2008 Ford Ranger Xlt Standard Cab Pickup 2-door 2.3l on 2040-cars

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Shelby GT500 laps N"urburgring in under 7:40?

A couple of weeks ago we brought you footage and official times of the new Chevy Camaro Z/28 lapping the Nürburgring. With a 7:37.47 lap time, the Z/28 emerged as the fastest muscle car ever to lap the circuit. But what was missing from that picture was how fast the king of all Mustangs, the Shelby GT500, could manage to lap the Nordschleife.
Ford never released any information or footage of the GT500 on the Nürburgring that we were aware of - that is, until the guys at SVTPerformance.com put in a request for Mustang videos. Among the clips they received was never-seen, in-car footage of the Shelby GT500 lapping the circuit. And boy did it hustle.
Although not quite official, the video seems to show the GT500 lapped the venerated German track in a touch under 7:40. That would make it a tick or two faster than the Camaro ZL1 - but what of the Z/28? By Chevy's quoted time, the Z/28 is still faster than the GT500, but SVTPerformance suggests GM may have fudged the numbers a bit and scrubbed half a second or so off their lap time.

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.

2015 Ford Mustang renders reveal look of the real thing

This is, according to the pony-car obsessed kids over at Mustang6G.com, the closest, most accurate rendering of the new, 2015 Ford Mustang to date. Artis Chazcron used a combination of Ford CAD images and information from assorted spy shots to assemble a fairly handsome car, albeit one that conforms to the tired cliché of being more evolutionary than revolutionary.
Now, it's very important to note that these are still speculative renders, and that they only represent the base car - that could explain the lack of the Mustang's vestigial side scoops, along with other, newer styling cues that Mustang6G seems to think will arrive on production models. Those items include a new, double-bubble roof, although the Mustang aficionados claim that even if it were present, it'd barely be visible from these angles.
The front end is pretty spot on, compared to what we've seen from earlier spy shots, while the tail, with its interesting light design is something new. The louvered taillights look quite different from the current version, obviously, though Mustang has gone the whimsical route with taillights before. Also, note the new rear diffuser uses an integrated reverse light and rear foglight, the latter of which is required for sale in Europe.