While Japanese automakers try desperately to get more consumers into cars, other businesses are teaming up with police to lure senior citizens out of their vehicles. Reuters (via Yahoo News) reports that businesses are offering everything from higher interest rates at banks to free deliveries and meal discounts to seniors who voluntarily renounce their driving privileges. The effort comes as Japanese police try to curb the 100k accidents caused last year alone by Japan's massive over-65 population. "Have the courage to give up your licence," the police say on their website. "If you have lost confidence in your driving … if your family says they are worried about you driving … please think about handing in your license." I wonder if it would work here. Anything to get another stuck-at-40mph LeBaron off the road, eh?

The International Herald Tribune quotes unnamed sources who are "not authorized to comment publicly on the matter" as saying that ToMoCo may double its stake in Fuji Heavy Industries, makers of Subaru vehicles. Toyota currently owns 8.7 percent of Fuji, and would be looking to spend some $295m to raise its stake to 17 percent. "Toyota wants to mitigate the risk of building new plants by utilizing Fuji Heavy's facilities both in Japan and the United States," says Seiji Sugiura, an analyst at HSBC Securities. "Other automakers would also want to reduce risks for each other by boosting ties, even if that wouldn't amount to mergers and acquisitions." According to reports from the Nikkei business daily, Toyota may be looking to subcontract its subcompacts (say that ten times fast) to a Japanese Fuji plant, and jointly develop a sports car and environmentally-friendly technologies. Toyota has said it will not increase its stake in Fuji beyond 20 percent, keeping the relationship with Fuji as a partner rather than a subsidiary.

Chrysler VP (and 37-year Toyota veteran) Jim Press ruffled some feathers at old mother Toyota yesterday when he claimed that the Japanese government had footed "100 percent of the bill" for the development of the Prius powertrain. ToMoCo didn't waste a second refuting the allegation of its former head of North American operations. "I can say 100 percent that Toyota received absolutely no support – no money, no grants – from the Japanese government for the development of the Prius," Toyota spokesman Paul Nolasco tells the AP. The story also notes that while the Japanese government often assists private development projects, particularly for clean energy projects, the collaboration is not typically hidden from sight. That Press' allegation is the first whisper of any public-private cooperation in the development of the Prius could be an indication that he might not be working with all the facts. The irony of all this is that if our own government's massive public-private green car initiative of the nineties, the Project for a New Generation of Vehicles, had produced the Prius, every politician in America would be falling all over themselves trying to claim credit.

The Japanese government has been ordered by a district court to pay worker's compensation to a woman who claims her husband worked himself to death at Toyota. Yahoo! says Hiroko Unchino applied for compensation after her 30-year old husband, Kenichi, collapsed and died at work in 2002. He'd averaged 80 hours of overtime per month in the six months prior to his death, and had 114 hours overtime for the month before his death. The government acknowledged death from overwork, or karoshi, as a basis for claims in 1987. Since then, they've acknowledged 147 cases. Uchino sued after the Labor Ministry said her husband's case didn't qualify as karoshi. Curiously, Toyota wasn't involved in the suit. Yet.