News
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China Can’t Sell Cars to Its Own People Anymore, So It’s Flooding Everyone Else’s Driveway Instead
China’s passenger-car market spent June doing exactly what it’s done for the better part of a year. It’s cratering at home while pouring out the door to the rest of the planet. Dealers moved just 1.602 million new cars domestically last month, a 23.2% collapse from a year earlier, according to the China Passenger Car…
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That Car Wash You Love Might Be Sanding Down Your Paint Job. Here’s Which Ones to Skip
You trust it every week or two. Pull in, pick a package, stare at your phone for four minutes while foam and rinse arms do their thing. Nobody thinks twice about the equipment inside that tunnel, or the brush hanging on the wall at the self-serve bay down the street. But operators build the physical…
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IIHS and Consumer Reports’ New Teen Car List Isn’t Really About Price. It’s About Which Cars Are Too Light to Survive a Crash
Every year, IIHS and Consumer Reports publish a list of used and new vehicles that are safe enough, and cheap enough, to hand to a sixteen-year-old. Every year, the coverage focuses on the same thing: the price tags. Forty-five vehicles under $10,000. Twenty-nine more under $20,000. Twenty-two new models under $45,000. Skip the price tags.…
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O’Reilly’s $10 Billion Bid for NAPA Sent Wall Street the Wrong Message. Here’s What It Actually Missed
O’Reilly’s Rumored NAPA Grab Is a Bigger Swing Than the Stock Slide Lets On Wall Street threw a tidy little tantrum when word got around that O’Reilly Automotive wants to swallow the business behind NAPA. Genuine Parts Company shares shot up somewhere around 13 percent; O’Reilly’s drifted down a few points. If you’ve watched a…
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10 Wrecked Dodge Hellcats Are Sitting on Copart Right Now, Just Waiting for Someone Brave Enough to Rebuild Them
Every week, Copart’s lanes fill up with performance cars that met a rough end. The Hellcat family is no exception. From stripped shells to lightly bent widebodies, these supercharged Dodges prove that even 700-plus horsepower isn’t immune to a bad day. Here are ten wrecked and salvage Hellcats currently listed on Copart. Below is a…
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Cops Have Been Manually Rescuing Stuck Robotaxis for Years. Washington Just Voted to Take That Option Away
When a Waymo froze in the middle of an officer’s response to a mass shooting earlier this year, the fix wasn’t complicated. An officer walked up, opened the door, sat down, and drove the car out of the way. The same thing happened in June. An officer had to reposition a stalled Waymo blocking the…
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Detroit Is Panicking That Teens Won’t Get Their License. Maybe Check the Sticker Price First
The decline in teenage driving didn’t start with the smartphone. It started in 1983, when Ronald Reagan was a year into his first term. Back then, a “smartphone” existed only in science fiction. That’s roughly when researchers at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute first noticed licensing rates among 16-year-olds beginning to slide. It’s…
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Ford Quietly Tested Its “Quality Comes First” Ads on Factory Towns Before Anyone Else Saw Them. That’s Not a Coincidence
Ford just won its first J.D. Power quality crown since 2010, and its new “Quality Comes First” campaign celebrates it. Its first move wasn’t a Super Bowl spot. It was full-page ads in the newspapers of Kansas City, Louisville, Chicago, and Dearborn — the towns that actually build the trucks. That’s not how you sell…
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Denver Cab Companies Say Waymo Found A Loophole In Colorado’s Taxi Law — And They’re Not Wrong
Two Colorado transportation companies filed paperwork this month arguing that Waymo doesn’t belong in the same regulatory category as a chauffeured Mercedes. They’re technically correct. A fleet of purpose-built robotaxis has about as much in common with a limousine service as a vending machine has with a butler. But that’s exactly the point, and it’s…
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IIHS Handed Out Its Top Safety Pick+ Award This Week, and Audi Couldn’t Even Win It Twice
Here’s a detail buried at the bottom of this week’s safety news that matters more than the headline: Audi currently has two sedans in front of crash-test engineers, and only one of them was good enough for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. The redesigned 2026 A6 made the Institute’s top list. The A3 did…
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Waymo’s “Free” Robotaxi Rides Have Nothing to Do With Generosity. They’re Buying Time With Regulators
Waymo wants you to believe the free rides in its new robotaxi are a nicety. The company’s own blog calls it a “Trusted Tester” rollout, a chance to gather feedback before charging full fare. That’s technically true. What the blog does not mention is that Waymo currently has no legal way to charge for those…
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Your Mercedes Speedometer Can Just Go Dark While You’re Driving. Regulators Finally Made It a Recall
Here’s a fun trait of modern luxury cars: when the speedometer is just pixels on a screen, a software hiccup can erase it. Mercedes-Benz USA has now filed a recall covering 144,049 vehicles whose digital instrument cluster can go blank for a moment while you’re driving, taking your speed readout and warning lights with it.…
