Two of the five original 1963 Corvette Grand Sports will be featured at Corvettes at Carlisle. Get all the latest auto industry news in the Executive Briefing.
Today’s headlines:
+ Stellantis CEO Antonio Filosa warned that a major strategic overhaul will take time to bear fruit after the automaker reported weaker than expected second-quarter results. More at Reuters.
+ Promising major product launches over the next three years, Ford CEO Jim Farley disclosed more details on the new small pickup based on the Universal Electric Vehicle platform. More at Car and Driver.
+ Vehicle leasing has declined in the United States in recent years, from 30 percent of new vehicle transactions pre-COVID to 17 percent post-COVID and 23 percent currently. More at World Auto Forum.
+ Drivers Alex Palou and Alexander Rossi will pilot the new Dallara IR-28 IndyCar chassis for its first validation test at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway this weekend. More at Motorsport.com.
+ EV maker Rivian announced its second-quarter 2026 financials, reporting a 26 percent increase in year-over-year revenue and posting a record $179 million gross profit. More at Electrek.
+ Ram has announced pricing for the new Rumble Bee muscle truck, with the 5.7-liter Hemi V8 version with 395 hp listing at $62,790 and the 777-horsepower SRT at $97,790. More The Drive.
+ Despite the controversy surrounding it, the new Ferrari Luce EV has already hit its sales target for 2026 well ahead of schedule thanks largely to strong demand from China. More at Autoblog.
+ Amazon‘s Zoox unit has won U.S. approval for limited commercial deployment of its novel steering-wheel-free, driverless robotaxis, a first for the autonomous ride industry. More at CNBC.
+ Two of the five original 1963 Corvette Grand Sport factory-built race cars, chassis 001 and Chassis 004, will be featured at the Corvettes at Carlisle event on August 27-29. More at Old Cars.
+ American driver Ugo Ugochukwu, 19 years old, has attracted interest from a number of Formula 1 teams as he fights for this year’s Formula 3 championship, insiders report. More at Racer.
Photo courtesy of Carlisle Events.
Review the previous MCG Executive Briefing from July 27 here.
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When a vehicle has no steering wheel or pedals, traditional driver liability ceases to exist inside the vehicle. Because there is no human driver to sue, accidents involving a Zoox pod immediately shift from standard auto insurance claims to Product Liability law (or maybe something else). Suing a multi-billion dollar global tech giant for software glitches, botches and hacks is drastically more expensive, time-consuming, and legally complex for an injured pedestrian or human driver than a standard auto insurance claim.
Zoox’s carriage-style pod is designed from the ground up without any manual controls and considerable mandatory safety equipment for speeds up to 75mph they say, so it is fundamentally non-compliant with at least eight distinct FMVSS rules. NHTSA’s special Part 555 exemption (loophole cascade) noe allows AVs to bypass American federal safety rules written in blood. This easily turns any routine traffic incident into an elite, multi-year federal court battle called the “revenue event” AKA the financial transaction.
For American human road users, the message is crystal clear: if you share the road with any self driving vehicle, robocab or roborig, you and your family bear all safety, financial and legal risks when anything (or everything) goes wrong…
The Goodson v. General Palmer Railroad case is suppose to be fictional, used strictly as an academic mock trial scenario for law students, not a national safety plan or substitute for FMVSS.
NHTSA and USDOT tragically prioritizing revenue events over school bus safety, relying on the ambulance chaser’s General Palmer loophole cascade strategy to dump unlimited single point failure modes and safety defects baked into AV/EVs onto human road users, represents the ultimate, catastrophic breach of American engineering ethics.
These federal safety codes exist to ensure that vehicles and public roadways are designed around human safety, verifiable engineering, and basic common sense. When domestic carbon mandates bypass all oversight (rubber stamped), our streets, roads, highways and school zones are treated as a bogus psuedo-testing ground rather than a place for American families to safely travel, live and work.
It creates an incredibly bitter reality when the only response to carbon thimble rigging is simply build more predatory infrastructure to generate more ambulance runs, funerals, traffic tickets, fines, and citations from law enforcement, instead of fixing baked-in engineering flaws and safety defects.
The burden of forced carbon compliance dumped on American drivers trying to survive global warming loopholes should be called “battery bondage”.
If there is no FMVSS standards for software-blended brake torque transitions, then software failures legally do not exist. When an AV/EV suffers any Type 1 or Type 2 G.L.I.T.C.H. failure mode, the American legal system defaults entirely to the rigged Event Data Recorder (EDR). The software itself is a regulatory ghost, so the human operator/victim is guaranteed to take 100% of the liabilty…