News
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Extended Car Warranties: Sometimes a Lifesaver, Usually Just Fear Dressed Up as a Sales Pitch
The pitch always lands at the worst possible moment. You’ve just agreed to a price, you’re exhausted, and the finance manager slides across a laminated sheet asking if you want to “protect your investment.” That’s the extended warranty pitch, and dealers engineer it to hit your gut instead of your calculator. The FTC has a…
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VinFast Just Bet Its Self-Driving Future on Cameras Alone. No LiDAR Safety Net Included
VinFast wants to sell you a self-driving car that doesn’t need the expensive parts everyone else insists are mandatory. That’s the pitch behind its tie-up with Autobrains, the Tel Aviv AI outfit VinFast has partnered with. Together they’re building what the two companies call “L2++” driver assistance and a bare-bones autonomy stack they’ve branded “Robo-Car.”…
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Toyota Blamed “Final Adjustments” for Delaying the Electric Highlander. Translation: Three Brands Are Riding on One Untested Factory
Buried a few paragraphs into Toyota’s own press materials, though, is the reason this delay is worth a second look. The 2027 Highlander is the first battery-electric vehicle Toyota has ever built at its Georgetown, Kentucky plant. Its battery packs come from a $13.9 billion factory in Liberty, North Carolina that only recently started shipping…
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Your Spark Plugs Could Still Be Fine at 100,000 Miles. Here’s How to Know Before You Pay to Replace Them Anyway
Somewhere along the way, “100,000 miles” became the universal spark plug expiration date. People repeat it so often that they treat it like a hard deadline. In reality, it’s a best-case number for exactly one type of plug, under conditions your engine may or may not be living up to. Why Plug Prices Range From…
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China Can’t Sell Cars to Its Own People Anymore, So It’s Flooding Everyone Else’s Driveway Instead
China’s passenger-car market spent June doing exactly what it’s done for the better part of a year. It’s cratering at home while pouring out the door to the rest of the planet. Dealers moved just 1.602 million new cars domestically last month, a 23.2% collapse from a year earlier, according to the China Passenger Car…
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That Car Wash You Love Might Be Sanding Down Your Paint Job. Here’s Which Ones to Skip
You trust it every week or two. Pull in, pick a package, stare at your phone for four minutes while foam and rinse arms do their thing. Nobody thinks twice about the equipment inside that tunnel, or the brush hanging on the wall at the self-serve bay down the street. But operators build the physical…
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IIHS and Consumer Reports’ New Teen Car List Isn’t Really About Price. It’s About Which Cars Are Too Light to Survive a Crash
Every year, IIHS and Consumer Reports publish a list of used and new vehicles that are safe enough, and cheap enough, to hand to a sixteen-year-old. Every year, the coverage focuses on the same thing: the price tags. Forty-five vehicles under $10,000. Twenty-nine more under $20,000. Twenty-two new models under $45,000. Skip the price tags.…
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O’Reilly’s $10 Billion Bid for NAPA Sent Wall Street the Wrong Message. Here’s What It Actually Missed
O’Reilly’s Rumored NAPA Grab Is a Bigger Swing Than the Stock Slide Lets On Wall Street threw a tidy little tantrum when word got around that O’Reilly Automotive wants to swallow the business behind NAPA. Genuine Parts Company shares shot up somewhere around 13 percent; O’Reilly’s drifted down a few points. If you’ve watched a…
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10 Wrecked Dodge Hellcats Are Sitting on Copart Right Now, Just Waiting for Someone Brave Enough to Rebuild Them
Every week, Copart’s lanes fill up with performance cars that met a rough end. The Hellcat family is no exception. From stripped shells to lightly bent widebodies, these supercharged Dodges prove that even 700-plus horsepower isn’t immune to a bad day. Here are ten wrecked and salvage Hellcats currently listed on Copart. Below is a…
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Cops Have Been Manually Rescuing Stuck Robotaxis for Years. Washington Just Voted to Take That Option Away
When a Waymo froze in the middle of an officer’s response to a mass shooting earlier this year, the fix wasn’t complicated. An officer walked up, opened the door, sat down, and drove the car out of the way. The same thing happened in June. An officer had to reposition a stalled Waymo blocking the…
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Detroit Is Panicking That Teens Won’t Get Their License. Maybe Check the Sticker Price First
The decline in teenage driving didn’t start with the smartphone. It started in 1983, when Ronald Reagan was a year into his first term. Back then, a “smartphone” existed only in science fiction. That’s roughly when researchers at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute first noticed licensing rates among 16-year-olds beginning to slide. It’s…
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Ford Quietly Tested Its “Quality Comes First” Ads on Factory Towns Before Anyone Else Saw Them. That’s Not a Coincidence
Ford just won its first J.D. Power quality crown since 2010, and its new “Quality Comes First” campaign celebrates it. Its first move wasn’t a Super Bowl spot. It was full-page ads in the newspapers of Kansas City, Louisville, Chicago, and Dearborn — the towns that actually build the trucks. That’s not how you sell…
