Silverado "top truck"

spoon059 wrote:

CKNSLS wrote:
Yea, they should have been allowed to go belly up and put the already fragile economy in to a full blown depression!

I sense sarcasm, even though I agree 100% with what you wrote. We set a horrible precedent by subsidizing private industry. Where does it stop? GM had 95,000 direct employees in the US at that time. How about a company that only has 85,000 employees, are we gonna bail them out in 2 years too? What about 60,000 employees? Private industry is just that... PRIVATE INDUSTRY. Companies that cannot compete in the private sector go under all the time. Just as point of reference, in the month of August 2013 the United States lost 278,000 private sector jobs from business's that the US Gov't didn't think were "too important to the economy" to prevent from failing. That is almost THREE TIMES as many jobs as GM would have lost, and those jobs disappeared in a months time.

Before we start talking about employees losing jobs and suppliers losing income and how losing GM would cause an avalanche of job losses, lets get serious for a minute. There are X numbers of vehicles sold every year in the US. For a very simple example lets pretend its 100 vehicles sold every year in the US amongst all the car manufacturers. Lets say that 30 of every 100 cars sold was a GM product and the other 70 included Chrysler, Ford, Honda, Toyota, Kia, Hyundai, etc. If GM went out of business, does anyone really think that we as a nation would only buy 70 cars a year instead of 100? No, probably 28 or 29 people would buy from a different manufacturer and 1 or 2 would hold on to their GM product and keep buying parts from outside vendors. At the end of the day, the parts suppliers would still have the other big brands to sell to and the laid off auto workers would probably find jobs with another manufacturer who now has a bigger piece of the market and needs more employees.

GM had about 95,000 employees in the US at the time of the bailout. $25 billion that the US government GAVE (not loaned... GAVE) to GM would equate to over $260,000 per employee. I'm not even going to get into the loaned portion of money that GM "paid back" by giving shares in GM. In my opinion, I would have rathered the US government allow GM to go under and give each fired GM employee $25,000 as severance. That would have cost taxpayers 1/10th the amount of money, would have been more than fair to the employees and helped them weather the transition to work for Ford, Chrysler, Toyota, Honda, etc etc.

Anywho, back to the original topic. Chevy/GMC make nice looking trucks but have never really been my cup of tea. I wasn't a huge GM fan before the bailout and I REFUSE to support socialism and buy one now. It seems that everytime a new model is released with some new changes, some magazine declares it the "Best New Vehicle" based upon arbitrary opinions and testing about specific features that the new vehicle has that others don't. Its kinda like Ford having the "best turbo engine V6 on the market". Pretty easy to be the best when you are the only. My daughter is the best child I have ever had... she is also my only child. It doesn't do anything but prove my arbitrary opinions...

The argument that they received a bailout and now I won't buy one of their products rings hollow at best. The money is already spent-it's gone. That's it. The only reason Ford din't take any money is because they had already taken money from the governement in '09-
But wait a minute.

From Forbes-

"OK, Ford didn’t file bankruptcy or get bailed out by Uncle Sam, but didn’t it receive $5.9 billion in low-cost government loans in 2009 to overhaul its factories and bring out more fuel-efficient technology? What would have happened to Ford if Congress hadn’t authorized taxpayer money to fund that $25 billion Energy Department program during a moment of crisis for the industry?"

Full article here-
http://www.forbes.com/sites/joannmuller/2011/09/19/ford-looks-hypocritical-in-new-anti-bailout-commercial/

Back to topic. I had an opportunity to test drive a 2014 Silverado half ton yesterday. I already have a 2011 Crew Cab. The reworked Silverado is very impressive. It is the smoothest riding truck I have ever been in-whisper quiet at highway speeds. The transmission is now silky smooth and the transition from V8 to V4 mode via AFM is now truly not perceptible.

I bought a half-ton because I didn't want the "truck ride" now the new Silverado exceeds that request in every way. I know some will say-"but hey It's a truck! I don't care it can still be smooth and whisper quiet!