”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?

The Truth About Cars is excited to announce that in our relentless drive towards globalization, TTAC has now added a Polish edition.

Articles appearing in Thetruthaboutcars.com appear in real time in the Polish language.

“The content of TTAC has so much polish,” said Franciszek Ksawery Postbischil, Warsaw-based editor of TTAC Poland, “that a Polish edition is simply germane.”

The layout of the Polish edition caters to the eclectic tastes of our Central European readership. Instead of cars, which attract the attention of our predominantly North American readership, readers in Poland can feast their eyes on pictures of nature, taken at random from Flickr.

TTAC Poland is called “Samochody”, which is Polish for “cars”. The truth has been omitted.

[Ed: With today's news of NHTSA's investigation results, we thought we'd look back at TTAC's coverage of the Toyota Unintended Acceleration scandal.]

The Toyota Unintended Acceleration Scandal of 2010 was a curious beastie of a media phenomenon. Shortly after I started writing for TTAC, NHTSA opened an investigation into Toyota Tacomas because, as the Center for Auto Safety’s Clarence Ditlow put it,

If there were truly human error, there would be a proportional distribution across models. It’s very difficult to explain how some makes and models have higher numbers of complaints than others absent some flaw in the vehicle.

Fresh as I was to writing about the world of cars, I was sure I had the story dead to rights. I had seen this movie before, when my father told me his epic Parnelli Jones Unintended Acceleration story. Dad had even killed the the family pickup’s engine at a traffic light to prove it… and I knew how bad the brakes in the old Ford were (but that’s another story). Absent a better explanation than mere statistical likelihood, I knew there was only one cause for this problem. With a level of confidence that seems totally at odds with subsequent events, I concluded by suggesting that

the Detroit Free Press and Motor Trend blog, are trying to resuscitate the [Audi 5000] media frenzy, only this time Toyota’s to blame for people mistaking the accelerator for their brake pedal… If a TTAC reader out there has a Tacoma, perhaps they would do us the honor of standing on the brakes while mashing the accelerator for a few seconds. This should prove fairly simply that “unintended acceleration” is possible only when you are not actually on the brakes.

It was that simple… wasn’t it?

What I hadn’t counted on back in early 2008, was that floormats and sticky pedals would emerge as possible causes of UA in Toyotas. Reports of runaway Toyotas continued to surface throughout 2008 and 2009, and nearly a year after taking on Ditlow’s statistics, TTAC logged its first story on possible “electronic” causes for UA in Toyotas. The now-defunct Autocoverup.com took up Ditlow’s statistical logic in April2009, and added the missing piece: a story that could not be logically explained.

On November 5, 2008, I was driving on a freeway in my 2008 Lexus ES350 with the cruise control on. I gave the car a little extra gas to pass another car and the car just took off. I tried to disengage the accelerator by trying to turn off the cruise control switch as well as tapping on the brake pedal, but it would not disengage. I tried to turn off the engine by pushing the keyless ignition button, but it would not turn off. I checked the floor to make sure that there wasn’t anything on the accelerator, and there wasn’t. I then put the car in neutral, but when I did this, the engine sounded as if it were going to explode, so I put it back in gear. By this time, I was going well over 100 mph. My only choice was to stand on the brakes. Within seconds, the car was in a cloud of smoke coming from the 4 wheels/brakes. The car began to slow as thankfully the brakes were stronger than the engine which was going at its maximum rpm’s. The car went over a mile before finally coming to a stop. I was then able to put the car in park and stop the engine. After a few moments, when I had calmed down a bit, I started the engine again and it immediately start racing at maximum rpm’s again, so I shut it off . . .

Before Toyota’s first floormat recall, the formula for the media firestorm that would erupt nearly a year later was already in place. First, statistics seemed to point to Toyota. Second, the power of narrative far surpassed the media’s mechanical knowledge. By the time Toyota finally blamed and recalled its floormats, it looked like the company was trying to blame a mundane floormat for a ghost in the machine.

With the powderkeg packed, the unintended acceleration scandal needed only a spark to ignite it. That spark was the fiery crash that killed an off-duty police officer and three family members near San Diego. Because the driver in that incident was a highway patrol officer, many refused to believe that he could have born any responsibility for the incident. Even after evidence surfaced that the car in the incident was a dealer loaner with incorrect floormats which, even with its pedal trapped, could be controlled, the Saylor crash remained proof positive for many that nobody, no matter how well trained, was safe from their Toyota if it decided to take off.

Weeks after the Saylor crash, Toyota recalled 3.8m floormats. Shortly after it announced it would be introducing brake override systems. Though, in retrospect, Toyota was probably scapegoating mats to keep from blaming customers, the story was already reaching a fever pitch. In the wake of the Saylor incident, even I began to hedge about the possibility of some kind of electronic problem causing UA. After all, cars were becoming increasingly electronics-dependent… weren’t we asking for some kind of inevitable techno-nightmare? Still, by the end of 2009, I thought the story had finally had its last hurrah. Of course I was wrong.

By the end of January, Toyota was recalling cars around the world, for sticky pedals made by its supplier, CTS. On February 1, the recall spread to the US. As TTAC explored the roots of Toyota’s decades-long trend towards decontenting, the first signs of saber-rattling from Washington were hitting the airwaves. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood may not have had the first idea about what was actually causing UA in Toyotas, but he definitely knew the political routine, and he laid into Toyota with gusto. Papers were leaked to the relevant congressional committees, and as tensions built in the leadup to congressional hearings, the story exploded in a riot of mass media confusion.

ABC News dumped fuel on the fire when notorious auto safety-baiter Brian Ross teamed up with Professor David Gilbert to produce a video suggesting that errors could be caused in Toyota’s engine control unit without registering error codes. Ross’s report was quickly criticized, and Toyota maintained that Gilbert’s test results had no bearing on real life. After all, the Southern Illinois professor had hard-wired ECUs to create his “ghost in the machine.” In the frenzy, everything from “tin whiskers” to cosmic rays were blamed for creating an untraceable, irreparable madness in Toyotas… eventhe nerd-god Steve Wozniak got in on the fun. TTAC’s own investigation, in which we stripped and analyzed both the recalled and replacement pedals was fascinating but inconclusive. By the time congressional hearings began on unintended acceleration in Toyotas, we were no closer to the truth than when the story started… if anything, the dizzying blur of media coverage made the certainty of early 2008 difficult to recreate.

Luckily, congress was on hand to bring back a sense of clarity to the issue. Not through the clear-eyed vision of our elected representatives though, but rather because of the very opposite. Both the House and Senate committee hearings were flailing disasters of mechanical misunderstanding, misleading testimony, grandstanding and general uselessness. Akio Toyoda was duly humiliated before the House Oversight Committee, before that august body settled into the defining moment of the entire scandal: a day-long hearing in which every hope for a secret hidden electronic gremlin was dashed upon the rocks of common sense. From the committee’s lying, lawyer-connected “expert witnesses“, to a failed attempt to skewer Toyota’s head of US operations, to its concluding meeting with Ray LaHood, April 24 brought every accusation against Toyota to the fore, and yet none managed to stick. By the end of the day’s “Comedy In Three Acts,” my belief that UA in Toyotas was primarily due to operator error was fully renewed. I concluded

Congress holds hearings like these to uncover shocking evidence and to impress its constituents with its dedication to their safety and well-being. Having been enticed into believing that sinister conspiracies exist in Toyota’s software code and the halls of the NHTSA, the House Energy Committee uncovered only one actionable solution to the ongoing scandal: greater funding for NHTSA’s investigative capabilities. Put differently, after hours of posturing congress finally met the enemy and he was them.

By the time Jim Sykes escalated the media hype a step further, when his Prius was caught being slowed by police cars on an interstate, the story was already over-ripe, and decaying from within. By the time the media learned that Sykes was hardly credible (never mind that his story was never credible), his 23-minute-long 911 call gave the story the reek of self-parody, and it collapsed on itself. Since then, we’ve received only regular updates from NHTSA with findings that point to driver error as the main cause of UA, capped by a report I summarized in a post titled Unintended Acceleration In Toyotas: The Ghost In The Data. Its conclusion:

This, in a nutshell, is what the whole Toyota unintended acceleration scandal is boiling down to: either pedal design or some other ergonomic issue makes UA more common, in which case the government can regulate it, or Americans are really becoming worse drivers and are always glad to have a convenient scapegoat for their ineptitude. As unsatisfying as these conclusions are, making peace with them is the only healthy choice at this point. Unless, of course, Government-run “behavioral training and adjustment” sounds like a practical solution to you.

With confirmation of this conclusion coming from today’s release of the long-awaited NASA investigation findings, it seems that the chimera of “Unintended Acceleration” may well be sealed up back in the American unconscious, where it should lay dormant for at least a few more years. After all, as a mass-market brand, Toyota’s lessons should be better remembered than were Audi’s from decades earlier. And yet, I still worry that the connections -and lessons- from the Toyota UA scandal could slip away just as they did after the Audi scandal. Ironically, I feel I captured the real lesson of the scandal best outside of TTAC, when I wrote in a Reuters op-ed:

Just as motorists can never assume that their vehicle will always function perfectly, consumers should avoid being lulled into a false sense of security by an automaker’s reputation alone. Automobiles are complex machines manufactured by firms that must constantly test the cost-quality equation to stay competitive in a cutthroat industry. As long as this is the case, the market for automobiles will remain dynamic and cyclical: an arena with little room for the kind of unquestioning trust that Toyota has enjoyed for so many years. If there’s a lesson to Toyota’s tumble, it’s that easy assumptions aren’t enough to keep you safe on the road, or in the showroom.

A year on from the height of the scandal, I think that if we bring anything away from the experience, it should be this.

Chrysler’s Super Bowl ad starring the city of Detroit and its new 200 sedan may have captured the imagination of American industry-watchers, but its timing was highly inauspicious. As the ad was launched, Chrysler was being thrust into a kind of transnational custody battle between US taxpayers and the Italian government, a battle that underscores the ambiguous benefits of national bailouts of multinational companies. At the same time, Chrysler workers have once again made news by getting caught partaking in controlled substances during a lunch break, an awkward representation of the culture of the city that Chrysler is so desperate to re-inspire faith in. And even outside of the controversies swirling around America’s most challenged domestic automaker, there are signs that the phenomenon that can be termed “automotive nationalism” is outliving its usefulness. Chrysler may argue that “what we make makes us,” but appeals to the national or regional character of a car are not simply misleading… they’re downright dangerous.

Of course, assigning national attributes to a vehicle is as old as car criticism itself. For much of the 20th Century, cars were products of nations first and consumer goods second, a perspective that helped shape much of the modern European automotive market, with such troubled brands as Seat and Lancia surviving solely due to strong home-market sales to patriotic citizens. And, for a good deal of the past century, the application of national stereotypes to automobile brands may even have had some basis in reality: Italian cars were full of character but somewhat unreliable, just as German cars really did embody the values of quality, exactitude and seriousness. At the same time, these perceptions were forged in a very different world from that which we now occupy. In the early days of the auto industry, national identity was the lens through which all economic and cultural artifacts were judged.

Today, the national character of automobiles is an increasingly tenuous concept. On a macro scale, most modern automobiles are remarkably similar in layout, performance and “character.” The differences between (for example) French, German, Japanese, American and Korean midsized family sedans are incredibly subtle, and offer little material evidence for any kind of national identity. Reliability, long a point on which to characterize entire nations’ automotive outputs, is no longer an acceptable price to pay for some other, more positive national characteristic (say, “character”). As has been suggested by neoliberal economic theorists, global competition has an intensely homogenizing effect. Though enthusiasts may bemoan the development, automotive identity has been largely benchmarked out of existence, and consumers have broadly benefited as a result.

And global competition hasn’t merely erased most of the allegedly national characteristics from cars in terms of the end user experience. From planning through production, every process involved in the creation of a vehicle has changed in ways which weaken any possibility of a connection between a national attribute and the finished product. After all, many modern vehicles are planned, designed, styled and produced in vastly different regions by vastly different cultures. For example, Hyundai’s Tucson was designed by a German, for a Korean company and is assembled in the American South. Similarly, the 200 that Chrysler is so eager to associate with Detroit is an Italian-led development of a US-produced vehicle (the Sebring) which was engineered by a joint German-American firm (Daimler Chrysler) on a Mitsubishi platform. And as if that weren’t enough, the exact same vehicle will be rebadged and sold as a Lancia Fulvia in Europe. And this vehicle represents Detroit how?

But again, the problem isn’t simply that cars don’t represent national identities any more… it’s that pretending they do is deeply dangerous. Perhaps nothing proves just how ripe “automotive nationalism” is for a trip to the ash heap of history like a recent episode of Top Gear, in which one of the globally popular show’s hosts attempted to apply this outdated perspective to the Mexican Mastretta sportscar. With shocking results. After all, if Italian cars are “flamboyant” and German cars are “relentlessly efficient,” why wouldn’t Mexican cars be “lazy, feckless and flatulent”? The problem with this wince-worthy moment isn’t so much that Top Gear’s well-traveled hosts seem to have no knowledge of Mexican culture beyond what they learned watching “Speedy Gonzalez,” but that they continue to put so much stock in their concept of “automotive nationalism” that they can’t tell the difference between analyzing a forthcoming automobile and parading their ignorance and prejudice before a global audience. In this clip you can watch as 20th Century thought breaks over the rocks of 21st Century reality, taking out the world’s best-known proponents of automotive culture in the process.

Of course, old ideas will always have deep resonance with people, and there’s no way to expect that automotive nationalism will simply disappear overnight. Indeed, Chrysler’s post-bankruptcy advertising has relied entirely on the concept that rebuilding lost American icons like Detroit and domestic manufacturing can be accomplished by buying their vehicles. These vehicles represent “us,” Chrysler tells America, and by buying them, we can support the disappearing but somehow still authentically American values that made this country great. But what are those values, really? Fiat-Chrysler is asking us to project our image of ourselves onto their vehicles, just as they’ll ask Italians to project their self-image onto Lancia-badged, Canadian-built Chrysler 300s… and the strategy may yet have enough legs on it to generate some short-term sympathy. But will it last?

In a word, no. Especially in mature markets like the US and Europe, consumption has long replaced production as a source of identity. With the rise of global communication, communities and identities are fragmenting anyway: people are free to choose and mold their identities, and as a result, global, interest-oriented communities are rapidly outstripping the importance of local, geographically-determined identities. And as this process continues, the car you drive and what it says about you has become far more important to the construction of identity than which car is built nearest to where you live. Chrysler’s thesis, that the things we make make us, is another lingering echo from the 20th Century: today, what we buy, not what we build, makes us.

One of the more admirable qualities of the blogging culture is a relentless underdog streak. Anyone who mans the ramparts of a decent blog is forever scouring the worlds of business, media and opinion for an opportunity to attack the most prominent voices of the day. And TTAC is no exception: we certainly came up by attacking the apologists and Polyannas who are still massively overrepresented in the world of automotive commentary. But what a difference a bailout makes. While the mainstream automotive media spent much of the leadup to the auto bailout making apologies and excuses for Detroit’s decline, TTAC told the unpleasant truth, gaining us new readers and credibility every step of the way. Now that I find myself being asked to contribute to one of the most prestigious opinion outlets in the world (the NY Times op-ed page) on a regular basis, TTAC is no longer the underdog, and other blogs have stepped into the breach to attack us as the new status quo. Fair enough… let’s do this thing.

After an embarrassing hacker attack left its commenter base vulnerable and seething, it’s no wonder that Gawker’s Jalopnik car blog decided to lead the charge against my latest Op-Ed on Detroit’s “Guzzling” ways. And because the entertainment-oriented car blog has wisely decided to hire the former Detroit Free Press reporter Justin Hyde, they actually have someone on staff worthy of taking up the debate. Unfortunately, however, Hyde seems more interested in penning a takedown than actually engaging in a debate about the issues raised in the piece.

Hyde thesis is essentially that “Niedermeyer wants to blame Detroit for building the pickups and SUVs that remain popular with buyers” and that “Detroit can rightfully claim a share of leadership in green cars.” Towards the end of the piece he distills the argument:

So according to the Times, if gas prices don’t rise and Americans don’t buy greener vehicles, then the bailout of GM and Chrysler fell short. If gas prices do rise — creating the demand for the more-efficient models Detroit has now shown it can produce — that’s also bad, because the credit markets will suffer, and then flying unicorns attack Detroit and its Bailout II: Electric Boogaloo.

The implication is that I am somehow responsible for creating this damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t dynamic. What Hyde clearly doesn’t understand is that I never took to a public forum and attempted to make a politically unpopular bailout more palatable among certain constituencies by claiming that it would transform Detroit’s automakers from truck and SUV-dependent “dinosaurs” (the White House’s words, not mine) into green car leaders. My op-ed wasn’t meant to suggest any particular policy, or to push Detroit into either being “Pelosimobile” pushers or SUV-dependent laggards, but to point out the disconnect between an important justification for the bailout (green transformation) and the reality (GM and Chrysler have the worst fleet fuel economy numbers in the business). Hyde accidentally puts his finger on this reality when he writes

It may be news to the anti-SUV crowd, but Detroit can rightfully claim a share of leadership in green cars.

The first half of this sentence explains why my op-ed was necessary (the second half is highly debatable, witness the fleet-wide efficiency reality). Like it or not, SUVs do have a terrible reputation around the world, and Americans who oppose them on moral grounds can’t be blamed for taking Obama at his word and assuming that the government-led “transformation” of Detroit would lead GM and Chrysler to de-prioritize large gas guzzlers. Nowhere do I state that the government should have forced GM or Chrysler to build certain vehicles, but I absolutely understand why Americans might be disappointed to find out that the green rhetoric surrounding the bailout turned out to be just so much hot air.

But there’s that Catch-22 again: either Obama had to intervene in the day-to-day operations of the automakers, exposing him to libertarian and conflict-of-interest critiques, or he had to let GM and Chrysler operate purely on the basis of profit motivation, allowing old, bad habits to continue unchecked. But did TTAC create this lose-lose situation, or did Obama himself create it by justifying the bailout on green grounds? The fundamental problem here is that the American people overwhelmingly opposed the auto bailout, and rather than simply sell the policy as “the right thing to do” (a line that did emerge in the Administration’s rhetoric, but only after the bailout improved the auto-sector job situation) he had to sweeten the pot by promising that Detroit would transform into green car crusaders. Obama, not TTAC, promised the “flying unicorns”… we simply pointed out that

the bailouts have created a perverse new dynamic. With G.M. stock now being publicly traded on Wall Street, taxpayers have every incentive to cheer on the bailed-out automaker as it overproduces vehicles and pushes cheap credit. After all, the sooner G.M.’s stock hits a certain level — likely around $52 per share — the sooner the Treasury can sell its remaining equity and get taxpayers out of risk.

There’s certainly an argument to be made that allowing Detroit to operate as a business, though detrimental to Obama’s green goals, was the lesser of the two evils. But, as is so often the case when Jalopnik strays into heavy opinion, Hyde refuses to even take that stand. Instead, he concludes with a paragraph that oozes the kind of thinking that has enabled Detroit’s complacency for decades:

For this holiday, I’d wish for a few days where we set aside the kvetching about what the U.S. auto industry is or isn’t, and simply enjoy the fact that we as a nation decided a couple hundred thousand people should earn a living in manufacturing instead of hearing their children ask Santa Claus to stop their electricity from being shut off. I would also wish for better insights into the auto industry from the New York Times op-ed page, but I know better than to ask for flying unicorns.

In short, the message is “quit your whining.” For a piece entitled What The New York Times Op-Ed Page Doesn’t Know About Cars, that’s a pretty weak payoff. The American taxpayers made a massive investment in an industry that is constantly plagued by boom-bust cycles, makes huge gambles that destroy billions in wealth, and follows interests which, in the eyes of many, fundamentally trades off with the well-being of America’s environment and economy… but Hyde would prefer that we didn’t discuss any such trade-offs inherent in this kind of intervention. Given that the piece in question raises a number of issues that aren’t huge problems at the moment, but are indicative of industry backsliding into old bad habits (fleet sales, incentives, etc), isn’t discussing their trade-offs and raising awareness of them a fairly reasonable topic for an opinion piece?

And this is where Jalopnik and Hyde let down the blogosphere’s proud tradition of attacking op-ed columnists: if you’re going to imply that someone knows nothing about cars, you need to do better than wishing an end to all criticism of the bailout, or discussion of its fundamental contradictions. Blogs are about ongoing debates, but rather than adding anything meaningful to the war of ideas, Jalopnik simply retreats into the kind of “leave Britney alone” apologia that screams “we can’t handle the truth.” Luckily, readers who share Hyde’s visceral disagreement with my words but want more substance than limp-wristed a plea for censorship can always turn to TTAC’s comment section, where a vibrant exchange of ideas is already under way. After all, we don’t mind at all when people disagree with us; we all learn by having their views challenged. But the debate must go on…

One of the world’s foremost authorities on Automotive Journalism recently got their hands on a trio of Corvettes just for fun. But what unfolded was on the verge of hilarity, if not for their self-proclaimed journalistic superiority over us “punk kids with lots of servers and a desire to get free test drives.”

And that’s why it stings, in case you missed the backhanded TTAC insults in the link above. So let’s start with the Video reviews: I am no Jack Baruth, but I see numerous problems with their driving.  For one, Edmunds Chris Walton is caught–on camera–with his hand on the bottom of the tiller. (2:00 in the Grand Sport video) Anyone who’s taken a weekend driving school knows that 9-and-3 hand positions are the only way to fly.  After a brief reality check with Baruth, the other glaring deficiency comes to light: rarely, if ever, did Edmunds come close to hitting a racing line.

While power-on oversteering burnouts and gratuitous audio of LS-X mills are most welcome, Edmunds needs to hit apexs, take advantage of the entire track, and generally drive to the expectations of their most savvy readers.  To that effect, the commentator “1krider1” has it right: “Get some track instruction and learn to drive.” And consider the source, he’s probably be NASA racer/LeMons winner and Speed:Sport:Life contributor Rob Krider.  I’m no Tiff Nidel, but the rest of Edmund’s puff piece leaves much to be desired.

After just one launch with our Quicksilver Metallic 2002 Z06, it was obvious that the trick to getting the most out of the veteran Vette would be traction management. While Team Corvette has just announced major improvements are in store for its preferred Goodyear Eagle F1 Supercar tires, nothing could be done for these vintage examples because they were toast.

Don’t take my word for it, the comments section is filled with complaints that Edmund’s didn’t spring for a new set of tires when putting a C5 Corvette against a pair of hand plucked, PR-approved C6s from GM’s stable. With very little doubt, the C5 Z06’s track numbers on fresh rubber would easily match or (probably) beat the 2010 Grand Sport.

Again, it’s those tires. Surely the skid pad would reveal how little ultimate grip remained in the weary run-flats, and we were right. At 0.92g of lateral acceleration, the result shows some decline from the 1.0g a car like this could post in 2002

Apparently Edmunds isn’t big on doing their homework, since the C5 Z06 never came with run-flat tires. And if they installed a set, shame on them for stacking the cards in the C6’s favor.

As our test driver said after finishing this portion of the track test and anticipating the next day’s adventure on a road circuit, “I know I should be looking forward to driving three Corvettes on a racetrack tomorrow, but after today, I’m not so sure about this car. I’ll give it my 98 percent effort and reserve 2 percent just in case.”

Let’s blame the old car, not the people using worn rubber in a comparison test. Stay classy, Edmunds.

The Grand Sport now proves communicative, and we could confidently explore its limits thanks to its quick turn into each cone and the ability to throttle-steer the rear of the car. Did we just say that about a Corvette?

If you’ve spent enough time around C5 and (especially) C6 vettes, you’d know that they all behave this well once you ditch the run-flat tires for normal rubber. Or, for maximum butt kicking, installing the barely-legal Michelin Pilot Sport Cups used on top dollar Porkers.

We finally managed a run of 71.3 mph with the stability control on while sawing madly at the disinclined steering wheel.

Let’s hope you weren’t “sawing”  from the bottom of the steering wheel.  Not that you should saw at the wheel. Ever.  Especially when mad.

(We tried to verify with GM if these discrepancies could be explained by the Carbon’s active suspension or any other differences in hardware, but the Corvette engineers reported that the steering racks of the two cars are identical and further insisted that our impressions of the two cars should be reversed. Hmmm, sounds to us like prototype engineering might be the culprit.)

Not exactly. We might answer this question if we knew the Carbon’s active handling status: 100% on, 100% off and if the Traction Control was disabled or in “Competitive Driving” mode.  Edmunds needs to get off of the usual excuses for prototype vehicles and fess up to which mode was used while “sawing madly” at the wheel. I am not the only C5/C6 handling nanny-savvy reader on the planet, so let’s just finish this train wreck.

We have no qualms declaring the 2010 Chevrolet Corvette Z06 Carbon Edition the best Corvette money can buy. You might suggest that the ZR1 represents a better deal since you get 133 hp more for just $5,495 more. But here’s the deal. The Porsche 911 GT2 is more powerful and both quicker and faster on a drag strip (and more expensive) than a Porsche 911 GT3, yet we still prefer the immediacy of the GT3′s naturally aspirated engine, its linear power delivery and the overall cohesive personality of the chassis. The same goes for the Corvette Z06 Carbon.

Wrong. Unlike the small displacement, turbo laggy Porsche GT2, there’s no lack of immediacy with a twin screw supercharger on a 6.2 liter V8.  Go ahead and ask me how I know. I know GM didn’t provide you a ZR1 for testing, but how could Edmunds get this so wrong? Oh wait, the lure of free press cars.  And the promise of more free press cars.  Press cars!

Benefit of the doubt: perhaps Edmund’s believes the ZR1 isn’t as track worthy because of the issues with heat soak in forced induction applications.  But will the intercooled “Z” lose 133 horses in 100+ degree weather on an asphalt track? Not bloody likely.

If Edmunds has the nerve to pull this stunt again, they better stop “sawing madly” at the wheel. And call out the Carbon Z06 as a fashion-statement fraud, because the Z06 + Z07 package is the real deal. Then they better put new tires on the C5 Z06. Have we journalists learned nothing from the Firestone tire debacle? If Edmunds doesn’t learn from their mistakes, they might face the wrath of more commentators like “1krider1” when he said:

“You guys are an embarrassment to real auto journalists.”

But this set off a light bulb in my head. Why should I post a comment about why I disagree with an article, and get browbeaten, if I can write an article of my own, highlighting my thoughts? Isn’t that the American way? Why give something away for free, when you can sell it?

But before I proceed, I ought to clarify that I’m not going to advocate why Top Gear USA will fail. That’s another topic completely. I’m going to talk about my reasons as to why I think Top Gear is all right.

Top Gear does something which few shows do: capture our imaginations. Say what you want about these awful reality shows (America’s next supermodel, American Idol, America’s got talent, etc), but everyone watches for one reason, to see an underdog story come true. Want proof? Look at the Susan Boyle video.

And this is what Top Gear does. It shows us what deep down we’d all love to do, if we were given a budget of their size. I would love to do a cheap car challenge with my friends which (nearly always) ends up destroying the car in some fashion. Or do a race across Europe. Or build an amphibious vehicle.

Now many criticize Top Gear for not catering to “normal people” and not doing enough “proper reviews”. But wouldn’t that be defeating the object, somewhat? When Top Gear WAS doing reviews of Vauxhall Vectras and Toyota Corollas (A.K.A “Old” Top Gear) did it capture the imaginations of people around the world?

There were probably a thousand other shows on American TV doing exactly the same thing, so what would have made “Old” Top Gear distinguishable from the rest? In fact, I find it strange that it’s normally “petrol heads” who criticize Top Gear for not doing enough reviews on “normal cars”.

You’d have thought, showing Lamborghini Gallardos doughnutting and Bugatti Veyron being maxxed out would get the petrol in their veins flowing? But no, what they actually want to see is a Honda Civic being tested on whether it has the best boot space in its class. Yeah, right(!)

Top Gear  talks more about the car industry as a whole. They criticized the car scrappage scheme in the UK for not being environmentally sound, they moan about speed cameras & various new motoring laws and the price of petrol. These are topics WE’VE talked about on TTAC.

But for some reason, it’s fine for us to talk about it because “we’re The Truth About Cars and we’re committed to telling the truth about the car industry”, but when Top Gear does it, it’s seen as silly and frivolous.

Now as I mentioned earlier, the reason (I believe) for Top Gear’s success is the way it captured people’s imagination. Top Gear started doing stunts which, quite frankly, people hadn’t seen before on any show. Can anyone name a TV show (I won’t even say “car show”, just any show) before Top Gear which did stunts like this:

• Race an Aston Martin DB9 against the Eurostar/TGV to Monte Carlo, France?
• Cross the English Channel in an amphibious vehicle?
• Have a road trip across South America?
• Race a Ferrari 612 Scaglietti against a plane to Verbier, Switzerland?
• Try to see if they could go from London to Edinburgh and back again onone tank of fuel?
• Race a Mercedes-McClaren SLR against a boat to Oslo, Norway?
• Try to destroy a Toyota Hilux?
• Race a Bugatti Veyron against a Cessna 182 to London, UK?
• Try to send a Reliant Robin into space? (I doubt anyone had the budget to do that!)
• Have a road trip across Africa?
• Race a Nissan GT-R against the Shinkansen Bullet Train across Japan?
• Race a Toyota Hilux against a dog sled to the North Pole?
• Drag-raced a Bugatti Veyron against a Euro Fighter Typhoon Jet?

All of these stunts/races were thing people had rarely seen on TV, let alone on a car show. Now we come to the “Star in the reasonably priced car” segment. I’m going to gloss over the comments who say that it contains a load of British stars who they don’t know, because if you remember it’s a British show with, well, British stars.

My criticism stems from the petrol heads who see this part as the bit which could easily be cut out of the show. But I believe this segment has merit. Now, I’m not a fan of “celebrity culture”. I couldn’t give a toss what Madonna has been doing for her lunch. But a lot of people do care. As TTAC commentator Tricky Dicky eloquently puts it “The whole point of the ‘Star in the Reasonably Priced Car’ is NOT to deliver a benchmarkable assessment of driving skills, it is to get another angle on a celebrity doing something outside of their comfort zone.”

No-one actually cares if Michael Gambon has a perfect driving line. In fact, quite the opposite, we WANT to see how bad celebrities actually drive. And at the very worst, this segment has given us one thing. Andy Garcia, Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz and Jeff Goldblum driving a Kia C’eed. What other show has done that?!

Now is Top Gear perfect as it is? Hardly. Top Gear has thrown some clunkers our way. The bit where they tried to make their own electric car was painful to watch as it didn’t tell us anything and was quite unfunny. The caravanning episode, whilst funny, told us what we already knew; that caravanning is utter misery.

But even “The Sopranos” had some dud episodes, too (“Pine Barrens” springs to mind). To say Top Gear is brilliant all the time, tells us that,

1. There’s no room for improvement (which there clearly is!) and

2. You’re believing the hype.

Top Gear is a great show, but is it without fault? No.

So, there you have it, my case for why Top Gear should be given a great deal of respect for what it has done. It has got people who weren’t that interested in cars, interested in cars. And surely that can’t be a bad thing?

Disclaimer: Cammy Corrigan is fully aware that this article may end her writing career, but still went ahead with it. With a little TOO much encouragement from Bertel Schmitt, who said: “I’m a sucker for career-ending stories.”