A $300,000 Nissan, and a stolen Bugatti that phoned home

Good morning. Tomorrow is Election Day in the US. This is the one time a year I'll ask you to rank something above browsing auctions for cars you don't need: go vote. If you're not sure where your polling place is or what to bring, vote.gov will point you to your state's election office. The auction listings will still be there when you get back.

Today's issue happens to be about knowing exactly where things are. A Bugatti that couldn't hide, the box in your own car that makes that possible, and a green Nissan whose price we'll know to the dollar at 1:20 this afternoon.

In today's newsletter, we'll get into:

Let’s roll.

Three hundred thousand dollars for a Nissan. Try saying that to anyone who has picked up an Altima at a rental counter.

This one is a 2002 Skyline GT-R M-Spec Nür, one of 285 built, and the bid sits at $300,000 on Bring a Trailer. It closes this afternoon at 1:20 PM ET. It's finished in Millennium Jade, one of 144 Nürs delivered in that color, over black leather, with 62,000 km (about 38,000 miles) on the digital odometer.

The Nür editions were Nissan's send-off for the R34. Every one got the RB26DETT with the reinforced N1 block from the factory, individual throttle bodies, and a speedometer that reads to 300 km/h. The M-Spec was the leather-lined, road-biased flavor of the pair. This car also has the six-speed manual, Super HICAS rear steering, an active rear limited-slip, gold Brembos, 18-inch forged six-spokes, and the ATTESA E-TS Pro all-wheel-drive system we took apart back in August. The center-dash screen still reads out boost, throttle position, and injector duty, which in 2002 was the closest thing a road car had to live telemetry.

In fairness to the bidders, the R34 earned its reputation long before it earned this price. Japan's makers capped advertised output at 276 horsepower by agreement at the time, a figure few people believed applied to this engine, and on a tight road the car kept pace with machinery carrying twice the cylinders and several times the sticker.

The seller is Private Collection Motors in Costa Mesa, offering it as part of the same Iconic Collection that sold a 157-mile McLaren Speedtail for $1.93 million last Monday. The car carries a Montana title and hasn't been through California's emissions or BAR inspection.

One item worth a phone call before bidding. The listing says the car was imported this year. Nür models were built in 2002, and the federal 25-year exemption we covered in August runs by month of manufacture, so 2002 cars reach it during 2027. A state title and a federal import entry are different documents. Ask which provision the car entered under and request the entry paperwork.

My call: I think it finishes between $340,000 and $375,000. That's below the 2023 high-water mark, which fits a car with 18,000 more kilometers and a market that cooled this summer. Even at the top of that range, it's still the most expensive Nissan most of us will ever see sold.

Mate Rimac runs Bugatti Rimac from an open campus in Sveta Nedelja, outside Zagreb, with no perimeter fence. By his own account, he also leaves the keys in his cars, his personal Chiron Sport included, so engineers and friends can borrow them without tracking him down between meetings.

Last week, a 36-year-old man walked onto the campus, said he was there about a job, finished a cigarette, and drove off in the Chiron. The car is worth about €3 million, roughly $3.3 million. He came for an interview and left with the company car.

Nobody noticed for hours. Colleagues drive the Chiron often enough that Rimac rarely knows where it is. It took a bystander spotting an unfamiliar driver, followed by a roll call in the company group chat, before anyone confirmed that nobody at Bugatti had it.

Then the engineers opened the car's server logs. The Chiron reports its position, speed, and fuel level, and it was headed for Slovenia with about an hour's head start. Rimac got into his Porsche 911, which had a full tank, and followed. Croatian police alerted their neighbors.

The data showed the thief one problem he couldn't drive around: the Chiron was running low. He stopped at a Slovenian gas station, put in half a tank, and allegedly left without paying, in the most recognizable car on the motorway. Then he crossed into Austria. An Austrian officer was added to the group chat and received live coordinates for the rest of the evening, which may make this the first international pursuit coordinated in the same app your coworkers use to pick lunch.

Shortly after 7 PM, motorway police in Styria boxed the Chiron in at a gas station in Seiersberg, near Graz, with about ten cruisers. It left on a flatbed.

The ending isn't the one most of us would write. Rimac stayed at the police station until the early morning proving the car was his, then asked to meet the man. He described him as distressed, with a difficult past, and said he'd gladly have driven him home to his family. He declined to press charges, though prosecutors in Austria and Croatia are pursuing the case anyway. The Chiron has minor front-end damage, which Rimac says he'll fix.

In a six-minute Instagram video, he left a note for anyone else with ideas: "you can't do anything with the car without us." The keys now live in his pocket.

The Chiron didn't need a hidden tracker. What caught it ships in most new cars, and it comes down to two components wired to the antennas usually tucked into the shark fin on the roof.

The first is a satellite navigation receiver, and it only listens. GPS satellites, along with Europe's Galileo and a few other constellations, broadcast precise time signals. The receiver works out its own position from how long each signal took to arrive. Nothing is transmitted at this stage, and nobody in orbit knows where your car is.

The second is the telematics control unit, or TCU: a small computer with a cellular modem and an embedded SIM. It sits on the car's internal network, so it can read what the other modules know (speed, fuel level, tire pressures, lock status, crash sensors) and package that with the position. Many units carry their own backup battery so they can still place an emergency call after a crash cuts the 12V supply. Europe has required automatic crash calling, called eCall, on new model types since 2018.

A position report is tiny, a few dozen bytes covering coordinates, speed, heading, and a timestamp. The TCU sends it to the automaker's servers over the same cell networks your phone uses, and the automaker's app reads it back to you, or to Mate Rimac's engineers.

Automakers build this in for emergency calls, stolen-vehicle tracking, remote diagnostics, over-the-air software updates, and subscriptions. The subscriptions are real money. GM booked $800 million in OnStar revenue in the second quarter of this year, up more than 20%, with more than 12 million subscribers worldwide. In 2022 it began building a $1,500 three-year OnStar package into the price of some Buick, GMC, and Cadillac models. Carriers don't publish what they charge automakers for the data itself.

The hardware also ages with the network. When AT&T shut down its 3G service in 2022, millions of older cars lost their connected features overnight because their modems had nothing left to talk to.

Then there's what happens to the data afterward. Last Thursday, GM agreed to pay $220 million to 36 states over its former Smart Driver program, which logged trips, hard braking, rapid acceleration, speeding, and location, and allegedly passed it through data brokers to insurers. The states count more than 10.2 million affected Americans, including over 123,000 here in Connecticut. GM, which ended the program in 2024, now has to get express consent before collecting or sharing that data. That sits on top of a federal order finalized in January barring it from sharing location and driving data with consumer reporting agencies for five years.

FCP Euro started in 1986 as a brick-and-mortar parts store in Groton, Connecticut, opened by Harry and Kathy Bauer. In 2001 their son Nick Bauer and his longtime friend Scott Drozd took it over and moved the business entirely online. Twenty-five years later it's headquartered in Milford, ships from Connecticut and a second distribution center in Mesa, Arizona, and lists about 275,000 parts for BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Audi, Volkswagen, Porsche, Volvo, Jaguar, Land Rover and Mini. By early 2024 it had passed $200 million in revenue with about 300 employees. If you've been to Lime Rock, you've seen the name on the autocross course.

I've been buying from them for more than ten years. The SL500, the CL600, S600, the M5, and both B58 BMWs run mostly on parts that showed up in an FCP box.

Start with what you're buying, because the labels matter. Genuine means the automaker's box and logo, the same part the dealer sells. OE is that identical part from the company that made it for the factory, in the supplier's own box. OEM comes from a company that supplies the automaker, though not necessarily that exact part. Aftermarket is everyone else, where quality depends on the brand. FCP labels which tier you're getting, and for most jobs the OE version is the dealer part without the automaker's logo, usually for much less.

Then there's the lifetime guarantee. Anything you buy from FCP is covered for as long as you own the car, wear items included. You buy the replacement, send the old part back, and receive store credit for what you originally paid. Brake pads are the example FCP uses itself: buy pads once, and each set after that is covered by the credit from the worn set you mail back. Since November 2022 the credit is store credit at the original price, and the company polices abuse like returning parts long before they've worn out.

Why would a retailer offer that? Every claim starts with a new order, so FCP books a sale each time. The credit only spends at FCP, which keeps you coming back. The credit is fixed at the price you paid years ago, so inflation trims the liability every year you keep the car. And the customers who use it most are enthusiasts who hold their cars long enough to become regulars. In effect, it's a retention program funded by the margin on the replacement orders.

Now the habit I'd ask you to build. Before you pay a dealer parts counter, ask for the part number on the quote, paste it into FCP's search, and compare the same number in the same tier. In my experience, FCP comes in under the dealer almost every time on the identical part, and stepping down to the OE version (same part) usually saves more. After a decade of doing this, I struggle to come up with a reason to buy parts for a European car anywhere else.

That's a wrap. See you Wednesday — same inbox, lower gear.

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