I can’t believe I haven’t treated you to the soothing, mind-expanding goodness of an Automotive Would You Rather since January! What the hell is my problem? Don’t I realize how much you need this? This one is on me, and I apologize. So we’re going to fix this right here, right now, because I have two important, mind-expanding what-if scenarios for you to carefully consider, one that would offer you the opportunity to become a captain of industry, and another that forces you to consider some difficult ethical questions. So, prepare yourself, lubricate that brain with a healthy squirt of linseed oil in each ear, and let’s get to it!
Oh, and I know every time I do one of these there’s at least one commenter who tells me this isn’t the sort of thing they want to read about. So, if that’s you, go back to the home page! There’s so many other stories! I’m not offended! Get out of here, before it gets weird!
SCENARIO ONE: The Five-Year CEO
You’re stalking exes on Instagram one night from the hammock you sleep on in your dilapidated houseboat, when you notice something interesting. One of your old partners, one who broke your heart, seems to be doing really well and for the first time in a long time, you can look at their pictures of their incredible new life without resentment or jealousy. You do note that in all of the photos, they’re holding what appears to be a slightly rotting avocado. You don’t think much of it, deciding that you’re going to reach out and send them a nice message. For the first time, you feel a burden off your chest, and you fall asleep, loudly and lavishly.
When you awake in the morning, you find messages from your ex. They’re so happy you reached out, and they’ve been thinking about you for a long time, feeling badly about how it all went down, which made them decide something. They’re going to send you the secret to their new success in life: that rotting avocado.
You see, the avocado actually houses an ancient Krometherian god (a pantheon that, yes, included the famous Gozer the Gozarian), one of the ones worshiped commonly around 5740 BCE in the Kromenian River Valley (and also by the ancient Hittites, Mesopotamians, and the Sumerians), which is located in the river basin between modern day Chile and Vanuatu. The god was named Arcthania, and was the God of Opportunities. Your ex agreed to worship this nearly-forgotten god, and in return they were granted the chance to take advantage of an opportunity provided by Arcthania. As a result, they now have a fantastic life. Now, it’s your turn.
You place the avocado on an altar you made from old Amazon boxes, and performed the many, complex, and surprisingly naked rituals with the avocado. After a long night of sweaty worship, the avocado began to hover, glow, and emit a booming voice that echoed out across the houseboat. You’ve never heard the language before, full of odd whistling and belching sounds, but somehow you know what’s being said.
Essentially, it’s this: Arcthania has conjured a magical opportunity for you. The opportunity is that you can immediately take total control of any major automaker you choose, and you can steer that company to do or make anything you want. Total control. If you say, for example, you’d like to re-direct all of GM into making nothing but the world’s best amphibious vehicles, then that’s what will happen, using all of the resources that colossal company can muster.
There’s a catch, though: this can only last for seven years. After seven years, it will all collapse, completely, with factories closing and jobs lost and everything going straight to hell. Maybe the assets could be bought and restarted by another entity, but you’d be out, and known as the one who cratered a massive auto company. So, you can absolutely achieve your wildest automotive dreams, on a massive scale. Until, you know, disaster.
SCENARIO TWO: The Unbearable Pain Of Being
You wake up in the hospital, where you’ve just woken up from surgery as doctors have been desperately removing shards of Kinder Surprise Egg chocolate from your colon, when the fourteen eggs you were trying to smuggle into America (they’re illegal here, you see) inside your anus experienced catastrophic failure, rupturing the eggs and showering your insides with chocolate egg and plastic toy shrapnel. The process subjected you to massive amounts of pain, pain that was intense enough that the quantum barrier between our world and the Realm of Feels became porous, and a Pain Spirit entered our world.
The Pain Spirit is a being of considerable power, and is bound to you, personally. It has access to your thoughts and desires, and is actually delighted for the opportunity to experience our world, which is filled with wonders like Stuckey’s and Dave and Buster’s. As a way of saying thanks, the Pain Spirit has generated a self-contained amorphous semi-being, which has been trained to be able to literally become any car you want, just by commanding it.
You always wanted to drive a Gordon-Keeble? Just look at the glowing orb that is the amorphous semi-being and command it! Want a Facel-Vega? Just ask. A Maybach? A Renault 4? An Ariel Atom? Say the word, and off you go!
Oh, but there is one thing: because this magic was generated by a Pain Spirit, a side effect is that whatever car you command the semi-being to become can feel pain. That means if you ding a door, it hurts the car. If you run it too hard or too long, it aches. An actual crash would be excruciating. It’ll feel cold out at night and in the rain and snow, and if you park it in the hot sun, you know it’ll suffer. Cobblestones hurt, so do railroad tracks. And don’t get me started on gravel.
Sure, maybe you can ignore this, because the car will still do its best, if you’re willing to push it, but somehow you’ll know when it’s hurting.
So! There are your options: be an auto industry kingpin for seven glorious years that will absolutely end in disaster, or drive any car you’ve ever wanted, but you’ll know when it feels pain. So what’s it gonna be? Time to choose!
Oh, Jason… I have so many thoughts and feelings. Do I get to keep the remnants of my fecal kinder egg? Does the avocado smell? Am I cursed to the same fate as John DeLorean?
Well… I can’t choose, so here’s what I would do for each scenario:
Scenario 1:
I don’t care about profits. I take over Alpine and force them to continue manufacturing the ICE A110, bring it over to the US domestic market and slash the price so anyone can afford one. The market gets flooded with A110s, everyone gets to drive a fun car, parts are everywhere, and we can ride out the end of the consumer gas-powered vehicle era with style.
Scenario 2:
I turn my Pain Spirit into a Lamborghini Miura. I named it Miurial. Miurial and I go everywhere together. I daily drive her, but I take excellent care of her. I painstakingly plan out every drive and route so we never hit any potholes, only drive on the best roads, and show Miurial the time of her life. 50 years later, I can hardly drive. Miurial and I spend our time in my spacious, climate-controlled garage. We watch Cars over and over and I obsessively point out the plot holes and small details that paint the Cars universe as a nightmare world. I develop a rare form of intestinal cancer from a chocolate contaminated plastic shard left over in my anus from the Kinder Egg fiasco. I spend my final days in Miurial. When I feel the end coming, I sob as I pour sugar into Miurial’s gas tank, simultaneously stuffing my face with the delicious poison until I’m in a diabetic coma and Miurial has aspirated her last breath. I bury us both in a large, ornate tomb like the pharaoh that I am. We meet up in the afterlife and Miurial and I spend eternity on the literal Rainbow Road in the sky.
Also what happens if I eat the avocado?
Gozer the Gozarian has been my go to for dark occult worship for years, I thank them every time the stop light sequence goes my way or I manage to cross all three local rail lines with no delay when I’m only 10 minutes early to a movie or whenever I need to chain the souls of the restless dead. So naturally I’m going with choice one!
I’d take over Tesla, and convert the entire company line to making sweet drift capable Japanese style hot hatches from the 80s. Well, we would also scrap all the cybertrucks and build Delorians from the left over panels, and I would start a custom order line where you could put in to get your own EV versions of old Packards and Studebakers. Then when the company tanks in seven years I have a lot of sweet rides to enjoy and the lifelong satisfaction of screwing over Elon Musk. Win win!
….what?
I already anthropomorphize my cars to that degree. I’d give it a nice comfortable garage and enjoy drives on perfect Sundays.
I think the key missing piece of information is if the car / pain spirit can communicate this to you. I think all car enthusiasts want to treat their car as good as possible, now one could have something closer to a horse-rider relationship.
You best bet my car-being would be in a nice heated garage and only fed the most premium of fuel and oil.
I’d take over VW and make only beetles, buses and Karmann Ghias, updated a bit technologically, of course, worldwide.
7 years.
As an engineer, I would focus on the inverse of “design by committee”, and it would ONLY be engineers making the decisions. BUT, I would hire a proper distribution of engineers by demographic, and we would all decide by majority vote. So, “design by a committee of engineers”.
So in 7 years you’d never actually ship anything? Committees made up exclusively of engineers work on timescales measured in decades because everything must be perfect. 😉
Seven years of dicking with the auto industry, just to be sure I collapse the entire company and ruin the livelihoods of thousands? No thanks. I’ll let those people keep going making bland nothingmobiles. At least they won’t be on my conscience.
However, I find myself decently comfortable abusing an interdimensional traveler. Even if I decide I feel terrible about it, if my choice is crush the one vs crush the many, I’ll take the one as a lesser of two evils.
However, in this totally made up jaunt in to interdimensional space, I’m 100% confident that a sprit being called a “Pain Spirit” is actual one of two things. Its either a Sadist, loving the pain it inflicts, at which point I have no issues returning the favor OR its a Masochist, and therefore already loves the pain I might inflict upon it, so I find no reason to feel bad.
OR I thought about this WAY TOO HARD… Thanks Jason. That is your fault.
Automotive CEO for seven years? That seems like it would be a record according to my morning memory over the last 30 years. What’s the percentage of auto CEO’s that last 7 years?
7 years should be enough to design, R&D, and manufacture a 2 door coupe with 6&8 cylinder options and a sports sedan with 10&12 cylinders options, of course both RWD, manual, no screens, etc. I would keep the first of each off the line for myself, who cares if anyone buys them, and if it costs me my job.
Put the 10 and 12 cylinder in the coupe too and you’d have a couple sales from me.
Let’s see what happens if GM kills all vehicles but bland, amorphous crossovers. My reason is that other automakers will see how a focus on crossovers killed GM and work harder to make interesting/fun cars.
Toyota would suddenly start making all the old classic cars of our dreams but brand new and with Toyota reliability! New Citroen DS, SM and CX. New Jaguar XK120s and E-Types, Tatras, Dusenbergs, Cords and Auburn. Any car you want all for the price of a Carolla or Camery!!!!
I’m down for a little spirited pain.
I’ll take a Volvo P1800 Cyan please.
Hmm, I guess I’m evil.
Wait… I could get that with the CEO gig too.
Let’s go that route.
Get outa my chair Christian Dahl.
I realize this might be a bit too late, but I’d be the CEO of AMC. My first acts would be:
I do not see Eagles, Javelins, Matador coupes (and only coupes!), or AMX IIs and IIs on your list. You have failed. Return your avocado.
No no no. I’ve thought this through. My FIRST acts would be to create vehicles that generate sales volume. The Scrambler (a pickup) and the AMC AM Van (a crossover) are gimmies, you have to admit. The Commander would be a utilitarian fighter in the Subaru Crosstrek market space and steal thunder from the Scout.
If I’m around for act TWO, I’d sit the clones in front of a AMX for inspiration and find a boutique builder such as Saleen to build AMXe, a no-holds-barred pavement ripper.
Brown, manual diesel wagons as far as the eye can see….
I naturally chose to be a bigshot CEO, since those C-Suite lazy asses can drive any car they want without having to worry about pain. Or consequence. Or guilt. Or payments.
Ford would bring back their experimental Paul Rand logo and put it on all the econoboxes you could shake a stick at. Fun, cute hatchbacks everywhere. Electric, hybrid, ICE, they would all be fun, approachable little things accessible to everyone. A revisit of the Model T corporate philosophy, with wayyyyy less antisemitism.
Y’all are thinking about it backwards – you guarantee a company makes enthusiast cars AND survives for the next seven years.
Who wants to see Mitsubishi go out in a blaze of glory?
CEO, also if this is making a comeback does that mean readers rides might not be that far behind?
CEO for me, please. In seven years I’ll be seven years older than my already old self. I ran out of fucks to give a long time ago, so being the old man who cratered a car company is NBD. Now, which one to put out our misery?
Addendum: I want some of whatever Jason is ingesting!
Be careful what you wish for because he has chainsawed lead acid batteries without a respirator and eaten food in a moldy Scion xB. Also one of his business partners eats shower spaghetti… Still want some of what he’s ingesting?
“Had your fill of tacos? Would ye sooner eat a bilge rat than another burger?”
I think he’s still working on finishing off that wheelbarrow of cocktail shrimp.
Chrysler, let it go out with a bang
This is the sort of thing I want to read about.
Yay it’s back!
Me too! To Hell with the nay-sayers!
I, too, would choose the CEO job at Tesla. Cybertrucks for everyone! Hmm, you know what? I think Tesla already has a CEO with a rotten avocado. And is Gozar the Gozarian related to Gosar the Arizonan, ‘cause that is one evil, scary dude, too.
I would gladly take over as CEO at Jaguar so that I can fulfill my dream of reviving that company with some epically beautiful new vehicles, and maybe also a heritage line of retromods – I’m thinking an electric E-Type, an XJS shooting brake with non-Lucas wiring and a reliable motor, and a Mark II with disc brakes.
I’ll feel no guilt when the entire enterprise burns to the ground at the end of my term, all I did was delay the inevitable.
I can think of several companies that wouldn’t need my help to collapse within 7 years….
Anyways, nothing in the prompt says I need to direct the car company to make actual cars, so if I were evil enough I could just turn it into my own personal Wayne Enterprises and mortgage all the assets into building me a bunch of cool stuff and a palatial fortress in a tax haven with enough private security to protect me from the legions of angry employees.
Or I could just take the second option and build a climate controlled garage.
I could never do the latter option. Physically inflicting pain on somebody, compared to the indirect knowledge of someone becoming unemployed? The latter still absolutely “hurts”, but in a comparatively tiny manner.
If I don’t choose a tiny automaker to affect the fewest people, I’d go the other direction and pick whatever automaker has the most dealerships, in the hope that the cratering might accelerate the death of the dealership model.
As the CEO, do I have a golden parachute?
7 years AND I know the company’s wrecked at the end regardless? That takes the pressure off. Perhaps I’d take Tesla. Ousting the other guy would be great, I could make the focus the vehicles instead of FSD, and the end result would crater the overpriced stock.
You better get your poop in a group, mister! 🙂
CEO, please. I could spend five years making incredible cars, and then spend the last two years selling off divisions and other assets so the collapse at the end would affect as few people as possible, all of whom would receive generous severance packages.
And I would be known as the person who cratered a husk, a shell, a bagatelle. NBD there.