Gimmicks. How sad.

If they were offering a general rebate of $1,000 (which is rather low compared to last year), it would be equivalent to the $1k so called fuel card. So, they are counting on the suckers to think they are getting free gas. And what will they do when the fuel card runs out?

Apparently, GM thought that last fall's surge in gas prices was a one time phenomenon. Same goes for those who recently bought all those newly introduced monster SUVs. Ethanol or not, there is no free lunch.

The President needs to stand up and say something along the lines of fool me once, etc and tell people, "You have been warned, high gas prices are and will continue to be a fact of American life. Get used to it. If you choose to buy a gas guzzler, don't expect us to bail you out."

News flash:
Elizabeth Lowery, GM VP of environment and energy demoted to VP of marketing, given a $1k fuel card, for her efforts.

It's blasphemy that vehicles named Sierra, Tahoe and Yukon so significantly depreciate the ecosystem of their namesakes!

The Yukon has a 26 gallon fuel capacity. That's over $75 per tank. At 13 MPG, that's 338 miles. The rebate will buy just over 13 tanks of gas, which will take the poor owner of said vehicle just over 4000 miles. So for at least 96% of the vehicle's life, the owner will be on their own. They'll be facing even higher prices to tool around in a monstrosity that should be called the 'greenhouse gas machine.'

Total fuel cost for the life of the vehicle @ $3.00/gallon: $22,758. Prices will almost certainly go higher. A person could wind up spending more on fuel than they did on the vehicle itself.

If externalities were considered, (estimated by some to be $5 to $15/gallon) this boondoggle could cost society $50-100 thousand.

Buying it because of a 1K rebate check? Are people insane?

This type of pathetic offer is an insult to the intelligence. GM should concentrate on producing a vehicle based upon value. Low mpg vehicles do not have much value today and will have less value in the future as gasoline goes up to $4 and $5 per gallon. I already pay $3.47 for regular where I live and next week, the cost is supposed to increase.

I would suggest that GM re-evaluate what it is doing. Rebates from our government and from GM are nothing more than chum thrown out into the water to draw in fish. If GM had a good product, there would not be any need for this type of offer but the fact remains that GM is not meeting fuel mpg requirments the public needs. Therefore, it does not have a product the public needs.

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"Many assets damaged in Katrina are just returning or will be returning this summer. These and other considerations will exert downward pressure on prices"

There are plenty of wildcards that could impact oil prices, but most of them are on the upside (Nigeria, Iran, Chad, Russia, and oh yes, depletion). However, gas prices may very well come down as ethanol supplies finally catch up enough to replace MBTE -- probably just in time for the elections so politicians can say that their jawboning brought down prices. That won't help the SUV buyer long, though, unless they plan to sell the vehicle the first year.

The $1k should only be for E85.

Flex fuel vehicles will be great when decent production methods are put into place. Till then it's just a subsidy for rich farmers.

Prius;the hurricane season to which you refer is part of what I had in mind when I mentioned natural disasters as a wild card.Jmartin;the nations you list are what I had in mind when I mentioned geopolitics.my mention of wildcards was intended to refer to things that could return to higher prices.Perhaps I should have started a new paragraph to indicate that the wild card statement was in contrast to the downward pressure statement.I apologize for the sloppy sentence structure,I havent been writing much since the eighties.{Im old}

While everyone here is complaining about GM vehicles, step back and really take a look. Tahoe and Suburban lead their class in fuel economy. Say what you will, the people that buy the bigger SUV's probably need the size for their life style. Families, sporting events, moving live stock, large trailers etc. As ethonol becomes more commonly used (Brazil is almost 100% ethanol ecomony) price of ethanol will come down, we will be supporting our farmers and becoming less dependent on foreign oil. Oh Yeah, GM also has many vehicles that exceed 30mpg available for those that are concerned about fuel prices. Myself, I would like to not be dependent on foreign oil, and my FF Tahoe gets about 80 mpg of gasoline, the rest is thanks to the farmers in the MidWest. By the way ask a fireman how he likes opening a Hybrid vehicle when electricity is coursing through a wrecked Toyota and what are you going to do with the batteries when they go bad?

Does anyone here realize who the largest purchaser of raw ethanol is before it is blended into e85? It is the same major petroleum companies who sell you their high priced gasoline. Last year of the 4 billion gallons of ethanol that were produced, 3 billion gallons of it was purchased by these same major petroleum companies.

Ok lets get real here if you had a strangle hold on a market and you saw that a cheaper substitution for your product was coming online to compete with you, wouldn't you try to buy them up or out before it happened so you could once again control the market? That my friend is what has happened here. We are only getting the half of the story that these major petroleum companies want us to get. I suggest that we do our full research before we put ethanol down.

Plus there are new production methods under development right now that will lower the cost of ethanol again; I am referring to the switchgrass production. Switchgrass or Cellulosic ethanol has the potential to out produce sugar cane in the amount of ethanol produced per ton of crops used. If we look at all of the information correctly it should be easy to see that ethanol should be cheaper than gasoline. But we are at the mercy of the major petroleum companies that control their liquid gold around the world.