It's pretty amazing to me the amount of shit that apparently you can Just Do as an NYC mayor. It makes basically every other American politician look like an incompetent loser. What do you mean there was just a button that reversed wage theft? Why wasn't and isn't everyone hitting it all the time??

“We couldn’t get the rights, but we can change his name a little.”

“Yes, see you on Monday, which will be a totally normal day, business as usual.”

#RadRide at auction today! It certainly wasn't the plan to have all the classics this week, but there are SO MANY good ones! Take this 70 Nissan Gloria Super DX Wagon for example! It's all-original with a 2-digit plate so it's been 1 owner since pre 90s! Red interior! DM for interest or to bid! #JDM

35 years later this still slaps. I remember watching the original video on, ahem, a version of MTV. Feels very timely rn. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mlwq...

Anybody having a WWIII watch party this weekend? Non-zero chance of carrier loss.

Folx, if we try just a little harder the top of the hood can sit at double the diameter of the wheel & tire. We don't have all that much further to go! www.caranddriver.com/news/a704648...

I know this is de minimis in light of, uhh, impending WWIII & the Blizzard of 1978 reuniting for a comeback tour. But WTF is going on on CNN's front page these days? Is it still a news site?

Me: I just wanna listen to some Fleetwood Mac in the morning. Youtube: Ok. But you have to watch ten Grainger ads in a row & try to figure out WTF they even sell or do.

$73,495 for a version with some options, & at the end of the day you're still driving a disposable A6. Who is buying the A6 these days anyway? This isn't 2006. www.caranddriver.com/reviews/a702...

One of my few regrets about unwritten articles is not having done a truck listicle with actual trucks & then adding this thing in there & evaluating its attributes as if it were one.

You can tell insurance companies are making too much money by how much they advertise on TV & Youtube, which is seemingly like 80% of all ads on cable news. /CaptObvious

Looking at a vintage Nintendo SNES cartridge, & the delivery time is 6 weeks. But I'm like "Hmm, can I even be sure that the US of A will be around in six weeks at this rate?"

Aight, who's gonna stay up late to watch if they're gonna do Eye-ran after the markets close? There's too much momentum & too much hardware over there for them to pull back now.

::whispers to wife:: That’s the Director of National Intelligence.

::the most Bri’ish accent youve ever heard:: Dab o’ oppo!

One thing I still dont get about this is what was GM's longterm thinking: People would just accept insurance cos jacking up their rates via data gained thru OnStar on their driving & would just shrug & keep paying for OnStar? GM expected this to continue indefinitely? gmauthority.com/blog/2026/01...

Guy at the post office bragging excitedly about getting a 2025 Tacoma for $50K (with heated seats!). Is this what 2025 Tacomas with heated seats go for these days? (JFC wtf are these numbers?)

Nobody can convince me that the Stellantis & Stargate Atlantis names & logos aren't related.

Have they even tried astroturfing some local opposition to Danish rule over the island & shipping them some arms? You know - the way they usually do these things?

European automakers must be baffled that given the 'murrican love for futbaw we haven't had a nameplate like the Dodge Linebacker yet. Stella is probably sitting on that one for when things get *really* desperate, not the regular kind of desperate, which is all the time. (You owe me, Stella).

My dream is to be interviewed in character as retired French F1 driver Jean-Michel Jarre over the loudspeaker at a major concours event, with a heavy French accent, & to see if anyone notices at all.

When these came out I thought that these were for people who owned the Caliber, but apparently that wasn’t enough to keep this model afloat.

Starting to suspect that part of what’s driving the Greenland thing is that no one dares to show him the non-Mercator projection map of Greenland.

Another thing that's suboptimal about living in a Verhoeven film, besides waking up to check if a new war has started overnight, is that I am forced to learn the names of this giant cast of characters & a lot of them sound like they wouldn't make it into a Verhoeven script for being too on-the-nose.

Ultimately, I have little sympathy for those who were affected by this b/c this is 2026 & of course this is what companies are gonna do. We've been in a scam-based economy for a while now, & everything is being "monetized," which is a word you didn't really hear as much even 20 years ago.

Anchors on US TV screech about China's social credit system at every opp, without evidence, but here in the US of A we've had an automaker selling data on people's driving habits to data brokers, who sold it to credit agencies & insurance cos, which was used to vary or deny people's insurance rates.

::rubs temples:: I dunno if it'll surprise anyone in this day & age that an automaker sold driver behavior data collected thru OnStar to brokers & insurance cos who used it to "vary" or deny insurance rates but it's a bleak symptom of monetizing everything at every turn. alloymag.com/ftc-gm-onsta...

One big difference between 2015 and now in the automotive media is that back then we weren't chronicling a dystopia. And now it feels like we are.

One question I haven't been able to get an answer to for a while is how Donkey Kong Country 3 was so bad after the first two were so great? It feels like it wasn't even made by the same developer.

The lesson here (for Ford) is don't have real workers around when the president visits. Just have HR people & your own bodyguards dress up as assembly line workers. Rookie mistake! My security consultancy could have foreseen this, for a fee.

We’ve settled into this new pattern of starting limited wars on weekends as soon as the markets close, at standoff ranges & with zero appetite for risk. But these are also just punitive things now done for ratings. This upcoming one will be just purely out of spite now that Plan A failed.

::sigh:: Folx, we need to bring back hardware-defined vehicles.

This armored 2005 W220 S-Class Guard from the Turkish embassy is now up for auction. Original price was around a quarter mil euros. I have a feeling this will get shipped back to Yurrp by a flipper. But with the way things are going in this country, who knows? alloymag.com/armored-merc...

I went to grad school with Walter Rohrl, but the way they pronounce that name in Germany is very different when you hear journalists in old broadcasts say it out loud. I am now thinking: Would *he* recognize it as being the same name?

Had this weird dream over a week ago where I was watching the news and we invaded a South American country, but not the whole country, & only just kidnapped its president & flew him to NYC & we're going to charge with him with possession of a machine gun.

I am concerned about Honda. And not just because of whatever this is supposed to be. alloymag.com/afeela-cross...

Part of living in a Paul Verhoeven timeline is waking up at 4am just to check if another war has started, since they start & stop very abruptly now, & one of them could even be against allied territory.

Our first fundraiser at @alloymag.bsky.social and it concerns what has been happening in Sudan, including to a family member of a friend of ours. alloymag.com/year-1-fundr...

This is going to be Diplomat Luxobarge Week over at @alloymag.bsky.social including the armored variety.

I usually do not gratuitously besmirch the solid reputation of the electronics in the Aston Martin Yolanda, but one of my friends did a cross-country trip in one of these in the 1990s & it went about as well as you'd expect in that regard. The details: alloymag.com/aston-martin...

I've clearly underestimated how mentally exhausting it would be to be actually living in a Paul Verhoeven film.

I now see JDM cars every time I go somewhere. The same was not true even five years ago.

Folx, somebody who’s good at the economy help me out here: Is it a good sign when there are Harleys for sale in people’s front yards just before the holidays?

Yesterday was French Car Day at Alloy, (which was not planned at all, I swear), but it all started with the fact that I wrote a thing about a car I think about all the time: The Pujo 604, esp its diesel-flavored versions. alloymag.com/peugeot-604-...

The Icy Hot Stuntaz are now closer in time to the election of Ronald Reagan than they are to us.

This week on Alloy we got a chance to revisit one of our fave imports from the darkest days of the Malaise era, when British Leyland thought the Rover SD1 would do well in 'murrica cause we liked big sedans with V8s. (The venture did not go as planned).

Tesla has figured out a long time ago that it can keep facelifting its (objectively dated) cars pretty much indefinitely. And its buyers seem to agree. alloymag.com/new-teslas/

Don't know what is breaking my brain more about 2026: the fact that the Afeela sedan is still set to launch (at $89,900), or that the goth-style Jag-wire EV is also on the way. What a time to be alive.