I’ll never buy a GM or Chrysler product, and I like the Challenger, Charger and Camero a lot, but no way no how.

Ford is still an option in my book.

Tell me about it. And this guy LOVES him his cars. He was in tears – it scraped the side of his truck in the driveway on the way down, damaging both considerably. Genuinely depressing.

Even with their new, guaranteed-to-fail “management”, I still wanted a Camaro. Have ever since Mom sold our ‘68 convertible all those years ago and especially because the new body style is awesome! Unfortunately, it’s style over substance I guess.

This or next was going to be the year to replace my 10-year-old Maxima – even against my better judgment (I contract independently now, mostly telecommute, so I presently log less than 1000 mi/yr – so a ‘cool’, ‘fun’ car seemed justifiable). My ‘91 Maxima carried me over 230,000 mi., on one engine and minimal maintenance – it’s at 275k today and STILL being driven, by a third owner, with the original engine! Try THAT with a GM car. A union-owned, union-run shop will never, ever achieve that level of quality.

Corporatist meddling by the federal government aside, GM will not significantly improve its position in the market until it improves its level of Quality – and that’s spelled with a capital “Q”.

There’s a reason GM was ripe for seizure by the feds. They suck at quality. Image repair won’t help in that regard. No one I know has been satisfied with a GM auto for as long as I can remember. This phenomenon has continued right up through present day, when I looked outside last week to see my neighbor’s 2009 Camaro embedded in our front yard’s flower garden. The parking brake failed to hold the car on the tiny grade in his garage! The car rolled back, out of the garage, down the driveway, across the street and into our yard. Thank God no kids or another car happened to be in its path.

A quick search revealed that this problem is not unique to my neighbor, and caused by a cost-cutting, crap design that GM has been using for years. In this case, it’s “too expensive” to design a PB that engages the brakes, so a low-quality drum brake is activated by the PB – which is only reliable when the vehicle is in a nose-down orientation.

Quality. That’s capital “Q”. Write it down.

Combined with the government bailout, I never intend to buy a GM product again.

Forget about Chrysler. Six sigma designed to fall apart after 6 or 7 years. Real smart to have the secondary car market impression of your car being junk. Young buyers start in the secondary market. After experiencing Chrysler as a used car, why would you ever buy a new one?

Would I be better off in an indifferently assembled GM “car” that breaks down on the way to work and consumes more of my repair budget?

Would the US be better with millions of GM owners spending more on their cars than they should to suport a bloated GM and UAW? (and reward sloppy workers and cluless management?)

Me and my family are better off in what I want: a reliable fashionable automobile: the US is better off with non-GM workers doing decent work on time–people that bring in foreign purchases and don’t need to drain money from our fellow citizens to support a lot of indifferent workers and greedy executives.

Your the cheerleader with the pompoms, right? Cute. Gimme a F! Gimme a U!