Never Stop Driving

[ROB III]

To drive well is to live well

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To drive well is to live well

Indeed!

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A bit of observation from Hagerty Media's Larry Webster in this week's 'Never Stop Driving' post - 'Community Standards'.

https://www.hagerty.com/media/never-sto ... d568259d8a

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This week's Never Stop driving featuring a few comments from the always interesting Bob Lutz along with a few from Larry Webster regarding the turmoil rippling through the auto industry at the moment.

https://www.hagerty.com/media/never-sto ... d568259d8a

Lutz:
“The time it takes a car company to take a new car from concept to production is about three and a half years and that hasn’t changed for decades, except in China. There they work the white-collar engineers, designers, and product planners like factory workers, three shifts a day, seven days a week, pumping out new products in half the time.”

On European car companies: “They’re in terminal trouble: The Chinese-market profits are imploding, and they can’t make money selling EVs, which they’re mandated to build.” “The European governments are gonna have to figure out that their fuel economy regulations are killing their own industry.”

Regarding Jaguar's latest foibles: “The idea was good, to break out of the run-of-the-mill, dog-eat-dog, Mercedes-BMW-Audi-Cadillac-Infiniti-Lexus [segment]. Breaking out of that and going up into the stratosphere like Cadillac is doing with the Celestiq. But the Jag [Type 00] concept has nothing. It’s just boring. It could have been done in five minutes by any gifted 16-year-old who knows how to sketch cars. The ad campaign did them no favors, either.”

NSD-124-Tavares-and-Macron.jpg (250.33 KiB) Viewed 550 times

French President Emmanuel Macron (R) shakes hands with Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares (L) as he visits the Stellantis stand as the Paris Motor Show, October, 2024. Ludovic Marin/AFP/Getty Images