#american-muscle-cars

#american-muscle-cars

"I started Wheels of NYC as an Instagram page of parked cars in the city. No events, only photos."

We had this storied journey where we had to build the team, in a sense, before we had an entry. This project is so complex, even now, walking through the factory, seeing all the things that had to be built. There are some 43,000 parts you're designing your own chassis. It's a big, big task.

The electric crossover's battery can be preconditioned for fast charging when using Apple Maps on CarPlay, allowing drivers to stick to Apple's interface for the entire trip.

There's a key reason why many EVs are expensive. Economies of scale just haven't kicked in as they have for gas cars. Over 100-plus years of building dino-burners, we've gotten pretty good at every individual part. There are plenty of firms that can build fuel pumps, turbochargers, alternators, and radiators at scale, leveraging hundreds of thousand-unit volumes to drive per-unit costs down.

The project was originally intended to be much less, simply a garage for the owners' current beloved collection of five Porsches-two convertibles, a coupe, an SUV, and an electric sedan. But as they started talking, says lead architect Carl Baker, the mission crept to include "the ability to indulge all of their hobbies."

In the short term, expectations are brutally realistic, but this is still a team intent on making noise from day one. That intent will be made clear when Cadillac unveils the livery of its first F1 car during a Super Bowl commercial Sunday. Such a move is a statement and arrival aimed as much at mainstream America as at a paddock that, for years, questioned whether the brand belonged on the grid at all.

In a more-natural habitat - the serpentine road course of Sonoma Raceway - this 1,250-horsepower hybrid advances its case as the fastest production car in American history, and among the speediest to ever roam this planet's surface.

Vintage cars, especially pickups and SUVs, are usually made from two parts: a standalone chassis and a body that bolts on top of the chassis. So why not swap the original underpinnings with something more modern, while retaining the classic look of the original bodywork? That's exactly what the United Kingdom's Electric Classic Cars thought of doing, and it might just supercharge the EV conversion world.

The American automotive landscape is changing after a period that saw tighter emissions rules push automakers toward more efficient, quieter powertrains and prompted shifts away from big V8 engines. But many of those regulations, including the federal EV incentives, have fallen away, leading automakers that once promised to discontinue the gas-hungry engines to reinvest in V8 offerings - especially in full-size trucks and performance cars.

While Ford ( NYSE: F) was eating through billions of dollars in an attempt to gain a large market share in the US EV market and its EU and China units stagnated, its best-selling, and likely most profitable vehicle, the F-150, continued its gargantuan unit sales. The F-150 is part of the F-Series of full-size pickup trucks. Last year, unit sales of these in the US reached 828,832, up 8.3%.

Cadillac's response was to design specifically for that liminal space. The testing livery features what they call "the Cadillac precision geometric pattern" in gloss and matte sequences, turning functional camouflage into brand vocabulary. They're using the constraint of secrecy to communicate design philosophy, establishing that their approach blends automotive prototype discipline with motorsport theater. The giant Cadillac crest draped across the engine cover isn't trying to hide anything. It's declaring that the space between stealth and spectacle is itself worth designing for.

Reengineering the Bolt for a new battery pack wasn't the work of a minute. The cells, modules, and electronics are all different but had to fit in the same size space with the same mounting points as the original. And GM's own LFP factory won't be producing cells until sometime next year. Which means for now, GM is importing LPF cells from CATL in China, paying costly tariffs in the process.

The best custom builds do not just remix old ideas. They ask what those ideas would look like if they were born today, with access to current tools, materials, and manufacturing processes. The SP40 Restomod Speedster is that question answered in carbon and billet. It takes the stance and spirit of a 1930s streamliner, that long, low, purposeful shape built for speed rather than comfort, and reimagines it through the lens of modern coachbuilding.