Wednesday O/R/T: Building The Basic Car, Pimping The CasiOak, Casey Wants A Bull, Jalopnik Goes Ham On Paul Walker

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this guy again

Going value-sized on today’s Open Thread since some of you have the day off…

Ferrari wins LeMans

Don’t bring Nyck de Vries to a gunfight. After crashing the Toyota prototype against the back of a GT3 car during warmup in an incident best described as “NASA Spec Iron driver, but make it professional”, Nyck de Vries was not quite what Toyota needed to beat #50 Ferrari. This win closes some of the gap between Ferrari and Porsche in the WEC season. Your humble author doesn’t have the patience to watch the whole race, despite the fact that I adore prototype cars more than any other cars, so perhaps Sherman will favor us with an extended version of his Sunday musings on the subject.

Introducing… Cuck and Bull, Your Shadow Service

108% bald

Certain killjoy ACF readers have suggested that this distinguished publication spends too much of its valuable attention detailing the travails and bizzarities of Casey Putsch, likening it to pulling the wings off a fly or shooting a pellet gun at an innocent opossum. Those readers are wrong, of course. Casey’s latest attempt to become relevant dropped yesterday: he’s started an exotic-car repair shop that is literally called “Horse and Bull”, presumably for the two kinds of shit he’s going to feed anyone optimistic enough to bring him business. He’s “specializing in the pre paddle shifting era of cars”, so if you have a Patent-Motorwagen and a first-generation Hyundai Santa Fe you’ll now be able to have both of those vehicles serviced right here at Cuck and Bull.

Those of us whose cars are all post-paddle-shift will have to wait a few months for the next anguished video in which, one suspects, Casey will detail how all his customers turned out to be very bad people.

More over Fraudemars, there’s something meatier

Something like nine years ago, I found myself at The Smoking Tire proprietor Matt Farah’s home, admiring his collection of Casio G-Shocks. I had a few Omegas and IWCs back then, which you’d think would have made me immune to the charms of digital plastic stuff, but in the years to come Mr. Farah and I would basically trade places. I sold my US-made Weiss and stopped spending money on Swiss watches, choosing instead to buy a wide variety of G-Shocks. Matt, in turn, met and did business with Cameron Weiss before leaping into the world of Swiss watch resale, Swiss watch rental, and so on. He even sold me his rare and sought-after GMW-B5000 TFG-9 “C3PO” G-Shock as he transitioned into the world of prestige timepieces.

At the same time, Casio has been doing a little of prestige work themselves, a process I documented in an interview with G-SHOCK inventor Kikuo Ibe five years back. In particular, they’ve dramatically expanded their high-end, completely Made-In-Japan line, Master of G aka “MR-G”. It now includes versions of the original “square” G-SHOCK that retail for between $3500 and $4500. They also debuted a wildly popular analog-digital line with a octagonal-bezel look stolen straight from Gerald Genta’s famous Audemars Piguet Royal Oak. The early versions sold for $99 and were derisively called “CasiOaks”, but the market loves them.

Now we have the first CasiOak done to MR-G standards. It’s $4,800 which likely makes it the most expensive regular-production watch in history to offer solar battery charging. (Although Jonny Lieberman once claimed that the Solar G-SHOCK has no battery, that’s not true; the watch does, in fact, work at night.) The “module”, which is what Casio calls its digital movements, is supposedly unique to MR-G, with gold-plated contacts and a few extra features, but it appears to operate about the same way as the module in most CasiOaks priced at $159 and up. The bezel is the unique cobalt-chromium alloy developed in Japan and known as COBARION, while the rest of the watch is done in the Japanese DAT55G titanium alloy.

Merely by existing, the new MRGB2100B-1A raises a few questions worth asking:

• How does the materials cost compare to what you’d get in a $5,000 Swiss watch, like a Tudor GMT or Pelagos?

• What about labor? Using a digital module drastically reduces assembly labor time. Is there more hand work done on these, compared to what you get in the equivalent Swiss piece?

• The appeal of the mechanical watch nowadays has a lot to do with the fact that it’s unnecessarily complex and defiantly anti-modern. Are we now to the point that digital watches without a computing/smart component can claim a similar appeal? Hint: Hamilton’s Pulsar debuted in 1970 and was broadly on sale in 1972. The Rolex Oyster Perpetual, commonly considered to be the first self-winding modern mechanical watch, debuted in 1931. Digital watches are older now than automatic watches were when the digital watch debuted.

• The $99 plastic CasiOak was a brash doff of the cap to Audemars, its $550 metal successor narrowed the gap. Is this simply too close to the “real thing” to be anything but derivative?

Sadly, I don’t think I’ll be acquiring one of these any time soon. My heart’s-desire G-Shock for 2024 remains the MRGB5000B-1, followed closely by the 50th Anniversary of Casio GMW-B5000SS-2.

He’s not wrong about Paul, but is he right?

and then the teacher was like, no gum in class, and i was like, whatever

Jalopnik’s relatively pedestrian piece on an ex-Paul-Walker Camaro for sale yesterday focused almost exclusively on Walker’s preference for young women:

[Y]ou could own your own piece of Walker memorabilia. You know, as long as you’re fine with all the alleged statutory rape, that is… there’s no getting around the fact that Paul Walker liked ’em young… At best, Walker was just a good, old-fashioned groomer. Sorry, but every man in his 30s dating a teenager is a predator, full stop… sometimes the art really just shouldn’t be separated from the artist. Especially when kids are involved.

The “art” in this case, as a few commenters pointed out, is a car that was four years old when Paul Walker was born. It’s also worth noting that Jalopnik frequently mentions Carroll Shelby without going into the detail of the sexual assault allegations against him. Finally, there’s no proof that Walker actually had sex with anyone under the age of 18.

Your humble author is not a fan of grown men getting overly involved in the lives of teenaged girls/women whatever, but as has been the case with much of Jalopnik’s content over the past decade, this piece comes off about 50% “Captain Save-A-Ho Rides Again” and 50% “I, Collin Woodard, Am Really Envious Of Paul Walker.”

A worthy goal, but how would you do it?

This past Sunday, commenter Mikal offered the following:

I really want to start an oem that simply makes basic transport. Think 05 Corolla / mazda3 with basics and a low entry cost with tons of service manuals and tutorials on how to maintain it.

No turbos. No autopilot. No screens. No nonsense.

If you have 250Million laying around pls reach out to me so we can begin this endeavour

I think it would take a lot more than $250M to make this work. Still, let’s dream together for a moment and think how it could be done. Basic requirements beyond Mikal’s, just offhand:

• Basic sedan and/or wagon form factor, about 175 inches long

• Room for a quartet of adults

• At least 120 horsepower, 140 preferred, against a curb weight of sub-3000

• Simple, high-quality interior

• Screws and fasteners designed for repeat disassembly over time

• Serviceability is the focus, so if a little more size or weight is required to make that happen, so be it

• It should pull its own codes, offer maintenance suggestions, and so on.

Some variant of this requirement list has resulted in everything from the Model T and Type I Volkswagen to the Tata Nano and Dacia Logan. In recent years, at least, attempts at basic transportation have fallen afoul of enhanced consumer preference for luxury branding and features.

Couple that with the fact that a vehicle like the one described above might not be all that cheap, and the path forward to me is obvious: You have to heavily market this thing as a stealth-wealth anti-luxury luxury object.

Consider the following advertising copy, to accompany flattering pictures of the car on social media and elsewhere:

IT DOES LESS, CONSUMES LESS, AND MIGHT LAST FOREVER. The 2026 Endura isn’t a car like you know cars. Here’s how it approaches the environment: It’s made by workers earning a fair wage in North America, using recycled and upcycled materials. Here’s how it approaches gimmicks: there aren’t any. Here’s how it approaches planned obsolescence: by ignoring it.

We expect the Endura to last 500,000 miles or thirty years, if you do your part by taking care of it and following our maintenance schedule. The parts are durable and easy to service. If they fail, they’re easy to source and replace. We’ve reduced complexity both inside and out. Most low-speed collisions and parking-lot mistakes can be repaired using just a few simple tools, which we include with the car.

At 32MPG city/highway, the Endura conserves fuel without requiring expensive battery or hybrid systems. It also protects the environment by lasting a long time, thus removing the requirement to replace it every few years. Several major systems, including the in-car entertainment, are completely modular so they can be updated over time. No, it’s not fast, flashy, or future-focused — unless your idea of “future-focused” is “lasts into the future, long after the competition is in the junkyard.”

Make a long-term decision in a world of short-term ones: contact your Endura dealer.

A car like this would have to cost more than a modern-day basic Civic or Corolla, but you could also finance it over a longer period with some additional confidence. I think it’s important to build the whole thing, and the parts, in the First World. You could hold competitions to see how quickly young people can swap bumpers, upgrade the stereo, install a new transmission.

A spec racing series wouldn’t go amiss, of course.

Who’s gonna buy it? Rather ironically, I think many of the first buyers would be wealthy people trying to make a point, but there’s a major untapped market: Gen Xers and similar heading towards retirement age with little idea of what the future holds. You could suggest that they buy an Endura as the lowest-cost long-term transportation solution.

One major advantage you could offer: if it’s the only car you sell, it’s free to look fairly imposing and/or serious, as opposed to being obviously the cheapest and smallest car in the lineup. You could do one expensive exterior trim piece, like a CNC-machined stainless grille or something like that, to drive the point home.

If I had a couple billion to develop it, I’d do something very close to an Alfa 164 in terms of looks, with non-direct injection, naturally-aspirated, four-cylinder Toyota powertrains. What would you do?