News
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Ascend Elements Got ‘Fined’ $7.5 Million by the DOJ — But Never Paid a Single Dime
Ascend Elements finally has a face to go with the wreckage in western Kentucky. Last month, the Department of Justice put a name and a dollar figure on the fraud case tied to the bankrupt, half-built Apex-1 battery plant outside Hopkinsville: $7.5 million, paid by the company that was supposed to turn spent EV batteries…
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Venezuela Oil Deal and Gas Prices: What Drivers Should Expect at the Pump
If you drive anything, you’ve noticed the damage. The EIA’s most recent weekly survey put regular unleaded at $4.049 a gallon, 92 cents higher than a year earlier, with on-highway diesel at $5.454 — a brutal $1.74 year-over-year jump. So when the president posts that he’s just secured enough oil to “substantially lower Gas Prices…
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Werner Trucking’s 1,400-Veteran Pledge to the White House Isn’t Even Its Biggest — That Was 2018
Werner Enterprises stood next to representatives of the White House on July 30 and pledged to hire 1,400 military veterans and veteran spouses in 2027. The Department of Transportation is treating that number as proof its new veteran-trucking push is already working. Take a closer look at Werner’s own paperwork, though, and the number stops…
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VW Supervisory Board Showdown: Four Plants, One Veto, and a Telling Word Change
Volkswagen’s supervisory board is expected to sit down this Friday, September 4, to vote on the largest restructuring package the company has ever attempted. The works council and IG Metall won’t confirm the date — supervisory board scheduling is covered by confidentiality, as the union’s own Wolfsburg office pointedly noted — but everyone involved is…
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Ford Recalls 148,663 Mustangs Over a Wire That Can Kill the Engine and the Headlights at Once. The Fix Isn’t Coming Until March.
Somewhere in the engine bay of a 2024-2026 Ford Mustang sits a small bolted ground connection that, according to Ford’s own recall filing, is capable of taking down five separate systems at the same time. Not one at a time. Together. Lose that connection and a Mustang can lose its drive power, its headlights, its…
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Breaking: Florida Didn’t Ban Flock’s Spy Cameras. It Just Evicted Them From the Shoulder
Read the headlines this week and you’d think Florida just switched off a surveillance network. Governor Ron DeSantis called the state’s license plate reader cameras “out of control,” Florida’s Department of Transportation fired off a memo, and by Monday night dozens of local news stations were running some version of “Flock cameras banned in Florida.”…
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Norway Found a Cure for China’s Bus ‘Kill Switch’ — Bringing Back the Diesel Engine
Two governments got handed the exact same discovery. One called it a managed risk and moved on. The other used it to rewrite its own emissions law. That gap says more about where this story is headed than another SIM card ever could. We covered the original discovery back in July: Norwegian transit authority Ruter…
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An Iowa Dealer Allegedly Financed the Same Cars Twice — Stellantis Just Won $5.5 Million By Default
Winning a lawsuit and actually getting paid are two very different things, and Stellantis just learned that the hard way in eastern Iowa. This week, a Linn County judge entered a default judgment worth nearly $5.5 million in favor of Stellantis Financial Services against Sky Auto Mall, the now-defunct dealership group that used to sell…
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GM’s Wireless Update Failed So Badly, Dealers Now Have to Fix These 7 SUVs By Hand Before Selling Them
General Motors has spent years selling the wireless update as the thing that would make a dealership visit optional. Push a signal, skip the shop, move on with your day. That pitch just ran into its limits on some of GM’s most expensive vehicles. Infotainment computers inside seven 2025 SUVs — the Cadillac Escalade, Escalade…
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Honda and Nissan’s Merger Collapsed — So They’re Quietly Merging Their Computers Instead
In February of 2025, one of the biggest corporate marriages in automotive history died in a conference room instead of a courtroom. Honda and Nissan had spent the better part of a year working out how to combine into the third-largest automaker on the planet by sales. They walked away because they couldn’t agree on…
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Hyundai’s American-Built Global Pickup Has One Big Problem: Nobody Knows Where It’s Actually Being Built
Hyundai just told the world it wants to build a real pickup truck in America and ship it to the rest of the planet. Every outlet covering the story named the same probable birthplace: Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant America, the electrified-vehicle complex in Ellabell, Georgia. There’s a problem with that assumption, and it came from…
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China’s #1 Bestselling Car Just Failed Its Own Safety Audit — And That’s Not Even the Scary Part
Somewhere in a Chinese testing facility, a government inspector measured the wheelbase on a Geely Xingyuan pulled straight off a dealer’s lot. The number didn’t match what Geely had filed with regulators. Not by much. But by more than the 1 percent margin the rules allow. That’s a strange thing to get caught on. The…
