News
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Stellantis Is Bragging About a 38% Shipment Surge. Its Dealers Are the Ones Left Holding the Bag
Stellantis wants the headline to be simple: North American shipments jumped 38% in the second quarter, a number the company reported directly to investors this week. That figure is accurate. It is also not the number that matters most in this story. According to Stellantis’s own Q2 2026 shipment disclosure, the company moved an estimated…
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Your Neighborhood Garbage Truck Is About to Start Spying on You. Your Car Already Did, and Got Fined for It.
Cape Coral, Florida is looking at a proposal to strap AI-powered cameras onto its garbage trucks. As the trucks roll their normal routes, the cameras would scan yards and house fronts for code violations: overgrown grass, illegal dumping, peeling paint, the usual blight checklist. City leaders are framing it as a staffing fix. Code enforcement…
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EPA’s New Truck Rule Turns a Federal Felony Into a Factory Setting
Mac Spurlock ran a diesel repair shop in Wasilla, Alaska. In 2022, about thirty armed federal agents raided it, and a jury convicted him of a felony for disabling the system that forces a truck to lose power when its emissions equipment glitches in the cold. President Trump pardoned him this year. Now the EPA…
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California Handed Oil Refineries a Bigger Break Than Its Own Regulators Recommended. Now It’s Getting Sued for It
California has one climate rule everyone already knows: every new car sold in the state must be zero-emission by 2035. It has a second rule almost nobody’s heard of. The agency writing that first rule just spent the spring on something else entirely. It quietly handed California’s oil refineries the richest subsidy package its cap-and-trade…
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Why Your Quick-Lube Guy Keeps “Finding” Problems Your Car Doesn’t Have
You went in to a quick-lube shop for an oil change. You’re leaving with a new cabin air filter, a “fuel system cleaning,” and a top-off of two fluids you didn’t know your car could lose. Nobody held a gun to your head. Somebody just held up a filter that looked like it had been…
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Used Car Prices Climbed Again in June. Turns Out the 2021 Chip Shortage Just Never Sent Its Final Bill
Cox Automotive has a word for what happened to used-car prices in June: “normalizing.” It’s a calm, tidy word for a market that hasn’t behaved normally since 2020, and it’s worth questioning before accepting the headline number and moving on. The Manheim Used Vehicle Value Index rose 2.1% year over year in June, settling at…
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Timing Belt or Timing Chain? Ignore the Wrong One and Watch a $2,000 Repair Bill Show Up
Ask ten drivers what a timing belt does. You’ll get eight shrugs, one “isn’t that a serpentine thing?”, and maybe one correct answer. Ask what a timing chain does and the confidence goes up for a strange reason. People assume chains are permanent, so nobody has to think about them. That assumption is exactly what…
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Everyone’s Dad Was Wrong About Warming Up the Car. Here’s What Actually Happens to a Cold Engine
Ask anyone who learned to drive before the 2000s how they start a car on a cold morning. You’ll probably hear the same routine. Start the engine, get out, scrape the windshield, and let it idle for five or ten minutes before putting it in gear. It isn’t stubbornness. It’s advice passed down from a…
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State Farm Just Deputized Your Toyota to Snitch on You After a Crash
Somewhere in Bloomington, Illinois, State Farm’s engineers just solved a problem that has nothing to do with speed. They built a faster crash data sharing pipeline between your car and your claims adjuster — one that gets your car’s side of the story before you’ve said a word. The company now lets eligible Toyota and…
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Nobody Changes Their Brake Fluid Until It’s Too Late. Here’s Why That Gamble Can Kill Your Brakes
Ask a mechanic to name the maintenance item drivers ignore the longest, and brake fluid usually tops the list. It’s not that owners don’t care about their brakes. It’s that brake fluid never announces itself the way other fluids do. There’s no dashboard light for old brake fluid, no mileage sticker in the corner of…
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Thailand Just Bet $4.1 Billion It Can Out-Build the Rest of Southeast Asia on EVs
Thailand just put a number on its EV ambitions, and it’s a big one. That’s 137 billion baht — roughly $4.1 billion at the Board of Investment’s own conversion rate — pledged across 198 electric-vehicle projects as of May 2026. The BOI laid out the tally at the iEVTech conference in Bangkok. The interesting part…
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Everything You Think You Know About Ethanol Gas Wrecking Your Engine Is Probably Wrong
Somewhere along the way, “don’t use that gas, it’s got ethanol in it” became one of those warnings. Parents passed it down like a family recipe, minus the ingredients list. The problem is that almost nobody explains what ethanol actually does once it’s in your tank. So the warning just calcifies into vague dread. Your…
