Turnpike has $33M in uncollected tollsHARRISBURG — Pennsylvania Turnpike officials say their inability to sufficiently punish toll violators helped contribute to more than $33 million in outstanding and uncollected tolls.At locations where there are no people to accept tolls and there are no gates, many people choose to go through E-ZPass lanes and skip the toll. Workers at the Monroeville Interchange said they can have up to a hundred violators every day, and that includes only drivers in the afternoon rush hour.There are 1.5 million violators across the state each year, KDKA-TV reported Monday.“When you talk about 1.5 million people and we only collect 70 percent of those, those are not good numbers,” Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission Chairman Sean Logan said.While other states can invalidate a vehicle’s registration, fine violators and even jail them, Logan said Pennsylvania violators are simply billed for a toll from the furthest point, plus a $25 processing fee. If the commission receives no response after the first or second notice, the case is then handed to a collections agency, which is not allowed to report non-payments to credit bureaus.The turnpike wrote off $3.7 million in uncollected tolls at the end of the fiscal year in May.Logan said the number of uncollected tolls will increase significantly if the turnpike continues to toll electronically without the ability to enforce the fees.

Takata fined $70M over air bag defectsDETROIT — U.S. auto safety regulators fined Japan’s Takata Corp. $70 million Tuesday for concealing evidence for years that its air bags are prone to explode — a defect linked to eight deaths and more than 100 injuries worldwide.Under an agreement with the government, Takata will phase out manufacture of air bag inflators that use ammonium nitrate, the propellant blamed for the explosions. It also agreed to a schedule over the next two years for replacing many of the devices already in use.And unless it can prove they are safe, Takata may have to recall all its inflators.The company admitted that it knew for years that the inflators were defective but that it fended off recalls by failing to tell the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Honda profits up despite recallTOKYO — Honda reported a quarterly profit of $1 billion today, up 7 percent from its revised result from the year before, even as costs of a massive recall related to defective air bags dented the boost from healthy sales.Tokyo-based Honda said it will stop buying air bag inflators from Takata for models now under development.The maker of the Odyssey minivan, Civic sedan and Asimo robot had recall-related expenses totaling $723 million for the quarter. July-September sales rose nearly 16 percent to $30 billion.The automaker said it revised past earnings because it adopted International Financial Reporting Standards, a set of accounting rules being promoted globally by the International Accounting Standards Board as more transparent and accountable.