Welcome to The Morning Dump, bite-sized stories corralled into a single article for your morning perusal. If your morning coffee’s working a little too well, pull up a throne and have a gander at the best of the rest of yesterday.
Brit Agency Tells Insurers To Stop Screwing Customers
It’s a weird time to be a car insurance company. First, there’s inflation, which makes the cost of most things go up. Second, cars are more complicated and expensive, and parts that used to be cheap, like headlights, now cost thousands of dollars to replace. Third, and most importantly, it was some actuary’s job somewhere to guess what a car would be worth in the future, and those assumptions were probably based on a typical depreciation curve. The last few years have been extremely atypical, with residual values through the roof. The cost of replacing a car now is way higher than it was in the past. What’s an insurance company to do? According to the Financial Conduct Authority (I love the way the Brits name things), which is the British version of the Fair Trade Commission, some companies are just undervaluing cars. Here’s the publication’s release on the topic: The insurance industry is an extremely competitive world and so there’s a lot of pressure to keep costs down in order to not lose customers, but this sucks. If you crash your car right now you’re not in a great position to replace it without losing a decent amount of money, which is the whole point of having insurance. In some cases, claims staff are only increasing that offer to the fair market price when a consumer complains. Offering a price lower than fair market value is not allowed under FCA rules. The FCA is acting against those firms that it has found breaking its rules.
Everyone Had A Great Month Except Honda
It’s great to be a Japanese or Korean automaker in the United States, unless you’re Acura or Honda. It sucks to be Acura or Honda. Let’s look at the year-over-year sales numbers from November:
Hyundai: +43% Kia: +25% Mazda: +30% Subaru: +52% Toyota: +10% Lexus: -4% Honda: -5% Acura: -14%
Ouchie, bro. Some of this is due to capacity and supply chain and all that, but I don’t think that’s all that’s going on here. Honda has no real attractive options for either hybrids or EVs. Their cars are fine, but there’s no sizzle there. Also, according to a study reported by Green Car Reports, Honda owners (and to some extent Lexus/Toyota buyers) are flocking to Tesla: It’s not everything, but it’s something. Owners of both brands have long been considered to have the most brand loyalty. But a lack of EV offerings is starting to hurt these brands in measurable ways, these results suggest.
What Happens If No One Buys Your Cars?
Worse than what’s happening to Honda is what’s happening to extremely random carmaker Evergrande, created by a company that was once China’s biggest property developer. Here’s how our modern market works, generally: you can make a market, which Tesla did with the Roadster and Model S; you can be a fast-follower, which is what Toyota did when it made the Prius after watching Honda attempt the same with the Insight; or you can be too late. Someone probably lost their shirt by being the last company to produce a bunch of fidget spinners. The Chinese car market is weird because the central government and the various subdivisions of China all pushed massive incentives to create electric cars. This ended up jumpstarting a lot of successful companies like BYD (to learn more about this I recommend Levi Tillemann’s “The Great Race”), but someone always shows up to the party when the keg is kicked and that someone appears to be Evergrande. Here’s what Hong Kong-based financial news source Asia Financial had to report on the company: Yeah, that’s not great. But don’t worry, it gets worse: However, the company has paused production as there are not enough new orders for the electric sport-utility vehicle, according to two sources who declined to be named because they were not authorized to speak to the media. Triple ouchie, bro. The group had touted the EV unit as key to its transformation plans, with chairman Hui Ka Yan vowing to shift the group’s primary business within 10 years from real estate to the automobile venture, and to make 1 million vehicles a year by 2025.
Saudi Arabia Is Part Of The Future Of Green Energy According To Saudi Arabia
As a journalist it’s always fun to report on Saudi Arabia because, well, they sometimes kill journalists. Saudi Arabia, for better or worse (just kidding, for worse) is a petrostate. About 46% of their GDP comes from oil and oil extraction. They can see the writing on the wall, of course, and they’re trying to see if they can find any other thing that they can do to reduce their own dependence on oil exports. So, here’s a press release from the Future Minerals Forum, outlining how His Excellency Khalid Al-Mudaifer, Vice-Minister for Mining Affairs, Ministry of Industry and Mineral Resources, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia views all this: And… And… I don’t start shit but I can tell you how it ends. What he’s asking for is investment so they can remove the minerals from African countries that are happy to trade them for cash, and process them using their cheap petrochemicals, thus creating a new dependency for the world. It’s better than relying on China, right? Right?
The Flush
Have you ever had a car written off? Did you get a fair value? Sounds like your next article: How to get fair value in this stupid market. Which publicly accessible resources are best to quote and which are lowballer porn? How to not fall into the trap of I know what I got (or I had)! How to successfully argue the brand new tires, paint or what not add to the value. How to resist the temptation to punch a lowballing appraiser in the face.
