Sam Abuelsamid  0:00  
Coming up on episode 215 of wheel bearings. We've got the 2021 Mazda Miata RF grand touring the Hyundai Sonata n line, the Mazda MX 30, Evie, the Ford Maverick, and British drivers looking for a V's when they can't find gas. All that more coming up next. Did you know you can support wheel bearings directly? Head to Patreon comm slash wheel bearings, media, and you can become a patron today. Your contributions will help fund the platforms and tools we use to bring the podcast to you. And exclusives improvements are already on the way thanks to your generosity. So if you want to be part of an automotive podcast like no other head to patreon.com slash wheel bearings media

This is Episode 215 of wheel bearings. I'm Sam Abuelsamid from guidehouse insights

Nicole Wakelin  0:54  
I am Nicole wakelin from true car

Roberto Baldwin  0:57  
and I am Roberto Baldwin from Kelley Blue Book.

Nicole Wakelin  1:01  
I almost said that a good thing. I

Roberto Baldwin  1:03  
wouldn't I wouldn't pick somewhere else to pick somewhere else.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:06  
Okay. Well since Robbie has been so bogged down in work the past week that he didn't get a chance to drive anything. We will start with the call Nicole What did you drive?

Nicole Wakelin  1:19  
I had the 21 Hyundai Sonata but not just the Hyundai Sonata I have the Sonata and line which is sort of the performance version of the Sonata which sounds honestly it sounds a little bit city silly because like it's a sedan it's a performance version. It's a Hyundai none of those things seem to fit together like you've taken these disparate pieces that don't belong together. They do they actually come together and they come together quite nicely the engine in this I didn't write the specs I just read the horsepower because apparently that's what I was focused on. 290 horsepower 311 pound feet of torque CVT so now the big thing is so 290 horsepower in the end line the rest of the lineup you get either 180 or 191 so it's a pretty big jump in horsepower it's not an insignificant change. It is a two no I'm gonna find it No, I'm not gonna find it here we go to two point.

Sam Abuelsamid  2:18  
Did you say it has a CVT?

Nicole Wakelin  2:20  
Oh, I'm sorry. It does not have a CVT. It has an eight speed You're right. I don't know why I said that. It does not. I saw the wrinkle in your brow. I was like wait, I said something wrong.

Sam Abuelsamid  2:30  
Somehow the idea of putting a high performance into this thing with a CVT just seems totally uncommon.

Nicole Wakelin  2:39  
Clearly. I need one more sip of my coffee. Let's try that again. That's an eight speed dual clutch automatic. How's that sound a little bit better. Yeah. 2.5 liter turbocharged for at least it's 290 horsepower. That's versus the 180 or 191 depending on which engines you choose for the rest of the lineup. So it's a pretty big jump in horsepower. And you do feel it, there's a there's a big difference in how this one drives. It's more responsive, it's more aggressive. If you're getting on the highway, you don't really have to think about how close that guy is behind you. You've got enough power to accelerate wherever you want to accelerate, which is really nice. So it does make this sort of almost kind of mild mannered sedan, a hot little sedan it's fun to drive like I really I truly enjoyed it I like the Sonata anyway and any of its guises because I've driven a couple of the others. So it's no surprise that I like this one even more. And it comes with all sorts of extra little goodies that you know if you think of it, it's like the top of the Sonata lineup and then they shove this cool engine in there too. So you get eight way power front seats, there's Nappa leather and the seats are special n performance seats so they're a little bit a little bit more bolstered, not like so heavily bolstered that you feel like you're being strapped in and you can't move like if you have a larger frame you can still get comfortable but they are a little bit more bolstered. You have the upgraded infotainment which has a 10.25 touchscreen so there's nice, large touchscreen, you get navigation, you get Apple CarPlay you get Android Auto, you get a 12 speaker Bose audio system that sounds fantastic. You get wireless charging. So basically think of this as your top trim of the Sonata. This is what you're getting but they put the cool engine. I love it but you are going to pay a bit of a premium for it. So if you went with a bass, cheapest version of the Sonata, you can get its 24th at just over 24,000 24,150 you want to do the end line. It is 34,100 so you're paying an extra 10 grand but mind you, you know you're getting extra features. You get extra safety, you get all the things. Yeah, it's not just like oh here we gave you an engine we'd like $10,000 for it. It's we gave you an engine And all this other stuff we'd like $10,000 for it I kind of think it's worth it I mean if you like the performance I don't feel like the other versions of the Sonata you get in them and you drive them you think this is awful This is a milk toast sedan it has no words it's not like they're terrible. Sometimes you find when you move up like engines especially in sedans the base engine is a miserable place to live like it has no power it has no response and you don't want to drive it you step up and suddenly this is what should be the base trip like get rid of that other engine not so in this one this one feels responsive no matter what you drive but if you sort of crave that little extra bit little then go with the headline and it's roomy it's you know you can easily sit three people in the backseat it's not one of those like we say it's it's three but only if they're very skinny teenagers or toddlers no three adults can sit back there so I'm a fan

Roberto Baldwin  5:54  
I do love the Hyundai Sonata a lot I drove it in the first time we drove it was the Korean spec so I had a smaller engine but we drove it in Korea so it was okay and then later that they let us drive the the US spec on like their proving grounds in Korea but no I sat in the back I sat in the front and he was like this is a really nice sedan we you know, myself and the other people who were driving with me back when that was the thing we really enjoyed it yeah no I'm I'm a fan of Hyundai Sonata and I think the headline I'm sure is pretty dope. Sounds like

Nicole Wakelin  6:30  
I'd like the styling on it because it's it strikes this neat balance where it's like when you make a sedan like you don't want it to look the but it also shouldn't look like it's like a little pocket rocket of a hatchback either so because you make them so aggressive and like now you guys have gone too far. They did a nice like we will hit a little we will keep it looking like a nice sedan but we're gonna not make it boring so when you look at the front of it like the way the lights and the yeah the trim sort of that Yeah, the way they come down the hood. The way everything is accented It looks good like you don't just er could just walk by it and think it or whatever you walk by they go that's kind of a good looking car. So I like how they did it.

Sam Abuelsamid  7:10  
And, and it's not over designed, you know, as we've talked about with some other brands in this segment it it it's got enough flourishes to make it interesting without making it look like they didn't know where to stop, right.

Nicole Wakelin  7:25  
And that's what happens in so many and especially in the front end like the back you're like okay, they did a nice job. And then you come around the front like, oh, there's so much happening. So many angles, so much stuff. There's plastic, there's Chrome, there's vents that don't need to be there what is happening and it's overwhelming and it makes it look messy and cluttered and not cool. This one I'm like oh no, there's just an affair that you think Okay, nice looking sedan not seriously, if this is what you want. Go find yourself like a civic hatchback or something. This is not your car.

Roberto Baldwin  7:53  
Yeah. Yeah, it's funny because you talk about how the front has always been aggressive in the back sort of like, and I mean, the reason for that is, you know, for buffering and whatnot, but it always looks like they got super excited about the delay in the front of the car. And then by the time they got to the end, it was like 11 o'clock at night. They're all full of pizza. They're like, you know, just kind of just kind of shave it off. It's all gone.

Nicole Wakelin  8:15  
There's a spot to open the trunk sticker bags right in the middle. Good. Let's go.

Roberto Baldwin  8:19  
Let's go. Let's go and we're done. We're done. Look at all the stuff the cool stuff. We did the front. It's awesome. Don't

Nicole Wakelin  8:25  
look at the back. We're sleepy. We've had pizza.

Roberto Baldwin  8:27  
It's every hobby I've ever done ever. You're just like Yeah. Oh god.

Nicole Wakelin  8:32  
You're done.

Sam Abuelsamid  8:38  
Excellent. Excellent. All right. So I had something quite different. I had the 2021 me Mazda Miata RF Grand Touring which you know is longtime listeners will know I am a fan of miatas I own one and the RF of course is the retractable hardtop version and the the Grand Touring you know has all the all the options it has all the goods all the goodies on there. Yeah, I love driving miatas Fortunately, this one came with a manual transmission, not the optional automatic Yay. No one should ever buy a Miata with an automatic transmission.

Roberto Baldwin  9:23  
That's sacrilege.

Sam Abuelsamid  9:26  
Exactly. And it also came in what I personally consider to be probably the best color available in the entire automotive industry today. Soul red crystal,

Nicole Wakelin  9:37  
it is the best color of any car. I love how that looks

Roberto Baldwin  9:41  
mas is really good. My reds are

Nicole Wakelin  9:44  
they should get rid of just make those reds. Get rid of all the other colors just

Sam Abuelsamid  9:50  
make everything in Seoul crystal red and they would probably triple their sales

Nicole Wakelin  9:54  
like What did you buy? I bought the red car everybody would know what it was the red car company that beautiful,

Roberto Baldwin  9:59  
listening often Distance lights yeah there it is there's

Sam Abuelsamid  10:02  
it's it's a it's a gorgeous red and yeah I spent some time yesterday I went out for a drive in the countryside I am less a fan of the RF version. I guess I would be more a fitness buff so I'd be more of a fan of the RF version if I was driving a Miata in Michigan your route you know I drive my Miata you know when the weather's nice i don't i don't drive it with you know I don't drive it in the wintertime it's never exposed to salt. So if I was using a Miata, you know in regions where you get winter weather year round, then not to get winter weather year round but of those driving a year round in regions where we get winter weather. I would be I would probably be more of a fan of the RF Seattle How about

Roberto Baldwin  10:53  
There we go. Seattle Woodward this rainy not salty

Sam Abuelsamid  10:57  
raining all the time. Yeah. So you know the RF unlike the the previous the third generation Miata, they first introduced a retractable hardtop on the third Gen Miata. And that one was a three piece that when you looked at it, when it was up, when you looked at it in profile, it looked exactly the same as a convertible and it fit in it completely retracted under the lid in the same space as the convertible top. And what the, you know what the top down, it looked exactly like any other Miata convertible. That was the MC generation. For the nd they they created this RF, which is partially retractable, so when you retract it, the roof panel goes down, pops down behind the seats, and the rear window also drops down. And as it's going through this little dance of pieces moving around the seat, the B pillar lifts up and moves back and then goes back into its original position. So what you're left with is kind of a more of a Targa than a convertible. And it does have a you know the bet, because the back window drops down, you do have airflow through the under the target bar. I generally prefer, you know, full blown convertibles top completely down, I look around, there's nothing nothing around me. That said, this thing still drives like a Miata and still drives fantastic. And one of the cool things when when Mazda did this current generation Miata A few years ago, they actually reduced the weight from the previous generation got it back down to the point where at least the regular convertible version is almost the same weight as the original 1990 Miata. You know, it's about 2100 pounds. The RF of the thing is about 100 pounds or so heavier, because of the the top mechanism but it's it's easy to get in and out of compared to a lot of smaller convertibles. You know, if you have physical mobility issues that might still be a challenge because it is still fairly low, but it's not, it's not bad to get in and out of, it's, it's reasonably roomy. And it's quick, it handles great. The gearboxes you know shifts, there's a slick shifting gearbox to six speed manual transmission. You know, it's not, it's not a particularly powerful car by modern standards. You know, it's, it's a two liter four cylinder naturally aspirated 181 horsepower, 151 pounds feet of torque, but in a car that weighs you know, between 21 and 2200 pounds, that's plenty. Frank, frankly, a car probably weighed 567 100 pounds more would still be plenty, but it feels really good. And, you know, in this vehicle, the base convertible miatas start at a little over $26,000. The RF starts at $33,045 for the club, which is the base model and that gets you 17 inch wheels, nine speaker Bose audio system.

The Grand Touring that I drove is another 15 $100 so it's 34 or 525. That gets you a few additional things like heated leather seats, which if you're going to drive it in the wintertime, you know or even you know fall or early spring with the top open, but it's still kind of crisp out but the roads are clear. Having those heated seats is really nice. You know, it keeps your backside warm, but you can still enjoy the open air. It's got navigation, adaptive front lighting, that starts at 34 or 525. All in the one that I've gotten a driveway right now. The only option on that is that soul red crystal metallic, which is an extra $895 and it's worth every penny. Worth every penny. worth it. worth it. So you can find your car with delivery it came to from CES you can catch a 36,003 65 which is I think, you know pretty reasonable price for a really fabulous sports car. And as I said, you know with the with the hardtop is as an RF. It's eminently drivable in wintertime, just put some snow tires on it some winter tires so you get decent traction. And I have I have driven miatas in the past in in the middle of winter, I've driven them in February, I had a hard top a retractable hardtop and see the third generation model 1213 years ago, in the middle of February it came came on winter tires, it was fine, it was great, you know, it's got traction control, stability, control, abs, all that stuff. So it's very easy to drive, you know, obviously it doesn't have a whole lot of ground clearance. So if the snow is very deep, you might want to leave at home and take something else. But other than that, it's you know, it's great. It's a great all weather car, and then you get open air motoring as well. The the Miata still has monster's older generation infotainment system which is okay it's the seven seven inch screen that sits above the dash there you know, but it has support for Android Auto and Apple CarPlay so you can use those and it's what does it have this thing what does it have? It does not it does not have a touchscreen Okay, thank you. No I think you know what, your hands enemy out of your hands should be on the steering wheel not on the not on the touchscreen maybe on the CBI

Nicole Wakelin  16:39  
role like giving him okay

Sam Abuelsamid  16:44  
just just set it up wherever you want before you go and then just don't touch it again just keep your hands on the wheel or on the shifter that's never that's all you need to touch

Roberto Baldwin  16:53  
on the radio on put your put put your favorite CD on, or I guess audio album I don't know put your favorite album on.

Nicole Wakelin  17:04  
Roberto like 1995 your favorite CD

Roberto Baldwin  17:07  
put in your favorite cassette tape

Sam Abuelsamid  17:09  
I'm not even sure if this thing has

Roberto Baldwin  17:10  
a CD nothing has a CD player you know I was thinking about CD players yesterday cuz I'm working on the jag right now because it feels like it has some sort of it's it's it's been starved of gas at certain instances so I don't know if it's like vapor lock or if it's dirty fuel and jack I don't know some try to figure it out. And I was sitting in a yesterday listening to it. And I was looking at the CD, the CD player and I was like, I got some CDs in the house. I guess. There is a CD and my wife put a mix CD that I had made in like 2001 in there so but yeah, CD players kids. The future

Nicole Wakelin  17:43  
I don't think I have a single CD left. I bet my husband does somewhere but I don't have any. Yeah, I

Roberto Baldwin  17:48  
don't have anything that plays CDs in my house other than like probably my PlayStation.

Nicole Wakelin  17:53  
Oh yeah. Okay, that would play CDs. That there you go. That's how I could play CD. Oh, I

Roberto Baldwin  17:58  
have a I have a blu ray burner that I absolutely never use. I'm sure they probably play CDs.

Nicole Wakelin  18:04  
There you go. So you have to between the three of us we have exactly three options,

Roberto Baldwin  18:08  
or three options. And they're all in my house.

Sam Abuelsamid  18:10  
I have a I have a DVD burner around here so external USB DVD.

Nicole Wakelin  18:18  
We have that thing maybe I don't know.

Roberto Baldwin  18:20  
Mine's not even in a case not

Sam Abuelsamid  18:21  
like you have that DVD burner There you go. So that's four we have now on here and yeah, and and I have a PlayStation upstairs. So yeah, that's fine. That's fine. I think there's actually an old DVD player in a closet somewhere. Oh, that's sick, didn't get rid of

Roberto Baldwin  18:38  
point seven, five. That's 5.75 abilities to play.

Nicole Wakelin  18:45  
Let us play one in a car. But you know, whatever.

Roberto Baldwin  18:48  
The last Prince concert I went to the princess when Prince was doing that tour was playing the piano. And at the end of the concert, they were handing out CDs. And I was like oh this is awesome. And I just looked at it and like what to do with it. I still have it. It's still wrapped it's like you know it's one of the last concerts where he passed away but I've just like and it's still wrapped not because I'm like oh I gotta save this forever because I'd love prints and I love you know his music and I went to the store then he passed away now I just wrapped because I don't know where to play. I guess I got played in the car.

Nicole Wakelin  19:18  
I just go

Unknown Speaker  19:20  
there we go in the carpet.

Sam Abuelsamid  19:21  
When I when I graduated in 1990. And I bought my Mustang my first Mustang. Yeah, CDs were still comparatively new there were about six years old or so at that point. And I actually like the following year. I went to it came with a single CD player and an in dash CD player. But I went out and got the Pioneer back then pioneer had these multi Disc players that you could get and they had a cartridge system that you could put six CDs into and it was you could use it in the car or use it in with a home CD change That accepted the same cartridges. So over time I bought tons of those cartridges and put all the CD, all the CDs in there. And I would just swap those in and out and I installed that thing in the trunk and that was great. But not anymore.

Nicole Wakelin  20:13  
CD changer in the trunk of my beetle. He had to go out and it would always get stuck and then when it got stuck, you'd have to like wait till you're parked somewhere and go out of your trunk. Yeah, my husband did the coolest thing he did a very I'm an engineer and I have bungee cords kind of thing. A car that did not have a CD player back when everyone had CD players. So we had a giant boombox that played CDs and he put the CD player but the problem is you go over bumps so he had like used bungee cords that he put through and like had like like your entire backseat is now to play CDs and he was like yeah like we were in college he's like what's the problem? Okay, that's fine I guess and I could still see the image that was

Sam Abuelsamid  20:55  
like a perfectly reasonable solution to me

Nicole Wakelin  20:57  
right see cuz engineers yeah floating around. Yeah, we could go for big bumps he's like look it didn't skip I'm like are you aiming for bumps just to prove how cool your little CD setup yes

Roberto Baldwin  21:07  
he was he was that's how he moved you

Nicole Wakelin  21:14  
can make a CD player not skip in his little whatever the heck it was. I'm in

Sam Abuelsamid  21:19  
30 years later

Roberto Baldwin  21:20  
Let us share our life together and have children

Nicole Wakelin  21:23  
cobbling things together with bungee cords and two by fours so not much has changed.

Roberto Baldwin  21:27  
That's all we need. Really. I buy bungee cord all the time, but I'm at Harbor Freight tools like he knew I probably need some more bungee

Nicole Wakelin  21:34  
bins of so many bungee cords

Sam Abuelsamid  21:39  
Alright, enough enough of the Miata just you know if you want a sports car go buy a Miata. They're great. If

Roberto Baldwin  21:45  
you're too tall, you can get a big deal wrong. That's the big Miata for tall people.

Sam Abuelsamid  21:51  
Yes. The only flaw in the BRC is there's no converter. Yeah,

Roberto Baldwin  21:55  
that is but boo urns.

Sam Abuelsamid  22:00  
Alright. So this week, Nicole and I both did some traveling. Nicole took a couple of trips. Let's start with the first one. Okay. Which was to Tennessee to drive your

Nicole Wakelin  22:15  
truck so I went to Tennessee and drove the Ford Maverick which is their baby truck it's the littlest of the trucks I feel like there's a million different yeah little baby turkeys like reverse like rocking it like it's a baby tiniest little track it but it is still a truck like there's this sort of sense they get smaller and smaller like the Ranger. You know, it can do all the software and stuff and it's capable at small chocolate like wait, we're smaller than a ranger. What are we doing now? The Maverick is it's a great option for people who want a little bit of truck but aren't going off road and you know really heavy duty off roading don't need the heavy duty capability. But you want a little bit of that it's like a very livable truck that especially the bed there are roughly a billion different ways you can configure things in the bed of this truck. So Ford is going to sell you whatever kind of pieces you want but they didn't want you to have to feel like you have to buy pieces because this is an affordable truck it starts at 19 995 it's not like this you know $50,000 truck and you have all this money to spare because clearly you've got a big budget and they're going to buy all your accessories. They want people to be able to use it however they want to use it. So the way they've designed the bed, there are areas where you can slide in like a two by six I guess it would be and you can create partitions in there. Then you can slide pieces of plywood or whatever on top and you can create two levels and you want it to be two levels all the way deep or you just want like a second level on the back. But only one level on the front. It even has the tailgate it has like the cable that holds the tailgate up you can move that cable so you can readjust your tailgate so instead of fully opening you can just have a party open and when you do that, you can literally put a piece of plywood in the back and it comes directly and sort of props perfectly on that tailgate so you can either store stuff or once again you've created multiple levels and things it is the most versatile truck bed for such a small truck you wouldn't really sort of expect them to have thought that much about it but they did they were really trying to get to that person who's like I just need that extra versatility. But I don't want the heat I don't want even as big as a ranger and I don't need the capability as a ranger and I definitely don't want what an F 150 offers. And I think the maverick does a good job of that. They are very specific in saying this is not your I'm going to crawl up rocks in the weekend truck like if you want to we drove up a fairly rugged trail. But I mean it wasn't like we had to crawl it wasn't like you had to have any particular skill set. It was loose rock and stuff but you could have you could have probably done it and a heck of a lot of you know decent SUVs as well. And I asked about it it's like you know if you that's if you want that really super super capability if you really want to be able to do that and to go offer it every weekend. That's where we have the Ranger. That's the Rangers for it. This is not a ranger. This is a maverick. And it's got the other nice thing about it is there's three trims starts at 19,000. So it's affordable, it has a standard hybrid engine. So you're getting a hybrid truck and that's the standard powertrain. That's the only powertrain that you're getting and it's fantastic it's going to make sure that you're on the on the base and it's going to make sure that you're able to do everything that you need to do it doesn't feel like this like sloppy underpowered like oh I put a hybrid in a truck you know they haven't hybrid now available in the f150 so they've they've got this hybrid thing they've got it figured out it's smooth, it's responsive. I really liked it I thought that the interior even is a very comfortable easy to live with interior I guess it's not something that you feel like like sometimes when you get a cheaper vehicle it feels every bit the cheaper vehicle This doesn't it doesn't feel like it's like feel like it's cheap. It doesn't feel like you've got like plastic fantastic everywhere they used you know it's not leather and wood trims and metal everything but it's it's still attractive and well designed. And they have really neat stuff on the doors the doors you know when you have water bottles you have a standard water bottle it fits you get any of those sort of fat water bottles or taller water bottles you can't put them on the door you can't put yes he's holding one up right now in fact I believe that even has a Mustang logo on it that you're holding up saying oh look at that look. brand you are but you can fit they the way they've done the door handle normally you have the armrest that goes like fully the length of the door. It kind of only goes partway like the handle is a partway situation so there's a spot where you could put a gigantic water bottle in there and it would hold which is kind of nice again it's just like sort of little things that make it more livable

so the interior is really really well designed. I you know there's a couple little small trucks like you've got the Hyundai Santa Cruz out there. I feel like the maverick is a more Truckee truck How's that? And you have the hybrid like that's your base engine if that's if you want the base that's your your cheapest engine you can get a turbocharged four cylinder there's a little bit more horsepower a little bit more torque. Yeah, if you want that go for it. But it's not like driving the hybrid you feel like you're driving hybrid. It never really feels like it you never feels underpowered, you never feel like it's lacking. So if you want to go up, okay, but you don't have to if you want this super affordable small dimensions truck that actually is easy to move through a city easy to park in a parking lot. Easy and narrow spaces. affordable, has just enough capability and an unbelievably versatile interior. Maverick

Roberto Baldwin  27:52  
Maverick Yeah, I like the idea that Hyundai and Ford have both sort of looked at what Honda has been doing with originalline and said you know what, not everyone needs a gigantic truck and when as soon as they put the maverick on sale, the amount of people who are like oh yeah, we totally want that. That. That seems like something that you know, I mean, a maverick is like a maverick or originalline or like the perfect size for people like me who do like you know, I like to go places and do things and sometimes it'd be nice to have a truck but most of them I just rent a truck whenever I need one when we had the ridge line it was great because we could go and buy big giant things and put mulch in the back of the car because that's what you do. And ya know $20,000 so cheapest Ford it's it's no they're gonna sell a ton of these and they're you know at the at the expense of of the bridge line and at the expense of the Santa Cruz just because Ford is so well the F 150 is a nation upon its in itself versus the rest of the world when it comes to vehicles. And so when you have that

Sam Abuelsamid  28:56  
150 business is bigger than a lot of carmakers

Roberto Baldwin  28:59  
yeah it's bigger Yeah, it's bigger than Nike I think I read somewhere it's pretty big Yeah. So so when you if you're a Ford person which you know I grew up in a small town lot of people who drive a lot of trucks and there was still the Ford versus Chevy fights so I'm sure people are you know they're I'm not gonna buy a Honda Ridgeline I'm not gonna buy a Hyundai I'm gonna buy a Ford and I think they're gonna sell a ton of these and yeah, I can't wait to try it and pick up mulch and so on.

Nicole Wakelin  29:29  
And you could pick up a lot of moats like they had its It was interesting, they had it set up in a couple different configurations just so that we can kind of see like the kind of versatility they wanted us to be able to understand that it had in the trunk and they had like a couple of bikes in the back and then they had adjusted that tailgate to that sort of halfway position. They provides a nice stop for the you know for that stuff. And then they have the bed rails that they have options for the where you can you know, there's tiedown clamps everywhere. So you can see your care everything they even had. They had that they had a full of sporting equipment where they showed how they sort of Like levelled things differently and like there's a you know the net and things you throw like footballs or soccer balls taking and then like oh but if it opens because you have this little part you know you put your little pieces of wood in there and now they're just floating around a little spot and sort of bouncing all over the back of your truck and they had you know they had a lot of different configurations to show you and there's a lot of versatility they also did something really neat with us, and I'm forgetting the what they actually called it but there are they made things very 3d they're going to do a lot of 3d printing compatibility with this. So there is a clip on the back of the center console and it's just like a little clip that sneaks in and it's tiny little thing. You can make 3d printed stuff using that clip so that you could have say you want the back of that to be a space to hold your phone and you want a 3d printer special phone holder do it you want to 3d print a little trash can do it. You want to 3d print some fancy thing to hold whatever your phone and your laptop or just you can end it just clicks right in and they have the same thing inside when you lift up the rear seats they flip right up and there's storage in there that again there's some there's some there's the ability to make stuff in 3d print stuff for this that is exceptional I mean if you want to go and you want to pay for Ford stuff knock yourself out Ford will sell it to you but they wanted this to be you know this is an entry level truck they want it to be something that if you are younger especially you know younger folks are more likely to be playing around with the 3d printed thing you can make this work for whatever lifestyle it is that you want. I thought this was amazing and it I think it feels like a truck like you were saying you know a few people love their Ford's the F 150 is a nation unto itself. If you're that guy, or that girl and you love trucks, you're like I'm not driving that I live in a city. I'm not driving an F 150 in the city. This is your chance to get something that still does Truckee stuff gives you just enough easy access to the bed. It's not as tall as you know what f150 is low. It is a very versatile truck. I think they're gonna sell a zillion of these things.

Roberto Baldwin  32:02  
Oh, yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid  32:03  
I think you're right. And you know, going back to before the two of you joined the show, and for four years, we've said that the ridge line is really all the truck that most truck buyers actually need. You know, it's got more than enough capacity, and it's big enough. And now you know, I would say these new smaller trucks you know, the the maverick and the Santa Cruz are an even better fit for most people than then even originalline that the current generation Ranger is actually quite a bit larger than the last generation Ranger that that went out of production in I think 2011 or 2012. This one, this one is significantly larger than the current one is significantly larger. The Maverick is actually much closer in size to that old Ranger it's actually length in total length. It's midway between the regular cab and extended cab versions of the old Ranger. So it's a little bit shorter than the old extended cab Ranger but a little bit longer than a regular cab and with this you get a full Crew Cab so you got room for five people. You've got the beds shorter than it was in the old Rangers but you know that's that's fine it's still I think plenty big enough for what most people need for truck ish stuff. You know I like what you're saying Nicole but the you know some of those touches like the the cables that hold the tailgate. Because when when you put a sheet of plywood in there, yeah, there's four feet between the bed rails but not between the wheel wells. So you know if the it's set up so that when you put that when you put that bed halfway down or the tailgate halfway down, you slide in that those sheets of plywood, they sit on top of the wheel wells right and across the tailgate and it's actually sloped down slightly towards the front so that it's not going to slide off the back. So you know you can put those those big sheets of plywood in there. You can do all those those cool things with it. And you know, especially you know gas prices are up compared to where they were not so long ago. You know that that hybrid, you know, 40 miles per gallon city. That's great fuel economy. And so I think that I think that this will be appealing to a lot of people there are a couple of things that people should note though. You know at that base $20,000 price point. You are You are that you know for did have to skimp on a few things to get to hit that price point. Like the a lot of the Driver Assist stuff. That is part of the copilot 360 package is not included. It's not standard on there at that $20,000 price point it's an x so it's an extra 500 $540 for the copilot 360 package that gets you the the blind spot monitoring cross traffic alert. You but you also get a full size spare with that and the lane keeping system. You do get automatic emergency braking is standard but You know those other touches you will have to pay a little extra for and you know if you if you start optioning this thing up you know just like with buying a ranger or an F 150 the price does climb pretty steadily like the two liter turbo with four wheel drive and the trailer towing package and you know on a Lariat that'll get you up to about $37,000 which is still you know, I mean that's cheaper than than what you're going to pay for a ranger Lariat right but you know it's it's not quite as cheap anymore

Nicole Wakelin  35:33  
it does climb up and but you know that's like a You're right. That's almost like a warning with any truck like starting 30,000 but what you're probably gonna eat unless you're just like I want that cheap truck to do cheap truck things I want the base trim. I don't care about all the bells and whistles trucks more than it feels like more than any other kind of vehicle out there suddenly you've doubled the price of your truck you're like I thought all I did was get heated seats what just happened suddenly you've doubled your cost so it's really yeah it's super easy to do and truly like you said Sam This is no exception if you start adding options and they do offer you know even on the base trim, you can option that turbocharged engine you can option all wheel drive and the tow package and for copilot 360 and all that stuff you start packing that stuff onto the base trim suddenly your base trim is not as affordable I but I appreciate that that stuff is still available on the base like if I don't want to go up to a lake because there are

Sam Abuelsamid  36:29  
some people

Nicole Wakelin  36:30  
right like if you are some people that will live without

Sam Abuelsamid  36:33  
that stuff

Nicole Wakelin  36:34  
exactly if you don't like if you just want to get okay safety's important to me I want to add on the Ford copilot 360 just add that don't worry about all the other stuff you're like you know what I don't care about any of this I just wish I had the more powerful engine on the base model okay go ahead and do that you know i i appreciate that they the way that they package this it makes it again just like that bed it makes it very easy to make this the truck you want it to be with just the options that you want and not being stuck getting like all sorts of stuff you don't you want one little thing oh I have to move up a whole trim level and I just blew an extra $1,000 or something stupid like that you know I'm gonna

Roberto Baldwin  37:12  
say that my wife really liked the ridge line for its price and was very disappointed that wasn't a hybrid and she's just like well why isn't it a hybrid I'm like oh there's a whole well there's yeah let's just let's just move on to another car when we were shopping for cars. She's like well why isn't it a hybrid I'm like

Nicole Wakelin  37:31  
it doesn't matter if you don't like it let's move on

Sam Abuelsamid  37:36  
but I was just pricing out Ranger or excuse me Mavericks here and even even if you go the the mid level trim and I think the XSLT is that's the mid level is kind of the sweet spot for the maverick I think that's going to have the the equipment that most people are going to want and that's that's the one that's probably selling the biggest numbers yeah it's under 27 with with the Excel t luxury package that gets you you know the Driver Assist stuff and and the full size spare and everything else and as a hybrid you're still well under $27,000 delivered so i think that you know there you can this is still you know a very affordable truck especially compared to anything else and like you said it'll it'll do almost everything almost all the truck stuff that most people will want for you

Roberto Baldwin  38:27  
mpg that's if you're if

Nicole Wakelin  38:29  
you're trying to do like if you're using it as a work truck it's not going to like if you're someone who's I don't know a contractor you build houses you you know, a plumber or whatever do lawns or something. Yeah, you're gonna want a full size truck because this isn't enough but for most people who just want a little bit of truck, but they're not doing legitimate I'm making a living kind of work out of their truck. This is more than enough you know?

Sam Abuelsamid  38:53  
This This will haul all your

Roberto Baldwin  38:55  
all your bicycles, your molds, all the things and your soccer ball hose. It can tow package it can go up to 4000 pounds towing so if you need to tow like motorcycles or side by sides or skied or whether it's sea doos or whatever, you're fine. You're fine jet skis. Yeah, this is 40 miles per gallon. Alright.

Sam Abuelsamid  39:22  
So the The other thing that we drove this week, both you and I drove it, Nicole Yes. Is the Mazda MX 30 it's Mazdas first Evie. What do you What did you think?

Nicole Wakelin  39:40  
I liked it. Oh gosh, I feel like

Roberto Baldwin  39:47  
there has to be a lot of Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid  39:50  
Okay, so here's the thing, like a lot of caveats.

Nicole Wakelin  39:53  
Okay, so it makes 31st TV go monster for doing your first TV. I think that's great. But it is a walk 100 miles of range now I get it most of us don't drive more than 100 miles in a day I mean that is more than enough to get you through the typical day. Can I just tell you I had the worst range anxiety Do you know what he did? There was a spot where they said make sure you don't take the first turn make sure you take the second turn oh we get what did I do? I took the first turn Oh anyway and it says to me, you know in 10 miles but what only 10 miles wait Am I turning around in 10 miles? Or is that just like 10 miles and I'm taking it oh my gosh if I have to run 10 miles then that's 10 miles back that's 20 miles long is this drive I don't like doing the math in my head I'm thinking Did I just burn through like a fifth of my range because I made a wrong turn and I didn't totally fine it just like sort of picked up the drive route later on. But I had that moment of thinking oh god if you there are spots where if you make a wrong turn on the highway you're suddenly driving an extra 20 miles right and it's like the pain oh god I thought I was gonna be home in five miles I'm gonna be home in 20 so I did have a little bit of range anxiety my own fault because I made a wrong turn but you know I think other humans make wrong turns to time. Yeah, right. So that the 100 mile range I get what they're saying with that part of their you know, during the presentation they said people don't need the range they think they do, you don't need to be able to drive 350 miles every day. But if you buy that it's kind of like the truck thing. If you're buying the giant f150 to haul air most of the time you're spending a lot of money on a truck you don't need if you're buying a vehicle with 350 miles of range you're spending a lot of extra money to get range that you don't need I get it but if I it made me that made me nervous I had super range anxiety when I made that turn it on like that is the worst range anxiety I've ever had in my life and I suddenly got it I was like this is it because I'm in the desert I'm gonna die out here in California when I run

Roberto Baldwin  41:57  
out of place to get lost and by the way right exactly

Nicole Wakelin  41:59  
I had like half of my coffee for the morning I'm like oh god I'm gonna die all I got is a half a Starbucks I'm never gonna make

Roberto Baldwin  42:07  
it I'm gonna ration it out for a day

Nicole Wakelin  42:09  
you get a ration it out sip it slowly but I mean that was so the 100 mile range is is a little bit like I don't know how you feel about that the car itself though I mean it drove nicely it you have that beautiful what was the color the sole red metallic Sam

Sam Abuelsamid  42:26  
you just Sol Sol Sol red crystal Sol right

Nicole Wakelin  42:28  
crystal you know you got this beautiful Mazda colors it's it charges quickly because the battery is so small. It starts at 33 four so it's relatively affordable ish. And it has that you know really smooth quiet Evie ride they did some neat stuff on the interior they have they really were all about the sustainability. So two things they did when you touch the door panels there's felt that maybe think of those little felt animals that people make you ever seen little felted animal creatures that people do as a hobby so it was really soft It was like really nice felt and then on the center console like underneath it where there was little storage area and then where your cupholders were in the couplers these little covers that flip open it was cork which I guess harkens back to something Mazda did at some point they made stuff made cork something yeah back

Sam Abuelsamid  43:20  
back when the company started yeah that's what they did they started Started off making cork stuff so before the long before they got into making cars

Nicole Wakelin  43:32  
so it's like a call back to Mazdas roots and it does look really cool but I also I was a little concerned about that because it's court but it's not as if it has any kind doesn't feel like it has any kind of particular finish or coating or treatment or anything over the top of it

Roberto Baldwin  43:49  
we were down

Nicole Wakelin  43:50  
yeah and the same with a felt and my concern was the first time you managed to spill your coffee or drop a french fry on there. You're gonna have like how easy is it going to be to clean up stains on that and I even thought about that on this on the door trim because if you live someplace where it rains or where it snows if you have to open that window to pick up drive thru food or to pay a toll or something it gets soaked like you can get a lot of rain and a lot of snow on that it'll make a mark on some leather that you kind of have to like Egads. Like to you know, clean it off. I thought what will this do to felt if it's constantly exposed to the elements and maybe monster saying okay, other than the food thing, we don't care because right now we're only selling it in California. And we don't have rain and we definitely don't have snow down here. So maybe, maybe that was it, but I loved how it looked but I was a little bit nervous about how well that would hold up with day to day use. So that was my summer. Yeah,

Sam Abuelsamid  44:47  
I suspect that they have addressed that. You know, they've probably thought about that. You know, one of the things they did talk about in the presentation is the use of Yeah of recycled materials in the interior and you know some of the stuff they that they have inherently have to limit how much recycled material they incorporate into that like that fabric is made from 20% recycled threads, recycled fibers you know so that's something that you know and the reason part of the reason why they have to do that is to get the durability that they need you know because they talked about you know, when you're recycling fabrics, you know, every time you recycle it you know the fibers themselves get broken down and they get cut up and and so you don't get the you know, you're not going to get as much durability so you can recycle things like that maybe three four or five times before they are no longer useful for at least for that kind of application. So that you know that felt you know only includes you know, 20% recycled materials and the rest is virgin materials in order to get the durability the ability to clean it that you talked about I suspect with the court even though it's not immediately apparent that you know that they have you know incorporated something in there to you know to allow you know to limit its absorption of anything you spill on it because you know, they know stuff is gonna get

Nicole Wakelin  46:29  
spilled i would i would think that I'm like that's my assumption like okay, they've considered the fact that it's literally part of those covers or by your cupholders, you're reaching to flip open that cover and you've got that you know, Starbucks frappuccino in your hand that's dripping molasses and Carmel and whatever and it's going to get on things but I mean it's not a perfectly I mean it definitely it looks beautiful and it feels beautiful. Like it has that that the cork texture it's not like they smoothed it out so much that it no longer feels like cork you can feel it there's crevices and cracks. It's like an English muffin like a Thomas's all the nooks and crannies. So you wonder if those nooks and crannies would tend to hold on to stuff. I don't know, maybe I had too many kids in my car over my life who managed to get things stuck in perforated leather seats that hold everything in those stupid little dots. That's kind of what I was thinking of.

Sam Abuelsamid  47:15  
We've had, you know, we've had cork floor mats in our kitchen. And yeah, you know, yeah, you know, by the stove and by the sea by the sink, you know, and we've built stuff on it. That cleans up fine, okay, it hasn't really been a problem. Okay. So it's it's surprisingly durable. In fact, you know, when we were, were, we were redoing the floor in our kitchen, we're going to be redoing the foreigner kitchen shortly. And one of the materials we actually considered was cork for the the kitchen. We know my wife opted for something different for a variety of reasons, but it is surprisingly durable, a surprisingly durable material. So it will I think it will hold up pretty well. Okay. The you know, the rest of this vehicle, you know it. I think the thing the thing that we have to keep in mind here is this is very much a compliance car. Yeah, mas is building me it's not. It's not an SAE it's not. Yeah, it's not but I mean, the reality is, it is it's a compliance car.

Nicole Wakelin  48:25  
Did you hear how many units to sell?

Roberto Baldwin  48:28  
What 12?

Nicole Wakelin  48:30  
You're slightly low. I know how many do you know how many it is? Sam? Did they say that during your thing?

Sam Abuelsamid  48:35  
They did, but I don't remember the number. It's

Nicole Wakelin  48:38  
160 565 600. Yeah, very small volume car.

Roberto Baldwin  48:45  
Okay, well, yeah, that makes sense. Because Yeah,

Sam Abuelsamid  48:47  
but you know, I mean, this is this is based on the platform of the CX 30. So it's a modified version of the CX 30. It's got a shorter wheelbase than the CX 30. And, you know, they're kind of following the strategy that Hyundai did with the original ionic. And, and Toyota or Honda did with the the clarity, and they've designed it to accommodate multiple powertrain configurations. So this first one that we're getting here in the US is, is the battery electric, because they have to sell a certain number of of those in California to meet the zero emission vehicle mandate standards. But they're also going to have versions of this for various markets. They also have, they already started selling this thing in Europe earlier this year. Where again, for the same reasons, but they're going to have versions of this that have a standard hybrid powertrain, plug in hybrid, mild hybrid, and a series range extender series hybrid range extender, which that is actually the one that I'm probably the most interested in because that's the one that is used. Using the rotary engine as the range extender and that's coming they declined to say exactly when it's coming but my guess my understanding is going to be sometime next year that one's going to arrive so you'll have a little rotary engine under the hood that drives a generator so it's not going to be connected directly to the wheels and that will provide you know that will generate power to charge the battery and give you substantially more than that 100 miles of range when you need it and and there's also a conventional piston engine plug in hybrid and hybrid versions coming as well but not necessarily for for the US market because what they're doing is they're targeting this this vehicle for global markets and there's some places where the charging infrastructure just isn't there isn't really set up so that's where they're targeting the hybrid versions and the plug in hybrids You know, he did they specifically mentioned Mexico as an example of where you'll see the hybrid and plug in hybrid variants. So this one will be available it's right now it's launching in California only but it will be available nationally starting sometime in 2022 You know, I think what's what impressed me about driving it is that when it It feels like a Mazda when you drive it you know monsters have a certain feel you know, they're meant to be drivers cars they you know, the it's got the same steering feel that you get in a cx 30 or three which is which is really good. And they one of the areas that they did a lot of focus on was the brake field. You know, I know from my own experience as an engineer, trying to blend regenerative braking and friction braking is actually a really hard problem because the regenerative braking is pretty predictable in how it behaves friction braking you know your conventional brakes where you've got brake pads that clamp onto a brake rotor is a lot less predictable you know as the pads wear as they heat up you know they behave differently and so modeling that To try and make sure you get exactly the right amount of braking based on how hard the drivers applying the brake pedal is is actually really hard at but at least you know within the couple of hours that we had with this thing you know it yeah it felt really good the the you know there was nothing no jank Enos in the pedal feel you know it felt very natural you know I tried modulating the brakes you know going up and down on the brake pedal and it behaved very predictably exactly as I would expect it to. Now part of that is there they opted not to do kind of the one pedal braking type of system you know that you see on a lot of other TVs you know so but you know they do give you they they do use the what would normally be the paddle shifters on the back of the steering wheel to allow you to change the amount of region but it will never bring the car down to a complete stop with with just region so you know I like I like driving it i think you know

you know we've often said that you know, in agreement with what Mazda says people buy way more range than they actually need Yeah, and you know, the reality is especially in California 100 miles is probably going to be fine for most driving you know, like studies have shown that you know, 75% of all daily commutes are less than 40 miles so you know, 100 miles of range is probably going to be fine for most people you know, but then the Amaz is aren't necessarily intended to be for everybody. And one thing that Moz is doing that's unique compared to any other manufacturer certainly unique compared to what we saw with the first generation of TVs like the first gen leaf and the fee at 500 e and the Focus Electric you know, that had 700 mile range is they've got a program where for the first three years of ownership you get 10 days a year of free rentals you know so if you're taking a road trip you know if you've got to go somewhere farther than 100 miles you can go to your Mazda and go to your local Mazda dealer and you can choose any other vehicle in the lineup for up to 10 days a year free of charge that's that's all included in the price and then after that, you know they have a discount on those on those rentals so i think you know, I think it's a it works it should actually work out pretty well for most drivers you know that the Choose the the MX 30

Roberto Baldwin  54:54  
it's the Toyota Mariah and the Honda clarity cell vehicle model. I mean, that's what Toyota and Honda have done with those. Well, the clarity, I think is gone. But with the Murrays, you get, you know, 14 or 15 or whatever, how many however many days a year of free Toyota rental, so when you decide you want to leave Northern California, or Southern California and go on an actual drive, then you can you can get one of these cars. Yeah, so, you know, it's I don't think mot Yeah. 500 and something of five, whatever that seems about right. For sales.

Nicole Wakelin  55:29  
500-500-6095 196.

Roberto Baldwin  55:33  
Yeah, that's I mean, it's, it's clearly it's very much a compliance car. I mean, you could get a 2019 egolf that has better specs than this. So yeah, this is 125, the same 50 kilowatt?

Sam Abuelsamid  55:44  
Yeah, but the golf doesn't have those rear hinged half doors. Oh, that's true.

Nicole Wakelin  55:49  
What did you think about those doors, Sam? So do we say that, like you, your friend doors, open your back doors, it's people hate it when you call them suicide doors, but they flipped backwards to get your access to the rear seat

Sam Abuelsamid  56:00  
a little bit. You know, Mazda did that on the RX eight, they had the same kind of thing, it was a two plus two coupe. And you had those half and half doors, you know, rear hinged half doors. BMW does it on the three, and it's got a similar configuration. You know, I think, you know, the rear seat leg room is not great, you know, it because this thing is shorter than the MX 30. You know, if you, if you regularly need to carry a couple of extra adults in your car, this may not be the best choice for you. Unless, unless, of course, you happen to be, you know, short, and you drive with your seat well forward, it's probably not gonna be the most comfortable car. But, you know, if you're single or a couple, using it as a commuter car, then it'd be fine for most of the time.

Nicole Wakelin  56:50  
Yeah, and I do what you said about the braking, I definitely noticed that as well, it's actually it is, in a good way, feel less like an Eevee when you're hitting the brakes, arena driving, then some do it the the way they've modulated the brakes does feel incredibly smooth, you never a lot of them, you have it takes a little time for you to figure out and then maybe mess with regenerative brake settings to get that comfortable spot where you don't feel like it's either, like it's grabbing too fast. If you have to get used to him. I didn't have to get used to this at all. Like, there was no time here was like, Oh, wait, I'm hitting that too hard. I'm hitting that too soft? Which is? Yeah, that can be that can be a real issue on some cars, and it can be one that makes, you know, getting accustomed to driving it a little tricky.

Sam Abuelsamid  57:34  
Yeah, I mean, you can you can get out of a cx nine or cx 30 and jump right into this thing. And feel right at home. Yeah. It's it drives drives basically the same. You know, and it's, I think it's 140 horsepower. And about 180 or 200 foot pounds of torque, which again, you know, is very, you know, ends up giving you performance, it's very comparable to a cx 30. So it's, you know, it's right in that same ballpark, you know, it's, it's not a, it's not going to run with, you know, a Tesla Model three performance or anything like that. You don't think what it'll do now. But it's, you know, it's more than enough for for, you know, what people do on an average day. And then they, you know, they took advantage of the behavior of the, of the electric motor, and, you know, it's instant responsiveness to incorporate that into their g vectoring control system. And at the end of the show, I've got an interview that I did the other day with Jay Chen, who is the head of powertrain for Mazda, USA and Dave Coleman, who's the head of vehicle dynamics, and we talked a lot about that stuff about the powertrain and the, the the way this car handles, so stay, you know, make sure you listen all the way to the end, and especially if you're into the more techie stuff, we had quite a good conversation about that stuff. All right. Anything else on the MX 30? Yeah, that covers it for me. 560

Roberto Baldwin  59:11  
people will buy it, and that's about

Sam Abuelsamid  59:12  
it. Alright, sticking with with EBS for a moment. You probably heard in the news about gasoline shortages in Britain in recent weeks. Apparently gas stations have been running out of fuel. They've had all kinds of problems with not being able to find enough truck drivers to drive the tankers to deliver gas to the gas stations. And on Detroit bureau the other day, our friend Mr. Eisenstein had an interesting article. Let me find it here. About how this is turning to turning some drivers in The UK towards EBS more towards EBS. And he talked to somebody from arbitrator group over there, which is a search engine for people shopping for vehicles. And turns out that they've had a huge increase they've seen a huge increase in drivers 94% over the span of just one week of people researching Evie ownership and reviewing the E V's that they have listed on the site, and on Google searches for EBS have climbed by 16 100% it's 1,600% since the crisis began a few weeks ago so a lot of people are now thinking that Okay, yeah, post Brexit you know and post COVID issues like this are likely to keep popping up your supply chain issues maybe just make the switch to the Eevee and do not have to deal with that anymore. What do you guys think about this

Nicole Wakelin  1:01:03  
it's definitely something that would make people I think encouraged them to start looking at V's but how many of those people will pull the trigger and do it like you know you're just looking and going How much does it cost? What kind of range is there what kind of options out there you know, I wonder how many of those shoppers are just like looking because they're thinking I wonder if now's the moment or how many are saying I am done with the internal combustion engine Bring me my Eevee

Roberto Baldwin  1:01:26  
I mean the I mean we'll have to find out in six months when they see if there's a spike in Evie adoption and in the UK but I think just the fact that people are looking at them and maybe test driving them I mean so many 1000 are looking at them maybe 20% might go and do a test drive and maybe 5% might buy one but it does you know it bodes well for Evie adoption and you know it's I was talking to FedEx and the founder of FedEx one of his things at one point was him and like some big government people have like started a coalition where they talked about they were investigating electric vehicles purely from a security standpoint because that means you're not you know reliant on gas you know you know fossil fuels from other countries if you have electric vehicles you are just reliant on making sure you can you know supply electricity to your to your nation versus trying to supply electricity and you know, importing fossil fuels so it's it's it's it's sort of a you know if you want to be able to say I'm self sufficient in one way or another you can get you know, solar panels a battery and an Eevee and be like yeah, take that. I don't know whoever runs the I guess BP British but British Petroleum

Sam Abuelsamid  1:02:46  
will be any BP has invested heavily in the last few years in Eevee charging infrastructure they bought a couple of charging companies in the UK and you know, they've been installing more and more chargers at their gas stations in in the UK. So and you know, same thing has been happening with other oil companies in other regions where he V's are starting to take off especially in Europe, we're getting a lot more charges being installed at gas stations. So you know, that's that's the sort of thing that I think we're gonna see a lot more of going forward as demand for fuel maybe starts to dry up a little bit over the next decade. Yeah, these companies are going to be looking for other lines of business to make up for that

Roberto Baldwin  1:03:34  
kind of make your money. I mean, you already have the infrastructure you already have places they already have electricity. I mean most of them, a lot of them have What do you have it? those giant car washes, so that's so they're wired, they're wired for giant power, so I don't know how much a giant carwash cost when it comes I don't know much electricity a giant carwash car uses but if they can put if they can put an EPA electrify America charging station at the at the I hop near my house. I'm sure they can put them on. Pancakes I want Yeah, you guys want some fresh and fruity while you're charging your EV there's there you can do that near near where I live.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:04:21  
Okay, we have one comment the more of a comment than a than a question. Before we get into that interview. This is from Sean Whitehurst. Yes, he says, so I'm a few episodes behind by think losing the the tank mode on the rivian is a big loss for the urban crowd. In cities without alleys behind houses it would be great. My alley is just over a car length wide and I can fit a suburban possibly to in my garage. If, if taken it takes a half a dozen maneuvers. With tank turning it would be a lot easier as people move back into cities where Are there freestanding homes readily available to have charging hookups, these customers are going to choose for ease of use. So what do you think? Would you? Well, first of all, have you ever lived in an area where you've got you know, an alley behind your house, you know, to access your garage? And do you think something like a tank turn capability would be useful to you?

Nicole Wakelin  1:05:24  
That kind of let you pivot? Right? refresh memory? Yeah, that's right. I thought

Sam Abuelsamid  1:05:29  
yeah, they showed a review and showed a video about a year or so ago, where they were using because they've got a motor tied to each wheel. And so they can run the wheels on opposite sides of the vehicle in opposite directions. So it can turn on its own, the whole vehicle can turn on its own axis.

Nicole Wakelin  1:05:46  
I've never lived someplace that required that kind of access to get in and out of my driveway or to get in and out of my garage. I mean, I can see how that would have been a huge boon for people who live in tight congested areas. I don't I don't I don't know if that would do you think that would make someone choose to buy that truck versus another truck? I don't know is that like is that that big of a selling feature? Like how high would that read on the list? Did you guys live someplace with a really tight turn into your garage like that

Roberto Baldwin  1:06:12  
I lived in a when I lived in a city I had a fire hydrant in front of my garage. So we had to come in at is very weird angle where you almost hit a light pole. So you had to go through a light pole and a fire hydrant and then go in and in turn and it was an it was it was difficult if you didn't know how to do it. And it took you know, once once you know how to do it. It wasn't hard, but it wasn't easy. It was I could get an LR three I did a Land Rover in there. I could get a Mazda not a Mazda Model X in there. But it was it took like five minutes to get it out. I don't think I don't think take turn was really gonna help me so much. And I think that's such a Yeah, like tank turn is such a like, it's like 30th on the list of things. It's just like a fun goofy thing that you can do. And if you're buying a suburban he live in is really type thing in a live in the city. It's like where you park in the suburban when you're driving around. I think you just learned I think the thing is you just this is the good this is the garage that I have. This is the vehicle that I have, after about a month, you just know how to get that vehicle into the thing without you figure it out. Yeah. And now we have like all the sensors and you have the camera on the back. Like all that makes it like 1000 times easier. Although when I would pull cars out of my garage, I'd have to turn everything off because it would just be because everything was so close. And I was parking sensors all the Parkinson's were losing their mind and I'd be like inches from like essentially just ripping the sheet metal off the side of all these vehicles which now I can tell because I don't live there anymore. So now the automakers don't know that that was what was happening every day. But yeah, I think you just learn it.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:08:00  
Yeah, the other the other downside to tank turn in that kind of scenario. You know, when they showed that original video, you're so go. Yeah, that was it was in a dirt field where it was doing that. Which is fine. Yeah, your auto trail, being able to swivel around like that. It's great. But, you know, if you're in the city, if you're in an alley unless the alley is, you know, unpaved, you're going to be scrubbing those tires. Oh, turn, because there's no give on the you're gonna be wearing out. Yeah, yeah. So you're gonna be wearing you're going to be going through tires every couple of 1000 miles.

Nicole Wakelin  1:08:38  
That would be on your tires. Oh my god, that would be murder on your tires. If you had pavement. Yeah.

Roberto Baldwin  1:08:43  
Every time there just be these black spots.

Nicole Wakelin  1:08:46  
spot where you did your take? That's how you know, like that's here's the spot. It's all black rubber on the pavement.

Roberto Baldwin  1:08:53  
Yeah, yeah, I do have a friend who saw somebody who's walking through the city of San Francisco and they had just got home with their new car. It still had that like the monroney on the side. And it was an H and H three. And he saw them trying to pull into the garage. And it turns out the car was too tall. The truck was the SUV was too tall. And he's like any law he pointed and laughed, and I'm like Nelson from the census. And you feel I kind of feel bad, but also I'm like you don't think about that when you buy a car that's

Nicole Wakelin  1:09:22  
like if you're gonna buy a gigantic vehicle should know unless you have a knowingly gigantic garage. You should be like, wait a minute,

Unknown Speaker  1:09:28  
wait a second. What's the height of this thing?

Nicole Wakelin  1:09:30  
And how tall is my check that so we got very

Roberto Baldwin  1:09:33  
excited at the dealership and they bought an eight to 12 people who bought the h3 and then I guess they just parked it on the street which Good luck with that in San Francisco, which is someone who's lived there who lived there for nearly 20 years. It's by a small car. That's all I'm going to tell you.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:09:53  
All right, another one from Brian Baron Hausen on Twitter. And he has Have retweeted a comment or tweet from somebody else for mass for shut ins podcast said cars need separate horns for Hello just FYI the light has changed and have a good one and a few and then Brent asks so why did Town and Country horns stop being a thing anyway I don't even remember having separate horns we have separate horns

Roberto Baldwin  1:10:27  
I think we have separate ways of using the horn like a like a quick tap with the fist like you'd like to make a little finger tap and hold it down is like the few but a quick tap is like when you're at the light like look that's just like hey there's this wake up

Sam Abuelsamid  1:10:41  
just say Hey guy the lights turn green.

Nicole Wakelin  1:10:43  
I have to look for it I have this there's this comedian that occasionally does these like you know two three minute videos and he had a whole thing about the different kinds of horns and what like this tap that tap what it means that by the end he said the like I'm gonna run you over I hate you tap like slamming on the horn but all the different etiquette for what you know the light I've just you know it's okay hey get moving it really you have to learn how to finesse it because you got to be able to say to someone Hey, just get out of the way a little Hey really get out of the way or if you move the lights in green for a minute and a half yeah you need to be

Roberto Baldwin  1:11:16  
what do you do? Get off your phone get off this the tap is like get off your phone the double tap tap is like Did you forget yes you forget you're driving a car I'm sorry but the bad that's like you You're messing up your your your

Nicole Wakelin  1:11:30  
do that to me the other day at a red light I'm at a red light and he just honks I'm like it's red I don't know

Roberto Baldwin  1:11:37  
here's the other thing is that sometimes when you're doing things you actually accidentally hit the horn Has that ever happened where you're behind somebody and he accidentally hit the horn for oh sorry sorry sorry he didn't mean to you that's where you need another horn where you like did it like a little apology The problem is that not everyone is aware of horn etiquette so we that's I don't know why we don't teach stuff like that in school where you're like okay yes yeah, do we even have driver's ed from what I seen on the road we don't but okay,

Nicole Wakelin  1:12:08  
we do my daughter just done and it was terrible the classes were awful she learned nothing. She also had the instructors say to her at the very beginning of the class that they were good the kids who already started driving with their mothers needed to spend some time on learning everything that their mom's told him because we didn't know how to drive wow yeah, I mean the nose I didn't punch him in the nose because there are a limited number of driver's ed classes but I was like are you kidding me buddy? Yeah,

Roberto Baldwin  1:12:39  
it's not it's not in school though right? It's like the thing you have to pay for it's like an art for this I paid for some you pay for pure you pay for massage money that's great.

Nicole Wakelin  1:12:48  
I paid for massage me I paid about $700 for my daughter couldn't get a driver's license Yeah,

Roberto Baldwin  1:12:54  
we when I was in high school we had to take a whole It was a whole quarter like you just took driver's ed like there was like a regular school class you had to take it and then at the end you get to drive around in a car

Nicole Wakelin  1:13:04  
No, we had to pay for it. There's one driver's ed class at our high school that has like just like four or 500 kids in the class there's one driver's ed class in the spring and one driver's ed class in the fall so you could never get into it you always have to go pay for it so that's insane

Sam Abuelsamid  1:13:19  
when when when my kids were learning to drive you know they took you know driver's ed outside of school that didn't take they didn't get it at school. But then I gave them supplementary lessons on vehicle dynamics you know how to handle a vehicle in the snow doing some skid control you know, we went into high school parking lot after it snowed and you know had hail I was I was in the passenger seat with my hand on the on the ebrake the parking brake Yeah, no, you know proper proper mechanical parking brake you know, so I could put it into a skid and you know, teach them how to steer into the skid all that all that kind of stuff that's that's great. Yeah, we just did you never get that kind of thing that any driver as

Nicole Wakelin  1:14:03  
a kid we went also went down to the high school and I was like, okay, big empty parking lot slam on the brakes and the car like okay, here's why you don't do that.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:14:14  
I'll use that as an opportunity to show you know here's what it feels like when your abs activates in your tracks natural activate oh yeah especially

Nicole Wakelin  1:14:22  
I used to teach that and you know they really don't have any situation drivers ever they ever get the opportunity to see how all those sort of safety systems work and what does it feel like when your car when you know when when you do lose traction and that will be such a benefit because the first time most people feel that is when it actually happens and you suddenly think Yeah, holy crap, I'm sliding or whatever,

Roberto Baldwin  1:14:43  
you know, usually when there was a friend's stupid Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:14:47  
Yeah, and you know for what it's worth, you know, most like racing schools also offer you know, special classes for teen drivers you know, you know, car controls, good control. You know and they you know they'll use you know skid cars that have you know these outriggers on them with actuators that unload the, the the back wheels and things like that, you know, so they can make it understeer and oversteer. And, you know, to teach you how to how to control a car, you know how to regain control a car out of a car. And, you know, they're not cheap. You know, it can be a couple $1,000. But it's actually probably a really good investment, you know, and making your kid a safer driver.

Nicole Wakelin  1:15:29  
I can't think of it because this conversation came up last minute. So this wasn't something we were like planned to talk about. But a couple of the automakers I want to say maybe Ford and Kia, I could be wrong in that they offer some things where they come in, they do sort of like free classes that they cut like they did one at Foxboro stadium once, I think it was Ford. And they let us come as journalists to try and do it. And they had a bunch of teenagers there. And it literally taught you what it like they had the goggles to wear so you can see what it was like if you were drunk and you were trying to drive and how hard it is like and crazy and don't ever do it. And they had the same thing that ski control and they had tires that were worn and tires that weren't worn. So you could see how well your car breaks with the right tires versus how poorly it breaks when your tires. You know, it was a really valuable class. The

Sam Abuelsamid  1:16:13  
it was it was called driving skills for life. That was it is the name of the program. And yeah, they would go around the country to different locations doing it. I don't think they've done it the last two years for COVID. Yeah, but I would want I would hope that when things settle down that they will resume that

Nicole Wakelin  1:16:31  
well. And you know, it was neat, because I believe that a parent could come and there weren't there were a couple of parents there but there were maybe three or four of us that were journalists. the neatest thing was the kids all thought like all of them uniformly thought the reason that they couldn't drive with the drunk goggles on was because they were kids who didn't know how to drive yet. They're like I bet you guys can do this and I was like heck no What makes you think that just because I drive a lot if I was drunk I could dry they literally were not trusting it so then all the adults were like no, no, no, I will show you how slot like if you try do you put those goggles I was like holy heck. They the kids were disbelieving that it was really that hard. They were thinking it was because it was like oh I'm just a kid. So if you ever do one of these, there's an opportunity for you to try to do some of this stuff your kid does that like did do it because it teaches them it's not just their young experience. There are some things you should never do like drive drunk or drive, you know, high or whatever. Don't do that stuff.

Roberto Baldwin  1:17:29  
I think teenagers are naturally distrustful of adults and they feel like they're being tricked a lot of the time and we're like No, I mean yeah, you are being tricked a lot of time but sometimes not so much. Right? Sometimes it's like no really you can't do this for your own good times. None of us can drive drunk no it's a bad night don't drive no no no no yeah, cuz Yeah. So

Sam Abuelsamid  1:17:49  
Alright, last one is from I'm a nuisance and he asks Are they asked I don't know if it's male or female. How many times will Roberta's dog bark during the podcast? Well the answer is zero.

Roberto Baldwin  1:18:03  
They've been asleep and it's a weird so we we okay so we do the podcast that times that the dogs are typically outside we usually record in the morning so I get up in the morning I let them out to go the bathroom which they have one yard for the bathroom and they have another giant backyard I run around and just be insane. And so usually at the time we're doing the pockets they are out in the backyard. So they're all like jumpy, our we do the podcast in the afternoon and in the afternoon after I get off. I usually work till 5pm even though I'm freelance I try to keep like regular human type type ish hours. I'll take them to the dog park or they'll go out in the backyard again and so those are so both times are kind of like they're like yeah, let's go party and so I stopped the party for your benefit.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:18:56  
Last episode, you know, boy was barking quite a bit I tried to cut out most of those I think I missed one or two. So

Roberto Baldwin  1:19:04  
sorry he's he's very sweet. He's you know Yeah, he's a very even he's in the other room you can in the doors close, you're gonna really hear him and I can't and the other one is a puppy. So I can't just sort of leave her to her own devices for a few hours while we're doing the podcast because if I do at the end of the podcast, there's a disaster there's something something is broken and now I have to replace it or fix it or figure out what she has eaten and hope that she passes it'll it'll be better when when Nico gets a little older but but yeah, because Nico sorta gets Bowie all excited about barking but

Sam Abuelsamid  1:19:43  
but but life is always better with dogs so you know, an occasional bark, it's it's worth it. All right, with that. Right after we say goodbye. We will have the interview that I did earlier this week, with J Chen and Dave Coleman j is the head of powertrain for Mazda USA. And Dave is head of driving or vehicle dynamics. And we talk about a whole bunch of cool stuff about the MX 30. So stay tuned for that right after we say goodbye, and we'll see you next time. Bye, guys.

Roberto Baldwin  1:20:18  
Bye bye.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:20:21  
Hey, Sam here, I've got J. Chen, who is the powertrain manager for the new Mazda MX 30. And Dave Coleman, who is the vehicle dynamics manager for the MX 30. And just had a chance to drive this vehicle yesterday. Nicole's driving it tomorrow. We're not going to talk about the our driving impressions just yet. But during the presentations before we went out for a drive, Jay and Dave talked about some really interesting things around the the design of this vehicle. The the MX 30 is is a unique product for Mazda, Mazda. Mazda is an interesting company as an automaker, they've always kind of marched to the beat of their own drummer. They've done things a little differently, a longtime proponent of waggle rotary engines, which I love, still build miatas, which are an increasingly rare type of vehicle in the world today. And the MX 30, your first Eevee. And let's start off with just kind of an overview of this vehicle, quick overview about the platform and what what was the overall strategy in designing this vehicle.

Unknown Speaker  1:21:38  
While I was sitting here waiting for the other guy to start talking, I'll kick off with that I'm really we're just dipping our toe into the AV landscape right now. But the idea is we're building this off of a cx 30 platform, and but trying to really differentiate it from the CX 30 itself. So that's why it's writing in a completely different body. But what you see a lot of times when, when the TV world is you see either a really expensive high performance movie, or something that is pretty expensive, but expensive, it feels really cheap. And this comes from the fact that the batteries themselves are really expensive, and drive up the base price of the car. And so your two strategy strategies are either you you spend all of your budget, on batteries, and cheap out on the interior cheap out on the body cheap on everything else that makes the car pleasant to exist. And, or you start from the expensive platform and you build a really expensive car, we wanted to take a different approach and try to balance the battery size versus vehicle quality thing differently so that you actually have a nice car to drive at an affordable price. And so that's why we come into this segment with what most people will think is a surprisingly low range of 100 miles, we've really found that if you really look at the way people drive 100 miles is plenty for most of their driving, they will occasionally take a long trip. And so by putting us a smaller battery in the car, we're able to deliver the rest of the car at a much higher level. So you have a really nice high quality interior a really good driving experience. And then we can cover the few times when you need the longer range than that. By simply letting the people who own the car borrow a Mazda from their local dealer. We the car comes with a plan where you have a boy,

Sam Abuelsamid  1:23:39  
I have to remember the exact years 10 days a year yeah,

Unknown Speaker  1:23:43  
for three years, I think it's 10 days a year where you can borrow another car. So realistically, how many days a year are you on a road trip a year, you're traveling a car journalist so you don't count. But normal normal people that covers their long driving trips, and then the rest of the time they have French daily driving. And this is really both a better play I think for balancing where you put the cost of the car so that we can have a more pleasant car to live with. But also for balancing. If you look at you know batteries as a resource, we could build a 300 mile range car or we could build three of this car with the same number of batteries. And so this is this is a much better use of the batteries rather than dragging heavy batteries around all the time in a car that that you're not actually using those batteries carry around the number of batteries you're actually going to use and then take a road trip into one of our other cars.

Unknown Speaker  1:24:44  
Right and it hits on it as a much more practical solution. I mean just as Mazda is just dipping our toes into the Evie waters. I think there is customer there are customers that are doing that you know there's customers that are just full on you know, you know, all go home into the If you will, but we're targeting customers that are, you know, a little bit timid about it. And they want to get into a car that they can, you know, feel good about feel comfortable and drives normally intuitively like, like their gas card that they're used to. Right and not have to deal with that rage anxiety. The thing is, you know, as Dave says, this Mazda MX 30, elite loader, I think if you're going to take that handful of road trips in a year, I would prefer to not have to do with a lot of the existing charging infrastructure on a long long road trip, I would just do it in the gas cart, as we've been saying, he's kind of progressed hand in hand side by side infrastructure, range infrastructure, when you dry, it's not all one another. So I think the main point is that we want our customers who are looking at them and started to feel comfortable getting into Eevee, and not be totally blown away by this alien landscape in this wild wild west of, of an Eevee life.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:25:57  
Yeah, I think, you know, that, that approach of, you know, having that loaner program is, I think is a really good solution. I mean, certainly something I've talked about over the years, you know, until relatively recently, when we've started getting a V's with longer ranges. The idea that, you know, most people are not road tripping every week, they're, you know, they do it a couple times a year, you know, they take a summer road trip with the family or, you know, go visit the grandparents or whatever it might be, and most of the time, they're just driving around town. And unfortunately, you know, most car buyers are not always necessarily completely rational in their they tend, they tend to people tend to buy for their worst case, use case condition, you know, that they may, you know, they may get a big SUV or a pickup truck, because they need to tell their boat, you know, out to the lake in the springtime and haul it out of the lake in the fall. But they're not using it as a truck most of the time. And similarly, for something like this, you know, they're commuting most most of the time and a couple times a year, they might need something for longer ranges. And I think this is a really interesting solution. Of course, it's not the the only solution that you've got planned, you got a whole range of options available that you've got coming, you know, for, both for different markets and different use cases. Jay, can you talk a little bit more about what you know that the using this particular vehicle architecture, the CX 30 architecture, what are you going to be able to do with, with the MX 30 in different different variations of power trains?

Unknown Speaker  1:27:37  
Well, so you know, Mazda being a smaller company, we we still take sustainability, and then mobility seriously, right. And so when we, with our resources, when we look at solutions for mobility, and then all that, we have to look at it from a world perspective, it's not like we developed the MX 30, specifically, just for the US market or for this or that market. So by doing that, if we have this platform to start, you know, gets getting really seriously electrified, we need to offer it solutions for different regions. Now. different regions have different charging infrastructure, I'm sure we all realize that, and a lot of people don't realize is that the power generation in different regions is also different. So let's say for example, if you're living in California, we have a lot of solar, we have a lot of wind, if you're living in Norway, or Scandinavia, computers, you have geothermal, you have wave, you have a lot of really clean energy in that way. It makes sense to use a lot of Evie and charging. But if you're living in a place that well was using a lot of burning coal, or even, let's say cleanly burning, clean, LPG, well, that's still generating co2. And so do you really want to be be using co2 and inefficiently transporting over the grid and putting into your Eevee so you could dry so the concept behind this is that we offer the MX 30. Using this multi solution scalable architecture, long words, but basically, it means we could put different Lego pieces of power chain into it, would there space for a gasoline or internal combustion generator, we can reallocate battery sizing and put a small fuel tank in there or large fuel tank, or you know, we can shift different battery sizes small, medium, large, and, you know, the engine size can also potentially be changed. So this gives us the solution to build anything from a mild hybrid inside the MX 30 platform, to a strong or conventional hybrid that has been on the market for many years, which is still good, it gets better mpg. We could build it as a range extender, but plug in hybrid or in the case of the first initial release for California and then subsequently other states. It would be a full battery electric but it has to make sense, right? It has to make sense for the customer. It has to make sense for the environment. It has to make sense for us as a manufacturer, too. We got questions. Well why aren't you offering this bV? In these days, well, yeah, it might be a novelty item for certain people that really want it. But like we said, you know, the infrastructure, the energy, everything's gonna kind of move in pace with each other. It's, you know, so putting this on sale for that one region for that one customer that wanted it just like our diesel wagon Mazda six, you know, it doesn't really make sense. So um, that's the main thing about this gilbarco architecture. And it's right tool, right solution being environmentally responsible. And it's different for different regions throughout the world and throughout maybe even one market like North America.

Unknown Speaker  1:30:38  
Yeah, I think you left brown of your example of the diesel manual wagon. Oh, yes. Oh,

Nicole Wakelin  1:30:42  
yeah. Brown? Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:30:47  
And if you had, if you had offered that car that that brown manual, Master 60s, a wagon, I would have bought that.

Unknown Speaker  1:30:54  
You, you and three other people.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:31:00  
So with some of these other variants, will we be seeing I think there's there's been some discussion of a range extended or series hybrid version of the MX 30. Following the, the the battery electric here in the US market? Is that something that we'll be seeing in the not too distant future?

Unknown Speaker  1:31:22  
Well, we have officially noticed that for North America, we will be releasing a series plug in hybrid version of mX 30. And so that is taking the scalable architecture and we are now putting an internal combustion engine into it. And because it's a series hybrid, it would the agent is not connected to the drive wheels, it's just generating power. Right? So this is this Miss mix match. And so this solution would be a slightly different customer a slightly different usage need right now maybe your teenager that wants to do their more common road trips, but wants to feel clean and green, and that can commute around town with adequate you know, get to school, or you know, the run their errands, and this and that. So, yeah, as far as release dates, and all those additional things I don't want to take away from our launch of the battery electric version right now. But it is, we understand that it's, you know, it's a customer that might be looking for just a slightly different permutation of the usage for the current mX 30. battery electric version.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:32:25  
One One last question about that, before we move on? Will will that series plug in hybrid? Will that be the one with the the rotary engine?

Unknown Speaker  1:32:34  
I don't know what will be officially released as far as the powertrain. And I think Zack or one of the PR Guys, can I answer that for you? If we've announced exactly what it is, then we, I will be more than happy to discuss it with you.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:32:50  
I know I know Mazda has been granted a patent on that on that architecture. So we'll hopefully, hopefully, we'll see the return of the rotary in the not too distant future as part of the MX 30 lineup or other vehicles from from Mazda. Alright, so moving on, you know, continuing with the with electrification electric drive, and also starting to blend in some of the vehicle dynamics characteristics of this car that that you talked about Dave? You know, the the one of the beauties of electric motors is their responsiveness, that instant torque, and that that ability to control it very precisely, which gives you a number of advantages, both in terms of drivability that you've talked about Jay and and also a new take on the G vectoring control system that Mazda has had for a number of years now. Can you talk about how those two things work hand in hand and what that does for you?

Unknown Speaker  1:33:53  
Yeah, absolutely. Let me back up once that didn't before that, just to explain sort of the the layout of this vehicle with a lot of battery weight in the car really down low and really far back. And a relatively small drive motor in the front, the weight balance of the car has completely shifted from where a cx 30 is about 60% on the front tires and 40% on the rear. This is 60% on the rear tires 40% on the front, which and the center of gravity is really low, it's about two inches lower than then 630. So what this is giving us sort of as a starting point, is the weight distribution. And center gravity of like a mid engine sports car, which is candy both good and bad. Mid engine sports car handling potential is really high. But the dynamics can feel a little bit strange for someone who isn't really the kind of pro driver we're good at sorting out how different cards work. The problem with a mid engine car is because the front end is so lightly loaded, the turn in response isn't very good. A tire doesn't have a vertical load on it's really hard to direct response to that initial steering wheel input. So a good driver what they'll do is when they're coming into it Well trail brake, and that will shift weight onto the front tires and make the front end bite and make the student response be the way they're expecting it to be. And that feeds into what we're doing here with G vectoring. control. So Jeeva controls the system that we developed a couple of years ago, based on that very concept of looking at what professional drivers do to make a car handle better, they are constantly doing weight shifting forward and back onto the front tires off the back of the front tires. So you you shift onto the front tires at turn in to make the car turn in better, and then you shifted on to the rear tires, which are pointed straight up the car straight back out out of a corner. And a good driver will do that completely subconsciously. And what we've done is just automated that so that when we take input from the electric power steering computer, and it looks at your steering wheel speed, and uses that to tell the power train to reduce power a little bit and shift weight onto the front tires. And what we end up with is a much more direct consistent steering response. That really makes it the controllability the car very, very natural. That sort of the steps that we're able to take it farther with the electric powertrain is how quickly the tire chain can respond and how precisely it can respond and how often it can respond. So if our weight transfer, when we turn the wheel is controlled by reducing engine power, there's an obvious problem there that when you're not driving the car, so you're coasting or, or, or braking or going downhill, there's nothing to reduce, we can't do a transfer in those conditions, we're not actually accelerating or at least pulling along the car at a constant speed. With an electric motor, we can we can always do a little weight shift because the electric motor can do regenerative braking. And even if we're already off throttle, and in full region, there's a little bit more region we can always throw in with GVC. So every time you turn the wheel, we're automatically shifting weight onto those front tires and making it behave as if it were a normal front bias car in terms of steering response. But then in terms of grip balance, because we have the weight more evenly distributed between all four tires, all four tires are doing their job to help the cargo around the corner. So it's really kind of a best of both worlds scenario where we get the handling potential of emitted car, and the natural diamond dynamics of a front engine car all pieced together in a car with no engine at all.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:37:22  
Yeah, what one of the interesting things that you mentioned in the presentation was with with an ice doing g vectoring. Control, you know, once you lift off the throttle, and you're coasting, you don't have any torque there that you can manipulate. But what? You still have that and can you talk a little bit more about that.

Unknown Speaker  1:37:47  
Right. So the best we can do with an ice system is make the car steering response behave the same way that it would if you're off throttle. So off throttle, the car has a certain certain response and on throttle, this response will get a little bit weaker, because the weight shifted off the front tires. And using this this automatic weight transfer system is GVC we can make the car behave the same way it did when you were coasting. right that's that's the maximum potential we can do with the electric motor, we can do that weight transfer, even when you're off throttle, even when you're coasting even when you're doing regenerative braking. So we can sort of aim for our ideal steering response and use the amount of weight transfer that we need to get that response in every condition. So what that combined with the fact that they in a very weird roundabout way an electric vehicle lets us have a stiffer tire tinted because the way the powertrain is mounted differently in the way that we don't have to worry about making the powertrain bounce on its mounts, which is kind of an esoteric suspension tuning problem that we have, I won't bore you with that. But we have a stiffer tire and a stronger GVC response which gives us this really direct national steering response. We're really happy with the way that our steel handles which kind of brings us back to the thing about you talking about how people don't buy the car completely on national reasons. We're quite pleased with that, because we spend a lot of our effort doing completely rational things that you can make are fun to drive. Yeah, you don't. Right. So So yeah, there is still plenty of room for passion and enjoyment in an electric car.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:39:26  
Jay Yeah, with the electric motors, you know what you've talked about the minimum jerk theory and you know how how jerk impacts the way a drunk passengers in the occupants in the vehicle perceive the the performance. Can you talk a bit about that and and how an Eevee helps you to to minimize jerk.

Unknown Speaker  1:39:54  
Wow, that's a that's a complicated one. That EV really actually helps us control jerk as we intended to, just as a rehash, you know, jerk is, is the change of acceleration. And going back to our simple simplified analogy, when you ride in a school bus, it has a lot of, you know, jerk as the guy, as a driver of changes gears in this nice uncomfortable, right. And for those of us that have written as passengers and somebody V's we kind of get that feeling. The flip side, if you have minimum jerk, a very natural intuitive motion that that we as humans, like, say like riding on a bullet train, you don't feel this jerk, but you can still get a lot of things done, you can still accelerate at a very high rate. So basically, we as humans, like to do things with the least amount of jerk necessary in the smoothness profile. And that's just to save energy and, you know, minimize wear and tear. Well, the electric motor is very powerful and very responsive as Jade, as Dave has already alluded to. And so it gives the ability to generate a tremendous amount of of jerk or change and acceleration in a very short amount of time. And that can be very good if you had this very high intention. But it's not always that case, right? We're not always driving to be a jerk on the freeway, or this and that, right? So I'm

Unknown Speaker  1:41:22  
not this definition of jerky.

Unknown Speaker  1:41:26  
That's, that's right, I should probably engineering

Sam Abuelsamid  1:41:27  
definition versus the sociological definition.

Unknown Speaker  1:41:33  
But yeah, you know, so I think we recognize that not all people want to drive in that manner. And even though electric vehicle offers these opportunities, we intentionally tuned our vehicle to one primarily mimic the intention of the driver in a smooth equal motion, but at the same time, not be so touchy sensitive that it can, that it can be uncomfortable for the driver, uncomfortable for the passenger, or be at times even difficult to control, maybe you hit a hot pothole, and your foot accidentally tipped into the gas a little bit in the car jumped forward, you know, that's completely possible with the Eevee. And so back to the target customer, that the intention, when we released this car, we wanted to make sure that hey, this is an intuitive natural transition for the guy that's got their second car that's I see their drive, and then they get into this and or their wife gets into this for one day, and isn't completely freaked out by it, you know, say, Oh, yeah, okay, that's cool. And it's quiet, and it does all the things I expected to. And, you know, it's not a science project to figure out how to get this thing running or even driving smoothly. Hopefully that answers what you were after.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:42:43  
Yeah, yeah, no, I think that's, that's good explanation for that for the listeners. You know, how all this stuff works together. So one of one of the other beautiful things about electric motors is that unlike an ice, the process is completely reversible. You can put energy into a motor and get torque to drive the vehicle. Or you can use the motion you have to get energy back out of the motor. And once you burn the gasoline, your meal, you're done. Real Estate doing real estate back, you're never going to convert that exhaust back into fuel onboard vehicle. Can you talk about how on the MX 30 you're handling regenerative braking and and what the benefits of that are? Go for it. This

Unknown Speaker  1:43:32  
is this is an interesting area that sort of crosses over between the department and my department, of course, because the regenerative braking is part of the powertrain department's job but the implications of what that regenerative braking do have all kinds of effect on on what we have to do on the chassis side. So yeah, at the most basic level, of course, we get to basically reverse the purpose of the motor intended into a generator, when you get off the throttle, and use the inertia of the car to charge the batteries which is, which is really one of the biggest benefits of electric car. One of the reasons that you have some things that run against your intuitive understanding of cars, you're used to looking at how much range you have left in your tank. And if you get stuck in traffic, that range might not be enough because of course, you don't stop and go traffic, the cars less efficient. electric cars the exactly the opposite, it's more efficient and stop and go traffic because for every time you decelerate, you're just putting energy back into the battery and you're not throwing away a bunch of energy pushing air around the car because you're moving so slowly. So it's one of those things that just sort of you have to reorient your mind to what seems intuitively obvious when you're driving one of these cars. But in terms of making the the, the amount of sort of engine braking field that you get from regenerative braking, making that intuitive for people is tricky because what people want really seems to vary a lot person to person, some people used to a car with a lot of gas and just coasts. Some people are used to prefer a car, we let off the gas and it slows down really hard. I probably goes back to what they learned to drive on, they learned to drive on some, you know, floaty automatic transmission car, that coasted a lot, that's what feels natural. If they learned to drive on a brown diesel manual wagon, that's going to have a lot of a lot of engine braking, right, so that's gonna feel natural. So most electric cars will have buried in the settings menu someplace where you can change the amount of regenerative braking to kind of fit your preference, we went ahead and pull that up right up in front and gave it put that control in the the paddle shifters that we would have used for an automatic transmission in this car. So there's a minus pedal on the left steering spoke plus pedal on the right hearing spoke. And every time you started the car, it'll start out with sort of a neutral setting that's got a mild amount of regenerative braking that's kind of feels close to a normal automatic transmission car. If you hit the up shifting, you get less and less region. If you hit minus, you have more and more regions, I mean, let off the gas it slows down a lot. The side effects of that are that we want there to be a really linear route controllability from the gas pedal to the amount of gt you get both on the positive side and the negative side. So when we have a lot of region, we need more pedal stroke to control how much the car slowing down. So we shift the neutral point in the gas pedal when you change that pedal pedal. So the point that you'd hold the gas pedal at to just cruise down the highway will get deeper and deeper in the pedal.

Unknown Speaker  1:46:30  
Which means that the whole adaptable mapping shifts as you change these pedals. Which also means that if you're just cruising along and hit the up the up shift paddle to get less region, it actually goes a little bit faster each time because it's moving where you are in the gas pedal stroke, where the software is interpreting that where that really affects me and my team using the brakes, because at the same time that we're giving the driver all this control over how much region there is, we are going to at the end of the day, use the maximum amount of region that possible to maximize the efficiency of the car. So all we're doing is we're shifting whether the driver controls the gas pedal or whether it's hidden hidden in the brake pedal. When you step on the brake, we're actually feeling normal in a normal car, you're feeling a piston building up hydraulic pressure pushing on another piston that's squeezing on a brake for you actually feeling the mechanism of brake. You step on the brake pedal in this car, you're feeling a spring, little elastomer that you're pushing on. And the way that we fool your brain into thinking that that's a real brake pedal is we give you exactly the amount of braking G to go with the amount of spring that you're pushing on, that would match what it would feel like in a normal braking system. But where that braking g comes from completely depends we can we can switch it between region braking and friction braking from the brakes of the wheels. Kind of on the fly. Depending on how much region you're already using. If you're I mean 90% of the cars region is used from the gas pedal, or give you a little 10% of the big pediments defeating the friction brakes early if you are in the mode where there's almost no reason you're coasting when you hit the brakes most of this slowing down that you feel comes from region and then when you've used all that up we'll start putting a little bit of friction brake and we even change it depending on the charge of the battery if the battery is completely full and we turn on a generator there's no place for that power could go We can't put region into nowhere so we just have to go to shake the friction break so there's all this sort of behind the scenes Hocus Pocus in the brake pedal to make the brakes feel completely normal and hopefully when you drove the car you couldn't tell that all this crazy stuff was happening just felt like normal breaks right? in reality it's constantly switching back and forth between region and fiction in some combination of the two to capture as much energy as possible while giving the driver the most natural controllability right

Unknown Speaker  1:48:47  
yeah and and sorry so let me let me add into that it's just this is again going back to that natural driving thing right i think a lot of us really freak out first time we get into Eevee and you know the braces feel very awkward or you know, a blended hybrid system the brace just don't don't feel intuitive. So, um, that's a big plus. And the second thing is that you know, the paddle system to control regeneration and the pedal position that's actually also helpful in the way because sometimes you know, as you're driving in, as you're driving in traffic, you have a certain mindset and you want more deceleration, you know, but then you get out into open traffic and you're just cruising and you want, you don't want this high precision deceleration response from from your accelerator pedal. So that's another potential. This gives you the opportunity to choose how you want to do it.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:49:33  
Okay, yeah, you know, as someone that has owned manual transmission cars my entire life, every car that I've ever owned, it's been my primary cars been a manual. And then hopefully I'll live you know, I'll be able to continue that trend for my remaining days. You can you might guess where I fall on that spectrum I left as I've driven a lot of movies over the past 15 years. Yeah, I really appreciate the the strong region. I was just wondering, you know, was there any thought given to in addition to the paddles, you know, just having a one pedal mode switch to activate. So if somebody just wanted strong region all the time, they just hit that switch and, and not go back and forth with the paddles.

Unknown Speaker  1:50:23  
Let me let me jump in on the first side of that, that your, your question is almost a two part, because you mentioned one pedal. And in our studies of human centric, motion and perception, we really, really, really debated this internally and talked about this Okay, well do we want one pedal which by our definition, and understanding is the ability to stop all the way without ever using the the pedal or the brake pedal. And in art evaluations long before he V's and everything else, we understood that human perception and motion in deceleration and braking takes two modes, the initial is a deceleration control mode, where you're just gauging by feeling. And by the visual flow going past you, you're more concentrated, when you're slowing down for 50 mile per hour, the initial focus is just bringing the speed down. And the after you get down to about a five mile per hour or I'm sorry, probably like seven mile per hour range, then you become more sensitive to position, your focus then shifts into Okay, I need to stop here, before I hit the parking bumper, I need to get I need to stop to this point. So I can hit the apex correctly. Right for that, you know, low speed right turn. And so in our human centric study, we found that we it's okay to it's, you can adequately control deceleration through a pedal. But when it comes to precision and higher g deceleration, you need the positive control, if you understand them, pushing positive control on the B pedal to more precisely control that, as we know, as you're decelerating, just like our shifters, your body motion is moving forward. So you if you're done decelerating you downshifting forward. Similarly, that action would would would work more, because you have a brake pedal supporting your weight, and all that for that final bit. So that's the braking, perception slash control. Ideal again, a lot of flavors and a lot of interpretations. This is this is how we, as Mazda kind of have focused on it as as, you know, old school car, guys, and

Unknown Speaker  1:52:38  
how do you say, we could be a little stubborn like that. And you know, it's

Sam Abuelsamid  1:52:44  
not I understand

Unknown Speaker  1:52:46  
something here that I think, you know, make sense to us. Because we're in this world so much that I think might require a little bit more explanation that's just human centric engineering, which is kind of like in by tie, one of the things that seems like a throwaway tagline, but is actually some insight into a really deep and different way that Mazda has the company operates. When we talk about human centric engineering, we are talking about us trying to figure out what is fundamentally going on in the human subconscious, that makes a car feel natural, right. And when we're accelerating, take away the car. And when when a person is walking, when they're accelerating. They accelerate with their calf, when you push off on the end of each step, you're pushing up with your calf. And as you have to balance your body against that acceleration, there's a natural acceleration that comes from that push from your calf. And then you're balancing mostly the part of you that still balancing in a car, because everything else is what about the seat is your neck, supporting your head, right. And so you see a very direct relationship between pushing off with your calf muscle and tensing these neck muscles right here. And that you go back to this minimum jerk Dana keeps, keeps talking about, if you look at the, the profile, a force profile exerted by any mammals muscle muscle, when they move, it follows this, this acceleration curve that minimizes the total amount of turf, because that takes the least amount of energy and eating food is too hard. And so you will have this acceleration profile from your calf muscle that you then respond to with your neck muscle. And that is sort of behind all of these weird little decisions we make about why is the brake pedal so so heavy, we make our brakes heavier than a lot of German cars do, for example, German cars, when you're coming to a stop on a German car, you tend to have so much Grab on the brake pedal that you're actually lifting off the brake as you're coming to a stop or controlling with your shin as you're trying to control that completely unnatural. We keep the bank heavy enough to use pushing with your calf because that's the muscle that's tied to your balance in your brain. And that's how we naturally intuitively balance You see a lot of cars where they have a manual shift mode and up shift is forward, the downshift is backwards, well, that puts the G forces in the wrong orientation for the direction you're pushing. We, and BMW and only Porsche GT cars, not the rest of their cars go the right way. So all these weird little decisions like that, come from sort of a deep philosophy of trying to figure out what is intuitively human, that make a car enjoyable to drive.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:55:29  
Now that that, that makes more sense, or less sense, to me, to me, it makes it makes a lot of sense. I mean, you know, I'm an engineer, so I get it. And, you know, and, and thinking about it from that perspective of, you know, the, the, the human interaction with the machine, and how, how, how our bodies respond to the motions of that machine? it, I think it makes a lot of sense in that perspective. So I appreciate that. That explanation. And, you know, for what it's worth, Yeah, I agree that, you know, it is there is a very different control, you know, as you're slowing down and coming to a stop, you know, when you're when you're doing if you're using a vehicle and Evie with one title driving it, it's definitely something that people aren't used to. And I, you know, I've become accustomed to it, but I can, I can definitely see, you know, where it does actually make make a lot of sense, you know, the way you described it of, you know, as you get to that transition point, you know, somewhere around six or seven miles an hour, you know, go moving over from the accelerator pedal to the brake pedal, to to have that precision control at the very end of the stop as you come to a stop. So that does make a lot of sense to

Unknown Speaker  1:56:58  
shift shift away from your weak Shin muscle onto your stronger and much more precise gaff. Which that's the muscle that's, that's used for, for all of the big forces in real life.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:57:10  
Okay, yeah. No, that makes that makes perfect sense. Well, I think that answers a lot of the topics that I wanted to cover in this, you know, in terms of the, the power train, I guess, one other area that we didn't really dive into j is the battery itself. You know, we've talked, we talked about, you know, the way you chose the size of the battery. But can you talk a little bit about the, the technology of the battery itself, what, you know, if you, if you can say what chemistry is, and, you know, kind of the construction of the battery? I'm curious about that?

Unknown Speaker  1:57:44  
Well, ironically, I am more focused on the, the driving fuel side instead of the electrons in the battery management and the battery control side, but it is a lithium ion battery. And, you know, the configuration, not to particularly a verse in that, um, I think there's other guys that have more in depth knowledge about that. We can try to get back to you about that. But I think, you know, it's a we have our supplier for that. And so it's it's not groundbreaking, or necessarily a breakthrough in terms of battery technology.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:58:25  
Okay. All right. Well, that's fine. Well, I really appreciate you guys taking the time to talk through all this stuff. Yeah, I think that. Yeah. As usual with Mazda, you've taken a slightly unique approach that, you know, I think a lot of people will appreciate. And, you know, it's, it's, it'll be interesting to see how the market reacts to what you've done here with the MX 30. Because it is it is a unique vehicle in the in the segment in terms of EBS and how you've approached in it, and I think it's very consistent with Mazda. You know, with with the way you do all your vehicles, so thank you so much for your time today. It's been great. Thank you.