JUST ANOTHER MANIC WEDNESDAY.

By Peter M. DeLorenzo

Detroit. Now that we’re more than halfway through the year, it’s incredible that the level of chaos in this business is not calming down in the least. In fact, it’s ramping up to new levels. 

The chip shortage thing, which has thrown the entire retail end of the market into an unsustainable frenzy, has also ravaged the auto supplier community. Now, suppliers who were begging for positive developments after the Shit Show that came to define last year instead find themselves in the barrel again this year with little signs of relief on the horizon. Not to mention the fact that huge chunks of volume have been taken from the manufacturers, which will have a devastating effect on their collective bottom lines.

But that’s just one dimension of the chaos. The other is that it looks like Elon’s Muskian Nightmare of promoting the Autopilot option on his Tesla cars – a function that never performed to its level of promise and that has been in myriad fatal accidents since its introduction – is now facing proper and intense government scrutiny for the first time. This past Monday, according to reporting by Neal E. Boudette, writing for the New York Times, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration – aka NHTSA – has opened a formal investigation into Autopilot. The agency said it was aware of 11 accidents since 2018 involving Teslas that crashed into police, fire and other emergency vehicles with flashing lights parked on roads and highways. In one of the incidents, a Tesla smashed into a fire truck in December 2019 in Indiana, killing a passenger in the car and seriously injuring the driver.

That it has taken this long for NHTSA to investigate Tesla’s Autopilot function is simply unconscionable, especially since St. Elon has made promise after promise about the option’s capabilities in a never-ending stream of public statements and calculated brow-beating meant to deceive the consumer public. And judging by the insanity generated on Twitter by Tesla Fan Boys (and Girls) vehemently defending the function as being safe and that it works as promised, it suggests that Musk has snowed a notable – and vocal – segment of the population to believing the unmitigated bullshit he has been spewing. (It’s easy for me to ignore the crazed bleating from Musk’s cultists, but clearly others out there haven’t been able to.)

Tesla’s legal minions have tried to back the company away from Elon’s incendiary statements on more than several occasions, but the damage has been done. Accountability, something that has been Musk’s Kryptonite basically from the very beginning, is going to come down in decisive hammer blows on The Reigning Blowhard from Silicon Valley. It is long overdue, and it couldn’t happen to a more deserving target.

In other news, my column on Ford a while back stirred some hard feelings from the Dearborn contingent, including from the Top Man himself. I was too harsh and over the top, according to the assessment, and I had gone too far in my criticism of the company and its current CEO. I see it differently, of course, and I stand by every word of that column. 

That said, the one thing I have been consistent on in criticizing Ford is the company’s piss-poor performance on vehicle launches. To say that the company has botched major product launches over the last half-decade is a painfully true understatement (the latest being the Explorer in 2019), and it has cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars, adding up to billions when it was all said and done. 

But this is supposed to be a New Era for Ford, captained by the currently anointed Golden Boy who has made a career out of good fortune falling on his head. To his credit, he has taken advantage of every gilded spoon thrown his way and spun a muddling propensity for vindictive mediocrity into a golden cloak of fame and fortune. 

That is all fine and dandy if you’re one of The Chosen One’s bootlicking apostles, but I would like to interrupt this ongoing lovefest with one particularly salient question: If this is the best that the Ford Motor Company can muster in terms of executive leadership, then how to explain the burgeoning screwup that has completely paralyzed production of the company’s latest cash cow – the (real) Ford Bronco?

What’s going on with the botched launch of the Bronco is rewriting the history books for serial automotive incompetence. The details? As reported by Michael Martinez in Automotive News, and I quote: 

“In another setback to the troubled launch of one of Ford Motor Co.'s highest-profile vehicles, the automaker last week said it needs to replace all (Bronco) hardtop roofs made so far because of quality problems. 

That will push back deliveries for months, further irking customers who already had their orders delayed by the coronavirus pandemic, the global semiconductor shortage and earlier issues with Webasto, the same supplier involved in the latest snag. The previous roof issues, which were unrelated, forced Ford to postpone production of certain configurations.” 

And to further explain the situation, here’s more from AN:

“With saleable Broncos so scarce — at the end of July, Ford had built 13,380 but sold just 4,078 of those — some dealerships are marking up the few that have made it onto their lots by as much as $50,000.

Ford officials are scrambling to clean up the mess. It has hired an Ohio design firm to shower increasingly frustrated owners with Bronco-branded gifts as the setbacks pile up.

It's unclear how much the damage control and replacements will cost Ford or for how much Webasto will be responsible.”

What exactly is the problem with the hardtop roofs? According to Ford PR minions, the molded-in color roofs can have an “unsatisfactory appearance when exposed to extreme weather or humidity.” Or basically, when exposed to standard, day-in, day-out use. To say that this is simply unacceptable for a contemporary automobile manufacturer in today’s cutthroat competitive environment is being kind. This is an unmitigated disaster of stupefying proportions. After promising that the botched launch of the Explorer would never be repeated, here Ford is at it again with an even higher profile screwup.

Do I relish having to write this about Ford? No. I want all of our Southeast Michigan-based auto companies to do well, with full employment, booming sales and breakthrough product introductions coming one after another. But reality suggests that it can’t be all “bunny rabbits and rainbows,” and to see Ford stumble and bumble its way through another product launch disaster is almost too painful to watch. 

I can’t closeout this week’s column without mentioning the non-Dream Cruise that’s happening this weekend here in the Motor City. As in past years, the action up and down Woodward leading up to Saturday’s ”main event” has been nonstop. And if you live anywhere within earshot of Woodward, the ground-pounding V8s can be heard racing hard into the night. 

Just the other day, in the middle of a non-descript afternoon, I was waiting at a light on Woodward next to a Charger Hellcat. The driver gave no indication of what was coming, but when the light turned green, he nailed the throttle and that Charger disappeared in a fog of tire smoke that was prodigious, and he kept his foot in it at least up to 100 mph.

I had to smile to myself, even though that sound and fury is slowly fading into the past. Yes, EVs can be brutally fast, but those future sounds will be synthetically manufactured, and it will never, I repeat, never be the same. Which, in my estimation, is a crying shame.

And that’s the High-Octane Truth, especially for this week.