into Your Arms" and a cover of the Simon and Garfunkel classic, “Mrs. Robinson.” Dando continues to record and perform, but has never regained the popularity he and his band enjoyed in its heyday.

There have been several instances of musicians successfully suing companies for using melodies and/or voices that too closely mimic their own work.

In one well-known case, frog-voiced troubadour Tom Waits won a $2.5 million judgment in 1992 against  Frito-Lay after successfully arguing that the chip maker used another singer to impersonate Waits in a Doritos ad. Waits later won a similar lawsuit in Germany against automaker Adam Opel, a division of GM that is in the process of being sold off as part of General Motors’ Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization.

Check out the Chevy ad above and a live recording of "Ray" here (the best line is in the intro when Dando tells the audience: “I just woke up”).

-- Martin Zimmerman

Photo of Evan Dando by Los Angeles Times

Auto News Roundup 6-5-09: GM to sell Saturn to Penske, Tata bringing Nano to U.S., Volvo gets help from Sweden

-- GM made a tentative deal to sell its 350-dealer Saturn brand to auto dealership group owner and former race car driver Roger Penske. LAT

-- Pricing is announced for the 2009 Infiniti G37 Convertible -- $44,715 for standard version and $44,765 for the sport model. Edmunds

-- Mazda mourns the loss of its European head of product communications, Neil Warrior, 48, who was on the Air France flight that crashed in the Atlantic. Automotive News (subscription only)

-- Tata announced plans to bring their cheapest car to the U.S. within two years, after meeting emission and crash standards. Tata said it plans a 2011 European roll-out for the Nano, which costs $2,300. Yahoo

-- The Swedish government won approval to help co-finance Volvo's green car development with loans of 500 million euros ($710 million). CNBC

--Joni Gray

GM's CFO sells shares a bit late

Being a dyed-in-the-wool company man can make you poorer in a hurry.

That's the lesson on display with General Motors Corp.'s chief financial officer, Ray G. Young. While other top GM executives dumped their shares for nearly $325,000 a few weeks ago in anticipation of the rumored bankruptcy filing that ended up becoming a lot more than a rumor, Young held steady. 

It was a surprising show of faith in the company from a man who, perhaps more than any other on the planet, was aware of the GM's grim financial picture and the growing likelihood that it would file for Chapter 11 protection.

As it turns out, GM was in a hopeless situation, with twice as many liabilities as assets and, sure enough, it filed for bankruptcy on Monday.

On Wednesday, a day after GM dropped off the NYSE and became a pink sheets issue, Young sold his stock, according to a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The executive, who has been making the rounds on the tube to explain his company's situation, unloaded 11,579 shares at 55 cents apiece. That's $6,368.45 worth of the bankrupt carmaker.

Young's colleagues, including former vice chairman Bob Lutz, got out when GM was still well over $1 a share. And if Young had held his shares for a day longer, he could have gotten more: GMGMQ (the new ticker for the stock) traded at 75 cents today.

According to the SEC filing, Young has exercised options for 212,487 GM shares since 2001, with strike prices as high as $75.50.

In addition, as a top executive, Young was forced to accept a 20% pay cut to his $900,000 annual salary this year under terms of the original round of bailout loans GM received.

It's a bitter pill for Young, who has been at the company since 1986 and served it in Europe, Brazil and Asia.

So why hold the shares so long? A GM man to the end, Young said he stuck with the automaker for reasons beyond compensation. "There's a tremendous loyalty to this company," he said in an interview earlier this week.

"We basically have written off our life during the past year. We're not crazy. We're not talking about service to the country here. We really do believe in GM."

--Ken Bensinger

Photo: Ray Young, GM's chief financial officer, in New York on Monday. Credit: Stan Honda / AFP/Getty Images

Auto News roundup 6-4-09: Toyota claims hybrids will rule, Indiana challenges Chrysler bankruptcy, GM offers cash for dealer closings

-- Toyota, on the day Prius clinched the top sales spot for the first time (in May), makes the claim that hybrids will dominate for some time before battery technology catches up. USA Today

--The State of Indiana is temporarily stalling the sale of Chrysler to Fiat based on $42 million owed to retirees. Source: The Detroit Bureauvia Autoblog

-- GM is offering dealers up to $1 million to close their retail operations. Automotive News via Autoblog

-- 'Cash for Clunkers' legislation stalls in Senate. Car industry believes consumers are waiting for Congress to act before car-buying. Detroit News

-- Audi releases a new set of pictures of the redesigned, 340 horsepower 2010 Audi TT. Audi continues the claim that the TT is not scheduled for U.S. consumption. Autoblog

-- The Hyundai Accent has received a major face-lift and technical upgrade, and has been renamed the Verna Transform. Edmunds

-- Joni Gray

GM stops sharing with others

General Motors Corp.'s bankruptcy plan -- to overhaul the company's balance sheet and dump $57 billion in debt -- will finally do away with those brutal quarterly reports, stained blood red with yet another multi-billion-dollar loss.

That's because GM won't be issuing them anymore.

The automaker said today that it would no longer file most financial statements, including 10-Ks, 10-Qs, 8Qs and the like -- for the foreseeable future. It won't have to.

That's because GM will use bankruptcy to sell its assets to an entity it calls "New GM." And unlike the GM we all know and love (or love to hate), the New GM will not be publicly traded. At least not yet.

Publicly traded shares in GM ceased trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday (they're still available on the pink-sheets exchange, ticker GMGMQ, where they last traded at 62 cents per share). Once the court-ordered asset sale is accomplished, current shareholders in the "old GM" will be wiped out...

GM’s interim chairman, Kent Kresa, said that he was cancelling the company’s annual shareholders' meeting in August and is selecting a new board that will not, obviously, be up to shareholder approval.

No worries if you have a GM car warranty

General Motors has received permission from bankruptcy court to make good on payments for company-backed warranty repairs. The giant automaker, which filed for Chapter 11 yesterday, received the approval for the payments from the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York, thus eliminating a worry for consumers with cars still under warranty.

The company had already told dealers yesterday to go ahead with the repairs, assuming the approval would be forthcoming.

The court action also provides for warranty payments on new vehicles sold while the company is in bankruptcy.

-- David Colker

Photo: GM service bay  Credit: Bloomberg News