A biweekly roundup of automotive news, good, bad and just plain weird:
First Shelby Cobra sells for $$$$$$$$
The madness and mayhem of Monterey Car Week is over now, with empty champagne bottles piled high in drifts. As usual, it was an affair of excess, and as usual the traffic was bad enough it’d have you wishing for a bicycle instead. Over at the auctions, however, well-heeled folks were throwing money at vintage sheet metal as if they’d gone completely crazy.
Given how much collectors were spending on classic Ferraris and Jaguars, the auction of the very first Shelby Cobra attracted a great deal of interest. For the Shelby brand, this is genesis: chassis number CSX2000 is the very first V8-powered machine assembled by Carroll Shelby and his crew, and is unrestored.
Everything’s original, except the paint colour. Shelby, ever the tricksy self-promoter, had this first car painted multiple times so that it would appear to the press that multiple Cobras were already coming off the line. In point of fact, they had just this one, which appears in the blue that was the last colour used.
Total price tag? A whopping US$13.75 million. Converting to Canadian funds, that’s enough to purchase the entirety of Prince Edward Island and set up your own country: Potatolandia.
Still, classic car experts looked a little surprised that the Shelby didn’t crack the $20 million barrier. Could the market finally be softening? For now, this Shelby sits on the record books as the most expensive American-made machine ever sold.
Tesla P100D quickest new car on the road
What a time to be alive. The fastest-accelerating four-wheeled machine on sale today is a four-doored luxury sedan – and it’s electric. Already silly fast, a new battery pack for the Tesla Model S pushes the car to be able to run to 100 kilometres per hour in a claimed 2.5 seconds, making it as quick as hybrid supercars from Ferrari and Porsche.
Because of the way electric cars work, boosting up the available power also increases the range. The new P100D can thus boast a range of 500 kilometres, more than enough for it to operate as anyone’s daily driver. Obviously, that’s a maximum range, and if you want to warp to highway speeds repeatedly, expect your range to evaporate accordingly. Just as, it should be pointed out, fuel economy goes to pot when you behave the same way in a gasoline-powered AMG or BMW M.
This new 100 kWh battery is more complex to produce than the current P90’s power pack, and Tesla’s announcement indicated that initial production might be limited. It’s also very expensive: Canadian pricing is yet to be released, but the car will cost $141,000 in the United States. If you’ve got a P90D on order, you can upgrade to the full 100 for a cost of $10,000. If you’re driving around in a 90D already, a 100 level upgrade will cost about $20,000, and require a battery swap.
So, in 2016, it’s possible to buy both a 707 horsepower manual-transmission Hellcat Challenger, and a full electric sedan with about the same power. I’d argue that the perfect garage kind of needs both.
Honda patents 11-speed transmission
While the top end of the market exults in ludicrous displays of power (be it electric or internal combustion), the mainstream manufacturers appear to be working on some clever tricks to improve fuel economy. Honda, for instance, has just patented something mind-boggling: a transmission with 11 speeds.
Do we not already have enough speeds in our automatics these days? After all, Mazda seems able to easily hit their fuel economy figures with just a plain old six-speed. Still, Honda’s new 11-speed ‘box is apparently not just an automatic, but a triple-clutch transmission with the ability to shift both extremely fast and with
great efficiency.
How it works is as yet unknown, but it would appear as if the tough new emissions requirements of the future are driving manufacturers to continually innovate. The only trouble is that all this growing complexity must surely lead to worse reliability.
Autonomous vehicle ride sharing by 2021?
Ford, the company that put America on wheels with the Model T, has recently announced an ambitious plan to create a ride-sharing fleet. In partnership with Uber and Lyft, the company plans to release a fleet of full Level 4 autonomous cars into select cities by 2021.
As full level four machines, these cars will have no steering wheel, no gas pedal, and no brake – no human controls at all. You’ll summon one on your smartphone, and it’ll whisk you off to your destination.
It sounds like nothing we’ve ever seen before – except for taxicabs, which pretty much currently do the same thing. However, in the autonomously-driven future, you won’t have to actually talk to anyone except on your social media fields, and that’s what’s important, right?
There are, of course, some cities where an autonomous fleet will work better than other places, especially as an intense mapping effort seems to be part of Ford’s plan. Densely built up areas like San Francisco’s Silicon Valley will probably be the first frontier for Ford’s fleet, with a tech-savvy population that won’t find a completely driverless car too weird.
The future, therefore, is still more than a few years away. In the meantime, you’ll still have to call a cab.
Watch this space for all the week’s best and worst of automotive news, or submit your own auto oddities to [email protected].
