Dan Neil, My Hero

I've mentioned Dan Neil before. He's the one-time writer for Car and Driver who landed a gig writing about cars for the LA Times, and somehow managed to snag a Pulitzer Prize for his work. Now he is giving lectures at UCLA and causing the Times to lose its $10 million account with GM. GM looks incredibly petty by pulling its advertising over Neil's cutting remarks, which have the unfortunate characteristic of being true. It is not one scribe's fault that GM's market share and consumer satisfaction ratings have shrunk year after year. GM puts out shoddy products, and has for decades now. There are certainly good engineers at GM, but they are buried somewhere under the layers upon layers of middle managers and red tape. No public spat with a media outlet will change that fact, and the celebrated Bob Lutz (who revived Dodge in the last decade) has only had a minor positive influence (see the Solstice).

Fight the Man, Dan!