Hagerty is a company that focuses on car insurance for enthusiasts and classic cars. They also make car-related content for people who really follow cars.
The hosts frame the episode around a debate or disagreement related to the Tesla Model S. In podcast terms, this signals that they’ll likely weigh pros/cons, challenge assumptions, or discuss why the car matters beyond just specs.
The Tesla Model S is an all-electric car made by Tesla. It’s important because it helped show that electric cars could be exciting and useful, not just “green” transportation.
They mean the Model S represents a different way of thinking about making cars. Instead of designing around a traditional engine, EVs push companies to focus on things like batteries, software, and how the car learns and improves.
Concept
motor-train car of the year
They’re referencing an award that’s about the car’s drivetrain—basically how the car makes and sends power to the wheels. For an electric car, that’s the electric motors and how they’re set up to move the car efficiently and smoothly.
“Hyperbolic” just means exaggerated. In car talk, it means someone might be praising or criticizing a car in a way that’s more extreme than the facts support.
Term
accusations of filleting Tesla
“Accusations of filleting Tesla” appears to be a metaphorical or humorous phrasing for criticism that someone is “cutting up” or unfairly presenting Tesla content. It’s not a standard automotive term, but it signals controversy around how Tesla is being discussed or defended.
A “signature edition” is a special, limited version of a car. It usually has unique styling or color and is made in small numbers, so it can be more interesting to collectors. Here, Tesla is using it to mark the end of that Model S run.
The Cybertruck is Tesla’s electric pickup. The host mentions it because it’s been a controversial or frustrating topic for them personally. It helps explain the emotional backdrop to the Model S discussion.
“End of the run” means Tesla is finishing production of that version for good. When that happens, companies sometimes release a small special edition to mark the final cars. The limited number (250) is part of why it’s treated like a collectible.
A “one year only color” means the paint color was only offered for a single year. Because it’s rare, people may care more about it when buying or collecting.
The Lexus LS 400 is a luxury car from Lexus that became famous for being well-built and comfortable. Here it’s just mentioned because it was sitting in the studio behind them.
An appearance package is mostly about changing how the car looks. It might add different trim or wheels, but it usually doesn’t make the engine or drivetrain meaningfully stronger.
“Plaid” is Tesla’s name for its top, performance-focused Model S version. Here they’re pointing out the logo and interior details that make that version stand out.
The hosts describe the interior materials—specifically white leather—along with contrasting black and gold details. Interior material choices matter for perceived quality, comfort, and long-term upkeep (cleaning, staining, and wear patterns).
A “new front end” means Tesla redesigned the car’s front styling. It can change the headlights and the shape of the nose, and it often makes the whole car look newer and more distinctive.
Concept
final updates
“Final updates” usually means the last big improvements before the next major change. That can be good because the car may feel more polished, but it also might be near the point where a newer version is coming.
The host mentions Mercedes to make a comparison: even non-Tesla brands end up offering similar tech ideas. It’s an example of how Tesla’s influence spread.
Software updates mean the car can get new features or fixes after you buy it. Instead of only changing parts, the car’s computer can be updated wirelessly.
Touch screens are the big displays you tap to control things like navigation, media, and settings. The idea is that the Model S helped make this style of interior normal.
“Full self-driving” is Tesla’s name for advanced driving help that can take over more tasks than normal cruise control. It’s not the same as a car that’s guaranteed to drive itself everywhere, but it pushed the idea of automation forward.
Jalopnik is an automotive media outlet, and the hosts cite an editor-in-chief there as an example of early skepticism about Tesla’s ability to build the sedan. This provides context for how widespread the doubts were across car journalism.
“Vaporware” means a product that sounds real in announcements, but people think it won’t ever actually show up. Here, it’s what critics thought about Tesla’s sedan plans.
A “loan” in automotive journalism usually means the manufacturer provides a vehicle to a journalist for evaluation, often before or around launch. The hosts mention it as an early access moment that helped them test the Model S firsthand.
The Nissan Leaf is an electric car. The host is describing a time when it didn’t have enough range to get where they needed to go, which is why EVs felt risky back then.
Rated range is the number of miles the car is advertised to get on a full charge. Real driving can use more energy than the test, so the actual miles you get may be less.
Range anxiety is when you worry your electric car won’t have enough battery to finish the trip. It gets worse if you’re using lots of power (like heat or lights) or if the car’s real range is less than you expected.
Door handles on the Model S are part of the car’s access system, which can be controlled by software and sensors. If they fail to deploy or respond, the car may not unlock properly, turning a convenience feature into a real usability issue.
A “sports sedan” is a performance-focused car category known for sharper handling and more engaging driving dynamics than a typical commuter sedan. The host is using it as a comparison to describe how the Model S drives, not just how fast it is.
The Porsche Taycan is Porsche’s electric car. The hosts are saying Tesla’s Model S helped pave the way for Porsche to build something similar in the EV world.
An electric sports car is an EV built for performance and fun driving, not just commuting. The hosts are saying Tesla helped prove EVs could be “sports-car” exciting.
“0 to 60” is a common performance metric measuring how quickly a car accelerates from a standstill to 60 mph. The hosts correct a script error about the Model S’s 0–60 time, highlighting how important accurate performance claims are in car journalism.
Superchargers are Tesla’s fast charging stations. The point here is that, back in 2012, there weren’t many of them, so charging on the road wasn’t as easy.
Charging stations are places where you plug in an electric car to add energy. The hosts are saying that in the early days there weren’t enough of them, so you couldn’t always count on being able to charge when you needed to.
In an electric car, “stranded” means you can’t keep going because you can’t get enough charge in time. If there aren’t many charging options nearby, a problem can leave you stuck.
“Phased out” means the product is being stopped and eventually won’t be sold anymore. The hosts are implying the Model S is being discontinued without an obvious immediate replacement.
The host is talking about Tesla possibly using a factory to build humanoid robots instead of cars. That would be a big change in what the company is focused on.
They’re wondering if Tesla is moving away from making cars and toward something else. If that happens, it could change what future vehicles look like and how the company supports them.
Concept
engineering that goes in the car
They mean the real technical work behind the car—how all the parts are designed to work together. With electric cars, that engineering is a big deal because it changes how fast, efficient, and smooth the car is.
Term
chief of basically engineering
The speaker is describing a senior engineering leadership role at Tesla, responsible for coordinating engineering priorities and execution across the vehicle program. Understanding who holds that kind of role helps explain how design and engineering tradeoffs get made.
Term
designer
The speaker mentions getting time with “Franz,” described as the designer, highlighting the collaboration between design and engineering. In automotive development, design leadership shapes packaging, ergonomics, and visual identity, while engineering ensures those choices are feasible and durable.
Concept
day-to-day operations
This means the founder is involved in the company’s regular, everyday decisions. The host is saying that involvement can influence what gets built and how.
The Elantra Stratos is a special Hyundai race-style project, not a normal showroom car. It’s meant to demonstrate engineering and performance ideas that come from motorsports.
The Lancia Stratos is a sports car that’s famous for rally racing. It was designed to compete in competitions rather than just be a normal road car. People talk about it because it became an icon in motorsport.
The hosts are talking about Elon Musk’s social media presence and how it affects how people think about Tesla. The point is that online drama can overshadow what the company actually builds.
Re-engineering a vehicle for updated safety and crash regulations means modifying structures, restraint systems, crash structures, and sometimes software/calibration to meet legal requirements. If the changes are extensive, the cost can approach (or exceed) the cost of starting a new platform.
“Luxury car segment” refers to the market category of higher-priced vehicles, where buyers often expect premium features, refinement, and brand positioning. The hosts suggest that this segment may be “dying,” implying slower growth and less incentive to keep investing heavily in that specific product niche.
The Tesla Model 3 is Tesla’s high-volume electric sedan and is positioned as more affordable than the Model S/X. Here, the hosts compare Model 3 sales volumes to Model S/X to argue Tesla is better off investing where demand is strongest.
The Tesla Model Y is Tesla’s popular electric SUV. The hosts mention it to show that Tesla’s biggest-selling cars are the ones that make the most sense to keep developing.
R2 is Rivian’s smaller electric vehicle. The hosts are basically saying Rivian has multiple SUV/EV options that could compete if Tesla expanded into that segment.
Concept
EVs as the right solution for transportation, not for joy
They’re talking about two different ways people think about electric cars: as practical transportation, or as something that’s actually fun to drive. The Roadster is brought up as an example of the “fun” side.
The Tesla Roadster is Tesla’s more performance-and-fun-focused electric car. In this segment, they’re saying it’s interesting because it’s built to feel engaging to drive, not just to get you from A to B.
Analog steering means the steering feels connected to the road, not muted or overly “computer-y.” The hosts are saying the original Roadster’s steering feel helped make it fun to drive.
Lightweight cars tend to feel quicker and easier to move around. The hosts are saying the Roadster felt joyful partly because it wasn’t as heavy as many EVs.
The Lotus Elise is a small, lightweight sports car that’s built to feel fun and responsive to drive. Here, it’s mentioned to compare what people like about traditional sports cars versus what EVs might change.
A manual transmission is when you choose gears yourself, usually using a clutch pedal. They’re saying EVs could keep that more hands-on driving style, but they think future EVs may not.
Manual steering is the more traditional steering feel where the connection between your hands and the wheels is more direct. They’re saying the future car may use electronic steering instead of the traditional setup.
“By wire” means the car uses electronics to control things that used to be connected by cables or mechanical parts. They’re implying the future EV will be controlled more by computers than by direct mechanical feel.
Driverless autonomous taxis are self-driving cars that pick up passengers like Uber/Lyft, but without a human behind the wheel. The hosts think this is where the real money is because it can be used constantly as a service.
“Tail rear end treatments” means different rear-end design packages—rear bumper/valance styling, diffuser-like shapes, and other aerodynamic or visual elements. The hosts mention multiple rear treatments, suggesting Tesla was tuning both appearance and airflow.
“Flared” means the fenders/wheel areas stick out more than usual. In this case, they’re saying the outside body is flared to change the look and fitment, not the cabin.
A prototype is an early test car made before the final version exists. “Drivable” means it could actually move under its own power so people could try it out.
They’re describing a very hands-on test-mule build—taking an existing car and physically modifying its structure. The goal is to make sure the new design and drivetrain can fit and work before committing to a final build.
The Mercedes-Benz CLS is a luxury sedan with a sporty-looking shape. They’re saying the prototype started with a CLS and then got cut up and rebuilt to test the Tesla concept.
The Toyota RAV4 EV is a gas-free electric version of the RAV4 SUV. They’re mentioning it to show that some companies tried EVs in limited ways before fully committing.
“Bricked” means the car’s computer got stuck in a broken state. When that happens, the car may not unlock or start, even if the hardware is otherwise intact.
In an electric car, the battery is the big power pack that stores electricity. They were trying to reach it because the prototype wasn’t working well enough to use normally.
The Tesla Semi is an electric truck meant for hauling goods. It’s designed for long-distance driving. It’s talked about because it’s a big step toward electric power in commercial trucking.
The Mazda 6 is a regular, everyday type of car from Mazda. They’re using it as a style comparison—like saying the shape mixes Mazda 6 looks with Tesla Model S looks.
The Jaguar XF is a luxury midsize sedan from Jaguar, known for its distinctive profile and “silhouette” styling. The hosts mention it because they see similar design cues in the car they’re discussing, emphasizing how body shape can look like multiple brands at once.
A “pseudo grill” is a grille-like design that looks real but isn’t doing the same job as a normal gas-car grille. They’re saying it was more about looks, and later they decided it wasn’t needed.
A “nose cone” here refers to the front-end styling piece (and likely the associated aerodynamic/thermal design) that Tesla initially included. The hosts explain it was added because they thought it was needed for cooling, but later they found it wasn’t necessary—showing how packaging decisions can change after testing.
SpaceX is the space company Elon Musk runs. The hosts are saying Tesla wanted the car’s front to look like it belonged on a spaceship, not just like a normal car.
Hill hold is a feature that keeps the car from rolling backward when you’re stopped on a hill. When you’re ready to go, it releases the brakes so you can pull away smoothly.
Brake assist helps the car stop faster in a panic by adding extra braking power when it senses you’re braking hard. The point here is that the earlier car they drove didn’t have that extra help.
Term
Mercedes shifter
A shifter is what you use to choose the car’s gear or driving mode. Here, they’re saying the early car used a shifter that felt like it came from Mercedes, implying some shared or reused hardware.
“Off-the-shelf” parts are components that already exist and are used in other products or cars. The host is saying early Tesla builds may have used ready-made parts to get the car working faster.
The accelerator pedal assembly is the part that connects your foot to the car’s response when you press the pedal. It tells the car how much power you want.
Early production is the first period when a new car is being built in volume. During that time, teams often discover small problems and tweak how parts are assembled so the cars come out consistent.
Superglue is a quick glue that bonds parts together fast. They’re describing how, during early manufacturing, they used it to keep a small part from moving.
A micro switch is a small, sensitive electrical switch that changes state when actuated by a mechanism. In this case, it’s mounted inside the door handle and was held by a single screw, so it wasn’t secure enough—leading to the need for additional adhesive during assembly.
Crimping is a method of mechanically and electrically joining wires or terminals by deforming a connector around them. In this story, crimping is part of the repair/assembly process used to reattach the door-handle switch wiring after disassembly.
This means they weren’t just tweaking an existing car—they were trying to create a new vehicle and get it built with limited money. It’s describing the early, difficult startup phase.
Build quality is basically how “well made” the car feels. It’s about whether parts fit nicely and whether the interior and exterior look and feel finished.
Concept
number one selling car in the world
They’re saying the Tesla Model S became a top-selling car globally. The exact “#1” depends on how you measure sales and which year you’re talking about.
Car
Citroen DS
The Citroën DS is a famous mid-century French car known for its advanced engineering and comfort-focused design. The hosts use it as a historical parallel to the Tesla Model S, pointing to its aerodynamic thinking and pioneering suspension/braking tech.
Oleoneumatic suspension is a suspension system that uses fluid plus compressed gas to help the car ride smoothly. It’s a more complex setup than simple metal springs and shocks.
LIVE
Oh, Jason is at the lectern, ready to administer wisdom.
Hi, welcome to another episode of the Carmageddon show.
My name is driven by, oh, sorry, I spoke over you.
Driven by whom?
Hagerty.
Hagerty.
The shirt on, it says it right here.
I don't have the jasonsemi.com shirt on,
cause it's too golden here,
but you can go to jasonsemi.com
and get a free quote on car insurance.
Probably give a fuck.
I mean, right.
I'm primed for an argument.
I'm Derek Tam-Scott.
This episode is about controversy.
Controversy.
The Tesla Model S,
and it's non-trivial significance
as perhaps one of the most significant cars
of the preceding, what do I don't know,
you chose three quarters of a century?
Three quarters of a century.
Okay.
I'm gonna keep my mouth shut.
If you're skeptical about this statement,
then stay tuned or watch Jason's video
that's on the Hagerty channel.
Both, I suppose.
And we'll discuss the significance of the Model S,
not just as an electric car,
but also as a philosophical shift
in the way that cars are developed.
That sounds very brainy and heady.
Our specialty.
Yes.
Plus I probably say something like fart or something.
Yeah.
Cause levities.
Drop an F bomb or similar.
Do we have a counter on this?
How many F bombs I'm about to drop?
I'm going to attempt to clap.
I attempted.
Bravo friend, you attempted.
You think that was, by definition, a clap.
Congratulations.
Thank you.
Okay.
You've now watched the Tesla Model S revelations.
You are going to get some commentary,
I think from the public about being a Tesla fanboy.
Why do you think so?
Because you were very complimentary
towards the Tesla product
and people can't imagine that it could deserve it.
I mean, I said it was certainly not perfect then
and it's not perfect now.
And is that too far?
By repeating that it was the motor-train car of the year
that I thought it was going to change the world.
Genuine, I want your real take on this.
No, I'm sure.
I know you and I know that you carefully engineered
everything that you said to be fully defensible
and not hyperbolic.
Not in a situation like that.
Sometimes you are hyperbolic,
but a situation like this,
given how much flak you've gotten
from accusations of filleting Tesla,
you were the one who put that in there.
I think that-
Hold on, I put what in where?
The educational adult anatomy video.
That, yeah, you knew what you were doing
when you said all that.
We had a lot of internal discussions
about whether we should do this video.
So the backstory is Tesla reached out to me.
They have certainly heard my criticisms.
They have certainly heard my praise.
The Cybertruck thing still rings painful to me,
but said, hey, we have a signature edition Model S
that'll be celebrating the end of the run.
We're going to make 250 of them.
They wouldn't tell me what it was initially.
And this, would you be interested in covering it?
And they also had a signature edition
of one at the beginning and that was a color
that was exclusive to that edition, right?
That dark red?
If I understand correctly, yes.
One of my friends is kind of a Tesla Model S enthusiast.
You have Tesla friends?
He sold them.
When he was in college, he worked selling Teslas.
And so he knows like the Model S,
particularly of that era, I'm sure,
well, but he's the kind of person who'd be like,
oh yeah, that's a one year only color.
First year only, that color was available.
I think that's the deal with that dark red.
And that was the car in the studio,
which is right behind us right now.
Just don't look.
Just glances over and sees a brown Lexus LS 400.
The car that was in the studio was the actual car
that won the motor drunk car of the year thing.
So signature edition.
It was a signature edition, 2012 model year set on it,
even though there was some confusion about that initially.
They told me it was 2013.
But anyway, so Tesla called me and said,
hey, we have the signature edition
that we're doing to celebrate the end of the run.
Would you be interested in doing an Icons episode
or anything else on it?
And my knee-jerk reaction was no,
because I'm just not willing to be beat up again
over celebrating a car that people feel strongly about.
And then I asked and I was like,
is this like more performance or this or that thing?
And it turns out the car is mostly an appearance package.
So what we really didn't spend a lot of time
in the video on was the car itself.
And I'm sorry that we don't have it here in the studio.
It was a very short loan for the cars.
And they had to go back before we could.
And all three of them came from Tesla?
Yeah, all three.
Actually, there were five cars that came from Tesla.
Two of them didn't make an appearance
in the episode, I'll explain that later.
And so the car has like cool things,
cool features if you're a Tesla nerd,
like the plaid logo is gold.
It's got gold logos in the seats.
The interior was genuinely gorgeous of the car.
It had white leather,
but then it had black and gold little details in it.
Hopefully, I think I have pictures of it.
The car looks,
and then it's got the new 2026 front end on it.
I have to say, it's stunningly beautiful now.
I always thought the Model S was a good looking,
handsome sedan, the final updates on it.
As soon as I walked into the Tesla studio,
I was like, wow.
But anyway, they offer this,
it's mostly an appearance package.
And they was just a way to celebrate the end of the run.
And I thought, I initially thought no,
and then I really thought about it.
And I'm like, Model S is whether you're,
if you're a car enthusiast,
whether you like the idea of electric cars or not,
it changed the world.
And my thesis there is,
walk into a Mercedes dealership,
walk into a Porsche dealership,
walk into a Toyota dealership,
walk into any dealership in the country,
or anywhere in the world,
and you're gonna see things that didn't exist,
and it all traces,
all of them trace back to this car.
Not just the fact that they're electric,
but the fact that they're capable of software updates,
the fact that they have touch screens,
the fact that they have some sort of full self-driving,
like autonomous capability.
All of these things started with this car.
And then I thought about, like, wait a second,
everyone said this wasn't possible.
Like the Roadster happened and everyone said,
oh, it's a niche thing.
Tesla will be gone, it's flash in the pan.
And we included that one clip from another journalist
who was, I think at the time,
the editor-in-chief of Jalopnik,
saying there's just, yeah, no way.
There's just no way this company has the money
to develop the sedan.
We all thought it was vaporware.
I thought it was gonna be a piece of shit.
And then I drove it for the first time
and I was like, oh my God.
Roadster?
No, no, this is, I'm talking about Model S, yeah.
And so I referenced in the video that first loan.
So it wound up being the first Unchaperone loan from Tesla.
They probably gave it to me only because I had,
A, the car was probably ready,
but B, I had given the Roadster some really good,
I said some great things about Roadster.
Cause I genuinely liked it when I thought
I was gonna hate it.
They didn't know that at the time.
I mean, now I can say it.
But the car really did change my opinion of EVs
because prior to that, the only thing that happened once
was that I got stranded on the side of the road
and a Nissan Leaf on the way to a hookup.
At like 11 o'clock at night, didn't happen.
I didn't get laid.
I wound up getting the car home,
but it died three houses down
and I ran extension cords down the street.
This is the infancy of EVs.
And so my experience was a car that was rated at 73, 74 miles,
whatever it was, died after 40 something.
And it was halfway down the drive.
At the drive, I was like, oh my God,
I'm not gonna make it there
and I'm not gonna make it home.
What the fuck do I do?
And so I turned all the lights off,
turned the heat off and drove on the side of the highway
at 38 miles an hour on the shoulder with no lights on
and still ran out of range before I got home.
So they were like, ah, this thing goes 300 miles.
I thought, bullshit.
Like there's just no way this car is gonna exist.
It's not gonna work.
And then they give me the car and it worked.
And then you'll see the story.
They beamed an update to fix the door handles
because the thing wouldn't let me in the fucking car
and I was in the parking lot.
I never thought I was trying to steal it
because I was trying to get the door handles open
and people look like a spaceship.
And I really thought about all this.
And I went back to my original notes on that Model S
and I was like, this,
the first things I wrote were like,
this is never gonna work.
This is a fucking science experiment, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba.
And then by the end of basically the first drive on the car,
I was like, they're onto something here.
And this is pretty cool.
And then by the end of spending three days with it,
once I knew that I range anxiety wasn't a thing,
I was like, this is amazing.
Like it handles like a sports sedan it does it.
So I called Tesla back and I was like,
you know what, I will take it,
but I'm not gonna do an icons on it.
I just don't think, we didn't think me,
Anthony Esposito, my boss,
didn't think we needed to do a big production on Model S.
But actually it's really important for car guys to know.
Like this was the start of all of the things
that have caused Porsche to make a Taycan or a Macan EV.
And then go down the road of an electric sports car,
which they're sort of backtracking from.
But it really did,
whether it proves to be the long-term solution
or not the Tesla way or the non-Tesla way,
it really made everyone stop,
laugh, poke fun, and then emulate.
And I think it's a story that everyone kind of needed to know.
So absolutely I made it as bullet proof
and argument as possible.
There's one mistake in there.
I said two full seconds quicker to 60 when it's 1.8.
I noticed that.
Yeah, I'm sorry.
We just recorded, we had so many VO patches in this thing.
I fucked up so many things in the script, admittedly,
that we had a bunch of editing patches that I had to make
and that was one that I just didn't have time to fix.
But yeah, the car is,
it was a really great reminder of this,
what it was a flashback to 2012,
which feels like yesterday,
but no superchargers, no charging stations,
no public infrastructure, no nothing.
You are stranded if anything happens on this car.
And that's no longer the case.
So how does it,
so it's being phased out.
It's done, it's now production's over.
And there's no replacement in sight.
I mean, not that I know of, I don't.
Right, so what's the rationale for that?
It's just not a space they want to be in anymore or?
Elon went on record and saying
they were going to repurpose the factory
for humanoid robots, which I think they are.
I mean, I confirmed that and they said yes,
but I think if I read the...
So are they transitioning away from being a car company?
I've heard some discussion
about whether that's the case or not.
I don't know.
Look, at the end of the day, the Model S
was going into its 15th model year.
And at that point, let me say this also,
the reason that I've continually been accused
of being a Tesla fanboy is because I appreciate
the engineering that goes in the car.
But the background to that is Tesla gives me access
to the engineers.
And on this case, once I said yes,
I said, look, I need some time with Lars,
who's their chief of basically engineering.
I don't know what his actual title is.
And they said, well, we'll do one better.
Let's get Lars and Franz, who's the designer together.
And we'll spend 45 minutes together.
It wound up being three hours.
Like these guys are, I kind of wanted to say in the video,
like, forget about Elon.
I know everyone's got such strong feelings on Elon
one way or another.
And he, by everyone's admission,
is still very much involved in that company
on the day-to-day operations
and all the decisions on the cars and and and and and.
But go watch the Jay Leno videos
with Franz and Lars in them.
These are the coolest guys you'll meet.
They are total car nerds.
They're total data nerds.
They're total engineering nerds.
Franz has some very cool cars.
Right.
He has Elantra Stratos.
Right.
He's got great shit.
And more importantly, like I left there with like,
I feel bad.
I kind of feel bad for them
because they're in this world
where they're being judged by what Elon tweets,
not the products they've made.
And they don't seem to be that bothered.
Either they have a really good game face.
And I suspect that's actually the case
or they're just not bothered
with all the negativity around it.
But they're true car guys.
And I would love to take like the biggest
internet troll detractor
and just put him in the car with Lars for not like any car
and just hang out with the dude
because he's genuinely cool as fuck
and knows his shit unlike any other engineer.
So they put me in the room with them
and I got to ask every question.
And so they answered the reason,
basically the reason Model S is going
out of production is he did not say this.
I'm reading between the lines here
because they have to be very careful what they say.
The cost to re-engineer Model S
to continue to comply with all safety
and crash regulations would be greater than to start over.
And I think that's a dying segment.
Like the luxury car segment.
You can look at the volumes of Model 3
and Y versus S and X
and you see you're better off spending the money
on developing, continuing to develop.
I mean, if they made a large SUV
that was developed to highest standards,
I think that could be potentially interesting to the market.
That is a market that has potential for sure.
Gravity.
Well, I think gravity, well.
Well, they would go head to head with gravity
and review in R1S and, you know, if they made it.
R1S and R2 are the sort of,
although R2 goes together with Model Y.
Yeah, but if they made a product,
I mean, I don't think the SUV segment is dying
is what I'm trying to say.
If they chose to develop a clean sheet design
that was done to the same high standards
than SUV and was a premium SUV, people would buy it.
Yeah.
I think there's Model S.
You know, the roadster's apparently happening.
We keep hearing about that.
I don't know.
I don't know anything.
But I don't, roadster, I'm curious about,
I'm not particularly excited because most of the time
I think of EVs as the right solution for transportation,
not for joy.
And roadster seems to be something about joy.
What about the original Tesla Roadster?
Did you find that to be joyful or just interesting?
It was joyful by virtue of its lightweight
and analog steering and small compactness.
The powertrain was interesting and it was fast
and it was cool.
Novel. Novel.
But overall, I would choose and did choose
the Lotus Elise, right?
But so yeah, I tend to think of EVs as like transportation
device and like let's keep the manual transmission,
do you know?
Right, and all of those characteristics that you just
listed off that made the original roadster interesting
are things that are not going to be present
in the new roadster.
So far as I would, we guess, yeah.
I mean, it's not going to be lightweight,
certainly in the 2600 pound window
and it's not going to have manual steering.
No, it'll probably be by wire everything.
It's just a different, it's a different.
It's going to be a different form factor
of an experience that probably we already know.
A friend sent me a picture today of a cyber cab.
I saw one yesterday.
So they're apparently driving around.
I think that's Tesla's future.
I think driverless autonomous taxis is the way to go.
And if you look at their planned production volumes,
there, that's where their money is.
I don't know.
I mean, I don't, that's not an enthusiast future.
That's a transportation solution future.
So are they no longer a car company?
I don't know what that means.
Yeah. So Model S is not being replaced.
Model S is so far as I know, they're not being replaced.
But it was a great trip down memory lane.
So what they did was they gave me one of each front end.
So the car had four different front ends on it,
three different tail rear end treatments
and then two widths, small and wide.
Is it flared or is the whole car wider?
The whole car is wider.
So it's flared up front and the fenders are flared.
So not, I'm sorry, the cabin is not flared,
but everything else is flared.
So it's not like a ZR1.
Kind of is.
I mean, the cab is not flared on a ZR1,
just the fenders, front and rear.
So yeah.
And they flared in the same way as a ZR1 or a ZR6.
You get the original one in here.
Oh, and then while this is going on,
I was talking to Franz and Lars
and they're telling me all these stories.
Like they were driving around and ran into Accio Toyota.
And they wanted to have-
As one does.
As one does.
And they had dinner with him.
How hard did they hit him?
They just said, I'm a tip your comedian.
He'll be here.
Go away.
They wound up, long story short,
they wound up hanging out with him
and then he drove the Model S and loved it.
And I was like, what do you mean he drove it?
And they're like, oh, it was the prototype.
It was drivable.
And I'm like, it was totally drivable.
They're like, yeah, it was a CLS that we cut in half.
So it was a Mercedes CLS that they bought,
chopped in half, used the basic structure
to drape on their styling, put a,
I think it was a Roadster powertrain.
I said that in that video.
So I hope it's correct in that thing.
And Akio drove it, thought it was great.
I thought that was really interesting.
That would explain some of the RAV4 EV thing, I suspect.
It's interesting because they philosophically
as an organization have not embraced electrification.
But they did an electric RAV4 that was Tesla powered.
Yeah, but it's like one sidebar.
It's like the smart EV thing.
Like it was this sort of temporary.
Smart ED.
Is that what it was called?
It's an electric drive or a rectile dysfunction.
As if the smart didn't provide enough erection
to play the characteristics to begin with.
Wow.
That's a little harsh.
Well, did you find that to be the smart
to be an erection promoting vehicle?
I've never gotten a boner from a smart car.
I'll tell you, there you go.
Anyway, here's Jason's getting canceled again.
So we were talking about this and he was like,
what, you never drove the prototype?
And of course I've never driven the prototype.
So if he looks at the PR people and he's like,
can you send that up?
And I was like, what?
I'm like, France, we're filming in three days.
And this was like, I think of Thursday
and we're filming on Monday.
And I see the PR guys just look like they're gonna pass out.
And I think this is what happens
when you have a big executive of relatively small car company
say something, it will be done.
And I'm like, are you sure?
So you got the prototype, which we saw on screen.
And it was, they had no time to get it ready.
They're like, yep, you can drive it.
The whole thing, they couldn't get it.
They couldn't get into it.
I don't know if I should be telling the story,
but it was bricked.
And I could see that they had tried to get the hatch open
or they tried to get to the battery.
Because if you looked in,
you could see the door's locked
and it had the same stupid fucking door handles
that the production car had and it wouldn't open.
So they literally called me and were like,
so the car doesn't move, is that okay?
I said, yeah, back your truck up, right to the studio.
We have sort of a small ramp.
We'll push it up, no problem.
I figure worst case, we drag it with Vangina
right into the studio.
Oh, we're totally fine.
Fucking truck comes.
It's a 50-something long foot, enormous truck.
Semi. Semi in it.
And Derek knows this driveway.
It's tiny, like you're not fitting.
A 25-foot truck would be tough.
A 50-foot trailer. It is tough.
Yeah, there is no chance.
Right, the trailer alone is 50 feet.
The whole rig is 80 feet, including the...
It was longer than my property, basically at the house.
So it was really funny
because now they're asking me,
please keep everything under wraps.
The new car, the 2026, the signature edition was under embargo.
So that couldn't sit outside at all.
It had to be covered and whatever else.
And so the fucking truck comes over
and we park it in the middle of the street.
There's nowhere else to put it.
So we're blocking both lanes of traffic
and we roll it out, but that's it.
Like now what?
We can't put it on Gojax
because the street is to...
The aggregate's too coarse and there are cracks everywhere.
So there's no way we're gonna be able to make this work.
So we had to turn it like 90 degrees
to get it into the driveway.
And so I put Gojax, and this is so fucked up.
I put Gojax on the front, I'm sorry, on the front wheels
and I put a chalk under the right rear wheel
and I dragged it using one of the wheel spokes.
So they're gonna kill me if they see this.
Dragged it sideways and we got it turned
and somehow aimed almost at the door and just pushed it.
The whole thing took two hours.
I think it was a fucking nightmare.
And we got it in, put it in Gojax
and pushed it in the corner and now we're like,
oh, I guess we gotta film around this fucking thing
in the studio because we couldn't put it back outside again.
But it was so cool to see that
because it changed so much.
Like it's instantly, it's actually the car
that I used on the thumbnail, which may still be up.
I mean, we can modify thumbnails after the videos go live.
But it just, it looks like a Model S, but not really.
It's like a Mazda 6 meets a Model S and it's super curvy.
I always thought there was a lot of Jaguar XF also.
Yeah, yeah.
It's a form factor, silhouette.
Yeah, silhouette.
So we had that.
Then we had the Motortran car, the 2012 car
and then the 2026 signature car, the final, which is a plaid.
And then they gave me two other, they were white cars
that had the second front end.
So without the nose cone and then.
Without the pseudo grill.
Yeah, they actually called it the nose cone
because they wanted it to look like SpaceX apparently,
like space, be reminiscent of a spaceship.
I didn't know that.
I didn't see that.
I don't see that.
Maybe that's why it's called the nose cone.
But either way, they initially had the nose cone in there
because they thought they needed the cooling
and then it turned out they didn't.
They kept it there for sort of,
because I think the world wasn't ready
to see a grillless car.
Then they got rid of that.
Then they did a front end update when the plaid came out
and they just did another one for 2026.
So we did have all four cars.
We shot the two cars, the white cars in here very quickly
for the one sequence where we show the four front ends,
but it didn't quite work out the way we wanted.
So we used found footage of that.
But it was really cool to drive the original.
So they came with plates on them, like drive them,
do whatever you want.
It was really cool to drive the original one
because it didn't have hill hold
or any sort of like brake assist at all.
So you just put it in gear and it rolls.
It had a Mercedes shifter, Mercedes.
I remember this.
Window controls.
And like there was other stuff
that was all off the shelf from other manufacturers.
I think they told me the accelerator pedal assembly
was Ford, but they were scrapping these cars together basically.
And they were telling stories of like they ran out of.
So Lars, when I was having this conversation,
I so wish we would have had cameras there.
Lars and France were reminiscing
about the early, the beginning of production.
And one of them was like,
hey, remember when we ran out of superglue?
And I was like, God, please don't kill me for saying this.
I was like, what the fuck did you using superglue
on the line for?
And he was like, the door handles.
So apparently there was a micro switch in the door handle
that was held on by one screw,
but it wasn't really sufficient.
And so what they did was pull,
and this was Lars who's now chief of engineering and France,
were on the production line helping build these cars.
And they had to pull it apart, put superglue in,
crimp it together with, and then screw it down
to hold it together so it wouldn't move.
And then put it in the pile to go put,
or put it directly on a car.
And they're telling these stories.
I'm like, you guys were on the production line.
He was like, yeah, it was just a bunch of us.
Like we were just trying to shit these cars out.
Like there were all these cool stories that I don't like,
I don't want to put in the video
because it just means more Tesla fanboying,
but they really were scrappy building a car from scratch,
like barely getting out the door.
And I did make fun of the build quality a little bit
in the video, I showed that sort of piece
of the interior hatch, which was fucking horrendous.
Like how that made it out of the factory
was an indication that this car wasn't finished.
And to the point of everyone who thought there was vaporware,
they really barely had money to get the car out the door.
And they did it.
And now they have the number one selling car in the world.
I don't know if it'll be this year,
it wasn't last year, I think it was the year before or whatever.
This car company has really made an impact on everything.
And it really did date back to this car.
So I thought, let me just, I'll try it.
I'll just try it again and see if the world will accept this
as a-
Significant, historically significant.
It's interesting because I remember in the year 2000,
a bunch of magazines did evaluations
of the car of the century.
And I think it was,
it was one of the British classic magazines, I think,
or car magazine, they chose Ford Model T, the Mini,
probably the Beetle or something like that.
One of the cars on the list was the Citroen DS.
And the Model S reminds me of the DS in a lot of ways,
actually.
And so it was interesting that that car,
which is obscure in a lot of places,
was viewed to be significant enough to include.
And I think it has a lot in common with the Model S.
Obviously form factor, aerodynamic focus,
just like this wildly bleeding edge innovation
that sort of accurately in many ways predicted the future,
not 100% accurately, but sort of permanently altered
the trajectory of the car in a lot of ways,
whether that's the oleoneumatic suspension
or the sort of automated transmission
that is included as part of that hydraulic system.
First car with disc brakes,
first production car with four wheel disc brakes,
I guess, or no, sorry, front disc brakes.
They have drops into the back.
It was, oh, it did?
I think so.
I think.
No, I'm not sure.
Does it matter?
And it's sort of a long list
of technically innovative features
that were adopted by other manufacturers.
Ferrari starts putting disc brakes on cars in 1959,
and Ferrari, of course, is like a motorsports icon
that should be at the bleeding edge of performance.
Jaguar was doing it on race cars,
I think starting in 53 or 54.
And so this is like Le Mans winning cars
have disc brakes in a year or two before a sedan
with a 1.9 liter engine is incorporating them.
The suspension system was licensed to Rolls-Royce
because Rolls-Royce calculated that or concluded
that they couldn't do anything that was any better
than what Citroën had come up with over a decade prior,
because Rolls-Royce starts using it in 1966, I think, 66,
and Silver Shadow came out.
Just a sort of long list of everybody sort of being like,
hmm, we have to start incorporating a lot of the thoughts
that are being used by Citroën,
the turning headlights and just this, you know,
a unitary construction that's sort of modular
with easily removable body panels.
It just, it was a really impactful car.
And they did sell, you know, million,
I think seven or million five units of the DS.
So it was a high volume car,
even though it's extremely esoteric and obscure now.
And it wasn't cheap.
No, it was a mid-sized car, an executive type car.
It was probably cheaper than a Mercedes E-Class,
but, you know, more expensive than a Camry.
Interesting, the list of cars that you just gave
for the most impactful car of the century.
The 20th century.
When I asked, when I was writing this episode,
I was part of the DriveTribe Collective,
which is the Richard Hammond's thing that he set up
that is now folded, unfortunately.
But I asked everyone in that group on a group chat,
what does everyone think the most impactful car was?
And it was everything you mentioned plus 1974 Golf.
And then one or two people said Model S.
Golf, yeah, I think was probably the car on the list
of the five that I didn't include,
but I think it was on the list.
But that was, I mean, this sort of seems to be agreed.
And so-
It's interesting that, okay.
So sell me, this is turning into a Volkswagen sidebar.
Sell me on Golf versus Mini.
What does Golf do that Mini doesn't already do?
This is why I had no problem making one of the variants
of the thumbnail, say the most important car
of the last 75 years, because I thought I can go back to
as far as Model T, which was, I can't say a hundred years
because that I don't think the Tesla is more impactful
than the Model T was.
And the Beetle is-
Didn't the Model T come out in 1908?
Okay, fair enough.
But I was Beetle and T that I think those stand on their own
against Model S without question.
Golf and Mini.
I think Mini does.
I'm not sure that Golf does anything that Mini doesn't.
Probably not, probably not.
I mean, it was reliable.
That's one thing it did.
No, but Mini established the formula.
I just don't think it was as, maybe it isn't as impactful.
A powertrain layout.
So I think what Mini did-
Well, it's not just a powertrain layout,
it's a packaging solution that allows the dominant mode
of car to become front-wheel drive,
which is something we still live with today for-
For what?
For economic economy cars, I guess is the word I can't even say.
The idea is so-
So reprehensible.
What year did Mini come out?
1959.
Okay, so I can still say 75 years then.
Can I do that math?
Yeah, ish.
60 plus 60 is 120.
So yeah, it's almost there.
It's just about-
It's very close.
I mean, I think we can all agree
that those are the foundational most,
the sort of Mercedes-Benz patent wagon,
then you get the Model T, then you get the Beetle,
and then I guess Mini.
But the thing that Model-
Okay, saw me on Beetle actually while we're here.
What does Beetle do that like Austin 7 combined with
Ford Model T doesn't do?
What did Beetle do?
Yeah, like-
Well, I mean, what it did in retrospect
was put the entire world.
What the Model T did for the US,
the Beetle did for the world.
Okay.
Right, I don't think the T was ever designed to operate
around the world in the way.
I don't know much about those cars.
Yeah. I should.
No, I mean, you're right.
It mobilized America.
The rest of the world wasn't there yet, I think.
It didn't work for whatever reason,
that car just didn't work in the rest of the world.
It didn't build them in England
and sell them in limited numbers in England.
So my question is why didn't it?
Why did it take the spark of the Beetle at that point?
I don't know that cars were ready
to be mainstream enough in other markets.
Like I don't, I think that the countries
maybe weren't necessarily ready.
Like it was still a thing that was intended for the elite
as opposed to like the world wasn't ready for people's cars.
That happened, I think in continental Europe
in the probably early post-war or late pre-war era.
And the Beetle was primed to do that.
The Beetle was the car that was ready
because it had come out in 1940 or whatever it was, 39.
Yeah, I mean, I guess there are things,
there's other than being air cooled and rear engine.
What did it do that the T didn't?
Nothing.
Like you said, it was globally impactful
and it was widely exported.
Obviously every country, I've talked about this before
but every country had a car that was the equivalent
to the Beetle in the US.
I guess it was the Ford Model T in obviously for Germany,
it was the Beetle in Italy, you get the Cinquecento,
the Topolino, the original.
And then you have this the Ducevaux, the Citroën,
England, I guess the Austin seven
and Morris Minor after the war,
but Austin seven is pre-war.
So that predates the Beetle in some sense,
but the people's car.
But the Beetle was the only one
that sort of hit every country.
Yeah, it was a global success for sure.
So, okay, that's the significance of the Beetle
because I think the Beetle was the best selling car
since the Ford Model T.
Only beaten by Corolla and now I think Gulf.
Yeah, which took a long time.
A long time.
I mean, it's only the Beetle to be creative.
It was what, 1939 through 1990.
2002 or three or something like that.
It's incredible.
Yeah, it's tough.
It's tough to say this is an impactful car
because we don't know how history shakes out.
Yeah, it's a little early to call.
And this is interesting
because this is a question that I posed to you before
when you told me that you had done an episode about Model S.
I said, is this going to be like it permanently all,
the question is how temporary or permanent
is the de-electrification thing that's happening right now?
Is, was electrification a cul-de-sac
or are we heading down a temporary sort of like diversion
away from the inevitable, yeah, thank you.
Detour away from the inevitable electrification
that is the future of automobiles.
And depending on which of those paths
or which of those scenarios ends up being reality,
it shapes the legacy of the Model S.
Well, here's why I'm willing to still put the stamp
on that most significant car
is because it actually isn't really just about electrification.
So that was the Tesla made electrification,
an electric car really work, right?
And that was clever thinking.
And that alone-
They did the same thing they had done with the Roadster,
which was desirability, right?
They made, as you would call it,
it's not a penalty box the way that every EV,
because every other EV prior had been like,
oh, a glorified golf cart, basically.
Yeah, Mitsubishi IMEV, which hadn't happened yet,
but which was a nightmare, but no,
but it actually goes so much further than propulsion.
It goes to the idea of continual evolution.
So what I didn't realize-
Can you imagine restoring a Model S in 30 years?
Well-
You're like, what serial number is it?
And it's like, oh, well you, yeah,
well you gotta find the, and that's not-
It's not gonna happen.
Granted, they had literally two days
or a day and a half to get this,
the prototype running to get it here
before it had to get on a truck.
So no, I'm not throwing any shade at them at all,
but they couldn't get the car to turn, unlock.
So to your point,
and it's gonna be a nightmare
when these cars are a hundred million years old.
Because you have rolling production changes.
And now you're like,
well, if it's before March of 73, then you need this.
And if it's after, then you need that.
And the parts aren't compatible.
So to me, the most interesting thing about this car
that no car has ever done,
not even Beetle,
was that there were no model years, right?
There was just a continual evolution of stuff.
And I went back into my notes
and I had a meeting in 2019, it turns out, with Lars,
and I didn't know who he was at the time,
but I have an audio recording of that meeting
about this whole idea of battery bucks.
And I wanted to write in a column for Rundtrak.
I think Rundtrak-
A buck is in a dollar.
Dollar.
Not a model for forming-
Correct.
Or a male, whatever the fuck animal that would be.
Dear, elk.
Elk, dear.
But the idea that basically,
the currency that they traded in
on the engineering side was battery bucks,
which is how many dollars in batteries
would I need to add to make up for this feature
that I'd like to have, right?
And so in that discussion in 2019,
he was like, look, Lars started at Honda
and it worked in the chassis development group.
And he never interacted with powertrain at all
because all car companies are siloed.
And so if you're in chassis, you package protect
and you say, I need this room
and the strength for the suspension.
And so, hey guys, go make that.
Make the body and give me this room
to do whatever I want in.
And everyone else keeps their fingers out of it.
And so he was saying, like if he had ever suggested
a low rolling resistance wheel bearing
or something that cost, quote, significantly more
than any the other.
And the example that he gave was like,
if it's $20 per wheel bearing
and it costs 50 cents more, that's significant.
And he would have been fired for suggesting such a thing.
My words not his, I'm just being hyperbolic.
But it just wasn't done.
But when you're looking at getting the,
extracting the absolute most out of a car,
which you need to do efficiency wise in an EV,
they really looked at things in terms of battery bucks.
And so he gave me this example of like,
what the rolling resistance of the car would have been
with conventional wheel bearings.
And then with these new ones
that cost them a couple of actual dollars per car.
And the cost of adding battery was a couple hundred bucks.
I mean, I made up the $500 figure for the,
for the episode that was probably a little bit high,
but somewhere of three, four, $500 batteries.
So your ROI is 10 X effectively.
And the customer gain.
So who cares if it costs two bucks extra?
100 X.
100 X, 50 cents to $500.
The more importantly is you can start to take advantage
of all these little efficiency gains.
And so that's a thousand X.
Whatever, I can't fucking do that.
It doesn't matter a lot.
But the point being that they weren't locked
into these contracts with suppliers
and saying this meets our specification
that's good enough in perpetuity.
It was, hey, we want more efficient this,
can we make this work?
And if you look at, I made the chart of Tesla's MPGE.
So this is the EPA independent rating of these cars.
They just got better and better and better and better
and better over time.
And it was just, it was the cumulative effect
of all of these continual changes
that did not necessarily take place
with model years
and were not necessarily even hardware.
There were software changes and there were,
there was hardware changes.
They went from like inductive heating
to heat pump, for example.
And then they created that octave valve,
which a friend of ours actually worked on, right?
It was the idea that you can take heat
from any one place within the system
and put it somewhere else.
So you need heat to warm the battery,
but you're creating heat from the air conditioning
in the car.
So take that waste heat from the AC
and put it into the battery
and use it to precondition the battery for charging.
Oh, or take extra heat out of the battery
and put it in the cabin or to the motors or whatever.
It was just, it's just all of this creative thinking
that allowed them to just do what was effectively not possible.
That is the kind of shit, that kind of thinking
that is bleeding over to the other car companies.
Is it?
Slowly, but also touch screens didn't exist.
iPad didn't exist when they started working on this car.
Barely, iPad beat the Model S to market
by six months or nine months or something like that.
But they were telling that story of head to head engineer
that sort of create the whole thing internally.
Like how do you make a capacitive touch screen
that responds quickly?
But every car has a touch screen.
Every car now is in an internet connection, right?
They did stupid little shit like Century Mode
or the dash cams.
Like you have the cameras for the ADAS stuff, use it.
Genius.
The example that I gave is a little bit
of low hanging fruit of the doors, right?
So you open the door, the Model S is frameless doors.
Slam the door and it absolutely sounded like shit
on the early cars.
And a lot of the noise was the sort of rattling
of the door within the frame.
So they did, I'm sorry, the glass within the frame.
So they did what other car companies have done before
and it's not novel to Tesla,
but they just have the computer put the window up slightly
when you open it and once it's slammed shut,
it goes back to where you had previously said it,
which is in this case all the way down.
It's clever redeployment of technology,
of hardware that's already there using software
and they were just constantly adding to that stuff
and that will feed into other car companies
without question.
All of that, the sort of smart engineering.
But they put, I mean, we don't realize,
I didn't realize that Model S is so different, right?
So the final number, I asked them to please calculate that
for me and it took them a week, but they got the number
and the total parts carry over between the 2012 car
and the 2026 car was 3%.
Like then I had them go around the car with me
and like show me a part that is the same.
Windscreen?
No.
Side windows?
It was fucking wild.
To why I'm like this, no, this, no, the hood,
the hood is one millimeter had different gap on one side
than the other because panel fitment.
And then there was like all of these tiny little changes.
It was the door striker.
I think we cut that from the episode.
Yeah, that's not in the episode.
The door latch itself is different,
but the striker is the same part.
The front door exterior skin is the same,
but that's the only exterior part that's visible.
That's the same between the cars.
And you start looking, the mirrors are slightly different,
the roof no longer has a sunroof.
It's now fixed, it's class.
None, everything you see has been tweaked,
just these little tiny changes to make the car continually better.
And the joke is that they re-did the front end again
for its last year, like they couldn't stop.
They couldn't stop tinkering.
And that is fucking wild to me.
Yeah, that's why it's going to be a pain to restore one
because you're like, they'll be unrestorable, right?
Maybe that's why they did the signature edition.
So people will lock them away.
And you know, those will be the collector versions one day.
Who knows?
But it was interesting to go drive the original one
because I thought that was so fast back in the day
and it's still quick, it's five seconds to 60,
but not crazy.
Yeah, what were your experiential notes
from driving the original?
The steering was incredibly slow compared to the modern stuff,
but it was actually quite good.
It rode well, but it was really loud inside.
There was a lot of wind noise.
The new car is much, much, much quieter.
I preferred the controls of the old car.
I preferred the physical steering wheel stock
to the stupid steering, the yoke and just go fuck itself.
But you can get the car without a yoke
and you can get it with a regular turn signal stock.
The vertical screen, I actually,
I kind of liked better than the current screen.
The interior had warm things about it,
so it had no, it was weird, no center console.
So it was just all open
and then they added the console back in.
I kind of liked it all open, the feeling of it,
but there was wood in that car
and it just felt a little bit more oldy,
timey, oldy, worldy,
but like it didn't smell particularly good.
The new car smells, and I don't mean like age smell,
but just like leather smell.
They don't, the cars don't feel that much alike at all.
But the crazy thing is I got in the 2016 car,
one of them was like a,
so the two white cars that we had
didn't make it on camera,
I was willing to drive a lot more
because I didn't want anything to happen to the red ones
that I knew were going to be on camera.
And so we had to run errands,
we had to bring the van to go get fixed
and all kinds of other shit.
And so I got in a 20, god damn it, what 20?
19, I think it was?
I'll have it in my nose.
An old car.
No, it was older than that, like 20, whatever it was.
The car's nearly 10 years old.
And I thought, let me see if it can drive itself.
And it drove itself the whole fucking way
from here to the repair shop
when I didn't touch anything and didn't do anything.
The only difference is
it doesn't have the interior cameras.
So it can't, you have to touch the steering wheel.
Like it can't look at you.
The new cars look at you
and know whether you're paying attention or not.
And we'll disable, it's called supervised FSD now.
You're not allowed to say the auto thing word.
But like, think about that.
Like my e-golf is a 2019, it left the factory
and it's static from here on out.
The fucking modem is no good
because they retired 3G and Volkswagen,
which I still think we should sue them over.
I seriously still think
there should be a class action lawsuit on this.
The car cannot communicate with the outside world.
It cannot be updated.
There's nothing that can happen
unless I take it to a dealer
and they charge me to do whatever they can possibly do.
And then what they can do is super limited
and they wouldn't do anything
unless they were recalled and forced to do it anyway.
But here is this car that has evolved
and has gotten additional features.
It has sentry mode, it has dash cam.
It has, who knows what the fuck,
blind spot monitoring, which it didn't initially have,
but it does now, all these new features
and it can fucking drive itself.
Like it actually drove itself.
We did the whole episode on that, so I won't go into it.
But it pulled into the fucking parking lot by itself.
And I'm thinking, what 10 year old car in the industry
gains features?
None.
Right, that's when you start to think
this company is just different.
Different than VW, who says we're sun setting this feature.
Peace out, girl scout.
Right, on a car that's still under warranty.
When Tesla's like, no, we're still doing updates.
We're still doing it, we're still doing it.
The software defined vehicle.
And that's the idea of a software defined vehicle was Tesla's.
Well, yeah, I mean, it's a,
this is a manifestation of the difference in philosophy.
You know, oftentimes we call Tesla a tech company
or that it's representative of thinking in Silicon Valley.
But this example or these anecdotes about the model
illustrate how differently tech companies approach things
than legacy manufacturers and points to the concerns that
we have previously voiced about the American car industry
and legacy car manufacturers generally getting left behind
as the new way of doing things becomes more dominant.
Whether that's from companies like American companies
like Tesla and Lucid and Rivian or whether that comes
from overseas in the form of the Chinese companies
whose cars we are not allowed to sample
or have not had the opportunity to sample.
So it's an interesting example of the difference
in fundamental philosophy of how they engineer their products
and expect consumers to interact with them.
And how the, how the companies are set up, right?
At the end of the day, if you have silos, it's not going to work.
The original intro that I wrote that I had to cut
for A for length and B for preach, for preachiness avoidance is
you, right now we have an onslaught of cars in the rest of the world
that do things that we can't imagine at prices
or the do things that our cars don't at prices we can't imagine.
Yeah.
And we are stopping them from coming in, right?
So our government has said we're not going to allow
Chinese imports of cars effectively.
We, in the last couple of months, the Trump administration got rid
of CAFE, which is corporate average fuel economy requirements,
and really are trying to roll back a lot of the environmental
protections that were, that were done in our previous regimes.
We're not going to discuss whether that's the right thing or not.
However, what that's done is encouraged all of the car companies to,
not all of them encouraged.
Loosen their belts.
To loosen their belts a little bit.
Some went so far, including Honda and even Volkswagen,
to just write down, meaning cancel their EV development programs
and just write that off as a loss and say,
we're not going to spend.
Presumably for VW, that's a global decision.
Well, for the US, they killed, they killed,
they just killed off ID for, for example,
but like Honda abandoned their entire program,
their entire EV program.
And my, the line that I think I left in the episode is
they've all sealed their fate, right?
At the end of the day, the US government,
the US market is a, is a huge car market,
but we are not the only car market.
And we're not the entire globe.
And we're rolling back emissions.
The rest of the world has basically decreed,
we're going electric.
And it also remains to be seen,
of course, what will happen in the United States
in five years time.
We don't know, right?
Right now, if there's one thing we're certain to,
certain of its uncertainty, right?
Inconsistency, things are changing.
And car development schedules are far in excess of five years.
And so-
So I, but I really think that the premise of this whole thing
was that Tesla saved the American car industry,
because a lot of people, a lot of very pro-American people
hate Tesla, right?
And they forget that it's an American car company
that it primed the US car industry to really take over.
A renaissance, yeah.
To be once again at the leading edge
of the automotive industry, a position
which the American car industry had not occupied in 50, 60, 70 years.
I'll go even further.
Forget about the bleeding edge, just relevant, right?
So the original photo shoot that I put together,
which I'm still really proud of,
because I thought it was super clever,
was that I got that Model S, that silver Model S,
together with a bunch of pastel-colored 50s and 60s cars
that our friends owned in Palm Springs,
which is where those cars live.
And the title of the article was,
the last time an American car mattered on the world stage,
it had fins, right?
That was the point.
This was the first time that it wasn't just,
that it wasn't, you know,
didn't need to be the best-selling car in the world,
that people needed to pay attention to the American car industry.
And so it brought the focus back to the US car industry
and were dominant in one sense.
The best-selling car in the world comes from America,
from an American brand, right?
But the American, the traditionals,
should have taken lesson from this.
I mean, remember that Tesla doesn't patent anything.
They share all of their intellectual property
with every other car company,
going to, so far as writing a book
on how to make a 48-volt electrical architecture in a car
and giving the part numbers for the stuff
that they co-developed with suppliers
to the fucking CEOs of the American car companies
and say, we did your homework for you.
Like, the suppliers are all upset
that our volumes are too low to justify the expense.
Here, go and order their 48-volt steering systems.
Go and do all this other stuff.
I made a little bit of a joke in the Cybertruck video
where I handed over a binder, you know, whatever.
But that's an actual thing. That happened.
And instead of fucking paying attention to Tesla
and saying, oh, wow, let's write on their coattails
and sort of change and adapt what we do,
it's let's double down on the F-150s
that are short-term profit center.
Fine, totally don't blame you there.
But let's ignore all of that and make our GM.
EVs not even have car play
because we know we're a tech company now
and we know how to do better.
The what?
And now let's cancel everything
and just cancel all this shit.
A new F-150 Lightning is not electric anymore.
I don't know what the F-150 Lightning
country-wide sales were.
I do know I see a lot of them wherever in the US I go.
But like, guys, the world,
F-150 is a US product, so maybe that's not the right example.
But there are plenty of global products
that have just been canceled now because of a pullback.
And I don't see the rest of the world
thinking this pullback is permanent.
I think everyone's sort of weak.
It's short-sighted to cancel these programs
when there's a reasonable chance
of the mandates returning for the US market
that they will make.
And the mandates.
They'll be on the back foot.
And they didn't go away for Europe either.
But especially given how long a development cycle
of a car is, which is, you know, five,
it's between half and a full decade.
So my thought on this is that Tesla handed
the cards over to the Detroit three
and said, balls in your court, you know,
this is where not that the Model S was perfect.
It never was.
And it still isn't.
But it was a demonstration to the market.
This is possible.
We're doing it.
You can do it, too.
Here are all the tools you need to do it.
Have at it.
Go beat us.
Make a better car.
And they dropped the ball completely
and now have canceled all their programs.
And I love me a zero one X.
I love some of these fucking Mustang lunacy machines, right?
There's a lot of really fun stuff happening
in the American car industry.
And I'm a huge fan of it.
Like as I said on the black wing icons episode,
when we're faced with this inevitable future of,
I shouldn't maybe use the term inevitable,
I think it is, when we're faced with the possibility
of a future of electrification,
let's have a fucking party and celebrate combustion.
While we still can.
While we still can.
That means black wings.
That means zero ones.
That means Mustang fucking dark horses and GTTs and all of a sudden.
Like that's awesome.
But you need to do your homework for the future.
Right.
Because the whole reason this is true of Porsche also,
and this is why Porsche made SUVs
is so they could still continue to exist
so they could make the first ever GT3 or the second ever GT3.
And mind you, let's talk about Porsche for a second.
Porsche makes a competitor to the Model S called the Taycan.
Model S was at the time the most, I think it was,
the most efficient vehicle that the EPA had ever rated.
And the Taycan was the least efficient EV ever made.
And it had all of these concessions to efficiency,
like that stupid two speed rear transmission
and all this other shit that they built in
in the name of efficiency.
And they couldn't match anything,
much less a Tesla on this other stuff.
And it took them another full generation of cars
to make something compelling.
Now you get Macan.
Like I've driven the Macan EV, not extensively,
but it's fucking great.
I'm not saying it's the right solution.
I've heard it's difficult to keep functional from the dealers.
Yeah, I heard that too.
They were all originally recalled or something, weren't they?
I think they had a stop sale on them.
And every one of them needed like 100 hours with the work.
But from a consumer perspective,
with the hopes that they'll get that right,
it's actually a really nice product now.
And so it took Porsche a generation to get there,
but I have faith that they'll get there.
I'm not saying in the marketplace,
they should abandon a gas powered Macan.
But I am saying they should take lessons
from little things like I don't need a key
because my phone is my key.
All of the tech stuff built into these cars.
That's pretty cool.
And if that makes me a Tesla fanboy, be it.
But at the end of the day,
our transportation needs are changing.
We can't be stuck in this like carbureted, we can,
but the average American consumer cannot be.
And the point you were making earlier
is that while we cannot make all of these exciting,
compelling, enthusiast products,
if we don't make something that makes enough money
to keep the lights on that sells en masse
to people who just need a way to get around.
That's F-150 and Silverado, I guess.
Yeah.
Right?
I mean, people want their big V8.
And look at the fucking screaming
that happened when Dodge canceled the Hammy for the Ram.
People lost their shit.
Straight six is better.
It's just a better engine,
but everyone wants their V8's fine.
Now they can have them, right?
It's coming back, but at the same time,
if that fucking charger EV is the Daytona is the best EV
that Stalantis can make, Stalantis is fucked.
And that car is terrible.
Like as a vehicle, it's a 6,000-pound coupe
with no room inside and drives like shit.
It's a little bit harsh, but not a compelling product.
Feels like a 25-year-old car with an electric powertrain in it.
Feels like a 40-year-old car.
I mean, isn't it a W211 under there?
I don't even know what's underneath it anymore.
It's so bad it's hard to tell.
Okay.
I mean, it really is just poorly done, right?
It's just a poorly done.
It's grafting an electric powertrain into an oldie-timey car.
And that wasn't the point of Tesla.
The point is you take the car
and you make it work in a modern world with things like no fuses.
Like it's just all of that simple stuff.
The Model S no longer has fuses.
Neither does the Cybertruck on Model 3, right?
Does your fucking cell phone have fuse?
Does your laptop have a fucking circuit breaker panel on the back?
Like what year is this?
Why should your car, right?
And Tesla just was like, this is dumb.
It's wasteful.
And in the event of a fault, you can't turn the power off.
You got to wait for a fuse to blow.
Maybe that takes too long and melts all the wiring.
Maybe the fuse melts together and doesn't come apart.
You have an electrical fire.
No, just put an e-fuse in it.
Like why is that so difficult?
And it's all of those little innovations
that have captured the engineers in the industry attention,
including, and I spent two hours on the phone
with Monroe and Associates.
So have you ever seen their videos?
Monroe and Associates is a company.
These are the ones who disassemble cars completely.
It's their job to purchase a car and fully disassemble it
and reverse engineer the entire thing and cost engineer it.
So this is what this whole car costs to assemble.
This is the bill of materials.
This is how long it took to assemble, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And they can either work for the car company
and give suggestions and say, you can eliminate three hours
by making these changes.
Take these three screws and put them into fasteners.
Get rid of this fastener and put it in a screw
because that's going to be a warranty claim
because it's not going to be good enough.
They can sort of give all those advices
or they can do a competitive vehicle analysis.
And they have been incredibly positive,
like incredibly bullish on Tesla for years,
just because of the way they did things
and then slam the shit out of them
for the way they did other things.
So I remember the first video that I ever saw from them,
the first piece of content I saw,
was them saying that the way the car was actually built physically
was 1990s entry level like Daihatsu level
of build quality and materials and stuff like that.
But the electrical architecture was 20 years,
I think 15, whatever it was,
some enormous number of years ahead of the next best thing.
And those things, those differences have shrunk,
but and obviously the build quality got much, much, much better.
But they were right.
Yeah, it was a Daihatsu, right?
And to slam the door, door panel fell out,
like all that we know.
But that proved not to be a barrier to entry
to people who wanted a better, more modern.
Yeah, because the parts of the car are so that the consumer
cares about or that a material factors for their enjoyment
are so wildly ahead that you forgive things
that become sort of peripheral and insignificant,
like perceived and actual quality.
And borrowed a BlackBerry and an original iPhone
from a friend of ours for that shoot.
And it was fucking wild to feel that little itty bitty iPhone
in my hand and then look at the BlackBerry
and long for the days of that physical keyboard, right?
And so I had a line about autocorrect fucking everything up
and of course autocorrect ducking up half of what we type.
But we put up with autocorrect,
which genuinely sucks to this day that that keyboard sucks
to the point where everyone is now just sending
voice memos to each other or whatever,
proving my point that the fucking keyboard was better.
But the iPhone does so many things better than a BlackBerry did,
which was better than a flip phone did,
which was better than a landline did,
that we're just willing to put up with some of those flaws.
And I think that's the same thing with Tesla, right?
Not perfect, but sort of definitely aiming towards a future
that is going to leave everything else behind.
And so I did the video.
Okay. Well, good luck.
I mean, we're saying no one's seen it as of this recording.
You would you like to make a prediction
on how much shit I'm going to get?
Yes. Shit.
Okay. Like not Cybertruck levels of shit?
No, I think not.
But you should get your shit Brella out or whatever.
If there is a Sun Brella, then there is technically a shit Brella.
Yeah. Because people are not going to consume that with,
they're going to just do a, they're going to watch it once
and do a sentiment analysis and see that your sentiment was positive
and they're not going to do any more reasoned analysis than that.
Do you think the intro opening scene will derail anyone?
And for the record, what I did was I went and bought
one of those vintage Tesla stickers,
which was tough to find the one that I wanted
because I wasn't going to get the, there's a lot of,
like I don't know about where you all live,
but here I would say 30% of Teslas on the road
have some sort of bumper sticker on them,
which either F Elon, which spells felon in the Tesla font,
or I bought this before we knew he was crazy,
or like there's just every variant and what I found was
the sticker that says vintage Tesla pre madness edition.
And I thought that was like gray and like beige enough.
Like, okay, there's a lot of madness about Tesla.
I'm definitely not going to say what,
which I don't need to say in a journalistic piece,
which way I feel about, like it doesn't fucking matter
what I feel about Tesla or what anyone else feels about Elon.
But that's why the first thing you see
is me slapping that bumper sticker on the car.
And I'm like, I know, I know, I know, I know.
Everyone's really like upset about this.
Do you think that will, that was engineered in?
Yes, I know, I could tell.
I don't know, maybe it will reduce the volume
of hate mail appreciably.
One percent.
Yeah, who knows?
I don't know.
But I mean, it doesn't matter.
There's no such thing as bad publicity.
It's an irritant.
At the end of the day though,
I think it's a story that people need to understand
because they're going to continue to see Tesla's thinking philosophy.
And yeah, but they're going to divorce it from Tesla
and be like, oh, it's just the way the world is now.
Okay.
That's the point of your content is to explicitly make that.
Statement.
Connection.
Yeah.
I mean, we should know that disc brakes started
where disc brakes started and electric starter
was invented by Cadillac.
And you know, there are things that we should all understand.
Like you and I got something, oh, heated seats.
Everyone got so cross with us about heated seats.
Because we missed, of course, that it was invented in America.
I assumed it was in Germany.
I mean, it was actually.
Yeah, it was invented in America in the 1960s.
But okay, now we know that.
And we also know that the modern car was invented
by Tesla in the early 2000s.
Sorry.
Okay, well, be nice to me.
Just trying to tell a fucking story.
The people consuming this content are more likely to be
nice to you than the people who are just
mouthing off on the internet.
It'll be, it'll be really festive and reddit, I think.
Just don't go.
I can't not.
Okay.
All right.
Well, listen, if somebody has a valid counterpoint,
I'll answer.
I just was in there was a fucking free for all on Reddit.
Last, I guess it's a couple of weeks ago now.
Where somebody was like, you know, the problem with communities
is she never admits when he was wrong and Cybertruck this.
And so the good thing was there were many redditors
who stepped in and were like, no, no, no, Jason, you know,
the guy said I would never admit when I was wrong.
And I'm like, I sort of was a little bit of an asshole.
I'm like, I think you have me confused with our friend, Matt Farrell,
which I probably shouldn't have said.
But I was like, you know, I was like tongue in cheek,
joking like, leave me alone.
And then, but the guy was like, you're wrong about Cybertruck
because you said it was the first car with direct,
with, that was ever had steer by wire.
Okay.
Infinity had a system called direct adaptive steer.
And I covered it at length at Motor Trend.
It was in the Q 50.
And it was a by wire system.
There were two generations of it.
And it was a by wire system.
It had a conventional steering column.
Everything else was the same, but it had a clutch
that could decouple the steering wheel from the steering column.
And when the computer declared that it did its checksum
and made sure that everything, all the self tests,
it would decouple and you would drive by wire,
but it always had the ability, the failsafe,
if anything went wrong as it would reattach,
reconnect the steering wheel to the steering column.
What I said in the Cybertruck video was the Cybertruck
was the first ever production vehicle to ever have no physical connection
between the steering wheel and the front wheels.
And I specifically phrased it that way
because it wasn't the first partially steer by wire.
It's the first fully steer by wire,
but more importantly, it has no way.
There is no physical connection period, full stop.
Oh, this guy was in a fucking tizzy about the fact
that you got it wrong and you wouldn't admit it.
And the fact that you said you called out the infinity
and the captions was admitting you're a fuck up and whatever.
And I was like, all right, so I wrote the captions.
I always write the captions.
And I added in there because some people had pointed it out
and I need to clarify like DAS existed,
but it did have a physical connection.
I don't know why you get into it in the weeds with these people.
Because it turns personal and they're attacking things that I made.
If you go out of your way to try to get something right
and then somebody comes after you
and not only thinks you got it wrong
or accuses you of getting it wrong,
but then attacks your person.
And it's like you're just being paid by this
or you're just a fanboy or whatever else.
It fucking stings.
Like if I didn't try, I wouldn't care.
If I just wrote this episode on Model S
and didn't give it any thought to the hate and the hate mail
and the ire and all the controversy that it was going to create,
I wouldn't care about the controversy.
But I specifically engineered it and double checked
and triple checked and paid close attention
to how I phrase things and the way I phrase them
to minimize that.
And if somebody comes at me and if they're right,
then it's going to hurt even more.
If I did get something wrong,
I'll find out because nothing goes by the internet.
But the point there is like you spend the time
to try to avoid controversy
and then someone accuses you of being a shill anyway.
It's fucking, it burns.
You're letting them win.
Now I'm going to keep, I didn't let them win.
I did this episode.
Okay.
And I'm going to keep covering cars if they don't like it tough,
but they need to know it.
And I'm sorry if you're so myopic
that you don't want to hear about the things you don't like.
So I'm never going to mention an automatic transmission again
because I don't like them.
That's not the way the world works.
Tough, deal with it.
Accept it, move on.
Okay. Well, sorry.
That was not supposed to be a rant about.
Well, we got it at no additional charge.
Why thank you.
Beyond these zero dollars that you already pay for car money.
You have a huge amount of zero dollars
that Tesla has given me for the coverage.
Right. Okay.
Well, I thought it was interesting.
It was informative.
I like framing cars in terms of their significance.
So I found it interesting.
Wait till you see the episode on the car
that's actually behind us.
Oh yeah. I look forward to it.
Next week we have a really interesting car.
Oh, I look forward to it.
Because I don't know what it is either.
You do.
I do.
You do.
It's electric also.
How exciting.
We'll see.
How electrifying.
That we'll see.
Okay.
It could be, could be sacrilege.
Right.
I will find out.
Stay tuned to the next episode of the podcast
called the Car Mudge Show or something.
Great. Thanks for joining.
Yep.
About this episode
The Carmudgeon Show digs into why the Tesla Model S matters far beyond being an EV: it kicked off a software-driven, continuously updated approach that reshaped what other automakers build, from touchscreens and OTA updates to driver-assist features. Jason Cammisa defends his earlier praise amid Tesla fanboy backlash, recounting early Model S experiences and the car’s “continual evolution” philosophy. They also discuss why production is ending (cost to meet safety rules), what Tesla’s next factory plans may be, and compare Model S’s impact to other historically influential cars like the Citroën DS and VW Beetle.
Jason’s got a new episode out on the Hagerty YouTube channel about a car that most enthusiasts love to hate - The Tesla Model S. While it entered production as a Car of the Year winner and paved a path for Tesla’s eventual success in selling cars on the global stage, people have loathed the company’s existence in recent years due to sociopolitical actions from CEO Elon Musk. But is the car good enough to diverge from the hate?
===
Visit https://JasonSentMe.com for a quote on Hagerty's Guaranteed Value® Insurance!
===
Ignoring the lever-pulling of one man in particular - it’s hard to argue otherwise that the Tesla Model S is the most significant car of the last 75 years. Enjoying a near 14 year production run, you’d think it’s getting long in the tooth - but actually, it’s been continuously upgraded every year in both hardware and software, so much so that the final version - despite looking very similar - only shares 3% of its components with the original car that debuted in 2012.
Over the course of the episode, Jason and Derek compare the Model S to other revolutionary cars in society - like the Ford Model T, Volkswagen Beetle, Citroen DS, 2CV, Mini Cooper, and several others with varying similarities.
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