According to Gooding & Company’s year-end review, this 1934 Bugatti Type 59 Sports brought the highest auction price of 2020 at $12.68 million. Get all the latest auto industry news in the Executive Briefing.
Today’s Headlines:
+ Ford and Mahindra & Mahindra of India have called off a joint venture in which the two automakers would share vehicle development programs in emerging markets. More at Reuters.
+ Fiat Chrysler Automobiles has confirmed plans to refurbish a plant in Poland to produce three new models for the Jeep, Fiat, and Alfa Romeo brands, including some electrics. More at The Detroit News.
+ Ming-Chi Kuo, a widely followed Apple analyst, is warning investors to be skeptical about rumors surrounding the Apple car, predicting it might not appear until 2025 or 2028. More at CNBC.
+ Former CART and Indy Racing League winner and IMSA sports car champion John Paul Jr. has died at age 60 after a 20-year battle with Huntington’s Disease. More at Racer.
+ Massachusetts has joined the growing list of U.S. states, nations, and other jurisdictions that have banned the sale of new gasoline-fuel vehicles after 2035. More at Car and Driver.
+ The most expensive car sold at auction in 2020 was a 1934 Bugatti Type 59 Sports that brought $12.68 million at the Gooding & Company Passion of a Lifetime sale. More at Sports Car Review.
+ Jack Miller, curator of the Ypsilanti Automotive Heritage Museum and the founder of the the nationally known Ypsilanti, Michigan Orphan Car Show, has passed away at 81. More at MLive.
+ Honda announced that due to low volume, the automaker will stop selling cars in Russia in 2022, although it will continue to market motorcycles and power equipment there. More at CNET Roadshow.
+ Early buyers report that prices of the 2021 Jeep Wrangler 392 start at around $75,000, some $25,000 more than the next most-expensive Wrangler model. More at Road & Track.
+ Mercedes Formula 1 driver Lewis Hamilton, who won his seventh world title in 2020, was awarded a knighthood in the United Kingdom’s New Year’s Honours List. More at CNN Sports.
Photo courtesy of Gooding & Company.
Review the previous Executive Briefing from December 28 here.
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Looks like Mass has been drinking the CA koolaide. Glad I won’t be around to see them realize how stupid their plan is. Liberal groupthink at it’s best, believing in the fairy tale of climate change. Even the best meteorologist can’t predict the weather precisely over a few days, yet these idiots think they can tell what will happen 50 or 100 years from now, conveniently after they are dead and gone. The biggest lie is the folly they think they can change the weather! Man didn’t make this old earth and he sure can’t change how it works!
There will come a time for electric vehicles, the market will be the best one to decide that, not Govt bureaucrats. Nothing forced into the market by the Govt has ever been a good idea.
Climate change is for real. The science is fairly bulletproof at this point. However, what will put electric vehicles over are their far lower energy and operating costs. This is why the truck fleets are throwing money at electric trucks that are still on the drawing boards. If you read the EB every week, you have seen the global automakers switching to EV production as quickly as they can. The various government edicts banning new fossil vehicles after 2035 etc are mainly window dressing. The global automakers will be pretty much out of the ICE business before then.
I guess we will just have to agree to disagree. I’ve lived through the claims we would be in a new ice age by now and also that there would be no Artic ice by now. Computer models are only as good as the data entered into them, and those that enter that data have their own interests, mainly more money for their “research”. There have been as many reports of cooked data as there have been sky is falling warnings, so which scientist do we believe? I consider myself a realist, and take scientific data with real life experience for a balance. I do still believe the market is the better force factor for new or different products, when it’s time to switch, the market will demand it. Until then, upgrades have to be made to the electric grid and infrastructure to support electric vehicles. Many states, CA for example, at the present can’t even keep electricity flowing during peak periods like summer heat, any more additions to charge electric vehicles with the current systems in place will just crash the grid more frequently. I’m not seeing any rate decreases for electricity, all this infrastructure replacement and upgrading will have to be paid for somehow, so rates will only go higher, negating any advantage electrics seem to have.
It will be years before electrics replace ICE in over the road trucks. The weight penalty is still too much for anything other than local or less than truckload hauls, not to mention the time penalty to recharge. 15 minutes to refuel a diesel versus 3-4 hours or more to recharge an electric, fleets can’t afford to have trucks sitting around that long doing nothing. When those problems are worked out you will see a move in that direction, but an artificial deadline from Govt won’t work. All these costs to change over will have to be recouped, and with operating costs what they are and rate income what it is, there will have to be massive increases to freight rates, passed along to the consumer, who will have a duck fit. The current climate is for cheaper rates, not higher, and that won’t change anytime soon without a fight.
Electric trucks will take over even faster than cars. In trucking, fuel and operating costs are everything. It will happen faster than you can imagine. Watch and stay tuned.
Also you are working under the assumption that there will be no advancement in technology.
You are confusing weather, with climate. Two totally different sciences. Climatologists are more akin geologists, not so with meteorologists.
Your local news weather person works with data in days, weeks, or months. Climatologists, deal in years, decades, and centuries. There is where you see trends, and can compare gains and losses over time while looking at the years, or decades leading up to a climactic event.
Sorry to see that MCG has joined climate change BS There are just as much info for as against this idea of cc
Yes, with the scientists lined up on one side and the talk radio hosts and televangelists lined up on the other. I am more of a science guy.
By talk radio hosts and televangelists, it appears you believe that anyone with a conservative view must be unenlightened simpletons who deny science and foolishly practice a religion (disclaimer: I am no fan of televangelists). As a retired automotive engineer with over 40 years experience, I agree with “following the science”. However, your comment that the climate change science is bulletproof reveals your lack of understanding of science. Hypotheses must be openly debated and real-life experiments must repeatably show a correlation of fossil fuel use and “climate change” before it is accepted as scientific fact. Computer models are not real-life experiments, and attempts to shut down debate by claiming the science is settled does not make it so.
As BA noted, there have always been alarmists believing extinction is just around the corner unless we listen to “the enlightened ones who know better”. Where is the world famine and Ice Age predicted in the 1970s? My college books repeatedly mention the overpopulation crisis. Why is there still Arctic ice? Should have been gone by 2005. No, 2015 for sure. We’re past the tipping point. And so it goes.
Climate change is science. You’re doing politics, AM talk radio style. Here is the link to the NASA climate site. Spend a week or two with the material and if you can poke any serious holes in it, get back to me and we’ll discuss it. https://climate.nasa.gov/
I challenge you to refute the following. Please knock off the AM radio ad hominem comments, and I promise not to label you negatively.
1. NASA (climate) and IPCC are HIGHLY political governmental organizations. They are inherently biased because if they reported non-alarming climate data, they would be defunded, research grants would disappear, etc. Those challenging the results would be, and are being silenced. There are many highly respected climate scientists whose viewpoints are not being heard.
Unequivocal truth – follow the dollar.
2. Correlation does not automatically equal causation. Statistics 101
3. The scientific method includes observation, suggesting hypotheses, and conducting experiments to determine validity of the hypothesis. Most all of the NASA data is observation. Where is the experimental data?
4. Only after analysis and debate of experimental data can any conclusions be drawn. Any claims that the science is settled is folly, especially since there is no experimental data.
You’re still not doing science. You’re doing politics and rhetoric. What you think of NASA as an organization is not the issue. Show me where their science is wrong.
This is probably what the conversations were like when the diesel-electrics ended the steam age.