Okay...I'm taking a lot of crud for my LaCrosse comments.

www.Jalopnik.com offers this link to the image of the whole car, apparently previewed for media in July, though I was not present.

Here is the link to the image. IT's worth noting that my wise-guy friends at jalopnik.com have identified this car in their blog as a Lucerne, but we think it is the image of the new LaCrosse. My question: Will Tiger Woods actually drive one of these things?

http://jalopnik.com/photogallery/newgmcars/1002793462

Looks like a decent job from Lutz's design lab. But I'm still not excited.

Automotive News this week reported that Indian auto/truck maker Mahindra and Mahindra is delaying launch by six months to the fourth quarter of 2009. This, in fact, was known months ago, which is why Mahindra dealers haven’t begun building showrooms.

Since anything can happen to further delay a launch, dealers will wait until the last possible time to erect showrooms.

Mahindra, which said months ago it was delaying launch from mid 2009 to the end of the year, right now has a handful of pickup trucks being durability tested in Wisconsin. This Fall, the test will be expanded to 25 vehicles. The company plans to launch with a pickup truck in late 2009, and follow with an SUV a year or 18 months later.

According to sources, the chief concern of the company is to make sure that trucks are spot-on in terms of fit and finish and won’t be prone to early recalls for quality issues. Mahindra is anxious to avoid the Hyundai syndrome (quality problems that set in shortly after launch sunk the brand for a decade.

If there is a concern among executives at Mahindra, and U.S. distributor Global Vehicles, it is the continuing high price of diesel in the U.S. All of Mahindra’s vehicles are diesels, and expected to get around 30 mpg. Diesel today, nationally, is about $4.15 per gallon on average, compared with $3.69 for gasoline.

Mahindra is developing a “cost-per-mile” marketing and education campaign to support the case for buying diesel vehicles. The other concern is convincing pickup truck buyers to trade down to a smaller size truck. To that end, the Indian company is focusing on making sure the pickup (as yet un-named but previously called the Appalachia) can tow a typical bass boat, with total towing weight perhaps reaching 3,500 pounds.

I caught a few minutes of Rush Limbaugh's radio show today. God help me.

Rush, who is no fan of promoting the purchase of more fuel efficient cars, was blathering about how the current Moscow Auto Show is showcasing gas guzzling SUVs. He then excoriated the U.S. for promoting "bubble cars" at its shows. Hmmmm. I don't recall seeing too many "bubble cars" myself.

He then made the cogent point that because we are beginning to emphasize more fuel efficient vehicles, and Russia and China are pushing gas guzzlers at its shows, we (the U.S.) are abdicating our role as a global super power. Never mind that Russia and China subsidizes the cost of gasoline, making gas cheap in those countries.

They actually pay the guy for this kind of insight.

Earlier this week, I wrote a story for BusinessWeek.com about the protests enveloping the plant which is slated to soon commence production of the $2,500 Tata Nano, the world's cheapest car. To recap, on Aug. 24, an estimated 30,000 protesters, angry at the way the state government had acquired 400 acres of land surrounding the plant, gathered at the factory and blocked roads leading to it. Some 4,000 riot police with water cannons were on standby in case of violence. Some of the protesters stayed on, setting up a reported 21 camps and promising not to leave until the land, which Tata wants for suppliers, is handed back. Protesters are said to have attacked Tata employees and stolen equipment from the site.

Yet for all that Tata insists that the Nano will go on sale as planned in October. If the problems at Singur aren't resolved, the company says one possibility is to shift production to another plant. There's also the option of ditching the Singur site altogether and building a new site somewhere else in India.

One wonders what this is going to do to the Nano's profitability. Tata says it's already spent $350 million on the plant in Singur. Even if it can move successfully the whole plant bit by bit to a new site, Ashvin Chotai, an independent auto analyst, reckons it would cost another $50-$100 million. And that doesn't taken into the account the added costs for suppliers, which would also face the prospect of moving closer, or sending parts further, to a new site. "There is a possibility that Tata may need to shoulder some of these costs," says Chotai. Then there's the impact of rising raw materials costs, which consultants Global Insight estimate account for about 23% of the Nano's pretax price.

So what's all this got to do with the Mini? Well, like the Nano, the Mini was small, had an innovative design and low price (retailing at under £500). It was hugely successful, too, selling over five million between 1959 and 2000. Most analysts expect the Nano, with its super-cheap price to be at the very least a big seller in India. Still, there's one aspect of the Mini's history that Tata would be wise to avoid: the more Minis that were sold, the bigger the losses were for the now long defunct British Motor Corporation. Indeed, Ford estimated it lost £30 on every one sold because the price was too low. Putting that into perspective, that equates to a loss on the Mini of over £7 million, a huge sum at the time, in 1967 alone. That's caused some auto historians to claim that the legendary Mini was in fact "a major factor in the demise of the British auto industry". Sometimes a commitment to a low price can be very costly.

I'm having a snarky Dennis Miller moment. The Democratic Convention kicks off today. The China Olympics concluded last night. A new NFL season is almost upon us. Baseball playoff fever is hotting up.

And into my e-mail box today came a sneak peak, I thought, of the 2010 Buick LaCrosse. Okay, I'm not that juiced up, but I'll have a look. I'm game. But then I open the e-mail from GM, and all I get is a shot of the grille of the refreshed 2010 Buck LaCrosse (pictured above).

Readers: Help me think of a top ten list of things of greater consequence than the refreshed grille of next year's Buick LaCrosse, which will be shown, I'm told, at this fall's LA Auto Show

I'll start off the first three:

10. A new polymer that will make plastic garbage bags break down in landfills 2% faster.

9. New printer cartridges from HP that will be 3% more expensive than the rip-off prices the company charges already.

8. Whirlpool announces a breakthrough that will result in the lint trap in its dryer needing to be cleaned after every five loads instead of every four loads.

At a media event in Lordstown, Ohio, earlier this week, General Motors Chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner told reporters that the Hummer brand has some interested suitors. GM said earlier in the year that the company plans to sell it. The reasons are easy enough to see. GM can ill afford to feed its eight brands with new vehicles and marketing schemes. Hummer, with its line of militaristic gas guzzlers, is out of step with the times. So GM wants out.

But who will buy it? News reports already say that automakers in China and India have begged off. Who wants a gas hog brand when oil prices keep going up? But there’s another problem Hummer has. Its dealer network. At the beginning of the decade, when gasoline was cheap and big suvs were en vogue, Hummer was hotter than a $2 pistol. Dealers ponied up as much as $15 million to build the flashy Quonset hut-styled showrooms on expensive real estate for the new premium, badder-than-bad suv brand. They expected GM to build a full line of Hummers so that the dealers could pump up sales of expensive utes and fetch a fat return on their investment.

With Hummer sales off 40% in the U.S.—by far its biggest market—keeping those dealers happy will be some trick. Any buyer will have to invest hundreds of million, if not billions, to upgrade current models and come up with some new ones. Otherwise, they’ll be trying to sell Hummers through a network of angry retailers. Getting out of Hummer isn’t easy, either. If the brand’s buyer failed and wanted to walk away, they could be subject to lawsuits from dealers who invested in the franchise. GM coughed up more than $1 billion when it closed down Oldsmobile a few years ago. With a deterrent like that, it'll take some big discounts to sell this franchise.

Hyundai Motor Co. executives boldly say they expect to sell up to 50,000 of its new premium Genesis model in the U.S. market when both the sedan and coupe versions are both on the market.

"I think it's reasonably achievable," Hyundai vice president for product development John Krafcik told reporters.
Krafcik said Hyundai could sell up to 20,000 of the sedans and 30,000 of the coupes a year.

If the South Korean automaker can pull it off, it would be quite a turnaround from a decade ago when Hyundai was still at best a compromise, and at worst a joke, in American living rooms and driveways.

The Genesis sedan, which starts at $33,000, went on sale in late June in the United States. Production of the coupe model will start in December in Korea.

Hyundai said today it expects to release its first hybrid in the U.S. as early as 2010, featuring lithium-ion battery technology, Krafcik said. Hyundai will offer a hybrid version of the Sonata sedan for American consumers.

Hyundai has had a mixed bag of sales success this year. The cheaper cars—Accent and Elantra—are way up, 56% and 25% respectively. Sonata is up just 6.2%. Hyundai’s upscale aspirations are slow going. The Azera sedan sold 12K through August, down 12% from a year ago. Santa Fe is down 15%. The Tucson small crossover has been lost in the marketplace. Veracruz, a premium SUV that can sticker close to $40k has only sold 7K through August.

Though I have not yet driven the Genesis, the reviews from some of my peers have been very good. Consider what Edmunds.com said: “With badges removed, the Genesis could easily pass as a Lexus or Mercedes-Benz…anyone shopping in the $30K-$40K entry-level luxury sport sedan segment would be remiss if they didn't give the 2009 Hyundai Genesis serious consideration.

Good luck with that 50,000 thing.

I'll have a review of the new 2009 Honda Fit later this week when the pesky embargo lifts. But in the meantime, I can't help but gush on the liklihood...call it a rumor...that real-life driving fuel economy for this runabout is likely pushing 40 mpg. That's a piece of change greater than the government rating.

Sure, most cars get higher than the government rating. A friend of mine suddenly finding himself driving a Mercury Grand Marquis to work everyday says he is getting 27-28 on the highway. But 39-40 in combined fuel economy for the Fit, if it holds up with the reviewers who will be unleashing their reviews later this week, would be very nice indeed for a petrol car.