"As the documentary-style video portrays, at the instant Dylan plugged in and fired up his electric guitar, some of the Newport crowd booed the game-changing decision. Festival founders interviewed for the video said they recognized the new technology as a force to be reckoned with...." Blah blah blah...the Audi A3 Sportback e-tron plug-in hybrid.
September 2, 2015
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28 comments:
"Blah blah blah"
Running out of energy?
The target market for Audi is really that old?
The idea of Dylan plugging in is okay, I guess, but still I'd have tried to work in a butt plug angle. Or maybe an angled butt plug, depending on my mood.
Anyway, I thought it was Hendrix who "fired up" his guitar.
I doubt their cars can sing, either.
"It has, like, a different, kinda energetic power to it." Courtney, who is pedestrian at best, figures out why she likes her electric guitar.
(Also, note that Dylan is not in the video.)
From "Bob Dylan's Blues":
Lord, I ain’t goin’ down to no race track
See no sports car run
I don’t have no sports car
And I don’t even care to have one
I can walk anytime around the block
Read more: http://www.bobdylan.com/us/songs/bob-dylans-blues#ixzz3kc5qXDBM
I kind of liked Audis until this.
Advantage: Mercedes.
I've owned two Audis over the years. My parents gave me Audi #1 as a graduation gift, a pretty good car I drove for years and later traded for a GMC pickup. Audi #2 was a 1991 Quattro CS sedan with everything. That was the most troublesome car I have ever owned, though to be fair two of the disasters were the directly the fault of idiots I actually paid. One problem was really funny in retrospect, but at the time I didn't think anything but how do I find and kill the designer of this POS? or something along those lines.
The Quarter CS had automatic jimmy-proof door locks. Why automatic? According to the Audi salesman it was to foil car hijackers. My car never was never hijacked, even when I mistakenly took a shortcut through Liberty City at 2 a.m. on a Saturday, but my car once hijacked me. Thanks to the automatic locks I got trapped inside my own car! The locks would cycle open and then closed again so rapidly I couldn't work the door latch in the microsecond interval. Unlocked! Locked! Unlocked! Locked! on and on for ten minutes. The windows rolled up automatically as well so those exits were also excludedl. I had a first-generation cellphone installed inside so I thought I'll call Audi so I did, paying AT&T a hefty fee for director assistance. The national Audi support line operator had no idea what my problem was. "You say you can't get out of the car? Try opening the door." Motherfuckers.
Finally, I got directions to the nearest dealer. On 1/3 of a tank I couldn't make it, but decided to try nevertheless. I thought I might find a sympathetic full-service station along the way. No such luck. But I did persuade the Apu at a "Quickie-Mart" to pump ten gallons for me for an extra $5 passed through the sunroof. When I reached the dealership the techs were baffled "You say you can't get out of the car? Try opening the door." More motherfuckers. "I can get out through the sunroof, but I don't want to crawl over the roof!" I said.
The head technician came up with a solution. "Toss your keys out to me and I'll open the door from the outside," he advised. That was easier said than done. The mechanic had to fight the automatic lock from his side too. He put so much torque on the key to resist the locking cycle that the shaft of key got corkscrewed! And I'm still in the car!
Then I suggested a solution. The locks work with electric motors, right? "Right," said the tech. And with the power off it's still possible to open the door from the outside with a key, right? "I suppose so," ventured the tech. You "suppose so," eh? Here's what I'm going to do: I'm going to disconnect the battery. That should disable the automatic locks. Then you can let me out. The 1991 Audi Quattro CS had the battery not under the hood where a sane designer would put it, but under the rear passenger seat. I don't think they put it there to benefit a driver trapped in his car, but that's how it worked out. I crawled over the front seats and lifted the rear seats to reveal the battery. The techs passed me a wrench and i removed the cable from the negative post. That killed the automatic locks and allowed the tech to open the door.
It turned out that the locks worked on an electrically pressurized pneumatic system. A defective "air-tight" seal caused the locks to go crazy. Disconnecting the battery also fucked up the computer, my radio presets, the security alarm system, and service log file. An expensive and humiliating situation caused by superior German engineering.
Typo alert: The Quarter CS had automatic jimmy-proof door locks. That's Safari's spellcheck/auto-correct feature doing its typical mischief.
@Althouse, you like Dylan, yes? And do you still own your Audi TT? Coincidence?
What's an Audi? The 500S is still the
King of the road.
And the Benz guys have moved everything to Atlanta and bought the Stadium too,
the Apu at a "Quickie-Mart"
I don't know what an Apu is, but otherwise, a great story.
38k for a hybrid? IDK. I am in the market for one, and I don't mind spending 38K on a car, but honestly, that is almost twice the price of a Prius, which, like them or not, dominate the market for a reason. Nobody else seems to come close to their mileage and comfort.
Apu owner and proprietor of Springfield's Kwik-E-Mart, home of the Squishie and the 9-day-old beef-less hotdog (some of us are Hindus, dank you very much...)
Bob Dylan is not a current big deal in music, or am I just not the demographic at which Audi advertisers are aiming their commercials?
I know all that stuff about "sell the sizzle not the steak", but REALLY. If I were in the market for a plug-in car, I'd like some information about the characteristics of the Audi plug-in. I've never been a huge Dylan fan -- like some of his stuff, not all, and I'd generally rather hear his songs sung by somebody that can sing, but hey that's just me. But even if I thought that Dylan plugging in the electric guitar was the greatest improvement in music since Bach sat down at the organ, why should that make me want to (a) trade in my gasoline powered car for an electric one, or (b) choose Audi as the electric to buy?
. . . now if Audi had some mostly naked girls in the ad that would have sold me completely.
Other Quattro CS disasters.
The Unfortunate Incident of the Brake Fluid An ernest young attendant at the only full-service Exxon station in Warrenton, Virginia topped off my brake fluid with DOT3. The Quattro didn't use brake fluid; it had a unified hydraulic system that operated the brakes and the power steering. The only approved hydraulic fluid was their Audi's own product available for three times the price of anybody's hydraulic fluid at any authorized Porsche/Audi dealer. Result: Ruined steering rack. Cost: $900. I sued the station, but they went Chapter 13 before we came to court.
The Tragedy of the New Brakes The Quattro had oversized vented brake rotors that were about two inches wider than the non-Quattro models' rotors. On a routine service visit an Audi "technician" from Haiti misread a service guide and lathed the rotors too thin. Result: wrapped rotors. Cost to me: $100 tow charge plus $160 labor. The dealership bought the rotors for me ($800), though they never admitted any fault.
When I took my car to be safety/pollution inspected the tech reported that his test had equipment red-flagged the emissions. He suggest adjusting the idle. The alternative was a failed inspection. The idle speed was adjusted via a screw on the throttle body housing. Audi covered the screw with red paint to reveal any tampering, but since the car was now out of warranty I said What the hell. Try it. Adjusting the screw fixed the emissions test, but fatally loosened the screw. A few days later the car would not idle. Whenever the RMPs dropped below 1200 the car stalled. I pulled over and popped the hood. Immediately I noticed a gapping hole where the idle adjustment screw had been, which created a fatal vacuum leak. I plugged the hole with chewing gum, which fixed the stalling problem, but made the car idle much too fast. I visited the local dealership to get a replacement screw. The parts manager said it wasn't a separate part. He said I need a new throttle body. "How much?" sez I. "Twelve hundred dollars plus labor," sez the parts manager. "Fuck you and all who sail in you," sez I on the way out. This crazy problem got fixed rather cheaply in the end. I called an Audi parts dealer called Skokan in New York about a throttle body. His price for a new one wasn't that much cheaper than the dealership, but he had a wrecked Quattro CS which had a broken throttle body on it. Shokan offered to ship that useless mass of cast aluminum to me for $29, then I could salvage any parts I needed myself. So $29 and five business days concluded The Adventure of the Missing Screw.
Chewing gum!! Yikes, be careful.
The neighbor across the street when I was growing up was a Professor of Mechanical Engineering. This was in the early '60's when you loaded up the car, the wife, and the kids to see the USA. The car was a huge Buick Road Master with the three ports in the fender.
He was driving across some desert, and noticed that the gas gauge was dropping fairly fast. He went to evaluate the problem.
He found a small leak in the gas tank. There was no service station in sight, so he fixed it with chewing gum, and carried on.
The gasoline dissolved the chewing gum, and carried it to the cylinders. He ruined the motor.
Ya' know....someone could probably start a blog about automotive horror stories.
Someday, I may tell the story of the gunpowder powered rocket vehicle (pipe bomb with one end open) that added a fourth port to the side of his Buick.
Dylan pitches Chrysler, no? "Is there anything more American than America?", I seem to remember him asking.
mikee -- Dylan himself might not be a big deal in the music industry any more, but the concept of Bob Dylan always is.
Quaestor -- those are awesome stories; thanks.
At least Bob personally didn't seem to have anything to do w/ that 2 & 1/2 minutes of marketing twaddle.
Typo alert: Result: wrapped rotors. Should read: Result: warped rotors.
Safari strikes again!
"You can't import cool." -- Robert Zimmerman
Agree with FissionChips. Either the Audi target market is pretty darned old, or whoever makes the marketing decisions is. Or both.
"I think the first guitar I ever got was an acoustic, but I prefer playing electric now. It has like a different kind of energetic power to it."
Courtnet Barnett - Singer Songwriter
Yeah, that's called ELECTRICTY you drug addled moron.
"Audi wants you to associate its cars with Bob Dylan."
There's something wrong with their mufflers and they're trying to put a positive spin on it?
I visited the local dealership to get a replacement screw. ... "Twelve hundred dollars plus labor,"
My girlfriend had an Audi - they wanted $700 for what amounted to a thick-walled plastic milk carton.
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