That’s what U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood is weighing, Bloomberg reports. LaHood thinks motorists are so distracted by their cell phones that bans on texting don’t go far enough.

There are already restrictions in 30 states, but LaHood goes much farther. He even has Ford’s Sync in-car communications systems and General Motor’s OnStar in his sights.

read the rest on usatoday.com

We caught up with David for a brief chat on Monday morning and when asked how it felt to be voted number one as the most influential auto recycler of 2009 he replied, “I was in shock!  I love the business and love all the great people involved in it.” “It is a huge honor and over at Standard Auto Wreckers we are committed to helping our fellow recyclers across North America and the world.”

As reported in the New York Times, a crazy legal action makes you understand the adage “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.”

And now a Chrysler dealership in Hopkins, Minn., is using that concept to sue a customer over a deal it says she should have known was an error.

In October, Tammie Townsend of Golden Valley, Minn., bought the 2007 Chrysler Pacifica that she had been leasing for two years. She signed the papers to convert the lease to a sale, agreeing to pay $11,639, or about $6,000 less than the car’s Blue Book value, James Eli Shiffer wrote in The Minneapolis Star Tribune on Saturday.

And there’s the rub. Walser Chrysler says that the price was “an administrative error,” The Star Tribune reported. The dealership contacted Ms. Townsend two weeks after the purchase to say that it wanted an additional $7,000 or she needed to return the car.

“She was told several times what the [correct] price was,” said Doug Sprinthall, vehicle operations director for Walser Automotive Group. “We made a clerical error.”

In fact, Mr. Sprinthall said, the dealership would have reimbursed Ms. Townsend if it had accidentally overcharged her.

But Ms. Townsend, whose husband recently lost his job, doesn’t see it that way.

“You can’t sell someone something and then come back and say: ‘Whoops, I made a mistake. You have to pay more,’ ” said Ms. Townsend, 40, a hairstylist who lives in Golden Valley.

Ms. Townsend said in a telephone interview on Monday that since the article about her situation appeared in The Star Tribune, she had been inundated with phone calls from people — “even people I don’t know,” she said — supporting her.

The dealership has been getting phone calls, too, and those calls have also been backing Ms. Townsend, Mr. Sprinthall said on Tuesday.

But he said some of those callers had misconceptions, thinking that the deal had been a straight sale. But it was a lease-buyback arrangement, he said. So there are essentially two contacts — the original contract for the lease, which set a purchase price for the car, and the contract for the actual purchase.

“We’re attempting to negotiate this out with Tammie right now,” Mr. Sprinthall said, although Ms. Townsend said in an e-mail message on Tuesday that she had not heard anything about that from her lawyer.

“We don’t make a habit of suing customers,” he said. “I think we’ll work it out, and we’ll move on.”

It seems the entries for Standard Auto Wreckers and Car-Part exchanged a few words before the big race.  Rumor is Green-Gold Thunder started talking smack first, whispering things like, “you look like you were born in a junkyard” and “get ready to eat my radioactive dust” – Car-Part High Octane replied with, “hey sissy, at least I don’t glow in the dark”.

In the end every horse that participated was a winner because all racing proceeds went to benefit charity!

We have some really great topics over there and I would like to encourage our members and visitors to swing-on-over and contribute!

Thanks again to everyone that has helped this partnership become such a great success!!!

Workers at the Sunnyvale recycling station ran giddily about early Tuesday morning, catching the cash and stuffing the money inside a plastic bucket. They had even found a body among the hundreds of thousands of tons of recyclables sorted at the SMaRT plant over the years. But cash? Buckets of it? Never.

“It just kept coming,” Geronimo Martinez, 57, a supervisor at the station, said Wednesday, “more and more. It was crazy. I thought at first it was a joke.” All told, they retrieved $3,200 — and now Sunnyvale police are sorting out the mystery of how hundreds of Ben Franklins ended up in the trash. Sunnyvale spokesman John Pilger said the money was in a load of recyclables that came from Mountain View. Could it be drug money? Stolen from a bank? Someone’s life savings? If it’s yours, good luck claiming it.

Pilger said the money has been booked with the city’s Department of Public Safety. If the cash goes unclaimed for 90 days, it will be turned over to the city’s general fund.  That is a bit of a downer, I would like to see half go to charity and the other half go to the workers themselves.

The Prius hybrid automobile is popular for its fuel efficiency, but its electric motor and battery guzzle rare earth metals, a little-known class of elements found in a wide range of gadgetry and consumer goods.  That makes Toyota’s market-leading gasoline-electric hybrid car and other similar vehicles vulnerable to a supply crunch predicted by experts as China, the world’s dominant rare earths producer, limits exports while global demand grows.

Worldwide demand for rare earths, covering 15 entries on the periodic table of elements, is expected to exceed supply by some 40,000 tonnes annually in several years unless major new production sources are developed. One promising U.S. source is a rare earths mine expected to reopen in California by 2012.

A Toyota spokeswoman in Los Angeles declined comment on its resource development plans. But media accounts and industry blogs have reported recently that Toyota has looked at rare earth possibilities in Canada and Vietnam.

Canada’s own Retire your Ride program is an initiative of The Government of Canada, Clean Air Foundation and its partners, designed to enable people to get their high-polluting cars off the road and reward them for doing so. The program is committed to improving air quality by responsibly recycling vehicles and aims to retire at least 50,000 vehicles per year until March 31, 2011.

And this is all fine and dandy and I am a big supporter of anything that encourages folks to help the environment and it even puts a few bucks in their pockets. But there is a big problem when it comes to the fact that these cars need to be running and insured – and they only get $300 for a car in that condition.

What that means (and I know because I was in this situation with my 1994 Concorde that had only 75k kilometers on it) is: I have to get rid of my current car that is serving its purpose of getting me around to work and play but I only get a paltry $300 which won’t even cover one month of my new car payment of $400 for a Honda Civic. So really what is my incentive? Now if it was like the USA and I was getting a $3,500 discount off my new car I would say whoa, that pays for 10 months of my new car and maybe my old one would be dead by then anyways.

It is good to see various car companies coming out with incentives above the $300 the government is offering but to make this program a ‘real’ success I would like to see the minimum amount raised to $900 or even $1,200 for each car brought in through the program.

The ‘Cash for Clunkers’ program now renamed CARS was a huge success in the USA because it offered a real, worthwhile incentive to get old cars off the road, now it is time for the Canadian government to step up and offer more to make the Retire your Ride program even more successful.