While it may feel like there’s been a concerted effort by the United States to remake its environmental policy in such a way as to completely ignore the existence of the environment, the reality is that there are so many different initiatives being undertaken at the same time that they can sometimes be at cross-purposes. A good example is a recent decision regarding aluminum and steel products, which are necessary both for electric cars and your sweet aftermarket exhausts.
The Morning Dump is treading familiar ground today, so why not talk about Tesla? The company is likely to face a class action lawsuit over its self-driving claims in California, and this particular ruling sets a potentially worrisome precedent for the automaker. While TMD is in California (though your author is on the East Coast), let’s check out another electric carmaker there: VinFast. It just opened up its first dealership in the state as it pivots away from a pure direct sales model.
And, finally, Amazon is getting into the used car space, but the competition isn’t that worried.
Aluminum And Steel Tariffs Come For Aftermarket Products, Derivatives
I have previously discussed the logic of steel and aluminum tariffs here, so I won’t get into too much detail. It is not uniquely the viewpoint of this current administration that America needs to be able to produce some amount of its own raw materials. While there’s a cost savings to making things cheaper in other places, there are legitimate reasons why you don’t want to be reliant on distant countries for the basic building blocks of everything.
On the other hand, you can’t just suddenly build up a huge steel and aluminum manufacturing base in the United States overnight. There’s also questionable logic behind producing energy-intensive aluminum here when Canada is right there and has smelters running that can process aluminum at a much-reduced cost.
Nevertheless, the current administration has targeted both steel and aluminum for massive tariffs. The initial tariffs were focused on the raw material itself, but a new rule this week is taking aim at products made with aluminum and steel. Basically, if something is imported into this country and contains steel or aluminum (or both), it’ll get the 50% tariff on those materials, and then whatever isn’t steel or aluminum will be hit with whatever tariff exists on that country. You know what kind of products use a lot of steel and aluminum? Car parts!
You can read the full decision here in the Federal Register, but unless you’re an expert in trade, I don’t think any of the hundreds of codes will mean anything to you. Thankfully, Reuters has a reasonable translation (bold mine):
Evercore ISI said in a research note the move covers more than 400 product codes representing over $200 billion in imports last year and estimates it will raise the overall effective tariff rate by around 1 percentage point.
The department is also adding imported parts for automotive exhaust systems and electrical steel needed for electric vehicles to the new tariffs as well as components for buses, air conditioners as well as appliances including refrigerators, freezers and dryers.
A group of foreign automakers had urged the department not to add the parts, saying the U.S. does not have the domestic capacity to handle current demand.
My understanding of how politics works in the 21st century is that people can endure wages that only slowly increase, employment that slowly decreases, and basically any other concern, so long as prices don’t go up. How does this decision not cause prices to eventually increase? In theory, companies in the United States are looking to restart or expand facilities to process these metals, but in practice, it’s a little bit of a harder proposition, according to this report from S&P Global Mobility:
Of the four active US smelters, two are operated by Alcoa and two by Chicago-based Century Aluminum. In earnings calls for their Q1, neither company said they would increase production and restart idled capacity because of US tariffs.
“It’s hard to make a restart decision based on a tariff that can change. We have seen the volatility of discussions around the tariffs over the last 60 days,” Oplinger said on Alcoa’s April 16 call. “We wouldn’t necessarily make a decision to restart capacity simply based on tariffs just because they can change.”
It doesn’t appear to be changing, so perhaps this will get companies on the long and expensive road to building more domestic capacity. That the ruling seems to particularly call out the parts necessary to make electric cars is not great for Tesla, but Tesla has bigger concerns.
Tesla Might Have To Answer For Its Big Autopilot Promises
There’s a sense that Elon Musk, by virtue of his money and power, is made of Teflon. Or maybe mithril, since he’s such a fan of sci-fi/fantasy. It’s clear that Musk views himself as some sort of protagonist in a Sci-Fi universe, even if he’s more of an L. Bob Rife-type figure to some.
Either way, his recent foray into expanding his power via politics has not gone well, and the hundreds of millions of dollars he’s spent to influence the election haven’t resulted in limitless control for Tesla. In addition to increased costs in the United States from tariffs, the company is facing a class action lawsuit over its Autopilot claims. Specifically, that customers paid for something that was never truly delivered.
The most important part of this ruling, I think, is not so much that it allows a class action lawsuit to proceed, but that it holds the company accountable for what CEO Elon Musk says and what it promised in blog posts. From U.S. District Judge Rita Lin, via Reuters:
In her decision on Monday, the San Francisco-based judge also said thousands of people likely saw Tesla’s claim in the “Autopilot” section of its website from October 2016 to August 2024 that its vehicles contained hardware for full self-driving.
Tesla made a similar claim in a blog post, newsletter and quarterly earnings call, as did Musk at a 2016 press conference.
“While these channels alone may not ordinarily be enough to establish class-wide exposure for a traditional car manufacturer, Tesla’s distinctive advertising strategy warrants a departure from the typical approach,” Lin wrote.Tesla does not use mass advertising or independent dealers, and Lin said it was reasonable to infer that class members interested in Full Self-Driving technology went to Tesla’s website to get information.
Musk and Tesla have a history of making big promises that take time to come to fruition (if they ever do). If other courts agree with this interpretation, then there may be more suits to come.
VinFast’s First Dealer Opens
I wrote earlier this month that VinFast is an automaker that is not keen on giving up, even if its attentions are maybe shifting a bit more towards Southeast Asia. While Tesla has found success outside of the dealership model, that hasn’t been the case for the Vietnamese carmaker, so it just opened its first dealer in California.
Vietnamese automaker VinFast opened its first franchised dealership in California, ending its direct-sales model in the state and the U.S. after struggling to sell its electric vehicles.
The VinFast San Diego store is part of Sunroad Automotive Group, which sells 14 brands at nine locations and has annual sales of 30,000 vehicles, VinFast said Aug. 19.
VinFast opened distribution to franchised dealers in late 2023 but kept its 15 California direct-sales showrooms. VinFast said April 24 it would close those stores and seek dealer partners.
“We believe in VinFast’s strong potential to make a lasting impact in the North American market,” Uri Feldman, president of Sunroad Holding Corp., said in a statement.
If California decides to replace the $7,500 tax credit with its own, this may not be the worst idea.
The Internet Can Be A Strange Place
I had a great time at Car Week, and I feel renewed seeing so many young enthusiasts. At the same time, it made me realize how far removed reality is from the mechanics of the Internet. There is something fundamentally broken in the way people interact with websites. Layoffs abound in the media space, and everything feels like a dumb game.
In theory, this article from Automotive News is about how companies like Cars.com and CarGurus aren’t threatened by Amazon’s new foray into used cars, but something else caught my eye:
Vetter said dealership feedback from Cars.com suggests Amazon isn’t having much of an impact anyway.
“I have talked to a lot of the dealers … and the feedback thus far has been — there’s a lot of effort but not a lot of traction,” Vetter said.
Vetter said Amazon could make a bigger impact by partnering with Cars Commerce.
“I’d love to be a reseller of Amazon solutions to the industry and ship dollars away from Google, right? We’ve got the distribution already built,” Vetter said. “If Amazon’s serious about wanting to sell advertising into the automotive industry, I think we’re an established platform that could provide a lot of scale and help on that, just like we’ve helped dealers with Google … or buying traffic on Facebook using our first-party data.”
That’s Cars Commerce (Cars.com) CEO Alex Vetter saying the quiet part out loud.
If you’re not aware, the fundamental promise of free information being supported by advertising doesn’t really work anymore. Most of the sites you read are playing some sort of game to trick the system so it can filter more eyeballs through as many revenue sources as possible.
What I think he’s saying here is that he’d like to partner with Amazon to use their “solutions” and products to take money away from the Google ecosystem. He also admits to “buying traffic” on Facebook, which isn’t wrong in and of itself, nor is using “first party data,” which is the information you give websites when you go to them.
It’s all an arbitrage, really, and all “free” content is just a slippery slide trying to land you in the funnel for some sort of commerce. This is why we’re trying to build a membership business as fast as we can, because none of this feels sustainable. If you feel the same way, please consider becoming a member.
What I’m Listening To While Writing TMD
I lied, the song of summer is “Golden” from the Netflix show KPop Demon Hunters. I will not explain, and if you have a kid I don’t need to explain.
The Big Question
What do you read on the Internet? Where do you shop for cars?
Top Photo: Flowmaster
Idk what blew my mind more,the fact that the morning dump isn’t EST (which makes sense, I’d be lucky if this is up by the time I take lunch) or the fact that the fake kpop reality show is a cartoon. This is a website about cars?
“VinFast is an automaker that is not keen on giving up“.
Of course they aren’t. They’re Vietnamese.
The Vietnamese people were at war with Japan, France, The United States, and China, one after the other, for decades, and THEY’RE STILL THERE.
Four of the most powerful militaries in the world lost to them.
Don’t EVER bet against the Vietnamese, they don’t know how to give up or lose.
“What do you read on the Internet? Where do you shop for cars?”
What do I read? The news, mostly. Even though I’m not a conservative (used to be), I quite like checking out the articles aggregated by Drudge Report, and seeing what’s being posted to various subs on Reddit, among other things.
Where do I shop for cars? Wherever.
Right now there’s a 2008 Kia Rondo that I bought from the wholesale inventory of Carmax when I worked there (great little $2500 beater).
There’s a 1996 GMC Sonoma that I picked up from a friend. It’s going to be getting a V8 swap sometime soon.
Then there’s the 2011 Mazda 3 that a customer brought to my shop with a blown engine. He decided not to fix it, and called around to several salvage yards for offers. I offered him $50 more, he accepted, and I went to a self-service yard and pulled an engine and swapped it. It runs and drives and I’ll be selling it soon.
True that. They were the only ones to successfully hold off the Mongolian empire and of all the countries China has conquered over the centuries Vietnam is the only one to retain its own language. The VinFast is still crap though.
My last car was a impulse buy from a Miata Club member the day I joined the club. I had bought my Miata off a used car lot (and have been very happy with it), but a club member stood up and said, I’m old, I can’t get in and out of this anymore, Carvana is offering me xxx, so I’ll sell to someone in the club for xxx (actually less than Carvana was offering him) Knowing that it was a smoking deal and how dependable Miatae are in general, I bought it 2 days later for my son as a commuter car. It’s an automatic 2016 with 70,000 miles and came with winter tires and wheels too. It’s about the most beat up Miata I’ve ever seen, chips, dings, and scratches everywhere, but it also came with a huge stack of maintenance receipts. My son is now in the Miata Club with me, he’s much more interested in cars, and we have something we can share as a hobby, and that’s worth far more than I paid for the car.
“I will not explain, and if you have a kid I don’t need to explain.” Cracking up since my 4, 6, and 10 year old kids can’t stop singing “What It Sounds Like” (is this appropriate for pre-schoolers? who the hell knows.)
I read Autopian on the net and now use auto tempest to shop cars. Cars.com has been weirdly broken for a few weeks now. I can actually search cars on cars.com better through auto tempest and it includes the gurus and auto trader as well. I hate that Doug DeTurdo is connected, but I guess so be it for now.
I read this site as a paid member. Defector(paid sub), 404Media(paid sub), Arstechnica(paid sub), Racer, InsideEVs, my local news paper website and sometimes one of the horrifically bad local news stations. I will also read the occasional schlock from a cnn/nbc/abc/wsj/etc that’s a free to read article.
I still use autotrader to search out vehicles because I’m an elder millennial and it’s my most boomer trait that I just haven’t let go of. I also look at Facebook Martketplace to look at all the beat 90s-2000s Camaros/Firebirds that I dream about buying and working on.
Translation: Trump Always Chickens Out
KPDH is this year’s Elemental. Neither had a lot of support from their respective studios/distributors, but both are great movies that touched a nerve with the public and outperformed in a massive way. If nothing else, it’s refreshing to have a good, wholesome thing making waves for a change.
Also the music is just fantastic. If you haven’t heard the story of Ejae (the singing voice for the main character) you should look it up. In short, she trained for years to be a KPop star, got rejected because she was “too old”, went into the production side, wrote songs for this movie, and when they heard her demo tracks for them they hired her as the actual voice. Just such a feel-good story.
Golden is probably the best standalone song (hence going #1 on the charts), but in the context of the movie What It Sounds Like is my favorite.
I read (and am a member of) this site for automotive news and excess hilarity to brighten my day. I only watch the morning news for traffic and weather as 1) the rest of what’s on offer is all bad and 2) my current existence is bad enough without adding all that extra shite. I used to visit ESPN.com on a regular basis, but somewhere along the way I completely lost interest in professional and collegiate sports.
I can tell you where I don’t go to shop for cars, and that is your garden-variety roadside used car lot. When I was looking for a car for my daughter, I contacted some of these joints requesting CarFaxes on vehicles I saw on their sites. Every last one of them refused to provide one unless I was present at their location. Yeah, that’s gonna be a ‘no’ from me, dawg. I ended up at a local Mini dealership and bought there from a salesperson who was upfront about the car’s condition/history and even brought the vehicle to my place of work to test drive it.
internet news sources: BBC, CBC, AP, and local sites.
internet fun: google maps, autopian, NIH articles, F1 & motogp news, and instagram.
the last car i bought was with a text message: my daughter worked in sales at a dealer and texted a proposed deal when the ford exploder finally exploded.
…and nobody asked, but i believe his name is ENRON musk…
Reading is this site, general and local news aggregated on Google News and Flipboard, a few Substacks I subscribe to, ESPN, and a few other sites for fantasy football and college sports updates.
For car shopping I am almost always looking for something specific (2-4 yr old wagon, PHEV commuter, etc.) so recently I have been using Autotempest which seems to have pretty good search and reach. I have also been ‘shopping’ for an R129 SL for about 18 months on bringatrailer and carsandbids but that really could go in the what do I read online category because I need to finish a couple other projects before I can really start bidding on anything there…
I read this site, and if I want to upset myself, I will try to read about current events through sites like The BBC and I also used GroundNews for a while. I used to regularly check a few make/model specific automotive or motorcycle forums but I don’t enjoy that as much anymore, since I have less time for projects, and most of my current projects are house based.
I shop for cars on Facebook if I want something cheap, but I hate it because it killed Craigslist. I found my last car through Autotempest, but actually think Cars.com does a better job.
Does anyone know if private party auto sales are on the decline? I would speculate that negative equity, and a lot of people who aren’t interested in dealing with your typical Craigslist tire kicker conspired to dry up the private party market, or maybe FB is so unusable that I just can’t find anything of interest anymore.
I hate that I use FB marketplace to sell (never to buy).
I currently have a new mounted Falken Wildpeak M/T 35×12.50R17 on a Black Rhino Stadium wheel. It has never turned under the weight or power of a vehicle and was purchased only because a place I went required a spare.
Pictures are clear. Title is clear. Description is clear.
Picture show the little hair things still everywhere on the tire.
Stamped 11th week of 2021 and kept in a garage.
“Is this just for one?!?!?”
“Yes. $200 for something new that retails for close to $700 means there is only one, not four”
“That makes no sense!”
I mean, I have had many is-this-available ghosts, which I expected, but too many of the above to have any faith left in the average person.
The FB Marketplace “Is this available?” auto-message button may be the worst idea FB has ever implemented in anything.
I always tell myself “don’t reply to the idiots, they won’t buy it anyway” but inevitably every “Is this available” is met with “Yes, when do you want to come look at it.” Someone recently asked me what color the car I was selling is, but not only did I include about 1 dozen high quality photos, the ad described the car as black on black, and I clicked the little indicator so you can sort by car color. Absolutely maddening.
I would say the majority of people who are not going to trade something in still send a request for quote to Carvana or Carmax to see if they can sell a car for enough to avoid feeling like they need to deal with FB Marketplace tire kickers and so on. Probably the only ones left on those sites besides small dealers is the people trying to sell the thing those purchase your car lots don’t want to touch.
Aluminum and steel import tax Now that’s a great way to lower canned food prices.
Are YOUR grocery prices lower?
Way to go!
they have no issue with higher prices as the poors don’t matter to them.. the thing with the raised prices on steel and Aluminum, the domestics will just charge the same so no all prices are up!
All my regular websites are ones I subscribe to. Autopian, ArsTechnica, Aftermath.site (old Kotaku staff), and motomatters.com (essentially 1 guy that writes 3,000+ words about every MotoGP race and I love him for it). I guess I still check Jalopnik out of some misplaced nostalgia but I wouldn’t even say I read it anymore.
Car shopping is the usual: Craigslist, Autotrader, FB Marketplace, depends what I am looking for really. BaT or C&B for shits and giggles but nothing I’ve ever considered buying.
Thanks for the aftermath.site. I used to love reading that site but I moved away from all gawker sites around the creation of the autopian.
I occasionally look at the comments on the German Lighting Site, but I read and savor The Autopian.
Mercedes’ arrivals are so well researched and interesting, Adrian’s are so snarky, David’s and Torch’s are classic. There isn’t an Autopian writer I don’t like.
And given how much I read (including books), that’s saying a lot.
If you aren’t trying to find something specific and just want the best deal, Nextdoor is surprisingly good (just ignore all the people complaining that they saw a teen in their neighborhood or whatever). Buyers face less competition and the sellers are a little less likely to have done some “research” and decided they could get double the actual value.
Way too many things. Tech news, regular news, stuff about games, stuff about skydiving, science news…and sometimes a website about cars. I forget the name. It brings to mind the word “utopian,” so it’s probably like “Car Paradise Resident.” There’s a goofy guy named Jack Flashlightski or something, Mike Difficultree, Beemer Roader, the Rook, and a ska designer named Adrianna or something.
Most of my Internet reading is either here or a news aggregator (Yahoo, MSN). The news stuff gets a bit worrisome sometimes (okay, daily), so I’d be tempted to change my user name to Bela Covfefe but I don’t want to wind up on somebody’s naughty list when the excrement hits the radiator fan, if you know what I mean.
As for car shopping, it usually starts with a search on a large auto sales site (Cars For Sale, AutoTrader, etc) range limited to a couple of hundred miles at most. Research on specific models usually involves some time on the manufacturer’s website, then trips to a dealership for test drives.
My only private purchase was for my very first car, and the guy was a crook. (The car shorted out on my way home about 15 minutes after purchase, leaving me stranded on the roadside back in the days before cell phones.) I’ve sold two cars privately, but otherwise they get traded in at a dealership or sold to the scrap yard after reaching end-of-life.
We tend to split new vs used car purchases about 50-50. If the wife is going to drive it, it’s almost always new (I can think of only one exception). I’m way more flexible on that for myself – I’ve learned a lot about how to evaluate (and repair) a vehicle over the years, and now I have a cell phone. 🙂
Alcoa mines and processes bauxite in Jamaica and then ships it to Iceland where power is cheap for further processing. This is how things are done in a world economy, the interdependency is a good thing. If you’re willing to pay more for something – a coffee maker, a washing machine, all the crap you buy at Walmart, and steel, and aluminum, you can make it all here in the good old US of A. But don’t complain about the price. And you’re in luck because there’s a crap job in a coal mine just waiting for you. Get off your butt, roll up your sleeves and get to work, and watch out for the black lung desease.
I read websites with articles written by Freaks and Geeks, and published by weirdos and oddballs.
I shop for cars online until physical presence is absolutely necessary. Why would I willingly subject myself to the dealership experience more than strictly necessary?
I only regularly come here to read articles, a bears blogs, tech blog and a Blackhawks blog. Car shopping is anywhere on the internet it can be cars.com, Facebook, eBay and so on. Just depends the type of vehicle I am looking for.
This class action thing was always inevitable. Elon has been bullshitting from day one. I don’t care if he believed his own BS or not. He should have factually known that the cars were not capable of doing what he kept promising they would soon do. That’s fine once of twice maybe, but this has gone on for over a decade with cars sold as capable aging out of service while never providing the promised benefit. To me this is just simple fraud of staggering proportions. No truly functional camera based system exists because such systems can never properly function in the real world. As such, Tesla’s camera only system is by definition incapable of that which Elon claimed it was able. That’s willful fraud and should be remedied accordingly.
It really does feel ridiculous they’ve gotten away with it for so long when it is clearly false advertising for like a decade at this point.
Has anyone successfully sent their Tesla out trolling for ride fares while they site in the office for 8 hours? I’m pretty sure Elon promised you could. He also told me the CyberTruck was bulletproof as well, so yeah.
Being a drug-addled Nazi liar who overpromises and underdelivers, I’m surprised the class action suits didn’t come sooner. Maybe those of us who have to share the roads with their beta testers can join in the fun!