Thursday ORT: ModaMonsoon, ES Beats 135, Dan and Jasmine, Farley's Wire, Kenya's Watching You, NASCOTA

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Good morning, friends. I’m back home from the Car Design Event in Munich. In the weeks to come, I’ll have some CDE-related stories to share with you, including an up-close look at the Norton Manx and Manx R. Thank you for your patience with me; we will now be resuming regular schedule for the next two weeks at least. Also, I invite you to join me in pouring one out for the Hyundai Ioniq 6. While the “N” version will be available in the United States next year, the charming and eclectic base sedans are gone. In general I’m glad to see EVs depart the marketplace, but the Sixer was somehow more honest than its competition.

Who’ll stop the rain

you know it was bad if magneto is licking the shaft like this

When Hagerty, an insurance agency masquerading as an insurer that sends a lot of its liability to Bermuda banks for some reason astoundingly popular automotive lifestyle luxury brand featuring Jason Cammisa, took control of the Amelia Island Concours, more than a few feathers were ruffled. All sorts of allegations have been made about the way Hagerty operates Amelia, and participation among both volunteers and entrants has reportedly suffered, but the most fascinating part of the fallout was RM Sotheby’s decision to leave Amelia and start its own concours/auction in Miami.

Generally, it’s worked out. Certainly the auction results have been strong at “ModaMiami”; this time a 250 California fetched $7M, a 550 Maranello got $307,500, and a 1990 Testarossa sold for $395,000, which is a fair amount above the $28,000 you probably would have paid for it in 2002. I’ve also been told by attendees that the show runs a lot better than Amelia currently does. The founder of Amelia Island, Bill Warner, chose to appear at Moda last year instead of Amelia; this was interpreted by some as a deliberated and pointed statement regarding how Soon Hagerty, the third wife of the company’s CEO, operates the concours she now owns.

RM Sotheby’s was set for another great ModaMiami show, but they made one critical mistake ahead of time: they paid for Jonny Lieberman to attend as an “influencer”, possibly because they couldn’t afford “Ms. Emelia”. Three different ACFers have been at pains to tell me how Jonny embarrassed himself at ModaMiami, mostly by talking incessantly, in his outdoor voice, about himself for nearly a week straight. Eventually this was too much for God Himself to handle, so He chose to strike the show with a hurricane.

Here at the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course, that kind of weather is just “racing in April”, but the Florida concours crowd was traumatized. One Pebble-winning Mercedes 320 Cabriolet owner complained bitterly that the rain was washing off the cherished fingerprints left on his car’s dashboard by Reinhard Heydrich.

(I made that last sentence up, but you get the idea.)

Will this rainstorm be the death of ModaMiami? I doubt it. The event simply has too much going for it, from a location that is much more convenient than Amelia’s to the arguably far superior reputation and prestige of RM Sotheby’s when compared to Broad Arrow, the Hagerty auction subsidiary founded with the assistance of former RM executive Kenneth Ahn. Just to make sure this doesn’t happen again, however, I am hereby volunteering to replace Lieberman at ModaMiami next year. All I ask is that I be paid one dollar more than they paid Jonny, and that the entire hotel room be bleached, sterilized, and lightly irradiated before I get there.

Somebody’s watching me, it’s my anxiety — but it’s also a fellow in Kenya

wait, you mean i get paid for this?

Once again, quoting the great Scott Lockin: “AI means aliens and immigrants.” Hot on the heels of the revelation that Waymos were relying on human operators in the Philippines comes an even funnier story. Perhaps you’re aware that Meta and Ray-Ban have sold over seven million pairs of their social-media-optimized Wayfarer Meta prescription glasses. I assume you, Dear Reader, don’t have a pair, because it would take a genuine idiot to send every single thing you see and do to “the cloud”. Even if you were willing to liveblog your existence to the FBI, presumably you wouldn’t let Meta, of all firms, take a look as well. Am I right?

Well, if you did get the Meta glasses, then you’ll be displeased to know that your images were being reviewed by a live team in Kenya:

Videos, including of glasses-wearers using the toilet or having sex, are sometimes reviewed by a Kenya-based Meta subcontractor, according to an investigation by Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) and Goteborgs-Posten (GP).

“We see everything - from living rooms to naked bodies,” one worker reportedly said.

I ask you — haven’t the people of Kenya suffered enough? Imagine having to watch the sex lives of Meta Ray-Ban owners.

All jokes aside, however, it’s worth taking a moment to remember that “AI” results are so non-deterministic that Meta can’t even trust their glasses to identify objects correctly. They have to put a call center behind it. No wonder the folks at Anthropic don’t want Claude running a weapons system. When you look at the AI hype, try to look beyond the glimmering press announcements and pseudo-intellectual essays to what the providers are actually doing.

Speaking of people no one wants to watch

The results from the Texas primary have been interesting. On the Democrat side, Jasmine Crockett was successfully primaried by James Talarico. (To clarify, she was beaten for the Senate election, not kicked out of her House seat. ) Listen, I’m not going to tell you that I’m a Jasmine Crockett fan, but she was clearly elected in good faith by people who, on the whole, seemed to approve of her performance in office. Replacing her with Talarico feels like a bit of disenfranchisement-via-Uniparty-war-chest. My suspicions are not reduced by what amounted to a campaign ad for Talarico in the New Yorker last week. If ever there was a statement of “Here is what we, the power brokers of the East Coast, would like to see happen in Texas,” the Talarico puff piece was it.

On the Republican side, one-eyed SEAL Dan Crewshaw was beaten by a pastor, allegedly because of a $675,000 contribution by a pro-Trump billionaire:

Sources close to Marling say it started several years ago, when he invited Crenshaw to appear at an annual conservative youth summit. Crenshaw said he would speak only if audience members wore masks, so the story goes, and Marling said no. (A person close to Crenshaw denies this happened.)

Supposedly, Crenshaw is too pro-Israel and too neo-con for many people in Texas now, including Robert Marling. But just when you think this is a purity spiral on the red side, we have this:

Crenshaw also accused Marling’s Woodforest National Bank of loaning $20 million to Colony Ridge, a residential development near Houston that conservatives say is a haven for undocumented immigrants.

The spice always flows. The solution is always more immigration, lower wages, a smaller middle class, fewer homeowners. Whether the face of it is Jasmine Crockett, Dan Crenshaw, or their replacements.

Speaking of contenders who are going home

Perhaps you’re aware that the Euro-weenie behind “Gen X Garage Talk” tried to get a 135i to do an ES300’s job. And perhaps you recall my statement that

if Luke keeps the car, maybe we can keep trading numbers until I don’t feel suicidal…. or he does.

Well, I am pleased to announce that my Lexus has won this particular battle, because Luke has pulled the ripcord and sold his 135i back to its previous owner.

I realized that this one little BMW could easily absorb another five, eight, or even ten thousand dollars over the next few years. Not because it’s unreliable, but because old performance cars require proactive care

Contrast this querulous attitude, heretofore known as “The Virgin 135i Owner”, with my approach, “The Chad ES300 Enjoyer”.

In all seriousness, I can’t blame Luke here. He loves the car, but he also knows it will require constant involvement. This was why I sold my 190E 2.3-16, and why I sold a mint 560SL with the hardtop for $6,000 in 2014, thus proving once and for all that I should never be allowed to make any choice whatsoever on my own. I will probably sell a few bikes and cars of my own in the near future, if only for the purpose of keeping The Commander in the air, and I know two things are certain:

0. The sale will make perfect sense when the car leaves;

1. I will never forgive myself afterwards.

Luke, you fought the good fight. But you fought it against the Lexus ES300 — and that, my friend, is putting yourself in the path of the Harkonnen fist.

The Chronicles Of Reddick

If you watched it, you saw NASCAR history. Never has a driver won three races in a row to start the Cup season, and double never has something like this happened with a road course in the mix. The conventional wisdom is that you need a “road course specialist” to win these events — but maybe you just need a Toyota Camry. The 23XI car driven by Tyler Reddick seemed to have an extra gear in it. From his unhappy vantage point a few hundred yards back, the expected winner, Shane van Gisbergen, complained of no grip and no power.

This year NASCAR once again used the short version of COTA. This increases passing opportunties but also makes it so dirtbag Radical SR8 owners can’t chuckle at the laptimes, which are four or five seconds behind even indifferent drivers in the mighty RPE-V8 sports racer. In fact, I once got a stock Lamborghini Huracan on street tires around COTA just nine seconds behind the front-running Cup cars. They’re just not happy on this track. Which makes it more fun to watch, honestly.

While Reddick was justly lauded — and, predictably, accused of cheating after the fact — perhaps the most impressive drive came from Conor Zilisch, who

• Started in 25th.

• Got to 7th, and got dumped in Turn One.

• Which put him down to 37th, but

• He got back up to 4th (!), and got turned around again.

• Went back down to 33rd, but

• He was 14th at the end.

Zilisch made a total of seventy passes for position during the race. On a road course. In a spec series. I’d say he can hold his head up about it until the end of time.

It felt right, but we fumbled when it came down to the wire

Ford CEO Jim Farley says a deep teardown of a Tesla was a wake-up call that reshaped how Ford thinks about building EVs. In a new interview, Farley said he was “flabbergasted” by the differences he saw when Ford’s team pulled apart a Tesla alongside EV chief Doug Field, pointing to how Ford’s Mustang Mach-E wiring harness was about 70 pounds heavier and roughly 1.6 kilometers longer than Tesla’s approach. Farley argued the contrast wasn’t just parts selection, but philosophy. He said legacy automakers often default to sourcing another harness, while Tesla designed the vehicle around efficiency and a smaller battery-first mindset, which can reduce weight, complexity, and cost.

My first response: They’re just learning this now? Sandy Munro did this in 2021! Watch that video around the 5:30 mark to see an example of something Tesla does much better than Ford.

Which doesn’t mean that Ford doesn’t know quite a bit more than Tesla does about many different issues, from build quality to durability testing. It makes you wonder: Why didn’t one of the Big Three just build Teslas, but better, instead of shambling through their own design processes? Remember the Rover 800, known as the “Sterling” here? Or the Rover 600, which was to the Accord as the 800 was to the Legend? Hell, what about the NUMMI Nova and Prism, both of which were just reskinned Corollas?

A Tesla Model 3 with a Lincoln interior would be murderous competition for everything from the Lucid Air to the Mercedes EQS. It might not matter anymore, now that we have some relative sanity in American automotive regulations, but if that Blue Wave comes in and starting in 2028 every car sold in this country has to be a 100% EV that plays a Lizzo song every time you flick the turn signal, someone should be looking to partner with Tesla.

Bonus redpill, or maybe blackpill, content

some of you have seen the original of this image on my instagram

Via Rob Henderson: a recent study suggests that interbreeding between Neanderthals and more modern humans was sharply divided along gender lines. In other words, it was almost exclusively male Neanderthals and female “Anatomically Modern Humans”. The Science article ends with a hilarious quote:

The mating bias Tishkoff and her co-authors have uncovered reflects something about the cultures and social behaviors of both species, she says. The team did not venture to guess whether the intercourse was consensual or coerced. But to Steven Churchill, a Duke University paleoanthropologist who was not involved with the research, the finding implies aggression.

If males from one species monopolized females from the other, he says, “it’s hard to reconcile that with anything but a competitive, unfriendly interaction.”

Thoughts about that, in no particular order:

• Everything I have read seems to suggest that Neanderthals could easily beat modern humans in a one-on-one fight, but that collectively the moderns were able to drive Neanderthals to extinction because they had superior language, organization, and culture.

• Let’s, for a moment, therefore characterize the Neanderthals as “more masculine” and the modern humans as “less masculine”.

• This suggests that women, given an individual mating preference, will choose “more masculine” even when it is against their best interests and the interests of their society.

• And it also suggests that the Neanderthal male / human female pairings weren’t necessarily nonconsensual, because in general the Neanderthals couldn’t win tribe-against-tribe battles and therefore they were unlikely to be able to take “the spoils of battle” as often as human men could. So these pairings had to be in times of peace.

• Putting aside “White Hispanic” interracial marriages, the most common form of interracial marriage in America is a white man and an Asian woman. The second most common form is a black man and a white woman. Marriages of Asian men and white women are statistically rare; marriages of white men and black women are so rare as to be statistical noise, although I’m aware of a few right here on ACF.

• Whether it is actually true or not, there is a cultural perception in America that Black men are the most masculine men and Asian men are the least masculine. Similarly, there is a perception that Asian women are the most feminine, Black women least so.

• Similarly, there is a perception that Asians are the most successful group in America, with Blacks as least successful.

• Therefore, whether we are talking 300,000 years ago, 50,000 years ago, or right now, a certain percentage of women would rather have overt masculinity than a group inclination towards success.

Rob Henderson, in his notes on this, wonders if modern men with a higher percentage of Neanderthal genetics are more successful with women than their more genetically modern counterparts. I took a sample size of one person for my investigation, comparing a rather Neanderthal-esque man with various handsome and accomplished but less Quest-For-Fire-typa husbands, and can confirm this hypothesis to be correct.

My more serious takeaway from this study, and the other data: Some women have an expressed preference for men who are more “primitive” or “savage” than they are, but they are not the majority in any race or subgroup. So it’s no use blackpilling about how “some white women are addicted to black dudes” or how “any asian woman will do anything for a mid tall white guy” because those women aren’t all the women, they aren’t even most of the women.

Also, if Motor Trend’s Ed Loh could break the stereotype and get a white wife, anything is possible. Keep fighting the good fight, brothers!