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When electric cars and plug-in hybrids begin hitting the U.S. market in bigger numbers next year, a significant barrier to entry for consumers who don’t live in places where people have garages with electrical outlets will be where to obtain juice. True, you could run an extension cord out of the apartment window—although if you live in a 40-story high rise, that will need to be a pretty long cord.

Ron Bloom, the man taking the lead for the Obama administration’s auto task force, told Reuters that the U.S. Treasury, which controls 60 percent of General Motors, was a tad surprised when the carmaker decided against selling Opel: “Bloom said the administration was caught off guard when GM decided this month to keep its European Opel unit rather than sell a majority stake to a Russian-backed group led by Canadian auto parts maker Magna International.”

Now that we have Twitter, I don’t much see the point in live-blogging events if your goal is simply to tell people what’s happening, rather than why or what it means. The New York Times’ Micheline Maynard live-blogged GM’s third-quarter financial report today, but besides telling us what CEO Fritz Henderson said, or how he responded to this or that reporter’s question, there isn’t much that tells us the significance of the information dispensed.

Above, you can see the business end of a Nissan Leaf, the 100-mile-per-charge, all-electric car that Nissan will begin selling next year (the charging ports are located right between the headlights). I attended a sunsplashed media even in the parking lot of Dodger Stadium today (read: it was toasty hot, even for November).

Nissan is rolling out its forthcoming all-electric car, the Leaf, for media on Friday in Los Angeles. It's part of the Leaf’s “Zero Emission” tour, which will take the car to other cities. And it’s all happening at Dodger Stadium, where I last was when the Dodgers clinched the NL West title. I’m going to Twitter the event—check it out at @mattdebord—and assuming there’s no ban on Flip video, provide an analysis of what Nissan has to say, with moving pictures.

General Motors’ Chairman, Ed Whitacre, said yesterday that GM plans to pay back the government loans it accepted during its bailout/bankruptcy, contradicting a GAO report that maintained GM will never be able to return those taxpayers' funds. On the one hand, GM seems to be doing better than anyone expected.

Felix Salmon doesn’t like Cash for Clunkers. I think it saved as the U.S. economy. Regardless of who you believe, C4C did prove that American truck owners, given a decent incentive, will trade in their old truck for ... a new truck.

Over at the New York Times Magazine, “Consumed” columnist Rob Walker has seen a Hummer— the large and often derided, military-derived General Motors SUV that will soon be sold as a brand to the Chinese—in the parking lot of a Goodwill and “smirked.” The implication is that the Hummer owner painted himself (and it’s probably a him) into a financial corner through his purchase of a pricey, gas-

Yesterday was D-Day for Chrysler and Fiat’s CEO, Sergio Marchionne, to present his five-year plan for Chrysler. Reportedly, for more than six hours, Marchionne and his lieutenants PowerPointed their way to the future. There was much live-blogging and tweeting of this event, which sounds as though it was astonishingly dull and intensely granular, if utterly necessary given the relative lack of information that’s emerged from Fiat-controlled Chrysler since the company emerged from bankruptcy.

BusinessWeek has put together a slide show of the “Fifty Ugliest Cars of the Past 50 Years” that has the auto blogosphere scratching its collective head. There are some usual suspects: the Pontiac Aztek, the Yugo, the Cadillac Cimarron.

What once looked liked a done deal now suddenly isn’t. General Motors’ board has decided against selling Opel, it main European division, to Magna, a Canadian part supplier, which had partnered with Sbrebank, a Kremlin-backed bank, along with GAZ, a Russian carmaker, and the Opel union. Germany wanted this deal, but GM’s new board increasingly didn’t.

Well, one of them already does. Honda just celebrated the 9th birthday of its iconic robo-creation, ASIMO—although according to Wikipedia, the models on which ASIMO are based have been around since 1986, making him/her/it a whopping 23, plenty old enough to drink, drive, and vote. Why am I interested in this? For starters, ASIMO shows everything that’s right and wrong about Honda. The Japanese company seems to make ... you name it.