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Toilet Bike Neo

When is number two really number one? When it fuels a custom motorcycle.

I don’t think you’ll be seeing this on American Chopper anytime soon, but perhaps it’s time for a new breed of bikes. Such as a talking poopcycle.

Leave it to the Japanese to create a motorbike fueled by feces. And if that wasn’t enough, it also talks and can write messages in the air. Japan’s largest toilet manufacturer, TOTO, is the force behind the world’s first poop powered motorcycle, the Toilet Bike Neo.

This far out invention features a talking toilet for the seat, which also doubles as a potential fueling point for the bike, bringing new meaning to the phrase “Fill ‘er up.” As of now, the biogas which propels the motorcycle doesn’t actually come from the driver’s waste, but is instead supplied by biogas fuel from Shika-oi and Kobe city.

The Toilet Bike Neo is part of an environmental initiative, the TOTO Green Challenge, which highlights the company’s goal of achieving 50% reductions in CO2 emissions in bathrooms by 2017. The Toilet Bike Neo is currently on a 600 mile tour of Japan, from Kyushu to Tokyo, to promote the challenge.

Travel to a developing country and you may encounter hog toilets: outhouses built over pig pens, where hungry swine anxiously consume what's dropped down the hole and essentially use it as fuel. More or less, a similar idea has recently been digested in Japan, only the toilet sits over a different kind of hog.

The country's leading toilet maker, Toto, has created Toilet Bike Neo, a talking hybrid toilet-motorcycle that runs entirely on -- you guessed it -- human waste. The turd trike is part of Toto's Green Challenge campaign to reduce half of all bathroom carbon dioxide emissions by the year 2017.

Starting this week from Toto's headquarters in Kitakyushu, the biogas-fueled motorcycle embarked upon its multicity tour of Japan, during which it hopes not only to stir dialogue about conservation, but likely move a few bowels along the way. The tour even includes a pit stop at a butt-shaped boulder in Nakatsu.

As it motors its way to Tokyo, Toilet Bike Neo will also be wowing spectators with other bells and whistles. Besides talking and playing music, the bike also uses residual light imagery to write messages in the air as it drives by.

No word yet on whether that message is "Light a match."

In 2010, Warner produced and sold 2 million bulldog trailer-hitch assemblies.

1. The units were produced at a cost of $45 per unit and sold for $60 each. However, the cash expenses incurred for each unit only amount to $20 per unit because the firm has fixed operating costs (including depreciation and other overhead costs that total $50 million per year).

2. The company is considering a change in its inventory management process that would reduce its average inventory balance down to 100,000 units rather than the 300,000 units it now carries.

If the firm institutes the change in 2011, how will the firm's earnings be affected?

Assuming that the firm simply reduces its production next year by the 200,000-unit reduction in ending inventory. How will the firm's cash flow be impacted by the change in inventory policy?