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• Driver and passenger each get a screen in the Wagoneer S.
• The all-electric Wagoneer gets a sleeker design than the gas-powered SUV.
• Wagoneer S is expected to go on sale this fall.

The first all-electric Jeep is on its way to dealer lots in 2024, and we just got our first look inside the swanky SUV.

Jeep released the first interior shots of the electric Wagoneer S this week, which appears to be packed to the gills with tech.

This screen-laden interior is made possible by parent company Stellantis’s BEV-specific platform, which will underpin the Wagoneer S. This platform is also engineered to deliver performance, reaching zero to 60 mph in roughly 2 seconds at the top end, the company said.

The Federal Aviation Administration quickly grounded 171 other Max 9 planes with the same door plug, mostly flown by United Airlines and Alaska.

Four critical bolts used to secure the door plug were missing from the jet when it left Boeing’s assembly line, The Wall Street Journal reported, representing a massive quality control lapse.

This oversight has cast renewed scrutiny on Boeing’s family of Max airplanes, which already saw 346 fatalities after two Max 8 jets crashed in 2018 and 2019.

Three weeks after the blowout, however, the Max 9 is carrying people once again. Alaska’s COO Constance von Muehlen was on board the carrier’s first passenger flight since the grounding and took the seat by the door plug, CNN reported.

The green light comes as regulators approve new inspection and maintenance processes in relation to the door plug. But questions surrounding Boeing’s safety and quality control still remain on the minds of travelers.

Here’s what to know about the Max 9 inspections, and how aviation experts view the return to service.

The Max 9’s enhanced inspection process will take up to 12 hours

Last Wednesday, the FAA announced an “enhanced maintenance process” to be completed on the 171 grounded Max 9s before they could return to service.

This includes visual inspections of the left and right mid-cabin door plugs, as well as inspection of specific bolts, guide tracks, and fittings to ensure all critical components are correctly installed.

The agency also said it would cap production of the 737 Max, have “increased floor presence at all Boeing facilities,” and ramp up oversight of the planemaker and its suppliers — particularly Spirit AeroSystems (not related to Spirit Airlines), which installed the door plug.

“The exhaustive, enhanced review our team completed after several weeks of information gathering gives me and the FAA confidence to proceed to the inspection and maintenance phase,” FAA Administrator Mike Whitaker said in a January 24 statement. “However, let me be clear: This won’t be back to business as usual for Boeing.”

So far, carriers including United, Alaska, and Panama’s Copa Airlines have re-launched their Max 9s after the required inspections, with Copa being the first to do so on Thursday, Reuters reported.

According to aviation analyst and president of Atmosphere Research Group, Henry Harteveldt, these inspections are “extremely thorough.”

“There were at least four revisions to the inspection process before the FAA, Boeing, and the airlines agreed on the final procedure to be done to inspect these planes,” he told Business Insider on Tuesday. “The initial inspection procedures were taking two to four hours; the agreed process takes between 10 and 12 hours.”

Alaska noted the same 12-hour timeframe in a January 26 statement.

Not all experts agree on the Max 9’s safety

It wasn’t long after the Alaska Max 9 blowout that airline customers started voicing concerns about the safety of the plane after its return to service — with some travelers even opting to pay more to avoid flying on the jet.

According to the Washington Post, the travel booking website Kayak said its filter for the 737 Max significantly increased in the days after the incident.

Former Boeing senior manager-turned-whistleblower Ed Pierson told the LA Times in an interview published Tuesday that he would “absolutely not fly on a Max airplane.”

“I’ve worked in the factory where they were built, and I saw the pressure employees were under to rush the planes out the door,” he said. “I tried to get them to shut down before the first crash.”

Joe Jacobsen, a former engineer at Boeing and the FAA, gave the paper a similar take: “I would tell my family to avoid the Max. “I would tell everyone, really.”

In a statement to Business Insider, Harteveldt expressed confidence in the Max 9.

“I understand why people may be concerned about flying on the 737 Max 9 right now, but those planes would not be back in the air if the FAA did not think they were safe,” he said. “No airline is going to dispatch a plane that it does not know to be 100% safe.”

Harteveldt further explained that the Max 9 problem is not as complex as the fatal Max 8 crashes, which involved flawed flight-control software and a faulty sensor.

“The [Max 9] problem is isolated; the mechanics and engineers know exactly where to focus — and they did that — so it’s a very different kind of problem for the plane,” he told BI. “All of this certainly undermines the trust we place in Boeing, but, personally speaking, I would not hesitate to fly on a 737 Max 9 if the schedule and fare met my requirements.”

However, Harteveldt emphasized that those who are concerned about flying on a Max 9 do have options. For example, Alaska and United currently allow passengers to switch their flight from a Max flight to a non-Max flight for no extra charge — similar to what carriers like Southwest Airlines did after the Max 8 crashes.

Passengers have more control over their personal safety

Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University associate professor and air crash investigator, Anthony Brickhouse, told BI that passengers should focus less on the aircraft they are flying on and more on their personal safety.

He listed things like wearing a seatbelt at all times, listening to the safety briefings, and leaving personal items behind in case of an emergency evacuation — the latter two helped save the lives of the 379 people on board a Japan Airlines Airbus A350 that caught fire in December.

“The federal regulators and the NTSB are going to do their job and make sure the aircraft we fly on are as safe as possible,” Brickhouse told BI. “But passengers need to do more to impact their own safety at the end of the day.”

This was the scene of havoc and tragedy that a federal jury was plunged into in New York on Monday, as testimony began in the 2002 cold-case murder of the Run-DMC star.

Two men, Karl “Little D” Jordan Jr. and Ronald “Tinard” Washington, are on trial in Brooklyn’s Eastern District of New York, accused of shooting Mizell in the head, execution style, more than 20 years ago in a dispute over 22 pounds of cocaine.

The trial’s first witness was one of the first police officers at the scene, Detective James Lusk. He told jurors he responded to the shooting minutes later, running up the stairway to Mizell’s second-floor recording studio to the sound of cries and screams. 

It was early evening, October 30, 2002, and behind the studio’s glass door, in a cluttered, narrow room lined with couches, it was bloody bedlam.

“I saw a male lying, head toward the window,” against a green couch, Lusk testified of Mizell.

Another man “was kind of scrunched up on top of that couch,” Lusk said of a second victim. The man, Tony Rincon, had been shot in the leg and was screaming for help.

Within earshot, maybe in the hallway, a woman was “crying hysterically,” Lusk testified.

A television set, which Lusk described as “old school,” not a flat screen, “was showing video games.”

Mizell had been playing video games when Jordan and Washington, both armed, had been buzzed inside, prosecutors allege.

The shooting happened so fast, Gonzalez said in openings, that Mizell had no time to reach for the .380-caliber pistol beside him, on the armrest of the green couch.

The two “killed a world-famous musician,” Gonzalez said. Then, “as quickly as they came, they fled,” she told jurors.

“Did you have the opportunity to observe Mr. Mizell’s body before and during when EMS arrived?” the detective was asked by prosecutor Artie McConnell.

“Yes I did,” answered the detective.

Mizell “had a tremendous amount of blood already pooled on the floor,” the detective told jurors. “He was unresponsive” to being shaken.

“I did see blood to the back of the head and assumed that was the injury,” he added, as the jury viewed a photo of Mizell’s slumped body, displayed for them on a screen.

Mizell’s killing remained a cold case until Jordan and Washington were charged in 2020 in connection to his murder. Both Jordan and Washington have pleaded not guilty.

Another man, Jay Bryant, has also been charged in the DJ’s murder and has pleaded not guilty. He will be tried separately at a later date.

“The defendants allegedly carried out the cold-blooded murder of Jason Mizell,” the then-acting US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, Seth D. DuCharme said at the time Jordan and Washington were charged.

DuCharme called it “a brazen act that has finally caught up with them thanks to the dedicated detectives, agents and prosecutors who never gave up on this case.”

Federal prosecutors allege that Mizell was in his studio in Jamaica, Queens, on October 30, 2002, when Washington and Jordan, armed with firearms, burst into the studio.

The prosecutors say that Washington pointed his gun at a person inside the studio and demanded that they lie on the floor, while Jordan approached Mizell and fired two shots at close range, with one hitting Mizell in the head, killing him.

The second bullet struck Rincon in the leg, according to prosecutors.

Gonzalez promised jurors on Monday that prosecutors would prove that Jordan later boasted “I would kill him again,” and Washington told his girlfriend he was the second shooter and was proud he’d got away with it.

A lawyer for Jordan, John Diaz, meanwhile predicted in opening statements that the government will fail to prove his client was there at the murder or involved in narcotics dealing.

“This case will be about 10 seconds, 21 years ago,” a lawyer for Washington, Ezra Spilke, said in openings, highlighting the difficulty in proving a murder that happened so quickly and so long ago.

“Their version is one version of many,” he said of the government’s case.

Prosecutors have alleged that Mizell was murdered out of anger stemming from Mizell cutting Washington out of a drug deal.

“It was an ambush, an execution, motivated by greed and revenge,” Gonzalez told jurors.

The investigation, according to prosecutors, revealed Mizell had acquired about 20 pounds of cocaine from a narcotics supplier in the Midwest and that the plan was for Washington, Jordan and other co-conspirators to distribute the drugs in Maryland.

Prosecutors allege that before Mizell’s death, Mizell told Washington that Washington would not be involved in the drug distribution in Maryland, which led the suspects to plot to kill Mizell.

Mizell’s family has maintained that the DJ was not involved with drugs, according to the Associated Press.

Washington and Jordan face at least 20 years behind bars if convicted in the case.

The success of the IPO is contingent in part on the state of the IPO market, which has struggled in recent years. Reddit’s valuation is estimated below the $5 billion figure in private markets, Bloomberg reported. When Reddit first began preparing to go public in late 2021 — a record-breaking year for venture capital — some thought the company could be valued as high as $15 billion in an IPO.

Investors are hoping that 2024 will be a more active year for the IPO market. IPOs began showing signs of life again last year as profitable tech startups like Instacart and Klaviyo filed to go public. This year’s IPO market may also be helped by the Fed’s promised rate cuts and a weak M&A market. The last time a social media company went public was in 2019. That was Pinterest, and it was valued at $10 billion.

Reddit’s current target shows that those days of sky-high valuations are gone, for now. Reddit declined Business Insider’s request for further comment.

Reddit, which some have dubbed “the front page of the internet,” was launched in 2005 by University of Virginia roommates Steve Huffman, Alexis Ohanian, and Aaron Swartz.

A year later, it became one of the biggest sites in the world in terms of unique visitors. The founders then sold it to Condé Nast for just $10 million. Ohanian went on to launch venture firms Initialized Capital and Seven Seven Six, but Huffman stayed close to the company and has been CEO since 2015 — seeing it through an explosive period of growth during the pandemic, when it birthed the meme-stock craze.

Still, even Huffman is shocked by how far Reddit has come since its launch. He once said the business felt like a “homework assignment that got out of hand.”