The Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT) announced last week that the experimental increase in the state’s maximum speed limit to 80 MPH has been a success in terms of safety. UDOT Deputy Director Carlos Braceras testified before the state Interim Committee on Transportation that that there has been no increase in accidents as a result of the higher number printed on the speed limit signs on certain stretches of Interstate 15. In 2008, the state legislature granted UDOT permission to test higher limits on rural sections of the road. Using crash histories, engineering studies, UDOT carefully selected the areas that it believed would best handle the increased limit. The department then conducted before and after surveys of speeds and traffic volume on the three sections where the limit was changed. Although the signs permitted another 5 MPH in speed, the results showed that drivers did not ‘take advantage’ of the new limit to drive significantly faster.
We now know that OnStar is a PITA if you’re doing a quarter mile in a 700hp+ Hennessey-tuned Cadillac CTS-V (a.k.a. V700). The service doesn’t know the difference between a performance run and an accident. Har har. Even so, this incident raises some questions about GM’s Big Brother division. Read More >
Thanks to the laws regarding “fair use,” TTAC can blog on your behalf. Obviously, we don’t cut and paste entire articles. Except when we do. This is one of those cases where a misleading headline deserves the full monty [via ekathimerini.com]. Or, as the Greek sage/storyteller Aesop said, “We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.”
Our politicians’ obsession with their public personae and the emphasis that they put on public relations stunts often causes serious problems for public policy and prevents political staff from doing their job properly.
The most recent example of this phenomenon was the government decision to replace public officials’ luxury gas-guzzling automobiles with smaller, more environment-friendly hybrid vehicles.
The decision has obviously not been thought through properly.
Out of 200 Ford Motor Credit cars at the auction yesterday I bought 10. Seven that I designated for retail, three for wholesale. I was second to last bidder on appoximately 30 more. Which means from a sellers perspective, I was crucial to him driving his overall prices up. The truck in question is an ’04 F150 4×4 reg cab with 60k on it. Terrible paint, needs a solid grand spent on a strip down and repaint. But it was cheap, I mean silly cheap. I gave $5,000 for this little pearl, and ready to go it’s worth 9-10 grand. The why is simple. It’s a 4×4 with under 80k miles in a recent body style. That’s the why on the value part. The why on, how did I get it for 5,000 is not as simple.
What’s the first thing you notice when you step inside a car? Some folks look at the seats. Others will set their eyes on the carpet or the far side of the dashboard. For me… it’s smell. I swear at times I can actually tell what auction a car came from given the smell on the inside. Brands also give forth their own odorous emanations. Fur starters . . .
When the history of the 2008/2009 federal bailouts is finally written, the chapters on Cerberus’ federal teat suckage will contain some of the best/worst examples of insider sweetheart deals between failed financiers and Uncle Sam. Deals that protected their protagonists from genuine accountability for their actions, and inaction. Case in point: Cerberus-owned GMAC’s eleventh-hour, Christmas Eve exemption from FDIC banking laws. GMAC’s Board Member, former U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow, brokered the get-out-of-C11-free card and subsequent $6 billion bailout. Dirty? How about the fact that GMAC’s then-Chairman’s J. Ezra Merkin’s was up to his eyeballs in Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. OK, so, here we are. When federal Pay Czar Kenneth J. Feinberg announced that executives at ChryCo Financial wouldn’t get as close a haircut as their colleagues everywhere else, his explanation let the C11 cat out of the bag.
When the Detroit uses the word “misunderstanding” in the lede graph of a story about The United Auto Workers (UAW), you just know there is some serious negotiation, posturing, ass-covering and ass-kicking going on behind the scenes. In this case, it seems that the union’s members are not happy about a no-strike clause in their proposed contract with Ford. “The Detroit News has learned that the [no-strike] language, which was included in recent contract changes the UAW negotiated with General Motors Co. and Chrysler Group LLC, was mandated by the Obama administration as a condition of its bailout of the two companies. It was designed to ensure the competitive gains that were forced through by the White House could not be reversed in 2011 contract negotiations between GM and Chrysler and the UAW, according to people familiar with the situation.” What’s this got to do with Ford? Can you say “pattern bargaining?” It seems that the UAW, who practically invented the term, can’t quite bring themselves to use it now. Or keep their members in the loop.
The GM-Opel-Magna-Sperbank deal is on its last gasp. On Friday, GM’s chief Opel negotiator, John Smith, said that nothing will happen until the GM BOD will get around to reconsider the sale at its next regular meeting on November 3, says Reuters. In the meantime, the matter turns into a chain letter exercise. Chain letters everybody wants to receive, but nobody wants to write.
As reported by TTAC, EU competition commissioner Neelie Kroes wants letters from all parties involved, certifying that the deal had not been reached under political pressure. All parties involved, meaning GM, the Opel Trust that officially owns Opel, and the German government. Except a vague note from Berlin to Brussels, no letters have been written. Nobody wants to write, everybody wants to receive a letter: Read More >
Here’s a piece of news that will make Gordon G. Chang double his daily dose of Maalox, after he had eaten his words written in Forbes: This September, GM China sold more cars than GM USA. General Motors and its local joint ventures sold a record 181,148 vehicles in China in September, the company reports via Gasgoo. Back home in the U.S.A. GM sold 156,673 cars and trucks, as per Automotive News [sub] official statistics. Read More >
Biological mimicry is when a group of organisms share common perceived traits with another group. One relative rare classification of this otherwise fairly common phenomena is automimicry, when a vehicle parked too long with other vehicles of a different species begins to take on those qualities. It’s not yet fully understood what advantages are incurred to the automimic, but we can surely speculate.
Pity Takanobu Ito. Like many (ok, some) of us, the CEO of Honda is torn between his love for speed and the desire to be perceived as environmentally responsible. On the one hand, he lambasted Toyota for building its $375k LF-A supercar, saying that to his mind the fuel-cell FCX clarity (once described by Jonny Lieberman as “exactly like a Honda Accord”) was his idea of a modern sports car. On the other, “I would like to make a sports car,” Ito tells Automotive News [sub]. “Once we have that technology and once we have cash on hand, I would like to see Honda have a sports car that symbolizes our technology.” Is he referring to the forthcoming CR-Z? Because, as cool as that car looks, it will hardly satisfy the LF-A jealousy we detect in Mr Ito’s voice. And you have to imagine that the creator of the NSX is as qualified as anyone else to design and develop the first 21st Century green sportscar. But what would that look like? Assume any price point up to the LF-A’s insane $375k sticker, and give us some specs. And remember, at this point, green is relative… and quantifiable only in terms of marketing.
Bob Lutz is, apparently. So is Jack Baruth. But will the “V-Series Challenge” prove anything? Not so much. Nobody will be surprised when a CTS-V sets the fastest lap time of the event (at the hands of GM’s test-driver John Heinricy), or if Lutz’s god-knows-how-many practice laps brings his lap time lower than his challengers’. As we’ve said before, GM has set the terms of a battle it is nearly incapable of losing… but what of the war? Who cares what your top-of-the-line sedan is (even if it’s amazing, which TTAC readily admits it is) when your point of entry is the Aveo? Oh, and how much profit does the CTS-V make? Still, we can’t say no to a few hot laps on someone else’s dime. Do you know what a membership to Monticello costs?
That’s right. Buy a $110,000 Tesla Roadster, and according to the Denver Post, the state of Colorado will give you $42,000 in tax breaks. That’s 85 percent of the premium over a Lotus Elise. Colorado’s alt-fuel and zero-emissions tax credit system gives between 50 percent and 85 percent of the premium over a comparable gas-burning car, but as a zero-emissions vehicle only the Tesla can claim the full 85 percent discount. “Most of them are (Toyota) Priuses and hybrid vehicles,” say CO revenue department spokesfolks. Still, the colossal incentive on the two-seat Roadster was enough for the state legislature to limit discounts to no more than $6,000. But that limit doesn’t go into effect until January. Between now and then though, there’s practically no reason to buy an Elise in Colorado… unless you want to be able to fill up at a gas station. [Hat Tip: Freedmike]
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