Showing posts with label GM. Show all posts
Showing posts with label GM. Show all posts

Sunday, December 19, 2010

GM Aerotrain



one has been preserved and is at the at the Museum of Transportation in St. Louis, Missouri, and Car Nut commented to say that one is rusting away at the National Railway Museum in Greenbay Wisconsin

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

General Motors and SAIC to jointly develop small engine and dual clutch transmission

gm-saic

General Motors has reached an agreement with one of its primary Chinese partners, Shanghai Automotive Industries Corp. (SAIC), on the joint development of powertrains for small vehicles.

GM and SAIC will develop and produce a family of four-cylinder engines ranging from 1.0- to 1.5-liters with direct injection and turbocharging. The GTDI engines should cut fuel consumption by around 20 percent compared to similarly-sized engines with equivalent output.

The engine will be used in GM and SAIC vehicles in China and around the world, and to go along with the new engine, the partners will also develop a small dual-clutch transmission that should provide a 10 percent boost in efficiency over current six-speed torque converter automatics. Work on the engine and transmission will occur at GM's powertrain engineering center in Pontiac, MI and the Pan Asia Technical Automotive Center in Shanghai.

GM has yet to announced when the new powertrains will debut in production, but mid-2011 is a safe bet.

[Source: General Motors]

Thursday, June 17, 2010

Cool new website to recommend, best written one I've come across in a long time, broad and well chosen cars of topic, humor in analysis of car design

From Yugo to Maybach, Greek auto manufacturers to Citreon, with a funny take on design and good use of photos to illustrate the posts



Referrring to Mercury:
They are memorable for just a small handful of cars, including the Mercury Monterey, Park Lane, and Turnpike Cruiser, the 1960’s Cougar, and the one time sale of the great de Thomaso Pantera. Everything else they did was offensive, like the Mercury Topaz, Sable, and every other version of the Cougar. Oh yeah, lets not forget that whole sitcom period, where they had the gay cousin (Merkur) come join the family. Mercury was Terri Schiavo, and it took too long to pull the plug.

On Yugo:
What is the difference between a Yugo and a golf ball? You can drive a golf ball 200 yards. (Thank you, I’ll be here all week)

As with most things, a combination of issues killed the Yugo, including the fall of communism, a terrible EFI replacement due to cost cutting that almost ended with a recall, a United Nations embargo of Yugoslavia, the mercy bombing of its factory, an issue with the timing belt, the fact that people considered the car disposable and neglected to do basic maintenance, and finally the unfortunate death of a person who’s Yugo was blown off a bridge during a 50mph wind.

On people driving hybrid cars:
They know about the engine because of an equally huge V12 badge on the back of my car. As they are driving up beside me, that badge is like a billboard for seal harvesting.

It’s not like my car runs on sliced polar bear, it just drinks a little heavier at the bar, like Mel Gibson. What’s funny is that I am probably doing as much to help the environment as they are, at least for the next 10 years. That little Honda or Prius has to be created from nothing, and in order to do so it will need steel (strip mining and CO2 emissions) and plastic (drilling and petroleum product manufacturing) using energy (coal) to put it all together. My energy was used ages ago during the renaissance by English people who burned peat, so something called my “lifecycle CO2 emission” is low.

On Aston Martin's new micro car:
Let’s get this done as quickly as possible to avoid the nausea.
Aston Martin is a venerable British marque known equally for its great cars and its greatest enthusiast, James Bond. With icons like the DB3, DB5, Vantage and Vanquish, the company lives up to its slogan, “Power Beauty, Soul.” Not wanting to rest on its laurels, however, Aston Martin is making some changes:
First, they’ll start making teeny tiny little microcars with engines from a blender. Yes, a blender. These cars will be based on the Toyota IQ, an adorable little lunch box better suited for storing sandwiches than cruising the countryside.
For an indepth uncovering of GM's false advertising about paying off their government loan: http://chrisoncars.com/?p=825 I was amazed, and if it's the only thing you read to get informed about today, I think you'll enjoy the info Chris dug up
Check out all the cool posts at http://chrisoncars.com/

Friday, January 29, 2010

Inventing planned obsolescence, that didn't turn out so well for GM.

It is with sad irony that the company which invented "planned obsolescence"—the decision to build cars that would fall apart after a few years so that the customer would then have to buy a new one—has now made itself obsolete.
It refused to build automobiles that the public wanted, cars that got great gas mileage, were as safe as they could be, and were exceedingly comfortable to drive. Oh—and that wouldn't start falling apart after two years.
GM stubbornly fought environmental and safety regulations. Its executives arrogantly ignored the "inferior" Japanese and German cars, cars which would become the gold standard for automobile buyers.
Beginning in the 1980s, when GM was posting record profits, it moved countless jobs to Mexico and elsewhere, thus destroying the lives of tens of thousands of hard-working Americans. The glaring stupidity of this policy was that, when they eliminated the income of so many middle-class families, who did they think was going to be able to afford to buy their cars? ... Micheal Moore http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-06-01/goodbye-gm/
 

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