FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) — The State Department had been in talks with Elon Musk’s Tesla company to buy armored electric vehicles, but the plans have been put on hold by the Trump administration after reports emerged about a potential $400 million purchase.
A State Department spokesperson said the electric car company owned by Musk, who has become President Donald Trump's billionaire adviser aiming to dismantle agencies and downsize the federal workforce, was the only one that expressed interest back in May 2024, when Joe Biden was president.
While it was in its planning phases, the deal with Tesla was forecast to be the largest contract of the year. It shows how some of his wealth has come and was still expected to come from taxpayers before the plans were put on hold. His companies obtain hundreds of millions of dollars each year in contracts. SpaceX has secured nearly $20 billion in federal funds since 2008 to ferry astronauts and satellites into space. And Tesla had already received $41.9 million from the U.S. government, including payment for vehicles provided to some U.S. embassies.
No government contract had been given to Tesla or any other manufacturer to produce armored electric vehicles for the Department of State, the agency said.
The Biden administration had tasked the State Department to gather information from potential suppliers to buy these vehicles in September. An official request for bids was to be released in May, according to State Department data from December. But that solicitation is now on hold with no plans to issue it, the State Department said.
After reports emerged about the plans to buy from Tesla, the State Department changed the data entry on its expected contracts forecast for fiscal year 2025 late Wednesday. The State Department said it should have been entered into the system as a generic “electric vehicle manufacturer," but there is at least another entry for a different purchase that continues to list a company— German car manufacturer BMW.
A Michigan judge is putting sponges in the hands of shoplifters and ordering them to wash cars in a Walmart parking lot when spring weather arrives. Genesee County Judge Jeffrey Clothier hopes the unusual form of community service discourages people from stealing from Walmart. The judge also wants to reward shoppers with free car washes. Clothier says he began ordering “Walmart wash” sentences this week for shoplifting at the store in Grand Blanc Township. He believes 75 to 100 people eventually will be ordered to wash cars this spring. Clothier says he will be washing cars alongside them when the time comes.
At 100 years old, the Goodyear Blimp is an ageless star in the sky. The 246-foot-long airship will be in the background of the Daytona 500 — flying roughly 1,500 feet above Daytona International Speedway, actually — to celebrate its greatest anniversary tour. Even though remote camera technologies are improving regularly and changing the landscape of aerial footage, the blimp continues to carve out a niche. At Daytona, with the usual 40-car field racing around a 2½-mile superspeedway, views from the blimp aptly provide the scope of the event.
You'll just have to wait for interest rates (and prices) to go down. Plus, this deal's a steel, the big carmaker wedding is off, and bribery is back, baby!
Japanese automakers Honda, Nissan and Mitsubishi are dropping their talks on business integration.
It’s a chicken-and-egg problem: Restaurants are struggling with record-high U.S. egg prices, but their omelets, scrambles and huevos rancheros may be part of the problem. Breakfast is booming at U.S. eateries. First Watch, a restaurant chain that serves breakfast, brunch and lunch, nearly quadrupled its locations over the past decade to 570. Fast-food chains like Starbucks and Wendy's added more egg-filled breakfast items. In normal times, egg producers could meet the demand. But a bird flu outbreak that has forced them to slaughter their flocks is making supplies scarcer and pushing up prices. Some restaurants like Waffle House have added a surcharge to offset their costs.
