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The Persuader
My personal blog, started in 2006. No paid or guest posts, no link sales.
Posts tagged ‘2008’
03.03.2023

Above: The 1966 Alfa Romeo Giulia, the most recent entry to Autocade.
Next week, Autocade will turn 15. I donât expect big editorials extolling its history, mainly because the site has not changed much in principle or appearance since it was first conceived in 2008.
We did a single video under the Autocade name, which my friend Stuart Cowley filmed, edited and directed. But as we both have full-time jobs, it never took off into a series of web videos.
There could be a surprise development from Autocade thatâs actually Amandaâs brainchild, but Iâll have to work out how much time is involved. It looks like the next major addition to the Autocade world will happen in its second 15 years. It wonât be an online magazineâI once registered a domain related to Autocade and stuck a Wordpress installation on it, but nothing came of it, and I gave up the name. Besides, there are plenty of entries already in the online automotive space, and Iâm not interested in being a latecomer.
The original site is getting close to 31 million page views, which I am very happy aboutânot bad for a hobby, spare time site that so many have found some utility from. Thank you, everyone, for your visits and your interestâand big thanks to Nigel Dunn, Keith Adams, Peter Jobes, and my anonymous (at his request) friend for your huge contributions.
Extra thanks to Graham Clayton for being our number-one commenter (when we had Disqus forms running). Iâll be back with a âtraffic reportâ during March, and maybe a hint of what weâre up to for Autocade in 2023.
Tags: 2008, 2023, anniversary, Autocade, cars, friends, JY&A Media, publishing Posted in business, cars, interests, internet, media, New Zealand, publishing, UK, USA | No Comments »
30.06.2021
After 13 years, it was time to facelift the Lucire licensing website.
Itâs a very familiar template, similar to what we used for JY&A Consulting a few months back. The home page copy we already had from a flier that we created late last year that Susan Ninan and I worked on; and the âAboutâ pageâs text was mostly carried over (though it still needs 13 years of updates).
I am surprised the old site still netted us enquiries but it was looking extremely dated. The 2008 design was positively archĂŚological in internet terms. However, Iâm not sure if the new one is particularly interesting, because the web design convention is to do something very simple at the moment.
The old one was created with consideration for those who didnât have mouse wheels, whereas these days it seems to be all right, even fashionable, to scroll away.
Hopefully everything is more fit for purpose though, and the links are more useful. Weâve kept the code very light.
And if you do want to license an international fashion magazine with an independent, authentic and engaged firm, you know where to come.


Above: The old and the new Lucire licensing sitesâto my eyes, the old appears more creative, even in 2021.
Tags: 2000s, 2008, 2020s, 2021, design, fashion magazine, history, JY&A Media, licensing, Lucire, publishing, trends, web design Posted in design, internet, marketing, media, publishing, technology | No Comments »
25.06.2021
When I was in NYC in the summer of 2001, I stood at a Lower Manhattan bakery trying to order a cream cheese bagel for a friend of mine. The proprietor was busy making something. After close to five minutesâ waiting the counter, I asked if I could be served. His response: âYou want to fight me?â My sense is that cream cheese bagels have upset Americans for decades. This is merely part of the trend.

Note: I am not sure if the words cream and cheese mean the same thing there.
Poking around the bowels of Facebook, I found this. Apparently I had invited some contacts to join Facebook. It’s probably time to delete them, since they were smart enough not to respond.

I’ve no desire to allow them to create shadow profiles, because of something I did in 2007â8 before I knew shadow profiles even existed. Luckily I do not have Messenger, though I believe I briefly downloaded it in 2012 before deleting it soon after. I must have been careful to not let it import any contacts.
Tags: 2001, 2007, 2008, 2012, 2021, culture, Facebook, Florida, Manhattan, Miami, New York, NY, privacy, Twitter, USA Posted in culture, USA | No Comments »
31.12.2020

One thing about not posting to NewTumbl is I’ve nowhere convenient to put quotations I’ve found. Maybe they have to go here as well. Back when I started this blog in 2006â15 years ago, since it was in JanuaryâI did make some very short posts, so it’s not out of keeping. (I realize the timestamp is in GMT, but it’s coming up to midday on January 1, 2021 here.)
Here’s one from Robert Reich, and I think for the most part US readers will agree, regardless of their political stripes.
In 2008, Wall Street nearly destroyed the economy. The Street got bailed out while millions of Americans lost their jobs, savings, and homes. Yet not no major Wall Street executive ever went to jail.
In more recent years, top executives of Purdue Pharmaceuticals, along with the Sackler family, knew the dangers of OxyContin but did nothing. Executives at Wells Fargo Bank pushed bank employees to defraud customers. Executives at Boeing hid the results of tests showing its 737 Max Jetliner was unsafe. Police chiefs across America looked the other way as police under their command repeatedly killed innocent Black Americans.
Yet here, too, those responsible have got away with it.
I did offer these quotations with little or no commentary at NewTumbl and Tumblr.
What came up with the above was a Twitter exchange with a netizen in the US, and how some places still touted three- to four-day shipping times when I argued that it was obviousâespecially if you had been looking at the COVID positivity rates that their government officials relied onâthat these were BS. And that Amazon (revenue exceeding US$100 milliard in the fourth quarter of 2020) and Apple (profit at c. US$100 milliard for the 12 months ending September 30) might just be rich enough to hire an employee to do the calculations and correlate them with delaysâwe are not talking particularly complicated maths here, and we have had a lot of 2020 data to go on. But they would rather save a few bob and lie to consumers: it’s a choice they have made.
The conclusion I sadly had to draw was that businesses there can lie with impunity, because they’ve observed that there are no real consequences. The famous examples are all too clear from Reich’s quotation, where the people get a raw dealâeven losing their lives.
Tags: 2008, 2020, Amazon, Apple, Big Tech, Boeing, corruption, deception, finance, law, pharmaceuticals, racism, Robert Reich, Twitter, USA, Wells Fargo Posted in business, culture, internet, politics, USA | No Comments »
11.03.2020

I did say Iâd blog when Autocade hit 4,100 models, which it did yesterday. Proof that the hundredth milestones arenât planned: the model was the Changan Zhixiang (éˇĺŽĺżçż or éżĺŽĺżçż, depending on which script system you prefer) of 2008, a.k.a. Changan Z-Shine. A less than stellar car with a disappointingly assembled interior, but it did have one thing many period mainland Chinese cars lacked: a self-developed engine.
It shows the nationâs quick progress. The Zhixiang was Changanâs (back then, weâd have written Changâan) first effort in the C-segment, after making microvans, then A-, then B-segment cars, with quick progress between each. The Changan Eado, the companyâs current C-segment sedan, might still be rather derivative, but the pace of improvement is still impressive.
After 1949 through to the late 1970s, Chinese cars in the PRC were few in number, with mass production not really considered. The first post-revolution cars had panels that were hand-beaten to the right shape in labour-intensive methods. Some of those cars borrowed heavily from western ones. Then came licensed manufacture (Jeep Cherokee, Peugeot 504, the Daihatsu Charade at Tianjin) as well as clones (CitroĂŤn Visa, SEAT Ibiza). By the 1990s some of these licensed vehicles had been adapted and facelifted locally. The PRC started the new century with a mixture of all of the above, but by the dawn of the 2010s, most Chinese press frowned upon clones and praised originality, and the next decade was spent measuring how quickly the local manufacturers were closing the gap with foreign cars. Itâs even regarded that some models have surpassed the foreign competition and joint-venture partnersâ offerings now. Style-wise, the Landwind Rongyao succeeds the companyâs (and Ford affiliateâs) Range Rover Evoque clone, the X7, with a body designed by GFG Style (thatâs Giorgetto and Fabrizio Giugiaro, the first production car credited to the father-and-son teamâs new firm) and chassis tuned at MIRA. The Roewe RX5 Max is, in terms of quality, technology, and even dynamics, more than a match for the Honda CR-Vâa sign of things to come, once we get past viral outbreaks. Styling-wise, it lacks the flair of the Rongyao, but everything else measures up.
But the Zhixiang was over a decade before these. Changan did the right thing by having an original, contemporary body, and it was shedding Chinese manufacturersâ reliance on Mitsubishiâs and othersâ engines. To think that was merely 12 years ago, the same year Autocade started.
Tags: 2000s, 2008, 2010s, 2019, car design, car industry, cars, Changan, China, design, Fabrizio Giugiaro, GFG Style, Giorgetto Giugiaro, history, Landwind, licensing, Red China, Roewe, SAIC Posted in business, cars, China, design, interests | No Comments »
07.03.2020

Autocade turns 12 today, as it’s now March 8 here in New Zealand. From zero models to 4,093 (the Hyundai Avante XD is the latest); and as I write this sentence, itâs netted 18,683,611 page views. Just four years ago this month, it had only managed eight million.
Just this week, I added two public notes of thanks to Carfolio, with whom weâve done a bit of an information swap, on the site. Admittedly that swap has been in our favour. The first fruits of that were four Toyota models. It shows that we motorheads have been able to find each other and work on a spirit of cooperation, to make the web more informative and useful.
Itâs a far cry from those early days when the site got its first few models; it took four months to get to 500. The timing wasn’t great, considering the Global Financial Crisis was beginning to happen around us, and more people were being sucked in to Facebook. As a hobby, I carried on, because it was a satisfying use of my time.
Iâll leave a stats’ breakdown when we get to 19 million views, and no doubt Iâll do another post when we get to 4,100 models.
Stuart Cowley, who shot the first Autocade video with me fronting it, has a few more up his sleeve that heâll edit in due course. Iâm open to seeing what the future will bring for the brand.
Having one independent web publication thatâs survived 22 years and counting, and another thatâs now 12, is perhaps quite rare these days.
Since I began writing this post, Autocade has gained another 73 page views.
Iâm grateful for all the support out thereâthank you for all your views, feedback, generosity, information, and your shared love of cars.
Tags: 2008, 2020, anniversary, Autocade, car, car industry, cars, encyclopĂŚdia, JY&A Media, publishing Posted in business, cars, internet, media, publishing | 1 Comment »
07.03.2018

Above: Autocade can be hard workâand sometimes you have to put up less exciting vehicles, like the 2001â7 Chrysler Town & Country, for it to be a useful resource.
March 8, 2018 marks 10 years of Autocade.
Iâve told the story before on this blog and elsewhere, about how the site came to beâannoyed by the inaccuracies and fictions of Wikipedia (who said the masses would be smart enough to get rid of the mistakes?), I took a leaf out of the late Michael Sedgwickâs book and created a wiki that had brief summaries of each model, the same way Sedgwick had structured his guides. I received an emailed threat from a well known British publisher (Iâm looking at you, Haymarket, and as predicted in my reply, your thoughts proved to be totally baseless) when we started, and 12½ million page views later, weâre on 3,628 models (I think we finished the first day on 12), with our page on the Ford Fiesta Mk VII leading the count (other than the home page).
Autocade began as a wiki but with so many bots trying to sign up, I closed off those registrations. There have really been about six contributors to the site, all told: myself and Keith Adams for the entries, Peter Jobes and Nigel Dunn for the tech, and two members of the public who offered copy; one fed it in directly back in the day when we were still allowing wiki modifications. I thank everyone for their contributions.
A few years ago, I began running into people online who used Autocade but didnât know I was behind it; it was very pleasing to see that it had become helpful to others. It also pleased me tremendously to see it referenced in Wikipedia, not always 100 per cent correctly, but as Autocade is the more accurate site on cars, this is the right way round.
When a New Zealand magazine reviewed us, the editor noted that there were omissions, including his own car, a Mitsubishi Galant. Back then we were probably on 1,000 models, maybe fewer. All the Galants are now up, but Autocade remains a work in progress. The pace of adding pages has declined as life gets busierâeach one takes, on average, 20 minutes to research and write. You wouldnât think so from the brevity, but I want it to be accurate. Iâm not perfect, which is why the pages get changed and updated: the stats say weâre running on 3¡1 edits per page.
But it looks like weâre covering enough for Autocade to be a reasonably useful resource for the internet public, especially some of the more obscure side notes in motoring history. China has proved a challenge because of the need to translate a lot of texts, and donât think that my ethnicity is a great help. The US, believe it or not, has been difficult, because of the need to calculate cubic capacities accurately in metric (I opted to get it right to the cubic centimetre, not litres). However, it is an exciting time to be charting the course of automotive history, and because there are still so many gaps from the past that need to be filled, I have the chance to compare old and new and see how things have moved on even in my four-and-a-half decades on Earth.
Since Sedgwick had done guides up to 1970, and paper references have been excellent taking us through the modern motor carâs history, I arbitrarily decided that Autocade would focus on 1970 and on. There are some exceptions, especially when model lines go back before 1970 and it would be a disservice to omit the earlier marks. But I wanted it to coincide roughly with my lifetime, so I could at least provide some commentary about how the vehicle was perceived at the time of launch. And the â70s were a fascinating time to be watching the motor industry: those nations that were confident through most of the 20th century with the largest players (the US and UK) found themselves struggling, wondering how the Japanese, making scooters and motorcycles just decades before, were beating them with better quality and reliability. That decadeâs Japanese cars are fascinating to study, and in Japan itself there is plenty of nostalgia for them now; you can see their evolution into more internationally styled product, rather than pastiches of othersâ, come the 1980s and on. The rise of Korea, Spain, China, India, Turkey, México and other countries as car-exporting nations has also been fascinating to watch. When Autocade started, Australia still had a domestic mass-produced car industry, Chrysler was still owned by Americans, and GM still had a portfolio of brands that included Pontiac and Saturn.
I even used to go to one of the image galleries and, as many cars are listed by year, let the mouse scroll down the page. You can see periods grouped by certain colours, a sign of how cars both follow and establish fashion. There are stylistic trends: the garishness of smog-era US cars and the more logical efficiency of European ones at the same time; smoother designs of the 1980s and 1990s; a creeping fussiness and a concentration on showing the brandâs identity in the 2000s and 2010s. As some of the most noticeable consumer goods on the planet, cars make up a big part of the marketing profession.
The site is large enough that I wouldnât mind seeing an academic look at industry using the data gathered there; and I always thought it could be a useful book as well, bearing in mind that the images would need to be replaced with much higher-resolution fare.
For now, Iâm going to keep on plodding as we commence Autocadeâs second decade. The Salon de Genève has brought forth some exciting débutantes, but then I should get more of the Chrysler Town & Country vans up âŚ
Tags: 2008, 2018, anniversary, Australia, Autocade, cars, China, Chrysler, history, Jack Yan, Japan, JY&A Media, Keith Adams, media, Mediawiki, New Zealand, publishing, trends, USA, Wikipedia Posted in cars, China, culture, design, globalization, India, internet, marketing, media, New Zealand, publishing, technology, UK, USA, Wellington | No Comments »
05.03.2016
I had expected our car encyclopĂŚdia Autocade would reach 8,000,000 page views this month, just before its eighth anniversary. The difference was that this time, I was there last Monday GMT (the small hours of Tuesday in New Zealand) to witness the numbers tick overâalmost.
Usually, I find out about the milestones ex post facto, but happened to pop by the websiteâs statsâ page when it was within the last hundred before hitting 8,000,000âand took the below screen shot where the viewing numbers had reached 8,000,001 (I also saw 7,999,999; and no, these special admin pages are not counted, so my refreshing didnât contribute to the rise).

The site is on 3,344 individual entries (thereâs one image for each entry, if youâre going by the image excerpt), which is only 86 more than Autocade had when it reached 7,000,000 last October. The rate of viewing is a little greater than it was for the last million: while I’m recording it as five months below, it had only been March for just under two hours in New Zealand. Had Autocade been a venture from anywhere west of Aotearoa, we actually made the milestone on leap day, February 29.
Not bad for a website that has had very little promotion and relies largely on search-engine results. I only set up a Facebook page for it in 2014. Itâs been a labour of love more than anything else.
March 2008: launch
April 2011: 1,000,000 page views (three years for first million)
March 2012: 2,000,000 page views (11 months for second million)
May 2013: 3,000,000 page views (14 months for third million)
January 2014: 4,000,000 page views (eight months for fourth million)
September 2014: 5,000,000 page views (eight months for fifth million)
May 2015: 6,000,000 page views (eight months for sixth million)
October 2015: 7,000,000 page views (five months for seventh million)
March 2016: 8,000,000 page views (five months for eighth million)
I started the site because I was fed up with Wikipedia and its endless errors on its car pagesâIâve written elsewhere about the sheer fictions there. Autocade would not have Wikiality, and everything is checked, where possible, with period sources, and not exclusively online ones. The concept itself came from a car guide written by the late Michael Sedgwick, though our content is all original, and subject to copyright; and thereâs a separate story to tell there, too.
I acknowledge there are still gaps on the site, but as we grow it, weâll plug them. At the same time, some very obscure models are there, and Autocade sometimes proves to be the only online source about them. A good part of the South African motor industry is covered with material not found elsewhere, and Autocade is sometimes one of the better-ranked English-language resources on Chinese cars.
Iâd love to see the viewing rate increase even further: itâd be great to reach 10,000,000 before the end of 2016. It might just happen if the viewing rate increases at present levels, and we get more pages up. Fellow motorheads, please keep popping by.
Tags: 2008, 2016, Autocade, car industry, cars, Jack Yan, JY&A Media, marketing, media, publishing, Wikipedia Posted in business, cars, China, interests, marketing, New Zealand, publishing | 3 Comments »
02.12.2014
I was curious tonight to see the rate of growth of entries on Autocade. It hasnât changed greatly. The initial 500 didnât take long, but, since then, every 500 entries have taken 18 months to be added. However, the trafďŹc has grown at a much faster rate.
March 2008: launch
July 2008: 500 (four months for ďŹrst 500)
December 2009: 1,000 (17 months for second 500)
May 2011: 1,500 (17 months for third 500)
December 2012: 2,000 (19 months for fourth 500)
June 2014: 2,500 (18 months for ďŹfth 500)
March 2008: launch
April 2011: 1,000,000 page views
March 2012: 2,000,000 page views
May 2013: 3,000,000 page views
January 2014: 4,000,000 page views
September 2014: 5,000,000 page views
Weâre now sitting on 5,317,738 page views, which means weâre doing roughly 100,000 a month.
Tags: 2008, 2014, cars, JY&A Media, publishing, statistics Posted in cars, media, New Zealand, publishing | No Comments »
30.11.2013
Interesting to spot this link. When I started Autocade in 2008, I approached Haymarket, letting them know I was a Classic and Sportscar reader since it began in the 1980s, and I was inspired by the Sedgwick guides that it ran then. Autocade was to be an online cyclopĂŚdia that would use a brief format, with original research, of course, but I would welcome the input of C&SC if it so wished.
As I recall, the response from the boss was condescending. His staff were so busy there was no way they could ever contribute to such a venture, he told me. That was before the threat: if any part of the Sedgwick guides wound up in Autocade, there would be a lawsuit.
All this in a single reply, to someone who told him he was a customer since 1983.
This link illustrates that the first part of his response was complete bollocks, as the guide now exists online, and has done so for nearly three years. In fact, C&SC solicits input from the public. They have taken the Autocade approach.
And seriously, did he think another publisher would be stupid enough to reproduce the guides online for all to see?
No, Haymarket has not broken the law: anyone is free to do a guide with their own, original content, and they are free to solicit outside help.
Nor do I particularly mind seeing this guide online (right down to the ‘most recently updated’ column) because it helps with researchâanything is better than the inaccuracies, assumptions and rumours that pass for facts in Wikipedia. There’s only a tiny bit of overlap with Autocade in terms of the eras covered, so the two sites complement one another.
But it smacks of gross hypocrisy.
Not only are they doing something they said they would never do because they lacked the resources, they threatened a loyal customer when they had no basis to do so.
In essence: Haymarket Publishing once threatened me with a lawsuit for proposing an idea, one which they have since adopted. Yes, it really is that simple.
I lost a lot of respect for a certain Haymarket big-wig that day, someone whose work I had read and admired for decades. Itâs surprising to think he hadnât learned some basic rules in business.
Brands are not steered by market dominance or big corporate mouths. They are, instead, steered by everyday people, who you should work with, rather than make unwarranted threats against.
Oh, after reassuring the chap that Autocade would have only original content (after all, he may have not known that New Zealanders are generally law-abiding), I never received an apology for his unprofessional behaviour.
Even a note of thanks now would be nice for borrowing an idea they were presented with five years ago.
Tags: 2008, Autocade, branding, business, cars, customer service, Haymarket, JY&A Media, law, media, New Zealand, publishing, UK Posted in branding, business, cars, internet, media, New Zealand, publishing, UK | 3 Comments »
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