Posts Tagged ‘GM’

Over the past couple of years, I’ve taken quite a liking to the Zeta platform at General Motors. Designed mostly by Holden in Australia, it’s an amazing rear-wheel drive platform. In America, we know it as the Pontiac G8, and more recently re-tooled for the Chevy Camaro. After the Pontiac division was deactivated, many thought [...]

I’ve seen at least a dozen companies within the past month lock down their Facebook walls. As if Facebook didn’t need any more issues, after their latest privacy meltdown… here comes something else. In case you were living under a rock, Facebook decided to capitalize on everyone’s profile on search engines. They did so by [...]

Pontiac and the IIHS haven’t exactly gotten along very well over the years. Not only has IIHS been a bit unwilling to review Pontiac exclusives like the Solstice, but they’ve also held out on the exclusive-to-America G8. Well, after doing some digging, we have some results. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety posted rear crash [...]

Chevrolet confirmed to me today that the Volt will always be able to charge, even if your local utility company doesn’t want it to. Smart Charging is a hotly debated topic today. Many believe it is necessary to help keep power grids online, faced with ever-increasing demand. Opponents feel that it adds an additional layer [...]

Apparently GM Holden gets to rebadge while Americans don’t. The car maker is poised to begin selling the Pontiac G8… in Australia. The Pontiac G8 saga really couldn’t get any weirder at this point. The G8 is based on the Commodore VE, which is sold in Australia. Now, Holden will be selling the G8 in [...]

GM Holden just received a cool $200 million to source other automakers, now that their capacity to sell the Pontiac G8 was undercut by the Auto Task Force. Granted, one of the first announcements out of the Saturn/Penske deal was that the Sky roadster was going to be cut from production immediately. But, we already [...]

“I got Bluetooth!” “Me too!” “I got a rock…” Yes, that famous Charlie Brown line is what many new Pontiac G8 owners are saying. See, the Pontiac web site clearly lists Bluetooth as an included feature for the 2009 model year. Yet, many who are snapping up these discontinued-despite-Vice-Chairman-Bob-Lutz-saying-it’s-better-than-sliced-bread-wanting-to-save-it cars (yes, the G8 saga is [...]

It seems many are still unaware of the concern that the Chevy Volt will lack an Emergency Mode. As I’ve said in the past, I won’t buy a first-generation Volt if it is missing this key safety feature. What is an Emergency Mode? At first I wasn’t going to re-state this, but I feel it’s [...]

Okay, taking a page from the deals at CheapenGadget.com, I’ve written a how-to for getting the Volt for only $28,000. That’s less than the cost of Saturn’s VUE hybrid… which doesn’t happen to be electric. And, it’s only $6,000 more than the Toyota Prius 3G (seriously, they need to stop with the 3G references, it [...]

GM just announced that the first Chevy Volt has been built. Now, you might have seen Volts in the past, but they were actually mules from another pre-production car, the Chevy Cruise. The Cruse will be launching this year, and uses the same platform as the Volt. Some have asked me if you should take [...]