Shamelessly imitating Silicon Valley, GM Adds Ridiculous LYRIQs to a Tired Old Song
And they'll pay you not to talk about it
Apparently Bob Lutz and I have even more in common than I thought. Sure, we were both part of the “CTS-V Challenge” thirteen long years ago, we both raced Plymouth Neons (of all things), and we both have homes off the beaten path.
(In my case, it’s because I live in the middle of nowhere. In Bob’s case, it’s because he put a mile-plus-long asphalt driveway between his mailbox and his astounding Swiss-chalet-style mansion. His driveway is worth more than my house, and maybe yours, too.)
Most importantly, however, we are both fans of Automotive News stalwart Jamie LaReau. Long-time readers will recall how I gently teased her back in the day; when she realized what was up with the article in question, she canceled what I was kind of hoping would turn out to be a hot date. The loss was entirely mine, and remains so. A mutual acquaintance told me that Mr. Lutz is rather fond of her as well, despite being even older than I am and, as of a few years ago, owning just one more jet plane than I have. What can I say? We are men of wealth and taste.
Now Jamie has gone out and found herself a bona fide story: how General Motors is offering a $5,500 rebate to buyers of the new LYRIQ electric boondoggle — but only if they sign a nondisclosure agreement regarding their experiences with the new car. The number of people doing this is very small, perhaps as few as twenty victims, er, customers. Doesn’t sound like a big deal — except it probably is, and not in a good way.
Those of us who grew up reading claptrap like To Kill A Mockingbird are accustomed to thinking of attorneys as the good guys, fearlessly defending the innocent among us in a never-ending battle against pollution, poison, the rear brakes of the Chevrolet Citation, and overzealous cops who, if the latest Netflix documentary can be believed, are always trying to frame abusive and bisexual husbands for murder in the first.
(Sorry to pick on Harper Lee, but my God is that a terrible book. If you want to share a good civil rights-era book with your teenaged children, may I recommend Invisible Man instead? It’s brilliant from nose to tail and there’s no Southern-white-woman literary carpetbagging going on; as a member of Ice Cube’s “Lench Mob” once said, Ralph Ellison was Blacker than the city called Atlanta. Seriously. Give it a shot.)
So much for the Atticus Finch days. The past twenty years have seen our Lizard People become obsessed with using the law as a sledgehammer with which to browbeat rivals, critics, independent observers, activists, (via the SLAPP) employees, and even their own customers. In a recent job, I was given two important documents when I was hired. The first said I could probably be fired at any time and for any reason. It was very clear on what the company considered to be my complete lack of rights or recourse. The second one was a 10.5-page document detailing my responsibilities to the corporation after said firing, which are considerable and occasionally bizarre.
Will these two documents hold up in court? Something tells me we’re going to, as the kids say nowadays, fuck around and find out. But the very existence of such paperwork tells you a lot about the people who thought it was useful and/or necessary. I’ve hired a lot of people to work for me in my life, usually on a handshake. It never occurred to me that I should make them sign a document that made them promise not to talk about insider trading or corruption or illegal practices or kickbacks to executives — because, frankly, we weren’t going to do any of that shit. We were just going to fix some computers then have a steak dinner where we talked about how white-hot the woman who owned the client company was.
(Sorry, Amelia.)
Similarly, General Motors isn’t having customers sign a full-blown corporate NDA about the new LYRIQ because it’s just going to be so Gosh-darned awesome. When I tested the C7 ZR1 before its official debut, I didn’t sign anything like that, because Alex MacDonald knew the car would exceed all of my expectations and then some. What’s the old saying? If you have nothing to hide, you shouldn’t be worried.
Clearly, in this case GM has something to hide. Besides the fact that their new electric sled recharges at the robust rate of 21 miles per hour off household current, or that it fails to exceed my old Lincoln MKT in any metrics other than 0-60 acceleration, total curb weight, and “percentage of vehicle raw materials dug up by children in hellish conditions”. There’s more to it than that. Someone at the General took a solid look at this greatly-daring new vehicle and said out loud, “We need to make sure the customers can’t talk about this thing.”
Okay, so what if they did? To me, electric cars are in the same bucket as front-firing switchblades, certain portable welders, and the Kawasaki ZX-14R, and that bucket is marked Don’t mess with this stuff if you don’t have clear expectations and procedures. Buying an electric car is a lot more like buying a Swiss luxury watch than it is like buying a plain old Honda Civic DX. You’re paying more, you’re getting less, you want the world to see it, and you probably have some kind of idea how to take care of the thing. That’s why I have very little sympathy for the oft-reported complaints of Tesla owners. Nobody with two brain cells to grind together thinks you’re going to get Toyota reliability out of an ancient battery-powered toy built in a tent right next to where the workers used to sabotage the Malibu and Cutlass Supreme. They call it “the bleeding edge” for a reason.
Similarly, GM’s decision to slap an NDA on the LYRIQ isn’t nearly as consequential as if they were to slap an NDA on the Silverado, Tahoe, and Suburban — but remember that this dopey-looking Cadillac-badged electric brick is supposed to be paving the way for the firm’s future behavior across all markets. Don’t you think the various lizards in the RenCen wish their parents (in some cases, literally their parents, their parents were working there at the time) had been smart enough to make sure the original X-body cars went out in 1979 with an NDA in the purchase agreement? Imagine the raw power you would feel if you were able to take someone who had lost their family to that infamous rear-brake issue and then sue them into silence!
The X-body was just as experimental as the LYRIQ. Scratch that. It was more experimental, because the LYRIQ is mostly a signifier bibelot for the chattering classes but the Citation was expected to become the most popular car in America immediately. Which it did, making the impact of those poor decisions in its construction even worse. (From what I can find, more than twenty people were killed by the brake issue, and hundreds more were injured.)
Arguably, whatever rationale you use to put an NDA on a electric toy Cadillac should apply double or triple to any new mainstream automobile from Accord to Nissan Z. “Oh, Jack, stop being dramatic. It wouldn’t hold up in court.” Anyone who says that has never spent much time in court. To begin with, anything can happen in a courtroom. You can walk free on videotaped murders or do 30 days in jail because you talked over the judge in a $271 small-claims case. Only a fool, or a fortunate son, thinks he has any real say about what happens once the judge gets rolling. Furthermore, being in a courtroom is expensive. The on-track operating cost of my Radical SR8 is over two thousand dollars an hour, but filing and following up on even a basic motion against a corporation makes that look like the late charges at my hometown library circa 1981. It’s very hard to “win” a lawsuit. Even if the court rules in your favor, you’ve spent a lot of money, time, and aggravation on the way there.
For that reason, any legal shackles GM puts on its customers are likely to be at least somewhat effective, and most so against the middle class. The Earned Income Credit crowd has nothing to lose, and the wealthy often have some sort of counsel on retainer. The family that stretches to make a $899 lease payment for HOA-meeting driveway clout? They’re very touchable. And since that’s the majority of the Cadillac owner base nowadays… well, as Randal says in Clerks 2, you don’t need to be Jamie LaReau to see the problem there. Unless Ralph Nader decides to put his Florsheims back on before storming into a District Court, the average Cadillac buyer is holding the short end of the stick.
(Topic for sidebar: The Golden Era C/D editors considered Nader to be the same as Ditlow or Claybrook — in other words, the enemy. Was that correct, or was that an odd but likely profitable little way for David E. to genuflect a bit in front of the General?)
Will the Silverado Custom buyers of 2025 find themselves signing away their rights of free speech and expression for the privilege of purchasing America’s ugliest truck? Too early to tell — but it’s not too early to talk about why GM thought they could get away with inflicting an NDA on the already-benighted LYRIQ buyers. So let’s do that.