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The US Treasury has handed GM CEO Dan Akerson a $9 million slap in the face

Perhaps because of the pesky detail that General Motors still owes the US taxpayer the paltry sum of $25 billion, GM’s largest shareholder (the US Government) has stepped in and capped CEO Dan Akerson’s salary at just $9 million – less than half what the other big boys get paid.

Bastards.

GM CEO Dan Akerson

• $9 million income
• $173,000/week
• $34,000/day 

Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne

• $22.2 million income
• $427,000/week
• $85,000/day 

Ford CEO Alan Mullaly

"Yeah - mine is the biggest." Ford CEO Alan Mulally on the size of his package, recently

• $29.5 million income
• $567,000/week
• $113,000/day

Experts reveal world championship bullshit bridge-building secrets (opinion)

There’s a gulf between the absolute truth and an outright lie, and it can be spanned only with a bridge built of bullshit. Building bridges of bullshit is a real skill (often called, erroneously, ‘PR’ or ‘communications’). There are weak bullshit bridges and strong ones, but even a bullshit bridge built by a master bullshit bridge builder tends to have a half-life of about a week – just ask Tiger Woods, Bill Clinton … or any man who’s ever been caught with his wheels hanging out of the wrong garage during an unauthorized service.

Read more on the $275 million bailout, and the $12 billion we've spent keeping oversaeas car makers going, the demise of the large locally built car in Australia, plus the potential plan to cut manufacturing jobs despite the government funding.

Two of the best bridge builders/spin doctors in Australia – really impressive, elite performers; true masters of their craft – are

Parliament erupts with Holden job-cut speculation despite ink only just drying on latest $275 billion taxpayer bailout

South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill yesterday refused to tell Parliament how many jobs will be cut at Holden’s Elizabeth car manufacturing plant.

Holden won’t tell opposition leader Isobel Redmond how many jobs will go – and Jay Weatherill won’t tell the public, which footed the bail-out bill: “[I won’t] put in the public sphere any material that Holden has not,” he said

Why the large Aussie car is terminal – despite the $13 billion you paid to save it

The demise of locally built Holden Commodore and Ford Falcon sales is accelerating. Back in 2003, Ford sold 73,220 Falcons. At the end of 2010 Falcon sales had dropped to 29,516 Falcons – a reduction of 60 per cent in seven years. Then, in 2011, Falcon sales, incredibly, fell another 37 per cent – to just 18,741 units.

The Holden Commodore hit its stride in 2002, with 88,478 Commodores rolling out into the hands of buyers. Despite spending $1 billion developing the VE Commodore (some of it even GM’s own money), Commodore sales fells to 44,387 by the end of 2009 – a 50 per cent drop over seven years. A slight rise looked like the light at the end of the tunnel for Commodore in 2010 (one per cent, or an increase of 1569 sales). But that was short-lived: By 2011 Commodore was well established in a terrain-warning trajectory, too, finishing the year with just 40,617 sales – a year-on-year decline of 12 per cent.

The Ford Falcon limped out of the blocks in 2012

Extreme Corporate Arrogance

Holden and Ford each spend an eight-figure sum every year refining and promoting their image to the public through advertising and below-the-line marketing. They are very effective at cloaking the dubious public policy that supports them in a mist of red-blooded Aussie virtue.

The unique Aussie-ness of Holden in particular is a veneer at best. You only need examine more deeply the hugely successful ‘Football, Meat Pies, Kangaroos & Holden Cars’ advertising campaign of the 1970s, with its catchy jingle and the golden tonsils of radio and TV voice legend Ken Sparkes it cemented Holden as an Aussie Icon. It was in fact a hasty rip-off of a US ad campaign for ‘Baseball, Hot Dogs, Apple Pie and Chevrolet’…

In response to my post on the $275 million deal, a Holden insider sent me the following, via Twitter (@cadoges, if you feel like bailing me up in 140 characters or less): “I don’t have a business degree but a $275 million investment for a $4bn return and 16,000 jobs sounds like a smart investment to me…”

It’s an example of the kind of institutionalized, conditioned arrogance at play in these US-based companies. For starters, the $275 million isn’t an investment – it’s a grant, a donation. We’re not getting it back.

Apart from those who object to the use of public money to keep factories owned by overseas interests open only in the name of jobs and not viability, there’s the pesky notion that customers have sound, hip-pocket reasons and commercial considerations underpinning the desertion of Holden and Ford's locally made cars by formerly loyal customers.

Business Customers

Business and government fleets have been for decades the foundation upon which Holden and Ford’s factory outputs have been based. (When you own a factory, the pesky imperative is that production must equal sales – and customers buying dozens of cars at a time are a real

Australian car industry support package remains highly discriminatory and questionable

GM Holden got what it wanted today: a $275 million taxpayer-funded government grant in exchange for ongoing operations at its Elizabeth, SA manufacturing plant, which builds the Commodore and Cruze. It’ll never have to be repaid – it’s not a loan; Holden boss Mike Devereux pulled me up on that at today’s press conference. And he was quite right. Loans demand repayment; grants don’t.

Above: One other these places is a taxpayer funded, subsidised welfare operation. The other is Centrelink

Whatever strings are attached to the grant in what Mr Devereux calls “binding agreements” between GM Holden and the Federal, Victorian and South Australian Governments will forever remain secret, despite the fact that this is public money we’re talking about here.

This grant, which is really just the glace cherry on the icing sugar on a postcode-sized cake of ongoing multi-billion-dollar taxpayer handouts to the Australian automotive industry is, like all its predecessors, highly discriminatory. It's a joke - but the Australian taxpayer should not be laughing.

Thousands of Australian businesses struggle every day to compete against the vicissitudes of currency and global competition. Only the local auto-industry

What should the Australian government do, by way of industry support? Support a terminal car industry, or boost hi-tech companies with global sales potential? The decision should be a no-brainer

Nuance Communications and Spanson Inc are two companies you’ve probably never even heard of. But if you’ve used Siri – the voice-activated assistant locked inside an iPhone 4S – you’ve used Nuance’s speech software. Nuance also sells the software for in-car entertainment and navigation systems.

Spanson makes NOR flash memory chips that make Nuance’s software work faster and enjoy larger lexicons. So the pair is in something of a symbiotic relationship.

Wouldn't investing in an industry like this make more sense for Australia than dumping hundreds of millions more taxpayer dollars into an industry on life support, with no real hope for the future?

Quarter-billion-dollar Holden prop-up deal virtually done, but four experts highly critical of Holden's long-term taxpayer funding

GM Holden’s addiction to your tax dollars is getting to be about as dignified, and as justifiable, as the performance of a strung-out, crack-addicted whore in South Central Los Angeles. “Australia’s own” Holden currently has its hand out for – wait for it – an additional quarter of a billion dollars jointly funded from the Federal and South Australian Governments. And if current news reports are accurate it appears those funds will shortly be forthcoming.

It’s undignified when corporations threaten governments, and the implied threat here is pretty clear: give us the money or the jobs are toast.

Just three weeks after the South Australian Centre for Economic Studies (CES) slammed taxpayer-funded subsidies for GM Holden as (paraphrasing) bad public policy, it appears the floodgates on another officially sanctioned tsunami of your taxpayer funds are about to open.

Twilight, eat your heart out

Luxury 4WDs are the fastest-growing segment of the car market. They're also a way to beat inflation, losing less value over time than their luxury car stablemates

Luxury 4WDs are starting to stack up as a real hedge against vehicular depreciation. The Bob Browns and Penny Wongs of this world might revile them as CO2-belching harbingers of envirogeddon, but the Australian used vehicle market is in love with them. (Used luxury 4WDs, not Bob or Penny, that is…)

Luxury 4WDs are often faring better today in the resale stakes than similarly priced luxury cars wearing the same premium badges, as our case studies below demonstrate.

Would you buy a new car online?

This concept is repugnant to new car dealers, but as a species the choice to adapt or die is already upon them. Most are, apparently, choosing to dodo-up.

Like vinyl records previously, car dealerships face extinctionOnce you decide to buy a particular new car it becomes, effectively, a commodity – at least inasmuch as the particular new car offered by Dealership X is identical to the same model offered by Dealership Y. And, with commodities, the only variable that really matters is price.

Dealership sales staff are well established in decline. Previously (before iPods played HD video) a salesperson could inform you about the nuances and technicalities of your particular new car. Dealerships were a valuable repositiry of information and guidance. Not any more. These days, serious customers routinely

Have you noticed that even today's small cars are huge?

You can’t open a newspaper or a magazine these days without staring at a headline about the obesity epidemic. But it’s not just waistlines that are rapidly expanding – vehicles are, too.

There have been tremendous advances in efficiency technology - and these are often offset by each new model getting heavier and heavier. This occurs because each car company is obliged to offer more with the next new model: more space, more features, more legroom, more power - more everything. It's a prime motovator to get the last (say) Commodore owner into the next model.

Cars have grown out of all proportion, too

In fact a whole new class of vehicle

TIP 1: Buy your next new car at the end of the month

When you buy a new car, timing is everything. New-car dealerships have very aggressive sales targets, and they are accountable for those projected new-car sales on a monthly basis. Serious financial incentives are paid by wholesalers (car companies) to the dealers that meet their targets; those that miss their target lose their bonuses.

New car dealerships also pay interest on their

New car dealerships work like this: when a car company (the manufacturer of the car, or the importer of it) delivers a car to a dealer, it becomes the dealer’s property. The dealer pays for it on credit; he needs to sell it to reduce the interest cost of holding it. This is true for every vehicle you can see on the showroom floor, as well as every vehicle you can’t see in the dealer’s warehouse.

Essentially, dealerships use the equivalent of a big, fat

When you’re buying a new car, always leave your trade-in at home. New car dealers love to confuse buyers and obfuscate the deal’s economics with trade-ins. Sometimes they offer what appears to be a high trade-in price but refuse to discount the new car you’re buying – with a better financial result for them than had you just bought the car with no trade-in and simply driven a hard bargain. Coming to grips with whether you’re getting a good deal on a new car, or not, slips further from your grasp whenever a new car dealer starts cooking the books with your trade-in.

You should also realize that new