High Mileage vs. High Tech

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Table of Contents

• High Mileage vs. High Tech: Why EV Longevity Isn’t …

• Why Stellantis Feels Like British Leyland 2.0

• Between ICE Present and EV Future, Legacy Carmaker …

• Ram HD 6.4 HEMI V8 vs. Ram HD 6.7 Cummins I6

• Spy Photos and Renderings

• The “KIA Boys” Are Back

• The finish line

High Mileage vs. High Tech: Why EV Longevity Isn’t the Same As ICE Longevity

By: Sergiu Tudose

A high-mileage EV isn’t just a passenger vehicle like any other. It’s a tech product, and tech products tend to age very differently from traditional internal combustion cars.

If you bought an ICE-powered Toyota back in... let’s say 2021 – it's not going to be completely “left behind” from a technology standpoint by future ICE-powered models. Whereas if you bought a bZ4X a few years back, even if you’re happy with it, do you really think anybody’s going to want it as a used car purchase by the end of this decade?

Arguing in favor of most EVs as being a good buy regardless of mileage is like arguing that your old iPhone 11 will still be a great gadget in the year 2030 because you hardly use it and your battery health is still at 80% or more.

For as long as I can remember, buyers have approached mileage in ICE cars with a straightforward logic. Racking up 34,000 miles on your Camry or Civic is next to nothing. You know the maintenance, you can measure wear, and you can predict the lifespan easily. More importantly though, those cars were never at risk of becoming obsolete from a technological standpoint.

The core value proposition of your 8-year-old Camry hasn’t eroded that much. Electric cars, on the other hand, tend to age on two separate fronts. They wear mechanically, like any other car, but they also age as tech products, and that’s where 35,000 miles (or 50,000 miles, 80,000 miles etc) starts to look different.

When it comes to battery health, even if degradation slows after that initial dip, capacity loss is inevitable. A used EV buyer will always ask about the number of fast charges, how often the battery was nearly depleted, or what climate the vehicle lived in. ICE buyers rarely ask such questions about engines with 35,000 miles.

Then there’s the technology curve. Maybe I’m wrong, but it really does feel as though EVs are evolving nearly as quickly as smartphones. Charging speeds improve year after year, ranges get better, as do driver assistance features. A high-mileage EV bought today will be nothing but a visibly outdated piece of technology 8-10 years from now, competing with newer models boasting double the range.

Speaking of feeling outdated, EVs are inherently quiet, and the fact that there’s no engine noise means there’s nothing to mask squeaks, rattles, or other types of noises. So, every loosened bit of plastic will make itself heard. You might dread the day you went for a budget-grade trim. This type of thing will be just background noise in a Civic or a Camry, but not so much in a high-mileage Model 3.

Many EVs rely on lightweight, cost-cutting materials to offset those heavy batteries, so those materials can start making noise far sooner than expected. Add the harsher suspension setups (compared to ICE cars), and you’ll see just how the perception of quality declines faster in an EV than with a traditional combustion engine car.

As for where things are headed, picture the used car market in 2030 and an EV buyer trying to decide between an ultra-affordable 2022 Tesla Model Y with 80,000 miles on the clock and a brand-new 2030MY EV with zero miles.

Maybe that Model Y still has a little over 200

miles of range in that battery (on a single charge), maybe it doesn’t. Maybe that buyer lives in a cold climate. Meanwhile, the 2030 EV is offering 600+ miles of range, and a sub-10-minute charging time to 100%. It’s game over.

Note: please continue reading the full article on our site.

Why Stellantis Feels Like British Leyland 2.0

By: Alex Oagana

If you want to know what happens when a car company grows too big, too bloated, and too unfocused for its own good, history has already given us the ultimate case study: British Leyland. That glorious mess of an automaker was born in 1968 when the UK government thought it was a good idea to merge pretty much every struggling British carmaker into one lumbering mega-conglomerate.

Austin, Morris, Rover, Triumph, Jaguar, MG, Mini, Land Rover - you name it, they all got shoved under one chaotic umbrella. The result was a decades-long comedy of errors featuring endless labor strikes, laughably bad quality, overlapping brands that cannibalized each other, and a management structure so confusing you’d need a PhD in bureaucracy to figure out who actually approved the Marina.

British Leyland was supposed to be the savior of the British car industry. Instead, it became its funeral director. The once-proud empire of Austin-Healeys, Jaguars, and Minis collapsed into a punchline, and by the 1980s, most of the brands were either sold off or left to rot in some government-funded warehouse.

Now, more than 50 years later, we have Stellantis - the Frankenstein’s monster stitched together from Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and PSA Group. On paper, Stellantis is a modern miracle: the world's fifth-largest automaker, 14 brands under its control, a global footprint, and billions in revenue. But peel back the slick PowerPoint slides and corporate PR spin, and what you see looks eerily familiar. Too many brands, not enough direction, overlapping products, questionable quality, and a creeping suspicion that at some point, the whole house of cards will come tumbling down.

Let’s start with the obvious problem: fourteen brands. That’s not a portfolio, that’s a zoo. Jeep, Chrysler, Dodge, Ram, Fiat, Alfa Romeo, Maserati, Peugeot, Citroen, Opel, Vauxhall, DS, Lancia, Abarth. Each one comes with its own history, its own baggage, and its own half-baked plans for survival. Some, like Jeep and Ram, are profitable juggernauts. Others, like Lancia and Chrysler, are effectively brand names sitting on life support, wheeled out every few years with some halfhearted 'revival' announcement before fading back into irrelevance.

This is exactly what doomed British Leyland. They had too many brands competing in the same segments, eating each other alive. Why buy a Triumph when you could buy a Rover? Why buy an Austin when a Morris offered basically the same car with a different badge? Stellantis is no different. Do we really need both Peugeot and Opel building compact hatchbacks on the same platform, just with different grilles? Does the world actually benefit from Fiat and Citroen both selling budget-friendly city cars that look like they were designed during a coffee break?

Note: for the full article, please continue reading on our site.

Between ICE Present and EV Future, Legacy Carmakers Chose Irrelevance

By: Cristian Agatie

Legacy carmakers seem to think the EV revolution is already past its peak point. It started when Tesla launched the Model S in 2012, was deemed inevitable as the Model Y became the best-selling car in the world, and is now waning as Tesla's sales plummet. After all, if Tesla cannot prove EVs are the future, who can?

To be fair, America did not trust electric vehicles, which it saw as an exponent of woke culture. Many in the US still consider EVs as an abomination forced upon them by a corrupt Democratic government. This perception made American legacy carmakers stick their heads in the sand, hoping the danger would go away. It also influenced European carmakers, some of whom are still convinced they can survive on gas-powered cars alone.

This belief made everyone chicken out when the current US administration pushed back against electric cars, batteries, and renewable energy like solar and wind. Many legacy carmakers stopped their EV and battery projects, blaming low demand and market difficulties. However, it wasn't the removal of the EV credit that made them pledge allegiance to Big Oil. It was their continued belief that EVs are only a temporary craze, which was set to disappear, and now there's a strong reason to believe it will.

European carmakers have also bragged about bold EV plans while sabotaging the EV revolution by lobbying the EU to allow them to continue selling the combustion vehicles they were good at. But American and European carmakers are not alone in faking electrification, hoping it will disappear. Japanese carmakers have never been fans of electric vehicles, and EVs made by Toyota, Honda, and Mazda are laughable.

One after another, these companies have canceled new EV models and scaled back their EV plans. Stellantis scrapped its most anticipated EV, the Ram 1500 REV pickup truck. Honda ceased production of the Acura ZDX, and the sister model Prologue is also expected to go on the chopping block.

Porsche cut back its EV plans and delayed the SSP Sport platform well beyond 2030. Audi is again turning toward combustion cars and plans to build them indefinitely. At the same time, Volkswagen has paused EV production at its factories in Germany due to low demand and is reconsidering its EV plans.

They all insist that the low demand for EVs doesn't justify new investments. They try to convince everyone that people don't want EVs, they want gas cars, maybe helped a little by a small electric motor to fake electrification. Not once have they admitted that their electric models are poorly designed and disconnected from what customers want from a modern vehicle.

That's why legacy carmakers either made a bet that electric vehicles would disappear, or they deliberately chose to continue what they are doing for as long as they can and then close shop. As long as gas-powered cars still sell, they are doing ok, but that won't last forever. Electric vehicles are superior in every way, and people who went electric are not looking back to gas cars.

This means that the market for gas cars will shrink every year, every month, every second, no matter how good or efficient combustion engines become. And when it gets small enough that it can no longer support all the companies building ICE vehicles today, they will start dying like dinosaurs. By then, pure EV manufacturers will be further ahead, and competing with them will be impossible from a weak position. We've already seen it with Nokia and Kodak. We know how this is ending.

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ng on our site.

Ram HD 6.4 HEMI V8 vs. Ram HD 6.7 Cummins I6

By: Mircea Panait

Beyond the stronger frame and more robust suspension, heavy-duty trucks are big on torque as well because they have to fulfill their workhorse duties. The Ram truck brand's three-quarter-ton and one-ton models are unique in the segment due to the optional Cummins turbo diesel, which is a different animal from the Power Stroke V8 and the Duramax V8.

The big question, however, is whether you need the pricier Cummins over the less complex HEMI gasser. To answer that question, one has to consider a variety of things, beginning with towing capacity. The payload rating also matters a lot, as does yearly mileage.

Also consider what your ideal Ram HD will be used for. That being said, both engines have their strong points and weaknesses. The 6.7-liter Cummins, for example, is notorious for Bosch-supplied CP4 fuel pumps that may fail prematurely. Ram and Cummins returned to the older CP3 design for model year 2021, whereas the current iteration of the inline-six turbo diesel employs the CP8 high-pressure fuel pump.

The Ram HD specification of the 6.4-liter HEMI is known for multi-displacement system and lifter issues, along with exhaust manifold leaks. That being said, let's kick this piece off with a closer look at the Big Gas Engine version of the free-breathing 392 mill.

The 6.4-liter HEMI naturally aspirated V8

Hemispherical combustion chambers are not unique to Chrysler, but Chrysler made hemi-head engines popular by using the Hemi moniker. Originally called FirePower, the first-gen Hemi was replaced by the legendary 426 leviathan we all know and love. The 426 was discontinued in 1971, only for the Auburn Hills-based automaker to bring the Hemi back in 2003.

Now advertised in all caps, the HEMI comes in three displacements for model years 2025 and 2026. The 5.7-liter naturally aspirated V8, which is called Eagle, can be found in the 2026 Ram 1500 and the Dodge brand's Durango. Its larger sibling is referred to as the Apache, but enthusiasts prefer to call it 392 after its displacement. 392 cubes are 7.0 liters in metric speak.

The 6.2-liter supercharged V8 is the HEMI to rule them all. It launched for the 2015 model year with a massive 707 horsepower and 650 pound-feet (881 Newton-meters) on tap. For the 2023 model year, it climaxed to the tune of 1,025 horsepower and 945 pound-feet (1,281 Newton-meters) on E85 corn brew.

Now that you're acquainted with the current-gen HEMI engine family, we can focus on the 6.4-liter Big Gas Engine of the Ram HD line. As implied, this fellow differs from the 392 of the Durango in the sense that Chrysler had to make certain modifications to enhance durability. While both mills feature cast-iron blocks with aluminum twin-plug cylinder heads, the Big Gas Engine is running a slightly lower compression ratio.

For the full article, please continue reading on our site.

Spy Photos and Renderings

By: Mircea Panait

Have you ever imagined Ferrari making electric vehicles? To be revealed in three stages, the Italian automaker's first-ever production battery-electric vehicle has been recently spied with 250 GT SWB Breadvan-like camo hiding its final body panels. From the looks of it, Ferrari decided on a five-door coupe thingy instead of a proper GT, an SUV, or a supercar. Will it sell as well as the Purosangue? Given the lack of an internal combustion soul, we have our reservations about that.

Expected with in-wheel hub motors, the zero-emission thriller is referred to as F244 by the Maranello-based automaker. Ferrari originally intended to immediately follow this fellow up with a second battery-electric vehicle, yet insufficient demand has forced the Italian automaker to delay the F245's debut to at least 2028.

Our spy photographers have also caught BMW's first electric X7 on public roads, an X7 that should weigh more than 2.5 tons. Instead of the Neue Klasse platform of the second-generation iX3, the iX7 uses the next iteration of the CLAR, a modular architecture that already has a handful of all-electric applications.

That doesn't mean the CLuster ARchitecture-based iX7 will be inferior to its compact-sized cousin, though. BMW is certain to use gen-six battery and motor tech for larger electric utility vehicles. Although the iX5 is getting an FCEV option, the fuel cell powertrain is not likely to carry over to the iX7.

In the internal combustion space, Lexus is busy testing its long-awaited replacement for the LC and the spiritual heir of the LFA. Previewed by the superb-looking Sport Concept, the LFR is a GT with a V8-shaped heart that beats to the tune of Gazoo Racing.

Wait, scratch that! Make it the plural form of heart because said twin-turbocharged V8 is assisted by a yet-to-be-detailed hybrid system. Over 800 horsepower is the most correct guesstimate we have right now. Certain people look forward to around 900 at full song, which is quite a bit more than the LFA's 552 horsepower and the LC 500's 471 horsepower.

In the rendering space, the one that piqued our interest the most in the past week is the mid-size pickup envisioned by pixel artist Theophilus Chin. Leaning heavily on the Dakota Nightfall Concept, which will turn into a production model in 2026, the Dodge Dakota's replacement should borrow a lot of styling cues from said concept and the Ram 1500.

Unofficially designated 2028 Ram Dakota for the time being, the midsizer is allegedly underpinned by the STLA Frame platform. The Dakota Nightfall Concept is rocking Chinese underpinnings that were not designed with North America in mind. With a bit of luck, the Dakota for North America will follow in the footsteps of the 2026 Ram 1500 REV with a range-extended powertrain of its own.

The “KIA Boys” Are Back

By: Bogdan Popa

The Kia Boys never sleep, and police in two more American cities warn that teenagers often see your car as a sitting duck. The number of stolen Kias and Hyundais keeps rising, and law enforcement says you have two options.

You can either patch your Kia – which is free and takes about 30 minutes – or pray that the Kia Boys don't find your car. Either way, you might still need a steering wheel lock because teenagers don't seem to care whether your vehicle already has the anti-theft update.

After announcing iOS 26, Apple finally started shipping the brand-new iPhone 17. As it happens every year, early adopters have already found the first issues, and one of them prevents them from using CarPlay wirelessly with an iPhone 17. Fortunately, a fix is coming, though it could take a while until it goes live.

The Android Auto space received mixed news this week. On the one hand, users started struggling with zoomed-in interfaces on the Coolwalk screen. No fix is available, but Google is already investigating. Second, the search firm shipped new updates in the beta and stable channels, so if you're still battling old bugs, it's time to check these new versions out. 

Congratulations for reaching the finish line!

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