Oprah Winfrey Gives Cars to Audience
CHICAGO (AP) -- Talk show host Oprah Winfrey celebrated the premiere of her 19th season Monday by surprising each of her 276 audience members with a new car.

"We're calling this our wildest dream season, because this year on the Oprah show, no dream is too wild, no surprise too impossible to pull off," Winfrey said.

Making sure the audience was kept in suspense, Winfrey opened the show by calling 11 audience members onto the stage. She gave each of them a car - a Pontiac G6.

She then had gift boxes distributed to the rest of the audience and said one of the boxes contained keys to a twelfth car. But when the audience members opened the boxes, each had a set of keys.

"Everybody gets a car! Everybody gets a car! Everybody gets a car!" Winfrey yelled as she jumped up and down on the stage.

The audience members screamed, cried and hugged each other - then followed Winfrey out to the parking lot of her Harpo Studios to see their Pontiacs, all decorated with giant red bows.

One woman stepped up onto the frame of a driver's side door, put her head on the roof and hugged the vehicle.

Winfrey said the audience members were chosen because their friends or family had written to the show about their need for a new car. One woman's young son said she drove a car that "looks like she got into a gunfight"; another couple had almost 400,000 miles on their two vehicles.

THAT IS ABOUT $650,000 IN FREE CARS! SWEET, AND THEY WHERE PONTIACS

Oppps forgot a ZERO!!!

that should be $6,500,000 USD!

Hold on........................

No, I still don't want to go to a taping of Oprah.

But you gotta admit that was pretty damn cool of her!

When I first heard about this from my gf I was like damn, that was really nice of her. However, I came to find out that Oprah did NOT buy those cars. I was pissed, I cant believe that she is taking the credit for them. That is just low. According to CNN, GM donated all the cars, NOT OPRAH ! ! ! I dont like her even more now. I love GM though, it may be a marketing scheme for the G6, but what a nice thing to do. Go GM and on Oprah.

Well, If it wasnt for Oprah, it never would have happened.

And GM never would have done it if there wasnt something in it for them. Now they have a new car almost endorsed by Oprah. every woman in america will be running to check it out and order one. Its the best advertising in the world for them.

Yep it only cost them 7million.... for 1billion in advertising dollars -- Smart as heck. People are still talking about it at work.

I totally agree, I just dont like Oprah, thats all.

I would like to know what the criteria was for those people that got picked to go on the show. How many thousands of people wrote in saying why they needed a new car. So did they just throw em all in and do a drawing kind of thing or did some one or some group go letter by letter to determine who was worthy of a new car. If that's the case who is the all mighty who decides person A is more needing then person B. Besides that what if person B isn't as educated as person A and just isn't able to put how bad they need a car into words. I hate when things are subjective and not quantitative. And if it was a drawing I think they missled people and should have stated winner will be picked by drawing.