Because so many people like to accuse me of beating up on Toyota: General Motors has recalled 1.3 million Chevrolet and Pontiac models in North America for power steering failures that are tied to 14 crashes and one injury in the United States, the company said Tuesday. The recall affects 2005-2010 Chevrolet Cobalt and 2007-2010 [...]

A few weeks ago, ABC reported that a former Toyota Product Liability lawyer had accused Toyota of hiding information in product liability suits. The House Oversight Committee subpoenaed his documents and found that they showed Toyota hid internal data recording Toyota testing data, collected in an electronic “Books of Knowledge.” Chariman Towns has written Yoshimi [...]

My takeaway of the first of two hearings on Toyota’s unintended acceleration problem (the other will be at 11:00 today) is that Toyota has locked away the answers in Japan. By design. Recalls A key to understanding how this worked is how recalls were decided. In response to a question from John Dingell, Toyota US [...]

Jim Lentz is testifying before the House Commerce Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee as we speak. Waxman just played a statement saying Lentz made saying they were confident they had solved the unintended accleration problem. He then asked Lentz if he still stood by his statement. Lentz said yes, as he defines sudden unintended acceleration. But [...]

To get an idea of just how ridiculously bad the Toyota-funded study of its “sticky accelerator” problem is, you need only compare the 6 vehicles the contractor in question purchased to study, with the years and makes of vehicles Toyota has recalled. Here are the 6 cars the contractor has studied: 2002 Camry (North American [...]

As you may know, there are a slew of hearings scheduled next week to try to understand the Toyota brake problems. The head of Toyota (and grandson of the company founder) caused a bit of a stir yesterday when he tried to correct the mistaken impression that he would testify personally. Akio Toyoda told a [...]

I’ve made a concerted effort to avoid piling on the Toyota recall story. But this excellent Bloomberg story–describing how two former National Highway Traffic Safety Administration officials helped Toyota avoid more comprehensive responses to its brake failures on four different occasions–deserves a lot of attention. Former regulators hired by Toyota Motor Corp. helped end at [...]

As you all might know, we here at Emptywheel are car people. And one annoying thread ran common as a persistent undercurrent through all of our auto and auto bailout coverage over the last year, and that was how pitiful and incompetent the American marques were, how much they deserved their fate and how awesome [...]

DiFi seems to think CA is losing its Toyota plant to KY or MS. More likely, however, CA will lose its Toyota plant to a place where health care costs are cheaper: Mexico and Canada.

GAO says that advanced technology cars may not have the ROI GM needs to become profitable again.