Headless Horsemen
Hi Friends!
This week it was announced that Jaguar Land Rover CEO Adrian Mardell is planning to step down. He has been at the helm of JLR for 3 years. Obviously, we’re all familiar with the trials and tribulations that Jaguar has gone through lately. He’s the guy that facilitated and signed off on all of that stuff. While the company seems to want to continuously point to his 35 years of service with the brand, what they’re not really saying is he worked his way up into leadership, away from the sales, marketing, design and development sides and instead as a finance guy. This is something he was certainly good at however, as he not only removed significant amounts of debt from their books, but was a key player in producing some of the best years that the company has had in its recent history.
The week prior, Porsche CEO Oliver Blume stated that the company’s current business model isn’t working and that they’re looking at nearly 2,000 layoffs. This comes after revealing the end of two of Porsche’s most beloved and best-selling gasoline powered models (The Boxster and the Cayman – a platform that absolutely saved Porsche from ruin just a couple decades ago) and a new all-electric SUV, which nobody is asking for.
Not long before that, Tyrone Johnson, a Managing Director for Hyundai publicly came out and said (and I quote):
“Nobody wants manual gearboxes anymore. If you want to go fast, there’s nothing better than an EV. I don’t understand the nostalgia.”
Of course, I don’t think that we need to go into the absolute disaster that was the Carlos Tavares years at Stellantis or the complete debacle that’s been the most recent iteration of the Dodge Charger. We all know what a wreck that’s been.
Meanwhile over at Chevrolet, they were taking their gasoline powered, 1,064 horsepower and 1,250 horsepower supercars to The Nurburgring and setting lap records with them with GM president, Cadillac F1 proponent and second generation GM car guy Mark Ruess beamed in the media.
GM stock is currently near its YTD high. Hyundai is down and Jaguar and Porsche sales are really low.
What’s the point of all this? There is a clear disconnect at the top of a huge percentage of automotive brands right now. Brands who have car guys in charge are speaking the correct language and producing results and the ones that have leaned on bean counters are finding themselves in the stupidest, most self-imposed situations imaginable, with the victims ultimately being these brands enthusiast-base (AKA us).
I really don’t think that this is complicated. Listen to what people are telling you they want to buy, then make that thing.
This isn’t just limited to high performance offerings, sports cars, etc either. For years, the market has been screaming for a small, reasonably priced, reliable, basic pickup truck. Think back to the Nissan Frontiers, Toyota Tacomas, Chevrolet S10s, Ford Rangers, etc of the ’90s and early 2000s. While a number of these lines still exist today, they’ve become giant, bloated monstrosities that rival the bulk of full-sized offerings from back in that era.
Ford of course, finally answered with the Maverick and it’s done well for them, but where’s everybody else? I don’t think anybody can really argue with the fact that absolutely nobody wants another dumb crossover SUV. Especially if it’s electric (here’s looking at you Alfa Romeo Tonale/Dodge Hornet).
So, my question is, how do we influence car companies to make the cars that we actually want to own and enjoy? In the case of Porsche, what people were spending their money on seems to be irrelevant to the company, so it doesn’t really appear that it can be done with cash. There’s obviously some nepotism at GM and a likelihood that some luck was involved with that situation (like, we could have wound up with anybody, but fortunately got Lloyd Ruess’s kid), so I’m not necessarily sure how we elevate people that don’t enjoy those advantages to positions where they can make decisions for enthusiasts.
I think it’s pretty clear wherein as recently as just 10 years ago, these companies were definitely listening (Hellcats, GT500s, F-Types, etc), I’m not really sure how we get that stuff back. Either way, it’s really obvious that there are some pretty defined lines that have been drawn between an executive teams who are passionate about cars and executive teams who are just there to be a part of the process. The answer is, we need more car guys running car companies.
That’s it for this week……
Darin Roberge
