1968 Pontiac Firebird Convertable on 2040-cars

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Watch this garbage truck consume a Pontiac Grand Am

When an old car or truck offers its dying breath in your driveway and you just don't have the financial or mechanical wherewithal to resuscitate it yet again, you traditionally have to go to the trouble of calling a flatbed or a tow truck to come haul it away. That usually helps to put a few bucks in your wallet and helps recycle some of the vehicle's parts, but the transaction doesn't seem as final or perversely satisfying as the dispatch service that this New Way Cobra Magnum garbage truck offers.
Okay, okay, so this refuse hauler isn't actually designed for this sort of thing, but it's oddly comforting to know that a sanitation truck can compact a hapless Pontiac Grand Am into oblivion. Next time, we won't feel so guilty about slipping that rusty charcoal grille onto the curb next to the cans on garbage day. Watch the carnage by scrolling below.

Airbag recall adds 85k Pontiac Vibes to tally

The repairs needed for the faulty airbag inflators supplied by Takata continue to expand. Toyota initially announced a recall of 766,300 vehicles equipped with the bad part on June 11 as a followup to a campaign from 2013. Soon after, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened a preliminary evaluation into five automakers who also used the component in their models. Now, NHTSA has released the official announcement of the latest Toyota recall listing 844,277 affected cars, including the newly added 2003-2004 Pontiac Vibe.
While NHTSA's document didn't include a model-by-model breakdown, General Motors spokesperson Alan Adler estimated to Autoblog that roughly 85,000 Vibes in the US would be covered under the latest recall. Like the rest of the affected models, the airbag inflator could rupture in a crash causing the bag not to work correctly, possibly spraying metal fragments at the occupant.
Toyota spokesperson Cindy Knight told Autoblog that the reason for the disparity between the earlier press release and NHTSA document was that Toyota was continuing to comb through VINs to create a list of affected vehicles. The original number was an estimate of that process at the time. Scroll down to the recall report from NHTSA.

GM recalling another 2.7 million vehicles in five separate campaigns

The recalls keep rolling in from General Motors, evidently keen to avoid repeating the mistakes of the ignition-switch debacle and clean house. This time they're all coming at once, with five separate recalls announced together covering approximately 2.7 million vehicles.
The largest of the five actions involves over 2.4 million units of the previous-generation Chevrolet Malibu and Malibu Maxx, Pontiac G6 and Saturn Aura in order to fix brake light wiring harness, which have been found to be susceptible to corrosion. The recall is separate from the 56k Aura sedans which GM recently recalled over faulty shift cables, not to mention the previous massive recall of 1.3 million vehicles - some of them the same models - but appears to have resulted from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration investigation that started with the G6 almost a year ago.
The second-largest campaign involves the 2014 Chevy Malibu, specifically those fitted with GM's 2.5-liter engine and stop/start system, approximately 140,000 examples of which has been found to have problematic brakes. The issue does not appear to be connected to the recall of 8k Malibu and Buick LaCrosse sedans (also involving brake woes) which we reported upon last week. Four crashes have been reported in such models, but GM admits it's not yet clear if the problem was a contributing factor in the accidents.