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Hyundai, Kia announce buyback plan for angry Korean investors

Hyundai's controversial decision last September to move its Korean headquarters to an expansive (and expensive) new facility was met with a swift backlash by shareholders. After making the biggest land purchase in South Korean history, the company's share price took a nine-point nose dive.
Now, in a bid to get back in the good graces of its stockholders, Hyundai and its subsidiary, Kia, will make a $615-million stock buyback plan. Reuters claims this is the first time in ten years that Hyundai has made a buyback offer with the explicit purpose of pumping up share prices.
The total deal bumped up Hyundai's share prices 5.7 percent while Kia is up two percent, although neither company has fully recovered from the battering that followed the headquarters announcement. It's unclear what else it will take for Hyundai to recover the ground it lost during the land deal.

Next Kia Sedona minivan spied

After skipping the 2013 model year and returning for 2014, the Kia Sedona is getting a full redesign for 2015, which we see for the first time in these new spy shots. The new Sedona isn't going to look as much like the 2011 KV7 Concept as we had hoped, but we definitely see some key styling cues from the Kia concept minivan.
Even though it's covered in heavy camouflage, we can see that some of the KV7's cues on the 2015 Sedona include the vertical front marker lights, the horizontal taillights and the pinched beltline starting at the C-pillar. Kia's trademark Tiger Nose grille is present and accounted for, as is the telltale dip in the windshield.
All in all, the next-gen Sedona already looks to be a significant improvement over the current, generally boring model, which dates back to 2006 and has a striking resemblance to the Ford Freestar. There is no word yet as to what will power the 2015 Sedona, but our spy shooter said that this prototype was most likely powered by a 2.2-liter diesel.

Poor headlights cause 40 cars to miss IIHS Top Safety Pick rating

Over the past few months, we've noticed a number of cars and SUVs that have come incredibly close to earning one of the IIHS's highest accolades, the Top Safety Pick rating. They have great crash test scores and solid automatic emergency braking and forward collision warning systems. What trips them up is headlights. That got us wondering, how many vehicles are there that are coming up short because they don't have headlights that meet the organization's criteria for an "Acceptable" or "Good" rating. This is a revision made after 2017, a year in which headlights weren't factored in for this specific award. This is also why why some vehicles, such as the Ford F-150, might have had the award last year, but have lost it for this year. We reached out to someone at IIHS to find out. He responded with the following car models. Depending on how you count, a whopping 40 models crash well enough to receive the rating, but don't get it because their headlights are either "Poor" or "Marginal." We say depending on how you count because the IIHS actual counts truck body styles differently, and the Infiniti Q70 is a special case. Apparently the version of the Q70 that has good headlights doesn't have adequate forward collision prevention technology. And the one that has good forward collision tech doesn't have good enough headlights. We've provided the entire list of vehicles below in alphabetical order. Interestingly, it seems the Volkswagen Group is having the most difficulty providing good headlights with its otherwise safe cars. It had the most models on the list at 9 split between Audi and Volkswagen. GM is next in line with 7 models. It is worth noting again that though these vehicles have subpar headlights and don't quite earn Top Safety Pick awards, that doesn't mean they're unsafe. They all score well enough in crash testing and forward collision prevention that they would get the coveted award if the lights were better.