GM is out $220 million over how it handled customer personal information, and on the vendor side Cox is investigating a cybersecurity incident at VinSolutions — the CRM a lot of rooftops live inside. Meanwhile a franchise store in Miami is getting the full internet treatment from a consumer channel for what happened at the desk. The pattern is simple: what you collect, what your vendor stores, and what your closer says out loud are all now discoverable in public. Worth a read before your next vendor renewal, and worth asking your CRM rep what data leaves your building and where it goes.

An out-of-warranty battery replacement on a five-year-old Taycan now costs more than a brand-new Camry, and Tesla's first Cybertruck trade-in offers are landing well below what owners hoped. Over in Germany, VW has started pulling 4,100 EVs a year apart at Zwickau specifically because there's money in reusable components — which tells you where the real value sits on a tired electric. If you're appraising used EVs, the battery is the car; everything else is trim. Price the unknown, or let somebody else own it.

A 405-hp manual Cayenne GTS just crossed a Cars & Bids block at $35,250 — less than a new minivan — and the broader run of former flagships is now priced like well-equipped family sedans, with risk ranked accordingly. Further down the ladder, a turbocharged three-row Subaru Ascent starts around $15,000 used, roughly half a Telluride. The spread between acquisition cost and retail ask looks fantastic right up until the first repair order. Buy the boring one for the front line and let the hero car be somebody else's hobby, because with the Fed holding steady, nobody's payment math got easier this week.

The Maverick is officially America's best-selling hybrid truck and the fuel-economy champ under $30K, and coverage is pointing to a broader return of small, cheap pickups after fifty years of them getting bigger. At the same time, readers keep explaining why they're holding onto old cars — price, too much tech, no emotional connection to the new stuff. Your customer isn't chasing a feature list; they're chasing a payment and a vehicle that does a job. Stock accordingly: small, efficient, easy to fix, and priced where a real person can live with it.