News
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Rivian Just Learned That ‘The Tariffs Were Illegal’ And ‘You’ll Get Your Money Back’ Are Two Different Sentences
Somewhere inside the U.S. Treasury sits a pile of cash that, according to the Supreme Court, the government was never allowed to collect in the first place. Rivian wants its share back. So do a lot of other companies. And the fact that getting it requires a nine-page federal lawsuit says more about how Washington…
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A Stolen Ford Explorer Beat Ontario’s Anti-Theft Tech. A Fast-Food Receipt Still Busted the Teen Inside
A 16-year-old in Hamilton, Ontario didn’t get caught because police cracked his stolen Ford Explorer’s security system, traced his phone, or ran a license plate reader. They got him because he kept his lunch receipt. That’s the whole case, and it’s tempting to file it under crime doesn’t pay, and neither does saving your fast-food…
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That $19.99 Car Wash Membership Isn’t Selling You Clean Paint. It’s Selling Wall Street a Subscription.
A market research firm just published a report projecting that the global car wash industry will grow from $38.4 billion this year to $55.5 billion by 2033. That’s a modest 5.4 percent annual climb, the kind of number that normally belongs in a filing cabinet. But buried in the release is a sentence that matters…
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LAPD Quit Flock’s Camera Network Two Weeks Ago. Connecticut’s Smallest Towns Just Reached the Same Conclusion.
Somewhere in Killingworth, Connecticut, population barely 6,500, a handful of elected officials just made the same call as the Los Angeles Police Department, the country’s second-largest police force. Both walked away from Flock Safety’s license plate camera network within weeks of each other. That’s the real story hiding under this summer’s headlines about sawed-through camera…
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Ford’s Bronco Fire Fix Costs About a Dollar a Truck. Guess Who’s Stuck With the Rest of the Bill.
Ford will spend something like a dollar per truck fixing the wiring problem behind its newest Bronco recall. Multiply that by 565,691 trucks and the parts bill still won’t show up as a line item on Ford’s next earnings call. The tape isn’t the expensive part of this recall. The expensive part starts after the…
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GM Just Spent $430 Million Upgrading Two Factories, and Electric Cars Weren’t Invited
General Motors put out a press release this week about paint booths, assembly lines, and square footage. Read past the numbers, though, and it isn’t really a manufacturing update. It’s a confession about which vehicles GM has decided are worth defending for the rest of this decade, and every one of them burns gasoline. On…
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Genesis Just Recalled 94,760 Cars Over a Fuel Leak It Already “Fixed” Once Before
Genesis is telling nearly 95,000 U.S. owners that fuel can leak out of the connection between the fuel pipe and the fuel rail on their G80, GV80, GV70, or G90. That’s the headline. The more interesting fact is sitting in NHTSA’s own recall database: Genesis and parent company Hyundai already recalled this same fuel line…
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Volkswagen Fought EU Tariffs On Chinese Cars In 2024. Now Its Own Best-Seller Got Smoked By A Brand Called Jaecoo, And VW Wants Tariffs Yesterday
Volkswagen wants Brussels to move fast on tariffs against Chinese plug-in hybrids. What the company isn’t saying is that eighteen months ago, its own lobbying helped make sure the last round of tariffs came in soft enough for Chinese brands to keep winning anyway. On Volkswagen Group’s first-half earnings call this month, CEO Oliver Blume…
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Ford Gave This Windshield Plant a Crisis-Management Award. Weeks Later, It Had One of Its Own.
In June, Ford handed a Tennessee glass plant a trophy for handling crises well. In July, that same company sent 325 of its own people notice that they no longer have jobs. Nobody at Ford or at Carlex Glass America is calling that irony. Maybe they should. Carlex, the Tier 1 supplier that fabricates windshields,…
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The Pandemic Turned Your Nissan Lease Buyout Into Free Money — And Some Dealers Grabbed It First
For a strange stretch of the pandemic, leasing a Nissan came with an accidental jackpot nobody had planned for. Sign a lease in 2018 or 2019, and the dealership calculates what your car will be worth years down the road, then locks that number into your contract as a fixed purchase option. Nobody expects that…
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Roger Penske Is Buying Back the Company That Bears His Name — and Wall Street Never Really Owned It Anyway
Roger Penske and Mitsui & Co. did not wake up this week and decide they wanted control of Penske Automotive Group. They’ve had it since Bill Clinton’s second term. What they filed with the SEC on July 22 isn’t a takeover. It’s closer to a receipt, proof of purchase for something they already own. The…
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Ford’s Self-Assembling Car Fortress Isn’t Really About Stopping Thieves. It’s About a Battery Problem Nobody Talks About
Ford has a patent application describing cars that arrange themselves into a defensive ring around other cars, and it reads exactly as strange as that sounds. But strip away the wall-of-cars headline, and the interesting part isn’t security at all. It’s what the filing quietly assumes has to be true before any of this works:…
