Even Bugatti is hopping on the certified pre-owned train, Pizza Hut goes three-wheeling, Toyota gives up on production in Russia. All this and more in today’s issue of The Morning Dump.
Welcome to The Morning Dump, bite-sized stories corralled into a single article for your morning perusal. If your morning coffee’s working a little too well, pull up a throne and have a gander at the best of the rest of yesterday.
I Woke Up In A Certified Pre-Owned Bugatti
If you’re like me, you can’t afford a new Bugatti. Hey, some of us have regular jobs and didn’t do something insanely lucrative like invent canned soup. But let’s say that owning a new Bugatti is just barely out of reach for you and not akin to becoming an astronaut. What do you do? Drop some serious cash on something that may have been totaled while the driver was allegedly distracted by a low-flying pelican? Absolutely not, Bugatti is here to help by launching a certified pre-owned program, even if the first paragraph of the press release is a little bit puzzling.
With the launch of the Certified Program, those who choose to purchase a pre-owned Veyron or Chiron through an authorized Bugatti Partner will be able to do so safe in the knowledge that the vehicle they are buying exhibits the incomparable quality expected of the Bugatti ‘macaron’.
While this statement largely succeeds in making people hungry, Bugatti’s using the “round badge” definition of macaron. Wait a second, didn’t Bugatti just kill its round badge? Anyway, Bugatti’s CPO program includes a one-year (lol) limited warranty and that’s about it other than prestige. Hey, maybe buying a flood-title Veyron isn’t such a bad idea after all.
No One Out Three-Wheels The Hut
I’m at the Pizza Hut. I’m in the three-wheeler. I’m in the combination Pizza Hut and three-wheeler. Yes, if you live in certain parts of California, your next pie might come in an Electrameccanica Solo three-wheeler. Electrameccanica has partnered with American West Restaurant Group, the biggest Pizza Hut franchisee in California, to fit these tiny little EVs with special pie-slinging gear.
While the three-wheeled Solo makes a puzzling commuter car, it almost seems born for pizza delivery. It can squeeze in tight gaps, park on a postage stamp, and doesn’t cost nearly as much as say, a Kia Rio. To prep the little things for your next office party, ElectraMeccanica replaced the standard car’s Smart Roadster Coupe-like hatch with a dedicated pizza holster. While only 14 of these nifty little delivery vehicles will be in service to start, here’s hoping that three-wheeled pizza delivery catches on. Who wouldn’t want their pizza delivered in a weird and joyous little car?
[Ed note: This is not the Deliverator we were promised! – MH]
Boeing Settles With SEC Over 737 MAX Claims
Reuters reports that Boeing will pay $200 million to settle Securities and Exchange Commission claims of misleading representation of the 737 MAX’s safety.
The SEC also said former Boeing Chief Executive Dennis Muilenburg had agreed to pay $1 million.
“In times of crisis and tragedy, it is especially important that public companies and executives provide full, fair, and truthful disclosures to the markets,” SEC Chair Gary Gensler said in a statement. He added that Boeing and Muilenburg “failed in this most basic obligation.”
The SEC said Boeing and Muilenburg did not admit or deny the SEC’s findings. The regulatory agency said a fund will be established for the benefit of harmed investors.
It turns out that Boeing’s claim that the 737 MAX “as safe as any that has ever flown the skies” simply wasn’t true. Shocking, I know. You’re probably thinking “gee, $200 million sounds like a slap on the wrist considering 737 MAX crashes killed 346 people,” and you’d be half-right. While $200 million doesn’t seem like a whole lot in the grand scheme of things, it comes on top of a $243.6 million criminal fine, $1.7 billion in restitution to airlines, and a $500 million victim fund. Looking at this breakdown, the victim fund should’ve been bigger, given how $500 million divided by 346 only works out to about $1.44 million per victim. You can do a lot of things with $1.44 million, but money can’t bring a family member back to life.
Toyota Finally Gives Up Hope On Russian Production
Some automakers take quite a while to change course. Case in point, Reuters reports that Toyota has finally given up hope on restarting Russian production.
The automaker suspended production in St Petersburg in March due to supply chain disruptions and stopped vehicle imports into Russia.
The factory, which has a capacity of 100,000 units a year and produced the Camry and RAV4 models, will be preserved and may be sold in the future, Kommersant’s sources said.
Toyota has not decided to quit the Russian market completely but sees no prospect of resuming car production there, the sources said.
It’s surprising to hear that Toyota held out hope for resuming Russian new car production in the face of sanctions against Russia, particularly since the company has a reputation for lean, flexible manufacturing, and since competitors like Renault threw in the towel fairly early on in the war with Ukraine. Perhaps just-in-time delivery and plant redundancies eased some of Toyota’s short-term pain. Regardless, the people of Russia need new cars, but they likely won’t be made by Toyota for quite some time.
The Flush
Whelp, time to drop the lid on today’s edition of The Morning Dump. Happy Friday, everyone! The weekend is very nearly here. Today’s question is one about music. If your car had a theme song, what would it be? For my 325i, I’m going with Dropkick the Punks by The Faint. What can I say, infectious fuzz pairs beautifully with the induction noise of a partially-uncorked inline-six.
Lead photo credit: Bugatti
For my GX, gotta be Canyonero. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PI_Jl5WFQkA
22 electric Mini: Blacklight Shine- The Mars Volta. It’s smooth, and new, and the singer’s voice reminds me of the sounds the electric drivetrain makes ????
95 Wrangler: Bad Reputation- Joann Jet. She’s strong, she’s bad, but people can’t help but smile.
13 Mazdaspeed 3: Song for the Dead- Queens of the Stone Age. It takes a minute to get going, but once it does, hold on.
My theme songs would work with any car. Rain by the Beatles or Let It Rain by Eric Clapton. Not only do I love to drive, I enjoy driving in the rain.
Derp, that’s “Bus Stop” by the Hollies, of course.
Long time reader (of the site-which-shall-not-be-named), first-time poster.
‘68 GTO: toss up between “Umbrella” by the Hollies (for the 60’s feel of course) & “Cars ‘n’ Girls” by the Dictators (no explanation needed?)
‘74 911 Targa: “Hold on Tight” by ELO. I always imagine that just as I have my foot in it in second and he sings “tiiiii-iiiight…”, the top magically flies off and into traffic…
‘93 NSX: “Full Circle (feat. Boxed In) by George Fitzgerald. Hypnotic night driving jam which drops just as the pop-ups pop up.
Derp, that’s “Bus Stop” by the Hollies, of course.
I remember when Boeing was looking for engineers for the 737Max. A good software engineer used to command upwards of $100 per hour back in the 1990s.
A fellow college graduate I know had skills as an embedded system designer. In college, he built a self-balancing unicycle from scratch and did all of the programming himself. He still uses it to this day as transportation, in fact(he can’t afford a car, more on that below).
Companies were supposedly unable to find people with his skillset to do the work. Applying to jobs was something he did multiple times a day fresh out of school during the start of the great recession, but he was never contacted. Eventually, he ended up homeless after college and his student loan went into default. From there, the interest and fees piled on. For a period, he was working TWO menial jobs and because of wage garnishment, was still priced out of a cheap apartment, so continued living on the street.
Fast forward some years later. He already paid more on his student loan than he ever took out from garnishments, but it kept increasing in balance. Boeing advertised the jobs for designing the 737Max onboard systems, and he applied. He was totally ignored. Boeing instead claimed to the government they couldn’t find anyone with the skillset in the U.S. They got approval to bring in some VISA applicants from India and then paid them only $9 per hour to do the work that should have been well over $100 per hour. The new hires hadn’t the slightest clue how to do it right, and didn’t complain about the wages lest they get sent back to their home country. And their design ended up killing hundreds of people. Someone who might have been able to do a much better job was ignored during that period and went homeless for lack of income. Just one of many ways younger generations are being screwed in all directions. Talking heads in the media wonder why millennials and gen Z aren’t buying new cars. The uncomfortable truth is that more than 80% are completely priced out of even the cheapest models.
This whole country is going to go down as a result. Its leadership ate this country’s seed corn and the consequences are coming to bear next harvest as a result.
Something something bootstraps…
My experience as a scientist ranging from B.S. to Ph.D. in the American STEM labor market was similar to that of your friend’s. I’ve been hearing cries of “labor shortage!!!!” for DECADES from all around yet my actual experiences have reflected a long term STEM labor glut. It’s been that way since at least the late 80’s/early 90s.
The universities push the myth as that brings in scholarships, tuition, grants and a flood of cheap, highly exploitable labor in the form of students, technicians and post docs. Industry pushes the myth to make sure they get multiple, highly skilled and experienced applicants at all times and a glut obviously keeps wages down . There is NO downside for them to perpetuate the myth. I’d have thought the rise of the internet would have exposed the myth long ago and to some extent maybe it has but TPTB have a loud megaphone whereas busting only happens in whispers. The mythos is strong too, especially among the non STEM folks who only hear the megaphone, not the whispers and the boomers who still believe it’s the 1950s.
Of course this is a generalization. There are a few labor hot spots here and there but the hot spots do not make up for the overall STEM glut. Neither do the wild success stories of those with ivy league educations and recommendations from Nobel laureates represent the reception by industry of those those with *only* state level educations and recommendations from mid level managers and professors.
IMO when companies are forced to actually pay corner office C-level compensation packages (with parachute) to un/underqualified but trainable people across a broad range of STEM positions THEN they can bitch about a shortage. Till then their hyperbole is all bullshit.
The Shakespearian Simians are the reason we have most modern technology, IMO.
Although I currently have a decent job at an engineering firm, if I had to do it over again knowing what I know now, I likely would have dropped out of high school and sold crack. It would have allowed me to get an electric vehicle conversion I started designing in high school operable in time to where I’d have had a decent shot at working for Tesla or some other EV startup(That GT6 in my profile is that car, and I lost many opportunities because I didn’t have it running when it would have mattered due to lack of money to pursue it). Designing components for/working with for EVs is what I went into electrical engineering for! I ended up having to settle for a boring job designing circuits for a utility, due to needing to pay student loans, and couldn’t chase my dream job. I lived in a barrio, rode bicycles for local travel, and drove clunker cars I’d fix up for longer trips, in order to pay them off.
For about a year and a half, I was out of work in my field with 9 years of relevant experience and washing dishes at a restaurant for minimum wage. Most of the people I worked with at that restaurant ALSO were college educated, some of them ALSO with STEM degrees and years of relevant experience. It took thousands of applications and a year of searching to get THAT crappy minimum wage job when unemployment was supposedly under 4%, and then thousands more applications and another year and a half to get my current job at an engineering firm. 800+ credit score and no criminal record of any kind. “Now Hiring!” signs everywhere, where I’d apply, then hear nothing back, call, be told the job wasn’t available anymore, and the “Now Hiring!” signs would stay up. Meanwhile, I was “lazy” for being out of work, in spite of constantly searching. Something is not adding up with regard to the government’s official statistics on both unemployment and inflation.
I can guarantee you I’m probably the only person ever who commuted to a crappy dishwasher job in a scratch-built vehicle that gets the equivalent of 4,000 miles per gallon. What does that say about a “free market” which has no use for my capabilities when we’re simultaneously staring at the consequences of more than a century of wasteful fossil fuel usage: rapidly depleting finite oil reserves, wars for said oil reserves, and incipient global ecological collapse?
Most people my age are doing far worse than I am, unfortunately(and by 1960s standards, I’m not much better off than a burger flipper or janitor from back then, even though what I make today is considered very good money). The present is already bleak, but the future staring at us is a creature even worse. We have the likes of Boeing to thank for that. It’s looking more and more each day as if Ted Kaczynski was right about the fate of industrial civilization. I don’t know whether to laugh, or cry.
At least now I have the financial means to build or complete vehicle prototypes I designed many years ago. One idea in the pipeline is a mostly-analogue high-performance electric car. No computers more complicated or fancy than a Motorola 68000, no power-anything, everything repairable with a soldering iron and basic hand tools, and batteries that will last decades(CALB LiFePO4s are awesome for this, but there are others). Thinking of using a Mercedes 240D as a base for this prototype, with a VW Beetle pan as a possible alternative, depending upon how many seats I want this car to have.
I remember when Boeing was looking for engineers for the 737Max. A good software engineer used to command upwards of $100/hr back in the 1990s. A fellow college graduate I know had skills as an embedded system designer. In college, he built a self-balancing unicycle from scratch and did all of the programming himself. He still uses it to this day as transportation, in fact(he can’t afford a car, more on that below).
Companies were supposedly unable to find people with his skillset to do the work. Applying to jobs was something he did multiple times a day out of school during the start of the great recession, but he was never contacted. Eventually, he ended up homeless after college and his student loan went into default. From there, the interest and fees piled on. For a period, he was working TWO menial jobs and because of wage garnishment, was still priced out of a cheap apartment, so continued living on the street.
Fast forward some years later. He already paid more on his student loan than he ever took out from garnishments, but it kept increasing in balance. Boeing advertised the jobs for designing the 737Max onboard systems, and he applied. He was totally ignored.
Boeing instead claimed to the government they couldn’t find anyone with the skillset in the U.S. They got aproval to bring in some VISA applicants from India and then paid them only $9/hr to do the work that should have been well over $100/hr. The new hires hadn’t the slightest clue how to do it right, and didn’t complain about the wages lest they get sent back to their home country. And their design ended up killing hundreds of people. Someone who might have been able to do a much better job was ignored during that period and went homeless for lack of income.
Just one of many ways younger generations are being screwed in all directions. This whole country is going to go down as a result. It ate its seed corn and the consequences are coming to bear as a result.
The Pizza Hut mobile is a good choice for innercity commuting. Charge it up between runs, get food to people.
As for theme songs, depends on the car. I always thought about names. Here my first pass.
Z28 – Ridiculous by Redfood. As that is what that is what is it. Fun, party vibe, puts a smile on my face.
DTS – Lawyers, Guns, and Money by Warren Zevon. It fits the mob and lawyer car vibe.
Crosstrek – Liberty Bell March aka Monty Python Theme. Dunno why, just popped in there.
My car’s theme song?
Well, it’s a Volvo, so something by Abba would be an obvious answer, but doesn’t seem right since it is a 2016. Needs something more techno. I’ll go with Swedish House Mafia’s “Save the World” since that goes along with Volvo’s safety reputation. Plus the video has a pack of hero doggies taking out bad guys!!! Seriously, it’s hilarious, watch it…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXpdmKELE1k
I see your editor’s Deliverator request and raise you the RadiKS Mark IV Smartwheels, introduced on a hi-tech skateboard and later seen on a bad-ass bike. What speed bump? Potholes are no-holes when your ride is gliding on Smartwheels!
“What about the Tweel?”
Re: Tweel, a dismissive “I’m aware of its existence.”
And now I learned that anything in less-than/greater-than symbols is excised from the comments here. Holdover from the days when one would use that as visual commentary rather than imbedded code. 🙂
Miata: Red Barchetta, Rush. It’s a backroad fun machine.
F150: Heavy Fuel, Dire Staits. Despite teh powerboost, this is the song. I have no idea why, it just is.
Tesla Mod 3P: Song2, Blur. It alternates from “I’m just minding my own business” to “I’M EATING THE ROAD” Hella fun.
A Miata is a good choice for that song. Especially if it’s red.
I don’t really have a theme tune for my current car, a 2017 Chevy Volt named Archangel after Garrus’ codename in Mass Effect 2; though I sorta treat “Terminus”, a synthwave album by Eyeshadow 2600 FM with a lot of inspiration and some samples taken from ME2, as emblematic of it.
My last car was easier – 2007 Saturn Ion named “Faith” after the protagonist of Mirror’s Edge, theme tune was “Still Alive” (the Mirror’s Edge theme, not the Portal credits song). It had a 6 disc changer and I made a mix CD for when I picked up the car with that as the first track. That disc stayed in that slot for the entirety of my ownership of the car.
My electric Triumph GT6’s theme song is “Turbo Killer” by Carpenter Brut. This car is meant to be driven in a most abusive manner at high speed. Being an EV with a ecent power to weight ratio and all its torque at stall with no lag, it will be a slayer of turbo-equipped machines.
My other hooning machine, a custom built electric velomobile/microcar, has “Progenies of the Great Apocalypse” by Dimmu Borgir for its theme song. This is going to be a post-apocalyptic and Satanic-themed vehicle with a paintjob to match, as well as being perfectly functional in a resource/energy-scarce environment. It’s getting a rust paintjob with a big red anarchy sign on the side, Baphomet hood ornament, pentagram wheel disc covers, fallout shelter sign as a rear derailleur cover, red/orange/yellow/blue LEDs inside the wheels to make it look like it’s on fire while going down the street at night(and to make it more visible for night riding), among other aesthetic modifications. But it will also be able to be fueled by solar panels, grid electricity, generator electricity, and even human power, any of them by their lonesome, or any combination thereof.
Both vehicles are meant to be practical in the context of not just getting around from point A to point B, but doing so inexpensively and reliably while the throttle is being abused(overall operating efficiency was a major consideration which will allow for this). There’s no reason that a practical and efficient machine can’t also excel at hooning, and both vehicles are built with that philosophy in mind.
Turbo KILLER!!!! fantastic choice
I was driving with my wife in her ’12 Forester not long ago. I pressed the CD button on the stereo for the first time in who knows how long. Paul Simon’s Graceland was in there! She asked why that album was in there and I responded that it’s because she’s a middle class white lady in her late 30s driving a Subaru, that’s why.
The Camaro is obviously “Bitchin Camaro” by The Dead Milkmen https://youtu.be/1v3CzvQ9e_w
The Beige Unicorn? “I Got a Name” by Jim Croce https://youtu.be/O_BEFyNNIvM
Currently, the theme song for my ‘02 wrx is the Dead’s St Stephen because of a service road to the Blue Ridge Parkway. It has rough, rocky straights (bells & soft singing) interspersed with well-gravelled hairpins (heavy chords/strumming). At the right speeds, I can match the song pretty well.
Still trying to find a road that fits Rush’s 2112 Overture for more than a minute or two
I do hope the special pizza hatch on those three-wheelers is known as the Pie-hole.
I need more details on these pizza holsters. Are they spring-loaded? At least heated? What’s the maximum carry capacity?
I thought that Pizza Hut car was an Elio for a minute.
deliver frozen pizza 😛
The theme song for my Stelvio is “Paranoid Bulldozer Italiano” by Igorrr.
https://youtu.be/uKcAMo4rcWk
Years ago a neighbor told me that whenever he saw me going out in my 8 litre Bentley he had an uncontrollable urge to listen to The Dambusters March.
Dude! I didn’t know that Bentley made an 8 Liter, so I had to go to Wikipedia and learn about it. Very cool car. If you ever need someone to Chauffeur you around in it, shoot me a message.
>Pizza Hut
Dunno about Cali, but in TX that three-wheeler would be considered a motorcycle. There may only be 14 because that’s the number of delivery drivers who also have Class M licenses.
>Flush
For my 2013 Dodge Dart, I would go with a mediocre cover of a metal song: Akanoid’s synthwave cover of Peace Sells fits it to a T.