News
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Amazon’s Zoox Just Got a Government Hall Pass for Its Steering-Wheel-Free Robotaxi – And the Rulebook Is Still Being Written
The federal government just gave an Amazon-owned company permission to charge people money for rides in a car with no steering wheel, no brake pedal, and no driver’s seat. That will be the headline everywhere else. It’s not the real story. The real story is buried in the same announcement: the agency policing that decision…
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Holmes Motors Repossessed a Deploying Soldier’s Car Without a Warrant. The $137,000 Fine Is the Least Interesting Part of This Story
A soldier in Alabama handed her car dealer a copy of her deployment orders. The dealer repossessed her car anyway. That’s the entire scandal, reduced to one sentence. Everything else — the $137,000 settlement, the stern quotes from the Justice Department, the phrase “lease-here, pay-here” — is just the machinery that made it possible. This…
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O’Reilly Auto Parts Charged Workers Extra For Smoking. A Judge Just Said: Show Your Homework.
Everyone assumes a tobacco surcharge lawsuit is about the money. It rarely is. On July 30, a federal judge in Springfield, Missouri, let a proposed class action against O’Reilly Automotive move forward, rejecting most of the company’s attempt to get the case thrown out. The claim: O’Reilly charged tobacco-using employees more for health coverage without…
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BYD’s Humanoid Robot Debuts in August, and the Robot Isn’t the Part That Should Worry Everyone Else
BYD has run this play twice before. In 1995, it started as a battery maker, winding lithium-ion cells for Nokia and Motorola handsets. In 2003, it took that battery and manufacturing know-how and bought its way into the car business, back when almost nobody outside China took a battery company turned automaker seriously. Now, starting…
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Brazil Is Buying Chinese Cars By the Billions. The Real Fight Is Over Screwdrivers
Everyone is reporting that Brazil just became the world’s largest importer of Chinese-made vehicles, spending $5.2 billion in five months and blowing past Russia. That is the headline. It is not the story. The real story is what Brazil wants in return. Brazil ran this exact play on Volkswagen, Ford and General Motors seventy years…
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Audi Already Closed One EV Plant. The One It Might Close Next Builds an EV, Too.
Audi already knows what happens to a plant that builds an electric car nobody buys in sufficient numbers. It shut one down. On July 29, roughly 6,000 workers gathered outside Audi’s Neckarsulm plant in Germany to protest the possibility that theirs could be next, and the thing nobody at that protest said out loud is…
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Trump’s Michigan Tariff Victory Lap Starred a Factory Built to Bury GM’s EV Trucks
When a president stands on a General Motors proving ground and announces that tariffs are dragging factories back across the border, the obvious move is to check which factories actually moved. That’s the wrong instinct. The more interesting question is which numbers just got repackaged as a tariff win that had nothing to do with…
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New York City Fixed Its Illegal Car-Crushing Program. It Left One Loophole Big Enough For A Mercedes-Benz.
Buried inside New York City’s sanitation code is a clause that reads like a guest list for a Concours d’Elegance. Rolls-Royce. BMW. Mercedes-Benz. Jaguar. Porsche. Lamborghini. Ferrari. Lexus. The city didn’t put those names in its rulebook to celebrate them. It put them there because it keeps getting sued over how it destroys them. On…
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BYD Patented A Car That Won’t Start If Something’s Alive Underneath It. That’s Not Even The Real Story
Picture a cold morning outside Shenzhen. A BYD hatchback sits in a driveway, and a stray cat has tucked itself into the flat, sheltered space beneath the front bumper. The driver climbs in, turns the car on, and nothing happens. Not a dead battery, not a software bug. The car itself decided nobody is going…
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Kia Just Spent $649 Million To Build an EV It Has No Intention of Selling You
This week, welding robots inside a Kia plant in Nuevo León, Mexico, started getting reprogrammed. They used to build gasoline-powered Fortes and Rios. Soon they’ll be lowering battery packs into the floor of an electric EV3 crossover instead. That $649 million retooling job says far more about the slow unraveling of North American trade rules…
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Stolen American Cars Disappear by the Thousands Every Year. Kenya’s Steering Wheel Law Is Why None of Them Show Up There
Somewhere along the Eastern Seaboard tonight, a shipping container is being sealed with paperwork describing its contents as household furniture. Inside sits a Cadillac Escalade that was parked in a Virginia driveway a few days earlier. This is not a hypothetical. An entire task force exists to catch exactly this, run by U.S. Customs and…
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Motive Sold Truckers an AI Camera to Keep Them Out of Court. Now the Camera Is the One Being Sued
For the better part of a decade, the sales pitch behind putting an AI camera on a semi’s windshield has been simple: it protects the driver. When something goes wrong, the footage is supposed to back up the trucker, not the shipper’s insurance adjuster or a plaintiff’s attorney. Motive Technologies has built a nearly 100,000-fleet…
