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Posts By: Robert Farago
Top Gear presenter and Times carmudgeon Jeremy Clarkson is not one to walk away form a fight. In fact, you could say he never met a fist he didn’t lunge his towards. After Tesla and the MSM knocked Clarkson for pretending that a Roadster ran out of juice in an episode of the shark jumping car show, Clarkson mounted Ye Olde “Valid Yet Undeclared Fictional Recreation of Theoretical Facts” defense. And that, one presumed, was that. Only, of course, it wasn’t. In Clarkson’s Times column, the world’s most famous pistonhead attempts to disprove the English maxim “the first thing you do when you’re in a hole is stop digging.” “Tesla, when contacted by reporters, gave its account of what happened and it was exactly the same as ours. It explained that the brakes had stopped working because of a blown fuse and didn’t question at all our claim that the car would have run out of electricity after 55 miles.” Uh, yes it did. Anyway… “The problem is, though, that really and honestly, the US-made Tesla works only at dinner parties. Tell someone you have one and in minutes you will be having sex. But as a device for moving you and your things around, it is about as much use as a bag of muddy spinach.” Dodgy handling, high price, yada, yada, yada. And the Roadster’s greatest sin?
“400-mile total driving range
40-mile all-electric range with zero fuel consumption and zero tailpipe emissions
Jeep® Patriot EV joins the growing portfolio of electric-drive vehicles being developed by Chrysler LLC.”
Bloomberg has had a look at the U.S. new car market and it seems that American consumers are busy joining their Japanese counterparts in a new trend: hanging onto their cars until they die. “Used vehicles being traded in at dealerships averaged 6.3 years of age after the Wall Street meltdown in late 2008, about 6 months older than before the crisis, according to forecaster J.D. Power & Associates in Troy, Michigan.” And you know which way this one’s going. TTAC’s Best and Brightest have been connecting those dots for some time. Still, it’s a bit startling to see the MSM do the same. “If the industry sells fewer than 12 million vehicles this year, the government will have to write more checks” media-friendly auto analyst John Casesa told Bloomies. “Otherwise GM, Ford and Chrysler will be gone, bankrupt.” TARP this. “’Even with a drop in the price of gasoline, families aren’t changing their decision to keep running the old car’ said the Conference Board’s Goldstein. Nor will steps such as an easing of credit standards at lender GMAC be enough on their own to revive showroom traffic, said Tom Libby, a J.D. Power analyst. ‘Just because GMAC has become a bit more lenient, it’s not like a light switch,’ Libby said. ‘It will take economic stability to reignite car buying, it will take some calm. That’s what a shopper needs for the confidence to spend $26,000.'”
The Detroit News and The Wall Street Journal are reporting that Motown automakers’ pensions funds are no longer fully-funded. “The outgoing director of the U.S. Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. warned Friday that Detroit’s Big Three automakers face a $41 billion pension shortfall. “We’re not trying to tell people that the pension house is on fire,” quoth E.F. Millard in the DetN. “The point is that in many ways this has a similar look to other situations, such as a Bethlehem Steel.” Not surprisingly, the WSJ has an even more alarming sound bite. “An awful lot of people seem to think these plans are well funded or overfunded. Each of these plans is significantly underfunded [and] in three years I don’t want people coming back and saying, ‘How come the PBGC never told us that?'” Let’s drill down, then.
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