Enlarge / Artist's illustration of a pressurized lunar rover design conceived by Toyota and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. (credit: Toyota/JAXA )

On the sidelines of the state visit by the Japanese prime minister to Washington this week, US and Japanese officials have signed an agreement to cement a partnership that will pave the way for a Japanese astronaut to walk on the Moon.

The Japanese astronaut, still unnamed, will become the first international astronaut to walk on the Moon under the auspices of the NASA-led Artemis program. Astronauts from NASA's other major partners on Artemis—the European Space Agency (ESA), Canada, and the United Arab Emirates—will also get a chance to fly to the Moon, either to the planned Gateway space station in lunar orbit or on trips to the surface.

But Japan will get the first international seat on a lunar landing mission, President Biden announced Wednesday during a joint press conference with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. Other topics on the agenda for the official visit included deepening economic, military, scientific, and educational ties between the two nations.

Enlarge / Toyota Kentucky currently churns out Camry sedans, but from next year it will also make electric vehicles. (credit: Toyota)

Toyota's factory in Georgetown, Kentucky, is getting an additional $1.3 billion investment, the automaker says. Last year it announced that the Georgetown plant would build its forthcoming three-row electric SUV; now it says it's also adding a battery pack assembly line, among other improvements.

"Today's announcement reflects our commitment to vehicle electrification and further reinvesting in our US operations," said Kerry Creech, president of Toyota Kentucky. "Generations of our team members helped prepare for this opportunity, and we will continue leading the charge into the future by remaining true to who we are as a company and putting our people first for generations to come."

Toyota has lagged behind industry rivals in its electrification plans; here in the US its sole battery EV offering is the stolid bZ4x electric crossover . The company's slow-rolling of EVs led to a change of leadership in 2023 as Akio Toyoda was replaced as CEO by former Lexus head Koji Sato.

Enlarge / Infotainment system in a 2016 Ford Escape. (credit: Getty Images | Todd Korol )

A federal appeals court rejected lawsuits that alleged five major carmakers violated a Washington state privacy law. The lawsuits centered on car infotainment systems that store text messages in a way that potentially allows the messages to be retrieved by law enforcement using specialized hardware and software. The rulings in the carmakers' favor came in cases against Ford, General Motors, Honda, Toyota, and Volkswagen.

A three-judge panel at the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit unanimously upheld US District Court rulings that dismissed the five class-action lawsuits, which were almost identical. The appeals court ruled in Ford's favor on October 27, then issued rulings upholding the dismissals of the other four cases on Tuesday this week.

We'll cover the Ford ruling here since the other decisions don't go into the same level of detail, and the arguments were similar in all five cases. The simple version is that the cases failed because the plaintiffs' data stayed in the car systems and apparently was never transmitted to law enforcement, Ford, or anyone else.

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Six weeks of targeted strikes by the United Auto Workers has proved to be an effective approach. Ford, Stellantis, and General Motors have all reached tentative agreements with the UAW over the past 10 days. Now, the union wants to focus its attention on automakers like Toyota and Tesla, who have resisted unionization or opened plants in right-to-work states that are hostile to collective bargaining.

The UAW began strike action at three car factories in mid-September , the first time in the union's history that it initiated industrial action against all three of the big US automakers simultaneously.

After watching years of executive pay raise largesse, the union asked for a 36 percent pay increase spread over four years, the return of cost-of-living adjustments, and the return of defined-benefit pensions. Among other demands were an end to the two-tiered system of hiring some employees as temporary workers, which meant that people hired after 2007 could be paid half as much as someone doing the same job hired before that practice was instituted.

Enlarge / This is the engine bay of a 2018 RAV4 Hybrid, but the problem is not the hybrid traction battery. (credit: Alun Taylor)

There's plenty of fear, uncertainty, and doubt about electric cars and the potential risk of battery fires , but the regular old 12 V battery is responsible for Toyota issuing a recall for more than 1.8 million cars this week.

Toyota says the problem is due to differences in the sizes of replacement batteries—some have smaller tops than others, and if a smaller-top battery isn't held in properly by its clamp, the battery could move under hard cornering, letting the positive terminal contact the clamp, causing a short-circuit and possible fire risk.

The problem affects 2013–2018 RAV4s —about 1,854,000 of them, according to Toyota. The official National Highway Traffic Safety Administration safety recall notice has not yet been posted, but NHTSA's Office of Defects Investigation has had an open case looking into the problem since February 2021 , after 11 complaints about "non-crash thermal events" starting in the engine bays of RAV4s.