Sam Abuelsamid (00:02)
This is episode 441 of Wheel Bearings. I am Sam Abuelsamid from Telemetry.

Nicole (00:08)
Hi, I'm Nicole Wakelin from Top Speed and Test Miles.

Roberto Baldwin (00:11)
And I am Roberto Baldwin from SAE International.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:15)
And Nicole, what you been driving?

Nicole (00:16)
Yes.

I had, um, sorry, text messages from 18 people at once. Everyone's asking me a question work related. I'm like, it is podcast time. Dang it. Everyone leave me alone. Good Lord. I had the Volvo XC 40 B5 all wheel drive, um, which we have like horrible weather. Like we're having a blizzard as we speak. is blizzarding.

Sam Abuelsamid (00:27)
It's gonna have to wait.

I've heard something about that. I heard

you had some snow flurries yesterday.

Nicole (00:43)
It's currently

blizzarding in New Hampshire before it blizzarded in New Hampshire. It just snowed like a half a foot of snow on Friday and we were going away for the weekend and we took this through the snow and the muck into the White Mountains in New Hampshire. Our little XC40. It was fabulous. Actually did really, really well. Russ was very skeptical. I said, we should take the Jeep. It's never going to make it. I'm like, it's going to be fine. I'm like, you don't need a Jeep. So we did take it out and actually it was handled really well.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:06)
haha

Nicole (01:12)
You know, we had some deep ish snow when we got up to the mountains because they were still doing that plowing and you get those spots where you have the giant berm of snow that it looks you know, it's four times as deep as the actual snowfall and had no problem getting through anything. It was actually it was a really nice drive and it was really really comfy. 247 horsepower, 258 pound-feet of torque. So it moves. It's not huge. You know, it's a crossover.

It's got seating for five people. So it's not this like giant vehicle, but it Yeah, it's got seat belts for five. It really four I can't see putting more than four people in here even with four people. I think the back seats It's a little squished a little bit squished like Robbie and Russ could not sit front and back behind each other One of them would have their knees broken. It's just just crying sadly crying so but it was it was a nice car to drive the the base person this I have no monroney, but the

Sam Abuelsamid (01:45)
Well, it's got seatbelts for five people.

Roberto Baldwin (02:03)
Just crying.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:04)
haha

Nicole (02:12)
base for the B5 auto drive is $4,200. You can keep going up depending on which trim that you have. goes all the way up to like $52,000. ⁓ So it's not an inexpensive proposition. The one thing I didn't like is there's not wireless ⁓ Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. It's wired. So if you don't have ancient, I know, right? And

Roberto Baldwin (02:35)
What year is this? Come on. This, and this is a,

Sam Abuelsamid (02:39)
I mean

Roberto Baldwin (02:39)
this is a, this is supposed to be a luxury car.

Sam Abuelsamid (02:39)
to be fair the XC40 is it is approaching the end of its life cycle for the current model.

Nicole (02:45)
It is and

it feels like it is because A, it doesn't have that and it has that old, the screen that sort of, I don't like it. It's thank you. Robbie's looking at me making the, yeah, it's, I'm not a fan, but it was actually, I think it was bigger. it? No, I guess it was just nine inch screen. Yeah. It felt very small. Felt very, very small. If the screen feels tiny, tiny, tiny, which is again, you know,

Roberto Baldwin (02:54)
Portrait?

Sam Abuelsamid (02:56)
the nine inch screen.

Nicole (03:15)
Nine inches was once a big screen, like there was a five inch screen and your option was a nine inch screen. Now the nine inch screen feels kind of tiny. So this, although it's comfortable and it's nice, I love that has this like a sort of ⁓ felt kind of trim on the interior on the doors. Handled absolutely beautifully in winter weather, did a fantastic job. It feels like it's needing a little redo, a little refresh, little attention.

screen feels old, not having the wireless connectivity. It's funny how aggravating that was because we were traveling and I don't normally keep wires in the car because everything's wireless. And so I was bringing them in the hotel because I was using them to charge my phone when I was in the hotel. Then we get back out and I was like, gosh, gosh, dang it. And I have to go back and get a cord because I forgot to bring the cord back out with me. yeah, I mean, overall, and it's, you know, it's got a decent little amount of card room. It's not a huge amount. I think it's about 25.

cubic feet behind the rear seats, 57.5 if you fold them flat. So you have a decent amount, but it's a nice little compact crossover. I think that has plenty of power handles, great in the snow, looks great, quiet ride, but it feels like it needs some updating.

Sam Abuelsamid (04:32)
Just a little. ⁓

Nicole (04:33)
Just a little bit, just a little

skosh of updating. Currently, I put it in the garage though for the blizzard, because it's blizzarding and the snow is on our driveway. On the right side of the driveway, you could almost see the pavement. On the left side of our driveway, it's taller than me. That's the kind of wind, little windy. ⁓ Yeah, so that's the Volvo XC40.

Roberto Baldwin (04:36)
Goosh.

Sam Abuelsamid (04:51)
It's a little windy.

Roberto Baldwin (04:54)
Well, scooch.

Sam Abuelsamid (05:01)
I've always liked the XC40. ⁓ I like the overall size of it, but the back seat is a little snug. That is the one downside. For just a couple, empty nesters, ⁓ or a young couple, or a single person, it's great. I think it's great choice. ⁓ But if you've got ⁓ family, got kids that need to sprawl,

Nicole (05:04)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (05:29)
⁓ Yeah, maybe you want to step up to the XC60.

Nicole (05:31)
to sprawl.

Yeah, it's just a little, it's not a car for, it's not really a great family car. Like in fact, if you ever had people in the back, would say really just go up one, one little pip. It's a great, if you're just you and your, just you, your dog, as long as a corgi and not like a burner, you're fine. And you or you and your husband. Yes, that's true. They would take up the entire, the entire cargo area from the lift gate to the front seats, but he would fit back there.

Sam Abuelsamid (05:53)
Well, I mean if you fold the back seat down the burner will be okay.

Nicole (06:04)
you

Sam Abuelsamid (06:05)
⁓ All right, Robbie, what did you have?

Roberto Baldwin (06:08)
Yes,

I drove just a little like a little compact like economy car. It's the Aston Martin ⁓ Vanquish Volante.

So it's the vanquish, but with that, but it's a convertible.

Nicole (06:29)
Hahaha

Roberto Baldwin (06:29)
So if you don't

know, the Vanquish is Aston Martin's fancy new, it's essentially a race car, race car coupe. It has, hold on, me get my, whoops, there we go. It has 824 horsepower. That's from a 5.2 liter twin turbo V12 engine. You can, it.

Nicole (06:42)
⁓

Sam Abuelsamid (06:54)
That's not bad, you know, that's adequate.

Roberto Baldwin (06:57)
It's yeah, it's got a, it's got, you know, it's ready to partay. It's got a, and what's fun is that like it, for the drive modes, it has GT. GT is like the chill mode. You just kind of drive in and then it has sport and then it has sport plus. And what's, what's fun about this vehicle is that it has, ⁓ you know, adaptive cruise control and lane ⁓ keeping assistance because, which I think on one hand, what's great is that there's just an off button.

Sam Abuelsamid (07:08)
Ha

Roberto Baldwin (07:27)
in the center console for that. You hit the off button and a little thing pops up on the screen and says, hey, do you want to turn this off? I guess, you're are you sure? And you say yes. And then it turns off the lane keeping assist and all the fancy things to keep you from dying. Because this vehicle, again, it's essentially a race car that looks really pretty and is very comfortable to drive. But like wherever the wheel is, that's where it's going. The steering is extremely tight. And so I would...

Sam Abuelsamid (07:52)
haha

Nicole (07:53)
Ha

ha ha ha.

Roberto Baldwin (07:56)
assume a regular person who's used to a wheel that has like a little bit of play, there's a little bit of, you you have something to sort of move around with without like leaving the lane, the car doesn't twitch into that direction. This does not have that. Like you move a little, hey, you're going left. Hey, you're going right. And so if you're driving on the freeway, this might keep you in your lane. It's definitely not a car you can kind of look away and then look back because you look away and your hands might move a little bit to where your head goes. That's one of the tricks of driving is look where you want to go.

Sam Abuelsamid (08:15)
Ha

Nicole (08:26)
Mm-hmm.

Roberto Baldwin (08:26)
So if you're looking away and your hands kind of do that, ⁓ you're just gonna go into the other leg.

Sam Abuelsamid (08:32)
But since this is just an economy car, it wouldn't really matter if you got a few dents and dings on it, right?

Roberto Baldwin (08:36)
Yeah,

yeah, it only costs, so the suggested retail price is a very, very low $468,000. So, half a million. The vehicle I had delivered to my home was $644,700. $644,000. So, $645,000. Yeah. There's an import tax on it. Guess what the...

The import tax is crazy.

Nicole (09:09)
How much is

Sam Abuelsamid (09:09)
Let's

Nicole (09:09)
it? Is it as much as a car?

Sam Abuelsamid (09:10)
see, from the UK, it's probably going to be what, 25%. So does that $645 include the import tax? Okay, so then working back from that, it's about $120,000.

Roberto Baldwin (09:20)
Yes. Yes.

It's, well, no, that's pretty little high. $37,900. So you could have bought another car with the import tax. Who knows what it is now? I don't even know anymore. The tariffs are all like every day it's, you know, we joke every day it's something different, but literally every day is something different. It comes with a $500 umbrella, which is kind of nice, but it's not like, who has the umbrella indoors? Is Rolls Royce? Yeah, it's just in the trunk. It's just in the trunk, but it has its own little straps and everything. It says,

Sam Abuelsamid (09:32)
⁓ okay.

Nicole (09:32)
See, you could have bought

a car though. You could have bought another car. Mm-hmm.

It is, it truly is.

lovely.

Sam Abuelsamid (09:53)
Yeah.

Nicole (09:53)
Yeah, that's roles.

Roberto Baldwin (09:58)
It says Aston Martin on it. ⁓

Sam Abuelsamid (10:00)
So what exactly does a $500 umbrella entail? What makes it different from a $5 umbrella?

Roberto Baldwin (10:07)
It's, well, it stops the rain.

Well, it says it has a little metal handle. This is Aston Martin on it.

Nicole (10:15)
I mean, that's worth at least what, yeah, $495 right there. So, mm-hmm.

Sam Abuelsamid (10:15)
⁓ okay, well that's...

Roberto Baldwin (10:16)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. yeah.

Let me see how much the, so it has, this one has all the carbons. ⁓ So the interior carbon ⁓ was a $27,400 option. The exterior, let's see, there's, heated steering wheel's 800 bucks. The satin black wheels, ⁓ 2,600.

Sam Abuelsamid (10:20)
So let's bargain then.

Roberto Baldwin (10:46)
⁓ Let's see, the Inspire monotone interior was $10,800. It's a very expensive car. No one's buying this car and saying to themselves, ooh, I don't know. Do I really need that thing? This is one of those cars I think people buy and then they hope that, like a Bugatti, where they hope to sit on it and hope that it makes some money, it increases in value and they turn around and sell it, ⁓ which makes it even better that I got to just drive it around.

Nicole (10:54)
Hahaha!

Sam Abuelsamid (11:15)
Well,

I think, you know, the thing you have to do if you want to buy an Aston Martin is just wait until it's like 10, 15 years old and then you can buy it cheap. ⁓

Roberto Baldwin (11:25)
Yeah, you could probably get

this in like, for like 50,000 in a couple of years.

Sam Abuelsamid (11:28)
Yeah, well, mean, that's what TFL did. Roman bought, what, think in 2007 or 2008 Aston Martin Vantage for $33,000 a couple of years ago. And then his son, sold it to his son Tommy for that. yeah, he's got, you know, what, 18, 19 year old Aston Martin Vantage now that they bought for just over $30,000. Yeah.

Roberto Baldwin (11:42)
Aww.

Yeah, so you could do that. So,

Nicole (11:51)
That's cool.

Roberto Baldwin (11:54)
all the things is very expensive. ⁓ It's very ⁓ blue. I got the blue. It's got this, what's it called? Chimera, Chimera, Chimera? Chimera, Chimera blue. ⁓ And so I get in the car to start it and I turn it on and I can't see the display because it's ⁓ turned down. And I cannot, and because it's turned down, I cannot figure out how to get the display to work.

Nicole (12:04)
Chimera? I always say chimera. Am I saying it wrong?

Sam Abuelsamid (12:04)
camera.

Nicole (12:21)
Yeah.

Roberto Baldwin (12:21)
how to turn it up. I cannot increase the brightness.

I'm clicking everywhere trying to figure out how increase the brightness. I'm like, you know what, no one buys this car for the infotainment system. Fine, whatever. So I'm driving, I stopped somewhere, I add my phone. This vehicle supports Apple CarPlay Ultra. This is where CarPlay takes over the entire everything. Every time I saw it, was like, that's dumb, that's lame. Nope.

Nicole (12:25)
Haha.

Sam Abuelsamid (12:40)
⁓

Nicole (12:41)
Ooh. And how is that?

Sam Abuelsamid (12:50)
haha

Nicole (12:50)
Ha

ha ha!

Roberto Baldwin (12:51)
Not

definitely at all. It's actually quite, I could find a display, the brightness display. It's literally just more, you know, little icons in Apple CarPlay that control other things in the car. That's, and it just looks like Apple CarPlay. It's the same sort of Apple. And so it does all the stuff. It took over the screen, the dash cluster, looks nice, looks easy. It's easier to read than the Aston Martin version. So yeah, I don't.

I mean, if you're Aston Martin, it's really expensive to do your own infotainment system. You know, probably don't care that someone else owns that real estate because you just, people aren't buying, again, people aren't buying an Aston Martin vanquish because they're like, ooh, the infotainment system's a little slow. No one's thinking about that. No one's like, well, I don't know. It doesn't have Alexa. So I can't control my lights at home. No, no one cares. No one cares. It's like when you get it,

Nicole (13:36)
Hahaha!

Sam Abuelsamid (13:37)
Haha.

You have

somebody at home, if you have $650,000 to spend on an Aston Martin, you have somebody on staff to take care of your lights at home.

Roberto Baldwin (13:57)
Yeah, you just call and yell at them. And if their name happens to be, Yeah, so you don't need any of that stuff. That's it. Somehow I got this car during the nicest couple days in a couple months. 70 degrees. Just 70 degrees, nice. Just like Nicole. It's like Nicole, where Nicole's living right now. It's warm, top down, know, slightly cloudy, so it's not too sunny. You know, when too sunny, it kind of brings your head.

Nicole (13:58)
Correct. Jeeves. You say Jeeves. Turn on the lights, please.

Sam Abuelsamid (14:13)
Perfect. Perfect for convertible-ing.

Nicole (14:13)
you

It's perfect weather right now.

Roberto Baldwin (14:28)
Absolutely, I love driving this car. I'm terrified of driving it because it's, again, $645,000, but I also love driving the car. I didn't go anywhere. I just got the car parked in my driveway and I drive it and then it goes right back in my driveway. I don't take it to the store. I don't take it to a drive-through. I don't take it anywhere.

Nicole (14:43)
⁓ god.

Sam Abuelsamid (14:45)
Yeah, I saw

your post on Instagram about not wanting to park it anywhere.

Roberto Baldwin (14:51)
Yeah, so I don't park it anywhere. I went to Mare Island, it's over in Vallejo, to take some photos of it because I know that there's people that work there, but it used to be a military installation and there's just not as many people as the military had. So there's always kind of open areas to park it and take photos. So I took it over there to take photos. It is really fun to drive. It is indeed like driving a GT. I would say 90 % of the time people are going to be driving this, are going to be in GT, and they're going to be happy.

Sport, amazing, sport plus I am driving a race car. That's, every little, everything you do is just like, so yeah, it is not to be trifled with as a car. If you are thinking about buying one of these and you are a listener, you you should be signing up for our Patreon if you have enough money to buy it for that. You should be on like five, five of those. You should have like five accounts just for us.

Nicole (15:25)
Hahaha!

Sam Abuelsamid (15:44)
Absolutely.

Roberto Baldwin (15:50)
Anyway, if you buy it, ⁓ just know that this is a sports car first and foremost, bordering on a race car. ⁓ I know, vanquish. Yes, it will vanquish you. ⁓ It does not have like, you know, a nice like chill, you know, steering mode. Yes, it's, you know, the suspension softens up and you know, the engine kind of chills out.

Nicole (15:57)
Ha

Sam Abuelsamid (15:59)
I mean, they call it vanquish for a reason. It's going to vanquish you.

Nicole (16:01)
Thanks

Roberto Baldwin (16:19)
a scooch when you're in GT mode. But the reality is that you're still driving this like really powerful V12 824 horsepower engine. You're just holding on. The engine's doing everything. You're just like, here we go. It handles great. It handles one. It's everything it's supposed to be. There is nothing about this car that's just like, ⁓ they kind of like phoned it in or, no, it's every.

Sam Abuelsamid (16:44)
except for the stock

infotainment.

Roberto Baldwin (16:46)
But yeah, who knows? I don't even know. I used it for a little bit and then I stopped.

Sam Abuelsamid (16:50)
⁓

Roberto Baldwin (16:54)
And again, I expect it, you know, I think I've talked about CarPlay Ultra. I was like, I don't think this, why would you do that? This is too much. I'm fine. I like CarPlay, but this, nope, totally works. No problem. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy. The problem, okay, there is one issue. If you use Google Maps, it doesn't show up in the center display in the dash cluster, because it wants you to use Apple Maps. Oh no. Oh, it also didn't tell, like the default, the cars infotainment system.

Nicole (17:17)
you

Roberto Baldwin (17:23)
the IndyGadash cluster, it'll tell you the temperature of the tires. And it doesn't tell you that in CarPlay Ultra. So for someone who's about to go and do some crazy driving, know, this has, yeah, you're gonna want to, just do sliding all over the place. ⁓ What else can I, just like an F1 car.

Sam Abuelsamid (17:35)
you want to know the temperature of your tires because you want to make sure they're not too cold, they're not too hot.

Nicole (17:40)
Just right, you went imperfect.

Sam Abuelsamid (17:43)
just like an F1 car. They know that

they have sensors to measure the temperature of the tire tread.

Nicole (17:49)
Mm-hmm.

Roberto Baldwin (17:49)
Yeah, let's see. It's got dual zone climate control. All right, cool. Whatever. It has a lot of buttons. Volume. There's a volume, not a knob, but one of those rollers. The temperatures are rollers. You can turn on the auto for climate control, AC for climate control. All those are buttons. They're also in the the infotainment system. But yeah, lots of buttons, which is really nice. It does have just ⁓

Sam Abuelsamid (17:54)
Ha ha.

Okay.

Roberto Baldwin (18:20)
cruise control, adaptable cruise control, what is it? Adaptive cruise control. It does have ⁓ adaptive cruise control. I tried it out, it was fine. I finally turned everything back on on the freeway and just like tested. It's not lane, it doesn't center you, but it's lane keep assist. So it's not going to, like, it just knows when you're getting to the edges, like hey, hey, hey, and it'll nudge you back into the center of the lane. So you got that going for you. If you're, you know, if you have this vehicle and it's a little,

Nicole (18:24)
Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (18:37)
Okay.

Nicole (18:37)
Okay.

Roberto Baldwin (18:49)
much for you at the beginning. This might help. Again, I cannot stress enough that wherever you turn the wheel, that's where the car's going to go. Yeah, eight speed automatic transmission, ⁓ super fun to drive. ⁓ It's the electronic limited slip differential, so it's fun around corners. ⁓ It does not have, ⁓ you can't raise it. It doesn't have a button to raise it like the Lamborghinis have.

Sam Abuelsamid (18:57)
Ha

Nicole (18:57)
You

Roberto Baldwin (19:17)
which is really helpful when you have that sort of that splitter or not splitter but the rear spoiler up front. So when I got it, they showed me, I'm like, well here in the front, cause you have to like go around this car. I'm like, it's a little, they're like, yeah, all those cars have it. And then there was a little bit. I was driving and there was a two by four in the road, which I didn't see. There was a car in front of me. And then also there's two by four and there's two cars and I'm like, oh no, oh no. And I went over, it was fine. So it's higher than a two by four.

Sam Abuelsamid (19:17)
huh.

Ha ha, barely.

Roberto Baldwin (19:47)
That was I was just like no no I'm gonna die

Nicole (19:48)
It's, I love that you have, that would have given me a panic attack. I'd have been like, Oh God, no, no, no.

Sam Abuelsamid (19:52)
Well, I mean,

at the 2x4, I'm kind of surprised that it didn't damage one of the tires because it's probably like, you know, three or four millimeters of tire sidewall.

Roberto Baldwin (20:01)
Yeah, there's no sidewall in the tires. It was right in the center of the road, so thank God. Yeah, 10.25 inch, you know, touchscreen display. Again, who cares? To be honest, no one cares. You're buying this, again, you're not buying this car. like, oh, my touchscreen is playing. It works. didn't, you know, there's a little bit of a scooch of latency. get no one cares. You don't care if you're buying this car. You're buying this car because A, people in chargers and challengers,

will wave at you and honk at you and yell at you that they really like your car. People in Mercedes will follow you. Yeah, it's very nice to have ⁓ the top down. It does have like those little baffles that go behind you, but those you have to put in like, guess, manually. They're in the trunk in a bag. Whatever, just have, this is my hair from being in the wind all day. No one cares.

Nicole (20:36)
There you go.

you

You

Roberto Baldwin (21:00)
⁓ Yeah, no, I really really like this vehicle. You know what it made me do it made me miss my del Sol

Nicole (21:06)
cheese

Sam Abuelsamid (21:07)
Ha.

Roberto Baldwin (21:08)
I'm all driving around like, aw, I miss my Del Sol.

So I don't know if that's what Aston Martin was going for.

Nicole (21:17)
But that's what they did.

Sam Abuelsamid (21:20)
I'm sure that was totally top of mind as they were designing the Vanquish. Somebody that drove a Del Sol 25 years ago, what would they want today? Where have they gone in their lives since the Del Sol was around? Build the perfect car for that and there you have the Vanquish.

Roberto Baldwin (21:22)
Yeah, the fact that it's you can get the regular coupe and

Nicole (21:29)
It's like, you know what?

Yeah.

Roberto Baldwin (21:40)
It was

the vanquish. a lot of trunk space. Not a lot, no, not.

Sam Abuelsamid (21:45)
Again, when

you can afford $650,000 for car, you just, well, no, you buy what you need when you get there. Yeah.

Roberto Baldwin (21:49)
You have someone to just follow you, or you just ship it. Just buy new stuff. Buy

new stuff, then drop it off at the Goodwill on the way when you leave, on the way out of town.

Nicole (21:57)
new stuff.

Sam Abuelsamid (21:58)
or just leave

it in the hotel room for the staff.

Nicole (21:59)
Just play new stuff.

Roberto Baldwin (22:01)
There you go.

Here's some stuff. What else? What can I tell you about this? Oh, someone in a Miata almost got in a head-on collision with me because they decided to go straight into the wrong lane around a blind corner. But the Vanquish's magic brakes stopped that. Yeah, it's got the brakes are fantastic. I think, are they? You know what? I was going look this up. Are these ceramic brakes?

Nicole (22:12)
God.

Sam Abuelsamid (22:23)
Well, that's good.

yeah, they probably are carbon ceramics.

Roberto Baldwin (22:31)
Because they squeak, so I just assume they are.

Yeah, they are fantastic.

Sam Abuelsamid (22:38)
For

$650,000, you're probably gonna get carbon ceramics.

Roberto Baldwin (22:40)
Yeah, they better be. here we go, brakes, learn more.

Carbon ceramic brakes, yes, they are. So they're carbon ceramic. See, they do squeak. That's just the nature of carbon ceramic brakes, but they also will stop you like there's no tomorrow. So if a person decides to come at you, ⁓ you can stomp on the brakes and just come to immediate stop.

What else can I say about this car besides that I really liked it and that it costs more than my house. Yeah, I think that might be it.

Sam Abuelsamid (23:13)
I mean,

that's almost three times what we paid for our house.

Roberto Baldwin (23:17)
It has a top speed of 202 miles an hour. The fact that it's a convertible, convertible is way more than their counterparts. I think it's like 200 pounds more. But when you're cruising around in a twin turbo V12, I don't think 200 pounds really matters.

Sam Abuelsamid (23:34)
No, when you get to 850 horsepower, a couple hundred pounds, not going to make a huge difference.

Nicole (23:35)
Nope.

Roberto Baldwin (23:40)
Nothing,

Yeah, there's not a lot of room for space. So yeah, I mean, you're not gonna be hauling anything in it anyway, so that's how you're space. That's it. It is really nice to drive around in GT mode. Like it doesn't, it's not so much a sports car or a race car that when you're in GT mode, it feels like you are trying to reign in a wild horse.

Sam Abuelsamid (23:50)
Yeah, exactly.

Roberto Baldwin (24:07)
So that that is really nice. So it doesn't feel like I think some of the one the the issues probably with the Julie a little bit was that it always felt like it was ready to go and the brakes were always so tight that you couldn't stop at like the drive-through correctly So they've they've they've sort of eased they've sort of shaved off all the bits a bit for GT mode Except for the steering because the steering is just the steering is not really much you can do about that ⁓

Sam Abuelsamid (24:22)
Ha!

Roberto Baldwin (24:36)
But it is, I mean, guess they could have like electronically, who can, you know, it's.

Sam Abuelsamid (24:41)
Does

the car you have have the wood veneer on the back of the seats?

Roberto Baldwin (24:47)
no it's all carbon fiber they spent they did the twenty seven thousand dollar carbon fiber bit

Sam Abuelsamid (24:51)
Okay. I think this might just

be for the 60th anniversary edition. I'm looking at the cue by Aston Martin, celebrate 60 years of Volant with ⁓ exclusive anniversary editions.

Roberto Baldwin (25:06)
Yeah, yeah, for, ⁓ yeah, so I haven't had cars in a while and like last week's was like the Corolla Cross. And this week is ⁓ the Vanquish. ⁓ Yeah, yeah. Why is?

Sam Abuelsamid (25:14)
haha

Nicole (25:15)
You

Sam Abuelsamid (25:20)
So you're a little variety.

Nicole (25:22)
Just mixing it up a little bit.

Sam Abuelsamid (25:24)
Yeah.

Alright, well maybe someday I'll get to driving Aston Martin. Hasn't happened yet.

Roberto Baldwin (25:32)
I drove the Vantage in another one. ⁓ wow. Hold on, I wanna double check, make sure my top speed is correct.

Sam Abuelsamid (25:40)
Back when Nathan Hoyt was still at Aston Martin, promised he'd get me into one eventually, now he's not there anymore.

Roberto Baldwin (25:40)
top speed is 214. I'm sorry, it was 214. It's what...

They had a great PR person at Aston Martin who just left. I'm very sad about it.

Sam Abuelsamid (25:59)
All right, well let's carry on. So ⁓ I had ⁓ the 2025 Mazda CX-5 Turbo Signature. ⁓ Is that the whole name? Turbo Premium. Yeah, Turbo, sorry, Turbo Premium. ⁓ And the only thing that really matters is that it was painted sole crystal red. ⁓ So that makes it essentially perfect.

Roberto Baldwin (26:23)
Yeah, that's all that matters.

Nicole (26:25)
You

Sam Abuelsamid (26:28)
because there's really nothing you can do to improve it on a car. ⁓ Even if it does have a little rotary controller for the infotainment system, as long as it's sole crystal red on the outside, nothing else really matters. ⁓ Nicole will tell us also about driving a CX-5 in a few minutes, ⁓ but it was different from the one that I drove. So the one I drove ⁓ was the outgoing generation.

Nicole (26:48)
Yes.

Correct. It's kind of funny that you have that one.

Sam Abuelsamid (26:57)
And I was there at the LA Auto Show back in 2017 or 2018 when they introduced this generation. Mazda had an offsite event one evening at some studio in Hollywood. And I was there and most of the evening I was standing next to Gene Jennings. that was, even though the car was nice.

Just hanging around with Jean for a couple of hours. That kind of made the whole day. ⁓ It was worth it. And Jean had had a couple of drinks ⁓ and had lots of stories to share. She was always ⁓ great to spend time with. you ⁓ know, so this generation of CX-5 has been around for a while. This is the second generation and the third generation is coming up.

Roberto Baldwin (27:40)
Aww.

Sam Abuelsamid (27:53)
shortly. This one has the 2.5 liter Skyactiv-G engine. It's turbocharged so it's 227 horsepower, 310 foot pounds of torque.

I've driven quite a few CX-5s over the years, ⁓ including the short-lived diesel version, which was surprisingly good. ⁓ But ⁓ it did not sell very well. I think they sold fewer than 1,000 of those in total over a couple of years, and then they discontinued it. ⁓

Roberto Baldwin (28:22)
That's not good.

Sam Abuelsamid (28:26)
This one, this is kind of the sweet spot, ⁓ the 2.5 turbo, at least among this generation, six-speed automatic transmission. And the CX-5 was kind of the first of the Mazdas to really upgrade the interior and really start to move Mazda in the direction of...

having a more premium feel, a more premium looking feel to it. ⁓ When you sit inside this thing, it feels like a much more expensive vehicle than it is. ⁓ I remember back early on, like early on in the history of this show, ⁓ before YouTube had even joined, ⁓ when I drove one, I drove a CX-5 and at the time, it was like $37,000.

And I complained, you cause that was quite a bit more than most of the other car crossovers in this segment. know, cars like the RAV4 and the CRV and the Escape, you know, they were not, they were not that expensive, but this, this had such a much nicer interior, the materials, the colors, the fit and finish just felt so much more premium. But I just felt like at the time 37 seemed like a lot. Now 37, not so much. And in fact,

Nicole (29:46)
Ha ha ha.

Sam Abuelsamid (29:49)
The base MSRP on this version, the premium trim, is in 2025, is only $38,000, which is barely more than it was seven, eight years ago. And all in with the options on this one, it came to a grand total of $41,520. You wanna take guesses at the destination charge?

Roberto Baldwin (30:15)
Ooh, 11.

Nicole (30:18)
1495.

Sam Abuelsamid (30:20)
⁓ Nicole gets it. It was $1420. So you know $41,000 you know still not cheap but considering where this was a number of years ago it hasn't really gotten that much more expensive and the reality is and if you listen to the interview from last week's show that I did with Tom Donnelly I brought this up with him that kind of the rest of the segment

has caught up price-wise. So if you look at the top sellers in the segment, they're all in the high 30s to $40,000 range now, but none of them today, even the brand new RAV4, feel and look as nice on the inside as the CX-5. And we'll hear your impressions of the new CX-5 in a couple of minutes. But this one had leather seats.

8-way power driver seat, 6-way power passenger seat. had all the driver assist features. had adaptive cruise control, stop and go, blind spot monitoring, lane keeping assist, all that stuff. It did still have the 10.25 inch center screen that is only touch when you're Apple CarPlay or Android Auto.

when you're using the stock Mazda infotainment, you have to use the ⁓ rotary controller on the center console. ⁓ And next to that rotary controller, there's a smaller rotary volume knob there, which I think that's in a good location, makes it very easy to use without looking at it. can just drop your hand down and give it a twist. ⁓ The rest of this vehicle, by the...

Compared to the current generation of its competitors, it's a little bit smaller than those. So the backseat is a little bit tighter than a CR-V or a RAV4 or a Tucson or a Sportage. But it's still very usable by a couple of adults. You probably don't want to take a long road trip with a couple of adults in the backseat. certainly to go out to dinner or something like that, have no problem at all. Wireless Android Auto and Apple CarPlay.

⁓ There's a GE wireless charging pad, all the usual stuff. ⁓ It's rated at 24 miles per gallon combined, 22 city, 27 highway. ⁓ I still, even now, at the end of its life cycle, I still really like this car. I like the way it looks, I really like the way it drives. It drives like what you expect of a Mazda, tight steering, some decent steering feedback.

really good combination of driving dynamics with the ride quality and the handling. ⁓ It's just really, really nice to drive. ⁓ And I, you know, even now, you know, before the 26s get to the dealerships, you know, this is still a vehicle that I would recommend to somebody looking for a vehicle in this class, you know, the compact crossover class. So I think it's, I think it's still a great option.

And you the engine, know the 227 horsepower, know that the numbers don't seem as high as some of the competitors But it feels strong. It's got a lot of torque. So it's a it's really nice engine So that is the 2025 Mazda cx-5 2.5 turbo premium in soul red crystal metallic

So, Nicole, you also drove a CX-5.

Roberto Baldwin (34:08)
So

Nicole (34:09)
Yes. Yeah.

So I drove the 2026 Mazda CX-5, which is the next... They made it so much better, you know why? You know why? You know why? I'm so excited they got rid of this stupid knob! I've never been so excited in my life to see them change something. The command... Commander knob, they called it? I called it the world's most annoying infotainment control ever.

Roberto Baldwin (34:14)
Dun dun dun.

Sam Abuelsamid (34:18)
and they've completely broken it,

Hahaha

Roberto Baldwin (34:24)
Can they get rid of the dial?

Aww.

Nicole (34:37)
invented. I hated that thing and they got rid of it. And I even had a there's an interview at the end of the podcast with Matthew Valbuena. I believe I his name right. And he's in charge of figuring that stuff out, like making that stuff seamless. And I chatted with him about it because for the longest time Mazda tripled down on that. Right. Weird. We're going to keep it. But he said all the apps that you have, they all use, you you're used to a touch screen. So when you start mapping it out to that controller,

suddenly you can't map it the way that you want to naturally use it. So that's why they went with a touch screen. So I was overjoyed for that one reason alone. I'm like, yes. So don't get the 25 because it has a stupid old controller. Get the 26 because it doesn't have a stupid old controller. No, he's wrong. He's wrong. It's the worst. hate that. So it got the new. The other things to change is this is a little bit bigger. The wheelbase gets a little longer. So there's a little more room for people, little more room for cargo in here.

Sam Abuelsamid (35:19)
Get the 25, get the 25.

Nicole (35:34)
So it's a little bit roomier, which is good. Still has that sort of compact footprint, still really easy to move around in urban areas. So it serves that purpose well, but it's just a little bit more versatile for you, which is good and has 40, 20, 40 split fold seats so that you can, you know, have people sitting on the left and the right and still put like skis or something through in the middle, which is pretty cool. Pricing on this, it starts at 29, 990. That's the bass.

Then there's the preferred at 34, 250 and the premium plus at 38, 990. So it still stays well priced. You don't have the turbo engine though anymore. That is, that is gone. You just have the 2.5 liter four cylinder with a six speed automatic, 187 horsepower, 186 pound feet of torque. It's, it actually is really responsive. This isn't just by getting a little bit bigger. It's not a huge car. You know, it's relatively compact.

So it's still, it gets out of its own way. I enjoy driving and it still handles like a Mazda. Mazda should have that nice little handling, should have that little bit of fun. And I enjoyed how this handled. they worked to make this, this isn't an all new, this is like refreshed, I would say. I don't know. ⁓ It's definitely much, I think it's much better than the old one. I think they did, ⁓

this is technically the third generation, so I guess it is all new. But yeah.

Roberto Baldwin (37:04)
Three's the magic

number.

Sam Abuelsamid (37:05)
Although it doesn't, when you look at it, doesn't look that much different on the outside.

Nicole (37:10)
No, they can't, it still looks very similar. Suddenly have that brain cramp.

Roberto Baldwin (37:12)
Like if you go to Mazda site,

you can see the 2025 and the 2026. You can just keep going back and forth with all new in model year 2025. And if someone didn't tell you that there was a 2026, you were like,

Nicole (37:22)
Yeah.

So it, it, it's, it's changed enough. You know, they dropped the turbo engine, they changed the infotainment significantly. They made it longer. There's changes, but it doesn't, it still feels very much like the car was before in the best ways. Like it truly was an evolution of this. wasn't like they took everything they have from the old CX five and chucked it out the window and then introduce new one. This is really just an evolution of it. And I think they improved it in, in numerous little ways.

to make it a better vehicle. So I thoroughly enjoyed my time driving this. I thought it was fabulous.

Sam Abuelsamid (37:58)
So, you know, I was earlier today, was watching Tommy Micah's review of this. And one thing that he brought up was just the size of the screen. You know, it's a 15.6 inch center infotainment screen, which he thought was maybe a little too big. What did you think of that?

Nicole (38:03)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

I thought the screen was fine. didn't think, see, I like a larger screen. So for me, I thought it worked well. You know, before the screens they had were a little bit in Mazda's, weren't, because they weren't full touch. One point they were really far back on the dash. Then they were a little bit closer. So I feel like they've made this bigger and positioned it. So it's in the right spot for you to be able to use. And it's the right size. I thought it was good.

Sam Abuelsamid (38:46)
Okay, that's fair.

Nicole (38:46)
Yeah, I like

larger screens because I also feel like they're easier to deal with when you're in areas where the navigation is really complex. You're in a city or something. It's easier to follow than trying to follow something small. It's just because you can keep track. It doesn't look like you've driven over your own route eight times. And yeah, so I prefer the larger screens.

Sam Abuelsamid (39:05)
Yeah, I mean, one of the things that Tom Donnelly mentioned when I talked to him ⁓ was the hybrid system that's coming for next year. That's going to replace the turbo. And that system is really designed to be ⁓

Nicole (39:15)
Mm-hmm.

Sam Abuelsamid (39:23)
to provide more performance ⁓ as well as better fuel efficiency. And so that's why they're not doing the turbo now because they're going to get even more performance with the hybrid version next year.

Nicole (39:37)
Right, so

it'll be interesting to see how that does. You know, they've done that sort of staggered thing. You get one engine now, you'll get the next engine later, and you'll like it. ⁓ So we'll have to wait if you want that extra performance. I'd imagine that it's going to be, you know, when they get rid of a turbo and everybody cries because the turbo is gone. This is still a pleasant car to drive. It's not like you're crying big crocodile tears because there's no turbo, but I'm excited for them to do the hybrid and see how that comes out and see if that really does give you that little extra oomph.

Sam Abuelsamid (40:06)
Yeah, well, you know, the CX-5 is not a sports car anyway. ⁓ So while the turbo is nice, it definitely was not necessary. The SkyActiv G engine is still a really wonderful engine.

Nicole (40:11)
No.

It's a good little engine and it's

like you said, this isn't a sports car. This isn't a Miata. This isn't something supposed to be super high performance. And that's not why you're buying this. And what I like about Mazdas in general is they do still, you know, even when it's an affordable crossover like this, it still looks beautiful. It still has a nice, comfortable, quiet interior and it still has really good handling. So you don't feel like you've.

sacrificed a lot. might not have the power of a more expensive vehicle with a bigger engine and blah blah blah, but you still have great handling. It's a really well done package.

Sam Abuelsamid (40:57)
And one thing that was interesting that I learned from previous conversation with Mazda, when they first announced the new CX-5 some months ago, I asked why they kept the name because all the other Mazda crossovers in the last few years, as they've been replaced or new models introduced, they've...

They've changed the nomenclature slightly. So you've got the CX-90, the CX-70 for the larger ones, the CX-30, replace the CX-3, ⁓ you you get the CX-50 and then the CX-5 is the only one without a zero at the end for the crossovers. so, it's just, you know, CX-5 has been the best selling model for a long time. There's a lot of, a lot of brand equity in that, in that nameplate. And so they decided, you know, rather than rename it to CX-60 or CX-55 or something,

they would just keep the CX-5 name.

Nicole (41:51)
Well,

and that's the thing too, you know, different automakers over the years have done that where they've changed the name, you know, they re they rename the whole lineup to make them all fall into a new nomenclature or something. And it's confusing to people too, when you keep changing the names your vehicle. So where does that best selling vehicle or it is a big deal? Don't get confused. People let people get confused about what it is. Leave it alone. Leave the name alone.

Sam Abuelsamid (42:16)
Yeah, now they've got two crossovers that are similarly sized with the CX-5 and the CX-50. The CX-50 is designed to be a little more rugged, off-roady, versus the CX-5, a little more stylish, sleek. ⁓ So it'll be interesting to see how the sales split between those two develops over the next couple of years. All right, anything else on the new CX-5?

Nicole (42:39)
Mm-hmm.

No, I think that's about it for me.

Sam Abuelsamid (42:46)
Alright, well, tell you what, I'm going to drop in the interview that you did with Matt Valbuena right here and we will be right back after that. ⁓

Nicole Wakelin (42:57)
Okay, so first tell me your name and your title.

Matthew Valbuena (43:00)
My name is Matthew Valbuena ⁓ and I am a project manager for Mazda responsible for Mazda's in-vehicle technologies and the human machine interfaces that interact with those technologies. It says project, it says proj manager, infotainment and HMI.

Nicole Wakelin (43:13)
what it says in your business card because I think you'd need three.

close

enough.

Matthew Valbuena (43:23)
Coastal now, but it's like infotainment isn't really a consumer friendly word and HMI people don't know so it's a lot easier to express it as in-vehicle technologies and how you interact with it.

Nicole Wakelin (43:33)
makes

more sense. So today I have the pleasure of driving the new CX-5 where you guys have really completely reworked how the infotainment screen and infotainment system, and particularly you got rid of that knob that anybody listening to the podcast knows I hate it. So tell me a little bit about what you did.

Matthew Valbuena (43:51)
So the 6CX5 features Google built-in. So Google built-in means that for Mazda, Google Maps is the native mapping solution and Google Assistant is the native voice assistant. And because it's Google built-in, we also have access to the Google Play Store, which allows you to download apps. So in the car that you were driving, we had downloaded Spotify, we downloaded Waze, the Google Chrome browser was downloaded ⁓ and the car already had YouTube installed. ⁓

This allows the user to download the apps that they want to utilize in the car so that way they don't have to use their phone in the vehicle. They can still use CarPlay, they can still use Android Auto, but if they forget their phone and leave it at home, they're not kind of left out in the dark. They still have access to their Google Maps, they still have access to Spotify because of this Google built-in experience. ⁓

The other big benefit of this Google built-in experience is it really helps us meet customer expectations. As I kind of mentioned before your drive, a lot of customer expectations of what they can do in the vehicle is based on what they can do outside of the vehicle.

And when you look at how much time people spend in the car interacting with infotainment versus how much time they spend out of the car interacting with their smartphone, with a tablet, with their laptop, with a smart TV, all of those interactions kind of change what they expect to be able to do. So with Google built in, we are bringing familiar apps and familiar interfaces. So when you're on your phone or mainly on your phone with Google Maps, the way you pinch, zoom, swipe, ⁓ tilt the map view, all of that.

is capable in the vehicle. So from a ⁓ intuitive factor, it's much easier for you to hop into this vehicle and figure out how things work. And kind of the goal is when you buy a smartphone or when you buy a tablet, when you open the box, there's just a charging cable and a quick start guide. And the quick start guide basically says, here's where you plug it in, here's how you turn it on, and that's it. Whereas the car has a three, 400 page owner's manual.

We don't want the infotainment system to require a three to four hundred page manual to figure out. So the goal is to kind of deliver that easy to use, intuitive user experience.

Nicole Wakelin (46:06)
Do you feel like because that dial for a long time that what there was a name for? ⁓ That was something that Mazda sort of doubled down on being a better solution than touching a screen all the time But now you've given us of course voice control is the best way to go But you've also now the touchscreen is a touchscreen. Yes, so when the change in why you're like that's still working

Matthew Valbuena (46:10)
commander.

So when we launched the second generation Mazda Connect system with the 2019 Mazda 3, that vehicle was entirely non touchscreen. You had to use the commander knob to operate everything including CarPlay and Android Auto. ⁓

we saw lots of complaints, specifically with the app-based experience with CarPlay and Android Auto, that those interfaces were designed for touch input and that trying to use a commander knob was very difficult and frustrating for the users. So starting with the introduction of the CX50, we brought back touchscreen inputs specifically for CarPlay and Android Auto. The native Mazda interface still required the use of the commander knob. So clearly, we saw that app-based interfaces

really had to have the touch interface because they were designed or optimized for touch. So with this Google built-in solution, because of the fact that we have the ability to run apps from a variety of third parties like Spotify or ⁓ Chrome, example, ⁓ trying to be able to map the variety of user interfaces and capabilities to a commander knob.

becomes a limiting factor, becomes a challenge. And we didn't want to have those same type of complaints from you saying, ⁓ I love this app, but it's so difficult to use with this knob. And again, kind of when I talked about Google Maps, all those swiping gestures and input methods, they just become second nature, you don't think about it. So when you see the similar interface in the car, you kind of already know how to use it, even though you may never have actually interacted with it before.

Nicole Wakelin (48:04)
Okay, so I'm pleased with that because I'm glad to see that the old commander knob is gone. So what do you think for people getting into a car? And this is a specific question for, you know, the average age of a car is what I think 12 years old.

Matthew Valbuena (48:17)
The average registered vehicle on road is about 12 years old.

Nicole Wakelin (48:20)
So

if you haven't had a car in 12 years and you get into a car today, it is suddenly like a computer on wheels and it can be really overwhelming. You talked about not wanting a person to feel like they need a manual. Do you think that person who is coming from a car that didn't really have an infotainment screen and is now getting into this is going to find it an easy switch?

Matthew Valbuena (48:38)
believe so, simply because of the fact that you look at, I know I keep mentioning smartphone, and we're not saying this car is a smartphone on wheels, but the familiarity with those types of inputs and interfaces, 83 % of the adult population in North America has a smartphone. That means my grandparents have a smartphone.

my nieces and nephews have a smartphone. So this wide-ange range means that everybody has this kind of basic understanding of how to navigate through swipe and kind of move. Maybe they don't know all of the advanced multi-touch capabilities or things of that, but they don't need to in order to interact with the system. If they can swipe, if they can tap, they understand the interface. And when you look at, you were talking about people who have a car that's 12 years old, that is definitely a learning curve, but in my personal case,

My son is now 15 and a half. So he's getting his license in a couple of months. So for him, he's Jen Alpha.

Nicole Wakelin (49:33)
I think Alpha, that seems right. We'll go with that.

Matthew Valbuena (49:36)
⁓ So he grew up around technology and you know, he had a tablet when he was younger and we would play games on it and stuff like that. And the first time he sat down in front of a desktop computer, he thought it was a touchscreen. He went out and swiped and tried to touch it and it wasn't. And so I think the expectation there is even in his classroom, you know, his school has Chromebooks. Every single one of those Chromebooks is a touchscreen. ⁓ So it's just now becoming to a point where it's so ubiquitous that

the learning curve has really kind of been diminished compared to trying to teach something in a new operating way. Like, okay, you have to use this joystick or these buttons to do something. And they're like, why can't I just reach out and touch it? So ⁓ the other benefit again with this system is the fact that it's flexible. So we talked about the average vehicle on the road being 12 years old, the registration, 12 years.

The average consumer keeps their smartphone for 33 months. In that 33-month span, they see two to three major OS updates. So if they had their car for 12 years, in that same time period, they would have had four or more smartphones, and they would have seen at least 12 OS updates. With this Google built-in system, we are able to offer over-their updates and keep the system fresh with major OS updates as well as incremental...

feature additions or bug fixes or revamp the UI. But the idea is to keep the user experience fresh, just like it does on your phone. Every year you get a new look and feel, we want to be able to offer that same type of continuous improvement with the in-vehicle experience.

Nicole Wakelin (51:20)
So and that's important because you do get into a car even that's just a couple years old and you can already see how some of the things on that interface are starting. It's not that you're like this is not new this hasn't been done in a couple years.

Matthew Valbuena (51:31)
Well, especially like when you look at like the app situation like you know You have these apps that kind of pop up out of nowhere and also become this home run thing and with the ability to run these apps natively If it's available in the Google Play Store, you can add it to your cars. You can have the latest content the latest app Functionality and the vehicle does support video and gaming. So while the car is stopped You can utilize full-screen video viewing. So YouTube ⁓ Amazon Prime video HBO

any of the streaming services that are available, you can utilize that in the vehicle if you choose. So it's great for, in my wife's case, ⁓ school pickup. You know, when you're sitting in line, you're just kind of waiting on your kid to out the car, you know, yeah, you can watch something on your phone while you're parked, but you now have a larger screen in the vehicle and you can play it through the entire audio system. Why not take advantage of that extra few minutes of time to catch up on Bridgerton or whatever you may be watching? ⁓

Nicole Wakelin (52:25)
Are you reducing ph...

Matthew Valbuena (52:26)
My wife is a huge one and she's been catching up on it. I've been walking into the room and seeing things on the screen going, ⁓ that's happening.

Nicole Wakelin (52:34)
One of the things that it doesn't have, talking about knobs and controllers, there's no volume knob. That caused a problem for Honda. The world had a small revolt. Honda brought back its volume knob. So tell me about why you guys said, well, let's see what happens if we get rid of it.

Matthew Valbuena (52:41)
Correct.

Honda did it with a much smaller screen. And I'm not saying that the screen is a justification for it, but it was a much smaller area to work with. So it was kind of an interesting choice in their case. We still have volume controls on the steering wheel. just like Tesla or Rivian, we do have volume controls on the screen, but it's offset to the passenger side of the screen for the passenger interaction. We really see the driver keeping their hands on the wheel utilizing the volume control. So.

In our evaluation and in our testing, the knob was not a major concern. It was commented on, but once they actually got to use the system and interact with it, it didn't become the hot spot that ⁓ some people thought it might be.

Nicole Wakelin (53:36)
So it's kind of like we're all scarred for life from Honda doing that and we need to give other things a little bit of a chance to see how they work in other setups, other applications.

Matthew Valbuena (53:43)
Possibly. I

think a little bit it comes down to the total experience, right? So maybe if, maybe in Honda's case, I could have been the straw that broke the camel's back. ⁓ know, but I don't see users complaining about that in other vehicles that are similar. So again, I bring up Tesla and I bring up Rivian. Obviously we're not an EV company, but when you look at those vehicles and you look at customer satisfaction, you look at online comments and forum posts, and even ⁓ automotive reviewers.

you don't see a lot of animosity for them not having a volume up. So it is interesting how traditional automakers don't get that same leeway. And I don't know if it's because expectation, well, you had a knob before, you should always have a knob. Whereas these guys started off with the clean slate approach and for some reason it wasn't expected of them.

Nicole Wakelin (54:34)
really thought of it, but you're right. It's the guys who've never had one. It's like, that's OK. But you've had one. It's like, wait. You removed my volume knob.

Matthew Valbuena (54:41)
So I totally get it. I understand it. And what I would say is try it. Don't let the lack of something be a deterrent. Try it out, experience it, take it for a test drive, play with it at the dealership. But you spent time with it. Yeah. Did you have a...

Nicole Wakelin (55:01)
Actually, to your point, I didn't miss it being there. I had that when you first sit down in a car and you don't know where anything is, because it's new and it's a great for the late-o-lantern. Once I did, it's like, it was right here. And you can tell Google turned up the volume a little bit, so you don't even have to reach for buttons. Correct. So if you had to pick out one thing that was sort of your favorite element of the new tech inside of this, what would you say, this is cool? This is my favorite thing.

Matthew Valbuena (55:27)
I think for me it's a slight surprise and delight, but when you are on the home screen, there is a vehicle graphic that is shown. You can swipe the vehicle to rotate it around, but if you turn the headlights on, the hazards, the brake lights, open the door, all of those are reflected in the vehicle graphic. ⁓

It's just kind of fun. adds some whimsy to it. ⁓ But it's also just kind of cool to show. You can rotate it. So I think that is kind of fun. From a functional standpoint, I would say ⁓ Google Maps. Google Maps. You know, it's such a ubiquitous navigation solution. There are more than two billion monthly active Google Maps users worldwide. because of that, all of that rich POY data and all of that

functionality is built in. So for me, I oftentimes kind of get hungry around 10, 30, 11 o'clock. And so I'll just kind of see what's new, what's in the area and look up some spots to see how far it is away from the office. And I'll start the route and make, okay, it's 12 minutes with traffic, cancel the route on my phone. Now I can go out to the car and it'll be my recent destination. So I just click on that taco spot and I'm there. So the flexibility and kind of the way

When you're in the Google ecosystem how easy it is to utilize ⁓ My wife and I like to take road trips and a lot of times we'll share a map on Google Maps and we just add a bunch of pins Well those pins those favorite those want to want to see want to visit places are accessible in the car as well So if you are on a road trip You don't have to worry about typing in every navigation destination in the car You can do everything on your PC everything on your computer, but it's still accessible from the car

Nicole Wakelin (57:13)
Excellent. Thank you very much. I appreciate your time. This is great. And I'm very happy with the changes. No more a little funky dial.

Sam Abuelsamid (57:22)
Okay, and we are back. ⁓ And while you were driving the CX-5 in, ⁓ where was it, Encinitas, I think, around Encinitas, I was just a little bit north of there, spending a few days with Toyota to ⁓ see the new Highlander that we talked about last week.

Nicole (57:33)
Yes, Encinitas.

Sam Abuelsamid (57:45)
⁓ and to drive their two newest EVs in the lineup, which are basically an extension of the BZ family. So, you know, last year they relaunched the BZ, you know, they dropped the 4X from the name, ⁓ they substantially upgraded it, fixed all the things that we hated about the first ⁓ iteration of the BZ-4X, and now they're expanding that family.

So we've got the BZ Woodland and the CHR name is back after a brief hiatus of a couple of years. So you get to drive both of those. The BZ Woodland is basically, it is arguably what the new Subaru Outback should have been. And this is a vehicle co-developed with Subaru. Subaru is calling their version the Trail Seeker.

They launched that and they launched it last year at the New York Auto Show. also unveiled an all-new Outback which went way off in kind of a different direction. Arguably what they're calling the trail seeker is the true successor to the Outback. The BZ Woodland is ⁓ the Toyota badge version of that car. I really like it. It's basically the BZ as a wagon.

It's really good. All the improvements they did to the regular BZ are here, but the roofline is a little bit longer. Overall length of the car is about six extra inches, so you've a whole bunch more cargo space in the back. It's only being offered with all-wheel drive.

⁓ So it's got the same motors front and rear so the regular BZ is available with front wheel drive or all wheel drive with a 221 horsepower motor on the front and 160ish horsepower motor on the rear axle. ⁓ For the Woodland they're using the same 220 horsepower motor front and rear but the overall even though that adds up to 442 horsepower

they're only giving you 375 horsepower in total at a time. Because what they're doing is they, and in the interview I did last week with the chief engineer, ⁓ talked about this. ⁓

They're adjusting the front to rear torque balance based on the conditions. So you can get up to 70 % to either axle and 30 % to the other axle. So you can get full power on one axle and then less, about half power on the other axle. ⁓ And it works really well. The default is kind of biased towards rear torque.

And surprisingly, you know, it makes this thing drive really, really nicely on the curving roads we drove around around Ojai, California. Even, you know, they have two different trim levels. So they're, I can't even remember what they're called now. But the two trim levels, and there's two tire options. Both of them are the same size tire. They're on an 18 inch wheel.

But you can get it with regular all-season tires or all-terrain tires. And with the all-terrains, because they have more rolling resistance, you get a little bit less range. So it's rated at 260 miles of range with the all-terrain tires. 283, 281, sorry, with the all-season tires. And then, you know, it's not...

I mean, this is not a hardcore off-roader, but it is surprisingly capable off-road. It's got Subaru's X-Mode software in there, so it does the front to rear torque balancing and side to side traction control with the brakes. ⁓ When we drove it, the night that we arrived in Ojai, ⁓ the first thing, so there were several waves, I was on the last wave, ⁓ and we arrived in time to see the unveiling of the Highlander.

and then after dinner it started pouring rain and it was just a downpour for several hours. But then when we, ⁓ you the next morning sun was shining but the place that they had set up for the off-road course was just way too muddy.

They went up there into the mountains into the ranch that used to belong to Paul Walker who was in the early Fast and Furious movies. ⁓ And they got a Tacoma trail hunter stuck in the mud up there. So they decided, yeah, we're not gonna take the busy woodland up there today. ⁓ But they did let us, the next day we went up with the woodland, but we didn't get to go all the way to the top of the mountain. So we didn't get to do some of the stuff like the moguls that people

Nicole (1:02:47)
geez.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:03:01)
and the earlier waves did, but I saw some of the videos that they did. we did a similar type of course last summer with the Subaru Soltera, which is essentially the same vehicle, ⁓ but without the wagon ⁓ back on the body. And we did that with the all season tires on the Soltera, not even all-terrain tires.

and it did fine. The X-Mode stuff works really surprisingly well. ⁓ the tires that are on the Woodland ⁓ are slightly larger diameter than the ones on the regular BZ. So you get about two tenths of an inch of extra ground clearance. So instead of 8.2, you get 8.4 inches, which doesn't sound like a lot. And it's not, to be fair, compared to most off-roaders.

But it's comparable to what you get on most Subaru's ⁓ and compared to other off-road variants to technically off-road variants of other EVs like the Hyundai IONIQ 5 XRT, the IONIQ 5 XRT only has 7 inches of ground clearance. The Mach-E Rally is only 5.9 inches of ground clearance.

Nicole (1:04:12)
wow.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:04:13)
So ⁓ it's actually pretty useful. Driving up the road up into the mountains on the ranch there, a lot of the mud had dried, but the road, the trail was still pretty rough. ⁓

There were sandy bits in it and we got into some of these sandy parts of the trail. The system worked just fine. ⁓ So with the 375 horsepower of this thing, ⁓ it'll do 0-60 in about 4.4 seconds. ⁓ It's got 33.8 cubic feet of cargo space behind the second row. If you fold down the second row seats, you get 74.3 cubic feet of cargo space. ⁓ It comes standard with

all weather floor mats on both trims. ⁓

Roberto Baldwin (1:05:03)
Yay. I think all cars should just come

standard with all winter floor mats, but just just me. I'm like, I don't, why do I need carpet? Well, yeah, even the Aston Martin. Why do I need carpet? I'm not driving him with my toes.

Nicole (1:05:08)
Seriously, yep.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:05:09)
Even the Aston

Martin?

Yeah.

You could though.

Roberto Baldwin (1:05:21)
I do drive the BRZ in the summer. I take my flip flops off and I just drive with my feet. Just my bare feet all the time.

Nicole (1:05:21)
Have you ever?

I

was in a Rolls Royce, what's the convertible? Rolls Royce convertible. Anyway, I've drawn a blank. Dawn, I think, and they had the lambswool floor mats that when you step on them, they go, whoosh, sink. And I was like, can I just take off my, I did, I took off my shoes for a minute and I was like, my God, this is amazing. So I would drive that in my bare feet. So that's it.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:05:32)
⁓ the dawn yeah

haha

⁓ So, you know, even on the all-terrain tires, though, driving up these curving mountain roads, the BC Woodland handled surprisingly well. It was actually a lot of fun to drive. The steering is good. It's got decent steering feedback, really nice steering feel. ⁓ It's a really good car to drive. ⁓

Roberto Baldwin (1:06:19)
Does

it, do you know if it's the same like suspension setup that they have on the Outback Wilderness? Because that Outback Wilderness did so well just on the regular road around corners. like, yeah, cause we have active suspension now.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:06:34)
It's going to be a little bit different because it's a different platform. this was for the Woodland and the Trail Seeker, the development was led by the Subaru engineers. So it's probably lot of the same engineers that worked on the Outback Wilderness that had a hand in this one. So there's two trim levels, base and premium.

Roberto Baldwin (1:06:36)
We're not active, what was it?

Okay, yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:06:59)
It only comes with all-wheel drive with 375 horsepower. The base is $46,750 including the $1450 destination fee. The premium is $2,100 more than that, so $48,850. So not cheap. It's still 400 volts, 150 kilowatt charging.

Roberto Baldwin (1:07:20)
Is it still 400 volt?

Sam Abuelsamid (1:07:27)
So they say it'll do 10 to 80 % in about 30 minutes. It does have a Naxx charging port, SAHA 3400 charging port.

Nicole (1:07:35)
You gonna

be okay, Robbie? ⁓

Roberto Baldwin (1:07:38)
It's just, it's got all the bits that you want. You're like, oh, it's essentially just a Subaru. It's a wagon. It's an EV. You're like, yay. It's 150 kilos.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:07:38)
And.

Roberto Baldwin (1:07:49)
What year is it? Come on. They did almost everything right. How's that?

Sam Abuelsamid (1:07:50)
Hey, know, least,

yeah, at least the charging curve is vastly better than it was on the original BZ4X, which took well over an hour to charge. This will do it in about 30 minutes. So, you know, it's roomy, the backseat is very roomy, so you can take your teenage kids, take your adult friends to go camping or whatever.

Roberto Baldwin (1:07:57)
God, that was just toward.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:08:16)
The ⁓ charge port is on the front right fender. ⁓ So when you nose into a supercharger station,

nice short cords that they have on the version 3 superchargers, they'll fit, it'll reach. ⁓ So it won't charge as fast as a Tesla or as a Hyundai, Kia, Genesis EV, but it's not that far off now. ⁓ And then the all-terrain tires are no-cost option ⁓ because you're losing some range, so you can choose those for no additional charge if you want.

So I I really like this thing, you know Yeah, so close

Roberto Baldwin (1:08:53)
And that's nice.

It's so close. It's so close. They're so close.

So close. had to charge the, because the, we took the BRZ and the IONIQ 5 out of the driveway to park the Aston Martin. So because we had to, because the driver was at an angle, a hill, blah, blah, blah. So the car takes up two spaces. So we couldn't charge the, in the, you know, the IONIQ 5, we don't charge it every day. There's no point. You don't need to charge it every day. But it was like around 40%. And then I did a bunch of,

Nicole (1:09:15)
jeez.

Roberto Baldwin (1:09:25)
like went and visited family and I was coming back as a 20%. I charged it at the EA station down the street. And it's really nice when you just plug it in, it charges at 235. So that's, you're just like, all right, I don't wanna be here for a little bit and then I'll be on my way. We don't charge that car very often at this. That's only when we're on road trips other than that. Even though it's free, we're just like, meh.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:09:38)
Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, my wife, my wife only plugs

in the EV6, you know, once at most twice a week.

Roberto Baldwin (1:09:51)
Yeah, you just like, well, here we go.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:09:54)
So the other Toyota that we got to drive is the new CHR, which is also on the same architecture. But the CHR ⁓ has a ⁓ 4.4 inch or 4 inch shorter wheelbase than the BZ and the BZ Woodland. ⁓ It's actually 4.4 inches longer than the old CHR. So did you guys drive the old CHR?

Roberto Baldwin (1:10:20)
I don't even remember. Must not have been exciting. I think I did.

Nicole (1:10:20)
Yes, there was not.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:10:24)
It certainly wasn't exciting from a performance standpoint. ⁓ No, ⁓ it had like a 140 horsepower 4-cylinder engine with a CVT. I went back to look up acceleration numbers for the old CHR when I was writing this review. ⁓ Most of the 0-60 times recorded for the old CHR, between about 10 and 11 seconds.

Nicole (1:10:27)
Mm-mm. It was not great.

It sounded awful. was...

geez.

That sounds about right. Nowhere, nowhere's where you're going, Robbie. Nowhere at all. Eventually. A little bit, just a tiny bit.

Roberto Baldwin (1:10:52)
I mean, where are you going really? Slow down, chillax, no we're fast. You know what, I'll get there eventually. It's quicker than walking. Have you tried walking to the next town?

Sam Abuelsamid (1:10:54)
No more fast, that's for sure.

Roberto Baldwin (1:11:06)
It takes a while.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:11:09)
So the new CHR ⁓ is 6.7 inches longer than the old CHR. It's a bigger vehicle. ⁓ The backseat is definitely tighter than the BZ and the Woodland, ⁓ but it's still usable by adults. Whereas the old one, again, if you ever sat in the backseat of the old CHR, not only was the backseat tight, but the way the belt line swept up at the back there, ⁓ the rear windows were very small.

It very claustrophobic feeling in there. It was not pleasant. ⁓ This one is much, much, much better. ⁓ Better in every way. ⁓ So it's also all-wheel drive only, the dual motor all-wheel drive, but it's got the regular BZ's all-wheel drive setup. So it's front biased, 338 horsepower, which again, is plenty for this thing.

Nicole (1:11:43)
No.

Roberto Baldwin (1:12:05)
That's

more than enough you need.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:12:06)
Yeah,

Nicole (1:12:06)
Mm-hmm.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:12:07)
does 0-60 in about 4.9 seconds. Oh yeah, a little, just a skosh. It's available in two trims, SE and XSE. The SE is on 18 inch wheels. That's the one you should buy. 287 miles of range. 20s on the XSE, 273 miles of range.

Roberto Baldwin (1:12:10)
So quicker than the other one.

Nicole (1:12:15)
Yep. Thank God.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:12:33)
Basically most of what I said about the Bezee Woodland and what I've previously said about the 2026 Bezee applies here. Same much improved interior. You don't have that little instrument cluster display down at the end of this kind of tunnel on the top of the dash and mounted too low so that the steering wheel cuts off half the screen. It's same display, but it's mounted up higher closer to the base of the windshield. ⁓ It's much more usable now. The whole interior is better.

You've got dual wireless charging pads, 14-inch touchscreen. It does not have the new infotainment system that's on the new RAV4. It's still the previous generation, which is fine. My only complaint with the previous gen infotainment system ⁓ is it does take a while to boot up. I was reminded of this when I was driving the Corolla Cross a couple of weeks ago and driving these two.

It takes a good 30 seconds before the system is completely fired up and running. ⁓ Which, if you need navigation for where you're going, which when we're doing these drives, we typically do, ⁓ you know, you gotta sit there and wait for it to finish powering up and getting everything on the screen.

Roberto Baldwin (1:13:49)
You gotta

start the car and then like put your seatbelt on real slow like. Just your mirrors. Every time you get in the car, you're really gonna take your time. That's where that six seconds or that 10 seconds would have helped. ⁓

Sam Abuelsamid (1:13:55)
then adjust your mirrors, adjust your seat and yeah.

Nicole (1:13:57)
Ha ha ha.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:14:07)
but driving this thing up into the mountains, ⁓ was a lot of fun to drive. ⁓ It's not rear bias torque ⁓ like the Woodland, but it was still a lot of fun to drive this thing. It handles really nicely. ⁓ I like this car a lot. ⁓ I'm not actually sure which one I would buy if I was...

going to buy one of these. I like the station wagon layout of the woodland but I also like the slightly smaller footprint of the CHR. ⁓

Roberto Baldwin (1:14:45)
looks a little like the crown.

Nicole (1:14:49)
You're torn,

you don't know what you get, huh?

Sam Abuelsamid (1:14:51)
Yeah, definitely. Yeah, it would probably be the wagon. Yeah. So yeah, it probably would be the station wagon, although the CHR is more affordable.

Roberto Baldwin (1:14:51)
You get a station wagon. Come on, Sam. Look, I've even been wearing my station wagon shirt today. Station wagon.

There we go. That was close.

They

are pretty pricey for 400 volt vehicles, but they're also Toyota, so people are gonna buy them anyway. I mean, Toyota could...

Nicole (1:15:08)
Mmm.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:15:09)
Yeah. Yeah. So

the CHR, the SE starts at $38,450 including the destination charge. And the XSE is $2,000 more for $40,450. Again, take the SE. ⁓ The main thing that you're going to lose is the 20-inch wheels and the puddle lights and the mirrors. Who cares?

The cloth seats in the SE are really nice, ⁓ rather than the synthetic suede and leather seats that are on the XSE. So I would probably just go with the SE, save the $2,000 and have some sidewall so that when you hit potholes you're not going to destroy your wheels all the time. So that is the... ⁓

Roberto Baldwin (1:15:40)
Cheers.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:16:01)
the 2026 CHR, both of these, BZ Woodland and the CHR will be in Toyota dealers starting on the West Coast in the next few weeks, ⁓ starting in early March and gradually making their way across the country. So Toyota, for a company that has been as ambivalent about ⁓ electric vehicles as Toyota has been over the last several years, they're suddenly gonna have a whole bunch of EVs in their lineup.

They got the BZ, the BZ Woodland, the CHR, the Highlander at the end of the year, and then several Lexus EVs as well.

Roberto Baldwin (1:16:38)
I don't think they like people like looking at the BZ4X. mean, like, this is trash. This is not a Toyota. This is not, this is not up to snuff. How dare you put your badge on this vehicle? I think it was, there's, there's a little bit of like, okay, this is what, you know, and then seeing like how well Hyundai's doing, like Hyundai is making a profit on this. We can't let that happen. Come on, come on. We have to beat Hyundai. I think there's a, there's a little bit of hurt ego when it came in, in their, their EV lineup.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:16:49)
Yeah. Hey, I mean, they clearly listened.

Nicole (1:16:50)
Hahaha!

Roberto Baldwin (1:17:07)
where they were just like, well, this is good enough. And then everyone was just like, no, we're not just going to accept this because it's Toyota. Because again, most Toyota vehicles are actually really, really nice and they last a long time. ⁓ That's their deal. And then they come out with like, mer.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:17:24)
And that's the other thing, the interior of both of these cars was actually so much nicer, the materials and everything, compared to the new RAV4. You ⁓ know, the RAV4, I when I drove that in September, it...

Roberto Baldwin (1:17:33)
⁓

Sam Abuelsamid (1:17:37)
felt really cheap inside. It hard plastics, didn't have nice textures on it. This has really nice materials. ⁓ It feels, I wouldn't call it premium, but it feels way better than a RAV4. ⁓ It's not quite at the level of a Mazda, but it's getting close to that. And it's really nice to drive. And the CHR, for example, we drove it up into the mountains. ⁓

Roberto Baldwin (1:17:39)
Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:18:07)
And by the time I drove it up and then drove it back down again, I was driving at a fairly brisk pace. It averaged 3.7 miles per kilowatt hour.

Roberto Baldwin (1:18:19)
See, that's the thing with it, that's great. And then the Highlander was like 3.1 to 3.7 with the two different battery size or the two different ⁓ vehicles or trim levels. these are they're really, they're essentially, trying, if these were 500 volt vehicles, they would be hitting four. I'm sorry, 800 volt vehicles. Did I say 500?

Nicole (1:18:20)
Mm-hmm.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:18:21)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah, mean

that's really the only thing left that they really need to address is the system voltage.

Roberto Baldwin (1:18:48)
Yeah, they would get that

really nice efficiency boost once they go to 800. So they're doing the work. And for that, we applaud them. I salute you, Toyota. For making the EVs we always knew you could make.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:18:58)
Absolutely.

Nicole (1:19:00)
Ha ha

ha ha ha!

We always knew you could do it.

Roberto Baldwin (1:19:05)
We knew you could do it. We believed in you. Now give us a Tacoma. ⁓

Sam Abuelsamid (1:19:06)
⁓

So there was also a drive program ⁓ in California last week for the new Jeep Cherokee. ⁓ well, ⁓ fortunately, I was I couldn't go because ⁓ I was in Mexico to spend some vacation time with my lovely wife. Yeah, had lots of good food, got some sun.

Nicole (1:19:31)
That's right, you should have a little vacation.

Roberto Baldwin (1:19:33)
Hardian.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:19:39)
went swimming in the Caribbean. It was great. No complaints. ⁓ But ⁓ the first reviews, the first drive reviews of the Cherokee came out today. so I put a link in the show notes to ⁓ the TFL review. It's a video review. ⁓ Case went and drove it. And this ⁓

The way the vehicle is being launched right now is not the reincarnation of the old XJ Cherokee. This is not an off-roader yet. ⁓ Jeep has said there will be a Trailhawk version of it coming, but that's not here yet. ⁓ The version they're launching right now is hybrid only.

Did you guys have a chance to watch this review or read any of other reviews that are out there?

Roberto Baldwin (1:20:39)
I did

not. I was driving a convertible around the middle of nowhere.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:20:42)
⁓ well, okay, that has to take priority.

Nicole (1:20:45)
I didn't see that specific review, but I did have some people speak to me about what it was like. What did TFL's review say?

Sam Abuelsamid (1:20:54)
⁓

It said it's mostly really nice, ⁓ roomier than the old one, looks better, ⁓ drives pretty well, the ride and handling is good. It ⁓ wasn't crazy about some of the controls inside. They have a similar type of ⁓ touch control panel below the ⁓ infotainment screen that they have.

on the swagon ear and the charger where the whole panel kind of moves when you press on any of the buttons. But overall I thought it was pretty good. The new hybrid powertrain felt really nice. We'll see how it does in terms of real world fuel economy. But I think this is just the beginning for the new Cherokee. And the last one...

Roberto Baldwin (1:21:27)
⁓ that's weird.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:21:48)
There was a lot of people that didn't like it. think from a design perspective, think people are probably going to like this one a lot better. ⁓ But hopefully we'll get a chance to drive one of these ourselves pretty soon.

Nicole (1:22:01)
Yes.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:22:04)
And then Scout has reportedly delayed, well there were some stories that came out on Friday, Thursday, Friday, that Scout delayed the launch of their new truck and SUV from 2027 to 2028. But then Scout's denying it. There were other stories that came out today that said, no we're still on target for 2027. We'll see.

⁓ There's now an increasing amount of skepticism as to whether they will ever even launch the fully battery electric version or just go with the eREV. ⁓ And that's actually one of the reasons given for a potential delay is challenges with developing the eREV version of this thing, which is what they're going to launch with. ⁓ What do you think? Do you think they'll ever launch the BEV version of this?

Nicole (1:22:32)
We'll see.

I mean, I'm a little skeptical at this point, but.

Roberto Baldwin (1:23:00)
I think I'm

if you're Volkswagen and you're just trying to do something that's the problem with Volkswagen is that you know, I feel like This if it were if Scott were its own company if it was divorced from Volkswagen It would we I wouldn't I would be like, yeah sure. Yeah 2026 production with 2027 deliveries, but they're not

Nicole (1:23:17)
Mmm.

Roberto Baldwin (1:23:27)
divorce from Volkswagen and Volkswagen is still trying to figure out what it's doing in the United States. And ⁓ I could see them saying, you know, well, a lot of people wanted this one. So why even bother making the other one? Why even bother making the bath? ⁓

And when you don't have a lot, when you're in some financial difficulties like Volkswagen is, then yeah. And of course, they're probably a little gun shy based on the nostalgia market after the ID buzz, which people were like gaga for. And then it came to market and then people are like, eh, but that's really all. But to be honest, that was all Volkswagen's fault. It's seven years, come on. It should have been at the longest five years.

Nicole (1:24:08)
Not so much.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:24:14)
Yeah.

Nicole (1:24:14)
Yeah.

Roberto Baldwin (1:24:16)
and they should have had an entry level version that people could pick up for $55,000. Instead they're like, hey, you gotta pay, or $50,000. Instead you gotta be minimum of 60 if you're lucky. Now you can see them discounted though. There's a bunch of them that are discounted out there. So yeah, I think they're, as a company, not Scout, but as Volkswagen as a company, they're sort of tiptoeing and trying to figure out the best way to bring this vehicle to market.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:24:32)
Ha

Nicole (1:24:33)
You

Roberto Baldwin (1:24:46)
Unfortunately, I think that tiptoeing ⁓ is a lot of like, well, you know, lack of focus and leadership, to be honest. You really need someone to just say, we're going to do the E-Ravs first. We're going to see how those sell. We're going to look at our reservations for the BEVs. And if it's above this amount of reservations, we're going to make the BEVs because we said we'd make them. The end. Instead, it feels like, well, I don't know, maybe, you know, a lot of people want the E-Ravs, so maybe we should just do that. But what about everyone who already got, like, I don't know, that's a whole other.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:25:07)
Yeah.

Roberto Baldwin (1:25:15)
You know, car we have to develop and, you know, but don't you have a platform? Well, you know, our platform, we got like 17 platforms right now. So yeah, it's sort of.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:25:26)
Well the thing is it's the same platform as the eRev. The Bev and the eRev are the same platform. The only difference, and you're gonna have the same motors, the same power electronics, the only difference is the eRev's probably gonna have a little bit smaller battery, a gas tank, and a range extender engine. But I think one of the, well it is, and I think one of the challenges is they were evidently

Roberto Baldwin (1:25:45)
But those three things, that's a lot for Volkswagen.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:25:55)
they are evidently planning to put the engine, instead of putting it where, you know, under the hood in the front, where Ram is doing with their eREV system, they're apparently going to be mounting the engine in the back, under the bed, behind the rear axle. And that might be part of the problem that might lead to a delay. You know, I mean, that's actually a lot more complicated to do than the way that Ram is doing it.

Roberto Baldwin (1:26:25)
Yeah, I don't understand. Are they really that concerned about people saying the frunk isn't that big? Because you're taking, you're removing space from an area of the vehicle that is always being used for space. And that's the back of the vehicle. A big frunk is great, but mostly people are using the cargo area in the back, the trunk, they're using the trunk.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:26:45)
Well, but

it's underneath. It's behind the rear axle, underneath the bed is what we've been hearing. So it's not actually going to take away from the normal bed volume.

Roberto Baldwin (1:26:51)
It just seems like, why?

But I'm just curious why they're putting it back there outside of, outside of they want a big frunk is what I'm, yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:26:57)
But it's just.

I have no idea. ⁓ But there's

Nicole (1:27:03)
It's a mystery.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:27:06)
going to be an event at ⁓ Scout's Tech Center here in Novi next week that I'm going to. And Scott Keough is going to be there doing a fireside chat. So maybe we'll get a chance to ask the Scout folks, you know, what are you thinking here? What's going on with this? Why are you doing it that way?

Roberto Baldwin (1:27:31)
What are we doing? I don't, yeah. I kind of wish Scott was its own thing.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:27:39)
I mean, if you are a Volkswagen dealer and you ask Volkswagen, they will tell you, it is their own thing. They are separate companies. It's not part of Volkswagen.

Roberto Baldwin (1:27:50)
Yeah, let's see.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:27:51)
because

they're planning to sell direct to consumers.

Roberto Baldwin (1:27:54)
I know, I know, but still, it's, you know. We all know the truth.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:28:01)
Yeah.

Roberto Baldwin (1:28:03)
We all know the truth. I mean, think it's, it's, mean, as an e-rev, I think it makes sense. makes, I think for some people it makes sense as ⁓ an EV. I think it's a cool, I mean, I like the scouts, the designs are awesome. I'm very excited about this vehicle. I, you know, I think like the, like the Rivians, it's, they're essentially, Rivian's a Patagonia of, of EVs. It's a Patagonia jacket. This is what, that's what this is. You're going up against Rivian with, with hopefully more money behind you. ⁓ but yeah.

Nicole (1:28:13)
Mm-hmm.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:28:21)
Yeah.

Of course, know, Rivian's got a lot of Volkswagen money behind it now. Maybe that's the problem.

Roberto Baldwin (1:28:34)
⁓ Maybe that's why they're like, no, Rivian took all

our money. no.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:28:41)
Although, know, Scout is going to be using Rivian's ⁓ electrical architecture and everything on their trucks. And yeah, their software platform. So we'll see how that works out.

Roberto Baldwin (1:28:46)
that's good. So at least I got something. That'll be good.

had a question. Yeah, well,

you know, I think it works well, you know, on the Rivian except for the fact that they don't believe in buttons, which is ridiculous and door handles. So Scott has door handles. Look at that. You look at it. Look at those. You could grab it and open it like a proper car.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:29:03)
Yeah, and lots of buttons and switches.

Nicole (1:29:04)
Ha ha ha ha!

Sam Abuelsamid (1:29:09)
Alright, a couple more things. ⁓ unveiled ⁓ their autonomous solutions ⁓ designed to accelerate autonomous mobility and delivery worldwide. over the last couple years, Uber has been partnering with

Roberto Baldwin (1:29:11)
Bring back door handles people.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:29:30)
almost every autonomous vehicle company you can imagine investing in many of them putting hundreds of millions of dollars into these various companies including Neuro and Wave and I don't think they invested in Waymo but they've been putting money into a whole bunch of other companies ⁓ and they've also been partnering with these companies to deploy

Roberto Baldwin (1:29:48)
So they're spreading their money everywhere.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:29:57)
their robo-taxis and trucks and everything on the Uber network. so today ⁓ Uber announced this autonomous solutions ⁓ suite, which is basically a bunch of things to make it easier for

AV companies and the fleet owners that are going to run these vehicles in the future to bring their robo-taxis to the Uber platform in whatever city they're going to operate in. So right now Uber is running some Waymo robo-taxis in Austin and Atlanta. They're running AV ride vehicle robo-taxis in ⁓ Dallas. ⁓

know, a bunch of others in various other cities. They have partnerships with WeRide, a Chinese company in the Middle East. ⁓ And so what they've done is they've, you know, they're putting in place all the tools necessary to support these vehicles, to provide remote assistance to the vehicles, ⁓ mapping services, ⁓ training data that the companies can use for

developing their systems, regulatory support, to work with regulators to get approvals to run these vehicles, fleet financing, and this is all based on the a lot of it is

Nicole (1:31:24)
Wow.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:31:27)
Excuse me, based on the experience that Uber's already been gaining over the last 15 years running ride hailing services. They're taking that and applying it to RoboTaxis on the operational side. the thing with RoboTaxis and other automated vehicles is there's developing the actual technology, and then there's actually putting it to work. And that's a whole other problem.

you very expensive, you know, because you got to set up depots and charging networks and so, you know.

⁓ Uber is investing $100 million in charging infrastructure for robotaxis because these are all electric vehicles. They're providing financing to fleets that are going to buy these robotaxis from companies like Motional and Maymobility and various others. ⁓ then provide the... ⁓ They've got... They already know... ⁓

and have the experience in terms of where you can do pickups and drop-offs for ride-hailing, especially at places like airports and other stadiums and things like that, where it can be really complicated to do that kind of stuff. They already know all that stuff, so they can provide all that information to the...

the companies bringing their robo-taxis to their platform. And of course all the dispatch and everything else. So it's pretty interesting what they're doing. They're even providing an insurance program for these vehicles.

Nicole (1:33:02)
I mean, that's pretty cool. They're drawing a lot of knowledge they have from the people that they've done stuff with. And I don't know, I think the RoboTaxi thing is kind of cool. I'm excited to see somebody pull it off.

Roberto Baldwin (1:33:14)
I'm curious how they're working with cities, because I used to cover Uber back in the day, and I was in there interviewing, I don't know, someone important in Uber, it doesn't really matter, they're probably not there anymore. And I asked, I'm like, do you work with the city? They're like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, we work with every city. And then I kept, I'm like, well how do you work with the city? They're like, well, you we work with the city. So I just kept giving them examples of how they could be working with the city, and they just kept, no, no.

No, no, no. The way they work with the city is that they do something, the city gets mad, yells at them and they're like, okay, we'll fix it. That's how they were working with the city. So I would like to, I would hope that their work, that this is not ⁓ more of that.

Nicole (1:33:40)
Hmm.

Hahaha.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:33:46)
Yeah.

I think that that has changed

under Dara Koshershahi, the current CEO.

Roberto Baldwin (1:33:54)
I hope so. I do

know the... and also these charging stations with these EVs, with ⁓ these robo taxis. Don't put them next to a house or an apartment building where cars are just going beep, beep, beep every 15 minutes. You have a lot of money.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:34:07)
Yeah, Waymo

learned that lesson in Santa Monica.

Roberto Baldwin (1:34:14)
Yeah, put it, put them, put, yeah, don't do that, that's not.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:34:21)
⁓ So Uber wants to be the operator of RuboTaxis. They gave up on trying to develop their own. They just want to be the platform that runs them and provides all the backend services for these things to work.

Roberto Baldwin (1:34:36)
They'll see, I mean, this is like, and this is all, but this also says, you know, tells Waymo and all these other companies like, oh, we'll take care of the backend. So we're going to have, we're going to own the data, which a lot of these companies aren't going to be super stoked about. So we'll see how it works. mean, Uber was, know, they, they were going to have their own self-driving cars and that didn't happen. They were going to have flying, you know, were going have air taxis. That didn't happen. So Uber has a, has a history of like, we're going to do this big thing. And then like two or three, they hire a bunch of people two or three years later.

They kill it because someone else is already doing it or it's not ready yet, et cetera, yeah. And it is an investor ⁓ brief, so again, anytime you do anything with investors and you say autonomous, your stock price goes up. Just ask Rivian.

Nicole (1:35:05)
Yeah, it doesn't happen. Yep.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:35:17)
Yeah, true. All right. And then as I mentioned, I was in Mexico last week on vacation. ⁓ And one of the things I kept an eye on when we were outside of the resort was look at all the different cars that are available down there. ⁓ There's a lot of stuff that is on the road in Mexico that you can't get here in the US.

Nicole (1:35:18)
Hehehehehe

Sam Abuelsamid (1:35:45)
like, you know, Pujos, for example, and Seats and Cupras and a whole bunch of different Chinese brands. ⁓ It turned out the second night, or the first couple of nights we were there was ⁓ the end of Carnival. ⁓ And so there was, know, right outside the resort, there's a big local Carnival parade in ⁓ Playa del Carmen.

And ⁓ after dinner one night, my wife and I walked out there to watch the end of it and saw a bunch of BYDs. Saw quite a few BYD sharks, both in the parade but also in the subsequent days just driving around. ⁓

Nicole (1:36:21)
wow.

Roberto Baldwin (1:36:25)
wow.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:36:29)
Saw some BYD Seagulls, which they call the Dolphin Mini in Mexico. This is the little compact electric hatchback that they sell in China for like $10,000. It has 180 miles of range. ⁓ It's a cool looking little car. ⁓ But saw some great wall motors cars and Cherries and ⁓ Geelys and assorted other Chinese brands.

⁓ And also saw some cars from brands we get that models that we don't get here like the ⁓ Kia K3 ⁓ which is the replacement for the old Rio. The K3 basically looks like a slightly scaled down version of the K4 and it's pretty cool looking. ⁓

Nicole (1:37:11)
Right.

So you got to see

Roberto Baldwin (1:37:20)
Yeah.

Nicole (1:37:20)
some cool

stuff that we won't have.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:37:22)
Yeah, one thing I don't see a lot of there, not a lot of full-size trucks or SUVs. Most of the, you know, you see a bunch of Suburbans that are being used as airport shuttle vehicles, you know, for the resorts to get people back and forth between Cancun Airport and Playa del Carmen and some of the other resorts.

⁓ but not many regular people driving full-size SUVs and only saw a handful of full-size pickups like F-150s, Rams and Silverados. it's funny, the Silverado in Mexico is called the Cheyenne. Yeah. One of the coolest things I saw though was the Volkswagen Robust or probably pronounced Roboost. ⁓

Roberto Baldwin (1:37:59)
you

Nicole (1:37:59)
is it really?

What is that?

Sam Abuelsamid (1:38:12)
Do you remember the old Rabbit pickup truck from the 1980s? It's basically that. It's a golf pickup truck. So it's a two-door pickup truck. The front half is basically a Mark 7 Golf, and then got a pickup bed on the back.

Roberto Baldwin (1:38:15)
⁓ yeah, there's couple of them around my neighborhood. ⁓ that's rad.

Nicole (1:38:15)
Yeah.

Wow.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:38:36)
And then one day we went to visit some friends, have lunch with them, and getting back to the hotel, we called an Uber and got to ride in a Dodge Attitude.

Roberto Baldwin (1:38:48)
attitude.

Nicole (1:38:49)
That's a dodge attitude.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:38:51)
Well, I'll tell you this, it doesn't actually have much attitude. The attitude is now in its fourth generation. It's a subcompact sedan. The first two ⁓ iterations of the attitude were based on the then current versions of the Hyundai Accent. So they were rebadged Hyundai Accents. ⁓ The one that we wrote in was a third generation attitude.

Nicole (1:38:54)
Ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Mm-hmm.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:39:19)
⁓ which is basically a Dodge badge version of the Mitsubishi Mirage four-door sedan. ⁓ Actually, was surprised ⁓ sitting in the back seat of this thing. It was surprisingly roomy. ⁓ That's about the best I can say for it, but it was surprisingly roomy for a small car. ⁓

Roberto Baldwin (1:39:28)
Wow.

Nicole (1:39:42)
Hahaha!

Sam Abuelsamid (1:39:48)
Unfortunately, ⁓ the one we rode in, ⁓ the owner, I think, needs to get some new brake rotors. Seems to have some seriously warped brake rotors, so every time he hit the brakes, you just feel the shuttering as he's slowing down. ⁓ But, ⁓ yeah, so.

Nicole (1:39:57)
no.

Roberto Baldwin (1:40:03)
⁓ that's a bummer.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:40:08)
And then the current generation that debuted in 2024 is actually made by GAC from China. Chinese built and it's based on a model called the Trumpchi MPAL.

Nicole (1:40:25)
That sounds funky.

Roberto Baldwin (1:40:25)
That's a cool name.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:40:26)
Yeah.

Roberto Baldwin (1:40:28)
I would love a Trump, and Pow. What are you driving? Trump, Chi, and Pow. ⁓ that sounds.

Nicole (1:40:30)
⁓ You

Sam Abuelsamid (1:40:33)
Wouldn't you rather

have it with a Dodge Attitude badge on it though?

Roberto Baldwin (1:40:36)
Attitude I like that it's called attitude There's

Nicole (1:40:37)
You

Roberto Baldwin (1:40:40)
a band called urge overkill and in one of the songs like in the middle. There's like a little Like sidebar where woman just says attitude

Sam Abuelsamid (1:40:50)
⁓ But no, it was interesting to see the variety of different cars, small, compact to at most mid-size models. A lot of Toyota Hiluxes. ⁓ I only saw one or two Tacomas, but lots of Hiluxes. ⁓ And some of the Nissan, not the Frontier, but the global compact truck that they sell, I think is called Navara.

⁓ So that was kind of interesting. All right, we got a couple of listener questions. ⁓ Both of them interestingly related to eRevs. So Ken wrote in, say, I love the idea of 100 % electric driving experience, instant torque, no gear shifts, and smooth power. I own an IONIQ 5 for local driving, but I still have charging anxiety for long distance trips or towing for our second car. I'm specifically looking for more options in the eRev.

category. Vehicles like the old BMW i3 rex or the upcoming ram 1500 ram charger. Actually it's called the ram rev now. Where the gas engine acts only as a generator and has no mechanical connection to the wheels. And then we also had another one another oh so it's questions for a show. Aside from the ram charger and the new scout harvester models who else is actually bringing this tech to north america in 2026 and beyond?

Is there a technical or regulatory reason why more manufacturers aren't choosing the series hybrid setup over traditional parallel plug-in hybrids like the Jeep 4xe or RAV4 Prime?

So Stellantis is also launching ⁓ an eRev version of the Wagoneer this year. So you can have a full-size three-row SUV. ⁓ And Ford recently announced, when they announced they were canceling the F-150 Lightning, they're bringing a second generation Lightning in a couple of years that will be an eRev. So there's that option as well. ⁓

I think there's more coming that we just they just happen to be in. Hyundai has previously said they're going to bring E-REVs to North America and I expect we will see others coming in the next five years as well.

Roberto Baldwin (1:43:09)
It's it's newish. I mean, not for BMW, it's new. It's, you know, it's new. So it's kind of hard. So everyone's and everyone wants to, everyone, don't think anyone wants to be first, like really first. Maybe the vault.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:43:11)
Yeah. Well, I've been...

Nicole (1:43:14)
Ha ha ha.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:43:21)
I mean, you know who

built the first EREV? Fisker. The Fisker Karma is an EREV. And those are still being built. ⁓ It's the Karma Rivero now.

Roberto Baldwin (1:43:27)
Oh yeah, the Karma, the Karma, the Karma. So the Karma. But they're still being built. But you know, if you're an automaker

Nicole (1:43:29)
All right. The karma.

Roberto Baldwin (1:43:38)
and you're like, well, this is the best one, that's not a lot of sales. So I you know, I think there, I think a lot of people, remember when everyone was like, oh my God, P-Habs are the future. Everyone's going to be buying P-Habs. And then you actually looked at the data and BEVs outsell P-Habs like 10 to one or something ridiculous. Like everyone was like, oh, P-Habs are in,

Sam Abuelsamid (1:43:40)
Heh. Heh.

Nicole (1:43:41)
Ha ha ha!

Roberto Baldwin (1:43:57)
It did help that, you know, the 4xe was a good car until you couldn't charge it anymore. In theory it was a good car.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:44:01)
Yeah.

Nicole (1:44:02)
You

Sam Abuelsamid (1:44:04)
Tell us about that, Nicole.

Nicole (1:44:05)
Yeah, hmm, yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:44:07)
Are you

guys able to park the Wrangler in the garage yet? Okay.

Nicole (1:44:11)
We can now. It's

Roberto Baldwin (1:44:12)
Yay!

Nicole (1:44:13)
officially cleared. It can be plugged in and it can be parked inside of a structure without worries about it catching fire. So good days. Good days. Yes.

Roberto Baldwin (1:44:22)
Fantastic. So yeah, think,

you know, we might see some more EREVs. think some folks are, they're going to say EREV and they don't have to do anything. Everyone just wants to see who has the first one that comes out and how well it sells. I think everyone's a little, maybe a little gun shy because of P-HEVs, the plugin hybrids, because they were like, these are going to do huge. And you look at the numbers like,

Sam Abuelsamid (1:44:31)
Yeah.

Nicole (1:44:32)
Ha ha ha.

Mm-hmm.

Roberto Baldwin (1:44:45)
I remember people telling me on podcasts like, well, everyone's buying P Hebs now. I'm like, well, no, everyone's talking about P Hebs. No one's actually buying them. And I think P Hebs are, you know, sort of a great solution for a lot of people. But I know some people absolutely positively hate P Hebs in the automotive journalism world. I'm like, well, they're like, well, just make it a Bev. I'm like, you got to, okay, fine. And it's, for me, it's, you know, I live in California.

Nicole (1:44:51)
Yeah.

Roberto Baldwin (1:45:10)
I can't swing a bat without hitting a charging station. So I'm just like, well, whatever, it's fine. I can drive my IONIQ 5 all the way to LA, no big deal. I've done it dozens, 10 times? Well, maybe dozens. I don't know. I've driven to Southern California a bunch in the IONIQ 5. So now I'm bumping up against our allotted mileage for our lease. That's how much I've So I don't know. Yeah. I think the first company that comes out, everyone's going to be watching. And then once it comes out, and if it does really well,

Sam Abuelsamid (1:45:30)
haha

Roberto Baldwin (1:45:40)
then you'll see a lot of EREVs suddenly appear two years later.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:45:45)
Yeah, and the second half of this year will be interesting to watch when the Wagoneer and the Ram eRevs launch. Those will be the first two kind of really more mainstream eRevs to hit the US market. And then probably late 27 or into 2028, we'll see the new Lightning eRev. And then perhaps the Scout at some point may finally make it to market.

⁓ and Hyundai. Hyundai will probably be somewhere around 2028 when we see their first E-Reps. All right, and finally from Steve. ⁓

says, in my view, from an untrained automotive observer, the E-rev category feels like the sweet spot of migrating to burning fewer fossil fuels. Simpler and lighter drivetrain, a solution for range anxiety. Yet the industry has offered so many more hybrid and PHEV models. Why is there hardly anything beyond the Volt and the i3? Well, think we just answered that. ⁓ Yeah. I think they're.

Nicole (1:46:47)
I kind of answered that, yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:46:53)
mean the Volt wasn't truly an eREV, it was more of a longer range plug-in hybrid. It was sort of a semi-eREV. The i3 was a true eREV.

but it was so limited in the power from its generator and it only had a 1.9 gallon gas tank, so it couldn't actually go very far for range extending. It was really only for emergency use. ⁓ So those two weren't really great examples of EREBs and then of course, like I said, the Fisk or Karma. ⁓ So I think this year is gonna be potentially the turning point for EREBs in North America.

Roberto Baldwin (1:47:35)
If you get an i3 eRev, you can actually hack it to actually work well as an eRev. There's a hack for it. Yeah, you can hack it to do that. you want a cool carbon frame little car that you can cruise around as an eRev that actually performs like a real car, can hack your i3. If you can find one, it's like the A-Team. And if you can find it, maybe you could drive.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:47:41)
Yeah, yeah, you do have to, can put different software in it.

Roberto Baldwin (1:48:04)
The i3.

Nicole (1:48:05)
Ha ha

ha ha ha

Sam Abuelsamid (1:48:06)
Well, ⁓ if you've ever watched the Rich Rebuilds YouTube channel, he buys, you know...

cars from scrap yards for practically nothing ⁓ and fixes them up. And he bought an i3 Rex, which is the eREV version, a while back, about a year or so ago. And ⁓ he got it up and running again. It had a bunch of faults and the range extender wouldn't run and nothing was working properly. He got it up and running again and then added a five gallon auxiliary gas tank to it.

So it could actually go several hundred miles ⁓ on a tank.

Roberto Baldwin (1:48:44)
Cool.

Nicole (1:48:46)
Wow.

Roberto Baldwin (1:48:47)
Not that you drive 700 miles in an i3, but it's such an amazing, like around, yeah. I mean, it's such a great around town car. I love the little i3. There was one in, ⁓ the last time I was in Hawaii, were we on Kauai? Yes, we were in Kauai. And there was a guy with an i3 and he had the surfboard sticking out the top and he had his dog in it. And I just saw him everywhere. Everywhere we went, there was this guy.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:48:50)
Well, I said several, not seven, several hundred. So about 300, I think.

Nicole (1:48:51)
Ha ha ha ha!

Sam Abuelsamid (1:48:58)
Yeah.

Roberto Baldwin (1:49:16)
I was like, there's only one road in Kauai by the way, so you don't have a choice. You do kind of see everyone.

Nicole (1:49:17)
You

Sam Abuelsamid (1:49:21)
There's

one road that basically goes around the island from one end of the Nepali coast to the other.

Roberto Baldwin (1:49:24)
Yeah,

it does like three quarters of the island and the other part you gotta take a boat or a plane or whatever. ⁓ But yeah, I think, know, I still like the i3. My wife does not like the way they look, so.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:49:37)
Did you ever drive the i3, Nicole?

Nicole (1:49:39)
Drove her for like a hot minute. I didn't really ever have it as a loan or anything. Somebody had one and I drove theirs. That was literally the extent of it, quite a while ago. So yeah, that was it. I haven't had much time with it.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:49:52)
It was an underrated car.

Nicole (1:49:54)
I think so. seemed fun. He loved it. He thought it was the best car ever.

Roberto Baldwin (1:49:54)
Yeah.

Sam Abuelsamid (1:50:00)
Alright, well that's it for this week. Thank you everybody and we'll see you next time. Bye!

Roberto Baldwin (1:50:07)
Bye.

Nicole (1:50:07)
Bye.