Sam Abuelsamid (00:01.711)
This is episode 418, 1919, 419 of Wheel Bearings. I am Sam, a Bull-Sammet from Telemetry.

Nicole Wakelin (00:06.476)
Nine? Yes.

And I am Nicole Wakelin from Car Talk. Let's do that this week.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:16.636)
And sadly, Robbie is busy throwing up right now. So

Nicole Wakelin (00:20.014)
We're going to say he ate gas station sushi, though we don't know that that was the cause this week, but it feels like a Robbie thing to do.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:27.311)
pretty sure Robbie is smart enough not to eat gas station sushi. Although he might do tacos.

Nicole Wakelin (00:31.328)
Unless it was desperation, right? So let's blame gas station tacos. Okay.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:36.535)
Yeah, gas station tacos I can believe, but gas station sushi, I think he would avoid anyway.

Nicole Wakelin (00:41.607)
Let's hope.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:44.239)
So what have you been driving?

Nicole Wakelin (00:46.368)
had been driving the 2025 Toyota Prius Nightshade Edition in this color.

Here it's saying that's not the name of the colors. Funny My Monrooney does not give the actual name. It says it's mustard and black, but that's not what it's called. There's an official name for this yellow color that is very mustardy. And I thought it would be on my Monrooney and I just realized it's not. but it's this very bright. Last week I had an EX 30 that was so, it was a moss color that you could see from space. I'm like, now you swap me for this mustard color that you can also see some from space. Could I get a black car?

Sam Abuelsamid (01:19.407)
I just gotta say I just gotta say one one thing I should have mentioned it last week but the the name of the color on the x 30 Moss I have never seen Moss that bright yellow moss is green

Nicole Wakelin (01:24.075)
What?

Yes.

Nicole Wakelin (01:31.607)
Like, right, like other than maybe in a sci fi movie on another planet, maybe moss is that yellow. But that is I'm like, what natural moss is this? Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:40.451)
Yeah. All right. Sorry to interrupt. Continue.

Nicole Wakelin (01:42.223)
No, you're right. So OK, I'm trying to get the name of this color as I'm talking to you. It's called Karachi. I got it. They describe it as mustard yellow, but it's Karachi. K-A-R-A-S-H-I. And only the night shade edition, either with all wheel drive or without, is available in this Karachi color, which is kind of, I mean, if you want to stand out at will. I saw people looking at me much like in the X 30. They're like, hmm, she made a choice. And I kind of want to be like, not my car, not my car. I didn't pick this.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:45.135)
I'll look up the color while you...

Nicole Wakelin (02:12.297)
my god.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:13.209)
Well, according to Wikipedia, Karashi is in fact a type of mustard, used as a condiment or seasoning in Japanese cuisine.

Nicole Wakelin (02:17.708)
Yes, it's a it's a Japanese mustard, right? So it at least has so looking like a mustardy yellow and Japanese company, it makes sense. I don't know how I feel about the color. I feel about this color. But in general, the Toyota Prius, so they this is like a light refresh, I guess, of the of the current generation and the nightshade gets. New trim level, so it gets.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:39.279)
I'd say it's more just a new trim level. Yeah, because they don't really change anything except

Nicole Wakelin (02:44.718)
I don't think they change anything else, but it gets like all this blacked out bits and there's like 19 inch alloy wheels that are black and it's just, it's supposed to, I kind of don't know. It's kind of the moody, like I'm still hip and trendy, but I'm driving a Prius. That's what I think it's trying for.

But you're still driving a Prius. That said, I do actually think this is a pretty decent car. Like I've never been a huge fan of the Prius. Anyone who knows me knows that's not my favorite vehicle. This one, I like this the last show when they changed the styling, it went from this weird like we have to show you that we're a hybrid like back in the day when it was, you know, this and what there was a Honda Civic hybrid or something, I think at one point, and that was it. This was like, look at that. That's the hybrid.

because it had to stand out for being different than everything else. Now hybrids are just, everybody's got one. You got them in small cars, in big cars, in SUVs, you got them in trucks, you got them in everything. So to have your...

Sam Abuelsamid (03:42.029)
And Toyota literally has them in every model they sell.

Nicole Wakelin (03:44.891)
in everything, truly. So to make your Prius, which like once upon a time, it was the hybrid. Well, now it's not. So I think it makes sense if they toned this down. It still has Prius design. It still has that hatchback. It's still Prius in a lot of ways, but it no longer looks a little bit weird. Like you wouldn't necessarily see this on the highway and immediately go, that's a Prius, which is before there was no way you would miss it. You can get it with front wheel drive or all wheel drive. And it has one hundred ninety four horsepower

front wheel 196 for all wheel.

It's not it's the engine is responsive enough. It'll get up to speed. You mash that gas pedal to get on the highway. It gets on the highway. No problem. So the power, even those numbers that are low, that's not really a problem. But it is loud. Like when you mash the gas, even if you're not being aggressive, say you're just at a traffic light in regular city driving, it sounds like it is working very, very, very, very hard. It always sounds like it's working hard, especially

especially on the highway and even once you're up to speed and you're no longer accelerating, it's still kind of loud. That was probably my biggest gripe with this is that it was just I took a friend out for dinner and they're like, whoa. I'm like, yeah, it's kind of loud. literally thought like, what are you doing? I'm like, I'm not doing anything. It's the Prius. This is just how she sounds. So that was my big complaint about this. Have you driven the Prius? What did you think about the engine?

Sam Abuelsamid (05:13.069)
I have driven the Prius and the Prius plug-in hybrid. It's no longer called the Prime, it's just the plug-in hybrid now. And yeah, I agree. this is a phenomenon that is common to all of the front drive Toyota hybrids, all the transverse engine Toyota hybrids. Toyota's got two different hybrid systems. There's the system that they use on the...

Nicole Wakelin (05:18.125)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Nicole Wakelin (05:32.408)
Mm-hmm.

Sam Abuelsamid (05:41.741)
trucks and SUVs like the Sequoia and Tundra and Tacoma and a 4Runner. And then there's what's on all the others. And so this is their ECVT system. And, you know, I know I have complained about that in the past year. You know, Toyota's four cylinder engines and actually in all their applications, even on the longitudinal engine applications, their four cylinder engines do not sound very good. They're, they sound

Nicole Wakelin (06:05.443)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-mm.

Sam Abuelsamid (06:10.979)
I mean, they're great engines. They make plenty of power. They're very efficient, generally very reliable, but they sound bad.

Nicole Wakelin (06:12.941)
Right.

Nicole Wakelin (06:19.32)
They sound awful. that was such... The sad thing about it was like, if you could make this not sound like this, or if you could just add more sound deadening material between me and the engine so I didn't hear it sounding like that, it would be a much better car.

Sam Abuelsamid (06:35.383)
And the way the hybrid system works, the ECVT, because it's revving up, basically when you're accelerating, it'll rev up to about 4,000 RPM, which is where the peak torque of the engine is. And then the engine will just sit there and it'll be changing the ratio continuously as you accelerate. they call it a motorboating effect because that's kind of the way motorboats work. You rev it up and eventually the boat catches up to the speed of the engine. And it's just...

Nicole Wakelin (06:57.268)
Mmm. Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (07:04.447)
not a pleasant sound. And this is, you know, as good as Toyota's hybrids are in every other respect. This is why I prefer Honda's hybrid system, because it is much more pleasant to drive.

Nicole Wakelin (07:14.977)
Exactly.

And I think it's that, once upon a time, way back...

when the Prius was one of only a couple of hybrids, it wasn't so bad because you didn't have a lot of other hybrids to compare to. You didn't know how hybrids sounded. You didn't have a lot of other options, right? You couldn't go and buy 10 other vehicles that sort of accomplished the same thing. Now you can. So I think it's one of those things that does it have enough power? Yes. Does it handle well? Yeah, it handles fine. It's a pleasant car to drive aside from that sound. And it seems like a small factor.

that every time you accelerate, when your passengers hear that, when that noise, it's like annoying and it's almost, to me, it becomes stressful. This is why it becomes stressful. I know that I can merge into traffic. know in my logical brain that I have plenty of power to merge into that heavy highway traffic that's going like 70 miles an hour flying down the highway, but it sounds like I don't. So you have that sense of like, right? And you're like, come on, on, come come on. And you're going plenty fast enough. The sound doesn't match the performance.

Sam Abuelsamid (08:17.069)
Yeah, it sounds like it's about to blow up.

Nicole Wakelin (08:24.656)
So you have a sense that you are going to not accelerate quick enough and someone's going to be right on your rear bumper. That's not the reality, but that's how it sounds like every time. So to me, it's a stressful sound like that that really takes away from things, which is unfortunate because it does have enough power. It just doesn't sound like it does. And it was comfortable. I I found it comfortable inside. I had the 12.3-inch touchscreen. There's an 8-inch screen that's standard. think it's only

on higher trims at 12.3, and I think it's even an option on the Nightshade. So you either have an eight-inch screen, which isn't super large, or you have the 12.3-inch. You get Apple CarPlay and Red Auto. You get a couple USB-C ports front and back. You have a decent amount of cargo room, not as much as the last gen, and I don't have the number off the top of my head, but the last gen had more room than this one does. This is 23.8 cubic feet.

with rear seats up, still a good amount of space, still that hatchback so you can wedge in there stuff that wouldn't fit into a traditional trunk. And it still gets good fuel economy. it varies a lot. There's a lot of numbers because there's front-wheel drive, all-wheel drive, there's different trims, which means the car's all way a little bit different. So everything's getting, there's a couple of different fuel economy numbers. For the one that I had, it is 49 city, 50 highway for a 49 combined. That's solid fuel economy for a pretty well-equipped all-wheel drive.

You can do better, but you've got to lose the all-wheel drive, lose some features, whatever. So I don't think that it's, it does what a Prius is supposed to do, and that it gets good fuel economy. I feel like where I would like to see Toyota step up, and like you said, Sam, this engine, the sound of it, you got to do something, because it detracts significantly from the drive experience, and it makes you think that it's less than it is, in terms of the performance and the capability of merging. So that was my big dislike. Otherwise,

I like this. I thought it was good. And it is, let's see, $35,695. And the only thing that was added on to mine was the, I had a fixed glass roof, that's like $1,000. And it was an extra $735 for the 12.3 inch screen. So that's the nightshade plus those two little things added on. You win either way. You want to take a guess at delivery?

Sam Abuelsamid (10:47.407)
I'm gonna go with $12.95 again.

Nicole Wakelin (10:49.974)
you're close. It's weird number 1135?

This is what my friend Roni says, which I'm almost distrusting that this is strange number, but that's literally, say I have an official one this week. $11.35 is delivery processing and handling fees. So all told, $36,830 for this. Not bad. You're getting great fuel economy. You're getting Toyota, which the reliability is great, and the Toyota, you have them forever. Toyota's don't give up on you. You give up on it and just say, I'm moving on, and somebody else gets it. So it's a solid vehicle.

You just have to be prepared to deal with that sound. You have to, it's a sound and it's not a pleasant one.

Sam Abuelsamid (11:30.627)
Yeah, I think, you know, what I would generally recommend, you know, for anybody considering a Prius, is if you ha if you're able to plug in at home, just get the plug in hybrid because then, you know, you're getting 45 miles of electric driving range. So you're going to end up doing pretty much all your driving on electricity and, you know, and it's got more electrical power. So I think.

Nicole Wakelin (11:43.566)
Mm

Nicole Wakelin (11:49.663)
Mm-hmm.

Sam Abuelsamid (11:59.095)
If I recall correctly, even when you're accelerating, the engine doesn't feel like it's working as hard because it's using more of the electrical power to accelerate. And it's just, think it's a more pleasant driving experience, which is a shame because I really liked the design of the current generation Prius. Yeah, it's a good looking car. The only other complaint I have about it is it still has that tunnel style

Nicole Wakelin (12:12.323)
Mm-hmm.

Nicole Wakelin (12:18.466)
Yeah, it looks so good.

Sam Abuelsamid (12:28.513)
instrument cluster display like they had on the BZ-4X. And I'm guessing that, you know, like the, see the current Prius came out two years ago. So probably next year we'll see a mid cycle update for the Prius. And at that point they will probably update the interior with the same kind of stuff that they did to the BZ this year and get rid of that, that style of instrument cluster.

Nicole Wakelin (12:31.725)
Yeah.

Nicole Wakelin (12:43.532)
Mm-hmm.

Nicole Wakelin (12:52.835)
Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (12:57.263)
So you can actually see the cluster display in front of you instead of having the bottom half of it cut off by the steering wheel.

Nicole Wakelin (13:01.836)
Yeah. Yeah, it's so that and that's that is a wonky thing. Weirdly, that didn't bother me as much as the sound like every time I hit that gas pedal. It's the worst sound it reminds me. Russ had a Honda Civic hybrid back in the day when.

God, the girls were little like they, so I'm going to say maybe like, I don't know, 18 years ago or something. was a long time ago. And I just remember the first time I drove it. It was the first time I'd ever driven a hybrid in my life. And I got in like, is this okay? Is this, is this car? Okay. Is it going to make it? So it reminds me of that. And that is a very old hybrid, you know?

Sam Abuelsamid (13:38.659)
Yeah, and that was really more of a mild hybrid system anyway. It wasn't as powerful as the Toyota hybrid systems. The current generation, the last couple of generations of Honda hybrids really, with their two motor hybrid systems are a lot better. And they're basically much more similar mechanically to the Toyota system than they are different. But the way that Honda controls it, it's a much more pleasant driving experience.

Nicole Wakelin (13:42.381)
Yeah.

Nicole Wakelin (13:46.06)
Mm-mm.

Nicole Wakelin (13:54.648)
Yep.

Nicole Wakelin (13:59.811)
Mm-hmm.

Sam Abuelsamid (14:08.194)
Honda's four cylinder engines are just generally more pleasant to listen to than Toyota's. Even on the non-hybrid versions, if you get a Corolla, Corolla comes with a CVT if you don't get the hatchback with a manual. just the gas Corolla, very similar kind of experience to the hybrids. it's just, they're not great sounding engines.

Nicole Wakelin (14:12.45)
Mm-hmm.

Nicole Wakelin (14:37.067)
Mm-mm.

Sam Abuelsamid (14:37.261)
Same thing to the Tacoma and the 4Runner. Those four cylinders don't sound great.

Nicole Wakelin (14:43.404)
Yeah, I just don't.

Sam Abuelsamid (14:47.619)
All right. Excellent. so that's the, that's the Prius, latest. Yeah. The, latest Yolde Prius. all right. I, had the 2026 Genesis GV 70 3.5 T sport prestige all wheel drive. again, too much name. so this is the, this is the top of the line, top of the top of the line, GV 70.

Nicole Wakelin (14:51.862)
That is Yildir Pryas, yeah?

Nicole Wakelin (15:05.655)
Mmm.

too much name.

Sam Abuelsamid (15:17.871)
which I have liked the GV70 ever since it came out. There's two engine options available, two powertrain options available now. The 2.5 liter turbo four cylinder or the 3.5 liter twin turbo V6. And the V6 is, I don't remember how much power it has.

Nicole Wakelin (15:44.175)
That's it. You always have everything ready. I'm the one who's like, or horsepower V6. So 300, 300 horsepower and then 300 and then the 3.5 turbo is 375. Yep.

Sam Abuelsamid (15:47.567)
why doesn't it say how much per is it three hundred

Sam Abuelsamid (15:57.327)
Okay, yeah, that sounds right. So it you know, the four cylinders turbo is plenty of power 300 horsepower. But you know, 375 is more. And this is a quick little beast. That's a little I mean, you know, it's it's a midsize two row. You know, it's in the same class as say a BMW X3 or

Nicole Wakelin (16:04.942)
300 is a lot, yeah.

more!

Sam Abuelsamid (16:26.135)
see an Audi Q5 something like that. So it's a two row, five passenger crossover. It's a rear wheel drive, all wheel drive platform. So the engine sits longitudinally in the engine compartment. For 2025, I think, I think last year, the GV70 got a mid cycle update where they along

You know, and over the last year and a half or so, most of the Genesis models have gotten an interior update and most, most of the update is to the interior. There's not really anything notable changed on the exterior, but on the interior, they have given it a significant upgrade. they replaced, the separate screens with the infotainment screen. was sort of embedded in the dash and then, more traditional instrument cluster display under a hood with just.

the single long curved panel that we see on a lot of the Hyundai Motor Group vehicles now. Although in this case here, there's two 12.3 inch displays in there, but there isn't a seam like you would see in a Hyundai or Kia.

Where it looks like two separate displays. In fact, I think it I think it's actually a single display With the right hand side of it being having a touch sensor on it touch touch surface on it and then the instrument cluster area Is obviously no touch because you know, it's behind the steering wheel. You don't need to be touching that part Yeah, and you know they went to the new center console design with

Nicole Wakelin (18:10.338)
That would be weird.

Sam Abuelsamid (18:18.093)
rotary shifter, and then there's also a rotary control knob that you can use to interface with the infotainment. As I said, the infotainment is a touchscreen, but you can also control it from the rotary controller, which can be a little more convenient sometimes because it can be a bit of a reach because of the way the touchscreen is set up there.

Nicole Wakelin (18:31.395)
Mm-hmm.

Sam Abuelsamid (18:44.879)
It's got support for wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. The default Genesis system is also pretty good. One of the couple of main differences between the top two trim levels of the GV70, and of course, there we go. My screen just went black for a second there.

Nicole Wakelin (19:09.058)
You're in troubles today.

Sam Abuelsamid (19:10.423)
Yeah, so there's the Sport Advanced all-wheel drive and the Sport Prestige all-wheel drive. I had the Prestige. Probably the most notable differences between the two are 19-inch wheels on the Advanced versus 21-inch alloys on the Prestige. And also there's Nappa leather upholstery in the Prestige.

And the driver's seat in the Prestige also has an adjustable thigh support, which I always like to have.

Nicole Wakelin (19:46.35)
Do you actually, I was just gonna say, do you actually use the adjustable thigh support? Yeah?

Sam Abuelsamid (19:49.525)
I do when it, when it's available, because my, well, my proportions, you know, I've got, like longer thighs, shorter calves, you know, just the way, the way my body is proportioned, my hip to knee length is on the longer side. So I like having that, that little bit of extra support under my thighs. Yeah. I, I, I use that whenever it's, whenever it's available. and you know, the nice thing is depending on.

Nicole Wakelin (20:06.912)
Okay. So you do use, okay. All right.

Nicole Wakelin (20:15.118)
Fair enough.

Sam Abuelsamid (20:19.231)
shape your body or how the seat feels to you, you have the option not to extend it. Yes, exactly. So the, you know, the GV 70 is, you know, it's a very attractive vehicle. You know, it's as with all the other current genocide, genocide, Genesis is, it's got the, the, the split lighting theme. So you get the split horizontal.

Nicole Wakelin (20:23.416)
to ignore it. You don't have to use it if you don't want to.

Nicole Wakelin (20:39.47)
Genesis.

Sam Abuelsamid (20:45.007)
headlights in the front and then the split horizontal tail lamps in the back. And that's a theme that they're extending to their new race cars. Inside there's some carbon fiber trim in here. There's also by the media controller knob, there's a fingerprint sensor there. So if you own the vehicle, I didn't have a Genesis account set up for this car so I couldn't program.

the fingerprint sensor, but using the fingerprint sensor, you can start the car without having the key fob on you. So that gives you another way to get in and out. There's also a bunch of drive modes and also terrain modes, which, you know, there's off-road terrain modes, which, no, with 21-inch wheels and low-profile tires.

Nicole Wakelin (21:35.83)
You gonna go off-roading in this, Sam? No?

Sam Abuelsamid (21:43.651)
you don't want to you don't want to you don't need to there's no need for you to ever mess with the terrain modes. No, no, definitely not. Yeah. In fact, you know, the this this is the I don't know if I mentioned it on the show last week. When when this car was delivered, I walked out in the driveway. And I could immediately see that the right rear tire was flat. Yeah, and it on the way to being delivered here it had

Nicole Wakelin (21:44.684)
Yeah.

This is not the car to buy if you're going to go off-roading. It's other cars, not this one.

Nicole Wakelin (22:08.059)
right!

Sam Abuelsamid (22:13.081)
picked something up and had a notable gash in the tread and in from the tread into the sidewall area. And so I put the spare tire on it and waited for you know that the guys from Drive Shop came over the next day with another car, another GV 70 that had been used the previous day by some executive from Hyundai who was in town for for a conference. And so

The wheels look really nice. They're these nice five spoke wheels and they have two red stripes on each of the spokes, which gives it a little bit sportier look. They're a dark gray painted wheel and then the red stripes just give you that extra little accent there. So they look really sharp. But I genuinely enjoyed driving this car. It's not necessarily the most fuel efficient car.

Nicole Wakelin (22:59.63)
Little oomph.

Sam Abuelsamid (23:12.055)
out there with the 3.5 turbo, but it's not bad. You know, did about 22 miles per gallon. I had to, excuse me, drive back and forth to Detroit a couple of times. The back seat with the driver's seat set at my position. I had plenty of room in the back seat, so that wasn't an issue. There's good cargo space. One of the things that they have on a lot of the Hyundai Motor Group vehicles is on the inboard side of the front passenger seat. There's a couple of switches there.

So that, you know, if there's nobody sitting in the front passenger seat, somebody in the, in the rear seat can actually slide the front passenger seat forward and back, or actually flip it downwards. if they, if they want more room. So, you know, if this vehicle is being used to drive people around, as opposed to driving it, you, you can do that fairly easily from, from the back seat. So that's a nice little detail, for a luxury vehicle.

Nicole Wakelin (24:08.259)
Mm-hmm.

Sam Abuelsamid (24:10.927)
What else? one thing I did know when I put the spare tire on, I pulled out the spare tire and put it on. The spare tire is actually also an alloy. It's a mini spare, but it's an alloy wheel. It's not a steel wheel. Yeah, with the spare tire. It doesn't matter. It's smaller, but it's still an alloy wheel, which was an interesting detail. Yeah. What else? In sport mode,

Nicole Wakelin (24:23.726)
really? It matches the rest of the wheels? Okay.

Nicole Wakelin (24:33.73)
That's kinda cool.

Sam Abuelsamid (24:40.057)
You know, this is a genuinely fun car to drive on some curvy roads and with when you're using Your phone projection for navigation Normally you can show If you're using the built-in infotainment and using navigation you can flip through a couple of different modes on the on the Cluster screen and one of them shows the map

So it shows the gauges on top of the map. So you see the map with your route right in the middle there. And then if you're using Google Maps or Apple Maps, it will actually display that map in the cluster screen. So you don't have to look away. Plus with the heads up display that's on the Sport Prestige, it'll also show you the navigation prompts in the HUD as well. And one other detail, when you...

put it into, when you go through the different drive modes in, in comfort mode, the, the, the virtual needles on the gauges show up as sort of a sort of a orangey salmon color. As you flip through the modes, when you go to sport mode, the needles turn to red. And then when you go to sport plus mode, they go to sort of a glowing

Nicole Wakelin (25:54.21)
Mm-hmm.

Nicole Wakelin (26:00.015)
Mmm.

Sam Abuelsamid (26:07.159)
almost a fiery red. So if you watched any of the Star Wars sequel trilogy, Kylo Ren, they basically some clearly whoever did did this design was a fan of Kylo Ren's lightsaber. Because that's what it looks like. It looks yeah, it looks like this, you know, fiery red for the gauge needles. So it was a fun little touch.

Nicole Wakelin (26:21.558)
Is that what it reminds you of?

Nicole Wakelin (26:27.052)
That's funny.

Nicole Wakelin (26:31.03)
It's in a, so you're saying red and apparently I'm on to new movies and all I could think of was the new Tron movie that's coming out, Tron Aries, and it's all red. All the blue lines from Tron turn red. So in my head, it was Tron.

Sam Abuelsamid (26:44.399)
And the GV70 does not yet have a hands-free driving mode. It's got the Hyundai Motor Group Highway Drive Assist, which is a hands-on lane centering and adaptive cruise. But it does have a driver monitor camera on the steering column. So there's an infrared camera. So it will give you alerts if it detects that you're looking away from the road.

for too long or if you appear to be drowsy or inattentive for some reason, or if you're having a medical emergency and you're not watching the road, then it will start to give you alerts and eventually bring the vehicle to a stop if you don't respond. Yeah. So the one that I had, let's find the right tab here, was finished in monorad paint.

Nicole Wakelin (27:29.356)
Yep, which is good.

Sam Abuelsamid (27:40.219)
which was a $650 option. And this is a very red, not quite like a soul crystal red, but a very attractive red. The only other option that was on here was the optional $30 NFC key card. So you can just put that in your wallet and tap that on the door when you're ready to go. Grand total. Well, first off, let me

Nicole Wakelin (27:42.702)
Mmm.

Nicole Wakelin (28:01.271)
Okay.

Sam Abuelsamid (28:09.743)
say the the base price for a GV70 with the four-cylinder engine is $48,985. As delivered, the one that I drove was $72,225.

Nicole Wakelin (28:28.514)
Which is a lot, that is a deal for what that is.

Sam Abuelsamid (28:30.935)
Yeah, I mean, if you compare this to, you know, say like an X3M, you know, or an SQ5, you know, which would have comparable performance, you know, similar size, those are going to be more expensive. So it's not an inexpensive car, but it is a not insane amount, you know, given the segment that it's in, you know, compared to its direct competitors.

Nicole Wakelin (28:36.907)
Mm-hmm.

Nicole Wakelin (28:43.116)
Mm-hmm.

Nicole Wakelin (28:56.941)
Right?

Sam Abuelsamid (28:58.927)
And these are now the GV 70s are now built in Alabama. They're built in Montgomery, Alabama. They started off building just the GV 70 electrified there and they've added the gas versions there as well. So they're built in the U S so not as much tariff content. There's some, there's going to be some tariff on there because 64 % of the parts are still coming from Korea.

But you know, it's not it's not the full amount. So you want to guess at the destination charge?

Nicole Wakelin (29:36.334)
1495?

Sam Abuelsamid (29:38.338)
so close. 1450. Yeah.

Nicole Wakelin (29:40.38)
I was really close. Okay. That's about as close as I ever get. don't even win when Robbie's not here. I still can't get it.

Sam Abuelsamid (29:47.097)
Hahaha

So that's the 2026 GV70.

Nicole Wakelin (29:53.665)
I like that car. That car was on my list when I bought my car. That was one of the ones I was considering, to be honest. That was on there.

Sam Abuelsamid (30:03.417)
Were you considering the gas one or the electric?

Nicole Wakelin (30:05.774)
It was going back and forth. I wasn't I was uncertain. I had not gotten that far. But I was looking at I was like, well, that was part of it. comes as gas or electric so you can get either one when you get it. And I was like, I don't know. don't know. But that was that was on my list. It's so much I like that car. Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (30:21.507)
Yeah, no, it's a really nice car. And one of the nice things about the EV version is that the charge port is in the grille. So, yeah.

Nicole Wakelin (30:32.61)
Which I love. think that's, I love, you know, because it is funny, you know, you drive up and having to back in or having to pull in, if you could pull in and charge cars, it would be easy. But backing up, you know, I hate backing up to charging ports. It's like, you're always doing this like, okay, am I straight or am going to hit it? And sometimes there's random stuff and sometimes the port, the actual units and some of them are very close to the curb, you know, and others are a little further back from the curb. You're like, how close am I to knocking over that giant expensive electric thing behind me? makes me nervous.

Sam Abuelsamid (31:00.377)
Well, you know, and especially if you're going to use a supercharger, you know, most of the superchargers have very short cables. So having it upfront, yeah, having it upfront makes it a lot easier. You can usually reach it.

Nicole Wakelin (31:05.386)
Mm-hmm. Yes. They do. So you have to get close. Mm-hmm.

Nicole Wakelin (31:13.61)
I like that. think that's a great idea. I think that I wish everybody I wish they just did that. I don't know why Nissan did that on the Leaf and then they changed it because now they have two ports. But like at the front thing, that was the way to do this everybody.

Sam Abuelsamid (31:26.887)
All right. Let's move on. So this week, the Center for Automotive Research, which is a nonprofit organization here in Ann Arbor, they've been holding this conference. This year was actually the 60th year of the management briefing seminar. And this year they moved it. They used to do it in Traverse City every summer, beginning of August. And in recent years, especially since the pandemic,

Nicole Wakelin (31:45.099)
Okay.

Nicole Wakelin (31:50.414)
Mm-hmm.

Sam Abuelsamid (31:55.983)
That's been more of a challenge. It's been more of a challenge for people to get time off and get budgets to travel up there. So this year they moved it to downtown Detroit. Actually not so much downtown, it's actually in Corktown in Detroit to the Michigan Central Station, which is fantastic venue.

Nicole Wakelin (32:15.382)
I still need to get to see that. have not been there yet. Somehow I drove by it once. was like, there it is. And I did not have time to stop. I still want to see that. I know. I know. I've got to take a walk through because everyone says it's just phenomenal.

Sam Abuelsamid (32:22.521)
When when you're in Detroit, you definitely got to stop by and take a walk through the lobby area through the ground floor Yeah Anyway, they MBS was at Michigan Central and I did a bunch of interviews with various people which I'm gonna say for next week because both Robbie and Nicole are abandoning me next week so patrons patreon supporters They've already got it. They've already heard these interviews

Nicole Wakelin (32:43.374)
I'm sorry.

Sam Abuelsamid (32:50.399)
But next week I will be including these interviews in the show. And so that includes a conversation with Michael Dunn from Dunn Insights. Yeah, we talked about China and I also talked with a couple of folks from Brembow about breaks and Mike Dowsett from Magna.

Nicole Wakelin (32:58.56)
I love Michael Dunn. He's amazing.

Nicole Wakelin (33:08.014)
Mm-hmm.

Sam Abuelsamid (33:15.159)
about what they're doing with, he's the chief engineer, head of eDrive systems at Magna. So we talked about hybrids and plug-in hybrids and eRevs and battery electrics and what Magna is doing. So those will all be on next week's show. But for this week, I didn't get a chance to talk to Gil Pratt. Gil Pratt is the, I've talked to him before and there's a couple of interviews with him in the archives somewhere. But Gil is the,

Chief Scientist for Toyota and he's also the head of the Toyota Research Institute. And TRI does a lot of interesting stuff. One of the things that he talked about in his keynote this week was some work that they've been doing with behavioral science. Toyota has long been about trying to reduce carbon emissions from vehicles.

And that's why they were the first to bring a modern production hybrid to market. this is why, apart from the BZ, which is just battery electric only, every other model, all the other models that Toyota currently sells in North America have a hybrid powertrain option. And many of them are hybrid only. But they also offer a couple of plug-in hybrids.

And one of the challenges with plugin hybrids, of course, is getting people to, you know, plug them in because you and Russell on a plug-in hybrid. Do you, do you plug it in regularly?

Nicole Wakelin (34:50.732)
We do. We do actually, we trade off between the the Wagoneer, his car, and if I happen to have an EV for a press vehicle, but we do plug it in at home. do. We actually do. So we even we bought our level two charger before we had any electric vehicles. So yes, we're in the minority, though.

Sam Abuelsamid (35:02.711)
Okay, that's good.

Sam Abuelsamid (35:11.599)
Excellent. Because a lot of people apparently buy plug-in hybrids and then don't plug them in, which is kind of wasteful because now you've got several hundred pounds of dead weight that you're carrying around, which means you're going to have worse fuel economy and your handling is going to be worse and you're not getting any benefit out of it. Plus there's the wasted materials and energy that went into building that battery. And you're getting worse fuel economy than if you just drove a regular hybrid.

So if you live somewhere, you know, if you are not able to plug in your car, don't waste the money on a plug-in hybrid. Just get a regular hybrid. Yeah. But if you do buy a plug-in hybrid, you know, Toyota has been doing some research on how to get people to plug it in more often. And, well, one of the things they came up with was trying to,

Nicole Wakelin (35:41.528)
Right.

Nicole Wakelin (35:49.678)
If you can't plug it in, don't get that power to there's no reason to do it. There's absolutely no reason to do it. Yeah.

Nicole Wakelin (36:03.34)
and what do they come up with?

Sam Abuelsamid (36:10.081)
Adjust drivers behavior a little bit. Well, know, basic. Basically, they're just all they're really doing is they're, you know, they're just trying to remind people, hey, you got a plug in hybrid, plug it in, you know, and then you're going to save money on gas because, you're going to, you know, the both the RAV4 and the Prius plugins, you know, get 40 plus miles of electric driving range.

Nicole Wakelin (36:13.164)
That sounds scary. Like you're going to, we're going to adjust your behavior. Okay.

Nicole Wakelin (36:28.258)
Plug it in.

Nicole Wakelin (36:39.853)
Mm-hmm.

Sam Abuelsamid (36:40.247)
which, you know, that covers more than 80 % of daily driving for Americans. know, 80 % of people drive less than 40 miles a day. And so if you've got 40 miles of electric range, you plug it in every day, you're not going to use any gas.

Nicole Wakelin (36:49.208)
Mm-hmm.

Nicole Wakelin (36:57.858)
Yep. Russ hardly ever puts gas in his car. In fact, it periodically gets to a point when it says like, you must use the gas. We're not letting you use the, like use some gas for a change buddy. And he'll use the gas. Yeah. Right.

Sam Abuelsamid (37:05.956)
Yeah.

Yeah, well, mean, all plug-in hybrids have what they call a maintenance mode. Chevy was first with this with the Volt, where every once in a while it will run the engine for a little bit with the goal of being able, going through at least one tank of gas a year. So you don't want the gas sitting there in your tank for a year or more. Yeah.

Nicole Wakelin (37:31.062)
Exactly. So I mean, it's a good reminder, not complaining, but that's how often he doesn't, excuse me, doesn't need to use the gas engine is that it's like, Hey, you need to use that buddy.

Sam Abuelsamid (37:42.979)
So what TRI did was they came up with a modified version of the Toyota Connect app. And they did it with a couple of different vehicles. And some vehicles they had the smartphone app and others they had the prompt in the car. that when you get in, when you park the car, when you're about to get out, if the battery level is low, it will prompt you.

to plug in the car. That's all it took. Yeah. And

Nicole Wakelin (38:14.422)
Okay, that's fair. That's it. Did it work? Did it get people to actually plug in?

Sam Abuelsamid (38:21.769)
It did, you so they, you they had a control group and they had a group that got these prompts. And let me find the numbers here. But they found that with these prompts, they increased the charging by 10 % for plugin hybrid drivers. It's not a huge amount, but you know, it's better than nothing.

Nicole Wakelin (38:41.902)
10%. Okay. Here in the...

Nicole Wakelin (38:47.534)
Okay, what is it? So in the US, yeah, charge up by 10%. In Japan, drivers shifted to charging to peak renewable energy hours by 15. Okay, that's a little different. Yeah, that's different. Okay.

Sam Abuelsamid (38:55.809)
Right. this is the is the this is a different experiment. Yeah. So the other thing that Dr. Pratt talked about was that, you know, for you know, for years we've been told, you know, it's best to plug in your car at night because that's when there's the lowest demand on on the grid, which is true. But as more and more renewables have been added to our

Nicole Wakelin (39:19.01)
Mm-hmm.

Sam Abuelsamid (39:24.815)
power generation ecosystem. And we've got more, especially solar. We've got a lot of, especially in places like California, Arizona, Texas, we often have a lot of excess solar capacity available during the day. You know, this past year, you know, in California, you know, from spring and all through the summer, we've generally had more solar generation capability

than demand. So basically, it's been almost 100 % solar use during peak periods of the day. so you might as well, in that case, plug in during the day when you've got that renewable energy available. then, so in most cases, that's probably going to be workplace charging or if you're going out shopping, whatever, if you're not at work.

Nicole Wakelin (39:55.874)
Mm-hmm.

Nicole Wakelin (40:13.4)
Mm-hmm.

Sam Abuelsamid (40:24.571)
but that, that sort of behavior is better because you can take advantage of renewable energy. And so what they found from that was, with both plug-in hybrid and battery electric drivers, that the, prompts, shifted, charging to, daytime charging by 59%. and added, about 30 minutes of daytime charging per vehicle overall.

Nicole Wakelin (40:53.954)
Which is significant. Okay.

Sam Abuelsamid (40:55.021)
Yeah, yeah, that's definitely an improvement. And the other thing that they found overall was by getting more plug-in hybrid drivers to actually charge their vehicles so that they weren't using gas as much, they found that the satisfaction of American plug-in hybrid drivers with their vehicles increased by 16%.

Nicole Wakelin (41:23.086)
That's a pretty good improvement.

Sam Abuelsamid (41:24.771)
Because now, yeah, I mean, now these drivers realized, wow, I'm not using any gas. So they were more satisfied with their cars.

Nicole Wakelin (41:30.702)
Now you're suddenly great. Which is funny because it's like all you had to do is just plug it in to begin with people, but like remind people, plug it in. That's a funny thing, though, like when you really think about it, it's like I'm going to go buy a plug-in hybrid because if I plug it in, I just use electricity and eliminate gas. Dang it. I'm still having to use gas because you're not plugging in like it's such like a logic disconnect there. Like if you're not getting the satisfaction you think, try using the car. The reason you bought it, the way that it was designed to be used.

Sam Abuelsamid (41:58.521)
Yeah, you know, I paid more for this thing. Why am I not? Why am I not getting benefits out of this? And it's like you got to do is plug it in and you good So So some some interesting interesting stuff that they found and I think they're gonna be rolling this out to To their production apps in the in the next year or two probably So they you doing these just-in-time reminders

Nicole Wakelin (42:04.654)
us.

Nicole Wakelin (42:09.411)
See?

Sam Abuelsamid (42:27.375)
has had a notable impact relative to the control group that didn't get the reminders.

Nicole Wakelin (42:34.584)
Good.

Sam Abuelsamid (42:35.437)
Yeah. All right. How do you feel about having all virtual buttons having everything controlled through your touchscreen in your car?

Nicole Wakelin (42:44.842)
I hate the idea. Hate it. Hate. I really hate it. I really hate it, Sam.

Sam Abuelsamid (42:48.143)
Do you really hate it?

Okay. Well, apparently more and more automakers are hearing that message because Mercedes-Benz is there. They're one of the companies. In fact, it was their head of software that was speaking with AutoCar at the IAA show in Munich. It was Magnus Oster Osberg. And he acknowledged that, yeah.

We're, we're hearing the message from our customers. They, they don't like having everything being touch controls and they are moving back to putting more physical controls in there. And it starts off with the new CLA and the GLC that they're launching this year. and you know, for those, because a lot of the, the, like this, the GLC, you know, has this coast to coast display. and there's, starting with, putting.

Nicole Wakelin (43:45.613)
Right.

Sam Abuelsamid (43:49.965)
more of the controls back on the steering wheel, getting away from the capacitive controls that they've had on the steering wheel in recent years, going back to rollers and rockers and buttons on the steering wheel. And in upcoming models, they will gradually be adding more physical controls back in the center stack and other places, at least for the most commonly used stuff. Because what they don't want to do is they don't want to clutter things up too much.

Nicole Wakelin (44:21.122)
physical controls I'm all for. Bring them back. Bring them back. I don't know where we thought that this was everything in the touch was a good idea.

Sam Abuelsamid (44:32.655)
You know, I was talking with Adam Ismael from The Drive this week. He called me up for a story he was doing on this. And, and where, you know, where a lot of this came from is, you know, starting with Tesla, you know, when they did the Model S, you know, they were trying to take cost out of it, you know, because it costs a lot to engineer all those physical controls and then to, to manufacture it, to assemble it. You know, that's, that's a lot of

Nicole Wakelin (44:48.302)
Mmm.

Nicole Wakelin (44:55.032)
to do all the buttons. Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (45:00.949)
extra manufacturing complexity, you know, to put all these pieces together. And so they, you know, and they also wanted some flexibility to make updates and changes. You know, when you do it as virtual controls, you can change the interface up. It doesn't have to stay the same, which in and of itself is not necessarily a good thing because, you know, in the interface that you're using to control the vehicle, you probably want it to be familiar. You don't want to be looking around for stuff.

But that's a whole other issue. And then when they did the Model 3 and then the Model Y, they wanted to take it to an extreme and eliminate the visible vents in the dashboard. wanted a very minimalistic looking interior. And then they did something stupid that too many other automakers, yes, we're talking to you Lincoln and Polestar and Porsche and now BMW actually have copied.

Nicole Wakelin (45:32.023)
Yeah.

Nicole Wakelin (45:48.974)
We did something stupid.

Sam Abuelsamid (45:58.659)
which is having the vent controls in the touchscreen interface. Bad, bad idea. Don't ever do that. But at least Mercedes-Benz kept the physical vent controls. I think last year we saw Hyundai do a mid-cycle update of the Tucson and the Santa Cruz, and they went from that all touch center panel to adding more physical buttons back in there.

Nicole Wakelin (46:04.362)
god, I hate that so much.

Nicole Wakelin (46:10.658)
Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (46:28.121)
Volkswagen is starting to move back to physical controls. I think hopefully this is a trend we're going to see across the industry to find the right balance in there between physical controls for the stuff that you use most often, especially things that you're going to be using while you're driving. And, you know, then having some touch controls, because I mean, part of the reason why we went in this direction, because we have, you know, this is like where iDrive started 25 years ago with BMW. They came up with the iDrive system.

because there were so many features being added into the car that the buttons became overwhelming. so they came up with iDrive as a way to try to find a balance. And it's kind of shifted too far in the opposite direction of decluttering. So hopefully we'll see more of this in the coming years.

Nicole Wakelin (47:16.888)
Mm-hmm.

Nicole Wakelin (47:21.118)
Yeah, that would make me happy. Put everything back. Put the buttons back, people.

Sam Abuelsamid (47:24.343)
Yeah. All right. Let's see what's next on the list here. IHS, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. know, every year they buy a whole bunch of vehicles and they crash test them. They do all kinds of testing on these things. And they've just done a round of testing with seven different EVs and

Nicole Wakelin (47:49.326)
Mm-hmm.

Sam Abuelsamid (47:51.723)
One of the things they do is periodically they update the tests. They update the way they do the tests because the industry follows what IHS is doing. They want to get top safety pick and top safety pick plus. You look at companies like Hyundai and Kia, they heavily advertise all the top safety pick plus vehicles they have. And so the industry doesn't want to get left behind. as

Nicole Wakelin (48:03.626)
Mm-hmm.

Nicole Wakelin (48:11.406)
It's a big deal. Yep.

Sam Abuelsamid (48:18.831)
you know, as the tests are done and they see that, okay, I didn't do so well on this thing. They make design changes to do better on those tests in future years. You know, a notable one in recent years was the small offset rigid barrier test, you know, where, you know, the vehicle has crashed into a rigid barrier with where it's set so that it overlaps 25 % of the vehicle's width. So if the vehicle is, you know, six feet wide, you know, it'll,

the barrier will be overlapped by one and a half feet. When they first started doing that, when IHS first started doing that about 10 years ago, 10, 12 years ago, most cars did really poorly on that. And that's actually a pretty realistic test, very representative of what often happens in the real world. Yeah, somebody, yeah.

Nicole Wakelin (49:00.557)
Mm-hmm.

Nicole Wakelin (49:07.288)
Cause that's the moment. Yeah. Like that you see like, my gosh, you're to hit someone and you both veer or one of you veers and you you're clipping each other. Essentially. You're not like smack head on. You're partly head on and you're just kidding the sides here. Yeah. So it's.

Sam Abuelsamid (49:16.29)
Yeah, it's

Yeah, it's a really hard scenario to design for, but cars have gotten so much better with that. so, you know, what IHS does is every few years, they update some of the tests, you know, and raise the bar, make it tougher and tougher. And this year they did a new moderate overlap. They updated their moderate overlap tests. So they've been doing the moderate overlap for a while. In the past, they only measured the impact on the driver dummy.

Nicole Wakelin (49:22.958)
Mm-hmm.

Nicole Wakelin (49:35.853)
Mm-hmm.

Sam Abuelsamid (49:49.591)
now they also have a passenger in the rear seat behind the driver, or at least a, a crash test dummy behind the driver. Not yes. No. and, so now you've got, you know, they've got the impact on two pass two people in the vehicle, on that side. And, not everybody did so well on this. So they tested the BMW I four, the blazer, EV, the F 150 lightning.

Nicole Wakelin (49:57.039)
Not a real human. They don't test with real people.

Nicole Wakelin (50:07.554)
Mm-hmm.

Sam Abuelsamid (50:19.875)
the Nissan Aria, the Cybertruck, Model 3, and the ID Buzz. The BMW, the Chevy, the Cybertruck, and the ID Buzz all got good ratings. That's the highest rating for the moderate overlap test. The F-150 Lightning got a poor.

Nicole Wakelin (50:27.778)
Mm-hmm.

Nicole Wakelin (50:43.726)
Which kind of surprised me. I was not expecting that. When I saw a poro, I'm like, oh gosh, that like of these vehicles, was, it got the worst rating in the bunch.

Sam Abuelsamid (50:45.399)
Yeah, I know.

Sam Abuelsamid (50:53.773)
Yeah, the I4 also, you know, one of the, thing that they evaluate is the headlights, the quality of the headlights. the I4, depending on which trim level of the I4 you get, you get different headlights and on the base level headlights, they got a poor rating for that and a marginal for the upgraded lights. The cyber truck got a poor for its headlights. most of them got acceptables. and so,

Nicole Wakelin (51:14.606)
Mm-hmm.

Sam Abuelsamid (51:23.737)
Check out the link in the show notes. You can see all of the test results, but definitely some mixed results for all of these, which is, the thing is even now where they've got poor results, if you compare these to vehicles from 10, 15 years ago, a poor today is vastly better than the results would have been 10 or 15 years ago.

Nicole Wakelin (51:49.153)
It's true because you're exactly right. So if you look at this, you're like, well, I had a, you know, this old car and it was rated great. Yeah. But if you tested that older car today, it probably would not do well. Like because they're constantly sort of raising the bar for what they want automakers to do. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. It encourages them to continue.

to develop vehicles that are safer, to come up with new ways to make it affordable to build a car, but still build a car that's safe. So I think it's a good thing as they sort of slightly adjust these all the time. It makes us all safer. Honestly, it was one of the reasons that I decided to get rid of my last car, because it was a 2010, very low mileage, nothing really wrong with it. But I just like, gosh, that is like that is so old now, like safety wise, that 2010 is.

Sam Abuelsamid (52:31.791)
things practically new compared to my car. 1990. It's 36 years old.

Nicole Wakelin (52:34.094)
We didn't know you. year is yours? You're Miata. What's your Miata? Yeah. See yours is ancient. Mine was just old. Yours is ancient. But yeah, but like that, if you look at the technologies that were on those older cars and you think, well, I used to this all the time. Yeah. But if you knew what it had, if you knew them, what you know now, you know, those, the newer cars are so, so much safer. So that even when cars don't perform as well, they're still much safer than cars were, like you said, 10, 15, 20 years ago.

Sam Abuelsamid (53:02.787)
Yeah. And according to the IHS, the Lightning got a poor for that moderate overlap test. The Nissan Aria got a marginal. In the case of the Aria, it said the restraints worked well to control the motion of the rear dummy during the crash, but injury metrics showed a high risk of chest injuries. For the Lightning, measurements, both of them offered good protection for the driver, but for the rear passenger.

Measurements taken from the rear dummies showed a high risk of not only chest injuries, but also injuries to the head or neck. In addition to the rear dummies, lap belt moved from the ideal position on the pelvis onto the abdomen, which increases the risk of internal injuries. So my guess is that probably in the next year or so, I don't think that they have tested the gas F-150 with this new moderate overlap test yet.

Nicole Wakelin (53:37.302)
Ouch.

Nicole Wakelin (53:44.269)
Wow.

Nicole Wakelin (53:51.02)
Mm-hmm.

Sam Abuelsamid (54:00.609)
And it's got the same structure, it uses the same belts and everything, it's the same cab. And even though the Lightning sales volumes are not huge, I'm guessing that Ford will probably do an update to these systems probably by next year. Yeah.

Nicole Wakelin (54:14.806)
Yeah, I would guess that too. Yeah.

Cause a lot of times the automakers do when they, when they receive kind of feedback on this, the IHS is like, this doesn't work.

this isn't quite what you thought, they will adjust it. They're like, whoops, as soon as we can fix this, we're going to going forward, we have adjusted this little thing or that little thing to make it safer. And they'll even sometimes have it retested. So that's how you get these things sometimes. What will say like the 2025 measures this way, but 2025 is built after, you know, July 3rd, or have this rating because they literally change it. If it's something they can change, they'll do it as quickly as they can. Yes.

Sam Abuelsamid (54:28.878)
yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (54:51.075)
Yeah, especially for safety stuff like this.

Nicole Wakelin (54:54.251)
What do you, I'm gonna skip down though. What do you think's gonna happen with ARIA? Do you think anything's gonna change with the ARIA to make those crash tests?

Sam Abuelsamid (55:00.367)
I suspect that the Aria will probably not get any changes anytime soon. Well, actually, I shouldn't necessarily say that because for model year 2026, which is starting roughly about now, there will be no Aria in the North American lineup for Nissan. Yeah, it was revealed this week that the Aria is going away. It hasn't been a huge seller for Nissan since it launched.

Nicole Wakelin (55:06.228)
And why is that?

Nicole Wakelin (55:14.004)
Mm-hmm. Like, nowish.

Nicole Wakelin (55:21.355)
Mm-hmm. It goes poof.

Nicole Wakelin (55:30.027)
Nope.

Sam Abuelsamid (55:30.063)
Although this year has been its best year to date, but it hasn't done particularly well. But it's still going to be available overseas, so it's still going be in other markets. So we could see Nissan make some updates to the Aria, just because it's... Yeah, yeah. We just won't benefit from it. Yeah.

Nicole Wakelin (55:44.13)
That's true. Yeah. Just not here.

We won't know it over here. Well, you know, and it actually doesn't really surprise me. Aria is going away because it wasn't it wasn't doing well here. It didn't get, think, the buzz and the traction they were looking for when they first announced it and first put it into production. But the new leaf is getting incredible buzz. Like people really, really like the new leaf. So it's it feels like a pretty solid strategy. I can see why Aria would go and leave would stay.

Sam Abuelsamid (56:17.487)
Yeah. And Nissan only sold 9,345 Arias last year in 12 months, which is not great. Although through July of this year, they sold 11,600. So yeah.

Nicole Wakelin (56:30.338)
But this year such a weird number because of all the because the the what you would call the the tax incentives are going away. I feel like it pushed stuff earlier in the year. And so, you know, so I feel like this is a weird year to look at the sales because they were heavily frontloaded, I guess. And you don't know what's going to happen after.

Sam Abuelsamid (56:49.261)
Yeah, it'll be interesting to look at the numbers for the whole year, come January.

Nicole Wakelin (56:53.494)
Right. And to see if they literally fall off a cliff in September, which might even, or after September 30th, which might even not necessarily mean EV sales have really declined. If they stay whole, it's just, you wonder if they're just going to like everyone bought them first nine months of the year.

Sam Abuelsamid (57:06.317)
Yeah, where you might have had somewhat more even sales over the course of the year, you'll see it compressed mostly into the first nine months.

Nicole Wakelin (57:10.935)
Right.

into the first nine months because we have now what you have nine days 30 days has nine days to secure your. EV purchase and still take advantage rates in the September 30th is when it's you have to have it all signed on the dotted line.

Sam Abuelsamid (57:28.047)
Yeah, so you gotta have a signed purchase contract and make at least one payment by September 30th. So even if you haven't actually taken possession of the vehicle yet on September 30th, as long as you've made the first payment on your signed purchase agreement, the IRS will still let you claim the 7,500 bucks. Yeah.

Nicole Wakelin (57:37.805)
Right.

Nicole Wakelin (57:43.298)
You'll be clear.

Nicole Wakelin (57:47.118)
So nine days people move it or lose it.

Sam Abuelsamid (57:52.995)
Yeah. And just for comparison, you know, with the Aria, Ford sold 21,785 Mach-E's through the first six months. So that's, you know, almost, almost double the number of Arias. Yeah.

Nicole Wakelin (58:06.35)
Yeah, huge difference. Yeah, when you look at that, I mean, you see, that's huge. You can see why they didn't. You can see why they didn't keep it. It makes sense. It was a nice car. was decent enough. But yeah, you can see why it didn't make it.

Sam Abuelsamid (58:22.553)
But I think the Leaf is going to have a very different sales trajectory because the way they've priced it, 300 miles of range for the S Plus model, as we talked about last week, starting at 31 and change with delivery. think it's going to be very interesting to watch sales of that and then the Bolt starting around the end of the year, beginning of January. And then as we get into next year, the Slate.

Nicole Wakelin (58:37.452)
Mm-hmm.

Sam Abuelsamid (58:52.399)
And then at the end of next year, the Ford truck, and I think we'll be seeing some other lower cost EVs coming to market as well. Kia's got the EV3 and EV4 coming. Hyundai's gonna have some additional models.

Nicole Wakelin (59:03.959)
Yeah, I agree.

Nicole Wakelin (59:13.166)
I'm still super excited about the Leaf. I always thought it was... I don't know what I was expecting. I think I thought, it's going be fine. The Leaf. But it was good. Like it wasn't just fine. It was genuinely good. I am super impressed with this little car. you're looking for like an affordable electric vehicle, go buy a Leaf. I love that thing.

Sam Abuelsamid (59:16.503)
Mm-hmm. It was really good.

Sam Abuelsamid (59:35.791)
Maybe you can get a Nissan dealer to trade you for the Wagoneer.

Nicole Wakelin (59:39.374)
I could get two.

Sam Abuelsamid (59:43.215)
All right. Let's see. So let's stick with Nissan for a moment. You know, as we've talked about, Nissan's having some challenges with their business. Sales globally have not been exceptional. They've been losing a bit of money. And earlier this year, they replaced their CEO, their global CEO, with, you know,

Nicole Wakelin (59:48.696)
Yeah.

Nicole Wakelin (59:54.53)
Mm-hmm.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:00:12.013)
with Ivan Espinosa, who was formerly their head of product planning. He's now running the whole business. And in addition to ditching the Aria, they have also decided to make some organizational changes with their design studios. So Nissan has a bunch of studios around the world, several in Japan, as well as

actually two studios here in the U S and in Brazil, in the UK, in China. Um, and, um, they, uh, they're closing two of the studios, uh, Nissan design America in San Diego, uh, which is, mean, that one's been around for decades, uh, since at least the 1980s, I think maybe even back to the seventies. Um, and they're also closing Nissan design, Latin America and Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Nicole Wakelin (01:01:01.666)
Mm-hmm.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:01:10.223)
So they're shutting down those studios. Nissan does have another studio in LA, which they call Studio 6, which has been an advanced creative studio, which is focused more on, I'd say, exploring emerging consumer trends with a focus on the evolving global lifestyle and technology cultures that shape the long-term experiences of Nissan and Infiniti. That will become the primary US design hub. So I think

Nicole Wakelin (01:01:28.46)
Ooh. Mm.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:01:38.861)
They're probably going to take on some of the responsibilities of what the San Diego studio was doing. Although I think they probably won't be doing as much as what was being done in San Diego.

Nicole Wakelin (01:01:46.669)
Right.

Nicole Wakelin (01:01:52.43)
Yeah, does that mean a lot of people are going to be out at Nissan? Do you think they'll like?

Sam Abuelsamid (01:01:57.327)
Um, I mean, I don't think it's a huge number of people. Uh, you know, typically these studios, you know, you're not talking about thousands of people working there. Yeah. Uh, it's, you know, the numbers are probably, I would guess probably no more than a couple of hundred people. Uh, and I think, you know, if they're going to take on some of the responsibilities of the San Diego studio, you'd probably see some of those people shift over to the LA studio. Um, and you know, some will.

Nicole Wakelin (01:02:01.005)
Yeah, that's always just stinker.

Right, right.

Nicole Wakelin (01:02:14.082)
Mm-hmm.

Nicole Wakelin (01:02:25.453)
Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:02:27.279)
We'll go elsewhere.

Nicole Wakelin (01:02:28.95)
Yeah, I mean, it's kind of a sad thing, but it also I what makes me weirdly happy about that is knowing that Nissan is having trouble and knowing that they're trying to figure things out to.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:02:40.249)
Are you happy that Nissan's having trouble?

Nicole Wakelin (01:02:41.902)
No, knowing that Nissan's going trouble, having trouble, I'm happy to see they're taking action to try to get themselves out of it. Like knowing that Nissan's having trouble, knowing that they need to do something, knowing that things have to change. I think it's it's a sad thing they're laying people off, but or not letting people to closing studios. But I'm happy they're doing something, you know. They're not just sitting and waiting for the winds to change and suddenly for it to get better.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:02:46.103)
okay.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:03:06.959)
Yeah, because that that doesn't usually happen very often.

Nicole Wakelin (01:03:09.418)
It does not, but sometimes companies just sit around and wait for it and don't really do anything. And I feel like Nissan is trying to do stuff. So a lot of credit to Nissan for actually doing something.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:03:20.515)
All right. Hyundai had an investor day in Seoul this week and they talked about a whole bunch of stuff. They unveiled their bold 2030 vision and their product roadmap. And that included a number of things. They are doing an expansion of the plant near Savannah, Georgia.

which will add production capacity of 200, 200, an additional 200,000 units by 2028. So that will put that plant at about a half a million units of capacity. And no mention of, you know, how the recent immigration raids might have an impact on this, but it sounds like they're moving forward. They're having.

conversations with, with, the U S government about, you know, how, you know, because whenever, whenever companies start new factories or do expansions and, or, you know, do retooling, they typically will send over some of their people from the home office to work for a while overseas, to, you know, help with things like installation, calibration of equipment, you know, getting things up and running.

Nicole Wakelin (01:04:35.694)
Mm-hmm.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:04:46.799)
And, you know, they, this is, this was the issue a few weeks ago when there was an immigration raid at the battery plant, the adjacent battery plant near Savannah, which is a joint venture of Hyundai and LG. And actually at the, at the management briefing seminar this week, Bob Lee, who's the CEO of LG Energy Solutions North America, actually did address this, the beginning of his keynote.

Nicole Wakelin (01:04:57.805)
Mm-hmm.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:05:15.855)
He took a couple of minutes to talk about this and said, you know, they are in active talks with U.S. authorities, you know, to make sure that going forward they have the right paperwork for everybody, you know, to make sure there's no issues with any of this.

Nicole Wakelin (01:05:27.63)
Yeah.

Nicole Wakelin (01:05:34.262)
It's important to make sure that if you're going to bring a whole bunch of people over here, you don't make a clerical error and have, what was it? 400 and close to 500 people that were somehow their papers weren't right. I'm like, okay, guys, I feel like I should be able to figure this out. It is.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:05:38.189)
Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:05:49.419)
Yeah, I know. It's unfortunate. I mean, it's unfortunate the way the whole thing was handled. With companies like LG and Nissan, or Hyundai, that are investing tens of billions of dollars in the United States, instead of just going in and taking people that are just doing their jobs and cuffing them and putting them in cages for a week.

Nicole Wakelin (01:06:07.17)
Mm-hmm.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:06:18.723)
before finally letting them go and flying home to South Korea. It's like maybe sit down with management and figure out, what's wrong? What do we need to fix here to get through this? it doesn't sound like it. It sounds like, well, guess Jose Munoz, who's the CEO of Hyundai Motor Group, acknowledged that he's in charge of all this. He said,

Nicole Wakelin (01:06:31.384)
Do we know they didn't ever talk to anybody? Do we know that for sure?

Sam Abuelsamid (01:06:48.589)
He was not aware of the raid until he saw it on the news.

Nicole Wakelin (01:06:52.588)
Hmm. Well, I can believe that. They're not going to tell you they're going to raid you if you're you have an immigration issue.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:06:58.029)
Yeah. so yeah, he was not aware that there was any issue until he saw it on the news. anyway, back to, back to products. you know, last week we mentioned, the ionic three, which was shown in concept form at IAA. that's going to be going into production, for Europe. no mention of us ever seeing that here, unfortunately.

Nicole Wakelin (01:07:03.107)
Yeah.

Nicole Wakelin (01:07:13.677)
Mm-hmm.

Nicole Wakelin (01:07:22.062)
Of course not.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:07:24.727)
Yeah. They're also doing locally designed EVs for India. And then a couple of new models that are being produced in China for the Chinese market. Their first eREV models are going to launch in 2027 with more than 600 miles of range. No word on what these are or like what vehicles these will be.

Nicole Wakelin (01:07:42.158)
Mm-hmm.

Nicole Wakelin (01:07:48.832)
Yeah, just that they're coming no idea what they are. Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:07:51.695)
Yeah, my guess is, you know, we might see perhaps an eREV version of something like the, either the IONIQ 9 or the Palisade. Those, you know, those larger vehicles are the most likely to go eREV. They expect electrified vehicles to reach 3.3 million units by 2030, including more than 18 hybrid models and a comprehensive EV lineup. And that's global sales, 3.3 million global sales of electrified models.

and then expanding into new segments, including midsize pickup trucks and light commercial vehicles. And there will apparently be a midsize pickup coming to the U.S. market.

Nicole Wakelin (01:08:32.83)
Mmm, that will be interesting. I'm curious to see that.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:08:36.407)
Yeah. And then some next generation battery technology that is debuting next year. Genesis is also going to be adding EREVs and hybrids to their BEV powertrains for the complete lineup. Their flagship SUV, the GV90, is expected to be the first one to get an EREV powertrain.

Nicole Wakelin (01:09:04.089)
cool.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:09:05.198)
and they're targeting annual sales for Genesis of 350,000 units by 2030.

Nicole Wakelin (01:09:10.274)
What are they at right now? Do you know what the current is?

Sam Abuelsamid (01:09:12.143)
I think it's probably somewhere around 175.

Nicole Wakelin (01:09:19.15)
That's OK. So that's that's a lot. But it's also I mean, considering how strong Genesis has been with their offerings and is their name get some recognition because a lot of people still really don't know who they are. I mean, it's doable and they can keep introducing good products and new products and increasing the variety of options for people. think they could I think they could do that. What do you think?

Sam Abuelsamid (01:09:40.623)
I think that is absolutely possible given the way, I mean, all three Hyundai Motor Group brands, Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis have been doing steady growth for years now. Almost every quarter they've got year over year growth. I don't see, based on what we're hearing so far, I don't see any reason for that to let up anytime soon.

Nicole Wakelin (01:09:58.189)
Mm-hmm.

Nicole Wakelin (01:10:08.364)
would have to be a gigantic fumble on their part to really see that go the other direction or to stall.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:10:10.798)
Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:10:14.349)
Yeah, they've got fantastic products across the range. mean, there's really nothing right now in the Hyundai lineup that is really kind of weak. Pretty much everything they've done has been a hit.

Nicole Wakelin (01:10:29.046)
No, it's a pretty good lineup. Yeah.

Nicole Wakelin (01:10:35.608)
So we'll see, we'll have to see in five more years.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:10:36.537)
All right.

Um, all right. A couple of weeks ago, I had a chance to have a conversation with David Salters, who is the president of Honda Racing Corporation, U S. Um, unfortunately I had a, uh, technical issue that with the recording. I, I can't, uh, include the recording on the show. Otherwise I would, that was my plan, but, um, we had a really good conversation about how Honda is using software in its race cars.

And you know, we focused on two main areas that probably the two areas that HRC US is focused on which is their IndyCar program and then also their their GTP car which is Follows the LMDH rule set. So it's a prototype endurance race car It's the Acura ARX06 In that class in the LMDH class there

There's some the rules specify some basic dimensions for the cars They have some aerodynamic regulations for you how much downforce are allowed to generate And then they They're allowed to use whatever engines they want So the engines are open that doesn't define displacement or configuration or anything else. What they do have though is a spec hybrid system So they have to use the same

Um, motor generator unit and gearbox and battery on all the LMDH cars. So right now the LMDH class includes, um, BMW, um, uh, Porsche with the 963, uh, Acura, um, and,

Sam Abuelsamid (01:12:29.935)
else is in there. Lamborghini, there's there's, there's like seven, seven different ones. And there's three more coming Genesis is starting next year. They're testing their car right now. In 2027, Ford and McLaren are both joining LMDH. And, oh, Cadillac, I forgot Cadillac. That was the other one I was trying to think of. And so there's a whole bunch of manufacturers participating in this. And they all have very different looking cars and

Nicole Wakelin (01:12:30.19)
I can see him staring up at the sky.

Nicole Wakelin (01:12:49.88)
All right.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:12:59.363)
very different engines. Cadillac's got a big naturally aspirated V8. Porsche and BMW and Lamborghini are using turbocharged V8s. Acura has a turbocharged 2.4 liter V6. They all have the same hybrid hardware, but they're allowed to do whatever they want with the electronics and the software. And so what Acura is doing

is, they're actually using the, the ECU, powertrain ECU from the formula one program, which has a lot of extra computing capacity. And so they have a whole team of software engineers, you know, and Honda has always been about motor sports right from the very beginning, you know, back in the 1950s. So Akira Honda, you know, got involved in motorcycle racing. and Honda has been involved in motor sports ever since.

Nicole Wakelin (01:13:40.002)
Mm-hmm.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:13:58.831)
And it used to be that they would regularly rotate engineers through the motorsports programs, know, spend a few years doing motorsports and come back to production programs. They don't do that so much anymore because motorsports has gotten so specialized. But what they do is they have an annual tech conference in Japan and they bring in engineers from Honda operations all around the world, including race engineers.

Nicole Wakelin (01:14:10.531)
Mm-hmm.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:14:25.475)
to present some of the stuff they're doing. they've had last year, had engineers from HRC US present about what they're doing with the LMDH program and with the IndyCar program in Japan and sharing that knowledge with the production engineers. So in the Acura, the endurance race car, they have the core software that controls the hybrid system.

It doesn't just control it for fuel economy or anything else like that, like production hybrids do, but they're actually running a simulation model alongside the control software side by side in the same ECU. So it's running simulations in real time as the car is driving, as it's being raced and sometimes making adjustments to some of the control to optimize the control. And, you know, they are

Nicole Wakelin (01:15:13.677)
Wow.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:15:24.247)
The software team is doing software updates, releasing software updates to the race program, sometimes multiple times a week, and even during the course of a race weekend. They will release software updates based on the data they're getting. They'll make changes and then push that back into the race cars. And if you look at the steering wheel of a modern race car,

Nicole Wakelin (01:15:37.976)
Mm-hmm.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:15:53.263)
There's a picture in my story that I wrote of the cockpit of the the ARX06. On the steering wheel there are 20 different buttons and then more off to the side.

Nicole Wakelin (01:16:04.11)
my God. I mean, that takes our, like buttons thing a little bit too far.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:16:10.851)
Yeah, but the thing is, you know, typically in endurance racing, you know, you will have two or three drivers that share the car and not all drivers like their car set up exactly the same way. And in the past, they always used to have to, you know, find a compromise between the setup for different drivers, you know, that, everybody could get along with. you know, some, some drivers like, like it to be a little more tail happy. Some drivers like it to a little more understeer. and so.

what they can do now with the software is the drivers can make adjustments as they're driving. know, and they, they, the system, the, the, the control software, even, even when it's not being manipulated by the drivers, you know, they've got high precision GPS on the cars and the system will change the way it's controlling the hybrid system from corner to corner.

So, you if it's a long sweeping corner, it'll control it one way. If it's a tight corner, because it knows where on the track the car is and it will make adjustments and they're using the hybrid system to do things like preloading the differential to change the handling balance and changing the brake by wire control to change the front to rear brake balance and doing all kinds of cool stuff with it. And then the other thing we talked about was the IndyCar program where Honda and Chevrolet collaborated on

developing the hybrid system for the Indy cars. And there they don't get quite as much freedom. They can't be changing the software for the hybrid system the way they do on the prototypes. But different drivers are using the hybrid system in very different ways. And this year, Alex Paloe, who won the Indy car championship, he won eight out of 17 races. And he clinched the championship with, I think, three or four races to go.

Salters was talking about the way that Palo was using the system versus the way some other drivers are using the system, harvesting energy to, because on the IndyCar, because they didn't have enough room, they don't actually use a battery, they use super capacitors for energy storage. And it's all, whole thing, the whole system is packaged into the...

Nicole Wakelin (01:18:04.898)
Mm-hmm.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:18:33.443)
the bell housing in the back of the car with the clutch and, Polo, you know, just, seemed to really be able to utilize that software and use, use the settings that he had available to him to really get the most out of the system more so than any other driver. Cause there's been some drivers that really complained that they don't like, like the system very much, but Polo, just, he just flew away. He just ran away with this year's championship.

Nicole Wakelin (01:18:56.398)
Mm-hmm.

Ha ha ha ha.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:19:02.444)
with the way he was using the car, using the system. Yeah.

Nicole Wakelin (01:19:04.204)
That's very cool tech. That's neat. That's a really neat way to make it, you to give everybody what they want.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:19:08.739)
Yeah. All right. So this past week was the 10th anniversary of Dieselgate.

Nicole Wakelin (01:19:17.132)
Has it really been 10 years?

Sam Abuelsamid (01:19:19.523)
Yeah, 10 years, 10 years ago that I got a call from a reporter saying, so there's this thing with Volkswagen and their diesels and the EPA and the EPA is not happy. And so I had to start doing some research to find out what the hell was going on. And, you know, over the next year and a half, you know, they

Nicole Wakelin (01:19:39.662)
It's crazy.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:19:46.189)
Volkswagen got sued by everybody everywhere in the world because because yeah, because they were they were, you they had been cheating on their diesel emission controls. You know, they were they had been advertising for years, clean diesel. And, you know, my wife and I bought a Volkswagen diesel. We bought a jet of TDI sport wagon. And turns out it wasn't so clean.

Nicole Wakelin (01:19:49.782)
Everybody who could hire a lawyer.

Nicole Wakelin (01:20:12.494)
I knew people who did the trade when they, you know, because you were offered money for your not clean diesel that you thought was a clean diesel that actually were sort of thrilled. Either they were thrilled because they got way more than what they thought. You know, like, OK, fine, I'll get myself into a new car. Or they were horrifically dumb because they really just wanted the diesel and didn't care so much about the clean part. And they were just like, I like it the way it is. Dang it. I don't want to have to trade it in. Yeah, but then.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:20:37.795)
Well, I mean, you didn't have to sell the car. You were allowed to keep it, but then you had to get updates to the car to make it compliant with the regulations, which reduced the performance in the fuel economy somewhat.

Nicole Wakelin (01:20:42.411)
Right.

Nicole Wakelin (01:20:47.158)
Right.

Exactly. They just wanted it like, like it how it is. I don't want you to mess with my car in that, like you said, was not an option. had to, you had to get things changed up with your car. had to trade it in, but I remember you took the bio.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:21:00.695)
Yeah, we took the buyout. Yeah.

Nicole Wakelin (01:21:04.682)
I remember driving, doesn't feel like it was very long before diesel gate happened. Audi did a whole big diesel program in Washington DC and we all had white Audis and they all had like a decal low along the side that was like, Audis, clean diesels. All these picture this. I got a lot of mileage out of those pictures when that scandal broke. Cause I'm like, we're just going to use the pictures I have of that as the header image forever.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:21:26.147)
Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:21:31.823)
Yeah. Yeah. Back in 2008, in the fall of 2008, when Audi was getting ready to launch their quote unquote clean diesels, they, they did a drive program. usually when they do media drive programs, you know, they bring people in to some location for a day. You you fly in, you drive the car the next day and then you fly home for this thing. It was a two week program where we drove across the country from New York to Los Angeles and they

You know, everybody was on waves of three or four days. you know, I actually did ended up doing two waves. did. So I was on this for a week. we drove from New York to DC, to Cleveland, to Chicago, to Memphis, to Dallas, to Amarillo. And then, I flew home from, Denver. and then the second week ended up going all the way to the West coast, you know, and they had, you know, dozens of Audi Q7 diesels.

and, yeah, I mean, was a shockingly expensive program for Audi to run. they, mean, they did all, you know, they, spent a lot of money promoting clean diesel. You know, they use diesel engines in their, Le Mans race cars, won, the 24 hour Le Mans multiple, multiple times the world endurance championship. And then when diesel gate happened, they canceled that entire racing program, and went into formula E.

Nicole Wakelin (01:22:36.239)
yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:22:58.031)
You know, Volkswagen group made a huge pivot towards electrification, um, you know, designing all kinds of new EVs. Uh, part of the settlement that, um, Volkswagen of America did, um, with, uh, EPA and, uh, the California air resources board was they had to invest $2 billion in charging infrastructure. And the result of that was electrify America. They, they built electrify America.

Nicole Wakelin (01:23:21.207)
Yep.

Nicole Wakelin (01:23:25.059)
Yep.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:23:27.247)
that $2 billion. And now, know, a decade on, you know, at that time, you know, diesels were, you know, still really popular in Europe and in a lot of European markets, like in Italy and in France, diesel engines were had like 70 80 % market share. And even in Germany, it was over 50 % market share. And I was just looking up the the numbers 2025.

Nicole Wakelin (01:23:46.37)
Yeah, they were huge.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:23:57.007)
As of July of this year, gas vehicle registrations through July in Europe had declined by 20 % from the previous year. the gas vehicles accounted for 28.3 % market share in Europe this year, compared to 35 % last year. Diesel.

Nicole Wakelin (01:24:24.352)
Mm.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:24:25.903)
dropped from 26 % last year or dropped by 26 % to just 9.5 % through through July of this year. Yeah.

Nicole Wakelin (01:24:35.586)
Diesel got hammered by this. It so did. This was like the kiss of death for Diesel, this entire situation with what happened with the Volkswagen Group.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:24:45.039)
Yeah, I I remember back in the late 2000s, they were projecting that with clean diesels, light duty diesels would account for somewhere between 10 and 15 % market share in the US by 2020. No.

Nicole Wakelin (01:24:59.285)
Mm-hmm.

Nicole Wakelin (01:25:03.584)
Yeah, no. Not so much. Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:25:07.437)
No, never got past about 2 % before it went away completely. Basically, one of the only light duty diesel still available in the US market is the GM 3.0 liter inline 6 that they have in the trucks and full size SUVs. That's the last one. Everything else is pretty much gone.

Nicole Wakelin (01:25:24.68)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. It was a huge impact far beyond Volkswagen, entire scenario, fiasco. Mm-hmm. Everybody's like, we're out.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:25:33.539)
Yeah. BMW, Mercedes, everybody dropped their diesel engines. Yep.

All right. Let's see. Sticking with VW for a moment. We mentioned tariffs earlier. Apparently, Volkswagen is going to increase prices on most of their imported Volkswagens by nearly 7 % for model year 2026.

Nicole Wakelin (01:26:02.318)
Yikes. Well, I think we knew this was coming though, you know?

Sam Abuelsamid (01:26:06.787)
Yeah. Yeah, it was more a question of when not if.

Nicole Wakelin (01:26:10.732)
Right, exactly, exactly. So we all knew that was gonna happen. was just that was sort of, again, the sort of rush that people were having. I you even saw, I wanna say it was, was it Mazda? I saw someone actually advertising, know, tariffs have not affected the impact of our vehicles. They're on lots today, kind of thing. Like, everyone was trying to like, buy now, or you know, you're in trouble later. We can't guarantee what it's gonna be in another two months. So here you go, you know?

Sam Abuelsamid (01:26:38.671)
So far, Audi is only raising their prices by 3.7%, but that's an increase of as much as $4,700 compared to a model year 25.

Nicole Wakelin (01:26:43.438)
that.

Nicole Wakelin (01:26:48.525)
Yeah. It's a chunk of change extra. It's going to add on. It's not $4,700. That's going to change things. Either you can't get it, or you've got to go down a trim. That's a trim or two, depending on the vehicle.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:27:01.711)
Yeah. Well, the, the jet, base Jetta S, uh, is up by a thousand and $50 for 26 compared to 2025. Um, and, uh, the Taos, uh, crossover is going up by a thousand and $55 for the base trim. Um, see the, uh, the, the Atlas, which is built in, uh, Tennessee is only going up by a 3%.

Nicole Wakelin (01:27:11.032)
Yeah.

Nicole Wakelin (01:27:32.396)
Yeah, so things will even though it's, and that's the interesting thing about it, like, you know, some vehicles aren't, made here, some vehicles are made other places, even for the same automaker, they have multiple plants. So it's not like they're only gonna necessarily up the price on the one that technically comes from another country. They up the price of a lot of them to sort of keep any of them from getting prohibitively high, you know, spread it out a little.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:27:52.431)
Well, and well also, even for those that are built, that are assembled here, you know, they're often using a lot of components from outside of the U S like, you know, the powertrains for the Taos, or for the Atlas are, you know, VW doesn't have an engine plant here in the U S so, you know, engines and transmissions come from overseas.

Nicole Wakelin (01:27:58.006)
Right.

Mm-hmm.

Nicole Wakelin (01:28:04.931)
Yep.

Nicole Wakelin (01:28:09.901)
Mm-hmm.

Nicole Wakelin (01:28:15.682)
Yeah, it's a very, it's an incredibly complicated situation because of the fact that cars are made up of more than a few parts from more than a few places. Thousands and thousands of parts.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:28:22.541)
Yes, many thousands of parts.

all right. Ford is moving their world headquarters. And they announced this week that they are going to close and demolish the glass house, which has been there to building a Dearborn that has been their world headquarters since 1956. I used to work there. I did. I worked there for, I worked in the building, for about a year and a half before they moved us across the road to another building.

Nicole Wakelin (01:28:45.454)
56. Did you really?

Sam Abuelsamid (01:28:56.911)
but still spent a lot of time there. I spent a lot of time in that building over the years. so Ford has been building a new, they've been essentially revamping their product development center campus for the last several years. So they demolished their old design studios, their engineering center, and they've been demolishing it in phases and then building new

new buildings and so the new product development center campus now has about 2.1 million square feet of space and yeah, 2.1 million square feet, which is about a little more than double the 957,000 square feet in the glass house, which is a 12 story tower.

The glass house is about a mile and a half away from the main PDC campus. And so now everybody that was working in that building is going to be migrating over to the PDC campus, excuse me, the PDC campus, which is much more modern space. All the design studios are in there, fabrication shops, conference rooms, individual workspaces, open concept collaboration space.

and then it's also right across the street from their proving grounds. So it's just going to be a lot more convenient for everyone.

Nicole Wakelin (01:30:31.438)
It actually looks much more modern too. The old glass house had this very like, hello 1950. It just looked, it was a cool building, but it was very, it's just a giant.

rectangle, essentially. And the new one has, it's got an actual design to it. It feels more modern, so I think it's a nice, but it still has a lot of glass. Like, it's very, so it's sort of a nod to the original in some ways. And it's nice, you know, it's gonna be so much bigger, it's gonna be much more modern in terms of what people expect or hope to have in an office space, rather than what they were just given in 1956.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:31:06.031)
Yeah, instead of instead of mid-century modern, it's now going to be 21st century modern. Yeah, yeah. And yeah, I mean, there were about 2000 people that worked in the Glasshouse building. And the new building has capacity for 4000 people. And it's, you know, across the whole campus, including the Research and Innovation Center and the engine labs and the track and everything. You're within walking distance of about 14,000 employees of Ford.

Nicole Wakelin (01:31:09.994)
21st century modern. Exactly. I like it. I think it looks great.

Nicole Wakelin (01:31:23.564)
Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:31:35.705)
that work in that whole campus area. so, you know, I'm anxious. Hopefully, you know, we'll get a chance to go through there and get a tour of it, because it's opening up in November. I'm guessing that, you know, we'll probably be getting an invite sometime in the not too distant future to get a look at it. Yeah. But, you know, it's a shame, you know, they're going to redevelop that.

Nicole Wakelin (01:31:46.319)
I bet at some point they'll give you a tour. Yeah.

Nicole Wakelin (01:31:55.446)
I bet you'll get a tour of it. Yeah, I bet you will.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:32:03.255)
that property, they're working with the city of Dearborn, you know, they're going to drop, you know, bring the building down and then, you know, use that as open space, parkland, and maybe some other things going forward.

Nicole Wakelin (01:32:17.356)
Yeah, they'll do something neat with it. They won't let it just be a mess. They'll come up with some other interesting proposition for what to do with that space, I'm sure.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:32:24.483)
Yep. So our friends over at TFL, they, you we, I think we've talked, we talked about earlier this year when they bought several of the members of the team there, including Tommy Micah, Roman's son, and Case, and Tommy's father-in-law all took advantage of this insane lease offer that was available to residents of Colorado.

Nicole Wakelin (01:32:47.882)
Alright. Right, it was crazy.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:32:52.399)
Fiat was offering a two year lease, 10,000 miles a year on the 500E for nothing down and zero dollars a month. And yeah, just here, just go drive the car for two years. Don't drive more than 20,000 miles and it's all good. So, the 500E is a nice car. a fun little car. If you don't need a long distance,

Nicole Wakelin (01:33:04.94)
Basically just drive our car. Please.

Nicole Wakelin (01:33:18.369)
It is.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:33:22.029)
You know road trip car. You just need a local or regional commuter. It's great for that. You know, it's just at its MSRP. It's a little bit expensive for what it is. But you know for you know for nothing for two years. Hey, of course, you know, no good deed goes unpunished. And today they published video. They periodically do videos with updates of what.

Nicole Wakelin (01:33:32.814)
A pricey, yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:33:50.435)
the TFL has in their fleet because in addition to the press cars that they get loaned, they buy a bunch of vehicles, they buy and sell vehicles to use for longer term testing. And so Tommy did their fleet update today and he talked about the 500E and it's mostly his wife that drives it. It had, it suffered two stone chips, one of which they were able to repair. But the other one,

Started to spread before they were able to get it filled in the windshield. These are stone chips in the windshield and Usually, you know these things aren't that expensive, you know to replace a windshield You know back on that Jetta When I had to get it, you know had a crack that developed from a stone chip I think I paid like $250 to safe light they came out and replaced it right in my garage

And, you know, Pete, you know, there's no problem. The windshield for this Fiat 500E, pretty small car. How much do you figure that windshield costs?

Nicole Wakelin (01:34:56.408)
Tiny little car.

You think, like you said, Sam, maybe $250, $300, maybe $400, if for some reason it was kind of pricey.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:35:05.135)
I mean, it does have front-facing camera for the forward collision alert. that, yeah, I know.

Nicole Wakelin (01:35:08.598)
Okay, okay, so you got to mount that that adds to the cost of okay, let's go let's go crazy and go five

Sam Abuelsamid (01:35:16.919)
Okay. $2,000.

Nicole Wakelin (01:35:19.982)
What the heck? Was there any, I didn't have a chance to watch the video, although I saw about this. Was there any reason why they said it was going to be $2,000 to replace the windshield in a Fiat?

Sam Abuelsamid (01:35:33.165)
Nope. My guess is probably has something to do with limited volumes of this car in the US. They don't sell that many of them. And they've got to import the windshields from Europe. And so there's probably tariff costs associated with that now. So yeah, that's nuts.

Nicole Wakelin (01:35:35.264)
I'm baffled.

Nicole Wakelin (01:35:58.893)
So, but I think they're still making out on the deal. They've got, if you only pay $2,000 to repair the windshield and you're paying nothing to have the car, divide that over two years, you're still, your net is still pretty cool. You're still pretty good. Right? Right?

Sam Abuelsamid (01:36:06.573)
It's true.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:36:10.223)
Yeah, you're still definitely coming out ahead. But if you have a 500E, if you get a stone chip in the windshield, get it repaired immediately before it starts to spread, crack starts to spread across your windshield. Just take it right away and get it filled because you don't want to replace this windshield, especially if you didn't get it for free for two years.

Nicole Wakelin (01:36:19.074)
Fix it. Fast. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Nicole Wakelin (01:36:33.803)
my God, two grand. I know if you didn't get it for free, then you're just stuck. Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:36:38.999)
All right. Last item for this week is Stellantis had a briefing call on Thursday morning to tell us about a new battery design that they came up with new battery architecture. So typically on EVs today, know, your, your electric propulsion system consists of your battery pack, your motors, a power electronics unit.

which does the conversion back and forth between the DC, the direct current of the battery and the AC required for the motor. And then back in the other direction when you're regenerating to go from AC of the motor back to DC for the battery. And then an onboard charger unit for level two charging, which again takes your AC, converts it to DC for the battery. What Stellantis, what the team at Stellantis did in partnership with

Nicole Wakelin (01:37:24.803)
Mm-hmm.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:37:37.519)
Total Energy, which owns SAFT, a battery manufacturer, as they came up with what they're calling IBIS, which is...

Sam Abuelsamid (01:37:52.823)
integrated battery, intelligent battery integrated system. and so what they, what they've done is instead of having a separate power electronics module, they have on each of the modules of the battery, they've put a little, they've combined integrated a little inverter right on the battery module. and you know,

Nicole Wakelin (01:37:52.918)
and trying to figure out.

Nicole Wakelin (01:37:57.536)
Okay.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:38:21.215)
When you have the power electronics unit, what happens is when it's generating the sine wave for the alternating current, you end up with a sine wave that looks kind of jagged. It looks noisy. It's not a real smooth sine wave. And what happens from that is that you end up, it's less efficient. You lose efficiency from that.

And what they've done is they've eliminated that power electronics module. They're doing the inversion at each module and they can control each module independently and then combine the outputs of those. And because each module is doing its own thing, they can actually arrange it so that they're getting

a three phase AC output from the full battery pack instead of just a single phase, which overall makes the whole thing, the whole system more efficient. each of the modules is running at lower voltage and it can generate a clean sine wave, a much cleaner sine wave. The bottom line is that you end up with about a 10 % improvement in efficiency. You have saved some volume for packaging the

discrete power electronics module. They got about 15 % more range out of it. They claimed to have reduced the cost and also made it safer and not just the upfront cost, but also reducing the total cost of ownership because they can make the battery pack last longer. Because what happens now is each module is controlled individually.

Each module is only 48 volts, whereas, you know, typical battery pack for an EV is anywhere from 350 to 900 volts. And so when you're servicing a battery pack, a high voltage battery pack, you've got to have specialized equipment, specialized training and processes to do any servicing on that. In this case, because each of the battery modules is only 48 volts.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:40:45.207)
It's much easier and safer to handle. So now if there's a problem, if there's a bad cell in there somewhere, they can go in and technicians just at any dealer or service shop can go in and pull out that one module and plug in another one. And because they're all controlled individually, you're, it can also, man, you can have modules with different cells in them, different chemistries. So you can mix and match different chemistries and.

balance it all out through the final control system. So it's a pretty slick solution. They're hoping to have it in production. They did it first on a stationary energy storage system, and now they have a prototype running on a Peugeot E4008. And they're targeting getting this design into production by the end of the decade.

Nicole Wakelin (01:41:43.832)
That's really cool. I love to see this sort of next-gen stuff coming up, these things you start to try to move EV technology forward and improve on the things that worked but weren't the best designs ever. It's neat to see these kinds of evolutions happening. What do you think?

Sam Abuelsamid (01:41:55.055)
Mm-hmm.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:41:59.555)
Yeah, no, think it's pretty clever. What will be interesting to see is we're now starting to shift towards structural battery packs that don't have any modules. And I asked them if a solution like this would be compatible with a system like that. And they said, yeah, I think they can make it work with that type of architecture.

You know, because that's what's going to be in the new, in the BMW Noya class battery pack. It's a structural battery pack, no modules. Ford's upcoming LFP battery packs are structural like that. Tesla is doing it that way. A lot of Chinese are doing that. And so they say it should be compatible with that as well as working with things like LFP or LMR cells. So we'll see.

it's going to be interesting to watch.

Nicole Wakelin (01:43:01.708)
Yeah, I feel like that EV technology needs to grow and change. So I think this is neat. OK, guys, make it happen.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:43:07.299)
Yeah. All right. I think that's all we've got for this week. We do have one email that came in from Andy from Melbourne about the, the Tello truck. I'm going to save that one for when Robbie's back because I think Robbie actually has seen the Tello. So we will save that one.

Nicole Wakelin (01:43:24.256)
Mm-hmm.

Let's get Robbie's little opinion on that one.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:43:28.983)
Yeah. and, he's definitely seen the slate, up close. So, yeah. But I think Robbie's the only one of us that's seen the Tullow. so we will come back to that one. and if, in an upcoming show.

Nicole Wakelin (01:43:33.762)
I've seen this late, that I have seen up close,

Nicole Wakelin (01:43:44.653)
Yes.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:43:46.211)
Alright, anything else we didn't cover?

Nicole Wakelin (01:43:49.236)
No, that's it. And I will see you not next week, but the week after, I guess.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:43:53.977)
Yeah, and I'll be back next week with a bunch of interviews. And so stay tuned for that. Bye, everybody.

Nicole Wakelin (01:43:59.266)
There we go.

Bye.