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Our council secretary Steve emailed me that Dolce Vita had fixed their sprinkler problem and the banquet room was open for business. I called and spoke with the manager and got the room for our meeting on August 24th. I know a lot of members like the place and I'm glad we can go there. It is getter harder to find a restaurant that can hold everyone without paying a room fee. Restaurants don't seem the same since Covid.
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Virginia has a new tool to stop speeders. Here’s how it works.
From The Virginian~Pilot
Most days on the highway, it often seems Virginia is for speeders.
Faced with the reality that fines, driver’s license suspensions or even the threat of jail time didn’t seem to make a dent in Virginia’s speeding problem, state lawmakers recently adopted a new strategy.
Under new legislation effective July 1, a judge must order a person convicted of reckless driving over 100 mph — a so-called “super speeder” — to install an intelligent speed assistance device in their vehicle. Judges have the option to mandate the use of the device for reckless driving convictions on a restricted license instead of fully suspending a person’s driver’s license. The Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles will also offer use of the device in lieu of license suspension for drivers who have racked up too many demerit points.
“I think every person can come up with a reason why he or she speeds on any one given day,” said Holly Dalby, a spokesperson for AAA Tidewater. “There’s always an excuse.”
But 342 people were killed in Virginia in speed-related crashes last year, which she said shows why slowing down and driving responsibly is so important.
The DMV reported 22,529 speed-related crashes in 2025. From January through June, preliminary data shows 9,480 speed-related crashes and 137 fatalities, a department spokesperson said.
Michael Travars is president of LifeSafer, one of the companies that makes intelligent speed assistance devices. He said they use existing GPS technology previously employed in fleet vehicles. The devices track the posted speed limit based on the car’s GPS location and physically prevent the vehicle from speeding, behaving in a sense like a cruise control with a hard stop that the driver can’t override.
AAA officials and Travars hosted a demonstration of the technology for local media on Monday in Virginia Beach. He lauded Virginia’s lawmakers for their receptiveness to the idea.
“When the technology was explained to them, they didn’t say ‘No one’s done that before, come back later.’ They said, ‘We would save lives with that technology’ and they pushed it out there,” Travars said. “We did demos with the legislators and they said, ‘Yeah, this works. We’re going to do this.’” Del. Patrick Hope, D-Arlington, sponsored the bill.
While the device does not automatically apply the brakes or cut off the engine, it can detect tampering or removal attempts. Installation costs up to $100, monthly leasing is $130 and the monitoring fee is $50 per month, according to the Virginia Alcohol Safety Action Program, the agency overseeing the intelligent speed device initiative.
“The most important thing for my client is that they’re still able to go to work,” said Kimberly Schreiber, a defense attorney who attended this week’s demonstration.
Some people keep driving with a suspended license because they feel they have no other option for transportation. But Schreiber acknowledged that doing so usually just gets people into more legal trouble.
Nine people have been referred to the speed monitoring program as of July 14, according to the safety action agency. One person prequalified and eight were through court orders. Those referrals include a person convicted of reckless driving for going 100 mph in a 65 mph zone in Newport News. Another of the referrals involved a person convicted of going 49 mph in a 25 mph school zone in Lynchburg.
Under Virginia law, reckless driving by speed is defined as going 20 mph or more over the posted limit or over 85 mph regardless of the applicable speed limit.
Schreiber said the speed monitoring device is also an option parents can use for new teen drivers to help reinforce safe behaviors behind the wheel.
“We’ve had parents say that they put it in for their kid,” she said, “but then when they drove the same car, they didn’t realize how much they were speeding, and they said, ‘You know what? This was good for me to at least experience it and see that it’s probably my behavior that needs support too.’”
146 mph ticket in Hampton
State police data backs the assertion that speeding is an endemic issue on Virginia’s highways.
In the last 12 months, state police cited a driver for going 146 mph in a 60 mph zone in Hampton. Troopers stopped a driver for going 148 mph in a 55 mph zone in Fairfax County in March. And in May 2025, troopers cited a person for going 151 mph, also in Fairfax County, according to the available data.
Overall, state police reported law enforcement agencies across Virginia made 71,115 reckless driving stops for speeding statewide from July 2025 through June. During that time, data also shows law enforcement agencies stopped 18,447 people for reckless driving by speed in the agency’s Division Five, which includes all of Hampton Roads’ cities and many surrounding counties. That’s the highest number of citations out of the state police’s seven divisions. Virginia Beach had 3,843 stops reported, followed by Northampton County on the Eastern Shore with 3,231.
However, Matt Demlein, a state police spokesperson, said there’s a caveat with the speeding data: not all divisions used the state’s electronic summons system for the entirety of the last 12 months, and not every citation issued is entered into the electronic system. That means it’s possible a higher speed may have been missed, Demlein said in an email.
Best in Show July 4th Trailways Cruise-In - 1952 Chevy Pickup - Tommy and Connie Jordan
I-64 speed cameras may be coming to James City County
From The Virginian~Pilot
The Virginia Department of Transportation will start lowering speed limits in the Interstate 64 construction zone from New Kent County into James City County, raising the prospect of more dollar-generating speed cameras.
James City County police have applied for permits for speed enforcement cameras and are awaiting approval, according to a police spokeswoman.
VDOT announced earlier this week that the variable speed signs will be put in use for the entire length of the I-64 Gap Widening project. Until construction is complete, speed limits will be reduced to 60 mph when workers are in work zones and returned to the current 70 mph speed limit when workers are not present.
The speed cameras have been a financial windfall for New Kent County. It expects to collect $8.7 million in the fiscal year that ended June 30 from the $100 tickets issued to each driver recoded exceeding the speed limit by at least 11 mph.
VDOT announced that, in coordination with contractors, it will establish temporary variable speed limits as soon as next week. They will be between mile marker 215.6, just east of the New Kent Courthouse/Providence Forge exit and mile marker 233.3, just west of Route 199/Lightfoot (exit 234) as part of the Segment B widening project in New Kent County, and Segment C widening project in James City County. Variable systems were deployed in Segment A in New Kent during the fall of 2024.
New Kent Sheriff Lee Bailey is looking to acquire additional cameras, but said this week the equipment is unlikely to arrive imminently.
“We would not do anything until we had the permit and all the signs are in place,” Bailey said in an email this week. “Upon the completion of Gap A, we may see about doing Gap B. I have submitted the paperwork to start the process for Gap B, but have not received the required documents to do that.”
Segment B of the I-64 widening is scheduled to be completed in the summer of 2029, according to VDOT. Segment C is expected to be completed by late 2027. It includes nine miles of interstate widening and pavement rehabilitation; the repair, rehabilitation and widening of two bridges on I-64 east and west over Six Mount Zion Road; and the paving of the Lightfoot Park and Ride lot in York County.
Jewels Found On Ebay
Here are a couple of hot finds from Ebay Motors.
eBay item number: 158078040967
$6,500.00 or Best Offer
eBay description: 1959 Buick Hearse. Yes the top was cut off. Would make a cool Nashville tn cruiser. Decent old car engine turns last I checked. Clean title. Might deliver for a fee.
Local pickup, i can put you in contact with transport. Can load with a forklift. Payment to be made cash in person, or bank wire, will take a bank check but must clear before it leaves. We do accept payment through eBay or any other way then stated. We will take care of transfer of title outright between buyer and seller. Not through eBay, no one needs all that complication.
Why? Why would someone cut the roof off of a hearse? Cool Nashville cruiser? What does that mean. It's only got a front seat and a large bed area. And not back - no tailgate - no nothing to keep stuff from flying out the back. What was the person thinking who did this?
Next up is another "project".
eBay item number: 158054080871
$3,150.00 or Best Offer
eBay description: Up for sale:
1947 Crosley Sedan.
Included in this sale:
Extra engine (stuck)
Additional radiator
original title
All 4 hubcaps
5 wheels
Motor manual
See photos for condition details.
Payment must be made in full prior to pickup.
Local pickup only - Montgomery City MO 63361
I am selling for my father in law. All questions will be passed on to him!
My father owned a Crosley station wagon back in the 40s. He said the engine was made out of sheet metal and had to be replaced on a regular basis which was easy as two guys with a pole and chain could pull it out and drop in the new one. Plus this car is either ugly or cute depending on your mood I suppose. This is best left to the scrap metal people.
eBay item number: 158071705904
$1,499.00 - no bids
eBay description: 1957 Chevrolet Wagon project car. Just a roller, most the loose parts inside the car go to other cars. We just stored parts in it. Can load with a forklift Clean title
Look at this - a 57 Chevy with a starting bid of only 1499! This is a shell with a lot and I mean a lot of parts missing. I guess if you are in need of some sheet metal and you can't afford better pieces this might be for you. But everyone else should pass on it - the bidders know - no bids.
The Unaffordable Automobile
From The Epoch Times
Few things symbolize the post-war American way of life better than the automobile and the freedom of the open road. And few things are better indicators of the financial health of the American household and the economy as a whole than the industries which produce, sell, and insure the cars and trucks Americans love to own and drive.
Multiple indicators in the automobile industry are flashing red warning lights. Whether we look at aggregate units sold, prices for new and used vehicles, average ownership periods, loan costs and the delinquencies thereupon, and even the cost of insurance, we see signs of a strained American consumer impacted by inflation in the auto industry—inflation that has substantially outpaced the Consumer Price Index as a whole.
While new vehicle sales have recovered from their COVID-era trough to roughly 16 million units annually, the figure is still short of the 17 million-plus pace that defined the pre-pandemic era. New auto sales figures distill data about big-ticket discretionary spending, debt capacity, employment income confidence, and credit access into one number. The U.S. auto market, taken in full, paints a picture of an American consumer stretched thin, barely holding on, and running out of room to maneuver.
The average new vehicle now costs around $49,000, compared with about $36,000 in 2018. That’s a 40 percent increase in six years, driven first by pandemic-era shortages of chips and other parts that gutted inventory and handed dealers pricing power they hadn’t seen in decades, and now by a market that has simply re-priced itself higher and stayed there. Inflation did what inflation does: it ratcheted up and didn’t come back down. Even with recent gains, real incomes have not kept pace.
Financing costs have made the equation worse. Auto loan rates, which averaged around 3 to 4 percent in 2021 when the Fed was still running its zero percent interest rate experiment, are now north of 6.5 percent for new vehicles and closer to 12 percent for used. The response has been predictable. Loan terms have stretched to nearly 69 months—almost six years—to keep monthly payments low and to spread the pain across time. Down payments have shrunk, and leases have grown in place of purchases. Negative equity, where the owner owes more on its vehicle than it is worth, has become endemic. Americans are not solving the affordability problem. They are deferring it.
The delinquency data confirms that deferral has limits. Auto loan delinquency rates have hit their highest level since the Global Financial Crisis. Almost 8 percent of auto loan balances are at least 30 days past due, according to Federal Reserve Bank of New York data from the first quarter of 2026. Total auto loan debt now stands at $1.69 trillion, a larger figure than total student loan debt. Auto loans, once the least risky of consumer credit products, have quietly become one of the riskiest.
Transportation is the single most inflated major consumer spending category since the pandemic.
The problem isn’t limited to sticker prices and loan rates. The total cost of car ownership has been quietly compounding for years. Auto insurance premiums rose more than 50 percent in some states between 2020 and 2024. Repair and service costs have risen by approximately 35 percent since 2020. Part of the challenge with modern vehicles is their technology. Cameras, sensors, and proprietary electronics can turn a minor fender bender into a several thousand-dollar repair and recalibration job. The auto owner’s transportation budget is being hit from every direction simultaneously.
Americans have responded rationally by keeping their vehicles longer than at any point in recorded automotive history. The average car on the road today is 12.2 years old. The average new car buyer holds onto a vehicle more than eight years before trading it in. The decision calculus has shifted from “when do I want a new car” to “when can I afford one.”
Passenger cars now comprise a minority of the new vehicle market, representing less than 17 percent of new vehicle sales. Light trucks and SUVs make up the vast majority of new automobile sales at 83 percent of vehicles produced.
While some of this is due to consumer preference, automakers have for over a decade shifted their focus from entry-level sedans in pursuit of higher-margin trucks and crossovers. This shift has effectively eliminated the affordable “starter car” on-ramp to new vehicle ownership.
Younger buyers feel this most acutely. Gen Z is entering the market at the worst time in decades, paying record prices with entry-level wages and student debt in tow. Their auto loan delinquency rate exceeds 7 percent. Millennials, who should be in their peak earning and spending years, are leaning heavily on used vehicles and extended lease terms to manage cash flow. Both generations are financially exposed in ways their parents were not at the same age.
More optimistic economists cite the headline sales volume figures as evidence that the auto market, and by extension the consumer economy, is fine. But this is not the right number to watch. Delinquency rates, average loan terms, ownership holding periods, and insurance renewal rates tell the real story.
Yes, American consumers are still buying cars. But they are doing so on worse terms, with thinner financial cushions, and fewer options than at any point in recent memory. The car is no longer just transportation or an asset. It has become a financial liability that millions of households can barely sustain. Like homeownership, automobiles have become a “tale of two cities,” with the wealthy riding the waves of higher prices that are drowning the working and middle classes.
The automobile market does not signal a healthy economy, but rather one on borrowed time. Over the same post-pandemic period, corporate profit margins have continued to expand, and shareholders have reaped the lion’s share of the benefit.
The best solution would be to see more of these productivity gains translate into higher wages. This was Henry Ford’s prescription. He paid his workers well above industry standards so his employees could afford his cars. We need more of that thinking across corporate board rooms.
Staff Pick July 4th Trailways Cruise-In - 1972 Chevy C10 - Paul Allen
State Farm Just Deputized Your Toyota to Snitch on You After a Crash
From The AUTO/WIRE
Somewhere in Bloomington, Illinois, State Farm’s engineers just solved a problem that has nothing to do with speed. They built a faster crash data sharing pipeline between your car and your claims adjuster — one that gets your car’s side of the story before you’ve said a word.
The company now lets eligible Toyota and Lexus drivers share crash data straight from their vehicle to the State Farm app after an accident. Eligibility starts with the 2020 model year. The pipeline runs through Connected Analytic Services, a Toyota affiliate built specifically to broker vehicle-generated data to insurance companies. One tap of consent inside the Claims Hub is all it takes. A claims representative can then see direction of travel, vehicle speed, point of impact, and a mapped crash location, pulled from the precise date and time of the wreck.
State Farm is careful with its framing. Jennifer Megargell, the company’s vice president of property and casualty claims, describes the service as offering “faster insight into what happened and what needs to happen next.” Notice the word doing the work there: claims — not score, not premium, not renewal. That distinction is the whole ballgame, and it’s worth understanding why State Farm needed to draw it so precisely.
The Crash Data Sharing Pipeline Isn’t New
Here is what most of the coverage missed. Your car has been capable of telling this story for two decades already. Since federal rule 49 CFR Part 563 took effect, virtually every car sold in the U.S. with an airbag control module has logged speed, braking, seatbelt status, and delta-V for the several seconds surrounding a crash. Insurers and crash reconstructionists have always been able to pull that data. They just needed a physical connection to the module, a few hundred dollars of specialized hardware, and usually a signed release or a subpoena.
State Farm and Toyota did not invent a smarter black box. They built an API for the one that was already there. The real surprise is not that your car can talk. It is that the industry spent two decades making that conversation slow and expensive on purpose. Only now did it decide the friction was a cost actually worth removing.
The GM Playbook, Cleaned Up
The second detail deserves more scrutiny than it has gotten. Connected Analytic Services is not a one-off State Farm arrangement. It is a Toyota-owned brokerage built to sell vehicle telemetry to multiple insurance carriers, not just one. That structure is close to identical to the arrangement that got General Motors into serious trouble. Our earlier reporting on the FTC order against GM detailed how OnStar fed driving-behavior data to a consumer reporting agency. Insurers then used that data to help price policies, often without customers realizing what they had agreed to. GM eventually paid to settle a related lawsuit and shut the whole program down.
Toyota built nearly the same plumbing and wrapped it in the safeguards GM lacked: single-event consent, no use in setting future rates, and an opt-out State Farm says carries no penalty. This is not really a customer-service upgrade. It is compliance architecture, engineered in direct response to a scandal that cost a competitor real money and worse headlines.
It also fits neatly into Toyota’s broader thinking about the data living inside its cars. The automaker has separately filed a patent describing plans to pay drivers directly for useful vehicle data. That tells you Toyota views the information streaming out of its dashboards as an asset with value well beyond any single insurance partnership.
Every Insurer Is Building the Same Pipe
Crash data sharing will not stay a State Farm-only story for long. USAA already pulls automatic crash-severity data through its SafePilot ecosystem. Progressive, through its partnership with Cambridge Mobile Telematics, triggers repair workflows the moment a serious impact registers. Liberty Mutual imports connected-vehicle data straight into its claims system, and GEICO has acknowledged it may draw on its DriveEasy program during investigations.
Tesla never bothered separating claims data from pricing data at all. Its insurance arm has priced policies off real-time driving behavior since 2021. General Motors, notably, has a pending patent for vehicles that automatically exchange insurance information with each other after a crash — no phone call required. The industry stopped debating whether cars should participate in claims a while ago. What is left to fight over is who controls the pipe, and how much liability comes attached to it.
There is a nice irony buried in all this. OnStar’s original pitch in 1996 was built entirely around crash detection — a car that could call for help automatically because the driver might not be able to. Three decades later, that same basic capability is still here: a car recognizing and reporting its own crash. It has just become the mechanism an insurer uses to get ahead of a phone call from the policyholder. The safety feature and the claims feature are the same sensor. Only the recipient changed.
What Crash Data Sharing Means for Your Next Claim
Here is where the coverage has undersold the story. Objective crash telemetry does not just speed up a claim. It hands insurers a new argument against the people who used to have the last word on vehicle damage: body shops and independent appraisers.
If a car’s own sensors report a modest delta-V, expect a shop’s total-loss estimate to run into that number or a supplemental repair request. Faster claims cut both ways. Sometimes fast means a check clears in three days. Sometimes it means the insurer arrives at the negotiating table with a data point the shop cannot easily out-argue. That negotiation matters more now that car insurance affordability itself is under strain, for reasons that have little to do with any individual driver’s data at all.
State Farm inherited a credibility problem it did not create. Texas’s attorney general is still pursuing a similar claim against Allstate over driver data allegedly collected without adequate consent. Drivers who have read about GM’s OnStar mess have learned to be suspicious of the phrase “opt-in.”
State Farm’s model, narrow and one-time, is a real and meaningful departure from continuous telematics monitoring, at least as written today. But GM’s Smart Driver program also began as a narrow, opt-in convenience feature, before its data ended up resold to insurers who had nothing to do with the original agreement. Consent has a way of drifting once the pipe is built. Businesses tend to use it for whatever the case demands next quarter. Today’s crash data sharing promise is only as durable as the policy language that backs it.
Read the Consent Screen
Regulators have already noticed the broader pattern behind crash data sharing. California’s push for a mandatory tracking off-switch, and the automaker pushback that followed, targets exactly this kind of data flow. If you want to see what your own vehicle already reports, our guide on how to check and limit what your car tells companies is a reasonable place to start.
Your Toyota did not gain a new ability this year. It got a new customer for one it already had. The part of this story getting the headlines is speed. The part that will still matter in five years is different. An automaker and an insurer just agreed on a permanent, sanctioned doorway into your car’s memory of the worst five seconds of your week. Read the consent screen before you tap yes. It is doing more work than it looks like.
Youngest Driver July 4th Trailways Cruise-In - 1966 Mustang - Dylan Taylor
Oldest Driver July 4th Trailways Cruise-In - 1992 Mustang GT - Rock Bates
The Briefs
Two men allegedly stole a vehicle at gunpoint in Chicago's Humboldt Park neighborhood and then, in a spectacular failure of criminal logic, attempted to sell it back to the same victim in the same alley just hours later — leading to their swift arrest by Chicago police. The concentrated police presence in Humboldt Park, a focal point for the city's violent crime reduction efforts, likely contributed to how quickly officers responded. The incident is a reminder that Chicago's carjacking problem, while trending downward from its pandemic-era peak of over 2,000 incidents in 2021, is far from resolved. The city's dedicated carjacking task force continues to work neighborhoods where opportunistic vehicle theft remains stubbornly common.
Cape Coral, Florida is considering a proposal to mount AI-powered cameras on its garbage trucks to scan residential properties for code violations — overgrown grass, illegal dumping, peeling paint — as the trucks drive their normal collection routes. City leaders frame it as a cost-effective staffing solution, since code enforcement departments are chronically understaffed and the cameras would ride on vehicles already covering every residential street.
The proposal draws an uncomfortable parallel to the auto industry's own surveillance controversies, where automakers have faced regulatory action for collecting and sharing driver data without adequate consent. The broader question is whether municipal governments adopting AI surveillance on public-service vehicles will face the same privacy backlash and legal scrutiny that has already caught up with connected-car manufacturers.
General Motors is investing $275 million to add internal combustion engine production at its Spring Hill, Tennessee assembly plant — the same facility it has held up for years as the centerpiece of Cadillac's electric future, home to the LYRIQ, LYRIQ-V, and VISTIQ alongside a $2.3 billion battery joint venture with LG Energy Solution. It's a striking reversal for a plant GM repeatedly pointed to as proof that Cadillac was serious about going all-electric.
Crude oil production by the United Arab Emirates surged 122 percent after Abu Dhabi’s withdrawal from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). The UAE told OPEC that it produced more than 3.8 million barrels of oil per day in June, up from 1.71 million barrels reported in May. After almost 60 years as a member of the oil-exporting institution, the UAE announced in April that it would be exiting the group amid frustrations over its production quotas.
Governor Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 168 on July 13, creating the MyFirstEV program — a $3,500 point-of-sale rebate for first-time electric vehicle buyers in California. The catch: the program's eligibility criteria effectively narrow qualifying manufacturers to Rivian and Lucid, while Tesla — the company responsible for nearly half of all EVs registered in the state — is locked out. The bill even includes a provision anticipating legal challenges, a clear signal that lawmakers knew the structure would draw lawsuits. The move raises pointed questions about whether MyFirstEV is designed to foster competition in the EV market or simply pick winners among California-connected manufacturers.
Three men were arrested in Miami-Dade County after a scheme to cheat on the Florida driver's license exam using concealed earpieces fell apart in the most low-tech way possible — one suspect's earpiece became lodged in his ear canal, requiring fire rescue to extract it and drawing the attention that led to arrests by the Miami-Dade Sheriff's Office. Beyond the comedic failure, the incident raises pointed questions about oversight at Florida DMV testing centers, where a coordinated cheating ring was able to operate, suggesting gaps in proctoring and security protocols.
Hyundai is recalling Tucson models on at least two continents after front-facing cameras began producing false object detections — effectively "seeing ghosts" that trigger unwarranted driver-assistance responses. The defect has prompted action in both Vietnam and the United States, even though the affected vehicles were built in different factories, pointing to a software-level root cause rather than a manufacturing issue. The fix is a relatively simple camera software recalibration performed by a technician with a laptop.
After the Supreme Court ruled that Donald Trump's global tariff program was never legal, the federal government owed Ford approximately $1.3 billion in duties the automaker had previously paid. Rather than booking the refund as a one-time item, Ford ran the money through two of its core business segments' operating profit, materially boosting its quarterly results.
A Mach-E owner, represented by a plaintiff's lawyer in San Diego, is now challenging that accounting decision, arguing that consumers who absorbed tariff-inflated prices deserve a share of the windfall.
Two teens in San Mateo were detained by police after their Waymo vehicle reported their unruly behavior, KLTV reported on July 8. The robotaxis are equipped with interior cameras that allow Waymo personnel to observe passengers. A Waymo representative contacted police when they saw a live feed of the 15-year-olds drinking and firing a gun that shot Orbeez gel pellets. "We got a call from a Waymo rep saying there were two people in their vehicle, and they saw them shooting out of the vehicle," Jeanine Luna of the San Mateo Police Department said. "And then they also described the passengers maybe being intoxicated as well." A Waymo rep told the passengers that the car was having trouble and disabled the vehicle until police arrived. The teens cooperated with law enforcement, and no one was hurt. They await charges from the district attorney.
On July 2, Jalen Godard, 29, of Odenton, Maryland, robbed a Verizon store ... and then promptly called police to report his vehicle stolen. The two robberies were called in separately but within minutes of each other. When officers arrived, they observed blood on Godard's glasses, hands and shirt, as well as blood on the store's window, and put two and two together. "That's some karma right there, dude," one officer said in the body cam footage. Godard denied being at the store, but the stores cameras show him robbing it. No word yet on a suspect in the vehicle theft.
A different kind of Tasmanian devil is wreaking havoc on the island. Neil, a 2,200-pound elephant seal, has visited Tasmania every year for the last five years, causing destruction to personal property and even stopping traffic in southern towns, UPI reported on July 2. "At the moment, we don't have a complete understanding of the damage Neil has caused to public infrastructure, but he has obviously knocked over a number of poles and bollards," one mayor, Brendan Blomeley, said. "He's broken fences, he's harassing people's cars -- that's just a function of his size," seal expert Jane Younger added. Neil has become a bit of a local celebrity, but officials urge the public to give the seal his space. "I understand that until he completes his molting process, he'll continue to scratch up against things to help shed his old fur," Blomeley said. "Until then, I encourage everyone to please give Neil the space he needs and not to attempt to visit him. While he is of great interest, he is also potentially dangerous and does pose a risk to the community."
On June 24, Nadi Jabari, 46, was arrested in Hillsborough County, Florida, after he tried to impersonate law enforcement and conduct a traffic stop, complete with the familiar red and blue flashing lights, WKRN reported. Unluckily for him, the car he pulled over was an undercover vehicle that belonged to the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office. The detectives quickly turned the tables and conducted a traffic stop of their own on Jabari. Their search of his black Chevrolet Suburban yielded an illegal emergency light installation, an emergency light bar and a firearm. Jabari has been charged with false impersonation, unlawful use of blue light, and possession of a firearm. "When someone falsely presents themselves as law enforcement, they threaten the trust that exists between deputies and the community we serve," Sheriff Chad Chronister said. "This individual's actions were dangerous, deliberate, and illegal. We will aggressively pursue anyone who attempts to impersonate a deputy and use that deception to intimidate or endanger others."
Wesley N. Jackson of West Virginia allegedly ripped automated license plate reader cameras off their poles and destroyed them. Rather than charging him with ordinary vandalism, prosecutors reached for a felony statute normally reserved for sabotaging emergency equipment like ambulances, fire trucks, and 911 dispatch systems.
The case gets thornier from there: the county may not even own the cameras. Many ALPR systems nationwide are deployed by private companies such as Flock Safety, which retain ownership of the hardware and sell surveillance-as-a-service to law enforcement. The prosecution's use of an elevated felony charge for destroying what may be privately owned surveillance equipment on public infrastructure highlights the growing friction between expanding automated surveillance networks and the communities they monitor.
California May Finally Let Insurers Use Your Driving Data.
For two decades California has been the only U.S. state where auto insurers were legally barred from using telematics data — braking patterns, speed, mileage — to set premiums, a restriction rooted in the consumer protections of Proposition 103. Assembly Bill 311 would change that, opening the door to telematics-based pricing while layering on new disclosure and consent requirements.
The bill arrives with the General Motors/OnStar data-sharing scandal still fresh. GM was hit with a $12.75 million FTC settlement for quietly funneling driver data to insurers without adequate consent. AB 311 essentially aims to legalize what automakers were already doing covertly — but with regulatory guardrails that, on paper at least, put the driver in the loop.
Sometime around 3 a.m., a man walked into a Newark Police Emergency Service Unit garage, popped open a bay door, and drove off with a Lenco BearCat — an eight-ton armored truck worth roughly half a million dollars and built to shrug off gunfire. The joyride lasted barely two hours before it ended on a residential street in nearby Irvington, proving that a vehicle designed for tactical police operations is spectacularly impractical as a getaway car.
Beyond the absurdity of the theft itself, the incident raises serious questions about physical security at police equipment facilities. If a single individual can walk into a garage and drive away with one of the department's most expensive tactical assets with minimal resistance, the security protocols clearly need a second look.
A 1926 Ford Model T collided with a Chevrolet pickup truck during Monday morning traffic in Goldsboro, North Carolina, sending three people to the hospital. This Model T — which turns 100 next year — predates seat belts, crumple zones, airbags, and virtually every other passive safety feature modern drivers take for granted, leaving its occupants extraordinarily vulnerable in any collision with a contemporary vehicle.
The crash underscores a long-simmering tension in the classic car world: vintage vehicles are street-legal in most states, but their complete absence of modern safety engineering makes any road encounter with today's trucks and SUVs a wildly uneven matchup. It's a hard reminder that antique cars and everyday traffic don't always mix safely.
The International Motorsports Hall of Fame in Talladega, Alabama, quietly sold a 1968 Chevrolet Camaro SS convertible—a former pace car that had been sitting at the museum—through a bare-bones classified ad that described it only as a "1968 Chevrolet, as is," with no photos, no condition report, and just a P.O. Box for responses. Only one bidder responded, winning the car for $15,000. The Hall of Fame then reportedly turned around and spent nearly $23,000 of its own money restoring the vehicle, raising immediate questions about how a nonprofit disposed of a potentially valuable asset for a fraction of its worth.
The Grappler Police Bumper is a pursuit-ending device that wraps a fleeing vehicle's rear tire in nylon webbing, bringing it to a controlled stop without the dangers associated with PIT maneuvers or spike strips. It proved its value in a June 2023 incident in Mesa, Arizona, when an Arizona Department of Public Safety sergeant used it to safely end a pursuit of a driver who had struck a pedestrian at an intersection takeover.
Two months in, the Virginia State Police photo-enforcement program along the Interstate 81 lane-widening project in Staunton has generated nearly 20,000 speeding tickets and more than $1.9 million in fines, state police statistics.
Everything You Think You Know About Ethanol Gas Wrecking Your Engine Is Probably Wrong
From: The AUTO/WIRE
Somewhere along the way, “don’t use that gas, it’s got ethanol in it” became one of those warnings. Parents passed it down like a family recipe, minus the ingredients list. The problem is that almost nobody explains what ethanol actually does once it’s in your tank. So the warning just calcifies into vague dread. Your owner’s manual, meanwhile, has had an answer for two decades. It’s just never as fun to read as a rumor.
The Blend You’re Already Running, Whether You Know It or Not
Here’s the part that surprises people. More than 98% of gasoline sold in the United States already contains ethanol, according to the Department of Energy’s Alternative Fuels Data Center. The standard blend is E10 — 10% ethanol and 90% gasoline. It’s been the default at nearly every pump in the country for years. If you’ve been driving a gas-powered car built any time recently, you have already been running on ethanol for your entire ownership. Your engine has not been secretly falling apart because of it.
Where the Real Line Actually Gets Drawn
Drivers usually tangle up the myth between E10 and E15, and that’s where the actual rule lives. The EPA approves E15 (10.5% to 15% ethanol) only for model year 2001 and newer light-duty gasoline vehicles, per the Department of Energy. It’s not approved for motorcycles, boats, or small engines like lawn equipment. And it’s not meant for classic cars built before that cutoff. That’s not a superstition. It’s a federal fuel requirement, and it’s the one piece of the ethanol conversation that actually deserves a second look before you fill up something older or something with a carburetor.
What Ethanol Is Actually Doing to Performance and Mileage
Ethanol carries a higher octane rating than straight gasoline. That’s why refiners blend it in to help meet octane requirements without extra refining steps. But higher octane isn’t the same as more power. It just resists knock better, which matters more to a tuned or turbocharged engine than to your commuter sedan. The tradeoff is energy density. Ethanol holds less energy per gallon than gasoline — roughly 30% less in its nearly pure form — and that difference scales down with the blend. At E10 the fuel economy hit is small enough that most drivers never notice it against normal variables like tire pressure or driving habits. It is real. It’s just not the villain it gets made out to be.
Where the Myth Actually Becomes a Real Risk
The genuine ethanol risk doesn’t live in your daily driver. It lives in equipment that sits for months at a time. Ethanol is hygroscopic, meaning it attracts moisture from the air. Fuel that sits unused in a boat, generator, or lawn mower can undergo phase separation, where water and ethanol settle out from the gasoline. That’s a legitimate mechanical problem. It’s exactly why the EPA restricts E15 away from marine engines and small equipment in the first place. It’s also why fuel stabilizer exists as a product category. None of that has much to do with the car in your driveway that you drive every week.
What This Actually Costs You, in Real Numbers
If there’s a dollar figure worth paying attention to, it’s not a mystery ethanol repair bill. It’s the fuel economy math. A small, consistent percentage hit on mileage compounds over tens of thousands of miles. It works the same way paying for premium you don’t need quietly drains your wallet. Where ethanol does turn into a real repair bill is in vehicles running fuel blends they were never built for. Degraded fuel lines or a fuel pump failure from contamination can land in the same range as any other fuel system repair. Those jobs aren’t cheap, regardless of the cause.
Why This Keeps Coming Up in Washington
Part of why the ethanol conversation never fully settles is that the rules keep moving. Federal volatility waivers have allowed year-round E15 sales in some years and not others. Lawmakers have repeatedly pushed bills to make E15 available nationwide on a permanent basis, including legislation introduced by Senators Deb Fischer and Amy Klobuchar that we covered in detail here. Every time that debate resurfaces, so does the old fear that ethanol is somehow new or untested. In reality, it has been the default fuel blend for the better part of two decades.
The Actual Takeaway
None of this means every ethanol claim is empty. E15 in a pre-2001 car, a boat, or a chainsaw is a legitimate problem. Stale ethanol fuel left sitting all winter is a legitimate problem too. But for the overwhelming majority of drivers filling up a modern gas vehicle at a regular pump, nothing has changed. The fuel in the tank is the same E10 blend it’s been for years. That worry is better spent on the basics that actually extend a car’s life. Stay current on your oil change interval and follow the fluid schedule in our 200,000-mile maintenance guide, instead of watching the ethanol percentage printed on the pump sticker.
Repair Mistakes & Blunders
From Rock Auto
It was time to change the oil and filter on my wife’s 2019 Buick Encore—a simple enough job, or so I thought. Right away something seemed off: the drain plug wouldn’t take a 10 mm socket, only an 11 mm. I shrugged it off (“YouTube isn’t always gospel”) and carried on. Out came the fluid, though it looked surprisingly clean for used engine oil. I replaced the plug, swapped the filter, and moved on to refilling.
But the dipstick kept reading full - completely coated, right to the top - no matter how carefully I checked. After only getting about two quarts in, I knew something wasn’t right. Was there an air lock? A hidden plug? My wife needed the car moved, so against my better judgment I started it and shifted into Drive… nothing. Reverse? Nothing. The car just sat there.
Shutting it off, I took a closer look underneath and spotted another drain plug, farther toward the passenger side. This one fit a 10 mm socket perfectly. A little research confirmed it: the transmission drain plug is 11 mm, and the engine oil drain plug is 10 mm. Yes, I had drained the transmission.
Fixing the mix-up wasn’t quick or cheap. Refilling the transmission is a fiddly process, and I still had to go back and do the oil change properly. On the bright side, I now have a very clear understanding of where both drain plugs are located.
Stephan in Canada
Oldest Vehicle July 4th Trailways Cruise-In - 1922 Chevrolet - Douglas Robinson
Trump Pardons 6 Prosecuted for ‘Fixing Their Car’ Under Biden-Era Emissions Rules
From The Epoch Times
President Donald Trump on July 2 announced pardons for six individuals he said were persecuted by the Biden administration for repairing their own vehicles, saying the cases were emblematic of regulatory overreach.
“It is my Great Honor to have just signed Pardons for six people who were persecuted by the Biden Administration, and were in, or being sent to, prison, for ‘fixing their car,’” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post. “I AM SETTING THEM ALL FREE, RIGHT NOW!”
The pardoned individuals were targeted under the Clean Air Act for allegedly disabling or tampering with vehicle emissions control systems, generally on commercial diesel trucks or personal vehicles.
Individuals who had installed “defeat devices” were pursued by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Justice under the Biden administration. Trump’s action means the immediate release of those in prison or facing incarceration.
The identities of the six people were not named in Trump’s post.
On June 29, the president signed a presidential memorandum titled Lowering the Cost of Living by Promoting the Freedom to Fix, directing federal agencies to expand access to aftermarket parts and support independent repairs to lower costs for Americans.
“We have a big ruling that we’re just issuing now,” Trump said. “I think it’s very important to lower the price of your car.
“In all fairness, this is something that’s very exciting to me. It means a lot to people that own vehicles, cars in particular, but cars and anything else. It’s going to save them a lot of money, and they’re going to be able to do it themselves.
“We are not going to be going after people who are fixing their own vehicle, like past administrations have.”
Trump’s “right to fix” memorandum specifically seeks to counter manufacturer restrictions and regulatory hurdles that undermine consumer access to parts and repair information.
Specialty Equipment Market Association CEO Mike Spagnola said in a statement sent to The Epoch Times on June 29 that Trump’s memorandum is “more bold action in support of vehicle owners and automotive aftermarket industry businesses from across the nation, and an example of federal leadership on behalf of our nation’s vibrant car culture.”
Spagnola highlighted aspects of the order that protect aftermarket manufacturers and expedite approval processes.
Least Distance July 4th Trailways Cruise-In - 1932 Chevrolet - Milton Freeman
Wanted: Designs for an Ocean View license plate
From The Virginian~Pilot
Professional artists and anyone with a creative impulse could have a chance for their work to adorn license plates across Virginia next year.
Del. Phil Hernandez, D-Norfolk, hopes to establish a specialty license plate honoring the city’s Ocean View neighborhood in the 2027 General Assembly session.
Starting Monday (August 3), his office is accepting submissions from residents, artists and students throughout the 94th District. They will be accepted until Sept. 15.
Hernandez said the license plate contest is a way to have some fun with state lawmaker duties and the democratic process.
“The main thing is that it has to speak of Ocean View,” Hernandez said. “It has to really feel like the place.”
Hernandez said he selected the neighborhood for its history and sense of community. He said many longtime residents had seen it change over the decades but were forever committed to the neighborhood.
“There’s just something about it that I wanted to lift up,” he said.
There are hundreds of specialty plates available in Virginia, according to the Department of Motor Vehicles website. Some other location-specific plates include the cities of Virginia Beach, Chesapeake and Fairfax, the Eastern Shore, the NASA Langley Research Center and Newport News Shipbuilding.
Hernandez said his staff had not yet decided whether the plate will include a charity donation as part of its fees, as some other specialty plates do.
The winning design will be selected by a seven-person community panel, Hernandez said. His office will also gather the 450 signatures needed to indicate interest in the plate. In early 2027, the lawmaker plans to carry legislation creating the plate through the General Assembly.
Submissions should be simple, bold designs using no more than four colors, with clear space left around the plate’s lettering and numbers, according to Hernandez’s office. There is no limit to the amount of designs a person may submit.
To submit a design and for more information, visit forms.gle/MKr2TttYkze2pBc27.
Yard Wealth: How Working on Your Own Cars Is a Radical Act
From Hagerty
In 2016, I got a letter from my insurance company, stating that I needed to get rid of the “debris” around my house.
My best guess is that they were referring to the highly sought-after, single-side-cover VW transaxle from the mid-1970s that was sitting under an overhang. Perhaps they also meant the front end, complete from spindle to spindle, that I removed from a donor car and that currently lay in potentialu in my carport, awaiting a full rebuild before being transplanted into the Karmann Ghia. Could they mean the body pan rusting along the side of the house, with a perfectly serviceable torsion housing and trailing arms waiting to be harvested? Or the heated leather seats under a tarp, which I spent three hours removing from a late ’90s Audi at Chesterfield Auto Parts (a salvage yard on the south side of town)? Surely they weren’t referring to the roughly 2.6 dirt bikes, two of which needed only a fresh battery and a carb rebuild. At the risk of boasting, I also have an impressive stock of new and scrap metal—rod, flats, plate, square tubing, pipe, sheetmetal, and a few solid billets—all nicely collated by shape, size, and type of alloy.
On my rides through rural Virginia, I see yards where old appliances, ATVs, furniture, and all kinds of crap are not strewn but obviously arranged in front of the house and carefully mowed around. It looks like a yard sale, but it is not. What is it, then? It is something universal, apparently. Dutch historian Johan Huizinga reports that among the Trobriand Islanders, “foodstuffs are not valued solely on account of their usefulness, but also as a means for parading wealth. Yam-houses are so constructed that one can compute from outside how much they contain… The best fruits are the most conspicuous, and particularly fine specimens are framed, decorated with paint, and hung up outside the yam-stores.”
My house is situated such that my yard wealth is not visible from the street, and I have placed it mostly out of sight of my immediate neighbors (because I am neither a Trobriand Islander nor an ostentatious redneck). I’m not sure what the zoning laws are, but for sure the general vibe here, on the West End of Richmond, is more uptight than it was where I lived previously, on the Southside. There, many people had project cars. While the toddlers and their mothers socialized on the sidewalk, the neighborhood social life of the men took place mostly in the unpaved alleys between streets, where the sheds and garages abutted. Everyone knew who had a sandblaster, who had welding equipment, who had a metal lathe, who was especially good at diagnosing electrical gremlins, and so on. There was a good informal economy of favors done and six-packs delivered. My next-door neighbor was a cop. We absolutely hated each other but regularly found ourselves in this kind of interaction.
In my new neighborhood, the lawns are meticulous, the houses are much farther apart, there are no alleys or sidewalks, and recycling is taken very seriously. An outdoor inventory of used auto parts is not part of that equation. Somehow, I gather, a $40K hybrid SUV getting 31 mpg—and the intercontinental energy and material flows that brought it into being—are more “green” than a ratty-looking old Volkswagen assembled from castoff parts, foraged locally, that gets 32 mpg. There is a certain aesthetic of cleanliness that must be adhered to. Better yet, invisibility. To count as green, those ugly chunks of rusting 1970s steel would need to be removed and recycled: melted down in a coal-fired blast furnace and sent across an ocean to become raw material for, say, an electric car, to be returned to the U.S. on a diesel-powered container ship. Such details are best kept out of mind; the main thing is that this journey accomplishes a moral cleansing of the metal.
My insurance inspector might have also been offended by some items along the side of my garage: A bucket of waste oil, a handful of dead batteries, a cashew container full of used brake fluid, and red plastic cans of gasoline in various flavors (two-stroke mix for the lawn and garden equipment, gas that is too far gone for internal combustion but still useful for starting bonfires, and some fresh, premium stuff). Plus a can of kerosene that I use for cleaning parts. Depending on when he came snooping around, there may have been a yogurt container of half-evaporated epoxy primer, because letting it evaporate and then taking the solid remains to the dump is the prescribed method for disposing of it. Would my insurer prefer that this volatile stuff—filthy and apparently haphazard but in fact carefully tended for use, reuse, alternative use, or disposal—be kept inside the shop, in closer proximity to the welding and grinding sparks?
Nobody wants to live next to a Superfund site; I get that. My point is that our judgments of “responsibility” get clouded with aesthetic considerations that are in turn wrapped up with class-based forms of self-regard and virtue signaling. Zoning laws, as well as the informal norms of bourgeois environmentalism, serve to maintain social demarcations (and with them, wildly divergent property values). They also enforce the planned obsolescence that our economy is based on.
People who work on old cars, whether as enthusiasts or out of necessity, are out of step with this regime. Maybe that’s why we tend to have the secret pride of the dissident: Someone with an alternative frame for making sense of the world, one that allows him to see the value in things that are commonly despised.
Superficially, litter and the rusting carcasses of salvaged cars are both an affront to the eye. But while litter exemplifies that lack of stewardship that is the ethical core of a throwaway society, the visible presence of old cars represents quite the opposite. Yet these are easily conflated under the environmentalist aesthetic, and the result has been to impart a heightened moral status to Americans’ prejudice against the old, now dignified as an expression of civic responsibility. Car people tend to see through that.
Prejudice against the old goes deep in the American psyche. Alexis de Tocqueville reported his conversation with an American sailor in 1831: “I ask him why the vessels of his country are constituted so as not to last for long, and he answers me without hesitation that the art of navigation makes such rapid progress each day, that the most beautiful ship would soon become nearly useless if it lasted beyond a few years.” Here is a striking defense of shoddiness as a natural corollary of the faith in progress.
You don’t have to be a reactionary to see that the idea of “progress” does a lot of mischief in the world. To be skeptical of progress is to have what Michael Oakeshott called a “conservative disposition.” He wasn’t talking about a political ideology. More like an attitude. The conservative, in this sense, doesn’t automatically defer to those who claim to speak for the Future. But neither does he hanker after an imagined past. Rather, he lives more fully in the present: He wants to take care of the stuff that already exists, because he sees the value in it. This is a posture of gratitude and repose in the world as it is, rather than restless pursuit of optimization and novelty. It is a happy place to be. And yes, it tends to require parts cars. Sorry!
Longest Distance July 4th Trailways Cruise-In - 2004 Corvette - Ricky Poole
Best Other July 4th Trailways Cruise-In - 2025 Harley - Milton Curley
Authorities Hunt ‘Mexican Batman’ After Vigilante’s Street Justice Goes Viral
From American Liberty News
A mysterious vigilante nicknamed the “Batman of Lagos de Moreno” has become one of Mexico’s most talked-about figures after allegedly hunting down suspected motorcycle thieves, duct-taping them to lampposts and leaving them on public display — complete with handwritten accusations and what appeared to be the motorcycles they were accused of stealing.
Now, authorities are hunting the masked mystery man — or possibly a group of vigilantes — while social media erupts with praise from frustrated residents who say criminals are finally facing consequences in a region long plagued by violence and distrust of the authorities.
Over roughly 10 days, police in Lagos de Moreno, a city in Mexico’s violence-ridden Jalisco state, discovered five men bound to street poles with gray duct tape. Some had their mouths covered, others appeared to have been beaten, and several had the Spanish word “ratero” — “thief” — scrawled across their faces. Pink signs hanging above their heads listed their alleged crimes, while some had cartoonish mustaches or cat whiskers drawn on them in marker.
In several cases, motorcycles believed to have been stolen were left beside the suspects.
Jalisco State Security Secretary Juan Pablo Hernández confirmed authorities are investigating the incidents and have identified two vehicles believed to be connected to the attacks, though no arrests have been made.
Officials stressed that, regardless of the allegations against the bound men, they are being treated as victims while investigators also examine claims that they participated in motorcycle thefts.
The vigilante earned his comic book nickname after Mexican journalist Luis Cárdenas posted dramatic images of the scenes on social media.
“In Jalisco, after the lack of help from the authorities, an anonymous hero started hunting down motorcycle thieves,” Cárdenas wrote in a post that quickly went viral. “So far, he’s already taken down five in ten days, and they call him the ‘Batman of Lagos de Moreno.'”
Authorities have not determined whether a single person is behind the incidents or whether multiple people are working together.
That uncertainty has fueled competing theories.
Some residents see the so-called “Batman” as a fed-up citizen taking on criminals after years of unchecked theft. Others — including some security analysts and local media — caution that the operation bears similarities to intimidation tactics historically used by organized crime groups seeking to control territory or send messages to rivals. Prosecutors say they have not reached any conclusions.
The case has struck a nerve because it comes amid Mexico’s ongoing struggle with cartel violence, rampant organized crime and deep public skepticism toward law enforcement.
Lagos de Moreno sits in a strategically important corridor in northeastern Jalisco, an area long contested by powerful criminal organizations, including the Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG). The region has repeatedly made headlines for kidnappings, disappearances and cartel-related violence.
Frustration over rising crime has fueled other vigilante movements across Mexico in recent years. Earlier this year, armed women in neighboring Michoacán began patrolling their communities to defend residents against cartel violence after accusing authorities of failing to provide adequate protection.
Despite the online admiration surrounding the anonymous crime-fighter, Mexican authorities say vigilante justice remains illegal under the country’s constitution, which prohibits citizens from taking the law into their own hands.
Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department continues to advise Americans to reconsider travel to Jalisco because of widespread violent crime, underscoring the dangerous backdrop against which the “Mexican Batman” saga has unfolded.
The Supreme Court Just Lit a Fuse Under Flock’s License Plate Camera Empire
From The AUTO/WIRE
Lee Schmidt and Crystal Arrington just wanted to drive around Norfolk, Virginia, without a government contractor logging every trip. Instead, they became the named plaintiffs in one of the most consequential Fourth Amendment fights in the country, and a Supreme Court ruling that has nothing to do with license plates just walked into their case like an uninvited but extremely useful guest.
Back up to 2023, when Norfolk police partnered with Flock Safety to bolt roughly 175 automated license plate reader camera clusters around the city. These aren’t your grandfather’s speed cameras. Flock’s hardware pairs infrared imaging with onboard AI to log a plate number, timestamp, and location for every passing car, then builds what the company calls a Vehicle Fingerprint, cataloging color, make, body style, and even bumper stickers so investigators can search for a car even when they don’t have a plate number. Norfolk holds that data for 21 days, the maximum allowed under Virginia law, and officers can query it without a warrant.
Schmidt and Arrington sued in October 2024 with backing from the Institute for Justice, arguing that a city-wide camera dragnet capturing their daily movements amounts to a warrantless search under the Fourth Amendment. In January 2026, a federal judge in the Eastern District of Virginia disagreed and granted summary judgment for the city. Flock published the court’s reasoning almost immediately: with a rolling 21-day window and roughly 175 camera clusters, the system didn’t track enough of a person’s life to count as the kind of exhaustive surveillance the Supreme Court worried about in its 2018 Carpenter v. United States decision on cell-site records. Schmidt and Arrington appealed to the Fourth Circuit, where the case now sits as Schmidt v. City of Norfolk, No. 26-1227.
That appeal drew a genuine murderer’s row of amici. The ACLU, ACLU of Virginia, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a joint brief in April arguing Flock’s networked databases let agencies run retrospective searches across jurisdictional lines, sometimes years later. The Cato Institute and the Electronic Privacy Information Center filed separately, both hammering the same theme: a single camera snapping a single plate is constitutionally unremarkable, but a 175-camera grid feeding a searchable, multi-week archive is a different animal entirely. On the other side, South Carolina led fifteen other states and the District of Columbia in a brief filed in June defending Norfolk’s approach as consistent with decades of case law holding that nobody has a privacy interest in a license plate visible to any passerby.
Then came June 29, 2026, and a decision that has nothing to do with cameras on poles. Chatrie v. United States traces back to a 2019 armed robbery of a credit union in Midlothian, Virginia, where investigators couldn’t identify a suspect from witness accounts or surveillance footage. Detective Joshua Hylton instead sought a geofence warrant ordering Google to hand over Location History data for every phone within 150 meters of the credit union around the time of the heist, executed in three escalating steps that ultimately unmasked Okello Chatrie, who was convicted of the robbery. Chatrie argued the warrant amounted to an unconstitutional, suspicionless dragnet search of everyone who happened to be nearby, including, notably, churchgoers at an adjacent building.
The Supreme Court agreed, 6-3, with Justice Elena Kagan writing for the majority and Justice Amy Coney Barrett in dissent. The Court held that police conducted a Fourth Amendment search when they obtained Chatrie’s location data, because, as the opinion put it, “an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in his cell-phone location information.” Just as important as the holding is the reasoning: the Court rejected the government’s fallback argument that the search was fine because it only pulled a narrow, time-limited slice of a much larger dataset. Once the Fourth Amendment applies, the majority reasoned, it doesn’t matter how small a bite investigators took out of an all-encompassing database. That is a direct shot at the exact argument Norfolk used to win in district court.
Here’s where it gets awkward for the states defending Flock. Their amicus brief leaned on United States v. Chatrie, 107 F.4th 319, a 2024 Fourth Circuit panel opinion holding geofence data collection wasn’t a search at all. Problem is, that panel opinion was vacated when the full Fourth Circuit took the case en banc back in late 2024. The en banc ruling that replaced it was itself wiped out by the Supreme Court on June 29. In other words, the precedent Norfolk’s allies cited to prop up their case no longer exists in any form, and the doctrine that replaced it cuts against them.
None of this automatically kills Flock’s Norfolk win. Chatrie is a cell-phone case, and stationary roadside cameras are a different technology with a different legal pedigree going back to United States v. Knotts, the 1983 case holding that a person driving on public roads has no reasonable expectation of privacy in movements from one place to another. Norfolk’s defenders will keep leaning on that line. But the more interesting legal fight is over duration and aggregation. In Carpenter, the Court found that seven days of cell-site records was enough to trigger Fourth Amendment protection. In a 2021 Fourth Circuit case out of Baltimore, Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, 45 days of aerial surveillance photography was enough too. Norfolk’s 21-day retention window sits uncomfortably between those two numbers, and the district court’s argument that 21 days and 175 cameras don’t add up to tracking the full sweep of someone’s movements gets harder to defend now that the Supreme Court has said the size of the data slice isn’t supposed to be the test in the first place.
Flock isn’t just fighting this in court, either. The company has spent the past several months publicly reassuring customers after reports surfaced that federal agencies accessed local ALPR data outside the terms local police departments had agreed to, a controversy that pushed dozens of cities to reconsider or cancel their contracts. Flock’s response has included rolling out search filters, an offense-type dropdown, restrictions on federal access permissions, and hiring a chief information security officer, all moves aimed at making the product look more defensible in court and in city council meetings alike. A ruling against Norfolk at the Fourth Circuit would land on top of that reputational pressure at the worst possible time for the company’s sales pipeline.
For everyday drivers, the practical stakes are bigger than one Virginia lawsuit. Automated plate readers are now standard-issue for police departments, HOAs, and even private toll operators, and the data they generate typically isn’t governed by the same warrant requirements as a phone tap or a home search. If the Fourth Circuit, and eventually the Supreme Court, extends Chatrie’s logic to camera networks, expect retention limits, warrant requirements, and interstate data-sharing restrictions to tighten considerably, the same way Carpenter reshaped how police request cell records after 2018. Until then, the law varies wildly by state: Virginia caps retention at 21 days and restricts sharing outside the state, while plenty of other jurisdictions using Flock hardware keep data far longer with far fewer strings attached.
Nothing about Chatrie forces Norfolk to shut off a single camera today. But the Fourth Circuit now has to grapple with a Supreme Court opinion that dismantled the exact legal scaffolding the states used to defend Flock’s cameras, while the residents suing over those cameras have a stack of fresh citations to hand the judges. Whichever way the Fourth Circuit rules, this is very likely headed back to the Supreme Court, and the next stop after that is every driveway in America with a Flock camera parked at the end of the street.
Americans Are Smashing Flock Cameras
From State of Surveillance
The surveillance state has a sabotage problem. From California to Virginia, people are taking vice grips to the $7.5 billion camera network with ICE ties.
People across the United States are cutting down, smashing, and dismantling Flock Safety surveillance cameras. At least two dozen cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025. One Virginia man faces 25 criminal charges for systematically destroying 13 cameras. He says he did it for the Fourth Amendment. The destruction comes as public anger builds over Flock’s documented ICE connections. Cities are hiding camera locations. Reddit threads show near-universal support. This is what happens when a $7.5 billion surveillance company ignores public opposition.
The Destruction Map
The cameras are coming down:
La Mesa, California (February 2026): Two cameras found destroyed on Fletcher Parkway. One smashed and left on the median. One had key parts removed. This happened weeks after the city’s Flock contract moved ahead despite local opposition.
Eugene and Springfield, Oregon (October 2025): Six cameras cut down from poles. At least one spray-painted. A note left behind: “Hahaha get wrecked ya surveilling f**ks”.
Suffolk, Virginia (April–October 2025): Thirteen cameras systematically destroyed over six months. One man arrested after detectives tracked him through (you guessed it) the surviving Flock cameras.
Greenview, Illinois (February 2026): Two cameras cut down. Poles severed at the base.
Lisbon, Connecticut (February 2026): One camera smashed. Police investigating.
The pattern: destruction in blue states, red states, cities, suburbs. Nobody is coordinating this. People are just angry.
The Guy Who Got Caught
Jeffrey S. Sovern, 41, of Suffolk, Virginia, didn’t hide what he did. He set up a GoFundMe for his legal defense. He linked to deflock.org, an anti-surveillance activist site. He wrote a statement:
“I appreciate everyone’s right to privacy, enshrined in the fourth amendment.”
And:
“I appreciate a quiet life and am not looking forward to this process, but I will take the silver lining that this can be a catalyst in a bigger movement to roll-back intrusive surveillance.”
Sovern faces 13 counts of destruction of property, six counts of petit larceny, and six counts of possession of burglary tools. The tools in question: vice grips and metal cutters. His method: dismantle the mounting poles, remove the wiring, batteries, and solar panels. Clean work.
Reddit’s reaction: near-universal support. When your jury pool thinks you’re a folk hero, that’s a problem for prosecutors.
Why People Are This Angry
Flock Safety operates in approximately 6,000 U.S. communities. That’s thousands of AI-powered cameras scanning every license plate that passes. The company is valued at $7.5 billion.
The pitch: neighborhood safety. The reality: a surveillance network that feeds into federal immigration enforcement.
Here’s what the data shows:
More than 4,000 lookups by local and state police were conducted for federal immigration purposes, including searches explicitly tagged “ICE,” “ICE+ERO,” and “ICE WARRANT”.
In Virginia alone, police performed nearly 3,000 immigration-related searches on the Flock network over 12 months.
In Washington state, at least eight law enforcement agencies enabled direct sharing of their Flock networks with U.S. Border Patrol.
One Texas school district had cameras searched by 30 law enforcement agencies from states including Florida, Georgia, Indiana, and Tennessee, for immigration purposes.
Flock says it doesn’t work with ICE. The data says local cops run ICE searches through the backdoor.
People noticed.
When Councils Ignore the Public
La Mesa is the template. The city’s latest Flock contract placed automated license plate readers across town over strong local opposition.
The contract moved ahead anyway.
Weeks later, two cameras were found destroyed on the same street. One smashed. One gutted. Positioned on the median like a message.
San Diego had the same dynamic. Huge turnout against Flock at council meetings. In December 2025, a split San Diego City Council approved continuing its license plate reader program anyway. This is what happens when elected officials tell constituents their concerns don’t matter: some people stop using official channels.
Cities Are Hiding Camera Locations
Louisville is suing to keep Flock camera locations secret. The city claims releasing the locations could compromise public safety. The real concern: vandalism.
In Hampton Roads, a federal judge in Norfolk released the locations of about 600 Flock cameras in late 2025 after lawsuits, ruling the locations weren’t protected.
Flock itself doesn’t publicly disclose where its cameras are. But there are now over 6,000 communities with cameras. That’s a lot of hardware to protect from angry residents with vice grips.
Flock’s Response
Garrett Langley, Flock’s 38-year-old CEO, has made statements that don’t exactly calm things down. He’s claimed that mass surveillance could eliminate all crime in America. The company’s official statement about the destruction:
“We respect and value concerns and feedback raised about our technology, and building trust is important to us.”
Building trust. While cities hide camera locations and police run ICE searches without warrants. While school cameras get searched by agencies three states away. While council meetings with overwhelming opposition end in contract renewals.
That trust-building isn’t going well.
What Happens Now
The destruction is likely to continue. The triggers remain in place:
ICE searches continue: Despite Flock’s denials, the backdoor access through local police hasn’t stopped.
Cities keep ignoring opposition: When public comment periods become performance theater, people find other outlets.
Cameras keep expanding: 6,000 communities and growing. More targets, more opportunities.
Arrests create martyrs: Jeffrey Sovern’s GoFundMe. Reddit threads full of support. The more people get charged, the more attention the cause gets.
Meanwhile, Amazon already killed its Ring-Flock partnership. 46 cities have formally rejected Flock cameras. Austin cancelled. Eugene cancelled. Mountain View cancelled. Santa Cruz cancelled. Alameda County postponed .
The political winds are shifting. But for some people, the official channels are too slow.
The Bigger Picture
This isn’t about Flock specifically. It’s about what Flock represents: surveillance infrastructure that expands regardless of public opposition, that claims to be local while feeding federal databases, that promises community safety while enabling deportation machinery.
Flock CEO Langley said mass surveillance could eliminate all crime. The people smashing cameras would argue mass surveillance is the crime.
Right now, that argument is being made with vice grips.
Better keep the windows rolled up in this area
Funny Car Stories
From AACA Forums
Many years ago I worked in the service department of our local Buick dealer. One day a fellow came in for service with his brand new Park Avenue and while we were talking he told me he installed a 12v powered picnic cooler in his trunk. He was quite proud of his installation including running a wire from the fuse box to the trunk. I asked him how long it took and he said, "all day." Why so long? Well, the last six hours I was locked in the trunk because the lid came down while I was in the trunk pulling the wire into the trunk. He told me he had to wait for his wife to come home and let him out. At that point I held up his key ring which had his remote keyless entry fob on it and asked him if he'd had his keys with him? Very sheepishly he replied, "yes, I had it in my pocket. I just never thought of it."
When I was in my very early teens my grandfather decided to sell a 1924 REO speedwagon at a local car swap meet. The truck hadn't run since the 60's so he hooked up the lawn tractor with a chain to pull it out of the barn after it was uncovered, around the farm and into the front yard where the trailer was waiting.
My dad was behind the wheel steering while I was on the passenger side smiling ear to ear going for a ride in the old REO. Near the end of the journey we were passing under a large cottonwood tree with one low hanging branch. Concerned that the branch would hit the high cab of the REO I jumped over to the drivers side like lightening and stomped on the brake. Those big rear drums locked up pronto and jerked grandpa right out of the tractor seat as the REO dug her tires in and the chain went tight.
I'll never forget grandpa getting situated back into the seat and turning around giving us one of those "what the heck is going on back there" looks. It will always be remembered as the day I saved the REO... we miss you grandpa.
I was the service manager at a Pontiac dealership during the late 70s - early 80s, in which time a lot of car makers switched to the column mounted dimmer switch. One day a young lady brought her new Pontiac in with an unusual complaint. She said that the car had been sold to her without a bright button. I asked what a bright button was, and she said the lights got brighter when the bright button was pushed. I realized she was referring to a dimmer switch and told her the car did have one. Her reply was that she was positive the car didn't have one because her boyfriend also couldn't find it. I moved her car to where it faced a white wall and showed her the dimmer switch function. Her parting comment was that she couldn't wait to show her boyfriend that he wasn't so smart after all!
I was the assistant service manager at a Lincoln-Mercury dealership in the late 1980's. One of our customers was an elderly woman who came in one day complaining that the horn blew when she was making turns. It turns out that she injured herself and had a cast on her wrist that would catch the horn button whenever she made a turn.
Another situation I remember at the Pontiac dealership was when an older gentleman brought his new car in, complaining that the car was making a peculiar noise. He said that he had brought the car in three times before and we were unable to find the problem. I asked him to describe the noise and he said that it would only make the noise when parked on a slope with the engine running. We took his car and drove to the back of the lot to where the pavement sloped up to a storage shed. He parked the car on the slope and said "hear that"? I couldn't hear anything unusual in the sound of the car, so I asked what kind of noise was the car making. He replied that it was a high pitched whining noise. I listened for several minutes and still could not hear anything unusual and the man kept insisting the noise was there. I then asked if he could hear the noise at that exact time. He replied that no, he couldn't as he was hard of hearing, but his wife (who was at home) could hear it well. I then asked if his wife wore a hearing aid and he said that mostly she didn't as she couldn't stand the whistling noise the hearing aid made.
There was this story of a guy around here who took his car to the shop because he kept hearing music when he turned a corner. They found one of those musical birthday cards that one of his kids put down the side window. Every time he turned a corner the card would open and play music.
Ok here's the perfect storm. Me with a suspended license, a 64 Corvette, and a lovely young wife. against my better judgment, we decided to take a Sunday drive as we got on the ramp to I 95, I noticed we were going like a bat outta hell. I said slow down, you're doing over 70 on a sharp curve! She replied " I'm only doing 30" as she pointed at the tach.
A few years ago, when Donald Trump was just a rich guy with some real estate, the Trump Foundation had a car show at the Trump National Golf Course in Bedminster, NJ. I drove over in my 1912 Buick. An Indian fellow with a Bentley walked over and started asking the usual questions. One question was where did I get tires? I replied: "We get them from you guys." "What do you mean?" "A company bought up all the molds for old tire sizes. Now the small tires are made in Vietnam, and the bigger ones in India." I knelt down on the grass and searched the sidewall of my 33x4 tire until I found the little legend: "Made in India." Well, gang, I've had people take pictures of every part of my car, many times. But this is the only time a fellow in a suit and tie squatted with his cell phone to take a picture of a 3-inch-wide piece of my sidewall.
A friend demonstrated crank-starting a Model T. A lady asked him how far it could go. He said a full tank was good for about 180 miles. She said: "I mean, how far until you have to wind it again?"
I worked at an Oldsmobile dealership in the 80's, in upstate NY. Those "Deer Alert" whistles were pretty popular and we sold lots of them. A lady came into the shop complaining, saying she was sure we had put them on backwards. She had seen several deer along the road the night before and "obviously those whistles were not scaring the deer away, but rather they were calling them in."
I was driving a tow truck in the mid 70's when I was sent to pick up a green Ford station wagon at a supermarket parking lot, the man said the keys would be in the ignition. When I got there I hooked up to a green Ford wagon with the keys in it but it was the wrong car! Luckily he got the name of the shop off of the truck. Boy was he mad. The next week a woman came back in with her Dodge Aspen, when I asked her "how's your ol Aspen?" She wasn't amused.
Teaching a girl friend to drive a stick shift, I asked her if she knew how to "double clutch"? She said "You can't fool me, one of those pedals down there is the brake!"
Woman goes into the dealer and says her mechanic told her to get a 710 cap as hers was missing. Puzzled, the parts man looked up her vehicle and could not find any reference to a 710 cap and she had no idea what it went to other than it was under the hood. She showed him the note her mechanic had written and it showed 710, but if you turned it around it was the "OIL".
Back when I was about 19 I worked at a shop in Warren Michigan and was often sent out on wrecker calls. One early evening in October a call came in from a lady saying she needed her car towed in because it wouldn't run. She told me the name of her street and said because it was getting dark that she would leave her porch light on because it would be too hard to see the address. I said that would be fine and I got the truck ready to go and went to her street. As I turned down her street I noticed almost every house had the porch light on???.......That's when I realized ......It was Halloween night.
My stepfather was a bus driver 40-50 years ago. He told me a story how he and a couple of his friends at the bus depot who were also practical jokers, told a rookie driver whose bus wasn't running right to collect some exhaust gas and bring it over to the depot mechanics for analysis. They explained the proper procedure and handed him a big glass jar. The young guy stood behind a running bus with the jar for several minutes, trying to capture the exhaust gas.
Once we were racing at an unfamiliar track and I was BSing with an official when a wreck happened that broke off a wheel and tire assembly and was punted up into the stands. It was like slow motion to see the spectators part to let that tire bounce off the bleachers and over the top and into the concession area behind the stands. It didn't hit anybody but bounced over the fence and thru some poor schmucks windshield in the parking lot.
The officials radio lit up for an ambulance call as someone in the stands turned an ankle or something when the crowd parted. Well, they produced about a 1950 something Pontiac ambulance that was parked in the pits, but they had to push it over to the grandstands with a push truck because it didn't run.
I asked the official what if they ever had to transport some one. He calmly said "well then we use the tow truck".
A few of guys were out cruising and the passenger in the back seat decided it might be fun to hang a BA. (you remember those)
The car hit a bump or something like that and he slipped and ran the window crank up deep you know where.
A trip to the hospital as he was bleeding pretty badly. And a VERY uncomfortable few weeks.
Three of us in the back seat of a buddy's car going somewhere I don't remember. Windows open, enjoying the warm summer day. A dude on a Harley with his woman on the back passes us. My buddy, sitting by the window, yells a disparaging remark to the biker, something about the size of his woman's butt as I remember. A mile or so down the road we come to a stop light. The biker, now in front of us, stops, gets off his bike and walks back toward our car, a big grin on his face, ambling slowly, no sign whatsoever that he is angry about the remark. Just in case, my buddy quickly closes the window. Biker dude gets to the car, still smiling pleasantly. Maybe he wants directions? He taps on the window and my buddy smiles and lowers the window. Took several weeks for my buddy's black eyes and bloody nose to heal. I suspect the biker's knuckles took a while to heal as well.
I have a story that I was refraining from telling because I wanted to keep the thread clean, but since its deviated, I'll follow suit. I have a collection of vintage hearses and one of the most common and most annoying questions I get is "have you ever had sex in the back?" After finally hearing this one too many times, I figured that a stupid question deserves a stupid answer, and I replied with "That depends. Do you mean with living people?"
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