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Automotive News ranks the maiden journey of the Detroit Big Three CEOs to Washington to beg for bailout funds as second on its list of the 10 top automotive blunders of the year.


But Fortune magazine, even though surveying things with a bit more detachment, puts that ill-fated trip at No. 1 on its list of the year's top blunders in all business segments.


We tend to agree with Fortune, which calls its list the "dumbest moments" review.


Having to go hat-in-hand to D.C. to ask Congress for help was bad enough, but to fly there in private corporate jets and then to have the gall to complain that you are running out of money - well, it takes a stunning degree of political and public relations naïveté to do that.


There are, of course, valid arguments for sending your top dogs out on private jets. They can work undisturbed while in the air, get to where they are going in the minimum amount of time, arrive fresh and clear-headed and ready to go to bat for the company, and get home and back to the grind without having to loiter at the airport for hours waiting for a scheduled commercial flight.


But if they had to fly, for Pete's sake, couldn't they at least have jet-pooled? Did no one in their PR departments warn them, or are they so full of themselves they just couldn't see how insufferably pompous they looked?


(If you are wondering, for its top automotive industry blunder, Automotive News picked the fact that GM and Chrysler waited until they were nearly out of cash before seeking federal aid. We think that was probably a wise move - it would have been difficult to persuade Congress to act while there still was money in the bank.)


Fortune wasn't satisfied with lambasting GM's Rick Wagoner, Chrysler's Bob Nardelli and Ford's Alan Mulally for flying to D.C. to seek an auto industry bailout.


For its second-dumbest business blunder of the year, it again picked on the automakers-in-chief, this time for choosing to use their companies' hybrid cars for cross-country drives to D.C. on their second, and ultimately successful, trip to implore Congress for a financial rescue.


That ranking we don't agree with.


It seems that Fortune's gripe is that Chrysler's Nardelli made the drive in one of the company's Dodge Aspen two-mode hybrids, a car that had just been ordered dropped from the company's 2009 lineup.


We think the three should have drawn straws and carpooled in the hybrid from the company run by the guy with the short straw, but we don't think that the trip rates as the second-dumbest move made in the business world last year.


Not even close.

Tags: Chrysler, Ford, General Motors, Opinion, Auto Industry Bailout, Top Auto Industry Blunders, Top Business Blunders

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Jetting to D.C. To Seek Bailout $$ Lands Auto CEOs Atop Year's Dumb Moves Lists was originally published by Green Car Advisor. Read the full story by clicking here.