Wednesday ORT: Oscar, Ford's Nutjob, MT's Partnership, Alphard Appreciation Thread

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the virgin lando and the chad oscar

What is this — the bottom third of a CarGurus listing? Everybody’s talking about mid-sized FWD sedans this week. From Shooter, we hear that “Also, I have a line on a cream puff 2016 ES350 with 59,000 miles owned by a 90 year old guy in Louisiana if you know anybody. They want $19,900 for it.” If the condition is good enough, that’s a deal. Comment if you’re interested, I’ll put you in touch.

Next up — the Singer Milan is for sale. There are two legitimate buyers talking to me but they might both have blockers to purchase. Why am I selling this very tasty, very well-preserved stick-shift sedan and keeping the beater Lexus I just bought? Simple: I gave my Accord to my son and I want to sell this before I’m tempted to drive it in the winter and ruin it. Too nice of a car to be salted, at least by me. Your mileage may vary. ACF price is $6k, which is about 40% of total cost for me and the fellow who built it.

Oh, and my Reverb store has been loaded with $35,000 worth of no-excuses, prime-time guitars. My son has a lot of flying to do this year. Selling these instruments will enable me to keep him in the air and off the streets, where he might be tempted to use drugs, engage in promiscuity, or listen to that one fat girl who sings about being messsss-eeeee. ACF readers can expect a 10% discount, minimum, off Reverb listing prices. And yes, that’s a real 1979 Gibson Explorer with a binding-and-blocks fretboard, in near-mint condition. Possibly the best one… in the world.

Oscar’s no grouch, but neither does he seem particularly excited

*evil voice* george is leading the team

If the Suzuka Grand Prix was boring — it didn’t seem that way to me, because I was there, but I bet the TV coverage was dire — then this one was the precise opposite. Rarely has an F1 race with such an undisputed winner been so entertaining. Random observations follow:

• Oscar > Lando, for real. There’s something vaguely Saltburn-ish about what’s going on McLaren: the hard-bitten scholarship student is taking everything the sensitive rich kid has to offer and more. Young Piastri is hard as nails and appears immune to self-doubt, a quality the inarguably quicker-over-one-lap Norris could use. I know that Lando was anointed as the WDC prior to the season’s first laps but I think Oscar has a better shot at it. This is a marathon, not a sprint.

• #Justice4Yuki, continued. Is Tsunoda the rightful occupant of the second RedBull seat? Hard to say, but he’s certainly doing better than the last two fellows to sit in it. His 9th-place run wasn’t exactly awe-inspiring, but he was within shouting distance of Max for most of the race. That’s not nothing.

• Gasly and Ocon shining together, but separately. While Sir Lewis got Driver of the Day for reasons that don’t appear obvious, either of the squabbling 2024 Alpine duo would have been more fairly awarded the laurels there. Both of them appeared to outdrive their equipment by a considerable margin. It was nice to watch. I’m not sure you can bet your mortgage on Williams beating them both at the end of the year.

• Sainz returns, kind of. The qualifying discrepancy between Albon and Sainz was what I expected to see from Australia forward. Neither of them got much of a race strategy, and Sainz was just unlucky with Yuki in what looked like a racing incident. If Carlos has the car under him now, expect Albon to fade backwards by comparison.

• Princess George now welcoming stress, not running from it. What a remarkable final stint. Deftly judged and aggressively driven. Kimi Antonelli looked brilliant in qualifying, too. Mercedes is not exactly fading into the background.

• Sir Lewis, please report to the red discourtesy telephone. Without the sprint win, which was arguably an almost accidental result of an odd setup decision, Hamilton would have half of his teammate’s points and would be battling with a Williams driver for 9th place. I expected Leclerc to comprehensively toast Sir Lewis in qualifying. I did not expect the discrepancy in race performance to be this significant. Much ado was made about the new Hamilton hairdo; it occurs to me that Sebastian Vettel also grew his hair out as he descended into a sort of charmingly batty ineptitude behind the wheel.

• GP and Max, still the effective team. This video shows why Max and GP do as well as they do, and how serious they are when it counts:

This is going to be a great season, isn’t it?

Mask Off For Motor Trend

fridge of the year

Things don’t look great at the moment for China’s much-ballyhooed electric-vehicle assault on the American market, what with the MAGA folks backing major tariffs and Team Blue licking their chops for a limited nuclear exchange over either the Strait of Formosa or the Golden Gate Bridge, whichever happens first. Not to worry, because there’s always someone willing to sell the communists the rope with which to hang them. In this case, it’s the increasingly awful people at MotorTrend, who are in open “partnership” with Li Auto to pimp the ugliest minivan since the Ssangyong Rodius.

Both the partnership and the deeply embarrassing “content” generated as a result feel a little bit to me like all those Eighties-vintage Sean Connery Suntory advertisements; surely the purpose is to generate some dim prestige in the home market rather than stoke excitement among an American MT readership that can neither afford a new car nor recognize any concept too complex to be explained during a forty-five-second Big Bird sketch from “Sesame Street”. Yet there it is, on social media. We’re in partnership with a Chinese van maker! And not just any Chinese van maker, a nearly bankrupt Chinese van maker! Trust the people who hired Lieberman and Loh to always draw the short straw, even when it comes to taking bribes.

The tie-up between Li Auto and Motor Trend is so foul that I almost refrained from mentioning it here, but I feel it’s worth using it to make a particular point, namely: The automotive media, as a whole, has zero interest in consumers or drivers, and will eagerly betray anyone or anything for the smallest of rewards. The game was always rigged — but now it’s threadbare.

And then the whole terminal clapped

i don’t think ‘attributed’ means what he thinks it does, but go off, queen

I can’t remember exactly where I was when I heard my first lizard person use the phrase “read the room,” but if I could go back to that moment in time I would just leap out of the nearest fifth-floor window and save myself another two years working in automotive insurance. There was about a six-month period where “read the room” was said by everyone, in every circumstance. It was the “peel back the onion” or “land the plane” of its era. Like “gen pop” is now.

I have to think Barrett Evans, Ford’s now-disgraced “Chief Learning Officer”, is an intelligent man. You don’t get to that position at the age of thirty-four by being stupid. He had a pretty big-wheel job at Macy’s before that, while he was still in his twenties. He and his husband own a seven-figure historic home in Cincinnati. Given that the job of “Chief Learning Officer” can’t involve a single God-damned moment of anything that a reader of Richard Scarry’s Busy, Busy World would recognize as “work”, yet it likely pays half a million dollars a year or more, all signs point towards Evans being a pretty sharp dude.

Unfortunately for Mr. “chivalryandchampagne”, however, he has no ability to read the room. Which is why there’s a smoking hole where his LinkedIn used to be.

Now here’s the funny part: I don’t entirely disagree with the point made by Evans in the rant that he claims to have targeted at an elderly “Fox News viewer”. We do not live in the world of Ayn Rand or the most autistic Internet Libertarians. We live in a world where people make sacrifices both large and small to ensure that others have access to society and its benefits. Airport wheelchairs are not free to purchase, maintain, store, or have pushed. The money that makes them possible is extracted from everyone at the airport. It truly is a form, albeit a basic one, of “equity”. In the Ayn Rand world, wheelchairs are either self-funded or the product of ubermensch generosity. In this world, you probably pay an extra dollar per flight for wheelchairs you’ll likely never use.

Evans was not an idiot for thinking any of the above. The idiot part came when he decided to harass an old person for watching television with which he disagreed. Actually, even that was probably something he could have done without penalty, especially since I doubt he said as much as he claims to have said.

Nah, the real stupidity was in bragging about it on social media like it was 2020 and he’d caught someone wearing an “All Lives Matter” shirt. That was where his “filter” truly malfunctioned. I guarantee you that Evans lives in a series of echo chambers, both corporate and corporeal, where he never has to hear from someone who doesn’t share his approximate worldview. He no doubt expected applause from his social-media echo chamber — and the strong number of “hearts” suggests that he got it, at least initially.

In much the same way that Evans “signal boosted” his interaction with an elderly passenger by broadcasting it on social media, however, some detractor of his must have seen the value in “signal boosting” him further, to the point where Mr. And Mrs. F-150 Customer could see his behavior. There’s a lesson for you: when you roll a stone downhill, don’t think you’ll be the one to say where it stops.

Five years ago, a flamboyantly gay millionaire with a mega-millions email job could be a civic hero for harassing a wheelchair-bound Boomer in public. In 2025, the tables have turned. Barrett Evans might not still be Ford’s “Chief Learning Officer” next month, but you can’t say he didn’t learn anything this week.

A van for the man with a plan

I spent a lot of time last week in the second row of various Toyota Alphards and Vellfires. Truly, I can’t think of a better place for a passenger to be; I’ve been driven in Phantoms and Cullinans with less comfort. And the price is right, too: the Alphard Executive Lounge, as seen above, is just a $60,000 proposition with 2.5-liter hybrid power. The new one even looks pretty decent, in its own way and when compared appropriately with awful stuff like the Hyundai Palisade:

The little Z-for-Zorro character line on the side kinda “crosses the line”, as the family patriarch in Parasite might say, but so does the grille-ish thing on the nose of every current BMW.

I understand that a four-cylinder aero-brick with a significant focus on passenger accommodations might not be the greatest thing for interstate trips or spirited backroad driving, but can anyone explain to me why the Alphard is not standard equipment for every “black car” service in New York City and San Francisco? Right now that role is often filled by Escalades and Suburbans, which are impossible to maneuver in the city and offer a third-row entry/exit procedure that is somewhere between “unpleasant” and “paparazzi beaver shot”.

Having tried to force the “Taxi of Tomorrow” on its medallion-holders in a process that was eventually reversed, perhaps NYC should consider writing a bit of legislation that makes Alphards, and their turbocharged sporty sisters known as Vellfires, legal to operate in the five boroughs. This would fix half of the problem with NYC black car service.

The other half of the problem is the people who drive for NYC black car services, but let’s face it: that’s an area where Japan has an unconquerable advantage, and likely always will.