News
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Deadliest Cars And Trucks Of 2023: What The New IIHS Fatality Data Really Shows
Two vehicles on the IIHS’s new fatality tables are the same SUV. The Volkswagen Atlas with front-wheel drive ranks among the twenty models least likely to kill its own driver, at five deaths per million registered vehicle years. It also ranks fourteenth-worst in the country at killing the other driver, at 94. Add the optional…
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Ford Just Blew Up the Assembly Line It Invented. The Target Is a Used Tesla.
Ford wants you looking at a $30,000 electric truck due in 2027. Look instead at the factory floor underneath it, because that’s where the real news is buried. On August 11, Ford Motor Company unveiled the Universal EV Platform and the manufacturing system built to feed it, backed by roughly $5 billion in investment split…
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IIHS Releases Zero Driver Death List. Here’s Who’s Paying for It.
Six vehicles just posted a perfect record in the most sobering scorecard in the auto industry: the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety’s driver death rate study. Zero deaths per million registered vehicle years. Not one dead driver behind the wheel of an Audi Q7, a BMW X7, a Chevrolet Tahoe, a Mercedes-Benz GLB, a Mercedes-Benz…
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Ram Recalled 1.5 Million Trucks Over a Seat Belt Bolt. Stellantis Already Told Investors It Was Coming.
Stellantis didn’t need a technician crawling under a Ram 1500’s rear bench to figure out something was wrong with its trucks. It had already told Wall Street. Three months before recall paperwork for a seat belt defect started landing in mailboxes, Stellantis published a financial disclosure admitting that warranty costs had ballooned by billions of…
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VW’s Atlas Water Pump Can Cause ‘Catastrophic Engine Failure.’ Volkswagen’s Fix Is a Claim Form, Not a Recall.
Somewhere in a New Jersey federal courthouse, Volkswagen’s own lawyers signed off on a sentence that should make any Atlas owner uneasy: a failed water pump in the 3.6-liter V6 could trigger “sudden and unexpected catastrophic engine failure” while the vehicle is being driven. That phrase comes straight from a class-action complaint, and it reads…
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Flock’s AI License Plate Readers Are Wrong Most Of The Time, And That’s Somehow Not The Craziest Part
In the summer of 2024, a Roseville, California, police officer called a driver to deliver an odd apology. His car kept getting flagged as stolen. Not because it was stolen. Because a camera could not tell an 8 from a 9. That mix-up happened at least six times. Each time, a Flock Safety camera, one…
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Savannah Just Benched Six Employees Over Flock Camera Misuse. Georgia Isn’t Dirtier Than Everyone Else — It’s Just the Only One Checking.
Six people did not lose access to Savannah’s Flock cameras this week because Georgia grows worse cops than everywhere else. They lost it because Georgia is nearly the only place that would tell you when it happens. Savannah Mayor Van Johnson announced the suspensions in a Facebook post Friday: four police officers and two civilian…
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Grupo Antolin’s Own Bondholders Say the Restructuring Vote Was Rigged. They Want the Case Kicked to Michigan.
Grupo Antolin told a New York bankruptcy judge in July that its Chapter 15 case wasn’t really a bankruptcy at all, just a polite request to let a Spanish restructuring run its course without American creditors getting in the way. That argument worked well enough to get the company provisional protection at its first-day hearing.…
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A Billion-Dollar Kentucky Battery Plant Went Bankrupt, Got Fined By The DOJ, And Is Now Owned By The Contractor It Never Paid
The Department of Justice just closed the books on a $7.5 million fraud settlement involving a battery plant in western Kentucky. That sounds like the headline. It isn’t. The real number in this story is zero, as in the amount of federal grant money the Department of Energy has left to give Ascend Elements, the…
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Toyota And Hyundai Are Being Investigated Over Your Driving Data. GM Already Wrote The Playbook For How This Ends.
Somewhere in Canberra, government lawyers are trying to work out exactly what a Toyota RAV4 knows about the person driving it, who else has seen that information, and whether anyone actually agreed to any of it. Strip away the regulatory language, and that is what a new investigation into Toyota and Hyundai actually amounts to.…
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Kia ‘Fixed’ Its Telluride’s Flaming Seats In 2024. The Fix Could Catch Fire, Too.
Kia just told the owners of 462,869 Tellurides to park their SUVs away from the house because the driver’s seat might catch fire. That instruction should sound familiar. Kia said almost the exact same thing about many of these same trucks two years ago. What makes this recall worth stopping on isn’t the fire risk.…
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BYD’s Commercial Trucks Grew 183% In July. Its Passenger Cars Are The Ones Actually In Trouble
Somewhere inside BYD’s July sales numbers is an admission the company will never put in a press release. The business that made it the most-discussed automaker on the planet isn’t what grew last month. The vans and delivery trucks nobody outside the freight industry pays attention to are. That’s the real story here, and it’s…
