News
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Ford Gave This Windshield Plant a Crisis-Management Award. Weeks Later, It Had One of Its Own.
In June, Ford handed a Tennessee glass plant a trophy for handling crises well. In July, that same company sent 325 of its own people notice that they no longer have jobs. Nobody at Ford or at Carlex Glass America is calling that irony. Maybe they should. Carlex, the Tier 1 supplier that fabricates windshields,…
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The Pandemic Turned Your Nissan Lease Buyout Into Free Money — And Some Dealers Grabbed It First
For a strange stretch of the pandemic, leasing a Nissan came with an accidental jackpot nobody had planned for. Sign a lease in 2018 or 2019, and the dealership calculates what your car will be worth years down the road, then locks that number into your contract as a fixed purchase option. Nobody expects that…
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Roger Penske Is Buying Back the Company That Bears His Name — and Wall Street Never Really Owned It Anyway
Roger Penske and Mitsui & Co. did not wake up this week and decide they wanted control of Penske Automotive Group. They’ve had it since Bill Clinton’s second term. What they filed with the SEC on July 22 isn’t a takeover. It’s closer to a receipt, proof of purchase for something they already own. The…
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Ford’s Self-Assembling Car Fortress Isn’t Really About Stopping Thieves. It’s About a Battery Problem Nobody Talks About
Ford has a patent application describing cars that arrange themselves into a defensive ring around other cars, and it reads exactly as strange as that sounds. But strip away the wall-of-cars headline, and the interesting part isn’t security at all. It’s what the filing quietly assumes has to be true before any of this works:…
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Honda CR-Vs Are Getting Gutted in 20 Minutes Flat, and the Real Culprit Is Bolted Under the Dash
This isn’t really a story about stolen Honda CR-Vs. It’s a story about a thirty-year-old emissions regulation that accidentally became a master key. Action News Philadelphia has been tracking the wave for weeks. Police say thieves are working in small caravans, hitting parked CR-Vs at night, and vanishing before an owner even hears the glass…
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A Tesla Driver Blamed a Blackout for a Fatal Crash. His Car Was Still Taking Notes.
Every state in the country lets people with seizure disorders keep driving. That is not an oversight. It is policy. And it is the detail nobody is examining after a Tesla plowed through three cars near Orland Square Mall in Orland Park, Illinois, last month, killing a 66-year-old bystander named Antoni Luczynski. According to an…
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EPA’s 2027 Diesel Rewrite Cuts Truck Prices and Shifts Repair Costs to Owners
Buried on page 17 of EPA’s new heavy-duty proposal is a table that tells the whole story better than any press release. Under the agency’s own accounting, the rule change saves truck buyers $37 billion in warranty costs — and hands them back $25 billion in higher operating costs. Net savings: $12 billion. That $12…
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Florida Motorcyclist Fled Troopers Twice, Then His Own Bike Ratted Him Out By Catching Fire
The most important decision in this story doesn’t belong to the guy on the motorcycle. It belongs to the trooper who chose not to chase him. Early Sunday morning on Interstate 75 near Bradenton, a Florida Highway Patrol trooper rolled up on a crash involving two motorcycles. One rider was hurt. The other, 20-year-old Jason…
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How a Charlotte Crew Stole 100 Luxury Cars Using Nothing but Key Fobs
Five people are now serving federal time for a car theft operation that ran from 2021 to 2023 and hit dealership lots in fifteen states, and the thing worth sitting with is how little technology was involved. Nobody cracked an immobilizer. Nobody built a CAN injection tool. They walked in the front door, shook hands,…
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Tesla Said FSD Can Handle Whiteouts. Now Federal Regulators Want Receipts.
NHTSA didn’t ask Tesla to fix a sensor this month. It didn’t ask for a recall, a software patch, or a single physical change to any vehicle. It asked Tesla to defend its own FSD marketing, line by line. That’s a different kind of federal letter than automakers are used to getting, and it says…
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Jimmie Johnson’s Brother Took $140,000 for a Chevelle Restoration. Five Years Later, There’s Still No Car.
A famous surname isn’t a business license. It isn’t a bond, an escrow account, or a receipt for the parts you paid for but never got. In the classic car restoration world, though, a well-known name can function as all three – right up until it doesn’t. That’s the real subject of a lawsuit filed…
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Mercedes Dealer Loses $20,270 Over Tech’s “Extended Test Drive” to a Bar
A Shelby County judge has attached a dollar figure to one of the more creative defenses in recent memory: that a five-hour bar crawl in a customer’s Mercedes was an “extended test drive.” Judge Lynn Cobb of Shelby County General Sessions Court ruled this week that Mercedes-Benz of Collierville and service technician Derrick Nguyen owe…
