Good morning and welcome to The Downshift, or TDS for short.
The Downshift gathers all the automotive headlines you need to know as you start your day. News is summarized in a sentence or two, and you can follow links for a deeper dive. Happy Friday, let’s get into it.
🧑⚖️ Tesla has been sued over the Cybertruck’s door design, following “a series of incidents,” in Bloomberg’s words, of people being trapped inside the vehicle following a loss of power, in some cases leading to injury or death. The suit was filed on Thursday in California state court by the family of a college student who died in a Cybertruck crash last November in Piedmont.
🔌 In other Tesla news, sales of the EV maker’s products increased by 7.4% in the third quarter, compared to last year. However, the market doesn’t seem to think that trend will hold now that the federal tax credit has disappeared, and so shares fell by 3.6% anyway, Bloomberg reported.
🫰 More than one in six car buyers are financing vehicles with $1,000 monthly payments, according to data from Experian, relayed by Automotive News. And if you want to identify precisely when that happened, blame the supply shortage between 2021 and 2022, when the percentage of buyers with $1,000-plus payments ballooned from 6.7% to 15.5%.
🗓️ If you’re wondering when Jaguar Land Rover will restart production after a crippling cyberattack, it seems they are, too. All a spokesperson could tell Autocar as of Friday was that activity would resume “in the coming days.” Wednesday marked a month since the company’s plants shut down due to the hack.
🔥 Nissan will recall 19,000 Leaf EVs in the U.S. due to a fire risk when fast charging, the NHTSA said Friday, per Reuters.
🇬🇧 British startup Encor has announced a Lotus Esprit restomod in the style of the Series 1 cars, though they will use Series 4 donors from the ’90s because they incorporated V8s. They’ll cost $580,000 in addition to the cost of sourcing your own Esprit for the project, according to Hagerty.
📱 A Xiaomi SU7 owner in China claims that their car drove away on its own while parked and with nobody in the driver’s seat, per CarNewsChina. It was reported that an Apple device sent a remote parking command to the vehicle, though the owner says their phone was not in use at the time of the incident, and supplied a video to back this up.
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