Headlines for the Week for June 18th, 2018

Flying Cars to Take Off in Ingolstadt

Long time listeners may remember a few months ago I mentioned Audi’s partnership with Airbus to start developing flying cars. As a refresher, these were very loosely termed cars. Basically it’s a three-part design, with a quadcopter, passenger pod and electric skateboard-like platform. The pod can be transported by either the quadcopter or wheeled platform, making it either flying or car, but not really “flying car.” I said at the time that the idea was pretty neat and more likely to succeed than any other system I’d seen and, sure enough, Audi has just received approval from the German government to start testing these in their headquarter city in Bavaria, Ingolstadt. Now, this is a long way from being like “oh my God, we are all going to be catching flying car taxis from the airports within five years,” but it’s a lot closer than I thought we’d see in my lifetime, so I’m hoping this actually goes somewhere. Onward and upward, Audi.

Volvo’s New US Plant feat. Dig @ Trump

In a time when automotive manufacturing jobs can be hard to come by in the US, who can we trust to bring back those jobs? Yep, the Chinese and Swedes! Volvo, which is owned by Chinese company Geely, formally opened their new factory in South Carolina, which will build the new S60 we’ll get to later. In addition to providing Volvo the chance to suck up to American buyers by focusing on the $1.1 billion investment in America and the 4,000 jobs the factory will host when construction is complete, the event gave Volvo execs the chance to cast some serious shade at Donald Trump and his supporters Nikki Haley and Governor Henry McMaster. Volvo CEO Hakan Samuelsson said “If you have trade barriers and restrictions, we cannot create as many jobs as we are planning to. We want to export and if suddenly China and Europe have very high barriers, it would be impossible. Then you have to build the cars there. And then all cars will be more expensive, you have to invest more tooling and have every model in every country. That’s against all the logic of modern economies that trade with each other.” It seems there’s a lot of commentary about our trade policy being against all logic, and yet here we are, threatening a 25% tariff on imported vehicles and auto parts. It’s almost like logic doesn’t factor into decisions at all, but what do I know, I’m only a master of business with a degree in political science who happens to like his cars cheap and fast.

Audi CEO Arrested, Thrown in Slammer

^Criminal

The fallout from the Dieselgate scandal continues still in Germany where this week Audi CEO Rupert Stadler was arrested based on concealment of evidence relating to the defeat devices on Volkswagen Auto Group vehicles. He’s actually remaining in custody because the prosecution thinks he’s a flight risk. Audi has had to scramble to name an interim CEO while their boss remains a jailbird, but this just continues to look bad. If the CEO of one of your major brands was aware of the effort to deceive authorities, former Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn is probably shaking in his boots because you can bet he knew about it too. It’s a serious problem when a culture of corruption comes straight from the top, and you would’ve thought Volkswagen had learned its very expensive lesson, but by keeping Stadler as Audi CEO this long after the scandal came to light, maybe they need a couple more billion dollar settlements before the root out all the corrupt jerks. I’ll take my settlement in the form of a V10 R8, thank you.

Teslupdate #1,000,000,000

This will again not be the week when we have no Tesla news, because there was some wild shit going on with Elon Musk’s company this week. First, the not-so-wild: tesla completed the setup of a third production line over the weekend...in their parking lot. Yes, the new line is underneath temporary tents outside because the space is needed that badly to ramp up production to meet goals. Back when the factory was a combined General Motors and Toyota venture, they managed to crank out 8,200 cars per week from the inside of the place, so if Tesla needs to move outdoors just to reach 5,000, I think you can imagine how much more complicated those production lines must be and how much more space they take up.

Amazing work by Tesla team. Built entire new general assembly line in 3 weeks w minimal resources. Love u guys so much! Pic of 1st Model 3 dual motor performance coming off the line … pic.twitter.com/Xr55P3fmGd

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 16, 2018

Next came some serious shade thrown from General Motors. Actress Mary McCormack who you may remember from some sort of television shows somewhere, tweeted out a video of her husband’s Tesla Model S, which apparently just started catching fire while he was driving it and burst into flames in the middle of Santa Monica Boulevard. Tesla has no idea what happened or why, but GM jumped at the opportunity, offering the actress a free Chevy Bolt as a more dependable loaner car. Nicely done, GM communications guy Ray Wert.

Okay now we get to the crazy shit - on Sunday, Elon Musk sent out an email accusing a former employee of sabotage and intellectual property theft, as well as leaking sensitive information to third parties and the press. He followed that email up with another about someone potentially trying to sabotage a production line by starting a fire. Then on Tuesday Tesla filed a lawsuit against a former employee for allegedly having stolen confidential information and making false claims to the media. Then on Thursday, someone claiming to be a friend of Martin Tripp, the guy Tesla sued, called the Gigafactory to warn that Tripp was coming in to shoot up the place, causing a minor panic and for beefed up security until the county sheriff found there was no credibility to the threat. Then AFTER THAT, Tripp posted to Twitter an email exchange that he had with Musk about the lawsuit wherein they both called each other horrible human beings and generally behaved like children.

We’re not yet sure if the Sunday email and Tuesday lawsuit are connected, but if not, that means there are several people trying their darndest to mess up Elon’s life. And jeez, people if you like constant dramabombs being dropped, no need to watch daytime television, just follow Elon Musk on Twitter. This is ridiculous.

J.D. Power Initial Quality Honors Hyundai

The annual list of J.D. Power rankings for initial quality were released this week and, if you’ve been listening to this show and looking at their recent cars, you won’t be surprised to learn that Genesis, Kia and Hyundai are the top three brands. All of them being owned by Hyundai. Even Porsche comes in at just fourth spot and Ford in a somewhat unbelievable fifth. The trick is, the initial power rankings count the number of problems experienced per hundred vehicles in the first 90 days of ownership. If things are going wrong within 90 days, that’s generally not a great sign for future reliability, but certainly not a sign that cars with good initial quality will last longer, as may be the case with Ford. They also don’t measure the severity of problems, so a busted transmission is effectively the same weight as a windshield wiper motor squeaking, which is pretty misleading. Furthermore, as I’ve discussed before, automakers pay JD Power for the right to use their awards in marketing materials, so these sort of non-firsthand user reviews should be taken with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, Hyundai definitely deserves a look as they do make some pretty nice cars. Just, as with everything else, QUESTION EVERYTHING.

RC-6 Corvette

While I’ve never driven one, It’s my understanding that Corvettes are very fun cars to drive. But in the Netherlands, where people decided they’d rather have land where the sea was so they built a complex series of windmills to drive the sea back into the ocean, one man has gone and made his Corvette a bit more complex as well. Specifically, he modified his C6 Corvette to be remote controlled. We’ve seen full-sized R/C cars before, but doing so to a Corvette is an entirely different scale; one that cost about $4,000. It’s honestly really impressive that someone could pull this off, but I still think I’d rather be behind the wheel of that V8 rather than just puttering it around a parking lot. But that’s the Dutch for you - defying convention, and the ocean.

Authored by
Devlin Riggs

Header image: When your GTI is the least athletic member of your automotive family tree.

New Cars for the Week of April 23rd, 2018

It’s just been about four weeks since our last regular podcast episode, with only the New York and Beijing motor shows occurring in that time span, but holy hell have we seen a lot of new cars! So it’s not just one long new car regurgitation, I split this up a bit and focused on the cars from New York in brief this week, along with a few standouts announced separately. Here we go.

New York Auto Show

The new Honda Insight was officially unveiled in New York to very little fanfare or excitement. Remember this is basically the Civic Hybrid, re-branded with a new name or little ostensible reason. Rather than being the cheapest possible hybrid you can buy, the new Insight is going upmarket and Honda is slotting it in between the Civic and Accord’s prices. Based on the Accord’s current sales, or lack thereof, I think Honda might struggle a bit with this one.

Mercedes unwrapped the new AMG C63, which uses a twin turbo V8 to churn out a somewhat surprisingly  modest 470 horsepower. Not that that number is small, it’s more than a Camaro, but barely. For having twin turbos, you know this car is capable of more, and there will undoubtedly be some sort of AMG Black version eventually. I secretly love Mercedes AMG cars because they are just mental and not balanced and precise like BMW’s M cars, which adds a measure of excitement to the drive. But wait for the Black version.

As recently as last year, Volkswagen was under a lot of pressure for not having a large, three row SUV, so they came out with the Atlas. Now they’re doing what every great German car company does and making as many versions of each of their car as possible to fill niches that didn’t previously exist. As such, we’ve now got the VW Atlas Cross, which is a 5-seat version of the 7-seat SUV they came out with last year.  If you’re thinking “well, isn’t that just what the new Touareg is supposed to be?” Yes. Yes it is.

Toyota isn’t resting on its laurels with the RAV4, which, outside of pickups, is the best selling vehicle in America. In New York they unveiled the new model for 2019, which takes the old model, roots around on the dash for a while until it finds the butch knob and then cranks that shit up to 11. The new car looks significantly beefier and squared off than the sort of swoopy current model, and sits on Toyota’s new and excellent TNGA platform that underpins the Camry. The new RAV4 is wider, but shorter and lower, and is apparently better to drive because of the new dimensions and architecture. It’ll come with a four cylinder and hybrid powertrains, with the latter potentially capable of achieving 70 miles per gallon. Who needs the Prius!?

Nissan also unveiled a new bread-and-butter car, the 2019 Altima, which I might normally just skip over, but I drove an Altima 3.5 SR to Kansas and back recently and actually quite enjoyed it. Mostly because of the V6. Sadly that engine is gone, replaced with a less powerful turbo four, but it’s the neat variable compression engine that changes piston stroke to give either better fuel economy or more power, so that’s neat. Problem is, it’ll still be paired with the CVT, which, of course, stands for continuously variable tragedy.

We got a new Hyundai Tuscon, which I might also normally just skip over.

There was also the new Kia K900 for the drivers who want a luxury sedan but don’t care about the luxury brand. I’m just getting word from the newsroom that that there are in fact zero buyers. Not one.

Subaru unveiled a new Forester for next year, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that they hadn’t. Subaru pulled a neat trick here though. Whereas other car companies will refresh a car to disguise the fact that they haven’t made any substantial changes to it, Subaru has actually moved the forester to a completely new global platform chassis and managed to tweak the styling so subtly, that buyers might not be able to identify it as a new car. But to some extent, if it’s not broke, don’t fix it, right? And the Forester is selling, mostly despite its beigeness.

There was a new Audi RS5 sportback, which is basically just a faster version of the S5 sportback, which is basically just a faster version of the A5 sportback which is a four door version of the A5 coupe and I wish the Germans would knock it off with this Russian nesting doll system of car models.

The Maserati Levante Trofeo was unveiled, which uses a Ferrari-sourced 3.8 litre V8, spitting out what I’m sure is a delightful sounding 590 horsepower right up until the time the SUV catches itself on fire or kicks into limp-home mode because you decided to turn on the air conditioning or something. It’s honestly pretty good looking. Kind of like a Quattroporte and a Porsche Cayenne mated, in a consensual way.

We also got a couple of cool concepts in New York, which I think have been largely missing from Auto Shows recently. The first was the Volkswagen Atlas Tanoak, which is a pickup. From Volkswagen. A Volkswagen Pickup. The concept, which is fairly foreign to us here, isn’t all that weird though. Volkswagen makes the Amorak pickup and sells it in the rest of the world. The Atlas Tanoak had some really neat features and could further shake up the somewhat uncrowded pickup market in a similar way to the Honda Ridgeline, which has been selling really well. I’m hoping they pull the trigger on this guy.

A slightly less realistic concept was the Genesis Essentia concept, which was probably the best looking car at the show. It looked to me like what a futuristic Mazda RX-7 might be, with a domed glass greenhouse and smooth, sweeping lines. Hell, it even has a triangular grill one might think was referencing the rotary engine of the Mazdas. Genesis calls the design philosophy “elegant decluttering,” which is a phrase I am now going to use every day of my life when someone asks how I want something done. “Well, this sandwich is fine, but it could use some elegant decluttering.”

Jaguar’s Crossovers

If you like Jags, and who doesn’t, and you like crossovers, ugh, who doesn’t, there’s good news for you this week! Jag has sprinkled some special sauce on its F-Pace mid-sized crossover and out came the F-Pace SVR, which has a supercharged five litre V8 pumping out almost 550 horsepower to all four wheels. Jag’s going after the Macan Turbo, but bringing a knife to the gun fight since it boasts more than 100 more horsepower than its German rival. It’s not just all power either, they’ve addressed the suspension to firm it up and improve handling, which it needs because it’s a freaking top-heavy SUV with more power than a Ferrari F430 got less than ten years ago. Excessive? Yes. Do I want one? Also yes.

In other Jag news, the company has teamed up with Waymo, Google’s self-driving company, to build driverless I-Pace compact electric crossovers. Waymo is slated to buy 20,000 of them, which is a tremendous amount of cars, and will complement their existing fleet of Chrysler Pacificas. Waymo is planning to introduce the first all-self-driving ride sharing service this year, expanding to provide one million driverless journeys a day by 2020. Based on the current sentiment regarding autonomous vehicles...good luck!

Polestar 1

You’ve heard about the Polestar 1 on my show before, so you’ll remember Polestar. You know, the now-independent company that used to be Volvo’s own tuning arm that unfortunately has a name like a video sharing website for strippers? Anyway, we learned some new things about their first car, which is basically a carbon fibre coupe version of the Volvo S90 sedan. We learned it will have 600 horsepower and be able to go 93 miles on electric-only power before the gasoline motor kicks in. It will very strangely have a slightly rear-biased weight distribution despite being a front-engined car. And we learned it will cost $155,000, which is an incredibly high amount of money, putting it on par with the likes of the AMG GT, Mercedes S Class Coupe and Porsche 911 Turbo, despite being a kind of not-Volvo. It’s also going to be available via subscription if you like to not own things, but if the choice is subscribing or paying a ridiculous amount, I can see why folks might choose the former.

Lynk & Co 2

Speaking of not-Volvos, Lynk & Co, not to be confused but will totally be confused with Lincoln Cars, have introduced their second model, the Two! This comes after the Chinese company’s first model, and I’ll bet you can guess what that was called. Yes, the 1, which was based on Volvo’s diminutive XC40, has been squished down to even smaller proportions to form the 2, making it an even more compact compact crossover. We know next to nothing else about these cars, other than that they’ll be electrified in some way or another and only for sale via a subscription service, starting in China, then moving to Europe and the US. When? Who knows, but they’ll eventually be joined by a third model, and I’ll give you one guess as to its name.

Authored by

Devlin Riggs