Showing posts with label car. Show all posts
Showing posts with label car. Show all posts
Friday, April 3, 2015
Monday, December 8, 2014
Tuesday, May 20, 2014
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
A Test of Smart Cars Gets Under Way
The following is
an excerpt from an article in
The New York Times
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
A Test of Smart Cars Gets Under Way
By BILL VLASIC
ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Federal regulators on Tuesday announced a yearlong “smart car” project to determine whether wireless communication between vehicles can improve safety on the nation’s highways.
Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said 3,000 cars, buses and trucks in this city near Detroit would be equipped with data recorders and a technology akin to Wi-Fi that can transmit information about accidents or hazardous traffic conditions.
Drivers in the connected vehicles will be warned, for example, of sudden changes in traffic patterns or potential collisions through data transmitted from similarly equipped cars and roadside devices.
Mr. LaHood said the $25 million study would yield data useful in deciding whether the government should require such crash avoidance technology in future vehicles.
For more, visit www.nytimes.com.
Saturday, August 18, 2012
Progressive’s Side of the Insurance Case That Blew Up on the Internet
The following is
an excerpt from an article in
The New York Times
Saturday, August 18, 2012
Progressive’s Side of the Insurance Case That Blew Up on the Internet
By RON LIEBER
It isn’t often that automobile insurance becomes the subject of nationwide outrage. So when it does happen, it’s worth a peek inside all our policies to figure out how they actually work and what the insurance companies are up to behind the scenes.
This week, a man named Matt Fisher took to his Tumblr site to call out Progressive, which insured his sister, Katie, two years ago when she died in a car accident. The company recently sent its lawyer to court — not to assist her estate but to argue that the driver of the other car, who had a suspended license and little insurance, was the innocent party.
Or, as Mr. Fisher put it, “My Sister Paid Progressive Insurance to Defend Her Killer in Court.”
The outrage on social media came swiftly, and it was brutal. Progressive’s initialpublic comments parsing the definition of “defendant” only opened up the company to further vitriol.
After several requests, I finally got Progressive to come to the phone and explain in detail, out loud and on the record, why it chose to fight Ms. Fisher’s family in court.
In the end, the saga of Ms. Fisher and her family isn’t just about whether Progressive made a needless mess of its reputation this week. And it’s not simply about whether everyone should drop their Progressive policies in protest either, as scores of people have threatened to do. We also need to take a close look at our own coverage and determine whether we have a fundamental misunderstanding of how our various auto insurance policies actually work.
Before @fishermatt became a social media phenomenon, he was a devastated older brother. His sister was just 24 when she died in Baltimore with two degrees from Johns Hopkins University to her name and nothing but promise in front of her.
The insurance machinery began its work relatively quickly. Ms. Fisher had $100,000 in liability coverage per person in this accident, and three people (and the lawyers negotiating for them) wanted a piece of it: a passenger in her car, the driver of the car that hit her and a passenger in that car.
Progressive sized up its legal risks. Three individuals thought Ms. Fisher had run a red light — the police officer who filed the accident report (but who did not witness it), Ms. Fisher’s passenger and the driver of the other vehicle. On the other hand, one eyewitness said that it was the other driver who ran the light.
At that point, Progressive chose to pay the liability claims. “If we determine that we shouldn’t pay any third parties, our insured can get sued and be responsible for any amount over the limit,” said Marcia Marsteller, the business leader in Progressive’s legal department for claims. “If we make the wrong call and don’t pay them and perhaps we should have, there is an issue for her estate.”
For more, visit www.nytimes.com.
Sunday, April 1, 2012
‘American Icon’ Examines Ford’s Rebound - Review
Excerpt from an article in
The New York Times
Sunday, April 01, 2012
‘American Icon’ Examines Ford’s Rebound - Review
By NANCY F. KOEHN
IN 2008, the Ford Motor Company seemed caught in a death spiral.
The company was hemorrhaging cash — more than $83 million a day — as the bottom fell out of the car market. In late autumn, Ford’s stock price bottomed out at $1.01.
Move forward three years. For 2011, Ford turned a net profit of $20 billion on sales of $128 billion. It distributed profit-sharing payments of about $6,200 to each of 41,600 eligible employees. On Friday, its stock closed at $12.48.
It is a remarkable comeback, all the more noteworthy because Ford was the only Big Three carmaker not bailed out by taxpayer money. In “American Icon: Alan Mulally and the Fight to Save Ford Motor Company” (Crown Business: $26), Bryce G. Hoffman recounts the turnaround in careful, often gripping detail.
A reporter for The Detroit News who has covered Ford for six years, Mr. Hoffman bases his account on more than 100 interviews and access to a range of company documents and personal notes of participants. (This access, Mr. Hoffman writes, came without Ford exerting any control over what he wrote.) A result is a compelling narrative that reads more like a thriller than a business book.
Make no mistake, this is a story, not a structured analysis of Ford’s transformation. Those looking for how-to lists will be disappointed. Instead, Mr. Hoffman offers Mr. Mulally’s vision for saving — and permanently changing — a giant American company. The author explores how Mr. Mulally and his team executed this vision, and what this meant on the dynamic, risky stage of the auto industry.
Saturday, March 17, 2012
Enthusiastic About Car Sharing? Your Insurer Isn’t
Excerpt from an article in
The New York Times
Saturday, March 17, 2012
Enthusiastic About Car Sharing? Your Insurer Isn’t
By RON LIEBER
At first glance, the idea of person-to-person car sharing appears to be the perfect solution to any number of problems.
People with idle cars (and most cars are idle most of the time) can make some money by renting them out to others who need a car sometimes but not often enough to own one. At some point, the world would ultimately need fewer cars and places to park them. It feels greener, and sharing is polite and all that.
But then the grown-ups show up, in the form of insurance companies. I called them this week in the wake of an announcement by RelayRides, a company with venture capital backing from both Google Ventures and General Motors, that it was taking its car-sharing service national.
And the grown-ups are not pleased. They want you to know that RelayRides insurance won’t be adequate in the event of a catastrophic accident and that your own insurance company may take away your insurance if it even hears that you are lending your car to someone in exchange for a few dollars an hour.
So anyone considering this sort of thing has to ask: Is the insurance industry overstating the risk of playing along with this cutting-edge idea, is RelayRides underestimating your exposure, or both?
RelayRides is one of several car-sharing services to arrive on the scene in recent years. Getaround is another start-up, as are JustShareIt and Wheelz, a company that the car-sharing giant Zipcar invested in last month.
They’re all part of a larger “collaborative consumption” movement that has captured the imagination of a growing number of civic-minded, Web-addicted people who want to both save some money and use a bit less of the world’s resources. This includes home-sharing services like Airbnb, office-sharing services like Loosecubes and general sharing sites like NeighborGoods and Rentabilities.
Friday, December 9, 2011
IRS Announces 2012 Mileage Rates
IRS Announces 2012 Standard Mileage Rates, Most Rates Are the Same as in July
WASHINGTON — The Internal Revenue Service today issued the 2012 optional standard mileage rates used to calculate the deductible costs of operating an automobile for business, charitable, medical or moving purposes.
Beginning on Jan. 1, 2012, the standard mileage rates for the use of a car (also vans, pickups or panel trucks) will be:
- 55.5 cents per mile for business miles driven
- 23 cents per mile driven for medical or moving purposes
- 14 cents per mile driven in service of charitable organizations
The rate for business miles driven is unchanged from the mid-year adjustment that became effective on July 1, 2011. The medical and moving rate has been reduced by 0.5 cents per mile.
The standard mileage rate for business is based on an annual study of the fixed and variable costs of operating an automobile. The rate for medical and moving purposes is based on the variable costs as determined by the same study. Independent contractor Runzheimer International conducted the study.
Taxpayers always have the option of calculating the actual costs of using their vehicle rather than using the standard mileage rates.
A taxpayer may not use the business standard mileage rate for a vehicle after using any depreciation method under the Modified Accelerated Cost Recovery System (MACRS) or after claiming a Section 179 deduction for that vehicle. In addition, the business standard mileage rate cannot be used for more than four vehicles used simultaneously.
These and other requirements for a taxpayer to use a standard mileage rate to calculate the amount of a deductible business, moving, medical or charitable expense are in Rev. Proc. 2010-51.
Notice 2012-01 contains the standard mileage rates, the amount a taxpayer must use in calculating reductions to basis for depreciation taken under the business standard mileage rate, and the maximum standard automobile cost that a taxpayer may use in computing the allowance under a fixed and variable rate plan.
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