Headlines for the week of February 5th, 2018

Super Bowl Commercial Round-up

The Super Bowl was last weekend and it may have been one of those occasions where the game was actually more interesting than the commercials. Except for the Tide ads, those were great. We seemed to have far fewer car commercials than usual this year, but a few featured prominently.

Jeep had several ads talking about roads and going off of them and even had Doctor Ian Malcolm being chased by a T-Rex in a Jurassic Park throwback ad, which was clever but not especially impactful. Overall I got a very “meh” feeling from Jeep.

Hyundai had an ad where they tried to be profound by telling drivers of their vehicles at the Super Bowl that they helped contribute to cancer research but it ended up looking more awkward than anything else. 

Toyota tried to go the funny route by uniting a bunch of unfunny holy people in a Tundra to go root for the same football team as some sort of “God Squad.” I guess they were trying to walk the line between a profound “look at us all being together as one” and funny buddy comedy, but it just fell flat into boringtown.

But boringtown was anywhere but where Ram went after their ad aired. Fiat Chrysler’s truck brand’s commercial focused on service and utilized a portion of Dr. Martin Luther King Junior’s “Drum Major Instinct” sermon. The backlash was swift and ruthless, calling the ad exploitative and out-of-step with the legacy of Dr. King. There’s actually some great irony in the fact that, later on in the same sermon, Dr. King warns parishioners of the dangers of advertising and capitalism, and how the man will try to sell you expensive cars you don’t need.

Conveniently, that bit was not included in the selected audio for the commercial, which showed clips of Ram owners using their trucks to apparently give back to their communities. There’s an old saying in PR that any press is good press and while Dodge, Ram and Fiat Chrysler are all feeling the burn from using Dr. King’s speech out of context, granted with the blessing of the organization that sells the rights to use Dr. King’s speeches (apparently against the will of his estate and foundation), guess what we’re all talking about? The new Ram. Well played, Ram. 

Labor Pains

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago how German steel workers were going on strike to get the option of working 28-hour work weeks for a couple of years to care for family members and some other various benefits. Well guess who gave in? Yep, the German Unions wore down the companies and factory workers will now get the option to go part time for a while and return to full time work with no penalties. Lucky bastards.

Photo by Reuters

Meanwhile back here in America, former Fiat Chrysler Automobiles labor relations chief Alphons Iacobelli accepted a plea deal for his role in siphoning off more than $4.5 million in training center funds to union and company personnel. The fact that he was offered a deal indicates Iacobelli was ready to roll over on others who played a part in paying UAW officials $1.5 million to sway union negotiations in the company’s favor, rather than looking out for the workers who paid their dues to ensure the union looked out for them. So the plea deal here isn’t the end. Instead it’s somewhere in the middle as this scandal starts to spiral out. The FBI has also begun asking questions about current contracts because although companies and the union both insist this activity was in the past, officials aren’t convinced. In related news, I’m thinking of starting an auto worker’s union. Who’s in?

F1’s GridKids and FE’s New Digs

In racing news this week, Formula E unveiled their new race cars for next year, which look like a mashup of Formula 1, IndyCar and LeMans prototype, all to good effect. But the changes aren’t just cosmetic. The cars will be faster and have nearly twice the energy storage capacity, doubling range, demonstrating the drastic evolution that’s taken place in battery technology recently. The cars also feature the protective “halo” that is being rolled out to Formula 1 cars to protect drivers. With Jaguar, Nissan, Audi and Porsche all taking part next year, and with the cars being faster and more aggressive than ever, this could be the turning point that makes Formula E a legitimate racing series. Or we could end up with a glorified marketing showcase that features precious little go-karts that operate on a slightly faster scale than you can do in some indoor arena near your house.

Photo by Formula E (Twitter)

Meanwhile in Formula 1, the changes taking place there this year won’t be limited to the cars. Following the #metoo and time’s up movements and widespread allegations of workplace abuse, F1 has decided it will no longer objectify women by using the pretty ones as Grid Girls from this season on. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the sexes are equal. We still don’t have any female F1 drivers on the horizon, but at least it’s an overdue step in the right direction. In their place will be some adorable GridKids, sort of like the ones you see walking out professional soccer players. So Formula E gets faster and Formula 1 gets less sexy, but also cuter. 

When your Kids are Sheep

In other kid news, a new service funded by Jaguar Land Rover is enlisting Land Rover Discovery LR4s to take kids to school in Massachusetts. The service, called Sheprd, is described as Uber meets the School Bus and provides parents the opportunity to book rides for their kids to one of the 70+ partner institutions in Newton, Massachusetts. It’s $17 per ride, per child, regardless of distance, which sounds like a not bad deal, considering it’s a luxury ride with a driver who faces much stricter rules than any old Uber or Lyft yahoo. This type of service has been around for a few years apparently, and I did actually see some minivans in Boston when I was there with big yellow “School Bus” signs and flashing red lights on the top. My immediate reaction was of course, “Sorry, Chrysler Town & Country, but you are not a school bus." Turns out, they are sort of sanctioned that way. Go figure. In any case, if you’re rich and think the ol’ big yellow fellow is too pedestrian for your offspring and you happen to live in Newton, Massachusetts, look up Sheprd.

Buick’s Wagon “Problem”

Despite Buick’s inability to make good commercials, they do actually make an interesting car now with the Regal TourX. Originally, Buick only figured the wagon would account for about 30 percent of their sales, but based on its popularity so far, around 50 percent of Regal sales could be the TourX wagon. But according to Phil Brook, Buick’s US Vice President of Marketing and Horrible Music Choices, its popularity all comes down to how they pitch it. Instead of calling it a wagon, Buick is all like "it's a crossover!" because instead of trying to change the ridiculous, dated perception that wagons are boring boats for big families, Buick, who themselves are trying to overcome dated perceptions, would rather take the easy route and just call their wagon something it is not. So while they say crossover, we’ll know the truth, and so will your eyes, because that thing is glorious and it’s a wagon! 

Mitsubishi’s Good News/Bad News

Hey, remember Mitsubishi? They made the Eclipse and Lancer Evolution and the Montero and they were cool and good. Well, now they make the Outlander and the Outlander Sport and a few old Mirages, but mostly crossovers. Turns out people are still buying them for some reason! Last year, for the first time since 2007, Mitsubishi sold more than 100,000 vehicles in the US, with their Outlander Models comprising more than ⅔ of that volume. With the upcoming Eclipse Cross bastardization, I mean crossover, that’s likely to tick up even further and could mean six years of steadily increasing sales for a brand struggling to find relevance in a very competitive market. 

At the same time, in the last two weeks, Mitsubishi has also had to recall more than 368,000 vehicles for parking brake, sunroof, stalling and other issues. If your math needs a bit of a refresher, that’s more than three times the total amount of cars they sold last year, which only demonstrates the scope of the problems the brand is going through. It’s difficult for me to really root for a brand that consistently kills off their interesting cars in favor of bland and uncompetitive crossovers, but it sounds like Mitsubishi needs all the help it can get, so good luck, guys.

SUVs Keep Rolling

Even though they’ve killed off the good cars, Mitsubishi does have the right idea, and it’s showing with increased sales. Crossovers and SUVs are hot. They’re the reason Honda has told us not to expect another S2000 roadster and why Nissan keeps kicking the Z can down the road, which sucks, but is understandable. As a case in point, consider Mazda. In January, Mazda sold more CX-5 compact crossovers than every other model in their lineup combined. So that’s the 3, the 6, the Miata, CX-3, CX-7 and CX-9. All of those together sold fewer than the 13,463 CX-5s that sold last month alone. And for good reason. They’re good cars. Several of my friends own them and so do many of my neighbors. But when asked by one of those friends why I didn’t consider one when buying the GTI, you may recall I mentioned that I wanted something that felt special. In all of last year, Volkswagen sold just more than 20,000 GTIs in the US. In one month, Mazda sold way more than half as many CX-5s. They’re not exactly special. But they are really, really good cars. For compact crossovers, I mean. Whatever.

But Mazda’s not alone here, and it’s not just limited to compact crossovers either. Big SUVs are going gangbusters. So much so that Ford can’t keep up with the demand for the new Lincoln Navigator. They’ve never had to make so many, so they simply can’t keep up with the number of buyers knocking down their door. And, just to prove everything is relative, “so many” in the case of the Lincoln Navigator means they sold fewer than 1,300 last month, which is actually on pace to be more special than the GTI. Then again, I don’t have $72,000 to drop on a gargantuan SUV that gets 18 miles per gallon combined.

But where Mazda and Ford are seeing success, Fiat Chrysler is being, well, Fiat Chrysler. Turns out, nobody wants or trusts that their Maserati Levante SUV will hold up to the rigors of driving. Demand is so low for the big, expensive, pointless SUV that the factory in Turin, Italy will have its working hours cut by 59 percent until July, when they’ll reevaluate their life choices, or at the very least their product mix.

Robocop (But for Real)

Autonomous vehicles aren’t just going to make driving easier for us, they’re apparently going to make catching us when we’re driving quickly even easier too. That’s because this week we learned that Ford has filed a patent for an autonomous police vehicle that would be fitted with a learning brain that will know how to find good hiding spots to catch speeders and other various vehicular evildoers.

Fortunately, it seems like this is yet another one of those patents that is intentionally vague because the people filing it have no idea how it would work or how they might create such a machine. Again, this makes me wonder what the function of patents are other than to settle the “I thought of it first” legal fights, but I’m comforted to know that if SkyNet ends up happening and the robots take over, it won’t start in our cars.

Airbnb for Garages

As society continues to compact itself into cities, life with a vehicle becomes a little tougher. Whether it’s finding a place to plug in your hybrid or just finding a flat spot to change your oil, garages are pretty useful for car owners. Yet some lucky jerks who have more money than cars may have some free garage spots sitting unused while a gear head is looking for a spot to get some quick wrenching done. Well, like everything else, now there’s an app for that. Garage Time is like the Airbnb for garages, where garage owners with space to spare can list their garage for an hourly rental fee to others interested in using it. Similar services with DIY car workshops have started cropping up in some cities, but nothing quite this peer-to-peer yet. I think it’s a neat idea, and I could certainly spare someone my garage if they needed it, but strangers? I have enough trouble losing hammers by myself.

Yet Another Meaningless Degree

Great news this week in believers of an impossible future, you can now receive a degree in flying car engineering! That is, if you don’t mind going to a school nobody has ever heard of and attending classes digitally. Udacity, which is apparently an online school started by a former Stanford University professor, already teaches a self-driving car program that has attracted 50,000 students since it started in 2016 and founder Sebastian Thrun is expecting at least 10,000 students to sign up for the flying car program. Although this doesn’t offer anything like a bachelor’s degree, it doesn’t cost nearly as much, running around $1,200 per term and also doesn’t require you to take electives like Mongolian Literature or Intro to Sub-Sarahran Political Science. Thrun says that this program is intended to solve the huge shortage of engineers capable of working on such technology, but if the choices are wait a little longer for a well-engineered flying car or get one sooner but it’s been designed by someone who paid less than three grand and took courses in his parents basement in between Overwatch gaming matches, I think I’ll pick the former.

VaLet’s take the Ferrari

Back when I lived in Los Angeles, I remember vividly an occasion in Malibu where I gave a valet my keys and, when sitting down at my table on the patio, definitely heard the squealing tires and unmistakable NISMO exhaust of my G35 as the asshole peeled out in my car, going to park it. I was pissed but wrote it off as some kid having fun. I would have been a whole lot more pissed if he had given my keys to someone else who simply insisted my G35 was their car, even without a valet ticket.

Well, that’s just what happened, except instead of Malibu it was St. Petersburg, Florida and instead of my crappy old, but lovely G35, it was some lawyer’s Ferrari 458 Spider. Fortunately for the attorney, police caught the would-be thief as he tried to enter a highway because he apparently didn’t have the lights on and wasn’t able to drive the supercar very well. When asked for a reason why he might trick a dumb valet into giving him the keys, the driver said he was trying to impress his date. And nothing impresses a date more than a rap sheet including grand theft and possession of cocaine. Because of course he had cocaine. It’s Florida!

One Giant Leap Backwards for Man

In other rich people news, you may know that money can’t buy you happiness, but it can buy you a highly customized Aston Martin Valkyrie. It can also buy you an actual rock from earth’s moon. Apparently some entrepreneur and instagram user with a bunch of fancy cars is having his moon rock ground into dust and used in the mix of his Valkyrie’s Karosserie Lunar Red paint. Not that you’ll probably be able to tell. It’s not like the moon is sitting up there in the sky sparkling like a diamond. It’ll probably just make the paint’s finish a little more dull. But Spacepaint! 

Authored by
Devlin Riggs

Teslupdate & Germany's "Things You Just Do Not Do"

Teslupdate (again)

Good lord was there a lot of Tesla news in the last few weeks. Looking at my browser as I wrote this, there were no fewer than sixteen tabs open. And unless you were living in self-imposed media detox, which I would completely understand given the current political climate, you probably heard about the biggest story, which was SpaceX’s launch of the Falcon Heavy. But hold on, we have some ground to cover before then.

First up, a report from CNBC indicated that Tesla was having employees hand-assemble the battery packs to be used in the Model 3s while the machines that were meant to produce them were still being built. As part of this “production hell” that Elon Musk talked about, Tesla was apparently loaned “scores of employees” from Gigafactory partner Panasonic, who make the individual cells for each of the batteries. Concerns were raised that the hand assembly was pretty slapdash and the resulting products were incomplete or unsafe, which the company responded was an allegation that was “detached from reality.” 

Unfortunately for Tesla, it came back to bite the company later last week when Sandy Munro, the founder of Munro & Associates, a Detroit-based engineering firm specializing in reverse engineering products like cars and planes, compared the quality of a Model 3 he was tearing apart to a Kia in the 90s. Calling out panel gaps and fit and finish issues, as well as mechanical quirks, Munro says he hasn’t seen poor fitment tolerances on a car like the Model 3 since the 1970s. In one part of the car, he was able to fit a fingernail in between panel gaps, while on the other end of the same panel, his whole thumb nearly fit. Munro also pointed out how complex the cars were to get in and out of in case of an emergency, noting especially the fact that the rear passengers don’t have mechanical door handles, only electronic. This could be a serious problem if an accident ignites the batteries and cuts power. Of course it’s hypothetical, and these are some of the first models to come out, so hopefully the company is getting these issues all figured out, but not a great first impression to set. 

Video by Autoline.tv

So how did the company respond to Munro’s comments? Flamethrowers! That’s right, Elon Musk fired up the old hype machine on Instagram and announced the sale of 20,000 actual flamethrowers labeled with his Boring Company logo because I guess that was the brand flamethrowers make the most sense under. What they basically did here was take a nerf blaster, cut out the nerf darts and springs and paint it black and white, then insert a $50 Lincoln Electric Inferno propane torch kit, which you can buy at Home Depot, and call it a day. Oh, and they’re charging $500 for the privilege of owning it. Oh, and they’re already sold out, so Elon Musk just made $10 million in the span of a few hours. Oh, and god damn I wish I would’ve thought of this first because this is some Grade A genius shit. Seriously, it looks badass and sure, it’s a ripoff, sure it’s unnecessary, but it’s fun and I do admire a company that can have fun for the sake of it, even if the sake of it is also the sake of distracting you from all the other bad shit going on.

Speaking of bad shit, Elon, zeh Germanz are coming for you! (You may need one of those flamethrowers, so hang on to it.) Porsche announced this week that it's doubling its investment in electric vehicles to an amount nearing $7 billion, which is in addition to what they’ve already spent on their really sexy looking Mission E electric sedan. Some of that will go toward the hybridization and electrification of the Cayenne, Macan, Panamera and 911 and 718 Boxster/Cayman twins, but much will go to future vehicle programs, and they’ve promised that their cars will remain focused on fun. CEO Oliver Blume recently spoke at the 70th anniversary of Porsche sports cars, saying, “At Porsche, the driving experience will always be at the forefront, but in a traffic jam or when you park a car, the driver might want to hand over control of the vehicle.” Finally, someone gets me. Thank you, Oliver! In addition to the spending on vehicles, Porsche has committed almost a billion each will go to expanding their facilities and the development of a charging infrastructure.

But they’re not the only Germans on Elon’s tail. Volkswagen is busy trying to atone for its Dieselgate scandal, from which a big part of the settlement will go toward a massive charging infrastructure, the size of which will rival Tesla’s. Last February, Electrify America, the name of the initiative, announced a very adorable 500 charger network in the first phase. Well, after signing on infrastructure company Greenlots, they’ve gotten a bit more ambitious. Electrify America has announced their first phase will actually now be 4,800 chargers, beginning with 2,800 level 2 chargers in America’s 17 largest cities by 2019 and another 2,000 level 3 chargers throughout 39 states thereafter. Those level 3 chargers will restore 80 percent of a battery’s charge (depending on the battery, of course) in around 30 minutes. Tesla, meanwhile, hopes to have 5,300 chargers up by the end of this year, which is a respectable tally, but we know how Tesla is about keeping promises.

To that point, Elon Musk kept a promise this week when he sent his Tesla Roadster into space on the Falcon Heavy rocket launched by one of his other companies, SpaceX. The launch went off pretty well and successfully launched the car and its passenger, StarMan in his custom-designed spacesuit, on a trajectory toward Mars. In a truly un-Elon-like turn of events, SpaceX actually over-delivered on his promise because the Roadster is on course to overshoot Mars and end up somewhere in the asteroid belt. Whoops.

And speaking of whoops, yesterday Tesla’s quarterly earnings came out, showing the company lost $675.4 million in the three months ending in December. This is compared with losing just $121 million for the same period in 2016, which accentuates just how much the company is spending on the production of the Model 3. The production hell, however, only resulted in 2,425 Model 3s being shipped in the same quarter. It’s not abnormal for startups and tech companies to go for a while without posting a profit. Look at Twitter, they just scored their first ever quarterly profit in last part of last year. But Twitter’s product is entirely digital. To create and make real cars is a completely different undertaking than building a digital platform like PayPal or anything else Musk is familiar with. What’s critical not just for the company but for maintaining the confidence of investors is to show that Tesla isn’t making money right now, but has a roadmap to get there. If the constant production problems and quality issues continue, and if they can’t ramp up to the point where they’re meeting their 2,500 unit per week production target, Elon is going to need to sell a whole lot more flamethrowers.

Germany’s “Things You Just Do Not Do”

In one of the most bizarrely horrible stories to come out of the automotive world in recent memory, news broke this week that a research group operating at the Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico, commissioned a test to prove that diesel fumes were not as dangerous as the World Health Organization indicated. The test itself involved locking ten monkeys in a sealed room and having them watch cartoons while the exhaust fumes from a Volkswagen Beetle were piped in. There are also rumours that there was a similar test conducted on humans, though it’s difficult to believe anyone would’ve signed up for that. It’s actually difficult to believe this whole thing was ever thought of as a valid option. The European Research Group on Environment and Health in the Transport Sector was funded by Volkswagen, BMW and Daimler, who hoped tests conducted would refute evidence that pointed to diesel engines’ potential for harm. Meanwhile VW and several other companies were installing clever software in their cars so the diesel engines could pollute more without being caught.

What really gets me about this is the stubbornness of the whole thing. We’ve known for a long time that diesel emissions aren’t safe and yet the Germans, who were so heavily invested in the development of diesel technology, simply couldn’t accept the fact that the rest of the world wanted a cleaner way to drive vehicles. The realization that diesels were bad could’ve been a turning point for Germany. They could have said, “You know what? You’re right. This is dangerous, and even though it’s more efficient, we need to find a better way to move forward.” They could’ve led the field in hybrid petrol powertrain development, or in electric vehicles or in hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. Instead, they found a way to make their diesels motors look cleaner while in fact being much dirtier. And they locked some poor monkeys in a room and probably gave them cancer trying to prove that the rest of the world’s scientific community was wrong.

So what happens now? Volkswagen has set up a lobbyist as a patsy who has accepted blame, despite the fact that internal emails leaked to the German paper BILD suggest that senior management was made aware of the details of the testing. What we get is another scandal for Volkswagen, and let’s not forget BMW and Daimler who helped fund the research, to sweep under the rug. 

Does someone have Elon Musk’s number? I think I know a few people who would like to borrow his hype machine.

Authored by
Devlin Riggs

Headlines & New Cars for the week of January 29th, 2018

PSA Moves into ATL

Peugeot Citroen Group or PSA, as you’ll recall, recently bought Opel and Vauxhall from General Motors and it’s looking like that’s not the only way the French are coming after America. That’s because this week PSA group announced that their new North American headquarters would be based in Atlanta. Mercedes-Benz and Porsche have also opened headquarters in the Atlanta area, so it’s starting to become something of an automotive hub outside Detroit. As an America, which I assume most of you are, you’ll probably know that Peugeots and Citroens aren’t sold in America and haven’t been for the better part of 30 years. Well, that’s about to change, as we’ve heard that all future PSA models will be designed to comply with American safety standards. According to CEO Carlos Tavares, they’ll start selling their cars here in 2026, which is exciting, because there are a lot of really neat French cars that could only make the roads around here look better. Whether or not they make enough compact crossovers to satisfy the American market is a different thing though. 

Volvo’s Very Green Factory

As we’ve covered before, all next generation Volvos will be hybrids or electrics of some sort, but they’re probably going to be using some sort of gasoline engines for some time more. But to demonstrate how deep their commitment is to environmental responsibility, Volvo’s factory in Skövde, Sweden, is now entirely carbon neutral. They accomplished this through biomass and waste incineration to produce heat for the factory, which, way up there near the arctic circle, they definitely need, and by sourcing all of their power from renewable sources. This is something they intend to reproduce across all their factories by 2025. BMW, in typical BMW fashion, wants to get to the same destination faster and is aiming for carbon neutral status at all factories by 2020. It’s nice to see both how manufacturers are embracing environmental friendliness and to see that BMW can turn literally anything into a race.

Tesla Bringing the Fire to the Firetrucks

Photo by Culver City Firefighters

Tesla was back in the news this week when a Model S operating in semi-autonomous mode smashed into the back of a parked firetruck on the 405 highway in Los Angeles. The firetruck was blocking traffic to help clean up a prior accident and luckily nobody was injured, but the images make it look like the Tesla was going pretty damn fast at the time of the collision. When reached for a comment, Tesla representatives pulled out their old standby that autopilot was only supposed to be used by a fully attentive driver, which everyone immediately knows is bullshit because why would you name it autopilot if it wasn’t meant to take over for the driver? Clearly the driver wasn’t paying attention because it’s generally pretty hard to miss firetrucks with their big red bodies and flashing blue and red lights, especially in sunny, clear LA. What this really underscores is not the carelessness of drivers trusting their cars too much, but rather how far we have to go before autonomous driving is ready for our roads. Tesla plays it fast and loose in this regard, saying that they’re the closest company to a level 5 autonomous vehicle, and Chevy unveiled its completely driverless Bolt last week, but a study by AAA this week revealed that 63% of drivers actively fear autonomous cars joining our roads. Granted, that’s down from 78% last year, and somehow 51% of people still want some autonomous features in their cars. But stories like this keep cropping up and that 63% may start to creep back up again. 

Lexus’ Loserface

Jeff Bracken, who is Vice President and General Manager of Lexus Group, sat down with CarBuzz this past week and spoke very candidly about the famous, or infamous, spindle grill that adorns all modern Lexuses. He said the grill was an attempt to revive the Lexus brand from its formerly boring identity after Lexus was outsold by Mercedes and BMW in 2011. Average buyer age was inching up past 60 and the company needed to attract younger buyers to stay relevant, so they shook things up and slapped on a face that looks like an angry insect mated with an alien that had its face stretched back by an industrial leaf blower. I won’t ever knock a company for trying to do something different because trying to appeal to everyone means you’re going to wind up with a bland product that lacks identity and appeal. Basically, a Subaru. Functionally good but completely uninteresting. But in doing so, you polarize your audience, and what Lexus has done is taken its brand from boring to ugly, and I don’t know about you, but I’d rather drive a boring looking IS-F with a 400 horsepower V8 that nobody expects because it’s a sleepy sedan, than a hideous looking ES350 that goes okay but looks like it burns when exposed to sunlight and will be waiting underneath your bed when you go to sleep at night.

This Week in Shade Throwing

While Lexus’ VP sort of took a dump on his own brand’s styling, other auto executives took this week to throw some shade on their competitors. Starting with Aston Martin CEO Andy Palmer, he spoke to Autocar on the difficulty of working with electric vehicle manufacturers and vendors and highlighted Dyson in particular, saying “I wish him the best of luck but on the numbers that have been reported, I know you won’t do it for that money, and you won’t do it in that timescale. At least, I know that I couldn’t.” Of course he’s not saying that Dyson can’t do it, and highlights the fact that he couldn’t, but still definitely implying that they don’t know what they’re into. He mentioned other EV tech companies, saying “We’ve had discussions with about 10 of them. Every single one has underestimated the difficulty of engineering a car to a budget and to an aggressive timescale. Some of them will get there, but always over budget and late.” 

Speaking of companies that sound an awful lot like Tesla, Bob Lutz, former GM executive, came out swinging this week, first bending over backwards to compliment the company on their incredible achievements in creating an attractive, fast electric car, but then he went off the rails a little bit. After suggesting that collectors should start snapping up Model Ss, he said “Twenty-five years from now, [the Model S] will be remembered as the first really good-looking, fast electric car. People will say "Too bad they went broke.’” Bob is not known for pulling punches, but he is known for reviving General Motors, so he absolutely knows the automotive industry, which should be fairly alarming for Elon Musk and Tesla. They, however, know how to run technology companies, and as the automotive market increasingly becomes the technology market, maybe they’ll figure it out or maybe Bob will be totally right.

Faraday Future Resembles the Presidency

In other electric vehicle startup news, Faraday Future lost their head of human resources this week, which wouldn’t have been much of a story if they hadn’t made it one. For one, the departing Crystal Peterson had been with the company for three years, which is ages in startup years, and her departure was greeted with an internal communication (which was, of course, leaked to the press) indicating a new no-tolerance policy for negativity or disloyalty. “We will not allow the organization to be submarined from within” said the memo. Oh, I think we’re well past, that, guys.

Be Nice to Robot Pizza Man

Last summer, I covered a story detailing the miserable lives led by some Ford engineers who had to babysit autonomous pizza delivery cars shipping out piping hot Domino’s to residents of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Well, occasional co-host and frequent contributor to the show Mike LaBozzetta shared with me a story that wrapped up some of their findings from the study, which did end up being pretty interesting, but still not something I’m sure was a good use of their master’s degrees. They learned that people were paranoid and didn’t want to enter the last four digits of their credit card to receive their pizza, but they were just fine entering their phone number. They learned that people were courteous and would thank the autonomous car for bringing them their pies. They learned that people were dumb and would come outside without shoes on and not want to step into the street where there may be broken glass. All of this evaluation of the user experience will help inform and refine future delivery processes for both Domino’s and Ford, which will make things easier for people as this sort of technology catches on. What I think we’ll start seeing is, rather than tailoring existing cars to fit the specific types of tasks an autonomous vehicle performs, I think we’ll probably see a tailoring of the vehicle design, where maybe there’s an animated figure that interacts with the user to both establish a personal connection and engender trust, so they can receive the credit card information and say “you’re welcome” when the vehicle gets thanked or “I’m sorry, you really should be wearing shoes” when the car runs over your bare feet. 

NYC to Try Charging for Congestion

Despite conjuring images of black lungs, congestion in cities is quite a different thing and is definitely a problem in many cities worldwide. While we have toll roads and bridges here in America, we haven’t really seen any congestion charges levied in any cities yet. But that could change soon in New York because a proposal from the governor’s panel recommends establishing a $11.52 charge for drivers accessing certain parts of the city. This is intended to discourage drivers going to areas to try to reduce congestion, thus the name. Scheduled to go into effect in 2020 if approved, the charges are projected to raise $810 million without factoring in fees for taxis or Uber or Lyft drivers, much of which would get reinvested into the city’s subway system, which is barely functioning. Of course, instead of driving, people will probably try to take the subway to get to the parts of the city now covered by the congestion charge, in which case they’ll be using the already-horrible system and not paying the fee to improve it. So New York definitely has it all figured out.

Once Again, LA’s in it for the Looks

Photo by Los Angeles Times

On the other coast, Los Angeles has been called out for its highly publicized purchase of all-electric BMW i3 patrol cars. A CBS investigation found that, after having the city spend more than $10 million on the cars, they mostly sit around unused in a parking garage. The whole report was pretty damning, finding the cars had very few miles and that the “administrative purposes” the cops were supposed to be using these for turned out to be manicures and not much else. They’re leasing the vehicles from BMW, getting a hundred of them every couple of years and BMW must be thrilled to be getting such low mileage cars back off lease to sell on to manicurists across the southland. Get your shit together, LA.

Bentley Takes on the Mountain

Speaking of doing things just for looks, Bentley has announced that they will be entering their new Bentayga SUV in the annual Pike’s Peak International Hill Climb this year. Now, I get on automakers’ cases for testing their cars on the Nurburgring because, come on, who really cares? Even most auto enthusiasts don’t get to drive on the Nurburgring. But taking a 5,340lb SUV on a grueling hill climb normally reserved for purpose-built race cars takes idiocy to an entirely new level. Maybe they just think they aren’t selling enough cars in Colorado, or maybe they thought Richard Hammond got some great press when he crashed his Rimac on a hill climb in Switzerland that they thought they could replicate it? Dunno. It’s dumb. 

Bullitt Bonus to Help Boys

After announcing the new Bullitt Mustang last week, Ford auctioned off the first to roll off the production line and it fetched $300,000 at the Barrett-Jackson auction. Unlike most auction sales, where buyers pay way over the value of a car to benefit nothing but their own ego, the money will actually go to Boys Republic, a school for troubled young men in California. A fun fact here is that Steve McQueen, famous actor and race driver, who drove a Mustang in the movie Bullitt for which the special model got its name, he actually attended Boys Republic when he was a kid. So kudos to Ford for doing something nice and making that neat connection there. I’m sure they’ll make up some of that money from suing John Cena for selling his GT.

Ford’s Self-Serving Study

But suing people and giving back to charity aren’t all Ford has been up to. This week they released the findings of a survey they conducted that found that, wouldn’t you just know it, driving a sports car makes ya feel good! Apparently the study focused on the vaguely-termed “Buzz moments” and what triggers them by testing people’s reactions to watching Game of Thrones, kissing their partner, dancing and driving a Focus RS. Unsurprisingly, they found that driving the Focus RS gave participants more buzz moments than all the other testing situations. Unfortunately, it could also give them carbon monoxide poisoning because Ford also announced a service advisory for more than 27,000 Focus RS models because of bad head gaskets, which has apparently been a known issue that is only now being confirmed. So if you’re driving a Focus RS and you’re feeling light-headed, you could be having one of those great buzz moments, or your brain could be starved for oxygen and you need to seek medical treatment.

Owl’s Involuntary Ride Ends Surprisingly Well

Photo by Petersburg Animal Care and Control

A couple of weeks ago, I covered a story about a bobcat getting stuck in a vehicle’s grill after being hit and being taken for a 50-mile ride. Well folks, it’s happened again, but this time to a great horned owl! After being hit by an SUV, the owl became lodged in the grill of the car for 160 miles before the drivers finally decided to stop and see what that thing was he hit a few states back. Fortunately, the poor owl will be okay apart from a few busted blood vessels in his eye and some tussled feathers, but people. Come on. If you hit something, (and you would feel it if you hit one of the largest owls in the world) pull over and check it out! 

Would you Trust 3D Printed Brakes? 

3D printing has come a long way in recent years, going from high-end manufacturing to consumer-friendly applications. Chances are you know someone who owns a 3D printer, but Bugatti is going a step beyond creating neat figurines, puzzles or wedding toppers. They’re working with a German company to develop 3D printed brake calipers - the things that squeeze the brake pads onto the brake rotors to actually cause your car to stop moving. Typically, brake calipers are cast aluminum or steel or iron because it’s reliable, sturdy and doesn’t flex, ensuring you get even braking which, as you can imagine, is fairly important. But cast metal is heavy and when you’re talking about super cars, every little gram of weight reduction helps improve performance. But the more weight you take out of brake calipers, the more likely they are to flex, which reduces braking performance. So by 3D printing these calipers, Bugatti is hoping to get the best of both worlds; light as a feather and stiff as a board. Kind of like that stupid game dumb kids play when they want to pretend their friends are dead.

Lotus Leader Leading Lovely Life

Photo by Warren Allott for the Telegraph

Jean-Marc Gales is the CEO of Lotus and someone I think would be really fun to grab a beer with. How can I tell? No, it’s not the french name, it’s the fact that he was pulled over for doing 102 miles per hour in a 70 mile per hour zone last year and tried to get out of the ticket by saying that it was important that he test the cars himself. Of course it didn’t work and he was fined £666 for his trouble and banned from driving for 30 days. In the worst case scenario, he could’ve been banned for six months, so he did get off light. And I know what some people will say “oh, he was driving dangerously.” Well there’s a difference between driving fast and driving dangerously, and you can hit those sorts of high speeds very quickly when nobody is around so it isn’t necessarily the case that he was endangering anyone. At the same time, dude, you’re a CEO of a major British car company. Your engineers take these cars to the countless tracks you have in England to test them. Just tag along sometime and test them there. It’ll be so much better and you won’t get banned! Still, Jean-Marc, you’re my kind of idiot. 

It’s the Dream of the (Honda) 90s in Forever 21

Like it or not, mom jeans are back in style and so is plaid flannel, holes in denim and a bunch of other dumb stuff we used to wear in the 90s. For me, this isn’t a real problem because my wardrobe never really evolved beyond that, but in case yours did and you’re aching to get back with that vintage vibe, and you also happen to be a huge fan of Honda Motorsports, well you should hit up Forever 21. The disposable clothing company announced this week that they are coming out with an outrageously extreme lineup of Honda-themed apparel that screams 90s and, as obnoxious as most trendy things are, I kind of love it? But at the same time I don’t. Because I would love it if it were one of those “look how crazy and silly this is, I’m going to wear it because I don’t care what people think and I think it’s radical,” but I fear it’s actually a “this is so extra because it looks like what my stepbrother used to wear when he would like come back from street racing with his friends. Oh my god, remember Bryan? I had such a huge crush on Bryan! Anyway, what’s Honda 500?”

High Times & Dank Withdrawals

If there is one business that has made a name for itself by catering to stoners and drunks, it’s Taco Bell. The home and indeed birthplace of "fourthmeal" knows its core customers, what they want and when they want it. The problem for their customers is, Taco Bell isn’t everywhere, which leads to problems like we saw this week in Spring Hill, Florida. There, a man desperately jonesing for a burrito tried to order one from a drive through lane at a Bank of America. Unfortunately for this gentleman, they were fresh out, so he passed out behind the wheel in his car, blocking a lane. After the manager tried pounding on the car to wake him up, he repeated his request and, when it couldn’t be satisfied, drove off in a huff. Fortunately he only made it as far as the parking lot, where he parked to pass out again. Cops determined he was high on Oxycodone and Xanax, which he was actually prescribed, and charged him with a DUI. So not only did the poor guy not get his burrito, he received prison con queso. Where queso is a hefty fine.

New Cars

LFP Hellion

Every once in a while, something good comes out of Ohio. My wife is one example, but it’s been more than 30 years, so they’re about due. In comes Lebanon Ford, a dealership in Ohio that just loves mustangs, but thinks that the measly 420 horsepower V8 is just pathetic. To resolve this perceived issue, they’re twin turbocharging the V8 and selling the revised model as the LFP Hellion. The crazy thing is, this thing starts at 600 to 700 horsepower at 7 PSI, but the turbos can be tuned to run at 30 PSI, meaning the car pumps out an incredible and entirely unusable 1,200 horsepower. And all of this starts at just $52,000. Of course, the current Mustang is one of the best looking in the company’s history, and now with Lebanon Ford’s help, they are also the most ridiculously powerful. In terms of bang for the buck, this has to be one of the best. Well done, Ohio. 

Casil Motors SP-110 Edonis Fenice

Even the relative car noobs will probably at least know of Bugatti from their outrageous Veyron (one of which I actually saw on the highway last weekend) and, more recently, the Chiron, but those are not the only two relatively modern super cars the company has made. The sort of analog black sheep of the Bugatti family is the EB110, which was last produced 26 years ago, but still looks incredible. Well a company that specializes in repairing those 110s apparently purchased a bunch of carbon fibre monocoque chassis for the 110 and are planning on making their own vehicle with ten of them. In place of the EB110’s surprisingly reasonable 550 horsepower quad-turbo 3.5 litre V-12, they’re porting it to 3.8 litres and twin turbocharging it to 720 horsepower, which will deliver 60 miles per hour in 3.4 seconds on your way to a claimed top speed of 220. The vehicle, which has a very sad look about it could be sad because of its name. It’s called the Casil Motors SP-110 Edonis Fenice, which sounds like a great name you give to a cat that’s an asshole so you can put him down in a way that he knows he’s being put down, but can’t do anything about. But for a car? That’s kind of a shame.

The Future of Gas

I talk an awful lot about electric cars on my podcast, and for good reason. They’re widely accepted as the future of motoring, whether they be powered exclusively by batteries, by hydrogen fuel cells or some sort of capacitor setup we’ve yet to see. And the reasons for this are myriad - EVs produce fewer carbon emissions, they have fewer moving parts so are in theory more reliable, they make less noise and better pair with autonomous systems and, critically, there is a finite amount of oil on this planet to power internal combustion cars. 

But the truth is, and I’ve spoken to this before, I love gasoline. I love pumping it into a tank for five minutes and turning a key or pressing a button and having an electric motor spit that gasoline into a chamber whose sole purpose is to contain a tiny explosion ignited by a little electric spark. And, more than anything else, I love the sound it makes. I love the fire and the fury of a singing six cylinder and the rumbling burble of a V8, even at idle. I love the angry beehive of a turbocharged four cylinder or the raucous rasp of a V-twin, or especially my inline triple. And I will miss all of those things when gasoline engines go away. 

But fortunately, I don’t think we’re in danger of that, at least not for many years. In 2017, electric vehicles made up less than a tenth of a percent of total vehicle sales in the United States, and, sure, they did better elsewhere in the world where incentives are higher or there are more models available or where the income gap is narrower and people have more funds to spend on more expensive electric vehicles, but most analysts predict it will be at least 2025 before electric vehicles are on parity with internal combustion cars in terms of costs.

With the average price of new cars rising every year and the income gap only widening, an increasing majority of the auto buying public will be priced out of electric vehicles even when their average price matches gasoline cars. Buyers will continue to buy used petrol-powered cars until the third or fourth generation of EVs are out and the initial versions have depreciated to the point where they’re affordable. Even then, you’ll have the issue of battery life/reliability and the question of whether infrastructure has built up enough for buyers to see EVs as worthy competitors to good old gas engines.

According to a new report by the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, the rate of car ownership in the US is increasing, from .756 vehicles per person in 2015 to .766 vehicles per person in 2016, so there’s a very real chance that, of the people who will be buying an electric car, they’ll be buying it to complement their existing gas vehicles or to serve as a commuting car.

Another report from Bank of America predicts that the U.S. will reach peak oil demand in 2030, meaning there will be no further growth in the demand for oil or gasoline. This, they say, will be directly caused by the increasing share of electric vehicles in the automotive marketplace, which is great. Why is it great if I’m trying to make an argument for gas cars? Because less demand means that we could run into oversupply situations where gas gets even cheaper for those holdouts of gasoline cars like myself and low income households who can’t afford electric vehicles. There’s obviously a risk that oil companies anticipate this and start to curb their drilling or cut supplies, but, from my knowledge of the oil and gas industry, once a well is tapped, it doesn’t make much sense to just plug it up and leave it if even people are using less of your product. You run that well dry and squeeze it for everything it was worth. Companies may not drill new wells or invest so much in shale, which would be a great thing for the environment, so either way we kind of win.

Plus, innovation continues with gasoline engines. Companies are finding new and creative ways to increase efficiency and maximize output. Take Mazda’s Skyactiv-X technology, which achieves 30% better fuel economy than its already good Skyactiv-G engines like I had in my Mazda 3 (R.I.P.). Those will debut in 2019 while the Volvos and BMWs of the world transition their lineups to all-electric and hybrid vehicles. Indeed it’s telling that the first companies committing to move to all-electrified cars are luxury automakers, because they know the cost is higher and their buyers can afford it. 

But for every Volvo XC90, there’s a Shelby Mustang and for every Honda NSX, a Dodge Demon. In fact, there have been many cars announced in the past year that rely solely on burning dinosaurs to go fast and create a great time, and there’s no reason to think that’s going to stop, especially when mixed with some hybrid and electric vehicles, auto manufacturers can meet corporate average fuel economy standards and still have room to blow on gas guzzling performance cars for the masses. Plus the low-cost cars will still be gas-powered, as will the classic cars and trailer queens and garage angels that have been sold up to this point and will be driven on weekends by old guys who share the same love for the symphony of combustion that I have. So I’ll continue to talk about electric cars and they’ll very much continue to be the future of motoring, but that doesn’t have to mean that internal combustion and gasoline will be relegated exclusively to our past.

Authored by
Devlin Riggs

Headlines & New Cars for the week of January 22nd, 2018

Arbeit Macht Schwer

In case you thought the US was the only country with labor relations issue, here comes Germany to reassure us that we're not so different. Factory workers at Audi and Porsche plants have gone on strike to support demands of a six percent raise and the right to ask for a reduction in hours from 35 to just 28 so they can do things like care for children or the elderly for a couple of years, then return to work full time. In response to the union’s demands, employers have apparently offered a two percent raise, a one-time only “bonus” of two hundred Euro, and flat out refused to consider the reduced hours point. As they say, misery loves company, so I’m happy to see the rich American tradition of overwork and underpay is starting to catch on across the world. It makes me feel slightly less guilty for not working in France or Norway.

Geld Macht Spaß

Last year we covered the launch of the Porsche Passport Pilot Program, or as nobody calls it, Quadruple P. Well, they have some early numbers to report based on the program in Atlanta and signs are good for the brand, with 78% of participants having never owned a Porsche before. The company envisions this as just one way buyers can experience Porsche ownership, and they anticipate about 30% of buyers will purchase vehicles online in the next couple of years. Mercedes-Benz is thinking similarly, estimating that 25% of their new and used sales will come from the internet by 2025. But back to Porsche Passport - they also say it’s reaching a younger demographic, though they don’t specify how young. Given the fact that most of the participants are opting for the higher-cost, $3,000 per month service, I can’t believe these people are that young. To be able to basically have $36,000 to spend on a car every single year in addition to housing costs, food and other things, it seems like you’d have to be doing pretty damn well for yourself, which generally takes a few years. Or, in some of our cases, not at all. 

We Really Did Forget Dieselgate

After a disastrous 2015 and '16 where they were found to be using defeat devices to circumvent global emissions laws in their diesel cars, Volkswagen spent most of 2017 trying their absolute hardest to help buyers forget about dieselgate. A lot of this included generous discounts, goodwill campaigns and reinvestment in popular vehicles, not to mention the rebirth of the Microbus as the I.D. Buzz. Turns out, all that work paid off and buyers around the world pretty much did forget and stepped right back in line to snatch up new Volkswagens. What makes it more incredible is that, while the industry as a whole was down last year from 2016, Volkswagen recorded record sales, increasing 4.2% verses the year prior. And while the rest of the industry braces for more stagnating sales, VW sales chief Juergen Stackmann is optimistic, expecting sales to continue to rise in 2018. Based on the popularity of the gigantic Atlas, the compact Tiguan twins and the attractive Arteon, as well as the deal I was able to strike on a leftover 2017, it looks like their aggressive measures may be pretty effective!

Infiniti’s Shocking Moves

Meanwhile in Japan, Infiniti also had a great year, increasing sales eleven percent over 2016, but they’re still very much playing catch up to the German, English and Swedish luxury brands. Their plans to overtake their competition hinges primarily on electrification, as Nissan CEO Hiroto Saikawa explained this week. All new Infinitis launched after 2021 will be all-electric or will be range-extended hybrids, but not in the conventional sense. The company’s technology called ePower uses a gasoline motor to recharge the battery in its range extended hybrids, but that gas motor doesn’t drive the wheels at all. And there’s no plug-in feature. So the propulsion is entirely electric and the power generation entirely gas. It’s a weird setup, and especially considering Infiniti’s recently-announced variable compression engine, a strange change of approach to try to lure buyers. Then again, it could be a great solution for buyers without a garage or access to plug-in locations. 

Acura Wants to be Exciting Again

In addition to announcing the new 2019 RDX, Acura dropped a bombshell on the Detroit Auto Show, announcing the return of Type-S and A-Spec brands. For the uninitiated, Type-S is a high trim level applied to Acura models that are especially fast and good handling, and it was last used ten years ago on the TL sedan, but was famously applied to the RSX and Integra coupes, which were a ton of fun to drive. A-Spec is another trim level more focused on comfort, style and refinement than outright speed, so it’s somewhat less exciting, but no less important to buyers. The bombshell, however, was kind of a dud because they didn’t announce which models would get which trim levels or if they’d be bringing back an actually affordable fun car. It’s like Honda has this caged lunatic who wants fun cars and they let it out just a little bit at a time because if they let it off the leash completely, we’d end up with cars enthusiasts like and that’s just too much for them.

France Wants to be Less Exciting

People keep dying on French roads, with increases over the past three years after steady decreases going back as far as 1972. In response, France is lowering the speed limit on most of their highways by ten kilometers per hour, so the fastest you will be able to legally drive in France is just 56 miles per hour, rendering the fairly standard 0-60 calculations pretty useless. To their credit, the French don’t attribute all the deaths just to speed alone and have tightened regulations on cell phone use and drunk driving. This comes as road deaths are up also in Britain and the United States, illustrating a disturbing trend that I think must be attributed to cell phone usage. When I was hit a couple of weeks ago, I was lucky to come away uninjured and the other driver offered no excuse for why he ran a red light that had been red for at least seven seconds. Based on the Uber and Lyft stickers in his window though, I guessed that he was trying to find a fare. I wouldn’t go so far as to say those ride sharing companies are complicit in the wreck that has cost me days worth of time fighting with insurance companies and trying to find a new car, but the sooner we can integrate smart features into a car so drivers need look at their phones less, the better. 

BMW to Charge for Not Their Service

BMW, though, has a different idea of how to integrate phones into cars and that involves squeezing its drivers for every penny they can get, like little Bavarian weasels, hiding away all their nuts. But the truth is, the nuts aren’t even theirs! Or maybe the tree isn’t. This is a bad metaphor. BMW wants to charge a subscription fee for Apple’s CarPlay software, which they currently have as a $300 option when you buy a new car. By charging $80 per year after the first year, which is free, they argue that you pay less if you only keep the car a few years, which I guess most BMW owners do because they want to be seen driving a new BMW. The issue here is that more than 400 models of car come with Android Auto and almost as many come with Apple’s CarPlay, but it’s included in the price and not an option you have to add in later. Hell, you can buy a Toyota Corolla or VW Jetta and get these features for free, but you don’t with BMW. It’s like how fancy hotels make you pay for WiFi when you get it for free at Best Western. Why? Because the fancy hotels know you have the money to pay for it. Okay, that was a better metaphor.

Taking Crashes to New Heights

In Santa Ana, California this week, a driver managed to launch his Nissan Altima into the second story of a dental office, using a raised center media as a sweet ramp for the epic Dukes of Hazzard-style flying act. The driver, who was apparently high as a kite, was able to exit the car and hang by the door until police came and literally caught him. He and his two passengers were injured and taken to the hospital where they had some serious coming down to do. 

Photo by Southern Counties News

Tackling Terrible Truckers

From bad drivers to bad truckers, we’re headed back to England, where the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency, or DVSA, announced the findings of a 4,000 vehicle roadside test. They found that one in 13 trucks on British roads were fitted with an emissions cheat device that give false emissions readings, allowing the truck better performance while drastically increasing pollution. If this sounds familiar, it should because it seems like there’s this type of story every week, it just usually involves auto manufacturers getting caught doing it, not truck drivers who are looking to skirt the law. A representative of the DVSA, Gareth Llewellyn said, “we’re committed to taking dangerous lorries off Britain’s roads. We won’t hesitate to take action against these drivers, operators and vehicles.” Unfortunately for Gareth, when trucks were found with defeat devices, drivers were given ten days to fix the problem or pay a £300 fine, which sounds an awful lot like they’re hesitating to take action to me.

Have a Seat

Back here in America, our love for three row SUVs has apparently created quite a criminal enterprise, because there have been a rash of robberies - of just the third row seats from SUVs. Apparently, on most General Motors SUVs, like the Chevy Suburban, Tahoe and GMC and Cadillac Siblings, if you’re able to pop open the rear glass on the lift gate, the alarm on the car doesn’t go off. Once inside, the third row can simply be unhooked and then passed out the open hatch. And who is buying all these third rows to make stealing them such a popular endeavor? If you guessed “people who have had their third rows stolen,” you’d be right. It’s tempting to victim blame here and say “just park in a garage or back in so the back glass isn’t so accessible,” but what’s the point of a car alarm if it’s not going to alarm you when someone is stealing something from it? Come on, GM, this is on you.

AI Coming Along Swimmingly

While Google and Amazon work to integrate their digital assistants into more and more new cars, Nissan is going a sort of different direction with their own artificial intelligence. Instead of a female voice, Nissan’s Xmotion Concept features a koi fish as a virtual assistant that swims across the myriad interior screens to provide drivers assistance with, well, driving, as well as entertainment and navigation. It’ll also connect with the driver’s smartphone to share information between it and the car. And in case you’re thinking this is some sort of anthropomorphized Admiral Ackbar-looking fish, no, it’s just a normal koi fish, and I think it’s neat and more companies should think outside the pond when coming up with virtual assistants.

SUV Free and Happy to Be

While Ferrari and Lamborghini rush to catch up with Bentley and Porsche on the super-expensive SUV craze, McLaren is pretty content just where they are, thank you very much. The company’s chief designer, Dan Parry-WIlliams, told Top Gear magazine this week that “I’m not the first person to point out that an SUV is neither particularly sporty or utilitarian. It’s not ‘everything for a reason’ unless the reason is to clutter up the streets.” He’s referring there to McLaren’s design motto, “everything for a reason,” and it’s refreshing to see a company stick to its credo. Meanwhile, at fellow British sports car company Lotus, whose mantra, handed down from founder Colin Chapman was “Simplify and add lightness,” they’ll soon be launching their own SUV that will neither be simple nor light, though that may be said of their buyers. 

The (Frozen) Vaporware Car

Photo by Simon Laprise

In Montreal this week, someone had a good time at the expense of some local police, who attempted to ticket a snow-covered vintage Toyota Celica Supra that was parked in a snow removal lane, blocking in other parked cars. Upon lifting the very real windshield wiper to place the ticket, the police officer discovered that the wiper arm wasn’t attached to anything because the entire car was simply a pile of snow molded into the shape of a Supra. The whole thing was the brainchild of a French Canadian artist named Simon Laprise, who found the windshield wiper on the street and placed it on the car for maximum confusion. As for the ticket issued? The citation read “You made our night, hahahahaha” or whatever the French word for laughter is.

New Cars

Jeep Grand Commander

Detroit might make a great place to launch a new Jeep, but that’s just what Jeep hasn't done this week, when images of a new three-row SUV leaked to the media. It seems every company is scrambling to get an SUV with three rows out there for all the families who insist that contorting yourself to wedge in between a door sill and the second row only to sit cross-legged on a tiny, barely-padded foldable bench seat is more dignified than just swallowing your pride and buying the mini-van you should be getting. And with regards to Jeep, they don’t currently have a third-row-capable SUV in their stable and haven’t since the mercy killing of the Commander in 2010. If you forgot the Jeep Commander existed, you’re not alone and you’re totally forgiven because it was horrible and ugly. But now we have had a look at the new Grand Commander, a seven seat SUV that is apparently a China-only vehicle. At least according to what we know about it right now. The new model borrows heavily from Jeep’s other products for styling, which is now a good thing and it looks pretty decent, so it’d be hard to believe Fiat Chrysler wouldn’t wise up and bring it over stateside at some point. Plus, starting at around $38,000, it’d fit right in with most of its contemporary competitors. Until we know if it’s coming here or not, I guess you’ll just have to buy the Honda Odyssey you should be getting anyway.

GM’s Autonomous Bolt

One of the biggest stories to come out of Detroit this week was General Motors’ launch of the all-autonomous Chevy Bolt. This is a big deal because GM is calling it the first pre-production car to be shown without a steering wheel or pedals, which I guess is accurate since we’ve definitely seen concepts without them before. While it’s ostensibly a major step forward in terms of the future of autonomous vehicles, indicating GM’s confidence that they have a car ready to go completely without human controls, it really doesn’t feel all that special. Just looking at the photos of the interior, which doesn’t have to cater to a driver anymore, it really just looks like they took the passenger’s side, went into Photoshop, copied, pasted and flipped it so the former driver’s side looks the same. That’s it. I mean, in a fully driverless car, you don’t even need a dashboard. Your displays can be anywhere, or everywhere! The seats could swivel or not even face forward, and yet here we are, with a Chevy Bolt where they just Control X’d the steering column and pedals. Congratulations GM on making the future of motoring so unappealing.
 
But thank god, Chevy wasn’t the only company exhibiting at this year’s North American International Auto Show. In fact, there were a ton of new vehicles. If you want to learn more, check out to my Auto Show Rap-Up from last week's podcast. 

Authored by
Devlin Riggs

2018: The Year the Sedan Died?

Mid-sized sedans - we’ve talked about them before on this site, and the news is rarely good. But recently, it’s just been one hit after the other for the segment and, according to a Bloomberg article this week, there’s a very real possibility that the mid-sized sedan segment ceases to exist in as little as eight years. So could 2018, a year heralded as the Year of the Truck by three very high profile unveilings in Detroit, also be the year the sedan died? 

Truthfully, this movement started years ago. After the days of $4 per gallon gasoline subsided, American buyers resumed the 1990s trend of buying gas-guzzling SUVs and driving vehicles vastly larger than they needed or could justify simply because they could. The family car became the family SUV and the primary victims of this trend were the cars that performed most poorly in a shrinking segment. These, of course, were Fiat Chrysler products. 

But to his credit, Fiat Chrysler CEO, Sergio Marchionne, did the unthinkable - he killed off the Chrysler 200 and Dodge Dart - the traditional bread-and-butter mid-sized sedan and compact sedans that kept the big three American automakers alive during the oil crisis of the 1970s. And the outcome for Chrysler has been incredible. They’ve refocused their efforts on selling Jeeps, SUVs, big, powerful Dodges and Ram pickups, all of which are much higher margin cars than the 200 or the Dart, and the company is finally looking to turn a profit in 2018, which it has not done since 2012.

Other companies are taking a different path, moving production from the US, Canada or Mexico to China. It’s where pretty much all future Buicks will be built, and Ford has alerted Fusion suppliers that they will cease Mexican production, with the alternatives being China or not producing the car at all. With such a declining pie, the pieces are getting smaller for each manufacturer and to justify their existence, mid-sized sedans need to achieve a greater profit margin, which means cutting production cost or raising price. And in a declining automotive market where SUVs and crossovers frequently cost around the same price as sedans, the latter simply isn’t an option. 

So, will 2018 be the year the Sedan died? I think not. Or, I should say, not yet. Toyota has unveiled a brand new Camry and Avalon, the Honda Accord just won car of the year (again) and a new Nissan Altima is coming soon, too. But there’s an unshakable feeling that, even though these sedans will be the best they’ve ever been this generation, this could be sort of a last hurrah for them, as crossovers continue to come in and eat their lunches.

It’s not all sunshine and rainbows for crossovers either, though. A study released today showed that compact crossovers, some of the most popular vehicles, especially among young buyers, are among the fastest depreciating cars on the market, losing up to 1.18 percent of their value every week. It’s terrifying to think that you could go in and buy a Honda HR-V or Toyota C-HR or Mazda CX-3 or any number of the other alphanumeric-named, useless hatchbacks on stilts and find yourself a year later with a car worth just 39 percent what you paid for it 52 weeks ago. And the truth is, there’s no great advantage to these compact crossovers. They have less storage than the cavernous trunks of mid-sized sedans. They handle worse, usually have less powerful engines and generally all have obnoxious styling. But they’re hip and offer a slightly higher ride height, which allows you to see more of the road beyond the screen of your iPhone 10. Plus, they’re easier to park in these urban communities where I’m told the youth all live. 

So sure, things could turn around for the sedan, once people realize how poor these compact crossovers are both in terms of value and practicality. But at the rate sales are declining and sedans are being put out to pasture, by the time common sense catches up with buyers - by the time they realize that sedans really are enough car for virtually everything - it could already be too late.

Authored by
Devlin RIggs

Headlines & New Cars for the Week of January 15th, 2018

BMW’s Double Drift of Daring

This week, BMW reclaimed their Guinness World record for longest vehicle drift, which was taken from them by a Toyota GT86 almost four years ago. To do so, BMW set their new M5 out on a skidpad and let it rip. For eight. Straight. Hours. They covered a truly ridiculous 232.5 miles in that time period and required refueling, but did they stop to gas up? Hell no! BMW saddled up a second M5 with a custom fuel tank and some tech borrowed from fighter jets and performed a mid-drift refuelling, where the second M5 drifted alongside the first one while a technician hung out the window, gassing up the record car. They blew away their old record of 51.3 miles and more than doubled Toyota’s 89.6 miles and kept the rubber tires intact by continuously wetting the skidpad. Undoubtedly, this will drive hundreds of millionaires into BMW dealerships to purchase M5s so they can try to recreate it in their lavish circular private driveways.

World Rally Championship Will Do It Live

Racing has been kind of on a bummer streak lately. Formula 1 had the fewest passes ever this past season, the World Endurance Championship keeps losing teams due to high costs, Forumla E is still kind of a joke and IMSA, which is looking really good, is hard to find. Well good news, sports fans, because the World Rally Championship has launched a WRC All Live package on their WRC+ service that will stream every single rally stage as it happens, along with the ceremonies, interviews and press conferences, among other things. In total, it’ll be more than 25 hours of live video coverage of every rally. It’s not free, unfortunately, and at $10.83 per month or about $110 per year, it’s not cheap, especially considering many of these live stages happen in the middle of the night for us here in North America. But pound-for-pound, rallying is some of the most exciting, entertaining racing you can watch. The only danger is that you’re going to get hooked and start treating any gravel or dirt road as your own private stage when in fact it’s someone’s driveway and they’d like very much if you’d get your stupid Subaru out of their bushes so they can go to work, thank you. 

Diners, Drive-Ins and Distractions

Just when we thought it was over. Just when we thought Elon Musk and Tesla could cool the hype machine and have a real conversation about the bottlenecks in production and challenges of building a car company from the ground up. Just when a very real satellite malfunction may have cost the US Government billions of dollars aboard a SpaceX rocket. Just when shit was getting a little too real, Elon Musk resorted to what he knows best - the rabbit in a hat trick. He tweeted this week that he’s “gonna put an old school drive-in, roller skates and rock restaurant" at one of the new Tesla Supercharger locations in LA. And you know who will care? The same number of people showing up to Rams games in LA. AND THAT’S NOBODY. That being said, there was a super cool video this week of a Tesla Model X towing a Volvo semi truck up a snowy hill, which is crazy to think it’s capable of doing that, given its max tow rating of just 5,000 pounds. I also saw my first Model 3 on the highway yesterday morning and it looks like a cross between the egg-shaped Model X and the svelte Model S, which is to say I didn’t like it very much.

Toyota & Mazda to Colonize the Deep South

Toyota and Mazda pulled their own little LeBron James stunt this week except Alabama is in almost no way similar to South Beach Miami, which is probably a good thing, considering the companies plan on building Corollas and crossovers there and not...sand castles? What do they build in South Beach? Failed baseball franchises? In any case, the new $1.6 billion plant will open in Huntsville, which is a charming little town that’s about to get a lot of new manufacturing jobs to complement all the high tech industry that’s there already. Other than crossovers and compact vehicles, we don’t have much information on what Toyota and Mazda will collaborate on there, but I look forward to the chance to interview some Japanese businessmen who have developed southern accents.

Dieselgate, Down on the Farm

A class action lawsuit was filed this week against Ford and Bosch, alleging that emissions defeat devices were installed in diesel F250 and F350 trucks, causing them to produce 50 times more nitrogen oxide than legally permitted. Sound familiar? Well, Bosch was allegedly the company behind Volkswagen’s diesel cheating as well and we saw how that turned out for them. Unfortunately for Ford, half a million of these trucks have been sold from 2011 to 2017 and could be subject to this lawsuit and to recall. In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs allege that the Ford Super Duty pickups would have been better off called Super Dirty, thereby proving that lawyers are not completely devoid of humor, just devoid of good humor. We’ll see how this plays out for Ford and if they’ll be on the hook for billions like VW was when they got caught.

Takata Recalls Expand, Again. Again.

In other stories that just won’t die, Takata announced this week an expansion of their airbag inflater recalls, adding 3.3 million cars to the list, just in America, making it the largest of its kind. The cars range from Audis, BMWs, Jaguars, Land Rovers and Mercedes Benzes all the way to Fords, Subarus, Mitsubishis, Hondas, Mazdas and Fiat Chrysler cars. So everyone, please get these replaced if you receive a notice, because they do kill people. I’m less worried about the Fiat Chyrsler owners though, because a car has to be running to hit something and have the airbag go off and “running” isn’t really one of their strong suits.

A New Dealership Experience

A Rolls-Royce showroom in London will be the first location to feature the new Elysium-R. The $51,500 masterpiece features near-black pure aniline leather, an almond gold frame and will be limited to only 18 production units. It’s also a not a car, but actually just a chair. But it’s a really fancy chair that neutralizes gravity, implementing flotation theory, whatever that means. Also its gel-filled armrests are supposedly meant to mimic the quality of human skin, because everyone knows that rich people love nothing more than to rest their arms on the skin of the under-folk. This is apparently the product of years of research into human kinetics, which sounds an awful lot like some rich kid spent a few years sitting around and his rich dad told him to get off his ass and do something, so he made a chair.

Bad News for Turkwomen

Do you like driving? Are you from Turkmenistan? Are you a woman? Well shit news, you can’t drive anymore, honey. That’s according to their certifiably insane president Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, who last week banned all black cars because he thought they were unlucky. What’s his reasoning for banning women? Just some good, old-fashioned misogyny! Naturally he thinks pretty much all of the car crashes in the country are caused by or because of women, so banning them from the roads entirely, in his words, “rectifies the situation.” The ban was actually announced in December but has started getting implemented this week, with women drivers being stopped and having their licenses and cars seized by the government. Look, I’m sure Turkmenistan isn’t a shithole, but they sure do have a shithead for a president. You know you’re backwards when Saudi Arabia looks more progressive than you do.

Beetles Belong in Junkyards, not Trees

Photo by Scott Sommerdorf of The Salt Lake Tribune

In other bad news for ladies, a woman in Clearfield City, Utah is going to be charged with a misdemeanor if she doesn’t remove her nuisance vehicle. The problem is, that vehicle is a 1973 Volkswagen Beetle that doesn’t run. Oh, and it’s also in a tree. Since it didn’t run, the owner, Janis Zettel, decided the right thing to do wasn’t to send it to the junkyard, but rather to paint it like a ladybug and have it chained up in a great big old tree as a fun little whimsical effort to put smiles on the faces of children. You hear that, Clearfield City? Think of the children! She even had an arborist check it out to make sure it was safe and that the car wouldn’t bring down the tree and harm anyone. I’m sure her neighbors love it, but hey, there are probably other houses in Clearfield City they can move to, the damn grinches.

 

New Cars

Ginetta G650-LT-P1

British company Ginetta unveiled this week their G650-LT-P1, or G60 for short, and it’s a non-hybrid race car that they intend to race in the LeMans Prototype 1 category, which finally gives Toyota’s unreliable hybrid racer at least one competitor for the upcoming season! Or, well, at least part of it because Ginetta is only fielding two or maybe three cars if they can find the money, and they’re only committing to a “super series” of eight races beginning in May. And by only eight races, I mean holy shit, this is a small British manufacturer who has somehow scrounged up the pounds to compete with the world’s largest auto manufacturer at arguably the highest level of motor racing. Good for Ginetta and good for us because this’ll be interesting to watch!

Ford Edge ST

In less than 24 hours, Ford teased, and then released all the details of the forthcoming Edge ST, which will now not debut at the Detroit Auto Show, but instead on your computer monitors or, more likely, your iPhone screen. Clearly their marketing department doesn’t really understand the concept of building “hype,” because they kind of did the same thing with the new Ford GT, which was arguably a much bigger deal. They could, for once, take a lesson from Elon Musk. 

In any case, Ford’s prior ST cars include the Focus and Fiesta, which were fast, nimble little hatchbacks that were available only in manual transmission form for real driving purists, and they were apparently really good fun! Well, Ford has decided that crossover enthusiasts who never learned how to drive a stick deserve to have fun too, because they’ve basically taken the Ford Edge Sport and given it more sport, pumping its 2.7 litre EcoBoost four cylinder up to 335 horsepower and 350 foot pounds of torque routed through all four wheels. It looks and will probably drive a lot like a lifted WRX wagon, which is not a bad thing, so I’m actually on board with this idea. Yes, I generally oppose the concept of crossovers, but they don’t have to be boring and bad and kudos to Ford for trying to raise the bar that Infiniti set with their FX.

Authored by
Devlin Riggs

These headlines originally aired in the AllWaysDrive Podcast. Subscribe now and hear all the latest news and reviews!

Consumer Electronics Show Round-Up

Last week was the annual Consumer Electronics Show, and as vehicles become increasingly laden with technology, the show has become increasingly a car show. Here is a comprehensive round-up of everything CES had to offer petrolheads.

Samsung & Harman’s Autonomous Tech & Digital Cockpit

Technology company Samsung and high-end audio manufacturer Harman teamed up (well really, Samsung bought Harman last year for $8 billion) and showcased a new camera system for autonomous vehicles that included safety features like collision and lane departure warning systems and adaptive cruise control. They also showed off a so-called “digital cockpit” that is basically replacing the entire dashboard of a car with customizable screens that users can set so their profile comes up when they go to drive a car. It’s massive, and cool looking, but do we really need more distracting screens in front of us in cars? They’re kind of aiming to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.

Digital Assistants Get Baked (In)

A number of automakers, including Toyota, have announced plans to integrate Amazon’s Alexa into their future vehicles, but a lot of these cars already have Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. At CES, Google has announced that the company is rolling out an update to Android Auto this week that will add Google Assistant to compete with Alexa for the title of which AI can more poorly interpret the words “Call mom.” In reality, the list of functions you’ll be able to do with Google Assistant should be pretty impressive, from sending and receiving messages and playing music to reserving parking spaces with SpotHero and ordering coffee from Starbucks, all while keeping your hands on the wheel. Since more than 400 models of car or truck already feature Android Auto compatibility, this could be a major leg up for Google in the digital co-driver space.

Aptiv & Lyft’s Autonomous Rides

Outside the Las Vegas Convention Center, special BMWs outfitted by autonomous car maker Aptiv and organized by Lyft were available to shuttle CES delegates around the city to predetermined destinations. Sure, this is cheating a little bit because users couldn’t just input whatever destination they wanted, but the cars still had to deal with real traffic along their prescribed routes, and they did it without incident. Aptiv expects to have a Level 4 autonomous vehicle suite available to manufacturers like BMW next year.

VW & Uber Partner with Nvidia

Speaking of partnerships, Nvidia took the opportunity of CES to announce deeper partnerships with Volkswagen and Uber. With VW, Nvidia will help out with vehicle automation and AI, specifically for the I.D. Crozz and Buzz vehicles coming in 2022. This will apparently proliferate through Volkswagen’s other EVs as the lineup grows. That AI will also go into Uber’s fleet of self-driving taxis and freight trucks, where it has already been getting a bit of action in the autonomous Volvo XC90s. Uber says it has completed more than two million miles of autonomous driving in its tests.

Kia Niro EV Concept

In addition to the raw technology, we also got a look at some new cars, or at least concepts. One was the Kia Niro EV Concept,  which takes Kia’s Niro compact crossover, throws out its hybrid powertrain, and swaps it for a fully electric system offering 238 miles of range, which is the same as the Chevy Bolt, but in a larger package. The concept is very concept-y with its execution and has a ton of features that’ll never make it into the final car, like some huge screens and two-spoke steering wheel. But let’s be honest, if Kia gets a compact crossover EV to market that has good range and good looks, they will just be printing money come 2020.

Hyundai Nexo FCV

Kia’s parent company Hyundai also got in on the concept car action, unveiling their Nexo flagship crossover, which is a large hydrogen fuel cell vehicle with an electric motor developing 160 horsepower and almost double that in torque foot pounds. It’s not exactly fast at a 9.5 second 0-60, but it’s three seconds faster than Hyundai’s Tucson Fuel Cell Vehicle and has a range of 370 miles, which beats nearly every pure electric vehicle on the market. Plus it’s a crossover, so people will actually buy it. Now the only thing remaining is to figure out a hydrogen filling infrastructure…

Byton EV

Another new electric vehicle startup called Byton showed off their electric crossover at CES this year. It features what they call a coast-to-coast display, which is lovely that they thought enough to cover us here in flyover country. That screen also covers the entire dashboard and they say it will make it to the production model, which will apparently start around $45K and will be manufactured in a plant in Nanjing, China. It’ll get 250 miles of range in the base model and looks really nice on the inside and outside, but in a sort of plain way. It’s kind of a toned-down mix of a Range Rover and Lexus RX - it doesn’t really have an identity of its own, but it’s not ugly, and the screen in the middle of the steering wheel is kind of cool. It also has Amazon’s Alexa baked into it, so voice command should work, well, mostly okay. So why bother having the big screen? In any case, Byton, I’ll believe you can produce this car when you produce it. As we’ve seen with Faraday Future, the automotive industry is no stranger to Vaporware.

Toyota’s e-Palette Concept

One of the neatest automotive concepts at the show was Toyota’s e-Palette concept, which is what they think the future of mobility looks like. Basically, in this future, Toyota manufactures the hardware, basically a vehicle shell that is highly customizable. It could be a delivery van, a ride-sharing vehicle or mobile e-commerce platform. Since it’s all modular, it can even be all those things within the span of a day. While Toyota provides the hardware, companies would be the software designers, creating unique user experiences for the occupants or people to whom items are delivered. It’s an interesting idea and could be a workable concept, especially in cities. For now though, we’ll just have to rely on Tony in his red Toyota Avalon, who is only four blocks away but Lyft says it’ll take him 14 minutes to get here.

That’s all the major stories from CES this week, but we’re on the verge of the Detroit Motor Show, so stay tuned for that next week! 

Authored by
Devlin Riggs

This story originally appeared in the AllWaysDrive Podcast. Subscribe now and get the latest news every week!

Headlines & New Cars for the Week of January 8, 2018

Sales Slump to Continue

After all the numbers came in for 2017, overall vehicle sales were down 1.8% over 2016, which marks the first decline in seven years and, unfortunately for car makers, there’s no real end in sight. That is, unless you’re a super car manufacturer. Aston Martin and McLaren both recorded their biggest ever sales years in 2017 because the rich are getting so incredibly stinking rich!

Anyway. During the recession, people held on to their cars longer because they couldn’t afford to replace them. This meant stiffer competition among automakers for the sales that were occurring, so they worked hard to make their cars more appealing, more reliable and safer. When the economy finally bounced back, people spent the next seven years getting rid of their old vehicles and upgrading to newer, better cars.The reports bear this out – cars these days are safer, more reliable and more satisfying than ever before, and so people are keeping them longer, leading to a sales decline.

Sure, you’ll still have incidents where people blow through red lights and total cars, thereby generating a certain amount of reluctant sales, but there are already 1.26 vehicles on the road for every one licensed driver, meaning we have a shit ton of unlicensed drivers out there, or people just have plenty of cars.

And that’s what the industry experts are thinking – we’ve reached peak car, where we’ll back off to a stable replacement level of sales each year. Plus, as interest rates rise, people aren’t going to want to take out loans for new cars either. So how will automakers cope with a shrinking pie from which to get slices? Will they keep innovating as they did during the recession to attract a larger share, or will they collectively start making their products less reliable so they go bad at a prescribed point, forcing owners to upgrade? This is what we’d call the iPhone sales tactic.

Leasing Surges

On the heels of the sales report, leasing looks like it’s going gangbusters. About 31 percent of all new vehicle sales are leases in the US, but if you look at plug-in hybrids, the number jumps to 55 percent of all sales. And then there’s pure electric vehicles. Eighty percent of all EV sales are leases, which is crazy. Almost all people want to essentially rent these cars for a few years and Bloomberg is reporting that a major cause of this is the overall sense among consumers that electric vehicles are going to get better than they are now, so they don’t want to be locked into obsolete technology. Plus, resale value of EVs is currently very, very poor so purchasing one outright just doesn’t really make any sense, apart from for those 20 percent of people who bought them outright. Enjoy your Leaf!

Fuel Costs Jumping

Of course, those EVs may start to look more attractive this year as the 2018 Fuel Price Outlook suggests that gas prices could peak at just less than $3 per gallon. GasBuddy predicts that the national average price will rise 19 cents to around $2.57 per gallon this year, which still is not THAT bad, especially when you look at the rest of the world. But combine that with the drop in fuel efficiency we saw among new car purchases last year and GasBuddy predicts the average household will spend $1,898 on fuel this year. That’s $133 more than last year, which is the cost of at least two nice taco dinners, and I cast shame upon the evil oil spectators behind this rise because nothing should stand between us and nice taco dinners!

California Banning ICEs

Meanwhile in California, the land of the future, a bill has been introduced to the state legislature that would ban the sale of new cars and trucks powered by gasoline or diesel fuels by the year 2040. If you’ve been tuning into the show for a while, you’ll know that 2040 is also a deadline set by Paris, London and a few other cities or countries, with some even having more aggressive targets for pollution reduction. They estimate that the measure, if it’s adopted, would cut greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent from 1990 levels in just ten years. We’ll have to see how they end up voting, but I bet there are going to be some very busy lobbyists in Sacramento this week! 

Mazda’s Creepin’ Tech

Mazda this week filed a patent for some technology that’s both innovative and incredibly creepy. It’s apparently all in an effort to thwart distracted or drowsy driving. Basically, there is a camera or series of cameras set up inside the car, pointed at the driver and the car’s computer uses the driver’s eyes and expression to determine if the driver is paying attention and engaged with the drive they’re going on. If it determines that the driver is busy checking texts or Facebook or dozing off, the car will apparently respond by doing anything from simple sounds and visual prompts to changing the navigation system to route the driver to a more fun-looking road to drive. If the driver looks like he or she is having fun and is entertained by the route, the computer will store that route for later reference. Basically, Mazda is going to find all the cool roads and fill them with CX-9s because drivers can’t put their stupid phones down anymore.  

"Eyes on the road, buddy!" - Mazda

Nissan Gets in Your Head

And speaking of creepy, Nissan is taking it to the next level with their new Brain to Vehicle (B2V) system, which they will be showing off this coming week at the Consumer Electronics Show. Drivers are fitted with a skull cap that monitors brain wave activity and transmits signals to steering, acceleration and braking systems that can respond before the driver even moves his or her hands or feet. The driver still actually makes the car do things, but the car just anticipates what’s going to happen and can start things milliseconds sooner. Apparently this is meant to enhance the driving pleasure when it seems to me it’s just cheaper to make cars faster and more responsive than to dump time and research into brain wave monitoring. But hey, they’re making money like crazy selling Nissan Rogues to people so they can do what they want I guess. 

Tesla Under-performs...Again

Meanwhile a Tesla earnings call this week managed to once again unveil the woeful under-performance of the company in meeting the goals its founder sets for it. Rather than churning out a few thousand Model 3s per week as predicted earlier this year, Tesla’s highest number yet was a little less than 800 and, let’s be honest, making almost 100 cars a day is still a super achievement and they’re ramping up effectively. The problem comes when the founder is all bluster about getting to 5,000 cars per week by the end of Q1 2018 which, by the way, has been pushed back to the end of the second quarter. Tesla’s stock took a hit after the announcement, which was, for once, not accompanied by some other shiny thing to distract investors from the problems going on. Tesla has a big year coming up with the launch of both their semi truck and the Model Y, but it’s critical they get their shit figured out quick, or buyers are going to start figuring out that hey, that Chevy Bolt is a pretty nice car and I can go buy one right now.

Burn Rover, Burn

On Sunday night last week, a parking garage in Liverpool, England, resembled the gates of hell as a raging inferno engulfed 1,400 vehicles. Fortunately, no one was injured and, surprisingly, the fire wasn’t started by an Italian super car. It was rather friendly fire, coming from a Land Rover, of course vehicles not known for their wiring or electronics excellence. The fire really is something incredible to see, as you can tell from the video above. The fuel in the cars just fed the fire until it was completely unconquerable by the local fire brigade, meaning they couldn’t stop it spreading to other cars. Sort of like an automotive herpes that, instead of itching, just creates a huge insurance hassle for thousands of people.

Squirrels Drive Local Man Nutty

A British Volkswagen Golf driver learned the hard way how squirrels are  just rats with fluffy tails last month. Apparently he parked his car outside his girlfriend’s father’s home near London and then left with the girlfriend for a month to tour southeast Asia. During that time, several squirrels decided that hey, Volkswagen does make a pretty comfy car, and called the place home, storing acorns in every conceivable place throughout the vehicle they could access. The glove box, the engine bay, even the transmission was packed and the owner found it tough to shift when he returned home. The clean-up and disposal of hundreds of perfectly good acorns that would feed families of the little bastards throughout the winter cost the driver £230. Which is not a small sum, especially coming back from vacation.

Hot Dog, Cool Crime

In other food-related automotive antics, a driver in Texas got off with a warning this week when he was pulled over for a minor traffic violation. Apparently, prior to departing, he placed a hot dog on the rear bumper of his Chevy Silverado and taped a piece of paper with “Free hot dog” written on it above (hard to tell from the above photo, but easy to see how creepy it is) . He then proceeded to drive from Waco, Texas to Brownwood and back, a journey of more than 120 miles, before getting stopped. The hot dog and sign were still there. Now if you’re me, you think this is like the adult equivalent of free candy written on the side of a seedy van, but if you’re a Brown County sheriff's department officer, you just think he’s a funny dude and let him be on his way. Only a matter of time before witness reports roll in about bodies being found in the back of a white pickup with hot dog residue on the bumper.

Pampered Oregonians Pumping

You may or may not be aware, but New Jersey and Oregon both require full service gas stations, or at least they did. Oregon has started allowing rural stations to permit self serve. You know, the same kind of gas we have literally everywhere else in the country? Well apparently people are freaking out about it, don’t know how to pump their own gas and are afraid that they will either burn the whole place down or smell like gasoline the rest of the day. I get that if you grew up not doing it, you may not know how to pump gas, but I fail to believe that people have never watched an attendant do it for them, and I have absolutely zero sympathy for these pampered brats kicking and screaming to get the good old times back. This really seems like a Portlandia sketch in real life. But apparently that really just is the state of Oregon.

Turkmenistan Bad Luck Ban

They aren’t the only place suffering though. Do you love black cars? Do you live in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan? Well tough luck. Your car has just been banned because the president of the oppressive country has decided they are bad luck and they must be impounded or repainted at the owner’s expense. And I do mean expense because it’s a very poor country and the people there can absolutely not afford to repaint their cars just because their president is a nut job. Sorry Turkmen!

Banned in Turkmenistan.

New Cars

Is there a future for the Fusion?

First up in new car news is actually the cancellation of a new car, or at least new design. In a letter to suppliers this week, Ford announced that they are canceling the planned redesign of the Ford Fusion which was scheduled for a 2020 launch. While this doesn’t mean that the Fusion itself has been discontinued and doesn’t rule out a major change coming later, this does look pretty bad, given the trouble brands have had with selling mid-sized sedans this past year. Buyers just want SUVs, trucks and crossovers these days and while Fusion sales are going okay, particularly to fleets, Ford apparently doesn’t see the value in spending time and money in refreshing a car that has only been around four years and remains one of the best looking cars in its class. That or this is the evidence we need to show that Ford is all a part of a massive marijuana smuggling scheme from where the Fusions roll off the line in Mexico. Remember those stories? Twice Fusions have been found with the spare tire well packed to the brim with weed awaiting receipt by a distributor in the US only to be discovered by a so-called innocent car buyer. Sure, Ford. I’m on to you.

New Audis with New Looks

While Ford foregoes redesigns of its cars, Audi has decided that their utter lack of creativity for their own cars needs to be changed. If you’re like me, you’ve probably sat in traffic, admiring an Audi and thought “that’s a really nice looking S6. Or, uh, A8. No, A4? RS4? Shit.” That’s apparently pretty common. According to an interview with Autocar, CEO Rupert Stadler says the similarity between models was used to make Audis more recognizable to emerging markets, which they say has worked swimmingly and now they’re free to spend money and be creative again. Marc Lichte, Audi’s Chief Designer, was quoted as saying something along the lines of “Oh, thank god, Jesus in heaven I’m bored to death over here and only have rulers on this drafting table!” New designs should start rolling out in March or April of this year.

This originally aired in The AllWaysDrive Podcast on January 4, 2018. Subscribe now and never miss the latest new car news!

Authored by
Devlin Riggs

My Terrible, Horrible, No Good Very Bad Automotive Wednesday

If you listened to my podcast last week, you'll know that everything sort of went to shit for me in a number of ways, some of them quite literal. Let me set the scene...

It's Wednesday, January 3rd, 2018. 

First thing in the morning, one of our cats (we have two cats and two dogs to keep harmony in the pet universe) has been having kidney issues and heart troubles and has lost some weight from not eating, so my wife took him to the vet in her Ford Fusion Energi. Undoubtedly traumatized by the experience, the cat does absolutely nobody a favor and spends the ride home from the vet shitting himself, and then freaking out and jumping all over the shit. Which, fortunately, was confined to the crate in which he was being transported. 

People, if you do not transport your pets in crates, not only are you asking for shit all over your seats and carpets, it is extremely dangerous for the animals if you get into a wreck and they go flying. 

Speaking of wrecks, that’s where the evening comes in.

This video was captured by my Yi dashboard camera as I was t-boned while driving through a green light on my way home last night. I really pride myself on being able to anticipate other drivers and having great situation awareness, but I honestly did not see the impact coming at all. You may have noticed toward the end of the clip that you hear me laugh, or at least I think that’s me and not the episode of the Everyday Driver podcast I was listening to. Apart from the fact that it makes me sound like I’ve lost my mind, I think it’s because a driver had just run the red light going eastbound on the road I was crossing. There are three lanes going that way and only one lane going westbound, so I was looking to the left to make sure nobody else was going to run that light and hit me. And then pow, I’m hit by someone in the only lane going westbound. And this wasn’t some sort of light-turns-green-I-gun-it thing. The eastbound driver blew the light a second after it turned red and I waited until I saw that the others going that way had stopped.

By the time I got hit, the light had been green for at least five or six seconds. The guy who hit me offered no explanation for why he wasn’t paying any attention to the light. He did, however, admit fault to both me and the police and apologized. I mean I know he didn’t mean to do it, his 2010 Escape is just as messed up as the Mazda. 

Fortunately, both he and I are okay. I got a knock on the knee and am still a bit sore, but I don’t anticipate any lasting effects. It might have been a different story if he had hit me on my driver’s side. I’m waiting to hear about whether or not my car is totaled, but it took a really big hit and I would be more surprised if they try to fix a five year old Mazda with 85,000 miles on it. 

They say bad things come in threes, so naturally the universe had to bend us over a barrel and show us the 50 states yesterday when we got home after my wife picked me up from the police station where I was taken after my car was towed. 

We got home, raised the garage door and went inside, closing the door as we entered the house. After a couple of bangs and squeaks, we rushed back out to the garage to find the door had managed to detach itself from the track on four of the eight rollers and was perilously hanging, unable to be lifted or lowered. But this is where our luck (finally) started to change. We have amazing neighbours. Honestly, my wife and I feel like we won the neighbor lottery. Next door lives a contractor and his son, who is a small engine certified mechanic and who has already helped out with a few things I couldn’t figure out myself. One of his best friends, who I frequently talk to about trucks when he’s over, is honest to god an overhead door technician. He was over in 15 minutes and in 30 minutes we had the door closed and back on the track. It’s not totally fixed yet, but should be soon, and it’s no longer an open invitation for someone to rob us of all our shit. So thank you thank you thank you Nick and Garret, you guys are awesome!

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My first consideration is the Mazda CX-9. This is the safe choice. The 2016 model is drastically improved over its predecessor, offers tastefully sharp styling, a pretty rewarding ride and decent handling and fairly good power from a four cylinder skyactiv turbo engine. It also has a third row of seats, which is great for winery trips or hauling other people’s children to be eaten by German fairy tale grandparents. It's not especially interesting or special in any way, though.  

Next is the Toyota 4Runner. It’s no secret, I’ve been a fan of four runners for a long time and the rugged utility would be nice on lake weekends or for home renovation projects, which seem to be basically the only thing I do anymore outside of work and this podcast. The styling of the most recent generations isn’t great, in my opinion, and the power from the 4-litre V6 is okay, but it definitely doesn't have the speed, handling or enjoyment to drive I'm looking for. The 4Runner does have a third row and off-road capabilities which I might use more if I had them.

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I'm also considering the Toyota Tacoma. Like the 4Runner, I’ve been a fan of the indestructible Hilux or Tacoma for a long time, and that sort of nostalgia and brand loyalty plays strongly in the inclusion of them both in my decision. The 2016 model introduced some great changes to the Tacoma in a nicer interior, more aggressive styling and a bunch of handy features that pickup enthusiasts understand better than I do. Again, points are gained for utility, but no third row seat, and lost for ride, handling and speed. But reliability and resale value of both these trucks is absolutely off the charts, so if it turns out two years down the road that I’m ready to be back in a fast car, I won’t lose much when it comes time to sell. 

The Lexus IS 350  is not the ISF because I’ve checked prices and those are well out of the range of feasibility, but the IS350 is no slouch. It’s quick, it’s reasonably nimble and it’s a nice, comfortable place to be inside. It’s crazy reliable, but not especially interesting, and recent model years have become afflicted with lexus-face, which sort of looks like cyborgs mated with the aliens from predator, but also with Lightning McQueen from cars and the outcome was, well, not good. Interior space is also apparently cramped so fitting all my stuff may be a challenge.

The the successor to the G35 and G37 sedans, the Infiniti Q50, retains the 3.7 litre V6 that makes my heart skip a beat when I hear it. There’s no question that nostalgia plays into this because I miss my G35 coupe so badly, but is it a good idea to basically get the same car, but with four doors? Can I move forward while also moving back? Speed, handling and reliability are all checked but the Q50 is fairly ubiquitous on the roads these days, so it’s not very interesting or special. But I know how that smile is going to crack across my face when I punch it and hear that exhaust note.

I'm also considering the Infiniti FX50. I’ve talked about this on the podcast before. Nissan basically took the G35 platform, stretched it a bit, put a larger wagon body on it, lifted it a few inches and threw out the V6, replacing it with their biggest engine, a 5 litre V8. At almost 400 horsepower, this is the most excessively fast on this list, and the S model has rear wheel steering and active dampening, so sharp handling and fun to drive are definitely in the “yes” camp. I’ve also heard many positive things about the long term reliability of the V8 and it has more cargo space than the Mazda (albeit barely), so it’s fairly practical. It definitely is not fuel efficient, but it’s interesting and special. 

Number seven on the list (if you're counting) is the Acura TSX Sportwagen. I looked at these when I got the Mazda and really liked them, but they were slightly out of my price range. Five years later and guess what? They’re in my price range. Go figure. They’re totally practical, totally reliable, somewhat rare because they didn’t sell very well in the states because they were released before the wagon renaissance, but also without Acura’s lovely V6. All that weight has to cope with a 200 horsepower four cylinder, and it does pretty well. It’s not fast, but it’s not slow, and it handles well for having a pretty big body. I liked it a lot when I drove it before and that probably won’t change. But will it put as big a smile on my face?

Lastly, the Volvo V60 T6 R design. It’s 325 horsepower and 354 pound feet of nordic fury, but packaged in an unassuming estate package. Powerful enough with its turbocharged straight six to put a smile on my face and practical enough to haul all my photography gear doing it. The interior may look like it’s from 2006, but coming from the Mazda, almost anything is a step up. Reliability on newer Volvos is somewhat questionable. They’re not as bulletproof as they used to be, and it’s not the Polestar version that is completely mental, but I think the T6 R-Design is still pretty special. 

That about does it for my unfortunate tale and quest for a new car pending the decision of my insurance. If you have any suggestions that you didn't see on my list or experience (positive or negative) with the cars I'm considering, please leave me a comment below!

Authored by
Devlin Riggs