The Autoextremist Brand Image Meter

It's all in good FUN especially if you have a GEN 1 already.:devil::lol:

 

:cornut: All in good fun here. DaveO is such a fun insulter that I always end up laughing. One needs to think of him as the Don Rickles of MA.

Jason

 

^^^^^ Nice one buddy.

 

Yup - 2002 R53 with 161,000 miles, build date July 2002 bought brand new from the dealer and going strong. Bought it for the Mini heritage and for the promise of a modernized fun little hatchback - MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!

 

Nothing new.... Same thing happened in the fastener industry...

Fer the longest time, this was the standard bearer.... Slow to use.... But eventually got the job done...






But then along comes the new guy.... Much faster.... Got the job done quicker with enough time to sit back and enjoy a cold beer...






Course.... The classic fasteners would have none of this....
They were the original.... And nothing was better....






And so it goes.....

 

Peter DeLorenzo and Jack Baruth are just about the only automotive writers I put any stock into (i.e., they don't have their mouths stuffed full of P.R. 'offerings').

 

This was my first go-around with DeLorenzo. The OP link shuffled me to another article, not the brand article, one in which the author writes six (6) paragraphs lambasting GM CEO Dan Akerson, calling him ego-maniacal, paranoid, clueless, possessing a PR bagman, fraudulent and purveying unmitigated 8uLL$h1t [sic: no period at the end of the sentence].

Now that's some bombast. Maybe a little too much. Could this be the scribblings of the pot re: the kettle?

I went to 'about the author' and saw the portrait: a selfie of a guy wearing shades and staring off to the horizon. Welp, I'm out.

 

Most of the time DeLorenzo gets it right. In the past few years he's been overly loose with his lambasting, showing his bitterness and saturation in the industry a bit too much. I can relate; sometimes it seems the automakers *try* to screw things up and/or are so incompetent and myopic that you wonder how they even got to their office that morning to begin with. So, if you're able to read DeLorenzo through the appropriate filter, he makes sense. Taken at face value, the things he writes (versus what he means to say) makes him sound like a raving lunatic.

But you do have to take a step back and remember that we're all human, and by the wise words of George Carlin:

As such, the probability of a stupid decision being made is quite high, and it's easy to focus on those decisions and assume you'd make a better one in the exact same circumstance. Not to be an apologist here, because some of us *would* make better decisions, but it's an academic argument anyway so it doesn't really matter.


As for his current opinion of MINI, I think he's basically right. There are the MINI loyalists and the brands tightly walled off niche, that's all that matters to the company.

 

^Fair enough^, I'll give him another try. Cynicism breeds cynicism, and I try to avoid automotive cynics, because it's a razor's edge for me. I still have fleeting moments of genuine car thrill, but after the better part of two decades as a car professional, there's a little loss of luster. The thrill comes with shared enthusiasm: when C. Harris waxes poetic about a car that I could conceivably afford, or Singer makes a Targa (Targa!) that is so beautiful that I need to spend some alone time with its images, I still love cars.

 

I agree totally. It's why I don't read DeLorenzo with any real seriousness, knowing how much of an ass he is. I do agree that the passion added by Chris Harris is intoxicating and a wonderful addition to car culture.

 

Meh. DeLorenzo is an egotistical SOB. I've never met a good PR guy/gal who wasn't.

He hates Dan Akerson ("Captain Queeg" he calls him) for good reason. Anybody who loves automobiles should hate him as well. DeLorenzo is an 'Old School' GM loyalist, raised in the GM culture. I'm not ("By no means") a GM loyalist of any stripe, but I was a PR guy for some short time. I appreciate PR professionals who scream that the emperor has no clothes... without doing it on behalf of another emperor.

 

I'll say this, he writes about what none of the other publications dare to here in Detroit. The local journalists just take what they're fed. I don't always agree with everything he writes, but it is good to see a different slant, not biased by advertising dollars.