To paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, the Maybach experiment was a conspiracy between Daimler and the rich to make the rest of us feel smart. The ultimate zombie brand, exhumed during the go-go nineties as a way for Daimler to charge even more for a stretched S Class, has now fallen on troubled times. And now, according to the ever-trusty limobroker.co.uk, none other than Mariah Carey has put the Maybach seemingly irrevocably in its place:
Initially a top class Mercedes complete with a chauffeur was sent to take Mariah to the studios, but this wasn’t deemed exclusive enough for a star of Mariah’s stature and was then replaced by a £250,000 Mercedes Maybach. However the Maybach limo was also rejected and then, third-time-lucky, a Rolls Royce Phantom was dispatched.
OnStar’s Privacy & Compliance Officer Jane Speelman has an “I can’t let you do that Dave” moment in a Fastlane webchat titled “Onstar Debunks Privacy Misconceptions.” Yikes!
“Just because you have money doesn’t mean you’re smart” has a new poster boy. According to The AP :
A man blamed a low-flying pelican and a dropped cell phone for his veering his million-dollar sports car off a road and into a salt marsh near Galveston. The accident happened about 3 p.m. Wednesday on the frontage road of Interstate 45 northbound in La Marque, about 35 miles southeast of Houston.
Sex sells. Or does it? I’ve long argued that sex actually gets in the way of selling cars. Who can think about cars when they’re thinking about sex? Sure, the blog posts on The Babes of SEMEN—I mean SEMA get eight billion hits. But so what? Does a pretty face and a pneumatic chest do anything to stimulate people to buy the trash and treasure (mostly trash) on display at a show or available (God help us) via the web? The example here is a perfect example of why you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. But as far as I know, the only reason to catch flies is to kill them. Or at least trap them on a sticky stuff until they die. Hey, come to think of it, maybe sexual come-ons (so to speak) aren’t such a bad idea . . .
What a charming title for an automotive advice column: “Queen of the Road.” No, it doesn’t appear in a Utah newspaper. But the California curmudgeon is as credulous as the spiritual descendants of the talking salamander. His/her reader posits: “I drive daily on westbound Highway 24 through Lafayette, usually in the early evening. On several occasions, as I pass by the Lafayette BART station, my little Volkswagen Jetta seems to lose power. I push on the accelerator but the car doesn’t respond, quite a nerve-racking experience in the middle of evening rush hour. I’ve found that if I downshift and accelerate, power is restored and I continue on my way.” The Queen’s edict: “It’s indeed possible that a magnetic field or radio frequency interference affected your car’s computer and caused the car to stall.,” as the LA Police’s investigation into an EMP (electro-magnetic pulse) remote car disabler almost seems to prove. And there’s history here, dammit! “When the computers were first installed, in the 1980s and 1990s, cars would pull up at intersections and when the signs changed from ‘Walk’ to ‘Don’t Walk,’ their trunks would pop open. The cars’ trunk releases were picking up the radio frequencies from the ‘Walk’ sign.” Who knew? Now what?
One month ago DARTZ presented uberluxury armored car with whale penis interior – PROMBRON’ (ex.RussoBaltique), lot of people name this car as DARTZ.KOMBAT. As the world’s resonance was very huge and DARTZ got lot of angry e-mails from Greenpeace, WWF and also Pamela Anderson, DARTZ make strong decision to stop their plans regarding such interior.
“We have no any ideas to kill the whale or something like that. All we want – to make just luxury car. Real luxury car which will be world number one car. Our brand was started at 1869 when in Riga was opened Coach Factory or Russo Baltiysky Vagonnij Zavod – PBVZ, and first products was luxury train coaches. At 1907 was made a decision to open Car Department, and at 1909 first car left factory – the name of this car was RussoBalt. This was luxury and sport cars. At 1911 specially for Monaco Rally car got french style name – RussoBaltique. At 1912 factory made world first 4 x 4 wheel drive car, and at 1914 – armored car. All we want to unite luxury and armoring traditions of RussoBalt factory in one car, which brand celebrated 100 years now. At 1922 RussoBalt was renamed to PROMBRON’ (ex.RussoBalt).
WreckedExotics.com heads off the reservation to offer some discarded not to say abandoned Rolls Royce parts. Apparently the bits “Was [sic] removed from an undamaged Phantom to make a custom body. It includes the trunk lid with hinges and trunk liner, rear window, rear quarter windows, interior rear quarter C-pillar trim with wood and mirrors. The roof extends to just behind the sun roof but also includes the complete sun roof.” If I was BMW, I’d buy these items and crush them, stat. And what, dear God, happened to the donor car? Inquiring minds (with strong stomachs) want to know.
Jay Leno wasn’t present for the roast of Bob Lutz, but he did check in via video with a few jokes about Bob’s age. Luckily, former Car and Driver editor Csaba Csere decided to mine a richer vein of humor, digging into Lutz for his Merkur branding debacle and his distaste for flying commercial. Maybe retirement allowed Csere to loosen up and deliver some of the evening’s better zingers. Whatever it was, the contrast to Automobile Magazine’s Jean Jennings couldn’t have been greater: Jennings’ contribution was less roast and more abject fawning. She couldn’t have been more toothless if her press fleet access depended on it. Apparently she thought it did.
The evening before Bob Lutz was named Chairman of Opel, he was roasted at an Arthritis Foundation benefit at the Ritz-Carlton in Dearborn. The lead-off hitter was none other than Lutz’s boss, Fritz Henderson, and the inherent awkwardness of a boss roasting his far more charismatic employee made Fritz’s jabs some of the evening’s best. Here is his tribute to a man called Maximum.
I have no idea when someone somewhere decided that there was some kind of safety problem with gas pumps offering a locking clip at the end of the nozzle. You know, the little metal doo-hickey that lets you take your hand off the pump while the car fills with gas, then kicks back to let you know it’s done. I suppose someone somewhere experienced a clip failure. I imagine gas poured onto the ground. I have a hard time believing that the result was a lethal conflagration, but a million monkeys and all that. Perhaps it was the idea of an inferno that led to their ban; the relevant bureaucrat having seen Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds” as a kid. Meanwhile, here in the Ocean State, we have to physically squeeze the trigger on the nozzle until the tank’s full. As fellow SUV owners will attest, that can be a long time. Anyone who doesn’t live in the desert or the Deep South will also tell you that pumping gas in sub-zero weather is painful enough to make an Antarctic explorer nostalgic. Tall people have to stoop. Weak people have to strain. Nervous people have to stand still. All for the lack of a single piece of metal. If we can put a man on the moon (and I know you and I were deeply involved in that venture), why can’t we (and now I’m talking about you rather than me) design a gas pump that doesn’t require so much human effort?
I know I “raised” expectations with the previous post on the beautiful Charlene. And so I feel obliged—obliged I tell you—to provide the denouement to what could well be the sleaziest sexploitation perpetuated by anyone even remotely connected to the automotive industry. I think we can all learn a lesson here: lock up your daughters. And if any member or our B&B needs more vigorous instruction on this matter, Google “Standing and Modeling” using only the first letters of each word.
Recent Comments