News
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A Two-Bay Tuffy in Indiana Just Went Bankrupt. Wall Street’s Biggest Tire Chain Almost Joined It.
Two Tuffy Tire & Auto Service locations in Fort Wayne, Indiana, are still open. The bays are still full, the phones still ring, and a customer dropping off a car for an oil change this week has no reason to think anything is wrong. But the company that owns those two shops, Automotive Solutions Inc.,…
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Toyota Just Fired Up RAV4 Hybrid Production in Kentucky. Buyers Are Already Outrunning the Assembly Line
The RAV4 is Toyota’s volume engine — the best-selling thing it makes that isn’t a Camry-shaped memory. Anything that throttles how many the company can build ripples straight through dealer lots and your local supply. And right now the sixth-generation RAV4 sits in an awkward spot. Buyers want it badly, but Toyota is only just…
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Europe Just Regulated Brake Dust Like Exhaust — So Bosch Cut the Wire to Your Brake Pedal
A market research report making the rounds this week claims the global regenerative braking systems business will roughly double by 2035, reaching $14.3 billion. Nobody who owns a car should care about that number. What they should care about is the regulation buried behind why that number exists: for the first time in automotive history,…
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Volvo Just Beamed Apple Music Into Two Million Cars Overnight. Last Year, the Same Pipeline Beamed In a Brake Problem.
Volvo wants you to notice the music. On July 7, the automaker started pushing a wireless update that drops native Apple Music into more than two million Volvo cars built since the 2020 model year. No dealer visit. No new car. No waiting. It is a genuinely good update. It is also the least interesting…
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Subaru’s 541,000-Vehicle Recall Isn’t About a Broken Part. It’s About a Label Nobody Checked for Seven Years
Half a million Subarus are heading back into the recall system this year, and not one of them needs a new part. Subaru of America filed paperwork with NHTSA on July 7 disclosing that 541,237 vehicles carry an incorrect Gross Axle Weight Rating on their federally required certification label. The fix isn’t a wiring harness,…
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BMW Says 29,000 Hybrids Might Catch Fire — Good Luck Finding Out if Yours Is One Before Next Month
If you own a BMW 330e, 530e, or 740Le built sometime in the last decade, here is some safety advice straight from the company that built it: do not park it in your garage. Do not park it near your house. Leave it outside, out in the open, away from anything that could burn if…
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Mexico’s ‘Electrified’ Car Boom Is Mostly Just Hybrids, and It Picked the Worst Possible Week to Look Suspicious
Mexico’s auto distributors want you to know that electrified vehicle sales are up 44% this year. What they’re less eager to explain is that “electrified” is doing most of the work in that sentence, and that the timing of this good news could not be worse. According to data compiled by the Mexican Association of…
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Uncle Sam Just Handed Bosch $225 Million To Make EV Chips – In The Same Business That Just Bankrupted America’s Last Champion
Bosch says it just reached “a milestone.” That part is true. It’s just not the milestone the press release wants you to focus on. On July 13, Bosch signed a definitive agreement with the U.S. Department of Commerce for up to $225 million in direct funding, part of a roughly $2 billion plan to convert…
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Stellantis Is Bragging About a 38% Shipment Surge. Its Dealers Are the Ones Left Holding the Bag
Stellantis wants the headline to be simple: North American shipments jumped 38% in the second quarter, a number the company reported directly to investors this week. That figure is accurate. It is also not the number that matters most in this story. According to Stellantis’s own Q2 2026 shipment disclosure, the company moved an estimated…
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Your Neighborhood Garbage Truck Is About to Start Spying on You. Your Car Already Did, and Got Fined for It.
Cape Coral, Florida is looking at a proposal to strap AI-powered cameras onto its garbage trucks. As the trucks roll their normal routes, the cameras would scan yards and house fronts for code violations: overgrown grass, illegal dumping, peeling paint, the usual blight checklist. City leaders are framing it as a staffing fix. Code enforcement…
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EPA’s New Truck Rule Turns a Federal Felony Into a Factory Setting
Mac Spurlock ran a diesel repair shop in Wasilla, Alaska. In 2022, about thirty armed federal agents raided it, and a jury convicted him of a felony for disabling the system that forces a truck to lose power when its emissions equipment glitches in the cold. President Trump pardoned him this year. Now the EPA…
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California Handed Oil Refineries a Bigger Break Than Its Own Regulators Recommended. Now It’s Getting Sued for It
California has one climate rule everyone already knows: every new car sold in the state must be zero-emission by 2035. It has a second rule almost nobody’s heard of. The agency writing that first rule just spent the spring on something else entirely. It quietly handed California’s oil refineries the richest subsidy package its cap-and-trade…
