The first public-private partnership toll road established as a not-for-profit corporation has gone bust. The Connector 2000 Association, which operates a sixteen-mile, four-lane toll road linking Interstates 85 and 385 in southern Greenville County, South Carolina, announced last week that it was in default on its financial obligations.

“Traffic on the Southern Connector was inadequate to permit the association to collect sufficient toll revenues to pay debt service on the bonds which came due January 1, 2010,” a Connector 2000 Association statement explained. “The association has been advised that the trustee has made no payment of any such debt service. An event of default currently exists… The association is actively negotiating the restructuring of its bonded indebtedness with the trustee, the South Carolina Department of Transportation (SCDOT), and certain owners of large blocks of the bonds.”

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Toyota plans to roughly double its global production of hybrid vehicles to 1 million units in 2011. On the surface, this plan doesn’t sound too ambitious. Hybrids are flying off dealer’s lots in Japan. About 350,000 hybrids were sold in Japan last year, accounting for 11.9 percent of total sales. Toyota’s Prius took the lion’s share with 209,000 units sold. Honda’s Insight made up for another 94,000 units. Less that 50,000 were “others.”

And herein lies problem number one for Japanese hybrids: Read More >

Osamu Suzuki said today he would probably refuse advances by Volkswagen if they would want to get deeper in bed with their new Japanese bride.

“When Suzuki becomes a bigger and more successful company, Volkswagen will probably want to buy more of our shares,” Suzuki said. “If that happens, Suzuki will probably respond by saying, ‘Let’s continue as we are.'”

We’ll see.

Belgium’s Antwerp can focus on its core competencies as a hub of the diamond trade. Opel will close their plant in the port city of Belgium within the next months, reports Das Autohaus, citing an announcement by Opel. The plant will be closed “to safeguard the future of the company quickly and sustainably.”

Nick Reilly expressed his supposedly sincere condolences: Read More >

I don’t watch “24” but apparently GM’s dead brand Pontiac Pontiac “received $256,200 in exposure by 8 total sequences, including one verbal mention” on the season premiere of the Fox terror drama according to Front Row Marketing and TVbythenumbers.com. Your tax dollars hard at work building equity for dead brand? Out of morbid curiosity, are there any 24 fans out there who can tell us what these references were? [Hat Tip: Graham Smith]

Almost exactly a year ago, we heard that Ford wouldn’t be developing a global RWD platform in Australia.  That came as sad, but obvious news back then… but check it out: Motor Trend just got a hot “scoop”!

Under the global rear-drive platform plan, the 2014 Mustang was to have shared its basic architecture with the next generation Australian Ford Falcon, and possibly a new flagship sedan for Lincoln. The Mustang would have been on the short wheelbase version of the platform, the Falcon on the mid-wheelbase, and the Lincoln on the long wheelbase. But that strategy has changed…

…By the time a new rear-drive Lincoln could appear, the Town Car will have been out of production for three to four years, and with high gas prices in Australia, no-one expects major growth in Falcon sales. These factors taken together seem to have conspired to torpedo the global rear-drive platform. “The [next generation rear-drive] Falcon is dead,” said one Ford insider bluntly, in apparent confirmation.

Shocker! The problem is that Ford’s just released a new Mustang, meaning the current model will be a bit long of tooth when the nameplate’s 50th anniversary rolls around in 2014. The good news? Motor Trend’s “scoop” isn’t that Ford will be slapping together a “very special edition” consisting of paint, wheels, badges and certificate of authenticity.

The bad news?

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ADAC is who responds to essentially every automotive Panne (breakdown) in Germany. And with the Germanic proclivity for thorough record keeping, they have kept them all, and analyzed them more thoroughly than any of Freud’s patients ever were. Did your mother have a flat in 1983? ADAC knows. And they’ve been using it to publish annual best and worst reliability rankings since 1978. If you caught the Toyota Starlet CC, you’ll know that it was the queen of the ADAC numbers, and the bane of Mercedes and the other (once) proud builders of  the world’s most presumably durable iron. Since ADAC doesn’t have an easy way to see all thirty year’s worth of the good and naughty, my Germanic side kicked in and I spent a chunk of last night transcribing them unto a spreadsheet, because…well, that’s just how Germanic I am. Read More >

Jeremy writes:

Hello Sajeev, I have a 1993 Mercury Grand Marquis that I picked up from a family member a couple years back. I registered the car in my name with only 37,000 miles on the clock, it now has just over 51,000. The car was garage kept for years. I have updated the fuel filter, spark plugs, tires, air filter, and the regular oil changes.

After driving the car for a while I noticed the transmission shifted with a slow “shudder” from 3rd to 4th gears. The transmission seemed to shift smoothly under light acceleration but mild to brisk acceleration is accompanied by the transmission shudder.

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Ford’s facing one of the toughest challenges in automotive product planning: how to offer the competitive compact pickup consumers say they want without cannibalizing far more profitable full-sized trucks. The solution? Don’t offer a competitive compact pickup. “It’s no secret we have a new Ranger coming globally. We’re working on one for all the other markets in the world,” Ford’s Derrick Kuzak tells Pickuptrucks.com. “The difference is that all of those other markets only have a Ranger. They don’t have an F-150 above it.” See how that works? But don’t worry, Ranger fans. Ford has your effete, pathetic backs…

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The Detroit Free Press reports that a recent filing by the California Air Resources Board [Full filing in PDF format here] threatens that a rapid ramp-up to the proposed 35.5 mpg 2016 standard and a reduction in zero-emission vehicle credits are necessary “to ensure California’s continued support.” CARB spokesman Stanley Young explains that “what we wanted to do is convey the level of importance for these two issues,” and that it’s “too early” to say whether California will withdraw from its compromise with the Obama administration. Still, the threat of a California withdrawal should be enough to get some attention in Washington, as Obama adviser David Axelrod has called the emissions compromise one of the administration’s top accomplishments of 2009.

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After years of spurning lithium ion batteries in favor of Nickel metal hydride cells, it seems Toyota might changing their mind. The Wall Street Journal reports that Toyota Tsusho Corp, which is 21.8% owned by Toyota Motor Corp., has secured the loans it needed from the Japanese government to buy a stake in a lithium project in Northern Argentina. The article states that “people with knowledge of the matter” (read in to that what you will), values Toyota Tsusho’s investment somewhere between $100 million and $200 million.

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Update: It’s obvious I’m confusing as many or more folks with this post as I am enlightening some. As an addicted Economist reader, I enjoy unraveling the myths and stereotypes that Europeans pay $30k for a basic Ford Focus or pay $9 for a gallon of gas. We do, if we go there with our dollars. They don’t. The information below is intended as a set of tools to better understand the issues, but will not explain them all perfectly. I’ve run out of time to respond to comments, so I hope this helps. Or pick up an Economist :)

European new car prices can be as confusing to us Yanks as ordering from a menu in Latvia. We’re always hearing about tiny $29k econoboxes and the like. List prices are typically converted to US dollars, and the results can be very misleading. MSRPs are assumed to be more solid than ours. And the 19% VAT (value added tax) is not factored in. The result often is an assumption that European car manufacturers are getting ginormous prices for their little hatchbacks. Lets pull back the curtain of confusion and seek some truth. Like the Audi A3 shown above: if you factor in purchasing power parity, remove the (included) 19% tax, and factor in the 29% discount being offered, the equivalent US price is: $12,353. Allow me to explain: Read More >

New York Governor David A. Patterson (D) is joining a number of other states in promoting the use of freeway speed cameras as a way to address his state’s massive $7.4 billion budget shortfall. Patterson’s budget proposal, released yesterday, includes a plan to deploy fifty photo radar vans to generate $96 million in net profit for the general fund by 2012.

“The mistakes of the past — squandering surpluses, papering over deficits, relying on irresponsible fiscal gimmicks to finance unsustainable spending increases — have led us to a financial breaking point,” Patterson wrote. “There are no more easy answers…. The only way we can emerge from this crisis is through shared sacrifice.”

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We should have seen this coming when Mazda first called its Furai and Nagare concepts “design studies” instead of “the unfortunate results of a savage brown-acid-and-Lovecraft bender at Mazda’s design studios.” New direct-injection, stop-start engines are approved for the European version of the new Mazda5, but as usual there are no guarantees they’ll make it to the US market version. More details when Mazda5 comes alive at the Geneva auto show.