News
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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”…
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Toyota And Hyundai Got Caught Tracking Drivers. GM Already Put A Price On It: $25 Billion.
Five years before Australian regulators opened a file on Toyota and Hyundai, General Motors stood in front of a room of investors and put a number on exactly what a modern car’s data is worth. Not a guess. A target, published in a press release and repeated in filings with U.S. securities regulators: $20 billion…
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Toyota’s Third Blank-Speedometer Recall in a Year Comes With a Two-Tier Fix — Guess Who Loses
Toyota is telling 508,000 Camry owners to bring their car to a dealership so a technician can fix a problem the company could, in theory, solve from a server rack. That gap, between what’s technically possible and what Toyota is actually doing, is the real story hiding inside this recall, not the blank screen itself.…
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Russia’s Record Car-Import Month Has Two Real Stars: A Country That Builds No Cars, and a Corolla That Won’t Die
Start with the number every outlet will repeat this week: Russia imported nearly 95,000 passenger cars in July, the busiest month for auto imports since the start of 2026. Now forget that number for a second and look at this one instead: 14.7 percent. That is the share of new-car imports credited to Kyrgyzstan, a…
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Waymo ‘Recalled’ 4,000 Robotaxis For Blowing Through Construction Zones — And Not One Of Them Stopped Driving
Nearly 4,000 Waymo robotaxis are now the subject of a recall filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Here’s the detail that matters more than the software bug itself: not one of those vehicles missed a shift. No owner got a letter. No dealer appointment was booked. NHTSA calls it a recall. Waymo doesn’t…
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A Cadillac Did Donuts at a Michigan Wedding and Got Impounded. It Might Be Home Before the Honeymoon
Dearborn Heights police impounded a Cadillac CT5-V in late July after investigators say its driver blocked Warren Avenue and filled the intersection with tire smoke during a wedding celebration. Cell phone footage of the stunt, which also shows a white Rolls-Royce fishtailing through the same crowd, spread across social media within hours. Mayor Mo Baydoun…
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Cars.com Just Had a Record Quarter – By Politely Admitting Fewer People Are Showing Up
Cars.com told investors this week that it just posted the fastest revenue growth in its history as a public company, excluding the freak rebound after the pandemic. Then, a few slides later, it told them something that should have been the headline instead: fewer people are actually visiting Cars.com than before. Management didn’t bury that…
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Canada’s $28 Million Car Theft Bust Has a Twist: Nobody Actually Stole Anything
No smashed window. No screwdriver jammed into a steering column. No key fob relay box pressed against a bedroom wall at 2 a.m. In the scheme the RCMP just spent a year unraveling, the crime starts in a finance office, with someone signing real paperwork for a real loan and a real insurance policy. Nobody…
