The News Wheel
No Comments

Car News In the Rearview: Szechuan Sauce Volkswagens and Other Ominous Things

Decrease Font Size Increase Font Size Text Size Print This Page

Hello, and welcome to In the Rearview, where I bring you the week’s top car news in delightful, nugget-sized form.


Nicely Done: Here is what Chevy is doing to help those affected by Hurricane Irma


GM Canada Logo

This week, we start with news out of Canada, where the General Motors CAMI Assembly Plant strike has finally come to an end, with GM giving up a four-year contract with some bonuses and raises, but still not any promises to keep the Equinox’s production at the plant.

2018 GMC Sierra 2500HD

Meanwhile, GM has held a super-duper-mega-secret meeting of dealership representatives to show off a secret prototype of a new 2019 GMC Sierra 1500 Denali, but wouldn’t show them the most super-duper secret of all–just what they did to its bed to be able to call it “revolutionary.”

1967 Mazda Cosmo rotary engine

Then, I felt like I had to personally apply some brakes to the hype train, because this week people suddenly starting going “MAZDA IS DEFINITELY PUTTING OUT A ROTARY-ENGINE PLUG-IN HYBRID NEXT YEAR,” when all it said was it was probably making a rotary-engine plug-in, and is putting out a plug-in hybrid next year.

At this point, fans of Rick and Morty are probably more obsessed with the Szechuan sauce than Rick actually is

And speaking of hype, just how good is McDonald’s Szechuan Sauce? Well, apparently, to one guy who is really, really into Rick and Morty, good enough  to trade his VW GTI for.

In more global news, Paris apparently decided that France in general was onto something when it announced a ban on combustion cars starting in 2040, but that that just wasn’t good enough. So, long story short, no more combustion engines in Paris after 2030.

Then, Shell, the petroleum company, did something that I thought was a really, really good idea–it has bought up an electric car charging firm. Really, it’s a win-win for Shell to have both chargers and pumps at their stations, since 30-minute charging times means a lot of time hanging out and eating snacks.


More Good Things: Meet the top-selling 2018 Chevrolet Equinox


Meanwhile, Ford is also taking another step to support electric vehicles, by both tripling its charging stations for its employees and starting a not-at-all-pointedly-named Team Edison to study electrics.

Kobe Steel building

Finally, it turns out that the third-largest steel producer in the world has been lying to customers about the quality of its metals for the past decade, delivering possibly poorer quality metals to people in nice, low-impact manufacturing such as airplanes, space shuttles, bullet trains, and, of course, automobiles. We don’t even know how bad the damage is (or will be) yet, but it can’t be good.