Wednesday Night ORT: Pink Uber, BidNerds, Acura Changes, GM Suffers

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For some of you, it’s not even Wednesday night anymore — so please accept my apologies. While going through yet another round of inept fixes on my V-Strom, I managed to snap off a bolt in the fairing. I eventually drilled it out and retapped the threads, but not before trying ten other stupid and time-consuming ideas. Also, I was on a podcast. So…

We all know it’s going to be men in dresses, right?

oddly enough, my preference in women isn’t shown here

At Uber, we believe that when we make our platform better for women, we make it better for everyone.

Across the US, women riders and drivers have told us they want the option to be matched with other women on trips. We’ve heard them—and now we’re introducing new ways to give them even more control over how they ride and drive.

For the first time in the US, we’re launching Women Preferences—features designed to give women riders and drivers more choice, more confidence, and more flexibility when they use Uber.

Pilots will begin in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Detroit in the next few weeks.

That’s what Uber is saying to pimp its new “Women Preferences” service. There’s something brilliantly late-stage-cap about all of this. Uber itself is an absolutely despicable service, and I say that as someone who has used it hundreds of times. In the same way that the lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math, Uber transfers wealth from desperate working people who are too simple to understand the cost of wear and tear on their car to the wealthier customers and infinitely wealthier shareholders. While it’s possible to make money as an Uber driver if you analyze and control the situation to a fare-thee-well — brand-new Toyota or Tesla, only drive at certain times, lie to your insurance company about what you do with the car — most Uber drivers are lower-middle-class people who are trying to make ends meet using the car they’re already not maintaining properly and won’t have paid off any time soon.

Oh, and there were nearly 3,900 sexual assaults reported to Uber during the 2019-2020 drivin’-and-rapin’ season.

Sexual predators come in all shapes, sizes, and colors — but I’m willing to bet that a strong factor in many of those assaults was a drastic cultural gap between the women and men involved. I am in the habit of thoroughly interviewing my Uber drivers and I’d say a couple dozen of them, mostly foreign-born, have used part of our time together to express their opinion that their female customers are dirty whores.

This opinion isn’t new or exclusive to Uber immigrants. 20-plus years ago, a musician friend of mine who was driving a taxi on the West Coast sent me a dozen or so instant-photo nude snapshots of his female customers — and in most cases, the photos were snapped during some sort of outrageous activity. But while my friend shrugged it off as “lol, hoes gonna hoe”, I think it weighs more heavily on the souls, and decision-making processes, of men who didn’t spend five or ten years fronting a band in dive bars.

To be clear, I’m not saying that anyone is “asking for it”. What I’m saying is that when I go to Germany I think everyone is angry with me, because that’s how they express themselves. (Also, they’re probably angry with me.) If I came to the United States from a deeply religious country and I found myself carting party girls around NYC or Vegas all night, I’d probably get the seriously wrong idea about what these women want and/or will accept.

But Uber can’t say that, because heads would implode, the same way that the media has to identify rioters and flash-mob criminals as “teens”, as if their age was their primary defining characteristic in life. So instead we get this notion that all men are dangerous, and you should definitely choose a female Uber driver, or female Uber customers, wherever possible.

At the same time, however, there’s no way that Uber is gonna define “woman” as “assigned female at birth”, because that would be worse publicity than having 3,900 rapes in their cars, and by a long shot. So you cannot tell me that the resulting pool of Uber Girls will not be at least 40% possessed of a twig and berries. Especially in San Francisco and, to a lesser extent, NYC.

I like to think that I’m a free-market kind of guy but I don’t see how humanity would be in any way harmed by the wholesale elimination of ride-sharing services. Let’s get rid of DoorDash and those services while we are at it — they demean the people who work them and impoverish the idiots who use them. I grew up in a world where you could take a taxi somewhere or call a “delivery restaurant” for delivery. In both cases, the people doing the work were legitimate employees of a company, not taskrabbits burning their own Dodge Journeys at both ends.

I was doing alright until the fake 917 with Martini stripes showed up

Many years ago, I was introduced to the world of podcasting via a long and highly impaired night in Manhattan Beach where, let’s face it, I told no lies but also made no friends. If I could go back and do that podcast again, I wouldn’t, not least because it meant hanging out with Blake Z. Rong all night. Blake had yet to be involved in his “finger rape at the media event” controversy, nor was he dating a high school senior at the time, but even back then you could tell that there was something off about the kid.

Tonight, I made my triumphant and mostly non-controversial return to the format with the help of the “BidNerds”. One of them sells used exotics for a living, the other one just likes to bid on auctions — or at least that’s what I think they do. The format is fairly amusing. We look at a car and guess what it sold for, offering some opinions along the way.

One thing that “JP” and “Deeb” were careful to school me on is that the market has its own logic — just because I think that putting crappy Chinese Stoptech brakes and bargain-basement KW suspension on a 997.2 GT3 lowers the value, that doesn’t make it so. (That was an actual car we looked at tonight.)

The appeal of podcasts continues to mystify me; when I have a long drive or plane ride ahead of me, I like to occupy my time by listening to the same five songs on a loop while going into miserable introspective detail about every mistake I’ve ever made in my life. Not everyone is like me. So check out BidNerds!

It was the blurst of Acuras

Not gonna lie; I’m a little sad that Acura is discontinuing the TLX. It’s a good car. Looks nice; when was the last time a front-wheel-drive, transverse-mount sedan had this kind of aggressive profile and proportions? The Accord on which it’s based is a good car and the TLX is made better by the presence of a V-6 instead of a sad little puffer-four. The pricing isn’t too outrageous by modern standards. They’re painted well, made carefully, and they last a long time.

That doesn’t mean anyone wants them. I think having a manual transmission would help, but when they did have a manual transmission that didn’t set the sales charts on fire so I can easily see why Honda wouldn’t want to waste ten or twenty million bucks on certifying that powertrain when they can spend the money on the necessary incentives to sell the piece-of-shit electric SUV that will take this decent car’s place in the lineup.

Apparently they’re going to call it the “RSX”, which would be like renaming Florence Pugh “Paulina Porizkova”.

If I had the money, I’d buy an TLX just to make sure I had a decent new FWD luxury car in my life. Except I wouldn’t. I’d buy an ES350 Ultra Luxury. And that’s the problem for Acura. Lexus has had the better mousetrap in any year that you couldn’t get a clutch pedal in the TL or TLX. Which is why you’ll still be able to buy an ES, albeit a weird one, next year.

Imported from anywhere but Detroit

If you’ve ever wanted to know why Substack is on the way to a billion-dollar valuation, a quick look at this utterly moronic, biased, and brain-dead headling from Ja’han Jones on MSNBC should set you straight.

General Motors has claimed that tariffs have cost it 1.1 billion-with-a-b dollars since President Trump instituted them earlier this year. (For the record, the tariffs have also beaten my ass to a low four figures, mostly thanks to my tailor and a couple of “bargain” Japanese watches.)

Let’s put that number in perspective: GM had plans to completely waste, lose, destroy, burn like the KLF — a full $35 billion on EVs. That’s not the money they were gonna lose selling them, mind you. That’s the money they were gonna lose designing the cars and making the factories for the cars that they would then lose billions of dollars selling. Think of the $35 billion as what you spend to buy a 1984 Porsche 928. There’s still a lot more money left to lose after that.

Of course, they fully expected that the US Government would make them whole on that. Instead, the US Government is taxing their asses on the GM product lineup that is mostly:

• Trash SUVs from China

• Trash SUVs from Korea

• Pickup trucks from Mexico

• Sedans, if there are any left, from Canada

The raw pathetic fact is that General Motors in 2025 is only differentiated from “Imported from Chrysler” in 1987 by the minor fact that the Plymouth Conquest and Dodge Conquest were actually great cars that were hellacious fun to drive and looked super cool, two things that no one will ever say about the Buick Envision.

For the people in back: General Motors is supposed to be the foremost American, American, American automaker in the world. Not a reseller of white-label Daewoos. My only regret about this 1.1 billion dollars in tariffs is that it wasn’t accompanied by a public whipping of their executives, the way Stalin or Putin would do it. Imagine having the astounding cheek to bitch about the fact that you’re having to pay tariffs on the cars you closed American factories over. Imagine the nerve of MSNBC to uncritically line up for the destruction of American jobs and American cities and American products because it scores points with the cat-lady crowd.

GM should be embarrassed. And they are — just kidding. They’re not. What they are is scared. Which is why they are re-sourcing production to the United States as fast as their little legs can carry them to it. They’ll say that Trump and tariffs had nothing to do with it. And MSNBC will co-sign on that lie. But you, the person who lives in reality, will know. Just don’t mistake anything GM does for patriotism or even concern for the American worker, ever. They were on a rocket ride to being an all-Chinese company and they couldn’t have been more jazzed about it. Until the reality-TV star rug-pulled them.

Good. If I want a car built in Korea, I’ll buy a Hyundai Sonata.

No, wait. They build those in America now. Because that’s the right thing to do. Too bad it took aggressive government interaction to remind Mary-n’-Mark of that fact.