News
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Baltimore Paid $400K After a Patrol SUV Hit a Teen. The Real Story Is What the Black Box Would Show
Baltimore’s spending board just cut a $400,000 check over a car crash that wasn’t really a crash — it was a fleeing 16-year-old ending up under the passenger-side wheels of a Ford Explorer wearing police livery. The Board of Estimates, the five-member panel that signs off on the city’s money, approved the payout unanimously on…
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This El Paso Man Tried to Steal Back His Own Repossessed Car. It Didn’t Go Well
There’s a particular flavor of automotive stupidity that only surfaces when someone stops making car payments, and a 21-year-old named Donovan Acklin just supplied a textbook example of it. According to the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office, deputies were called out to the 14400 block of Cassidy Drive in far east El Paso on June…
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A Stolen Carvana Car Hauler Turned Highway 231 Into a Demolition Derby in Bay County
Car haulers are built to move other people’s vehicles slowly and carefully. They are not built for a police pursuit. That contradiction sits at the center of an incident on the afternoon of Tuesday, June 30, 2026, when a stolen Carvana flatbed car carrier led law enforcement on a chase down Highway 231 in Bay…
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Rivian Is Turning a Dead Fry’s Electronics Into Its Newest Sacramento Showroom
The building where Northern California nerds once wandered fluorescent-lit aisles hunting for hard drives and discount motherboards is about to get a second life with a very different kind of hardware. According to a press release from Sacramento Councilmember Lisa Kaplan’s office, Rivian has signed a long-term lease for roughly 60,000 square feet at 4100…
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Trump Skipped the USMCA’s First Checkup — And Your Next Car Might Pay for It
Six years to the day after it replaced NAFTA, the USMCA hit its first mandatory checkup, and Washington failed it on purpose. On July 1, 2026, trade officials from the United States, Mexico, and Canada held the treaty’s first Joint Review, and the U.S. Trade Representative’s office confirmed the outcome. The agreement wasn’t terminated, but…
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Recall Fatigue Is Real: What to Actually Do When Your Car Gets Recalled
The recall notices keep coming, and after a while they all blur into the same beige envelope. A software glitch here. A cracked bushing there. Ninety-six thousand Hyundai Tucsons whose gauge clusters can blank out mid-drive. A generation of Ford Explorers that can shrug themselves out of Park. If you’ve reached the point where you…
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The Right-to-Repair Map: Which States Actually Let You Fix Your Own Car in 2026
Ask ten drivers whether they have a “right to repair” their own car, and most will assume the answer is obviously yes. It’s your car. You bought it. Of course you can fix it. Then they take it to an independent shop for a check-engine light, and the shop shrugs because it can’t pull the…
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Guy’s Ford Explorer Had Cop Lights and a Police Radio, So Indiana Troopers Cited Him
You can buy a lot of things over the counter that have no business being on a private vehicle, and a light bar that flashes red and blue is near the top of that list. A resident of Dubois County, Indiana apparently agreed with that concern, because a citizen tip is what pointed troopers toward…
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California Man Pleads Guilty in $476K Fake-License Car Loan Fraud
James Raymond Hanes had a simple trick, and like most simple tricks that end in a federal courthouse, it worked until it very much didn’t. Print your own face onto someone else’s driver’s license, walk into a dealership as that person, borrow money you never intend to repay, drive off, and sell the car to…
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Mercedes C300 Flees Trooper, Hits Semi Head-On the Wrong Way on I-55
Fleeing a traffic stop is a bad bet on its own. Doing it the wrong way up an interstate, straight into a loaded tractor-trailer, is the kind of move that usually doesn’t leave anyone around to explain the reasoning. This one, improbably, did. Check This Out: 5 Genius Garage Upgrades Under $100 That Make a…
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The ‘Buy American’ and ‘Buy European’ Pitch Is Getting Harder to Believe When the Platforms Keep Coming From China
Two stories crossed the wire at roughly the same moment this week, and read together they say something the marketing departments in Detroit and Europe would rather you didn’t dwell on. The first: Jeep’s next flagship SUV for the European market is reportedly slated for assembly in China rather than in the United States. The…
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The Enthusiast Car Isn’t Being Killed. It’s Being Managed Into Extinction — And That’s Worse
Nobody is going to hold a press conference to announce the death of the fun car. There will be no executioner, no dramatic final rev, no black armband draped over the last stick shift. Instead, the enthusiast car is being handled the way a struggling company handles an unprofitable division: quietly, on a spreadsheet, with…
