Private Equity, not venture capital

Two ex wives, pretty fiance, million plus dollar house and expansion plus the usual shtick can lead to cash flow problems. He cannot sell his Countach because he has a 300K loan against it. Which explains why on one of his latest videos he was filming from a hospital bed with kidney stones. You cannot stop or you will…

One has to wonder just how the hell an automotive lifestyle brand founded by the late Ken Block wound up over a billion dollars in debt just over a decade after it was founded.

Huh, did not know any of that. Was just a windshield sticker as far as I knew. 

That’s a lot of debt. Did they try doing donuts around it? What about jumping a car over it?

The actual Hoonigan likely didnt have anywhere near this much debt or business volume. They were basically a merchandise and media production company. The nugget hidden in this article is that Wheel Pros, a MUCH bigger company, bought Hoonigan last year and renamed themselves Hoonigan. The company that went bankrupt…

Yeah they were abandoned by their core audience when they got bought by Wheel Pros. I also think that most of their personalities (which built the following in the first place) left because they realized Hoonigan got bought and cannibalized for the branding by big money. 

Hoonigan, prior to the merger, was a promotional agency masquerading as a t-shirt/youtube brand. They made millions on deals with big companies like General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, FCP Euro, Kubota, Black Rifle Coffee, etc.

Post-merger they wrapped the Hoonigan name around the company formerly known as Wheel Pros, so…

I honestly didn’t know that Hoonigan was anything other than a slogan or name. I associated it with Ken Block but that’s as far as it went for me. To discover it’s an actual business with $1.2 billion in debt blows my mind as much as those gymkhana videos. This might be part of their business problem.

“Keeping it real” almost exclusively goes wrong.

‘For example, some workers said they were told to ignore “No Turn on Red”’ - A lot of cyclists and pedestrians rely for on those “no turn on red” signs when they have a green and the cars driving parallel to them have a red. How good are Teslas at noticing a cyclist on a path behind them to the right, moving at about…

I saw this from multiple angles last night.  The tow truck driver did not hit the bus.  He turned the corner and his truck fell off the tow truck and rolled in front of a bus.  The truck owner took off IN the tow truck and drove away, finally ditching the tow truck a few blocks away.  This has video from many…

Makes sense.  On video, left his truck behind and the police are “looking” for him?  Next statement will be that they “couldn’t definitively identify him in the video” and there will be no charges.

Can you prove that coming to a complete stop reduces the frequency of accidents?

Being predictable is the safest way to drive. Shit drivers are unpredictable drivers. Someone that stops at a stop sign is driving predictably. Someone that rolls through it is not. 

Im not familiar with that example, id agree that they shouldnt disobey rules like that.

The whole selling point of autonomous cars is that one day, hypothetically, they’ll be safer than humans because they won’t get tired or lazy or lax with the rules.  “No u-turn” signs might seem arbitrary sometimes, but there’s usually a reason they’re there.  Teslas ignoring those signs and then having to back into…

Define shit drivers.

thats the free market baby! free from the pesky laws of democratic oversight. 

First Gear: For the love of god, Tesla (and Waymo and the rest), stop forcing the public to participate in your half-baked experiments against their will.