Motor News

Kia has announced a few changes for the 2022 Soul, including the company’s new logo.The base LX model is no longer available with a six-speed manual transmission.Pricing starts at $20,635 and ranges up to $28,965 for the Turbo model.Kia is dropping the cheapest version of the Soul from the lineup for 2022, as there’s no more manual transmission available. The base LX model previously came standard with a six-speed manual transmission and carried a starting price of $18,765, but for the new model year the 2022 Soul LX now comes only with a CVT automatic and starts at $20,635.

Other updates for the 2022 Soul include the company’s new logo that’s propagating across the lineup. It appears on the hood, the tailgate, the wheels, and on the steering wheel. There aren’t any other obvious visual changes, but there is more standard equipment on hand. The LX gets a larger 8.0-inch touchscreen, while the S, X-Line, and GT-Line now have a 10.3-inch touchscreen as standard with built-in navigation. These trim levels also now come standard with dual-zone automatic climate-control, push-button start, a wireless charging pad, and additional USB ports; these features were previously available only on the EX and Turbo trims.

Kia

All 2022 Soul models besides the Turbo still come with a 147-hp 2.0-liter inline-four, while the Turbo has a 201-hp turbocharged 1.6-liter inline-four and a seven-speed dual-clutch automatic transmission.
This content is imported from {embed-name}. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io More

Lexus has previewed the new LX, which will again be closely related to the Toyota Land Cruiser.The company has filed for a trademark in the U.S. for the name LX600.We expect the LX600 to have a twin-turbo 3.5-liter V-6 with upwards of 400 horsepower.Now that the new Toyota Land Cruiser is here, the focus turns to the Lexus version. A new Lexus LX is taking shape thanks to a thinly veiled preview—literally—during the online reveal video for the new 2022 NX. Unlike the new Land Cruiser, which won’t make its way stateside, the LX is expected to be sold in America, and Lexus has trademarked the LX600 name in the U.S.

Unlike the current LX570 model, which has a 5.7-liter V-8 engine, the new LX’s nomenclature won’t correspond with its engine displacement. We think the LX600 will have the same twin-turbo 3.5-liter V-6 as the Land Cruiser, which makes 409 horsepower and 479 pound-feet of torque in global versions of the SUV. A 10-speed automatic transmission and four-wheel drive will be standard. A hybrid version may arrive later on with the same iForce Max powertrain as the 2022 Toyota Tundra.As for the LX’s new look, we can see in the teaser that it has L-shaped lighting accents and the Lexus spindle grille—no surprises there. It will again be visually differentiated from the Land Cruiser with lots of extra chrome trim and ritzier trimmings inside.The price difference was small between the previous Toyota and Lexus versions of this luxury SUV, with the Toyota starting at $87,030 and the Lexus at $88,550. The LX outsold its slightly downmarket stablemate in the U.S., which explains why Toyota only saw fit to offer a single version of this model for its new generation. We expect to hear more about the new LX within the next few months, and it should go on sale in early 2022.
This content is imported from {embed-name}. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io More

Usually, if you sell a stock for $24 before it drops to $10, that’s a good thing (well, not for the buyer). But if you’re an executive at an electric-vehicle startup with perhaps some inside information and you do that, well, that’s potentially suspicious.That’s what happened at Lordstown Motors, the company preparing to build the Endurance electric pickup (pictured). It turns out, five executives sold off shares in early February, just as news of a mid-January prototype fire was breaking.Lordstown president Rich Schmidt sold 39 percent of his shares for $4.6 million, and the startup’s propulsion head, Chuan “John” Vo, sold almost all of his shares for $2.5 million.Members of the leadership team at Lordstown Motors appear to have sold large amounts of company stock just before reports of various troubles at the company became public. Five top Lordstown executives—including president Rich Schmidt, now former chief financial officer Julio Rodriguez, and propulsion head Chuan “John” Vo—sold some of their shares worth a total of more than $8 million in early February when the stock was worth around $24 a share. Today, it’s worth around $10.

Chuan “John” Vo (L) and Rich Schmidt of Lordstown Motors.
Lordstown Motors

The reason this is all news, other than the fact that Lordstown is dealing with the departure of its founder and CEO, among other issues, is that something else was happening in early February: news was getting out that one of the prototype for the company’s all-electric pickup truck, the Endurance, caught fire in early January. Lordstown began trading shares after a splashy NASDAQ debut in October 2020 as part of a reverse merger with DiamondPeak Holdings Corp., a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. Lordstown reaffirmed to the media last week that it will indeed start building the Endurance in September and deliver the first units to customers in early 2022.

On June 14, Lordstown issued a press release responding to a report issued by Hindenburg Research that called some of the automaker’s claims into question. While most of that release dealt with the company’s production issues, the board special committee that issued the release also dealt with the share sales and said they were sold for reasons that didn’t have to do with how well Lordstown was doing. It said, in part: “As described in various Form 4 filings in the months following the DiamondPeak transaction, certain Lordstown Motors directors and executives have sold or transferred shares in the Company. Each of those transactions were made for reasons unrelated to the performance of the company or viability of the Endurance, and each such director and executive retained substantial Lordstown Motors equity holdings in the form of shares and options following the sales and transfers described in the Company’s public filings.”That claim does not appear to be completely true. Both CNN and the Wall Street Journal report that Vo sold 99.3 percent of his vested shares for a cool $2.5 million on February 2. He held on to just 717 shares. Schmidt sold 39 percent of his vested equity for $4.6 million. The other three executives sold shares worth between $250,000 and $400,000. Lordstown did not respond to Car and Driver’s request for clarification on this point but there does not seem to have been any laws broken, and the Journal says most other companies—98 percent—have blackout days where company insiders are not allowed to sell shares just before quarterly disclosures. The Securities and Exchange Commission has issued two subpoenas to Lordstown about the SPAC merger and surrounding public statements. Lordstown said it is cooperating with the investigation.
This content is imported from {embed-name}. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io More

The EPA has announced that the 2022 Jeep Grand Wagoneer is rated at 15 mpg combined, less than the Cadillac Escalade and Lincoln Navigator. It’s powered by a 6.4-liter V-8 and comes standard with four-wheel drive. The Grand Wagoneer will be on sale this summer starting at $88,995.The Jeep Grand Wagoneer is returning this summer as a massive three-row SUV, and the EPA is estimating that it is good for 15 mpg combined. There’s also a cheaper and less luxurious Wagoneer, but its fuel economy estimates have not yet been announced. The Grand Wagoneer’s EPA estimated fuel economy makes the big Jeep less efficient than other American luxury SUVs such as the Cadillac Escalade and Lincoln Navigator.
All Grand Wagoneers use a naturally aspirated 6.4-liter V-8 engine that produces 471 horsepower and 455 pound-feet of torque, and four-wheel drive is standard. The V-8 has cylinder deactivation and is paired with an eight-speed automatic transmission. The EPA estimates that the Grand Wagoneer will get 13 mpg in the city and 18 mpg on the highway. The Wagoneer will likely be more efficient, as it’s powered by a 5.7-liter V-8 with a 48-volt belt-driven motor/generator system called eTorque. The Ram 1500 with eTorque is rated 2 mpg higher than the model without the hybrid system.

Cadillac Escalades with four-wheel drive and the standard 6.2-liter V-8 engine are rated at 16 mpg combined, 13 mpg in the city and 19 mpg on the highway. The Lincoln Navigator, which uses a twin-turbocharged V-6 engine, is rated at 17 mpg combined, 16 mpg city, and 20 mpg highway. German luxury SUVs such as the BMW X7 and Mercedes-Benz GLS-class are EPA-rated at 21 mpg combined with their respective turbocharged six-cylinder engines. Jeep says that both a hybrid model and hands-free driving will be available eventually. The 2022 Grand Wagoneer will arrive this summer starting at $88,995.
This content is imported from {embed-name}. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io More

WFLA News Channel 8 via YouTube

Snap, Inc., introduced a speed filter in 2013 as a way for users to document how fast they were driving when a particular video was taken.In the following years, numerous fatal crashes involved the speed filter in some way, leading to a gamification of driving by some young Snapchat users.In May, the Ninth Circuit Court ruled that parents of young men who died in a crash where a speed filter was used right before impact could sue Snap, Inc. This month, the feature was removed.In what feels like the origin story for a fair number of lawsuits, the company behind the popular Snapchat app finally removed the “speed filter” feature from its app this week, which would display the speed at which a person was moving when a Snap video was taken. NPR was the first to report the removal of the feature, which was introduced in 2013. A representative from Snap, Inc., told NPR this week that the speed filter “is barely used by Snapchatters . . . And in light of that, we are removing it altogether.” But there is another, legal reason the tech company may have decided that now was the right time to take away something that’s been around for eight years.
This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Multiple lawsuits have been filed against Snapchat for the Speed Filter feature over the years, and news reports about people, including many teens, who’ve died or been injured in crashes that in some way involved the filter are not hard to find. To cite just a few examples: a woman died in a Mini Cooper going 106 miles per hour in March 2018. Three young women died in a fire after a Camaro crashed after going over 70 mph in February 2016. A man driving a Volkswagen Golf killed himself and four others after going at least 115.6 mph in October 2016.

In all of these cases—and many, many more—Snapchat’s speed filter is thought to have played a role in the speed the drivers were going before crashing. Until the vehicles crashed, some people using the speed filter to record high speed levels seemed to treat it like a game to drive beyond their own abilities. In describing the Snapchat video of the Golf, a Tampa Bay Times story said, “A woman is heard giggling during the 10-second clip, apparently filmed from the passenger seat.”Snapchat’s response to incidents like these in the past has been to say the company doesn’t approve of irresponsible driving and making the app display a “don’t snap and drive” warning when using the speed filter. This isn’t helpful when a passenger is the one filming, and, more recently, Snapchat reduced the maximum speed the app would display to 35 mph.

CBS via YouTube

Things changed in May, when a three-judge panel of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the parents of three young men who died in a crash in Wisconsin while using speed filter to record speeds of up to 123 mph have a right to sue Snapchat. NPR called this a “surprise decision” as it did not allow Snapchat to hide behind Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which tech companies often rely on to not be held accountable for what users post on their sites. The Ninth Circuit judges said since the speed filter was a feature of the app and not user content, Section 230 did not protect Snapchat. The problem, the Ninth Circuit said, is the inherent design of the app, which rewards users with “trophies, streaks, and social recognitions” based on the snaps they send, the court wrote. The problem is that the app doesn’t precisely tell users how to earn these achievements. “Many of Snapchat’s users suspect, if not actually ‘believe,’ that Snapchat will reward them for “recording a 100-mph or faster [s]nap” using the Speed Filter. According to plaintiffs, ‘[t]his is a game for Snap and many of its users’ with the goal being to reach 100 mph, take a photo or video with the Speed Filter, ‘and then share the 100-mph-Snap on Snapchat.'”The court said last month that, at the very least, Snapchat should have known that a reward system like this incentivized young drivers to drive at speeds that were dangerous for them, but it did not take action to remove this incentive from the app. After leaving the feature in place for eight years, it took just a month for Snap to remove the feature once the court’s decision was made.
This content is imported from {embed-name}. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io More

Bureau of Customs PH / Facebook

Yes, that is a McLaren 620R being crushed by a backhoe.This display of destruction is the latest in an oddly long lineage of spectacular public crushing of illegally imported cars. In this case, the Bureau of Customs in the Philippines crushed a total of $1.2 million in cars over two separate incidents. One featured 14 Mitsubishi Jeeps, while the other starred seven cars headlined by the McLaren.

This particular crushing is part of a lasting campaign to crack down on illegal car importation, an issue apparently very close to the heart of Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte. He ordered a similar crushing in 2018, an event that involved a tractor driving over a startling $8 million of cars in a monster-truck-like exhibition of punishment. This particular crushing is less destructive, but there is something particularly cruel about smashing the roof of each car individually for the sole purpose of destroying something.

Bureau of Customs PH / Facebook

That is the point, of course. All the smashing is meant to discourage importation by showing that the end result for anyone who tries is a car crushed in front of them for the whole world to see.
This content is imported from Facebook. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

The Philippines Bureau of Customs notes that the crushing also involved the destruction of a Lotus, a Bentley, a 911, an SLK, a Genesis coupe, and, somehow, a Solara convertible. But the track-focused 620R is by far the most rare thing crushed. Just 350 were produced, and the loss of this one means that number is down even further.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io More

If you thought the seven-year search for new U.S. Postal Service mail trucks was over, think again. There were three companies bidding for the massive contract, and one of them, Workhorse, now says a court should look into whether the deal was conducted fairly and whether the government didn’t seriously consider its all-electric options including the Workhorse prototype pictured above.The public details remain a bit vague, given the secrecy of the contract bids and other non-disclosure agreements.In February, the U.S. Postal Service awarded a deal for up to 165,000 new mail trucks worth up to $6 billion to defense contractor Oshkosh. The search for new delivery vehicles took the USPS around seven years, and once the Internet learned what the quirky new van would look like, much merriment ensued. Not everyone was happy, though. Workhorse, formerly known as Amp Electric Vehicles, was one of two other contractors bidding for the USPS contract (the other was Karsan). This week, Workhorse sued the postal service over the terms of the deal, especially whether or not the mail carrier ever seriously considered Workhorse’s electric vehicles as suitable replacements for the Grumman “Long Life Vehicles” that are commonly seen delivering mail today.

Workhorse’s lawsuit—the version that the public can see, anyway—is vague, as the company said the revealing all of the contract information would release details about its bid for the contract and the company’s EVs that would be helpful to competitors. Alongside the court filing, Workhorse issued a media statement that said Workhorse representatives met with the USPS in early March to “discuss the award and further specifics of the USPS selection process,” but that the details of the meeting “cannot be disclosed at this time.”Nonetheless, we can get a feel for what the issue is based on anonymous sources who have spoken to the Washington Post, and it seems to all come down to the level of electrification the USPS is actually interested in. The February announcement included language about EVs but also made clear that gas-powered mail trucks would still be part of the USPS. Workhorse insiders told the Post that they believe the USPS didn’t seriously consider Workhorse’s bid, in part because it leaned so heavily on electric vehicles. Embattled USPS postmaster general Louis DeJoy said after the Oshkosh announcement that only around 10 percent of the trucks the postal service will buy will be electrified. Workhorse is asking the court for a preliminary injunction to halt the procurement process for Oshkosh’s mail trucks until the decision is reviewed. It also reportedly claims that the USPS did not fully evaluate an all-electric prototype from Oshkosh.

“The allegations are that basically that [the Postal Service] never planned to seriously consider Workhorse and they put their thumb on the scale to select against Workhorse,” a source told the Post. The USPS and Oshkosh are not commenting on the lawsuit, and Workhorse said it is “unable to provide any further information with respect to this matter currently but will provide updates when appropriate and as permitted under its non-disclosure agreement as part of the USPS [Next-Generation Delivery Vehicle] program.”Oskhosh has said in other instances that the ability to swap out the gas-powered powertrain in its new trucks for all-electric versions was a selling point to the USPS, even though it told the SEC last November that is basically an electric-powertrain amateur: “While we are continuing to explore options to offer more propulsion choices in our products, such as electric-powered vehicles or mobile equipment, with lower emissions, this may require us to spend additional funds on product research and development and implementation costs and subject us to the risk that our competitors may respond to these pressures in a manner that gives them a competitive advantage,” the company wrote at the time.Whatever trucks the USPS purchases to replace its current fleet, they will be a massive upgrade. The LLVs currently in use were all built between 1987 and 1994 and were supposed to be retired after, at most, 24 years. All of the trucks are older than that at this point, but mail carriers might need to drive them for a few more miles before new trucks arrive.
This content is imported from {embed-name}. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io More

Toyota has dropped the first full photo of the upcoming 2022 Tundra full-size pickup. This is an off-road-ready TRD Pro model with black 18-inch wheels wrapped in Falken Wildpeak all-terrain tires. The new Tundra will be fully unveiled later this year and will go on sale shortly after. After photos of the 2022 Toyota Tundra leaked on the internet (and were published here at Car and Driver, among other places), Toyota has released a clear photo of the upcoming full-size pickup in TRD Pro form. The new Tundra will debut in the coming months and should arrive in the U.S. by the end of the year.
This content is imported from Twitter. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

We’re getting a clearer look at the truck’s imposing new front end, which features a black grille with three integrated LED light bars. “Toyota” script sits up top with a stamped “Tundra” badge in the lower front bumper, which has the same camo-like pattern as the fender flares. A new set of TRD Pro-specific wheels are mounted with 285/65 Falken Wildpeak all-terrain tires. This example also has a red interior.

The new Tundra is expected to use a new twin-turbocharged V-6 engine, and Toyota released an image of the new truck’s engine cover this week. The photo showed an “iForce MAX” badge with blue lettering, suggesting a new hybrid powertrain, which surely could be an option. Another major change should be seen in the rear suspension setup, which is expected to replace the old truck’s leaf springs with coil springs, air springs, or possibly an independent rear suspension. Look for the official details and specs on the 2022 Toyota Tundra in the coming months. This TRD Pro model should cost just over $50,000, and the base truck’s starting price is expected to be around $36,000.
This content is imported from {embed-name}. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io More