Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Join the Comprehensive Reinvestment in Autocross Program!

Hi all,
Here's an only semi-simian post from your old pal Breauxt. I have found the recent discussion about public policy and economic impacts of legislation on a number of racing lists I'm on coincidentally amusing given the work I've been doing recently on a personal project I'm sharing with Ed Montgomery. I shouldn't be sharing this information just yet, as the PR roll-out is not scheduled to start moving until next week. Ed is, I guess I need to now refer to him as "Mr Montgomery" now; anyway Ed is the new Car Czar for the US government.

This is kind of weird in that Ed is just a dude I happen to know from Maryland with no more experience with the auto industry than you or me. But he's an enthusiast and loves cars and driving fast. He had an SS 396 Nova for a while as a young guy, and then moved on to more realistic machines as he pursued his doctorate, got married, and had kids. We all know the drill. He's got a Pontiac G8 now and is a cool guy.

I happened to meet him through work, oddly enough. I work with clinical research data and early last year was visiting Johns Hopkins in Baltimore on business. After my last data model review session, I was walking around the historic campus with my camera and spied Ed's G8 in a parking lot. I hadn't seen a G8 yet, so was giving his car a good bit of attention. He came out to his car to go home and couldn't help but notice me laying on the ground looking at the suspension of his car. This of course sparked a conversation. It turns out he has been a user of some research administration software my team built and we've, by now, become pretty good friends.

A few months ago, Ed and his family (he's got adorable kids, twins!) were visiting my family in Italy. On this visit I knew I'd be playing tour guide to the Montgomery clan and so had rented a 'big' car - in this case a 5 series BMW. I typically rent the cheapest buzz-bomb I can get, knowing I'll be mostly driving my parents' Peugeot (a perfectly adequate 308 diesel). The big Bimmer was the perfect ride for touring around northern Italy. My family and Ed's would caravan from restaurant to winery to historic race track in the Bimmer and the Pug, each time flipping a coin to see who would have to suffer the indignity of riding in the Peugeot for the next leg.

At one point, on the superstrada near Lucca at just over 190 kph (that's about 115 mph), I commented to Ed, "How come GM can't make a car like this? We're cruising along at a ridiculous speed and the people in the back seat are asleep". He piped back, "Bret, GM does make cars like this. My G8 is a prime example, as is any Cadillac". I initially scoffed at Ed as being a GM apologist, but then remembered that his dad has an S class Benz. Ed is no stranger to quality motoring. The conversation shifted to the power perception holds over even an educated public (myself being an example - a fan of the G8 assuming it was an order of magnitude less "good" than my 5 series rental).

Skip forward a few months and Ed and I have been chatting with increased seriousness about how a manufacturer can bridge the "perception gap" that exists with the American car companies. I had since taken test drives in a variety of American cars: G8, Malibu, CTS (and CTS-V Whoa Nelly!), Fusion, Mustang, etc. I found these all to be decent cars. There is no reason these cars and their stablemates should be being outsold by foreign products. In particular, not a car as boring and uninvolving as a the Camry.

As the financial apocalypse settled in, and the North American car manufacturers became the pariah of the national media, I became incensed. The news readers on CNN, FOX, and MSNBC would talk about how the "Big 3" weren't building efficient cars and I would scream at my television, "I just got a real world 50mpg in a week long test of a mid-size Ford Fusion Hybrid! Toyota's large SUV's are so inefficient that they might as well be clubbing baby seals in comparison to the domestic SUV's!"

A plan hatched in my mind. What if the domestic manufacturers took a grassroots approach to grabbing control of the perceptions of their products? After all, who does a person ask for car advice? A car guy, of course. What if the most prolific car guys (and car girls!) were privy to the real quality and performance of domestically manufactured vehicles? These folks would be evangelists unclouded by public perception or marketing influences, because they'd be driving the real products, right now.

I had written little more than an executive summary of the concept of seeding perception among the "car intelligentsia", when Ed started getting calls from the Obama Administration about a "high level" position. Ed had been helping me craft my proposal as a behavioral marketing experiment that I'd hoped to see conducted at Wharton or Harvard's business schools. However, as Ed started being vetted as a candidate for "Car Czar", we started thinking about the real and immediate market influence a program like ours could have by being federally funded. What if we gave 1 year free leases of America's greatest cars to America's biggest real world car fans? These are the thought leaders who impact the average Joe's buying decisions.

Now that Ed is Car Czar, our idea has been given a green light! We have 10,000 slots open for a one year lease of a premiere American car. I'm driving a CTS-V (and loving it, by the way) and am doing my part to show the country that American cars are just as good as anything in the market!

Here's where I get in trouble: I'd love to see as many "drivers" get handed keys to these cars as possible. Who really cares what some fashionista is driving anyway? I contend that racing enthusiasts and participants in autocross will have a bigger impact on public perception.

Want to get your name on the roster of candidate drivers early? You'll get the pick of the best cars available to the program: including Corvettes (yes Z06 is included), Mustangs of all varieties, the new Camaro, all the V series Cadillacs, as well as the hybrid offerings of the domestics (I don't think those will have much pull with this crowd). Click the link below to go to the website for this new program. This is a new site and it hasn't been announced yet. You'll want to act fast as the PR machine will kick in probably next week.

looflirpa.net

1 comment:

eto said...

Hmm... the link does not work. April Fool's? :D

If not, it was a pretty good read. I do think that a lot of US cars get overlooked, just because they are domestic. The G8 GXP has been mentioned several times as well as the current Cobalt SS really surprising a lot of magazines in small car performance tests. Saturn has great cars right now, but GM is tossing them aside as well as Pontiac.

As long as what is left of detroit isn't a bunch of Volt-wannabees, there may be hope for domestic grassroots motorsports.