Chris Anderson’s story “The Emperor’s New Clothes” encourages people to question what they’re told, value honesty over flattery and be brave enough to call out the truth – even when it’s uncomfortable or unpopular.
And it’s a tale of nudity and scammers but no sex except for the Emp’s naughty bits.
There’s a lot of Emperor’s New Clothes stuff going on in our motoring world today.
Let’s start with Jaguar, which has a rich history of making some beautiful but mainly unreliable cars. Well of course like the E-Type and the XKR.
Anyway, it stopped making crook-looking woke electric cars that no one wanted like the I-Pace while the Indian owner of the legendary automotive company decided to take a break for a while to see if they could come up with a better idea than the I-Pace.
Now one reviewer said this about the I-Pace: It has “a lukewarm set of features for a premium price tag, and plenty of recalls, and the Jaguar I-Pace sets a questionable precedent for the company’s planned electric future.”
Jaguar and the US authorities recalled 6400 I-Paces five times for battery fires for which the company had no fix. Last month Jaguar in the US said it would buy back about 3000 I-Pace EVs from the 2019 model year because of the fires.
Anyway, the best idea Jag could come up with was a short hallucinogenic sci-fi movie which featured no cars but models of no particular sex wandering around in very colourful clothes or very large colourful paper Xmas bonbons looking like they just came back from a very quick trip to the morgue – or a Jag repair shop, both being similar.
Naturally a car ad with no cars for an iconic brand that tried to make serious cars before they went electric didn’t exactly set the world on fire like an I-Pace battery. Rawdon Glover, the managing director of Jaguar, said the new ad campaign had been lost in “a blaze of intolerance”, explaining that the company needed to move away from “traditional automotive stereotypes” like cars that don’t work.
In Australia, Polestar boss Scott Maynard said “there’s no doubt in my mind that selective reporting is having an impact on consumer confidence and the speed of take-up of electric vehicles”.
Scotty blames the media for cooling EV demand. “It’s selective reporting. If an electric vehicle catches fire, it’s all over the news,” he said. Polestar is a Swedish car maker majority owned by the Zhejiang Geely Holding Group.
While there is no doubt the media is to blame for global warming and or colding, child poverty, a packet of B&H costing $79 a packet (so if you smoke a pack a day you could lease a new Porker) and high housing interest rates, it’s bit harsh to blame us for EV sales being in the toilet.
There’s only one country where things are going right for the EV industry and that’s our old friend China. There’s only one reason the Chinese are the Emperors and Empresses of electric cars and that’s because they had a proper plan and a proper policy.
Twenty years ago China realised it could never compete in the petrol car market and could see the environment was going to become a big deal so built a complete supply chain, including cheap steel, batteries and importantly the charging infrastructure to support an EV industry.
Today, even US co-president Elon Musk’s Telsa car company can’t compete. Fifty per cent of cars sold in China are electric. It’s not long before 100 per cent of the world’s EVs will be Chinese.
Meanwhile, the FIA is in more trouble than a porcupine in a balloon factory. More bizarre penalties at the Qatar GP – particularly the one dished out to Mad Max – have the drivers asking serious questions about the administration of the FIA.
These include questions about race director Niels Wittich being forced to leave and a number of other FIA staff looking for new career opportunities. Not to mention drivers asking for three years what the fines they paid were being spent on. “FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem has told Formula 1 drivers to mind their own business after they asked where money from race fines was going and why senior figures had left the governing body.”
And talking of bad behaviour, let’s all wonder how Dan Kawai and the team at Autoleague are feeling after refusing to talk to customer Helen Chaberka about her lemon Jeep.
Since the incident Helen has been in hospital six times this year, three of them in ICU.
After chasing up AAMI owner Suncorp about customers Mark and Lyn Waldron who must wait five months for their car to be repaired, AAMI has provided a rental car. A condensed response from the Suncorp spokesman said: “AAMI understands the customer’s concern about the wait time for car repairs. In the case of an accident involving a wild animal, it’s generally considered an at-fault incident.
“AAMI has kept the customer informed about the assessment and repair timeline (it didn’t actually) and will continue to monitor and provide updates as required. A hire car was offered and accepted by the customer through to mid-January when the repairs are expected to be completed.”
Looking for the perfect yuletide gift for someone you love (like you), imagine owning Bernie Ecclestone’s car collection of 69 F1 cars.
SDL dealer Tom Hartley Jnr has them up for sale at around $600m as a job lot or for individual sale. For $600m the package includes the first Ferrari to win an F1, lots of Brabhams, Michael Schumacher’s 2002 F1 championship winner; the ex-Works Maserati 250F, the monstrous 16-cylinder Mark II BRM and the famed Vanwall VW10 which, in the hands of Stirling Moss, achieved multiple Grand Prix victories in the 1958 F1 season and clinched the first ever Constructors’ Championship for Vanwall.
It was first ever British car to win a Formula 1 race, the Championship and opened the floodgates for SDL-based teams ever since.
And if you’re looking for real race action this weekend, forget the F1 in Abu Dhabi and head to Steve Shelley’s One Raceway at Goulburn where your WART team will be in action. And in hot news, King Chuck has just sent the Sultan a telegram. Happy birthday Mick!
jc@jcp.com.au
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When you have more money than sense, try a Pagani Zonda
It’s reputedly got the same power as a turbo-prop aircraft and probably flies faster when it leaves the road and buries itself in a tunnel wall. Life flashes by quickly behind the wheel of a Pagani.