Ford's new Ford is a Geely

Good morning. Welcome to September. The driving season has about six good weekends left in it, Volkswagen's board meets Friday, and the last gasoline Lotus is already showing up on the used market. Autumn works fast.

This is also the month every enthusiast quietly runs the same calculation: which cars earned their keep this summer, and where they're all going to sleep once the salt trucks come out. We have thoughts on the second half of that below. And in Valencia, Spain, Ford just made an announcement that says more about the next decade of this industry than any concept car has managed in years.

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

Let’s roll.

First, a result we owed you: the Valencia Orange BMW 1M from issue #18 sold for $75,000. Fifteen years old and roughly 60% over its original sticker. Keep that number nearby; it does some work at the end of this section.

Today's car closes on Cars & Bids this afternoon at 3:57 PM EST: a 2024 Lotus Emira V6 First Edition, Osmium Silver over tan, 3,400 miles, out of Boulder, Colorado. It's the spec the purists asked for: the Toyota-sourced 3.5-liter supercharged V6, 400 horsepower, and a 6-speed manual driving the rear wheels. The Driver's Pack and touring suspension are aboard, along with 20-inch forged wheels and the KEF sound system. One owner, bought new in May 2024, clean Carfax.

The Emira matters because it's billed as the end of a line: the Evora's replacement and Lotus's last internal-combustion car before the brand goes electric. The industry has issued a lot of those farewells lately, and most of them have aged like boxing retirements. Until the comeback press release arrives, though, the Emira is the closing chapter, and it's also one of the last new cars sold in America with hydraulic power steering, a detail the service history confirms in the most Lotus way possible: the power steering pump was replaced at 9 miles. The A/C system followed at 2,480 miles, and a fuel tank pressure sensor after that. Charming British fragility survived the Geely takeover just fine.

Two things on this particular car deserve a closer look. The seller fitted a Larini exhaust and an Eventuri carbon intake, and the exhaust work deleted the third catalytic converter. The seller warns that the car may not pass emissions testing in some states. In California and the states that follow its rules, that's not a footnote, it's a registration problem, and the bidding will price it in.

My take, for whatever an engineer's bias is worth: the hydraulic rack is the single best reason to want this car. Electric steering reports what the software decides you should feel. A hydraulic system pipes the contact patch straight to your palms through incompressible fluid, no editor in between, including the mid-corner chatter you never asked for. That unfiltered channel is what people actually mean when they say "feel," and the Emira is one of the last places left to buy it new.

Thirteen months ago, Jim Farley stood in Dearborn and told his own employees that Chinese automakers would be selling in America within five to ten years. What he didn't say: Ford would sign up with one first.

The deal, formalized in July and detailed on Geely's earnings call this month, works like this. Ford and Geely formed a joint venture at Ford's Valencia plant in Spain, a factory that has been running below a quarter of its capacity for years. Ford holds 66%, Geely holds 34%. Geely gets a European production base inside the tariff wall, starting with its EX2 EV. Ford gets something arguably more valuable: access to Geely's GEA platform, the multi-energy architecture under the EX5, China's best-selling EV, for a new compact Ford SUV due in 2028.

Read that again. Ford, the company that invented mass production, will build its next European volume SUV on a Chinese architecture. Ford's counterargument is that the car will carry its own styling, tuning, and software. The company has promised a rally-bred design and insists it isn't in the toaster business. The underlying math is harder to style away: developing a dedicated multi-energy platform costs billions, Valencia was bleeding, and Geely's architecture already exists, already scales, and already supports EV, plug-in hybrid, and range-extender powertrains on one structure.

Ford isn't alone in reaching this conclusion. Renault is borrowing the same GEA bones for two models it will build in Brazil. The platform, the billion-dollar core competency automakers spent a century guarding, is becoming something you license, like a phone maker buying chips.

In the winter of the late seventies, an Audi chassis engineer named Jörg Bensinger noticed something strange during cold-weather testing. The quickest vehicle in the fleet on snow wasn't a test mule or a prototype. It was a VW Iltis, a boxy military runabout with roughly 75 horsepower. Traction, not power, was the untapped variable, and Bensinger took the observation to Ferdinand Piëch, grandson of Ferdinand Porsche and father of the Le Mans-winning 917, with a proposal: put all-wheel drive in a fast road coupe.

The idea wasn't new. The packaging was the problem. In 1979, all-wheel drive meant a transfer case, a heavy separate gearbox bolted into the drivetrain. Acceptable in a truck, disqualifying in a sports coupe.

Audi's solution was elegant enough to still be taught: a hollow shaft. The gearbox's secondary shaft was bored out. Power flowed rearward through it to the center differential, and a second, thinner shaft ran forward inside the hollow one to drive the front differential. Two power paths in one shaft's worth of space, no transfer case, and a weight penalty small enough to hide.

The result launched in 1980. Officially it was just the Quattro; enthusiasts later added the "Ur," German for "original," to separate it from everything the name would eventually be stuck on. It carried a turbocharged inline-five hung ahead of the front axle, around 200 horsepower in European trim, and permanent all-wheel drive in a segment where that combination simply didn't exist. The timing was surgical, because the WRC had only just legalized all-wheel drive. Mikkola, Mouton, Blomqvist, and Röhrl proceeded to make everyone else's rear-drive rally cars look historic, and within a few seasons every serious manufacturer had copied the recipe outright.

Audi built just 11,452 road-going Quattros across eleven years. Every all-wheel-drive Lamborghini and Bugatti since runs on lessons that started here.

Enthusiasts will spend six months researching a purchase and six minutes deciding where the car will live. The math says that's backwards. A collector car is driven maybe five percent of its life. The other ninety-five percent it's parked, and cars are not neutral while parked. Fuel varnishes, batteries drain, tires flat-spot under a static load, moisture finds unpainted metal, and rodents treat wiring harnesses as a food group. Deterioration doesn't bill you monthly. It bills you all at once, later, with interest.

The storage market breaks into three tiers. The home garage is free until you count what else you wanted to put in it, and most multi-car problems outgrow it quickly, which is a sentence I write from experience. Commodity self-storage runs roughly $150 to $250 a month, with no climate control and nobody looking at the car between visits. Professional collector storage typically runs $300 to $600 a month per car depending on the market, and what that buys is the point of this section.

The professional tier isn't selling square footage. It's selling controlled temperature and humidity, battery tenders on every car, tire care, security, and, most underrated, a knowledgeable human walking past your car regularly. A slow coolant weep spotted in month two is a hose. Spotted in month fourteen, it's a paint-damaged subframe and a story. Call it $5,000 a year against a $100,000 car: five percent annually, which sounds steep until you price a single winter of doing it wrong.

A case in point from my corner of New England: Garage42 in Acton, Massachusetts, runs this model at scale, with room for 200 cars under one climate-controlled roof. Every car sits on a battery tender, the building carries its own electrical backup and fire suppression, and a multi-level lift system stacks the collection without stacking the risk. There's an in-house detailer with dedicated wet and dry bays, and a management side that will prep a car for a track day or have fresh tires mounted while you're at work. The pitch is an extension of your own garage, except this one is staffed. Full disclosure: the owner is a friend, which is how I know the operation this well, and you should apply whatever discount to my enthusiasm you see fit.

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