My recent interview with St. Charles Toyota about their remarkable on-line lead generation should be an inspiration to car dealerships. What are the manufacturers doing?

David Scott wrote a fascinating post yesterday about how auto maker Web sites don’t have much under the hood. The folks at St. Charles Toyota are communicating with clients. Car makers are talking to … well, Mr. Scott points out, they’re not always sure. Many lessons to be learned for Web content and design.

It’s not all bad. George Ajazi wrote a post on our Funny Business blog yesterday about some clever on-line ads from Honda. Somehow, Honda is silly and genuine at the same time. But then, this is not a corporate Web site. In most cases, companies–not just auto makers–are too conservative to be funny, and too cautious to engage in real communication with customers. So they fall back on slick graphics and ad-speak content for their site.

As blogs continue to grow in popularity and customers become accustomed to two-way communication with businesses, these glitzy Web sites will seem even more out of sync with reality–if that’s possible.