Wednesday ORT: Pop Goes The Hyundai, Autoblog Praises Hennessey, Debate, Dead Voters At My House

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when i find the dude who ran into the drivers door we’re gonna have a talk

Before we start, I’d like to thank the readers for their positive response to our last guest post by John Marks, and call your attention to another guest post arriving tomorrow, a sequel to A Snowy Night… from our friend April. Also, let’s give a warm Welcome To Substack! to fortunate daughter and vaguely witty NPC Taylor Lorenz, who found out the hard way that you can’t call Joe Biden a war criminal and still get work at the newspaper that was, almost literally, the last one to stop clapping at the accomplishments of his administration. After just one day, I regrettably note that she is clappin’ my subscriber cheeks by a ratio of eleven to one. The only thing I know for certain: it’s not because of her looks.

Can’t hide money (shifts)

Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip… ping of the ECU over-rev counter. At the age of eighteen, Christian Matzoros bought a 2022 Elantra N. Well, good for him, right? Three months ago, the engine failed while he was driving down the road. The Elantra had 46,000 kilometers, which if I recall correctly is either 30,000 miles or 300,000 miles, but Matzoros wasn’t worried, because he had purchased a warranty good for 7years/140,000km.

(Sidebar: the Hyundai Canada warranty is similar to the Hyundai USA warranty, with one important exception: the powertrain warranty is about half as long. However, in this case the original powertrain warranty should still have been in effect, in addition to his extended warranty.)

Three months later, the dealership presented him with a $10,000 bill. When the local news contacted Hyundai Canada, they said

a spokesperson said “Hyundai Canada has conducted a thorough investigation into the matter involving Mr. Matzoros’ Elantra N. After reviewing the vehicle’s engine data, which was retrieved through the Engine Control Unit (ECU) – a system that monitors and records engine performance for diagnostic purposes – it was determined the engine experienced conditions exceeding its designed operational limits, resulting in significant mechanical failure. These findings point to excessive engine revving, which falls outside the coverage of the vehicle’s warranty due to improper use.”

“The warranty for Hyundai vehicles covers defects in materials and workmanship under normal usage conditions. Damage caused by misuse, including exceeding the vehicle’s mechanical limits, is not covered. In this instance, the excessive stress caused by significantly exceeding the maximum recommended RPMs on multiple occasions falls outside the warranty parameters. We have provided a full explanation to Mr. Matzoros regarding the cause of the issue and the reasons for this decision.”

This particular Elantra N is equipped with a six-speed manual, and while it can’t over-rev on the throttle, presumably young Matzoros has been selecting third instead of fifth while making his runs at Toronto Motorsport Park, where he admits to drag-racing the car on the 1/4-mile strip. This is all pretty cut and dried…

…except for the fact that Hyundai has a fuel pump recall on this car. And it also appears that Hyundai Canada considers driving at the redline to be an abuse of the vehicle, as shown in this forum discussion of a Veloster N engine failure from 2022:

No, it wasn't a money shift issue. They are denying the whole issue based on the redline data from the ecu. The service manager rejected the warranty claim because of evidence the car was redlined at a racing event, which seems ridiculous considering the encouraging nature of the model's marketing materials.

It’s not hard to find discussions of engine failure in the “N” Hyundais, both from money shifts (which isn’t Hyundai’s fault) and seemingly regular operation (which makes you wonder). The DCT transmission in the car has also experienced significant issues and was the subject of a major recall for oil pump failure.

All of this is a shame, because while I can’t speak to the excellence of the Elantra N, having never driven one, I can tell you that the Veloster N was a brilliant automobile. I drove one at Grattan three or four years ago and was charmed beyond words. Arguably it had a little bit too much chassis for the available power, but that’s not a criticism we should be eager to make in a road-oriented car.

It should also be noted that the ascension of Hyundai/Kia/Genesis to a first-rate automaker, as exhaustively claimed and repeated by the automotive media over the past fifteen years, might be just a bit oversold. While it’s true that most of the company’s current products are hugely impressive in the short term, it’s equally true that the more complex vehicles — Genesis, Kia Stinger, and so on — appear to be far from trouble-free in real-world use. The experience that one of our readers had with the previous-generation G90 was heartbreaking to me; I reluctantly removed it from my “Dream Car For Not-Quite-Retirement Years” and penciled in “Lexus ES350 UL” to replace it.

As I was forcibly reminded during my time at Road&Track, the purpose of new-car automotive media is to sell cars, not comment on their likely future reliability. That being said, as people keep those cars longer, and as new cars become more and more expensive in comparison with real-world income, the stronger the case becomes for making consumer advocacy a part of “buff book” and website coverage. This goes double with regards to the cheerleading that’s been done lately for all sorts of unproven or problematic technology. In particular, there should be real caution shown when praising the performance of “solid-state” battery cars. Don’t hold your breath on that. Meanwhile, speaking of new-car consumer advocacy:

New Autoblog shills for old scumbag

these are the people who lecture you online about diversity

The news of Autoblog’s death has, it turns out, been greatly exaggerated. Sure, they got rid of all the people you couldn’t remember knew and for whom you had active, well-earned contempt loved, but the train kept-a-rollin’ with no breaks. Broadly speaking, the new articles don’t seem much different from the old ones, but one in particular caught my eye: a puff piece for the Hennessey Venom F5.

Let me make this as plain as possible: I have zero, nada, nilch respect for John Hennessey or anything he has ever accomplished. I advocate against purchasing any Hennessey product, down to and including the T-shirts, in the strongest possible terms. I am unaware of a single incident in which Hennessey or his products have met the expectations of his customers, but I am aware of several incidents in which he was taken to court for theft and fraud.

Hennessey and I have had one interaction, by the way. A few years ago I interviewed him at his Texas shop for Hagerty. During the interview, I reminded him of a Viper forum thread in which he threatened to pick a name from the thread at random, fly to that person’s home, and “make an example of his family”. He ended the interview shortly afterwards, then got on the phone to Hagerty PR, who then got on the phone to me, at which point I refused to write any article about Hennessey and his “Venom F5” whatsoever. Happily, I was still able to visit a Buc-ee’s while I was in the state.

I can’t think of any other personality in the auto world whose misdeeds have been so comprehensively and legally documented — but that hasn’t stopped Autoblog from publishing what amounts to a sales brochure entitled “Hennessey Venom F5 lineup: Inside the world’s fastest hypercar family”. It fails to mention the fact that a Venom went upside-down with David Donohue at the wheel, but you do get hard-hitting journalism like

It’s also worth noting that nearly every Venom F5 is a unique creation. Hennessey works closely with each customer to deliver bespoke options, including personalized paint jobs, interiors, seats, and even hidden Easter eggs within each car. With so much variation and such limited supply, it wouldn’t be surprising if each F5 ends up having its own nickname in the future—like a Rolex, but rarer and more exclusive.

Yeah, I bet the Venom F5 will have a nickname:

I feel compelled to point out that in my complete tour of the Hennessey facility, I didn’t see a lot of what you’d call “car-making” happening. I saw a lot of boxes of parts, and a lot of empty floor space. When I’ve visited other small-batch carmakers, including Bufori in Malaysia and the old Lotus Elise line at Hethel, their facilities didn’t look anything like the Hennessey building. You know, what with the whole “line of cars being built” part that I didn’t see at Hennessey.

At this point in the article, I was all prepared to write some slightly sheepish paragraphs about how, despite my disdain for Old Autoblog, the site was at least doing the bare minimum not to lead customers directly into a buzzsaw… but then I thought to look at the Internet Archive cached page for Hennesseey-on-Autoblog stuff. The old site basically served as a PR repository for Hennessey, creating 149 articles that, almost without exception, repeated the company’s claims as fact.

I had to use the Internet Archive for this because Autoblog has scrubbed most of its search results, and archived articles, since the transition. Oh well. Meet the new ‘Blog. Same as the old ‘Blog. Turns out nothing of value was lost.

VP Debate open discussion

Feel free to discuss the debate here; I didn’t see it. The conventional wisdom, from what I can tell after the fact, is that Vance triumphed over Walz in a generally friendly and factual discussion.

Welcome to Ohio, now let’s get your dead ass to the polls

I’ll preface this by saying that I was requested to write about it by the surviving relatives of the person to be discussed.

In January of this year, Danger Girl’s first husband lost his battle with cancer at an age that, were I to discuss it, would cause about 75% of my readership to shudder involuntarily. Their 20-year-old daughter, who had been going to school near her dad, then came to Ohio to live with us and campaign her new Spec Racer Ford in the OVR-SCCA. (DG is a fair bit younger than I am, but her daughter is older than my son because I spent my late teens and all of my twenties racing BMX, which is the most statistically effective means of preventing pregnancy yet discovered.)

The former Mr. Danger Girl, whom we’ll call Erik because that was his name, never lived anywhere besides Texas or New Mexico. He wasn’t particularly interested in politics, not in the modern Extremely Online sense, but as I understand it his sympathies were largely Blue and I believe that’s how he voted.

Erik’s death was recorded in Texas, and his will was settled under Texas law. Mini Danger Girl and her mom sold Erik’s house, paid his debts, and that was the end of the matter. Or was the end of the matter, until his voter registration form showed up at our house yesterday.

Prepared by Civitech, the form has Erik’s name and identifying information already printed on it. All I have to do is sign and return. I don’t even need to know his Social Security Number — it’s apparently acceptable to write “None” on line 10, where I should theoretically provide my SSN or government ID number. There’s even a postage-paid envelope! I can then vote by mail, as Erik.

I have a few questions about this:

• Other than a short period of mail forwarding, there’s been nothing recorded anywhere to associate Erik with my home address. So how was that done? Which records are being scraped for this?

• Civitech serves the Blue Tribe, as you can see from their list of partners above. Would they have done the same had Erik been a registered Republican? Is there an equivalent to Civitech that registers dead people to vote Red?

• Filling this out and voting with it would constitute a fifth-degree felony. How would they prove that I did it? Is anybody looking at these records to vet them for fraud? What would the penalty be, anyway? A fifth-degree felony isn’t much more than “spitting on the sidewalk” in Ohio.

• I can see this being a valuable service for living people who move from state to state, but — and this is the big one — there’s really no public record associating Erik with my address that is not also, in some way, associated with his death. So, does Civitech know Erik is dead? Let’s assume that they didn’t do something as vile as scour the death records. Do they have a database somewhere, linked to an algo that estimates the percentage chance of Erik being a living, legitimate voter? What percentage is that algo currently showing?

In a state without mail-in voting, of course, this is a much riskier proposition. In a state with voter ID requirements, it is, as Neil McCauley would say, “an address to a cowboy score.” Here in Ohio, it would likely fly. Don’t worry — I’m not going to use it to bolster the prospects of Senator Vance or Governor Walz. I’ll probably just mosey down to my local polling place on the day and fill out my own legal ballot, on which I will write in “Carlton Douglas Ridenhour” for president.

(He’s not running, but without some encouragement we’ll never get him to run.)

Danger Girl is personally offended at the idea of some faceless “voter tech” corporation using her dead husband, who is generally acknowledged to be a decent fellow, as a literal pawn in our political struggles. I think it’s probably more harmless than that. Someone paid Civitech several million dollars to make sure that no Democrat moves without receiving a pre-filled voter form in their new home. The vast majority of those people are still alive.

That being said, this episode brings my temperature regarding voter-ID laws up from “lukewarm” to “hot stove”. We probably didn’t need them a hundred years ago, when most people would have been personally known to their poll workers. That’s no longer the case — at least it’s no longer the case outside my township. The poll worker last year knew who I was when I walked in.

Everything requires identification now. Most of you have probably gone through some form of the modern humiliation ritual where you have to take a “selfie” and submit it, along with a picture of your ID, for anything from an employment application to an online pharmacy to renewing your tags at the DMV website.

Delegates at the DNC were required to show ID. Amazon workers who vote on unionization are required to vote in person with state ID — because the rate at which Amazon compensates its warehouse labor is de facto more important than which tentacle of the Uniparty sits in the White House. While it’s nominally possible to get on a plane without ID, ask anyone who has gone through the process — it’s miserable.

I have no idea if the amount of vote fraud in this country is significant or not. I’m not sure which avenues of vote fraud are most commonly exploited. Hell, for all I know the Dominion machines pretend to take our votes then the actual selection of the President is done by Oprah, Katie Couric, and P-Diddy. I do know this, however: in an era of nearly unprecedented division across the country, any measures that reduce the appearance of impropriety should be pursued with all possible speed and effort. In 2016, they said the Russians stole the election. In 2020, they said that the boarded-up vote-counting offices stole the election. You’d be a fool to think that an even stronger claim will not be made in 2024.

It’s not hard to get a state ID. My son had to get one so he could scoop ice cream for a summer job, at the age of 14. When I worked in the check-cashing industry — O happy days! — I cashed millions of dollars’ worth of welfare payments for people who didn’t have a car, a job, or a fixed address, but who nonetheless had a state ID. The politicians who publicly act as if requiring a legitimate ID to vote is the same as making every person of color in this country pass “the gom jabbar” are doing a disservice to the people they claim to represent.

I invite my Blue readers, or readers who have a philosophical objection to the idea of verified in-person voting, to argue the contrary. Compelling and/or amusing arguments will be pinned immediately, with my thanks. As always, thank you for being decent to each other.