You Didn't Sell Anything, So Why Are You Still Here?

Or: Two Years To Flatten The Inventory Curve

i mean, this *is* the only view most people wanted of her

Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?

That is the question posed by Arbuthnot to Alexander Pope in the latter’s Epistle, and it would have had more resonance with an audience for whom breaking on the wheel was still an accepted, if rare, practice. The implication is that Pope’s criticisms of his various opponents — Hervey, Addison, — amount to little more than vicious bullying; Pope is beating up on people half his size.

Ah, but here’s the thing: Pope was a four-foot-six hunchback who spent his life suffering indignities up to and including having the Crown run a fuckin’ public highway through his rented land. (In characteristic fashion, he excavated a tunnel beneath the road, called it a “grotto”, and made a very big deal of the natural spring he had discovered in the process. Johnson wrote, of this, that “he extracted an ornament from an inconvenience, and vanity produced a grotto where necessity enforced a passage.”) He was also very much the sort of fellow to punch up, not down, and his most frequently chosen opponents were powerful men indeed. In fact, his most devoted foe, the homosexual midwit Lord Hervey, openly wrote about the desirability of having Pope killed, and implied with some plausibility that the only reason Hervey’s men didn’t beat Pope to death in public was because it was more humiliating to let Pope live on as a cripple.

In other words, Pope’s enemies had every advantage over him, from height to money to literally murderous political power — and all Pope had to fight with in return was his talent.

I’m reminded of this rather ironic circumstance every time one of my friends gently suggests to me that I am bullying someone in the auto business. By and large the targets of my “bullying” are astoundingly fortunate nonentities whose power and privilege range from nine-figure inheritances to infinite worldwide travel and free shit, and occasionally include literally being able to fire me from my day job over the phone — but the implication is that I am “punching down” jusy because I’m smarter and meaner than they are.

Here’s an example. Back in 2012, I took the proverbial paddle to Jonny Lieberman and Ed Loh of Motor Trend on Facebook over a moronic trifle of a magazine called Motor Trend Classic. Afterwards, I got a call from a bigwig PR person lamenting that I had “publicly humiliated” Loh and that consequently Loh was “obsessed” with getting back at me. Truthfully, I didn’t think much of that interaction at the time, as in the below video from Street Fighter: The Movie:

Well, about a week later my plant manager at Honda of America got a call from a friend of Ed’s in Honda PR. Would they terribly mind removing me from my job at the earliest possible opportunity and putting me out on the street, as a favor to an important media outlet? Keep in mind, I had a two and a half year old son who had spent six months in the NICU and was still not healthy by anyone’s definition, who relied on the healthcare I was getting from that job, something else that was widely known in the community — but still, would they mind tossing Motor Trend a bone here? Just for future “Car Of The Year” potential?

To his eternal credit, the plant manager told Honda PR to fuck right off, perhaps not unrelated to the fact that the plant had experienced hours of server-related downtime in the year prior to my arrival and just 2.5 minutes in the year after, but also possibly because the men and women who actually build Hondas in the United States have generally held the California PR and sales operations in the highest, or lowest, possible contempt. Lucky for me, but to reiterate: These people wanted my premature son to go on Medicaid because I hurt someone’s feelings on Facebook. And yet I still occasionally hear from auto-biz people about what a horrible bully I was in that situation, over a decade later.

Who breaks Ed Loh upon a wheel?

Time, of course, has done a lot to humble both me and my old antagonists in the years since then. Motor Trend has suffered the indignity of becoming almost entirely video-focused, a situation that would strike any genuinely serious autowriter as being roughly equivalent to the unpleasantness forced on Burt Reynolds in Boogie Nights when he realizes he’s not allowed to wrap the fuck scenes with some stupid dishwasher-repair plot. The joke in that movie, of course, is that all pornography is trash, regardless of whether it’s 35mm or VHS or MP4.

Similarly, all new-car journalism is at least partially automotive PR by another name. The end result of pornography is always masturbation; the end result of automotive journalism is intended to be the sale of a new car to someone who would not have made that purchase decision without Ed and Jonny’s, ahem, lubricating efforts. Everybody knows this, so the chain of custody is usually crystal clear: Porsche wants to sell a few more shitty “sports cars” made mostly from recycled plastic, LCD screens, and bad gaskets, so it pays for Jason Cammisa or someone else with a similarly flexible code of ethics to visit Stuttgart via business class jet, then Road&Track publishes an article about how great the new 911 is, and some drooling moron who just got his first M&A bonus buys a 911 instead of a BMW, or vice versa, and everyone is satisfied.

That’s how the business has worked for seventy years… or at least that’s how it did work, until 2020, when everything changed. Almost overnight, buying a new car became an oddly Soviet-era exercise: you had to know someone, or you had to pay too much, or you had to wait in line somewhere. There was no such thing as “unsold inventory”. Even no-hope companies like Jaguar and Volvo were able to clear the showroom floors, while the real-world transaction prices for bonus-baby rides like a Benz G-wagen doubled or even tripled overnight.

For the better part of twenty-four months, there has been a customer waiting at the dealership for every single new car produced in or shipped to the United States of America. And the manufacturers have changed their behavior accordingly…

From 1982 to 2019, pretty much every car company offered some sort of discount, incentive, or subvention program to its dealers on a monthly basis. There were secret dealer cash programs everywhere from Kia to Lamborghini. Anyone who worked at car stores during that era could tell you that your fortunes rose and fell based on those programs — one month you can lease new Windstars for $259 a month, and the next month it’s back to $463 a month, for the same vehicle, and God help you if the customer comes in at the end of the month and you explain this to him and he acts accordingly but on the first of the month Ford makes the program better instead of worse so now Windstars are $229 a month and he tells everybody at his church that you’re a thief and/or child molester!

(A moment of silence for the Ford Windstar LX, which was a brilliant vehicle and almost a luxury car in many respects — but was unfortunately supplied as standard with an engine/transmission combo that was more self-destructive than W. Axl Rose or Blake Z. Rong.)

Manufacturer-to-dealer programs are now vanishingly rare. And why shouldn’t they be, when the average dealer profit has increased from about a million bucks per store in 2019 to three, four, or (according to one source) seven million dollars in 2022? Automotive advertising dropped 48% in 2022 compared to the previous year, for obvious reasons: why bother to “generate demand” for something that is guaranteed to sell? One wonders why any automaker bothered to advertise at all!

As long as we are thinking along those lines, there’s another question worth asking. Last month, I lampooned poor stupid Andrew Krok for fluffing the Civic Type R in one of the least valuable car reviews ever written. About a half-dozen people wrote to me privately, saying something along the lines of “Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?” Why be so hard on Krok, who is just enjoying some free travel in exchange for doing naked PR work?

It’s a reasonable question, to which I can only answer: If you think I have the capacity to bully CNET, rather than the other way around, then God bless you. But there was a different, more important question that nobody bothered to ask, namely:

Why, exactly, does Honda need to do PR for the new Civic Type R?

The previous CTR was so popular that unmolested Phoenix Yellow examples are selling for more than double MSRP. The new one is a better car and will therefore do even better. Consider that there is no Civic so bad that there is not a line of potential buyers waiting outside the dealership door for it like we’re back in the “Arrogance And Accords” era, and this is the very best Civic of all. Who needs to be convinced? Who needs a review of the Civic Type R in the first place, when the only question anyone is asking about it amounts to: How much do I have to pay over sticker?

inventory levels are trending lower than my nipples are pointing!

Brother Bark and I had a long talk about this Tuesday night. His knowledge of the business is often better than mine; he never worked in ground-level service and sales the way I did, but he knows hundreds of dealer principals on a personal level and he has also served as a mentor and coach for several female PR people at the manufacturers.

“It’s all about headcount battles,” was his opinion. “And budget. Nobody in PR wants to give up a single headcount or dollar — and if they don’t use those resources, they won’t have them in 2023 and beyond. So the programs continue, and the free shit continues. There’s no positive impact to the bottom line, but then again there never was. Not in the modern era. Everybody knew that. The numbers were faked, or exaggerated, anyway. It’s all a joke.”

This “joke” made me laugh, because back when I was at Honda it was considered a badge of honor to give “red money” — internal budget — back to the company. The men who ran the North American production infrastructure believed to their core that Hondas needed to be slightly cheaper than the competition, and they acted accordingly, pun intended. For that reason, Honda never paid mileage. If you needed to go somewhere, you pulled a beater from the plant fleet and hoped that all the wheels stayed on. The cafeteria was expected to turn a profit. Stuff like that.

In the make-believe world of coastal PR agencies, however, to give up money would be to give up power. So the events continue, and the free cars continue, and the whole bizarre circus jerkoff ride of automotive journalism doesn’t miss a beat. Because the Vice Lizard Of Free Shit For Motor Trend doesn’t want to have a smaller org chart than the Vice Lizard Of Making Glass Transmissions For Minivans.

No doubt many justifications are offered for this state of affairs, from the always-popular We Need To Retain Brand Equity In The Minds Of Gen Z Customers to the frankly hilarious Our Social Justice Mission Relies On Our Media Partners To Be Effective — but it’s smoke and mirrors. Every bit of it. All the cars are pre-sold. The dealers are fat and happy. If each and every autowriter disappeared from the planet tomorrow in a “Sudden Departure” scenario, not a single dealership transaction in America in the following year would be any different.

For seventy years the automotive journalism business existed as nothing but an extension of automotive PR. Now it exists to keep mid-level executives secure in their power. I used to pity the likes of Lieberman and Loh because they were just whores and the PR maestros were pimps — but sex work is at least work, after a fashion. Now, in 2023-to-be, every word they write is simply unnecessary. They’ve gone from being sex workers to being outright welfare cases.

In other words, Andrew Krok didn’t get his super impressive hotel room to sell more Civics — he got his super impressive hotel room because some VP at Honda derives a sense of self-worth from how much money can be wasted on press trips. Krok’s paean to the Civic’s super awesome handling at the limit wasn’t just pathetic — it was irrelevant. Nothing would have changed if he hadn’t written the article, and indeed I’m aware of several people in the business who haven’t written anything for years but still get a free car every week and international travel six times a year, because the budget needs to be spent whether or not it generates any coverage.

Truthfully, I didn’t much like working for Honda. It didn’t pay all that well, the hours were awful, and it’s remarkably soul-sucking to spend ten hours a day in a white Cintas uniform when you take more personal joy in fabric quality than any other straight man in Christendom. But there was a day when my three-year-old son asked me what I did for a living; I was able to point to a random Accord on the street and say “I helped make that.” It makes a difference, to be able to say something to your child along those lines. There’s a reason that so many executives are miserable on six-figure salaries; they secretly suspect that nothing they do really matters, that they are just occupying a chair and being paid to repeat platitudes. They don’t make anything, or do anything, worth remembering.

The past two years have made it glaringly obvious what many of us in the business have long suspected: there’s no real need for it. Nothing we did really mattered. At best, we were underpaid car salesmen. At worst, we were, as a friend of mine so adroitly put it in an email to me about his autowriting gig, “screaming into a void where nobody reads me, or really gives a shit about any of it.”

This won’t be the last time I write about the business, but something about it feels final to me. The butterflies of this industry have been broken. Not by me, but by the wheel: of events, of progress, of inevitable time. What if you held a party, but nobody came? Scratch that. What if you held a party, and everybody came, over and over again, but nobody cared?