Good morning. Two things are true today: the most valuable McLaren ever built is going up for sale, and Ford is recalling every Bronco it has ever made. Likely, only one of those affects your driveway.

In today’s newsletter, we’ll get into

The Auction Desk: The Pop Art F1 finally goes public.

One Big Story: Ford recalls every Bronco ever built.

Engineer’s Corner: BMW spent 45 years on hydrogen. The hard part wasn't the fuel cell.

Garage Economics: $808 : The average new-vehicle monthly payment in July.

Let’s roll.

Nick Mason — Pink Floyd's drummer, and the owner of a garage containing a 250 GTO, a Maserati 250F, a Bugatti Type 35 and a Jaguar D-Type — is selling the car most people assumed he'd die owning. McLaren F1 GTR chassis 10R goes to RM Sotheby's Monterey with a stated value in excess of $35 million. Lot 328, Saturday, August 15.

10R is one of two short-tail GTR prototypes McLaren kept for itself — the other, 01R, won Le Mans outright in 1995. Finished at Woking in December 1995, it was the first of only nine cars built to the revised 1996 specification, and McLaren held it back for development and testing rather than selling it to a customer team. The scarlet-and-yellow scheme is the only livery Woking ever applied to a GTR itself. Mason bought it from the factory in 1999, after McLaren converted it for road use and hung a British plate on it.

Here's the part enthusiasts will care about: he used it. Autocar tested it in 2009, after which the car left the road and entered a field, requiring a Lanzante restoration. Then at the 2017 Goodwood Members' Meeting, Mason lost it during a GT1 demo and hit a tyre barrier — cue restoration number two. Twenty-five years of ownership, two trips to the body shop. This is not a car that lived under a sheet.

Not "some Broncos." All of them — model years 2021 through 2026, the entire population built since the nameplate returned. The engine-compartment wiring harness doesn't have enough abrasion protection. It can rub through, expose the circuits inside, short, and start a fire.

Why it happened: Ford's Critical Concern Review Group ran CAE simulation and vibration testing and found the Raptor's more aggressive suspension makes the underhood environment shake harder — but base Broncos showed wear heading the same direction. Fifteen incidents with fire evidence between October 2024 and June 2026. No crashes or injuries. Ford estimates about 1% of the trucks actually have the defect.

Why it matters to you:

The other side: Ford Executive Chairman Bill Ford — who backs the legislation — told an Axios event in Washington that Detroit shouldn't plan around permanent walls. Per the Wall Street Journal, he said America "can't expect to keep them out forever."

The BMW iX5 Hydrogen enters series production in 2028 — the first mass-produced hydrogen model BMW has ever built, and the moment the X5 becomes the only vehicle on sale offered with five drivetrains: petrol, diesel, plug-in hybrid, battery-electric and fuel cell.

Headline numbers: up to 750 km WLTP, refuelling in under five minutes, and full xDrive — the first fuel cell vehicle to get BMW's electric all-wheel drive.

But the interesting engineering isn't the stack. It's the tank.

Problem one: hydrogen is superb per kilogram and dreadful per liter. Compressed to 700 bar it's still bulky, and it's stubbornly cylindrical, because pressure vessels want to be round. Round things pack badly into flat floors, which is why fuel cell cars have always stolen cabin or boot space.

BMW's answer is Hydrogen Flat Storage: seven carbon-fibre-reinforced high-pressure tanks connected in parallel inside a rigid metal frame. Instead of seven separate vessels, the chambers are combined into a single enclosed unit governed by one central main valve, storing at least seven kilograms of hydrogen. The assembly occupies the same footprint as the Gen6 high-voltage battery, leaving cabin space untouched, and the 700-bar tanks pick up structural crash protection from the body.

Problem two is money — and this is where the tank does its real work. Low-volume alternative-drive cars normally die on fixed cost, because they need their own line. Because the hydrogen pack drops into the battery's space, the iX5 Hydrogen can be built alongside every other X5 on the same production line. BMW didn't solve the cost problem with chemistry. It solved it with packaging.

Problem three: the stack. The third-generation system, co-developed with Toyota, is 25% more compact than its predecessor. The lineage explains the strategy — Gen1 arrived in 2014 in a BMW 535iA and was developed entirely by Toyota; Gen2, in today's pilot fleet, was a BMW-developed system using Toyota cells; Gen3 is jointly developed, with cells shared across passenger and commercial vehicles. Shared cells mean volume, and volume is the only thing that makes a stack affordable. Series production runs at Plant Steyr, with Landshut supplying drive components.

Problem four: it has to drive like a BMW. Fuel cells dislike abrupt load changes — a stack responds on its own schedule, not your right foot's. Hence the buffer battery, xDrive, and BMW's Heart of Joy drive and chassis control software arbitrating between them. Josef Hochreiter, who runs hydrogen vehicles at BMW, frames the whole exercise around the balance of the overall system rather than any single component.

And the one they can't engineer away. The pilot fleet has covered more than a million test kilometers across 20-plus countries, surviving 45°C heat, sand and dust, with full system performance available shortly after cold start and range unaffected by extreme cold. That proves the car. It doesn't prove the fuel exists near you. BMW's response is HyMoS — an industry initiative to make stations economic by pooling demand from trucks, buses and passenger cars at the same sites, piloting in Germany and France.

That's the average new-vehicle monthly payment in July, per the J.D. Power/GlobalData forecast — the highest ever recorded for the month. Average transaction price hit $45,369, up 1.2% year over year. And the number that explains everything: the average loan rate fell to 6.54%, the lowest July reading since 2022.

When the rate drops to a four-year low and the payment still sets a record, the rate was never the problem. The principal is.

The rest of the ledger: 29.4% of trade-ins arrive with negative equity, up 1.1 points. 13.8% of loans now run 84 months or longer, up 2.0 points. Subprime share climbed 1.8 points to 10.3%. Total retail spending on new vehicles: a record $51.8 billion for the month.

Then there's the incentive split, which is the most revealing chart in the industry right now.

Post-tax-credit America is spending more than three times as much per EV to move a shrinking slice of the market. Meanwhile the topline looks terrific: roughly 1.42 million units, a 16.9 million SAAR, the strongest sales pace of 2026 — with hybrids doing all the lifting, exactly as we flagged when Honda pulled the plug on the Prologue.

Quick hits:

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