This being Q&A Wednesday, I promised to answer  TTAC commenter 28-cars-later’s question in feature-length. He said: “Bertel, how do you get such access to Ghosn… is Nissan just *this* friendly to the press?” Let me explain to you how it works.

I am in Tokyo for a simple reason: Love. Being here also is made easy due to the fact that nowhere in the world can you cover the world’s automotive industry with greater ease than in Tokyo. Companies that are in charge of about a third of the world’s automotive output are not more than a few subway stations apart. Sure, companies like Toyota or Mazda officially are headquartered elsewhere, but they have substantial presences in Tokyo. From where I live, it’s 45 minutes to Toyota, 30 minutes to Honda, 30 minutes to Nissan in Yokohama. All by train, few people still drive in the world capital of cars. Besides, having Ronnie Schreiber in Detroit provides plenty of counter-weight, especially now that he covers the truly poetic aspects  of the state of Michigan, in a story so deep that I am unable to fathom it.

You don’t have to speak Japanese to work with the Japanese car companies. I don’t, except for what’s needed to order a hotto kohee, a hot coffee.  The large multinationals usually have large polyglot and often multinationally staffed  PR departments that cater to the international media.

Nissan is the epitome of internationalism. The whole company is like the United Nations, their management hails from all corners of the world, the language at 1-1, Takashima 1-chome, Nishi-ku, Yokohama-shi, Kanagawa 220-8686, Japan, officially is English. Simultaneous translation is a growth industry at Nissan.

Despite their inscrutable image, access to Japanese carmakers is easy. Much easier than, say, get access to a flack at GM, at least for me, Ed Niedermeyer, or Robert Farago back when.  In Tokyo, simply pick up the phone to make your presence known, you have a get-to-know-each-other meeting over a cup of  hotto kohee, and unless there is immediate mutual dislike, you are in. With a third of the world’s automotive volume  being bunched-up within a few square miles, getting the inside track is a matter of a few days  and a similar number of cups of kohee.

Actually, one  needs to be selective in making contact, because  soon you won’t have time to write with all the visits. Let’s have a look at my Outlook. Tomorrow, at noon, I will be at Mitsubishi to learn what they will race up  Pike’s Peak. Then I need to jump on the Keihin-Tohoku  line to Yokohama to learn everything about Nissan’s Common Module Family (CMF), despite warnings that “this briefing will consist entirely of the same content which Nissan disclosed on February 27, 2012.” You never know. On Friday morning, I will be at Nissan again for some kei car story that is sadly embargoed until June 6th. After a ride on the Keihin-Tohoku line, I will be at Toyota. On Monday, I will go on a 4 hour ride on the alleged bullet train to Shin-Kurashiki near Hiroshima. There, I will hear everything about a kei car Mitsubishi builds together with and for Nissan. It’s most likely the same car that will be disclosed by Nissan on Friday under embargo. So I better don’t go on Friday, thereby being able to write what and when I want, apart from being able to sleep in.

Once you are on the list, you visit a third of the world’s automotive volume multiple times a week. If you are not on the list, no problem. Show your meishi, your business card, at most press conferences, and you are in.  Exciting, no?

Now you probably ask how can they afford all those lavish press events with all the free booze and canapés multiple times a week? Simple: There is no free booze, there are no canapés. The only food is of the for thought variety. You are lucky if you get a bottle of water – usually reserved for special occasions, such as the quarterly results, or the launch of a new model. The entertainment at the launches consists of a PowerPoint deck, the lavish press trip usually takes place on the aforementioned Keihin-Tohoku line, paid for by my own SUICA card, a fare card that depletes faster than the battery of a Plug-in Prius.

When I go to Mitsubishi on Monday, there will be free transportation: A shuttle bus from Shin-Kurashiki to the factory. The train fare  from Tokyo ($330) is expected to be paid by the members of the media. Yesterday, going home to Tokyo on a (free) bus laid on by Nissan, a whisper went through the assembled A-list of Tokyo’s press corps: We were told to surrender the lanyards, as we always do. But this time, we could keep the baseball hat. At factory visits, hats are mandatory. It also is mandatory to give them back. Except at the launch of Infiniti’s main premium segment model. There, you get a free hat.

This is probably not the answer 28-cars-later wanted to hear. But it’s the truth. He surely doesn’t want me to lie.

Closeness allegedly breeds contempt. Not true in this business. Familiarity makes for mutual respect. It’s easy to hurt someone who doesn’t like you either, it’s harder to throw written invectives at someone you will see face-to-face tomorrow. GM has yet to learn this simple trick of manipulating the media.

I am known to occasionally make a mistake. Then, my phone rings, and someone apologizes for not having been clear enough in the morning.  Japan is the land of politeness, and  of high precision. Factual mistakes are fixed immediately. Differences in opinion are never mentioned, and it is understood that they would remain unchanged anyway. I have yet to hear one comment about a car review, good or bad, on TTAC. Wait, the other day, someone at Nissan said “I did read Baruth’s comparo of the 2012 and 2013 Sentra.” I gave the internationally accepted hand sign for “give it to me,” and nothing was given.  I don’t know whether they liked it or not. After reading the story, I still can’t figure it out.

They usually can take a joke. Despite of what some people think, my picture features of Nissan’s gesticulating CEO Carlos Ghosn appear to be a source of great amusement in the company, and I always have the same seat at the press conference. (Front row, across the aisle from the brass, right in front of the lectern.)  And that’s the secret of unfettered access: Make them laugh.

Time was, the only time you could see cool cars on TV, outside of reruns of the Rockford Files and Starsky and Hutch, was on Saturday Mornings on The Nashville Network. Those programs, aimed at shade tree mechanics and the average do-it-yourselfer, were about as interesting as a high school auto shop class’ instructional videos. Things have definitely changed and today, thanks to hundreds of cable channels and the advent of Reality TV, car related programming is easy to find. The problem is that Reality TV is character driven and you have to endure colorful personalities in order to see the cars.

The first Reality Show that really grabbed my attention was American Chopper. I know it’s not about cars but, when you think about, it wasn’t really about bikes, either. American Chopper was about fathers and sons, and how working class men pass along their work ethic and values to their children – at least for the first few seasons. After that it was about how money and fame corrupt and about how families and relationships can self destruct as father and son compete with one another for time in the limelight. Watching American Chopper for the first few years was like spending time in the garage with my own dad, learning a lot about being a man while getting yelled at for being stupid, unskilled and lazy. Watching American Chopper as the show churned through its final episodes, and as the entire Teutul family descended into chaos and mutual hatred, was painful. If the events depicted in the show happened in real life, the Teutels should be ashamed of themselves. If those events happened because of clever editing, the production company should be ashamed. Either way, because I felt something of a personal kinship with those characters, it felt personal.

Since then I have sought out lighter Reality fare and now I have a new guilty pleasure, the Discovery Channel’s “Fast N’ Loud.” The shows premise is simple. Basically, two guys with a small shop shuck-and-live their way around Texas looking for old cars that they can fix quick and the sell for a big profit. This is a subject I personally know a lot about, after all I did help to kill the American Muscle Car and, truth be told, the show strikes me as being fairly true to life.

If Fast N’ Loud was a typical reality car show, our greasy looking heroes Richard Rawlings and Aaron Kaufman, would buy a piece of junk and then, in the name of drama, inflict some crazy-short deadline upon themselves which they would then meet with seconds to spare. Then, they would sell their crazy creation to a corporate customer for about a bazillion dollars. Although I wonder about the Ford Bronco, which had seats upholstered in a red and black plaid pattern suspiciously close to the halter tops the well endowed waitresses at a certain restaurant were wearing at the end of the show, that sort of thing doesn’t generally happen here. More often than not, Richard buys a piece of junk, drags it back to the shop where Aaron picks apart all the problems. Sometimes the answer is to throw a lot of money at a project and hope it pays off while other times the answer is to roll the hulk out front, put a for sale sign on it and hope to pass the trouble along to some other sucker with more time and resources to throw into it. Seems about right to me.

Then comes the cars. In American Chopper Paul Teutul thought like an artist and he always seemed to be more concerned about creating his artistic vision than he was about creating a reliably running bike. In Fast N’ Loud, master mechanic Aaron Kaufman spends a great deal of time on actual engineering and he often states that his primary concern is safety. Sure, some of the cars that emerge from the shop are show boats, but for the most part the cars end up as fairly mild customs that sell for less than stratospheric amounts of cash. I like that.

Lastly, let’s talk about the main characters Richard Rawlings and Aaron Kaufman. On the surface they seem like prototypical Reality TV chumps complete with abundant tats, crazy skull rings, various piercings and no fashion sense. Personality wise, however, they differ from the usual fare and, again, they come off as likable and especially genuine.

Richard Rawlings is the front man and I know his type intimately, I grew up around them. Fast N’ Loud’s Gas Monkey Garage is his business and like many successful small businessmen who sell to the public, he has an effusive, outgoing, larger-than-life personality. He is engaging and smart but not afraid to be silly in order to bridge the gap between himself and the customer. He does what it takes to get the sale and he knows that getting noticed is at least as important as offering a quality product. He mixes with the rich and famous one minute, talks to 70 year old Texas farmers the next and he finds something in common with each of them. That’s how sales works and if he was any different, and any less genuine, he would be out of business in a month.

Aaron Kaufman is the master mechanic and he oversees Gas Monkey Garage’s staff as they work on the various cars that Richard brings back to the shop. Thanks to his shaggy beard and slicked back hairstyle, I first expected Aaron Kaufman to be another larger than life reality show figure with a pretend bad-boy attitude. The personality that has emerged over the course of the show, however, is a quiet, thoughtful and genuinely likeable. Aaron Kaufman comes off like a guy who knows how to repair cars and who thinks that doing a good job is critical. Often there is, albeit mild, conflict between Aaron and Richard over the rising cost of this or that project as Aaron seeks to ensure the job gets done right while Richard seeks to control costs. Again, this is a compromise that all small businessmen make on a daily basis and it lends credibility to what we see on TV.

Now into its second season, I believe that Fast N’ Loud is on its way to being another huge Reality TV hit for the Discovery Channel. I earnestly hope that Richard Rawlings and Aaron Kaufmann can keep their egos under control as their fame and fortunes increase. It would be a shame to see these two very likable guys turn into raging jerks. I know that some part of reality TV will always be scripted, but as long as the set-ups are interesting cars and not silly interpersonal drama they can count me among their regular viewers. The world needs more fun, silly shows that can draw attention to the car hobby. This is a good one – check your local listings for the time and channel and sit through an episode, you might find yourself surprised at just how much fun you’ll have.

Thomas M Kreutzer currently lives in Buffalo, New York with his wife and three children but has spent most of his adult life overseas. He has lived in Japan for 9 years, Jamaica for 2 and spent almost 5 years as a US Merchant Mariner serving primarily in the Pacific. A long time auto and motorcycle enthusiast he has pursued his hobbies whenever possible. He also enjoys writing and public speaking where, according to his wife, his favorite subject is himself.

Sweet, sweet publicity. Although I am loathe to admit it, I am a sucker for a slick ad campaign. Those catchy jingles, perfectly posed photos, and quick camera cuts work their way into my psyche and demand that I throw down my hard earned cash for something I may not need, but God how I want it! Done right, an ad campaign can have a lasting effect on me – I’m not sure if Bertel is to blame, but does anyone else remember when Volkswagen used Elvis Presley’s “Devil In Disguise” to promote their GTI? I sure do- too bad I can’t find it on you tube! So let’s talk car ads – here are some of the greatest car ads of all time:

Nissan 300ZX

Click here to view the embedded video.

Nissan had a real string of clever commercials in the early 1990s. I think the company really understood that people weren’t buying some of their cars on cost or features, they were buying them because they were some of the coolest cars going. The above ads spring right from the mind of every boy who ever owned a classic GI Joe.

Isuzu Impulse

Click here to view the embedded video.

Joe Isuzu was the pitchman in one of the most popular TV commercial series of the 1980s. You may or may not know it, but not everything he says is the truth…

Dodge Shadow

Click here to view the embedded video.

Today computerized graphics and morphing from one shape into another is old hat, but way back in 1987 that technology didn’t exist. This commercial was incredible and it drew a direct line between the legendary Dodge Dart of the past and the new, modern K car based Shadow. It got my attention for sure, this commercial is the reason I got my ass down to the local Dodge dealership when I went looking for my first brand new car.

Mercury Cougar

Click here to view the embedded video.

This is one of the earliest car commercials I can remember from my childhood. Back then I was more interested in the cat than I was the car (or the woman.) I guess it’s a sign of my age that today I am more interested in the car than I am the cat (or the woman.)

Bonus: American Home Direct

This is actually a Japanese advertisement for life insurance but it is a touching story about a man, his cars and how his life’s priorities change as he moves through life. Keep your handkerchief handy for this, it’s a beautiful, touching ad featuring some cool classic Japanese cars. (Big thanks to Japanese Nostalgic Car for turning me onto this a couple of months ago.)

Click here to view the embedded video.

There you have it, food for thought. As always, your own contributions and suggestions are more than welcome. Also, if you have better internet sleuthing skils than I, feel free to find that Golf GTI Elvis ad I mentioned!

Thomas M Kreutzer currently lives in Buffalo, New York with his wife and three children but has spent most of his adult life overseas. He has lived in Japan for 9 years, Jamaica for 2 and spent almost 5 years as a US Merchant Mariner serving primarily in the Pacific. A long time auto and motorcycle enthusiast he has pursued his hobbies whenever possible. He also enjoys writing and public speaking where, according to his wife, his favorite subject is himself.

Dodge Charger

They say that you don’t regret the things you do as much as you regret the things don’t do. I hope the auto manufacturers are listening, because when I look at so many of the fantastic looking four door sedans on the market today, I feel a sense of regret for what they aren’t doing, namely making two door coupes. I know there are financial considerations, probably tens of millions of dollars worth, at work behind the scenes. I understand, too, that there are likely to be engineering challenges and any number of other issues that a simple layman like myself can never really understand, but the fact that there are no really cool coupe versions of today’s hot sedans gnaws at me.

Thank God for artists like Casey Shain, a man of considerable talent who, like many of us, believes that today’s cars can be better. Unlike most of us, however, he has the talent and the ability to turn his thoughts into artistic reality. His website artandcolourcars.blogspot.com showcases his digitally altered “fake” cars and his love of all things automotive. It is filled with images that rival those of any professional design studio and I highly recommend checking it out. If you are anything like me, you will spend hours there.

Like so many of us, from the time he was a child Casey dreamed about designing cars. Instead, he earned a bachelor of arts from Vassar College and worked as a designer in the publishing industry for more than thirty years. These days he is a freelance book designer and a professional “starving artist,” but he spends much of his free time working with Photoshop and pretending to live that childhood dream. He says, “I’m the same doodler as when I was a child, only now my crayons are digital.”

Casey’s cars may not be real in the sense that they are made out of rubber, plastic and steel, but the detailed images he creates certainly have a life of their own. As a kid who grew up spending hours in front of the fire looking at the Sears Christmas catalog, I know there is a great deal of joy to be had simply looking at pictures and dreaming about the possibilities. Still, I hope that one day someone turns these ideas into reality. Come on car companies, don’t wonder “what if” – take a chance!

View more of Casey Shain’s work here: Casey Shain Car Photochops at Pintrest

Buick Verano “Skylark Hot Hatch”

Thomas M Kreutzer currently lives in Buffalo, New York with his wife and three children but has spent most of his adult life overseas. He has lived in Japan for 9 years, Jamaica for 2 and spent almost 5 years as a US Merchant Mariner serving primarily in the Pacific. A long time auto and motorcycle enthusiast he has pursued his hobbies whenever possible. He also enjoys writing and public speaking where, according to his wife, his favorite subject is himself.

If you have a spare four minutes and four seconds (plus time for the commercial) take the time to check out the following discussion over at Bloomberg.com. As a layman, I find these kind of discussions very interesting and would like to hear the best and the brightest, many of whom I know to be connected with auto industry, give a little perspective to what seems to me to be a very shallow look on the subject of modern car design.

The active premise of the Bloomberg piece is that American car design lost its way in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, and is now beginning to return to its former glory. There is no doubt in my mind that improvements automotive technology have ushered in a golden age of performance, dependability and longevity, but I am left feeling cold when I hear people talking about how superior the “new designs,” are to the ones that came before.

There were some fantastic designs in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s and when I look back at the clean, classic lines of many of those cars I miss the days when designers used a straight edge as a part of their work. The Chevrolet Vega and Monza, while mechanically problem prone, are still wonderful looking little cars that have aged quite gracefully. The mid 80s Fox Body Mustangs, shown in the piece alongside both previous and later versions, look especially good to my eye. Of course you already know my thoughts on the Chrysler LH cars of the 1990s – I like them so much I put my money where my mouth is and have a 300M Special in my driveway.

My take is that there were some damn good designs in the eras these people are deriding. Sure there were some uninteresting and even outlandish designs too, but that doesn’t mean that designers have spent the last 30 years sleeping on the job. They were trying new things and some of those really worked. So, tell us now, what are your favorite cars from the much derided ’70s, ’80s and ’90s?

Thomas Kreutzer currently lives in Buffalo, New York with his wife and three children but has spent most of his adult life overseas. He has lived in Japan for 9 years, Jamaica for 2 and spent almost 5 years as a US Merchant Mariner serving primarily in the Pacific. A long time auto and motorcycle enthusiast he has pursued his hobbies whenever possible. He also enjoys writing and public speaking where, according to his wife, his favorite subject is himself.

Investigative reporter

We have a new car show season. With it come new car releases, and with them comes a contagion that is as tiring and headache-inducing as a Cobo Hall flu on top of an after party hangover. The disease goes by the name of embargo, and it comes with  the embargo breach as a secondary infection.

In case you have studied Pol.Sci. instead of HTML, you might be thinking that we are talking about real embargoes, such as those of Iran or Cuba. We don’t. In our biz, an embargo is when an OEM sends a blog a picture or a story, and then asks not to “print” it until later. If you think that the outcome is both predictable and inevitable, then you are absolutely correct. We could put the matter right to sleep without wasting (ha!) precious HTML column inches, would the new car season not also be marked by an excited chattering, twittering, OMG+1000ering over busted embargoes in what goes as the automotive media these days.

So let’s do what we rarely do, let’s talk about embargoes.

Our embargo

In the funky world of car blogs, embargoes are treated with the fascination otherwise reserved for an older sister’s first period, for our first pubic hair, or, OMG!, stained linen. Likewise, a broken embargo is treated with the enthrallment, or faux outrage caused by school buddies who purportedly went to “third base” without going blind.

Whenever an OEM tells me that “kids have lost their interest in car”, I say: “Wrong, look at Jalopnik.” Jalopnik is the epicenter of youthful eruptions caused by titillating embargoes.  Jalopnik even has a special section for “Embargo News, Videos, Reviews and Gossip.” Currently,  the section crucifies Cycle World (yes, Cycle World) for blowing an embargo.  I was unable to find out which one. I had to withstand attempts of the Jalopnik section to lure me into other Gawker assets that promise me “Orgasm-Free Casual Sex.”  No thanks. In my advanced age, one is grateful for any orgasm one can achieve during casual sex.  (Speaking of age, things got a little better at Jalopnik after Ray Wert was replaced by a more youthful looking, but far more mature Matt Hardigree. As mature men, they talk less, and do it more.)

However, I am looking forward to the promised reviews of embargoes. Car reviews: Tired. Embargo reviews: Wired. Can we hope for five star embargoes? Three thumbs down for halfhearted embargo breaches? A “Meh” for indignant reports of embargo breaches, illustrated with the embargoed picture?  +1000 for the intrepid reporter who can’t be cowed by the OEM machine, and who hits “Publish” a day before he is allowed to? Best upskirt picture during car reveals? Endless opportunities for a blogging biz that always should be on the look-out for distinction at the lowest cost.

Bad boys they are, Jalopnik is a bad influence on other adolescent automotive authors, who try to be a Jalop, even when writing for a site that makes its money by selling contact data of car buyers to car-dealing sharks. Oh, the excitement when they hold their first embargoed picture in their shaking hands! The temptation to jerk off to it usually overcomes the best of them. Kimberly-Clark, always on the lookout for new niches for its tissues, should look into the matter. EmbarGoezAwayz® perhaps?  I mean, I invented Sneezies® for them in the 80s, why not continue on the road to success? You know where to find me, I’m sure.

Their embargo

With that rant off my chest, here the Truth About Embargoes.

What is an embargo? In real life, an embargo is close to a blockade, and some say it’s an act of war. If we stop Iranian oil, it’s God’s work. If the Arabs stop Arabian oil, it’s an outrage. In the unreal life of the motor media, an embargo is a request not to publish something before a set date. Blogs know how to design, make, market and even recycle cars, why should they listen to silly pleas to delay their orgasms until a later date?

How binding is an embargo? It is not binding at all. Usually, an embargo is an appeal to professional courtesy. Lack of  which renders the matter void.

What happens after a breach? Nothing, except for the excited chattering and twittering that provides added media exposure. In most serious cases, the sanction may be that the reporter is not invited back.  This rarely happens, and only with the most stringent types of embargoes as listed below.

What is the sense of embargoes? Purportedly, it is to give journalists time to get their heads and printing machines around a topic. In reality, an embargo acts as a timer that sets off a cluster bomb strike of stories, timed just right for maximum impact for the OEM, while delivering useless crapitation on the part of the individual news outlet. An embargo usually contravenes the interest of the publication, and the stage is set for trouble.

Embargo consequences

Types of embargoes

The buff-book embargo: This is a throwback to the times when pictures of rare pre-production models were shot with large format cameras, on (OMG!) film, where color seps were made, and where cylinders needed etching. This took at least a month, and led to the strange custom, still observed on occasion, that reporters congregate in a room a month before the launch, where they are presented with a top-secret car, and a piece of paper on which they have to promise that they won’t say anything until the embargo lifts. Unless the paper is a hard and fast Non Disclosure Agreement, in which clear sanctions, such as loss of your firstborn, or $250,000 for each breach, are agreed upon, that paper only has symbolic value. The buff books stick to the embargo, because they want to be invited back, and they need the month anyway. They also do on-line, and a day after the meeting, renders appear that come close to the actual car. Those, wink-wink, do not count as a breach of embargo. I observe the buff-book embargo, even if it leads to a conversation like this one: “As you know, no photography allowed today, Mr. Schmitt.”  “I know.” “Where is your camera?” “At home, you told me not to bring one.” “Oh. You brought your phone, did you?” “Sure.” “Good. Keep it in your pocket.” “Sure thing.” Wink. Wink.

The individual embargo: Trusted reporters sometimes receive individual access to car, inside information, executives, production sites etc. before the launch, with the understanding that the story is held back until the launch. This usually is in form of a handshake agreement, sometimes on a piece of paper. This embargo is rarely breached, because it gives reporter and publication a better story, and a leg up on the riff-raff that has to quote from the press release. I observe the individual embargo. I am old-fashioned and I believe in handshakes.

Ignore it: Common (market) embargo of today

The common embargo: Sometimes, press releases, even those published on publicly accessible websites, or sent out via mass emails have “Embargoed until ….” on them. This is regarded as effective as appeals for chastity until marriage, and it is as commonly ignored. When I was young, pubescent kids used to get thrilled about chastity and we tried to get our hands and more as deep into other pants as possible. These days, kids excitedly twitter and chatter about (OMG!) breaches of embargo.  I ignore this kind of embargo, I would laugh at complaints and never receive any.

The come-on embargo: The industry, fascinated with the social media thing, has caught on to the stirring in loins and keyboards caused by a titillating embargo. As the slow reveal loses its efficacy, nothing punches better through the clutter of pre-car-show press releases than a big “EMBARGOED UNTIL …” on the email. In a world where real tits have given way to titillations, this assures attention, just like adolescent sex was exciting, because it was verboten. High fives in the PR departments of the OEMs are triggered by the secondary explosions in blogs that feign outrage over embargo breaches by colleagues who dared to go to third base first (“AutoWeek’s Phil Floraday Breaks Embargo On Buick Enclave!!!” OMG!)

Expect large-scale farming of these genetically modified forbidden fruit, and expect them to taste as bland as GM produce usually tastes. A blogger who gets excited, or worse, who observes the come-on embargo is a lost cause, and really should look for other employment.

I have not read Automobile magazine regularly since the late David E. Davis, Jr. departed the Ann Arbor rag a few years ago. I did grab a copy of their November issue while stuck in an airport last week and was treated to a pair of puzzling pieces from Contributing Writer Ezra Dyer.

His monthly column was a first-person rant about a recent car buying experience, your basic Dealership Treated Me Badly story, of which you can find about 10,000 examples of on the Internet. What’s next? An expose on how drunk drivers kill innocent people? It must have been a slow news month at Automobile.

Dyer cried because the dealership’s “title guy” (“finance manager” to you and me) attempted to add a service plan and extended warranty to the deal. Ezra, you are in the car writing world and don’t know what happens when you buy a car? If nothing else you could have used your default position: tell the dealer who you are and promise them some free publicity if they cut you a deal and supply you with a seamless buying and financing process.

In an attempt to protect both his story and the flagging advertising sales of the magazine, Dyer did not disclose the brand, model or type of car he purchased. He did mention that the vehicle was located “two states away” and had a certified extended warranty, so it must have been a hard-to-find late model used car. I am wary when an auto writer does not want the audience to know what kind of vehicle he or she owns.

Next up, Ezra writes of his trip to Europe to drive flat out on a “secret” test track in a 1200 horsepower Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport Vitesse worth $2.5 million and capable of hitting 255 mph. Now there’s a great story I am thinking, that is merely everyone’s fantasy.

Bugatti has seen enough Frank Bacons darken their door to know they need to control car writers’ driving behaviors while piloting their million dollar babies. I don’t know about you but I would follow Bugatti’s rules if given this amazing opportunity. If Bugatti ordered me to don Danica Patrick’s firesuit and then clay bar and Meguiar the car before we hit the track, I would happily comply. But not Dyer, he had to do it his way.

Dyer’s marching orders were very precise on approach speeds to the mile long straightaways, where to be on positioned on track and when to hit the go pedal, all monitored by his passenger, Bugatti test pilot Loris Bicocchi. Let’s let Dyer take it from here:

“…my brain skips a half a step ahead of the approved takeoff sequence…we’re closing in on 300 kph when I hear a strange noise. It almost sounds like a man yelling. In fact, it is a man yelling. In my peripheral vision, I see Bicocchi gesticulating frantically. I hit the brakes. Bicocchi is pissed. “I was yelling at you to slow down! You need to look at me!” he shouts. He looks angry but also petrified. “I had no control!” he seethes. In my defense, I was not ignoring him. I simply could not hear him…”

You can’t tell a Big Time Auto Journo like me how to drive! He did get his act together and hit 205 mph on the following straightaway. Dyer did not mention what happened after his run but I imagine Bugatti threw him out on his ezra.

Ezra Dyer is a funny and insightful writer and obviously not afraid to admit his screw-ups but I question his editorial judgment and behavior in these two instances. So memo to Automobile: Next time please send Editor-In-Chief Jean Jennings along on such missions. She would have negotiated an additional $1000 discount on the car and would have easily hit 225 mph in the Bugatti. You see, Ms. Jennings is an adult.

 ”Do you want to accompany? or go on ahead? or go off alone? … One must know what one wants and that one wants”

Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight Of The Idols

This week’s news that GM would stop production of the Chevrolet Volt for the third time in its brief lifespan came roaring out of the proverbial blind spot. Having watched the Volt’s progress closely from gestation through each month’s sales results, it was no secret to me that the Volt was seriously underperforming to expectations. But in the current media environment, anything that happens three times is a trend, and the latest shutdown (and, even more ominously, the accompanying layoffs) was unmistakeable. Not since succumbing to government-organized bankruptcy and bailout has GM so publicly cried “uncle” to the forces of the market, and I genuinely expected The General to continue to signal optimism for the Volt’s long-term prospects. After all, sales in February were up dramatically, finally breaking the 1,000 unit per month barrier. With gasoline prices on the march, this latest shutdown was far from inevitable.

And yet, here we are. Now that GM is undeniably signaling that the Volt is a Corvette-style halo car, with similar production and sales levels, my long-standing skepticism about the Volt’s chances seems to be validated. But in the years since GM announced its intention to build the Volt, this singular car has become woven into the history and yes, the mythology of the bailout era. Now, at the apparent end of its mass-market ambitions, I am struck not with a sense of schadenfreude, but of bewilderment. If the five year voyage of Volt hype is over, we have a lot of baggage to unpack.

When a history of the Volt is written, it will be difficult not to conclude that the Volt has been the single most politicized automobile since the Corvair. Seemingly due to timing alone, GM’s first serious environmental halo car became an icon of government intervention in private industry, a perception that is as true as it is false. I hoped to capture this tension in a July 2010 Op-Ed in the New York Times, in which I argued that

the Volt appears to be exactly the kind of green-at-all-costs car that some opponents of the bailout feared the government might order G.M. to build. Unfortunately for this theory, G.M. was already committed to the Volt when it entered bankruptcy.

But by that time, the Volt was already so completely transformed into a political football, the second sentence of this quote was entirely ignored by political critics on the right. The culture of partisanship being what it is in this country, any nuance to my argument was lost in the selective quoting on one side and the mockery of my last name on the other. One could argue that that this politicization was unnecessary or counter-productive, but it was also inevitable.

The Volt began life as a blast from GM’s Motorama past: a futuristic four-place coupe concept with a unique drivetrain (which still defies apples-to-apples efficiency comparisons with other cars), a fast development schedule and constantly-changing specifications, price points and sales expectations. It’s important to remember that the Volt was controversial as a car practically from the moment GM announced (and then began changing) production plans, becoming even more so when the production version emerged looking nothing like the concept. But it wasn’t until President Obama’s auto task force concluded that the Volt seemed doomed to lose money, and yet made no effort to suspend its development as a condition for the bailout, that a car-guy controversy began to morph into a mainstream political issue.

At that point, most of the car’s fundamental controversies were well known, namely its price, size, elusive efficiency rating, and competition. Well before the car was launched, it was not difficult to predict its challenges on the market, even without the added headwinds of ideological objections (which should have been mitigated by the fact that they were actually calling for government intervention in GM’s product plans while decrying the same). But GM’s relentless hype, combined with Obama’s regular rhetorical references to the Volt, fueled the furor. Then, just two months after Volt sales began trickle in, Obama’s Department of Energy released a still-unrepudiated document, claiming that 505,000 Volts would be sold in the US by 2015 (including 120,000 this year). By making the Volt’s unrealistic sales goals the centerpiece of a plan to put a million plug-in-vehicles on the road, the Obama Administration cemented the Volt’s political cross-branding.

When GM continued to revise its 2012 US sales expectations to the recent (and apparently still wildly-unrealistic) 45,000 units, I asked several high-level GM executives why the DOE didn’t adjust its estimates as well. But rather than definitively re-calibrate the DOE’s expectations, they refused to touch the subject. The government, they implied, could believe what it wanted. Having seen its CEO removed by the President, GM’s timid executive culture was resigned to the Volt’s politicized status, and would never make things awkward for its salesman-in-chief. And even now, with production of the Volt halted for the third time, GM continues to play into the Volt’s politicized narrative: does anyone think it is coincidence that The General waited until three days after the Michigan Republican primary (and a bailout-touting Obama speech) to cut Volt production for the third time?

Of course, having used the Volt as a political prop itself from the moment CEO Rick Wagoner drove a development mule version to congressional hearings as penance for traveling to the previous hearing in a private jet, GM is now trying to portray the Volt as a martyr at the hands of out-of-control partisanship. And the Volt’s father Bob Lutz  certainly does have a point when he argues that the recent Volt fire controversy was blown out of proportion by political hacks. But blaming the Volt’s failures on political pundits gives them far too much credit, ignores GM’s own politicization of the Volt, and misses the real causes of the Volt’s current, unenviable image.

The basic problem with the Volt isn’t that it’s a bad car that nobody could ever want; it is, in fact, quite an engineering achievement and a rather impressive drive. And if GM had said all along that it would serve as an “anti-Corvette,” selling in low volumes at a high price, nobody could now accuse it of failure. Instead, GM fueled totally unrealistic expectations for Volt, equating it with a symbol of its rebirth even before collapsing into bailout. The Obama administration simply took GM’s hype at face value, and saw it as a way to protect against the (flawed) environmentalist argument that GM deserved to die because of “SUV addiction” alone. And in the transition from corporate sales/image hype to corporatist political hype, the Volt’s expectations were driven to ever more unrealistic heights, from which they are now tumbling. Beyond the mere sales disappointment, the Volt has clearly failed to embody any cultural changes GM might have undergone in its dark night of the soul, instead carrying on The General’s not-so-proud tradition of moving from one overhyped short-term savior to the next.

Now, as in the Summer of 2010, I can’t help but compare the Volt with its nemesis and inspiration, the Toyota Prius. When the Toyota hybrid went on sale in the US back in 2000, it was priced nearly the same as it is today (in non-inflation-adjusted dollars), and was not hyped as a savior. Instead, Toyota accepted losses on early sales, and committed itself to building the Prius’s technology and brand over the long term. With this approach, GM could have avoided the Volt’s greatest criticism (its price) and embarrassment (sales shortfalls), and presented the extended-range-electric concept as a long-term investment.

Even now, GM can still redefine the Volt as a long-term play that will eventually be worth its development and PR costs… but only as long as it candidly takes ownership of its shortcomings thus far and re-sets expectations to a credible level. And whether The General will defy and embarrass its political patrons by destroying the “million EVs by 2015″ house of cards in order to do so, remains very much to be seen. One thing is certain: as long as it puts PR and political considerations before the long-term development of healthy technology and brands,  GM will struggle with a negative and politicized image. And the Volt will be seen not as a symbol of GM’s long-term vision and commitment, but of its weakness, desperation, inconstancy and self-delusion.

As a “glass-half-empty” kind of guy, I would need a minute to think about the most fascinating story I’ve ever written, but could easily tell you about the most infuriating. That dubious honor goes to the Facebook launch campaign for the 2012 Ford Explorer.

Starting in June of 2010, Ford released a series of “teaser images” of wilderness or other scenes with an Explorer barely visible. The process went on for roughly a month, and I was responsible for writing blog posts about the new images, which proved to be trying. By the time the 2012 Explorer launched, I was sick of hearing about it, and didn’t care whatsoever about any of the new technologies or improvements.

The Explorer is far from the only car to get this treatment; most notably, the Chevrolet Camaro and Scion FR-S/Subaru BRZ underwent this excruciatingly uninteresting method of endless concept cars and leaked details. Other vehicles, like the Dodge Dart get social media soft launches where little teaser photographs are dribbled out bit by bit.

The car companies feel that this builds buzz for the “brand”, but most importantly, it’s great for the auto bloggers. Every new photo or piece of information can generate a new post, which can generate an all-important “click” (see also: Top 10 lists, slideshows, reporting on social unrest and natural disasters). It’s a symbiotic relationship between the OEM and the media that’s unlikely to change, given the dysfunctional economics of blogging, that rewards speed, sensationalism and superficial content (which generate clicks) over the kind of slow, measured, in-depth work that the foundations of real in-depth journalism are built on. The kind of content that takes time and money to produce, bores many readers because it’s over 800 words long and often gets displaced in the article hierarchy because a new Toyonda Camcord Juicy Couture Special Edition was released and if we’re not first at re-hashing the press release and stock photos, we’ll be rendered irrelevant. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a new Ferrari teaser photo to write about.

I was originally hesitant to jump on the Tesla Roadster “bricked batteries” bandwagon, and my initial story was written with a sort of cautious neutrality. Further context will be provided by the details that have surfaced in the 24 hours since the story broke. Hope you’re ready to dive in to it all.

Original story here. A quick recap: Tesla Roadster owner Max Drucker contacted Tesla CEO Elon Musk regarding a dead battery in his car. Drucker’s car died after he left his Roadster parked, without leaving it plugged in for two months. The vehicle subsequently died. The car was towed to a Tesla service center and a technician determined that his battery would have to be replaced at a cost of $40,000. Drucker sent an angry letter to CEO Elon Musk admonishing him for poor customer service.

- The Tesla “bricking” story broke on the blog of Michael Degusta. Degusta and Drucker have a long history as business partners. This was not disclosed. I contacted Degusta, who said he would put me in touch with an owner who has had their car “bricked” (he did not say if it was Drucker or one of the other four affected owners) and refused to put me in touch with the Tesla service manager who claimed that, among other things, Tesla was tracking vehicles by GPS without the owner’s consent. I was reluctant to take those claims at face value – now they can’t be independently verified. On Degusta’s blog, he discusses an owner of Roadster #340, who parked his car in a temporary garage, sans charger, while his home is being renovated. This is consistent with Drucker’s emails to Tesla – but also consistent with Drucker at best not following the protocol outlined in various documents (obtained via Green Car Reports) and the Tesla Roadster’s manual, or at worst, being negligent. Drucker’s Roadster wouldn’t have the Tesla GSM connection that can alert Tesla to low battery charge conditions. Those were only installed after the first 500 Roadsters were produced. Degusta makes a big stink about the GPS tracking of the Roadsters, but is on record claiming that, and Degusta is unwilling to back that claim up beyond anecdotal evidence.

- A copy of the Tesla Roadster owner’s manual (covering the Tesla Roadster S and Roadster 2.5. Link is at the bottom of the page for you to peruse yourself), states in numerous places that owners are not to leave their vehicles uncharged for long periods of time, or to drain the battery down to zero. Doing so, the owners are told, will cause permanent damage to the battery, and such damage will not be covered under the Tesla Roadster’s warranty agreement. This is spelled out in numerous places in greater detail throughout the manual. Scans of these pages are available in the gallery below. In addition, there is an agreement which owners must sign at the time of purchase that has the owner acknowledge the responsibility of maintaining a proper battery charge, and that any damage that results from negligence in this area is not covered under warranty. Degusta’s complaints that the “Battery Reminder Card” handed out to owners during servicing don’t contain adequate warnings of the consequences are also misleading, as the consequences are spelled out in the aforementioned documents.

- The Tesla Roadster’s battery, unlike those in the Nissan Leaf and Chevrolet Volt, is made up of 6831 “consumer commodity cells”, basically laptop or cellphone type cells that combine to make up the battery pack. These batteries use Cobalt Dioxide chemistry, which is the most energy dense, and prone to decaying with time as well as use. This is not the case in the Volt or Leaf, which use different chemistry. In addition, the “state of charge” used by the Tesla pack is different; when a Tesla range indicator displays “zero miles”, it could have 5 percent of the battery life left. If the car is then parked without charging, it may drain to zero, leaving the car “bricked”. A Volt, on the other hand, may actually have one half to one third of the battery pack’s life left upon displaying “zero miles”; it only uses 10.4 kW out of its 16kW battery. Exact figures for a Tesla battery weren’t available, but are said to be much higher.

-It’s theoretically possible to revive a “bricked” consumer cell via slow trickle charging, in the same way that a dead iPod or laptop can be brought back to life if left to charge for a very long time after months of not being used.

So, we know for sure that it’s possible for a Tesla to “brick”. Tesla has admitted it in a statement, but also seems to have provided ample warnings that it could happen and that it can easily be prevented. These measures, along with the structure of the warranty agreement, leads us to believe that a product liability lawsuit is highly unlikely (a former auto industry lawyer we spoke to agreed, though cautioned that California’s Lemon Laws were the most liberal of any of the 50 states).

Of course, Tesla could have replaced the battery pack in good faith (and maybe had Drucker and the others sign an NDA agreement that also absolves Tesla of any responsibility for the pack’s failure), but for some reason, they didn’t. In the gallery below, we have scans of the manual. You can read the manual for yourself here.

I remember looking at the then brand new Ford Five Hundred and thinking to myself, “This would make one heck of a Volvo.”

Like the Volvos of yore this Ford offered a squarish conservative appearance. A high seating position which Volvo’s ‘safety oriented’ customers would have appreciated. Toss in a cavernous interior that had all the potential for a near-luxury family car, or even a wagon, and this car looked more ‘Volvo’ than ‘Ford’ to me with each passing day.

Something had to be done…

Hmmm… why not subtract ‘twenty’ from the Five Hundred name. Call it a 480, and put in a nice classic Volvo styled fascia on the front end. Throw in an interior inspired by the best of Swedish design and, Voila! Ford would have offered a Volvo that would have hit the square peg of the brand’s main customers… and maybe even a few others who were considering an upscale Camry or a Lexus ES.

Sadly Ford never made a Volvo version of the Five Hundred, or the Flex for that matter. Instead they mis-balanced the diverging priorities of competing simultaneously with BMW (S40′s, C30′s, S60′s) and conservative middle-aged Americans who valued luxury transport over driving dynamics (Xc90, XC60, C70).  The brand became a disaster.

I am starting to see the same ingredients mixed into other brands these days. Take for instance Scion.

Yes this brand will get a nice pop and halo in the form of the upcoming FR-S. Then again, halo sports cars that are shared with other brands tend to be short-lived. Just ask Pontiac and Saturn about the Solstice and the Sky.

So what would be the perfect car to put into Scion’s kinship?

Two years ago I would have strongly argued for making the CT200h a Scion. It didn’t have the luxury trappings of a Lexus. However it offered tons of sporting character and attracted the type of youthful and educated audience that Scion sorely needed at that point.

You know. The type of people that quickly walked away from Scion after they started marketing bloated SUV-like compacts that should have been marketed as… Toyotas… or Volvos. Who knows.

Wait a second. YOU know!

A lot of potentially great cars over the years have been marketed to the wrong brands for the wrong reasons.  So I ask the B&B, “What cars were given the wrong brand, and where should they have gone?”.

Like most marketing classes in modern day MBA-land there are no right answers. Just SWAG’s and opinions. Feel free to demote a Cadillac to a Chevy if you must. So long as you can defend it, let’s hear it.

General Motors announced changes to the Chevrolet Volt’s design after a NHTSA investigation into why a Volt caught fire following crash testing.

The changes will go into effect once production restarts at the Hamtramck, Michigan facility, but customer cars already sold will follow a different protocol.

Starting in February, GM will initiate a “voluntary customer satisfaction program” to make the necessary changes to the Volt. According to GM’s Rob Peterson said that  formal recalsl must be initiated by NHTSA, and their lack of movement prompted GM to enact a voluntary one instead.

The fix involves changes to the Volt’s battery pack housing, as well as a coolant temperature sensor and a special bracket to prevent overfilling. The previous system allowed the battery housing to be punctured, which then resulted in coolant overflowing onto a circuit board causing an electrical short. The short was determined to be the cause of the fire.

Rather than running commercials during the Super Bowl, General Motors is looking to try something more subversive – product placement within other brand’s TV spots during the big game.

Automotive News reports that GM marketing man Joel Ewanick was investigating the possibility of paying other advertisers to insert GM vehicles into their ads. But various contractual elements related to Super Bowl advertising may kill the idea in its nascent stages.

Super Bowl ads are apparently restricted via a form of non-compete clause. Ford and Chevrolet could not run ads in the same “pod” (i.e. commercial break), and GM’s plan would cause havoc with this arrangement. Having GM products inserted into another company’s ad, as well as commercials for GM’s own products would cause a logistical nightmare for the people who decide where and when ads are placed.

Furthermore, the plan would run afoul of a long-standing policy against buying a 30 second spot and then re-selling 5 or 10 second blocks of time. NBC, which broadcasts the game, would also have to approve any ads that feature the promotion of an unrelated brand. The article also mentions a “reward system” that would give small prizes to viewers who are able to spot product placements, though no details on this seemingly silly scheme were given.

As much as Super Bowl ads have become a part of pop culture, meriting their own examination, the undeniable fact remains that for many, the ads are a great way to grab another beer or, shall we say, recycle the liquids via the municipal sewage system.

All told, this has been a successful holiday season for your humble editor. I have showered myself with gifts, avoided annoying family entanglements, kept my pimp hand weak strong, and made sure there’s a three-hour gap in my Christmas to re-watch Michael Mann’s Heat in its glorious entirety.

And yet… I’m dissatisfied. Perhaps because there are ten simple things the automotive industry and/or its various players could do to make this the best season ever, and as of yet, none of them have been done. So here’s my list, delivered nice and late. Warning: mixture of hatred, sarcasm, and foolish sincerity ahead.

#10: Get the Chinese crap out of iconic American automobiles. There’s no simpler way to say it. Ford, please fit a decent, American-made transmission to all the Mustangs. If you need to, just toss in the GT500 transmission, charge everyone a fair amount for the difference, and rest secure in the knowledge that the right thing has been done. GM, you don’t get a pass on this either. Every Corvette sold in this country should have American-made wheels. It’s that simple. I don’t want to do 195mph on wheels made by suppliers who can just close their doors and reopen the next day under a different name. We won’t even talk about the electronics. Just fix the running parts, okay?

#9: Mercedes-Benz should formally apologize for the W220 and W210. Every customer who purchased a new S-Class or E-Class from those infamously troubled generations should receive a letter in the mail, hand-signed by Dr. Panzer Kampf-Wagen or whoever is running the show nowadays, apologizing for selling them an utter piece of junk. Hundreds of thousands of customers were basically swindled. They thought they were buying a Mercedes-Benz, not a cost-cut half-plastic embarrassment. Make it right. And throw them a little incentive towards the price of a new (and presumably better) Benz, just to make up for the abysmal resale on, say, the 2001 S430.

#8: Kill the Caliber. Okay, I guess that one’s been done.

#7: Buy all the Calibers back. Well, a guy can dream.

#6: Extend the warranty on the Cadillac Northstar. All of them. As dismal as the Mercedes-Benz S430 was, at least the basic mechanical parts were generally sound. Not so the Caddy four-valver. It’s great to drive and the name is also really cool, but they have become infamous for reliability issues. Now would be a good time for GM to show that they are serious about making Cadillac a world-class brand. They could do this by extending the warranty to match that of existing world-class brands like Hyundai, Kia, and Mitsubishi. If you really want to impress people, and if you really want to do something about Cadillac residuals, extend the warranty backwards in time. There’s precedent. Honda did it on the exploding-tranny Acuras. Surely Cadillac can match Acura.

#5: Go ahead and release the real 2012 Honda lineup. Oh, you’ve certainly had your fun with us, you crazy Japan-people, you. We Got Punked! I’m laughing. I really am. So now you can pull the wraps off the Civic, Acura TL/TSX, and CR-Z that you really want people to buy. I can hardly wait. DO EEET NOW. Obviously anybody who accidentally bought the current cars will get to trade, right?

#4: Let’s get Car and Driver and Road & Track off the newsstands. And AutoWeek while you’re at it. Seriously. Those of us who remember these magazines in their prime (not that AutoWeek ever had a prime, but you get the idea) are just depressed by reading them now — and the younger drivers don’t care. Close their doors and give existing subscribers, none of whom paid more than $6.95 a year anyway, their choice of Grassroots Motorsports or Shaved Asians to finish out their terms. Reading these once-great magazines now produces the same uncomfortable feeling I had when I heard that Jaco Pastorius had died in a gutter. Let’s make the dignified choice.

#3: End trim discrimination for manual transmissions. We live in an era where just-in-time manufacturing and supply have revolutionized the way cars are built. There is no reason whatsoever why the Hyundai Elantra Limited can’t be had with a manual transmission. Same goes for any other number of cars on the market. I’m not asking anybody to take the completely wacky step of fitting optional manuals on cars which don’t have them available now. I’m not living in dreamland. I understand that it’s critical for every Nissan Maxima sold to be crippled with that ridiculous Completely Vapid Transmission, and I can see how it’s simply too much hassle to offer a stick-shift in US-market Mercedes-Benz sedans, what with the extra $10 million it would cost to test the powertrain combination. That kind of cash pays for a lot of hidden goodwill programs on the W210 (see #9, above). I’m just saying: if you offer a manual transmission in one trim level, offer it in all of them. TSX Wagon, I’m looking directly at you. It can be special order only. That’s okay. I will wait.

#2: Porsche. Try finding it in your God-damned hearts to engineer, build, and sell a sporting 2+2 made to last a lifetime under a combination of four-season street and casual racetrack usage. Take all the money you waste on lifestyle marketing, accessories catalogs, special promotions, unique tie-ins, PR, free trans-Atlantic business-class flights for sycophants, hybrid drivetrains for five-thousand-pound crapwagons, special advertising sections, long-term loaners, Peter Cheney’s garage door, full-color glossy posters featuring frog-faced, thyroid-deficient trucksedans, whatever special tools are required to make sure the Cayman’s engine pushes less air than the 911′s, and any other unbelievably stupid thing you’re currently doing — and put all of it into creating a decent car. Just do that. Just put aside the thirty years of self-aggrandizing detritus you’ve built up around a once-legendary brand. Just build a car that will run 200,000 miles with careful maintenance the way (some of) the air-cooled cars did. I want to buy a Porsche. But I’m not a big enough fool to give you $85,000 for something that will have major, unresolved defects and a 35% residual five years after I take delivery.

#1: I’d like my colleagues to look in the mirror. If you’re writing in this business, today would be a good day to take stock of who you are, what you’re written, and the things for which you personally stand. Today would be a good day to remember that, although your super-best-friends in the PR business may pay for your daily driver, send your family on vacations, and pick up the tab for your drinks, your genuine and true responsibility is to the people who read your articles. My son is two and a half years old. The day will come when I am dead and he will only have what I’ve written to guide him as to who I was. He will see that I was flawed, intemperate, promiscuous, and occasionally naive to a fault — but he will also see that I believed in my readers and was passionate about creating content in which they could believe. Will your son be able to say the same? Or will he say, “My father (or mother) was a pawn of people who bought and sold him for the price of a monthly car payment”? Here’s a litmus test. If you had more interactions with PR people, fleet managers, and industry buddies than you did with your own readers last month, you’re part of the problem. Fix your wagon.

What are the chances I will get any of these gifts? Let’s be honest. It’s between slim and none. I have received one thing for which I am grateful, however: all of you at TTAC. Time and time again you have demonstrated that, collectively, you are the greatest group of partners any writer in the automotive world could wish to have. Merry Christmas to me, indeed.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Motor Trend’s Car of the Year award has been a lightning rod of criticism among automotive gadflies ever since… well, you decide. Corvair? Vega? Mustang II?  Every year, MT picks one “best” car from a market that serves a wide variety of needs, and every year, the autoblogosphere rushes to help the tottering “contest” collapse under the weight of its own pretense. This year, with Motor Trend picking Volkswagen’s new de-Euro’d Passat (a car that has received a decidedly mixed critical reception) for its highest honor, is it any wonder that the peanut gallery is frothing over the choice?

Jalopnik, the gaddiest of automotive gadflies, swung for the moon with their headline of “Golden Shower” superimposed atop a picture of Editor-In-Chief Angus Mackenzie. Mike Spinelli’s satirical rant, praising Motor Trend for giving the award to a car that has been watered-down and decontented for the American market, would be funny if there weren’t legions of people who earnestly believed the Passat could qualify as some kind of enthusiast vehicle beyond the mere fact that it was a Volkswagen, and therefore obscure to most consumers.

The previous Passats were great cars. I lobbied hard for my folks to buy a B6 Wagon in high school but they ended up going with a Hyundai Santa Fe. The inside of a Passat was, to quote a popular movie at the time “lined with rich mahogany and filled with leather [bound books]…” and the 2.0T engine provided a nice kick. The dealer even had a parts counter guy who offered to re-flash the ECU for another 40 horsepower and 90 lb-ft, but alas, it wasn’t to be. Otherwise, the Passats were just “meh” to drive. More fun than a CamCord to be certain, but eating diabetic candy is more fun than eating celery sticks.

But a rant like Jalopnik’s, as funny as it is, is just as disingenuous as Motor Trend’s award – it’s not really about the quality of the car or of Motor Trend’s journalism, but a sly bit of branding and status whoring, intending to position Jalopnik as a site of integrity, by the enthusiasts, for enthusiasts. We’ve seen this before with the Jeff Glucker hit-piece, in spite of the rampant XBOX whoring and other questionable tactics like misleading headlines that lead to single sentence posts. Motor Trend may have made a bad call, but trotting out the typical “enthusiasts are being ignored” canard is the wrong move when our target for attack has given the COTY award to illustrious candidates like the 2002 Ford Thunderbird and the 2001 Chrysler PT Cruiser. Spinelli asks rhetorically “Why would Motor Trend cater to the whims of “enthusiasts” over the marketplace?” Because, as we’ve established long ago, enthusiasts complain endlessly and buy seldom. Meanwhile, the new Jetta is setting sales records, despite it apparently being the enthusiast Antichrist on four wheels [Ed: to the point where Forbes calls it a "flop," despite its 27% bump in sales]

On to the next bête noire – Motor Trend brags about this year’s field of cars being one of the largest and most competitive, at 35. Looking at the field, I can see about, oh, 33 more worthy candidates (aside from the Fisker Karma, which is vaporware and looks like a kosher sausage that stayed in the frying pan too long). Why not the Ford Focus or the Chevrolet Sonic, two small cars that prove that American cars can beat the imports at their own game [Ed: Might this not have been the best year in history for MT to give a GM small car the honor, after so many embarrassments?]? Why not the Audi A7, which should win for no other reason than being heartbreakingly beautiful? Why not the Nissan LEAF for being a mass market EV that actually works?

If you ask me, the reason is because Motor Trend is out of touch with everything and everyone else outside of Planet Motor Trend, and has officially become irrelevant. They slam the Ford Explorer, but again, it seems to do just fine in the sales race. Their endless advertorial love affair with the CTS-V wagon “long term tester” is almost a parody of auto journalisms excesses. And don’t forget MacKenzie’s own piece for Subaru’s magazine (and MT) which detailed his all-expenses paid jaunt to the Australian Outback in – A Subaru Outback! More than anything else, this seems like MT is betting that the new Passat will sell well, rather than rewarding a manufacturer for a truly significant achievement. And who precisely learns what from that?

Ed described the new Passat to me as “A German Impala” and that’s a pretty apt, if uncharitable description. It’s a lot better than the “enthusiast” vanguard would have you believe, but there’s still something not quite right. It’s a little watered down, a little soft around the edges – just right for everyone else who isn’t totally immersed in the world of automotive trivia. And they’ve never bought a car based on an annual award anyways.

You know, it’s getting goddamned hard for a chap to enjoy a decent corporate-sponsored nosebag from time to time what with the ever-imminent prospect of Jack “Banquo” Baruth popping out from behind a silver soup tureen and shouting “J’accuse!” like some sort of admonitory, jort-clad Visigoth. At least, such I was thinking to myself as I lined the walls of my pericardium with the rich yellow fat best produced by overly-sauced food and moderately crappy wines.

This was in the latter stages of a lunch – sorry - launch I was attending in, admittedly, a very unprofessional capacity. I’m still not entirely sure how I ended up here, but I’m one of those people who can’t say no when offered work; here though there would be no byline, and theoretically therefore, no conflict of interest.

Still, I was keeping one eye open, metaphorically-speaking, for our own favourite Sword of Damocles, as – pardon me good sir, but I believe your trotter is in my trough!

Lifer Automotive Journalist the Size of a Small Moon: “Oh, do beg pardon. Snarfle-snarfle-glub.”

Think nothing of it. Now where was I? Ah yes, the dining room. There I was, surrounded by the ambiance of several tonnes of avoirdupois on the hoof rapidly consuming their considerable body weights in alcohol, rich meats and cream-based sauces. The sound was akin to that of creating a vast clone army of Cookie Monsters and then turning them loose to attack the Nestle Toll House central warehouses. Om, as they say, Nom.

As I sat, replete and idly wondering how much leftover ribeye I could secret away in my pockets for homeward economy-flight consumption before I became drunk enough to lose basic motor skills, a voice hissed at me.

“Psssst!” came the hoarse whisper, “Lime-Green Audi S5!”

Thus it was that I received the secret verbal handshake that identifies those of us for whom the gravy train remains a bemusing through-the-looking-glass experience, best described by TTAC contributor Derek Kreindler as a luxury vacation with people you hate. Not that I object to the free bacon of course.

Fast-forward a bit and here I am again at yet another free-for-all, sipping a Stone IPA I didn’t pay for, noshing on some quote-unquote “vintage”  ribeye – hipsterism for carnivores? – with port-wine reduction. As our gracious host rises to his feet to thank the assembled journalists for coming, thus reminding us all about how important we really are, I’m thinking about Jeff Glucker.

A better writer than I has already covered this topic, but moving forward, the immediate fallout of Gluckergate has been the usual 10-10-80 polarization of those who read, follow and comment on the various automotive blogs and websites that are part of Interwebs 2-point-whatever-we’re-at-now. 10% of people were outraged at Mr. Glucker’s ethical mis-step, and applaud Jalopnik’s no-holds-barred outing. 10% of people (including yours truly) were outraged at Jalopnik’s mean-spirited sensationalization of Mr. Glucker’s misstep, their gleeful attempt to score points off a rival blog, and the offensive odour of holier-than-thou adopted by a site that used to be a cool place to get COTD.

For 80% of folks however, it seems to have been no big deal, business as usual, a Pontiac Tempest in a GM-stamped Teapot that showed up in a giftbag in the free hotel room you were flown to on business class. By the way, these are only approximations – I don’t know how accurate my Scion calculator is.

The consensus seems to be, and I apologize in advance as I’m about to start slopping around the whitewash of generalization here, that automotive “journalism” should forever be aware of the invisible quotes surrounding the latter half of its appellation. At the end of the day, to seize hold of one of the most hackneyed phrases available, the public sees us as little different from those who review TV shows or toasters.

For me, it’s even more simple: there but for the grace of God, go I. Like Jeff Glucker, I am no Baruth or Farago when it comes to “tirelessly savaging his enemies”. Quite frankly, the thought of even mildly inconveniencing an enemy makes me yearn for a nice, long, mid-afternoon nap. No, I’ll have to be content with merely savaging the English language.

And really, fat jokes aside, who am I to begin to cast the stones of ethics at my colleagues when I myself am working towards the same equipment list as the current Nissan Altima: full-size spare tire as standard. If there’s a sin too often revisited at the TTAC offices, it’s that of patting ourselves too hard on the back for being independent, and incorruptible, and outside the mainstream.

But when our own Edward N. half-despairingly asks the question, “where is the pride?” I bristle. It’s right goddam here.

No, not necessarily only in the articles and reviews before you now, but in the company I am privileged to keep. It’s in the excellent weirdness found at Glucker’s own Hooniverse website. It’s in the riotous anarchy of the 24 hours of LeMons. It’s in the sensible debate of a Best and Brightest comments section and the in-sensible arguing on the facebook page of a certain be-flipflopped TTAC alum.

Surely, the face of automotive journalism has changed as the face of traditional media has changed; not always for the better, but with a new host of writers and thinkers, and most importantly, with a new kind of audience. Not only that, but also the shoulders of the giants we stand upon are not always as sloping as we New Breed hacks would have you believe: there are many print journalists to whom I humbly doff my cap.

The cogs of the PR machine grind grimly on, just as they always have done, with free lunches and free cars, jewel-like launch settings for economy-grade rides and endless giveaways. But the cogs have chipped a tooth: in internet forum discussions, in the musings of those automotive writers I’m honoured to call colleague and in, quite frankly, a higher calibre of PR folks who actually care about the companies and products they represent, there is pride to be found.

Most of all, dear reader, there is you, the TTAC audience; the some of the people you can’t fool any of the time. It is my humble privilege to lay before you such scribblings as I do and have your own finely-tuned bullshit-o-meters waver the needle if you detect the influence of a comped bar-bill.

In the meantime, I happily wade though rivers of bearnaise to bring you The Truth, ever mindful of my responsibilities to the pull-no-punches ideals set out by our founder, and carried on by the writing and editing staff of TTAC.

Obsequious Waiter: Would Sir laike an aftair-dinnair meent?

No, sod off. I’m absolutely stuffed.

Obsequious Waiter: Oh, but Sir, it’s only wafair-theen.

Oh all right, just the one then.

Kaboom!

If you saw the video above on Autoblog, accompanied by some tired prose suggesting that you summon some enthusiasm for this, the latest automotive promotion, would you think twice? You might if you knew the person who posted the story, and knew they were being paid to promote said promotion. But how does one actually get an inside look at the gritty world of automotive PR payola? How do you break through the great wall of… what’s that, Jalopnik?

Today, Autoblog writer Jeff Glucker wrote about Nissan’s Britney Spears contest. Trouble is, he’s working for the agency that’s running it.

Earlier this week, [then-Autoblog Associate Editor Jeff] Glucker sent out an e-mail solicitation to several of his contacts in the automotive website world, asking for help promoting a new campaign for the Nissan Versa:

Hey there,

I am working with third-party agency that’s assisting Nissan with a new campaign for the Versa. No, I didn’t lose my job or anything – this is just some side contracting work so I can buy a second iPad or golden shift-knob for my car.

Oh right, you just have to open your eyes.

Autoblog’s Editor-in-Chief, John Neff, quickly responded:

Autoblog’s editors were completely unaware of this improper relationship. Upon hearing these allegations, we conducted our own internal investigation into the matter and found the report to be true. Upon this discovery, we immediately terminated our relationship with Mr. Glucker and removed the article in question. We will also be reviewing Mr. Glucker’s other articles to determine if conflicts are evident.

I would praise Mr Neff’s response, except for two things: first, it was the crushingly obvious choice, and second, the reaction from commenters was decidedly ambivalent. One commenter in particular captured the cynical outlook on Autoblog’s mission, sneering

What a buzzkill, Neff. Way to go.

Like this website isn’t just a bunch of fluff pieces anyway.

And that’s the real problem. Glucker’s screw-up was spectacularly blatant, but it’s just a symptom of the larger disease. When you’re being paid peanuts to sling warmed-over press releases, when you joke about the stupidity of your own commenters, when “PR-friendly” is the name of the game, “screw-ups” like this are inevitable. And any business that relies as heavily on popular opinion as the car business does will see to it that “screw ups” like this are inevitable (preferably through an agency). We’ve seen where this rabbit hole ended up for the less-scrupulous buff books, and it ain’t pretty.

Meanwhile, what’s most chilling about all this is the Kitty Genovese effect that had to happen for the Jalopnik post to exist at all. I can understand why Glucker’s (“part-time”) employer didn’t insist on ethical behavior, and why Autoblog’s readers and editors were in the dark and/or apathetic, but what about Glucker’s “contacts in the automotive website world”? That not even one returned his email and clued him to the problems with having an online automotive marketing “part time” job while working for an online automotive media outlet should be surprising… but sadly it isn’t. A somewhat more surprising possibility is that one of these “contacts” actually ratted Glucker out to Jalopnik, rather than giving him a much-needed reality-check. The most implausible scenario of all: Glucker was stupid enough to actually send the email to a Jalopnik staffer, who was the source for the story. The problem isn’t just that Autoblog’s readers don’t seem to care much about Glucker’s sin, it’s that his “contacts,” his fellow automotive bloggers, didn’t care that he was screwing up either… unless they could use the story.

I don’t blame Jalopnik for running their story. It’s the truth, Glucker certainly screwed up badly enough to be fired, and as Hunter Thompson put it, “a man with a greed for the Truth should expect no mercy and give none.” But the conditions that create these kinds of problems aren’t going to go away unless automotive writers embrace a culture of pride, not just in themselves, but in their entire profession. A cluelessly blatant shill email like Glucker’s should elicit a brisk, collegial ethics lecture in the best case, or stinging (but private) mockery in the worst. But because emails like Glucker’s are the everyday staple of the modern “automotive journalist,” because nobody in the business likes to speak up on ethics, and because hypocrisy is rampant, his colleagues looked the other way. And they let him walk of a cliff, chasing a golden shift knob.

When bearded flip-flop enthusiast and serial-ruiner Jonny Lieberman recently wrote about his new long-term-tester fantasy ride – a stick-shifted, murda’d-out Caddy CTS-V wagon – he facebooked a prediction, “Cue the Baruth-venom in 3…2…1…” Quoth JB in response, “No venom here. In the best liberal fashion I have censured you for the ethics of it and moved on.”

Those of us in the peanut gallery goggled at the collegiality of the kaijus of contrarianism; thank goodness they weren’t going to start throwing buildings at each other again. Now Frank Greve’s AJR piece on auto-journo shillsterism has shown up, basically lauding Mr. Baruth as the Last Honest Man In Auto Journalism™ and intimating that Motor Trend is, by comparison, the painted whore of Babylon. Jeez, hasn’t Tokyo suffered enough?

Now, while I was happy to see TTAC receiving the laurels it so richly deserves, particularly as I am privileged enough to be allowed to write for them from time to time, I must confess that Mr. Greve’s article got up my nose a little. On one hand, he’s correct: there is a tremendous amount of manufacturer manipulation of reviewers either by a heavy hand on the tap controlling the free-car pipeline, or by stuffing them so full of foie gras that it leaks out onto the page in the form of talking points. On the other hand, the subtext of Mr. Greve’s expose seems to chart something of an annoyance with the pesky “automotive enthusiast.” To wit:

John Pearley Huffman, a prominent freelance reviewer, goes even further, suggesting that he and his colleagues have distinctive perspectives when it comes to guiding consumers.

“Car writers are, first and foremost, automotive enthusiasts,” Huffman says. “We love cars more than maybe even the manufacturers do.”

Egad! Those bounders actually enjoy piloting these ‘orrible bellowin’, pollutin’ machines! Why, they could be driving something nice and safe like a Hyundai Elantra. Or, alternatively, another Hyundai Elantra.

Thing is, upon reflection, Mr. Greve’s criticism hits a little too close to home. The chances of me subverting an accurate criticism of a vehicle based on the offer of a free jar of Grey Poupon or two are slimmer than the chances of me getting lent a hi-po Caddy-wagon for an entire year. On the other hand, does the fact that I love nearly everything about the automobile hamstring my objectivity right from the get-go?

It would seem, dear reader, there are not one, but two great crimes perpetuated upon the public by the Automotive Journalism community as a whole. The first is caving to the pressure to pander, something which you will not find here at TTAC.

The second though is perhaps more insidious. How does one leave an a priori affinity for the automobile curbside, particularly in an era where there are supposedly no bad cars? Complain about the numb steering in a Fiat 500? Well, you might as well kick a puppy.

Mr. Greve offers no concrete solution to the problem of either over-fed parroting and/or froth-mouthed enthusiasm when it comes to automotive journalism’s shaky state. On the other hand, he mentions Consumer Reports more than a few times. The question seems to be, should we turn away from over-wrought prose and hi-res shots of curving flanks and towards a system of shaded dots and empirical data? Well, not to put to fine a point on it, “No.”

On one hand, I would no more turn to a Baruth column as a piece of pure consumer advice than I would turn to Commando as a how-to on home security. When I see the Baruthian byline you just know it’s going to be a wild ride of brutal and occasionally scandalous honesty. Also, he is the only person I have ever seen bother to make a small grammatical correction in a Facebook posting.

But consider this for a moment: would a non-bi-Phaeton-owning, non-Porsche-collecting Jack Baruth have made a different call on that fateful Panamera. ‘Twere he merely a clipboard jockey, would panel gaps and impressive numbers have swayed him towards a more positive verdict?

Like anything else, it’s how you use it. Automotive enthusiasm can be either a whetstone for your quill, or a set of rose-tinted spectacles. The character of the writer is what guides that particular choice.

I keep in my office a sign to hang above my keyboard. Inspired by an excellent article from the Guardian’s long-term science writer, it trumpets the following sage advice, “Nobody has to read this crap.”

In a world where the VW Jetta can sell like pretzels at Oktoberfest, despite being universally panned as a cheap, plasticky sell-out, every automotive journalist should take this phrase to heart. People don’t have to read regurgitated press releases, vomited onto the page as a sticky mess of bland positivity.

But nor do they need to, nor necessarily want, two slices of dry white toast: there are more Jakes than Elwoods out there. Good automotive writing needs meat and flair. There’s a place for folks who make their living reviewing toasters and dishwashers, but you don’t walk into a dealership and fall in love with a Cuisinart.

Cars are an emotional choice, every time. They are part of our culture, an expression of our personal style, and as such, they deserve to be written about by people who are passionate about them. And by the way, that’s guys and gals too, Mr. Greve, with your baby-hoisting Mothercare quip: I know plenty of women in the auto-chronicling business who are both bigger gearheads and better writers than I.

As for myself, a 9-5 day-jobbing freelance who takes the bus to pick up my press-cars and has to fill them with my own fuel (despite what the Editor keeps slipping into the disclaimer), know that I’ll never intentionally pull my punches. More than that though, I’ll strive to never write anything that puts you to sleep.

Knowing that some of the top PR professionals in the business are regular readers of TTAC (they could be anyone…), I can imagine a number of them shaking their heads in disapproval at the headline of this post. “It’s happened,” they’re probably muttering to themselves, “TTAC has finally lost the plot.” But instead of dismissing out of hand the seemingly preposterous premise of this post, I ask the assembled anonymous masses of PR pros to bear with me for a moment. As laughable as it might seem to postulate that the industry’s spin doctors can learn something from the most infamously “off the reservation” auto exec ever, the urge to write off this post is part of the very problem I hope to tackle. Allow me to explain…

With the depth of the financial crisis-precipitated recession behind us, and the auto industry showing some signs of returning to normalcy (if not the “old normal”), the temptation to rely on proven practices must be greater than ever. But although the industry is doubtless in better shape than it was a year ago (let alone two years ago), this is no time to sink back into complacency. Beneath the short-term shocks of the last several years, is a rising tide of more subtle challenges which are all-too easy to ignore. From weak products to increases in traffic, from government regulation to the social sphere’s shift towards the online world, a number of factors are conspiring to hollow out the industry’s cultural relevance, especially in “mature markets.” In Japan, the decline of the automobile has been so dramatic it’s even inspired a name for the emerging post-automobile order: kuruma banare. And if business-as-usual continues in the US, we’ll see that trend pick up pace here as well.

So, you might be asking yourself, what does this have to do with PR? After all, the in-depth studies of kuruma banare identify it as the product of a number of trends (referenced above), many of which seem unavoidable. Though I wouldn’t pretend to have a definitive answer to the waning cultural appeal of automobiles, I am convinced that a paradigm shift in how automakers view and practice PR is the first step in revitalizing the image of the most powerful and sophisticated consumer good on the market. And the core of that shift can be found in, of all places, the writings of one Robert Lutz.

In his first book, Guts, the then-recently retired Chrysler product development boss laid out seven idiosyncratic “laws of business,” with such blasphemous titles as “The Customer Isn’t Always Right” and “Financial Controls Are Bad!” They’re the kind of “laws” that, on the surface, add to Lutz’s reputation as “overly opinionated” and a “loose cannon,” but for an industry built on consistency and process, they represent an eye-opening counterpoint to conventional wisdom. Which is, in my mind, precisely what is called for to combat a rising tide of automotive apathy.

For the purposes of this piece, let’s concentrate on Law Four: “Too Much Quality Can Ruin You.” As a consummate “product guy,” with a well-documented disdain for the entire business of PR (more on that in a minute), Lutz doesn’t mention spin-doctoring in his law, but the core of his argument applies nicely to it. Towards the end of the chapter on Law Four, he sums up:

“Given two extremes- “zero defects with no delight” and “delight with a few squeaks in it”- the public will always buy the latter.

Lutz revisits the theme in his latest book, Car Guys vs. Bean Counters, in which he publishes a memo he circulated through GM shortly after arriving there, aimed at repairing its moribund new product development system. In the last of ten rules with which he hoped to smash GM’s institutional reluctance to develop great products, he writes

Remember the Bob Lutz motto: “Often wrong but seldom in doubt.” None of us is infallible, and we all make errors. Remember baseball, where a batting average of .400 is unheard of! But pushing and arguing for what you believe to be the right course (while recognizing you just might be wrong, therefore, still willing to listen) is the key to moving forward. Errors of commission are less damaging to us than errors of omission. In our business, taking no risk is to accept the certainty of long-term failure. (Even Aztek, in this sense, is noble!)

This approach is essentially Lutzian, producing occasional “sins of commission” like the Pontiac Solstice’s compromised ergonomics and practicality, but also fundamentally changing the image of GM’s products. Apply this line of thinking to the world of PR, instead of just product development, and you’ll understand the essence of my argument.

Public Relations, by definition, is about creating a product: positive news and analysis about your company. And the higher “quality” this product is, the better your career as a PR professional will be. But what is “quality,” actually? With apologies to Robert Prsig, the best synonym in the industrial context is “consistency.” Consistently good news, generated with consistent regularity is the “product” the PR professional aspires to. Everything else is to be avoided or suppressed. But what few, if any, PR professionals (or the people who employ them) seem to understand, is that “too much quality” can kill PR strategically, even as it achieves tactical goals (obvious “wins” and attendant promotions).

What the “quality” paradigm leaves out of PR is an understanding of the consumers of PR. Just as GM failed to understand that a sixth-generation Malibu design that had “zero compromises” (based on its internal product development rules) could be utterly mediocre and unappealing to consumers, Automotive PR professionals fail to understand (or accept) that an endless flow of perfectly consistent positive news is equally unappealing. Nothing about the millenia of evolution that has shaped modern man has prepared us for the kind of “quality” the PR business provides; The human mind thrives on contrast, deriving equal enjoyment from a thrilling roller-coaster one minute, and a warm drink and good book the next. We understand reality through the twists and turns of narrative, the interplay between hero and villain, the drama of the rising power and the crumbling empire. Modern PR provides us with none of these things, preferring blindered, parallel flows of positive information: a “perfect mediocrity” (another Lutz-ism) that interests only those who are paid to feign interest in it.

These thoughts had been rattling around my brain ever since I began diving into Lutz’s work in preparation for my review of Car Guys, and when I met Lutz in person for the first time last week, I shared with him an abbreviated version of the argument you’ve been reading here. To my surprise, the idea of applying his product philosophy to PR had never occurred to him, although he seemed intrigued by the parallels. And then it occurred to me that this was precisely the point: though he’s always exercising his own form of PR, he’s never spared a moment’s thought for the traditional or tactical practices of the PR profession. Which is precisely why he is, love him or hate him, the sole towering industry figure in the imaginations of car guys and auto journalists. Yes, part of his appeal has to do with other aspects of his product philosophy and the vehicles he helped create, but the fact that he has no internal PR “quality control” makes him wholly unlike anyone else in the industry. The wild inconsistency between his penetrating insights and his flamboyant (for lack of a better word) bullshit is the antithesis of industrial PR “quality” and the key to his appeal.

As I left his rural spread just outside Ann Arbor, it occurred to me (and not for the first time) that there might well never be another auto executive like Lutz again. If that’s the case, it’s hard to imagine the industry ever overcoming the relentless loss of relevance and excitement that’s occurred as high modernity fades in society’s rear-view mirror. Yes, the cars themselves are important. But the people who dream them to life, create them from raw materials, and represent and defend them in the public space have to live up to the huge social and cultural impact that cars promise. In particular, the PR pros have to learn that eliminating risk is, to quote Bob one more time, “to accept the certainty of long-term failure.”

The first time Top Gear “tested” an electric car, it depicted Tesla’s Roadster running out of electricity and being pushed from the track. Tesla immediately pointed out that the batteries “never fell below 20%” during the test, a charge the British motoring show addressed by claiming that its review

offers a fair representation of the Tesla’s performance on the day it was tested.

Tesla responded again, and then three years later (as the Roadster was headed out of production) the EV maker sued the BBC and Top Gear producers. An online war of words erupted, with Tesla coming away looking rather foolish. And guess what? Now it’s all happening all over again… and this time, the most EV-committed global automaker, Nissan, has taken the Top Gear bait.

In the video above (if it hasn’t yet been pulled), Jeremy Clarkson and James May drive a Nissan Leaf and a Peugeot Ion (a rebadged Mitsubishi iMiEV) and run out of electricity. Comic antics ensue. Nissan though, wasn’t amused (and apparently hadn’t heard of the Tesla debacle), and so Executive VP Andy Palmer rang the Times of London [sub], which dutifully ran a piece with the headline “Clarkson didn’t give our electric cars a sporting chance.”

Having had some practice with this very scenario, Top Gear producer Andy Willman fired back at the Top Gear blog, laying out a four-point defense:

1) We never, at any point in the film, said that we were testing the range claims of the vehicles, nor did we say that the vehicles wouldn’t achieve their claimed range. We also never said at any time that we were hoping to get to our destination on one charge.

2) We never said what the length of the journey was, where we had started from, nor how long we had been driving at the start of the film. So again, no inference about the range can be gleaned from our film.

3) We were fully aware that Nissan could monitor the state of the battery charge and distance travelled via onboard software. The reporter from The Times seems to suggest this device caught us out, but we knew about it all the time, as Nissan will confirm. We weren’t bothered about it, because we had nothing to hide.

4) The content of our film was driven by the points we were trying to explore. As James stated in the introduction, you can now go to a dealer and buy a ‘proper’ electric car, as in one that claims to be more practical and useful than a tiny, short-range city runabout. That’s what the car company marketing says, and that’s what we focused on in our test: the pros and cons of living with one as an alternative to a petrol car.

Ask any fan of Top Gear whether its tests (with the possible exception of test track laps) are any more “real” than, say, professional wrestling, and the answer will be “no.” Top Gear is a scripted show, more allegory than documentary… and as long as they don’t explicitly present EV segments as scientific range tests, where’s the lie? If Top Gear were really “journalism,” they would have tested the Tesla with less than a 20% state-of charge (for starters). Nissan complaining about its treatment in this segment is akin to the the American Kennel Club complaining that Top Gear treated sled dogs unfairly in the Polar Special because the presenters were allowed to modify the Toyota HiLux the dogs were racing against. In the very electric car segment that Nissan’s Executive VP got so steamed about, the lads were also scolded for parking in handicapped spaces, for crying out loud. That says everything you need to know about how seriously Top Gear should be taken as journalists.

But I would argue that there’s a calling that’s even higher than the exalted “journalist”: the comedian. Whereas the journalist has only a noisy commitment to objectivity, a tenuous concept if ever there was one, the comic lives by a far stricter code. With no platitudes to hide behind, the comic has no choice but to point out all that is strange, awkward, unspoken and unrecognized in the world. And Top Gear’s producers realize that audiences aren’t hungry for literal, documentary-style automotive tests verite. What they want is an allegory that helps them understand the truth that’s being left out in the tsunami of EV enthusiasm. And, as Willman points out, a lot is being left out:

In the story in The Times Andy Palmer, Nissan’s Executive Vice President, was quoted as saying that our film was misleading. Well with respect to Mr Palmer, Nissan’s own website for the Leaf devotes a fair amount of space to extolling the virtues of fast charging, but nowhere does it warn potential customers that constant fast charging can severely shorten the life of the battery.

It also says that each Leaf battery should still have 80 percent of its capacity after five years’ use, and that, to a layman, sounds great. But nowhere is it mentioned that quite a few experts in the battery industry believe when a battery is down to 80 percent capacity, it has reached End Of Life (EOL) status. Peugeot, for example, accepts 80 percent capacity as End Of Life.

Now I also know, to be fair to Nissan, that when you go to buy a Leaf they do warn you about the pitfalls of constant fast charging. But the website is the portal to the Leaf world, it’s their electronic shop window. Is it misleading not to have all the facts on display? I’m only asking.

In the world of PR, journalists are expected to objectively repeat what a company’s representative tells them (specifically about the kinds of issues Willman raises) and test their cars under OEM supervision. Comedy, on the other hand, asks Clarkson and company to portray the reality of carbon-age men fumbling to come to grips with strange new technology. Which approach produces the more truthful “review”? More importantly, having the advantage over real journalists, why can’t EV companies just laugh at the comedians?

If you asked an auto industry lobbyist, say, a month ago, what the big fights were over in CAFE negotiations, he probably wouldn’t have said “the number.” In the parlance of the Potomac valley, that means everyone at the table knows that at some point they’re all going to join hands and sing kumbaya over one highly symbolic number. Not surprisingly, the numbers that everyone in DC has been looking at fall right in the middle of these four scenarios… not coincidentally the tipping point where hybrids swing from a quarter to nearly half the market. But are these WSJ [sub] charts even accurate? John Krafcik, CEO of Hyundai Motor America and the industry’s CAFE contrarian implies that it’s not for everyone, telling Automotive News [sub] that

Honestly, our focus isn’t on hybrid. Our focus is on optimizing internal combustion and getting as many fuel-efficient vehicles out there, across the lineup. That’s the way you do it. If you look at the math, if you look at how CAFE math works, volume trumps everything.

But then Krafcik oversees a brand that doesn’t just sell lots of high-efficiency cars, it sells very few pickups… resulting in a sales-weighted fleet fuel economy 35.7 MPG in the first half of this year (as calculated by Hyundai). Did we mention that the 2016 passenger car standard is 37.8 MPG, at which time it figures its non-hybrid Elantra will get 50 MPG combined on the CAFE test? And nobody can look at Hyundai’s six-month sales performance (up 26%) and argue that Americans don’t want to buy fuel-efficient cars. In short, Hyundai is proving that automakers who can make money selling appealing, fuel-efficient cars need not binge on hybrids Even, according to the EPA’s final rule on standards through 2016, for manufacturers trying to sell as many pickups as possible.

GM had apparently opposed the round of emissions standards through 2016, and the EPA’s final rule [PDF] makes an example of The General, noting

GM recommended that the agencies relax stringency specifically for large pickups, such as the Silverado… The agencies disagree with the premise of the comment that the standard is too stringent under the applicable statutory provisions because some existing large trucks are not already meeting a later model year standard. Our analysis shows that the standards are not too stringent for manufacturers selling these vehicles. The agencies’ analyses demonstrate a means by which manufacturers could apply cost-effective technologies in order to achieve the standards, and we have provided adequate lead time for the technology to be applied. More important, the agencies’ analysis demonstrate that the fleetwide emission standards for MY 2016 are technically feasible, for example by implementing technologies such as engine downsizing, turbocharging, direct injection, improving accessories and tire rolling resistance, etc.

First, GM’s argument incorrectly suggests that every individual vehicle model must achieve its fuel economy and emissions targets. CAFE standards and new GHG emissions standards apply to fleetwide average performance, not model-specific performance, even though average required levels are based on average model-specific targets, and the agencies’ analysis demonstrates that GM and other manufacturers of large trucks can cost-effectively comply with the new standards.

Second, GM implies that every manufacturer must be challenged equally with respect to fuel economy and emissions. Although NHTSA and EPA maintain that attribute-based CAFE and GHG emissions standards can more evenly balance compliance challenges, attribute-based standards are not intended to and cannot make these challenges equal, and while the agencies are mindful of the potential impacts of the standards on the relative competitiveness of different vehicle manufacturers, there is nothing in EPCA or the CAA81requiring that these challenges be equal.

We have also already addressed and rejected GM’s suggestion of shifting the ‘‘cut off’’ point for light trucks from 66 square feet to 72 square feet, thereby “dropping the floor’’ of the target function for light trucks. As discussed in the preceding section, this is so as not to forego the rules’ energy and burdensome for light trucks as compared to passenger cars. Based on the agencies’ market forecast, NHTSA’s analysis indicates that incremental technology outlays could, on average, be comparable for passenger cars and light trucks under the final CAFE standards, and further indicates that the ratio of total benefits to total costs could be

So CAFE is set up to be achievable with fuel-efficient non-hybrids and to be achievable with pickup trucks… so why does the WSJ and the auto lobby insist (using EPA data) that hybrids and plug-ins will take over the market depending on where “the number” ends up? Not because of market reaction to “the number,” but because CAFE includes special incentives for things like flex-fuel vehicles and (wait for it) hybrids and plug-ins. How does it do it? By counting EVs, FCVs and PHEVs (when running on grid power) as creating zero grams of C02 per mile driven, even though the EPA acknowledges

The zero grams/mile compliance value for EVs (and for PHEVs when operated on grid electricity, as well as for FCVs which involve similar upstream GHG issues with respect to hydrogen production) is an incentive that operates like a credit because, while it accurately accounts for tailpipe GHG emissions, it does not reflect the increase in upstream GHG emissions associated with the electricity used by EVs compared to the upstream GHG emissions associated with the gasoline or diesel fuel used by conventional vehicles.EPA explained in the proposal that the potential for large future emissions benefits from these technologies provides a strong reason for providing incentives at this time to promote their commercialization in the 2012–2016 model years. At the same time, EPA acknowledged that the zero grams/mile compliance value did not account for increased upstream GHG emissions.

Combine that incentive with another new feature:

the new program enables manufacturers to transfer credits between the two averaging sets, passenger cars and trucks, within a manufacturer. For example, credits accrued by over-compliance with a manufacturer’s car fleet average standard may be used to offset debits accrued due to that manufacturer’s not meeting the truck fleet average standard in a given year. EPA believes that such cross-category use of credits by a manufacturer provides important additional flexibility in the transition to emissions control technology without affecting overall emission reductions.standards.

And you’ve got a formula for CAFE compliance success: over-comply on cars by going big on expensive hybrid technology and you can swap the credits over to your truck fleet. Then you get to keep trucks cheap ‘n thirsty while complaining that the government’s awful regulations forced you to jack up prices on cars by “mandating” hybrid technology (or the even better-incentivized “zero emission” EV/FCV technology). And as gas prices get more expensive, the car buyers will have little choice but to suck it up and fork over for the hordes of “necessary” hybrids… or at least they would if Hyundai weren’t stepping off of the regulatory primrose path to ruin, and showing that another way is possible. In a lot of ways it’s not unlike the first-ever round of CAFE, in which Detroit overcompensated for its land yacht indulgences with disastrous results, and had its lunch eaten by the Japanese in the decades following. Let’s hope that Hyundai isn’t the only firm that’s learned from that history.

Dan Gurney signing autographs for members of the the media at the 2008 New York Auto Show

The big OEM car show season is over and now that summer is here, it’s time for car shows, meets and cruises. For the people who work for marketing in the car companies and in the aftermarket it’s really a year long season. I see some of the same faces at the NAIAS, the Detroit Autorama, the Hot Rod Power Tour and the Woodward Dream Cruise..

I’ve attended press previews of some of the big auto shows since 2002. I’ve worked Detroit every year since, Chicago every year but ’09, and Toronto a couple of times when it didn’t conflict with Chicago. A car show media preview is not the same as the public car show and not just because there is staging and seating for the press and the displays are not in their final form. In a word the difference is access. During the public days, some of the cars are locked, and the ultra luxury and exotic rides are completely roped off from the unwashed masses. If you have a question to ask, there are trained product spokes men and women who will tell you about the floor models or give you a shpiel about a concept vehicle. There may be some sales reps from local dealers as well who will gladly give you a business card. You never see an executive from an automaker on the show floor during the public days. If there are celebrities, like racers, athletes and entertainers making personal appearances, they too are usually behind ropes and if autographs are available, the lines are long.

The media preview is completely different. Aside from its utility to journalists, for a car guy or gal it’s an auto show on an exponential scale. Yes there are models and product specialists on the turntables and around the displays who can try to answer you questions, but more important there are all the executives, product managers, engineers, designers and marketing people involved in making this year’s tangerine flake streamline babies. I like to talk to pretty ladies as much as the next guy so the models and booth professionals are fine with me. If I have a question or comment about a car, though, I think the chief designer could probably answer my question better than someone who’s learned a script. If you had your choice of people to talk cars with, wouldn’t you pick Carroll Shelby over someone hired by a talent agency?

Carroll Shelby side

The same goes with access to the many politicians that attend major auto shows, particularly in the last couple of years as the US government involvement in the domestic auto industry has increased many fold. Over the years I’ve spoken to about a half dozen US senators, 10 or 12 members of the US house, along with county executives and state legislators.

Sir Jackie Stewart side

The media, of course, has better access to the cars themselves. Almost none of the cars are roped off from the media, certainly in terms of getting up close looks for photography, and the vast majority are available to sit in, even some of the concept cars, though that is rarer of course. If a model on display is locked, you can usually get someone to open it up. Any questions you might have are immediately answered, and if that person can’t answer it, they’ll find someone who can.

There are press conferences and product revelations every hour or so. Typically a press conference has a speech or two, maybe some entertainment or special effects, vehicle intros, and when it’s done they invite everyone onto the stage to get a closer look at the cars and then work for interview opportunities. Folks like Alan Mullaly will immediately be surrounded by 20 or 30 (or more) reporters (and sound & camera operators). Usually journalists from major news operations like the AP or Detroit radio station WJR get the first questions in, and then you hope to be able to get a few words in, maybe when the PR folks start dragging the exec away. There is, after all, a pecking order in most situations. Though Bill Ford’s or Alan Mulally’s handlers will eventually intercede, the engineers, designers and marketing folks will hang around for some time. Sometimes, too, you do just run into execs without their handlers. I recall talking with Jim Press when he was running Toyota in the US when something else was happening at the Chicago show and we both happened to be walking across the Toyota display. Another time I asked Roger Penske about the financial viability of racing while we shared an the escalator.

Sometimes the press events are pure publicity stunts. Li Shufu was the owner of a little known Chinese car company when he signaled that he wanted to play in the big leagues by being the first Chinese car company to display at the NAIAS in 2006. Today Geely is known as the company that owns Volvo. Malcom Bricklin held a press conference in the lobby of Cobo Hall, Li Shufu got some attention from the media that year at the NAIAS, but then Malcolm Bricklin’s press conference in the lobby of Cobo Hall that year may have had even more reporters. After all, Bricklin is at least as much of a self-promoter as Li and he’s got much better English skills. Bricklin may be better able to schmooze a reporter in English but Geely will probably be selling Chinese made cars in North America before anything imported by Bricklin will. At the time Bricklin was hyping a deal he said he had with Chery to build cars for the US market with a price 30% lower than the competition by the end of 2007. It’s now more than 5 years since Bricklin’s announcement and he’s still no closer to making a deal with a Chinese supplier. The Chinese car market matured so quickly that Chinese car execs know that they don’t need a hondler like Bricklin to crack the US market.

After the pressers are over, in addition to the aforementioned physically attractive product specialists hired for the event, there are marketing and communications folks in the displays to help you with answers or help schedule interviews with the appropriate people. Remember that pecking order? Journalists from the traditional buff books always have an easier time snagging interviews with higher-ranking car company people than mere car bloggers, though that has started to change as the car companies become more adept at new media.

There is usually lots of food and drink for free at the previews. It was pretty austere the last few years due to the auto industry’s crisis but in 2011 it started to pick up again.. Here, too, there’s a pecking order. There are invitation only events both on and off premises. Some (many, most? – I’m a relative bottom feeder) of the displays have private lounges where the level of service and victuals is a notch or two higher than what is served out front. Members of the lucky sperm club like Keith Crain (his family publishes the Automotive News among other things) or Dutch Mandel (who inherited his father’s position at Autoweek,which Crain’s family publishes) walk around like pashas and get invited back for single malt in the Bentley stand, or cappuccino in the Lamborghini display.

There are other journalists who are notable. You see local newscasters, people from major networks, automotive writers whose work you admire or criticize, and the like. Plus, there are scads of other kinds of celebrities. Though there may be an occasional NASCAR, NHRA or IndyCar racer making a personal appearance during the public days, there are lots and lots of racecar drivers at the previews. Some are there to jazz up press conferences. Other times they are there for newsworthy reasons like when the Deltawing Indycar concept was revealed at Chicago last year or when Bobby Rahal announced a while back that his team would be racing M3s for BMW in American Le Mans Series’ GT2 class.

Also occasionally jazzing up the press conferences will be other kinds of celebrities like athletes or entertainers.

True story: I was walking down the main aisle at the ’07 Detroit show and a pretty woman approached from the other direction. I didn’t know who she was, just another attractive blond at the show. It’s not just the various models and product specialists, there are many other pretty women at the big shows. Marketing people, like pharma salesfolks, tend to be good looking. Plus there’s on-air talent from tv (and there’s no question that foreign language stations even more so hire talent based on looks), former models working for talent agencies, etc. So pretty ladies are very common at the car shows, and that’s usually what I’ll say to them. So as she walked past me, I told her, “there is no shortage of attractive women at car shows”.

Now I have as little game as can be had concerning women. I’m the anti-Jack Baruth when it comes to the distaff side, like Kryptonite to Supergirl. I believe that my old shrink used the word “repel”, but that remark about women at the auto show usually gets a friendly response. It’s a non-creepy way of saying “you’re a babe”, and face it, pretty ladies don’t mind being reassured that they’re not ugly. It also says, “you’re not the only pretty face around here”, which I’ve since found out can be disarming to pretty women. I believe that in PUA-speak, it’s a “neg”.

She paused, smiled a genuinely warm smile, put her hand on my arm and in a slight Cherman accent said “Oh, thank you, that was so nice” and we both went on our ways. Meanwhile, my son, 22 at the time, started freaking out. “Dad, do you know who that was??!!”

“I dunno. Some spokesbabe?” I knew it wasn’t Jill Wagner, Linda Vaughn or Jungle Pam.

“No, Dad, that was Heidi Klum!”

It turns out that the supermodel’s hubby, the singer Seal, was performing at the Audi presser.

Many of the celebrities, entertainers and athletes you see during the media previews are often A listers, while others are lower down on the list. I think it was Kia that brought in TV pitchman Anthony Sullivan to one show. Sometimes there are celebrities also notable as gear heads, like Jay Leno, Patrick Dempsey, or Jesse James.

Then there’s swag. Mostly press kits, but some freebies. Scion gives away plush toys of their cars, sometimes from a car with a claw crane built in to the cargo area. I always take some home and give them to the babies and grandbabies of friends (my kids are grown and my granddaughter is a bit too old for plush toys). I still have a couple of Acura branded Etch-A-Sketches™ left from a Toronto show, and some folding chairs from Honda, Mazda and Jaguar. My day job is a small embroidery business. I was once waiting to get some kind of t-shirt and said to myself, “self, this is absurd, you make your own damn t-shirts and baseball caps”, and then I thought it was so silly that I decided to do it on purpose. I guess I’m easily amused. My younger daughter, now 22, still gets a big kick out of it when I bring home one of those shirts vacuum packed into small shapes.

Some of people attending the previews sell the swag they get. To begin with, the press kits are pretty cool and contain more info than you can find anyplace else as well as the high end photography and CGI stuff, but also just about anything that is not available to the general public can be collectible. As a result, sometimes the communications people can be niggardly with the press materials. The high end marques even ask for business cards and check your credentials to make sure you’re media and not an exhibitor or working on the show. The companies say they don’t want the press kits to end up being sold as collectors’ items. That must be why Ferrari puts holographic authenticity stickers on them, and why other press kits sometimes come with limited edition x of y numbered die cast models. One year, Heisman Trophy winner Eddie George was appearing on behalf of Bridgestone and before giving out signed footballs, he even joked about them ending up on eBay. So you get a lot of stuff that you have to carry around.

The line between Jim Press and Dave Marek should be labeled Bobby Rahal

When you get to the media center, one of the first things you do is get one of the large tote bags they give out. At some of the shows like SEMA or Geneva, they actually give out rolling luggage. It’s changing to thumb drives and cds/dvds, but there are still hard copy press kits and paper, cardboard and plastic are bulky and heavy. There’s less stuff to shlep, but still enough to make your sore from lugging it around.

At the 2005 NAIAS in Detroit Ford showed the Shelby GR-1 concept, conceptually based on the Shelby Daytona Coupe. Carroll Shelby was there for the occasion. He was sitting at one of the tables they set up for interviews, and talking with his friend Hoot McInerney, a long time Detroit Ford dealer. I heard Shelby tell McInerney, “Hoot. I’ve worked with a lot of people in this town but if I was ever in trouble and needed to talk to somebody, you’d be the guy I’d call.”

I wanted to get Shelby’s autograph on a press kit. The people at Ford’s media information booth wouldn’t give me another GR-1 press kit, so I handed Shelby a Sharpie™ and asked him to sign my big canvas tote bag that the NAIAS was handing out back then. Carroll proceeded to sign the bag with that distinctive signature that he will put on anything in return for a contribution to the Carroll Shelby Foundation ($250 for car parts, $150 for die cast, posters, etc, + $15 shipping). Again, the media has special access. Everybody knows how he likes to make money personally and raise money for his charitable foundation with of his name, but Shelby doesn’t charge for his autographs when he’s at a car show media preview. In fact I’d already gotten his moniker on a Shelby Cobra Concept press kit he year before. Of course, he’s already getting paid by Ford for the use of his name, and charging reporters for his autograph might seem greedy and unseemly to even Ol’ Shel.

So I had an autographed canvas bag. Then the light bulb went on. I always have a bag like that at the car shows and there are always autograph worthy people there. Some famous, others not so famous but important car people like designers, so I started getting the bag signed. Remember what I said about A listers? The racers at the big car shows are usually champions and winners of major races. The other athletes are also generally very successful.

After Shelby, I think the next really notable autograph I got was Richard Petty who was appearing with Kasey Kahne when Chrysler introduced the current NASCAR “Charger”.

One I had those two, they were like magnets for others. When you ask a car guy, or in the case of Danica Patrick a car girl, to put their name next to Mario Andretti’s or Jackie Stewart’s they take it as a compliment.

Regarding Sir Stewart and compliments, Jackie Stewart has a distinctive and elaborate autograph. It’s very legible with flourishes above and below. After I got Stewart’s signature I was playing with Google and found a sweet story by Eoin Young about that very autograph.

” In what I consider to be the “Good Old Days” of the 1960s, a driver’s signature was a work of art, something instantly recognisable and a mirror of the man. Thus Graham Hill’s signature was done with a swashbuckling flourish and Jim Clark’s signature was almost that of a shy schoolboy, both of which fitted the men with the pen. Jackie Stewart’s original signature was probably much like Jim’s, but he felt that if someone granted him the honour of asking for his autograph, it should be worthwhile, and he practised his copperplate autograph. No disinterested squiggle, looking away, talking to someone else, here.”

Almost everybody has been approachable and affable and nobody’s refused to sign it. Mario Andretti was a little bit brusque when I approached him, but he warmed a bit when I asked what Colin Chapman was like (“A very special, one of a kind, guy.”)

As I write this, the bag currently has over 60 names. Some are squiggles. Others are clear, legible, and distinctive. Designers autograph like they’re signing one of their drawings and often date it. Racers and athletes add their car or uniform number. Evander Holyfield just signs his last name and a New Testament verse ciation. Malcolm Bricklin’s is big and bold, a little out of control. Next to Bricklin is Sergio Pininfarina. The designer’s signature is precise, but spare, with a flourish that almost looks like an automotive profile. John Lieberman added USS (United States Senate). Tom Matano, the Miata’s designer, left “Always Inspired”. Some people are asked so frequently they carry their own Sharpies with them, others are surprised to be asked, like George Gaffoglio, whose family runs Metalcrafters.

Speaking of families. There are some brothers on the bag. Designers Ian and Morey Callum. Paul Teutul Jr. and Mikey Teutul of Orange County Choppers. Paul Sr. is on there too. Actually, I made it onto an episode of American Chopper when the Teutuls made a bike for Lincoln-Mercury (with really sloppy welds, btw). The Teutuls aren’t the only father-son combination. In addition to Mario, I got Michael Andretti’s graph at the DeltaWing reveal. Though his dad’s mark is one of the squiggles, he quickly spotted it. There are cousins too, with Bill Ford Jr. and John Firestone IV (Billy’s mom is a Firestone, that’s thing with Explorers rolling over was kind of embarrassing to him personally). Another family business represented is Harley-Davidson with Willie G’s autograph. There are people no longer in the public eye like former Chrysler design head Tom Gale, and emerging automotive magnates like Geely chairman Li Shufu (most likely the first autograph he signed in the US). There are even some Kanji characters courtesy of Shiro Nakamura, long time head of Nissan design, along with Akino Tsuchiya who worked in Chrysler’s Pacifica studio.

There is a World Series champion, Detroit Tiger Dave Rozema, a NBA champion, Detroit Piston Rip Hamilton, along with the aforementioned boxing champ Evander Holyfield. There are even a couple celebrity journalists like Brock Yates, and David E. Davis Jr. Recent additions have been racers Derek Bell and Rhys Millen and Ford GT designer Camilo Pardo.

A couple of years back at the Detroit show I couldn’t find the bag in my working tote (I’ve long since stopped using it for anything but autographs), and I thought I lost it. I mentioned it to Denise McCluggage, the accomplished racer, rally driver, photographer and writer. Knowing what was on it, she tried to comfort me. She was almost as upset as I was, what a classy lady. Then my son, my only son, whom I love, came up and told me he had put it in the car for safe keeping.

I’m able to identify almost all of the signatures. I suppose I should document all of them just in case one of my grandkids takes it on whatever Antique Roadshow’s or Pawn Star’s equivalent will be a generation hence, for their sake, but I figure the provenance is already pretty good.

Actually, I have no idea of its value. It’d be fun to hear what the Best and the Brightest of TTAC think of its potential value, but in any case it’s not for sale (well, unless someone offers me silly money, after all, it’s only a bag with some ink on it). Also, though I’ve identified most of the signatures, there are a few that I can’t recall or can’t identify. Also, there are are some that I’m sure I got, like Denise’s, but I can’t find them anywhere. So if you can spot one that you recognize and I haven’t identified it, or if you think I’m dead wrong, let me know in the comments.

It’s not for sale, I’ve never sold any autographed item I’ve ever had. I was reminded of that at the Chicago show this year. Over in the north hall at McCormick Place there was a display of historical photos from the show’s 100+ year history. One of the photos was of the Lincoln-Mercury Sports Panel, part of L-M’s “youth oriented” marketing in the late 1960s.

That panel included, among others, legendary racer Dan Gurney. I still have a postcard autographed by Gurney when he appeared on behalf of Lincoln-Mercury at the 1969 Detroit auto show.

Here’s the ones I can read, identify, or remember. Blow the photos all the way up and rotate them to see if you can identify some of the ones I can’t figure out.

Mark Modica, a former Saturn dealer GM bondholder, has leveraged his financial loss at the hands of the government bailout into a blogging position at the National Legal and Policy Center, a conservative nonprofit that “promotes ethics in public life through research, investigation, education and legal action.” At the NLPC, Modica focuses on what he believes to be corruption surrounding the auto bailout, and has written a series of anti-GM posts that make TTAC look like a Detroit hometown newspaper (TTAC “bias police,” take note). Most recently, Modica has caught the attention of the auto media, including Automobile Magazine and Jalopnik, with a series of posts accusing Chevy dealers of “scamming” taxpayers by claiming the Volt’s $7,500 tax credit and then selling Volts as used cars. TTAC welcomes anyone seeking to cast more light on the bailout, but unfortunately, Modica’s attacks are too focused on making GM look bad and not focused enough on providing relevant information to the American people. Let’s take a look and see why…

In the piece that set off the current flap, Modica wrote

I recently set out to determine how honest General Motors is being when it claims that demand for the Chevy Volt is exceeding supply. It was not hard to discover that this is not the case as retail sales remain dismal. A web search on vehicle locator sites such as Autotrader and Cars.com exhibit sufficient supply of the Volt, one dealership within 70 miles of my location had six new Volts available for sale.

Even Ebay lists vehicles, many had no bids and one listing in Texas hadn’t even met reserve with only one day of bidding time remaining. But I discovered something far more disturbing during my search. Many Volts with practically no miles on them are being sold as “used” vehicles, enabling the dealerships to benefit from the $7,500 credit supplied by the American taxpayers on each car. The process of titling the Volts technically makes the dealerships the first owners of the vehicles, which gives them the ability to claim the subsidies.  The cars are then offered to retail customers as “used” vehicles.

The practice of dealerships purchasing from one another is not uncommon. “Dealer trades” are done all the time in the industry. What is very unusual is for the receiving dealership to be able to maximize profits at the expense of taxpayers by claiming tax credits of $7,500. It is also very rare for dealerships to part with any model that has higher demand than supply, as GM claims is the case with the Volt. In addition to qualifying dealerships for a $7,500 tax subsidy, the titling process also allows GM to record Volt sales even if the cars are sitting on dealership lots.

Modica’s attack is hamstrung from the start because his goal is to demonstrate that supply of the Volt exceeds demand. The simple truth is that the government’s tax credit, in combination with strong early-adopter demand and low production volumes, basically guarantees that Volt demand will outstrip demand in the short term. If Modica wants to prove that the market won’t support the Volt’s high price and complexity, he’s going to have to wait until production ramps up and the early adopters have satiated their “gotta have it” instincts.

Because he doesn’t appear to have the patience to watch the Volt fail on its own terms (which, it must be added, is not a foregone conclusion, depending on how GM handles production), Modica has to look twice as hard for potentially damning evidence. Since the availability of used Volts alone doesn’t say much about the supply-demand balance, Modica manufactures another “scandal”: that Chevy dealers are taking the $7,500 tax credit that the government intends for consumers, and then selling Volts as used cars with no tax credit.

This “scandal” quickly falls apart under the weight of its over-ambitious pretensions: after all, if demand for Volts is as weak as Modica wants to believe, surely absorbing the tax credit at the dealer level is a recipe for Volts languishing on dealer lots. Since Modica offers no evidence for high dealer inventory, his major thrust (proving that demand for the Volt is weak) falls apart. Furthermore, without a single case of a dealership claiming the tax credit and then selling a Volt to a customer under the pretense that it still qualifies for the tax credit, his research ends up well short of proving a “scandal.” As a result, Modica is left having to argue against dealers taking the credit on principle.

And here’s the tragedy: Modica is so focused on landing a political-economic “scandal,” he ignores the legitimate criticisms of both GM’s Volt-dealer policies and the government’s tax credit. Had he been less interested in the political side of things, Modica would have noted that GM’s hands-off approach to Volt dealers has led to dealers gouging early adopters. Sure, that storyline would have proven that short-term demand for the Volt was strong, but then Modica could have pointed to the contrasting situation at Nissan, where Leaf sales are pre-arranged online, cutting dealer markups out of the loop. This strategy also keeps Nissan dealers from taking the tax credit (at least in theory), and will prevent any “gouging fatigue” that could hurt Volt demand down the road.

From the other side of this issue, if Modica had been more interested in the politics of plug-in tax credits, he would have realized that manufacturing a poorly-proven “scam” was wholly unnecessary. As TTAC reported back in February, taxpayers have already lost some $7m worth of plug-in tax credits to fraud. In short, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration has already proven that $33m of tax credits were claimed erroneously by everyone from prisoners to IRS employees ($7m of which is unrecoverable), offering Modica a well-documented scandal that has been undercovered in the mainstream media.

When industry and politics collide, the public deserves strong, independent information gathering and analysis to protect against inevitable abuses. But those who wish to take up that mantle have a responsibility to own up to their motivations: are they looking for legitimate issues regardless of their political or economic consequences, or do they set out with predetermined conclusions and gather up just enough information to support them? Unfortunately, Modica’s history and recent work seem to place him in the former category. Exploring the interaction between the US Government and the auto industry that it now interacts with more than ever, requires the ability to spot scandals without having to manufacture them. And the more you cover the inevitably tortured relationship between private business and public government, the more you realize that there are very few big scandals anyway… after all, free markets and fair governments almost always die the death of a thousand cuts rather than being taken down by a cartoonish scandal.

Back in 1976, the Italian automaker Fiat had been badly battered by a global energy crisis and the resulting malaise infecting the global auto industry. In what Time Magazine described at the time as “a devastatingly ironic example of petropower,” Col. Muammar Gaddafi instructed his Libyan Arab Foreign Bank to invest some $415m into the Italian automaker, giving it a stake that would eventually grow to some 14 percent of the firm’s equity.

By 1986, Fiat’s Libyan stakeholders were becoming more trouble than they were worth. In the wake of the Lockerbie bombings, the US introduced sanctions on Libya, and Fiat’s Libyan connection left its attempts to bid for US military contracts (particularly those related to Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative) dead on arrival. As a result, Fiat and its shareholders bought back the entire 14 percent Libyan stake in the firm, presenting the Libyan Arab Foreign Bank-controlled Banca UBAE with a $3.1b check. And, according to what a Fiat spokesperson told us yesterday, that is where the story ends. But thanks to the now-ubiquitous Wikileaks, we have found that this story may in fact go farther than that. In fact, as the evidence stands right now, either the US State Department is working with bad information (which major news sources have yet to correct), or Fiat is lying about its ties to the embattled Gaddafi regime.

As with so many of the best stories in recent months, the major point of factual conflict in this tale comes from a Wikileaks-sourced US State Department memo. The memo, which does not appear at cablesearch.org, was provided to Reuters by an unnamed third party and was cited in a Reuters piece that focused on Gaddafi’s ownership of Wyndham Hotels. The Fiat connection isn’t made clear until well towards the bottom of the story, when Reuters reports

A 2006 U.S. State Department cable obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to Reuters by a third party describes LFICO/LAFICO [the Libyan Arab Foreign Investment Company]as Libya’s largest government-owned investment company, operating under the auspices of something called the “General People’s Committee” which has served as the Gaddafi government’s Ministry of Trade and Economy…

The State Department cable said that, as of 2006, LFICO’s holdings in Italy included 2 percent of Fiat, 15 percent of the Tamoil energy company, and 7.5 percent of Juventus, where a soccer-playing Gaddafi son, Saadi, once sat on the board. The cable said LFICO also had over $500 million worth of investments in Britain.

If the Gaddafi-controled LAFICO/LFICO held two percent of Fiat as recently as 2006, then the public narrative that had Fiat completely buying out its Libyan backers in 1986 is not completely accurate. In hopes of reconciling the discrepancy between the leaked memo (which presumably reflects the conclusions of the US intelligence community) and the public rejection of Libya’s equity stake in Fiat, we reached out to Fiat’s international media relations staff requesting clarification. The response, from Fiat’s Richard Gadeselli, came as follows:

Dear Mr Niedermeyer,

Further to your email, I would mention that the Reuters report you refer to is incorrect. As too are other similar mentions that have appeared recently in the media concerning the LIA’s holdings in Fiat.

The LIA sold all of its 14% shareholding in Fiat SpA in 1986 – ten years after its initial stake was bought.  It no longer has a stake in Fiat SpA.

I trust that this clarifies the matter.

Banca di Roma didn’t violate economic sanctions, because the stake was sold through Libyan companies rather than the Libyan government, Mr Brambilla said.

Though they were sporadically enforced, the sanctions nevertheless limited Libya’s room for manoeuvring in some countries. For example, Libya’s UK bank accounts were frozen and funds such as dividends from the Metropole stake could not be transferred to Libya.

That is why Lafico works to avoid detection when it makes investments, Mr Huwej says, adding that in everything it does, Lafico is aware the US is watching.

As such Mr Huwej sometimes avoids doing business under Lafico’s name. A farming company in Egypt owned by Lafico is registered there as simply Agriculture Investment Co., he says. 

Another strategy employed by Libya is to keep stakes small or indirect, particularly in banking companies. Though bank investments are a small slice of Libya’s holdings, they’re among the most scrutinised by the authorities, as access to banks means access to money and the ability to move it around the world.

I know, the sniping at Jalopnik is getting old, and I’m sure this article will receive a lot of complaints. But this is The Truth About Cars, and the truth must be told. Banking on the limited attention span of its readers, Gawker’s outlet for things remotely related to cars headlined yesterday: “European Union wants to ban gas, diesel cars by 2050.” A headline like that is sure to produce clicks. Too bad, clicking readers are being had.

Just for this occasion, we break the TTAC rule of not copypasting whole articles. Here is the Jalopnik article in full length:

“The European Union’s transport chief wants to ban diesel or gas-burning vehicles in cities by 2050, mainly through higher taxes and new rules. Maybe now’s the time to start broadening those U.S. import rules…”

That’s it. No more. Where’s the beef the Jalopies have with the brutal transport chief?

The site that just a few days ago did pride itself of its investigative journalism skills, not only fornicated the puppy on this one, it also missed out on the juicy stuff.

Fornicating the puppy dept.:

• Of course the EU does not want to ban gas and diesel cars by 2050. That becomes clear to the intrepid few who venture beyond the headline. Someone may want to discourage ICE city driving 40 years from now. Manhattanite Gawkers should have noticed that their hometown had declared a war on cars decades ago.

• Jalopnik became the victim of a badly written article in London’s Telegraph that talks in tortured grammar about a plan of “Siim Kallas, the EU transport commission.”  Mr. Kallas, Vice-President of the European Commission and Commissioner for Transport  (that’s his correct title) and former Prime Minister of Estonia, published a white paper with the boring title “Roadmap to a Single European Transport Area – Towards a competitive and resource efficient transport system.” If you want the original, here it is.

• Mr. Kallas does not and cannot ban anything. He wrote a white paper. He might as well have written an op ed piece in the New York Times. He has his job until 2014. It is a long and arduous road before anything becomes unanimously accepted by all 27 members of the EU. In the meantime, a commissioner can write all the white papers he wants.

• The white paper does not talk about a ban. It says that “the gradual phasing out of ‘conventionally-fuelled’ vehicles from the urban environment is a major contribution to significant reduction of oil dependence, greenhouse gas emissions and local air and noise pollution.” But there is a gotcha in the next sentence.” It will have to be complemented by the development of appropriate fuelling/charging infrastructure for new vehicles.” It’s more fluff than Obama’s plan to put a million EV’s on the road by 2015.

• There is nothing in the white paper that calls for a ban of diesel or gas-burning vehicles in cities by 2050 through higher taxes and new rules. There is a mealy-mouthed passage that calls for “developing and deploying new and sustainable fuels and propulsion systems” in order to “halve the use of ‘conventionally-fuelled’ cars in urban transport by 2030; phase them out in cities by 2050; achieve essentially CO2-free city logistics in major urban centres by 2030.” Again: If there are no new and sustainable fuels and propulsion systems, no change. The white paper might as well have called for eternal happiness, the elimination of heart attacks and a worldwide ban of the common cold. Actually, the paper has an even nobler goal: “By 2050, move close to zero fatalities in road transport.”

Missing out on the juicy stuff dept:

We must wag a finger at Jalopnik for neglecting its usual mission of wallowing in juicy scandals. Justin Hyde must have been in an awful hurry when he cranked out the two sentences. Now, TTAC has to do the heavy lifting.

• Hugh Bladon, a spokesman for the Association of British Drivers recommended that Commissioner Kallas “goes and finds himself a space in the local mental asylum. If he wants to bring everywhere to a grinding halt and to plunge us into a new dark age, he is on the right track. We have to keep things moving. The man is off his rocker.”
• Christopher Monckton, spokesman of the anti-EU UK Independence Party opines that “the EU must be living in an alternate reality.”
• UK Transport Minister Norman Baker said “We will not be banning cars from city centres anymore than we will be having rectangular bananas.” With that vote against, the measure is dead.
• Environmentalists blast the paper. Franziska Achterberg of Greenpeace says: “This Commission paper blatantly passes the buck to the next generation.”  Jos Dings of the Transport&Environment group says: “This is a manifesto for inaction. The only concrete action the Commission proposes within its current mandate (2010-14) is to expand airport capacity, which will make the headline targets even harder to reach.”
• Commenters at Jalopnik immediately created a European flag with tiny hammers and sickles. Jalopnik was derelict in its duty of informing its readership that Mr. Kallas was formerly a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and a member of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union. He should be comfortable as a Commissar.
• Totally overlooked by Jalopnik: Baden-Württemberg,  that German state that Porsche, Daimler, Bosch and Gemballa Tuning call home, will be the first German state to be ruled by a Premier of the Green Party. They won by a landslide last weekend. Now that is a story worth watching.

Jeez, must we do all your work?