Wednesday ORT: Penny Stuck, Ollee Watch, PittRace Auction, EU Blinks, PORSH TURBO

All subscribers welcome

Good evening friends. A reminder: this is an Open Thread, so feel free to add any topics of discussion except Olivia Nuzzi. I have nothing personal against her, but if I had a nickel for every female journalist who behaved like a bonobo behind closed doors while publicly scolding the whole world about morality, I’d be able to make every episode of this Substack free.

Brass in pocket, but no more copper

The penny has been in production at various iterations of the US Mint for about 230 years, but no longer. Apparently they cost 3.7 cents each to make. I have no trouble believing that. Even stainless steel washers from China in bulk packaging are worth more than a penny each nowadays.

If my local McDonald’s is any guideline, this will slightly increase prices overall. They’re rounding down to the nearest nickel for totals ending in “1” and “2”, and rounding up for “3” and “4”. (The same is true for 6/7 and 8/9.) Most consumer prices outside WalMart and Costco end in 8 or 9, but that’s really only relevant for food and other untaxed items.

As a child, I filled the Seventies-era “Snoopy Penny Book”, as did many of my classmates. If any of the pennies I found ever became valuable, I certainly failed to take advantage of that increase in value.

The penny was always going to fall to inflation eventually, but I have to think that our transition to a largely cashless economy has advanced its demise. I can’t help but audibly groan when the person in front of me at a store decides to pay in cash. Moving out to the township has exposed me to many more such transactions than I ever saw in the suburbs. Today the card reader at my Shell station was borked so I walked in to the building and wasted eight minutes of my life behind three people who were paying cash in the absolute most leisurely manner possible.

There’s something disreputable about cash in any quantity now, but especially in the gas-station quantity. No doubt the sheer unpleasantness of handling money has something to do with it. As privacy-compromising and bugman-compatible as NFC credit cards are, I absolutely delight in having to not touch anything that another human being has recently touched. Tap and go.

Capital One states that cash is used in just eleven percent of consumer transactions nowadays. There’s something ironic about the fact that we are going to change all of our purchases to account for a coin that no one wants to use anyway.

I continue to recommend the hoarding of pennies; they’re like copper pipes that you can read and examine when you get bored.

Speaking of pennies on the dollar

I’ve recently heard an interesting rumor, a bit second-hand or possibly third-hand, to the effect that the PittRace owners were threatened by Pennsylvania officials with eminent domain if they didn’t get out of the way of the datacenter. If true, it sheds some light on the damp-squib, Baltimore-Colts-esque nature of the closure.

Now we have the auction of the track’s assets, which includes a surprising number of architectural and structural items including the signage and the toilet doors. Feel free to post your most interesting finds from the 550-plus items on the list. A lot of attention will likely go to the eight “autonomous testing” BMW 540i sedans on the property.

I was never a huge Pitt Race fan, and I hate the idea of all the “supercar dorks” coming over to Nelson Ledges and Instagramming their “hot laps” at ten seconds off my son’s pace in a Honda Accord, but I’m gonna bid on something. It was a brave and important thing to build and run. I’m sorry it’s gone, and I’m sorry it’s going out like this.

Well, I know what I’ll be doing in an upcoming weekend

Casio’s Module 593 is a genuine powerhouse of the horology world. It’s the “movement” behind every example of the famous F-91W, a few examples of which have been given away here on ACF. It’s also behind fancier efforts like the metal-finish A158 and the cheapest First-World-made watch on sale anywhere, the Japanese A159W. In most instances, it’s accurate to within ten seconds a month. The only charge you can lay against it is that it’s not terribly feature-packed by 2025 standards.

The Ollee Watch changes that. It replaces the Module 593 in any of the Casio watches that use it. You get Bluetooth connectivity and about 30 different features including step tracking, a few very simple on-screen video games, RGB backlight, temperature measurement, and other features that are still in development. Get it for $55 and install it in your existing watch, or buy a pre-installed one for $99.

I recently bought a gold Japanese A159 that I’m going to convert to an Ollee. I think it’s fascinating. There’s one big issue with it: battery life drops from 7-10 years to 6 months or thereabouts. This would be less of an issue if the battery weren’t such a hassle to change. Still. Let’s say you live in Lagos, Johannesburg, London, or any other major city where people are getting their hands chopped off during watch thefts. This would be a nice way to have some functionality and your fingers intact.

Now we just need someone to come up with an adapter for the Apple Watch that converts it to an ETA 2824-2.

Turns out a change is not gonna come

As the photo above shows, I had the rare pleasure of photographing a Mercedes EQS the other day, from the comfort of my mighty Lexus LS430. The EQS had apparently suffered a charging flap failure, so the owner had secured the flap with black duct tape… which didn’t hold once they got on the freeway.

This episode just confirmed my general impression that the EQS is an utter disgrace and a blight on the S-Klasse designation, which prior to this had only been applied to

a) the finest sedans sold in the world at any given time;

b) the W220.

You know who else probably feels that way? Ola Källenius, the Mercedes-Benz CEO. And he’s doing something against it: pushing hard against the pathetic and ridiculous 2035 EV mandate in the European Union. It now appears that he might get his way. A recent interview in The Verge suggests he has gotten the attention of European regulators in general and German politicians in particular.

Let’s face it: Germany is in worse trouble than it’s been at any time since 1944. An absurdly permissive, even submissive, attitude towards immigration has the country reeling under a tidal wave of rape, assault, crime, and willful unemployment. Most of their munitions have been given to Ukraine, and their energy prices are sky-high. The automotive sector has been a rare high point, employing 800,000 people and making serious money with it, but it’s obvious to any sane person that the 2035 mandate will kill that business and plunge the country into hard recession:

Källenius noted that even after 2035 there would still be more than 200 million conventional cars on the road. Without alternative fuels and new ICE cars to replace them they would age, risking “a ‘Havana effect’ that would cause our vehicle fleet to grow even older, harming both the climate and the economy.”

Germany is lobbying to weaken the ban and create a longer transition period. The German economy is barely growing after two years of recession. The auto industry’s troubles go back a lot further. Auto production in Germany peaked in 1998, but fell 25 percent in the wake of covid in 2020, and has declined every year since. And now German automakers face new competition from lower-cost Chinese vehicles.

The country’s political leaders are alarmed because of the nearly 800,000 jobs that the industry provides and because economic uncertainty is fueling a rise of support for right-wing populism. Against this backdrop, the government is throwing its weight behind industry demands to roll back climate goals and throw core gas-powered cars a lifeline.

“There will be no hard cut” in 2035, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz pledged after a meeting with auto industry leaders in September.

Italics and bolding are mine. You see, the German mandarins and EU tyrants would happily let every German man, woman, and child eat drywall dust in the name of climate change — but since the average German’s response to this forcible deprivation has been not to lean over and take it Olivia-Nuzzi-style but instead to vote for the AfD, something must be done lest Germany lose its 25-year tradition of being governed by people who hate it.

Since Germany is the only functioning country in the EU, something will certainly be done. If I had to guess, the deal is already done behind closed doors, or close to it, because the Germans tend to work on a 6-year or thereabouts engineering cycle for new vehicles. Unless they get the alles klar in the near future, Mercedes-Benz risks being in the position of having engineered no new volume platforms. Which would basically make them the General Motors of Germany.

Or we could just double down on this remarkably stupid idea instead

the unsolved problem: it sucks balls

If Motor Trend didn’t exist, I would have to make it up just so I’d have a completely predictable punching bag. The well-respected (by no one) Scott Evans, once briefly famous for launching a Cadillac CTS 150 feet into the trees during a lead-follow street drive, has managed to combine the two core Motor Trend functions of

a) mindlessly promoting EVs

b) mindlessly promoting Porsche

in a single, and absolutely astounding, article.

The car that changed everything for Porsche, the Cayenne, is poised to do it again. This time, it’s not changing body styles but powertrains. The 2026 Porsche Cayenne Electric looks ready to solve nearly every issue dragging on EV adoption and potentially reverse the company’s fortunes.

If it does, it couldn’t have come at a better time. Porsche’s profitability has taken a staggering hit as massive EV investments run square into the reality that widespread electric car adoption isn’t growing as fast as many companies projected when they authorized those investments (plus a massive shift in Chinese customer interest). The Cayenne Electric has an answer for almost any reason you can point to as to why people aren’t switching to EVs quicker.

Bolding and italics mine. Can you imagine actually committing this to the public record? Evans is being wasted in Ed “Down” Loh’s slop shop. He could be writing press releases for the White Star Line.

The top-dog Cayenne Turbo Electric produces up to 1,139 hp and 1,106 lb-ft of torque in Launch Control mode from just two electric motors, one front and one rear. With that, it will hit 60 mph from a stop in 2.4 seconds by Porsche’s typically conservative estimate. From there, the company says it’ll do a quarter-mile run in 9.9 seconds, which would shatter our SUV record and put it among the quickest cars of any type on the market. Top speed: 162 mph.

Finally! A fast (in a straight line) EV! Since the last battery car of which I’m aware was the GM EV-1, I can only assume that this is the biggest deal since Pets.com.

You can also tow with it, up to 7,716 pounds. That’s more than enough to cover your typical camping trailer or moderately sized boat, and with more than 350 miles of range unladen, it’ll likely go 175 miles while towing and getting about three hours down the road between charging stops.

175 miles, my ass. Maybe if you’re towing that 1200-pound Scamp trailer that Fat Brad and his wife were gonna live in. (If Brad and Mandy are in the trailer, I personally and scientifically estimate towing range as “don’t.”)

The Ford Lightning is getting 90-mile tow ranges in real-world use. This won’t be better. It also looks like a Futurama meme:

It’s also Fully Prole Screened, with almost a BYD Dolphin’s worth of LCD:

This massive, bloated, 5,860-pound piece of trash is going to sell for $165,350. I’m not sure how it “solves every EV problem but one”. The only problem I see it solving is that if you bought this instead of a gas Cayenne, you’d never have to replace the turbos or seals.

Let’s hope Ola Källenius succeeds in his mission to make cars like this at least temporarily irrelevant. I might gripe about Porsche more than a little bit but I also spent twenty years of my life behind a Stuttgart-crested steering wheel. The people who genuinely love the brand deserve more, and better, than this.