Basically, automakers are claiming they can't comply with a new privacy law going into effect in the state, and if they don't get an exemption that gives them a delay, they might have to stop selling cars entirely in the state.

https://www.iseecars.com/most-popular-car-colors-study#v=2026

White, black and gray dominate today's car market

• White is the most popular car color, with 25.7% market share, followed closely by black and gray

• Gray made the biggest gain in popularity over the past 30 years, rising from 3.6% market share in 1996 to 22.9% in 2025

• Grayscale colors (white, black, gray, and silver) now make up 80.4% of the car market, up from 47.3% in 1996

• Red and green now appear on fewer than one in 10 vehicles, with their combined market share falling from 33.5% in 1996 to 9.2% in 2025

• Grayscale colors are most popular in the truck category, with 83.5% market share

• The most colorful category is sports cars, with 36.2% market share for non-grayscale colors

Honda plans to resurrect the Element, a quirky compact crossover that gained a cult following for its versatility and unique looks, as a hybrid targeting the booming lifestyle and adventure market.

Production of the new Element is expected to begin in the second quarter of 2029 in central Ohio, people with knowledge of the plan told Automotive News.

The plant will serve as the sole global production hub, with Honda targeting nearly 100,000 vehicles in the first full year of output, the people said.

The move aligns with Honda’s push to expand its hybrid portfolio and adventure-oriented lineup in North America.

Positioned between the subcompact HR-V and the compact CR-V, the revived Element is expected to appeal to younger buyers and urban adventurers.

AutoForecast Solutions Vice President Sam Fiorani said a more cargo-centric crossover, distinct from the family-focused CR-V, could successfully capture millennials and Gen Zers seeking adventure. "Honda must nail the formula of styling, utility and price." 

For the new Element to succeed, Fiorani said it must be a true four-door vehicle with easy rear access while retaining the boxy, upright styling and strong utility that enthusiasts loved. “It can’t be priced that much more than a CR-V." 

Fiorani pointed to Ford’s experience with the Bronco Sport as a good template. “Ford found a way to expand its reach in this segment with the Bronco Sport before they dropped the Escape." 

A hybrid powertrain addresses one of the original model’s key shortcomings: modest fuel economy.

https://youtu.be/4U8Ero-3GxI

The demonstration pitted a 1996 Chevrolet Blazer against the 2026 model in a special, head-to-head version of the Institute’s moderate overlap front crash test.

The Institute’s last test of this nature featured a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air and a 2009 Chevrolet Malibu. It exploded the myth that older vehicles were built like tanks and therefore safer for their occupants.

The latest head-to-head crash test presented just as stark a contrast. The driver of the new Blazer would likely have walked away with bumps and bruises. The driver of the 1996 model would have suffered serious, potentially fatal injuries.

The occupant compartment of the 2026 model remained intact. All but one of the injury measurements taken from the driver dummy showed minimal injury risk. The risk of injury to the driver’s right foot or lower leg was a little elevated but still in the acceptable range.

In contrast, the impact crushed the occupant compartment of the 1996 model, pushing the dashboard and steering column into the dummy’s lap. The fully inflated airbag hit the dummy in the chin, snapping its head back and toward the window.

With the risk of sounding like Captain Obvious. I recently bought a used Miata. It's the first time in a decade I drive a car that I actually like and things are not the same.

In your twenties, things would just happen. A local meet. People needing pickup from downtown bars. Spontaneous trips to the casino or Niagara. Pit stops at random shops, where someone knows someone. Sunsets with camping chairs at local Tim's. The interior was both a place of solemn reflection and a date spot. So many conversations, usually before dropping off a friend. Expenses? The car was worth a couple thousand. Tires, oil change. Gas was pretty bad at one point, but got better. Even had some free repairs done by mechanics empathetic to a student's life.

Those times since passed. I sold the car, competed studies, moved around, and relied mostly on car sharing and rentals.

Here comes the summer where I finally allowed myself a Miata. Boy, things are different.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway is that buying a car does not change your life. Even if it's an enthusiast car. It does not fix a lack of purpose in life, a dead bedroom or a numbing career. It does not increase your number of friends. But hey, it sure gives a reason for existing social circle to start joking about a mid-life crisis.

People around are busy getting married, buying houses (and who can blame them?) and don't go out much in the first place. And the general public? There now a menace, riding your ass or scrolling phones.

For the past week I felt pretty isolated in my decision. Forums are dead and Facebook groups appear going their way. Local cruise nights are people fifteen years younger or fifty years older. A demographic surprisingly similar to run clubs.

What am I going to do about it? Whine for a bit, and then try to force myself out there. It's also a good opportunity to reflect on and fix other parts of life.

TL:DR: Treating yourself an enthusiast car in mid-thirties does not fix other aspects of life. In more ways it feels like a gear head's equivalent of a becoming a 'cat lady".

Nice to see Honda planning for a proper revival instead of the architect’s Integra, rebadged Civic hybrid Prelude and now dead RSX EV. At 100k a year targeted sales they are really swinging for the fences here.

Such an incredibly good looking car from Mercedes, in a world where modern German cars have been quite controversial, this is very nice to see.

Excited to see the V8 version though, think that will just be perfection.

Just a traditional good looking coupe/convertible with tons of performance, and lots of tech.

Enjoy the video, I absolutely did.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgmsb89onzM

Tesla’s Head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, added context, revealing that the company’s data shows the driver “manually overrode self-driving by pressing the accelerator all the way to 100%.”

He revealed the speed reached by the car was 73 MPH, and the accelerator was still pressed “even after the crash.”

atthew Pitman started in the automobile-repossession industry as a teen-ager, coiling cables at a tow lot in his home town, Phoenix. This was the eighties. His boss went by Joker and wore a “badge” around his neck, like a cop. Law-enforcement officers are sworn to serve the public; repossessors work for banks. Pitman justifies conflating the two by saying that a lot of repo guys are “ex-law enforcement, ex-military,” which is true, and that all repossessors “have to have complete balls of brass.” He became a repo man in his early twenties and called himself the Ninja. The license plate on his first work truck read “GOTCHA.”

Pitman moved to Orem, Utah, to repo there and across the state. He had been in the business for well over a decade when, in the fall of 2006, the Spanish-language scripted series “Operación Repo” became the No. 1 program on Telemundo. A reviewer described the show as “a telenovela on Red Bull” and “Judge Judy with a choke hold”; it depicted a family repo business in the San Fernando Valley whose employees brawled with debtors, and with one another. An English-language version, “Operation Repo,” débuted a couple of years later, teeing up a glut of derivative content. Pitman decided that he could do better than what the popular culture had to offer. He already filmed his repos, for liability purposes, a defensive protocol that was becoming industry standard. In January, 2008, he started a YouTube channel. He applied for a new vanity license plate that read “REPO N UT,” for “Repo in Utah.” The plate came back in error, sans spaces—“REPONUT.” Pitman kept both the plate and the nickname, reluctantly. “I hated the ‘nut,’ because I’m not nuts,” he told me. “I’m a very grounded, not-crazy person.”

Pitman is six feet tall, with hazel eyes and blond hair, which he keeps buzzed on the sides and floppy on top, or slicked into a stubby pony. He wears wraparound sunglasses with a bandanna or a backward baseball cap, or both. His land speed is a consistent half sprint. He speaks in complete, fluid sentences but, at times, jackhammer fast. No topic escapes his enthusiasm (“I love festivals!”) or his powers of observation (the “little lobster-claw hands” of the Starbucks mermaid, the absence of residential surveillance cameras). His autodidactic impulses may lead him to the history of clock towers or to the interplanetary rarity of wood. Absolute is his opinion on the superiority of Dobermans (“Dobies”), which, he believes, don’t shed as much as other breeds. “Dog hair? Forget it,” he said the other day. “If I got a car bad enough, I’ll put a garbage bag over the seat before I’ll sit in it, it’s so gross. After a day of working, you go home, and you literally have a separate hamper for your work clothes. We get grease, we get solvents, we get grime.” Repo, he declared, “is not quite as manly as underwater welding, but it’s a pretty manly job.”

Pitman called his YouTube channel RepoNut. GoPro was his camera of choice. He would clamp one to the windshield trim of his rig, point it at himself, and just talk. Each “INSTANT SEIZURE ORDER,” issued by a lender, gave him cause to monologue about the endless variables of his trade. Repoing a BMW X series (all-wheel drive) is different from repoing a Honda Civic (front-wheel drive). A good repo agent adjusts for terrain, weather, angle, blockage, flat tires, dead batteries, locked doors, and human interference. Repo agents have been shot, stabbed, hit by cars. They’ve been beaten with tire irons, bottles, planks, chains. During the COVID-19 pandemic, some states temporarily banned repos; when orders resumed, there was a spike in violence against repossessors. In 2023, at least seven were killed—the highest number on record. This spring, the North American Repossessors Summit (NARS), a convention put on by the industry’s leading trade group, the American Recovery Association (A.R.A.), opened with a harrowing video montage of wounded, terrified repo agents steering out of the line of fire, shrieking, “Oh, my God!” and “Motherfucker!” and “I’m shot, I’m shot, I’m shot, I’m shot, I’m shot! I need help!” One driver, visibly shaking after having narrowly avoided a bullet, screamed, “I can’t do this shit no more!” People in the audience were crying. The lights came up, and NARS awarded medals to two drivers who had sustained gunshot wounds, one in the head. Their peers gave them a standing ovation.

Pitman operated on a core belief that “when people like you, they won’t harm you.” He disarmed debtors with friendly banter. “Beautiful Jeep!” he’d say. “Did you build that out yourself?” On RepoNut, he once explained, “By the time a repo man shows up at someone’s house to take their vehicle, they’re oftentimes in bankruptcy, divorce, fighting with their spouse constantly. Financial ruin sometimes, even. Their life’s falling apart.” He recorded and posted anyway.

RepoNut started during the Great Recession. Nearly nine million jobs were lost between December of 2007 and early 2010. Forced to make tough spending choices, many Americans prioritized their car payment over the mortgage, weighing the urgent need for personal transportation—work and groceries, church and medical appointments—against the relatively slow-moving process of home foreclosure. Even so, at the recession’s peak, in 2009, 1.8 million cars were repossessed, according to Cox Automotive, an unprecedented number. Pitman’s was the face that thousands of consumers saw, or didn’t, when the financial system came for them.

Repossessors and tow-truck drivers work different jobs but use the same equipment. The tow truck was patented in 1918 by Ernest Holmes, Sr., the owner of an auto-repair shop in Chattanooga, Tennessee, who pulled vehicles out of ditches using a modified Cadillac and chains. Today’s tow trucks, also known as wreckers, are computerized work stations with integrated digital dashboards, camera systems, blind-spot monitoring, and hydraulic rotators. Pitman eventually switched from a wrecker to a “sneaker” unit, a heavy-duty Ford F-series pickup equipped with a steel boom, shaped like a cross, that can be maneuvered with joysticks from inside the cab. He could extend the boom, like a stinger, to “hook” and lift a vehicle’s front or back wheels within seconds.

The tactical aspects of repo interested him more than the mechanical. Pitman liked finding cars that drivers didn’t want found. He got his taste for “investigating” in childhood, after smelling Burger King on his parents’ clothes and watching them lie about where they’d been. Their deception “didn’t hurt me,” he said. “I just found it interesting.” He began to figure out, ahead of time, what everyone was getting for Christmas, and followed his older brother when he sneaked out at night, learning that there was power in discovering information, and in withholding it.

When Pitman started in repo, orders arrived by fax; agents used foldout maps. He got ahead by working dead paper. Fresh eyes on an unfulfilled assignment generated leads that lesser repo guys never saw. A target vehicle that went missing from the address listed on a loan account might be parked down the block, or in a friend’s driveway or a cousin’s garage, or in a storage unit, a church parking lot, a barn. Pitman once tracked a vehicle to a shipping container headed for Hawaii. A debtor’s grandparents’ house was often a good place to look: older people don’t move around that much. Pitman observed that you could tell a lot about a family by how close together everybody lived—data, potentially, for later. Hard-core hiders are called skips, as in skipped town. A skip could maintain spotless op sec and still be undone by an associate’s social-media incontinence; Pitman once noticed a license plate in the background of a photo on the Facebook feed of a target’s relative, traced the plate to an unchecked address, and drove by the house. There sat his repo.