“Toyota deserves a public retraction and formal apology from ABC News.” At least according to the automaker itself. For what, you ask? For ABC’s “irresponsible broadcast entitled “Expert: Electronic Design Flaw Linked to Runaway Toyotas.” You surely remember the piece, which originally aired the night before a Congressional Panel began investigating the issue of unintended [...]

We can’t even pretend to know the first thing about currency manipulation, so we won’t bother trying to explain how artificially depreciated currency can help imports into the U.S. market. But American manufacturing groups have long accused the governments of China, Japan and South Korea of manipulating their currency to gain an bigger foothold [...]

It would seem that once was enough for Toyota North America President Yoshimi Inaba. Just weeks after the top Toyota executive went before a congressional hearing in the United States, The Globe and Mail is reporting that Inaba has turned down a similar invitation to appear before the Canadian government. The topic of conversation? [...]

“When we talked with Toyota owners, they all voiced the same desire – to drive the car back to the lot, hand them the keys and pick up a check.” So says Steve Berman, a lawyer from Seattle who has filed a class action lawsuit against Toyota on behalf of “dozens” of owners in Arizona [...]

The hits keep on coming for Toyota, with reports of unintended acceleration multiplying like rabbits with aphrodisiacs and grandstanding of all sorts going on at every level. Orange County, California District Attorney Tony Rackauckas has added another layer to the cake with a lawsuit alleging Toyota sold cars it knew had problems.
DA Rackauckas (great [...]

One of the most interesting sidebars that came out of Toyota’s recent recall woes and the subsequent Congressional hearings on the subject was the Japanese automaker’s relationship with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Actually, the interesting part of the relationship with the regulatory body had more to do with the fact that Toyota hired [...]

“The panel is deeply concerned that Treasury has not required GMAC to lay out a clear path to viability or a strategy for fully repaying taxpayers.” This, according to a Congressional Oversight Panel that was created as a watchdog for the U.S. Treasury’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds. The fix? Potentially breaking GMAC up [...]

Without the government bailout of General Motors and Chrysler, the U.S. auto industry would likely have two fewer domestic automakers and hundreds of thousands of high paying jobs would be history. The Detroit News reports that ex auto task force chief Steve Rattner recently told an audience at a bankruptcy conference that the state of [...]

Safety doesn’t sell cars. At least that’s what Detroit executives walked around saying back in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. The whole of them were convinced that if you even mentioned the word “safety” in a marketing campaign it would imply that cars were unsafe. In fact, it took a crusader like Ralph Nader to [...]

Remember a couple weeks back when we told you about Chrysler’s improbable legal battle against little Lake Mary High School in Florida? Chrysler’s legal team put the smack down on the school for using the Ram logo as its school insignia, and the law jockeys in Auburn Hills, MI were giving the school until June [...]

After Dave Chappelle threw himself overboard the USS Hollywood, he did an interview in which he said, “When a person tells you something’s… just business, that means some ice-cold [stuff] might be about” to happen. We can imagine that Toyota, doing everything it can to make its case better in the eyes of the American [...]

Is CARB backing down on its so-called “cool cars” regulation? On May 7, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) will have to turn in its final draft of the controversial regulations, which calls for automakers to build cars and trucks with windows that prevent 45% of the sun’s energy from entering a vehicle by 2014 [...]

And here we thought all that Toyota bashing was happening just in Washington, D.C., in Midwest bars and on late night talk shows. It appears Toyota can’t even escape the negative press that has come as a result of the company’s recent recall woes at the 82 annual Academy Awards, either. During host Steve [...]

When U.S. domestic automakers were commuting back and forth between Detroit and Washington while begging for government funds in the fall of 2008, a big deal was made of the fact that their CEOs were traveling in private jets instead of driving company vehicles. The backlash from JetGate was substantial, as each automaker quickly ended [...]

According to Automotive News (which is citing four separate yet unknown sources), General Motors is preparing to reinstate more than 580 dealers that had applied for government-mediated arbitration to keep their franchises in the United States. For those keeping track, 580 represents exactly half of the 1,160 dealerships that signed up to go through [...]