By the slimmest of margins, California's remarkable winning streak for sales of new cars, trucks and SUVs has finally come to an end, falling just short of reaching six years of sustained growth.

The latest membership estimates for Amazon.com's Amazon Prime service show that the e-retailer's bid to consolidate consumer spending onto one platform has now attracted almost one in six Americans, according to independent research by Cowen & Co. In addition to signing up some 50 million Amazon Prime customers, the company expanded into car sales last week, teaming up with Fiat to sell cars in Italy.

A tire-industry working group led by Chinese rubber manufacturing equipment company Mesnac is striving to standardize the way in which the industry uses radio frequency identification tags. This includes how those tags are attached in tires, as well as how they are tested and encoded with data.

The movie "Back to the Future" showed us cars hovering in air in an idea of what 2015 would look like. Now in 2016, we see our cars still bound to the earth. However, when the movie was made, in 1985, most of the materials in modern vehicles didn't exist.