News
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GM Signs On With SAIC Until 2047 — and Quietly Drops Chevrolet From Its China Plans
General Motors just signed a lease on a country it has spent two years writing down. On August 5 in Shanghai, GM and SAIC put their names to a 20-year extension of SAIC-GM, pushing the venture out to 2047 — a full year before the original 1997 agreement was due to lapse. That’s the headline.…
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A Naked Fire Truck Joyride In Wisconsin Exposed More Than The Driver, Watch
Just before 1 a.m. on a Tuesday in Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin, a woman walked up to a parked pickup truck outside Fire Station 3, climbed inside wearing nothing at all, flipped on the emergency lights, and drove off. Dispatchers spent the next hour listening to her on the fire department’s radio asking if anyone had…
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Mercedes-AMG’s Metal Badge Is So Fancy It’s Allegedly Branding Owners Like Cattle
Two Southern California drivers have handed the auto industry a real-world lesson in a problem that should have been obvious the moment somebody decided a painted plastic badge wasn’t premium enough: real metal gets real hot. Mercedes-Benz is now defending a design choice that has nothing to do with horsepower, brakes, or crash structure. It…
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Uber Pledges $10 Billion to Robotaxis — What That Actually Buys, and Who Builds the Cars
Uber spent Wednesday morning telling investors it intends to become the world’s largest platform for cars that don’t need a driver. Wall Street spent Wednesday afternoon marking the stock down. Both reactions are defensible, and the gap between them is the whole story. Start with the number that matters to anyone who cares about vehicles…
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An East LA AutoZone Gets Ransacked During Street Takeover. California’s Looting Law Never Even Applied.
Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies responded to Olympic and Atlantic twice in about twenty-four hours this past weekend, first around 2:20 a.m. Saturday and again around 3 a.m. Sunday, each time for a street takeover that spilled into the AutoZone’s parking lot. Both times, authorities say, people broke away from the crowd of spectators and…
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Dodge Brings Back the Super Bee With 600 HP — And Buries the Real News in the Fine Print
Read the press release Dodge sent out on August 7 closely enough, and it tells on itself. Dodge calls the new 2027 Charger Super Bee Launch Edition the “quickest, fastest, most powerful SIXPACK Charger” ever built. Notice the qualifier. Not the quickest, fastest, most powerful Charger, full stop. The quickest, fastest, most powerful SIXPACK Charger.…
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Relay Car Theft Explained: Why Your Key Fob Is Broadcasting Through Your Front Door
A Chicago driver walked out of her house this week to a stretch of empty curb where her car had been. No broken glass, no scattered trim clips, no ignition lock hanging out of the steering column. Police told her what happened: someone stood near her house, captured the signal her key fob was quietly…
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California Legalized 80,000-Pound Driverless Trucks Using a Rule Built for Fixing Typos. The Teamsters Just Called That Bluff.
No self-driving semi has crashed on a California freeway. None has even been allowed to try. That is the detail missing from most of the coverage of Teamsters California’s new lawsuit against the state’s DMV, and it is the detail that actually matters. On August 5, Teamsters California filed a writ of mandate in Alameda…
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Japan’s Earthquake Barely Touched Honda’s Closest Factory. A Plant 600 Miles Away Still Can’t Build A Civic
Honda’s factory in Ozu, Kumamoto, sits close enough to the epicenter of Japan’s July 28 earthquake that it took a direct hit. It’s already building again. Meanwhile, in Saitama, nearly 600 miles north, the Honda plant that builds the Civic, the Civic Type R, the ZR-V, and the new Prelude didn’t even shut down until…
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SRT Says It Just Cured Turbo Lag. What It Actually Cured Is Stellantis’s Hemi Guilt
Stellantis spent seven weeks and, from the sound of it, a battery small enough to fit inside a flashlight, engineering a fix for a problem the company created for itself. That’s the part of the eBoost Air story that didn’t make it into the press photos. On Thursday, SRT, Stellantis’s performance skunkworks, showed off a…
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Škoda’s New Flagship EV Has Flush Door Handles and a Panoramic Roof. That’s Not the Story.
Škoda’s new Peaq flagship SUV comes with flush door handles, a panoramic roof with electronic shade control, and bidirectional charging. Every one of those features is engineered to make you look at the car. None of them is the actual story here. The real story is happening on the floor of Škoda’s Mladá Boleslav plant,…
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Stellantis’s CEO Used To Run Quality Control. Ram Just Recalled 1.27 Million Trucks On His Watch.
Ram just recalled 1.27 million trucks. Buried in the same federal paperwork is a number that matters more than the headline: Stellantis estimates only 6.1 percent of those trucks actually have the defect it’s recalling them for. That gap is the real story here, not the bolt. The distance between “we recalled 1.27 million vehicles”…
