New York, Nov. 22: Nearly half of Americans say they are ready to let the Big Three automakers go out of business rather than rescue the sputtering car companies with taxpayer dollars, a new poll shows.

According to the New York Post, voters believe that the Detroit auto industry - which includes GM, Ford and Chrysler - have priced themselves out of the car market with labor contracts that are more expensive than what Japanese and other foreign companies pay workers at American assembly plants.

New York  - Suffering US automaker General Motors Corp will again cut its production, the firm said Friday.

It will add a week to holiday production halts at four plants and another factory in Canada that was slated to be shuttered will close two months earlier than planned, Bloomberg financial news reported.

Its sales have fallen 20 per cent for the year and dived 45 per cent in October.

Belgrade - The last of the Yugoslav-era cars, known for their lack of reliability as much as tasteless design and crude unworkmanlike finish, rolled off the assembly line in Serbia on Friday, nearly two decades after Yugoslavia itself fell apart.

Zastava, the car factory in the central Serbian town Kragujevac, has effectively ceased to exist and, following a massive investment by the Italian giant Fiat, is to begin making a modern small car.

Launched in 1953 in a country recovering from a destructive war while trying to implement its own form of socialism, Zastava was to prove that Yugoslavia could build a car of its own.

Los Angeles - These days the big news in the US auto industry seems to be coming from Washington where Detroit's "Big Three" automakers are begging politicians for a few million greenbacks to save their ailing companies.

But the real green in the auto industry was on display at the Los Angeles auto show, where the focus was on exactly the kind of environmentally friendly cars that American automakers so studiously ignored for so many years, to their ultimate detriment.

The largest Indian passenger car maker Maruti Suzuki, launched a new car model A-Star on Wednesday. A-Star is developed at the Manesar facility of the company and it is the fifth model in A2 segment. The car would also be exported in Europe, Middle East, Latin America, Asia, Australia and Africa. The company has set a target to sell 50,000 units of A-star in Indian market while one lakh units would be sold in international markets. The company is optimistic to export 2 lakh units by 2010-11.

Toyota, major Japanese Automobile Manufacturer, has put the launch of Prius, the world's first mass-produced hybrid vehicle on hold, owing to a steep duty structure and inability to fix a competitive price.

Toyota was working on bringing Prius at a price tag of Rs 20-22 lakh. But Honda is already offering the Civic Hybrid at Rs 13.36 lakhs, a price which makes Prius a bad deal for the end customer. Honda recently reduced price of Civic Hybrid by Rs 8 lakh due to low demand.