Volkswagen is reportedly planning to produce a pickup truck for the United States. Get all the latest auto industry news in the Executive Briefing.
Today’s headlines:
+ Volkswagen’s top investor and controlling family shareholders called on the auto giant to take immediate action to fend off intensifying competition from Chinese car brands. More at CNBC.
+ Reportedly. Honda is outsourcing the development of a new vehicle platform to Tata Technologies of India, a division of the industrial giant that owns Jaguar and Land Rover. More at Motor Illustrated.
+ Four Senate Republicans introduced resolutions to overturn EPA waivers that allow the California Air Resources Board (CARB) to set its own vehicle emissions standards. More at CBT News.
+ Porsche Motorsport Vice President Thomas Laudenbach confirmed the two-car Penske IMSA racing program will continue as planned despite company budget cuts. More at Motorsport.com.
+ German auto suppliers are more indebted and spend more on interest than their international rivals as competition from China intensifies, according to an upcoming study. More at Reuters.
+ Dodge is offering a new program called Color Jailbreak in which Charger buyers will be able to select from a far more extensive list of paint colors than in the factory catalog. More at The Drive.
+ Clemson University graduate students have developed a solar EV prototype engineered to generate more power than it consumes during a typical urban commute. More at Autoblog.
+ Acura announced it will reveal a new concept car at Monterey Car Week to preview a design language that the Honda brand says will shape its future model range. More at Automotive World.
+ Volkswagen is reportedly planning to produce and market a pickup truck in the United States, which would be assembled in VW’s Chattanooga, Tennessee, plant. More at Car and Driver.
+ Joe Custer, chief operating officer of Haas Factory Team, said its NASCAR Cup charter is not for sale and it remains committed to competing as a single-car operation. More at Yahoo! Sports.
Photo courtesy of Volkswagen.
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>> Volkswagen is reportedly planning to produce a pickup truck
That looks like every other pickup truck. Whatever happened to stylists and brand language? And like every other pickup, it looks like it has a boxer engine standing on end.
Why do we still have a driveline hump when seating is so tall and everything is front wheel drive? Take a look at 50s and 60s FWD and you don’t see that.
To nobody’s surprise, Clemson’s Deep Orange 17 Luminetta is effectively a glorified, high-tech 4 million dollar solar golf cart coupè built with “free” money. In the fine print the claimed 12-mile commute in 30 minutes and 31-mile surplus range from sitting in direct sunlight for 23.5 hours afterwards is all digital computer modeling and simulation. No physical test drive was actually conducted to generate their data…
Re:”Senate Republicans push to repeal California’s emissions rules” reveals the ultimate double standard: Ohio Senator Jon Husted campaigns against the “California CARB nightmare” to win votes in Ohio, while his party is actively grinding Ohio into a green energy “CARB colony” with EV/AV/DS/wind/solar mandates dumped on Ohio tax chattle. Husted prolly doesn’t want a national Green New Deal because that would mean federal bureaucrats control revenue and take the credit. Instead, he wants a privatized, corporate Green New Deal exclusively inside Ohio, where readymix rinos and ambulance chaser frat bros control the revenue, exemptions, contracts, data and loophole cascades to force compliance.
My race shop and residential electric bills have almost doubled during 2026, harvesting all that clean green free wind and sunlight in the dark doldrums of Ohio…
When you said “ambulance chasers replaced engineers,” you are identifying the fact that both ODOT in Ohio and the NHTSA are no longer run by ethical engineering professionals whose primary goal is to prevent a safety crisis through rigorous math and safety margins. Instead, both are now essentially bureaucrat legal loophole compliance teams controlling the legal and financial liability before and after any crisis occurs.
It should be quite obvious by now that this inorganic push for vehicle automation and battery infrastructure mandates in the United Stated is not a series of errors or experiments, it is a deliberate, systematic strategy to squeeze human drivers out of traditional vehicles.
Clemson grad students digitally modeled sunlight availability across four cities: Greenville (South Carolina), Frankfurt (Germany), Madrid (Spain), and Mumbai (India). The vehicle is currently being retained at Clemson University’s International Center for Automotive Research (CU-ICAR) before it makes an official public debut at the 2027 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas-
Source: Clemson News https://share.google/ISM9LV4I4LU6Yo1ZR
If battery technology could actually stand on its own merits, if the math worked honestly, if the safety was real, or even if the wild claims of efficiency were partially true, there would be absolutely no need to hide behind legal loophole cascades, metric unit tricks, stunts, theories, liability dumping, confusion, manipulated data and ouright data fraud. The very fact that American battery mandates require continuous PR gloss, forced labor, forced compliance, and complex jargon monoxide is proof that this imported battery crap is all illusion, the results speak for themselves…