Category: Business

Stupid Stupid Stupid

Corporate Fuckery, Drive Time

Yeah, this one’s going to turn out well for them:

Jaguar’s last ever petrol car came off the assembly line at the brand’s Midlands factory on Friday (19 December) ahead of its daring switch to all-electric vehicles next year.

The final Jaguar model with a combustion engine under its bonnet is an £80,000 high-performance F-Pace SVR SUV finished in black paint, according to the Jaguar Enthusiasts’ Club, which was in attendance as the Solihull factory officially signed off its last petrol model.

Under the bonnet is a burbling 5.0-litre supercharged V8 petrol engine – a stark contrast to the first ‘new Jaguar’ that will debut next year, which is a near-silent four-door GT that will cost almost twice as much, with a quoted £120,000 to £140,000 starting price.

While parent group JLR made no official announcement of the event, the Jaguar Enthusiasts’ Club says the final model is being gifted to the Jaguar Daimler Heritage Trust in Gaydon, where it will be retained as a museum piece.

The club said Friday was a ‘quiet, historic full stop’ for Jaguar’s 90-year relationship with the internal combustion engine.

Yeah, and they’re celebrating this piece of boneheaded idiocy?

No wonder the car, and the staff, are all wearing black:

I think a better payoff line would be:

“Pissing Away 90 Years Of Jaguar Heritage”

Oh, and “full stop” is what’s going to happen to Jaguar’s EV sales, but let’s not spoil the party.

It’s Not Hyperbole

Food & Drink, Marketing / Advertising, Patriotism, Trades

When I first referred to Jeremy Clarkson as “The Greatest Living Englishman”, it started off as a nod to his unflinching honesty when it came to everything he looked at, such as his (non-)review of some Vauxhall car model back in the 1990s:  “If they’re not going to bother to make an interesting car, I’m not going to bother to review it.”

That caused Big Business (in this case, Vauxhall’s then-parent company General Motors) to go apeshit, because that’s not the way car reviewers are supposed to behave.

It’s that same unflinching honesty that he displayed in his first bumbling efforts at farming which turned his Clarkson’s Farm TV show into a runaway smash hit, and along the way almost single-handedly changed the way the British regard both food and the farmers who produce it.

So when he turned that same agricultural ignorance towards brewing beer — simply because he had a barn full of unsold barley which he needed to sell — one might think that it was just another celebrity using their name to sell a product.

In this case, one would be not only wrong, but spectacularly wrong.  And if you want to see a case study in marketing that, in hindsight, never had a chance of failing, then I implore you to watch this video.

Time and time again, “the experts” believed that Clarkson was making a mistake, and every single time he proved them not only wrong, but spectacularly wrong.

He turned a few thousand pounds’ worth of unsold barley into a £75 million company, and in the process, changed the way British people think about farming, about beer and about the people who farm and the people who brew beer.

And he did it all with his usual unflinching honesty and openness, which gave the lie to the usual corporate veneer of respectability and care for both their employees and their customers.

Which is why he truly is the Greatest Living Englishman.

I can’t wait to try it the next time I go over to Britishland.

So Long, Faerie

Corporate Wokism, Drive Time

It’s probably too late, of course, but I see that Jaguar Land Rover (JLR, to use their stupid non-brand acronym) has finally decided to can the woke twerp who turned Jag into… well, nothing.

Just the “relaunch” ad’s smug payoff line was enough to set my teeth on edge:

“We’re here to delete ordinary. To go bold. To copy nothing.”

I hate to tell them this but if Jaguar was anything, it wasn’t “ordinary”.  And frankly, if anything was worth copying, it was Jaguar’s heritage of wonderful, sleek and bold designs.

I’d post pics of the suggested modern replacement for the above (as envisaged by the now-departed Gerry McGovern), but I don’t want to ruin anyone’s appetite.

I just wonder what Jag is going to do now?

Update:  OMFG

Playing Sherlock

Drive Time, Trades

Okay, as a longtime data geek and mechanical moron, this video had me enthralled.  What was it all about?  Some guys asking themselves “Why?”

This brand new L87 engine with ZERO miles never even made it into a vehicle before it was condemned by GM. It failed one of their quality control Pico tests and we want to know why. In this video, we tear it down, take some measurements, and run tests to uncover why it was tossed in the trash — and how this single engine design ended up costing GM over a billion dollars in recalls and warranty repairs.

I don’t have the faintest clue what any of the technical pieces or terms are all about, but the search is absolutely thrilling.  It’s when these mechanics start looking at the data gathered from analysis of the different engine components that my inner data geek gets excited,

It’s the kind of stuff I used to do at The Great Big Research Company in my initial job in the Stat department:  picking at the data, looking for stuff which shouldn’t be there and is, and/or stuff which should be there and isn’t.

My favorite quote:  “These are big numbers.  Are they big enough to ruin an engine?” (He’s talking about a hundred thousandths of an inch, which in the real world would scarcely matter except when you’re looking at precision-made machinery.)

I’m not going to post a spoiler, here, but it involves the level of chamfering around some holes.

What I truly love is the level of expertise shown by all the guys in the video — and when they bring in Dave himself, his explanation of the problem is absolutely brilliant.

Go and watch the video.  It’s half an hour out of your day, and I promise you that you won’t be disappointed.  Even if you’re not the slightest bit interested in the minutiae  of engines — which would make you similar to me — the journey is worth the time.

Stupid Money

Drive Time, Marketing / Advertising, The Gun Thing

Via Insty (again), I see that Overfinch has crafted a line of bespoke Range Rovers in Holland & Holland livery:

The 2025 Range Rover Holland & Holland Overfinch’s interior is much more overtly extravagant, though Range Rover’s minimalist form language still dominates. Most surfaces are wrapped in Bridge of Weir leather, and those that are not are instead covered with open-pore French walnut veneer or real metal. The stainless-steel inserts in the doors feature the same engraved scroll work as on the “Royal” shotguns, the engraved diamonds embedded in the veneers in the doors echo those on the guns’ stocks, and the Holland & Holland crest is inlaid on the front and rear center consoles, the latter housing a Champagne cooler and a pair of Champagne flutes.

The leather seats feature a unique quilting pattern that also echoes the Holland & Holland diamond motif and features illustrations of game birds stitched into the backrests. In the duo-tone colorway the front seats are trimmed mainly in Harris Green and the rears mainly in London Tan.

Sounds like something an Arab oil sheikh would want to putter around his Scottish estate in, playing a Laird.  Still, I like that interior.

Of course, from the outside the thing is 2025 Rolls-Royce-level Fugly:

…but not as ugly as its price of $650,000.

To put it into perspective, that’s just over the price of three new H&H Royal and a couple-three of their secondhand Royal shotguns.

Lovely as all get-out, but not even with a lottery winning would I be tempted.  And that’s by any of them:  the H&H Range Rover or the H&H shotguns, which taken as the package above would set you back about a million bucks.

Maybe the parvenu status-seekers of today’s ultra-wealthy set would be tempted by such blatant brand-harvesting… hence the title of this post.

As for myself (given a lottery winning as above), my choices are below the fold. Read more