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Crunch watch Dec 08: the auto industry in crisis

By Tim Pollard and Simon Stiel Motor Industry 31 December 2008 14:05 Wednesday 31 December 2008• GMAC, GM's finance arm, said it would immediately revise its criteria for providing loans, after the US government bail-out of the General's credit arm. It will now supply credit for anyone with a score of 621 or more on the Fico scale, the scale used to assess Amercian customers' creditworthiness (Financial Times)• The news means that 80% of US consumers would now qualify for a loan from GMAC – which should improve sales in the depressed US market (Detroit News)• Chrysler is being lambasted for taking out full-page adverts in the American national press thanking the nation for supporting its auto industry. But critics point out this is a fresh waste of bail-out resources, as pages in the Wall Street Journal – one of the titles in which the ad ran – reportedly cost up to $264,000.

Bench Racing: New crop of supercars

It's been a while since we've hypothetically raced a handful of cars around the office; long enough that an entirely new crop of supercars has arrived for us to chart, graph and dissect. Today we're zeroing in on the $1-$3 million price tag range, which fits the Ferrari LaFerrari, McLaren P1, Pagani Huayra and the Bugatti Veyron Super Sport. The first three fit neatly, pricewise, at about $1.3 million.

Flavio Manzoni on the design secrets of the Ferrari LaFerrari [w/Video]

Flavio Manzoni has explained the secrets behind the design of the LaFerrari hypercar in an interview with Autocar's Steve Sutcliffe. Ferrari's design chief, speaking at the Ferrari Museum in Maranello, talks of how the LaFerrari was designed to manifest the future of Ferrari and mark a milestone in the design process. Presentations of four 1:1 scale models adorn the walls of the room kept exclusively for project LaFerrari, although there were five initial presentations – three from Ferrari and two from Pininfarina.