Is EAG gone

This is a very accurate analysis of the history and market. Art was not doing anything innovative.

 

When I was CEO we had around 50 cars. Art was storing most of them in unairconditioned storage units for long periods of time. His workflow was a joke. He was blowing off customers for 2+ years. I doubt he has many cars to work on at the moment. He seems to have a lot of time on is hands lately.

 

He was not the first to do swaps. Art's best skill by far is running scams. His legal record backs that up. Conversions just happened to be the scam opportunity that fell into his lap.

 

Was your judgment recent and in the Dallas area? It's hard to remember all of the details. Didn't you get a default judgment because he never showed up to court?

 

There is no doubt EAG pioneered this entire conversion category, and it looks like soon there will be another reason to consider a nice second-hand Maserati GranTurismo;
https://www.instagram.com/p/DJuGSYSu3kx/

 

They were I think first to market without using factory parts... I mean it's that counts for pioneer in your book then I can't really dispute that

For me I think being first only matters of you do it decently well, if the organization didn't blow up then yes I would agree with you they were a pioneer, but being first and then out running your own capabilities is kinda a "meh" achievement... Like finishing your first marathon at 55 then immediately dying of a heart attack

 

This reminds me of Teddy Roosevelt's The Man in the Arena;
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

 

That parallel really does Teddy a disservice...

 

I dunno I'm a bit conflicted

In general I would probably agree with you... But especially in the modern world there's so much emphasis on" first"even if it's **** that it's a bit harder to give credit to those who just rush to be first with an unfinished product

I can't speak to every part of the kit but the fact that Dr. S or whatever their company is called now went through the trouble of getting the shifter chassis cast and eag went with some janky ass multi piece bolted together abomination is very telling

I mean if that's all you had for a prototype, that's fine, but these were going on customer cars. Is there anything functionality wrong with it? No, those bolts are heavy duty enough and torque down enough it would be solid, but it is janky and no way cost effective. It screams of a rush job to be first. THAT isn't something to be rewarded because something like that is so easy to solve but want so it leads one to question what other areas had short cuts been taken.

Being first IS important but I think we would all agree that there are only so many sacrifices that should be accepted for that accolade before your say.... Woah there buddy maybe slow down a bit and make sure all the Is are dotted and Ts crossed before taking customer money and assets into your custody. It screams of trying to lock down as many customers as possible to corner the market before you even have a solid product. The subsequent financial failure of the company only confirms this hypothesis

 

The whole thing about the janky bolted together frame also shows there was like no attempt to optimize the product before launching. There's no way a piece like that is more cost effective than getting a casting made. It feels like they had a cnc machine so they just wanted to utilize as much scrap as possible or something. "For want of a nail, the horse shoe was lost, for want of a horse shoe the house was lost.... The war was lost" type BS....or...they had a hammer so every problem looked like a nail. It just screams "this was poorly managed"

 

I can attest that anyone that did the Trev adjustment at the same time as the conversion would have their mind blown. I did it after and really makes the car drive so much more proper.

I agree that they over engineered some of the parts and one video even said they had some crazy multi-axis CNC machine. EAG should of never moved to a larger shop using other peoples' money.

Covid times did weird stuff for peloton and others. "Like the first two thirds of McHammer behind the music the money never runs out"

 

I was wondering if you are still drinking the Kool-Aid. Nice and second had Maserati are two words that rarely belong together. If Art still thinks converting Maserati GT will be profitable he is delusional. The only GT that can be "easily" converted are the early 2008 models before the auto gearbox was changed to the double clutch system. My market analyses has been consistent. There are probably just a few clean 2008 cars with a good ownership history that are worth converting. How many people will pay $30k to convert a $20k 2008 Mas Gt? I bet less than 10. If somehow he manages to get 10 new suckers to give him money he would still wouldn't make meaningful money. He would actually probably lose money because he is horrible at finishing projects and the dev cost would kill the profits.

I design and manufacture tons of parts. Here are some quick numbers based on my extensive experience. Keep in mind I helped develop a lot of similar parts already.
1. Initial design would cost $10-20k
2. Initial prototype parts assuming the kit needs 50 parts would run about $30k,
3. First parts will need to be changed several times until everything fits. That's another $10-20k for design edits and another $10-30k another batch of parts.
4. Assuming the second set of parts works (highly unlikely) you need to work on the computers, it can be done but it would take many months. Art would need to pay upfront for that development or work out a deal to pay per flash. Paying per flash is unlikely because the market cap is so low the software development wouldn't be worth a slow pay off. So, $10-20k for software maybe.
5. I am not going to bother estimating the cost of storing the car, purchasable hardware, install labor.
6. If you manufacture some of the parts in house you need to pay for tooling and fixtures. I buy a lot of both. For 30 parts you are at $5-0k

That total is $75-130k. for easy math lets call it $100k in dev.

Now you need to build the kits. Even if you make 60% of the kit in-house your cost is going to be at least $7k per. Assume install is a couple days (Art's history is up to a year install time) You are looking at $3k in labor. Flash the computer, another $1-3k. That means an approximate cost of $13k to install a kit.
Now lets spread out the dev cost across 10 kits. That is another $10k per kit. Now your 10 kit cost is $23k per kit. That leaves $7k to cover rent, admin labor, taxes, shop disposables, insurance (doubt he has any), ongoing legal troubles, and default judgments. Not a chance in hell he makes any money on converting Mas Gt.

Art is almost certainly selling incomplete projects. Bill, how long did he promise you that you would get the fist converted 599? He told that same lie to dozens of people.

 

We remember the Wright brothers not because they were the first to fly, we remember them because they were the first to not die in the landing

 

I get the feeling that a converted maserati GT will end up costing more than a converted 599 after a couple years of you factor in random **** that breaks and subsequent residual value

 

because he got it kick started vs a bunch of key board cowboys w grand ideas…. He did it…. In the entrepreneurial world that is everything…. Then the market ran with it. Love him or hate him he cranked these things out and got the train rolling. That deserves acknowledgement. I’m no proxy… just an enthusiast that remembers the early days. Heck I think he used parts of my car for molds…. While it was in for service….

 

Ok let me ask you this… would these kits have hit the market if Eag had not done the original work?

hard to answer…. But folks took the idea and ran with it,

anyway I was just thinking back nostalgically about those crazy times.

I’m glad I did not get any meaningful skin in that game…

and the market is pretty efficient… the poor operators get washout out and replaced w good business practices…

 

EAG fixed my 360's CEL when nobody else could.

 

Agreed. I didn't even know conversions were a thing until EAG converted a Scuderia several years back. The software still wasn't fully worked out but I thought, man that's cool. As someone that never considered a car with an F1 gearbox, I thought I could potentially be a buyer if they could iron out the issues. Love em or hate em, EAG spawned companies like Macchina Motorwerks, Modena Lucerna and Cambio Manuale. And with people like 360Trev on the software side, these conversions are virtually flawless.

 

Yes, basically. I think we filed in Austin courts. Sorry I do not have exact details. Attorney has it and I was going to find a chaser to stay on it for the next 10 years and renew every two. Probably a waste of time, but who knows ??

 

If Art pioneered anything, whatever that is, was at the expense of many to all of his early clients. Ever so many of them were screwed over in so many ways.

So any credit he deserves, if any, is well outweighed by the means which he used to get there.

Which is why this thread continues in controversial fashion.

If you were one of those people who got burned badly, it is very difficult to appreciate anything that he did that can be considered progress in the field.

Lorenzo completed a conversion, documented here on FCHAT, long before Art even started. That would have inevitably led to this market’s existence.

I for one, wish Cambio Manuale got there first. George’s business and product is what this market should have been from the start.

 

Do you have a link to that conversion thread(s)? Would be an interesting read. I obviously don't know the details, but to say that one owner's one off? conversion would have inevitably lead to the creation of a market maybe a stretch. What is clear is that after EAG created multiple, reproducible kits, conversion have become commonplace.
I don't have any skin in the game, either. I wouldn't touch an EAG kit with a 10 foot pole (I have a Modena Lucerna kit in my CS) given the issues I've heard about the hardware and, of course, the company. But to say they didn't kickstart the conversion craze is likely due more to their business practices rather than their actual contribution to the industry.

 

I wasn't necessarily looking to go back and forth, just share my thoughts, but for clarification:

I was only interested in an F430 if I could get a stick, I saw Lorenzo's thread and that prompted me that this was possible and to look further (and I found EAG), at that point there was already great in interest in conversions. I believe the 'drive' would have produced the market eventually.

I didn't say this wasn't the case and said 'I wish CM got there first', kind of a 'Once Upon a Time in Hollywood' situation

Not sure if you are referring to my post, I didn't say they didn't, I just said I thought they did a gruesome job doing it as far as their clients were concerned

This is the thread that started it all for me:
https://www.ferrarichat.com/forum/posts/145385332/

Of note, in other conversion threads, it mentions a couple 360 conversions done even prior to this one. Exoticars USA was also doing them in Nov 2020 as an example of a pro shop doing it.

 

Eag was the first to do conversions on a large scale, I'll give them that. That's about all I'm willing to give them. They were in the right place at the right time. No doubt about that.

What still blows my mind is how they convinced the Ferrari community that their product was so amazingly engineered and superior to OEM when even Hellen Keller can see all of the shortcuts they took on the shifter housing design to cut costs. It's really remarkable.

The idea of a manual swap was far from unheard of though. Hell, when I bought my car in 2017 my buddy and I talked about doing one the day I picked it up. That was before I heard of what Lorenzo had done and documented so well. All they really had to do was remanufacture some of the parts.

I couldn't stand their arrogance and still can't. I knew eventually it would catch up to them. Even when I started my conversion, they were the only ones selling kits and I decided to put together my own instead of deal with them. My friend and I remanufactured the parts that were NLA and that we couldn't find reproductions of at the time and made our own conversions which we each clocked thousands of miles on. There are just much better options now.

 

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EAG, now has EAG Canada. He has approached numerous euro shops be be "official installers" but wants a huge percentage. So much so, it's not worth it. I take all the risk, he gets all the money? Fugg that noise.