The Vergecast - Jeff Bezos steps away as Amazon CEO / Ford's electric Mustang Mach-E / Apple Car rumors

Episode Date: February 5, 2021

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, Sean O'Kane, and Becca Farsace discuss driving Ford's electric Mustang, what's next for Tesla's product line, rumors around Apple's Car endeavors, and Jeff Bezos stepping down as Amazon CEO. Further reading: Scientists want to know if vaccinated people can still become COVID-19 long-haulers If you’re starting an online class, check to make sure your professor is alive Volunteers built a one-stop website to find open NYC vaccine appointments Amazon will have a new CEO as Jeff Bezos transitions to executive chair later this year Bezos’ Amazon: from bookstore to backbone of the internet Meet Andy Jassy, Amazon’s next CEO  Amazon’s electric Rivian vans will start making deliveries in 16 cities this year Ford Mustang Mach-E Kuo adds fuel to Apple-Hyundai electric car rumors  Apple and Hyundai-Kia pushing toward deal on Apple Car Tesla’s new Model S can go up to 520 miles Tesla Roadster production delayed to 2022 Tesla agrees to recall cars with failing displays Tesla’s next car will seamlessly unlock with UWB, FCC leak suggests Don’t buy Teslas during a production ramp, Elon Musk says Another SpaceX Starship nails clean test flight, but explodes on landing Elon Musk’s shot at Amazon flares monthslong fight over billionaires’ orbital real estate The Alpha 1 is Sony's new flagship camera with monstrous  iOS 14.5 tries to solve Face ID’s mask problem with your Apple Watch HP’s Spectre x360 14 review: the best 2-in-1 you can buy Rad Power Bikes raises $150 million to grow its electric bike empire Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on The Vergecast, we got a car show. Becca Farsage and Sean O'Kane join us talking about the Mustang MockE review. There's some Apple car rumors, some Tesla news. Also, Jeff Bezos stepping away from the CEO of Amazon. That's coming up on the Vergecast now. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct-taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together.

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on your company's data in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of America's auto industry.

Would that be great if we were like a trade car podcast. I mean, we're going to try for it today. Yeah, but I meant like we were like deep in the weed. Like we were actually like the trade group podcast. And it was all just like endless hyping of cars. Like specifically American cars. Just nonstop differential discussion.

Yeah, exactly. No one thinks this is as fun as I do. But I think it'd be hilarious. Anyway, I'm Neil. I'm your friend. Dieter Bonas here. I'm your compatible charging plug. I don't know.

We're actually are going to talk a lot about cars today. So Sean O'Kane, our senior transportation reporters here. Hey, Sean. Hey. And Becca Farsacha is here because she got to drive a very cool car this week as well. I did. I still don't understand how y'all let me do that, but we're here to tell tell. I'm excited.

So, yeah, Sean and Becca worked on our Mustang Mock E review, which is up on the site and on YouTube. We're going to talk about that in great detail. There's a ton of like Apple car rumors all over the place. There's Tesla news. We're not a car show. It's going to be great. Also, you might have noticed that, uh,

Jeff Bezos, one of the richest men in the world and CEO of Amazon has stepped down. So we're going to talk about that a little bit. And there's some gadget stuff to talk about too. So a PACs show. First, as always, the biggest story in the world continues to be the pandemic, which hopefully if you're looking at the numbers, some of the numbers are going down, which is good. But we're not through it yet. And we have a bunch of stories on the side this week about what I have constantly

been thinking of as like second order effects of the pandemic, like not the thing itself, but what is happening around it. So, you know, vaccine distribution is in full swing. hopefully it gets even faster. Hopefully, all this can be vaccinated. Look, the verge is turning 10 in November. And if everyone isn't vaccinated, I won't be able to throw a party. So I've got, there's just a lot of pressure I'm putting on state and local authorities to get this done.

But one of the major stories of pandemic is there are some people who get COVID-19 for just a very long time. I called long haulers. And so there's still some research to be done about whether vaccinated people can just have a low-grade COVID for a while. That's a great story. Kind of a big question to ask. The shift, this is like an incredible Monica story. Monica's doing a lot on e-learning and remote learning. To shift to remote learning means a lot of people are just watching videos of classes.

And she found some students who have been taking a class. And it turns out the professor of the class has been dead for quite a while, which is just a remarkable second order remote learning COVID effect. And it really just a great story. So go check that out. And then again, vaccine distribution is kind of the story of the moment for COVID. it's hard to get a vaccine, particularly in New York. New York State's not doing so great. Like in Wisconsin, where my parents are from,

random pharmacies have vaccines and just tell people and then random people get vaccinated. Holy crap. A lot different than that here. So volunteers in the city have built websites and other community kind of organizations to help people find vaccine appointments. That's on the site.

So check that out. Still the biggest story in the world. Something we're tracking very closely. Nothing gets back to normal until this pandemic. It's under control. And then, like I said, we're going to throw over. 10-year party. I've got big goals, you know.

Here in San Francisco, it might be familiar to some of us, the Mascone Center where all the conventions were held. They're setting up currently to be a vaccine center, and they've got like road signs. Our friend Brock Keeling has been tweeting pictures of they're changing out all of the parking rules around Mascone to prepare for mass vaccination effort there. That's amazing. New York State and City. Very different situation. It's better. All right. Arguably the biggest news of the week, although it's hard to say what to say about it. But Jeff Bezos, who's the founder and CEO of Amazon, announced alongside Amazon earnings this week, which, by the way, were extraordinary. Amazon is just printing money. Later on this year, he will step away from being the CEO of Amazon. He will remain the executive chairman of Amazon, so still involved in a lot of things.

and Andy Jassy, who is currently the head of Amazon Web Services, will become the new CEO of Amazon. Yeah, the big earning news of the day was supposed to be that Google's finally breaking out its numbers for the Google Cloud Services and how they're not doing great. And so everyone's like, oh, wow, we know what Google Cloud Services are. We can start tracking that. That's going to be the thing we're all talking. Just kidding, Jeff Bezos. Do you think Google, like, slipped a message there? Like, we heard through the grapevine that you were planning on doing it.

this, could you bury our bad cloud numbers? I guess that doesn't make sense because Bezos would want people to look at it. He actually kind of stepped on his own business there. I think he'll be okay. I always wonder, like, it didn't leak. There was not even a whisper of it. There wasn't a steady drumbeat of news that, you know, Jeff was getting bored, which they're often, like a good example, a radically different context is Jeff Zucker,

who runs CNN announced today, like this morning that we're recording, that he'll be leaving CNN at the end of the year. There's been like one year's worth of drumbeat of news around that decision. Like, we knew what's happening. He said it's happening. It's a big deal. And then he's, it's going to happen. Thank you, AT&T. AT&T owned CNN. Just a thing that I think about all the time, which is a remarkable fact. But with Bezos, it was just a complete bolt out of the blue surprise. And I always wonder, like, who in the Bezos circle knew, right? Like, did he, tell the staff of the marvelous Miss Maisel that he was leaving Amazon. It just like held it like, uh,

um, it'd be great. It is like, it's a really interesting question in, in the sort of afterlight of him being like hacked by Saudi Arabia over WhatsApp or, you know, like, I'm sure his already tight circle of,

uh, trusted folks is even tighter now. So it was probably nobody. Or like one person. Uh, well, he, he wrote a really,

uh, It's a pretty remarkable letter, actually, to the staff of Amazon saying he's proud of how many things Amazon has invented, which is an incredible list. Amazon itself, selling things on the internet. The Kindle. By the way, all these things are at once, like, amazing and wonderful and paradigm shifting inventions and businesses. And then there's like a laundry list of things that we can talk about that are like, the Kindle ushered an ebook DRM. And now we live with that every day. Yeah.

But on the whole, the Kindle market, that entire kind of business didn't exist to inventing it. AWS, Andy Jassy, who's taking over Amazon, was the founder and leader of AWS. That is a remarkable business that even a company, like you were saying, Deere, like Google can't just walk into. Or Microsoft. Or Microsoft. Yeah. I think over the past year, there have been like a handful of like big AWS outages, right? And we would like notice because like the internet would go down.

Right. Yeah. Because the internet just runs on AWS. So, like, this incredible backbone service, which we will talk about more. Just there's this fulfillment by Amazon where third-party sellers get to use the Amazon platform. A company like Anchor does not exist unless Amazon is there too enable to business. So a pretty amazing collection of things to have invented. And then Bezos is like, keep inventing M. out.

Yeah. Well, so I think part of the point of that letter was to remind people that Amazon is not a tech company you can just take for granted. as infrastructure. They have become infrastructure for many things on the internet. But they also, like, yeah, Apple's got the iPhone, but we did Alexa and we did, you know, this fulfillment thing and we did AWS. It's like a reminder that Amazon has done a bunch of stuff and shouldn't be taken for granted. It sort of like elevates them in people's eyes as a tech company as Jassy takes over. I think that was part of that point. But both Bezos and Andy Jassy have this thing, this day one thing, right? Like I think there's a good issue to be a ton of continuity between these two guys. Andy Jassy, he believes all the same things Jeff Bezos believes in terms of being aggressive and needing to keep on inventing things. He gave this whole speech at Amazon's Cloud Services Convention, reinvent something, something.

And it was basically just like 20 minutes of him giving what sounded like a pretty generic leadership discussion, you know, how do you run a company, blah, blah, blah. But now, like a month later, he probably knew that he was going to, like, me, like, be the CEO, or at least knew he was next in line or whatever. And so now you look at it and you watch it again. It's in the story that Nick Statt wrote up at the bottom. And you can just see it's him basically saying, I believe in all the things that Jeff Bezos believes in terms of how to run a big company

and make sure that you're continually making stuff and not resting on your laurels. Yeah. I think so one of the challenges with Amazon generally, and like I said, almost every one of its businesses, has some meaningful controversy associated with it. Whether that is as small of a thing is ring cameras and surveillance and giving the footage to the police or ring cameras being hacked. Like that's real. That's like which product people love. And then there's like a controversy next to it. AWS is like a monopoly provider of cloud services in a competitive market, but absolutely dominates to make it just because

of the way it works. It's like hard to leave AWS. I would argue that I mean there's other places for parlor to have gone, but I think AWS deep platforming parlor, that was the thing that I think that that was the gut punch they couldn't recover from. Like, they eventually got deep platformed by stuff further down the stack. But I think that that was the moment was like, oh, you're like, it's been really hard for you. Yeah. And that's like a level of controversy we've talked about a lot. There's, I promise you people find things to complain about with AWS. Besides, I wanted to run an unmoderated social platform that like fomented an insurrection. But they do have an awful lot of power, right? The store itself, how many stories have we run about either

sellers on the store getting their products copied by Amazon or workers in their warehouses who are trying to unionize or being treated poorly? Like, the store has its own enormous set of controversies. The one thing that is true across all of them, which I think is absolutely remarkable, people love Amazon so much that some of these stories just never get any traction. So we haven't done this for a while. We need to do it again. But on some cadence, we run a survey. How do people feel about tech companies?

Amazon is by far the most beloved tech company. It's usually Amazon and Google in some order because they provide such an immediate constant utility to people. And they do it compellingly well. Right. And like surprisingly to me, Apple is like usually lower on the list than you would expect. Because you have a phone, but you're not like constantly asking your phone for things and having this relationship. with Apple. Like, you only really think about, like, you have an iPhone, you might love it. You only think about Apple in that context if, like, the phone breaks or like, it doesn't work the way you

wanted to. Google, you're like, what, what's the weather and like Google tells you? Or Amazon, you're like, I need, I don't know, I need ice skates. And Amazon's like, here's some weird ones. Like, here's a company you've never heard of that makes a knockoff of the famous ones. They're cheaper. The ice skates will be at your house tomorrow. I think that is just a remarkable achievement to be so beloved that very real issue. and controversies, which are very real. I don't mean to discount them at all. But they often run up against the fact that people love Amazon so much, they don't want

it to change. And I think one of the challenges for Jassy is, can he handle the challenges without getting distracted by them or shoving them aside while maintaining how beloved Amazon is in all of the spaces that it's in. Yeah. I also think it's interesting. It'll be interesting to see how people feel about Amazon and how Amazon is positioned in the media.

now that the CEO is like Andy Jassy, who's a great guy and charismatic, but he's no Jeff Bezos, right? There's not like the charismatic founder that everyone's eyes like light up with stars when he walks in the room because it's Jeff Bezos. Andy Jassy can't just buy you if he's mad at you. Right? Like Jeff Bezos, like his presence is like, huh, what if I buy your town and then evict you? Like I can just do it. Right. Like he is one of the richest and most powerful people in the world.

Annie Jassy is an executive who works for Jeff Bezos, who now is one of the most powerful people in the world, but hasn't demonstrated that and doesn't have that aura. Right. But Annie Jesse isn't spending his off hours, you know, running, like looking at the Washington Post or trying to build rocket ships or, you know, spinning up his charity because he has to because when somebody finally realized that you make millions upon billions of dollars and you don't have a good charity, which is all things that Jeff Bezos was needing to do. And so, you know, the parallel here is such a over at Microsoft, right? Like the services guy becomes the CEO. And smart, intelligent, don't mean to denigrate him because you're not the charismatic founder. But people feel a little bit differently about Microsoft now than they did under Balmer or Gates. Wait, so I'll make a different comparison because Basis is going to go be the executive chairman.

Right. Which is what Gates did to Balmer. Right. Balmer still had Gates as like his technical advisor. Gates was still in the company and doing stuff. Bombers job for better or worse was to like sell more copies of windows to the to the detriment of every other thing that happened. Yeah, I don't know. Like whereas I think Nadella, Gates was already gone. The bomber era had come to a close. Yep. They knew the future was services. Nadela like see change in the company's value proposition to people without a real change. culture because he was like the ultimate insider.

Right, but they did have change in their product strategy. Like, Nadella had to like offload Nokia. You know? He had to do stuff to change like what they, what Microsoft was to consumers. I don't see any radical shifts in Amazon. Like, they don't have any albatrosses that they need to drop. They've got a bunch of controversies to deal with. Yeah. But they don't have Windows phone.

You know what I mean? They did. They had the fire phone. They did have the fire phone. That's true. The fire phone is one of those like, When you think about a company's corporate culture, it's a less well-managed company would have still been trying to ship the fire phone.

Yeah. Right? They would have like, we need this. It has to happen. We don't want to be on Apple and Google's platforms forever. Like, Jeff Bezos was like, yeah, that sucked. I'm killing it. Like, I'm very sorry we did this.

And that team rolled over and made Alexa, right? Yeah. And they just made a better thing. And they, like, they will all happily laugh at the. disaster of the flyer phone. Whereas like, if you talk to Microsoft people at Nokia, like, they're still pretty, like, prickly about it. Right. Yep. And we're like, no, that was horrible. Like, you, you destroyed the Finnish economy. Like, I don't, you should just be okay with the fact that it didn't go well. Yeah, I think you're right. I mean, look, there's a huge

antitrust case against Amazon. AWS, one of the remedies proposed in the case is that AWS could split off. Yep. Which would be remarkable. So, Like I said, big challenges. But again, the company is so beloved that I think he just walks in with a card that most new CEOs don't have. Yeah. Right? It's not beset by challenges. The founder is still there.

He's still going to be involved in a bunch of stuff. In many ways, he might end up being more of the face of the company, which is the thing that happened with Gates. Like, he just became a symbol of the thing without having to do any work, which sounds great. And if somebody could get me that gig, I'd be very happy about that. Just be the mascot. But he's got a bunch of stuff to solve. And I will see. Sean, I want to ask you, Deider mentioned the Washington Post, he mentioned Blue Origin.

In this letter, he said, I'm going to, Bezos said, I'm going to devote my attention to my other passions, including the Washington Post, his day one fund, his charity, his Earth fund, and Blue Origin. Do you think he's going to, like, like, he's pretty far behind Musk and SpaceX, right? Is there a path for him to be more competitive there? In some ways he's behind, but in others, there. targeting in the near term of much different sort of business than SpaceX is because they're focusing on sort of suborbital flights. And they're really looking at a longer term picture for deeper space travel. So I think the really interesting thing to pay attention to now that he'll have more time to devote to it is, does he change the pace of development at Blue Origin?

Because right now, Blue Origin has been the very sort of steady. We don't really mind if we appear like we're behind SpaceX kind of company, whereas, you know, Elon Musk is out building metal rockets on the Texas coast and like just letting them fall into gigantic explosions. Because like that rapid prototyping is the way that he likes to try to learn things. And so does Bezos sort of stick with the plan with Blue Origin? or now that he has a little bit more time and a little bit more focus on it and maybe sees like, you know, maybe the competition of just the two companies

incenses him a bit more. Does he change things? And so that's definitely what I'm going to be paying attention to. Yeah. I think it would be good if, right now SpaceX's real competition is like ULA and like they just seem so big that they can't get anything together. It would be good if like Bezos was like,

all right, you get more than one day a week for me, which is what he had been giving to Blue Origin. And he like, can you imagine if you walked into his rocket company? I was like, we need 100% customer obsession. And people are like, who are the customers? He always has the cowboy hat on for Blue Origin stuff? I mean, I get it. I appreciate it. I appreciate the entire Bezos metamorphosis from like extremely nerdy guy.

You should go watch early Bezos videos where he's got like the bad hair. There's a really good. I think it's PBS News Hour. did it or one of the PBS programs did a big thing about that and it's just you know in an hour and a half you really get to watch him go from from one end of the spectrum to another yeah and now he's just like

a cartoon character the other thing I'll say and then we should move on we should talk about cars I did watch some of the early Bezos stuff where he was he talked about why he picked books on the internet and it is just the most like laser focused sharp clear

what is the internet for and how can I build a business using this tool thing I have ever heard, right? Like, he's like, the biggest bookstores in the world can only hold 175,000 books. There are three million books. Our modems are bad. Our computers are slow. If you want people to put up with this shit, you have to offer them value, and the value is the entire catalog.

And so he didn't come to books because he was passionate books. He was like, how do I make people use a crappy computer to buy stuff? Which is just not how anybody thinks. Well, and also, like, he saw that you can books, books last a while, like thousands of years if you store them right. And so you can have, you can warehouse books have a huge selection. And it costs less than warehousing dog food, right, or whatever else was going on in the early 2000s. That's true. I just like, we spend so much time thinking about, and the show talking about products where basically the idea is, what if we put a computer in it?

And you're like, well, no, that's a coffee maker. like I don't need to worry about what version of Android my coffee maker runs like please I'm good that other flip of how how can I deliver you so much value that you'll use a bad computer like I honestly wish more companies thought that way like I wish more companies just accepted yeah this computer is slow this broadband connection is not valuable but it's so worth it like I think a lot of products be better if people thought that way that said laundry list of controversies associated with thinking that way for the past 25 years, but we'll see how it goes. Anyway, we're going to take a break and we're

going to talk about some cars. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Murrow to move faster. With real-time collaboration and a robust CMS, with everything you need for great SEO, not to mention advanced analytics that include integrated A-B testing, your designers and marketers are empowered to build and master's. maximize your dot com from day one. So whether you want to launch a new site, test a few landing pages, or migrate your full.com, Framer has programs for startups, scaleups, and large enterprises to make going from

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So Becca, I know Sean reviewed the Mustang Maki. True. I would like to start with a story you were telling us before we came on the air. I knew I shouldn't have brought this up. Look, I've told this story on the show before. I once crashed a Mustang into a bank. as a young boy Were you trying to rob it?

What's going on? No, I was racing a friend, and I'll tell you, 90s Mustangs did not handle well. They were not made for turning, and I just understeered through that turn, hopped to curb, the impact, it didn't hurt the car,

but the impact was such that the car cut off, and then I just slowly rolled into the side of a bank, like very slowly. We were also surprised that we just kind of watched it happen, and then we're like, well, the bank's cool,

the car school. And then we continue driving to high school. That's how that ended. My story is not so slow, to say the least. See, there you go. Okay, so you got to drive a Mustang Maki and you got in some trouble. Yeah, you know, I was really focused on getting the shot

and I do not own a car in Brooklyn. So I did not realize that there are cameras on most streets watching for speed. And I just kind of, you know, put the pedal to the metal. Wanted to see what would happen. Wanted to get a really good shot of us driving through Brooklyn and saw a lot of flashes. Oh, no. And then proceeded to freak out and call one of our producer Sophie and be like, Sophie, I don't know what just happened.

I saw a lot of flashes. Yeah, it was a total nuby moment. But, uh... Wait, you got a speed camera ticket? I got a speed camera ticket, man. Like, not an actual cop? Not even an actual cop. Robot cop.

Oh, my God. Robocop. True Verge fashion. Amazing. Yeah. This is why a camera should be outlawed. See? I knew I could bring it all the way around.

Totally on that side now. It's changed me. That's so funny. All right. So you two have been driving the Mustang Maki for several days. It obviously inspired Becca to just gun it through Brooklyn. Sean, tell us about your experience with this car. Because it's a big deal.

It's a very big deal. I think the most interesting thing to me to know sort of like off the top of you don't know much about the Mustang Maki is that a couple years ago, Ford, you know, Ford is one of those companies that had made electric cars before. They made like a really not so great electric version of the Ranger, which is its smaller pickup truck a bunch of years ago. And then they made an electric version of the focus. They've been making hybrid cars for a year. So they've been dabbling in the technology for a long time. But they've never really made a full sort of long range electric car.

And so they set out to finally kind of do that a couple years ago. And originally, and the wild thing is that they were doing it at the same time that they had announced that they were throwing $11 billion into this whole new sort of electric vehicle push. And yet they were going to just sort of make a longer range Ford Focus. It was not really going to be something, you know, terribly exciting, most likely. but the team that they put on it sort of realized that right away, and they sort of also at the same time got a message from then CEO Jim Hackett, whose whole deal was kind of shaken up the company and starting a big restructuring effort. And so suddenly the idea was,

let's change it to something that's more Mustang inspired. And then that sort of cascaded into let's make an electric Mustang, because I think Ford saw the opportunity to sort of turn the Mustang into its own brand. in a way that it really wasn't before by just being sort of one car that had been iterated on. And so that's the thing that I think about a lot and was thinking about a lot when I had this car is just like how close we were to not having it, which is just really fascinating to me. And so, so yeah, so the Mustang Maki, we saw it for the first time in November 2019. Funny enough, the same week that Tesla announced the cyber truck.

And so we're talking about, you know, almost like polar opposites as far as the, you you know, what those vehicles are like. But it's now finally here. It's starting to ship the very first few customers have them in the U.S., but the rest of some of the first deliveries are being delayed because it's just hard. When you're working on a totally different sort of platform and a totally different kind of technology to power vehicles,

you just run into stuff. Volkswagen's had this problem, Audi's had this problem. A lot of car companies that know how to make cars and deliver them are having trouble with some of their early. early mass market EVs. But it's here for all intents and purposes. There are a whole bunch of different models and a whole bunch of different trims we could get into if you want to talk about that. But the one that I tested out was the premium version. It's basically, it's pretty much the mid-range spec, especially because I had the all-wheel drive configuration. So it had two motors on it,

one on the front, one in the back. And the extended range battery pack, which has about 98 kilowatt hours of energy, but only about 88 of that is usable. And that's good for about two. 270 miles. And so this is basically this, this version of the Mustang Maki, the premium version, starts at a $47,000, but with all of those options and a couple other little bells and whistles, the trim I had was $55,000. So certainly not cheap. Ford's cars are still eligible for the federal tax credit, at least for a little while longer. So if you are one of these early buyers, you'll be able to get $7,500 back. And then plus whatever state incentives, depending on where you live, So while it's not super affordable, it can get closer to that in a way that Tesla's vehicles no longer can because they're not eligible for that federal tax credit or even Chevy's vehicles aren't.

So the Chevy Bolt is stuck at that sort of base price of $37,000 unless they decide to change it and take a bigger bath on it. They're like giving bolts away right now, though. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. It's a weird, it's a weird sort of situation where like, we could talk for a very long time about how I don't think Chevy has given and GM has given enough love to that car because it's just perfectly cramulent. But the Machi is a much more exciting vehicle. I think it, you know, so I had it for a week. I think it is the most competent EV on the road that's not made by Tesla or Porsche. I almost, we actually had to like make sure we had this in the video because I hadn't even really mentioned Porsche.

the first few passes through the edit, just because I'm not really considering it, because for most people, I mean, a lot of people talk about, oh, you know, Tesla's are really for, you know, rich Silicon Valley bros. The Tycon is extremely expensive, and, you know, in many cases, it's like three times the price of the Mustang Monkey.

So I wasn't even really considering it, but they do get credit for making, that is a really good car, sort of across the different versions that they have. So, you know, I think Ford really accomplished something great in making something that sort of stands toe to toe in a lot of respects to those vehicles, but particularly Tesla. It's easy to want to try to get away from, and I think valid to try and get away from

just comparing all EVs to Tesla, but Tesla is the standard bearer for sure. And the Mustang Maki in many ways lines up really well against the Tesla Model Y as far as comparison sake goes. So it's hard to sort of avoid that. but I think Ford did a good job. It's going to make a lot of people think about making that decision in a way that no other vehicle right now really kind of was. I mean, the only other options right now in the market are from the luxury automakers, so Jaguar, Audi, Mercedes-Benz, and those are all, in my opinion, just worse off, and the Model Y just sort of like leaves them in the dust if you were trying to consider.

And they're more expensive. Well, we've also got the ID4 from Volkswagen and the Polestar. coming sort of. Yeah, I mean, the ID4 will be interesting when it gets here. It'll be really interesting to see if Volkswagen has any of the software issues that, I mean, Volkswagen, so for Volkswagen really quickly, their whole new lineup of electric vehicles that's coming out is like the ID lineup. And it'll basically be eventually from number two, which is like an extreme subcompact, all the way up into bigger size vehicles and numbered accordingly. The ID3 is a hatchback that launched in Europe in the middle of last year, but the ID4 is the first one that's going to come

to the United States because they just didn't think that a hatchback was going to succeed here, which I can't really blame them because no one buys sedans or hatchbacks anymore in any appreciable numbers. The problem that they've had is that when they shipped the ID3 last year, the software was in such a poor state that they actually shipped the ID3 without a lot of the software on it and said that much of it was going to come in and over there update later. and that was sort of a big black eye to them. And so, like, if it's going to have, they better not have the same kind of issues with the ID4 here because it's just not going to, it's not going to stand.

But yeah, that will be a sort of similar competitor to. And there's a lot more coming. So, so Ford can sort of be happy about putting out a really competent EV that is one of the sort of few in the affordable-ish range for right now. But it's not going to be long before they'll be company. So here's my question. We talked about this when it was first announced, but now Becca and Sean, you've driven it. Is it a Mustang? Does it have the soul? Does it have the essence of a Mustang? And I know Nelai has emotions about this. Maybe he can tell us what a Mustang is a Mustang. To me, it's just like a knockoff Camara, but what is a Mustang? Wow. The show's going to go sideways. I want to know from the people that actually drove it if it is a Mustang. I mean, you know as well as anybody on this call that it's working. We're going to go. Words have meanings. I'll put it this way.

I think people who hold extremely dear the things that they thought a Mustang was before this car will probably have a hard time wrapping their minds around sort of attaching that branding to this one. There are very many things different about it for all the sort of styling choices that Ford made to try to make it seem like a Mustang to putting the only. the pony logo on it. There's not even a Ford logo on the car at all. They did a lot of things to sort of in some ways justify it, but, you know, there's no engine noise. There's no rumble from the combustion engine. There's none of those things. You know, the ride height is higher, which I think

is good in some, you know, some sort of just general respects for vehicle safety and things, but, you know, it's not that sort of low riding feeling that you would get from a Mustang. You don't really get that feeling of like, you know, having that gigantic hood in front of you that is containing the combustion engine that is powering your Mustang. So I think if those things really matter to you, then no, you're not really going to consider this thing. And we've already seen a lot of feedback just on the review on Twitter and in the comments and stuff of people saying that. And then those kinds of people sort of split into two camps of, well, I'm still really interested in it. or that's enough for me to never consider it ever again.

From a pure, like, business perspective, I think it was extremely, I think there was risk to the bet, but I think it was an extremely smart move by Ford, especially, and not even really that risky when you look back at, think about like 10 or 15 years ago, there was no Porsche SUV, there was no Lamborghini SUV, there was no Asson Martin SUV, there was, you know, the idea that any of those companies would do those kinds of things, even though they were known for being, you know, sort of, again, different iterations on similar vehicles and having this sort of solid sports car brand, there was no way you could think that that would happen. And now, you know, Porsche's SUVs are its best selling models. And, and that's why all

these other luxury and sports car manufacturers are following them into the space. So I think Ford was smart to do this and let, you know, really pin this sort of, you know, really pin this sort of new lineup of electric vehicles on the Mustang to start, especially because like, if it falters and it doesn't perform well, the next one coming is the F-150, which is probably, they're going to have a whole different issue trying to sell F-150s, electric F-150s to sort of, you know, maybe classic truck buyers. And that's a whole different kind of dynamic. But it's probably set up for better success in some ways than maybe the Mustang. But I don't know, I think it was a really smart bet from a business perspective.

That's a really long way of not answering your question. But, like, it's not a Mustang. And it's like, that's a good thing. But, like, it is a Mustang because, like, in 10 years from now, like, I wouldn't be surprised if there are, like, a couple different Mustang models in a way that there never really were. Yeah. I mean, this is what Ford, like, Ford broadly is doing this, right?

Like, yeah. The Bronco is two cars. Yeah. And one of them, one of them is, like, a ridiculous not car. Like, there's a Bronco sport, which is like, it's a little itty-bitty. And there's a Bronco. which is like the halo car that takes on the Jeep Wrangler. They're like obviously, they're much more interested in people buying those brands than buying a Ford.

Yeah, it's a Mustang, but the definition of Mustang is changing. And, you know, for the most part, you can get a lot of the same, you can spark similar joys in this car that a Mustang does. But, you know, it is made for very different things. Like the goal that Ford had with this car was to sort of approximate that performance that Mustangs are known forward, but add in all the utility of an SUV and make this the kind of thing that you can use every day in a way that you maybe can't with like a two-seater Mustang or something. Sean, you have a line in the script that's in the video script that is that's about like you can eat, you can feel comfortable eating a cheeseburger in this car.

And I think if I remember, Kratzley, you ate a cheeseburger in this car. I did. And I also ate a cheeseburger in this car. And so there's something very approachable about this Mustang that I don't know if I would feel comfortable eating a cheeseburger in a more historic Mustang. Yeah. Well, like, if we gave you like a 60s Mustang, like do not eat a cheeseburger in this car. But like, Deeter, I think my answer is, first of all, there have been so many crappy

Mustangs. Like, yeah. The Mustang I owned was legitimately a crap Mustang. Like it had a V6 engine that made, I think, 165 horsepower and it couldn't turn very well. Yeah. Did I love the shit out of that car? Like, every day. right?

It was just a fun car to have, but it drove poorly and was slow, but it was a Mustang. Like, it was that thing. Every, I think right now we're going through the cycle where people who were like kids in the 80s now have money to blow.

And like when that happens, the cars from their youth get expensive again. So like vanilla ice 90s Mustangs are expensive right now. which is a horrible mistake. You should not spend $30,000 on a white 1988 Mustang GT. You just should not do it.

But that's how much they're selling for because they captured that moment in time. I'm telling you, this is one of the worst cars ever made. I hope I get some angry. I hope you know ICE goes like rats this in the mail. ICE, if you're listening, you can come on the show and defend the 88, or I think it was a 92. I think he had a 92 white GT.

I'm just saying. I used to hearse, if you're out there, baby. The floor is open. I think the question, I think it was brilliant for them to call this car Mustang. Get all the attention. Make every review contend with that question. Make people on the street. This is like the best moment in Sean's video.

Make people on the street see the logo and freak out. They would not have gotten that with a focus. If they'd called it the Ford Electra Bolt or whatever, horrible name, the Ford ID4, right? Like, they're not going to get that. They put the whole weight of this brand on it. And now we're saying it's really good and it's a competitor to Tesla. And that's like, that's going to work from the marketing perspective.

The question is, I don't think anybody generates the kind of memories or cultural moments in their family SUVs that you generate in a Mustang. Like, ICE, again, if you're out there. come on the show and tell me if you were going to make ice ice baby today, would you put this Mustang in that video? Like, I don't know the answer to that question, because it is just kind of a mid-sized crossover SUV. And that's like,

I think that's the big question for that. Well, I mean, it, I mean, as Becca can attest, it definitely can, the speed can quick, sneak up on you in a way that could maybe make some of those

memories. But I think that's a good point. It's very good. Very, very quick. The amount of heads, that this car turned, I did have the brightest blue I've ever seen it in a car. Yeah, that powder blue one is great. Yeah.

Try driving it, though. It's like everyone's staring at you. And, you know, they definitely, cameras definitely got me. No hiding in this car. But the amount of heads that this car turned with the badge on it also is insane. I mean, everywhere we parked this car, somebody stopped to take a photo and to tell us how impressive this, you know, to have that badge, on there. And then, you know, we got really lucky that Sean was rolling on the GoPro, and this is in the YouTube video, where a moment rolled up to it, what, a stoplight? Yeah, but I stopped at a stoplight on, like, a divided highway. What are you driving? An electric Mustang. There is something, I spend, you know, a good amount of time in the video and also in the written review, trying to sort of parse this out,

because there is something really kind of intangible about the design. And it's been polarizing. I know a lot of people don't love the way it looks, but I think Ford pushed the design of the car. enough to the point that it really does stand out. Like they could have made something more boring looking and still tried to call it a Mustang. And I think that actually the thin line between those two versions is really, it's kind of crazy because I think they could have failed really hard with it. And they may still, but like what they did with the design is, I think, you know, just enough to really make it stand out in a way that it's going to make people notice it.

And it looks just different enough that people are going to sort of natural. understand that there is something different about it in a way that a Tesla vehicle does and not really in an off-putting way like some other EVs, like the sort of older Nissan Leafs, or even the BMW I 3, which I personally like, but I know a lot of people don't. And so it's this, I think they really just struck this interesting balance of being able to make it really stand out, make it look a little different, make it look a little, give it that sort of quality of when people see a new iPhone that makes them feel like they need the new iPhone. even if they don't wind up getting it, maybe they trade their phone in for something else.

The I-3 looks like literally like three C-cell batteries on wheels. I don't know what you're talking about. And yet it's one of the better electric vehicles on the road the last couple years, which is kind of insane and insane also that BMW never really followed it up with anything. So we think the car is good, right? It like drives well. It's fun to drive. The design and the name give it this opening against Tesla. there are two things that I saw people reacting to with our review. One is the obvious one, which is the charging situation, where they seemed to lag way behind Tesla. So, Sean, you're in Austin, Becca, you're in Brooklyn. What were your charging experiences like?

Well, I was to the thing that got me really almost angry was like, I was just expecting a much better charging scene here in Austin. I figured, especially with now such a big booming tech scene, that they would have been kind of ahead of that curve, but it's really not great. I guess it just comes from the fact that so many people live in houses here. So a lot of people are able to charge at home in a way that they wouldn't in, say, New York City or even like a more sort of mid-range city. And so it's really, there's like a real dearth of options. There's a ton of old, really slow level two chargers around the city.

There's one Electrify America Station, which is Volkswagen's sort of answer to Tesla superchargers. network though I always try not to give them too much credit for it because they only did that network because of dieselgate. And and and but even the even superchargers I was looking at the map the other day. There's only really like three or four real supercharger station stations in Austin and they're all in north Austin. So and I'm way down in south Austin. So like it would be a hike.

North Austin is where the tech campuses are right. Right. So that's where a lot of those. That's where the electrify America station was too. But so I mean anyway. So the the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, long story short on the charging situation is that Ford is definitely just coming from a disadvantage here like many other automakers that are making EVs that haven't gone out and done

the work of building their own charging networks because the charging scene in the United States is like a real bummer and it just there are a bunch of different networks that started up over the last decade or so they all work in sort of slightly different ways and have slightly different quality some of them are on the older spec that charges slower, some of them on the newer spec that at one point was called fast charge but is now really kind of almost embarrassing not fast enough compared to these newer networks like Tesla's and Volkswagen. And so you really, you run into this problem where the biggest frustration that I've ever had and I've had it repeatedly with electric vehicles that aren't Tesla's is you already are budgeting

time in your head, whether it was based on using the plug share app or whatever that's telling you how long you're going to have to stop somewhere to charge up to how much or your vehicle is telling you. You're already budgeting that time and it takes a certain type of person to sort of like start from that point and accept that. Then you get to the place and one of the, you know, the first plug you plug into isn't working. Or it starts charging, but it's charging more slowly than it's supposed to and it never really quite ramps up to that top speed. And then you start wondering, okay, should I switch to another plug? And, you know, you sort of wrestle with it because you're like, if I switch the other plug and I get the same speed, now I've wasted more time. And it's just like every option that you face after that first sort of problem you run into just sort of like starts to compound and take a lot more time to charge. And so Ford really doesn't have a solution to this because there's really no solution to it other than better infrastructure. The only thing that they tried to do is they have, you know, created, quote, unquote, this thing called the Ford Pass charging network, which is essentially just like coalescing all of those disparate networks into the Ford Pass app and also through the

main screen of the Machi so that it seems almost as if all of the charging stations are at your fingertips, which is a nice idea in theory. And they're also trying to go even further than that by partnering with Electrify America and some of the other networks to basically make it so that eventually you'll just be able to pull up to those stations plug in and you won't need it and you know a separate app you won't need to create a separate account which is another thing that happens if you're not really up on what you need for electric vehicle charging sometimes you pull into a station and you realize oh great now i got to download an app i just create an account uh so they're trying to solve that part of the problem but it's a tough one to solve because it just doesn't quite work yet and then even when it does wind up working you're still in many cases going to be stuck with slower chargers you can sort of mitigate you can sort of mitigate you some of this if you buy the more expensive mockies which have you know like I said the version I tested had 270 miles the real wheel drive version of that spec or that model would get 305 miles and I think that would be obviously even better and the ultimate solution here if you're not talking long road trips is being able to charge at home which just you know like I said here is an

option it was an option for me I was able to plug in just to a 120 volt outlet on the outside of my house and I was able to get like 65 miles in a little under 24 hours, which is not a lot, but enough to cover, you know, what I was using on daily trips. But the actual out there while you're in the world and, you know, making sort of short to medium or I guess even medium to long trips, it's just a real, it's a real issue. And I know, Becca, you had a different experience, but also not necessarily a great one. Yeah, yeah, Alex, who's the video director that helped me on this shoot, and I had, neither of us had ever driven an electric vehicle or charged one, for that matter. And so when they dropped it off to us, they're like, please just leave us with 60 miles left in the car so that we can get it back to where we need to go.

So great, no problem, whatever. I'll just plug it in for half hour or something and, you know, juice it up for you. I had no idea about what it actually takes to charge one of these. So we drove, I think, like 60 or 70 miles out into Long Island to shoot. And we're out there. We're shooting all day. Cars on all day. We're driving around all day.

And by the end of the day, we had like 70 miles left. And it was around like 6 o'clock, 7 o'clock. And we were like, oh, let's just go charge up really quick out here before we get back to the city. Because I'm sure that charging of the city is going to be way harder. So I went on the Ford pass on the app, and you're right, finding a charger was actually very easy. It propagated all the chargers within the area. I found a charger. I went to, I think, a quick charging station because I think it had like a lightning bolt and a plus sign.

And something told me this was going to be fast. And I was like, great, we're good. And we roll up to a Harley Davidson store that's closed on the side of a highway. There's like maybe one light in the parking lot. We roll up to the charger. there's like, I can barely see anything. It's a pretty dark parking lot. I plug it in.

I get in the car and I'm like, okay, we'll just wait for 20 minutes or something. I had no idea. And Alex and I are sitting there and it's going up slow, like very slow. And we had this moment where we're sitting there in an empty parking lot on the side of the highway that is dark. Two young women just like, this could go really wrong, really fast. Like, I don't know if I feel wonderfully safe sitting here. And then I called Sean and I was like, Sean, how long is this going to take? And Sean went on to explain the charging problems.

And I was like, yeah, I'm experiencing this charging problem right now. And I think we sat there for like an hour. Oh, my God. And we ended up getting up. The whole time we were sitting there, we're like, we just need to get to 130 miles. Because then it'll take us 60 miles to get back and they'll give us still an extra 10 mile buffer on the 60 miles that they wanted and we're just sitting there doing this crazy math of miles. And we both came to the conclusion that unless I had a charger at home and I had a garage,

this is so not practical for someone who lives in the city. Yeah. Meanwhile, like with Tesla, there's a supercharger network and you roll up to it and it's like a party at every single one because there's a line now. Like all the most popular supercharger stations have lines. So they just turn into like Tesla owner. club coffee talks. And then the thing works really well. Then you're like on your way. I mean, I will say there are, I've definitely had issues with Tesla superchargers where

you do run into that same problem of like, wow, it's only going at like 50 kilowatts. Do I move to the next one to try to get like as fast as I should be getting? So like there are definitely been times where their supercharger network, you know, has similar problems, but it doesn't have like the full scope of issues that a lot of, uh, a lot of other charging networks have. Yeah, but Tesla, I mean, not to, not to hype them up too much, but Tesla also owns that network. And if you're mad at them, you just like tell them that it's broken and it's Tesla's responsibility

to, and there's like a lot of Tesla owners. So like one company is getting a lot of reports about one broken thing. Yeah. Whereas like the weird charge plus station at the Harley store, like who is accountable for it? It's like a very different problem. One thing that never really hit me until I was. running into the issues at the Electrify America Station was that so many, especially the really fast chargers, but so many of the, you know, sort of medium to fast chargers that do exist

are located near highways, you know, for good reason because they're most needed for people on long-range trips. But the problem you run into is like when you have an issue at one of these stations, then all of a sudden you're on customer service call with these companies and you're like screaming over the din of the highway. And I was just like, I was sitting they're thinking about it. I was like, I'm not going to call because I don't really need to call. One of these stalls is going to work and no one else was there. So I was fine. But I was just thinking, like, man, if I had to get on the phone right now, all I would be able to think about is how loud the highway is and how just gross it is that I have to, like, scream over the highway to be able to, like, have this terrible conversation about how stall seven isn't working next to the colds. So that's the charging situation. You guys have mentioned Ford Pass several times now, which brings me to the other thing that everyone caught. in our video and our review, which is that in order to make this car, Ford Motor Company, was required to develop and ship software. I mean, I on a Ford, I know what their software's like.

That screen in the middle is a new version of sync. I saw this comment on our site. I saw on YouTube. In our video, that screen looks laggy. Is it laggy? Yeah, you know what? It looked like the version that, or the model that Becca had might have had more issues than the one that I had.

There were definitely some, like, slightly chuggy animations on mine, but I didn't really have too much problems with it. And actually, I'd say in the review, for the most part, I just used CarPlay because there's wireless CarPlay and wireless Android Auto, which is just like, I don't know why you wouldn't want to use either one of those. But, you know, I'd used Ford's system as much as I really kind of wanted to and then just stuck with CarPlay. And CarPlay's animations were really, like, extremely fluid.

So, like, you know, the display can certainly serve that up. But, yeah, I think Becca's had probably a little bit more of an issue than mine. It's funny, I saw a lot of comments about this as well. But while I was using the interface, I never thought it was laggy because I'm not expecting it to be my iPhone. I don't know. It felt very to the speed that most cars infotainment systems are. See, but that's bad. That's like the floor is low.

The floor is low. But then once everyone said that, I was like, you know, maybe it was pretty slow. Like, I don't expect the refrigerator to be fast, you know? Yeah. The floor is like Fiat Chrysler's UConnect getting your car stuck in the blue loop. Oh, God. That UConnect shit is so annoying. And I would just, like, I own a Jeep with the UConnect system until 2019.

They were shipping resistive touchscreens. Like, cars is a low, low, low, low floor. I think that the way that I thought about it was, about it was, So it definitely could use some work. You know, it's early. These are just shipping. I'm sure they were probably rushing to finish it. You know, for people who are curious, this is still the version of sync that is built on

KUNIX, which is the BlackBerry sort of underlying operating system. Sink is, Ford will tell you in very explicit terms, sync is not an operating system. It is, you know, the sort of infotainment layer that runs on top of KUNIX, and that is important to know because they just announced a deal with Google to where sync is basically going to switch over to running on Google's native Android Automotive OS by 2023, though we don't know exactly. I just want to point out that what Ford has announced is that it's skinning Android and the skin is called sync. Like I read this announcement as like, this is what I'm reading, like where it's 2011 again and like Motorola is telling us that like bubble OS is the new. Also like I hate to say this, but CUNIX is fast as hell.

It's super fast on its own. And so if you can't make your skin fast on Cunix and you. You think you're going to make it fast on Android? I have some stories to tell you. The SurfaceD, or you'll probably get a kick out of this. The Surface UI, like, what you're actually interacting with is HTML5, too. Yeah. No, that's pretty common, actually.

Like, SpaceX is using HTML5 for some of its interfaces. Right, yeah. So, I mean, I think what I was getting around to is, like, they're starting from a better place than almost any other legacy automaker would with, you know, existing versions of infotainment software, let alone something that, you know, you know, you know, you. needs to look good and work sort of well on such a giant screen. So, you know, if you haven't seen the screen before, look at the site. It's a 15.5 inch portrait touchscreen that sort of like almost kind of floats off the dashboard at the top. And so yeah, I mean, it definitely,

it needs a little work. There are definitely some like UI issues that like I didn't really love. You know, I think our friend Mike Murphy tweeted something when he got his review unit just about like the menu and how imposing it looked and how sort of ridiculous it seemed to have so much many options. But the thing that I liked about it is I think Ford did do a good job of designing the UI for the size of this screen in the sense that there are very like forgiving hitboxes for all of the UI elements. You know, you're not really like squinting to see some of the menu options on there. It's it's pretty big and easier read. And so I think they I think they're starting from a really good place. They say they're going to do over the air software updates for

this car. And that that's going to be. This is going to be the sort of first one where they really start supporting that kind of process moving forward. So it'll be interesting to see how they actually do that and whether they live up to the sort of, you know, what people have come to expect from like Tesla with over the air software updates. And so they could make some changes that could make that a little bit more fluid. But I was happy with where it was at, but if only because the floor is so low. And I didn't have any like real problems. The only thing that I really, really, really got annoyed with was there's a wireless charging pad in this car. and my iPhone was sliding around during, you know, excited driving, but also not even the most

excited driving. And so when it would slide, it would trigger this error message that would like pop down from the top of the screen that says like, you know, charging disconnected or whatever. And which is fine. Like if you can't fit all the phones, even if it's the most popular one. But it would happen. And then that would that error message would go away and then it would come back again. and then it would go away.

And it was just like, listen, I understand that there's a problem here with the design. You're popping up the alert. Do it once and then like make it go away. And then like maybe there's a deep menu setting somewhere that says like only alert me once that wireless charging got disconnected. But that was the only thing that really, really kind of like bum me out with the new sync for. Becca, you're using it with Android auto, right? You have an Android phone. Is it as smooth?

At the moment I'm using an iPhone, which is very strange for me. Very strange for me. I don't want to talk about it, but I am using an iPhone right now. It's my fault, by the way. It's all Dieter's fault. I'm sorry. Yeah, I use my S-10 as like my home remote right now because I didn't feel like downloading Hugh and all of that.

And, God, I just can't wait to go back. Anyway, I was having also the same charging problems. Just kind of all over, it just would, I mean, you'd be driving in a straight line. I don't, there was no disruption happening. It would just go in and out a lot. I was wishing it was more of like, I know the new Cadillacs do this where you put your phone kind of into a slotted, slanted holder. That just seems like a better design to me.

Yeah. You know, it's funny, we've been talking about all these things, and it reminded me that two CEOs ago, Mark Fields was a Ford CEO in 2016, and he was at the Code Conference. And first of all, I asked him over and over again why Ford cars couldn't get over there updates, and he yelled at me, which is why I remembered it. And two, in 2016, Ford and Google were about to sign a gigantic deal to use Android. And they backed out at the last minute because Google wanted too much in Ford so they could build their entire own system. And now it's 2020.

And they're like, we're going to just let Android be the thing that we run. But it's remarkable. Like, that is a long, that's two CEOs. That's a long journey to get to the point where they're finally, four years later, going to the platform that enables more over the updates, more feature updates. faster development. And I think they signed a big deal to use Google's cloud services. Well, and depending on how heavily they scan Android,

it could be really compelling. Because, like, Andy, reviewing the Polestar, right, has been talking up Android Auto as like the one you have it as a native system. Ford's not the first to do this. Google, the first vehicle to have it, like sort of on the market is Polestar, Polestar 2, which is a car made by

a car made by a Chinese company called Gioi, which also owns Volvo and shares technology across Polsar and Volvo. Yeah. But is going wider with that with GM. And there have been a bunch of other bigger deals that have been signed with Google for this Android automotive OS. And so, yeah, I think that probably all of that movement probably helped inspire Ford to finally just give in. All right. We should take a break.

I want to come because there's more car stuff to talk about. There's Apple building a car. potentially there's a new model S. Let's take a break and come back and talk about all that stuff. Support for the show comes from Upwork. The days of doing it all, all by yourself, are over. There's no romance and burning out while you're trying to scale. Instead, you can check out Upwork.

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But there's this other company called Tesla. They have a very famous car called the Model S. And Sean, there's a new one. Yeah. This has been rumored for a very long time of Fred Lambert over at Electric, who was sort of the like the er Tesla blog and has been covering them obsessively for years, had run a story two or three years ago now about how there was a Model S and Model X design refresh coming.

He had a render of the inside of the car that had more of a Model 3 style sort of landscape screen and changes to some of the other interior bits. and it was something that sort of loomed for a while, and Elon Musk shot it down. At one point he said, you know, there's no redesign happening. We make constant improvements to our vehicles, et cetera, et cetera. And then lo and behold last week, redesign, not a super big overhaul in the exterior of either vehicle,

just some sort of aerodynamic changes, but enough to probably be able to sort of notice the difference if you look at the vehicles side by side. But the big changes come inside. and the interior is basically the same between the two new versions of each car. It has that sort of same horizontal display now, as opposed to the portrait one that was embedded in the dashboard in the original, you know, longstanding Model S and Model X. So that's new. It's also a more like bezelless design than the one in the Model 3.

It's actually really more akin to what we saw in the prototype of the cyber truck. So, you know, it looks a little bit newer, a little bit fresher. And then the sort of more polarizing aspect of the changes to the new SNX is that they both have these U-shaped, almost like butterfly racing steering wheels. So not your typical oval steering wheel. There's no top to the steering wheel. And there's been a lot of talk over the last week or so about whether that is going to be safe. It appears the Tesla did not let the federal safety regulator, the national, Highway Traffic Safety Administration know about this ahead of time, which is appropriate and

unsurprising if you follow the sort of long history of Elon Musk's interactions with that agency. And so that's a whole conversation. Another change that they made that was less obvious in the moment is that they are, Elon Musk said that they are trying to and will be automating, shifting between park, reverse, neutral and drive on these new vehicles and that there will be an override function in the touchscreen, but the physical controller, which previously was on one of the stocks in a Tesla to shift between park reverse neutral and drive is gone. And they'll be, they'll be using autopilot cameras and software and sensors to just guess.

He literally said guess at when you should change between those drive modes. And, you know, it was funny. I was like, I'm pretty sure we covered this extensively, you know, in my earlier days at the verge. Because I know that there was a big controversy over some of the other automakers really changing the designs of these shifters. And I was like, I got to find that. And I looked for it. And I was like, oh, right, Neely did this video in his Jeep. Yeah.

Yeah. My Jeep has like that. An extremely bad shifter that killed people. Yes. Yeah. So those are the big changes. They're more expensive, about 10 grand more each. improved range because they've made some changes to the battery pack and the cell design.

These are not using the new cells that we saw Tesla debut at Battery Day last year. That's still something that's on the horizon for its vehicles and it's unclear whether those new batteries will ever come to these cars. But, you know, sort of changes all around mostly on the inside and certainly making the vehicles a little bit better than before, which is an interesting move because the, oh, and I should say about the Model S especially, but also the Model X, they both have new in addition to new battery packs, they have new power trains, specifically a three-motor version, which they've been calling the Plaid power train, because Plaid is one step faster than ludicrous in space falls.

But this is a three-motor power train that they were developing sort of with the new roadster in mind over the last couple of years, but had put it in a Tesla Model S and run it at like Nuremberg Ring and Laguna Seca. And it was just like those tests were happening at the same time that the Taekon was being announced. And so there was, you know, Portia had had the Tycon of the Nurberg ring. And there was this like month or two where there was just this like constant update of like whose lap time was faster. So that new power train is in and it's really, it's absurdly expensive if you want that model. It's like $130,000 or something crazy like that. I want to run through a bunch of the steering wheel to me is like the ultimate example of first of all it's like that's a steering wheel that Michael Knight had in Knight writer in his.

Yeah. I get why you'd wanted to look like that, but turning, you actually often go hand over hand, and you can just see that that's going to get regulated out of existence. The shifter, I'm like, 50-50 on. Really? I don't know. I just, have you ever been in the wrong gear and pushed on the gas? Yes, you have. It's terrifying.

Well, presumably, you know, it's going to guess right. I mean, I have to make a three-point turn just to get out of my garage. So there's a part of me that just wants a giant shifter. there's a part of me that's like, I'm just going to press the gas and you're going to figure out the rest of this would be great. I just can't help but think about car washes. Is it going to know to put it in neutral? Oh, yeah. That's a really good point.

If it sees rainbow foam, then it goes into neutral automatically. We'll see. Tesla owners only get there. They rub them with a diaper and that's it. That's my fairest few of the reference for the day. I just want to, Sean, quickly go through a couple other Tesla things. I want to talk about Apple. They are in the middle of like a couple recalls right now.

And you mentioned in the Mustang review, like Ford is good at making cars and Tesla is still like trying to figure it out. And then Elon this week was like, don't buy a car while we're ramping up production, which is an incredible thing to say. Yeah, this was really incredible. So the recall is for another sort of longstanding thing with older Model S's and Model X's that we've known about for a while was first reported by motherboard, I think, in 2019. is that they were built, the sort of overall powering of the displays in those vehicles had this particular flash chip in them that it was just all sort of architected in a kind of way that eventually that flash chip would burn out. And so in 2019, people who had bought their Teslas in like 2013, 2014 or whatever,

started seeing their model S displays blackout and just like stay blacked out, even after they, like, rebooted their cars a couple times. And that cuts access to the rear camera. It also severs access, obviously, to anything else through the touchscreen. But, like, Tesla put so much of its sort of vehicle controls through the touchscreen that that, you know, was possibly a pretty nasty safety risk in certain situations. And so last year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration started an investigation into it. And then that wrapped up in January. They sort of took the unprecedented step of publishing a letter that they had sent to Tesla,

asking Tesla to recall the vehicles. Tesla is sort of famously not keen on doing recalls. And so I think they were trying to find a way around it. They were trying to sort of only replace these things as they were burning out. And what was really wild in that exchange that NHTSA, the agency, posted in January, was that Tesla just basically admitted straight up that, like, no, all of the vehicles that had this chip are going to suffer from this problem. It wasn't like, oh, maybe it's likely.

So now this past week, the Tesla agreed to do the recall. They're contacting owners. They're trying to upsell owners on replacing the whole media unit with the newer version that they had started shipping a couple years ago, which cost $1,500. And a lot of people got up in arms about that, though it is an appreciable, like, new thing that would add new features. So, you know, you could go either way. But you can get the, if you have a vehicle that's affected by the recall,

all, you can get a fix for free, and there's information on sort of Nitz's website. And you can go to our post on the site, too. It sort of gives customer service numbers and everything. But yeah, it's not great. And it's another version of these sort of long-tail effects that Tesla doesn't seem to understand might be an issue despite having had many people in the industry tell them that they would run into over the years. And sort of, you know, the, the, like you mentioned, Elon Musk was on this podcast earlier this week with this industry analyst who was famous for sort of criticizing the Model 3's build quality in 2018 and in like pretty crazy ways. Like he was like, you know, it's as bad as Kea was in the 90s.

And Musk in this podcast interview was like, oh, well, you know, I agreed with your criticisms, basically saying he was right. And then was explaining to him that he was, Musk was asked why a new Model 3 that was produced because it's pretty famous at this point that there were problems as Tesla ramped up production of the Model 3. They were trying to make a new car they had never made before and scale it up as quickly as possible so that it could become the first mass market EV they sold. They ran into a ton of issues doing that. And, you know, I think a lot of people probably think that like maybe they've gotten past that now because there are so many on the road and they've been making them for a couple years. But this analyst was saying, you know, hey, I bought a new one late last year.

We were next to a guy who had a new one from a month later, and the paint job on his was like so much better. And Elon Musk was saying that, yeah, we're still figuring out how to get the paint right. And we were making cars so fast last year. He didn't say this, but to make the goal that, you know, he had set for the company of 500,000 vehicles shipped last year, that they, the paint was getting messed up because they were making them so fast and they weren't giving them proper time to dry. And then on top of that, he was saying he also said that as he was talking about these. production ramp issues, which they're still having during moments when they do continue to scale up production. He was like, you know, friends ask me, when should I buy a Tesla? And I tell them, buy it right at the start of production or when it levels out and basically saying, don't buy it

it in the interim because it's going to have issues. He was like, which is just a, you know, a wild admission. And then he also said, you know, some things about, he always like caveat some of these things with like, you know, if we had known about it, we wouldn't have designed it this way. And it's like, with the paint issue especially, it's like, these are things that people definitely have told him about. He never really wanted to hear them. But it's just a sort of repeating pattern that we see with the company. And it's something that, you know, a lot of people have been looking at the Maki review and asking me like, you know, the Mocky really doesn't match up on range and you had all these issues with charging. Why would you ever consider this over a Model Y?

And I think that's really the crucial tradeoff because the prices are similar enough. But for me, the consideration I would have to make. is is it worth it for me to sacrifice a little bit of range? Because it's not a lot depending on which model. But is it worth it for me sacrificing a little bit of range and making sure that I really have to charge at home or find that charger near me that is the most reliable versus, you know, access to the supercharger network.

But trade off, if I go the Tesla route, trade off really just super unknowns about bill quality. I mean, the issues that they've had, even with the model Y, which you feel like they would be better at, you know, that they've had a lot of experience building cars. They're all over the map. I mean, it's everything from seatbelts being detached from the sort of, you know, anchors on the bottom of the vehicle to, you know, one guy's glass roof flew off. So, like, you know, it's, you really have, it's like a grab bag kind of thing.

It can be sort of anything. And they're doing things to make them more reliable in how they're building the Model Y. but, you know, it's just, it's, that's the tradeoff for me that I would have to consider. And it's, you know, not reassuring to hear him come out and say sort of so coldly that there's a whole, you know, months long stretch where their vehicles are not up to par for his friends. And if he wouldn't recommend him to his friends, then like, yeah, it was a lot. I mean, I would say the counterpoint here is Ford Software is like part of the equation. Yeah, like Tesla's pretty good at software. They've had bugs, no doubt.

It's software. And, yep, there's a lot of Ford dealers out there to help you if something breaks, but they all have to get trained up on how to fix this car. Yeah. Yeah, and exactly how dealers are going to approach. The Mocky is still kind of tough to know. You know, theoretically, it may be something. We've seen this with other electric vehicles where dealers are reticent to really push the vehicles

because, you know, over the lifetime of a car, an electric vehicle is going to need less maintenance, and therefore that means less money in the pocket of the dealers that typically do the maintenance. So we've seen them sort of not really want to put them out there as like an option for people to buy. There are other reasons why there may not be attractive to people. But yeah, that's one of the things that's definitely unknown about that. But again, the consideration is like, do you feel like Ford can scale that sort of service fast enough and good enough to meet or beat the level of customer service you can get for Tesla right now,

which is also a crapshoot and something that the company has said repeatedly for months, years even, that they're going to improve. And yet they're still at the point where they're just not really there. And that, you know, on their earnings call last week, they were asked about this again, thankfully,

because they hadn't faced this question in a while, but like, when are you going to improve your customer service? And their answer was that the first answer was, we're building the cars to be better so they don't need to be serviced, which, like, is a great idea in theory, but like, whoop.

And then the second answer was like, and you know, we're also making sure our mobile service vans and, you know, et cetera, et cetera. But like, you know, Elon Musk said this was a big priority for him over a year or two ago. And it's just still a problem. So those are the kinds of considerations that I think people are really going to wind up having to make when it comes down to buying, you know, if they're looking at those two vehicles. All right. I want to make sure we give Dieter five minutes talk about gadgets at the end. But big, I told you just going to be a car show. This is like a big story that's not a story yet

Right like there's no other way to describe it like the noise around Apple making a car Is getting real loud like really loud really loud in like the last month kind of just bam I'm gonna talk about it now yeah and there was also like I don't know like there's rumors of what they're gonna do of who they're hiring There are there's long bin Apple test cars like lighter rigs on the roof like floating around But the the rumor that's gotten really hot is Apple's either going to make a deal with Hyundai or make a deal with Kia. Hyundai and Kia are owned by the same company. So it gets a little wonky in there to build a lot of cars in Georgia.

Yeah. Which would basically make Hyundai or Kia like Apple's Foxcon for cars. Yeah. Or I saw the comparison to, you know, I guess Apple took some sort of stake in LG when they made the display deal. Yeah. I've seen that comparison made too. And I think there is an element of truth for that.

Yeah, it's really, honestly, it's hard to, it's hard to really wrap my mind around. It looks like what happened is that, you know, within the last couple weeks, there was some sort of, I forget exactly who wrote the story, but someone basically went to Hyundai and Kia, a Korean news outlet, I think, and, like, asked them about this. And, you know, they just, it's that sort of journalist dream where, like, they got the right person who was like, yeah, it's happening. And then, like, and then that set off, like, alarm bells, you know, like, Hyundai's stock went crazy in Korea.

It happened sort of overnight here. And then it got picked up by business trades here. And then they were sort of linking to the story in Korea. But then the story in Korea got edited so that like a lot of the details were suddenly gone. And so, you know, it seems like there's been just a lot of cleanup happening in the press over the last couple weeks, probably from Apple's side, but also from Hyundai's side a little bit. But then it also has this vibe of like, you know, it feels like kind of the cats out of the bag that they were in talks. And so people on the Hyundai side, I think, you know, obviously have a lot. more to gain of this being public. And so we keep hearing more details like so now, you know,

it's, it's, they're still close on a deal. But now we know that it's, yeah, it's probably going to happen at the Kia factory in Georgia. It could be as many as 100,000 cars a year, but eventually up to 400,000 cars a year. The report we saw yesterday before we recorded this was that it's going to be electric, autonomous vehicles that are Apple branded. But our first, we're, but our focused on last mile travel. So last mile being a sort of industry buzzword that really makes you think that this is necessarily not necessarily going to be something that people drive, let alone own, which is really interesting. And we know looking back at like the scope of coverage about this project, which was started in 2014 and was originally supposed to be like a car,

like an electric car, but then was pivoted a couple years later to autonomous vehicles. software sort of broadly and then moved into just like autonomy software more generally. And, uh, but the, the idea now being that Apple is going to make some sort of, um, you know, almost like robo delivery vehicle kind of thing. Uh, I don't know. It's, it's really hard to know exactly what's going on. The CNBC report from yesterday was like, um, yeah, electric autonomous vehicles that could be last mile, but are designed not to be driven. So exactly what. what that means is not super clear. You could say the new Model S is designed not to be driven eventually because the steering

wheel is so impressive. Or we could be talking about a vehicle that, you know, is no steering wheel and pedals. You know, we know Apple has tested AVs, like you said, over the years in, like, California, but they haven't been, like, an extreme, extremely busy tester. And the way that all this news continues to be framed is, like, there is no deal yet, even though they're close to a deal. and Apple's still in conversations with other companies. So it's hard to know exactly what's happening right now.

We do know that, you know, Apple's played the field and has entertained basically every idea. I was looking back today as I was sort of getting ready for whenever, whatever happens, happens. And, you know, they had been talking to Volkswagen at one point to BMW to Mercedes-Benz. I reported last month, I think, that they tried to buy canoe, which is an electric vehicle startup that just went public. that was started by the people who left Farity Future when Farity Future first almost collapsed. So they've really run the gamut of the options out there, I think because they're a big enough company that all the options are available to them. It would be really interesting to go this route.

I mean, it would obviously be huge for Hyundai and Kia, which have sort of grinded over the last couple decades into becoming, you know, sort of the most reliable foreign budget costs. But this would obviously elevate those two companies and their sort of parent company to a much different height But yeah, we we know a lot more, but we also still don't know exactly what we know with all these reports They're all they're all so similar and it's just really strange It's just weird because cars are hard, you know like not even from like a making a car like Tesla Makes cars and it's hard and the cars are of somewhat inconsistent quality

But just like what cars should they make? Should they should they should they? make a convertible? Like, should they make a truck? Yeah, we've seen so much reporting over the years about them not being able to really figure out. I talked to somebody who worked there a couple years ago and that, you know, they were just describing that, you know, one of the things that got people really excited about it in the early days of the reporting on this project was that Apple had a lot of its own veterans working on it, but also had hired away a lot of industry veterans from the automotive industry. And so while in theory, you think, wow, they're going to make something great. In practice, it was more like they were all given their own like little fiefdoms

of the different part of the car that Apple wanted to make, you know, originally. And then that turned into a nightmare because none of them wanted to play well with the other parts of the project. And so it was never really going to come together. And that's why they sort of pivoted away to autonomy software. And so now they're back somewhere in the middle or something. I don't know. It's kind of hard to peg. The Apple executives do not drive sensible cars. Like, any Q is on the board of Ferrari. Like, yeah. Phil Schiller is like a fan of like British racing cars. Like just down the line.

Yeah. Like you can't imagine Apple being like, we've made a sensible mid-sized crossover. The main interface is carplay. And if your baby throws up in the back seats, it's easy to clean up, which is like the market for cars. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I mean, it's on one hand, you kind of think, well, they have to go consumer, you know, passenger

vehicle because like who wouldn't want to own an Apple car. But then on the other hand, you're kind of like, well, that, yeah, that sounds really difficult in many ways. And like maybe they're, you know, they've been waiting in the wings because they want to make this bigger play of an electric autonomous vehicle that, you know, I guess maybe turns into a robo taxi of some sort. And then it becomes this much bigger transportation play. Yeah, but that's just not Apple. I don't know. I'm dying to see what this turns into. Like Apple making an autonomous taxi is just not very Apple, right?

Like, that's a very utilitarian product in the end. Talk about a car that people have to be able to throw up in. If you make a cab, like the number one thing you have to deal with is like, someone's going to throw up in this car. All right. That's a lot of car news. I'm excited. I'm trying to get the CEO of Ford on Decoder, and I'm trying to get them to send me all kinds of cars right now.

So hopefully we have more on the Mustang and more from that coverage. And we'll see what Apple does with this car. Before we end, though, I promise the beginning we're going to have some gadget, gadget talk. Dear, you got a lightning round, let's do it. Okay, so Monica just reviewed the HP Specter X36014, which is the sort of two-in-one Windows laptop

that, you know, it's got a weird shape and you would be, it would be natural for you to just ignore it. Be like, oh, HP made another Spectre laptop, it looks like it came out of Battlestar Galactica. I don't need it. But it turns out it is stupendously good. It's one of these evil laptops. It actually lives up to the claims.

It's probably going to be one of the best Windows laptops of the year, like full stop, and it's January, or February now. So go read that review. Again, it's like one of those laptops where you look at it and you're like, shrug, but actually it's very, very good. It makes me want to buy it, but I'm not going to because I'm being responsible in 2021. iOS 14.5 betas, developer betas are out, and the big news is it supports the new dual

sense and Xbox controllers, and they're giving you the option to unlock your iPhone with your Apple Watch. Okay. Yeah. My suggestion to you, by the way, so you have to have it on it. Like, as long as it stays connected to your wrist, your Apple Watch stays unlocked. My suggestion to you if you do this or going to turn this on is to switch your Apple Watch pin to at least six digits instead of the standard default four, because that's just a lot more secure. I want to talk about e-bikes for like an hour, but we're not going to do it, which is not. But Rad Power got a big investment, and so I'm excited to see them make some new bikes.

And then Becca. Just the Alpha One, Sony's flagship camera, it just looks like Sony finally did the thing where they stopped making compromised parts spin cameras and they just made the camera. Is this true? Is this the camera? You know, it might be true. We got to put it to the test. But on paper, this is fast. This is a fast camera.

And I have spent, since this dropped, I have spent a lot of time thinking about the fastest thing I could photograph in New York City. There's a lot of fast things in New York City. There's people driving marquees through intersections. I know. I know. What the heck? But Sony claims you can get 155 full-frame compressed raw images or 165 full-frame JPEG images and up to 30 frames per second with the electronic shutter and still get the full auto-focus, which that's nuts. That's nuts. And of course, there's the 8K-30, which is also very cool. excited to see how hot this camera gets. That's been a big issue with getting up to that resolution.

So, yeah, this seems like it's going to be super fast, and I'm ready to put it to the test. We'll see. Although their part's been cameras, not so bad either. Yeah, we're both team A7C, right? Oh, we're both team A7C, yeah. All right, I'm editing this podcast before we do an hour on the A7C. Sean, Becca, it was lovely to have you. I'm excited that we did a car show. It's been a long time coming. Yeah, happy to be here. Yeah, thanks so much around us. You can tweet at us. Sean, you have a bad Twitter handle, so you have to say it yourself.

I've been working on it, man. No one answers me about it. S.O.K.K.N. Beka's at Becca Farsace. Deeter is at Backlond. I'm at Reckless. Talk about bad Twitter handles. Come on.

Yeah, what the heck? We're not getting into Backlund. It's a good story. But I'm never going to tell you. Words have meetings. Yeah. Oh, man. Can I get it at Mustang?

All right. Well, if you can get me at Mustang, please send me an email or tweet at me. I'm at Reckless. We're back next week on Friday. That's it. Rock and roll. Wear a mask.