Pulling a Porsche

I was reading today about one of my favorite automotive anomalies. Once small niche market subsidiary of Volkswagen, Porsche, takes control of their former parent company by dramatically buying over 50% of the company. I've often thought of this as a benchmark of success for a small company when they can grow enough to actually take over a much larger entity. Today's news (http://www.autonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090325/ANE02/303259967/-1&campaign_id) is that Porsche is doing some creative refinancing and may increase their VW stake to 75%.
Of course almost every vehicle Porsche produces is a home-run, and they have a very high profit per vehicle due to the structure of their options list. VW on the other hand has produced a variety of market flops (at least here in the US) such as the Phaeton and Toureg.

Unfortunately the American based car companies have no such miraculous news to share. Recently I've noticed the automotive press has downgraded the former "Big 3" to the "Detroit 3", an accurate description since only GM remains in the top 3 automotive producers worldwide. GM announced some weeks ago that they were going to discontinue the "performance" division, fortuitously (for Ford) about the same time that Ford announced the return of the SHO Taurus. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I haven't had much experience with the GM "performance division" cars, but have heard mostly positive things about them, and many of them brought some glitz to otherwise boring cars like the Cobalt.

One home-run that I am fairly familiar with is the Pontiac G8GT. For ~$30,000 you can have a V8 rear drive large sedan that performs well, and is quite comfortable. Pity that GM chose not to offer the regular GT with a manual transmission, I would seriously consider buying one if that were available. The biggest drawback to the GT is the somewhat ungainly automatic transmission, which compared to the best-in-industry Jaguar automatic seems like it's stuck in a vat of molasses. Of course you can pay about $10,000 more and get the GXP version with a manual, and an extra 60HP, better suspension and brakes etc, however I really feel that the regular GT is adequate in all those areas. Of course this car is made in Australia, so it's not as red-white-and-blue as some of us would like to see, but at least it's coming from an American company. Yet another "bust" in the myth that the Americans can't make good cars.