David strikes an optimistic tone for the automotive industry for 2025, offering his own unique wish list
It’s Christmas. The one night of the year when we all act a little nicer, smile a little easier and cheer a little more. For a couple of hours out of the whole year, we are the people that we always hoped we would be.
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I didn’t write that. I don’t have nearly enough Christmas spirit in me to pen anything so beatific. It’s actually a (slight) paraphrasing of Bill Murray’s speech at the end of Scrooged. I copied it almost verbatim because, well being a grumpy old man, my explanation of goodwill amongst men would probably be a little lacking. And frankly, Frank Cross’ line about becoming the people we always hoped we would be is perhaps the best descriptor of that which would cure all the polemics — political or otherwise — that plague modernity.
What I’m trying to say is that this will be my attempt to channel Murray’s Cross character and produce a vision of the future that is both hopeful and optimistic of the12 months ahead. Admittedly, I’ll probably have to fake the optimism, but let’s hope the adage that, if you fake something long enough it becomes real, turns out to be true. In other words, here’s Motor Mouth’s automotive wishes for Christmas 2025.
A little reality on the EV front, please
Like so many things these days — OK, every damned thing these days — the subject of electric vehicles has become politicized. They are either the Earth’s saviour or the destroyer of livelihoods. The only thing that can save the planet or a blight on our roads and the demolisher of industries.
Unsurprisingly — and like pretty much everything that has become similarly politicized — the answer is probably somewhere in between. Short-haul delivery trucks? Why aren’t they electric already? Few choices in modern mobility make more sense than a battery-powered Canada Post truck. Long-haul 18-wheelers hauling oranges from Florida? Not so much. Second car in the family? With the incentives currently offered, you’d have to be an idiot to buy anything but an EV. Single car household that road trips every second weekend while hauling a trailer? You’d have to be just as stupid to buy anything battery-powered. Big whoop, you say, who doesn’t know that nothing can be everything for anyone?
Well, seemingly the vast majority of folk because electric vehicles are now, thanks to Trump and Trudeau, very much part of the political landscape. We have one side — those just turfed out of the US office as well as those about to be turfed from Canadian leadership — trying to forbid anyone from driving anything else, while the incoming governments, again, on both sides of the 49th, are promising to do everything they can to stifle their demand.
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So, let’s find a compromise. In fact, let me be the first to suggest an opening gambit. I, despite my reputation for being anti-EV, will go on record as believing the optimal percentage of BEVs on North American roads come January 1, 2035 — the date pretty much all EV mandates chime in — should be somewhere around 40%, give or take 10 points on either side. For those who see the only acceptable result as only zero emission vehicles, how is getting almost half of consumers to make the move to battery power in less than 15 years a failure? For all the coal rollers out there, what do you care if someone else is willing to spend 45 minutes at a roadside stop charging? As long as you’re not forced to sit around pulling your pud, what do you care?
The car you drive — and this, I should remind you, is coming for a committed gearhead — does not define who you are and, considering Frank Cross’ inspired words, who you should be. A car should be a mode of transportation, not some ideological holy ground that adds more polemics to divisions already too extreme.
Let’s hoist a glass for Honda and Nissan; they’re going to need it
Honda and Nissan are said to be merging. At least, that’s the news flooding the airwaves as we head into Christmas. Both are in big trouble. Nissan screwed up the consumer swing to hybrids and let their previous leadership in EVs fester. Honda, meanwhile, missed the boat on both.
And they are both paying the price. Nissan says it has only about 18 months to turn things around as Renault tries to walk away from the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance. In fact, the French automaker seems so desperate to drop Nissan that it’s to dump its shares in the Japanese automaker to Foxconn, the Taiwanese iPhone giant looking to branch out into EVs. Honda, meanwhile, is so tight for cash that it has cut the gross that salespeople make selling Civics and CR-Vs in half, and some of their warranty hijinks are truly special. In other words, they’re both seemingly scraping the barrel for every last penny.
So, here’s to hoping this particular union actually does better than some of the other conglomerates of convenience — Chrysler with Daimler, Chrysler with Fiat, hell, Chrysler with pretty much anyone — have managed. From Nissan’s point of view, this amalgamation needs to work out better than the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance that never generated the “synergies” of scale promised. And for Honda, the proposed tie-up needs to speed up its work on battery electrics faster than its tie up with General Motors — and its Ultium batteries — did. Both brands, I should remind everyone, have made great cars in the past. Let’s hope their future is as bright.
Speaking of Chrysler, er, Stellantis
The former Chrysler Corp. is once again in the headlines and, as has been so common in its history, it’s the result of its boom-or-bust corporate revenue philosophy. Two years ago, Stellantis — still not a name that rolls off the tongue, is it? — was rolling in dough, profit margins high and demand unrelenting. Now, things are so bad, the company has fired its once-feted CEO, Carlos Tavares, and there’s talk of divesting of some its diverse — and famed — automotive brands.
And that’s where our Christmas wishes should be. Stellantis owns, or is partnered with, no less than 16 individual makers of automobiles. Some of those — Dodge, Ram and, hopefully, Chrysler — are inviolate. Fiat, being the namesake of Italy and one of the founding fathers of the partnership, probably is too. There’s also a whole bunch we North Americans don’t give a good goddamn about — Peugeot, Citroën and something called DS (a luxury offshoot of Citroën). But some of the brands that might be on the bubble — they certainly were on Tavares’ radar — are storied names that do hold a historical if not profitable attraction to North Americans.
I’m talking Maserati, Alfa Romeo and Lancia. Maserati’s losing money, Alfa’s foray into North America is proving as problematic as always, and Lancia’s barely relevant in Italy. Under Tavares, it’s almost assured that two the three would have been unloaded; Maserati sold at the very least, and Lancia simply shuttered. With chairman of the board John Eikann back at the helm, Maserati will most likely survive although Alfa Romeo and Lancia probably remain on the bubble.
Making their situation even more disconcerting is a recent Italian law, passed by PM Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, that says any Italian brand that has remained unused for more than five years becomes the property of the government. Meloni has already threatened to sell other defunct brands owned by Stellantis — Innocenti and Autobianchi — to China, but they are long forgotten and not much missed. Maserati and Alfa Romeo, on the other hand, as nothing but badges for Chinese EVs would be, by all that is holy, an efficiency too far. A prayer, then, for Stellantis to finally figure out what to do with two of the most historic names in the automotive world. Lancia, sadly, looks to be beyond redemption
Quick wishes
Let’s hope Trump and Musk come to their senses over national autonomous automobile regulation: The Trump transition team recently announced it would end the collection of collision data required of companies selling semi-self-driving cars. This would benefit almost nobody but Elon Musk because, well, those reports have resulted in the investigation of Tesla’s Autopilot system. Streamlining data collection would probably — because governmental agencies are nothing if not overly bureaucratic — be a worthwhile exercise in cost-cutting, but optimizing safety, and writing informed standards for future autonomous automobile regulations, requires all the information we can muster. So, c’mon, Elon: Get your boot off the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s neck and let the NHTSA’s safety experts do their job.
A prayer for Mate Rimac: Not even 20 years ago, Mate Rimac was a lonely Croatian hot-rodder shoehorning a fork-lift motor in an aging BMW 323i because he couldn’t afford to rebuild its blown gas engine. Now he’s the CEO of both Rimac (it of the 1,888-hp Nevera supercar) and Bugatti as well as single-handedly responsible for building a Croatian auto industry. But Neveras are proving a tough sell specifically because they’re electric and the slowdown in the luxury EV segment is probably putting dampers on his battery consultancy business. Let’s pray, then, that Bugatti’s 1,800-hp Tourbillon — which he, too, masterminded — is gargantuan success. I know it tops my list of supercars I want, nay need, to drive next year.
A turbocharged “attaboy” for Lewis Hamilton: Cheated out of his record-breaking eighth championship by Red Bull’s Schumacher-in-training, Max Verstappen, Hamilton has left the Mercedes-AMG Petronas — where he garnered six of his seven F1 championships — for Ferrari. Ferrari is in a spot of worry itself, not atop the F1 driver’s chart since 2007. The coming together of former foes is in the best spirit of Christmas, so let’s hope they can both top the charts next year. Besides, I so wanna see Lewis kick Verstappen’s butt. His loudmouth father, too. Sorry for the loss of Yuletide bonhomie there, but I can’t remember a more obnoxious father-and-son duo in racing!
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