Why the Hoonigan $1.2B BANKRUPTCY Situation is CRAZY 

The slammed 70s silver Mercedes, classy, cool, different.

Seeing Ryan Anderson in Sun Uva Digger tear up the burnyard

Old yard DT was the best stuff back in the day. Just the randomness of it, people showing up and tearing up that small ass space.

not my favorite, but its my first gymkhana video. it was when ken block was hooning his WRX STI hatch around some abandoned warehouse. this was around '08-'09 (i was 7-8 years old at the time). and that's how i founded out about hoonigan

Ken Block Mustang

I think its much simpler then that. They wanted to get their money and didn't care how they destroyed the brands. Suck all the money out and sell off all the assets and let the chips fall where they may. Let the banks eat it.

@@norberthofer5830 I think having working there, Vin knows what he is talking about. Not to discredit your opinion though.

I think it all comes back to the idea that corporations and businesses don't understand how RU-vid works. Sure. maybe this series doesn't get as much views as another but that's not the point. It's not all about the dollar signs. I work for an auto parts company that never understood that from the start. The former studio manager was much more understanding about RU-vid but if they tried something new and the first video didn't get as many views as the others the higher-ups axed it quick, they didn't even give it a chance to grow on viewers. He left before I started and was eventually replaced with someone who had a TV background, but that isn't always the same. Now the channel has millions of subscribers but gets only a couple thousand views on most videos for the first month. The OG subscribers dropped like flies.

I work for wp and called this last year. Nobody wants to admit it but realtruck probly looking to buy.

We(the audience) loved the OG Hoonigan guys and the vibe yall had.

I've been watching you guys for years and I can't imagine how it would feel for you and the boys to see all of this go down.

Yep, that’s what Private Equity firms do, buy up struggling businesses, do Nothing, and end up failing the company in the process.

Exactly. This is far from mismanagement. Its by design.

Yup cash in on brand name while minimizing investment.

​@conchobar its happening with everything so that there can only be one. Its not about loosing money now they will gain all the money back in the end

@@deep_drift But..... in this case, the "private equity firm" was the struggling business! They bought Hoonigan only for the IP name, nothing else, they were already in a deep hole and wanted to use the Hoonigan name to get out of said hole, it backfired.

It sux that hoonigan got sold in the first place.

I never knew hoonigan was a company, what did they sell? I thought it was a yt channel related to ken block

Ken never should've sold it

@@devlintaylor9520it became a company. Ken sold it

@@devlintaylor9520 Professional youtube channels are basically all registered company´s. They dont necessarily sell tangible products, but merch is exactly that, and sponsors in videos is another way to keep the company healthy among some other options. Views alone is usually not enough for even a basic income, espacially for company´s like hoonigan with (pre wheel pros)dozens of employees, cars and a huge space to maintain. Thatdudeinblue is Davids company for example, and the name its probably trademarked to protect himself against potential imposters. There are many other examples of company´s that sell nothing tangible, just their time/advice, like therapists, consultants etc.

Kikawa

Micah had an epic manline in his E46. Will never forget that one.

cant forget circlejerks :D

Wow how did you watch a 13 minute video and write all that in the 8 minutes the vids been up while not understanding a single thing that was said

​@@jcat96 life must be hard being this much of a loser

@@jcat96 Probably watched the other 50+ videos out there that said the same thing over a month ago - Including the Donut and Hoonigan staff that left and all posted their "why we left" videos. Hoonigan and Donut started to suck over a year ago, most of us don't need the Dude in Blue to tell us what we already knew.

Dude... wheel pros rebranded as hoonigan last year, amd it's technically wheel pros that's going bankrupt.

People in the comments here acting like industry experts always cracks me up 😅

this is my exact thoughts as well.

Not against hoonigan. Against their own business and the market crashed with other car related markets.

This entire transformation started a year ago and was all planned out. Companies don't go bankrupt over night.

Exactly. Either that or they're gonna pump and dump or asset strip.

@@poolhalljunkie9 That's what happened to sears and k-mart by the same guy. They didn't "not adapt" to walmart or amazon, they were purposely sabotaged. That's what happened to red lobster too.

Everything popular ends up getting played out everything runs it's course.

Unless you have the old school shirts chase would draw those are still bad ass and old school

Was evening for me. Feels like so long ago

@@yota8325Been goin downhill since they changed from midnight video release to 8am release. Was the first sign that that there was some money cruncher trying to optimize the fun out of it…

@@Thee_Sinner yeah when it wasn’t in my inbox first thing in the morning (UK Time) I knew sumn was up

Pretty nuts…

Blame 4WheelParts

It's actually 1.8bill

Money washing

@@StoneRiderM3 Most likely...

That can't happen. You can't recreate the magic that manline was without all of the people who were there, at that moment, in that place in their lives, the exact way that they were in their personalities. You can't recreate something like Daily Transmission. It happened. It's over. Let's remember it fondly, and hope that one day we can witness someone else capture their own magic. First it was MotorTrend. Donut. Hoonigan. This isn't just cars either, it's a lot of the big RU-vid content creators that are coming apart at the seams. Gaming channels, tech channels, you name it, so many of them are dropping like flies. This is a deeper issue within RU-vid itself. Google has the rot of a corporation succumbing to entropy.

That’s impossible. The people that gave it life moved on

Thing come. Things go. That's life. The Block family cashed out and rightfully so. They had to move on with their lives and a heap of cash will hep their process of grieving.

I’m curious what’s an example of some of the things you used to like watching from Hoonigan

Doing big gymkhana vids and stuff doesn't work out if the sponsor money is dry as it is now, block was good at scoring those deals but the marketing budgets were larger then too. Wheelpro themselves also would have had a major downturn in sales from the overall downturn.

​​@ChrisDriven they'd have guests on to show off their whips and then shred the yard. All while Darnell/Dan were building the next fun thing to rip of their own. It was just a simple formula that worked for years.

Carwow still going strong though!

Drag racing just doesn’t match the absurdity of people drifting the original (tiny) yard.

Great perspective! Thanks for sharing that. What a crazy time that was.

@@ThatDudeinBlue Thanks David, I appreciate what you do

AIM was the only thing they had left -- but I think you're also underestimating it. It was the social media before social media. It was pre-Myspace social media. _Everyone_ used it, and that made it a homerun product. Once the majority of people buy into a social product and it becomes the default goto... it takes effort to screw it up. Time Warner let it die on the vine. AIM could have been Insta or TikTok... instead it fell into disuse when MySpace and Facebook came in.

I don't recall any of my tech savvy friends using AOL at all back in the day. It may have been a big brand, but most "computer nerds" avoided AOL like the plague. I think it was mostly used by the less-than-tech-savvy masses for access, and I think it's "heyday" was actually prior to the internet being opened up for public access and really taking off. But even before that, most of my computer friends were using local BBS'es and FIDOnet for their online activities rather than AOL. Some may have been using CompuServe in the early days, but even that seemed relatively rare amongst the "nerds" of the time -- most of us had a modem and gravitated to a favorite local BBS or 2 or 3 for access or just ran our own. Weirdly, I can't remember past phone numbers or other tidbits of information that were important to me at one time, but somehow I can remember my BBS's Fidonet address (1:115/858) even though that information is utterly and completely worthless today.

Much like Sears buying K-Mart. As if Sears wasn't dealing with enough already n

Exactly. These companies are run by a bunch of braindead idiots.

Curious to know the first.

@@cs1375 rebranding Twitter to X lol

Maybe it was an attempt to keep the name alive

Sadly, it's non-car people taking control like wamin and transies.

Nobody could have shouldered the weight of Ken's loss to hoonigan. It sucks when your parents pass and leave you something great that you aren't equipped to manage and maintain, and have to let it go, but it happens. She's just a kid, after all.

And it wasnt BBS and Recaro from Japan that had issues but the Euro side.

BBS and Recaro going bankrupt was a certainty the moment when Germany's economy took a dip. They, together with many other german brands were just managing by thanks to germany's aggressive tax cuts and bonuses while on a overall growing economy. The moment the growth slowed, taxes came back and bonuses dried ip. And companies like BBS and Recaro went bust. Not the same thing happening to Hoonigan.

I don’t think lia has been or would be able to do anything for hoonigan. She’s in the f1 academy with williams, racing in nitrocross, pursuing her own goals very separate from hoonigan. She hasn’t been on the channel for quite a while, I don’t think she has any say in the direction of the company

dammit we need a new name for these vehicles, but what? "the new mustang truck, the mustang suv, uh uh how about the mustang racing buttplug!?"

They had to make the Mach E a Mustang to lower the Brands Emissions Levels in order to keep the Proper V8 Mustang Legal for Sale in Europe.

He wouldn't have sold it if he was so passionate about it. It was just another money cow to him.

I mean, he died doing an extreme sport. When you choose that lifestyle, it's honestly bound to happen, sooner or later.

He didn't even do very crazy or dangerous things during his career like Travis Pastrana for example. His stuff was mellow by comparison.

More likely - some generic holding group will buy it and just do nothing with it

That's most car content the Amount of people that can do something cool with a small budget are over shadowed by the 20 that think a cold air intake and ebay exhaust is a build.

​@@TwoDollarGararge fr my charger build videos only get 1k views and its a 23 392 bge swap build

@HansBelphegor builds don't do well they retain a small core audience the first video, getting it running and finishing it at the end do well. A minority wants to see the tedious work of wiring or waiting a week because you got the wrong water pump or the month wait for rebuilt injectors. Most people just want the highlights and the dopamine hit for free.

Ken sold Hoonigan long before he passed away.

The day of the giant conglomerant is over, GE is no more.

“Smarterchild has messaged you”

I still had my aim for email till I was like 21 then I started getting really weird looks on job applications and stuff so I changed it but I’m still using aol mail 🤣

@@dnukem1722 lol good job keeping it so long. The drunken away messages on AIM people had in college were hilarious. Such simpler times.

@@ThatDudeinBlue The OG ChatGPT

bad economy? it's always a bad economy for some one. Record low unemployment and profits for big companies. This isn't because of the economy it is loading a company with debt, pull out the cash and shit can it. Private equity can fuck all the way off.

​@@davesnothere8859You have zero idea what you are talking about.

They refused to drop the quality or futures to Opel level and use standardised GM parts, they apparently continued to develop things despite being told and it didn't add up financially. Volvo had problems when Ford owned them as well, they wanted to use some Ford components and it wasn't up to quality so they had to abandon that idea (not sure if that's why it was sold). Turns out it costs money to develop and manufacture decent quality. 😄

But sometimes you have to take a risk and you lose.Not every business works most fail.

Why are you calling the first one the 'free market?' The free market allows for what you call the 'stupid market.' If you like market economics (I generally do), just use that term. Calling things that flourish in a freer (less regulated) market not 'free market' inadvertently runs cover for these kinds of behaviors. Stuff like what WheelPros did is a part of the endstate of a less-regulated, wealthy investor-owned, market economy where everything is commodified and forced to turn an expected amount of profit.

@@shoryuag please don’t get hung on my words for markets. I’ve seen soooooo many times : some group builds and builds just to sellout to some equity group for a big payout. They wake to find everyone gone, the knowledge base dried up and the workload doubled. Everyone built it, two guys got rich, the business closes. It’s stupid.

Same reason as to why Street Takeovers are so popular, its no longer about car culture itself, rather its mentality of getting clout and this comment shows

@@deep_drift when Car culture started getting popular on social media that’s when it became about clout… car culture used to be an underground thing.. It wasn’t something that was made public.

The culture unirunically died with haggard garage lol its never been the same since

I love 1320video but they really helped start the "clout era" for cars. Everything got way too much too fast. "why is the EPA cracking down???" because you have a hoodstack exhaust off the turbo on your brand new mustang...

Cleet and legitstreetcars are still about reasonable rigs in my opinion. But you are right, most channels are doing crazy supercar rebuilds.

Hopefully you have a good options at getting re-employed. Best wishes bro, unemployment can be tough.

Honestly, the latest stuff Nolan has been doing hasn't been that bad.

Maybe he shouldn't have sold it then.

😂

The explanation your commenting is allllmost what really happens . The owners apparently have to much Liquid CASH AND if you think like Money . An what money would do . Ie if your company has multiple competitors in each market segment.. an if u have the capital an foresight if you can't drown or STARVE, your competitors, you BUY them out . Billionaire's want more more more . Monopoly... But couldn't be seen as a market segment monopoly because *separate brands ie* competition* regardless if their owned under 1 branding marketing etc GLOBAL CORP ....

@@DaVe-iSnOtHoMe.MaN.LemmingsWeB Both happen. Buying out competition is real. Look at Disney, and Then what freedom group did to the gun industry. But some brands (like Gibson) tried to market themselves to non guitar players, and fell on their face. A lot of it is investors not understanding their customers and not marketing to them which causes the companies to take a steep dive. Thankfully though there are finally some trust busting suits being pushed for to break up some of the big tech companies, And the Entertainment industry (like disney, comcast, Sony, ect.) are about break up under their own weight/financial failures. A lot of massive corps are falling apart right now.

A lot of that may depend on Brian Scotto. Hopefully he branches out on his own or goes somewhere that will support him. He was a really big part of what made Hoonigan the way it was.

Hoon died when the accident happened . He never set out what would happen to the business in the event of its SOLE OWNER dying. Ie Accounts frozen, estate lawyers . Then because there wasn't a plan for a situation like this. The bills couldn't get paid . Employee's of over 10 years were promised bi weekly cheqs but how can a dead man sign anything.

Wheel Pros was bought by private equity years ago and then slowly sliced the company down to nothing. It was a great company owned by 2 gentleman living in TX and then it all just went to shit.

The owners of said companies need to stop selling them. They're as much at fault as the companies buying them.

Fast and Furious 3 was the last true car movie, everything after that was a bad action flick with cars in it, the story lines and the stunts just got more and more ridiculous after that. Most of the later movies just defy physics at every turn, suspension of disbelief only get you so far and then it's just cringe worthy.