Wednesday ORT: McBonvoy, Way Mo Snitchin’, Destination Unwanted, The Price Of Pork

All subscribers welcome

Good evening, friends. I’d like to thank everyone who chimed in on State of the Stack. I’ll be reading your suggestions — all of them — and working out a plan. In the meantime, however, I’m pleased to announce that we will have seven car reviews in the month of October. Six new cars, plus some time in an immaculate, 20,000-mile, velour seat W140 600SEL. It’s never been a better time to join the elite ranks of paying subscribers. And one of these cars, I’m almost happy to say, is the worst new car I’ve ever driven. From a certain point of view, at least. So clear your calendar and let’s go.

McBonvoy the logo

So. McLaren has a new “wordmark”. Does this matter? To answer that question, we have to figure out if McLaren still matters. I’m guessing that some major percentage of you will be of the opinion that it does not. Easy argument to make. Their lineup is oddly like what Chevrolet offered during the Fifties; one million possible variations of the same chassis. Can you tell the difference between a lease-giveaway Artura and a highly-desired Senna? Most people, meaning most women, cannot. What distinguishes a 750S from a 720S or, for that matter, a 650S? Being a McLaren enthusiast is like being a Seiko enthusiast in its unquenchable nerd-dom, minus the fact that no Seiko in history has ever just exploded after wandering off a lightly garden-hosed road.

Then there’s the fact that McLaren has been publicly led by three people: the guy with the McLaren name who is actually remembered by no one under the age of 70, the British control freak who made Fernando Alonso cut his (lovely) hair, and the fat American who is perenially yelling “YEAHHHHH!” like he’s a U10 girls soccer coach. All three of these people were, or are, brilliant individuals, but they’re not Enzo Ferrari. They’re not even Carlos Ghosn.

Against the above, I have just one point to plead, and it is this: The McLaren supercar/hypercar/whatever in its various forms is the purest rich-person vehicle to exist in modern times. It is the closest thing to a race car you can buy. In fact, the street cars are faster than the McLaren GT4 race car. Every McLaren is a twin-turbo unhinged mid-engined carbon monster that only does one thing well and that one thing is either exhilarating skilled drivers or murdering unskilled ones. The McLaren is what people think the 930 Turbo was. I made a rather poorly phrased comment a week or so ago to the effect of “I’m pretty comfortable driving McLarens fast because I am also comfortable driving the provably deadly Radical SR8 fast.” You don’t need to be a prototype/Radical driver to operate a McLaren at speed, but it would help.

This new “wordmark”, with its awkward nod to a heritage that essentially never existed in anyone’s mind until yesterday and is therefore peak McLaren marketing, apparently presages a move into SUVs and lifestyle branding and an attempt to join Ferrari in the “clothing licensor that happens to make cars” segment. That makes me sad. I have many great memories of McLarens but here’s just one: I had a 765LT in California and some young writer/racer told me he could beat me across two hours of mountain roads on his track-prepped MV Agusta. I gave him a fifteen-minute headstart, took a slightly longer route, and beat him by almost half an hour. During that time I’m pretty sure I averaged over 110mph. On canyon roads. Probably activated ABS a hundred times, put the car sideways again and again. I have no clear recollection of the drive because I was completely focused on making pace. My only rule was to not try any pass I wouldn’t try on a ZX14R. While I was waiting for this fellow on his very quick bike that he rode knee-down everywhere, I thought to myself, “The second time you try that, you will get killed. So be content with what you’ve done.” Trust me, Ferrari could never perform like that. So yeah, it’s a stupid logo and a goofy company and Lando Norris is a broccoli headed emo rich kid. But if you told me to spend five hundred grand on a street performance car tomorrow, I wouldn’t go anywhere else.

McBonvoy the car

It’s also the case that I can forgive a lot of stupidity when something like the McLaren McL 6GT arrives at the same time. Forget the name, which refers to a car only race nerds remember and sounds uncannily like a Chinese electric SUV for the home market.

This is the first stick shift McLaren since the three-seat F1. McLaren says it is V8 powered without giving details; hard to believe it’s anything other than the existing ex-Nissan-racing twin-turbo dealio. It is the most handsome McLaren in modern history, which isn’t saying much, and it will probably give their dealers the previously unknown pleasure of forcing buyers to build a relationship.

“Well, we would love to put you in the 6L when it gets here… but we’d sure like you to experience a couple of Arturas while you wait.”

Gives a new meaning to “drive-by”

a Waymo spokesperson confirmed… that the incident involved one of its cars.

The company pulled the car over after detecting a “violation of our terms of service involving a firearm,” the spokesperson said. The company alerted emergency services and “cooperated fully” with San Francisco police.

The incident took place shortly before 4 a.m. on Sept. 3 in the city’s Richmond District, the Police Department said in a statement Thursday.

The department said officers conducted a “high-risk vehicle stop” and detained the two juvenile passengers — a boy and a girl. The statement did not identify them further.

Officers searched the car and discovered a loaded, AR-style assault rifle, as well as “suspected marijuana and mace spray,” authorities said in the statement.

Today’s question to ponder: How did the Waymo detect firearms activity? There are two obvious answers, and a likely one:

0. Waymo is using image recognition constantly against in-car video feed, looking for things that look like guns;

1. Waymo is watching its riders a lot more than they admit;

2. Waymo is… profiling.

Which do you think it is? If I ran Waymo, I would at the very least be running an LLM against the audio feed on a pretty much constant basis, listening for situations that could require a human overseer… uh, given the likely ethnicity of the offenders, maybe we should use a different word here, but I’m not sure what the word would be.

What will really bake your noodle, as the Matrix lady says, is when you realize that it’s cheaper to have foreigners watch the passengers all the time than it is to have a distributed AI service evaluating the video. I bet there are cube farms overseas where each person has to watch nine feeds at once in the time-honored “Brady Bunch” security-camera layout.

If everyone understood this, maybe they’d go back to the existing business model of having just one immigrant watching you while he drives the Uber, and you can look at him, too.

Barra’s big booty

The 2027 Sierra 1500 Pro starts at $51,295 (all prices include the destination charge).

The 2027 Sierra 1500 Elevation costs $59,995, while the AT4 starts at $73,495. The Sierra Denali starts at $76,795, while the AT4X and Denali Ultimate sit at the top at $85,495 and $87,895, respectively. GMC dropped the SLE and SLT trims for 2027.

Sierra 1500 Pro – $51,295

Sierra 1500 Elevation $59,995

Sierra 1500 AT4 $73,495

Sierra 1500 Denali $76,795

Sierra 1500 AT4X $85,495

Sierra 1500 Denali Ultimate $87,895

Emphasis above is mine. A 402-hp 5.7-liter small-block is available for people who don’t want an “upgraded” 350-horse four-banger, which is pretty much everyone who doesn’t want to drive the truck version of the 944 Turbo S right down to the mystery dashboard failures. The 6.6-liter does 481 horsepower, which is admirable as hell if it doesn’t blow up.

Eric Starkman has some choice words about the destination charge:

Underscoring Barra’s “smarter by half” culture, GM has raised the mandatory “destination charge” on the 2027 Sierra to an eye-watering $2,795. A decade ago, destination charges for full-size pickups hovered between $995 and $1,195. By raising this non-negotiable fee to nearly $2,800, GM masks its true price increases while dealers leave the fee out of their promotional advertising.

The punchline: the destination charge on a 2026 Buick Envision, which GM imports from China, is $1,995.

Yet for a Sierra built in Fort Wayne, Indiana, or Flint, Michigan, GM charges domestic buyers $2,795—$800 more than the destination charge on an crossover GM ships halfway around the globe from China.

The margins GM enjoys on its trucks are enormous. If Barra were plowing those profits into engineering and marketing EVs to beat China at its own game, the markups might have a shred of justification.

Instead, over the past three years, GM has blown roughly $23 billion buying back its own stock to juice its share price. Meanwhile, over the past 12 months, Barra and other company insiders sold some $226 million of their personal GM holdings.

It grieves me to say this, because I loved my 2017 Silverado and I want America’s marquee car company to build great trucks, but: If you do business with Reuss and Barra nowadays, you’re buying from people who clearly see you as a sucker to be fleeced. I’d want to see ten years of reliability data on these new engines before I would trust them to take me to the grocery store. The pricing is as deceptive as it is deranged. This is a great opportunity for Ford, which probably won’t take it, and for Ram, which can and should. Of the Big Three, only Stellantis has a reliable half-ton V-8. Who would have ever imagined such would be the case?

Maybe they could cover it with a $27,950 destination charge

Porsche’s destination charge is only $2,950, which gets you a Cayenne all the way from Slovenia or whatever and is therefore much better value than what GM is doing. But they’re gonna need to bump it, because apparently they’re losing money on the most overpriced cars they’ve ever sold.

Well… we all know that’s not true. Porsche makes outrageous money on their product. But their fabulous EV transition has proven to be a real problem. No one wants electric Porsches, not even in Germany where your humble author just paid $12.49 a gallon at a roadside fuel stop. According to Torque News, which to my sorrow is the most comprehensive source I’ve found, reversing the strategy will cost Volkswagen $9.7 billion. Porsche is preparing to do some staff reductions as they search for profitability.

Can we all see how crazy this is? This used to be a company that survived on five thousand kinda-sorta handbuilt cars a year, each of which required a little cash on the hood to leave their local Porsche+Audi dealer. Now they’re doing 310,000 units annualy, many of them marked up to a degree that would make Big Booty Barra blush, and they’re sucking wind.

I dedicate this upcoming reorganization and nightmare product-revision strategy to every Cheetos-stained podcuck out there who has warbled erotically at 129dB about how WE NEEDED THE CAYENNE TO SAVE THE COMPANY. News flash: instead of saving the company with that extra 305,000 units of Bratislavian hostel junk, Porsche used the money to

0. Play corporate-raider findom games, badly;

1. Create an infinite variety of sedans and SUVs that weaken the brand every time you see one on the front lot of a J.D. Byrider;

2. Pursue the wir schaffen das brain-damaged dream of a K-shaped lineup where the real boys got increasingly self-parodying GT3RSRSSRSSSSSSRR wingthings while the proles had to eat the EV vegetables.

A bunch of you have sent me the Angeles Death Highway video about the Porsche GT3. It’s painfully perceptive, especially the part about how all the old guys want their GT3RSRSRSRSRSR to ride like a Carrera. You know what I’ve seen about thirty of during a single Wednesday in Zurich? Regular Carreras. You know what I haven’t seen one of on the road over the course of five days in Mitteleuropa? A GT-anything. Turns out the Germans like soft-ass Carreras. With a targa top or convertible top, please and thank you. Driving a GT3 to Malibu Cars and Coffee is less German than falling asleep on the Maginot Line.

Let’s hope this moonshot-priced Porsche plan includes decent combustion-engined Boxsters and Caymans. It would also be nice to see a car placed under the mid-motor product. Something transaxle, even! Use VW parts where you can. The last time this was tried, it kinda did save the company. Porsche made serious, life-preserving bank by putting their crest on Audis from Neckarsulm. They could do it again, except they’re closing Neckarsulm.

Housekeeping

This week will also likely see the return of “Ask Jack”. I was a little short on questions to bring it back and I’m relying on you to help. I would be delighted to answer questions both automotive and non-automotive. Email them to jbaruth@gmail. Thank you for your support.