Subscription services mean you pay a monthly fee to use certain features in your car, like heated seats, instead of buying them once. It's a way for car companies to offer more options without including everything in the initial price.
The window sticker is a label on a new car that shows important details like the price and features. It helps you see what comes with the car before you buy it.
The Ford F-150 is a popular truck that can be used for work or personal use. The 2024 version has new features and options to make it more comfortable and efficient.
Automated driving services are technologies in cars that help with driving, like keeping the car in the lane or adjusting speed without the driver doing much. Some cars can even drive themselves in certain situations.
The Renault Wind is a small car that can be driven with the top down, like a convertible. It's designed to be fun and sporty, and it’s easy to park because it's not very big.
The Holden Caprice is a big, comfortable car that was made in Australia, often used by people who wanted a luxury ride. It's known for having a lot of space inside, making it great for long trips.
The Chevrolet Caprice Convertible is a big car that many families used to drive around in. It's known for being comfortable and has a classic style that people like today.
A turbocharger helps an engine produce more power by forcing in extra air, which allows it to burn more fuel. This makes the car faster and more efficient.
The Buick Grand National is a fast car from the 1980s that had a powerful turbocharged engine. It was known for being one of the quickest cars of its time.
The Buick Century is a type of car that was made for many years, known for being comfortable and roomy. People often liked it because it was easy to drive and had a smooth ride, which is why it gets mentioned alongside sportier models.
The Chevrolet Monte Carlo is a sporty car that was made for several decades, famous for its stylish look and good performance. It was often used in racing, and people liked it for both everyday driving and racing on tracks.
An intercooler cools the air that comes from the turbocharger before it goes into the engine. Cooler air helps the engine run better and produce more power.
An old school mechanic is someone who knows a lot about fixing cars using traditional methods, without needing computers or modern tools.
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Oh, the technological challenges we have in the modern world.
I am over it.
Last night, power went out.
We had a power surge.
And well, the power was only out for like five seconds.
Of course, that was enough to throw all the computers into a hizzy fit.
So we didn't have any internet.
And through our servers for a loop, for some reason or another, or whatever you call the
things that get us to the internet.
And because we didn't have the internet, we had no phones.
And it was only 4 or 15 when it happened.
So we're still in business, but the people that are out there trying to call and check
on their cars, they think we're out of business.
We're just mean people because we're not answering the phone.
And they need their car back.
And General Motors announced yesterday, you know, their stock is really going up for some
reason or another.
But yeah, they announced yesterday that these computers that we rely on so much are going
to be driving their cars in 2028.
I'm not glad I'm not a GM owner or, well, they won't be driving all the cars.
It'll be, I'm sure, an available technology.
Something you have to pay extra for, probably have to subscribe for.
See, that's the big trend right now, folks, subscription services.
Yes, when you buy a car, just about any car in the not too distant future, it'll be
equipped with every single option that they can possibly make, including heated seats.
Although on your window, or on your window label, the window sticker, it won't
say that it has heated seats.
The car has it.
It's just not listed there and you didn't pay for it.
But you will have to pay to use it if you want it.
It'll be a subscription.
BMW tried that.
They made a lot of people angry.
You know, you think if you buy a BMW, pay that kind of money.
It should have heated seats.
Well, so did most of the BMW buyers.
And they appreciated the heated seats for the first 90 days because it was free.
They were on a trial basis.
Boy, I used my heated seats this morning.
It was 39 degrees here in East Tennessee and I jumped into my car and I was cold.
And so I turned on my heated seats and my heated steering wheel and I got warm pretty
quickly before the car actually warmed up.
I was feeling warm.
And so you think about that as a subscription service.
One day you go out to your vehicle, fire it up, turn on your heated seats and they
don't work.
I don't think people are going to love that, but that's what's come in subscription
features.
That you have to pay for.
Like, well, Blue Cruise.
You know, I have Blue Cruise on my F-150, my 2024 Platinum F-150, but it doesn't work
because my, what was it, is either 90 days or six month trial on the Blue Cruise.
I mean, it was okay.
My wife was not real happy with it.
Put your hands back on the steering wheel.
Honey, I'm using the Blue Cruise.
You trust that?
Well, not 100%.
That's why my hands are really close to the steering wheel.
Yeah, AI is supposed to make these automated driving services a whole lot more reliable.
In other words, okay, so you're going down to Interstate and you're getting ready
to pass an 18-wheeler.
Now, when you get up real close to it, are you moving over away from it just
a tad bit?
I do.
You know, I might hug the left lane.
I'm going to look in my left mirror to make sure nobody's over there, but I'm going to
move over because I don't want to be real close to that 18-wheeler.
Now, when I had the Blue Cruise on, it acted like that 18-wheeler wasn't even there and
kept going right down the center of my lane, which would be appropriate under normal circumstances,
but not with an 18-wheeler roaring right beside me.
So what AI is going to do, it's going to recognize the fact.
It's going to really notice how you drive.
It's going to take note of the little things that you do, the little quirks that you do,
hopefully just the good ones, and it will adjust.
For example, it will learn that you don't like to be right beside an 18-wheeler at
about two feet away.
No, it doesn't.
You don't like that.
You always move over, so when it sees an 18-wheeler, it'll move over.
Are you going to trust that?
Is that going to make you feel good about getting a paper copy of USA Today and reading
it while you're going down the interstate?
There have been some people die doing that in Tesla's, watching movies.
I'll never forget going past a vehicle we were in Alabama, heading to Birmingham,
Alabama, and we were driving in the slow lane.
That's the one on the right-hand side, and we were passing a vehicle in the
fast lane, the one on the left.
And as we passed it, I noticed that this dude had his cell phone mounted up on his
dash, and he was watching a movie.
Had his arms crossed, watching a movie, and the car was driving itself.
It was a Tesla.
That's just not good.
That's not what you're supposed to do.
Why do humans do that?
Why do humans break the rules?
You know, there were just a bunch of rule breakers.
I was so upset the other day.
I was walking along a road that runs behind my house.
I have probably, I don't know, 500 yards of road frontage behind my house.
And just looking at all the trash, mostly Bud Light cans.
You know, that must say something about, I don't know whether it does or not.
I'm not going to make any judgment calls.
Lot of McDonald's bags, a whole bunch of business cards.
I don't know how that happened.
I know the guy that owns the business.
I think they must have been sitting on top of a truck, and the wind caught it
and blew them off all over my property.
I don't know, but I've got probably four or 500 business cards I've got
to go down there and pick up.
I ought to call him and have him come pick them up.
But yeah, people litter.
I do not understand that mindset to think that it's okay to roll down
your window and throw something in somebody else's yard.
Of course, I don't understand.
One of my other neighbors has these poles up beside his mailbox so
that people won't bash his mailbox.
I don't think I did, although I must admit, I did throw some eggs.
And that's probably one of the worst things you can do when I was a teenager.
And the worst part about that, well, the worst part was that I was doing it.
The second worst part was that I got caught.
And my parents found out.
And I got to go back to their house and clean up the side of their house and
the window.
Really, I didn't throw them.
I was just the getaway man.
I was the driver, my buddy through the eggs.
And I distinctly remember, you know, the reason that I got caught is
because the people whose house got hit with the eggs,
they happened to know my mom and dad.
And I happened to be driving my dad's Caprice convertible with dealer tags on
the back of it.
I mean, there's your forensic evidence right there.
It didn't take a CSI expert to figure that one out.
So they called my parents and my mom answered the phone.
And the lady said, can I speak to Mr. Lawson?
And she said, well, sure.
And dad came to the phone and said, Mr. Lawson,
what does your son have against us?
He said, what do you mean?
He said, well, he drove by and threw eggs at our house.
I didn't get to use his car for quite some time after that.
So I guess I'm the pot calling the kettle black.
Anyway, I'll take my first break.
I'll be back here in just a minute.
I had a lady in the service department the other day and
she was having to spend some money.
She had, well, her husband was having to spend some money.
It was his truck and she brought it in.
And she was sitting there waiting because we were having to put
a new turbocharger on it.
Now this vehicle had 100 and I think it was close to 200,000 miles.
And that's pretty good longevity for turbochargers compared to the way
they used to fail back in the early days when they first came out with them.
I remember we, Chevrolet came out with a 3.8 liter V6 that they put in Buick Grand National.
Some of you guys may remember that car.
It was a two-door black Buick, basically a Buick, what was that, Century?
And but they called it a Grand National and it was really fast.
It had 3.8 liter V6 with a single turbocharger that was very prone to failure.
Well, they decided to stick a detuned version of that into Chevy Monte Carlo.
We sold a couple of them and then we decided not to order any more of those because
both of them were in the shop more than they were in the owner's driveway.
But that's not the way it is today.
These turbochargers that Ford has come out with in their EcoBoost engines,
that's what, that's what it stands.
Well, when you say EcoBoost, when you say the word boost,
that means turbocharging because this lady wanted to know, Lenny,
what does a turbocharger do?
And I said, well, my best example of that is that you know when you're
trying to get a fire started and you blow on it, what happens?
Well, the flame goes up.
That's right, that's what turbochargers do.
They increase the amount of air going into the engine and
most turbochargers today have something else that makes it even better.
They have something called an intercooler and
what that does is that cools the air because really what spins the turbocharger
is exhaust.
The exhaust that's coming out of the engine is coming out with pretty good force,
like blowing really hard and it spins these little veins inside this turbocharger,
like a little wheel.
And on the other side of that wheel is another wheel that is bringing in
air to blow into the engine.
Well, the intercooler cools that air and what happens when you blow cooler air
inside of a combustion chamber and engine gives it even more power.
I don't know why cold air is better than hot air, but
it is as far as engines are concerned.
Is that making things too simplistic?
There's a lot of things that make an engine efficient to make it run right.
I have a mechanic working on a 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air that I bought.
Ever since I've had it, it hasn't run.
Well, I mean, it would run.
It just wouldn't, when you would put your fill in the gas,
it would just choke down and die, which is not what I really wanted.
I wanted to be driving the thing.
So the mechanic suggested that we rebuild the carburetor.
So we did.
We put the carburetor back on it, same problem.
Now, the carburetor had a lot of issues.
A lot of the parts apparently that were put in to the carburetor were put in backwards.
So whoever rebuilt it the first time didn't do a very good job.
But because the carburetor was struggling so much, apparently the mechanics had
adjusted the valves to the point where they could at least get it to go down the road.
Well, now that the carburetor is set up properly, now the valves need to be
re-adjusted because it just will not create any vacuum.
And when you don't have vacuum in an engine, it doesn't run.
And so that's what we're working on right now.
But see, those engines are very simple.
You know, a really good mechanic, old school mechanic and figure something
out in an old car like that just so easily.
There's no computers to hook up to it.
You know, you don't have to have a master's degree in electrical engineering
to be able to work on a 1957 Chevy.
You just have to know basic mechanics.
As a matter of fact, the guy that's working on it that discovered this problem
probably 10 years ago, he was a lawnmower mechanic
and he's got the skills.
He knows exactly what needs to be done.
I said, how did you learn all this stuff?
He said, just doing it.
His dad just said, go fix that lawnmower.
He said, I think I was around eight years old.
And I didn't know anything about engines.
He coached me along and I finally got the lawnmower running.
And that's when I that's how I got started working on lawnmowers.
This is him talking.
And then he started working at a shop that that worked on small engines,
weed eaters, all that kind of stuff, chain saws.
And he decided that there wasn't any money in that and try to get a job
at a new car dealership and couldn't get a job anywhere at any new car dealership.
Why? Because he didn't have enough experience.
You're a lawnmower mechanic.
Well, we gave him a chance.
We put him to work in our quick lane, which is that we're I mean,
all you have to do is change oil.
He certainly knew how to do that.
He knew how to replace the filter.
He knew how to look at a belt and tell if it's worn out.
He could look at brakes as well.
He'd done a lot of brake jobs on his dad's vehicles and neighbor's vehicles
and had a little garage behind his house, and that's how he learned it.
I don't even think he graduated from high school.
But see, those days are over when it comes to working on modern vehicles.
I mean, he can still function.
He works on a lot of my older vehicles, but we've had to send him to school
and upgrade his skills.
And, you know, the problem with this gentleman is he has great skill and great
knowledge, but he's not a good test taker.
And when you go to these schools, you have to take a test at the end
and he struggles with that.
But of course, I wouldn't let somebody go because of that
because he's too valuable.
He can fix a lot of other things.
He's a master on our alignment machine.
I mean, he's just really good.
So one of the things that I've always worked really hard my entire career.
And of course, I picked this up for my dad is to just look for character first.
And then, you know, if somebody has the right character,
then they can learn to do just about anything.
If they have a good work ethic, they show up on time.
They keep their areas relatively clean.
He's not an expert at that, but, you know, you can't have everything.
But he's always looking for something to do.
When when he's not on a job, he doesn't have three or four cars
on a lift at the same time.
He's bored and he's looking for something else.
You know, why he's waiting on parts for that particular vehicle.
These are these are the kind of people that we need in this society
because everybody can't be an engineer designing things,
people selling things, working in administrative jobs, working on computers.
Somebody is going to have to know how to weld.
Somebody is going to have to know how to actually turn wrenches,
pull transmissions, pull engines, do break jobs, test drive vehicles,
understand what might be the issue and put them up on a lift.
You know, all of those mechanical things, a computer can't do that.
I use AI all the time for different things.
Just it's basically my search engine now.
I mean, I rarely Google something.
I use chat GPT, but I get criticized for it all the time.
It's amazing how, how people that don't use it push back on using it at all.
I mean, I've introduced it to a couple of my mechanics.
Okay.
So I've got this, this guy that works on our tractors and lawnmowers
up at green outdoor.
And I was describing to him what chat GPT and perplexity and those
types of AI bots, what they do.
And he said, you know, I'd like to try that.
And I showed him and the chat GPT, I told him to download the app and
they get a chance to try it for free.
And so he did.
I saw him a week later.
He said, Lenny, I can't thank you enough.
You can't believe how many problems this has solved for me.
You know, I can even take a picture of a part and it will tell me
where to find it.
Um, you know, he needed some information on a particular repair issue
that he was having with a TYM tractor.
He didn't know exactly what the process was to disassemble and
reassemble this particular thing.
He asked the question to chat GPT and in seconds, step by step
instructions on what to do.
Now, chat GPT can't do the work, but it can certainly shorten the timeframe.
You know, rather than looking all over the world, trying to find
something on Google, trying to find an article that will address the
situation that you're trying to fix.
So whether it's a turbocharger and trying to understand what that is or
instructions on how to fix a TYM tractor, you can find it there.
Is it always going to be right now?
Probably not, but it will point you in the right direction.
And most of the time, I say probably not.
I would say more likely probably because there's a lot of data that it's
able to put together in an instant in a heartbeat.
We are headed for uncharted waters when it comes to this and how it
affects our car life and our regular everyday life.
I'm very interested in taking advantage of the technology.
If it can make my dealership better, if I, if it can help us
make better decisions, financial decisions, if it can help me analyze,
you know, my financial statements and help me figure out ways to better
invest my money, then I think that's a, that's a win for now.
Who knows what'll happen in the future.
I'm not worried about World War three.
I'm just worried about today here now.
I'll be back in just a minute.
So I was at the house.
I was by myself with one of my grandchildren, one of my grandsons.
And I said, you want to watch a movie?
He said, sure.
And I said, well, let's go over and pick one out.
We may pick one out.
Uh, well, I've got all these DVDs over here.
What's a DVD?
Now he's five years up now, six.
And he doesn't know what a DVD is.
I pulled, I showed him all the ones that I have.
And, and you know, I said, you want to watch a despicable me?
He said, yeah, how's that work?
And I opened up the case and showed him the, the disc.
And he said, I've never seen one of those before folks.
Is it moving that fast?
It sure is.
You know, but basically when he wants to see a movie, he grabs my iPad
and just uses his finger to, you know, go to, I don't know, we
don't let him go to Netflix or something like that.
But you know, he, he is able to access things so much more quickly.
He doesn't have to open a DVD player, you know, hit the open button, pull
the DVD out of the case, stick it down in there and then close it and,
and hit the play button.
He doesn't have to do that.
He just touches something, moves his finger around or even talks
into the remote control now.
I mean, my granddaughter, she's, what is she, eight.
She's talking to the remote control.
You know, this technology thing is, is don't let it get ahead of you.
If you want to, if you want to live a simpler life, I understand that.
I wish in many ways that I could go back in time, but you know, it was
okay back then.
Everybody thinks about, well, he's so great in the seventies.
Really?
Was it?
I don't know.
That's when I got caught throwing eggs.
Well, thanks for listening to this edition of my car guru.
If you need me, you know how to get me four, two, three, five,
two, 20, 20.
That's my cell phone number.
The only one I have, or you can send me an email to Lenny Lawson 2020
at gmail.com and I'll see you on the next edition of my car guru.
About this episode
Exploring the intersection of technology and automotive life, this episode dives into the implications of subscription services for car features, such as heated seats and automated driving. The host shares personal anecdotes about modern vehicle technology, including AI's role in enhancing driving experiences and the challenges of trusting automated systems. The discussion also touches on the evolution of car maintenance, contrasting old-school mechanics with today's tech-savvy approaches, and the rapid pace of technological change that even the youngest generation is adapting to.
