Mercedes Is Upping Its Stake in Aston Martin

And Chevy is first out of the gate with a SEMA concept.

Mercedes Is Upping Its Stake in Aston Martin And Chevy is first out of the gate with a SEMA concept. BY WES RAYNAL An action-packed week this week—let's get right to it. Here's what's happening in the car world: FROM THE EDITOR'S DESK A couple weeks ago Ford quietly announced that all 2021 F-150s would come standard with a center console touchscreen containing a new digital owner's manual. The manual would have search capability and streamed videos.    Big deal, you say? More than a few cars have digital owner's manuals.    Ah, but no other cars come close to the 150 in terms of sales volume. Consider: Going to a paperless owner's manual saves 290 tons of paper a year. That's how much 122 F-150s weigh on average! Or put another way it's about 18,000 feet of stacked paper.    Craig Schmatz, F-150 chief program engineer, gives us the backstory on how the 2021 F-150 digital owner's manual saves a literal mountain of paper and what that means going forward.   "We know people want information at their fingertips," Schmatz told Autoweek. "Paper is going away, everyone has an e-reader like a Kindle, so putting it on board this way is just a natural evolution.    "The Sync 4 with over-the-air capability was kind of the enabler."    Schmatz explained that a typical F-150's printed owner's manual is more than 700 pages. With the digital version Ford is going to provide a 150-page supplemental book. "If for some reason the vehicle loses power there is the quick-reference book," Schmatz told us. "The owner can also go on ford.com or through the FordPass app, but we wanted to make sure we had a small, paper copy, and even that will get smaller over time."    All 2021 and beyond F-150s, including the 2022 electric version, will have the paperless owner's manual because they all have Sync 4 standard. Schmatz told us going forward the plan calls for the paperless trend to spread to other cars and trucks in Ford's lineup.    "Mustang Mach-E will have it as well," he said as an example. "Over the next couple years as cars and trucks migrate to the Sync 4 platform it will allow them to make the change.    "The really exciting thing for me," he told us, "is that we're planning on providing additional features through over the air updates, and now we can provide the owner's manual information for those features. So the manual will stay as fresh as the vehicle.    "Right now we don't know what we'll need or want to update," he told us, "but by the middle of next year our plan calls for us to be able to update almost every module on the truck. So for example with our hands-free drive assist, we're providing the hardware at Job 1, and then via over the air we'll be able to provide the full set of content in the middle of the year to make the hands-free-driving feature functional."    He also said the digital manual will have videos for the more complicated features, and even those will be updated as a feature gets updated.    Other future F-150 goodies include the new 3.5-liter PowerBoost full hybrid powertrain. Ford says it's the only full-hybrid powertrain available in a pickup and develops 430 hp and 570 lb-ft, the most torque ever in an F-150. Looking forward to driving it!   CAR NEWS AND NOTES Mercedes-Benz announced it is taking a larger stake in Aston Martin, and some digging beyond the press conference unveiled a couple more newsie tidbits: Aston wants to sell 10,000 cars annually. It managed 6,000 last year and an increasingly large number of future sales are likely to be SUVs. Further, there's going to be rapid electrification for the parts of the world hurtling toward combustion-engine bans. We're told both mild hybrid and PHEVs will be developed, and that an electrified DBX is seen as the top priority. Go here for the story.    The SEMA Show is next week. It's virtual, so tragically we won't be able to spend a couple days slogging the miles (and miles) of halls in the boiling hot Las Vegas Convention Center crippled with thirst. Pity. Chevy, always a huge SEMA participant, comes this year with a cool truck: the 1977 K5 Blazer-E, an electric retrofitted SUV. The show truck is meant to gauge interest among SEMA members who might want to do their own EV conversions using the electric equivalent of a crate motor in the form of a plug-n-play package like GM's Electric Connect and Cruise kit. Chevy said it wants to offer a "comprehensive line of Connect and Cruise systems" from its Performance arm. The Blazer-E power comes from a 400-volt Bolt EV battery pack with 60 kWh of usable energy installed in the cargo area. The output is about 200 hp and 266 lb-ft of torque, more than the stock '77 Blazer's 175 hp from a 400 cubic-inch gasoline V8. So it's ahead of the game already! We'll have all the SEMA news as it develops next week.    Mini has big EV plans coming as well, including an emphasis on—you guessed it—crossovers. The automaker plans to develop a new electric crossover with China's Great Wall Motors. The EV is one of several Mini plans to launch over the next four years as it looks to reposition itself to a consumer market shifting away from small cars. Though there are other Mini EVs coming the company hasn't said how many or what models are U.S. bound. RACING LINES Now that Lewis Hamilton has F1's all-time wins record with 92 it's time—right on cue—for some wild speculation and rumor mongering about whether he'll stay with Mercedes and if so for how long? Hamilton has won 71 races with Benz and his contract is up at season's end. He says he wants to stay with Mercedes but claims he doesn't know how long he wants to keep racing. Next on the list of major F1 marks for the six-time champ is Michael Schumacher's record seven titles. With this season winding down and Hamilton the points leader yet again, he could tie it in 2020 and break the record next year.    Hmmm. Not sure about this one: Kyle Larson is returning to NASCAR's Cup Series next year with Hendrick Motorsports. You'll recall Larson used a racial slur during an iRacing event on April 12 and was suspended from NASCAR and fired by Chip Ganassi Racing. He returns to Cup following a "summer rehabilitating his image." He was required to attend sensitivity training before he could apply for reinstatement. He completed the formal training May 6 but took extra steps to express remorse and better understand the impact of his words. I'd love to hear what all you readers think in the comments below.   WHAT WE'RE DRIVING Mark Vaughn is spending time putting the new Ram TRX through its jumping abilities and other off-road shenanigans. Vaughn says the TRX is loaded with off-road goodies such as a seriously reinforced frame, wider track and suspension upgrades. Perhaps best of all it uses the 702-hp (!) 6.2-liter supercharged Hellcat V8!   MOSTLY ODDS, SOME ENDS The Unimog has turned 70, sort of. The ginormous trucks have worn a three-pointed star badge long enough for just about everyone to consider it a Mercedes-Benz design. But that's not the case. This week marks the 70th anniversary of Daimler-Benz's purchasing Unimog from Boehringer Bros. The small Göppingen, Germany-based automaker Boehringer Bros. first showed the production-ready prototype at the Deutschen Landwirtschafts-Gesellschaft (DLG) show in Frankfurt in 1948. Check out Jay Ramey's cool story on the brand's history.   LISTEN UP Mark Vaughn had so much fun in the Ram TRX he wrote about it and recorded a podcast about -- the latest Quick Spin -- with Wesley Wren. Tune in here, on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever podcasts are played. LISTEN NOW QUOTE OF THE WEEK "It was a strange year, emotionally. The unknown was the biggest issue. You start to get the scale of it, and it puts things in perspective. And not just for me, but the mechanics, the team workers. Are we going to have a championship this year? Are we going to have a race this year? Are we going to have a job this year?" —Scott Dixon, speaking to Autoweek after winning his sixth (not a typo!) IndyCar title   WHAT'S AHEAD That's it for this week. As always we're on the case this weekend, monitoring and reporting on automakers' and sanctioning bodies' latest happenings . We'll continually update the site of course—you'll know what's happening when we do. Check back often!    Thanks for reading Autoweek, and please stay safe. Follow Us Unsubscribe Privacy Notice autoweek.com ©2020 Hearst Communications Inc. All Rights Reserved. Hearst Email Privacy, 300 W 57th St., Fl. 19 (sta 1-1), New York, NY 10019

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