This 1956 Packard Caribbean Hardtop will be offered at the Mecum Auctions Harrisburg sale. Get all the latest auto industry news in the Executive Briefing.
Today’s headlines:
+ Volkswagen reported an 8.6 percent slide in global vehicle deliveries in the second quarter, the steepest quarterly decline in four years due to a sharp downturn in China. More at Reuters.
+ The best-selling luxury-brand vehicles in the USA so far in 2026, all SUVs, include the Lexus RX and NX, BMW X5 and X3, and Mercedes-Benz GLE-Class and GLC-Class. More at Car and Driver.
+ The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has proposed rolling back emissions standards for new heavy-duty trucks and buses, decreasing the warranty period to five years. More at Automotive World.
+ The Honda Indy 200 at Mid-Ohio produced another sizable year-to-year audience increase for Fox Sports and the IndyCar Series as an average of 1.3 million TV viewers tuned in. More at Racer.
+ All-electric vehicles are in strong demand amid the Iran war and high U.S. gas prices, which is causing used EVs to see a jump in prices, according to Cox Automotive. More at CNBC.
+ The European Commission is reportedly still considering a mandate for automatic in-car speed limiters controlled by GPS, to be based on the current speed-monitoring system. More at The Drive.
+ Audi is facing a class action lawsuit over allegations that a design flaw causes severe premature corrosion of the subframes of Q5 and SQ5 SUVs built from 2009 to 2017. More at Autoblog.
+ Tesla has introduced its three-row, six-seat version of the Model Y from China to the U.S. lineup, the Model Y L Premium, with a longer wheelbase and a list price of $61,990. More at CBT News.
+ Featured offerings at the Mecum Auctions Harrisburg sale on July 22-25 will include a 1956 Packard Caribbean Hardtop loaded with rare options including air conditioning. More at Old Cars.
+ Guenther Steiner urged the FIA to introduce permanent, full-time stewards and increase the use of AI to prevent a repeat of the anticlimactic end to the British Grand Prix. More at Motorsport.com.
Photo courtesy of Mecum Auctions.
Review the previous MCG Executive Briefing from July 10 here.
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The 1956 Packard was a stunning car. The 1957 only a little bit less so. They came so close to going out on top. They got catfished instead.
Since EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has no formal background in engineering, chemistry, public health or environmental safety, he was placed in charge of the EPA because his perticular legal/lawyer skillset is needed to clear the regulatory runway for American highway automation, using targeted rule rollbacks like this to squeeze out independent human truckers sooner rather than later, IMHO.
Even if this EPA bigrig emmision warranty rollback proposal somehow isn’t actually part of culture dé carbon’s grand plan to force driverless roborigs on the American public, the practical result is still a tactical pincer movement: Zeldin and his EPA makes older human-driven trucks riskier and more expensive to operate, while the dude at NHTSA removes all human safety design requirements from FMVSS to make remote operated roborig fleets cheaper to deploy sooner…
When you synthesize the actions across the EPA, NHTSA, state DOT’s and Wall Street, it’s now quite clear that the destruction of independent trucking is not an accidental byproduct of policy, it is the goal. When the federal government strips away human safety design requirements from the FMVSS while simultaneously introducing massive loophole cascades into the EPA’s emission warranty codes, they create an ecosystem where decentralized human ownership will soon become completely unviable.
This is exactly why places like the Halderman Sustainability Lab at Ohio Northern University exist. Their role is to inject a layer of academic prestige into a fraudulant broken system. They train students to ignore the basic physics of the velocity-cubed formula, teaching them instead how to manage the corporate software that converts low-efficiency turbine rotations into valuable, tradeable paper carbon offsets for tech firms.
From the IHRA using bright green paint to mask empty bank accounts and look like a “revitalization” (future data centers), to city councils weaponizing railroad crossings to build predatory Ohio logistics thoroughfares, to wind developers installing 30 mph offshore hardware in 7 mph doldrums, carbon’s playbook never changes. It is a top-down, highly coordinated system of asset extraction using all means of deception. Then break an existing local economy, use corporate greenwashing as a moral shield, dump the multi-million dollar bill directly on local households, call it progress and move on.
The risk of Darana Hybrid-owned race tracks being flipped into data centers according to mr. internet:
■Kil-Kare Raceway (Xenia, OH): Critical data center risk due to completed corporate transfer and close proximity to the rapidly expanding Columbus AI tech corridor.
■Heartland Motorsports Park (Topeka, KS): High risk of total industrial liquidation after being completely dropped from the national schedule amid severe corporate budget constraints.
■National Trail Raceway (Hebron, OH): High risk because its Licking County location sits directly inside the ground zero corridor of Ohio’s multi-billion-dollar semiconductor and server hub boom.
■Milan Dragway (Milan, MI): Moderate risk as it faces national tour cancellations but is temporarily buffered by active weekly grassroots bracket racing programs.
■Dragway 42 (West Salem, OH): Moderate risk because it remains grouped in the acquisition portfolio but is geographically insulated from the primary tech sprawl.
■Memphis International Raceway (Millington, TN): Low risk because the facility remains largely disconnected from the major Midwest digital infrastructure pipeline.
■Maryland International, Darlington, and GALOT Parks: Zero risk as the initial acquisition deals completely fell through, leaving them entirely independent.
The primary reason American government/carbon culture cannot completely apply highway safety’s “blame the driver and hide the bodies” model to all aviation, rail, and sea safety yet because the physics of those failures are impossible to sweep under the rug.
In American highway safety, government ambulance chasers play the “blame the operator” game because it finances “diamonds as large as horse turds”. But in other transit, if carbon inc. tried to use those same loophole cascades to stop maintaining aircraft engines, airports, rail lines, harbors, cranes, or cargo hulls, the physical hardware would literally tear itself apart within weeks. You cannot “deflect liability” away from a train derailment that just leaked chemicals into a major river, another 757 flying into the ground, or a container ship that just drifted into an interstate bridge.
If the goal is absolute, immediate carbon eradication, and the ends obviously justifies the means, you don’t need carbon taxes or electric vehicles. You just need to apply the internet era loophole lawyer’s favorite scapegoat “blame the human operator” algorythms to the rest of American transportation, let the legal and financial liability terrify every professional driver, licensed pilot, locomotive engineer and sea captain into quitting, and watch the entire domestic transportation machine grind to a permanent, carbon-free paradise!
Wait, did you just try to blame an emissions standards rollback on carbon reduction efforts?!? That’s some galaxy-brained rabbit hole thinking there.
Time to start applying Occam’s Razor. The diesel truck manufacturers want this to reduce their warranty costs.
The EPA claims this particular rollback will save the trucking industry $12 billion overall. It “lowers the upfront purchase cost of a new truck by up to $6,000”, but shifts 100% of the mechanical risk right back onto the owner-operator the second the truck hits Year 6.
To nobody’s surprise, the federal government altered its data models- notice this EPA proposal preserves the Biden admin’s strict new bigrig 2027 tailpipe standard on paper while cutting the long-term hardware warranty by half, relieving the manufacturers of liability, not the poor sucker suddenly stuck with a noncompliant 2028 rig in 2034…
The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association (OOIDA) has slammed the new EPA proposal as a “missed opportunity” that “sells out small-business truckers” at the behest of mega-fleets and engine manufacturers.
Comparing the mandated 2027 Toyota Prius emissions warranty to the newly announced EPA heavy-duty big rig rollback proposal reveals the gigantic regulatory double standard. While the feds relieve multi-billion-dollar commercial truck manufacturers of long-term emissions equipment liability, your standard consumer passenger vehicle is held to a dramatically higher regulatory emissions warranty standard of 8 years in EPA states, 15 years in CARB states.
When one looks at how the lawyer frats in charge of the EPA and USDOT, especially at NHTSA and FHWA, have operated in unison for decades now no matter who holds the oval office, it becomes quite clear there is no functioning separate checks and balances, much less any evidence of old school engineering ethics (do no harm) from what I can gather…
The Morgan it says is “Owned since 1990 by Michael Lang, visionary and producer of the Woodstock music festivals”
Lang died in 2022.