The global car business has always been sort of zany, but in the past few weeks, it has gone right off the charts. Since, um ... yesterday, a number of mad, mad things have happened. For starters, the Committee of Non-TARP Lenders, a group of (depending on who you read) "dissident" or "rogue" Chrysler debtholders that I think came into existence approximately eight days ago and was led by external communications desk at OppenheimerFunds, has disbanded. I initially knew them as the Committee of Chrysler Non-Tarp Lenders, or CCNTL (pronounced "Com-Sin-Tel"), but I guess we can just shorten that to CNTL ("Sin-Tel") and consign their junk-bond bleatings to the dustbin of history as they are hammered into submission by public opinion and the White House.

Meanwhile, as General Motors (GM) barrels toward bankruptcy, the company has announced that it wants to trade—yes, trade—its Latin American operations for a stake in Fiat. Welcome to the post-industrial barter economy! The Italian carmaker has built good business in Brazil, and picking up GM Latin America would represent another coup for CEO Sergio Marchionne, who will once again get something for nothing. I can't actually figure out what a stake in Fiat, for a potentially bankrupt automaker, will mean, or whether GM will somehow possess a smidgen of Chrysler through owning some of Fiat—which, of course, it paid $2 billion a few years back to get out of owning.

Finally, baseball and politics stat whiz Nate Silver has crunched some numbers indicating that Americans are driving less than they're supposed to and—disturbingly—may drive even less in the future. Silver sees this as a highly unusual trend, given our reliable patterns of almost always driving more.

But, again, these are highly unusual times for car culture: High gas prices were followed by a credit crisis that made car loans hard to get, then by a crisis in Detroit that idled plants. The leasing market tanked. New car sales are down significantly from previous years.

This suggests that people are hanging onto older, less reliable vehicles and may also be putting off repairs, stalling on renewing registrations, not driving because they don't have any money to spend when they arrive at their destinations, and so forth. Economic and behavioral factors are undoubtedly meshing here in ways that a basic set of numbers and extrapolations can't fully account for.

The trend may not dissipate anytime soon. Some analysts are predicting a brisk recovery for the North American market—back to 14 million to 16 million new vehicles sales by 2012—but today Toyota announced it lost $4.4 billion in fiscal year 2009 and expects to lose $5.5 billion in fiscal year 2010.