Eideard

After floodwaters receded at the Honda factory in Ayutthaya province

In an effort to prove that no flood damaged vehicles will be sold to customers, the Honda factory in Thailand’s Ayutthaya province began destroying over 1,000 cars. The factory was one of the hardest hit by the several months of record flooding, which only receded a few weeks ago. The devastating floods were the worst the country experienced in 50 years and left over 700 people dead. According to AFP, the scrapping process is expected to take one month.

Honda’s production was disrupted from the floods and only recently returned to normal. According to AP, American Honda Executive Vice President John Mendel says it will not be until March that dealers will be fully restocked.

Aerial images of the submerged cars in the Honda lot provided powerful visuals of the effects of the severe flooding on businesses…The area is home to large production centers for global car and computer industries. According to Bloomberg, Toyota had to suspend local production of its Camry and Prius lines, and Apple faced delays in parts used for Mac computers. Western Digital shares hit a year low in October and is now working to regain their losses, according to Reuters.

Not that anyone in the United States would have to worry about buying a car leftover from a flood, eh?

To arrest one foreign car-making executive under Alabama’s new tough immigration laws may be regarded as a misfortune; to arrest a second looks like carelessness.

A judge has acted to put a Japanese employee of Honda Motor Company out of his misery by dismissing immigration charges against him, three days after he was booked under Alabama’s new immigration laws that have been billed as the most swingeing in America. Ichiro Yada is one of about 100 Japanese managers of the company on assignment in southern state.

Yada was stopped in Leeds, Alabama, at a checkpoint set up by police to catch unlicenced drivers. He was ticketed on the spot, despite the fact that he showed an international driver’s licence, a valid passport and a US work permit.

Bamalama coppers probably think an international driver’s license is just for driving outside Dixie.

Key parts of the new immigration law, HB56, came into effect in late September, including the driving provisions. Under them, the police are required to check up on the immigration status of anyone they stop who they suspect of being in the country illegally…

Yada is the second foreign car executive to fall foul of the new law. Last month police officers arrested a German director of Mercedes-Benz for failing to carry a valid driver’s licence. The move exposed Alabama to widespread criticism and ridicule…

The St Louis-based Post-Dispatch newspaper revelled in Alabama’s embarrassment by publishing an open letter to foreign car companies encouraging them to pack their bags and move to the rival car-producing state of Missouri.

“We are the Show Me State, not the Show Me Your Papers State,” it wrote, telling auto bosses: “You’ve got two choices. Either ask your executives to carry their immigration papers at all times, or move to a state that understands gemüchlichkeit…”

Between redneck idiots, Tea Party idiots and the new Republikan Party idiots, freedom to travel in a free country is only a memory in the Confederate States of America. That includes all the old boundaries plus the states outside of Dixie run by the latest clan of fools dedicated to voodoo economics and ethnic hatreds to match.

Honda Motor Company has announced its 2020 CO2 emissions reduction targets to address climate change and energy issues. Honda said its global environmental slogan will be: “Blue Skies for Our Children.”

Honda has been pursuing its own environmental targets; in 2006, Honda set a goal to reduce global CO2 emissions from use of its motorcycles, automobiles and power products by 10% by the end of 2010 compared to year 2000 levels. In 2010, the goal was attained by all products.

Honda said it has now set a goal to reduce CO2 emissions from its global products by 30% by the end of 2020 compared to year 2000 levels. Furthermore, in addition to reducing CO2 emissions during production and supply chain, Honda said it will strengthen its efforts to realize reductions in CO2 emissions through its entire corporate activities. Honda will also strengthen its efforts in advancing technologies in the area of total energy management, to reduce CO2 emissions through mobility and people’s everyday lives.

The new global environmental slogan and symbol will be used with Honda’s internal and external environmental activities and communications around the world.

Anyone surprised to see an automobile company with higher environmental standards than Congress? Not so incidentally, one with a record of delivering on what it promises.

Already the undisputed leader in the gas-electric vehicle market, Asahi (via Reuters) reports the Japanese automaker is planning to launch a new compact hybrid based on the next-gen Yaris platform and due to go on sale in Japan for $15,760 by 2011. That bargain-basement price will be made possible by a low-cost version of Toyota’s Hybrid Synergy Drive, used in the current Prius and featuring a downsized four-cylinder engine that may make it even more fuel efficient than its larger sibling.

In addition to production plants in its home market of Japan, the report indicates that Toyota may also assemble the compact hybrid in France for the European market. This news comes just weeks after Toyota officially announced its intentions to build a hybrid version of its Auris hatchback in the United Kingdom. We certainly wouldn’t be surprised if Toyota imported either of the new hybrids to the States in light of the success it’s seen with the Prius.

It’s expected that the new Yaris-based hybrid will go head-to-head with Honda’s recently announced Fit Hybrid. While Toyota’s interest in hybrid technology is anything but new, the fuel-saving models have just recently earned the top sales spots in Japan and are expected to be increasingly important in over the next few years as the latest round of strict emissions and fuel economy requirements are implemented worldwide.

Another couple of choices welcome in our family for certain. My wife’s ancient Volvo is too old and gets gas mileage too good for the Cash for Clunkers program. If and when it croaks we’ll probably turn it into a planter. Not unknown in our community.

Having a couple of affordable hybrid options for commuting and errands covers 99% of our time spent on motorized wheels. Though I think I’d still prefer she have something with all the cushy bits of a Prius – more choices is what it’s all about.

A report presented recently to the US Congress warned that sat-nav – satellite navigation – systems could start to fail from next year as the US Air Force’s satellites deteriorate. It is yet another episode in our long and fraught relationship with in-car navigation – a phenomenon that is more ancient than you might think.

Today’s sat-navs are really a number of older inventions cobbled together. In fact, mechanical in-car navigation stretches back further than most people would think – 100 years to be precise.

Honda’s Electro Gyrocator was the first computerised in-car navigation system. Developed in Japan, it was…a solid-state system that could not respond to the changing narrative of the drive. So if you went wrong the errors soon stacked up and, unlike a broken watch, it would not even be right some of the time.

However, unbeknown to most motorists, the technology for a real-time system already existed. The US Defense Department had developed GPS (global positioning by satellite) in response to the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957, but it wasn’t until the 1980s that President Reagan made it available for civilian use.

The other technological piece of the sat-nav jigsaw was digital mapping, which was pioneered by a tiny British firm, NextBase, which grew out of a circle of friends who met as teenagers, programming some of the earliest home PCs at a school holiday computer camp in Northampton…

The technology for sat-nav, in other words, was around for several years before it was developed. All these different inventions simply needed to be brought together…

We still don’t quite trust the electronic voice to get us where we want to go. Since before even the arrival of the car, people have worried that maps sever us from real places, render the world untouchable, reduce it to a bare outline of Cartesian lines and intersections. Sat-nav feeds into this long-held fear that the cold-blooded modern world is destroying local knowledge, that roads no longer lead to real places but around and through them.

You can sense it in all those fearful newspaper headlines about motorists guided by their sat-navs to the edges of cliffs or deposited in village ponds. We may have grown to rely on in-car navigation, but it will be a long while before we learn to love it.

Cripes. If I was still on the road, I’d have one in my car in an instant.

I’ve used my old handheld GPS – in conjunction with Google Earth – to retrace trails that go back 500 years. We build tools to aid our lives, our knowledge.

Toyota, which has dominated the market for gasoline-electric cars so far, is looking to take back the crown after Honda’s new Insight became the first hybrid ever to top the best-sellers’ list in Japan last month.

“The hybrid market is going to be one of the fastest-growing segments in the world,” said JPMorgan Securities auto analyst Takaki Nakanishi. “With the global economy in a recession, luxury and large cars are not selling but fuel-conscious cars are in fact growing. Toyota’s earnings performance is hurting right now, and they can’t afford to lose the lead in this market”.

Introducing the third-generation Prius, Executive Vice President Akio Toyoda said the upgraded model…costs about $3,000 less than the previous version…

Although gasoline prices have nearly halved since peaking last July, automakers expect growing interest in the fuel-saving technology with consumers continuing to trade in big SUVs in favor of small cars, even in the United States.

By 2018, JPMorgan Securities expects roughly one in every 10 cars to be a hybrid, with global sales reaching 9.96 million vehicles as more brands such as Daimler’s Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen, as well as General Motors Corp’s plug-in Chevy Volt, join the market…

The new Prius will start at $21,620, or at least 300,000 yen less than what executives had originally said the car would cost.

With an eye on competing with the Insight, Toyota will also take the unprecedented move of…selling the entry-level grade of the previous Prius in Japan at the same price as the Insight’s $19,190.

The about-face came after Honda’s Insight became an instant hit after going on sale in Japan in early February. Honda sold nearly 10,500 Insights in April, more than double its target of 5,000 units a month.

Competition is good. Competition is fun. Competition is something that both Honda and Toyota know all about.

True – it ain’t going to be a bed of roses for management-types; but, it should help out us ordinary garden-variety consumers and that’s who I really care about.

Regardless of whether you’re talking politics or automotive technologies, the voting and driving public often gravitates to what’s new and fresh.

This herd mentality suggests that there’s hope in what’s new simply because it’s new. Focusing on automotive technology, the green trend AOL Autos identified at the recent 2009 Detroit Auto Show seems to be pushing buyers into two camps: diesel or hybrid.

But we’ll let you in on a secret: The traditional four-stroke internal combustion engine isn’t dead, nor is it irrelevant to the green movement. Not by a long shot.

The initial revelation is that efficient gas engine-powered cars ain’t dead. Wow. Whoda thunk it?

All I have to do is look out the window at the number of Mitsubishi Eclipses, Honda Fits, Toyota Yarisi, VW Beetles making it down the street. All efficient. All a pretty good return on economy and performance vs. cost. People in the hinterlands ain’t as dumb as Detroit thinks they are.

So let’s assume you’re interested in driving green. By this we mean you want a fuel-efficient vehicle that reduces your carbon footprint. Today, the celebrities of the green movement are diesel- and hybrid-powered vehicles.

Here’s a quick review of these different technologies. The defining characteristic of the diesel engine is its compression ignition cycle; this means that the engine uses ultra-high compression ratios in the combustion chamber to ignite the fuel-air charge (gasoline-burning internal combustion engines use spark plugs to fire up).

The defining characteristic of a hybrid is that these vehicles use a combination of electric motors and internal combustion engines (working in tandem) to propel the vehicle.

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Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

Honda Motor Co said on Monday its new Insight model became the first hybrid to be crowned Japan’s best-selling car last month. The Insight went on sale in Japan in early February as Honda’s first real attempt to challenge Toyota Motor Corp’s dominance in the gasoline-electric hybrid segment.

A ranking of Japan’s top 30 excluding 660cc minivehicles announced by the Japan Automobile Dealers Association showed the Insight selling 10,481 units in April, catapulting it from 21st place in March.

The car, whose main sell is its affordability with a price tag starting at $19,190, was followed by Honda’s Fit subcompact.

Toyota’s Vitz subcompact ranked third. Other Honda and Toyota models comprised the top 10 list.

Toyota’s flagship hybrid, the Prius, came in 21st ahead of the launch of its successor third-generation version on May 18.

First month numbers don’t always mean a boatload of beans – as we all know. Looking forward to the first full quarter and second quarter of sales to see if the sell holds up.

Thanks, Josie Garthwaite

Dog-crazy Americans will soon be able to buy a pet-friendly car with a cushioned dog bed in the trunk, fitted with a built-in water bowl and fan and a ramp to help less agile dogs climb in.

With the help of a rescue dog named Sammy, Japanese car maker Honda Motor Co unveiled the pet friendly version of its Element utility vehicle at the New York Auto Show.

It features easy-wash seat covers, a fitted dog bed with restraints to keep Sammy safe in the event of a crash, and a paw logo on the side. Honda said the car would go on sale across the United States from the fall of this year.

This sort of reminds me of the time a few years ago when I went to the store to pick up a few things. When I came out, I suddenly realized that the buggy was full of things for the cat, but there was nothing for me.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures

Jenson Button says he and teammate Rubens Barrichello will not be underestimating their F1 rivals after a triumphant 1-2 in the season-opening Australian Grand Prix. The Brawn GP pair dominated Sunday’s race at Albert Park, leading many to predict they will take a stranglehold on this season’s title race.

Who’s predicting that? Some ninny who never follows Formula One?

But Melbourne winner Button is warning against complacency…

“Rubens and I are both going to be very competitive, pushing each other very hard. But I’ve a feeling other teams are going to be on us very quickly, and when we get to a different type of circuit, maybe in Malaysia, some other cars which weren’t so competitive here will be.”

Sunday’s sweep of the first two places completed a fairytale recovery for a team which was rescued from bankruptcy by Ross Brawn and team chief Nick Fry after Honda pulled out of F1 late last year.

Not since 1954, when legendary five-time champion Juan Manuel Fangio led home Karl Kling for Mercedes in the French Grand Prix, has a team taken the top two places on their debut.

An exciting race. Including the disastrous crash 2 laps from the finish that took out Kubica and Vettel. Lewis Hamilton was moved to 3rd after a penalty on Trulli for passing while the safety car was out.

UPDATE: FIA back to normal, reversing earlier ruling on Trulli – DQ for Lewis Hamilton and reinstating Trulli’s 3rd place.