News
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A Banned Airbag Part Just Killed Its 11th Person — Because You Can’t Recall a Crime
Banning a part and recalling a part sound like the same government action wearing two different hats. They are not. On August 27, in Dallas, that distinction got someone killed. A 2018 Chevrolet Equinox crashed hard enough to trigger its driver’s air bag, and instead of cushioning the driver, the inflator detonated, throwing metal fragments…
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Porsche Says It’ll Build You a Manual Panamera. That’s Not Generosity—It’s Marketing
Nobody is actually getting a manual Panamera. That’s the detail almost every outlet skipped on the way to the fun headline. What Porsche’s Sonderwunsch division confirmed during Monterey Car Week isn’t a product announcement. It’s a demonstration of how a low-volume, high-margin bespoke shop keeps itself in headlines without building anything at all. Here’s what…
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Ford Only Recalled Two Trucks For This Brake Failure. NHTSA Wants To Know About The Other 82,040.
Ford has already fixed this exact brake failure once. The fix covered two trucks. Now the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is reviewing whether the same failure mode – intermittent loss of anti-lock braking and regenerative braking – shows up in 82,040 more of them. All 2024 Ford Maverick Hybrids. All built on hybrid hardware…
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The Fiat 500 Hybrid Sold So Well It Broke Stellantis’s Own Supply Chain
Stellantis idled its Mirafiori assembly plant in Turin for three days this week. If you’ve followed Fiat’s slow-motion Italian decline over the last fifteen years, that sentence alone probably triggered a groan. Mirafiori has spent more than a decade as the industry’s shorthand for Fiat’s shrinking Italian footprint — a factory built to produce hundreds…
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Canada Paid Stellantis $222 Million To Save A Jeep Plant. The Jeep Went To Illinois Anyway
When Unifor and Stellantis sat down in Toronto on September 1 to open contract talks over the future of Stellantis’ Brampton plant, most of the coverage treated it like a standard labor story: wages, benefits, a September 11 deadline, a binder exchanged for the cameras. That’s the press release version of events. Here’s the version…
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A Serial Dealer Kept Flipping Rooftops. Stellantis’s Own Bank Just Sent a $3.9 Million Bill With His Name on It, Too
When a car dealership closes, most people assume the customers take the hit. Sometimes they do. But the biggest number, the one with six zeros, almost always belongs to somebody most car buyers never think about: the bank that financed the inventory in the first place. That is the real story behind a new federal…
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You Handed Your License to the Rental Car Counter for a Few Minutes. That Might Have Been All It Took.
Brian Krebs remembers the moment clearly enough. He and his mother stood at a Hertz counter, handed over their driver’s licenses, and waited while a clerk disappeared behind the desk with them for a few minutes to process the paperwork. It’s the kind of moment nobody thinks twice about. Krebs, a longtime security researcher, didn’t…
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Uber Cut 3,300 Jobs the Same Day It Put Driverless Mustangs on London’s Streets. That’s Not a Coincidence.
On September 2, Uber’s newsroom quietly published two stories within hours of each other. One announced that roughly 3,300 people were losing their jobs. The other announced that Londoners could now hail a Ford Mustang Mach-E with nobody meaningfully driving it. Read separately, they’re unrelated news items. Read together, they’re the same story. CEO Dara…
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Forget the 200 Jobs. Honda’s $472 Million Alabama Expansion Is Really About Its EV Retreat
Alabama’s economic development office is celebrating another win this week: Honda is pouring more money into its engine plant in Lincoln, Talladega County will eventually collect new tax revenue, and 200 people will get jobs paying an average of $30.25 an hour. That’s the headline every outlet covering this story ran with. It’s also the…
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Ford And Stellantis Sued The Same Dealer Over $18 Million. The Real Victim Just Traded In A Jeep
Ford Motor Credit and Stellantis Financial Services don’t agree on much. They compete for the same buyers, the same dealer floor space, and the same slice of America’s new-car business. But this spring, both companies filed lawsuits, days apart, against the same tiny dealership group in eastern Iowa, and for a few months they were…
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Watch: A Corvette Driver Hit 156 MPH Fleeing Police, Crashed, and Bragged He’d ‘Buy Another One.’ He’s Missing the Actual Bill
The thing that ended a 156-mph run through two states wasn’t a faster patrol car, a spike strip, or even the crash. It was a sticker. Jayden Atreeyian Smith’s Corvette was riding on registration tags that had expired back in March, hidden under a license plate cover, on Interstate 55 near Blytheville, Arkansas. That’s what…
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Honda’s $9.4 Billion Plan To Fight Cheap Chinese EVs Involves Buying More Parts From China
Honda wants to save $9.4 billion by 2030, and it told suppliers this spring to cut prices 30 percent on some of the most important parts in a modern car. Buried inside that plan, almost as an aside, is the detail that undercuts the whole premise: Honda also asked those same suppliers to buy more…
