We didn’t want a big fleet of electric vehicles. We’re only just over two years or so away from the games and time is running out to create a viable network. Many of the vehicles will be used for around 18 hours a day. It’s hard graft, and we knew BMW could supply the vehicles to meet these demands.”

Paul Deighton, CEO of the London Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games (LOCOG) explains to Autocar why the games won’t be relying on electric vehicles in 2012. Nissan had presented a bid to be the games’ official vehicle supplier which proposed using Leaf EVs for over half the planned fleet. A “small proportion” of BMW’s winning fleet proposal will be electric MINI Es, and all proposals were required to achieve a fleet average of 120g/km of CO2. But that hasn’t stopped Nissan from getting petulant.

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GM Europe’s head, Nick Reilly, has suggested that the job losses at Vauxhall UK may not be as bad as was feared. Before GM did a U-turn with the sale of Vauxhall/Opel, Magna agreed with Vauxhall to cut 800 jobs, no forced redundancies, and keep the Luton and Ellesmere Port plants open. Then, GM realised they liked Vauxhall/Opel so much, they kept the company and put its European operations back at square one. So far, with “New GM” in control, the results can be summed up in 4 words: Annoyed the German government.

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London, England Mayor Boris Johnson is retreating from his campaign pledge to end the city’s “punishment of motorists.” Johnson’s predecessor, Ken Livingstone, lost his re-election in large measure because Johnson pledged to scale back the £8 (US $13) fee imposed on motorists entering the downtown area. Johnson announced Friday that he will boost the tax to £10 (US $16.40) to shore up Transport for London’s mass transit budget. “The proposed increase in the charge will ensure that the system remains effective in controlling traffic levels in central London, and the revenue will also help us fund the vital improvements to London’s transport network that all Londoners want to see,” Johnson said in a statement.

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A UK government group has just released a proposal that would impose a per-mile tax on motorists to rescue the planet from an imagined catastrophe. The Committee on Climate Change (CCC), a body established by the UK Parliament to advise the government on environmental issues, has set a target of a two-percent annual reduction in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. CO2 is a naturally occurring gas that is essential to human life. The committee believes it can reach its goal by imposing massive new taxes on drivers that will reduce demand for driving which, in turn, would reduce carbon dioxide output.

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Derren Brown is, for me, the World’s greatest illusionist. In his career, he has, played Russian Roulette (and won), predicted the National Lottery numbers live on TV and tricked bookmakers in paying out on bets which hadn’t won. But this problem, I think, would have been beyond him. How do you revive a car plant in a high cost country? The answer? A 4 month break.

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For the past several years, the UK Department for Transport (DfT) has heralded the drop in the number of serious traffic accidents as evidence of the success of its speed camera policies. For the first time, the agency admitted last Thursday that injury numbers have dropped because its statistical method is incomplete. Although DfT reported 230,905 injury accidents took place in 2008, the agency now believes the true number of accidents is actually three times greater. “Our best current estimate, derived from survey data with cross-checking against other data sources, is that the total number of road casualties in Great Britain each year, including those not reported to police, is within the range 680 thousand to 920 thousand with a central estimate of 800 thousand,” Matthew Tranter with DfT’s Road Safety Research and Statistics wrote.

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Everyone knows that killing a hangover with hair of the dog is an impermanent solution at best, but that’s just what Britain’s government has done. With the British version of Cash for Clunkers winding down early, Business Secretary Peter Mandelson has extended the scheme by an extra £100 million ($160 million), which should be good for another 100,000 car sales. And then what? British car output fell almost a third year-on-year in August, which indicates that the hangover at the end of the latest extension should be a nasty one. The US should know the extent of its own clunker hangover in a few days when September sales are released. Here’s hoping our leaders just pop an aspirin and watch cartoons until they’re feeling better.

An advertising campaign in the UK began using automated number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras to identify passing vehicles and create personalized advertisements. The motor oil giant Castrol UK Limited yesterday activated a set of five electronic billboards in London that flash an image of the exact type of Castrol-brand motor oil appropriate for the nearest vehicle. ”The right oil for your car is: Castrol Magnatec 5W-30 A1,” the advertisement reads for eight seconds as a Jaguar with the license plate 1DFL drives past. The roadside digital billboards, seventeen feet wide and eight feet high, are owned by Clear Channel Outdoor. Castrol’s campaign added the license scanning technology which ties into the official UK Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) database. The agency provides private registration information to just about any company willing to pay the desired fee. According to Castrol, this particular campaign does not store any information about what vehicles or drivers pass the sign.

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Does this headline seem familiar? We noted a while back that British reliability records showed Chrysler and Fiat sharing space at the bottom of the rankings. Now, Glass’s Guide (via Autocar) has ranked British resale values by model, and Fiat’s Alfa 166 sedan takes dead last place. Not that this is entirely surprising; after all, reliability and resale tend to go hand-in-hand. The troubling part is that abominable resale values are already a major drag on Chrysler’s viability. How on earth is Fiat going to improve this desperate shortcoming for Chrysler, when it can’t beat the resale bug with its own products?

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