Car News

EXCLUSIVE Rescue crews and emergency workers across Australia – including police and the fire brigade – will soon have access to a smartphone app that will show the fastest and safest way to cut open cars involved in life-threatening crashes. It means rescue workers will have access to technical diagrams and critical information for hundreds of cars in a matter of seconds, saving critical time that could end up saving lives.

A hacker in the United States has uncovered old Tesla hardware on eBay that allegedly contains personal data from owners – including passwords, home addresses, calendar events and phone call history. Worse, the hacker claims Tesla knows about the breach but is yet to do anything about it.

US car giant Ford will share data from an entire year of driving from two of its self-driving cars to the wider academic research community to help fast-track autonomous driving technology. In particular, the extra data will help researchers gain important insights into how the vehicles identify objects and hazards in a wide variety of driving conditions.

Audi Australia has issued a recall for 10,373 examples of its A1, A3 and TT sports coupe due to potentially faulty seven-speed dual-clutch automatic transmissions that were previously dismissed as not requiring repairs. Affected models include 2011-2016 model-year A1 small hatchback (pictured below), 2008-2016 model-year A3 mid size car (pictured above) and the 2012-2016 model-year TT sports car.

Sales of petrol-electric hybrid vehicles skyrocketed in April 2020, even though it was the weakest month in 26 years and the sharpest decline since records began in 1991. The Toyota RAV4 Hybrid appears to have been the driving force behind the unprecedented growth rate of all hybrid vehicles by 64.1 per cent (from 1711 to 2809) in April 2020 versus the same month last year.