News
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One Rivian Hire Reveals the Company’s Real Plan for Commercial Vans
Rivian Just Hired a Fleet Sales Director. That Tells You More Than the Press Releases Do. Rivian didn’t put out a release for this one. Dan Pisegna announced it himself on LinkedIn on August 15 — a new job as Director of Fleet Sales at the Irvine-based automaker. No newsroom post, no quote from RJ…
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A DUI Camaro Crash Ended Inside a Bedroom — the Insurance Gap Is the Real Story
A Camaro Ended Up In a Hesperia Bedroom. The Charge Sheet Is the Interesting Part. Every so often a crash report reads less like a traffic collision and more like a fever dream. This is one of those. At 7:22 p.m. on August 12, deputies from the Hesperia station were sent to the 11700 block…
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California Just Handed Waymo Its Biggest Robotaxi Expansion Yet — 18 Counties, No Driver
Waymo Just Got the Keys to Most of California — Here’s What the Paperwork Actually Says The headline number is 18 counties. The more interesting number is 3,871. On August 14, the California Public Utilities Commission’s Consumer Protection and Enforcement Division signed off on Waymo Advice Letter 0004 and its supplement, 0004-A, clearing the Alphabet…
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Washington Dusted Off a 96-Year-Old Tariff Law Nobody Had Ever Used — and Detroit Is the Guinea Pig
Forget the 50 percent. Forget the wine, the dairy, and the hockey sticks that made for such a fun headline this week. The sentence that should actually worry anyone who owns, builds, sells, or fixes a car in North America is buried in a White House fact sheet from July, phrased so blandly you could…
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Avis Briefly Became a $27 Billion Meme Stock — Its Own Books Said It Was Worthless
For a few days in April, Wall Street decided that Avis Budget Group – the company that rents you a Nissan Versa at the airport counter – was worth more than Ford Motor Company. On April 1, Avis stock opened at $147.52 a share. Three weeks later, it touched $765.94 in intraday trading, a 419…
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A Robot Didn’t Kill This Stellantis Mechanic. A Bypass Key Did, and OSHA Predicted It Decades Ago.
Nobody has ever been crushed by an industrial robot that was doing exactly what its safety systems were designed to let it do. Every documented case starts the same way: someone decides that, just this once, the safety system can wait. That is what a wrongful-death lawsuit alleges happened last spring inside Stellantis’s Dundee Engine…
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China’s EV Price War Got So Brutal, Automakers Are Bribing You With Karaoke Machines Now
BYD wants to sell you a car with a karaoke machine wired into the dashboard. Somewhere in Shenzhen, a set of headlights can already project a movie onto your garage door. Neither of those is the story. The real story is why an industry stacked with battery chemists and manufacturing engineers is suddenly fighting China’s…
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Musk Says Tesla Builds America’s Most American Car. His Own Truck Skipped the Test
Every new car sold in America wears a sticker almost nobody reads. It lists exactly how much of that vehicle was built domestically, expressed as a single percentage. This past weekend, that obscure sticker became Elon Musk’s favorite talking point. What Musk didn’t mention is that the number on it is filled out by the…
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Medford Takeover Bust: Why Seven Seized Cars May Never Come Home
The interesting number out of Medford isn’t 15. It’s seven. Fifteen people got charged. Seven of them are going to spend the next several months learning how New York civil forfeiture actually works, and it is not the process most enthusiasts assume it is. Per Suffolk County Police, the department’s Street Takeover Task Force picked…
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State Farm’s $5 Billion ‘Thank You’ Check Is Actually a Receipt for Three Years of Rate Hikes
State Farm wants its customers to see this as generosity: a $5 billion “thank you,” mailed out in waves to more than 49 million insured vehicles. It isn’t generosity. It’s a receipt. When an insurance company hands back nine figures a month for the better part of a year, that money didn’t materialize out of…
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Two BMW Street Racers Killed a Grandmother in Florida. The Law Says the Passengers, Spectators, and Camera Phones Could Be Just as Guilty.
Two men in two BMWs are facing vehicular homicide charges after a street race in Ocala killed a 77-year-old woman riding in a Toyota RAV4. That part of this story is straightforward. The part that should worry anyone who has ever shown up to watch one of these meetups, ridden along, or pulled out a…
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East L.A. AutoZone Hit Twice: 27 Sought And What It Means
A parts store is not a jewelry counter. There’s no vault, no serialized inventory, no activation lock. That’s exactly why it keeps ending up on the wrong end of these things. Investigators with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department have now circulated photographs of 27 people in connection with two break-ins at the AutoZone in…
