Wednesday ORT: Bahrain Misery, EV Cope, Come On Eileen, Scout's Out, Quality Is Job None

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Good afternoon, friends. Plenty to discuss today, but first a non-commercial message:

Loopy’s Loonies strike again!

he was making a meowve, i had to get it on

I’m pleased to report that the $1,000 original funding target at City of Elderly Love for “Julius” has been considerably exceeded. By my count, ACF readers have sent over $1,200 to help the little orange fellow. One of you madmen put five hundred dollars in the hopper. I have sent a total of 13 books and extended readers for approximately six years in subscription time. Many of you said, “Don’t send me the book,” which I immediately took to mean F**k you and your stupid book but in most cases was probably just a desire to help Julius with nothing in return. (Maybe.)

It’s not too late to pitch in — I’m still mailing books and extending subscriptions. While our friend should be 100% handled now, there are plenty of other animals at CoEL who could use a hand up. You know me, ACF: for me, the action is the Julius.

Might be a season to forget

The second Bahrain test is underway, and my enthusiasm flags a little more with every report I read. The demands of the upgraded MGU-K system mean that we might see drivers braking 500 feet from corner entry like it’s NASA American Iron. The engines are “derating” on the straights; one source predicts 50-60km/h passes being a constant thing as the hybrid systems gain and lose power. Max Verstappen didn’t like driving the car in the sim and he hates driving it in real life. Lewis Hamilton likes the balance of the smaller chassis but admits that “you need a degree” to keep the various systems working correctly when behind the wheel.

While Williams don’t appear to have suffered at all from missing the pre-test, Cadillac looks pretty bad. Which all sane people expected. The miracle is they’re only 3-4 seconds behind the pace. Not bad for a team that has mostly run a spec series with less permitted variance than Radical SR1 Junior Cup.

Ferrari looks good, but Charles looks better than Sir Lewis. If the new red car is the class of the field… who is the #1 driver here? The fast guy, or the famous one? The one who could run five or ten more years in your seat, or the “ambassador” to be? Ferrari is not McLaren. They won’t let it shake out on track. A decision will be made.

Someone call Atticus Finch, because Scout is about to take a beating

behind me, you’ll see two vehicles we will not be selling

Early this week, the global automotive enthusiast community experienced a profound moment of not really giving a shit when Der Spiegel reported a delay in Scout Motors production until “at least” 2028. The news was a profound setback to the hopes of all five of the people who had planned to buy the Scout EV that probably won’t be made at all or the Scout hybrid that is almost certain to be an utter quality and performance nightmare. Around the world, in fifty languages, you could hear enthusiasts asking, “What was the Scout thing supposed to be, again?”

Scout’s Dorkrector of Media Manipulation, Jamie Vondruska, immediately said

“We are still moving full steam ahead, bringing Scout back to market. Everything is moving forward and making good progress. Much like the guy who is balancing spinning plates on sticks and running back and forth to keep them spinning to prevent them from falling, we are juggling a lot at once. New factory. New suppliers. Two completely new vehicles. Could there be potential delays? Of course. But I will let you all know as quickly as I can if there are any official changes or major announcements.”

Vondruka, who is most notable for selling a website, finishing DFL in a 47-car TDI Cup field at Road Atlanta, and simping exceptionally hard for at least one female blogger/autowriter who found him “icky”, did a passable job of imitating someone who thinks Scott Keogh will find him another do-nothing-bitch job after Scout conspicuously fails to launch in 2028.

The Scout business model, best described as “building the HHR to Ford’s PT Cruiser, but even later and with an embarrassing amount of reliance on government-to-consumer incentives,” is confidently predicted to outsell Fisker in 2031.

Yearning to sniff the glove of the master once more

this dumb ass really has a picture of a vinfast on his website

Although your humble author is pleased to have appeared in the digital pages of The Free Press, I am frankly embarrassed to be a subscriber this week in the aftermath of Michael Dunne’s moronic, cope-ridden, and possibly corrupt article for the publication. Titled “The Car World Is Going Electric, Without America,” the article is a fully-cucked plea for a return to the days of Sleepy Joe’s Big Taxpayer Golf Cart Giveaway, when morons like Michael Dunne, the “founder and chief executive of Dunne Insights”, aka “CEO OF ME” like every other do-nothing bitch on LinkedIn, could pull in six or seven figures a year babbling about Nissan Leafs (Leaves?) to terrified morons.

While I deplore violence in all its forms and have never personally even hurt anyone’s feelings, this passage should earn Dunne a solid keel-hauling or Singapore-style caning:

There is also an awkward truth Detroit executives will only whisper: Many dealers actively sabotaged EV sales.

Car dealerships make most of their money on parts and service. EVs need far less maintenance—no oil changes, no transmission repairs, no exhaust systems. For a dealer, every EV sold represents years of lost service income. Is it any surprise that when customers walked in curious about electric vehicles, salespeople amplified every concern? Range anxiety got talked up. Cold-weather performance became a deal-breaker. Charging difficulties were presented as insurmountable obstacles.

Jesus in your mercy, preserve us from unemployed Redditors who seriously believe Scrooge McDuck bullshit like this. Anyone who genuinely thinks EVs have lower frequency of repair than the equivalent ICE vehicles should be, as Felix Gallo once wrote of Java’s in-house developers, tucked away in an attic like a mad, fretting aunt — not given one of the largest bullhorns in America.

And anyone who thinks that dealerships sabotaged EV sales because… they wanted to sell more oil changes? Allow me to share some real math, as opposed to “Free Press Brooklyn” math. The average EV on a floorplan is eating $5-6 of a dealer’s margin each and every day it sits there. The average quick service oil change is somewhere between a loss leader for a dealer and a $5 profit. Therefore, it is in the dealer’s interest to immediately sell each and every EV it gets, regardless of long-term oil change revenue.

Oh, and as far as “exhaust system repairs”: Hey, moron, exhaust systems in America are under a Federally mandated eight-year warranty, and consequently are nowadays entirely made of long-life materials.

As far as transmission repairs… well, if they are GM trucks they’ll definitely need some, but that’s not a statistically significant driver of dealer-principal behavior.

But wait — Dunne isn’t done being stupid.

In several countries, EVs now account for a significant share of new car sales:

Norway: 96 percent

China: 51 percent

UK: 24 percent

Dunne acts like this is what people want, but the real-world cost of operating an EV in Norway is up to 70% lower than ICE cost, due to excessive and extravagant taxation on ICE vehicles. The funny thing: now that Norway has taxed their way to basically 100% EV usage, they are changing the tax structure to penalize luxury EVs.

China? That’s a dictatorship.

The UK? That’s sharia law. Not really, but you get the point. Acting like people in the United Kingdom have free rein to do anything is ridiculous. That’s the place that makes you pay the government to turn your TV on.

Wait, it gets worse.

China’s dominance in EVs and batteries is our Sputnik 2 moment. That nation’s massive vertical integration—making its own batteries, semiconductors, and software—gives it a cost advantage that Detroit, today, cannot match. Ford CEO Jim Farley recognizes the danger, calling Chinese automakers “an existential threat.” He is not wrong.

The stakes extend far beyond the auto industry. The same rare earths that power EV motors also power the guidance systems in our missiles and the motors in our military drones. Every EV battery plant that does not get built in America is a strategic vulnerability.

Farley, for those of you who don’t know, has been trying to turn Ford into a licensed EV maker for China. Remember Michael Crichton’s book Airframe, where the wing design for the Boeing 777 Norton N-22 is almost given to China? Truth is stranger than fiction. (By the way, Boeing ended up giving China the 737 wing.)

This moron Dunne really thinks that the war against China will be fought with EVs, or with EV batteries?

The EV transition has not failed. It is winning—just not here and not by Detroit. There are no shortcuts. Building a world-class EV and battery industry requires that America commit to 10 years of uninterrupted, intense effort. We should also pool resources and investments with our allies—Japan, Korea, and Europe—to achieve the innovations, manufacturing scale, and lower costs that can match China.

Translation for the non-developmentally-handicapped: The EV transition is winning everywhere the alternative is being shot or arrested by a government agent. Yay! The only thing that can save this country is to hire Dunne Associates to talk about EVs.

Pathetic. Utterly so. What’s next? Having the president of the NRA write a Free Press article about gun laws in Europe? Letting Woody Allen write a sentimental article to whitewash his own reputation for raping a seven-year-old?

Just kidding. The Free Press already did that.

She chose China faster than Jim Farley would

Another dopey Free Press article this week wonders why everyone is being so nice to Eileen Gu. In case you had no idea who this broad was, which was the case for me before the Winter Olympics began, Eileen is the San-Francisco-born, Stanford-educated, single-tiger-mom-and-went-out-to-get-milk-but-never-came-back-white-dad HAPA gold medalist who decided she’d rather ski for the Chinese Olympic team than for the American one. This has many people upset, apparently.

In one of the many fawning interviews given to her by both the Chinese and American press, Miss Gu said that she considers herself American when she is in America, but Chinese when she is in China. Incidentally, this is how I feel about being German, or at least the way I felt right up to moment some bartender in Munich told me I couldn’t have my feet up on the chair, at which point I felt my internal compass flip from “Manfred von Richtofen” back to “Eddie Rickenbacker”.

If I had to guess, I would say that envy, not patriotism, is behind much of the anti-Eileen carping. Unlike most of us, she has the option to represent a nation that hasn’t deliberately self-sabotaged into civil war and mindless discourse. I’m not one of those people who thinks China is going to defeat the United States on our own soil, ever, nor do I think that our country will become irrelevant because we’ve lost leadership in the drone industry or whatever, but I do think China has a much stronger concept of what it is and what it wants.

To be an average everyday white (or black!) American in 2026 is to be continually lectured by your phone and television about how worthless you are and how important it is to replace you with one billion real Americans who will cheerfully pick almonds and recycle e-waste for two dollars an hour, all the better to pack the rental housing and consume the infinite software and media monthly services provided by the realest Americans who just happen to have bought everything while you were busy finding daycare for your kids or being stop-lossed in Afghanistan.

Everybody makes fun of the Chinese “social credit” system where you get dinged for not keeping your sidewalk clean or whatever… but in America we have a social credit system where you get dinged for not protesting ICE or not bleating “Black Lives Matter!” at work like Julia screaming at the telescreen in 1984. The people who actually run this country couldn’t make it any more plain that they despise the vast majority of the population outside the top 50 metro areas, yet the minute something needs to get sorted out with violence somewhere overseas the military advertising flips immediately from “My two lesbian moms made me a great REMF” to “Peace Through Strength” so the otherwise worthless and dirty young white boys of the Midwest are willing to sign up for the endless woodchipper.

(For the record, if I had my way, The Commander would be flying for Emirates, not the USAF, in 2030. He wants to tangle with Chengdus over the Strait of Formosa, because — unlike me — he still has faith.)

China, like the Islamic faith, offers its adherents a coherent vision of purpose and future. The West, by the contrast, increasingly appears to believe in nothing but convenient abortion on demand and an increasingly degraded approach to art, architecture, literature, and music. So I’m not surprised when some young man in London decides he would rather serve Allah than serve… some combination of “Cool Britannia” and crew-cut lesbian Episcopalian priests. Nor am I surprised when Eileen Gu decides she would rather represent a whole country of people who look (half) like her instead of… Bad Bunny, the Jimmy Kimmel Show, and Meta, Inc.?

Ah, but let’s hold on a moment. It turns out that the lady in question has received nearly $14 million from the Chinese government over the past three years in exchange for flipping her allegiance, while at the same time earning $23 million a year from Chinese-friendly multinationals like Red Bull and IWC Schaffhausen who wouldn’t be nearly as interested in a mere Arcadia-American.

I take it all back. Changing your Olympic allegiance for an eight-figure payoff? Forget her name, forget her willful ignorance regarding Tibet, forget what she kinda looks like; this broad’s a natural American.

Today, in “Charts That Surprise Exactly No One”

This is making the rounds in my group chats, so let’s take a look at it: the chart is basically the Consumer Reports 2025 data re-popped in a single frisky picture. I have a few takeaways, then let’s hear yours:

• Never change, Chrysler Daimler/Chrysler Chrysler LLC Stellantis! Someone has to occupy the bottom slot, and while Rivian is there temporarily, soon they will be out of business and the Dodge Ram 1500 can once again assume its rightful place as The Vehicle Most Likely To Lose Knobs Off The Dashboard.

• Speaking of Rivian: isn’t that the “joint architecture” for the Scout? This would be very worrisome, if the Scout were ever actually gonna get made.

• Why is Kia above Hyundai? Isn’t Kia supposed to be the cheap one?

• Why is Hyundai above Genesis? Isn’t Hyundai supposed to be the cheap one?

• The more Korean and Chinese your GM vehicle is… the more reliable it is.

• Who here is surprised that BMW has Mercedes-Benz so soundly whipped on reliability? What happened to the Star, anyway?

• Why is Honda above Acura? Isn’t Honda supposed to be the cheap one?

• Why is Ford above Lincoln? Isn’t Ford supposed to be the cheap one?

• Why is Toyota above… oh, I give up.

Frankly, the most surprisingly thing about this chart is Subaru’s performance. I can only assume that Consumer Reports doesn’t survey, or project, out past the life of a flat-four head gasket or driveline seal. I do think that consumer bias and preference have quite a bit to do with these rankings. There is no way the Acura Whatever-X is significantly less reliable than the Honda made on the same line from the same components. Rather, one suspects Honda buyers are willing to eat some minor rattles or hassles that are unacceptable to the Acura crowd.

Let’s hear your ideas… which, based on both this chart and our own Kyree’s experience, will never involve me trading my LS430 for a Genesis G90.