About 20 years ago, I was working on the technical staff of a small hospital under the theoretical supervision of a nice old woman whose name escapes me. When I say “old” I mean about the same age I am now, by the way. She had a 1991 Buick LeSabre and she was having some sort of problem with it that required a long stay in the indifferent care of our local Buick dealership. Around day eight she lost her patience and called the dealership for a good old-fashioned screaming fit.

At some point in said fit, she yelled, “I EXPECT MORE FROM A BUICK THAN THIS!” Then she turned around and froze me with a furious glare, because I was laughing my proverbial ass off. What kind of idiot expected anything special from a Buick in 1999?

Yet there was a time when the tri-shield badge conveyed some real prestige and excellence. My friend Thomas Klockau just wrote something neat about the Electra 225 that has me itching to buy one of those old boats. And while Buick’s current lineup is a mish-mash of Asian hatchbacks and anonymous sedans, there have been a few decent cars in the lineup from time to time. Which happens to be topic of today’s “Ask Jack.”

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In So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish, Douglas Adams introduces the reader to the character of Rob McKenna. Rob is a truck driver; he is also a Rain God. It rains every day of McKenna’s life because the clouds want to be near him. Later on in the book, McKenna starts earning a healthy living from vacation resorts, which pay him to stay away.

I can’t say it’s rained every day of my life. I can say that the weather in my home town improves dramatically the minute I leave. Last week, while I was riding a Road Glide around Los Angeles in a recurring rainstorm, there was an early spring in Ohio. Temperatures went from the mid-twenties to the mid-seventies pretty much overnight and stayed there until my plane was about halfway back home, at which point it started to rain and the mercury dropped twenty degrees. I am not kidding about this.

On the road home, I saw a two-foot-wide hole in the freeway where there had previously been no hole whatsoever. I drove around it. Shortly afterwards, I was confronted by an odd tableau: at least six cars pulled over, covering both shoulders, with their drivers in conversations ranging from dazed to agitated. All of the cars were tilted to some degree, because they all had at least one flat tire. In my rearview mirror, I saw a Subaru coasting to a stop on the right shoulder behind me. It, too, was tilted.

Turns out that was just the beginning.

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It’s one of those scenarios that brings to mind William Gibson’s maxim about the future being unevenly distributed. About 90 days ago, approximately 1,000 Chinese-made electric scooters appeared more or less overnight around Santa Monica and Venice in California. Each scooter featured an individual QR code and directions to download the “BIRD” app. With that […]

I’ve never met filmmaker Spike Lee, and somehow I doubt the two of us would be friends if we did meet. Yet I’ve admired his work since seeing “She’s Gotta Have It” almost 30 years ago. More specifically, I’ve always admired the way Lee holds all of his characters to account for their actions, regardless of their color. In a business that treated African-Americans as alternately evil or magical, Lee gave them the freedom to be real people: flawed, damaged, inspirational.

His fifth film, Jungle Fever, has been politely ignored for the last couple of decades, largely because it asks questions that are no longer permissible to ask in our single-opinion modern media culture. At the time, however, it was intended to be a bold statement both of Lee’s status as a greenlight director and his willingness to use that status to put the audience in some deliberately uncomfortable situations. Part of that statement included having Stevie Wonder write an entire album’s worth of original music to serve as the soundtrack.

That album, too, has vanished into the Orwellian ether, partially because of the cringe-inducing title track, but mostly because the music didn’t meet the standards set by Stevie in the Seventies. There’s one exception: the ballad “Make Sure You’re Sure.” Joshua Redman was the first jazz musician to hop on the train, but he wasn’t the last.

Which brings us to today’s question: When it comes to a trackday, how sure do you want to be?

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This week I spent three days ripping a new Harley Road Glide around Greater Los Angeles. Don’t believe the people who tell you it never rains in Southern California. Man, it pours! I covered about 350 miles, 200 of which happened after dark and in annoying weather conditions.

The Road Glide is a big bike so for the first two days I didn’t do any lane-splitting (or “filtering” as the English say), preferring just to ride in the HOV lane and deal with any slowdowns that came my way. On the third day, however, I was in a situation where I needed to cover 26 miles in a big hurry to make my flight. So the proverbial gloves came off. I started slipping between cars, slaloming through the freeway lanes. Then I found myself on La Cienega with very little time left. It was time to start lane-splitting for real. At one point I had to zip up on a sidewalk right in front of a LA cop; he hit me with a “WOOOP” from his siren but didn’t pursue the issue beyond that.

The good news is I made my flight. The bad news is that I frightened myself a few times. Should I have done it?

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The speedometer on the little two-seater was already past 90 and climbing as I watched the grey-haired fellow to my left put both his hands on the left side of the steering wheel and start to tug at it. There was a curve ahead, a long blind left-hander with a line of Jersey barriers on the shoulder. What was on the road after that was a complete mystery, both to him and me. Neither one of us had ever been here before.

He tugged on the wheel at the same time as he stomped on the brakes. Various lights flashed on the instrument panel ahead of him. The car slewed then caught itself. There was a hot metallic smell as the stability control and ABS clamped all four corners of the car in rapid-fire pulses. The right front tire groaned in protest as we gradually sacrificed momentum down to about 30 mph.

“Let’s pull over here,” I said in what I hoped was a flat and judgment-free voice, “and stop for a minute.” We came to a halt in a small parking lot. A minivan pulled in behind us. I got out of the car and walked over to the minivan, where my photography team was waiting. We were all here to do a story on this relatively rare and exotic car and its owner, whose bacon had just been saved along with mine by the very best efforts of an Italian stability-control engineer.

“Move something,” I told the photographers, “I’m riding in the van now.”

“I GUESS HE DON’T WANT TO RIDE WITH ME!” the owner yelled. “I DRIVE AT THE EDGE!”

“He drives over the edge,” I spat, stepping into the van and finding a recently-cleared seat in the third row. “Over the edge of idiocy.”

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There’s your manifesto! This year’s Jeep Super Bowl ad was more than a breath of fresh air in the middle of turgid political pronouncements and vapid virtue signaling. It was a reminder that Fiat Chrysler Automobiles has a rock-solid grip on what its core product is and how to develop said product. In fact, other than the temporary aesthetic disaster of the square-headlight YJ, it’s fair to say that the descendants of the CJ-7 have been on a pretty solid path for the past 30 years.

Has anybody else managed their heritage brand this well for this long? The short answer is “maybe.”

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A few years ago, I decided to have a heart-to-heart talk with my little brother, the artist currently known as Bark M., about something that had always puzzled me.

“Dude,” I asked, “why did you quit being a performing musician? You were making halfway decent money, you were on the road all the time, you were playing music that you loved, you were hooking up with a different college girl every night. Why would you leave all of that behind and manage a Men’s Wearhouse, for Christ’s sake?” Bark gave me this very sour look and replied, “I got sick of being in a van.”

I had to laugh, because at that point it made perfect sense. I’ve never met anybody else who is as picky as my brother when it comes to travel. Take this past weekend for example. I was on a two-stop Southwest flight that ended up taking ten and a half hours in the air to get me from Oakland to Columbus; he was on a nonstop from LAX to Cincinnati. When I finally landed after my back-of-coach-class ordeal I found that he’d been on Instagram complaining about the quality of his Delta One meal service. If ever there was a man who would give up dating a new 19-year-old every weekend night just so he didn’t have to ride in a van, it would be Bark.

Don’t tell him, but there’s now a company that rents first-rate, brand-new vans to traveling musicians so they can enjoy all the comforts of home while they travel. The company is called Bandago and it’s based in San Francisco. These vans have leather recliners, video games, and giant flatscreens. If you had a touring band, you’d never want to give your “Bandago” back. If you were renting your Bandago so you could perpetrate some crime with a crew of miscreants, you would also not want to give your Bandago back. Which leads us to a real San Francisco treat of a story.

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Way before the book Rich Dad, Poor Dad existed, I had my own financial angel and devil on my shoulders in the form of my grandfather and mother, respectively. Granddad retired at 54 and lived more than four decades in perfect comfort based on the investment decisions he’d made prior to retirement. My mom is… well, let’s just say she didn’t retire at 54.

Mom always had champagne taste and a debutante’s contempt for anybody who did not. When my grandfather decided to buy himself a Cadillac shortly after retiring, my mother told me, in quite snippy fashion, that it was “a used Cadillac, like what a loan shark would drive.” I don’t know what I thought I was going to find in Granddad’s garage when I got there, but the six-month-old ice-blue Eldorado Biarritz that he’d actually bought wasn’t it. He took me to the grocery store in it. When we went to the register, he took out a coupon book.

“Granddad,” I asked, “why do you use coupons if you have a Eldorado with a stainless steel roof?”

“Johnny,” he winked at me, “that’s why I have one.”

Shortly afterwards, my father bought a Town Car. It was brand new, which pleased my mother. But in my heart of hearts I always liked Granddad’s Eldorado better, all the more so because I knew he got it cheap. Every time I manage to buy something outrageous at a steep discount, I think of my sharp-dealing grandfather and his delight at never paying retail for anything. Which brings us to today’s questioner, who is considering following in the old man’s footsteps, after a fashion.

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I don’t think I heard the term “MVP” used in software development until six or seven years ago. It doesn’t mean “Most Valuable Player,” nor does it mean either of the two rude but hilarious things from the “roasting” episode of Arliss, neither of which would be appropriate for a family website like TTAC. Rather, […]

True story: when my pal “Creighton” decided to start using his Charger Hellcat for Uber, he called his insurance company and had them upgrade his policy to commercial status. Doing so pretty much wiped out any profit that he was going to make as an Uber driver, but he still made the call because he’s the kind of person who doesn’t like to take unnecessary risks.

Getting rideshare-specific insurance isn’t always prohibitive, but during my conversations with various Uber and Lyft drivers I’ve yet to hear of anybody besides Creighton actually ponying-up for real additional coverage. Most of these people are living pretty close to the bone and they don’t really think they have that much to lose in the first place. Plus, there’s the fact that both Uber and Lyft offer some additional coverage as part of their driver agreement.

That’s the theory of it, anyway. What happens when two Lyft drivers collide? Yesterday, someone found out.

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John Le Carre’s superb A Perfect Spy opens with a curious quote, attributed to “Proverb”:

A man who has two women loses his soul. But a man who has two houses loses his head.

I’m not so sure about the first part of that. The virtue of dating two (or more) women is that you don’t expect that any one of them will fulfill all your requirements, which prevents you from becoming overly demanding or difficult with them. As to the second part, all I can tell you is that when I’ve owned rental property I’ve found it to be more hassle than it was worth. I suspect the original author of the proverb was not talking about that situation. Nor was he referring to our blessed above-one-percent crowd who frequently own domiciles on both coasts, or vacation homes in sunny spots. Rather, he probably meant that a man who operates two separate families will lose his mind. This sort of thing was more common in the days before Equifax and cell phones, mind you.

The question becomes: Is owning two cars like loving two women, which is often a good thing, or is it like maintaining two households, which is almost always a bad thing? Before we fall back on the truthful but unsatisfying “it depends,” let’s consider today’s questioner and see if we can’t keep him in sound possession of both soul and head.

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“Mr. Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.” Thus spake Auric Goldfinger — and I’m starting to think he had a point.

About this time last year, my 2014 Accord Coupe was smacked on the rump by a cheerful part-time weed dealer in a battered Mazda2. It could have been a lot more hassle than it was. The kid was willing to wait for the cops, his insurance company was slow to act but friendly enough once they got started, and the insurance-selected body shop actually did a half-decent job of installing and painting a new bumper.

I should note that part of the reason everything went so well was my determination to not get agitated about the incident and its repercussions. As long-time TTAC readers know, I’m very fond of my Accord, but it’s fundamentally a cheap little car built right here in Ohio by a bunch of teenagers.

Had it been my 911 or my old Audi S5 in that little fender-bender, I would have raised all sorts of hell and insisted on using my own body shop and having a third-party inspection and so on. Or at least that’s what I did every time one of my “nice” cars was damaged by someone else. Hell, when my 1990 VW Fox was dented on a downtown street some time in 1994 I contrived to have the repair done by the only Lamborghini and Ferrari certified shop in Ohio. It was too nice. The paint on the repair was deeper and glossier than the Brazilian factory spray.

If last year’s Accord injury was happenstance, then what happened to me yesterday was coincidence. Once again my car’s been damaged by an utter idiot — but as you’ll see, this time there’s nothing I can do but grin and bear it.

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I learned something today that made me almost physically ill: Have you ever flown in or out of SFO, the wacky San Francisco Airport with its wacky fake TSA that takes bribes to let cocaine come through the screening process? Did you rent a car? And did you take that crappy-ass AirTrain that basically goes all around the Bay Area before dropping you off at the rental car facility approximately 42 minutes after you got on the thing?

Did you know that SFO charges eighteen dollars a ride for the AirTrain? They aren’t charging you; they are charging the rental companies, who pay eighteen bucks per contract for an “AirTrain fee” in addition to an amazing amount of other surcharges. No wonder it’s such a nightmare getting a car at SFO.

Of course, you don’t have to rent a car. You could take an Uber, or you could “rent” through Turo. The mandarins of San Francisco don’t like that, so they are taking Turo to court. That in and of itself is pretty much enough incentive for me to use Turo the next time I fly there. Whatever the Government of San Francisco is for, I’m probably against.

How about you? Would you Turo? And would you rent your own car through Turo?

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It’s odd to consider, but in a world where Steve McQueen had never lived I’d be about three dozen serious injuries better off than I am today. Scratch that. I don’t need him to have never lived. I just need him to have not supported the production of “On Any Sunday.”

That film romanticizes the Elsinore GP, which in turn led me to enter the Elsinore GP, which led me to break my leg training for the Elsinore GP, which led me to record a big fat DNS for the Elsinore GP. Worse than that, however, the opening sequence of “On Any Sunday” is commonly understood to be the catalyst for the sport of bicycle motocross, which has treated me worse than Ike Turner treated Tina.

Not that I bear any grudge against the man, mind you. I do, however, have complete and abiding contempt for the consumer-driven culture of McQueen worship that has arisen in the past 20 years or so. If you wear Hunsiker McQueen shoes or a McQueen T-shirt, or if you repeat the “Racing is life” line from LeMans like it was someone’s actual philosophy and not just a line written for an actor on a set, I’m going to think less of you. It’s not because McQueen was a vile person at times, although it is worth noting that his behavior often went past the rambunctious into the just plain despicable. It is because while boys and teenagers need heroes to admire and emulate, grown men shouldn’t wear another man’s face or name on their bodies if they can help it. Period, point blank.

Last week, Ford introduced a new “Bullitt Mustang” with the help of McQueen’s lovely granddaughter, Molly Flattery dba Molly McQueen. I have to say that I like everything about the car but the new-for-2019 nose, which is uncomfortably catfish-esque, and the “Bullitt” logos. As was the case the last two times a Bullitt Mustang appeared, there’s been a revival of interest in the movie. My wife had never seen it, so we watched “Bullitt” this past Friday night. Shortly afterwards, I read a Jalopnik piece by Raphael Orlove describing the movie as “boring garbage.”

It seems like the right time to take a look at the film without Gulf-colored lenses or Millennial-ish suspicion, so let’s open the curtain on another episode of TTAC At The Movies, shall we? Warning: spoilers ahead for those of you who haven’t managed to catch the film in the past 49 years. (Read More…)