News
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31 Felony Charges Later, Georgia’s Tag Office Has One Very Awkward Question: Who Else Has Her Login?
Every title-fraud story The Auto Wire has covered shares one plot point: someone had to fool the person guarding the paperwork. A forged signature. A washed title mailed in from out of state. A dealer betting nobody would check the VIN twice. This case, out of Athens-Clarke County, Georgia, skips that step entirely. According to…
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Blame Yourself: America Lets the Fastest Drivers Write the Speed Limits
AAA says speeding is the new normal. The deeper story is that America sets speed limits from how fast drivers already drive, and every new car already knows the number.
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Florida’s Flashy New ‘Super Speeder’ Law Grabbed the Headlines — a Forgotten 1971 Statute Grabbed the License
Quashay Frazier Jr. lost a drag race on the Buckman Bridge in Jacksonville on a Friday night. He did not lose his driver’s license because he was doing 120 mph. He lost it because he raced. That distinction sounds like a technicality. It isn’t. It’s the actual story here, and it’s the part almost nobody…
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McLaren Wants More US Dealerships. State Franchise Law Says Not So Fast
McLaren Wants More U.S. Stores. Franchise Law Is About to Get a Vote. Speaking at Monterey Car Week, McLaren CEO Nick Collins floated growing the brand’s American retail network by as much as 40 percent — somewhere between five and 10 additional stores over roughly two years — on the strength of the U.S. now…
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One Rivian Hire Reveals the Company’s Real Plan for Commercial Vans
Rivian Just Hired a Fleet Sales Director. That Tells You More Than the Press Releases Do. Rivian didn’t put out a release for this one. Dan Pisegna announced it himself on LinkedIn on August 15 — a new job as Director of Fleet Sales at the Irvine-based automaker. No newsroom post, no quote from RJ…
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A DUI Camaro Crash Ended Inside a Bedroom — the Insurance Gap Is the Real Story
A Camaro Ended Up In a Hesperia Bedroom. The Charge Sheet Is the Interesting Part. Every so often a crash report reads less like a traffic collision and more like a fever dream. This is one of those. At 7:22 p.m. on August 12, deputies from the Hesperia station were sent to the 11700 block…
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California Just Handed Waymo Its Biggest Robotaxi Expansion Yet — 18 Counties, No Driver
Waymo Just Got the Keys to Most of California — Here’s What the Paperwork Actually Says The headline number is 18 counties. The more interesting number is 3,871. On August 14, the California Public Utilities Commission’s Consumer Protection and Enforcement Division signed off on Waymo Advice Letter 0004 and its supplement, 0004-A, clearing the Alphabet…
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Washington Dusted Off a 96-Year-Old Tariff Law Nobody Had Ever Used — and Detroit Is the Guinea Pig
Forget the 50 percent. Forget the wine, the dairy, and the hockey sticks that made for such a fun headline this week. The sentence that should actually worry anyone who owns, builds, sells, or fixes a car in North America is buried in a White House fact sheet from July, phrased so blandly you could…
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Avis Briefly Became a $27 Billion Meme Stock — Its Own Books Said It Was Worthless
For a few days in April, Wall Street decided that Avis Budget Group – the company that rents you a Nissan Versa at the airport counter – was worth more than Ford Motor Company. On April 1, Avis stock opened at $147.52 a share. Three weeks later, it touched $765.94 in intraday trading, a 419…
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A Robot Didn’t Kill This Stellantis Mechanic. A Bypass Key Did, and OSHA Predicted It Decades Ago.
Nobody has ever been crushed by an industrial robot that was doing exactly what its safety systems were designed to let it do. Every documented case starts the same way: someone decides that, just this once, the safety system can wait. That is what a wrongful-death lawsuit alleges happened last spring inside Stellantis’s Dundee Engine…
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China’s EV Price War Got So Brutal, Automakers Are Bribing You With Karaoke Machines Now
BYD wants to sell you a car with a karaoke machine wired into the dashboard. Somewhere in Shenzhen, a set of headlights can already project a movie onto your garage door. Neither of those is the story. The real story is why an industry stacked with battery chemists and manufacturing engineers is suddenly fighting China’s…
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Musk Says Tesla Builds America’s Most American Car. His Own Truck Skipped the Test
Every new car sold in America wears a sticker almost nobody reads. It lists exactly how much of that vehicle was built domestically, expressed as a single percentage. This past weekend, that obscure sticker became Elon Musk’s favorite talking point. What Musk didn’t mention is that the number on it is filled out by the…
