The Chery Omoda 5, one of the country's best-selling Chinese cars, has been pulled from sale after at least three incidents of complete wheel detachment.

Malaysia has banned sales of the Chery Omoda 5 after wheels detached from at least three vehicles during normal use. Not loose. Not wobbly. Completely off.

The Ministry of Domestic Trade and Cost of Living ordered an immediate halt to sales this month and told Chery's Malaysian distributor to inspect every affected model still on the road. The Omoda 5 had been one of the country's most popular Chinese imports, undercutting Japanese and Korean rivals on price.

Wheels falling off is the kind of failure that doesn't need explaining. It's not a software bug or a battery chemistry problem or some obscure component you've never heard of. It's the bit that stops the car being a very expensive shed.

Chery is one of China's largest automakers and the Omoda 5 is part of its push into Southeast Asia, where lower prices have made Chinese brands competitive against the Japanese manufacturers that have dominated the region for decades. That strategy works until something this catastrophic happens.

The timing is unfortunate for China's car industry more broadly. BYD recalled vehicles over airbag issues in 2023. European regulators have raised concerns about crash test results from some Chinese EV brands. MG, now Chinese-owned, has faced quality complaints in Australia and the UK. Vietnam suspended imports of certain Chinese models last year over safety documentation.

None of that is wheels literally departing the vehicle while someone is driving it down a road.

The Malaysian government hasn't said what caused the failures. Improper torque on wheel bolts would be the obvious culprit, but three separate incidents suggests either a systemic assembly problem or a design flaw that lets bolts loosen under normal conditions. Either way, it's the sort of thing that should have been caught before the first car left the factory.

Chinese manufacturers have spent years insisting their quality control matches or exceeds Western and Japanese standards. They've pointed to their use of European suppliers, their investment in R&D, their success in crash tests. Then a wheel falls off and all of that evaporates.

The Omoda 5's appeal in Malaysia was straightforward: it looked decent, had reasonable equipment, and cost less than a Honda HR-V or Toyota Corolla Cross. That value proposition assumes the car stays in one piece. When it doesn't, the discount stops mattering.

Chery has not yet issued a public statement on whether this will affect Omoda 5 sales in other markets. The model is sold across Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and parts of South America. If the problem is assembly-related and specific to Malaysian production or distribution, other markets may be unaffected. If it's a design issue, they're all potentially compromised.

The ban stands. No new sales, every existing car under scrutiny, and one of China's flagship export models suddenly notorious for something no car should ever do.

Got a motors question? Ask Mike anything | Buying advice, fault diagnosis, what something's worth. He's the bloke that's read everything.

Sources: Malaysia Ministry of Domestic Trade and Cost of Living (KPDN), regional vehicle safety recall databases

Dealer data shows the Velar among the fastest-depreciating used cars in 2026, as the premium SUV market corrects hard.

The Range Rover Velar is haemorrhaging value faster than almost anything else in the used market right now, according to dealer asking price data for 2026. That'll sting if you bought one new three or four years ago.

The entire premium SUV segment is being repriced downward as buyers retreat from expensive metal and the market corrects from the fever dream of 2021 and 2022, when used car prices briefly convinced everyone that depreciation was optional.

It isn't.

The Velar launched in 2017 with a starting price around £44,000 and could reach £86,000 if you ticked enough boxes. It was positioned as the sleek, design led alternative to the sportier Range Rover Sport and the smaller Evoque. Handsome thing. Sold well initially. But even luxury SUVs that sold well are not immune to gravity, and gravity is reasserting itself with some force.

Typical depreciation for a luxury SUV historically runs 40 to 60 per cent over three years. Some Velars are now exceeding that, particularly the higher spec petrol models from 2020 onwards. If you're seeing numbers closer to 65 per cent, you're not imagining it.

Part of this is structural. Range Rover products depreciate faster than most premium brands anyway because the initial prices are so high and the reliability reputation so patchy. Warranty expiry is a cliff edge, not a gentle slope.

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But the current correction is also timing. The used market is recalibrating after the pandemic spike, when stock shortages and supply chain chaos sent used values through the roof. That's over. Supply is back. Demand is weaker. And expensive SUVs are being hit harder than anything else because they cost a lot to run and buyers are feeling economic pressure.

Then there's the electric transition. Not because the Velar is electric ... it isn't. But because uncertainty about what kind of powertrain will hold value in five years is making buyers cautious about committing to anything expensive with an internal combustion engine. That caution shows up in resale prices immediately.

For current Velar owners, this is miserable. For buyers, it's an opportunity if you can stomach the running costs and the knowledge that the value will likely keep falling. Sound familiar? Premium SUVs are cheaper now than they've been in years, but they're cheaper for a reason.

The Jaguar I Pace lost over 60 per cent of its value in some markets by 2023. Tesla Model S and X dropped 30 to 40 per cent in the used market during the same period. The Velar is in similar company now, which tells you something about how far the luxury segment has corrected.

Diesel models are faring even worse, which is no surprise given the broader collapse in diesel resale values since emissions scandals and impending bans started reshaping buyer sentiment from 2018 onward. If you own a diesel Velar, you have MotorBuzz's sympathy, but not much else.

The Porsche Cayenne and BMW X5 historically lose 50 to 55 per cent in their first three years. What's different now is the speed. Dealers are adjusting asking prices to reflect reality, which means the cars are sitting on forecourts longer and being discounted harder.

The 2008 financial crisis saw luxury car values drop 20 to 30 per cent almost overnight. This isn't that dramatic, but it's the same principle. When economic conditions tighten, the first thing people stop buying is expensive, depreciating luxuries. A £60,000 SUV is exactly that.

If you're thinking about buying a used Velar now, the value might be tempting, but factor in that it probably won't stop falling for another year or more. And if you're trying to sell one, brace yourself. The market has moved, and it hasn't moved in your favour.

The Velar debuted at £44,000 in 2017. Some of those early cars are now trading for under £15,000. That's a lot of money to lose in seven years, even for a luxury SUV.

Sources: UK automotive retail data, historical depreciation figures from Cap HPI and Glass's Guide, Land Rover UK pricing archives

Discontinued electric pickup trucks are suddenly moving at $25,000-$45,000, down from launch MSRPs that topped $92,000.

Used Ford F-150 Lightning electric pickups are selling for roughly half their original sticker price after Ford pulled the plug on production. Trucks that launched between $55,000 and $92,000 depending on trim are now changing hands for $25,000 to $45,000.

Ford announced the discontinuation in late 2024 after production cuts throughout the previous eighteen months failed to align output with demand. The Rouge Electric Vehicle Center in Dearborn employed about 750 workers building what was supposed to be a 150,000-unit-per-year operation. Actual sales never came close.

The depreciation curve here is brutal but not unprecedented. The Chevrolet Bolt followed a similar trajectory after GM killed it in 2023, with used examples dropping 40 to 50 percent below original MSRP within months. Tesla's serial price slashing on new inventory has done comparable damage to used Model S and X values.

What's unusual is the sheer capability on offer at these prices. A full-size electric pickup with 230 to 320 miles of range, depending on battery configuration, now costs less than a new Civic. The Lightning still hauls, still tows, still plugs into Ford's charging network.

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The catch is obvious. You're buying a discontinued model. Ford's warranty and service network remain in place, so parts and support aren't disappearing overnight, but long-term residual value is already shot. Anyone buying at $30,000 shouldn't expect to get much back in five years.

If you're planning to drive it into the ground, none of that matters. For someone who needs a work truck and has access to home charging, a lightly used Lightning at half off makes financial sense in a way the original MSRP never did. Ford's pricing ambition outran the market's willingness to pay EV premiums for pickup capability.

Nissan Leaf models from earlier generations lost 60 to 70 percent of their value after three to five years as battery technology improved and range anxiety persisted. Volkswagen's e-Golf exit from the US market in 2020 created similar dynamics, though on a smaller scale.

This isn't a crisis for buyers. It's an opportunity dressed up as a cautionary tale about first-generation EV depreciation. The Lightning works. It's well-built. It just arrived at a price point the market rejected and now sits at a price point the market will accept.

A two-year-old Platinum trim Lightning with 15,000 miles listed at $42,000 isn't a warning. It's a $50,000 discount on a truck that still does everything Ford promised it would do.

Sources: Ford Motor Company production and MSRP data, used vehicle market listings, General Motors Chevrolet Bolt discontinuation reporting

The Swindon dealer commissioned five exclusive Tailor Made models through Ferrari's personalization program, because nothing says six decades in business like half a million quid's worth of custom inventory.

Dick Lovett has commissioned five exclusive Ferrari models through the factory's Tailor Made program to mark its 60th anniversary as a dealer group. The Swindon-based outfit, which runs Ferrari showrooms in both Swindon and Bristol, ordered the bespoke cars as a statement of longevity in the prestige market. Whether that statement is directed at customers or competitors is unclear.

Founded in 1964, Dick Lovett has grown into one of the UK's largest luxury car retailers, with over 25 locations representing Ferrari, Bentley, McLaren, Aston Martin, and Lamborghini. It remains family-owned, currently run by Nick Lovett. The five Ferraris are not standard models with a different paint code. Ferrari's Tailor Made program allows extensive customization of colours, materials, and interior finishes, often running 15 to 30 percent above the base model price. On a Roma, that's an extra £40,000 minimum. On an 812, considerably more.

This kind of commission serves two purposes. First, it's marketing. Five one-off Ferraris arriving at the same dealership creates a story, draws attention, and reminds people that Dick Lovett has the kind of relationship with Maranello that allows them to place such an order in the first place. Second, it's inventory investment. Bespoke Ferraris with dealer provenance and low mileage appreciate if kept in a collection or sell at premiums to collectors who missed the original allocation.

Official Ferrari dealers typically order one to three special commissions annually. Five at once is unusual. It signals confidence, financial strength, and a calculated bet that the ultra-luxury personalization trend will continue to grow. Ferrari sold 350 bespoke Tailor Made models globally during its 70th anniversary in 2017. The appetite for customization has only increased since then.

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Other prestige dealers have used similar tactics. JCT600 commissioned special Porsche models for its 75th anniversary in 2021. HR Owen has done the same with McLaren. The difference is scale. Five Ferraris is not a token gesture. It's a statement that Dick Lovett intends to remain relevant in a market where personalization has become the expectation, not the exception.

The cars themselves have not been publicly detailed. Ferrari Tailor Made commissions are often kept private until delivery, and some owners never publicize the specifications at all. What matters to the dealer is less the individual spec sheets and more the collective message: we have the access, the budget, and the client base to justify this kind of order.

Sixty years in the prestige car business is rare. The automotive retail landscape has changed entirely since 1964. Dealers that survived did so by evolving their brand portfolios, expanding geographically, and cultivating relationships with manufacturers that go beyond simply shifting stock. Dick Lovett has done all three. The five Ferraris are a reminder of that.

Whether this kind of commission is genuinely celebratory or a calculated marketing exercise is beside the point. In the prestige car world, the two are the same thing. Sentiment and strategy are indistinguishable when the product costs this much and the margins justify bespoke inventory as both a sales tool and an asset.

The cars are expected to be delivered throughout 2024. No pricing has been disclosed, but assuming an average base price of £250,000 per car and a 20 percent Tailor Made premium, the total order is worth approximately £1.5 million before options.

Sources: Dick Lovett official announcements, Ferrari Tailor Made program details

Most dragster drivers are retired by 60. Plourd is bringing his own 11,000-horsepower car to Vegas.

Bernie Plourd is now licenced to drive a Top Fuel dragster at 73 years old. That makes him the oldest person ever to obtain an NHRA licence in the category.

Top Fuel is not a gentle introduction to motorsport. These machines produce around 11,000 horsepower and cover the quarter mile in approximately 3.7 seconds, reaching speeds north of 330 mph. The forces involved are close to 6 Gs during both acceleration and braking. Most drivers start in their twenties or thirties, and the typical retirement age is somewhere in the fifties or early sixties. Not because the sport becomes boring, but because the human body eventually stops cooperating.

Plourd went the other way.

The NHRA licensing process for Top Fuel is not a formality. It requires multiple successful passes at progressively higher speeds, physical examinations, and demonstrated control of a vehicle that accelerates faster than anything else on Earth. You cannot fake your way through it. You either handle the car at speed or you do not get the licence.

He handled it.

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Plourd is not just collecting the licence as a novelty. He is bringing his own Top Fuel dragster to compete in Las Vegas. That means he intends to race it, not put it in a museum or take it out for exhibition runs. Actual competition against drivers who are, in some cases, fifty years younger.

This is not entirely without precedent in drag racing. Shirley Muldowney became the first woman licenced to drive Top Fuel in 1973, and she raced competitively into her sixties. But there is a difference between continuing a career you started young and obtaining the licence for the first time at an age when most people are thinking about golf, not 11,000-horsepower nitromethane engines.

The physical demands are not theoretical. A Top Fuel run subjects the driver to forces that compress the spine, strain the neck, and blur vision. The braking parachutes deploy with enough violence to throw you forward against the harness. And that is if everything goes right. If something goes wrong at 330 mph, the margin for error is nonexistent.

Plourd passed the tests anyway.

There is something straightforward about this. No marketing angle, no awareness campaign, no stunt for a documentary. Just a 73-year-old man who wanted to drive a Top Fuel dragster and did what was required to make that happen. The NHRA does not hand out licences to make headlines. They hand them out to people who can control the car.

He will run at Las Vegas with his own machine. Whether he wins or loses is almost beside the point. The licence itself is the achievement.

Sources: NHRA

A barely-driven 2025 ZR1X with 1,250 horsepower sold for $102,000 above MSRP at Barrett-Jackson. The auction house has turned first-allocation Corvettes into lottery tickets.

A 2025 Chevrolet Corvette ZR1X with 19 miles on the clock sold for $102,000 over sticker price at Barrett-Jackson in January. The car had barely been driven. Someone paid roughly £80,000 extra to own a track-focused Corvette immediately instead of waiting for an allocation like everyone else.

The ZR1X produces 1,250 horsepower. It is a limited-production variant of the already-limited ZR1, with track-specific aerodynamics and performance components that Chevrolet bolted on to make it even more uncompromising. The base ZR1 starts around $180,000 to $200,000. Add the ZR1X package, then add $102,000 on top of that, and you are well into mid-six-figure territory for a Corvette with delivery mileage.

Barrett-Jackson has turned first-production Corvettes into speculative assets. The first retail 2020 C8 sold for $3 million in 2020. The first 2023 Z06 went for $3.6 million in January 2022. The 2024 E-Ray VIN 001 fetched $1.45 million a year later. Those were charity auctions with tax-deductible incentives, but the pattern is consistent. People will pay absurd premiums to be first.

The $102,000 over sticker represents roughly 50 percent above retail. That is a more restrained premium than the VIN 001 circus, but it is still a staggering markup for a car that is not meaningfully different from the one someone else will buy in six months for sticker price. Or below sticker, if the hype cycle collapses.

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The ZR1X is not a collectible in any traditional sense. It is a track weapon with a warranty. The 19 miles on the odometer suggest the car was driven from the factory to a transporter and then to Barrett-Jackson. It has never been thrashed, never been enjoyed, never been used for the purpose it was engineered to serve. It exists as a transaction.

Chevrolet has been quietly brilliant at manufacturing scarcity around the C8 generation. Every variant has been positioned as limited, every allocation has been managed to ensure demand outstrips supply, and every new model has been launched with just enough fanfare to trigger bidding wars at auction. The ZR1X is the latest example. It is a car designed to make people feel like they are missing out.

The buyer at Barrett-Jackson will own a very fast Corvette. They will also own a reminder that they paid $102,000 more than the next person who gets one. Whether that feels like exclusivity or impatience depends entirely on how the market moves. If values hold, it was a shrewd purchase. If they do not, it was an expensive way to skip the queue.

Barrett-Jackson does not break out how much of the final sale price includes buyer's premium and fees, which are typically added on top of the hammer price. The $102,000 over sticker figure likely includes those costs, but the principle remains the same.

The Corvette has always occupied a strange space in the American market. It is attainable exotica, a supercar for the price of a well-specced German saloon. But the auction market has turned first-production models into something else entirely... a manufactured collectible with no patina, no history, and no miles. Just a number on a build sheet and a receipt that says you were first.

Chevrolet has been good at keeping that cycle spinning. Barrett-Jackson has been good at monetising it. The car is now owned by someone who will either drive it or store it. If they drive it, the 19 miles will become 1,019, and the premium will fade into irrelevance. If they store it, they will own a museum piece that commemorates the moment when a Corvette with delivery mileage sold for $102,000 over sticker.

Sources: Barrett-Jackson Auction Company, Chevrolet official specifications

Air sweeps, K-9 units, and high-speed pursuits recovered more than four vehicles a day across Illinois in a 90-day enforcement blitz.

Illinois State Police recovered 424 stolen or hijacked vehicles in 90 days using aerial surveillance, K-9 units, and high-speed pursuits. That's roughly four to five vehicles a day, every day, for three months.

The operation combined helicopter sweeps with traditional ground enforcement. Air units spotted stolen vehicles from above, ground units closed in, and when suspects ran, police chased them. K-9 teams tracked fleeing drivers who bailed on foot.

The numbers don't just reflect police effort. They reflect scale.

Chicago reported over 21,000 vehicle thefts in 2023. Cook County saw carjackings jump 104% between 2019 and 2022. Illinois ranks among the top ten states nationally for vehicle theft, according to the National Insurance Crime Bureau. This wasn't a targeted sting against one organised ring. This was sweeping up a constant flow of stolen metal.

High-speed pursuits remain controversial. Departments across the US have tightened chase policies over safety concerns, some banning pursuits entirely for property crimes. Illinois clearly took a different approach here, pursuing suspects actively to recover vehicles and make arrests. Whether that policy holds depends on how many crashes, injuries, or civilian complaints came with those 424 recoveries. The State Police haven't released pursuit-related incident figures.

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Aerial surveillance isn't cheap. Running helicopters costs thousands per flight hour. Deploying them for vehicle recovery suggests either budgets stretched to breaking point by the theft surge, or a calculated decision that the cost of inaction ... insurance claims, public fear, resale of stolen vehicles to other criminals ... outweighed operational expense.

Other cities are running similar operations. California Highway Patrol recovered over 1,000 stolen vehicles in Los Angeles in 2023. Detroit brought back roughly 900. Philadelphia's auto theft unit recovered more than 2,500. The Illinois figure sits in the middle, neither the worst-hit nor the most successful recovery effort nationally, but notable for the tactics used.

Carjacking and theft aren't the same crime, though both feed the same black market. Carjackings involve force or threat. Thefts involve keys left in cups, unsecured fobs, or bypassed immobilisers. Some of the 424 vehicles recovered were taken at gunpoint. Some were taken because the owner left them running outside a shop in January.

The 90-day window suggests a time-limited task force rather than permanent policy. Task forces work when resources concentrate, then dissolve when funding or political will runs out. Whether Illinois continues air sweeps and aggressive pursuits or reverts to slower investigative methods will show up in the next quarter's figures.

Four hundred and twenty-four vehicles in three months.

Sources: Illinois State Police, National Insurance Crime Bureau, Chicago Police Department data, Cook County carjacking statistics

Officers can now take your vehicle immediately at the roadside if you're caught without insurance or a valid licence. No advance notice. Pay up or watch it get crushed.

Over 70 vehicles have already been confiscated by UK police under enforcement powers that allow immediate seizure without prior warning to drivers caught without insurance or a valid licence.

The seizures happen at the roadside. If you cannot produce valid insurance or a driving licence when stopped, the car goes. Section 165A of the Road Traffic Act 1988 gives officers this authority, and they are using it.

Officers retain discretion in how they apply the power, but the shift is clear. Previous enforcement typically involved warnings or notices before confiscation. That courtesy has evaporated.

Getting your car back is not cheap. Recovery fees alone run £150 to £200. Storage costs add £10 to £35 per day. You have 14 days to pay up and reclaim the vehicle. Miss that window and your car gets crushed or sold at auction.

ANPR technology makes this efficient. Automatic Number Plate Recognition systems scan plates constantly, cross-referencing them against insurance databases in real time. An uninsured vehicle flags instantly. The stop follows.

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The Motor Insurers' Bureau estimates roughly one million drivers in the UK are driving without insurance. That's one in every 34 vehicles on the road. Police forces have run periodic crackdowns for years. London's Metropolitan Police alone seized over 10,000 vehicles in previous operations targeting uninsured drivers. Operation Cubo and similar initiatives across Police Scotland and regional forces have confiscated hundreds of vehicles in single sweeps.

What's different now is the removal of the buffer. No letter in the post. No grace period. The enforcement happens the moment you're stopped.

The discretion officers retain matters in theory. In practice, if the insurance database shows no valid policy and you cannot produce proof on the spot, the legal grounds for seizure exist. Whether an officer chooses to exercise that power or issue a warning instead depends on the individual situation and the officer's judgment.

The financial penalties extend beyond the immediate recovery and storage fees. Once your vehicle is seized, you still need to arrange insurance before you can reclaim it. If the car was uninsured because you couldn't afford the premium in the first place, you now face that cost plus the seizure fees. The arithmetic does not work in your favour.

Vehicles left unclaimed get disposed of quickly. Fourteen days is not much time if you're scrambling to find several hundred pounds while also sourcing an insurance policy. Auctions move fast. Crushers move faster.

The enforcement targets a real problem. Uninsured drivers create risk for everyone else on the road. When an uninsured driver causes an accident, the Motor Insurers' Bureau covers the cost, which gets passed on to insured drivers through higher premiums. The industry estimates this adds roughly £50 to every policy annually.

But the immediacy of the new enforcement approach removes any margin for error or misunderstanding. If your insurance lapsed because of an administrative failure, if you believed you were covered under someone else's policy and weren't, if the database hasn't updated to reflect a policy you just purchased ... the car still goes.

Seventy vehicles seized so far suggests this is not a token initiative. The number will climb. ANPR coverage is extensive and growing. The technology does not forget to check.

Sources: Road Traffic Act 1988, Motor Insurers' Bureau

Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen have called it quits on spaceflight following NASA's first crewed lunar mission in over half a century.

All four Artemis II astronauts have retired from spaceflight after completing NASA's first crewed lunar mission in more than 50 years. Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, Mission Specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen flew the 10-day lunar flyby mission and have since confirmed none of them intend to return to space. Entire mission crews don't retire simultaneously.

Apollo astronauts flew multiple missions. Shuttle crews cycled back into rotation. Even Neil Armstrong, who retired after Apollo 11, didn't take his entire crew with him. Buzz Aldrin flew again. Michael Collins stayed in the programme. The Artemis II decision suggests something about the mission changed them in a way that made returning impossible or unnecessary.

The Overview Effect is the term psychologists use for the cognitive shift astronauts experience when they see Earth from space. It was documented by author Frank White in the 1980s after interviewing dozens of astronauts who described a profound and often permanent change in perspective. Viewing the planet as a fragile sphere hanging in the void, without borders, without the noise of politics, tends to reorder priorities. Some astronauts describe it as spiritual. Others call it disorienting. Almost all say it makes the idea of returning to space feel redundant.

Artemis II was a flyby mission. No landing. No surface exploration. The crew travelled approximately 230,000 miles from Earth in the Orion spacecraft, tested life support systems, validated hardware, and came home. For NASA, it was a technical proving mission ahead of the Artemis III lunar landing. For the astronauts, it appears to have been something else entirely.

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Victor Glover became the first person of colour to travel to the Moon. Christina Koch became the first woman. Jeremy Hansen became the first Canadian. All three held the distinction for exactly 10 days before deciding they'd had enough of space. Wiseman, who commanded the mission, had already flown to the International Space Station in 2014. He knew what Earth looked like from low orbit. The Moon offered a different view, and apparently that was sufficient.

Bill Anders, who flew Apollo 8 in 1968 and became one of the first three humans to orbit the Moon, retired shortly after returning. He later said the mission gave him a perspective on Earth that made further spaceflight feel unnecessary. Anders took the famous Earthrise photograph. The image of the planet rising over the lunar horizon became one of the most reproduced images in history. He described the experience as transformative and said he had no interest in going back.

The difference is that Anders retired alone. His crewmates, Frank Borman and Jim Lovell, kept flying. Lovell commanded Apollo 13. Borman flew one more mission before retiring in 1970. The Artemis II crew retiring together suggests the mission had a collective impact that transcends individual psychology.

NASA has not commented publicly on the retirements beyond standard statements acknowledging the astronauts' service. The Artemis programme continues. Artemis III, which will land astronauts on the lunar surface for the first time since 1972, is scheduled for 2027. The crew for that mission has not yet been announced, and NASA will now be selecting from a pool that no longer includes four of the most experienced astronauts in the programme.

The timing is awkward. Artemis II was supposed to demonstrate that crewed lunar missions are sustainable and repeatable. Losing the entire crew to retirement immediately after the mission raises questions about whether deep space travel, even at the relatively modest distance of the Moon, is something humans can do repeatedly without psychological cost. NASA has decades of data on astronauts living in low Earth orbit. The space station is 250 miles up. The Moon is nearly a thousand times farther. That distance appears to matter.

What the four astronauts plan to do next is unclear. Wiseman, Glover, Koch, and Hansen have not announced post-retirement plans. Most astronauts transition into engineering roles, academia, or private industry. Some become public speakers. A few disappear entirely. None of the Artemis II crew has given interviews since returning from the mission.

NASA announced the Artemis II crew in April 2023. The mission launched sometime in the 2025-2026 timeframe using the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft. It was the first crewed test of hardware designed for deep space. Everything worked. The astronauts came home safely. The crew for Artemis III will be selected from a pool that includes astronauts who have never seen Earth from beyond low orbit.

Sources: NASA official statements, Overview Effect documentation by Frank White, Apollo programme mission records

China's largest car exporter will add iCAUR to its existing Omoda & Jaecoo operation, marking another front in the systematic occupation of British forecourts.

Chery Automobile is launching iCAUR in the UK in early 2027, its second brand in a market it only entered properly four years ago. The company already runs Omoda & Jaecoo here, established in 2023, but has decided one beachhead is insufficient for a manufacturer that shipped 1.6 million vehicles globally last year.

iCAUR will be positioned as a technology-focused electric vehicle brand. Exactly what that means beyond the standard fare of touchscreens and battery packs remains unclear, but specificity has never been a prerequisite for launching Chinese EV brands in Europe.

The strategy is straightforward. Chery exports to more than 80 countries and operates factories in Brazil, Egypt, and Iran. It understands volume and it understands how to saturate a market. Running multiple brands under one corporate structure allows it to occupy different price points and customer segments without cannibalising its own sales. It also provides insulation if one brand fails or needs to be withdrawn, which is not a theoretical concern.

Sound familiar?

GWM launched its Ora electric brand in the UK in 2022 and pulled it a year later. The Chinese advance into Britain has not been frictionless, but it has been relentless. BYD arrived in 2023. NIO installed battery swap stations the same year. XPeng began deliveries. Geely already owns Polestar and Lotus. SAIC owns MG, which now dominates UK electric vehicle sales in a way that would have seemed absurd a decade ago.

Chery is doing what works. Establish brand one, secure dealer networks, build recognition. Then establish brand two in a different segment before the first one has even matured. By the time iCAUR launches in 2027, Omoda & Jaecoo will have had four years to build whatever customer base and aftersales infrastructure can be built in a market that remains suspicious of unfamiliar badges.

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The timing is deliberate. UK car manufacturing fell to its lowest level since 1956 in recent years. Domestic production is collapsing while Chinese imports are accelerating. The industry talks endlessly about the transition to electric vehicles as though it is a shared challenge being navigated collectively. It is a market transfer happening at industrial speed.

Western legacy manufacturers are cutting production and shedding jobs. Chinese manufacturers are adding brands and expanding capacity. The assumption that European engineering heritage and established dealer networks would provide some kind of moat has proven to be wishful thinking. Chinese companies have simply built their own networks and undercut on price while offering equivalent or superior technology.

iCAUR will not be the last. Chery has the scale and the appetite. It is China's largest automotive exporter by volume, a position it did not achieve by exercising restraint. The UK market is not being contested, it is being occupied, one brand launch at a time.

Whether iCAR succeeds or fails individually is almost irrelevant. What matters is the cumulative weight of multiple Chinese brands operating across multiple segments with backing from manufacturers that measure their output in millions of units per year. Omoda, Jaecoo, iCAUR, BYD, MG, XPeng, NIO. The names accumulate.

British buyers will have more electric vehicle options at lower prices, which is the argument used to justify or at least accept what is happening. The counter-argument is that this is the automotive equivalent of scorched earth, and the ground being scorched is what remains of Western car manufacturing.

Chery has not announced specific models, pricing, or dealer locations for iCAUR yet. That will come later, probably with the usual optimistic statements about commitment to the UK market and investment in local jobs. The product will likely be competitive, possibly impressive. The machinery driving this is efficient and well-funded.

Early 2027. Two years away. Enough time for several more Chinese brands to establish themselves and several more Western manufacturers to announce restructuring.

Sources: Chery Automobile Co., Ltd., UK automotive manufacturing data, Financial Times automotive sector coverage

A coordinated nationwide operation has dismantled eight illegal garages where stolen vehicles were stripped for parts, with around 130 cars recovered.

Police have recovered £2.6 million worth of stolen vehicles and closed eight chop shops in a nationwide crackdown on organised vehicle theft networks. The operation suggests roughly 130 vehicles were pulled back from illegal garages before they could be dismantled and sold as untraceable parts.

Chop shops work fast. A stolen Range Rover or BMW X5 can be stripped to a bare shell in under four hours, with parts dispersed across the black market by morning. That speed is why recovering stolen cars intact is rare. Most victims never see their vehicle again.

The £2.6 million figure tracks with average stolen vehicle values hovering around £20,000, though organised crime groups favour high-value targets. Range Rovers, Mercedes SUVs, and performance BMWs top the shopping list. These aren't opportunistic thefts. They're ordered, stolen to specification, and processed through networks that have been running for years.

Vehicle theft in the UK hit a decade high in 2022 with 130,000 cars stolen. Insurance premiums reflect that. Every stolen car that ends up in a chop shop instead of being recovered pushes the cost onto everyone else's policy.

Eight sites shut down in one operation is significant. Chop shops aren't garden sheds with a socket set. They're industrial-scale operations with hydraulic lifts, cutting equipment, and logistics networks to move parts quickly. Shutting them down requires coordinated intelligence across multiple police forces, which means this wasn't a local crackdown ... it was planned at a national level.

Previous operations give context. West Midlands Police recovered £3 million in stolen vehicles in 2022 under Operation Cantil, which led to 50 arrests. Metropolitan Police Operation Endeavour in 2023 pulled back over £1 million in vehicles from London alone. Those operations were regional. This one spans the country, which suggests the networks being targeted operate at a similar scale.

The parts market for stolen vehicles is vast and surprisingly open. Engine components, doors, bonnets, wheels ... all of it moves through online marketplaces and salvage yards with minimal oversight. A stolen car's VIN can be traced. Individual parts can't. That's the whole game.

Organised crime groups don't steal cars for joyriding. They steal them because there's a supply chain in place to monetise every component. The theft is just the first step. Chop shops are where the real money gets made, turning a £40,000 car into £60,000 worth of parts with no provenance questions asked.

How much impact this has on theft rates comes down to arrests. Shutting down eight sites matters, but only if the people running them are taken off the board. Premises can be replaced. Skilled operators with connections across the parts market are harder to replace.

The National Vehicle Crime Intelligence Service has been tracking the rise in organised theft for years. Keyless entry vulnerabilities, lack of physical steering locks, and the high resale value of parts have made certain models near-perfect targets. Manufacturers have been slow to respond.

No word yet on how many arrests were made or whether charges have been filed.

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The billionaire posted his email and partial credit card details in a screenshot promoting features the platform doesn't need.

Elon Musk posted the last four digits of his own credit card number to X while demonstrating the platform's new AI shopping assistant. The screenshot, which also included his email address, was meant to showcase how users could buy things through the site's chatbot. He deleted it quickly. Not quickly enough.

This happened in 2024 while Musk was pushing AI-powered shopping as part of his vision to turn X into an everything app. The irony is hard to miss. The man who wants to handle your transactions can't even sanitise a screenshot before broadcasting it to 200 million followers.

The post vanished within minutes, but archives and screenshots spread across the platform before he could scrub them. The usual pattern. Musk rushes to promote something half-baked, the thing breaks or exposes something it shouldn't, and the internet gets a permanent record of the failure.

AI shopping through X. Nobody asked for it. The feature is part of Musk's relentless attempt to bolt commerce onto a platform that started as a place to argue about football and now exists primarily as a vehicle for his own pronouncements. Whether anyone actually wants to buy a lawnmower through a chatbot embedded in their Twitter feed is a question that doesn't seem to trouble him.

The security implications are obvious. If the platform's owner accidentally exposes his own payment details while testing the system, what happens when ordinary users try it? Musk has form for shipping features before they're properly vetted. This is the same site that briefly let anyone with eight dollars impersonate a pharmaceutical company.

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He's not the first tech executive to leak his own information during a demo. Mark Zuckerberg showed his phone number to a conference hall in 2019. Jeff Bezos allegedly had his phone compromised via WhatsApp the year before. Sundar Pichai once exposed his calendar during a presentation mishap. The difference is those were isolated incidents, not part of a sustained campaign to add features nobody requested.

The everything app strategy made sense in China, where WeChat genuinely does everything. In the West, it looks like feature creep driven by a billionaire's impatience. X already has payments infrastructure, verified accounts, long-form posts, video hosting, and job listings. Most of it works poorly or not at all. Adding AI shopping to the pile doesn't fix the underlying problems.

Musk's approach to product development has always been to ship fast and fix later. That works when you're building rockets or electric cars with controlled testing environments. It's riskier when you're handling financial data for millions of users on a platform already notorious for security lapses and impersonation scams.

The incident also raises questions about internal processes at X. Did nobody review the screenshot before Musk posted it? Or did he just fire off the tweet without checking, the way he fires off everything else? Given the company's skeletal staff after mass layoffs, the latter seems more likely.

What's telling is how predictable this was. Musk has been adding features to X at a frantic pace, most of them solving problems that don't exist. Audio calls. Encrypted DMs. Longform articles. Now AI shopping. Each one arrives with fanfare and minimal evidence of demand. Each one becomes another thing the platform does badly instead of doing its core function well.

The email address and card digits are out there now, archived and screenshot and probably already being used by scammers in phishing attempts. Musk will change the card. He might change the email. What he won't change is the impulse to rush half-tested features into production because he thinks they sound good.

The last four digits were visible in the screenshot's payment confirmation field.

Sources: X (formerly Twitter), archived social media posts

A 30-year-old family sedan with a Yamaha V6 and five-digit mileage is being offered for $9,900. The market says that's not completely mad.

A 1994 Ford Taurus SHO is currently listed for $9,900 with reported five-digit mileage and apparently spotless condition. That's nearly half what the car cost new, three decades ago, which tells you something about how collector tastes work when nobody's watching.

The SHO ... Super High Output, because Ford's marketing department was having a normal one in 1989 ... was a Yamaha-engineered curiosity that put 220 horsepower through the front wheels of America's rental fleet workhorse. The 3.0-litre V6 was hand-built, the five-speed manual was the only transmission offered, and roughly 5,500 of these second-generation models left the factory in 1994. Most of them racked up 300,000 miles ferrying insurance salesmen between client meetings before being scrapped.

This one apparently did not.

Five-digit mileage on a car from 1994 means under 100,000 miles, possibly well under. Average use would have put 360,000 to 450,000 miles on the clock by now. So either this SHO spent most of its life in a garage being preserved by someone with inexplicable taste, or the odometer has been on a very long holiday. Assuming the former, the asking price sits at the awkward intersection of "completely unreasonable for a Taurus" and "actually defensible if you know what these are."

Hagerty pegs an "Excellent" condition second-gen SHO at around $8,400. Classic.com shows recent sales between $2,500 for tired examples and $12,000 for the genuinely pristine ones. A 15,000-mile 1995 model sold on Bring a Trailer last year for $13,000, and a first-generation 1989 SHO with 24,000 miles fetched $18,000 in 2022. So there is a market. It's small, it's weird, and it's populated entirely by people who remember when Ford briefly cared about building something interesting.

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The original MSRP was around $23,000 to $24,000, which in 1994 bought you a genuinely quick family sedan with a hand-assembled engine and exactly zero prestige. You couldn't impress anyone with a Taurus, SHO or otherwise. That was the point. It was a Q-car before anyone in America used that term, and it appealed to the sort of person who finds sleeper sedans more interesting than anything with a badge people recognise.

The cult following has kept values from collapsing entirely, but it hasn't pushed them into the stratosphere either. A comparable BMW E36 M3 or Audi B5 S4 from the same era commands significantly more money, despite being far more common and less mechanically interesting. The Taurus name does the SHO no favours. It's still a Taurus, and most people see a Taurus and think "rental car" or "fleet special," not "Yamaha-built homologation special that exists because Ford's engineers got ambitious."

This asking price is a gamble. The seller is betting that someone out there has both the knowledge to appreciate what a low-mileage second-gen SHO represents and the poor judgment to spend nearly ten grand on one. That person exists. Whether they exist at this exact moment, scrolling classifieds with $9,900 burning a hole in their pocket, is the question.

Most buyers would expect to pay $5,000 to $7,000 for a clean driver-quality SHO. Paying $9,900 requires belief that low mileage and originality justify the premium, which in the 1990s performance sedan market is a harder sell than it should be. These cars were built to be driven, and the ones that weren't often suffer from sitting. Seals dry out. Fluids congeal. A garage-kept SHO with 40,000 miles can need just as much sorting as one with 140,000 that was actually used.

Still. If the mileage checks out and the condition matches the asking price, someone will buy it. They'll drive it twice a year, polish it obsessively, and tell everyone at cars and coffee that it's got a Yamaha engine. And they'll be right. That's worth something, even if it's not quite $9,900.

Sources: Hagerty Valuation Tools, Classic.com, Bring a Trailer auction archives, Ford historical specifications

The national average has been above $4 per gallon for over 100 days, beating the 99-day spike that followed Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

The US national average for petrol has now stayed above $4 per gallon for more than 100 days, officially longer than the 2022 price surge that followed Russia's invasion of Ukraine. That earlier spike lasted 99 days and peaked at $5.016 per gallon in June, the highest nominal price ever recorded. This time round, the price hasn't hit the same peak, but it also hasn't come back down.

AAA tracks prices at roughly 150,000 petrol stations across the country. The $4 mark matters psychologically more than mathematically. It's the number that changes driving habits, makes people actually consider smaller cars, and turns dinner table chat toward what's parked in the garage.

The average American driver covers 13,500 miles a year. In a car doing 25 mpg, that's 540 gallons. At $4 per gallon, you're spending $2,160 annually on fuel. At the old $2.50 average from the 2010s, it was $1,350. The difference is $810 a year, which is real money to most households.

The 2022 spike was sharp and visible. Prices shot up, people complained loudly, and then they fell. This current stretch is different. It's not dramatic. It's just there, week after week, stubbornly sitting above the psychological threshold without the sharp peak that makes headlines but also signals a coming drop.

Regional variation remains brutal. California regularly sits $1 to $2 above the national average. Drivers in the Midwest might still find sub-$4 petrol without much effort, but averaged out nationally, the floor has lifted and stayed lifted.

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Crude oil prices, refinery capacity, and seasonal demand all play a role, but none of those factors alone explains why prices have settled here rather than reverting. The 2008 spike hit $4.11 in July and collapsed almost immediately. The 2011-2012 period saw prices flirt with $4 but never consistently break through nationally. This is different.

It makes fuel efficiency matter again in ways it hasn't for years. A car that does 35 mpg instead of 25 mpg saves you roughly $617 a year at current prices. That's enough to make the hybrid option on a family SUV pay for itself faster than the salesman's finance chart suggested when petrol was cheaper. Electric vehicles, despite their higher sticker prices, start looking less like virtue signalling and more like a hedge against this becoming the new normal.

Inflation-adjusted prices in the 1980s were higher than today's nominal $4-plus figure, but that's not much comfort when you're filling a tank every week and watching the numbers climb. People remember what they paid recently, not what their parents paid in 1982.

The sustained nature of this is what grinds. A sharp spike hurts, but it also ends. This just sits there. No one's panicking, but no one's particularly happy either, and that low-level irritation has a way of shaping decisions in ways a temporary shock doesn't.

Sources: AAA (American Automobile Association)

BYD, Chery, and Leapmotor are rewriting the playbook Japanese brands used in the 1980s—manufacture where you sell, avoid the duty.

The European Union slapped tariffs of up to 45.3% on Chinese-made electric vehicles in October 2024. Within months, BYD announced a factory in Hungary, Chery a joint venture plant in Barcelona, and Leapmotor a Stellantis-backed assembly line in Poland. This is not desperation. It's the same move Toyota and Honda made forty years ago when America threatened them with import limits.

SAIC's MG brand faces the steepest rate: 37.6% on top of the standard 10% duty, totaling 47.6%. That kind of levy doesn't leave room for competitive pricing unless you're selling six-figure luxury products, which MG decidedly is not. The response has been swift and industrial: build inside the wall, not outside it.

BYD's Hungarian plant is expected to start production in 2025. Chery's Barcelona facility, a partnership with EuroGroup Lamda, targets the same window. Leapmotor's Polish operation, underpinned by Stellantis's existing infrastructure, began assembly in 2024. These aren't exploratory investments. They're calculated workarounds to protectionist policy, executed with the kind of speed European legacy manufacturers abandoned decades ago.

Geely already had a head start. It owns Volvo, which means it's been operating Belgian and Swedish factories for years without fanfare. Producing Polestar and Lotus models on European soil gave it tariff immunity before tariffs were even a topic. The others are now catching up, and quickly.

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Turkey has emerged as a parallel option. BYD committed $1 billion to a Turkish factory, a hedge that keeps one foot inside the European customs union without full EU regulatory entanglement. It's a clever play: access to European markets, lower labour costs, and none of the Brussels bureaucracy.

Chinese EV sales hit roughly 8% of the European market before the tariffs landed. That share was growing, which is precisely why the tariffs exist. The European Commission justified the move as a defence against state-subsidised dumping, but the practical effect is straightforward: Chinese brands either pay the levy or stop paying it by building locally. They chose the latter.

The United States went further, imposing a 100% tariff on Chinese EVs in 2024. That's a market effectively closed to imports, which makes Europe the battleground. Establishing manufacturing presence now, while the rules are still forming, locks in local production status and supplier relationships before competitors can do the same.

Great Wall Motors explored a German factory in 2022 but abandoned the plan the following year. Whether that was due to costs, political headwinds, or strategic recalculation isn't clear, but it left an opening others have filled.

The playbook is decades old. Honda opened its Ohio plant in 1982. Toyota followed in Kentucky in 1986. Both were responding to voluntary export restraints and tariff threats. Both became permanent fixtures in the American market, employing tens of thousands and building political capital that made them harder to dislodge. Hyundai and Kia repeated the strategy in the 1990s and 2000s, in both the US and Europe.

Tesla did the same thing in reverse, building Gigafactory Berlin-Brandenburg in 2022 to avoid EU import duties on American-made cars. BMW and Mercedes opened US plants in South Carolina and Alabama in the 1990s for similar reasons. The pattern is consistent: tariffs don't stop foreign manufacturers, they relocate them.

UK dealers are caught in an awkward position. Post-Brexit trade rules mean they're outside the EU customs union but still adjacent to it, and supply chains built for an integrated European market are fragmenting. Where vehicles are built, and under which tariff regime, now determines pricing structures and availability in ways that weren't relevant five years ago.

BYD's Hungarian plant is expected to produce several hundred thousand units annually once fully operational.

Sources: European Commission, Reuters, Financial Times, MotorBuzz research

Two years after killing off the supercharged 6.2-litre Hellcat and pushing an electric-only Charger, Dodge is reversing course. The V8 returns in 2027.

Dodge is reinstating the supercharged 6.2-litre Hellcat V8 in the Charger for the 2027 model year, abandoning its brief and commercially disastrous experiment with an electric-only muscle car. The 717-horsepower engine, discontinued in 2023 alongside the previous-generation Charger and Challenger, will return after the battery-powered Charger Daytona failed to convince the people who actually buy these things.

The electric Charger launched in 2024 with a 670-horsepower dual-motor setup in Scat Pack trim. On paper, quick enough. In showrooms, it died on arrival.

Stellantis had bet that American muscle car buyers would embrace electrification if you gave them enough horsepower and kept the nameplate. They would not. The Charger Daytona represented the kind of strategic miscalculation that gets executives fired, and in December 2024, that's exactly what happened when CEO Carlos Tavares resigned amid disagreements over the company's EV strategy and a spectacular North American sales collapse.

The Hellcat engine is not subtle. It produces 717 horsepower in standard tune and 807 in Redeye variants. It sounds like a mechanical argument. It drinks fuel at a rate that would horrify fleet managers. It is also what Charger buyers wanted, and Dodge's decision to delete it in favour of batteries and silence was met with the kind of customer revolt that shows up in quarterly earnings reports.

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Ford kept the V8 in the Mustang while launching the Mach-E. General Motors delayed electric truck rollouts and extended production of petrol Silverados when EV demand cratered. Porsche maintained combustion engines alongside the Taycan because customers kept buying them. Mercedes-Benz walked back its EV-only timeline in 2024, quietly admitting that the market was not cooperating with its 2030 plans. Audi did the same.

Legacy automakers spent the last five years announcing grand electric futures, then spent the following two years backtracking as actual humans declined to participate in those futures at the projected rate.

Dodge's reversal is particularly stark because the Charger has been a muscle car institution since 1966. Multiple generations, countless film appearances, a loyal customer base that knows exactly what it wants. Stellantis thought it could override that with electric performance. It could not.

Stellantis reported severe inventory problems and declining North American sales throughout 2024, driven partly by an EV strategy that assumed demand would materialise if you simply stopped offering the alternative. The Charger Daytona became a case study in what happens when product planning gets disconnected from the people who open their wallets.

The Hellcat's return is a corporate admission dressed up as a product announcement. It confirms that the 2024 pivot to electric-only Chargers was premature, that killing the V8 was a mistake, and that Dodge underestimated how much of its brand equity was tied to a specific kind of engine noise.

Whether this saves the Charger lineup depends on how much damage has already been done. Two years is a long time to tell your core customers they can't have what they want. Some of them will have moved on. Ford sold them a Mustang. GM sold them a Camaro before discontinuing it. Some just bought used Hellcats and decided to keep them longer.

The 2027 Charger will carry the same 6.2-litre supercharged V8 that made 717 horsepower before Stellantis decided batteries were the future.

Sources: Stellantis official communications, Cox Automotive sales data

Not filming racing. Actually racing. NASCAR's apparently taking this seriously.

Tom Cruise is reportedly trying to race in NASCAR's ARCA Menards Series as part of a Days of Thunder sequel, and NASCAR's CEO has confirmed they're discussing it. He's 62 years old.

This isn't stunt coordination. The ARCA series is a legitimate developmental racing ladder with cars hitting 180+ mph on superspeedways, real competition, professional safety protocols. If Cruise actually does this, he'll be competing against drivers trying to build careers, not extras in fireproof suits.

The original Days of Thunder came out in 1990, pulled $157.9 million worldwide on a $60 million budget, and featured actual NASCAR drivers like Rusty Wallace and Neil Bonnett. Tony Scott directed it. Paramount distributed it. The racing sequences were shot at Charlotte, Daytona, and Phoenix.

Thirty-five years later, someone at Paramount has apparently decided a sequel is worth making, and Cruise has decided that filming close-ups in a stationary car against a green screen isn't enough.

He's got form for this sort of thing. The Mission: Impossible franchise has turned his stunt work into a marketing pillar. Hanging off planes, motorcycle cliff jumps, the lot. But those are controlled film stunts with riggers and safety teams and takes. Racing wheel-to-wheel in ARCA is different. You can rehearse it, but you can't control what nineteen other drivers do at 180 mph.

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NASCAR has allowed celebrity participation in lower-tier series before. Frankie Muniz ran ARCA races in 2023 and 2024. But Muniz is 39, not 62, and he wasn't trying to film a major studio sequel while doing it.

Paul Newman raced professionally into his 80s, competed at Le Mans, won SCCA championships. Patrick Dempsey ran the 24 Hours of Le Mans multiple times between 2013 and 2015 while still acting. Michael Fassbender did European Le Mans Series after prepping for a Ferrari film. Steve McQueen and James Garner both raced.

But they weren't building film production around actual race results. This is different. If Cruise bins it in practice, production stops. If he can't qualify, the script has a problem. If he finishes last, the sequel loses its narrative engine.

The ARCA Menards Series runs on the same tracks as the Cup Series, just with less power and older chassis technology. It's still full-contact motorsport with crashes, blown tyres, and drivers who take it seriously because it's their route to Cup. Cruise will be racing against people half his age who need a good finish more than he does.

Whether NASCAR actually sanctions this depends on how much liability they're willing to carry and how much Paramount is willing to spend making it work. Cruise has leverage. Days of Thunder is part of NASCAR's cultural footprint, and a sequel with real racing footage could be worth the risk.

Or it could be the most expensive on-set insurance claim in film history. ARCA cars don't care who's driving them.

Sources: NASCAR, Paramount Pictures archive data, ARCA Menards Series records

Renault Group joins growing chorus of manufacturers calling for flexibility in ZEV targets, as the gap between government ambition and showroom reality widens.

Renault Group's CEO has become the latest manufacturer chief to publicly challenge the UK's Zero Emission Vehicle Mandate, arguing that an 80% electric sales target by 2030 needs to reflect actual consumer demand rather than political ambition.

The mandate, introduced in January 2024 under the previous Conservative government, requires 22% of new car sales this year to be zero emission vehicles, rising to 80% by 2030 and 100% by 2035. Miss those targets and manufacturers face fines of £15,000 per non-compliant vehicle. Which is not a rounding error when you're selling volume.

Renault operates three brands in the UK; Renault, Dacia, and Alpine; and like every other manufacturer trying to meet the 2024 threshold, it has discovered that you cannot mandate demand into existence.

EV market share in late 2024 sat somewhere between 16% and 18%, depending on which month you're looking at. The mandate required 22%. The maths does not work unless you discount heavily, bank credits from overperformance in previous periods, or trade compliance instruments with rivals who somehow managed to sell more electric cars than the target required.

Most manufacturers chose discounting. Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes, and nearly everyone else with a dealer network offered substantial reductions in the final quarter of 2024 to drag the numbers over the line. That is not a sustainable business model. That is expensive panic.

Sound familiar?

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Renault is not the first to say this out loud. Ford UK chair Lisa Brankin called for flexibility in September 2024. Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares went further in October, warning that the mandate could lead to plant closures. A month later, Vauxhall, owned by Stellantis, announced it would close its Luton van factory, citing regulatory pressure among other factors.

The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, which represents the industry, has been asking for wiggle room since the mandate came into force. The government has so far declined to provide it.

There is a pattern here, and it is not complicated. Manufacturers are being forced to sell cars that buyers are not yet ready to purchase in the volumes required, at prices that make no commercial sense, under the threat of fines that could destabilise already fragile balance sheets.

The mandate includes a credit trading system, which in theory allows manufacturers who exceed targets to sell compliance credits to those who fall short. In practice, it creates a secondary market where success is measured not by selling good cars but by navigating regulatory arbitrage.

The EU faced similar pressure in 2023 and delayed its own 2035 combustion engine ban after German manufacturers made it clear the timeline was politically determined rather than demand-led. The UK has not blinked yet.

The 2030 target of 80% is six years away. Current market share is under 20%. For that trajectory to hold, something extraordinary needs to happen; either consumer behaviour shifts overnight, or the government rewrites the rules, or manufacturers eat losses they cannot afford, or production moves elsewhere.

The fines are £15,000 per vehicle. For a manufacturer selling 100,000 cars in the UK and missing the target by ten percentage points, that is a £150 million problem. Which explains why Renault's CEO is not the last executive you will hear making this argument in 2025.

Sources: UK Government ZEV Mandate policy documentation, Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT), public statements from Ford UK, Stellantis, and Renault Group

Another independent goes under. This time it's a Californian family business that's been shifting metal since 2004.

A family-run used car dealership in Stockton, California has closed after 20 years, with liquidators appointed to wind down what remains. Two decades of getting punters into cars, gone.

The closure isn't an isolated tragedy. Everything that can squeeze an independent dealer is doing so at once.

Floor plan financing, the credit line dealers use to stock their forecourts, has tripled in cost since the Federal Reserve started hiking rates. Used to be you could carry inventory for 3-4%. Now it's north of 9%. Every car sitting unsold is haemorrhaging money.

Then there's the buyers. Auto loan rates have jumped from around 4% in 2021 to 7-9% now. That's hundreds more per month on a typical used car. Punters who could stretch to a $15,000 motor three years ago are priced out or choosing something cheaper. Sound familiar if you've bought used in the past three years? The profitable middle of the market has collapsed.

Wholesale acquisition costs remain absurd. Used vehicle prices peaked in 2022 but they're still 30-40% higher than pre-pandemic. You're paying top dollar at auction and hoping you can shift it before the next rate hike or economic wobble sends buyers running. Independent dealers operate on margins of 2-5% per vehicle. There's no cushion.

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Meanwhile the big groups and online platforms keep growing. Carvana imploded spectacularly, shedding 4,000 jobs. Vroom shut down entirely. CarLotz went bankrupt. But the survivors ... CarMax, the national chains, the franchise mega-dealers ... have the scale and capital reserves to weather this. They can afford to sit on inventory. They can negotiate better wholesale prices. They have finance arms that make money even when car sales don't.

Family operations don't have that luxury.

The national independent dealer count has dropped 5-8% since 2020. California has been particularly brutal. Multiple small and mid-sized independents across the state have closed or been absorbed in the past 18 months. Some sold out to consolidators. Others just folded.

For buyers, this means fewer local options and less room to negotiate. The personal relationship with a dealer who knows your family, who'll sort you out when something goes wrong, who doesn't run everything through a call centre ... that's disappearing.

For the family in Stockton, it means watching liquidators pick through two decades of work. Twenty years is a serious innings in this business. Most don't make it past five.

The forecourt will probably become something else. A chain, maybe. Or luxury flats nobody can afford.

Sources: Federal Reserve interest rate data, Cox Automotive market insights, California business filings

Controlled testing reveals the 2027 electric SUV delivers better results on all-season rubber than proper all-terrain tyres.

The 2027 Rivian R2 Performance recorded superior test results on standard all-season tyres compared to aggressive all-terrain rubber in controlled conditions. Not marginal differences. Better.

This is the compact electric SUV Rivian announced in March 2024, sitting below the R1S in the lineup and scheduled for production in 2026. The Performance variant represents the higher-spec trim, and the testing covered acceleration, braking distance, handling response, and off-road traction.

All-season tyres use shallower tread patterns and harder compounds optimized for on-road grip and efficiency. All-terrain rubber features deeper, more aggressive tread with larger voids designed for dirt, gravel, and mud. The conventional wisdom says you fit A/T tyres if you want proper off-road capability.

The R2 appears to have missed that memo.

The result likely stems from how electric powertrains behave differently than petrol engines when it comes to tyre performance. EVs benefit significantly from lower rolling resistance, which all-season tyres provide. The additional weight of the battery pack changes how tyres interact with the road surface, and Rivian's traction control systems appear to be calibrated around different characteristics than traditional off-road vehicles use.

Stop and consider what that means for a decade of established off-road wisdom.

Modern all-season technology has also improved considerably in recent years. Compound formulations now deliver grip levels that would have required specialist rubber a decade ago. But that doesn't fully explain why they'd outperform dedicated off-road tyres in mixed conditions.

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This isn't the first time EV weight distribution has produced counterintuitive tyre results. Tesla Model Y owners have reported better winter performance with all-season tyres than expected. The Ford F-150 Lightning shows different tyre performance characteristics than its petrol-powered equivalent. Consumer Reports' October 2023 crossover testing found highway tyres outperforming A/T options in mixed conditions on three different models.

Tire Rack's 2024 Q2 all-season comparative test showed similar patterns across electric crossovers. But those are usually edge cases or specific weather conditions.

This is broader.

For R2 buyers, the implications are straightforward. The standard all-season fitment may deliver better all-around performance while saving money and improving range. All-terrain tyres aren't cheap, and they increase rolling resistance, which cuts into battery efficiency. If the all-seasons are genuinely more capable in real-world conditions, fitting A/T rubber becomes an expensive downgrade.

Rivian's traction control systems deserve scrutiny here. The company has spent years developing software that manages torque delivery across individual wheels with the kind of precision combustion engines can't match. In many off-road situations, that precision counts for more than tread pattern. If the R2's systems are tuned to exploit the characteristics of all-season tyres ... more compliant sidewalls, different contact patch behavior, lower mass ... then aggressive tread blocks become irrelevant or counterproductive.

The R2 starts production in 2026, which gives Rivian time to refine the tyre recommendations based on real-world testing. But if these results hold, it represents a significant shift in how buyers should think about tyre selection for electric SUVs. The assumptions that worked for decades of 4x4 development don't necessarily transfer.

Production starts in roughly two years. The all-season tyres come as standard equipment.

Sources: Rivian official announcements (March 2024), Consumer Reports October 2023 crossover tyre testing, Tire Rack 2024 Q2 all-season comparative test

The UK platform's AI tool lets dealers order specific used cars via WhatsApp instead of trawling auction sites and trade networks.

Motorway has built an AI assistant that sources used car stock through WhatsApp messages. Dealers can text what they're after and the system searches the platform's inventory without logging into anything.

The tool addresses a genuine friction point. Most dealers spend hours each week checking BCA, Manheim, and various trade-to-trade networks hunting for specific vehicles that customers want or that fill gaps in forecourt stock. Now they can send a message asking for, say, a low-mileage diesel X3 in black, and the assistant pulls matches from Motorway's network of over 5,000 verified dealers.

It's practical automation, not revolutionary. WhatsApp has more than two billion users globally and is already embedded in how many UK dealers communicate with suppliers and customers. Using it to source stock just removes the step where someone fires up a laptop, logs into three different platforms, and applies the same search filters they applied yesterday.

The used car trade in the UK moved approximately 7.1 million units in 2023 according to SMMT data. A large portion of that volume flows through dealer-to-dealer networks where speed matters. If a retail customer walks in asking for something specific, the dealer who can locate it first usually gets the sale. Text-based sourcing means that can happen from a phone in a pocket rather than back at the office.

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Motorway is positioning this as conversational AI, which it is, but the underlying function is straightforward database search triggered by natural language instead of form fields. The advantage is accessibility. Dealers who are comfortable with WhatsApp don't need to learn another platform interface or remember another login.

Other platforms have been adding AI-powered tools recently. AutoTrader rolled out AI valuation features in 2023. Cazana introduced machine learning for real-time pricing data in 2022. BCA Marketplace integrated automated bidding. CarGurus enhanced its instant market value tools with AI last year. The pattern is consistent but the execution varies. Some of these tools require dealers to adopt new workflows. Motorway's approach slots into something they're already using.

The question is how well the assistant interprets requests. Natural language processing works brilliantly until it doesn't. If a dealer texts "clean diesel estate under ten grand" the system needs to understand what "clean" means in context... low mileage, good service history, or literally just washed. How it handles ambiguity will determine whether this becomes a time-saver or just another thing that needs supervising.

WhatsApp-based business tools have been gaining traction in sectors where speed and mobile access matter. The automotive wholesale market fits that description. Dealers operate on tight margins and faster stock turnover. Anything that shortens the gap between identifying a need and filling it has commercial value, assuming it actually works as described.

Motorway's network covers over 5,000 verified UK dealers. That's a decent pool to search, though not the entire market. The tool's usefulness depends on whether those dealers are listing the kind of stock other dealers want to buy. If the inventory skews toward high-volume mainstream cars, it works. If it's patchy or niche, dealers will still need to check the usual channels.

The assistant is live now. No word on whether Motorway plans to charge for access or if it's included as part of the platform's existing dealer services.

Sources: Motorway, SMMT (Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders)

Pre-tax profits nearly triple at the former Pendragon operation while most of the UK dealer sector continues to struggle with margin compression and falling demand.

Lithia UK's pre-tax profits hit £60 million in 2024, nearly three times the previous year's figure. That's not something you see often in a dealer sector that's been haemorrhaging margin for the past two years.

The American-owned group took over what was left of Pendragon in 2023 for around £250 million, inheriting a network that had spent years restructuring its way through one financial difficulty after another. Lithia Motors, one of North America's largest automotive retailers, clearly saw something worth salvaging. Turns out they were right.

Margin compression. Reduced profitability. Cautious consumers sitting on their hands while interest rates make financing a new car feel like a punishment. Vertu Motors has flagged challenging conditions. Inchcape has been restructuring. The broader market has shown modest recovery in 2024, but it's still well below pre-pandemic levels.

Lithia's turnaround suggests that well-capitalised American ownership and competent management can extract profit even when the market isn't cooperating. That's either a vindication of their operational model or an indictment of how poorly some of these dealer groups were being run before someone else took over. Probably both.

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Pendragon's sale price of £250 million looked like a bargain at the time, and it's looking even better now. The business had been limping along for years, shedding sites and trying to stabilise operations while the market shifted under its feet. Lithia walked in, applied capital and process, and within a year the numbers are moving in the right direction.

The UK new car market remains a difficult environment. High interest rates have made financing expensive. Consumer confidence is fragile. Supply chain pressures haven't entirely disappeared, even if the worst of the semiconductor shortages are behind us. Against that backdrop, tripling profits isn't just good performance, it's notable.

They've managed to turn around a struggling dealer network while most of their competitors are still trying to work out how to stop the bleeding.

The figure is £60 million in pre-tax profit. Pendragon's previous owners would have taken that in a heartbeat.

Sources: Lithia UK financial filings, SMMT market data