The 2027 Corvette Grand Sport made its public debut at the New York Auto Show. Get all the latest auto industry news in the Executive Briefing.
Today’s headlines:
+ Most of the top automakers in the U.S. saw new vehicle sales slump in the first quarter, many of them pointing to big drops in March sales as the cause for Q1 deficits. More at MSN News.
+ The head of a group representing nearly all major automakers called for scrapping the federal 18.4-cent per gallon tax on gasoline and replacing it with a vehicle fee. More at U.S. News & World Report.
+ Workers at Webasto Detroit voted 276–133 in a National Labor Relations Board election to unionize with the United Auto Workers after a 2.5-year organizing effort. More at CBT News.
+ A delegation will travel from Argentina to the Miami Grand Prix to meet with Formula 1 executives to make their case for a Grand Prix at the Buenos Aires circuit in 2027. More at Motorsport.com.
+ Shares in Tesla fell more than 5 percent this week, their worst slump of the year, after the company released a disappointing deliveries and production report for the first quarter. More at CNBC.
+ Volkswagen is recalling 75,323 Jetta and Tao models in the USA to correct a software defect that can cause the digital instrument cluster to go blank while driving. More at Autoblog.
+ With a time of 6:15.977 minutes, a track-only Ford GT Mk IV driven by Frédéric Vervisch recorded the fastest lap ever for a production vehicle on the Nürburgring Nordschleife. More at Motor Trend.
+ Noteworthy product debuts at the New York International Auto Show include the Hyundai Boulder Concept, the 2027 Corvette Grand Sport, and the 2027 Chrysler Pacifica. More at Car and Driver.
+ French automaker Renault Group’s Chairman Jean-Dominique Senard will not seek a new term at the end of his current term in spring 2027, sources close to the matter say. More at World Auto Forum.
+ Abel Motorsports, which fields a four-car team in the Indy NXT series, has filed an Indy 500 entry for Jacob Abel, who was bumped from the field last year in a Dale Coyne car. More at Racer.
Photo courtesy of Car and Driver.
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Ford is confusing me. I thought the Ford GT Mk IV was the car that won LeMans in 1967. Most sources refer to that car simply as Ford Mk IV but some say Ford GT Mk IV. I’ve never seen GT40 as part of the official name for that car in records. This current article says the GT40 has won LeMans three times, so they don’t include 1967.
The 1966, ’68 and ’69 cars were GT40 Mk IIs. The road car based on them was the GT40 Mk III. The re-imagining in 2005 was just Ford GT. I assume the 2nd generation in 2017 was the GT Mk II. This latest car is called a Mk IV. What was the GT Mk III?
On the same note, the LS6 was an early ’70s 454 engine. The 2001-2005 Corvette Z06 had a different LS6 and the new Corvette Grand Sport has yet a different LS6. This whole retro thing is going too far. Get your s*** together guys. You can’t establish legends if it takes a guidebook to tell them apart.
That’s an interesting issue. Short answer is we enthusiasts place more significance in these designations than the Ford Motor Co. does. The 1967 Ford Mk IV (my personal favorite) was not a GT or a GT40 originally. It was a Le Mans prototype built at Kar Kraft in Dearborn and developed by Shelby American. But as the GT40 name became more prominent in passing years, the name was backdated to GT40 Mark IV by Ford media people.
At first, Ford GT was the name of the car and GT40 was the name of the program at Slough UK. You can see this in the early promotion. But the audience loved the name GT40, height of the car and all that, so it became attached to everything.
When the Ford GT was reborn in 2004-ish, GT40 was not adopted because some guy in Ohio owned the rights to the name and wanted too much for it. Or so the story goes.
Just a minor note, Don (which proves your point about how confusing it all is): The 1968-69 LeMans-winning cars were actually based on the original GT40 Mk 1 because the rules changed, disallowing engines larger than five liters. So Ford used the small-block and John Wyer’s Gulf team won the GT40s last two.
According to online estimates, a VW Jetta or Toa contains roughly 150 million lines of computer code—about 18 billion (with a B) individual characters—sourced from nearly 70 different suppliers. Its recalled dashboard infotainment system alone includes around 3 million lines of code.
For comparison, a Spectrum cable box famous for utter user frustration and lock up—runs on about 30 million lines of code. A typical autonomous vehicle can contain 300 million lines of code, totaling over 36 billion characters, all written, reviewed, and maintained by human beings.
This level of complexity creates a risk profile that’s impossible to ignore. Every additional line of code is another potential failure point, another opportunity for a bug, a vulnerability, or an unforeseen interaction between components built by different teams, companies, and countries. Now connect it to the internet, when millions and millions of these lines govern braking, steering, acceleration and navigation, any small defect can ripple outward with real‑world consequences.
Post-modern vehicles aren’t just machines anymore—they’re sprawling software ecosystem vending machines, and the more complex and greedy they become, the more fragile and deadly they are…
Great arguments for zonal architecture and SDV. But really difficult for the Detroit 3 with so many suppliers and outside engineering.