Wednesday ORT: Gold Card, CBs Up FTRs Down, Cars&Bumps, Decibelics

All subscribers welcome

It’s an exclusive club! Next week I’ll be sending 19 of my favorite ACF readers the stickers denoting their membership in “Loopy’s Loonies”. Benefits of displaying it on your car include: much higher closing rate with women, knowing nods from 3,308 readers, a guarantee that I won’t shoot at you from my car, even if you honk at me while I’m trying to listen to Clairo. If you missed out, keep reading because we will partner in the future with another animal in need of help later this year. One more thing: it’s an Open Racing Thread, so if you really want to talk about how Verstappen was booed at F1 Live, fire away. And here we go:

Would you really cough up $5M to live here?

the price is about to go up

Your humble author has long been interested in the Malaysian Second Home program, which would allow me to live there for up to twenty years in exchange for a fixed investment amount of about $250k. It really is a lovely country and there’s something to be said for being the tallest person in ones immediate vicinity pretty much all the time.

The United States has long maintained a similar but much more expensive program, serving as many as 8,000 people per year, but President Trump plans to ditch it and replace it with a “Gold Card” visa-to-citizenship offering priced at $5 million. As with many of Trump’s plans, this has already induced massive cognitive dissonance at outlets like MSNBC, which is unabashedly in favor of opening the border to anyone who wants to wade across the Rio Grande but immediately starts clutching pearls at the idea of doing it via private jet and wire transfer.

I like the transparency of it; instead of having vaguely defined and unevenly administered programs for high-net-worth citizens, you have a price and a result. Trump said off-the-cuff that “10 million” people might take advantage, which is surely wishful thinking given that perhaps only 15-20 million people outside the United States have the ability to stroke the check and the entire global money supply is only something like $150T, but make no mistake: even getting 35,000 people to join the program would pay our rather considerable Ukraine-war tab, at least the tab to date. The most exploding-head way to spend the windfall would, of course, be on a border security program.

Now how much would you pay to sell your car for less than it’s worth?

if being uncool is cool, this guy is miles davis

Having alienated the Reddit community while adding quite a few unemployed people to said community, Cars&Bids is taking the logical next step of raising fees. It was 4.5 percent up to $4,500. Now it’s 5.0 percent and $7,500. The minimum fee has gone from $225 to $250. If these numbers sound kinda-sorta familiar, it’s because the 5.0/$7500 structure is what Bring-A-Trailer charges.

At the very least, the business fallout from this will answer the question of “What if the 1977 Ford Granada had been priced the same as the Mercedes 450SLC they advertised it against?”

One correspondent of mine this week suggested that it’s time for a Cars&Bids Deathwatch. I assured him we would never be petty or unpleasant enough to do such a thing. Furthermore, we would do well to keep the Collapse&Buckle situation in perspective: they’re still ahead of Hagerty Marketplace.

Honda adds some neat bikes, Indian puts one out of its misery

he still can’t really tell you

Speaking of being a hater, it’s time to say goodbye to the only consumer product that I ever refrained from buying out of sheer, undiluted, 100% petty unpleasantness, namely: the Indian FTR1200. I had every intention of buying the flat-track-styled streetbike when it came out. Not only had Indian been very good to me in the past, giving me a chance to ride a Chieftain cross-country and attend Sturgis in 2016 on their dime, I also loved the idea of having an American-made “hooligan bike”. Also, I could have easily afforded it at the time, because I had yet to cut the throat of my professional career by leaving the contract-tech game.

Alas, before my local Indian dealer could actually get an FTR in stock, the company gave one as a long-term loan to Fat Brad Brownell, who proceeded to waddle around on the thing for quite some time and in many ways became the public face of the FTR1200, at least to the automotive-web-reading crowd. Of course, that was all before going to another Indian press event and riding the FTR they gave him for that event into a ditch, as seen above. (They still invite him to every press rides, presumably because they’re going to crush the bikes afterwards or something like that.) Not only was I unwilling to pay real money for something the company was giving to idiots for free, the idea that I was even interested in the same bike as Brad made me reconsider my choices a bit. I mean, I wouldn’t ride anything else he had, if you catch my drift, even if you put a gun to my head.¹ So while there are currently eleven motorcycles in my barn, you won’t find an FTR among them.

Which is just as well, because when I fired up the Harley-Davidson Sportster S for the first time I realized that it was basically a bullet to the FTR’s dome: faster, more characterful, cooler-looking, blessed with the bar-and-shield logo, and no more expensive. In fact, the FTR’s closest competition is arguably the Harley Nightster, which runs the same quarter-mile times with 975cc at real-world transaction prices around ten grand.

Rather than fight back, Indian has decided to abandon the FTR program. There’s a $3,000 rebate on FTRs at the moment, if you’re really interested; my local dealer has a $17,249 FTR-R Carbon Fiber available for $11,999.

Heck of a deal, but even forgetting the Brownell association you’re still looking at no more pace than my old V-Strom and a riding position that isn’t really suited for anything beyond short rides. I have a Suzuki SV1000 that will put the fanciest FTR back on the trailer for a total investment of under three grand… but maybe Brad will trade his LiveWire for one, once he gets done recovering from an utter Twitter shellacking at the hands of Matt Hardigree, that is.

Meanwhile, riders who are looking for an interesting non-sportbike to buy in 2025 will have a couple of nifty two-cylinder choices from Honda:

Sold as the Hornet in Europe for the past two years, it’s coming here as the CB750. That’s an evocative and important designation, attached in this case to an 83-horsepower parallel-twin that shares nothing with the NC750 “half-a-Fit” engine but is instead related to the Africa Twin. No doubt this will be a hell of a motorcycle for anyone who buys it. Honda has unmatched experience in UJMs and builds them just a little bit more precisely than everyone else.

Also coming here from Europe: the NT1100 touring bike.

You get a 101-hp version of the Africa Twin engine in an aerodynamically efficient upright package with factory luggage. It’s basically a lower-power version of the Harley Pan America ST that had me terribly excited until the minute I realized they were going to build it in Thailand. By contrast, Honda makes the NT1100 in Japan. Announced in January for the Canadian market at $17,599 CDN, and already offered to USA police departments with a special livery for $14,499, it’s anyone’s guess as to what Honda will charge here for civilian models.

On paper, I’m really interested in the NT1100 and it would make a nice commuter. Last night, however, I took advantage of some 45-degree weather to fire up the V-Strom and run it to dinner. It’s clearly not as nice of a bike as the NT1100 will be, but it also sounds just plain nasty when cranked, even through the factory pipes. Let’s hope that there are enough non-white-trash-L-twin-aficionado-typa-dudes out there to make the NT1100 a success in the States. Our motorcycle market works best and most strongly when there’s a little bit of something for everyone.

From Barcelona, the home of rock and roll…

Given the slightly deranged fervor with which I push USA-made products on readers, friends, family, strangers, and even sworn enemies, it must seem odd that I’m about to recommend a Spanish maker of distortion pedals. This, after all, is a field of endeavor in which Americans have been the acknowledged leaders for quite some time, even if the Dallas Rangemaster and original Tube Screamer were overseas products.

Well, of course I contradict myself, I contain multitudes. Tune in next week, when I will sing the praises of a Chinese watch. I’m not kidding.

Back to pedals. An ACF reader made me aware of Decibelics, the Barcelona one-man boutique that produces the finest Klon Centaur replicas known to man. What’s a Klon Centaur? It’s about five grand, is what it is. The now-famous distortion pedal was made by a one-man shop in Boston between 1994 and 2008, but he kept falling behind on orders so second-hand prices went through the roof even as more and more marquee-name guitar players started relying on Centaurs for their live sound. He tried simplifying the design and product after that, but the market didn’t want what he had to offer at that point.

The production of Klon replicas, commonly called “Klones”, is a difficult and fussy thing. Eleven years ago I ordered a very nice one from a young man who is still in the business of making them, albeit with different graphics. I liked my Klone just fine but rarely played it. There have been plenty of other takes on the formula since then — but Decibelics is objectively and subjectively the nicest.

Made in small batches by appointment, his “Golden Horse” is a mini-form-factor Klone using the same wiring and transistors as the original, with the owner’s name written inside the case and a very nice paint job in your choice of multiple colors. Although I’ve been on the list for a Horse, I lost my patience and went to Reverb for a used Golden Royale, which is two Klons placed in series so you can have both a “clean boost” for non-solo playing and a “cranked boost” for solos, all in the same box.

Readers, it is just soooo nice. Rather than ask you to sit through a tone demo, I’ll save it for next week when Project Epiphone returns from its final tweaks so I can kill both birds with a single nonmusical stone-in-love.

What has completely sold me on “The Spaniard” and his American copies, however, is the warranty experience that my friend had with his Decibelics pedal, which amounted to: I’ll send you a new one today, send the old one back when you get around to it. There’s no finer way to handle it. Find him at Decibelics.

1. If you ever want to feel grateful for your life, no matter what it’s like or what’s happening in it, watch this video starting at 31:52 and ending at 32:30. Don’t thank me, making my subscribers feel good is just part of the service we provide here at ACF.