The engine in the Lancer is one of its okay points. It lacks a lot of grunt but you get that from a 2L engine. Btw, the Lancer is as stock as it gets, it's not the EVO or anything crazy like that

My problem is hanging down the back of the rear seats in the boot are 2 flaps of carpet, secured to nothing, about 10 inches longer than they need to be so they flop onto the floor of the boot, with a cut down the middle. I'm sure there's some bizarre reason it's like this (as the show model EVO I saw had the exact same thing) but for the life of me I don't know what it is, and it looks shit. My brother is one of the design engineers for Holden (GM to you folks) here. When he saw it he took one look and burst out laughing and said "we'd get fired if we let our cars out the door finished like that".

That said, cars GM make in Australia are actually pretty good. The Monaro (Pontiac GTO to you folks), the HSV Clubport (Pontiac G8 to you, I think they will come over there in the ute, the sedan and the wagon) are all really good cars (though for the life of me I'll never understand why Americans need to butcher them with the ugly fucking Pontiac grill etc).

But unfortunately, Holden is also copping the brunt of the GM US issues, which is a shame because as I said they actually make good cars. With that, and petrol going up to nearly $1.70 a litre recently (which isn't much to the Europeans, but is a lot more than the Americans pay) it pretty much killed the locally produced car market here.

Petrol is currently around $1.05 per litre here (but should be cheaper except the USD -> AUD conversion went from $0.95 to $1.00 recently to $0.65 to $1.00 over the course of about 6 weeks recently) so maybe that'll help breathe some life into the market again.

Who knows?

Anyway, the other thing that Americans need to realise is you need to do everything possible to bail out these companies because directly and indirectly (eg through parts, servicing, suppliers, distributors, dealers etc) they employ something ridiculous like 20,000,000 Americans! You lose those jobs and the fragile economy is *fucked*.

Now I wish our government would see sense. They just announced a multi-billion dollar bailout of car dealerships here! What the fuck? What's next? Bailing out chemists? Milk bars? Supermarkets? Where does it stop? A massive car manufacturer is one thing, small dealerships (which are rarely more than private businesses with a handful of employees) is just silly.

[/rant over]