Will Electric Cars Do in The United Auto Workers?
The auto workers strike, like the actors and writers strike, is about new technologies killing work. Artificial Intelligence mimicking voices and faces and writing scripts and electric cars being simpler to build might mean fewer workers. Even fewer if the cars come from China or Vietnam.
President Biden supports the auto workers, but he also is big on electric cars. It is a revolutionary time and no one can tell where it will end. One headline said Elon Musk and non-unionised Tesla are already the winners in the strike against the three old car giants.
Car Empires
Google’s Empire
The United States Justice Department is after Google’s dominance of the ad biz. Well it certainly dominates the search biz and the hip bone is connected to the thigh bone.
As a shareholder of Alphabet— a small position in my retirement account— I would love to see them break up Google. Like the breakup of Standard Oil that made John Rockefeller richer than he already was, there are bits of Google, such as YouTube, that would be worth much more on its own.
The Death of Empires
The Polyglot Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1910
An unruly Empire where the population spoke 23 languages from Slovenian to Ukrainian and Yiddish to Romanian. And of course German and Hungarian. It’s where the First World War started when the Austrian Archduke and his Czech wife were shot by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia.
After two World Wars, this is how the Empire was divvied up. The biggest loser after the First World War was Hungary, which lost more than half its territory to Romania. That slice of the old empire sticking into northern Italy is a now a German-speaking region, home to Jannick Sinner, the red-headed Italian tennis ace.
The British Empire at Its Peak
The British Empire peaked 100 years ago, says The Economist in reviewing two books on the subject. While the Austro-Hungarian was destroyed by the First World War the British Empire expanded as this map shows. Canada, Australia and New Zealand, the Dominions, were already itching to be more independent after the First World War. The Second World War would be the beginning of the end, though it would take another few decades before the British Empire was no more.
The Violent Collapse of the French Empire
The French Empire was second in size only to the British Empire. Here it is in 1921.
This map lasted until the 1950s. First the French were kicked out of Indochina— Vietnam- with the defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Then the civil. war in Algeria, where the French had been since 1830. Read La Peste or L’Etranger by Albert Camus to see how Algeria was thought to be part of France. Some tony bits of the French Empire remain: Martinique and Guadeloupe in the Caribbean; St. Pierre and Miquelon off the coast of Newfoundland— left over from the Treaty of Paris of 1763— and French Guiana in South America, home to Devil’s Island, where Alfred Dreyfus was imprisoned. The prison only closed in 1953.
Tiny Holland’s Huge Empire
This was it after the Second World War. It was once much larger, and included South Africa and Manhattan, where Dutch names are a reminder: Harlem and Roosevelt for two. The richest slice was Indonesia. A short war of independence ended that.
Like France and Britain, small slices remain, in the Caribbean for instance.
Dine and Dash
If it’s a choice between the mortgage or dining out, restaurants are the losers.
These numbers are from the five biggest Canadian cities.
The biggest loser is Toronto, home to over-priced housing, higher mortgage payments and rising rents. The Toronto Star reporting that the Open Table online reservation systems says sit down diners were down 10% in the first ten days of Sptember.
Even bon-vivant Montreal is taking a hit.
The Tragic Death of Jean Bugatti
The ultimate in between the wars cool: Jean Bugatti, designer and son on the founder standing beside the 1932 Bugatti Royale. It is one of the largest cars ever made and there were only seven of this model. It weighed 3,175 kilograms or 7,000 pounds. The straight eight engine had a discplaccemt of 12.76 litres or (778 cubic inches). By comparison the modern Mercedes 600 limousine has a 6.3 litre engine. The Bugatti and is one of the largest car engines ever built, and one of the rarest. New, they cost the equivalent of $630,000.
Jean Bugatti was born in Milan, and worked in France and Germany. His father gave him the company. He died in 1939, aged 30. He was test driving a new model on a public road, swerved to miss a cyclist and the brakes failed. As you can see from the gruesome photo of the wreck, the cars of the era folded, even these giants.
Essay of the Week
I have always had three jobs, sometimes more. Television was my regular job and on the side I would write for newspapers and magazines. I started off writing movie reviews for a long defunct Montreal weekly called the Sunday Express. I got paid $15 (I made $135 a week back then) and two free tickets. Handy for taking girlfriends to the movies. The only movie I remember reviewing was If It’s Tuesday This Must Be Belgium. Great title, crummy movie. It came out in 1969. My first big stringing jobs were with Time Canada and BusinessWeek. It became an addiction.
My BusinessWeek editor told me to “Get quotes with numbers in them.” One time I wanted an interview with Robert Scrivener, the president of Bell Canada. I called the PR department in my CBC capacity; not a chance. Time Canada? They would get back to me. BusinessWeek? “Mr. Scrivener will see you at 2 o’clock.”
In the 1980s I wrote for five different papers while working in television at the same time. One trick, pre-Internet, was to sell the same story to different publications with a slight twist for each. Once I called Paul Maidment, then business editor of The Economist, and pitched a story on Mitel, the Ottawa telecom company. “It’s a great story Fred, and I’m reading it in the International Herald Tribune right now.” Oops.
One of my favourite side jobs was writing car articles for the National Post. The CBC told me I could write them as long as I didn't take freebies from car companies that I might report on in my day job. One of my tricks was to put my business card in the windshield wiper of an oddball car I saw on the street. One of them was an old Mercedes 300SEL 6.3.
Here is the story from 2005.
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You might call this the thinking man’s muscle car. Back in November of 1968 Road and Track called it “Merely the Greatest Sedan in the World.”
There is nothing flash about it, just the standard Mercedes 280 sedan body style of the 1960’s stretched by four inches. About the only thing that sets it apart is the chrome 6.3 on the right side of the trunk lid.
The car is the Mercedes-Benz 300SEL 6.3, in its day the fastest four door sedan in the world. Mercedes made it fast by stuffing the 6.3 liter v8 engine from its giant Pullman limousine into the 300 series. That gave it 300 horsepower, enough to push you back into your seat and with 435 lb-ft of torque, more oomph than a modern Chrysler 300C Hemi.
Not only could it out run the American muscle cars, it was faster than any 911 Porches of the era. The old Mercedes 6.3 did zero to 60 mph in 6.9 seconds and had a top speed of 131 mph. Those numbers are as tested by Road and Track. Mercedes claimed the car had a top end of 140 mph. This car weighs just over 2 tons. In spite of its weight it could out run many of the muscle cars of its day.
“This is faster than a 396 Camaro and as fast as a 440 `6-pack’ Road Runner,” says Randy Crooks, a man who sells tombstones in Lake Echo, Nova Scotia, and who is the acknowledged expert on the 300SEL 6.3 in Canada. “It is the ultimate sleeper car.”
Another expression for sleeper is `Q Car’. It means that sitting a stoplight no one could ever guess how fast this thing is going to take off. I tried it myself the other day in a 300SEL 6.3 so mint it looked and sounded as if it just came out of the showroom. I didn’t have a stop watch, but from a standing start I was at the speed limit in a flash. It was nowhere near as smooth as a modern car, but then it is 35 years old.
The car is owned by Bill McNamara, a Toronto lawyer who drives his 1970 6.3 every day. He has even put four snow tires on and driven it in the winter, but after the latest paint job leaves it garaged on snowy days. McNamara is probably the only person in Canada who uses a 300SEL 6.3 as a daily runner. That according to Randy Crooks who says there are fewer than 15 of them in the country.
McNamara bought his car from Crooks in 1999 for $8,000. He fell in love with the car in the early 70’s when one of his father’s friends let him take one out for a ride.
“I’m not sure if I even had my licence back then,” remembers McNamara. “He told me to gun it and we were doing 85 mph in no time. Ever since then I wanted one.”
Everything works, from the air conditioning to the stock radio. McNamara won’t say how much he has spent on the car, out of a combination of modesty and embarrassment, but it is expensive to keep on the road. The biggest mechanical job was a transmission overhaul at around $4,000. The car was in the shop for 6 months getting painted. It looks new, and that can’t have been cheap.
Parts are hard to find, and McNamara had a spare car for a while just for parts. He uses a Mercedes dealer to do the work
“It’s expensive, but there’s a mechanic there who knows the car.”
The car has a number of things you have know about. A unique airbag suspension; a Bosch mechanical fuel injection system and a transmission that was designed in 1964.
Randy Crooks figures there are two types of people who can afford to drive a car like this. “People with deep pockets, or people like me who know how to fix them,” says Crooks who is a master mechanic.
Strangely enough, the cars themselves don’t cost that much.
“They don’t fetch a huge amount in the market unless they’re mint,” says McNamara.
There aren’t many for sale, and prices are all over the map. There were 3 on E-Bay. The most expensive was a 1969 model from a dealer in Hamburg, Germany, and the bid was US $21,000, though it probably went for more. Hemmings Motor News had two: one for US$15,900, the other for US$45,000. It is listed as mint, so that is probably the price for a top 6.3.
“I know that car,” says Crooks. “You could get a mint one for $20,000 though. People are afraid of them. But they’re pretty reliable for a car that old.”
While Bill McNamara may drive his car every day, Randy Crooks takes his two out only for fun. And he’ll probably buy and sell a few more down the road. His every day car is a Toyota Corolla. He ran his last one for 600,000 kilometres.