Welcome to road shows autocomplete your weekly roundup of the biggest news in the automotive world.
This week we have news on Tesla's liquid cooled charger connectors, CS DEF CON supercars and Jim's continued fight with the UAW.
But first let's start with BMW Toyota recall Usually, when you hear a brand new car is being recalled, that kind of makes sense.
I mean, something that's never existed before is bound to have a few teething issues, right?
Only when you see that a recall has been issued, you kind of expect that it's going to be issued by the company who's badge in on the hood.
Well, that's not the case with this seven car recall by BMW for the Toyota Supra.
Toyota's New Super coupe is being recalled by the Germans over concerns that bad welds would make the car and safe.
Those seven cars owners can Look forward to getting a brand new car though, so that's cool.
But still, welcome to a brave new world.
We've known when to expect the Corvette C8 convertible for a while now.
And while we've seen static photos of it previously Obviously, it's retractable hard top design still managed to impress what emotion.
It makes the comparatively bargain price Corvette seemed like more of a contender to the exotic crop tops from exotic companies building cars and exotic places.
The best part is that the vert version vet isn't wildly more expensive than the regular old coupe slash target version.
And while the Corvette convertible wasn't a surprise, the debut of the new car race car shares how it was The C.A.R.
is a bold year and win year version of the road based Corvette C-8, but it's still very much a Corvette at heart.
We're also digging.
It's mostly Silver Debu livery.
We're told that it will have its inaugural run at Daytona in January.
You know what company is down near the bottom of our list of most likely to electrify its lineup.
Yeah, Maserati.
But apparently the company is drunk off the success of its Ghibli model, having just sold its 100,000 version.
And it's now working on rolling out at least eight plug in hybrid models in the next three or four years, wild right?
And it's also planning on releasing the long awaited elf here eSports coupe.
But wait, as they say, there's more.
Ferrari's slightly less fancy cousin is also committing to getting into the race for autonomy.
Though, we'd expect that's a little further off than the early 2020s.
We'll just have to see.
Everybody knows by now that Christian von Koenigsegg is a Swedish maniac Who builds some of the world's most extreme cars.
But what they might not know, is that he's also interested in making cars that advance technology in ways other than hot nasty bad **** speed.
Enter the Regera, which debuted back in 2015.
The oddball super car use a twin-turbo V8 and a 3-motor hybrid system to drive the vehicle without a transmission.
And as a testament to just how fast hybrids can be, Koenigsegg just set a new 0 to 400 to 0 kilometers per hour records with It made the run in just 31.49 seconds.
For those of you who don't speak metric, 400 kilometers per hour in just under 250 miles per hour.
The SEC recently concluded an investigation into some [UNKNOWN] sales reporting practices by Yacht Chrysler and determine that there was something rotten in Auburn Hills.
Specifically, they found that there had been a long term and widespread practice of falsifying sales documents to make it look like there had been consistent month to month sales growth.
Not really a good look right?
But in the end it worked out okay for FCA because the SEC said if it paid a $40 million fine and promise to never ever, ever do that, again, it could skate by with no admission of wrongdoing.
40 million bucks is a good sized chunk of change but FCA statement on the matter said that it would not impact its bottom line.
Despite what crazy uncle Ilan, what have you believe Tesla Like everybody else, it's still likely quite a raise from true commercially viable autonomous driving.
And if we in the squid is true, a possible purchase of machine-learning startup deepscale would back that up.
Still, machine learning is a critical part of the whole self-driving equations.
So If it did, indeed by the upscale reports aren't totally confirmed on that yet, then it would be a huge leg up for the Big T.
GM and the UAW are still at each other's throats and their disagreements which have led to a strike that's now entering its third week Don't appear to be ending anytime soon.
Specifically, the UAW shot down James most recent proposal, James representatives have called that proposal comprehensive, but apparently it wasn't comprehensive enough.
And now the work stoppage by the UAW has started to affect GM operations in Mexico.
The last strike by the UAW against GM that went longer than two days happened in 1998, and that went for nearly two months.
When most people think about railroads these days it's probably because they're playing Monopoly.
But for big businesses like car companies Dealing with railroads like BASF, CSX Norfolk Southern and Union Pacific is an expensive fact of life because well, it's still one of the cheapest ways to get cars from one side of America to the other.
Still cheapest doesn't mean that it's cheap.
See, back in the early aughts, those four railroad companies taxed some fairly hellacious fuel surcharges under the shipping bills for its clients.
Two which were sister companies Hyundai and Kia.
These fuel surcharges ended up exceeding the actual cost of fuel by six.
Billion dollars over four years.
Needless to say, Hyundai and Kia found out and we're super pissed now they're suing the railroads for triple the amount of the fees that they paid.
This could be a huge hit the American rail industry if it goes through, electrify America is becoming more of a household name for people that own EVs because its charter network is one of the fastest growing networks in the US.
But folks from the VW back charging company aren't content to just charge your car when you're on the go.
Nope.
They want to charge for you at home too, to that end the company announced that it's going to start offering a $499 level to charger designed for home use, this charger is weather sealed so it can be mounted outside your garage.
And it comes with a 24-foot charge cable.
It's also got Wi-Fi because of course it does, so you can see how your vehicle's doing via the Electrify America app.
Sweet, sweet convenience.
As electric vehicle charging speeds go up, so does current, and current means heat.
Keeping a charging cable cool when there are hundreds of kilowatts going through it is becoming increasingly important.
So Tesla for its V3 supercharger went with liquid cooled charging cables.
Still the big key things that can do one better than That it has been investigating using liquid to cool the charger connected to and it may have found a solution because it recently filed a patent application for the idea.
Obviously, making sure that everything stays clean and dry is important for safety here so we'll be super curious to see if this actually makes it into production.
Equatorial Guinea is a little country sandwich between Gabon and Cameroon on Africa's West Coast.
And against all odds, it's making automotive news headlines, but surprised.
It's not for a good reason.
See, its Vice President got caught up in a massive money laundering scheme.
And as part of that investigation, his wild **** collection of supercars was seized and subsequently auctioned off.
Among the cars taken were a Lamborghini Veneno Roadster, an Aston Martin One-77, and a Koenigsegg 121.
And they were all auctioned off for charity.
That's it for Auto Complete this week.
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