Automotive News asked five auto finance experts to share their thoughts on these challenges and what affordability constraints might mean for the months ahead.
The tariff rate on electric vehicles is expected to quadruple from roughly 25 percent to 100 percent, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday, citing people familiar with the plans.
Potentially carcinogenic chemicals used to meet auto safety regulators’ flammability standards were present in essentially all vehicles tested in a study from the Green Science Policy Institute and Duke University.
When doctors began using the drug sotorasib in 2021 with high expectations for its innovative approach to attacking lung cancer, retired medical technician Don Crosslin was an early beneficiary. Crosslin started the drug that July. His tumors shrank, then stabilized.
But while the drug has helped keep him alive, its side effects have gradually narrowed the confines of his life, said Crosslin, 76, who lives in Ocala, Florida: “My appetite has been minimal. I’m very weak. I walk my dogs and get around a bit, but I haven’t been able to golf since last July.”
He wonders whether he’d do better on a lower dose, “but I do what my oncologist tells me to do,” Crosslin said. Every day, he takes eight of the 120-milligram pills, sold under Amgen’s brand name Lumakras.
Crosslin’s concern lies at the heart of an FDA effort to make cancer drugs less toxic and more effective. Cancer drug trials are structured to promote high doses, which then become routine patient care. In the face of evidence that thousands of patients become so ill that they skip doses or stop taking the drugs — thereby risking resurgence of their cancers — the FDA has begun requiring companies to pinpoint the right dosage before they reach patients.
Tim Henderson | Stateline.org (TNS)
Black homeowners’ property values are on the rise across the country, with some of the biggest upswings in Midwestern and Southern states. The boon to Black homeowners, after decades of lagging property values, could help them close a racial wealth gap that has kept the American dream out of reach.
Home values increased on average 84% in majority-Black ZIP codes between 2016 and 2023, outpacing growth in white ZIP codes, where values grew 69%, according to a Stateline analysis of federal housing and census data.
A hot market during the COVID-19 pandemic, an intensifying housing shortage, and new state and federal efforts to fight appraisal bias may finally be moving Black homeowners a bit toward property value parity.
Morgan Williams, an attorney for the National Fair Housing Alliance, an advocacy group, cautioned that the push for more fair housing appraisals remains in the early stages. And he noted that even unbiased appraisals can perpetuate undervalued housing by using past sales as a benchmark.