Sam Abuelsamid  0:00  
Coming up on episode 246 of wheel bearings. We've got the Hyundai Tucson plug in hybrid BMW IX, GMC Sierra AT4x and Denali ultimate. And our first drive impressions of the Ford f150 Lightning. All that more coming up next

this is episode 246 of wheel bearings. I'm Sam Abuelsamid

Nicole Wakelin  0:37  
From where?

Sam Abuelsamid  0:39  
Oh, from Guidehouse insights, 

Nicole Wakelin  0:43  
I'm missing my cue. Bread. I am Nicole Wakelin from the FAST Women podcast on Newsweek.

Roberto Baldwin  0:54  
And I am Roberto Baldwin, this week from Wired, Wired Magazine, the Bible of technology.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:03  
So let's let's let's hear from the fast woman in the group

Nicole Wakelin  1:06  
first. Oh, man and first it's like getting called on because you sat in front of the

Roberto Baldwin  1:12  
classroom. That's what you get for being an overachiever. Dang it

Nicole Wakelin  1:16  
So I

Sam Abuelsamid  1:18  
a little bit slower would have been fine.

Nicole Wakelin  1:20  
I know so I had actually you're gonna have to edit this I was pulling up thing and I just pulled up the wrong thing. So I have the wrong information in front of me so you're gonna have to pick someone else. Wait a second. Okay. You got the wrong one.

Roberto Baldwin  1:34  
Oh, this week or this past week I drove the BMW i x their giant SUV their Evie SUV it's never easy to say Evie SUV, or the it's not easy for EB SUV, SUV, the ESU es luxury sport utility vehicle it is there. You know they introduced the IX and the i Four same time I did the Drive Program for both those vehicles the same time I've gotten the vehicles around the same time at my house. So I draw the eye x that is their large SUV. And unlike the i Four which essentially just looks like a four series that happens to be an Eevee the i x you from the outside from the inside it looks very futuristic II you know that sort of the the the desire to make sure that your Eevee looks like it's something different from a gas powered vehicle. And so that's what they've done with the ix versus the i Four. It's sort of it's they've been and they have the three. Let's all talk about the three for a second. Little bitty urban Eevee the mega city car yeah, that's a great little city car. That was super polarizing Americans are like, Oh, it's stupid, it's small, it looks weird. It was you know, they just they made they built a concept car. They're like, You know what, let's just build that and send it to people see if they like it. And some people did and some people didn't. So with the i x, they sort of still there there. There is a good flavor of that sort of concept. The futurism going on in this vehicle. A lot of crystals. I talked about the little crystal knob for the and I talked about the crystal controls for the seeds. I think when I did the video for it like the crystal was shooting rainbows into my eyes. Germany that's a real thing that happened. Ah pasty Issue.

Nicole Wakelin  3:33  
Issue. What happened there was a rainbow I hit

Roberto Baldwin  3:37  
a rainbow hit my I taste the rainbow in your eye. So yeah, so it's a large SUV. It's very large. It's very comfortable. I would say it was large and in charge. If you if you like yeah, thank you. It has a 105.2 kilowatt hour battery pack. So I just got a pretty large battery pack and I had the vehicle with the 22 inch wheels. So the larger the wheels on an Eevee you know the worst the ranges. So the 22 inch wheel vehicle. This is a larger 350 miles range according to the EPA, the 20 inch one three or 24 Miles according to the EPA. So it's 20 inch wheels and then they have the 21 inch and 305 miles. I got in the 22 inch vehicle during my test a range of 344 Miles wow that's Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah, I was very, very late and

Sam Abuelsamid  4:47  
and this is going both uphill and downhill right. Not just downhill all the way.

Roberto Baldwin  4:50  
Now this is uphill and downhill the Bay Area is very hilly. The route I take has a lot of there's a kind of a steep incline on the freeway, I do 50 miles on the freeway at 70 miles an hour, I set cruise control. And then I do that. And then after that I drive on some back roads. And I drive through suburbia, essentially a bunch of small towns, little suburban things stop and go, you know, just regular driving around town stuff, I figure, that's a good sort of slice of what real life driving is people drive around, you know, they do their 20 miles to work, and then they drive around 20 ish miles. And you know, taking care of stuff going to target and, you know, driving down those long, boring suburban roads that sort of meander around manicured lawns. So that's, that's how I do my day range test, I do it for all the vehicles the exact same way, I do it in the middle of the day. So there's not a lot of traffic, so the traffic is about the same. And that mean, the temperature doesn't fluctuate too much here. So it wasn't, that wasn't really an issue. And I keep the temperature in the vehicle at 70 7070 degrees. I don't have the air conditioning blasting, I don't have the heater blasting. And I turn up the the brake whatever the highest brake. Regenerative braking is, I'll use that as well, because I figured once people realize, oh, because everyone seems to like one pedal, one pedal driving, I'll set that up to if it has it, but I just put it on the highest braking, and not eco, but normal mode. That's how I do my test. Every vehicle, I drive do the exact same test the exact same route, it's very boring. Because you're just like sitting there at 30 miles an hour, people are passing you they're angry. And yeah, and some vehicles do really, really well. And some do, you know, let's hit the APA or or they'll be under the EPA, this did really, really well 344 miles, based on a 100 mile loop. So So kudos to BMW, I think, you know, overall, a lot of the German automakers when it comes to their, to their range, they're taking the you know, they're taking that, that, that, that that setting, with the EPA test, they're just taking like, okay, or they're going under, they're like, you know, we'll take the lower number. And it's almost like Disneyland, Disneyland notoriously would say, oh, it's gonna take 45 minutes from this spot before you get on the ride. The reality is, it only took 30 minutes from that spot to get on the ride. But because you thought it was gonna be 45 And now it's 30 you're Oh, how this is wonderful. Oh, they somehow they sped it up or somehow they, it creates the you know, you instead of being disappointed, you're like, Oh, hey, we got there a lot quicker than we thought we would, which is always nice. So I think that's what the German automakers are doing with range, where they're like, Yeah, we only have 300 and ran on our 15 Miles array. And the reality is, they have 323 25 the vehicle itself beyond the fact that it's it's range number is it's very comfortable, it's very futuristic as a new version of I believe I drive eight which is nice, you know, they keep updating their, their infotainment system on a pretty regular pretty regular clip like every few years if they got a new update in there so so good for them on that they have kept the knob whereas Mercedes has removed the sort of touchpad knob circle thing. BMW has kept there's so if you're a fan of that, it's still there. That area though, is all wood. So you have like, sort of like these little buttons there. And my wife didn't know they were buttons she thought they were just like what is all this and she's like changing things. Because they don't look like buttons are just

Sam Abuelsamid  8:35  
sort of raised white. Yeah, cuz when they're when they're not active, the back lights off, right? So they they're backlit and it shows up through the wood veneer, right.

Roberto Baldwin  8:44  
Yeah, they have like a like a, like a white ish rate like raised white. It's really it's, it's, it's sort of odd. And once you get used, they're like okay, that's fine. It looks really pretty. It looks really nice. Again, it's that would sort of like from the i three and the thing that BMWs been showing off at CES for years were your living room is now your car and sort of the organic world. One thing I do not like about the car or the doors they're just there just to the whole idea where you I just want doors with like mechanical handles, like the push button like they have a it's a it's flat and easy. You know, you reach under and there's a button you push it in the door opens and you're like, okay, and then they get out there's a there's a there's a button where your thumb would go on the handle. So you hit that and that opens the door that's but it's not there's no there's a mechanical thing underneath or you can find it and you can pull on that and I'll do it. But for the most part, it's all this electronic I hit a button and then the door opens I just find that just

Sam Abuelsamid  9:46  
is it just the door power.

Roberto Baldwin  9:49  
It doesn't know what to do on open by itself. You still like it open it'll like open a little bit and then you push

Nicole Wakelin  9:54  
it the rest of you to push it the rest of the way. Do all the work for you.

Roberto Baldwin  9:57  
It doesn't do all the work for you but the door is really big and It's actually kind of hard to grab the handle when it's all the way open or all the way closers like oh man, and I have really long arms look see.

Nicole Wakelin  10:10  
I can vouch I've seen him in person very

Roberto Baldwin  10:12  
long, for reasons that are unknown. And even I was like, man, it's kind of a pain like you have to like kind of reach back and pull them to close. And I don't know this the it's too much cleverness for its own sake when we just the Macan. I mean, the button is doing what you would do if you were just pulling on a mechanical thing.

Sam Abuelsamid  10:32  
Where at least it doesn't fold up into the sky.

Roberto Baldwin  10:35  
That's true. Gets you got that. I mean, you can still have those as mechanical those don't need to be electronic either hazard. I don't know. Anyway, but the overall the vehicle it was it was really nice. It's very comfortable. It is definitely somebody for like a first adopter who wants to sort of show off their Evie. Whereas the AI for again, you someone could get in that car, and they might not even know it's an Eevee for like the first 1520 minutes while you're driving them around. If you're driving, if you're driving down the street and you see an eye for there's nothing really to tell

Sam Abuelsamid  11:08  
you. You can easily mistake it for any other for series. Exactly. It is.

Roberto Baldwin  11:13  
As far as I'm concerned. It's the best four series. But yeah, it's the whereas the i x is very much like hey, I'm a little different. And then you get inside and you're like, Hey, I'm a lot different. So yeah, the i x for the folks who are looking for, you know, a Model X competitor, I would prefer this over the Model X. I've been in the Model X couple times those doors are still a pain in the ass. Those are up in the air.

Nicole Wakelin  11:41  
How's it go? One more time? Up in

Roberto Baldwin  11:43  
the air. Okay, well, the wings have a fountain on the wings of love.

Sam Abuelsamid  11:47  
Well, the the range you got out for this thing actually bodes well, for the upcoming I seven, which has the same 105 kilowatt hour battery pack, it's probably probably the exact same battery pack. And I think the same the same electric motors. They're in this because what but 516 horsepower, which I think is what what they have in the ice seven. And BMW when they did the preview of the ice seven last month in New York, you know, they said it would get about 300 305 five miles of range. So if it does, as well overachieving as the i x does, you know, then it'll probably be closer to 340. You know, which would put it, you know, not that far off of where the the Mercedes EQs is?

Roberto Baldwin  12:34  
Yeah, yeah, no, it's I think they they really they've done a really great job at sort of, I mean, and I think, like I said, a couple places. are, you know, the Germans are sort of under reporting under EPA range. Yeah, I feel like the ice sevens probably got to do even better. I think we're talking probably 340s. But you're like, oh, you know, we just everyone wants to be very clear. I mean, the Germans have gotten a lot of trouble because,

Sam Abuelsamid  13:00  
yeah.

Roberto Baldwin  13:04  
Yeah, a lot. Almost all of them have have done something. It was just Volkswagen did the biggest and the worst. So it was Yeah. So it's, you know, they're, they're, they're working against, you know, their own history to make sure that what they're they're bringing to the world is, is better for the environment and say, I don't know, a diesel spewing machine that cheats.

Sam Abuelsamid  13:29  
Okay, so, oh, how much was the iEX that you're driving?

Roberto Baldwin  13:32  
It was doo doo doo doo. All right, the manufacturer MSRP was at $3,200. The vehicle I was driving was 101,020 $20 $101,020. And the biggest biggest expense was the Premium Package with the multifunctional seats into your camera. So my conic sound parking assistance. Live cockpit Pro. It's just a bunch of stuff that's inside the car and like 3d view. The thing that I still like is the active driving assistance Pro. That's 1700 bucks. That's it hands free up to 40 miles an hour. When you're in traffic, I still keep my hands on the wheel. I'm currently driving the maki within has blue cruise. And I still am like, oh, I take my hands off the wheel and I just I it's automatically I just have my hand on the wheel still. It just I just can't it's hard for me to like think that oh, it's hands free. I keep my hands off. I just like oh, I keep my hands off and then without even noticing my hands back on the wheel.

Nicole Wakelin  14:43  
Not even trying. I'm not even

Roberto Baldwin  14:45  
trying.

Sam Abuelsamid  14:46  
I've got it I've got an F 150 in the driveway right now with with blue crews and I don't I don't put my hands back on the wheel. But I do keep my hands close to it. Just in case.

Roberto Baldwin  14:57  
Just in case right? Well, well because

Sam Abuelsamid  14:59  
I don't need tirely trust is

Nicole Wakelin  15:00  
hard to trust that it's really hard to trust it.

Roberto Baldwin  15:04  
Yeah, I'm waiting for the Mercedes dry pilot, I've done a two demos and one in Germany, one in LA, where it's hands free, and you don't want to pay attention to level three and you know, in certain circumstances on the freeway, blah, blah, blah. And on the track in BMW where I was behind the wheel, like looking away, like Oh, it's fine because there's all these BMW engineers in the car and we're on a track and in the real world, I don't know how much I'm gonna like not

Nicole Wakelin  15:30  
paranoid BMW engineers sitting by you, so I'm

Roberto Baldwin  15:34  
sorry, not BMW, Mercedes Benz engineer Mercedes. Yeah. Someone's gonna yell, I'm gonna get an angry email now.

Nicole Wakelin  15:41  
You've made a terrible mistake.

Roberto Baldwin  15:43  
I made a horrible mistake. Nicole, what did you dress?

Nicole Wakelin  15:47  
So I actually was all dry programs all the time. This week. I just flew from place to place to place and don't even know what timezone I'm in right now. But I drove the 2022 GMC Sierra 1500 84x and Denali ultimate. I had new versions of a truck that is not as new.

Sam Abuelsamid  16:10  
That old either years ago, right, so

Nicole Wakelin  16:13  
these are the two new trims of this truck. So the Denali ultimate which I keep wanting to call the ultimate Denali, so instead of calling it the ultimate Denali Ultimate is the fancier version. Yeah, I feel like that's the ultimate Denali

Sam Abuelsamid  16:25  
all the extra fancy, the extra fancy, fancy Denali.

Nicole Wakelin  16:29  
Right now you have the fancier Denali, so that sounds kind of funny, like the Denali Ultimate is a fancier Denali, and the 84x is the more off roadie 84. See the theme? Yep. So So basically, with the Denali ultimate, it's exactly what we think it's going to be they took all of their all of the upscale fancier trims adding a little extra everything making it your luxury truck, and they made it super luxury truck. They made it ultimate. So a lot of it is the styling outside they have the grill gets its own little chrome treatment. It's called Vader Chrome. I kind of love that because in my head, it's Darth Vader's pickup truck.

Roberto Baldwin  17:07  
Is it spelled like Vader like Darth Vader?

Nicole Wakelin  17:09  
It is the ad er, it's not like some fancy spelling that sounds like Darth Vader. No, it is Vader. It is like, this is his GMC Sierra. So it has Vader Chrome, which is like sort of a smoky kind of Chrome, which looks really cool. So that's it's got its little design elements. It's like yeah, so that's kind of neat. They have all inside. You've got like laser etched topographical maps of Mount Denali on the wood trims. You've got it on the leather seats. And the seats are 16 way power adjustable heated and massaging seats.

Roberto Baldwin  17:45  
Thanks very ultra Luxe,

Nicole Wakelin  17:46  
it's very ultimate, hence the name. So otherwise, it's you know, underneath it all it's it's it's a Denali, it's it's, you know, a top trim of this year 1500. They've just made it look better. They've upgraded the interior materials, they've upgraded the styling. It I really like it. I mean, it's it's, if you're looking for a luxury truck, the downside to this is you can't get the max Trailering Package with this. So if you want the ultimate intoeing and payload, you cannot get it with the ultimate Denali.

Roberto Baldwin  18:17  
You can't put two ultimates together because they cancel each other out I think is what they're saying.

Nicole Wakelin  18:21  
Is that like assess what happens. Yeah, it's like net zero kind of situation.

Sam Abuelsamid  18:26  
It's probably it's probably because I think they think they use bigger wheels and tires on the

Nicole Wakelin  18:31  
so you still have an impressive amount. I mean, it's still got the 6.2 liter V eight you can still tow at 900 pounds, a payload of 2010. And there's a turbo diesel engine you can get and the turbo diesel is the same payload but it takes the towing down to 800 pounds. Oh, so I know you lose 100 pounds,

Sam Abuelsamid  18:50  
but you're towing long distances. You definitely want the diesel. Yeah, because your fuel economy is gonna be way, way way better.

Nicole Wakelin  18:58  
Exactly. So like suck it up with 100 pounds of towing that you lose because you're gonna want it for other reasons.

Roberto Baldwin  19:03  
Just take a seat out and put it into put in the bed. Just take one seat out like

Nicole Wakelin  19:07  
like make someone not ride along like you can't come you're 100 pounds get out.

Roberto Baldwin  19:10  
Sorry. Sorry, third.

Nicole Wakelin  19:14  
Stay home. Yeah, exactly since the house is yours for the weekend. So and it is like premium pricing. So if you're just getting a C or 1500 and you're looking for the bass trimmer that you're looking at about $35,000 If you want the Denali ultimate, you're looking at $81,000 so it's more than double the price of the base trim of this truck, but it is it is that Uber luxurious truck and a very smooth ride. It's It's basically your luxury truck and they did a really good job. I got to say you know, because this is really about style and comfort. That's what the dolly is. And they did that they nailed it. It looks really good. It doesn't look cheap. They did a very good job. I think of upgrading it so that you know there's contrast stitching and there's lots of leather so it has the style and the look and the comfort you want that's what You're buying this one for I mean, there's, you know, 10 100 other configurations you can do and trims if you're looking for just capability and roughness and I want to get some work done. That's not why you're buying this one, you're buying this because you want a luxury truck and it it looks like it. So that was the Denali ultimate, which I liked very much. I thought it was really good. Your second choice in the mix is the 84x, which is your off road version. And they had us take that oh my god, you guys, we were off road for like a week and a half. I think I don't, I felt like I lived in the desert. Like this is my home. Now this little patch of dirt is rock. This is where I live now. They took us into an A desert in like, like a park national or like a state park that was outside of San Diego, it took us about two hours to get there. We spent two and a half hours driving then it like was it was like 10 hours of driving for this 84x. And the offer part was really cool. They took us to the thing called the Diablo drop off, which is this sort of narrow spot where you drive sort of steeply down and there's you know, it's like the uneven you've got the wheel one wheels popping up the other wheels pop it up, you know, you had to use your lockers, you had to be in for low, you get all the way to the bottom. And there's kind of a It's not like it's you're in Dunes. But there's a stretch that feels like a sand dune, that very soft, very deep sand. So that you have to kind of keep your momentum when you're going up the hill or you're going to be staying in the soft, very deep sand. Which another vehicle that wasn't part of our group did and held us up for almost 45 minutes because he was right in the middle of all the things. So we just sat there waiting. Yeah, he got stuck. And he was with a bunch of buddies. Like there were like six people with jeeps, and

Roberto Baldwin  21:42  
no one had a winch. Well, I

Nicole Wakelin  21:44  
think they were I don't know if they're all like you could do it. I'm like, could he do it faster? Because I would really like to be done with a desert at this point.

Roberto Baldwin  21:52  
Can you do it later?

Nicole Wakelin  21:54  
Later, could you do not in our way,

Sam Abuelsamid  21:56  
will pull you out now. And then after we're gone, you can go back into the sand. You can try

Nicole Wakelin  22:01  
the same spot and have the joy of getting yourself out yet. What would it like? Does nobody have a toe strap? Like can we just get them out of the car, please? So but so now that the trucks had no problem with it, you know, it was it was easy to go down that it was easy to get through and they aired us down quite a bit. We were at like 15 psi and the tires. So they aired us way down for this stretch of the drive. And we needed on the sand. We went through a couple of like silt beds to enough that you had like is the person in front of you went through it you suddenly had that what whole anything? Yeah, so we did some of that. So it was really it was a genuine offered experience in the truck handled it fine. You know it has this is this one is the one that's supposed to be your most off road worthy version of the whole Sierra 1500 lineup. And it has this terrain mode that kind of lets you do like a one pedal off roading, which is kind of cool. But it's almost too grabby. Like I almost felt like it was grabbing a bit like it makes it a little hard to control because you have to be so easy. Oh like Yeah, and it's like hard enough to do it. And in the highway, you know, when you're just driving on pavement, but when you're really trying to modulate that throttle driving off road, it's hard when it grabs like no no too much at work. I'm stuck. Like it's a little it's a little disconcerting. I feel like it's the one of those things once you play with it enough, and you start to get the hang of it and exactly how much it's gonna grab the brakes. It would probably be really cool. So that's your and that one is just available with a 6.2 liter V eight, you don't have any other choice. That's it, you're gonna get that with your 8900 pail, towing and your max payload on that is only 1420 So the max payload is really what drops not so much the towing. And you get the fancy you can still get the fancy multipro tailgate with it six different positions. Yeah, whatever you

Roberto Baldwin  23:48  
want to do with it. The future it's a staircase. Exactly. It's

Nicole Wakelin  23:52  
like the craft Multimatic bed of tailgates.

Sam Abuelsamid  23:57  
So, you know, on the Denali ultimate, you know, for years now we've been you know, everybody's been saying that the, the Ram 1500 has the best interior on any pickup truck. Would you say that this was as good or better?

Nicole Wakelin  24:13  
Oh, gosh, that's tough. Oh, you're putting me on the spot. Okay, let me think I Oh, I think honestly, it's gonna be a little bit a matter of your preference here. Like I think GMC did a really good job of making this feel like a premium truck. It genuinely does. The Ram has more of the like, I'm a cowboy kind of vibe going on to the interior. I love that. I like that. You know, sort of I just moved to Texas I got me a truck and it's beautiful and it has that you're laughing but you know I'm right Robbie. It does feel like that doesn't the interior. I got me a truck. There's an effort to have our show. I liked the RAM. I think the RAM overall has been get more of a composed ride, which gives it more of a luxury feel to it because you know, it's the it's the interior and it's the ride quality and a luxury vehicle truck sedan sports car, I don't care what it is. It's the interior and the ride quality. And I feel like rams is a little bit smoother, a little bit quieter, feels a little bit more like a luxury car and truck form and I just really liked the interiors like the even the stamped which one is it has they have the branded stamp on it that's on the long horn is it the longer the longer they've literally branded it. So like your branded stamp looks different than mine because it really is a brand. It's not like a pre printed piece of wood. They brand that sucker so everyone is a little bit different. I really liked that. But the interior the GMC is like on par with it with that topographical map and with the quality of the leather and the sort of theming I just personal preference here. I prefer the RAM but I think it's going to come down to that in terms of did they meet them? I think they came up to it. I think they're darn close. But I think the RAM is like a skosh quieter and smoother and I like the cowboy vibe.

Sam Abuelsamid  26:07  
Okay, did you? Did you get to try supercruise on the Sierra?

Nicole Wakelin  26:11  
Yes, I tried supercruise with a very small section of highway and I tried super cruise on the Hummer EV. So this is the second time I tried the super cruise with a new word to like change lanes for you. If you come up on someone who's going a little slow for your speed, it will see like okay, you can go in the left lane lane and pass them and will essentially do a little pass for Yeah. I mean, I think it's just as good on this as it was on the Hummer. I don't notice a significant difference to me. I mean, supercruise is good, that would be a reason. That could be reason enough to say, Okay, I would do this truck over another luxury truck. Because it really is supercruise is really good. You've driven supercruise, right, Tam?

Sam Abuelsamid  26:52  
Oh, yeah. Many times and I drove supercruise on the prototype Sierra, at the GM proving grounds last summer. Okay. Before before they reveal the, the new Sierra, they. We went out there, and we got to try it out and try out the auto lane change and also try it while towing a trailer. So if you had a chance to do that, well,

Nicole Wakelin  27:15  
I did not I did not try it with the trailer. They did say you could do that. You tried it with the trailer? How was

Sam Abuelsamid  27:19  
it? Yeah, that was good. You know, they do some really clever things with that. So when you're accelerating, and braking, it looks at how fast the vehicle actually accelerates, versus how much throttle input you're giving it, and how much braking input you're giving it. And from that they kind of back up, they estimate how much the load the trailer load is. You know, so obviously, the heavier the trailer is, the slower it's going to accelerate for a given amount of throttle input. And then they use that to adjust the GAP settings when you're in supercruise. So if you've got a heavier trailer on there, it will give you a bigger gap to the vehicle in front of you because it knows it's going to take you longer to slow down or respond. So they did some did some cool stuff with that. You know, and generally, you know, I mean supercruise always works really well. It's it's very, very consistent, very, very predictable in what it's going to do. Unlike blue cruise, which we'll talk about next time. But yeah, no, I think I think GM still have all the hands free systems I've tried, they still do it the best.

Nicole Wakelin  28:36  
Yeah, it definitely was, like when you're talking about Robbie, you know, the sort of trusting the system is it going to do like you kind of want to keep your hands on like, is it gonna do what I think it's gonna do? Who's Luke who's I think he does a really good job of mimicking what I would do is also many of them, they stopped too soon or they stopped too late. They're not going to hit something but it's just not where I intuitively feel like it should be or they go a little further to the left lane or a little further to the right lane. They just don't mimic how I drive enough. I constantly feel like it's missing something. You don't with blue Cruz. It really feels like it mimics how you drive. Yeah, I mean supercruise excuse me, it does feel like it mimics how you drive so you feel you very quickly have confidence in the system and are willing to trust it like okay, you know, this is driving the way I would drive. It's not making me nervous, I can totally trust supercruise to do the right thing.

Roberto Baldwin  29:24  
It's interesting because when when supercruise launched when the fish their initial drive, the car would stay right in the middle of the lane. And you'll be passing like big rigs and people were getting nervous because the car was right in the middle and think we automatically as driver like like move over a little bit from big rigs that we don't like we don't even realize it so they had to adjust supercruise so that we would do that so that the keep people from feeling nervous, whatever coming up to a big rig

Nicole Wakelin  29:50  
so maybe that's it so maybe you know that they've adjusted enough that it it mimics the the things that maybe we don't need to do that we do as a human like okay if you're interested He

Sam Abuelsamid  30:00  
tries to do naturalistic driving behavior. And it does.

Nicole Wakelin  30:03  
I think it does. It mimics what you do whether it makes sense that going a little bit further to one side to avoid the big rig that is perfectly centered in its lane, and you don't need to move at all, but we do anyway. We'll do that anyway, because it makes us all more comfortable. I feel like that whatever it's doing, it's figuring that out enough that it is driving the way I would drive. So I trust it.

Sam Abuelsamid  30:24  
Yep. All right. Though, how much was the 84x

Nicole Wakelin  30:30  
The 84x is it's free? I don't have let's say at 4x It's actually not that far behind the Denali ultimate it still sits right at the top of the lineup because it was off road was the Denali ultimate up there because of its just luxury, so it's 75 Seven. Okay, so it's still right up there. Yeah, it's like about spy $1,000 less than Denali ultimate so pick you're getting you're getting a high end check either way, is it off roading? Is that you want or is it luxury that you want pick one? Oh the interior the 84x is still really nice. A little bit more rugged than that. But you know pick you pick am I going to go off road and Diablo drop or am I going to want fancy pants?

Sam Abuelsamid  31:13  
I want luxury while I'm going down Diablo drop?

Nicole Wakelin  31:15  
Well, tough luck Sam number a fancy

Roberto Baldwin  31:19  
hat. This is my fancy offerzen Has my

Nicole Wakelin  31:25  
fancy off road hat.

Sam Abuelsamid  31:27  
All right. See you excuse me?

Nicole Wakelin  31:32  
Sam's dying.

Sam Abuelsamid  31:33  
Yeah, I had the Hyundai Tucson plug in hybrid limited. All Wheel Drive. So this is currently kind of the the ultimate version of the Tucson. But it's not called Ultimate. It's just limited. This this year is the first year that they've made a plug in hybrid variant available in here. It's the same system that they have in the Sorento. So basically, essentially exact same powertrain that's in the Kia Sorento, plug in hybrid. And it's it's the same basic architecture as the standard hybrid Tusan. The only difference is the plug in hybrid gets a more powerful motor, electric motor. So the the the standard hybrid version has a 59 horsepower electric motor, and the plug in hybrid, you get 90 horsepower so that it's more capable of driving, you know, just on electric power alone. And the battery pack goes from 1.49 kilowatt hours to 13.8 kilowatt hours. So I took it out and drove it Oh, and this is all paired with the 1.6 liter turbo and six speed automatic transmission that you have in a whole bunch of different Hyundai and Kia vehicles. The 1.6 liter turbo in the hybrid and plug in hybrid is rated at 180 horsepower, 195 foot pounds of torque. The total system output in the plug in hybrid is 220 261 horsepower, and 258 foot pounds of torque. So it's got got more than enough performance. When I did my range test with on electric drive with this thing. It's rated by the EPA at 33 miles of electric range. I actually got 39 miles worth it. Oh wow, which was quite a surprise. It came up just shy of what I've gotten previously with the Ford Escape plugin and the Toyota rav4 Prime, which got like 41 and 42 miles combined, or respectively. Aside from having a plug port on the left rear fender everything else about this is virtually identical to any other current generation Tucson. For for good or ill. For the most part, it's really good. I you know, I don't have any really major complaints about the Tucson this current generation Tucson is a little bit longer, a little bit bigger than the previous generation and prior generations of Tucson. It's almost as big as the last generation Santa Fe was and the Santa Fe of course also grew in size. So it's several inches longer wheelbase there's more rear seat legroom. In this in this new Tucson you also have more more cargo space available. The battery will charge up to 7.2 kilowatts, when you plug it in, takes about two hours for a full charge if you've fully depleted it. One thing that they're they're the EV mode when you when you engage To Eevee mode, it will, unless you're particularly light on the accelerator, it will still sometimes turn on the engine for anything other than mild acceleration, so you can, you can drive it just on electricity. But if if you give it if you try to accelerate away from a stop, you know, with any kind of aggression at all the engine will come on, briefly, but it'll come on, and then it'll shut off again. So but it's it's very seamless, and it's performance, you don't really you can hear it a little bit, and I was watching for it. But it's not really it's not noticeable, you won't, you won't feel any lurching or anything when the engine starts up, or when it shuts down, it's all it's all quite smooth.

The overall fuel efficiency, again, it's rated at 42 miles per gallon, combined on the EPA rating, or an 80 MPG E with combined, that's using their combined rating of both running as a hybrid and running as an Eevee. Sorry, it's 35 when it's running just in pure hybrid mode. So that's a little bit less than what you get from either the escape or the the rav4 prime, I actually got about 3033 running in hybrid mode. So I did a little worse in hybrid mode than the label would it did better in electric mode. A little little odd. My only significant complaint you know, I liked the design of the new Tucson, especially what they've done with the front lighting, where the the daytime running lamps are kind of hidden behind this, this new grill design that they have, so that when they're off, it just looks like it's kind of black or gray all the way across. And when you turn it turn it on, it lights up from from behind, and you see the lights in the corner. So look, that's pretty cool effect. But my only complaint about this is the center console. Too many touch controls, they've gotten rid of all the physical controls for climate control for volume. It's all touch it's got a nice, really nice screen. The the infotainment screen is in typical Hyundai fashion is really bright, high contrast, easy to read in any lighting conditions. That part works great. But the the controls below it are touch controls for volume for climate. And I'd rather just have either sliders or knobs for some of that stuff, rather than actually have to look at it to do some of the stuff. But everything else about it the the A das Hyundai's ATS systems always work really well. No no complaints there. The it does have the latest generation of that stuff which includes the what Hyundai calls their highway drive Assist, which is their sort of level two, it's a hands on system it's not a hands free system, but it does a really good job of lane centering and maintaining you know the constant distance to the vehicle in front of you. The base there's two trim levels for the plug in hybrid the SCL which starts at 35,400 and the limit is 43,200 with delivery of 1225 The one I tested had was 43 976 $44,000 is not cheap for Tucson. Yeah but because it's a plug in you can get federal tax credit on this and in some states state and senators as well. I think the federal tax credit on this one because of the battery size is about $6,000 So that would you know if you get if you opt for the limited that drops you down to about $38,000 Roughly which is still kind of pricey for you know for what this is, but if you want something that's really efficient and can do most of your driving on electricity alone without using any gas you know, it's an it's another good option there along with the rav4 prime and the the escape plug in hybrid, which are similar in size and have similar performance levels. So that is the Hyundai Tucson plug in hybrid limited all wheel drive.

Nicole Wakelin  39:46  
So overall, you like it. Yeah,

Sam Abuelsamid  39:48  
I do. I just wish like I said I just wish that Hyundai had kept some physical controls for the climate and, and audio volume. It's just

Nicole Wakelin  39:56  
funny because so many the OEMs that pulled out like every conceivable All button just made it all capacitive made it back in the other driver like wait, people hate this, like volume knob like he didn't give you everything you had 15 years ago, but they give you back, like some essential things essentials. There's some things that it's just easier to use a button or dial or knob for that it is to be trying to slide something up and down or tap it or touch it.

Sam Abuelsamid  40:22  
Yeah. All right. Let's move on to some of the other stuff. Let's start with this article. I found the other day on Ars Technica that was written by some guy named Baldwin.

Nicole Wakelin  40:36  
He's a jerk. He doesn't know what the hell he's talking about. He doesn't

Roberto Baldwin  40:39  
he doesn't know. Damn.

Sam Abuelsamid  40:41  
Anything. He it's versus old beaters. So Mr. Baldwin, tell us all about this article. So

Roberto Baldwin  40:49  
I wrote an article. And yeah, is which is better for the environment, your your your up, you're old beater. And I did a lot of math, which I think everyone should just applaud me for doing a lot of math. I don't want to do math. Class. I'm like math is math isn't hard. It's just a lot of pieces of paper and calculations, and then doing it again and then doing it again, because I don't want I want to make sure everything is correct. So I you know, I talked a little bit about the adjustment factor of EPA ratings. Most automakers when it comes to EVs, they just use the regular adjustment factor. Whereas Tesla and Lucid Air they use a different adjustment factor because they go on the dyno meter a bunch more times. So you can read it all the the article that I talked a little bit about the factory impact, like these factories that are building some of these cars that are the most efficient. Some of them are not so great, like the Fremont factory in Tesla's Fremont factory. It's got a lot. They've gotten in trouble with EPA a lot about Clean Air Act violations, which is sort of ironic, consider you make it look like we're gonna make the air clean. And then the factories just like

Sam Abuelsamid  42:07  
to have a lot of problems with emissions from their paint shop.

Roberto Baldwin  42:10  
Yeah, so they have a lot of Yeah, and then you know, some of the, you know, lucid is a new company. They haven't really said much, Kia and Hyundai, they've talked about the future but right now they're not really doing too much. The Chevy Bolt and the Bolt EV are being built at the Orion plant which I think is called plant zero now. No, that's that's the Detroit Hampshire I'm sorry. That's right. That's that's a different plant. That's

Sam Abuelsamid  42:32  
where the Oregon not sorry, Oregon orienta plant I don't pronounce that's weird here in Michigan,

Roberto Baldwin  42:40  
I went to that plant and I wrote an article about it. And I did a whole tour. And I didn't put like Lake or whatever. There's like all this there's there's another name for the plant that everyone colloquially uses. And I didn't put that in the article. And I got a very angry email from somebody. I couldn't access that email. So I couldn't remember what it was because the email was where I worked somewhere I worked and I don't have access to my old work emails. But yeah, anyway, they use landfill gas to power that factory. And so you know, we you know, I talked a little bit about about that the most efficient EVs on the road, according to EPA, Tesla, lucid have obviously are up there, but also the Chevy Volt and the Hyundai Kona electric, which is number four, which is the car I own. I know makes me feel a little bit better about the vehicle I own. Then I talked about carbon footprint, breakeven point, like how long you have to drive an Eevee versus a gas vehicle the same about the same market before it breaks even. Yep, EVs have a larger carbon footprint when they're built. And it turns out, it's about 1300 miles, they used to be like 40, and it's getting lower and lower 1300 13 13,000 13,500 miles, wow, was the average. So if you're like this, if you get to the BMW four series and the BMW i Four, it's gonna be, you know, the i Four is going to have a larger carbon footprint than regular four series. But after 13,500 miles or so, maybe a little more, maybe a little amount less. They hit parity when it comes to carbon footprint, because now you're factoring in their, you know how much they're belching into the real world driving around. And then after that, the the IFA will just sort of just keep leaving the course. Yeah, it'll just take off. And so I talked a little bit about that. What happens? And then we come down to what that means for an Eevee versus your old car, your beater car, and how this was a huge pain in the ass. The long story Long story short, like these, yeah, if you if you read the article, there's a lot about grams per co2, you know, of, you know, vehicles or 2.5 years or older. You know, I did you know, it's a long story short, it's about two years, you drive your beater for about two years. And it'll be more efficient than buying a new Eevee for two years, but then after that, because we're just removing the carbon footprint at like, have it's been built in, totally, it's gone, we don't count that I didn't count that at all. It's completely depreciated that out of the equation. Yeah, that doesn't count anymore. So if you have a 10 year old, whatever, if you're driving it for two years, and you're driving an Eevee, for two years, for the first two years, because we're not counting the carbon footprint of that old beater. It's more efficient, you know, quote, unquote, has a lower carbon footprint than the Evie. But then after two years, the Evie surpasses its parody, they both have the same carbon footprint. And then of course, the exponentially, the Evie just gets more, you know, better and better for the environment versus the beater, which is still just really bad. But at the end of it I talked about, it's still really expensive.

Sam Abuelsamid  45:58  
Well, and that I mean, that I think, ultimately, is is the real issue for a lot of people, because most people never actually buy a new car in their lifetime, that most people only buy used cars. Really? Yeah, we I've sold at least

Roberto Baldwin  46:15  
the only new cars I've ever had releases. And I've had to and everything else I've ever purchased, like bought a car, we're, we're used,

Sam Abuelsamid  46:24  
we sell in the US, there's the used car sales outnumber new car sales by about three to one. And the vast majority of people can just can't afford to buy a new car. It's too expensive. So most people only ever buy used cars, and they drive them into the ground and then buy another used car. And so and I wrote something up for work the other day about this, because there's a there was another article that I saw about California Air Resources Board has been, there's a bill in the California Assembly to direct the Air Resources Board to do a study and figure out how to incentivize so called gas super users to to buy EVs instead, what counts

Nicole Wakelin  47:13  
as a gas super user.

Sam Abuelsamid  47:15  
So what what they, what they found from the federal transportation bill, or the Federal Highway Administration, I think does a survey every five years, the National Household travel study, and what they what they found from that from the last one in 2017, is that 10% of the vehicles on the road account for 34% of the missions, or 34% of the fuel of the gasoline used. Because those are older cars that are driven primarily by lower income people, who in many cases also have very long commutes. Because they can't afford to live close to where they work to the city where they will they buy cheap, older cars, that they drive until they third dead, you know, and they, you know, because they they're cheap, but they you know, they use more fuel, and they get driven more miles. And so how do you get how do you create an incentive program for those to get those people into EVs, which I think is actually going to be a real challenge. Because if you if you think about who that demographic is, you know, and I, in this blog post that I wrote for work, you know, I gave the example of you look at work, the area where you live, Robbie, in the Bay Area, you know, a lot of people that work, you know, relatively low income jobs, you know, in Silicon Valley, and San Francisco and so on, have to live out in places like Stockton and Modesto and have, you know, two or three hour commutes each way to get to work. And, you know, they're often you know, they're they live out in those areas, because it's cheaper to live there. They have they have a cheap car, but they use a lot of gas because they drive a lot of miles with vehicles that aren't as efficient. And, you know, there's a good chance that a lot of those people also don't own a home, they, you know, they rent somewhere, so they're not necessarily going to have access to charging because they've got longer commutes, you know, a cheap, Evie that gets, you know, say 100 miles of range might not be adequate for them. So maybe, you know, maybe it's better to just get those people into cheap hybrids, you know, like a maverick or, you know, a Hyundai ionic or, you know, some other or even even a, you know, entry level Prius, you know, that are in the low $20,000 range, and incentivize those instead of EVs because that might actually be a better solution for those people.

Nicole Wakelin  49:53  
It would make sense because really like EVs even for people who aren't for do do buy new cars, the price Fact of buying an Eevee that is more expensive than a hybrid more expensive than a gas car. And you have to buy, you know, go ahead and have some kind of charger installed at your house and this and that a lot of people just think I'm not spending all that money to do this. It's just not. Doesn't make sense.

Roberto Baldwin  50:16  
Yeah, a lot tougher. Because when you when you don't have I grew up, like stupid poor. And so you don't have like, it was weird because someone was like, Well, why don't you just buy a new for people I watch people just pay full price for a new phone. I'm like, because people don't have that sort of money. He's like, What do you mean, I was like, Oh, dear. It's the same thing where you're like, you're just buying a cheap car. And even though it's gonna cost you more for gas, you don't have the capital saved. You can't say what the capital to buy a new car, or to buy a car, you don't have that kind of disposable income to say yours, you're just going from like, paycheck to paycheck to paycheck. And if you don't live in Modesto, or Stockton, or whatever, you're typically living in a shared living, you know, you're in apartment with other people or you're in a house with a bunch of other people. And, you know, that means there's nowhere to charge. Where are you? What are you going to charge and you don't own the place you can't put a charger in. And you know, if you're lucky and this and the what's nice about the barriers if you to rent or buy near, like a BART station or Caltrain is way more expensive than it is away from public transportation. So unless you live in the city, or you live near a bus line, it's super, super expensive to like, get into the city, because you have to pay, you know, a premium to rent a house or to rent that apartment near a BART like we couldn't we wanted to buy our house near Bart, we couldn't afford it. We were not really Yeah, we couldn't afford to live near public transportation. Because

Nicole Wakelin  51:44  
I never really thought about that. How much that would increase things because not we have terrible public transportation. It's never an issue.

Roberto Baldwin  51:50  
Yeah, we can we can we want it's I want something close to BART, because I can just get off the plane and get on BART and come straight home. Right? It's the middle of the day, I'll do that. And my wife will pick me up at BART er, but you know, it would have been a lot easier for most of the flights or most times I have to go in the city just to take public transportation. But you know, now I have to like get in a car drive to BART park it and and get in the car and then drive. Yeah, it's it's, there's there's so many, like sort of barriers to EVs. And it's going to be a while before the current generation of EVs start hitting, you know, at least three years before the start hitting the used car market. So you know,

Nicole Wakelin  52:27  
yeah, there's gonna be a while before that, yeah, that's the thing people you can't buy. What if you want to use Divi? It's like, you have a very small number of options out there.

Roberto Baldwin  52:35  
Yeah, you're either getting a you know, the 100 mile car, you know, the the ego, that's pretty much 500 or whatever, or you're buying a new car, or it's very

Sam Abuelsamid  52:45  
new. And if your commute is, you know, 7580 90 miles each way. 100 mile, Evie, you know, unless you, yeah, you're not going to, you're going to be really stretching it thin. And, you know, maybe you might have workplace charging, but then you know, you're back to, you know, can you charge at home? And it's not always a practical alternative? Yeah. So, I mean, the, it's, the solution is a lot more complex than just giving some tax breaks to low income people to buy an Eevee you know, what you what, really what you really need to do is figure out, you know, why do we have these disparities in housing, you know, making housing available in a lot of these more popular areas, and making it more affordable for people so they can live closer. Ideally, you know, it's better if people live closer to where they work, you know, and don't have to have that commute because that's also a lot of time out of their day. And, you know, that means time and you can't spend with your kids or you know, whatever.

Roberto Baldwin  53:46  
It's very, it's interesting because they're expanding Bart here in the Bay Area, but they're expanding it down, where a lot of people make a lot of money does not expand, they're not expanding it up to like Vallejo, so they're not helping the people that need it the most. Yeah, so they're sort of expanding it down even though there's a Cal train already but they're not expanding it up to like lino some of these towns that are you know, don't have the money they don't have the tech workers either just regular working class people who need jobs. And that's right, I left I was like, man I wish we had borrowed up here. Meanwhile, they're like we're running borrowed all the way to San Jose. I'm like, we already have Cal train to San Jose. What's going on?

Sam Abuelsamid  54:22  
He don't need another train to San Jose. Yeah,

Roberto Baldwin  54:25  
we Okay, fine. Another train to San Jose. Whatever.

Sam Abuelsamid  54:28  
Plus, plus a lot of those companies in a lot of the big companies that also have their own private buses. You get the buffer workers. That's the whole issue. Luxury buses,

Nicole Wakelin  54:37  
right? Gosh. All right.

Roberto Baldwin  54:42  
Anyway, yeah. EVs are cool if you could afford it and blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Anyway, if you can, if you can get I'll just keep talking about the maverick for forever. Mavericks great little car 40 MPG hybrid. You can do anything you want with it.

Sam Abuelsamid  54:57  
Yep. All right. Next up, you know, we've we've talked before about the chip shortage. And now turns out that BMW, for the last several months has been delivering new vehicles to customers that don't have Android Auto or Apple CarPlay compatibility built in yet.

Nicole Wakelin  55:16  
Have they been upfront with it though? Like these customers? No, there is no,

Sam Abuelsamid  55:20  
I'm not sure if they how upfront they've been, I would assume that they have mentioned something, or certainly customers have probably figured it out pretty quickly. Turns out that, you know, they, because of the chip shortage, they actually switched over to a different chip for the infotainment system, so they replace the chip that they're using. But that required rewriting a bunch of software. And BMW has been a little bit slower on rewriting that, you know, to make see the quote here, and the story is, the chips built into these cars in the first four months of this year needed updated software in order to be fully functional, and offer Apple CarPlay and Android Auto and Wi Fi capability. Then rather than delay the production or handover these cars until the work on the software update was completed, we have been delivering the cars to customers with the information that Apple, Android and Wi Fi will become available via an update by the end of June at the latest. So yeah, they have they have told customers Okay, so people knew. Yeah, yeah. And so it's just, you know, takes time to rewrite the software and validate it and everything. And these vehicles do have over the air update capability. So you know, the customers won't have to take these into a dealer to to get them reflashed or anything, they'll just get a software update that enables that stuff.

Roberto Baldwin  56:43  
Hopefully, sir, yeah,

Nicole Wakelin  56:46  
there's I think there was some other I was reading something or another company doing the same thing where like the, the, you know, you'd have a blank if you didn't have heated seats in your car, well, the button is there for the heated seats, you push it, it does nothing.

Sam Abuelsamid  56:56  
Yeah, that will come to suck, and it's not connected to anything,

Nicole Wakelin  57:00  
right. So it's like you don't this is coming, we'll get you squared away. When we can do this, we'll say,

Sam Abuelsamid  57:06  
done that on some of their goals. They've also done that with heated steering wheels. And, and most companies have disabled some function or another on vehicles over the last year because they just didn't have the chips for

Nicole Wakelin  57:20  
it. And if you just go it's like just, you know, writing stories on various cars, when I go to confirm things on the OEM site and then go to double check what they have on the consumer site, and almost every consumer site you go to right now, when you go to it, there's a warning somewhere at some point, when you're looking at the vehicle, when you're building the vehicle, when you're trying to find out if your dealer has it, it's like, you know, due to supply chain constraints, the vehicle may not be as listed here, please check the sticker and check with your dealer. So basically to like, look at your exact vehicle, if it has it, because one, the blue one might the red one might not choose carefully.

Sam Abuelsamid  57:54  
And in most cases, you know the manufacturers have said as soon as we get the parts, we will give you a call and command and we'll we'll put it in for you. In this case, BMW actually has the parts the physical parts, they just didn't have the software they didn't have the bits to program on do it. So it'll be a little easier for them to do the upgrade.

Nicole Wakelin  58:17  
I feel like that would make me less nervous just saying you have to give you an over the air update because some software guy who designed software for BMW and that's all he's ever done is designing the software they're just gonna be mature car, the idea that like something physical thing is not right. And they're gonna they can you take it to Bob's, you know, Chevy or Bob's RAM or whoever, you're gonna fix that for you. I'm like, I want that from the guy on the assembly line. I don't want that other guy at the dealership who's only done two of these in his life. Doing that to my car, like that would makes me more nervous, you know,

Roberto Baldwin  58:50  
especially we're more trained to like, Oh, you have a new iPhone, but in like six months, this software updates, I'm gonna do this cool thing. And so our brains like oh, okay, yeah, software's gonna,

Nicole Wakelin  59:00  
you're used to that, like software updates happen sometimes they don't even work right. You know, to be fair, they blow things up really good. Oh, download it, after all, like, I guess they're just as likely to cause issues who hasn't you know, had that happen when they download an update to their phone or their laptop or whatever, but somehow that I'm okay with, but it makes me nervous to think that I'm just going to have a dealer even with the right training the right equipment, the right everything, fixing my heated seats to make them heated because currently the parts aren't in there. Or whatever. We got a guy his name is Phil. It was really good as he read this manual. He wants to two minute videos.

Sam Abuelsamid  59:33  
He's already replaced them on replace this part on 50 other cars, you're good.

Roberto Baldwin  59:37  
Yeah, you want to be the you want to be the 51st person you don't want to be like, what's your five?

Nicole Wakelin  59:42  
What if you're one through five? What if you're number one? A few months you not want to be number one.

Sam Abuelsamid  59:51  
All right. Speaking of Apple CarPlay and cars that don't have it. That's something that Tesla owners I have never experienced, Tesla has never included any kind of smartphone projection system, no Apple CarPlay, no Android Auto, all their stuff is completely built in house for their software. But 111 person decided, no, that's not good enough. I want CarPlay and my Tesla. And so he made it happen. He figured out a way to use the built in browser that's in Tesla vehicles and the infotainment system to Raspberry Pi's. And, and Linux and basically having the the Android interface being projected into the Wi Fi. So doing doing a web server, from a Raspberry Pi into the browser, on the Tesla infotainment screen. And then running CarPlay on Android, which you can do and you know, because that's something you know, for vehicles that have Android automotive, you can you can get the code for CarPlay. And there's an Android app that that you can put on there and run to create to have CarPlay on the screen. And that's what this person did. So they've got CarPlay running on Android in a in the browser from two Raspberry Pi's. And he's working on an upgraded version of this that does it with just one Raspberry Pi. The responsiveness is not great, it's a little laggy. If you watch the video that's in the the story from The Verge will be in the show notes, and you can check out the video. And you can see it does work. It's just a little slow.

Roberto Baldwin  1:01:48  
But it's some of those apps and like ways. I remember talking to somebody at some automaker years ago about ways. And they're like, Yeah, we were wondering if we could like make it native in the car. But it uses so much ease as far more resources in the car can can handle right now. Yeah. So I think Yeah, he'll be able to get to, it'd be able to get to work. But then as soon as you launch his ways that Raspberry Pi checks on person

Sam Abuelsamid  1:02:16  
a bit, because this was I think this was in a model three that they did this one. But I think if you actually tried this in one of the new Model S or Model y or Model X, the the upgraded ones, the refreshed ones that they just did that have the horizontal screen, the landscape screen, instead of the old portrait style screen. Those things are actually running an AMD soc. It's basically the same chip that's in a PS five.

Roberto Baldwin  1:02:46  
But but but but Karpeles running on the Raspberry Pi. And it's just been it's just been Yeah, it's been shelled in essentially using the web's Yeah, it's still the Raspberry Pi that's that has to take care of all they're just gonna show you guys got to do all that. All that kind of shoving in video, like go out and buy an NVIDIA Xavier,

Sam Abuelsamid  1:03:10  
you get an NVIDIA Shield that might do it. Yeah,

Roberto Baldwin  1:03:13  
I mean, shove it onto the end of the Raspberry Pi. And you're good to go.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:03:21  
Okay, so it is it is possible to to hack your car for good. All right, one more vehicle that Nicole and I drove last week.

Nicole Wakelin  1:03:34  
I mean, we could really just skip this. This is kind of a small, nothing of a vehicle. No one cares about this at all. Sam, I don't even know why this is

Sam Abuelsamid  1:03:41  
just it's just another variant of the F 150. I mean, you know, they're everywhere, whatever. There's

Nicole Wakelin  1:03:45  
so many doesn't even keep track anymore.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:03:49  
So we got to drive the F 150. Lightning last week

and I'll start with the frunk is really big. We on the second morning when we were heading out to do the off road driving. You know, we had four of us in the in the truck. And we put our four carry on bags plus two stuffed backpacks in the front. And it was fine. It closed up fine. Yeah, so yeah, lots of room in the front. What did you think of the lightning?

Nicole Wakelin  1:04:24  
I like you know what I liked best about the lightning is that aside from the fact that you know it's an Eevee and you have that impressive Evie acceleration. It's it's not an insult. This is a compliment. It's just another f150 Like it drives like an f150 It feels like when f150 It has capability. It doesn't feel like they tried to do some like, Oh, this is an electric vehicle, huh? It's like no, we just made an F 150 Electric because it does cool stuff. We didn't try to like change the whole character of an F 150. It still feels like that pickup truck in all the right ways. Some people love it's the best selling car in the country best selling vehicle. So I liked it. I thought it was really good. I liked the base trim better than the what's the top on the platinum? The Platinum Yeah, I like the base trim better I don't like Okay, so the platinum has these fancy pants seats and if you played with the seats I played with the seats and it says like platinum and has this extra like little thing that's supposed to support your shoulders. And all I could think of was like it had wings, it was like the maxi pad of car seats, wings. And it like had these like wings that came around you and I'm like I don't

Roberto Baldwin  1:05:32  
like wings are in the Maki.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:05:36  
No different okay,

Nicole Wakelin  1:05:37  
I don't feel like the wings were as robust in the machi they are robust wings in the in the Platinum, so it was too much actually. And I even like the dashboard that the leather trim in the platinum. It's like a like a maybe a one inch strip of leather on the dashboard that like, which is okay leather, but they have this nice funky like texture on the dashboard. And the base one actually liked the base trim better than the fancy one.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:06:01  
Yeah, and one other difference with the Pro which is the base trim is that the Pro is the only one that has the 12 inch landscape display, the the XL T the Lariat and the platinum all have the 15 and a half inch portrait style screen like it's the same, that's the same screen that's in the maki with the gluon volume knob on the on the bottom of the screen to same interface that you find in the Maki, the the Pro has the the 12 and 1212 inch screen that you find on the gas engine platinum and it's fine. And the nice thing about it is with the the big screen, you're back to having the climate controls and everything in the touch interface. Whereas with the 12 inch screen, you still get rotary volume knobs and tuning knobs and climate controls. Which if you drive in the wintertime you have gloves on you know you can operate all that stuff with gloves on works works really well. You know and some people might like the look of that better you know and I agree I I like to look at the Excel or the pro Sorry.

Nicole Wakelin  1:07:16  
See like the I was like I was impressed like there are very few times I've been I like based trends or they don't have enough as have base base trim, but like the lower trims and vehicles, they generally feel and look like lower trims. And this one, I thought, gosh, I totally fine and actually like this better, which is rare. But I think it's part of their strategy too. You know, they pricing has escaped me. But the pricing on the base trim of the f150 Lightning is not outrageous

Sam Abuelsamid  1:07:40  
for a truck that starts at $40,000. Okay, I

Nicole Wakelin  1:07:43  
had 40 in my head and I couldn't remember. So it's like 40 grand, so you don't, you can get into an Eevee truck for less than $40,000. And it doesn't feel like junk inside. It feels nice. That's impressive. And that makes it the neat thing about this is it gives it appeal to any kind of truck person like truck guys, you've got a truck you can afford. You want to work truck that can do work it can't you want it to be nice inside it is you want to try going with an Eevee Hey, you can do it with this. I feel like it really stands to expand the appeal of EVs in a way that other vehicles haven't because the f1

Roberto Baldwin  1:08:21  
zoning ridicul Exactly. So

Nicole Wakelin  1:08:23  
if you can get if you can get people all those best selling vehicle people to say, alright, fine, I'll give your Evie thing a try. And hey, it drives you know, it's not that impressive, Evie acceleration, but it still looks like an F 150 and feels like an F 150. And forms like an F 150. That's, that's something

Sam Abuelsamid  1:08:42  
if you've ever been in an F 150 you get in this thing, and you know exactly where everything is exactly, everything works well. And what is it's all the same, which is part of why they were able to offer it at such a relatively reasonable starting price. Because, you know, they, they use all the same parts in the cab. And so they've got huge economies of scale, you know, from building 900,000 A year of these, right?

Nicole Wakelin  1:09:04  
Well, and they talked about how that also means that if you have an f150 right now, and you have accessories that work in the bed, and you've spent a lot of money on random accessories here and there, they didn't want to make it so well. If you get a lightning gotta buy all that stuff again, you can take them off your f150 and you can put them in the f150 Lightning, like they're compatible. So you don't suddenly, you know, they could have, they could have decided to change that they didn't and I know it makes sense for them financially from a point but it also for consumers. That's fantastic. So whatever you have in your f150 that you use, or however you configure that bed right now, you can do the same thing and the lightning. That's pretty amazing.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:09:41  
Yeah, basically, you know, it's a quieter f150 that has a very large lockable front storage cores. Yep. And there's also a lot faster. It's the fastest f150 they've ever built.

Nicole Wakelin  1:09:56  
When well it was the other big thing is that the f150 Lightning can charge your house, you get the if you get the you have to get Ford's little charging things to be able to have it go back and forth between the two do the engineering Sam so that it

Sam Abuelsamid  1:10:11  
so the the charge station pro actually comes with any any any lightning you get with the extended range battery with the 300 plus mile battery comes included with the charge station Pro, which is an 80 amp charger, that's 19.2 kilowatts. And then you have if you want to do the the house, the backup, the intelligent power backup, you'd have to buy the Sunrun home integration box, which has the transfer switch and automatically does the switches back and forth. So when as soon as your if your power goes out, then it automatically starts pulling power from the truck. And then as soon as you power comes back on, it reverses and goes back the other way. So that home integration box is $3,800. But the charger comes with the truck. And with if you get the standard range truck, you can also get that charger. Normally an 80 amp charger like that usually cost upwards of $2,000. It's only 1300 bucks. If you buy the standard range one and you want to upgrade to that you can get that for $1,300. So it's not cheap. But you know, it's a lot cheaper than if you just went on Amazon or went somewhere else and bought an 80 amp charger.

Roberto Baldwin  1:11:28  
Yeah, mostly we're at the top out, like 60 or 50.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:11:31  
Yeah, there. Yeah, I saw there's like clipper Creek makes an ADF charger. There's a few others out there a few other 80s. But, you know, most most EVs won't charge that fast on AC anyway. They the Lightning has dual onboard chargers to enable that 19 kilowatt charging.

Roberto Baldwin  1:11:53  
So it's like an eight and 11.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:11:56  
That's actually pointed to nine point twos 9.2 or 9.9, point six to 9.6 kilowatt chargers. So that you know actually one of the questions that we had from came in from Twitter was from from John Halkias, what's the real actual cost to outfit your home to use this vehicle with the intelligent backup power, it doesn't make sense to use Ford's recommended Sunrun or hire an outside contractor to do the retrofit for it. So the first part, you know, the actual cost, in addition to the truck, 3800 bucks for the home integration box. And then whatever the installation cost is, which, depending on your home, you could run from anywhere from 1000 to maybe several $1,000. Because to use this, you you'd have to have an ATM circuit or actually 100 amp circuit available for it. Because for an ATM unit, you need need a little buffer. So you'd have to have a dedicated 100 amp circuit from your circuit breaker panel. Which means you're gonna have to have at least a 200 amp panel in your house. So if you have an older house that only has 100 amp service, you're gonna have to upgrade that to 201st. So you have to replace your breaker panel. But if you have a 200 amp panel, which most newer vehicles that are most newer homes have and you've got enough capacity, you may have to put a new, a new 100 amp breaker in there. But you know, so it basically to do what I recently did, which was have actually have a 50 amp circuit put in that cost me 700 bucks. But 400 amp, you're probably looking at about 1000 bucks, if that's all you want to do is have the 100 amp charging or the ATF charging, and then probably somewhere in the neighborhood of maybe 1000 to 1500 bucks to install the the Sunrun box and edition that so you're looking probably a couple grand at a minimum for installation.

Nicole Wakelin  1:14:02  
I feel like the total probably on like, Okay, if you're just gonna park it probably five to $6,000 Depending on your house, your configuration, what's the what's already existing for your electrical panel at your house, which is a lot. But at the same time, if you're looking like you're using that the reason you would want that is so that you can use your truck to power your house, right? So for three days, they say no problem. If you're conservative in how you use that power, they say you could get as much as 10 days. So if you're sort of cycling what your turn off all the excess computers, right turn off the stuff that isn't like your heat, if it's winter or your fridge, if it's summer and you're trying to keep your food from going bad. Like if you're conservative. So 10 days, if you get yourself a generator depending on the size of your house, you can spend $10,000 on a generator to power a good sized house like and so it's not as if like, Oh, this is absurd. No, you're kind of turning your truck into a generator and you're doing We get for what? Like, yeah, you're like, oh gosh, five $6,000. But if you put a generator on your house, you're gonna spend at least that if not more. And now you have something that's, it's, you know, it's not like running every month like, and you know, we've never lives near somebody who has a generator, and they have to run once a month to make sure they're running. And it's always on a Sunday morning at 5am in my neighborhood, and you hear the like, the generator, you avoid all that, you know. So it's,

Sam Abuelsamid  1:15:25  
it's, it sounds expensive, silently switches over,

Nicole Wakelin  1:15:29  
it just silently switches over. And it seems expensive. And of course, if you can't afford the $6,000, you can't afford it. But if in lieu of getting a generator for your house, it's, it's absolutely brilliant.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:15:40  
Yeah. And, you know, if you're also looking at putting solar on your home, you know, you can roll all that right into into that purchase as well. So you know, that you might you'll save yourself some some headaches there if you're doing all that at the same time. And then the other part of the question was, do you have to use the, the Sunrun unit? For now? Yes, you do. Because the Sunrun box has to communicate with the Ford charger. Eventually, Ford does plan to open that up to other providers. So you will have other options, but for the time being, the son Ron is the only one that's that's compatible with this. But I would

Nicole Wakelin  1:16:21  
totally do it. If I was getting an F 150, I would spring to have that whole situation set up, I would absolutely figure a way to figure that into the cost because I think it I we don't lose power. Generally, for huge swaths of time, it's not like we live in someplace where there's hurricanes. But if you live like I'm in the northeast, if you lose power for 24 hours, and it's 30 degrees out, you are cold,

Sam Abuelsamid  1:16:43  
you get hit by an ice storm, exactly. utility poles down, there have

Nicole Wakelin  1:16:47  
been occasions where we've been out without power, like, you know, in the very many years of the tier 234 days, but for the people who don't have any way of generating that power, your pipes are frozen, and now you are spending 1000s upon 1000s upon 1000s of dollars. And that's every time that happens. If you could avoid that by spending six grand when you buy your truck to turn your truck into a makeshift generator? Heck, yes, I would do that.

Roberto Baldwin  1:17:11  
Yeah, here in Northern California, they typically summertime, they just turn off power, like, Oh, we're gonna have to power off for, you know, 12 hours, this day, we're gonna have that we're actually quite lucky we live near like a switching station. So they can't they don't turn our power off. But our neighbors down the street, they their power will just go up all the time. But one of the things when I was looking at the for the future is like a second Evie is something that has bi directional charging that is essentially this that you can have like maybe if we got Volkswagen, the the ID buzz, you know, it's an I got nice big battery, we're not gonna drive it as much as we do the Kona. So if it's just sitting there, I can, you know, charge it during the day. And then you know, have it you know, power goes out, hey, it's cool, because we have one runs our house

Sam Abuelsamid  1:17:55  
what this starting the summer, PG and E, which is your utility robbing is starting a test program with both GM and Ford alike. So this power backup thing we've been talking about, that's all managed entirely locally at your house. So it does all it does the detection of the power outage and switches everything over locally. But what PG and E is going to be testing with GM and Ford is a system. It's part of what they call demand response. So one of the things with demand response today that they do is, you know, if you sign up for a demand response program, they can have a separate panel for your air conditioning, for example. And they can remotely turn off your air conditioning. So if they're seeing too much load on the grid, and they need to lower it down or rebalance things, they can switch stuff off remotely. What they're going to be doing with GM and Ford EVs is testing demand response using the EVS to as power generators for the home. So if the load on the grid is too high, they instead of doing rolling blackouts, they will just send signals to these vehicles to these homes that opt in and say, Okay, turn off your power switch over to pulling power from the Eevee for an hour or two. And they can rotate this around around different homes, so you're not off for an extended period of time, you might be off for a couple of hours, and then back on but you'll still have power because you've got your Eevee so you won't have a blackout, but it reduces the load on the grid so the utility can get things under control again.

Nicole Wakelin  1:19:43  
I don't want them turning off my power though. I don't know. I guess you'd be coming home like like the air conditioning is off.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:19:49  
Well, it's off but if you got the CV your air conditioning will still be on.

Nicole Wakelin  1:19:52  
Exactly. I would still have my AC

Roberto Baldwin  1:19:55  
it's just hard for me to trust pg&e Wrap up Danny.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:19:57  
Well, anybody trust them? Probably legit Didn't that concern? Yeah.

Roberto Baldwin  1:20:03  
I'm more than I'm more than happy to reduce my carbon footprint by putting solar panels on my house and using batteries and cars and everything. But as pggne is like, hey, we want to help like,

Sam Abuelsamid  1:20:16  
I can handle it on my own.

Nicole Wakelin  1:20:17  
I got this. Thank you.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:20:21  
All right, did you do any towing? Nicole,

Nicole Wakelin  1:20:24  
I didn't, unfortunately did not have an opportunity to do that, because they scheduled me very close flights. So I did not get any towing.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:20:30  
But I did, I pulled the Max Tow rating on the lightning. If you get like the pro with the extended range battery, or the Lariat, or the XL t, you can get up to 10,000 pound tow rating. And you can also have a payload capability of up to 20 235 pounds. So I pulled a 9500 pound winery trailer, we were at a vineyard that had a couple of very large water tanks on there and several wine barrels filled with something presumably not wine. So it was a 9500 pound trailer. And I took the took it on this little drive route. And it barely felt like there was even a trailer attached. I mean, this thing was 775 foot pounds of torque. This thing just, it just goes even with that that trailer back there. One of the interesting things at the end of the show, we've got I've got a 30 minute interview I did with Darren Palmer, the VP of electric vehicle programs at Ford, one of things he talked about was they they have we talked earlier about, you know, the trailer towing with supercruise, and how GM is kind of kind of estimating the weight of the trailer on the fly, what Ford actually has their bed scales that they've that they're building into f 150s. Now, so you know how much load you're putting in the in the bed for the payload and also a smart trailer hitch. So you know what the tongue weight is. But then the other thing you can do is, when you set up your trailer for the first time, you can suggest you calibrate it. And basically what you do is you hook up your trailer, and then you go and drive 10 miles. And it takes it captures a bunch of data. And the reason it does that is so that for the range estimation, you know, when you put a QR code on the trailer hit on the trailer, and then the camera looks at it, and it automatically will when it sees the QR code for that trailer, it's been calibrated, it will automatically adjust the the model for the the range estimation. So you can you'll have a more accurate picture of how much actual range you have when you're towing. And, you know, the one of the other questions we had here was from, let's see was asked, I think it was also from John Halkias? Or was, how does the towing affect the range? And the the question, the answer to that is complicated. It depends on the trailer. If you have a fairly low, low profile trailer, that that's basically if the, if the top of the trailer is below the top of the f150, the the aerodynamic drag, it'll basically be in the in the wake of the truck, and it won't have nearly as much impact on range. Obviously, the weight will have some impact, but not nearly as much as if you had like a tall horse trailer that sticks up above. And so the rain, the impact on range can be anywhere from 20 25% You know, if you're just towing a smaller trailer with a couple of jet skis on it or you know snowmobiles to up to 45 50% if you're towing a big horse trailer. So the the impact is is variable. But if you calibrate the trailer, at least the range estimate you'll see on the cluster should be fairly close to what what you'll actually get. Oh, and

Nicole Wakelin  1:24:20  
they said to us, I remember reading some of this stuff when they were talking about how they're figuring range when you have a trailer hooked up. They're gonna use like they're going to be looking at where you're driving and the terrain you're driving in and they're even going to be comparing that to similar Ford vehicles that were driving similar roads and seeing how that impacted the range so they're, they're doing a lot to try to give you as accurate as possible an estimate. So you're not blindsided with thinking I have 200 Miles Nope, I had 125 You know, which it sounds like it should be a pretty close estimate what they're going to give you there it seems like it should be pretty good. I mean, we won't know until we all go toe something are told you know can Zoomer started showing in the real world and say it was spot on, it was way the heck off. But it seems like they put a lot of effort and a lot of high tech tools in here to try to make that as accurate as they possibly can in real time.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:25:11  
Yeah, yeah. Certainly, you know, with all that torque, you know, things got no problem at all with the weight. It's just, it's just a question how much it impacts the range. So. So, while we're, while we're at this point, why don't we go ahead, and well, I guess, one more thing is the the pricing, you know, they start, they start at 40 grand, they're, they're shipping to dealers. Now, that's for the standard range Pro, the fully loaded Platinums that we're driving, we're about 94 $95,000. All in, you can still get a $7,500 federal tax credit on that. So that gets you down into the mid 80s. But that's, you know, still not cheap. You know, probably an XL T or Lariat, you know, an XL T with the extended range battery is probably the sweet spot. They're all four wheel drive standard equipment, there's no rear drive, single motor version. And there's no there's no other body configuration is just the super crew with the five and a half foot bed. That's the only configuration because it turns out that more than 80% of all f150 buyers, that's the configuration they buy, very few people actually buy standard cab F 150s anymore, or any other truck for that matter. So that's the only one they're gonna offer. For the time being at some point. I wouldn't be surprised if they do offer, you know, a standard cab or you know, the extended cab pro just only for the the the fleets, but for now, that's only the one configuration. So let's look there's some other questions we got about the related to the right lightning. So let's go into the q&a. So Brent burns house and asked, obvious question, would you pick it over a rivian?

Roberto Baldwin  1:27:04  
Don Don? Yes. Why?

Nicole Wakelin  1:27:08  
Because the rivian is cool as it is, was this little like cargo tunnel and stuff. I like the ability to turn that f150 into a generator for house. I like how well it's going to estimate or it appears to be able to estimate the range, especially when you're towing a trailer. I think the interior and the drive and the feel of the f150 Feels like a traditional truck and all the right ways. So I would pick I would pick up 150 Lightning,

Sam Abuelsamid  1:27:44  
I would agree. You got similar range 320 And I think 329 For the rivian the lightnings got only slightly less towing capability the rivian claims 11,000 pounds versus 10,000. So it's close enough so it's a wash. You've got significantly more payload capability 2200 pounds with the Ford you've got that big Fronk which I think in for most people will probably be more useful. I think some people might find the pass through cargo area behind the cab more useful in the rivian I'm not sure it's long enough. Long enough to stick a surfboard in there. Robbie, do you know

Roberto Baldwin  1:28:31  
the pass through?

Nicole Wakelin  1:28:33  
Yeah on the rivian that route?

Roberto Baldwin  1:28:35  
I mean it's it depends on on what you on what you what you serve. I mean there's different types surfboards. I mean, if you're writing a longboard now if you're writing somebody sure if if you're writing a fish, I mean the fish might be too wide. It's yeah, it's it's sort of all over the place. snowboards in there though. Okay. Yes. Nobody will be fine.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:28:54  
Okay. So you can you could put the snowboards in the front of the the f150 because

Nicole Wakelin  1:28:59  
it's so stinking huge. Yeah, I feel like the cargo tunnel is a neat neat idea. And probably it's gonna give you some functionality that you don't have an f150 but I feel like what you gain is like the times when you really need that pass through are really really really small. Like the times you have to be like oh my gosh, this is so cool. But it's like 99% of the time, you're gonna be able to do just fine with a ginormous trunk or frunk f150 You're not necessarily going to need the pass through situation. So that the

Sam Abuelsamid  1:29:28  
Caribbean does have the camp

Roberto Baldwin  1:29:30  
kitchen, but does $1,000 And you can buy a cam kitchen for like 100 like 105

Nicole Wakelin  1:29:37  
Cam kitchen and put in the bed and have like little thing that you can take it in and out and wheels to slide the thing in.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:29:43  
And I'm sure it's only a matter of time before somebody comes up with a camp kitchen, thrown it into the front of the f150 and you've got the power there. You've got four outlets. Oh,

Nicole Wakelin  1:29:54  
you can just like slide it out. It's your whole kitchen. It's just Yeah, slide it out from the front because Look your stuff

Roberto Baldwin  1:30:01  
back, warm and starts melting everything

Nicole Wakelin  1:30:05  
has to be a safety thing until it reaches a certain temperature. The latch will not release or some good. Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:30:10  
I'm sure so I'm sure somebody will come up with that sooner rather than later. Or, if not in the front, at least in the back could put one in the bed. Yeah, use the 240 volt outlet, but that's back there. Alright, next. You kind of addressed this already, Nicole, from Paul Kavanaugh. I know I realized that I did with the pro trim make a good personal vehicle.

Nicole Wakelin  1:30:31  
And I already said I'd like to pro trim, I think it would I don't, I think this is probably the first time that the base trim of something I really think is the best deal the best option unless for some reason you want to go with a fancy you know, there's there's in between, there's a lot but I think the pro trim makes a lot of sense. As a personal vehicle. Yeah. Visitation

Sam Abuelsamid  1:30:52  
buying it, especially if you get it with the with the extended range battery. You know, for for commercial users, you know, the 230 mile range is probably going to be fine for a lot. Like for a landscaper, things like that. But for consumers, you probably would want to order it with the bigger battery. But that's it, you know, I mean the rest. If you've, if you've ever been in a bass, like an XL trim f150. In the past, this is a much higher grade trim grid than what those were it's not just a stripped down hard plastic, everything work truck, it

Nicole Wakelin  1:31:26  
still feels nice. Like it's the base trim of the lightning. But think of it more like a mid trim of a typical truck. It's nicer. Don't think of it like the base trim of any other truck that you've been in, because they all have a base trim. That's just terrific. This isn't like a typical base trim, but think of it more like a mid range trim. But it happens to be the base for the lightning

Roberto Baldwin  1:31:46  
and you get actual physical buttons. For control so

Nicole Wakelin  1:31:51  
yep, that's a bonus.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:31:53  
Okay, let's see, we already answered the question about the actual cost for the for the home power backup. Yeah. Okay, so we got a couple other questions as well. See from Grant, he asks, maybe more more of a question for the next time you interview a Toyota rep, but how did they think it was acceptable for the Bz 4x? With?

Nicole Wakelin  1:32:16  
Actually it says BZ for z? Did you do that type of?

Sam Abuelsamid  1:32:19  
No, I was just a straight copy and paste.

Nicole Wakelin  1:32:21  
Source Name. No one gets it right. I'm not picking on you, Grant, I can't either.

Roberto Baldwin  1:32:25  
I got it wrong. In a video, it was supposed to be a joke that I got it wrong. And then I was supposed to have the correct name. And I couldn't figure out the correct name. So the video was just me saying things and they had to put like a little like, like a little bug that said, it's

Nicole Wakelin  1:32:37  
Bobby's confused.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:32:38  
So how did they think it was acceptable to deliver the BZ for z? With DC fast charging speeds as slow as they are? At least from what we've seen, from early reviews and otherwise good vehicle with a major rather major flaw?

Nicole Wakelin  1:32:51  
I don't think anybody knows. And I don't think I heard as a real answer, because that was never questions asked at the launch. And it was kind of like, it's fine. It's fine. Next question. Like it really wasn't?

Sam Abuelsamid  1:33:04  
Yeah, it's basically you know, most most of the Chargers most of the DC chargers that are out there are only 150 kilowatts or 120 kilowatts anyway or less. So, you know, you can you can use all that. But still, you know, especially when you look at, you know what you're getting from Volkswagen or Ford, or Hyundai Kia 230 kilowatts, you know, VW and Ford, you know, 150. It's, it's just not a, you know, it's not,

Nicole Wakelin  1:33:36  
it's an odd decision.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:33:40  
All right. And then the last question from Edgar Diaz. been listening to this podcast for a few months now, and I'm enjoying it. I really appreciate how you have at least one lady on there. So it's not to be overly male in your perspective. Cool, quick question, and would appreciate your thoughts. My wife and I are thinking of getting an electric car. But it seems that all the new electric cars are tracked by the manufacturer or others. Do you think this is an issue? Or is there a way to turn this off? This may make a difference in our purchasing decision.

Nicole Wakelin  1:34:14  
Oh, anchor, I think you're being tracked everywhere. Anyway, I think the car is the least of your worries between your phone and everything else.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:34:22  
Yeah. I mean, if you're taking your phone with you, you're also being tracked you're still being

Roberto Baldwin  1:34:25  
Yeah, I think yeah, it's Well, I think here's the here's the here's the issue, if you're using Google Maps, you're being tracked, and you're being tracked for ad dollars. If you're using Apple Maps, you're less likely to be tracked, but you're still being tracked. And that's like every car to be honest and not just yeah, he's it's like every car has something but a lot of it is anonymized because no one wants to get into a big trouble for that, right. You know, if you're using OnStar OnStar is tracking you but you're saying hey, I want you to track me in case you know, something breaks down and I didn't want to help me. So I mean, I hate saying yeah, Everything's tracking you. But everything is kind of because it's such an easy like, well, nothing matters because everything's tracking you, which is, you know, really not fair because you shouldn't be tracked for absolutely everything we do. You can't use. Like, you can't use Google Maps without signing in, you can use Apple Maps without signing in. So you can use all these systems without actually creating accounts. And so if you don't have an account that you're less likely to be tracked or kind of tracking, you know, they don't know who you are, personally, as for your vehicle being tracked. Again, it's it's it's more, I mean, your biggest concern would probably be OnStar. And that you have to opt in for that, really, for a car, and everyone has some sort of tracking or, you know, our Hyundai has something where we can set it up, or we know what we know where it's at. But again, they're the automakers after, especially after the GM hack, they're all still a little gun shy. They don't want to be whenever you ask him about this, right? Well, people have to opt in, you know, they're always like, you have to opt in. And it's anonymized. So yes, you're being tracked. They don't know what you though, they don't know, like, Hey, I know where this car is. I know, it's Edgar Diaz, they just know, I know, some data about an anonymous vehicle. It's

Nicole Wakelin  1:36:11  
gonna sound weird, but it's almost like sort of, as far as the personal intrusion into what you're doing with your day. It's sort of innocuous, because it's not really looking and saying, This is what Edgar does every day. It's just, there's a car and many of them go here. And this, you know, it's not, it doesn't generally record that kind of personal like, this is your exact vehicle. And this is where you personally drive is just like, we have vehicles that drive here,

Roberto Baldwin  1:36:36  
who's whereas Google, if you use Google Maps, that's exactly what it is.

Nicole Wakelin  1:36:41  
So it's not the car. It's not the OEM, it's not the car and the OEM that are getting your data that I'd be more nervous. But it's more just like, do you use that other stuff on your phone? Or in your car? Do you use that other stuff than they got? Yeah,

Roberto Baldwin  1:36:52  
I talked to Pollstar and Google about Android Auto. And they said under automotive, because that is Google. Yeah. And they said, Yeah, you can use it without an account, if you want. If you're concerned about privacy, you don't have to use your Google account to use, you know, Android, automotive and our vehicles. So there's, you know, if you're thinking about a Volvo, or, or a pole star, or anything that's using Android automotive,

Sam Abuelsamid  1:37:13  
and the same is true for other manufacturers that are bringing Android automotive based systems like GM, on the new Sierra, and the Hummer, and all their new vehicles coming out of Android automotive, you can use them all without logging in. So you can, you can, you can still, you know, you'll still have Google Maps, it'll know where a car a vehicle is. But not, it won't, it won't be able to tie it. Well. If you have your phone with you, then they can probably Google can probably D anonymize it and tie it back to you. Because, you know, they they know, you know, they know where the location of your phone, certainly your self, your cellular carrier knows the location of your phone at all times. But the manufacturers do also collect some, well, first of all, virtually all new cars have conductivity built in. And, you know, for manufacturers, it's helpful. Because, first of all, it's how they're, they're going to be able to do OTA updates. So if you don't ever want OTA updates on your new car, then you can certainly turn off the conductivity. But, you know, they can also they can get telemetry data, diagnostic data from your car. So, you know, you mentioned Nicole, that, you know, they know the type of car actually, they they know, the type of car you're driving, they don't necessarily know, it's you, right? Or they don't really care that it's you. They don't care. Yeah, but what they're looking for is patterns in how people use the vehicle. Because that's something that they use for debugging problems. But also, it's a it's an input that they use in their product development process. For the next generation, they want to know, you know, how many miles a day to people driving these things where, you know, where do they charge, you know, do they charge at home? Do they charge at public chargers? What kind of chargers are they using? Are they using AC? Are they using DC fast chargers? You know, so they're, they're, they're trying to understand, you know, how, how the charging experience another thing, and this is something I talked to Darren about, you know, is the the charging experience. You know, one of the things that Ford does, for example, now is every time you plug in your car, they send back some data to home base, you know, okay, we we had the drive the owner plugged in his car, did it initiate a charging session correctly? How fast did it charge? How long did it take to start the charging session? If it didn't initiate a fast charging session correctly? You know, what you know, and then to collect a bunch of other data to try and understand what went wrong. And you know, this is part of, you know, when the maki came out last year, there were a lot of complaints from people using especially Electrify America stations, but also some other public charging stations, about the Chargers not starting the charging correctly. And they. So Ford put in this telemetry data to understand what was going on. So that, you know, if there's a problem with the vehicle, they can fix that. And if it's a problem with the chargers, they can let the charging network operators know and get it fixed. So, you know, yeah, I mean, they're certainly very valid privacy concerns. But there's also some very good reasons why it's beneficial, not only to you now but to the manufacturer, and to future Evie owners, to share that data to help fix those problems to diagnose those problems and, and make the experience better in the future. If you don't, if you decide you don't want to share any data, you have the option, when you get the car, of turning off the conductivity, you don't have to, you know, everybody now gives you usually, you know, anywhere from one to five years of free basic connectivity, so that they can do things like OTA updates and telemetry collection. But if you don't want it, you don't have to agree to the Terms of Service, when you first get in the car, you can have that turned off. So there is a way to turn it off. And that'll turn off the data modem, but before warned that you will never get any OTA updates. If you do that.

Roberto Baldwin  1:41:43  
Whatever, you're cool, that's cool. I mean, that's fine. It's, it's, and it's also the attack surface. I mean, people for the for the most part you're the average person really shouldn't be concerned too much about I mean, you should be concerned about tracking, especially if it's not anonymized. But no one's going to go after regular person, they're usually going after politicians, CEOs, people who are doing human rights abuses, people who were wandering by nation state, stuff like that is where it really gets really tricky and weird, the average person is more likely to get swept up in some sort of major leak. That's where that's where all the stuff happens is when it's not a chance to you it's not between you or your device and a person, it's between that person and the server where all that information

Sam Abuelsamid  1:42:27  
is. So it's just gonna say it's gonna be somewhere in the cloud, where that's more likely to happen.

Roberto Baldwin  1:42:32  
But yeah, you can turn everything off to and then you know, I drive I have a Subaru BRC, it has like nothing.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:42:38  
Yeah, my Miata has nothing. And I drive it around all the time. But the Miata doesn't even have an OBD two port. So. All right. So that's all the questions for this week. Stay tuned. Right now for the interview I did with Darren Palmer at the drive. We talked for a little more than half an hour. And Darren had some really good stuff in there, I asked him whether there will be a lightning Raptor. So stay tuned for the for his response to that one. And we will talk to you next week. And oh, and you know, if you were if you were a Patreon supporter, you would have actually had the Darren Palmer interview last week, Patreon feed last week. So if you want to get early access to interviews, I usually put those in the Patreon feed right away. And then we put them in the regular show later on. So thanks, everybody. Thanks, guys by Darren, the f150 Lightning first day first time today driving us it's been almost a year since I had my first exposure to it out of the Romeo Proving Grounds. I was really impressed with it back then. But give me the what was the overall guiding philosophy in creating this vehicle because you've Ford has taken a very different approach with this than your chief competitor jam has done with their upcoming Silverado. Evie. What What was the guiding principle with this vehicle?

darren palmer  1:44:14  
So the first thing we did, within two weeks of starting a project? We said to ourselves, when actually do we know who wants an electric truck and why? And we asked ourselves that question do we know? And when we, as we were working then into medicine, everything was done as a team. We said actually, we don't really know. No one's done this before. Let's not assume or use some out of date surveys where the context name may not rescan speak to people. So within two weeks, we went out and I said let's go to the toughest place we can think of that's currently highly relevant, which was Texas. And and we also said let's go to California because we're likely to Find the front edge day of uptake as well. So let's go to the two places. And we went there with, we made couple of models, we made specification sheets. In fact, we actually made it brochure models of the vehicle, not no models of some of the features like market Frank. And specifications is equal, like it would be a catalogue you would get, and we hadn't designed the thing yet. So we knew roughly what we could do. And we were testing what what is important for people. So we took that out. And then we really took people for a human centered design style experience, because you don't just ask somebody, Hey, do you want, but then we explored other features, because we'd already known from our prior research for the electrics, that it's the other elements that bring in. So when an iPhone launched, it was capacitive screen technology that made a new experience. But it was when you put that together with what the product was that made it game changing. So we said that could be the same. So what can you do? And so it can have a big Frank, it can do by direct your power. And we were exploring those elements. And again, don't take here's a design, what do you think you start with? What do people do? And what are their problems, you know, issues, and you look for where they're using workarounds. This is what human centered design does. So we actually made models of a Franken, we asked them, What would you do with this. And that's when we saw some of the magic. So we saw people coming up with what they would do with these francs as long as it had power and could carry the weight. And then we saw what they would do with bidirectional. So we saw, they were getting very excited about this. And there was the work side, which you would think would be one of the top things being a truck. And then there was the social side, it was much stronger on the social what they're going to do with it at home, this front gating, because we could see it was going to be a thing of putting their precious things in there. The guy putting his golf clubs in somebody else putting their, you know, some kind of precious things they have. Guy was a woodworking but very ornate. And he would put precious tools in there and things. And so it was someone's own space with power that was theirs locked away and safe. And we saw that early on. So that plus the bidirectional, we could see there was something special there. And they became things that the truck does that no other product does. And in the end, we've done that with Mackey as well. The ones that are that you can only do now with these products. They're the strongest things. Now when I asked customers, every time I meet customers, I made 175 in an afternoon in Palo Alto, we arranged it was going to be for an hour. Well, four and a half hours later, we're still there somewhere. And then they were all talking about bi directional power, pro power and board. And the mega power, Frank,

Sam Abuelsamid  1:48:04  
all of them. Was this more recently this media off. Yeah, it

darren palmer  1:48:07  
was maybe three months ago. And I said, Let's meet some customers while we're there. And we arranged that. And somebody said, you know, hey, let's just go on social media and ask for the customers. So I said hold on Darren, and they look. So there's 10,000 People in the 10 mile radius, and we can't put out so you could have a stampede. So we use the dealers to contact some of the customers.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:48:29  
And these are customers that had pre order

darren palmer  1:48:33  
relationships. So they went out for like one hour anyway, Oh, stop, because they were already were 200 customers in an hour. We had stopped. So we stopped because we don't want too many people in one place in COVID, and so on. And then we hosted them outdoors. We brought we were there for other reasons. And we brought the proceeds. Let's just do it. One hour, quick meeting we said four hours later, the team were rushing around getting people drinks and things and getting that into there because they just wouldn't go home. And they were chatting and the funniest thing I just remembered from the whole thing we were out there much longer than expected. I got a bit sunburned so to Jason. And just as they were loading the truck, the only time they left is when we loaded the truck to take it away. And as one of them loaded. I heard one of the people say look at it. It's beautiful, isn't it? Wow, that's really cool. And, and they arrived. They weren't. They weren't I don't know what I expected people to be. They weren't exactly right. Exactly. They were all people from all walks of life. And, you know, they all had different uses for the truck and if it was using the new things we put into it. And that's how I realized I saw that this thing's going to have wide appeal, you know from and that whole price range which are all F or 50s have from low 30s up to 90s. It has appeal across the board. So that's very exciting to to see with customers.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:49:56  
I'm curious, do you know if if any of those People were people who had also previously reserved something like the cybertruck.

darren palmer  1:50:06  
Yeah, so I would say half to a third arrived in a Tesla. Okay. And that was Palo Alto. So it's a particular area,

Sam Abuelsamid  1:50:20  
right? Sure. Yeah. And Tesla's are like Toyota Camrys.

darren palmer  1:50:23  
Yeah. So they, and, and they were talking about, you know, they were like, what I asked, What are you gonna use it for, and a lot of them were, I knew I want a truck to use a truck. And I would like to go electric, right, and I just didn't have an option before. So I need a truck, I need to do stuff. And they had other cars like Tesla, or others, and they use them, and that's great. But they needed a truck to do stuff. And you asked them, like, what are like, you know, we always do do things right around the house, picking stuff up, you know, pulling stuff whenever I need to, you know, and that versatility is what these trucks are all about, you know, I can do anything I want, they may need to do it. So a lot of them were they wanted to truck some that had reserved others, because they just wanted an electric truck, which one's gonna come first because they really warm, they are all in all into electric and they want to get out of gas costs a lot, some of them own f150 Because it's the best selling truck. So but not not as many as you think. The electric was a gateway into a new product type for them. So lots of that, and how they're gonna use it and lots of use of Frank, a lot of use of bidirectional, especially they're combined with solar. A lot of you should prepare on board to power things or go camping or whatever, and the bed for whatever they need to do with it and the payload. So they want to just do whatever they need and being able to tell

Sam Abuelsamid  1:51:52  
timings an interesting use case with EVs, because obviously, they have tons of torque. So the ability to tell is not an issue, I think for at least for an electric truck and use as long as the, the vehicle structures accommodates it. But one of the challenges with towing with an Eevee is the loss of range. And, you know, I know in the past like when, when Tesla first introduced the Model X, Dan Edmonds, who was at Edmonds at the time, he did a bunch of tests, towing a trailer with a Model X. And there have been other other Evie trailer towing tests, generally, you know, it's like 40 to 50% reduction in range. How, how have you addressed that problem of maximum maximizing, not just the ability to tell but how far you can tell and, and being able to charge when you've got a trailer hooked up? And things like that?

darren palmer  1:52:51  
Yeah. So a lot of f150 reservationists, all f150 drivers, they want the ability to tow that mean, they want the ability to do whatever they want, whenever they want. That's the versatility. So

Sam Abuelsamid  1:53:05  
living in Michigan, you go up by 75, or us 23. On any weekend, year round. You got you see trucks towing snowmobiles, and jet skis and boats. Yep.

darren palmer  1:53:16  
You asked pretty much anywhere from 50 intend tender? And do you need to tow the answer's yes. How often do you get varying answers, but they want to be able to do it. So we said, we want to make sure that everybody who most will be telling for the first time on electric. What I mean is it will be the first electric vehicle they've towed with. We need to make sure that covered. What cannot happen is that they set up set off, they get halfway to the charger and it says you're not going to make it reroute. This is not what we want to happen. So we spent a lot of time to develop solutions that mean that one happened. So our goal was a team. I said I want that when you hook your new trainer. And before you leave on the journey, I want the accuracy to be and better than 10% and your longtime Evie user you know most EVs are not within Timpson and I want it to be within 10% with a trainer on it. And I asked them I need solutions that do that. So this truck has a solution where you hook the trailer to the truck by the way it helps you set the tongue weight using its weighing scale. Then it's the truck says hey, I recommend you validate this trailer. What's validate drive 10 miles so you drive off you drive 10 miles and it measures the trailer. Can you believe that? And then adjusts its knowledge about that trailer?

Sam Abuelsamid  1:54:46  
That's measuring things like how much how much power is it take them to go this speed

darren palmer  1:54:51  
was a drag. Every trade is different some you've got different breaks that dragging different so it measures the trailer and then stores that trailer under a certain line and then knows about the train at. So if you could have got a brand new trader, it says hook and it tells you please validate his trainers a tick box when you do it and go tick validating now that's a good one. So now when you say I want to go on the journey 600 miles, it uses that trailer, it knows it's connected. And it uses that trailer. And so it will now adjust the range depending on what it is, you know, every trade is different. This is the trouble, they have different drag weight high. When they're not above the height of the cabin, that's good. It's better. It's aerodynamics that gets you with trailers, not the weight, because we'll use the weight of the trailer in the overrun to charge the vehicle. So in the trailers are pretty good. Because you pull this extra weight when you go downhill, they're going to push the truck and it uses that region. But high speed is aerodynamics that get you. So we wanted to make sure you're covering people so they know what they get. So the vehicle will adapt and it will change the available rank. When you enter in where you want to go. It will take that into account you'll get you safely to the charge stations. So you know by now last time we spoke was however many charge stations now it was it charged stations this week. 72,000. Yeah. So if that so we're now 70,000. Yeah, it's going up like crazy now because there's a lot of investment from other spirit parties. And as you know, we chose to do that. So. So it's now 70,000. So it's going to route you between them. The truck, you may notice now has new categories. So it actually has a 50 kilowatt can be has AC web use an ATM journey. It has 50 kilowatt, 100 and over 100. Now,

Sam Abuelsamid  1:56:51  
when you're when you're looking for chargers, so you can tab you can filter I only want

darren palmer  1:56:56  
150, right? You only want and you can press that now the battery hasn't got that on yet. You can imagine we might roll that out. Right. So but yeah, so yes. So so you'll see the little faster and faster, charging straight, so you can choose the best. Now if you've selected journey, it's going to choose the best for you anyway. Right. And depending on your charging, so yes, it will reduce charging it some amount, right. I mean, it depends on your trailer, but you know, a lowest trailer with motorbikes on it's gonna be quite reasonable. It can be 30% more, right. But a big one, you know, big ones gonna take can take you 40 or 50%. Exactly the same as gaps, of course.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:57:34  
So something like the typical snowmobile trailer we see in Michigan, all winter long. Yeah, that's relatively low. It's got a sloped front. Well, how much? How much? Do you think that was? Generally? 2530?

darren palmer  1:57:48  
Yeah, I'm not gonna I don't want to give you a number. Because I know that each one's got different breakdowns and all that. And that's why it measures because otherwise, you say, number go, people wonder why they don't get it. It's because it got electrical hydraulic brakes. And although some people might not have optimized the trailers yet for electric right, over time, they can do that. So but it will be quite a reasonable drop for these. And then it's up to a lot, you know, if it's a really heavy thing with a big square box, and you drive at 75, it's going to drop likely gets exactly, sure. But I guess I know, you just put it in. So that the truck will tell you. And that's what's super important, because people will have no experience yet. Very few people, and it's got you covered. So it's gonna get you between stations. So but you know, there is an effect, but you can do what you want. And you said earlier, they're quite good at towing. I mean, they're exceptionally good. So I would do 60 miles an hour and accelerate with a 9000 pound trailer and gas and it slowly gains. You do that in an F 150. Lightning strikes think? Yes, issues.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:58:53  
780 foot pounds of torque

darren palmer  1:58:55  
is effortless, right? But it uses the power same as gas does. So you know. That's a fact of life with electric. And and the other part people you mentioned, people want drive thru charging, so they can charge you with a trailer. Well, the big electric charging companies know this. But there's been no one to use them yet. Right? Well, now all of a sudden, there's gonna be 150,000 plus of these things a year coming through, they're in business, they know where the money's gonna come from, right? And they know you're gonna use the power. So they start to put them in and they're already talking about it. They know, people want charging stations with nice facilities. Well, they're safe and drive through at least some drive thru. So they know that they're going to put in what people want, because then they get more money generate more money, right? So we know that we're talking to them about it. We're actually also mapping the country and saying to ourselves, if you assume 200 Day miles of driving or something, where are the black spots in the car? trigger. And then we, when we find them, we've seen that already. We talked to the company, so you putting something there who's putting something there? And where we were gonna find someone's not? And you ask them, it's probably economics. We're gonna get into why? How can we support putting something there? Because if we can map the country with no more than 230 miles between any roughly between any charter you can go anywhere. Okay, so that's we're working on that as well masked overs team is doing that and cross referencing with the charter companies, because if they're already putting something in there, then we're fine, right? But there's bound to be some knock. And one way or another we can support to get that done. Maybe we trapped together with somebody else, or another car company doesn't matter, because we all want this. So we're getting into that now. Now that we're getting through launch. We're getting into that as well.

Sam Abuelsamid  2:00:49  
Yeah. Last fall at the maki GT drive. We talked at that time, and you told me about the charge angels program? Yes. Which couple of weeks ago, I was at my local EAA station down the road from my house. And that I pulled in there was one of the frontrunners, which area in Ypsilanti. Oh, wow. That's cool. And so they were there and I chatted with the with them. So they were going through testing, each one of the six chargers there was one of which was not non functional at the time, it was excellent and had been non functional for several days, because I'd been there a couple of days before that. And they were aware of that. And we're logging that. How's that program going? Does it feel like it's having any impact on your charging network providers?

darren palmer  2:01:39  
So it was a fascinating one, because we got them ready. We got them kitted out, we sent them out. But started doing it. We got data immediately. Of course, if it's network related, they can immediately connect to the network. Do you know? Are you fixing it? Because they're going to fix it ultimately. So they know in the fixing? That's good news. But we found a low delay, we don't see any problem. And our guys say, oh, we need better network analytics to fix this. And we're like, we haven't got the data. We want to fix it.

Sam Abuelsamid  2:02:10  
So you turn off the charging network that people were charging

darren palmer  2:02:13  
doesn't work. Yeah. Right. Now we've got data analytics getting back to the office, right? What's going on? Find out we don't have enough data to be to know what's going on. You use a lot of the protocols are not clear enough? And is it the car? Or is it the charger and you could you could spend a long time trying to work it out. So they actually say, well, we got the wrong equipment. We need different equipment, which has network analytics on it. So this is completely different equipment really expensive, really rare. And we had to we had to order oil. And of course, COVID took us a while to get it. And then we upgrade your account. So they've really unique, and they can now look at all the signals going backwards or forwards. Now when we get a data what's going on, we can analyze it and find out where and if we have a discussion with a provider, they're pretty helpful. And they got its assets here. It's like, no, that's exactly what's happening here. And we've had times where they say, that's technically the car. And we say, well, who can move fastest? Can you tweak or weaken to who can do it quickest? And who and we help each other? Whoever can tweak crickets does it if we know it's not going to fix any other cars. So it's more about learning because the problems are never unique. It's more about learning, Hey, there's this problem out there? Can we detect it? And we've seen now we know it's there? Can you pull the cars and find out look, it's happening and lots of places? What's the fix and you get the fix and then you roll it out to either the network or the car so they don't have to go every charger in the country to find it. They just keep every unique issue they find what is it why and then you fix it and it will fix it for the whole network. So I've seen a huge improvement in did not charge that can't get a charge that's gone right down it's really small now. I still have section of it charged but wasn't as clean as we want. It wasn't click

Sam Abuelsamid  2:04:03  
walk slow or take a couple of tries. Yeah.

darren palmer  2:04:07  
And then I find a whole load of was smooth. But an area got generated in his appearing in my list is troublesome. Turns out it was an error after they unplugged. So it didn't actually affect their charge. That was in our data. Tim That's not okay. So different data's No, it's actually not that inconvenient, because they charge perfectly. So we're still figuring that out. But and that's going down to uh, now we set targets for next year to really get really reliable. And, and we've had some networks with faulty systems on them. And you know, and if they're working well with us, great, but some of them, we found some more bigger issues and we said, hey, can you even get this applicators fixed in two in like two days or taking out the network? And they come in like, well, we can't do it. They are not over the air updatable. We said, well, we're taking you out of the network. which will get free charge around the network so that people don't get sent. And then it's amazing how fast they start coming back.

Sam Abuelsamid  2:05:07  
Given that this is an issue that is going to impact the entire industry, have there been any conversations, you know, doing maybe doing some sort of consortium of all the automakers to work together? To? It certainly would be easier to scale. He did that.

darren palmer  2:05:27  
Yeah, I mean, your thing is, you're still at the early stage where all the new cars are coming out, right. And so you're gonna then mix up all sorts of other issues with the cars with the network. So if we could do more of that, I think, maybe a bit later, we can do it. But at the moment, you're still in kind of gross errors. There's some networks that are a bit old fashioned. They were there before, and they're not powerful enough in those. And then there's, you know, we only launched a car last year. And we had to few we were the first plug in charge as well had worked pretty good, but it was some issue. So you know, we should do that. Because at the moment, we're still launching cars like crazy. And everybody is. So you'll see other manufacturers launch their cars into the networks and also have problems right. And so yeah, I think the space for that we need to do more of that at the moment. We're, we're just getting on with it. And we do this the charge annual program was I think the first of its kind and pretty unique to because we just should be able to detect it from a distance and just know and then fix it, but he can't, because if the breed is not working, and it's stuck, it's just should, but it isn't telling you that you're in the early days of this charging hardware, the hardware is going to upgrade. And I know they're trying to upgrade the hardware, but they're caught up with COVID COVID chip as well, and they can't get the new charges to put them in some makes it better than others. Now,

Sam Abuelsamid  2:06:49  
back to the lightning. Before we finish up. You've taken quite a different approach with the design of the lightning from what GM is doing with the Silverado Edie, you know, they there's is purpose built, as they say. The lightning is a lot. Everything down below is purpose built for an electric truck. But the top part is, is obviously a lot of it is carryover, which has some significant benefits because you can leverage your economies of scale. What What would you say to people that look at the lightens? It's only 300 Miles Silverado is going to have 400 promise and 400 miles. Yeah. And there's different there's different compromises they're talking about, you know, what? Why wait for did the lightning? They did as opposed to taking an approach?

darren palmer  2:07:48  
Yeah. I started answering it and I didn't answer it fully, actually free, right. So so we went to the customers first and worked out what they wanted. And what they wanted. They wanted electric truck that can meet their needs of what they do. They want to bidirectional charging and power and they want to make a powerful, they wanted the bed exactly like today. Do not touch that bit. Because every accessory we've got matches it. They also wanted payload of the truck today. And 10,000 pound plus towing. This is the list of everything they want it also new tech and the latest technology and hands free and big screens and connection with all their phones and in vehicle office and lighting all around and automatic towing and automatic parking all those things. The truck has all of those things. It has a payload now of 2225 I think Greg some 22 235 payload is a truck trucks need to carry stuff 10,000 pounds.

Sam Abuelsamid  2:08:56  
I know what it turns out, it's not 1000 pounds less than that, yeah,

darren palmer  2:08:59  
10,000 pounds having a spare wheel very, very important. The truck driver and the frunk. So I would put it to you the entire bottom of the car that's Electric is brand new, completely brand new. The whole front trunk is brand new, the carryover pieces B pillar back and they wanted the the beds to be exactly the same so it can match. And then because of that scale, we can deliver that 39 974 And we can deliver it right now. So that's the approach we took because it delivers everything they want right now. And we've delivered 320 miles now. And we're going to continuously develop an over the air as well for the vehicle so so to do what the peak what people needed, and to deliver it right now and at the price I wanted. We're I think we're really delighted with everything we've we've delivered. So that's why we took that approach. The you know the amount of interest we've had 200,000 wasn't reservations and that's before anybody touched one. It seems to have struck a chord with America. And it also means a lot of doubters to electric can see their way into it as well. I think what's going to happen, we'll put them in every data, the data will call people who bought many trucks from them and say, try it, some of them will say, hey, I'm interested. And they'll say, just come train, and they'll come down, it won't be scary. They'll try it out. And they'll see some of the benefits and and then, you know, some of the things they see as faults or problems of electrics, they'll start seeing as, you know, actually, I can live with this, right, because the truth about having an electric if you have a charger at home, every day is a full tank. And the amount of times you're doing 700 miles in one go is less than daily life. And if you need to, we got the biggest network in America and you stop for usually 20 minutes, every three hours Charles to thing, get coffee, because you just plug and walk, get coffee and get back in, it's gonna work for a lot of people's lives. further generations later, we'll do more things. But this vehicle is right for right now. And is first to market by a very long time for most people. Now, don't forget, we're launching right at the beginning with the whole range from 39 Not not just top with this, importantly, that

Sam Abuelsamid  2:11:23  
you're not just launching a platinum 90,000.

darren palmer  2:11:27  
And we're not just retail, it's fleet as well. So these things are going to be all over the country in fleets, and majorly. And as soon as people start using them in fleets, they're going to be addicted. I can tell you that straightaway. Because the savings are going to be amazing.

Sam Abuelsamid  2:11:40  
Oh, yeah, I'm sure you know, for for a lot of fleet users that, you know, their use case is predominantly local, they're not driving, they're not doing transcontinental trips every day, or every week. This is an ideal vehicle for them, especially when you compare the price against the gas versus in

darren palmer  2:11:57  
science. And so Ted Canis is running Ford Pro for us. He was an original of Edison, you know, and he's doing everything they need to support their business, because you've got business and you need 20 trucks, you need to know the charging infrastructure and have it sorted out. So he they acquired electrify with Murphy to have the solution. So people come to us and say we can give you a fleet of 20 trucks, look at the price. And by the way, we can also set up your warehouse to charge these things. And they pointed out they talk today, if you get it right, you'll see savings and like half running costs. But if you get it wrong, that can be more than gas. And so it's really important that you're set up properly. And that's what Ford Pro does. So Ted's just started going. He just started selling that tray transit. And we keep finding use cases we never even thought about, and the customers are finding them. So one of them, which just went crazy, is the wine industry. I guess it's obvious when you look back, but the wine industry we did, we joined with Francis Cutler, in his green yard. And we started showing him what we could do. And we set him up with a full fleet with electric truck and, and transit. And he just like it just loved it. I immediately pulled more. And then every all the other wine producers, right, what are you doing? And he showed them? And I want some of that. And so we just I can't remember how many wine producers there are in America? Is it 30,000 or 3000? It's

Sam Abuelsamid  2:13:27  
probably closer to 30. Yeah.

darren palmer  2:13:29  
So law. And they're all asking one each other now and say well, why don't we have that? Right? And he used to have transit vans, with diesel underground with a wind. That's because it's rather a vehicle if you got Yeah, and diesel you can put underground with stage four, but you don't want it. And now we've got rid of them on electric. And it's obvious, isn't it? It's not they're not even more expensive. So they've gone crazy. So that's selling like hotcakes. And we're just getting going and we know we're just gonna go right.

Sam Abuelsamid  2:13:58  
Well, and he transits available in a bunch of different configurations in a regular body because kind of ways customers have to how are we going to see different variants of the lightning is No, not at the moment. I mean,

darren palmer  2:14:09  
we some people might prefer a single camera or something. Yeah, they might. Yeah. But this is what's available now. And the price is fantastic. Some reason they want single cabins because it's cheaper, but it's so cheap. Now, we can do that. Because

Sam Abuelsamid  2:14:24  
we have learned configured about a single motor rear wheel drive, we

darren palmer  2:14:27  
considered that and that's something we can do. But we decided, as we launched, we want a simple message. So how does it compare to get more powerful? How's it offered yet? The same or better? And how is it taught how it howling no problem in any condition. If you have a single motor, some of those things are a bit less. We didn't want the message getting lessened. We've our some of them are not as good as gas and when it's just cuts keep it simple. We didn't expect 200,000 conversion rate As you might say, some microphones we will drive and some might prefer one single cup. Yes, we still got too much of that

Sam Abuelsamid  2:15:07  
too. Well, I heard I heard that when you first broke ground on our EVC that the initial plan was for 25,000 a year. Yeah, now 150? Yeah,

darren palmer  2:15:19  
it went up a lot. Yeah. And that's we, you know, we, we knew it would grow over time. That was the plan. But he didn't realize how short No, I'm sure. We could sell 200,000 this year. Yeah, no one's even the top in the industry didn't think that so. And, you know, it might if the product wasn't good enough, we might not have been here. So it seems to have captured people's attention and how free half to three quarters were mentioned bidirectional power when you call them. And least half or more, we'll mention mega power as the reason they're looking

Sam Abuelsamid  2:15:55  
yet enough source of Samsung, SK going to be able to get you in a fashion,

darren palmer  2:16:00  
that was a big deal, right to get the batteries and our team have achieved that because of the relationship that it's going, you know, the batteries will be the new chip shortage right there. So it's really important to have vertical scale, vertical integration and partnerships to get the batteries. Also, the battery providers are going to know they're in short supply, who they get about those, they know how to get charts. And we use the same batteries, you know, between transit and Mackie so that you can mix between what if one's not successful, the other one to get out over three times. But nevermind. And then you know, with the truck here and other things they're going to share. So you can if one wasn't successful, you can share to the others. But say we're not in that situation at the moment. But one day might be right once we put a lot of capacity in we can move between different vehicles if needed.

Sam Abuelsamid  2:16:52  
So once the rapid lightning gonna launch?

darren palmer  2:16:55  
Well, the funny thing is that the lightning's quicker than any retro, so yeah, and, you know, we're not talking about future products, as you know, but you know, we're, we're looking at what next when you know, one at a time, we can't really put a lot of concentration into this one getting an errand time to it, we got we got the Okay, Tobias we gotta go. That's on time, completely on time for a brand new truck. So we're really pleased about that. But a lot of work into that. And we don't mean launching it a couple of 100 trucks, when we have 2800, parked ready to go, we didn't even have the okay to sell. So that's how we launch we're getting ready to do final testing and you go like, that's what's gonna happen now. So they'll really start flooding. And we've taken the orders in batches to make sure we give people dates, and we can deliver to their dates. We had so much demand on Bronco that we disappointed a few people on delivery, because some of the options like Sasquatch manual, we were like much more than we ever expected them to be. So we learned our lesson and used it for this to make sure we only offer people vehicles that they can have and give them dates. So I'll open up again and work toward next round.

Sam Abuelsamid  2:18:10  
Last question. Were there any important lessons from maki that you apply?

darren palmer  2:18:14  
Absolutely loads. Absolutely. Now, Jeff. So the most important of all, which I see obvious, but most important was don't assume a damn thing. And go and speak to customers real early. Because wherever you think they're gonna say, it's not what they say. That was the earliest bet the best one we had from anything, we're using it for every single product. So the other thing I used was developing in the Edison team, to be free to be fast and free and with a cross functional group, and then go and shop it around our expert teams. So I mentioned earlier we had an excellent track proposal with no spare wheel. And we said hey, probably be okay we no spare you can use a you know, you can use a a kit and maybe they use more around town and the big mistake. We shot that round truck teams and like no way no how never. And they give us the stories and all the examples and it's no good when you're off road asking for a ride. It's no good. Just don't do it. So we had to redesign again to get spare wheel and they helped us by the way so we shopped it around the groups and they showed us when we did Mustang Mackay was shocked it to the regular wrestling team. And they like they told us things we would have forgotten or lost and said hey, you have that it made me better. So we did the same again. And we're going to do it on every trip. So I'm going to transit and now our next car so shopping it around our own teams who have experienced once we have the basics. Really powerful.

Sam Abuelsamid  2:19:49  
Thank you very much. Thank you

Nicole Wakelin  2:19:50  
have a fresca How old are you? Okay, got it. The slurp was awesome. It was like that was like you were on a soda Commercial

Sam Abuelsamid  2:20:03  
got that recorded

Roberto Baldwin  2:20:05  
established in 1966