August 2009 Archives

Such devices have the potential to save thousands of lives.
But there is a civil liberties issue involved. I wonder if anyone has challenged the legality of such devices.

Toyota developing anti-drunk driving gadget

(AFP) TOKYO -- Toyota Motor said Monday it was developing anti-drunk driving equipment that would lock the ignition of a vehicle if high levels of alcohol are detected in the driver.

The system features a hand-held breathalyser, equipped with a digital camera, that detects alcohol consumption and photographs the driver's face for identification, a company statement said.

If the driver tests positive, the system either warns him or her, or locks the vehicle's ignition depending on the level of alcohol detected, Toyota said.

Read more on Toyota's device.

In today's Business Casual column.

Lisa Norris is watching the national health care debate with a mix of disappointment and revulsion.

Read Business Casual.

It was bound to happen afte GM pulled out of the joint venture.

WSJ: Toyota To End Production At US Nummi Plant In Mar '10

DETROIT -(Dow Jones)- Toyota Motor Corp. (TM) plans to cease production in March next year at a California assembly plant it owns jointly with the former General Motors Corp., according to a person familiar with the plans.

Toyota's board voted earlier Thursday to stop production at the factory, known as New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. or Nummi, the person said.

The joint venture has mostly been a money-loser since Toyota and GM established their partnership in 1984. It makes about 400,000 vehicles a year. Toyota will release a statement later today on the decision.

The company plans to relocate production of the Corollas compact car and the small Tacoma trucks to other factories in North America where there is idle capacity, the person said.

Read more on Nummi.

Torrance-based Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A. Inc. is voluntarily recalling 95,700 Toyota and Scion vehicles sold in the United States.

On certain 2009 and 2010 model year Toyota Corolla, Corolla Matrix, and 2008 and 2009 Scion xD vehicles all equipped with 1.8 liter engines, the vehicle brakes may not work well if operated in extremely low temperatures.

Toyota will notify vehicle owners from 19 states with very low temperatures. California is not one of those states.

Customers with questions may call the Toyota Customer Experience Center at 800-331-4331 or the Scion Customer Experience at 866-707-2466.

This is no surprise. But Toyota is well positioned to rebound once the worldwide economy recovers.

Toyota to cut capacity amid sales slump

TOKYO, Aug 26 (Reuters) - Toyota Motor Corp., the world's largest automaker, said it would halt a production line in Japan as it looks to cut excess capacity to return to profitability amid an industrywide sales slump.

Car plants around the world are idle or running below capacity as the industry copes with a slide in sales that sent General Motors Co. and Chrysler Group LLC into bankruptcy and has Toyota headed for a record loss this year.

Total cuts could reach 700,000 cars, or 7 percent of Toyota's global capacity, including a production line in Britain that may be halted and a joint venture with General Motors in the U.S. likely to be closed, a source with knowledge of the matter said.

Read more on Toyota.

Auto website Edmunds.com says: Cash for Clunkers party is over, and now the auto industry is likely to experience a painful hangover."

Edmunds expects a "steep decline in sales in the coming weeks based upon a significant drop in 'purchase intent' behavior of its Web site visitors."

"Current purchase intent is down 50 percent from the Cash for Clunkers peak, and down 11 percent from the June average," Edmunds.com Senior Analyst David Tompkins said in a release Wednesday.

Home prices in five South Bay cities rose in July compared to June, a sign the local housing market is stabilizing.

Carson, Inglewood, Rancho Palos Verdes, Redondo Beach and Torrance all saw month-to-month increases in their respective median home prices, according to a report released Tuesday by the California Association of Realtors.

The median refers to the middle price where half of homes sold for more and half for less.

The July monthly increases coincided with a rise in sales that allowed several local communities achieve at least 30 sales in a single month for the first time this year.

Probably not. But it's a neat coincidence (or a case of great minds thinking alike, ahem) that my column on transforming the newspaper industry preceded an initiative by the News Corp. head.

Here's my column.

And here's a LA Times story on Murdoch's efforts to make money off the Internet.

With real estate, it's worth celebrating when the bleeding is slowing.

For the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Glendale region,, home prices dropped year over yera in June by 13.94%, according to First American CoreLogic Media, which compiles data on the housing market.

That's an improvement over May's year-over-year drop of 16.34%.

Nationally, housing prices fell 7.8 percent in June compared to June of last year, representing the smallest year-over-year decline recorded in 2009.

June's decline was a 0.7-percent improvement over the 8.5 percent decline in May.

Other findings on the national level:

* Month-over-month declines have been moderating in the first half of 2009. Between January and June 2009 home prices improved by 3.3 percent. This is the first time in four years that the spring and summer seasonal price trend exhibited its normal pattern.

* The seasonal improvement in home prices in the first half of 2009 is a positive sign, but it is important to note that a decline in distressed sales, rather than an increase in traditional home sales prices, was responsible for the uptick. If the decline in distressed sales is sustainable, and not simply a result of recent foreclosure moratoriums, this could be the first step toward recovery, which will then be followed by outright price increases that will result in continued upward price trends.

* Nevada (-25.4%) remained the top-ranked state for annual price depreciation barely edging out Florida (-25.1%), which, unlike other hard hit states, is experiencing worsening price declines in 2009. California (-17.0%) continued to improve in June and its depreciation rate is the lowest since October 2007. Arizona (-16.2%) and Illinois (-14.8%) round out the top five states for price declines.

* More than 15.2 million U.S. mortgages, or 32.2 percent of all mortgaged properties, were in negative equity position as of June 2009. June's negative equity share was slightly lower than the 32.5 percent as of the end of March 2009, and it reflects the recent stabilization of home prices.

I didn't need this on a Monday morning.

Roubini Sees Increasing Risk of Double-Dip Recession

Aug. 24 (Bloomberg) -- Nouriel Roubini, the New York University professor who predicted the financial crisis, said the chance of a double-dip recession is increasing because of risks related to ending global monetary and fiscal stimulus.

The global economy will bottom out in the second half of 2009, Roubini wrote in a Financial Times commentary today. The recession in the U.S., the U.K., and some European countries will not be "formally over" before the end of the year, while the recovery has started in nations such as China, France, Germany, Australia and Japan, he said.

Read more on Roubini.

July's unemployment rates by city, according to the California Employment Development Department:

- Carson: 12.6%
- El Segundo: 5.9%
- Gardena: 11.7%
- Hawthorne: 16.1%
- Hermosa Beach: 5.3%
- Inglewood: 15.5%
- Lawndale: 12.4%
- Lomita: 8.6%
- Los Angeles: 13.7%
- Manhattan Beach: 4.5%
- Palos Verdes Estates: 2.6%
- Rancho Palos Verdes: 4.3%
- Redondo Beach: 6.7%
- Rolling Hills: 1.3%
- Rolling Hills Estates: 3.4%
- Torrance: 6.3%

It's really not that much money, compared to some of the aerospace firms like Northrop.
By the way, Honda's U.S. headquarters is in Torrance.

Honda spent $623K in 2Q lobbying on auto issues

(AP) WASHINGTON -- American Honda Motor Co. spent $623,041 lobbying on the Cash for Clunkers program, hydrogen fuel cells and other automotive issues during the second quarter, according to a regulatory filing.

American Honda, the U.S. arm of the No. 2 Japanese automaker, also lobbied on legislation that would provide safety standards for alerting the blind to quiet vehicles, such as hybrids and electric cars.

Read more on Honda's lobbying.

This San Pedro resident was hit by a triple whammy.

Business Casual: The economic downturn's human toll

I waited 15 minutes in German Martinez's San Pedro townhome before he finally walked in with a deep sigh and an apology for his tardiness.

Read Business Casual.

Sounds good. We'll think about it in five to eight years, when we're ready get rid of our Corolla.

2010 Honda Accord adds new features

(CNET) The 2010 Honda Accord lineup is getting a features upgrade on certain models with an expanded application of Bluetooth HandsFreeLink to vehicles equipped with leather seating surfaces (previously exclusive to navigation-equipped models) and new rear seat ventilation ducts on Accord Sedan EX and EX-L models for more-direct rear passenger airflow. Subtle modifications include graphically optimized climate control buttons and the addition of a trunk roof lining on Accord EX models.

Toyota's latest Prius promotion.

Toyota Now Planting Flowers, Fixing Roads in Broke California

(AdAge) Toyota's latest iteration of the 2010 Prius campaign looks like a pile-up of Rose Bowl float, highway beautification and eco-vertising. (Did I just coin something?!) With Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Toyota yesterday unveiled a giant flowerbed-like display along the Pasadena freeway that's meant to be at once Prius advertising and aesthetic relief for L.A. commuters. With a little bit of sustainability throw in. Saatchi & Saatchi, L.A., brokered the campaign, which also includes infrastructure improvements along roadways for the city (as in, you let me plant flowers in the shape of vague advertising along your highway, and I'll fix your sprinkler system).

Read more on the Prius promotion.

This economist is a real heavyweight when it comes to housing. We should at least consider his warning.

US Housing Market Could Be Facing Another Bubble: Shiller

(CNBC) The housing market, which already has been battered by the worst collapse since the Great Depression, could be setting itself for another bubble, well-known economist Robert Shiller told CNBC.

With home affordability at a 40-year high, there is "absolutley" a possibility that the housing market will face another bubble in the next five years, said Shiller, an economics professor at Yale, co-founder of MacroMarkets and co-developer of the monthly Case-Shiller home price index.

"The low interest rates, the affordability is leaning that way and the ratios are back down," Shiller said in a live interview. "I get glimmers of excitement among some people, but we still have a high inventory of unsold homes, and we still have a lot of weariness because of the recent experience."

Read more.

Andrew Leonard, who writes the How the World Works blog at Salon.com, has been seeing the economic glass half empty for ages. But now he feels better. That makes me feel a bit more at ease.

How the World Works is headed to the East Coast for an extended vacation: No e-mail, no tweeting, no Facebook updates, no obsessive watching of weekly jobless claim statistics and the latest dirt on Larry Summers.

Read the whole blog post.

Apparently, Sit 'n Sleep co-founder Larry Miller plans to eventually bring back his frazzled accountant Irwin in his commercial spots, where he's famous for saying, "You're killing me, Larry!"

I reported in my July 17 Business Casual column that Irwin, who is real-life accountant Irwin Zigmond, was cut from Sit 'n Sleep ads as the company rolled out a new marketing campaign.

On a blog post dated July 28, Miller writes:

To the legion of concerned Irwin fans, I am happy to announce that Irwin is very much alive, rested and ready to step back into the recording studio after a brief hiatus to pronounce that I, Larry Miller, am killing him!

Advising caution always makes sense.

Home Prices: There's No Quick Recovery Ahead

(WSJ) So, is our long national nightmare over? Has the housing market finally hit bottom?

There has been some muted -- albeit exhausted -- cheering from homeowners in recent weeks. But before we break out the champagne, look out for further potential problems just down the road.

Read more on the housing bubble.

This week's Business Casual Column:

Forrest Blake was like an alcoholic running a brewery. Except his obsession was golf. And it almost ruined him.

Read Business Casual.

California is in the batch of states feeling the worst pain.

The negative home equity nightmare: Housing won't stabilize until 2011

(Daily Finance) Aggressive lending practices fueled the housing boom, and the availability of generous sums of mortgage and home equity money left borrowers with more debt and less equity than ever before. The Federal Reserve reported that home mortgage debt grew at a double-digit rate every year from 2002 to 2006. But as real estate markets across the country have seen price declines between 10 percent (Dallas) and 54 percent (Phoenix), an estimated 11 to 15 million households are now "underwater" on their mortgages, owing more than their house could be sold for today. This overhang, already being blamed for exacerbating the decline in residential real estate, likely won't peak until 2011, according to a research note from Deutsche Bank obtained by DailyFinance.

Read more on home prices.

Employers share top 20 strangest complaints they received from employees in new CareerBuilder Survey:

•Employee is too sun-tanned.

•Employee has big hair.
•Employee eats all the good cookies.
•Employee is so polite, it's infuriating.
•Employee suspected co-worker is a pimp.
•Employee is trying to poison me.
•Employee's body is magnetic and keeps de-activating my magnetic access card.
•Employee is personally responsible for a federally-mandated tax increase.
•Employee was annoyed the company didn't provide a place for naps during break time.
•Employee only wears slippers or socks at work.
•Employee's aura is wrong.
•Employee smells like road ramps.
•Employee breathes too loudly.
•Employee wants to check a co-worker for ticks.
•8:00 a.m. is too early to get up for work.
•Employee wore pajamas to work.
•Employee has bells on her shoes and it's not the holidays.
•Co-worker reminded the employee too much of Bambi.
•Employee spends too much time caring for stray cats around the building.
•A male employee keeps using the ladies' room because the men's room is not as tidy.

Interesting theory. Anything is possible in this sordid tale.

Ruth Madoff: Another Victim or "Mastermind" of Bernie's Ponzi Scheme?

(Tech Ticker) Tuesday's guilty plea by Madoff CFO Frank DiPascali confirmed what many have suspected all along: Bernie Madoff didn't act alone.

Erin Arvedlund, author of the newly published book Too Good To Be True: The Rise and Fall of Bernie Madoff, has what she admits is a "crazy theory": Wife Ruth Madoff "was actually the mastermind of the whole thing. A Lady MacBeth figure if you will."

Read more on Bernard Madoff.

But will the Volt be as reliable as the Prius?

Chevy Volt blasts out the Toyota Prius with official 230 MPG

(taintedgreen.com) We've known for a long time that the Chevy Volt will travel 40 miles in electric-only mode, but comparing efficiencies between vehicles is most easily done in terms of miles per gallon. That in mind, GM just announced that the Chevy Volt has received an EPA rating of 230 miles per gallon when driving in the city.

Read more on the Chevy Volt.

Everybody's gunning for Toyota's Prius, the king of alternative fuel vehicles.

Nissan's all-electric 'Leaf' could outsell Toyota's Prius: exec

(AFP) TRAVERSE CITY, Michigan -- Nissan's upcoming all-electric car could outsell hybrids like Toyota's Prius even though it can't drive more than about 100 miles (160 kilometers) without stopping to recharge, a senior executive said Thursday.

That's because, unlike more expensive hybrids, owners of the zero-emission Leaf will be able to save money while saving the environment, said Larry Dominique, Nissan North America's vice president for product planning.

"Hybrids won't get you there, range extended (plug-in hybrids) won't get you there," Dominique told reporters on the sidelines of an automotive conference in Traverse City, Michigan.

Read more on Nissan's Leaf.