Wednesday Open Thread: Nissan's Struggles, RoboCop For Real, In Defense Of McLaren

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nobody was ever dumb enough to call her an erection denier

Your humble author is facing a real personal choice today: use red Permatex for the stator gasket on the Super Blackbird or wait for the actual Caltric gasket to arrive next week? Last week my commute was cut about 12 miles short by the Bird’s ancient and much-abused stator, which decided to engage in murder-suicide with the regulator-rectifier. PROTIP: when the speedometer needle drops to 0, that means your battery is four minutes away from being empty. I think I’m gonna Permatex it. The worst thing that could happen is that it drips a tiny bit of oil. Well, the actual worst thing would be to drip oil on the back tire — but there’s not a lot of oil behind that cover. I’ll keep you all posted on this critical decision. And with that…

A modest proposal for Nissan

When I drove the variable-compression Nissan Rogue, I thought it was a pretty decent car — but the general public appears to be a little less enthusiastic, about that particular cute-ute and the rest of the brand’s products. In March, Nissan made some industry news when it started offering cash to any dealer who would take additional product. This is often done almost everywhere in the form of additional holdback and/or post-sale incentives, but Nissan tried a different tack: offering to simply pay cash when the car shipped to the dealer.

Many dealers outright refused this offer, and no wonder: collectively, they are already sitting on over 100 days’ worth of inventory. This used to be standard operating procedure for everything but Ferrari stores but the market has changed in two significant aspects. The first is that dealers have become addicted to making money on new cars. Prior to 2021 this just didn’t happen. You sold new cars so you could have the franchise on parts and labor. After three years of selling the inventory for full pop or more, however, everybody’s adjusted quite nicely to a world where your front end also brings in cash, and nobody wants to go back to 2019.

The second issue is the cost of money. High interest rates were common in 1979 of course but those were 3-year loans, so nobody stayed underwater forever. Taking out a 6-or-7-year loan at 8 percent or more, by contrast, essentially guarantees that you’ll be underwater for 3-4 years at least. Nissan dealers have always had to “deal harder” than their Honda or Toyota counterparts. This state of affairs makes it a lot more difficult for them to move the metal.

Jeremie Papin, the American chairman for Nissan, is promising better product and… well, everything short of magic beans. I don’t know if product is the problem, really, especially in an era where much of the volume comes from largely generic junior girlbossboxes like the Rogue and CR-V. I also don’t know if better product would be any kind of solution. It takes a genuine decade for the general public to wake up to changes in product quality, function, or even curb appeal. Oldsmobile had some really nice product for their last half-decade. Didn’t help.

Allow me to lay out a competing strategy, one that would be cheap and possibly even effective: Rebrand Nissan as a brand for men. Put the 400Z front and center of every ad, even if the ad is for the Rogue Sport. Lean in on Nissan’s urban notoriety with aggressive-looking, Scat-Pack-ish takes on the Altima and Rogue. Hire some cool Japanese dudes like Ken Watanabe to be the face of the brand on TV and YouTube.

Doing this lets Nissan work with the platforms and products that are already on the table. There’d no doubt be some shocked pushback from the state media, which is like free publicity and which would further endear Nissan to various marginalized communities like black men, Hispanic men, and white men.

Here’s the secret-weapon part of it: a lot of women would also be charmed by aggressive, male-centric marketing. I’m always told that girlbosses buy SUVs to feel safe. Wouldn’t a Rogue SE-R feel safer than a Rogue SV? How many women do you see with “angry Jeep” grilles? A lot, right? Making the cars explicitly masculine would help their sales with women. I promise.

Oh, and do whatever it takes to get the Gen Z enthusiasts on board, which probably wouldn’t be impossible given what’s on Nissan’s product shelf. Do a low-content, 4-cylinder turbo Z-car and call it the 240Z. Toyota does that with their Supra now, there are no laws against it.

This idea will be a lot cheaper than pushing through some product program for the Murano, and it will be more effective, I promise. Too bad they’ll never do it.

You down with OCP? Yeah, you know these three

The story goes like this: A lack of policing, coupled with a total lack of accountability for the criminal class, turns downtown Detroit into a hellhole. This lowers property value to almost nothing, at which point evil corporate types buy the city for pennies so it can be rebuilt as “Delta City”.

Well, that was RoboCop, but it’s also real life. According to a fawning article in Bloomberg, about 70 percent of downtown Detroit is now owned or controlled by a triumverate of “Quicken Loans” founder Dan Gilbert, the Ford family, and the (Little Caesars) Ilitch family. Amazingly, the cops are back and things are improving immediately:

“Anyone who looks back to 2013 with the bankruptcy, it’s night and day,” Gilbert, 62, said in an interview. “The city has an energy it never used to have.”

It also has a high-brow vibe for a gritty town that had Bruce Springsteen crooning about “snakeskin suits packed with Detroit muscle.” Gilbert said Hudson’s Detroit has sold most of its new $1 million condos. Longtime Detroiters can still find a Coney Island franchise selling the city’s culinary staple, a hot dog smothered in chili, onions and mustard, but these days there are wait lists for restaurants selling aged steaks at $70 a cut and braised lamb Provencal for almost $50. The metro area’s median apartment rent jumped almost 5% in April to $1,400 a month, five times the national increase.

I’m not one for conspiracy theories that don’t involve honeycomb aluminum and weather balloons, but man oh man was this convenient for these billionaires, who just got most of a modern city for free. It’s also one of the very few cities with a complete road/train infrastructure and access to fresh water. In a world where all the climate-change stuff happens as predicted, Detroit (and Chicago) could eventually outshine sea-level and temperature vulnerable cities like NYC and Los Angeles.

Alternately, these idiots just paid cash for a bunch of property that has a net negative value the minute the feds step in and start really enforcing post-George-Floyd policing rules. One suspects, however, that the deck would still be stacked in their favor somehow. History records very few instances of people with this much collective power coming up with the short end of the stick.

Would you live in Detroit? I think I’d rather take my chances with a house trailer in Missouri.

Justifying the ways of God to man, or something like that

it all looks so peaceful in the photo

Compared to the Audi and the Lamborghinis, the interior is cheap and fragile. Compared to the Ferrari, the engine sounds like a Kitchen-Aid and the interior electronics are roughly equivalent to a prepaid-service smartphone. It doesn’t look like anything so much as it looks like nothing in particular. In my experience, women prefer the Lamborghini Huracan to this or any other McLaren with approximately the same amount of fervor they’d apply to talking their way out of accompanying you to a Dream Theater concert.

Doesn’t matter. If you had the racetrack all to yourself, for the whole day, and nobody was there to watch, and the only thing to be gained was the satisfaction of driving well, you’d choose this one in a heartbeat. Res ipsa loquitur, man, and the 12C speaks with the racer’s voice.

That was what I said nine and a half years ago at TTAC, and it’s what I still believe. We’ve had a lot of discussion about McLaren on ACF lately, much of it derisive or contemptuous. Approximately the following allegations are often made:

• McLaren is barely competent to assemble automobiles at all, much less vehicles with this level of complexity

• The Artura is a deeply embarrassing and unreliable piece of shit that doesn’t know if it wants to save the environment or destroy the Ferrari 296 but in truth is capable of neither

• The McLaren engine is basically a white-label generic racing engine with roots in Nissan, of all places.

• They’ve only really ever made one car that is sold as everything from P1 to Senna, with an incomprehensible jumbling of resale-allergic and ultra-desired nameplates in the middle

• Ferrari and Lamborghini make cars that are simply better in every way, from infotainment to gold-digger appeal

• As a brand, McLaren doesn’t know what it is or what it stands for

• Zak Brown is wayyy too fat to appear on European television

Alright, maybe the last point came from me, but it’s only because I sympathize with the man. It’s hard enough to be portly, it’s harder to be portly when you’re short, and it’s worst of all when your company dress code requires skin-tight tech fabric with sponsor names all over it.

Every one of the above allegations, plus whatever the McLaren haters on ACF can improvise on short notice, is absolutely true. Does it matter? Depends on who you are. If one of my readers came into money and wanted to try My First Supercar to replace their Mustang or Grand Cherokee, I’d recommend anything but the McLaren. So who are the Woking wanker-mobiles for, exactly?

I’ve put a few thousand miles on everything from the MP4-12C to 765LT, the GT3 and GT4 race cars as well, much of it at speeds and in situations that would fry the eggs of the average enthusiast, and my truest answer to the above question would be: They’re for the people who can really drive them. While a 488 Pista and 765LT might put up similar numbers at the dragstrip or on the dyno test we call the Burgerkingring, they are as dissimilar as the aforementioned Pista would be to a Hellcat.

Everything that makes the McLaren an ownership nightmare and/or a hassle to operate, from the close-set seating to the carbon-fiber MonoCell to the deranged lightswitch response of the powertrain, also makes it more challenging, thrilling, and rewarding to operate at the limits of the tires. The mid-engined cars sold by the competition are street-focused vehicles with concessions to looking sporty — think Huracan STO — but the McLarens are all first-and-foremost track rats.

Eight or so years back I did an R8-vs-570 test, from which the above Summit Point Shenandoah jumper shot was taken. The R8 was a great car that anyone could live with on a daily basis, and it was extremely rapid thanks to its characterful V10. The 570S sounded like a combination of a Dyson (LMP1) and Dyson (bagless vac) and kept resetting the Bluetooth connection in a manner seemingly calculated to get you to punch its crappy little Android-based center screen. There wasn’t much to choose between them on racetrack pace, either — but while the R8 accepted that sort of use, the McLaren adored it.

McLarens are fundamentally different. When I worked for Xtreme Xperience as a right-seat coach, I learned quickly that TC Mits or his wife can pretty easily adapt to a Gallardo or Huracan from their M3 or even CR-V. It’s faster, yeah, but it sends pretty understandable signals and it works like you’d expect. The McLarens, on the other hand, were a nightmare to coach. Steering motions that wouldn’t fluster a Gallardo would spin the MP4-12C. So why would you want to drive one? Same reason you’d rather listen to Mahler than to Yuno Miles. The more you know about driving, and the better you are as a driver, the more you’ll enjoy the McLarens.

This wouldn’t be an ACF post if I didn’t also take the chance to disrespect Porsche, but in this case I have a good reason to mention them. The reason the 911 is such a successful street and track car nowadays is pretty simple: it’s designed to do nothing but accelerate and brake. All the claptrap talk about downforce is just there to reassure you that it won’t leave the track tail-first — which never happens nowadays because everybody drives them the same way, especially at trackdays. You mash the gas on corner exit, let the car sort it out, then you mash the gas at the brake point, then you saunter through about 10% below the limits of the car, and if you do that, you turn a decent lap time without ever encountering a smidgen of risk.

The McLarens aren’t like that. They have little drive-wheel traction compared to something like a 911 GT3RS and will cheerfully punish any leadfoot with a corner-exit spin into the nearest barrier. They don’t brake particularly well, either, because all the mass is centralized and therefore the front tires have more to do than they would in a 911. The whole purpose of the McLaren design is midcorner speed. It’s a car for people who want to take risks on the track. If you do that, then you’ll steam away from the Porsches. If not, then you’ll spend all day waving them by, at which point you’ll feel compelled to go to the Porsche dealer, who will explain to you just how little resale value your car has and how strong the market-price adjustments are on on his car.

In other words, the McLarens are driver’s cars. Which is a label that is used, often fairly, on everything from “E38 BMW vs. W140 Benz” to “Staudacher P1 vs. Elan P1”, but in this case it applies just a little bit extra. Note to my more well-heeled readers: you should own one, at least once. Fifty years from now, nobody will even understand the concept of it.