News
-
Costco’s Synthetic Oil Price Just Jumped 60%. The Purchase Limit Is the Real Story
Costco has spent four decades building a reputation on prices that refuse to move: the $1.50 hot dog, the $4.99 rotisserie chicken, the vat of trail mix that costs about the same today as it did when gas was two dollars a gallon. So when a Costco staple gets dramatically more expensive, and the warehouse…
-
Dallas Turned Its Garbage Trucks Into A Surveillance Fleet, And The Real Trick Was Doing It For Almost Nothing
Dallas didn’t buy a single new vehicle to build one of the more sweeping property-surveillance operations any American city is currently running. That detail keeps getting buried under the privacy outrage, and it’s the actual story here. Since April, the city has had AI-powered cameras mounted on the fleet trucks that already run bulk-trash and…
-
Every New Car Was Supposed To Stop Drunk Drivers By Now. Nobody Told The Cars.
Somewhere in this country, almost every day, the same scene repeats itself. A driver, allegedly over the legal limit, puts a vehicle into something it was never supposed to hit — a parked car, a mailbox, someone’s driveway. Field sobriety tests get declined. The breath test gets refused. Handcuffs go on. Local news covers it…
-
The Chinese Car Ban Bill Also Outlaws Airbags Nobody Noticed
The Alliance for Automotive Innovation sent a two-page letter to congressional leadership on September 3 asking for a permanent ban on “the sale, import and manufacture of Chinese connected vehicles, hardware and software” before the 119th Congress wraps up. It went to Speaker Johnson, Majority Leader Thune, Minority Leader Jeffries and Minority Leader Schumer, signed…
-
Volkswagen’s Old Beetle Factory Is About to Build Iron Dome Parts. The Real Story Is Why It Had To.
Volkswagen just agreed to sell a car factory to an Israeli investment firm so it can start making parts for European air defense systems. Read that sentence again. A company that has spent 89 years building Beetles, Golfs, and Passats is now stepping into the missile-defense supply chain. That part is genuinely strange. The stranger…
-
Third Time’s Not the Charm: Stellantis Just Re-Recalled 328,381 Jeep Grand Cherokees for the Same Spring That Keeps Falling Off
Stellantis wants this to read like a routine safety notice. Read the paperwork closely, though, and it looks more like a confession: the automaker has now told owners of certain Jeep Grand Cherokees, in writing, three separate times across three years, that their rear suspension had been fixed. Twice, it hadn’t been. A recall is…
-
Tesla’s Self-Steering Crash Save: The Rules Nobody Wrote Yet
Tesla’s AI account posted on September 4 that FSD Supervised v14.3.9 is rolling out with something new: the driver-assistance software can now activate “on your behalf” when a collision looks imminent and automatic emergency braking might not be enough. It can also switch itself on, per that same post, if the car decides you’re heavily…
-
Tesla’s Cybercab Didn’t Ask Permission to Ditch the Steering Wheel. Now the Feds Want a Word.
NHTSA didn’t open a Cybercab audit because anyone believes the car is dangerous. It opened one because Tesla, unlike every other company running driverless fleets on public roads, didn’t ask for permission first. CBS Austin was first to report that Tesla’s gold Cybercabs had begun picking up paying riders in Austin this month. Days later,…
-
Toyota’s Paint-Warranty Program Got Robbed From the Inside. The Dealer Still Had to Pay Toyota Back $2.1 Million.
Somewhere in a Toyota service drive outside Boston, a claim gets typed into a warranty system, a body shop gets a work order, and a reimbursement check eventually clears from Toyota back to the dealership. That pipeline exists so owners with a factory paint defect can get it fixed without a lawyer or a lemon-law…
-
Jaguar Land Rover Is Cutting 4,000 Jobs, and Somehow Not One Is on the Assembly Line
Jaguar Land Rover just confirmed it is eliminating 4,000 jobs, roughly one in ten people on its payroll, over the next two years. Look at who is losing those jobs, and the story gets more interesting. Every one of the cuts lands on salaried staff in Britain — engineers, planners, marketers, people who work in…
-
Flock’s Camera Installer Called Police on a Reporter. Your Car Can’t Object.
A driver passing a Flock Safety camera gets no warning, no chance to ask why the lens is pointed at the road, and no practical way to decline. The car is photographed, its plate and distinguishing features are turned into searchable data, and the trip continues. A Flock installer in suburban Atlanta had options. When…
-
Grok In Tesla Robotaxis: The Fine Print Riders Are Missing
Everyone’s passing around the news that Grok is “coming” to Tesla’s Robotaxi service. It isn’t coming. It’s already in the fleet, and the place Tesla documented it wasn’t a hype post — it was a privacy notice most riders will never open. Tesla’s Robotaxi Rider Privacy Notice states plainly, in the section covering infotainment data,…
