Sam Abuelsamid  0:00  
Coming up on episode 415, of wheel bearings got the Hyundai IONIQ nine, the Acura Adx, the Subaru saltera, the jeep 2026, Jeep Cherokee Mavericks are getting more expensive and cheaper. Nissan prices out the new leaf charge points, Omni port conversion kits are now available. Infiniti is bringing back the Q 50. Tensor wants to sell AVS to customers, all that and more coming up next.

Sam Abuelsamid  0:33  
And this is episode 415, of wheel bearings. I am Sam Abuelsamid from telemetry,

Roberto Baldwin  0:40  
and I am Roberto Baldwin from SAE International, and

Sam Abuelsamid  0:44  
Nicole is traveling somewhere today. Can't remember exactly where, but the sky. Well, she may or may not be in the sky right at the moment as we're recording, I'm not sure where. I mean, to be fair, we're all in the sky. That's true, yeah, but just in, you know, various different levels of the sky. Yeah, it's all it's all sky. Anything above the ground is technically sky. Everything's sky, yeah, but, but she will be joining us briefly joining us later in a segment that she and I recorded earlier this week to talk about the 2026 Subaru saltera. But before we get to that, Robbie, did you drive anything this week?

Roberto Baldwin  1:25  
I didn't have anything at home, but I did go somewhere and drive something. Oh, what did you drive? I drove the 2026, Kia Sportage hybrid. So I cruised all the way to Louisville, Kentucky, which I'd never been to, as far as I know,

Sam Abuelsamid  1:43  
there's been a lot of drive programs in Louisville. I'm surprised, at least one.

Roberto Baldwin  1:48  
I don't think I've been to one. I I'm 80% sure I've never been to Louisville, Kentucky, okay? Or I don't know, I'm pretty sure I've probably been to Kentucky, but, like, driven through it. I don't think I've ever, like, just hung out in Kentucky. It doesn't really matter, to be honest, because, no, doesn't really matter, because most time moving in these you know, I didn't, I didn't leave the hotel to do anything other than drive a car down the bourbon Road, Bourbon Trail, whiskey trail, whiskey road. Some road by the Ohio River is very pretty. There was a lot of corn, I think maybe also potatoes. And it was a nice it was a nice drive. It was a wasn't too hot, wasn't too cold. And that's the Kia Sportage, no, I'm just

Unknown Speaker  2:40  
kidding. No, so the 2026

Roberto Baldwin  2:43  
kia sportage is the hybrid version. I drove it, and for what is starting at $30,000 I found it to be actually quite nice. I will say that I the seats felt a little bit stiff after a few hours behind the wheel again, seats are very relative. You should, you know, drive a car, see if you like it before you you, you know,

Unknown Speaker  3:09  
buy it.

Roberto Baldwin  3:09  
Just sit in it, even as you sit it, sit it, drive around. Like, you know, you're thinking about the dynamics of the car and stuff. But also, like, where's your butt, where's your back, where's your shoulders, where's your legs? Like, like, is it pinching anything that it shouldn't be, because everyone's body is slightly different from everyone else. So that said, you know, the seats felt, oh, just, just a scooch, a scooch, stiff. But, you know, fine for you know, if I had to do a road trip, I wouldn't be like, Oh, no. Again, much better than the worst seats that I've ever sat in, for me, which is the the Mini with the John Cougar Mellencamp. I got, like, two blocks before I was like, I hate this car, and I shouldn't, because I really love minis, but I hate this car because I cannot get comfortable. I don't know what I there's nothing I can or can't do with this vehicle. I'm going to die being upset.

Sam Abuelsamid  4:09  
That is always the worst feeling when you when, when this, when you get in, and after a few within a few minutes, you realize the seats just don't work, or they don't work for your body. Yeah,

Roberto Baldwin  4:20  
they just, they did. They just didn't work for my body. In that, in that, in that Mini Cooper. And again, I really like mini coopers because they're like, everyone likes to say this, you know, they're like, What do you go karts? It's small, it's nimble, it's quick, it's a fun drive. Manual transmission. Nope. So anyway, so, yeah, so the Kia sporge hybrid. I was surprised. The suspension was nice. It quarters well for a little, you know, a little small SUV, but you are sitting pretty high, like. The seat itself is high because people want to feel like they're they're sitting up. I am not those people. I like to sit low because I have a very tall body, and so when I'm sitting high, it just makes me feel like I'm, well, yeah, it makes me feel weird. My the X type that we have, it sits high. It's a sedan, and and it sits high. So I don't like that. That's another thing I like about that car. So you know, if you're if you are tall, or if you're not a fan of sitting high, it feels a little weird, a little awkward. The motor and engine pair really well. It has the eight speed automatic transmission, not a CVT high five to Kia for that. And if you, if you just doing regular driving, it's fine, but if you're pushing it, it has paddle shifters, and you're gonna want to use those paddle shifters, because the the the gear shifting feels a little on the slow side. It shifts a little, you know, a few seconds later than I think it should. Doesn't sound shipped as as much as it should. But again, aggressive driving. How many people are going to be doing that depends on where you live. Yeah. So if you live somewhere with a lot of with a lot of twisties, which they were not, you know, Kia was nice enough to put us on roads not, you know, nice roads with twisties on it. You're gonna want to use the the paddle shifters as eco and sport. There's no normal mode. You know, they have an eco normal sport mode on most car. It's just ECO or sport, which, to be honest, that's fine, if you can. There's also my, you know, your own personal driving dynamics setting, where you can go warning. You can tell you know how much you want. So that could be your normal eco and sport. Initially, I was like, Well, this is kind of weird. And after a while, like, No, not really. So yeah, Eco and Sport, the Pablos are good.

Unknown Speaker  7:00  
Oh, oh,

Roberto Baldwin  7:02  
here's, here's. Remember back in the day when the EV nine and the ionic five had that little panel for HVAC and for climate controls and to control the like physical buttons

Sam Abuelsamid  7:16  
for you could talk like you could talk about it between, between the audio and climate controls,

Roberto Baldwin  7:24  
yeah, yeah, it's back in the Kia.

Sam Abuelsamid  7:28  
Sport Kia, unfortunately, put that on a whole bunch of vehicles, yeah, yeah. So, and hopefully, in the next generation, when they do the next complete redesigns, right, that will go away like it has on, you know, like similar things have gone away on the Hyundai side.

Roberto Baldwin  7:46  
It feels like they bought a bunch of them and they're like, Ah,

Sam Abuelsamid  7:48  
no, so gotta use them up.

Roberto Baldwin  7:50  
Gotta use them up. So that's there. I remember initially being like, Oh, this is fine. But then you're like, oh, and we do this. Let me do this. Let me do this. Let me, let me change that. And, I mean, and in our Honda area, I have, like, the, there's a little star, like, you hit your favorite I use it all the time. And then while we were driving, we were toggling between Kia sex stuff and our stuff. And we kept having, like, Oh, if we had the H back on, because it was, like, 80 degrees and humid and overcast. And so, you know you're doing a lot of climate control adjustments so you don't sweat through your clothes. But so that's back. Fortunately, they have, you know, it's a $30,000 car, so it has little, you know, you can just grab the vents and move them

Speaker 1  8:35  
around, the way God intended, yes, the way I lord and

Roberto Baldwin  8:40  
savior Dolly Parton intended you just grab them and move them around. Yeah, the rear seats, six foot three. If I'm just sitting like I normally sit, I can stick my hand between, you know, my head and the roof. If I try to sit up like a proper gentleman, I don't know, like, maybe Victorian times, like, my head will, like, sort of hit the roof. So again, six, three doesn't mean that it's gonna be bad for you. It depends on your torsos. I mean, some people are shorter than me, but they have longer torsos. So, you know, give that if, if you plan on, if you have tall children, turn on rolling around town with tall children, it's, you know, give that a look. Leg room wasn't too bad behind some folks who were shorter than me. What's cool is the in the seats themselves, they have USB C ports in the back seat. They also have a little hook for like your your purse or your bag, or your your fanny pack or whatever. And then they have another thing in the headrest for your jacket, so you can put your jacket there, boop, you could hang it on there, or you shove your, your, your, I stuck my iPhone in there. I mean, it cuts off half the screen, but my head look at this. And when I told Kia that, like, it's not for that, okay? And it has like, a little bit of rubber in there to keep your your jacket from falling just like this little it's like these weird little type. Is that, like, get you excited about a car with like, Oh, it's just a little bit of rubber. So my my jacket, we had a bump. It won't slide off or whatever. That rubber is not enough to keep your iPhone from flying out whenever someone

Sam Abuelsamid  10:12  
goes around. Does the does the Sportage also have the USB ports that are on the inboard side of the front seats, so along, along the side of the seat,

Roberto Baldwin  10:23  
yeah, that's where the USB ports, yeah, yeah. They're part of the

Sam Abuelsamid  10:27  
that's a cool feature to have, you know, to because, you know, a lot of times, you know, you'll find manufacturers will put the ports like, at the bot at the back end of the the center console, and they're like, right down by the floor. And you're, you're trying to, trying to plug it in, you know, you're, it's way down below your eye level. You're trying to, trying to get it in there. It's a pain, you know, having it right there on the seat back, you know, is, is very convenient.

Roberto Baldwin  10:53  
It is because you're, you're already, probably, if you're sitting in the back seat, if you're adult, an adult, and you're, unless you're in a large sedan or a large SUV. It's already weird to sort of try to move and do things. It's like being in a plane, and they're like, Okay, now try to find a thing way down here, exactly. It's the same where you can't see it. It's dark. You're like, you get your phone out, you get the light on with this. You can just like, Oh, it's right here, boop, and you just plug it in. You can watch your or ignore or do whatever you do with your phone, or just charge it really, yeah. Um, so, yeah. So the it

Roberto Baldwin  11:24  
comes with a 1.6 liter

Roberto Baldwin  11:30  
engine. It has 268 horsepower

Roberto Baldwin  11:35  
six speed automatic, 2000 pounds of towing, I don't know that's that's

Sam Abuelsamid  11:41  
better than 1000 pounds or nothing, yeah, yeah, motorcycles, jet

Roberto Baldwin  11:45  
skis, sea doos. What else could you put back fun stuff? It's really a fun stuff for towing. It's not really like, Oh, we're gonna haul a bunch of, you know, some horses. I mean, you could, but it would not be a you would not have a good time the there's a little bit more powers, couple more horsepower, power from the from the front motor. They've improved it. They got a couple more kilowatt out of that. It has for the front wheel drive version, it's 42 miles per gallon combined. All Wheel Drive, 35 miles per gallon combined. Again, it's a hybrid. They have a plug in hybrid that's coming out later this year. The hybrid and the gas version should both be on sale relatively soon. It probably showed up in dealerships now. It has the same batteries last year. The Kia connect. You know, they're, they're sort of the thing, it's five years. I always forget to mention that Kia will give you free access to their sort of mapping and, all you know, their online stuff with your car for five years. After that, there's apparently a list of plans. What's really interesting is they, I didn't realize. I don't know anything about sports. I'm just going to put that out there. Kia is like an official sponsor of the NBA. I didn't know that. I'm sure some I'm sure I've seen it. I just doesn't register in my brain. But you can get NBA skins for your for your of your favorite team, for your your infotainment system. So, yeah, you'll be able to buy like, if you like the Lakers or the

Roberto Baldwin  13:28  
other teams, nicks,

Sam Abuelsamid  13:32  
pistons, pistons.

Roberto Baldwin  13:34  
There you go, like the Lakers or the pistons or the I'm pretty sure the nature of team still this works. Of course, I

Sam Abuelsamid  13:40  
know they are, yeah, I believe they are still a team. Yeah,

Roberto Baldwin  13:44  
yeah. You can get, you can, like, do that to your car. And asked about, like, football, MLB and hockey, they said. And then they informed me that, yes, they are the efficient, they're an NBA partnership. So, you know, they'll still see how it goes. I'm like, oh, okay, because sports people like their sports and you know, good for you to have something that you love. And it'd be great if you were, like, a huge Raiders fans. That's what I know. Raiders fans are insane. If they had a Kia Sportage, and they ever had the option to get a Raiders skin, they would totally make their car into a Raiders vehicle. So yeah, starts at 30,290 we were driving the $40,000 prestige. Apparently they sell my, I believe it's more than 50% they're like, of that, yeah, S Yeah, the SX siege, top selling trim with over 50%

Sam Abuelsamid  14:42  
of sales. Wow, that's, that's unusual. I mean, usually the the top the mid, yeah, it's like, mid trim. That's, like, that's most the sales. Usually it's, yeah, like, you know, 15, maybe 20% go for the top trim, 10 or 1510. To 15% takes the entry trim, and then everything else is in the middle.

Roberto Baldwin  14:58  
Yeah. Yeah, no, it's, you know, the interior is really nice. They replaced it. There's like, a little a scooch, a teeny, tiny bit of piano black. But the rest, like all the other things, has this, like, sort of, it's like a gray silver, and it has, like a this nice little line texture to it. So it's, it's a matte. And so it feels that the quality of the materials feels again, Kia Hyundai better than what you would expect for, you know, a Kia Hyundai at this price, I'm very Yeah, 40 people are like, you know, I just want the $40,000 Kia. So good on them, because those, those, you know, the higher trans means more, more profits for them, to be honest. And I think that is it, yeah, 2000 Oh, it was, I'm sorry, the the increase is five horsepower. So they got a little bit more

Sam Abuelsamid  15:55  
power train increase, yeah, yeah. So 232

Roberto Baldwin  16:00  
horsepower estimate, yeah, no, it's a good little car. It handled better than I anticipated. Acceleration isn't great. It's, you know, 1.6 liter even, you know, we have the all wheel drive version. I mean, it's not gonna but it, but it's more than adequate to get on the freeway, yeah? In sport or in Eco mode, even eco motors, like, oh, yeah, this is fine. That's then, that's the thing is that most car I drove a car in the 90s, they had like, 80 something horsepower, and I was more an hour. I could get to 65 miles an hour. No problem. Get on the freeway. So you should be fine.

Sam Abuelsamid  16:34  
Yeah? I mean, my, my car's got 116 horsepower, or that did when it was new 35 years ago.

Roberto Baldwin  16:39  
Yeah, yeah. So, yeah. So, these, these, you know, we, I think for especially car automotive journalists, we get, sort of, we get, you, we get used to sort of EVs, or we get used to, like, super, super quick cars, and then we get in a regular car. We're like, oh, I don't know. I'm like, no, no. You do know it's fine.

Sam Abuelsamid  16:58  
It's fine. Well, this, and, you know, this is, this is why, you know, when we bought our EV six, you know, we bought one with rear wheel drive, you know, which 215 horsepower, but that is way more than enough. You know, even, even that, you know, we'll get to 60, and I think about six and a half seconds, which is as fast as anybody needs. Yeah,

Roberto Baldwin  17:21  
you're fine. I think the horsepower race of especially with EVs, is a little out of control. I think it creates situations where people who are again into cars, who don't have experience going that quick, are gonna hurt themselves or others. So if you do get a car that goes really quickly? Please, do I don't. I don't ever just get into a car and just take off. You can put me any car, super car, whatever. EV, I adjust my mirrors, I do the thing and I drive it very, you know, sort of cautiously for the first few miles, and work my way up to understanding that dynamics of the vehicle, how quick it is. And this is, you know, Sam and I, and Nicole, we've been, we're in cars all the time, so we have a lot of experience driving, just driving, to be honest, and understanding like, what the dynamics are these vehicles, and what happens when something goes a little sideways, and how to correct it's, you know, because we're in cars so often and all the time that we know how to, like, fix, you know, something that's going sideways in a vehicle. The average person you you know, you have your car, maybe you drive a rental car, every once in a while, just ease into it,

Sam Abuelsamid  18:33  
ease into well, and, I mean, even, even for us, you know, because we get in and out of such radically different cars all the time. It's a lesson that we have to learn early on. Is easing into it helps while you figure out, okay, how does this car differ from the one that I just handed back to the fleet guy 15 minutes ago, and the two vehicles I've got to talk about, you know, kind of fit into that, you know, that they are quite radically different in their performance capabilities. So,

Roberto Baldwin  19:08  
yeah, it's it, yeah, it's any, no, it's, there's, there's it. This is how you end up with things, the cars and coffee, you know. So they get them, they get a Mustang, anything before, like 2015, you know, the other live axle in the back, which is that car is just made to do burnouts, really, and they, you know, the wheels are cold. They don't think are the tires are cold. They don't think about that. They don't think about the fact that, you know, the most, most roads in, you know, suburban or wherever, are a little off camber. So because water has to go somewhere. There's

Sam Abuelsamid  19:41  
probably some oil that's been dripped from trucks and cars, you know, yeah, makes them, makes them slicker than normal. So, yeah, they don't think about the fact that,

Roberto Baldwin  19:50  
yeah, there's oil in the middle of the road, you know, that's the thing. And you've had a bunch of cars that are probably older, going to cars and coffee and they, you know, they they pull. Out, and they think they're being cool, and they stomp on the the accelerator, and they go sideways and go, you know, barreling into another car, or into a

Sam Abuelsamid  20:09  
ditch, or, god knows what, wrapped around a tree or

Roberto Baldwin  20:13  
wrapped around a tree. And it's, it's, that's not worth it. You're not impressing Anyone, anyone that ever anyone can make a car do a burnout? Yeah, if you, if you, if your right foot can stomp down quickly, boom. Guess what, you have all the qualifications of doing a burnout. It's everything that comes after that.

Sam Abuelsamid  20:32  
Yeah, so, so be careful out there, people, be careful. All right, anything else on the Sportage hybrid for 2026

Speaker 2  20:39  
I don't think so. They

Roberto Baldwin  20:47  
sell a lot of cars. They have that. Yeah, the PMs coming out. Blah, blah, blah, blah, 12.3 dual, 12.3 inch screens. Same thing. Wireless CarPlay, wireless Android Auto over the air updates. Yeah, there you go. So the thing that people want to be able to plug their phone in without having to plug their phone in, is there?

Sam Abuelsamid  21:05  
Excellent. All right, well, I had a couple of different vehicles to drive. I've had, I've been double booked a couple times, and some get getting some stuff out of the queue here. So first up was a crossover that, in terms of, terms of its acceleration, is is actually on the little little more marginal, you know, still adequate, but, but, you know, it's getting to the point where it's barely adequate by modern standards, and particularly for a brand that you know that likes to tag itself as you know, precision performance, the Acura ADX is totally underwhelming. It is the the entry level model into the into the Acura lineup. It is based on the Honda HRV, and which means it's also based on the Civic and the Acura Integra. And frankly, my recommendation would be, if you're looking for an entry point into the Acura lineup, buy an Integra instead. Yeah, it, you know, the ADX is, you know, it's got some accurate styling cues applied to what is overall, kind of a relatively bland looking design. It's not, not terribly exciting to look at. And that's, that's unfortunate. It's not bad. It's just, it's a little Yeah, a little meh. And then on top of that, it's got the same, you know, the 1.5 liter turbo four cylinder that Acura and Honda have been using in a bunch of vehicles for better part of a decade now, which is a really good engine. I mean, we had it. We had that same engine in our civic for, you know, a long time. But the Civic weighed, you know, a little over 2900 pounds. The ADX does not the the ADX compared to an Integra here, let me find the numbers again here. Let's see compared to a front so the front wheel drive ADX is 300 pounds heavier than an Integra, and then adding all wheel drive to that adds another 250 pounds. So you're talking a 550 pound weight deficit compared to an Integra. But for reasons that are unknown, the ADX has 10 fewer horsepower, 190 horsepower, and 13 fewer pounds, feet of torque at 179 and all this is paired with a CVT, which all these things combined do wonders to SAP all the joy out of driving an ADX integrity,

Roberto Baldwin  24:08  
just a better all the way around, like, if even just the numbers

Sam Abuelsamid  24:12  
of it, yeah, you get a little a little more power and torque, A lot less weight, about the same amount of interior volume, you know, because the Integra is a hatchback, so it has most of the practicality you have of something like an Adx, you know, a small crossover. And it's so much more fun to drive, you know, civic or, you know, either a civic or an Integra. You know, the interiors of the Integra and the ADX are quite similar, but they you know, when you take 550 pounds out of something, it makes a big difference, or when you add 550 pounds, it makes a big difference in a bad way.

Roberto Baldwin  24:58  
And the integral is cheaper,

Sam Abuelsamid  24:59  
yeah. And. The Integra is cheaper. So, you know, I, you know, I went out and did a couple of zero to 60 runs with the ADX. And, you know, in sport mode, it did zero to 60 in about nine and a half seconds,

Roberto Baldwin  25:16  
which, again, Acura,

Sam Abuelsamid  25:19  
this is supposed to be the performance brand for Honda, yeah, so it is decidedly underwhelming from a performance standpoint. And the one that, the one that they sent me was, as so many actors in the most actors in the press fleet these days, was this urban gray pearl color, which, you know, if you look really closely, you can, you know, under certain lighting conditions, you can see the pearlescent effect barely. But, I mean, this is just such a boring, boring color, which is unfortunate, because they actually sell, you know, I mean, if you, if you're gonna get an Adx. They have this wonderful Adriatic blue color, which looks great. And there's Milano red, which looks great. And then there's urban gray Pearl, which is boring. I did not like the color. Wasn't. Was unimpressed by the performance. It other than that. You know, it generally drives quite well. You know, it's got the same it's the same platform, the same suspension. You know, obviously tuned a little bit differently to handle that extra nearly 600 pounds. But you know, the steering feels good. You know, the ride quality is good, so the the driving dynamics are good. No, no issue there. But just, you know, if I was going to spend my money, I would take a pass on on the ADX and get an Integra, you know, because it's, it's just, you're just going to have so much more fun with it. And frankly, it looks better. Looks a lot better. So

Roberto Baldwin  26:59  
I was concerned, because it's a small crossover. Everyone loves a small crossover. I was like, regardless of what we say, people have been I was like, Oh, I wonder if this is outselling the Integra, because there's a potential for it to outsell the Integra, because blah blah blah, no one buys sedans. Blah blah blah, which key is, like, No, our sedan sales are up, like, something percent, 20 or, I don't know, the the Integra, like, really, does it more than double your was it month to date? And, yeah, the integral is winning, or the ADX. So I'm like, whoo. Good job

Sam Abuelsamid  27:37  
making the right choice.

Roberto Baldwin  27:38  
And I understand Acuras, like, what they what they're doing, because they're like, everyone wants, everyone has this car in their site. You know, everyone has a segment in their lineup. We got to put this segment in our lineup. And we're like, we're not going to build something new, so we're going to build it off, as you know, the the tiny, little Honda and the Civic Platform. And, but, yeah, yeah, the the Integra still, it's still leaning. So, I mean, it's not beating the MDX or the RDX, which I really like the RDX. I was just

Sam Abuelsamid  28:12  
gonna say, if, if you want a modestly sized Acura crossover, get the RDX, yeah,

Roberto Baldwin  28:18  
it's not. It's a good, that's a good, that's a good, good car. Yeah, yeah. I think you're like, we got to do something. We we got to have something in that segment. So I don't know, yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid  28:30  
I mean, like, I Yeah, you know, I don't understand where we're Acura put all this extra weight in this thing. Yeah, it's just, it's, I mean, yeah, the all wheel drive, okay, I get that. That's a couple 100 pounds. But, you know, Where's, where's all the other weight coming from. I don't know, every

Roberto Baldwin  28:53  
ADX comes with a case of the balloons. You just have to find them. Okay, like, oh, you bought this. Wow. Okay. You don't know much about our brand, but you really want an Acura. Here's some doubloons.

Sam Abuelsamid  29:13  
There are, there are some nice interior color combinations for the ADX as well. Like they've got, you can get it in this red they call the combination red with silver metal film trim. But you know, then this is the one that I had, which is a, you know, it's a kind of a, sort of a burgundy light, not as dark as a burgundy, but a really nice red, you know. And the combination of the red and black and some silver on the interior of this thing works really well together. There's also what they the package they call orchid, which is mostly off white, but with some blue accents in there on the seats and. And the the door panels, which also looks really good when I did the the first drive with the ADX back in the spring. That's what I drove then. And that's also a really nice color combination. But I'm always a little wary about, you know, white leather seats. You know, it's there, yeah, over time, you know, just it doesn't feel like something that's gonna hold up very well, but, but the red that I had on this one looked really good. You know, overall packaging, you know, it's typical Honda, you know, the packaging is good. There's plenty of interior space, plenty of cargo space, you know, no, no real complaints about the package. You know, the design, like I said, is not as interesting as other Acuras, and the powertrain is just not, not up to snuff for what I would expect in an Acura, especially, you know, for an a spec, I would, I would expect, you know, I would hope for, you know, if it's, if it's going to be as heavy as it is, I would, I would hope for a little more, little more power, or, you know, put a regular automatic transmission instead of the CVT in there. I understand why they did it for for cost reasons. You know, they already had this, this engine and the CVT combination certified for a bunch of other applications, fine. But, you know, then just, just get the Integra. And if you opt for the Integra, you know, what else you can get a six speed manual transmission. Yeah. So even better

Roberto Baldwin  31:33  
it is, yeah, yeah, you can get the CVT or, yeah, like the six speed manual transmission. Just get the Integra. Yeah. I feel like they're like, Oh, someone's like, we really got to do this. Let's go. We do this for we need this. We got to be part of this segment. Everyone's like, Fine, putting it together on the week, you know, yeah, right after lunch on a Friday, let's put this car together. How many gonna sell? I don't know. Everyone says sale. And look at the market.

Roberto Baldwin  32:06  
You gotta

Sam Abuelsamid  32:07  
Yeah, the just looking at the Monroney, that urban gray Pearl, which is such an incredibly boring color, it's a $600 option. Wow. So just, get the blue or the red. Yeah, you'll be You'll be much happier, awesome.

Roberto Baldwin  32:25  
So over time, everybody is get the accurate and get the Integra and get blue or red. The red is really nice, yeah,

Sam Abuelsamid  32:34  
and the blue and red, they don't cost extra. The Platinum white pearl and the urban gray pearl. There are 600 bucks extra, and they're boring, yeah, just get, get the cool colors, and don't pay extra. So all in the one that I drove, which was an Adx, all wheel drive, a spec with the advanced package, 45,950 bucks. Now take a guess at the destination charge, 1500 1350

Roberto Baldwin  33:06  
Wow, that's not too bad. Yeah.

Roberto Baldwin  33:09  
Oh, the destination charge for that Kia was, hold on, I can tell you, it's like 15. It's like 1495 or something. They're very upfront. They're 1445

Roberto Baldwin  33:22  
that's what it is that's not bad. They tell you,

Roberto Baldwin  33:25  
like, right up the right at the top of the thing. They don't hide it or anything. 1445 which is still, I everything over $1,000 still feels like I'm getting ripped off. Yeah, to be honest.

Sam Abuelsamid  33:37  
All right, let's, let's move on to the other one that I had, which was the ionic nine. Also drove the ionic nine back in the spring the first drive in Georgia, near the plant in Savannah. Was very impressed with it, and so I had a week with it. And the the one I had was the the top end, all wheel drive, performance, calligraphy, design and so this thing, you know, it is the three row crossover. It has 311 miles of rated range. I on my driving loop, I averaged 3.4 miles per kilowatt hour, which is pretty good for a big electric SUV like this, 3.4

Roberto Baldwin  34:26  
Yeah, wow, that's pretty dead. Is good.

Sam Abuelsamid  34:30  
And, you know, so, this is the, this is the top end model. It's really nice inside, you know, the the exterior design as a little controversial. There's, you know, some people not, not totally crazy about it. I don't mind it, you know, I kind of like the, you know, the the Volvo esque look of the tail lights, you know, the old V 70. I think, I think it was the V 70 that had, you know, this kind of tail light shape. You. The the, you know, all three rows, it's fairly roomy, including in the third row. I, you know, I set the seats for, you know, for so I could be comfortable and have some plenty of excess leg room in the first and second rows. And got into the third row and was more than comfortable back there. Hyundai, excuse me. You know is now include. Is now putting J 3400 slash next charging ports on all their, almost all their EVs. I think by the end of the year they'll probably all be switched over. But they the ionic nines. Definitely have those, and they are shipping to adapters with with all the EVS that have the next port on there, including the ionic five, the six, the nine. They so you get an AC adapter for charging at home if you have a J 1772 charger. And then there's a DC adapter for charging at CCS charging facilities. When, when you charge on CCS, it will charge at about 225 or so, 230 kilowatts on a 350 kilowatt charger. If you are using a supercharger, it'll charge about half that speed because the 800 volt architecture and Tesla Supercharger is only being limited to 500 volts, so they don't charge as fast. But Hyundai all the Hyundai Kia, Genesis EVs, have really amazing thermal management on their batteries, so they're able to hold that close to their peak charging rate all the way up to like 65 70% state of charge, whereas most EVs start tapering off when you get to about 25 to 30% state of charge. And so this is, this is an impressive vehicle. The one that I had was in the gravity gold mat exterior with a gray interior. It has all the goodies on it. It's dual motor, all wheel drive, 440 ish, or the spec page, go four, sorry, 422. Horsepower, 516 foot pounds of torque. It will do zero to 60 in under five seconds. So is plenty quick. It's 110 kilowatt hours of battery. One of the things that one of the few details that I'm not thrilled about is they're on this. They're using the same stock that they're using on some of the Kia, EVS now. And I think the ionic five might have got this this year, which is so there's a third stock on the steering column. So you have on the on the left hand side, you have the turn signal stock. On the right, you have the windshield wiper controls, and then down below that, there's a stock that is fixed in place. And you twist the end one direction or the other to go into driver reverse, press the button on the end to go and put it in park. And then it has the start stop button towards the inboard end of that near the steering column, which is a little awkward to get at. The the way the steering wheel is to sign designed in this one. It's a little bit easier to see than it was when they first did this on the EV nine, but it's still, you know, Kia or Hyundai should, and Kia should probably consider just dispensing with the start stop button altogether. Just move. You know, do do

Roberto Baldwin  38:52  
I like to start? I like being able to turn the car off or on, especially, okay, so in the ID buzz, if you get out of the car, it just turns off. If you're not in the front seat, if you don't you don't have the seat belt on, it just turns off. It's annoying. I want to be able to just be able to leave my car, like to manually control turning my car and car off. I liked I had the stock I but I don't the power button for mine, for the Ioniq five is in the dash, but I like the little stock at the bottom, where I just turn it forward and turn it back. It's pretty easy to remember. I like that better than having to reach to the center console.

Sam Abuelsamid  39:26  
Yeah. The shift look, you know, for shifting is, I'm fine with it. Just the position of where the start stop button is is kind of awkward, a little weird, yeah. So you got to kind of reach under the steering wheel and hit it. When you hit it with your thumb. You get used to it over time. On our EV six, the start stop button is on the leading edge of the the center console. Yeah, it's pretty easy to get at, yeah. But other than that, the rest of the ergonomics in this thing are really good. It's, you know. Hyundai is going with lots of buttons and knobs for all the climate control stuff for volume and tuning. It's got a capacitor panel for some of the other climate controls, things like your heated and cooled seats, the defoggers and the fan speed, but you know, it's got, it's a good balance of physical and touch controls. The the finish on the dashboard is a little unusual, and one on one part of the dashboard on the passenger side, it's got this sort of metallic it's almost like a, you know, like a metallic or kind of look to it. It's, it's hard to describe, you know, I kind of like it, you know, it's, it's something a little different, the granite, sort of weird, yeah, maybe sort of like a metallic granite, yes, if you think, if you can imagine a cross between metallic and granite, that's kind of what it looks like. But, you know, they have done the proper thing. Got manual vent controls everywhere. So that is good, you know, this thing, this thing drives really well for, you know, for such a big vehicle, you know, this is about a 54 5500 pound vehicle drives well, it's quick it, as with a lot of the other Hyundai Motor Group products this year, it does have driver monitor system on there, so there's a little camera module on the steering column, infrared camera module on the steering column that will alert you if you are getting distracted or appear to be drowsy or anything like that. It does not yet have hands free driving capability, but it's got Hyundai's highway drive assist two capability. And you know, during during my driving with this and you know, bring up something, a conversation that popped up in our Discord the other day with, I think it was at the, was it the Sportage was in, oh, the Tucson or Tucson? Yes, you know, apparently some Tucson drivers have been having some issues with phantom braking, with the automatic emergency braking system, where it's randomly slamming on the brakes for for no readily apparent reason, I have not experienced this either in a Tucson or in any of the other Hyundai Kia or Genesis vehicles that I've driven, including our EV six. Have you? Have you noticed it in any of these vehicles at all? I

Roberto Baldwin  42:39  
haven't. The only car I've ever had phantom breaking in was a model three, okay, and a Model X, okay. But again, we only have those cars for a little while, and this person's had it had, has it happened three times, which is kind of terrifying,

Sam Abuelsamid  42:55  
yeah, yeah, that's not good, if that's happening. You know, we've had our we've had the EV six for just over a month now. I mean, you've had, you've had the Kona, and then now the ionic five for a few years now. And so hopefully this is something that is unique to the Tucson, and hopefully they'll get it fixed soon. I mean, it's something that should be updatable with software, although I don't think they can do an I don't think they can do an OTA update for that, but if it does turn out a real problem, and then they, hopefully, they'll do a recall and and update that software.

Roberto Baldwin  43:34  
Yeah, if you if it's happening, you can go to NITSA site and say, Hey, this thing is happening. So the more people to do it, the quicker they'll hopefully move it says, not great organization, but they do, you know, recalls are important, and it, this is a, you know, this is a safety critical part, so hopefully they'll move pretty quickly on it. And, you know, hassle you need, your your the Kia people don't hassle the Kia dealers, maybe will have something will happen, but probably just hit up, hit up Kia directly, yeah, just gotta just jump over the dealer. The dealer is not going to do much because they don't have control over that, to be

Sam Abuelsamid  44:09  
honest. So yeah, if you have experienced that problem on your vehicle, go to the NHTSA office of defects investigation site, and you can submit your issues there. There's a button, I'll put a link to it in the show notes. There's a button at the top right corner of the page to report a safety problem. And so you can, you can submit that there if it has happened, and if there, if there are enough reports, NHTSA can require Hyundai to do a recall and fix that problem all right, and then the price that that is really the only downside of this vehicle. It is a little expensive. The ionic nine starts at about one. About $55,000 but the one that I had, the all wheel drive performance, calligraphy, design, $79,540

Roberto Baldwin  45:11  
that's a lot,

Sam Abuelsamid  45:12  
yeah. I mean, you know, if you compare it to some, you know, some other three row electric SUVs, you know, like a rivian R 1s you know, that's, that's the loaded trim, you know, that's, that's about where an R 1s starts, or what else is up there. The Lucy's lucid, yeah, yeah, assuming you can even get a lucid gravity Evie nine, yeah, Evie not. It's a little, it's a it's about the same price as an EV nine, pretty close to the same price as an EV nine. But so this is, this is the the top of the line model. And I do what you probably want to get, you know, if you, if you're considering one of these, is get the mid level, the SEL trim. I think, is the mid level one currently. And you can get that, you know, in the nicely equipped in the mid 60s. So you want to guess at the destination charge 1400 16. Oh, yeah. And the the ionic nine is is built in Georgia. It's built in Ella Bell, Georgia, near Savannah, at the new Hyundai Motor America, meta metal plant, metal claw.

Unknown Speaker  46:32  
There's there cool,

Sam Abuelsamid  46:35  
all right, so that is drove I will drop in here the segment that I recorded with Nicole earlier this week about the 2026 Subaru saltera Short and TLDR. It is way, way, way better. And we talked a little bit about the difference in the experience of the type of drive programs that Subaru and Toyota do with essentially the same vehicle, because, you know, this is the same vehicle as a Toyota Bz, and we had a lot of fun with this thing. And some people on the drive even got to see a

Roberto Baldwin  47:15  
moose. Oh, I saw a moose once. It

Roberto Baldwin  47:19  
bit my sister. Oh, really?

Sam Abuelsamid  47:22  
Moose bit your sister?

Roberto Baldwin  47:23  
No, it's a joke for money. Oh,

Sam Abuelsamid  47:27  
okay, I missed that one. I forgot about that one. I

Roberto Baldwin  47:29  
did see a moose, though. I did

Sam Abuelsamid  47:30  
Colorado,

Roberto Baldwin  47:32  
maybe Utah, right?

Roberto Baldwin  47:36  
It was a pole star event, though. Okay,

Sam Abuelsamid  47:38  
yeah, yeah, Harvey and I didn't see the moose Harvey breaks together, but, but some other folks did see it, and it was just wandering around, just stand by the side of the road. All right, so I will drop that in here, and we'll be right back. All right. And Nicole is absent this week, but she's here because we recorded this earlier, ahead of head of the recording the regular show and the Mario and everything. Because last week, you and I were both in Denver, Colorado, to drive,

Nicole Wakelin  48:13  
what to drive the new Subaru, Solterra.

Sam Abuelsamid  48:16  
Yeah. And, you know, we saw the 2026 salterra at the New York Auto Show back in April. Yes, got some some details on it then, and Subaru referred to it then, and also last week, as all new, even though, when you look at it, it's not really all new, but you know,

Nicole Wakelin  48:38  
and it was one of those things everyone kind of asked them and said, What do you mean? It's all new. It's mean? It's all new. It's not all new. It's, this is it's, it's new bits. But their, their argument is that, if there is so much that has changed, that enough has changed, that it is essentially all new,

Sam Abuelsamid  48:55  
yeah. I mean, apart from the most of the outer sheet metal, yeah, and some of the supporting structure, almost everything else has changed on this thing. Yes, it is pretty fundamentally a different car than it was three years ago.

Nicole Wakelin  49:09  
It really is. And what did you think? Thumbs up or thumbs down? Overall impressions? Oh,

Sam Abuelsamid  49:14  
absolutely, thumbs up. You know, I mean, you know, we've talked, excuse me, numerous times over the last three years about how underwhelming the Bz 4x and the saltera were, yeah. And I think Subaru and Toyota have addressed almost everything with this revamp. I

Nicole Wakelin  49:36  
think they have. They've they fixed all the like, one of the things that always drove me nuts, and they kind of fixed part of it already. And they it already, and they finished fixing it in this for this year, is originally the steering wheels round was a circle, and the infotainment, I mean, excuse me, the instrument cluster was down this sort of like tunneling kind of thing. It sort of had wings, and it was hard to view. It was just awkwardly placed. Well, I think it was last. Year they flattened the top of the bottom of the steering wheel, which made it better. And this year they removed the little wing things so it makes the dash.

Sam Abuelsamid  50:06  
And it's also actually mounted up a little bit higher than it was before,

Nicole Wakelin  50:10  
yeah, oh, okay, and so, so, all in all, it is greatly improved from where it like you can actually, you can actually see it. Now you don't have to crouch to look under or lift your head up to see over the steering wheel, because it wasn't just adjust your seat or just the wheel position. I could never find in the original I could not find a way to sit that something wasn't locked. Crazy. Yeah,

Sam Abuelsamid  50:34  
and you know, everybody I've talked to had the same problem with that, and I can only imagine that the the the only person that ever actually evaluated that within Toyota or Subaru had like, an extraordinarily long neck, you know, so that their their their shoulder point was down low, you know. So they want have the steering wheel low, but their head was up really high, and so you could see it.

Nicole Wakelin  50:56  
It's such a weird thing, because, like, you know, when these guys do when they design a vehicle, when they do testing, they test everything like everything is looked at not once, not twice, multiple times. Is this right? Ergonomically, right, safety, right, you know, ease of use, right? Is this all right? And how many people looked at that and went, yep, this is good. I don't know how it got as far as it did, but yeah, this so it made me very happy that they had changed that. I because I thought that. And there's a lot of things that made the Solterra really lackluster before or frustrating. That was one of the frustrating things. They fixed that. So I like that. And they did some they did some interior stuff to make it better too. Like you now have dual wireless charging

Sam Abuelsamid  51:39  
pads. Yeah, they rearranged the whole center console. Yeah. So it's way better than it was.

Nicole Wakelin  51:44  
It's and they have, because there's now radiant heat available. Sort of, it's sort of like where the where the glove box would be essentially on the front. I don't think it's every trim. I think it's select trims, and I forgot which trims. I think it might just be the top, but it's radiant heat there, which is great, because it helps warm you up, and it gets the car warm a little bit faster. Bit faster, but that means there's no glove box. So instead of the glove box, that rework, center console now has the usual storage bin that you lift up. Actually it lifts like left, right, like it doesn't actually lift straight back. But there's also space underneath that center console that has a fairly deep edge to it, so you could put your wallet something small keys, and they're not gonna, like, slosh out and end up underneath your feet. So that was so, you know, they made a big change there by doing the radiant heat. But then they decided, Okay, we got to give them back storage somewhere. I was talking to Garrett go, who's their car line planning manager, and he said that if you look at the amount of space that they had before for little storage, and you look at what they have now, there's actually a little bit more now than there was with the old glove

Sam Abuelsamid  52:49  
box, awesome. And, you know, I mean, those things are nice convenience features, but you know, there were also some pretty fundamental functional flaws with the car too, before there were the range was short relative to the competition. The charging times were extraordinarily slow. It was awful. Yeah, it originally, and they did subsequently make some changes to the charging curves that made it better. But originally, in its original form, it would take an hour, almost an hour, to get from 10 to 80% charge,

Nicole Wakelin  53:23  
which is an insane amount of time where you've got cars who will do that, will do it in like, 28 minutes, 22 minutes, whatever, 18 minutes, 18 minutes, like 18 minutes or an hour. And it baffled me that they, when they and I don't know what the sales have been on this. I don't know if sales have

Sam Abuelsamid  53:43  
been good or bad. Okay, so, so not great. It

Nicole Wakelin  53:47  
makes sense, given that it wasn't so much that it was bad before, it just had so many things that were not as good as they should have been to be competitive. And now they fix that. It has it charges in 30 minutes. Now I believe 3030,

Sam Abuelsamid  54:02  
minutes to 80% in 30 minutes, in minutes and they added preconditioning. Basically, they completely revamped the thermal management system, yeah, for cooling and heating the battery, so that, now you know, they say that it'll go from 10 to 80% in 30 minutes, anywhere from 14 degrees Fahrenheit to 70 degrees Fahrenheit, ambient temperature. So even in cold weather, it will still charge just as fast they were

Nicole Wakelin  54:27  
when I was talking to Eric. He was saying one of the things that they really focus on is so most OEMs like the sweet spot is 70 degrees. That's what those batteries like. They like that 70 just nice. Happy. Like humans, they want that temperature. When it gets too hot, when it gets too cold, they get cranky, and they don't charge as well. They charge more slowly. So there's issues. So they wanted to focus instead of that number that everybody gives, you know, the performance numbers when you're at the perfect temperature. This, like I they wanted it to perform perfectly when it was colder, when it was hotter, because they said, you know, people buy Subarus enough because they're gonna hide it. In their garage when the blizzard hits, they're going to go out to the grocery store, go skiing or go hiking or whatever. So they need to know that their customers are going to have the right experience. So they worked really hard to get that preconditioning so if you're using it. And he even said, you know, I said, What if you forget? I was just kind of curious, what if you forget? Like, oh my gosh, didn't precondition the battery, and you haven't had it in NAV. Because if you have it in the the native navigation, it will automatically precondition before you get to your charging point. But if you just stop on your own, and he said, even just turning it on, like doing the preconditioning, that you can activate manually, just doing that even will help reduce that charging time, not as much as if you'd done it fully before you got to the charger, but at least improve it. So it was a big thing that they focused on, which I think is important we all nobody wants to sit around and charge forever. Nobody,

Sam Abuelsamid  55:48  
yeah, and you know, so they, you know, as part of that, part of the changes around the battery, they also reconfigured the battery a little bit so they managed to squeeze in a few more cells. They bumped the capacity up from 72.4 to 74.7 kilowatt hours, I think now, yeah, so they've got, and the thing is, they, you know, that's all. They only increase the battery capacity by about two and a half percent, but they got 26% more range, because it's gone from about 222 for the or 228 I think, for the with the 18 inch wheels, to 288 miles. So they got 26% more range, and then to 278 if you get the limited with the or touring with the 20 inch wheels. So that is, you know, right in the ballpark with with most of the other all wheel drive crossovers. Now, you know, with Ionic 586, the ID for, you know, all of these, if you get them with all wheel drive, those are the kind of range numbers you're going to get with those as well. So it has suddenly gone from also ran to being very competitive, at least on paper, and

Nicole Wakelin  57:07  
it did it also in terms of horsepower. It was originally a whopping 215 horsepower, which now it's, it's up to 338 horsepower. That's, there's because there's two different options. And for the powers here, 338, or 233, on the base. But even the base 233, you're still getting extra horsepower. So they fixed the how the battery charges. They fixed arranged. They fixed the horsepower. They fixed some interior gripes. They really did. They checked off all the things that I think somebody who owned it might have complained about, and that journalists would have complained about, because it just wasn't

Sam Abuelsamid  57:45  
up to snuff. Yeah, and I sat down and recorded a conversation with Garrick, which run after this, and we talk about some of the, some more of the details of what they changed, like the magnets, they redesigned the motors, putting the gears in the oil of the motor so that there's less friction, polishing the gears, a whole bunch of cool stuff that they did, a whole bunch of little things that all add up to that 26% improvement in range to just to get more efficiency out

Nicole Wakelin  58:17  
of it. And I think what you said there, it kind of sums up the Salter. It's a whole bunch of little things they've done, little things all throughout, through the design, through the comfort, the convenience, how it how it handles, how it drives, it's much smoother and quieter, like there's they just touched every single part of that vehicle and improved it a little bit. So overall, it's a huge change.

Sam Abuelsamid  58:36  
Yeah. So what was what was fascinating? One thing that was fascinating was looking at the difference in the when, when a manufacturer brings the people out to drive their vehicle between different manufacturers, and particularly in this case, because you have effectively the same car, the 2026, Toyota Bz and the Subaru salterra, you know, aside from some slight differences in the styling of the lights at the front, they are the same vehicle, right? But the experience that we got our first opportunity to drive them was so totally different. You know, when in back in 22 when they launched, you know, Toyota did their Drive Program in Encinitas, California. And we drove around just on roads, around Encinitas and Carlsbad and a little bit up into the hills. You know, the closest we got to going off road was if we happened to stop by the beach to take some pictures. Exactly. There was no off roading at all, right. And when Subaru did their original one. They did it. They did a two part drive in Santa Barbara, and then they took people over to Catalina Island to go off road. This one for for this drive, we went to Denver, and we drove out into the mountains. And I would say close to half of the drive route was on Durham. Roads, yeah, and not just dirt roads, but winding dirt roads through the mountains. We climbed from about 50 280 feet elevation in Denver up to over 9500 feet, and then back down and back up a couple of times. And one of the roads in particular would actually, actually turned out to be quite rocky, and you see the reason why the benefit of the 8.3 inches of ground clearance that the saltera has compared to on the ionic five, the standard ionic fives are only six inches. And on the XRT, which is their off road version, it's seven inches. This has another 1.3 inches on top of that. And even the mach e rally, which is supposed to be their off road one, right? It only has 5.8 inches

Nicole Wakelin  1:00:50  
of grass. Oh, Lord, yeah. This one there was interesting because they had us on this for this off road just to drive for, like you said, half of the time we drove, we were driving in the dirt, and some of it was very easy dirt road stuff, but there was some of it that there was enough bumpity rocks you had to sort of slow down and pay you weren't going to take that at 30 miles an hour, like you had to slow down and make sure you were you were paying attention a bit to where you were placing your wheels. And it was fine. It performed beautifully. And they had a section where they took us where they had some spotters, like one real, more aggressive, I guess, off road section. We went very steeply down and back up. And you're trying everything, and it performed beautifully. They had a little course set up. There were moguls, you know, so you can have the one wheel, wheel in the air thing, so, and, you know, I always feel like one of the things that lets you know that it's doing it well is when you look at it from outside the vehicle and you think, holy cow, because you see what the car is doing, and inside it's like, doo doo, doo doo. You don't feel it. You don't really feel just how, how much is moving. And that was a little bit what this was, you don't feel it in a good way. You don't feel it. You feel very secure and you feel very confident driving off road,

Sam Abuelsamid  1:01:59  
yeah. And you know, one of the, again, one of the interesting differences, you know, in how Subaru sees their customer base for their cars. You know, they they feel their their customers. They're going to take their cars everywhere, you know. They're going to drive them around town. They're going to take them out to the trailhead to go hiking and camping, you know. And they're going to go all these different places with the same vehicle, yeah, and so many other times, like, you know, earlier this year, when we drove the ionic five update, you know, we drove around the on road driving portion was with the, you know, Limited trim, the high end trim, with street tires. And then we did off road with the XRT on all terrain tires this we arrived at the quote, unquote off road course at this ranch, you know. And instead of having us Park those cars and get into something else, it was prepped for that, you know, with some off road tires or anything, right? You just, they said, Okay, go there and we just keep on driving.

Nicole Wakelin  1:02:58  
Yeah, which is, which, to your point, that's huge. Because normally, when they, you know the number of times that they have, you get out of the car you've been driving all day. Take these. There's five of this one that we've done, just tricked out for off road. You guys are going to take turns and you're all going to drive it. It was like, no, just hop right back in there. Get get a bottle of water from the cooler. Hop right back in and go.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:03:17  
You know, I'm not sure which one you were driving, but we had a touring XT, which was on the 20 inch wheels with Bridgestone taranza all season tires. So these are, like, the most street tire street tires, right? Yeah, they're not. This is the kind of stuff anybody's gonna buy and put on their car. It's, it's

Nicole Wakelin  1:03:35  
actually perfect for the Subaru customer, because it's not like you're a hardcore off road, or who needs this, like, gnarly stuff to do what you need to do. But you're gonna get out there and adventure a little bit. You're gonna go a little bit further, you, like, the outdoorsy thing. So you want to be able to take the car that rides just fine on the highway, just fine on the pavement. Is nice to drive around that and just drive it right off the road and have an adventure. You can do it. You don't have to suddenly, like, oh, I don't know the right tires, right this, I don't have to write that. It was very, very easy. I liked it. It was sort of because I was not a big sotera fan before. I really wasn't, because of all little things that weren't quite right, and also didn't think it rode especially well. I think it's incredibly quiet now. It's much quieter, much more relaxing, more comfortable car to ride in, and they fixed all the problems like i Now the one thing we don't know, and by the time this airs we might is we don't have pricing. We did not have exact pricing. And they've said in their presentation that it was not going to be significantly different. They were talking like double digit numbers,

Sam Abuelsamid  1:04:37  
like, yeah, so under $100 less than $100 difference, either plus or minus,

Nicole Wakelin  1:04:43  
plus or minus. So it's going to be priced pretty close to what it is for the 2025, and you Sam, you might have that, but the time this airs, and you can tell people, but yeah, As of recording this, they said they don't have it yet. They were still going back and forth a little bit. So that makes it, yeah. Not an inexpensive vehicle, but it makes it, let's assume the prices were 25 close enough, right? It makes it a much better deal than it was before. Before you looked at what it was, you looked at how much it cost, and you kind of thought, I know a lot of other cars that are in this range that are way better now. Now this has things to recommend, especially that 8.3 inches of ground clearance. That is not, that's not a small thing.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:05:23  
Yeah. I mean, look right now for 20 the 2025 Solterra premium, which is their base model, which always strange to see. The base model premium starts at 3438 495, and the touring Onyx edition, which is the top end, is 45 495, so, you know, they've, they've hinted that, you know, it's going to be within 100 bucks all those, and that's Subaru only sells to Salter as a dual motor, all wheel drive. They don't do a front wheel or they don't do a front wheel drive version, like like Toyota does. But going back to what you were saying about the ride quality, I think one of the things that really impressed me the most, you know, yeah, it is very quiet, but like on some of the dirt road sections, you know, we were on some washboard road that was really knocking around. And it was amazing how well it did, you know, just soaking it up. I wouldn't call it plush, but it did a such a great job with wheel and body control. So you weren't getting that head toss that you often get in these kind of off road scenarios, the body, you know, felt very smooth and minimized the body motion while allowing the wheels to do their work. And again, that was one of things. Garrick explained, you know, they made a bunch of changes to reinforce the structure so they could retune the suspension, the springs and the dampers, and allow it to do that better, so you have a much smoother ride on these really uneven surfaces. And, you know, like, you know, on some of the rocky sections there, you know, it did even with these 20 inch all season wheels and tires. It did really well on that and it was comfortable. The only thing because of the low profile of the tires, you had to be very careful of where you placed the wheels to try and avoid sharp edges and cutting a tire, which can happen when you're off roading,

Nicole Wakelin  1:07:21  
yeah, yeah, it was. I truly was impressed with this. I thought it, I think it's a nice way you're looking for an EV, and you want it to still be Subaru. Yeah, it is. It's an EV, but it at its heart, first and foremost, it's Subaru. And I think that's brilliant, and I think they did a really good job. I think Subaru deserves a lot of credit for for looking at what was not working well, and looking where it was lacking, and saying, We gotta, we gotta step up our game in these areas.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:07:50  
And they did, they listened and they addressed the problems. It's a good thing. I

Nicole Wakelin  1:07:55  
feel like it's and it's not like this car has been out for seven years or something like this would normally be just a little mid cycle refresh at this point in the car's life cycle. Nope. They're like, we're gonna do the whole thing all new. It's all new, guys. We're gonna fix it

Sam Abuelsamid  1:08:07  
all for you. Yep, at least all the important parts. All the important parts. Yeah, all right, well, thanks, Nicole, and I will let you get back to wherever it is you're going to be on on Sunday. Okay, I'll talk to you later. Bye, bye. All right. So, Garrick, you are carline product line and product manager, Caroline product planning manager at Subaru, right close enough. Yeah, for the for the Salter, yep. So, you know, today we talked a lot about, you know what? What's changed on this Altera presentation this morning, but I'd like to go over some of that again for the listeners, wheel bearings, you know, the car that's you're at the point that where it would traditionally just be a mid cycle refresh for our product, a new product like this and but you made some pretty fundamental changes. Can you talk about some of those changes? What you know? Give us some. Let's go over some of the highlights of what has changed, and we'll get into a few of the more interesting detail.

Garrick Goh  1:09:11  
Sure, yeah, we looked at what was holding people back from not only Solterra, but from electric cars in general. And a lot of you probably know what, what that is, right? It's driving range, charting speed cars too expensive. So by addressing those and also improving a lot more aspects of the car in general, we think we'll we'll be in a pretty good place. Turn the knob the wrong way. Sorry. Hopefully your music cancelation technology is good, but yeah, hopefully we'll be in a very good spot with this, with this new generation of Solterra. So since the car launched in 2022 you've already addressed pricing. Pricing come down from the original launch price. But what are. Some of the biggest changes that have been made for the 2026 model, probably enhancing efficiency and performance. So it's easy like the thing that sticks out to a lot of people is the range is now up by 26 ish percent. So it goes 288 miles on the full charge now, as opposed to the 227, from last year's car. And on the way there, we made a lot of improvements to get there, because the aerodynamics is more, it's more, it's better than last year's car. The even the drag from the wheel bearings is down by 18% the motors have been redone significantly. They're smaller, they're lighter, they're more powerful, they're more efficient. The battery pack has more capacity. But we didn't just go in with a sledgehammer approach and just fill it with like 90 kilowatt hours worth of batteries. We wanted to improve efficiency and use that electro electricity capacity that we have, electric capacity that we have more efficiently. So along the way there, like we have an all new dashboard, we have a new structure. The way the subframe is welded together is different. It's been reinforced. The roof structure is improved. What else we also have Andrew strong here, who's our also works on the car line planning team here for Solterra. Feel free to jump in with anything that I'm missing here. Yeah, lots of it's like you were saying, Sam. It's this is about the time where we do the mid cycle refresh. And that's when we usually like. The wheels changed a little bit. The Grill changes a little bit. There's a new color. Price goes up a little bit. But in this case, we changed the battery, the motors, the interior, the exterior colors, interior colors, there's a leather option now, styling, you name it, like bigger screen, better infotainment,

Sam Abuelsamid  1:11:57  
yeah, so, and we saw the styling in New York. New York Auto Show. You announced it there. And, yeah, that's a nice improvement. It looks sleeker. You know, the new the new lighting signature for Subaru going forward with the six element lights corresponding to the six stars of the the logo is a nice update. But some of the interesting to hear about, some of the detail mechanical improvements, like, remember, one thing you talked about was the gears, you know, every EV, you know, while they typically don't have a traditional transmission, they still have a set of reduction gears to go from the speed of the motor down to the speed of the wheels. And talk about what was changed with the gears on this car?

Garrick Goh  1:12:39  
Yeah, sure. So the Japanese have a word for it, kaizen. So continuous improvement. And I think that was the mentality in going into updating the motors. Yeah, we wanted to make them more efficient. So big changes to the inverter. It uses silicon carbide now, so it's able to use electricity much more efficiently and handle heat so much better. But even like the gears that you talk about, the final drive output is basically the same as last year's car, but the shape and location of the gears that transmit power from the motor to the differential, they've all changed like, and that's because we found that it was more efficient to make the gears all kind of like along the same plane along the bottom so that they sit in the essentially the oil pan for lubrication, so we don't have to work the new electric oil pump so hard to keep them lubricated, and even down to, like the surface of the gear teeth, right? Like we we're polishing that to more of a mirror finish than it was last year. So even little things like that add up to a big change in range and efficiency.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:13:42  
Yeah. I mean, when you, when you have a whole stack of these things that you've done, that's, that's where you get that 26% from. It's not one thing, yeah. So a bunch of things, and the motors were another one. You mentioned changing the position of the magnets and the motors, and the motors actually physically smaller than before, right? That's right, even though it makes more

Garrick Goh  1:14:01  
power. Yep, yep. So the stator in the rotor got a little bit smaller. We were more efficient with the windings, where we found that relocating the magnet position on the rotor, like separating them a little bit, allowed us to not only have a higher output, but also made it more efficient. And even the inner diameter of the rotor got bigger, so there's less rotating mass, it's more efficient. It's lighter, and integrating the inverter, which is also smaller, into the motor case itself, helped shrink that whole package of the motor, which actually helps with handling quite a bit, because these you bring everything closer to the center of mass on the vehicle, and it makes it more willing to rotate, because you don't have a larger motor that's hanging out over the front axle, or a larger rear motor that's hanging out over the back axle of the car.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:14:44  
And you have, you now have slightly more battery capacity than before. It's not, it's not a, it's not a huge jump, you know, it's a lot, lot less small, lot smaller increase than the increase in range that you got. Where did that extra. Capacity come from, is that a change in the chemistry and a change in the configuration of the battery itself?

Garrick Goh  1:15:05  
Yeah, we are saying a couple more cell. We found a way to squeeze a couple more cells inside pack. So the pack itself is slightly larger, so the frame of the car had to change around it to make that work. But it's pretty similar in kilowatt hours to last year's car, okay?

Sam Abuelsamid  1:15:21  
And you know, one of the big complaints with the original version of this car was the charging speed. It was, shall we say, leisurely, compared to a lot of a competition. And it's a lot, it's a lot more competitive. Now he's not top of the segment, but it's, it's a lot more competitive. Now you can get 10 to 80% in 30 minutes. And what did? What had to change to achieve that? We

Garrick Goh  1:15:49  
improved the way the cooling works for the cells, like it's each individual cell is heated and cooled more efficiently than it was than they were before. There's also additional insulation to keep those cells, like separated, in case one gets warm, it doesn't affect the other one nearby. And something that we really paid attention to was not just getting that overall charge time rating down, which we did, by five minutes, but since a lot of Subaru customers like your endeavor, especially like, they don't stay home when it snows Right? Like they go skiing, they go hiking, they're still out and about. And they bought these cars to be able to use in all kinds of weather. So they are saying, like, Hey, okay, like, the 30 minute rating and 70 degree weather is one thing, but what happens when it's freezing, like, below 32 so we focused on really improving the battery preconditioning system, such that charging even at like 14 degrees Fahrenheit, it's still 30 minutes. Yeah, actually is a big change from not only last year's Solterra, but compared to a lot of our competitors

Sam Abuelsamid  1:16:55  
as well. Yeah. I mean, that was certainly last was it, I can't remember his last winter. I think was last winter. You know, we were seeing news reports of, you know, when there was a polar vortex that hit the Midwest. Of people in Chicago with EVs not not being able to charge them because it was so cold. And now you can, even at 14 degrees, it'll charge just as fast as it does at more

Garrick Goh  1:17:19  
temperate, yeah, with a preconditioning activated, yeah. Okay,

Sam Abuelsamid  1:17:22  
so, you know, propulsion system for an EV is obviously a key component, yeah, it makes, makes it a lot more usable. You've got, you know, much more range now than you did before, but you've also changed a lot of other things in the car, you know, in in the the structure of the car and the suspension and everything. Let's talk a little bit about that. You know what? What changed with the suspension in terms of the what you did to improve the ride and handling, improve the capability off road and even, you know, this particular vehicle, the saltera, is not necessarily the most off road capable EV that you're going to have in the lineup, as we were discussing earlier, but it's, it's still surprisingly good. Yeah,

Garrick Goh  1:18:07  
it still has to be a Subaru, like when we were finding this car a long time ago. Like we considered, should we make it like everybody else in the segment and had like five inches, six inches of ground clearance? Do we need all wheel drive? Like we could probably squeeze out like five more miles of range if we make compromises there. But like I was showing you earlier, Sam in the presentation, that if you look at purchase reasons for Solterra, for I want to drive this car off road and compare it to literally every other car in the segment. Solterra is all the way at the top, because if you're looking for a Subaru, Ev, you want something that can do Subaru things right? And so because of that, we improved. We wanted to improve the all wheel drive system even beyond what we had last year. So it reacts more quickly than it did last year. It's more predictable. You might have noticed this today if you were sliding it around on gravel roads like there's less course correction needed. And even if you don't drive like that, even if you're because you can drive like that. None of us would ever drive like that, okay. Well, hypothetically, if you were to drive because you can drive Solterra like that, it makes driving to the market in a snowstorm like a breeze, because the car just handled it that much more smoothly, okay? And speaking of smoothly, we did make a lot of reinforcements to the structure. We changed the suspension completely, the front string, shocks, bushings, they've all been stiffened up. And same with the rear, they've been softened a little bit. So we found that by doing that, the car turns in quicker, it handles better, but it also gives you a better ride, which is what a lot of the feedback has been so far, that if you drove it back to back with the last Solterra, not only is it more fun and playful to drive, but it's more comfortable and it's a lot quieter too, like even the door glass is different. The way we attach the window glass is different. There's a lot more sound insulation in the all over the cabin. So that's probably one of the first things people say when they come back from. Driving this car, is it, how much more comfortable the bite it is? Yeah,

Sam Abuelsamid  1:20:03  
and that was something that was particularly impressive, and especially on, you know, I mean, we had a lot of dirt roads on the drive route today, including quite a bit of washboard road. And, you know, the car that my driving partner and I were in was the touring XT that has the 20 inch wheels, you know, fairly large wheels, and even on very rough, you know, unpaved roads. You know, we were not, weren't having a lot of head toss. It was very comfortable, and it was more that we were kind of hearing, rather than feeling, what was going on. Below the body was very stable, but you could tell that the suspension was working and doing his job, even with the relatively low

Garrick Goh  1:20:46  
profile tires. It's funny that you mentioned head toss, because that actually is a metric that we have at Subaru. Like, we have a camera and we compare cars, and we measure how much, literally, how much head toss there is, and that's because we focus on details like that. Like, I think it's not something that somebody goes when they test drive the car, and they're like, oh, yeah, my head doesn't move around a lot, but what they will say is, man, this car is really nice to drive, yeah? And that's what it translates

Sam Abuelsamid  1:21:12  
into, yeah. It was very impressive. And then the interior environment was another thing that, you know, got a very thorough makeover this year. Yeah, again, you know, for what would a point in time that would normally be, you know, some mild updates did a pretty, you know, pretty major tear up. And, you know, change the entire dashboard, entire center console, and, you know, I think, addressed a lot of the complaints that most of us had about the previous generation.

Garrick Goh  1:21:45  
Yeah, it really opens Lowering the center console really opened up the cabin, like it feels a lot more airy, and having the dual wireless phone chargers that are sitting there like that's something a lot of our customers actually have been asking for. I guess they don't play fighting over who gets to charge their phone with the front passenger. And since it is an electric car, we might as well use some of that electricity for other fun things too. So like the USB C ports on the back, they now are up to 60 watts. So you can run your Nintendo Switch or your laptop, and on some of the trims, they even have a 1500 watt power outlet in the back. A lot of our customers like to go car camping. You can run your Andrew, you could run your coffee maker.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:22:22  
You could run a skillet or small fridge, tailgating. Yeah, yeah. I think you know the big thing. You know, looking at the going from 2022 2325 to this, 2026 model is the attention to all the little details. As you said, it's the Kaizen, you know, continuous improvement of not just one thing, but literally everything. I mean, you know, the basic body shell is the same, but almost everything else has changed, yeah, even the the charging port, yeah, he adopted the J 3400 Max charging port. But you didn't just swap out the CCS port that was there before you actually moved it to the other side of the car.

Garrick Goh  1:23:03  
Yeah, and that's because a lot of those charging stations are set up intended to be backed in with the driver side of the car. But we were talking to our customers, a lot of them don't like backing into parking spaces. They'd rather go nose and so in order to be able to charge more easily, we moved it to that side of the vehicle. And while we were at it, we know that Max is not the only charging standard out there at the moment. So we're throwing in J 1772 level two and CCS level three adapters with every Solterra, and also upgrading the included charger that Solterra has from level one to level two this year. Okay, that's, that's there. You can't hurt anywhere, yeah,

Sam Abuelsamid  1:23:43  
and I know Kent, we're not ready to talk about pricing yet, but from what you hinted at, sounds like it's going to be a very positive message, sir. Yeah, it'd be right about the same. So all right, well, fantastic. Is there anything else about the changes to the 2026, Salter that we haven't talked about that like listeners should be aware of.

Garrick Goh  1:24:04  
There is just so many little things, like things that we didn't mention today. Like even they all come standard with headlight washers, because Subaru customers driving the salt on the snow and or in opera a lot. So you can just wash that off. Just all those little items add up to a very big change in the overall feel of the car. And I think that's what you noticed today. Yeah, makes it, makes it much more usable. Makes it, you know, makes

Sam Abuelsamid  1:24:30  
it from what was, I'll say, and also ran before, to something that is very much fully competitive in the segment, yeah. And should it should be on people's list for consideration now, okay, thinking about an EV in this size. Yeah, we're

Garrick Goh  1:24:46  
looking forward to it. All right. Well, thank you so much. Thank you appreciate it. Thanks for having us. Great sir.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:24:56  
All right, we're back, and I. Let's talk about the 2026 Jeep, Cherokee, Cherokee. Did you? Did you watch the backgrounder?

Roberto Baldwin  1:25:07  
I did not. I think I was somewhere, okay,

Sam Abuelsamid  1:25:13  
probably, well, I went to it in person. They Jeep did a background briefing on it a couple weeks ago, and then they finally released the all the details on Thursday this past week. So the you know, Jeep has been out of the sort of compact, ish, mid size crossover segment for a couple of years now, since they discontinued the last Cherokee and they're back with a brand new Cherokee. They've been promising this for a little while, and it's, it's interesting, you know, they, they've gone in a different direction with the design. This time, last time, when they launched the last generation Cherokee, the design was kind of controversial. You know, it was a very different kind of design direction for Jeep, and they did not carry that over to any other Jeep products after the response they got. And this one is, you know, more in a lot of ways, more traditional Jeep looking, you know, it's a lot boxier, you know, it's got a few things that kind of slightly hint back at the back to the 1984 XJ Cherokee with, you know, so the XJ Cherokee had square headlights, or rectangular headlights, and this one doesn't have rectangular headlights, but the the LED running lamps that go around the headlamps, you know, are done in sort of a rectangular shape, you know, give you a little little bit of a cue back to that, you know, you get the seven slot grill and sort of other things. What do you think of the design?

Roberto Baldwin  1:26:59  
I like it, you know, I think it's, it's closer to a jeep, to be honest, than the last version.

Roberto Baldwin  1:27:08  
The See, I'm trying to look at the the back looks like a Honda passport, a little

Roberto Baldwin  1:27:15  
bit. But you know the bat that the lights are, what's going on with these lights? Yeah, they're fine.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:27:24  
The headlights are the tail lamps. The tail lamps, yeah, the tail lamps, you know, they kind of incorporated sort of a an X shape in there that's supposed to kind of give you the cue of the molding on a jerry can.

Roberto Baldwin  1:27:41  
Okay?

Roberto Baldwin  1:27:44  
All right, sure, it, what's it? It reminds me of something, and I cannot it's it's not a jerry can. It's definitely not an extra something that it reminds me of, but it feels just, you know what the problem is? I think here's the issue is that the top lamps are closer to the this sort of middle light that's not turned on, versus the side LEDs, so there's, like, a little bit of a so it feels a little

Sam Abuelsamid  1:28:15  
uneven. Just unbalanced, yeah,

Roberto Baldwin  1:28:16  
it feels unbalanced. There you go, because either you go for it and you move them out further, or you just line them up, yeah. Like, you can't, like, do halfway. This is why I learned in design school, like, don't kind of, like, make something off. Like, if you're going to go off, you have to go all the way off, because we don't. It's going to create this weird tension that people don't understand, and it's going to make them feel weird and they don't know why. That's what's going on with these rear tent with these rear tan tail lights.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:28:39  
Okay, that's fair enough. That's, that's, that's a reasonable explanation. I can live with that. So it's funny, you mentioned the passport, because this thing is quite a bit larger it. It is almost six inches longer than the old Cherokee. It's almost the same size as a passport now it's, it's like, just under an inch shorter than a passport. So this makes it several inches longer than, you know, vehicles like the rav4 and the CRV, and it's actually almost the same size as the previous generation Grand Cherokee. So the Grand Cherokee, when it, when it was redesigned, grew bigger, and now this one has grown bigger, and it's basically taking the size of the old Grand Cherokee, which means it's got a lot more room inside than the old Cherokee. Although, strangely enough, when you go through the spec sheet, it's not really much roomier than a than it than a rav4 it's something, something about the packaging, where it's got almost the same dimensions inside as a wrap for but it's bigger on the outside, so it's kind of the opposite of a TARDIS, Oh,

Roberto Baldwin  1:29:54  
hmm. It's, it's interesting, because I've been asking we're going to start doing reviews on SA. E on the media side, and people are asking. People are saying, well, you know, could you we see, well, these cars are bigger, but they're not bigger inside. So one of the things people are asking about is, like, give us like, the real dimensions of the interior versus the outside of the car. Because, yeah, like this, this vehicle versus, like, the Rev four is a perfect example of that where, yes, it's bigger on the outside, but it doesn't mean you have more passenger space on the inside. Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:30:30  
So one of the interesting things about this vehicle, so it's built on the Stella large platform, which is the same platform that they're using for the wagoneer s and there's the Dodge Charger, and also the upcoming Jeep recon. Which are, you know, three quite different vehicles from this you know, first of all, all three of those are battery electric vehicles, although the charger is now being offered with an internal combustion engine as well. This one the Cherokee, is not going to be an EV. It is actually going to be launching as a hybrid only. And unlike the charger with the hurricane six cylinder, which is longitudinally mounted, this is a transverse mounted powertrain, and then it's got different front suspension from those vehicles which have a multi link setup, although we actually don't actually know what the suspension is on the recon, but the Waggoner s and the charger have a multi link front suspension. This has a Strut front suspension. And at launch, there'll be four trim levels, and the only available power train is going to be the stellantis new hybrid. So it's a 1.6 liter turbo with a hybrid drive unit two motor hybrid that's similar in architecture to what you get from Honda and Toyota and Ford. So it's an ECVT and 210 horsepower, 230 foot pounds of torque. It's a mechanical all wheel drive, so it's not using an E axle, so there's a drive shaft running to the rear axle, and it's all wheel drive is standard, so there's no front wheel drive version of this, and they're projecting 37 miles per gallon combined, which is about the same as the combined four all wheel drive, rav4 and the CRV,

Roberto Baldwin  1:32:31  
cool. I mean 30. I mean you can't shake 37 miles per gallon in a stellantis vehicle.

Unknown Speaker  1:32:37  
That's, that's, that's

Sam Abuelsamid  1:32:39  
pretty impressive for stone, yeah, for stellantis,

Unknown Speaker  1:32:42  
good for them.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:32:45  
And right, right now, you know, the trim levels range from the base to the Overland. There's no real hardcore off road version of this, but they, they did say that there will be a Trailhawk version coming next year, and there will be other other powertrain options. So we're guessing that the Trailhawk will use the the two liter turbo that's in a whole bunch of other stellantis products. So they'll probably be around 272 75 maybe 280 horsepower. The the versions they have now have eight inches of ground clearance. Trailhawk will probably have a little bit more, probably have a two speed transfer case, like the old Jeep Trail Hawk hat, or the old Cherokee Trail Hawk ad. And, yeah, I mean, it's, I think it's, it's some interesting decisions they've made with this vehicle.

Roberto Baldwin  1:33:39  
Yes, yeah, I think we'll see how it sells. We'll see how it drives. I think stellantis Need a win.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:33:48  
Oh, and pricing, well, pricing is actually surprisingly, surprisingly good. It starts at 36 995, including the 1995 destination charge. Oh, cool. And then the the overland tops out at 45 995 including destination, alrighty. So too bad, yeah, it's, it's competitively priced. It's not, it's not significantly more expensive than anything else. I mean, it's in the same ballpark as a as a RAV for CRV hybrid, yeah. And my guess is that even in the forms that it is right now, you know, which is, you know, we don't have the Trailhawk yet, that it will, it'll probably, it'll probably do better off road than either the rap for the CRV,

Roberto Baldwin  1:34:40  
I would hope so. Yeah, it's, we're gonna call this a jeep. How's it go for, you know, what? Don't ask.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:34:47  
It's okay, you know. Yeah, it'll handle dirt. No, no, it'll, it'll, I'm sure, it'll be fine. It'll be fine. So, yeah, it's, you know, and it's supposed to launch this fall. So in the next. Sometime between now and November, should be going on, so we'll see how it does. It's gonna be, you know, it's going right up against, you know, an all new rav4 that is also launching this fall, around the same timeframe, and will also be hybrid only at the at the backgrounder, I asked Mickey Bly, who's the Senior Vice President for propulsion systems at stellantis, whether you know, because they're, they're talking about, you know, other potential for other powertrain options. So I asked him, you know, since this is a transverse mounted engine, will a hurricane fit sideways in this thing? He just smiled and laughed. Didn't say no, he didn't say no. I'm pretty sure it won't fit.

Roberto Baldwin  1:35:46  
I'm gonna say that it looks I like it better design wise, than the rev four, but it also still just looks like a passport with a jeep, yeah, with the front of a Jeep slammed on front, which, which, I guess means I like the passport more night, the way the passport works, more than the rev four,

Sam Abuelsamid  1:36:05  
yeah. I mean, you know this, at least from the front, you know, this has got a Jeep look to it. And, you know, from the back, you know, apart from the slightly unbalanced tail lights, you know, it looks enough like a jeep. I think people will be happier with this one than they were with the last generation Cherokee,

Roberto Baldwin  1:36:22  
Oh, yeah. I'm sure they will be,

Roberto Baldwin  1:36:23  
yeah, their f4 looks too much like the the Prius, which I like the way the Prius looks. But it's sometimes some designs just shouldn't get bigger. Does that make sense? The Lucid going to the the air, to the gravity. I'm like, Oh, that looks that looks really nice, like that design language, it like works really well to me. I think the the Prius to the ref word less, so, okay, it's, yeah, that's, that's my hot take on the rap for all right, it's gonna last you 1000 years, but you might want you

Sam Abuelsamid  1:36:58  
know, you might get tired of looking at it,

Roberto Baldwin  1:37:00  
yeah, yeah, or you might like it. Who knows? No one, no one bought a Prius in the early days because it was cool looking. Yeah,

Sam Abuelsamid  1:37:09  
that's true. All right, so we mentioned price, you know, some price. Did we mention prices going up or, I don't know, I can't remember anyway, Fort Maverick has gotten a lot more expensive since we since it first arrived, since my neighbors bought their XL hybrid in 2022 so three and a half years ago, they paid $20,000 1995 and 2121 five, including the destination charge is what they paid the TFL guys just sold their Maverick. They bought they bought a maverick in December. They got the new 2025, model. They got the hybrid with all wheel drive that launched this year. And when they bought it, you know, they bought an XLT with some options on there. They paid 37,000 for that. It has since gone up by about $2,000 and the the maverick now the at least for 2025 models, the starting price for the Maverick is 28 145, for the XL hybrid front wheel drive, that is a 37% increase over three years. And adding to that, the increase is actually more than that. It's actually now probably closer to 40% because sometime in the last three or four months, they also increased the destination charge for the maverick from 1495 to 1695 so it's now $1,700 for delivery on this thing. So you're going to be paying, you know, if you're buying a 2025, Maverick, you're gonna be paying basically $30,000 at a minimum for this thing.

Roberto Baldwin  1:39:11  
It's, yeah, it's such a

Roberto Baldwin  1:39:16  
this is where I, I get when people are like, Oh, Ford's gonna kill slate. I'm like, Are they, though? Because how long is that $30,000 you know, Maverick size electric pickup going to be $30,000 a week two weeks. This is a company that's that's taken some, some some pages out of Tesla's playbook and said, Hey, let's just raise prices and lower prices willy nilly until people just don't know what they're you know, like, how much was this again? Like it was if you tell somebody who's buying a maverick, if you walked into a Ford dealership and said, you know, these used to be $20,000 you're not gonna be super angry. You. Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:40:00  
Well, for what it's worth, on Friday, I did get an email from Ford with pricing for the 2026 model year Mavericks, which basically stays unchanged, fortunately, because they just raised the prices a few months ago, with one exception, when they brought out the 2025 they did a refresh for the 2020 25 models. When they brought out those 25 they dropped the XL EcoBoost front wheel drive version. So you used to be able to get it with the the two liter EcoBoost, 250 horsepower and front wheel drive and the base XL. And they dropped that for the model year 2025 Well, it's back for 2026 and it is $1,000 cheaper than the hybrid. Of course, you will make up that $1,000 pretty quickly in your fuel costs. Yeah, because the the front wheel drive hybrid gets about 42 miles per gallon the EcoBoost and maybe about 26

Roberto Baldwin  1:40:58  
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, still, the every day, every just, what are we doing? What do we just don't, don't, don't do that. Yeah,

Sam Abuelsamid  1:41:11  
so you can, you can pay, you can pay a little bit less upfront. You'll have a little more power, maybe a little more towing, I'm not sure, but you will pay a lot more in fuel

Roberto Baldwin  1:41:24  
over the life of your vehicle. That that that extra $1,000 isn't going to be that big of the deal over the life of your it still doesn't, you know, excuse them for, you know, again, 30 something, 37 almost 40% price increase. Like, imagine if the the the f1 50 did, they had a 40% price increase over the quarter. The course of three years, just like, if that's insane, yeah, the f1 50 now starts at $80,000 what?

Sam Abuelsamid  1:41:54  
Let me see? Let me do a quick comparison here. So I'm pulling up the 2024, Matt, Maverick and which had the that front wheel drive EcoBoost combination. Let's see Maverick. Where's Maverick? Maverick? Front wheel drive. There we go, doing maths. So, yeah, yeah, according to fueleconomy.gov You know, they've got a calculator on there, yeah, the Maverick was rated, officially rated by the EPA at 37 combined with the hybrid and front wheel drive and the two liter EcoBoost front wheel drive was rated at 26 and so your your annual fuel costs for that $1,300 for the hybrid, 1850 for the EcoBoost. So over, over a five year period, you're gonna pay about, $1,250 more in fuel for the EcoBoost, at least, because most people are actually getting better than that 37 miles per gallon with the hybrid Maverick. So you know, you you will make up that $1,000 difference in fuel costs pretty quickly. And depending where you live, if you live in California or somewhere where fuel is significantly more expensive, then you'll make it up a lot faster. Yeah. All right, speaking of $30,000 EVs, there's another one that's coming shortly, the 2026 Nissan Leaf. I was, I was really surprised when I saw this release the other day. The the new leaf, which they're, they're offering, they're going to offer it with two different battery sizes. But initial, at launch, it's only going to have the larger battery, which will give you 303 miles of range. It's, I think, a 72 or 73 kilowatt hour battery that'll give you 303 miles of range. And in the s plus the leaf s plus trim, which is the base trim with the big battery that is going to be priced from $29,990

Unknown Speaker  1:44:21  
yeah. So, just threw this

Roberto Baldwin  1:44:23  
sword down, hammer, something. I don't know what that. I can't remember what it anyway, take that forward in Slate, I guess.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:44:36  
Well, actually, the first one has got to take that as GM. So that kind of sets the bar for the new Chevy Bolt.

Roberto Baldwin  1:44:42  
I think when this news came out, everyone at GM, like an hour before, they're like, All right, we're gonna provide this much for the bolt. And then the leaf came out, they're like, oh, man, oh, this is gonna look bad if we cannot do nice. Done. Oh, man, we're just making the exact same car with different underpinning. Yeah, yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:45:06  
So it's 75 kilowatt hours. There is going to be a 52 kilowatt hour version coming next year, sometime next year, and that one will probably get somewhere around 222 30 miles of range, and it will be cheaper, yeah, and that'll probably be around 25,000 and keep in mind that, you know, this is, you know, this car is not going to be eligible for tax credits, because by the time it, the time it goes on sale, the tax credits will be gone. Plus, it's built in Japan. Anyway, it's no longer being built in Tennessee. So that that, that's one of things that really surprised me, was that they were able to, able to get that pricing, even though they're bringing it in from Japan and they're dealing with tariffs and

Roberto Baldwin  1:45:53  
everything. Yeah, no, it's, it's, um, it's, it's bold. It's a bold move by Nissan. It's a, it's, I've driven it a little bit, a teeny, tiny bit, on a track in Japan. It does not feel like the previous generations Nile leaf were fine, but boring they were. There's nothing. There was nothing exciting about the previous generation Nissan Leaf. This one feels like, Oh, this is nice. I like this.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:46:22  
It's like a mini area,

Roberto Baldwin  1:46:25  
yeah, a few few,

Roberto Baldwin  1:46:26  
you know, rounds, or, you know, a few laps around a track with some curves and some bumpy bits and a straight it is not the quickest vehicle out there for EVs, but it is more than it's still an EV, which means you're still gonna, like, get from zero to 30. The thing you really care about, you know, quickly, it handles rail. It felt comfortable. You know, they did everything felt nice. The they, what they did do is they set the suspension and everything for this vehicle, for America, for global so, you know, so you're not going to get the that weird sort of squishing issue we get if you got a vehicle from another country, or, you know, more rigid, if it's in Europe. So, yeah, no, it's, it's, I think Nissan has a winner here, if people are interested in it. And good for the again, good for them, for for seeing what needs to be done in this segment, having, you know, a relatively inexpensive EV, and just being like, yeah, all right, sure. Maybe like, we can't we, no matter what they were, they were not going to get any sort of deal. Tariffs are probably going to, like, kick them in the teeth. But, you know, that's the thing is, you trying to react to those things? Because they change every week. At some point, I think they just had to say, this is what we're gonna charge. It hopefully things work out. Who knows? Of

Sam Abuelsamid  1:47:51  
course, what they haven't told us is that the destination charge will be $5,000

Roberto Baldwin  1:47:56  
but I know it's $50,000 destination charge. I'm gonna watch. I can see, if I see destination,

Sam Abuelsamid  1:48:03  
I think, I think it is in here some Oh, it's 14 nine, it's 1500 bucks, yeah, so it's still, you know, by current standards, you know, not unreasonable. So, yeah, we're gonna be doing a longer drive in a couple of weeks down in San Diego. Are you going on that drive program? I will be on

Roberto Baldwin  1:48:24  
that drive program. It's a bit it's an important car, especially it's an important car because of the price point. It's a really important car for Nissan, and it's a very interesting car because of everything that's going on. Because, again, it's still built in Japan. There are no more EV credits by the time it comes out. Who knows what the tariffs gonna be. It's, there's a lot going on around this vehicle, and it's actually nice like the pictures, don't I don't feel like the pictures do

Sam Abuelsamid  1:48:47  
it. Just I saw it. I saw it a couple of years ago in Japan when we went to the Japan mobility show, and I was there with Nissan, and they took us to the design studio and showed us all the stuff they were working on. So we saw it a couple of years ago, and it's, a, it's a sharp looking little car. It is, yeah, it's, it's about the same size as the old leaf.

Roberto Baldwin  1:49:05  
Yeah, it's about the same size. But it's, yeah, it's actually quite. I like the way it looks. I like the design of it. I think I again, I still think the photos don't. It's one of those cars where the photos don't quite tell you the full story. But, yeah, it's, it's because it does look a little weird to squat, which it's cool because the lights in the back are, there's two horizontal lights followed by and then three vertical lights, and those are supposed to and now this Nissan is the name, but they're like, oh, ni is like, two, and son is three. So, like, huh, knee, son, nice, get it? And I was like, oh, that's clever,

Sam Abuelsamid  1:49:47  
yeah, it's a fun little touch, you know, that, but, you know, and it also, you know, is, at the same time, is a little bit of a callback to the to the z as well, because the Z's got those two horizontal lights, you know. Which goes back to the the 90s, 300 Z or 300 ZX. So, yeah, it's, it's an, it's an attractive, attractive little car, and it'll be the cheapest EV in America with 300 miles of range, yeah, which is a big deal. Yeah, three, you know, 300 303 miles of range, starting at under 30 grand. And so I think, I think this could actually be more successful than the last generation leaf was,

Roberto Baldwin  1:50:28  
yeah, fingers crossed for a Nissan. They need, they need some wins like stellantis, but maybe more so than stellantis, they need some wins. Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:50:37  
All right, next up, ChargePoint we talked a few months back. Maybe it was even last year when ChargePoint first announced their Omni port, which is kind of the opposite of Tesla's magic dock, you know. So the magic dock allows you basically builds in an adapter into the charger. So depending on what car you're charging, if you're charging a vehicle with with a Nax port on it. You just pull out the cable, plug it into the car. If you're charging anything with a CCS port on a with a magic dock. Then it comes out with the with the adapter already connected, and you plug that into your CCS port on the car, Omni ports the opposite, because charge point has had CCS cables on their chargers. And so this provides an adapter to plug into a car with an export on it, and they now have the conversion kit available to retrofit existing chargers cool. So hopefully this means that we will see the operators, because charge points got kind of a different business model for most of the other charging networks. They don't they sell the Chargers. They run the back end. They build, they manufacture the chargers, and they run the back end software platform that handles payments and authentication and everything. But they don't actually own and operate the Chargers out in the field. That is whoever the site owner is, as why you often find these things at like stores and parking lots, things like that. You know, people buy them from ChargePoint, install them and then chart, and ChargePoint provides all the back end service for it, so the site owners will have to make the investment to do this upgrade. I don't, they don't say how much it's going to cost, but they have the kits available now to upgrade most of their existing chargers.

Roberto Baldwin  1:52:33  
Yeah, it's, it's, I went down, I tried these out. They're pretty great. I think it's, I do wish charge point was like, EA or EV, go where they did, actually, but, you know, yeah, because everyone so well, there's a charge point near my house. It's in front of like, a school or a library, and like, the initial cost to just plug in is, like, five bucks. Yeah, I was like, What? What is happening? Because there's EV, there's a there's a there's an EA station, like, two blocks away. But I just needed video of an AC charging station. So I'm like, oh, and then I look at my bill, I'm like, Whoa. I should have looked at this before I started

Sam Abuelsamid  1:53:06  
filming. Yeah, well, that's, that's part of the problem with having the site owners running the thing, running these things, is they get to set their own pricing. So charge point doesn't set the pricing. So a lot of stores and stuff, they do it as a convenience for their customers. And they, you know, there's no no charge for it. You can charge for free. And like here, Washtenaw Community College in the parking garage there, they have some charge point level two chargers, and it's just free of charge. I used to use those from time to time. And across the street from the college, there's a fitness center there. They just installed some charge point chargers. There a couple of AC chargers and also a DC charger. And they do charge I'm not sure what the pricing is. I'll have to go and look. But so the pricing is kind of all over the map with ChargePoint because of that,

Roberto Baldwin  1:53:56  
yeah, the EA, sorry. SAE, we have charge point in front of the building at the in Warren, Warren Dale. But it's only for uh, EA SAE employees. So you have to, like, someone has to, like, unlock it for you. Essentially, they have to set up your account, you know, they have to unlock your account so you could use them. So, which is great, because then it's free, yeah. But I mean, I'm charging rental cars, so it doesn't really, that's not Yeah, but yeah, so it's nice. You know, I think people try to get there early, just thinking,

Sam Abuelsamid  1:54:31  
all right, oh, let's go back to Nissan for a minute. Speaking of wins, apparently, Nissan or Infinity has told their dealers that they're bringing back the Q 50 Dan, which they recently discontinued, and they're going to offer it with a twin turbo v6 400 horsepower and a six speed manual transmission.

Roberto Baldwin  1:54:56  
Yeah, all right, okay, let's do. It's two bits of good news out of Nissan, yeah, I feel, I'm feeling good about that trip I took to Japan, where they were like, Yeah, we, you know, in a very nice way that, yeah, we kind of messed up. We're figuring it out. We're gonna, you know, we're gonna do this, right?

Roberto Baldwin  1:55:15  
Yeah, no, that's pretty cool.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:55:17  
Well, I mean, their new CEO was formerly their head of product planning, yeah? And so I think, you know, he knows a thing or two about what to do. So,

Roberto Baldwin  1:55:29  
I mean, it's a niche car. It's going to be like a niche little halo,

Sam Abuelsamid  1:55:33  
yeah. But I mean, right now, infinity is a pretty niche brand anyway, so

Roberto Baldwin  1:55:37  
that's true. I have not been excited about Infiniti until now, for like, the last 10 years, it's like 10 years of me like, Okay, you're making cars good for you, yeah, this is the only car I'm like, yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:55:48  
So I look look forward to to driving, driving the Q 50 twin turbo v6 with us, with a manual gearbox in the hopefully not too distant future.

Roberto Baldwin  1:55:58  
Yeah. Fingers crossed.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:56:01  
So this week, the US and the European Union announced a framework trade agreement which will lower the tariffs on imports from the EU and eliminate tariffs on imports from the US into the EU so you will set their tariff rate at 0% us is still going to charge 15% which doesn't really seem fair, but as part of one of one of the complaints has been so called non tariff barriers, which, you know, in some cases it's legit, but you know, sometimes, you know, when you have different regulations, different standards, you know, that adds costs for companies that are bringing products in, and that's, you know, generally considered a non tariff barrier. And one of the complaints about from the administration has been non tariff barriers in the EU and so reading that, when I read through the agreement, the framework agreement, there was an interesting statement in there to the effect of the United States and the European Union commit to work together to reduce or eliminate non tariff barriers with respect to automobiles. The United States and the European Union intend to accept and provide mutual recognition of each other's standards.

Unknown Speaker  1:57:31  
Oh, okay,

Sam Abuelsamid  1:57:33  
so, I mean, that's all it says right now, that's it's very vague, yeah, it remains to be seen exactly how that's going to work out, but in principle, that should mean that if a European vehicle has been certified to European regulations, that the US will accept that, and manufacturers could bring that vehicle here and Sell it here without modifying things like the lights or, you know, other, you know, the crash structure and things like that. And the same goes true the in the opposite direction. Anything that is certified to US standards should be able to be sold in Europe, which makes for potentially some interesting opportunities.

Roberto Baldwin  1:58:28  
All right, here's, here's what I'm thinking.

Roberto Baldwin  1:58:31  
This sentence is essentially to placate the administration. That's it. There's no, there's. So we are talking about multiple countries, multiple they're all gonna stop this. They're all gonna fight this for the next couple years. So they're like, let's just put it in there. Nothing's gonna happen. We just put it in there. We placate the man. And then, you know, when he's gone, hopefully they, you know, the next administration will figure it out from there. I don't, I don't see people. I don't see European countries allowing an f1 50 that doesn't have to do any sort of passenger, you know, or, I'm sorry, pedestrian safety tests into their countries

Sam Abuelsamid  1:59:16  
Well, you know. And I actually, you know, I wrote a blog post for the telemetry blog about this, and I don't actually think that that is going to be a problem anyway, you know the because nobody, in almost nobody in Europe, is going to buy a full size pickup truck

Roberto Baldwin  1:59:34  
SUV. Are you going to drive that thing exactly on the on the autobahn? And

Sam Abuelsamid  1:59:38  
so technically, they could Ford, could, you know, or GM, or stellantis, could sell those big trucks and SUVs in Europe, but they're not going to, because nobody's going to buy them. The market is is pretty fundamentally different. However, I think where there's an interesting opportunity is with EVs, because. Is, you know, Ford could potentially, you know, could take their new $30,000 electric pickup truck, send those to Europe and let Ford of Europe dealers sell those things. You know, Cadillac has talked a lot recently about, you know, wanting to expand their global presence, particularly because sales in China. You know, for anything that's not a Chinese brand has been tapering off. And, you know, Cadillac is investing heavily in in Formula One. They've gotten launching a Formula One team. Next year, they're in the World Endurance Championship. You know, they're spending a lot of money. And this is this, you know, this is not money that is probably going to have much impact on Cadillac sales in the United States. Yes, it's the rest of the world. And you know, they, you know, they are selling, you know, a bunch of EVs here. And you know, they could offer vehicles like the optic and the Lyric, this will make it easier for them to sell those vehicles in Europe without having to do a lot of re engineering.

Roberto Baldwin  2:01:06  
I still think it's mostly the placate,

Sam Abuelsamid  2:01:08  
you're right. It is. It is mostly, you know, playing politics. But, yeah, I think it provides some interesting opportunities.

Roberto Baldwin  2:01:16  
I mean, it'd be great if we get some cool, like, you know, vehicles from Europe over here. I don't know how that works with our 25 year. I guess that just goes away. We don't have to worry about, which is cool be I'm like, Oh, cool. We can get all these cool cars that are in Europe over here. But I think especially going over there, it feels, I don't, it's just so many. There's so much red tape that isn't that has to be like gone through. There's so many, there's so many countries that you're dealing with in Europe, and so many organizations that you're dealing with where they're going to be like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Even though there is potential for, you know, a lyric or which makes sense in or at optic, which makes sense in Europe, they're, they're going to look at the waste worst case scenario and try to block this. And so we're gonna, it's gonna be years before if this even does happen. Yeah, and again, one line, one line is, it's so vague, yeah, no, I just want to get a Honda e over here, like, on the used market, with, like, you know, with its tiny little battery. And it's,

Roberto Baldwin  2:02:22  
like, he's driving around.

Sam Abuelsamid  2:02:23  
Can park it anywhere. Park it anywhere. This

Roberto Baldwin  2:02:27  
is a bad deal. I'm like, I don't care. I want the Honda e so I want this to be true, is what I'm saying. Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid  2:02:35  
All right. One last one, which is tensor, this company. I first became aware of them about two or three weeks ago when I got a note from Andy Hawkins at the verge. He asked me if I knew anybody these guys. I'd never heard of them. They had a website up that had no information. And then this week, this past week, they announced what they're doing, which is kind of bonkers. They they plan to sell a level four Robo car to consumers, you know. So this, this is a car that is in many ways, much more akin to a Waymo than, say, a model three with FSD with full self driving. This thing has some, they say, over 100 sensors on it. It's got five Lidars, all rotating lidars. It's got six high definition radars, seven or what, no more, I think more than 20 cameras. There are 17 megapixel cameras. It's got microphones on the outside, if you're if you were going to do a RoboTaxi, you know, this is kind of the way you do it. But, you know, we have no idea where this company came from, although Andy did some digging, and he found the in the US patent trademark database. He found the trademark application for tensor, which seems to indicate a relationship to auto x, which is a Chinese automated vehicle company, and because of the ban on Chinese software and hardware for connected and automated vehicles, you know, perhaps this is a spin off of what what auto X was doing. And the car itself, which is a four door sedan, is going to be built by Vin fast in Vietnam. What do you think of this?

Roberto Baldwin  2:04:48  
I I don't know.

Roberto Baldwin  2:04:53  
I mean, we don't I mean, we don't know. Again, we know very little about this automaker building one test. Car that drives around autonomously on a track, you know, on a predetermined that people were, people were shoving me in cars for the last 10 years, especially like eight years ago, I was in a car like every week, that was an autonomous level four car that was, you know, here we're going to go on this drive, and you go on the drive and you know that it's a, you know, it's a, it's a planned route. The car knows where it's going. The cars, it does its thing. It has all the things attached to it. And you're like, oh, okay, I guess I don't, I mean, it's, it's a slot car, it's a riding around the slot car that knows that other things exist, like a Roomba, it's a Roomba, yeah, my riding around flock car, Roomba, that knows that my cat's coming near, yeah. So, you know. So, you know, this company seems like, you know, they have all the bits on there that you would want on a vehicle. That means it's going to be very expensive. Building One car. Building One car is impossible. Building at scale is, I don't know, try to jump from your house to the moon. That's what's building at scale. Is like, I mean, you every startup, it doesn't matter, you know, slate rivian. I didn't even, I wouldn't even cover rivian. I made someone else that Engadget cover rivian, because, like, I don't know if we're gonna make it, because it's just like, you don't know. That's the thing is, like, you know, for every Rovi and for every lucid there's like 10 other companies that whose names you don't even remember because they just fell apart. There's so much they have to do to make this work, and it's at all that it would still don't know how much it's going to be with $300,000

Sam Abuelsamid  2:06:36  
cost, I'm guessing, yeah, at least 250 to 300,000 for this thing and the computer in this thing is using eight Nvidia Thor chips, which, I mean, this is their high end chip for automated driving. You know, this has 1000 Tera ops of performance each chip. So they've got eight of them, Aurora, which is doing self driving trucks. They use one. This is, this thing is so it seems to be so over engineered. It's, it's just, yeah, well,

Roberto Baldwin  2:07:17  
here's the thing you say the A, they had to sell the car, but B now they have to, they have to do you have to pay either there's going to be subscription or they're just going to be losing money, because you need someone who is watching these vehicles. You need someone to fix those, those issues where the car gets confused and all, none of these cars understand a turn signal, none of these cars understand a police officer staying in a road or even you forward or telling you to stop. And then these cars understand a lot of they just know, object, object, object, object, object, object. It doesn't understand the context of what that object may be doing, or might be telling the car to do or the driver to do, versus, you know, Thing, Thing in the road, stop. Now, what if you're human, thing in the road that's telling me to just go around. Oh, all right, yeah, yeah, I'll just go around. That's fine. I understand. It's telling, yeah, look, all right, there's no one coming. The person's telling me to, like, waving me forward, cool, whatever. Versus, you know, a lot of you know we see, we've seen this a lot in San Francisco, where they just all get trapped somewhere. Yeah, they all get confused. I watched two I watched a cruise and a Waymo both trying to get, like, what was in the left lane? What was in the right lane? On Van Ness in San Francisco. They both wanted to be in the other lane, and they both kept slowing down, trying to let the other one pass. And it was the funniest thing. They both had their blinkers on, but they didn't understand the other one had its blinker on. So they just came. It was just like, oh, it but, you know, you think, Oh, well, I'm just driving from here to here. That's, that's pretty easy. But the reality is, the human brain understands so much about what's going on that we don't even think about that. We don't think that. We don't think about it when it comes to these, these, these vehicles. And I'm saying all this as someone who you know, when there are autonomous vehicles that make sense, that are safe, that's going to be amazing, because there's so many people who just don't want to drive, yeah, or just can't drive. There's so many people who can't drive, and maybe public transportation doesn't serve them in a way that it does everyone else.

Sam Abuelsamid  2:09:16  
Yeah, the you know, the specs for this thing are just so insane compared to everything else that's out there. I don't know who's going to be making all this stuff, other than Vin fast, apparently, building the car.

Roberto Baldwin  2:09:30  
Yeah, I don't know, worked out, to be honest.

Sam Abuelsamid  2:09:33  
Yeah, yeah. Vin fast not doing great. So yeah, it's, it does have sensor cleaning systems, though. So it does, it does have the capability to keep its sensors clean. So that's good. I

Roberto Baldwin  2:09:44  
mean, I applaud them for doing all the things that it looks like you should be doing. That said is this is going to be a very expensive vehicle to build. It's going to be a very expensive vehicle to own. It's going to be a very expensive vehicle on their end to operate. Mm. So it'll, yeah, I mean, if they, if everything works out, you know, in five years, it's going to be awesome.

Sam Abuelsamid  2:10:05  
So, so who, who gets to 20 customer deliveries, first tensor, or Faraday Future with the FF 91

Roberto Baldwin  2:10:14  
oh my gosh. So real customers, not, not employees. That's, that's a huge, okay, I think there's been like 13, like Faraday futures delivered to customers. But I think those are the 12 mules that they were using before probably finish them. Ooh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna say Faraday, which is bonkers. Yeah. You know, again, they might only deliver 20, I'm not saying that Faraday's ever gonna go to scale,

Sam Abuelsamid  2:10:45  
yeah. And given the way this thing looks, you know, with all the sensors sticking out of it and everything, yeah, if you had, you know, two, $300,000 to spend, would you choose this?

Roberto Baldwin  2:10:58  
Yeah, well, you're talking about Silicon Valley. So

Sam Abuelsamid  2:11:01  
that's true. There will be some, some billionaires that'll that'll buy this. Oh yeah,

Roberto Baldwin  2:11:06  
they'll buy it there.

Roberto Baldwin  2:11:08  
They're fine again. I think kudos to them for doing the correct thing is shoving as many things on there as possible. But this is, this is a very, very difficult

Roberto Baldwin  2:11:21  
problem to crack.

Roberto Baldwin  2:11:23  
I'm always amazed whenever like, GM, like, Hey, we're gonna start doing it again. I'm like, is that really where you want to put your money? Could you just I just feel like there's unless you have a team that this is their entire life. Yeah, let that, let those people do it, and then just license it later, later, I

Sam Abuelsamid  2:11:40  
actually did see one of the cruise bolts on i 94 not far from here a couple of weeks ago, but a week and a half ago

Roberto Baldwin  2:11:47  
was this was, Oh, they've spun that back up

Sam Abuelsamid  2:11:50  
there. They're using, they're using the the car, the the former cruise car, some using some of them for testing purposes and mapping and things like that. Okay, so the cruise car, well, it was going the opposite direction, but, yeah, someone on the road for the first time in a while. I wish we could

Roberto Baldwin  2:12:10  
pick one up real cheap. Probably not, I don't think so. They're very expensive.

Sam Abuelsamid  2:12:16  
All right, that is it. Oh, wait, sorry, forgot. Got one email from John W and I already replied to John by email, but I wanted to talk about it here. So right, right in but so despite Nicole's recent horror stories with her wagoneer s, I went ahead and leased one anyway. Figured I'd beat the clock before the EV tax credit vanished. My local dealership apparently called in a favor from the dark arts department, and somehow got me out of my Rubicon four by E lease eight months early, ended up with the 2024 launch edition in white. And I've got to say, the ride comfort and tech are pretty impressive so far. That said, my very first charging experience was less magical. Oh no, Freedom move app showed two stalls in use, even though the cars had pulled out 10 minutes earlier. Long story short, I had to pony up with Apple Pay instead of tapping into the $600 charging credit stellantis gave me, naturally, I went down the dark rabbit hole online, looking for an adapter that would let me use Tesla's network, only to learn those adapters are stuck at level two charging I specifically asked my dealer if I could plug into the Tesla supercharging network, and they swore I could. So this, is this actually coming down the pipeline? Or do I need to order some secret part that isn't being talked about yet? Love the show and really appreciate any help. So what I told John, I gave give him an explanation. We've talked about it here before, but you know, with the adapters for CCS and J 1772 and Nax, there are, there's two different types of adapters. The first adapters that came out the CCS, the next to CCS adapters, those only handle DC charging. So if you, you know, if you've got one that's got, you know, the full CCS port on there, it will not pass through the AC lines. And there's a bunch of reasons for that that we don't need to go into right at the moment. And then there are also separate adapters for AC charging. So if you want to do Nax to to to just for AC charging. So if you've got a if you go somewhere and there's a Tesla destination charger, which is an A level two charger, and you want to charge your CCS or 1772 equipped car, which is what the wagon your S is, then you need this different adapter that uses the pins, the AC charging pins. And I think what John was found when he was looking was the Nax to J 1772 adapters. And so I sent him a couple of links, and I will include a link for the electron vortex adapter that I've been using, which is the DC charger. But electron also makes. An AC adapter. And then there's, there's also other brands that are selling AC adapters. There's more of the AC adapters out there right now than than the DC adapters, A to Z EV is the other, probably the other best known brand, third party brand, for the CCS next to CCS adapters. Both of those have been tested by a variety of people, including Tom malagni on his state of charge YouTube channel. They both that and the electron both work well. They're both pretty reliable. And, you know, I haven't had any issues with electron. And so you can, you know, what you might want to do is get one of each of those. Like, yep, get one AC and one DC adapter and keep it in your car.

Roberto Baldwin  2:15:47  
That I will say that you might so how many supposed to but they said this summer, summer is not quite over yet, right? No, yeah, September, this, yeah, a few more weeks, Hyundai supposed to have their, their their adapter for the CCS enabled vehicles. I'm still waiting for mine that said you might want to be some automakers, including Hyundai, will void your warranty if you're using a third party adapter and something weird happens. So just, just throwing that out there so we have not so I'm waiting for my free Hyundai one for my ionic five. I think it's free. I can't remember. It's been so long since they told us

Sam Abuelsamid  2:16:24  
about, I think they I think Hyundai. I think Hyundai is shipping them free of charge to existing customers.

Roberto Baldwin  2:16:30  
Yeah. So just, you know, check with your your automaker, just in case, if you're like, you know, you're concerned about, you know, warranties and whatnot. I mean, for, I mean the electron, the lecture. I mean Tom Malaga, anything he says, I'm like, All right, yeah, that seems right, yeah. Tom does this stuff. And

Sam Abuelsamid  2:16:48  
both Ford and GM and also Honda are now shipping electron adapters for their vehicles. So I think you know, if at least those three OEMs are using electron as their vendor for their adapters. Probably be fine with that

Roberto Baldwin  2:17:04  
one. Yeah? How they said that they're building their own, yeah? I talked to them, so we'll that's probably what's taking them so long. I guess I don't know. Maybe there's also, you know, 1772 is still not 100% finalized, and I think most of what you need to build an adapter is, is done. So they should be fine with that. But there's still some, there's, there's some really cool stuff coming for 7072 that I need to finish writing a story and editing a video. Sorry.

Sam Abuelsamid  2:17:36  
So yeah, so I haven't had a chance. Oh, wait, did I remember? If I, I did, I did use the electron with the charger at at the supercharger station here. So I used use the electron adapter with the Dodge Charger Daytona, and it worked. So you should be fine with that one.

Roberto Baldwin  2:18:00  
Cool, yeah, because working on that should work for I wouldn't see why they would have different I don't know stellantis, though.

Sam Abuelsamid  2:18:06  
The only thing is, you know if you are, you know if you're if you're using a supercharger with a non Tesla vehicle, and it doesn't yet have the plug and charge capability built into the vehicle, yet, if you haven't gotten enough the software update for plug and charge, then you will need to use the Tesla app to initiate the charging and do the payment and all that stuff. But it's, it's pretty, pretty easy to do.

Roberto Baldwin  2:18:31  
Yeah, it's that like every time for Tesla, the only the biggest issue I had with their charging station was I, I hadn't updated my credit card from the last time I had reviewed a Tesla, which at that point had been a very, very, very long time ago, back before, back when they had people there and the CEO wasn't yelling at me over the phone.

Sam Abuelsamid  2:18:55  
On that note, thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next time bye.