With my previous Chevrolet Cobalt XFE encounter in mind, visiting three dealerships in search of an XFE tester came as no surprise. Ironically, the dealer formerly associated with “Mr. Big Volume” (a.k.a. Bill Heard) had one XFE-badged Cobalt that survived last month’s Cash For Clunkers shopping spree. Like the surprisingly respectful staff at this once-infamous [...]

Before we jump into this one, it’s important to lay out a few caveats. The first is that, in general, TTAC doesn’t do recalls. It’s impossible to cover them with any fairness, and most of the time they’re inconsequential or hard to verify. The second is that TTAC really, really doesn’t do sudden unintended acceleration (SUA) scares. If someone tells you their throttle sticks wide open at precisely the same time as their brakes fail, they’re either covering for their own incompetence or looking for a buck. Period. Now, the proliferation of computer controls may have introduced a greater possibility of simultaneous system failures than existed on old, mechanically-actuated brakes and throttles. In fact, the recent rash of SUA complaints involving Toyota and Lexus models had me wondering if ghosts in the machine were rendering the time-tested SUA debunking test obsolete. No such luck. It turns out it’s the floormats, stupid. Toyota initially dismissed all SUA claims, but now Bloomberg reports they’re recalling floor mats on 3.8m Toyota and Lexus models for causing the gas pedal to stick.

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Xerox Corporation announced yesterday that it would acquire Affiliated Computer Services (ACS) for $6.4 billion. ACS is a major, long-time player in the speed camera, red light camera, tolling and parking ticket business. Xerox, famous for its domination of the photocopying market from the 1960s to the 1980s, sees the purchase as a way to reinvent itself and dominate the business outsourcing market. “By combining Xerox’s strengths in document technology with ACS’s expertise in managing and automating work processes, we’re creating a new class of solution provider,” Xerox CEO Ursula M. Burns said in a statement. “A game-changer for Xerox, acquiring ACS helps us expand our business and benefit from stronger revenue and earnings growth.”

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How about a backers for an independent British sportscar marque? Kuwait’s national Investment Dar, which paid $925m for a 51 percent stake in Aston Martin two and a half years ago, has secured a claims freeze from creditors, reports The Guardian. This, nearly seven months after the fund got into trouble and offered its Aston stake up for biding, and our Aston-buyer-rumor-meter is still registering a fat goose egg. $393m of Dar’s stake was financed with a Shariah-compliant loan, and the Dar has been forced to publicly ask its creditors to chill. The finance guys will come to some kind of musawamah, but it’s Aston I’m worried about. McLaren is making a less indulgently heritage-dependent bid to be come the British sportscar firm, while Aston is… languishing on the market, firing workers, being turned down by celebs, rebadging Toyotas and generally cheapening the brand.  Where do you go from there?

It’s been a long time since anyone has taken on the many makers of Lotus 7-based sportscars. These kitcar cottage industries have made many updates to their drivetrains over the years, perking up Colin Chapman’s classic design with engines from ranging from Ford Duratecs to Suzuki Hayabusa mills to handbuilt V8s. But these have been incremental changes, keeping the look and underpinnings of the original unchanged. What has yet to be attempted is a fresh-sheet, 21st Century re-imagining of the classic form. Until the krauts behind Roding came along, anyway. Auto Motor und Sport shows off renderings of their all-new lightweight roadster, developed with help from Munich Technical University and set to debut as a production car in 2011. Though it looks 7-like, it’s actually a mid-engine design, which is how we imagine Herr Chapman would create his own all-new 7 (witness the Elise). The engine itself is a 400 hp turbocharged five-pot (of Audi extraction?), which gives the Roding Roadster a power-to-weight ratio of about 6.5 pounds per horsepower, or about the same as an F430. So 2,400 pounds isn’t quite in the same featherweight class as the 7, but the Roding looks like quite the compelling interpretation of a classic roadster.

GM’s grand experiment with Ebay will be over by the end of the month, reports Automotive News [sub]. GM had extended the program once, and was considering continuing it into October. So why didn’t they? Paging GM spokesfolks… we have a cleanup on aisle nine…

The need to roll eBay out nationally isn’t there as it was when we first rolled out the pilot. At the time we had no large, national marketing programs in the system, so that made sense at the time. What we’ve come up with since then are two large, national programs that are already in place.

In other words, failure was not an option… but only because there were no parameters for failure. Gosh that sounds exactly like what Mark LaNeve said when he was asked why the program was being extended despite generating what can only be described as weak sales. Come to think of it, how was the California-only Ebay experiment a substitute for a “large, national marketing program?” More importantly, did GM sell a single vehicle on Ebay?

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Any hippie will tell you what Chrysler is finding out as it tries to kick-start its product development to life: karma’s a bitch. In the pre-bailout era, Old ChryCo held the dubious distinction of having the worst supplier relations in Detroit. Now, for some odd reason, suppliers aren’t wanting to shoulder the cost of developing components for new Chrysler vehicles. The Wall Street Journal reports Chrysler isn’t making any production volume promises for future products (an ominous sign in its own right), which means cash-strapped suppliers aren’t rushing in to spend their money developing parts. “Why would we want to tie ourselves to Chrysler when GM and Ford are a known factor?” asks one interior-component supplier. “We’re already financially strapped so we have to be more choosey in where we will spend our money.” Meanwhile, this supplier recalcitrance is making it hard for Chrysler to plan anything.

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The big blockbuster, peanut-butter-approach programs like zero-percent financing and employee discounts for everyone have all been done before

GM spokesman John McDonald in a Bloomberg story on the industry-wide drop in incentives and rising transaction prices. What about Truck Month? Surely we can all agree that has been “done before.”  And though the Detroit automakers have eased incentives by about 25 percent from their March peak, at $3,278 this August, they’re still higher than the industry-average of $2,474. And the brief respite from incentive-redlining could be ending soon. With inventories depleted by Cash For Clunkers, GM is adding shifts in hopes of increasing production by 20 percent in the fourth quarter. Throwing more cars into a clunker-hangover sales environment could be just the thing to bring incentives and “peanut-butter-approach programs” (can anyone explain that pejorative?) back in a big way. But don’t call it a comeback: they never really left.

In case you couldn’t tell, I’m hardly the biggest fan of the Insurance Institute For Highway Safety. Corporate-backed safety nannies posing as quasi-governmental bodies with an ends-justify-the-means vendetta against speed, light weight and other admirable car qualities just rub me the wrong way somehow. But the enemy of my enemy is my friend (for at least a legislative session or two), and it turns out the IIHS and I can agree on something to hate: Neighborhood Electric Vehicles. Now, you might think that limiting an entire class of cars to 25 MPH is something the IIHS would consider a good first step, but you’d be wrong. A Wall Street Journal piece on the rise of these annoying little vehicles quotes an IIHS spokesman calling NEVs “souped-up golf carts,” and warning of the safety consequences of allowing them on public roads. In fact, the IIHS is threatening to perform another round of its patented “no shit, Sherlock” crash tests, “proving” that NEVs aren’t capable of protecting passengers in a collision with a real car. Despite the pointlessness of this gesture, TTAC wholeheartedly embraces the idea of NEV crash testing, purely for entertainment and schadenfreude-related reasons. If the portion of the video above (showing what appears to be a Chrysler GEM NEV) is anything to go on, this could be epic. Meanwhile, our suggestion to eco-freak “early adopters” is to skip the NEVs and buy a motorcycle-category three wheeler. You’re still going to die in a crash, but at least we won’t get stuck behind you going 25 miles per hour. Check out TTAC’s review of the Miles ZX40 NEV here.