1929 Model A Huckster on 2040-cars

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2017 North American Car, Truck, and Utility of the Year entries announced

Over 40 vehicles will compete for the 2017 North American Car, Truck, and Utility of the Year awards. If that name looks a little strange, it's because the competition added a third category. In years past, pickup trucks, crossovers, SUVs, commercial vans, and minivans competed for the same award. That's why there were occasionally weird comparisons, like last year's competition between the Volvo XC90 and Nissan Titan XD. The new format separates pickups and commercial vans into the truck contest and CUVs, SUVs, and minivans into the utility competition. A complete list of eligible vehicles is below, but here are a few highlights. For one, the entire list of entries has a luxurious lean. Of the 43 vehicles, nearly half of them are from premium brands. There are two eligible Bentleys – the Bentayga and Mulsanne – the Rolls-Royce Dawn, Jaguar F-Pace, Audi Q7, and the Mercedes-Benz GLS-, E-, and S-Class Maybach. The performance ranks are lofty, too, with the Audi R8, Acura NSX, Alfa Romeo Giulia, Mercedes SL- and SLC-Class, Porsche 718, and F-150 Raptor. The mainstream entries are just as comprehensive. From the Chrysler Pacifica to the Chevrolet Cruze to the Fiat 124 Spider to the Mitsubishi Mirage, NACTOY has covered an enormous price range with this year's contestants. Of course, these are only the eligible vehicles. They'll need to run through three rounds of judging, starting in September at NACTOY's traditional Hell, MI, test drive. The Canadian and American journalists involved in the judging will announce this year's nine finalists – three in each category – on December 6. Cars Acura NSX Alfa Romeo Giulia Audi A4 Audi R8 Bentley Mulsanne Buick Cascada Buick LaCrosse Cadillac CT6 Chevrolet Bolt Chevrolet Cruze Fiat 124 Genesis G90 Hyundai Elantra Infiniti Q60 Jaguar XE Kia Cadenza Lincoln Continental Mercedes-Benz E-Class sedan Mercedes-Benz S550 Maybach Mercedes-Benz SL-Class Mercedes-Benz SLC-Class Mini Clubman Mitsubishi Mirage/G4 Porsche 718 Boxster and Cayman Rolls-Royce Dawn Toyota Prius Prime Volvo S90 SUVs Audi Q7 Bentley Bentayga Buick Envision Cadillac XT5 Chrysler Pacifica GMC Acadia Infiniti QX30 Kia Sportage Mercedes-Benz GLS-Class Jaguar F-Pace Mazda CX-9 Nissan Armada Trucks Ford F-Series Super Duty pickups Ford F-150 Raptor Honda Ridgeline Nissan Titan half-ton Related Video: Featured Gallery Bentley Bentayga View 23 Photos News Source: Automotive News - sub.

Weekly Recap: Ford guns for 2016 Le Mans glory with new GT

On the eve of the 24 Hours of Le Mans, Ford confirmed it will return to the French endurance race in 2016 and campaign the new GT racecar 50 years after three GT40s swept the podium at the Circuit de la Sarthe. The factory will back a two-team, four-car effort that will compete in the World Endurance Championship and the Tudor United SportsCar Championship running cars operated by Chip Ganassi Racing with Felix Sabates. The GT racecar will make its track debut in January at the Rolex 24 at Daytona, and the driver lineup will be announced later. "But rest assured, there's quite a line forming out the door," Ganassi said at the announcement. The GT is the modern successor to the iconic GT40, which won Le Mans four straight years from 1966-1969. The racecar is a rolling testbed of Ford's latest technologies, including a powerful twin-turbo EcoBoost V6. The car also makes extensive use of carbon-fiber pieces and advanced aerodynamics. Ford tapped Multimatic Motorsports of Canada and Roush Yates Engines to aid in the development of the GT racer. The road-going version, which was revealed in January at the Detroit Auto Show, is also set to launch next year. It caps Ford's growing performance lineup, and the company has ambitious plans to launch more than 12 new sporty models by 2020, including hot metal like the Focus RS, F-150 Raptor, and Shelby GT350R. The GT embodies Ford's best tech, but news of its return to Le Mans immediately conjured images of the company's fierce rivalry in the 1960s with Ferrari and intense competition with Porsche. "When the GT40 competed at Le Mans in the 1960s, Henry Ford II sought to prove Ford could beat endurance racing's most legendary manufacturers," Ford executive chairman Bill Ford said in a statement. "We are still extremely proud of having won this iconic race four times in a row, and that same spirit that drove the innovation behind the first Ford GT still drives us today." Ford is going back to Le Mans. Somewhere, Hank the Deuce must be smiling. OTHER NEWS & NOTES 2016 BMW 7 Series arrives in the fall BMW revealed the sixth generation of its flagship 7 Series this week, which will start at $81,300 when it launches in the United States this fall. BMW is billing it as the roomiest 7 Series ever, and it measures 206.6 inches in length.

2016: The year of the autonomous-car promise

About half of the news we covered this year related in some way to The Great Autonomous Future, or at least it seemed that way. If you listen to automakers, by 2020 everyone will be driving (riding?) around in self-driving cars. But what will they look like, how will we make the transition from driven to driverless, and how will laws and infrastructure adapt? We got very few answers to those questions, and instead were handed big promises, vague timelines, and a dose of misdirection by automakers. There has been a lot of talk, but we still don't know that much about these proposed vehicles, which are at least three years off. That's half a development cycle in this industry. We generally only start to get an idea of what a company will build about two years before it goes on sale. So instead of concrete information about autonomous cars, 2016 has brought us a lot of promises, many in the form of concept cars. They have popped up from just about every automaker accompanied by the CEO's pledge to deliver a Level 4 autonomous, all-electric model (usually a crossover) in a few years. It's very easy to say that a static design study sitting on a stage will be able to drive itself while projecting a movie on the windshield, but it's another thing entirely to make good on that promise. With a few exceptions, 2016 has been stuck in the promising stage. It's a strange thing, really; automakers are famous for responding with "we don't discuss future product" whenever we ask about models or variants known to be in the pipeline, yet when it comes to self-driving electric wondermobiles, companies have been falling all over themselves to let us know that theirs is coming soon, it'll be oh so great, and, hey, that makes them a mobility company now, not just an automaker. A lot of this is posturing and marketing, showing the public, shareholders, and the rest of the industry that "we're making one, too, we swear!" It has set off a domino effect – once a few companies make the guarantee, the rest feel forced to throw out a grandiose yet vague plan for an unknown future. And indeed there are usually scant details to go along with such announcements – an imprecise mileage estimate here, or a far-off, percentage-based goal there. Instead of useful discussion of future product, we get demonstrations of test mules, announcements of big R&D budgets and new test centers they'll fund, those futuristic concept cars, and, yeah, more promises.