“New oil pump gears installed and timing cover on; new pistons in and fitted; con rods torqued; waiting for paint to dry on oil pan.” — Zombie Motors
Author Archives: Steve Mays
Low Bar
The truck is getting a new/rebuilt engine
It’s been just over a month since my last update on the Land Rover. Speciality mechanic Philippe was giving it a final check-up before sending it my way. (“Houston, we have a problem.”) Without going into detail (at this time), there were serious problems with the engine. Rather than deal with those down the road — without the services of Philippe and Mr. Wolf — we decided to put in a new/rebuilt engine.
Mr. Wolf found what we needed at Zombie Motors. A 300Tdi 2.5 liter diesel engine that will be a major upgrade from what’s presently in the truck (specs below) and you can read about 300Tdi engines here. Zak at Zombie Motors sent a couple of photos of the block, just back from the machine shop.
The engine will be assembled next week (at Zombie Motors) and shipped back to SF where Philippe will do the swap. Then Mr. Wolf picks it up to put some more check-up miles on the new engine. Once he puts his stamp of approval on it, I fly out for a little celebration and we ship the truck back to Missouri.
Zombie Motors – engine update (PDF)
Zombie Motors – Tdi engine conversion (PDF)
Chaos Monkeys
In a recent Rolling Stone piece Matt Taibbi described Antonio Garcia Martinez as “the most interesting and damaging defector to have ever left the ranks of Facebook. An iconoclastic combination of Travis McGee and Michael Lewis, he is a former physics Ph.D. candidate from Berkeley who worked at Goldman Sachs before his two years at Facebook.”
The Travis McGee reference intrigued me so I bought Martinez’ book (Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley). Only halfway through but can safely say it is one of the best books I’ve read about Silicon Valley. Martinez’s writing style reminds me of Taibbi and he makes the world of tech start-ups read like a thriller. I’m at the part of the book where he’s just gone to work for Facebook:
“Facebook is full of true believers who really, really, really are not doing it for the money, and really, really will not stop until every man, woman, and child on earth is staring into a blue-framed window with a Facebook logo. Which, if you think about it, is much scarier than simple greed. The greedy man can always be bought at some price or another, and his behavior is predictable. But the true zealot? He can’t be had at any price, and there’s no telling what his mad visions will have him and his followers do. That’s what we’re talking about with Mark Elliot Zuckerberg and the company he created.”
If The Social Network is how Facebook started, Chaos Monkeys is what it became. Nobody knows what it will become.
Car dealerships are doomed
Long-time auto exec Bob Lutz thinks car dealerships are doomed. They have 20 to 25 years left. Autonomous vehicles will completely disrupt the industry.
”Are they going to be fun? Absolutely not,” he said. “There will be no joy in sitting in an autonomous vehicle …. But it’s going to be enormously efficient.”
He suggested that parents will be willing to place their children in autonomous cars to take them to day care, soccer practice or school. He said they would be able to give their children limited access to a vehicle subscription service that would let them call cars to take them to preapproved locations, and that access could be expanded as they get older.
”When you send them off to college, you won’t send them with a car, you’ll send them with a subscription to a driverless vehicle service that they can use at their leisure,” he said.
I think it’s been a long time since cars were cool (not that I was ever a car guy). They’re all look like gray blobs of molded plastic. Lutz says the car of the future will just be a “module.”
He likened the modules to subway cars: Passengers don’t know who makes them, only that they get the riders to their destinations.
If I can drive my (mythical) Land Rover for five or ten years — and it’s as much fun as I hope it is — I’ll count myself lucky.