News
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Manual Nissan Z Nismo Arrives in Japan: Gearing, GT-R Brakes and Real Costs
The Fairlady Z Nismo went on sale in Japan today with a third pedal, four years after the RZ34 arrived and roughly eight months after Nissan first showed the car at Makuhari Messe. Nissan says the six-speed was added because customers kept asking for it, which is corporate-speak for “we finally read the forums.” The…
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Senator Hawley Is Investigating Flock Safety’s 120,000 Cameras. Your License Plate Was Never the Point
Flock Safety’s cameras do not need to read your license plate to know it’s your car. They can do it from the dent in your bumper, the roof rack you never removed, or the faded parking sticker from a job you quit two years ago. That single fact, buried in the company’s own marketing copy,…
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F1’s Engine Report Card Says Red Bull Is Winning. Even Red Bull Doesn’t Believe It.
Formula 1 released its midseason engine report card this week, and the team sitting at the top is the one complaining loudest. The FIA’s own numbers say Red Bull Powertrains builds the fastest internal combustion engine on the grid. Red Bull’s team principal says that is not true. So does the man running Mercedes. When…
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A Belgian Chip Deal With BYD Reveals How EVs Really Get Sourced
Melexis signing a purchase agreement with BYD is, on its face, the least exciting automotive story of the week. A Belgian chip designer and a Chinese carmaker put pen to paper. Nobody’s 0-60 time changed. Stay with it, though, because the boring version of this story explains a lot about how your next EV gets…
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Corolla’s 60th Birthday Trim Is Four Different Cars Depending On Your Country
The Corolla turns 60 this year, and Toyota is marking it the way Toyota marks everything: with badges, decals, and a paint color you can’t get on anything else. Fine. That’s the Corolla’s whole personality. What’s actually interesting is that Toyota has issued at least four different versions of this anniversary car across four markets,…
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Rocket-Powered EV Dies With Chinese Vacuum Maker’s Car Division
A Chinese company that makes very good robot vacuums told the world it would build a car that hit 62 mph in 0.9 seconds using strap-on rockets. Roughly four months later, that car is gone, along with the division that was supposed to build it. Dreame Technology posted a statement to its official Weibo account…
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VW Plant Closures Blocked by a 1960 Law, Not Boardroom Politics
Volkswagen’s supervisory board meets in Wolfsburg on September 4 with three competing blueprints for the company’s future sitting on the same table: one from the management board, one from the labor bench, and one from the state of Lower Saxony. That is not a negotiation. That is a standoff with a date on it. CEO…
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Porsche Sold Its Own Consulting Arm, Then Paid Four Times as Much to Rent It Back
Porsche spent three decades building a consulting firm from scratch, spent 2023 buying out the last outside shareholders so it would own all of it, and on August 24 sold the entire thing to an Indian technology conglomerate that most Porsche owners have never heard of. That’s not even the interesting part. The interesting part…
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Thieves Didn’t Hack This Lamborghini’s Security System. They Just Pointed a Gun at the Guy Holding the Keys
Nobody bypassed an immobilizer in Old City early Thursday morning. Nobody cloned a key fob, ran a relay attack, or spent forty minutes fighting a steering lock. Three men allegedly walked up to a parking booth on Race Street, broke the glass with a window punch, pointed a handgun at the attendant inside, and asked…
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Stellantis Wants to Beam a Hologram Into Your Robotaxi’s Driver Seat. Here’s What It’s Not Telling You.
Somewhere in Stellantis’ latest patent filing sits an admission the company will never put in a press release: the empty driver’s seat isn’t an engineering problem anymore. It’s a marketing problem. And the fix isn’t smarter software — it’s a hologram. The filing, first reported by ClubAlfa, describes a system that turns a windshield into…
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VW’s Layoffs Could Hit 140,000. The Family That Controls the Company Already Wrote Off the Loss and Went Shopping for Drones
Volkswagen wants the headline to be about jobs. On August 24, labor representatives told employees the restructuring could ultimately touch as many as 140,000 positions, well above the roughly 100,000 management has floated so far. That’s a gap of 40,000 people, treated in most of the coverage like a rounding error. It isn’t. But it…
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Hyundai Just Settled Its Strike. Its Next New Hire Doesn’t Need a Raise, a Union Card, or a Retirement Age.
Hyundai Motor and its union reached a tentative agreement this week to end the company’s first full-day strike in a decade, and on paper it reads like a clean win for labor: a raise, a bigger bonus, hundreds of new jobs, and a real shot at a longer working life. Union members vote on it…
