Early this morning in the sleepy town of Stuttgart, a group of German police inspectors arrived at the Porsche headquarters in Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen complete with search warrants in hand in an attempt to uncover some evidence of suspicious activity. The search order was handed down by their local public prosecutor’s office and dealt with the suspicion of breaching a publication duty as prescribed by the German Stock Corporation Act which means that they could have been manipulating the German market. The boys in blue who were on the scene were said to have seized numerous business documents by the end of their exploration.
Of course the German sports car manufacturer denies any allegations and are cooperating fully with the German officials in the hopes for a speedy resolution. Off the news that Porsche is making major moves on the financial market, recently selling 10% of their stock to a state run Quatar based investement group and only a short period of time after the Porsche/VW merger was completed, the perfect time for a world wide corporation to fudge some paperwork, not that this is the case. However now that the authorities are involved, this incident can’t help but make you think back to this past January when one of the richest men in the world, Adolf Merckle, took his own life after betting wrong in a big way on the German automotive conglomerate VW, which is now quite entangled with the sports car maker Porsche.
This is something we never saw coming. We were recently watching an episode of Glenn Beck at FOX News when the broadcaster turned to a subject near and dear to our hearts: cars.
As it turns out, Beck – and some of his constituents, we think – talked about the repercussions of using your computer to try to avail of the Cash for Clunkers program. Apparently, when you want to trade in your clunker, a warning box pops up, which says:“This application provides access to the DoT CARS system. When logged on to the CARS system, this computer is considered a Federal computer system and is the property of the US government.”
It can be argued that Steven Rattner, the head of US President Barack Obama’s auto task force was the person responsible for saving the US auto industry. After all, he was the one who oversaw the bankruptcies of both GM and Chrysler and he was the one who initiated the bail-out plan that ultimately saved both companies from extinction.
And now, after only six months on the job, Rattner has decided to call it a day, filing his resignation, which was announced by the White House last Monday. Rattner’s decision - he said was brought about because he wanted to go back home to his family in New York – has resulted in talks that he relinquished his post due to an investigation regarding an investment scandal.
According to the Associated Press, Rattner has become the subject if an investigation with regards to a state pension fund that provides numerous benefits to more than a million government employees. That, of course, comes at the heels of another controversy involving Rattner and his association – he’s an investor - with Cerberus Capital Management, which, incidentally was the former owner of Chrysler.
Currently, tire manufacturers can use their own criteria for rating their tires which can lead to buyer confusion. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is worried that consumers might not be able to easily pick the best tire for their needs. To remedy that situation, NHTSA is proposing a new, consumer-friendly replacement tire label which would include, for the first time, information about the tire’s impact on fuel economy and CO2 emission reductions.
“Today’s proposal takes the guesswork out of buying the best tires for your vehicle,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. “Our proposal would let consumers look at a single label and compare a tire’s overall performance as it relates to fuel economy, safety and durability.”
Based on the criteria shown on the proposed label, sticky performance tires may draw the short straw. For example, summer tires aren’t the best in rainy conditions, aren’t particularly durable and because of the soft compounds used and have a higher rolling resistance which yields lower fuel economy. These characteristics would yield a tire report card that would make any parent weep.
Perhaps a fairer system could be devised where tires were rated based on their class. Shading each tire class’ label a different color could prevent an all season, 80,000 mile tire from being compared to a summer only, high performance tire.
You drive through a construction zone. It’s early in the morning. There are no workers. You are driving UNDER the normal speed limit. What does that get you? In one woman’s case, five tickets in the mail!
A province of Manitoba, Canada installed speed cameras in its construction zones to ostensibly catch drivers whooshing past workers at unsafe speeds. The problem is, it left the cameras on even when there was no work being done. This scam, sorry, enforcement netted the local government millions of dollars: tickets issued mushroomed from 3000 in 2007 to 60,000 just twelve months later. A provincial court has found that such tickets violate the law, but the local government maintains that payment of a citation is an admission of guilt. As one justice stated, "It’s almost a disincentive for Manitobans to pay their fines because, if the law is challenged, the only way you get your money back is if you didn’t pay."
