Palisades Car Insurance is starting their search for the nicest drives in New Jersey. We are asking New Jersey-ians to submit their nicest drives in text, photo, or video so that everyone can enjoy the best NJ has to offer. The best part is that everyone submitting a nice drive will be entered to win one of twenty-five $50 gas cards!

Submissions will last until June 22. At the end of June, Palisades will share its top 10 drives (as selected by an expert panel of Palisades Crashbusters ® – people who drive over 300,000 miles a year) on its website.

For submissions please visit Palisades.com/nicedrives and fill out the form.

Why the nicest drives? Well, Palisades is the nice New Jersey car insurance company. So nice, that its service is ranked as one of the highest in the state — better than Allstate, GEICO, State Farm, Progressive, and others. (Source: Palisades was ranked far superior to many national insurance brands – including Progressive, GEICO and State Farm – on how well its policies and practices supported quality and speed of repairs, as well as the overall customer experience according to a recent independent survey of NJ body shops conducted by USA/Direct, Inc.)

There you have it – looks like some of you could have the opportunity to win a free gas card. Not a bad deal for entering some information on a website.

Is this stuff really that hard? Couldn’t any high school student educated in basic economics come up with a solution to the “problem” that the major automakers are facing? Hey, we can even get more in-depth about a solution and tell the automakers to cut expenses – a novel idea! Or how about this one? The automakers should be making more products that the consumers want to buy. Eureka! We’ve figured it out!!!

Seriously, it is a disgrace that the big three automakers are facing the problems that they are today. These companies deserve what they’re getting – they didn’t produce fuel efficient cars in mass quantities when the consumers demanded them as far back as ten years ago and are currently doing nothing to sell the excess quantities of their product. There are a lot of people out there (like me) who would LOVE to buy a new car. In fact, you could say that someone like me is constantly in the market to buy a new car.

But most of the people in my situation are realists. We know that we can buy a good used car that is only one or two years old for 60% – 75% of the price of the same model if it was brand new. Why would anyone pay the premium to purchase the new car in this economy? With all of the executives driving the buses at these companies (pardon the pun) can it be that none of them realize that they need to cut prices in order to stimulate sales? I’m a big fan of Chevrolet (and I have no idea why since I’ve paid more to have my Blazer fixed than the thing could ever be worth). I’d love to buy a 2009 Chevy Impala. Yahoo! Autos suggests that the model I would like to buy starts at $28,000 and that the 5-year cost to own this car is $52,000.

Why would I ever buy that car in today’s grim economy? Is there no one at Chevrolet who is looking at this and saying, “Hmmm… We need to fix this problem.” Better yet – do the people at Chevrolet even see this as a problem? Here’s why they should.

I can go to Enterprise Rent-a-Car and get a certified pre-owned (used) 2008 Chevy Impala for $15,000. Read that again. I can get a one-year old Impala for about HALF of what a new one costs.

How can you fix the problem that today’s automakers are facing? Simple. Cut prices and move product. If this doesn’t happen, then you and I better get ready to pay a little bit more in taxes because you know another government bailout won’t be too far behind.