Today’s maniacal raving is on a subject I hold dear to my heart: the trials and tribulations of the auto industry. I love cars. I love trucks. I love things with engines that make a lot of noise and burn gasoline in wanton fashion. So I believe I have complete authority in making decisions on the entire industry’s behalf. After all, I’m probably better suited to the job than most of the company bosses, in light of recent economic clusterfucking.
So let’s get straight down to brass tacks:
- Payola and the plight of the auto rag: Or the decline of objective reviews in auto magazines. Actually they aren’t subjective either (that would be a marked improvement), just grey drivel that more often than not resembles ad copy and brochure babble taken straight from the manufacturer. It’s so obvious that we can now predict how a magazine will behave, to within a few degrees of leaning. Car And Driver will declare that anything this side of a Tata isn’t quite as good as a BMW 3 Series. Canadian Driver will be exceedingly polite to all but the worst automotive turkeys, much like we Canadians normally do in the presence of others. And so on. Can’t you folks be a little more original? Can you see beyond the ad revenue column? Can’t you, I don’t know, actually review the cars? And for God’s sake, stop with the irrelevant comparisons. If I wanted to know how a Hyundai stacked up to a Lexus, then I shouldn’t be reading an auto mag in the first place. I would be taking my medication more often.
-Hybrids, or how I learned to stop worrying and be a smug environmentalist wanker: Hybrid are a fad. They are inefficient. Expensive. Offer poor real world performance and economy. The only thing a hybrid is good for is stroking the ego of some greenheaded prick who wants to show the whole damn world how goddamn much he or she cares for the environment – without actually understanding any environmental issues or the fact that their Prius gets worse fuel economy than a basic Civic. Hybrids are symbols, a symbol that has been latched onto by the media and the green bastards of this world. Just as driving an Escalade is akin to killing a baby seal in public, a Prius suggests you are a worldly, caring hippie who just wants to love mother earth. And hasn’t heard of public transport. The only good hybrid is one that uses the electric motivation as a sort of electric supercharger – here, Lexus is ahead of the game, using the hybrid drive in conjunction with a decently sized gas motor to make a higher-performance vehicle that has the benefit of a few extra MPGs. But even those are just part of the whole ill-advised fad; the reason I like them is because they are actually fun to drive, and show a real improvement over a straight ICE. So if you really must have a hybrid, at least get one that is fun. Except for the Escalade or Suburban Hybrids. Those are just idiotic.
- Lemon-Aid: Oh Jesus H. God, I despise the Lemon-Aid guides. Nowhere else will you find a more idiotic collection of personal anecdotes, rumours, myths and biased reportage than in the pages of the best selling Lemon Aid guides. With fantastically helpful insights like “Audis attract rodents” when describing how an A4 owner had to replace a wiring harness due to mouse activity (yup, that was important enough to warrant a half page), I cannot comprehend how anyone finds the Lemon Aid a useable tool. Let’s not forget that it is the Lemon Aid guide that continues to propagate the myth of Audi “sudden acceleration” (which was dismissed as due to idiot drivers who couldn’t work the closely placed pedals), even on recent models that have absolutely no relation to the original claim of defect (which was the Audi 5000 of the late 80s). Its main source of information is owner feedback – that’s subjective anecdotes. Anyone who knows anything about research methods knows that anecdotes and subjective experiences are the worst possible way to gather information on a given subject. I’ll give you a summary of what the guide offers, to save you the trouble of reading the whole thing – BUY A TOYOTA OR A HONDA CIVIC. Everything else, according to the guide, will break down, burst into flames, kill kittens, and give your children cancer. Never mind that Toyota had a streak of engine sludging problems or that the Civic is hit-or-miss for reliability and build quality – no, facts like that are ignored in favour of catering to the common market myths, and shitting all over any company that isn’t Japanese (except for Nissan, they seem to get lumped in with parent company Renault for dodgy cars). Do yourself a favour – go browse (don’t buy) a Lemon Aid guide for some cars you have owned. Go ahead, check it out. I guarantee you will get a hearty laugh out of the experience. And remember folks, no vehicle lasts forever or will be completely free of problems. That’s what the Lemon Aid authors seem to be incapable of understanding.
-The idiocy of the market, also known as the Homer effect: I think Detroit has proven how idiotic the market is, and how catering to perceived demand is a quick way to certain death. I say this not for their failures, but for their successes in design (which ended up as failures) – namely, the Pontiac GTO and the G8. Here were great cars that have become monumental flops. Taking the best of the Aussie tradition of stuffing big V8s into sporty coupes and sedans, the GTO was a rebadged Holden Monaro (a highly acclaimed car everywhere else in the world, aka the Vauxhall Monaro/VXR) while the G8 is a rebadged Holden Commodore (ditto). Here was American carmaking at it’s finest, albeit perfected on the other side of the world. So what happens? The fickle market turns their noses up at these brutish tyre smokers and keeps buying tired old Buicks. There are many other examples – the popularity of hulking trucks and SUVs, despite their thirst and horrible dynamics with no more practicality than a decent station wagon (unless you are one of the few who actually use these vehicles to haul things or tow stuff, or have 5 kids). Or the greatest example of them all: the runaway success of the Prius, an automotive turkey and not even that efficient in real conditions, but a great seller simply on its symbolic value. Anyone who owns a Prius should be bitch slapped and handed the keys to a far more economical diesel sedan. Oh wait, that’s not possible in North America because they don’t sell those here, outside of a few overpriced BMWs and Benzes.
-Automatics: Speaking of the idiocy of the market, what the hell happened to the manual transmission? CVT, DSG, or plain ol’ slushbox, the auto dominates the market in North America, where most people think a clutch is a group of birds. Ever try to get a manual car made in the last ten years? Good luck. Nowadays it’s an option that will cost you extra, not that any lazy North American could be bothered to row their own even if it was still cheaper to get a manny tranny. Us enthusiasts get left out in the cold while everyone tries to make a better mousetrap, er automatic. We end up with horrid things like the bane of spirited drivers, the slushomatic-fantastic CVT, or worse the auto that thinks it’s a manual, the semi-auto (with no charge herky-jerky function). I suppose it’s not surprising we’ve become auto-crazy - it’s hard to handle a cell phone and a hot coffee while shifting.
-Ethanol: The US of A’s saviour was supposed to be corn juice. Make some alcohol with our crops, mix in a little gas, throw it into your flexy-fuel vehicle, and voila! No more foreign oil dependency. Great idea. In theory. In reality even E10 has a significant impact on fuel economy – it kills it. E85 is considerably less efficient than good-old-Saudi petrol. Add to that accelerated wear on fuel systems and catalytic converters* (governments were never great at long term planning, were they?), not to mention crop shortages because you are using your food supply to make fuel, and you have a recipe for corn-flavoured disaster. I wouldn’t completely throw out the idea, however – why not try some methanol blends? You can make methanol out of anything this side of wood. Ethanol can also be made quite effectively from sugar cane, rather than corn. Just let us have regular gasoline alongside the blended stuff – some of us like to keep our cars for more than a few years, and don’t like the idea of losing 10%+ of our fuel economy simply because of a government’s hair brained scheme.
*But what about flex fuel cars, I hear you say. Those cars are indeed fine – but running E10 in a normal fuel system will cause problems in the long run as well as a drop in fuel economy. And nowadays E10 is the minimum, with normal gasoline pumps becoming scarce in the US. There are even pushes for minimum E15 or E20, which would be spell disaster for non-flex fuel vehicles.
