News
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Inside the $280 Million Bet on the Paint Layer Your Body Shop Can’t Match
Paint plants don’t usually get much attention from enthusiasts, which is a shame, because the coating on your car is one of the few things on it that was engineered to last twenty years without any maintenance and usually does. PPG put shovels in the ground August 6 on a 100,000-square-foot addition to its Delaware,…
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Florida’s Flying-Car Test Track Is the Headline. The Robotaxis Already on I-95 Are the Real Story
Florida’s governor stood in front of a hangar in Auburndale this week and talked about flying cars. That’s the part of this story everyone will remember. It’s also not the part that matters. Buried in the same announcement, almost as a footnote, was the actual news: Waymo is already carrying paying passengers on Florida’s interstates…
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Flock Wanted 350,000 Uber and Lyft Dashcams to Spy for It. Nobody Behind the Wheel Would Have Known.
The dashcam mounted on your Uber driver’s windshield was sold as a witness. A silent, unblinking one that could settle a dispute, beat a bogus insurance claim, or clear a driver after a crash that wasn’t their fault. That was the pitch, and for years it worked exactly as advertised. Then Flock Safety looked at…
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California’s New EV Rebate Comes With an Escape Hatch, and Only Tesla and Lucid Fit Through It
Sacramento wants this to read like a feel-good story: walk into a dealership, buy your first electric car, drive away $3,500 lighter on the price tag. That is not actually the story. Read what the California Air Resources Board put in writing about MyFirstEV, the state’s new instant rebate program, and a different plot emerges.…
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The 1966 Loophole Behind California’s Emissions Power, and the Senate Push to Kill It
Four short resolutions dropped in the Senate on August 6, and none of them read like automotive policy. They read like paperwork. That’s the point. Senators Cynthia Lummis, Eric Schmitt, Pete Ricketts and Jon Husted introduced four joint resolutions under the Congressional Review Act, each one disapproving a separate EPA waiver granted to California. The…
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Musk’s Terafab Will Run on Its Own Gas Plants and Battery Banks
SpaceX has told Grimes County that its enormous new chip plant will not be plugging into the Texas grid like the rest of us. It’s building its own power stations instead. At the August 5 question-and-answer session before the Grimes County Commissioners Court — the first time company representatives sat in a room and took…
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Huawei Promised It Would Never Build A Car. It Didn’t Have To – It’s Already Running 25 Of Them
Huawei’s founder has put his signature on a promise, more than once, guaranteeing his company will never build a car. Nobody has caught him breaking it. And yet Huawei’s automotive alliance just told the market it delivered 45,046 vehicles in July alone, pushing year-to-date volume past 286,000 units – a 13.7 percent jump over the…
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Tesla’s ‘Insane’ Mode Is On Trial For A Salon Crash. It Shouldn’t Be The Only Defendant
A Tesla Model Y ended up inside an Arlington, Virginia hair salon this month, and the woman who was only test-driving the car is now suing Tesla for more than ten million dollars. The easy version of this story writes itself: a sinister-sounding acceleration mode did exactly what its name promised, and chaos followed. That…
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BYD Filed Six New Solid-State Battery Patents, But the Real Story Is Whether Two Rocks Actually Touch
Forget the six patents for a moment. The most interesting number in BYD’s newest solid-state battery filing isn’t a range figure, a voltage, or a production date. It’s 60 percent. That’s the minimum share of a cathode particle’s perimeter that BYD says must stay in physical contact with solid electrolyte particles for one of its…
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California’s New EV Rebate Just Went Live. The Automaker It Was Written For Didn’t Show Up
California flipped the switch today on a new $3,500 discount for first-time electric vehicle buyers, and the state’s press release wants you looking at the money. Look instead at the guest list. Three automakers are handing out the rebate at the dealership right now: Tesla, Hyundai, and Lucid. A fourth name is conspicuously missing from…
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Lotus Unveils a Hybrid V8 Supercar to Save the Brand. The Real Story Is the Chinese Factory Running at One-Fifth Capacity
Lotus wants the headline this week to be about a supercar. A new hybrid V8 coming in 2028, code-named Type 135, packing more than 1,000 horsepower, built to remind everyone that a company now majority-owned by a Chinese industrial conglomerate still remembers what Colin Chapman’s name is supposed to mean. It’s a good story, and…
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Hertz Investors Sue After a 40% Wipeout — the Fleet Math Behind the Collapse
On June 24, Hertz told the market two things at once: that demand was fine, and that it needed money. The stock did not take the news gracefully, and the plaintiffs’ bar showed up on schedule. A securities class action filed in July names Hertz Global Holdings along with CEO Wayne Gilbert West and CFO…
