Wednesday ORT: Yugo Returns, Montana Getaways, Real Luxury Cars, Jaguar Eats It, Regular Cabs

All subscribers welcome

this is not a bmw m1

No politics and no actual racing topics from me for this week’s Open Thread, but as always I’ll pin your discussions, so don’t be shy! Trackday Club members, please watch for a special article tomorrow detailing your swag and driving opportunities for 2025. Thank you!

Yugo straight to Utopia

really just wanted to capture lena’s aquiline profile here

Strictly speaking, your humble author is well clear of the automotive shrimp-and-buffet business, but when the people who run Car Design Event in Munich accidentally copied me on their 2025 invite I wasted no time forcing myself onto the roster and bringing Mini Danger Girl along for the ride. The purpose was to permanently frighten MDG out of ever wanting to have anything to do with autowriting or public relations, but I’m afraid it had quite the opposite effect. After just one Cuban cigar and a little bit of 18-year-old Japanese whiskey, she pronounced herself ready to move to Munich and work for C//DE, by force if necessary. She was captivated by Lena Siep, the event’s urbane and stylish presenter, and she became immediate friends with Tisha Johnson, the designer of the SLATE pickup.

the utopia… some hated it, i like it

The big news out of C//DE this year was the debut of the New Yugo, intended to be built in Serbia and propelled by (thank God) an internal combustion engine. We were treated to some more exotic iron, including the second of two BMW Turbo concept cars from the Seventies and the new Pagani Utopia.

At dinner, MDG and Tisha griped about a presentation video from Dutch yacht-builder Feadship, which was overloaded with imagery of beautiful young wives and even more beautiful younger mistresses. “Really, what kind of person wants to float around, basically going nowhere, on some stupid yacht with a woman half his age?” they collectively wondered, before turning to me.

“Um,” I replied, “a really… bad person? And that video,” I replied, “was just completely offensive to me. I would never have a yacht like that, even if I could afford it.” Which is true. Mine would be exactly the same as the concept, but in flat black.

The new Genesis convertible was there. I’d have one of those in a heartbeat, although I’d like the moss-green hardtop coupe version that debuted a bit earlier even more. The interior is just lovely. They wove little hints of purple into the blue Alcantara.

The acknowledged superstar of C//DE was the SLATE pickup, previously discussed here on ACF. I think it is a hugely important vehicle, and after speaking to Tisha at length I think I admire the ideas behind it even more than previously. I’ll be covering those ideas in the Washington Examiner next week, and we’ll have a deeper dive for paid subscribers afterwards. You’ll want to hear what Tisha said, trust me.

a race winner photographs a race winner

After C//DE, I had the chance to tour the BMW Museum with X1 and X3 exterior designer Calvin Luk from BMW. We disagreed quite a bit about the merits of the various 5 Series cars on display, but he did offer some really interesting insight about the evolution of flame surfacing from E60 forward. I’ll write that up on Sunday.

It was an unalloyed pleasure to walk through downtown Munich with my recently acquired daughter. In addition to being a remarkable touch behind the wheel of a race car, MDG has tremendous humor, insight, and personality. I might not have any future left in the autojourno world, but maybe she does. “Maybe I’ll live in Europe for a few years while I figure out what’s next for me,” MDG noted, as we stood in the shadow of some lovely cathedral, eating pretzels.

“Sure,” I replied, turning my face away from hers as if I’d seen something fascinating over my shoulder, “you can leave us any time you’d like.”

It was always bound to happen

In 2023, Montana was home to more than 2.3 million registered vehicles but only 879,000 licensed drivers. That 2.68 vehicle-to-driver ratio is by far the highest among states and more than double the national average, according to a Bloomberg Tax analysis of Federal Highway Administration data.

That number means potentially hundreds of thousands of vehicles plated in Montana are parked and driven elsewhere, costing the outside states billions of dollars in lost taxes and fees, according to state revenue officials.

“I see these Montana plates at various car shows and I’ve asked the owners about it. I think the attitude is: Catch me if you can,” said Lamborghini Club America president Andrew Romanowski.

But now, finding little support from Montana, states are cracking down on residents hiding behind these tax shelters.

So says Bloomberg, discussing the recent trend in Western states to “claw back” taxes on vehicles that are registered in Montana but driven in Utah, California, and elsewhere.

Former Montana revenue director Dan Bucks said there are likely more than 600,000 vehicles registered in Montana but operated in other states.

Last year, the state reported 10,757 registrations of vehicles made by Aston Martin, Bentley, Bugatti, Ferrari, Lamborghini, McLaren, Pagani, and Rolls Royce, according to Montana Motor Vehicle Division data obtained through an open records request.

I don’t know how I feel about this, to be honest. My general attitude towards taxation is: let’s have less of it. I also think that sales taxes in general are regressive and unpleasant. They encourage people to feed money back into our ourboros-esque financial pyramid scheme instead of spending it on something that might create a job or improve someone else’s life.

On the other hand, I don’t like the idea of regular jamokes like me paying full sales tax on our Lexus ES300s and whatnot while the Pagani crowd forms $1,500 LLCs to evade those same taxes. Like so many things, this smacks of Two Tier America. It’s also, morally speaking, a total externality on Montana’s part. They sit and collect registration money for cars that impose a burden on the infrastructures of other states. So yeah, Utah, get your money.

I have thought about forming a Montana LLC for the sole purpose of buying watches, which impose no externality on anyone in my home state save for the occasions when I comprehensively explain the Grand Seiko Spring Drive or Tudor’s aluminum-bronze alloy to a complete, and often terrified, stranger. Seriously. I will never buy anything more expensive than a $149 G-SHOCK in New York City, even though it’s home to one of just three Grand Seiko boutiques in the USA, because there is no way in hell I’d give a thousand bucks or more in sales tax to the idiots who came up with Vision Zero.

The (awful) year of the (mangy) cat

Was it really just six months ago that Jaguar decided to commit public suicide? The Indian automaker’s bizarre public-relations turn towards the sort of pansexual derangement that would make RuPaul blush was actually just half of the self-harm. Maybe a third. ‘Cause you also had the decision to go “all-electric in 2025”, which customers met with profound disinterest. And when the EVs weren’t ready to go on time — a situation that should have surprised precisely no one — the dealers were stuck selling just one vehicle for the 2025 model year, that vehicle being the moldy and frumpy F-Pace tall wagon that is currently celebrating nine years of mostly unchanged existence. Just to put that in perspective, the F-Pace has competed against three entirely different Lexus RX platforms.

(Badly, I might add.)

What’s worse, from a dealer’s perspective, than having just one subpar vehicle to sell? Having too many of them. Look at the above image showing “days in stock” per brand. Jaguar and Lincoln are off the chart because having them on said chart would visually derange it. I hate to see Lincoln suffering like this, although it’s arguably an appropriate punishment for turning the Nautilus into a piece of Chinese-made dogshit. Jaguar, on the other hand — who cares? They abandoned their core business model of making beautiful sedans, and now they have nothing worth buying.

(That’s right. The business model was sedans, not sports cars, and here’s the best part: it always was.)

I’m a former Jaguar owner so I could wax a bit lyrically bitter about the fate that has befallen the brand. It used to mean something. When the E-Type was the fastest and most beautiful thing you could get south of a Ferrari, that meant something. When the XJ6 survived twenty years in production and propelled Jaguar out of government ownership thanks to John Egan and Pininfarina, that meant something. When the all-aluminum sedans came out, that meant something.

Now it’s a hollow shell of a virtue signal, owned by people who hate everything for which Jaguar originally stood. Let it burn to the ground, let it go unremembered, let people think Jaguar ceased to exist in 1989 or 2008 or whenever. Let this milquetoast foulness perish from the earth. And let it be a warning to the next group of idiots who think their midwit college degrees and fashionable perversions make them greater than someone like William Lyons could have ever been.

Real luxury, or really depressing?

As long as we’re having a data-driven Wednesday, let’s take a look at this chart of what “ultra-wealthy” people buy. I’m told that the definition of “ultra-wealthy” is $30 million or more in net worth. So not me, then. Not even Brother Bark, although he might be on his way, it’s hard to tell.

Five “insights” from the above, add your own:

1. BMW > Mercedes. I guess old money really is dead. You’d think that the unquestioned superiority of the S-Klasse over the Siebener would keep Benz on top, but maybe this is a case where the X7 is more desirable than the GLS?

2. Will Tesla retain that enviable status now? Ultra-wealthy people, contrary to what you read in Mother Jones, tend to also be reliably ultra-liberal. Not necessarily ultra-left-wing, mind you. How many Tesla owners are unhappy with Elon’s current “heel turn” with President Trump? Maybe fewer than you’d think, since one perk of being ultra-wealthy is that you don’t have to watch the news.

3. All those Toyotas are Land Cruisers, right? And how funny is it that the Land Cruiser alone is ahead of Lexus? And yet…

4. Lexus > Porsche. Which would once have been “of course” territory, since Porsche sold essentially handmade sports and GT cars while Lexus sold Toyotas with gold badges. Nowadays, however, they are both crossover-centric. Honestly, you’d be a bit silly to buy a Macan over an RX, or any Porsche at all over the GX550.

5. How many times have I told all of you that Ford is a premium brand, and more so than Lincoln, despite all the Black Label and nifty interior stuff? It’s the only domestic non-EV on the chart. We all know that it’s the F-Series Platinum, King Ranch, and Limited accounting for those sales, but how funny is it that Ford beats Cadillac right off the chart?

Now, why does any of this matter? Over to you, “Alone” aka The Last Psychiatrist:

The target demo is not the 1%; the target demo is the Aspirational 14%. They know they are supposed to like quality and goodness and etiquette and discretion, but no one ever taught them what those things look like, so when someone does point it out to them they will go all in. Hence: anything in Trading Up. And they don't care about the next generation. Not really. They don't want them to be eaten by zombies but anything past 2069 is of no consequence. What they do care about is how a product brands them, what it says about them now, now that time is running out. Can't afford to be subtle, which is the same thing as saying I'm willing to pay $10000 to get the message across. There's a difference between what the brand is and what the brand says about you. You'll pay 10x for the former and 100x for the latter.

Let’s take a silent moment to chuckle about the idea of a Patek Philippe being a $10,000 watch, brand new. I passed over a lot of $10k stainless steel Nautiluses back in 2011, when the above article was written. Today, the cheapest Nautilus on Chrono24 that doesn’t look like an obvious fake is… $36,000. If you want an American seller and some paper with it, you will get no change from a $55,000 bill. If you want one that looks new, or is nearly new, you might as well drop $105,000 on a white gold one; it’s no more expensive than a grey market stainless steel example.

All that aside, the point is that the 14%, a group that includes a lot of ACFers, often looks to the 1% for cues. The 1%, a group that also includes a lot of ACFers, in turn take their cue from the ultra-wealthy, who make up about one household in fifteen hundred. Often, each group is distanced from its superior by time as well as wealth, which is a fancy way of saying that by the time someone like your humble author manages to get a Nautilus of my own, the really wealthy people will be off to something else. So maybe I’ll get a Land Cruiser around the time Wes Siler’s wife buys him whatever’s next.

Isn’t a half cab just a fakie 180?

Perhaps you noticed Rivian up there at the bottom of the wealthy-person list. My neighbor drives one. Maybe he’s ultra-wealthy. In any event, wouldn’t it be nicer if the Rivian were more… trucky? Enter ACF reader Slowtege, who provided this illustration for us. And just for the heck of it, he came up with another regular cab, this one taking dead aim at SLATE:

He chose the pre-facelift model because he dislikes the facelift, as do all decent people. What say you, ACF? Are you a buyer for either of these? At $20,000 plus tax, I like the Maverick quite a bit. Rivian will never get my business, as I associate the R1T with rotund auto-beardos whose wives used to support their unemployment with sex work. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Sex work is real work. So is Substack work… and with that, my shift is over. It’s your turn to talk!