By Leftlane Staff
Wednesday, Jun 14th, 2006 @ 1:38 pm

In late May, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman criticized GM for offering unlimited gas for a year at $1.99 a gallon to buyers of certain sedans and SUVs, including Hummers in California and Florida. Friedman said General Motors was “like a crack dealer” addicting Americans to SUVs. GM’s Steven J. Harris then responded to Friedman, saying “the people who buy full-size SUVs, by and large, do so because they have a need for them.” Friedman has now written another column where he replies to GM. “No one should be making a huge gas-guzzling Hummer, and no one should be driving one, and no one — certainly not G.M. — should be subsidizing people to drive them,” he says. “Pardon me if — at a time when China is imposing higher mileage standards than America — I don’t want to join the many congressmen and senators in drinking G.M.’s Kool-Aid and not demanding that it become the most fuel-efficient automaker in the world. If more people in Washington insisted that G.M. focus on building cars that could compete in a world of $3.99 gasoline, rather than creating an artificial universe of $1.99 gasoline, G.M. would not be worrying about bankruptcy today.” [Read his whole column here - registration requires].

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