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AD #4002 - Xiaomi 1500 HP Porsche-Killer Priced At $73,000; Mercedes Says AI to Replace Car Designers; Tavares Walks Away with Only $36.4 Mi

AD #4002 - Xiaomi 1500 HP Porsche-Killer Priced At $73,000; Mercedes Says AI to Replace Car Designers; Tavares Walks Away with Only $36.4 Mi

Autoline Daily Feb 28, 2025 10 min
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About this episode

Tesla moves forward with robotaxi permits in California amid competition from Waymo and Amazon's Zoox, signaling a potential boom in autonomous ride services. Mercedes-Benz's design chief predicts AI will replace car designers by 2035, highlighting rapid advances in automotive design technology. Xiaomi enters the electric performance market with its 1500 HP SU7 Ultra, priced competitively at $73,000, quickly hitting sales targets. BMW shifts to dedicated EV production plants to meet growing demand, while Ford abandons its EV regional hub strategy due to dealer pushback. Warwick Acoustics introduces energy-efficient electrostatic speakers to boost EV range. The episode also polls listeners on the future of paddle shifters in modern cars.

Topics: robotaxi services autonomous vehicles ai in car design xiaomi electric suv bmw ev production ford ev sales strategy ev range technology paddle shifters automotive industry trends executive compensation
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Speaker 1: This is Outline Daily, the show dedicated to enthusiasts of the global automotive industry. Tesla is taking the first steps
to get approval to operate its robotaxi service in California.
Elon Musk previously said it hoped to start offering robotaxi rides in California by the end of the year, while Tesla is supposed to start the service in Austin, Texas in June. The company actually applied for the California permit
in November, but Bloomberg broke the news yesterday, and this story comes at a time when the company desperately needs something to get it back on track. Its sales and
profits have dropped significantly and its stock prices down sharply. Meanwhile,
Waimo posted on x yesterday that it's now providing two hundred thousand paid rides a week with its robotaxis in Phoenix, LA and San Francisco. It says that represents twenty times
growth in less than two years, and it's soon going to start operating and Austin, Atlanta, and Miami. Then sometime
later this year, Zeukes, which is owned by Amazon, is supposed to start paid Robotaxi rides in Las Vegas and also has plans to operate in San Francisco, Austin, and Miami, so the robotaxi business could be about to really take off.
Speaker 2: Carlos Tavares is getting.
Speaker 1: A twenty four million dollar pay package as he walks away from the mess that he left at Stalantis. That's
a big drop from the thirty nine million he was paid in twenty twenty three. But Tavares is also getting
another twelve point four million dollars as part of his severance package, bringing his total compensation to thirty six point four million. Even so, as far as big time CEO
severance packages go, that's not much of a payout. For example,
when Mark Fields left Ford as CEO in twenty seventeen, his severance package was fifty million dollars, or four times what Tavara has got. President Trump reaffirmed his plan to
slap twenty five percent tariffs on Mexico and Canada next Tuesday.
He also announced an additional ten percent tariff on China in addition to the ten percent tariff that was imposed at the beginning of the month. Trump says he's moving
forward with the tariffs because the countries aren't doing a sufficient job of curbing fentanyl from entering the US. As
we've reported, the tariffs on Canada and Mexico could increase vehicle prices by as much as ten thousand dollars.
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Speaker 1: Automotive designers will be obsolete by twenty thirty five.
Speaker 2: And that's not just me saying that.
Speaker 1: It comes directly from the Chief of Design at Mercedes, Benz Gordon Wagner. He says the company's been working with
artificial intelligence right now, ninety nine percent of what it spits out is crap, and then his team has to sift through to find what's good. But the AI is
getting better every day, which is why Wagner says, quote, I think in ten years maybe most of design will be done by AI, and it will make designers obsolete.
And he's not just talking about low level designers.
Speaker 2: Quote. My successor will.
Speaker 1: Be a machine and it will be much cheaper than my salary. So far, it looks like Shaumi has done
a pretty good job of going from making cell phones to also building electric cars, and its first performance model, a tricked out version of its SU seven today and called the Ultra, will start hitting customer hands in China in March or April.
Speaker 2: While the presale price.
Speaker 1: Was listed at nearly one hundred and twelve thousand dollars, base versions of the SU seven Ultra are much cheaper.
They start at about seventy three thousand dollars, but even at that price you still get the tri motor set up, which produces over fifteen hundred horse power and helps accelerate the car from zero to one hundred kilometers an hour in roughly two seconds. Shall Mei set a sales target
of ten thousand units for the SU seven Ultra this year, and it hit that goal within the first two hours of the model going on sale. It will be interesting
to see if this car can buck the trend of most performance models, which typically sell pretty well at first, but once everyone that wants one has one, sales start to fall off, at least until the next new model comes out.
Speaker 2: It looks like BMW has.
Speaker 1: Extreme confidence in its upcoming new class next generation of beevs.
The automaker announced that it's shifting its EV production strategy from plants that build multiple powertrains to plants dedicated to building fully electric vehicles. All of BMW's production locations are
able to build ices, p haves and pure electrics on a single line, but the company expects a quote significant increase in the market shares of beev's by the end of the day decade, so it's planning to convert its plants in Hungary and its main plant in Munich to fully electric factories.
Speaker 2: The plant in Hungary will.
Speaker 1: Start building new class vehicles by the end of this year, and the Munich plant will be fully electric in twenty twenty seven. BMW's plant in South Carolina will start building
beev's alongside other powertrains in twenty twenty six, and its plant in Mexico will do the same the following year.
Ford is scrapping a plan to store and distribute evs through regional hubs. The automaker launched the pilot program last
year with the F one to fifty Lightning to help reduce expenses for dealers and to make the company more competitive with automakers that use a direct sales model.
Speaker 2: These hubs or EV.
Speaker 1: Centers were loaded with vehicles instead of on dealer lots, and then were shipped to stores within two weeks of being ordered. But by doing this, the evs were still
owned by Ford and not the dealer, so this meant the vehicle were only listed on Ford's website and not on popular third party sites that many consumers visit, and because of that, dealers never got on board with the scheme, so Ford is reverting back to its traditional sales process.
A company called Warwick Acoustics out of the UK is applying high end headphone technology to car speakers, all with the promise of increasing EV range. It's using what's called
an electrostatic speaker, which features a super thin diaphragm between two staters and when the audio signal comes in the diaphragm vibrates between the staters, creating sound. Not only are
these speakers much smaller, noise canceling tack allows them to create sound zones within a car. The diaphragm comes to
rest much faster than a typical speaker cone, which cuts down on buzzes. They're lighter and they use a lot
less power, which is why Warwick says they can increase ev range. The company claims weight and power use can
be cut by up to ninety percent compared to a typical car audio system. Okay, we've got another poll and
we want you to help the auto industry decide what it should do with paddle shifters. They first started appearing
in mass market cars a little over a decade ago, mainly when automakers started introducing DCTs, or dual clutch transmissions.
Paddle shifters were also marketed to enthusiasts as a way to shift a car themselves, since manual transmissions were slowly going away. But the evidence suggests that most drivers who
have paddle shifters never use them, and now automakers are wondering if they should get rid of them as a way to cut costs. So what would your advice be
to automakers? One I love them and use them a lot,
so keep them. Two I rarely use them but want
them when I need them. Three I never use them,
get rid of them. And four who cares?
Speaker 2: I drive a stick? You can vote by.
Speaker 1: Going to the postab on the Autoline Network homepage on YouTube and we'll post it in the transcript for today's show on the Autoline website and on Monday we'll review the results and we'll make sure the automakers hear what you have to say. And that brings us to the
end of this week. I want to take a second
to acknowledge again that we hit show number four thousand on Wednesday, and to say another thank you to all of you that have tuned in.
Speaker 2: So thanks and have a great weekend.
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