News
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Ford’s Quarterly Loss Hides a Worse EV Number and a Very Good Trade
Ford’s second quarter produced a $1.3 billion net loss, a raised profit forecast, and a press release that manages to be accurate about both. Fine. The interesting numbers are the ones nobody put on a slide. Start with the ledger. Revenue of $48.3 billion, down $1.9 billion. Wholesale volume of 1,039,000 units, down 12 percent.…
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Tesla ‘Fixed’ This Suspension Failure Twice Already. NHTSA’s New Files Say That Didn’t Work.
Federal safety regulators just opened a new investigation into Tesla’s front suspension. That’s not really the news. Tesla has been down this exact road before, twice, and both times the company said, in effect, that it had already fixed the problem. A single sentence buried in NHTSA’s own paperwork now says otherwise. On July 29,…
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Carvana’s Record Quarter Wasn’t Built on Used Car Prices — Here’s What Actually Happened
Carvana just printed the best quarter in its history, and the press release invites you to credit execution. Fine. But before anyone files this under “used car market goes brrr,” go look at what the federal government says used cars actually cost right now. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the used cars and…
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Jeep Recalled 641 Wranglers Over Cracking Steel Wheels — Which Defeats the Entire Point of Steel Wheels
Jeep wants this to read as a story about 641 wheels. It isn’t. It’s a story about which failure mode is supposed to be impossible on a Wrangler, and which one just happened anyway. Steel wheels have stayed on the Wrangler and Gladiator order sheet for one specific reason, and it isn’t cost. Buyers who…
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Rhode Island Will Send Your Home Address to Firefighters If You Drive an EV
Rhode Island’s DMV is about to start mailing your local fire station a list of everybody in town who drives something with a big battery in it. Not a database firefighters can query. A list. Twice a year. On paper or in a spreadsheet — the law doesn’t say. Governor Dan McKee put his signature…
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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…
