Skip to content

BRAKING NEWS: Porsche of the month club costs $2,000

A biweekly roundup of automotive news, good, bad and just plain weird: Porsche’s Passport – the end of ownership? With the coming age of autonomous driving (which, incidentally, has a long way to go), there’s been much speculation about new ways in w
Porsche
Porsche 718 Cayman. photo supplied

A biweekly roundup of automotive news, good, bad and just plain weird:

Porsche’s Passport – the end of ownership?

With the coming age of autonomous driving (which, incidentally, has a long way to go), there’s been much speculation about new ways in which people might experience cars. Actually, you don’t even have to wait for autonomy: even here in Vancouver, we’ve got car-sharing apps that let you nab a Prius or a Smart car for a quick one-way trip.

In Atlanta, Porsche has another take on ownership brewing. It’s called Passport, and it’s an attempt to take the streaming video concept of Amazon Prime and Netflix into the automotive field. For a monthly subscription of $2,000 to start, Passport members can choose from a Boxster, Cayman, Macan, or Cayenne, and cycle between the cars as often as they want.

Everything’s covered, from insurance, to maintenance, to taxes. Select where you want your Porsche to be dropped off – home, airport, or office – and Porsche’s employees will show up with a gleaming new car.

It sounds pretty compelling, apart from the cost. The higher-trim $3,000 “Accelerate” package is pretty pricey for a fancy leasing program. Not to mention there’s no word on demand versus availability. Come a sunny day, what if all the Boxsters are already booked?

For me, there’s a bigger problem. Years and years ago, a Porsche sports car used to be the reward for long hours of work. You had to save up to get one, and as a result, people took pride in ownership. Now, lease rates are cheap, and the sheer number of crossovers means that people are just cycling through for a couple of years, always looking for a new flavour.

Programs like Passport will doubtless become more common. They won’t give you the same long-lasting joys as proper, long-term ownership.

Volkswagen Scirocco discontinued

While Canada never got the current-generation Scirocco, VW always dangled their little coupe just over our heads. It’s a pretty little thing, full of charisma, and eschewing the faux-retro look of the modern, Golf-based Beetle.

Originally a replacement for the Karmann Ghia, the Scirocco arrived in the mid-1970s, with the second-generation car arriving in the 1980s. Some consider the Corrado to be a Scirocco in everything but name only, and you can count me among them.

I drove a Euro-spec Scirocco R some years ago, and it was every bit as fun as a GTI, with just a little more edge and style to it. While the front-wheel-drive coupe segment isn’t of huge sales importance to any company (witness the extinction of the Toyota Celica), you have to feel like the Scirocco would have given VW a little shot in the arm after the whole TDI debacle.

For now, the only time you’ll see a Scirocco is if it’s one of the classic versions, or when the European models turn 15 years old and someone starts importing them. If, however, VW has their wits about them, they’ll bring the car back with the next generation of Golf. Sure, crossover sales will fill VW’s bank statements, but you need a little personality parked beside them in the showroom, to get curious buyers to wander through the door.

Kobe Steel manufacturer scandal

As manufacturing cars gets tougher, and profit margins leaner, skulduggery gets ever more common. Wide-ranging outrages from VW’s dieselgate, to the GM ignition issues, to defective Takata airbags have made many a headline, and eroded consumer confidence.

Now we have a problem with the very steel that makes up our cars. Kobe Steel, a supplier to more than 500 companies from bullet trains to rocketry to car and airplanes, has admitted that it falsified certification data on its steel products. Essentially, materials that were not up to spec were represented as higher quality than they were.

The aftershock was immediate, with company stocks plummeting two billion dollars overnight. The bigger problem is how to recall products affected by the problematic steel: an airbag can be replaced at a dealer, structural components can not.

And further, is it possible we’re simply trying to build too many cars, too fast? Are all these issues just symptoms of an industry that lists sales growth as a primary metric of success, instead of customer confidence? More than a few companies could focus on building better cars, rather than just more cars, and they could vet their suppliers a little more effectively.

Mid-engined Corvette goes to McDonald’s

The mid-engined Corvette is a unicorn predicted by every major magazine since about four minutes after the first Corvette rolled off the production line. After all, the ‘Vette is America’s sports car, and to beat the world it’s got to take on mid-engined stuff like the Ferrari 488.

The advantage to having an engine in the middle of the car is mostly about weight distribution. Engines are heavy, and the further away you put them from the car’s centre, the more a pendulum effect can build up through corners.

Now, finally, it appears like the Corvette is finally getting the reworking it needs to be a halo vehicle worthy of taking on the likes of the Ford GT. Rumours have become truths, with camouflaged vehicles caught testing in Michigan, alongside a mighty Porsche 911 Turbo S that Chevrolet seems to have brought along as a performance yardstick.

Where were the pictures snapped? At a McDonald’s drive-thru. The Corvette may be undergoing a metamorphosis into the layout of an exotic supercar, but it is obviously still emphatically America’s supercar.

Oxford to ban gasoline and diesel cars

While major European centres seem ready to turn away gasoline and diesel cars within the next couple of decades, the little college city of Oxford is ready to become the U.K.’s first internal-combustion-free-zone a little sooner. By 2020, the city centre will be only open to electric vehicles, be they buses, taxis, passenger cars, or delivery vans.

The move makes a lot of sense. Oxford is a dense, medieval city, and its university dates back to 1096 AD, or perhaps even further.

As such, it’s already an ideal place for people to get around on bicycles, en route to lectures where tweedy academics try to prove that Shakespeare’s plays were actually written by a middle-aged donkey named Susan. There’s little need for individual transport by car, so changing over to electrification is almost a no-brainer.

It could be a model for the way EVs will gradually take over Europe’s denser areas, and perhaps, eventually, our own. Still, there are far more wide-open spaces on this side of the Atlantic. As Susan might say, “To EV or not to EV, that is the question.”

Watch this space for all the best and worst of automotive news, or submit your own auto oddities to mcaleer.nsnews@gmail.com.