Tesla's new FSD subscription plan requires for many cars a hardware upgrade that owners were told they already had. | Continue reading
Europe is trying its hand at slowing drivers down using technology. | Continue reading
There's no need to ever fight over airline seat armrests, because this is a problem that has been solved | Continue reading
One company's data is easily accessible, no matter how many times it claims privacy, Motherboard reports. | Continue reading
Ever since Tesla announced that it’s developing an all-new Roadster, there have been remarkable claims made about its potential for speed. First there’s the claim of getting from zero to 60 mph in 1.9 seconds, which we scrutinized more than once, and now there’s the claim that wi … | Continue reading
No one has been able to avoid the used car price discussion these days. We all know that the once-cost effective option of buying used has become as much of an investment as buying new. And some new reporting and data tracking from CarGurus illustrates what brands are raising pri … | Continue reading
The simplest and most genius-brain solution to charging times and range with EVs isn’t one you’ll find in America. In China, though, it’s gaining ground. All that and more in The Morning Shift for June 2, 2021. | Continue reading
A woman in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, watched State Police place a tracking device on her vehicle last weekend and contacted her local NAACP president, who was frankly unimpressed by the agency’s spycraft. | Continue reading
Designing a digital interface that is equipped to handle all of the capabilities modern cars have without simultaneously being a cluttered, overwhelming mess is a challenge, to say the least. Some automakers have gone for the kitchen sink approach of lavishing their dashboards wi … | Continue reading
The Ford F-150 Lightning has a targeted normal range of between 230 and 300 miles depending on which version you get, according to Ford. It can also tow up to 10,000 pounds, according to Ford. What Ford is apparently not willing to say right now is how much range will decrease wh … | Continue reading
The cyber attack that shutdown the Colonial pipeline causing a gas panic and stoking fears of gasoline shortages, didn’t actually shut down the pipeline. It impacted the billing system at the Colonial Pipeline Co., which shut it down because they were worried about how they’d col … | Continue reading
Making cars drive themselves is very, very hard. Sure, we’ve come an awful long way since that Stanford-modified Volkswagen Touareg won the first DARPA Grand Challenge back in 2005, but we’ve still got a long way to go before full Level 5 autonomy. No matter what anyone says. In … | Continue reading
One of the barriers to EVs right now is the hassle of charging. In fact, one fifth of all EV buyers go back to gas vehicles, mainly because of charging issues.But charging infrastructure and technology keep getting better. | Continue reading
The Hernando de Soto Bridge is a through arch bridge connecting West Memphis, Arkansas to Memphis, Tennessee across the Mississippi river on I-40. The 9,432 foot long bridge is, as you can imagine, one of the busier bridges in the region. Over 37,000 cars, trucks, and tractor tra … | Continue reading
According to a report from The Intercept, one of the largest law enforcement agencies in the U.S., the Customs And Border Protection, has now found a convenient back door to siphon much of the information from the fortress of your smartphone: your car. | Continue reading
If there’s one area where you wouldn’t expect Tesla to run afoul of the law, it’s emissions. And yet. | Continue reading
Over the weekend, there was a horrific crash in a Tesla Model S that claimed two lives, It took firefighters over four hours to extinguish the burning car. Significantly, crash investigators are certain that nobody was in the driver’s seat at the time of the crash; the bodies wer … | Continue reading
The news cycle may have moved on from the Ever Given, but the Ever Given still hasn’t moved on from its holding spot in the Great Bitter Lake in the middle of the Suez Canal after almost a month. The crew still stuck on the ship is very concerned about this, as there seems to be … | Continue reading
Two people are dead after their Tesla turned into a fireball upon striking a tree in Spring, Texas, a town just north of Houston, local news station KPRC 2 reports. | Continue reading
Owning a car can be hard, but it’s the people who brave the struggle who do the most for car culture. Among those people is this hero in Seattle who built an engine crane out of two-by-six planks. It’s incredible. But, let’s look into how safe it is. | Continue reading
With a new more environment-friendly White House and wholesale improvement in the range of new electric cars, the American nation’s anti-EV forces are mustering again to slow progress down by embracing some of modern history’s most tiresome shibboleths – the first one being that … | Continue reading
Tesla, as usual, is very generous in providing us with lots to talk about, especially when it comes to their Level 2 driver assist system known, confusingly, as Autopilot and/or Full Self Driving (FSD). Yesterday there was a crash of a Tesla using Autopilot that hit a cop car, an … | Continue reading
I’m pretty sure nearly everyone who reads this site is at least aware of that Top Gear episode where a very fast German woman drove a diesel Ford Transit van around the legendary Nürburgring. That woman was legendary racing driver Sabine Schmitz, who sadly died today at the far-t … | Continue reading
This past week, Elon Musk tweeted an announcement that the demand for Tesla’s new Full Self-Driving Beta software — a Level 2 semi-autonomous driver assist system that is not fully self-driving at all — was so high that Telsa would be making it available to any Tesla owner. In ca … | Continue reading
The world rightfully gawked at the engineering prowess of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory as it successfully landed the car-sized rover named Perseverance on the surface of Mars. You might think that I, an engineer with experience working on a deep space mission, would be less i … | Continue reading
A Ford Expedition traveling on a Southern California highway crashed into a semi truck carrying gravel Tuesday. Authorities believe that the SUV was carrying 25 people and unfortunately, at least 13 were killed in the crash and others are injured. | Continue reading
“I think I’m going to fly home. I can’t take this anymore,” Brandon mumbled as he sat slouched in the corner of a Denver bar. It was approaching midnight, and my friend was in shambles, his spirits having been crushed by 12 straight hours of extreme, high-intensity wrenching on t … | Continue reading
I know we’ve been doing a lot about the new mail delivery vehicle, but think about it — this is, more than most new car introductions, a vehicle that all of us Americans (global friends, please feel free to weigh in) in some sense, own. And even though the Postal Service doesn’t … | Continue reading
When you’re facing a world that seems to be moving away from the internal combustion engines that we’ve always known and loved to electrification, it’s time to maybe reconsider your options. But instead of making some cool electric cars, Porsche is considering a different option: … | Continue reading
This has been the coldest and snowiest winter in years for much of the U.S., which is perhaps why I’ve been subjected in recent days to various takes about whether it is OK to stand your windshield wipers up after parking when expecting snow or ice. Friends, it’s fine. | Continue reading
I’ve realized that I sort of have a type when it comes to people I hold as personal heroes. They tend to be mechanically-minded tinkerer/artists, people like Alexander Calder or Rebecca Horn or my friend Tom Jennings. They don’t necessarily take themselves too seriously, but they … | Continue reading
Recalls are usually the result of an engineering or design flaw, or a break down in manufacturing. It’s unusual that they are pinned on one poor factory worker. | Continue reading
Elon Musk is taking accountability for Tesla’s manufacturing failures. He recently sat down with one of Tesla’s biggest build-quality critics, manufacturing expert Sandy Munro, founder of the benchmarking consultancy Munro & Associates. Here’s what Musk had to say about large … | Continue reading
Adobe’s Flash, the web browser plug-in that powered so very many crappy games, confusing interfaces, and animated icons of the early web like Homestar Runner is now finally gone, after a long, slow, protracted death. For most of us, this just means that some goofy webgame you sea … | Continue reading
Remember back in 2018 when the plague of electric scooters descended upon our lands, wreaking havoc, ruining days, and cluttering up sidewalks? The very natural response was to subject these seemingly endless scooters to violence and terror in the hopes that they would leave our … | Continue reading
I’ve been a driver for ride-hailing services since 2016, and between Lyft and Uber, I’ve racked up nearly 10,000 rides. I’ve put more than 150,000 miles on my Chevy Sonic, driving something like 40 hours a week. | Continue reading
An undersea tunnel and roundabout between towns in the Faroe Islands, set to open later this month, will reduce a 64-minute trip to just 16 minutes — and will look utterly beautiful while doing it. | Continue reading
Aptera, the company that designed a radical, wildly efficient three-wheeler and then died (but only after making into a Star Trek movie) was reborn a few years back and is now ready to officially announce their all-new, reborn car, which it seems like it is just calling the Apter … | Continue reading
My partner recently gave me a school bus as an early birthday present. Together we are going to build it into an RV. One of the biggest challenges facing so-called skoolie builds is getting the whole rig legal. Many states present a bunch of red tape to cut through, but there is … | Continue reading
Back in September of 2019, a 600+ foot cargo ship called the MV Golden Ray, which was apparently loaded in an unstable fashion with over 4,000 cars, capsized in St. Simons Sound just off the port of Brunswick, Georgia. Since then, responders have been working to remove the ship i … | Continue reading
Ford at one point estimated that it was going to lose $5 billion due to the pandemic, and even though it later said the number turned out to be $1.9 billion, the factory shutdowns really did look for a time like an existential threat. Which means, going forward, Ford will do almo … | Continue reading
I’m old enough to remember when the Tesla Model 3 was supposed to be the affordable Tesla, the one that costs “only” $35,000, except we only ever really saw the $35,000 Model 3 in fits and starts. Now it looks as if Tesla might soon be moving on from the $35,000 Model 3 for good. | Continue reading
In what may be one of the most Italian things that has ever happened, the Italian State Police rushed a donor kidney from Padua to Rome for a transplant in a Lamborghini Huracan. Last week’s journey is around 300 miles, but with the help of a specially-outfitted supercar, the pol … | Continue reading
We’ve written about the hacker/security researcher who goes by GreenTheOnly on Twitter before, as he has done a lot of digging into the data stored in modern cars, with a focus on Teslas. As a result, occasionally salvage yards will send him black boxes and memory modules from ca … | Continue reading
You’re driving down the road. Suddenly, a Toyota RAV4 pulls up beside you. Sprayed on its focus group-derived curves is a chihuahua, posing gracefully before a waterfall. | Continue reading
I’ve never thought about how coal actually gets used. It came out of the ground, it goes into a power plant, soot comes out, and West Virginia dies happy and very, very early. The end. Sure, it had to go onto a train at some point, and that train was probably unloaded by Dickensi … | Continue reading
Fisker is cashing in, Polestar needs money, and Carlos Ghosn’s case is still developing. All that and more in The Morning Shift for October 30, 2020. | Continue reading
Are you confident enough in your DIY skills that you’d feel comfortable installing a high-voltage charging station in your home to maintain your electric vehicle? A recent survey shows that 25.5 percent of Americans that own an electric car with a Level 2 charger think they are. | Continue reading