These Are The Top News Stories Of The Week

Toyota is having a bad time. The company’s kei car wing has been forging crash test results, and its diesels have had “irregularities” in horsepower and torque ratings — irregularities so vast, apparently, that Japanese officials had to raid one of the company’s factories today. - Steve DaSilva Read More

Florida is not known as a home of good decision-making. This penchant for poor choices goes all the way to the top, to the governor whose anti-LGBTQ animus seems unrivaled. Case in point: Trans people are now banned from holding drivers’ licenses in Florida. - Steve DaSilva Read More

We’ve known for a while that things weren’t going great for the online used car dealer Vroom. Back in 2022, it was sued by the state of Texas for its shady sales practices and later that year managed to lose more than $50 million in a single quarter. Now that Vroom has finally shut down, seemingly for good, Click2Houston reports that the abrupt closing has left customers with all sorts of questions. - Collin Woodard Read More

Since it was introduced to the market in 2015, Tesla’s so-called Autopilot system has been quite easy to misuse or abuse. The world has seen hundreds of instances of Tesla drivers using this system as a way to allow the car to dangerously “drive itself,” something it can’t do, even if Tesla has actively encouraged people to try anyway. With the feds in the middle of an investigation of “Autopilot” crashes, Tesla issued a recall of over 2 million cars to add alerts and controls to encourage drivers to be more attentive while using the driver assistance tech. Since this fix was implemented in mid-December, it’s been causing a stir among owners and regulators alike. - Bradley Brownell Read More

Happy Monday! It’s January 29, 2024, and this is The Morning Shift, your daily roundup of the top automotive headlines from around the world, in one place. Here are the important stories you need to know. - Steve DaSilva Read More

EVs are really heavy, and neither America’s drivers, nor the vital infrastructure they drive on, are ready for the chaos those big cars will bring. Experts are now especially worried the nation’s guardrails won’t hold up to the weight of EVs in a crash. - Lawrence Hodge Read More

Back in 2021 Mazda announced plans to introduce three new crossovers in the U.S. — first came the CX-50, which rode on an existing platform, and then last year saw the debut of the CX-90, a large three-row replacement for the CX-9 that uses a new rear-drive platform with new inline-6 and plug-in-hybrid powertrains. - Daniel Golson Read More

Oh boy, another convoy is on the move! This one is called the “Take Our Border Back” convoy and it kicked off a week long road trip in Virginia Beach to the Texas/Mexico border Monday where the U.S. government and the Texas state government are doing whatever is going on down there. - Erin Marquis Read More

A lot of times, when Consumer Reports puts together a list, it involves page after page of data, spreadsheets, pivot tables and all the other tools smart people use to glean insight from a giant pile of numbers. Take, for example, turning its annual survey responses into a list of the least satisfying cars to own, or the least reliable cars to buy new. - Collin Woodard Read More

The Tesla Cybertruck is probably the most controversial vehicle launched in a decade due to its overall absurdity, and now that absurdity is causing wheel covers to inflict significant damage to this nearly 7,000 pound truck’s custom tires. This electric truck’s aero wheel covers have an unusual design that actually extends beyond the alloy wheel and onto the sidewall of the tires, the part of the tire that needs to flex to absorb impacts, as well as flexing every single time the tire rotates. - Logan Carter Read More