Ford Motor Company has announced that, in partnership with the Corning glass works, the new Ford GT supercar will have a windshield and engine cover made of what they call Gorilla Glass Hybrid.

In case you don’t know, Gorilla Glass is Corning’s brand name for the ion-exchange-strengthened glass used in smartphones and tablets. Instead of two sheets of annealed glass laminated with a middle sheet of clear polymer — as in conventional safety glass — Gorilla Glass Hybrid replaces the inner layer with Gorilla Glass.
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Forty-nine cars worth more than $2.2 million dollars arrived for one-week stays in my driveway during the 2015 calendar year. Seventeen of them were traditional four-door sedans, including an XSE V6 version of America’s most popular car — the Toyota Camry. Another 15 were utility vehicles of one kind or another: the tiny Jeep Renegade and Mazda CX-3 to the full-size GMC Yukon Denali and Cadillac Escalade.

There were five pickup trucks, six hatchbacks, one wagon, and two vans. Three V8s. Many turbochargers. Five diesels. And two manual transmissions. Read More >

General Motors has delayed delivery of its Canyon/Colorado diesel trucks for an unspecified problem at their “final validation” stage, the automaker told TTAC on Wednesday.

“Those trucks are still in final validations and we hope to ship soon,” said Brian Goebel, a spokesperson for GMC.

More than 60 trucks ordered by customers are in varying stages of production, according to customers who shared order details with TTAC. Several of those trucks’ delivery dates have been pushed back multiple weeks, and many of those orders go as far back as the beginning of August.

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The joke that spotting a high driver is as easy as looking for the car safely going 7 mph on the interstate isn’t entirely accurate, according to Denver police.

“You’d be wrong. We’ll see the same levels of intoxication between someone who’s been using alcohol and someone who is on drugs,” Denver police Captain Mark Chuck said Wednesday. “There’s virtually no difference.”

Spotting those signs of impairment could become very important as federal regulators devote resources to developing nationwide standards and training tools for law enforcement. The recently signed federal highway funding bill, dubbed Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act, directs the Transportation Department to study how to spot marijuana-impaired drivers as more states legalize the drug.

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Ford will have a rear-wheel drive, hybrid F-150 truck by the end of the decade, Ford CEO Mark Fields told NPR on Tuesday.

“Well, we do have plans to have a rear-wheel drive hybrid truck but the end of the decade. So yes, we’re working on electrified F-series, and it’s really around a conventional hybrid,” Fields said during an interview.

The automaker announced earlier this month that it would invest $4.5 billion in electrification and will unveil a refreshed hybrid Fusion at the North American International Auto Show next month as part of that plan. The hybridized, full-size pickup will arrive by 2020, although the automaker doesn’t plan on total market domination for the truck — at least right now.

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Like any after-school special will tell us, it’s what’s on the inside that counts.

Infiniti revealed Monday its refreshed Q50, complete with three turbocharged engines in varying levels of potency. The new VR-series engine, which will be replacing Nissan’s everlasting VQ-series engine first in the Q50, will be a twin-turbocharged 3-liter V-6 that produces 300 horsepower and 400 horsepower in two different tunes.

The base mill in the Q50 will be Mercedes’ turbo four, lifted from the Q30, which makes 208 horsepower. Oh yeah, and there’s a refresh for the QX60 too.

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If you see this Cadillac a-rockin’, you should submit a complaint to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

That, and depressed 2016 sales outlooks, the Federal Reserve rate hike, a Chinese electric vehicle Warrior and CarMax, after the jump.

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The European Union’s anti-fraud office is investigating Volkswagen for misusing publicly funded loans to develop illegally cheating software in its cars, the New York Times reported Wednesday.

Volkswagen was provided the low-interest loans by the European Investment Bank to develop engines that were more fuel-efficient and produce less carbon dioxide, according to the report. In September, the automaker admitted that 11 million vehicles worldwide polluted more than advertised and used an illegal “defeat device” to fool emissions tests.

The automaker’s woes compounded Wednesday: A European bank — partly funded by the U.S. — announced it would suspend a $327 million loan to Volkswagen that would have been used to build a $1.2 billion factory in Poland. That factory was slated to build commercial vehicles.

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German transportation authorities approved Wednesday Volkswagen’s fix for 8.5 million illegally polluting cars in Europe, according to the automaker.

Fixes for the automaker’s 1.2-, 1.6- and 2-liter diesel engines include software updates and, for Volkswagen’s 1.6-liter models, a mesh air pipe that calms air ahead of its intake mass air sensor.

The fixes are approved for Europe only.

Last month, Volkswagen officials submitted its proposed fix for North American cars to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the California Air Resources Board. Those fixes have not yet been approved by those agencies. Read More >

The U.S. auto industry generated an overall sales increase in November 2015 despite notable decreases at American Honda and Volkswagen Group, and a shorter-than-normal November selling season.

So strong were the numbers produced in the lead-up to and during November that analysts and forecasters are all but certain that 2015 will go down as the best year ever for auto sales volume in America. Just six years removed from the doldrums of 2009, auto sales in 2015 are expanding for a fifth consecutive year, rising 52 percent compared with 2010 and 5 percent compared with 2014.

This is the theme of auto sales coverage as we approach the end of 2015, as bestseller lists highlighting the strength of pickup trucks and ever more popular crossovers are being prepped. But what about the small figures behind the big numbers; the less well-known stories which contribute to the overall theme?

These are they. Read More >

If you want to see a great example of automotive journalism, go read Raphael Orlove’s account of the unclear history of the development of the Saleen S7 supercar.

Triggered by an email tip, Raph checked into the rumor of the Saleen S7 starting its life as an Aston Martin racing car before being stolen by Steve Saleen himself. Orlove spoke to the entire cast of characters involved in bringing the Saleen S7 into reality — Steve Saleen, Reeves Callaway, UK racecar builder Ray Mallock, and Phil Frank, who designed the body — to try and clarify the matter.

Since none of their stories precisely align — and in some cases contradict each other — Orlove wasn’t able to determine the true provenance of the S7, but he did a great job of debunking the Aston Martin rumor by tracking down leads. It’s also well written and highly entertaining.

The timing of what’s essentially a story about intellectual property coincidentally got published soon after a recent auction for that same intellectual property along with what appears to be enough parts and tooling to at least contemplate building a few S7s again. Read More >

It’s been a while since I’ve written about a Volkswagen product in a positive light. They certainly haven’t made it easy. That said, new cars aren’t my thing, and Wolfsburg did make the occasional interesting car back in the day.

I’ve been on a binge lately of looking at hot hatches that are becoming eligible for historic plates. That seems appropriate as I’ve passed the halfway point to my theoretical retirement. The Volkswagen Corrado has always fascinated me, so I fired up my usual searches.

Ugh. Finding an older Volkswagen that isn’t either thrashed or stanced is a challenge.

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Buried deep within the recently passed highway transportation funding act is a provision to incentivize whistleblowers to speak out against automakers who design serious safety flaws in the cars that they make.

The Motor Vehicle Safety Whistleblower Act, passed in Congress earlier this year and signed into law by President Barack Obama this month as part of a larger highway transportation funding bill, is the first federal attempt at preventing catastrophic defects such as the ignition switch installed into General Motors cars that killed 124 people. This year, General Motors settled with victims and families for more than $600 million and paid federal regulators more than $900 million in fines.

The bill’s language specifically targets defects such as GM’s ignition switches, but could leave helpless whistleblowers in cases like Volkswagen’s or examples such as Ralph Nader’s outcry as part of his groundbreaking book “Unsafe At Any Speed.” Read More >

Auto supply giant Bosch is being investigated for its part in the widespread emissions cheating scandal that has engulfed Volkswagen, Bloomberg reported (via Automotive News).

Prosecutors in Stuttgart say that they’ve contacted the company, which supplied Volkswagen with engine control modules that helped the cars illegally pass emissions tests, about their role in engineering the illegal devices.

A spokeswoman for Bosch said it would comply with requests from authorities.

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Some Volkswagen diesel owners say the goodwill compensation packages they elected to receive four weeks ago, as part of the automaker’s apology to North American consumers, still haven’t arrived in the mail.

According to several owners who wrote on VWVortex, gift cards have taken longer than four weeks — the timeline promised by the automaker — to arrive, if they’ve even arrived at all.

Most of the owners who posted on the forum said that they registered for VW’s goodwill program around Nov. 9, when registrations were initially open.

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