News
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Volkswagen Wanted Tariffs to Keep Out Cheap Chinese EVs. The Cheapest One in Germany Showed Up Wearing Four Rings.
Somewhere inside Volkswagen Group’s tariff lobbying operation, someone owes a colleague an apology. For two years, Volkswagen has argued to Brussels that Chinese manufacturers can build an electric car for meaningfully less money than a German factory can, and that without countervailing duties, European automakers would lose the affordable-EV fight before it started. The European…
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Six Defendants Allegedly Stole $4 Million in Rental Cars. The Going Rate Was $2,000 Each.
Six defendants are accused of taking about 150 rental cars worth more than $4 million with forged licenses and stolen credit cards. The resale price is the real story.
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A $5,295 Fee to ‘Certify’ a Car That Was Already Certified. The Rule Meant to Stop It Died Six Months Ago.
Manchester City Nissan will pay $4 million over alleged junk fees. The bigger story is that a CPO badge is a database entry the dealer controls — and the federal rule written to stop this was deleted in February.
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A Georgia Sheriff’s Office Fired Its Fourth Employee for Flock Camera Misuse This Year. Somehow, That’s the Good News.
Cherokee County, Georgia, wants you to read Wednesday’s arrest as proof its license plate camera policy finally works. Four employees fired over the same kind of misconduct in a single year is an odd way to make that case. Stick with the math for a second, though, because it says something real. It’s just not…
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The EPA Calls This a Gas Price ‘Emergency.’ It’s Been One Since May.
Gas is about to get a little cheaper for the last stretch of summer. That’s not really the story. On August 20, the EPA and the Department of Energy issued a temporary emergency fuel waiver that lets refiners start selling higher-volatility E10 gasoline on September 1, two weeks before the summer blending season was scheduled…
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GEICO’s $1.65 Million Settlement Isn’t About the $150 Checks — It’s About the File That Sets Your Rate
A federal judge in Maryland is scheduled to sign off in January on a settlement that will send roughly 7,200 people a check for about $150 each. That is not, on its face, a big number. But the case behind those checks is a rare, detailed look at how a car insurer treats the file…
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Stellantis Patented Emergency Lights for Cars That Have Already Rolled Over
Every taillight ever engineered assumes the car will stay right-side up. Stellantis just filed a patent that quietly admits otherwise. The application, submitted to France’s national patent office, INPI, describes a pair of auxiliary warning lights mounted low on the front and rear bumpers — not the taillights or headlights you already know, but a…
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Toyota Owes 48,280 Tacoma Owners New Shocks. Somebody Has To Build 193,120 Of Them First
The corrosion fix is the easy part of Toyota’s Tacoma shock absorber recall. Building 193,120 remote-reservoir Bilstein dampers is not, and federal law sets the letter date regardless.
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Stellantis Filed Three Backup-Camera Recalls in Three Months. The First Two Covered Only 75 Cars.
Stellantis didn’t tell federal safety regulators about a blank backup camera once this summer. It told them three times, under three different explanations, at three wildly different scales. The version that made headlines this week covers something like 900,000 vehicles in the United States and helped knock nearly 4 percent off the stock in a…
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Wall Street Cheered a Bronco Pickup That Doesn’t Exist. It Ignored 565,691 Real Ones With a Fire Risk.
On Wednesday, Ford stock jumped 4% on a rumor about a truck that does not exist, might not exist until 2030, and that Ford has not confirmed. By Thursday afternoon, shares had given back nearly the entire move. Nothing about Ford’s business changed in that 24-hour window. A headline did. That round trip is a…
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Record $2.1M Ford GT Sale: The Mileage Cliff Explained
Eight Miles, Two Million Dollars, and the Number Nobody Is Talking About The headline figure from Bring a Trailer’s August 4 auction is $2,101,000 — a 2006 Ford GT Heritage Edition with eight miles on the odometer, and the highest recorded sale for a first-generation GT in Classic.com’s database. That’s the number that traveled. It…
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Tesla’s Recalling Nearly 5 Million Cars In China Over Door Handles It Still Won’t Redesign
Tesla just told Chinese regulators it will fix nearly five million cars without a single technician touching a single vehicle. That sentence says more about how recalls work now than anything else in this story. China’s State Administration for Market Regulation disclosed Friday that Tesla will recall 2.98 million China-made and imported Model 3, Model…
