Motor News

Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) has issued a recall for 29,884 of its 2014–2019 Jeep Grand Cherokee SUVs with the 3.0-liter EcoDiesel engine.
The problem is with the exhaust-gas recirculation (EGR) cooler, which could crack and result in a fire.
Owners of the affected Grand Cherokees will be notified beginning on December 31, 2020.
FCA has issued a recall for 28,884 Jeep Grand Cherokee SUVs from model years 2014 to 2019 equipped with the 3.0-liter EcoDiesel engine. The recall is due to the potential for the exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) cooler to crack because of “thermal fatigue,” which could lead to vaporized coolant entering the intake manifold and potentially resulting in a fire, according to a filing with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).
FCA said that it is unaware of any injuries or accidents as a result and said it will fix this issue by replacing that part with one not susceptible to cracking. The automaker will begin notifying the owners of the affected vehicles beginning on December 31.
Jeep owners can check the NHTSA website or NHTSA’s new recall app to see if their vehicle is involved in the recall.
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Living up to its name, this aftermarket hitch is truly hidden when not in use. We tested it on a BMW X7 but it’s available for a variety of vehicles. More

Shopping for a good deal on some gear, or buying a gift for someone into cars? Start here. More

Toyota says the 2021 Mirai will have a 400-mile range thanks to a more efficient fuel-cell stack.
This second-generation Mirai is a rear-wheel-drive sedan with a near 50/50 weight distribution but isn’t powerful enough to be classified as a sports sedan.
Toyota is lowering the price 20 percent compared to the current Mirai and hopes to increase sales of the FCEV tenfold globally.
Toyota’s Mirai hydrogen fuel-cell electric vehicle (FCEV), like all vehicles powered by the most abundant chemical substance in the universe, is a bit of a curveball in what we’ve come to expect from the future of driving. While gas-powered vehicles dominate the here and now, EVs are expected to grow market share and eventually become the dominant means of transporting ourselves around town. FCEVs do offer the best of both of those worlds, plus quick refueling and a much smaller carbon footprint, but the refueling infrastructure hasn’t materialized.

Toyota Reveals More 2021 Mirai Details

Toyota’s 2021 Mirai Could Run on Cow Manure

The U.S. and the Global Hydrogen Fuel-Cell Game

But Toyota and other automakers including Hyundai aren’t about to give up, so here we have the stylish 2021 Toyota Mirai, a vehicle with improved range, a bit more horsepower, near 50/50 weight distribution, and now rear-wheel drive. Toyota is hoping that all these updates will lead to a tenfold increase in global sales of the vehicle and is also promising it will be 20 percent cheaper than the 2020 model, which starts at $59,545, although Toyota hasn’t announced specific numbers yet.
The 2021 Mirai is built on Toyota’s GA-L platform. It’s 2.6 inches lower and 2.8 inches wider than the current Mirai, giving it a sleeker and sportier stance. A more compact fuel-cell stack resides under the long hood. Fuel-cell cylinders are situated under the cabin and below the trunk. A bigger change is the switch from front- to rear-wheel drive, although that decision was based more on available room for all the vehicle’s powertrain components than on making it more exciting to drive.
The new smaller fuel-cell stack where hydrogen is turned into power is more efficient, producing 128 kW compared to the current Mirai’s 114 kW. The single motor in the back produces 180 horsepower and 221 lb-ft of torque. So, although it looks quick, Toyota claims its zero-to-62-mph time is about 9.2 seconds.
Still, Toyota says the vehicle’s near 50/50 weight distribution and low center of gravity should give it a sporty feel while driving. What’s important is that the time behind the wheel has been increased to about 404 miles, according to chief engineer Yoshikazu Tanaka, compared to the 2020 model’s EPA-estimated 312 miles. That’s important for a vehicle using a refueling infrastructure that’s still in its infancy.
Hydrogen refueling stations are out there but are mostly concentrated in California and parts of New England, limiting the areas where the Mirai and other fuel-cell vehicles can be operated. The 2020 model is only sold in California and Hawaii. Still, the 2021 Mirai looks much better than its predecessor, and its increased range does make it more compelling for potential buyers. But that infrastructure will have to catch up if Toyota wants to see a massive sales increase among U.S. buyers.
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The idea of self-driving cars being used for crime has been suggested, but a car-hacking expert told us success for autonomous drug mules or other criminal endeavors is not that likely.
The systems will surely be exploited at some point, experts told Car and Driver, but likely not for high-level crimes due to the expense, time, and knowledge it would take to pull it off.
However, it’s those working at ride-hailing companies and service providers for automakers will be the ones with the access needed for such schemes.
While we’re still years and years away from truly autonomous veicles, it’s important for automakers, ride-share companies, and security researchers to figure out how these robot vehicles might be hacked or used in ways not intended by the manufacturers. After the OnStar hack of a few years ago where someone could take over a vehicle from the comfort of their own home, companies involved in transportation realized that if there’s a security issue with a vehicle or system connected to a vehicle, someone will exploit it.
Among the more far-fetched claims was one by the late drug kingpin Pablo Escobar’s brother to a U.K. publication last year. He told Metro UK that drug smugglers routinely use Tesla Autopilot to deliver illegal drugs with no people behind the wheel. “I heard a lot of people use it especially for countries within South America and that many people can hack nowadays the systems also to make it the way they want it,” he said, providing no evidence whatsoever.

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Rewritten Autopilot Is Coming in a Few Months

The theory behind using a self-driving vehicle as a crime surrogate seems to be that people are fallible, untrustworthy, and not always working in the best interest of their criminal overlords. If you remove a person from a criminal enterprise, you lower your risk of being caught. But that doesn’t mean a robot on wheels is going to help bolster crime syndicates. If anything, they could be worse than people with loose lips.
“These anonymous vehicles, they’re gonna know where they’re coming from and where they’re going,” Robert Leale, president of CanBusHack and co-founder of the Car Hacking Village, told Car and Driver. The Village is part of the annual Def Con hacking conference. Leale noted that these vehicles leave a digital bread crumb everywhere they go. While a criminal might think twice about talking to the police if they’re caught, an autonomous car “doesn’t care if it rats you out,” said Leale.
It’s not just the fact that autonomous vehicles will hold a treasure trove of data about its movements that could lead right to any criminal. Part of what will help them succeed is a connection to the infrastructure they’ll be driving through. Sensors on traffic lights, signs, and between other vehicles, as well as cellular signals that ping off local towers, all are ways to pinpoint a vehicle’s exact location. You know how in crime shows the baddies always turn off their phones so the cops won’t trace their movements? This is essentially the same thing but with wheels.
These scenarios involve personally owned vehicles. They don’t even get into the data gold mine associated with using a ride-sharing service. Those will likely have cameras both inside and out of the cars keeping an eye on passengers and sharing all that data directly with a company’s servers. They will also likely be monitored by humans if the car detects something is a bit weird. So if the computers don’t rat out the criminals, humans sitting potentially hundreds of miles away will.
“It’s not an ideal situation if you want to do illegal activities,” Leale told Car and Driver. “There’s a huge cost and expense,” he added. The amount of work needed to circumvent all of these systems far outweighs the benefits. That’s not to say it won’t happen. Targeted attacks against the vehicles of individuals are still a possibility and tweaking the software of an autonomous vehicle to do things like drive through the desert or other environment where tracking is difficult is a possibility. But it’ll require a lot of work and like any exploit to a system, once discovered it will be fixed by the security researchers working for automakers, suppliers, and ride-sharing companies. So these types of exploits will be used sparingly.
A larger issue is employees with access to these systems using them for either their own gain or to track and stalk individuals. There are multiple instances of people using their positions in law enforcement and at tech companies for that purpose.
Self-driving robotaxis are still in their infancy stage and relegated to predetermined areas, while personal autonomous cars won’t be on the market for a very long time and will likely be far too expensive at the outset to risk using for crime. In other words, sure, you could use a self-driving car for crime, but it’s not going to be better and in most cases worse than doing crimes the old-fashioned way, with people.
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With no new federal aid on the horizon and the pandemic ongoing, experts think many more vehicles could be repo’d. If that’s you, start talking to your lender now. More

A plate company called Reviver has been working on the idea of digital license plates since 2009, and it’s taken time to get customers and states to approve the change.
Digital plates are more expensive than metal ones, sure, but they can do more, too, like display Amber Alerts or an “I’m Stolen” message.
Up next, if things continue to go well, we may see cars designed with built-in license plates.
Today, only two states allow digital license plates: California and Arizona. That’s slow progress for Reviver, which formed in 2009 to change how the old, metal-based automotive technology works. But things are about to change, and 2021 is when the company will finally step down hard on the “go ahead, try it out” accelerator.
That’s according to Neville Boston, Reviver founder and chief strategy officer, who told Car and Driver that his digital Rplates will be available in Michigan by the beginning of the second quarter of 2021. Boston and his team met with Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson at an auto show a few years ago to discuss approving these non-traditional plates, and it wasn’t difficult since, in Boston’s words, Benson is a technologist. The legislation is taken care of, and now it’s just a matter of integrating Rplates with the Secretary of State’s systems and databases.

Michigan Considers Killing License-Plate Stickers

Ohio No Longer Requires Front License Plate

California License Plates Go Digital

Integration is required because the Rplates do more than just take the letters and numbers of your license plate and turn them into pixels on a digital ink screen, similar to a black-and-white Kindle. By making the license plate a screen, Rplate lets people display their own (approved) messages. The plate can also warn people that the car it’s on has been stolen, or maybe to show an Amber or Silver Alert, if the state wants that functionality, Boston said. Rplate users can also pay their registration fees through Reviver, making annual renewals a paperless affair.
“You own the plate, but the message and plate number are owned by the state,” Boston said. “Think about it as a digital display until it’s actually activated and provisioned, and then it becomes a compliance tool.”
Those two aspects to the Rplate mean it has two costs, the price of the screen itself and then the subscription connection. The basic Rplate with a five-year battery is $499 and then either $55 a year or $4.99 a month. It is also available for $17.95 a month for 36 months. Everything’s a bit pricier with the wired Rplate Pro, which is the more powerful option that works best for fleets because it can offer telematics options through its built-in GPS system. The Pro costs $599 and $75 a year, or $599 and $6.99 a month to buy outright, or you can pay for it in installments of $24.95 a month for 36 months. Plus installation, of course.
Currently, a little over 4000 Rplates are running on the roads in California and Arizona, and Boston said he hopes to roughly double that number by the end of 2020. Looking ahead, between eight and 10 other states could approve the digital technology next year—Michigan first, then likely Georgia and Texas and others Boston declined to name—which is why the company claims there could be 100,000 or so in use by the end of 2021. Expansion will also be driven by dealership groups Reviver is working with to preload the battery-operated Rplate on some vehicles on their lots, as well as colleges and universities that will partner up to sell digital versions of the popular school plates.
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All of this growth will move Reviver along to the next big phase of its plans: cars with built-in digital plates. That’ll take a while, but you know it’s coming.
“We’ve actually had conversations with every one of the major OEMs around that,” Boston said. The automakers want to see more people using the plates and more states approving them before making any sort of commitment, but once the number of users grows, it “will allow us to have a more substantive conversation with the manufacturers,” he said.
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Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) is suing Volkswagen Group to stop it from selling its high-end SUVs from VW, Audi, and Porsche in the U.S. market because they use an off-road mode similar to Land Rover’s.
JLR says the off-road mode, first seen on a VW product in the Bentley Bentayga, infringes on the Land Rover Terrain Response system patent.
The most recent set of lawsuits was filed on November 19 and targets the Audi A6 Allroad, Q5, Q7, and Q8; the Lamborghini Urus; and the Porsche Cayenne and Volkswagen Tiguan, as Bloomberg News first reported.
Jaguar Land Rover has filed a set of lawsuits demanding that its rival, the Volkswagen Group, be forbidden to sell new VW, Audi, and Porsche SUVs in the United States. That’s a huge ask, but it started very small: with the chrome dial on the Bentley Bentayga’s center console, the one encircled by cactuses and snowflakes.
It was a quiet spat until last week, when JLR in one day launched four U.S. lawsuits in two states and an unfair trade complaint against the entire VW Group. JLR, after years of unsuccessful negotiations with one of its largest competitors, now wants the U.S. to ban the importation of nearly every new VW, Audi, and Porsche with an off-road mode.

2017 Bentley Bentayga’s driving-mode dial.

If this much fury over a driving-mode switch sounds crazy, allow us to explain, as evidenced by years and dozens of filings we reviewed in U.S. district courts, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and the U.S. International Trade Commission.
Terrain Response and the Bentley Bentayga’s Alleged Copy
The Bentayga launched in 2016 as the world’s fastest and most expensive SUV. In that year, we whipped a Bentayga to 60 mph almost two full seconds ahead of the best Range Rover, and then tore another one through the Easter Jeep Safari in Moab. But the Bentayga had a rockier start. When the EXP 9 F concept debuted at Geneva, it was so universally panned that Bentley reportedly began redesigning the exterior a week after the show.

Bentley Unveils Shocking EXP 9 F SUV Concept

While the production Bentayga looked better, it shared many components with the VW Group’s lesser brands and has faced more competition in the super-luxe-SUV segment—hence, a 2021 refresh arrived much earlier than by the usual company standard. In that time, Land Rover responded by stuffing the Range Rover with more lavish long-wheelbase trims and more power, and by offering a hand-built two-door variant the company later abandoned. With the addition of the new Aston Martin DBX, and to the delight of the very wealthy, the market now has four British luxury SUVs priced in the $200,000 range.

Terrain Response on 2017 Land Rover Discovery.
Land Rover

But lawyers and engineers at Jaguar Land Rover are less than delighted with the Bentayga. To them, the Drive Dynamics mode in the Bentayga ripped off Land Rover’s Terrain Response. That system, introduced on the 2005 LR3, offered a level of electronic control and customization unlike any other vehicle at the time. Five preset settings optimized the ABS, throttle and transmission tuning, differential locks, and air suspension for a variety of surfaces, indicated by icons on the center console (general, grass/gravel/snow, mud and ruts, sand, and rock crawl). Building on two older British patents filed by Ford, Land Rover submitted a patent application for Terrain Response to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in 2003. It was approved in 2008.

JLR patent drawing, showing relationship of differentials to suspension and wheels.
USPTO

The Bentayga continues to offer four on-road driving modes as standard (Comfort, Sport, Custom, Bentley), and an All-Terrain Specification. That option, which adds four off-road modes, was the red flag. Twisting the dial to these modes (Snow & Grass, Dirt & Gravel, Mud & Trail, Sand) can change the vehicle’s behavior in a similar method as Terrain Response. For example, in Sand mode, the Bentley and the Land Rover will delay ABS intervention to allow loose sand to build up underneath the front tires, which shortens braking distances compared to stopping on firmer surfaces. The Bentayga also adjusts its ride height, steering, throttle, transmission, and various other systems to coincide with a given surface.
Car and Driver has no knowledge if other automakers, such as Ford, are currently paying royalties to Jaguar Land Rover for selling vehicles with similar terrain-adaptive driving modes. Vehicles of all types with multiple driving modes that control multiple vehicle parts are now becoming common. Technology licensing is also common in the auto industry—so in February 2016, that’s exactly what Jaguar Land Rover had in mind when it sent a friendly letter to Bentley, in which it alleged infringement of its patented Terrain Response.
Patent Talks
Bentley didn’t believe it had violated any patent, and it didn’t intend to pay royalties for what it saw as a commonplace feature in a luxury SUV. That sparked Land Rover to rewrite its original U.S. patent to detail, with more exacting clarity, the features it charged Bentley with copying. By September 2016, Land Rover submitted an application that would reissue its 2008 patent with dozens of new claims, such as defining its system as “having driving modes that include at least two off-road modes and an on-road mode,” according to the patent and filings submitted by both automakers. A year later, Land Rover sent another letter to Porsche, alleging that its Cayenne was now infringing the Terrain Response patent and required licensing.
By February 2018, with talks going nowhere, Land Rover told Bentley its reissued patent would be approved “shortly.” The original patent did have a potential loophole. It described how the various driving modes worked but didn’t frame them in the unique context of the driver’s benefit—that a driver would have “direct input regarding the surface terrain.” When the patent office approved the reissue in May, Land Rover conceivably would be in a more secure position to demand royalties from Bentley. It sued Bentley for patent infringement—of the new patent that had just gone into effect—a month later.
In July, according to the lawsuit documents, Land Rover sent two more infringement letters to Audi and Lamborghini, specifically for the ANIMA system on the Lamborghini Urus and for Audi Drive Select on the Q5, Q7, and e-tron. Bentley shot back in October. In a motion to dismiss the case, the automaker said Land Rover’s entire 2018 patent should be declared invalid.
“The patent at issue in this case does not purport to solve a technological problem,” Bentley said in the filing. “Instead, its claims are directed to the concept of controlling a vehicle on the basis of a driver-selected driving surface—an abstract idea that is not patentable under Supreme Court precedent.”
In 2019, Bentley filed two petitions with the Patent Trial and Appeal Board—a body of patent judges that rule on disputes much quicker than the larger trial system—attempting to negate Land Rover’s new claims. In them, Bentley referenced the Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution VII, Hummer H2, and Porsche 959 as three “obvious” examples that automakers, well before Land Rover’s first patent, had been selling cars with selectable on- and off-road modes.

What Does Terrain Response Do?

“People are out in the world right now deciding, am I going to buy a Bentayga or a Range Rover?” Land Rover said in a hearing before the patent board in 2019. “Range Rover is the well-known leader of Terrain Response. It’s brand-defining technology, Your Honor, that Bentley has put in their vehicle.”

Excerpt of status hearing transcript, 9/17/19.
U.S. District Court, Eastern District of VA

Bentley, in one petition, said Land Rover was simply “reciting new limitations related to the conventional use of common automotive subsystems.”
By August 2019, the board denied both of Bentley’s petitions. In March and October of this year, it denied the automaker’s request for rehearings. In one response, the board said it didn’t think Bentley’s argument about the 959’s center and rear differentials being separate “subsystems” was valid. Bentley’s trove of supporting research—everything from a Hummer press kit to an Infiniti QX4 owner’s manual to Car and Driver’s own 2013 story about Porsche transmissions—wasn’t enough to invalidate JLR’s patent.
Banning VW Imports?
On November 19, with its lawsuit against Bentley still pending, Jaguar Land Rover filed four more lawsuits against Volkswagen Group of America, Porsche Cars North America, Audi of America, and Automobili Lamborghini America for patent infringement. On the same day, Jaguar Land Rover filed a request to the U.S. International Trade Commission to investigate the automakers under unfair competition laws and block their vehicle imports. Specifically, according to contents of the letter released to Bloomberg, Jaguar Land Rover is targeting the Cayenne, Urus, Tiguan, A6 Allroad, Q5, Q7, and Q8.
Regarding the lawsuits, a spokesman for the Volkswagen Group of America issued this statement: “The Volkswagen Group is examining the action in order to determine further steps. We will not comment any further regarding an ongoing proceeding at this stage.”
A spokesman for Jaguar Land Rover North America said the company “does not comment on ongoing legal disputes; however, protecting our Intellectual Property is something we take very seriously.”
According to the most recent lawsuits, Jaguar Land Rover wants to recoup years of back royalties and damages. The VW Group, while it has not formally responded, wants to avoid federal repercussions over illegally imported vehicles, especially after the diesel-emissions scandal of a few years ago in which it was found guilty and fined billions by the U.S. Given the pending court cases and the trade commission investigation, it’s likelier the VW Group will settle with JLR without having to formally license its current and future vehicles.
Until then, keep buying all the expensive SUVs your budget can handle and drive them in any mode you want.
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