Quick Shifts

Each week I bring you the top stories in the auto industry along with my commentary or sometimes amusing thoughts about the craziness that goes on in the world of cars.  

Stories you'll find today:

• When Your Explorer Goes Exploring Without You
• Half-Million-Dollar Flush
• From Hot-N-Ready to Booked-N-Processed.
• The Most Secure Car on Earth, Except for the Trunk

When Your Explorer Goes Exploring Without You.  A Ford Explorer ST owner in Illinois dropped his SUV off for a simple sunroof-noise repair and wound up starring in his own low-budget remake of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. While he was out of the country, his FordPass app lit up with alerts showing the SUV wasn’t just being “tested” — it was being lived in. By the time he got home, the car had piled on roughly 100 miles, including a jaunt down a toll road the owner certainly didn’t authorize. When he brought it back a second time, the mystery joyrider added another 140 miles, which is less “diagnosing a rattle” and more “using your customer’s ST as a commuter special.” The story unraveled quickly: a dealership tech was helping himself to the keys like the Explorer was a company demo. The dealer fired him, reimbursed the tolls, adjusted the lease, and threw in free oil changes for life — which sounds generous until you remember the customer didn’t ask for the “extended-mileage surprise package” in the first place. It’s a reminder that we live in a world where your car is more honest with you than some of the people working on it. FordPass doesn’t care about excuses — it snitches in real time. And while most service departments would never dream of pulling a stunt like this, stories like this one are exactly why owners watch their apps like hawks and why trust, once dinged, takes more than free oil changes to restore.

Half-Million-Dollar Flush.  Elon Musk’s Boring Company is back in the news, and—stop me if you’ve heard this one—it’s not because anyone suddenly decided the Hyperloop was a good idea. Regulators in Clark County say the tunnel crew treated public manholes like their own personal dump chute, off-loading drilling fluids into the sewer system even after they were told to knock it off. The county hit them with roughly half a million dollars in fines for sending a chemical slurry—including one compound so nasty employees reportedly got chemical burns—straight into infrastructure that was never meant to handle Musk’s mystery soup. Inspectors say the team paused the dumping while they were being watched, then started right back up the minute the clipboard went home, which is exactly the kind of subtlety you expect from a company called “Boring.” For an outfit that loves to pitch futurist visions, this is the sort of old-fashioned environmental no-no that usually ends with lawyers, press releases, and a line item in the budget no one wants to explain. It’s another reminder that big ideas don’t matter if the basics—like not dumping toxic goo into public pipes—aren’t handled first.

From Hot-N-Ready to Booked-N-Processed. A Florida woman was clocked at 107 mph in a 55 because she was desperately trying to make it to Little Caesars before closing — which is the kind of commitment to $6 pizza you usually only see in college dorms and late-night bad decisions. Deputies say she blew by them like she had pole position at the Indy 500, only to discover Florida’s new 100-mph law doesn’t include a “but I was hungry” carve-out. And it gets better: when they asked why she was in such a hurry, she reportedly admitted she didn’t want to miss grabbing a Hot-N-Ready before midnight, which is a level of honesty that belongs on a motivational poster titled “Know Thyself.” Instead of driving home with a cardboard box full of regret, she got a night in jail, a misdemeanor charge, and a story that’ll follow her longer than the smell of takeout in a 12-year-old Corolla. At 107 mph, there’s no room for reaction time, no margin for error, and no justification involving pepperoni that’s going to make a trooper nod in understanding. Pro tip: if you’re pushing triple digits for budget pizza, the problem isn’t the closing time — it’s every life choice that led to that moment.

The Most Secure Car on Earth, Except for the Trunk.  The presidential limo—yes, that presidential limo, the multi-ton armored “Beast” that’s supposed to shrug off anything short of a meteor—rolled through Palm Beach with its trunk hanging open like an absent-minded dad leaving the garage door up. The Secret Service says it was just a mechanical hiccup during a motorcade from Mar-a-Lago to the airport, nothing inside went missing, and no national secrets were flapping in the breeze. Still, for a vehicle designed to withstand chemical attacks, ballistic assaults, and the occasional political firestorm, it’s not a great look when the only part that misbehaves is the simplest hinge in the whole operation. It’s a reminder that even the most over-engineered ride on Earth can be humbled by the same gremlin that plagues every 12-year-old SUV at the grocery store. Sometimes it’s not the threats outside the limo that cause trouble—it’s the trunk latch inside it.