Wednesday ORT: We Need To Talk About Jaguar, GM Lays It Off, What Women Really Want

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Trigger warning: There’s explicit sexual discussion at the end of this article. If you’re not interested in that, close it up after the second section. Thank you. I know that some of you are old and prudish, just like I often am.

With that out of the way, allow me to continue with an apology. Last month I indicated that the Sunday OT would move to Monday and the Wednesday ORT would move to Thursday. Well, the race season ended and my work schedule adjusted a bit so it became easier to get them done on the original day… and now you’re getting the Wednesday ORT on Tuesday night! The world has gone insane! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together! Well, here’s the reason: I’m staring down two onsite work days with a 3am rollout between them. Plus, a lot of you want to talk about this Jaguar thing. So, as the nice old lady with the guitar said, let’s give them something about which to talk .

Cat sad fever

What’s going on at Jaguar, anyway? The brand will not sell any cars in the United Kingdom for the 2025 model year, although production will continue for other markets including ours — I believe so, anyway. This sabbatical was meant to be the equivalent of a local radio station changing owners and playing “Stairway to Heaven” for 24 hours straight; some of you are old enough to remember that when such a thing happened, it meant a format change was imminent. Jaguar, too, had a plan. They would be all-electric for 2026.

Enthusiasts always understood that this was a mind-bogglingly stupid idea, but the rest of the world is starting to cotton to the fact that “all-electric”, as a strategy, is uncomfortably similar to “all-leisure-suit” or “all-Macarena” in its likely ephemerality. Going all-electric in 2025 is a great way to go all-out-of-business, unless you’re Tesla and you actually own the only brand with significant electric equity in the public eye. You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Jaguar's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Jaguar faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Jaguar because Jaguar is dying. Things are looking very bad for Jaguar. As many of us are already aware, Jaguar continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

Someone in the marketing department must have decided the end wasn’t coming soon enough; as with Kevin Costner in the so-far-dismal second half of “Yellowstone” Season 5, they’ve hired a hitman to put a gun in Jaguar’s mouth and pull the trigger. The mutual antipathy between X and Substack means that I can no longer embed the Tweet. You’ll have to click right here and see for yourself. I’m truly sorry. For those of you who can’t or won’t click, here’s a screenshot that says it all:

Don’t bother waiting for a car to appear in the whole video, because it doesn’t. Even Elon was bewildered:

The ad, taken as a whole, is the most direct yet example of the old “Stonetoss” cartoon becoming reality:

Adding insult to injury, the new Jaguar logo loses the “leaper” and simply becomes an ugly sans-serif tech-ish nonentity:

This is the worst Jaguar logo ever, and I’m including the unlamented Atari Jaguar in that accounting.

Feel free to discuss your thoughts below. Here are mine: I took my drivers’ license test in my father’s dark-grey 1986 XJ6, which at the time I considered to be the greatest car ever made. The old man wasn’t quite so sure about it, especially after having it towed directly from his garage at least twice. In 1990 he did the sensible thing and got a Lexus, but the cat scratch fever had already gotten me and in 1995 I bought a champagne 1985 Vanden Plas with real wire wheels. (Fun factoid: the Jaguar “factory” wires for the USA market were made by Dayton, in Dayton!) I loved that car and I swore that nothing short of being thrown in jail for an extended period of time would cause me to sell it. Anyway, uh… I don’t have the car any more, but I have a dozen great stories about it. I adore Jaguar. It means the world to me. As a brand, as individual products, as a racing history.

I’m not saying there’s no room in the world for weird gender-bending sans-serif automobiles. Surely there is. Does it have to be Jaguar? It’s an insult to the memory of Sir William Lyons, who spent his life delivering the most dynamic and sensual cars humanly possible. They usually weren’t as good as they looked; how could they be, the prices weren’t that high and the company was always in trouble. It didn’t matter. To own a Jag was to be, in some way, the man you’d always imagined being. I don’t imagine being any of the men in that video.

Speaking of deranged viewpoints and EV collapses

I know I’m getting old and disconnected from reality because about half the stuff I see on a daily basis now appears to have dropped in from a parallel universe. Did General Motors really get rid of a thousand phone sanitizers because they’ve come to hate “financially independent childless women”? It would be a shame were that the case, because I’ve also come to believe that the entire modern world, particularly in America, runs on those “FICWs”, if you will. They’re watching the Netflix! They’re buying the Starbies! They’re keeping the influencers in business! Buying the microbrands! Patronizing the popups! Where would we be without them?

I looked at Miss Morris’s LinkedIn and I was torn between “what exactly does this broad do for a living” and “gosh, she’s like a younger, more financially independent and childless version of meeee”:

Julia, if you’re reading this, I recommend you learn a trade, or possibly join the Army in time for this pop-up, micro-brand, influencer-centric war that President Biden is gonna get us into with Russia before the end of the year. Don’t do what I’ve done, Julia. Don’t expose your bleeding heart and miserable soul to a callous and quite handsome group of Substack readers week out and week in. You’re better than that.

The rest of you General Motors EV people: you got to go. It’s not particularly fair. Even five years ago, I was hearing that the Big Two Point Five were ruthlessly axing any internal-combustion opportunities, making it hard for engineers and other white-collar types to get their success tickets punched without serious time in the glamorous, future-forward EV jobs. Many of those people are now going to experience some genuinely awful times. I’ve been laid off and fired enough to know for myself.

The big question: If you’re Mary Barra or that highly competent not-at-all-nepo-baby fellow Mark Reuss, how can you save the General before it has to go to the United States Government for a helping hand? No doubt those two fools, I mean, geniuses thought they had a Big-Gretch-sized marker to call in with the Harris Administration should the worst come to pass… but the man who will answer the phone now is going to have far less sympathy.

Idea for GM, and it’s free even though I have burning personal animosity towards at least half a dozen Important People there: Stop what you’re doing, license the Tesla Model 3, expand the old NUMMI plant to make more of them, call them the Chevrolet Nova. That will give you a car that people actually want to buy, and it will stop you from having to waste a single additional dollar on EV dreams. You can then focus your time and attention on keeping your core truck line from being antiquated pieces of junk. You’re welcome.

Speaking of the FICWs and what they’re into

One of my most dependable readers messaged me a few weeks ago regarding the infamous Aella preferences article. I’d been aware of it in a sort of distant way, kind of like the way my mind vaguely registers the presence of restaurants in major cities that cost steakhouse money without being steakhouses, but I’ve now read it and I am legitimately fascinated by some of the data. For instance, did you know that you are three times as likely to be rimmed on your first date or thereabouts by women who average more than one new sex partner every year, compared to the chicks who rack a new body every ten years? This makes me pathetically glad I’m permanently out of the dating market; I could easily see jumping headlong out of a Vegas hotel window should something like that happen.

Here are the high points for ACFers still in the dating market:

• You’d better be ready to slap, choke, or be physically forceful with your dates, especially if they are under 40 years old. I’m sorry. I know most of you don’t want to do it. Just imagine you’re auditioning for Dr. No. More than seventy percent of women want to be slapped and choked hard. Half of them want to be spit on. What is this, the UFC?

• Women consume more erotica than men, or maybe they’re just reading it for more than three minutes at a time, it’s not entirely clear.

• More women want to be handcuffed than want to perform oral sex. Ladies, I’ve been handcuffed for real — and my primary thought during every episode where it happened was: “How can I avoid oral sex?”

• They want us to make noise during the act. That does not include farting, so you’re probably not already covering this desire.

• They generally do not want to be called dirty whores or sluts. So when you’re choking them, slapping them, spitting on them, handcuffing them, or enduring Your First Rimming at their experienced hands, it would be advisable for you not to say that.

Here’s the master list of preferences.

Note the pretty wide disparity between women who read Aella’s Substack and women in general. For those of you who don’t know, “Aella” is the work name of a porn star and escort. I assume that many of her readers lean in that direction, for the same reason that ACFers appear to have an unusual number of Gibson Les Pauls and fully-caged race cars. It’s Tuesday night and I need to get on the elliptical machine, so let’s end with a bit of doggerel regarding the best way to use the above data:

The younger they are, the harder they ball;

Give ‘em a slap and the cuffs.

Groan loud cause your silence ain’t wanted at all;

Then pray to your God that’s enough.

The toilet’s unwanted for shoving her head

Yet just half want explicit consent,

Approval for missionary positions in bed

Seems to hover at eighty percent.

The list above of what you should do in the sack

Applies to women both high and low class;

But if she’s a reader of Aella’s Substack

Then, my friend, you had best guard your ass.

That’s all for tonight, ladies, gentlemen, and whatever the rest of you are!