Free Republic

Hertz raised the number of electric vehicles it plans to sell this year as it is cutting its EV fleet to reduce losses that have weighed on the car rental giant’s earnings. In the first quarter, Hertz upsized its EV disposition plan by 10,000 vehicles, for a total of 30,000 EVs intended for sale in 2024. Most of these EVs will be Teslas. The company incurred a $195 million charge to vehicle depreciation to write down the EVs held for sale which were remaining in inventory at quarter-end to fair value and recognize the disposition losses on EVs sold in...

Shares of rental car giant Hertz plunged by more than 20 percent on Thursday after the company reported huge losses related to its investment in Electric Vehicles (EVs). For months, Hertz has been struggling after going all-in on EVs. On Thursday, Hertz executives said it lost $1.28 per share in the first quarter, many times larger than Wall Street’s estimate of a loss of 45 percent per share. The wider-than-expected loss came even though business was actually busier than expected for Hertz. The company took in $2.1 billion in revenue, slightly outpacing expectations. In January, Hertz executives announced that they...

I'm not sure if car and truck manufacturers are still using soybean based coating for the myriad of wires in vehicles with sensors all over them. A friend just spent over $3k on two vehicles because of squirrels eating the wires. Both vehicles required complete re-wiring, entire harnesses were chewed through. Their pickup truck is only a few years old, the suv a bit older about 4 years. The insurance would not cover the damage, and the manufacturer would not either. Trying to find out if our 2022 Buick Encore has soybean coatings, lots of squirrels, mice and other critters...

BEIJING/FRANKFURT (Reuters) -Tesla has cut prices in a number of its major markets, including China and Germany, following price cuts in the United States, as it grapples with falling sales and an intensifying price war for electric vehicles (EVs), especially against Chinese EVs. The price cuts come after Tesla, led by its billionaire CEO Elon Musk, reported this month that its global vehicle deliveries in the first quarter fell for the first time in nearly four years. "Tesla prices must change frequently in order to match production with demand," Musk posted on X on Sunday. Tesla, the EV market leader,...

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. — Workers in attendance for Friday's United Auto Workers (UAW) watch party feel they've made history. And for those Volkswagen employees who wanted unionization, the third time was the charm. In order to unionize, the UAW needed 50% plus one vote. Both previous UAW elections fell short of this, with 2014's election showing 47%, and 2019's election showing 48%. But Friday night, employees won by a landslide with the official National Labor Relations Board results reporting 2,628-985 votes for union representation. Some who came to watch the vote were from other right-to-work states in the U.S., wanting to...

Europe’s plunging electric vehicle sales are painful proof the market isn’t ready to stand on its own, putting governments on notice for more support until affordable EVs become a reality. The glut is clogging up ports and factories are cutting production — a red flag for the region’s climate goals and risk of job cuts after Tesla’s mass layoffs this week. Without subsidies, the cost of EV ownership no longer makes sense for many drivers. Insurance and repairs are more expensive than for combustion-engine cars, and many would-be customers still bristle at limited charging infrastructure. At the same time, rapid...

Thousands of Alabama Mercedes-Benz workers will vote in May to determine if they want United Auto Workers (UAW) union representation. The election is set for May 13-17 and will be held in person in Vance, Ala. The National Labor Relations Board, which will administer the vote, will count the ballots on May 17. The vote comes as around 4,300 workers at the Volkswagen factory in Chattanooga, Tenn., are voting this week on union representation, the results of which are expected Friday. The development is part of UAW’s push to unionize workers at auto manufacturing factories in Southern states.

The Corvette's executive chief engineer waves the checkered flag just as his masterpiece—the new ZR1—debuts this summer. Tadge Juechter, the Corvette's executive chief engineer since 2006, has announced his retirement. Juechter's career with General Motors spanned 47 years, most of which were spent in the Corvette division. He led the development of the C7 and C8 generations, with the latter effectively making him the godfather of the mid-engined Corvette that debuted for 2020. Since 1993, Tadge Juechter has been involved with one of the most iconic sports cars in the world: the Chevy Corvette. By 1999, he was named assistant...

Ford Motor Co. is recalling more than 450,000 compact SUVs and pickup trucks over loss of drive power because of a battery issue. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) announced the recall in a notice Wednesday, which affects 2022-2024 model year Bronco Sport SUVs and Maverick compact pickup trucks manufactured between 2022-2023. An undetected low battery charge could lead to some electrical accessories such as hazard lights not functioning properly or cause a loss of drive power in affected vehicles, according to the NHTSA. The issue affects 456,565 vehicles. Last week, Ford issued another recall for tens of thousands...

Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. Or so said Steve Jobs when he announced iPhone in 2007.But I’m talking about a different revolutionary product. A foundational product that forever changed how everyone on this planet gets to where they need to be. Today, I’d like to tell you about the Etak Navigator, a truly revolutionary product and the world’s first practical vehicle navigation system.Here’s a picture of it:At the time, it was considered out-of-this-world. This is what Silicon Valley’s San Jose Mercury News said about it:The Etak Navigator launched 39 years (!) ago...

Ford issued a recall for 42,652 examples of its 2022-2023 Bronco Sport and 2022 Escape SUVs to address a fuel leak caused by a cracked fuel injector. Vehicles equipped with 1.5-liter EcoBoost engines are included in the recall. The fix includes the installation of a drain tube to redirect any leaking fuel from the engine to the ground along with a software update that adds fuel injector leak detection to the engine control unit. This might sound eerily familiar to owners of these particular vehicles. Back in November of 2022, Ford issued a much larger recall covering a similar range...

The infamous white Ford Bronco carrying OJ Simpson in a low-speed chase across Los Angeles after the murders of his ex-wife and her friend may finally be up for sale — with the hope of getting at least $1.5 million. The 1993 SUV’s three owners – Simpson’s former agent Michael Gilbert and two friends of longtime pal Al Cowlings, who was behind the wheel June 17, 1994 – told Clict they plan to cash in on the new interest following last week’s death of the disgraced NFL great. “Before OJ passed, we had always thought this was going to be...

In this video we're talking abour GEOFENCING and GEOTIMING and how it could stop your car from going where you want, when you want, and it applies to all cars after around 2016. Scary stuff. #News #EV #BigBrother

In recent months Tesla has had a bumpy ride. In January the electric-vehicle (ev) pioneer warned that growth would be “notably lower” this year, as motorists’ enthusiasm for battery power loses charge. The same month it had to suspend most production at its giant factory near Berlin because of supply disruptions caused by turmoil in the Red Sea. Its market share in China, the world’s biggest ev market, is falling as it fends off cheaper local competition, especially from byd, which late last year briefly eclipsed Tesla as the world’s biggest ev-maker. Tesla hit another big pothole on April 2nd,...

Joe Biden’s massive electric vehicle (EV) agenda will subsidize the lifestyles of America’s well-to-do while hitting average people the hardest.... The Biden administration is aggressively regulating the U.S. auto market to drastically increase the proportion of EVs sold over the coming decade, but consumer demand has not taken off as quickly as proponents had projected despite the subsidies made available by Biden’s flagship climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Manufacturers are slashing prices of their EVs to make the vehicles more appealing to consumers, which will increase prices for internal combustion engine (ICE) cars to compensate; this dynamic will...

The new "EV Tax" is the highest in the nation and will likely put the brakes on EV adoption in the Garden State. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ With the stroke of a pen, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy has unplugged the state's pro-electric-vehicle position, signing into law a new EV road tax that is the highest of its kind in the nation. Starting in July, New Jersey EV owners must pay an annual $250 road tax fee in an effort to offset the state's loss in fuel tax revenue. The new fee will increase by $10 each of the next four years until...

Here's something we learned just from Politico's headline: Republicans are waging a crusade against electric cars, and they might regret that in the 2024 election. Politico is correct if waging a crusade against electric cars means opposing EV mandates and impossible deadlines. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm wants the entire U.S. military fleet to be electric by 2030. It was Politico who told us last December that the Biden administration's $7.5 billion allocation had led to exactly zero charges being installed two years later. It's funny … Politico told us one year ago that Republicans were stoking the fires of the...

As the automotive industry rapidly evolves towards electrification, high-voltage batteries are finding their way into various applications. From mining trucks to hydrofoil boats, electric powertrains are finding their homes in many unsuspecting vehicles. But one area is particularly fascinating: the classic car domain. Due to the high-torque nature of electric motors and battery packs that allow for a low center of gravity, swapping an old gas-guzzling engine for a battery pack and electric motors provides a quieter, faster, and more refined driving experience. Florida-based automaker E.C.D. Automotive Design Inc. has been working on precisely that. Founded in 2013, the automaker...

FSD Beta V12.3.3 (2024.3.10) – Tesla FSD V12.3.3 is rolling out to vehicles in North America, soon after v12.3.2.1 was released. This release changes the designation from "Beta" to "Supervised", which apparently means that it requires supervision, according to Tesla: "Under your supervision, Full Self-Driving (Supervised) can drive your Tesla almost anywhere."FSD Beta 12 upgrades the city-streets driving stack to a single end-to-end AI neural network trained on millions of video clips, replacing over 300k lines of code. Elon Musk said that Tesla's Full Self-Driving (FSD) version 12 will be released more broadly soon, but has only rolled out to...

Battery electric vehicles like Teslas are fast, sleek, jewelrylike cars that capture the imagination. Hybrid cars, at least in the U.S., often bring to mind the Toyota Prius, long seen as a dawdling, egg-shaped vehicle for shuttling back and forth to Trader Joe's. But quietly amid all the BEV hype, automakers' hybrid fleets took broad strides forward. Car buyers flinched at the challenges of EV ownership. And sales of hybrid cars, led by Toyota Motor (TM) and Honda Motor (HMC), ramped up to outpace those of the flashier electric vehicles. Now carmakers are in overdrive to respond as analysts take...