Category Archives: Cars

Economic Inequality and Supercars

March 13, 2013Cars, Psychological MusingsSteve Stern

inequality-page25_actualdistribwithlegend-1

First, the unequal wealth and income distribution in the good ol’ United States. As the chart above shows, it is much worse than most people think (my personal experience is that everybody thinks they are middle class, a couple of weeks ago, I have a guy making $500,000 a year complain about Obama wanting to increase his taxes when he is really only middle class). The realty is that somewhere between 1.3 million to 1.4 million households – that is about 1% of the total population – have about 80% to 85% of of the total wealth in the United States.

In term of income, the 1% earns something like 18% to 19% of the entire income earned in the United States. That is a huge amount of money per household and it is pretty hard to spend it all – not being part of it, I can’t say for sure, but how much toothpaste can one person buy? – without buying hyper luxuries like supercars. And that is just for the United States; there are lots of Russian oligarchs and oil-rich Saudis who also might like a supercar. It turns out that the actual pool of people who can afford to pay $2 million – over even $20 million – for a car is pretty large.

(As an aside, when I went to the McLaren dealer last September where – so far – they don’t have supercars, they told me that most of their buyers paid cash and already had a Ferrari. End aside.)

I do want to point out that I am against this inequitable wealth distribution on general principals, even if it were not bad for the country. But, as bad as it is for the country, it is good for supercars.

Last week was the Geneva Auto Show and Ferrari, Lamborghini, and McLaren, among other lesser known marquis, used the opportunity to unveil their new supercars. Because this large, hyper-rich, class is relatively new, the concept of supercars is also new, even the name supercar is new. Sure, there have always been high performance cars; cars that are more agile and faster than their litter mates and they have always costed more, but not that much more.

When the Ferrari GTO – as close to a supercar as there was in the early 60’s – was made, it cost about $18,000 compared to about $2,000 for a Chevy. Today that Chevy would be about 8 to 15 times as much at $16,000 to $30,000 and a normal Ferrari is about $225,000. The new LaFerrari, Ferrari’s new supercar shown above – with a 6.3 liter V-12 and and electric booster motor (making it an hybrid, I guess) putting out about 950 horsepower to give it o-60 mph times in under 3.0 seconds and a top speed in excess of 217 mph – has a waiting list of about 700 and the price has not been released (but is expected to be north of $2,000,000).

Meanwhile, the new Lamborghini supercar, the Venenos, with similar specs – but without the electric, hybrid, motors – will sell for about $3,900,000. (The McLaren seems cheap at only about $1,000,000.) It is easy to say that these are nutty numbers, but the cars are not only selling, people are waiting in line (of course it is a allegorical line, at these prices, the future owners send somebody else to put their name on a list, somewhere).

These cars are called supercars because they truly are staggering capable, stunning to look at, and – relativity – exclusive. But, in the real world, what can anybody do with them. Going 100 miles per hour on any California public road – except, of course, an empty road in the Mojave – is pretty hard for longer than 30 second bursts (and, then, only by risking a major ticket). There are places in Nevada where driving very fast is possible but 200 miles per hour – even there – would be a good case for insanity.

At first, it seems that their only purpose is as wealth indicators – and people who are staggeringly wealthy do need to have some way to differentiate themselves from the hoi polloi – however, I suggest that another, greater purpose, is as eye candy for the rest of us. Even if we never see them in real life, just looking at the pictures and videos of these cars causes wonder and amazement to a geaarhead.

To my eye, the Lambo looks a little too much like the Batmobile and the LaFerrari is – by far – the better looking. The Ferrari, with its F16 fighterjet canopy, looks graceful as well as blindingly fast so I have included a promotional video.

Voisin and the Mullin Automotive Museum

December 18, 2012Art, CarsSteve Stern

A week or so ago, Malcolm Pearson and I went to see the Voisin show at the Mullin Automotive Museum. Actually, Automotive Museum is somewhat of a misnomer, it is really a museum of French cars and – really, almost exclusively – pre-World War II French cars, extreme Art Deco French cars. The Mullin Museum is in Oxnard, about five and half hours – without gas, pee, or food stops – out of our way, and there are not many people that I enjoy being with, besides Malcolm, that are also willing to get up early enough to leave San Jose at 6:30, drive to Oxnard, walk around the Mullin for three hours, and drive back to San Jose that same night. Even to see a brace of Voisins (17 Voisins might be more than a brace but they were bracing).

As an aside, Voisins are fine cars and seeing a group of them is interesting and great fun, but they are not great cars. Maybe a better way to put it is that they are great cars, but they were not great in the right direction. To my mind, they seem to be on the same level as Lancias (and, as somebody who has owned three Lancias, I mean that in the best possible way). Both Lancia and Voisin were trying to make – make is pretty weak sauce for the passion involved – great cars but both made engineering decisions that were both brilliant and wrong for the market. End aside.

One of the very nice things about this special show of Voisins is how they reflect the early history of the automobile. Because Voisin was an aircraft inventor and manufacturer – he first flew an airplane in 1906 and, because the Europeans didn’t know about or didn’t acknowledge, the Wright Brothers, he won a prize for the first controlled flight – the early cars were built using typical airplane construction techniques (including aluminium rather than the more typical brass).

By 1938, when Voisin built the Avions C30S Coupe for the Paris Auto Salon of the same year, the cars were more mainstream – and not all personally designed by Gabriel Voisin himself – but still very distinctive and exquisitely made. Along the way, the company made some memorable cars that, in my humble opinion, would do honor to anybody’s livingroom as a piece of sculpture. In 1934, they built the black and yellow Avions Voisin C27 Grand Sport Cabriolet with a body designed by Giuseppe Figoni – before he joined forces with businessman Ovidio Flaschi, thereby creating Figoni & Falaschi that is, by far, the best name of any car-body design company, ever – and was sold to the Shah of Persia. In 1935, they built the Avions Voisin C27 Aerosport Coupe with a large sunroof.

In 1938, Voisin built the Avions C30 Cabriolet with coachwork built by Dubos that was later requisitioned by an Nazi stationed in France (maybe the Nazi liked it because it was more sedate, even a little Germanic, compared to many of the other cars.

In 1935, Gabriel Voisin, himself, designed and built the C25 Aérodyne which was Voisin’s “car of the future”. It was hyper-expensive in the middle of the depression, improbably streamlined, featured an huge – powered – sunroof, and had the best Art Deco upholstery I have ever seen.

By almost any standard, it was a tour de force but it had a six cylinder, sleeve-valve, engine while Bugatti – out in the sticks in Molsheim – was building less expensive cars with with eight cylinder double overhead cam engines.

What I like about these cars is that they were built by individuals, artists. Idiosyncratic artists that often got lost in their art and held it dearer than making money or, even sometimes, making a good car. For years, Ferrari built very fast cars with V-12 engines designed by geniuses like Gioacchino Colombo and Aurelio Lampredi and they didn’t have radiator fans which Ferrari considered – I don’t know exactly, undignified? too feminine? too ordinary? – unnecessary. The problem was that no radiator fan made these cars very hard to drive in the real world with actual traffic and traffic jams. When asked about this problem, Ferrari said that Nobody should drive a Ferrari in traffic, if there is a traffic jam, just pull over to an espresso bar and wait for traffic to clear. This is the same guy who – for years – refused to install disc brakes on his race cars because they were invented by the English. (I had a Ferrari Lusso – luxury in English – that didn’t have a radio or a glove box, or, even, a locking passenger door.) Bugatti refused to install hydraulic brakes on his cars, preferring to keep mechanical brakes – with delicate cables and pulleys going every which way – long after everybody else had agreed that hydraulic were the only way to go.

To me, all this makes the cars more fun, more interesting, even if it makes them less of a transportation appliance and the French were and still are the best -worst? – at idiosyncratic cars. Here are a couple more examples without further comment.

^{1939 Delahaye Type 165 Cabriolet with a Figoni et Falaschi designed body}

^{1938 Dubonnet Hispano-Suiza H6C Xenia with a Jacques Saoutchik designed body}

Lewis Hamilton goes to Mercedes

October 2, 2012CarsSteve Stern

Lewis Hamilton is one of the best drivers in the world today. Like Obama, he is half black. Since he has been thirteen when McLaren signed him to their Young Driver Support Programme – love that spelling – he has been racing, either directly or indirectly, for McLaren. Yesterday, he left to go to Mercedes. I think it is a great decision.

McLaren, in many ways, has been his family – his mother left when he was two and his father was his manager until about two years ago – so, in many ways, he is leaving home. I think that is part of the reason going to Mercedes is a great decision. At some point we have to leave home to become an adult and I think that this is that time for Hamilton.

But more importantly, McLaren just doesn’t seem able to win a championship (although Hamilton won a championship as a driver) . They have been second for much of the 2000’s but don’t seem able to turn the corner to first. Mercedes have been much worse and will probably finish in fifth place this year. But I think that it might be easier to get to first from fifth than from perpetual second. In second, the temptation is to do the same thing as last year, only harder. In fifth, everybody knows that there have to be big changes.

McLaren

September 23, 2012Americana, CarsSteve Stern

McLaren makes awesome race cars, it is in their DNA, just like Ferraris. The founder, Bruce McLaren, was a race car driver from New Zealand. Early in his career, he started modifying the cars he was driving and, then, designing them from scratch. In the CanAm Series – which featured huge American V-8s stuffed into lighweight bodies, and where I saw my first McLaren in 1967 – they became the dominant manufacturer (if manufacturer can be used for a company making ten to twenty cars a year). In 1967 they won five of six races they entered and by 1968, McLarens won 11 of 11 races. In 1980 – eleven years after he left home to go to Europe to race, eleven short years – Bruce McLaren died in an accident testing one of his own cars.

As tragic as that was, Bruce McLaren might not have felt that way, he once said about a team-mate that was killed The news that he had died instantly was a terrible shock to all of us, but who is to say that he had not seen more, done more and learned more in his few years than many people do in a lifetime? To do something well is so worthwhile that to die trying to do it better cannot be foolhardy. It would be a waste of life to do nothing with one’s ability, for I feel that life is measured in achievement, not in years alone – the company didn’t die and has gone on to become one of the great racing teams in Formula 1.

The McLaren- Ferrari Formula 1 rivalry is the longest-lasting rivalry in motor racing. Now McLaren, about 49 years after the company was founded, has started making street cars¹ to go after Ferrari. I think that there is a difference between a company that races to promote their regular cars and a company that sells cars to help them race. McLaren falls into the latter group…with a vengeance. Their cars can go over 200mph and get to 60 from a standstill in 3.1 seconds. There are ten dealerships in the US and one is in Silicon Valley, where I went to take a look.

They are selling about five cars a month. Sixty cars a year is terrible if you are a Chevy dealership, but pretty good, I guess, if you are selling a little known car that sells for about $300,000. The cars are more subtle than Ferraris and, to my eye, more elegant. Because McLaren has made its living racing cars – they spend about an half billion a year to race two cars in twenty races – it figures that the cars they make would be all about passion but they really aren’t. The McLaren way is about getting the details right. The McLaren street cars are at their best in their details.

From the doors to service area, to the receptionist’s desk, even to a small flower arrangement – in the McLaren “official” color of orange, of course – everything pushes the McLaren image.

Having said that, I am not too sure what the McLaren image is. Perfection, meticulous hard word work and attention to detail, I guess; efficiency and attention to detail, maybe. Either way, they are handsome devils and their detailing is exquisite.

From their carbon brakes and wheels with tires that are less like balloons to cushion the ride than like wallpaper,

to the perfectly detailed, 600 hp, turbo-charged, V-8, engine – visible under glass for all to admire –

to the steering wheel and shifting paddles controlling the seven speed transmission (although I am not so sure that I like the leather doily over the tach).

The major design elements are the the tilting doors and the huge side scoops.

I like McLaren, I root for McClearn’s Formula 1 team. When they are leading a race, as they were today at Singapore, and then have a mechanical failure, I am disappointed. But I think that I admire them more than I love them. It would be hard not admire them, they are staggeringly fast, marvelous to look at, and competent in the extreme but, somehow – to me – don’t generate much lust. In the end, this precision over passion is slightly strange; the company was fathered by a passionate man and the CanAm cars, like the one at the top of the page, are all libido. These McLaren street cars will will probably be driven by a guy that is nice enough -deeply nice enough – that anybody would be comfortable having him take out their daughter and brash enough to have had made their first $100,000,000 by the time he is forty (many McLaren buyers already have a Ferrari that they don’t bother trading in).

1. Although they did make a – sort of goofy – three seat, hyper-fast, hyper-expensive, street car for a while and they did most of the heavy lifting on the $450,000 Mercedes Benz SLR.

Pebble Beach Tour d’Elegance

August 17, 2012Around home, Cars, PhotographySteve Stern

^{From Corvette Expert Jim Gessner, memory by Steve Stern}

One of my first car memories and my first racing memory was watching a Mercedes Benz and Corvette race for the Del Monte Trophy on the winding, very narrow, town roads of Pebble Beach. (We were kids and, as the Corvette with the bigger engine lead the MB 300 SL, we said such pithy things as Nothing beats cubic inches, then when the much more expensive MB passed the Vet, we said Except cubic money.) In those days, before actual racetracks, we all got to stand very close to the action. The Pebble Beach race has moved to the Laguna Seca racetrack and the attached car show has become the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, probably the best carshow in the world, with an admission of $250 which does keep the hoi polloi pretty far from the action (the VIP tickets cost $600 and do include lunch [which proves, once again, that there is no such thing as a free lunch]).

To make the cars more accessible, the organizers have started the Pebble Beach Tour d’Elegance. The cars that are entered into Sunday’s show are encouraged to take a tour around the area on Thursday. While they don’t have to tour, if two cars are tied in points, the car that has been on the tour wins. On Thursday, Michele and I went down to the Monterrey Peninsula to check it out. Once again, we are able to stand very close to the action.

^{1924 Rolls-Royce 20 HP Barker Tourer}

^{1955 Mercedes Benz 300 SL}

^{1954 Ferrari 500 Mondail Pinin Farina Spyder}

At the end, when all the cars are parked, unbelievably close.

^{1925 Rolls Royce Phantom 1 Baker Sports Torpedo Tourer}

But out on the road, listening to the cars go by, for a car nut like me, is thrilling. Getting close and seeing the details just adds to the thrillingness.