Opinion Kilcrohane's view of the Automotive Industry and Global Economy. Part Deux.

[BMW4ever]

The only media that even mentions Jaguar still is British

No. Yank media has an attraction too - Benjamins.

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- F-Pace SVR an icon?

Crowbarred in by Jason - 'incentives' by JLR NA to Hagerty.

Same with most of the US car media. Jonny Lieberman is notorious. Road & Track seems to do JLR articles in inverse relationship to the number of cars JLR genuinely sells in America - similar for C&D and Motor Trend.

Also non-UK, non-US media - Jens Meiners - a German, who I know works for a US rag(C&D) mainly, but is never slow to stick his tongue up any JLR exhaust pipe. Or Austrian Georg Kacher - the doyen of doyens of the motoring scribbling 'profession' - apparently. Georg used to love blowing JLR's trumpet, with wondrous 'inside-track' and 'deep-dive' tales of JLR's amazing future product plans. Now, is Georg still alive? He seems to have gone very quiet. Can't think why.

The JLR thing has blown up in their faces - making them look clowns,, highly-paid clowns, who just wrote to script - dictated from way, way above, and with the implicit threat that if you veer, you pick up your P45.

If they hadn't have been writing about cars, they would have worked for Fleet St, or the BBC etc, and have been telling us 24/7 about Russia being smashed, and the West teaching Russia/Putin a lesson, etc - right up until Ukraine collapses, and Putin/Lavrov announce all the gas is being switched off, in Sep/Oct. They're lowlife, lying, venal scum.

 

[klier]

Now, is Georg still alive? He seems to have gone very quiet.

Hmm.....you're right, I haven't seen much of him lately.

And this 'JLR thing' is just the J right? LR has some amazing products on the shelf and seems to be doing fine??

 

[BMW4ever]

I don't like electric cars. Yes they may be fast in a drag race, but they are frustrating slow in the real world, because no matter how hard the industry tries, they will never be able to make a battery with the same energy density of a fossil fuel that can be poured into a tank in a matter of few minutes. And battery swaps is yet another of many broken promises by Saint Elon.

Hybrids are a much better alternative.

Me too - EVs. BUT, when they're the only game in town - dictated by .Govs worldwide - you have to take part, or literally starve, and die.

JLR is in that situation, uniquely in the global industry. I-Pace was just to sell JLR, almost 4 years ago, off its launch. A bigger, heavier, faster, not that much dearer, iX, has almost double the I-Pace's real-word range - ~350-370 versus 190-210 miles (summer).

No one, but the biggest fan, is going to buy an I-Pace. Genuine, non-JLR , non-UK.Gov and all its quangos, NGOs etc, global sales are ~3,000/yr, and falling.

Telling people to hang on till 2024/5, for that £200k BEV Full-fat, is sheer desperation, and ridiculous.

 

[BMW4ever]

What the extreme tightening up of red(dyed) diesel usage AND a whacking increase of 48p/litre in the duty on it by HMRC in April, and now near as dammit £2/litre for non-red brings into play - 'only £24k'(probably plus VAT) for a battered farm-runabout Defender:

UK firm can electrify original Land Rover Defender for £24,000 | Autocar

Conversion can be made to a farm-working Defender 90 or 110; offers a cost-saving “drop-in” fitting

www.autocar.co.uk

This would make sod all sense if farmers were still able to use red at just ~50p/litre, which was the case just over a year ago.

And people wonder why the cost of food is rocketing - it's deliberate, and overwhelming majority caused by govts.

Of course, the higher price of fuel goes, especially diesel, JLR just becomes more crocked - to make sense of running a 2.5 tonne SUV, unless you're Rockefeller, you need diesel, to do 25-30 mpg. SVAs, SVRs, are for the birds - no one buys them - a few London, Manchester, B'ham drug dealers, 'celebs' - given them, paid to drive them - and press cars/long-term loaners - that's it - irrelevant.

EV is the only game - even for battered farm runabouts.

And that's why it's so quiet with JLR - not a peep from the usual suspects - its highly paid media pushers.

 

[BMW4ever]

I know this is the 'JLR-Hate' thread, but let's spread the hate a bit - to the other global car industry PR-Ponzi outfit:

Tesla will jeden zehnten Bürojob streichen

Bei Tesla soll in den kommenden Monaten etwa jeder zehnte Bürojob wegfallen. Die Zahl der Fabrikarbeiter werde hingegen wachsen.

www.automobilwoche.de

- just opened, and it's already cutting. Told ya. Tesla Berlin is massive over-capacity, on top of massive over-capacity - Shanghai sending cars to Europe. The last thing Tesla needed was another factory.

But, the subsidies, grants, and kickbacks to local and national, bent German officials and pols - Tesla Berlin had to be built, finished - even though a one-brain cell blind man could see Tesla needed it like a hole in the head - all part of the Ponzi - eternal, exponential growth.

Tesla Berlin is the bust. It exposes Tesla for what it is - a monumental fraud. Real demand for Tesla global is about 1 million/yr. But now it has around 4 times that in capacity. Very like JLR of course - current, but falling, demand around 200k/yr, capacity around 800k-1m/yr.

Both are completely, massively bust - how could that not be with those fixed costs to utilisation and real sales.

But both are top-level PR tools for their states//regimes - so Too Important to be let Publicly Fail.

Some low level bureaucrat in Brandenburg will eventually go to jail - carry the can, the scapegoat - for this epic white elephant, massive waste of resources, and of course huge criminal fraud.

 

[BMW4ever]

Ken Clarke, last serious Chancellor of the Exchequer - Selfridge's towel-folding, wallpaper-baron, 2 Irish baronetcies, ten-jobs Osborne, Darling, the Edinburgh divorce lawyer, the 'endogenous growth theory', history lecturer, Brown - etc. - all pygmies, frauds, towered over by someone with genuine 95 octane brain power - Kenneth Clarke - son of a working-class craftsman - self-made - not the upper-middle-/upper-class twits the rest of them were, - has just told some 'oh my god, get this bugger off - BBC - home-truths, on 'WatO - Radio 4 1 o'clock news:

- 'we are the sick man of the G20'
- 'our productivity is abysmal'
- this 'Pandemic-caused' economic crisis was already happening in 2019' - Fed and other CBs were even then printing money hand over fist, to keep phony asset values up, in around September that year - the Ponzi collapsing - The Pandemic and now War in Ukraine cover for 'They' to drop the long-bust, phony UK/US economies, and blame Putin, and The Virus
- 'base rate should have gone up 50 bps last week' - as I said - 'and continue going up, to get inflation in control'
- 'we have a massive crisis - the worst since at least 1979' - note he makes this worse/far worse than the GFC of 2008-9
- etc

- all in almost total opposition to the lies fed daily to the plebs by the regime and its mouthpieces like the BBC - 'Bouncing-back Britain', 'fastest post-Pandemic GDP growth in the G7', 'record inward investment', 'sunlit uplands as far as the eye can see', etc.

God I miss Ken Clarke. A genuine, warts and all, rounded human being, who got to where he was by his brain power, not the silver spoon, or affimative action, and/or a huge PR/lie machine - 'Boris'. Anyone seen Squeaky? With the missus again, in Mumbai/Bangalore?

Kenneth Clarke - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[BMW4ever]

Clarke is saying nothing that anyone with a brain and a conscience would, should, ought to be saying - the reality of UK 2022.

I, am saying the same about JLR. JLR is the posterchild for the Big Lie that is 'Stunningly Successful, world-beating/-leading UK' - 'stunningly successful, world-beating/-leading JLR'.

 

[Centurion]

Telling people to hang on till 2024/5, for that £200k BEV Full-fat, is sheer desperation, and ridiculous.

JLR should sell the Jaguar brand to Geely and allow the brand to share BEV underpinnings with Lotus.

 

[J.E]

I have a simple advice to all the patronising bleeding hearts out there: buy a Jaguar.

If you don't want to see it go, then trade in your BMW for a Jaaaaaag.

Go ahead, WTF are you waiting for?

For them to go down and then you mourn the death of a brand that you had every chance to buy it from, but chose not to?

 

[BMW4ever]

JLR should sell the Jaguar brand to Geely and allow the brand to share BEV underpinnings with Lotus.

Geely is in clover - ~$10bn valuation alone for Polestar(PSNY) of which it owns the majority, direct and through Volvo. Why in the world would it - he, Li Shufu - take on Jag/JLR? Lotus is more than enough of storied British brands to be bringing back from the dead.

The tragedy of Jag is that it was bought by Ford. Its natural life was that of other British brands, which bit the dust in the 60s/70s/80s. The Cat had two/three lives - Ford and arguably Egan's privatised Jaguar Cars - which gave false hope.

Jag ultimately was no different to Triumph, or Riley, or Austin, or Morris, or Rover, or... . The agony is the non-administering of the coup de grace - it's dead, long dead, but no once can finish it off, as it has to exist for PR, 'PR-UK'.

It's condemned to be Schrodinger's Cat - alive and dead at the same time - and if you observe it, too closely - check the real sales figures - it disappears entirely.

 

[Centurion]

Geely is in clover - ~$10bn valuation alone for Polestar(PSNY) of which it owns the majority, direct and through Volvo. Why in the world would it - he, Li Shufu - take on Jag/JLR? Lotus is more than enough of storied British brands to be bringing back from the dead.

The tragedy of Jag is that it was bought by Ford. Its natural life was that of other British brands, which bit the dust in the 60s/70s/80s. The Cat had two/three lives - Ford and arguably Egan's privatised Jaguar Cars - which gave false hope.

Jag ultimately was no different to Triumph, or Riley, or Austin, or Morris, or Rover, or... . The agony is the non-administering of the coup de grace - it's dead, long dead, but no once can finish it off, as it has to exist for PR, 'PR-UK'.

It's condemned to be Schrodinger's Cat - alive and dead at the same time - and if you observe it, too closely - check the real sales figures - it disappears entirely.

When do you think JLR will come clean and proclaim Jaguar dead?

We haven't seen a single mule of the next gen XE, XF, e-Pace or F-Pace.

The "new" F-Type is just a heavily facelifted variant of the Model that launched in 2013. It's at the risk of becoming a dinosaur in 2-3 years like the XK was in the last 3 years of its life.

 

[BMW4ever]

When do you think JLR will come clean and proclaim Jaguar dead?

We haven't seen a single mule of the next gen XE, XF, e-Pace or F-Pace.

The "new" F-Type is just a heavily facelifted variant of the Model that launched in 2013. It's at the risk of becoming a dinosaur in 2-3 years like the XK was in the last 3 years of its life.

Good question. THE question. The short answer is never. Everything propped up indefinitely. They've gotten away with it for over 40 years with the phony, printed-money economy, so why not 10 years or more, since it went bust in 2015/16, with JLR.

Nothing actually goes bust in UK anymore - anything that matters to the system, or has mates'/cronies' money on the line. All those energy companies that went bump with wholesale nat gas price going up six-fold? No problem - the taxpayer/pleb is told to make the 1%/0.1% whole - an extra ~£100 per year alone on energy bills.

Why weren't they made go properly bust - everything recovered, down to stationery, to pay debtors/shareholders, and directors remuneration, bonuses, etc investigated for obvious taking the p!ss - knowing profits were theirs, and the losses, bill-/taxpayers - a one-way bet.

I though we had capitalism in this country - red in tooth and claw. Apparently not. If you're a mate, a crony, or a donor, the rules, Law, don't apply. Same goes for Tata's JLR. The Big 4 auditors can put their name to, sign off on, the biggest cock and bull story ever - JLR's books - knowing they will never have to pay back the fees, less go to jail, like Enron/Arthur Andersen.

The system is the fraud, and vice versa, in 1980-2022 UK.

The only thing the system cares about is 'optics', PR. They care that the formal, public closure of Jaguar would mean the end of the Castle Brom 'Spitfire factory'. That's all they care about. Telling the ordinary Brits year after year about the Battle of Britain, Dunkirk, D-Day etc, and then having 'the factory that won the War' closed, would be a real Dunkirk for the criminal regime - not gonna happen.

Castle Brom will be 'reimagined' as an 'Experience Centre' or suchlike - some nothing bollox. VR headsets for schoolkids, to see where great-granddad put together the Spitfire - to kids whose grandparents came from the Punjab, Jamaica etc.

It's all bollox. Take none of it too seriously. 'They' know that we know - some of us - but They also know we can do nothing about it - their lying and massive plundering, and BSing of the little people.

 

[BMW4ever]

Normal 'wisdom' would say a protracted national rail strike should be a boon for car sales. Nope. Yesterday was approaching Christmas Day for traffic, and supermarket customers counted on one hand. The Great British Public took the excuse of No Trains for deckchairs in the garden/park - a pre-Glastonbury.

The days of Brits doing anything to get to work, school etc, are now long gone - a generation at least. Covid is now the ready-made excuse of course, too.

The culture of the last 40 years has come back to bite with a vengeance. '(real)Work is only for suckers'. 'Chill out, man' 'Chillax', etc.

All designed to make people idle, indolent, and ultimately, useless.

New car sales are just going to fall and fall. £2/litre fuel and under 35s believing just driving is killing the planet, a 'crime' - not taking public transport - are the last few nails in the coffin.

We're headed for Soviet Union 1960s/70s - ZiL lanes and limos for the 'elite', and cattle class in public transport - if you can afford it - for the plebs.

 

[BMW4ever]

What's the only thing worse than £2 (a litre) fuel? £1 fuel, or less:

ZeroHedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

www.zerohedge.com

- real demand in the West is off the charts collapsed. Yes, China and Asia are buying, but the West still represents at least half of global demand - did.

The reality is, from supply-demand equilibrium, oil should now be being given away.

This is a classic one-two. First, smack the schmuck with massive inflation, and see his demand and standard of living collapse, next collapse the economy - what was left of it - with small and medium businesses going to the wall by the hundreds every day, as they have stock, bought into schedule deliveries of components/raw materials, that cost multiples of what they can now sell the assembled/value-added product for.

Classic. 'They', their Media, told everyone for the last year supply chains were stretched to breaking point, and beyond, so anyone wise rushed to secure as much supply, stock as he could, and to hell with the price - just getting the stuff the most important.

Now, warehouses full of finished goods, and components/raw materials, that haven't a hope of making a profit - cue, massive bankruptcies - or at least filing for protection from creditors. As usual, the lawyers/shysters, insolvency practitioners, will have a field day.

This is re-run of the post-1929 Crash, '30s Depression - it was the crash in prices(in the US and UK) - for everything - that did the real damage - not the wheelbarrows of Marks in Weimar Germany - that is the beloved by the Media tale told to the plebs of this devastating period of history.

The worst thing for debtors is deflation - massive deflation, the worst of all, of course. And what is Britain and America full of? - debtors.

At least 70% of Brits are debtors - mortgage, car loans, etc. That '£1m' terrace house in outer London, with a debt of ~£350k on it, is about to be worth less than the debt - never mind wiping out the 'equity'. Those cars outside, with say PCPs of in total up to £1k/month, are now obviously worthless in terms of taking up the option of buying, and zero rollover to a new PCP contract, and probably barely used anyway - up to £1k/month to drive to the supermarket 1-2/week, and 1-2 days in the office.

People have no idea what's coming. They've been teed up by Media-Govt for inflation/hyper-inflation, but it's deflation, and the rocketing real value of their debt/debts, that will kill them.

 

[Serpens]

Oof you've gone to posting zerohedge links now? The barrage of global conspiracy theories make more sense now.

When do you think JLR will come clean and proclaim Jaguar dead?

We haven't seen a single mule of the next gen XE, XF, e-Pace or F-Pace.

The "new" F-Type is just a heavily facelifted variant of the Model that launched in 2013. It's at the risk of becoming a dinosaur in 2-3 years like the XK was in the last 3 years of its life.

Based on recent articles it does not sound like any of those models will be seeing a new generation, so that makes sense that you haven't seen mules. The next-generation Jags seem to be all firmly upmarket.

 

[Centurion]

The only thing the system cares about is 'optics', PR. They care that the formal, public closure of Jaguar would mean the end of the Castle Brom 'Spitfire factory'. That's all they care about. Telling the ordinary Brits year after year about the Battle of Britain, Dunkirk, D-Day etc, and then having 'the factory that won the War' closed, would be a real Dunkirk for the criminal regime - not gonna happen.

This made me chuckle. BMW and VAG have done well to distance RR and Bentley from British heritage. At their product launches there is no Gary Macgovern and every possible A to Z list British celebs waxing lyrically about how the brand is a British institution like the queen and Royal family.

Credit due to where credit is due. Jaguar did make a big effort in modernising by launching the XF and XE sans mahogany interiors and influence from old world Britain. However modernisations sometimes fail and their new line-up of cars failed to take off. It’s also worth mentioning that attitudes to luxury has dramatically changed over the past 10-15 years. Jaguar were too late to launch a range of SUVs and didn’t explore the launch of a hatchback.

 

[tristatez28lt1]

Rumors are that the future of Jag is this: Bollore cut all product dev from the old cars because they were not competitive. The old XJ was supposed to be on the new RR platform but was completely unfit to compete with a Taycan or Model S. RR engineers didn't want to give up anything from RR capability so the platform just became incredibly complex - think about benchmarking everything from an S-class, X5, X7, e-tron GT, Cayenne, Taxcan and then building a platform that can do it all. Now the plan is for two SUVs, possibly a sports car, and XJ with prices that start above €200k to enter the brand, making the brand very exclusive, profitable, compete with Bentley, Lambo, the top of the line brands. To me, this future is just as dire as its past.

 

[BMW4ever]

Oof you've gone to posting zerohedge links now? The barrage of global conspiracy theories make more sense now.

Give over. Current-day Zerohedge is milquetoast, not far off something like Sky Australia, or Fox in the US - watered down to almost nothing.

 

[BMW4ever]

This made me chuckle. BMW and VAG have done well to distance RR and Bentley from British heritage. At their product launches there is no Gary Macgovern and every possible A to Z list British celebs waxing lyrically about how the brand is a British institution like the queen and Royal family.

Gerry McGovern.

The thing about JLR and Britishness is it tries too hard. Rolls-Royce and Bentley do not fight shy of being German-owned, German-teched companies. The customers generally know it, see it as a positive, so both companies don't hide it. Also, their clientele is truly global, less than 15% in UK, whereas JLR's is around 40%.

 

[BMW4ever]

Rumors are that the future of Jag is this: Bollore cut all product dev from the old cars because they were not competitive. The old XJ was supposed to be on the new RR platform but was completely unfit to compete with a Taycan or Model S. RR engineers didn't want to give up anything from RR capability so the platform just became incredibly complex - think about benchmarking everything from an S-class, X5, X7, e-tron GT, Cayenne, Taxcan and then building a platform that can do it all. Now the plan is for two SUVs, possibly a sports car, and XJ with prices that start above €200k to enter the brand, making the brand very exclusive, profitable, compete with Bentley, Lambo, the top of the line brands. To me, this future is just as dire as its past.

That can't be true - fully. 'eXJ' was due 2019, at least 2 years before L460 Full-fat. It was pulled, I agree, and have said before, because it was a joke against the then coming Taycan(/e-tron GT). I believe 'eXJ' was just an I-Pace with a rear overhang, and lower ride height, and even more squashed roof. I-Pace is basically a shortened platform 2012 L405 - 2016 F-Pace.

Without the 'foot garage' thing of the Taycan, the headroom/seating position in the lower-roofed eXJ would have been a joke - in the back especially - the whole point of luxury/chauffeur-driven limos - which even the Merc EQS suffers with to a degree - low-slung seats, high knees, to try to get half-decent headroom - all caused by trying to get height/cross-sectional area down, for the dreaded aero drag effect on EV range at higher speed.

The Bentley thing, as I've also said before, is for the birds. £200k for a Jag is never going to fly - unlike those birds.

This is all deliberate BS, to give the impression something's happening - Jag not long dead, killed off by JLR/Tata 3 years ago - arguably once 'New Gen' failed in 2015/16.

It's so reminiscent of MG Rover in 2004/5. 'Leaks' - deliberate - of amazing future product plans, faithfully reproduced by the media reptiles - mates of the bosses - long, liquid lunches, rounds of golf as guests, free holidays dressed up as product reviews, etc.

They all know it's over. The pretence is the game.