Do you live in New Jersey, but travel around states where a traffic enforcement camera could ruin your day? You may soon be able to put that fear aside, thanks to a new bipartisan bill going through the state’s legislature.

Further along in its investigation of potential industrial espionage, the FBI has acquired access to the work email of former Ford engineer Sharon Leach.

Please welcome Jim Yu to TTAC. Jim is an attorney, a contributor to Hooniverse and the author of the highly recommended “ Tamerlane’s Thoughts“. Jim is also the owner of a manual wagon.

In the face of GM’s ignition debacle, the General hired noted mass torts expert Kenneth Feinberg to set up and execute a compensation scheme for injury victims and families who have lost loved ones. So, is it fair?

First, a little bit of background on Feinberg. I do not know him personally, but I took a semester-long course with him in the late ‘90s. He is extremely sharp and engaging. Moreover, his compassion for victims is always tempered by his calculated pragmatism.

UK drivers who find themselves in an accident may also see their cell phones confiscated by the police to determine if they were used prior to said accident.

In its criminal investigation into General Motors, U.S. Attorney Preet Bharra’s office are summoning current and former employees to come to New York for interviews regarding the automaker’s actions over the ignition switch behind the February 2014 product recall of 2.6 million vehicles.

Two weeks after the Stuttgart Regional Court threw-out charges of market manipulation levied at former Porsche CEO Wendelin Wiedeking in December of 2012, prosecutors have called for an appeal of said ruling.

Automotive News reports General Motors’ attorney Kenneth Feinberg met with Texas attorney Robert Hilliard at the former’s office within the Beltway to begin preliminary discussions over the claims of the latter’s 300-plus clients affected by the ignition switch recall. During the talk, no agreements were reached regarding compensation, while Hilliard viewing the first meeting as GM’s way of convincing him that it would do “the right thing” by his clients. Feinberg states he is gathering proposals for a compensation program similar to the one he orchestrated for 9/11 victims and victims of other major disasters, and should have a package ready within the next few weeks at the latest.

Six months after 17-year-old Brandon Majewski was run down by a 42-year-old female SUV driver in a residential community north of Toronto, his 23-year-old brother was found dead from an overdose. His family believes it was “grief” that killed him. Now, the people who lost two sons in half a year have another problem: a million-dollar-plus lawsuit from the woman who was responsible for at least one of those deaths.

The House Energy & Commerce Committee recently released the documents GM submitted for investigation, which includes emails and internal reports documenting GM’s response to reports of their early Chevrolet Cobalt and Saturn Ion models inadvertently shutting the car “off” while driving due to an ignition cylinder that was, simply, too easy to turn out of the “run” position; and in the case of several accidents, allowed the ignition cylinder to rotate out of the run condition before or during accidents, causing the airbags to not deploy when required.

The documents, totaling 619 pages (some with repeat info), reveal just how deep seated “old GM” was in their cost cutting ways (Driving down supplier costs to the point of sacrificing quality, admittedly poorly designed ignition cylinder, and removing internal quality control on the parts), and just how blind sided “new GM” was during their investigations. It also confirms how suspended engineers Ray DeGiorgio and Gary Altman were involved in the ignition switch response, and fuzzy problem solving. Full text and an analysis of key documents below.

I drive around 30,000 miles a year and so it is inevitable that I occasionally get stopped for speeding. Thanks to taking “Traffic Safety” schools that allow scofflaws like me to avoid having the infraction appear on my driving record, I have a spotless history: numerous arrests, no convictions.

A few weeks ago I blundered into a small-town speed trap while going 67 mph in a 50 mph zone, ignoring a radar detector signal that I wrongly assumed was false. Throw in the fact that it was at night and that I was in unfamiliar territory meant I absolutely deserved getting pulled over.

Little did I know that the online ticket-beating traffic school I chose to attend had a curriculum written for 10 year olds.

General Motors, in the midst of a 1.6-million vehicle recall involving a faulty ignition switch discovered a decade earlier — and the resulting silence until late February of this year — must now answer a 107-question survey issued by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration about the recall by April 3.

New Mexico can be a wonderful place, the kind of place where you can find everything from the “Octopus Car Wash” to your future wife. But for David Eckert, one particular night in New Mexico was a nightmare — one for which the settlement has finally arrived.

A plan to create a database from collected license plate data by the Department of Homeland Security was cancelled after said plans were made known without knowledge from top officials.

Well, this is certainly an interesting situation. When an Audi A7 decided to snag some of the empty space in a “bike box” at a central London intersection, a couple of cyclists decided to give the driver of that Audi some forthright feedback. Naturally, the situation escalated.

Now that most of you have given your tacit approval for TTAC to continue to post stories about police and motorist interaction, please consider this strange case. It all began at 2:10 AM on April 20, 2012 when an officer observed Frederick Weaver weaving and driving an estimated 25 mph in a 15 mph zone in his Acura as he cruised through the Carleton Place town home community in Wilmington, North Carolina.

WKYC-TV reports that when Norman Gurley was pulled over for allegedly speeding in Lorain County, Ohio on Tuesday, State Highway Patrol officers arrested him for having a hidden compartment on his car, charged with a felony despite the fact that he was not violating drug, weapon or any other contraband laws. Gurley thus became the first person charged under Ohio’s relatively new “hidden compartment” law intended, supposedly, to stop drug smuggling. The law states: “No person shall knowingly operate, possess, or use a vehicle with a hidden compartment with knowledge that the hidden compartment is used or intended to be used to facilitate the unlawful concealment or transportation of a controlled substance.” That may create a problem if you drive a Dodge Dart in Ohio.

When sixteen-year-old Ethan Couch killed four people and paralyzed another, the Best&Brightest here at TTAC expressed an almost universally negative view of his actions and the “Affluenza” defense that enabled him to avoid prison in favor of a $450,000 rehabilitation vacation.

Any defenders Mr. Couch did have, however, will likely reconsider their position on the matter given the latest news from the incident.

Comedian Randy Liedtke baked himself an iPhone cookie. While this was certainly a blow struck against the police state known as the People’s Republic of California, for Mr. Liedtke himself, it didn’t work so well.

On June 15th of this year, three people who had stopped to help the driver of a stranded vehicle in the Dallas-Fort Worth area were struck by a vehicle driven by sixteen-year-old Ethan Couch. All three people were killed, as was the driver. The two passengers in Ethan’s car were ejected; one suffered from multiple broken bones, while the other was paralyzed to the point that he must now use his eyes to communicate with others.

Testing revealed that Ethan was drunk, with a BAC of .24, and had traces of Valium in his system. The prosecution asked for a twenty-year prison sentence. What they got was something else entirely.

Distracted driving is a problem, and if you don’t believe us, just ask Sally Kurgis’s dad. (Miss Kurgis, by the way, got a sweetheart deal from the Columbus courts, something that is currently being hotly debated within the city itself.) Because distracted driving is a much safer and easier arrest to make than, say, drug dealing such a danger to the public, many police departments in California and elsewhere have a laser-like focus on punishing anyone crazy enough to touch a cellphone while operating a motor vehicle.

A Los Angeles comedian has decided to gum up the easy-ticket-money works a bit —- but there’s some genuine irony involved.

When a New Mexico state police officer fired shots at a minivan that was fleeing the scene of an arrest, TTAC’s readers were sharply divided on the merits of his actions. Now, officer Elias Montoya has been terminated from his job as a highway patrolman — and many New Mexico residents are rising to his defense.

Nissan BladeGlider

Delta Wing Project 56, a company backed by racing and pharmaceuticals entrepreneur Don Panoz to develop the DeltaWing racecar, is suing Nissan, claiming that the recently revealed BladeGlider concept, which Nissan revealed at the Tokyo Motor Show, infringes on intellectual property related to the DeltaWing.

Nissan says that their delta shaped car is inspried by “the soaring, silent, panoramic freedom of a glider and the triangular shape of a high-performance ‘swept wing’ aircraft.” One of the members of the BladeGlider project is designer Ben Bowlby, who originated the concept of the DeltaWing and he’s named as a defendant along with Nissan and Darren Cox, director of Nissan’s global motorsports program.

Here at TTAC, we’re always willing to shine the relatively dim spotlight of Internet Hammurabian Justice on police who are mendacious, power-mad, or just plain unfit to be cops. At first glance, the October 28, 2013 incident in which a police officer repeatedly fired his service weapon at a minivan full of children appears to be a prime example of this. After all, how can it ever be right to shoot at kids?

Strictly speaking, the answer to that question is “Unless they are busy endangering your life or the life of someone else, never.” In this case, however, the blurred lines of who’s responsible for what would make even Robin Thicke a trifle nervous.

When David Eckert left the Wal-Mart parking lot in Deming, NM, he apparently failed to come to a complete stop at a stop sign. What happened next is the stuff of prison-planet nightmares.

Texting. Cellphones. Entertainment systems. All of these have been regulated in order to diminish distracted driving as much as possible. Google Glass may now be added to that list, courtesy of the California Highway Patrol via a speeding ticket that became more upon closer inspection.

The murder rate is up in Tennessee for the second year in a row but the state highway patrol has a solution: spending hundreds of dollars per hour to catch drivers who are texting.

Ford Motor Co. has agreed to settle a class-action lawsuit over claims that the Navistar made Power Stroke diesels in its 2003-07 Super Duty pickups and E-series vans were defective. The 6 liter V8 diesel engines, now discontinued, had a variety of problems involving the fuel system, turbochargers and other components.

The settlement covers anyone who bought or leased a ’03-’07 Ford truck equipped with the 6 liter Power Stroke.

According to the settlement, any U.S. purchaser or lessee of a 2003-07 Ford vehicle equipped with the 6-liter Power Stroke diesel engine is covered if the vehicle’s exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) cooler and EGR valve, oil cooler, fuel injectors, or turbocharger was repaired, replaced or adjusted prior to 135,000 miles or six years. Ford will reimburse deductibles paid under the trucks’ original five year / 100,000 mile drivetrain warranty, up to $200.

Every year the Michigan State Police conduct comparison performance tests of police package vehicles offered by the domestic automakers. The results influence millions of dollars worth of purchasing decisions by police agencies around the country and they’re also the source of bragging rights. It’s tempting to compare the way automakers tout the MSP Police Vehicle Evaluation results to the way car makers brag about times on the Nurburgring circuit, but the police car testing is undoubtedly more consistent and reliable than ‘Ring results. This year, Chrysler made a big deal about the 2014 Dodge Charger Pursuit AWD with the 370 horsepower 5.7 liter Hemi V8 posting the fastest lap time, 1:33.85, on the Grattan Raceway road course, along with the best braking performance from 60 to 0 mph, 126.5 feet.

Fiat will have almost a year to negotiate a price for the 41.5% of Chrysler that is owned by the UAW employee health benefits trust. That’s because the Delaware Court of Chancery set a date in September of 2014 for the lawsuit Fiat has filed against the trust, known as VEBA, to determine the sale price.

Here’s something to consider: if you are operating a motor vehicle on private property, and you’ve been drinking, should that be considered DUI? What if you’re on a racetrack that is closed to the general public?

A Califonia jury ruled that Toyota Motor Corp was not at fault in a 2009 accident in which 66 year old Noriko Uno was killed when her 2006 Camry ran into a tree after being hit by another car. Uno’s survivors blamed the accident and her death on unintended acceleration and Toyota’s failure to incorporate a brake-override system in Uno’s car. This was the first wrongful death lawsuit over accusations that Toyota products could uncontrollably accelerate. The jury found that Uno’s Camry was not defective, instead placing full liability for her death on the driver of the car that hit Uno before she sped the wrong way down a one-way street and into the tree. Uno’s survivors were awarded $10 million.

New York City newspapers are reporting that there were at least two and as many as five off-duty NYPD police officers among the motorcyclists riding with the pack that chased and beat Range Rover driver Alexian Lien after he rear-ended a sportbike rider who appears, in the videos of the incident, to have brake checked the SUV.

Last week, a group of motorcyclists “boxed in” a Range Rover on the freeway, apparently so they could “shut down” the road as part of a larger celebration. Alexian Lien, the Rover’s driver, struck a motorcyclist who brake-checked him; afterwards, he was chased into the city, dragged from his vehicle, and beaten savagely in front of his wife and two-year-old daughter. The District Attorney for NYC has elected not to prosecute the biker who allegedly smashed Lien’s window and dragged him out of the car for the beating, causing outrage around the country.

Now, new information has come out suggesting that the city may be willing to effectively cede control of its streets to those same bikers.

The United States Federal Trade Commission has launched an investigation into whether car dealers colluded against the online car shopping site, TrueCar, over price competition the site encouraged. Automotive News is reporting that a number of car dealers, including the Kelly Automotive Group in the Boston area, received letters from the FTC saying that the agency is looking into whether companies in the “retail automobile industry” committed anticompetitive acts “by agreeing to refuse to deal with TrueCar” during 2001 and 2012.

Wired.com is reporting that the state of California has abruptly tabled legislation that might have allowed RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) chips to be embedded into the state’s drivers’ licenses. Privacy activists are hailing the suspension of this plan as a victory against government intrusion in people’s lives and believe that these chips, which are actually tiny radio transceivers that can be accessed over the open airwaves without the consent of the person carrying the document, will eventually be used to track people’s movements without their knowledge. Currently, three states, Michigan, Vermont and Washington, already have RFID chips in their licenses and are already sharing information collected by the DMV, including basic identity data and photos, with the Department of Homeland Security via a national database. Scary, right?

While Americans have an image of Europe as the place of autobahns with unlimited speeds, if a new proposal by the European Commission’s Mobility and Transport Department is approved, all cars on the continent could be fitted with devices that limit top speed to 70 miles per hour. Cars would possibly be equipped with cameras that would read speed limit signs on roads and apply the brakes if the legal limit is exceeded. The goal is to reduce the 30,000 annual traffic deaths in Europe by a third. The regulations would not just apply to new cars sold in Europe. Used cars would have to be retrofitted.

After losing a motion to prevent him from appearing, Toyota Motor Corporation’s CEO for North America, Jim Lentz took the witness stand in a lawsuit filed by the survivors of a woman who was killed when her Camry allegedly sped out of control and hit a tree after it was hit by another car, whose driver is a co-defendant in the case. One issue in the court case is why Toyota did not equip Noriko Uno’s car with a brake override system that automatically closes the throttle when the brakes are applied.

Chinese businessman Zhan Baosheng’s “Tesla” web site

Tesla Motors faces trademark issues in the United States and China as it tries to expand its lineup of cars and countries where it is sold. According applications found at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s web site, on August 5th, Tesla filed three trademark applications for use of the name “Model E” in three categories, “automobiles and structural parts therefore,” automobile maintenance and repair services, and apparel. With merchandise sales being an important part of car marketing today, additional filings to cover apparel and similar logoed items are standard practice. Last year, Tesla CEO Elon Musk hinted at a Model E in an interview with Jalopnik, “There will definitely be more models after the S and X. Maybe an E :).”

As police departments across the United States start retiring their Ford Crown Victoria P71 Police Interceptors, now that those out of production vehicles are reaching departments’ mileage limits, it looks like they are replacing at least some of them with SUVs, not sedans. Though the end of the Crown Vic has been mourned by law enforcement officers and car enthusiasts alike, both groups looked forward to the new police package sedans being offered by the domestic automakers. Ford brought out the SHO Taurus based Police Interceptor sedan to replace the Crown Victoria, General Motors is importing a police only Caprice PPV with rear wheel drive from Australia (while continuing to offer a police package for the FWD Impala) and Chrysle r sells pursuit Chargers. Police department purchasing officials, though, are apparently opting to buy SUVs instead of the new cop cars.

The first wrongful death lawsuit concerning the sudden acceleration of Toyota cars to go to trial has started with opening arguments. According to Bloomberg, the lawyer for Noriko Uno’s family said that Toyota knew that their gas pedals could get stuck and that the company was liable for her death because Uno’s 2006 Camry did not have a brake override system. The Toyota that Uno, 66 at the time of her death, was hit by a car that ran a stop sign. Her Toyota subsequently accelerated down the wrong side of the road for 30 seconds before hitting a tree, causing her death.

GM tabbed the automaker’s head transmission engineer to be interim chief of the firm’s global powertrain operations while the company conducts a search for a permanent replacement for Sam Winegarden, who was fired in the wake of an emissions testing scandal in India.

Jim Lanzon, 62, is currently vice president of GM, global transmissions, a position he’s held for 11 years and had an important role in negotiating the recently announced agreement between GM and Ford Motor Co. over jointly developing new 9- and 10-speed automatic transmissions. Like Winegarden, Lanzon has been a longtime GM employee.

Tavera SUVs at GM India assembly plant

Automotive News is reporting that Sam Winegarden, GM’s vice president for global engine engineering, the company’s highest ranking powertrain executive, was fired this week along with about 10 other GM Powertrain employees in the U.S. and India, over cheating in GM’s emissions testing at its Indian subsidiary.

The regulatory and verbal war between France and Germany over Mercedes-Benz’s refusal to switch to the R1234yf air conditioning refrigerant has escalated. After a French court ordered a 10 day stay, lifting that country’s ban on R134a equpped A Class, B Class, CLA and SL cars made since June, Daimler expressed confidence that the French government would abide by that ruling. That confidence was apparently badly placed because the French government has now invoked a “safeguard procedure” of the EU that allows member countries to act unilaterally to avoid a serious risk involving the environment, public health or traffic safety, reinstituing the ban. Daimler promised that it would continue fighting to allow the sale of those cars in France. It claims that the new refrigerant is dangerously flammable and toxic.

Visionary Vehicles’ envisioned dealership

Malcolm Bricklin’s company, V Cars (formerly Visionary Vehicles), was awarded $2 million by a Detroit jury in U.S. District court. The lawsuit was filed after Bricklin’s failed effort to set up a joint venture with Chery to produce Chinese made cars for the North American market. The jury ruled that KCA Engineering, a company founded by former Visionary executive Dennis Gore while he was still an employee of Bricklin’s startup, had committed fraud as well as a number of other misdeeds. When Gore was first hired by Visionary, Bricklin said it was because of his expertise with Asian car manufacturers.

Noriko Uno was killed in 2009 when her 2006 Toyota Camry sudenly accelerated to 100 MPH, resulting in her leaving the roadway and hitting a telephone pole and a tree in the median. Today, jury selection begins in a California lawsuit filed by her survivors.

Last week, the European Union Commission’s Technical Committee on Motor Vehicles meeting affirmed France’s refusal to allow Mercedes-Benz to sell cars using R134a refrigerant, and alsom indicated that other EU countries may block the sale of those cars as well. Now, Honeywell International, which owns the rights to R1234yf, (the only refrigerant currently approved by the EU) said that Daimler’s concerns are unfounded. M-B had run tests showing that under certain circumstances, leaks in the air conditioning system could cause underhood fires, and that when it burns, R1234yf produces poisonous hydrogen flouride gas.

A U.S. District Court judge gave final approval of the settlement of a lawsuit filed against Toyota on behalf of owners of Toyota vehicles who claimed that the car maker’s recalls related to unintended acceleration caused their cars to depreciate in value.

TTAC has recently addressed the issue of police using scanning technology to read license plates and then store their street locations. When the story broke, it centered on a few counties in Northern California, but the American Civil Liberties Union has just released documents that show that the practice is widespread across the United States and that few of the police agencies or private companies that are scanning license plates and storing that data, making it possible to retroactively track drivers, have any meaningful rules in place to protect drivers’ privacy. There are few controls on how the collected data is accessed and used. The documents reveal that many police departments keep the information on millions of people’s locations for years, or even indefinitely, whether or not they are suspected of a crime. Data on tens of millions of drivers is being logged and stored.

Ally Financial, what used to be known as the General Motors Acceptance Corporation, GMAC, before GM’s bankruptcy and bailout, itself received over $17 billion from the U.S. Treasury during the bailouts of 2009. On Tuesday the company said that it was looking into options on how to repay that money and comply with the Federal Reserves’ latest stress tests for financial institutions. Ally is 74% owned by Treasury and it is trying to buy back some taxpayer-owned stock and reach an agreement with the Fed on its capital structure (known as the “Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review”) so it can offer stock in an IPO. Ally had originally planned on a 2011 IPO but having to resolve claims against its bankrupt Residential Capital mortgage unit delayed that. ResCap hopes to be out of bankruptcy by 2014.

Prematurely pronounced dead, trucks are back in favor. They never went out of style with one eclectic clientele: Thieves. “Thieves continue to target large pickups and large SUVs at higher rates than other vehicles,” says the Highway Loss Data Institute (HLDI) that keeps track of these things. “No. 1 on this year’s list, the four-wheel-drive F-250 crew cab, has a claim frequency of 7 per 1,000 insured vehicle years, or nearly 6 times the average for all vehicles.”

When Spyker sued GM for mucking with Saab’s failed deal with Youngman, and wanted $3 billion for its trouble, TTAC’s resident garage lawyers did not give Spyker big odds.

Yesterday, the suit was thrown out.

Everybody’s talking about abuse of police power nowadays, but what are you doing about it?

If the answer is not “crush eight cop cars with your tractor then drive away”, you’re not doing as much as Roger Pion.

Edited to congratulate the B&B and to add information

The American justice system has shown a large degree of overreach in the not so distant past, punishing or shaking down foreign companies for misdeeds performed on foreign soils by foreign perpetrators on foreign victims. This is not a matter of right or wrong. It is a matter of jurisdiction and sovereignty. Enough is enough, says the U.S. Supreme Court and decided to hear Daimler’s appeal against a decision by a San Francisco court that workers or relatives of workers at an Argentina-based plant operated by Mercedes-Benz, a wholly owned subsidiary of Daimler, can sue for alleged human rights abuses performed by Daimler in the 1970s in collusion with Argentina’s then military junta. Daimler had been on the receiving end of judicial overreach in the past.

15 percent of traffic fines issued in Dubai every day are for driving at speeds in excess of 130 m.p.h.. That’s why Dubai’s police now has a Lamborghini Aventador that can do 216 m.p.h.

It’s now apparently legal to have self-driving cars in California and Nevada, and this should spread across the country rapidly. One industry report predicts we’ll have them by 2019. For the purposes of this article, let’s assume that the costs will come down slowly but surely and adoption will grow quickly. Let’s jump all the way to the end point, where self-driving technology is safe, reliable, and mandatory (yes, mandatory), just like seat belts, air bags, and so forth.

Someone I know tried to cut down the boredom of daylong drives up and down I95 with roaches in his car – the smokeable kind. Not that the drives became any shorter, they just appeared longer. With the relaxed marijuana laws in Washington state and Colorado comes a fresh look at how to handle dopers behind the wheel. Dopes behind the wheel are easy to gauge, dopers not so much.

If a Pennsylvania company will get its say, Ford needs to equip its F150 truck with carburetors. Or, at the very least, with something else than its current fuel injection system. TMC Fuel Injection System LLC of Wayne, Pennsylvania, sued Ford for allegedly infringing a TMC patent, Reuters says.

A Florida cop was fired and arrested after brutalizing a woman in front of his own dash cam. A routine review of dash cam video revealed that he brutally slammed a woman into her car.