Re: new Elan - GM owning Alfa

[Richard Welty <rwelty@domain.elided>]

On Thu, 17 Oct 2002 11:04:34 -0700 Richard Lane <srlane@domain.elided> wrote:
>... But nothing, NOTHING, fills me with more cold,
> chilling fear than the thought of General Motors owning my favourite
> make. I've had the misfortune to drive dozens of their US rental-market
> cars over the years and together they form the "bottom 10" worst cars
> I've ever driven.

it's good to remember that rental fleets generally get a lot of "CAFE
specials", gutless wonders with base trim whose job is to bring up the
"Corporate Average Fuel Economy" numbers.

> any rays of hope? Well....Bob Lutz is at GM now - and he's a car-guy and
> he might just see the light.

yes, the presence of Bob Lutz is a positive.

> And this new GM engine didn't exactly
> emerge from "the bowels of GM" but was designed in Chicago by a small UK
> consultancy that has designed (among other stuff) the new Triumph
> motorcycle engine and a lot of "german" engines that you would be
> surprised to hear about. It's good to have these things to cling on to.

while GM has produced some bloody awful engines over the years (remember
the olds diesel? the 8-6-4 idiocy? any number of miserable 90 degree
V-6 engines created by hacking two cylinders off of a V-8? the oft maligned
vega engine, which would have been nice if they'd put about 2 more years of
engineering development but which stank as shipped?), they have also
produced some very fine ones as well. it's fashionable to bash the small
block because it's a cast iron pushrod, but it's really a classic example
of the breed. the modern northstar v-8 is a really fine motor, too. the
motor that became the Rover V-8 was originally GM as well, and a nice piece
of work.

it may be bad, it may not, it may not even happen. we cannot influence it
much if at all, whatever happens happens.

richard
--
Richard Welty                                         rwelty@domain.elided
Averill Park Networking                                         518-573-7592
              Unix, Linux, IP Network Engineering, Security
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