Pundits have been predicting that 2008 won’t be kind to auto manufacturers.   But a quick tour of the year’s first two major auto shows — the North American International Auto Show in Detroit and the Chicago Auto Show — demonstrates that manufacturers plan to do anything but pull in their horns. (And when it comes to Chrysler, we can say that quite literally, since its Detroit show press event featured a full-on cattle drive.) Read more . . .

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What do consumers want in a vehicle? A lot of people think they know, but Autobytel, one of the most popular new-car buying and research destinations on the Web, decided to ask the question of its millions of monthly car-shopping visitors. Specifically, consumers were requested to review some of the most highly anticipated year-end vehicle debuts and to provide their feedback on what directions they think automakers should take (and which strategies they might want to reconsider) in 2004. Here’s what today’s in-market auto shoppers have to say about current model trends and what they’d do differently moving forward: Read more . . .

In the late 1950s a cover of a leading do-it-yourself magazine pictured helicopter-like flying cars and predicted we’d all be driving one by the year 2000. Ten years later a similar magazine suggested that we’d all have cars with turbine engines under the hood that could run on salad oil or kerosene as easily as on gasoline. By the 1980s those supposedly in the know predicted that technology would conquer the problems associated with the electric car. New batteries, they said, would finally take electrics out of the horse-and-buggy era and make them viable. Read more . . .

Everybody I know who attended the North American International Auto Show in Detroit left Cobo Hall shaking his or her head. In looking for common threads within the mind-boggling expensive exhibition of the latest wares from the world’s car companies one trend was obvious–there was no trend. Or, perhaps more accurately, there were several trends, some running in parallel but others clearly contradictory to one another. If one were to take a clinical view, one might say the auto industry is demonstrating a serious case of schizophrenia. And that disease, if indeed it is a disease, was never more apparent than at the press conferences that preceded the public opening of the Detroit auto show. Read more . . .