Editorials

The Trump administration wants to roll back the fuel-economy standards put in place by the Biden administration. There's a public-comment period before the rules would be finalized. Consider this my public comment -- this is not a very good idea.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece suggesting that I don't want to see automakers revoke access to Apple CarPlay -- not unless they come up with a better smartphone-mirroring system.

I still stand by that -- but three separate instances of CarPlay going bye-bye when I needed it suggests that the universe is trying to tell me something. Or, at least, it's laughing in my face.

In the latest instance of people realizing vehicular connectivity is just one massive liability, we have a Norwegian probe into Chinese buses. Norway is presently growing its fleet of all-electric, Chinese-built transit vehicles and the government has become concerned that the connectivity features equipped permit a way for the buses to be remotely shut down. However, this isn’t a problem that’s limited to Chinese-made products — as the odds are good that your own vehicle boasts similar vulnerabilities.

To paraphrase the late, great Charlton Heston, you can pry my Apple CarPlay from my cold, dead hands.

OK, fine, that's a bit extreme. But given GM's seeming desire to replace CarPlay with its own Google-based system, you can see why I, an iPhone owner, have some reservations. Especially if other automakers follow.

Jim Farley, CEO of the Ford Motor Company, was recently interviewed about automotive electrification, tariffs, competition from China, and how the industry is using technology to keep people from modifying their own cars. While the interview covered a lot of ground, it was loaded with the kind of non-answers CEOs are infamous for. But some of the responses he gave about locked ECUs and tuning were simultaneously enlightening and deeply troubling.

Ed. note -- We have yet another TTAC Content Creator starting today. He's Gary Vasilash, a long time automotive industry observer/writer/journalist.

The headline on a news release from Ford surprised me:

“Ford Receives Most Honors of Any Brand in 2025 J.D. Power Initial Quality Study”

For three years, NASCAR has come to Chicago in early July and shut down streets in the heart of downtown in order to stage two races on those same streets.

For three years, rain cast a literal and figurative cloud over the event. For three years, I was there to take it all in.

I hope that this was just the third year, and not the final year.

While the automotive industry is gearing up to pivot toward “software-defined vehicles,” there hasn’t been a surplus of clear explanations on what exactly that will entail. Oversimplified, it just means that manufacturers want to start building automobiles where all functions are controlled via software, rather than being determined exclusively upon the mechanical hardware they came with — and I have a sinking feeling they are going to be just awful.

Yeah, yeah, it's a day late. Mea culpa. Anyway, time for my 2025 Indianapolis 500 recap. I've done one of these most years -- and this year was one of the most interesting races I've seen since starting at TTAC.

We’re back with a Z4 update today, and it’s an unexpected one. Spring of 2025 saw record rainfall here in southwestern Ohio, and a few weeks ago it rained for five solid days. Factually, the Cincinnati area experienced 7.85 inches of rainfall in April of 2024, compared to its 30-year average of just 4.73 inches. But why should one care about rain if they’ve a watertight hardtop roof?

Earlier this week, a fourth-generation Toyota Supra was intentionally wrecked by the Florida Highway Patrol (FHP) at a claimed 100 miles per hour. The driver and passenger of the now-destroyed JDM import were reportedly hospitalized after the car left the road, collided with a light pole, and subsequently caught fire.

It has been over three years in the making, but the documentary The Last Independent Automaker chronicling the life and times of the American Motors Corporation debuts today on PBS. The team behind the documentary secured over 100 hours of footage from the AMC vaults, scoured hundreds of historical photographs, and interviewed more than 35 people from the AMC sphere.

Believe it or not, we’ve crossed the two-year ownership mark with the Nashville-via-San Diego sourced 2010 BMW Z4. The 60,000-mile mark on the odometer has rolled past, and among many fun drives on curvy roads additional maintenance items have been resolved. Oh, and there was a multi-day stay at the dealer for an important recall.

The 2025 Detroit Auto Show media days were quite dead.

Elon Musk fans, and Musk himself, have taken to social media to claim that the mainstream media is biased against the Tesla Cybertruck because of how the explosion of a Cybertruck in Las Vegas was covered. They've been comparing it the coverage of the involvement of a Ford pickup truck in a terror attack in New Orleans, and claiming reasonable differences in how the events were covered are somehow a signifier of anti-Tesla bias.

As if often the case with these sorts of things, it's a bunch of bull dung.

I let my thoughts on last week's 2024 Los Angeles Auto Show press day marinate over the long flight home and throughout the weekend. Here's my take on a weird (in a mostly good way) media day last week in LA.

The world lost a great automotive designer in September, as it surfaced earlier this week that Bruno Sacco passed away at the age of 90. An Italian by birth, Sacco’s career and indeed the majority of his life took place in Germany. There, his flair for serious and orderly designs were put to use on the exclusive luxury wares from Mercedes-Benz.

Last Friday brought us the final episode of a car show concept that started over 20 years ago. It’s been a long time coming, with much hemming and hawing in the media over the conclusion of The Grand Tour, or as many considered it, Top Gear 2.0. But now the episode has aired, the contract completed, and elderly hosts are off into the sunset to work on their multitude of other projects. It’s finally time for Top Gear's conclusion, The Grand Tour's "One for the Road."

While the Mercury Capri never quite matched the Ford Mustang on the domestic market, the former became a performance icon in Europe. Chasing the success of the Cortina’s numerous sporting variants, Blue Oval thought the region might want a coupe to fill a niche similar to the Mustang’s. The gamble worked and the feisty little fastback went on to be a big success in Europe.

Absent from the market for decades, Ford has opted to revive the model. Sadly, the resulting product represents its predecessor in no way. Rather than being a sprightly lightweight coupe wearing the blue badge, it’s another electrified crossover.

A month or two back, I was told in no uncertain terms that I could no longer plug in electrified vehicles -- meaning "pure" battery-electric vehicles (BEV) and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV) -- to charge when parking them in the large parking garage that's attached to the condo building I live in.

The California Senate has passed a bill that, if signed into law, will require all new cars sold or build in the state to have "passive speed limiters" installed by 2032.

This is a horrible idea.

Toyota, Mazda, and Subaru conducted a press event designed to explain why they’re walking away from full-blown electrification. While this is something numerous automakers have done in recent months, the “Multipathway Workshop” faced a predictable amount of criticism from EV acolytes.

I woke up Sunday pretty fired up for a day full of racing. Unfortunately for just about everyone involved in racing, Mother Nature didn't cooperate. Still, the 2024 Indianapolis 500 was raced in its entirety, albeit after a four-hour delay.

The Chevrolet Malibu is dead.

Or, at least, it will be come November.

Cadillac once said it would be all-electric by 2030, but like other automakers, it has appeared to soften that commitment.

Sometimes, government regulations make so much sense, you wonder why they weren't passed before. And sometimes, they make sense when taken at face value, but not as much when you think it through.

That, I think, is the case with the recent rule that requires automatic emergency braking to be standard on all new cars starting with the 2029 model year.

Last month, I was chatting with Dave Thomas from CDK Global on the TTAC podcast. We were discussing electric vehicles, and Dave suggested that for many EV buyers, range isn’t that much of an issue.

One of my favorite little nuggets of irony is that the Hell's Kitchen area of Manhattan is actually very well-to-do. It's not anything like any commonly imagined vision of hell, unless your vision of hell consists of yuppies, puppies, and way too many people.

A few weeks ago, venerable car-enthusiast magazine/Web site Road & Track created a mini-controversy with the deletion of an article from the Internet.

The Biden Administration dropped a new rule limiting tailpipe emissions from passenger vehicles yesterday, and you know what that means.

Yes, it's lying season!

The world lost one of its preeminent car designers today, as Marcello Gandini has passed away at the age of 85. Though perhaps best known for the flashy and outrageous Lamborghini Countach, Gandini’s pen was applied to many other Italian, German, French, British, Japanese, and Swedish concepts and production designs. Gandini’s prolific portfolio of work made a permanent mark on automotive design.

Just short of the eight-month mark, Amazon’s expensive The Grand Tour is back for its penultimate episode. Following last summer’s “ Eurocrash,” the maturely titled “Sand Job” sends the trio of presenters to an all-new location to tread upon content ground they’ve crossed many times previously. And though the special is sparse on content, it’s certainly coming with length.

Look, we’re all for a pinch or two of financial prudence around here. Springing for luxury items just isn’t in the cards for most of us, despite the lavish recompense* deigned upon us by our corporate overlords in Downtown Canada. (*note: the recompense isn’t actually lavish at all).

But even we feel comfortable calling out moronic fiscal advice when we see it. Case in point – a post on a website called Investopedia suggests that anyone making $100,000 per year should spend no more than roughly $15,000 on a car.

Hoping to increase the United States’ electric vehicle charging infrastructure, the White House has announced $623 million in grants to build more charging stations. This plays into the Biden administration's goal of having 500,000 public chargers in the U.S., and see 50 percent of all new vehicle sales become electric, by 2030. However, the federal government has already poured billions into the cause and it’s looking like an incredible waste of money during a period where citizens are growing increasingly concerned about the economy.

News broke earlier this week that Stellantis would pull out of auto shows, including the upcoming Chicago Auto Show, for the foreseeable future.

Lost a bit in the holiday rush here at TTAC was a new Reuters story about Tesla blaming the buyers of its cars for parts failures.

If you see something, say something. That's what they say.

Well, I've seen something problematic lately, and now I feel like it's time to use this platform to put a PSA out into the world.

General Motors announced its intention to drop Apple CarPlay and Android Auto on its upcoming EVs earlier this year. Now we have a new piece out in Motor Trend in which the company explains in so many words that the decision is all about driver safety.

Now that I've had nearly a week to digest the Tesla Cybertruck news, I've come to the conclusion that the Cybertruck will neither revolutionize the automotive market nor be such a flop that it kills Tesla.

Last week, on the day before Thanksgiving, a middle-aged couple in a Bentley met a fiery end under mysterious circumstances near the U.S.-Canada border outside of Buffalo, New York.

It was gloomy when I landed in Los Angeles last week. Gloomy enough that it put me in a sour mood -- despite living in the Midwest, I like sun.

The same cloud cover that prevented me from getting a view of the city upon approach to LAX painted downtown in a shade of grey that would be right at home in some depressing movie about urban malaise.

Then, on Thursday, the sun came out. Just in time for this year's sole media day.

This year has seen a surge of panicked reports discussing how the U.S. government has mandated vehicle hardware that would allow authorities to wrestle control away from the driver. Usually referenced as a “kill switch,” the device is supposed to be required on every new automobile manufactured after 2025.

The claim hangs responsibility on the extremely broad Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that was passed in November of 2021. But the pertinent legislation actually focuses on combating impaired motorists by mandating “advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention technology” as standard equipment. Though it doesn’t get all that specific in terms of what that entails and gives an incredible amount of leeway to federal regulators.

Despite rampant talk about how the United Auto Workers’ stand-up strike and its resulting deals would bankrupt the automotive sector, the union strategy appears to have ended up costing the industry less than the labor strike GM endured all by its lonesome in 2019.

With average fuel prices creeping back up, you’ve undoubtedly seen a slew of articles trying to explain why. The trend seems to be to just blame it on warm weather. 

Over the past week, countless media outlets published stories about how oil refineries have had to scale back production targets to contend with exceedingly high temperatures. But is this really the keystone issue for why you’re once again contending with undesirable fuel prices? 

DuSable Lake Shore Drive is back open. The flooding has, hopefully, receded. The drivers are no doubt thinking about Atlanta.

Yet the Grant Park 220 that took place here in Chicago last weekend is still very much on my mind.

On June 16th Amazon Prime released the latest episode of The Grand Tour, “Eurocrash.” With a runtime longer than every previous episode of the show (1 hour 47 minutes), “Eurocrash” sends the presenters to central Europe for a long road trip. This particular installment is a bit different than past voyages though: The connecting thread between the presenters, journey, cars, and the episode’s events goes missing. 

Automakers seem to love the idea of subbrands.

The most recent one to make this sort of shift -- Land Rover.

What I can't figure out is: Why?

If you’re someone who follows automotive trends, you’ve undoubtedly noticed just how much effort is going into infotainment screens and features associated with connectivity. This is because auto manufacturers believe leveraging consumer data in a manner similar to tech companies (e.g. Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Alphabet) will yield oodles of cash. However, this is also why we’ve started seeing businesses dumping things like Apple CarPlay from their vehicles and some of us have a sneaking suspicion this practice will continue.

For better or worse, a lot of people in this business on all sides (journalist, analyst, PR, pundit) tend to use any given auto show's press conference schedule, along with the type of debuts that occur/news that is made, as a metric for the health of the industry.

One of the most infuriating things about this job is watching the media scratch its head about why roadway fatalities keep going up when the answer is as plain as the touchscreens on their dashboards. Modern vehicle interfaces are much more cumbersome than their predecessors and yet we’ve seen years' worth of coverage offering all the insight or a shrug. While there are certainly other reasons crashes have spiked (e.g. drug and alcohol abuse), the alluring tablet located next to your steering wheel has been the elephant in the room nobody was talking about — not with the seriousness that is deserved.

But things could be changing.

Motor 1's John Neff recently wrote a screed defending the proliferation of screens in cars, and as he anticipated in his concluding paragraph, his take went over about as well as a stinky release of flatulence during high tea with the royal family.

Automotive enthusiasts and journalists, as well as consumers, pushed back hard, at least from what I saw on the socials.

Picture it. Last Tuesday, late afternoon. Checking the used convertible listings like I’d been doing for some time, it seemed the right car would never materialize. But on that particular afternoon, I happened to check Facebook Marketplace, a terrible place to search listings which I generally avoided. The default 249-mile search radius showed me a particular convertible I hadn’t seen listed before. Turned out it was the one.

Two weeks ago, President Joe Biden announced during the State of the Union that federal infrastructure projects will, going forward, be required to use all American-made construction materials. Applause resounded throughout the divided chamber.

And why not? Nobody ever wins an election - especially when it’s not an election year - by promising to buy more foreign-made goods.

The Chicago Auto Show has often been a dreary event from a new-vehicle launch perspective. A fun event for consumers, sure, but often overshadowed in terms of vehicle debuts by the shows in Detroit, New York, and Los Angeles.

Hertz has reportedly fallen short of its promise to buy 100,000 electric vehicles from Tesla last year. Though, taking a look at the role EVs are playing in the rental industry right now, the company might actually have made the correct decision.

Would you believe it’s been a year and a half since we last discussed used convertibles? Much has changed during the interim: The economy, the used-car market, and life in general. While some of you were fairly convinced I’d purchase a car “on the rebound” after I’d dumped the quality control nightmare that was the Golf SportWagen in July of 2021, you were wrong. Let’s catch up a bit.

Earlier this week, we covered legislation introduced in Wyoming that would ban the sale of EVs in that state.

Amazon is reportedly dumping famed auto writer Jeremy Clarkson over his having made jokes about Meghan Markle late last year. Though it’s only a rumor at present and seems like the streaming service may just be attempting to appease the offended parties until all is forgotten. Unspecified sources have told Variety that Amazon won’t be working with the host beyond the seasons of The Grand Tour and Clarkson’s Farm that have already been commissioned – providing a buffer period for tempers to cool and memories to fade.

It's that time of year. Time to look back, take stock of the year that's just passed, do some self-reflection, and think about the best and worst cars we drove in 2022.