Flying Cars to Take Off in Ingolstadt

Long time listeners may remember a few months ago I mentioned Audi’s partnership with Airbus to start developing flying cars. As a refresher, these were very loosely termed cars. Basically it’s a three-part design, with a quadcopter, passenger pod and electric skateboard-like platform. The pod can be transported by either the quadcopter or wheeled platform, making it either flying or car, but not really “flying car.” I said at the time that the idea was pretty neat and more likely to succeed than any other system I’d seen and, sure enough, Audi has just received approval from the German government to start testing these in their headquarter city in Bavaria, Ingolstadt. Now, this is a long way from being like “oh my God, we are all going to be catching flying car taxis from the airports within five years,” but it’s a lot closer than I thought we’d see in my lifetime, so I’m hoping this actually goes somewhere. Onward and upward, Audi.

Volvo’s New US Plant feat. Dig @ Trump

In a time when automotive manufacturing jobs can be hard to come by in the US, who can we trust to bring back those jobs? Yep, the Chinese and Swedes! Volvo, which is owned by Chinese company Geely, formally opened their new factory in South Carolina, which will build the new S60 we’ll get to later. In addition to providing Volvo the chance to suck up to American buyers by focusing on the $1.1 billion investment in America and the 4,000 jobs the factory will host when construction is complete, the event gave Volvo execs the chance to cast some serious shade at Donald Trump and his supporters Nikki Haley and Governor Henry McMaster. Volvo CEO Hakan Samuelsson said “If you have trade barriers and restrictions, we cannot create as many jobs as we are planning to. We want to export and if suddenly China and Europe have very high barriers, it would be impossible. Then you have to build the cars there. And then all cars will be more expensive, you have to invest more tooling and have every model in every country. That’s against all the logic of modern economies that trade with each other.” It seems there’s a lot of commentary about our trade policy being against all logic, and yet here we are, threatening a 25% tariff on imported vehicles and auto parts. It’s almost like logic doesn’t factor into decisions at all, but what do I know, I’m only a master of business with a degree in political science who happens to like his cars cheap and fast.

Audi CEO Arrested, Thrown in Slammer

The fallout from the Dieselgate scandal continues still in Germany where this week Audi CEO Rupert Stadler was arrested based on concealment of evidence relating to the defeat devices on Volkswagen Auto Group vehicles. He’s actually remaining in custody because the prosecution thinks he’s a flight risk. Audi has had to scramble to name an interim CEO while their boss remains a jailbird, but this just continues to look bad. If the CEO of one of your major brands was aware of the effort to deceive authorities, former Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn is probably shaking in his boots because you can bet he knew about it too. It’s a serious problem when a culture of corruption comes straight from the top, and you would’ve thought Volkswagen had learned its very expensive lesson, but by keeping Stadler as Audi CEO this long after the scandal came to light, maybe they need a couple more billion dollar settlements before the root out all the corrupt jerks. I’ll take my settlement in the form of a V10 R8, thank you.

Teslupdate #1,000,000,000

This will again not be the week when we have no Tesla news, because there was some wild shit going on with Elon Musk’s company this week. First, the not-so-wild: tesla completed the setup of a third production line over the weekend...in their parking lot. Yes, the new line is underneath temporary tents outside because the space is needed that badly to ramp up production to meet goals. Back when the factory was a combined General Motors and Toyota venture, they managed to crank out 8,200 cars per week from the inside of the place, so if Tesla needs to move outdoors just to reach 5,000, I think you can imagine how much more complicated those production lines must be and how much more space they take up.

Amazing work by Tesla team. Built entire new general assembly line in 3 weeks w minimal resources. Love u guys so much! Pic of 1st Model 3 dual motor performance coming off the line … pic.twitter.com/Xr55P3fmGd
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 16, 2018

Next came some serious shade thrown from General Motors. Actress Mary McCormack who you may remember from some sort of television shows somewhere, tweeted out a video of her husband’s Tesla Model S, which apparently just started catching fire while he was driving it and burst into flames in the middle of Santa Monica Boulevard. Tesla has no idea what happened or why, but GM jumped at the opportunity, offering the actress a free Chevy Bolt as a more dependable loaner car. Nicely done, GM communications guy Ray Wert.

Okay now we get to the crazy shit - on Sunday, Elon Musk sent out an email accusing a former employee of sabotage and intellectual property theft, as well as leaking sensitive information to third parties and the press. He followed that email up with another about someone potentially trying to sabotage a production line by starting a fire. Then on Tuesday Tesla filed a lawsuit against a former employee for allegedly having stolen confidential information and making false claims to the media. Then on Thursday, someone claiming to be a friend of Martin Tripp, the guy Tesla sued, called the Gigafactory to warn that Tripp was coming in to shoot up the place, causing a minor panic and for beefed up security until the county sheriff found there was no credibility to the threat. Then AFTER THAT, Tripp posted to Twitter an email exchange that he had with Musk about the lawsuit wherein they both called each other horrible human beings and generally behaved like children.

We’re not yet sure if the Sunday email and Tuesday lawsuit are connected, but if not, that means there are several people trying their darndest to mess up Elon’s life. And jeez, people if you like constant dramabombs being dropped, no need to watch daytime television, just follow Elon Musk on Twitter. This is ridiculous.

J.D. Power Initial Quality Honors Hyundai

The annual list of J.D. Power rankings for initial quality were released this week and, if you’ve been listening to this show and looking at their recent cars, you won’t be surprised to learn that Genesis, Kia and Hyundai are the top three brands. All of them being owned by Hyundai. Even Porsche comes in at just fourth spot and Ford in a somewhat unbelievable fifth. The trick is, the initial power rankings count the number of problems experienced per hundred vehicles in the first 90 days of ownership. If things are going wrong within 90 days, that’s generally not a great sign for future reliability, but certainly not a sign that cars with good initial quality will last longer, as may be the case with Ford. They also don’t measure the severity of problems, so a busted transmission is effectively the same weight as a windshield wiper motor squeaking, which is pretty misleading. Furthermore, as I’ve discussed before, automakers pay JD Power for the right to use their awards in marketing materials, so these sort of non-firsthand user reviews should be taken with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, Hyundai definitely deserves a look as they do make some pretty nice cars. Just, as with everything else, QUESTION EVERYTHING.

RC-6 Corvette

While I’ve never driven one, It’s my understanding that Corvettes are very fun cars to drive. But in the Netherlands, where people decided they’d rather have land where the sea was so they built a complex series of windmills to drive the sea back into the ocean, one man has gone and made his Corvette a bit more complex as well. Specifically, he modified his C6 Corvette to be remote controlled. We’ve seen full-sized R/C cars before, but doing so to a Corvette is an entirely different scale; one that cost about $4,000. It’s honestly really impressive that someone could pull this off, but I still think I’d rather be behind the wheel of that V8 rather than just puttering it around a parking lot. But that’s the Dutch for you - defying convention, and the ocean.

Devlin & G35 circle story attribution.png

Authored by
Devlin Riggs

Header image: When your GTI is the least athletic member of your automotive family tree.

Now, I try not to get to political because my podcast is about cars and not ideologies, but the truth is the automotive industry is heavily affected by the actions of politicians, so every once in a while, those actions are worth exploring if only to evaluate their impact on our favorite past times; cars and driving.

The policies in play this week are all about import tariffs, taxes placed on things made outside the United States for the simple fact that they were not made in the United States. Last week it was steel and aluminum, both of which are critical components in cars and which are rarely made in the United States anymore. China, specifically, is one of the world’s leading exporters of steel and and the theory is that, by imposing a tariff on Chinese steel, companies would rather purchase steel from US steel plants because it’s cheaper, thereby creating jobs in the steel manufacturing sector and leading us all to live happier, more fulfilling lives knowing that we provided people with some work.

The problem with that theory is, companies that use steel don’t exist to create jobs or give everyone a warm, fuzzy feeling inside. Unless that company is Chipotle, companies exist to make money and they will fight tooth and nail for every profit margin possible. That means that, when something costs more to make, they will charge consumers more to buy it, leading to price inflation and a lower quality of life because people have less money after spending it all on whatever they are buying with steel or aluminum in it. Like, for instance beer cans or my beloved Diet Coke.

This week, the conversation turned from raw materials to completed cars, when Trump proposed implementing a tariff on European vehicles, claiming that the US had been treated very unfairly by the European Union. The EU responded by saying they would tax Harley-Davidsons if such tariffs were applied to their vehicles. And let’s be honest, people are not going to go buy a Cadillac instead of a Mercedes just because a 10% import tariff has been applied, they’re just going to pay more for the Mercedes and hate the government.

The apparent issue at the core of this is that Trump thinks that, because the US has a trade deficit, that means that everything is all wrong and we’re losing and everyone else is winning and we need to be the ones winning, when that simply isn’t the case.

Here’s a quick explanation of the trade deficit; I go into Chipotle and I get steak tacos, I have a trade deficit with Chipotle and I have to pay them for the product I received. This is partially because it’s more expensive to go buy the ingredients myself, but also because I am lazy and by having Chipotle do the hard work for me, my quality of life is higher.

And that’s what it boils down to: quality of life. The primary argument for implementing tariffs and reversing the trade deficit is to create jobs, but that effort is doomed to fail because we have things like the minimum wage here, and health and safety rules that make the production of goods more expensive than they can be produced in China or most countries in southeast Asia, where there is little to no worker protection. And why have those regulations in place that guarantee a certain hourly wage and working conditions that aren’t likely to wind up in employees dying? Because we want a higher quality of life. Part of the price we pay for that is a trade deficit, where we consume more than we create, product-wise. What we also get are cheaper goods, access to more and varied items and low inflation.

And now we’re at a point when our chief executive is calling for a trade war that he insists is good and will be easy to win. What we’ll get with a trade war is more expensive raw materials, more expensive products, access to fewer items, higher inflation, higher debt from greater spending on more expensive items and the accompanying high inflation, which will likely increase personal bankruptcies and lead to actually fewer jobs than it will create because we can never truly compete with our trading partners in some sectors. Especially after we learned this week that Americans owe more than $1 trillion in car loans, and we’re borrowing record amounts of money to buy cars, often at deep subprime interest rates, we simply cannot contemplate policies that will only cause us to plunge deeper into personal debt. There’s no such thing as a good trade war, and there are no winners. In a trade war, everyone loses, including us petrol heads.