Recent auto news that leaves one hanging

Tesla’s Musk could learn from college students

Under any other circumstance, the fact Tesla’s stock sank like the proverbial stone while chief executive Elon Musk fiddled — OK, he simply was extremely rude to a couple of stock analysts, but it did cause TSLA to plummet some 5.5 per cent — would have been the top automotive news story of last week.

Ditto Ford’s announcement it will unceremoniously dump anything that even remotely looks like a sedan and instead concentrate — yes, in these times of supposed ecological concern and ascendant electric vehicles — on great, huge, honking trucks and SUVs. I mean, we’re talking about the end of a 115-year history. Ford famously revolutionized the automotive world with the Model T, which, in case you need reminding, was definitely not a truck.

Instead, what was grabbing headlines — at least in my neck of the woods — was a car hanging from, well, a bridge. Cops were angry, reporters scrambled for a unique camera angle and the bicyclists who frequent the Don Valley were left gawking at what turned out to be one very decrepit Honda Civic sedan — basically an empty shell completely stripped of engine, transmission and even seats to make it easier to hoist.

No one has yet taken credit for this little misadventure — where’s ISIL when you need it? — but, eventually, speculation settled on the usual suspects, which is to say engineering students. Having an iron ring of my own, I can attest that this is the kind of stupid stuff fledgling engineers, sufficiently, um, lubricated, are likely to dream up.

Yet no matter how much Toronto’s media wanted to ascribe credit (or blame) to local masterminds, it turns out this kind of thing is actually old hat to apprentice techies from the Left Coast. Indeed, according to an autofocus.ca story out of Quebec, University of British Columbia’s engineering faculty has quite a history of this car-as-pendulum stuff. In fact, says author Daniel Rufiange, a similarly disembowelled Volkswagen Beetle that UBC’s pride tried to hang from a Vancouver bridge in 2009 — poorly conceived this plot, the Veedub plunged into the icy waters below — was just a reprise of another Beetle they dangled from the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco in 2001.

Yes, that Golden Gate, and don’t ask me why a bunch of engineers from British Columbia felt the need to travel all the way to California to do stupid stuff, but I’m guessing alcohol was involved.

The granddaddy of all cars-in-weird-places stories, says Rufiange, goes to the enterprising engineers of Cambridge University in England who, in 1958, perched an Austin Seven atop their senate’s peak. What made this feat all the more glorious — and no doubt instigated yet another drunken bash — was the fact the authorities (whom we can assume included some the students’ engineering professors) couldn’t figure out how to get the diminutive little Austin off the roof and had to resort, almost assuredly to much howling reverie, to dismantling it, by blowtorch no less, to get it down.

But while that may have been the most celebrated automotive news of the week, it wasn’t the weirdest. No, that’s reserved for a Ford patent. Yes, the company that decided it doesn’t want to build cars anymore revealed it has a plan to extend the usefulness of its future trucks and SUVs. Based on the concept that future “mobility” will be multi-modal — i.e., rather than a single source of mobility like a car, our trips may be a combination of car, bus, trains and even bicycles — Ford seems to be working on some sort of crossover-cum-minivan with a built-in electric motorcycle.

Officially dubbed a “multimodal passenger transportation apparatus,” the patent was filed late last year. Essentially, the e-bike is built into the middle of the CUV and, when needed, would exit like Dark Knight’s Christian Bale riding his Batpod out of the “Tumbler” Batmobile.

The patent’s drawings are remarkably crude — presumably so no one could copy this brilliant idea — but the Batcycle looks to be an integral part of the main car. Indeed, according to drivespark.com, the electric bike actually forms a major portion of the truck’s dashboard. At least we now know why Ford is killing off the Focus and Fiesta.

But, I’ll leave it up to Lord Elon to wrap up this cavalcade of weirdness.

The reason for the Tesla CEO’s grumpiness with analysts on Wednesday was the news that somewhere along the line, Silicon Valley’s favourite car company burned through $750 million last quarter. And not 750 million of our shortchanged loonies, either, but three-quarters of a billion In-God-We-Trustbut-we’ll-make-do-withTrump-for-now American greenbacks.

With said expenditure causing Elon so much irritability — and knocking some US$3 billion off TSLA’s market cap in overnight trading — it got me wondering how much his little Tesla Roadster-in-space escapade contributed to the red ink in his company’s corporate ledger.

Luckily, the good folks at Business Insider had just the numbers to allow me to calculate the enormity of Musk’s folly. In an article appropriately titled Here’s how much money it actually costs to launch stuff into space, authors Sarah Kramer and Dave Mosher estimated that it takes anywhere between US$9,100 (Space X’s Dragon cargo spacecraft) and US$43,180 (using Orbital Science’s Cygnus spacecraft) to send each pound of cargo into space.

A 2008 Tesla Roadster weighs approximately 2,800 pounds. Do the math and that means Tesla’s little publicity stunt cost somewhere between $25.5 million and $121 million. Of course, Musk might have reduced the cost of flying his roadster to the moon if he had jettisoned the motors, wheels, seats and, in the specific case of his electric Roadster, the batteries. That is, if he was as smart as bunch of drunken Toronto engineering students.