Thursday ORT: Maverick, Mamdani, DisCharged, F'edHA, K vs. X

All subscribers welcome

I should have written this Open Thread last night but I had a chance to enjoy an A5 Wagyu filet instead — and those opportunities don’t come everyday to those of us in the, ahem, leisure set. Please accept my completely insincere apologies, and let’s go!

Instead of “Lightning”, call it “Static Discharge”

Ford has been the king of the Yes, but… performance news lately. Last month they announced the Mustang RTR, which was meant to be the first really serious four-cylinder performance Mustang since the SVO, but it’s automatic-only. Prior to that, they released a track-focused Mustang GTD that set new standards for road-course performance, but it is a $325,000 Boomer toy likely to spend its entire life being shipped carefully between heated garages and auction floors.

Here’s the newest entry in the but wait, there’s less category: SEMA’s Maverick 300T. This thing is being announced with an astounding amount of fanfare for what amounts to:

• Mustang Ecoboost turbo and other components;

• Maverick Lobo suspension;

• Graphics and wheel package.

Ford’s blog has the full details:

The centerpiece is that proven turbo with a significantly larger 59mm compressor wheel (up from 53mm on the stock unit). Here’s where it gets really good: We paired it with a Mishimoto intercooler that’s 58.8% larger than stock. This intercooler delivers a 39.6% increase in temperature reduction and a 20.1% reduction in pressure drop compared to the factory unit.

And that’s about it. The reason you’re seeing this on the front page of every car blog, however, is because Ford is going to make the “300T” kit available in EPA- and CARB-compliant form next year. Which is nice — but that is very far away from selling it in showrooms as a normal production model. The correct thing to do would be to put the new turbo in the lackluster “Lobo” sport model, which already tortures the cash register to the tune of between $38,000 and $46,000, and charge… about nothing for it. Because the actual cost of the different hardware is probably $500 or less.

Instead, you’ll need to drop five grand or whatever on the kit — I’m thinking it will be closer to eight — plus the cost of installation, which will be ten hours minimum. The cheapest way to do a 300T-compatible Maverick is the $30,535 XL Ecoboost AWD, so this is going to be a forty-thousand-dollar truck, minimum.

There’s a more courageous way to do it: offer it as a $33,999 XLT AWD, standard Ford Popular Equipment Package production vehicle. That would be a segment killer, basically the 2026 equivalent of the fabled LX 5.0 Mustang. It would run mid-thirteens for the price of a Hyundai Santa Cruz 2.5T that runs high fourteens. More important than that, it would have some street cred. When I was kid, we rated LX 5.0 drivers as being cooler than GT drivers.

Ford has no reason to do anything else but this. CAFE is dead and this wouldn’t have been a real CAFE problem anyway. Most importantly, it would some clear air between the price of a desirable Maverick and what dealers are kicking the cheapest F-150 out the door for. As a $45-50k shop project, however? Don’t expect much.

They voted for this

So. New York is going to have a socialist mayor. Is this a bad thing? Zohran Mamdani isn’t the first ethnic loyalist to ride a wave of English-illiterate immigrant sentiment all the way to the top job: every time you book a flight to or from LGA you’re indirectly honoring the Italian-American who broke Irish power in New York City. (Come to think of it, “Boss Tweed” was the same kind of fellow, only a generation earlier.) Like it or not, New York is a brown city now, with Irish and Italian descendants making up about one million of the 8.5 million inhabitants. Muslims now outnumber Jews there, accounting for perhaps 750,000 residents across the boroughs.

Across America, a sort of approximate but very reliable rule regarding elections is appearing, to wit: Ethnic minorities vote based on race, while whites vote based on ideology. This is how much of California gets Imedla Padilla vs. Marisa Alcaraz in basically every election. It is a formula, that followed to its logical conclusion, will eventually result in an immigrant-heritage ruling class in every city of more than about five thousand people.

Oh, I don’t hate the fact that Mamdani is a Muslim, you might say. I hate the fact that he wants to kill NYC’s police funding and turn the place into a battle royale with about three bottleneck exits. Well, let me give you a complete list of people who don’t have to worry about that, because it won’t affect them:

• Everyone who lives out of the NYC metro area, which is most of us;

• Everyone in the NYC metro area who is south of 120th street or west of Howard Beach.

Seriously. I was joking to my father today that when I finally get my waitlist call from the Vacheron Constantin boutique on 57th street I’ll need The Commander to provide air cover in an A-10 for the exit, but that’s not really the case. Manhattan is now a land of $100 million penthouses. Brooklyn is for rich people. The residents of these areas have more political power than the rest of the country combined and they will use it to ensure that they can still — as I observed a few years ago, to my utter amazement — let 19-year-old girls walk dead drunk in a miniskirt and bra top, swinging a $20,000 handbag, down Bleecker at 2:21AM.

All of these people will feel warm and fuzzy about electing a Democratic Socialist whose entire career experience up to this point has been bad rapping and arguing over parking tickets. They will be totally fine. Now, if you live in Queens you are utterly screwed, and your life is about to go Back To The David Dinkins Future, but let’s face it: if you live within walking distance of the Unisphere, or on Staten Island, you literally don’t matter as a human being. You’d be just as “important” to the ruling classes if you lived with me in my township.

Traditionally, the Mayor Of New York has been a very powerful man, but that was because he was someone like Fiorello LaGuardia who could pick up the phone and wield the subtle levers of power built by him and his constituency over decades. Mamdani is not that person. He needs 20 years in office to be that person, to put his loyalists in the corridors and intersections of power. By then, you’ll need a working knowledge of Amharic to get a driver’s license anywhere in the city, but that’s the future, which will take care of itself.

If there’s any real danger from this election, it will come from Mamdani’s powerlessness. When NYC hasn’t burned to the ground between now and 2030, a lot of people across the country will assume, recklessly, that Democratic Socialism is actually a fun and harmless variant on Democratic Non-Socialism. At which point we will have Democratic Socialist mayors across the country, in positions where they will not be balked by billionaires and Rockefeller-era families.

There are two ways to look at it. One goes like this:

• Weak men (Koch, Dinkins) create hard times.

• Hard times create strong men.

• Strong men (Giuliani, Bloomberg) create good times.

• Good times create weak men.

• Weak men (DiBlasio, Adams, Mamdani) create hard times ← YOU ARE HERE

And repeat. The other way to look at this is as the end of politics as usual in the United States. For the last thirty years, we have had two kinds of politicians:

• “Republicans” promised to protect us from perversion and wickedness, but what they actually did was send manufacturing to China and soldiers to die in Afghanistan.

• “Democrats” promised to protect us from racism and bigotry, but what they actually did was send manufacturing to China and soldiers to die in Afghanistan.

The election of Donald Trump was a powerful rebuke to Republican interests. And without the “superdelegates” protecting the interests of JP Morgan Chase and Silicon Valley, we would have gotten Bernie Sanders on the Democrat side twenty years ago. The Democratic Party’s structural resistance to leftism was created to crush the socialist impulse. What it has done instead is to make it antibiotic-resistant. We are rapidly approaching the time when you’ll have to be partisan to Nick Fuentes or Chapo Trap House levels just to win a primary. May we all live in interesting times.

John the Baptist, musclecar version

Finally, some form of rationality has returned to the Stellantis sedan lineup. The 420-horse Charger R/T, powered by the low-output(!!) straight-six, is $49,995 for the two-door and $51,995 for the four-door. Spend another five grand and get the 550-horse version. Above them is the Daytona EV, which will sell for approximately nothing in real life. The new Hurricane High Output I-6 is usefully stronger in peak and (ESPECIALLY) midrange power than the 485-hp Apache 392 V-8, but the car in which it sits is not much faster, because it is 450 pounds heavier. Supposedly the engine itself saves 100 pounds over the Hemi…

…which suggests that a 2026 Charger with the 392 in it would be damned close to 5,000 pounds.

And yet. Wouldn’t you really rather have the V-8? As Aurelius said to Maximus, dream with me for a moment. There’s no reason to think the 392 can’t match the Hurricane for output with a little tuning. We also know that the aftermarket strokes it to 411… and 426. Surely a 426 Hemi would match the Hurricane while offering a much more charming experience.

In reality, however, Stellantis doesn’t need to do anything to the 392 except stroke it down to 6.2 liters and put the Hellkitty on the grille. At 800 horsepower, even a 5,000-pound Charger will haul the mail. Which makes this 2026 Hurricane Charger basically John the Baptist; you might be converted into a customer by 550 horsepower, but most of us will wait for the Son of God to appear in the engine bay.

America first, trash the other homes later

Like Trump or hate him, he sure is teaching Americans a lot, and always by following the same script:

0. The media assure us that our generic concern about something isn’t real, and that the numbers are actually quite small;

1. Trump makes some blanket and possibly illegal move;

2. The media screams bloody murder about ALL THE PEOPLE WHO ARE AFFECTED.

This was true with visas — we were regularly told that immigrants were arriving at a historically normal rate, but it turns out that there are 55-plus million visas outstanding in addition to illegal immigration. It was true with SNAP; the media never said a word about how many SNAP recipients there were until there was a budget fight, at which point it was “41 MILLION GO WITHOUT FOOD.”

Here’s the newest one. The Trump Administration took the radical step of limiting FHA home loans to US citizens and permanent residents. I highlight the latter because it’s critical to remember. Now it turns out that about seven percent of FHA loans were going to H1-B and other work visa holders.

This is, frankly, insane. Because FHA, like it or not, is a welfare program. Without FHA, it would be much tougher to get a mortgage. I got my first house at the age of 28 as an FHA recipient; my credit was good but I was young and I’d been earning decent money for all of 12 months at that point.

Now, I’m not going to argue that immigrants shouldn’t be eligible for some benefits. If you just got here and you suffer from a terrible setback, I don’t think the answer is always to put you on a boat back home. This isn’t Singapore or Japan or Switzerland. There are a lot of immigrant children eating meals on SNAP. I’m personally a fan of children getting meals, although when I was in Catholic school I wasn’t a fan of those meals. But subsidized mortgages for H1-Bs? That’s just yet another way the federal government secretly supports the lowering of labor prices in this country.

(Another way: More than 160,000 “students” are on OPT visas in this country. They don’t have to pay into Social Security, and neither does their employer. So the Federal Government is literally incentivizing your employer to replace you with a 29-year-old “student” who earns a median rate of $34.71 an hour.)

What will it do to home prices if we take out seven percent of the competition? So far, not much. Prices rose year-over-year in September. Over time, however, I think this could help with affordability.

Or it will just help BlackRock buy houses for less. In the America of 2025, anything’s possible!

The eternal battle: K vs. X

We will finish today’s ORT with a call to action for our commenters. Who made the better economy car in 1981-1983: General Motors or Chrysler? Give your reasons, too, if you’re willing. I’ll tally up the votes for next Wednesday. I’ll also keep my vote quiet until then, but here are a few thoughts both ways.

For the X-car: Available V-6 engine, greater variety of trim and body styles, hatchback versatility, sporting variants were pretty good, interior packaging was arguably superior. Some of them are even beautiful, in a way.

Against the X-car: It killed a couple hundred people because GM was lazy and evil. Build quality was subterranean. They weren’t reliable even as new cars. No real wagon, no droptop.

For the K-car: Price was right, standard equipment was plentiful. Available 2.6-liter Mitsubishi Hemi. Both engines were dead-nuts durable and reliable. Transmissions were better. Quality was better. Much safer. CONVERTIBLE! WOODY! WAGON!

Against the K-car: It looked old on the day it was released. No chance of getting 110 horsepower, let alone the 135 of an X/11. Zero rizz. Four body styles instead of five. GM Rally wheels did not fit.

In the interest of specificity and impartiality, we will not consider what happened to the platforms starting in 1984, so save your heartfelt “Caravelle vs. Ciera” arguments for the next debate!