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The Drive 🤝 your inbox. Every weekday The Daily Brief wraps up the biggest stories and our exclusive reporting on the auto industry and car culture. Statistically speaking, you probably don’t drive a diesel. Oil burners represent a tiny chunk of light-duty vehicle sales, even when you factor in heavy-duty pickups and the like. But in the freight world, if you’re hauling heavy loads, chances are you’re fueling up with diesel—or maybe you were, if you drove for one of the 16 trucking companies that went bankrupt last quarter. According to multiple sources, the rising cost of diesel fuel was…

An OpenAI publicist tried to change the topic of CEO Sam Altman’s interview with Vanity Fair’s Mark Guiducci after the editor brought up a ChatGPT user’s suicide. When Guiducci confronted Altman about the incident, the publicist warned Guiducci about running out of time, saying she’d like to “move on” to another topic.The interruption came shortly after Guiducci asked Altman if he knew who Laura Reiley is, a journalist who wrote an essay for The New York Times about her daughter’s conversations with ChatGPT before she took her own life. “Her daughter committed suicide after speaking to ChatGPT. ChatGPT did not…

Automotive We have been spending quite a bit of time lately looking at what is happening inside Stellantis, and the new Dodge Charger has become one of the clearest examples of why the company has so much work to do. Just days after we reported on Stellantis deploying more than 2,000 engineers and creating nearly 50 “quality war rooms” to attack vehicle problems faster, the Charger story has taken another interesting turn. That report followed our own week behind the wheel of the 2026 Dodge Charger R/T Plus Sixpack S.O. 4-Door, where we found plenty to like about…

The penalty could be up to 10 percent of Google’s annual revenue. Gary Hershorn/Getty Images A Polish regulator said that Google isn’t playing by the rules when the tech giant displays articles from local media publishers in Google Search, Google News and Google Discover. Poland’s Office of Competition and Consumer Protection, abbreviated as UOKiK, said that Google leaned on its dominant market position and failed to provide necessary data when negotiating compensation with the country’s news publishers. Tomasz Chróstny, president of UOKiK, said in a press release that there were rules that clearly laid out what info…

The Drive 🤝 your inbox. Every weekday The Daily Brief wraps up the biggest stories and our exclusive reporting on the auto industry and car culture. Volvo and Lamborghini aren’t often mentioned in the same sentence, but that’s exactly what’s happening here with YouTuber Peter Bjorck, the creator of the Volvoghini. Scroll through his Instagram, and you’ll see that he has a thing for mid-engined, Lambo V10-swapped Volvos. And not just any Volvo—old-school 240s—making his latest creation as silly as it is badass. Bjorck has been building and refining his 1975 Volvo 240/244 for several months, and in his latest…

Toyota Motor North America has opened the Toyota Battery Center of North America (TBC) at its research and development campus in Saline, Mich. The 30,000-square-foot facility serves as a central hub for battery evaluation and development across the entire life cycle, including raw material sourcing, customer applications, and recycling. Engineering teams at the site will support Toyota’s manufacturing network by testing technologies for hybrid, plug-in hybrid, hydrogen, and fully electric vehicles. Toyota is also providing research access to the facility in partnership with the University of Michigan Electric Vehicle Center to foster research and train future battery engineers.

Credit: u/always_trolled on Reddit The Lucid Cosmos is out testing in California traffic. A camouflaged prototype of the midsize SUV was photographed on Highway 101 in Morgan Hill, about 40 miles south of Lucid’s headquarters in Newark. The four photos show the sub-$50,000 SUV from the rear and the side. They come two months after Lucid pushed the Cosmos launch back to the second half of 2027. Lucid Cosmos prototype spotted on Highway 101 Reddit user u/always_trolled posted the photos on the Lucid subreddit. Highway signs in the shots for downtown Morgan Hill, East Dunne Avenue, and Cochrane Road put…

That’s despite having less hydrogen on board than its predecessor.

Revealed back in January at the Detroit Auto Show, the 2027 Ford Bronco RTR is about to go on sale this month. It stems from a collaboration between the automaker and RTR Vehicles, the aftermarket powerhouse specializing in OEM+ conversions and parts fabrication for a variety of Ford models. But the new Bronco RTR lets you have all that goodness straight from the factory, and the first deliveries are expected to reach customers in January 2027. With orders opening soon, Ford has just announced the pricing details we’ve all been waiting for, so let’s go ahead and see what you’ll…

The European Union’s General Safety Regulation 2 cracked down on emissions, and the Mazda MX-5 Miata paid the price. Mazda decided to discontinue the 2.0-liter four-cylinder engine option for the Miata in the EU, leaving only the smaller 1.5-liter 4-cylinder available there. Meanwhile, the more powerful 2.0-liter mill remains available in several markets worldwide, including Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Losing the 2.0-liter engine hasn’t affected values so far, but in 20 years or so, when these are certified classics, what will that mean for owners? Or the future of the Miata as we know it? How…