This 2023 Ferrari Daytona SP3 will be among the rare exotics featured at the RM Sotheby’s Monterey Auction. Get all the latest auto industry news in the Executive Briefing.
Today’s headlines:
+ New-vehicle affordability declined slightly in June, as higher prices and higher interest rates outweighed income growth, according to the Cox Automotive/Moody’s Analytics Index. More at CBT News
+ Toyota’s vice chairman, Koji Sato, also the head of Japan’s major automaker association, is calling for more component sharing to combat competition from China. More at Car and Driver.
+ Amazon’s Zoox autonomous vehicle unit has deployed a software fix after one of its driverless vehicles entered heavy smoke at an emergency fire scene in Las Vegas. More at Autoweek.
+ A new engine and chassis combination for the IndyCar Series in 2028 is expected to turn its first laps of validation testing within the next two weeks, multiple sources report. More at Racer.
+ Luxury British sports car maker Aston Martin reports that discussions are ongoing with potential lenders for funding to be backed by company assets to boost its liquidity. More at U.S. News and World Report.
+ Volvo Cars expects stronger profitability in the second half even as the Swedish carmaker warned of rising costs of raw materials and a more severe slowdown in China. More at The Economic TImes.
+ Chinese automaker Guangzhou Automobile Group (GAC) celebrated the production of 30 million vehicles with a ceremony at its Guangzhou plant just north of Hong Kong. More at Automotive World.
+ General Motors plans to demolish the former Pontiac Engineering Center Building A on the GM campus in Pontiac Michigan, which it reports has been vacant since 2020. More at The Detroit News.
+ The Driver’s Philosophy Collection at the annual RM Sotheby’s Monterey Auction on August 13-15 will feature a selection of rare exotic sports cars and vintage collectibles. More at Old Cars.
+ Current NASCAR Truck Series points leader Layne Riggs reports that so far his plans for 2027 remain uncertain, but he’s aiming for a competitive ride in the Cup Series. More at Yahoo! Sports.
Photo courtesy and copyright of RM Sotheby’s.
Review the previous MCG Executive Briefing from July 17 here.
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That 2023 Ferrari Daytona SP3 must not be enjoyable to drive if the owner is chucking it after three years. Maybe he should have bought a Corvette instead. Of course if he said that out loud, the factory wouldn’t allow him to buy another Ferrari.
So it only took Amazon and Zook AV experts, engineers, scientists and PHD’s 15 years to finally discover a temperature difference between smoke and fog, but somehow super smart carbon reduction folks have yet to figure out a way to positively identify “visual chameleans” like a Chrome Yellow #2 school bus with flashing red lights and a big stop sign or a 50mph 15,000′ freight train??
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/us-senators-urge-agency-probe-tesla-full-self-driving-response-railroad-2025-09-29/
Engineering? Safety? Ethics?
Dogs? Ponies?
Bueler? Bueler? Bueler?
So fucking tiring and pathetic…
Carbon culture’s ADAS, EV, AV and AI boondoggles are the ultimate manifestation of a rigged carnival game. Lithium battery slavers and loophole lawyers are building a rigged high-tech midway on American roads, with human drivers, families and school children stuck throwing the rings at the milk bottles.
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
FYI, Hyundai is recalling more than 47,000 2025 and 2026 Kona EV SUVs in the U.S. after discovering a defect with the rear center seat belt buckle. According to recall documents, Hyundai’s supplier, Joyson Safety Systems determined the issue resulted from inadequate inspection controls that allowed metal stamping dies used to manufacture the buckles to remain in service beyond their intended lifespan, leading to excessive wear.
https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/rcl/2026/RCLRPT-26V452-5146.pdf
Look at the warning issued: they are officially telling drivers not to let anyone sit in the rear center seat until the dealership fixes it in September…
This blog has more details, makes one wonder about the other 4 buckles in a Kona…
https://www.bizzycar.com/blog/july-2026-hyundai-recall-for-rear-center-seat-belt-buckles-affecting-47749-vehicles
Carbon culture (global warming) compliance faux-engineering replaces our American professional engineering ethical code with a “legal” loophole checklist. In traditional American engineering disciplines like civil or mechanical engineering, there is a foundational ethical code, often symbolized by the Order of the Engineer and the wearing of a stainless steel or iron ring. The core vow is to place public safety and welfare above all else.
The failure to enforce the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS), the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) and the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) is not an accident caused by an empty office or a lack of personnel. It is a deliberate, selfish political choice of execution, especially in Ohio…
As of 2026, there are still no FMVSS for Automated Driving Systems (ADS). If a software provider vanishes, there are no federal rules mandating who keeps the servers running.
The MUTCD governs infrastructure, like road signs, highway lines, and physical signals. It does not regulate wireless spectrums, cloud networks, or server up-time. When cloud-dependent fleets loses their mapping backend, the physical highway infrastructure cannot compensate to save the vehicles.
If any AI cloud architecture suffers a sudden operational shutdown due to a glitch, DDOS or bankruptcy, the CFR does not feature any backup plan where government takes over server maintenance to keep vehicles driving safely.
Online sources- IndyCar teams are heavily restricted from recycling or discarding unwanted or broken hybrid components because of critical parts shortages, strict spec-supplier protocols, and the temporary nature of the current car design. Rather than scrapping or recycling older or malfunctioning hybrid components, the racing series is actively hoarding and rebuilding every piece it has to prevent the grid from collapsing.
The current IndyCar hybrid layout is a temporary, “stop-gap” retrofit forced into the ancient Dallara DW12 chassis, which was never structurally designed to hold a hybrid battery unit. Because IndyCar is already actively designing a completely new, hybrid-specific car architecture for the 2028 season, the current supercapacitor-based ESS assemblies are classified as a dead-end technology. The series is keeping the entire current hardware loop locked down under strict intellectual property control until the current contract expires, preventing any parts from filtering down into public or commercial recycling streams.
The ironclad hybrid NDA enforced by Roger Penske, Team Penske, Honda, GM and IndyCar is probably the ultimate carbon corporate shield. In their world, proprietary software coding, logger configurations, chamfers, tapers, thread pitches and spec supercapacitor telemetry are guarded more fiercely than atomic secrets.The depth of this corporate secrecy was proven during the massive 2024 IndyCar Push-to-Pass cheating scandal, where Team Penske was caught running secret/hidden (and very illegal) lines of code left over from confidential hybrid testing. The code allowed their drivers to illegally deploy horsepower boosts on starts and restarts when the rest of the field was locked out.