Nut-fest Friday #33 | Faulty Airbag Fiasco Worsens + Porsche Watch Gets Criminal Ambassador

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• published: 27 Jul 2017
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This week: Holden in the shark tank, Ford on the nose, Benz packs its fluffer and flies the motoring press to South Africa to overlook conveniently some blatant truths about its new Navara ute, Porsche appoints a criminal ambassador for its new shitbox watch, and I’ll let you know which dickhead carmakers think it’s a good idea to replace your recalled airbags with … more potentially defective airbags. That’s all coming up. Ford has recruited 18 noses as an olfactory not-so-secret weapon to crack the kooky code of why the company’s sales are so spectacularly shit in China … and of course to refine the unique smell sensation that is so quintessentially ‘Ford’. Apart from being crap drivers, Chinese buyers are quite sensitive to smell, it seems. They place ‘unpleasant smell’ ahead of performance and safety on their hit parades of why we didn’t buy that car. Oh - to be a fly on the wall for that process: Labrador. Labrador? Great Dane. Definitely great Dane. Bulldog. French I think. South of France. Good thing we didn’t step in it. The distinctive aroma of Ford. Coming soon to the sole of a shoe near you - if you’re not careful. Mercedes-Benz continues to excite the world’s most gullible motoring press here in Australia in the manner of a cheap fluffer on the set of a budget pornographic movie. And I must say - some of them do seem pretty excited. The new Mercedes-Benz Navara is one of the cheapest, lamest, brand-devaluing badge engineering exercises of all time. But of course I’d suggest you cannot say this publicly if Mercedes-Benz sucks your teat via an all-expenses-paid junket to South Africa, where your mission is to write essentially only nice things about a three-year-old Nissan with a three-pointed star. Laughably, the Australian Navara is routinely criticised for poor laden ride quality and QE2 steering, but motoring journalists like CarsGuide’s Andrew Chesterton here seem effusive about the alleged Merc’s capabilities - even though these are the same as the Nissan. Carsguide itself describes the Navara’s ride (the actual Nissan one) as (quote) “skittish” and (quote) “dodgy” while it says the steering is (quote) “slow, and dead-weight heavy”. But I suppose it’s quite easy to overlook that when Mercedes-Benz hooks you up to the fluffing apparatus and flying you up the pointy end… Porsche is using sublimely ignorant, short-arsed, Argentinian, ball-kicking criminal Lionel Messi to promote its new useless and exorbitantly priced (but attractive) Huawei watch. It seems like a perfect fit to me. Who better to represent such a product from such a brand? Seldom have I seen so perfect an integration of core values and attributes between sponsor and ambassador. Toyota, Lexus, Mazda, BMW and Subaru all walk away with a collective solid gold cockworthiness award this week - for retrofitting potentially defective Takata airbags to vehicles identified to contain potentially defective Takata airbags. I think the Keystone Cops reached out and had a hand in this. Corporate fuckwittery does not get much more broad spectrum than this, frankly. Kindly all insert the mighty King when it arrives. You deserve it. According to (personal opinion) some dickhead who amazingly approved an official statement from Toyota and Lexus: “This action provided safety for a number of years, however, due to exposure to the environment over time, these airbags will need to be replaced again.” What a load of bullshit: Unless you can know the exact point in time when the retrofitted airbag’s exposure to the environment causes it to become defective, then all you unprincipled dick-tips are doing is playing Russian roulette with your customer’s lives. Eighteen people have died, and many more have been injured as a consequence of the defective airbags firing projectiles into people’s faces. You arseholes. The hot tips here: if you have purchased any used car, or if you have moved since buying your new car - update your ownership details with the manufacturer. You’ll need the VIN code for that. It’s on the rego papers. This way the manufacturer will be able to contact you over any recall, including this one. Alternatively, visit any authorised dealer and get them to punch the VIN code into their database - they’ll know instantly if your car has an outstanding recall in play. The work will be done for free. You can also visit recalls.gov.au here in Australia - that’s the ACCC’s official recalls listing website. It makes me wonder exactly how many corporate bullshit-driven liberties are being driven by expediency, like this, completely under the radar, out there in the market - perhaps affecting your car - right now. A Rumsfeldian known-unknown in the domain of automotive intelligence-gathering.