Wednesday Open Thread: Clowns For Dealers, Sevilles For Sale, Zeppelin and Tyrese In Tandem Sorrow

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this image is an improvement because the mouth isn’t opened enough for drake to fit

“I have this really unique set of experiences where I've built a dealership, I've grown a dealership, I've gotten to a big scale and have been at a small scale. I've been involved in dealership acquisitions. I've been involved in growing dealerships organically,” said Levi. “People want to know the secrets, the nitty gritty of the automotive industry and so that's what brings people to Car Dealership Guy.”

Which is an odd way of saying “my dad sold used cars and I ran through $49 million of venture capital not selling enough used cars,” but if I can unironically walk around NAMM with a “Taylor Performing Artist” badge for three delightful years in a row then Yossi Levi is surely entitled to pretend to know something about dealerships.

(Sadly, your humble author is no longer a Taylor Performing Artist, but for a brief shining moment I was right there with George Strait and Christopher Cross. Turns out there’s a limit to how much someone will indulge you as a musician just because they like you as a writer. It’s for the best. Jack Baruth plays the Taylor 714ce and 614ce “Builder’s Edition” nonetheless!)

Last week was NADA week. Not nearly as cool a show as NAMM, since it’s about selling cars and not selling $15k guitars to dentists playing great music, but for Mr. Levi it was supposed to be a big “coming out party” where he would finally reveal his face to an adoring public. Some of the media showed up, largely because he’s done something in the past to endorse all of them, but what we call “organic attendance” was estimated by my source at “about twenty people”.

The Car Dealership Guy “media empire” is a sticks-and-bubble-gum patchwork of: submissive-male mouth-open avatars, off-putting merch, fawning interviews with dealers including ones who set records for complaints with their local attorneys general, imprecise language (using “warranty” to refer to service contract, and so on), and questionable sourcing. Here’s a great example:

How can something be “exclusively found” at CDG when it’s sourced elsewhere? Because only Yossi Levi had the brilliant idea of dividing the price by the payment! You can’t get division anywhere else!

(Feel free, if you like, to discuss why almost all the cheapest leases for Feb 2024 are EVs, using our handy “comment section”.)

At least Yossi Levi shows his work, so I went to RealCarTips.com. It’s the earnest if somewhat scattered project of a former “broker” and car-industry research person. I don’t know if any of the data he shows is real, how he gets it, or how applicable it is to what you could actually get in person. But whatever it is, surely RealCarTips.com represents a lot more work than CDG’s exclusive division technique.

But wait, there’s more: he promises an incredibly detailed report on the industry via a combination of Twitter and ChatGPT. Here it is:

If this is your idea of “incredible detail”, I recommend you avoid getting a job in data science, digital photography, or, uh, automotive detailing.

I have trouble not seeing people like Mr. Levi as essentially parasitical. He doesn’t do anything. At best he’s an imperfect aggregator of apocrypha from whatever percentage of car dealers might be Extremely Online and inclined to babble their business via social media or email. At worst, he’s a just another example of bad media driving out good. You’d be much better off reading Consumer Reports or even Automotive News. The fact that he views his experience “leading” a company through a $50 million capital burn despite the fact that they owned zero inventory and had basically zero real expenses as an argument in his favor should tell you all you need to know both about the man and the system that encourages people like him.

I could go on, I suppose — there’s a lot about the fellow to question and/or dislike, including the odd fact that he deliberately presents as bright white in most of his media, like he’s the reverse Kirk Lazarus of making stuff up about the automotive market.

Any rational world would give this person the same critical reception accorded to 6ix9ine’s Tattle Tales, but given the astounding efficiency with with YouTube and Spotify podcast systems elevate raw trash to the heights of profitability, I’d say there’s an even chance of him getting a Doug DeMuro payday in the future. Will he pay back all the people who wasted their money on his last venture? Not even EasyCare would give you a warranty, er, service contract, on that.

Your Chance To Buy A Seville Personally Inspected By Me (Oh Yeah, Mary Kay Owned It As Well)

The inimitable Thomas Klockau is on the site this week talking about a remarkable red Seville for sale — and when I did a little more investigation on this Seville I realized that it was one of two remarkable Sevilles being sold out of the same outlet in Torrance, CA. I’d never seen the red car, but I had seen the two-door bustleback being sold at the same dealer prior to its listing there. There are a lot of two-door Sevilles out there — more than one would think, anyway — but this one in particular was owned by “Mary Kay”. My son and I saw it, in company with a lovely glassback Caprice, during our LA-to-Denver trip in 2022.

The context: Our pal “Motoman” offered us a tour of some Torrance Airport hangar/garages, one of which was stuffed to the gills with rare “Malaise” cars and Rolls-Royces.I saw the Seville and immediately demanded further investigation. The owner was some Hollywood person, very tall, very flamboyant. Gave us a full tour of his Corniches (both generations) and Trans Ams. The Mary Kay car was doing daily-driver duty for him. I hope he’s selling it on a whim, and not because he’s experiencing something that is making him sell his cars. He was a good dude, and everything he had was highly covetable by any sophisticated man.

I’m sure many ACF readers are actively put off by something like a neoclassic Seville, but I’d rather have one than own any current Porsche. There’s a fundamental good humor to this sort of vehicle that hasn’t survived decades of soaring income inequality and scowling-face front fasciae since.

Moon Suits, Welsh Words, Tyrese Takes A Swing

The Welsh word hireath has no direct English translation but it’s popularly said now to be “longing for a home you never had” or “longing for something irretrievably lost”. Earlier this week, our valued contributor Ronnie Schreiber sent me this picture from the January 31, 1975 Zeppelin show at Detroit’s Olympia Stadium. Some of you may have caught this or other stops on the tour. Most of you probably weren’t alive. I was three years old — and this image absolutely steeps me in hireath.

Just look at it. See the beauty of the women. The men in the crowd, universally masculine without being “toxic” as the kids say now. Their universal youth and similarity; most of them could be siblings. The clothing, so far removed from today’s don’t care athleisure. And these were the outcasts of 1975!

Pagey’s 31. Wearing his “rose top” and “moon pants” that stood in for the better-known “dragon suit” during the ‘75 tour. Most of his great albums written and recorded already. Still has the fury in his fingers and the teeth in his head; by 1980 he’d have lost both to methamphetamines and would be preparing to undergo the long hibernation that would eventually end with his reappearance as a silver-haired eminence three decades later.

The fellow with the white ‘fro is offering Robert Plant a bottle of liquor. Did he take it? The serious young man standing a few spots over has to be a musician; his eyes are on John Paul Jones. All 16,500 tickets sold in four hours — not via social media buzz, but because the DJ on the local rock station announced it and everyone was listening, of course they were, I remember years where my whole teenage world happened to a broadcast soundtrack shared with everyone I knew.

Intellectually I know that this image, which conjures an America almost infinitely superior to today’s degraded and dissipated adult-playpen/forced-labor-camp, was in and of itself seen as a decline from the past — and rightly so, Zeppelin was great but were they as good as Coltrane or Gillespie or Rachmaninoff or Bach for that matter? Does the arc of the world just bend towards Gomorrah until… what? A Big Bang style reinvention of Western society? Will people be genuinely nostalgic about Drake and Bad Bunny and Taylor Swift in thirty years? Will someone get on the holographic FeelsNet in 2065 and bemoan the fact that they were born too late to see Travis Scott falling off the stage as the autotune trills his cry for help?

Well, let’s be optimistic. Our old friend Tyrese, whose fine Singleton-directed film Baby Boy has been watched so often by me and Brother Bark that we could probably do the script from memory, and who provided many of the laughs (plus the drama) in recent Fast and Furious movies, has a side gig as a songwriter. Not just a performer, but a writer. This tune is trending on Spotify playlists now. It draws heavily from the Isleys and a dozen other R&B performers of the Seventies, and it’s two minutes longer than can possibly be justified by the source matter, but it has merit nonetheless. Will it conjure up a bit of hireath in the future? I’d bet on it — and before you ask, the singer at the end is the subtly devastating Le'Andria Johnson. See you on Sunday!