Wednesday ORT: Savoy and Speed Triple, Checo's Back, BMW Bottoms, Fuel Fetish, CDG Brilliance, 7 Lean Years

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you won’t see yourself coming *or* going

Housekeeping: We have so many topics to cover this week, I’m going to run another OT tomorrow to make sure nothing gets left out.

A brief commercial message: Our own Toly Arutunoff’s art-car MGA is on Bring-A-Trailer. You needn’t be an exceptionally self-confident patrol of automobiles and the avant-garde to buy it, but that wouldn’t hurt.

Another one: An ACFer has a great motorcycle for sale at a giveaway price.

“Triumph Speed Triple. 13k miles. Actual is 12,9** Front brake handle is broken. Replacement is on the way and will be installed. Rear brakes have just been bled. New oil and filter. New battery. There is no body damage, it has frame sliders and an aftermarket arrow exhaust. I have the original exhaust somewhere in a box. Tires are old enough I wouldn't ride it far without changing them but I've taken it to work and back without issues.” He bought another Speed Triple so you know he’s convinced by the bike. $3500 or possibly less to an ACF reader. If you want to be put in touch, comment below. Someone please buy this motorcycle before I do. What a deal.

Not the oldest two guys to ever drive a Cadillac, but…

If these aren’t the four safest hands available in F1, they aren’t far off. However, I still don’t have my head wrapped around the idea that there will actually be a Cadillac F1 car ready to start the 2026 season. I don’t see that any of the players involved, whether Andretti or WTR or GM, have any relevant experience outside spec or BoP series. This will be the first time in decades that GM can’t make a phone call to get a rule or an allowance made for them. Some of you will remember how World Challenge let Heinricy & Co. basically re-engineer the CTS with a dropped body and relocated engine; there are, as they say, many such stories.

Your humble author had some formative experiences from 2009 to 2011 or thereabouts. I had occasion to deal with senior GM people on several occasions. I’d always assumed that the General’s executives were deeply and permanently ashamed. Of: giving away the car market to Japan, releasing safety tragedies like the X-car, requiring a public bailout, failing for 30 years or more to field even vaguely competitive entries in several major market segments, and so on.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. Nearly every GMer I ever met was deeply arrogant, self-satisfied, dismissive of the competition both across town and overseas. They all thought they were doing great. The attitudes described by John Z. and David E. hadn’t materially changed, even though the circumstances certainly had. The most fascinating part of it, to me, was that I never met anyone who thought of himself or herself as an employee of a car company that needed to change its ways. Instead there was a lot of pride regarding their individual progression through GM. Like Milton’s Satan. Here we may reign secure, though in hell!

By contrast, my meeting with Gene Haas prior to his debut Formula One race revealed a man who was confident and determined but very far from self-satisfied. He has an active and curious mind, and he is dedicated to results above everything else. The only arrogant thing he said to me in our whole time together was that he could afford to run the F1 team indefinitely, without major sponsors. Which was such an astoundingly ludicrous boast I made sure to get it in the article, as-is.

That was ten years of not having major sponsors ago.

It helps when you make the CNC machines yourself, of course — but I think GM will struggle to ever do as well as Haas, on the pure grounds of moral and intellectual inferiority.

When the locals don’t get a say in the ad campaign

A bunch of you scalawags sent me this yesterday: this is how BMW is promoting the new M3 Competition. Built around the core traditional M3 virtues of: 500hp, all-wheel-drive, four doors, ZF8 automatic transmission, and two-ton curb weight, the Competition is sure to delight college students from Hong Kong to Vancouver. The marketing, however, seems a bit… well, I think the kids would call it queer-coded.

Except I don’t think it’s intentional. I think it came this way from Germany and the locals got tired of trying to talk the Fatherland out of it. Or they just had a really bad translator. At a minimum, this should be “admire the outside / respect the inside.” Right? Or maybe they’re deliberately targeting the friends of Dorothy. Which is ridiculous. I have quite a few gay pals, but none of them are gay enough for this thing.

At a reasonable $92,000 as commonly equipped, the M3 Competition is a great way to sit in Los Angeles traffic. I say “reasonable” because the only justification a BMW needs to be $92k is that it needs to be twice as good as a $46k BMW and this is what you get for $46k now:

It’s a Corolla, right?

Gas: the final frontier

Just twenty-one days ago I wrote a bit of an insane screed about how the increasing complexity of modern cars, and the increasing urbanification/sissification of their drivers, meant that people were obsessing over oil changes far more than anyone should. At the time I thought I was being a bit unpleasant. Turns out I wasn’t unpleasant enough.

I’m thrilled, as usual, to have this reinforced with the newest Vette-owner fetish: detailed, careful fueling. Read this man’s post. Please.

And yes, he really does drive around everywhere with his custom autocross numbers on.

This is Tim, by the way. We all knew he looked exactly like this.

Just looking at the dude makes me want to change my voter registration back to blue, but it does help drive the stake into the heart of the argument that GM had to take the Corvette mid-engine for the purpose of doing business with younger customers.

Still. Ignore everything I said above, and in the previous Sunday thread, about GM being a bunch of arrogant morons — because it turns out this new “Vette fueling protocol” thing is brilliant. This idea that you need to develop and test fueling protocols for your Corvette is breathtaking in its simple genius, because it offers something for everyone. You see, when the Vette guys were obsessed with oil changes, the owners who used FasLube weren’t included. When the Vette guys were obsessed with detailing, the owners who were too fat to lean over and wax their fenders weren’t included.

On the other hand, everyone — everyone! — has to put gas in their car. Except the people in New Jersey, but they will have the even subtler pleasure of commanding the fueling protocol! “I told you already… release your hand pressure on the thickest part of the hose just before COMPLETION!”

If GM lets CorvetteForums run wild with this, we could be as little as 6-7 months away from general hivemind agreement regarding specific C7 fueling protocols. From there it will trickle down quickly. I anticipate the first serious argument about 1963-67 Stingray fueling protocols to happen no later than August of 2026. Hundred-page arguments will happen regarding just how cool your car needs to be in order to safely fuel, and the differences in that required coolness between C5 hardtops and C5 hatchbacks. There will be laser thermometers involved. The accuracy of those thermometers will be disputed. Someone will absolutely call someone else’s wife a dirty whore over this. John Hennessey might even threaten to borrow a stepstool and punch someone in the face.

Committed William Gibson readers will recall how, in Mona Lisa Overdrive, he made the point that for addicts, the preparation of the drug is nearly as important a part of the ritual as the actual ingestion of the drug. It was one of his more admirable insights, and it helps explain why stuff like “fueling protocols” are so crack-cocaine-ish in their hold on hobbyists.

The irony is that I now have a fueling procedure for my Lexus ES300. Despite a new OEM gas cap, it will throw a code after about half of the times I fill up. So I got to keep that thang on me — and by “that thang”, I mean a Harbor Freight code scanner.

He can’t really be this dimwitted, can he?

After being browbeaten by the crowd on X and Instagram, the “Car Dealership Guy” apparently edited his posts to mention the end of the Federal tax credit. Did he just not realize that before? Did he think there was a genuine groundswell of support for EVs? Did he think that the EV sales would just keep increasing?

The real question we should all be asking, however, is something along the lines of How bad can EV sales get after the incentives go away? You’d think that losing $7500 of Federal money wouldn’t be that awful. I mean, Ford bumped the price of the Super Duty about eight grand over the past two years and no one seemed to notice. But when you look at how these cars are actually being moved, they’re going out the door on short term leases where $7500 can have an astounding effect on the monthly payment. I’m talking $350-375 a month.

One interview I just read talks about how Chevrolet EV buyers expect, in the words of the sales manager, a “cell phone monthly payment”. By which he means $200-250. That’s just barely possible at the moment. When the incentive disappears, those payments will be $600/month. Minimum.

Take a moment to appreciate the absurdity of what’s happening here. Even with panic-purchasing and cellphone payments, the total percentage of people who are willing to take an EV is a robust… 9.1%. By contrast, the total “sports car” percentage, according to the best numbers I can find, is between four and five percent. Without incentives, without multi-billion-dollar investments on the part of the OEMs, without local subsidies.

Now imagine if the automakers had put their EV funding into sports cars. Or personal luxury coupes. Or El Caminos. Go ahead and laugh, but something important has been taken away from us in this EV frenzy. We’ve lost a lot of potentially great cars, from a real in-house Toyota Celica and Supra to a next-generation Camaro. All of these cars were lost in time, like tears in rain — in this case, the “rain” is the “make it rain” you get when you throw money at whores, or EVs.

Just tell 'em you're trying to cure a seven-year ache

Everyone’s talking about the Bloomberg article that blows the panic whistle on seven-year car loans. I’m personally fascinated by this excerpt:

Shirria McCullough, a licensed clinical social worker in North Carolina, has been trying to eliminate debt from her life while documenting the process on TikTok. After she posted about the $45,000 Pilot, bought in 2023, a viewer commented that they’d never heard of Honda Motor Co. offering loans lasting seven years. McCullough hadn’t realized the loan’s length. The thought of her and her husband paying interest for so much time — adding thousands of dollars to the overall cost — made her “feel sick to my stomach,” she said.

“That was like the nail in the coffin on us making sure we were going to get this car paid off within the next year,” said McCullough, 42. First, they refinanced the loan for six years through a local credit union, then they paid it off completely in June to be free of it. “It was not a financially wise decision, but thank God it’s paid off now,” she said.

How do you not know the length of the loan term you’re signing? Did it never occur to Shirria to, uh, multiply her payments by the term she thought she had? This makes the car salesman in me absolutely salivate.

Also, being a licensed clinical social worker must be a pretty good gig, if you’re paying off new Honda Pilots in two years. I have no idea what it pays, and I only ever dated one woman with that approximate job. Not only was she a complete financial mess, she would also fake prescriptions for various psychoactives in the names of her clients and then take the stuff in random combinations during our time together. I still kind of miss her, but I am also 92% certain that the Grand Bohemian in Asheville won’t let me come back ever, thanks to her.

Longer loan terms are never a good thing, and doubly so in this post-ZIRP era. When I took out the loan for my 300c — yes, make a shocked noise, I didn’t pay cash like all the rich autojournalists and Twitter financial advisors — I went five years instead of six because I wasn’t emotionally able to look at the total interest number for the latter. That being said, I hope Dave Ramsey will forgive me for pointing out that taking out a 7 year loan on a new Camry is not a terrible idea. That car will still be worth half of retail in seven years.

By way of comparison, if you wanted to have half the equity in a 1996 Taurus when your loan was over, you’d probably want a 30 month loan tops. Cars are lasting longer than ever now. 100,000 miles is no big deal, even for most GM and Chrysler automobiles. And if you’re taking out a 7 year loan on, say, a 4Runner or Lexus GX, then you’re basically investing.

Another thing that Bloomberg didn’t discuss: I suspect we will see some inflation taming under the current administration, like Trump or loathe him, but had the election gone another way we could have had another eight years of Biden-style increases. In a country that runs a real-world 4% or 5% inflation rate, doing a seven-year loan is not a bad idea at all.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to find out how long I can get a loan on the last of the LS460L sedans with all the options. Nine or ten years should make it work for me. See you tomorrow!