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!
SHOW ME THE AVOCADO!
My vision? Use the political lobbying and manufacturing power of whatever auto manufacturer can get away with it to remake ALL the classic cars: Ferrari California spiders, Lamborghini Murias, long nosed, air cooled 911s, gull winged Mercedes, Jaguar XJ-13s, split window C2 Corvettes, the rarer and more exotic the better, all with modern metallurgy, paint, rust proofing, fuel economy and emissions and the best crash protection possible given the constraints of the designs, built to Singer or better quality standards but at used Changli prices. For 7 years these beauties will be cranked out by the gazillions making every mall parking lot a Pebble Beach, everyman’s garage a micro Jay Leno collection.
The death of the company will be from fighting the massive copyright infringement lawsuits. Totally worth it. Especially since the avocado comes with its own goldenest of parachutes.
I call this maneuver “The Reverse Wolf of Wall Street.”
I’m taking the reins of something like Hyundai USA or some other right-to-work state evildoer, and spending the seven good years investing in cross-compatible infrastructure, job broadening and education opportunities for all the workers (ESPECIALLY the kids in Alabama, whose paid “work” will take the form of high grade education, healthy meals, any extracurriculars they desire, and zero actual factory work), and when the seven years are up, all the actual workers “lose their jobs” with golden parachutes and a hookup for work, higher education, etc.
My fellow C-suiters get none of this.
Ooooooh, I love this idea.
How big is the golden parachute for option number one? It’s the amoral option, but think of how many Cayennes I could buy! Obviously, I would steer clear of the Volkswagen Group accordingly so I could keep myself in Cayennes for the long-run, but…
Unfortunately, I’m not a herb, and the idea of cratering that many livelihoods would weigh on me forever. Give me the sad car power. I hope they like pain. That daily-driven Tatra has been a naughty little piggy that soiled the driveway, and it’s going to be punished.
So the answer is obviously the avocado, but the way I see it, there’s two ways of doing it. First is the obvious one, taking a struggling manufacturer and giving them one last hurrah of batshit insanity. Say, forcing Mitsubishi to give us a new Evo, Pajero, 3kGT, and Delica Space Gear before they implode. Sure, it’ll fail, but you’ll be a legend among car bros.
The second idea is something I call Seven Years of Suck. Take a company that’s doing fine but is boring you to tears, and turn the dull and awful up to 11. Say you pick Ford? Kill the mustang, kill the lightning, kill the maverick, make it so everything is a bloated, CVT-only crossover. That way, when the company dies in seven years, the lesson every car company learns from the death of one of the big three is TO GO ABSOLUTELY BATSHIT INSANE. Crossovers are suddenly dead. Everything has a manual option. Mazda is making a RX-9. Bloated giant trucks are no longer a license to print money. Toyota is making an electric MR2. Ford is
The car world is infinitely more exciting going forward, and all it takes is seven years of boring, and the demise of an industry behemoth.
Not that you don’t have enough on your plate already Jason, but if this whole online auto journalist/entrepreneur thing doesn’t work out, you can probably make a living writing ‘speculative fiction’ with tongues firmly planted in (any available) cheeks. I seriously think you’d be a worthwhile successor to the much-missed Douglas Adams.
Thanks! 🙂
With the Avocado of Destiny, I would take over Nissan and bring back Datsun as a line of compact RWD EVs, including of course a sturdy little pickup and a sporty 510 sedan.
It was about time! This is exactly the kind of thing I want to read about.
Easy peasy, hand me the reins to Maserati and I’ll force them to design a manual gearbox, cancel production of anything that isn’t V8 and RWD, and divert all budget to developing a reliable V8 that still sounds as good as the old one. Once that’s done, then we can think about reworking the chassis, interior and all that other unimportant stuff. Besides, this way they survive a whole 7 years instead of the 2-3 that they have left.
Avocado and Tesla, please. I’d clean up quality control, bring back steering wheels, enforce a new corporate culture featuring Weaton’s Law. Then I would get a normal-ish pickup truck out the door, in time for the stock to tank and the whole thing to get bought by GM. Golden parachute, here I come!
I’d totally be the industry kingpin for 7 years. I’d produce highly-efficient, inexpensive, reliable, high-performance vehicles that use living-wage labor with the thinnest profit margins possible that resist planned obsolescence. I wouldn’t care about the inevitable failure, because it would get that genie out of the bottle for good and other manufacturers would have to suck it up and follow my lead, or perish.
Torch…
You are bonkers.
Now we know what inhaling Chinese battery dust does to the human brain.
That thought occurred to me as well, until I realized that if anything, this one feels a little dialed back.
#2, it is kind of normal for me to feel automotive guilt, so this is not much of a stretch.
How does the pain car communicate though? If’ it’s constantly screaming at every bump, hell no. If it’s silent but you just have to live with the knowledge it feels pain, I think I can forget.
Avocado and I am going to run Dodge. I will continue the ICE lineup of the Charger/Challenger and Durango with the hemi engines and hire Mark Smith of Smyth Performance to run my new Ute division and offer factory Utes based on the Dodge Charger in both righthand and lefthand drives.
If I had to choose between seven years of driving GM or seven years of driving a GM, I’ll just pass.
Rotting avocado for me. And the company I’d want to be CEO of would be Stellantis. And the way I see it, nothing will be lost because in 7-10 years, there’s a decent chance Stellantis might collapse anyway because they didn’t start with the BEV thing sooner.
And then some other company will come along and buy Jeep and inadvertently get struck by the Jeep Curse just the way Willys, Kaiser, AMC, Chrysler, DaimlerChrysler and FCA did.
https://blog.consumerguide.com/is-there-a-jeep-curse/
#2 creeps me out. As others said, I’d take over a company that was already en route to the shitter–Buick–and make a line of perfect 1930s Delahaye reproductions with modern performance and safety features.
As I live in a civilized, freedom-loving country, I don’t need to smuggle Kinder eggs, so I guess the pain spirit option is out for me? I like the success avocado more anyhow. As others have said, just pick a brand that wasn’t likely to survive the next seven years anyhow and go wild. Maybe take over whoever’s currently got zombieSaab just to ensure the Night Panel comes back.
Easy-peasy. Give me the avocado and BYD. I’ll focus all efforts on the ultra-ultra high-end EV sports cars, luxo-barge sedans and coupes, as well as SUVs and trucks that are crosses between the Hummer EV and Dartz. All of which will be sold at a loss to put others out of these markets.
Hopefully, this will force the other companies to focus on rational, fun, and affordable options for the masses.
And after seven years, we can stop reading Matt’s and Patrick’s articles fawning over BYD.
but once BYD is gone, you’ll be resigned to reading the incessant deluge of mournful retrospective articles, just like people still make about Saab and Pontiac.
I would go with the first one and pick a company like Mitsubishi or Buick that’s already on it’s way out, but at least they’ll be remembered fondly when I’m done (even if I’m not). I particularly like Buick because I could finally build the Avenir concept, and maybe poach the Ciel designers from Cadillac to build that too. It would be the most beautiful car lineup the world has ever seen.
That said, if your ex ever sends you a rotten avocado and tells you to dance naked around it, check reeeeeal carefully for hidden cameras.
“That said, if your ex ever sends you a rotten avocado and tells you to dance naked around it, check reeeeeal carefully for hidden cameras.”
Nah. Anyone that clicks on that link deserves what they get.
I’d be the carmaker mogul, and I think I’d have to do it for my Pops.
I’d take over Land Rover and I’d produce the BOF Defenders nonstop for those 7 years, making every configuration you can think of. I’d replace the engines and transmissions with much better made units from other automakers but keep the fully floated axles. I’d also rustproof them by an obscene amount.
Land Rover is probably already dead within the next 7 years.
Instead using this blessing as if it is a diagnosis of a terminal illness that will kill a successful company within 7 years one should use it instead like a Miracle drug that’ll take an automotive company on life support and give them an extra 7 years of peak living.
Option 2 for me. As noted upthread the pain spirit is likely a masochist, and as such it would only be proper to manifest it as a Ford RS200 group B rally car. So…much…suffering!
My friends (and wife) say I punish my vehicles already so I might as well torture some good ones.
I’m taking the first option. Since I’ll be in “Total Control”, I’ll make the rules so I won’t have to go to the automaker’s HQ. I’ll be a remote worker CEO.
Why does this matter? Because I’m taking over AvtoVAZ, the parent company of Lada. And that enterprise is state-owned, which means that to actually be in Total Control of AvtoVAZ, I’m now in charge in Russia.
We’re leaving Ukraine, and making nothing but mine-clearing tractors and delivery trucks for the next seven years. Lots of mine-clearing agricultural tractors, mostly.
You win.
Can you make velour interiors standard as part of that deal?
Oh, hell yeah, I’ll go for that! In deep rich colors only; navy blue, maroon, chocolate brown and kelly green.
They’ll have to be washable fabric, though, because I imagine popping a land mine off will often result in a Code Brown moment.