Eyes Off

This is episode 424 of wheel bearings. I am Sam Aboual-Sammid from Telemetry and I am

Roberto Baldwin from SAE International and oh yeah, and we have the podcast. It's the

Automotive Engineering podcast, so I'm from SAE. Excellent. And I can't remember where

Nicole said she is this weekend, but she's not here. So she's somewhere. It's the two

of us. Somewhere rad probably. Yeah, it usually is. Well, tomorrow, certainly by the time

everybody hears this when it goes up on Tuesday, I will be getting close to Japan. I'll be

on my way to Tokyo. Man. I know. I'm so jealous. I love going to Japan. Japan's great.

Japan's the best. Everyone listens, figure out a way to go to Japan. It's very expensive

to get there, but once you're there, it's really cheap. It is right now. The exchange

rate in the yen and the dollar is very favorable to Americans right now. Yeah, so do that before

that changes. But yeah, it's very expensive. You know, flying there is going to cost you

an arm and a leg. But once you get there, I think when I was in Osaka, I would pay like

$40 for a hotel room. Wow. And it was a good, it wasn't like scary like Motel 6 where it's

floor sticky and it's gross. It was a nice hotel room. I mean, it was small. You pull

back the blanket and you see all these nasty things on the sheet. You just hope it's water

stains. Yeah. You know, the hotel rooms are very small, the ones, you know, the traditional

sort of Japanese ones. But I mean, you're in Japan. What are you going to just stay

here? What are you going to just hang out in your hotel all day? Yeah. Moving and shaking.

You just need someone to sleep and shower and use a special magical toilet.

Well, I will be hanging out with with Honda this week. Going to the show on Wednesday and

going to the media day for the Japan Mobility Show, formerly known as the Tokyo Motor Show. And

then on Thursday, we get to meet with the CEO of Honda and then learn more about Honda's space

program. And then on Saturday, we go to Chigi to drive the new Prelude and also Honda's next

generation hybrid system. I'm going to I'm going to Kia to look at the something. I don't know

if I'm allowed to say. Oh, yeah, no, it yeah, they're they're gonna be showing a new vehicle

that's going to be out in a few weeks. Yeah. So that's what that's what I'm doing. I wish Kia

would move it to Korea. Korea is also delightful. But yes, I love Korea too. I'm just traveling in

Asia in general. Yeah, I'm just going to Orange County. So yeah, I live in Orange County. You're

driving down or flying down? I'm flying down. Okay. That's all right. It's a hell drive because

you gotta drive through LA. So yeah, that's true. Yeah, it's because it's on the on the wrong side

of Los Angeles. Yeah. All right. Well, you didn't have you driven you driven stuff this week,

but it's all stuff that you can't talk about yet, right? There's stuff I can't talk about for like

weeks and other stuff I can't talk about for months, months, like, like next year, like well

until next year. That's that's all I can say. Sorry. Okay. Well, I drove some stuff. Actually,

on Thursday, I was out at M1 Concourse in Pontiac, Michigan, with crew from CNBC. They were working

on a story on EV performance. You know, our you know, basically our EV is getting too fast. And

we had a trio of electric vehicles that we borrowed to do some do some evaluation with and

some filming with. We had a Kia EV6 GT line 2026 model, which went from zero to 60 in like 4.8

seconds. We had a Porsche Macan 4S electric, which is the base version of the electric Macan.

Which did it in about four seconds. And then we also had a 2026 or actually it was 25 Audi

RS E Tron GT, which did it in 2.6 seconds. And the the the the reporter from from CNBC was

running along was somewhat shocked at how fast these cars were. It he was not expecting this.

He doesn't usually drive EVs. And so he was not expecting these levels of performance.

I don't think people realize how fast under five seconds is. I don't think that really

under three seconds or under three seconds. Under three seconds is that's it makes it can

make you very sick if you're not used to it. And all your internal organs, like your eyeballs

feel weird. It takes a few launches before you get used to it. The first time though,

it's just like, Oh, I think I'm going to vomit. I've had friends who have said, Don't ever do

that again. Yeah, I don't like that. I don't enjoy that. No, it's one of those things that I think

for most people, you know, when you buy vehicles like this, it's like, Okay, you're buying it for

bragging rights. And, you know, you do it a few times to show it off for your friends. And then

you never use it again. Yeah, it's just it's just it's kind of pointless to have that much

performance in the real world because you can't you can't use it. I mean, certainly if you live

it in many places in California, you know, you're not going to use that on the 405 or the 101,

you know, or 280 in the Bay Area. It's it and it's, you know, not only can you not do it,

but even if you find a time when there's nobody around, you shouldn't be doing it.

Because there's no need to be accelerating that fast. Yeah, you're giving all the people a lot

of power who have very little experience with that power. That's that's that's that's sort of the

scary part is that we're you know, it's such a quick, it's just a huge jump in acceleration. And

how quick these and how quick vehicles are is that, you know, the average person again is used

to like six seconds, five seconds, seven seconds. And they've been fine with that. And then they

get in something with three seconds. And it's, there's there's always the potential, you know,

I, you know, I talk about this a lot where, you know, in the 80s and 90s, 70s, you know,

when a car broke free, it would break, you could break a car free at like 20 miles an hour.

Like you can make a mistake where the car was going sideways at like 20, 25 miles an hour

in the rain or, you know, sometimes even on dry land. But you're pretty bad in those days.

Yeah. And tires are pretty bad. So you, you could like correct at a slow speed and you would learn

how to correct at a slow speed now because tires are so much better and vehicles are so much better

at keeping you on the road, which is great for safety. And for, you know, 90% of the people out

there who are just driving like regular, this is outstanding because it means, you know, fewer

deaths, fewer injuries, fewer collisions. But the flip side of that is that things don't go wrong

until the vehicle is really going very, very fast. You're doing things like 70,

80 miles an hour. Now you're having to correct in an environment without any previous experience

correcting at a low speed. And so that's when you end up with like, you know, there's an accident,

but it's catastrophic because you were just going so fast and things went wrong so quickly that you,

you know, you don't have the, you know, the person doesn't have the experience to, to react

in any meaningful way because they've never experienced this because the vehicle and the

tires have been, have done such a great job of keeping you, keeping you and keeping the vehicle

from breaking free. And when it does, it's really, really bad. Yeah. And most people don't get the

opportunity to practice those kinds of skills, you know, especially early in their, in their driving

life. You generally don't get much opportunity to practice the kinds of skills, the car handling

skills you need to be able to recover when your vehicle does lose control. You know, I've been

fortunate, you know, in the, the jobs that I've had, you know, as an engineer, you know, spending

a lot of time driving vehicles on frozen pads of, you know, frozen lakes and things like that

for, for the work I've done to, you know, to be able to understand the, those dynamics and, and

how to control the vehicle better. And, you know, as my kids, you know, got to driving age, you know,

I made sure to take them out, you know, soon as it snowed, you know, take them over to the local

high school and the parking lot and, you know, practice some car control with them, you know,

first get them used to what ABS feels like, what traction control feels like, and then to do some

skid control, you know, sitting in the passenger seat and yanking on the parking brake to, you know,

to get the back end of brake free and have them practice, you know, steering into a skid, you

know, so that they know what it feels like. And hopefully, you know, if they get into that kind

of situation, they are able to respond appropriately. Yeah, it's, it's, it is a sort of, it's a learned

and something you have to, you know, having to do, for Sam and I, like, you know, like Sam said,

we've been very fortunate in that our jobs involve us doing these things pretty often.

It's sort of, and, and we've, you know, we've had the benefit of, you know, people at tracks who,

you know, if I've had instructors like, oh, if you do this, you'll be better at this. And I've

had instructors like on ice driving, be like, oh, you should do this. And I'm like, oh, that's,

that's awesome. And I'm, you know, I grew up driving on snow in a rear wheel drive, you know,

I learned how to drive on snow in a rear wheel drive, nice, not even nice on dots and 260Z.

So zero weight in the bag, zero, you know, and so you just, everything was a skid in that car.

And so I just, that's how I learned how to drive. And even then, you know, I still have,

you know, you still have instructors like, oh, you know, I saw you're doing this, you should really

do this. You're like, oh, and then you see, you see the benefits of it. And you see the benefits of,

of like learning from people. And the average person doesn't have that. And it's, you know,

if you, if you, if you want to have fun, do autocross, you know, take, take some defensive

driving classes, do some ice stuff, I know, you know, it can be expensive sometimes, but if, if

you really want to, you know, sort of explore the dynamics of vehicles outside of sort of the safety,

you know, the safety, you know, all the implemented safety, which of course keeps you on the road

from dying, keeps you from dying. If you want to explore more of that, you take some classes,

do it somewhere safe. So you know, when things go wrong, oh no, you hit some cones.

Who cares? As opposed to, oh no. The consequences are minimal, but you, you learn, you'll learn

some important skills and gain some important experience so that when it, if and when it does

happen in the real world, and at some point in your life, it probably will happen in the real

world. You know, you want to know how to respond to those situations when the car does start to

lose traction. Yeah. And you know, it's also nice about this, is that you end up, you know, you,

you maybe end up being part of a community, you know, you have, you know, you go out with your,

your Miata's or your BRZ's or your M twos or whatever. And you, you know, you sort of meet

people and you know, now you have some new friends, which according to the internet and the world

is very difficult for people to, to make nowadays.

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All right. Well, I did that, you know, that was only a few hours at M1, you know, shooting

that story that probably be coming out in a couple of weeks. But I did get to spend some more time

with a 2026 BMW iX X drive 4545. Yes, 45 with the 22 inch wheel package. And

you know, so the the iX is BMW's mid sized electric crossover. You know, let's get the

obvious thing out of the way. Yes, this is not a particularly attractive vehicle,

especially the front end. When my when my wife saw it in the driveway, she said, what is that?

But, you know, once you get past the front end, especially, you know, with the giant

kidney, this is probably the most egregious variation or one of the most egregious variations

of the twin kidney grill, especially given that, you know, since it's an EV, there's no actual

grill there. I think probably the only the only BMW that may have larger twin kidneys on it is the

the BMW m hybrid v8 prototype race car, you know, which is that's a whole different story. And,

you know, the way it's done there actually works with that design. But once you get past that,

you know, this is basically a tallish mid sized wagon, you know, it's not this is not an SUV,

you know, that in any form is going to be an off roader. You know, there's not that much ground

clearance. But it, you know, it works really well for for what it is. It's, you know, it's,

they got it got an update a mid cycle refresh last year. So it got some new headlights. The,

you know, the, for the most part, the front end state design stayed largely the same,

but it did get new headlights and tail lights, got some interior updates. And it's now I think

when it originally came out in the US, at least it was available in a rear wheel drive version.

And I think in Europe, they still offer the rear drive. Now they are only offering

three different dual motor all wheel drive models in North America. So there is the 45,

which is the base model. There is the I X X drive 60. So the 45 gets 402 horsepower

from two motors. And we'll do zero to 16 about 4.9 seconds, which is as fast as anybody really

needs to go. The X drive 60 gets 536 horsepower and does zero to 60 and 4.4 seconds. And then

there's the I XM 70, which gets 650 horsepower and goes zero to 16 3.6 seconds. The, the one that I had,

as I said, had the optional 22 inch wheel package. So I think it comes standard on 19s or 20s.

And the interior is very much kind of the modern BMW ethos, you know, the design direction they've

gone across the board with BMW, where you have one large display that, you know, that spans from

the in front of the driver across the center of the dashboard, very much simplified, a bare minimum

of physical controls on the dashboard, which is not not the greatest, it's not certainly not my

preference. But it does have manual vents, which is a good thing. So you got manual vents.

There's buttons in the middle of the dash for the hazard lights and the front and rear defoggers.

And then there's buttons on the steering wheel, and a few buttons on the are actually not so much

buttons, but haptic controls on the center console. So this is likely to be one of the last

BMWs that comes up, comes to market with, with the rotary iDrive controller. It still has one,

it's, it's a clear, I don't know if it's glass or, you know, or if it's plastic, but it's a clear

crystal like knob. And then there's a toggle on the center console to the left of that for the

shifter to select your gears to go between reverse neutral drive and what they label as

be or break where you get your max your one pedal mode. And then the rest of the buttons there

that surround the iDrive controller are just haptic controls. So you press on them, you'll get a

little bit of feedback. But there's no, there's no physical buttons there. Overall, it works well.

You know, the touch, the screen is also a touchscreen.

The seats, you know, are really good. They're very comfortable, very supportive.

Had no, no issues there. There's lots of cargo room in the back. And when you open up the rear

hatch, it's got this clamshell style tailgate that kind of wraps around the sides, similar to the

Audi Q five and the Lincoln Corsair. When you open it up, there's actually auxiliary lights

underneath there on the sides to the on either side of the cargo opening, so that if, for example,

you know, you have to carry something long in here and leave the hatch partway or all the way open

as you're driving, you still have lights on the back there that, you know, because the other

lights are actually on the tailgate itself. They said there, there is a touchscreen interface

for the for the infotainment that you can use as an alternative to the iDrive controller,

but it is, you know, the distance to reach it is kind of long. So it's a little awkward to use

the touchscreen. So I actually prefer using the iDrive controller on this one. It's this is this

vehicle, as I said, is plenty fast, you know, under five seconds or 60. It will, depending on which

tire and wheel package you get, you can get up to 312 miles of EPA rated range. With the 22 inch

wheels, it's rated at 279. And, you know, BMWs, you know, modern BMW EVs have generally been,

you know, pretty good on their efficiency. And, you know, they generally don't have any issues

hitting their rated range numbers. So, you know, you will, you know, even with the 22s,

you will probably get close to 300 miles of driving in real world conditions, you know,

unless you are using this like a sports car, which it is most definitely not.

The ride and handling is good. Oh, one more thing in the cargo area. When you open the tailgate,

there is, you know, the floor is flat. But then when you lift it up, there is another

storage bin underneath. So you can lift it up. And there's that's where you've got the tools

for changing tires. There's no spare tire. But you can, you know, it's got got some got a reflector

there. There's tow hook. So you can screw that in, you know, if you need to tow the vehicle.

What else? Lots of room in the rear in the rear seat in the second row.

In the back of the front seatbacks, there's USB charging ports there. There is a wireless

charger in the center console. So yeah, I mean, it was it's this was, you know, if you can get

past the looks, you know, this is generally a very pleasant car to drive. You know, if you need a

five passenger crossover that will go at least 300 miles on a charge, this isn't this is not a bad

choice. Sorry, actually turn hit a tab and that was the end of that.

So the xDrive 45 starts at $75,150. Mine had a bunch of options on there, including

the integral active steering, the four wheel air suspension for 1600 bucks, the driving assistance,

driving assistant professional package, which includes a hands free driving highway driving

system, similar to supercruise or blue cruise is $2,550. This one had the M Sport package on there,

which gives you, you know, some m badges and other exterior elements as well as the 22 inch

wheels. That's $4,500. Most people get a lot for badges. Yeah, most you know that you don't need

no stinkin badges. Yeah. But you do get an M steering wheel, you know, so there's that. I guess.

Well, the M-steam will have the owl cut out the. No, it's leather. Oh, thank God.

No, I'll. I hate Alcatare so much. Anytime it's on a steering wheel, it just, it feels gross.

Okay. Like I'm a. I don't mind it, but you know, I, ugh.

All in the grand total, including delivery. Remember I said this was $75,000, $75,150

base MSRP, including delivery came to $96,275, which, you know, on premium vehicles, it's very

easy to extremely inflate your price. You know, if you're not careful with the options list.

With wheels and badges. So you want to guess at the destination charge?

1100. Oh, you're very close. 1175. Yeah.

It's the luxury people are like, we're already going to charge you a lot. Why are we going to

charge you a hundred, almost a hundred grand for this thing? You know, we're not going to lie about

where the price increases are. We're just going to tell you right up front. Here's where the price

increases are. We're not going to sneak it into some weird. Oh yeah. First deliver your car is

going to be $40,000. Like what? So yeah, 279 miles of range for this, this variant.

And if, you know, if you're looking for, you know, a premium, you know, luxury EV crossover,

wagon thing, you know, I think, you know, this is definitely, I think, I don't know,

this would be right up there with the BMW, or the, sorry, the Mercedes EQE SUV.

I got to say, I think I kind of like the, and the EQE, you know, having the,

the, the zero, zero-layer interface, I think actually works a little better than the BMW

iDrive interface. I know there's, you know, there was, do we even talk about it? No,

but there was news about, you know, GM's going to get rid of the car play on Lallard cars,

blah, blah, blah, which I'm like, no. But the only car, the only system that I really barely

ever use car play with is the, is the zero-layer. Like I plug my phone in and like, oh, there's

the map, there's a little thing for music. I don't know, that's fine. I, everything else I have to,

like I test the infotainment system, but then I immediately go to car play to do this stuff.

The, the Mercedes zero-layer, I'm just like, no. Yeah, because with the zero-layer system,

you know, it's basically you, the whole screen is the map. And then you have some widgets that are

around, you know, they're overlaid on top of the map in the corners or the bottom, bottom level,

you know, for things like media players and give you access to a few other things that you need,

that, you know, don't take up a whole lot of space. They still have decently sized touch targets.

So it's not too hard to hit those touch targets. And you're not going back and forth

between different modes all the time, which I think is really helpful.

Yeah. Yeah. Cause in, in car play, I immediately go to the mode where it shows the map and music

and all the other, you know, other widgets about things that are happening. And that's what, I

think that's why outside of like text messaging through, you know, it'll pop up and say, Hey,

you got text message, you know, pop into car play and then I can pop back out to zero-layer.

So yeah, if you're a car automaker, GM, and you want to tell people we're not going to have car

play anymore, you got to be as good or better than the zero-layer. Well, we'll talk more about

GM in a little bit. But so that's the, that's the 2026 BMW IX X drive 45 with 22 inch wheels.

All right, let's, let's get into some of the other stuff this week. So the reason why the show

is pushed back to, for publication is pushed back to Tuesday this week is because of the

embargo on the 2026 Jeep Grand Cherokee. For some reason, Jeep wanted to have it out on a

Tuesday morning. So that's, that's when the show will show up in your, in your pod catcher.

But for 2026, the Grand Cherokee is getting a very mild mid-cycle update.

You know, most people probably won't even notice the differences visually from the exterior.

You know, a little bit of change to the front fascia, not a whole lot. It's, you know, it looks

pretty much like the, the Grand Cherokees for the last three years. The current, what is it, the

WL version of the Grand Cherokee that came out three years ago.

The inside, there is a change in the dashboard design. So they've gone to a different dashboard

layout that has the larger screen. So it's a larger center screen. So it's a 12.3 inch

infotainment screen in the center now. And it's integrated. And that there's,

below that, they've integrated the same kind of haptic panel for the climate controls that

they've been putting into other models, like the Wagoneer S and the Grand Wagoneer and various

other models. So they've gotten rid of the physical controls there, replaced it with this haptic

touch bar for temperature control, defoggers, direction of where you want the airflow. The

vents are still manual. So that's a good thing. So it's not a huge change. It's a fairly modest

change, but it is a change and still has the optional passenger side screen, which again,

you know, not really that useful for most people. Someone's out there is enjoying it. I don't know,

no one I know, but someone out there bought it and they have a family member and that family

member is having the best time of their lives. Yeah, probably. Maybe. Or, or maybe a Jeep employee,

for all we know. It's, it's somebody. Yeah. Someone's having the best time with the,

with the, you know, passenger side screen to play. Or somebody at a supplier that's selling

no screens to Stalantis. Oh, oh, that person's having the best days. They're selling it to Stalantis,

Mercedes. Yeah. So the big news though is under the hood. You know, so the, the previous two

powertrains that were available on the Grand Cherokee for 2025 are carried over. So you still

have the Panistar V six, and you still have the four by plug in hybrid system. Those go unchanged.

What's new is the, the new Hurricane four engine. And so I think it was last week or maybe the week

before we talked about Stalantis is big $13 billion investment announcement. And one of the things

that was mentioned in there is that they're going to build what was referred to in that press release

is the GME T four Evo engine in Kokomo at their Kokomo engine plant, starting in 2026.

Well, that engine is the brand, the official public public facing branding for that engine

is Hurricane four. So this is a brand new two liter four cylinder. And you might be thinking,

why is Stalantis making a brand new two liter four cylinder when they have one that they just

introduced in North America a few years ago, that's the, the so called GME four cylinder,

it's the global medium engine is what GME stands for. And there are similarities between these

two engines. They, they actually have the same boring stroke, but the GME, the current GME

four cylinder has 275 horsepower or somewhere thereabouts, depending on which configuration it's

in, which, which vehicle it's in, like the old, the last generation Cherokee had this, and I think

it was like 265 or 270. In the Alpha Romeos, I think it gets up to 290 on some variants. And then

in the Jeeps, the Jeep four by ease, it's 275. The new engine that the new hurricane for has,

it's a completely different block, completely different cylinder head. It's, it's actually

based on the design of the, the three liter six cylinder hurricane engine that is in the

some of the rams and the grand wagon ears. So it has the same bore spacing as that same,

same boring stroke, two liters, but now makes 324 horsepower and 332 pounds feet of torque.

And the cylinder head design, well, the block design, the previous GME engine was a sand cast

block with iron cylinder liners. This one is a die cast aluminum block with deep skirts,

and lots of ribs on there that makes it nice and stiff so it doesn't vibrate too much and

doesn't make too much noise. And it's got the same plasma bore spray system that they use on the

six cylinder and that's been used by various others going back to the GTR and some of the

former Shelby GT 500 engines that Ford has made. So there's no liners in there, but they spray this

really hard coating on the cylinder bores after it's machined that gives them durability that

they need. And then the cylinder head is where things get really interesting. So the, the new

engine has two fuel injectors per cylinder. There's direct injection and port injection.

And there's also two spark plugs per cylinder. And hopefully by the time this comes out, there

what they've got, what they've done is they've incorporated what they call a pre chamber

design. It's a passive pre chamber design into the cylinder head. And it's similar in concept to

what they did on the Maserati Natuno v6, their three liter v6. But they've done it here in a way

that's a little more cost effective to manufacture. Hopefully we'll be proved durable. But what you

have one of the spark plugs is in the top of the cylinder head right in the center between all the

valves. And then there's a copper alloy insert that gets pressed in to the cylinder head above

or below the spark plug. So the spark plug sits above this pre chamber. And then the other spark

plug sits off to one side. And so what happens is when the when you have the the piston going down

on the intake stroke, sucking in air and fuel, and then the valves close, and goes up on the

compression stroke, as it's going up on the compression stroke, this little copper insert

has nine holes in it, eight around the perimeter and then one in the center. And some of that

air fuel mixture gets pushed up through those little orifices into this chamber. And then as

the piston approaches top dead center, the spark plug goes off, it ignites that little bit of air

fuel that's inside there. And then it sprays out and what you end up with is nine flame fronts

that spread out from this pre chamber and gets you much more uniform combustion across the cylinder.

So you make more power and the things more efficient and has cleaner emissions. And so,

you know, you get all you almost achieve what they call homogeneous combustion. So basically

almost all of the air fuel mixture in the cylinder ignites simultaneously.

So it's it's much more it's a much more efficient system that also makes it's 20% more power than

before, and 10% better fuel efficiency. So we'll see, you know, how you know how the fuel efficiency

actually does in the real world. But it's it's a it's a pretty cool setup. And they said you know

324 horsepower from a four cylinder turbo. It's not bad. Can't complain.

It's a lot of spark plugs when it comes time to do it.

That's true. But yeah, I mean, modern spark plugs generally last 100,000 miles anyway. So

yeah. And then you get a spark plug, you're like, yeah, I mean, with modern, modern, high,

high voltage ignition systems, you know, you can generally go at least 100,000 miles before

changing spark plugs. I still have so many. I don't know why I have so many feeler gauges,

just billions of because, you know, you set the pre gap, you just have to gap your spark plugs.

Now they're all pre wrapped. And I got so many I'll just I'll check them before I put them in

anyway. Yeah, I check them stuff. I've got some of those little coin spark plug gap gauges.

Oh, the little, yeah, it's a little circle or the I have the ones that and then I have the ones

all with the 1 million iterations, little slides out the little metal slats. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, that was those were the days. Don't have to do that very much. Although I do that

on my on my Miata because it you know, it still doesn't it has, you know, it's it's a distributor

of the ignition system, but it's not quite as modern as current systems.

It's fun to do. You know, you let me get my feeler gauge out, then you can't find it.

I guess I go buy another one. Number 12. So the hurricane for is starting production now.

That's just it's actually already in production at Stalantis is Dundee engine plant here in

Michigan. It's about 20 miles south of me here. And then next year, they're going to add

production to the second facility. So you know, they're going to be they're going to be using

this across the board on a lot of Stalantis products over the next several years. I would

expect that we will see this come to the Wrangler and also the Cherokee because remember that the

new Cherokee is launching only as a hybrid. But you know, they've said that eventually there will

be a combustion engine in there. So I'm guessing that there will be a version of this engine in

the new Cherokee. You know, 300 horsepower Cherokee, that can be fun. And then you know,

assorted other Stalantis products. So this will gradually initially the the GME engine will stay

in the plug in hybrids. But I'm guessing at some point they will transition over to this engine as

well. All right. So speaking of trucks, scout, you know, they when when it was announced that scout

was coming back to Volkswagen was going to revive the scout brand. A lot of people got really excited.

You know, and it was going to be electric. And then by the time that they actually showed us

concept version of the truck in the SUV, I said, yeah, we're going to do an extended range EV version

as well. And now with the way the market's going, it's like, yeah, I think, you know, based on our

pre orders, we're going to start off building just the rev version. And, you know, the full

battery electric version will come along at some point, maybe. I mean, any rev truck makes

sense. Yeah, I like the idea of electric scout, but also Volkswagen has issues, money issues. So

yeah. Yeah. So let's let's see. Yeah, I mean, that's what's driving this, you know, is,

you know, VW group as a whole has been having some struggles, they're not selling as much as they did,

certainly not selling as many EVs as they hoped. And so I think they figure, well, we can sell a

lot more of these e revs. Because I think the last number I heard was about 85% of the pre

orders were for the e rev version. The big question, though, is, you know, when it does come out,

you know, how much, you know, what kind of capabilities it actually going to have as an e rev?

Because the rumors are that, you know, it's going to use the Volkswagen E8, E8 888 four cylinder,

which is the one that they use in pretty much everything, you know, two liter four cylinder

turbo. It's going to be mounted in the back somewhere. And it's, it's unclear, you know,

there's been some reports that the e rev version may only have like 3,500 pounds of towing capacity.

You know, if that's the case, that's not going to go over very well with truck buyers.

I wonder how many people who are who are looking at this are towing that much though,

I think those folks, whenever someone's, they're always going to buy that, you know, a diesel.

Are there people who are just like, I'm going to, they're going to over buy for, for what they want

to do? Yeah, no, I mean, you know, this, this is basically a full size truck and full size SUV.

I mean, this is roughly the same, close to the same size as an F 150 or Silverado. This is not a

big size truck like the Rivian R one. And, you know, if you look at, you know, people that are

buying, you know, even the F 150s and Silverados, the light duty F 150s and Silverados, you know,

they're often towing campers or boats, you know, that weigh six to 8,000 pounds. Yeah,

they may not be using the full 10 or 12,000 pound capability. But, you know, a lot of them are towing,

you know, five to 8,000 pound loads. A lot of them. Is that a truth? Well, it is here in Michigan.

All right. Well, yeah, that's what you're seeing. That doesn't mean that I always want to see the

data and no one's ever going to give us. It's like the plug in data. Yeah. Like I want to know how

many people are actually using their truck to do truck things. And I also want to see how many

people, and I think those folks who are buying those, you know, I don't think they're, they're

very smart about what they're buying. This is, this is essentially like a ridgeline.

Just a big, yeah, but bigger. Yeah. A big ridgeline.

Yeah. I mean, this, this is sized like a full size truck. So that's going to be real interesting

to see how that plays out. Yeah. Yeah. That does make sense. You know, full size trucks generally

have that capacity to do the full size truck thing where the midsize, you're like, okay,

I understand that I'm getting a midsize truck. So I shouldn't be expected to, to be, you know, again,

carrying a fifth wheel or a giant boat or whatever, not carrying but towing.

And so when you see a full size that doesn't do that, yeah, you get a good, yeah, it's a good

point. All right. Let's continuing with, with the EV theme for a couple more minutes.

Prog, the city of Prog in the Czech Republic has been on a splurge of installing lamp post EV

charging. This, this is what I like to see. This is what we need more of. More of this,

you know, not, not so much emphasis on DC fast charging, because especially in cities, because

this, you know, it's just parked, just park it. It's bringing your own cable and you plug it in

there. Easy peasy. I've done it in Germany. I've done it in, I don't know, some other places I

can't remember. It's great. Because you're like, Oh, I'm going to be inside for hours. I don't need

DC fast charging every time I park my car. Yeah. I mean, if you, if you live in a city,

you know, a lot of people who live in urban areas, you know, park, have to park on the street.

And, you know, this is perfect. You know, you just pull up to the curb, take out your cable,

plug it in, you're good. And, you know, it's very, you know, from an installation standpoint,

it's very easy because street lamps, they already have power. You know, they're already running,

running on, you know, they've already got lots of power. And, you know, here in the US, you know,

many of them are running, you know, a single phase of a 480 volt circuit. So they're running like,

was it 277 volts. And, you know, the new SAJ 3400 standard supports that. So it's much easier to

install a charging outlet on those poles, you know, without having to put in a transformer or

anything, you just tap right into the power that the lights are using. And you're good to go.

So so far, in 2024, Prague really began their program last year, they put in 143

new street lamps that had EV charging ports on them. By 2026, they hope to have 1500 installed

and 6000 by 2030. So these are all across the city. Cool. And says here in this Jalopnik article,

two years ago, there were only 2400 EV charging points in the entire Czech Republic.

Wow. Yeah. Well, you know, you got it, you move quickly. If you're smart, if you're smart about

it, I don't understand why America is so slow on the bring your own cable thing. But I also

understand why America is like, part of me is like, why aren't we doing the thing that everyone

else is doing that makes sense? And then also part of me is like, yeah, I know why. Yeah.

I got a closed door. All right. So I also drove the Toyota RAV4 2026 Toyota RAV4 last week.

And the new, you know, the new RAV4 is based on the same architecture as the previous generation.

So it's not really all new. You know, so it's same dimensions, same 106 inch wheelbase, you know,

it's the same size 183 inches long, I think. So, you know, it hasn't grown larger, hasn't grown

fatter. But you know, got new styling, all new styling. And for 2026, there's no more gas only

versions. They're all hybridized either regular hybrid or plug in hybrid. And so they have,

they do have a couple of new trim levels. So you know, the design, you know, which we first saw in

May at the Toyota event at their headquarters is, you know, a little chunkier looking, a little

blockier looking them before it's got a variation on the what they call their hammerhead headlight

theme that they put on the on the latest Prius and the Camry. You know, it's a little,

a little more squared off version of it. It's like someone said, Hey, can you make a RAV4

with Legos? Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. Hey, take the RAV4, now build it with Legos.

Yeah. All right. Boom, that's what you're getting. So, you know, they're kind of splitting up the

trims, there's like seven trims all together now, splitting those up across three different groups.

So they've got their core group, which is, you know, kind of the most mainstream variations.

Then there's the premium group, or sorry, no, the, the rugged group, which is the new Woodland

trim, which replaces the former TRD version, because TRD is now being reserved for body

on frame trucks and utilities. So they're calling it the RAV4 Woodland is the off road version,

or off roady version. And then there's the sport group, which includes the, the new GR Sport.

So, you know, the, the basic RAV4 hybrids drive pretty much like current generation RAV4 hybrids.

Yeah, they're, they're not mechanically all that different. They got a little bit more power.

Because there's no gas version now, and no previously on the 2025 RAV, they only had

the hybrid with all wheel drive, and it used an electric rear axle system

to provide on demand all wheel drive. And then, you know, front drive. So there was no

mechanical all wheel drive system on there. And you couldn't get a front wheel drive only

RAV4 hybrid. If you want a front drive, you'd have to get a gas version. Well,

now since the gas version is gone, they're offering a gas RAV4 hybrid front wheel drive

hybrid, sorry, they're offering a front wheel drive RAV4 hybrid, which has 224 horsepower.

And then there is the 226. And then if you want all wheel drive, they add the rear

axle and you get a total combined output of 236 horsepower. So it's about 10 more than before.

And then the the plug-in hybrid has the batteries been bumped up from 18 kilowatt hours to 22.7

kilowatt hours. So it'll now give up to 52 miles of electric driving range and has 324 horsepower.

And the GR Sport version is only available as a plug-in hybrid. So there's four different

trim levels that have a plug-in hybrid. Driving, first of all, driving around in the plug-in hybrid

with in just EV mode, you know, it's got plenty of performance to get around. So you can easily

drive this as your as a daily driver, 203 horsepower from the electric motors alone. So if you're

driving with the engine off in EV mode, you get 200 horsepower, which is basically the same as what

you got before with the gas version. And now you've got 52 miles of electric range to play with.

So for the vast majority of people, it's going to be fine. That's going to be, you know, this

this would be, you know, this would meet your needs as an EV. And then as with other plug-in

hybrids, when you want to take a longer trip, just keep going. And it operates as a hybrid once the

battery is depleted. So performance, not an issue here. One interesting thing with the plug-in

hybrid that I noticed is that, you know, we've complained in the past about the sound of Toyota's

four cylinder engines with the hybrids, you know, they're not the most refined sounding engines in

the world. You tend to be a little, you know, they're good, they're strong enough, they're

durable, but they just don't sound very good. Well, that's not a problem with the new plug-in hybrid.

It's way quieter now, when it's running in hybrid mode. And the reason why is they actually,

the plug-in hybrid actually has a completely different block that has been significantly

stiffened compared to the regular block. So it's a little more expensive, but it, you know,

it's a lot stiffer, vibrates a lot less, makes a lot less noise. And then they've also added some

other noise insulation throughout the vehicle as well. So, you know, now there's a lot less

difference between driving in EV mode and driving in hybrid mode with the plug-in hybrid RAV4.

And it's actually quite pleasant to drive. You know, we had no issues with performance

or anything else like that during the time we were driving it. The biggest issue I had

with the new RAV4 is the interior feels kind of cheap.

Oh, yeah. And it's interesting because there was another car.

Is it the blockiness? It doesn't blow?

No, it's the materials. So, you know, there's not much, you know, there's not really any,

there's no piano black anywhere, which is good.

All right, so we get a plus one for that.

Yeah, but if you look at the dashboard, you know, you'll see that there are

panels, you know, that are just flat, almost completely untextured. And I asked, you know,

because these were pre-production vehicles that we were driving, you know, is this production

representative? You know, because oftentimes what you'll find on pre-production models,

you know, if they don't have all the tooling quite ready and installed, you will find panels

in pre-production models or in prototypes that don't have the graining that you will find on

the production models or textures that you'll find on production models will just be smooth plastic.

And, you know, so I specifically asked Toyota, is that the case with this one?

And I said, nope, this is production representative. And I said, yeah, okay.

I mean, the fit and finish was good or the fit was good. But it just, the materials just look

kind of cheap. You know, it's like hard plastics everywhere. And it just didn't feel, it didn't

look and feel great. And, you know, there's another car that I drove earlier this week

that is, I can't talk about yet, but that is considerably less effective, less expensive

than this vehicle is likely to be. And it has a much nicer feeling interior than this does.

Even the Nissan Leaf, which is, you know, it's, yeah, even the Leaf, the cheap Leaf

for an EV, the cheap for an EV Leaf, even that you're like, oh, this is nice in here.

The Maverick, even though it's not using like premium materials, feels

Yeah, the texturing that they put on those materials, you know, it's still hard plastic,

but the, the graining and the texturing they put on it feels and looks a lot better.

Yeah. The texture goes a long ways, what we're saying.

Yeah, it does.

A little bit of texture goes a long way, like very flat, just kind of meh, just kind of feels

Yeah, I mean, I don't, I don't need the top of the dashboard to be, you know,

all padded and, you know, covered in leather, you know, especially on more affordable vehicles.

Yeah.

But, you know, I do want it to, you know, at least have some texture to it, you know, that

looks like there was some thought given to it. And this

It just looks cheap. You know, I'm sorry, that's just the way it is. It does not look,

you know, for, for a vehicle and Toyota has not released pricing yet for the new RAV4.

You know, it will probably be a little bit more than what it was last year.

You know, the 2025 RAV4 hybrid started at 33, 32, 850. I'm guessing it's probably going to be

at least 33 and change, maybe 34 for a base. And then the plug-in hybrid will probably start

somewhere around 44. The last one, the previous one started at 44, 800. I'm guessing it'll

probably be at least 45. And, you know, maybe a little bit higher for the plugins, although

I think there's different trim levels. So there's actually lower trim levels now

available for the RAV4 plugin. But like the GR Sport, you know, which is the top trim level,

you know, that thing is probably going to cost somewhere around $55,000. And that has the same

dashboard materials that are in the base RAV4. You know, and that's, that's kind of unfortunate.

You know, I'd like to see Toyota put a little more effort into the interior materials that they put

in these vehicles. And it hasn't hurt their sales yet. Last year, the RAV4 was by far the most,

the best-selling single nameplate in the U.S. So, you know, GM Ford likes to talk about the F-Series

being the top-selling vehicle in the U.S. But when they say that, they're talking about F-150s,

250s, 350s. Every F-Series up to like the F-600 medium-duty trucks.

And that has fleet sales. So you have to imagine how insanely well the RAV4 is actually selling.

Yeah. But the F-150 itself is somewhere around 400,000 units last year. The RAV4 sold 475,000

units in the U.S. And, you know, I would expect that this one is going to sell just as well because

it has all the things that people like about a RAV4. You know, it's, you know, good size. It's,

you know, it's got, you know, basically the same powertrain. It's got all those features.

And it, you know, despite my complaints about the materials in the interior, one big change that

they made is this has their next generation entertainment system, which is the first thing

that they've built on their new Areen software platform. That is, that's their platform for

their next generation software-defined vehicles. So the ADAS and the infotainment on this RAV4

are all built on that software platform. And the biggest change from a functional standpoint

for the infotainment, you know, you were talking earlier, but, you know, a lot of infotainment

systems, you know, you've got to go, you know, to do different modes, you've got to switch modes,

you know, and the previous gen Toyota multimedia system was overall, I mean, it was such a huge

improvement over the prior Entune systems. Entune was that great. Yeah. But, you know, my biggest

complaint with that system, with the Toyota system, the last current generation of the Toyota

system, was that you couldn't display multiple things on the screen at the same time. So you were,

if you're in navigation mode, you got no media player controls, or vice versa, you know, or if

you're in settings, you couldn't see any of the other stuff. Now, it gives you, you get two screens

that you can swipe through. And on the main screen, you have two windows on there. And so you

have about two thirds of the screen is taken up by the navigation screen, and you can switch these

around, you can switch what displays in which window. But so the first one, the first screen

has two windows, two thirds of it being nav by default, and the other third being the media player.

And then one swipe to the left, you get a second window that has three more widgets on there. So

you get three panes on there showing different functionality. So it's very easy to have to

have access to all the things you want without having to switch around between different modes

very much. And so I think that that was a big improvement to this vehicle.

That it's also got a new voice control system that worked pretty well, worked pretty reliably

during the time we had it for a few hours. Yeah, I mean, it's overall, you know, it's

definitely an improvement. It's, it's a, I think it's a better vehicle, except for some of those

interior materials. And then, and then there's the woodland, which, you know, like everybody else,

you know, Toyota's got to have an off roady variance of the RAV4, you know, Honda's got their

trail sport, CRV trail sport. And, you know, you've got the wilderness additions from Subaru and

various others. And like most of these off roady versions, you know, it's mostly off road in appearance.

You know, there's no skid plates on this. You do have, you know, the front, the front fascia,

the lower part of the front fascia is molded so that it looks like it, you know, looks like it's

skid plate wrapping up from underneath, but it's just plastic. It does, you know, the RAV does have

more ground clearance than a lot of these vehicles. So it's, you know, 8.3 inches of ground clearance.

So it's got a reasonable amount of ground clearance. And with what they did, you know, they did some

interesting stuff with the ADAS, you know, with the new ADAS system, with controlling the wheels,

you know, to get you better control on the off road stuff. So we did a light off road course,

you know, no really big rocks or anything, because, you know, that's not what this thing's

designed for. But it was, you know, it was more than just a dirt road. And it did good. It did fine.

Um, so, you know, it was, it was quite, uh, you know, quite reasonable to drive, you know,

on the types of things that you're going to use a RAV for, or you just want to be, you know, take

a little bit of care to make sure that you don't go over, you know, anything that's sticking up

more than 8 inches, because it could tear up the underside of the vehicle.

Okay. Yeah, that, yeah. All right, keep going off road-ish.

Yeah. I mean, it'll get, you know, it'll take you down trail to a cabin, things like that,

you know, or to a lake. All the things you need to do. The things that most people are actually

going to do with these vehicles, as opposed to, you know, what, you know, what, you know, the

hardcore off-roaders are going to do. Yeah, the hardcore people, they, they know what they're

going to buy. They're buying old, they're buying old, uh, old Wranglers and ripping everything out.

Yeah, Wranglers or Broncos or Four Runners. Yeah, that's, you know, or old Nissan Xterras.

You know, that's, that's what they're going to use. They're, they're not even going to consider a RAV

4. No one's knowing me. I have a big RAV 4 on the trail. No, no, don't do that.

All right, let's, so yeah, as I said, pricing's not available yet. This thing's going on sale

late this year. We'll probably hear pricing sometime later in November, maybe early December

before it goes on sale. And then Toyota this week also showed off the new Land Cruiser FJ

in Japan. Man, okay. So remember when they had that big event where they showed off all these EVs

in the background? We're going EVs. Like this was like one of those in the background. And I lost

my mind because I was like, I want a baby FJ EV. What am I going to do? Don't need it. Not doing

any off-roading. This is, this is the problem with, with, you know, I think me, to be honest,

a lot of people who buy off-road vehicles is like, you don't need that car. You don't need that.

What am I doing? What am I doing with this? I live in the East Bay. Where am I driving over?

That said, I want the baby FJ.

And I mean, what do you think of the design of this thing?

I really like it. I like the little baby FJ. It's very, it's very blocky. Yeah, it's another,

it's another Lego car. Yeah, it's a Lego car. It's, it is, you know, it's reminiscent of all,

essentially every, you know, off-roader, which are just, you know,

a square and a rectangle and then four wheels. The portions are a little interesting. I mean,

it looks like it's a little, I mean, the ones that they showed, you know, the wheels,

you know, for an off-roader, the wheels almost look a little small. So it looks a little top-heavy

to me. I like the fact that they show one with a snorkel. Yeah.

Yeah. It's, yeah, this is, again, this is sort of, it's, it is a Suzuki Samurai. There you go.

I think it's bigger than a Samurai though. Yeah, but it's, it's, it's, it's this generation

Suzuki Samurai. Yeah. Hey, you want to, we can't get the Jimny. Well, we're not going to get this

either, actually. Yeah, I think about it. Yeah, we probably won't get this one either.

I don't even know. There's a lot of Jimny's in Japan, so I can see why they would make this.

Yeah. Or, or whenever I go to Japan, I'm just looking for Jimny's, one or the other.

But I mean, you know, again, if you're, if you're actually going to do some real off-roading,

this is a much better solution than the, than the RAV4. You know, it's, I think it's still a unibody,

but you know, you're going to have some underbody protection on this thing.

You know, and in a lot of ways, it's better than, you know, the bigger vehicles like a,

like a four-runner or the bigger Land Cruisers, because you can go into spaces where those vehicles

are going to struggle. You know, having a, having a smaller vehicle like this actually makes a lot

of sense. Yeah, that's why the two-door Wrangler makes so much sense. The two-door Defender makes,

you know, there was a Defender 90 outside the GM event. Did you see it? Yeah. Yeah, I did.

I told somebody that someone got the right, they purchased the correct Defender.

But this, this one is a four-door though. Yeah. Yeah, but it's so small. Yeah. It's like four doors

in a way that like, you know, like the, the, what do you call it? The Honda Fit was a four-door.

I'm like, yeah, it's four-door, but you know, it's pretty small, but you can put so much stuff in

that car. Yeah, no, I'm a big fan. We're not going to get it. So I don't know why I care.

Yeah, it's about, it's about 10-inch shorter wheelbase than the 250 Series Land Cruiser,

which is the one that we get here. And that's, that's what's sold here is the Land Cruiser

and the Lexus GX is the 250 Series. So, you know, it's, it's considerably smaller.

Yeah. It, yeah. And it has, it has a 2.7 liter gas four-cylinder. So no electric version of this

one. Yeah, this is Japan. Japan, there's, there's, there's a lot of issues around electricity in

Japan, you know, earthquake, the nuclear thing, they're a little, a little shy on electricity,

to be honest, when it comes on. But when you drive around, there's like electric charging. I'm like,

yeah. I'm like, yeah, I can just drive my car here and charge it at the gas station.

Yeah. All right. So, you know, if they do offer this, you're going to get one?

I mean, mate, well, it feels electric, yeah. By the time this comes out, then like the R2 will be

out and the Slade will be out and the blah, blah, you know, there's so many sort of small

vehicles that, you know, it's hard to, it's hard to live in Northern California for me

and think about buying a gas-only car. Yeah. When, you know, like it's the other day, we're like,

it smells like smoke. And then we walk outside as you do and you look around on the horizon,

see which way the fire is, because you want to make sure it's not near your house.

That's the reality that we live in. Speaking of the R2 and the R3,

Rivian had some news this week. They laid off 4% of their staff, about 600 people.

And their chief marketing officer left and CEO, R.J. Scarridge, took over as head of marketing

for Rivian. What do you think?

When you have that type of company, do one job and do it well. That's really what it comes down to.

Find another marketer, achieve a, you know, figure out something.

There's a lot of external issues with any, you know, EV startup. There's a lot of external issues

that they have to deal with in the United States right now. But as the CEO, that's your job.

Maybe don't split your time now. Maybe, you know, double down on that CEO position and working to

figure out ways around the word no and then hire someone who can do your marketing.

Yeah, no. I mean, they're not cheap vehicles. That's the one thing. But they have money from

Volkswagen. How that works out, you know, essentially, I'm sure to many Volkswagen

developers, they have a bunch of kids that are coming in and telling them how to do their job.

And they've been building cars for, you know, we're Volkswagen. We've been building cars for

one million years. And I'm sure there's probably pushback when it comes to that.

There typically is, especially in large corporate entities, when you bring someone

in to help you out, there's always going to be people who are like, boo, you don't know what

you're doing. I'm like, well, so I think there's the CEO position for Rivian is, you know,

three full time jobs. Let's not, let's not become the marketing head of marketing as well.

Yeah, you know, when I when I saw RJ at an automotive press association event here in

Detroit a couple weeks ago, you know, he did confirm that the R2 is scheduled to start production

in the second quarter of next year. Yeah, and that's, that's going to be a crucial vehicle for

them because the R1 is just, you know, as much as a lot of people like it, it really hasn't sold

very well. Yeah, it's, they sell about 10,000 of them a year. Yeah, I mean, it's not cheap.

The EV9 exists. So you're, you know, you're going up against, that's sort of the problem that a lot

of the new companies have is that until you're established, like what, okay, I'm going to put

my, you know, if you have somebody with a lot of expendable cash, this is your second or third car,

okay, yeah, it makes sense. But for someone who's like, you know what, I really want a large EV,

a large SUV, that's an EV, but I don't, you know, this is going to be the main car. What are you

going to, to gamble on a startup that, and you see startups disappear all the time and Rivian's

been around for a while. So it's, you know, it's kind of tough to call them to start at this point.

Do you gamble on a new company or do you gamble on a company that you know isn't going anywhere?

And that's, that's, I think that's a lot of, especially now with, with, you know,

inflation's going back up, you know, recession's always on the horizon, you know, job cuts,

government shutdown, it's fight, you know, it's, it's a bad economic time and you,

but you still, you know, I need to get this car, what are you going to get? Are you going to get

the more established, the car from the more established company that's been around for

a billion years and, and also makes giant boats? Or are you going to get it from

the folks who, you know, it's great that they're, you know, it's American built, American made, but

you know, am I going to gamble on that? That's, yeah.

Yeah, it's going to be real interesting to see how the R2 does, you know, that one's, that one's coming

next spring, you said, you know, and it's supposed to cost around $45,000, you know, it's,

you know, the R1s are expensive enough that most of them, you know, unless you leased them,

you know, did not qualify for the tax credits anyway. The R2 is likely to be, you know, it's at

a price point where the people that are inclined to spend that kind of money are going to be much

more sensitive to the absence of the tax credits. And so I will be real interested to see how that

one plays out. You know, the R3 is the, you know, that's the one that most people actually seem to

want, you know, it's a smaller one. And that one is probably going to start in the upper 30s.

And again, you know, that's not coming until 2027.

Yeah, that's it. I have people like text me about the R3. I actually had someone text me this week

about the R3. And I'm like, okay, well, the R2 is coming out first. And I don't know if coming

out with the R3 first would make more sense, because excitement doesn't mean sales.

Yeah. I mean, that's the, you know, so, but, but you'd also don't want to back yourself in the

corner. You don't want to pull a VW ID buzz situation where, you know, you got people excited

and then you made him wait for seven, something you, and the right time he comes out, I was like,

man. And then it was, you know, too expensive and too expensive range. Yeah, it's, even with the

range issue, if you just, if it wasn't as expensive, or if you gave like some good lease offers on it,

like, you know, Hyundai does great with these lease offers. If you gave it some good lease

offers, just get them on the road, and then people will see them and then they'll want them.

Right now, I don't see very many ID buzzes on the road, which is unfortunate. Again,

I really like the ID buzz, even with all those like weird problems, you know, no second year,

second road thing, what do you call it, cup holders, you know, really about 245 miles of range,

you know, it's 400 volts, so it's as efficient. I mean, they'll still charge it up to 200,

but you know, it's, it's 400 volt, 200 is peak, and it doesn't stay as consistent as an 800 volt

system would. And so there's a lot of like little weird things that you're just like, oh, there's

all this cool stuff that this thing does. And then there's a lot of like, oh,

so hopefully the R3 doesn't end up falling into that, that trap.

So, you and I were both in New York this week for a GM event.

Yeah. You want to talk about that?

So, we flew out to New York, and GM had an event where they had a bunch of executives

stand up and tell us a bunch of things. There's going to be 2028, they're going to have their

software-defined architecture, which they really didn't save software-defined vehicle

very often in the, I don't think they said it at all, they said it afterwards when you talk to people.

Yeah, I don't think in the main presentation they did.

They never said the word software-defined vehicle, which was kind of weird. They're going to have a

level three SAE level three autonomous driving, which is eyes off, hands off in certain situations

on the highway, etc. In 2020, a lot of things are coming in 2028. And then after the little

presentation where it did felt very, it was very corporate, then we had the opportunity

to talk to engineers, and that was way, way better. Questions were asked during the Q&A,

and none of the answers were very satisfying because you weren't talking to the engineers.

At the end of the day, I mean, I know it's great to say, oh, I got the CEO of this company to

talk to me. I've talked to a lot of CEOs one-on-one, and some of them are great, and some of them are

very media savvy, they're media trained, so they're going to say the thing, which is completely

worthless and not helpful to me at all. And then you talk to the engineers who are building it,

and then those folks, they know what's going on, and it was really great to talk to them

after that presentation. Because if I'd flown out there just for that presentation,

I would have been sad. Yeah. Well, I think you were standing there when we were talking to

Senaz afterwards. She's one of the PR people from GM, and she was asking what we thought,

and we both expressed our thoughts that, frankly, talking to CEOs most of the time,

not all that useful or interesting, because they're so media trained, and they tend to be,

most of the time, they tend to be so on message that you don't really get anything,

any useful insights from them very often. Yeah, and I think someone made the remark during that

conversation that Mary Berry could say something that destroys the stock price.

Yeah. Just to get inadvertently say something. So as a CEO, you have to be very, very careful.

As an engineer, you're not going to affect the stock price. So the engineers have a little

bit more leeway. Unless you contradict the CEO.

Unless you contradict the CEO, and then there's always that. Then there's a lot of emails with

PR people, and you're like, okay, what's real? You have to tell me what's actually real. Don't lie

to me. Yeah, no, it was great. When they talked about level three, I think they said all the

correct things. That doesn't mean that everything's going to be perfect when it launches, but I think

they're very smart about our customers and our beta testers. There is no real way with level three

that you can just tap someone on the shoulder and say, you have to take over right now,

which is true because you're telling people that they can watch a movie, they can read a book,

and then they expect them to, within seconds, take over the control of the vehicle. And within

seconds, whatever the issue is, it's too late. By the time the car tells you to take over and your

brain decides you're taking over and you're dropping what you're doing, it's probably too late.

It's not probably, it's too late. Yeah. Things happen very fast on the road.

Yeah, you're moving pretty quickly. So it's pretty, it was, it'll be interesting to see

what the launch is in 2028. It's going to be on highways. They're very adamant that it's,

that's it. It's not going to be in the full domain that like Supercruise has right now,

because Supercruise has, you know, some other roads. But so it's, yeah, and then, you know,

the new batteries that they're working on, and of course, the, the SD and the software defined

vehicle architecture that they're talking about was interesting because it really does give them,

it gives automaker more control over what is getting put in their car and how it is controlled.

And, you know, I've talked to Mercedes about this and it's the same thing where it's like,

you know, every time something new gets added to a regular car, you're like, okay, well, now this

person has talked, this person has talked, this person has talked, this person has talked, this

person, now this component's talked to, this component that talks to this component, the

toxic of this component. And it's, it's, it's a huge pain in the ass, to be honest. And so you

don't get the updates, you know, these very quick updates that a software defined vehicle could

could do. So, yeah, no, I think it was overall, I think it was a good presentation. I think

having the folks there that we could talk to was huge. And then being very sort of,

you know, telling us what's, you know, all these events are always like, we're the best,

this is the best, the thing we're doing is the best, blah, blah, blah. But when, you know,

you sort of cut through that, you know, as, you know, we've been to a lot of these things,

and this one feels like GM's doing the right thing. Yeah, I mean, the key now, you know,

as I've told the number of people over in recent days, you know, they said all the right things,

now they have to execute on it and make it reality. You know, because most of the, most of

the big stuff, you know, is still three years away. The new electronic architecture, which is,

you know, they're, they're moving to a central compute architecture. So it's not even Zonal,

like for example, what Rivian does, you know, with the Zonal architecture, you know, today,

you know, traditionally, most vehicles have anywhere from 50 to 100 or more electronic control

units scattered around the vehicle that are all connected together over a CAN network. And, you

know, it's, it's very difficult to do updates on that. And to manage all those different bits of

software, a Zonal architecture centralizes most of that into typically, you know, one, one to three

ECUs, you know, in the vehicle, maybe one that manages the powertrain and chassis, another one

that does body control stuff, and another one does infotainment, and then has some usually

three or four zone controllers at the corners that handle power distribution, and also do some

signal processing. So the raw signals coming off the sensors, there's some compute in there that

processes those and then sends those filtered signals back to the central compute. This one,

this system is not going to do that. Instead of the zone controllers, again, what they call

aggregators that don't have any compute in them. All they do is the power distribution to the

sensors and the actuators, and sending the routing the raw signals, the raw sensor signals back to

the central compute. And you get one central compute box that's running on an NVIDIA Thor

system on a ship, which is ridiculously powerful. It's going to be liquid cooled. Yeah, it's going

to be like your home gaming rig. Yeah, I mean, this is purple and not just yeah, this, this is the

same, you know, the Thor Thor is built on the same Blackwell architectures Intel or NVIDIA's latest,

you know, high end B to B 100 and B 200 GPUs that are running in all these AI data centers.

So it's a very powerful chip, but it is power hungry. And, you know, requires a lot of cooling,

but everything is going to run on that. And then there's there's also a communication module that

is the gateway to the outside world. But that's, you know, all, you know, all the infotainment,

all the driver assist and automated driving stuff, all the powertrain control, everything

is going to be running on that, on that box. So that's going to be interesting to see if they can,

how well they can execute that. I know it's almost like, like, you know, so when you do

driving assistance systems, you have all these sensors, and they have this thing called sensor

fusion, where it's just raw data, and it comes in, and then the you have this, the system that sort

of decodes the data and tells the car what's going on in real time. This is like sensor fusion for

like the entire car. Yeah. I know the GM is one of the companies that works with a company called

Synopsys that does simulation and virtualization tools for chip design. And, you know, they've

expanded that, you know, so that, you know, company, you know, companies like NVIDIA and AMD,

and everybody else that designs chips, they use Synopsys tools to simulate the chip before

they actually make any silicon. You know, and so they have the ability to, to run all that, you

know, in on the cloud or on a local machine, and run the, run the entire chip. And what they're

now is they've actually got tools that can emulate the entire control unit. So not just the

core, that core chip, but all the other parts, all the IO and everything. And if you've got multiple

ECUs in a vehicle, you can simulate all of those and have all those running in simulation and then

run your software, whatever your software platform is on that simulated version of the electronics

before you ever build any prototype hardware. And I believe the GM is actually using that,

I know they're working with Synopsys, and I believe that they are actually running

this platform already in simulation. So that's, you know, hopefully that will help

to get them to a better place when they launched this three years from now, than they were when

they started launching vehicles like the Hummer and the Lyric and the, and the Blazer EVs,

where they had a lot of software issues. But, you know, again, that's, you know,

they've got to execute on that. And that's not going to be easy.

But, you know, it was interesting, you know, during the video demo that they showed us of the

hands off eyes off system, you know, they showed a few different scenarios, you know, so all they

had was rent, you know, video renders. But one of the scenarios that they showed us was, you know,

cars driving down the highway, and there's a police vehicle on the shoulder with another vehicle.

And, you know, their, their system is designed to actually recognize emergency vehicles like that,

classify those separately from other vehicles. And so when it sees something like that, it will

actually move over to the left one lane to give extra room, you know, around emergency vehicles

on the side of the road, you know, which is what you're supposed to do when you're driving,

you're supposed to move over and give them room. And so their vehicle is going to, you know,

their system is going to be designed to specifically do that. You know, and they, they didn't mention

Tesla. But clearly, I think the reason why they showed that scenario is because, you know,

Tesla autopilot and FSD have regularly had problems with running into emergency vehicles

on the side of the road. So hopefully they can, they can get that right.

They also mentioned that they're using, you know, LiDAR radar and camera. So they're using this

whole, the whole suite versus, and then they, they purposely called out like camera systems,

like how they, they don't have the read the, the ability to see in every situation. And there's,

there isn't that redundancy that's there. And so that was very much a, you know,

they didn't say who. Yeah. But everybody knew. Everyone knows. It's, yeah.

So let's see what else. Oh, the other thing that they talked about at this event, they had

some folks from the GM energy team, you know, and GM energy cells, you know, a vehicle to home

enablement kit, you know, similar to what Ford has offered since the, the, the lightning launched

where you can get a smart inverter, a transfer switch, and, and a charger, the bi-directional

charger that lets you power your home off of your EV battery if your power goes out.

And what, you know, the problem with these systems is they are quite costly.

And they, you know, they can, it's not just the hardware. I mean, the hardware kit can cost

four to $6,000. And, you know, if you want a home battery as well, that's, you know,

several thousand dollars more. But then you have the cost of installation. And, you know,

it's basically an insurance policy. And, you know, the thing is, if you spend, you know,

anywhere from $8,000 to $15,000 or $20,000 to get this installed in your house, you know,

then what happens if you have to move two or three years from now? You know, you've spent all this

money, you haven't, you know, you haven't really gotten necessarily gotten the benefit out of it.

And so they're launching a leasing program for this, that, you know, similar to like the solar

leasing systems and programs where, you know, instead of paying upfront for all this hardware,

you sign a contract and you pay some number of dollars per month. You know, they put solar on

your house and you pay some number of dollars per month and you get the power from the solar.

And, you know, the rest, you know, the company that does it, you know, gets the,

any excess power they get to sell back to utilities and things like that.

And they're doing, it's going to be a similar kind of thing with this, where you pay some

amount per month and they cover, you know, the hardware, the installation and everything.

And it's transferable. So, you know, if two or three years from now you have to move,

you know, the new owner can pick up that contract and continue to use that. And so that's, that's

helpful, you know, so you're only paying for, for the time you actually have it in use as opposed to

forever. And there's other stuff that we'll talk about next week that Ford is doing that's,

that's pretty interesting. And I'm sure GM will probably be doing before long as well.

We'll talk about that one next week. Yeah, it's, it's, you know, I've looked the GM and energy

system and, you know, I keep pushing them every time I see them, like when will this work outside

of GM vehicles? Because right now everyone has a walled garden. And there was, there was a standard

from UL like a couple of months ago that I think lots of people are working towards. That'll,

that'll, it's, yeah, the problem is all these systems like, you know, the one with wall box and

Kia works with Kia, the one, the Ford builds work with Ford, the one of GM builds work with GM. And

so once you, we get to a point where, okay, I bought the GM one, but I own a Hyundai or I bought

the, you know, the, the wall box one, but I have a Ford like, or I bought a Ford and then, you know,

because you might, you know, if you, especially if you're leasing these vehicles, if you lease the

vehicle for, you know, so many years, but you spent like another $20,000 on this like VDH, like,

you know, mega system and you can't do the VDH part. That's sort of a bummer, you know,

because I was like another five grand just to do that. And if you can't do that, then well,

yeah, so

yeah, yeah, that's, that's definitely a problem that needs to be resolved is to have interoperability

between different brands. And then after the event was done, I got a chance to sit down with

Sterling Anderson, who's now for the last several months, he's been chief product officer at GM.

Before that, he was had that same role and he was a co founder at Aurora Innovation,

companies doing autonomous trucks down in Texas. And, and then he was chief engineer,

the first chief engineer for autopilot at Tesla, before he left there in 2016.

And so we had an interesting conversation about, you know, kind of what, you know,

what he sees as the challenges and his vision for, for GM and what his role is there. So I'm going

to drop that in here. And we will be right back a couple of last things. How about GM,

how's things going? It's good, yeah, I'm five months in now. It's been a really fun intellectual

journey for it kind of expanded the horizons quite a bit to, you know, there's a lot of

change, you know, going to Tesla, to Aurora, to GM, very different. Yeah, that's right.

Oh, yeah, I think there's, there's, there's a lot of opportunity right now in the disruption

that is everything that's happening, technologically in particular. Right. But, and, you know, the

layer on top of that, every day feels like a new, you know, regulatory environment that

had to work in a tariff or GM or whatever. So it's been fun to kind of navigate and learn the business.

So, you know, coming into GM as Chief Product Officer, what is, you know, what do you see

as the strikes and what are the things that you're going to try to evolve and progress for GM?

Yeah. Good question. I see a company that's really, really strong at turning the crank on a massive

supply chain and manufacturing out price. Really good. Like, the response in this of our supply

chain team to disruptions is extraordinary. I haven't seen that anywhere, including in the valley.

The kind of scale at which the manufacturing team has managed over years to hone kind of

the production chops really, really powerful. So I've been, I've been really impressed by all

of them. Before I came to GM, I actually pinged Mark and Mary and say, let's, I'd like to spend

some time at the product portfolio, just kind of understand where you are. So I came out in

March, this is before I came here, and we just lined up all the cars in the portfolio, which is

not a small lineup at the moment. You go to Milford? Yeah, exactly. And Mark and I just went for a

drive in just a bunch of different cars. So I started in the tracks and just kind of worked

our way through the portfolio, really impressed at the just level of refinement the team has achieved

in driving dynamics, ride handling, et cetera, like really, really good. I mean, $20,000 tracks

that drives like this car is extraordinary. All the way up to the Celeste, at the Celeste, right?

Mark and I went for a drive in that. And I mean, it's like driving on a cloud. It's, it's pretty

sort of. So the team is really strong at this, right? So it's so much of the core automotive stuff

that I don't have expertise in, they're really good at, which to me feels like a really synergistic

juxtaposition of strengths. There are areas of opportunity in software, in user experience,

and evolving our electrical architecture to enable us to, to get a ray of both,

which more quickly, that have seen kind of enormous potential to change.

Yeah, certainly, you know, software, I will agree, has been one of GM's biggest challenges

from a product standpoint over the last several years. You know, I know when they

watched the lyric, when I did the first drive as a lyrical, it was, it had a lot,

it was not quite fully baked. And, you know, then, you know, the blazer blazer problems on others.

Yeah. And I, you know, I've talked to Dave and some of the other members of the software team

over the last couple of years. I've been through the Sloan Lab a couple of times.

How do you, how do you feel GM has progressed on that front? Do you, do you think that GM

has made the right moves, is making the right moves? Are they going, going in the right direction?

Or there's still things that need to evolve? I think we've made a lot of progress on it.

I think that started with a refresh of the team,

that, you know, Avis started and Richardson's continued. I think it continues with

good practices across the company and how we test and develop our software, right? So,

introduction of not just, you know, a much more exhaustive virtual test suite, and, you know,

for regression and progress testing, but use of our install base, right? Vehicles sitting in

garages at night that are owned by our employees, that we can just be running hardware in the loop

tests on, like as a, like massive, think of it as a massive hardware in the loop testing suite.

So a lot of the best practices for how you do software, really the team has been up against

game on. So I think we're in a much better position. We're still getting better, right?

That I wouldn't call us done yet. But I think what we're doing on the centralization compute

is the next kind of major discontinuous step to improving how software does be so much easier

to target a single central compute system that's common across platforms. I want to get back to

that, but you mentioned running stuff on employees, vehicles, yeah, doing hardware loop testing,

I know, you know, GM and other automakers have always had, like, captured test fleets that they

use, pre-production model, before they start delivering to customers. Yeah. But it sounds

like this is something we're doing on an ongoing basis now, pushing, like, are you pushing OTA

updates to the cars to, they're running tests on there and then reverting them back to what they

had. Yeah, we can run. So when I say employee vehicles, I mean GM-owned vehicles that employees

use, that includes captured test fleet vehicles, that includes CBOs, are you familiar with that

program? We've got a pretty massive install base, so it has all these things, right? So it's a huge

opportunity for us to use it to run these tests. And you've got massive distributed

infrastructure is effective nowadays. Yeah. So the new BE architecture, which,

yeah, it's been talked a little bit about in the past, I've talked to David Richardson about before.

But this is the first time that it's kind of been shown publicly, you've got a central compute,

yeah, it goes beyond what's being done with zonal architectures at some other companies.

This, you know, both designing the electronics in-house and developing a whole new software

platform. Is GM ready for that? It sounds like, you know, you think that you've made a lot of

progress, you know, the organization is getting, but you know, that's, you know, the way that

modern software is developed, you know, is fundamentally different from the way it was

done when I was doing it in the 90s and early 2000s. And, you know, that has always been that

challenge over the last decade or so, especially of melding, you know, the kind of safety first

mindset, you know, of, you know, get something, you know, whatever you have ready for job one,

that has to be complete. And now it's more, more like a minimum viable product at job one.

And then continuing to evolve that and getting the right mindset, the right processes of place,

you feel like you're, that the team is getting there? Yeah, we are. Yeah, we're saying very,

I'm saying very close to it. All right, so I'm Mark, Mary, David and I go out to Milford's

Monty for specific detail to use about where we are on some of that work. Okay. And I think,

I think you're the, as far as I know, you're the first person at GM to have that title of

chief product officer. I don't think anybody's had that before. He's been head of product development,

the EVP. Yeah, this is on, this is on the EVP or product development

type. So that is the technically EVP or product development and chief product helps.

Okay. So, you know, what, what does all that entail for you? You know, what, what is your

remit within GM? Yeah, it's our products. Yeah. So development, it's their success.

So across ICE, EV, batteries, user experience, software and services approach.

What else? I always forget stuff. And I always feel bad for the team that I forgot.

Design engineering, manufacturing engineering, all of it.

Okay. So like, how do we, how do we turn this into a machine that hums, that turns out

and extraordinary products? You know, for the last, most of the last decade,

you're, you know, at Aurora, you were focused on automated driving. And, you know, what we saw

today, the announcement today of the development of a hands off, eyes off system that's targeted

for 2028 introduction. Yeah. Yeah. What, you know, are there things from what you learned

over the last nearly a decade with Aurora and work on autopilot custom for that,

that you're bringing to this team? You know, what, what lessons have you learned that are

being incorporated into what's, what's being worked on now?

Oh, I should have buried that one because that's a really important question we get, right?

Look, I'll go off the top of the dome and then I'm sure I'll think about things. Actually, we

talked, oh my gosh, I should have told him about that one. Look, a couple of things. First, the

imperative of having extraordinary talent and grace. It's like, just that foundation for the

rest of it. Second, the importance of creating a culture of kind of, we can do this, right? And

one that instead of asking, instead of suggesting, hey, you know, that can't be done or how could

we possibly, it simply asks the question, if we had to do that, or what would we do? Like,

what would we have to believe for it to be true and in Bosca? So kind of cultural foundation of

really being willing to do things that we haven't seen anything else do before, right? I've had so

many people this morning ask me questions like, well, Sterling, are people asking for this? And

like, what are, what are customers asking for? And what I told every one of them is, look,

customers don't ask for things they don't know they could have, right? It's the whole faster horse

thing. The same thing is true of engineering teams sometimes. Engineering teams can get stuck

in a rhythm of doing the thing they've always done. And looking out their kind of side view mirror

at competitors and being like, well, really, like, how are we relative to competition? And

that's good enough. One of the things that is important to me, and I talked to the entire

product organization about when I started was, I don't want us looking at the side view mirror.

And like, if you're looking at what our competitors are doing, like a, so we're not going to be the

source of all good ideas. So we should absolutely ingest them when they come, and they'll come

through different avenues. But I want your eyes on what's ahead. And like, I want competitors

watching us through their windscreen. I want them looking at, Oh, that was a really interesting

approach to an electrical architecture. Oh, that's this, that's a really compelling way

to develop a robotics. Oh, what they just did with the body architecture, or their AV system,

or whatever. We hadn't thought of that, right? And so that's culturally, that's what I'm pushing

us towards, is a world where invention is celebrated, and risk taking is rewarded.

Traditionally, GM, that was the case for most of its history until the last kind of last couple

of decades. I mean, GM, I don't know if it was in your part of the presentation this morning,

or maybe married, but you know, GM invented so many things, GM R&D. And a lot of that

are the last two decades that's been pared back as Mark sounds like trying to get back to that.

Yeah, that really innovative spirit. Yeah. And we've got a lot of really good people. I've been

really encouraged by the, like, I suppose I shouldn't have questioned it quite so much.

But it's a natural human tendency to want to be inspired by something bigger, to want it like,

and if you're an engineer, being unshackled by the like, you're to engineer from this catalog,

and being told, hey, go figure out like the best way to do this thing, and come up with a new

inventive way of doing it. Like, that's really compelling and motivating for an engineer. Yeah.

And so I think by imbuing that cultural expectation, there's a natural kind of self-selection process

that happens among the team, right? And those who are content with sitting still and effectively

plotting along and catalog engineering our products, they're going to find their way,

ultimately kind of eclipsed by those who are willing to push further and faster.

One last one. The integration of the cruise team with GM, you know, I've heard, you know,

in the past when Ford did that with a lot of the Argo engineers, it was a lot of friction there.

I don't know how true it is. I've heard some reports from various places that, you know,

not everybody is meshing entirely. How's that integration going?

Good now. It was really messy for a while, right? Like, just to put no bones, like, I don't want

to put any bones around that. Like, it was tough for one. But in the last few months, we've really

started turning around to the point that we brought on quite a few new people that are

super excited about this, many of whom are former departed cruise people who left coming back,

left over concerns, are now coming back. Okay. Well, that's good to hear. Yeah,

no, that ship has been turned around in a pretty big way. Okay. One last question I want to ask you

during your presentation. You mentioned that first car. You never said what it was. What was that

first car? Oh, a Toyota Corolla, a 1906 Toyota Corolla built in the New Me factory, which is

absolutely awesome. Anything last thoughts you want to share? I mean, I know you got my first car.

But no, I think we are really excited about where we're going. We're excited about where we're

going with user experience with the AI companion. We're really excited about where we're going

with robotics, with LMR battery chemistry is with our product generally. Yeah, like, my goal here

is to build exceptional products, right? And there are a number of ways that we can

make them exceptional in ways that people today don't even know to ask for. Yeah,

so that's the goal. There's a lot of promising stuff we're hearing about and I'm just now

watch the execution. Yeah, you have to figure out what's real. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, and that's

as you should, right? Like, but what's important to us and to me, I don't know if you have to go

to CES. And I say, well, I said the word the use of the word have to is delivered there.

I've had to for the last like decade. I get so tired of the future is now tight

proclamations and everybody talking about the future and never actually showing like, oh,

here's what we said last year. And here's what we've done. It's important to me that we deliver

on our promises. This is this part of why it mattered that we had LMR cells there,

you must see, right? They should have the time prototype for the IQ that you've got,

you know, you can see the modules as they lay out for STB too. So it's it's it's actively

in development and we're hoping to make a real next couple of years. I'll be watching carefully.

Yeah, always good to touch. Yeah, likewise. Always good to see you. All right. And the other night,

I went to a dinner with Tiago Castro, who is the new VP of infinity.

And some very interesting conversation there. But one of the things that he did tell us,

he did confirm is, you know, for the infinity brand, they plan to launch four new vehicles

over the next four years. And starting in 2026, with the QX 65, which was shown in

concept form at Monterey this year. It's basically a fastback two row version of the QX 60.

And then in 2027, there is a hybrid SUV coming across over. And then in 2028,

there's going to be a new sedan. And he said, yeah, it's going to be like a midsize sedan,

you know, along the lines of, you know, the old G 35 Q 50, that that type, you know,

that kind of form factor. And that is definitely coming, they say. So we'll see. I mean,

what do you think about infinity bringing back as a Dan in the lineup? Listen, if it's cool,

I'm down with it. That's what it really comes down to.

Yeah, fingers crossed. Yeah. That's I mean, yeah, it's like, like, like Volkswagen,

Nissan's having issues with Volkswagen, Nissan, Solantis, they're all like,

yep, it's challenging. I think, yeah, I think Nissan as an automaker is making some smart choices.

We'll see if the infinity line can, can, can, can sort of expand on those.

Do you think the Nissan Sakura or Sakura solar extender is a smart choice?

I think the Nissan Sakura solar center is dope, but I live, don't live in Japan. So

so we've talked about electricity. Yeah, we've talked about the Sakura before. It's,

a K car, it's actually the best selling EV in Japan. And it is a K car. So it's a little

tiny compact hatchback, you know, tall hatchback, very cute, a lot of fun to drive.

And for the Japan Mobility Show, they're showing a new concept called the AO solar extender

that basically is a pod that goes on the roof. And when you park the car, you know, there's on

the top of the pod, you know, this is a flat pod. On the top of the pod is a solar panel. And then

when you park the car, there's another panel that extends out from the front over the front end of

the car to basically double the size of the solar panel. And they claim that on a sunny day,

with the panel extended, it'll generate 500 watts. 500 watts? That's not the sneeze that.

Yeah. That's, you know,

you know, that'll add, you know, a mile or so an hour, probably a mile or two an hour.

But it's like free. That's the, that's the, when it comes down to it, I mean, well,

it's not free because you got to pay for the solar panel in the car, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But once you get it there, you know, they say it'll go up, you know, it's

potential to add 3000 kilometers, which is 1800 miles. So if you got 1800 miles of free

gasoline every year, you'd be pretty stoked. No. No, I'll not, again, not really free because

you still have to pay for it. You're paying for it up front. But, you know, you don't, it's maybe

better to think of it as not necessarily, you know, you're less, less reliant on finding a plug.

Yeah. You just park the car, you go to, I don't know, as long as you don't park it in a garage.

Yeah. You go to Tokyo, Japan or Tokyo, Disney, park it out in a lot. You're there for like 12

hours. You got like another, you know, you get eight miles and you get out. Boom, drive home.

Someone just put like a couple of gallons of gas in your car for free, like a little wizard.

Yeah. I mean, it would be great to have a car like the Sakura here in North America, you know,

especially if you lived in a city, this would be an awesome little car to drive around the city.

Easy to park. You know, it's fun to drive and it is shockingly roomy inside.

It is really weirdly roomy inside because it's just a box. Boxes are just roomy.

And you can do, it's really easy to pull U-turns because I kept getting off on the wrong exit

while driving around Japan. I drove mine around Yokohama and I just kept getting off on the wrong

exit because they had, they had set up Google Maps and Google Maps in Japan. Not right.

When I drove their big van and I think they used a different mapping and I didn't have any issues,

but of course I drove the big van second. So I'd already made all the mistakes I was going to make.

So you already knew your way around that. When I got back with the Sakura because, you know,

it's, it's from a place where you can like test drive cars. They're like, you,

you have to freeway a lot. I'm like, yeah, I kept,

they knew. They track, they're tracking you because it's, you know, again, it's,

you're going to get cars out to the general public. They're going to track it so you don't

just like drive off. Nice thing about this is, you know, because the solar panel is flat,

it's horizontal, it's on the roof. Even while you're driving, it's still generating some energy.

So, and you can, you know, with the, with the extender closed, with the panel closed,

you can still get up to 300 watts of energy and then 500 with the thing fully extended.

So you're just driving around powering like your radio?

Yeah, or your climate control, you know, heater, air conditioning. It's enough for that.

Yeah, it's, yeah, yeah, Nissan Secure. If you have a chance to go to Japan

and get an international driver's license, yes, a drive, international driving permit,

you can get them a triple A because they're not going to let you drive a car if you don't have

that. And then maybe you could go to Nissan's. I was in Yokohama, I think, and I think the

public can drive a car. I don't know how much they'll let like people from other countries

drive it. I was, you know, I'm a journalist, so they let me do whatever I want. But if you could

do it, drive it around and then just be really disappointed in America for choosing gigantic

trucks over fun little cars. All right, let's do a couple of listener emails.

Let's start off with a follow-up on last week's bill challenge. Bill challenge.

So Bill wrote back to us at the bill challenge, huh? Cute. Glad you guys had some fun with it.

Because we, you know, we were asking, you know, what kind of car Bill drives says he drives a

late model Lexus hybrid has a total range of about 500 miles, but Honda Accord from 15 years ago

is easily capable of getting between 300 and 400 miles. I had one and did the road trips the same

way back then. My age, let's just say I'm retired and have been on Medicare for several years.

I am much older than Robbie. Do I dehydrate myself before Stan starting out on a road trip?

Well, I certainly do not drink a 32 ounce big gulp before starting a road trip.

See, this is where Bill and I are already like deviating in our lives.

And I start out with an empty bladder. So not necessarily dehydrating, but not

filling things up before you leave. I usually take a coffee drink in an insulated container and

just sip it, sip on it during the drive slowly. Oh man, I'm again deviating so far.

When you when you need to drive 10 to 12 or even 15 hours to go visit your

family for the holidays, you don't want to waste any time with unnecessary stops.

I don't anyway. That's the case. That was the case for us for many years. Nowadays,

we only do road trips once or twice a year. And I don't even drive more than a few miles per hour

over the speed limit. It's usually only 70 miles an hour. But we have been doing these long holiday

trips since back when the speed limit was only 55 miles an hour. That was rough. Okay, have some

more fun. Have some more fun with this one now. Yeah, that's there. There's there's huge deviations

in Bill's lifestyle in mind. Yeah. I'm like, I was constantly like, before I will stop at like

the 7-Eleven, like a big gulp and I'm just big gulp of Mountain Dew. Yeah. And before I've even

left, I've already had a Red Bull and maybe a T. And so I'm already like at maximum capacity.

And then I'm just drinking a big gulp. So that's there. So there's that. I do understand the

long family trips. My dad, we're not stopping once you go. If you got to go, go now because once

you get on the road, we're not going to stop. And but those are only like three, four hour road

trips we didn't do. We did like one cross-country road trip as a whole family from California

to Pennsylvania, where we really didn't stop. And then me and my dad drove cross-country

when I was in high school again to Pennsylvania. And we stopped to use the restroom. We only stopped

to sleep once. We would just rotate. So we would just drive for like 12 hours, 10 hours. It's like

Oh, it didn't have air conditioning. So we didn't have to stop the pee because we sweated the whole

time. Oh, there you go. So that's the trick. So just turn off the air conditioning, turn up the heat.

You know, so you just sweat out the fluids. Yeah, we just sweat out the fluids the entire

time. So you'll be really gross when you get there. But at least you don't have to stop for a pit stop.

Yeah. And I had broken my left arm. And we were driving a 70s 260Z with a manual transmission.

So it was fine on the road. But at one point we were in a parking lot and I realized I couldn't

I had like, I was shuffle steering and then trying to shift gears and shuffle steering,

trying to shift gears. My dad's like, why don't we, before next time, before we stop in a big

parking lot, we switch drivers. I got my first ticket on that road trip as well. Oh, yeah?

70 miles an hour driving to the middle of nowhere in Utah. It was like the only car we saw for an

hour happened to be a cop car. Oh, that sucks. All right. And then we also got a couple of

follow up emails from Bob with the BMW i3 that we talked about a couple of weeks ago.

Bob was having an issue with the seatbelt latch in his car. And we had recommended,

you know, he had gotten it replaced at the dealer and they charged him some exorbitant amount of

money. I don't remember exactly. It was, you know, it might have been upwards of $1,000.

But, you know, we recommended that, you know, he filed a complaint with the

NHTSA Office of Defects investigation. And of course, you know, right now,

as we're recording this on October 26, the government has, the federal government has

been shut down for just over three weeks. And so not much is going on at NHTSA these days.

Not that much goes on at NHTSA most of the time, it seems, but

the mean things the Department of Transportation said about NHTSA at a Tesla hearing once was

Oh, you mean NTSB? Oh, yeah, I'm sorry, NTSB. Yeah, NTSB did not have any kind words for NHTSA.

Yeah, I was talking to somebody from NTSB at another event a few weeks ago. And

yeah, he was he was pretty harsh on NHTSA as well. Anyway, so Bob sent some follow up emails.

First off, you know, after we had recommended that, you know, push BMW for a refund on that.

So he said, he will be pushing BMW for a refund. We'll see what happens. And then

the next one was the vehicle looked up, you know, some some information, and says, you know,

from NHTSA, the vehicle manufacturer is responsible for repairing a seatbelt system that fails during

normal operation, especially if the failure is due to a defect. Under federal law, the manufacturer

must fix any safety related defects at no cost to the owner. And NTSA can require them to recall

and remedy the problem. And then for manufacturers responsibility, manufacturing defects, if the

failure is caused by a designer manufacturing flaw, the car manufacturer is liable and must

cover the repair costs. For recalls, if the failure is considered a safety defect, the National

Highway Traffic Safety Administration can require the manufacturer to notify owners and fix the

issue for free. And then warranty, while not all manufacturers provide a lifetime warranty,

they are required to correct safety effects, often under a specific vehicle warranty. So

even though, you know, something like the seatbelt latch may not necessarily be covered,

you know, under the warranty, you know, most vehicles have, you know, a bumper to bumper

warranty of about three, usually three to four years, some are a little bit longer.

You know, even though, you know, that warranty may be expired, you know, for something like a safety

defect like this. And it certainly sounds like what what Bob had was a safety defect,

they probably have to replace it free of charge anyway. And then final in response to an email I

sent to Bob, says, thanks, I'll catch it, catch the show tomorrow morning, I have had the utmost

respect for BMW. But when I gave when given, I already tried to resolve this matter with

a customer service person once, I now have to contact them again. They should know that this

is a NITSA requirement and should not be putting me through flaming hoops. If they refuse, I guess

I will reach out to NITSA, but I can see that getting lost in the shuffle is a distinct possibility.

I will keep you posted. And then the final follow up was I hope all's well, I want to want to have

the facts from NITSA regarding my issue before I pursue any further with BMW. Using AI, I am finding

conflicting information as to whether or not the manufacturer is required to fix safety related

issues. There's a shock. The vehicle age may be a factor. I read that the car needs to be less than

10 years old, which mine is. With the government shutdown, I've not been able to reach anyone.

If they have a direct if you have a direct contact, you can send my way, this will be helpful.

I will look Bob to see if I have any contacts and try and send them your way. Otherwise,

I will update you as soon as I can. So ongoing, nothing, nothing resolved yet.

Fingers crossed though. Yeah, good luck, Bob. And finally, from West in DFW. A couple quick

questions. Hold on, let me wrap this so I can read it. I forgot to do that. I hate it when I forget

to do that. Let's see. When range is defined for an EV, is that assuming no regen is used?

If it isn't, what is a good percentage average for additional mileage that one can get from

using regen? If it is, is it just averaged into the numbers? So this one, you know, every EV,

you know, is is using some some amount of regen by default. That's just the way it is.

It, you know, when they when they define the range, you know, they run the vehicles on the same

test cycle that's used for combustion vehicles. So there's some stent, there's a couple of standard

city and highway test cycles that have been used since the 1970s. And then there's also several

other different cycles that are meant to be a little more realistic of real world driving.

And so, you know, the what they do is they put it in whatever the default mode is for the vehicle

when you start it. So it's, you know, typically going to be some normal mode. And depending on

the manufacturer, you know, like BMWs often had, you know, strong regen is their default on some

of their vehicles on others. That's been an optional mode. So whatever the default driving

mode is, that's what they'll run, you know, and whatever amount of energy recovery you get from

the regen during the test cycles is what gets integrated. So they don't, they don't,

it's going to vary. You know, so if you've got a vehicle where the default is low regen, but there's

an optional one pedal mode, you know, you're depending on your driving conditions, you're

probably going to get some additional mileage. And it's hard to say for sure, how much that's

going to be, it's going to depend a lot on the vehicle. And what your driving conditions are,

you know, urban driving, you're going to tend to get more benefit from it, you know, or,

you know, where you've got more stop and go, as opposed to highway driving, we're probably

going to get a little or no benefit from it. Any thoughts on that?

Um, I think there's, yeah, I, yeah, they're definitely using the regen. I think the, yeah,

the sort of, I mean, BMW is sort of automatic auto smart regen, where it takes into account where

you're driving, what road you're on and the vehicles ahead of you and adjust its regen. The first

version of it, I drive, I drove it, I hated it. The second version and since it's, I've had it quite

useful, uses less regen, let's say on the freeway, because, you know, maybe you want to,

you want to roll for a while, you know. So yeah, I don't, it's, it's, it's difficult to determine

how much of your range is extended by regen, especially dependent on every car has a little

bit different regen. Some cars are, you know, a bit more aggressive than others and driving styles.

And the weird thing is if you really stomp on the gas and then you'll have more regen, but

you're also using up more, you know, it's not a, it's not an equal comparison. So yeah, I mean,

you, and what's funny is that you sort of get used to regen. And then when you get in a gas car,

my brain, I get sort of irritated that when I'm driving my BRZ, every time I lift, I'm not making

gasoline. I'm just wasting energy right now. And then what happens is you, you, you become accustomed

to regen as, you know, additional source of braking. So then when you, when you get in a gas

car and you use the brakes, the brakes don't feel that great. They don't feel nearly as, as, as good

as those in an EV. So that's another weird sort of like one of those weird things you get from.

Yeah. And for us, you know, that are jumping in and out of different cars all the time, you know,

making that adjustment between a combustion vehicle and EV can, you know, you've, you've got to reset

your brain every time you get into a different car. Yeah. Yeah. And that is very true. Even gas

cars, you go from gas car to gas car, but when you get from gas to EV, especially if you go from like

a little EV to a giant gas truck, you're like, ah,

it's like, why isn't this stopping? You're like, Oh my God, I got so much mass.

So yeah, it depends. It's hard, hard to give you a specific number.

You know, but you know, if you do a lot of urban driving, I would expect, you know, maybe,

maybe 10% more range. If you have, you know, like full one pedal mode available, 10 maybe, you know,

in extreme cases, maybe 15, you know, and, and then, you know, less on the highway. Yeah.

All right. And then the other question that Wes had was from what you've seen,

how do the stats for vehicle thefts of EVs compared to those of gas vehicles? If less,

is this because they're harder to steal or just not in demand yet? So I looked up and I found

a story from Axios from about a year ago based on data from the National Insurance Crime Bureau

and also from IHS. It sounds like a national insurance crime bureau sounds like a made up

thing, but also they're like solving insurance crimes. Yeah.

And so, and they will also use data from IHS, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety,

based on insurance claims, analysis of insurance claims. So

overall, between 2021 and 2023, about 49 of every 100,000

insured cars are stolen every year. So it's actually not that much. It's the rate of car

theft overall is pretty low. But and among the the selected vehicles that they have in the chart

here, the GMC Sierra, so that was 49 out of 100,000 insured cars. The GMC Sierra 227 out of 100,000

were stolen every year. And the Chevy Silverado 96. And interestingly,

the Hyundai's and Kia's that had the problem with being easy to steal,

don't even show up on this chart. So I'm not sure what that says about those.

If you're going to do a crime, you want to get the largest return on your investment for crime

doing. And a giant pickup truck is definitely, because you can sell those in other markets,

other countries, you can rip them apart. Yeah. And that's the thing. I mean,

most stolen vehicles are, I mean, some are stolen, somebody just take a joyride or

to ship them overseas where there might be a market for them. But the vast majority of stolen

vehicles, they go straight to a chop shop and get torn apart for parts, because you can make a lot

of money selling individual parts, to body shops, to independent repair shops, even some dealers.

That's where the money is in selling the parts. So it's kind of the opposite of

more than the sum of the parts. The sum of the parts is actually less than the parts themselves.

And so things like a Sierra Silverado or Wrangler, a lot of demand for parts for those

things because they sell in high volumes. The Tesla Model 3 during that time period

from 21 to 23, one theft per 100,000 vehicles. For not a lot. Yeah. And people don't know what

to do. Like, what am I going to do? You take it to a chop shop, you're like, I don't, what?

I mean, the battery's worth a lot of money. You don't have the, yeah, okay, hold on,

we got to hire a bunch of new, you know, hired goons who know how to work with high voltage

batteries. Yeah, who aren't going to get, you know, electrocuted and killed. Yeah, you know,

I think, I think these vehicles are inherently probably a little, a little more complicated

to steal. You know, it's not, it's not the same as just hot wiring them like you could with older

vehicles. But also, you know, trying to find the market for these things. And actually,

my guess is that over time, we will see those numbers for EVs go up. Because one of the things

you find is that, you know, the cost of repairing EVs tends to be high enough that, you know, when

they're in a crash, they, they're, they're more likely to be totaled by the insurance company

than repaired. And, you know, when that happens, there are often lots of good parts on those things

that, you know, when they go, they'll go to a wrecking yard, they'll pull the battery out,

you know, they'll test the battery, you know, if it's still good, you know, it may get sold as a

refurb for service part, or, you know, or recycled. And then, you know, other components will get

sold. And I think, you know, as the volume of EVs goes up, and there's demand to fix vehicles

that might have otherwise gotten totaled, I think, you know, you'll start to see

some increase in the number of EVs that get stolen. But it's going to be a little more

complicated to steal those, you know, so what you might see is, you know, EVs getting stolen,

not by somebody hopping in and, and hot wiring them, but, you know, actually hauling them up

onto a flatbed and taking them away. You know, and the crazy thing is like nearly every EV though

has some sort of tracking device. Yeah, I know where my Hyundai is at all times.

Yeah, I mean, they're, they're all connected, which makes it easier to, to track where it is

and recover it. So that, and not even track work and recover, that's tracked to where your chop

shop is. So now you're taking a huge, you know, you're, you're taking a huge gamble to sell like

some battery packs to somebody, because your whole, you know, your whole criminal enterprise

can be, you know, I stole three Teslas and now my whole criminal enterprise is gone.

Yeah. So for, at least for the foreseeable future, you know, you're, you're probably less,

less at risk of having your EV stolen than your conventional car.

Right. And that's it for this week. Thank you, everybody, and we'll be back next time. Bye.

Bye-bye.

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