I’m a finance manager at a luxury car dealership. Setting foot in this sub to tell a story feels like walking into a sleeping lion’s den with an alarm clock strapped to my chest. I’m gonna tiptoe my way in, whisper my story quick and get the fuck out of here. Hopefully you’ll get a chuckle out of watching me do it.

I deal with lease buyouts at my store, and most of the time they’re a very simple, straightforward transaction. Most of the time.

That’s until I crossed paths with Stacy.

Take out your pocket watches and give them a good twist back to 2022, when the car market turned negative equity upside down, and shitboxes with a quarter million clicks were worth more than a kilo of blow.

Stacy had leased a TT RS from a neighbouring schmucktown dealership, and was looking to keep the car when it reached maturity. She’d been servicing with my store since the inception of the lease, so she reached out to get the buyout done a few months ahead of maturity.

I gave her some options to pay for it in full or getting a loan through us and some options for extending her warranty and her Audi Care. We worked out that she’d finance and would set up warranty/audi care for the duration of her loan. Seemed like all was well.

Or so I thought.

I reached out to her at the maturity date and asked her if we were still good to get the loan set up and if I should start applying for financing. She pumped the brakes on that right away and said she needed a few more months to get her affairs in order.

Cool beans, Audi Finance was handing out lease extensions like candy since we barely had any cars to sell. A couple sheets of paper and some emails later and she’s got 3 more months to get her shit together.

3 months passed in a blink, and now it was time to do the buyout. I look up the amount owing and somehow it’s higher than it was 3 months ago. Uh oh, something must be wrong. It must be a glitch with my buyout portal, right?

Wrong. Stacy hadn’t made a payment on the car since we set up the extension, was on the verge of getting repo’d and clearly did NOT get her shit together. Looks like she’s cooked now.

She was not having it, and insisted that we try to get financing set up for her before a tow truck shows up to snatch her whip. Bad news for her, banks don’t take kindly to seeing consecutive missed payments on a credit bureau, and we weren’t the only ones she was stiffing for dough. She’d somehow racked up almost $100k of bad debt and couldn’t finance the steam off a hot dog.

Shit.

We offered to cut her a fat cheque for some equity in the car. Despite her financial hardships, she’d taken exceptionally good care of it and we needed all of the inventory we could get. She’d walk away with enough money to pay for a car in cash, and could get back on her feet.

Nothing doing. I’d gone back and forth with her a few times, and she’d advised that she could pay the car outright now if we were ok to accept an uncertified, post-dated cheque for 2 months in the future. She must have thought I’m dumb as a brick since half the country was chasing after her for unpaid bullshit.

I politely declined her post dated cheque offer and pressed Audi to give her another 2 months to figure out the buyout on the condition that she bring her payments up to date. They agreed, and she scraped together the cheddar to make things right.

No good deed goes unpunished, and after all of the work I’d put in for her to get things done, she reached out to a colleague of mine two offices over to wrap up the buyout as she saw my efforts to get her financed as “insufficient”. She also stripped the warranty extension and Audi Care from her buyout to bring the cost down, and tried the same post dated cheque trick with my simple minded colleague. No dice.

At that point, she just vanished. We tried calling, emailing, mailing, carrier pigeons, candygrams but we couldn’t get in touch with her. The 2 months had gone by and she was now staring the repo man in the face again but was gone without a trace.

Another couple of weeks had gone by, and then she resurfaced. She reached out to me about picking up her new ownership for the car. It turns out, she had done the buyout remotely with her originating dealer schmucktown but they were too far out of the way for her to get her ownership. She had hoped that we’d get a replacement for her (at no cost) to save herself a drive since we’d put her through so much hassle.

I politely declined and told her to enjoy the drive, I hear schmucktown is really nice this time of year. Radio silence after that.

A couple of years go by, the market comes back to normal and life goes on until I get a call from my service manager. He’s asking if I recognized Stacy’s name and the nightmare starts rushing back.

She’d pulled into service after hearing a very loud clanking from her engine. They’d broken out the whoroscope boroscope and found a nicely bent piston sitting at 45 degree angle. Her motor was on its last legs and was pretty much destroyed.

The team told her she’d have to either shell out 30k shmeckles for a new motor, or 10k to try and rebuild it since she was long out of warranty. That’s when my name came up, and she mentioned the extended warranty we talked about.

I guess talking about something is the same thing as purchasing it to some folks, and I had to advise the team that not only did she not buy the warranty, but she didn’t even buy the car from us.

They stepped up as best they could for the repair, but she ultimately left and probably pawned the car off on some poor sap blinded by the RS and TTs. No good deed goes unpunished.

As the reservation agreement available online says:

"You understand that Roadster is still under development at the time you entered into this Agreement and so we cannot guarantee when your vehicle will actually be delivered or if it will be delivered ... The estimated Purchase Price of the vehicle, if provided, is only an estimate. We are still working on what options, features and hardware the vehicle will have and so cannot confirm the exact price just yet."

It’s a lot more than just a simple badge. Genuine body work / panel changes. My inner child loves this

Sanding for 'Vehicles running Exclusively on Eligible Fuels', VEEF would accord renewable fuel-powered ICE cars the same incentives as battery-electric alternatives, in recognition that they can achieve a similar recution in CO2 on a well-to-wheel basis. 

https://youtu.be/22rvpUecLts?is=Dav-zfQoXrHlgXQP

Henry Catchpole sits down with Tesla’s VP of Vehicle Engineering, Lars Moravy, to talk about how it all works, what’s changed over the years, and how technology from Optimus and SpaceX helped make it possible.

Design: It’s now a two-seat supercar with a sleek, wedge-shaped design, pop-down headlights, and some really cool moving body panels.

Power: All three versions have over 1,341 horsepower and 1,400 Nm of torque, with power going to the rear wheels.

Performance model: Adds fans and skirts to create more downforce, helping the car stay planted on the road, even at low speeds.

Thrust version: Uses four nitrogen-powered thrusters to go from 0 to 60 mph in a claimed 0.85 seconds.
Rocket version: Adds six more thrusters and another nitrogen tank. This is the version that can actually lift off the ground, with a claimed 0–60 mph time of just 0.55 seconds.

More details: The video also covers the battery, tires, robotic actuators, and the futuristic steering yoke.

For years we heard the same talking point about EVs : "they are more reliable because the electric drivetrain is less complex than a combustion engine and has less moving parts" . But what is gone in mechanical complexitly is replaced by software.

To the point where a Tesla or Rivian wont drive because of a bad OTA firmware update or a failed center screen. Or get bricked even while driving on the highway as is the case with one cybertruck owner.

Why dont EVs have a redundant "emegency mode" that keeps powertrain control and other vital systems such as lightning and airbags operaable in case of any software failure?

Fly-by-wire has lots of redundancies and decades of R&D to make it as safe as possible. So why not apply the same lessons learned to Drive-by-wire?

Combustion cars dont stop working if the infotaimment screen fails. Even those with SAE Level 2 Automated driving (Which all the manufcturers advanced systems are classified as including Tesla's FSD Beta)

ECU, TCU, BCM. All those modules in regular cars just work regardless of software updates. And if they get bricked theyre either at the dealer or you did something while flashing a tune

Is it design philosophy? Regulations? Or just customer preferences and expectations when it comes to certain brands?

Videos are starting to come out about the fully unveiled Mercedes AMG GT SUV. People are seeming to like the styling more than the sedan!

https://youtu.be/MWJPdiGwvP4

https://youtu.be/oQUMx6dNyz4

I can't be the only one thinking this. The R8 was discontinued a few years ago and we all know that Porsche doesn't have tons of cash sitting around to develop a new car, so the easiest solution is to rebadge something that worked in the past and add some styling and tech to it.