News
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Dodge Is Recalling the Durango’s Spoiler a Third Time Because the Last Two ‘Fixes’ Never Actually Fixed It
Stellantis just told federal safety regulators it is recalling about 74,578 Dodge Durangos because a rear spoiler might not be attached to the roof correctly. That’s not the story. The story is that this is the third time in five years Dodge has recalled this exact part for this exact problem, and this time the…
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Toyota’s Grand Highlander Skipped the Screen Door on Its Grille, and Now the Feds Are Asking Why
Every three-row family SUV needs a face aggressive enough to look like it could tow a boat, even if it never will. Toyota gave the Grand Highlander one of the biggest, most wide-open grilles in the segment. Now the federal government wants to know if that face is letting rocks fly straight through to the…
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GM’s Fix for Its Self-Destructing V-8 Was Basically an Oil Change. Nearly 7,000 Owners Say That Didn’t Work.
General Motors already recalled 597,571 trucks and SUVs to fix a defect that can cause its 6.2-liter V-8 to destroy itself from the inside. For most of those owners, the actual repair amounted to an engine inspection, a new oil fill cap, a fresh oil filter, and a switch to thicker oil. Nearly 7,000 of…
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Volkswagen’s ‘New’ EV Plan for India Isn’t New. It’s From 2022 — And a $1.4 Billion Tax Bill Might Kill It Again
Volkswagen wants you to know it’s “evaluating” ways to sell more electric cars in India: importing finished models, assembling them locally from shipped-in parts, or eventually building a homegrown EV from scratch. That’s the news, based on an interview with Skoda Auto Volkswagen India’s chief published this week. It reads like a fresh strategic pivot.…
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A Cadillac’s Brake Complaint Just Became a 1.16-Million-Vehicle Investigation. Two of the Cars Involved Wear Honda Badges.
It started with one Cadillac. Now it’s 1.16 million vehicles wearing four different nameplates, including two you’d never expect to see in a General Motors defect filing: Honda and Acura. The federal investigation into GM’s electric brake booster, filed this month as Engineering Analysis EA26006, looks like a simple numbers escalation. It isn’t. The real…
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Advance Auto Parts’ Profit More Than Tripled. Its Actual Business Barely Grew At All.
Advance Auto Parts wants you to believe it turned a corner last quarter. Net income more than tripled, to $55 million. Diluted earnings per share jumped from a quarter to ninety cents. Gross margin rose by the widest margin the company has posted in years. Read only the headline numbers, and you’d think somebody finally…
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Right to Repair Just Won in Congress. Don’t Celebrate Yet.
On May 21, the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted 48 to 1 to advance a right-to-repair bill. Trade press treated the lopsided margin as a rout, a rare case of Washington actually agreeing on something. Independent repair shops, automakers, and the current administration all found something to like in it. That kind of unanimity…
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Hyundai May Push Its Georgia Factory to 800,000 Cars a Year — Here’s the Real Math
Announced factory capacity is one of the softest numbers in this business. It’s a plan, not a stamping press. So when Hyundai floats the idea of pushing its Georgia assembly complex from 500,000 vehicles a year to somewhere between 700,000 and 800,000, the right response isn’t awe — it’s asking what would physically have to…
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Why New Car Prices Climbed to $49,855 — It Wasn’t Really the Sticker
Every month a headline number lands, everyone recoils at how close new cars are to a fifty-thousand-dollar average, and almost nobody looks at the mechanism underneath it. July’s number deserves better, because what moved wasn’t really the price. It was the discount. Kelley Blue Book put the July average transaction price at $49,855, a 1.9…
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Mazda Patented a Fix for the Rotary Engine’s Dirtiest Secret. The RX-7 Crowd Should Pump the Brakes
Every time Mazda files a patent with the word “rotary” anywhere near it, the same ritual plays out. Enthusiast outlets dust off renders of the Iconic SP concept. Comment sections start drafting eulogies for whatever eventually replaces the RX-7. Someone, somewhere, declares “it’s happening” with far more certainty than the paperwork supports. This week’s patent…
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Flock’s CEO Compared Banning His Cameras to Banning Cars. His Own Website Proves the Analogy Backwards
Garrett Langley, the CEO of Flock Safety, picked an odd hill to defend this week. Facing a wave of bans and lawsuits, from the LAPD’s exit to a Wichita driver suing to rip out all 200 cameras in his city, he compared outlawing the technology to “banning vehicles,” as if a camera network and a…
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BMW Patented a Trunk Lid That Swallows Your Charging Cable — And That’s Not Even the Interesting Part
Somewhere in Munich, a BMW engineer just solved a problem that has nothing to do with horsepower, range, or 800-volt architecture. It’s the problem of a soggy, tangled charging cable rattling around loose in the trunk of an electric car. That sounds like a minor fix. It isn’t. It’s a small window into how automakers…
