If you’ve ever felt that the service centre at your local car dealership was not dealing straight with you, there’s a good chance you were right, according to a recent investigation carried out by Choice magazine. Results announced today show that 90 percent of dealerships tested failed to find at least one of four safety flaws intentionally planted in each of four different makes of cars.

GM’s sales worldwide dipped 0.6 percent over the first quarter, but this was largely because most of the gains made in new markets were offset by a sharp drop in GM’s North American sales tally, which fell 10 percent compared to Q1 2007 sales.

It has taken 45 years to achieve, but Toyota’s Australian operation has built its 2,500,000th car - a Toyota Camry Grande. Over its history, Toyota has built nine models in Australia, from its start with the tiny Tiara in 1963 to building nearly 150,000 Camrys and Aurions locally last year - the best year on record.

Subaru’s image is centered on its all-wheel drive technology, rally-car heritage and niche status. Toyota’s brand is built on affordable, every day cars that are anything but niche. Still, the unlikely partnership is soon to bear fruit. The new joint-venture, which was announced earlier this month, will see Subaru and Toyota sell rebadged versions of a jointly developed sports car with Subaru responsible for the engineering work and Toyota handling design.

Toyota has confirmed its upcoming Lexus LF-A supercar will contest the Nurburgring 24 hour endurance challenge – dubbed the 36th ADAC Zurich 24h Race 2008 – in Germany next month.

This will be the first public debut of the new supercar although details about the final production model are expected to be kept secret.

Carmakers are faced with a number of options for alternative fuel motoring but at this stage it’s still anyone’s guess as to what will be the dominant fuel source of the future. That’s why most of them are hedging their bets, developing a number of different technologies in the hope that one of them will be the right one.

Fuel prices continue their inexorable climb and emissions taxes are growing at a similar rate, driving the people that decide which cars will make it into fleet service to explore less-thirsty alternatives to the current crop of fleet standards like the Holden Commodore, Ford Falcon and Toyota Corolla.

News of a possible tie-up between Subaru and Toyota to produce a rear-wheel drive sports car that could be the successor to the much-beloved Celica has been circulating through the industry for some time, but today it’s official: Subaru and Toyota are partnering to produce a RWD sports car - though the ‘Celica’ name hasn’t been mentioned.

Australia’s once-protectionist economic policy toward the auto industry has been supplanted in recent decades with a very open one - too open, some claim, because the government has failed to secure truly reciprocal trade agreements.