A tax levied on speeding tickets funds the re-election efforts of two-thirds of Arizona’s politicians and provides lawmakers with a personal financial incentive to protect controversial photo enforcement programs. In 1999, a ten percent surcharge was imposed on all traffic tickets to create the “Citizens Clean Election Fund.” The fund allows politicians to avoid tedious fundraising efforts. After raising just $5 each from 220 people in a district, candidates for public office qualify for public financing money to match private expenditures. In effect, these lawmakers collect $16.50 for their campaigns each time a photo radar ticket is issued on an Arizona freeway. This adds up to big money. In 2008, traffic tickets generated $10,095,771 in revenue for the clean elections fund.

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From WNEM.com: “GM Installing Automated Line At Ohio Plant, Union Agrees To Concessions To Help Ford Stay Competitive With GM, Chrysler”: 

LORDSTOWN, Ohio — Despite bankruptcy reports, GeneralMotors said it is moving forward with a $350 billion investment at its Lordstown, Ohio, plant.

The automaker will install 840 robots ahead of next year’s production of the Chevy Cruze.

Local union leaders said the project gives workers a reason for hope. About 1,100 union workers are employed at the plant.

Meanwhile, the UAW said it has finish voting Monday on concessions to help Ford.

Here are some comments you don’t normally associate with the Ford Econoline: lack of manufacturer support and repair facilities, high repair cost and crippling loss of revenue during downtime. That’s what I gleaned from a Dodge Sprinter fansite and those comments came from one of the forum’s more even-handed members. Which explains the sea of Econolines (white paint, out of state plates) on the Bayou City’s expressways after the devastation of Hurricane Ike and not a single Sprinter. So let’s check out a Regency conversion van to find the Econoline’s inherent goodness, hmm-kay?

Best. Headline. Ever. But then Canada’s Globe and Mail threw out their word mincing machine sometime around the turn of the last century. The paper shows its stones by revealing that the new deal between Generous Motors and the Canadian Auto Workers isn’t what you’d call onerous. Not by a long chalk.

The extra holidays remain intact in the new, cheaper version of GM Canada’s deal with the CAW, negotiated over the weekend. So does the child care subsidy (up to $2,400 per kid per year) and the car purchase discount (up to $2,600), which GM Canada – despite being on the brink of crisis – generously extended last spring to some 30,000 retired workers. Of course, current GM workers who think their jobs might vanish will want to hold off on buying that new GMC Sierra, to take advantage of the $35,000 vehicle voucher they would receive as part of their $100,000 restructuring allowance.

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I was wondering how to report this aerial photograph of two members of the bailout bestowing Presidential Task Force on Autos (PTFOA) returning one of Chevy’s plug-in electric/gas hybrid Volt mules to the paddock. I stumbled upon this description of the death of a black hole at WonderQuest.co. Seemed appropriate.

According to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, our space vacuum teems with invisible particles that flash into and out of existence like virtual fireflies.

Suppose a pair of particle-antiparticles pops into being, conveniently enough, within effective range of the black hole’s gravity.

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Mikey, TTAC’s personal window into the CAW, writes:

My 2001 Firebird 3800 V6 convertible will shear left hand motor mount bolts and break them off in the block. The first time it happened my mechanic replaced the original bolts with 8.8 hardness. It took 2 years and 15000 kms for them to shear again. This time he went to aircraft quality bolts: so far so good, but the car hasn’t moved 2000 kms since.

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Less than sixty days ago, I wrote about my brother’s seemingly quixotic quest to purchase a year-old Pontiac G8 at something less than sticker price. Time after time, he’d been placed on endless hold, denied test drives, and generally treated with the type of courtesy normally reserved for guest stars of “To Catch a Predator.” After more than ninety days of intermittent searching, the best price we’d been able to find was a sorta-invoice deal from a dealer in Texas, more than a thousand miles away. Did I mention his trade-in? It was a 63k-mile Mazda RX-8 which was on its second rotary engine thanks to an autocross motor implosion and which also featured a fascinating array of scratches, rocker-panel dents, and impact-wrench-installed suspension upgrades.

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Today’s automotive industry stands on the cusp of great change. The automobile will remain, but its powerplant will change and evolve. Within two to three decades, today’s hybrid systems will look like museum pieces, as engineering resources around the world are devoted to alt power propulsion. For the United States to participate fully in this coming technological revolution, it needs a healthy automotive industry. It must fix the fundamentals…

“Enough’s enough” said Philippe Maystadt, the European Investment Bank president. Or words to that effect. Anyway, this Monday the banker signaled that the institution was approaching the limits of its support for the car industry.

Speaking at the bank’s annual press conference, and chronicled by the Financial Times, Maystadt confirmed that the EIB planned to authorize €7B in loans for car makers in the first half of the year, with most of the funds to develop clean cars.

But he warned carmakers—who have asked the EIB for some €40B in low-interest loans—that they had better look elsewhere, because the EIB doesn’t want to be over-exposed to the perilous industry. “It would be a mistake to concentrate a too big part of our lending on one sector,” Maystadt said. The auto industry already accounts for more than 10 percent of its €66 billion in expected lending this year.

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This time the bearer of good news is retired General Wesley Clark and his “Growth Energy” K-Street advocacy group. The special K says increasing the ethanol blend limit to E15 could create 136,101 new jobs and inject $24.4b into the US economy annually. How? According to the firm’s appalling report, bumping the federal blending mandate to E15 would double the “demand” for ethanol. As the report notes, in the mother of all Freudian slips “6 bgy of production capacity would be required to produce 20.4 bgy of ethanol (including current reserve capacity). This level of expansion could be met by the construction and operations of 60 100 bgy corn ethanol plants (emphasis added).” Of course they meant 60 100 mgy plants, but numbers have just become so darn confusing since billion became the new million.

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There will be no more Easter Monday holiday for Ford’s UAW employees, as ABC reports that the Blue Oval’s unionized workers have approved proposed modifications to their labor contract. Voting was close (and divisive) though. According to the UAW, 59 percent of production workers and 58 percent of skilled-trades workers voted for the agreement. The concessions could give the UAW a 25 percent stake in Ford, as its VEBA benefits fund will receive $1.6B in (non-voting) Ford equity.

In a recent interview with AutoObserver, Chrysler’s Jim Press tries desperately to state the case that somehow things could be worse at Auburn Hills. In the process he piles on the layers of denial that keep the smallest Detroit automaker senselessly hanging on. “It’s hard to say things are good when sales were only down 25 percent [retail],” press tells AO’s Michelle Krebs. “That’s terrible, but it’s less terrible than the industry decline of 40 percent.” It’s also less terrible than the 44 percent overall sales drop that ChryCo endured last month, but then the fact that Press only mentions retail sales kind of says it all. Especially considering he made AO’s editors include [retail] in his otherwise misleading (or is that self-deluding?) quote. But, “things aren’t so bad,” concludes Press. “At 80,000 vehicles sold in February, we’re doing OK.” Apparently we will know things are bad when Press starts lying about sales rather than pathologically misrepresenting them.

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Chrysler was actually the first joint venture in China, (dis)gracing the Chinese landscape with countless Cherokees. And this is where Chrysler might end up. Beijing Auto, a state-owned automaker that makes Hyundai, Mercedes and a few local brands, has “set up a work team in charge of the acquisitions and restructuring affairs, which will mainly involve its merger of a smaller Chinese carmaker Fujian Motor and purchase of US auto giant Chrysler’s assets,” Gasgoo reports. The reports are quite detailed, this time:

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