News
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Volkswagen’s ‘New’ EV Plan for India Isn’t New. It’s From 2022 — And a $1.4 Billion Tax Bill Might Kill It Again
Volkswagen wants you to know it’s “evaluating” ways to sell more electric cars in India: importing finished models, assembling them locally from shipped-in parts, or eventually building a homegrown EV from scratch. That’s the news, based on an interview with Skoda Auto Volkswagen India’s chief published this week. It reads like a fresh strategic pivot.…
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A Cadillac’s Brake Complaint Just Became a 1.16-Million-Vehicle Investigation. Two of the Cars Involved Wear Honda Badges.
It started with one Cadillac. Now it’s 1.16 million vehicles wearing four different nameplates, including two you’d never expect to see in a General Motors defect filing: Honda and Acura. The federal investigation into GM’s electric brake booster, filed this month as Engineering Analysis EA26006, looks like a simple numbers escalation. It isn’t. The real…
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Advance Auto Parts’ Profit More Than Tripled. Its Actual Business Barely Grew At All.
Advance Auto Parts wants you to believe it turned a corner last quarter. Net income more than tripled, to $55 million. Diluted earnings per share jumped from a quarter to ninety cents. Gross margin rose by the widest margin the company has posted in years. Read only the headline numbers, and you’d think somebody finally…
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Right to Repair Just Won in Congress. Don’t Celebrate Yet.
On May 21, the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted 48 to 1 to advance a right-to-repair bill. Trade press treated the lopsided margin as a rout, a rare case of Washington actually agreeing on something. Independent repair shops, automakers, and the current administration all found something to like in it. That kind of unanimity…
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Hyundai May Push Its Georgia Factory to 800,000 Cars a Year — Here’s the Real Math
Announced factory capacity is one of the softest numbers in this business. It’s a plan, not a stamping press. So when Hyundai floats the idea of pushing its Georgia assembly complex from 500,000 vehicles a year to somewhere between 700,000 and 800,000, the right response isn’t awe — it’s asking what would physically have to…
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Why New Car Prices Climbed to $49,855 — It Wasn’t Really the Sticker
Every month a headline number lands, everyone recoils at how close new cars are to a fifty-thousand-dollar average, and almost nobody looks at the mechanism underneath it. July’s number deserves better, because what moved wasn’t really the price. It was the discount. Kelley Blue Book put the July average transaction price at $49,855, a 1.9…
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Mazda Patented a Fix for the Rotary Engine’s Dirtiest Secret. The RX-7 Crowd Should Pump the Brakes
Every time Mazda files a patent with the word “rotary” anywhere near it, the same ritual plays out. Enthusiast outlets dust off renders of the Iconic SP concept. Comment sections start drafting eulogies for whatever eventually replaces the RX-7. Someone, somewhere, declares “it’s happening” with far more certainty than the paperwork supports. This week’s patent…
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Flock’s CEO Compared Banning His Cameras to Banning Cars. His Own Website Proves the Analogy Backwards
Garrett Langley, the CEO of Flock Safety, picked an odd hill to defend this week. Facing a wave of bans and lawsuits, from the LAPD’s exit to a Wichita driver suing to rip out all 200 cameras in his city, he compared outlawing the technology to “banning vehicles,” as if a camera network and a…
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BMW Patented a Trunk Lid That Swallows Your Charging Cable — And That’s Not Even the Interesting Part
Somewhere in Munich, a BMW engineer just solved a problem that has nothing to do with horsepower, range, or 800-volt architecture. It’s the problem of a soggy, tangled charging cable rattling around loose in the trunk of an electric car. That sounds like a minor fix. It isn’t. It’s a small window into how automakers…
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Belvidere’s Jeep Cherokee Delayed to 2029 as Stellantis Bets on STLA One
There are two ways to read what Stellantis said about Belvidere on August 14. One is that a shuttered Illinois assembly plant finally has a product with a name on it. The other is that the reopening slipped again, and the thing replacing the old date is a vehicle architecture that won’t exist in production…
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Black Hat Just Proved Your EV Charger Can Infect Your Car—And Everything Else Nearby
Forget air-gapped security discussions. Forget the naive assumption that physical charging hardware couldn’t be turned into an attack vector. A research team just demonstrated something far more unsettling: a single compromised charger becomes a worm that autonomously spreads to other vehicles and charging networks—without needing a driver to do anything after the initial connection. The…
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Waymo Told NHTSA How It Decides School-Zone Speeds. Then It Blacked Out the Answer.
A nine-year-old girl in Santa Monica is fine. She stood up, walked to the curb, and didn’t need to go to a hospital. Seven months later, that’s still the least interesting part of this story. The interesting part is what happened next: a federal agency spent half a year trying to get Waymo to explain,…
