Headlines for the Week of August 20th, 2018

Tesla to Stay Public, Crazy

Changing your mind isn’t inherently a problem, in fact I do it all the time. Whether it’s where to go to dinner, if I think I can get away with buying a new camera or what home project to tackle next, when I change my mind, it’s mostly innocuous, but the same cannot be said for Elon Musk. This week, he changed his mind, roughly three weeks after floating the idea of taking Tesla private using money he had not secured, despite a tweet indicating so. His public reasons for reversal include giving up too much control to large investors, losing too many small investors who believed in the company and becoming a distraction to the company while it strives to meet production goals. Well, a little too late on that last one, but the others I guess make sense.

It came out this week that the Saudi Public Investment Fund, which Musk cited as being the source of his secured funding, may have wanted Tesla to start producing cars in Saudi Arabia, which Musk objected to. Instead then, they’re going to dump some cash on Tesla competitor Lucid Motors, going quickly from friend to foe for Elon. The Norwegian sovereign wealth fund, another source of potential funding, dropped a sick burn this week indicating that they had no intention of investing in Tesla because, “we want to be invested in companies that make money.” Damn, Norway, you ice cold.

Coming out and saying “well, just kidding,” however, doesn’t get Elon off the hook from the SEC investigation that launched in the wake of his tweet that sent the company’s stock into chaos. Which makes it all a pretty bad time for Tesla’s communications chief to quit, which she has. It’s allegedly been planned for a while now, which I could understand because Elon has been tweeting for a while and, as a communications professional, I would find it incredibly frustrating to have my efforts continually undermined by my boss’s incessant unapproved social media activity.

On top of all of this, investment bank UBS published the details of their tear-down of a Model 3, which concluded that, for every $35,000 model Tesla sells, they will be losing almost $6,000. Bearing in mind that that base model car isn’t being produced yet because the company is focusing on more profitable models, it’s unclear how UBS came to this conclusion, but the rest of their report wasn’t exactly glowing either. They found the car scored below average on fit and finish quality and stated the car would be very difficult to work on if something went wrong because of part inaccessibility.

Finally, according to documents obtained by Business Insider, during the last week in June when Tesla built 5,000 Model 3s, only 14 percent of the cars made it off the line without a problem that needed fixing afterwards. That means that Tesla had to rework 4,300 of those 5,000 cars to get them in shape enough to deliver to buyers. Compared with an industry average of 20-35% rework, an 85% rework rate is absolutely unsustainable for a company still yet to turn a profit. The only positive here is that the company spent only an average of 37 minutes making the necessary fixes to each car, but do the math with me here: 37 minutes times 4,300 cars is 2,651 hours of extra work. That’s 110.5 DAYS, meaning 3.7 people had to work every hour of every day of June just to fix the problems in the cars coming off the line. I’m sure Elon would agree that those 3.7 employees’ time could be put to better use, even if, as the company stated in a reply to the documents, Model 3 labor hours have decreased 30% since last quarter. Maybe increase those just a bit and see if you can make more than 700 complete cars?

Ride Sharing Takes Another Hit

A survey of 1,250 consumers by Cox Automotive this week found that the cost of owning or leasing a vehicle was becoming too high and fully 57% of respondents said they didn’t think they needed to own a vehicle to get where they wanted to go anymore. Vice President of Research at Cox Isabelle Helms said that they are predicting a 40% reduction in consumer vehicle sales as people start to use ride sharing, ride hailing and rental services more often, highlighting the need for fleet-owned vehicles. Survey respondents highlighted Uber and Lyft as propelling the movement away from private vehicle ownership and ride hailing even in suburbia was up 21% compared with 2015, being up in cities 18%.

And everybody is feeling the effects of ride sharing. Whether you’re in New York, whose City Council voted to cap the number of ride share drivers, or in Seattle, where the local Department of Transportation found that an additional 94 million miles were driven on local roads last year because of ride sharing services. Whereas the most common refrain is that ride hailing services encourage people to drive less, they are actually making traffic worse, compelling people who might otherwise walk, stay home or take public transit to instead clog the street with a driver who has to come get them, drive them somewhere, then come back, get them and drop them off later.

And if you think we’ve reached “peak car” and that ride sharing and hailing services are going to take over, please allow AAA to change your mind with their recent study that found that replacing your car with those services is a tremendously bad idea. According to the survey, the average urban person drives about 11,000 miles per year, and using a ride hailing service to cover that distance would cost urbanites more than $20,000 annually on average. In expensive cities like Boston, that rises to around $27,500, or more than the cost of buying my GTI outright. The survey found that even if you owned a gas-guzzling pickup and covered the same distance, you’d spend just $7,321, or almost a third of what you’d spend on Uber. Even factoring in parking only adds around $2,700 to the annual cost of ownership. The caveat here is that people without a car might not always go out or travel as much or may not use Uber or Lyft for each journey. But you’d have to sacrifice a lot of trips in order to break even with what a car costs to own and run. Put more simply, always drive.

Dealerships in Dire Shape for New Hires

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that car dealerships are having a tough time finding people in their 20s and 30s who want to work long shifts and on the weekends to haggle with people to try to get a sales commission. According to the article, “Many millennials say car dealers have an outdated approach to selling that doesn’t always fit their values, even if the jobs have the potential to pay well.” People of my generation also want more stable pay, rather than commissions because of student debt. They cite the bait-and-switch advertising and confrontational haggling as reasons to quit, which a staggering number of them are doing. While nearly 60% of dealership hires are millennials, more than half of them quit within a year. It’s so bad that Nissan reported a 100% turnover rate at its dealerships last year. While that doesn’t mean everyone quit their job, it does mean that multiple people quit the same job within the same year to make up for those old “company men” who wouldn’t leave and just want to know what they can do to get you into the car of your dreams today. Guess what? It isn’t a versa of Murano, Cliff. Sorry.

Used Car Prices Defy Economics, Keep Rising

You may recall earlier this year I advised on waiting to buy a used car because there was a glut of vehicles hitting the market and that huge supply was going to mean some tremendous steals to be had, especially on slow-selling sedans. Well, maybe there’s a reason this podcast isn’t your #1 source for solid consumer advice. Turns out, whereas used vehicle prices usually peak in March and April, 2018 is proving to be a different beast, with used car prices actually increasing this summer, and there are a variety of reasons for this. First, consumers are scared of tariffs increasing the prices of new cars, so they’re shopping used instead. Second, incentives for new cars are flat, so buyers aren’t finding too many good deals there, so they’re resorting to used cars, driving up demand. Also, since the great recession meant so few cars sold from 2008 to 2011, there aren’t many cars from those years available on the used market, meaning most used cars for sale are newer, and thus commanding a higher price. This is actually producing a historic difference, with July’s Used Vehicle Value Index ending at its highest point ever, up 1.5% over June and a full 5% over July 2017. So you want more consumer advice? Just panic. Cause a pure, unadulterated panic because Trade Wars are hard to win and easy to lose.

Auto Average Age Advances in America

In keeping with the news that cars are getting more expensive is a study by the Energy Information Administration that found that owners are now hanging onto their cars longer than ever before. In fact, the average age of “in-use” vehicles last year climbed to 10.5 years, up from 9.3 years in 2009. The increase in age actually took place across all vehicle categories too, with pickups seeing the highest increase, from an average age of 11.2 years in 2009 to 13.6 years as of last year. Also correlating with this is the fact that consumers are now spending more on vehicle repairs and maintenance, since it’s often cheaper to keep a used car running than it is to pay for a new one. What doesn’t help is that these old cars are much less fuel efficient than newer vehicles, also costing owners more.

Survey Says Fuel Economy Matters

To that point, a survey by Autolist of 1,132 current car shoppers found that 41% of respondents disagreed with Donald Trump’s proposal to freeze fuel economy standards, with a further 30% being on the fence about it. Half of respondents also wanted California to retain its authority to set its own emissions standards. So despite the current trend toward SUVs and trucks, apparently people like the idea of fuel economy, but maybe it’s just not for them.

Keep a Cool Head While Riding

The news that I’m planning on selling my motorcycle won’t be new to any long-time listeners, but part of the reason I’m selling is because this time of year is the absolute worst to get out and have a hot engine between your legs. I’m one of those “all the gear, all the time” guys who doesn’t care to have my skin peeled off by the road surface if something goes wrong, which means I’m wearing Kevlar jeans and body armor, which gets really, really hot when it’s 90 degrees, sunny and humid out. Well for whiny people like me, a company called Feher has come along and just unveiled their new ACH-1, which they call the world’s first self-contained air-conditioned motorcycle helmet. It’s a full-face model that actually plugs into the battery on your bike via a long cord that you can snake down your jacket or via a battery pack. It uses the same sort of tech that car makers use to make cooled seats, delivering filtered, cooled air throughout the helmet without somehow giving you brain freeze. The company says it can keep your head 10-15 degrees cooler than the ambient air temperature, which is pretty significant. Comfort doesn’t come cheap though, and at $600, a moderately cooler skull is not going to persuade me to keep my Triumph.

Missing Mustang Found After Fifty Years

Way back in 1967, Ford built a Mustang Shelby GT500 EXP prototype to serve as the model for the 1968 Mustang California Special. This one-off prototype was the only GT500 hardtop coupe ever built by Shelby and factory-equipped with dual quad carburetors. The car, nicknamed “Little Red,” was mysteriously lost after production and only resurfaced this week in North Texas after being missing for 50 years. Intrepid researchers managed to track down the car using its Ford VIN rather than the Shelby serial number and found the current owner, who had kept it on a lot for 20 years. Now the guys who want to restore the car want to piece together the rest of the car’s history and just how it managed to go missing for so long. They’ve even started a website, shelbyprototypecoupes.com to help crowd source information, so if you happen to know anything, go contribute.

Automotive Bounty Hunters, Your Time is Now

In other lost car news, a vintage car dealer is claiming that his customized 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300SL Gullwing was stolen from a parking lot near the Nürburgring recently, and it’s worth more than $1.9 million. The dealer isn’t just sitting around, he’s offering almost $300,000 in reward money to motivate people to go out and find the car for him. This could include the thief, who could make a cool $300,000 just by saying they found it somewhere along the Autobahn. Unfortunately, this thing has probably already been chopped and parted out because we can’t have nice things in this world.

VW Shoots for the Stars, Hits Hail

If you’ve watched any documentary about World War II, you’ll probably know that Hitler was a pretty innovative guy and was constantly looking for crazy new ways to kill lots of people. One of these things the Nazis looked into was weather control, which, along with many other things, didn’t really pan out for them. Here we are, 80 or so years later and Volkswagen are at it again, trying to control the weather around their plant in Puebla, Mexico. The company has been using anti-hail cannons that fire off loud shockwaves that theoretically break up hail stones before they can form, which would prevent the cars leaving the factory from getting damaged. Now, there’s absolutely no evidence to support that these things actually do anything more than just make obnoxious booming sounds whenever there are clouds, but that hasn’t stopped neighboring farms from suing Volkswagen, claiming that the cannons are stopping rain from reaching their fields. Either fed up with the lawsuit or with the fact that these things are bogus and useless, VW has stopped using them to protect their precious Jettas. Here’s an idea, it sounds like you’re getting a lot of sun; install some solar panels over the parking lots to protect the cars and generate some extra power for the plant. That one is free, but I usually charge by the idea.

Asshats Arrested in Bay Bridge Burnout Bust

Good things to do in San Francisco include riding the trolley, eating some sourdough bread, visiting Lombard Street and buying a sweatshirt because you didn’t think someplace could be so incredibly cold in the summertime. Bad things to do include getting your buddies to shut down traffic on the Bay Bridge so you and your homies could rip some burnouts and donuts on the closed highway. For inconsiderately wasting a ton of people’s time on Sunday morning last week, one man in a white Mustang (of course) was arrested while another Mustang driver and a MkIII Supra driver miraculously got away. How? Oh, maybe because they were blocking traffic preventing cops from getting to them? What’s more curious is how the Mustang driver managed to get caught. How long do you have to be doing donuts on a closed highway in a major city before the cops show up?

Authored by
Devlin Riggs

Tesla’s Troubling Twitterer-In-Chief

Photo by The New York Times

Our top story last week concerned Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s tweet about taking the company private and my assessment was that it would solve all the company’s problems. I should have qualified that a little bit in that it would solve all the problems except the one sitting in the company’s fanciest chair - Elon himself. While it’s a great move for him to continue to exert more control over the company he founded, his control is pretty much the last thing the company needs to be successful. Which makes it all the more strange that he gave a long, winding interview to the New York Times this week where he was described as both laughing and crying and where he invited anyone to take over the company if they thought they were better suited to do the job. Let’s review the qualifications for how some other CEO might do something different then.

First, another CEO probably wouldn’t work 120 hours a week, neglecting his kids and setting an unhealthy and unreasonable example for the working environment for his colleagues. They probably shouldn’t take Ambien in order to fall asleep or go on drug-induced social media rants as some investors suspect he’s doing instead of sleeping. 

Second, a replacement CEO might consider consulting board members, attorneys, accountants or any other department before casually tweeting out a threat to buy out the company, which Musk did to the shock of his Board of Directors and to the displeasure of shareholders and the SEC. Not only has the company been subpoenaed for information related to the claims made in the tweet, there have also now been four lawsuits seeking class action status against Musk and Tesla because of the instability rocking the company’s stock price in the wake of the tweet. As it turns out, when you tweet out financially relevant information saying “funding secured,” you actually really must have your funding secured instead of only having some vague interest from a shady Saudi fund that, according to multiple reports, is not capable of financing the funding that you are meant to have secured. 

Finally, another CEO might focus less on investors short selling stock and more on the actual vehicles being produced to ensure that company is succeeding and fulfilling the promises the CEO sets for it. CNBC reports that Model 3 production is humming along at more than 5,000 units a week, which is the benchmark Musk set for the company, but Carscoops also reported that a $78,000 Model 3 was sent to a buyer kitted with three white door trim panels and one brown one. It seems unlikely that the buyer would’ve specified something like that and for nearly $80,000, you might hope that a company could look at its finished product to ensure that all the boxes were ticked before shipping it off to a buyer. There were multiple occasions during the production and shipment process where this problem might’ve been spotted but wasn’t, and a CEO should make it a priority to ensure that quality control on luxury vehicles is a little tighter than that.

So the invitation stands, if you think you can do a better job than Elon Musk, he’ll hand you the keys himself. Unless, of course, it turns out this is another one of those promises he come up just a bit short on.
 

Authored by
Devlin Riggs

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.

Headlines for the Week of June 11th, 2018

Daimler Defeat Devices Doom Diesels

In Germany this week, Transport Minister Andreas Scheuer made like a middle school principal and called Daimler CEO Dieter Zietsche to his office. On Monday, he asked a sheepish Zietsche if he know how exactly five cheating devices were found in new Mercedes diesel engines. Of course Dieter claimed he had no knowledge of such a thing and that it was his classmate Martin Winterkorn over at Volkswagen who was the cheater! Well, said Principal Scheuer, he didn’t believe that, but he did believe that Daimler had put defeat devices in as many as one million recent Mercedes cars to try to skirt the Euro 6 emissions standards and that, to make things right, Dieter would have to do the equivalent of resubmitting his homework. Which in automotive terms is recalling 774,000 of their latest model diesels. All joking aside, these cars were probably designed after Volkswagen’s dieselgate scandal came to light, so just how was it Daimler thought they were going to get away with this? And how far does this dieselgate rabbit hole go? The more they cheat, the more it seems like diesel cannot be made clean and really has no future.

Tesla Drops Employees, Props Autopilot

Just one week, I’d love to go through Feedly, which is an RSS reader I use to aggregate my news and think, “oh wow, not a single notable thing about Tesla this week, I guess their 5,000 vehicle production rate is humming along smoothly.” Sadly, that was not this week and they remain the brand mentioned more than any other on my and most websites.

First, some lawsuits; one from an employee who alleges he was fired after he expressed concerns about workplace safety, and another who claims he was ousted after expressing interest in joining a union. Both are crimes, both will probably be settled to nobody’s satisfaction, and both have been denied by the company. Why cover this? Because such rumors have been floating around for a long time and the more we hear about them, the more it seems Tesla has a toxic culture of secrecy, cover-ups and anti-union sentiment, which is a problem when it comes to protecting workers’ rights and well being. Also because no other company is having this sort of problem, at least not visibly.

Then came the news that Tesla is laying off nine percent of their workforce in an effort to streamline efficiency and gain better profitability, which is to say “any profitability at all.” It sounds like the cuts will come primarily from salaried positions because they need all hands on deck for the production of their vehicles. Despite planning factories in Shanghai and Europe, Musk still claims he won’t have to raise any new capital and that the company will be profitable by the third or fourth quarter of this year, so this culling is probably critical to getting there or close.

Finally, hot on the heels of a report from the Association of British Insurers and Thatcham Research indicated that calling vehicles “autonomous” led to dangerous grey areas and driver over-reliance on technology, Tesla announced that they will begin rolling out full self-driving features this August. Details are scarce (as they are on the fact that the next Roadster will apparently have rocket thrusters), but if there’s one thing that’s certain, it’s that people are too dumb for this technology. If you hear the word “autonomous” and you immediately stop listening to anything else and immediately start thinking that cars are going to do everything for you, you should not be allowed as a passenger in a car, let alone driving. Seriously, hop on a train.

Toyota Drops Cool Bill on Grab

Any time a car maker spends a billion dollars, it’s going to get some attention, and that’s just what Toyota did this week when it took a stake in Singapore’s Grab Holdings, which is Southeast Asia’s largest car hailing service, a company that drove Uber out of their home markets. That Toyota had to spend so much to buy in indicates not only the growing value of ride sharing, but the view among car companies that they think that traditional vehicle ownership is going to be majorly disrupted by car sharing and autonomous ride hailing services. Toyota’s big cash drop means they’ll get a seat on Grab’s board of directors, which analysts say almost guarantees that Grab will start buying Toyota cars for its service. As they say, you gotta spend money to make money, and with $54 billion in cash laying around, I’d say Toyota has some they can spend! Toyota has increased partnerships and investments in a bunch of automotive disruption companies that focus on ride hailing, ride sharing, electric vehicles and autonomous cars, so they are hedging their bets that one or more of those is going to take off and they’ll be well-positioned to take advantage. Once more, Ford should be taking note of how Toyota does business before they have to kill off their entire passenger car production because they didn’t plan well enough.

Autonomous Vehicles will be SO GREAT

Even though autonomous cars aren’t very good right now, they won’t always be glorified assisted driving systems. According to a report by Security America’s Future Energy, autonomous vehicles will be so great for everyone and will lead to an incredible $796 billion in total annual benefits by 2050. This comes from congestion mitigation and economic impact as well as the totally super easy to quantify “quality of life improvements.” It also means cost cutting for taxis and truckers since those hundreds of thousands or millions of jobs will be taken over by robots, and it’s like you always hear those people who lose their jobs to robots say, “but my quality of life is so much better now that I’m unemployed.” This report is full of bogus or at the very least dubious data and projections, including safety because, as we’ve been learning lately, safety isn’t exactly guaranteed by autonomous vehicles. Maybe by 2050 they’ll have it all figured out. That’s only 32 years or so from now.

Food in Fords Making Moves in Miami

Speaking of autonomous vehicles, when Ford isn’t buying old train stations in Detroit to slap their logo on, they’re building customized Ford Transit Connects to act as Postmates food delivery vehicles in Miami. The small vans will be equipped with curbside lockers to hold food, which will be placed in the car by the restaurant after a customer places an order through the app. The food will then be taken to the customer who will receive a locker number and code to unlock the locker. Car arrives, customer gets food, and we all move on with our lives without having to make polite small talk with the delivery person while you try to decide how generous you will be with the tip. In the wake of vacating sedan and small car sales, Ford may be jumping in with both feet on this “autonomous mobility” movement sector and this pilot project could help inform systems and layout for an entirely food delivery-focused vehicle sometime in the future. I look forward to the Domino’s Transit that will cook my pizza while it’s on the way to my house. I don’t mind having to cut it because it’s not like the people at the store actually do it worth a damn anyway.

China Proves U.S. IS Not so Bad

Starting on July 1st of this year, China will be rolling out a voluntary system by which all new cars will have RFID chips placed on the windshield of vehicles, thereby allowing the Chinese government to use its dense network of surveillance technology to track you wherever you go. If you’re thinking, “well at least it’s voluntary,” starting in 2019, it won’t be anymore, and all of those 30 million or so new cars sold in the world’s largest car market every year will be equipped with these chips. China already has a number of surveillance systems, including incredible facial recognition technology, in place that use artificial intelligence to track criminals and shame people with high debts or for petty shit like jaywalking, so this is just another way of maintaining social control, and probably another way in which China can expand its incredibly creepy social rating system. While it sounds like this is yet another step on China’s journey into a dystopian nightmare, bear in mind that we all carry around cell phones equipped with RFIDs, so this could already be happening in the U.S. without your knowledge.

Dieselgate Can’t Stop Won’t Stop

Despite beginning in 2015, here we are three years later and Volkswagen is still dealing with the consequences of their diesel cheating scandal or “dieselgate.” They set aside 28.5 billion Euro to cover the sprawling fines and lawsuits stemming from their inability to make clean diesels that won’t kill us with excess carbon pollution, but just this week they were hit with another one billion euro fine from the German government for the same scandal. The Germans’ investigation was apparently much more exhaustive than the one we had here in the U.S. because it took way longer, but also resulted in lower fines. Add to this the fact that former owners of cheating diesel cars in Vermont and Arizona will receive $1,000 for the hassle of having to turn their cars back in and this thing only gets more expensive for Volkswagen.  In any case, they have to be getting close to putting this whole thing behind them. Just too bad the millions of people in Europe who will likely die early from inhaling those diesel fumes won’t be able to. SAD!

Fishy Filings Could Trouble Toyota

For the last…ever, people and politicians have been saying “where are the jobs?” and this year, Toyota and Mazda came through, committing to spend $1.6 billion on a new plant in Alabama, where everyone was super happy to greet them. Well, almost everyone, because the Center for Biological Diversity has been saying for years, “what about the fish?” Specifically, the Spring Pygmy Sunfish, which is a rare species and could theoretically be driven to extinction by the construction of the factory and the various infrastructure and activities around it. In a lawsuit filed this week, the Center alleges there hasn’t been enough legal protection for the fish’s only known habitat near the factory location, and they’re hoping to get the Fish and Wildlife Service to make some special efforts to protect the important characteristics of the apparently critical habitat. All this for a small striped fish that rarely exceeds an inch in length and has already been presumed extinct twice before someone found one living somewhere. But being the relative conservationist that I am, it strikes me that it can’t be that hard to accommodate some small fish, plus what if there’s like a butterfly effect where if this fish dies, Elon Musk never colonizes mars? Talk about a disaster.

Fuel Economy Matters, but Does it Really?

A new study released this week by Consumers Union and sent to me by AllWaysDrive Blog minion Jordan revealed that, among 19 popular vehicle features, almost 1,900 drivers chose purchase cost, reliability, safety and fuel economy as their top four most important, in that order. The researchers also asked study participants which vehicle they would prefer and participants generally chose options that cost 25% more but increased reliability, safety, and fuel economy. Less important were acceleration and performance, which surely indicates that this study polled the wrong people. Setting aside the fact that the study’s sample size was relatively small compared with the total car buying public, this isn’t really reflective of reality, with the average cost of cars climbing and the average fuel economy of new cars sold actually decreasing since mid-2014 with the booming sales of SUVs and crossovers. So there’s obviously a disconnect between what consumers say they want in an ideal car and what they actually end up buying. Go figure that people can’t be trusted to tell the truth!

Cars Drivers Drive the Least

If you’ve looked on the app Autolist for a car, which I highly recommend you do, you’ve probably seen a bunch of “online only” results from a company called Carvana, which will deliver vehicles to your door in a sort of backwards dealership kind of situation. Well, they also come up with lists, apparently, and after analyzing more than 1.6 million automotive sales from January through May of this year, they’ve come up with a list of vehicles they say get driven the least each year. In the top 15, you get your regular list of high class Mercedes and BMWs that are someone’s “treat yoself” vehicle when they’re not driving their ’94 Ford Ranger back and forth to work, and the same go with the Sunday cars like the Maserati Ghibli, Lexus RC, M4 and sure, even the Volkswagen Beetle. Also on the list are the Nissan Leaf and BMW i3, which people don’t drive because of range anxiety and the Smart ForTwo which people don’t drive because it’s crap. But there are cars on the list like the Mini Cooper, VW Golf Sportwagen and Buick Encore, which are just sort of normal cars. Why are you not driving your Buick Encores, people? Is it because you’re tired of people asking “oh, that’s a Buick?” But leading the list are the Porsche 911 and Chevy Corvette, which are driven just 4,700 and 4,500 miles per year on average, which is just a crying shame because they are both some of the best cars to drive. You stupid collectors are ruining everything!

Fifth Gear Returns this Fall

After the bummer news last week that Matt LeBlanc was leaving Top Gear after his third season, we got a boost this week with the news that competing show Fifth Gear would be returning this fall, with old hosts and top blokes Tiff Needell and Jason Plato once again hosting after a three year hiatus. Fifth Gear never had the budget of Top Gear, didn’t do the crazy stunts and always focused less on the antics of three weird oldies instead of the cars themselves, which was always attractive to the real car nerds out there, even if it was a bit tougher to get the significant others interested. As I mentioned when the old Top Gear crew left for the Grand Tour, more car shows will never be a bad thing and, even if Vicki Butler-Henderson doesn’t return, I’m going to try to find a way to tune in here in the States, and so should you.

Ford Files Patent for Existing Thing

When they’re not buying train stations, delivering Miami’s to-go-orders or killing off popular vehicle models, Ford is busy filing patent applications for silly things that have existed for decades. Recently, the company applied for a patent for a screen that drops from a car’s tailgate to provide a privacy curtain. One could imagine this being especially handy at the beach for changing out of a swimsuit before hopping back into the car or for doing your business while out in the woods or when overcome with a sudden case of bowel evacuation syndrome because you ate curry for lunch and you knew it was risky but decided dammit, Darryl, just go for it. In any case, these screens have been around for years and you can buy them on Amazon if you’re the type of person who chooses not to think about if someone could just look through the windshield and see you despite the privacy curtain. The difference here is that they will apparently be built into the tailgate instead of being an add-on you purchase separately. There’s also a variant that deploys into an awning, basically giving you a shady spot to sit behind your car on sunny days. Plus, with the fact that the Mustang will be the only Ford vehicle without a hatchback or tailgate, this means they could apply it to almost every single car in their U.S. lineup! Hooray for small victories? 

Infrastructure, Now with Stuffed Crust

After so many campaign promises by so many politicians to address the country’s crumbling infrastructure, we are finally starting to see some progress being made. Oh, wait, did you think the government was doing something? Oh, no, sorry. We can’t even get a coherent trade policy. The entity currently working on restoring our roads is actually Domino’s Pizza. Under the guise of creating a smoother ride for their delivery vehicles so our pizzas don’t arrive in a jumbled mess, Domino’s is fixing potholes from California to Texas to Delaware and, after paving over the road canyons, painting them with a very tasteful Domino’s logo and their tagline, “Oh yes we did.” Yes, this is a publicity stunt and yes it’s working but hell no, I don’t mind driving over Domino’s logos in the streets instead of feeling the jarring crash of a six-inch deep pothole and wondering if my wheel has bent so much I won’t make it home. Oh yes you did, Domino’s, because oh no, our elected officials can’t.

Authored by
Devlin Riggs

Headlines for the Week of June 4th, 2018

EVs Are Takin' Our Jerbs!

Electric vehicles are all fun and games except for the fact that they contain 30% fewer parts than internal combustion vehicles. While, to most of us, that’s a good thing because it means less can go wrong, it also means there’s less to make. So while many new jobs are created in the fields of battery and motor technology, in Germany alone, as many as 75,000 engine and transmission jobs may be lost if as many as 25% of vehicle sales are electric by 2030. German labor representatives are on the case now, trying to put together plans to maintain jobs by retraining workers in new, relevant fields, or basically, what we refuse to do in America while instead pandering to people who don’t want to give up their careers working in unskilled labor areas that are obsolete. At least one country understands progress!

WRC goes All-EV

The FIA World Council this week approved big changes to the World Rally Championship, moving vehicles to a common motor setup, and those motors will be all-electric. They’ll also use common batteries and a common chassis, but the parts around those - suspension, steering, equipment, etc. - will be up to each team. In that regard, it won’t be entirely down to driver skill because they’re all driving the same car and they will all have the same power, 670 horses from twin electric motors powering all four wheels. The common components will help keep costs down, which has been a growing problem in racing across many series, and is the reason there’s only one team in the top level of the World Endurance Championship. Plus, the relatively short sprint distance of rallying is much more well-suited to electric vehicles compared with endurance racing because of range concerns. I think for many viewers and spectators though, it’s going to be hard to get over hearing the absolute chaos of turbocharged motors hurtling steel and plastic through woods and along cliffs. As for the people living along those cliffs though, they’ll probably really appreciate it.

GM Exec Crashes at Really Bad Time

If you’re a skilled driver who loves vehicles and you happen to crash a car on the track during an Indy car race, chances are you’ll be a bit sheepish but it’s okay, you’re a race car driver and this happens sometimes. But if you happen to be the pace car driver and you wreck the pace car, causing a half hour delay in the start of the race because you spun your Chevy Corvette ZR1 into a wall, you will feel mortified. One can’t help but feel a bit sorry for GM EVP of Global Product Development Mark Reuss, who did just that before the Detroit Grand Prix of Belle Isle this week. Even Indy 500 winner and fast circle man Will Power jumped to his defense saying the corner Reuss took is a bit off-camber and unloads the rear wheels, causing slippage. He even went so far as to issue a really painful apology that he 100 percent didn’t have to do because if you can’t imagine feeling exactly how he felt when he crashed that car in front of thousands of people, you need to be put on an island far away from people because you are a sociopath.

Come On and Take a Free (Autonomous) Ride

Great news for Californians as a new rule has just gone into place allowing you to be picked up by a fully autonomous vehicle. In even better news, the companies running these vehicles can’t charge you a fare for the journey because this is all in the name of testing technology and not capitalism. Well it’s in the name of future capitalism. But focus on free today. Problem is, only one company has applied for a permit to test fully autonomous vehicles in the state, and these systems aren’t exactly totally safe, as we’ve been seeing recently, so maybe don’t hold out for a rare free ride from a company that may kill you.

Tesla Investor Call Sans Fireworks for Once

Tesla held its annual stockholders meeting this week and we got some answers to boring bonehead questions without a healthy dose of attitude for once. The bad news is there is no real super interesting news, but the good news is there’s no real super interesting news. Musk said production of Model 3s is humming right along and they anticipate reaching 5,000 units per week by the end of this month, but right hand drive and base models are still going to have to wait until next year. He said the Model 3 was beating its rivals in sales, namely the BMW 3 series, Audi A4, Lexus IS and Mercedes C-Class. Hidden in that little gem was the fact that nearly a quarter of all Model 3 reservations have been canceled, either by the company or by buyers. While that sounds like bad news, to have that many cancellations and still be outselling the competition really illustrates the ongoing hype around and interest in the car. Finally, Musk said the Model Y was on schedule for release in 2020 along with the new Roadster and Semi. He also hinted that sometime after that, Tesla would be working on a Volkswagen Golf-sized hatchback, which makes sense since it’s the best-selling car in Europe. One can’t help but wonder if, by the time they get around to it, if Volkswagen won’t already have a mass-market electric hatchback on sale, beating them to the punch. Between the eGolf, the Golf GTE and the various VW ID cars, they have an awful lot of irons in the fire.

Lamborghini Awaits Worthy Battery Power

As for Tesla’s competition, they won’t be getting any from Lamborghini, at least for a while because the Italian supercar manufacturer says no battery exists yet that is worthy enough to be bestowed upon one of their raging bulls. Chief Technical Officer Maurizio Reggiani said that they’re aiming for brutal acceleration, a top speed of at least 186 and the range to be able to complete three laps of the Nurburgring. Given that the Nordschliefe is only 12.9 miles, achieving a range of 40 miles seems awfully doable, but I bet you’d be surprised how quickly that range disappears when you’re pushing a Lamborghini as hard as it’ll go around the German forest. But one needs only look at Tesla’s Roadster for evidence that batteries with incredible acceleration and high top speeds remain only a few years away. Even their top of line Model Ss feature an aptly named “insanity mode” which is damn quick. Lamborghinis, however, are permanently stuck in insanity mode, which is sort of why we like them so much.

Your Next Honda, Powered by GM

Tell me if this sounds familiar – A friend of yours is shopping for a car and wants something efficient, so you suggest the Chevy Volt. You get the response, “Yeah, but I want something reliable, so I’m thinking Prius or Insight." Well, the next time you have that conversation, you can fire back, “Yeah, well Honda likes General Motors’ battery technology so much that they recently signed an agreement to use their batteries in future electric vehicles.” Because that just happened this week. If you really want to turn the screw, you can say something like, “Honda is so far behind on battery technology, the deal really isn’t even a collaboration. The deal basically just gets GM a better deal because they can buy more batteries in bulk and then give them to Honda. They may be collaborating on hydrogen fuel cells in a more equitable partnership, but if you buy a Honda electric vehicle in the future, just know you’re basically getting a GM.” That’s not entirely true because motors and transmissions and well, the rest of the cars will be different, but sometimes it’s just good to knock people down a peg or two if they’re blindly brand loyal.

Hyundai’s Connected Car Tech Detailed

Are you the type of person who is too lazy to swipe a credit card or get out of your car for some nachos? Well Hyundai is designing a system just for you! Their Hyundai Digital Wallet and access to purchasing platform Xevo will allow drivers to pay for things like food and fuel and parking directly from the car without having to reach into your pocket or purse to get your preferred payment method. Before long, the steering wheel can just be replaced with a robotic arm that shoves churros into our mouths as the vehicles drive themselves to our destination.

While everyone loves churros, not everyone loves big brother, and a portion of Hyundai’s connected car tech pertains specifically to driver analytics, which the car will collect and share with a company called Verisk, who will give you a Verisk Driver Score, which can then be passed on to your insurance company if you either give them permission or simply don’t tell them not to. This is allegedly to offer tips and discounts on courses to help improve driving and not to tattle to your insurance company that you’re a dangerous driver, but I think the rest of the world can join me in issuing a collective fuuuuuuuuck that on this plan. Some drivers certainly could use some help not sucking, but I will hold myself responsible for informing them of their inadequacy by way of horn blaring and wild gesticulations.

Hyundai Missed the Diesel Bus

And poor Hyundai, they really try, but sometimes, they just kind of look like the guy at a hockey game who is so busy playing Pokemon GO that they miss a goal getting scored and then look up like “oh, what happened, do I clap now?” This week was one of those times because immediately after Nissan and Renault announced that they were both discontinuing development of diesel engines, Hyundai bursts into the room and is like “here it is, our new 2019 Tucson, which features a mild hybrid diesel engine!” Everyone’s like “oh, did he not hear the news?” I mean, truth be told, Mazda has some diesels coming up too, but these are going to be hard sales in Europe where diesels are tanking harder than the Las Vegas Golden Knights right now.

Most & Least Expensive Cars to Insure for 2018

Speaking of insurance, we got a couple of lists today of the most and least expensive cars in the country to insure. The top five most expensive included the Dodge Challenger, which no doubt made the list because of its Hellcat version, and the Toyota 86 and Mitsubishi Lancer, which made the list because they’re driven by young reckless kids. Topping the list though were the Mercedes S-Class and the Tesla Model S, undoubtedly earning their places because of high repair costs and the incredible amount of technology in each.

As for the cheapest to insure, there were predictably a bunch of Toyotas and Hondas, some GMC vehicles, most full-size trucks and, interestingly, the Chevrolet Corvette, which clocked in as the 12th cheapest car to insure. Ahead of it were a bunch more trucks and luxury crossovers and the Jeep Wrangler, which was number six, but the absolute cheapest car to insure in the U.S. this year was the Subaru Outback with its Eyesight forward collision avoidance technology. On average, buyers paid just less than $540 total per year, which is just about half my bill for the GTI, which is only moderately depressing. But it makes sense. They have great visibility, good reliability, good crash test ratings and are driven by crunchy dog-having, oatmeal-loving hippies who never exceed the speed limit and clean up their campsites after themselves. Not that insurance companies would profile people like that. 

Coder Boy’s Wild Ride

In a bizarre story from Virginia this week, a National Guard soldier got hopped up on drugs and stole an armored personnel carrier, then got engaged in a not-so-high speed chase with police after which he was arrested and charged with a whole slew of crimes because, go figure, the National Guard doesn’t appreciate you stealing their things. An APC is basically a tracked tank but without a turret and with a larger interior to accommodate the transport of troops. It’s big, it’s tan, it’s hard to miss flying down the streets of Richmond. Making the story even more bizarre is that this soldier is a sort of well-known coder who made an anti-social justice variant of a secure web browser and tried desperately to get the attention of an accused sexual abuser. Nobody is still sure why he stole the APC but cocaine is a hell of a drug, so maybe he decided “well, it’s there and probably more fun than an Uber home.”

It’s Rainin’ Merde

Finally, in truly disgusting news this week, a woman and her son in British Columbia, Canada were driving along at about 160 miles or a billion kilometers as they call them up there, from Vancouver when they were suddenly struck by a cascade of what appeared to be sewage flying through their open sunroof. One minute, you’re cruising along enjoying one of the many beautiful days the Pacific Northwest has to offer, the next, you’re getting pink eye from someone taking the afternoon flight from Philadelphia. The driver suspects it was sewage from a plane that just so happened to have the supreme bad timing and placement to hit her open sunroof, which is possible, but rare and hardly a reason to keep your sunroofs closed out of sheer paranoia. But can you imagine how much worse it would’ve been if she had been driving a convertible?

Authored by
Devlin Riggs

Headlines for the Week of May 28th, 2018

Tesla Hits Emergency Vehicle...Again

Let’s see if you’ve read this one before - A man’s driving his Tesla Model S and decides to relax a bit so he kicks on the Autopilot mode, which is working great, keeping him in the lines and evenly spaced between cars right up until the point where it runs him full speed into the back of an emergency vehicle. Oh, sounds familiar? It’s sort of becoming a thing, isn’t it? Except this time it wasn’t a firetruck, it was a Laguna Beach Police Explorer.

Photo by ABC News

The driver says autopilot was on, but we don’t know for sure yet if that was the case. What certainly is the case though, is that the driver was most definitely not fully attentive, which they are supposed to be when driving in autopilot mode because, guess what? People who are fully attentive will be driving, not letting the car do it.

It’s so widely accepted that people do not pay attention when the car is in autopilot mode that Shutterstock now has a stock video of a “sleeping” driver cruising along in a Tesla as it drives itself. This is about the time Elon Musk chirps up and howls at the media for covering another crash of his when there are millions of crashes every day. He’s not wrong here, especially since only minor injuries were sustained by the Model S’s driver in Laguna Beach. But it’s like when my mom let me have a rubber band gun when I was ten - I was given strict guidelines for how it could be used and then I went and shot my brother in the eye. I wasn’t aiming for his eye but hey, his eye got in the way of my shot. Shit happens. And guess what happened then? Yeah, my mom took away the rubber band gun. If people continue to demonstrate they cannot be trusted to use a technology the way it is designed to be used, then it’s either designed wrong or needs to be taken away until people behave. And yes, I realize this could be said about motor vehicles in general, but driving is a privilege and not a right, which the state can take away if you are truly and repeatedly bad at it! But given that Elon’s out there making my rubber band gun look lame with his flamethrowers and journalist credibility ratings services, I doubt he’ll have time to see the sense in my argument.

Tesla Gets Thumbs Up after Thumbs Very Down

After Consumer Reports knocked Tesla’s Model 3 for braking performance worse than a Ford F-150, Elon Musk first had a tantrum, then said everything could be fixed with an over-the-air firmware update, presumably to re-calibrate regenerative braking and increase the performance of the actual brakes on the vehicle. Less than a week later, out goes the update and in comes a big thumbs up from Consumer Reports, who have now bestowed their coveted “recommended” rating upon Tesla’s smallest car. I said last week that it would’ve been nice for the company to get it right the first time, but I’m probably being a little harsh, because almost no company gets their cars right the first time. Look at Ford, who has been making vehicles for a hundred years. They’ve recalled my wife’s Fusion three times now for different things. But with the Model 3, no recall is required. They just upload a fix, your car downloads it and boom, you’re good to go with better performance. It’s really honestly impressive that is even possible now, but as the owner of a phone that has been bricked by an over-the-air update, I can say it’s not a completely foolproof plan to avoid recalls. But good on Tesla for addressing a problem swiftly.

California Unveils Digital License Plates for Idiots

On the subject of California, the state unveiled new digital license plates this week, which are basically e-readers flipped on their sides that display your license number and have a GPS tracker, allowing big brother to see how often you drive past your ex’s house to see if someone new is staying over before you head back to your lonely apartment for a dinner of cheese and sadness. The plates can also display other messages, like advertisements while vehicles are parked, which is just exactly what the world needs more of. And they can be tracked if your car is stolen by a criminal stupid enough to not remove the license plate as the very first thing after actually stealing your car. They will be available for purchase through dealerships at a cost of $700, excluding installation costs and a $7 monthly subscription fee, while I’m not sure what you’re subscribing to other than the appearance of being a sucker. I could now go into how pointless and stupid this is, especially considering it goes on the most vulnerable part of your car in the event of fender benders, but I think you get the point already.

Weekend Motorsports Roundup

There was some racing going on this weekend, all over the place, starting with the Monaco Grand Prix in, well, Monaco. The famous city circuit is known for being tight and showcasing the technical skills of drivers rather than the flat-out speed of the cars and this year was no different. In fact, speed mattered so little that Daniel Ricciardo was able to win the race with a broken car down about 160 horsepower from Sebastian Vettel’s Ferrari behind him. In fact, every single driver who finished the race finished in the same position that they started after qualifying. So apart from pit stops, no real passing, which does not make for very compelling racing.

Speaking of uncompelling racing, the Indy 500 was also this weekend and it was won by Will Power, who managed to go around in circles faster than all the other drivers who went around in circles. Congratulations to fast circle man Will Power.

In more exciting racing news, the inaugural Americas Rallycross event took place this weekend in, um, not Americas. It’s taking the place of the Global Rallycross series that went belly up so it’s maybe not so surprising to see the cars racing at Silverstone in the UK. In any case, ex-German Touring Car racer Timo Scheider finished second in qualifying. Normally, second place finishers and qualifying laps aren’t notable except this one is because Timo finished it with his hood flipped up over his windshield. Stop and put it down? Ain’t nobody got time for that! Especially when every second counts and you’re going sideways so often you can just use your door windows to see where you’re going. And perhaps it’s because the course requires so much sideways driving that the winner of the actual event was Tanner Foust, former Top Gear US host who is incapable of driving in a straight line or swearing, and with whom I want to be good buddies. Congrats, Tanner!

Audi’s Bringing Cameras and Efficiency

What has been a key feature on concept cars for years may become a reality on the forthcoming Audi E-Tron. Whereas previously US law mandated that cars come equipped with side view mirrors, a revision to that regulation (we are in the age of deregulation, after all) will mean car companies can now use cameras and screens instead of glass. The advantage here is that wing mirrors generate drag that can cost electric vehicles as much as three whole miles of range, so by eliminating them, car companies can get better range out of their batteries and charge you thousands more for expensive cameras and screens instead of cheap mirrors and plastic housings. There aren’t many other advantages of cameras. Glass mirrors allow you a 3D stereoscopic view of what’s behind you, allowing for better depth perception, they don’t have screens that wash out in direct sunlight and they aren’t blinded by headlights when it’s dark. But progress, Audi will say, to which I respond, I’d rather sacrifice three miles of charge to be able to better see what’s on either side of me.

U.S. Production Update

Several companies announced new plans for U.S. production last week, some of which I’m sure a certain politician will use as evidence that his trade war threats and tariffs are paying off despite no credible evidence of a connection. First, Hyundai is investing $388 million towards building a new plant in Alabama where motors for the Sonata, Elantra and Santa Fe will be built. This of course means more jobs for hard working Americans, but at the same time, only fifty hard working Americans will be able to find new work there.

But Nissan is going the opposite direction, scaling back their North American production by 20 percent to adjust to falling profitability. Low demand has led to greater incentives and more fleet sales, which have decreased profitability for Japan’s second largest automaker. Fortunately, no employees are being let go at the two assembly plants in the US and three in Mexico, but I guess they’re going to be able to spend more time making sure all the bolts are tight on those Maximas and Rogues.

EVs Could Cost Governments Billions

Right now, many governments are investing in subsidies for electric vehicles and the infrastructure to support them, but that may not last too long because the same cars that governments want us to drive could end up costing billions in lost tax revenue. Right now, gas taxes are a huge source of funding for infrastructure support, but as EVs don’t use fuel, that revenue could dry up. The International Energy Agency estimates that, if 30 percent of new car and truck sales by 2030 are electric (which is hugely ambitious), governments worldwide could be missing $92 billion in tax revenue. Obviously that’s going to have to be made up somehow, whether through distance driven taxes or maybe via our electric bills. Otherwise those potholes and crumbling bridges will never be replaced.

Cars are Too Expensive

A new report by CNBC has revealed that the average monthly payment for a new vehicle is a whopping $523, in addition to the fact that loan terms extending as far as 96 months, or eight years, is becoming far more common. Average length is around 67 months, so somewhere in between five and six years, and the total amount borrowed for vehicles rests at around $31,500. All of these numbers represent unprecedented highs, which is a problem considering interest rates are increasing, averaging now 5.17 percent on new vehicle loans. It’s even more of a problem when you consider that, according to my buddy Chuck at the Federal Reserve, the average disposable personal income per capita is just $44,000, which equates to less than $3,700 per month. According to LendingTree, the average monthly Mortgage payment is around $1,100, meaning Americans are spending more than 43 percent of their income on just their car and their house. That may not sound like much, but as the price of goods and services like food and health care increase, consumers are less able to afford their lifestyles. Plus that disposable income number includes benefits and employer contributions to 401ks and pensions. If this sounds familiar, a similar thing happened in 2008 when housing prices were crazy high and we know how that all turned out. But it’s probably fine, guys. After all, 90-day delinquent loans only increased to 4.3 percent this past quarter and Bloomberg reports that people are prioritizing cell phone bills over their auto loans and credit cards, with PeerIQ CEO Ram Ahluwalia saying “the car is no longer a central asset.” But it’s fine.

Uber Pads Wallet, Prepares for IPO

Fresh off surprising Pittsburgh’s mayor with resuming autonomous vehicle testing in the city, Uber now wants to be the “Amazon for Transportation,” according to CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. Between its ride hailing service and UberEats, the company is doing pretty well financially and hopes to act as a platform for all sorts of transportation solutions, including public transit, ride sharing and even biking. It looks like others are buying this too, with Japan’s Softbank having taken a large ownership stake in the company. Softbank also announced this week that they’re investing $2.25 billion in GM Cruise, General Motors’ autonomous vehicle division, which may open up some doors for Uber to test with vehicles other than Volvo’s, and will allow GM to operate on Uber’s platform. But more than just some Japanese money, Uber wants our money as well and is on course for an initial public offering next year, where individuals with more hope than brains can spend their hard-earned money to purchase stock in a company that is still burning cash and doesn’t really have a solid path towards profitability, at least until its autonomous program cuts out all its human drivers. But Skynet doesn’t go live until 2047 in most Terminator timelines, so I think we’re good for a while if you want to get in on the ground floor.

Jaguar Land Rover Goes Muddin’ (Autonomously)

Jaguar Land Rover announced this week that they are developing a system called Cortex, a project that hopes to develop level 4 and 5 automation for off-road driving. Currently, autonomous systems rely on digital road mapping pretty extensively, so an off-road system would have to depend more on cameras evaluating the terrain ahead and adjusting the vehicle correspondingly. In theory, this will render the Cortex system more advanced and reliable than most other systems at adapting to unplanned changes in conditions. Head of the company’s connected and autonomous vehicle research program Chris Holmes said “It’s important that we develop our self-driving vehicles with the same capability and performance customers expect from all Jaguars and Land Rovers,” which I can appreciate. What I can’t appreciate is someone wanting to take their car off-road, but wanting the car to do the driving when you’re actually off-road. It’d be like designing a race car to drive itself, but with a race car driver as a passenger.

Duct Tape Fixes Everything

If you’ve been on YouTube, and I’ll assume you have, you probably know that there’s a video for how to fix virtually everything, and many of those fixes involve duct tape. Now there’s a video of how you can repair a flat tire with duct tape, except repair is really the right word, but rather “replace.” Some intrepid MacGyvers  who had a wheel without rubber decided to see what would happen if they wrapped the wheel in 20 rolls of duct tape and the results are, well, somewhat surprising in that the car definitely functioned afterwards. Granted, the non-sticky side offers virtually no grip, will tear under any torque and are utterly and completely unbalanced on the wheel, you can actually drive on a tire made of duct tape. That said, 20 rolls of duct tape cannot possibly be cheaper than a tire, so please leave this where it belongs – as a goofy stunt done by YouTube people.

Prius Greatly Improved with 8X the HorsePower

Photo by The Fast Lane Car

I’ve driven a Prius or two in my time and, not being the type of person who really appreciates driving in a super efficient sort of way, I can’t say I really appreciated the car. Now though, some nut jobs have gone and vastly improved the car by taking pretty much everything and throwing it out. The standard second generation Prius body of the vehicle in question now resides on a tube frame that also happens to house the motor from a Dodge Challenger Hellcat, which has been upped from its 707 horsepower to put down 800 at the wheels. Whereas the normal second generation Prius took about ten seconds to get to 60 miles per hour, this car now takes less than ten seconds to go an entire quarter mile and makes a divine sound while doing so. As for gas mileage? I’m gonna guess somewhere around 3 or 4, which does seem a bit thirsty when compared with the original.

Matt LeBlanc to Leave Top Gear

I’ve been catching up with the Grand Tour recently, which is a good show with some funny old guy that feels like an old couch – comfy, familiar, and a little stale. In comparison, Top Gear in the post-Chris Evans seasons feels fresh and interesting and fun and I find myself wishing for more episodes of it rather than the Grand Tour. One of the reasons it’s been so good is Matt LeBlanc, who unfortunately has announced that he will be leaving the show after next series because of time and travel constraints. I get it – he’s American and has to go to the UK for filming, which takes him away from family and friends for a considerable amount of time. In any case, Top Gear will continue on with Chris Harris, who is also excellent, and Rory Reid, who is a genuinely funny guy. But who will replace Joey? Chandler Bing?

Chrysler to Disappear with Fiat?

FiatChrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne will outline the next five year plan for the company’s car brands – a plan he will not oversee since this is his last year in charge of the company. In the last plan set forth in 2014 titled “Our Time Has Come,” Marchionne stated that Chrysler would have eight vehicles in its lineup by 2018, including two plug-in hybrids. As of last count, Chrysler has two cars, the Pacifica and the 300. I guess three if you count the Pacifica Hybrid as a separate vehicle, but still nowhere near eight total models. Gone is the weak 200 and the planned 100 compact sedan and various crossovers never appeared. FiatChrysler apparently got distracted with its brands that were actually doing well, namely Jeep, Ram and Ferrari, and didn’t really put any effort into either Fiat or Chrysler, both of which have crappy, unappealing lineups that are struggling to move cars amid poor reviews and a complete lack of buyer interest. How crappy you ask? Well the company has had to recall 4.8 million vehicles this week because their cruise control may not turn off, which seems like a pretty important thing to be able to turn off. Apparently braking still works to slow the car but people are idiots and may panic if their car doesn’t slow when they disengage cruise control.

Rumor now has it that Marchionne will announce tomorrow that Fiat will exit the U.S. market and Chrysler will exit the rest of the world, remaining for sale only in the U.S. My question is, why stop there? Chrysler has destroyed any sort of goodwill it had in buyers loyal to the brand by not coming out with anything new recently and the Pacifica could just be renamed the Dodge Grand Caravan, and that’s really only because Waymo just ordered 62,000 Pacificas for its autonomous fleet. Kill off the ancient 300 and you have nothing left to keep the Chrysler brand going. I’ll follow up on this next week when we hear more, but it’s probably not going to be too surprising if, just like Plymouth and most of Ford, we say goodbye to Chrysler.

Porsche Calls Car Collectors Immoral

Porsche Klassik magazine published an article recently addressing the issue of investors buying classic Porsches in order to profit from their appreciation rather than to drive them. The author called out such buyers for “spoiling the market” and “causing an explosion in prices even for ‘normal’ Porsche vehicles.” This is largely true, with prices for even basic air-cooled 993 models skyrocketing due to the desire of people to just buy and sit on cars until someone wants to pay them more for it than they paid. I appreciate good design and vehicular beauty and I think that some cars, sports cars especially, could be considered works of art, so in that sense, I appreciate why one might want to preserve such art. But like good artwork, great cars should be appreciated. You appreciate art by studying it and appreciating its form, and you appreciate cars by driving them.  The article goes on to say “the speculation in which many dealers are currently indulging is heading towards the downright immoral,” and I have a hard time disagreeing. But as baby boomers pass on and the generation saddled with $1.4 trillion in student loan debt comes up, these prices will fall back down. They have to, because otherwise the market for them won’t exist.

Authored by
Devlin Riggs

Tesla Troubles

Tesla: the company that generates more headlines and top stories than actual motor vehicles despite claiming to be a car company. Last time I covered the company, major shareholders had just approved a super unbelievable compensation package for CEO Elon Musk tied to the company’s total market value, rather than to numbers of vehicles produced or Model 3 orders satisfied or JD Power scores or any number of other metrics by which a car company may actually be adjudged to be a success. Just like in Ford’s case earlier, Tesla’s sole focus is on pleasing shareholders, and it really shows.

The problem for Elon and Tesla is, the hype machine eventually runs out of gas and the company valued more highly than Ford, GM, Fiat Chrysler or any number of actual car companies, will have to face the music eventually for perpetually failing to meet the goals it outlines for itself. And that’s a problem when you consistently set outrageous goals that artificially inflate your stock price. That “face the music” time may be coming soon, because there have been several issues in the past few weeks that deserve mention.

Photo by Jesse Gary, KTVU

First, another fatality. This is Tesla’s third in which Autopilot was engaged when the death occurred, and the preliminary investigation by a law firm representing the deceased’s family has decided that Tesla’s Autopilot misread lanes in the road and drove the man straight into a median, where the car burst into flames and killed the driver. Tesla insists that the crash is the driver’s fault because its system isn’t perfect and requires drivers to pay attention to the road ahead and provide input when prompted, which the driver apparently was and ignored. The National Transportation Safety Board admonished Tesla for releasing details about the crash before its investigation was complete and kicked them out of their investigation process. And yes, this is the second story in a row that involves someone dying because a technology company deployed a system to the public before it was ready.

Simultaneously, Telsa was busy recalling 123,000 early Model Ss because of power steering bolt failures that would render the car still driveable, but requiring considerably more effort. While it’s hardly a rare thing for a car company to issue a recall, its coinciding with reports about the Model 3 needing considerable rework after coming off the assembly line paints a poor picture of the company’s quality control.

Speaking of the Model 3, production has been shut down twice so far this year to address bottlenecks preventing the factory from meeting production goals. In their Q1 investor call, Tesla reported 2,000 Model 3s rolling off the line in the last week before the earnings call, which represents a significant jump over the 1,200 observed in the weeks prior, but remains 20% short of the 2,500 goal Elon set for the company in January. In response to inquiries about the delays, Musk declared that there were no delays, but that deliveries were just experiencing a “Time Shift,” which is basically a way of invoking quantum leap doctor who bullshit to try to explain away your company’s failure. And remember, the 2,500 goal was the re-forecast of a re-forecasted forecast. In addition to the shutdowns to improve efficiencies, Tesla is adding a third shift to their Fremont factory, meaning cars will be produced 24/7 in order to start reaching production goals more effectively.

Of course, another shift means a greater potential for labor issues and Tesla has had plenty of those recently, with the Center for Investigative Reporting, uh, reporting that Tesla has been under reporting worker injuries on legally-mandated reports to make the company’s safety record appear better than it is. The center’s magazine, Reveal, interviewed more than three dozen current and former employees, including ex-safety personnel and have previously been nominated for Pulitzer Prizes for the quality and reliability of their reporting. Tesla’s response? Lies. All lies! In fact, the Center is an extremist organization and pawn being used by the United Auto Workers union to try to influence workers into joining, which Tesla is known to be against, having reportedly fired 700 workers for their pro-union sentiments last fall.

And this is only one salvo in the many Tesla or Musk have launched at news outlets for accurately reporting the news. A recent Economist article suggesting Tesla would need to raise $2.5 to $3 billion this year to meet production goals prompted a tweet from Musk calling the Economist boring and replying that the company would be profitable in the second half of this year, a claim viewed as dubious by many actual economists who sort of know what they’re doing unlike a certain someone.

As a result of all of these issues, Tesla’s stock value has been dropping. And although he claims that he’d forego a salary in order to see the company thrive, it’s not hard to see how a $52 billion carrot dangling in front of you might motivate you to work towards it. The problem is, when your success metric is as squishy as shareholder value, which is based on perception, rather than substance, your focus is not on safety, or fair worker representation or quality, or or even human life. It’s based on what people think of you and your future potential, and all the talking in the world isn’t going to matter if you can’t do the walking, and right now, Tesla is still at a crawl.

Authored by
Devlin Riggs

Headlines for the Week of March 12th, 2018

How’s that Ramp Up Going, Elon?

If you’re hoping, as I do, that every time Elon Musk and Tesla revise their output schedules that this will surely be the time they get it figured out and it’ll be smooth sailing from here on out, you’re not going to enjoy this next story. Tesla had to completely shut down its Fremont, California manufacturing plant for a week last month to fix issues and bottlenecks related to the production of their Model 3 sedan. According to workers inside the factory, a staggering 40% of parts for vehicles were not suitable for use on cars, requiring extensive reworking or re-manufacturing, which are apparently different things. Reworking involves taking a new part and fixing it to be up to a certain standard, while re-manufacturing takes used parts and fixes them up to be new-looking again. Tesla insists they don’t put re-manufactured parts on cars, but if almost half of parts require reworking, and they’re still putting out cars with irregular panel gaps that command comparisons to 90's Kias, you can call it “re-wizarding,” but it’s still not a good thing.

Trump Strikes AGAIN

The President of the United States has a habit of weighing in on things in a…unique way, and last week, when discussing the Trans-Pacific Partnership and how horrible it is, cited a practice that is either so top secret that no auto industry professional in the world has ever heard of it, or is completely made up. Here are Trump’s exact comments: “It’s the bowling ball test. They take a bowling ball from 20 feet up in the air and drop it on the hood of the car. If the hood dents, the car doesn’t qualify. It’s horrible.” What!? What car could possibly pass this test!? After thoroughly baffling the automotive media for a while and offering no explanation for his comments, an astute reader of the Washington Post’s coverage of the story suggested in the comments that perhaps he was referring to a test where Japanese safety officials test pedestrian safety by shooting dummy heads at car hoods to determine how damaged a head might be if it made contact with a car. Perhaps someone explained this with a bowling ball analogy, which could account for some of the misunderstanding, but the part about a car failing if it dents is still completely out of left field. In any case, it’s a test Japan applies to all cars, not just imports to keep them out of the country, so to use it as a sort of argument against the Trans-Pacific Partnership was always a stretch but, when it comes to politics these days, sense and logic doesn’t really apply anymore anyway.

Green with Envy, Yellow with Value

When I chose the gorgeous Reflex Silver color for my GTI, resale value didn’t really factor into my decision; I just liked it more than all the other options available. But apparently people do choose white, silver and black because those sort of “neutral” colors are more universally liked and the theory goes makes your car more desirable secondhand. Well, turns out that’s bogus because a new study by used car search engine ISeeCars.com has revealed that the car color with the lowest depreciation rate was, in fact, yellow, depreciating an average of 27 percent in the first three years of ownership. Also above average were green and orange, going to show that safe colors really aren’t that safe. But that’s not to say all wild colors are helpful. Some of the worst performing colors were beige, gold and purple. The purple car that immediately jumps to mind is the Chrysler PT Cruiser, which immediately makes sense why it would be one of the worst cars for keeping its value.

Lamborghini Says, "Damn the Fuel Economy Standards!"

Speaking of yellow cars that don’t depreciate much, Lamborghini was in the news this week for comments made by the company’s chief technical officer, Maurizio Reggiani. He indicated that, while other companies like Ferrari are moving to a V-8 or V-6 turbo hybrid in their future cars, Lamborghini has no intention to stop making their V-10s like that which powers the Huracan today. I love this quote from him: “My question is, why do I need to do something different? If I trust in the naturally aspirated engine, why do I need to downgrade my power train to a V-8 or V-6? I am Lamborghini, I am the top of the pinnacle of the super sports car. I want to stay where I am.” You do you, Lamborghini, and we will love you always for it.

GM Wants to Rent Your Car

With the launch of its Maven service in several US Cities, General Motors joined the ranks of the ride-sharing businesses, but using new cars put into circulation by General Motors themselves. Starting this summer, GM will begin a pilot program, expanding vehicle availability to personal cars if owners are willing to put their vehicles up for rent. This equates to a sort of Air BnB on wheels, which actually already exists with services like Turo, which I did not previously know about. But this being a GM venture, it has some extra benefits, like Maven offering liability insurance for GM vehicle buyers who choose to take part in the plan. Given how people generally treat their rental cars, I can’t imagine there would be a whole lot of interest in pimping out your ride, but if you need some extra money, maybe it’ll catch on with the likes of people who see their cars as appliances.

Arlington 86s its Buses

In other ride sharing news, Arlington, Texas has done away with its public transportation, which apparently was lacking anyway. Instead of buses and routes, the city has launched Arlington Via, which features Mercedes-Benz Sprinter vans that can be hailed via an app or phone number and will come around and pick you up and take you to your destination. If this sounds a lot like Uber or Lyft, you’re totally right, except that it’s publicly subsidized, so trips are only $3 or you can buy a week pass for $10, which is crazy cheap! For about $40 a month, you can basically have your own driver that you occasionally have to share with other passengers. Mark my words, smart people will use and abuse the hell out of this system and it will be fantastic until the city realizes what a massive loss it is and discontinues it after its one year contract is up. I would absolutely be doing that if such a service were available here. It’s less than the monthly payment on any car! And you don’t have to drive in traffic!

Toyota Bolsters Avis’ Connected Fleet

Finally in rental car news, Toyota has signed a multi-year deal with Avis Budget Group that will supply 10,000 connected cars to Avis to “help streamline the customer rental experience.” It’ll basically help provide real-time location, odometer, fuel level and other information without the need for attendants to go check the cars manually, which would honestly be pretty handy if you’re running late for a flight and just needed your receipt so the accounting department doesn’t crucify you when you get back to work. It’s not very exciting and it seems like something that should’ve been accomplished years ago, but I guess we should just be happy with progress when we get it.

Buick’s Naming Crap Continues to Confound

Last you heard of Buick, they were prohibiting the use of the word wagon when mentioning their new Regal TourX, insisting it was a crossover. Well, starting next year, they will begin forcing drivers of all their new vehicles to insist that their car is indeed a Buick when asked by incredulous friends as happens all the time because their commercials are so reflective of real life. That’s because Buick is removing the “Buick” lettering from the back of its vehicles in the same way that BMW and Mercedes-Benz don’t actually say “BMW” and “Mercedes-Benz” on the back because people just know what the propeller circle and tri-star signify. Buick has the audacity to think that buyers most definitely know that the tri-shield badge means that a vehicle is the Buick. And while, sure, loyal listeners of my show may know that, I think it’s a bit presumptuous to suggest everyone does. But you know, good luck to Buick, who sold 4.5% fewer cars in America in 2017 than they did in 2016, which is also half the number of vehicles they sold in 2002. You’re probably doing just fine.

Elsa Lets the Boston Police Go

Video from Time

In South Boston this week, for the first time in, well, a week, the city got 16 inches of snow, which trapped a Boston Police van. Normally this type of story wouldn’t make the news, but the van was freed by none other than Elsa from Disney’s Frozen. A man dressed as the ice princess approached the beached van and asked the drivers if they wanted to build a snow ramp. She dutifully guided them as they rocked the van out of its spot and pushed until the vehicle was clear of the snow and then let it go. Turns out the cold never bothered her anyway. And that’s enough Frozen jokes.

New Cars

Baby Bronco and Mustang GT500

Ford made a big splash this week, announcing plans to refresh 75% of its lineup by 2020, which is good because, honestly, it needs the help. Where’s it making the biggest investment? Predictably, in vehicles that sell like hotcakes, namely SUVs, where the brand’s existing models are pretty long in the tooth. But we’re not just talking about the Escape, Edge and Explorer, all of which will get new versions, which include ST trim models that up the performance factor a bit. We already knew a new Bronco is coming and, although we haven’t seen it yet, Ford announced that they would have a smaller off-road-focused SUV that would be coming out to slot in below the revival of the bucking horse truck. We don’t really have any details on it, but the speculation is that it’ll give the Wrangler a run for its money in performance if maybe not in the customization sector. They also teased a photo of the new Shelby Mustang GT500, which can obviously only be a good thing. As we see automakers continue to churn out compact crossovers, it’s honestly great to see Ford say, “Yeah, but how about a Wrangler alternative and an even faster Mustang?” The market may not be demanding the most exciting vehicles, but at least automakers still have some people working there that want to inject the fun into cars to satisfy those of us in the so-called niche markets.

Audis for Everybody

If you like Audis, then screw the year of the truck, this is the year of the four rings for you. The company shared this week that they expect sales and deliveries of new cars to be pretty poor this year because they’re basically going to spend the entire next eight and a half months dropping new cars on us. They say there will be over 20 redesigned and new models launched this year, including the launch of several all electric models like the E-Tron crossover and E-Tron GT, a sedan. There will also be redesigned versions of most of the rest of Audi’s lineup, and the rate of unveiling means we’ll see a new car from them just about every three weeks, which is crazy ridiculous! But then again, when you think about Audi’s styling and realize they just stick an existing car in a copier and change the magnification level and hit “print,” maybe it’s not that outrageous to have so many cars coming out at once. Especially when Audi apparently achieved a billion Euro cost reduction last year by reducing research & development. Be prepared for a new generation of, “Oh, that’s a nice A-6. Er, A-4? Ach S-8!”

VW is S.O.L with New Names

Meanwhile at parent company Volkswagen, the Germans apparently had to come up with a new name for the electric vehicle brand they are preparing to launch in China with partner company JAC because they were not allowed to use the Chinese name for SEAT. Instead, they have chosen SOL, in all caps, which of course is Spanish for “sun,” conjuring images of a bright, shiny all electric future. Or, if you’re the type of person who uses acronyms, the capital letters S-O-L means “Shit Outta Luck,” which is just as well because the first car of the joint venture is a re-badged JAC vehicle that boosts just 114 horsepower and a top speed of 80 miles per hour. So, sorry, China, if you were hoping for a better electric vehicle to come from the partnership. I guess you’re, well, you know.

Lexus RC Black

It’s been at least a few weeks since our last black edition of any car, so we were about due for one. This time it’s Lexus, who is creating only 650 versions of their RC F Sport Black Line. The trick is, it’s not actually a trim available for the RC F. Just the RC 300 and 350. So not the V-8, just the V-6 and I-4 models, which, to me, causes it to lose a bit of the sinister element to it. What’s the Black Line version get you? More black. Just like in every black version of any car. Can this trend stop now?

Also from Lexus, they are launching the Sport Yacht concept, which is not a tongue-in-cheek concept car that plays on large sedans being referred to as land yachts. It is actually a yacht. It started as a fun concept from Toyota Marine Division, a 42-foot ship that features two Lexus 5-liter V-8 engines cranking out 885 horsepower and an almighty sound. The concept was never intended for production apparently, but after being handed the “Boat of the Year” award at the Japan International Boat Show, Toyota has had a sit down and think and decided that, yes, it would like to make more money from rich people and will actually build the boat and offer it for sale worldwide. Not just that, but they’re planning on a 65-foot version that can entertain up to 15 guests, because rich people love offering people a ride in their Lexus only to pull up in their Maserati and say, “Ha, silly, my Lexus is docked!”

Hyundai Kite Concept

Hyundai is also going nautical with their Kite concept, which debuted at the Geneva show two weeks ago but didn’t quite make it into my rap-up. It’s a sort of light weight dune buggy thing that was designed by 15 students as part of their Master in Transportation Design program at the Instituto Europeo di Design. The wild thing is, it can be transformed into a single seat jet ski, and who doesn’t want that! Granted, the utility of this thing is somewhat questionable. A dune buggy isn’t exactly practical for a daily commute and the number of times I have been flying over dunes only to arrive at a sudden ocean or lake and wished I could suddenly have a jet ski are relatively few. But you have to celebrate thinking outside the box, and this is most definitely that.

Honda Mean Mower Mk.2

Honda, it seems, is getting tired of being asked when they’re going to bring back the S2000 or some other affordable sports car now that their NSX has pushed decidedly upmarket. Instead of replying simply “never,” they’ve resorted to the tried and true internet tradition of trolling their fans. Instead of coming out with a fun sports car with 189 horsepower that will hit 134 miles per hour, Honda this week unveiled the Mean Mower Mk.2, a riding lawn mower with the engine from one of their 1,000 CC Fireblade motorbikes because why make a fun car when you can make a fun lawnmower instead? This isn’t the first time Honda has done this, having put a V-twin from a previous Fireblade into an older riding mower and achieving some impressive numbers. This second generation takes it up a notch, just as it takes up the trolling. Honda knows how to have fun. They’re just not going to go out of their way to help us have any. But hey, keep having your engineers work on pointless shit, Honda. And maybe give your designers the day off so we can have a Civic that doesn’t look like an origami spaceship.

Obituaries

Lincoln Continental

R.I.P

We heard some rumors last week that Ford is planning on canceling the Lincoln Continental after just one new generation of the car they allegedly spent $1 billion to resurrect, which seems like a ridiculous waste of money. That said, last year, they barely sold 12,000 examples, which pales in comparison to the 52,000 Mercedes-Benz E-classes or the nearly 41,000 BMW 5-Series cars of similar size and fanciness that were sold last year. When it debuted, the Continental was mocked for being a knock-off Bentley in its styling, but I guess not that many people are interested in driving Bentley knock-offs? This hasn’t been confirmed yet, but with sales that low and sales of sedans in general tanking like the Miami Marlins, it’s a safe bet that Ford might want to cut its losses. 

Authored by
Devlin Riggs

Headlines for the Week of March 5th, 2018

The Year of the ...Truck?

After a wild Detroit Auto Show when all three big American brands showed off their fancy, shiny new pickups, and on the heels of a market clamoring for bigger, butcher, gas-guzzlier vehicles, 2018 was decreed the year of the truck. So how are we looking two months in? Like maybe declaring what year this was in January was a little premature. Pickup sales were down a whopping 15% in February over 2017, which itself was not a great year for motor vehicle sales. Analysts are chalking it up to a “continued softening of the market,” which is a polite way of saying nobody is really buying cars right now. I think the best way to drive sales though, is to probably start accusing buyers of softening the market, to which all the super insecure guys will probably respond “No, you're a soft market! I'm hard all the time. Gimme that truck!"

Detroit Auto Show to Move to Fall

Speaking of the Detroit Auto Show, it usually kicks off the year every January, a time where it has to compete for attention with the Consumer Electronics Show, which is increasingly a car show as cars are increasingly consumer electronics. The idea has apparently been presented to move the North American International Auto Show in Detroit to October, when there’s less competition and the weather isn’t so shitty in Michigan and carmakers can do some things outside of Cobo Hall. The problem is, the show takes a whopping three months to set up, and there are events in the hall during those months, so the show would have to scale back on the extravagance or find another time altogether. Given that automakers have started sitting out some shows, and many didn’t come or brought a reduced presence to Detroit this year, not to mention the political pressure a trade war might bring, moving might not be the answer to the Detroit Show’s problems. 

Michigan Forgives Where Illinois Doesn’t

Also in Michigan, the state has forgiven $637 million in fees owed by drivers so the people in debt can get their licenses back. Those extra fees were a part of a scheme from the governor in 2003 to plug a budget hole by tacking on extra fees for traffic tickets committed by people with more than 7 points on their licenses. Of course, it’s not good to get any points, and perhaps if you’re such a bad driver that you rack up so many citations that your license gets revoked, maybe you shouldn’t get it back. But your tickets shouldn’t drive you into poverty such that you can’t afford to get it back. There are some stipulations regarding who can get their licenses back when, but most of the fees are being waived as long as drivers do it quickly. How many people are we talking? About 300,000 people have had their licenses suspended because of unpaid fees. That’s about half the population of the city of Detroit. To their credit, Michigan saw the error of their ways, unlike Illinois, but I can’t imagine I’d be too happy with them if I’ve had my license suspended for the past 15 freaking years, forgiveness or not.

Tesla Fined for Pollution

Tesla, makers of the clean-running, no carbon emissions electric cars for rich people, have been fined for air pollution. Specifically related to the excess nitrogen oxide pollution from the company’s Fremont manufacturing facility, not from the vehicles themselves. Tesla says the emissions were the result of some malfunctioning equipment that has since been resolved, but nevertheless, they have settled the case with California, part of which entails the installation of solar panels on the roof to further drive down the facility’s dependence on fossil fuels. As far as fines go, $140K and a promise to be more energy independent are getting off pretty easy.

Goodyear’s Green Tires

Goodyear is also getting in on the green bandwagon and has unveiled some new tires that are truly ridiculous and have no hope of ever seeing production, but are a neat idea and interesting to look at nonetheless. Basically, it’s an airless tire, which we’ve seen many concepts of previously, made of recycled tires, that features a healthy moss growing between its rigid rubber structures. The moss takes carbon dioxide and generates oxygen from it, and the moss is fed water by the tire, which soaks up some moisture and routes it to the plant. They said it could take as much as 4,000 tons of carbon dioxide out of the air and add as much as 3,000 tons of oxygen. That is, if everyone in a city the size of Paris wanted to drive around with fuzzy green wheels on our cars, which I’m not entirely against! Goodyear also showed off some new tires specifically designed for EVs since apparently traditional tires wear out 30% faster on electric vehicles because of both the weight and force of instant torque just shredding rubber. The new design has a bigger contact patch with the road for more grip and also generates less noise, which is great because EVs are already so quiet, tires do tend to be the loudest thing on them apart from wind, which I doubt Goodyear can do much about. These will be on the road in Europe next year, and they feature a light baby blue paint because that somehow became the official color of hybrids and efficiency.

Ride Hailing Wages In Dispute

A study released by MIT’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research or, as nobody calls it, CEEPR, compared a survey of 1,100 drivers for Uber and Lyft with what they called “detailed vehicle cost information” and found that the median profit for drivers came out to around $3.37 per hour before taxes. It said that as many as 74% of drivers are earning less than the minimum wage their states mandated, all of which means that most people driving for these ride hailing services would be living in poverty. Uber and Lyft were quick to dismiss the study as using shoddy and/or inconsistent data and much of it was self-reported by drivers, who are incentivized to paint a bleak picture of their earnings so the companies will raise their pay rate. The disputes were so strong that one of the paper’s lead authors actually came out and said that he agreed that some of the information could be misleading and that they’d rerun the numbers to try to improve the validity of the study. Either way, ride hailing drivers probably don’t make too much money and MIT students probably don’t have enough oversight in their research.

Audi Debuts (Not Terrible) Flying Car Concept

Flying cars. We’ve all been here before, but Audi has partnered with Airbus and Italdesign to unveil a concept that’s actually not too incredibly terrible. Instead of the tried and dumb design of a car-and-plane-in-one package that is what we commonly think of as a flying car, the Pop.Up Next concept utilizes a three-part system comprised of a passenger pod, a skateboard-like road-going electric vehicle platform that the pod can sit on, and an eight-rotor quad copter-like flying unit that the pod can hang from. The concept video, which looks really neat, shows that Audi knows that only super duper rich white people are going to use this thing, and it’s designed as a sort of taxicab supplement, where you can hop in a pod with the flying unit attached once you get out of your first class or chartered flight, then fly across the city to a lot where the skateboard-EV units are located and the flying unit will land your pod on the wheeled vehicle, sending you on your way to your final destination while the flying pod autonomously flies back to the airport or to a charging station somewhere.

As far as flying car concepts go, this is one of the most well thought out versions, but there are just so many hurdles to get over before these things can ever actually be realized. But the fact that these are fully autonomous gives this a leg up because then you don’t have to license drivers as private pilots, which, given the skill level of most drivers, always seemed like a long shot.

Anything Audi Does Dutch Can Do Better

The Dutch have come along and laughed at Audi’s pitiful attempt at a complicated-ass flying car and said, “No, you krauts, this is how we will get all the rich white peoples' money!” And they tore the cover off the Pal-V Liberty, which is also a flying car, but one of those car-and-plane-in-one package. Except it’s more of a car and a gyro copter, which permits a shorter take-off and landing, which is handy since I don’t think many people have their own runway. What’s different about this is that they say it’s fully road- and air-legal and can be purchased right now, making it what they call the world’s first production flying car. How much does the exclusivity of owning such a thing run? Well, their cheapest bargain basement Liberty Sport model, which comes with flying lessons since a pilot’s license is required, starts at just $368,000, or the price of a really quite nice, large Midwestern home. But can your home fly at 112 miles per hour and get 31 miles per gallon? I didn’t think so. Peasant. 

Renault’s EZ-Go Needs Customers to EZ-Come

Renault, meanwhile, is keeping its autonomous taxi plans completely grounded, but has also unveiled a pretty interesting concept called the EZ-GO. It’s all-electric and features level 4 autonomy as well as an interior that is basically just some benches and a lot of windows. It opens in a sort of clam shell way that would probably be terrible in rain but at least looks neat, and has a flat loading floor to haul wheelchair-bound passengers, which is a nice touch. They foresee this as a solution to ride sharing and ride hailing that cuts out the driver and use of a personal vehicle, which is to say a shared taxi, and are hoping to have operational prototypes on the road in the next four years. Parent company Nissan also owns a stake in a media company, which just so happens to be interested in providing content for passengers to view while riding in the EZ-GO. There were no suggestions on how much rides might cost, but if I’m a captive audience being forced to watch some commercials during my ride, it better be cheap or free.

Mercedes Puts Real Projectors in Your Projectors

Another neat concept shown at the Geneva Motor Show this week was Mercedes’ new projector headlight system. Now, projector headlights have been around for a long time. They use parabolic glass or plastic to project the output of your headlights further. But this is a bit different. Called the “million-pixel” headlight, these will actually project images onto the road ahead of you, warning of upcoming peril, or providing driving tips, or doing neat things like displaying the dimensions of your car to see if you’ll be able to fit in a parallel parking spot (in which, of course, the car will park for you). It can also detect faces and windshields and automatically dim pixels to not blind pedestrians or other drivers, which is a fantastic feature for all the old-ass Mercedes owners who constantly drive around with their brights on. I don’t think it will help them turn off their turn signals or stop mistaking the gas for the brake though. 

Pre-Production Honda CB750 Sets Record

Photo from AutoWeek

In motorcycle news, the Honda CB750 is one of the best selling motorcycles of all time. Well, that’s not the news, actually. It’s old news because they haven’t made the CB750 for decades. But when it came out, it was one of the first bikes to use a four cylinder motor and was pretty powerful. In fact, it’s referred to as the first Universal Japanese Motorcycle, which is sort of a term that covers a bunch of similar Japanese bikes to have similar specs and come out in the 70s and 80s. But the CB750 was the first, and at auction this week, a pre-production model from 1968 built for promotional purposes, and one of two produced prior to the model’s actual release, sold for a record of nearly $264,000. These bikes are so ubiquitous that you can head to craigslist right now and find one for around a grand, so why the markup? There’s exclusivity in being one of the first of the first of a kind.

Elon Set to Make ELOT of Money

Photo from Elon Musk's Instagram

Elon Musk has maintained that he won’t take a salary from Tesla Motors as they ramp up production and start fulfilling the 500,000 reservations for their Model 3, but two of Tesla’s largest shareholders are much more generous to the CEO than he is to himself. They have proposed a vote on a compensation package valued at $2.6 billion, which represents about 5% of Tesla’s market valuation, which some have accurately called ludicrously high. They apparently see it as a showing of support for the guy who has, in their terms, produced some pretty incredible things for the company so far, and they’re not entirely wrong. What he has also done is consistently over-promise and under-deliver while allowing some shady business practices to go unchecked and discourage unionization to protect the workers affected by the shadiness. And here I thought the secret to getting rich was under-promising and over-delivering. Turns out I’ve been doing it wrong my whole life. 

Saudi Sells Billionaire’s Blingy Rides

My house is a nice house, but it only has a two car garage, which is still more garage than many people have, but I think a prerequisite for a next house would be space for a third car. I, however, am not a Saudi billionaire, and it’s a good thing, because my garage space would not remotely be enough to accommodate the car collections of these guys. I’m speaking specifically about Maan al-Senea, who is being detained right now due to debts owed by his company, appropriately called the Saad Group. He owes as much as $16 billion to creditors and in order to pay off some of his debt, the government of Saudi Arabia is selling some of his cars. How far will that go? Well, considering he and his company have 923 vehicles licensed to them, it turns out the sales can go pretty far! I honestly don’t know how you store almost a thousand cars. But I’d sure as hell like to give it a try someday. But, you know, without the billions in debt.

New Cars

Chevy Bolt Rear Seat Delete

I drive a hatchback, which I occasionally use to haul work-related things, and it’s great because I can just fold the back seat down and throw in all my camera gear or whatever I’m toting with me on any given day. Hatchbacks are great for this, but I don’t think I’d ever really consider using one as a commercial hauling vehicle, but Chevy has decided that some people do actually think that’s a good idea, and that the best way to accomplish this is to take their all-electric Chevy Bolt and throw out its back seat, giving you plenty of space to store...whatever it is you have to take to your job site. I should caveat this by saying that you won’t actually be able to order a Chevy Bolt Rear Seat Delete (as they’re calling the package) because it’s restricted to government or fleet orders and is available as a $350 add-on. Which, when you think about it makes sense, because only the government would find it rational to pay hundreds of dollars more to get less of something.

Mahindra Roxor

If you haven’t heard of Mahindra, I don’t blame you. They’re an Indian automobile manufacturer who produces quite a few vehicles, just none of which come to the States. They’ve also had a license to produce replicas of the old Willy's Jeep for some time, and now, for the first time, they’re going to start releasing those replicas for sale in the US, and they’ll be made in Michigan! Mechanically, they are extremely similar to the old CJ-model Jeeps (before it was called the Wrangler), but it uses a unique power plant; a small diesel and manual transmission. Unfortunately, safety standards have advanced a tad since the 1940s, so while these are remarkably similar to the old models, they are most definitely not road legal. So if you’re in the market for a fun trail vehicle or a little utility all-terrain vehicle like the Polaris Ranger but want some vintage style, this thing is for you. Oh, and it’s also $15,000 so you could buy one or just buy a used Wrangler for less money and be able to drive it on the road. Your choice.

Obituaries

Volkswagen Beetle

We learned this week that the plucky Volkswagen Beetle will be discontinued after the current generation, though we don’t know when that will be. As all Volkswagens start to move over to the fabulous MQB platform, the Beetle doesn’t really fit and, as Research & Development boss Frank Welsch said, there’s only so many times you can have a “new new new new Beetle.” As it leaves, the new I.D. Buzz, the retro-futuristic electric minibus will be taking its place as the nostalgic vehicle in the VW lineup, albeit with a decidedly modern flair and probably no vase for flowers tucked into the dash.

Also last week was the Geneva Motor Show in Switzerland, and I’ve talked in the last few weeks about how so many cars had been unveiled online before appearing at the actual show. It really kind of took the wind out of the sails for the whole thing, and I wasn’t expecting to have a whole lot of new material for my usual Rap-up. So instead, in last week's podcast, I put together a little diddy that sort of expresses how I feel about this year’s event. If you haven't listened already, check it out!

Authored by
Devlin Riggs

Headlines for the week of February 12th, 2018

No Longer Saved By Zero

Nowadays, Chevy and Buick are at the top of my list when it comes to the absolute worst car commercials on television. Between the just genuinely terrible, staged, fake, “Real People” ads and the awful techno Buick surprise ads, it’s hard to think it was ever worse. And yet, Toyota tried their best to rob us of our sanity in 2008 with their “Saved by Zero” campaign that featured music from the Fixx to promote their zero percent financing program in the Fall. Of course, 2008 was right as the housing bubble was bursting, so low rates became common, and they’re still around today, but they may not be around too much longer. With interest rates rising three times last year and slated to rise again this year, offering zero percent interest to buyers is getting more and more untenable because it comes at the cost of profit to the dealership. But it’s still around in many places to try to spur sales that have been sagging. So what’s happening is a situation where dealerships and automakers are trying to decide whether to try to keep selling more cars, or sell fewer cars at a higher profit. In any case, if you’re in the market for a new car and have great credit, now might be a good time to buy.

Vintage Restoration Business is Booming

For people more interested in used cars, it’s looking like manufacturers are hopping aboard the vintage car bandwagon to help their old vehicles stay on the road. Usually when cars are discontinued, parts continue to be made for a few years and then the molds for the pieces are all destroyed and effort goes into producing parts for newer cars. This makes it pretty tough if you have an old car you love and want to keep it on the road if parts keep breaking. You have to rely on third party manufacturers of dubious quality or get something custom made, which can be super expensive. Fortunately, the cost of custom making things keeps going down thanks to new technology like 3D printing. Porsche this week announced that they would use exactly that technology to start making replacement parts for the 959 and 356, among other old vehicles. They have started printing just eight parts that apparently go wrong a lot, but are open to expanding their range to include other pieces and you know they’re of good quality since they’re produced by the mothership.

Fiat Chrysler is getting into the vintage restoration business too, with their “Reloaded by Creators” initiative. Instead of manufacturing individual parts though, they’re taking in whole cars and rebuilding them from the ground up, then selling them to collectors. Aston Martin and Jaguar already have similar programs and while there may not be too many vintage Chryslers that warrant full restoration, there are plenty of old Alfa Romeos, Lancias and Fiat Abarths that are deserving of some factory TLC. Who knows, the Italians might have even learned a few things in the 40 years since most of these cars were produced but, based on current reliability ratings, I wouldn’t count on it.

UConnect, IBreak

I say that because those Italians are in the same company as Chrysler, a company that pushed out an over-the-air update to its UConnect infotainment system on Friday that sent many, many vehicles’ infotainment systems into an inescapable boot-loop that, for some, has yet to be resolved. Until it is, drivers can look forward to having no radio, no reverse camera and limited control over vehicle interior functions. Aren’t touchscreens and technology great!?

Porsche’s Mission E Possible

Over in Stuttgart, Porsche is making waves with news that their Mission E vehicle will charge its batteries in less than half the time that it takes a Tesla to charge, more closely mimicking the refueling time of gasoline cars. They’re taking the shade throwing to another level, calling their system “Turbo Charging” to one up Tesla’s Supercharging, in which I can only assume is the first stage of a one upsmanship battle that ends in all of us using Ultra-Extreme MegaCharging PowerVolt MaxWatt Stations. Porsche achieves the faster charge rate by doubling the output of chargers, up to 800 volts, which can’t just run through the same channels as 400 volt chargers. It requires a wholly different and more expensive infrastructure and a different structure to the batteries, meaning this tech would be exclusive to Porsche. This opens up a whole other conversation about charging technology standards. Already, there are four different standards of charging port; one endorsed by the German automakers and Ford, one for Tesla, one from the Japanese automakers and one for China, which has by far the biggest lead in developing an EV infrastructure. What this likely means is that we’re going to wind up having to carry around a trunk full of adapters or that recharging stations will need to provide different plugs to suit different vehicles. Unless politicians want to get involved and try to pick one, but that would require regulations, and who needs those, right!?

Drowsy Driving Debate

Depending on who you ask, drowsy driving can be just as dangerous as drunk driving, or it could be just a minor thing that doesn’t have an appreciable impact on traffic safety. The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration is in the latter camp, with research indicating that only 2.5% of fatal crashes are the result of driving tired, but a new study from AAA indicates that up to 10.8% of crashes with moderate to severe damage could be caused by a lack of sleep. In their study, AAA put cameras in front of more than 3,500 drivers to track if crashes were the result of drowsy driving, which is how they wound up at almost 11%. The thing is, these drivers knew they were being watched and should have been incentivized to be on their best behavior, and yet still many drove tired and crashed. Plus AAA threw out any instances where they couldn’t see the faces of drivers more than 75% of the time, like if the driver was wearing sunglasses or if their hands were obscuring the camera, so the real numbers could be much higher than the data suggests.

On the heels of that study, Uber has rolled out a “feature” that limits drivers to a maximum of 12 hour shifts behind the wheel. The update will not permit drivers to accept new fares for six hours after working for 12 hours straight. Meanwhile, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration mandates that all truckers carrying passengers work no more than ten straight hours and take at least 8 hours off between shifts. Not to mention it has stricter requirements for drivers to obtain licenses to transport passengers. I get that the current trend is to damn all regulations and let the free market reign supreme, but beyond a certain point, we have to accept that some regulations have been put in place for the safety of consumers and that they shouldn’t be overturned or ignored or loopholed simply because regulations are bad. Uber and Lyft and other ride sharing companies cut some red tape and provide people with jobs, which is great, and I wholeheartedly support the gig economy, but by consistently flaunting the rules applied to other sectors, they walk a risky path that could lead to even tighter regulations for everyone.

 Waymo vs. Uber Settles, We All Move On Unhappy

Speaking of Uber, news came out that they settled their lawsuit with Google’s self-driving company Waymo for a cool $245 million this week, which is sort of anti-climactic because we don’t get a real “winner” in the battle for self-driving supremacy, as a jury wasn’t able to weigh in on the situation. What we get instead is a muddled non-admission from Uber that they stole trade secrets and an acceptance from Waymo that what they stole wasn’t worth more than $245 million minus attorney’s fees. So as Uber’s apology tour for their various misdeeds continues, they can at least cross “stealing from our competitors” off the list.

 Magic Cool Bus

Every year, the battle is usually between the Honda Accord and Honda Civic for which is the most stolen car, and for good reason. Whenever you see either car, you probably think “there’s a reasonable sedan driven by someone who bought based on a rich history of automotive reliability,” not “there’s a thieving criminal trying to lay low until he can get this baby to the chop shop.” Just like when you see a school bus, you think “there’s a municipal vehicle on the way to or from picking up children to advance their education.” But when you see a school bus hauling ass down a residential road at 3 AM, maybe you start thinking something else, and that’s precisely what happened to a police officer in Trotwood, Ohio. After following the bus for a while, the officer tried pulling it over for a traffic violation, which initiated what few would call a very high speed chase, but a chase enough that police called it off because it was getting too dangerous. And they were right to because the bus crashed not long after on a home’s front lawn. There, police arrested a couple of guys who had been sleeping in the big, yellow, very conspicuous, very poor getaway car.

Ontario’s Rich Police

In other crime news, police in Ontario, Canada have purchased a Tesla Model X police cruiser, which has not gone over too well with taxpayers. The Model X starts at more than $100,000 Canadian and then had to be customized with light bars and the various other things that differentiate cop cars from normal vehicles, so it was likely a very expensive publicity stunt. Criminals, on the other hand, are probably thrilled since they just need to find a getaway car with a range greater than 300 miles. Even if they get caught, there’s no guarantee the finicky falcon doors on the Model X will work to put them in. It was, however, probably a better buy than a Model 3, because the department would still be waiting until 2019 to get it and even then the criminals might be able to escape through some of the car’s panel gaps.

Money Doesn’t Buy Brains

Photo by Fellsmere Police

As a man who drives for about two hours every day in traffic, I don’t need more reason to believe that most people shouldn’t be allowed to drive. And yet, nearly every week, there’s a story that chips away at my already weathered opinion of my fellow drivers. This week’s example comes from Florida, and is truly as insanely stupid as a story from Florida should be. A man driving a fifteen year-old BMW X5 SUV called 911 to report that he was speeding and that his gas pedal was stuck and he was unable to slow down from the 100 miles per hour he had somehow achieved. BMW, however, are calling bullshit on the whole thing because the X5 uses floor-mounted pedals so there’s no way the pedal could’ve gotten stuck by a floor mat or other obstruction. Furthermore, the X5 is drive-by-wire, meaning there’s no physical connection between the gas pedal and the throttle and that the car’s computer cuts all throttle whenever the brake pedal is pushed. I’ll connect the dots here for you because this means that the man never pressed the brake pedal when trying to slow his car down, which sounds an awful lot like he was not at all trying to slow the car down. The 911 operator even tried offering him some tips like shifting into neutral, turning the car off or gently applying the parking brake to bring the vehicle to a stop. All of these things were deemed ridiculous by the idiot man who claimed his car might spin out if he did any of them. So how’d they end up stopping him? Spike strips. Spike strips which he swerved to avoid the first time they tried. If you’re worried about spinning out your car, and spike strips and swerving seem like better options than shutting off your car, switching into neutral or applying your damn brake pedal, you should be banned from even riding in cars for the rest of your life. This man must be banished to walk. Welcome back to the caveman days buddy, you’ve earned it.

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 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!

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