A regular C8 Corvette will get you to Publix with 495 horsepower. A Z06 Corvette has 670 horsepower and, thus, about the same power-to-weight ratio as an IMSA GTD Pro race car. What is the use case for the ZR1X in a country that has 342 million people (Census; perhaps 350-360 million if we believe Yale) trying to use roads designed for a nation of 150 million?
The heaviest Ferrari 308 was 255 hp and only a little lighter than the 495 hp Corvette. Nobody said that was an underpowered sports car. What balance of engineering considerations resulted in a 4,000 lb. car having more horsepower than a 10,500 lb. Pilatus PC-12 11-seat aircraft?
Also, in a country where the average IQ falls every year who is going to service this complicated machine? It’s awesome to own what will no doubt be a collector’s item, but will anyone have the skills to fix it 20 or 30 years from now?
Here’s a Facebook post about a 30-day repair to find an electrical problem in a Corvette with the base engine supplemented by an electric motor:
This is an aviation level of maintenance hassle for an in-production car where everyone at the dealer and everyone at GM should have fresh knowledge of how the E-Ray is supposed to work.
I guess I have to admit being in awe of the engineers who built a machine with this much horsepower that can also be sold with a 5-year powertrain warranty and the offer of an extended warranty!
In honor of D-Day (June 6, 1944), a few photos from Wheels Across the Pond 2025 car show, an annual event in Jupiter, Florida that showcases British and European cars (April 19 this year). It’s free for spectators and only $45 per car for show vehicle owners so it is unclear how the event survives financially.
Our show began in the $10 premium parking lot with a rare Talbo. These were apparently made in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, one town to the south, beginning in the mid-1990s. One sold in 2023 on BaT for $230,000 (2023 dollars, remember!). The BaT description: “Designed to resemble a Figoni et Falaschi-bodied 1930s Talbot-Lago T150C SS, the car features fiberglass bodywork finished in burgundy over a tubular steel chassis, and power comes from a 5.0-liter Ford V8 paired with an AOD four-speed automatic transmission. … TLC Carrossiers Incorporated was founded by former Pratt & Whitney engineer George Balaschak in 1990 to create a car inspired by the 1938 Talbot-Lago T150C SS that utilized modern running gear.” (Pratt has a big operation, complete with its own airport (private 7000′ runway), just west of Jupiter/PBG.)
A local art car was parked right near the entrance:
(The biggest art on display here is keeping an older Jaguar running!)
A guy whose dad was the original purchaser of a 1967 Morgan exhibited the family heirloom ($4,092 in what we are informed is our inflation-free society; about 75,000 Bidies today for a replica) and let us touch the wood that supports the body:
The English struggled to make decent cars before they were enriched by migrants. Examples:
Now that the UK is fully enriched, the Aston Martin DBX (not based on a Volkswagen like most of the high-dollar European SUVs) is available. It might be worth the $288,000 price if they could just make the interior a little more orange:
Since we don’t care about pedestrian safety anymore (if we did, we would impose a 50% tax on SUVs and pickups not purchased by people with honest jobs), why can’t we get this look for the nose of our Honda minivan?
Here’s a display that attributes the 1950s decline of the British luxury car industry to the British “victory” in WWII:
Turning now to the country that the British purportedly defeated, we find a great example of speaker-listener disconnect (“pragmatic failure” for the academics)… “I’ll pick you up in my BMW and we can go out for lunch” (a 13 horsepower 1957 BMW Isetta 300):
For scale, next to a baby stroller:
What Germany was able to build before it became an Islamic (as measured by hours spent on religious activities) nation (1961 Mercedes 190SL; current value about $150,000):
A Fiat Topolino and perhaps the only surviving Marot-Gardon (the owner drives it around his Palm Beach County (Lake Worth Beach) neighborhood):
Elizabeth Warren was at the event, but I didn’t get a chance to ask if I could join her on a taxpayer-funded trip to visit Kilmar Abrego Garcia:
Also in the motorcycle section, a 20 lb. bicycle from 1900, no carbon fiber required and the roads back then weren’t as smooth as they are now:
Who agrees with me that the 20-year-old Ferrari 360 is more attractive than their latest and greatest?
(They seem to be available used for about $100,000. It was $153,500 in 2000, which translates to roughly $285,000 in today’s mini-dollars (i.e., it wasn’t a great investment if held from new). Our neighbor who owns a couple of Ferraris says that maintenance on the 360 is astronomically expensive due to the need to drop the engine in order to replace a timing belt that has a 3-year life. “Ferrari realized that the reputation for excessive maintenance costs was killing sales so they made the F430 a lot cheaper and easier to service,” he said. Used F430s are perhaps 10-20% more expensive than the 360.)
Let’s close with some Deplorability, a MAGA sticker on a Superformance replica and a “Black Labs Matter” explanation on an old Land Rover:
There were a ton of recent McLarens at the event, but I don’t want to include any here because they’re as common as dirt parked in the strip malls of South Florida. Also, according to a friend who owns a Ferrari and an Aston Martin (24 cylinders total!), McLarens are horribly unreliable and expensive to maintain, e.g., due to broken axles. I’m also leaving out the Triumphs and MGs because the Mazda Miata is so much better.
Eighty-eight years ago today, on May 26, 1938, the Nazi Party’s union labor organization laid the foundation stone of the first Volkswagen factory. Adolf Hitler was present to witness this step in his 1933 vision becoming a reality. (DW) And, of course, today is Memorial Day where we remember Americans who died in our fight to strip the Germans of their empire (a fight that might not have been necessary if we and the British had stayed out of World War I?).
Let’s have a look at a cherished survivor of this company’s output, spotted here in Jupiter, Florida:
It seems to have one of the 5 mph bumpers that NHTSA required from 1973-1982 so perhaps it is a second generation (1967-79) bus, beloved by hippies, anti-war agitators, Grateful Dead fans, etc. Here’s the surprise…
Within 10 to 20 years the Chinese will be able to sell a car that is very similar to today’s rental car: 4 doors, 4 seats, air conditioner, radio, new but not fancy. It will cost between $2000 and $3000 in today’s dollars. With cars that cheap it will be unthinkable to manufacture in the U.S. Consumers won’t bother to finance a $2000 purchase separately (maybe they’ll add it to their credit card debt).
Among the large range of my failed predictions, this one would appear to have been an unusually spectacular failure. Very few Chinese-made cars are available in the U.S. and they cost $40,000-70,000, not $3,000. Maybe there is some hope for salvaging my reputation as a prophet. “What a $15,000 Electric SUV Says About U.S.-China Car Rivalry” (Wall Street Journal, May 3, 2025):
For an American used to a $50,000 gasoline-powered SUV as the standard family choice, the Chinese market is hardly recognizable. … Chinese car buyers no longer need to debate whether an EV can be made affordable, not when a decent starter model costs $10,000 and a luxury seven-seater with reclining massage chairs can be had for $50,000. … Toyota said its bZ3X—the recently introduced model that starts at $15,000—was designed in China by the company’s engineers in the country, who worked with a local joint-venture partner. It is made in Guangzhou with Chinese batteries and driver-assistance software from Momenta, a Chinese leader in that field.
I was off by a factor of more than 3X, then? What if we adjust for the inflation that the government assures us doesn’t exist? Adjusted for official CPI, $3,000 in 2003 is equivalent to about $5,250 today. So I was off by only a factor of two! What if we try to adjust for inflation as experienced by Americans who buy houses? (official CPI excludes the cost of buying and living in a house in favor of a hypothetical “owner equivalent rent”) The Case-Shiller Index has gone from 133 to 324:
If we adjust the $3,000 number from 2003 with the growth in house prices, we get $7,300. My prediction was of a $7,300 car, then, in today’s money and the WSJ says that $10,000 now buys a reasonably good car (denied to Americans, but available in the world’s largest market for cars).
Happy National Odometer Day to those who celebrate…
By taking a car to the dealer three times, I learned how white women with Long COVID feel. After every visit, the dealer said “Your AC is working perfectly.” On the fourth visit, the diagnosis was “There is no refrigerant in your system. It all leaked out from a failed receiver drier.” Because of Climate Change, I had no idea what a receiver drier was. From the Interweb:
1.They act as a temporary storage container for oil and refrigerant when neither are needed for system operation (such as during periods of low cooling demand). This is the “receiver” function of the receiver drier. 2.Most receiver driers contain a filter that can trap debris that may be inside the A/C system. 3.Receiver driers contain a material called desiccant. The desiccant is used to absorb moisture that may have gotten inside the A/C system during manufacture, assembly, or service. Moisture can get into the A/C components from humidity in the air. This is the “drier” function of the receiver drier.
It turns out that this is a $28.44 authentic General Motors part, including dealer markup. The total repair bill was nearly 46X this amount, however, at $1,297.34. I have to believe that this is some kind of record.
(Fortunately, the entire cost was covered by a $2,600 GM Protection Plan that I had purchased after hearing frightening tales of $25,000+ transmission replacements. The 2022 Chevrolet has only about 7,000 miles on it and will be covered by this extended warranty until it is 11 years old.)
It is a little tough to understand how the labor added up to $1,057.50. The shop’s nominal rate is $225/hr so that would be 4.7 hours of labor happening between the 7:45 am dropoff and 10:53 am “your car is washed and ready” pickup. Perhaps, though, this also includes some diagnosis time from Service Visit #4? Friends who’ve been getting Toyota and Audi repairs in Maskachusetts and Florida have reported some huge labor estimates/charges relative to the flat rate labor hours found with a Google search and/or the actual time the car spent in the shop. Dealers seem to be quoting and getting fixed prices that work out to $300-400/hr. for their labor. I wonder if car care has become like human care: you’ll pay a way higher price if you don’t have insurance and, therefore, it makes sense to buy “insurance” even when you don’t need the insurance part of the insurance (i.e., to shift the risk). Or just buy a high-quality Georgia-built Kia with its 5-year bumper-to-bumper warranty and 10-year powertrain warranty (Kia achieves its superb quality without the benefit of union workers).
Separately, let’s raise a glass of DOT 3 brake fluid to our 2021 Honda Odyssey (built in Alabama by non-union workers who rejected a UAW organization effort). After 4.5 years and 50,000 miles it has suffered exactly 0 failures of any kind. (The only expenses have been for maintenance items, such as oil changes, wiper blades, battery, tires, and brakes.) Due to the miracle of Bidenflation, the minivan is currently selling, in nominal dollars, for almost exactly what we paid for it (survey of similar-mileage Odysseys offered by dealers).
Courts are reluctant to take away convicted drunk drivers’ driving privileges because in many parts of the U.S. it is very difficult to function without a self-driven car (less true now than in 2005 due to Uber/Lyft).
How about an intermediate restriction on a convicted DUI American: a license limited to operating a full-self driving car? In an ideal world, of course, the supervisor of Tesla FSD wouldn’t be drunk. But if an alcoholic is going to be out on the road, and we know that alcoholics will be out on the road, wouldn’t all of us be far safer if the drunk driver’s job were limited to supervising an AI? The car itself could be tweaked to recognize that the driver was too impaired by alcohol for even the supervision function and then shut itself down.
We shouldn’t condone either drunk driving or drunk supervision of driving, of course, but on the other hand the U.S. is jammed with behavior that nobody condones. So maybe it is best to be realistic about our fellow Americans’ capabilities. Some people cannot lay off the booze (I actually don’t blame them. I was offered alcohol at 6:45 am by JetBlue a few months ago and nearly every restaurant in Florida seems to make various kinds of alcohol available with breakfast). If we accept that, maybe we can mitigate with a license restriction.
A friend’s sister lives in a rich all-white all-Democrat suburb of Chicago. Her Tesla was parked at the top of her driveway and she found the following note on it:
A dispute among white Democrats regarding 50 shades of righteousness was, of course, gold from my point of view and I immediately deployed it on X and Facebook. I assumed that a quiet claim of authorship would be understood as ironic given (1) the expressed desire of the author to remain anonymous (“signed, your neighbor”), (2) the legible and, therefore, likely feminine handwriting, (3) the inconsistency with viewpoint-diverse Florida, and (4) the inconsistency with the rest of my social media and Web output. Of course, I was wrong!
Here’s part of a post from a university professor turned Facebook executive turned venture capitalist:
Concerning an example of a Tesla being “keyed” as an act of protest, and the owner understandably complaining about it: I’m sorry this happened to you. It’s regrettable. I think it’s immoral and antisocial, in the ways you do. But I do think the issue here is whether the conditions obtain to make it justified, rather than merely the structural claim that it’s wrong because it’s property destruction. If the KKK were active in town and terrorizing and killing people with impunity, symbolic property rights infringement as a social retaliation would be regarded as understandable by many people. There are of course many reasons to object to even that. It’s unlawful. It’s vigilante justice. It can be seen as socially destabilizing. So there are people who will say it’s never ok. But many people think that unlawful civil disobedience is OK when the injustice issue is sufficient to warrant what they regard as a proportional response.  There’s a strong history of this in America. We like “law and order” but if we think the law is unjustly favoring the wrong order, we sometimes accept the moral appropriateness of unlawful behavior. So I think if you want to object to this, it needs to be met at that level. And I must say that folks who own these vehicles who are upset about these events, do not seem to be acknowledging that and engaging with it as such. At least not that I’ve seen on social media.
When someone puts this much thought into the nuance of keying a Tesla (“civil disobedience” for Democrat A to damage Democrat B’s car), it is time to spring into action.
On the theory that the most believable lies contain some element of truth, much of my reply is true. There is a board-certified emergency medicine doc who shares an alley with us (access to garages in our neighborhood is via alley so that houses don’t have ugly garage doors in front). He is married (being divorced in our part of Florida, due to a feminism deficit, lacks prestige). He does have a Model Y from a couple of years ago and, in fact, recently said that the car made it from Gainesville to our neighborhood via self-driving without a single intervention (3.5 hours).
Despite the elements of truth, it didn’t occur to me that the thoughtful Facebooker wouldn’t see the attempt at humor. He has some familiarity with my failure to conform to righteous political dogma, for one thing. His response:
I think what you did is exactly the right kind of response. You aren’t trying to upset someone or retaliate against them with violence or property destruction, or some other sort of harm, lawful or not. Your interpreting their car is potentially problematic and you’re explaining to them why and mentioning the broader context. I think that even somebody who disagrees with your views should find that admirable. Maybe somebody should create flyers with different interesting points on them and master distribute them to protesters and encourage them to leave them on cars instead do destruction.  The flyers could have a URL where the specific issue is being discussed and requested the person who owns the car participate.
A female Deplorable attacked me in the same thread and I admitted that the note was authentic, but my authorship wasn’t. That prompted the thoughtful original author to ask
So you didn’t write this note? But you left it for your neighbor? Or not even that?
When I confirmed that I was not the heroine behind the note, he added
Many of the things that I’ve seen you post on make you seem not just like somebody who disagrees with me politically but like a very mean spirited or unkind person. I was pleasantly surprised by this, but I can see now that actually you think that graciousness is worth mocking.
So… he is a kind person willing to look at the positive aspects of keying someone’s Tesla while I am an unkind person for mocking anti-Tesla hysteria among those who, just months ago, were saying that everyone should drive a Tesla in order to stave off a climate emergency.
Much the same thing happened on X. In response to a Tesla Owners Silicon Valley (99% as progressive as Queers for Palestine?)…
Sad that a professor at MIT and Harvard is so blissfully unaware as to think this is the first time an election has been bought. The naïveté is stunning.
(The guy clicked through to my profile, upgraded me from humble “teacher” to august “professor”, and didn’t learn enough from the context of my other posts to realize that this was a joke.)
Traffic in the U.S. is going to get slower every year as the population continues to expand via immigration and children of immigrants (Pew, 2015). Self-driving systems are going to get better every year, but perhaps not good enough that they can be completely unsupervised. What are people going to do on multi-hour car trips where they still have to sit in the driver’s seat and look at the road? How about exercise? With more time lost to traffic jams Americans will have less time to hit the gym or walk in the neighborhood so we’ll get yet fatter and weaker unless the car itself becomes a gym.
Suppose that resistance bands were built into the dashboard, floor, doors, and ceiling of the car. I asked ChatGPT to generate an image of this, but the request fried our future overlord’s brain.
It could look something like this image from Amazon, but with the band attached to the door or the dash instead of to the wall:
Democrat-run media says car prices will go up 25% due to Trump’s new tariffs. My prediction: average transaction price goes up 3% and if we hold the car model and trim level constant, up 5%. What’s the basis of my prediction? Americans spend every penny they can earn, borrow, win in family court, inherit, or steal. There simply isn’t any way for people to spend more on cars. (Prices did go up during coronapanic, but interest rates were low and the government was handing out $trillions in free money.)
Readers: who wants to take the other side of this?
(I’m personally in favor of free trade (zero tariffs) based on standard Econ 101 arguments. I believe that the classical Econ belief is that the U.S. is best off with zero tariffs even if other countries erect tariff barriers to our exports. In other words, we would be better off exporting nothing if it came to that so long as we could get cheap imports. However, if other countries blink first in the trade war that Donald Trump has started we might be better off than we were a few months ago.)
What happened to out family so far? The imported bicycles that we wanted to purchase have gone down by nearly 17 percent compared to a week ago:
REI (expanding in Florida, while closing stores in Portland, Oregon and Cambridge, Maskachusetts) and some independent bike shops all wanted to sell us XS adult bikes, which have enormous 700C wheels and weigh about 7 lbs. more than this Trek 26″ bike. Supposedly the kids won’t outgrow the XS adult bike as fast. My position is that road bike nerds will pay $thousands to shave 7 lbs. off a road bike so we should be happy to buy these with the expectation of reselling them in 2 years.
Loosely related…
My stance with the tariffs is basically
Everyone I know who's been wrong about literally everything for the last 10 years is SUPER pissed about them
So the 'inverse retard' indicator says it's probably fine
— Lukas (computer) (3/AC)🔺 (@SCHIZO_FREQ) April 3, 2025
And from today at Sun ‘n Fun, a Nash Metropolitan (it actually made economic sense to build cars in England back then!):
Compared to Maskachusetts, Florida is the land of the divided thoroughfare, dedicated left turn lane, and legal U-turn. It’s a little tough for people making a right turn on red on the cross street, though, to determine if a driver is making a left turn (no conflict) or a U-turn (conflict).
Now that all of the exterior lights of a car are LED, why not a mechanism for signaling a U-turn to other drivers? The rear left turn signal could add an extra color and a “U” symbol that lights up in between flashes (there’s already an array of LEDs that make up the “taillight”, right?) The front turn signal, seen by the right-turning driver (above), could add the same standard extra color.
Perhaps the toughest part is the gesture to activate the U-turn signal. The stalk is already heavily overloaded with user interface (pull back for temporary bright headlights; push forward for persistent bright headlights). Maybe a steering wheel button?
