Wednesday ORT: Planked, ADM for IS5 and 'Lude, Factory Zero, BYD Anti-Tourism, Altima, GX

Make It An ACF Christmas and Black Friday!

I’ve gotten enough done that I can now confidently predict this. Cat Tales: Four Years Of Friends And Ferals should be available for purchase by December 15th, outlets and terms to be announced as soon as I know them. Rewritten and expanded print-only versions of the fifteen stories appearing on this site will be accompanied by five new chapters: “Itinerant And Local”, “Daughters”, “The Domestication Of Tiger Dad”, “#5922”, and “Mama Runs The Voodoo Down”. Trackday Club members will receive the full e-book in their mail. I strongly encourage all of you to buy Cat Tales as a gift for the people in your lives who will be utterly bewildered by it.

I am hoping to have the companion website up by Christmas; it will feature photographs by The Commander of some notable feline personages from the book.

If, like me, you’re a little pinched for the holidays, and you’d like to give some free gifts: Between now and New Year’s Day, all paid subscribers can give a 90 day subscription to someone else. Just email me, jbaruth at gmail, with the email address of the desired recipient. If you’re not emailing me from the address associated with your username, put that username in the email. Trackday Club members can give two full annual subscriptions, under the same rules.

Tomorrow I will have the usual Made In USA: Black Friday Edition post up. Please contribute as you like. Off we go, and remember it’s an Open Thread. You’re allowed to talk about Olivia Nuzzi, Campbell Soup, or anything else…

Well, now it’s interesting

A bit of breaking news today: Adrian Newey will be the Aston Martin F1 Team Principal next year, with the existing TP, Andy Cowell, moving to Chief Strategy Officer where he can focus on managing the relationship between Aston Martin and the powertrain supplier in 2026, Honda.

Like many of you, I read Newey’s book when it came out six years ago; perhaps like some of you, I thought it revealed Newey to be a bit of a single-purpose device without much in the way of people skills or even strategic vision. Clearly he is one of the finest (if not the finest) senior engineers in Formula One history. I do not think he will be a great team principal. The men who do that job well tend to be delegation-oriented leaders with an ability to see beyond the car itself. If you asked me to pick the best TP in the sport right now, I would have to say it’s Toto Wolff. Historically, it’s either Jean Todt or Ron Dennis. Probably the latter. Christian Horner was astoundingly successful but he frequently proved inept at managing intra-team difficulties when he wasn’t simping over hard fours. The best thing Horner ever did was leave Adrian Newey alone to work on the aero — ironically, that is the one thing that Adrian Newey will not be able to do on his own behalf.

(Apropos of nothing, Red Bull has reportedly paid off everyone involved, with Horner gettting 80 million UKP and Fiona Hewiston getting 3 million UKP as goodbye handshakes.)

Alright, back to the race. The much-used meme was once again appropriate:

The numbers support this: Verstappen has 69 GP victories and 47 pole positions, while Norris has 11 wins and 16 pole positions. To put this in terms that Yankees fans will understand: Max is Reggie Jackson, while Lando is Dave Winfield. And so it proved on Saturday night. There’s only so much you can say about Max before it becomes tiresome. He is as good as anyone has ever been, and he only improves under pressure.

Not improving under pressure: McLaren engineers, who let the car ride too low in pursuit of pace that would allow Lando to dispense with Max before the self-doubt started. The double disqualification of the Papaya cars means that Max is tied with Oscar, and 24 points behind Lando. Everyone’s doing the math, but it boils down to: If Max finishes both GPs and the Sprint in first and Lando is right behind him, then Lando still wins the WDC by nine points. The obvious solution: Yuki needs to bump into Lando while he is getting lapped. You just know that Flavio Briatore would do it that way, right?

Other notes:

• Toto Wolff looks like more of a genius every day, and not just because he just cleared an extra billion dollars selling part of his team share. Princess George just keeps getting better; he will never be Senna or Michael but he gets a lot out of the car and he no longer makes stupid mistakes. Meanwhile, young Kimi Antonelli is on a course to beat Lewis Hamilton in overall points by the end of the year. Whether young Kimi eventually surpasses George or doesn’t, this is a strong team with two drivers who have relatively little prima-donna behavior in them.

• We all understand that Carlos Sainz is the lead Williams driver now, right? Albon’s radio excerpts are starting to sound like Joan Crawford discussing wire clothers hangers.

• If you’d taken a drink every time across the weekend that the F1 TV commentary team started breathlessly enthusing about Lewis Hamilton’s performance, you’d be dead or in jail right now. In reality, Lewis is basically the Yuki Tsunoda of Ferrari, minus the part where Yuki does all the in-race data collection on behalf of his world champion teammate.

• Gabriel Bortoleto is down bad, isn’t he?

• Apparently the Cadillac F1 team decided to release some swag at Las Vegas, against the wishes of Liberty Media. One pundit described the swag thusly: “$70 for a XXL Gildan 500 from a corporate team building exercise volunteer day in July.” It was awful.

• The non-taxpayer-funded American team, Haas, continues to look pretty good, by the way. I don’t know if Ocon is the right man to have in the car, but Oliver Bearman absolutely is.

One thing you can say about F1 in general and the FIA in particular: I don’t hear anyone suggesting that the disqualification was done for competitive or financial reasons. In NASCAR, you’d have doubts, wouldn’t you?

Now how much will you pay?

I don’t know how legit this picture is, and I haven’t been able to get any general idea of dealer sentiment with a few calls, but it does seem like the new Prelude, which is already strongly priced at nearly $44k including destination, will be the subject of additional dealer markup in the early months of its arrival.

This is how the Pontiac GTO got run out of the market, of course, but it’s also been the bane of other high-profile sporting-car debuts over the past few years. To my knowledge, the only time it didn’t kill the vibe was the Hellcat, and that was only because Dodge made it obvious that production would be essentially unlimited, plus they did the Demon on top of it to absorb all the drama and dealer stupidity.

That being said, I think people will pay $61,714 or more for Preludes, and here’s why: there are a lot of Millennials and Gen Xers who can spend that kind of money out of their recreational investment accounts without thinking twice. So the dealer wants twenty grand on top; you made twenty grand in the market last week, without thinking about it. If the ‘Lude is sufficiently rare, the way a Patek Nautilus or Rolex Platona is rare — meaning “we made a lot of them but there are also a lot of buyers” — then why not?

I guarantee you there are a lot of men out there who see the Prelude not as $61,714 but rather as 0.7 BTC. If you bought BTC at $15k or even $1000, then the car is almost free. That doesn’t mean the Prelude will retain value over the long run. Expect them to be pretty cheap in five years.

A car that will not be cheap in five years:

If you have the ability to do this, run don’t walk to your local Lexus dealership and make sure you get one of the final IS500 Ultimate Editions. Especially if your dealer, like this Connecticut dealer, isn’t marking them up. This is a car that will depreciate in glacial terms. Not convinced? Let’s see what the old ones go for:

That’s right: a 16-year-old car with 206,335 miles is selling for 45% of MSRP. If you want one with just 100,000 miles, be prepared to pay a lot more.

When I bought my 300C 392 a few years ago, my second-place contender was the IS500. I think I made the right choice because the Chrysler is tremendous unfiltered white-trash fun in a way that the V-8 Toyota simply can’t duplicate — but I am not stupid enough to think I made the right financial choice. The day will eventually come when you can get four Scat Packs for the price of one IS500.

Obviously many of us have seen this play out before; back in 1980 most of us thought the V-8 was dead and the future was slow. This time, however, I am less sanguine about the industry finding its way back to sanity. Even if we can reverse this ridiculous tide of EVs and three-cylinder turbos, there just isn’t the same kind of enthusiast buyer base out there any more. The future of performance cars looks a little Cuba-esque, I’d say. Doubly so if your idea of a performance car doesn’t involve a pinwheel, a battery, or both.

Speaking of V-8 Toyotas

It would be impossible to overstate just how charmed I’ve been during my first five thousand miles of LS430 ownership. Head to head, mind you, Big Lex was not equal to a Phaeton when it was built back in 2005 . There’s a thousand pounds of curb weight between them, eight inches of length. The LS430 isn’t really a full-sized car; it’s like the Scharnhorst of D-class sedans, closer in size to a 545i than to a 745i. 34-year-old Jack Baruth didn’t even bother to test-drive an LS before signing up for two Phaetons and the occasional company-car use of an A8 4.2. Looking back, I don’t blame him. The difference between an LS430 and a Phaeton, when new, is like the difference between a Yamaha acoustic guitar and a Martin D-45. They’re both great but only the latter is special.

Twenty years and 189,000 miles later, however, the Lexus is still very much on its feet as a usable daily driver. Which isn’t something you could say about any 2005-era German full-sized car in the present day. The Phaeton was built to lease, but the Lexus was built to last.

Not built to last, by the way: Mini Danger Girl’s Chevrolet Avalanche. Maintained without respect to effort or cost, first by her now-departed father then by my own shop, the Chevy was becoming more than a bit ratty and displaying the symptoms of incipient displacement-on-demand valvetrain failure. It was also one of the vehicles covered by the 5.3-liter class action suit, although as an Ohio resident MDG didn’t get a shot at that $3,000 payoff.

Doing the AFM fix, swapping tires, and doing other good-idea maintenance on the Avalanche would have run close to five grand. On a truck that really never liked to tow and which MDG doesn’t particularly enjoy operating in bad weather. So I dragged her into a Lexus-shopping episode with all the manic fervor of a recent convert to The Church Of The Fancy Toyota. We found one that had been garaged in my old suburb and which hadn’t had a single service issue in 80,000 trouble-free miles. Even better, it had the fancy red interior in NuLuxe, which is a fancy way of saying vinyl.

Unlike me, MDG is not an unemployed derelict of a human being rapidly disappearing from everyone’s notice and respect like Kevin Spacey in “American Beauty”, so it was no trouble for her to swap the Chevy for the Lexus and keep on truckin’. It’s essentially a new vehicle, with no signs of wear or use on it. Doesn’t even have the trailer hitch, so we will have to bolt one in before the race season restarts.

The GX460 was more or less the same from 2010 to 2023, and it wasn’t even a completely clean-sheet design in 2010. So Car and Driver always flayed it alive, giving it last place in a comparison test against the Land Rover LR4, Audi Q7, and other cars that are justly infamous for not lasting five years in regular use. Really, it’s nothing but a Land Cruiser Prado with a V-8. Which is another way of saying it’s nothing but a 4Runner with a higher roof and a V-8. It’s actually cheaper to buy used than the equivalent 4Runner TRD Pro.

The Lexus-ification of the GX460 sits pretty lightly on the Prado; they basically painted some of the interior silver, threw some wood at the dash and wheel, then called it a day. As a former Land Rover Discovery owner, I immediately understood exactly how to operate it, right down to the silly side-opening rear door.

We expect it to give another 100,000 miles worth of trouble-free service and then some. Compared to the chipped-out BMW X5 diesels that the kids in our race crew absolutely adore, the GX has zero “rizz” whatsoever. Doesn’t matter. Last week, Asheville Hustle author Andrew White noted that criminals, like the “chopper” motorcycles they ride, tend to be “here for a good time, not a long time.” With this GX460, we expect the reverse to be true.

They called it that because it makes Zero vehicles that anyone wants

and over here, mr. president, is where we are gonna lay off all the fathers and mothers right before christmas

Something I failed to mention about our Lexus GX460 buying experience: we got it from the same Chevy/GMC dealer where I bought “Tonka” the Canyon Denali four years ago. This dealer has one example each of the Silverado EV and Sierra EV. “They are going to be… a tough sell, despite aggressive re-pricing,” was the verdict of the F&I manager. I feel bad for the guy; together those two pieces of junk reflect $160,000 worth of floorplan load, and they aren’t going anywhere.

As bad as it is to have two GM EV trucks on your floorplan, however, imagine you were in the business of making them. That’s way worse. So Mary Barra is handling it as only she can, by laying-off 1,140 people from “Factory Zero” right before Christmas. The Factory Zero was known as Detroit/Hamtramck Assembly for about forty years; it built Sevilles, Eldorados, Lucernes, Impalas, and other cars that were actually purchased by real live customers with actual US dollars. The Impala, LaCrosse, and Cadillac CT6 were sent to early graves so Detroit/Hamtrack could undergo a Dunder-Mifflin Infinity rebranding as “Factory Zero”.

Factory Zero builds: the Silverado EV, the Sierra EV, the Escalade IQ, and the Hummer EV. Which is strange, because that also happens to be a list of “The Vehicles Most Unlikely To Be Sold By A GM Dealership Under Any Circumstances.”

It’s the BrightDrop fiasco redux. Once again, GM took a profitable plant making profitable vehicles and shitcanned it so they could build an EV daycare center. Once again, the numbers aren’t working out. Once again, the hard-working men and women who live near the factory are going to go home empty-handed for the holidays. Once again, Mary Barra and Mark Reuss will vote themselves massive bonuses for doing the fiscally responsible thing. If you’ve wondered why young people vote for someone like Zohran Mamdani, it’s because this sort of corporate behavior has become business as usual under the past few administrations. There was once a time where a Democratic administration would have been lion-like in the defense of organized labor and living-wage jobs. Nowadays it’s more important to get climate brownie points — and you can’t argue against the Sierra and Silverado EV being great for the environment. Nobody buys them and they don’t go anywhere. Environment: saved!

The enemy of my enemy is… actually, I don’t know them at all

If you could take just one important concept away from being an ACF reader: I hope it would be the following:

It is the common characteristic of intellectually deficient people to focus on the failings of their neighbors while assuming the very best of external entities.

I call this “Avatar Brain”, after the goofy film where a crippled Marine literally betrays the human race in favor of aliens and is somehow the good guy at the end of it. It’s a reversal of xenophobia; you have an irrational love of foreigners and the unknown. The cheap-labor crowd loves Avatar Brain people, by the way. If you’ve ever heard some Boomer (or Xer, I suppose) going on and on about how hardworking immigrants are when compared to Americans… that’s Avatar Brain. Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino has a massive case of it.

The opinion-industrial complex, on Substack and elsewhere, is currently gloating over the fact that BYD has overtaken Tesla in global sales. They are happy about this because Elon Musk is totally a Nazi who hates everyone but white people. If they had any sense, they would take a moment to inquire regarding how BYD’s executives, and indeed the Chinese people as a whole, feel about “brown folks”. I can give you a hint:

For what it’s worth, I think a lot of the “buff book” attitude towards foreign and domestic cars during the Seventies and Eighties was driven by this same impulse. The autowriters saw that Detroit executives lived like kings — and, worse yet, the men who worked the assembly lines also lived pretty well. It bred resentment. Meanwhile, the “inscrutable Japanese” and “precision Teutons” overseas weren’t flaunting their “Jobbie Nooner” lifestyles in the face of Jean Lindamood et al.

Which isn’t to say that Hondas and Toyotas weren’t better than Chevrolets and Fords, because they were. But the buff books tended to ignore issues that Japanese automakers handled poorly — rust resistance, NVH, crash safety — while harping endlessly on what their neighbors did wrong.

Today’s Chinese puff-piece writers like Kevin Williams are no different. They bitterly resent the existing players like Tesla while cheerleading strangers like BYD. I’m 99% sure that Elon Musk and Kevin Williams have a lot more in common than, say, Wang Chuanfu of BYD and Kevin Williams do. Since Kevin isn’t smart enough to understand that, he will continue to shill for foreign interests that are somewhere between “chaotic neutral” and “active evil”.

As Steve Perry sings, the party’s over

I guess this is it for the Altima. I can’t say I’m happy about it. Over the years, Nissan has made some brilliant cars with that nameplate. The original 2.4-liter/5-speed Altima was a damned good car that was comfortable, great to drive, and awfully durable. Later on, the 3.5-liter/6-speed versions were about as exciting an affordable sedan as anyone had ever manufactured. Heck, they even had a 248-horse VC Turbo Altima for the last few years.

Made with pride in Tennessee and capable of dealing with owners that ranged from careless to hateful, the Altima was a great example of a solid, high-quality modern sedan. Yes, it acquired the “hoodville” reputation near the end, because Nissan was willing to finance a lot of questionable buyers. Ask yourself: what’s wrong with that? What was wrong with putting lower-income people into a first-rate sedan? Should decent cars be reserved exclusively for the 800-beacon crowd?

If you can find an Altima that has been maintained and looked after, you will find that it’s a good vehicle, and worthy of your attention. We are poorer for its loss.