News
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A Texas Restoration Shop Promised Better Engines. It Delivered a 60-Year Prison Sentence Instead
A Galveston County judge has handed down one of the harshest sentences ever seen in an automotive fraud case. Richard Thomas Finley, former owner of Classic American Street Rods in the San Leon-Bacliff area, will spend 60 years in prison after a jury found him guilty of felony theft exceeding $300,000. Prosecutors say Finley ran…
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Toyota’s $283.7M Vietnam Expansion Is a Hybrid Plan, Not an EV Plant
Toyota just put another $283.7 million into Vietnam, and the paperwork that made it official is more interesting than the number. On August 28, the People’s Committee of Phú Thọ province handed Toyota Motor Vietnam an amended investment policy decision, and the provincial Department of Finance issued the 12th revision of the company’s investment registration…
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BYD’s Profit Jumped 30% While Sales Fell — Turns Out That Was the Plan
BYD wants the world to read this week’s earnings as an export success story. Look past the headline number, though, at the two figures that actually moved, and a different story shows up: a company that got tired of fighting the price war it started, and decided that making less money on fewer cars was…
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Xiaomi’s European Launch Plan: What Its New Global Site Reveals and Hides
Chinese brands have been announcing European arrivals for about five years now, and the announcements have roughly the same information content as a horoscope. Xiaomi’s version, live since 26 August at xiaomiauto.com, is at least a different genre. Under the hero image sits a section headed Dealer and Distribution Inquiries, with a single line of…
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JLR Is Building Its Most Important SUV Ever in America — Inside a Factory It Doesn’t Even Own
Jaguar Land Rover just told investors it’s bringing Defender production to the United States. Most of the coverage framed this as a tariff story, and it is one, but that framing buries the more interesting part. JLR isn’t building an American factory. It’s moving into someone else’s, and the someone else happens to be Stellantis,…
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Nissan Says Business Is Growing — Its Own Spreadsheet Says Sales Just Crashed 16.5%
Nissan put out a press release this week with a headline built for good news: growth in Japan, growth in the United States, momentum building everywhere that matters. Read past the headline, though, and the same document shows Nissan’s global sales fell 16.5 percent and global production fell 15.5 percent in July, year over year.…
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Tesla’s New ‘Chip Facility’ in Austin Is Bigger Than the Pentagon — Texas Says It Cost Just $50,000
Somewhere east of Austin, Tesla has filed paperwork for a semiconductor building with more floor space than the Pentagon. The filing lists its cost at fifty thousand dollars. That number isn’t a typo, and it isn’t Tesla getting a bargain. It’s also almost meaningless as a measure of what Tesla is actually spending. Once you…
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Chevy Camaro as a Teen’s First Car: What the Crash and Claims Data Show
Every spring the safety establishment publishes its list of vehicles it thinks a 16-year-old should be driving, and every spring you can search the whole thing for “Camaro” and come up empty. Enthusiasts tend to read that as institutional joylessness. It isn’t. The numbers behind the recommendation are worse than most parents realize, and the…
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A Minnesota Dealer Faked ‘Certified’ Used Cars for Years — Then Told the State He’s Too Broke to Pay Victims Back
Fridley, Minnesota, isn’t exactly the used-car capital of the world. But a small independent lot there just became a case study in what happens when a dealer runs out of tricks to hide. On August 31, Attorney General Keith Ellison announced that Midwest Car Search and owner Scott Spiczka agreed to pay $100,000 and permanently…
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An Atlanta Woman Stole $10 Million From Amazon for a Lamborghini — But the Dodge Durango Is the Real Story
Federal prosecutors in Atlanta released a forfeiture list this week that reads like a fever dream of consumer choices: a 2019 Lamborghini Urus, a 2018 Porsche Panamera, a 2022 Tesla Model X, a Kawasaki ZX-636 sportbike, a nearly $1 million house in Smyrna, Georgia, and, wedged in between the exotics, a 2021 Dodge Durango. That…
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Ford’s F-150 V8 Has Had a Drinking Problem Since 2018 — And It Never Once Triggered a Recall
A federal judge in Michigan just let a class-action lawsuit over oil-hungry F-150s keep moving toward trial, and most of the coverage is treating it like a story about bad piston rings. It isn’t, really. The interesting part isn’t that a truck engine burns oil. It’s that Ford, according to the court, may have known…
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Clark Howard Just Killed His Famous Car-Repair Rule — And Blamed the Wrong Culprit
For the better part of two decades, if a mechanic’s estimate crossed half of what your car was worth, consumer advocate Clark Howard had one instruction: walk away. That “50% rule” became one of the most repeated pieces of car-ownership folklore in America, dispensed on his radio show and printed on his own website, then…
