Police in Victoria, Australia announced today that the point-to-point average speed camera system on the Hume Highway has been turned off until officials are convinced that a fatal accuracy flaw had been fixed. Officials admitted that at least nine drivers have been falsely convicted of speeding on that road since 2007. Officials only began to double-check the accuracy of the Redflex automated ticketing machine after police went to seize the car of a young woman accused of driving a low-powered economy car at high speed.
“It’s been a failure of the system in terms of 100 percent accuracy,” Redflex CEO Graham Davie said on 3AW radio. “It happened because of a technical glitch in the clock system…. I’m sorry this event has occurred.”
In less than three years, officials in New South Wales, Australia have been forced to refund 18,944 faulty or illegally issued speed camera citations. Between July 2007 and May 2010, the state government has returned A$3,788,885 worth of citations issued by automated ticketing machines that were not operating properly, according to freedom of information documents obtained by the NSW Liberal Party, which used the figures to attack the party in power.
Despite collecting A$137 million in revenue from automated traffic ticketing, the Australian photo enforcement giant Redflex Traffic Systems yesterday announced its net profit before tax had fallen to a mere $442,000 for the first half of 2010. Redflex remains the number one player in the US market with US motorists providing 79 percent of the company’s ticket revenue. Redflex management, however, blamed recent losses primarily on “considerable public opposition” to photo radar and red light cameras in the US.
California courts are not alone in questioning the validity of red light camera and speed camera photographs as valid legal evidence. On Friday, the Queensland, Australia Court of Appeal ruled that automated ticketing cases require more than a pair of images in a folder to make a speeding case that will stick. The motorist, a non-lawyer, won her case against the government with only the help of her husband.
Officials in Tasmania, Australia last week reluctantly admitted that some of its speed cameras produced unreliable readings. The automated ticketing machines on Tasman Bridge were found to be issuing speeding tickets to vehicles that were not speeding, forcing a refund of 440 tickets issued between June 5 and July 5. According to The Mercury, a test of the device against a handheld speed gun showed inaccurate readings.
The New South Wales police, who enforce Australia’s “hoon laws” should be leading by example, and driving base-engine Corollas or Cruzes. Instead they went out an splurged on an Alfa-Romeo MiTo. Top Gear reckons the choice is “unimposing.” We call it cruel and unusual.
The motoring public in Queensland, Australia has foiled a police effort to deploy “covert” speed cameras across the state. Police have expanded their fleet of unmarked vehicles equipped with automated enforcement devices in an effort to boost the number of citations issued. The idea is to ensnare drivers “anywhere, anytime” by blending in with ordinary vehicle traffic in vehicles as diverse as a Toyota sedan, a Volkswagen Golf, a Mitsubishi Lancer, a Subaru WRX, a Hummer H2, and various types of trucks and SUVs.
When we reported that unintended acceleration in general and Toyota in particular are not a big topic in Europe and Japan, the answer was: “What do they know? They use their excellent public transport system and drive less.” (A myth, by the way. Unless there are mandatory annual odometer readings, nobody knows for sure. But the generally accepted average number of miles driven by year and car is 12,000 in the U.S.A. In Germany, the industry works with a 20,000 km average. Which is 12,427 miles.) The only countries halfway accepted as comparisons were Australia and Canada. Well, their numbers are in. Read More >
GM’s Australian Holden division has been developing the kind of big-bore RWD vehicles we tend to think of as being quintessentially American for quite some time. But every time GM hints at repatriating one of these old-school machines to its spiritual homeland in the states, something goes terribly wrong. One classic example of this disfunction was the offshoot of GM’s last effort to bring Holdens stateside as the Pontiac G8, the G8 Sport Truck, a rebadge of Holden’s Ute. The travails of the G8 have been well documented, but the Sport Truck was killed before it even had the chance to lose GM money and be cut along with the Pontiac brand. Now, just as the memory of that savage tease was fading, GM’s Mark Reuss reveals that the El Camino could be back after all.
Oh, the sad saga of the Pontaic G8. GM finally built a vehicle worthy of Pontiac’s sporty pretensions, only to can the whole brand months later, leaving the G8 orphaned. Which was crummy for enthusiasts, but ultimately a good thing for GM’s business as G8s were assembled in Australia and shipped over to the US, bleeding profit margin all the way. Then came news that a G8-alike would be built in North America, but would only be marketed to police fleet buyers as a Caprice. “Insult to injury!” shrieked the slighted fans of V8 RWD sedans. What they didn’t realize was that GM was still in injury mode. For the real insult, we turn now to the Carpoint.com.au [via Jalopnik], which reports that consumers can still buy new Pontiac G8s. In Australia. Sort of.
Despite his genial, affable manner, Alan Mulally is a businessman and, by all accounts, a businessman not to be crossed with. One story goes, when he first started with Ford, he let them know, in the clearest possible terms, “Everybody says you can’t make money off small cars,” he said. “Well, you’d better damn well figure out how to make money, because that’s where the world is going.” Long protected from the brutal rationalisation of the global market, Australia might be about to get a taste of the man’s darker side as he attempts to drag Ford’s Australian ops into the 21st Century. Read More >
Toyota had slammed hard on the brake when it came to capital expenditures. So hard that ToMoCo (and Sony) were rapped on the knuckles by the Japanese Ministry of Finance for hobbling Japan’s economy. Suddenly, Toyota starts pouring concrete and installing machinery again. Not because of newfound faith in the auto market in general. Two factors made them do it: The Yen has become so expensive that manufacturing in the USA is cheaper. And China is gobbling up cars faster than Toyota can make them.
According to the Nikkei [sub], a Toyota plant in the US and one in China will increase ToMoCo’s annual output capacity by 200,000 units before the Japanese 2010 fiscal ends on March 31, 2001. The construction will cost Toyota a little over $1b, depending on the vagaries of the greenback and its pegged follower, the Chinese Yuan. Here are the blueprints: Read More >
The Freep has dubbed Chevy’s Next Big Small Thing a “hit” on the grounds that it’s big in Australia. The only problem? It’s not really selling all that well. Towards the bottom of its write-up, the Freep reveals that GM’s Holden division sold 4,826 of the US-bound Cruze in the last three months. Center for Automotive Research president David Cole reckons those numbers “kind of give you a clue as to what the potential could be” when the Cruze arrives stateside. If that’s true, the Cruze is a loser. Not only has Toyota sold 7,550 Cruze-class Corollas in the last two months, the Mazda3 and Hyundai i30 are also the segment’s fastest growers.
General Motors’ so-called Alpha platform has been something of an enigma since it was first conceptualized by Holden as the TT36 Torana for the 2004 Sydney Auto Show. The TT36 concept was Holden’s pitch for a sub-CTS RWD global premium sedan, although, in proper GM fashion, that job went to the late, unlamented BLS. Though fuel economy issues were said to have killed the possibility of introducing an RWD model below the CTS, the penalty wasn’t huge, making the decision to go with a Saab 9-3 rebadge all the more strange. “As a lightweight rear-wheel-drive car that is going to add about 1mpg compared to an equivalent lightweight front-wheel drive car . . . we just have to sort of wait a while and see where we are,” is how Bob Lutz explained it to Go Auto last year. More likely, GM simply had no money to develop the platform in those pre-bailout days. Now that taxpayers are footing the bill, what can we expect from Alpha?
Recent Comments