"We're not viable, but please save us anyway" - GM/Chrysler [White House begins to smell the coffee]

GM owes roughly $28 billion to bondholders. Chrysler owes about $7 billion in first- and second-term debt, mainly to banks. GM owes about $20 billion to its retiree health care trust, while Chrysler owes $10.6 billion.

An exasperated administration official noted that the companies had not done enough to reduce debt; in some cases, it actually increased during this restructuring and review process.

NVDL: Last week I attended a presentation on an electric vehicle and the guys say that ICE [Internal Combustion Engines] conventionally only utilise 15% of the energy they consume - the rest goes into heat, wear and tear, entropy etc. 15% - that's shocking inefficient. The Joule is engineered to get 75% efficiency off a battery. GM and Chrysler could start by engineering lighter vehicles. They appear to lack imagination and vision. They've been caught with their pants down.

clipped from news.yahoo.com WASHINGTON – Neither General Motors nor Chrysler submitted acceptable plans to receive more federal bailout money, the Obama administration said as it set the stage for a crisis in Detroit that would dramatically reshape the nation's auto industry. The White House pushed out GM's chairman and directed Chrysler to move quickly to forge a partnership with Fiat if it expects to receive additional government assistance. President Barack Obama and his top advisers have determined that neither company is viable and that taxpayers will not spend untold billions more to keep the pair of automakers open forever. "We think we can have a successful U.S. auto industry. But it's got to be one that's realistically designed to weather this storm and to emerge — at the other end — much more lean, mean and competitive than it currently is," Obama said.