News
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NTSB Says the Tesla That Killed a Katy Grandmother Wasn’t Self-Driving. That’s Not the Relief Tesla Wants It to Be
Tesla did not build the software that killed Martha Avila. That’s the headline finding from the National Transportation Safety Board, and Tesla wants you to sit with it. The 76-year-old died in June after a Model 3 tore through the front wall of her Katy, Texas home doing better than 70 mph on a street…
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Police Hit Two Salesmen With 176 Charges in a Re-VIN Scheme. The Crown Quietly Dropped Every Single One
A Toronto re-VIN scheme shows just how sophisticated auto theft in the Greater Toronto Area has become, reading more like white-collar fraud than a simple car heist. A case out of Toronto Police Service’s 53 Division shows exactly how far the con has evolved. It also shows how badly it can unravel. In November 2024,…
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California Wrote An EV Rebate For Exactly Two Companies, And Tesla Isn’t One Of Them
California’s newest electric vehicle rebate is worth $3,500. The provision buried in its bill text anticipating a lawsuit is worth paying much closer attention to. On July 13, Governor Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 168, creating a program called MyFirstEV that hands first-time buyers a discount at the point of sale on a new electric…
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Barrett-Jackson Crashed Into the Midwest With a $38.1 Million Auction — and Shattered the Boss 429 Record
Barrett-Jackson has spent decades turning Scottsdale into the loudest week on the collector-car calendar. So the interesting question about its brand-new Columbus, Ohio sale was never whether the cars would sell. It was whether Midwest money would show up to buy them. It did. According to the auction house’s own post-sale report, the inaugural Columbus…
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A Two-Bay Tuffy in Indiana Just Went Bankrupt. Wall Street’s Biggest Tire Chain Almost Joined It.
Two Tuffy Tire & Auto Service locations in Fort Wayne, Indiana, are still open. The bays are still full, the phones still ring, and a customer dropping off a car for an oil change this week has no reason to think anything is wrong. But the company that owns those two shops, Automotive Solutions Inc.,…
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Toyota Just Fired Up RAV4 Hybrid Production in Kentucky. Buyers Are Already Outrunning the Assembly Line
The RAV4 is Toyota’s volume engine — the best-selling thing it makes that isn’t a Camry-shaped memory. Anything that throttles how many the company can build ripples straight through dealer lots and your local supply. And right now the sixth-generation RAV4 sits in an awkward spot. Buyers want it badly, but Toyota is only just…
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Europe Just Regulated Brake Dust Like Exhaust — So Bosch Cut the Wire to Your Brake Pedal
A market research report making the rounds this week claims the global regenerative braking systems business will roughly double by 2035, reaching $14.3 billion. Nobody who owns a car should care about that number. What they should care about is the regulation buried behind why that number exists: for the first time in automotive history,…
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Volvo Just Beamed Apple Music Into Two Million Cars Overnight. Last Year, the Same Pipeline Beamed In a Brake Problem.
Volvo wants you to notice the music. On July 7, the automaker started pushing a wireless update that drops native Apple Music into more than two million Volvo cars built since the 2020 model year. No dealer visit. No new car. No waiting. It is a genuinely good update. It is also the least interesting…
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Subaru’s 541,000-Vehicle Recall Isn’t About a Broken Part. It’s About a Label Nobody Checked for Seven Years
Half a million Subarus are heading back into the recall system this year, and not one of them needs a new part. Subaru of America filed paperwork with NHTSA on July 7 disclosing that 541,237 vehicles carry an incorrect Gross Axle Weight Rating on their federally required certification label. The fix isn’t a wiring harness,…
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BMW Says 29,000 Hybrids Might Catch Fire — Good Luck Finding Out if Yours Is One Before Next Month
If you own a BMW 330e, 530e, or 740Le built sometime in the last decade, here is some safety advice straight from the company that built it: do not park it in your garage. Do not park it near your house. Leave it outside, out in the open, away from anything that could burn if…
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Mexico’s ‘Electrified’ Car Boom Is Mostly Just Hybrids, and It Picked the Worst Possible Week to Look Suspicious
Mexico’s auto distributors want you to know that electrified vehicle sales are up 44% this year. What they’re less eager to explain is that “electrified” is doing most of the work in that sentence, and that the timing of this good news could not be worse. According to data compiled by the Mexican Association of…
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Uncle Sam Just Handed Bosch $225 Million To Make EV Chips – In The Same Business That Just Bankrupted America’s Last Champion
Bosch says it just reached “a milestone.” That part is true. It’s just not the milestone the press release wants you to focus on. On July 13, Bosch signed a definitive agreement with the U.S. Department of Commerce for up to $225 million in direct funding, part of a roughly $2 billion plan to convert…
