Wednesday ORT: Charger Boost, Hotel ICE, Zero Deals, Heavy Ram, Kurono Meteorite

All readers welcome

unfathomably cruel to release this when i am flat broke

Good morning to everyone — everyone, that is, but the moron who has invented no fewer than four different accounts in the past ten days trying to scam and defraud readers of this Substack. Your attempts to range-in what Substack will and won’t allow in terms of “fan pages” are depressingly stupid. Tell me: What’s like, to hate me so much you’ll spend hours in the pursuance of this idiocy, yet to be such a massive coward that you don’t even have the heart to send me an email? Imagine being mortally afraid of a 54-year-old cripple who hangs out with feral kittens all day. Your father probably spits on the ground when people mention your name. Get your testosterone levels checked, friendo.

Speaking of levels

The more things change, the more they stay the same. In the spring of 1990, I convinced my dad to trade his Jaguar in on a new Lexus LS400 — but when he got to the dealership, he thought the ES250 was good enough, and that’s what he bought. Twenty-five years later, (Edit — thirty-five!) I’ve convinced him to trade his 3-year-old 530i in on an ES350 in Matador Red with the fancy white NuLuxe interior. This is not my dream spec of “green Ultra Luxury with Mark Levinson sound” but it will very much do. So far the reports are all good.

By contrast, we haven’t had perfectly smooth sailing with my Lexus ES. The right front brake caliper seized up a few weeks ago, killing the pads, sending fuel mileage to LS400 levels, and lightly cooking the ABS sensor. I was able to swap it out in about an hour, despite temperatures in the low twenties — the advantages of having one’s own Rotary two-post lift are hard to overstate — which brings my total cost of ES300, parts, and service to a robust $11,171.18. I have just over 9200 miles on it since purchase. Which is a fancy way of saying that my 2001 ES300 is costing me more to run than my father’s 2025 ES350 is costing him to run. I might be the intellectual one in the family, but I’m clearly not the smart one.

On a more positive note, the first Blackstone report is in on the little Lexus, and it’s all good. Better than good, really. Wear is low. For what it’s worth, the 3.0 V6 in my ES300 puts up better wear numbers than the 4.3 V8 in my LS430, which has just 10,000 more miles on it. Both of them are great, but the ES300 is measurably better. Also, the Pennzoil Ultra Platinum I put in the ES300 definitely held up better than the Kirkland synthetic that had been in the LS430.

More to come in this exciting saga of “Idiot Spends Patek Philippe Money On Old Toyota.”

Exciting book club news, no cat content!

Early next week, and for the first time, the ACF Book Club will offer paid subscribers the one-two punch of “free book” and “author is available to discuss”. And not just any book, mind you; this one is a long-out-of-print auto-industry legend that is currently selling for between $800 and $1900 on Amazon and AbeBooks. Paid subscribers will have a sponsored (by me, and the author) PDF made available to them to read for free. Then we will have the author on hand to answer questions and propel the discussion.

What book is it? Some of you saw the picture above and immediately guessed. The rest of you: Sign up for your paid subscription this week, and join the party!

She ain’t heavy, she’s my (mommy)blogger

Jill Ciminillo embarrassed herself with an absurdly pick-me attempt to get Donald Trump’s attention just five months ago, but autowriting is a business where fringe lefty behavior translates directly into free stuff and travel, so I assure you her career momentum has only increased since then. Now she’s squiring a free $74,500 truck around and offering some, uh, informed opinions.

“This week I’m driving the Ram 2500, which is a heavy-duty truck,” she intones. Those ACFers who are reefer mechanics or long-haul drivers probably already have their heads in their hands, but for those of you who have never owned or operated anything larger than an Isetta bubblecar, this is a heavy-duty truck:

And this is a medium-duty truck:

And these are all light-duty trucks:

There’s a reason Ford calls its F-250 through F-550 trucks “Super Duty”, and that reason is because “Super Duty” conveys the idea of a heavy duty truck without actually promising it to the customer, which would be misleading. Ram has decided to call its 2500 and 3500 trucks “Ram Heavy Duty”, which to my mind is dangerously close to fraud. I think the only reason Stellantis feels confident in doing it is because they assume the average one-ton truck buyer is educated enough to know that calling it the “Ram Heavy Duty” is like the “695 Abarth Ferrari” or “F-150 Harley-Davidson”.

Jill Ciminillo should know better than to assist in this. As an automotive reporter, she should be a bulwark against, or an antidote to, exaggerated manufacturer claims. The first thing she should say is “This is a light-duty truck, Class 2b at best, nothing like the Heavy Duty that Ram claims.” But because she doesn’t know the difference between a Class 8 truck and an Iowa-class battleship, she just repeats the marketing pap like it was fed to her.

I can’t emphasize enough how much the automakers love having people like Jill review their pickups. Mommybloggers and influencers always give the same report:

“Ugh, this thing is awfully huge, but it has neat stuff.” When a hundred puff pieces like this are fed into the Google hopper, it comes back as “Women love these things, and they have no flaws beyond being TOO BIG AND MANLY.” And once again, bad autojournalism drives out good autojournalism.

The American Skyline starts to roar

For $529 and a few dyno hours, you too can have 583 rwhp in a gasoline-powered Charger. If that number looks familiar, it is because that’s in the neighborhood of what stock 707-horse Hellcats put down on a Dynojet. Is there more available? Of course there is. But this is what’s easy. This car doesn’t have an intake or exhaust on it. The fuel is “spiked” a bit to E20 for detonation resistance.

This is a $55,000 car. Which makes it damned hard for working-class people to afford… but not impossible, if all the sacrifices are made. And history shows us that such is often the case. A base Mustang GT is now $47k. Would you like to have 480 horsepower for that price, or 700 for ten grand more? Hemi or no Hemi, these Chargers are going to sell.

Time to get a great deal on a new… 2023 model!

I’m personally offended to have been targeted by an electric motorcycle advertisement; the last time I bought such a thing was ten years ago, and it was for my six-year-old son. So my first thought when I saw this on my Instagram feed was to sneer in disgust and swipe away… but then I saw the numbers “2023” on the ad. Can that be right? Are there still significant numbers of 2023 Zero motorcycles in stock?

Yes there are. And five grand off doesn’t start to cover it. How about ten?

Can’t believe the Zero DS hasn’t sold. It has a robust 39-mile highway range! Of course, the more expensive DSR/X stretches that out to… 85 miles!

Electric cars have proven to be a limited-use item, but compared to EV motorcycles, they have the longevity and range of a nuclear sub. The dumb-assed LiveWire isn’t any better, with real-world users reporting an 80-90-mile range. To put that in perspective, my SV1000 is good for 60 miles once the fuel light goes on. That’s how much range you have to find a last-minute refill. With the EV bikes, that’s more like a best-case scenario coming out of the garage.

What’s the true value of a Zero motorcycle, regardless of model year? I’d say it’s in the name.

The worst Hilton since Paris

Alright, I’m gonna come out and say it: I think that a hotel is perfectly within its rights not to accept bookings from government agencies, the same way I think that a baker should be free to not make a rainbow cake. I’m not sure that Lon Horiuchi was necessarily entitled to spend the night in a Westin Heavenly Bed(tm) before he headed out for a long day of shooting pregnant women in the face while they cradled their infant children in their arms. There is a word for overly-enthusiastic cooperation between corporations and the State, and that word is fascism.

That being said, when you make a big public deal out of refusing hotel rooms to ICE agents in Minneapolis, it can be argued that your motives are less “preserve the legitimate separation of church and state” and more “protect a multi-billion-dollar fraud and terrorism operation that has infiltrated Minnesota to the point it now wears the state government like a skinsuit and forces state officials to affirm daycare fraud in plain sight.”

So while the hotel had the right to refuse ICE, Hilton has the right to DELORT them for doing so, and I’m glad they did. Maybe now is the time for all of us to start thinking about how much of the American travel and road infrastructure is owned, operated, and exploited by external and foreign interests that are actively inimical to law and order, to say nothing of peace and quiet, in this country.

In other RESISTANCE news, Bela Fleck has decided to cancel three performances at the Trump Kennedy Center because, in his words, he “doesn’t want to make a political statement.” This decision should gladden the hearts of everyone, everywhere, who hates the idea of an American banjo legend playing at a building that has been irresponsibly named after a compulsive womanizer and congenital liar with ties to organized crime and an insanely haphazard policy of military interventionism south of our border. It will also gratify the people who don’t want him playing at a building named after Donald Trump.

It’s the worst deal you’ll never get

Last week we talked about a Japanese watch that could be had for a fraction of what it cost to engineer, specify, and build. This Japanese watch is kind of the opposite. It uses a movement that can be had on the open market for $120 and appears in watches that sell, brand new, for as little as $268. It has the same meteorite dial as watches that sell for $650. To buy it, you need to have payment in hand during a 10-minute period of time a week from tomorrow. The price is $1,850, and it will likely cost you another $300 in fees to get it into the United States, minimum.

But don’t fret, because you will never get the chance to buy it. The Kurono Special Projects 37mm INSEKI ‘隕石’ is the latest mass-market sensation from Hajime Asaoka, who has figured out a foolproof way to mark up watches by at least a grand over their street price:

• Make them in Japan via Precision Watch Tokyo Co., Ltd — although all PWTC does is assemble them, everything is ambiguously sourced;

• Restrict the supply to a handful of real-world stores in Japan which may or may not have any stock at any particular time;

• Do everything possible to stoke a massive hype machine that has grown men flying to Japan and sleeping outdoors just to have a chance to see the watches.

That’s not all of it, of course. The watches are frequently beautiful, and always carefully made:

They also always gain value in the resale market. You cannot lose money on the new-in-store purchase of a Kurono. (Up to now, anyway.) Which, in turn, fuels speculation and spree buying… and that just fuels the flame.

The raw fact is that every Grand Seiko in history has been a better watch than the best Kurono, in terms of material, workmanship, and accuracy. But a lot of Grand Seikos are just plain awkward-looking. By contrast, the Kurono watches are lovely from every angle. They come in the kind of elaborate gift packaging of which Rolex and Omega cannot even dream. Their tidy proportions flatter the wrists of smaller men in precisely the same way that an IWC Top Gun Doppelchrono does not.

Most of all, the wearing of a Kurono in public is a secret-society handshake, albeit one into a world populated by the kind of men who will sit outside a store in Japan all night while watching anime on their phones. They will tell you that the $1,850 watch is a brilliant deal because it was designed by Hajime Asaoka, whose handmade watches fetch $30k and up when you can get one, which is basically never. And they will point out the inevitable increase in value. Which is a fair argument, but one that never sits too well in my head. I buy watches, and cars, and guitars, with the intention of using them myself, not keeping them in pristine condition for a wealthier and bigger fool to come after me. You might as well make your girlfriend sleep in a separate bed so you don’t ruin her for the fellow who “steps up” after you’re done. If you get a Kurono, get it because you want it, not because you think you can turn $1,850 into $4,000. There are better ways to do that.

I wouldn’t be too quick to dismiss anyone who bought a Kurono. They’re beautiful pieces, with a nice story, and they are essentially 100% Japan-made. If you want “more” watch for the same money, try a Grand Seiko SBGR055. Good examples can be had for under two thousand dollars against a retail price of $3,900 in 2010. You get a 35-jewel Grand Seiko movement that is to the Kurono’s Miyota movement what a Lexus LF-A engine is to a Nissan Sentra’s four-banger, a “sapphire sandwich” of hardened glass front and back, vastly superior timekeeping (a few seconds a day compared to the 30-second variance permitted in the Kurono) and superior materials quality.

I won’t be in line for a meteorite Kurono next week — but if you’re lucky enough to score one, please share your experience with the rest of us.