Posts Tagged ‘ Audi ’

Week Adjourned: 8.6.10

August 6th, 2010. By admin

Top Class Actions

Could Say He was Over his Overdraft Fees. I think these guys deserve a Business As Usual, As Usual award. Commerce Bancshares, a Kansas City-based financial institution operating simply as Commerce Bank in the state of Missouri is being sued by a client who claims the company’s bank overdraft fees violate state law.

The plaintiff, Harold J. Joseph Jr., has accused the banking chain of manipulating the sequence of debit card purchases in an attempt to maximize the number and size of overdraft fees that they can impose.

Any of this sound familiar? Excessive bank overdraft fees lawsuits have been filed and/or settled against a variety of banks, including Wells Fargo, Bank of America, M&T Bank and Wachovia. The lawsuits allege that banks charge excessive overdraft fees when customers’ accounts go into overdraft. They further allege that the banks use a number of unethical practices to push their accounts into overdraft, such as misrepresenting customers’ account balances and reordering debits and credits to accounts.

New regulations that will take effect by mid-August seek to rectify this problem by making overdraft protection an opt-in service and by regulating the terms of the action.

FYI: Information about Commerce Bancshares second quarter earnings were posted in a press release July 21. Those of you hit with excessive overdraft fees may find the numbers interesting…”Commerce Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: AstraZeneca, Audi, Commerce Bancshares, Overdraft fees, Seroquel, Volkswagon
Posted in Emerging Issues, Week Adjourned | 4648No Comments »Week+Adjourned%3A+8.6.102010-08-06+21%3A06%3A20admin

Biggest News from Detroit Car Show: Driving’s Become a Distraction

January 15th, 2010. By Hunter West

Driver's Ed 2015? "There's your Aplusk Twitter alert!"

Get ready for a new round of lawsuits everybody. Because the nation’s roadways are about to become a lot more dangerous.

Consider this statement from an automotive industry engineer:

“Customers are expecting more and more, especially business people who expect to find in the car what they find in their smart phone,” said Mathias Halliger, the chief engineer for Audi’s multimedia interface systems, in comments published in the New York Times last week. “We should give them the same or a better experience.”

Experience?

Really…

Ford SYNC multimedia system

Let’s get one thing straight. Driving is not a video game. Driving is not a virtual ‘experience’. Driving is being in control of a hurtling goliath of metal weighing several tons hurtling down a road shared by other vehicles, or pedestrians hurrying across an intersection. Kids on bikes. Old men with their walkers.

It’s bad enough that car stereos are more complex, now that you can plug your iPod or mp3 player into the system. Now there are GPS systems that serve to distract drivers even further from the task at hand—which is driving safely.

Many states and cities have banned talking on a cell phone unless a Bluetooth or other hands-free device is used. Texting while driving is so stupid; its stupidity is a foregone conclusion. That’s been banned too, in many areas across the country. As the bans step up, safety advocates have been breathing a sigh of relief.

Well for them—and for the rest of us—this horror movie has just become a whole lot scarier, with automotive Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Audi, Auto Accidents, Car Accidents, Car Crash, Ford
Posted in Accidents, Defective Products | 24312 Comments »2010-01-15+17%3A53%3A29Hunter+West