Fans are furious with a NASCAR proposal to adopt electric race cars in the O’Reilly Auto Parts Series. Get all the latest auto industry news in the Executive Briefing.
Today’s headlines:
+ Amazon is expanding its Amazon Autos platform to six vehicle brands, allowing consumers to purchase new vehicles online while dealerships handle final delivery. More at CBT News.
+ Rental companies are reporting a noticeable increase in demand for electric vehicles as gasoline prices climb, according to data from Hertz and peer-to-peer platform Turo. More at Yahoo! Autos.
+ Honda announced it will exit the South Korean auto market at the end of this year due to sluggish sales, after annual volume fell from 12,000 cars in 2008 to 2,000 in 2025. More at Japan Today.
+ French automaker Renault reports that first-quarter sales rose 7.3 percent from a year earlier, well above expectations, due to increased sales to partners Nissan and Geely. More at World Auto Forum.
+ The FIA, Formula 1, the teams, and power unit manufacturers have agreed a number of tweaks to the 2026 regulations to allow drivers to push harder in qualifying. More at Racer.
+ Morgan has revealed the Supersport 400, a 402 hp high-performance version of the Supersport that is the storied British sports car maker’s most powerful vehicle ever. More at Car and Driver.
+ General Motors is reportedly tapping the brakes on its next generation of full-size electric trucks, delaying development of updated versions of its EV pickups and SUVs. More at Autoweek
+ A 2017 Dodge Viper GTC ACR-Extreme with 44 miles on the odometer sold for $532,999 on duPont Registry Live, setting an online auction record for Dodge Vipers. More at The Drive.
+ According to a report from Bloomberg, 20 percent of all Tesla Cybertrucks are registered under non-Tesla companies controlled by Elon Musk, inflating the sales figures. More at Motor Trend.
+ Public response was immediate and highly negative to a tentative proposal by NASCAR to adopt electric vehicles in the second-tier O’Reilly Auto Parts Series in the future. More at Autoblog.
Photo courtesy of NASCAR.
Review the previous MCG Executive Briefing from April 17 here.
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NOTICE OF DANGER!
No known autonomous vehicle system being tested on public roads performs a human‑style emergency manuever to avoid any child who enters the roadway! All current systems brake and hold lane. NO autonomous public test vehicle is allowed to steer around a child who suddenly darts into the street.
Not Waymo.
Not Cruise.
Not Tesla.
Not DriveOhio.
Not TRC.
Not any research prototype.
Not any academic system.
AVs CANNOT IMPROVISE like humans. A human can see the child, see the gap, predict the movement, improvise a dodge in a split second. NO known AV system performs a human‑style emergency manuever to avoid a child who suddenly enters the roadway.
Self drivers must detect, classify, compute trajectories, evaluate collision risk, check lane boundaries, check surrounding vehicles, communicate with HQ to confirm legality then brake and hold lane. Hit the child like a figgin’ roadkill deer even if the stopping distance is calculated to be beyond the child, catagorized as just another hazard, like a kindergarten trolley dilema.
Self drivers will not be able to safely conduct “emergency” obstacle “manuevers” i.e. emergency single/double lane change, etc. until the 2040’s or later according to Google and Microsoft A.I. estimates.
Or never if A.I. hallucination is not 1000% solved and all bad actors change their ways, or eliminated…
The ODOT in Ohio and the Ohio State Highway Patrol both instruct human drivers to brake and hold lane when a deer enters the roadway. Autonomous vehicles follow the same rule. It is confirmed that no known AV system being tested on public roads in Ohio performs a human‑style emergency manuever, commonly known as a swerve.
For your information, any “modern traffic calming” design, “safety” modification or roundabout that assumes evasive manuevering is possible by humans (or AVs) is patently unsafe and non-compliant without a legitimate documented CE, peer reviewed and closely analyzed under the FHWA NEPA Assignment MOU with Ohio.
As previously posted, conveniently no FHWA/FRA NEPA Assignment has a mandate nor any mechanism in place for reliable federal enforcement other than annual audits.
https://www.10tv.com/article/news/local/columbus-semi-driver-deadly-interstate-71-crash-delaware-county-fraud-investigation-ohio-dps/530-ca03514c-a19a-4bd4-a085-d9ad4c759c8d
From 30,000 feet, all “fake safety” programs/projects created by loopholes prioritize corporate/govt expansion over any genuine public protection. Then blame the driver and exploit the public when the magic doesn’t work again.
Loopholing FHWA NEPA Assignment to sabotage/surprise/confuse/make safer human drivers with “modern countermeasures” while loopholing pinkie-swear “honor system” public road testing of the internet using cable boxes to replace the same human drivers (with NHTSA and NTSB apparently providing free R&D), is already the biggest dog and pony show in American history…
Autonomous vehicle companies test in school zones during school‑bus hours and and on school bus routes because the chaotic, child‑heavy environment provides extremely valuable edge‑case data, and unbelievably, there are no federal rules prohibiting it. Ohio’s all permissive AV framework imposes no limits on where or when public AV testing can occur, and children generate exactly the unpredictable pedestrian behavior these experimental systems struggle with. Since AVs default to braking rather than swerving, AV companies face a lower liability by hitting a child while “following the letter of the law” than by attempting any evasive maneuver. Ohio’s NEPA Assignment structure removes federal oversight entirely, leaving only retrospective audits that do not evaluate any AV testing locations.
In short, nothing stops AV testing in the most sensitive environments, the data is uniquely valuable, and the regulatory system is built in a way that allows and incentivizes this practice. The result is the known dangerous/lethal mismatch between AV capability and real‑world child behavior, and the public should be plainly informed that autonomous test vehicles cannot perform any life‑saving evasive maneuvers a human can in the same moment.
Loophole-based safety systems are absolutely worse than having no safety system at all, because it creates the illusion of oversight while providing none. Loophole‑based safety systems are worse than no safety system because it creates the illusion of oversight while providing none.
In Ohio under FHWA NEPA Assignment, hundreds of roundabouts got approvals with no safety analysis, railroad crossing risks are no longer evaluated, school‑bus routing impacts are never evaluated, public input is no longer required, the FHWA and FRA does not review any federally funded project, ODOT approves all of its own documentation and grant solicitations while real public safety issues fall outside of NEPA entirely.
These are the baked-in structural flaw loopholes with a state’s NEPA Assignment, not a misunderstanding at all.
The fans of NASCAR also put the Goody’s Dash series out of business because it ran four and six cylinder engines and they were unhappy with how the cars sounded. They love their V8 motors. Maybe next, NASCAR should try having the truck series run diesels.
Mayhaps some of your readers would be find the content on selfdrivenews.com or insideautonomousvehicles.com more to their current interests.
I actually enjoyed and miss the NASCAR Goody’ Dash series. Dean Combs and Will Hobgood taught the youngsters and learners how to race with no video game heroics, and I had a big crush on Shawna Robinson, one of the very few women to win in any NASCAR touring division…
I thought that the Dash series was more relevant to the Sport Compact car trend among younger people and was a positive step for NASCAR to acquire a new generation of fans. I still think it is better than running cars that are no longer in production or never were. But then I haven’t agreed with or watched NASCAR since the Nineties.
According to Wikipedia, the Dash series was a stepping stone for Toyota’s NASCAR program, moving from Dash to Trucks to Cup.
In 1973, I was attempting to put a Vega together to run in the Baby Grand series which later morphed into Dash. The effort never came together.
I also planned an entry in the NASCAR Monster Miata series that ran only one race before being cancelled. Today, MX-5 Cup/Spec Miata is one of the most popular series for novice racers and runs under IMSA sanction (a NASCAR subsidiary).
I clicked on Inside autonomous vehicles. I read the post “DOT Moves to Clear Regulatory Path for Vehicles Without Steering Wheels.” What could possibly go wrong here ?
>> What could possibly go wrong here ?
Surely nothing. If you can’t trust the government, who can you trust?
Not to worry, state & federal governments will make it so expensive to own a car that you’ll be relegated to a subscriber taxi service where they can keep an eye on your every move. The interstate will restrict human drivers to one lane if they let you on at all. Maybe the smart move is riding a motorcycle. Or a horse & buggy.
Your next car purchase comes with an unwelcome passenger: a federal mandate requiring surveillance technology that monitors your every blink, glance, and head nod.
yahoo.com/news/articles/federal-surveillance-tech-becomes-mandatory-161321992.html
Epilogue:
Every ODOT roundabout built in Ohio the last 20+ years has gone through the same NEPA-loophole CE‑based, template‑driven, zero‑oversight process. Not one Ohio roundabout stands out as fully studied, independently reviewed, subjected to a full Environmental Assessment, subjected to a full Environmental Impact Statement, evaluated with site‑specific safety modeling, audited after construction or held to any performance guarantee.
There is also no documented case of any ODOT roundabout located near a railroad crossing in Ohio receiving a FRWA-mandated FRA‑compliant railroad‑crossing engineering analysis during planning or funding.
Not one.
No available FRA, FHWA, ODOT, ORDC or PUCO sources show a shred of evidence of such an analysis being performed for any ODOT roundabout constructed near an active railroad crossing anywhere in Ohio, totally breaching Fox River Grove school bus disaster federal mandates.
ODOT’s constant public sales drivel is “Roundabouts reduce injury crashes by 69%” and
“ODOT analyzed 76 Ohio roundabouts.” When placed together, it sounds like the 76 Ohio sites produced the 69% number.
But the 69% number existed before ODOT studied anything in Ohio. This Ohio “study” was contrived to support that national claim, not generate it. So why did the registered professional engineers at ODOT only “study” 76 out of 300+ of their roundabouts? The rest were not included because they suck. Loophole safety sucks badly. This selective sampling makes the Ohio cherry-picked synthetic dataset non‑representative, even though it is always used to justify more unlimited “free” federal funding…
The pattern in Ohio is the same pattern you see in things like odometer fraud, title‑jumping salvage vehicles, painting over rust, or creating a fake CarFax to make damaged vehicles look safe and new. In each case, the appearance of safety is substituted for the substance of safety. The paperwork is made to look clean while the underlying hazard is left in place or made worse at full retail or more no less, with no guarantees but coincidently somehow always creating a permanent “crash tax” revenue source.
That is what the special Ohio ODOT/FHWA NEPA process is twisted into: all steps that would reveal real risks are skipped, and the public is forced to accept and finance the appearance of loophole safety without any engineering work or documentation that proves it, and pay that tax.
It’s not your lying eyes or imagination. The product is so low‑quality but paperwork
“compliant”, and public presentation always highest‑gloss in Ohio. It truly is comparable to selling salvage 1986 Yugos at 2027 Tesla MSRP!
When ethics exist only on paper, the process becomes performative. The public sees the appearance of oversight but the agency avoids all accountability. Risks are hidden instead of mitigated while failures become recurring revenue events. It IS the same pattern as title‑washing,
odometer rollback, fake CarFax, painting over rust or leaving the cookie jar open with rats in the house.
The structure guarantees the outcome. It’s not that the laws don’t exist. It’s that the enforcement mechanisms are intentionally weak, structurally limited, and strategically avoided. In practice, that is the same as having no enforcement at all.
We can colaborate a technical paper for the Federal Railroad Administration!
I suggest the blatantly defective Ohio US68/SR31 ODOT roundabout as a case study, breaking ground this fall. “Loophole Roundabout, A Case Study” has a nice ring. It will document thevclear pattern in which transportation decisions are shaped by “loophole engineering” now, where narrow classifications and incomplete datasets drive outcomes more than any real‑world operating conditions. This process also produces “loopholed railroad crossings” such as those where FRA inventory sheets were revised to list only two trains per day despite consistent field observations of ten to twenty‑four daily movements.
When these documentation gaps are carried forward into project justification and funding solicitations with no oversight, checks or balances, the result is the “loophole roundabout” defined as a political vanity project (think crashtax revenue) whose rationale depends entirely on selective or outdated/manipulated/fabricated information/policy rather than any comprehensive safety, cost, and operational analysis (like a fake CarFax).
Together, these 3 new terms loophole engineering, loopholed railraod crossings and loophole roundabout we just inventrd will form a new conceptual vocabulary that we can develope specifically for this case study, offering an entirely brand new structured way to describe how documentation‑integrity issues, short cuts, loopholes and gaslighting influence state’s FHWA/FRA-NEPA Assignment funding and infrastructure decisions in ways that intentionally completely diverge from actual conditions on the ground…
In reality, what we’ve uncovered now points toward two distinct case studies—one that works like a microscope and one that works like a telescope. The “loophole roundabout” authorization gap is the microscope case study, zooming in on how a single ODOT‑Let project advanced for 116 days without municipal authorization, exposing the precise administrative mechanics that allowed a year-long defective US68 truck detour and exploiting the rail‑crossing risks to form inside that gap.
But the broader pattern, the rise of widespread defective truck detours in Ohio after 2015, belongs in a telescope case study, showing how FHWA’s NEPA Assignment and the shift of federal review responsibilities to state DOTs weakened the structural “lid on the cookie jar,” allowing the massivr outbreak of systemic oversight gaps to spread across multiple projects and jurisdictions.
Together, the microscope and the telescope reveal not just one local failure, but a state-widr governance archtecture that “unintentionally” enabled high‑risk truck detours and defective roundabouts to proliferate across Ohio and beyond…
Working Title:
The NEPA Assignment Loophole Cascade: How Procedural Exemptions Amplify Micro–Macro Risk in Statewide Transportation Systems
Draft Abstract:
This paper presents two case studies illustrating a “Loophole Cascade,” a failure mode in which routine NEPA categorical exclusions and LPA procedural shortcuts accumulate into significant safety risk. The micro‑level case shows an LPA project advanced despite missing routing justification, absent safety documentation, and bypassed multidisciplinary review. The macro‑level case reveals how unmodeled freight detours, inconsistent roadway classifications, and fragmented interagency communication compound these omissions. Together, the cases show how small administrative exemptions can erode safety margins in statewide and rural networks, creating latent conditions for high‑consequence failure…