GM Hides Fuel-Efficient Small Cars and Trucks -- in Brazil

The FlexPower engine effectively allows consumers to play the fuel market in Brazil, where nearly all of the country's 29,000 filling stations offer an alcohol fuel option. When gasoline prices are high, they can switch to ethanol. When ethanol prices are high, they can switch to gasoline or a combination of gasoline and ethanol.

The Montana is based on GM's subcompact Corsa car. Its 1.8-liter FlexPower engine generates 112 horsepower at 5,600 revolutions per minute and 174 foot-pounds of torque at 2,800 revolutions per minute. But it's a spunky, stable little thing at high speeds. Its five-speed manual shifter works smoothly. With its barely five-foot-long cargo box, it offers urban utility while minimizing urban parking hassles. The interior is one of the best looking I've seen in any small truck. It averages the U.S. equivalent of 35 miles per gallon on the highway.

· The Chevrolet Celta, a FlexPower one-liter, four-cylinder subcompact car that is too much of a lightweight for long U.S. highway runs. But it would be perfect for daily suburban-urban commuting. It gets the U.S. equivalent of 40 mpg. You can park it on a dime. It's the perfect car for academic and corporate campuses. The engine generates 70 horsepower at 6,400 revolutions per minute and 86 foot-pounds of torque at 3,200 revolutions per minute. Cute.

· The Chevrolet Corsa hatchback and Chevrolet Meriva city wagon, both of which are excellent substitutes for American-style minivans that are anything except "mini" and small-to-mid-size "crossover vehicles" that are minivans pretending to be sport-utility models.

The Meriva and Corsa are straightforward family mobiles, elegant in their overall simplicity, efficient and economical in operation, and beyond sensible in meeting the daily transportation needs of most American motorists and their families.

The Meriva city wagon and Corsa hatchback also come with GM's 1.8-liter, four-cylinder FlexPower engine. They are maneuverable as heck, and they both get a bit more than 30 miles per gallon.

I drove those vehicles and walked away from the GM do Brasil test track wondering aloud how a global car company filled with so many demonstrably talented and intelligent people could do something so dumb as to keep some of the best small vehicles made anywhere out of a market that's clamoring for those models.

It makes no sense. And to anyone offering the counter-argument that bringing in cars from Brazil will undermine GM's U.S. employment and labor-union relationships, I offer the following response:

Those jobs and relationships are being wrecked anyway. They're being wrecked every time an American buys a small car from Honda, Toyota, Suzuki, Nissan, Hyundai or Kia. They're being hurt because of the UAW's failure to win the hearts, minds and dues of workers at those GM rival companies.

The bottom line is that if GM does not give the U.S. market the small vehicles America wants and needs, someone else will. That means a financially struggling GM will lose sales and market share. No company suffering those kinds of losses can offer anyone job security.