Oooooh, Mama! There’s some serious fur flying in the blogosphere.
You all know I am a car junkie. And you all know I am a blog junkie. I satisfy both cravings with a healthy dose of car blogs and forums, with my favorite being The Truth About Cars.
This blog has it all: killer writing, a sense of humor and the balls to tell it like it is. In contrast to the rest of the pablum I consume about cars, these guys (apparently) could care less what the traditional car press thinks of them. These guys are nobody’s sycophants.
OTOH, I’ve admired GM for its early adoption of the blogosphere, if not for its pitiful products. For a company that just doesn’t get it on the product or marketing side, I’ve thought they’ve shown at least passing glimmers of “getting it” on their Fastlane blog.
GM had a podcast that, for a while, was cute. It featured this PR woman with the most nasal Midwestern twang I’ve ever heard who fawned over the GM execs she was able to get on the phone. When they got Corvette engineers to talk into their low-production-value podcasts (these podcasts are like GM interiors), you understood the meaning of unctuousness. But it was early corporate grokking of the blogosphere for 2005…and it was way inventive for GM.
Once, Lutz himself gave what I still think is a compelling description (about 2/3 of the way into this podcast) of why the blogosphere required authenticity and corporate involvement. I agree that the blogosphere is way to even the tables, even when across the table from you is Chubba Cheddar-cheese who’s never seen a press junket he didn’t like.
Still, GM management is responsible for destroying an American industrial icon through inexplicable and inexpressible hubris. And I’ve wondered why Lutz has never been culpable for this. He’s been there long enough. He’s delivered his own Aztek (or two).
But now…but now…it’s gotten really hot in the kitchen. The Truth About Cars is personally blasting Lutz, in its long-running (and sadly poignant) GM Death Watch over Lutz’s inchoate rant about CAFE.
If you like cars, you gotta read both posts, along with all the comments. If you don’t like cars, you still gotta read the posts and comments.
It’s all there: all the tragedy of GM’s arrogance, the unmasking of Lutz as just-another-cog-in-the-machine-of-GM-destruction, the astonishing balls of TTAC to write and post what it did, the car community going nutz over these posts.
I’m never going to need to watch another female mud-wrestling contest as long as these beeatches keep this up.
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