Category - Avoidable Contact

A weekly opinion column by Dubspeed Driven staffer Jack Baruth

Avoidable Contact #37: Branding got Ford into the Ranger/Panther mess, so why can’t it get them out?

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Ninety-nine percent of “automotive journalism” is repeating what you’ve just been told, particularly if it seems to make a bit of sense, so it’s no surprise that several color rags and major websites have run nearly identical features about the sales of Ford’s marked-for-death Panther-platform cars and Ranger pickups. In July, the Ranger outsold the Volvo brand in the United States, nearly outsold Lincoln, and moved more units than nearly every other Ford vehicle available. The Crown Victoria, Grand Marquis, and Town Car together are outselling the brand-new Taurus and nearly-new Flex despite having not received a major update since 1998 or thereabouts.

Most of these articles will then go on to wonder why Ford is throwing away nearly 15,000 units a month of paid-off platform sales, particularly when they have no replacement for either the Ranger or the Panthers on the horizon. 180,000 sales a year isn’t anything to sneeze about in this market, and surely the profits on these vehicles are extremely substantial. Why not just keep making the Ranger, Crown Vic, Grand Marquis, and Town Car until the volume doesn’t justify starting up the assembly plant in the morning?

Twenty or thirty years ago, that’s exactly what Ford would have done, and they would have been right to do so. Today, the answer isn’t so clear-cut. What’s changed? Branding. Follow along as I explain why Ford needs to cut these nameplates loose… but why it might make sense to keep the vehicles themselves in production.

Avoidable Contact #36: The culture wars gave Toyota a license to kill.

Jack Baruth

Avoidable Contact, Speed:Sport:Life Original Content

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Are Toyotas really accelerating without warning? It’s hard to say, since it’s been years since I saw any Toyota besides a Tundra even keep up with the normal flow of traffic. The Camry is the official car of the left-lane hog, the chosen transport of that woman ahead of you who ABS-locks her brakes for a yellow light and then won’t enter the intersection for a left on green. By and large, Toyotas are characterless cars purchased by fearful, fretting nebbishes. Twenty years ago, Toyota ads screamed “OH WHAT A FEELING!” but today’s Toyota ads are naked appeals to terror of the unknown. Do you clutch your organic-fiber blanket in bed at night and roll around shaking, dreading the day when your car requires service or — gasp! — maintenance? Toyota has the car for you. Corolla! It’s for cowards! Oh what a feeling!

If the average Toyota buyer is afraid of her own shadow and worries about automotive catastrophe constantly, surely the prospect of UNINTENDED ACCELERATION RIGHT INTO A FLAMING WALL OF DEATH should be enough to keep every Camry in the United States off the road, right? Well, that would certainly be the case, except for one little thing: there is a force that motivates the average Toyota fan or purchase far more than fear, and that force is pure, blinding hatred.
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Avoidable Contact #35: Become an English autowriter instantly with these five easy tropes.

Jack Baruth

Avoidable Contact, News, Speed:Sport:Life Original Content

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The nice folks at autowriters.com published a modified version of Avoidable Contact #31 last week, and as one might suspect it’s raised quite the fervor among the Frank Bacons of the world. This is all well and good, but it has occurred to me that, in the course of exposing the mendacity/mediocrity two-punch combo which characterizes our industry, I may have inadvertently crushed some of my readers’ dreams of becoming an automotive “journalist”. To those readers, I offer my most sincere apologies.

Better yet, I offer a solution. Instead of becoming an automotive journalist, why not become an English automotive journalist? Trust me, it’s a better gig. Not only will you instantly acquire the kind of cast-iron credibility that American autowriters will never so much as sniff, if you are lucky someone may even bring you back “across the pond” to run an American auto rag!

Naturally, you’ll need a little help to make this dream become reality. I cannot help you fake the accent, and I cannot teach you to operate a stick-shift with your left hand, but I can show you how to write just like an English journo. It’s easy! You’ll probably still need a freelance editor to take a look at your work and make sure it is written cohesively but other than that, you should be good to go. I’ve provided five “tropes” below to get you started. According to the nice people at tvtropes.org, a site I am not linking directly because it’s so good you will never return to S:S:L, “Tropes are “devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members’ minds and expectations.” It’s almost impossible to find a Brit-rag article that does not use one or more of these, so a solid command of this fab five is essential to your future career. Each trope is carefully described and a kind-of-fictional example is provided for your use. What are you waiting for? Get writing — and by next week you could be driving an Azure on the Mulsanne!

Avoidable Contact #34: When buying a new car, don’t forget the Grand National Problem.

Jack Baruth

Avoidable Contact, Speed:Sport:Life Original Content

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Imagine that you’re an alien. Not an undocumented immigrant, mind you, but a genuine, green-tentacle-and-glass-helmet monstrosity of a visitor from beyond the stars. While your fellow aliens examine the defense systems of Earth (not so hot) and the intelligence of the population (somewhat simian), you attempt to reconcile all the written history you can find with the evidence before your massive, bloodshot, singular eye. You are particularly interested in the history and psychology behind the local transportation devices, known as “cars”, “whips”, “hogs”, or “causes for divorce”.

Most of what you’ve learned is pretty common-sense stuff, even for an alien. There’s a problem, however, and you have, after some months of study, come to call it “The Grand National Problem”. You’ve used your indistinguishable-from-magic science to read everything in the vast record-keeping halls of General Motors. You know from the documentation that the vast majority of Buick Regals produced during the Eighties were chrome-laden, velour-lined “Custom” and “Limited” models. It’s as plain as the order codes on all the old Selectric-typed order forms.

Or is it? All those Customs and Limiteds GM supposedly rolled off the lines at, um, Flint? They’re gone. All your spaceship’s sensors can detect on the roads, all the ones you see at the half-ass local old-car shows, are examples of a rather minor production variant: the “Grand National”. In some years, Grand Nationals accounted for under ten percent of Regal production, but in the twenty-first century virtually every roadworthy example of the baroque Buick sports the blown-six logo and the “Darth Vader” paintjob. The regular Regals have been out of circulation so long, your orbital telescopes cannot even pick them out in junkyards. Something’s gone wrong, either with the data or the observations. Was there a G-body genocide? What happened?

Avoidable Contact #33: A modest proposal — cops don’t need to speed.

Jack Baruth

Avoidable Contact, Speed:Sport:Life Original Content

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The nice folks at Jalopnik link to us so often, it’s the least I can do to begin this column by suggesting you watch this video over there. For those of you who don’t like watching videos, it shows a police car operating at a velocity of ninety-four miles per hour in a marked 40 zone. At around the one-minute mark, we see the police car strike a Mazda containing two teenagers. Both are killed. The police car is not running its lights, was not operating the siren, and was not even responding to an emergency.

Here’s the best (or worst) part: the officer who killed the kids, Jason Anderson, was apparently “racing” the officer whose car recorded the video, one Richard Pisani. Pisani is traveling at about 74 mph during one part of the video. In a marked 40. I cannot find any evidence that Office Pisani was in any way disciplined for his conduct. Think about that for a moment.

Perhaps most worryingly, the video shows absolutely no awareness, driving ability, or the vaunted “high-speed police training” on the part of Officer Anderson. It’s fairly obvious that the Mazda is going to cross Anderson’s path. We’re regularly told that by police departments that their officers have “special training”, but this is an accident that most solid NASA HPDE drivers could easily avoid. If they weren’t driving a police car, you wouldn’t be surprised if their car insurance claim was denied by the company. This can happen in certain circumstances; insurance firms can just be like that. Which is annoying, especially if the worst-case scenario were to happen. A modest amount of steering to the left would have saved two lives. Instead, Anderson simply drives right into the Mazda, with his car’s “black box” recording 100% accelerator pressure up to the crash. He was flat-out to the very end.

The good news is that the technology exists to prevent a tragic event such as this from ever happening again. In fact, the technology has existed for a very, very long time, and it could be easily installed on every police vehicle in the country. Let’s discuss.

Avoidable Contact #32: Nobody wants a car to last forever.

Jack Baruth

Avoidable Contact, Speed:Sport:Life Original Content

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It was a sunny day in 1994 when I fired up my 1990 Volkswagen Fox and took my newly acquired “Swedish Mauser” 6.5×55 rifle to the local range. At that point in time, the rifle was around eighty-two years old, having been manufactured at some point in 1912. It worked fine and was accurate to slightly under one inch at one hundred yards — the so-called “minute of angle” which is a basic standard of accuracy for long guns. Having satisfied myself that this time-worn gun was up to snuff, I went home and played some guitar. In this case, the guitar was my 1982 Electra Phoenix X130, already twelve years old but showing very little wear despite a harrowing four years following me around a college campus.

My mail had been delivered that day by a mailman driving a Grumman LLV, very similar to the one pictured at the top of this column. And although I didn’t know it, Porsche was less than three months away from building a particular white 1995 993 Carrera with factory-matched white wheels.

Nearly sixteen years later, my Mauser is doing fine service for another shooter, who reports that it has required no repair or maintenance beyond the basics. It will turn one hundred years old in 2012. My Electra rarely comes out of its case any more, since I have an, ahem, Gibson CS-336 and Heritage H-535 Anniversary to supplant it, but when I do play it there’s no evidence that it’s now a twenty-eight-year-old guitar. My mail was delivered today by a mail lady in a Grumman LLV which could not have been manufactured any fewer than fourteen years ago. And my 1995 Porsche 993 Carrera slumbers in the cold garage dreaming of spring, shiny and corrosion-free.

The 1990 Fox I drove to the range that long-ago day? Gone, junked, rusted out, driven into the ground. In a story full of what they call “durable goods”, the Fox wasn’t truly durable at all. It was used and discarded, probably utterly worthless by the time the odometer reached the 150,000 mark. Surely VW understood how to make a consumer product as durable as a wooden Japanese guitar or a ninety-year-old rifle. The industry as a whole understood how to make durable items. My little white 993 still runs. The local mail truck still runs, although we’ll discuss later why Grumman’s understanding of “durable” differs from Porsche’s. The Fox’s lack of durability was almost certainly due to a particular decision or series of decisions made somewhere at Volkswagen. Why? What is the advantage of deliberately creating less-than-durable products? Put another way — why aren’t all vehicles “long life vehicles”?