This 1938 Delahaye custom will be among the star attractions at the Kruse Auburn Spring Auction. Get all the latest auto industry news in the Executive Briefing.
Today’s headlines:
+ A new Chevy Camaro, a Buick sedan, and a next-generation Cadillac CT5 will be produced on a modified Alpha platform at GM’s Lansing, Michigan plant starting in 2027. More at Car and Driver.
+ Farm manufacturing giant John Deere will pay a $99 million settlement and make diagnostic and repair tools available for 10 years in a landmark right-to-repair agreement. More at The Drive.
+ Car exports, an important source of growth for China’s auto sector, picked up the pace in March despite shipment disruptions due to the military conflict in the Middle East. More at Business Times.
+ Andretti Global will not enter a fourth car for the Indianapolis 500 this year due to Colton Herta being newly unavailable with the rescheduling of two Formula 2 races to May. More at Racer.
+ Tesla’s on-again, off-again plans for a smaller, cheaper EV are back on with a compact SUV smaller than the current Model Y and reportedly on a brand-new platform. More at Yahoo! Finance.
+ U.S. carmakers say proposed European Union regulations could keep full-size pickup trucks including the Ford F-150, Chevy Silverado, and Ram 1500 off European roads. More at World Auto Forum.
+ Kia America and Toyota Sales U.S.A. are both reinforcing stricter policies on broker sales, signaling an industry push to curb practices that bypass traditional retail channels. More at CBT News.
+ Sales of the redesigned Mercedes-Benz CLA sedan surged 127 percent in the first two months of 2026, accounting for 22 percent of the compact luxury market in Europe. More at Autoblog.
+ Pantheon, a custom 1938 Delahaye handcrafted by noted car builder Rick Dore, will be among the featured attractions at the Kruse Auburn Spring auction on April 24-25. More at Old Cars.
+ Gianpiero Lambiase, until recently Max Verstappen’s race engineer at Red Bull, will join McLaren as its chief racing officer, reporting directly to team principal Andrea Stella. More at Motorsport.com.
Photo courtesy of Kruse Auctions.
Review the previous MCG Executive Briefing from April 6 here.
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Kodiak A.I.’s recent large‑scale autonomous‑trucking deployment/demonstration “electronic drawbar” in Ohio opened the floodgates. Sparking from a governor’s executive order (2019‑26D) authorizing autonomous vehicle research on any Ohio public road (including school zones aparently). Self-certifying as its own federal agency (how??), Ohio Revised Code 2744.03 twisted into pretzel somehow gives cities, counties, and other political subdivisions immunity for any actions connected to government transportation infrastructure, therefore “justifying” unlimted AV “testing” in public.
To the new lady in charge of the Ohio FHWA offic who ducks my FOIA request, y’all sure ain’t in Kansas anymore are ya’ ha ha…
Here’s a compendium of known AV testers currently conducting or planning operations on Ohio roads according to Mr. Internet, including but not limited to:
-Transportation Research Center (TRC) -SMARTCenter
-ODOT (Ohio DOT)
-DriveOhio
-ThorDrive
-Aptiv
-May Mobility
-Local Motors
-Kodiak AI
-Dioram
-Clean Earth
-Rovers
-Yost Labs
-Litens Automotive Group
-EASE Logistics
-Kratos
-Bosch
-Tesla
-INDOT (Indiana DOT)
-Aurora
-Waabi
-Einride
-Waymo Via
-Amazon Zook…
-Ohio State University
-Ohio University
-Case Western Reserve
-University of Cincinatti
-University of Toledo…
The core issue is Ohio allows autonomous‑vehicle testing under executive authority, not any legislative framework with no AV-specific regulatory agency. That means no licensing system, no mandatory safety driver, no required public reporting of close calls or crashes, no required third‑party safety audits, no public database of incidents, no rulemaking body (like California’s DMV) and zero oversight. Ohio’s approach is “permission by default”, if a company registers with DriveOhio and “carries insurance”, it can test anywhere in the state.
AV behavior will always be based on a human opinion, not intelligence. This isn’t a mind. It’s a stack of human guesses pretending to be a driver. AVs don’t “understand” driving — they imitate it
Everything any AV does comes from human‑written rules, human‑labeled data, human‑designed models, human‑chosen priorities and belevie it or not human‑defined safety margins. There is no independent judgment. No intuition. No common sense. No courtesy. No eye contact. No problem solving skills. No I.Q. Just some anonymous human’s opinions and decisions layer-baked into 300,000,000 or so lines of “video game” code.
If the designers didn’t think of a scenario, didn’t include it in data, didn’t write a rule for it, didn’t test it, didn’t imagine it, then the AV simply cannot handle it. Not because it’s “stupid,” but because it has no ability to generalize beyond what it was given. Humans can improvise.
Machines cannot.
The Death of the “American Way” of the open road in Ohio. The elephant in the room is that NTSB recommendations are not binding and FHWA rules are not mandatory because ODOT is allowed to ignore both in Ohio.
You might ask yourself why aviation isn’t allowed to operate like AV testing is on public roads in Ohio? Aviation used to be the Wild West. But airplanes crashed, airlines cut corners, maintenance was inconsistent, manufacturers hid defects, people died, more people died, etc. The result was the creation of the FAA: mandatory safety reporting, pilot licensing, maintenance logs, accident investigations, black boxes, and public transparency requirements. Aviation is safe today because common sense regulation was imposed after tragedy.
If modern aviation was regulated like autonomous vehicles in Ohio, companies could test flocks of experimental aircraft over cities and populated areas, hide and manipulate crash data, self‑certify and define “safety”, expend massive public safety subsidies with no benefit/cost analysis and operate without any federal oversight at all.
No one should accept that.
The military tested aircraft over populated areas as late as the 1950s. A bunch of debris from a midair crash falling on a school put a stop to that (look up the Pacoima junior high crash).
Waymos apparently aren’t stopping for school buses…
According to wikipedia, on 1/31/57@ 11:18AM, a DC‑7B on a test flight and an F‑89J Scorpion jet on a radar test flight collided at 25,000 feet over the San Fernando Valley in California. The DC‑7B lost part of a wing then crashed into the playground of Pacoima Junior High School during a gym class. Falling airplane parts and engines also struck Terra Bella Elementary School and a church. This avoidable disaster killed 8 and injured 75…
What it was like on the ground according to
eyewitness accounts:
Children running from falling debris. Flames erupting across the playground. Wreckage scattered across school grounds. Teachers and students performing first aid. Chaos as emergency crews arrived. One student survivor later recalled seeing the DC-7 break apart overhead before it slammed into his schoolyard. A tape recording from inside the school auditorium captured the sudden roar and impact as the crash occurred during a student assembly. The disaster is one of the most devastating school‑related aviation accidents in U.S. history…
What do you think all those mammoth new American data centers are for? It does not take 200 acres, 236 diesel generators, 62 cooling towers and 3,000,000+ gallons of water per day to help little Achmed or Patel with their Common Core math homework.
Your autonomous vehicle future will require enormous computer power to process unimaginable mountains of data. That will require data centers- huge ones. So the nationwide push for data centers is directly tied to AVs for cloud‑based decision systems, storage of driving logs, mapping your destination, credit score, banking information and other items of interest. This is not speculation- it’s how the industry will work.