Chris Anderson's story "The Emperor's New Clothes" encourages people to question what they're told, value honesty over flattery and be brave enough to call out the truth – even when it's uncomfortable or unpopular.
There's a lot of Emperor's New Clothes stuff going on in our motoring world today.
Let's start with Jaguar, which has a rich history of making some beautiful but mainly unreliable cars. Well of course like the E-Type and the XKR. Anyway, it stopped making crook-looking woke electric cars that no one wanted like the I-Pace while the Indian owner of the legendary automotive company decided to take a break for a while to see if they could come up with a better idea than the I-Pace.
Jaguar and the US authorities recalled 6400 I-Paces five times for battery fires for which the company had no fix. Last month Jaguar in the US said it would buy back about 3000 I-Pace EVs from the 2019 model year because of the fires.
Anyway, the best idea Jag could come up with was a short hallucinogenic sci-fi movie which featured no cars but models of no particular sex wandering around in very colourful clothes looking like they just came back from a very quick trip to the morgue – or a Jag repair shop, both being similar.
Naturally a car ad with no cars for an iconic brand that tried to make serious cars before they went electric didn't exactly set the world on fire like an I-Pace battery. Rawdon Glover, the managing director of Jaguar, said the new ad campaign had been lost in "a blaze of intolerance", explaining that the company needed to move away from "traditional automotive stereotypes" like cars that don't work.
In Australia, Polestar boss Scott Maynard said "there's no doubt in my mind that selective reporting is having an impact on consumer confidence and the speed of take-up of electric vehicles". Scotty blames the media for cooling EV demand. "It's selective reporting. If an electric vehicle catches fire, it's all over the news," he said.
There's only one country where things are going right for the EV industry and that's our old friend China. There's only one reason the Chinese are the Emperors and Empresses of electric cars and that's because they had a proper plan and a proper policy. Twenty years ago China realised it could never compete in the petrol car market and could see the environment was going to become a big deal so built a complete supply chain.
Meanwhile, the FIA is in more trouble than a porcupine in a balloon factory. More bizarre penalties at the Qatar GP – particularly the one dished out to Mad Max – have the drivers asking serious questions about the administration of the FIA.
And talking of bad behaviour, let's all wonder how Dan Kawai and the team at Autoleague are feeling after refusing to talk to customer Helen Chaberka about her lemon Jeep. Since the incident Helen has been in hospital six times this year, three of them in ICU.
Looking for the perfect yuletide gift for someone you love (like you), imagine owning Bernie Ecclestone's car collection of 69 F1 cars. SDL dealer Tom Hartley Jnr has them up for sale at around $600m as a job lot or for individual sale.
jc@jcp.com.au