Today’s Recall News Involves … ‘Park Outside’ Notices You Need to Take Seriously! Coachella Valley Independent’s Indy Digest: Aug. 17, 2026

Indy Digest: Aug. 17, 2026

Back in 2020—early in the year, before things got, uh, weird—I received a recall notice in the mail.

It was for our 2009 Hyundai Elantra. There was a possibility that moisture could enter the anti-lock braking system and cause an electrical short that could lead to a fire—even if the car was not on. Until we got the issue repaired, the notice recommended that we park the car outside. I think it even recommended that we park it away from buildings and flammable things.

Our reaction was … to laugh. Our 11-year-old car, which we’d driven tens of thousands of miles without incident, was a threat to randomly catch on fire, hours or even days after it was last operated? We joked about needing to find some weedless field or empty lot so we could park it somewhere safe. Hilarious!

I hadn’t thought about that recall notice in years—until I ran across an article published today by The Washington Post. The story’s provocative headline: “They were told to park outside. Then their cars burst into flames.”

Ooh. Apparently, I shouldn’t have found that recall notice to be so laughable.

Here’s the lede (gift link):

Late last year, when Sarah Lammersen learned her 2022 Jeep Wrangler plug-in hybrid was being recalled because the high-voltage battery could catch fire at any time—even when the vehicle was parked—she jokingly texted the dealership, “I hope the car doesn’t catch on fire while we wait to schedule an appointment.”

Days later, the Jeep burst into flames. No one was injured in the blaze, which occurred while Lammersen’s daughter drove the vehicle, but the Jeep was destroyed, according to a lawsuit over the incident.

Yikes.

It turns out that more than 3.2 million vehicles nationwide are under one of these “park outside” recalls. Why? The article goes on to explain why these recalls keep happening.

The rise in park-outside recalls is being driven by the growing number of electronics and batteries packed into modern vehicles, involving ordinary wiring, seat motors, starter relays, high-voltage batteries and more, according to experts.

They’re known as “key-off fires,” said Frank Borris, a former NHTSA investigator who now

“The engine is off, but the circuits are still hot, and they stay hot all the time,” Borris said.

“There is a lot more electronics in vehicles today,” he added, “and that means more stuff can go wrong.”

(Sean Kane, president of Safety Research and Strategies) said vehicles today also run hotter and have more components packed tightly under the hood, providing more opportunities for fires to start.

“If something goes wrong, even if you park the car, the temperatures stay higher for longer than they used to,” he said.

So, if you get a recall notice like the one I received, don’t laugh. Take it seriously.

—Jimmy Boegle

More News

• A stir-causing poll showing that incumbent Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is leading her opponent by double-digits is complete fiction. The Los Angeles Times reports: “A poll claiming Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass was leading Councilmember Nithya Raman by a wide margin—and picking up support from most voters who backed Spencer Pratt in the mayoral primary—was bogus, the company behind the poll acknowledged Monday. The fake poll by Median Strategies showed Bass leading Raman by nearly 12 percentage points ahead of the Nov. 3 mayoral runoff, and said the results were based on a survey of 560 Los Angeles voters between July 30 and Aug. 5. It said it had a 4.1% margin of error. But Monday, in response to repeated inquiries from The Times, the company said the purported ‘poll’ was nothing of the kind. ‘Median Strategies was created as a short term social experiment to examine how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification,’ the company said in an email to The Times. ‘We are not seeking publicity or attribution for the individuals involved and are declining interviews.’” Wow!

• The president is decreasing joint military exercises with South Korea, because they’re threatening to North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, someone with whom Trump says he has a “very good relationship.” I can’t believe I just typed that sentence, and I also can’t believe this gambit hasn’t drawn universal condemnation from every member of Congress. The Associated Press says: “Trump said in a social media post that the exercises are not only costly but ‘send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile’ to North Korea, which he said ‘has been unthreatening and respectful’ during his time in the White House. Trump instructed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to ‘substantially reduce’ the exercises. He added that he recently asked President Lee Jae Myung if South Korea would join the U.S. in the ‘denuclearization’ of Iran, ‘and they said, “No thanks!”’ Trump’s move is the latest example of the American president appearing to turn against an ally in favor of a leader cast by previous administrations as an adversary. Trump and others in his administration also have railed against NATO allies over a perceived lack of support for his war against Iran, even as they seek to confront an increasingly aggressive Russia in the Baltic region.”

• And to justify the insanity, the president is just making stuff up. CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale says: “Trump has repeatedly delivered false assertions about the payments South Korea has made for decades to help cover the cost of the major U.S. military presence in the country (more than 26,000 personnel as of the end of 2024). On Tuesday, he wrote on social media that he had just spoken with South Korean acting President Han Duck-soo about economic issues and about ‘payment for the big time Military Protection we provide to South Korea.’ Trump then added this: ‘They began these Military payments during my first term, Billions of Dollars, but Sleepy Joe Biden, for reasons unknown, terminated the deal. That was a shocker to all!’ Trump’s claim is false in two big ways. First, South Korea’s payments did not begin during Trump’s first term. The cost-sharing deals known as Special Measures Agreements began in 1991, more than 25 years before Trump took office in 2017. Second, former President Joe Biden did not terminate a Trump cost-sharing agreement with South Korea. The only Special Measures Agreement signed by the Trump administration had expired by the time Biden took office in 2021—and Biden’s administration then signed two such agreements, one in 2021 and one in 2024, that both included South Korean spending increases.”

• In other news about presidential lies, Trump is accusing people of vandalism … when he was the one that ordered the “vandalism.” This claim is so nuts that even Fox News is pushing back: “President Donald Trump is blaming vandals for large spots of dead grass on the National Mall near the World War II Memorial, the same area where the president hosted crowds for a 4th of July celebration. Trump made the claim without providing evidence or explaining why he believes vandals damaged the grass. He shared a photo showing an area by the World War II Memorial with patches of brown and dead grass across much of the sprawling turf that was previously full of green grass. ‘Look what VANDALS did to the grass connecting the vandalized World War II Monument and the vandalized Reflecting Pool, which will be opened again, and better than ever, shortly,’ Trump wrote on Truth Social. ‘Anybody who thinks the Reflecting Pool wasn’t vandalized should go back to Law School!’ he continued. Trump had a large stage built and invited crowds to the same lawn for his Independence Day celebration last month. He is now blaming vandals for the grass damage. Crowds gathered to hear from the president and watch fireworks to celebrate the nation’s 250th anniversary.”

• Amazon is buying rare books, using them to train AI models, and destroying them. Ugh. TechCrunch reports via Yahoo! Finance: “Amazon is buying tons of rare books, cutting off their spines, and scanning them for AI training, according to 404 Media, which placed a tracking device in a rare book that ultimately arrived at an Amazon facility in Las Vegas. The facility, known as VGT3, identifies itself with a symbol of a dinosaur holding a book in its claws. Amazon told 404 Media in a statement that it ‘purchases books through commercial channels to improve the products and services customers use.’ Companies like Amazon need unfathomably large amounts of text to train their LLMs, which have already ingested what they can from the internet (and, in Anthropic’s case, illegally pirated books). Rare books, especially ones that are out of print or impossible to find on the internet, offer a new source of coveted training data. These texts are especially valuable since there’s no chance that anything published before 2022 was written by an LLM. When LLMs train on AI-generated text, they risk ‘model collapse,’ which can occur when the quality of an LLM’s outputs degrade after ingesting too much AI-generated text.”

• And finally … because nothing makes any sense anymore, here’s a piece from The Atlantic, written by a transgender former National Security Council employee, in which Mike Pence is praised effusively. Seriously, this is a must-read piece, for all sorts of reasons; first and foremost because it shows how idiotic and awful our current president’s administration is (gift link). Here’s just one snippet from the piece by Julia Curlee: “One week in, the administration I served reinstated its ban on trans people in the military. Decorated officers such as my friend Colonel Bree Fram were thrown out for the crime of being honest. In the White House, people called me ‘in­dispensable.’ I still was not welcome in their bathrooms. A month later, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard fired 100 intelligence officers, many of them trans, for taking part in an LGBTQ group chat that conservative media had cast as sexually explicit. The next day, I ran an intel briefing—for her—because that is what we do. The following week, the president stood before Congress and called trans children a lie.”

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