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The state has issued many harmless, fun car plates like the ‘HomeAK’ one shown here, but now it’ll make the vetting process stricter. More

Nissan is recalling the 2013–2015 Pathfinder SUV over a brake-light switch issue.
The problem, in which the brake lights can become stuck in the “on” position, affects more than a quarter-million of the SUVs.
Nissan will issue recall notices to owners beginning on March 1.
Nissan will recall 267,276 Pathfinder SUVs beginning March 1 for a problem with the brake light switch relay that can cause the lights to become stuck in the “on” position, according to documents filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).
The issue affects only 2013 through 2015 model years of the Pathfinder, and no other Nissan or Infiniti vehicles, the report says. It’s most likely to occur under “frequent stop-and-go driving with repeated brake pedal input” and can cause “chattering” in the light’s relay that can eventually cause it to become stuck.
Although always-on brake lights can be a safety problem, more serious consequences could include interference with the brake-shift interlock and the potential for “limited engine power (brake override), the ability to shift the vehicle out of park without depressing the brake pedal, and/or the engine starting without depressing the brake pedal,” Nissan said.
Dealers will either fix the relay by reinstalling it in a better position or replace it entirely. The 2013 and 2014 models of the Pathfinder were previously recalled for the same problem in 2016. Owners can go to the NHTSA recall site to see if their vehicle is involved in the current recall.

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Sometimes, when you’re leaving a job, you get an exit interview. What went right? What went wrong? Why did you ever think it was okay to microwave your leftover fish tacos in the office kitchenette? Well, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), in wrapping up its four-year tenure under the prior presidential regime, decided to give itself an exit interview of sorts, releasing a document titled “NHTSA Chief Accomplishments, 2017-21.” With 22 bullet points and about 1200 words, it’s a bit much to go through line by line, but let’s take a look at the highlights.

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At the top of the list is “Improved Safety and Affordability.” So did NHTSA introduce tougher safety standards or offer some kind of incentives to make cars more affordable? That’s what it sounds like, but no. What they’re claiming here is that the EPA’s reduction in Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards would result in lower car prices, thus prompting more people to replace their old (and probably less safe) cars with new ones.
This presumes that any R&D and production savings realized by a manufacturer will be passed on to the consumer, and that this savings will be pronounced enough to prompt (according to NHTSA) “three million additional car sales over the next decade.” It also assumes that car companies, which have multi-year lead times, will entirely rejigger their long-term product planning from one presidential administration to the next. And that, given a choice, car buyers will choose less efficient vehicles with some kind of up-front savings, with the understanding that they’ll pay more to fuel said vehicle over its useful life. Finally, the premise of a net public health benefit assumes that increased vehicle emissions make no difference to air quality. All righty! The bottom line is that the push toward electrification will eventually render CAFE standards moot, and like we said: that came from the EPA, not NHTSA.
Then there’s a bunch of stuff about encouraging autonomous-car development (okay) and child safety in cars (like expanding the ad campaign about pediatric hyperthermia). Then: scary batteries! “In light of recent fires involving electric vehicles that destroyed vehicles and even homes, we launched the Battery Safety Initiative to research battery technologies and develop safety standards to reduce future risks.” Here, for anyone interested, we will simply point out that when an electric car catches fire, it’s news, and when 150 internal-combustion vehicles cars catch fire, it’s an average Tuesday. That’s according to a U.S. Fire Administration report on vehicle fires from 2014 to 2016, a period that included an estimated 171,500 highway vehicle fires. The report doesn’t distinguish between EV fires and internal combustion, but it does say that, “flammable liquids and gases in general were, by far, the most deadly (67 percent of deaths)” item ignited. The Fire Administration’s report also includes some specific examples of all the ways that cars can catch fire, including this very New York scenario:
May 2017: A vehicle was parked on a city block in New York, New York, and had not been driven for about a week. When the owner of the vehicle went to drive it, he noticed his engine was overheating and then abruptly caught fire. He exited the vehicle, opened the hood, and discovered two deceased baby rats on the ledge of the engine. Firefighters soon arrived at the scene and extinguished the fire. Further investigation by firefighters found additional rats in the rims of the vehicle’s tire.
Point being: what about the fire rats, NHTSA?
Moving on, there’s a section pertaining to recalls. A few years ago, the Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Transportation conducted an audit of NHTSA’s recall procedures, prompted by the Takata airbag fiasco. The essential conclusion: “NHTSA’s process for monitoring for light-passenger-vehicle recalls lacks documentation and management controls, and does not ensure that remedies are reported completely and in a timely manner.” Basically, NHTSA needed to put some teeth into its recall procedures. And they say that’s what happened, with more than 1000 recalls in 2018 and more than 53 million vehicles recalled in 2019. “We also took necessary and appropriate steps to protect the integrity of the recall program, issuing more than $250 million in civil penalties, including the largest set of penalties in agency history, for failure to comply with regulatory requirements or for a lack of candor,” says NHTSA’s report.
So the Trump administration cracked down on corporate malfeasance for the benefit of consumers? Well, maybe! The key verb here, regarding penalties, is “issuing.” Which is not the same as “collecting.” By the time a case reaches the point where a fine is actually paid, it’s recorded as a settlement, and a former NHTSA staffer who dealt with railway cases told us, “Settlements were usually pennies on the dollar compared to the original penalties.” And over the past four years, settlements have totaled less than $15 million, almost all of which is accounted for by a single $13 million payment from Mercedes-Benz for recall-related shenanigans. So, regarding that $250 million, time will tell.
Further down, there’s a whole section about COVID-19, which may prompt you to ask, “What’s COVID got to do with driving?” Well, remember when people took to the empty roads to drive like absolute maniacs? Apparently, NHTSA took notice: “As the data began to indicate troubling trends in highway safety, we conducted research and prepared reports illustrating the rise of unsafe driving practices during the national health crisis, and began coordinating with our stakeholders to identify countermeasures.” By “stakeholders” we assume they mean “cops,” and by “countermeasures” we assume they mean “more cops.” Either way, NHTSA is on to you, Cannonball idiots.

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NHTSA also apparently leveraged its access to blood tests to try to expand data on COVID spread: “We used our own research tools to help address the national health crisis, repurposing an existing blood study testing for drugs and alcohol among fatal or near-fatal crash victims, to assist NIH in assessing scope and nature of COVID infection among the public.” Given the Trump administration attitude toward COVID testing (especially at the start), it’s interesting that NHTSA creatively used its resources to help generate some much-needed data. In the context of the 2020 federal government, that qualifies as low-key rebellion.
So that’s about it. NHTSA did some good things and some things that might be good but we don’t yet know. And it did some sort of pointless things, and took credit for at least one thing that was the domain of an entirely different agency. Now we’ll have four years to see how NHTSA functions under the Biden administration, and to ponder the real question we should be asking about the agency: Shouldn’t we be calling it “the NHTSA”?
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BMW and Audi are both shuttering their subscription services at the end of the month, joining other automakers that have ended their plans.
Yet Care by Volvo and Porsche’s Drive subscription services both continue to flourish.
The secret to success might be keeping drivers in the same vehicle for the duration of the subscription, rather than letting them change vehicles frequently.
The idea of swapping out a sedan for an SUV or a coupe for a convertible on a whim seems great. With a subscription service, you pay one flat fee each month, you’ve got access to many or all of an automaker’s lineup, and insurance and maintenance costs are included. You can also cancel your subscription much more easily than you can get out of a traditional lease. However, in practice, automakers have found that the frequent swap gets old for most customers. The companies that have successful car-subscription programs have found that customers prefer to pick one model and stay with it—and that’s what Care by Volvo and Porsche Drive are doing.

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BMW and Audi have both announced they will be shuttering their subscription services by the end of January. Ford, Cadillac, and Mercedes-Benz subscription offerings have also been closed down. All of these former services were united by one feature: the ability to swap vehicles on a regular basis at a pricey rate.
Costs ranged from $1000 per month for Audi’s lowest tier of its car-swapping service to the $3600 a month subscribers had to shell out to drive multiple AMGs in the Mercedes service. Allowing subscribers to switch out vehicles hasn’t been cheap for the automakers, either, as Gartner VP and analyst Mike Ramsey told Car and Driver: “They have to build out a ton of inventory ahead of time to allow for people to swap in and out of vehicles. In order for it to make sense, you have to charge a fortune for it.”
Porsche’s subscription service still allows for vehicle swapping and starts at $2100 a month, but its Porsche Drive single-vehicle subscription tier, started last August, accounts for a large percentage of its subscriber business. A Porsche spokesperson attributes the business model’s success to its flexibility, which includes “single-vehicle subscription, multi-vehicle subscription, and rental using the same fleet of vehicles, which offers a range of short-term access to our sports cars.” The program has expanded beyond its initial pilot city of Atlanta to Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Diego.
Care by Volvo got off to a rocky start in the summer of 2018, overwhelmed after essentially receiving a year’s worth of orders in three months. Toss in some regulatory issues with the State of New York, and customers were left waiting and wondering when their vehicle would arrive. The automaker says it eventually caught up with demand before the fall and adjusted how the subscription service works to appease both regulators and retailers. Since then, it’s been doing quite well.
Care by Volvo head Peter Wexler told Car and Driver that the service is currently experiencing double-digit growth month over month coming out of pandemic lockdowns, perhaps because the program is structured like a smartphone purchase: People buy a phone on an installment plan and at some point swap it out for a new phone. “It’s not like you switch [phone] models back and forth,” Wexler said. “A newer model comes out and you upgrade on your terms.”

Audi

Ease of use is also a selling point. Signing up has been optimized both online and at dealerships to determine eligibility within minutes. Plus, the single-vehicle option offers the all-inclusive cost without the high prices of a feature that might not be what customers want in the long run.
“At the start, customers enjoy changing the car,” Mercedes’s Adam Chamberlain told Automotive News last July, as the automaker shut down its own car-subscription service. “After a certain period of time, that sort of gets old and they want to leave their car with their stuff in it.”
But don’t count out some that have retreated from subscription programs. Cadillac is likely to restart its Book by Cadillac subscription plans at some point, although its signup page does point to an early 2020 reboot that hasn’t occurred. And a BMW spokesperson told Car and Driver that Access by BMW, launched in 2018 in Nashville, was “always intended to be a pilot program” but said the company is working on “the next iteration,” details of which aren’t yet available. How it’ll differ from the automaker’s last service is unknown, but don’t surprised if at some point you can subscribe to a 3-series for a few years without the ability to swap it out for an X3.
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Our trip through the week’s stories, including major updates to the Model S and X and the continued forward march of the EV agenda. More

The Taycan 4S comes closest of all electric vehicles we’ve tested to its EPA-estimated range figure, just 6 percent away from the 2020 model’s 203-mile rating. More

Only two versions of the 2021 Taycan family have had their EPA range numbers released—the 4S with two different battery packs—but Porsche’s high-performance EV gets substantially improved ratings this time around.
Last year, the 4S was rated at 203 miles, while the 2021 scores 227, a 24-mile increase.
These improved range figures are not a result of any significant hardware or software changes, but rather adjusting to reflect the fact that customers have been buying Taycans with the more efficient wheel-and-tire combinations.
Relative to its EV peers, the Porsche Taycan launched for 2020 with conservative EPA range figures. As proof, we just put a 2020 Taycan 4S through our 75-mph highway range test, and it came closer than any other EV we’ve tested to achieving its EPA combined range figure. For 2021, Porsche is dialing back on some of that conservatism and bumping up the range figures. So far, EPA figures are out for only two variants of the Taycan family, but for the one comparable model—the 4S with the larger battery pack—its range figure increased from 203 miles to 227.

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That’s for the 2021 Taycan 4S with Performance Battery Plus, the higher-capacity, 83.7-kWh battery pack. With the standard 71.0-kWh Performance battery, the Taycan 4S will officially go 199 miles (there was no equivalent 2020 4S to compare to). The other 2021 Taycan variants that we’re still waiting on official numbers for are the base Taycan (which will be available with either battery), the Taycan Turbo, and the Taycan Turbo S (both the Turbo and the Turbo S come only with the larger pack). The biggest difference between the entry-level Taycan and the 4S, Turbo, and Turbo S models is that the base model is rear-wheel drive powered by a single motor instead of the two-motor, all-wheel-drive setup found on the other models.
What changed to achieve these gains? The short answer: nothing. Porsche has simply adjusted the results to account for the fact that customers are gravitating toward the more efficient wheel and tire combinations.

2020 Taycan 4S Went 190 Miles in C/D Range Test

Although ratings on the Turbo and Turbo S models aren’t out yet, those, too, will increase for 2021 for the same reason. Documents that Porsche has submitted to the EPA suggest those figures could be as high as 221 miles for the Turbo and 211 for the Turbo S, both gains of roughly 10 percent. However, as it did in 2020, Porsche continues to voluntarily reduce the Taycan’s range figures for 2021. For example, for 2021 the 4S variants earned 235- and 212-mile ratings in the EPA tests, respectively, but Porsche chose to label them at the aforementioned 227 and 199 miles. (Automakers can always set fuel-economy or range figures as far below the test results as they’d like.)
As always, take the EPA-range numbers for EVs with a grain of salt when trying to predict out how far a fully charged EV will actually go, but we’re fairly confident that the Taycan’s new figures are more in line with those of its EV peers and also that a 2021 model won’t go any farther in our 75-mph highway range test.

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Ford Performance via Instagram

The 2021 Ford F-150 Raptor will be revealed on Wednesday, February 3, at 11 a.m. ET live on Ford’s YouTube channel.
We spotted a couple of 2021 Raptors testing and saw a coil-spring rear suspension setup and heard one with a V-8 engine.
The standard truck should be powered by a twin-turbo 3.5-liter V-6 with an optional supercharged V-8 saved for the higher-performance Raptor R.
The wait for Ford’s answer to the 702-hp Hellcat-powered 2021 Ram 1500 TRX will be over soon. The 2021 F-150 Raptor baja-crushing off-road pickup will be unveiled on Wednesday, February 3 at 11:00 a.m. You’ll be able to see if the new Raptor will have a supercharged V-8 or not live on Ford’s YouTube channel.
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We’ve seen a few 2021 F-150 Raptors testing around Michigan and spotted a coil-spring rear suspension setup—the two previous-generation Raptors had leaf-spring setups. We’ve also spotted a higher-performance version, likely to be called the Raptor R, which had a V-8 rumble that we caught on video. Rumor has it that the standard Raptor will still have the twin-turbo 3.5-liter V-6 under the hood. We’re not sure if the Raptor R, which could have a 700-plus-hp supercharged V-8, will be unveiled next week, but we’ll have to wait and see.

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The 2021 Raptor should stick to the formula: blackout “Ford” script grille, which we see in the teaser image below, plus wide fenders, 35-inch BFGoodrich K02 all-terrain tires, optional beadlock-capable wheels, and Fox racing shocks. It could also have additional accessories available from Ford such as a spare tire carrier and rock rails, and we hope Ford adds some fun Easter eggs to fight back at the TRX’s savage Easter eggs.

Ford

We’ll know all the details next week, and they should make the Ram vs. Ford battle for off-road-pickup dominance all the more interesting.
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