Few in the auto industry can claim to have had as lasting a legacy as Hal Sperlich. The one-time engineer who eventually led product development at two of Detroit’s Big Three and shepherded the development of two iconic products: the Ford Mustang and the Chrysler minivan. Sperlich passed away Monday at the age of 95.
Lexus is giving its RC and RC F sports coupes a “sonorous swan song,” finishing their run at the end of 2025. While the Japanese luxury brand does retain some passenger car models it mirrors the broader industry’s ongoing move to abandon passenger vehicles in favor of SUVs, CUVs and pickups.
As prices and interest rates have continued to rise in recent years, more and more owners are finding themselves with a lot of negative equity in those vehicles when they’re ready for a new car, truck or SUV. A new study shows Americans are upside down at record levels. Get details at Headlight.News.
It’s been five years since Toyota announced plans to open an entirely new city in the shadow of Japan iconic Mount Fuji. The first phase of development of this “test course for mobility is now complete and the automaker is about to invite the first “weavers” and “inventors” to start moving in. Headlight.News has more.
Once one of the most important auto shows in North America, if not the world, the annual Motor City event returned to its original January schedule after a brief summer run. But what has been renamed the Detroit Auto Show is a mere fraction of the size of what it was during its glory days. Headlight.News looks at what has happened — and why.
If you’ve got the floor all to yourself, why not do things with flair? That’s what Ford clearly had in mind when it crafted the Mustang GTD Spirit of American prototype that it unveiled ahead of the annual Detroit Auto Show on Thursday night. The red-white-and-blue exotic celebrates the achievement of Craig Breedlove, the one-time aerospace engineer who set an array of land speed records in a series of jet-powered racers.
Computers, TVs, drones, “smart” appliances, digital cameras. If those are the things you think of when someone mentions “consumer electronics,” you’re not alone. But you should add automobiles to the list as, these days, they’re starting to look more like smartphones on wheels. Indeed, high-tech “mobility” is one of the big topics at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. To get a sense of what we can expect at CES 2025, Headlight.News spoke to Gary Shapiro, CEO of the Consumer Technology Association, the trade group sponsoring the annual event.
This week in 2011, the final Mercury automobile rolls off the line at Ford Motor Company’s St. Thomas Assembly Plant in Ontario, Canada. The last Mercury, a Grand Marquis, is the dying vestige of a marque championed by Edsel Ford to fill the cavernous price gap between the Ford and Lincoln. Introduced in 1938, Ford sold more than 21 million Mercury vehicles during its 71-year lifetime. Being the middle child, it rarely had a distinct image, although it did have a handful of memorable models.
The U.S. auto industry ended 2024 on a high note, manufacturers revealed Friday as they delivered uniformly solid sales numbers for December. That translated into the strongest full-year demand since the COVID pandemic struck in early 2020. Get the details at Headlight.News.
The tagline “You’ve come a long way, baby” was once used for a less healthy product, but if you’ve climbed into just about any Kia in the last several years, you know it’s certainly applicable here. New products like the Carnival and EV9 continue to drive the automaker to new heights. Check out this comparison of two new Kia models at Headlight.News.
He may have had just one term in the White House but it came at a critical time for the nation, as a whole, and for the auto industry, in particular. Former President Jimmy Carter, who passed away over the weekend at the age of 100 oversaw changes to automotive safety and emissions regulations. He was also in the Oval Office at a time of a major oil embargo, an assault by automotive imports and a time of reckoning for Detroit’s automakers – including the near collapse of Chrysler Corp.
Ashes to ashes, dust to rust. The life of an automobile is fairly limited. And the same can be said for automotive nameplates. With only the rarest exceptions, even the most popular badges have finite lives, as the Ford Model Y and Volkswagen Beetle proved. With the arrival of the 2025 model year there are still more nameplates set to drive off into the sunset, the Chevrolet Malibu being just one of the best-known examples. Here’s a look at some other product lines we won’t see going forward.