Fiat

Every year automakers launch a barrage of advertisements pitching how they need to clear out the current year's vehicles to make way for new model year inventory. At the same time, the companies keep moving up the date on new model year car introductions.  This once all took place in late August and September, but now its starting in June and hitting full stride in July. Auto price information company TrueCar.com analyzed June vehicle sales by brand and model year and figured out which manufacturers have moved the most aggressively into the new model year and which ones were stuck still selling significant numbers of car leftover from 2011.

There was a time when if you suggested that Fiat, the Italian carmaker whose name is often derided in the U.S. as an acronym for "Fix It Again, Tony," would one day be in a position to buy one of Detroit's Big Three, you would have been laughed out of the room. Now Fiat is proposing to merge with and possibly acquire a majority stake in Chrysler, but on one condition: that American taxpayers pony up $3 billion to seal the deal, on top of the $4-billion bailout Chrysler received in December.

Just over a decade ago, German auto giant Daimler bought Chrysler for $38 billion, an alliance that promised to reinvent the auto industry but instead ended in tears. On Wednesday, Chrysler, bankrupt and downtrodden, got a new European boss and, along with it, what could be a last chance. After months of planning and negotiating, Italian automaker Fiat finally gained control of Chrysler, and its leader, Sergio Marchionne, took the chief executive position at the U.S. company as well.

The Obama administration on Monday gave Chrysler Corp. an ultimatum: join forces with Italy's Fiat within 30 days or prepare to enter Bankruptcy Court. Over the weekend, the president's automotive task force concluded that Chrysler couldn't survive on its own, despite the $4.3 billion that taxpayers have pumped into the company since December. The Auburn Hills, Mich., firm, which announced in January that it was in merger talks with Fiat, had asked for a $5-billion loan.

Vittorio Ghidella, credited with rescuing Fiat's auto division from the verge of collapse, is resigning because of differences about where the division, Europe's biggest car maker, should fit within the conglomerate. Fiat SpA, Italy's biggest private industrial group, said in a statement Friday that Ghidella, chief executive of the auto division for a decade, will leave by the end of the year.

Officials of Chrysler Corp. and Italy's Fiat SpA are in intensive negotiations that could result in a major deal between the two companies, industry analysts said Monday. Such a deal could be relatively routine, such as a joint development project, or it could involve one of the auto makers buying a stake in the other. "There's no question that they're talking to one another," said Shearson Lehman Hutton analyst Joe Phillippi.

Former astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who regularly appears gratis at local society and political gatherings, is being lured to appear on Italian television at the end of the month for a fee of $25,000. It seems that executives of the giant Fiat auto manufacturing company offered the Laguna Beach resident the megabucks to lure him to Milan, where he will talk about space flight on a television show. Accompanying Aldrin will be his fiancee, Lois Driggs Cannon, also of Laguna Beach.

General Motors Corp. and Fiat said Sunday that they will study the finances of Daewoo Motor Co. before deciding whether to buy the South Korean company's passenger-car unit and related assets. The two companies expect the evaluation to be swift, and it may soon be followed by formal acquisition talks, GM said in a statement to Bloomberg News. GM and Fiat emerged as the most likely buyers for Daewoo after a joint bid by DaimlerChrysler and Hyundai Motor Co. and a separate one by Ford Motor Co.

The only genuine monarchist of my acquaintance was a flamboyant fellow student at Brown University about 20 years ago. He planned to publish a magazine devoted to the enhancement of royal privilege, and solicited all the reigning monarchs for moral and financial support. He received only one reply--from the Shah of Iran, who sent good wishes but no money. In this decade's spurt of royal weddings it is more obvious than ever that the rites of monarchy retain their age-old appeal.

Dear Fashion Police: I wish you would send some officers to patrol my gym. Citations should really be issued to women who think that a black dance leotard with full underwear underneath can work as a swimsuit. Likewise for the men who wear those hibiscus-print swim trunks with dark socks on the track. Of course, I'd love it if you would also cite the people who get into the fast lane of the lap pool wearing shower caps, glasses or toupees, but I suppose that's not your jurisdiction.