Chronicling the Ever-Changing Automotive Industry
Sales were up for the second month of 2010, with a total of 778,738 vehicles sold in America. The pundits were proven correct when they said that Ford stood to gain the most out of Toyota’s recent drama, as they took the #1 position away from cross-town rival General Motors.
Continue reading ‘Sales Figures: February, 2010′
Consumer Reports has released its 2010 Automaker Report Cards. Each year, they take the average score of each automaker’s products and rank the automakers. Since Toyota has so many recalls, they’ve suspended the values for the 8 recalled models, so while Toyota is in 3rd place, that’s only a subset of their overall score. The only automaker to fall from previous ratings was Chrysler, which is interesting when you consider that most of their models are carryovers from the 2009 model year. Read on for more details.
Continue reading ‘Consumer Reports: Automaker Report Cards’
Edolphus Towns and Akio Toyoda
In an audacious move, Toyota president Akio Toyoda, grandson of the founder of Toyota Motor Company, said he would only come to the February 24th Congressional hearings (“Toyota Gas Pedals: Is the Public At Risk?”) if he were formally invited. He had planned on sending Yoshimi Inaba, the head of North American Toyota operations.
Continue reading ‘Toyota Exec coming to the US for Congressional Hearings’
AutoBlog picked up on a story out of Palo Alto, where it appears that 3 Tesla Motors employees died this morning in a plane crash. The plane was a twin-engined Cessna belonging to one of Tesla’s senior electrical engineers, Doug Bourn. Continue reading for more details, video and pictures.
Continue reading ‘Breaking News: Tesla employees die in plane crash!’
Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood (pictured) has gotten some good TV time this week. First he warned American drivers of Toyota’s recalled vehicles to park them immediately. Shortly thereafter, he retracted part of that statement in a “clarification” in which he told drivers to get their recalled cars to Toyota dealerships as soon as possible. In a report which came out Friday on the Detroit News, LaHood is apparently looking to limit in-car distractions for drivers.
Continue reading ‘Transportation Secretary LaHood looks to stem in-car distractions?’
We reported on news last week alleging that ex-NHTSA employee Chris Santucci interfered with an investigation into Toyota’s unintended acceleration issues. Since then, ABC News did its best digging and found some interesting information, which they reported on Friday.
The ABC News report explains that ex-NHTSA employees, including the previously-mentioned Chris Santucci, used their clout at the NHTSA to severely limit the number of reported incidents to lessen the impact on Toyota, to the point where it was highly ignored.
Continue reading ‘Update: NHTSA Investigation into Toyota hampered by ex-employee?’
