Ford Mustang owners drive their cars barely 2,000 miles per year, a new study found. Get all the latest auto industry news in the Executive Briefing.
Today’s headlines:
+ A U.S. bankruptcy judge is allowing bankrupt auto parts maker First Brands, which owns Fram, Raybestos, Trico, and other suppliers, to move ahead with a liquidation plan. More at Reuters.
+ China’s State Administration for Market Regulation and Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) jointly warned the nation’s automakers to stop their price war. More at Automotive World.
+ The U.S. new-vehicle market tightened in May as retail sales accelerated while inventory levels remained steady at 2.89 million vehicles, according to Cox Automotive. More at CBT News.
+ Dennis Reinbold, Indiana car dealership owner and co-founder of the Dreyer & Reinbold IndyCar team, has passed away at 65 after a prolonged battle with cancer. More at Racer.
+ While the advanced driver-assistance systems on modern cars provide many safety benefits, they bring higher repair costs and insurance premiums, according to JD Power. More at Car and Driver.
+ Ford is recalling more 255,000 Focus models from 2012 through 2018 to correct a malfunctioning canister purge valve that can cause the engine to stall while in motion. More at WDBO.
+ Nissan President Ivan Espinosa says that by embracing methods learned from China, the automaker has halved its vehicle development time from 55 to 26 months. More at Car News China.
+ Rivian Founder and CEO RJ Scaringe says there’s a big market for a small battery-electric pickup truck, but there are no plans for a pickup version of the R2 SUV as yet. More at The Drive.
+ A new survey from iSeeCars.com discovered that Ford Mustang owners drive their cars only 2.092 miles a year on average, while Corvette owners travel 4,394 miles per year. More at Autoblog.
+ Seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton took his first Formula 1 victory for Ferrari and his first win since 2024 with a commanding drive in the Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix. More at ESPN.
Photo courtesy of Mecum Auctions.
Review the previous MCG Executive Briefing from June 12 here.
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Rest in Peace Dennis Reinbold.
He founded Dreyer & Reinbold Racing in 1999, carrying forward a deep family racing legacy that began long before with his grandfather, Floyd “Pop” Dreyer, famous Indy 500 mechanic. Mr. Reinbold always made the show, his Indianapolis 500 racing team qualified all 53 cars he entered at the Brickyard…
“It’s the damn Deest thing.”
Ford is re-recalling over 255,000 Focus models (2012–2018) because “a canister purge valve can stick open, collapse the fuel tank, and stall the engine while driving.” But the real Deest signature isn’t a defective vapor purge, it’s the Ford Motor Company institutional slop that lets safety defects persist and loop for years. This is a repeat recall of a severe safety defect that was supposedly fixed in 2018.
And here’s Ford’s most elegant failure: The software update required to detect a stuck purge valve back in ’18 was never actually installed on most recalled vehicles, but the vehicles were marked as repaired anyway, so Ford and NHTSA could pretend the hazard was gone while the actual safety defect remained fully active.
This is classic Probātiō Deest-grade entropy in its purest form, Ford and NHTSA claimed the fix had been applied because the paperwork said so. The vehicles believed nothing because the software update was never there, verification free software updates!
Ford has severe stalling defects across multiple nameplates- Mustang, F‑150, Transit, Fusion, Focus, Escape, Edge, Explorer, but each one comes from a different failure, which is probably why they always show up as separate recalls instead of one “unified Ford stalling” safety recall…
GM’s infamous V6 engine Stall‑Diagnosis TSB way back in the 80’s used a single, unified flowchart that treated stalling as a system‑level behavior, checking MAP, TPS, IAC, RPM‑drop rate, and even ohm’d out the entire engine wiring harness, the ECM was programmed to intervene (add spark, open IAC, enrich fuel) whenever a stall was imminent.
In contrast, Ford’s post-modern approach handles stalling as dozens of unrelated subsystem failures, issuing separate recalls for purge valves, coolant intrusion, fuel‑pump modules, throttle bodies, wiring chafing, cam phasers, software glitches, updates, more updates, hybrid battery shutdowns, and more, each treated as an isolated safety defect with no unified diagnostic logic or any apparent stall‑prevention strategy.
The result is a clean contrast: GM killed dozens of birds with one stone back in the ’80’s, while Ford uses dozens of stones to kill one bird today, and it perfectly fits our Mr. Probātiō Deest’s pattern of paperwork patches instead of actually engineering any real solutions…
Pervasive purge‑valve pressure‑pulling pathology produced prolonged plastic petrol‑part puckering, plication, pancaking, plus powertrain plummet past predicted parameters. Prior patched PCM programming proved purely performative, permitting persistent peril, propagating post‑patch problems, prompting panicked pilots, plus power petering. Persistent paperwork‑preferred procedures perfectly personified Probātiō‑patterned paradigms, permitting paperwork predominance, people’s protest and passenger penalty.
Precisely!
“A new survey from iSeeCars.com discovered that Ford Mustang owners drive their cars only 2,092 miles a year on average…”
I’m surprised at that statistic, but it tracks just about perfectly with my personal experience. I’ve driven my 2012 almost 29,000 miles since I bought it in the summer of that year, which works 2071 per year.
Guess I’m not as unusual as I thought.
Sorry, that should have been, “…which *works out to 2071 miles per year.*”
Since before 2008, most of America’s highway transportation network is being transmorgified by government loophole lawyers, political hacks, lobbyists and ambulance chasers into a mammoth revenue‑extraction vending machine where evidently every intersection, junction, traffic signal, traffic conflict and railroad crossing is now a monetizable asset and money tree rather than any real safety obligation, especially in the loophole-lawyer controlled Ohio state government.
Through semi-secret NEPA MOU’s by the Obama and Biden administrations with state actors (no engineers), the FHWA and FRA created the self‑certifying, self‑policing loop that bypasses all intent, spirit, and color of MUTCD, 23 CFR, and federal highway safety laws. This allows blatantly defective roundabouts with retarded yield‑sign/stop‑bar combinations to proliferate statewide in Ohio, despite their predictable crash patterns, non‑compliance with national standards and a typical 5000% increase in crashes after completion.
At the same time, our NHTSA and NTSB, using carbon as an excuse, winks at all national EV and AV deployments using experimental non‑FMVSS‑compliant blended braking, and an absured contradicting illogical single pedal operation, forced into everday traffic with no validated deceleration profiles, no harmonized regen‑to‑friction transitions, no low‑µ or split‑µ test data- no federal braking standards at all- no matter how much blood is spilled.
In this post-modern internet era of human history, its the lobbyists, political hacks and shysters manufacture “safety narratives,” government safety agencies fabricate their own “compliance,” no real engineering or ethics involved, and the loophole lawyer’s “sovereign immunity” shields these people from all accountability and liabilty. The result is our national infrastructure optimized for grant capture, wealth extraction, liability shifting to users, thimble rigged construction volume, and crash tax revenue under the carbon carbon carbon excuse- not human safety, ripping-off and defrauding the American tax payer: human road users intentionally exposed to lethal risks that federal safety rules were explicitly written to prevent…
I am not offering an opinion here, I am only reporting findings. These failures are documented, observable, repeatable, and measurable, and they align with crash data, design defects, safety defects, blatant regulatory gaps, and oversight failures that NHTSA, NTSB and ODOT never acknowledge due to baked in sovereign‑immunity.
My findings are more accurate than any NHTSA, NTSB, or ODOT published document because I am not paid to defend this shit…
Post‑modern Ohio uncontrolled roundabouts built after 2008, outwardly resemble FHWA modern roundabouts but incorporate non‑standard, contradictory yield‑sign/stop‑bar configurations, creating predictable crash patterns and instantly shift 100% of legal liability onto the entering human driver the moment their front tires cross that transverse line, while Ohio’s sovereign‑immunity structure prevents any agency and contractor from ever being held liable for the unsafe defective conditions created. Ohio is the only state in America that does this.
Ohio roundabouts operate like a traffic signal displaying red and green at the same time: a control device that forces the driver into an impossible, mutually exclusive decision and then punishes them for whichever interpretation they make. But unlike a malfunctioning signal, which would trigger an immediate emergency repair, the post‑modern Ohio roundabout is declared “compliant” by the very institutions that created the confusing contradiction, leaving the human user trapped inside a permanent, state‑manufactured hazard.
The result is not merely unsafe infrastructure, it is an unhealthy, self‑protecting legal‑wealth-transfer ecosystem in which the design safety defect is normalized, all liability pre‑assigned, and human road users systematically exposed to risks they cannot avoid, cannot mitigate, and cannot legally defend themselves against.
The American carbon vulture culture has even exploited the FMVSS certification door jamb sticker itself into a loophole device, a label claiming compliance with standards that do not exist for any software‑controlled blended braking systems used in our post-modern EV/AVs. This is a another contrived Loohole Cascade failure mode from manufacturers/private equity self-certifying all of its own safety compliance with no meaningful engineering oversight whatsoever, leaving human road users legally and financially liable for all bad outcomes from these untested + unregulated = unsafe experimental systems sold with dozens of forseeable lethal single‑point failure modes.