Yes, bowing to unpopular demand, this is our bumper all-green, all-the-time edition plus bonus tales of SUA (sudden unintended acceleration) with a sprinkling of bad manufacturer stories.
Over at Bentley this week, current boss Adrian Hallmark announced a near record profit based on customers wanting to pimp their ride. Battler "Bruce Smith" (name changed to protect the guilty) had the company use wood from his own forest to make the car's interior panels and knit a personalised tree emblem on to headrests.
Our spies tell us CEO Hally was investigating making an all-wood car, with a wood-fired electric engine, before he was headhunted by Larry Stroll to become numero uno at Aston Martin. The wood-fired engine is probably a lame substitute for the Bentley 4.0L twin turbocharged V8 that ends its run this month as Bentley works towards all electric all the time just as world demand for EVs is going down faster than CEO Teddy Smith's Titanic.
Aston Martin shares have not been immune from the Titanic effect, with the stock halving in price over the last year. Hally did a sensational job turning the VW-owned Bentley around, but will need all his skill over at Stroll's place. Hally will be the fourth captain at the good ship Aston in as many years.
And a 2022 report from classic car insurer Footman James shows that classic cars are greener than EVs. "A battery-electric car creates 26 tonnes of CO during its production – emissions that would take a typical classic more than 46 years to achieve," it says.
And in Hyperdrive, Bloomberg's "newsletter on the future of the auto world" is a ripper yarn on "How Hertz's Bet on Teslas Went Horribly Sideways". When Hertz followed the Titanic down in 2021, private equity stars Tom Wagner and Greg O'Hara bought the rental car company and brought it back to the surface with a $2bn capital raising and "a fully charged bet to swap Hertz's gas-powered rental-car fleet for EVs". T&G found that their customers didn't want to drive electric cars; the ones that do have more prangs than conventional car renters; that the electric cars they were pranging cost a shed load more to repair than petrol guzzlers. Hertz settled for $200m. Its share price has dropped from $40 plus change to $10.
Talking of the Titanic, if you don't fancy electric or wood, what about hydrogen? Yup the same hydrogen that powered the good airship Hindenburg, which burned and crashed in New Jersey in 1937 killing 35 people.
Once again, we're putting off manufacturers behaving badly until next week but let's talk sudden unintended acceleration. SUA is when your car seems to take off by itself or have a mind of its own. Unfortunately, all the research shows it happens when a driver thinks he/she is putting his/her foot on the brake but it goes on the accelerator. Interestingly, it never happens with professional drivers. All happen in automatic cars. Sometimes the mats or parts of the car jam the loud button (Porsche/Toyota/Lexus/Audi). Less often it's an electrical fault. Shouldn't happen in new cars, which have shift locks and other stuff in place.
jcp.com.au