Audi has recreated the Auto Union Lucca, a 16-cylinder record car that ran 203 mph in 1935.Get all the latest auto industry news in the Executive Briefing.
Today’s headlines:
+ The jump in diesel fuel prices triggered by the Iran war is expected to accelerate electrification of China’s heavy truck fleet this year, analysts and automakers predict. More at AsiaOne.
+ Ongoing aluminum supply shortages are still disrupting ford F-150 and Super Duty truck production due to fires at supplier Novelis, leaving dealers with tighter inventory. More at Yahoo! Autos.
+ EV maker BYD is continuing its expansion outside of China, selling 26,396 vehicles in the United Kingdom through the first four months of 2026, double the volume of Tesla. More at Autoweek.
+ FIA President Mohammed Ben Sulayem says V8 engines will return to Formula 1 in either 2030 or 2031, describing it as only a matter of time before they are approved. More at Racer.
+ General Motors is expanding its investment in the skilled trades, committing nearly $200 million to strengthen technician training and community-based career programs. More at CBT News.
+ Local media reports indicate that Geely, China’s second-largest automaker, has acquired portions of a Ford factory in Spain and plans to produce one of its vehicles there. More at World Auto Forum.
+ The Toyota Corolla is celebrating its 60th year on the market this year with more than 55 million vehicles produced since 1966, but with little fanfare from the automaker. More at Autoblog.
+ Hyundai has filed a patent application for a battery-electric vehicle using body-on-frame construction, which would presumably be used on electric pickups and SUVs. More at Electrek.
+ Audi has created a hand-built replica of the Auto Union Lucca, also known as the Rennlimousine, a V16-powered record racer that ran 203 mph on the Autostrada in 1935. More at Car and Driver.
+ NASCAR Cup 2023 champion Ryan Blaney has signed a multi-year contract extension with Team Penske that will keep him in a Penske seat for the foreseeable future. More at Sports Illustrated.
Photo courtesy of Audi.
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So Hyundai is preparing to launch its first body-on-frame vehicle, with its turbo encabulator power source sandwiched between the frame and body, and expected to be unpinned by a platform enabling purely electric (EV), hybrid (HEV), internal combustion engine (ICE), and extended-range electric vehicle (EREV) configurations, eh?
According to Electrek: Five years after Tesla unveiled its 4680 battery cell at Battery Day in 2020 with big promises of 5x the energy, 6x the power, and 16% more range, the data tells a very different story. Tesla’s homemade cells consistently deliver worse energy density, worse charging performance, and less range than the cells they replaced. Energy density for Tesla’s 4680 cells produced at Giga Austin is 110.68Wh/lb, while the Panasonic 2170 cells they replace sit at 122.02Wh/lb. The new “8L” pack has a capacity of 79kWh gross (74kWh usable) which is 3 to 5 kWh less than the 82 to 84kWh found in the LG 5M pack. That’s 13% worse, not better. Tesla always claimed higher density, but who knows.
Out of Spec Roaming recently published a detailed analysis of the Telsa 8L pack’s charging performance, described the charging curve as “so bad” and ranked the 4680 cells as the worst battery option. Electrek’s take: Five years and billions of dollars into the 4680 program, the cells deliver less energy density than Panasonic’s 2170 cells, charge slower than LG’s, and charge slower than even the cheapest LFP chemistry from CATL…
FYI- Mercedes-Benz just issued another safety recall NHTSA# 26V315, this one affecting 144,049 cars across the 2024, 2025, and 2026 model years involving more defective infotainment control unit software. NHTSA documents show that the control unit may trigger an increased number of system resets as part of a fallback behavior, these resets can result in the digital instrument cluster’s display temporarily going blank, meaning that the driver loses access to key information and increases the chance of a crash…
> The Toyota Corolla is celebrating its 60th year on the market
I owned a 1968 and went cross-country in a 1969. Both 1st generation. Horrible cars, especially with an automatic. Not suitable for American roads. Noisy. Underpowered, making them susceptible to overheating. Uncomfortable seats. Gas mileage wasn’t better than similar 1200cc cars. The 510 Datsun was the car to have back then. Hopefully Toyota has improved their quality since.
I believe that Auto Union may be the one that killed Bernd Rosemeyer in 1938. It’s speculated that a gust of wind caused him to lose control at 270mph. It’s an awesome looking car but probably very hot inside. I’d like a 1939 Auto Union Type D Grand Prix racer please.
I don’t think it was the Lucca Rennlimousin that hit 270 mph. Its record was 203.2 mph using a 350 horsepower supercharged V16 with drag coefficient around 0.43. The Type C Streamliner of 1938 had nearly double the power with 600 hp and dramatically improved aero, sporting fully enclosed “land-speed” bodies. The all-time greats Bernd Rosemeyer and Rudolf Caracciola traded speed records in the C at over 268–270 mph in public road testing on the new German Autobahns.
The 1938 Streamliner dropped the drag coefficient from the 1935 Lucca’s 0.43 down to approx 0.20, with 600+hp from 366 cubic inches. It had a 75 gallon fuel tank filled with a complex “witch’s brew” of chemical fuel (nitro) specifically designed for the extreme compression of the supercharged (13–14psi boost) V16 engine.
Rosemeyer was killed during one of the 270 mph runs on the A5 Autobahn, when it appeared a gust of wind caught his machine, the crash recorded on newsreels at the time.
WAF: Geely is one of the Chinese automakers setting up production in Europe. The company has agreed to purchase Ford’s Body 3 vehicle assembly at Almussafes in Valencia, La Tribuna de Automocion reported, adding that Geely plans to use the acquired line to build its modular GEA platform. The deal likely involves Geely producing a model for Ford using the same architecture.
The same publication reported Chinese automaker SAIC Motor is considering a manufacturing site in the northwestern Spanish port town of Ferrol, in Galicia, citing unnamed sources familiar with negotiations.
Yes Virginia, any Chinese vehicle made in Spain can legally be imported to the U.S. if they meet FMVSS and EPA, but under Inflation Reduction Act rules any battery components, software or critical minerals sourced from a “Foreign Entity of Concern” such as Chinese battery manufacturers is ineligible for a $7,500 federal tax credit.
If any product is truly better, faster, cheaper, safer or cleaner, government doesn’t need to mandate it. People didn’t need a “Smartphone Mandate” to stop using flip-phones, and Henry Ford and Edsel didn’t need a “Model T Subsidy” to put the horse and buggy out of business. They sold themselves because they actually solved a problem for the buyer and improved the quality of life. The fact that the “Green New Deal AV/EV” transition require any mandates, subsidies, and “kill switch” legislation is proof that the tech is not even close to beating the incumbent on any of it’s own merits.
Forced “progress” is not progress at all; it’s social engineering at its finest…
Smells like the same “logic” of the Montreal Protocol that banned heavier than air R12 Freon refrigerent to theroretically enhance stratospheric ozone above Antartica, because an electron might hypothetically get “out of kilter” in a carbon atom in 0.000?% of the air 18+ miles above the South Pole, not because any Dupont patents expired, lol.
The Green New Deal’s AV/EV push stinks like the same old same old: a hypothetical “needs of the many” using theories, climate change, synthetic data, loopholes, wealth extraction, strawman and fake safety outweighs the “needs of the one”, quality of life, freedom and genuine safety…
IF BYD can legally import Spanish-made EVs into the USA, they’ll sell them for $10k and no one will care about the tax credit. They have the ability to crash both the new and used market which will significantly impact the economy. We’ll have to start a world war just to keep the manufacturing base afloat.
Historical American Precedents of “Truth Riding”
*Samuel Shaw and Richard Marven (1777): These two naval officers were the nation’s first whistleblowers. They reported the torture of British POWs and corruption in the Continental Navy. The Continental Congress was so impressed by their “let the truth ride” attitude that they passed the nation’s first whistleblower protection law in 1778 specifically to defend them against libel suits.
*Kermit Vandivier: 1967-1969, he blew the whistle on B.F. Goodrich for providing defective aircraft brakes—another “fake safety” scenario, called the A7-D Affair. Despite the failures, Goodrich management refused to redesign the brake due to cost and deadline pressures. They ordered staff to falsify qualification reports by miscalibrating test equipment and manipulating data to make it appear the brakes met military standards. Despite having seven children to support, he took his evidence to the FBI and Congress, forcing the company to fix the defect.
*Ernie Fitzgerald in 1968 exposed a massive $2 billion cost overrun in the C-5 Galaxy program during congressional testimony. This act led to his immediate firing from the Air Force by the Nixon administration, sparking a 13-year legal battle that eventually won him reinstatement and established landmark protections for federal whistleblowers.
The deeper philosophical point is just Engineering 101. It’s ultimately about epistemic humility because it is safer to admit uncertainty, it is dangerous to pretend certainty, and systems fail hardest when they believe they cannot fail.
This is the same “first grade” philisophical principle behind the “Swiss cheese” model of safety, Nassim Taleb’s work on fragility and aviation’s “trust but verify” culture. All safety and engineering ethics absolutes require data integrity absolutely- no strawman debate, no games, no illusions, no loopholes, no waivers, no gibberish, no if’s, and’s or butt’s.
Spot on. When “the science” switches from measurements to modifiers, it’s usually because someone is trying to sell a narrative rather than prove a theorem. The use of “likely” or “substantially” in a government mandate or a corporate ESG report is often a tactical move to avoid legal liability while still demanding compliance. If a project fails to meet a “bold” goal, no one can be sued for breach of contract because “bold” isn’t a metric—it’s just a vibe. This is exactly how the A-7D brake scandal you mentioned played out. Engineers had the hard data showing the brakes were failing compliance testing (the nouns and verbs), but management used “adverb-heavy” reporting to satisfy the contract requirements, until the FBI stepped in.
The two reasons why “adverb-heavy science” is always a red flag- subjectivity and bias. Without a specific timeline (e.g., “by Q4 2028”), or varifiable data (“1200 feet”), abverbs are just opinion. Real scientists use the “p-value” to determine if a result is statistically significant. If it says the results were “highly significant” but the p-value is 0.049 (just barely scraping by), the adverb is doing the work that the data can’t.
Policy loopholes, mandates, arm waving and strawman, like those “justifying” AV, EV, data centers and renewables using adverbs like “aggressively” or “boldly”, anything ending in “ly” are used to create an emotional sense of urgency that bypasses the math of energy density, grid capacity or common sense. Real science is built on nouns and verbs (mass, force, accelerate, decay). If you can’t measure the “extremely” or “mostly,” or a “likely”, its not science at all, its just marketing…
On the Trident sub program, the govt kept changing the design so systems were built, tagged as ready, then had to be torn out and rebuilt. On average dept, the original boat was built 3 times. On large projects, construction often starts when only 10% of engineering is completed, causing redoes and budget overruns.
According to mr. internet the Trident program is considered one of the most controversial weapons projects in U.S. history: ♤Substandard Steel, in 1979 an audit revealed that thousands of tons of non-conforming steel had been used. Investigators found improper steel in as many as 126,000 locations on a single Trident submarine.
♡Faulty workmanship, defective welding and painting at Electric Boat shipyard, leading to a major legal dispute between the Navy and the contractor over who should pay for the repairs.
◇Cost and delays, the program faced severe schedule slips and massive cost overruns. The delivery of the lead ship was delayed by years due to poor productivity.
♧Missile test failures; the Trident missile itself faced scrutiny after multiple failed undersea tests, later attributed to fundamental design miscalculations.
☆The aging Ohio-class subs are currently scheduled for replacement by the Columbia-class program, which plans for 12 new submarines with its own controversies, including a $130 billion price tag (lol) and constrction delays that forced the Navy to extend the service life of older Ohio boats even longer.