Business Notes AUTOS

"If you own up to your mistakes, you don't suffer as much," advises Chrysler Chairman Lee Iacocca in his current best seller, Talking Straight. Last week Iacocca's company made good on its most infamous goof-up in years, the practice of test-driving some of its cars as far as 300 miles with their odometers disconnected and then selling the cars as brand-new.

Under a settlement filed in a St. Louis federal court, Chrysler will pay some 38,600 automobile owners at least $500 apiece from an initial fund of $16.3 million. The settlement concludes an investigation that began some two years ago, Iacocca writes, when a Chrysler executive in Missouri "tried to weasel out of a ticket by telling the officer that he didn't know how fast he was going because his speedometer was disconnected."