Editor’s Note: This week, Peter is back from our summer break with a vengeance, reserving particular ire for the annual August events in Monterey and Detroit, and slamming the auction houses for basically destroying any shred of passion that remains in automobile culture. In On The Table, Ford has a name for its “Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread” EV pickup, and it’s underwhelming to say the least. And we have an unlikely collaboration between Louis Vuitton and Singer, plus, news from Audi, Mercedes-Benz, Genesis, VW, Dodge, Toyota and Acura. Our video this week features the story of the “Repco-Brabham V8,” the beautiful aluminum engine that GM let get away and which then became a F1 World Champion. Our AE Song of the Week is “Stoney End” by the late, great – and super-talented – Laura Nyro. In Fumes, Peter brings us the next chapter in his new series, “The Racing Machines.” And finally, in The Line we have INDYCAR results from the Streets of Markham, Ontario. We also have Cadillac’s V-ONE Concept, which has the manufaturer testing the waters for building bespoke track cars for well-heeled customers, something Ferrari has done for years. Remember, you can read past issues by scrolling down and clicking on “Next 1 Entries.” We’re back on it! -WG
By Peter M. DeLorenzo
Detroit. Greetings, WebVillians! I would love to report that our “break” was a wildly successful, wide-open pursuit of relentless fun, but the reality is that it was none of that. It was more of a much-needed mental respite from the week-in, week-out grind of producing this website. To be truthful, I started to get edgy after the first week of the first summer break we’ve ever taken. Not that I was bored, because I’m getting a book ready to be published after the first of the year, and that is consuming most of my waking moments, but even with that, I was still edgy. Relaxing has never been my thing. In the midst of all of it I reminded myself of one of my all-time favorite lines in rock and roll history from The Rolling Stones: “The sunshine bores the daylights out of me.” (We don’t call him The Prince of Darkness” for nothin’, folks. -WG)
This, as yet another relentless “heat dome” endeavored to fry our brains out. My usual rejoinder to those complaining about the heat around here has always been something like, “it’s better than February.” But, when WG – a true warm-weather aficionado – mentions the toll this heat has taken on her garden, you know it has been formidable. Then again, complaining about the weather has never been a value-added activity either, so we press on.
I didn’t expect much to happen on our break in terms of the business, and I wasn’t disappointed. The drumbeat of sameness coursing through the industry right now is debilitating and mind-numbing. And the auto companies and their dealers are hell-bent on painting a rosy picture of things no matter what, with a level of optimism that’s predictable, and with a large dollop of tone-deafness thrown in for good measure.
But no matter what they say, dealers never take the “long view” of things because it’s anathema to their very existence. They live in 30-day increments and that will never, ever change when it comes to the retail side of this business.
A sure sign of this are the gushing reports emanating from manufacturers and their dealers right now. These reports suggest that consumers are “adapting well” to the new retail environment, which is simply laughable. As if 84-month financing is anything resembling a whiff of sanity. Consumers are being cornered by the ugly realities of high prices and, with few options, they’re being forced to partake of a very unsavory stew. So, trying to “spin” the current retail environment as being even remotely acceptable is just so much unmitigated bullshit.
And guess what? Automotive News reported a couple of weeks ago that the average transaction price for a new vehicle exceeded $50,000 for the first time ever last September. “A record 24 percent of borrowers took out auto loans that span seven years or longer in the second quarter, according to Edmunds. In March, default rates rose to their highest levels since the Great Recession in 2010, and the number of defaults from January through March rose 9 percent from a year earlier, according to Cox Automotive.”
Affordability has been a serious problem gathering speed by the month, and I’ve written about it extensively for years now. You just can’t keep burying consumers in crushingly long loans leaving them hopelessly “upside down” the moment they drive off the lot with absolutely no hope of ever catching up financially, while touting it as the new standard operating procedure of the business. For the record, this attitude goes way beyond tone-deafness; it points to the massive disconnect between the manufacturer/dealer consortium and the consumers they’re trying to relate to. And it is flat-out absurd.
It’s no wonder that Hyundai and Kia are posting all-time sales records, or that Honda delivers strong performances month after month. Combine decent pricing with growing availability of Hybrids, and you have a winning recipe. And where does that leave the domestic manufacturers? Pushing more trucks, SUVs and crossovers – trying to leverage the only thing they have going.
But at the same time, you have to love the car business. Well, let me rephrase that. Some of us immersed in this seething cauldron of runaway egos, shortsightedness, intermittent brilliance and, remarkably enough and against all odds, indomitable spirit, still love this business. (Then again, when it comes right down to it, it all depends on the day.)
We love it for the unbridled creativity demonstrated by the True Believers, who keep stepping up to the plate and swinging for the fences against all odds. We love it for the relentless 24/7 churn – and burnout – that entails (even though everyone complains about it, they wouldn’t have it any other way). We love it for the brief shining moments when an exceptional design or product advancement emerges to remind us all of what turned us on about the business in the first place, even though those moments are fleeting, at best.
But truth be told, we also love to loathe it too. It can’t be helped.
We despise the carpetbagging mercenaries who seem to rear their ugly heads at the most inopportune moments to wreak havoc on this business, masquerading as corporate saviors. We cringe at the legions of spineless weasels who populate almost every corner of this business, the go-along-to-get-along hordes and dutiful, sniveling minions who project a positive demeanor but who wallow in serial, abject mediocrity at every turn. That part of the business is depressing and tedious, there’s no doubt. “Wait just a damn minute!” I can anticipate the Voices from The Other Side weighing-in on my perspective. “I’m sitting here in our balcony room overlooking the 18th fairway at Pebble Beach, sipping mimosas with my smoking-hot third wife. How bad can it be? You’re just envious that you’re not here.” Or something like that. We received an email very similar to that a few years ago after my continuous (mostly) negative commentaries on Monterey Car Week.
And yet, here we are.
As most longtime readers know, I have gradually become even more aggravated with the state of the so-called car “thing” as it exists today. It’s clear that the car enthusiast culture – or what’s left of it – has been overrun by aggressive corporate types (I’m looking at you, Hagerty), con artists, clueless marketing twerps, greed merchants, poseurs and too many (but not all) in the media who display more go-along-to-get-along, “Thank you sir, may I have another” cheerleading than your average SEC school. It’s clear that some in the media, who gushingly say (in so many words) that “everyone who is anyone in the car business is at Pebble Beach” have been co-opted and indoctrinated. And it’s truly pathetic.
Where is it all going? Nowhere good, I’m afraid.
Yes, I skipped – yet again – being amongst the shiny happy auto “enthusiasts” and marketing troops gathered out in Pebble Beach, patting themselves on the back that they’re present and accounted for at Monterey Car Week, even though the research gleaned and goodwill bestowed to prospects amounts to a giant bowl of Not So Much. As for the few brighter lights at the car companies who realize that the million-dollar bills they accrue at Pebble Beach really don’t add up to much of anything quantifiable, they’re unfortunately offset by the marketers who are whining because they aren’t there and who can’t wait to get out there next year. So, it seems that the cycle will continue.
If you need an excellent indication that luxury automakers and their marketing troops are completely out of ideas when it comes to marketing their wares, you only have to look as far as the over-the-top events held last week on the Monterey Peninsula. The relentless, ever-present din that hangs in the air out there is defined by the drunken spending among the luxury automakers, and unremarkably enough, the way they go about it has a stench of sameness attached to it that, in the end, makes it indistinguishable from one brand to another.
It’s the same luxury accoutrements, the same rote regurgitation of “luxury” words and phrases that are mumbled in an interchangeable soundtrack from brand to brand, and the same platitudes and cloying familiarity that blend together in a dismal cadence of vacuousness that goes by like a blur of marketing cotton candy, a fleeting sugar rush of pseudo substance followed by the inevitable crash of emptiness.
Yet automakers drop, collectively, one hundred million dollars (at least) out in Monterey every year like clockwork. Why? Because the lingering question hanging over the marketing troops isn’t, “Maybe we ought to reevaluate this whole thing” but, “What happens if we’re not there?” Which isn’t exactly an answer that makes a lick of sense, now does it?
As for the whole auction thing or as I refer to it, the “Circus of Artificial Enthusiasm,” we received an unending series of come-ons from the auction houses touting the latest and greatest cars leading up to “Monterey Car Week,” all of which are pegged at absurd bid levels, and it frankly left us cold. There is no excitement generated by these communiques, just a gloomy emptiness hanging in the air over machines that once brimmed with passion and creativity, but are now relegated to marks on a ledger, which will count toward a tally that will be used to promote next year’s installment of the “circus.” This tedious drill went far beyond the “Fools and their money…” adage well over two decades ago.
These machines are paraded on stage – souls removed – only to end up in antiseptic, “perfect” garages until they’re prepared for another auction down the road. This isn’t about the car culture or the sheer passion once associated with these automobiles. Now, it’s the living, breathing embodiment of Greed is Good. (By the way, $40,000,000 for the first Ferrari Luce EV? I mean, seriously, WTF?)
The calculated feeding frenzy manufactured by the auto auction houses has decimated the fundamental enthusiasm that used to define car enthusiasts of all stripes. There, I said it. The whole auto auction game has graduated from being merely tedious to a threat to car enthusiasm itself.
Speaking of something not making a lick of sense, the fevered business surrounding auto auctions has come to define the car “hobby” for a lot of people, which is a very bad thing. Why? It’s not about the cars anymore, or the fleeting moments in time that defined what those machines represented, or the memories they created for the enthusiasts who drove them. No, as I stated previously, it’s about flat-out greed, pure and simple.
Whether it’s resurrected cars over-restored to perfection or “survivor” cars brokered “as is” it’s really all the same. It’s a circus marked by overheated auction hucksters in cahoots with the blatant sycophants at the TV networks who all do their very best to add to the faux cacophony, which is only punctuated by the projected “record” dollar figures seemingly for every car. (The usurious buyers’ and sellers’ premiums are barely mentioned.)
Car auctions have destroyed the last vestige of rational thought that was once associated with being a car enthusiast. In fact, rational thinking when it comes to the car enthusiast experience was steadily reduced to collateral damage years and years ago by the “greed merchants” at the auction houses. And it really stinks.
As for our localized “Dream Cruise,” the annual car happening in August that went from being a spontaneous celebration of the automobile to an event wearing a leaded cloak of marketing sameness as orchestrated by the manufacturers and suppliers, I reserve particular ire for some of the card-carrying members of the local media who fall over themselves trying to pump up the volume on yet another edition, when the rote regurgitation of sameness hangs over the proceedings like a giant haze of “we’ve seen this before.”
The manufacturers and suppliers have their territories marked, the anticipation is missing in action, and the whole thing has been reduced to an annual dirge of predictability. Is this really what it has come to in the “Motor City”? Is this “celebration” of our car culture the best we can do? I certainly hope not, because it has all of the spontaneity of the grim “back to school” ads polluting the airwaves right now.
The High-Octane Truth about the Dream Cruise is that it simply doesn’t ring true anymore, as unpopular as that notion might be with some around here. And it hasn’t for a long, long time. The spontaneity that once bubbled up organically in the early years has been replaced by a rigid sameness that is as predictable as the local media coverage of the event, which is nothing but a regurgitation of the last decade’s worth of stories.
The Dream Cruise has been overhyped, overblown and overrated for years, just like Monterey Car Week. And car enthusiasm is in a dismal state as well, having taken a huge hit thanks to the malicious hucksterism as practiced by the auction houses. And unfortunately, none of this is likely to change anytime soon.
Halfway through 2026 and what have we learned?
Not much.
And that’s the High-Octane Truth for this week.
Editor’s Note: Click on “Next 1 Entries” at the bottom of this page to see previous issues. – WG