Tech Brew Ride Home - (Bonus) The WHOLE EV Space With EV News Daily Podcast

Episode Date: September 5, 2020

As I said on Friday, my goal this week was I wanted to learn more about the EV space. Yes, there’s Tesla, but we only talk about Tesla. And remember, I got turned on to the whole SPAC phenomenon because a lot of EV startups were going the SPAC route to get themselves publicly traded stocks that they hope will go hockey stick like Tesla stock. So, I reached out to Martyn Lee of the EV News Daily podcast. If you’re into the whole EV space, check out the EV News Daily podcast. As mentioned, it’s a daily just like this podcast is, but if you’re into the EV space, Martyn has you covered absolutely comprehensively. My thanks to Martyn for this great chat. Subscribe to the EV News Daily Podcast! Sponsors: Wipers123.com code RIDE Metalab.co TinyCapital.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to another weekend bonus episode of the Tech Meme Right Home. I'm Brian McCullough. So as I said on Friday, my goal this week was I wanted to learn more about the whole EV space. Yes, there's Tesla, but we only ever talk about Tesla.

And remember, I got turned on to the whole SPAC phenomenon because it turns out a lot of EV startups are going the SPAC route to get themselves publicly traded stocks that they hope will go all hockey stick like Tesla stock has. So I reached out to Martin Lee of the EV News Daily podcast to help fill in the blanks for me. If you're into the whole EV space, check out the EV News Daily podcast. As I mentioned, it's a daily, just like this podcast is. But if you're into electric cars, self-driving cars, basically the modern automobile industry, Martin has you covered absolutely comprehensively every day. My thanks to Martin for this great chat.

I you know we talked offline you do a show that talks about everything EV not just Tesla but and so I brought you on here as we said offline specifically to talk about things other than Tesla the entire EV space but we got a we got at least set the table a little bit so um what's your because I don't know if you know but um I have the Tesla Daily guy on now and again he's obviously you know, a Tesla diehard. From your perspective of the overall EV space, what's happening with Tesla right now? Is it just they're finally hitting those economies of scale that were promised all along? Yeah, I think economies of scale is a big part. Thank you for having me on, by the way, Brian. No problem. It's so good to come on and talk to you and your fans about EVs from a

perspective, maybe from a European perspective or more global, but you're absolutely right. Tesla has been on a rip lately because they've certainly hit their stride. I will say there's a little bit of a bubble around Tesla. So, you know, haters are going to hate me in my mentions, but that's fine because I just think that so many of the fundamentals haven't changed, and yet people are kind of jumping on board. Some will want to make a quick buck with trading it, but largely, you're absolutely right. They've hit their stride, and they're driving an entire industry forward. And then what's interesting is the automobile industry, as big as it is, is just a tiny, fraction. Like if you look at the,

the market capitalizations of the big automakers, and admittedly Tesla is up there, whatever they are today, like 400 and something, like 410, 412 billion. Right, we should have checked right before recording because God only knows on a day-to-day basis. It will have changed. It'll be double.

But all the big car companies, but then you put them on a graph and you put them next to Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and they're just a footnote. And so what's happening is the EV industry is becoming the tech industry, and at some point, someone's going to be, there's going to be lots of winners. It's not going to be one winner, but Tesla are certainly capturing

that part of the mix between tech and automaker, and they happen to make cars, but there's so much going on with the company that it does justify a big evaluation. Well, and that's specifically what we're going to talk about, is who these other winners could be. But again, as someone that maybe is not a Tesla diehard. From your perspective, is there anything that we should worry about? Is there anything on the horizons? Because I remember even a year, two years ago, there were things like the tax credits going away, maybe the Chinese market, not maybe being a problem or things like that. Is there anything on the horizon that maybe would give you pause about Tesla right now? None whatsoever.

Okay. I asked an answer, Doug. There's just nothing about that. So, you know, even if Elon were to leave the face, because Elon goes to Mars. Let's not be morbid and say that a horrible accident happened. Right, right, right. In 2022, Elon achieves his dream. He goes to Mars and we say goodbye to him forever. I still think the company, the tech, the IP, the management team,

the brand. It would take a knock in the way that Apple took a knock when we said goodbye to Steve, but ultimately it's a bigger, stronger company all these years later. And so there's nothing about that that I worry about. And even a couple of years ago, you're thinking, well, the other automakers could well catch up. And by the way, when they all put out press releases, they're all, in the first sentence, they're all, this is fill in the blanks plan to become the global leader in e-mobility. And from that, from the off, it's a joke because they've got to really go some to beat Tesla.

They're not going to disappear. There's also the doomsayers that are like, oh, all the existing automakers are going to disappear. They won't. They'll find new ways of doing business. But Tesla, for so many reasons, are just leading the way. And even the head of VW, as in the group, not the brand, but Herbert Dees arrived in 2015, boss in 2018. He has gone on the record and said, Elon can take risks that we can't with 300,000 employees. And he's leading. He's not a fanboy so much, but he's saying Elon's leading and we're fast followers. And so they, like, VW know their place.

but it's a beast of a company to turn around. Well, let's start with them, the fast followers of the major automakers, just for the sake of, I think there's, I want to learn more about the startups. So who among the major auto players is the best position right now? If you were going to say, well, they're going to be the ones that are most likely to get this and to be the most successful at Eby. Who would you say? I think VW have got a really good shout,

because although they've done some bad things recently, and their reputation has taken a knock, they do have somebody at the helm, as I say, he came from BMW, and if you like cars like the I3 and the I8, he was their BMW when they came around, and now he's at VW, turning that company into an electric car company.

So they sell something like 11 million cars a year, and they've got some really ambitious goals. Admittedly, I think they should still be bigger, but when you're owned by largely a family, like the Porsche and the family, even the state, like a bit of the state of Lower Saxony, O's V-Oens VW, and then you've got massive union pressure. What they're doing, I think, is as good as they can do. Now, the first VWID3s were made last November, so we're heading towards those cars sitting in a big car park for the last year, and why aren't they in customers' hands? Well, they'll say that they always wanted to be on the road in summer 2020. The truth is the software wasn't finished, and the whole thing's been a real mess,

and people will be under massive pressure. It's a company anyway that has a culture of just driving people really hard. It's ultimately what probably led to Dieselgate in terms of so much pressure, but the software's been the letdown with the ID3. It's the first car not coming to North America. It's the Gulf that's not a Gulf. It's the size and shape and... of a golf, but don't call it a golf, it's the ID3. But this sits on a platform, and this platform

will be used across the group. Other companies like Ford are licensing this platform. It's called the MEPB platform, and there'll be tens of millions of cars on the road using this platform, but it's not got off to a great start because it's not ready. Now, if customers want to take delivery of their ID3s in Europe, they can, and they'll be called, I think they're being called First Movers, which is a way of sugaring it somewhere. What? In other words, you get your car now, but it's not quite ready. Look, the things that aren't, I'm being slightly cheeky, the things that aren't finished, I think like the head-up display and stuff.

None of this is a deal breaker. And then if you want the software complete version, you can wait till next year. But look, how is that different to autopilot and Tesla, which is still labeled as beta? Right. But Tesla as a startup have fostered this kind of reputation of, it's fine for them to do it. And yet I'm saying not VW. And so I'm being the hypocrite. Actually, Tesla,

stuff out there that isn't ready, isn't finished, and they get praised for it. But at the same time, they're putting stuff out there at greater volume. Like, educate me about that. Like, I'm looking at numbers that I saw right before talking to you that, like, Tesla's delivering, what, like, 70,000 cars in the US right now while like the Bolt is doing 8,000 a year, the Leaf is doing 3,000 a year. So, like, none of the legacy automakers are doing anywhere near the EV volume that Tesla is, right? I mean, it's just embarrassing.

They did 180,000 deliveries in the first half of the year. They may well hit. They'll get towards half a million cars, even with COVID, and seven weeks of shut down in California. Because by that time, Shanghai was back up and running for them, and so they were still producing cars. But next year, they're going to have, with a full year of operation, they're going to have Shanghai making all those model threes.

They got that factory done a year to the day. Sixth of Jan, 2019. Elon was there for the groundbreaking ceremony and the pictures. a year to the day later, customers were driving their Model 3s. And the Model Y factory, which kind of goes unreported now, because it's not sexy anymore, but huge construction worker in Shanghai for Model Y, for batteries. So 300,000 cars from there. And over here in Europe, you're going to have Gigaburlin, making cars by the end of the year,

but customer cars by next year. So Tesla can do between 1.3 and 1.5 million vehicles by the end of next year, in Texas with the Austin Gigafactory and Cybertruck, which has anything from half a million upwards of pre-orders, although only $100, but it still counts. And they're just unstoppable

right now. The numbers are huge. And no one else is doing even five figures. No one's even close. So although I can say, look, I think VW have got the right idea, the Chinese company, so Tesla were the biggest TV company in the world last year. The company's behind them, like B1,

ID, very famous for buses and commercial vehicles and B-AIC and some big Chinese startups as well, which have got grand plans. In terms of numbers, no one's coming close. What about the tech? Because, again, I was just reading before talking to you, like an analyst says that there are some people like the Audi's, the Porsches of the world, where the vehicles might be superior to Tesla in a lot of ways, except in one very important piece of tech, which is the range. Is that still holding true? I think range is king. I think there's a couple of things happening here. Range is king in people's minds, but it's not.

My EV does 200 miles. I've got a small city car that I drive because when am I going to do 200 miles? Like, we just do chores. And if we do a long road trip, it's not onerous to stop for 30 minutes and charge up. But the perception from people coming from combustion cars is they need, you know, a thousand miles whilst towing a horse box and having eight kids in the back and, you know, not stopping for 12 hours. That's the perception. And so what Elon's done cleverly, he tweeted recently about what he thinks the new minimum range is. And he was saying, oh, I don't think you can sell an EV with 300 miles because they were dropping the base model Y.

And so we're not going to make that one anymore because it's not going to go far enough. So we think 300 miles is the base. Conveniently, no one else is really making an EV that goes that far. So again, an efficiency advantage from, which another box they get ticked there with Tesla. But they have got competition coming. Right, which let's get to that. And frankly, I'm just going to, this is Educate Brian Time. So I've got a list of some of the others here, Rivian Fisker, Faraday.

But just tell me first, in your opinion, who should I know about other than Tesla in terms of a startup first? Lucid, every day of the week. The team there, not to bang on about Tesla, but the cohort there, largely, there's a lot of people that came from Tesla, including their CTO and CEO, who was the guy behind the Model S program back at Tesla. So they've got good people, great tech. They've gone really big on efficiency. So look out for the lucid air. 517 miles range.

Right. We were just talking about range anxiety, but they're 500 miles. They would be the first to break that barrier, right? Yeah, completely. And they're doing it with efficiency. So, okay, so low slung sedan, but also they've worked. worked so hard on reducing things like the motor size, the weight, the battery is only 13 kilowatt hours, 113 kilowatt hour usable pack, which is only slightly bigger than a Model S, which is

100 miles plus less. And so Lucid's efficiency looks like it's going to be great. Not a cheap car starting at 60, but going over 100K for that. We'll find out more on the 9th of September when they do the release, the reveal of that car. But I really, really rate Lucid for going about their business quietly, diligently, and making a great EV. Look, it's a high-end luxury EV, but have them on your radar? Should Rivian be on my radar? A hundred percent. Massive investment from Amazon, and Rivian, again, they've been around a long time, and they've taken many years to find their groove, but they're in their groove now. And again, a company, which is going to be releasing two EVs, so trucks aren't a big deal over there. Like we have, don't get me wrong. Europe has

trucks, but we don't have the relationship you have with trucks. Right, a lot of these companies we're talking about, they're kind of leading with pickup trucks and things like that, yeah. Yeah, so we don't get that because we have trucks. You see them on the roads. I'm not saying they don't exist, but they're a working vehicle. And so we don't get what you have, which is people buy a truck just to go to do leisure pursuits at the weekend and use it for your regular commute.

Nothing ever gets loaded in the back. So they're doing the truck, they're doing the SUV. Again, great range and really great tech with the Rivian. not cheap cars, but a more conventional-looking truck than like the cyber truck. Lucid was the one that took the money from the Saudi Arabian public investment fund, I think. So you're saying that Rivian is heavily backed by Amazon? Yeah, and again, Amazon are using that relationship to have about 10,000 Amazon electric trucks. Right, okay.

About that per year. There's 100,000 Amazon electric trucks by 2030. So over the next eight years, again, not a massive run rate when you divide it by per year, if that's a linear curve as well. But again, just when Amazon put their money into something, you know that it's going to be taken really seriously. And again, a great team behind Rivienne, which gives me a load of confidence and a ton of interest in those cars. What about Faraday? Faraday was one of those ones that I heard a lot about and then I felt like had gotten in trouble or something. Yeah, completely. And again, big ambitions, but they just came unstuck when they realized how much it costs to get an EV on the road. And sadly, I don't think we're going to see anything from Faraday.

Let's talk about Biden. They're a Chinese player, right? Yeah, completely. And they're one of the Chinese players. Biden, again, have had their struggles. But recent news, they could be getting some more investment and things could be looking up there with Biden. Then one more on my list, because I want to lead us into what you can tell me about the SPAC phenomenon, which I just learned about and listeners just learned about recently, but it's big in the car space. So is it Lourdes Town Motors that is the most recent one to do a SPAC? So first tell me what Lortstown does. Yeah, they're making trucks to be used as trucks, though. So they're making the endurance. And that is meant to be a truck that is out there and earning its keep. And again, they're one of the companies that hopefully have the funding now to bring that car to market. But it's fantastically expensive to bring an electric car to market. And so, as you say, they've increasingly found this way to try and achieve that. And so neither of us have backgrounds in finance or Wall Street.

But for whatever reason, SPAC suddenly seemed to be the method of choice for these companies to raise this capital. Like, you know, everyone forgets what an IPO is. it's not just for the founders to get rich, it's to raise capital for a young company in theory. And so do you have any sense of, is it just everyone's like, wow, look at what Tesla's stock price has done.

If we can just get a publicly traded stock, like we'll have a lot of arrows in our quiver, I guess. Yeah, there is an element of that. So, you know, one example of that would be Fisker. So they are taking, this route to market. So if anyone listening or watching, so very simply, you can do an IPO with this, with this SPAC, and you can have investors that don't know what they're investing in, but you have the body that is then the money is placed in a, like a trust, and then they've got

two or three years, and it's time limited to go out and do a deal and find a company to merge with. And so that's what, so that's the background that's happening here. So that happened with Fisker. For instance, they've got a great SUV. It looks great. It's called the Ocean and Henrik Fisker is a great designer. And I think what they've done with the design of it is really good. But then to use an example of that, so in their documents, they said, well, we're going to be using, we want to use the VW MEPB platform like Ford are doing. So we'll use that platform. So we haven't got to worry about steering racks and, you know, how the car, we're just going to put the body on top and make it look like a Fisker. And the market was like, well, that's great.

and then when they had to file their SEC documents and VW were like I don't think you are and they had to file the documents to go oh yeah we're not but we're really hopeful that VW will carry on talking to us and if not we'll find somebody else and the stock price dropped

it was like 20% in a day and it's so like that volatility to me doesn't say this is a steady you know in a way boring but in a very steady working our way towards producing a car which is Elon's talked about production hell.

It's a famous quote of his. It's so hard to do this. You're right. There is a little bit of jumping on a bandwagon element about this. When we talk about, this is sort of coming back to Tesla's lead. When we talk about anybody, Fisker, a Rivian, whoever, coming to market in a big way, are we talking about next year? we're talking about 2022.

Again, all of these things that we've seen, all these growing pains that we've seen Tesla go through over the last five years, that's still in store for all these guys, right? And it's so frustrating for me, because for years I've been banging on about electric cars, and now we have so much heat around them. Almost now, I'm like, slow down a bit, because it's not this easy to simply go,

well, here's a render of a car, and we're going to make loads of them, and we've raised a ton of money. it's really hard. And actually, if you take VW, for instance, the ID3 is the first one. That's the Gulf shaped. The ID4 is the next one. That's if you want a Tesla Model Y competitor.

That's the one coming to the US first. But the numbers aren't going to be there. So VW of North America wants a load of the ID4s to sell. And they could be a very popular car starting at just over 30 grand. Of course, VW is still eligible for the $7,500 federal tax credit, which has expired now for Tesla and with the Chevy Bolt. And so they get those advantages, but they just won't get any of those in numbers coming to North America. They'll be made in Germany. They're being made in Anting, in China. But the Chattanooga plant in the US won't start

making them until 2022. So you're right. They are still one or two years away. And the same happens for the Toyota RAV-4, for instance, the prime. It's a plug-in hybrid, very, very popular. dealers have got waiting lists. Toyota just don't want to make many of them. And so there's demand. There's a huge demand for electric cars, but a lot of these car makers aren't making enough of them. Right. So what you're telling me is if I was in the market for an EV and I wanted to choose between four or five different options, it's not until 2022 or 2023 that I'll really realistically have that as an option. And that, so yes, so yes and no, one of the things that's happened this year, so Europe introduced some new emissions regulations. And it's all to do with if you sell enough electric vehicles to balance out the fossil cars that you sell, then you haven't got to pay any of the fines. And so it's, you know, roughly every two EVs you sell, you can sell one of your nice big, big expensive fossil cars with a nice big fat profit margin. And so, and that, but that tapers down quite quickly. So for this year, a lot of the EV makers have sent all their cars to Europe because if they

don't sell enough EVs, they're going to face really big fines for selling too many fossil cars. Now, COVID might have changed that because all car sales are down. But still, so yes, when that starts to taper down, all of a sudden, miraculously, you'll find cars available in the US. With all of these, again, maybe not here yet, but all of these cars coming to market, What's the state of the charging networks? Is it still just a chaos of all sorts of different proprietary things? Still too much. And you've got it good, right? Because you've mainly got Electrify America, Electrify Canada. These are the networks funded with the, you did a very bad thing, VW money.

And so $2 billion invested in a charging network of 50 and 150 and 350 and 350 kilowatt DC fast charges across North America. And so largely you've got that and some other big. networks. Over here, the market's a little more established, but that means there's more of a land grab. And if I want to drive across Europe with my EV, I've got to have a wallet full of RFID cards with apps. Some of them I've got to then open my email to confirm my email address, and I just want to plug my car in. Now, that's changing, and it's changing with a technology called plug-and-charge, and that uniquely identifies your car, like the new Porsche Tycon does this, which, which is a new, the new charges as well. So it's basically a Tesla supercharger for everybody else.

So the cars are equipped with it, the charges are equipped with it. You plug your car in, does a little handshake, and the car identifies itself. You already have your account set up with them, just as you've got your credit card in your iTunes account, and then it just bills you. All the billing happens in the background. You plug it in, you unplug and you go on your way. It's called plug and charge. It's coming to the US and to Europe as well. And, you know, that we should never have been in this situation where everyone tried to get their own little, their own little bit of the charging network. Somebody should have grabbed it by the scruff of the neck. But who was going to do it?

The European Union, regulators, carmakers, no one did it. And so now we're left with this mishmash, this patchwork of charges. They will all get joined up and they'll all get smart and they will all get connected. But that's going to take a little while. Last thing, you mentioned this right before we started recording, and it's something that I don't know if we've covered on here before, but we've covered something similar, which this growing sense that you can have a piece of hardware

and you might not necessarily own it. The most recent examples are the old original Sonos speakers that are now bricked. Not bricked, you can still use them, but they won't get updated. There was recently the stories that you can't load every program in the world on your Mac. there's certain things that Apple won't. So the question is, if I buy a piece of hardware, do I actually own it? And I feel like maybe I've done a story like this with cars, but now that software is eating the

auto industry, tell me about this idea of if you buy a $60,000 vehicle, you're really only owner of it so long as they deign to allow you to operate it. This is such a massive topic that doesn't get talked about enough. And this is the juxtaposition of tech and cars and over-the-air updates and four and five-g-connected cars. And so tell me, like, what's the current, so I'm fully in the Apple ecosystem, right? I've given up. I was iPhone 2 and then that was it.

And I've just, I've, I've now absolved any responsibility for worrying about my tech. Apple now does it. But for a couple of years ago, I'm like, you know what? I'm going to rebel. I'm going Android. and I bought a nice Android phone and had it for a week and was like, you know what, all of my, I spent so much money on apps, I'm just going back to Apple. So I'm in that ecosystem.

Not begrudgingly, but I'm in that system. But I know people do muck about with Apple stuff. Like, what's the situation with jailbreaking? Is that community and the phone makers, are they in a sort of standoff? We know it happens. People jail break their Apple phone. but is it like accepted in the tech community? No, it's really, really, it's not underground, it's in the background.

Early on in iPhones, jailbreaking was a bigger thing, but not only are Apple just so proactive about as soon as someone, it's news when someone comes up with a new jailbreaking scheme that actually works, but then it'll only work for about three weeks. And so it's like there are people that do it. I know people that do it, and there's that app store, is it city or something like that that people like, but it's just no one, I mean, I would say the percentages are less than 1% of people that jailbreak iPhones, even among, you know, super nerdy people.

Okay, okay, so it's not really like a done thing, but there's a case with Tesla recently where they've got some hardware, the motors inside your Model 3, are a bit better than you need, and they said, look, we'll make your cars better for $2,000. Now, there's a third-party company that came along either with a dongle or, they can, they've done something smart. There's like 300 million lines of code in an EV, but they've done something smart where they'll do that upgrade for you for $1,000. And so people did it.

And Tesla found that bug and they squashed it. And so this company told the people who've purchased it, don't do the over-the-air update because in a game of cat and mouse, we've worked out how to get around Tesla's update. And I think a handful of people did do their over-the-air update with Tesla and now there's a big warning on the screen that won't go away. There's also the case of a famous YouTuber called Rich Benoit, Rich Rebuilds. Now, he likes to recycle, reuse.

It's the good thing for the planet, right? So Tesla want to save the planet, reduce carbon emissions. So he found a car that was otherwise going to be written off and got it back on the road. He's an engineer. And so his first point was, I can't buy these parts from Tesla. Tesla won't sell me the parts. And then when he finally, after a campaign got hold of those, and got the car back on the road. Not only did Tesla turn off via over-the-air updates,

supercharging, which I kind of get, right? So I understand that. So the supercharging network, no one was going to build a fast charging network around the world, so Tesla did. Right, that's theirs, and that's fine, and they turned it off remotely on his car, because they said, we don't know how you've repaired this car. And now there is a scheme where you can take it to them and they'll appreciate. Anyway, but they also turned off fast charging completely. So are they allowed to do that? Well, I'm waiting for a landmark law case where someone says, look, I own, so I've, you know, I've bought, like, I've bought this phone. Right.

So if I want to take the back off, muck about with it, put a bigger battery in. Apple aren't going to then say, we're turning off the charging ability or. Hey, wait, whoa, whoa, whoa, don't say never. I mean. Yeah, I don't say never, right? Yeah, listen. So that's where we are. But on the other hand,

so Tesla obviously are aiming for robotaxies. Like they want to go for fully autonomous. So, you know, level four, there's five levels of agreed autonomy, what, zero to five. Level four, let alone five, is there is no steering wheel or pedals in the car. And they want to get to level five. So literally, these are robo taxis. You have nothing. There's no interface.

They take you play. They're doing it all with cameras. So to do that, they need a massive kind of back end, like a supercomputer. They're talking only in the last couple of weeks about this exa-flop supercomputer at FP32, which is one of the fastest, they've been working on it for two years, and it will be one of the fastest supercomputers in the world. That is going to be training their neural net so that all these little edge cases of a dog running out and someone crossing the road is going to be able to recognize all, apart from just highway driving,

which it'll do now. So actually, if I'm going to be getting in a car that is potentially looking after my life, do I want someone mucking about with it? It's a bigger debate than just they turned off my charging. Well, I get that, but again... I want them in control so that no one's mucked, like hackers and no one's mucking about with this.

Well, and certainly, and then that gets to the larger question of, well, there won't be car ownership as we understand it in however many years. But for the interim, you know, again, like the idea, it would be insane if you did something to your phone that Apple didn't like and they wouldn't let you charge it. It's also insane on this, you know, for most people, your car is your second biggest asset. So that the fact that you don't really have control over that asset, like I, especially in the interim where we're not at level four or five yet, like that does seem insane to me. and there needs to be a court case to settle, like, whose rights or who is at this point? Yeah, who owns this car?

So if Elon changes his mind one morning and wants to send an over-the-air update, so it's, again, it's a part of a bigger debate about how much do you give up? It's like giving up personal data. So how much are you giving up for something in return? So Tesla insurance is in California. They just registered a company in China only recently. They're going to be having Tesla insurance. I imagine at some point around the world. Every Tesla customer can get Tesla insurance. That's because

of all the cameras on the car and all the sensors on the car so that at every moment, at any time when you're driving that car, it'll know how hard you're pushing the accelerator, how hard you're breaking, how hard you're cornering. Your insurance price can be reflected on how safer driver you are. Right. We have done stories about that, yes. Right. So how much data, those cars are high performance. Like Tesla's are quick. They're fun to drive. But what? If I want to get a cheap insurance price, they know everything about me that I actually have to drive like a grandma to get cheaper insurance. So at what point do you want a connected product that is in a way always umbilically linked to the mothership? And that's with cars, something that we've, you know,

because they've been shipped by the car makers, they arrive in your driveway. And if you want to take off the exhaust and put some big, you know, big boy racer or big wheels and mod it, or like modding PCs and stuff. Like that is, that it has been the way forever. And so we're getting, and that's the culture of, that's a car culture that it would take, there would be a lot of kickback on that if people were like, you can't do that anymore. Well, you can't. You simply can't do that with it. You can't do something with a Tesla that they don't approve of and they don't like or they'll just turn it off. So that is that's where we are now at some point that's going to get resolved when someone says, I challenge you to this and I don't know where it's going to end up.

But generally, it's where EVs are going though, right? We want our cars to be fully connected. We go and charge them wherever we are. We plug them in. It just works. All of that relies on a level of a relationship with the people who sold your car more than simply taking it back to the dealer once a year for an oil change. So this is, we are in the first couple of years of a new era of how our relationship with how we get around. And again, you know, that's part of the whole kind of e-scooter, e-bike, e-car, what we're going to experience over the next 10 and 20 years. It's really exciting, but so many hurdles to overcome. Well, listen, don't ask my wife about that we just got a car for the first time in 10 years. And I have six,

speeding tickets in the first three weeks. Because here in New York City, they have the camera enforced stuff. So two weeks later in the mail, I get a little saying, hey, we caught you. And here's a picture of you going four miles over the speed limit here at this intercept. So talk about driving like a grandma here in Brooklyn. I have been forced to drive like a grandma. So guess what, everybody? It's coming for you, too. Listen, Martin, that was beautiful.

This is one of those episodes where it's Educate Brian. If you want to be educated, it sounds like I need to listen to the EV News Daily Podcast. Right. Okay. So I'm probably more passionate than most people about electric cars. But I'm not a kind of a single-minded cult member. I do appreciate there's pros and cons, but if you want to come and have a conversation, I do a daily podcast, I launched it.

I've done 860 of them. I just passed 700, so we're in simpler cohorts there. Yeah, I was February, you were the March. And so when you started that, it was like an endorsement of the model. Because everyone said, you are mad. Because I was seven days a week for a long time. And everyone said, you are mad to do a 20-minute podcast about electric cars every day. And then when you started yours, I was able to go, well, look, this guy's been podcasting for ages.

And he's doing it. So I can't be that wrong. And so, no, it's called Evie News Daily. And it's, look, if you happen to know a podcast that is like a TLDR, of the tech world that you get for your journey home every day. It's very similar to that, but it's all about electric cars. And yeah, subscribe and come and say hi on socials, and I put the audio on YouTube. And I just love having that chat with you, wherever you are in that stage of the EV curve, like whether you're still a skeptic or whether you've bought a car,

and we'll talk about all those things. Well, Martin, I think the real answer is anyone that does a daily podcast is insane, but you have the, you have the advantage of having an actual proper radio voice and you clearly know your stuff. So I am going to subscribe today, I promise. You're a good man. Thank you, sir. Thank you.