Is It Just Me…(Please Say No!)

I have a morning routine. I get up, feed and tend the dogs, pour a cup of coffee and watch the local news to keep up. I live in the northern suburbs of Detroit, Michigan USA, the home of General Motors (remember that for later).

There were 3 top local headlines this morning.

1. General Motors will re-enter the stock market tomorrow with an initial IPO of $33 per share.

2. Chevrolet (a product of General Motors) got an award from Motor Trend Magazine for the development of the Volt (an electric hybrid that will list in excess of 50 thousand dollars…yah…we’ll all get 2 of those)

3. There was a traffic accident on the busiest inlet to downtown Detroit that closed the expressway.

So here’s how it played out…

General Motors stock is a big deal around here. It means that they are going to raise money to pay back the federal loans they got on the backs of all the people they layed off before going bankrupt.

The Volt, although a great idea is priced above general market demand and in fact the cost of hooking up the “special” recharging system adds another $5000 to the cost of owning a vehicle that actually only travels 40 miles on electric power.

The Accident…A vehicle traveling along the service drive lost control plunging 30 feet down onto the expressway and slammed (airborne) into the side of a charter bus (which fortunately was empty of passengers). There was a remote reporter on the scene who could not offer any information, but managed to eat up 6 minutes of reporting the scene knowing nothing. The in-studio reporter made and obsessive point of trying to find out the make and model of the flying vehicle…this caught my attention…what possible difference could it make?

The news recycles about every 15 minutes and by the time the crash story resurfaced we knew it was a 2010 Chevy Malibu (A General Motors product) had flown off the service drive into a bus. Oh joy.

Mind you, I am not glued to the news. I shave and shower, play with the dogs, drink more coffee and generally have the program on as background noise.

So here we have, GM offers IPO, Motor Trend awards GM, accident closes expressway…but by the time I had heard the 4th recycled headlines it all sort of ran together and became a blur and what I heard was…

“Motor Trend awards GM for flying vehicle that can crush buses at $33 per share”.
And in the end what I am asking...is what does GM think about all of this and do you distill the news differently?

 I’m just saying.