Today’s excessively titled Rare Ride is one of a select few Infiniti Q60s blessed with a unique set of colors and options, and sold via luxury department store Neiman Marcus.

Hope you like Metallic Mustard.

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A stock 2021 Bronco Badlands finished third in the NORRA Mexican 1000 off-road rally, driven by two Ford engineers. The podium finish came in the Pre-Runner Truck class.

Bronco engineer manager Jamie Groves and Seth Goslawski, another Bronco engineer, drove the majority of the 1,141 mile race across the Baja peninsula. Brad Lovell, a Bronco advisory panel member and prior NORRA winner, helped navigate and drove one stage during the five-day event.

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Ford Motor Co. is recalling over 660,000 2016-2019 model year Explorer sport utility vehicles over the suspect roof rails the company initially claimed were probably fine. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration got involved last year, following a string of complaints of the rail cover loosening and sometimes being jettisoned from the vehicle, and recommended the automaker bring them in for repairs.

But Blue Oval felt that was unnecessary, claiming the odds of one decoupling were extremely low and likely to be battened down before anything happens. Besides, they’re just fiddly little pieces of trim and unlikely to do much damage. Obviously, opinions have changed since then with documentation from the NHTSA confirming Ford is moving ahead with the mostly voluntary recall.  (Read More…)

2013-15 Honda Accords are under investigation by The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) for a steering issue. Allegations of Accords suddenly losing control without warning have led to 107 complaints. According to a Motor1 report, there are as many as 1,120,470 Accords in the US that could be affected.

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General Motors is asking the federal government to reset the federal EV tax credit system, effectively requesting a personal favor. As one of the first manufacturers to get an electric vehicle to market that people actually wanted to buy, GM hit the 200,000 cumulative EV sales cap in 2018. While customers could still get money back through April of 2020, the automaker exhausted its allotment of $7,500 subsidies before most of its rivals.

Now it wants to see the government press the reset button on the program under a pretext of fairness. GM executives are claiming that companies investing in electrification shouldn’t be handicapped by not getting additional money from taxpayers. It seems anything but fair, frankly. Though it should be said that all-electric models have a poor track record in terms of profitability. The Chevrolet Bolt certainly didn’t make any money, however, GM CEO Mary Barra has said new versions of the model will be capable of turning a profit.  (Read More…)

I watched Elon Musk on Saturday Night Live and it was just…fine?

The much-discussed episode wasn’t a disaster, nor was it a great and memorable evening of comedy. It’s just something that happened. Something that will likely be more or less forgotten by Memorial Day.

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Well hello! It’s been over a year since we’ve had an update on the 2019 VW Golf Sportwagen seen here. In our last installment, I was filled with optimistical-ness at the prospect of years of trouble-free ownership. After all, surely all the kinks were worked out on this end-of-model Golf that was in production since 2013.

Spoilers: I was wrong.

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The Ford Lightning is back. And it’s electric.

We’re sure that last bit will piss a few of you off.

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We featured the predecessor to General Motors’ J-body last week in the Pontiac Sunbird, which was replaced by the J-body J2000 in 1982. But the Cavalier was always the star of the J-body show; the one everyone thought to buy.

Today we feature an immaculate wagon from Cavalier’s second generation.

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’60 H-D Bobber 113 CI, rigid frame, 4-speed, suicide shift. Harvey Mushman, owner/builder.

The 1Moto Show, the annual showcase for custom motorcycles held in Portland, Oregon, took place April 30-May 2. Is the 1Moto Show the best bike show in the country?

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I’ve been visiting car graveyards since I bought my first hooptie for 50 bucks in the early 1980s, and one thing about American junkyards has remained constant during the following four decades: the presence of 1970s British and Italian sports cars. Maybe they were a bit less weathered in 1987 or 1994 or 2006, but a steady trickle of discarded MGBs, 124 Sport Spiders, X1/9s, Jensen-Healeys, Spitfires, Midgets, and TR7s into U-Wrench yards has flowed at about the same rate throughout. That’s why I wasn’t surprised to discover this allegedly rare 1976 Triumph TR7 Victory Edition in a Denver-area yard last month. (Read More…)

Connected vehicle sales will grow 20 percent in 2021, with a 10.4 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) between 2020-2026 according to ABI Research, a tech market advisory group.

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Today’s Rare Ride marks the third time we’ve featured a Pontiac Sunbird in this series. The first Sunbird was from 1978 and presented itself as the Safari Wagon. But that was just a renamed Astre and not a real Sunbird. The second Sunbird we saw was a convertible with a 2000 in its name, a J-body from a time of naming turmoil at Pontiac.

In contrast, the Sunbird we have here is the original: An economical and optionally luxurious car that debuted in the Seventies without a confused identity. Your author’s never seen one in real life.

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Tread Lightly!, with the help of partners and volunteers, cleared 11 miles of tamarisk from Hey Joe Canyon, an off-road trail in Moab, Utah. The Easter Jeep Safari stewardship project was completed during the event. (Read More…)

Back in January, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said he remained confident that his company would be able to deliver a self-driving vehicle exceeding the capabilities of an average human pilot by the end of 2021. But this has become a tired excuse used almost reflexively by automakers for years, making the inevitable shifting of the goalpost so predictable that nobody even bothers to get upset anymore. Being lied to is just part of everyday living and the automotive sector is just one droplet in the overflowing bathtub of mendacity.

Unfortunately, organizations continue making the mistake of expecting to be given the benefit of the doubt as they continue repeating the same fables. We know they’re working on solid-state batteries and autonomous cars, but they’re hitched to these unrealistic expectations and completely fabricated timelines that draw our focus while they engage in slimier practices on the sly. While holding them accountable is often easier said than done, catching them in a lie is usually fairly simple. For example, the California Department of Motor Vehicles accidentally called out Tesla on the full self-driving (FSD) beta it’s been testing with employees.  (Read More…)