Bob Tasca III Braces for the Coming EV Onslaught—Both in NHRA and in His Showrooms

• Bob Tasca III is aware of the trend and mulling what the EV and autonomous car revolution that might mean to his network of auto dealerships and to the sport he loves.

• Tasca says that a human would be no match for autonomous technology on the race track. “The human element is what makes racing a variable. Autonomous technology, it’s going to do the same thing every time.”

• Meanwhile, Ford is working with the NHRA to design electrification rules for the series.

For Bob Tasca III, his grandfather’s word was gospel. And being a faithful believer has shaped the Motorcraft/Quick Lane Mustang Funny Car driver into a highly successful NHRA Camping World Drag Racing racer, automotive-industry businessman, and Ford Motor Company evangelist.

“My grandfather said something to me when I was a kid that I never forgot. He said, ‘In life, everything has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Plan accordingly.’”

Today, as the automaker landscape is starting to include electric vehicles and the still-Buck Rogers-ish autonomous cars, Tasca hears the echoes of his grandfather’s advice. He’s aware of the trend and mulling what that might mean to his Northeast network of auto dealerships.

“I believe electrification is the end of a lot of things but the beginning of many other things. As an entrepreneur, as a businessperson, I think you have to assess your business, how it will be impacted, and make the adjustments necessary to capitalize on it,” he said. “I mean, whenever there’s disruption in the marketplace there’s huge opportunity. And you can pretend it’s not happening and get left out in the cold potentially, or you can embrace it and figure out ways to really capitalize on it.

“That’s what I’m doing in my businesses,” Tasca said. “If I lost all my internal-combustion service work at my dealerships today, I’d be out of business. There isn’t a dealer in the country that would be in business, but that’s not going to happen. It’s not going to happen today. It’s going to happen over time and evolve—and as business owners and entrepreneurs we’re going to have to evolve, too.”

Vince Roman, CEO of Burns Stainless, a manufacturer of high-quality exhaust components, said during SEMA’s Motorsports Parts Manufacturers Council Trade Conference that electrification “is probably not one of those things that’s going to knock us out in my lifetime. I can see the aftermarket maybe getting hit before the racing will, because racing will stand for quite awhile.”

At the same time, TMG Performance’s Chris Thomson said the advent of electrification “absolutely terrifies us.” However, he said, “It is scary, but I’ve been doing this for such a long time that I remember when cars first got catalytic converters and everybody freaked out. Now you can have an emissions-legal car that will run in the drag races, that can run a 10-second ET, that you can drive down the road with air-conditioning on and get 28 miles per gallon.”

What might be slower to catch on, he said, are autonomous cars—and perhaps, by association, autonomous race cars. “I think what’s holding that back is liability,” Thomson said. A Carsurance.net blog predicted that “the autonomous vehicle global market is expected to reach $36 billion by 2025, with North America owning 29% of all the self-driving vehicles in the world.” Dampening that enthusiasm might be Thomson’s thought: “Who do you sue if there’s an accident?” That’s the thorny question today, in the wake of a handful of fatal incidents.

In the meantime, college engineering programs are diving into autonomous technology, inspired in no small way by the $1 million prize up for grabs this October 23 at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s Indy Autonomous Challenge. The competition is among universities to design software for self-driving modified Dallara IL-15 Indy Lights race cars to go head-to-head in a high-speed race around the world-famous two-and-a-half-mile oval.

Jason Fiorito—who is planning his own high-tech automotive and aeromotive innovation center at his Pacific Raceways dragstrip and road course near Seattle—was a bit lukewarm to the idea but had his own alternative.

His reaction to the unique race was “OK. Cool. But here’s what I want to see: I want to see a driver car compete with a driverless car. I don’t want to see a whole field of autonomous cars. I just don’t. You can play chess between two people, or you can play chess with a person versus a computer. Either one of those is interesting. Watching a computer play a computer? I couldn’t give a shit about that. I want to watch a person beat a computer. I want to watch a person beat an autonomous vehicle. I’m rooting for the person. There’s got to be a good guy and a bad guy. The computer’s the bad guy at that point.”