Passed by Saturn of White Plains (NY) today. The familiar Saturn logo was replaced by a temporary 'Buick GMC' sign.
Last year, on the other side of town, Sholz Buick, a long time presence here, went belly-up.
On another note, in a nearby town, Harrison NY... The Prius that crashed into a stone wall as it came out the driveway was supposedly another case of unintended acceleration. Toyota engineer examined the 'black box' data recorder and pronounced that the throttle was wide open and brake never pressed. This would imply a driver error. Speaking as a design engineer, I have some serious concerns about the honesty of black box data when the company who made the vehicle is the only one that can read it out. I think it much better for the public to have a third party black box recorder which can be read out (but not erased) by standard diagnostic tools. As vehicles incorporate more and more embedded computer devices, better software validation is needed. I see it quite often in my own work where software that works just fine in some conditions will be totally unacceptable with other conditions. Part of the problem is that software rarely runs in a linear fashion. Interrupts of differing priorities cause the programs to take different paths. In a real world, this sometimes causes unintended results. In the case of the 'alleged driver error' who is to say that the black box data actually recorded everything as it actually happened?
Oppie (Robert Oppenheimer)