Car companies are slurping your data (who knew?), me on the radio talking about that and making people mad, hot hatch rivals shake hands on track, a new VW camper is out, more utes going PHEV and a gorgeous new French electric hatchback
Just over a year after the Mozilla Foundation’s landmark report into catastrophic data privacy issues in the automotive sector, Australia’s Choice magazine had a bit of a look and a prod to see what car companies are doing with your personal data.
Toyota’s Gazoo Racing and Hyundai’s N will hold a combined event in South Korea. That sounds like a lot of fun and kind of makes perverse sense. Toyota is not at all big on the peninsula so why not show folks how the Japanese do things.
I love the VW Transporter and its variants more than is absolutely right and proper. I reviewed a California Beach camper for WhichCar a couple of years back and just didn’t stop grinning.
Now there’s a new one and CarThrottle’s Mike Bartholomew is all over it.
Aaaand to finish off, another iconic French city car is rebooted as an EV, the Renault Twingo. Ginny Buckley of Electrifying takes you through the concept car.
And that’s it for Links We Like for another day. If you spot anything cool, let me know!
Consumer advice is kind of what we do here (kind of?) so we’ll start with a story about the roads in Australia with the most speed cameras. I live within 3km of five of the things, so it’s a story close to my heart.
We’ve also got a new McLaren, the delectable new Renault 5, some amusing Cybertruck news and one of the more unexpected EV restomods.
Tomorrow on the Redline we welcome Scott Newman and his review of the new Corvette Z06 and E-Ray. First thing tomorrow morning!
Zane Dobie at Drive.com.au has the story of the roads with the most cameras in each Australian state and territory. While I live near five (I have precisely zero objection to red light cameras, just so we’re clear), if you live between Hurstville and Strathfield in Sydney, then…wow….
Now that we have consumer advice out of the way, let’s bounce to the other end of the spectrum and send you off to look at a new McLaren hypercar. After the Artura’s diversion into V6 territory, the 4.0-litre V8 in the W1 knows how to rev.
I shouldn’t like it – I’m not really into these super high-end cars because I don’t really see the point – but this one I would actually drive if offered it (hugely unlikely). Having said that, I’d swap a drive in a W1 for a run in a McLaren F1.
Also at CAR Vicky Parrott drives the spectacular-looking Renault 5. I think this car is one of the most important that Renault has ever made, and that’s saying something given its history.
The 5 reboot has been a long time coming and whether it comes to Australia remains debatable given French marques’ inability to get a good price on EVs for us, but I just want it here to look at it.
One of the biggest insurance underwriters in the US has stopped insuring the Cybertruck.
Come for the schadenfreude, stay for the litany of problems that has likely pushed GEICO to this decision. Torquenews’s Tinsay Aregay’s deadpan delivery of that long list is a lot of fun.
Kia has made an EV restomod of one if its early cars. Known overseas as the Pride, the restomod is an 80th birthday gift to itself. The Pride was basically a first-gen Mazda 121 produced under licence in Korea. And the 121 itself was commissioned by Ford to be sold in the US and Australia
It was sold here as the Festiva and it was bloody awful. So this EV restomod may actually be the one Festiva I’d own.
CarThrottle’s Mike Bartholomew runs you through the details.
It barely makes my top ten. There are so many other stupid rules in Formula 1 and they’re fundamentals, not details.
After the Singapore Grand Prix, British motorsport media went into the usual meltdown when one of their brave little boys had something taken away from him. Daniel Ricciardo’s heroics in the VCARB car, which is Red Bull’s second team, saw him secure the fastest lap of the race for what turned out to be his final race.
The lap time was not only the lap record (which will surely stand for a single year barring a downpour in 2025’s race) but it also denied McLaren’s Lando Norris an extra point, allegedly also denying him the World Driver’s Championship in the process. Somehow.
Unsporting! they cried as McLaren Team Principal (or whatever they’re called now) Andrea Stella lost his mind and told the assembled media dark forces were at work in the Red Bull pantheon. Daniel Ricciardo is plotting against little Lando.
Good gracious and mercy me, etc etc.
Formula 1 introduced the fastest lap rule a few years back. The idea was to stop the race turning into a procession (or more of one) after the final pit stops. One point is awarded to the driver with fastest lap.
But only if they finish in the top ten. Ricciardo was out of the top ten and was allegedly given the opportunity as a sort of parting gift. Fresh rubber, end of race, give it the the beans, son.
VCARB Team Principal Laurent Mekies pretended he didn’t even know if it was Ricciardo’s last race, but it could well have been an internal protest against Helmut Marko’s ongoing Reign of Terror.
Some in the British F1 media went absolutely bonkers and they trotted on down What About Lane and decided that this was all in aid of Verstappen’s title bid. Because Red Bull you see. And McLaren Team Principal Andrea Stella said so.
The Race – who I thought would and should know better – put up a YouTube short calling the rule ridiculous and creating “farcical situations.”
This video is offensively stupid and possibly the worst take imaginable from a serious outlet. The rule has been around for years and absolutely nobody has complained about it, at least not to this extent.
The Race thenput a whole video up discussing whether the “incident” was unethical, essentially walking back the diabolical stupidity of the by pointing out the flaw in its idiotic reasoning. To their credit, they left the original (above) in place but probably because it pulled clicks and views.
This second video took a rather more reasoned stance which I guess is some kind of redemption.
Sections of the British media (and countless geese on social media) have decided that by allowing non-points finishers to take the fastest lap away from the big boys up the front, it’s somehow a diabolical scheme.
I’m not much of a fan of the rule myself, it feels gimmicky and there are better ways to ensure the races are full length rather than decided by the pit stop strategy.
And this is where we come to my problems with Formula 1’s dumb rules.
The current rules stipulate a total of four engines and gearboxes that can be used in season. Break either “rule” by having more than the mandated number and the driver gets grid penalties.
Break bits of either and the driver gets grid penalties.
Those individual bits include turbo (4), MGU-H and MGU-K (4), energy store and control electronics (2) and exhaust (8).
While we’re here, only F1 could come up with MGU-H (h for heat) and MGU-K (k for kinetic). And I thought KERS was bad.
The reliability of things that teams build (gearboxes) and mostly external parties build (engines) are relied upon by the driver to support his grid position. Not solely if the driver is the fastest but also whether his gearbox will last so many races and his engines will last so many races.
So what happens in races? The teams demand their drivers go slower to assist with reliability.
Now, I don’t think we should go back to the old days of throwing in quali engines and then bolting in a fresh one for the race. That’s absurdly wasteful and incredibly tiring for pit crews. It is rarely the driver’s fault that an engine blows or a gearbox blows. Why should that have any bearing in the World Driver’s Championship? Punish the teams and the engine manufacturers, not the driver.
Or better still, completely overhaul the limits.
While we’re on the current engines, the reliability rules were enforced early on in this turbo hybrid era when engines blew with alarming regularity. The cost of developing these brand-new engines was colossal and remain vastly more complicated than the V8s they replaced (which had themselves become extremely reliable).
This is a very stupid rule. If you want “farcical” situations, it’s when McLaren had hundreds of grid penalties from its Honda engines exploding all over the place. Like actual hundreds. Even rivals suggested a rule limiting the penalties to prevent embarrassment.
Many rule changes are made in the name of cost-cutting but often end up being absurdly expensive. The FIA hasn’t the faintest idea what cost-cutting actually means and Formula 1 teams do everything they can to avoid cutting costs.
There’s the US$135m cost cap where the actions of another driver or team can affect the fortunes of a driver. If your teammate keeps throwing his car into the wall, your team has less money to spend on improving the car. If another team’s drivers keep running into you, your team has to take money out of the development budget.
This is supposed to help teams at the back push forward towards the front but it hasn’t come anywhere near making that happen. The gaps on the timing sheet might be smaller, but we’re no closer to Haas winning a race than we were before the cost cap.
Things are roughly as they were before the cost cap, with mid- and back-of-the-field teams swapping about, occasionally spending time next to Sergo Perez. There are enough loopholes for the big, well-established teams at the front of the grid to stay there. And then for 2026 the rules change yet again so the poorer teams have to grapple with that huge expense.
Do you see where I’m going here? Every major rule change fundamentally entrenches the cars at the front. The only “fairytale” championship win came in 2009, long before hybrids and cost caps when Brawn GP took the double with a car that started the year with no engine supply.
It was certainly very helpful that Honda had thrown hundreds of millions at the team before suddenly pulling out of the sport ahead of the season. So it was hardly underfunded or some scrappy lucky hit – the double diffuser was not some sort of fluke, it was funded by Honda largesse which had included coaxing Ross Brawn to the team that he ended up owning.
Nothing the FIA does makes any sense when it comes to cost caps. It also make no sense when it comes to what fans are going to see. Cars that are lifting and coasting to save fuel to stay under the 100kg limit (and therefore go out into the race with the least amount of fuel possible) are not exciting.
Drivers refusing to overtake each other in the name of not crashing are not exciting. Quiet hybrid engines (relatively speaking) mean absolutely nothing most people watching, so they’re not exciting. If they’d frozen engine development at the end of the V8 era and added KERS to run for ten years, there would be nothing different and the cars wouldn’t be the size of a Mazda CX-9.
In the name of relevance – surely the dumbest concept a bazillion-dollar sport can ever hope to achieve – each car is limited to 100kg of fuel per race. Being Formula 1, the teams don’t ever fill the car to the brim because they want to be as light as possible.
That means actual farcical situations where drivers are entreated to “lift and coast” to save fuel. F1 cars using 100kg or 150kg of fuel is not going to help climate change and nor is the ludicrous globe-crossing schedule that regularly fails to group races in geographic locations.
The China-Miami-Emilia Romagna-Monaco-Canada-Spain sequence is intensely stupid. 2023 had the Saudi Arabia-Australia-Azerbaijan-Miami-Emilia Romagna sequence. Fewer kilos of fuel in the back of 20 F1 cars hasn’t got a hope in hell of covering the carbon cost of a couple of Antonovs shuttling all that gear hither and thither.
So yeah. The racing is never better, the costs are never cut and neither is carbon. The real farce is the Formula 1 is trying to pretend it cares. It may well do, but at some point you have to take a long hard look at yourself and realise there’s only so much punters will take.
The fastest lap rule is way down the list. Probably at the bottom, actually.
Another week in the bag, another bunch of videos to watch. This week we have a drifter-in-training, motorsport cheating, a V10 people mover and the story of Group B rallying.
YouTuber Benny Surge seems keen on binning his car in the Nasho (in-joke for Facebook group purveyors of amusingly crashed cars) so spent a year trying to avoid it.
I have done some drifting on a skid pan (do not drift on the road, it is insanely silly and probably just as dangerous) and can recommend learning it as a skill. This is a fun watch. Thanks to Dan for the spot.
I do like a bit of rallying and I do like stories about naughty cheating in rallying. Or any racing, really. I cut my teeth watching Benetton cheating (allegedly, obviously, never proven…properly…) its way through the 1994 Formula 1 season.
The Revved Up channel has a five of the greatest racing cheats. And I don’t car that he can’t pronounce Peugeot.
Speaking of rallying, a video I’d always wanted to do has been done by DailyFuelUp. Group B rallying was absolutely wild and it didn’t help that fans had the same devil-may-care attitude to their own safety as the teams did to their drivers.
The cars were incredible but monumentally dangerous.
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The spectacular Renault Espace F1 lives rent-free in my mind. DriveTribe has a brilliant video taking you right through the plastic fantastic people mover’s unhinged cousin.
Sadly we don’t get much of the screaming V10, but a detailed walkthrough of a thing from 30 years ago that, as I say, lives in my dreams, is a great way to spend twenty minutes.
And that’s Weekend Watches for another week. A little abbreviated after a busy week but I reckon there are some rippers in here.
This is the coffee part of Cars – Coffee – Travel. First review of a cafe, so it’s probably terrible but hey, it’s a start. Also let me know if you want my coffee map of Hong Kong if ever you are going there.
Tucked away in the back streets of Tai Hang on Hong Kong Island, oneday. is a small, independent cafe with a neighbourhood feel.
Oh, and it’s awesome.
Cafe: oneday. Instagram: oneday.hongkong Hours: 0900-1900, 7 days (check Instagram stories for unscheduled closures) Address: 23 School St, Tai Hang, Hong Kong What3words: ///scrapped.hazel.secret Payment: Cash, Visa, Mastercard, Octopus
Tai Hang (大坑) is one of my favourite parts of Hong Kong. East of Central, it sits at the foot of Lin Ka Fung Hill (蓮花宮山). The Fire Dragon Path just looks like a walkway, but it’s part of the local mythology. Tai Hang hosts a Fire Dragon dance every year which looks like a lot of fun if that’s your thing.
Tai Hang is an up and coming neighbourhood with a bunch of new restaurants, retail and cafes, a big hotel and serviced apartment complex called Little Tai Hang as well as pricey residential blocks. And some classic old(er) Hong Kong stuff.
On School Street you’ll find all manner of businesses. Tai Hang is such a funny little area, with panelbeaters sitting next to an air-conditioning shop which is next to a laundry which is next to a nail bar. Or something like that.
Tucked way down on the western end is the freshly whitewashed oneday.
Through the big window you see the back of the coffee bar and into the kitchen. The glass door frames a narrow path to the back of the cafe and on the right is a long bench seat, a few tables and some stools. Folks bring their dogs in to hang out at their feet.
It’s bright and during summer (which is most of the year), the window to the right of the door folds up. You can sit there with your coffee with your coffee all year round.
Best seat in the house
Or on the bench seat under the big window, which comes out when oneday. opens.
A single group La Marzocco GS3 graces the coffee bar. As you go up to order, you’ll see a range of multi-coloured treats, egg tarts (aka Portuguese tarts), scones and pastries. And the bear-shaped Madeleine. There’s a reasonably extensive menu, too, all cooked up in the narrow kitchen.
To suit local tastes, you’ll see a row of flavoured syrups. Don’t worry about it, it’s not that kind of cafe.
oneday. roasts its own coffee and it’s spectacular. The day I was there last, they didn’t offer much apart from “Clean sparkling acidity, with citrus and tea-like notes.” It was terrific, a really nice last-coffee-of-the-day taste that left behind a subtle sweetness.
The coffee is sublime. Perfect temperature served in a branded cup with writing inside that reveals itself as you drink (I won’t spoil it). The team here is great with espresso-based drinks. I’m sure they’d be amazing with filters and pourovers but there just isn’t the space.
Coffee:
Espresso, Long Black: HKD35 Latte/Flat White/Cappuccino: HKD40
I really loved the egg tart, too, which wasn’t sweet like the ones we get in Australia, but with light flaky pastry that went everywhere and more custard than I knew what to do with.
The Madeleines are great
I also like the scone with jam and cream, an old classic.
The atmosphere is very chilled, but can buzz in the afternoon, especially on weekends and public holidays. Mornings will see folks toiling over laptops, but in the afternoon it feels very social and fun, much more a local cafe than any you’ll find in Central.
I’ve been here a few times and both of the guys behind the counter are clearly very committed to what they’re doing. They’re friendly too, and tolerate my attempts at Cantonese with a smile.
For me, if I haven’t been to oneday., I haven’t been to Hong Kong.
oneday is in School Street, Tai Hang. To get there you can:
catch a train to Tin Hau on the Island Line;
catch a tram to Victoria Park or Hing Fat Street;
a bus (many, many routes);
or walk.
If you’re coming from the Kowloon side, you can catch the ferry to Wan Chai and walk through Victoria Park, which is fun.
Last week I wrote about how private equity dimwits have caused a dramatic upheaval in large, well-known automotive YouTube channels. This week, it’s the third part of the puzzle.
In the first instalment, we got to the bit where Top Gear was handed over to Chris Evans for reasons that are totally unfathomable.
And then…
After a solitary and mostly awful season, Evans was gone and he was functionally replaced by a surprisingly disciplined Chris Harris. Harris’s YouTube videos on his own channel and The Drive were long and occasionally self-indulgent, the opposite of the tight seven-minute review segments of Top Gear.
But right from the off with this brilliant Ferrari f12 tdf review, it was obvious he was going to take over as a full-time host. Harris had demonstrated a very good understanding of the assignment and it was only a matter of time.
The broader cast was whittled away to leave him alongside LeBlanc and Reid to take the show closer to its original format. Evans, to his credit, bowed out gracefully (publicly anyway) but really shouldn’t have taken it on in the first place. He was not authentic and seemingly aped Clarkson’s mannerisms too often.
But the reality is, he is not a real car guy. I don’t know the man, but watching his version of TG was like watching Chris Chibnall’s Doctor Who. They both thought they knew what it should look like but produced something absolutely not great.
This is a way of making my point: I desperately want to see a Jodie Whittaker episode written by someone who knows how to write Doctor Who. I loved her Doctor, I couldn’t stand Chibnall’s Doctor Who, I couldn’t stand Evans’ Top Gear.
Between the remaining three, there wasn’t really the required chemistry. It seems like they got on perfectly well but LeBlanc’s flat on-screen persona never really lifted and Rory always struck me as the odd one out and was almost made to feel that way. Given the other two were already world-famous in their fields.
He also got stiffed by the BBC who took away his Extra Gear hosting duties by axing it. He took the hint and found himself in pastures less toxic. He’s just joined the Fifth Gear cast replacing the ancient Tiff Needell and I wish him all the best because he’s a genuine talent and he actually likes cars.
LeBlanc left reluctantly at the end of his second season as well, the two departing hosts replaced with ex-cricketer Freddie Flintoff and comedian Paddy McGuinness.
Once I got over the fact that it was at Reid’s expense, this line-up was actually good. Flintoff was the unexpected star and was obviously up for anything and McGuinness was a great foil to the bravado and bravura of his other two hosts. While being extremely funny doing it.
Sadly Flintoff was – I think – exploited by producers who got him doing things he really isn’t built for. He was nearly killed in an unbroadcast accident in a Morgan Super 3 at the Dunsfold track.
I don’t have any proof of the exploitation, obviously, but I reckon I’m on the money because the BBC settled with Flintoff to the (alleged) tune of £9 million or over A$18 million.
Watching Flintoff, he was game for anything and a proper team player the way elite team sports people are. So when they said, “Go fast in a three-wheeled Morgan without any protection,” he trusted them and said yes. That’s how it plays out in my head, anyway.
Chris Harris claimed in his already-infamous appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast that he had warned the BBC that someone was going to be killed before the accident. He was very nearly right – he also claimed Flintoff had not been wearing a helmet whereas the BBC initially said he was. I mean, seriously. As if that wasn’t going to come out.
I wasn’t originally going to post a link to anything Rogan does but this is genuinely compelling viewing. Rogan hardly says anything for the first two-thirds which is good because the less he says the better.
Watching Harris grapple with what happened to Flintoff is eye-opening. I had written the previous paragraphs about what I thought had gone down and Harris confirms my thinking.
TV people nearly killed at Top Gear host. That is utterly terrifying. The interview is definitely worth watching.
Why did this happen? TV people pushing someone manifestly under-qualified to be doing something that can be quite dangerous. Flintoff is not a car guy the way Harris, Clarkson, Hammond and even May are.
And you never saw May doing anything remotely risky because Wilman never asked him to. His only major injuries in 22 years were a concussion in a Top Gear special in 2010 followed by two on The Grand Tour – a broken arm and a lucky escape after a hard crash in a Lancer Evo in 2022 that was pretty much May’s fault.
After Hammond’s mammoth dragster accident, Top Gear/TGT tightened up and became an even more professional production outfit. Instead of being inevitabilities, incidents were rare.
So it comes down to TV people being bad at their jobs. Entertainment is full of lazy failsons rising to the top, with the odd genuinely talented person making their way through the muck. You might think I’m being hard here, but just look at the state of free-to-air television. It’s absolute swill.
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Someone pointed out the other day that the BBC passed on Game of Thrones and Succession but is still churning out Mrs Brown’s Boys. Australian TV with a few notable exceptions is pretty awful too. Again, don’t get me started on Doctor Who.
TV people try to create things that aren’t there, don’t understand the audience and think stunt-casting is a good idea. Which in a motoring program, puts people in danger. It’s one thing to manufacture peril – something old Top Gear did well most of the time. It’s another to put a host in genuine danger – something old Top Gear only did once or twice.
The difference between Hammond crashing a dragster is that he was very, very experienced but even then, shouldn’t have been doing what he was doing. Just because Flintoff’s first car was a Boxster doesn’t mean he knows what he’s doing.
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The Grand Tour
After the exit of the Top Gear trio, Amazon threw caution and a rumoured over $150m to the wind, signing up Clarkson and Wilman’s production company to create an automotive program for its then still-fledgling Amazon Prime streaming service.
Amazon didn’t seem to mind the reasons for Clarkson’s exit and were just keen to get the three of them on Prime. I braced for impact, wondering what would happen with the worst kind of people getting involved – Silicon Valley douchebags.
The Grand Tour changed the format but at the same time kept the fundamentals – three blokes having a laugh, brought together by their shared love of cars. Three blokes that enjoyed each other’s company and made sure everyone was having fun.
Except for the occasional production assistant, obviously. And, let’s be frank here, anyone not British and white in some cases, something fandom likes to brush off as political correctness gone mad. But things were said in both programs that would get you fired in a normal day job. Not at the BBC and not at Amazon Prime.
The ageing stars bowed out mostly gracefully in the final TGT September 2024, taking pot-shots and saying the things that gets you and me fired from normal jobs.
So what happens now?
No idea. I think I know what should happen, but even that could be quite wrong.
Top Gear actually stumbled into being good again with Harris, Flintoff and McGuinness but nearly killed one of them because TV has to be big, bold and explosioney – or even genuinely very dangerous. The Grand Tour did a bit of that and quickly realised it was tired and boring after doing it a lot.
Car shows had to change in the wake of the rise of automotive YouTube and its more successful proponents, who turned around stuff far faster than TV could ever hope. And did it on budgets of two-tenths of bugger-all and with inexpensive equipment like GoPros and their phones.
But TV people didn’t change the car show. Top Gear (2002-2015) and The Grand Tour are the only notable exceptions because the focus was the people watching it.
And now YouTubers have taken back what Top Gear was best at and are doing a great job. The Grand Tour is set to continue on Amazon, but how do you make that happen? With three unknowns? Amazon cannot and will not do that.
They’ll find three celebrities and send them out into the firing line, either in front of disgruntled fans or, worse, put untrained, inexperienced folks into real danger. Maybe with one actual car person in the mix.
Or worse they’ll mine the YouTube archives for as many odious folks as they can, stunt-casting their way to column inches with the usual divorced-dad-climate-denier guys Americans seem to adore.
TV people were not responsible for the idea of the globally successful Top Gear. When the original show was cancelled – a cosy, very British consumer affairs show – Clarkson and Wilman put their heads together and successfully pitched a reboot. Yes Wilman is a TV producer but has good instincts and knows how to listen and learn.
Getting this right is hard. But getting it wrong is so simple, so TV people keep doing that. They’re happy to take risks with actual people but not with the money that gets things made.
Whether we see another episode of Top Gear remains to be seen and I hope we do, but I hope it goes back to BBC2, starts small and creates a new wave of fun automotive television.
But if it doesn’t, that’s pretty much it for the car show until someone, somewhere, pulls off something unheard of and puts a bunch of fresh faces into a TV program that understand who and what it is for. As long as shareholder value or big ratings by the third ep aren’t the goal, we could see it happen.
It’s been quite a week, hasn’t it? For this weekend, you can sit back and watch the story of the Ford GN34, a clickbait EV trackday video, a question about whether Alpine was the way to go for Renault, a McMurtry fan car, some Antipodean rarities and a lovely old Chrysler getting fixed up.
First up, The Drive has the story of Ford SVO’s shelved 1980s GN34 supercar. Ford investigated building another car to embarrass Ferrari with and sell it at Corvette prices.
Watch for a sentence that wouldn’t be out of place in today’s market involving SUVs.
Mat Watson from CarWow has a clickbait-titled video where he takes a Hyundai Ioniq 5 N to Silverstone alongside a BMW M2. It’s a fun watch and, as I said, it’s clickbait-ey.
Big Car is a fun little channel (little, he says – I dream of these numbers) that has a look at car history, the car industry, that kind of thing. This video asks whether Alpine – Renault’s re-branded RenaultSport division – is headed for disaster.
Top Gear magazine’s Ollie Marriage takes the Goodwood record-setting McMurtry Spéirling, an electric hillclimbing monster with 1000hp and just 1000kg to push along. Marriage steps you through what this thing can do and it’s tremendous fun.
PD Evolution has does lists of stuff and in this case, it’s fairly niche – Eight Rare Australian Sports Cars. I didn’t even know there were that many, so you’ll probably learn some new names.
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The very entertaining Doubtful Technician tackles a very old Chrysler New Yorker. It’s a beautiful old thing and delightfully odd, even by 1950s Americana standards. It’s a slow video but I couldn’t tear my eyes away.
And that’s Weekend Watches for the week. I’m on the road next week but hopefully I see a few gems for you.
Today we’ve got a chat with Ford’s global boss, me being an attention whore, the first Australian reviews of the Polestar 3, news of Ferrari’s first EV and talk of the Ford Bronco coming to Australia.
CAR’s Phil McNamara talks to Ford boss Jim Farley about the brand’s decline in Europe and what he plans to do about it.
There’s no global downturn in EV sales – regional, yes, global, no – but I’m featured heavily in this article by the ABC’s Oscar Coleman where we talk about the myth that China is an overnight success in the automotive world. Ignore the headline on the story itself.
The Polestar 3 has landed in Australia for $130k for the the entry-level AWD version. A cheaper RWD version is coming (calling it now, it’s probably going to be the best one). The Right Car?‘s Matt Campbell was at the launch.
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MotorTrend has a piece by Scott Evans about the first Ferrari EV. There’s a fair bit of information there so at least if you’re going to complain that no Ferrari can be an EV, you’ll know what it is you don’t like.
Again, for some reason American sites don’t like previews.
Alex Misoyannis at Drive.com.au reports that the Ford Bronco might be coming to Australia because – in news totally unsurprising to anybody paying attention – it’s going to be built in right-hand drive. In fact, Scott Newman has already driven a right-hooker in this month’s issue of Wheels magazine.
Despite Bronco sharing underguts with the Territory and Ranger, it’s not nearly as big.
CarThrottle has an interesting bit about the new AMG CLE 63. Folks are probably aware that the C63 went to a four-cylinder hybrid and made the internet unhappy.
It seems AMG is back-tracking on the hybrid powertrain about which I have no comment because I haven’t driven the new C63.
And that’s it for another edition of Links We Like. Tomorrow will be Weekend Watches and Monday is Part 3 of Did YouTube Kill The Car Show? If you haven’t read that yet, here’s Part 1 and Part 2.
Last week I wrote about the beginning and middle of televised car shows like Top Gear and The Grand Tour. Part 2 of a series on the end of the car show on television (and prestige streaming) takes a quick detour on the upheaval in automotive YouTube.
So this part should really be called, “Who nearly killed automotive YouTube?”
2023 and 2024 saw an incredible amount of change in automotive YouTube. Well known personalities left big-name channels, starting their own and creating a whole new sub-genre of video – the Why I Left…video
You can basically boil down automotive YouTube into three main groups.
Publications with successful channels
Independent channels built by individual(s).
Automotive influencers.
Let’s start by working backwards, because I’m going to knock 2 and 3 off pretty quickly – they’re fine. And when I say they’re fine, not much has changed.
Automotive Influencers
The influencer world remains fairly obnoxious and concerned with headline-grabbing hypercars and tedious clickbait about which car they’ve bought/sold/crashed. None of that stuff interests me in the slightest but if it does you, have at it. These folks employ a lot of people so good luck to them.
Independent channels built by individual(s).
Group 2 is a bit more interesting. At the top you have folks like Doug DeMuro, Hoovie’s Garage, Throttle House that kind of thing. This group is growing and it’s largely at the expense of the first group, the publications with successful channels. Or formerly successful in some cases.
Most recently we’ve seen the implosion of Donut Media, or at least the departure of its most high-profile personality, James Humphrey. Whether you’re a fan of his or not, he was the beating heart of Donut. You could tell because he wore that heart on his sleeve.
He admits in his Why I Left Donut video that while he can sometimes rub people up the wrong way – meaning management – he knew his heart wasn’t in it anymore. He has a new channel, Speeed that has already garnered over a million subscribers and 8 million-plus views from just three videos (at the time of writing).
Two other well-know faces, Jeremiah Burton and Zach Jobe have also departed the channel, leaving the talented Nolan Sykes as the face of Donut. Burton and Jobe’s new channel, Big Time already has 1.5m subscribers.
Donut is just one channel. There are so many, “Why we left…” videos. Jumping to other side of the Atlantic, CarThrottle is a shadow of its former self after an exodus triggered by the departure of Alex Kersten.
Kersten left CarThrottle after ten years, having been responsible for guiding the site’s social media and then video efforts. He was the face.
Kersten started his own channel AutoAlex before even leaving CarThrottle. Ethan Smales and Jack Joy were the last men standing after fellow CarThrottler Edwin Klinkenberg joined forces with ex-Overdrive talent Will Chandler to create Top Dead Center [sic].
Oh, and then Smales and Joy left to start All The Gear.
Kersten and his business partner Rory McKie (also ex-CarThrottle) appears to be at the centre of this as the three channels share resources, sponsors and sometimes crew. CarThrottle has attempted a reboot with new presenters but is a shadow of its former self.
While I’m here, being mean to these guys in the comments is bang out of order. A lot of the comments have the usual stench of toxic fandom and slagging the guys willing to pick up the pieces is real shoddy stuff. Give them a break and give them a chance. When you think about it, the job is impossible because they’re left with the lowered budgets and ruinous management that broke the channel in the first place.
Anyway.
Why am I telling you all this? Because this problem is to do with what I like to refer to as the Private Equity (PE) Ponytails. And not necessarily those people, but people like them. MBAs (not a sledge)(or is it?) who come in to a business with next to no experience and run it with spreadsheets and ignorance.
The Venn diagram of PE Ponytails and TV people is almost a circle in that they like to attach themselves to a success and pretend they made it or fixed it.
Each of these channels grew on the backs of very talented, hardworking folks who understand their audience. Getting to a 100,000 subscriber mark is impressive for anyone, but both CarThrottle and Donut achieved millions of subscribers.
In Donut’s case, the business was sold off. And as is so often the case to private equity. To be exact, Recurrent Ventures took over and as the name suggests, it is backed by private equity, a fact confirmed by a visit to the company’s Crunchbase entry. Recurrent also owns “Popular Science, The Drive, Domino, MEL, Outdoor Life, Field & Stream, Car Bibles, SAVEUR, Futurism and Task & Purpose.” (taken from their self-written blurb at Crunchbase.
These companies bring bunch of overpaid – well, paid but whatever it is they’re doing, they’re paid too much – management types, cut budgets and increase targets for the sake of shareholder value.
They think because they own a number of properties, there will be “synergy” which almost never means anything but cutbacks, layoffs and redundancies. Naturally the amount of work left is exactly the same or higher, so fewer people are left doing more work.
Plenty of sites have suffered from this kind of post-acquisition trouble,suchas Vice and another of Recurrent’s purchases, The Drive. The latter’s YouTube channel is a ghost town compared to its past glories. The old videos continue to draw viewers but new videos don’t have the draw (nothing to do with the valiant hosts, of course – it’s hard to come back after years away).
Social media monitoring site SocialBlade shows subscribers as flat for years and a recent, small recovery in views since its return from effective hiatus of nearly four years.
Another type of video has become a thing in all this drama – the What happened to…? video. The Drive has one explaining its two year hiatus. PE Ponytail types feature heavily.
The ponytails tell the people who built their channels how to produce the kind of content the channel’s viewers like and insist they don’t need that much money to get those kinds of views. And then the views drop, they get mad, tell the presenters to work harder/better/faster. And then wonder why they leave.
CarThrottle was sold by its founder Adnan Ebrahim who had already sold part of the business to a Swiss venture capital firm. This particular firm told me in 2019 that CarThrottle was not for sale and, well, it was, because it was sold about ten weeks later.
The business was picked up by Dennis Publishing (publisher of Evo and AutoExpress) and that’s when the rot started. In 2021 Crash Media Group (publishers of motorsport site crash.net) bought the site and channel from Dennis and subsequently cut budgets, at least as far as I can tell from the exodus followed.
Kersten, Joy, Smales and Klinkenberg saw the channel through the difficult days of the pandemic and associated lockdowns and still produced some great stuff.
Neither buyer had any experience in the kind of content CarThrottle made, or understood the vision. Not all automotive content is created equal. See also The Drive, who were owned by Time Inc. and then someone worse, neither of whom understood why it even existed.
Automotive media is always in a state of flux. I worked for Carsguide as a freelancer for ten years and during that time it had three different owners. It’s now on its fourth since about 2015.
During my much briefer time at WhichCar/Wheels it had two owners. It’s now on its third since 2021, with the magazine properties (Wheels and the defunct Motor) going one way and the website another.
It has become clear over the past few years that the types of channel that survive are those dominated by their creators. This should sound familiar: Top Gear and then The Grand Tour were both left largely to their creators to own and run and were mostly great television.
Which is why that second group of channels will grow and proliferate. Mighty Car Mods, Tavarish, AutoAlex and a whole host of others all operate under the control of their founders. They’re fun. They know their audience. They understand the medium. They run the numbers.
And they often support each other and the people and businesses that support them. Which is an interesting point I’ve made quite by accident.
By and large, the people who write about cars quite like each other and aren’t all that bothered by the corporate games that go on above them. We lend each other gear on launches, chat to each other about what’s going on and test our theories about cars on each other.
In my early days I helped “competing” journalists shoot video on my gear because I was the only one turning up with anything half-decent.
We share cars on launches and therefore trust each other with our lives in often strange and unfamiliar locations.
If we could, we’d all (mostly) work together as one big happy family. I would love to do it full-time because these people are my friends and are some of the firmest and best friends I’ve ever had.
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And that’s because we’re all car people from different socio-economic backgrounds, faiths (or no faith) and different countries. And some of them are even ladies. Fancy that!
Interestingly we’ve seen the start of the kind of fragmentation I’m talking about happening here in Australia. Former CarAdvice and then Carsguide stalwart Matt Campbell was the victim of a new owner redundancy binge at the latter site. So he went and started his own channel.
I can tell you from personal experience, this is no easy thing in a crowded market and requires an enormous amount of work, discipline and mental strength because folks on the internet aren’t always very nice to deal with.
Matt already had over a decade of experience deep in the guts of what makes a successful YouTube channel tick and had spent a good chunk of the pandemic looking at ways to cost-effectively produce quality video reviews.
His channel, The Right Car?, has grown rapidly without support from sponsors or a well-funded parent company. He’s closing in on 10m views in under two years from a standing start.
He’s generating more than half the monthly views of his previous employer without all the budgets and staff. That’s no sledge on the fine folks at Carsguide, the point is that effective targeting by people who really understand the audience can make stuff happen. He has a clear vision, you know exactly what you’re going to get in every video and he delivers.
People he’s worked with for years have lent a helping hand to get him on his way, but he’s largely a one-man band, freelancing at CarExpert and News Motoring while he builds the channel.
Another CarAdvice personality, CarExpert’s Paul Maric basically runs the YouTube channel and does largely the same thing. You know he’s thorough, knowledgable and personable. The channel is huge and both supports and is supported by the carexpert.com.au
In the case of CarThrottle, Donut and even Overdrive, the ponytails think they understand the audience but they just don’t. They also think that because videos look cheap and cheerful that there is cost-cutting to be had while not a for moment understanding there’s a point to them looking a certain way.
The real issue here is that you can’t really manage creativity. The people who make good automotive videos do it on a mix of instinct and data. They know what works.
A lot of the stuff I’ve done over the years at Carsguide and Whichcar is to a formula that folks expect when they’re looking at a new RAV4 or CX-5 but the formula is different for a Lotus Elise or a £1500 banger. And I’d argue that there’s no formula for those cars, it’s about emotion, personality and fun. You just have to trust your instincts.
And some people have the worst instincts imaginable. When “shareholder value” becomes the driving force of a creative business, things more of than not go completely disastrously. The fact that these disasters keep happening is no mystery – I’ve already said, these people attach themselves to a success and bleed it dry.
So while I’ve already blamed TV people for killing shows like Top Gear, you can blame almost the same kind of person for almost killing automotive YouTube.
Next week is the third and final part of this epic look at how the car show died and how it doesn’t need to be this way. But courage is in short supply…
Weekend Watches is a pick of mostly longer-form videos to settle in with. This week it’s the history of the 911 GT3 RS, the Ford F150 Lightning in Australia, the new Ineos Grenadier Quartermaster, a Holden Piazza barn find (in America…!) and every MX-5 rated.
James Pumphrey’s new channel, Speeed, has just three videos but millions of views, so he’s certainly very popular after his departure from Donut. This week he’s detailing the history of the Porsche 911 GT3 RS. Strap in, it’s almost an hour of his distinctive style.
CarExpert’s Paul Maric puts the electric Ford F150 Lightning through its paces. As ever, it’s very detailed and that’s why it belongs here in the Weekend Watches.
A common complaint/question about electric cars and lifestyley truck things is whether they can tow. They’ve certainly got the torque, but range is a big issue. See what Paul found here.
Harry’s Farm tests the new Ineo Grenadier Quartermaster (I do love the names of the Ineos cars).
This BMW-powered Defender homage has a tray and reminds me a lot of the Jeep Gladiator as well as its original inspiration. Harry Metcalfe wasn’t a massive fan at first, so it’s interesting to see what he thinks of the car a year down the track.
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Donut’s Justin Freeman has a Holden Piazza but for some reason calls it an Isuzu Impulse (yes, I know why, I’m joking).
The car is a classic barn find and this video follows his journey, along with Zach Diehl, to get it up and running after decades in the shed. I love a barn find video and hope you do too.
And finally, The Intercooler names the best MX-5 ever made. It’s likely to be as contentious as their choice of M5, but these guys do know their cars.
A lot of YouTubers are down on the MX-5/Miata, but I reckon it’s a great car (I’ve owned a 1989 Clubman) and every time I drive one, I love it.
And that’s Weekend Watches for another week. Have a great weekend.
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