Car Keys with Robin Leech and Jay de Marcken – January 26, 2026

He is Robin Leach. He is Jada Markin. This is Car Keys.

Good morning to our listeners for this week's show of Car Keys with Jada Markin, Robin Leach.

We are doing this show

on the day after the main big weekend, biggest weekend snowstorm to hit our neck of the woods and

maybe the country in some time, some time is anything over ten years in my book.

What it made for me, because I love snowstorms, so listeners don't worry about it.

It won't hang around,

is I like to go driving in snowstorms, and I had some fun yesterday, which was a Sunday for

timing, and

the roads where I am located, which is in New Canaan, Connecticut for this show, were

being cleaned periodically. I would say

it seemed the way the snow was falling, that at least three or four hours was going between

reclaiming or re-clearing roads they had cleared to three or four hours ago before they came back.

I fortunately was able to go out in the dark.

It was snowing.

The roads had not been cleared in a little while, so I got to play in the snow

aside from the driveway, which is at my location quite long from the

town road, and was not plowed

after the first plowing several hours before I went out. So the

snow was deepest in the driveway and deepest for this particular

part of the discussion was at least ten inches. Now ten inches is

above ground clearance for many sedan-like cars, and in some cases even the smaller SUV cars.

And when it's deeper than

allowing solid ground clearance other than the weight of the vehicle getting its tires to the ground,

it can sometimes become a problem for people who don't know how to deal with it.

Did you ever make it to the road? Did you ever make it to the road?

If yes, I made it down fine.

Momentum is one of the key things you want to do if you get your vehicle moving in snow that might be deeper than the ground clearance,

the easy ground clearance. It's not just a flat, plain ground clearance situation because the underbelly of a vehicle has a lot of things

that are underneath that are not necessarily

evenly

located at a straight height from front to rear of the vehicle. So you can be dragging underbody components through the snow, which you can see

after you've gone along the road and you come back and see your tracks, sort of like skiing.

However, I got down to the town roads and I would say there were four to six inches on most of the roads I

chose to make my little

20-minute run around to see how it was and have fun. You can drive very nicely in

unplowed snow if you know what you're doing.

I personally, in a storm like we've had this last weekend,

like the snow

unaffected by

the pre-treating of the roads that the states and the towns were doing before the storm started.

This is why I like this. It's very simple. When you pre-treat a road, so the

snow that's falling on it

and accumulating hits the pre-treated roads,

there's a chemical reaction between the treatment and the snow which turns it,

which melts it and therefore turns the underbody of the snow falling into a relatively slick and slippery

substance. And that can be more dangerous to deal with if you go into a slide

or get into trouble because you're going too fast or even breaking with anti-lock brakes.

Then it could be if you were just

driving through virgin snow with no chemical effect at the bottom of the snow piling up.

That being said, all the roads around that the town and state

were treated in many cases before the snow. So this chemical effect was

readily apparent

underneath the snow that I was driving in

on my little 20-minute experiment. But what I also had problems with was visibility because it was snowing quite hard during my

adventurous drive.

The dry snow that was falling does not

accumulate on your windshield once you're moving. It just blows over.

I do not recommend using your defroster.

It's a snow is not sticking to the windshield because if you use a defroster and you melt the snow,

it freezes.

It can freeze on the windshield and even though you have windshield wipers going, you may not be able to use your

washers, which you probably don't want to do.

Because you would rather have the snow blow over the windshield so you can see. But

with snow falling and high beams on,

you can have a blind snow,

a pretty blinding view of the road ahead.

Fortunately, nobody else was on the roads that I was on and very fortunately, I did not meet a snow plow

coming at me because they were essentially clearing the side roads and these are town roads

straight down the middle.

They were not trying to do one lane,

the driving lane that they were going, direction that they were going in because the snow was so deep.

The best thing to do was to make a

a more or less single lane of drivable

conditions on these roads

before they would come back and redo them later on and once the storm comes, they come and do both lanes

and push the snow to the sides. If you only have one cleared lane

to be able to drive in, you do not want to necessarily have to be pulling over into the uncloud portion of that because that could pull you

even further off the road and possibly get you stuck

if you were to have to break and come to a halt and possibly get yourself pan-kicked on top of deep snow.

In any event, I had an uneventful adventure.

I love going out in the snow and that is my story and I stick with it.

I don't recommend that most listeners probably or maybe many many most listeners know how to drive and sew to our show, but

it's not something that I would recommend

going out,

especially when the state directive and maybe the town directors are to keep your

cars off the road during this storm, which was very severe by anything

memorable in in in the recent memory in our area.

Jay, you have any comments?

Yeah, I was going to ask you if you had gotten a memo from DOT not to get on the road if you didn't have to, but I guess

the memo to DOT was yes, that was a memo that was out. That was directed

not to you

or to commercial tractor trailers and if anybody's been watching the recent news stories of the

massive piles up on the interstates all around our country wherever there was a snowstorm

it was the wisest

memo that any DOT

operation could recommend and I guess it was probably followed.

So, let me...

You know, that that doesn't apply to the commercial

pickup truck snow plower tire people or if it does

they're not going to get arrested if they're found out there because they have to do driveways

and they had to maintain driveways at the same time pattern as the towns needed to maintain to keep the roadways open because

the driveway that I'm

currently located at has not been plowed since the storm and it has got an easy

eight to ten inches of

not only the powder snow that fell earlier, but we ended up with a little bit of a sleet-like finish

to the storm. It must have been warm up on top starting out as rain

and by the time it came down on the ground it was you could hear it falling

and it compacted the snow

so that maybe the ten inches was reduced to eight, but that snow was much more dense

and much more problematical for even getting out of a driveway parking area that you might be in

than just the fluffy snow that was occurring much of the time before the ending part.

So, in the meantime, I was watching YouTube videos and inside and

it just so happened that this week was the rally of Monte Carlo. It's road racing

European style. I didn't watch much of it, but I saw bits and pieces

and it takes place in the Alps

at this time of year in January and often times-

So it's under the Swiss Alps?

Well, French, Swiss, Monte Carlo, French Alps, right?

Yeah. Anyway, so, you know, snowy roads, but what was actually mind-blowing to me is that

the road conditions were very, very tough and these guys are obviously racing

and on open roads and I saw a few clips of cars going off the road and into ditches and falling

in one case, like, you know, almost 10, 15 feet down an embankment

and either, you know, people, spectators who are all along the race course,

you know, just run down, pick up the car, push it up and the car gets back on the road and starts

racing and my thought was just simply this is how much stronger cars have become over the last

20, 30, 40 years. I mean, these are cars that are falling, you know, upside down, rolling over

and they can sustain their weight and, you know, a few times over their weight being on their roof.

Do they have special reinforcement, Jay, to their structure or is it basically-

Sure, they do. They always have had, you know, structural reinforcement and roll bars,

but still, overall, cars are just so much stronger than they were. The windshields don't even break.

They fall, you know, granted there's snow on the ground but they're falling 10, 15 feet down in a

ditch and the windshield is not even broken. The car is upside down. That's extraordinary.

And we're just so lucky to be driving cars that are, again, so much, you know, safer than they were

20, 30, 40 years ago. That's my only comment. So moving on.

Yeah, let's move on to your list of best-selling cars of 25.

Best-selling cars of 25. Well, remember when the every year Ford and Toyota were in this

and Honda were in this three-way battle to have the best-selling car and it always hovered in the

400,000 to 500,000 units. Yeah, I remember that. And it was the Honda Accord, the Toyota Camry,

and the Ford Taurus. Nobody remembers what a Ford Taurus is, but the Camry and the Honda Accord,

the Toyota Camry and the Honda Accord, are still alive and kicking and still selling,

not in the numbers that they used to, but they're still selling. I don't have the numbers right

in front of me, but I think it was like in the 300,000 unit range. Well, was it because your list

is currently starting from the 25 going down? I haven't gotten to the Camry and or the Honda's,

is between 100,000 to 200,000 units for a surprising number of the 25 best-selling vehicles,

which tells you how spread out the sales have become, which you may want to comment further on.

But you're right, a decade ago or maybe longer, they were in the $300,000 to $500,000 vehicle

range, competing only with the Camry and the Accord. And then now I'm looking at the list and

the Honda Civic and the Toyota Corolla, which are smaller sedans, right? But like you've always

mentioned, the size of these cars just keeps growing. Honda Civic 238,000, Toyota Corolla 248,000.

So those numbers are pretty steady. Toyota Camry, 316,000 units sold.

Just for a sedan to let me interrupt you, that is supposedly extinct from or becoming extinct as a

designable model to buy by the users of cars of SUV drivers and the like. And the Camry has been

going against this train and caused the Ford Fusion to disappear, has caused the Chevy.

What was the Chevy model, Jay? It just recently disappeared from the production line, leaving

Hyundai Sonata the equivalent. The Malibu. The Malibu, right. The key of,

the key equivalent to the Hyundai and something like, I think there's a Honda sedan that matches

up to the Camry size. Is there not above the Accord? I can't remember what it is, but...

No, the Accord is the... The biggest one. Okay, but anyway, they're still out there selling.

People still want sedans, apparently. Yes. Enough to keep those models on the road.

So the best selling vehicles, and for once, car and driver has now combined,

or they have been maybe for the last couple of years, they do combine cars, SUVs and trucks,

as opposed to having separate lists. The big hitters in the passenger vehicles,

let's call it this way. So cars and SUVs, you're looking at the CR-V Honda, 400,000 units,

and the Toyota RAV4, 479,000 units. So those are the two best selling passenger vehicles

in the country. And the Toyota RAV4, I think, is the best selling vehicle in the world

right now, and it just passed the Tesla Y. Of course, here in the US, pickup trucks are still

the best selling vehicles. And truth be told, they are used for

personal purposes as far as as well as work vehicles. So I guess there's a reason for that.

But yeah, so that's the list. There's a separate list for EVs, and obviously EV sales are way,

way off compared to global sales. The only two vehicles to make it on the

20 top selling vehicles are I think the Tesla 3 and the Tesla Y. Every other electric vehicle

is way, way off that mark. But speaking of EVs, and I know we get back to that, and you and I

both talk about things we don't know much about because neither one of us drives one. But

a couple of things. Volvo is coming out with a pretty cool SUV, and we talked about it briefly,

the EX60. But it's not going to be cheap. We're talking 50, 60, 70,000 dollars for a pretty cool

vehicle with decent range anywhere between 300 and 400 miles range. But what I'm really following

is that, and I just read an article about that. It makes a lot of sense. Look for used EVs, electric

vehicles, to be quite affordable in 2026. And no used, you said? Used. Three year old vehicles.

And the reason for that in the article was mentioning this is a lot of these electric vehicles

two, three, four years ago were leased. And all those leases are coming up, and so all these

cars are in the used car market. Correct. And so now you're looking at three year old 2023 cars

that are getting on the market, whether it be Tesla, Mercedes, even Lucid, the first Lucid.

And the hunch is that there are going to be deals to be made. And you can see it already.

It's just, and I think that's the way to go. If you're not going to get any tax credits,

because there's no more tax credits on EVs, go for a used EV.

Absolutely right. I agree. Jay, along this side, there's one of the things that

people should understand, and you know more about it than either of the two of us, as far as

the longevity factor of batteries in electric cars. Going back several years when you were

telling me some Tesla batteries were going into 200,000 miles without needing replacement,

I think you said. But I would not be too disturbed by buying a used a three-year-old

electric vehicle based on a concern, possibly, of the battery life situation. Because I think

battery lives in electric cars, for the most part, are pretty greatly more reliable than the

warranty that they seem to come with suggests they might only be. I can say that my 2013

Camry Hybrid came with a warranty for the battery, for the hybrid battery part of it,

as a lifetime. There has been no problem with the battery, and it's now got 140,000 miles on it

in climbing, and it's now, what, 11 years old or 12 years old. That in itself tells you in the

Sonata that that battery for the hybrid system, which is not the same as a full electric battery

system, is going strong without needing replacement. I wouldn't worry about the battery situation

unless you get a car with a battery pack, which you're never going to be able to know in advance

anyways. No, I wouldn't worry about it at all. Okay. So something else, in all of this political

turmoil that we are living in, Canada has just announced that they were dropping tariffs on

Chinese electric vehicles from 100% to 6%. Effective, I'm not quite sure if it's immediately,

but it's a pretty sure thing. And that is going to change the landscape.

Yes, and obviously it means that we are going to see

Chinese electric vehicles in China. It's going to take a while, but not that long for Chinese

dealerships to pop up around the country. But I think we're going to see them, and we're going

to see smaller EVs. And that's a trend we're seeing in Europe too. Renault is doing very well

with their Renault 5 and their new Twingo coming out. And I still believe that small electric

vehicles going around town vehicles is really the smartest use of an electric vehicle.

And unfortunately, and I'm going from, I know I'm going from... I know we are going.

Chevrolet Bolt. Exactly, exactly. Chevrolet Bolt. They just redesigned it. It's better than ever.

And they allegedly are discontinuing it after this model year or 2017, Jay.

No, yeah, 2027. A one-year resurgence listeners, if you're a potential bolt buyer,

you had better go out and place an order at your nearest Chevrolet dealer, because

it may become extinct for not a very good reason, in my opinion.

Exactly. And the reason is that I forget which car, but some...

They're going to put a gasoline fossil fuel vehicle in its place in the assembly line,

and they can't seem to make... I would think they'd figure out how they could have both assembly

lines running, because I think the bolt is a catch for anybody who wants to buy a small

electric vehicle, run about. Yep. Totally agree. Yep. We've agreed on that for a long time.

We sure have. I got it. I read this latest thing that just came across the waves in the last,

the radio waves and the TV waves in the last week or so, about GM's stopping production of the

bolt at the end of whatever it is this year or in the next. Yeah. I have a little Q&A for you,

Robin, following an article I just read not too long ago. The features you never use in your car.

Yeah. Okay. So I'm going to throw them at you and you tell me what you use and don't use. Okay.

In the order and... And some of them are features that don't exist in any of your cars, I believe,

probably, but that you've used in other cars. Lane departure intervention.

Lane departure intervention comes in a couple of ways.

The intervention that is used on several of my cars is, of course, the blind spot

or side mirror warnings that go off if you start to change lanes and you can't see anything

theoretically outside of the inside car rear view mirror or even the outside side mirror.

That is one of the best inventions that they made. I hope it's standard in every car that's

currently being produced. Probably. Because you can lose a tractor trailer in a blind spot on your

vehicle. I don't know how it gets lost, but it can get lost and the blind spot detection system

is a savior. Yes, but lane departure intervention is when you get the little kick in the steering

wheel, either the vibration or the car pulling back into the lane. How do you feel about that?

Well, yes, I do and because there are a couple of Audi vehicles that are in my

ownership now and the steering wheel does indeed vibrate if you don't have your hands on it

or even if you have your hands on it after one or two successful lane departure avoidant signals

going forward. That is probably a good feature and beyond that, I don't have any vehicles that

might have even a more advanced system if you know of it. Head up displays, head up displays.

What do you think? I don't have them and I must say I have driven a few rental cars with them.

I find them interesting in the dark, more interesting in the dark to see than I think I

care about seeing them in the daytime. For listeners who don't know that, they actually

display the speed you're going at. They may display a couple of other things now. They've added

some features to it and you don't have to look down at your speedometer to see how fast you're

going because it's displayed in your visual view of the road in a three-dimensional sort of like

light situation. I think that's probably okay, but I don't know whether it's annoying or not.

I personally don't like it and I certainly don't like it in the Range Rover because Range Rover

has it non-aligned. It's not straight in front of you, so if you're looking at the road,

you're looking through the steering wheel and your heads up display is to your side. I can't

remember if it's left or right. Oh dear, okay. You're segueing me into the next topic I want to

bring in after you finish with your Range Rover complaint because I think you're- I'm done with it.

I'm done. You're done with it. Okay. Listeners, some of the newer cars, the newest cars, what seems

to be getting bigger in the dashboard are full dashboard-wide touchscreen displays of all the

things you're supposed to be able to control in your car. I know I am very critical of the redesign

of the Audi Q5 vehicle from 24 to 25 and apparently whether it's going to continue in 26. I don't know,

but I recently was able to have a Q5, 25 Q5 for a weekend and it's got a long screen. I think it's

18 inches wide from in front of the driver across the console and everything that you're supposed

to do to control your car is on that screen and if that sounded distraction to be gotten rid of,

I don't know what the engineers think the benefits of it are. Okay. And recently,

I just- I want to just add one more thing. A real estate friend of mine just- he's had five Q5s

and he just leased a 25 Q5 and he absolutely hates it for exactly the same reason I have just said

to the listeners on this show. He says he wish he hadn't gotten it, but he didn't know it in the

test drive. So if you're going to go out and get a car with a large touchscreen and do a test drive

besides turning out of a dealership and going four rides to get back to the dealership in

probably 10 minutes or less, which doesn't give you a chance to look at all this technology that's

in there, you should be paying attention to the convenience aspect of a touchscreen or not.

Okay, Robin, enough of the rant. If you can't see a 24-inch wide screen the first time you go in a

car, there's something- you've got a bigger problem than that. And by the way-

You don't go- you don't go to turn the radio on, you don't go to turn the heated seats on,

you don't go to do all sorts of things, all of which had controls on a dash that you could

tactilely touch. So okay, enough with the rant. Back to the Volvo EX60. You will have

voice activated controls for all of that. And furthermore, your interactions-

your voice activation will be controlled or by Google AI so that, you know, even if you're not

better than what you need or want. No, this is serious. I agree. I know and maybe the younger

people, if they can afford these cars with all this technology and that's another question,

will love it. But I can suggest to you that users or owners- you may be an exception, Jen, you can

say so- on our age group are not going to be as appealing of these technologies. I know voice

control is there. It's there on the outees, it's there on my jeeps. I can- if I remember how to

do it and do it, I can actually, yes, tune my radio with my voice in my Jeep Cherokees.

And if it will respond because if it understands the way I want to do it versus the way the

engineers put it into the system, it is fine. And I can go from FM to Sirius XM to AM

and the station number if I know the station number. But the other thing about that is when

you rent a car in, let's say, Las Vegas, you don't know what the station numbers are so you

can't do anything. So it's the old radio that you can have a dial on it better so you can scroll

through the screen on the radio and as opposed to trying to- how do you voice control finding a

radio station in Las Vegas? I haven't been to Vegas in 25 years. Well, okay, Beverly Hills,

Miami, whatever. This is what's going on with the technology listeners. So we chuckled and

you may like it and it's so, so be it. But you can listen to your hosts on this station

squabble about whether it's good or bad or in between. I'd like to return to your 25 best-selling

cars that Motor Trend did last year in another show, Jay. So until next time, listeners,

enjoy the snow, drive safely if the roads are not perfectly dry and clear and we will see you

on another show of Car Keys with Jay DeMarken and Robin Leach. Car Keys with Robin Leach and

Jay DeMarken is produced at the facilities of WHDD91.9 FM, RobinhoodRadio.com, Sharon Connecticut.

Car Keys with Robin Leech and Jay de Marcken – January 26, 2026

About this episode

Monte Carlo Rally

Chevrolet Monte Carlo

structural reinforcement

roll bars

Toyota Camry

Honda Accord

Ford Taurus

Honda Civic

Toyota Corolla

Ford Fusion

Chevrolet Malibu

Hyundai Sonata

Honda Crv Honda

Toyota RAV4

EV

Tesla Model 3

Tesla Model Y

electric vehicle (EV)

Volvo EX60

Tesla

Lucid

Mercedes

battery longevity

battery life

hybrid battery

warranty

Renault Twingo

Renault 5

blind spot monitoring

head-up display

Land Rover Range Rover

touchscreen displays

Audi Q5

Jeep Cherokee

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