Sam Abuelsamid  0:00  
Coming up on episode 216 of wheel bearings, Robbie rides a big BMW motorcycle. And we've got a pair of Ford plug in hybrids on opposite ends of the spectrum with the escape and the Lincoln aviator. We've also got first drives of the Ford Mustang Maki GT, the tundra, Toyota Tundra, and some information about Jim's upcoming ultra cruise system along with an interview with Dave parsec and Darren Palmer from Ford. All that and more coming up next.

This is Episode 216 of wheel bearings. I'm Sam Abuelsamid from guidehouse insights

Nicole Wakelin  0:41  
I am Nicole wakelin from autobytel

Roberto Baldwin  0:45  
I am Roberto Baldwin from TechCrunch.

Sam Abuelsamid  0:46  
And let's see who wants to go first let's let's have Robbie go first and tell us about something a little different than he drove or rode.

Roberto Baldwin  0:56  
So so so this week I rode the BMW are a teen motorcycle This is BMW is cruiser. cruisers are typically something like this this big you're typically going to see from Harley Davidson and what BMW has done is they've made a very very nice Harley Davidson they made the best Harley Davidson right now with the R 18 with a boxer engine yet so you have the huge boxer inches black black black passion and back and forth if you've ever seen a BMW motorcycle you see those huge giant just sticking out the side they're ginormous and when you're riding like it's you know it's balanced that's fine but when you stop you can feel it like moving the bike back and forth ever so slightly. Papa Papa Papa Papa, you're missing this but I'm moving my hands back and forth like I'm doing like a very tiny Chacha. So no.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:56  
They are 18 I think doesn't that imply that it's an 1800 cc engine

Roberto Baldwin  2:01  
1800 cc now my second car was a Honda Civic. Yeah, yeah, it's bigger. My my first car had a two liter engine. My second car had a 1.6 liter engine. And so this motorcycle not only has a bigger engine, I believe it has more power than that vehicle. It was 190 Honda Civic dx. I think it had like 89 ish horsepower. This motorcycle has 91 horsepower and 116 pound feet of torque and it only weighs well it only only and relatively speaking versus a car 761 pounds so it's not light in motorcycle terms. This is not a it's not a superbike it is not sport bike it is not a de is now it's not a dual sport it's not any of those it's a cruiser and it's unapologetically a cruiser just big and chrome and shiny and it's very it's a very pretty bike it's it's it's it's beautiful It's got all the shiny bits that you want and you know you can make it loud here's here's a fun little thing that I want to share with the world whenever you see like a Harley or anyone else riding a cruiser and they're just like bom bom they don't have to do that. That is not a thing that needs to be done that is not that doesn't keep the motor running it doesn't unless it's unless the the timing is is horribly off. They don't need to do that they're just doing that someone asked me once that so I just want to tell the world if you wondering why Harley davidsons are right right and wrong going mom mom just just just uh just revving the engine like all the time just because because it's loud that's why they're doing it because they can it's like me driving around in a car with an air horn just for the hell of it so yeah, so that's that's my little jump on the Yeah, yeah, that doesn't need to get done and unless they're very bad at driving and using a clutch. Anyway, so Yeah, it does. It makes a loud bomb bomb if you if you so desire. It has three writing modes. It has a rain, which is you know for the rain slick and has rock and it has roll So okay, so it's a German motorcycle that is looking at an American motorcycle. Harley Davidson, which is about as American as apple pie when it comes to vehicles built in Milwaukee. Well, they're built all over the world. By the way, Harley Davidson aren't just built in Milwaukee. They're built in different regions because it is it's cheaper to sell in a region if you build it there. So it's a German motorcycle built essentially to be an American motorcycle. And its drive modes are rock and roll.

Sam Abuelsamid  4:55  
Which is what what is sort of,

Roberto Baldwin  4:56  
you know, what is the difference? So rock Is the loud powerful it's sport mode it's essentially sport mode for the bike it's loud it's you get more low end torque it's ready to rock and roll it's ready to rock it's ready to rock roll roll roll is more subdued it's it's it's really nice for sort of riding around town where you're you're shifting non stop just like every stop sign every stoplight it's it's a much easier smoother writing experience it's not as loud so you're not you know someone rode by my house last night and put off you know set off a car alarm because they could because they could that's the only reason they did that people because they because they could yeah no it's so so it has rock it has roll it's a very comfortable it's very much a cruiser it has this really nice clutch trans and transmission it's very easy to ship it's very but you also get that nice clunk when you ride a cruiser you get these when you're shifting gears we rewrite a motorcycle it's it's nice when you can hear that clunk like as the bike is shifting gears as the gears engage he gets clunk it's very satisfying you know you don't really hear it on cars, but it's nice when you're a grandma grandpa so there you go. That's what's like riding the AR 18 it's a very nice bike I'm gonna have video of it and another variant of it on my YouTube channel at some point in the hopefully the near future it starts at $17,500 it is not a cheap bike motorcycles are well for the most you know if you want a nice motorcycle they're they're pretty expensive. The one I wrote had the premium package which is it has adaptive headlights that has Hill Start control so you don't slip you know roll backwards. If you've ever ridden a motorcycle in the city union what you end up doing is using your right foot to sort of hold the brake and kind of and I still do that even when I have Hill Country Hill star controller motorcycles but this has it so won't like roll back and to the you know a Hyundai sitting behind you it's got a reverse assist which I haven't tried yet i don't know but it has cruise control a lot more and more cycles of cruise control now. It's nice to be on long rides because you know if you keep your your hand and your wrist and your arm in the same position for like three hours it's kind of starts to hurt. So the price that I tested it at $22,615 so like let's see, so you can buy a Ford Maverick or you can buy the 2021 BMW R 18 and I'll be writing a different variant of this later on and I'll give you an update it's supposed to have some other stuff on it so no i i okay so here I always whenever I think of cruisers I think of boomers I am I am like right smack hardcore Gen X like you can't get more Gen X than me and so but no I actually enjoyed it I don't know if I would buy something like this I'm still not I'm just like when it comes to me it's kind of almost like the SUV of motorcycles but yeah no it's it's it's a nice bike if you're looking for a cruiser

Sam Abuelsamid  8:27  
so how's that price compared to you know a similarly equipped Harley oh that's our you know the cruisers from the the Japanese brands like a Honda like a goldwing or with the goldwing big class as a cruiser i mean i know i think they Yeah, that's a big v twin too.

Roberto Baldwin  8:47  
Yeah, those are I mean those are the goldwings just something else entirely. That is it is an amazing you know, they're just huge, gigantic. They're man. How big is it? goldwing goldwings like the size of an energy Yeah, they're about the size of an expedition. So okay, so I'm looking at what we got here on the the old Harley website for cruisers, I'm looking for something that's sort of close to it maybe the heritage classic which starts at 19 so it's about the same you know we're talking you know, you have things that are 19 2018 so it's about the same price you know, you can get the nice the inexpensive Harley the iron at three for you know, 10,000 which is a nice entry level price for a motorcycle or the 1200 you know, these are these are kind of smaller bikes though if you're, you know, if you're a big person like me, you end up going 1200 or larger, anything 800 and below you sort of look like a bear right in the tricycle.

Nicole Wakelin  9:51  
I think looking at because I like that image in my head.

Sam Abuelsamid  9:55  
Looking at the Honda motorcycle website. They Got the the goldwings under touring bikes and cruisers they've got like the fury is like 10,600 the shadow phantoms 70 970 shadow aero 78 so about eight to $10,000 for for a cruiser from from Honda

Roberto Baldwin  10:21  
yeah that sounds about right i mean you're yet to remember it's still a BMW BMW is their DS that go sport bikes are amazing they're also very expensive so you know you're paying that you're paying that BMW you know that that that BMW tax yeah exactly and you know if you're if you're looking at a three series or you're looking at a Honda Accord

Sam Abuelsamid  10:42  
exactly

Roberto Baldwin  10:44  
yeah that's gonna there's gonna be there's gonna be a difference Yeah, but it is a very pretty bike I'm sure those people who have the money and are looking for something that's not from Little Honda or Yamaha but you know maybe not a Harley they're probably the people I'm thinking people are probably cross shop this with Harley people who aren't hardcore Harley Davidson riders, people who ride Harley Davidson they are hardcore they're typically older than me and that's the only thing they're going to buy because they very much loved easy writer when it came out

Nicole Wakelin  11:19  
their entire reason

Roberto Baldwin  11:20  
they're on Tyrese in is Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, right tell you this. Yeah. or or or they can get an Indian Motorcycle. I think polarises opinion Oh yeah. Yeah, that was uh, I I grew up with a lot of bikers. I it's a weird thing to talk about but yeah, my parents were friends with a lot of bikers and so it was but the it was more about meth than it was motorcycles but whatever that's that's a whole other different story that's none of those people would have bought a BMW i can tell you that they would have been they are a Honda or anything they were like they bought Honda etc but they were not going to write a Honda cruiser no not not another hog was not going to be a Honda

Sam Abuelsamid  12:02  
Yeah, I remember at the LA Auto Show I think like three or four years ago they had they they they were showing up they revealed the I think it was an AR 18 concept so at the time before it went in production and remember that Ian Robertson I think wrote out on it so it was some high up executive from from BMW wrote out onto the stage on that ra teen concept and that sucker was loud

Roberto Baldwin  12:35  
it yeah it's funny because of the loudness is all behind you so when you're writing you're like oh, this isn't that loud. But then everyone behind you is like

Nicole Wakelin  12:44  
noisy

Roberto Baldwin  12:45  
especially especially if it's it was an inside Yeah, that where he wrote it Oh yeah. So it's a it's just echoes it's just a wall wall reverberates and they probably they probably pipe some in you know, just the you know, the the sort of the whole

Sam Abuelsamid  13:00  
thing amplified it.

Roberto Baldwin  13:02  
Yeah.

Nicole Wakelin  13:04  
Nice, nice.

Roberto Baldwin  13:06  
Enjoy.

Sam Abuelsamid  13:09  
Alright, lovely. All right, Nicole, what did you drive.

Nicole Wakelin  13:15  
I drove today and I drove it a lot today because we went for our little mini family road trip. I was in the 21 Lincoln aviator and we took it up to the White Mountains in New Hampshire which is like a two hour drive from my house through twisty turny roads like it's this highways nice sweeping highways there and then all these like steep hills and twists and turns. That is a fantastic road trip car. It's fantastic. It was so comfortable and so quiet like you think about what it's like a three row SUV it has seating for an entire army. It's huge. And you're kind of looking at like who would need this and as soon as I took it two hours up into the White Mountains of interiors back I'm like oh I would need this if I was doing family road trips because this is amazing. It is so soft, so comfortable. so quiet. It is all the things you want in a great big luxury SUV. And it's easy you can Karen an easy conversation with the people in the second row and even in the third row because I made my daughter ride back there for a little while might go sit in the third row so I can see if I can talk to you without screaming at you. You can because it's quiet enough. This is a hybrid it's a plug in hybrid it has a surprisingly short all electric range it was only 2121 miles of electric range. So you don't get a lot of Evie rage but you do get some which is like okay, that's cool like we drove it around a little bit and I was trying to eke out every last little bit but it takes like three hours to charge a level two charger so fairly I don't have the battery size in front of me but it's you know you're not getting a heck of a lot of rain for your three hours

Sam Abuelsamid  14:52  
16 or 17 kilowatt hours if I recall.

Nicole Wakelin  14:56  
Okay, so you're not getting a lot of range for your your Big battery because it not only does it fit in army but it's the size of a tank so it's huge but you know

Sam Abuelsamid  15:08  
it's gargantuan isn't it six hype

Nicole Wakelin  15:11  
but it still feels big like it's it's very boxy it's very square there's nothing there's no you know how they're like trying to Cooper phi all the SUVs like let's make a sloping roof let's make this look like it's sexy and small and Lincoln's like hell no big huge honkin SUV great big everything like I pulled into a parking space and it was narrow but I had enough room and the car was screaming It was a baby baby baby orange lights red lights beeping everything I'm like look, if you weren't so big, we wouldn't be having this conversation just calm yourself down car so it feels huge when you're driving it but powerful it's got like plenty of power you never despite feeling big, like kind of almost unwieldy and narrow spots. It drives nicely because it's got enough power you don't feel like Okay, come on. This huge thing is not moving. has some really cool like luxury bits and pieces. This one had some upgrades included a 28 speaker Ravel audio system. That just sounded amazing. It was one of those systems that you listen to a song that you've listened to 100,000 times and suddenly you hear extra things that you never noticed in the song before because the sound quality is so good like oh, there's extra little background bits in there that never really came through before. And it also has 30 weigh 33 zero 30 way adjustable seats. I felt like I was like counting like 123 there was there's individual extenders to support each of your thighs like just the little support and left by or even a little support and the right just in

Sam Abuelsamid  16:48  
case you're not

Nicole Wakelin  16:50  
supported. Right and even you only want individually you can do that you can pick which side it is and you can make the seats are super comfortable. I did have one weird thing so it has this interior. It's the interior and this one is kind of like this burgundy I forget the color now I can't find it on here. But is this really dark sort of Burgundy and it's leather and there's a little bit of swathing like on the a pillar. It's very fancy but Okay, so when I in the 80s my uncle sold Cadillacs and he had this Cadillac and I swear to God the red in the interior in this all I could think of looking at the dashboard is like oh my gosh, it's uncle jeans Cadillac. Like it looked just like it. I don't know that it's a good thing. The interior made me think of a 1980 something Cadillac. But that's what it looked like. But you know it's over the top but in a good way. I like this but here's your thing. So if you want this fancy SUV that has seating for an army and has 21 miles of electric range and 77 cubic feet for cargo and a 10.1 inch touchscreen, with the fancy 1980s Cadillac red leather situation happening, you are going to pay $88,335 for it. That's a lot like that. This is that's the jab. Yeah, right, exactly. That's it. Yeah. So I know it's a luxury SUV and I get it like luxurious. Chevy's are not going to be there that big are not going to be you know, $20,000 propositions. But that is a lot of money for an SUV. Like you have to be someone who has to. I feel like you would have to be someone who is driving a lot like constantly in your car for long distances, doing nothing but like practically living in it, taking your kids to dance lessons and football practice in school and playdates and to make that that kind of money worth it in an SUV. It's a lot of money. On the other hand, luxury, but it's a lot of money.

Sam Abuelsamid  18:52  
You know, if you have a lot of money, then you tend to be less concerned about that. So you know, I mean, if you are someone that can afford to spend, you know, $90,000 on a new car, then yes, you tend not to think about that quite so much.

Nicole Wakelin  19:09  
I guess but would you but I don't I maybe this I should say it this way. Would I spend $90,000 on this car? I don't know. I don't know there's lots of other there are other three row seven to eight passenger options out there. They

Sam Abuelsamid  19:28  
might let's say for example Range Rover, would you take this over a Range Rover?

Nicole Wakelin  19:34  
No, because I liked the idea of the capability of a Range Rover. Like I tried to go I didn't go off road in this I just wanted to take a picture in the grass. And it's so low that I had to find a spot where I could nicely drive into the farm stand because I'm like oh we'll rip that off. Where's a nice little spot and I'm driving into grass. It wasn't even like off road you know just oh that's too big of a dip between road and grass. Can't go there.

Sam Abuelsamid  19:59  
What about, let's say Audi Sq seven which has similar level of performance you know similar in size to this thing

Roberto Baldwin  20:10  
I think the Audi drive is much better than this car I'm

Nicole Wakelin  20:13  
gonna say the Audi has a sportier performance fields so I think I would still go out it before but I guess if you're that if you want the sporty thing at the Audi if you want the I'm driving a floaty boat kind of thing. The Lincoln

Sam Abuelsamid  20:28  
Okay, fair enough. Yeah, is

Nicole Wakelin  20:31  
that the comparison? Yeah, no, it's

Sam Abuelsamid  20:33  
good. They you know, you mentioned you know, the 21 miles of electric range and clearly in the case of this vehicle, Lincoln has tuned this thing more for performance for acceleration than for absolute efficiency you know, so they gave you a plug in hybrid with 20 miles of range but this is also the most powerful production Lincoln ever built. You know, this 400

Nicole Wakelin  21:00  
feels that way

Sam Abuelsamid  21:02  
Oh yeah. Yeah, it's

Nicole Wakelin  21:03  
Yeah, you feel it Yeah. 494 horsepower in 630 I think the torque I think that that's that's kind of that's kind of crazy. So I mean, it moves like you You put the hammer down on that to get on the highway and you will have absolutely zero problem accelerating your giant SUV into even the heaviest most congested, unhelpful highway traffic so it has a ton of power there are settings there are drive modes where you can choose to be and I forgot the exact names and the but like you can choose like a sport setting this a little bit more aggressive. You can choose one that focuses on efficiency you know so you can you can tweak things a little I kind of like to try I tried them all but I like to drive you know let's let's hear a middle of the road kind of options so for the most part I drove in that just to make happy Monday happy medium so you can play with it a little and I did get back a little bit a good amount of range just from regenerative braking like I kept thinking I should be done by now and it's like oh no I still have like a couple of miles left so I kept getting a little bit back a little bit back so that was you know that's kind of good but yeah, so I liked it I thought it was a really neat car I loved road tripping and I knew it was awesome i mean i can i can easily see if you have to like haul the family for eight hours to grandma's This is your car man like drive this

Sam Abuelsamid  22:24  
yeah and if you if you can't get comfortable in 30 way adjustable seats and you know there's clearly something wrong with you

Nicole Wakelin  22:33  
right there's there's more going on than any cars ever gonna fix Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid  22:37  
Which oddly enough was exactly the situation that Dan Roth had. He could never find a way to get comfortable in those seats but

Nicole Wakelin  22:45  
was that his big thing he can never get comfy I challenged him well he should he should be able to flow into later I feel like he should see if he can get comfortable a guy I feel like he should know people

Sam Abuelsamid  22:59  
might know a person or two

Nicole Wakelin  23:01  
he might know a person or two who could make that happen. Yeah, he might Yeah, he might know a guy

Sam Abuelsamid  23:07  
All right. I think at 88,000 that was the Black Label right?

Nicole Wakelin  23:13  
Yeah, this is the Black Label be at 1000 yes so I mean this is like the most tricked out you know the black labels sort of like it's their fancy buildings and cars it's got all the luxury goodies I mean it really looks and feels that it was really it is definitely fully feature for that you don't sit down and think gee they kind of skimmed they left out there's nothing they left out there's everything you could want to put on here it pretty much as

Sam Abuelsamid  23:41  
yeah and you can you can also get the Grand Touring starting you know that's the plug in hybrid starting at 68,000. So you don't have to go quite all in adjustable seats with that one but why

Nicole Wakelin  23:59  
well then why even bother with life? I mean really, if you're only gonna go with 18 ways Forget it. Like I don't want it now that's Forget it. Why Why did I even build that one?

Sam Abuelsamid  24:11  
Okay, all right. I also had a plug in hybrid vehicle this week from Ford Motor Company. That is kind of the the opposite extreme of the the navigator I had the What does appear to be a bit of a unicorn for for the the escape plug in hybrid, which was originally announced back to two and a half years ago when they when they first announced the the current generation escape. And it was supposed to go on sale in the US late last year. And it never arrived. It they they have been slowly trickling out over the last several months, but I guess now they're finally starting to deliver them in some significant volumes. And I've been pestering Ford to get into this vehicle for quite a while for most of this year. every couple of months, I'd shoot him a note and say, Hey, you got the scape plug in yet? Nope. Get these get plugged in yet Nope. If these get plugged in yet, yep, we got one we can get you in it next week. Oh, excellent. So basically, you know, this isn't fundamentally different from the regular Escape Hybrid, except it has a bigger battery. Instead of a 1.4 kilowatt hour battery, it has a 14.4 kilowatt hour battery pack. And the same engine, the same hybrid drive unit, it's front wheel drive only because the hybrid battery pack spans across underneath the rear seat. So there's nowhere to put the the drive shaft for the for the rear rear drive on the all wheel drive version. and Ford opted not to put an electric rear axle on this thing, which they are doing on the Lincoln courser plug in hybrid. So that's how they're going to differentiate the the courser from the escape plugin is with all wheel drive. So that means that this has about 200 horsepower total between 2.5 liter engine and the electric motor. It's officially rated by EPA with a I think it's a 37 mile range. Yeah, 37 mile electric driving range. So I've driven at longer distances a couple of different times this week, the first time I drove to, to Warren, Michigan for GM investor day, which we'll talk about later. And it was almost all highway driving. And doing that I got about 33 miles of electric range before they the engine came on. In Yeah, yesterday I took it and drove around, did some a mix of urban suburban, little bit of light highway driving, more typical mix of driving and got 41 miles before the battery was depleted. So the 37, I think, you know, in in a more tip in a fairly typical mix is very doable. And you know, that's, that's a little bit shy of what the Toyota rav4 prime, which is there, the plug in hybrid version of the rav4, the route that was rated at 41, I think, but in real world driving, you know, driving basically the same kind of route that I did earlier this year with the rav4. The rav4, I got 43 miles. And with the escape, I got 41 miles in the same kind of driving. So, you know, this is, you know, most people that like 75% of people drive less than 35 miles a day or something, I think is roughly the statistic. So you could if you plug this thing in every night, you can, most people can basically do all their driving electrically without using any gas. And then when you need to go for longer distances, just keep on driving, because then it just becomes a hybrid that that's that's the thing with with plug in hybrids.

The last generation of plug in hybrids that Ford produced between 2013 and 2020 were the fusion and the seamax plug in hybrids. And both of those vehicles were not designed as plug in hybrids, the batteries in those things were quite a bit larger than the new generation battery, that's an escape. And so what ended up happening with those cars is Ford had to stuff the battery in wherever they could and you ended up especially in the C Max, you ended up with very little cargo space left in the back because you had this big stack of battery in the cargo space. And so there was very little room to put anything and even in the in the fusion plugin. It basically consumed about half of the trunk and that thing, so it was a lot less practical. The Escape the battery is substantially smaller than it was in those vehicles it's entirely under the rear seat. And so there's no sacrifice in cargo space. With this one. You open the hatch and like you would never know that it's a plug in hybrid. It's it's got the same cargo space as any conventional escape. And the only the only visual difference you'll see is the extra door on the front right on the left front fender for the charge port. Everything else looks exactly like any other escape. Would which you know for for good or ill. You know the the exterior designer like the interior. The ergonomics and the design look nice, the materials Not quite as nice a lot of hard plastics. It You know, when especially when you compare it to something like that rav4, which, you know, the rav4 actually, surprisingly enough has a, as a looks like a more premium interior, or the Mazda CX five has a much more premium feeling interior than then the escape does. But you know, it drives well enough 200 horsepower is plenty, you can put it in different, you can select different modes, you can have just the normal hybrid mode and let the system decide when to use the battery, when to use the engine, there's a an all electric only mode. And there's a charge sustaining mode, you know, hold it for hold whatever charge you have for later. So if you're driving home, you've got you know, a few miles of electric range left, and you want to save it for driving through your neighborhood. So you can do that quietly, as you sneak in late at night, you can do that. And there's also a charge the battery mode. So if you're heading somewhere where you want to, you don't have any electric range available left, and you want to have some when you get there, you can actually have the engine run a little bit harder and charge up the battery. To do that. I you know, I have driven a couple of 100 miles over the past week, and I've drawn I think more than half of the driving over has been 185 miles I've driven and over 100 miles of that has been electric only. So it's it's, it's pretty, it's pretty good for that. The base price for the

base price for the SE trim level, for the for the plug in hybrid, it starts at $33,075 plus 12 $145 delivery, so 3434 34 to 50 roughly, for the cheapest version, the one I've been driving is the titanium which has all the nice goodies in there leather and heated seats and all the other stuff comes out to came out to a total of $43,025. But there is for now at least still federal tax credit available for these because Ford hasn't yet hit their 200,000 mark with their with their plug in vehicles. So the tax credit on the the escape plug in is 60 $800. So you know, getting you know for the bass, you know, if you get the SE, plug in hybrid, you can get that down to about 27 27,000 which is comparable to what you would pay for similarly equipped, hybrid regular hybrid version. And it's going to be a lot more efficient gives you a lot more electric driving capability. So if you're interested in if you're not quite ready to make the jump all the way to a full battery electric and you know that your daily driving, you know is in that you know less than 40 miles a day range and you have somewhere to plug in every day, then it's worth a look at something like this, you know, they're the rav4 prime is also another another one to take a look at, you know, the direct competitor similar size, the rav4 does have better performance. And it has all wheel drive because they have an electric motor on the rear axle as well. standard equipment, it's a little pricier than the Escape is. But it's got like 300 horsepower total between the front and rear electric motors and the engine. So it does have better performance, but you're gonna pay for that. With I've never even seen what that is the escape plugin.

Nicole Wakelin  34:03  
I know I have never seen one for reals ease, so I don't like wow, they itch. They really exist.

Sam Abuelsamid  34:09  
Yeah, you know, except except for the charge port door on the driver side front fender. You even if you if you saw it from the passenger side, you would never know that it was a plug in hybrid. Because there's there's nothing to visually distinguish it. And like I said, I think I was looking up sales numbers. I think over the last six months, they've delivered about 200 of them total. So and I'm guessing that almost all of those probably went to Ford employees and not to consumers. But they're now actually starting to roll them out to dealers and deliver them in larger volumes to consumers. The reason why it was delayed in Europe last year, the kouga which is what the the Escape is bashes the kouga outside of North America. The kouga plug in hybrid which went on sale earlier. Oh yeah problem with Take a guess battery fires because the the battery supplier it was the same battery supplier that was also supplying BM some BMW Vehicles In in Europe and they had a manufacturing issue with some weld splatter inside the cells that was causing short circuits and so they had to have a stop sale on the on the plug in hybrids and that impacted production for North America as well. And they delayed that while they worked on you know, working with the battery supplier to to work on some new quality processes and new testing procedures to make sure that they didn't they're all the same fire here when they launched it here.

Roberto Baldwin  35:53  
Yeah, good job. So

Sam Abuelsamid  35:54  
far it hasn't caught fire.

Roberto Baldwin  35:56  
Now burst into flames.

Nicole Wakelin  35:57  
That's a good thing. Yeah, who has not burst into flames wonder with that in the plus column.

Sam Abuelsamid  36:07  
All right. Let's see. What do we have next? Was the rundown tundra Shall we go with let's go with the tundra First,

Nicole Wakelin  36:19  
the tundra. So that's me. That's me. That's me. So I had the chance this last week to drive the all new 22 Toyota Tundra. They've been talking about this vehicle forever they released pieces of it, like we got all these details a little while ago and they're like, no, we're not gonna let you drive it yet. And they finally let us drive it. So they pretty much improved everything you can think of to improve with this. They've made a lot of changes to it. Some of them bigger than others. One of the big things is that there's a new hybrid engine that you can get with it. That is a big deal understandably so there's a new transmission they've added safety features. They revised the suspension system and the infotainment is all new. Talking about the engines first you get a 3.5 liter twin turbocharged V six 389 horsepower 479 pound feet of torque or you get that as a hybrid that is 437 horsepower 583 pound feet of torque you do feel the difference it does actually feel much more responsive in the hybrid. It's not like you drive the standard engine and you think it's underpowered but when you go step from one into the other there's a noticeable noticeable difference between the two I would buy either one I don't know that I see I'm not someone who would buy a hybrid just for the extra like to say I have a hybrid there I think sometimes things do just fine just with a gas engine so I don't know that I would necessarily say oh you got to get that you got to get that hybrid you got to get it for the extra powers power you got it you got to get it for the extra if you know if you want it go ahead but don't feel like you can't get by with a standard engine on their the infotainment system though. So they've significantly upgraded this and I think I touched another via the Alexis that has the same thing surprising no surprise because Toyota Lexus, same company, essentially. But the voice control on this is really really good. I find that voice control. It's it's hit or miss. Sometimes I think it's just my voice. Sometimes I think maybe it's the ambient noise in the car. Sometimes it's raining too hard outside. Sometimes it's a Tuesday and it's too sunny. I don't know why I have trouble with voice control on cars. But I do. And I find that these This works really well. First of all, it has two microphones so it picks up the driver and the passenger. So if you're the passenger, you don't have to like have you ever done it awkward, like sort of leaning over to scream something at it because you want it to hear you but it's listening by the driver. You don't have to do that. And then when it responds, it responds to you from wherever you're sitting. So the driver gets a response from those speakers. The passenger gets a response from those speakers. And it's a pretty intuitive system. You don't have to memorize commands like you know, Toyota directions to and then place you can say turtle where's the nearest whatever Toad I want coffee todo find me this and it's pretty good about finding what you want without having to come up with these specific language specific commands, which is always a pain in the neck because then if your passenger wants something even if you've memorized all exactly the things that you have the

Sam Abuelsamid  39:33  
right vehicle and know exactly, they

Nicole Wakelin  39:35  
don't know. And suddenly it's like, let me do this for you because you don't know the right words to say to make the system understand what you want. Just be quiet. I'll find your coffee for you, you know. So I really liked the infotainment I thought it was a leap forward. It's very fast. The screen is very, very easy to use. There's an optional 14 inch screen, beautiful screen, very responsive, you can really you can pinch Zoom out a lot of screens but some of them you when you pinch and zoom it's like, oh gosh, suddenly you're just like you're too far in or too far out. This one is responsive enough that you don't lose where the heck you are on the screen when you're playing with it. So I thought that was really good. They have this they have a nice range of trims. They've got six different trims all together. It includes the TRD PRO for like if you want to go out and do your, you know, heavy duty, going off road and having some fun stuff. And there's this really the 1794 edition, which I feel like is their version of like every truck has to have a cowboy version. It has to have one that is designed for the guy who's wearing chaps and a hat and like cowboy boots at is going to the ranch there might be one guy buying their truck that fits that but they must have a trim level of their truck for that guy. It's the 1794 it has all this extra leather and it makes it look very upscale. I drove that one for a good amount of time and I was like Okay, you know what, this is kind of growing on me I'm going to put on the Country Music station and embrace my inner cowgirl here this is kind of fun. So I like that I think overall I think people are going to be really pleased I don't know if it's enough to get someone who was an f150 guy and get him to be like oh Forget it. I'm going for the tundra but I feel like it's gonna make tundra fans really happy where it doesn't match up it doesn't have that crazy capability that you're going to get in an f1 50 the tow rating and the payload ratings those aren't up there so if you're looking for like the absolute maximum that you can get tundra is not your Huckleberry you don't want to do that. But really consider what you need you know much like you people buy big vehicles you know are you hauling air 90% of the time do you really need to have that payload you really need to be able to tow you know your house off the foundation maybe not maybe you don't so yeah so overall I was pleased with it we have no pricing pricing is coming out closer to the on sale date so they seem to think it was later yeah later I feel like it's like a coming soon situation we actually had models that we were driving pre production some of them like the trims inside were like fake plastic like the cheesy cheesy plastic like I went to take pictures the inside nine textured yeah oh do you guys have one with a plus? Yeah, they were textured like you touch it with your fingers and they felt like hollow like they were really so we were driving very pre production vehicles so it's not like they had very you know, they had they were finished enough that of course we could tell what they were going to be like but you had elements it's like that door panel isn't right and that center console isn't right. So you know I feel like when they give you things that are that that look like that they're still you know, sort of rushing to keep up and get things rolling. So I don't know they said it would be at least three to four weeks before we had pricing. So did they accordingly if you want a

Sam Abuelsamid  43:00  
new tundra So you mentioned towing not matching f 150 how much kenick tow

Nicole Wakelin  43:09  
let's see it can tell the towing is 12,000 and the maximum payload is 1940 so it still keep it Yeah, that's I mean that's what I'm saying. It's like it's not the highest number I think that was f150 1400

Sam Abuelsamid  43:25  
I think it's 14,000 and you know Silverado and rammer close to that as well and they're both

Nicole Wakelin  43:32  
right so they're all a little they're all a little bit more so it's but there's the weird thing with trucks as people get very like I need the truck that's the trickiest truck of all the trucks okay then if you want to spend your money to do that and you actually need it Have at it but if you if you don't need that like think about that before you buy a truck like I feel like people get a little carried away with like I have the biggest truck the manliest truck the most powerful cable your truck is like okay just because you can earn an extra 2000 pounds and you paid a small fortune to do that. Do you really need that like consider what you need when you buy a truck I feel just in general whether you're looking at a tundra or anything else

Roberto Baldwin  44:07  
you're stepping on we're stepping on the TR x and the Raptors

Nicole Wakelin  44:11  
to the dock but we're gonna be okay with that

Sam Abuelsamid  44:14  
mean 99

Nicole Wakelin  44:19  
I know I am I know

Sam Abuelsamid  44:22  
most people don't need Maverick or a Santa Cruz

Nicole Wakelin  44:27  
right yeah so I mean you don't see don't need to do you know it's you don't need to go crazy I feel like that I feel like they did a good job with this there was no real complaint that I had like sometimes you get these all new especially with the big truck like this and you sort of feel like okay you know what 90% of this is good but you guys so drop the ball in this one area. I don't feel like they did I feel like they paid attention to infotainment got some upgrades. They got the hybrid powertrain. They have a good towing and payload even though it's not the highest. They've got six different trends to choose from. They made they made the changes that needed to be made to keep this competitive and to appeal to truck buyers and like I said, I think it's going to people who are tundra folks are going to be really happy with this. I don't know how many people it's going to take away from other OEMs but that's always a thing with trucks like your Ford guy for life, your Chevy guy for life, your RAM guy for life, I don't know how much

Sam Abuelsamid  45:24  
we have the best owner loyalty of any segment in the auto automotive industry,

Nicole Wakelin  45:29  
right? So I feel you know, but I do feel like if you were looking for your truck for the first time, like you aren't already, you have not already committed your soul to specific OEM. That when you look at this and if you really pay attention that you could end up saying, Okay, you know

Roberto Baldwin  45:44  
what, there's no fancy tailgate options right?

Nicole Wakelin  45:48  
I liked it. So overall,

Sam Abuelsamid  45:52  
any little stuff.

Nicole Wakelin  45:57  
If you don't have like the multi pro doesn't open sideways or flip down or have steps or speakers. I think there's like an optional I want to say there's like an optional little

Sam Abuelsamid  46:07  
corner Step six. Yeah, I think they have a corner step that you can pull down like on the on the

Roberto Baldwin  46:12  
the point, right, but if there's no feedback, or

Unknown Speaker  46:18  
even bother

Nicole Wakelin  46:19  
to get I'm out. It's like not having 30 way seats in your SUV. What's the point?

Sam Abuelsamid  46:24  
Did they give any indication of ventually offering other other power trains? besides just the VSA feature products? Sam, you

Nicole Wakelin  46:35  
know the answer that question, let me hear you say it. What's the answer? We cannot

Sam Abuelsamid  46:39  
talk about

Roberto Baldwin  46:40  
future products.

Nicole Wakelin  46:42  
I can't believe you asked me that we can now I know what it's like to be an OEM. You cannot comment on future product. We cannot comment on future products.

Sam Abuelsamid  46:49  
What What about I think right now there's only the crew cab right. Or do they have

Nicole Wakelin  46:57  
Why do I feel like there's two cabs? No, there's two. There's the crew. Oh my gosh, and what's the other one called? I kept getting the name. There's the extended crew cabin. Is it a dual cat? It's Yeah, so they have the one they're both four doors but the one you have like full four doors. The other one you have a small little section it's like so you do have got two calves and yeah, and you have three bed lengths there's which I think there used to be two so now you have three beds. So okay, a little extra versatility in there. But yeah, you do get two cabs the smaller of the two the one with the smaller back seat it's pretty small like you can fit adults back there and you can sit that that's definitely are going to horse shows you want to large for quick drive thing. If you really are regularly putting people in the rear seats, you

Roberto Baldwin  47:40  
are all our listeners who are dragging horse trailers around,

Nicole Wakelin  47:43  
you want the larger cap,

Roberto Baldwin  47:45  
shout out to my horse folk.

Nicole Wakelin  47:51  
Right here driving, bringing giant horse trailers every

Sam Abuelsamid  47:54  
Whoo, there you go see a horse trailer around your horses very upset. 10 or 12 years, you know,

Roberto Baldwin  48:02  
I'm just gonna say your horses.

Sam Abuelsamid  48:06  
Take me anywhere, till until writing,

Roberto Baldwin  48:10  
you know, by me the good grain.

Nicole Wakelin  48:16  
Just leave me in the bar and you completely ignore me. Like I'm not even here.

Sam Abuelsamid  48:22  
Alright. So I on Wednesday, I went to Warren, to the GM Tech Center, where just before the investor, GM had their analyst or are their investor day for the Wall Street analysts, not they do different stuff than the kind of stuff I do for my work, you know, they, they decide what price what the stock price should be for various companies, you know, whether people should buy or sell stocks. That's not what I do. And they had a whole bunch of presentations at about, I think four or five hours of presentations for the the Wall Street guys. And before that, though, they did some briefings for media and Industry analysts. And we got to see some of the stuff a couple hours ahead of the Wall Street guys, including getting a briefing on GM new ultra cruise system. So I think Mark Royce initially alluded to or mentioned ultra cruise during a presentation he did about two years ago. And it's been mentioned a few times here and there but they've never given any details about it until now. So this is gems next generation beyond supercruise. So supercruise is gems hands free driving assist system, so called level two system that lets you go hands off in highway driving conditions and you can use it on about 200,000 miles of divided highways across North America right now. And the latest versions of it are adding features like lane change on demand automatic lane changing the ability to work while you're towing a trailer. lot of a lot of interesting features, ultra cruise takes it to a whole new level, instead of 200,000 miles a divided highways, it's supposed to work at launch in 2023 on 2 million miles of all kinds of roads, highways, urban, suburban, rural, you name it. And then over time, they plan to grow that to over 3.4 million miles, there's as close to four as close to 4 million miles of paved roads in the United States. And they want to get that up to close to three and a half million miles over at some point after the launch. And what this system will do, instead of just you know, when you get on the highway, and you're in the lane, you hit the hit the button, and then it just takes over the steering and speed control. The Ultra cruise system will actually let you put in your destination in the navigation. And it will do the steering and speed control for you. Most of the way to your destination it will go call it driveway to driveway capability, they say it should be able to operate in 95% of all common driving scenarios. So the places where it won't work would be like if you have really bad weather, or you know, a new construction zone has just popped up it might not be able to handle that or some particularly complex intersections and might not be able to handle. But most other stuff that you do on a day to day basis, it will be able to do the steering do the speed control, it'll read the traffic, the speed limit signs, know how fast it should go. It'll read traffic signals and stop at red lights, hopefully only at red lights and not at green lights like a certain other system. And you know it but it's not, they're not calling it self driving, because you still have to supervise the system, it's still level two system. So you can't crawl in the backseat and take a nap. You can't play games, you got it, you have to keep watching the road, but you don't have to touch the pedals or the steering wheel. And there it's going to have a more capable sensor system higher higher depth, higher resolution cameras, possibly imaging radar. They they didn't specify what kind of radar but they recently made an investment and a company called occupy that does imaging radar. And they may be using that technology and they're definitely going to have LIDAR on here they're have they have a Sept on LIDAR sensor that's going to be on these vehicles. It's it's going to be on premium models. They didn't specify which but starting with Cadillac as you might expect. So it'll probably be on the new Cadillac silastic, their electric flagship sedan, maybe on the Escalades possibly the lyric and

I think the first year they'll probably have it on two or three models eventually growing it to about nine models after a couple of years, but it'll be sold alongside supercruise so it'll be an extra cost option above and beyond supercruise what do you what do you think about this you know having a system that can do most of the driving for you but you still have to watch the road and be ready to take over at any time.

Nicole Wakelin  53:50  
I think it's kind of I mean it sounds like it's much you know, it's an improvement from where we've been but I still think until we get to one where it lets you let go you know like taking a nap I don't know how exciting it is like it's cool like nifty but you're still you I mean if you're being a responsible adult grown up like you should be when you're driving if it says you have to pay attention then you have to pay attention and you can only relax so much because you're still driving that you're still driving the car even if you're not serious you're still in charge of driving the car so I think it's very cool it's very exciting but at the same time I don't know how excited you can get one it's like well you know I still have to be there I still have to be paying attention I still have to be really on top of it just in case something goes sideways.

Roberto Baldwin  54:37  
I mean I think it illustrates just where we are in the quest for autonomy which is we're still a far we're still a long ways away for like a true autonomous you know, level three, they can drive everywhere. Vehicle I mean that's that we can be all excited about it. The idea you know, most people don't like driving. They're very they're they're angry. They're stuck in traffic. Most people are talking all they're doing is commuting which is really the worst driving possible. And so, you know, once we get to that point, I mean there there is a reduction of cognitive load when you're using these systems like supercruise I drove from New Mexico to El to LA with supercruise. And it was it was nice. But you know, and then if we drive from LA to wherever, you know, I do all the cross country thing with with ultra cruise, then you know, it's going to sort of reduce that load, but you start to pay attention and you know, they're they're smart about having, you know, the in car monitoring system, they're using LIDAR, they're doing all the things I have in all the redundancy, all the things that Tesla is not doing. And they're not saying that it's autonomous. They're not saying it's it's full self driving. And so I feel like they're, they're being a little bit more responsible when it comes to this. I mean, even Tesla's lawyers have said, oh, we're just not really self driving when talking to the state of California, which is two completely different, you know, messages coming from one company, where jams like, Hey, we're making a supercruise better, we're calling it ultra cruise. But what happens after ultra Cruise is like super duper cruise and super ultra mega cruise labs, when they get to level three, do they just call it something else? They're like, GM scope? I don't know. But no, I think it's, it's, on one hand, you have to worry about, you know, the the complacency that these sort of systems breed when people just sort of stop paying attention. You can you can still be looking at the road and not be paying attention. You know, and I think we've all done that, where you're driving, it's a long drive, you've been on the road for a long time. And suddenly, like, Oh, my God, I still zoned out your zone? Yeah, you know, you kind of forget the last five miles you've driven. So you know, I don't know if this is, this is a better or worse than that, because you know, you are looking at the road. So I think what we'll see how it comes out and what it means. And even if it means, you know, I still sort of keep my eye, you know, my hands kind of always hovering near the wheel with these systems because you know, robots. So we'll see how we'll see how it you know, we got two years to figure it out two years to see what happens two years, you know, Mercedes has their sort of, I think, I don't know, they're not calling it level three, but they have a they have a on highway system. That's geo fence like supercruise that you don't have to pay attention. You can like play Tetris while you're while it's while you're driving. Yeah, so that one's

Sam Abuelsamid  57:19  
limited to like, for, for that scenario where you're not paying attention that's limited to 37 miles an hour. Yeah, so there's that for low speed traffic conditions.

Roberto Baldwin  57:31  
So when so you know, every day on the way to work, which is kind of, again, again, the worst driving scenario. But you know, it's it's, you know, it's but yet, both of those systems sort of show like where we are when it comes to autonomous systems, from companies that are trying to be responsible, because they realize this is a lot harder than anyone anticipated when we started, you know, crowing about 10 years ago.

Sam Abuelsamid  57:58  
Yeah, and

Nicole Wakelin  58:00  
I don't think anybody realized how hard it would be. I think that's it. Nobody's everyone thought it was sort of builders. were so close, you're gonna have this just give us 10 minutes, and it's like, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. It's like been ours. Yeah. Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid  58:14  
Yeah. The, you know, the, there's a presentation I've given a couple of conferences recently. You know, and the opening slide is, you know, 2018 will be the year of self driving cars. Okay, maybe 2019. No, 20 2021 Yeah, I think, you know, later Later this year, we do have some, you know, limited self driving vehicles out there. You know, Wei Mo's running some stuff in Arizona. I saw on the way up from San Francisco Airport to Sausalito The other day I saw at least five different waymo vehicles in San Francisco cruises running their vehicles in San Francisco Argo is running in a bunch of cities and they're going to launch Robo taxi services later this year but with still with safety drivers I did have a chance to talk with somebody from Cruz at the the investor Day event and Dan aim and the CEO of crews did a presentation he was one of the presenters and he talked about you know their plan their business plan and how you know they're starting off with you know, Robo taxis and deliveries but eventually at some point you know on a on an on a graph that they showed with no actual dates on it or numbers they showed it hockey sticking up you know, as they add cruise technology to GM consumer vehicles. So, you know, some some indeterminate future point you know, you may actually have that from GM although, I'm, I remain skeptical on that one.

Roberto Baldwin  59:54  
sometime in the future things will make money.

Nicole Wakelin  59:57  
I love that chart with no actual numbers. dates, like, this is what we want it to look like when we don't know, but this is what we want it to look like.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:00:05  
That's what that's what has become known as a basis chart. Yeah, charts that Amazon's been putting out, you know, for years, you know, showing the growth in sales of Kindle ebooks or, you know, prime subscribers or whatever else in our app, Echo users, you know, without actually applying any numbers to it. So it's always rather annoying. But but but talking to somebody from cruise, you know, they they recently got their permit for care driverless Robo taxi operations in California, from the California DMV, but they also have to still get a permit from the California Public Utilities Commission. And apparently, that process you have to get the DMV permit before you can apply for the PFC permit. And that takes about three months or so. So based on that, that timeline, looks like crews might be ready to start driverless Robo taxi operations for the public sometime in early 2022. So you know they they might be one but it'll it's gonna be a race between them and waymo to see who can get out there first because Wei mo also has their driverless permit for San Francisco as well so we'll see which one gets to get starts operating in San Francisco first

Roberto Baldwin  1:01:21  
as someone who's been stuck behind the crews and way mo vehicles in San Francisco I tell you they're not good they just you know when you expect the car to do something and it doesn't like the person is lost or whatever that is what it's like being stuck behind these vehicles. It's like being stuck behind a loss tourist. Yeah, so I mean, maybe they've leaps and bounds improve their system during you know, the last six months or so. But a lot of drivers in San Francisco will probably tell you that there they are they oh god no, God it's one of those I don't like being around them when I don't like being when I'm riding a motorcycle. I don't like being around Uber or Lyft crews or contractors and white f150 all three of those people are just driving like insane. They're all that's all. I don't know what's gonna happen. I don't know what I'm gonna back off. I'm gonna speed up but I want to get away from those three scenarios. The contractors, the the Uber Lyft drivers and the waymo in the cruise cars because you're just like

Sam Abuelsamid  1:02:29  
oh, okay, yeah. All right. last story for this week. Robbie, you and I both had a chance to drive something this week. The Ford Mustang Maki gt What did you think

Roberto Baldwin  1:02:45  
it okay so we can also there and argue about whether or not the Maki is worthy of the Mustang name and I think there are people who are I think there's more people who are in the it's fine it's a Maki but it's not a Mustang then there are it's fine let them call it a Mustang you can I do believe that you can call it a GT though I think that it deserves that badge on there it was yeah I will drive a lot of power you know they're they're doing some good work with the with the suspension system there's there's a couple things that I found that I wasn't completely super excited about. I feel like magneride should have been a lot better when it comes to two launches. I don't think it gives enough doesn't stick in the back end enough so I kept getting wheel spin from the front the front tires which is you know physics but if you you know upset up your suspension a little bit better you don't get that you get all four tires you know grabbing at ones giving you all that extra torque and that power but overall Yeah, the GT the GT performance edition both of them are outstanding they're GTS they're their proper Ford GT maybe a Mustang

Sam Abuelsamid  1:04:00  
Yeah, did you get a chance to drive to try a blue cruise on one on one I did

Roberto Baldwin  1:04:05  
I tried out blue cruise um it is a it is not quite as nice as supercruise and I just from from the driving there's a little bit more ping pong game where you know kind of as it's trying to find the center of a road sometimes you know the cars or go back and forth this is something we have a lot with adaptive cruise control and lane keep assist when those like probably six years ago you got a little little bit of ping pong game with those systems as a little bit more ping pong and then the then then what Tesla's offering up and what Blue Crew are supercruise is and at one point there was a corner that was just a bit too sharp that I took control because I didn't I thought that we were going to glide into the other lane where there was another car for the most part though, I think it's a really it's, you know, it's it's their first this is their first vehicle with that they've driven that it's on, they're gonna have over the air update, which means it's just going to get better unless they make a short One mistake you make, you're worse. So I think if you if you're if you're going to pay for that, it's it's you know, just you're going to feel a little bit better because you know, it's going to get better. And you know, let's those handfree systems are nice. I also I missed the fact that there's no light on the steering wheel, like Mercedes, BMW, GM, they all have some sort of light system on the screen well, and not having that is sort of weird when it originally member when we saw supercruise, the first time when they showed the picture on the stairwell. Oh, that's ridiculous. And then you drive you're like, Oh, no, that's cool. Yeah, now, and now I feel like it's ridiculous that Ford doesn't have that.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:05:37  
Yeah, no, I agree. And I had a long conversation with a parasite the other night about that, you know, explaining, you know, why I didn't think that blue Cruise is as good as supercruise. And the, the HDMI that the interface is one aspect of that, you know, with, with blue cruise, you know, you're limited to the graphics that they have in the instrument cluster. And, you know, Ford uses, you know, for obvious reasons, they predominantly blue design, you know, and so it's not, it's not as immediately apparent, when it's changing modes, you know, that, you know, when you need to take over control, or what mode is available to you, because it sort of blends in more, whereas with supercruise, with the light bar, you know, you got blue, green, red, you know, and it's right in the lower periphery of your vision all the time, you know, when it when it has changed, it's very obvious, very unambiguous. And like, like you said, You know, sometimes one of the flaws in Super in blue cruise, which, when I had an early drive ended a couple months ago, here in Dearborn. I was talking to one of the engineers on it, who was riding with me. And I asked the question, one of the things that supercruise has done from the very beginning, when they first launched it in 2017, is they use the the maps, the high definition maps, as a long range sensor. So they're looking at about two miles out down the road, looking for curves in the road, they know the curvature of all the radius of all the curves. And depending on what your set speed is, if the if the system thinks your set speed is maybe a little bit too high, to get through that curve at that speed, it will automatically slow you down a little bit as you approach that curve, to a speed that you can get through safely and then and then resume your speed. So if you're going, if you've got it set at 80 miles an hour, and thinks you can only get through there 67 it'll slow you down to 67. And then as soon as you get past the apex, it'll speed back up to 80 miles an hour. For does not doing that for some reason. I think they will eventually but they're not doing that yet at launch. And that's why, you know, sometimes you see curves, you'll see it starts you'll feel it start to drift out and you have to take over control. And that's, that's not good. Yeah. I mean, if it's supposed to be a hands free system, you know, they need to be able to deal with that kind of scenario. But the, you know, I thought, you know, the, the the handling, you know, and the performance edition, coming back down Pacific Coast Highway, I thought was, was great. You know it for a vehicle that weighs 5000 pounds, and you know, is significantly taller than a traditional Mustang. Although, by SUV standards, it's actually not very tall. You know, it's, it's like six inches lower than a Ford Edge. So, you know, being in that in that range, though. It's, it feels really good, you know, going through those curves at at fairly significant speeds. And at one point I was, I was up behind like a 2010 2011 Mustang GT. And you know, I had no problem at all keeping up with him going through those curves. You know, off the line, the, the GT performance edition runs zero to 60 in about three and a half seconds, which is about the same as the GT 500 A Shelby GT 500. And it feels like it you know, it does it without all the noise that a GT 500 Meg's but it and it actually does it a lot easier because with the all wheel drive, you know, you're not struggling just to try to get grip, you know that the GT 500 has a lot more power, it's got seven or 60 horsepower versus 480 in the Maki, but the Maki can actually put that power and that torque to use whereas the GT 500 still struggles with that.

What else Oh, one one cool feature that that they added for the for the GT for both the base version and the the the performance edition the main differences between the for the performance edition you get summer tires instead of all seasons prolly summer tires versus continental all seasons and you get the magneride dampers but For both of them they added a new driving mode they had already had whisper engage and unbridled mode now they add unbridled extend, which is meant for track use or if you're autocrossing and what that actually does is it pre cools the battery when you engage it and then actually limits the power the total power output a little bit they didn't say exactly how much but it reduces the total power output a little bit so that it will stay within a band where you can get consistent performance so instead of 480 horsepower you might be getting, I don't know 420 or something for 30 and it'll keep it'll it'll be able to maintain that performance level over many laps. which is you know, I think if you if you're going to take this thing to the track, well I'm not sure why people would but if you're going to take it to the track or to just to an autocross Hey well you're going to be able to get much more consistent performance with it using that and it also reduces the front motor because the GT gets the same motor rear front and rear and so the nominal setup is you got 5050 torque split front to rear it rebalances it so you're getting 40% in the front 60% in the rear so it feels a little more like a rear drive car and you can you can get the back end out a little bit more with the accelerator pedal

Roberto Baldwin  1:11:22  
yeah with without unbridled it does tend to a little you could do due to it does tend to do some some understeer you know it's the unbridled thing is there's there's the set it up though if you've been driving around it just you just can't turn it on. That was Yeah, so I kept like I was driving and I drive I drive the roads that we drove all the time. There's this very nice these what nice windy roads from from Mill Valley to two Stinson beach. And I drive that's the road I drive all the cars on so I know pretty well. And I know how to like, you know, make sure I get the most you know I can I can test the performance of the vehicle with them. But because of that I couldn't turn on bridle extend on because I had just been pushing the car to like Oh, I should turn this on. It's like no. But I did get to use it the next day at auto cross, which was nice. So yeah, it does. Yeah, it does. It makes it a bit more neutral with with the and you get some you'll get some oversteer, which is always fun.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:12:21  
Yep. All right. Any other thoughts on the Maki gt?

Nope. Okay, I did, I did sit down with Dave parsec and Darren Palmer, to talk about the GT and also with Darren about some of the stuff that Ford is doing with charging including their new charge Angel program. And I will tack those interviews on the end here after we do our q&a. So we do have a couple of questions that came in one C's do the the one that came in last week after we recorded hit this one first. When do you see the tipping point this is from Dave vestment our Dan vassula When do you see the tipping point where it will no longer be more environmentally environmentally responsible to keep an older ice car on the road rather than buying an Eevee

Roberto Baldwin  1:13:25  
I think that comes I mean if you already have a car It depends on you know how what the kind of how old it is and but I think it also its its efficiency its miles per gallon so if your car right now is getting 10 miles per gallon i don't i don't know why but if yeah if you're getting like something that's 30 to 40 miles a gallon it's probably gonna be a little bit further out. But I think as battery as battery technology gets better and better and you're able to put lighter batteries, smaller batteries and get the same range. I think that's you know, that's when you you go past parity when it comes to not just the price point of EBS versus you know internal combustion engines but also you start going past the carbon footprint of a new Eevee versus of new ice because you're using less battery which means you know you're using less materials energy to produce the V Yeah, less energy to produce the vehicle so i think you know, I think it's still a little wild a little bit out versus like keeping something that you have I mean I'm a firm believer and buy used cars you know, drive a car until it falls apart and you know that's that's that's that's sort of where I am but yeah, no, I think it's it's we're getting there, I think but I think it's still a little a little a little bit out.

Nicole Wakelin  1:14:49  
think there's some time to go yet. I think it's Yeah, I think the same thing. I think we're at a point where the technology has to sort of get to a little bit more affordable, a little But more environmentally sourced, it's still so early really in the Evie battery situation. I mean, it feels like we've been dealing with these for a while. But in the grand scheme, we really haven't. And, you know, these technological advancements tend to happen in, you know, little tiny increments, and then maybe there's a leaf in little tiny increments, and then there's a leap. And I think we need a few leaps forward. Before it's something where everyone says, okay, it really makes absolutely no sense for me to have this ice vehicle, I really should be making the move to an Eevee this is, you know, I think we have a ways to go, I couldn't put a date, I couldn't say five years, six years, eight years, but I still I feel like there's a ways to go yet.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:15:37  
Yeah, I think even when we get to, you know, any, pick me up, pick any random date in the future, 2025 2028, whatever it might be, it depends on the vehicle that you're replacing, you know, if you're replacing, you know, something that's 25 years old, you know, something suddenly was built in the 70s, or 80s, as an example, or even even the 90s that doesn't have the same emission controls we've got today is not as fuel efficient, you know, that's going to be a different story than, you know, if you're driving something that's, you know, built in the last five years, or in the next five years, if you you know, come 2025 if you're driving, you know, a 234 year old Ford Maverick, with the hybrid, you get 40 miles per gallon or a Prius, you know, or a rav4 Prime these are, these are all very efficient vehicles and the the incremental benefit to, from replacing a relatively new vehicle that is very efficient with an Eevee is probably not gonna it, you're probably not going to be a net benefit yet, at that point, you know, as opposed to replacing something that's 20 or 30 years old. And it also depends on how you use that vehicle. You know, like, my Miata is 31 years old 32 years old. And but I don't drive it very much. So the impact of that vehicle is relatively minimal you know, but if you're driving an old car you know 50 6070 miles a day you know for a commute that's you know, that's a very different situation and you know, that's a vehicle that is probably worth replacing You know, you're gonna have a significant impact from replacing that with an Eevee and you know, if you're trying if you're driving something that old it's probably because you can't afford a new Eevee and so you know, you're probably going to replace that with a used Eevee at that point. But yeah, that's again that's a good thing you want to you know, once once something has been built you know, ideally you want to keep using it for as long as as long as you reasonably can so that you're not consuming that energy and those materials to produce another one Yeah,

Nicole Wakelin  1:18:10  
yeah, I think if he's driving something exceptionally old, but you know, like you said, a lot of times when you're driving older vehicles, there's two reasons either it's, it's something that's you're hardly driving at all and it's almost become sort of a classic thing that you have in your driveway because you love it, or you simply can't afford to get a new car and if you can't afford to get a new car for the time being. There are very limited options when it comes to EBS. If you want an affordable one I know there's a good number of TVs out there but very quickly you go from things that the average person to afford can afford to very expensive vehicles it just don't make sense for most of us whether they were an Eevee or not most of us wouldn't spend that kind of money so it it's a hard proposition for anybody when it comes to affordability even if you want to do the right thing in terms of having something that's efficient and good. I need

Roberto Baldwin  1:18:54  
a $20,000 Evie because when it comes down to because your average give him he gets even if it's 30 starts at 35 or whatever that's a usable Evie right? Well I get seven and a half $1,000 a tax rate Yeah, but if your tax if your tax liability isn't that high, then you're not really getting that money and you're still paying all it's the whole Yeah, it's a whole sort of crazy and then if you can lease it, buddy $1,000

Sam Abuelsamid  1:19:16  
Yeah, and make $40,000 a year you're probably not paying that much in taxes, you know, and you're not gonna get that 70 $500 right.

Roberto Baldwin  1:19:25  
So it doesn't Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So you're not you're not getting that

Nicole Wakelin  1:19:29  
there's a whole group of people who will never help and it's like that's awesome. There's a rebate that I will never be able to take advantage

Roberto Baldwin  1:19:36  
of $500 off that's why you could you could lease but if you're not making a lot of money typically you don't have very good credit that someone who you know when we

Nicole Wakelin  1:19:44  
and then the leasing is hard and your lease is too so you're still stuck in that

Roberto Baldwin  1:19:48  
yeah, that's all it's a whole thing. Anyway, the moral of story is we need $20,000 movies. Someone get on that. Yeah. No.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:19:56  
Well, that's actually one of the things Mark Royce did talk about during the investor day is you know, there, they've got they're gonna have a $30,000 Electric Equinox coming in in the next couple of years and they're also working on stuff that's closer to $20,000 that should be out in the next few years. So we'll see. We'll see if automakers can actually achieve that but at the very least up

Nicole Wakelin  1:20:19  
but then you wonder too like sometimes they come out with these and like this is this is gonna be great you look at it you're like, but it feels like a playschool car inside like they make it so they have to make other things so cheap in it you're like, wow, it's just like it's, it's you know?

Sam Abuelsamid  1:20:37  
Like, the good news is with all these new TVs coming that there's going to there's going to be a lot more used ones in the next few years. So hopefully you know people will be able to find some decent choices of use DVDs and yeah, in the USA they sell about sell about three and a half times as many used cars every year as new cars most people most people that drive never actually buy a new car in their lifetime they only buy used cars

Roberto Baldwin  1:21:07  
I've never purchased an average car I've released two new cars but I've never bought a new car ever never ever ever

Nicole Wakelin  1:21:14  
I'm like the human has never bought in a used car I've only ever bought new cars I think it was a fancy cars for so long like I was gonna buy like the lemon I was gonna get all the lemons they were gonna end up in my driveway and it was gonna be a bad choice having gone with this car and I'd be like no why do they do this

Sam Abuelsamid  1:21:34  
all right next up from somebody called Rebecca drives should features like automatic gain features like automatic parking have generic names like automatic parking or something brand specific like smart Park

Nicole Wakelin  1:21:51  
they should all have a uniform name we don't have like that when it's like ABS for brakes it's not like you know they don't have 85 brake brake brake it's on like we don't have all the it's confusing I actually had a website once where they asked that my entire summit was we literally are creating a glossary and it's gonna be like a page for each OEM and we're gonna write what the name of the tech is and then what the heck it does because someone's like lane keep assist lane alert assist lane keep assisting Lane Keeping lane helpful lane help our lane that like it all means the same thing and like the average person's like what the heck I think having a unified thing

Roberto Baldwin  1:22:35  
I stopped using brand names for most all of that stuff I'm like oh it has adaptive cruise control the driver's assistance system it has a you know adaptive cruise control and lane keep assist and that's what they get I whatever their weird name I remember having like Wait, what's it called? And then companies were changing their names I think Mercedes changed the name like four times over the course of like two years at one point. And I was just like, they no one knows what that is. And be everyone knows what adaptive cruise control is just it's adaptive, you know, the drivers assistance package their hands free system that's way easier than Yeah, now that we have blue cruise and super cruise and yeah, it's too many things. We're just gonna have to, like just tell the automakers and we're not doing that anymore.

Nicole Wakelin  1:23:21  
Yeah, we've decided we're not paying your brand.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:23:25  
I agree. I do the same when I'm when I'm writing stuff. I don't. So So, so far, I still use supercruise blue cruise, you know, the those level two systems because there are enough differences between some of those, you know, the need to distinguish those but for anything that is become more ubiquitous. I just use the generic names. And yeah, who cares? Who cares what they automakers call them in the press releases and the marketing materials.

Roberto Baldwin  1:23:55  
infotainment system, right. That's all you need to say.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:23:58  
Yes. And last one is from from Adam. And since it's now coming up on the middle of October, shockingly enough, and Halloween is just a couple of weeks away. If you were to design a modern car for the monsters, what new vehicle would you start with? I believe George Barris actually started with a Model T Happy Halloween. So what would you use as the basis for a new monsters car?

Nicole Wakelin  1:24:31  
I would use a I would use a challenger because it's got kind of funky lines to it. Like it's kind of different. I feel like you could have fun I feel like you could turn things into scary bat like wings and stuff. Not like actual flappy wings like like 1950s car wings. You know you could I feel like okay, that's

Roberto Baldwin  1:24:53  
what I was gonna say. You could cut challenger. cut the top off the challenger. Just cut it off. Cut it off. Yes like put some kind of like get removed the trunk just made him like one long thing have that stadium seating like you had in the hot rod. Boom you just got a challenger. It's ridiculous. You're going to take any corners everyone's gonna fall out Who cares? You're just going in a straight line. It's just it's big and loud and ridiculous and that's what The Munsters car is a big loud, ridiculous challenger with with everything caught up just just give it take it to the shop. go nuts.

Nicole Wakelin  1:25:29  
And you can you can paint it some crazy color and like your racing stripes can be like, can be like black or like orange stripes or green green is easily Mansouri. Right? Orange? Like, like,

Roberto Baldwin  1:25:39  
green? Little protectors on so it really terrifies people you know?

Sam Abuelsamid  1:25:47  
Yeah. Okay, I'm not gonna argue with

Nicole Wakelin  1:25:51  
this plan.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:25:56  
On that note, we will call it a show and make sure you stay tuned for the interviews I did with Dave parsec and Darren Palmer. See you next time, everybody. Bye,

Nicole Wakelin  1:26:09  
bye.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:26:14  
Hey, everybody, this is Sam. This week, I had the opportunity to drive the 2021 Ford Mustang Maki GT. And while I was at the drive program, I get to sit down with a couple of the subject matter experts, executives involved with this program. Among other Ford Evie programs. I sat down with Dave parsec, who was the engineering director on the Maki program, and has subsequently moved on to being the director of future electric vehicles for Ford. Brown's working on some very interesting stuff that he was not yet at liberty to talk about. But it did have a chance to chat with him about the Maki GT and what separates it from the rest of the Maki lineup. In addition, I also talked with Darren Palmer, the director of electric vehicles are the general manager of electric vehicles for for North America. And let's listen. Let's hear from Dave first, and then we'll go into Darren's conversation. Thanks, Dave. You were chief engineer on the sp 550. Mustang? Yes. Then your engineering director on the marketing? Yes. Yeah. You got the mochi gt? What was what were you trying to achieve with this one? And what did you do to make this true Mustang that nobody could argue with?

Unknown Speaker  1:27:41  
Yeah, so it's a great question. I mean, we first to do this, we embraced Mustang, you have to know Mustang, you have to understand what it means to be a Mustang. And that's what really fueled everything around this GT. Right? So it was pushing all the boundaries, including those things that we know to do. So I told you we lowered it 10 millimeters, you know, we put the magnet right, you know, suspension on it, we so everything that we all the tricks that you'll know that we've pulled on the Mustangs, we definitely applied to this product. And so this is really just getting the right group of people together that know Mustang, and said, if we're doing this, then watch this, right? And so when you marry it up with instantaneous torque, you've got the future Mustang.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:28:24  
So what, okay, you lowered it. What else? What else do you do to make to create gt from the standard Mustang?

Unknown Speaker  1:28:31  
Wow, I mean, so.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:28:32  
So you got more power?

Unknown Speaker  1:28:34  
Yeah. tonry power, right. I mean, you got 634 pounds of torque. Yeah, I mean, the Brembo brakes, you know, the brakes is what did you think of racism is amazing. Fantastic. Yeah. Right. So you have to have that stopping power in that linear feel of the brake system, you know, you have to have that the, the character of a Mustang is something that there's a few people inside Ford that know how to achieve it. And then those who are lovers of Mustang know what, when you drive it, and when you see it, and that all came into this, it's it's hard to people always think it's like some recipe book that I can lay in front of me that says, here's what you do. But there's so many variables that go into this, that you have to understand what a Mustang is, how it's supposed to feel, how it's supposed to perform, and then you pull all the levers that you have at your disposal to achieve that. And that's what we did with this. I mean, when you drive this machine, if I blindfold you, and somebody you would say it's a Mustang,

Sam Abuelsamid  1:29:28  
you mentioned the brakes. You got big Brembo brakes, they're theirs, they're still maybe not quite as big as what you would get on a VA Mustang. are on this one are you doing when you when you're using the brake pedal as opposed to just using rejet? Are you blending region and braking okay, because one of the things you mentioned, you know, linear breaks and it does feel feel really linear. I know that's that's hard to do. What? What did you guys do to get that, that feeling That makes it feel so natural.

Unknown Speaker  1:30:01  
Well, it took a, it took a lot to figure that out, because as you're, as you're leveraging the region, which could feel unnatural, right, you have to blend that in so that you are getting that natural feel that feel of your foot to that caliper, which is what most things are known for. Right? I mean, that's that, that, that linear, that linear feeling of that. So it was, it was a lot of back and forth between how much region is too much region? And then, you know, how do you blend that to get that natural feel. And so our engineers did amazing job, with the software and everything to be able to, to stay on the side of my foot feels connected to that Calvary, versus Oh, that's region kicking in. And that is, it's a tough balance. And to be honest with you, it's it's something that we took, it took a long time to achieve it, the first several attempts at it, you could feel the region, it just didn't feel right, it just didn't feel natural. So we've got some proprietary approaches to how we've done that. But it it worked out to be where, you know, we're very happy with the result. I mean, it feels extremely natural.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:31:07  
Was that was the software for that all developed in house or is that what they're spire? No, no. Okay. Cuz that's I know, you know, having having worked on hydraulic, electro hydraulic braking for hybrids, you know, back when I was still an engineer, it's, it's a hard thing to do to get that seamless and super hard, I was not able to detect any transition there between friction and, and the region, it's good to hear the spirit very predictable, which, especially on a performance car, like this is really important to predictability, knowing you give it a certain amount of pressure, you're going to get a certain amount of decent

Unknown Speaker  1:31:43  
well, and I'll tell you, and that's the other thing. So when you have an electric vehicle, the linearity of the accelerator and the brake, are hugely important, right. And what you hopefully you felt when you were driving today is how linear even the the, the accelerator pedal feels right. And with electric vehicles, you've got all that power, that's instant, it's almost like a light switch. I mean, you just put it in there it is, right, it's there. So the first time we went out, and we did some of this stuff, we were not very linear in the delivery of that power. And you can imagine how you can upset a car, you know, as you're, as you're in the middle of a turn, and you're looking to blend the power and you know, you get a snap of power. So creating that linearity of both on the accelerator and the brake, were extremely important, not only for a performance vehicle, but also to get the feel of the most thing because when you drive this thing, you also, you know, you'll feel that it's, it's it's spirited, it's lively, you can get the back end of step if you want to, not out of control, that that's typical of what Mustang is right.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:32:38  
And even even when I first drove the mot the other marquees a year ago, almost a year ago. That was one of the things I noticed right away was that ability to, you know, to, as you as you back off, you know, getting that weight transfer and getting it to turn.

Unknown Speaker  1:32:55  
Absolutely, yeah, that's,

Sam Abuelsamid  1:32:57  
that's something I wasn't I wasn't anticipating when I going into that,

Unknown Speaker  1:33:01  
and you haven't been on the autocross yet, I don't know yet. Okay, so you'll know tomorrow when you go there with many Mustangs because you've been around for a long time driving them, you can drive them with the pedal, and you're gonna find that tomorrow, you're gonna be able to drive this with the pedal, just as you wouldn't you know, as you know, a Mustang you're gonna get it to rotate, you're going to get it to do whatever you want it to do with very little steering input and a lot of pedal adjustments.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:33:22  
Right. Well, speaking of that, one of the new features that you've added on the GT is another variation of the drive modes, you've had whisper engage unbridled. Now you've got unbridled mix that then, so explain that.

Unknown Speaker  1:33:38  
Yeah, so unbridle is a stand was. So as you look at the EBS, and what your challenges are with them, you have all the power in the world, you know, it's amazing. But if you want to sustain that over a longer period of time, there's a lot you have to manage. And so what we did with unbridle extend, as we said, Look, we want spirited driving, but we want it over a longer period. So to do that, we do a couple things like proactively cool the battery. So if you're going on bridle extend, we know what you're anticipating to do. And so we set lowers cooling points, if you will, of the battery, we are anticipating the kind of heat that you're going to generate and so we're already ahead of that right. We're adjusting all wheel drive system to change the bias we give you what is typically a 5050 kind of bias we're gonna go 6040 we're gonna get a 60 and we're gonna free up you know the the stability and traction. There's a lot of things that we're doing the unbridled extent but it's all around, delivering a more sustained lap time and fun to drive versus a peak like anyone can go out RUN TO YOU KNOW, a one lap you know flyer but if you want to go ahead and run sustained laps and have a ton of fun over a longer period of time that's what unbridled extend has been designed to do.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:34:52  
So for example, you know if I would assume you guys taking these things out to ginger men or somewhere and you know, spent Days testing this, how, how long can it sustain the consistent level of performance? Yeah,

Unknown Speaker  1:35:07  
so that's a awesome question, but a hard answer to give you because as you know, it depends on driver depends on, you know, conditions that day, it depends on a lot of things. But what I will say is it significantly increases the number of labs that you can run and achieve this similar lap times. That's all I can say. Because you know how it is this depends on who's driving and what's going on that day, but but it will significantly improve how many laps you can pull off.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:35:33  
Track track days are a very popular thing for a lot of Mustang drivers. Would somebody that drives an internal combustion Mustang today? would do you think that they would want to take this vehicle to the track day? And

Unknown Speaker  1:35:48  
yeah, for sure. So you know what it's so I you know, I've spent a lot of time on the wheel of a lot of cars, in many Mustangs, the, the torque delivery, and just the acceleration that you get out of this, you can't help just smile here to hear me I was thinking, this is a fun track day car now, there's no doubt we're pulling a lot of energy out, you know, we're depleting the batteries charge, just like everyone else is. But But I will tell you that if you want to go have a ton of fun. Yeah, you put it in unbridled extend, and you're just gonna have a blast?

Sam Abuelsamid  1:36:22  
Did? Did you have to make any major changes in terms of thermal management for this to keep the battery and the motors in?

Unknown Speaker  1:36:29  
Okay, no, we did, we made a lot of changes with the GT, because of the power delivery that we're requiring, you can imagine that from right from the core of the battery, all the way through the entire wiring system, and everything else, the kind of heat that you're actually going to generate. And so we've got a ton of upgrades inside the GT to be able to handle that thermal in control that do the temperature. So yeah, oh, yeah, for sure we did. Okay.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:36:55  
Anything else about the GT that people should be thinking about? Well, they should just be thinking that this is whether it's, you know, it's as fast as the GT 500.

Unknown Speaker  1:37:03  
I was gonna say, Oh, yeah, think about, think about it. We have a vehicle at a price that is just ridiculous that delivers the 3.5 seconds zero to 60. On unbelievable acceleration, you know, listen to you guys. Go get one. I mean, it's gotta go.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:37:18  
Alright, thank you. Thank you. Darren Palmer,

Unknown Speaker  1:37:27  
Director of EDS for

Unknown Speaker  1:37:29  
North America, manager of

Sam Abuelsamid  1:37:31  
general managers

Unknown Speaker  1:37:31  
these days in North America for

Sam Abuelsamid  1:37:35  
so we were talking earlier. Obviously, we're here driving, Maki GT, which is a fantastic vehicle. But there's all kinds of other stuff that goes wrong with owning a Jeep owning an Eevee. And having an Eevee business, one of those things is charging. And Ford's been doing some interesting things on the charging front, we've got the Ford blue oval charged. But, you know, it's one thing to just to have connections to all the chargers. But tell me about what you're doing for reliability? Because that's, that's been the thing that a lot of people complained about. Non Tesla charging network?

Unknown Speaker  1:38:18  
Yeah, so one of the things is the non Tesla charging network, some of it is older. And it's quite extensive. But it's some of its older and so how do you guarantee the quality you need for customers, because you never want to send a customer to one. That doesn't work. So first of all, our strategy is to put together all the best networks in America, we've made a software platform that's really easy to integrate. And so everybody who we asked to integrates, and then people can approve it, either with luck in charge, or approval on the app simply only no cards just

Sam Abuelsamid  1:38:54  
pass out. Yeah, very simple honor. And

Unknown Speaker  1:38:57  
so we did that. Stage two, we monitor reliability from a distance, you can obviously wire it remotely, we see 99.5% of people get charged when they're going to get a charge. We also monitor first time flagging charges do they get exactly what they want, and less than 100% get? First time plug in charge, which means it can be inconvenient for people. Not perfect. So we said this, there's no good for us. And we're particularly getting ready for next year when we launch them. Lightning, where people have trailers and things and they just, they can't afford any inconvenience. So we got to a certain level would be using remote and there's many parts to the system. There's authorization negotiation with the car payment authorization and other signals. There's a lot of different signals there and most of them we pick up when it's not working. Sometimes you can't. So I took the decision early this year, okay, we got it too high, but it's got to be perfect. So we started a program called the charge Angel pro So we have a set of charge angels, which are people with a Mustang Mackie that's fully implemented. And we send them to areas where we haven't seen perfect, or phrase ation of the charges, they'll go and test them all themselves. And if they see an issue, they can, at the same time pick up the whole digital trace of what went wrong, it gets fed back to a network immediately. So

Sam Abuelsamid  1:40:24  
you know, if the problem was in the car software or the charger, or

Unknown Speaker  1:40:28  
if it cannot be immediately fixed, we'll remove it from the network. So we don't send anybody to charge, it doesn't work. And we'll warn them immediately. Because on our car, it shows you the writing and some feedback from the network, you can see that on the in the vehicle. So you immediately start warning people, obviously we work with a network, because first of all, we tell them, they are sick, they nearly always they're working really fast to try and fix it. So they may not have been aware, right? Because they can get stuck on he was waiting for a signal for a car or something like that. So there's many different types of faults. And that's why I need to send people out at the moment until the network's almost perfect, and then we can stop doing it. So we wanted to accelerate reliability. So that's what we're going to do.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:41:12  
Yeah, that reliability is going to be a lot more important. Going forward. You know, today, do you have an idea of what what are the percentage of Eevee owners that have that have off street parking at their home?

Unknown Speaker  1:41:30  
Yeah, I don't have that percent yet. What I do have is how many, like how many overcharging at home, and it's used by over 80% charging at home, because you can see them charging at night. And it's an extremely easy way, it's a no brainer way to own an Eevee, you're never gonna go back. It's so convenient, right? If you don't have it, we're thinking about that, and how to support them best one is having a very large network. Because if you don't have one at home, you have the choice of driving to DC and charging, when we have a huge network, or searching for an AC nearby, and maybe parking your car there overnight. And we have 63,000 flights. So you have a lot of people, they will have one nearby, and you can just park it over there for the night and charge it slow. So they go both ways. I'm also looking at what might happen next. And I think there could be a thing I'm calling grazing happen, where charges start to be at lots of places, hairdressers, you know, the supermarket store, you go to the clothes store, it starts, where you're going to be for 20 3040 you go and you plug in, you go in and you come out and grazing I call it opportunity. opportunistic. Yeah, I think that that will grow as well. And for some people who don't have a charger at home that can avoid them having to go and wait a DC. Yeah, but we want to support both.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:42:53  
Because once you get past, you know, because right now, I think, you know, the early adopters of EBS are largely people that you know, kind of have off street parking, you know, they, they can, they can charge at home. But as you start to expand the population of movies, and you start to get more and more ease in the used car market, which is actually the majority of what people buy is three and a half times as many used cars every year sold as new cars, you're gonna get a lot more people that don't have that austrey parking where they park man, or they live somewhere where they have to park in the street, and reliability of charging and access to charging, are they really critical for that population.

Unknown Speaker  1:43:33  
So what's great for customers is that already now you've got a network that sizes is pretty sizable, for a lot of us and you can travel a lot of the US with DC now as well, especially with a 300 mile car that is going to rapidly expand because now companies are starting to see people are buying the cars, they're growing into something like the f150 lightning, you can see that it's going to be a very popular car and it's going to drive much more adoption. And now it's worth investing in the network. So we're seeing huge increases in the network over the next couple of years, you're going to see it growing really, really large. And so reliability will be key because you don't want to inconvenience anyone by driving somewhere where it doesn't work. So that's why we're concentrating on reliability now. Just making sure it's ready for

Sam Abuelsamid  1:44:22  
one of the challenges. You know, I've experienced driving e V's, especially in places that perhaps not familiar with like this past summer I took a Maki and drove it from my home near an arbor to Traverse City in northern Michigan. And you know, there were places I charged it more frequently than I needed to because it had plenty of range. But I wanted to experience the you know, charging at different locations, different different charging networks. And, and one of the challenges I've seen not just on that trip but many times over the last several years is actually finding the charger You know, the app, you know, oftentimes, you know, on the navigation will say, okay, go to this store, and you know, charger there, we go to this parking lot the charges are there, but they don't tell you precisely where it is. And unlike a gas station where they typically have a big sign sticking up 40 feet in the air, here's the Exxon station or BP or whatever, you don't get that with chargers, you know, they're usually five, six feet high, they don't stick up much above the cars. So are you talking to your network partners about how you can either make them more visible, or get more precise location information in the NAB to help?

Unknown Speaker  1:45:39  
I mean, that's in everybody's interest, so that when we do talk to our partners, they're super keen to do that. We found a lot of them are just pure in the wrong spot. And I mean, I'm navigating, I mean, many navigations. Now they're accurate to within a meter or two. So there's really no reason why you can't he shouldn't route you right to the step of the charger. So if we find ones that are off, and we do, we then work with the provider to correct it, why wouldn't you see and everybody's interested, but really, your nervous system should be able to take you right, right next to the charger, right? You just follow the thing on the screen. And a lot I'm following now, DC fast charge when I've been around the country, they can be in the middle of a car park somewhere. But you just follow the route on the screen and it points you and it drives you through to cover I can see the lanes of parking in the car laws. You've

Sam Abuelsamid  1:46:31  
got that precise information, I assume

Unknown Speaker  1:46:33  
you just put up through it. Yeah. So most DC fast go through I have not had much problem with it. Some AC power rejection, they might be on the same day. They've been more different or somewhere. But we allow information extra information in there. So we can fill out that information to tell people to so you can see the charge when you think, Oh, this five stories. I wonder which one is on Instagram, it's on the fifth story. So you can find it.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:47:01  
Is there. Is there anything to allow drivers to put that information in, you know, if they find something or or to, you know, to provide some feedback about Yeah,

Unknown Speaker  1:47:11  
you can do that in some of the sharing apps. I'm we're talking I'm talking about, you know, how can we allow more input? I'm also interested in so when we were doing the charger Angel, I'm asking how might we get the fastest information for the next person? How can we help them one in one way would be to allow them to input. So I'm talking about that at the moment so that they can if they just found is broken, it broke that minute, they can then input to help an expert. So this is something I'm looking at now. Of course software on the car can all be updated over over the air. So it's pretty trivial thing to do. But yeah, that's something I'm thinking of when I need to need to get the latest thing because if somebody ever does go to a faulty charger or just went 14, I want them to be able to tell the next person.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:48:01  
Yeah. One other issue around DC fast charging is for, for reasons protecting the the life of the battery, the health of the battery, you know, all all EBS as you get closer to 100% charge this loadout because you don't want to overcharge the battery that's as bad. The current Maki's when you get to 80%. state of charge, it drops from the charging fast down to 10 kilowatts step. And that's going to change

Unknown Speaker  1:48:35  
right? Yeah. So that was one of those where we set up what we thought most people were used turns out to be yes, that is what most people use, they charge at home, they go on a trip and most trips, you're actually better to charge less than 80 is faster, and go to the next charging stop. That's the optimum route for the maximum state. Human nature can be I want an extra buffer, or I would like to the most I can get. And it seems like they're not that happy with 80%. They'd like more. So we listen to that said, Okay, that's what people want. And we did a bit more research on our systems and said can we give them a bit more allow them to charge 290 faster rate. Turns out we can. So we've just finished signing off now. We're dropping into cars for production just next month, and it'll drop into over the air quite soon as well.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:49:27  
So it will be worth buying the cars over the last year. They'll get enough

Unknown Speaker  1:49:31  
to go from 80 to 90. And yeah, surprisingly how many people talked about it, but we learned we can because we're listening. Okay, if people want something different, we'll listen to them. And that goes for anything so we hear them on our for example, hey, I love the interface. But sometimes I'd like a little x in the corner to tell me which which window is open to close it because there's no home button right? That's part of the interface. We heard you. So we put it on so the cars you saw Today, they have that on and is better. And so we learned for the customer when we changed it. And that's the whole point, right. And we did some things with the heat seek control, we've wanted a bit different wasn't clear, there was an auto part to it. We thought it was clear, but it wasn't. So we changed that. So you can see more clearly, and we're gonna keep doing that. And I can improve, my team can improve latency as well. So you'll see the latency is better on these two teams, it's faster. And it's just continuous improvement is great fun, we we never could never do

Sam Abuelsamid  1:50:31  
this. And, you know, one, one other thing that you're able to do now is, you know, Chuck, but improving the charging capabilities. But now when it charges, you're also going to have more more range than you had

Unknown Speaker  1:50:47  
to so really proud of that one was retained. So we set up the vehicle to last fall, I have a full warranty for eight years, at least 70% of its battery range. Of course, in real life is much more than that. So, but that's just the backstop. And we said, well, now we learned more about how people are using it and the conditions and we can see all of the temperatures of the car, we say well, we can probably give more, because it isn't in that most extreme circumstance, except very hot parts in Arizona going up a hill for hours. This is not most people. So if you're not in those conditions, why not give you more. And so we have decided to give more. So we are at the moment, we're going to give another 3% of battery. And that's also all already rolled out in production and now is coming to everybody else over the air as well who already.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:51:44  
That's amazing. You know, and this is one of the things that obviously Tesla pioneered this idea of your car, instead of you know, it being the same 10 years after roll off a subway line, it can be continuously improved. Even even with the hardware that you've got, you can you can learn from the way people use their vehicles. And the feedback you get and make it better over time.

Unknown Speaker  1:52:09  
It's amazing. I mean, we love it, we and we never had that ability before people love it, you're probably the thing you bought got better. It's like your phone, it's like your tablet. And these cars like these, it does feel more like a digital device than it used to be. So and it truthfully is so you can do that. So we built into this car, every module can be updated, even things the gear shifter can be updated. I don't know what we're gonna do with this gear should be. But it can be updated. And we think something up later we'll be able to do it. So it's amazing. And I'm giving range. You can potentially give performance. You can give mode changes, gains, useful utilities, navigation, unlimited. So we're just getting started, actually, I mean, we're only in our first updates. Now we did about 130,000 updates Now, something like that. We're just getting going. Great. So you've seen these cards, you see sketch app, and so on, but we got much more coming.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:53:09  
Yeah, I think earlier today, it was mentioned that for this first year production, you're going to be hitting the target that we had of about 50,000 units in the first year. And with the demand for this thing, are you increasing capacity,

Unknown Speaker  1:53:25  
we are already going to go up significantly in the next year. And we're continuing to build up capacity because we never advertised really the GT yet already sold out for the first model year. And that was a more premium car. We sold about 50% performance edition as well, which is even more premium car. We're seeing massive demand. So we are working on capacity continuously. And the same on the lightning have done huge capacity increase.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:53:54  
Yeah, they've already talked about that, you know, they've bumped the capacity for that from the electric vehicle, Senator 80,000 units, double what was

Unknown Speaker  1:54:03  
originally planned.

Unknown Speaker  1:54:04  
And we're still seeing that demand rising from customers. So it shows they're more ready for these products than we realized. And part of it that they feed back to us was the extra things they do. That's what they love. So Oh 400 liters of extra space in their hand. And they say oh, it's almost like an SUV. Now I can store things under there is much more useful for me. Then they see it as a leisure vehicle. And then the bi directional power has gone crazy. So incidents that have happened around the country, people like the idea that they can be independent, and really not for a lot of money. And much less than ever before that people like that. So we're seeing a huge push on that system at the moment. We're getting ready to launch out very exciting.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:54:48  
And there's also the E transit which is should also be launching pretty soon as

Unknown Speaker  1:54:52  
well. Yeah, that's going to mark now. And that one note is quieter on some people's radar a bit because you can But really, it meets the needs of a lot of commercial drivers. It has new high tech telematics for control of your fleet and efficiency. We have solutions for charging in decades. And in many cases, it pays back on day one. So if he pays back on day one, it means you can be more competitive than your competitors. And you can make your business better. So it's kind of been quiet. But we've seen huge demand now. It's going to change the world. But you know, it's a different type of vehicles. You don't see as much news about it. It's gonna quietly become my leading delivery vehicle in the world.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:55:43  
Yeah. Great. All right. Well, thank you so much, Darren.

Unknown Speaker  1:55:46  
Thank you.