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Ford announces 2014 F-150 SVT Raptor Special Edition

Ford has pulled the wraps off its anticipated 2014 F-150 SVT Raptor Special Edition model, a new variant of the popular street-legal off-road specialist. In a nutshell, the "special" is all cosmetic - there are no mechanical upgrades to the truck and its 6.2-liter V8 (411 horsepower and 434 pound-feet of torque), Torsen limited-slip differential, beadlock-capable wheels and internal triple-bypass FOX Racing Shox dampers all remain untouched.
The SVT Raptor Special Edition, which adds cosmetic enhancements to the existing Luxury Package, will be offered in Ruby Red Metallic and Tuxedo Black Metallic with box-side graphics. The interior upgrades include Brick Red seat bolsters (with black inserts), cloth honeycomb highlights and a console top finish panel.
As of now, Ford has only release a couple pictures of the Special Edition model. But check back later, as we will update the gallery when additional high-res images are released later today, and be sure to peruse the press release below for all the details.

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.

Justin Bell makes a horrible policeman

If you're wondering what type of person makes a good police officer, it seems a racecar driver doesn't. Let us rephrase that: Justin Bell, a racecar driver and the host of Motor Trend's World's Fastest Car Show, recently got behind the wheel of a 5.0-liter Ford Mustang police car with Sergeant Daniel Shrubb, co-founder of DRAGG (Drag Racing Against Gangs and Graffiti), and proved that his high-performance-driving skillset is a bit too aggressive for police duty.
While it's easy to get carried away in a Mustang GT, a patrol car driver must maintain some sort of restraint while pursuing a criminal, so as not to come off as a reckless driver to the public. We'll admit, some pursuit techniques are counter-intuitive to performance driving (stay off the gas in a lane-change exercise?), but Bell's judicious use of the handbrake can't be normal procedure.
Watch "The One With The Ford Mustang 5.0 Police Car" (yes, we caught the Friends reference too) below to see some shenanigans in one of Michigan's finest patrol cars.