News
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Rivian Loses Finance Chief As R2 Ramp And Georgia Plant Loom
Claire McDonough is leaving Rivian on October 30. That’s the headline, and it’s the least interesting part of the story. Rivian disclosed the departure in a regulatory filing on August 27, framing it as a move to pursue a new opportunity and relocate to the East Coast to be near family. Derek Mulvey, currently VP…
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Volvo’s New OTA Update Lets Its EVs Warn Each Other About Deer
Volvo has been quietly running one of the most interesting experiments in the industry for a decade now, and almost nobody talks about it. Not the safety cage. Not the seatbelt patent. The cloud. The company announced on August 26 that an over-the-air update adds four new Connected Safety alerts to its newest electric models.…
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Georgia Law Blocks Atlanta From Regulating Waymo Robotaxis, Drivers Discover
There’s a particular kind of irony in watching a gig-economy workforce organize against automation. Fifteen years ago these same independent contractors were the disruption — the reason Atlanta’s medallion cab operators were furious. Now the drivers are on the receiving end of the exact same trick, and they’ve discovered what the cab companies discovered: the…
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Texas Spent Three Years Bankrolling America’s Biggest Car-Surveillance Network With Your Insurance Money. Now It Wants a Quiet Exit.
Every story about Flock Safety’s cameras gets framed as a privacy fight: police versus civil liberties, safety versus surveillance. That framing misses the more uncomfortable part of what just happened in Texas. Governor Greg Abbott didn’t stumble onto a privacy problem last week. He stumbled onto a money problem, one his own state helped create…
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Why Steal a Car When You Can Just Finance One and Ship It Overseas?
Nobody broke a window. Nobody hot-wired an ignition. Nobody even needed a stolen key fob. According to a new industry report out of Canada, the fastest-growing form of vehicle financing fraud doesn’t start with a crowbar. It starts with a credit application. The Canadian Finance & Leasing Association says vehicle financing fraud tied to international…
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Street Takeovers Got So Out of Control This Weekend, Cities Are Now Just Banning Gatherings Outright — And Everyone Should Be Furious
If you’re hauling yourself to work this Monday morning while a grocery store two towns over is boarding up shattered windows, take a second to be angry. Not mildly annoyed. Angry. Because for the second, third, tenth weekend in a row, street takeover crews turned public roads into their personal playground from Friday night through…
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Toyota China Sales Fall 24% As Fuel Costs Push Buyers To EVs
Toyota built its empire on a simple promise: buy the boring one, save money on gas, sleep well at night. That promise is currently getting torched in the world’s largest car market, and the accelerant is the very thing that should be helping — expensive fuel. According to Toyota’s detailed July data, Toyota and Lexus…
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A Car Dealer Faked Titles To Dodge Sales Tax For Years. Getting Caught Cost Less Than One Car.
For a certain kind of car collector, the “Montana LLC” trick is an open secret. Buy a six-figure exotic, register the title to a paper company parked in Bozeman, and skip the sales tax everyone else pays. Estate planners and RV owners have quietly used the move for decades. It is not, as a rule,…
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DeSantis Wants To Ban License Plate Cameras — But Missed The Network Selling Your Data To Lenders
Ban every police license plate camera in Florida tomorrow, and your car does not become any less visible. It just becomes visible to someone else. That’s the wrinkle missing from Ron DeSantis’s sudden war on automated license plate readers. Speaking at Florida International University this week, the governor called the state’s network of roughly 7,500…
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Volvo’s New EVs Can Warn Each Other About Deer and Crashes. That’s Not Even the Interesting Part
A single connected car isn’t a safety system. It’s a witness with no one to call. Volvo’s newest software update is really about giving that witness a phone line — and the fact that it took the better part of a decade and roughly a million cars to make the line worth dialing tells you…
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Honda Is Opening a New Dealership Down the Road. Its Longtime Dealer Says That’s Not Even the Worst Part
A car dealership losing a fight with its own manufacturer over territory is not, by itself, news. It happens quietly, in state administrative hearings nobody covers, most weeks of the year. What makes the complaint filed this week by a longtime Maryland Honda dealer worth a second look isn’t the new store American Honda wants…
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The Internet Called It A ‘Snitch Car’ Patent. Ford’s Filing Says Something Very Different.
Somewhere in the comments under a story about a new Ford patent this week, a reader summed up the internet’s mood in one furious paragraph: cars are about to start ratting out speeders to the police, and the country is sliding toward a surveillance state one dashboard sensor at a time. It’s a great comment.…
