The United States is in a pretty bad spot. Even as the economy recovers from the depressing lows of 2008 and 2009, road, trail, and air travel infrastructure in the United States is failing at an alarming rate. Many underfunded municipalities are even ripping up paved roads and replacing them with gravel as a way to ease budgetary shortfalls.

But is there anything the United States can do to catch up with degrading roads, failing levies, and overflowing airports? Before you pump that cheap dino juice into your Maibatsu Monstrosity today, give this report from Business Insider a watch.

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An owner of a 2010 Cadillac CTS Sport Wagon that won a lemon law case against General Motors is now on the receiving end of GM’s legal department.

According to WSB-TV in Georgia, the vehicle’s owner, Patrick Morse, won his lemon-law case in 2014. General Motors, instead of abiding by the arbiter’s ruling, is leveraging a little-known law to appeal the ruling in the courts. The appeal process has left Morse with a troublesome car for the last two years — and there’s a possibility it could continue for years to come.

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Automakers are turning up the wick on drive-sharing investments and slowly transitioning from car manufacturing to providing mobility. That’s likely a good bet, too, considering a recent report from McKinsey Global Institute.

The report, titled “Poorer than their parents? A new perspective on income inequality,” is a stark reminder that the economic situation isn’t as good as it was 10 years ago, let alone compared to the highs of the postwar West.

For starters, 65 or 70 percent of households in the advanced nations studied were “in income segments whose incomes in 2014 were flat or down compared with 2005,” states the report. The United States is one of the countries pulling up that average with 80-percent of households in income segments either flat or falling.

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B. Breckenfeld writes:

My cars from the early 2000s had automatic transmissions that seemed to allow freewheeling when you lifted off the pedal. I used this for better gas mileage by letting the car coast when I could see red lights far ahead.

Starting about 2010, my cars produced by GM began acting more like their standard transmission counterparts by employing engine braking and downshifting as they came to a stop. This works great in mountain driving where engine braking is needed, but wouldn’t freewheeling on flatter ground allow better gas mileage?

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Some eight years after the now-defunct Motive Magazine put a Smart ForTwo to work on an urban golf course, Mercedes is finally catching up to support its customers’ favorite pastime.

Revealed yesterday, the Mercedes-Benz Style Edition Garia Golf Car isn’t just a glitzed up golf cart made to look like a miniature GLE Coupe. Instead, it’s the product of a competition started in 2013 to build the best golf cart or nothing.

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Our own Timothy Cain was smitten after spending a week with the midsize Mazda6. It’s a hard vehicle to hate. With its sexy, sculpted sheetmetal, it’s one of those cars you turn back to look at after you park it.

But the Mazda6, even with its willing chassis and sporting demeanor, is still missing many ingredients, one of them power. Call it the Miata Effect, or simply realize that Mazda doesn’t have its own V6 to stuff under the Mazda6’s long hood. Mazda’s midsize sedan isn’t nearly close to the most powerful option in the segment.

That may change though thanks to the Mazda CX-9 and its 2.5-liter turbocharged four-cylinder engine.

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Jack Taylor has parked his car in the Emerald Aisle for the last time.

The man who built a rental-car company on top of a leasing business, birthed from a side office in a St. Louis Cadillac dealership, has died at the age of 94.

Enterprise Rent-a-Car grew in an unconventional way compared to its competitors, which focused mainly on airports. Mr. Taylor’s company instead leveraged home-town business with downtown locations to offer vehicles for purposes other than out-of-town travel.

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Since a significant part of our staff lives north of the Freedom Border, we’re keeping it light today.

As Steph does each Canada Day, he’ll be crossing the Upper/Lower Canada border to extol the benefits of federalism to separatists. I’ll be reciting “O, Canada” with the gender pronouns intact while eating Canadian bacon and pledging allegiance to the ghost of John Candy. Tim will be counting up U.S. sales numbers. Sad!

You still have a couple of news items coming your way today, so stay tuned. Also, make sure to come back on July 4th as we will have a special piece from Jack (not Mark) Baruth.

With the settlement now filed with the courts between Volkswagen, regulators, and other plaintiffs in the ongoing diesel emissions scandal, the United States District Court Northern District of California has published the exact figures for buy backs and settlement figures.

Click the jump to find out how much money you’ll receive for your affected Volkswagen and Audi 2.0-liter equipped TDI.

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Attention keyboard warriors: your moderators have been selected.

Hit the jump to find out who they are and what they’ll be doing. Go on now.

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As a follow-up to the VerticalScope security breach, I want to take a moment to remind you to change your passwords if you haven’t done so already. That includes passwords for non-VerticalScope accounts that use the same email address or password.

Here’s the official notice from VerticalScope on the breach.

The Truth About Cars has always valued its knowledgeable, insightful, and outspoken commenters. It’s because of this that I’ve let you, the Best & Brightest, police yourselves.

With this approach to our community that exists below the articles, it was my hope that you’d become a chaff-shedding strain of wheat, dispensing with those who offer little in favor of focusing on those who offer much.

However, as is the case, sometimes the only person heard on a street is the one shouting through a megaphone.

I’m here to take that megaphone away — then give it back.

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The United Kingdom, through referendum, has decided to break off from Europe and go it alone. But what of all the auto manufacturers that produce vehicles in the island nation? And of their employees? And trade?

We won’t know the answers to those questions until the UK and European governments sort out how the two entities will work together in the future. For now, it’s business as usual. Though, thanks to Autocar, we at least have reactions from the big players in the UK’s automotive industry.

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I’ve gotta hand it to Edmunds. Whenever we at TTAC talk about a car produced in the last 15 or 20 years, I can usually find at least one photographic example of it within our media library. And it seems in the many, many years since TTAC switched to WordPress, we’ve not once needed a picture of a Daewoo Lanos …

… until now.

According to the aforementioned automotive site, Generation Z has a pretty odd taste in cars. Of the top 20 used vehicles bought by the 18-24 year demographic, the Daewoo Lanos — a car that’s been out of production since 2002 — topped the list.

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A diesel version of the Mazda3 is dead in Australia, reports CarAdvice, leaving just the gasoline-powered version of Mazda’s compact on the market.

The removal of the diesel model comes ahead of a mid-cycle refresh that will bring Mazda’s hatchback and sedan inline visually with the refreshed Mazda6 and CX-5, and the new CX-9.

A number of circumstances played into Mazda’s decision to discontinue the compression-ignition option.

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