This 1959 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz was among the top 10 sellers at the RM Sotheby’s Hershey auction. Get all the latest auto industry news in the Executive Briefing.
Today’s headlines:
+ Penske Automotive Group will go private as parent company Penske Corporation and minority shareholder Mitsui & Company agreed to acquire the outstanding stake. More at Wards Auto.
+ Porsche is officially developing a mid-engine supercar that it says will be permanently positioned above the rear-engine 911 in the sports car maker’s product line. More at Car And Driver.
+ The average transaction price (ATP) of new vehicles hit $50,562 in September, just $52 below the December 2025 record, while year-over-year growth holds at 0.7 percent. More at CBT News.
+ Following a series of brake failures at previous events this season, NASCAR will allow Cup teams to replace front pads and rotors after practice and qualifying sessions. More at Autoweek.
+ Volvo Cars is expanding its partnership with Nvidia to develop a new generation of driver-assistance and automated-driving technology, the companies jointly announced. More at Reuters.
+ Tony Roma, executive chief engineer of the Chevy Corvette and Performance Cars at General Motors, says a pure electric Corvette is coming but the carmaker can’t say when. More at The Drive.
+ Texas firefighters battled an intense fire for 18 hours at Frank Kent Cadillac in Fort Worth in which six Cadillac Escalade IQ EVs were destroyed and two were damaged. More at Autoblog.
+ Notable products on display at this year’s Paris Auto Show include the Alfa Romeo Cuorerosso, Citroen 2CV, Fiat Multiplay, Zeekr 9X, Denza Z Spyder, and Li Auto Li 6. More at Motor Trend.
+ Top sales at the annual RM Sotheby’s Hershey fall auction included at 1934 Duesenberg Convertible Berline by Murphy and the one-off 1956 Cadillac Eldorado Town Car. More at Old Cars.
+ After a number of successful track tests, Dallara has started series production on the IR-28 chassis that will supersede the current DW12 race car after the 2027 IndyCar season. More at Racer.
Photo courtesy of RM Sotheby’s.
Review the previous MCG Executive Briefing from October 12 here.
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I for one, am distressed at the corruption of the terms roadster, phaeton and coupe. Aside from that, awesomesauce!
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I thought that part of the reasoning behind motorsports was to improve the road car. No changing brake pads and rotors, engineer a solution! Discover the unfair advantage! We wouldn’t have disc brakes today if these simps were around when racing fulfilled its purpose.
Coachwork terms have always been elastic since .horse-drawn days. There never was any technical rigor in them. mcg
Perhaps not, but one used to be able to assume that if a car was referred to as a roadster, it was an open car. As marketing introduced further murkiness, it may or may not have had a folding top or any type of window, but it was open. Now we seem to have no limitations. Feel free to call it a bus or motorcycle or rocketship. If I order an F-150 pickup, I don’t want a nine-passenger limousine delivered.
The next-gen technical rules were designed to contain costs. For brakes in particular, the idea was to prevent teams from using one set of trick brakes for qualifying and another set for the race.
But with the next-gen car they ran into a peculiar brake cooling problem.—overcooling on the straights. The repeated thermal cycles eat up the pads and shatter the rotors. Until it gets sorted out NASCAR is allowing teams to change parts.
A WordPress ban during my hospital stay, eh? Then Kinetic fiberoptic dug up 5 days out of 6 in Idiotville, apologies…
Unlimited ADAS/human vision hacking and Ohio’s predatory infrastructure with immunity evidently is obvious USDOT national policy since before 2015. ODOT’s hostile statewide vision hacking in Ohio traces directly back way before the Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (STEA) and the FAST Act, which codified the retarded political gift NEPA Assignment Program under 23 U.S.C. 327-
• NHTSA (49 CFR 301): Mandates that your car must have collision avoidance systems and allows Level 2 ADAS but disclaims all responsibility and liability when predatory noncompliant defective infrastructure hacks, confuses or crashes those systems.
• FHWA (23 CFR / MUTCD): Allows states like Ohio to use supplements that make all ADAS AV safety standards dead law and non-mandatory, allowing complex visual environments, unlimited visual hacking, crash traps, fake detours and poisoned GPS with complete immunity.
• FRA (49 CFR 200-299): Exploits federal preemption to ensure that once any rail road crossing is modified with federal dollars, it is legally untouchable from negligence lawsuits regarding USDOT vision hacking loophole cascades, MUTCD breaches, sightline removals or safety defects under the retarded FRA NEPA MOU.
• Local Law Enforcement: Issues policeman ball tickets to the vision hacked human operators for “Failure to Maintain Reasonable Control” when ODOT/USDOT visual hacking causes any ADAS failure or human error with total immunity
Every level of American government highway safety is plainly rigged so that every agency under the USDOT umbrella and State of Ohio gov’t protects each other, while the citizen’s wealth, health and safety is systematically extracted through unlimited vision hacking, ONU Tesla hacker crashes, citations, insurance spikes, ambulance runs, funerals, cancer, luekemia and damages known as crash taxes in retarded Ohio.
USDOT’s obvious wider agenda:
1. Highway Infrastructure Blinds the Tech: Vision Hacking allowed by non-mandatory MUTCD rules and illusions allow any state to build predatory infrasture with immunity that acts as an ADAS vision data hack to cause revenue events with immunity.
2. The American ADAS vision hacking crash epidemic is logged in NHTSA’s pathetic SGO 2021-01: Level 2 ADAS crashes that a manufacturer might submit and mandatory report to NHTSA. ODI used to multiply documented safety defect failures by ten to see the true scope, as very few ever actually call NHTSA after a crash or safety defect related failure.
3. The NHTSA ADAS Safety Defect Investigation illusion: NHTSA ODI reviews the SGO data under its authority to “identify potential vehicle defects”. But NHTSA has zero jurisdiction over any road infrastructure safety defects or failures believe it or not, so it can never investigate whether the vehicle’s surrounding environment caused any ADAS crash under USDOT’s own rules.
4. The Revenue Collection: Local law enforcement uses the ADAS crash event vision hack to issue a “Failure to Control” ticket to the driver, extracting more public wealth with immunity.
5. The Legal Immunity Shield: If any citizen that can read a tape measure points to the thousands of crashes in the NHTSA SGO data shows that USDOT policy of unlimited vision hacking with immunity is extremly dangerous and quite lethal, NHTSA ignores you while FHWA and state DOTs loophole lawyers hide behind their “Discretionary Function Exception” NEPA MOU and sovereign immunity like cockroaches when a kitchen light is clicked on, claiming no mandatory duty to make any road safe, everything is “as is” with “no warranty” and all infrastructure failures and safety degects are automatically “driver error/sensor failures” and “coincidently” revenue events for these people, financial transactions for their friends and family, and priceless “free edge case” data for Tesla and the other anti-human un-American vision hackers just like ’em, thanks to word salad gibberish of the American loophole lawyer’s ambulance chaser fraternity/sorority…