AutoComplete: Tesla settles with Michigan, can now sell and service cars there
Cars
Welcome to Roadshow's Auto Complete.
Your weekly round up of the biggest news in the automotive world.
This week we have news on Tesla's Witcher ambitions.
The first C8 Corvette and new electric Harvey Davidson.
But first, let's start with Tesla's victory in Michigan Tesla's been trying to push a new way of buying a car for years now and some states have been pushing back saying that disrupting the traditional franchise dealer model would be bad for everyone.
No states gone harder with this than Michigan.
But that's changing kind of things to a settlement with the state of Michigan.
The big T can now open service centres in state through a subsidiary.
And it can now also sell and deliver cars in Michigan, provided that the cars are first titled out of state and then transferred.
It's a huge win for the electric car brand, but it's still got plenty of headway to make in states like Texas and Connecticut.
Harley Davidson is live wire represented a huge shift in thinking for America's longest running motorcycle brand when it came out last year.
The problem with the bike was that it was wildly expensive, and therefore inaccessible to most motorcycle buyers.
To help fix that, the eggheads at Harley R&D have been hard at work, coming up with new electric concepts to fill out the model range.
Specifically, they've been working on an electric middleweight bike, more of a competitor to, say, Zero.
And that takes some styling cues from the brand's legendarily awesome XR-750 flat-track racing bike.
Wherever in the schoolyard is that it as well as the E bikes and scooters at the brand showed off at CES in 2019 are due out in 2021 or 2022.
Toyota is starting out 2020 with some big recall energy and that's not a good thing.
See, the Japanese brand announced a three call around 3 million of its vehicles in the US And around half a million others around the globe for two separate airbag issues.
One of which has to do with, surprise, surprise to cut airbag inflators.
And the other is an issue with the vehicle's ECU.
The ECU fix applies to 2011 and 2018 Avalanche Corollas and Matrix, Matrices The inflator problem goes back to 1997 through 2000 and affects Celicas, Rav4s and Supras.
One of the things I remember most about riding the school bus as a kid was the unlovely bellow of its big old diesel engine as it scream wheezed up the hills around my neighborhood.
It is not a fun memory.
So that's why I can admit to being a little envious of the kids in Virginia who will be wafted to school in near silence in one of Daimler's new Thomas built electric buses.
The first bus has been named Joulie as in joules of energy, and is the first electric school bus to be equipped with DC fast charging.
Backing a 225 kilowatt hour battery and will do 134 miles to a charge with a three hour charge time using the aforementioned fast charger.
Tesla has been on this weird crusade to bring video Video games to its cars infotainment screens and its ambitions have gotten steadily more well.
Ambitious as time has gone on.
Case in point now Tesla boss Elon Musk is hinting on Twitter that you could soon be playing CD Projekt REDs.
The Witcher on your Model 3's infotainment screen.
Now, it's not totally clear if he means 2007's The Witcher or something more recent and much more resource-intensive like 2015's The Witcher 3, The Wild Hunt.
Either way, if this happens, it'll provide a welcome alternative to screaming alone in your car like a maniac when you keep dying repeatedly playing Cuphead.
First production C8 Corvette went to auction this past weekend and will be damned if it didn't sell for a cool $3 million.
Yep, you heard that correctly said $3 million at Barrett Jackson in Scottsdale.
Thankfully the money won't be going to waste or to GM for that matter, since the auction was held to benefit Detroit's Children's Fund.
A charity that seeks to improve schools in the Detroit area.
Now the car that cross the auction block was just a placeholder because the first seats haven't actually been built yet, but it's still cool and anyway, production is supposed to start soon with the first customer deliveries being made in March.
That's it for autocomplete.
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