The Best News Stories Of The Week, For May 25, 2024

For regular people, fuel economy is one of the most important factors when it comes to deciding what new car to buy, right up there with price, reliability and whether or not Apple CarPlay is available. And it makes sense. If one car gets 20 mpg and the other gets 25 mpg, fueling the latter is going to cost less in the long run. It’s a simple, straightforward number that makes it easy to figure out which car uses less gas. Except, when you dig a little deeper, measuring fuel economy in miles per gallon isn’t ideal, Vox recently argued. - Collin Woodard Read More

Buying a Fisker Ocean right now is probably a terrible idea. Bankruptcy is looming, the factory isn’t building any more of them and even the cars themselves are having all kinds of problems. And yet, somehow, buying a Fisker Ocean isn’t the worst electric vehicle you could spend your money on. No, that honor goes to the incredibly rare — and not in the desirable way — 2023 Lordstown Endurance that’s currently listed for sale over on Cars & Bids. - Collin Woodard Read More

City officials in Oakland, California decided to replace a traffic light at an intersection with stop signs last week. This decision wasn’t part of some urbanist initiative to calm traffic; the city couldn’t keep the light functional. - Ryan Erik King Read More

In developed countries all over the world, driving continues to get safer. The one exception to that rule is the United States, where driving continues to get more dangerous. Unfortunately, there are so many factors that make drivers in the U.S. more dangerous, there’s no silver bullet that will magically fix things. One thing that would definitely help, though, would be if drivers would simply slow down, especially in cities. In an attempt to make that happen, Road & Track reports that California just passed a bill that will require cars to warn drivers whenever they drive more than 10 mph over the speed limit. - Collin Woodard Read More

Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis declared a so-called Freedom Summer for the state kicking off May 27 and running through September 2. Freedom, as I understand it, means that a people can act, speak, or think as they want without the restraint of a governing body. So that must mean DeSantis is killing some long-unnecessary law, like the requirement to have an operators’ license to ride a skateboard, or the ban on unmarried women parachuting on Sundays. No, instead Freedom Summer is a mandate aimed at the state’s Department of Transportation, imposing new American Flag-colored lighting mandates for bridges. - Bradley Brownell Read More

The prognosis for Fisker owners seems to get worse and worse every week. The bankruptcy is still a looming threat, and the company is essentially having a fire sale to get rid of leftover inventory even though an Ocean is probably the last thing anyone should be buying right now. Now comes word that things have gotten slightly worse for Ocean owners. - Lawrence Hodge Read More

Corn is a problem. Or rather, America’s growing reliance on government corn subsidies to power our everyday lives. Beef is artificially inexpensive because farmers feed corn to cows, even though their digestive systems aren’t designed to process it. Sweet foods are artificially inexpensive because high fructose corn syrup is replacing cane sugar in almost everything we eat, despite it being horrifyingly bad for you. And when it comes to cars, corn ethanol is used to artificially drive down the cost of gasoline, despite it being less efficient, more harmful to the environment, and potentially detrimental to your car’s fueling systems. - Bradley Brownell Read More

We’re not entirely sure why, but automotive TV shows usually aren’t very good. Even if you ignore all the different Yelling Goatee Man Garage reality shows, you’re typically better off looking for a good show that happens to also include some cool cars, like Breaking Bad, than watching a show that’s more directly a car show. Remember the first season of American Auto? There’s a good reason it was canceled after two seasons. That may change soon, though, when Tires premieres on Netflix. - Collin Woodard Read More

If you’re not familiar with the Fiat Topolino, you’re probably not the only one. It’s a tiny electric city car that is based on the Citroen Ami and not sold in the U.S. In fact, even calling it a city car is a stretch because it’s technically considered a quadricycle that only has a 46-mile range and a top speed of 28 mph. As Motor1 reports, the Fiat Topolino is also illegal in Italy thanks to one tiny design decision that led to 134 Topolinos being seized by authorities. - Collin Woodard Read More

Car thefts have been on the rise in recent years due to a couple of factors: TikTokers discovered Kias were ridiculously easy to steal and budding thieves found a way to hack modern keyless entry technology. An update to the wireless car tech was supposed to thwart some of the hacks but on Tesla cars, at least, it appears to have made little difference. - Owen Bellwood Read More