Hi there, sorry, it's been a little while. Last week, you see, I was prancing around on the lawn in Monterey wearing my literal Sunday finest for the Pebble Beach Concours instead of my usual frantically typing away in my pajamas for you lovely people. Apologies.
I've weirdly seen a lot of folks online saying the event is over, that the whole Monterey Car Week experience has jumped the shark and is now irrelevant. I disagree. Yeah, it's been shifting and evolving into a much more mass-market event, particularly The Quail that takes place on the Friday before the Concours. And yeah, that evolution continued this year, but I can't say that anything was radically different than last year. I still had a great time and had a lot of great conversations with a lot of great people.
There were some changes, though...
Where have all the EV hypercars gone?
At this year's Car Week, I spoke to a lot of folks about a lot of things, but the main topic I was picking peoples' brains about was a bit of a thematic shift on many of the machines making their debut at the upper-stratum of the performance car market.
It seems to me that many manufacturers young and old have given up on outright performance metrics to instead focus on a set of more nuanced parameters like feel, engagement, timelessness, and various other factors that, cynically could be seen as saying "Well we can't make a car faster than the Rimac so we'll make one that's louder."
I'll counter myself by saying that I'm not a cynic, or at least I try not to be, and we certainly saw some exceedingly high-performance displays this past week, mostly on the part of Czinger, which set a slew of California track records in the 21C on the way to Monterey. (That's a wild machine that I got a bit of a taste of behind the wheel -- including a near head-on with a Carrera GT you can watch here.)
I'll also counter that cynical stance by saying I genuinely appreciate the focus on creating a machine that's genuinely fun to drive. Take that notion to its logical extreme, though, and, we wind up back at the Miatas and the MR2s of the world, because as everyone knows, it's more fun to drive a slow car fast than a fast car slow.
Anyhow, that's enough of my thoughts on the subject. Check out the perspectives of everyone from Maurizio Reggiani, former Lamborghini CTO, to Rouven Mohr, current Lamborghini CTO, plus numerous CEOs and various other interesting people over in my piece for Ars Technica.
Ford CEO Jim Farley nixed plans for an all-EV Lincoln
What is the future of American luxury? That's a question Lincoln would very much like to provide the de facto answer on a global scale, particularly in China, where it's trying to buck the "Whatever's newest is best" trend by leaning into the company's heritage and off-road fundamentals.
However, when it comes to powertrain, there was apparently a movement to switch Lincoln to be a fully EV brand a few years back. It's a movement that would have put Lincoln in good company, with many luxury marques making similar initiatives over the past few years. At the Concours on Sunday, Ford CEO Jim Farley told me that he unequivocally shut that motion right down.
"I'm sure glad I did," he told me, and for good reason. It's increasingly clear that the transition to electrification is going to take a little longer, at least here in the U.S., and so those brands that dove into the EV space with both feet are largely suffering from sore ankles at the moment.
It was a great chat with the Ford CEO, and I hope you'll check it out in this exclusive for Hagerty. It's fascinating how much you can learn about a person when talking about their car.
Adrenaline meets rejuvenation
The races at Laguna Seca are usually my favorite part of Car Week, and this year was no exception. Typically I’ll cruise up there on Saturday morning after a big breakfast and watch whatever's roaring around the track. If I'm lucky, I’ll get to do a little roaring myself.
This year it was in the passenger seat of a new Mustang GTD, Ford's 815-horsepower machine that, based on how many views my TikTok of the thing scored (2.2 million and counting...), has a lot of people intrigued. After that, I was whisked into the driver's seat of a Lincoln Navigator, where the SUV's rejuvenation system did its best to calm me down again.
It was an interesting demonstration, one that my typically relaxed heart rate did little to accentuate.
Sadly, I did not get to drive the GTD for that experience at Laguna, but I am at this very moment whisking my way out west for a chance behind the wheel, and to find out whether a $300,000+ Mustang makes any sense in the modern world. I suspect it does not, but as we saw earlier, logic rarely makes for the best driver’s cars, and this one looks to be very good indeed.
My best wishes for restful Sundays and empowering weeks ahead. Be well and do good.