GMC's bank busted for racism, what was GMAC now has a new name, and was found guilty of ripping off minorities

In an investigation of lending practices in the year after April 2011, the government agencies determined that Ally Financial and Ally Bank charged roughly 235,000 Asian/Pacific Islander, Black and Hispanic borrowers higher interest rates than their credit profiles warranted and higher rates than whites were charged in equivalent situations. The result was that those borrowers paid $200 to $300 more in total interest for the loan.

Ally Financial has agreed to pay a $98-million fine to settle an investigation into unfair lending practices overseen by the Justice Department and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).

http://www.autoblog.com/2013/12/27/ally-pay-98m-settle-ethnicity-based-discriminatory-lending/

The C.F.P.B. found that Ally “had not made sufficient efforts to ensure that it was complying with fair lending laws in its pricing of indirect auto loans,” Richard Cordray, the director of the C.F.P.B.


Those payments came in the form of “dealer markups,” or the percent that car dealerships can charge to arrange loans through banks like Ally.
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/12/20/ally-in-98-million-settlement-on-bias-in-auto-loans/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=1

Ally Financial Inc. was founded in 1919 as the General Motors Acceptance Corporation (GMAC), a provider of financing to automotive customers.  http://www.ally.com/about/company-structure/history/

GMAC sold a majority stake to Cerebrus in 2006, the investment group that bought Chrysler, and in 2009 they changed the name to Ally Bank, then in 2010 Ally Financial

poor GM owners, every one talks trash about them

from Facebook of course

Word of the day: Electrification

At this week’s Convergence in Detroit, Mark Reuss, NA president of GM, told a crowd at Tuesday’s keynote, “Hybridization is no longer enough; electrification is the future.”

What struck me most about this statement was the word, electrification; I had yet to hear it in the automotive context. So I did what anyone with a rocket stick would do, I googled it on my way home. The trail led back to GM’s blue paper on sustainable urban mobility, Roadmap to 2030.

For some time now I’ve been thinking about getting an electric or hybrid car but have been bemoaning the lack of choice. Apparently, the fact that a new ground-transportation paradigm requires wide-spread societal alignment hadn’t occurred to me. You just put up a few recharging stations, right?

GM EN-V electric concept car
Source Wikipedia

GM makes eight recommendations in their blue paper, two of which I find to be particularly interesting:

• Integrate electrically powered, connected vehicles into a multi-modal transport system that incorporates sophisticated inter-city transport, comprehensive subway systems, traditional vehicle movement, and specialized smaller urban vehicles
   
• Identify a series of “lighthouse” projects to demonstrate the potential and viability of connected electrically driven vehicles in a controlled environment such as an eco-city or small town

It is nice to see a company taking such a definitive stand and boldly painting a vision for the future; this kind of creative thinking is what we need.

I was surprised to discover the blue paper is from 2010; still if you haven’t already read it, it is worth a look. You can download the paper from the GM web site.