Let's Talk About Racers Instead

Auto racing, hunting, and anything to do with heavy industry, extraction, and agriculture (raising tomatoes in containers doesn't count) are worlds removed from the bicoastal ivory towers, so it's no surprise that CNN got it wrong when reporting on the Indianapolis 500.

For CNN--which appears to have no knowledge of the rube culture in flyover country--referring to "NASCAR'S Indianapolis 500" is an understandable error, just like generalizing all non-STEM majors as worthless is an understandable error by people who don't bother with the finer points of credentialism (FYI, dear reader, I'm a non-STEM major). Lumping together two very distinct racing institutions like NASCAR and the Indy 500 is like referring to "Boeing's A320" or "Google's iPhone."

Christian Bale and Matt Damon (indian express graphic)

Speaking of racing, I watched the very fine Ford v. Ferrari, a "true-story" movie about the Ford Motor Company's all-out effort to wrest the 24 Hours of Le Mans trophy from Ferrari in 1966.

While it has excellent-and-not-too-dizzying racing sequences, the power of the movie rests on Carroll Shelby's effort to get Ford to agree to the car designs and the driver, Ken Miles, he wanted. Matt Damon (Shelby) and Christian Bale (Miles) give excellent performances as they battle each other, the Ford bureaucracy, Lee Iacocca, Henry Ford II, and Enzo Ferrari.

What resonated most with this boomer was the movie's depiction of pre-1968 America, when men were confident in their ability to accomplish anything after the shared experience of World War II and when the women they loved supported them while being smarter than they were--Holy Pride and Prejudice, Batman! (1966 language reference). In tone, color, character, and attitude the movie was very much like The Right Stuff, the movie and book about the fighter pilots who became the first astronauts.

Highly recommended, even for those who don't know the difference between carburetion and fuel injection.

Carbon Indulgence

The above graph and commentary are from the WSJ on the week's action in auto stocks. [bold added]

As traditional car giants sputter, Tesla is in the lead. General Motors Co. and Ford Motor Co. gave tepid outlooks for the year ahead to investors as they deal with weakening demand and rising labor costs. Meanwhile, investors are gravitating to upstarts like Tesla, whose valuation soared in recent days to more than $130 billion—higher than that of GM, Ford and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV combined. Telsa shares gained 20% Tuesday.

When we left for Honolulu on Tuesday, TSLA was taking off like a rocket ship. It's fallen sharply but still finished 15% higher for the week.

I checked out the Tesla store at Ala Moana. The displays are more polished, and the products are, as expected, more advanced, than they were three years ago in Palo Alto.

Within the next five years we'll probably swallow hard and buy the Powerwall battery storage, the solar roof, and the car.

For an outlay in the low six figures we'll not only be independent of PG&E but more importantly signal our low-carbon virtue to the neighbors. A red Tesla, like the one in the showroom, will do the trick.

Was She Lying?

In the birthplace of free speech and the land of no-question-is-too-dumb, it's the one question that will get you fired, kicked out of school, and ostracized from social groups: Was She Lying?

Someone here is lying.

In Washington, to the contrary, senators managed to spend three weeks on Ford’s and Kavanaugh’s diametrically opposed, impossible-to-reconcile versions of events without confronting this critical, seemingly unavoidable fact. Instead, after watching, first, Ford’s trembling rendition of an atrocious attack and, then, Kavanaugh’s forceful denial, the Senate decided not to decide who was telling the truth.

It is a psychobabble default: We are to believe that Professor Ford is completely earnest, that she was undeniably subjected to a harrowing sexual assault, but that she has somehow misidentified her assailant — notwithstanding that she says she knew who Kavanaugh was before the attack and is “100 percent” certain he is the culprit.

Cowed by the “survivors must be believed” hooey — as if there were a link between X chromosomes and truth-telling — Republicans blithely went along, as if this preposterous mistaken-identity scenario were incontestable. Loud, aggressive hard-left activists had them afraid to confront Ford’s story … so they didn’t — and now they wonder why the media and Kavanaugh’s other critics keep pronouncing that the unconvincing, uncorroborated allegations against him are “credible.”

On the other hand, Kavanaugh is very persuasive in his indignant denials, and there is — if we may again mention this inconvenient fact — no support for Ford’s account, just her say-so. Just as no one in the Senate dared suggest that Ford might be lying, no one wanted to call Kavanaugh a liar to his face, either. As a result, we got more psychobabble: Kavanaugh occasionally drank beer to excess as a teenager, so maybe he tried to rape Ford in a drunken stupor (in front of a close friend of his) and, since no one mentioned it to him for 36 years, he can’t remember doing it.

Right.

It’s absurd. What happened here is simple. Either Ford is lying about being assaulted by Kavanaugh, or Kavanaugh is lying in denying it.

Asking the question is like questioning the existence of God a hundred years ago. Kids, stay away from this person.

The Opposite of That Which Was Intended

The Taurus will soon go the way of the Studebaker
and the Packard (Motortrend photo)

Its decision is no surprise if you've been following the car business: Ford to stop making all passenger cars except the Mustang.

Faced with plunging demand and declining profits from its passenger car lineup, Ford will shift its resources to the booming side of the market: pickups, SUVs and crossover-utility vehicles, said CEO Jim Hackett late on Wednesday.

...the real surge is on the utility vehicle side where traditional, truck-based sport utility vehicles and newer crossover-utility vehicles like the popular Ford Escape now account for half of the overall American new vehicle market. Add pickups, vans and other light trucks and that jumps to 65 percent, with sedans and coupes continuing to lose momentum.

Americans want SUV's, "cross-overs", and trucks, not sedans.

The factor behind this market shift is fuel availability, driven by the explosion in fracking. Gas being under $4 a gallon, Americans select big, fast, comfortable, and powerful transportation. Drivers may emit concern about carbon footprints and climate change, but their purchasing choices speaks a lot louder than words. As some bloggers are fond of asking, have you hugged a fracker today?

Note: WSJ auto columnist Dan Niel says that Ford's decision has been given a push by a change to fuel-efficiency measurements.

The “footprint rule”—which refers to the area within the perimeter of the four wheels—calculates a vehicle’s fuel economy as a function of its size. The rule change effectively incentivizes building larger vehicles by holding them to progressively easier standards. As a result, the largest and most profitable vehicles also enjoy the lowest relative costs of compliance.

Car manufacturers that only make large cars and trucks have a much lower--and easier---MPG target than those who sell a lot of sub-compacts. The result: more large vehicles on the road. As is often the case, rules that are not carefully thought through result in the opposite of that which was intended.