Car of Tomorrow
generation of NASCAR stock cars
The Car of Tomorrow (CoT) was the common name used for the chassis of the NASCAR Cup Series (2007 – 2012) and Xfinity Series (since 2011 full-time) race cars. The car was part of a five-year project to create a safer vehicle following several deaths in competition, particularly the crash at the 2001 Daytona 500 that killed Dale Earnhardt.
Used as the fifth generation car style for the Cup Series, the original Car of Tomorrow body design was larger and boxier than the design it replaced, and criticized for its generic appearance and poor handling characteristics. The CoT, however, implemented dramatic safety improvements, cost less to maintain, and was intended to make for closer competition.
The car was introduced in the 2007 Cup Series season at the Food City 500 on March 25 and ran a partial schedule of 16 races. The plan was to require all teams to use the new car in 2009, but NASCAR officials moved the date up to the 2008 season as a cost-saving measure. The Car of Tomorrow body style was retired by NASCAR after the 2012 Ford EcoBoost 400. The sixth-generation car, which featured the additional chassis safety improvements as well as improved body designs, debuted in 2013; many teams simply removed the CoT car bodies, added the new chassis safety improvements, and installed a sixth-generation car body. The chassis was used until the end of the 2021 season before eventually replaced with the Next Gen car in 2022.
In 2010, the Xfinity Series (then the Nationwide Series) debuted its own version of the CoT in a partial schedule, using the same chassis but different bodies and a shorter wheelbase; teams could take old Sprint Cup cars, change the bodies, and run them in the Nationwide Series, provided they passed recertification.
“Car of Tomorrow” enters the record as generation of NASCAR stock cars. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Tomorrow, generation and NASCAR can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Car of Tomorrow” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.