Believe it or not, we’ve already had this debate. In December 2007, we hashed it out and decided on “Priora.” But a TTAC reader wishes to reopen that can of worms (castigat ridendo mores). So here goes… “I had Latin in high school, so when I saw TTAC having the plural of Prius as Priora, my pedantry went on instant alert. While I admit, a priora, that it sounds good, it isn’t right. Actually prius is an adverb, so it can’t have a plural. But the related noun form is prior, prioris, 3rd declension. According to my Bennett’s New Latin Grammar (CR:1956), the plural of liquid stem (ending in -l or -r) 3rd declension nouns is -es (that’s a long e, with a bar over it). So it should be Priores.” Personally, go sum rex Romanus et supra grammaticam. Your thoughts?

Clearly, The Big 2.8’s head honchos did themselves no favors by swanning into DC for a federal teat suckle on big ass private jets. And Ford CEO Alan Mulally’s family outings on the company Gulfstream G500 were a bit OTT for a company on the ropes. But used judiciously, there’s nothing wrong with private jets per se; they can greatly increase an executive’s ability to get information from front line troops. By not sticking-up for private aviation, by slinking back into town via hybrid, the Big 2.8’s CEOs threw a valuable industry into disrepute. No, I mean the private aviation industry. AIN Online reports that “H.R. 7321, the auto bailout bill, which would have prohibited the financially strapped automobile manufacturers from owning outright, leasing or owning any interest in private passenger aircraft, as long as the government debt was outstanding; and required the manufacturers to sell or divest any aircraft or interest that was owned before the bailout. Even though the bailout bill failed, the damage was done. “Jeff Beck, a Gulfstream contract pilot, had one word to describe the state of the economy and the fallout following the GM and Ford announcements: bad. ‘As soon as [people] started talking about the auto executives and their private jets, it just killed the contract pilot business and the aviation business,’ Beck said. A number of other flight departments followed suit, Beck said, and now there simply aren’t enough jobs to go around.” Needless to say, there’s yet more perfidy here in GM and Ford’s craven capitulation to the congressional class worriers.

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Accidents more than doubled at the Houston, Texas intersections where red light cameras are installed, according to a study released Monday by Rice University and the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI). This result posed a dilemma for TTI and the city of Houston which had requested the study. Houston Mayor Bill White was furious when he saw the report’s draft text in August. He banned the document from publication and ordered a re-writing of the text that would reflect a more positive result. To accomplish this task, White was able to turn to the study’s primary author, Rice University Urban Politics Professor Robert Stein. Stein’s wife, Marty, is employed by the city of Houston as a top aide to the mayor. Stein’s newly revised report now concludes that “red light cameras are mitigating a general, more severe increase in collisions.”

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Now that the frog– fog of war is beginning to lift from the deal between the federal government and troubled auto and mortgage lender GMAC, a few key facts have emerged. First and foremost, Business Week (BW) reminds us that the U.S. Treasury’s $6b “investment” in GMAC leaves it as the lender’s largest shareholder. Not to put too fine a point on it, the federal government owns GMAC. Second, BW reckons that means a boardroom shake-up is on its way. “GMAC’s 12-member board of directors, of which [J. Ezra] Merkin is chairman, is expected to be clipped to seven directors. Cerberus has four executives on the current board, but will get only one voting director on the new board… GM will go from having four voting executives on the board to just one, nonvoting executive.” In other words, GM can’t manipulate GMAC to move the metal. Or can it? More [non-Dodge] ramifications after the jump.

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New Year’s Day is taking a bizarre turn, as Ford reveals the new Shelby Mustang GT500 Shelby Mustang Cobra Shelby Mustang GT500 on the same day that it’s advising motorists how to deal with what it calls “chuck holes.” Is that a regional thing, and what do woodchucks have to do with pavement other than, how do I put this.. splat? Anywho, here’s FoMoCo spinmeister Wes Sherwood’s take on pothole etiquette. “If safe, don’t swerve to avoid potholes. Swerving can create a situation where the front wheel and tire on the car can impact the edge of the pothole at an obtuse angle, which might do more damage than hitting it squarely. If safe, don’t brake just because you see a pothole: heavy braking compresses the front suspension of the car and will have a tendency to force the tire and wheel down into the pothole, instead of gliding over.” Oh, BTW: “To give drivers a fighting chance with monster potholes, [Ford] engineers tune shock rebound rates to keep the wheel and tire suspended so it can glide over the pothole, preventing the tire from dropping down into it and impacting the edge of the tire and wheel.” Gliding over potholes. Well I never!

The Mercury News‘ police blotter reports that “Twenty-two new cars parked at a Honda dealership in Redwood City were keyed over the Christmas holiday.” The attack has the hallmarks of the previous assault on innocent Audis. “A similar case occurred earlier this month at an Audi dealership in Concord, where employees discovered Dec. 13 that nearly 100 cars had been keyed overnight, police said.” The anti-Ingolstadt vandalism racked-up a reported $800k worth of damage. The Honda assault will hit-up the Honda dealer’s insurance company for something between $20k and $30k. An anti-import backlash or just plain nasty? “Redwood City police Detective Cochran said he is not aware of any connection between the two cases.” [thanks to Herr Schmitt for the link]

These highly-horsed Mustangs are a handful. I think I’ve called them death cars. But it appears that issue has been addressed. The official New Year’s Day press release tells us that “the 2010 Shelby GT500 is an estimated 2 miles per gallon more fuel efficient on the highway.” No wait. That’s not it. “The design team, with a nod to the original Shelby Cobras from the 1960s, takes those design cues even further with nuanced improvements in both the coupe and convertible, each of which boasts a more-refined interior.” No wait; that’s the bit where they piss on the 500KR. “Spring and dampers have been optimized for better roll control, giving customers more confidence when braking, accelerating or turning. The new chassis tuning takes its philosophy from the KR program, with a greater emphasis placed on primary body control. The team also stiffened the steering shaft.” Not convinced? “Another obvious difference for the Shelby is the addition of racing stripes, which also will now be available on the convertible. ‘Racing stripes made their mark on 1960s-era Ford performance vehicles,’ Hameedi notes. ‘That’s something we feel is a key part of the Shelby performance DNA – maybe more so than some of our competition.'” Failing that, “Standard safety equipment includes: dual stage front air bags, side-impact air bags and Ford’s Personal Safety System.”

Washington Post Harold Myerson’s column starts by presenting readers with a stark choice: nationalization or more rigid regulation. Things get interesting in a car-oriented sort of way when Myerson talks about Motown’s simmering antipathy towards the southern senators who almost denied them their $17.4b suckle on Uncle Sugar’s teat. “If Abraham Lincoln were still among the living as he prepared to turn 200 six weeks from now, he might detect in the congressional war over the automaker bailouts a strong echo of the war that defined his presidency. Now as then, the conflict centered on the rival labor systems of North and South. Now as then, the Southerners championed a low-wage, low-benefits system while the North favored a more generous one. And now as then, what sparked the conflict was the North’s fear of the Southern system becoming the national norm. Or, as Lincoln put it, a house divided against itself cannot stand… “But, just as Lincoln predicted, the United States was bound to have one labor system prevail, and the debate over the General Motors and Chrysler bailout was really a debate over which system — the United Auto Workers’ or the foreign transplant factories’ — that would be. Where the parallel between periods breaks down, of course, is in partisan alignment. Today’s congressional Republicans are hardly Lincoln’s heirs. If anything, they are descendants of Jefferson Davis’s Confederates.” That’s just WAY out there.

Uncle Sugar has completed the transfer of the first $4b of a $13.4b loan to General Motors, under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). Despite CEO Rick Wagoner’s previous pronouncement that his employer had enough cash to last through 2009, the artist once known as the world’s largest automaker (and the world’s most profitable corporation) was in danger of running out of money. And now it isn’t. Until later. Meanwhile, you might think that a $13.4b “investment” in GM would buy the U.S. taxpayer a little something called “transparency.” As The LA Times reports, you’d think wrong. “The cash-strapped Detroit company plans to use the money for continuing its operations… GM is obligated to make a large payment to a major supplier in early January; it has declined to offer details on the amount it owes or to which supplier.” And there are more strange doings over at Chrysler. (The automaker’s owned by Cerberus Capital, a private equity firm with close ties to the federal government, increasingly famous for bending rules to its advantage while operating under the cover of darkness.) “Auburn Hills, Mich.-based Chrysler is expecting $4 billion in cash as well, but the Treasury has yet to announce the closing of the first round of loan money. ‘We’re working expeditiously with Chrysler to finalize that transaction and we remain committed to closing it on a timeline that will meet near-term funding needs,’ [Treasury spokeswoman Brooklyn] McLaughlin said. Isn’t it wonderful how responsive our federal government is to the public’s– I mean, private industry’s needs? But wait! There’s more! Lots more!

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It would be everybody’s dream come true: A car running on nothing else than sunshine. Well, not everybody’s dream maybe. In Saudi Arabia, they have a lot of sunshine, but it doesn’t fit in tankers. “Toyota Motor Corp. is secretly developing a vehicle that will be powered solely by solar energy in an effort to turn around its struggling business with a futuristic ecological car,” reports AP via Yahoo News. AP says, Toyota is working on an electric vehicle that will get some of its power from solar cells on the vehicle, and that can be recharged with electricity generated from solar panels on the roofs of homes. As a next step, says AP, “the automaker later hopes to develop a model totally powered by solar cells on the vehicle.” Sounds unbelievable? AP says they have it on good authority.
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In Japan, a privacy rights group demands the take-down of Google’s Street View, after couples entering love hotels, or men urinating outdoors found a permanent home on Google’s servers. The Japanese group now found another ally: Porsche, or rather Porsche’s test drivers. They were caught by Google’s Street View car with the pants of some prototypes down. The invasion of Porsche’s privacy was spotted by a contributor to the Garage419 blog. In anticipation of his next vacation, he had googled the Mount Evans Toll Road.
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A short overview of what happened in other parts of the world while you were in bed. TTAC provides round-the-clock coverage of everything that has wheels. Or has its wheels coming off. Until Jan 4, 2009, WAS will be filed from Tokyo.

December possibly below 10m. Edmunds.com predicts the annually adjusted sales rate of light vehicles in the U.S. to come in at 9.8 million for December. J.D. Power and Associates now expects 10 million. The rate was 10.3 million in November. Sales results will be announced Monday, Jan. 5.

China expects 9.4m units for 2009: China’s total vehicle sales are expected to reach 9.41 million units for the full year of 2009, according to a State Information Center’s forecast, says Gasgoo. China’s GDP growth next year is expected to remain above 8 percent and its car market should see similar growth, says the forecast. Something is screwy about those numbers. January through November, China’s total vehicle sales were 8.63m. December is usually a strong month in China. The end of year number for 2008 (which is not out yet) is expected to be in the low 9m. If that’s true, then the forecast would not reflect increases in-line with expected GDP growth.
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