News
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Medford Takeover Bust: Why Seven Seized Cars May Never Come Home
The interesting number out of Medford isn’t 15. It’s seven. Fifteen people got charged. Seven of them are going to spend the next several months learning how New York civil forfeiture actually works, and it is not the process most enthusiasts assume it is. Per Suffolk County Police, the department’s Street Takeover Task Force picked…
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State Farm’s $5 Billion ‘Thank You’ Check Is Actually a Receipt for Three Years of Rate Hikes
State Farm wants its customers to see this as generosity: a $5 billion “thank you,” mailed out in waves to more than 49 million insured vehicles. It isn’t generosity. It’s a receipt. When an insurance company hands back nine figures a month for the better part of a year, that money didn’t materialize out of…
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Two BMW Street Racers Killed a Grandmother in Florida. The Law Says the Passengers, Spectators, and Camera Phones Could Be Just as Guilty.
Two men in two BMWs are facing vehicular homicide charges after a street race in Ocala killed a 77-year-old woman riding in a Toyota RAV4. That part of this story is straightforward. The part that should worry anyone who has ever shown up to watch one of these meetups, ridden along, or pulled out a…
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East L.A. AutoZone Hit Twice: 27 Sought And What It Means
A parts store is not a jewelry counter. There’s no vault, no serialized inventory, no activation lock. That’s exactly why it keeps ending up on the wrong end of these things. Investigators with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department have now circulated photographs of 27 people in connection with two break-ins at the AutoZone in…
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Cadillac Just Killed Its Two Cheapest Vehicles in the Same Year. Welcome to $49,200 and Up.
Everyone reading about the layoffs at Lansing Grand River is asking what happens to the Cadillac CT5. Almost nobody is asking about the car parked on the same line right now: the CT4. That is the more interesting question, because the CT5 is getting retooled. The CT4 is just disappearing. We’ve already covered why GM…
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GM Says Its 2027 EVs Won’t Need a Tesla Adapter. Your Trunk Will Disagree.
General Motors wants you to believe its 2027 electric vehicles are finally free of the adapter problem. Every Cadillac, Chevrolet, and GMC EV built for that model year will come standard with a native NACS port, the same connector shape Tesla popularized and still operates the busiest version of. Pull up to a compatible Supercharger…
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Toyota Just Patented A Fix For The Paddle-Shift Lag Its Own Engineers Invented Back In 2006
Pull the downshift paddle in a Toyota-built automatic and sometimes the car just waits. Not forever. Just long enough to notice. Long enough to wonder if the transmission heard you at all. That pause isn’t cheap engineering or a tired valve body. It’s a decision, written into software, and Toyota has been making that decision…
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Dinoco Blue Lightning McQueen Crocs: What Cars Fans Should Know
Twenty years on, the deepest cut in the Cars catalog isn’t a character. It’s a paint scheme that only exists inside a daydream, and Crocs has now molded it in polymer resin and bolted a wing to the back of it. Crocs has quietly pushed a live product page for the Lightning McQueen Dinoco Crocband,…
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Belvidere Is Getting Its Cherokee Back. It’s Also Becoming Stellantis’s Guinea Pig For a Platform That Doesn’t Exist Yet
Stellantis wants Belvidere to feel like a win. On Thursday, the company said it’s raising its investment in the shuttered Illinois assembly plant to more than $800 million and confirmed the factory will build the next-generation Jeep Cherokee. Buried a few paragraphs down, though, was the number that actually matters: retail production won’t start until…
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Stellantis Promised to Keep Brampton Running Until 2035. Canada’s $529 Million Contract Had a Trapdoor Built In.
Unifor called it “a dire development” when Stellantis told the union on August 12 that it’s shopping the Brampton Assembly Plant to another company. That’s the headline everyone is running with. It is not the interesting part. The interesting part is sitting in a 98-page contract most Canadians will never read, signed in 2022, quietly…
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California’s New Tire Rule Could Wipe Out 70% of What’s on the Shelf — And Sacramento Sat on the Law for 23 Years
Sacramento didn’t invent a new law on Monday. It finally read one it wrote in 2003. That’s the detail buried under all the coverage of the California Energy Commission’s unanimous vote to create the nation’s first efficiency standard for replacement tires — a standard that, by the tire industry’s own estimate, will make roughly 70…
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Honda Racing Launches Heritage Program
Every so often a manufacturer decides that the race cars rotting in the back of its warehouse are worth more as a business than as decoration. Honda Racing Corporation USA reached that conclusion this month, launching the HRC Heritage Racing Program during Monterey Car Week with a lineup of Acura prototypes and GT cars for…
