Today: Did you get the free fire pit extra on your new car? How much would you pay for an old Jag that hit a tree head on in 1996 and has been in the garage since? Hate electric cars as much as us? Why not slip in the driver's seat of your very own horse drawn Town Coach as sat in by the Maharajahs of Mysore and Wadhwan? And want proof the world has gone Captain Rats? Why not buy the original Gasoline Dessert Tank from Steve McQueen's Husqvarna 400 Cross from a Benzinkopf in Germany?
Now if you own a 2021 Land Rover Discovery or Defender MY2021, a 2020 Suzuki Ignis ATK, a 2020 Mercedes-Benz C, GLC or EQC, a 2007-2010 BMW E70 X5 or BMW E71 X6, a 2020 HiLux Rogue dual-cab ute, a Hyundai Tuscon built between 2015 and 2020, a Kia QL Sportage built between 2016 and 2021 or a Kia CK Stinger built between 2017 and 2019, happy winter. Yes, your car is on the recall list because it may burn to the ground.
In the US where cars are different, Audi is recalling its first all-electric vehicle because the battery can catch fire and it can't be put out by anything currently known to man, woman or other. While in soap dodger land, BMW has issued a voluntary recall of the $150k E-Tron SUV.
Just to make you feel better, if the future is electric, then you are in for a hotter, more expensive future. Too much stress on the alternator means too many fires in the lithium battery.
But wait there's more. As Wired recently asked: "What links the battery in your smartphone with a dead yak floating down a Tibetan river?" Yup, you guessed it, the answer is lithium. But dead yaks are the least of our worries. "Two other key ingredients, cobalt and nickel, are more in danger of creating a bottleneck in the move towards electric vehicles, and at a potentially huge environmental cost."
We all know you can sell a slightly used 2020 Land Cruiser for more than a 2021 model but $165k for a 61-year-old reddish Jag XK150 S 3.8-litre drophead coupe that found a tree in Hull in the wet in 1996 and hasn't been touched since? Wait, it gets madder. Estimate for a car Bonhams said was "worse than it looks" was about $20k. Well, there's your first problem. Hard to drive a car with a motor that's as useless as a sunroof on a submarine and wheels that are squashed to resemble ugly looking yak heads on a good day.
Compared to the mushed up Jag, the 1934 Mercedes-Benz 500/540k (factory upgrade) Spezial Roadster, Bonhams sold at Amelia Island last week, was a steal at $6.3 million.