I thought I had heard it all when it came to crazy automotive stories, but then an article was sent to me by a coworker. This is the only time I almost felt sorry for an insurance company. Geico was ordered to pay $5.2M to woman who got HPV from having sex in someones personal vehicle that they insured. This story raises so many questions like, how can you prove the transmission happened in that instance? Does this set a new standard for home insurance to liable if you were to contract a disease in someones home? If someone has a heart attack in your car, are you now liable? Regardless of how rediculous this sounds, a Missouri Court of Appeals orderd Geico to pay the damages. The original claim came in February 2021, when a woman claimed that the owner of the car did not disclose his status to hear and since the instance took place in his car his insurance was liable. A settle offer was presented to Geico which was rejected and probably laughed at, but it does not seem that Geico is laughing now. It seems to me that the world is continuing moving away from personal responsibility and toward making sure that the worst decision makers around us don’t have to deal with the consequences of their actions and instead may even be rewarded for their terrible decisions like having sex with people you don’t know very well in random cars.
If you needed another reason to question the effectiveness of universities in their current state, GM is dropping their 4 year degree requirement for many jobs to focus on hiring people with “skills”. Is this Mary Barra coming out and saying that a degree has no bearing on a persons skill level? As a father of 2 young kids, this is going to make it even harder for me to recommend to my children to go a big university and get in a ton of debt. I am not sure of the big advantage it gives if companies are going to start moving to skill-based hiring.
Ford just recalled almost 50,000 Mustang Mach-E’s and ordered dealerships stop delivering these vehicles to customers until the problem is resolved. The issue is reported as a lose of power and in a letter from Ford they state that the main battery connectors could heat up and cause a lose of power and increase the risk of an accident. This is also a huge fire hazard as in many cases of EV fires, it is not the battery that causes the fire but a short in the wiring somewhere usually cause by too much heat. The 48,924 Mach-E’s recalled representing about half of the total Mach-E’s produced from May 2020 to May 2022. As I have mentioned before, auto manufacturers are wanting to basically instantly switch over to EV tech after 100 years of internal combustion engines. Oh, and did I mention that the auto industry still recalls millions of internal combustion engine vehicles each year for safety and mechanical issues. If they still can’t build a gas engine that isn’t recalled regularly after 100 years of trying I am not sure how switching to EVs is going to make this any better.
Elon is still in the news for a number of reasons but the one I am most interested in is the finishing of the Gigafactory right outs of Austin Texas. I recently took a trip to south Texas with my family and drive byt his monster of a building and was beyond impressed. Elon recently stated that the move from California to Texas was by far the best thing for Tesla. He stated that this factory was up and running in 18 months and that he expects that they would still be getting the necessary permits for the factory if it were in California. Not only that but after getting all of the necessary permits you would still be open to lawsuits. It is very easy to see that less regulation and lower taxes drive businesses to expand, employ more people and as a result generate a lot more tax revenue for a particular area. With 100’s of 1000’s of people and many businesses fleeing the state of California every year, it makes you wonder if they will ever figure out that their policies are why they are leaving.
