Chinese EVs North of the Border

If you're a podcast host, listen up this once for you.

My name is Allie Jackson.

I'm the host of Finding Mr. Height,

a dating and relationship podcast

that I've been doing for four years now,

sharing my positive and practical approach to dating

that's built on my own life experience.

And I wanted to share another experience that I've had,

my secret behind monetizing my show.

It's called Red Circle.

And I was just telling my colleague

about how much I love their platform.

With Red Circle,

not only am I getting a seamless hosting experience,

but I also love the support I receive in ad sales.

It's not just typical ad sales either.

It's targeted opportunities based on my show and my life.

And the platform is super simple.

You just set your preferences

and Red Circle matches you with sponsors

that align with your show.

You can vet every opportunity

and their platform gives you great analytics.

More recently too,

my Red Circle team has brought me opportunities

outside of my podcast on social media.

To really augment the podcast partnerships,

bring them full circle.

I just can't recommend them enough.

If you want to give it a try,

go to redcircle.com to get your free trial.

That's redcircle.com for a free trial.

This is episode...

What episode is it?

436.

436 of wheel bearings.

I am Sam of Wool Salmon from Telemetry.

And I am Nicole Wakelin from Top Speed.

And I am Roberto Baldwin from SAE International

and the SAE Automotive Podcast.

Give it a listen.

Outstanding. Is it really you?

Are you there?

Do we have you?

Your audio's here.

We're gonna have you the whole time this week.

I mean, I think so.

Well, I'm also recording locally.

So even if things go horribly wrong

within the system we use,

I still have my audio that I can send to Sam

when things go horribly wrong.

Also, it's probably my fault

because I have about 15 to 20 Chrome windows,

not just tabs.

Within those tabs, there's like billions of little tabs

that also windows open.

Because I'm one of those people who like,

I can't, I will have tabs open for articles

I've written like two weeks ago

because I have so many tabs open

and I haven't gone through and like,

oh wait, this is,

I don't need any of this information anymore.

This article's done.

You're just like me.

I have tabs that have been open for months and months.

I'm the reverse.

Everything, all the tabs are closed unless I need it.

It's not there.

I throw away as soon as I don't,

I have the cleanest, tidiest little desktop and everything.

See, not, I bet your physical desk

is also very clean and tidy.

You don't know me?

Yes, it is.

It's very, very tidy.

When Russ uses it, I get all distraught

because I'm like, I'm sorry,

you move my notepad a half an inch to the right,

dude, put it back where you found it.

Mine is chaos.

There's like note book,

there's all, tons and tons of notebooks

with articles that I'm working on.

There's a keyboard.

There's a MIDI keyboard.

There's an audio recorder,

like a high-end audio recorder.

There's a card for my wife that she made for me.

There's a little, there's an owl.

There's a four track tape recorder,

like cassette tape.

I haven't used this thing in like 20-something years.

It's sitting on my desk.

Oh my gosh.

It's just, it's just chaos.

None of that clutter on my desk.

I have my desk.

Go pros.

I have exactly one piece of clutter I have

that doesn't belong on my desk.

I have an Oswald stuffed animal that my daughter gave me

and he sits there and keeps me.

Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, that's it.

That's a what, Gen 4 iPod?

I got a 40 gigabyte.

What are you gonna do with that?

Do you ever use that, Ronald?

Yeah, I have the charger for it and everything

and I'll plug it in, I'll listen to it.

Cause you listen to music without a thousand,

like it's like a time machine of what I was listening to

when this iPod was out.

I got my, I have a couple of iPods in a drawer

in my office as well.

I got my 7-Eleven watch.

Where the heck did you get a 7-Eleven?

Did you actually buy that at 7-Eleven?

No, you have to order it.

7-Eleven has a whole like,

because they realized that people love 7-Eleven,

especially in Asia.

So they created a whole line of 7-Eleven stuff.

They have watches and clothes.

It's actually really cool stuff.

It's really cool.

But for those, since those of you,

you can't see the video, the 7-Eleven watch,

the only two numbers on the watch are 7 and 11.

And 11.

Well, the other ones are really, really faint.

But it has like, they are.

I can even see them in the picture.

I believe you.

And it glows, and when it glows,

you see the 7 in the background.

Ooh.

I don't know why.

I can't see.

This is a visual gag for an audio podcast.

I apologize, everyone.

All right.

Well, and I want to sincerely apologize

for last week's show when Robbie's audio

for reasons that are remain unknown,

Riverside just stopped recording his audio.

It was transmitting it to us.

We could hear him the entire time

as we were having the conversation.

And you guys could tell from the emails I got.

You know, trying to pick up what we were talking about.

Oh my gosh, we're so sorry.

Responding to Robbie.

Again, I'm 100% sure it was my fault.

And right now, Riverside's only uploaded 1%.

I don't know what's going on.

I've updated Chrome.

Well, but we have recordings now.

So, if Riverside fails us, we have backups for all of us now.

This is never going to happen again.

It seems like everybody record on.

Famous last words.

Yeah, right, famous last words.

Hopefully, never going to happen again.

All right, Nicole, what are you driving?

I am driving, and it's the perfect week

to have a vehicle like this.

I have the Land River Defender Octa,

which feels like I feel like think of Doc Ock

every time I see this, I feel like it should be his car.

I'm like, you call it Octa?

It belongs to Doc Ock.

So, this is, it's crazy, stupid, powerful,

more powerful than a 4.4 liter twin turbo V8, 626 horsepower.

That's not very powerful.

Well, but I mean, it's a big,

it's more power than you need in this thing.

553 pounds.

Wait till we get to some of the stuff

we have later in this rundown.

I know.

So, it's got some oomph.

So, the Octa is also really expensive.

Let's start right off there.

Price is $158,300.

Oh, I felt that in my gut.

I know, you felt that, right?

Like, bam.

Well, what do you guys think the destination is?

$1,200.

$1,100.

Sam wins, but he's way low.

It's $1,850.

Oh, we thought it'd be high.

This is unusual for premium brands,

because premium brands usually don't hide

their price increases in the destination charge.

They just put it right up front,

and here's how much you're going to pay us.

And the funny part of that is, too,

this is $158,300.

Just make it like $1,000 more.

Nobody's spending money at that level,

cares about an extra $1,000 in the sticker.

You know what I mean?

So, this is great, big, fancy, expensive SUV.

We have had snow.

We've had so much snow here.

The snow keeps coming, and they keep saying

it's going to be a dusting of snow.

And last night, our dusting of snow

was enough that my husband was snow-blowing this morning.

There's probably three inches of snow,

and the rain that we're getting today

is going to be half a foot.

So, I have the perfect vehicle to have

when the roads are absolute garbage, which is what they are.

They're just covered in ice and snow and a mess.

You use your little drive mode thing.

You pick the one that has a little snowflake on it.

It just drove like a champ.

It's got plenty of power.

It's really comfortable.

It's a high step in.

So, the downside is if you just step up.

Like, if you have someone like kids,

you have a parent or somebody who has mobility issues.

It's a little tough to step up into.

Once you're in it, though, it's gorgeous.

It's beautiful. It's super comfy.

It has that cool mix of being a luxury car

with all these leather trims and everything,

and beautiful styling, but also being rugged.

It doesn't look like I always think I love Mercedes,

but they look very delicate to me inside.

Like, I'd be afraid to have a kid inside of a Mercedes

because everything is so pretty and fancy and delicate.

This is not a delicate car.

It's like, oh, I got a grr, arg.

And the color on this, what is it called?

Petra Copper.

Oh, God, the color is so cool.

It just looks so neat from the outside.

It's a metallic, but it somehow is sort of a matte kind of a,

like, it's really cool.

I love how this car looks.

You get wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.

You get a charging pad.

You get USB-C charging ports.

You can tow up to 8,200 pounds in there.

It's got great cargo room.

There's 34 cubic feet behind the second row

and 78.8 if you flip the second row down.

I love driving this.

It was super fun and it's very easy and very intuitive.

Oh, and this is really cool.

So on the steering wheel, the little paddle shifters,

the little up and down, they're sort of like clear plastic

with a plus and a minus on them.

At night, they glow.

So the little plus and the minus glow.

It's like the first time I sat in it, I'm like,

oh, that's kind of cool.

It's just completely unnecessary,

but a nice little touch.

Again, you spend $158,300 in a car.

You want it to look kind of nifty

and that makes it look kind of nifty.

I really enjoyed driving this.

I was happy that I got to drive it in the snow

because it proved so stable and handled so well

because the upside to having a heavy, big, great,

big, heavy SUV is that it gets through stuff,

but the downside is when it gets icy,

it's also, it's a lot of weight.

So if you have a lot of momentum,

you're gonna go and go and go.

Yeah, exactly.

So if it doesn't handle the roads well,

it's in some ways worse than driving something smaller,

but this actually was great.

It had no problem handling the snow.

It stayed very composed, didn't get stuck in it.

We'll see how I do in the next six inches of snow.

It looks like snow out there.

It looks scary.

So I thoroughly enjoyed driving this.

I've always been sort of a Land Rover fan.

I love this vehicle.

If I had $158,300, I don't,

but if I had $158,300, this would be on my list.

Even though, Land Rover doesn't have

the most fantabulous reputation

for not needing to be in the shop,

but as we all know, that doesn't matter to me.

They don't typically leave you

with a dead 12-volt battery repeatedly.

They do not.

So, you know, there's that.

It's usually something more expensive.

It's right. It's gonna be like,

this is $5,000 to fix this thing.

But so I really do like it.

And I, you know, this is the biggest burliest

of the defenders.

I think they're, if you go down the line

in the Defender 110, you can start at 63.5.

So I think that's sort of important to note.

Like the Octa's the fanciest.

It's very fancy.

It's very upscale.

It's got all the stuff.

If you want that, and it makes a heck of an impression

as you're driving, but if you want a Defender,

you can get it all the way down to 63.5.

So there's some room in there, depending on what you want.

So it's not like you can't afford a Defender

because they're all over six figures.

You can get one for under six figures.

You don't get some of the bling that you get on this,

but you're still gonna get a fabulous car.

You can still say you're driving a Land Rover,

Range Rover, Defender, like it's the longest title.

Yeah, so overall, I really liked it.

And I'm super psyched that I got this during a snowy week

because I normally get things like this.

And it's like, oh, it's the January thaw.

You don't eat it.

The next week I get a compact hatchback

and we get a nor'easter.

So I'm glad the timing worked out this time

to actually give it a go.

Well, the Defender X that I had in December

when I was out on the West Coast,

you know, that one, you know, that was 96,000,

which still is not cheap, but you know,

that was with the, I think, supercharged V6.

And that was also, you know, really nice.

I liked that one a lot, you know.

So, and I think even if you go with one of the, you know,

like the Defender S, you know, or even, you know,

the X Dynamic SE, you know, which is 75,

that's, you know, for a premium,

really off-road capable SUV.

You know, so I think, you know, Wrangler Bronco,

but, you know, with a lot more luxury than you get in those.

And if you put the right tires on it, you know,

you can basically do pretty much anything

you can do with those vehicles.

Yeah.

So I mean, it's, I've, you know,

I've long been a fan of the Defender.

This makes me more of a fan and wish me,

makes me wish I had 158,300 dollars to spend on one

because it's super fun.

Yeah.

But it's a versatile car.

It's, it's, I, you know, I think it's something worth looking at.

I wouldn't, you know, I just think it's important to think,

to realize that you have a range on this, you know.

It's, it's definitely a vehicle that you've got cheap ones

and you've got stupidly expensive ones.

So she's like, I can't afford one of those, we can.

I mean, you need to have some kind of budget at 63,

but maybe not as out of reach as you think it is.

Well, actually, I think probably the one I,

I might go for if I was buying a Defender

would be the Trophy Edition.

Oh, that's cool.

Sand glow yellow.

How much is the, how much is the Trophy Edition?

That's 87.4.

87.

Okay. So still.

So it's almost half of what the Octa costs.

Right. You could buy two of those.

Yeah. You know, but if, you know, if you,

if you remember the, the Land Rover Trophy

thing that they did back in the 1980s and 90s, you know,

those, you know, they had this yellow, you know,

they were all painted in this yellow finish.

And they, they did these annual adventures, you know,

they got, you know, serious off-road people

and went to all kinds of crazy places

for the Land Rover Trophy.

And so, you know, they've now got the Trophy Edition,

you know, which is basically that concept, you know,

in those days they were doing it not with Defenders,

but with the first generation discoveries.

And so, and actually, I think originally with,

even with Range Rovers, the first years were with Range Rovers

before they got, you know, crazy luxury

and then went to discoveries.

And they have the Defender Trophy Edition,

which is inspired by those Land Rover Trophy vehicles

from the, the 80s and 90s.

Yep. So there we go.

All right.

Cool. Well, it's a, definitely sounds like a good time

to have, have a Land Rover this week.

Yes. It's the perfect, it's a perfect week.

Yeah. I saw in my newsfeed this morning for some,

I don't know why it brought up a weather story about Boston,

but you know, I guess they're expecting like nine inches

in Boston today.

I'm a little nervous because when they say it's like,

this one, they said it was a dusting,

we were probably about three inches of snow.

This other one like, well, it's, it's not going to be anything.

Oh, you guys, it's probably going to be an inch to,

oh, you know what, you might get four,

oh, we're at a half a foot.

So I feel like every time I walk away and I look again,

the forecast goes up, which either means we're going to get

nothing or we're going to get absolutely clobbered.

So I don't know, we'll see what it is tomorrow.

Well, this week, you know, on Wednesday,

you were here in Detroit, Nicole.

My Lord. For the Detroit Auto Show.

I was.

And there wasn't really any snow in the forecast for that day.

And by the time we left Huntington Place,

there was several inches of snow on the ground.

I mean, it came in, you know, it was overcast,

but it wasn't, it wasn't looking like it was going to be a snowstorm.

It was, I was actually flying back after that out of Detroit,

back to LA to drive the Kia K4 hatchback.

And my flight got, I changed flight.

So I still get out the same night because my original flight coming

in was diverted to Columbus, Ohio, which is chilling in Columbus.

I'm like, that's concerning.

So I switched to another flight.

My original flight, they quote,

delayed it to the following morning at 9 a.m.

That's when it took off.

That's that's when it got from Columbus to Detroit.

When it got, I guess, from finally got from Columbus to Detroit

and then took everybody who remained on that flight, poor people to LA the next morning.

So I was very glad that I that I decided to change flights.

Otherwise, I would have missed the the Kia drive altogether.

Have you ever searched for yourself online?

I do it because in the work I do as an industry analyst and journalist,

I have to maintain my credibility and can't afford to have it damaged

by bad actors that are abusing my data.

You'd be surprised and upset about what you can find about yourself online.

Your phone number, home address, even details about your family are out there,

whether you agreed to it or not.

That's because data brokers are collecting and selling your information

to marketers, scammers and basically anyone willing to pay.

It's the reason robocallers know your name and why ads seem to track you across every screen

or a fights back.

They remove your personal data from broker sites and keep it off

or also lets alerts you fast.

If your information shows up in a breach or on the dark web,

but or does more than just cleaning up your data from brokers.

It's a full suite of digital security tools that protects every part of your life online

or gives you a VPN to stay private, anti virus to block threats

and a password manager to keep your login safe and spam call protection to cut off the scammers

or also scans the dark web for your most sensitive information,

like your social security number, bank logins and passwords

and notifies you instantly if they're exposed.

And if your identity is ever stolen, you're backed up by up to five million dollars

in insurance and a 24 seven US based fraud support to help you recover it quickly.

Other services charge about the same, but they only cover one or two areas.

With aura, you get it all data broker removal, credit and identity monitoring,

device protection and fraud support, all in one simple app.

Ora cleans up what's already out there, protects what isn't and puts you back in control.

Right now, you can try aura free for 14 days when you visit aura.com slash remove.

That's enough time for aura to start removing your personal information from data broker sites.

Sign up today at aura.com slash remove and get the peace of mind

that your privacy, identity and finances are safeguarded.

That's a u r a dot com slash remove.

Certain terms apply. See the site for details.

Did you know you can support wheel bearings directly?

Head to patreon.com slash wheel bearings media and you can become a patron today.

Your contributions will help fund the platforms and tools we use to bring the podcast to you.

And exclusives and improvements are already on the way.

Thanks to your generosity.

So if you want to be part of an automotive podcast like no other,

head to patreon.com slash wheel bearings media.

We've updated the wheel bearings merch store.

And now there's a whole bunch of new choices, new colors, new styles,

t shirts, sweatshirts, hoodies, hats, mugs, travel mugs,

stickers, aprons, tote bags, you name it.

Get your wheel bearings merch at shop dot wheel bearings dot media.

Go check it out.

That's shop dot wheel bearings dot media.

Well, well, the the vehicle that I had that I drove to the auto show

into some several other events this past week was the Porsche McCann Electric 4S.

So it's the first time I've had a portion in my driveway in many, many years.

And I really enjoyed it.

So the the McCann is is Porsche's entry level SUV.

This fits in down below the below the the Cayenne.

And it's relatively compact, not too small, but more more on the compact size.

And the, you know, as as is the, you know, typical of Porsche,

they have, you know, about sixty three thousand variations of it,

including five, five different electric variants from the base

McCann Electric that starts at eighty thousand three hundred dollars.

The McCann four and that's a rear wheel drive version.

Then they've got the McCann four electric than the four S the GTS and the turbo.

And those go from three hundred and fifty five horsepower with that

rear drive single motor version up to six hundred and thirty horsepower with the turbo.

The four S is in the middle of the range.

So with the over boost power with launch control,

you have about five hundred and nine horsepower,

which for a vehicle this size is more than horsepower.

Yeah, it'll do it'll do zero to sixty and under four seconds, which is which is quite good.

The the base power set up, you know, that you get all the time is four hundred and forty two horsepower.

And like I said, there's the over boost mode that will briefly pump it up to five hundred

and nine horsepower and six hundred and four foot pounds of torque when you use the over boost.

So that's that's a lot.

It's it's a very quick vehicle.

I like the size, you know, it's like I say, it's fairly compact,

but it will still hold four adults reasonably comfortably.

The back seat isn't huge, but you know, I could sit behind myself, you know, five, ten, five, eleven.

And I can sit behind myself.

It's got about nineteen cubic feet of cargo space in the back, which again,

not the hugest for a vehicle of this type.

But it also has, even with the dual motor all wheel drive version,

it still has a two and a half foot, two and a half cubic foot frunk as well.

That is you can you can use the but you don't have to go inside the vehicle like you do on, say, a Mustang Mach-E.

To pop the front, you can do it from the key fob.

And it's a it's a power lid on there.

And so that's big enough to hold, you know, a couple of decent sized duffel bags, a couple of backpacks.

You can put your charging cables in there and assorted other stuff.

You know, a couple of bags of groceries will fit in there.

So it's you know, you get some decent sized storage up front.

And one of the events that I went to, they had Valley Parking there.

And so instead of leaving my backpack inside the vehicle, I just, you know, I put it in the frunk.

So it was out of sight and out of mind.

The the one that I had was finished in the frozen blue metallic, which is kind of a pale

little bit maybe a little bit lighter than a typical Robin's egg blue, but you know, kind of a more pale blue color,

which when it was clean, which was not for very long, it was for like the first day or two that I had it.

And that's, you know, as soon as it as soon as it arrived, I took it out and got it photographed before the weather turned nasty.

And we were in one of our brief warm spells that we've had this month here in here in Michigan when when I got it.

And so the, you know, when I photographed it, there was no snow on the ground.

And then within a couple of days, we started getting some snow.

And then on Wednesday for the auto show, it was a heavy snow day.

And so the Macan, you know, was equipped with the usual array of driver assist features.

And as I was driving from Detroit back to Ypsilanti, within about 10 miles or so, I got

the alert coming up on the cluster screen, you know, assist features unavailable, please clean your sensors.

And it wasn't the camera behind the windshield that was the problem.

It was all the stuff in the front.

And when I got home and got out, you could just there was this like caked probably almost half inch thick layer of ice

across the the radar sensor and the other sensors in the front in the front fascia

and the you know, covering the headlamps and everything.

So fortunately, it was still daylight hours when I was driving it, because otherwise I would have had basically no light from the from the lights.

No problem. No big deal. It's OK.

Yeah. Fortunately, they did deliver the car on a set of snow tires.

It was on Pirelli Scorpion winter two tires.

They have several available when you when you go to configure a Macon, they have wheels and wheel and tire combinations ranging from

including 20, 21 and 22 inches in diameter.

This Macon had twenty ones on it.

So the midsize and you can actually when you order the car, you can order it with a winter wheel and tire package.

So you can actually get the same wheels, you know, so you can you can get two sets of the same wheels.

And, you know, if you are someone that switches out tires a couple times a year, it's handy to have an extra set of wheels.

So the the winter wheel and tire package were to go here.

Let's see the 21 inch set with the same wheels.

These are the 21 inch Macon design wheels.

So a set of four wheels and four winter tires.

Seven thousand twenty two dollars.

Oh, yeah, that's Porsche money, though.

Exactly. Yes, you will.

When you buy a Porsche, you will you will pay.

And it's funny, you know, for this is one of the rare instances where I did not get a

car with the car, but going through and going through the configurator and building it up.

You know, so they've got lots of colors available on this.

You know, so there's the basic white and black that you can get for free.

And then everything else costs extra.

The frozen blue metallic is thirteen hundred dollars.

They've got the legends colors, which includes the oak green metallic neo, which looks fabulous for twenty six hundred dollars.

And then they have paint to sample.

So you can bring a sample of literally anything to your dealer.

And they will match the color and paint the car to that exact same color.

That is a thirteen thousand eight hundred and seventy dollar option.

Wow. Yeah.

I mean, you have to make the paint and the paint is only going to be used once and blah, blah, blah.

So yeah, you know, you're talking, you know, maybe three or four gallons of paint.

You know, when you go to Lowe's and you take a color sample, you know, they'll do the color matching.

It's, you know, they don't charge you anything extra to do the color match.

But fourteen thousand dollars.

But, you know, again, it's not so much because they have to make the paint, but because they have, you know, it's they're basically going to be hand painting this thing.

They're going to hand paint the body shell rather than going through the regular paint process at the factory.

Let's see. What other crazy option prices we got here?

Oh, yeah, you can also get your wheels painted in various colors.

There's there's front fascia accessories.

So you can you can get there's an off road design package for the front fascia.

And keep in mind, this is not an off road vehicle.

This is very much a street SUV.

But you can get an off road, you know, the exclusive manufacturer off road design package, which gives you a lower bumper area.

That's kind of ridges.

It looks kind of like a skid plate, but it's very much not a skid plate.

So do not take this off road.

Do not get confused.

That's sixteen hundred bucks.

Do not get confused about this.

There's the sport design fascia package, which is forty three hundred dollars and it goes on and on.

If there, you know, if there is one thing that Porsche has become, you know, absolute experts in,

it's figuring out how to separate customers from their money.

As much money as you are willing to spend,

Porsche will happily sell you something to take that money from your from your bank account.

They will.

Let's see what else.

So the the Macan is built on the new PPE platform, which is the performance platform

electric. So this is after they did the the Tycon.

That was a platform called J1, which was used for the Tycon and for the Audi E-tron GT.

And then Audi and Porsche collaborated on a next generation platform,

which they used for for this for the Macan.

It's going on the new Cayenne.

It's being used by Audi for the Q6 E-tron, the new A6 and a bunch of others.

And it's a multi energy platform, but the electric version of it, it's an 800 volt architecture.

It has the capability of charging close to 300 kilowatts.

When when I did take it to the Electrify America Station,

I was when I stopped there on my way back from driving back from Detroit.

They I when you there's no in the in the settings, there is nowhere to manually

enable battery preconditioning.

Like as you do look, for example, on our EV6, you can go into the settings and you can turn on preconditioning manually.

There's nowhere to do that manually, but it does it automatically.

So if you use the built in navigation and you select a DC fast charger as your destination,

it will automatically do the preconditioning based on how far away you are from from the thing.

And in the cluster, it actually shows you the battery temperature.

Oh, mine just has a little thing to put over the battery.

It looks like a little coil. Yeah, it doesn't show you a coil.

It just shows you a battery icon and shows you the battery temperature.

So by the time I got to the to the charging station, it was around

even though it was about 15 degrees Fahrenheit, 15 or 20 degrees Fahrenheit, the battery was at about

70 degrees Fahrenheit, which is you know, getting into its optimal range.

I plugged it in

at at about

15% state of charge and it jumped up and started charging at about 250 255 kilowatts, which is pretty good

especially, you know, at that temperature

and charged it up to about 50%

and then had to run over to discount tire to pick up the

new tire for my wife's car because the day before she picked up something and got a puncture and of course

instead of being right in the middle of the tread where they could just plug in it for $5 sidewall, it was it was well

it was on the shoulder and

So not repairable. So that was a couple hundred bucks for me

But I don't think I've had I think I've had one puncture in a tire that was a repairable and the last like eight punctures

It's just like always right in the sidewall. I'm like son of a

Yeah

But the cargo area of the Macan is big enough to hold the 19 inch wheel and tire combination from a key EV6

So, you know, again nice good size cargo area

and

You know the before we started getting the snow I took it out on Saturday morning last week took it out for a nice

long drive

Out near out near pink knee, you know on some nice curving roads and even on the the winter tires

It was a lot of fun to drive

this this was great and

it the the one I had had the

Variable it's got airspring. I think it's airspring suspension, but it's variable height suspension system

So highway speeds it drops down a little bit when you put it in it has an off-road mode

But like I said, this is not an off-road vehicle

You know in this off-road basically means that it's an unpaved dirt road is about the limits of what this can do

But when you put it in off-road mode, it lifts up a couple inches

And it was it was fantastic. I really enjoyed driving this car

The again the temperatures during most of the time I had it were quite cold

So I was using the heat using the heated seats using the heat using the window defrosters

and everything

There is no

There's no standard rear wiper on the Macan you there is it is available as an option

But also kind of how much is that?

To be honest, I'm not sure I don't I didn't see it in here. It's probably here somewhere

But it's you know, it's a Porsche, so it's not gonna be cheap

Oh, here we go rear wiper trim in high glow. No, that's the trim

See where's the wiper itself?

Oh rear wiper. Oh, it's only three hundred and ninety dollars. Oh, it's shocking. Okay. So seems less

Yeah

So, you know, if you if you live somewhere that gets winter weather

I would strongly recommend that you spring for the 400 bucks for the white rear wiper

Because otherwise, you know, they

When you get, you know, a lot of snow coming down the airflow across the rear window not gonna cut it

It's not gonna keep that window clear

You know the the the default the defroster, you know, it'll it'll heat it and you'll have stripes of ice

It'll be sagging across your rear window, but it's you're you're still gonna have obscured visibility

So definitely get the rear wiper

So all in as configured

So I'm gonna give you two prices

There's as configured it would

Without the wheel winter wheel entire package 103,540 dollars

and

With the with the the same wheel and tire winter wheel and tire package, so if you order this extra

It that jumps to a hundred and ten thousand five hundred and sixty-two dollars

We said base price of the McCann electric is just over eighty thousand

so you're looking at

an extra almost thirty thousand dollars for the one that I had and

See where oh delivery

Take a guess at delivery charges

$900

1295

Nicole gets it, but she was not close

$2,350

Yeah, so the four the four s starts at eighty nine nine

11,290 dollars worth of options plus another seven thousand dollars for the winter wheel and tire package and

22,350 for the delivery processing and handling fee that's so much money

It is but you know, hey, it's a Porsche

Here's the thing when you get into a Porsche and you drive it for like a block you realize

Oh, that's where all the money went. Yeah, it really does totally solid

It always feels like oh, yeah, okay. I understand

It's definitely not a car that you get it and you think like I don't get it. Why is this so much money?

You're like, oh, this is why this is so much money

Yeah, I mean beautiful materials, you know, really solidly put together

You know, it's got manual vents

So you don't have to go into the touchscreen to adjust the vents where the air is flowing. Look at that

heated front rear seats

the only

Slight downside really on the center console where it's got some some touch controls for a few things

the

There there's like it's like one panel if you're old enough to remember the Blackberry storm

Smartphone Blackberry's first attempt at a touchscreen phone

It

They they wanted to give it the clickiness of a keyboard. So the the panel actually pivots a little bit

So when you press the the touch buttons

It clicks and you can you can feel it

Pip don't feel that whole panel pivot a little bit

Which is a little off-putting, but it's you know, it's not a big deal and the other thing that's

Not not so much a functional problem, but a little odd

It's just the position of the shift selector for the transmission

So it's it's on the dashboard to the right of the

instrument cluster

And it's kind of hidden behind the steering wheel and so there's just a little lever there

That's it instead of being a stock on the steering column

It's actually mounted on the dashboard. So you push it down for drive up for reverse and then there's a button for park

and

It took me a couple days to get you to remember get used to that's where it was

And once I got used to that it was fine

There's all of course, you know different drive modes. There's sport sport plus

the comfort mode which is what I

Ended up leaving it in most of the time once the weather got worse

But I did use one on my Saturday morning drive

I did use the sport support plus mode which gives you some more a little more noise and stuff like that

But overall really nice car to drive

cool

So that is the Porsche Macan 4s electric

Or electric 4s or I don't know whatever whatever whatever order of operations. They want you to use

Macan 4s has electric motors. That's what it is. You know what you're getting when you get when you leave. Yeah

All right, so

The

Let's start off with some stuff some news that came out ahead of the auto show

Ford you know as as has become their tradition

Does not show their stuff off at the auto show itself

They they do separate events before the show

And so

Excuse me Monday morning

In Dearborn at their new product development center in world headquarters

First time I've been in the building looks really nice

They showed us a couple of new models that are coming out

Starting with the Ford Mustang dark horse SC

So

this this is

This is effectively a replacement for the old Shelby GT 500

so

You know for this current generation for the s650 Mustangs Ford has

Ended their licensing relationship with Shelby American

So they're no longer paying a Shelby for every one of these cars that they sell paying them a license fee

And you know, that's why they brought out the dark horse branding

For the previous, you know above the GT model and now they have the dark horse SC

Which is as the supercharged 5.2 liter v8

That Ford was very

Ford basically wouldn't give us any specs on this car

Other than here's the displacement. You know here they told us some of the features it has but no no

Specific details on performance

But for reference the previous generation GT 500 that ended production like two years ago now

That one had

760 horsepower from its 5.2 liter supercharged v8

the current Mustang GTD which costs

$400,000 has

815 horsepower

So this one

Likely going to be somewhere in between those two probably closer to 800

But somewhere in that range because it's almost

Let's put it this way. If I was a GTD buyer

I would be really really angry at Ford if this had more than 815 horsepower

If it had an 800 horsepower

I mean also if you're buying the GTD, I don't know what you're doing with your money to be honest

You're having fun with it. You're just loving in love life

If you got $400,000 to spend on a Mustang

Yeah, whatever if it's like you bought a burger and then you like oh

I would like bacon on that burger and the burger itself costs 10 bucks, but the bacon costs $400

That's what the GTD is

To me fair the GTD is barely a Mustang. So the GTD is shaped like a Mustang. It's $400 bacon

Okay, okay

the

They you know, there's the base dark horse sc

Which again, we have no pricing information. This is going to go on sale

Um, you know start taking orders in the spring start deliveries in the summer

But the the current dark horse the naturally aspirated 5 liter dark horse with 500 horsepower

that

Starts at about

60 ish

$65,000 I think goes up to if you load it up with all of the options you can get it up to about $90,000

So this dark horse sc probably going to start somewhere in that $90,000 range

And then you can get the dark horse sc track pack

Which throws away the rear seat

Gives you carbon fiber wheels

with michelin pilot sport cup

four tires

And brembo carbon ceramic brakes

forged

control arms for the suspension

With the track pack they say they took out about

About 120 pounds of unsprung mass from the car and 150 pounds total

So between the four corners with the carbon wheels carbon brakes forged

control arms

They took off about roughly about

About 30 pounds from each corner of the car

Which will help with with handling and ride

And acceleration and then they also threw out the the the rear seat and and some other stuff

Um, and then it's got a big carbon fiber wing on the back the the front fascia of all the sc's

Like the last gt 500 a lot more open area for breathing so you can cool that engine down

Um, there's a big carbon fiber vent in the uh in the hood of the car

um, the the sc

Is the is about an inch wider

So it's got unique fenders different from other mustangs

Because it's got more wider track

There if you get the track pack the trunk lid is also different

Uh, it has a little duct tail spoiler on it

And then there's a carbon fiber wing that stands above that and the reason why they put the duct tail on there

is

They found that during their their wind tunnel testing they got a lot more downforce with that in there

While while they were able to keep the the carbon fiber wing at a reasonable angle

So it didn't completely obscure your view to the rear

And they say at 180 miles an hour it generates 620 pounds of downforce

So, you know, this is going to be a quick car and then there's also going to be a

limited edition

version of the

the sc that has

uh painted stripes

Uh on the hood and and the deck lid

Um, so not vinyl but actually painted. So that means they got to take it off the take it off the main paint line

Mask it they spray those stripes and then put it back in and do the clear coat

um, and on the uh on the last gt 500

You had the option of either vinyl stripes or painted stripes the the painted stripes

It's a $10,000 option

Yeah, um, so

Most likely i'm guessing that the um the the limited edition dark horse sc is probably going to be somewhere around 130 grand

With all that stuff on there

um

So it'll it'll be a fast Mustang but

It'll be a pricey Mustang and it'll be expensive Mustang

But you know, you know people are having problems paying for food, but we have a really expensive cars coming out

So i'm really excited about that. You know, the horse looks very it looks more like a horse of the apocalypse

It looks more like it's bringing pestilence or plague

Yeah, it's it does not look like a fun horse. It is not. Yeah. Well, it is the dark horse

I guess. Yeah. Yeah

One one interesting detail on the dark horse badging on the the rear

um, you know, they have some color options some accent color options

including one that has

That's teal. So you get teal painted brake calipers and seat belts

and accent stitching on the seats on the recaro seats and then

On the the perimeter of the dark horse badge and the eyes

It's painted in teal and then, you know, there's also a red package and there's a couple of others

um, so they they actually did some some cool stuff with the

with the colors um on the on the sc that won't be available on other Mustangs

um, and I had a had a chance to chat with uh, sarah watson

Who is the colored materials design manager for the Mustang?

Um, and so I'm gonna drop that in here and she explains, you know, some of the color choices. So

I'll have that right now

I mean, I have become I'm a I'm a big fan of bold colors on cars

You know, I think the the world has gone way too far towards monochromatic cars. Yeah, I don't I don't want any more black

White or silver or gray. I want interesting colors and I love seeing, you know, you know, especially, you know

Adding accents like the teal so

Tell me what what is the, um, you know, kind of what was what was the the driving force behind adopting the teal?

What what uh, what brought that up? Yeah, so actually we had a lot of um research and inspiration from our liveries

On the track. So your gt3's the way our drivers drive their cars in bold colors

You see the teal accent actually all the time

And as we have our standards like with the reds, we put those two together and it came out this way

So the teal tonic was like to be the loud aspect and then the race was to be tried true

Yeah, because oftentimes on on a race team, you know, the cars might have the same livery

But you'll have different accents on the car so you can distinguish them quickly on the track

Yeah, when I was looking at pictures the teal just stood out

Yeah, it stood out and then you dig deeper and then like I mentioned earlier first gen mustang had the um

I can't remember the the name of it, but had a teal on there on the boss 149

And so we took that and then

Used the inspiration there put it on the seatbelts put it on the calipers our accent stitching in the center line

Down in the car and I noticed on the the dark horse badge on the yeah on the back as well

To signal that it's the track car right and then on the limited edition one. It's red instead of the exactly

Exactly. So it was like you you had the best of both worlds

We talked to a variety of customers one who loved the standard love the traditional

But then we even got like a little bit louder and bolder on those keys

But then with the track we introduced like that next gen look and this is what we're going to be building off of even even more

So this was just the interest so you see more of that throughout the Mustang lineup

Like people want to be loud and bold. They want to be unapologetic

And you know, this was one of those packages that delivered on that

so um for the

For the the limited edition, um, the are the painted stripes standard on the limited edition

And what what color combinations are you going to have on the limited edition?

You get the black obviously with the red stripe the red with the red stripes and then the Oxford white

So it comes in with two colors only. Um, again to kind of have that symbolism of the other checker black on the racetrack

So we did it in white and in black. Um on the white you get

Also a standard black painted roof

You can't see that on shadow black car. Yeah, but that's been standard as well

So you have that whole sporty motif on the exterior that falls to the interior

And so on the Oxford white, this is still the same red and gray painted stripe there. Okay. Yeah

And then what what other color combinations you've got this blue? What is there a name for this blue?

Uh, this is argon blue argon blue is the unique exterior color to dark

to dark horse

Uh, sd. Okay. Um, our other colors will have the race red black white

There's also adiatic teal that we pulled from

Adriatic blue green. Sorry that we pulled from the effects. Okay. Um, so that's going to be on here

We have orange fury

dark matter gray

It's a total of nine colors. Okay. Um, that we pulled from again our effects our special cars

And then our base must say, um, you know, significantly coming from frat. Okay, great. Thank you very much. Yeah. Thank you. It was nice to meet you

Uh-huh

Okay, and we're back and I also spoke with uh, ari groanveld

Who is the chief program engineer for the dark horse sc

Uh at ford racing and I talked to ari a couple of years ago when they launched the raptor the bronco raptor

Uh, because he was the chief engineer on bronco raptor and then after he finished that you went over to work on dark horse sc

Um, and so we'll drop that in here now

All right talking with ari groanveld, uh, the

Chief product chief platform engineer program engineer

chief program engineer for uh, for all of ford racing or for the dark horse

Variants of mustang, right? Yeah the specifically i'm the chief program engineer on the dark horse sc. Okay. Yeah, so

The sc is the latest edition of the mustang lineup kind of completes

You know kind of the the type of lineup we've had in mustang for

Probably since the late 90s, you know going from a base to gt

Uh and then having something in the middle there and and then they're uh since at least the mid 2000s

We've had a supercharged one in there and then of course now you've got the gtd way up the top of the lamp

So tell us about kind of how you see this dark horse sc fitting in into that lineup and

um

Why uh, I guess why the move away from the the shelby branding that you had on the s5 50 and yeah

So let me address your first question the um

Between a base dark horse and a gtd

There's quite a bit of white space from a performance standpoint

And we took that as an opportunity

To really address the success that dark horse has been having on the base program and how it's attracting

more diverse younger customers

Um, and it's really resonating with them. So this is placed right in that white space

And obviously we pushed the team and the team pushes themselves quite frankly

To deliver as much as we could out of this car

in that white space

So that's that was your first question. Yeah, so, uh, you know shifted on the last couple generations away from the shelby branding to

The dark horse dark horse r dark horse sc

Yeah, um, and does does that

kind of

Change does that does that use that contribute? Do you think to some of that?

Change in the customer base for this car or for the for this lineup cars? Um

Your your question is about whether or not

Having having a new new branding this dark horse brand. Yeah, does that helped with maybe changing the perception a little bit of these

Higher performance mustangs and bringing in a new type of buyer. I I do think that's the case. Yes. Okay

So so with the sc

um, you know, what what were your main targets, uh, in terms of you know evolving

You know moving to a new generation compared to what you had gt 500 a few years ago

You know, what what were you trying to achieve and and prove on this generation?

Yeah, so I think it it's really about as we become forward racing

You could see the the lineage as we had on the screen showing that we've got the race car

variants of a dark horse

And then we have the production car side of dark horse and really we're trying to well what we're doing is we're sharing

technology between the two and there's that crossover between the two products

so

Love Shelby, but that was not

Didn't make sense in that crossover between what we're doing on the race car side and the production car side and that transfer of technology

So what were some of the things you've done on on this car?

on the dark horse sc

to

To really bring it in line with the forward racing ethos of the mid 2020s

Yeah, so I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that we're tapping into all our motorsports experience

We went through like some of the exterior styling changes that were made and how well how the how the design of the exterior was

Really formed by the function we needed

Um, yeah, because you got quite a bit more downforce now, right?

Yeah, we've got we've got a lot of downforce on here. So

Whether it was gt3 and learning that we could take the lower grill further down

And increase the open area which we did and compared to a base dark horse at 60 percent larger

We also opened up the outboard coolers. That's a hundred percent larger than a base dark horse

Those were some learnings from track time

We've also learned from an efficiency standpoint that some of the tricks that our NASCAR teams were using

To modify and optimize the exterior surface

Of the race cars

They were using 3d printed tiles and being able to go into the wind tunnel and quickly shop or

Swap out those so they're printing out sections of the that's right a front quarter front section of the car

Really, yeah a pillar forward

They were able to print that out and we thought that is a fantastic trick

So you can go through a lot more iterations in a session

Yeah, you start off with like computational fluid dynamics and that gets you to a point

That's a good starting point

But ultimately you have to go into a wind tunnel to dial it in and make sure you're there

And that that trick allowed us to say, okay, we're gonna change

We're gonna try this we're gonna try this try this all in one session in the the wind tunnel and provide that feedback to design

To say this is what works best for us

And then have the conversation about what the tradeoff is for the function

So obviously very focused on the function on this and in recent years forward has built a new rolling road wind tunnels full-scale wind tunnels

um, you've got um

Really some really interesting driver in the loop simulation capability. Yes

I assume all of that has been utilized in creating this and that gets you closer

Have better fidelity in your simulation. Yeah, we we utilize

um

All the simulation tools that we can so and and as we tap into the motorsports side as we're now one one family of

forward racing

We're able to to bring that to bear in the

The fact that the way we're structured

For example, like if I choose the power train chief engineer like my counterpart from a functional standpoint

He's managing both the race cars as well as the production cars

So there's nothing lost between having

The organization's not working so closely together

So we have accessed all those tools and we're finding just like that nascar example

Some some tricks that we hadn't thought to do previously

Are there things that you were learned from the gtt program that we're also brought into this?

I mean, obviously we saw some some visual elements in in the cabin. Yeah, so um, we would we would take this out

Testing with some of the race cars as well as gtt would be on the track at some on some occasions with us as well

so

As we're learning

For example, actually our duct tail spoiler. For example, we were out on the track. We realized that hey, this is really contributing to

Increased downforce. It's effective. I said it's more than 10 percent increased downforce as a result

And that translated into that's a different rear deck than you have on the standard mustangs, right?

Correct. Is that on the regular dark horse or is that unique to the this is unique to the sc

It's actually unique to the sc track pack. Okay

Yeah, so we found that that was very effective and gtt ultimately took that same concept and put it on their vehicles

Okay, so it's worth both ways. Yes. So and that's the intent. It's that sharing between

Hey, if there's something that we can learn from a production car side and translate that over to race

Fantastic, it's a two-way street

And uh, one of the things you talked about was weight reductions and particularly unsprung weight reductions

You talk a little bit about what what's been done there. Yeah, so on the uh, the track pack version of sc like specifically in the corners

We've made carbon ceramic brakes available right from gtd

So between that the michelin cup to our tires and the carbon fiber wheels

We're removing quite a bit of unsprung and rotational mass

From the vehicle. So from a total vehicle perspective, we're removing 120 pounds of rotational

Unsprung mass which is huge. Yeah translates in the ride control precision and the track pack also doesn't have

A rear seat. There's no no rear seat as well. It's it has more of like a shelf. Yeah. Yes, okay

Any any other highlights of the the sc that listeners the podcast should be thinking about sure. Yeah, um

I like the feature of the variable traction control. Yeah, so that's a lift from gtd

Obviously calibrated separately for our vehicles sure because you get different tires

Because in the past you've been able to say all right. I'm gonna go on or off

Right, but when you have a car this capable and you want to push it or if the environment is just a little

Maybe a little bit

Difficult to drive on maybe a little slipperier or then what depends what track different tracks have different services

Some have more grip some of love. Yeah, exactly

So you can go through a multitude of settings to control the the traction control that you want

So it's not just environment, but it's also the customer's capability and that's just within track mode, right? That's correct. Okay

Yeah

Corner to corner as you as you went out of the track and lost a different for one corner versus right

So so can you control that from the steering wheel? I guess?

Uh, no, it'd be through the center stack button and then I've got bring up a pop up and you can select

I can see you probably don't want to be messing around with that. Well, I should go in corner to corner

Correct. I thought uh, is the changing the levels of the vcc different on this versus gtd

uh the

The pop-up comes up from the center stack

Right, and then and then you could talk you could toggle through the steering wheel selections

Yeah, so you'd have to hit center stack and then it'd pop up and okay, so probably not not quite as uh

Advanced is what you've got a gtd, but then again, you know, it's a very it's very it's very simple

Well, I mean in terms of the interface. I think it's probably the same. It's the same. Yeah, okay. Sorry. Yeah, that was on me

Okay, all right. Um, well, thanks. Thanks. Sorry. You bet. It's good to talk to you. Thank you

And I just realized we did talk before um in chicago when the um, I think it was when the everybody's

Raptor was it the raptor? Yeah, it was. Yeah, okay. Raptor. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we spoke to her so

All right, we're back and um, so that's the dark horse sc

Um, they's probably second most expensive Mustang ever

Save up your save up them quarters people. Yeah, you're gonna need a lot of them

So many quarters you're gonna need a lot

And then after we were done looking at the Mustang

They took us over into another part of the building where we got to see the new bronco rtr

Um, so rtr is von gitton juniors company

And uh, they last fall they introduced a Mustang rtr

That uh, his his crew helped develop

And now they have a bronco rtr. There's actually there's actually been a bronco rtr available for a while now

But those the way they did those was those were purchased by um, rtr

Pre title from ford. So they got shipped from ford's factory to rtr's facilities

Where they got a bunch of upgrades

Um, including different wheels and tires and suspension upgrades and assortment of other stuff

Um, and you can still buy that one and that one's called the rtr spec

uh addition, but um

Now they're actually going to also do these in the factory here in michigan where they build broncos

And it's you know, slightly different spec with the the the spec version that you get from rtr

You can customize it more. So there'll be a little bit less customization available

With this one, but it's uh, it's got the the graphics the 35 inch, uh wheels and tires

Um, the lime green beadlock

Rings on the the wheels

That is you know, that's kind of rtr's signature color

And a bunch of other stuff. It's uh, these are all powered by the 2.3 liter four-cylinder eco boost

And it has the anti lag system that ford developed for this which basically means that

When you are off-roading and anti lag only comes into play when you're when you're driving off-road

Uh, what it does is it when you take your foot off the accelerator

It actually keeps the throttle open slightly so it allows air to keep flowing through just cuts off fuel

To the cylinders allows the air to keep flowing through so it keeps the the turbo spinning

So as soon as you get back on the accelerator, it's generating boost

More almost immediately instead of waiting so you don't have that lag

Oh, that's cool. Yeah. Does it say how much this is in here? I'm scrolling

Um, or is it a mystery? I don't think they give you pricing on this yet, right?

Uh, they did talk about pricing and uh, give me a second and I will find out

Okay, because I'm looking through the release and I don't see it. It looks awesome

I think it's funny that ford's going with all these like neon things like the blue on the the um,

Mustang we were just looking at and the green here and then they do the same thing on the the maverick lobo has like lime

Accents in it and stuff. We're like channeling our inner 80s child with some of these colors. Yeah, it looks cool

But it is very 80s. Everything new is old again. Everything old is new again. Is that the saying pretty much? Yeah

So the the the rtr spec that rtr themselves build

Runs close to a hundred thousand dollars

And this is going to be

Significantly less than that. Uh, it's gonna it's going to be cheaper than um, the bronco raptor

Which they actually recently reduced the price on the bronco raptor

Uh, and it now starts at about uh, only about 90 000 I think

um

Yeah, they didn't they didn't tell us the specific price for the rtr

Uh, but I think it's going to be somewhere around 70

I

Mean I mean it's a lot, but that'd be really cool for that

I bet people be excited about that the hardcore off-road

The thing is I think what's fun about these is you know that someone's going to buy it who's like

Yeah, I do this on the weekends. I'm going to use every single

Feature they've gotten this and then you know the other 99 percent is like never going to use any of this

But look how cool my thing looks like

Like most people don't use it all and if you know what you don't have to if you like how something looks

But I want to like I think it's it's neat that there's going to be somebody out there

Who's going to do that when we're going to get pictures on the internet of them blasting through the desert

That one guy so the the the the bronco raptor is now now starts at 79 99 95 plus destination

So about 81 uh or 82 2000 um, so I think this is going to the rtr is going to start uh just under 70 I think

Hmm

That's cool. That'll be fun. People will love it

All right, so let's get back to uh stupidly fast cars

The uh the chevy corvette zr1x

Um, it's you know, it's a little bit quicker than that defender octa. You were you were driving

Uh, it has 1250 horsepower. That's slightly more horsepower too. So just a skosh

Yeah, it's a thousand. I think a thousand and 64 horsepower from the um twin turbo 5.5 liter v8

And then it's also got a couple hundred horsepower from uh, the electric front the electric motor driving the front wheels

So it's all wheel drive

So last fall a couple of months ago

Um, the corvette engineering team took a zr1x

Uh production spec zr1x to the uh, 130 us 131 raceway. It's a drag strip here in michigan

Um to do some performance testing

um

This thing is insanely fast

Zero to six or sorry quarter mile time

They're they're

By by the end of the day they did two days of testing by the by the end of the second day

They were down to a quarter mile time of 8.675 seconds

That's insane. Yeah

And the trap speed was I think 159 159.6 miles an hour

That's a and they do have the zero to 60 on there. It's 1.68 seconds. Yes

Not even two seconds 1.68 seconds zero to 60. That's madness. It's wonderful madness, but it's absolutely madness

Oh, yeah, no one needs that on the

But remember this is this is on a on a prep track like you know, right?

Yeah, this is a real drag strip. Yeah, and that's this is with the roll out and everything

Yeah, so I mean this is this is totally optimal conditions, but you know, even still still

Yeah, even you know just on regular pavement, you know this car

Yeah, because because it's all-wheel drive and you've got you know, a couple hundred horsepower driving the front wheels

So you're gonna get

Even as the turbos are spooling up and everything you're gonna get

Instant response from the front, you know and by you know by the time you've used that up

The engine's gonna be kicking in and and you're just gonna be flying down the the quarter mile

You're probably still gonna easily on regular pavement. You'll probably be able to get you know, 10 second quarter mile times

Yeah, which is just ridiculous

Ridiculous

Yeah, now that is

That's one of the fastest quarter miles ever recorded

for a

road legal production car

In fact, I think it might be the fastest that's been published for

You know for a stock

Internal combustion vehicle they show they show a table on the the press release page

There's only two cars that went faster than that and they're both EV's the rematch and the vera are and the pinafore in a batista

The the rematch went 7.9 seconds at 186 miles an hour and the batista went 8.55 seconds at 155 miles an hour

Uh, so you know and those are cars that cost a couple of million dollars

Yeah

For these are

Price wise the only thing that's like close is is and it's they're almost

They're pretty yeah, they're so close. You wouldn't know the difference if you were sitting in the stands ever

You would never like it'd be a photo finishes the lucid air sapphire, which is an EV. Yeah

Um, you know the the z1x base price

Is for 2026 212195 dollars

So this is half the price of a mustang gtd

And it is way way faster

And it has a it has a trunk that you can fit a paddle board into

There you go, which you can't do on a mustang gtd

The gtd has no trunk

So that's a major detraction

So you can't take your paddle board with you in the gtd. You can the zr1x

Because that's totally what i'd use my zr1x for is to you know to go to the lake

Uh, definitely. It's kind of a lake adventure some car forget a Subaru. Let's get this. It's all wheel drive

You know what more to ask for it's essentially just a Subaru if it's all wheel drive. It's a Subaru

basically

Take your dogs to the vat, you know take your dogs to the lake

I

I took bowie

He's the german shepherd

In the brz to the to the vet and he didn't want to sit in the back because those seats are horrible

And so he sat in the front, but he's just a little bit too big

So he kept trying to put his paws like on both his paws on the seat

He looked really weird

So he had to put like his paws in the ground and so when we came out of the vet

He got in a car and I was texting my wife and some guy was walking by and he's just sitting there in this front seat

And the guy was just like looking at

So, you know, Nicole, you know, you could you could still get a zero one x

I mean, I could that. I mean, you know 209 700 dollars

Is only slightly higher than what I had in my just I'd have to stretch just the the tiniest of bits just

And and just you know, I mean, of course, you know, you want to get some winter tires for it

Yeah, you've got all wheel drive. I mean just get some winter tires

It's unfortunate. I don't have that to drive tomorrow

When we get half a foot of snow because that's going to be better than the defender I have sitting here

Fosha

Absolutely. Yeah, there's some blizzaks on there. Right and it'll be totally fine

All right, um, let's see

Honda did a business update this week and one of the things that they announced

Is that they are ending production of the current generation rd acura rdx

um, and

That because they've got the new rsx coming this year, uh, which

For at least temporarily is going to take the rdx's place. You know, it's a similar sized vehicle, but it's electric

It's going to kind of take the place of the rdx in the lineup for for now

um, but they do have a new rdx coming at some

Uh future date that they did not specify

uh, but

The uh, the next gen rdx will be a hybrid

Um, and uh, it's going to be the the hybrid system that we got to try out when we were in

Uh, in japan in october, uh, so it's their new their new platform

Uh, which I talked about back, you know in

Early november after after I came back from japan, uh, which you know is

Interesting new platform for their larger utilities and and trucks and vans and so on

That has some has a little bit of flex built into it

To allow for they claim better road grip certainly seem to work on the prototype that we drove

and it's it's a

a new version of their hybrid system that has

Two sets of final drive gears so that at higher speeds

They can pick from the the two different ratios

And that will um, they'll be they'll have a broader range of

Where they can run the engine at higher speed at speeds to get better overall

energy efficiency

So that's coming probably

We'll probably see it, you know sometime in 2027 as a 2028 model

Cool, that's a good thing. Yeah. Yeah

Um, and then honda also announced

that um

they've got

They've developed a new lightweight camper a camper trailer called the base station

Okay, I think this looks cool. I love how this looks

I want one

I want one you can fill it with moto compactos and have a gang

Look how cute it is

Like it's like it looks like it's a little just it's just the cutest looking thing and then the way it opens up

Where I get you know, so you can stand it and has this huge

It's got a pop top. Yeah, it's like an old uh vw van and it has like a lift gate like the door opening isn't just a door

It's this huge lift gate

So it'll be super easy to get in and out of you won't have to be slamming a door all the time

I love it. I love how this looks if you're camping and it's like raining

Yeah, get under there. You can be under that lift gate and like take off your muddy shoes or whatever

And then get into the vehicle

Without getting rained on which is nice. I kind of think this is cool

Yeah, you know that they kept the interior this thing only weighs 1500 pounds

So they say a crv could tow this which is incredible. It doesn't have to like you don't have to have like a great big three row

Or truck or something the crv

And you know the the photo the images they released, you know have it behind the the new zero suv

Um and with the you know with the top down

Uh, you know, it's just barely taller than the zero suv

So, you know, you're not you know, you're not going to have nearly as much aerodynamic drag as you would with a larger trailer

Um, so you could it's gonna have a lot less impact on the range of an ev

But yeah, I mean the ability to tow this thing with something like a crv or rdx

Yeah, would be really cool. And then I don't like something like this. This is this is cool

The the interior, uh, you know is is deliberately kept kind of wide open

there's

sort of a bed that

That normally can be a bench, but it can fold down as well

To be a bed for two

And then you can they've got it set up so you can add a second bunk

Up in the pop-top area

So it can it can sleep up to four people

It's got a nice low loading floor. It's modular so you can put all kinds of different things into it

It's it's and it's a slick design. I like the design of it. It really it has this very futuristic

Curvy cool design. I think it looks great. I really do think it looks good

So I it doesn't look like a typical camper. It makes me think of what was it lost in space with their little their little vehicle

They had I think it was lost in space. That's what it makes me think

So there's no word on pricing on this yet

Or even, you know, when it's gonna come out my guess is, you know, probably not certainly not before next year

You know 2027 at the earliest

But uh

Yeah, it'll be curious to see how they price it because there are some other small lightweight trailers

Um, some of which are pretty expensive like friends some friends of ours have one from a company called happier camper

That you know, it's kind of similarly sized to this actually probably smaller than this

And that thing was like $55,000. They're very expensive. They're not a cheap buy. Yeah. Yeah

So hopefully uh, honda makes this a little more affordable

I don't know

I feel like that would make sense if you're making a small little camper and you wanted to be something that

You know, people are going to be able to

All around with the crv. It's it should not be something that's outrageously expensive. You know, that's not the price point of the crv owner

Well, our our friends with their happier camper. They tow it with an odyssey honda odyssey. Okay

There you go

All right, uh, let's talk stilantis

Hey, the website's working

Is it working again? All right

So first first up for stilantis, um, you know after they paused

Importation of the tonali for a while last year. It's back again. The alpha male tonali

Um, but it's no longer available with the plug-in hybrid system. So they that's another one that they've dropped the plug-in hybrid from

So it's just the two liter turbo four cylinder

Uh, you know, it got a refresh this year styling refresh. Uh, so new front end

Um, but the uh, the the tonali's

Sibling the dodge hornet

Is dead. It is no more

Womp womp

You could probably still get one for quite a while

I think there's still quite a few of them sitting on dealer lots because it uh, it was not a great seller

No

It wasn't unfortunately it was in

It was an interesting idea, but it was not the uh target market for ye olde dodge owners

Yeah

Didn't didn't quite fit the uh, the dodge um muscle aesthetic

No brotherhood of muscle thing did not

Did not quite fit that not big enough to squeeze a hemi into so it's out of there

Exactly, um, but nicole you and I sat down at the auto show with tim caniscus

Um, we did what what did you think?

I mean, it's always fun interviewing tim because I feel like you could just

Put your microphone in front of him and say so how's it going and not ask a single other question

If you didn't feel like it and you'd have a straight half hour of tim just riffing on everything

Um, I thought it was interesting talking to him. He's he's probably one of the most

Blunt executives. I don't know how many times did you have to beep him?

Don't we had do we have actually when I went back and looked at it, uh, there

There were there were none. I guess warned there were some bombs in there. I have to listen to it again

I would listen to it again because I'm pretty sure there wasn't anything in there. He has f-bomb energy

That's what he always has f-bomb energy, which is not a bad thing

um, and it was it was interesting talking to him and hearing what he thinks the strategy is for

the

The different brands in the u.s for jeep for christler for dodge

Who am I for ram? Sorry? I suddenly forgot what brands were talking about. Um, I thought it was an interesting conversation

and I think he's you know, he did a very good job of

Being confident that they have the right strategy and that you don't need to have

More that what was he he hasn't come talking there where he talks about the number of trucks

He has and the number of vehicles that are in chrisler's lineup. So chrisler is

The pacifica. Yes, that's chrisler and he's like well arguably

We really don't have you know, the trucks, you know, I'm like, well, no

You have a lot of different kinds of trucks. Truly. They're not it's not and it's not like they have 18 flavors of the pacifica

They go like one, you know

So he he has some

He's he's going hard on they have the right mix. They've done the right things. They've done the right stuff with pricing

Um, so I thought it was interesting. What did you think sam? Yeah, you know

He's you know because stilantis sells all four brands in the same showrooms

You know, it's not like with gm for example, where you've got chevrolet dealerships and gmc dealerships and

Buick dealerships and catalac dealerships where you can have

A little bit of overlap because they're in different stores. They're not in the same physical location

Stilantis you've got all four brands in one location. And so, you know, one of the things he talked about was

Not necessarily having to have

every

Body style every type of vehicle in each

Brand, you know, because you don't you don't necessarily want, you know

This the same crossover as a chrysler and as a dodge, you know or a jeep, you know

There needs to be some distinction between them

So it sounds like he'd be still at least for the time being committed to all four brands

We'll we'll see, you know, how that evolves particularly with chrysler over the next couple of years

Um, but you know, the other thing that they're focused on right now

Is ramping up the hammy production?

Uh, especially in the trucks, you know, I think he talked about last year they built

They got 30,000 ramp 1500 hammy is built

About 10,000 of them delivered to customers this year. They're targeting a hundred thousand

Um, and you know between the the five seven hammy and the hellcat in the trx

You know, that's their priority for for ram for the moment

Uh, and so, you know between the talk conversation with tim and talking to some other folks

Um, you know the ram rev the e rev version is not going to be coming till sometime in the second half of the year

After they launch the trx

Um, and then there's also the the the wagon or the grand wagon year e rev that's that's going to be coming

Um, that's also going to be sometime in the second half of the year

Basically, they're trying not to launch too many things simultaneously. They're staggering things so that they can

You know, and he's talked about this before, you know, they want to focus on the quality and getting getting these things built right

You know instead of trying to do too many things at once

Um, so interesting conversation. Um, and of course, you know, you know, we only had ultimately about 17 minutes

With with tim, you know, he had 20 minute time slots

Um, because everybody wanted to talk to tim, uh, because he was one of the only he and antonio filoso were the only

Among the only executives available at the show

Uh, and um, you know and and tim is uh, unlike most executives, you know, I was having

You know conversation with somebody from gm, uh, you know, who had asked, you know, would would would help to have more conversations with

Mary Barra said to be honest with you. No, not really

Um, you know, because I was at a fireside chat with her on monday afternoon

that she did with kailey hall from reuters, uh for automotive press association event

and you know, it was about 40 minutes conversation and

Really didn't get much new out of it. Uh, you know, and and the thing I told, you know, the the gm pr persons

You know got a lot of respect for mary

But you know, she has been at this a while. She's very well trained media trained

She is very much on message all the time

You, you know, you are almost never going to get surprises from talking to mary barra

Uh in public

Well, I think, you know, there's a point to a point. That's good, right because you don't want your executive team

Going off the handle and and saying crazy things and they need to they need to still be professional

But it also could make for really boring interviews when you get in it. Like there's there's a line between

I'm

Making sure I'm towing the party line and I'm not saying anything completely

Untoward or that's going to make people angry

And still being more human and having a little fun with things and being a little bit more and mary's so on message

She really is and she's great, but there it's it's the message. It's exactly it's so in a box

That it's hard to have a really unique or interesting conversation with her sometimes

Well, let's start with a big question

Tim, what what's your vision for stilantis in north america besides how many is in health gas? Um

So that's probably a question you should be asking antonio. Okay, there's the co of north america. Okay

I work on the brands. I could tell you what my vision is for the brands

So what would we're doing on the brand? So what do you want to see from the brands?

Well, your question was very high level very like what are you going to do to change the company?

Not my favorite is go talk to him. Uh, but but on the brands

I think we're doing some some fun stuff most of which

We honestly haven't materialized in the marketplace yet. If I look back at last year

Most of the stuff that I said we were going to do and announce we were going to do looks like unfulfilled promises

I call last year kind of the dog year. It was almost like seven years and one because we did

So much shit, but it doesn't look like most of that has materialized. We launched four new jeeps in four months

It's crazy. I don't think in the 33 years of adunas. I don't think we've ever done that kind of a cadence of launched

Four new products in four months. They're literally just arriving at dealerships right now

So even though we talked about it for six freaking months

Just now starting to get to him. He's a great exam. We lost hemi

I don't even know how the headline of 10,000 orders in one day became this like

Huge thing. I mean he you saw half a million trucks 10,000. It's not it's not a crazy number

I mean, it's a great number, but it's not like game change. It took on a life of its own

Um, but the reality is we launched hemi never super excited me too. Everybody's excited

You know to bring back that choice for the customer, but the reality is we shut down the hemi line

Even though we announced that we brought it back. We had to bring the hemi line back up to speed

We had a deep priority as his production. Yeah, the production line

We had to de prioritize the g6 to bring the hemi back up and and all these things

But the reality is the reason I'm telling you that story is

We eat in that whole time period. We took 50 000 orders

We only built 30 000 and by the time they got to dealerships. We only sold 10 000

So ram sales were up last year retail to customers 50 000 units increase up 17

percent only 10 000 more henries

They only tell you that not to say hey, we could have done better

I tell you that to say we only built 30 000 last year

We're gonna build over 100 000 this year 3x what we did last year

So all that work that we did is just started to come to fruition

We made all this noise with nascar. We haven't even raced yet

We're gonna race at daytona for the first time. So we haven't been there yet

We talked about the tv show the tv show hasn't launched it

If we talk about free agent free agent hasn't launched it

TRX we launched TRX you're not gonna be able to buy it to the server

So what I'm saying is last year we built the foundation

Tons of work

Just starting to see it come now and one of the things that we're doing

Your question specifically what are you gonna do on the brands is we're trying to widen the scope of the brands and you see

The announcement will be the 13 billion

13 billion highs back

Perfectly to your question because it helps us expand the scope of our brands within the 13 billion

We're gonna increase the capacity of

Cherokee and compass one of the things that we've been constrained on is production capacity

The reason that we didn't sell a lot of units to fleet last year for truck

We didn't have the fast

Sterling hypes was really strangled. Hemi was not helping t6 had to come down while we were ramping up

So we didn't have the production that's going to get fixed. We're bringing mt4 to kokomo

That's going to give us more engine availability

Within the 13 billion we are now so we're going into Toledo to build the mid-sized truck which

Could we desperately need a mid-sized truck?

Because we used to have the most successful mid-sized truck of all time

In 2019 when we were killing it was ramp, but we didn't have a dakota in 19

We had the ds classic trucks the ds classic truck sold for 40 000 dollars

Which is the price of a mid-sized truck, but with a full-size truck. It was an absolute game changer

I need to get back to that with the dakota and then we're going to bring in

But I think is going to be another big enabler for us is a ram full-size utility vehicle in warren

We were the only ones in the industry trying to go into that very lucrative segment

With only one offering and we were trying to spread a gap of 50 000 dollars with one brand

No one's ever learned that lagonaire. It was too big of a gap for no one's ever done that successfully crossed 50 000 dollars with

Okay, we call it a wagon your grand regular. Let's be honest. It was the same car, right?

So you don't have enough woods, leathers and sunroofs to

Justify a value walk of 50 000 dollars. So now we're going to do it like everybody else

You know gm's got three a shabby a gmc and a catalac forge got forward and link it

We're going to come with a ram version and our jeep version and then your next question is going to be oh

So ram's going to be the cheap one and jeep's going to be the expensive one

No, it's going to be two different customers

It's one of the value of our company is we have one showroom with four different brands with four different positionings

And we can appeal to different customers within those positions

It's no different than what we did and now it sounds like that's corporate bullshit

But just look back at history. We did this successfully with the mastercars

I shouldn't say we did this immensely with brampton. You had a charger four door and you had a 300 four door

They were the same crop. They appealed to two completely different customers. It wasn't cheap and expensive

It was two different customers

They didn't cross up and they successfully existed in the marketplace in the same showroom

We can do that in the very lucrative uv market as well

so

That's a couple of the things that we're doing to expand the scope of the brands

Which I think is going to be our growth potential because right now we're competing in 55 percent of the industry

When you look at all of our sales across all of our brands

Yeah, we sold one just the american brands pressure jeep dodger and we sold 1.8 billion units last year 1.8

Freaking a lot of cars 55 percent of the industry

When I bring on all those other product lines, I'm going to go to 75 percent of the industry

My long-range plan is going to go beyond 75 percent of the industry. That's where the growth is going to

I think it's going to take you to get to that 75. The 75 is going to be within the next two years

Union equit. Yeah. Yeah

How much gold is the dakota the new truck to the solar assayants and your numbers for ramp? It will be

Very important to us because if you look at the the light duty truck

Light duty truck is about a million and a half units

And it is the battleground in the industry

Not only is it, you know the most lucrative and all the domestics have to live and die in that segment

It's 1.5 million units the the midsize

Is you know, everybody talks about affordability and the cost of vehicles and everything

Well, a midsize truck today is the same size as the bullseye truck was 15 years ago

Well, the shooter carrier on hasn't got you know significantly larger

So a midsize truck can appeal to a lot of people the industry by the time we bring the dakota in the market

We'll be a half a million units and it will grow to 700,000 units from there

So it'll be half the size of what we consider the battleground today

Well, I mean, you know to come alone last year with 278,000 units amazing. No, amazing

So now I put that one in a little bit of a different space than I put the domestic midsize trucks

Why?

It's it's been there longer. It's got kind of a cult following

Um, it's just a little bit of a different these getting your dakota to have the same cult

We're gonna do we're gonna do

A very unique positioning of dakota number one. It's going to be a real credible

A lot of capability vehicles going to be body on framed, uh, which it needs to be to transition to leg beauty truck

um

I don't I don't want to

Tell you any more about it. But I think I think our positioning of it is this

Pretty cool. The people that have seen it

We're pretty shocked. They're like, oh, that's just like it's up, right?

Technically you've had a midsize truck with gladiator. Does gladiator stick around with dakota?

I mean, obviously that's that's a very that's a very different. It's in this segment a lot

Uh, in hindsight, should we have cold gladiator or wrangler?

Probably way frankly if we did we sold 200 and kicked 2 000 if you had gladiator and wrangler together

And nobody would be sending out a press release

Yesterday on the rtr, which is a sticker package saying that they'd be wrangler because they did

If you include my one that has a bet on it, we kicked their ass. Uh, but whatever it is what it is

um

The reality is though does that compete with colorado canyon in tecoma. Yeah, it's not really cross-up with it

It's it's more of a wrangler

Um, it has all the functionality of a midsize truck. It can cross-shop through the midsize truck. It absolutely can

Um, but it's different

It's you know with the solid axle in the prong it attracts more of a wrangler buyer when it does a midsize truck buyer

And we it won't do that by the way. Okay. We'll absolutely keep it because I think it's gonna

It's gonna be like krescher and they feel like the funeral circuit

It's gonna be two completely right customers. We're gonna execute it completely different. Okay, uh, so

He's mentioned chrysler. Um, yeah, what's uh, what's going on with chrysler?

What's the future of that brand? You know

I've heard a lot of different things over the last several years

I I think it's been since like 2011 or something like that that I was working. I think it was 2011 actually that was working that course

um

And that question has been the exact same question forever

Ever since the days when chrysler had fiji cruiser and seabring and you know, I had like the bigger lineup

That question has come up over and over and over there

What's gonna have a little chrysler? What are you doing chrysler? Are you gonna shut down chrysler's dv chrysler?

the reality is

If I looked at each of these brands and tried to treat them as

a showroom

Yeah, you can make that. Hell you can make that case outrank because if you call a light duty truck and heavy duty truck a truck

Okay

One vehicle. Okay. I've pro master in it. I got one vehicle and a commercial vehicle, right?

So you can make the same case the reason you don't make the cases because you go. Oh, wait a minute

You saw 550,000 with those so I'm not gonna ask you that of course that makes sense

But chrysler you go. Oh, this one's 125,000 close

You need that brand you need that brand because you're in a showroom. That's a house of brands

I have pulled it from brands in the same show. I don't need to have a pickup first

I don't need to have a pickup truck per person

That could I expand chrysler? Yes. The reason I could expand chrysler is each of these brands has a very unique position

There are a large number of people in the industry

17 million unit industry and we sell, you know, 1.8 million of the north america brands this

That 1.8 billion by the way was was uh was global. So 1.4 in north america

So 1.4 out of the 14 million 17 million unit total in north america. It's still quite small

But within that population that we don't get there is a huge population of people that don't need to go off-road

Whether they go off-road or just think that they will someday maybe have the capability to guard us

There's a huge number of people that could care less about that

There's a huge number of people that could care less about doing a burnout and want a muscle car

And there's a huge population of people that I don't know how to tow a boat. I don't care

I don't need to put anything in the bed of my truck. I know I don't need that

They need transportation. They need cool reliable transportation and within our house of brands

This brand is never going to be for that customer. This brand if we do it, right?

This brand is never going to be for that customer. This brand's never I think so. What do I do?

Do I ignore them? No, so can I girl? Yeah, sure. I can do a car suit

But is it my number one priority today? No

That's what we get there probably

Huh, what is your number one? No a number one priority is where the money is brand

Brand and cheap. This is my volume. This is my money. This is my fun

And this is going to be something that we have capability to grow in the future. Absolutely

Okay, so

You know, we we put a call to our listeners or

What what they would want to hear from you? Yeah, and one of the questions was about affordability

Um, yeah, and and somebody also asked, you know back when the other guy was still in charge

He talked about bringing a new $25,000 deep on a new ramp hit or braggate through the lineup

Is that still part of the plan? So affordability affordability is tough subject because

Um, you can have this conversation

With every industry, you know, ever since COVID changed every

Ever since COVID the price of everything's gone up from a cold cold of cars, right?

The challenge is

Our is is the entire industry

I mean, you're seeing it right now the industry is taking huge write-offs and thinking huge write-offs because everybody is

De-prioritizing a web location, but yet we invested a half a trillion dollars in this

So everybody's thinking these huge write-offs. So at the same time you're taking huge write-offs

So you get to see everybody announcing. Oh, we're going to cut prices $10,000. That's impossible

It can't you can't take billions and billions and billions of dollars of write-offs and they go

Oh, by the way, I'm going to cut the price

But what you can do and you see us doing it and we literally just did it on jeep

So we did a plan called the jeep reset. What we did is we didn't say, hey, we're going to cut the price of jeeps

We said we're going to make jeep more jeep. We're going to give you more value if you look across the jeep lineup

We just added about $4,000 of customer value to all of our jeeps on average

That's a similar thing to add or to cutting the price because we took features that people wanted and we lower the price

35 inch reels are now $3,000 instead of $5,500. Is that a $2,500 price cut? No

But everybody wanted in any way. So it kind of is a price cut

So I can give you more value without cutting the price and give you more jeep

At the same time. So that is adding value. I think that is something we need to do a better job in the industry

We did it on TRX. Nobody talks about it at TRX because you go, oh, it's $99,000. Yeah, it's a freaking ton of money

But a lot cheaper than a raptor arc is $15,000 cheaper than raptor arc

And it's $25,000 cheaper than the outgoing model and it's on the new platform

So it adds more technology and more features. So now you get more value more features and a lower price

But okay, it's still a hundred grand. So I mean, it's not like it's an affordability issue

But the more that we can do that the better. Look at the notch. It releases dots. Oh my god, that's

Well, is it?

420 horsepower all-wheel drive now with the new hatchback design. I've got more functionality

I've got 420 horsepower standard and I've got all-wheel drive

And I'm 49,985 go back in time and look at what you got at that performance of what the price is

It's less expensive than it was previously

Faster than it was previously at the first

Sack absolutely a fact

The all-wheel drive in that car gives you the capability of having it all other everywhere in the midwest

It doesn't have to be a toy. You can drive it as an everyday car. So I got that. I also have performance

Now a 550 horsepower t sick lower drive will be the hell cat

So I'm giving you I'm giving me more and more value

So you should nick his poke me and tell me I have one more question

So I want to ask questions. So when we were talking about the, you know

The electrification strategy is completely changing for every automaker out there who's got rid of the key has

And that you're introducing a new

Vehicle with a recon and jeep. Do you think that's what people want?

The jeep? Yeah, um

Like the real like is that the the pull off the doors and go off-road? The question is

The definition of people was very vague

Uh a percentage of people that the use case works

Electrification is amazing. You guys have driven tons of electric cars

So she's the only one you you have a perspective that the average customer does not end

Those customers that are opposed to electrification never driven 11

but

The sub case in a lot of cases they don't need to because they know that it doesn't fit their use case. They know that

They live in an apartment. They don't have access to a charge at night

Or they know where they live. There is no infrastructure for charging or they know quite frankly, it's too expensive

Or they know I need to tow my boat and I've read the stats and it won't tow my boat and when the pull but and on and on and on all the six

promise um

The industry wanted to go to

50 60 plus percent electrification adoption

Customer pull for electrification

There's probably more in the sub 10% range now. Will that 10% grow as we get better? Yeah

But the cost of batteries got to come down the weights got to come down

Uh the overall price the cars got to come down the infrastructure got to come down

The question is when's that going to happen? We were trying to make it happen in one year

Is that going to happen in two years three years five years ten years?

I don't know but eventually it will happen and we will get to that 50 60 percent

I just don't know if it's going to be three years or 10 years and that way it's not going to be 2030

That's for sure. That's why you see everybody writing down these huge investments because they they have they have warehouses full of batteries and they're like

I'm not going to be able to use those in the next 24 months. It's not going to happen. Um, but we will get there

Okay, I I fully believe that we will get one last quick one. Are you going to bring back? Is going to bring back a rampage?

ah

It's a good car looks good drives good. I like it

Okay

Thank you, Jim

Yeah, well, you know as I said, we weren't dealing once to talk to Tim. There's also, uh, elissa prittle from

Motor Trend also sat down with him

Uh, and I've got I'll have a link in the show notes to her to her story

one of the things that she talked about talked to him about was

Um putting a hammy in the new charger

Um, you know, and of course the chargers, you know available as an electric now or with the the three liter hurricane six cylinder

and

basically tim told her that

Yeah, probably not going to get the five seven in the charger

um, because

You know, first of all compared, you know, you got 550 horsepower with the hurricane the the hemi is only 395 horsepower

And the chargers standard all-wheel drive

So it makes it hard to package that engine in there with the all-wheel drive system in the front

Um, and it's just not really worth it

You know, if they're going to do anything with a v8 in there, it's probably going to be a hellcat

Rather than the standard hemi

And even that he remained somewhat noncommittal on

So I'll have that link in the show notes as well

Uh, but you know as far as our conversation goes, yeah, I mean, you know covered fair amount of stuff in in 17 minutes

But uh, he did confirm, you know, um, you know dakota

Built in in Toledo, which was previously announced, but he also confirmed that the gladiators not going away

There is going to be a next-generation gladiator that is built

Uh on the same platform in Toledo

but that you know, they you know the the customer base for

The ram dakota and the jeep gladiator even though they're similar size and nominally both midsize pickup trucks

Totally different customer base. Yeah, and so, you know, the the gladiator is going to be, you know

Very different vehicle from the from the dakota

Yeah, too. So it makes sense to have both vehicles because small trucks, but entirely different

Small trucks, so it makes a lot of sense

Yeah

Um, all right. So that is everything I think we have for Stalantis. Um, so

there was um

Also some big news the other day

um from

Actually from from beijing

Mark Carney the uh, relatively still relatively new prime minister of canada

Um went to beijing this week

to talk to uh, the chinese leader zhijing ping

Um, and came back with a signed trade deal

that we'll see, um

tariffs on canadian products going into china

substantially reduced

So they get to sell their canola oil and uh, all kinds of other products at, uh, almost no tariff in china

Uh, and in return

Canada is dropping the the tariffs on chinese built EVs from a hundred percent to just six percent

for

At least 49 000 units a year

and so

Lower cost chinese EVs are going to start turning up in canada

In the not too distant future probably

And then and then it was a follow-up story, you know, again

Not not really a surprise to those of us, you know follow the industry

But canada wants to have chinese companies building their EVs in canada

And I I think it's only a matter of time

probably within the next six to 12 months that we hear the first announcements of

Probably byd, but you know, maybe Geely or somebody else

building a factory or taking over a factory in canada because you know, there's there's some stuff that is available

Like stilantis is brampton ontario plant near toronto, which was supposed to build the new compass

And that's going to be built in illinois now. And so

You know, they got there's a factory there. That's not likely to be used anytime in the foreseeable future the

The gm cami plant near ingersall that was building the bright drop electric fans

That's not being used

Um, I think it you know, I think it's only a matter of time before there's a deal for somebody some chinese company to build EVs in canada

Yeah, it's the first big foothold for china here and that's in north america and that's

It's a big deal. I don't think I wouldn't be surprised either to hear an announcement about a factory

following very quickly after

Oh, yeah

Yeah, canadians canadians, you know, canadian automakers, you know, people working those factories are like, oh

Okay, well, we can't do that now because these, you know, the u.s. companies pulled out and so they're like, oh, well

china's like, yeah, we'll build some cars there. All right, cool. Yeah

If you guys want to buy them, we'll build them

Yeah, and you know, mexico doesn't have any chinese factories yet chinese assembly plants yet

um, but

20 of uh, chinese sales or 20 of uh, vehicle sales in mexico last year in 2025

Were from chinese brands

So they've already got a significant chunk of the jet of the mexican market

And so, you know, this is i wrote a a blog uh, a post on the telemetry blog the other day

Um, you know, this could be an existential threat for the destroyed auto industry

um, you know, if they

If they continue to just, you know, to keep building stuff like

big v8 pickups and suvs

Um, they are going to be increasingly irrelevant

everywhere outside of the united states borders

Um, and between that and the antagonism that's being built up against the united states because of certain policies here

Um, you know, people in other countries don't want to buy us products regardless of what they are

And so that's going to make it really tough

You know, if if the ua, you know, if ford gm stilantis

Don't continue to invest and develop

You know competitive, you know competitive products including electrified vehicles, but you know also, you know smaller more affordable vehicles

Um, you know, they've got it. They've got to have stuff that is competitive in the rest of the world

And if they don't

They're going to be stuck with just the us market and nothing else

Yeah, I mean, it's a big market, but also maybe greenland. Well, maybe greenland. It's a big market, but also it's, you know, you

They have they have, you know facilities and they have cars and they have people who work in all these other countries and if you

If you don't keep up if you continue to sort of like, well, let's just keep throwing himmies and everything

That does not look well and the rest, you know, that's not going to help you in other in other countries

and yeah

Yeah, essentially sad trombone. Yeah

All right, and then finally, um, there was, uh

A story, um

That was on uh, see I found it

Turned up in my search that has your byline on it and call along with the miles

about, uh

The cars being up to 64 hundred dollars more expensive than before

Yeah, I'm doing some work with uh nick and with test miles and um, this was actually the first story I wrote

Um, yeah, woohoo

So it's it and basically it's talking about the the prices of new cars and and the impacts of what's made it

Pricier and is it your imagination that you're walking into the dealership and

You think man, these all seem more expensive and it's not like there was this, um independent analysis by this

company and they found that

Between tariffs and all these different things that are happening average price of new vehicles up about 13.5 percent

Which is about 64 hundred dollars

Uh price pump, you know that and it's it's 64 hundred dollars that shows up in your monthly payment and and does make your new car

A little bit more expensive, you know, it's not just the ev tax credit, you know that that was part of it for evs

But it it's sort of an impact to both

The use cars and the new cars everything is just is a little bit more expensive and because use car

New car prices are so high

Use cars are a bit more desirable

So even those tend to be skewing a little bit higher because people can get a more of a premium for those and they could have

Say two or three years ago

So it was about the the impact of the things that are making use and new cars more expensive to not your imagination about 64 hundred dollars

Yeah, real reels

You know, this was primarily increases on imported cars and parts, right?

Right, so it affects imports more than it does exactly if you're a u.s. Manufacturers

So that's why it's an average because it's looking at, you know, overall what it's, you know

Some imported cars are way more than 6400. It's more expensive. So that's what it comes out to on average is 64

Okay. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's that's a big chunk of change, you know in just one year

Yeah, it's not right. It hasn't been like a slow creep like we're saying. Oh, you know

Since you know, you know 20 20 10 since 2015 it's on top of the slow creep we've had already anyway, right?

It's like no since last year like that's a very short amount of time for a 64 hundred dollar price increase

That's not that's not a small number. That's a significant number, especially if you're looking for more budget friendly vehicles

So that that increases is

You are going to see it and it's not your imagination and there's you know, it's the terrorist. It's a lack of

Incentives it's a lot of things that are impacting it, but it is genuinely that's how much more it is going to cost you

Yeah

All right

Well, thanks all for listening and hopefully you will hear all three of our voices all the way to the end this time

And we will be back next time. Bye. Bye everyone. Bye

If you are a podcast host listen up this one's for you

My name is Ali Jackson

I'm the host of finding mr.

height a dating and relationship podcast that I've been doing for four years now

Sharing my positive and practical approach to dating that's built on my own life experience

And I wanted to share another experience that I've had my secret behind monetizing my show

It's called red circle and I was just telling my colleague about how much I love their platform with red circle

Not only am I getting a seamless hosting experience, but I also love the support I receive in ad sales

It's not just typical ad sales either

It's targeted opportunities based on my show and my life and the platform is super simple

You just set your preferences and red circle matches you with sponsors that align with your show

You can vet every opportunity and their platform gives you great analytics more recently too

My red circle team has brought me opportunities outside of my podcast on social media to really augment the podcast partnerships

Bring them full circle

I just can't recommend them enough if you want to give it a try go to redcircle.com to get your free trial

That's redcircle.com for a free trial

Chinese EVs North of the Border

About this episode

Land Rover Trophy Edition

Ford Shelby Gt 500

Request an Explanation

Want to learn more?

Help improve this episode

More from Wheel Bearings