The Ford Expedition is a large SUV that can fit a lot of people and their things. It's great for families or anyone who needs a big vehicle, and it can also pull heavy trailers if you need to take something with you.
Tilt steering means you can change the angle of the steering wheel to make it more comfortable for you while driving. It's a simple adjustment that helps you find the best position.
Subscription-based services mean you pay a monthly fee to use certain features in your car, like navigation or heated seats, instead of buying them outright.
BlueCruise is a feature from Ford that lets you drive without using your hands on the steering wheel on specific highways. It uses cameras to help keep the car in its lane.
The body control module is like the brain for many electrical parts of your car. If it stops working, things like your lights or windows might not work properly, and fixing it can be expensive.
A vehicle service contract is a type of agreement that helps pay for repairs and maintenance on your car. It's like a safety net for car owners to avoid big bills later.
An extended warranty is like extra insurance for your car that covers repairs after the regular warranty ends. It can save you money if something breaks later on.
An extended service contract is like an extra warranty you can buy for your car. It helps pay for repairs after the regular warranty ends, which can save you money if something goes wrong later.
A manufacturer's warranty is a promise from the car maker that they'll fix certain problems with the car for a set amount of time or miles. If something goes wrong, you can get it repaired for free.
LED headlights are a type of car light that uses special technology to shine brighter and last longer than regular lights. They help you see better at night.
Level three chargers are special charging stations for electric cars that can fill up the battery much faster than regular chargers. They are great for when you need to charge quickly while on a long trip.
Tesla is a company that makes electric cars and has many charging stations where you can quickly charge your car's battery. They were one of the first to set up a lot of these stations.
General Motors is a big car company in the U.S. that makes many different types of cars, including electric ones. They are working on having more charging options for their electric vehicles.
Electric vehicles are cars that run on electricity instead of gasoline. They are better for the environment and can save money on fuel, but they can lose value quickly.
Leasing is like renting a car for a few years. You make monthly payments, but you don't own the car at the end. This can be a good option for electric vehicles since they can lose value quickly.
Depreciation is how much a car loses its value as it gets older. Electric vehicles can lose value quickly because new models come out often and people may want the latest technology.
The Chevrolet Equinox is a type of car called an SUV, which means it's a bit bigger and can carry more people and stuff than a regular car. It's popular because it's comfortable to drive and has a lot of space inside, making it a good choice for families.
The Ford F-150 Lightning is an electric version of the popular Ford F-150 truck. It's designed to be powerful and efficient, catering to those who want a truck that doesn't use gasoline.
The Ford Lightning is a special version of the Ford F-150 truck that is designed to be faster and more powerful than regular trucks. People really like it for its performance.
The Ford Model T is one of the first cars that many people could actually afford to buy. It was made a long time ago, and it changed how cars were made and sold, making it easier for regular people to own one.
Car
Ford Edsel
The Ford Edsel was a car brand that Ford introduced in the late 1950s, but it didn't sell well and is remembered as a big failure. It serves as a cautionary tale in the auto industry.
A fast charger is a special charging station for electric cars that fills up the battery much quicker than regular chargers. It can take only about 30 to 50 minutes to charge the car.
Battery damage happens when an electric car's battery is harmed, often from charging it too quickly or in the wrong way. This can make the battery last shorter and not work as well.
A hybrid car uses both a regular gasoline engine and an electric motor. This helps it save fuel and be better for the environment than just a regular gas car.
Financing is how you pay for a car over time instead of all at once. You borrow money to buy the car and then pay it back in monthly installments, usually with extra fees called interest.
Intermittent wipers are the windshield wipers that don't wipe all the time. They can pause for a moment between wipes, which is helpful when it's just drizzling.
LIVE
Hey folks, Lenny Lawson here.
I was doing my best to do a video version of the My Car Guru podcast slash radio show.
So what I did is I bought this microphone.
It's called a Maono.
It sounds Hawaiian, M-A-O-N-O.
And it's a wireless, well, basically you plug a little receiver into the bottom connection
on your cell phone and turn it on.
And then you turn on a little wireless microphone and clip it to your lapel if you have a lapel.
And I just clipped it onto my shirt.
And so it starts working just fine.
And I recorded, well, the last program that I did, I recorded it, had my iPhone propped
up and pointed in my direction.
And so I just kept kind of looking back and forth to the camera and then to my computer
screen.
And so anyway, I get it all done and I finally take my first break and I hit stop button.
And then I went back to see what I'd recorded.
And you could see me talking, you just couldn't hear me.
You could hear me for about 10 seconds and it was very crystal clear, it was nice.
High quality microphone, till it wasn't.
And so there I was talking for five minutes with no sound.
You know, electronic things can be some boogers sometimes.
It gets so irritating.
So when I try to do things on my iPhone or on my computer, I was in a new expedition
the other day and Ford decided to revolutionize the instrument panel when it didn't need
revolutionizing because it was fine before my wife has a 2024 expedition that I bought
for her and she really loves it.
My daughter, Abby has a 2025 expedition that has this new funky dash, kind of a rounded
square steering wheel.
It's weird.
It has little mouse pads that you have to use with with your thumbs.
I guess you could use it with your finger, but you know, when you're holding the steering
wheel, you don't want to be pulling your hands off and pointing at stuff and moving this
mouse around trying to figure out how to adjust your steering wheel.
I mean, if you want to adjust your steering wheel, you remember when you just had a tilt
steering, you just pull a little lever and it goes up and down.
That was fine.
Why mess with it?
But no, they had to make it electronic.
So then, which was okay, had a little button on the side, your car may have that where
you push a little, you know, like a window or mirror controller, you push it up if you
want to go up, you push it in if you want it to go in and out and that's a great, it's
fine.
Well, it wasn't fine for Ford.
So they decided to make the, instead of having the controls right there where you need them
on the side of the steering wheel, you've got to work with this little mouse pad and
you've got to look up on your dash and find, okay, what's up, what's out, what's in, and
figure it out and push the button.
I don't need those kind of learning curves at my advanced age.
I don't think you do either, but you know, what these manufacturers are trying to do
to the automobile is to make it 100% configurable.
What does that mean?
Well, if you want certain features, you can subscribe to them.
We talked about this several episodes ago.
Subscription based services.
I got an email from Ford the other day showing a complete menu of subscription based services
that I can pay them, you know, $7.99 a month.
One of them was $49.95 or $49.99 per month.
That's for BlueCruise.
It's already on my vehicle.
It's equipped to do it.
It did it for the first 90 days and then it stopped and I got a message that said, if
you want this to continue, we're going to hold it ransom.
You have to send us $49.99 a month or you can pay in advance for a full year.
I decided to tell them to stick it.
I'm not paying for that.
My wife doesn't like it anyway.
It's okay, but I like driving and I don't trust some engineer up in Detroit to steer
my car for me.
I can handle that.
I've done it for a long time and I'm not subscribing to that.
Another thing had to do with Wi-Fi.
I don't need Wi-Fi in my car.
Do you?
At home, that's plenty.
I mean, I've got my cell phone and it's got 5G or however many G's they have right now.
That's enough.
I don't need Wi-Fi.
I don't need to be a Wi-Fi hotspot for the 18-wheeler driving beside me.
I just think these engineers, they just need something to do.
They decide to start screwing with our lives and messing with our cars and trying to find
ways to charge us more for already expensive vehicles.
You know, if you're thinking about buying a new vehicle today, consider buying a base
model.
I mean, let's say that you like leather seats.
That's just one of your non-negotiables.
Then buy a base model and have leather installed.
You can do that.
There's a place in Knoxville called American Radio.
I know that's weird, but they will install very high-quality cat skin with a K leather
interiors in your vehicle.
And then you can adjust your own steering wheel.
You know, you can just, you know how they have that little vise-like thing on the bottom
of the steering wheel?
You can tilt it up and down or push it in and out.
That's fine.
You can do that.
It's not going to strain your muscles too much to do that.
I don't need a mouse pad to adjust my steering wheel, thank you very much.
But we order these features or we choose these features or we can't buy the car without those
features and we end up never using them.
And then something breaks after the warranty runs out that's somehow tied to this thing.
For example, the body control module on your vehicle poops out and certain things aren't
working in your vehicle and because it has all these features, then you've got to buy
a new one and they're expensive.
And it's probably a good reason to buy an extended warranty.
You know, there's more reasons to buy an extended warranty or a vehicle service contract.
I use those terms interchangeably.
Now if you trade before the warranty runs out, the manufacturer's warranty, don't buy
an extended service contract.
But if you plan on keeping that car five, six, seven years, I recommend you buy one.
I didn't used to, but boy I do now because I have seen what happens not just in my dealership
in all brands.
I don't care what brand it is.
If it's a Mercedes or a BMW or a Porsche or a Honda, Toyota, whatever.
When those things break, it's like buying a new engine in some cases or when an engine
used to cost.
So just don't pay too much for them.
I mean the average extended service contract for just a typical small SUV, even for my
daughter's expedition, something like that, six years, 100,000 miles, it should cost no
more than between $2,500 and $3,000 maximum.
And you know, the manufacturer's warranty covers you for what, three years or $50,000.
So you're basically paying for three or four more years and another $50,000.
So if it was a seven year warranty and it was $3,000 and you're paying $750 per year.
And if you have one screen go out or one body control module go out or even if on a higher
dollar car that has special LED headlights, I mean you could easily spend $1,500 on one
headlight.
Isn't that nuts?
That's just the way it is though.
I remember we used to sell light bulbs for headlights and they were like $7.
But do you really need the fanciest headlights?
I know they're attached to that limited package that you really want or that one in Ford.
It might be the King Ranch or the Platinum.
Every car manufacturer has these higher end trim packages.
And they happen to call them limited or platinum.
You know, you probably need to own some Platinum to be able to pay to repair them.
Yeah, how much Platinum is going to take to replace the windshield wiper blades on this
thing?
That's what I want to know.
Okay, I'll be back in just one minute.
Okay, let's get on with it.
I'm thinking about you poor EV owners.
What has happened to the EV industry?
Of course, a lot of that depends on where you live.
And if you live in California, you know, they're kind of addicted to EVs, the large market
penetration out there, and to a certain degree in the Great Northeast in certain areas, but
not so much.
And I've got something to say to all EV owners.
I'm going to apologize for all of us car dealers who sold them to you because I don't know.
I think they were sold under false pretenses because the government told us that they were
going to fix the charging infrastructure, didn't they?
Remember that?
You remember back at the beginning of the Biden administration, they passed some type of a
big infrastructure bill and they were going to fund all the different states and all along
the interstates, you would have all these chargers that you could just pull into and
just this as easy as filling up with a tank of gas, but it didn't happen.
And it's still just kind of trickling out there.
I mean, in most small towns in America, there aren't any chargers.
The only chargers are at people's houses and they don't really appreciate you pulling
into their driveway and plugging in.
And so the chargers that are out there for the general public to use the level three
chargers, which are the fastest chargers, many of those still don't work.
The networks are very unreliable.
If you own a Tesla, then it's it's better, you know, because Tesla built their infrastructure
out before they really started selling a bunch of cars.
And but now see if you own a General Motors vehicle or a Toyota or Ford, you can go to
a Tesla supercharger and charge right up.
And those Tesla people aren't happy about it because they thought they had that network
exclusively to themselves.
So I'm even apologizing to Tesla owners because you were deceived.
I'll tell you something else you were deceived about the value of your vehicle and what it
would be worth when you were done with it.
I just hope that most of you had the sense to lease your your electric vehicles as opposed
to buying them.
Because if you bought them and financed them for any period of time or paid cash, the depreciation
is astronomical on those vehicles.
The used car market is not good for EVs.
Because we just we just don't know how long the batteries are going to last.
I mean, would you want to buy something that you know that is only going to possibly work
about 50% as well as it did when it was new?
You know, if you buy the average used car, you know, if you put gas in it, put some new
spark plugs in it, it's probably going to be fine for another hundred
thousand miles.
But with EVs, that's not the case because the battery gets depleted.
Well, it not only gets depleted, its ability to charge to 100% goes away.
And over time, it's going to keep going down and down and down.
And so the range that that you thought it would get when when you bought the thing,
what they told you would go 320 miles on a charge.
Well, now it's only 200 miles on a charge.
And you still have to get where you need to get.
And it just doesn't work with your life.
But then you're going to go to, I don't know, some Chevrolet dealership and you
sound just by me an equinox and you pull up and they see you wanting to trade that
vehicle and they start shaking their head.
We don't want that thing.
What are we going to do with that?
And then you get an appraisal and you owe, you know, $50,000 more on your vehicle than
it's worth, like if you bought a Rivian or one of those other oddly named a
Polestar.
Yeah, you're really in bad shape if you bought a Polestar because, you know,
you might as well have driven in a UFO because they don't have a clue what
that's worth.
Oh, but you were an innovator, you know, you wanted to be a groundbreaker.
You knew that these EVs were going to take over.
Well, they're not.
And it's not going to happen anytime soon.
I was reading automotive news.
Ford is probably, well, they say they're probably, which means they are going to
scrap the F-150 Lightning pickup truck.
We had really good luck selling the first one.
Some guy from California called us and said, I'll pay you $30,000 over when a
sticker for your Ford Lightning.
You know, what's a little car dealer in East Tennessee going to say if somebody
offers that, how soon can you get here?
We're not going to try to talk him out of it.
He wanted it.
That's, they were charging more than that out in California.
So that was a pretty profitable deal right there.
But then they stopped selling and they were just sitting out here.
Weeds, they're tumbleweeds blowing across in front of them.
And so we had one left and I ended up having to buy it.
I bought it from a nephew Max to drive.
Well, I didn't buy it.
Let me rephrase.
We leased it.
And so Ford has decided that, you know, it, well, originally they said, OK,
this is going to be the new Model T, but it turned out being more like the
Edsel than the Model T.
So Ford has racked up 13 billion in EV losses since 2023.
I know the government, you know, hear all these numbers, billions, trillions.
You know, it doesn't sound like a whole lot of money.
That's a lot of money.
I mean, that is, um, that is earth shattering money.
Ford was able to save itself back at the Great Recession by borrowing
about 30 billion and they socked it away.
And that's the reason they didn't have to take the bailout money from the
federal government, like General Motors and the Chrysler Corporation did.
And then you look at a company like Honda.
So they're rethinking their electric vehicle strategy.
Why?
Because the shifting US policies and weaker demand.
You take away a $7,500 rebate, it's going to have a big impact, but it was,
it was bad before that too.
The only thing that really caused the surge at the very end, you know, they
talked about, well, a lot of the manufacturers just bragging about how
many EVs they were selling right as the subsidies were expiring.
That's the only reason they accelerated is because there are some people out
there that say, well, you know, we might as well go ahead and get one because
these are going to go away and they are not going to be happy because of some
of the other things that I've been talking about, depreciation, charging infrastructure.
Maybe you have one and you're just elated with it, but you're rare.
So now even Honda thinks that if you can get an electric vehicle for under
$30,000, people will buy them.
That's kind of when all the manufacturers are thinking in the United States,
that is, as far as developing vehicles.
Hyundai is saying that Ford General Motors, we got to get EVs under $30,000.
Cause then all of those young people will be able to afford them.
All those unemployed young people who live in apartment complexes.
Where are they going to charge them?
You know, if you don't own a house or access to a 240 volt outlet, then
you're going to have a problem.
You're going to have to use superchargers.
You can't plug it into a 110.
If you take an EV and plug it into a 110, it takes about five, six days to fully
charge. You know, if you do it at 240, depending on the amount of amps that it
has, it can take anywhere from six to eight hours.
Fast charger, maybe 30 to 50 minutes, but you can't use fast chargers all the time.
Why?
Because it can damage your battery if you do that all the time.
So I don't think young people are that ignorant.
Personally, I think they're going to be able to figure that out.
I don't care if they do get them under, I don't care if they get them under 20,000.
They can't and build them profitably.
So the EV thing is pretty much dead.
And if I were you, I'd either look for just a nice high mileage gasoline engine
made by, you know, Ford, Toyota, Honda, General Motors, whatever brands that you
like, hybrids are okay if you want to pay over sticker form.
But I don't, I don't see that as a great return on investment because the
difference in the fuel economy between a hybrid and a high mileage gasoline
engine is not that great.
And you probably won't own it long enough to be able to make it to break even
for the extra costs.
So these are things you need to consider.
I will be back in just one minute.
Do you remember in the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy got caught up in that tornado
and then it landed and it landed on top of the wicked witch of the, let's see,
of the East.
And she was there with the Munchkins and she looked at, I think,
and the good witch pointed out to Dorothy that she had landed on the
wicked witch of the East and then the wicked witch of the East legs curled up
and rolled back underneath the house.
That really used to freak me out.
Well, that's what happened to EVs.
A big house landed on them and the house had a Trump sign on it.
And really it brought sanity to the market.
Now, one thing I think is crazy is that now the Trump administration is
saying, okay, well, let's do 50 year mortgages.
See, that's what they've done to the car business.
I mean, since houses have gotten so expensive, 50 year mortgages, since
cars have gotten so expensive, 84 month financing, 120 month financing, 10 years
to pay for a car.
You should need 10 years to pay for a car.
The cars are too complicated.
They become too expensive.
Let's go back.
Let's start buying basic cars, the base model.
It's all we really need.
But I am biased.
I mean, I was selling cars when a car was loaded.
If it had an eight track tape player and intermittent wipers.
And, you know, the intermittent wipers were not variable.
They would just go like every 10 seconds or so.
So as things have gotten more complicated, they have gotten more expensive.
How come it didn't work that way with computers?
You know, when computers got a lot more complicated, they got cheaper.
It's just like my first laptop.
I'm embarrassed to say what I paid for it.
Well, I leased it because it was too expensive to buy.
It was almost $7,000 for my first laptop.
I ended up leasing it for, gosh, I think it was $200 a month for 36 months.
And then you give it back to them just like a car lease or had a buyout.
So I don't know why that doesn't work with cars.
If I find out, I'll let you know.
If you want more information to help you buy, sell, trade, deal with body shops
and service departments and car dealerships and find ways to save a bunch of money,
just send me your email address and I'll send you a copy of the My Car Guru guidebook.
It's 32 pages long and it's packed full of even how to negotiate a deal.
I mean, a salesperson walks up to you and says, how much you want to pay a month?
You know exactly what to say and what not to say to get the best deal.
It's all in the My Car Guru guidebook.
You can send me your email address if you want to to Lenny Lawson 2020.
At gmail.com, which is my email address, or to my cell phone at 423-552-2020.
And I'll see you on the next edition of My Car Guru.
About this episode
Lenny Lawson dives into the pitfalls of owning electric vehicles (EVs), highlighting the disappointing charging infrastructure and steep depreciation rates. He discusses the complexities of modern vehicle controls and subscription services that complicate ownership. With anecdotes about his own experiences and the struggles of manufacturers like Ford, he emphasizes the importance of considering base models and extended warranties. The episode critiques the current EV market and suggests that traditional gasoline vehicles may be a more practical choice for many consumers.
