Automotive Industry

Another Boeing has crashed killing everyone on board. Again, it was a new aircraft. Boeing have long had a problem with quality control which regulators have shrugged off or allowed jerry-rigged solutions to be implemented. Why are they allowed to get away with it? Has the airline industry not learned the lessons of the Ford Pinto?

Australia's home grown problems from banking to home insulation are pretty epic but the sheer scale of the Takata airbags scandal is, simply, monumental.

Tata's Jaguar Land Rover has had an amazing run: it's profits have been spectacular and it has produced (admittedly having inherited some excellent work from Ford which sold the company on the cusp of it turning around) some excellent cars. But it's had to cease production of its iconic Defender Land Rover (the company says that to keep it abreast of changes in regulation was not feasible) and it's alienated some of its core - and amazingly loyal - customer base. So, as a luxury car maker which makes some extraordinarily competent vehicles that farmers and soldiers don't want (would you take a power washer to the interior of a Range Rover? Of course not) it's also made a blunder of epic proportions.

China is working incredibly hard to reduce its pollution problems, especially in the north where cold air and industrial outputs conspire to produce thick, choking smog. A stroll around any Chinese city these days will demonstrate the country's commitment to the development and production of electric vehicles. There has been announced a ban on the production and/or import of petrol and diesel powered cars "in the near future" and some say this could be as early as from 2020, Aside from European and Japanese hybrids and the expected re-emergence of Volvo as an electric-only brand, what else has China been working on. We have photos...

The Geneva Motor Show is the place where many companies put out their wilder concept cars. But Airbus has turned up with a concept that actually works in practice but is likely to have even more hurdles to legal use than driverless cars. It's.. well, it defies simple description but one thing it isn't is a car that flies and another thing it isn't is a flying thing that travels on the roads.

Der Spiegel, a German newspaper, has spotted a footnote in the activities of the German parliament. A vote in the upper chamber, the Bundesrat, was the venue for a statement that it wished to see a ban on new petrol and diesel powered cars by 2030. Will it and can it take effect? Read on for one of life's most wonderful ironies - and no, it's not the one about Germany inventing the internal combustion engine. Don't worry, DTM lovers: you are not about to be cast into the wilderness.

There are those who misguidedly think that the world would be better off without lawyers. The UK legal profession's problem is that it has for so long abandoned its long-standing principles that it's become utterly rotten from within. Add in the deliberate destruction of the profession by successive governments and it's no surprise that there is a crisis from which few will emerge unscathed.

When business-orientated CISCO bought out its consumer-orientated competitor Linksys in 2003, there were a lot of questions. Now, a decade later, the unit is being sold to Belkin. More questions.

When DRB-HiCom took over Proton, there were fears that the bean-counters that descended on Hethel were there to close it down or sell it off. They played their cards close to their chests - but slowly, production numbers began to ramp up, potential purchasers of the company did not wander around the factory, a raft of legal threats (and stupidity) receded as the new management modestly and quietly found out what was wrong, where the money was bleeding from and stopped it and gave the workforce reassurances and support. The next phase is to find new buyers and the first stop after Milan, despite a penal tax rate on foreign cars, is DRB-HiCom / Proton's home: Malaysia.

The American Suzuki Corporation is to enter adminnistration (the Americans call it "Chapter 11 Bankruptcy"). It's SUVs and pickups are just not selling enough, despite innovation and quality.

In the 1970s, The Ford Motor Company had acres of open storage filled with made-in-England cars that they could not sell. The culture was to keep factories open albeit below capacity. Now they, and other manufacturers, are facing the same dilemma. Ford says it's not going to make the same mistake again.

In terms of seriousness, it's not in the league of the disastrous brake pedal problem a couple of years ago but the scale of the recall is so huge that it's a PR nightmare.

Dany Bahar has been fired from Lotus. No one is saying exactly why, at least not in public. But it all comes down to two things: money and ambition.

The SAAB saga (no, that's not a new model) is still not over, despite news that a sale has been arranged.

Polk, a market research company, has produced a report that says that many owners of hybrid cars won't make the same purchasing decision again.