Zero to One-Eighty » gm

Wired: GM killed the wrong brand

Adrian Cooke — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 18:57:19 +0000

This has been burning me for a while. The El Camino was discontinued in 1987. In 2010, Pontiac were planning to reintroduce it with this:

2010 ~~Holden Ute~~ Pontiac G8 Sport Truck (Photo: General Motors)

But even before they killed Pontiac, GM nixed the return of the American ute. Some things are just too pure for this world. Chuck Squatriglia for Wired confirms the people’s choice:

General Motors is unloading three brands and tossing one overboard in a scramble to stay afloat, but the one it scuttled may be the one it should have kept.… It turns out Pontiac, which got the axe, is the brand people wanted to see saved.

Almost 10,000 responses to the article’s poll say the same:

Which brand should have been killed? n = 9,993
Pontiac	Saturn	Hummer	Saab
6%	27%	55%	10%

Ding, ding, ding: we have a winner.

The Silicon Valley of the 1920s

Adrian Cooke — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 04:59:42 +0000

James Griffioen, in his Detroit design guide:

Detroit was like the silicon valley of the 1920s. A new industry emerged here to transform the entire world. There were jobs for everyone. There was money to throw away on art deco skyscrapers with gilded roofs. As Detroit’s auto barons poured their wealth into the city’s buildings, they created one of the greatest collections of 1920s architecture in North America. Eventually, half the population left for the suburbs. That means the city is very empty. There are a lot of vacant lots, empty houses, and even empty art deco and beaux-arts skyscrapers. At night, a great swath of our lovely skyline is dark.

And showing a reporter from Time around the city:

I drove him down the main commercial drag of the old Polish neighborhood that now looks like it never recovered from a nuclear blast. I showed him the operating automobile plant that years ago required a vibrant part of the old Polish neighborhood to be torn down, but also explained that the Chevy Volt—the plug-in electric car that represents much of Detroit’s future—would be built there.

Reading Jim, the “nothing” I know about Detroit is gradually being turned into a small “something,” about where the city has been, and where it may be going.

El Caminos on Flickr

Adrian Cooke — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 16:59:50 +0000

By simonov, Gush Party and mezone

Beautiful.

The Big Three and the good fight

Adrian Cooke — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 17:12:26 +0000

Jim at Sweet Juniper! last week:

One thing I do like about GM, Ford, and Chrysler is that they are companies that still make something. What do the vast majority of the Fortune 500 companies even do? What does Goldman Sachs do? What do all those companies in Silicon Valley make? They shuffle paper, sure, transmit blips of binary code, attend important meetings, and make “deals.” Maybe brown people somewhere across an ocean will make whatever it is they’re selling or shuffling on paper or e-mailing each other about. But in Detroit, and in plenty of other industrial cities across this country there are still people making things without exploited labor, and believe it or not that still means something.

and this week:

It’s no secret that Americans don’t like to confront real issues of class. But I’m going to do it anyway. I think this ugly response to a mythology perpetuated about blue-collar workers is particularly shameful because so many American white-collar workers in both the public and private sectors are incredibly lazy themselves. God forbid a factory worker should step away from her job twisting the tops on the toothpaste tubes for a minute, but just because someone has a Bachelor’s degree that apparently entitles them to dick around on the internet all day with impunity.

I really like this blog. (Via Kris.)

A time of bad debts