Sales figures point to a record-breaking month for electrified vehicles in June, but the final tally doesn’t tell the whole story.

After a dismal May that saw sales fall below the previous year’s numbers, sales of plug-in vehicles (battery electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids) surged in June, hitting a combined total of 13,722 units in the U.S., according to Hybrid Cars. (Read More…)

Tesla’s bad news week has now spilled over into a second, after the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced a second investigation into a Tesla crash involving the semi-autonomous Autopilot system.

According to Reuters, the agency wants to know if the Autopilot on the Model X involved in a July 1 rollover was activated at the time of the incident, and if it played any role in the crash. The driver of the Model X, a Detroit-area man who wasn’t seriously injured, claims he was using Autopilot when the vehicle left its lane and hit a guardrail on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

While the NHTSA looks into this crash and the fatal May 7 collision that took the life of a Tesla owner in Florida, the automaker is engaged in a nasty war of words with Fortune magazine over two articles it claims are misleading and false. (Read More…)

Not too long ago, engineers from General Motors and NASA stood around a glove, thinking, we can rebuilt this — better, stronger, more dexterous than before.

Well, they did, and now RoboGlove — a term that conjures up images of a vaguely 1980s dystopian future — will soon get its manufacturing debut at the end of select GM workers’ arms. (Read More…)

Thousands of innocent Americans are going to jail due to faulty science and prosecutors who take the results of cheap (and error-prone) roadside drug testing equipment as gospel.

That’s the finding of a damning report published in the New York Times with the help of non-profit investigative journalism body ProPublica.

The Nixon-era chemical-testing technology used by police officers to analyze suspicious substances found in vehicles was never supposed to be the last word on a suspect’s guilt or innocence, but that’s what’s happening across the U.S. Backed into a corner, citizens faced with a “positive” test often accept a plea deal for a reduced sentence to get the nightmare over with faster. (Read More…)

There’s a good chance that the former managing director of Audi Volkswagen Korea will soon find himself pleading for a sip of Coke during the 11th hour of a grueling interrogation process.

Park Dong-hoon, now CEO of Renault Samsung Motors, was recently identified as a suspect in South Korea’s investigation into the Volkswagen emissions-cheating scandal, according to Wards Auto. That means a date with the “VIP Suite.” (Read More…)

The Leaf is nowhere to be seen — unless you’re staring at a Nissan dealer lot — and American buyers are barely budging their electric vehicle take up rate. Nissan, it seems, needs another incentive to sweeten its EV pot.

The solution? More free electricity. It’s not a new idea (actually, it’s an expanded version of two-year-old promotion), but the automaker probably figured, why the hell not? (Read More…)

If you’re going to let people take their hands off the wheel and let the vehicle do the driving, you’d better offer every tool available to make sure it’s safe.

That’s the view of Stefan Sommer, CEO of German auto parts supplier ZF Friedrichshafen, who advocated for the use of LIDAR (light detection and ranging) in autonomous or semi-autonomous vehicles in the wake of the fatal Tesla crash. (Read More…)

A rollover crash on the Pennsylvania Turnpike doesn’t generate many headlines, unless it’s a Tesla Model X operating in Autopilot mode.

After last week’s revelation of a fatal May crash involving Autopilot, another incident involving the semi-autonomous technology is the last thing the automaker needs, but that’s what happened on July 1, according to the Detroit Free Press.

A Model X owned by Southfield, Michigan art dealer Albert Scaglione crashed outside of Bedford, Pennsylvania, about halfway between Pittsburgh and Harrisburg. The vehicle, which the owner said was in Autopilot mode, left its lane, hit the guardrail, rebounded across both lanes and overturned after striking the concrete median.

Neither the owner or his son-in-law were seriously hurt in the crash. (Read More…)

It was heady days at Ford’s Windsor Engine Plant in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The facility cranked out Triton V8 engines and the mighty 6.8-liter V10 for an insatiable truck and SUV market (remember the Excursion?), but its future is now in jeopardy.

Aggressive fuel economy targets and the move towards EcoBoost power and fewer cylinders in Ford engine bays have workers and their labor leaders wondering how long they can continue building the factory’s chief powerplant — the Triton V10. (Read More…)

It’s a well-known fact that Islamic State fighters enjoy using hardy Toyota pickups in their pursuit of cleansing the Middle East of people even slightly different from themselves, but they’ll need to restock after last week.

Recent Allied military advances, including a huge, weeks-long push that liberated the Iraqi city of Fallujah, have ISIS on the run, and the U.S. Air Force’s best aerial hardware just caught a huge number of their vehicles making a break for it.

The results, as Defense Department video of the strike shows, wasn’t pretty — for the insurgents or their trucks. (Read More…)

If you were expecting Jeep’s upcoming Wagoneer and Grand Wagoneer to be range-topping standalone models, think again.

According to Automotive News, the new additions to the lineup will simply be upscale versions of the next-generation Grand Cherokee. Consider your retro-tinged dreams squashed. (Read More…)

Numerous reports of an exhaust smell in the cabin of late-model Ford Explorers prompted the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to open an investigation.

According to Reuters (via Automotive News), safety officials began looking into 2011–2015 Explorers last Friday after receiving 154 complaints of an exhaust odor. The issue, which is reported to be a factor in one crash (that didn’t result in injuries), persists in some vehicles even after they were repaired to correct the problem. (Read More…)

Edsel Ford II, great-grandson of Ford Motor Company founder Henry Ford, was arrested after an altercation at his Grosse Pointe Farms home last night, but no charges came out of this morning’s arraignment.

According to reports from the arraignment by the Detroit Free Press, police were called to the home by Ford’s wife, Cynthia Layne Neskow. The 67-year-old Ford, son of Henry Ford II and cousin of company chairman William Clay Ford, Jr,  spent the night in jail awaiting a misdemeanor domestic violence charge. (Read More…)

After agreeing to fork over up to $14.7 billion to U.S. owners (and the environment) in its U.S. diesel emissions scandal settlement, Volkswagen is saying Nein! to a similar buyback in Europe, because that kind of payout would just be insane.

According to Left Lane News, the embattled automaker isn’t planning any compensation to its clients on the Continent, meaning its 2.0-liter TDI models will go on well into the future, albeit in a slightly detuned form. (Read More…)

Less than a week after it was revealed that Tesla’s semi-autonomous driving mode played a role in a deadly May crash, the automaker is planning a host of changes to its Autopilot system.

The changes, billed as the 8.0 upgrade, include a feature that allows the vehicle to exit a highway and navigate an off-ramp while in Autopilot mode, according to Autoguide. The function will be activated by the vehicle’s turn signal. (Read More…)