CarGurus Sued By New York City For Allegedly Lying About Dealership Prices

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Good morning! It's Monday, October 19, 2026, and this is The Morning Shift, your daily roundup of the top automotive headlines from around the world, in one place. This is where you'll find the most important stories that are shaping the way Americans drive and get around.

In this morning's edition, New York City is suing CarGurus for misleading customers over vehicle prices on its website, Tesla is asking its shareholders to re-elect Elon Musk at its annual meeting (shock!), Jeep may start building vehicles in China for Canada and Ford has gone too long without a recall, so it's issuing one.

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New York City's Department of Consumer and Worker Protection is going after CarGurus, saying the online vehicle listing company deceived customers about dealership prices on its website. The consumer protection enforcement action, filed earlier this month, contends that the company's online price rating system and use of artificial intelligence chatbots ultimately present false prices that hide extra fees.

The department noted over 2,000 violations of the city's consumer protection law, and it's seeking penalties of up to $3,500 each. All in all, it could cost CarGurus millions of dollars. The new lawsuit, filed in New York State Supreme Court, looks to permanently stop CarGurus from deceiving New Yorkers and impose those civil penalties. From Automotive News:

"New Yorkers should be able to trust that a 'Great Deal' is actually a great deal," department Commissioner Samuel Levine said in an Oct. 15 statement. "Our lawsuit seeks to stop bait-and-switch pricing, eliminate hidden fees, and ensure customers aren't getting fleeced when making one of the biggest purchases of their lives."

[...]

CarGurus said it rejected the city's claims and vowed to "vigorously" defend the company.

"The allegations in the complaint ignore our decades-long track record of setting the standard for transparency in car buying and selling," CEO Jason Trevisan said in a statement posted to its website Oct. 15.

CarGurus presents deal ratings on its vehicle shopping website that include such labels as Great Deal or Overpriced. The company says those ratings are based on a transparent and objective review, and now include requirements that dealership fees are disclosed.

CarGurus failed to enforce its own rules, the city alleged. It said the ratings hide required fees or make them difficult to find and that an AI chatbot featured on its website also does not provide details of the fees in lists of deals it generates.

"CarGurus claims that it takes steps to remove such deceptive listings from its website," the department said, but added that it "found CarGurus failed to take adequate steps to enforce its own guidelines, leading to increased consumer confusion."

CarGurus and other third-party listing sites had to adjust their listing policies after a Federal Trade Commission decision in March told 97 dealership groups it considered it illegal to advertise prices omitting mandatory dealership charges, like document fees and pre-installed vehicle accessories. It said advertised prices have to be true, out-the-door prices, with the exception of government fees and taxes.

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Sometimes, news is so unexpected that you've got to drop everything to take notice of it. This is one of those times: Tesla just filed its proxy statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission asking shareholders to re-elect CEO Elon Musk to a three-year term at its December 3 meeting. It's a real shocker, I know.

Additionally, the filing seeks re-election of Chair Robyn Denholm and ‌director JB Straubel to three-year terms. The move comes about a year after the Austin, Texas-based EV maker's board granted Musk a performance award that was billed as a $1 trillion pay package. From Reuters:

Musk's 2025 CEO Performance Award of about 423.7 ​million restricted shares is reported at a $158.4 billion total ​in the summary compensation table.

None of the $1 trillion performance award's 12 tranches has been earned. Each needs a market-cap ​milestone from $2 trillion to $8.5 trillion plus operational targets, ​and the unearned shares vote in proportion to all other shares.

Musk ‌exercised ⁠all 303.96 million options from his 2018 award on June 16, leaving 286.4 million restricted shares that vest in January 2028 if he stays in a leadership ​role.

Tesla revealed ​it spent ⁠months working directly with the SEC to pioneer a voluntary retail investor voting ​framework, ultimately obtaining a formal SEC ​no-action letter.

Tesla's ⁠pledging policy caps borrowing secured by Musk's pledged shares at the lesser of $3.5 billion or 25% of ⁠the ​shares' value.

In total, Musk personally owns about 20% of Tesla, including 207.5 million pledged shares, while Vanguard Capital Management holds 5.3%. I'm not sure if Musk will ever make that trillion-dollar pay package from Tesla itself, but he's certainly going to try, and it's not like the board isn't going to do everything in its power to try and give it to him.

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Things are getting mighty weird for Stellantis in Canada. The automaker is apparently laying the groundwork for importing electrified Jeeps to our neighbors up north from China following a decision to scrap plans to build the next-generation Compass at the idled Brampton Assembly Plant in Ontario. It now plans to sell the plant to a local defense contractor.

Starting in 2027, a joint venture between Stellantis and DongFeng will build two Jeeps for sale within China and for international export — including Canada and Mexico. Don't fret, those vehicles won't be coming to the U.S. From Automotive News:

The battery-electric and plug-in hybrid Jeeps, to be built in Wuhan at the Dongfeng Peugeot Citroen Automobile plant, will leverage Dongfeng's electrified vehicle technology. Lv provided no further details on the export plans.

Stellantis Canada said the plan to import the Jeeps from China remains preliminary.

"At this stage, saying these vehicles are planned for Canada would be very premature," spokesperson LouAnn Gosselin said in an email.

She added that "potential imports" of the China-made Jeeps did not factor into the company's Brampton decisions.

The automaker's weighing overseas Jeep imports comes as its Canadian arm remains entangled in a battle with government and its unionized workforce over the future of the Brampton plant.

[...]

"The idea that Stellantis will import EV Jeeps built in China to Canada, while attempting to shutter a promised EV Jeep plant in Brampton, is entirely unacceptable and out of touch with Canadians," Unifor President Lana Payne told Automotive News Canada in an email.

The plant hasn't built a vehicle since 2023, when Stellantis began retooling it for the new Compass. However, the project was scuttled in February of 2025 when the Compass program was moved to the U.S.

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Ford is recalling 2,276 2025-2027 F-150s because someone forgot to make sure the front seats are properly bolted down. The good news is, less than 1% of vehicles will actually be affected, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The bad news is that it's the latest in a long line of recalls for the Blue Oval in 2026. From The Detroit News:

The improper securements may not restrain occupants sufficiently, increasing the risk for injury during a crash, it said, though Ford reported it isn't aware of any deaths or injuries related to the problem.

Dealer service departments will inspect and tighten or replace the front seat bolts, if necessary. The fix will done free of charge to the consumer, since the recall classifies the issue as a safety risk.

Owner notification letters are expected to be mailed on Oct. 26. The solution is eligible for mobile repair and dealer pickup and delivery, according to a Ford letter to retailers.

A warranty report on June 23 identified a missing seat-to-body front seat bolt on a vehicle and that the front passenger seat-to-body front bolt was not fully seated, according to a recall report. An investigation found an autoworker was unable to secure the seat on the vehicle within the workstation cycle time, which caused a line stoppage according to plant protocol. A team leader responsible for the repair indicated in the tracking system that the fix had been completed, but it hadn't. Investigators looked for similar issues and repairs to identify the recall population, identifying 62 vehicle identification numbers based on warranty and field reports with improperly secured seats.

This is Ford's 80th recall of 2026 — more than doubling second-place Stellantis' 39 recalls. All in all, FoMoCo has recalled 14,093,368 vehicles thus far. While we probably won't get to the 153 individual recalls it issued last year, we've already eclipsed the number of impacted vehicles. Good work, guys.

History.com

Being implicated in a drug ring is one of the many reasons I consider John DeLorean to be the coolest automotive executive of all time. Nobody has sauce like that anymore, for better or for worse, and you cannot deny that the DMC-12 looks sick as hell. I can't say it would have been quite so iconic without the movie, but we'll never really know, will we? In any case, if you want to learn more about DeLorean's legal issues, head over to History.com.

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Fuel prices have continued to trend in the right direction, but at a snail's pace. Sure, gas and diesel prices are going down, but it's not happening in any way that's truly meaningful for the average American driver. It's not helping that WTI Crude Oil futures and Brent Crude are both still highly elevated, sitting at $98 and $108, respectively, at the time of publication.

Here's where national average prices stand right now, according to AAA:

AAA

This all shakes out to the average price of a gallon of regular gas staying virtually the same overnight, according to AAA. While Regular did technically drop a fraction of a cent, the average price remained $4.30. It's a similar story with diesel, which was also technically down a fraction of a cent, while still remaining at $6.32.