Despite what Dunkin’ Donuts would have you believe, America runs on gasoline. We are a nation of drivers with a transit infrastructure geared overwhelmingly towards automobile travel (with fewer than one percent of those on US roads today being of the electric variety). We’re awash in cars (276 million were registered in the US as of 2020) with around 14 million new light duty trucks and passenger vehicles being sold annually, and nearly three times that amount (~40 million) in used cars.

Those figures slumped noticeably during the COVID lockdowns in 2020 and 2021, but now that travel restrictions have eased and life returns to a semblance of the old “normal,” demand for vehicles has spiked dramatically since the industry’s massive nosedive in April 2020. Combine that with low supplies of new vehicles due to the ongoing global processor chip shortage, and compounded by rising interest rates brought on by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the price for used vehicles has skyrocketed.

For used cars up to ten years old, the average price in March stood at $33,653, 40 percent higher than the year before. Newer used cars, those 1 to 3 years old, the average price was $41,000, up 37 percent year-over-year. “With nearly empty new car lots across the country, dealers have been holding prices of newer used cars high,” CoPilot CEO and founder Pat Ryan, told CNBC in April.

People are looking longer for used cars — around 171 days on average, up from 89 before the lockdowns, according to car shopping site, CoPilot — and paying top dollar for what they find. It’s not quite as bad as the new vehicle market where paying over MSRP has become the rule, rather than the exception. Prices for used vehicles have declined slightly in recent months, down 6.4 percent from January, but remain well above the pre-pandemic average.

“It’s potentially becoming a bit deflationary in that regard,” Jonathan Smoke, chief economist at Cox Automotive told CNBC in May, though he doubts it will immediately lead to a strong price correction. “This is not a commodity market that people are speculating, and used vehicles are assets that actually provide utility to folks.”

“We had an unusual circumstance over the last two years that stimulated demand, and we have limited supply,” he said.

Between the stiff competition, a short supply of available autos and a rapidly evolving market that takes place as much online as it does dealer lots, today’s car buyer faces some daunting prospects in their pursuit of a freshly used car. But there are still plenty of deals to be found, you just need to know where and how to look. But first, you need to decide what you’re looking for and how much you’re willing to spend for it.

What kind of car you need depends on what you plan to do with it. If you’re being unfairly forced back to the office and are looking for a daily commuter, you’re obviously going to want to look more towards smaller hatchbacks and sedans rather than commercial duty pickups — the reverse being true if you own a landscaping business. If you’ve got “$7-a-gallon-doesn’t-phase-me” money, maybe you’re better served commuting in an SUV instead. I don’t know, you do you.

Point is, you want to start with a nebulous idea of what you’ll generally use the vehicle for, then drill down through body type, drivetrain and engine types, into specific makes and models, options and model years until you’ve gotten a solid idea of what you want in a car and which cars will provide that (an excel sheet with all of this information — make, model, years to avoid or specifically look for, average price used, etc — can help you organize the process.) Then you get to take a looooong look at your bank balance and adjust your expectations accordingly.

While you’re doing your initial research, make sure to familiarize yourself with your local consumer protection laws, such as California’s Lemon Law. Doing so will help you spot any seller shenanigans before money changes hands.

Cox Automotive

As you can see in the chart above from the March 2022 Manheim Used Vehicle Value Index report, which follows the wholesale price of used vehicle sales, valuations have risen rapidly over the past two years. Before you start actively looking at vehicle listings, take a look around reputable car valuation sites like Kelley Blue Book, Edmunds, Consumer Reports or JD Power’s NADA guide to get a sense of what the vehicles on your list will likely set you back. Similarly, CarFax can provide vehicle history reports indicating a vehicle’s mileage, whether it’s been in any severe accidents, its previous owner and whether it was used in a fleet like a rental car or taxi.

“When dealing with a reputable dealer, you can ask for those kinds of reports,” Todd Ingersoll, CEO and President of Ingersoll Automotive, a GM dealership group out of Danbury, CT, told Engadget. “Another good indicator is what kind of work has the dealership done to the vehicle. So you can and should ask for the repair order of what was done to the car. If it's a reputable store, and they've done great work to get the car up to snuff for sale, they want to put that on display.”

While competition for used cars is currently fierce, prospective buyers have more ways than ever to search for their next vehicle. We’re no longer limited to the selection of whatever the local dealerships and used lots have available. The traditional car buying experience is not going away.

“Most consumers, when they're buying a very expensive item, they want to see it, they want to put their hands on it, want to drive it,” Ingersoll said, but it has been augmented in recent years by the rise of online listing aggregators like CarGurus, Shift, Autotrader, Vroom, and Carvana as well as hybrid companies like CarMax, which operates both an online showroom and a network of physical car lots throughout the country.

Chip Somodevilla via Getty Images

The modern car buying process has become a mixture of in-person and online channels, CarMax EVP of Strategy, Marketing and Product, Jim Lyski, told Engadget. Customers are going to “want to do some things in the store, and a retailer can provide a way to allow them to personalize their journey where they can leverage any channel that they want, and those channels are tied together in a really seamless way.”

We can already see evidence of this in the new car market, where online sales made up 30 percent of the total in 2020, up from 2 percent the year before, Alan Haig, president of automotive retail consultant group Haig Partners, told ABC News in 2021. What’s more, a Cox Automotive study from the same period found that customer satisfaction had reached record highs in 2020, with the overall process being more efficient with less time spent in physical dealerships.

Aggregators like Cavana and Vroom pull the vehicle listings of local dealer inventories and assemble them in a centralized, searchable database so you’ll be able to see what’s available both locally and in the wider region. There are going to be a lot more used cars for sale in San Francisco, CA than there will be in Sonora, CA — and there’ll be even more in the Los Angeles metroplex — so if you can’t find what you’re looking for locally, you’re going to need to expand your search area and be prepared to go to where the cars are. These sites are built to do just that. They’re also typically outfitted with handy loan and down payment calculators as well as quotes for the car you already own. You’ll want to check these listings regularly and be ready to make an offer quickly when you find what you’re looking for because the good deals on these sites go fast.

Brian Snyder / reuters

But even those don’t list every vehicle for sale in the area. Public boards like Craigslist or NextDoor are a treasure trove of highly affordable used cars that you won’t find on the larger aggregators. Of course, these are going to be private transactions so you’ll want to take the standard precautions. Meet in a public area, insist on a presale mechanic’s inspection, don’t with a big wad of cash and bring your most imposing friend along for “moral” support because seriously, this is Craigslist.

Speak to your family, friends and co-workers as well, as word of mouth is still a great way to find a used car and evaluate a dealership. “We always say the second, third and 12th cars are sold through the service department,” Ingersoll said. “How you take care of people long term, that determines how many people they refer to you.”

So, once you’ve found the car of your dreams, realized you can’t afford it, lowered your expectations and purchased something more sensible, now comes the paperwork! Depending on what state you live in you’ll have to do more than transfer title. In California for example, the DMV is going to want the bill of sale, vehicle registration, vehicle title and application and a smog certificate. You’ll also have to include the various fees like $15 for title transfer, $58 for the registration, $6 to the air quality management district and another $23 for the California Highway Patrol fee. Check with your state DMV to get a complete list of government fees and instructions for paying them online.

Lucy Nicholson / reuters

Dealership fees are another matter. In California, at least, rolling a dealership’s advertising costs into the price of a vehicle is illegal. If you’re buying a car from a dealership, be sure to ask for a comprehensive list of their fees and set about chipping off every extraneous one you can get the salesperson to accept.

So now comes the fun part wherein this reporter, one in desperate need of a car and no patience to wait for the next Maverick model year, puts his money where his keyboard is and attempts to follow his own advice in purchasing a car online. Will he find the 4Runner of his dreams? Will he get ripped off because Craisglist? Stay tuned to Engadget and find out later this summer!

EV startup Lightyear debuted its first solar-powered vehicle this week, a sleek sedan called the Lightyear 0. The company gave us a peek at a production prototype of Lightyear 0 in 2019, and at first glance, not much has changed. The car is essentially an unconventional hybrid equipped with both a conventional 60-kilowatt-hour EV battery pack and solar panels on its roof, hood and hatch. The solar panels on the Lightyear 0 will charge automatically whenever the car is exposed to the sun — it doesn’t matter if it’s parked or driving.

The Lightyear 0 isn’t as much solar-powered as solar-assisted. In order to drive for long distances, the vehicle has to tap into its battery reserve. The car’s solar panels can provide 44 miles of range per day in a sunny climate, whereas its EV range is 388 miles. But for drivers with exceptionally short commutes or those who need their vehicle infrequently, the Lightyear 0 could allow them to no longer spend money on gas or charging. The company claims that those with a daily commute of 22 miles can drive the Lightyear 0 for two straight months in the Netherlands summer without needing to charge. Drivers in sunnier climates can go for longer. Lightyear claims that the sun can provide the Lightyear 0 with anywhere between 3,700 to 6,800 miles of range annually.

It’s important to note that Lightyear 0 owners will need to drive for a significantly long time in order to justify the vehicle's purchase as a cost-saving measure. The Lightyear 0 will cost €250,000 (which amounts to roughly $263,262 USD), and the company only plans on making 946 units. But a more reasonably-priced vehicle is on the way. Lightyear recently also unveiled a prototype of a $33,000 solar-powered car, which is scheduled to go into production by 2025.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has deepened (PDF) its investigation into a series of Tesla crashes involving first responders to an engineering analysis. As The Washington Post explains, that's the last stage of an investigation, and the agency typically decides within a year if a vehicle should be recalled or if the probe should be closed. In addition to upgrading the probe's status, the investigation now covers 830,000 units, or almost all the Tesla Model Y, Model X, Model S and Model 3 vehicles the company has sold since 2014.

This development expands upon the investigation the NHTSA initiated back in 2021 following 11 collisions of Tesla vehicles with parked emergency responders and trucks. Since then, the agency has identified and added six more incidents that occurred over the past couple of years. In most of those crashes, Autopilot gave up vehicle control less than one second before impact, though Automatic Emergency Braking intervened in at least half of them. 

The NHTSA also found that the first responders on the road would've been visible to the drivers at an average of eight seconds before impact. Plus, forensic data showed no driver took evasive action between 2 to 5 seconds prior to impact even though they all had their hands on the wheel. Apparently, nine of the 11 vehicles originally involved in the investigation exhibited no driver engagement visual or chime alerts until the last minute before the collision. Four of them didn't exhibit any engagement visual or chime alert at all. 

The NHTSA also looked into 191 crashes not limited to incidents involving first responders. In 53 of those collisions, the agency found that the driver was "insufficiently responsive" as evidenced by them not intervening when needed. All these suggest that while drivers are complying with Tesla's instructions to make sure they have their hands on the wheel at all times, they're not necessarily paying attention to their environment. 

That said, the NHTSA noted in its report that "a driver's use or misuse of vehicle components, or operation of a vehicle in an unintended manner does not necessarily preclude a system defect." As University of South Carolina law professor Bryant Walker Smith told The Post, monitoring the position of a driver's hands isn't effective enough, because it doesn't ensure a driver's capability to respond to what they encounter on the road. 

In addition, the NHTSA noted that the ways a driver may interact with the system is an important design consideration for Level 2 autonomous driving technologies. These systems still aren't full autonomous and still mostly depend on the human driver, after all. "As such, ensuring the system facilitates the driver's effective performance of this supervisory driving task presents an important safety consideration," the agency wrote.

Lyft drivers don't have to worry about being fully replaced by the company's autonomous vehicles just yet. Company president John Zimmer told CNBC that Lyft intends to operate a hybrid network at first, with a fleet that's largely comprised of non-autonomous cars. "[J]ust like what happened with phones, you didn't have 3G go to 4G go to 5G on separate networks," Zimmer explained."You still needed to be able to make a 3G call when 4G wasn't available." And similar to when LTE was new and mobile users mostly had to connect to the internet via 3G, Lyft passengers will also largely have to rely on rideshare drivers.

Zimmer envisions a network wherein autonomous vehicles will only be taking five percent of all trips at first, with rideshare drivers taking the lion's share of the rides booked through the platform. Lyft plans to scale up its autonomous rides with its partners, though, so those percentages will keep shifting in the future. The company has been testing self-driving rides in Las Vegas since at least 2018 with its partner Motional, which is a joint venture between Aptiv and Hyundai. In 2020, Lyft announced that it intends to bring fully driverless cars to multiple US cities by 2023.

Lyft also has an existing partnership with Ford, and they're currently testing the latter's Argo-AI powered cars — with no human safety driver behind the wheel — on Miami and Austin roads. In addition, the company teamed up with Waymo to pick up customers in the metro Phoenix area back in 2019.

Volocopter's drone taxi is one step closer to entering service. The German firm has revealed that its four-seat electric VTOL aircraft, the VoloConnect, completed its first flight in May. The machine's initial trip was brief at two minutes and 14 seconds, but the maneuvers proved that the production-level aerodynamics and performance held up in real world conditions. There have been three flights so far.

The 60-mile range and 155MPH flight speed might not sound like much. However, they promise autonomous commuter flights beyond major urban centers — you could fly to a business meeting from the suburbs. The VoloConnect is effectively a companion to the VoloCity, a shorter-ranged eVTOL flier meant strictly for urban jaunts.

The VoloConnect is expected to serve customers starting in 2026, two years after the VoloCity's projected 2024 rollout. While that's a relatively long way off, Volocopter is unique in having multiple air taxis conducting real-world flight tests. The company is closer to actual commuter trips than competitors, many of whom have one model or an indefinite timeline for service.

Autonomous ships just took a small but important step forward. Hyundai's Avikus subsidiary says it has completed the world's first autonomous navigation of a large ship across the ocean. The Prism Courage (pictured) left Freeport in the Gulf of Mexico on May 1st, and used Avikus' AI-powered HiNAS 2.0 system to steer the vessel for half of its roughly 12,427-mile journey to the Boryeong LNG Terminal in South Korea's western Chungcheong Province. The Level 2 self-steering tech was good enough to account for other ships, the weather and differing wave heights.

The autonomy spared the crew some work, of course, but it may also have helped the planet. Avikus claims HiNAS' optimal route planning improved the Prism Courage's fuel efficiency by about seven percent, and reduced emissions by five percent.

As you might have guessed, the feat didn't quite usher in an era of zero-crew shipping. The other half of the trip still required human navigation, and most of the route was in the open sea. It would have been tougher for an autonomous system to control the entire voyage, particularly in ports where docking and packed waterways would pose additional challenges.

Avikus plans to commercialize HiNAS 2.0 by the end of the year. And even if fully AI-driven shipping is nowhere on the horizon, the company hopes its Level 2 autonomy will mitigate crew shortages, improve safety and reduce the environmental impact of seaborne transportation. The firm also expects to bring this navigation to leisure boats, not just giant merchant ships. Your next pleasure ride aboard a cabin cruiser or yacht might not always require someone at the helm.

GM's Cruise has received the first ever driverless deployment permit issued by the California Public Utilities Commission. That means the company can now charge for the robotaxi rides, ones with no safety driver behind the wheel, it gives to members of the public. Cruise has secured permission (PDF) to operate its paid passenger service at a max speed of 30 mph on select streets of San Francisco from 10PM to 6AM. 

The company is expected to have 30 electric vehicles in its fleet, offering its ride-hailing passengers paid rides. Those cars aren't allowed to operate on highways, however, or during times of heavy fog and rain. In its announcement, the company said it will begin rolling out fared rides gradually, including to areas not currently covered by its permit. 

A Cruise spokesperson told TechCrunch:

"In the coming months, we'll expand our operating domain, our hours of operation and our ability to charge members of the public for driverless rides until we have fared rides 24/7 across the entire city."

The company first received permission to offer passengers free robotaxi rides almost exactly a year ago and opened fully driverless ride-hailing to the public this February. In March, the CPUC gave Cruise (and Waymo) permission to start charging their passengers, but only for rides with a safety driver behind the wheel. Now, Cruise can charge customers even if there's nobody else onboard. The company called this development a "major milestone for the shared mission of the AV industry to improve life in [the] cities." It will also use this opportunity to gather data for the development of the project's future phases.

Ford head Jim Farley said the brand’s electric vehicles may shift to fixed prices and completely online sales. In a speech today at an IBM conference, Farley described a future where Ford dealerships would no longer stock inventory but serve as customer service centers for picking up online orders or repairing existing vehicles — with buyers also having the option for home delivery.  In this hypothetical scheme, eliminating car dealerships would put an end to haggling with salespeople.

“We got to go to non-negotiated price," said Farley. Naturally, he also used his speech to throw some jabs at competitors. "I believe some Mach-E and Lightning customers would love to have a Mustang for the weekend. Maybe they want a Super Duty. I can do that," Farley said, "They can't."

The company announced plans this year to be the top EV car maker in the world, hoping to beat out Tesla and other companies with strong EV brands such as BMW, Nissan and Kia. Farley said Ford aims to have the capacity to produce 600,000 EVs by 2023, a notably smaller figure than the 936,000 deliveries that Tesla made last year.

The CEO said he believes that prices for EVs will lower to an average of $25,000, as the cost of batteries and distribution gets cheaper.

BMW is expanding its lineup of electric vehicles once again. The iX1 SUV is an all-electric variant of the X1 crossover — BMW announced a third-gen edition of that vehicle as well. The iX1 is pegged as an entry-level model that's expected to supplant the i3 as the automaker's least expensive EV.

The company says the X1 will have two petrol and two diesel engine options when it arrives in October. Those variants "will immediately be followed by" the iX1 xDrive30, along with plug-in hybrid versions.

The iX1 will have a dual-motor powertrain with one on each axle. They'll produce a combined output of 313 horsepower and 364 lb-ft of torque. BMW says the EV will be able to go from zero to 100 kh/h (62 mph) in 5.7 seconds.

The automaker estimates the iX1 will have a range of up to 438 kilometers (272 miles). It can be charged at a rate of up to 127 kW and BMW claims you'll be able to top up the battery charge level to 80 percent of capacity in 29 minutes at high-speed public stations.

Inside the EV, you'll see a curved display with support for voice and touch controls. The central console includes a wireless charging tray for your smartphone. There will be support for BMW Digital Key Plus, along with Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.

BMW will build all models in the X1 lineup at its plant in Regensburg, Germany. It's keeping many of the details about the iX1 under wraps for now, including the battery capacity and pricing. The company should reveal pricing closer to the launch window.

Don't worry if you thought the Polestar 2's performance was somehow tepid. Polestar has announced a production version of the performance-tuned "Beast" EV it showed at the 2021 Goodwood Festival of Speed. The Polestar 2 BST edition 270 now produces 476HP from its dual motors (up from 408HP), and you'll also see modifications like a lowered ride height, stiffer springs, adjustable Öhlins dampers, a front strut bar and Polestar 1-influenced 21-inch wheels with custom Pirelli P Zero tires. This is a Polestar EV you can take to the track, to put it simply.

The BST edition 270 isn't quite as capable as the Beast. You'll have to make do with the usual four-piston Brembo brakes instead of the six-piston Akebonos from last year's one-off model. Even so, the improved driving dynamics and 4.4-second sprint to 62MPH should make it a viable alternative to rivals like Tesla's Model 3 Performance.

This variant will be very difficult to get. As the name implies, Polestar is making just 270 examples to sell across China, Europe and North America. You'll have to register just to be invited to buy one; if selected, you'll pay $75,500. Production is poised to start in the middle of the year, with deliveries starting in the fourth quarter.

The debut of this limited version makes sense. Polestar was originally Volvo's badge for high-performance models, and it spun out from Volvo (and Volvo's parent Geely) with a focus on speed. In that regard, the BST edition 270 is a reminder of the brand's roots, and a hint that projects like the Polestar 3 SUV and O2 convertible concept are just extensions of that go-fast strategy.