Bez looks unstoppable during practice and qualifying as he secures an easy pole position. Fermin Aldeguer begins from 2nd, and Raul Fernandez, of all riders, starts from 3rd. Marc Marquez suffers through wrecks and a rough start to the weekend having to come through Q1 only to place for a lowly 9th starting position.
Still, none of that was as bad as Perfect Pecco's perilous plummet from the pinnacle of last weekend: 16th place starting position for Bagnaia.
In the sprint Bez, or his bike, blew the start and tumbled back down to 8th position. Aldeguer charged ahead and, at one point, had a three second gap. That gap would be eaten up lap after lap by a hard charging Bezzecchi who would overtake Fermin on the last lap to come back to victory. Raul Fernandez started the same as he finished in the ride of his career. Alex Marquez managed to clamber from 7th to 4th, with big brother finishing 6th after a long lap penalty from an overly aggressive move on Alex Rins. The full race would have much more over aggression from both Aprilia riders with some gnarly results.
The race begins and Bez again is blown away off the line and falls back. As he tries to charge up through the pack he carries far too much roll speed through a corner, stands his bike up as he rolls off, and careens into the back of Marc Marquez' ride. As Marc hit the gravel trap and tumbles his right shoulder augers into the gravel and leaves him with damaged ligaments and at least one minor fracture. Marc will miss at least the next two rounds, but he has already secured the championship and so will focus on recovery as needed. Bez would shoot by and lose the bike in the deep gravel, tumbling as well, but without incurring serious injury.
Fermin Aldeguer and Pedro Acosta went toe to to for the first few laps until Aldeguer got by Pedro and... disappeared into the distance. The rookie, now the second youngest to have won a MotoGP race, finished 7s (giving up ~1.5s on the last lap as he cruised to victory) ahead of his competition in a total demolition job. Acosta, meanwhile, kept up an incredible defense against Luca Marini and Raul Fernandez. In the end, Pedro was helped immensely by Fernandez' excessive aggression and dive bombing which, instead of waiting for Luca to dispatch Pedro, cost both of them positions and forced Luca to cede two spots by the end of the race. Marini 5th, Fernandez all the way down to 6th.
Alex Marquez was the big winner over the weekend as he managed a third place to put both Gresinis on the podium and cement his 2nd place lead.
Pecco Bagnaia crashed out of the race after only seven laps while running, by that time, about 20s behind the race leader. This must be extremely distressing for the rider to go from one extreme to the other. His only saving grace is that he was helped in his championship hopes for bronze by Bez taking himself out earlier on.
Next week MotoGP is at windy, weathersome, and bird-filled Philip Island, Australia.
I need to swap my wedding band for a smaller one and when I checked last year 14k gold rings were still less than platinum. (Purity and cost to manufacturer platinum his higher).
I saw a few videos of the shenanigans in Pigeon Forge. From my understanding there was a car show at the convention center in Sevierville. Many cars drive south and ended up in Pigeon Forge at a gas station called Jimmy's.
From social media, the owner usually doesn't mind the cars but it appears things got out of hand. They ended up cancelling the car show in Sevierville and apparently lots of folks are mad.
Now, what I don't get is why schedule a large car show during an extremely busy week adding to the overall strain in the area.
There is a reason why Jeep week or Thunder rally is after spring break in PCB.
Could you imagine Thunder Rally while spring breakers are partying?
"Other than generating some warm-and-fuzzy authoritarian-adjacent, teacher’s-little-pet, run-to-mommy feelings on the part of the people who work there, what effect could it possibly have?"
This is why they pay you the big bucks, Jack. I'm stealing this, by the way.
Jack, love the notion that you were the hinge in the Bari Weiss deal! You 'da man!!
What is the connection with Morris Dees? Isn't he the former SPLC guide who got caught with his hand in the "cookie jar", so to speak?
I pay no attention to auto vehicle racing, I don't even own a car. Uber serves our needs these days so please excuse my naivete: Is Zak Brown the country music guy or someone in motor racing?
Yes. Zak Brown is the head of McLaren, hand in United Autosports, a few other things. Zac Brown is the "chicken fried" singer amongst other things. His only connection to racing was being in the same hotel room as Kenny Habul when it got raided for coke.
During COVID, the ownership of Grassroots Motorsports begged the community for donations to save the magazine. (It was never really clear why COVID meant it needed saving.) But when it turned out that the money wasn't necessary to save the magazine, the Suddards gave the money to the Southern Poverty Law Center for, like, no reason at all. They said that they were touched by the story of George Floyd.
A fair number of GRM supporters asked for their donations back; the Suddards declined.
Even better was when a subscriber/poster on their forum questioned the donation to SPLC, the publisher’s wife told the poster to die in a fire. Literally.
"And forget that GRM in general is the equivalent of your Oberlin-grad wine aunt in terms of understanding even the most basic political concepts." 🤣 And they no longer have a tent at the Rolex 24, nor midnight garage tours or Sunday brunch. I still have a couple of their t-shirts though.
AI is definitely a trade, but long positions have thus far paid off immensely. A few companies will win, and those companies will be unfathomably valuable. Google? OpenAI? For the moment enjoy the ride but don’t get greedy if you are investing. Take some profits.
Porsche should go back to what it did in the '90's but it won't. They and BMW, Mercedes and Audi are now addicted to making moribund and weak SUV's to the masses.
Porsche cars like the 911, 944 and 928 had great traditions of air cooled, 6 or 8 cylinders with manual transmissions and uncontrollable handling. They were unique and had a German flavour. Now they are made in Eastern Europe and Malaysia and have a Dim Sum flavour. They are overgrown, overweight and way overpriced. Sure they're more refined. But that's like being hailed as better behaved ever since being convicted as an axe murderer.
Most people are SUV first and those VPs and management who would previously buy the 911 or 928 in addition to the commuter BMW, Benz, or Audi are just buying one SUV now. Very few people have 3 cars nowadays, and as cost goes up they want one that does it all.
I bought the "to save the company" line for years, since the first Cayenne. I'm calling "bogus" as they backstroke through money and keep doing more and more stupid things ("Daddy says, no more ICE Boxters/Caymans -- oh wait! Just kidding!").
I would argue, however, that BMW has fallen even further than Porsche.
People don't want "one car that does it all", they want something that signals they're suave and urbane and successful. That's why they buy a Macan instead of a Q5.
FWIW, more people have 3 cars than at any time I can remember (I'm 62).
Sure, but what I see living across 3 of America’s wealthiest zip codes is that far more people have 2 cars than you’d expect in the past for the successful types. It seems to split between 2 cars for the “non-car” people buying the SUVs and the car folks with 4+ vehicles.
That third sports car is less expected nowadays among the younger successful crowd.
Every rich guy I know (regardless of their age) has at least 3 cars. Most of them have at least 5.
I don't live in the proper zip-code to speak with any authority regarding trends and what the cool kids do -- but there are plenty of people in flyover country with more than enough money to do what they want with the loose change they find in the couch cushions.
Lots of them will buy a Tesla Model S gonzo-plaid double-pump pooper-scooper for their 3rd of 4th car, because it won't go more than 75 miles or so without a "supercharge" (and not the kind guys like me like) and is therefore worthless as a useful automobile, so it becomes a garage queen that will sometimes (inexplicably) be trotted out as giving them both car guy and modern man cred. They think it makes them an alpha dog to drive 0-60 in .3 seconds or whatever for the two times they can do it before the batteries overheat. But there ain't nobody getting groceries in that.
But they still have that 3rd car. Or toaster. Or something.
Had BMW really fallen, or is that just the rose colored enthusiast perception of what they were?
As someone a bit younger than you, I hear of BMW as the drivers car but the volume seemed to be more the YUPPIE type and that doesn’t seem to have changed much.
Regardless of the Yuppie's ~motivations~, in the olden days, he ended up with a durable, repairable, driver's car whether he wanted or appreciated it or not.
The several I had were driver's cars first and foremost.
Rich yuppies have been gravitating towards them since the 80s, but the predominant flavor of them was still centered around the experience of driving until about the turn of the millennium. That's when they decided they wanted to be a mass production company, rather than a sports sedan company. They are the new Roger Smith GM: bland in the extreme, odd styling, weird product choices, bad engineering.
I had a V8 E39 (non M5) 540i with a manual -- which might have been the perfect automobile, had it not been let down by its "electronics by the sainted German engineers" which have plagued all German autos since 1995 or so. That car was a sledgehammer in a velvet glove, and it made me giggle every time I drove it.
BMW still makes accessible products with enthusiast intent. to get an enthusiast grade porsche you are spending at LEAST two hundo large. you can argue about whether you personally enjoy models like the 240, 340, M2/3/4, but to deny that they are appealing enthusiast options that are attainable without your dad having sold out to Oracle in the dot com era is to do a disservice to a brand that is at least trying (with varying degrees of success) to offer attainable, mass produced products for "people like us" (although after my last loaner, i question how this will work going forward)
porsche on the other hand has shown the type of deliberate disregard and disrespect to its core customer base for DECADES that is eerily reminiscent of how HK has treated its US customers ("HK: because fuck you") for probably just as long. lol, the cayman would suck and fuck all over a 911 with the same running gear so we're gonna nerf it. fuck you! entry level models? yeah, you get the four banger. actually, you liked the cayman too much, so we're making it an EV to punish you for your wrong opinions.
$90k at Mercedes still get you the real wealthy person’s Benz in today’s America (and probably the best thing they sell) - the E450 wagon which still has the turbo I6.
It also gets you the most interesting current Benz, the GLE580 which is their only big motor non AMG left
$26 is a big jump though, and to me the big German SUVs are less appealing than the mid-sizers. At that GLS price, I’d take a Navigator.
There’s a good chance one of those is my wife’s next car in 2 years, so we keep an eye on it. Hopefully they don’t ruin either model like BMW has been doing with the new interiors.
This thought occurred to me today: Will AI make Hollywood accounting obsolete by removing all the human creatives from the production of entertainment, thus eliminating everyone there is to cheat out of royalties?
To produce a true AI, and by that I mean the artificial person Strong AI of science fiction, will require not only a different sort of technology than silicon-based computing but a proper understanding, or at least a serviceable guess, of how human consciousness works.
I suspect we'll eventually be able to simulate the thought processes of some of the higher animals - dogs, cats, your deadbeat brother-in-law - but truly human thinking is likely beyond us.
For me the funniest dumb thing Porsche did was kill off the ICE mid engined cars, promise the world " mid engined" EVs, realize they would sell less than 500 worldwide,invent a battery supply problem to shit can the EV, and announce, kind of, a new ICEish mid engined model for a few years from now.
When they had a great 10 year old design that sold a fair number of cars that are very pleasant, quite fast, well built and AREN'T 911s. I've had any number of people realize my various mids are Porsches but not 911 Porsches and that leaves folks confused.
Anyways, the new Boxster GTS 4.0 is now broken in, and continues to please the hell out of me. 3100lbs, 394hp, gorgeous old school interior, restrained styling, small but not tiny, 4second 0-60, and even half way decent electric steering. Had the dumbass management developed a new gen 718 instead of wasting their time with the EV, jeez.
'Had the dumbass management developed a new gen 718 instead of wasting their time with the EV, jeez.
I'm not sure that would have been a good idea. It would have been bigger, wider, and so on.
Probably the most useful thing I ever learned from Matt Farah was that he went on some fancy trip with the MINI people and they told him that every time they poll existing MINI owners...
EVERY TIME...
....they want the car to get bigger. Because they are aging, and as they age they want a bigger car with more capability. So MINI keeps making the car bigger. Which retains the existing buyers, but puts off the new buyers, and ages the demographics.
The same is true for the Boxster. It keeps getting bigger, because if you own a Boxster long enough you have all sorts of ideas for how you'd use a little more space. But you're no longer the customer. The guy 10 years younger than you is supposed to be the customer.
Entry level everything is dying, and these companies aren’t paying attention to bringing in new business. It’s all set up to listen to current customers and squeeze them dry as the worst parts of the SaaS model get distilled down to the MBAs running these places.
But that's the thing, the Boxster/ Cayman hasn't really gotten any bigger since 2005. I've had all of them, 987s, a 981 and two 718s, they're all pretty much the same. The 981/718 Cayman seems larger than the 987 because it's packaged a bit differently and it has a slightly longer wheelbase, but it weighs the same as a 987.
There is a subclass of 718 buyers who now shell out $200,000+ for the GTRS or Spyder RS. Hell, my GTS was $120,000. They ran out of allocations before they ran out of buyers. The overwhelming feeling in the forums or in the PCA section I like at the track is that the EV was a dead ender.
I know you like Farah but he is a dope. Bought an ugly Spyder RS and had DeMan do a dumb aircraft fuel octane engine for it so it could go into Panorama.
Oh, and I disagree about buyer desires on the Boxster. It's every owners 2nd or 3rd car. It fits two people just fine, it's wide enough that you don't rub elbows and has 2 trunks. Having also owned a 991 I think it's more practical. I'm pretty sure having a bigger Boxster isn't something that owners were clamoring for.
MotoGP in Mandalika:
Bez looks unstoppable during practice and qualifying as he secures an easy pole position. Fermin Aldeguer begins from 2nd, and Raul Fernandez, of all riders, starts from 3rd. Marc Marquez suffers through wrecks and a rough start to the weekend having to come through Q1 only to place for a lowly 9th starting position.
Still, none of that was as bad as Perfect Pecco's perilous plummet from the pinnacle of last weekend: 16th place starting position for Bagnaia.
In the sprint Bez, or his bike, blew the start and tumbled back down to 8th position. Aldeguer charged ahead and, at one point, had a three second gap. That gap would be eaten up lap after lap by a hard charging Bezzecchi who would overtake Fermin on the last lap to come back to victory. Raul Fernandez started the same as he finished in the ride of his career. Alex Marquez managed to clamber from 7th to 4th, with big brother finishing 6th after a long lap penalty from an overly aggressive move on Alex Rins. The full race would have much more over aggression from both Aprilia riders with some gnarly results.
The race begins and Bez again is blown away off the line and falls back. As he tries to charge up through the pack he carries far too much roll speed through a corner, stands his bike up as he rolls off, and careens into the back of Marc Marquez' ride. As Marc hit the gravel trap and tumbles his right shoulder augers into the gravel and leaves him with damaged ligaments and at least one minor fracture. Marc will miss at least the next two rounds, but he has already secured the championship and so will focus on recovery as needed. Bez would shoot by and lose the bike in the deep gravel, tumbling as well, but without incurring serious injury.
Fermin Aldeguer and Pedro Acosta went toe to to for the first few laps until Aldeguer got by Pedro and... disappeared into the distance. The rookie, now the second youngest to have won a MotoGP race, finished 7s (giving up ~1.5s on the last lap as he cruised to victory) ahead of his competition in a total demolition job. Acosta, meanwhile, kept up an incredible defense against Luca Marini and Raul Fernandez. In the end, Pedro was helped immensely by Fernandez' excessive aggression and dive bombing which, instead of waiting for Luca to dispatch Pedro, cost both of them positions and forced Luca to cede two spots by the end of the race. Marini 5th, Fernandez all the way down to 6th.
Alex Marquez was the big winner over the weekend as he managed a third place to put both Gresinis on the podium and cement his 2nd place lead.
Pecco Bagnaia crashed out of the race after only seven laps while running, by that time, about 20s behind the race leader. This must be extremely distressing for the rider to go from one extreme to the other. His only saving grace is that he was helped in his championship hopes for bronze by Bez taking himself out earlier on.
Next week MotoGP is at windy, weathersome, and bird-filled Philip Island, Australia.
That AI money cycle is true.
I made some cash on an Nvidia call, and promptly lost it on an AMD put.
The amount of money being invested on AI is insane.
Forget AI. I've got gold in my safe I need to cash out.
Are you AI? Hold the gold.
Gold's going to go above 4500?
I need to swap my wedding band for a smaller one and when I checked last year 14k gold rings were still less than platinum. (Purity and cost to manufacturer platinum his higher).
During Covid I invested in lead. You don’t need to stockpile anything else if you stockpile lead.
My lead has been depreciating
i think i disposed of more lead than i acquired during lolvid
Don’t worry. AI “friends” will be enough to carry the machine learning to the next generation. He will be Buster Friendly.
I saw a few videos of the shenanigans in Pigeon Forge. From my understanding there was a car show at the convention center in Sevierville. Many cars drive south and ended up in Pigeon Forge at a gas station called Jimmy's.
From social media, the owner usually doesn't mind the cars but it appears things got out of hand. They ended up cancelling the car show in Sevierville and apparently lots of folks are mad.
Now, what I don't get is why schedule a large car show during an extremely busy week adding to the overall strain in the area.
There is a reason why Jeep week or Thunder rally is after spring break in PCB.
Could you imagine Thunder Rally while spring breakers are partying?
"Other than generating some warm-and-fuzzy authoritarian-adjacent, teacher’s-little-pet, run-to-mommy feelings on the part of the people who work there, what effect could it possibly have?"
This is why they pay you the big bucks, Jack. I'm stealing this, by the way.
Jack, love the notion that you were the hinge in the Bari Weiss deal! You 'da man!!
What is the connection with Morris Dees? Isn't he the former SPLC guide who got caught with his hand in the "cookie jar", so to speak?
I pay no attention to auto vehicle racing, I don't even own a car. Uber serves our needs these days so please excuse my naivete: Is Zak Brown the country music guy or someone in motor racing?
Yes. Zak Brown is the head of McLaren, hand in United Autosports, a few other things. Zac Brown is the "chicken fried" singer amongst other things. His only connection to racing was being in the same hotel room as Kenny Habul when it got raided for coke.
Got it, many thanks. Love Zac Brown.
During COVID, the ownership of Grassroots Motorsports begged the community for donations to save the magazine. (It was never really clear why COVID meant it needed saving.) But when it turned out that the money wasn't necessary to save the magazine, the Suddards gave the money to the Southern Poverty Law Center for, like, no reason at all. They said that they were touched by the story of George Floyd.
A fair number of GRM supporters asked for their donations back; the Suddards declined.
Got it, Jack and thanks.
credit card dispute time!
Even better was when a subscriber/poster on their forum questioned the donation to SPLC, the publisher’s wife told the poster to die in a fire. Literally.
"Here’s the funny thing about selling out: it almost never solves your problems." Excellent take on Porsche's situation.
Although in the case of Porsche, it seems to have moved into the mo’ money, mo’ problems realm.
Lots of cash meant less focus, and trying silly things like buying VW
Excellent take on LIFE
"And forget that GRM in general is the equivalent of your Oberlin-grad wine aunt in terms of understanding even the most basic political concepts." 🤣 And they no longer have a tent at the Rolex 24, nor midnight garage tours or Sunday brunch. I still have a couple of their t-shirts though.
AI is definitely a trade, but long positions have thus far paid off immensely. A few companies will win, and those companies will be unfathomably valuable. Google? OpenAI? For the moment enjoy the ride but don’t get greedy if you are investing. Take some profits.
Oh, you mean like when I bought Bitcoin at 343 and sold at 1260 thinking it was a good return? Smacks head.
That was a very good return. When you make money on a trade that is what matters.
Microsoft. They always win with their hammerlock on business.
This AI stuff is really useful for data analysis and excel monkey tasks, so it’ll be interesting to see the investor types turn on themselves
The GM of computers.
Ouch!!
Porsche should go back to what it did in the '90's but it won't. They and BMW, Mercedes and Audi are now addicted to making moribund and weak SUV's to the masses.
Porsche cars like the 911, 944 and 928 had great traditions of air cooled, 6 or 8 cylinders with manual transmissions and uncontrollable handling. They were unique and had a German flavour. Now they are made in Eastern Europe and Malaysia and have a Dim Sum flavour. They are overgrown, overweight and way overpriced. Sure they're more refined. But that's like being hailed as better behaved ever since being convicted as an axe murderer.
They need to make money!
Most people are SUV first and those VPs and management who would previously buy the 911 or 928 in addition to the commuter BMW, Benz, or Audi are just buying one SUV now. Very few people have 3 cars nowadays, and as cost goes up they want one that does it all.
I bought the "to save the company" line for years, since the first Cayenne. I'm calling "bogus" as they backstroke through money and keep doing more and more stupid things ("Daddy says, no more ICE Boxters/Caymans -- oh wait! Just kidding!").
I would argue, however, that BMW has fallen even further than Porsche.
People don't want "one car that does it all", they want something that signals they're suave and urbane and successful. That's why they buy a Macan instead of a Q5.
FWIW, more people have 3 cars than at any time I can remember (I'm 62).
Exactly. Multiple-car garages are far more common than they were when the 911 was Porsche's core product.
Sure, but what I see living across 3 of America’s wealthiest zip codes is that far more people have 2 cars than you’d expect in the past for the successful types. It seems to split between 2 cars for the “non-car” people buying the SUVs and the car folks with 4+ vehicles.
That third sports car is less expected nowadays among the younger successful crowd.
As my 2 year old likes to say “daddy you have two motorcycles”
And soon to be 2 houses. Uh, anyone wanna buy a house?
Moving or vacation home?
I’ve got a house to sell too, market has been weird lately.
Call when you're looking at owning 4 houses, gathering rent from none of them, and paying rent to live in a 1 br walk-up.
I've lived that reality. It was as much fun as it sounds.
I'd recommend that you sell something quickly, before you and Mrs. A turn on each other.
Every rich guy I know (regardless of their age) has at least 3 cars. Most of them have at least 5.
I don't live in the proper zip-code to speak with any authority regarding trends and what the cool kids do -- but there are plenty of people in flyover country with more than enough money to do what they want with the loose change they find in the couch cushions.
Lots of them will buy a Tesla Model S gonzo-plaid double-pump pooper-scooper for their 3rd of 4th car, because it won't go more than 75 miles or so without a "supercharge" (and not the kind guys like me like) and is therefore worthless as a useful automobile, so it becomes a garage queen that will sometimes (inexplicably) be trotted out as giving them both car guy and modern man cred. They think it makes them an alpha dog to drive 0-60 in .3 seconds or whatever for the two times they can do it before the batteries overheat. But there ain't nobody getting groceries in that.
But they still have that 3rd car. Or toaster. Or something.
Had BMW really fallen, or is that just the rose colored enthusiast perception of what they were?
As someone a bit younger than you, I hear of BMW as the drivers car but the volume seemed to be more the YUPPIE type and that doesn’t seem to have changed much.
Regardless of the Yuppie's ~motivations~, in the olden days, he ended up with a durable, repairable, driver's car whether he wanted or appreciated it or not.
https://static.standard.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/image/2015/04/24/16/1980yuppies1.jpg?crop=8:5,smart&quality=75&auto=webp&width=1000
The several I had were driver's cars first and foremost.
Rich yuppies have been gravitating towards them since the 80s, but the predominant flavor of them was still centered around the experience of driving until about the turn of the millennium. That's when they decided they wanted to be a mass production company, rather than a sports sedan company. They are the new Roger Smith GM: bland in the extreme, odd styling, weird product choices, bad engineering.
I had a V8 E39 (non M5) 540i with a manual -- which might have been the perfect automobile, had it not been let down by its "electronics by the sainted German engineers" which have plagued all German autos since 1995 or so. That car was a sledgehammer in a velvet glove, and it made me giggle every time I drove it.
Apparently its a different type of douche who buy bmws now
BMW still makes accessible products with enthusiast intent. to get an enthusiast grade porsche you are spending at LEAST two hundo large. you can argue about whether you personally enjoy models like the 240, 340, M2/3/4, but to deny that they are appealing enthusiast options that are attainable without your dad having sold out to Oracle in the dot com era is to do a disservice to a brand that is at least trying (with varying degrees of success) to offer attainable, mass produced products for "people like us" (although after my last loaner, i question how this will work going forward)
porsche on the other hand has shown the type of deliberate disregard and disrespect to its core customer base for DECADES that is eerily reminiscent of how HK has treated its US customers ("HK: because fuck you") for probably just as long. lol, the cayman would suck and fuck all over a 911 with the same running gear so we're gonna nerf it. fuck you! entry level models? yeah, you get the four banger. actually, you liked the cayman too much, so we're making it an EV to punish you for your wrong opinions.
Hey, dim sum flavor can be good.
The crypto bros should be scared to death of quantum computing. If you can crack the crypto, crypto is worthless.
'The crypto bros should be scared to death of quantum computing. If you can crack the crypto, crypto is worthless.'
They should also be scared to death of the aliens, who could crack crypto, and are statistically more likely to arrive than the quantum computers.
$90k at Mercedes still get you the real wealthy person’s Benz in today’s America (and probably the best thing they sell) - the E450 wagon which still has the turbo I6.
It also gets you the most interesting current Benz, the GLE580 which is their only big motor non AMG left
GOOD CALL, both of them.
Although I'd rather put $26k more loan on my back and get the GLS580.
$26 is a big jump though, and to me the big German SUVs are less appealing than the mid-sizers. At that GLS price, I’d take a Navigator.
There’s a good chance one of those is my wife’s next car in 2 years, so we keep an eye on it. Hopefully they don’t ruin either model like BMW has been doing with the new interiors.
The Lincolns look sharp.
Jack, any thoughts on PittRace closing?
Not Jack, but: "Sunday OT: Meet Big Lex, Odyssey Track Test, Pitt Race Remembered, Ford Stumbles"
Paid subscribers only
https://www.avoidablecontact.com/p/sunday-ot-meet-big-lex-odyssey-track
This thought occurred to me today: Will AI make Hollywood accounting obsolete by removing all the human creatives from the production of entertainment, thus eliminating everyone there is to cheat out of royalties?
To produce a true AI, and by that I mean the artificial person Strong AI of science fiction, will require not only a different sort of technology than silicon-based computing but a proper understanding, or at least a serviceable guess, of how human consciousness works.
I suspect we'll eventually be able to simulate the thought processes of some of the higher animals - dogs, cats, your deadbeat brother-in-law - but truly human thinking is likely beyond us.
For me the funniest dumb thing Porsche did was kill off the ICE mid engined cars, promise the world " mid engined" EVs, realize they would sell less than 500 worldwide,invent a battery supply problem to shit can the EV, and announce, kind of, a new ICEish mid engined model for a few years from now.
When they had a great 10 year old design that sold a fair number of cars that are very pleasant, quite fast, well built and AREN'T 911s. I've had any number of people realize my various mids are Porsches but not 911 Porsches and that leaves folks confused.
Anyways, the new Boxster GTS 4.0 is now broken in, and continues to please the hell out of me. 3100lbs, 394hp, gorgeous old school interior, restrained styling, small but not tiny, 4second 0-60, and even half way decent electric steering. Had the dumbass management developed a new gen 718 instead of wasting their time with the EV, jeez.
'Had the dumbass management developed a new gen 718 instead of wasting their time with the EV, jeez.
I'm not sure that would have been a good idea. It would have been bigger, wider, and so on.
Probably the most useful thing I ever learned from Matt Farah was that he went on some fancy trip with the MINI people and they told him that every time they poll existing MINI owners...
EVERY TIME...
....they want the car to get bigger. Because they are aging, and as they age they want a bigger car with more capability. So MINI keeps making the car bigger. Which retains the existing buyers, but puts off the new buyers, and ages the demographics.
The same is true for the Boxster. It keeps getting bigger, because if you own a Boxster long enough you have all sorts of ideas for how you'd use a little more space. But you're no longer the customer. The guy 10 years younger than you is supposed to be the customer.
Entry level everything is dying, and these companies aren’t paying attention to bringing in new business. It’s all set up to listen to current customers and squeeze them dry as the worst parts of the SaaS model get distilled down to the MBAs running these places.
But that's the thing, the Boxster/ Cayman hasn't really gotten any bigger since 2005. I've had all of them, 987s, a 981 and two 718s, they're all pretty much the same. The 981/718 Cayman seems larger than the 987 because it's packaged a bit differently and it has a slightly longer wheelbase, but it weighs the same as a 987.
There is a subclass of 718 buyers who now shell out $200,000+ for the GTRS or Spyder RS. Hell, my GTS was $120,000. They ran out of allocations before they ran out of buyers. The overwhelming feeling in the forums or in the PCA section I like at the track is that the EV was a dead ender.
I know you like Farah but he is a dope. Bought an ugly Spyder RS and had DeMan do a dumb aircraft fuel octane engine for it so it could go into Panorama.
Oh, and I disagree about buyer desires on the Boxster. It's every owners 2nd or 3rd car. It fits two people just fine, it's wide enough that you don't rub elbows and has 2 trunks. Having also owned a 991 I think it's more practical. I'm pretty sure having a bigger Boxster isn't something that owners were clamoring for.
Miata.net is filled with the same poison. Effin' boomers, man.
Mazda has done a decent job ignoring them and still somehow selling lots of Miatas.