News
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Norway Found a Remote Kill Switch in a Chinese Bus. Your Car Has One Too.
Last summer, engineers working for Oslo’s public transit agency drove two electric buses into an abandoned mine and started trying to hack their own fleet. They weren’t hunting for foreign spies. They were testing something far more basic: whether the same digital channel that lets a manufacturer beam a software fix to a bus could…
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Used Car Prices Just Hit $27,027 Again. More Than Half of Buyers Are Already Underwater Before They Sign.
Cox Automotive says the average used vehicle listed for $27,027 in June. That’s up 6% from a year earlier, the first time the number has cleared $27,000 since the summer of 2023, and on paper it reads like a market finally settling down. It isn’t. The price held steady while the ground underneath it shifted…
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Honda’s Best-Selling EV Just Died. Turns Out It Was Never Really Honda’s Car
Honda confirmed this week that the Prologue will not see a 2027 model year. Production and U.S. sales wind down once the current model year clears dealer inventory, and there is nothing lined up to take its place. If your instinct is to file that under “another slow-selling EV bites the dust,” stop. The Prologue…
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Volkswagen Wants to Axe Half Its Lineup. It Just Spent Three Years Building the Half It’s About to Kill
Volkswagen had a rough Friday. Group deliveries fell 8.6% in the second quarter to just under 2.1 million vehicles, and sales in China alone dropped by more than a third. CEO Oliver Blume stood in front of the board a day earlier and described the business environment as increasingly demanding, which is executive-speak for a…
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Ford’s New Remote Kill Switch Isn’t Really About Stopping Car Thieves. It’s About Owning The Off Switch.
Ford wants you picturing a thief. Someone jimmies open your F-150, leaves your own key on the seat, and floors it down the interstate while you stand on the curb reaching for your phone. That’s the scenario in every headline about Ford’s expanded Start Inhibit feature this month, and it’s a real scenario the technology…
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A Thief Couldn’t Start This Stolen Porsche, So He Dragged It Down the Street Like a Shopping Cart
Nobody was driving the Porsche that tore up Tujunga Avenue in North Hollywood last Thursday morning. That’s the detail worth sitting with, because it explains everything else in this story. Garage-worthy EDC gear, on sale this week. According to the Los Angeles Police Department, officers responded around 6:27 a.m. after a caller reported a man…
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A Zoox Robotaxi Drove Blind Into a Wall of Smoke at a Fire Scene. A Human Had to Rescue It
On June 20, an empty Zoox robotaxi drove into a wall of smoke on a street in Las Vegas, hard-braked, tried to steer around a fire scene it couldn’t see, and stalled out short of it. What got the car moving again wasn’t its cameras, its lidar, or a single line of self-driving code. It…
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Nissan Blames Crossovers For Killing The Altima. A Collapsed Honda Merger Is The Real Reason
Nissan wants you to believe the Altima is dying because America fell out of love with sedans. That explanation is convenient. It also leaves out the parts that actually explain what happened. When Ponz Pandikuthira, Nissan Americas’ chief product and planning officer, told WardsAuto the Altima would “soon depart” so a more mature Sentra could…
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Flock Killed Its Scream-Detecting Microphones. The License-Plate Dragnet Bolted Next to Them Is Doing Just Fine
Flock Safety wants credit for backing off something creepy. Fair enough. It earned some. The company has ended a pilot feature called Distress Detection, which used its network of gunshot-sensing microphones to listen for human screaming. Seven months of pressure from privacy advocates did the trick. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which had been sounding the…
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The New Mazda CX-5 Aces IIHS’s Nastiest Crash Test. The 2025 Model Would’ve Just Plowed Through the Motorcycle
Somewhere at an IIHS test facility last year, a Mazda CX-5 was aimed at a motorcycle-shaped target and told to stop itself before impact. Most of the time, it simply didn’t try. Run the test six times, at three speeds, from centered and offset angles, and five of six trials ended the same way: the…
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China’s EVs Just Passed Gas Cars at the Export Dock. Now the Dock Is the Problem.
China’s EV exports have passed gasoline cars for the first time, but weak domestic demand and rising tariffs are already pushing the industry beyond simple exporting.
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A Robotaxi Can Trap a Fire Truck at a Burning House. The Firefighter’s Only Weapon Is a Complaint Form
Picture a fire captain waving his arms at a driverless Waymo that just rolled past his cones and stopped six feet from the hydrant his crew needs. If a human driver pulled that stunt, the captain has real options: get it towed, have an officer write a citation, even have the driver arrested for obstruction.…
