Sam Abuelsamid  0:01  
This is episode 424 of wheel bearings. I am Sam Abuelsamid from telemetry,

Roberto Baldwin  0:06  
and I am Roberto Baldwin from SAE International. And, oh yeah. And we have the podcast, automotive engineering podcast. So I'm from

Sam Abuelsamid  0:17  
SAE, excellent. And I can't remember where Nicole said she is this weekend, but she's not here, so somewhere, just the two of us, somewhere, rad, probably, yeah. Usually is, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, tomorrow, certainly by by the time everybody hears this, when it goes up on Tuesday, I will be getting close to Japan. I'll be on my way to Tokyo. Man, I know I'm so jealous. I love going to Japan.

Roberto Baldwin  0:49  
Japan best. Everyone listens. Figure out a way to go Japan. It's very expensive to get there, but once you're there, it's not it's really cheap.

Sam Abuelsamid  0:57  
It is right now that the exchange rate between the yen and the dollar is very favorable to Americans right now.

Roberto Baldwin  1:04  
Yeah, so, so do do that before that changes? But, yeah, it's very expensive. You know, flying there is gonna cost you an arm and a leg, but once you get there, I think when I was in a soccer I would pay like, $40 for a hotel room, wow. And a really nice and a really nice, and it was a good It wasn't like, scary, like Motel Six, where it's like, the floor is sticky and it's gross. It was so nice hotel room. I mean, it was

Speaker 1  1:28  
small. He pulled back the the blanket, and you see all these nasty things on

Roberto Baldwin  1:35  
the Yeah, you just hope it's water stains. Yeah, you know the bet the hotel rooms are very small, the ones, you know, the traditional sort of Japanese ones. But I mean, you're in Japan, what are you gonna stay in your what you gonna just hang out in your hotel all day? Yeah, moving and shaking. You just need someone to sleep and shower and use a special magical toilet.

Speaker 1  1:56  
Well, I will be hanging out with with Honda this week, going to the show on Wednesday and going to the media day for the Japan mobility show, formerly known as the Tokyo Motor Show. And then on Thursday, we get to meet with the CEO of Honda and then learn more about Honda's space program. And then on Saturday, we go to Tachi to drive the new Prelude, and also Honda's next generation hybrid

Roberto Baldwin  2:28  
system. I'm going to, I'm going to Kia to look at the something I don't know if I'm allowed to say,

Sam Abuelsamid  2:38  
Oh yeah, no, yeah. They're facing, they're gonna be showing a new vehicle that's going to be out in a few weeks. Yeah, so that's

Roberto Baldwin  2:49  
what, that's what I'm doing. I wish Kia would move it to Korea. Korea is also delightful. But yes, I love Korea. I'm just traveling in Asia in general. Yeah, I'm just going to Orange County. So I lived in Orange County.

Speaker 1  3:02  
You driving down or flying down? I'm flying down.

Roberto Baldwin  3:06  
Okay. All right, it's a hell drive, because you gotta drive through LA So,

Speaker 1  3:10  
yeah, that's true. Yeah, it's because it's on the, on the, on the wrong side of Los Angeles, yeah. All right, well, you didn't have, you've driven, you've driven stuff this week, but it's all stuff that you can't talk about yet, right?

Roberto Baldwin  3:26  
There is stuff I can't talk about for like, weeks, and there's stuff I can't talk about for months, months, like, like, next year, like, well into next year, that's, that's all I can say. Sorry.

Speaker 1  3:39  
Okay, well, I drove some stuff. Actually. On Thursday, I was out at m1 concourse in Pontiac, Michigan, with crew from CNBC. They were working on a story on EV performance. You know, our basically our EV is getting too fast, and we had a trio of electric vehicles that we borrowed to do some do some evaluation with and some filming with. We had a Kia, EV six, GT Line 2026, model, which went from zero to 60 in like 4.8 seconds. We had a Porsche mak 4s electric, which is the base version of the electric Macon, which did it in about four seconds. And then we also had a 2026, or actually 25 Audi, RS e Tron, GT, which did it in 2.6 seconds. And the guy, the reporter from from CNBC, was running along, was somewhat shocked at how fast these cars were. He he was not. Expecting this. He doesn't usually drive EVs, and so he was not expecting these levels of performance.

Roberto Baldwin  5:04  
I don't think people realize how fast under five seconds is. I don't think that really under three seconds or under three seconds, under three seconds is that's it makes it can make you very sick if you're not used to it all. Your internal organs, like your eyeballs feel weird. It takes a few launches before you you get used to it. The first time though, it's just like, Oh, I think I'm gonna vomit. I've had friends who have said, Don't ever do that again. Yeah, I don't like that. I don't enjoy that.

Speaker 1  5:34  
No, it's one of those things that I think for most people. You know, when you buy vehicles like this. It's like, okay, you're buying it for bragging rights. And you know, you do it a few times to show it off for your friends, and then you never use it again. Yeah? You just sort of, yeah. It's, it's just, it's kind of pointless to have that much performance in the real world, because you can't, you can't use it. I mean, certainly, if you live in many places in California, you know, you're not going to use that on the 405 or the 101 you know, or 280 in the Bay Area. It's it, and it's, you know, not only can you not do it, but even if you find a time when there's nobody around, you shouldn't be doing it. There's no need to be accelerating that fast.

Roberto Baldwin  6:21  
Yeah, you're giving all the people a lot of power who have very little experience with that power. That's, that's, that's sort of the scary part is that we're, you know, it's such a quick, such a huge jump and acceleration, and how quick these and how quick vehicles are, is that, you know, the average person, again, is used to, like, six seconds, five seconds, seven seconds, and they've been fine with that. And then they get in something with three seconds, and it's, there's, there's always the potential, you know, I, you know, I talked about this a lot where, you know, in the 80s and 90s, 70s, you know, when a car broke free, it would break you could break a car free at like, 20 miles an hour, you make a mistake where the car was going side. Was it like 2025? Miles an hour in the rain, or, you know, sometimes even on dry land. But your tires were pretty bad in those days. Yeah, and tires are pretty bad, so you you could, like, correct at a slow speed, and you would learn how to correct at a slow speed. Now, because tires so much better, and vehicles are so much better keeping you on the road, which is great for safety and for, you know, 90% of the people out there who are just driving like regular This is outstanding because it means, you know, fewer deaths, fewer injuries, fewer collisions. But the flip side of that is that things don't go wrong until the vehicle is really going very, very fast. You're doing things like 7080, miles an hour now you're having to crash. Having to correct in an environment without any previous experience, correcting at us at a low speed. And so that's when you end up with like, you know, there's an accident, but it's, it's catastrophic, because you were just going so fast and things went wrong so quickly that you, you know, you don't have the you know, the person doesn't have the experience to to react in any meaningful way, because they've never experienced this, because the vehicle and the tires have been have done such a great job of keeping you, keeping you, and keeping the vehicle from breaking free, and when it does, it's really, really bad.

Speaker 1  8:20  
Yeah, and most people don't get the opportunity to practice those kinds of skills. You know, especially early in their in their driving life, you generally don't get much opportunity to practice the kinds of skills, the car handling skills you need to be able to recover when your vehicle does lose control, you know, I've been fortunate, you know, in the jobs that I've had, you know, as an engineer, you know, spending a lot of time driving vehicles on frozen pads of, you know, frozen lakes and things like that, for for the work I've done to, you know, to be able to understand the those dynamics and how to control the vehicle better. And, you know, as my kids, you know, got to driving age, you know, I made sure to take them out, you know, soon as it snowed, you know, take them over to the local high school in the parking lot. And, you know, practice some car control with them. You know, first, get them used to what ABS feels like, what traction control feels like, and then to do some skid control, you know, sitting in the passenger seat and yanking on the parking brake to, you know, to get the back end to break free and have them practice, you know, steering into a skid, you know, so that they know what it feels like. And hopefully, you know, if they get into that kind of situation, they are able to respond appropriately.

Roberto Baldwin  9:45  
Yeah, it's, it's, it is a sort of, it's a learned and something you have to end up having to do for Sam and I, like you know, Sam said, we've been very fortunate in that our jobs involve us doing these things pretty often. Yeah. Yeah, it's sort of, and, and we've, you know, we've had the benefit of, you know, people at tracks who, you know, if I've had instructors like, Oh, if you do this, you'll be better at this. And I've had instructors, like, on ice driving me like, oh, you should do this. And I'm like, oh, that's, that's awesome. And I'm, you know, I grew up driving on snow in a rear wheel drive, you know, I learned how to drive on snow in a rear wheel drive, nice, not even Nissan Dotson 260 z, so zero, weight in the bag, zero, you know. And so you just, everything was a skid in that car. And so I just, that's how I learned how to drive. And even then, you know, I still have, you know, you still have instructors. Like, oh, you know, I saw you're doing this. You should really do this. You're like, oh. And then you see, you see the benefits of it, and you see the benefits of of like, learning from people. And the average person doesn't have that, and it's, you know, if you, if you want to have fun, do auto cross, you know, take, take some defensive driving classes, do some ice stuff. I know, you know, it can be expensive sometimes. But if, if you really want to, you know, sort of explore the dynamics of vehicles outside of sort of the safety, you know, the safety, you know all the implemented safety, which, of course, keeps you on the road from keeps you from dying. If you want to explore more of that. Take some classes. Do it somewhere safe. So you know when things go wrong. Oh no, you hit some cones. Who cares? Yeah, as opposed to oh no.

Speaker 1  11:18  
The consequences are minimal, but you you learn, you'll learn some important skills and gain some important experience so that when it if and when it does happen in the real world, and at some point in your life, it probably will happen in the real world. You know, you want to know how to respond to those situations when the car does start to lose traction.

Roberto Baldwin  11:40  
Yeah. And you know, What's also nice about this is that you end up, you know, you maybe end up being part of a community, you know, you have, you know, you go out with your your Miatas or your BRZ or your M twos or whatever. And you, you know, you sort of meet people. And you know, now you have some new friends, which, according to the internet, and the world is very difficult for people to make nowadays.

Speaker 1  12:02  
All right. Well, I did, you know that was only a few hours at m1 you know, shooting that story that probably be coming out in a couple of weeks. But I did get to spend some more time with a 2026 BMW IX X Drive 4545 Yes, a 45 with the 22 inch wheel package. And, you know, so the the ix is BMWs mid sized electric crossover, you know. Let's get the the obvious thing out of the way, yes, this is not a particularly attractive vehicle, especially the front end when my when my wife saw it in the driveway, she said, what is that? But, you know, once you get past the front end, especially, you know, with the giant, probably the most egregious variation, or one of the most egregious variations, of the twin kidney grill, especially given that, you know, since it's an EV, there's no actual grill there. I think probably the only, the only BMW that may have larger twin kidneys on it is the the BMW M hybrid v8 prototype race car, you know, which is, that's a whole different story. And, you know, the way it's done there actually works with that design. But once you get past that, you know, this is basically a tallish, mid sized wagon, you know, it's not, this is not an SUV. You know that in any form, is going to be an off roader. You know, there's not that much ground clearance, but it, you know, it works really well for what it is. It's, you know, it's, they got, it got an update, a mid cycle refresh last year. So got some new headlights. The, you know, the for the most part, the front end stayed design stayed largely the same, but it did get new. Headlights and taillights, got some interior updates, and it's now, I think when it originally came out in the US, at least it was available in a rear wheel drive version. And I think in Europe, they still offer the rear drive now they are only offering three different dual motor, all wheel drive models in North America. So there is the 45 which is the the base model. There is the IX, X Drive 60. So the 45 gets 402 horsepower from two motors, and we'll do zero to 60 in about 4.9 seconds, which is as fast as anybody really needs to go. The X Drive 60 gets 536 horsepower and does zero to 60 in 4.4 seconds. And then there's the ixm 70, which gets 650 horsepower. Four and goes zero to 60 in 3.6 seconds. The one that I had, as I said, had the optional 22 inch wheel package, so I think comes standard on nineteens or 20s, and the interior is very much kind of the modern BMW ethos. You know, the design direction they've gone across the board with BMW, where you have one large display that spans from the in front of the driver across the center of the dashboard, very much simplified, a bare minimum of physical controls on the dashboard, which is not, not the greatest it's not, certainly not my preference, but it does have manual vents, which is a good thing. So you got manual vents. There's buttons in the middle of the dash for the hazard lights and the front and rear defoggers, and then there's buttons on the steering wheel and a few buttons on the or actually, not so much buttons, but haptic controls on the center console. So this is likely to be one of the last BMWs that comes up, comes to market with with the rotary I drive controller. It still has one. It's a clear, I don't know if it's glass or or if it's plastic, but it's a clear crystal like knob. And then there's a toggle on the center console to the left of that for the shifter to select your gears to go between Reverse, Neutral drive and and what they label as B or break, where you get your max, your one pedal mode. And then the rest of the buttons there that surround the I drive controller are just haptic controls. So you press on them, you'll get a little bit of feedback. But there's no there's no physical buttons there. Overall, it works well, you know, the screen is also a touch screen. The seats, you know, are really good. They're very comfortable, very supportive. Had no no issues there. There's lots of cargo room in the back. And when you open up the rear hatch. It's got this clamshell style tailgate that kind of wraps around the sides, similar to the Audi q5 and the Lincoln Corsair. When you open it up, there's actually auxiliary lights underneath there on the sides to the on either side of the cargo opening, so that if, for example, you have to carry something long in here and leave the hatch partway or all the way open as you're driving, you still have lights on the back there that you know, because the other lights are actually on The tailgate itself. The said there, there is touchscreen interface for the for the infotainment that you can use as an alternative to the I drive controller. But it is, you know, the the distance to reach, it is kind of long, so it's a little awkward to use the touchscreen. So I actually prefer using the I drive controller on this one. It's this. Is this vehicle, as I said, is plenty fast, you know, under five seconds or 60. It will, depending on which which tire and wheel package you get, you can get up to 312 miles of EPA rated range with the 22 inch wheels. It's rated at 279 and you know BMWs, you know, modern BMW EVs have generally been, you know, pretty good on their efficiency. And you know, they generally don't have any issues hitting their rated range numbers. So, you know, you will, you know, even with the 20 twos, you will probably get close to 300 miles of driving in real world conditions, you know, unless you're using this like a sports car, which it is most definitely not, the ride and handling is good. Oh, one more thing in the cargo area. When you open the tailgate, there is, you know, the floor is flat. But then when you lift it up, there is another storage bin underneath, so you can lift it up and there's, that's where you've got the tools for changing tires. There's no spare tire, but you can, you know, it's got, got some, got a reflector there. There's tow hook so you can screw that in, you know, if you need to tow the vehicle, what else? Lots of room in the rear, in the rear seat, in the second row, in the back of the front seat, backs. There's USB charging ports there. There is a wireless charger in the center console. Yeah, so, yeah. I mean, it was, it's, this was, you know, if you can get past the looks, you know, this is generally a very pleasant car to drive. You know, if you need a five passenger crossover that will go at least 300 miles on a charge, this isn't, this is not a bad choice.

Roberto Baldwin  20:20  
Sorry, actually, turn hit a tab, and that was the end of that.

Speaker 1  20:25  
So the X Drive 45 starts at $75,150 mine had a bunch of options on there, including the integral active steering, the four wheel air suspension for 1600 bucks, the driving assistance, driving assistant, professional Package, which includes hands free driving, highway driving system, similar to Super cruise or blue cruise, is 20 550 bucks. This one had the M Sport package on there, which gives you, you know, some M badges and other exterior elements, as well as the 22 inch wheels. That's $4,500

Roberto Baldwin  21:15  
most people a lot for badges. Yeah? You know that you don't need no stinking badges, yeah.

Speaker 1  21:20  
But you do get an M steering wheel, you know? So there's that.

Roberto Baldwin  21:23  
I guess we'll have the owl cuts

Speaker 1  21:28  
out the No, it's leather. Oh, thank god.

Roberto Baldwin  21:31  
No, I, I hate alcaterra so much. Anytime it's on the steering wheel, it's just it feels gross, okay, like I don't mind it, but, you know, I, oh, all

Speaker 1  21:44  
in the grand total, including delivery. Remember I said this was $75,000.75 150 base MSRP, including delivery, came to $96,275 which you know, on premium vehicles, it's very easy to extremely inflate your price. You know, if you're not careful with the options list, which we badges. So you want to guess at the destination, charge 1100 Oh, you're very close. 1175

Roberto Baldwin  22:16  
Yeah, the luxury people are like, we're already going to charge you a lot.

Speaker 1  22:22  
Why are we charging 100 almost 100 grand, for this thing? You know, we're not gonna lie about where the price increases are. We're just gonna tell you right up front, here's where the

Roberto Baldwin  22:31  
prices we're not we're not gonna sneak it into some weird, oh yeah, first deliver your car is gonna be $40,000 like, what?

Sam Abuelsamid  22:39  
So, yeah, 279 miles of range for this, this variant. And if you know, if you're looking for, you know, a premium, you know, luxury, EV crossover wagon thing, you know, I think you know, this is definitely, I think I don't know this would be right up there with the BMW or the, sorry, the Mercedes EQE SUV. I gotta say, I think I kind of like the and the EQE, you know, having the the 00, zero layer interface, I think actually works a little better than the BMW i drive interface.

Roberto Baldwin  23:30  
I know there's, you know, there was, we even talked about it, no, but there was news about, you know, GMs. GM is going to get rid of car play on all their cars, blah, blah, blah, which I know, but the only car, the only system that I really barely ever use CarPlay with is the G was the zero layer. Like, I plug my phone in and like, Oh, there's the map. There's a little thing for music, all right, that's fine. I everything else I have to, like, I test the info Tim system, but then I immediately go to CarPlay to do this stuff. The Mercedes zero layer administering there,

Speaker 1  24:03  
yeah, because with the zero layer system, you know, it's basically the whole screen is the map, and then you have some widgets that are around, you know, they're overlaid on top of the map, in the corners, or the bottom, bottom level, you know, for things like media players, and give you access to a few other things that you need that you know don't take up a whole lot of space. They still have decently sized touch targets, so it's not too hard to hit those touch targets, and you're not going back and forth between different modes all the time, which I think is really helpful.

Roberto Baldwin  24:38  
Yeah, yeah. Because in CarPlay, I immediately go to the mode where it shows the map and music and all the other, you know, other widgets about things that are happening. And that's what I think. That's why, outside of, like text messaging, through, you know, it'll pop up and say, Hey, you got text message, you know, pop in the CarPlay, and then I can pop back out to zero layer. So, yeah, if you're automaker, gee. Am, and you want to tell people we're not gonna have CarPlay anymore, you got to be as good or better than the zero lane.

Speaker 1  25:07  
Well, we'll talk more about GM in a little bit. But so that's the that's the 2026 BMW IX X Drive 45 with 22 inch wheels. All right, let's, let's get into some of the other stuff this week. So the reason why the show is pushed back to for publication, is pushed back to Tuesday this week is because of the embargo on the 2026, Jeep, Grand Cherokee. For some reason, Jeep wanted to have it out on Tuesday morning. So that's, that's when the show will show up in your in your pod catcher. But for 2026 the Grand Cherokee is getting a very mild mid cycle update. You know, most people probably won't even notice the differences visually from the exterior, a little bit of change to the front fascia, not a whole lot. It's, you know, it looks pretty much like the Grand Cherokees for the last three years. The current what is it? The WL version of the grand cherokee that came out three years ago. The Inside, there is change in the dashboard design. So they've gone to a different dashboard layout that has has the larger screen, so it's a larger center screen, so it's a 12.3 inch infotainment screen in the center now, and it's integrated, and that there's below that, they've integrated the same kind of haptic panel for the climate controls that they've been putting into other models like the wagoneer s and the grand wagoneer and various other models. So they've gotten rid of the some physical controls there, replaced it with this haptic touch bar for temperature control, defoggers, direction of where you want the air flow. The vents are still manual, so that's a good thing. So it's not a huge change. It's fairly modest change, but it is a change, and still has the optional passenger side screen, which, again, you know, not really that useful for most people.

Roberto Baldwin  27:29  
Someone's out there is enjoying it. I don't know. No one I know, but someone out there bought it, and they have a family member, and that family members having the best time of their lives.

Speaker 1  27:39  
Yeah, probably, maybe, or the maybe a Jeep employee. For all we know,

Roberto Baldwin  27:44  
it's somebody, yeah, someone's having the best time with it, with the, you know, passenger side

Speaker 1  27:50  
screen to play. Or somebody at a supplier that's selling those screens to stellantis, oh,

Roberto Baldwin  27:55  
oh, that person's having the best days. They're selling it to stellantis, Mercedes. Yeah.

Speaker 1  28:02  
So the big news, though, is under the hood, you know. So the previous two power trains that were available on the grand cherokee for 2025 are carried over. So you still have the pen of star v6 and you still have the four by plug in hybrid system. Those go unchanged. What's new is the the new hurricane four engine. And so I think it was last week, or maybe the week before, we talked about stellantis Big $13 billion investment announcement. And one of the things that was mentioned in there is that they're going to build, what was referred to in that press release is the GME t4 EVO engine in Kokomo at their Kokomo engine plant, starting in 2026 well, that engine is the brand. The official public, public facing branding for that engine is Hurricane four. So this is a brand new two liter four cylinder. And you might be thinking, why is still antis making a brand new two liter four cylinder when they have one that they just introduced in North America a few years ago. That's the so called GME four cylinder. It's the global medium engine. Is what GME stands for, and there are similarities between these two engines. They they have, she have the same boring stroke. But the the GME, the current GME, four cylinder, has 275 horsepower, or somewhere thereabouts, depending on which configuration it's in, which which vehicle it's in, like the old, the last generation Cherokee, had this. And I think it was like 265 or 270 in the Alfa Romeo's, I think it gets up to 290 on some variants. And then in the jeeps, the Jeep four by ease. It's 275 the new engine that the new hurricane for has, it's a completely different block, completely different. And cylinder head. It's, it's actually based on the design of the the three liter six cylinder hurricane engine that is in the some of the the rams and the Grand wagoneers. So it has the same bore spacing as that same same Boren stroke two liters, but now makes 324 horsepower and 332 pounds feet of torque. And the cylinder head design, well the block design. The previous GME engine was a sand cast block with iron cylinder liners. This one is a die cast aluminum block with deep skirts and lots of ribs on there. It makes it nice and stiff so it doesn't vibrate too much and doesn't make too much noise. And it's got the same plasma bore spray system that they use on the six cylinder, and that's been used by various others, going back to the GTR and some of the former Shelby GT 500 engines that Ford has made. So there's no liners in there, but they spray this really hard coating on the cylinder bores after it's machined that gives them durability that they need, and then the cylinder head is where things get really interesting. So the the new engine has two fuel injectors per cylinder. There's direct injection and port injection, and there's also two spark plugs per cylinder. And hopefully by the time this comes out, there will be a little video that shows you how all this works. But the what they've got, what they've done is they've incorporated what they call a pre chamber design. It's a passive pre chamber design, into the cylinder head, and it's similar in concept to what they did on the Maserati natuno v6 their three liter v6 but they've done it here in a way that's a little more cost effective to manufacture, hopefully will prove durable. But what you have one of the spark plugs is in the top of the cylinder head, right in the center between all the valves, and then there's a copper alloy insert that gets pressed in to the cylinder head above or below the spark plug. So the spark plug sits above this pre chamber, and then the other spark plug sits off to one side. And so what happens is when the when you have the the piston going down on the intake stroke, sucking in air and fuel, and then the valves close and goes up on the compression stroke. As it's going up on the compression stroke, this little copper insert has nine holes in it, eight around the perimeter, and then one in the center, and some of that air fuel mixture gets pushed up through those little orifices into this chamber. And then as the piston approaches top, dead center, the spark plug goes off, it ignites that little bit of air fuel that's inside there, and then it sprays out, and what you end up with is nine flame fronts that spread out from this pre chamber and gets you much more uniform combustion across the cylinder, so you make more power and The things more efficient and has cleaner emissions. And so, you know, you get, you almost achieve what they call homogeneous combustion. So basically, almost all of the air fuel mixture in the cylinder ignites simultaneously. So it's, it's much more it's a much more efficient system that also makes, yes, it's 20% more power than before and 10% better fuel efficiency. So we'll see. You know how? You know how the fuel efficiency actually does in the real world, but it's, it's a, it's a pretty cool setup. I said, you know, 333, 24 horsepower from a four cylinder turbo. Not bad. Can't complain.

Roberto Baldwin  33:59  
It's a lot of spark plugs when it comes time to do and that's true,

Speaker 1  34:03  
but yeah, I mean, modern spark plugs generally last 100,000 miles anyway, so yeah, and

Roberto Baldwin  34:07  
then you get spark plug, you're like, dude, yeah.

Speaker 1  34:12  
I mean, with modern, modern high, high voltage ignition systems, you know, you can generally go at least 100,000 miles before changing spark plugs.

Roberto Baldwin  34:21  
I still have so many. I don't know why I have so many feeler gages. Just billions of because, you know, you set the pre gap, you have to gap your spark plugs. Now, they're all pre wrapped, and I got so many. I'll just,

Speaker 1  34:33  
I'll check them before I put them in anyway. Yeah, check them. Still. I've got those little coin, spark plug, gap gages, oh, the

Roberto Baldwin  34:42  
little cert, yeah, it's a little circle or that. I have the ones that, and then I have the ones all with the 1 million iterations little slides out the little metal slots, yeah,

Speaker 1  34:54  
yeah, yeah, that was, those were the days. Don't have to do that very much, although I do that on my on. My Miata, because it, you know, it still doesn't. It has, you know, it's, it's a distributor of this ignition system, but it's not quite as modern as current systems.

Roberto Baldwin  35:11  
Get my feeler gage out, then you can't find it like, I guess I go buy another one, number 12.

Speaker 1  35:18  
So the the hurricane four is starting production now. It's actually already in production at stellantis Dundee engine plant here in Michigan. It's about 20 miles south of me here. And then next year, they're going to add production at a second facility. So you know they're going to be they're going to be using this across the board on a lot of stellantis products over the next several years, I would expect that we will see this come to the Wrangler and also the Cherokee. Because remember that the new Cherokee is launching only as a hybrid. But, you know, they've said that eventually there will be a combustion engine in there, so I'm guessing that there will be a version of this engine in the new Cherokee. You know, 300 horsepower Cherokee, that could be fun. And then, you know, assorted other stellantis products. So this will gradually, initially, the the GME engine will stay in the plug in hybrids, but I'm guessing at some point they will transition over to this engine as well. All right, so, speaking of trucks, Scout, you know, they when, when it was announced that scout was coming back to Volkswagen was going to revive the scout brand, a lot of people got really excited, you know, and it was going to be electric. And then by the time that they actually showed us concept version of the truck and the SUV said, Yeah, we're going to do an extended range EV version as well. And now, with the way the market's going, you know, based on our pre orders, we're going to start off building just the E rev version, and the full battery electric version will come along at some point, maybe,

Roberto Baldwin  37:13  
I mean, any rev truck makes sense. I like the idea of electric Scout, but also Volkswagen has issues, money issues, so, yeah, yeah. So let's, let's, we'll see, yeah.

Speaker 1  37:30  
I mean, that's what's driving this, you know is, you know, VW group as a whole has been having some struggles. They're not selling as much as they did, certainly not selling as many EVs as they hoped. And so I think they figure, well, we can sell a lot more of these erevs, because I think the last number I heard was about 85% of the pre orders were for the E rev version. The big question, though, is, you know when it does come out? You know, how much you know, what kind of capability is it actually going to have as an E rev, because the rumors are that, you know, it's going to use the Volkswagen e8, EA, 8884, cylinder, which is the one that they use in pretty much everything you know, two liter, four cylinder turbo. It's going to be mounted in the back somewhere, and it's, it's unclear. You know, there's been some reports that the E rev version may only have, like, 3500 pounds of towing capacity. You know, if that's the case, that's not going to go over very well with truck buyers.

Roberto Baldwin  38:40  
I wonder how many people who are, who are looking at this are towing that much though, I think those folks, Whenever someone's they're always gonna buy that, you know, a diesel. I think there's people who are just like, I'm gonna they're gonna overbuy for what they want to do.

Speaker 1  38:58  
Yeah, and no. I mean, you know this, this is basically a full size truck and full size SUV. I mean, this is roughly the same, close to the same size as an f1 50 or Silverado. This is not a midsize truck like the the rivian are one and, you know, if you look at, you know, people that are buying, you know, even the f1 50s and silver autos, the light duty f1 50s and silver autos, you know, they're often towing campers or boats. You know that weigh six to 8000 pounds. Yeah, they may not be using the full 10 or 12,000 pound capability, but you know, a lot of them are towing, you know, five to 8000 pound loads. A lot

Roberto Baldwin  39:41  
of them, is that a truth? Well, it is here in Michigan, all right. Well, yeah, that's what you're seeing it. That doesn't mean that's I always want to see the data, and no one's ever gonna give us, it's like the plug, that's true, yeah? Like, I want to know how many people are actually using their truck to do truck things. And I also want to see how many people, and I think those folks who are buying those, you know. I don't think they're, they're, they're very smart about what they're buying. This is, this is essentially like a ridgeline, just a big Yeah, but bigger, yeah, a big ridge, yeah.

Speaker 1  40:14  
I mean this, this is sized like a full size truck. So that's gonna be real interesting to see how that plays out.

Roberto Baldwin  40:21  
Yeah, that does make sense. You know, full size trucks generally have that capacity to do the full size truck thing where the midsize you're like, Okay, I understand that I'm getting a midsize truck, so I shouldn't be expected to to be, you know, again, carrying a fifth wheel, or a giant boat or whatever, not carrying, but towing. And so when you see a full size that doesn't do that, yeah, you get a good that's a good point.

Speaker 1  40:46  
All right, let's continuing with with the EV theme for a couple more minutes. Prague, the city of Prague in the Czech Republic, has been on a splurge of installing lamp post, EV charging this. This is what I like to see. This is what we need more of, more of this. You know, not, not so much emphasis on DC fast charging, because, especially in cities, yeah,

Roberto Baldwin  41:16  
it's just parked. Just park it. It's bring your own cable, plug it in. You plug it in there. That easy peasy. I've done in Germany. I've done it in, I don't know, some other places, I can't remember. It's great, because you're like, Oh, I'm gonna be inside for hours. I don't need DC fast charging every time I park my car. Yeah.

Speaker 1  41:34  
I mean, if you, if you live in a city, you know, a lot of people who live in in urban areas, you know, park have to park on the street. And you know, this is perfect. You know, you just pull up to the curb, take out your cable, plug it in, you're good. And, you know, it's very, you know, from an installation standpoint, it's very easy, because street lamps, they already have power. They're already running, running, you know, they've already got lots of power. And you know, here in the US, you know, many of them are running, you know, a single phase of a 480 volt circuit. So they're running like, was it 277 volts. And you know, the new Sha 3400 standard supports that. So it's much easier to install a charging outlet on those poles, you know, without having to put in a transformer or anything, you just tap right into the power that the lights are using, and you're good to go. So so far in 2024 they Prague really began their program last year. They put in 143 street new street lamps that had EV charging ports on them by 2026 they hope to have 1500 installed and 6000 by 2030 so these are all across the city. Cool and says here in this Jalopnik article, two years ago, there were only 2400 EV charging points in the entire Czech Republic.

Roberto Baldwin  43:00  
Wow, that's not Yeah. Well, you know, you gotta you move quickly if you're smart, if you're smart about it. I don't understand why America is so slow on the Bring Your Own cable thing, but I also understand why America, part of me is like, why aren't we doing the thing that everyone else is doing? That makes sense. And then also part of me is like, Yeah, I know why. Yeah. I gotta close the door, all

Speaker 1  43:25  
right. So I also drove the Twitter rav4 2026 Toyota rav4 last week. And the new, you know, the new rav4 is based on the same architecture as the previous generation. So it's not really all new, you know. So it's same dimensions, same 106 inch wheelbase, you know, it's the same size, 183 ish inches long, I think. So, you know, it hasn't grown larger, hasn't grown fatter, but, you know, got new styling, all new styling. And for 2026 there's no more gas only versions. They're all hybridized, either regular hybrid or plug in hybrid. And so they have, they do have a couple of new trim levels. So, you know, the design, you know, which we first saw in May at the Toyota event at their at their headquarters, is, you know, a little chunkier looking, a little blockier looking than before. It's got a variation on the, what they call their Hammerhead headlight theme that they put on the on the latest Prius and the Camry, you know, it's a little little more squared off version of

Roberto Baldwin  44:48  
it. It's like someone said, Hey, can you make a route for but with Legos?

Speaker 1  44:52  
Yeah, that's a, that's a, that's a good way of putting it, yeah, hey,

Roberto Baldwin  44:56  
Bill, hey, take the rap for now, build it with Legos. Yeah? All right. Right, boom, that's what you're getting.

Speaker 1  45:03  
So, you know, they're kind of splitting up the trims. There's, you know, like seven trims all together, now, splitting those up across three different groups. So they've got their core group, which is, you know, kind of the most mainstream variations. Then there's the premium group art and, sorry, no, the rugged group, which is the new woodland trim, which replaces the former TRD version, because TRD is now being reserved for body on frame trucks and utilities. So they're calling the rav4 woodland is the off road version, or off roadie version. And then there's the sport group, which includes the the new gr sport, the, you know, they the the basic rav4 hybrids drive pretty much like current generation rav4 hybrids. You know, they're, they're not mechanically all that different. They got a little bit more power because there's no gas version now, and no previously on the 2025 Rav, they only had the hybrid with all wheel drive, and it used an electric a rear e axle system to provide on demand all wheel drive, and then, you know, front drive. So there was no mechanical all wheel drive system on there, and you you couldn't get a front wheel drive only. Rav4 hybrid. If you want a front drive, you'd have to get a gas version. Well, now, since the gas version is gone, they're offering a gas. Rav4 hybrid, front wheel drive hybrid. Sorry, they're offering a front wheel drive rav4 hybrid, which has 224 horsepower. And then there is the if or 226 and then if you want all wheel drive, they add the rear e axle, and you get a total combined output of 236 horsepower. So it's about 10 more than before. And then the the plug in hybrid has the battery has been bumped up from 18 kilowatt hours to 22.7 kilowatt hours, so it'll now give up to 52 miles of electric driving range and has 324 horsepower, and the GR Sport version is only available as a plug in hybrid. So there's four different trim levels that have a plug in hybrid. Driving, first of all, driving around in the plug in hybrid with in just EV mode. Yeah, it's got plenty of, plenty of performance to get around. So you can, you can easily drive this as your as a daily driver, 203 horsepower from the electric motors alone. So if you're driving with the engine off in EV mode, you get 200 horsepower, which is basically the same as what you got before with the gas version, and now you've got 52 miles of electric range to play with. So for the vast majority of people, it's going to be fine. That's going to be, you know, this. This would be, you know, this would meet your needs as an EV. And then, as with other plug in hybrids, when you want to take a longer trip, just keep going, and it operates as a hybrid Once the battery is depleted, so performance not an issue here. One interesting thing with the plug in hybrid that I noticed is that, you know, we've complained in the past about the sound of Toyota's four cylinder engines with the hybrids, yeah, they're not the most refined sounding engines in the world. Tend to be a little they're good, they're strong enough, they're durable, but they just don't sound very good. Well, that's not a problem with the new plug in hybrid. It's way quieter now when it's running in hybrid mode. And the reason why is they actually the plug in hybrid actually has a completely different block that has been significantly stiffened compared to the regular block. So it's a little more expensive, but it's a lot stiffer, vibrates a lot less, makes a lot less noise, and then they've also added some other noise insulation throughout the vehicle as well. So now there's a lot less difference between driving in EV mode and driving in hybrid mode with the plug in hybrid rav4 and it's actually quite pleasant to drive. We had no issues with performance or anything else like that during the time we were driving it the the biggest issue I had with the new rav4 is the interior feels kind of cheap. Yeah. And. It. It's interesting because there was another clockiness. It doesn't know, it's the materials. So, you know, there's, there's not much, you know, there's not really any, there's no piano black anywhere, which is good, all right, so we get a plus one for that, yeah. But if you, if you look at the, at the dashboard, you know, you'll see that there are panels that are just flat, almost completely untextured. And I asked, because these were pre production vehicles that we were driving, is this production representative? Because oftentimes what you'll find on pre production models, if they don't have all the tooling quite ready and installed, you will find panels in pre production models or in prototypes that don't have the graining that you will find on production models or textures that you'll find on production models, so just be smooth plastic. And you know. So I asked, specifically, asked, Toyota, is that the case with this one? And I said, Nope, this is production representative. And I said, Okay, I mean, the fit and finish was good, or the fit was good, but it just the materials just look kind of cheap. You know, it's like hard plastics everywhere, and it just didn't feel, didn't look and feel great. And, you know, there's another car that I drove earlier this week. That is, I can't talk about yet, but that is considerably less effect, less expensive than this vehicles likely to be, and it has a much nicer feeling interior than this does. Even the Nissan LEAF, which is, you know, it's, yeah, yeah. Even the leaf, the cheap leaf for an EV, the cheap for an EV leaf, even that you're like, Oh, this is nice in here, the Maverick, even though it's not using, like, premium materials, feels, yeah, the texturing that they put on those materials, you know, it's still hard plastic, but the the draining and the texturing they put on, it feels and looks a lot better.

Roberto Baldwin  51:57  
Yeah, it's a texture goes a long way, is what we're saying. Yeah, it does a little bit of texture goes a long way, like, very flat, just, kind of, man just kind of feels,

Speaker 1  52:07  
yeah, I mean, I don't, I don't need the top of the dashboard to be, you know, all padded and, you know, covered in leather, you know, especially on more affordable vehicles, yeah. But, you know, I do want it to, you know, at least have some texture to it, you know, that looks like there was some thought given to it. And this, it just looks cheap. You know, I'm sorry, that's just the way it is. It does not look, you know, for for a vehicle, and Toyota has not released pricing yet for the new rav4 you know, it will probably be a little bit more than what it was last year. You know the 2025 rav4 hybrid started at 3332 850, I'm guessing it's probably going to be at least 33 and change maybe 34 for a base. And then the plug in hybrid will probably start somewhere around 44 is the last one. Previous one started at 44 800 I'm guessing it'd probably be at least 45 and, you know, maybe a little bit higher for the plugins, although I think there's, there's different trim levels. So there's actually lower trim levels now available for the rav4 plugin, but like the GR sport, you know, which is the top trim level, you know, that thing is probably going to cost somewhere around $55,000 and that has the same dashboard materials that are in the base rav4 Yeah, you know. And that's, that's kind of unfortunate, you know, I'd like to see Toyota put a little more effort into the interior materials that they put in these vehicles, and it hasn't hurt their sales yet. Last year, the rav4 was by far the most the best selling single nameplate in the US. So you know, GM Ford likes to talk about the F series being the top selling vehicle in the US, but when they say that they're talking about f1 50s to every F series up to, like the f6 100 medium duty trucks

Roberto Baldwin  54:07  
and the and that has fleet sales. So yeah, imagine how insanely well the rav4 is actually selling,

Speaker 1  54:14  
yeah, but the f1 50 itself is somewhere around 400,000 units. Last year, the rav4 sold 475,000 units. And you know, I would expect that this one is going to sell just as well, because it has all the things that people like about a rav4 Yeah, it's, you know, good size. It's, you know, it's, it's got, you know, basically the same powertrain. It's got all those features and it, you know, despite my complaints about the materials in the interior, one big change that they made is this has their next generation infotainment system, which is the first, the first thing that they've built on their new arena. Software platform that is, that's their platform for their next generation software defined vehicles. So the the ADAs and the the infotainment on this rav4 are all built on that software platform. And the biggest change from a functional standpoint, for the infotainment you were talking earlier about a lot of infotainment systems, you've got to go to do different modes. You've got to switch modes. And the previous gen Toyota multimedia system was overall, it was such a huge improvement over the prior and tune systems. And tune is that great? Yeah. But you know, the My biggest complaint with that system, with the with the Toyota system, the last, current generation of the Toyota system, was that you couldn't display multiple things on the screen at the same time. So you were, if you're in navigation mode, you got no media player controls, or vice versa, or if you're in settings, you couldn't see any of the other stuff. Now it gives you you get two screens that you can swipe through. And on the main screen, you have two windows on there, and so you have about two thirds of the screen is taken up by the navigation screen. And you can switch these around. You can switch what displays in which window, but so the first one, the first screen, has two windows, two thirds of it being nav by default, and the other third being the media player. And then one swipe to the left, you get a second window that has three more widgets on there, so you get three panes on there showing different functionality. So it's very easy to have to have access to all the things you want without having to switch around between different modes very much. And so I think that that was a big improvement to this vehicle, that it's also got a new voice control system that worked pretty well, worked pretty reliably during the time we had it for a few hours. Yeah. I mean, it's overall, you know, it's definitely an improvement. It's, it's a, I think it's a better vehicle, except for some of those interior materials. And then, and then there's the woodland which, you know, like everybody else, you know, Toyota's got to have an off roadie variant of the rav4 you know, Honda's got their trail sport, CRV trail sport. And you know, you've got the wilderness editions from Subaru and various others. And like most of these off roadie versions, you know, it's mostly off road in appearance. You know, there's no skid plates on this. You do have, you know, the front, the front fascia, the lower part of the front fascia, is molded so that it looks like it, you know, looks like it's skid plate wrapping up from underneath, but it's just plastic. It does, you know, the RAV does have more ground clearance than a lot of these vehicles. So it's, you know, 8.3 inches of ground clearance. So it's got a reasonable amount of ground clearance. And with what they did, you know, they did some interesting stuff with, with the ADAs, you know, with the new Adas system, with controlling the the wheels, you know, to get you better, better control on the off road stuff. So we, we did a light off road course, you know, no, no really big rocks or anything, because, you know, that's not what this thing's designed for. But it was, you know, it was more than just a dirt road, and it did good. Did? It did fine. So, you know, it was, it was quite, you know, quite reasonable to drive, you know, on the types of things that you're going to use a RAV for, for you just want to be, you know, take a little bit of care to make sure you don't go over, you know, any, anything that's sticking up more than eight inches, because it could tear up the underside of the vehicle.

Roberto Baldwin  59:11  
Yeah, yeah. Keep going off roadish, yeah.

Speaker 1  59:17  
I mean, it'll get, you know, it'll take you down trail to a cabin, things like that, you know, or totally engineer, yeah? The thing, the things that most people are actually going to do with these vehicles, as opposed to, you know what, what you know the hardcore off roaders are going to do,

Roberto Baldwin  59:37  
yeah, the hardcore people, they know what they're gonna buy. They're buying old buying Old, old wranglers and ripping everything out. And,

Speaker 1  59:44  
yeah, wranglers or Broncos or forerunners, yeah, that's, you know, or old Nissan xterras, you know, that's, that's what they're gonna use. They're, they're

Roberto Baldwin  59:56  
not even gonna consider a rap for no one's knowing me, don't. Do that.

Speaker 1  1:00:02  
All right, let's so yeah, as I said, pricing is not available yet. This thing's going on sale late this year. We'll probably hear pricing sometime later in November, maybe early December, before it goes on sale. And then Toyota, this week also showed off the new land cruiser. FJ, in Japan.

Roberto Baldwin  1:00:22  
Man, okay, so remember when they had that big event where they showed off all these EVs in the background? We're going EVs, like, this was like, one of those in the background. And I lost my mind because I was like, I want a baby. FJ, EV What am I gonna do? Don't need it, not doing any off roading. This is, this is the problem with with, you know, I think, me, to be honest, a lot of people who buy off road vehicles is like this. You don't need that car. You don't need that what am I doing? What am I doing with this? I live in the East Bay. There's no where am I driving over that said, I want the baby.

Speaker 1  1:00:58  
FJ, and I mean, what do you think of the design of this

Roberto Baldwin  1:01:04  
thing? I really like it. I like the little baby. It's very,

Speaker 1  1:01:08  
it's very blocky. Yeah, it's another, it's another Lego car. Yeah,

Roberto Baldwin  1:01:12  
it's a Lego car. It's, it is, you know, it's reminiscent of all, essentially every you know, off roader, which are just, you know, a square and a rectangle.

Speaker 1  1:01:25  
The portions are a little interesting. I mean, it looks like it's a little, I mean, the one, the ones that they showed, you know, the wheels, you know, for an off roader, the wheels almost look a little small. So it looks a little top heavy

Roberto Baldwin  1:01:42  
to me. I like the fact that they show one with a with a snorkel, yeah, yeah. It's, yeah, this is, I again, this is sort of, it's, it is a Suzuki samurai. There you go. I think it's bigger than a samurai, though, yeah, but it's, this is, it's, it's this generation, Suzuki Samurai, yeah, hey, you want to, we can't get the Jimmy Well, we're not gonna get this either, actually, and I think about it,

Sam Abuelsamid  1:02:08  
yeah, we probably won't get this one

Roberto Baldwin  1:02:09  
either. A lot of jimmies in Japan, so I can see why they would make this, yeah, or, or, whenever I go to Japan, I'm just looking for jimmies, one of the other.

Speaker 1  1:02:19  
But, I mean, you know, again, if you're, if you're actually going to do some real off roading, this is a much better solution than the than the rav4 you know, it's, I think it's still unibody, but you know, you're going to have some underbody protection on this thing, you know. And in a lot of ways it's better than, you know, the bigger vehicles, like a like a forerunner, or the bigger Land Cruisers, because you can go into spaces where those vehicles are going to struggle. You know, having us, having a smaller vehicle like this, actually makes a lot of

Roberto Baldwin  1:02:55  
sense. Yeah, that's why the two door wrangler makes so much sense. Two Door defender makes, you know, there was a defender 90 outside the GM event. Do you see it? Yeah, I told somebody that someone got the right they purchased a correct defender.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:03:12  
But this, this one is a four door, though,

Roberto Baldwin  1:03:15  
yeah, yeah, but it's so small, yeah. It's like four doors in a way that, like, you know, like, the, the, what do you call it? The Honda Fit was a four door. I'm like, yeah, it's four doors. You know, it's pretty small, but you can put so much stuff in that car. Yeah, no, I'm a big fan. We're not gonna get it, so I don't know why I care.

Speaker 1  1:03:34  
Yeah, it's a, it's about 10 inch shorter wheelbase than the 250 series Land Cruiser, which is the one that we get here. That's, that's what's sold here. Is the Land Cruiser and the Lexus GX. It's the 250 series. So, you know, it's, it's considerably smaller, yeah, it, yeah. And it has, has a 2.7 liter gas, four cylinder, so no electric version of this

Roberto Baldwin  1:04:01  
one. It's Japan. Japan, there's, there's, there's a lot of issues around electricity in Japan. You know, earthquake, the nuclear thing, they're little, a little shy on electricity, to be honest, when it comes on well, but when you drive around, there's, like, electric charging. I'm like, yeah. I'm like, I get to drive my car here, charge it at the gas station.

Speaker 1  1:04:21  
Yeah? All right. So you know, if they do offer this, you're gonna get one.

Roberto Baldwin  1:04:28  
I mean, me, well, if it was electric, yeah, that time this comes out, then like, the r2 will be out and the slate will be out, and the blah, blah, you know, there's so many sort of small vehicles that, you know, it's hard to it's hard to live in Northern California for me, and think about buying a gas only car, yeah, when you know, like it's the other day, we're like, it smells like smoke. And then we walk outside, as you do, and you look around on the horizon see which way the fire is, because you want to make sure it's not near your house. That's the reality that we live in.

Speaker 1  1:05:00  
Okay. Speaking of the r2 and the r3 rivian had some news this week. They laid off 4% of their staff, about 600 people, and their chief marketing officer left, and CEO RJ scarring took over as head of marketing for rivian. What do you think

Roberto Baldwin  1:05:28  
when you have that type of company do one job and do it? Well, that's, that's really what, what it comes down to find, find me, find another marketer, achieve them, you know, figure out something. The there's a lot of external issues with any you know, EV startup, there's a lot external issues that they have to deal with in the United States right now. But as the CEO, that's your job. Maybe don't split your time now, maybe, you know, double down on that CEO position and working to figure out, like, ways around the word no, yeah. And then, you know, hire someone who can do your marketing. Yeah, no. I mean, they're, they're not cheap vehicles. That's, that's the one, you know one thing, but they have money from from Volkswagen. You know how that works out? You know, essentially, you're to vote. I'm sure to many of Volkswagen developers, there have a bunch of kids that are coming in and telling them how to do their job, and they've been building cars for, you know, we're Volkswagen. We've been building cars for 1 million years. And I'm sure there's probably pushback when it comes to that there typically is, especially in large corporate entities, when you bring someone in to help you out, there's always going to be people who like, boo, you don't know what you're doing. I'm like, so I think there's the CEO position for rivian is, you know, three full time jobs. Let's not, let's not become the marketing and head of marketing as well.

Speaker 1  1:07:01  
Yeah, you know, when I saw RJ at an automotive Press Association event here in Detroit a couple weeks ago, yeah, he did confirm that the r2 is scheduled to start production in the second quarter of next year. Yeah, and that's that's going to be a crucial vehicle for them, because the r1 is just, you know, as much as a lot of people like it, it really hasn't sold very well. It's, yeah, they, they sell about 10,000 of them a year. Yeah. I mean, it's

Roberto Baldwin  1:07:33  
not cheap. The EV nine exists, so you're, you know, you're going up against, that's sort of the problem that a lot of the the new companies have, is that, until you're established, like, what? Okay, I'm gonna put my, you know, if you have somebody with a lot of expendable cash, this is your second or third car, okay, yeah, it makes sense. But for someone who's, like, you know what, I really want a large EV, a large SUV. That's an EV, but I don't you know this is going to be the main car. What are you going to to to gamble on a startup that? And you see startups disappear all the time, and rivian has been around for a while, so it's, you know, it's kind of tough to call them a startup at this point. Do you gamble on a new company, or do you gamble on a company that you know isn't going anywhere? And that's, that's, I think that's a lot of, especially now with, with, you know, inflation is going back up. You know, recession is always on the horizon. You know, job cuts, the government shut down. It's fight. You know, it's a bad economic time, and you but you still, you know, I need to get this car. What are you going to get? Are you going to get the more established the car for the more established company that's been around for a billion years and also makes giant boats? Or are you going to get it from the folks who, you know, it's great that they're, you know, it's American built, American made. But, you know, am I going to gamble on that? That's, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1  1:09:03  
It's going to be real interesting to see how the r2 does, you know that one's that one's coming next spring said, you know, and it's supposed to cost around $45,000 you know. It's, you know, the R ones are expensive enough that most of them, you know, unless you leased them, you know, did not qualify for the tax credits anyway. The r2 is likely to be it's at a price point where the people that are inclined to spend that kind of money are going to be much more sensitive to the absence of the tax credits. And so I will be real interested to see how that one plays out. You know, the r3 is that, you know, that's the one that most people actually seem to want. You know, it's a smaller one, and that one you know, is probably going to start in the upper 30s. And again, you know that's not coming. Till 2027

Roberto Baldwin  1:10:01  
Yeah, that's a i, I have people like text me about the r3 I actually had someone text me this week about the r3 and I'm like, Okay, well, the r2 is coming out first, and I, I don't know if coming out with the r3 first would make more sense, because excitement doesn't mean sales. Yeah, that's the you know, so, but, but but you'd also don't want to back yourself in the corner. You don't want to pull a VW ID buzz situation where, you know, you got people excited, and then you made him wait for seven something you Yes, and by time he comes out, I was like, and then it was,

Sam Abuelsamid  1:10:34  
you know, too expensive. And range,

Roberto Baldwin  1:10:36  
yeah, it's even with the range issue, if you just if it wasn't as expensive, or if you gave, like, some good lease offers on it, like, you know, Hyundai's does great with these lease offers. If you gave some good lease offers, just get them on the road, and then people will see them, and then they'll want them. Right now, I don't see very many ID buzzes on the road, which is unfortunate. Again, I really like the ID buzz, even with all its like, weird problems, no second year, second row thing. What do you call it? Cup holders. You know, really about 245 miles of range. You know it's, it's, it's 400 volts. So it's not as efficient. I mean, it'll still charge it up to 200 but you know it's, it's 400 volt. 200 is peak, and it doesn't stay as consistent as an 800 volt system would. And so there's a lot of like, little weird things that you're just like, oh, there's all this cool stuff that this thing does. And then there's a lot of like, oh, so hopefully the art three doesn't end up falling into that, that trap.

Speaker 1  1:11:39  
So you and I were both in New York this week for a GM event. Yeah, you want to talk about that?

Roberto Baldwin  1:11:50  
So we flew out to New York, and GM had an event where they had a bunch of executives stand up and tell us a bunch of things. There's going to be 2028 they're going to have their new like software defined architecture, which they really didn't save Software Defined vehicle very often in the I don't think they said at all. They said it afterwards. When you talk to people, yeah, I don't think in the presentation they did, they never said the word Software Defined vehicle, which was kind of weird. They're going to have a level three SAE, level three, autonomous driving, which is eyes off, hands off, in certain situations on the highway, etc, in 2020, a lot of things are coming in 2028, and then after the little presentation where it did felt very, it was very corporate, then we had a very then we had the opportunity to talk to engineers, and that was way, way better. Yeah, questions were asked during the Q and A and none of the answers were very satisfying, because we weren't, because you weren't talking to the engineers. I mean, at the end of the day, I mean, I know it's great to say, Oh, I got the CEO of this company to talk to me. I've had, I've talked to a lot of CEOs, one on one, and some of them are great, and some of them are very media, you know, savvy. They're media trained. So they're going to say the thing which is completely worthless and not helpful to me at all. And then you talk to the engineers who are building it. And then those folks, they know what. They know what's going on, and it was really great to talk to them after that presentation. So if I'd flown out there for that, just for that presentation, I would have been sad.

Speaker 1  1:13:28  
Yeah, well, I think, I think you were standing there when we were talking to Sanaz afterwards. She's one of the PR people from GM, and she was asking, you know, what we thought, you know, and you know, we both expressed our thoughts that, you know, frankly, talking to CEOs, most of the time, not all that useful or interesting, you know, because they're so they're so media trained, and they're they tend to be most of the time. They tend to be so on message that you don't really get anything, any useful insights from them very often,

Roberto Baldwin  1:14:06  
yeah, and I think someone made the remark during that conversation that, you know, Mary Berry could Barry, Barry Barry, Mary Barra could say something that knocks the, you know, that destroys the stock price, Yeah, you should get inadvertently say something so, so as a CEO, you have to be very, very careful. As an engineer, you're not gonna, you're not gonna affect the stock price. So the engineers have a little bit more leeway, and they're unless you contradict the CEO, unless you contradict the CEO, and then there's always, there's always that sort then there's a lot of lot of love of emails with PR people, and you're like, Okay, what's real? You have to tell me what's actually real. Don't lie to me. So, yeah, no, it was, it was great. I think the when they talked about level three, I think they said all the correct things. That doesn't mean that it's. It. You know, everything's gonna be perfect when it launches. But I think they're very smart about, you know, our our customers are not beta testers. We, you know, there, there is no real way with level three that you can just tap someone on the shoulder and say, you have to take over right now, which is true, because you're telling people that they can watch a movie, they could read a book and then expect them to, within seconds, take over the control of the vehicle, and within seconds, whatever the issue is, it's too late, right? By the time the car tells you to take over and your brain decides you're taking over and you're dropping what you're doing, it's probably too late. It's not probably it's too late. Yeah,

Speaker 1  1:15:41  
things happen very fast on the road. Yeah, we're

Roberto Baldwin  1:15:44  
you're moving pretty quickly. So it's a it's pretty it was, it'll be interesting to see what the launch is in 2028 it's going to be on highways. They're very adamant that it's, that's it. It's not going to be in the full domain that like super cruise has right now, because super cruise us, you know, some other roads, but so it's yeah, and then, you know, they the new batteries that they're working on. And, of course, the the the SD and the software defined vehicle architecture they're talking about was, was was interesting, because it really does give them a it gives automaker more control over what is getting put in their car and how it is controlled. And, you know, I've talked to Mercedes about this, and it's the same thing where it's like, you know, every time something new gets added to a regular car, you're like, Okay, well, now this person has talked, this person has talked. This person has talked. This person. Now this components talk to this component. That talks to this component, that talks to this component, and it's, it's a huge pain in the ass, to be honest. And so you don't get the updates, you know, these very quick updates that a software defined vehicle would could do. So, yeah, no, I think it was overall. I think it was a good presentation. I think having the folks there that we could talk to was huge. And then being very sort of, you know, telling us what's, you know, all these events are always like, we're the best. This is the best. The thing we're doing is the best. Blah, blah, blah. But when you know, you sort of cut through that, you know, as you know, we've been to a lot of these things, and this one feels like GM is doing the right thing, yeah.

Speaker 1  1:17:22  
I mean, the key now, you know, as I've told a number of people in recent days, you know, they said all the right things now they have to execute on it and make it reality. You know, because most of the, most of the big stuff, you know, is still three years away the new electronic architecture, which is, you know, they're, they're moving to a central compute architecture. So it's not even zonal like, for example, what rivian does? You know with the zonal architecture? You know today, you know, traditionally, most vehicles have anywhere from 50 to 100 or more electronic control units scattered around the vehicle that are all connected together over a CAN network. And you know, it's, it's very difficult to do updates on that and to manage all those different bits of software. A zonal architecture centralizes most of that into, typically, you know, one, one to three ECUs, you know, in the vehicle, maybe one that manages the powertrain and chassis. Another one does body control stuff, and another one does infotainment, and then has some, usually three or four zone controllers at the corners that handle power distribution and also do some signal processing, so the raw signals coming off the sensors. There's some compute in there that processes those and then sends those filtered signals back to the central compute this one, this system, is not going to do that there. Instead of the zone, controllers are gonna have what they call aggregators that don't have any compute in them. All they do is the power distribution to the sensors and the actuators and sending the routing the raw signals, the raw sensor signals back to the central compute and you get one central compute box that's running on an NVIDIA Thor system on ship, which is a ridiculously powerful

Roberto Baldwin  1:19:14  
it's gonna be liquid cooled, yeah, it's gonna be like your home gaming rig, yeah. I mean, this is purple, and,

Speaker 1  1:19:20  
yeah, this, this is the same, you know, the Thor. Thor is built on the same black wall architecture as Intel or Nvidia's latest, you know, high end beat b1, 100 and b2, 100 GPUs that are running in all these AI data centers. So it's a very powerful chip, but it is power hungry, and, you know, requires a lot of cooling, but everything is going to run on that. And then there's, there's also a communication module that is the gateway to the outside world, but that's, you know, you know. All the infotainment, all the driver assist and automated driving stuff, all the powertrain control, everything is going to be running on that, on that box. So that's going to be interesting to see if they can, how well they can execute that. I know it's

Roberto Baldwin  1:20:14  
almost like a like set, you know. So when you do driving assistance systems, you have all these sensors, and they have this thing called sensor fusion, where it's just raw data and it comes in, and then the the you have this, this the system that sort of decodes the data and tells the car what's going on in real time. This, if this is like sensor fusion for like, the entire car, yeah,

Speaker 1  1:20:37  
I know the GM is one of the companies that works with a company called Synopsys that does simulation and virtualization tools for chip design. And you know, they've expanded that, you know, so that you know, company, companies like Nvidia and AMD and everybody else that designs chips, they use synopsis tools to simulate the chip before they actually make any silicon. And so they have the ability to to run all that, you know, in on the cloud or on a local machine, and run the run the entire chip. And what they're doing now is they've actually got tools that can emulate the entire control unit. So not just the core, that core chip, but all the other parts, all the IO and everything. And if you've got multiple ECUs in a vehicle, you can simulate all of those, and have all those running in simulation, and then run your software, whatever your software platform is, on that simulated version of the electronics before you ever build any prototype hardware. And I believe the GM is actually using that. I know they're working with synopsis, and I believe that they are actually running this platform already in simulation. So that's, you know, hopefully that will help to get them to a better place when they launch this three years from now than they were when they started launching vehicles like the Hummer and the lyric and and the blazer EVs, where they had a lot of software issues. But, you know, again, that's, you know, they've got to execute on that, and that's not going to be easy. But, you know, it was interesting. You know, during the video demo that they showed us of the hands off, eyes off system, you know, they showed a few different scenarios, you know. So all they had was rent, you know, video renders. But one of the scenarios that they showed us was, you know, cars driving down the highway and there's a police vehicle on the shoulder with another vehicle. And you know, their their system is designed to actually recognize emergency vehicles like that, classify those separately from other vehicles. And so when it sees something like that, it will actually move over to the left one lane to give extra room around emergency vehicles on the side of the road, which is what you're supposed to do when you're driving. You're supposed to move over and give them room. And so their vehicle is going to, you know, their system is going to be designed to specifically do that, you know. And they, they didn't mention Tesla, but clearly, I think the reason why they showed that scenario is because, you know, Tesla Autopilot and FSD have regularly had problems with running into emergency vehicles on the side of the road. So hopefully they can, they can get that right.

Roberto Baldwin  1:23:26  
They also mentioned that they're using, you know, LiDAR, radar and camera so they're using this whole, the whole suite versus and then they they purposely called out, like, camera systems, like how they don't have the read, the the the ability to see in every situation, and there's, there isn't that redundancy that's there. And so that was very much a, you know, they didn't say who, yeah, but everybody knew. Everyone knows it's Yeah,

Speaker 1  1:23:57  
so see what else. Oh, the other thing that they talked about at this event, they had some folks from the GM energy team, you know, and GM energy sells a vehicle to home enablement kit, you know, similar to what Ford has offered since the the lightning launched, where you can get a Smart inverter and a transfer switch and and a charger, a bidirectional charger that lets you power your home off of your EV battery if your power goes out. And what you know, the problem with these systems is they are quite costly, and they, you know, they can, it's not just the hardware. I mean, the hardware kit can cost four to $6,000 and you know, if you want a home battery as well, that's, you know, several $1,000 more. But then you have the cost of installation, and, you know, it's basically an insurance policy. And you know, thing is, if you. Spend, you know, anywhere from eight to 15 or $20,000 to get this installed in your house. You know, then what happens if you have to move two or three years from now? You know, you spend all this money you haven't, you know, you haven't really gotten, necessarily, gotten the benefit out of it. And so they're launching a leasing program for this that, you know, similar to, like the solar leasing systems and programs where, you know, instead of paying upfront for all this hardware, you sign a contract and you pay some number of dollars per month. You know, they put solar on your house, and you pay some number of dollars per month, and you get the power from the solar and, you know, the rest, you know, the company that does it, you know, gets the any excess power they get to sell back to utilities and things like that. And they're doing it's going to be a similar kind of thing with this, repay some amount per month, and they cover, you know, the hardware, the installation and everything. And it's transferable. So, you know, if two or three years from now, you have to move, you know, the new owner can pick up that contract and continue to use that and so that's that's helpful, you know. So you're only paying for for the time you actually have it in use, as opposed to, you know, forever. And there's other stuff that we'll talk about next week that Ford is doing that's, that's pretty interesting, and I'm sure GM will probably be doing before long as well. We'll talk about that one next week.

Roberto Baldwin  1:26:34  
Yeah, it's, it's, you know, I've looked the GM and energy system and, you know, I keep pushing them every time I see them, like, when will this work outside of GM vehicles? Because right now, everyone has a walled garden. And there was, there was a standard from UL, like, a couple months ago that I think lots of people are working towards that all that are, it's that the Yeah, the problem is all these systems, like, you know, the one with wall box and Kia works with a Kia. The one the Ford builds worked with Ford. The one a GM builds worked with GM and so once you we get to a point where, okay, I buy, I bought the GM one, but I own a Hyundai, or I bought the, you know, the the wall box one, but I have a Ford, like, or I bought a Ford. And then, you know, because you might, you might, you know, if you, especially if you're leasing these vehicles, if you lease the vehicle for, you know, so many years, but you spend like another $20,000 on this, like VDH, like, you know, mega system, and you can't do the VDH part, that's sort of a bummer. You know, that was like another five grand just to do that. And if you can't do that, then, well, so

Speaker 1  1:27:43  
yep, yeah, that's that's definitely a problem that needs to be resolved, is to have interoperability between different brands. And then, after the event was done, I got a chance to sit down with Sterling Anderson, who's now, for the last several months, he's been Chief Product Officer at GM. Before that, he was had that same role. And he was a co founder at Aurora innovation companies doing autonomous trucks down in Texas and and then he was chief engineer, the first chief engineer for autopilot at Tesla before he left there in 2016 and so we had an interesting conversation about, you know, kind of what, you know, what he sees as the challenges, and his vision for for GM, and what his role is there. So I'm going to drop that in here, and we will be right back. Couple last things, yes, how about, how about GM? Thanks to us. Good. Yeah,

Sterling Anderson  1:28:39  
we're five months in now, yeah, it's been a really fun, intellectual journey for it kind of expanded the horizons quite a bit to, you know, there's a lot of, yeah, what has

Speaker 1  1:28:53  
changed? You know, Tesla to Aurora, GM, very

Sterling Anderson  1:28:58  
different. Yeah, that's right, or, yeah, I think there's, there's, there's a lot of opportunity right now in the disruption that is kind of everything that's happening technologically in particular, right? But, and, you know, the layer on top of that every day feels like a new, you know, regulatory environment. They have it to work in a tariff regime or whatever. So, so it's been fun to kind of navigate and learn the business.

Speaker 1  1:29:23  
So, you know, coming into GM as Chief Product Officer, what do you know? What do you see as the strikes and what are the things that you're going to try to evolve and progress for GM? Yeah, yeah,

Sterling Anderson  1:29:41  
good question. I see a company that's really, really strong at turning the crank on a massive supply chain and manufacturing outprize Really good. Like the response in this of our supply chain team to disruptions is extraordinary. I haven't seen that anybody. Including in the valley, the kind of scale at which the manufacturing team has managed, over years, to hone kind of their production chops really, really powerful. So I've been, I've been really impressed by all of that. Before I came to gn, I actually pinged mark and Mary and say, Let's I'd like to spend some time with the product portfolio, just kind of understand where you are. So I came out in March, this is before I came here, and we just lined up all the cars in the portfolio, which not a small lineup for the moment, to go to Milford yours. Yeah, exactly. And Mark and I just went for a drive, and just a bunch of different cars. I started in the tracks, and just kind of worked our way through the portfolio, really impressed at the just level of refinement the team has achieved in driving dynamics, ride handling, etc, like, really, really good. I mean, $20,000 tracks that drives like this car is extraordinary, all the way up to the Celeste at the celestic right mark, and I weren't driving that. And I mean, it's like driving on a cloud. It's pretty extraordinary. So the team is really strong at this, right? So it's so much of the core automotive stuff that I don't have expertise in they're really good at, which to me, feels like a really synergistic juxtaposition of strengths. There are areas of opportunity in software, in user experience, in evolving our electrical architecture to enable us to iterate of both much more quickly that have seen kind of enormous potential to change.

Speaker 1  1:31:43  
Yeah, certainly. You know, software, I agree, has been one of GMs biggest challenges from a product standpoint over the last several years. You know that? I know when they watch the Lyric, when I did the first drive, this miracle, it was had a lot it was not quite fully baked, yeah. And you know, then, you know, the blazer laser and problems on others, yeah. And I've talked to Dave and some of the other members of the software team over the last couple of years. I've been through the Sloan lab a couple of times. How do you how do you feel GM has progressed on that front, do you, do you think that GM is was made the right moves? Is making the right moves? Are they going going in the right direction, or there's still things that need to evolve?

Sterling Anderson  1:32:35  
I think we've made a lot virus on it. I think the that started with a refresh of the team that you know, Avis started, and Richardson has continued. I think it continues with good practices across the company and how we test and develop our software, right, sir. Introduction of not just, you know, a much more exhaustive virtual test suite, and, you know, for regression and progress testing, but use of our install base, right vehicles sitting in garages at night that are owned by our employees, that we can just be running hardware in the loop tests on like as a like massive, think of it as a massive hardware In The Loop testing suite. So a lot of the best practices for how you do software, really, the team has been upping its game on so I think we're in a much better position. We're still getting better, right? That wouldn't call us done yet, but I think what we're doing on the centralization compute is the next kind of major, discontinuous step to improving how software does it's so much easier to target a single, central compute system that's common across platforms. Yeah, I

Speaker 1  1:33:52  
want to get back to that. But you mentioned running stuff on employees vehicles, yeah, doing hardware testing. I know GM and other automakers have always had captured test fleets they use pre production model, yep, before, before they start delivering to customers. Yeah. But sounds like this is something doing on an ongoing basis now, pushing, or were you pushing OTA updates to the cars, to running tests on there and then reverting them back to what they had.

Sterling Anderson  1:34:22  
Yeah, we could, we can run so and when I say employee vehicles, I mean GM owned vehicles, right? Employees use that includes capture desk suite vehicles that include CBOs. You're familiar with that program. We got a pretty massive install base so advanced on these days, right? So it's a huge opportunity for us to use it to run these tests, and you got, you got massive distributed infrastructure is effectively

Speaker 1  1:34:47  
what it is, yeah. So the new be architecture, which, yeah, it's been talked a little bit about in the past. I've talked to Dave Richardson about before, but this is the first time that's kind of been shown. Own, publicly, get a central compute goes beyond what's being done with zonal architectures at some other companies. This you know the both designing the electronics in house and developing a whole new software platform. Do you is GM ready for that is, you know, it sounds, it sounds like, you know, you think that you made a lot of progress, you know, the organization is getting, but, you know, that's, you know, the the way that software, modern software, is developed, you know, is fundamentally different from the way it was done when I was doing it in the 90s and early 2000s and you know that there's always been that challenge over the last decade or so, especially of melding, you know, the kind of safety first mindset, you know, of you know, get get something, you know, whatever you have ready for job one that has to be complete, and now it's more, more like a minimum viable product at job one, and then continuing to evolve that, and getting the right mindset, the right processes in place, you feel like you're at the team is getting there. Yeah,

Sterling Anderson  1:36:15  
we are. Yeah, we're staying very I'm staying very close to it, right? So I'm Mark Mary, Dave and I go out to milford's monthly for specific, detailed reviews about where we are on some of that work. Okay?

Speaker 1  1:36:30  
And I think, I think you're the, as far as I know, you're the first person at GM to have that title of Chief Product Officer. I don't think anybody's had that before, and he's been head of product development,

Sterling Anderson  1:36:44  
which, but, yeah, this is on, this on the EVP or product development type. So that is the so I'm technically EVP or development, and G product helps. Okay,

Speaker 1  1:36:55  
so you know what? What does all that entail for you, you know what? What is your remit within GM? Yeah, it's

Sterling Anderson  1:37:05  
our products, their development, it's their success. So across ice, Ev, batteries, user experience, software and services approach. What else I always forget stuff, and I always feel bad for the team that I forgot, design, engineering, manufacturing, engineering, all of it. Okay, so, like, how do we, how do we turn this into a machine that hums, that turns out extraordinary products,

Speaker 1  1:37:40  
you know, we've heard for the last, most of the last decade, you're, you know, at Aurora, you were focused on automated driving. And you know what we saw today, the announcement today of the development of a hands off, eyes off system that's targeted for 2028 introduction, yeah, what you know, are there things from what you learned over the last nearly a decade with Aurora and working on autopilot, custom for that, that you're bringing to this team, you know, what? What lessons have you learned that are being incorporated into what's what's being worked on now?

Sterling Anderson  1:38:23  
Yeah, I should bury that one, because that's a really important question we get right. Look, I'll go off the top of the dome, and then I'm sure I'll think about things after we talk. Oh my gosh, right, so I'll go down. Look, couple things. First is the imperative of having extraordinary talent in place. It's like just that foundation for the rest of it. Second, the importance of creating a culture of kind of we can do this right, and one that instead of asking, instead of suggesting, hey, that can't be done. Or how could we possibly simply ask the question, if we had to do that, what would we do? Like, what would we have to believe for it to be true? And Posca, so kind of cultural foundation of really being willing to do things that we haven't seen any malice do before, right? I've had so many people this morning ask me questions like, well, but Sterling, are people asking for this? And like, what are what are customers asking for? And what I told every one of them is, look, customers don't ask for things they don't know they could have, right? It's the whole faster horse thing. The same thing is true of engineering teams. Sometimes engineering teams can get stuck in a rhythm of doing the thing they've always done and looking out their kind of side view mirror at competitors and being like, Well, are we like, how are we relative to competition? And that's good enough. One of the things that is important to me, and I talked to the entire product organization. Conversation about when I started was, I don't want us looking at the side view mirror, like, if you're looking at what our competitors are doing like a so we're not going to be the source of all good ideas. So we should absolutely ingest them when they come, and they'll come through different avenues. But I want your eyes on what's ahead and like, I want competitors watching us through their windscreen. I want them looking at, oh, that was a really interesting approach to an electrical architecture. Oh, that's, that's a really compelling way to develop robotics. Oh, what they just did with the body architecture or their AV system or whatever, we hadn't thought of that, right? And so that's culturally. That's what I'm pushing us towards, is a world where invention is celebrated and risk taking is rewarded.

Speaker 1  1:40:48  
Traditionally at GM, that that was the case for most of its history, until the last, really kind of last couple of decades. I mean, GM, I think I don't know if it was in your part of the presentation this morning or or maybe married. But, you know, GM invented so many things, GM, r, d, and a lot of that over the last two decades has been pared back as Mark, yeah, sounds like trying to get back to that. Yeah, that really innovative spirit, yeah. And we've got a

Sterling Anderson  1:41:16  
lot of really good people like, I've been really encouraged by the the like. I suppose I shouldn't have questioned it quite so much, but it's a natural human tendency to want to be inspired by something bigger, to want it like and if you're an engineer, being unshackled by the like, your two engineer from this catalog and being told, Hey, go figure out, like, the best way to do this thing and come up with a new, inventive way of doing it, like that's really compelling and motivating for an engineer, yeah? And so I think by imbuing that cultural expectation, there's a natural kind of self selection process that happens among the team, right? And those who are content with sitting still and effectively plotting along and catalog engineering our products, they're gonna find their way, ultimately, kind of eclipsed by those who are willing to push further and faster.

Speaker 1  1:42:16  
One, one last one, the integration of the cruise team with GM. You know, I've heard in the past, when Ford did that with a lot of the Argo engineers, it was a lot of friction there. I don't know how true it is. I've heard some reports from various places that not everybody is meshing entirely. How's that integration going

Sterling Anderson  1:42:42  
good now. It was really messy for a while, right? Like, just to put no bone, but, like, I don't want to kind of put any bones around that, like it was, it was tough for one but in the last few months, we've really started turning around to the point that we brought on quite a few new people that are super excited about this, many of whom are former departed cruise. People who left coming back, leftover concerns are now coming back. Okay, well, that's good. Darren, yeah. Another that ship has been turned around a pretty big way. Okay, one

Speaker 1  1:43:17  
last question I want to ask you during your presentation. You mentioned that first car. You never said what it was. What was that first car?

Sterling Anderson  1:43:23  
Oh, Toyota Corolla 19, um six. Toyota Corolla built in the new me factory. Oh, which is now Tesla. Yeah,

Speaker 1  1:43:30  
yeah. Awesome. Yeah. Any last thoughts you want to share?

Sterling Anderson  1:43:33  
I mean, my No, I'm not you got my first car? But no, look, I think we are really excited about where we're going. We're excited about where we're going. We're excited about where we're going with user experience, with the AI companion. We're really excited about where we're going with robotics, with LMR, battery chemistry is with our product generally, yeah. Like, my goal here is to build exceptional products, right? And there are a number of ways that we can make them exceptional in ways that people don't today, don't even know to ask for, yeah? So that's the goal. There's a lot, a lot of promising stuff we're hearing about, and I'm just now gonna watch the execution. Yeah. You gotta figure out what's real. Do it, yeah, for sure, yeah. And that's as you should, right? Like, but, but what's important to us, and to me, I don't know if you have to go to CES and I say or study the church, the word, use of the word have to is delivered there. I've had to for the last like decade. I get so tired of the future is now type proclamations, and everybody talking about the future and never actually showing like, Oh, here's what we said last year, and here's what we've done. It's important to me that we deliver on our promises. And I this is this part of why it mattered that we had LMR cells there. You must see, right? They have the design prototype for the IQ that you've got. You know, you can see the modules as they lay out for STV two. So it's, it's, it's actively in development, and we're hoping to make a real investment. My ears,

Sam Abuelsamid  1:45:00  
I'll be watching carefully. Yeah, always good to touch. Thanks. Yeah,

Sterling Anderson  1:45:03  
likewise, always get into it. See you

Speaker 1  1:45:05  
all right. And the other night, I went to a dinner with Tiago Castro, who is the new VP of infinity, and some very interesting conversation there. But one of the things that he did tell us, he did confirm, is for the Infinity brand, they plan to launch four new vehicles over the next four years, starting in 2026 with the QX 65 which was shown in concept form at Monterey this year. It's basically a fastback two row version of the QX 60. And then in 2027 there is a hybrid SUV coming a crossover. And then in 2028 there's going to be a new sedan. And he said, Yeah, it's going to be like a midsize sedan, you know, along the lines of, you know, the old G, 30 5q, 50, that, that type, you know, that kind of form factor. And that is definitely coming, they say. So we'll see. I mean, what do you think about infinity bringing back as a dan in the lineup?

Roberto Baldwin  1:46:25  
Listen, if it's cool, I'm down with it. That's, that's what it really comes down to, yeah, fingers crossed. Yeah. That's, I mean, yeah. It's like, like, like, Volkswagen Nissan's having issues with Volkswagen, Nissan celantis. They're all like,

Sam Abuelsamid  1:46:47  
Yep, it's challenging. Yeah.

Roberto Baldwin  1:46:49  
I think Nissan, as an automaker, is making some smart choices. We'll see if the Infinity line can, can, can sort of expand on those.

Sam Abuelsamid  1:47:01  
Do you think the Nissan Sakura or Sakura solar extender is a smart choice?

Roberto Baldwin  1:47:08  
I think the Nissan Sakura solar center is dope, but I live, don't live in Japan, so,

Speaker 1  1:47:16  
so the we've talked about free electricity, yeah, we've talked about the sakura before. It's a K car. It's actually the best selling EV in Japan, and it is a K car. So it's a little tiny compact hatchback, tall hatchback, very cute, a lot of fun to drive. And for the Japan mobility show, they're showing a new concept called the AO solar extender that basically is a pod that goes on the roof, and when you park the car, you know there's on the top of the pod, this is a flat pod. On the top of the pod is a solar panel. And then when you park the car, there's another panel that extends out from the front over the front end of the car to basically double the size of the the solar panel. And they claim that on a sunny day, with the panel extended, it'll generate 500 watts.

Roberto Baldwin  1:48:15  
500 watts. That's nothing to sneeze at. Yeah. That's, you know,

Speaker 1  1:48:22  
yeah, a mile or so an hour, probably a mile or two an hour,

Roberto Baldwin  1:48:27  
but it's, like, free. That's the when it comes down to it, I mean, well, it's not free, because you got to pay for the solar panel on the car, blah, blah, blah. But once you get it there, you know, they say it'll go up, you know, just potential to add 3000 kilometers, which is 1800 miles. So if you got 1800 miles of free gasoline every year, you'd be pretty stoked. No, no, well, not again, not really free, because you start to

Speaker 1  1:48:53  
pay for paying for it up front. But yeah, but you know, you don't it. It's maybe better to think of it as not necessarily. You're less, less reliant on finding a plug.

Roberto Baldwin  1:49:03  
Yeah, you just park the car. You go to, I don't know, long as you don't park it in a garage. Yeah, you go to Tokyo, Japan, or Tokyo Disney. Park it out in a lot. You're there for like 12 hours. You got like, another, you know, you get eight miles, and you get out, boom, drive home. Someone just put like, couple gallons of gas in your car for free, like a little wizard,

Speaker 1  1:49:24  
yeah. I mean, it would be great to have a car like the sakura here in North America, especially if you lived in a city. This would be an awesome little car to drive around the city, easy to park. It's fun to drive, and it is shockingly roomy inside.

Roberto Baldwin  1:49:40  
It is really weirdly roomy. It's just a box. Boxes are just roomy, and you can do it's really easy to pull U turns, because I kept getting off on the wrong exit while driving around Japan. I drove mine around Yokohama, and I just kept getting off on the wrong exit because they had, they had set it up Google Maps and Google. The maps in Japan, not right? Yeah, when I drove their big van, and I think that used a different mapping, and I didn't have any issues. But, of course, I drove the big van second, so I'd already made all the mistakes I was gonna make. So you already knew your way around that when I got back with the Sakura, because, you know, it's it, it's from a place where you can, like, test drive cars. Or, like, you got the freeway a lot. I'm like, yeah, they knew they tracked they're tracking you because, you know, again, it's, if they're you're gonna get cars out to the general public, they're gonna track it, so you don't just, like, drive off.

Speaker 1  1:50:37  
Nice thing about this is, you know, because the solar panel is flowing, flat, it's horizontal, it's on the roof. Even while you're driving, it's still generating some energy. So, and you can, you know, with the with the extender closed, with the panel closed, you can still get up to 300 watts of energy, and then 500 with the thing fully extended.

Roberto Baldwin  1:51:01  
So you're just driving around powering, like your radio,

Speaker 1  1:51:04  
yeah, or your climate control, yeah, heater, air conditioning. It's enough for that.

Roberto Baldwin  1:51:11  
It's a Yeah, yeah. Nissan secure. If you have a chance to go to Japan and get an international driver's license, yes, a drive international driving permit, you can get them at triple A because they're not gonna let you drive a car if you don't have that. And then maybe you could go to Nissan's. I was in Yokohama. I think it, and I think the public can drive a car. I don't know how much they'll let like people from other countries drive it. I was, you know, I'm a journalist, so they let me do whatever I want, but if you can do it, drive it around and then, and then, just be really disappointed in America for for choosing gigantic trucks over fun little cars.

Speaker 1  1:51:50  
All right, let's do a couple listener emails. Let's start off with a follow up on last week's Bill challenge. Bill challenge. So Bill wrote back to us at the bill challenge, huh? Cute. Glad you guys had some fun with it, because we, you know, we were asking, you know, what kind of car Bill drives? Says he drives a late model Lexus Hybrid has a total range of about 500 miles, but a Honda Accord from 15 years ago is easily capable of getting between three and 400 miles. I had one and did the road trips the same way back then my age, let's just say I'm retired and have been on Medicare for several years. I am much older than Robbie. Do I dehydrate myself before stand starting out on a road trip? Well, I certainly do not drink a 32 ounce Big Gulp before starting a road trip.

Roberto Baldwin  1:52:34  
See, this is where Bill and I are already like deviating in our lives,

Speaker 1  1:52:38  
and I start out with an empty bladder, so not necessarily dehydrating, but not not filling things up before you leave. I usually take a coffee drink in an insulated container and just sip it. Sip on it during the drive slowly,

Roberto Baldwin  1:52:51  
Oh man, I'm again deviating so far

Speaker 1  1:52:57  
when you when you need to drive 10 to 12 or even 15 hours to go visit your family for the holidays. You don't want to waste any time with unnecessary stops. I don't anyway, that's the case. That was the case for us for many years. Nowadays, we only do road trips once or twice a year, and I don't even drive more than a few miles per hour over the speed limit. It's usually only 70 miles an hour, but we have been doing these long holiday trips since back when the speed limit was only 55 miles an hour, that was rough. Okay, have some more fun. Have some more fun with this one now,

Roberto Baldwin  1:53:29  
yeah, that's, there's, there's huge deviations in Bill's lifestyle in mind, yeah, like, I was constantly, like, before I will stop at, like, the 711 like, in a big gulp, and I'm just Big Gulp, a mountain dude, yeah. And before I've even left, I already had a Red Bull and maybe a tea. And so I'm already, like, at maximum capacity, and then I'm just drinking a big gulp. So that's there. So there's that I do understand the Long family trips my dad, we're not stopping once again if you got to go, go now, because once you get on the road, we're not going to stop and but those are only like three, four hour road trips we didn't do. We did, like one cross country road trip as as a whole family from from from California to to Pennsylvania, where we really didn't stop and and then me and my dad drove cross country, when I was in high school again, to Pennsylvania. And we, we, we stopped to use the restroom. We only stopped to sleep once. We would just rotate so we just drive for like, 12 hours. 10 hours. It's like, do, do, do, do, do, do, do. So, oh, it didn't have air conditioning. So we didn't have to stop the pee, because we sweated the whole time. There you go. So there's, that's the that's the trick.

Speaker 1  1:54:55  
So just turn off the air conditioning, turn up the heat. You. Know? So you just sweat out the fluids.

Roberto Baldwin  1:55:02  
Yeah, we just sweat out the fluids the entire time. It's just when they've been

Speaker 1  1:55:06  
really gross when you get a summer, but at least you don't have to stop for a pit stop.

Roberto Baldwin  1:55:11  
Yeah, and I had, I had broken my left arm, so my and it was, we were driving a two, a 70s, 260, Z, with a manual transmission, so it was fine on the road, but at one point we were in a parking lot, and I realized I couldn't, like, I had, like I was shuffle steering and then trying to shift gears, trying to shift gears. My dad's like, why don't we before next time, before we stop in a big parking lot, we we switch drivers. I got it. I got my first ticket on that road trip as well. Oh, yeah. 70 miles an hour driving to the middle of nowhere in Utah. It's like the only car we saw for an hour happened to be a cop car. No, that sucks,

Sam Abuelsamid  1:55:48  
all right. And then we also got, got a couple of follow up emails from Bob with the BMW i three that we talked about a couple of weeks ago, Bob was having an issue with the seat belt latch in his car, and we had recommended, you know, he had gotten it replaced at the dealer, and they charged him some exorbitant amount of money. I don't remember exactly it was, might have been upwards of $1,000 but, you know, we recommended that, you know, he filed complaint with the NHTSA office of defects investigation. And of course, you know right now, as we're recording this on October 26 the government has the federal government has been shut down for just over three weeks, and so not much is going on at NHTSA these days. Not that much goes on in its most of the time, it seems.

Roberto Baldwin  1:56:44  
But the mean things the Department of Transportation said about NHTSA at Tesla, at a Tesla hearing once was, Oh, you mean? NTSB, oh, yeah, I'm sorry. NTSB, yeah. NTSB, did not have any kind words for NHTSA, yeah.

Speaker 1  1:57:00  
I was talking to somebody from NTSB at another event a few weeks ago. And, yeah, he was, he was pretty harsh on NITSA as well, anyway. So Bob sent some follow up emails, first down, you know, after we had recommended that, you know, push BMW for a refund on that. So he said he will be pushing BMW for a refund. We'll see what happens. Then the next one was the vehicle. He looked up, you know, some some information, and says, you know, from NHTSA, the vehicle manufacturer, is responsible for repairing a seatbelt system that fails during normal operation, especially if the failure is due to a defect. Under federal law, the manufacturer must fix any safety related defects at no cost to the owner, and it's a can require them to recall and remedy the problem and then for manufacturer's responsibility manufacturing defects. If the failure is caused by a design or manufacturing flaw, the car manufacturer is liable and must cover the repair costs for recalls, if the failure is considered a safety defect, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration can require the manufacturer to notify owners and fix the issue for free and then warranty. While not all manufacturers provide a lifetime warranty, they are required to correct safety defects, often under a specific vehicle warranty. So even though you know something like the seatbelt latch may not necessarily be covered, you know, under the warranty, most vehicles have, you know, a bumper to bumper warranty of about three, usually three to four years. Some are a little bit longer. You know, even though you know that warranty may be expired, you know, for something like a safety defect like this, and it certainly sounds like what, what Bob had was a safety defect, they probably have to replace it free of charge anyway. And then final, in response to an email I sent to Bob says, Thanks, I'll catch it. Catch the show tomorrow morning. I have had the utmost respect for BMW, but when I gave, when I when given, I already tried to resolve this matter with your customer service person. Once, I now have to contact them again. They should know that this is a NHTSA requirement and should not be putting me through flaming hoops if they refuse, I guess I will reach out to NHTSA, but I can see that getting lost in the shuffle is a distinct possibility. I will keep you posted. And then the final follow up was, I hope all is well. I want to want to have the facts from NHTSA regarding my issue before I pursue any further with BMW. Using AI, I am finding conflicting information as to whether or not the manufacturer is required to fix safety related issues. There's a shock. The vehicle age may be a factor. I read that the car needs to be less than 10 years old, which mine is with the government shutdown. I've not been able to reach anyone if they have a direct if you have a direct contact, you can send my way. This be helpful. I will look Bob to see if I have any contacts and try and send them your way. Otherwise, I will update you as soon as I can. So ongoing, nothing, nothing resolved yet. Fingers crossed, though. Yeah, good luck, Bob. And finally, from Wes in DFW, a couple quick questions. Hold on. Let me wrap this so I can read it. I forgot to do that. I hate it when I forget to do that. Let's see when range is defined for an EV is that, assuming no regen is used, if it isn't, what is a good percentage average for additional mileage that one can get from using regen, if it is, is it just averaged into the numbers. So this one, you know, every EV, you know, is, is using some, some amount of regen by default. You know, that's just the way it. Is it, you know, when they, when they define the range. You know, they run the vehicles on the same test cycle that's used for combustion vehicles. So there's some Stan there's a couple of standard city and highway test cycles that have been used since the 1970s and then there's also several other different cycles that are meant to be a little more realistic real world driving. And so, you know, the what they do is they put it in whatever the default mode is for the vehicle when you start it. So it's, you know, typically going to be some normal mode, and depending on the manufacturer, you know, like BMWs often had, you know, strong regen as their default on some of their vehicles. On others, that's been an optional mode. So whatever the default driving mode is, that's what they'll run, you know. And whatever amount of energy recovery you get from the regen during the test cycles is what gets integrated. So they don't, they don't, it's, it's going to vary, you know. So if you've got a vehicle where the default is low regen, but there's an optional one pedal mode. You know, you're depending on your driving conditions. You're probably going to get some additional mileage, and it's hard to say for sure how much that's going to be. It's going to depend a lot on the vehicle and what your driving conditions are, you know, urban driving, you're going to tend to get more benefit from it, you know, or you know, where you've got more stop and go, as opposed to highway driving, where you're probably going to get little or no benefit from it. Any thoughts on that?

Roberto Baldwin  2:02:37  
Um, I think there's, yeah, yeah. They're definitely using the regen, I think the, yeah, the sort of, I mean, BMW is sort of automatic, auto, smart regen, where it takes into account where you're driving, like what road you're on, and the vehicles ahead of you, and adjust its regen. The first version of it I drive. I drove it. I hated it. The second version, and since I've had it quite useful, uses less regen, let's say on the freeway, because, you know, maybe you want to, you want to roll for a while, you know, so, yeah, I don't, it's, it's, it's difficult to determine how much of your your range is extended by regen, especially depending on Every car has a little bit different region. Some cars are, you know, a bit more aggressive than others and driving styles. And the weird thing is, if you really stomp on the gas and then you have more region, but you're also using it more, you know, it's not a it's not an equal comparison. So, yeah, I mean, you. And what's funny is that you sort of get used to regen. And then when you get in a gas car, my brain, I get sort of irritated that when I'm driving, my BRZ every time I lift, I'm not making gasoline, wasting energy right now. And then you, what happens is, you, you, you become accustomed to regen, as you know, additional source of braking. So then you, when you, when you, when you get in a gas car and you use the brakes, the brakes don't feel that great. They don't feel nearly as good as those in an EV. So that's another weird sort of, like, one of those weird things you get from,

Speaker 1  2:04:15  
yeah, and for us, you know, that are jumping in and out of different cars all the time, you know, making that adjustment between a combustion vehicle and EV can Yeah, you've got to reset your brain every time you get into a different car.

Roberto Baldwin  2:04:29  
Yeah, yeah. And that is very true. Even gas cars, you go from gas car to gas car, but we need from gas to EV, especially if you go from like, a little EV to a giant gas truck here's, like, ah,

Sam Abuelsamid  2:04:43  
like, why isn't this stopping? Like, oh, my

Roberto Baldwin  2:04:45  
God, I got so much mass.

Speaker 1  2:04:50  
So, yeah, it depends. So it's hard, hard to give you a specific number, you know, but you know, if you do a lot of urban driving, I. I would expect, you know, maybe, maybe 10% more range, if you have, you know, like full one pedal mode available, 10, maybe, you know, in extreme cases, maybe 15, you know, and and then you know, less on the highway, yeah, all right. And then the other question that Wes had was, from what you've seen, how do the stats for vehicle thefts of EVs compare to those of gas vehicles? If less is this because they're harder to steal or just not as in demand yet? So I looked up and I found a story from Axios from about a year ago based on data from the National Insurance Crime Bureau, and also from National

Roberto Baldwin  2:05:47  
Insurance Crime Bureau. Sounds like a made up thing, but also they're like solving insurance crimes, yeah,

Speaker 1  2:05:55  
and so and they will also used data from IHS, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety based on insurance claims, analysis of insurance claims. So overall, between 2021 and 2023 about 49 of every 100,000 insured cars are stolen each year. So it's actually not that much. It's the rate of car theft overall is pretty low, like and among the the selected vehicles that they have in the chart here the GMC Sierra, so that was 49 out of 100,000 insured cars the GMC Sierra. 227 out of 100,000 were stolen every year, and the Chevy Silverado 96 and interestingly, the Hyundais and Kias that had the problem with being easy to steal, they don't even show up on this chart, so not sure what that says about those

Roberto Baldwin  2:07:02  
you you want. If you're going to, like, do a crime, you want, it's like, you want to get the largest return on your investment for crime doing. And a giant pickup truck is definitely because you can sell those in other, you know, other markets, other countries, you can walk them apart. And, yeah,

Speaker 1  2:07:19  
and that's, that's the thing, you know, I mean, most stolen vehicles are, I mean, some are stolen, you know, for somebody just take a joy ride or, you know, to ship them overseas, you know, where there might be a market for them. But the vast majority of stolen vehicles, they go straight to a chop shop and get torn apart for parts. Because you can, you can make a lot of money selling individual parts, you know, to body shops, to independent repair shops, even some dealers, you know, that's where, that's where the money is in selling the parts, you know. So the you know, it's kind of the opposite of, you know, more than the sum of the parts. It's, you know, the sum of the parts is actually less than the parts themselves. And so you know things like a Sierra Silverado or Wrangler. You know lot of demand for parts for those things, because they sell in high volumes. The Tesla Model three during that time period from 21 to 23 one theft per 100,000 vehicles for not a lot.

Roberto Baldwin  2:08:23  
Yeah, people don't know what to do. Like, what am I going to do? You take it to a chop shop. You're like, I don't, what, what? What? I mean, the battery's worth a lot of money. You don't, you don't have the, yeah, okay, hold on, we got to hire a bunch of new, you know, hired goons who, who know how to work with high voltage batteries? Yeah? Who aren't going to get, you know, electrocuted and killed? Yeah.

Speaker 1  2:08:45  
You know, I think, I think these vehicles are inherently, probably a little little more complicated to steal. You know, it's not, it's not the same as just hot wiring them like you could with older vehicles. But also, you know, trying to find the market for these things. And actually, my guess is that over time, we will see those numbers for EVs go up, because one of the things you find is that, you know, the cost of repairing EVs tends to be high enough that you know when they're in a crash, they they're they're more likely to be totaled by the insurance company than repaired. And you know, when that happens, there are often lots of good parts on those things that, you know, when they go, they'll go to a wrecking yard, they'll pull the battery out, you know, they'll test the battery. You know, if it's still good, you know, it may get sold as a refurb for service part, or, you know, or recycled, and then you know, other components will get sold. And I think you know, as the volume of EVs goes up and there's demand to fix vehicles that might have otherwise gotten totaled, and. Um, I think, you know, you'll start to see some increase in the number of EVs that get stolen. But it's going to be a little more complicated to steal those, you know. So what you might see is, you know, EVS getting stolen, not by somebody hopping in and and hot wiring them, but, you know, actually hauling them up onto a flatbed and taking them away,

Roberto Baldwin  2:10:22  
you know, and kind of thing, it's like nearly every EV, though, has some sort of tracking device. Yeah, I know where my Hyundai is at all

Speaker 1  2:10:29  
times. Yeah. I mean, they're all connected, which makes it easier to to track where it is and recover it

Roberto Baldwin  2:10:38  
so that, and not even track work and recover that's tracked to where your Chop Shop is. So now you're taking a huge, you know, you're taking a huge gamble to sell, like some battery packs to somebody. Because your whole, you know, your whole criminal enterprise can be, you know, I sold three Teslas, and now my whole criminal enterprise is gone, yeah.

Speaker 1  2:10:59  
So for, at least for the foreseeable future. You know you're you're probably less, less at risk of having your EV stolen than a conventional car. And that's it for this week. Thank you, everybody, and we'll be back next time bye, bye, bye.