Home Charging Still Takes 10 Hours. It Did in 2023 Too.
Every launch promises quicker charging, and every year the fast-charger figures do improve. Meanwhile the number that actually governs owning one — how long it takes on the socket in your garage — hasn't moved since 2023.
Electric Cars Lose Range on the Highway. Gas Cars Gain It.
Every driver knows highway miles are the easy ones. That's true for a petrol engine and false for a battery — EPA figures show electric cars losing 11% of their range the moment you get up to speed, and nobody mentions it at the dealership.
Premium Fuel Will Cost You $8,012 Over Five Years
Every window sticker carries a five-year fuel figure almost nobody reads. I pulled it for 6,000 recent models and sorted by fuel type. The spread between the best and worst column is nearly fifteen thousand dollars.
People Run the Same VIN 15 Times Before They Buy
I expected one lookup per car. The logs say otherwise: 430,409 checks spread across 28,797 unique VINs. People return to the same seventeen digits over and over, and the shape of that curve is the most honest picture of car buying I've seen in our data.
Every Car Brand Has One Signature Failure. Here's Yours.
I grouped 41,337 NHTSA complaint records by brand and looked at what each one's owners complain about most. They are not the same, and the differences map almost perfectly onto engineering decisions those companies made a decade ago.
The Brands With the Fewest Recalls (And Why It Misleads)
Kia averages 25 recalls per model, Ford 91. It looks like a quality ranking — and it mostly measures something else entirely.
Kia Has More American-Built VIN Codes Than Ford
The first digit of a VIN tells you where the car was assembled, not what the badge suggests. I went through the manufacturer code registry brand by brand, and the phrase "buy American" turns out to be much harder to act on than it sounds.
What America Actually Drives: The Used Market Says Trucks
New-car sales tell you what people were sold. The used market tells you what stuck around — and it is overwhelmingly trucks.
These SUVs Got Five Stars in Every Crash Test — and Three for Rollover
NHTSA rates three things and averages them into one number. For big SUVs, two of those scores are perfect and the third is not — and the third is the one that measures the crash they are actually prone to.
The Same F-150 Costs $8,000 Less in El Paso Than in Missoula
Truck prices vary more by city than most people would believe, and the temptation is to go buy where it's cheap. I matched F-150s of the same years city by city, then checked the odometers, and the free lunch got smaller.
New Cars Do 16,800 Miles a Year. Ten-Year-Old Ones Do 12,000.
Everyone quotes 12,000 miles a year as the standard. The listings say that number is only true for a decade-old car — new ones do far more, old ones far less, and knowing which end you are on changes what counts as high mileage.
Toyota Has 56 Recalls Per Model. It's Still Reliable.
Toyota's whole reputation is things not going wrong. Then you see the recall count — higher than Honda, double Kia — and it needs explaining.