Hyundai and Kia must pay $137 million in fines and safety improvements because they moved too slowly to recall over 1 million vehicles with engines that can fail. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced the penalties on Friday. “It’s critical that manufacturers appropriately recognize the urgency of their safety recall responsibilities and provide timely and candid information to the agency about all safety issues,” NHTSA Deputy Administrator James Owens said in a statemen

Volkswagen is bringing forward the development of a small electric car for the mass market in anticipation of tougher climate regulations, according to plans seen by Reuters, as it seeks to boost sales in a new green era. Under the project dubbed "Small BEV (Battery Electric Vehicle)", engineers are racing to develop a purely-battery powered car around the size of a Polo which will be available for between 20,000 and 25,000 euros ($24,000-30,000). This would make it cheaper than Volkswagen's I

Lewis Hamilton heads into Sunday’s Bahrain Grand Prix as the most successful driver in Formula One history, and now a seven times world champion, but the Briton will not be slowing down as he aims to round out a record-breaking season in style. The Mercedes driver clinched the title at the previous race in Turkey to equal Michael Schumacher’s record seven, having already surpassed the Ferrari great’s tally of 91 race wins. With three races to go and 10 wins from 14, Hamilton is on course for h

The U.S. government's road safety agency is investigating complaints that suspensions can fail on nearly 115,000 Tesla electric vehicles. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says it has 43 complaints that linkages near the ball joints can fail, allowing contact between the tire and wheel liner. In addition, NHTSA says it has eight complaints that may involve suspension failures that haven’t been confirmed by photos or service records.

Renault will stop assembling new cars at its Flins factory outside Paris and turn the site into a research, recycling and repair centre by 2024 in a move set to save full-time jobs at the plant, the company said on Wednesday. "The status quo was no longer possible, we had to be lucid about this," Renault Chairman Jean-Dominique Senard told an online news conference after meeting with unions at Flins, flanked by new Chief Executive Luca De Meo. Renault, which had been struggling with waning pro

If you traded a stock in the past week, there's a fair chance it was Tesla. Shares in the electric car maker led by CEO Elon Musk rose almost 3% on Wednesday and have now surged 40% since Nov. 16, when it was announced Tesla would join the S&P 500 in December. One of Wall Street's most loved - and hated - stocks, Tesla was already the U.S. stock market's most traded companies by average daily value, but trading has surged in recent sessions, along with Tesla's stock price.

Tesla Inc is issuing two recalls covering about 9,500 vehicles for roof trim that may separate and bolts that may not have been properly tightened. The larger recall covers 9,136 Model X cars from the 2016 model year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/rcl/2020/RCLRPT-20V710-9316.PDF on Wednesday. NHTSA said the front and spine cosmetic roof trim may have been adhered without first using primer, and one or both pieces of trim may separa

U.S. electric vehicle maker Tesla is looking at expanding in Europe by entering the mass-market segment with a compact car, Chief Executive Elon Musk said on Tuesday. "Possibly in Europe it would make sense to do, I guess, a compact car, perhaps a hatchback or something like that," Musk told an European online conference on batteries hosted by the German government. "In the U.S., the cars tend to be bigger for personal taste reasons," he said.

Ford Motor Co said on Tuesday it has ordered a dozen ultra-cold freezers that can safely store Pfizer Inc's COVID-19 vaccine, a move aimed at ensuring the U.S. automaker's workers have access to vaccines when they are rolled out nationally. Ford's purchase mirrors efforts by U.S. states and cities to buy equipment to store millions of doses of Pfizer's vaccine at temperatures of minus 70 Celsius (minus 94 Fahrenheit), significantly below the standard for vaccines of 2-8 C (36-46 F). Health car

Shares of the electric-car maker have risen nearly 28% since the S&P Dow Jones Indices confirmed they would add the company to Wall Street's benchmark index from Dec. 21. The recent rally has also boosted Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk's net worth by $7.2 billion to $127.9 billion, helping him go past Bill Gates to become the world's second-richest person, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Tesla has become by far the world's most valuable automaker, despite a production that is

Quality is once again Job One at Ford Motor Co. Taking a page from the automaker's ad slogan of the 1980s and '90s, Ford's new chief executive, Jim Farley, is aiming to rein in rising warranty repair costs that are a key reason why the Dearborn, Michigan, automaker's financial performance in North America has lagged that of its archrival, General Motors Co. As part of its new effort to cut warranty costs, Ford has told suppliers it will charge them upfront for half the cost of a warranty probl