We Drove A VinFast VF8 So You Don’t Have To — Carmudgeon w/ Jason Cammisa & Derek Tam-Scott — Ep 216
The Carmudgeon Show
We Drove A VinFast VF8 So You Don’t Have To — Carmudgeon w/ Jason Cammisa & Derek Tam-Scott — Ep 216
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70:24
Car
Bugatti Veyron
The Bugatti Veyron is a super-fast car that was famous for being one of the quickest cars you could buy. It was designed for speed and luxury, making it a standout in the automotive world.
Car
Pininfarina Battista
The Pininfarina Battista is a very fast electric car that is known for its luxury and high performance. It's designed to be one of the best electric cars in terms of speed and style.
Term
0-60 time
0-60 time is how long it takes a car to go from a stop to going 60 miles per hour. It's often used to show how fast a car can speed up.
Car
Grumman LLV
The Grumman LLV is a special vehicle used by mail carriers in the U.S. It's built to last a long time and can handle different types of weather, making it perfect for delivering mail.
Car
Tesla Model 3
The Tesla Model 3 is a popular electric car that has a simple design and uses a computer screen for most controls instead of traditional buttons.
Car
Chevrolet C7
The C7 Corvette is a model of sports car made by Chevrolet. It's known for being fast and having modern features, like doors that open electronically.
Car
Tesla Model
The Tesla Model Y Performance is a faster version of the Model Y, which is an electric SUV. It has better handling and quicker acceleration than the regular Model Y.
Car
Ultima
The Ultima is a fast sports car that can go from zero to 60 miles per hour in about seven seconds. It's designed for high performance and speed.
Term
rear wheel drive
In rear wheel drive cars, the back wheels get the power from the engine. This setup can help with better control and handling, especially when driving fast.
Car
BMW F80
The BMW M3 is a fast and sporty car that is designed for people who love to drive. It’s known for being really fun to handle and has a reputation for being one of the best cars in its class.
Term
high horsepower
High horsepower means the car's engine can produce a lot of power, making it faster and able to accelerate quickly.
Term
horsepower per dollar
Horsepower per dollar tells you how much power you get for the money you spend on a car, which helps you find good deals on fast cars.
Term
limited access
Limited access roads are special types of roads that have fewer places where cars can enter or exit. This helps keep cars moving faster and makes it safer because there are fewer chances for accidents.
Car
Maserati Levante
The Maserati Levante is a high-end SUV that offers a mix of luxury and sporty performance. It's designed to stand out with its unique style and powerful engines.
Company
Pininfarina
Pininfarina is a famous design company in Italy that creates beautiful car designs. They work with many luxury car brands to make their vehicles look stunning.
Term
obstacle aware acceleration
Obstacle aware acceleration is a safety feature in cars that helps prevent accidents. It makes the car go slower if it sees something in the way, like another car or a person.
Term
ADAS system
ADAS is a set of tools in cars that help drivers by making driving safer and easier. It can do things like help you stay in your lane or slow down if something is in front of you.
Term
red line
The red line is the highest point on the speedometer for the engine's revolutions per minute (RPM). If you go past this point, it can hurt the engine.
Term
revs
Revs are how we measure how fast the engine is working. The higher the number, the faster the engine is spinning.
Term
Slow car fast
'Slow car fast' means having fun driving a car that isn't super powerful. It suggests that you can enjoy driving more by pushing a slower car to its limits instead of just going fast in a powerful car.
Brand
Subaru
Subaru is a car brand from Japan that makes vehicles known for their all-wheel drive and sporty models. Many people like Subaru cars for their performance and reliability.
Car
Tesla Cybertruck
The Tesla Cybertruck is a new type of electric truck that looks very different from regular trucks. It’s designed to be tough and has cool features like being able to drive without gas, which makes it interesting to talk about.
Term
VR6 swap
A VR6 swap means putting a specific type of engine, called a VR6, into a car. People do this to make their cars faster or more powerful.
Term
wheelbase
Wheelbase is how far apart the front and back wheels are on a car. A longer distance can make the car feel more stable and comfortable when driving.
Car
Tesla So Model
The Tesla Model S is a high-end electric car that can go really fast and has a long battery life. It’s known for having cool tech features and is a big deal in the world of electric cars.
Term
track mode
Track mode is a special setting in some cars that makes them perform better on a race track. It can change how the car handles and allows drivers to turn off certain safety features.
Term
stability control
Stability control is a system in cars that helps keep them from sliding or losing control, especially in slippery conditions. It does this by braking certain wheels if needed.
Term
self-driving
Self-driving means that a car can drive itself without a person controlling it. It uses technology to see the road and make decisions, like when to stop or turn.
Term
ABS
ABS is a system in cars that helps prevent the wheels from stopping completely when you brake hard, so you can still steer and avoid obstacles.
Company
Waymo
Waymo is a company that works on making cars that can drive themselves. They test their self-driving cars in real-life situations to improve the technology.
Car
Toyota Corolla
The Toyota Corolla is a small car that many people buy because it’s reliable and doesn’t use a lot of gas. It’s a good choice for anyone looking for a simple and affordable way to get around.
Car
Vinfast Vf8
The VinFast VF 8 is a new electric SUV from a company in Vietnam. It’s designed to be affordable and has some cool features, making it interesting to people looking for electric cars.
Car
Chevrolet Tahoe
The Chevrolet Tahoe is a big SUV that can carry a lot of people and stuff. It’s great for families and can handle rough roads, which is why many people like to drive it.
Car
Alfa Romeo Stelvio
The Alfa Romeo Stelvio is a stylish SUV that is fun to drive. It’s different from other SUVs because it has a sporty look and feel, which makes it special.
Car
Porsche Cayenne
The Porsche Cayenne is a fancy SUV that drives like a sports car. It’s popular because it offers a lot of space and comfort while still being fun to drive.
Car
Fiat 500e
Car
Renault Twingo
The Renault Twingo is a tiny car that’s easy to drive around in the city. It’s perfect for getting through tight spaces and parking easily.
LIVE
All right, you're winning.
Welcome to this episode of The Car Margin Show.
That is Jason Camisa.
Jason.
Camisa.
You are Derek.
Derek.
Tam.
Scott.
We are your hosts.
Man, if you have that misophonia disorder where you hate the sound of throat clearing,
then I really apologize for all that.
Oh, is that a thing?
There's people who get triggered by that sound.
Oh, well, how about chomping?
Can we like...
Noisy chewing?
Yeah.
The Car Margin Show is driven by Hagerty, which is an insurance for enthusiast, by enthusiast,
and there'll be...
Of enthusiast.
It's made of real, live...
No, ground up.
Ground up.
Ground up enthusiast.
Fresh, but not from concentrate.
Man, we should probably talk about what this episode is about.
Hi.
It's about...
It's of the endering...
No.
It's about EVs from...
No, no, no, no.
Don't tell them now.
They're going to tune out.
Yeah.
This is a fun conversation about...
There is a shit fest.
There's definitely a robust shit fest in the second half of this episode, which...
But there's also really great stuff in this episode because there's a lot of knowledge
about the future of cars and technology, and right now, I think the automotive industry
is in a really amazing place in that it makes cars that are like the one behind
us are not amazing, and cars that are amazing at different things that you maybe
wouldn't expect...
We would value as...
Yes.
The...
If we had the opportunity to buy them.
Fuck.
I'm sorry.
Yeah.
Right.
Anyway, that's what this episode...
I think we get on to that.
Derek will clap, and we'll be right back after the jingle.
No bad.
He's getting better.
All right.
All right.
So we, as purveyors of information about amazing cars and drivers of amazing cars and collectors
of amazing cars, have an amazing car behind us.
It's a car.
It's Pininfarina designed, Derek.
I'm amazed.
It's got...
At what?
I'm amazed.
I'm amazed that...
By its qualities.
Wow.
We're off to a good start.
Way to just, you know, give away your feelings on the vintage past.
Oh, let's talk about other topics first.
Or do you want to start here?
No, we can start with one of those topics.
I don't want to bury the lead.
Okay.
We won't bury the lead.
So there are two other things I want to talk about.
First is, not Vietnamese car or country even, China passed an interesting regulation
or is in part of...
We're considering evaluating...
So basically, I think the process works something like, you know, they're accepting people arguing
and if no one argues this successfully, this goes into law.
But somebody hath proposed that in reaction to all of the access to an increased number
of accidents involving very fast electric vehicles, that all vehicles sold in China
must accelerate to 62 miles an hour slower than five seconds.
No faster than five seconds.
In their default startup mode.
So you can have a Veyron fast speed, you can have, you know, a Pininfarina Batista that
does 0-60.
It applies to gas vehicles, too, from what I was able to tell by reading about it.
I didn't read it that closely, but the way the article I read said it applies to cars
generally and then it said for EVs, there are these also additional and these safety
concerns things about like mechanical door handles inside and outside in case of, for
example, a battery.
Right.
So you have to mechanical door handles inside and outside, et cetera, et cetera.
So they said, the article said like for EVs, there are these additional regulations that
are being considered and I don't think those should be for EVs.
I think that mechanical door latch should be for all cars.
Yeah.
I mean, there was a whole raft of them that I, you know, stuff that I've sort of glossed
over because you know what I love about this is China was always the market that
didn't care about safety.
Right.
It was the market that was just get, mobilize the people and we'll deal with the safety
later.
And I love that.
It's now later.
Yeah.
I love that where it's later.
Like, you know, China is now leading the charge on, on some safety regs that I've
not seen anywhere else.
And I think.
Right.
And their products are apparently very compelling and of course neither of us
have ever experienced any Chinese vehicles that other than I guess like Volvo makes
cars in China.
But no homegrown Chinese manufacturers.
Yeah.
No.
Yeah.
And the amount of Chinese brands on the road that I didn't even know how to
pronounce the names really upset me because I'm an automotive expert.
I am too, but not that stuff.
Yeah.
You know, I was thinking about this and I was whether to feel guilty and I
concluded that I don't feel guilty because I don't give a shit about new
cars from legacy manufacturers either by and large, 95% maybe higher.
And so this is sort of consistent with my brand, but you're not in the same
boat because you're an automotive journalist and it's your job to know
what's going on to some extent.
Certainly more than me.
Yeah.
And it's been three years since I stopped getting press cars, three years
this month actually since I stopped getting press cars, the cars turned
itself off.
It's bored of our shit.
It's bored of our shit.
Same bitch.
No, we'll get back to the fast later, but you know, it's been three
years and I'm going to start going and doing commissive verdicts again
because I'm just, I'm losing touch with what's new in the market
and people are asking me for buyers advice and I just haven't
experienced a lot of stuff and that's a problem.
That all came from a lack of interest, if I'm totally honest, personally,
and I just wanted to spend more time with my own cars.
And I still do, but I think-
Or other people's cars that were old and interesting, such as the nature
of the cars that you come across with for revelations, for example.
Yeah, for sure.
Like the LLV.
Like the Grumman LLV.
Yeah.
God, that was so much fun.
Anyway, yeah, I think some of the safety regulations are needed.
You know, we need to slow these cars down.
Number one, I agree with that.
Number two, there need to be mechanical door latches.
And I am really uncomfortable, for example, in the back of certain,
like Teslas, for example, like a Model 3 does not have a mechanical
door release in the back.
That makes me very uncomfortable knowing that if there's an
electrical malfunction or even a software glitch, I can't get out.
I don't see them-
They don't have a mechanical?
In the front they do.
I don't believe there is in the back.
And I don't like these mechanical releases.
Remember, one of the first cars-
You mean electrical?
I'm sorry, electrical releases.
When the C7 Corvette first came out, it had electric door releases.
And very quickly thereafter, an old man died in his car in his garage
slowly over three days because he couldn't get out.
The battery was dead, or something happened, and he couldn't
figure out-
He didn't know there was a release and died in his car.
And what I said right at the time, I was at automobile at the
time when we were talking about this, I'm like,
I don't want to be on a road track.
Either way, this is not okay.
The benefits do not outweigh the risks here.
What are the benefits?
Is it cheaper?
No, there are none.
It's actually more expensive.
When I've talked to interior engineers and interior designers,
they say their product planners want them because that's the new thing.
But no one has been able to spout a single benefit to that.
And if you're not going to have a real potential benefit,
you shouldn't be accepting the safety risks.
And the other drawbacks of, you know, you need mechanical actuators
and all this other shit.
So sorry, I think that's a really great idea that China is stepping in.
I did as a great segue into the next small thing I want to talk about.
Drive a new Tesla Model Y performance.
Wait, do we want to discuss the merits of limiting performance?
Sure.
Whether we think that that's a good idea?
Sure.
Sounds like you already did.
You said it was a good idea.
I mean, the cars are too fucking fast.
You've seen Ultimas.
Ultimas do zero to 60 in, you know, seven seconds
and people crash them all the time.
That's an internet trope.
But it's true.
That's for you to decide.
It comes from somewhere.
I've certainly seen firsthand evidence of it.
I wouldn't exactly put the operators of rear wheel drive
Stalantis products that are hemi powered into a sort of position
of great honor either when it comes to operating skills.
F80, F3 drivers.
Yes.
High horsepower rear wheel drive cars of most types,
especially the ones that offer a lot of horsepower per dollar.
I actually don't think that those people are any worse drivers.
It's easier for large numbers of those to be sold.
I think people get into trouble in expensive rear wheel drive,
high horsepower cars too.
It's just that they're more expensive, so there are fewer of them.
So it's become less of a stereotype.
That's not to say that I think people with more money
are any more competent at operating.
No, but they also may have invested more
and respect their investment more.
Yeah, but it's a proportion of your net worth.
Fair point.
I wouldn't be surprised if some of these lower dollar cars
have negative equity or worth associated with them.
But also it also falls into younger hands.
F80s at this point, I think those are my biggest example.
One of my friends just asked me.
VQ cars.
They were perfect.
They're slow now by comparison.
Yes, that's true.
But fast enough to get into trouble.
His neighbor wanted to buy his kid an F80 M3.
And I said, just buy him a casket.
The kid's going to fucking die in that car.
First of all, it was a terrible rear suspension design.
The car couldn't handle its own power.
They were uncontrollable by professionals.
So what are you going to put an 18-year-old kid in this car?
The first thing he's going to do is tune it
up to 1,000 horsepower and die.
So at that point, just buy him a casket.
I got into trouble with 180 horsepower
in a 3,300-pound car when I was a teenager.
Right.
Now imagine what you do a three, four times that horsepower.
And a car that can't handle it.
Anyway, no, I think there's a huge benefit.
I think these cars are getting so much faster
than people are willing to drive them or traffic allows them.
Yes.
It's not.
That's something I think about every so often
is the fact that the speed limits were 65, I think,
at some point and then they were dropped to 55
in response to the oil crisis in 1970.
I don't know if it was the first or second crisis,
but one of them probably it was Nixon.
I think so.
That would be the 73 oil crisis, the speed limit,
national blanket speed limit reduction to 55 miles an hour
in the United States, which lasted until 1998
from memory before it went back to 65.
So the speed limits have not 65.
75, 80, I mean, it's now up to the States.
I'm speaking, yeah, in terms of California
on the roads that we normally drive on.
Like you would never like interstate 80
going through largely light, sparsely populated
portions of California went from 55 to 65.
Yeah, there was a federally mandated 55 limit.
That dropped out.
And then what they did for a while there
was the federal government said,
oh, you no longer have to have a 55 mile an hour speed limit.
However, if you don't, you lose your funding for the roads.
So most states stuck with 55 and 65.
And then now I think it's been reduced to 80
or 85, I think is the highest speed limit in America.
I've seen that in Texas.
But yeah, anyway.
So the speed limits have not changed
materially in 50 years,
notwithstanding that little fuel saving side quest.
And modern cars are a lot more capable.
And I wonder like, should speed limits be higher
because cars are more capable?
I mean, that's more an intellectual question.
I don't actually believe that that's true.
Well, I think what's happened is the opposite.
So if we look at, yes,
speed limits on open road interstates have gone up a bit.
Where cars are the most capable is at the lower speed,
the lower portion of that.
And the cities have consistently dropped their speed limits.
And so between traffic and that,
your traffic is going slower and slower
as the cars are getting much faster at those speeds.
And I think those are the speeds most people drive.
I mean, 80 miles an hour in interstate is far safer.
If you look at the empirical accident and death data,
then 35 miles an hour through,
or even worse, 45 miles an hour through a city.
Yeah.
And that's the magic of limited access.
Every car, you don't have a lot of cross traffic
unless somebody's losing it.
And they're crossing traffic.
But no intersections, right?
Intersections of the killers.
It's the interface between cars and other vehicles
and pedestrians and creatures.
And you typically don't have cars parked
along the side of the freeway
where if you drift out of your lane,
you're hitting a parked car or a kid runs out and, you know, anyway.
So, yeah, I think these, especially EVs are just
deadly fast in the circumstances where we're slowing down.
And I think it's probably the right thing to do to say,
all right, you're gonna have a fast car,
but you're gonna have to try a little bit.
Yeah.
And that was one of the things in this sort of Chinese regulation
under consideration that they are evaluating
is like trying to identify pedal misapplication
because the consequences of pedal misapplication
are so dire now because cars are so performant.
And like if the car changes speed
by more than 25 kilometers an hour in X seconds
or portions, I think it was less than a second, actually.
Like it's basically trying to identify intent
and sort of develop a bunch of, I don't know,
protocols or responses to figure out
whether this is an intentional maneuver or not
or whether it's an emergency or not.
Years ago, I almost had a crash in a Tesla,
it was a Model Y, I think.
I don't remember exactly what it was,
but it was a, I pulled out in traffic
and I was behind another car
and we were both making a left onto a sort of divided highway,
non-divided like two lane, 55 mile an hour highway.
And I floored it and the thing didn't move.
It moved very slowly and I was quite upset about this.
And I realized afterwards, digging through the settings,
there was something called obstacle aware acceleration
that was in just an option that someone had checked.
And what that was doing was using the cameras
and possibly back then a radar sensor,
although then it wouldn't have been a Y.
Either way, I was using its ADAS system
to determine that there was indeed an obstacle in front of me
and it would not give me full power.
And now in that case, it was poorly done
because the car in front of me was also accelerating
so I was just trying to keep up with him.
But everyone I know with a Tesla
where that's available, I've had them turn it on
because it's just so easy.
If you look at the human brain's reaction time
to understanding what's happening,
sensing it, understanding it and then reacting to it,
you have a finite, a non-zero.
Yeah, a window of time that must elapse
before and result as achieved.
And if you can put on 25 kilometers an hour
or whatever it is within that split second,
that half second or one second it would take to react to it,
then you don't have the ability.
And the car is too fast for the human mind, basically.
Yes, this is a concept that my dad introduced to me
in the context of his mirror,
which he called over-driving your headlights,
which is basically you shouldn't drive faster
than your headlights are allowed to see,
but it's basically the exact same thing
that you will not be able to perceive a threat
in enough time to react to it to avoid a situation.
It's amazing if you watch silly weird YouTube videos
or Instagram reels or TikTok reels of dogs
when they attack someone
or if they eat something really quickly,
it's almost like a sci-fi movie where they react
and they move so quickly, we can't even comprehend.
So if you're being attacked by a dog
and fortunately I have been once,
you can't defend yourself because they're like
fucking kung fu warriors where they're so fast.
Yeah, it's like trying to slap a fly.
Right, although you can make that.
Yes, but you have to sort of develop
or get lucky also.
They're faster than we are
and the cars are now getting to the point
where they're faster than the operators.
So I think it's a huge merit to slow these people down
or just do smart obstacle aware stuff.
Yeah, the general public also is,
I think doesn't need that level of performance.
I sort of, because I drive old cars,
I lament the fact that my cars are not fast
compared to the general public anymore
because in the 80s, the average person
is driving around in 100 horsepower car
and so if you have 200 horsepower like my cars,
then you have an advantage, a performance advantage
and that is not true anymore
and having the ability for people
who are just sort of dicking around
to have performance like that is, in my opinion,
well, it's frustrating for me as a driver of an old car.
Is it? I find that people have all this performance
but they don't use it.
Yes, people don't use it,
but if someone suddenly does decide to use it,
then it's quite frustrating.
I love that my cars are slow
because I get to enjoy the sounds of revs
and red line shifts and I'm racing them there,
not even aware that I'm there
and I find a joy in that, right?
Slow car fast, right?
Sure.
But I have lost a couple of drag races in the city
in the last couple of years in my old cars
and it's always to EVs.
No one in our favorite Subaru
is gonna ever floor it
because they don't wanna hear that fucking thing.
And so I will absolutely be able to outrun them
in whatever old thing I have
because they're just not willing to use the power
that they have.
Yeah, no, I'm really, I'm really happy
that China's sort of coming online
with like a safety consciousness conscience.
I guess the next step would be
to interact with the products
because I've heard they're very good.
I heard the CEO of Ford took one home
and wouldn't give it back.
Yeah, wouldn't give it back
and said this is so far and away ahead
and I've watched the sales of Ford have cratered
in China in the last 10 years
from over a million units to like a 10th or something
within the last 10 years.
Yeah, because the Chinese cars are so much more compelling
and we're completely missing out on that
because of, oh, let's talk about tariffs.
Yeah.
Well, so car and driver just did an article
and I actually picked up my print,
I get the print magazine of car and driver
and this past month I opened it up
and wound up sitting and reading and cover to cover
and it was a pleasure that I haven't had in a while.
I've sort of allowed myself
and I think it was John Folka wrote it for,
it was a piece on the China market
and what's happened with all of the domestic Chinese brands
versus the sort of imports
and the Chinese government set everything up for success
for China, which was to allow collaborations
between Western sort of traditional established car companies
and Chinese startups.
So that they could then study everything
the Westerners were doing
and then do a better job of it.
Technology transfer.
That's exactly what's happened.
So they're like, okay, we're done with you.
Now we don't need your inferior imported products.
And the products are superior and far cheaper
and we are exempt from that in the US right now
and we've talked about this before.
I think there's only one,
you can't stop the water coming from a river.
You can dam it for a while
and then it breaches the dam
and you're in even worse trouble
and I feel like that's exactly what's happening right now
with us.
Our car market will have a X amount of years.
Reckoning.
Well from now we'll have a reckoning
and it will be swift and brutal
and it will be the end of the traditional car companies.
Not unlike the one that happened
when the Japanese and later Koreans
started bringing cars to the United States market
in the 70s and 80s.
I think it'll be more seismic.
I think so.
I think it's over for the traditionals.
If we allow China to keep iterating
and getting as it is right now
by those whom I trust
they're already making in many ways
a superior product.
Not all, but many ways
at a vastly cheaper price
give them 10 more years of lead time
to make an even better product
that's even more valuable price wise
or adds more value price wise.
We're fucked.
The Western car companies will not be able to compete.
So I think either, especially the U.S.
Will the Vietnamese ones?
We'll talk about that in a minute.
Yeah, we'll get there in a second
but I just think we're setting ourselves up
for guaranteed sudden death
because it's not like when, you know,
when Honda's came to the U.S.
and Toyota's came to the U.S.
Yeah, it was a different category of car.
Different category.
It was a better product
but it wasn't seismically better
and it wasn't seismically cheaper.
I think it kind of was
but they weren't making the types of cars
that Americans wanted
and there was a more reliable sentiment
of American patriotism
and now it's so clear that whatever,
the best mousetrap will win.
But if they had tried to compete on American terms
and there wasn't such a strong sense of patriotism,
especially I think the memory of World War II
was much fresher then.
So there was this sort of impetus
to not choose a Japanese manufacturer at that time.
So anyway, speaking of American car companies,
we can discuss,
you drove a new Tesla product of some kind.
Yeah, so I went,
Tesla invited me on a sort of local launch
for the Model Y performance.
Hadn't spent any time with Model Y.
The new refreshed car that, you know,
I still get shit about Cybertruck.
I still get shit about, you know,
the Model 3 review.
Sorry, you know,
Model 3 is the best consumer product that we can buy
in terms of an automobile.
And Model Y I was a bit disappointed in,
in one sense,
because it's not better than the 3.
There's some compromises built into the rear suspension,
especially design that causes a little bit of ride harshness.
And I expect a 3 to ride better than a Y.
It's taller, you know.
You mean the Y?
I'm sorry, a Y to...
I got mostly the last time.
Let me explain.
I was up until 2 o'clock in the morning
and I'm normally,
that's like two or three hours,
three hours past my bedtime,
because I was ordering car parts for a VR6 swap.
And then I woke up at 7 o'clock in the morning,
like it was Christmas morning,
because I had to go through and make sure
I didn't fuck up those orders at 2 o'clock in the morning.
And I was on the phone with suppliers ordering
even more shit.
And I'm just, you know, so like I'm sleep deprived.
Merry Christmas.
Thank you.
It is Christmas came early this year.
It's about to come early
when the FedEx guy shows up at my door
and it's like piling VR6 parts.
Anyway, I expect an SUV
to fly better than the sedan it's based on
because it has more, can, could, should,
have more suspension travel and bigger sidewalls
and other sort of little benefits.
It's the opposite with Model Y
and talking to Tesla's engineers
who are just off the charts fucking brilliant
and there's no way of saying this.
Basically, one of the problems is that
you have an elevated H point.
So any motion you do get is...
H point is where the occupants hips are.
Yeah.
This is where your ass is.
And so the higher you are away from the ground
the more you're gonna feel.
The more emotion will occur.
Plus the Y has a slightly longer wheelbase
than the Model 3
and it's all done with the control arms.
So they sort of increase the wheelbase
and that changes the geometry
enough of the rear suspension
that it actually, they can't decouple
some of the longitudinal forces.
So some of the bumps as well.
And then you have bigger wheels.
And so all of these were therefore smaller sidewalls.
And so all of these sort of conspired to make the Model Y...
Is the OD, is the outer diet rolling down there?
I didn't.
I didn't think that much into it.
Interesting.
But given that the rest of the car is,
I suspect it probably is.
And so Model Y performance doesn't ride
as well as Model 3 performance.
Model 3 performance is a really hardcore sports sedan
and Model Y isn't.
It's a softer thing.
No track mode.
They realize that no one's ever fucking tracking these cars.
And they're right.
First of all, they have real world information.
So the last Model Y performance had a track mode.
They know no one ever used it.
You could turn off stability control
and they know that the only place anyone ever did that
and use the track mode functions of moving power around
was in low mu grip.
So parking lots in the snow.
And they're like, okay, so we'll put a mode in there.
They'll let you do donuts.
But we don't need a track mode.
That's idiotic.
And I'm like, thank you.
Thank you for being fucking realistic.
But it's fast as shit.
And all of the great changes
that made the Model 3 performance go
be an actual M3 beater in my mind.
BMW M3 beater are here.
So the steering is now natural and it's not gainy.
It's just the car is just really, really good.
That said, it's not as good as the Model 3.
And then I went back into Model 3
and I experienced something that blew my mind.
In my little insta review of the Model Y, in the lows,
you know, highs and lows,
the lows I said that is,
I think I use the word untrustworthy ADAS system.
I don't believe Elon's musings
that we don't need radar sensors or LiDAR sensors.
I think it's a cop out.
I think it's bullshit.
And I have seen too many videos
of Tesla's doing really scary shit.
I mean, did you see the one where they did the Wiley Coyote thing
where they painted a picture of a tunnel
and the thing just fucking drove into it?
Well, tell it, would you tell the voice?
Yeah.
I mean, it literally was like a freaking Wiley Coyote thing
where the car just drives into the wall.
And every other car they tested
came to a screeching automatic stop
before it hit the fucking painting
because it realized it was a fucking painting.
I'm, again, in the same way that we talk about the door latches,
you have to, if you're going to provide a benefit,
you have to then minimize the drawbacks.
You always have to look at minimizing the drawbacks.
There is a net benefit to society for self-driving
and ADAS systems, but the cars can't then crash more than,
especially when they're self-driven,
they can't crash more than human-driven cars
or we haven't, we're killing people for no benefit, right?
When you look at real-world crash data and death data
from Model 3 for Tesla stuff, it's off the charts high.
And it's, I've read somewhere, at least one or two places
that have decided that the Model 3
is the deadliest vehicle on the road,
even though it's the safest vehicle ever crashed,
ever crashed tested.
And that's telling us there's a human factor involved, right?
And what that is, I suspect is over-reliance
on the ADAS systems.
And if you're going to give a car-
Has anyone analyzed this
or is this just sort of like the data has been presented?
I'm sure someone has and I'm a bad journalist
because I haven't done my job.
I'm curious to know.
Yeah.
I would love IIHS or any of the other organizations
to really look into that and dive deep into it.
But I mean, I've driven these cars
and I've spent a lot of time in Model 3.
So there's a Model 3 in my inner circle.
I've probably driven more miles in the Model 3 this year
than any other car.
I don't really track how many miles I've driven it,
but I spend a lot of time in that car.
And the ADAS system falses constantly.
It beep, beep, beep, beep, beep,
and slams on the brakes for when nothing's there.
When we did the actually that head-to-head episode
that we did or tread-to-tread episode that we did,
Anthony Esposito was driving the Model 3 performance
and it came to a screeching ABS halt
in the middle of a highway over a shadow.
Scared the shit out of him
and everyone behind him.
Perhaps literally.
Driving the Model 3 around San Francisco
it often will see on the diagram
you can see it's identifying all of these parked cars.
One of them will turn red and start flashing
and the car will slam on the brakes for no reason.
Like it's identified that as a risk.
Cars fucking parked.
Like it's not going anywhere.
There are a lot of problems with that ADAS system
and I don't trust my life with it.
So I got a lot of shit, not a lot of shit,
but a bunch of comments like,
bro have you even tried autopilot?
I have not tried full self-driving recently
because I've tried it a year ago and it was terrible
and it was jerky and I got into a Waymo
and we've talked about Waymo extensively
and that is how you do self-driving.
Like wow.
So I thought, all right,
I had an hour long trip at eight o'clock in the morning
that I was going to do in this Tesla
and I plugged in the address of a bakery
because I went to go buy donuts for a friend of ours.
It was an eye doctor who was seeing a friend of mine
who owns the Tesla at eight o'clock in the morning
before his shop opened up and I'm like,
oh, we'll show up with like, you know,
donuts for the whole crew.
So I programmed the address and it took over.
This fucking car drove us the entire way
expertly making lane changes whenever it wanted
with nothing dangerous, no jerks,
no side to side, anything beautifully smoothly
including constantly 15 miles an hour above the speed limit.
So there is-
Pre-request.
Well, there's chill, there's normal, there's hurry
and there's mad max is the other four settings.
It was just in hurry and it was not fucking around.
I mean like in a 55 zone was doing 71 in the right lane
and got off the exit and stayed at 70 miles an hour
and I'm like hovering over the brake pedal going,
oh my God, I didn't know, I don't know this exit,
I don't know the road goes,
but it's doing fucking 70 down an exit ramp
where I know there's a red light at the bottom
and there are cars waiting and I'm like,
we're gonna be one of those videos where everyone dies
and there's a fireball and whatever.
Nope, right when it was sort of at the last conceivable
setting was on hurry.
The last conceivable safe time to come to a controlled stop
it started to bleed off speed and went right down
to a stop at the light with its signal on,
looked both ways and went through the, you know,
stopped and went made it right on red
and here's the thing,
pulled into the fucking parking lot
and then backed itself into a parking spot.
I shit, I mean I actually shit
and I had to eat my shit and my words and whatever
and then when we got out of the thing
I plugged in the address of the eye doctor's office
and it took us out of that parking lot
onto the main road, made a couple of turns
into the parking lot of the dentist's office
or the eye doctor's office which is super narrow
and like uncomfortable for I think, you know, for an-
The average operator?
Well it would be not a challenge for the operator
but a Waymo would never have been able to get in there
and it fucking pulled right into a parking spot.
It was a handicap spot so it wasn't looking at that
but I just drove us all the way back to San Francisco
like and it's not a Waymo.
It doesn't understand the subtleties of body language
of like start to move over first
and then put your turn signal on.
Like there's somebody right next to you, it's pacing in
it's like hey everyone get out of my way
and it'll have it's right hand turn signal on
for fucking 12 miles until it finally like slows down
and little shit like that like amateur stuff
that I'm like I want a sign on the outside of this car
that I'm not driving because I'm now a poor driver.
Like, you know, I'm not financially poor
like a poor quality like-
Low quality driver.
Low quality driver.
And I'm like, I just have a blue light
that says self driving on numbers but don't hunk at me.
I genuinely kept, all that kept going through my mind is
my mom is 75 years old.
I've always thought like her golf is probably going to be
her last gas powered car.
And now I'm like, oh shit.
If we make it 10 more years while she's still driving
safely and that golf makes it 10 more years
that's not going to be your last gas powered car.
That's going to be your last human driven car
because tomorrow if she needed it I would just buy her
and I'm going to get crucified for saying this.
I would buy her a Model 3 and say mom
if there are times where you're not, if she needed it, right?
If you're not okay to drive, just have it drive you.
You need to be in control.
You need to be watching.
But like it was that good.
And now I have this dissonance
because I know it doesn't have fucking radar
and I know it's not going to work in the dark as well
as it should.
And I know it's not going to work in rain and whatever.
So what happened in the last year?
I don't fucking...
Well, I mean a software constant updates
but this is one year.
Like, oh my God, if we get 10 more years
like where the hell are these cars going to be
especially the ones with LiDAR and radar sensors?
Oh my God.
Wow.
Did anything happen in your experience
that you felt like it would have handled better
had it had LiDAR or radar?
Fuck you.
What?
Well, can you repeat the question?
No.
There was no situation that you encountered?
Not on that one.
Not on that drive.
On a sunny morning.
But again, this is a car that I have driven.
I've probably been in this car 3,000 miles,
4,000 miles this year
and have had many instances
of it doing something that scared me
without full self-driving on.
I mean just like thinking something's there
breaking for it or warning me about,
it's mostly warning me about stuff that's not there
but even if I have it set when I'm driving it
on my profile to not give me full self-driving
to give me adaptive cruise
and it's fucking stupid.
I mean it speeds up when it shouldn't, it's just not.
Yeah, it doesn't detect the person
who's starting a lane change
and waits till the car's fully in front of you
before it decides to adjust its speed
or it does the opposite when somebody gets out of your way
and then you're like, please just accelerate
and it's like waits till the lane is completely clear.
Or you'd go to put the turn signal on which by the way
the fucking Model Y has a turn signal stalk.
This is, I was gonna say earlier,
the EU is in the process of contemplating
outlawing turn signal buttons and forcing a stalk.
What's Ferrari gonna do?
Put the fucking things back on the stalk where they belong.
I think the exemption might be the way Ferrari does it
which is physical button on the left
and a physical button on the right
versus Tesla's capacitive up and down on the left spoke
which was doubly, triply stupid.
Yeah, the Ferrari mechanism once you get used to it
doesn't bother me that much.
Not much.
I can adapt to it.
Is it better?
I think that the Tesla system, I don't know.
I mean, it depends on if you need to signal
while you're doing opposite lock.
Pulling out of a parking spot or making a lane change.
Yes, yes, yes.
So that's where all of these systems fall apart
is when you have to cross up or shuffle.
And now I don't know which way the left turn signal is
and I just, in a split second,
I need to make a lane change
and I just therefore don't signal.
This happens to me all the time in that fucking Tesla.
In fact, it happened all the time in the Tesla
where the turn signal didn't work at all.
And so it went into the shop three times over this
and they replaced steering wheels, sensors,
wiring harnesses and whatever.
And then finally did a software update pushed to all cars
which I'm now referring to as the Jason software update
because of course I escalated it to the chief engineer.
I'm like, dude, what the fuck?
My hand, my bare paws are big enough
where I hold the wheel
that it's activating the capacitive touch sensor.
And so it sees a human body part there.
It could be my dick, we'll never know.
You drive like a dick.
Exactly, you drive with my dick.
It sees a human thing there and it doesn't know where it is.
And when you go to put the,
it loses sort of its mapping of where this thing is.
And so when you go to press the turn signal,
it doesn't know where you're asking.
It doesn't know which direction to put the turn signal on.
So it doesn't do anything.
Now it's, they've done a software update
that says bitch, get your fucking hand off the wheel.
It says remove your hand from the turn signal
or remove your finger or whatever or long press detected.
And there are two different messages.
One that's permanent.
Once it goes on,
it stays on for the whole time you're driving the car.
But mostly it's a fleeting message of like,
you have no turn signals right now until you remove your hand.
That's like the one where it tells you
to put your hands on the steering wheel.
Yeah, exactly.
But this is like, hey, you're warning Jason,
you have no turn signals because you need to move your hand.
So it's forcing me to drive in a different position
which I don't particularly care for.
But they put a turn signal stock.
Head in two.
No, never gonna happen.
So yeah, anyway, the.
Okay.
So you now like full self-driving.
I can't believe how good it is.
Again, I know it's going to be good until it crashes.
That's the problem.
And the car's owner has said like.
You could say that about humans.
True.
But the car's owner is like,
there are a lot of times where it's looking at lane markings
and it will see a tram track or a wet,
especially in the wet, it has problems where it'll start to follow
curbs or pavement lines and stuff that don't exist.
And there's one spot where we mentioned
that it will drive off the road every single time.
Like it's on 280, it's in one of the interstates around.
And it just, it will go off the road.
So this is the problem.
It's not quite there yet.
And I understand there's a lot of political charging,
whatever.
I'm not getting involved in that discussion.
I will just say this is to the fucking parking spot
like door to door, amazing.
Couldn't believe it.
Do you think that, are these things,
forgive my ignorance, are these things talking to each other?
Or is this doing what Waymo does where they collect data?
Or is it reacting in real time?
For example, like if this,
would this be as good if it were from a place
that fewer Teslas had been?
I don't know.
I don't know how much.
Because this is obviously very heavy,
Tesla heavy country.
It is very, very heavy.
And like if you took it to, you know,
I doubt very much Montana or somewhere.
But the, but the thing is when you're in a Waymo,
there are, you and I experienced this
of two very discreet modes.
There is the mode where I've been here before
and I have no idea where I am.
And I don't know how to do this.
And it's obvious, right?
I've been here before as smooth and fluid
and fluent and beautiful.
And it recognizes where it is
and knows the intricacies of the landscape.
Right.
And then you have it make a U-turn like we did
at the end of a cul-de-sac.
A cul-de-sac that Waymo's don't go down.
And it was turn signals left, right, left, right, right, right.
And the wheels jiggling, you know, jiggling back and forth.
And it was just completely...
It looked like it was having a seizure.
Yeah.
That the Tesla was as fluent as the Waymo is
when it knows where it was in parking lots.
And I can't help but think it's,
so it's using real time stuff.
It's relying on real time stuff.
I'm sure it feeds back.
Tesla's always done that.
It feeds back.
I just don't think it's feeding back
and using a real time sort of connection.
The core question is, is this as good in places
where there are fewer Teslas as it is here?
I would love to know.
I would love to know.
Again, I'm scared of this.
And it's not because I'm scared of new technology.
I understand the limitations inherent
in not having that sensor.
And I don't...
You cannot trust it.
If it doesn't have a radar
and it can't see things you can't,
why would you trust technology that's not as good as you?
And it's not as good as,
it's certainly not as fluent as an expert driver like me.
But it's not as fluent in traffic.
It's not quite as good as a human driver yet,
but the one year, what a difference a year makes.
Wow.
So gotta say,
can't wait till other automakers
with full sensor suites catch up.
And now in San Francisco,
we have Zoos is now opening up for human rides
and Waymo is opening up to highways
of the entire corridor between San Jose
and I think Santa Rosa is going to open up.
So basically the whole Bay Area.
The whole left side of the Bay Area.
Yeah.
Shit's about to get really interesting in the...
Waymo's don't want to be going to the hood for some reason.
There are hoods on the west side of San Francisco?
Yeah.
On the left side, there are some probably...
A hood run in a Waymo for a...
It doesn't exist yet.
No, I'm kidding.
I'm sure we can find what...
Well, I think in times of civil unrest,
they become targets.
I also did see a video recently
where there were a bunch of police cars
that were stops behind a car that had a man in it
that was being removed at gunpoint
and the Waymo just drove right behind them
in a position that would have put it in the...
If they had needed to open fire on the person
who they had getting out of the car
and lying face down on the ground,
the Waymo would have taken bullets.
So, I mean, they are not great in emergency situations.
They stop on fire hoses and stuff like that.
It's just, we are...
And everyone who gets upset about EVs
and upset about autonomous vehicles
and all this other stuff,
I have to always remind,
we are at the infancy of this technology.
It's all in its infancy.
It will get...
But the speed at which it's getting better is just...
Yeah, we're on the steep part of the curve.
It's fascinating.
And I love being in San Francisco right now
because I feel like San Francisco and Austin and Phoenix
and there are a bunch of metro areas around.
We're just...
What do you say,
8% of the cars on the road in San Francisco
half the time are Waymos?
Yes.
Because they're fucking everywhere.
The other thing,
I don't know,
have we talked about this before?
They're really great for lane changes
because they will stop and let you in
if you need to make lane change in front of them.
I tend to not bully Waymos
because I tend to not need to.
I just honked at one the other day
and I was very upset with myself.
I'm like, you're a fucking moron.
But it was pacing me and I needed to get over
and I sped up and it sped up
and then I slowed down and it slowed down
and I don't know why
and there was kind of no one around
and I finally just lane changed into it.
I'm like, are you fucking stupid?
I floored it and lane changed into it
and it slowed down and it didn't honk back.
But there was one of the few times,
any time that I've been irritated at a Waymo,
it's because it can't speed
and we've talked about that.
Yes.
I understand that.
Going up and down Market Street
and when you pass the train islands
and the limit goes down temporarily,
they do speed through there
because the limit through the little train islands
for the trolleys is 10 miles an hour
and they go 25 through there.
So at least they do that.
I think they concluded that it would be dangerous
for them to slam on the brakes
as it's passing the little train island
when there's no trains around.
But yeah, they are frustratingly slow.
I mean, they're at least consistent.
Yes.
You can predict what's going to happen
and you treat it as a fixed object
in the environment and plan...
It's a moving traffic cone.
But it's a predictable cone.
Yes.
Which is tremendous.
Which is tremendous.
I think people don't really understand,
like you had a very negative reaction early on.
People don't understand
that we're used to interacting with them
and they're not.
I mean, are they...
If the, you know,
what percentile of irritability
of like irritation are they?
Are they like,
they're more irritating than an average driver
or they're less or they're better?
Less for sure.
Especially, you know,
the thing that I think that...
I have two stories, I guess.
Now, one of them is a story.
The other is just an observation is
they're somewhat poor at choosing where to pull over
and sometimes they really throw up the block
and cause like gridlock
because the thing just fricking stops
in a really inopportune place
that admittedly Uber drivers do the same thing.
But they stop in some very poorly judged locations
in a way that really snarls
the environments around them.
The other story,
which is an isolated incident,
but I had one where I,
it arrived to pick me up
and I couldn't open it, the door.
Like it really opened the door
when I, like the door handle wouldn't pop out
so there's nothing to pull on to get it to open.
So I like called support
and had them open the door.
You couldn't do it right in the out there.
There's usually...
No, no, no.
It didn't respond to it.
No matter what I did,
it wouldn't present me the door handle.
For the record,
typically it uses your location plus Bluetooth LTE
and it knows as you're approaching the car.
Yes.
And it gives you a button.
And the door handles just pop out.
Pop out.
And you can force it though in the app.
There's a button that says unlock.
It was unresponsive to that.
Interesting.
So then I got in the damn thing
and you have to push start ride
and I pushed the start ride button
either didn't appear
or when I pushed it nothing happened.
But I'm just sitting in there
unable to get the thing to start its ride
and in five minutes
it gives up on waiting for you.
It didn't know I was there.
It gives up
and then it started driving away
to pick up the next person
and I'm stuck inside of the car.
So then thank God it has a mechanical door really
so I open it
and then it stops
because now it's like oh the door's open
and I can't drive anywhere.
And then it drives
and then it charged me a cancellation fee
and then drove away.
And then like I waited for the thing
for like seven minutes
and spent five minutes
sticking around with it trying to get me.
And they obviously refunded that
when you called screaming.
Yes.
Okay, great.
So you know,
things that don't happen with Ubers is that.
Well, right.
But the Waymo isn't ever drunk.
So I mean,
I am now a 100%
Uber rider unless you mean Waymo.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Waymo.
Yes.
I don't,
I will not take a human driven taxi
unless I have no other choice.
The Waymo's have been very slow
to arrive lately.
Like it's like 10 minutes
instead of like three minutes.
And so that's the thing
that will drive me to take an Uber
in lieu of a Waymo.
I will only now do Uber black
because I want TCP.
So California has
TCP delivery laws.
I want an actual
licensed Limo driver,
not a cracked out Ultima driver
or worse, any EV.
Yes.
Because they have that sinusoidal gas region,
gas region.
I took a video the other day
of an Uber driver
where you can see his leg pulsing
and you're just like,
why are you doing this?
We're on the highway.
Like.
That's it.
That would be a nice mandate
for like all Ubers,
like the government should mandate
that all livery drivers
have an OBD2 connected pedal sensor.
And if they see acceleration D cell,
it just tases them in the fucking balls
and stops them from...
It's so nauseating.
I would support that legislation.
It's nauseating.
It is nauseating.
Genuinely nauseating.
And I don't know what causes people
to become spastic pulsing motorists,
but like I've seen...
I've seen it in an off-bed.
Like where you can,
like at nighttime
you can see the reflection
of the brakes
when you get into regen.
Come on.
You see the brake lights come on
as they go in and out of their phase
and it's pulsing brake lights
because they're...
We had an art director years ago
at...
I think it was when we were at Road and Track.
I worked with him a couple of places.
And a great guy,
car guy, whatever,
but he did this when he drove normally.
And I was in the back of a Subaru something
and it had the center gauge pod
that had a boost gauge.
And I have a video of...
God, I can't even...
I don't know how I'd find this,
but I took a video
of him going from full vacuum
to full boost
to full vacuum to full boost.
And it was just this perfect like
half a Hertz back and forth.
And then when we got to our destination
I sent it to him.
And I'm like,
check your phone.
This is what you do.
And he was like,
I don't do that.
I'm like,
we're all going to throw up
and we're all going to kill you.
And he's like,
why don't you say something?
I'm like,
you do this every time.
So just some people just don't...
They're not conscious of it.
Yeah, clearly.
And it has to be
my friend's significant other
does this so bad
that in A,
I think it was a four
or five-speed automatic Corolla.
He was able to get it downshifed
on the highway.
Oh, you...
Oh my God.
My uncle...
With four or five speeds
it's much more difficult
to get downshift than an A.
Ten speed.
No, my uncle years ago.
In his camera.
I'm like,
literally going...
It was a four speed.
It was like a 93 camera.
This is 100 years ago.
So it unlocked the torque converter,
downshift into third
and he'd lift.
And he'd go back into fourth,
lock the torque converter,
unlock the torque converter
back to third.
And I'm like,
you know you'd get a lot better gas mileage
if you just set the fucking cruise
and also your transmissions
wouldn't wear out at 22,000 miles.
Yeah.
People just...
It's something about human nature.
We just cyclically on off, on off.
Drives me absolutely up the wall.
Yep.
Same.
You know,
that wouldn't be a problem in this car.
Here's our perfect segue
to the VinFast.
And it wouldn't be in a problem
for this car.
I have a suspicion
we have not spoken yet
about what we did.
No.
About our independent separate drives
in the VinFast.
VinFast VF8.
So it wouldn't be a problem in this car
because on one word answer
on the count of three
you're going to tell me one.
One, two, three.
Delay.
Latency.
Yes.
Yep.
You can,
in this,
this 405,
402,
400 horsepower electric SUV
get to the pedal
to the floor and back
repeatedly
without ever having
any forward progress at all.
And I don't mean
from a standing start.
Yes.
I mean,
full throttle off.
Full throttle off.
Yeah.
It has what a full second and a half.
It is infuriating.
It is absolutely miserable.
I wanted to throttle the people
who were involved in calibrating that.
There were no people involved.
Yes.
They were dead.
They had died six months earlier.
It was done by a fricking
carcass.
Turtle.
Or something.
Speaking of,
so we've gone from cars
that are too fast for humans
to humans that are too fast
for the cars.
I mean,
it's unreal.
This is a 60,
5700 pound SUV
that is capable in theory
of a five seconds zero to 60.
And yet two and a half of that
is waiting for the fucking.
So I drove this thing.
I'm at a red light with its owner
next to me in another friend of ours,
C400 coupe.
Some Mercedes ugly coupe thing
with a twin turbo v6 in it.
And he pulls up next to me at the light
and he's like, we're going to race.
And I'm like, okay, fine.
And now I know this thing
has throttle lag from hell.
And so about a second
before the light turned green,
I nail it.
The light turns green.
At the exact moment the light turns green,
we have not moved.
The exact moment the light turns green,
I hear the Mercedes starter motor.
So that fucking Mercedes,
that laggy v6
has turned itself off.
And he still fucking beat us off the line.
I mean, we started to move a little bit
and then he rocketed right past us.
And it was like hilarious
because in the time that it took electrons
to go at the actual speed of light
through the wire a foot long,
that thing had engaged the starter,
got to idle,
engaged the transmission,
went, got turbo boost and moved away.
It's absolutely infuriating
and unforgivable.
And I think it's the world's first EV with turbo lag.
Which is a remarkable achievement.
The brakes kind of do it sometimes too.
Did you notice this?
I had several terrifying moments
with the brakes
where you would be coming to a stop
and you're,
maybe this is a,
no, because it would happen
on an initial application also.
I was thinking maybe it was a limo stop technique
where you start to release brake pressure.
It does that.
And it runs away
when you do that.
And it will also sometimes,
I'll keep adding brake pressure
and the thing is not stopping or decelerating
and you're like,
we're going to hit something.
We're going to roll into something
at three miles an hour
because I'm adding brake
and it does exactly the same thing the throttle does.
Which is this weird unnerving delay
where it does not do what you ask.
It also, like the throttle,
has a delay in removing pedal force.
So you come off the gas
and that thing continues to accelerate
for half a second
and it also does the same with the brakes.
It continues to slow down.
You're like, I'm already on the gas.
Yes.
So to me,
the most terrifying thing about the brakes is
our friends who own this,
which we'll talk about live on,
what, a 25% grade?
Yeah.
It's one of the steepest streets in San Francisco
which is famous for steep streets.
Right.
So I am,
I get in this thing
a foot behind my cabriolet,
my bitch basket.
And he's like,
you're driving and I'm like,
okay.
So first things first,
I get the key.
It's upside down.
It's upside down door.
So the key,
we'll put an insert of this,
but the key,
if you,
however you hold it,
which is, you know,
this way,
all of the buttons are upside down.
They're also unintelligible and small
and, you know,
the markings.
So you can actually.
But critically upside down.
And the V,
the Vinfast logo is also,
the V for Vinfast is also upside down.
I mean, the key is genuinely upside down.
They put the,
they just,
they shaped it wrong
and put the key,
the little hole for the key to tag
in the wrong corner.
Yep.
I have a little key built in.
All right.
So, so I get in this thing
and there is no on button,
there's no off button,
whatever.
So it turns on and does its whole thing.
And they're like, well,
it does have a 360 degree
around view camera,
but that will take minutes to boot up.
So don't,
don't rely on any sort of cameras.
I'm like, okay.
And there's lag on the,
on the camera.
So you can't really use the backup camera
because you will hit something
before it appears that you're hitting
something.
So I'm a little bit nervous about that.
The 360 cam did appear
because I was adjusting the settings,
which are all the fucking steering wheel
and everything else is on the screen,
Tesla style,
but worse.
And the thing did boot up
and I did find it fun
that it has a 360 degree,
like
surround
surround camera,
but the car you're looking at
is a different color with different wheels on it.
And the wheels don't turn or move.
So it's like,
you just start to float their space.
Anyway.
So he's like,
put it in reverse
and start giving gas.
And I'm like, okay.
And he's like,
and just keep giving gas
until the thing starts to move.
So I'm backing up the hill.
Right.
But I'm aimed right away
from my precious little
2,399 pound Cabriolet
that I really don't want to hit.
And so I put it in reverse
and I'm giving gas
and he's like, keep going,
keep going, keep going, keep going.
And I got to three quarters throttle,
three quarters throttle
in a 400 pound horsepower vehicle.
And it finally started to move
initially slowly
and then took the fuck off.
Yes.
And it was probably six seconds
of like a little bit more,
a little bit more,
a little bit more,
what the fuck is going to happen?
What the fuck is going to happen?
That scared the shit out of me.
Then he made me turn around
and go up the hill
and stop on the hill
and go to move.
Did he do this to you?
Yes.
It's a hilarious feature.
So all right.
What it does is
it knows that an automatic
transmission car
when you lift off the brake
will creep forward.
Yes.
And so it tries to emulate
this behavior,
but it does this in,
it's sort of,
and I mean this
in the literal dictionary sense,
retarded way,
like literally it is in retard.
And so
It's also retarded
in that sort of offensive way.
And you lift off the brake
and it kind of just sits there
for a while.
And then it's like,
oh yes, creeping.
Let's do that.
And then it starts creeping away
up the hill.
Up a 25% grade.
Yeah.
An extremely steep hill
in a way that's very artificial
for the gradient.
I mean an automatic car
would roll backwards
down the hill
in this situation.
And this thing
starts kind of running away
from you
and like sort of driving
itself off
when you lift off the brake
what is this thing going to stop
slowing down its acceleration
of creepage?
It will hit
four miles an hour
in creep mode.
So by the way,
creep mode turns itself
on every time you start the car.
You have to go into a menu
and disable it.
And it says
due to your country's
local regulations,
this will turn back on
every time,
like a little thing.
So you can turn it off
in which case
you're at the mercy
of the fucking
auto-breakable system
and the throttle to let it.
Like no chance.
But so,
but I mean,
I'm,
you're aiming up this hill
and it's just fucking terrifying.
Let go of the brakes
and it's
what five seconds?
Six, seven.
Yeah.
It's a comedianly long time.
You forget what you're doing
and like you're at a stop
stoplight near,
you know,
having a conversation
and cruising off into
another universe
and then the car starts
driving away.
And then it,
well it made it up
a whole hill
at four miles an hour
and you're thinking
this has gotta be
120 horsepower
to get this thing
to four miles an hour
up a hill
and it's like,
it doesn't matter.
fucking kid, hit a tree, I'm doing four.
What we're doing is testing out the creep function
to see just how much power it will use
to get to that four miles an hour.
So we have a trash bin to evenly distribute the force
and then an actual full dumpster.
And we're gonna see if we just get in
and take our foot off the brake,
if the vin fast will push the dumpster
down the parking lot.
I'm in drive and I'm, oh.
There is no end to the amount of power
this thing will deploy to do four miles an hour.
Who, somebody misunderstood what creep is and how it works.
I believe, this was the conclusion I came to
with this car.
I believe that it was designed by engineers
who had never driven or seen a car before.
And they're like, here's what a car does.
And they're like, oh, okay.
We'll emulate that.
Yes.
That's exactly what I said.
We'll follow the description.
So we were in a car with everyone.
And so I drove this car last year in Tahoe.
We raced it against Vangina up the,
you know, up the Donner Pass and whatever.
And we were just playing around.
I drove it.
I'm like, it's not that bad.
The more time I spent with it, the worse it got.
And so.
In urban environments where you're getting in
and out of the throttle and in and out of the brakes
is it really highlights it.
It's tolerable on the highway.
Although it still has the delay
but there's sort of margin.
Yeah.
The ride quality we've not touched on.
Oh, we'll get to all this.
The noise from the back right corner
we've also not touched on.
Oh.
Oh.
Yes.
10,000 miles, hold on.
Front left corner of the front right corner
of the suspension pops or all,
like there's so much other shit.
But yeah, I said, listen, many, many years ago,
I was asking, I was with Subaru
and I was asking a bunch of questions to the engineers
about chassis tuning on something was one of the cars.
And they introduced me to the guy who was,
whose job it was to do final chassis tuning.
He does not have a driver's license
and does not own a car.
It's all theoretical.
It was done at a computer at a desk.
Subaru.
Subaru.
Really?
This is the reason.
I'm shocking.
Right?
This is the reason some of the cars drive
the way they do.
It was all theoretical.
And this is why like at Lotus
they have like a guy who's a former race car driver
doing this shit.
Steering, done in a lab.
Suspension tuning, done in a lab.
Stereo, done in a lab.
Subaru's have been known for the longest time
to have the worst fucking stereos in the world.
And you listen to them stopped
and you're like, okay, it's not good.
And then as soon as you start moving
you can't hear anything
because they EQ'd it for fucking parked car.
The guy doesn't have a fucking driver's license
or drive, right?
And what I said to our friends is this,
all of the powertrain tuning was done
by copying theoretical data
by someone who is never driven, ever.
So we came to the same conclusion.
Yeah, I felt like that about the whole car though.
Not just the powertrain calibration.
Well the steering thing you get,
if you turn this wheel slowly at like
when you're parked at like a red light
or like stopped at a red light,
you feel like it's got artifacts
and errors and measuring torque and whatever.
But the one that got me, all right.
So one of the cars in right rear seat
for people in the car, I'm driving,
we're pulling into a parking spot
that's about nine inches longer than the car is
but we've been looking around for parking spot for a while.
So I'm shoving that parallel parking.
I am getting this fucking thing into that spot
if I have to total it.
Like that's my mentality at this point.
And we'll talk about what they pay for the car.
So they'd probably be happy to let it go.
And I go to back up and the cameras are delayed
and you just can't trust it.
And so our friend, the owner drops out
and he's like, let me jump out
and I will do the sealed fashion way.
And I'll guide you.
We're still moving.
He opens the door.
The fucking thing throws it, didn't slam on the brakes,
threw itself in park and shut off.
Okay.
I am in the driver's seat.
With the key.
No, he's got the key in his pocket.
And it's a no key detected, but shut off.
I'm in the driver's seat.
It's got a passenger or a driver's seat weight sensor
and a seatbelt fastened and I'm on the brake.
It knows there is a driver.
Someone got that algorithm wrong.
Like no key detected.
Now imagine you're driving on the highway
and somebody, it loses contact with the key
or something else happened
was going to do shut itself the fuck off.
Have you seen this video where it's like a bunch of youths
in like a fairly modern GM pickup truck
and they're driving down some country road
and the passenger in one motion simultaneously
puts it in park and turns the key off
and it just blocks up the rear wheels
and the thing fucking doesn't appear on it.
Everybody's laughing.
I imagine that's what happens.
Well, this is probably got a parking pole
on all four wheels.
So it's, who knows what's gonna lock all four
and you're gonna die.
And you're gonna die.
It's gonna be multiple revolutions.
That is so unsafe.
It scared the shit out of all of us
because a sudden park of a boom boom
and you just stop.
I'm like, oh my God.
And the residual lurching.
Oh my God, I was very, very cross.
At that point, I wanted to slam it into a wall.
Like this thing is not safe.
And so my determination was,
I have driven a lot of prototype vehicles
in 20 years of doing this.
None of them are as poorly tuned as this
in terms of power train calibration, not one.
Not one.
An impressive achievement for the VinFast VF-8.
I mean, okay, let's talk about what it is
and what it.
Well, we have to talk about ride quality
and the various noises as well.
10,000 miles on this car.
They have replaced 10,127.
Who's counting?
They have replaced, is it the spring pads?
Yes.
Twice now or three times?
Yeah, in the back.
It is on its third set.
So they have been replaced twice.
Because they basically fall apart
and then you have spring on.
I think they move out of position.
So you get this really glorious noise
from the back that's just like,
it sounds like there's a terror in the chassis
or something like that.
So that, yeah, it has that.
So yeah, in 10,000 miles.
The front suspension, it sounds like ball joints
that pop every time you turn the wheel left or right.
I identified it pretty quickly as a strut
because you also get a creak of the upper strut bearing.
10,000 miles.
No.
And there's the ride tuning also,
which is simultaneously, I don't,
I'm not that bothered by it.
I think it's at a speed,
I find it to be underdamped and at high speed.
And at low speed,
I find it to be intolerably crashy.
Windy and crashy.
Yeah, it's this wonderful mixture of poor,
like it's too harsh and too soft,
depending on the circumstances.
Yeah, I mean, there are plenty of cars
like that at the moment.
Yes, I think it's a modern car thing
because of wheel size.
At least sidewalls aren't outrageously slow.
But this is just,
I think it's got a geometry issue in it
because to get that harsh of impacts at low speeds,
it sounds more like a geometry issue to me
than a tuning issue, but I could be wrong.
It's pretty bad.
Especially if the spring rates are pretty,
it feels like a car with very stiff springs
at low speeds.
But yeah, but then you are clearly not enough
damper control at high speeds.
And they're not adaptive.
It's a fixed setup.
The ride's not good.
It's not something where I,
it's not last generation Tesla Model Y,
for example, which was an ox cart.
This is like, it's okay.
I think it's okay looking.
It's over styled for sure.
You know, that front end is just,
it got an extra set of headlights on it
and a bit too much shit.
Most modern cars are like that.
I think the rest of the car
is pretty plain and clean.
I mean, it almost has a Maserati.
Yeah, I was gonna say the doors kind of remind me
of a Stelvio.
Yeah, I mean, it's Stelvio slash Levante slash
even Cayenne in its hip line.
Again, Pininfarina.
I mean, it's not a terrible looking thing.
The interior is actually quite nice material-wise.
Seating position is okay,
but it's amazing to me how obvious this is
that the devil's in the details.
And that I could be, I could have almost,
I'm not, no way,
but you could spend a couple minutes with this car
and think, oh, I could buy this thing.
And after over the first time playing around
and sliding it around and doing stupid shit,
I'm like, yeah, it's fine.
But after, I mean, it took all of-
Yeah, when you try to do normal stuff in it,
it's so furiating because it,
infuriating because it doesn't do what you ask
when you ask for it.
Or does things you don't ask for it?
Like for example, there's a bug in the software
that if you have the key in your pocket
and you walk past the left rear backup sonar sensors,
it pops the hatchback open.
Yeah, I don't know if you know.
That's, you can just sort of like a little trick
that for whatever reason does that.
The interior lights flicker at some sort of rhythmic
sort of like thing occasionally.
I mean, it's just got a lot of bugs.
And the touchscreen is not intuitive at all.
Yeah, it is-
Incomplete, unfinished.
Unfinished, but a really great.
If you guys ever want to understand
where the chassis tuning magic is
that separates Porsche from everyone else
or some of those unattainable cars,
drive something like this and you realize,
okay, at first glance, it's fine.
It's a car.
It actually motivates.
It's quick enough.
Yeah, and then what does it range at?
It's 300 miles or something?
So this is the plus trim.
There's an eco trim,
243 on this plus trim,
264 on the eco trim,
which has 348 horsepower.
This is a 402.
It's an 87.7 kilowatt hour battery.
I mean, it's-
Okay, so for all of this amazing product,
what do we pay?
Oh, we looked this up and now I don't even remember.
Okay, it was 2200 down.
Right.
And 149 a month plus tax.
So their full payment,
I always do this,
total outlay divided by total number of months.
That's for a 24 month lease and 20,000 miles total.
They paid $240 and 66 cents plus tax per month, per month,
which is admittedly three times what I paid for the Eagle
for what you could get a Fiat 500E for the originally,
but this is also three times the range.
So I guess you get, and twice the mass and,
you know, for their,
they bought this to throw on Turro.
So you can Turro this car right now if you'd like.
In fact, maybe we should have Turroed it from them
and therefore, you know-
I mean, there might be a line after our endorsement for it.
If people, like it would be like an amusement park.
It's an interesting thing for a car guy to experience, I think.
I mean, it's, you know,
while we're sitting here talking about how, you know,
the Chinese car industry is surpassing us
and we're not able to test it,
now we can look at, you know,
and some insight into the Vietnamese car industry,
which I don't think is as far along as the Chinese one.
And there was-
It would appear not.
They partnered with BMW for some of the stuff.
Yes, I recognize the stocks.
Yeah, so some BMW parts in there
and previous VinFast before they went electric
used BMW power trains.
And apparently we're quite good
according to the owner of this car.
Who has no affinity to it.
I mean, you know, he's just like, it is a piece of shit,
but you know, it was a cheap piece of shit
and thanks to Turro, it's now paid for itself.
So they've, you know, they rented out and-
They did it for their amusement.
Yeah, it was because it was cheap enough.
And, you know, IE it will become a profit center.
Why not?
But yeah, man, this, I will say, as bad as this is,
is nothing in comparison to the Twingo,
the Twingo that I rented.
In Greece.
In Greece, yeah, it was Twingo, right?
I don't know.
It was the rear engine three cylinder, Twingo.
That could be, yeah.
Why am I not?
Twingo could be, yeah.
That's a real product that Renault makes.
That was truly horrendous.
And by an established car maker,
like that with the steering was so bad,
I couldn't believe it was in a production car.
The suspension tuning was so awful.
You know, the NVH from that three cylinder was,
every part of it was terrible.
And then the car, I think had 40,000 kilometers on it
and threw its drive belt while I was driving it.
So, you know, we know it's-
How many RPM?
Oh, it's sitting at idle.
And all of a sudden it was,
and I was like, what is that?
I mean, I had previously redlined it every shift,
but it was 29 seconds to 69, I'm exaggerating.
It was very fast in an alternate universe.
What a steaming pile of absolute horseshit
is what my notes say.
I guess-
What did the rest of them say?
You're not gonna give us the rest?
You may as well-
I mean, we could do the random number.
No, no, no.
This isn't random, this is specific.
Oh my God, the zoom function doesn't work
and this font-
Okay, we're not gonna get it all.
You want me to read it?
Can you see?
Well, I can try to find it again.
No, no, no, no stress.
We've shot on enough cars this episode.
You think so?
We'll do what we should do.
You actually suggested our best drives of the year episode
coming up maybe next week
or at some point before the end of the year.
Let's do best and worst
because that Twingo is all elaborated on that.
That was so cute though.
I was thinking 10 best and one worst was my-
10 best and one worst.
That's a lot in one year.
I mean, we'll see.
We'll see how many I can come up with.
My 10 might all just be my own cars,
which I might be driving the rover again soon.
The rover's running.
That works.
All right, well, that lies ahead
sometime between now and the end of the year.
Yes, so join us again next week
for another episode of us bitching about
the Carmudgeon show.
Yes.
Where you'll learn about shitty EVs,
great EVs, shitty ADAS systems,
great ADAS systems.
Or something altogether great
or an unattainable or old or new or-
Or Chinese regulations.
Or we just don't know.
You just never know.
We could say.
That's what the Carmudgeon show is.
It's like Mad Libs.
Choose country and decade and insert.
Soco reference.
Yeah, all right.
And you have your own,
very own homemade Carmudgeon show.
All right, we'll see you next week.
About this episode
Jason Cammisa and Derek Tam-Scott dive into their experiences with the VinFast VF8, a new electric SUV that leaves much to be desired. They discuss its frustrating throttle and brake lag, poor calibration, and the overall lack of intuitive design. The hosts share humorous anecdotes about their test drives, including the car's bizarre tendency to roll away on steep hills and its delayed responses. They also touch on the broader implications of the EV market, particularly in relation to Chinese regulations and the future of automotive technology.
Original notes
That’s right - on this episode of The Carmudgeon Show, Jason and Derek risk their lives to deliver crucial mass-market automotive journalism by getting behind the wheel of the VinFast VF8 - one of the most criticized vehicles ever to be sold in the US. But c’mon, really - is it as bad as everyone says it is?
Well. Uh…yeah. It’s even worse than you thought.
===
Visit http://JasonSentMe.com to get a Hagerty Guaranteed Value (TM) collector-car insurance quote!
===
Before jumping down the throat of the VF8, Jason and Derek discuss the recent developments of ADAS systems and vehicle acceleration regulations being considered within the Chinese market: “The cars are too damn fast!” - CCP, probably. Surprisingly, Jason and Derek both agree - and discuss the potential benefits of having acceleration-limited vehicles, referencing the terror of Dodge Challenger and Charger Hellcat drivers, F80 and G80 BMW M3, and of course the Nissan Altima.
As a counterpoint to the VF8, Jason discusses his recent experience driving the newly refreshed Tesla Model Y Plaid, and how he still thinks they are some of the best appliances on the road. Jason was able to test the most recent version of Tesla Full Self Driving (FSD), and how it’s made great improvements in recent years - even without LiDAR.
A great appliance, the VinFast VF8 is not. Jason and Derek share their findings in their individual driving experiences - in agreement on nearly all of the shortcomings of which there are many. At just 10,000 miles, the VF8 has experienced broken suspension components, dangerous throttle calibration, and other poorly-executed features that make us wonder how it was ever allowed to be sold to the public in the first place.
There are also dumpsters involved. More on that in this riveting episode of The Carmudgeon Show.
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