December 24, 2017

Hauling a Christmas Tree in a Ferrari Is Totally Normal

by MeDaryl • Cars • Tags: Automotive, business, Christmas, infrastructure, Luxury, New York City, pursuits, sports, transportation

Don’t ever let anyone tell you the GTC4Lusso isn’t a “real” Ferrari.

The Ferrari GTC4Lusso is a special car.

The four-seat hatchback combines sophisticated all-wheel-drive systems with spacious seating for four, plus a large trunk and 680-horsepower performance on a par with anything from Lamborghini and McLaren. This odd-ball hatchback can do zero to 62 mph in 3.4 seconds; top speed is 208 mph. It’s the type of car where you look down and realize you’ve been doing 115 mph the past five miles without knowing it. (Yes, that happened.)

I wrote about it when it first came out last year (as the follow-up to the famous FF), and when Ferrari introduced the 2018 turbocharged version.

I also took it two hours out of New York City to get a Christmas tree. Really.

Because why not? Compared with many other cars that cost the nearly $300,000 (or more), it’ll take to buy a GTC4Lusso, this is a shockingly drivable contraption.

That elaborate traction and stability apparatus is called “thrust-vectoring” and smooths out the car’s response to unstable conditions such as snow and ice. Better yet, it also has the advantage of something very simple, something immensely helpful when you’re lugging around Christmas trees on upstate farms: ride height. It’s higher off the ground than a standard sports car which makes it far less finicky over city pot holes and torn-up streets.

Inside feels like a very luxurious cockpit. Which makes sense—after all, the word “Lusso” means luxury in Italian.

The front passenger seat even has a computerized and interactive LED screen that creates a second cockpit all its own. Ferrari calls the new invention a “dual cockpit” configuration—it’s divided by a central console where all the car's comfort and entertainment controls are shared between both the driver and passenger.

It makes sense. Nice things are meant to be shared, right?

Click here to watch the video.

November 22, 2017

Elon Musk Channels Knight Rider With His Roadster-Semi Reveal

by MeDaryl • Cars • Tags: business, california, Consumer Discretionary, Elon Reeve Musk, Environment, infrastructure, MEIJER INC, Michigan, North America, pursuits, technology, TESLA INC, WAL-MART STORES INC

Tesla just unveiled the world’s fastest long-haul semi truck, which can go from 0 to 60 miles per hour in only 5 seconds while pulling a trailer. The much-anticipated reveal was the subject of speculation for weeks, with observers wondering whether it would be a freight industry curiosity—or a transformation. The initial take is that it might be the latter.

And that wasn’t even the biggest surprise of the night.

What followed was a scene straight out of the 1980s sci-fi TV show Knight Rider. With the trucks dominating a stage inside an airport hangar and a raucous crowd gathered around, the trailer of one of Tesla’s Semis tilted up, a cloud of smoke swirled, and out came an all new Tesla Roadster, a reprise of the vehicle that first defined the company as a maker of ultra-fast electric cars. Before the Model 3, Model X, and Model S, there was the Roadster. But this was something very different from the original.

The new Roadster is the quickest production car ever made, by a good margin, clocking 0 to 60 in 1.9 seconds in the $200,000 base model version. Even crazier is the car’s unprecedented battery range: 620 miles on a single charge. At the invitation of Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk, the crowd of Tesla owners and enthusiasts at the Hawthorne, California, airport jumped the barriers and swarmed the vehicles.

There’s a Tesla Roadster beneath this mob.

Photographer: Tom Randall/Bloomberg

“Wow, that was cool!” Toni Sacconaghi, a Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. analyst, wrote in a report to clients after the event. “Tesla’s addressable market for Semi Trucks may be considerably larger than we had estimated.”

Musk, 46, is known for being a showman, and Tesla is in the midst of a slower-than-promised rollout of the Model 3, the critical mass-production electric car that will make or break the automaker. The two new vehicles unveiled Thursday night could be seen as distractions at the very time when the company needs to be focused.

As central as the Model 3 is to Tesla’s survival, though, the Semi and Roadster are formidable in their potential to generate revenue. Of the two, the most important for Tesla’s future, the future of transport electrification, and the environment in general is the Semi.

A matte black Semi and an even bigger trailer beside it.

Photographer: Tom Randall/Bloomberg

The truck is a massive Class 8 Day Cab, capable of hauling a maximum vehicle weight of 80,000 pounds—pretty much the biggest long-haulers get—for a whopping 500 miles on a single charge, according to Musk. After the airport event, he sent potential fleet customers out in the Semis on endless breakneck loops along the runway. The trucks get to 60 mph just as quick as a Model 3.

Beyond speed, the Semi’s range and charging time are significantly better than the expectations of six analysts surveyed by Bloomberg before the event. This means the market Tesla is chasing is wide open. In North America alone, the diesel freight trucks in the Tesla Semi’s class account for about $30 billion in sales annually, or more than 250,000 new trucks, according to industry data tracked by Bloomberg.

The Semi’s specs mean that a driver could put in almost 900 miles a day, only stopping to charge during a 30-minute lunch break, and picking up 400 miles of battery range while eating his sandwich. That’s faster than any charger capability today—possibly by an order of magnitude. Moreover, that 900 mile-a-day capacity is actually more driving than U.S. laws allow. The two prototype Semis on display Thursday were day cabs, but Tesla plans to build a version with a sleeper cabin, too.

Given the Semi’s potential for long-distance hauling, the one remaining hurdle for luring truckers to electric is cost.

Unfortunately, that’s something Musk didn’t address—at least not completely. While he claimed the truck would offer customers more than $200,000 in fuel savings with an impressive 2-year payback compared with diesel, he didn’t disclose many of the assumptions behind those calculations, including the most basic: the upfront cost of the truck. A payback period of of 2 years is exactly what’s needed for Tesla to garner a big interest from the freight industry, according to the average of six analysts surveyed before the event.

Musk said Tesla will guarantee low electricity prices of 7 cents a kilowatt hour, significantly below average U.S. prices, which the company will ensure by deploying solar panels and massive batteries. The truck has a drag coefficient of 0.36, which is sleeker than a Bugatti Chiron supercar. The Semi’s wheels, trailer gaps, and undercarriage are sealed up to reduce drag.

Tesla has begun taking reservations for the Semi, at $5,000 a piece for delivery in 2019. Bloomberg was first to confirm initial Semi orders, from a Michigan grocery store chain and then from Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Meijer Inc., and J.B. Hunt Transport Services Inc. People familiar with Tesla’s Semi program said more companies would be disclosing orders soon. Roadster deposits, meanwhile, start at $50,000 for the $200,000 base model for delivery in 2020.

Both of the vehicles set new records for range and speed, and will become the targets to beat for companies going electric.

For more on Tesla, check out the podcast:

September 5, 2017

Finance Geeks Will Love This New Movie About the Tulip Bubble

by MeDaryl • Cars • Tags: businessweek-magazine, pursuits

Markets are governed by two things: math and story.

Math is simple. It’s reality, the fundamentals and the underlying supply and demand for whatever’s being traded. The story is where human psychology enters the picture. It’s what causes people to extrapolate wildly, move in herds, and swing from bouts of extreme pessimism to embarrassing optimism. Markets can whipsaw wildly based on story alone, though in the end, raw math eventually wins out.

Markets are at their most exciting when the gap between math and story is massive, when humans are fully in the driver’s seat and prices no longer bear any resemblance to reality. With this in mind, a financial bubble is the perfect setting for a romantic drama because, well, love is the other obvious area where the stories we tell and get swept up in can diverge so sharply from actuality.

This is the premise of , a film set in 17th century Amsterdam during tulip mania, an historic episode that’s come to be synonymous with bubbles. Based on the 1999 Deborah Moggach novel of the same name, tells the story of a wealthy Dutchman, Cornelis Sandvoort (Christoph Waltz), and his beautiful, bored young wife, Sophia (Alicia Vikander), who falls in love with Jan (Dane DeHaan), a painter commissioned to make the couple’s portrait.

Dane DeHaan riding the bulb bubble in .

Photographer: Alex Bailey, © 2014 The Weinstein Company. All Rights Reserved.

You might expect the love aspects of the plot to predominate and the markets part to get short shrift. But in it’s the financial story that’s fascinating, while the romantic angle for the couple is a little tired. In the end, I just didn’t care if Sophia and Jan worked things out.

The film does provide multiple interesting lessons on the nature of money and wealth, though. At one point, Jan explains to Sophia that the stunning blue found in the great Renaissance paintings was called “ultramarine” because it had to be imported with great difficulty from across the sea. The value of a commodity can come not only from its utility but also from the difficulty of its attainment.

Alicia Vikander plays the bored young wife, Sophia, to Christoph Waltz’s Cornelis Sandvoort.

Photographer: Alex Bailey, © 2014 The Weinstein Company. All Rights Reserved.

Meanwhile, the exchange of the actual tulip bulbs is particularly illuminating. While the trading takes place in a tavern, filled with drunks and prostitutes, the bulbs themselves are left for safekeeping in an abbey. This dichotomy between a rowdy bar and a house of worship is a perfect manifestation of Karl Marx’s essay “The Power of Money.” In it, Marx credits Shakespeare with identifying two essential properties of money: At times it’s divine, and at times it’s “the common whore of mankind,” as the Bard wrote in .

The film emphasizes—perhaps overemphasizes—how similar love and bubbles are. Sophia and Jan hatch a plot to escape together that involves a faked pregnancy, a faked death, and an overnight fortune made trading tulips. Only in their wildest fever dream could they really have thought it would work (just like the speculators who believed the price of tulip bulbs would only go up). In the end, the cold reality of their situation (the math) wins out. Their plan results in predictable catastrophe.

The director, Justin Chadwick, still manages to end on an implausibly feel-good note, one that seems discordant with how bubbles and heartbreaks typically culminate. Of course, the mere existence of the film is kind of a happy ending, as the production was beset by numerous impediments over the years that slowed its release. There just aren’t enough movies that delve into finance and the nature of money, so it’s a good thing this one finally came out.