Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - 1000 Mile EV Road Trip Recap

Episode Date: September 3, 2021

In this week's episode Marques and Andrew bring David Imel back on to talk about the giant road trip that the team took earlier this week. The whole point was to travel 1000 miles in separate cars in order to test out the EV charging network versus regular gas stations. There's a lot they discuss and there's even more coming in the full video coming to the MKBHD and Studio channels, so you're getting a sneak peak in this one! Links: https://twitter.com/wvfrm https://twitter.com/mkbhd https://twitter.com/andymanganelli https://twitter.com/AdamLukas17 https://www.instagram.com/wvfrmpodcast/ shop.mkbhd.com https://discord.gg/mkbhd Music by 20syl: https://bit.ly/2S53xlC Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marques. And I'm Andrew. And today we've got a, I'm going to call this a special episode. Yeah. back to another episode of the waveform podcast where your hosts i'm marquez and i'm andrew and today we've got a i'm gonna call this a special episode yeah even though it's pretty similar to our previous ones it's a special episode because we did this crazy spontaneous project and we finally get to reveal what we're doing why we're doing it and how it went this is a the most casual

version of where you'll see it but we're working on videos that may or may not be out soon by the time you see this podcast. But this is the project that we did. So you've heard us talk all the time about electric cars on this channel. We've had people on talking about Electrify America. We've had people on, we've talked about Tesla in the past. We just had Doug DeMuro on recently talking about cars. Clearly there's a lot of car talk on this channel. And one of the things that I've constantly heard in all this car talk is the difference between a road trip in a gas car and an electric car. Yeah. Just a fascinating question. Like what kind of time does it add to your trip?

What kind of experience changing does that do? Is there more range anxiety? There's just a different feeling doing a trip in a gas car like you're used to versus an electric car, a lot more planning needed. So we decided to actually do such a trip. Yeah. And we made a, we made a little bit of an experiment about it. It's semi-scientific, but here's basically how it went is we did a thousand mile loop roughly, and we used three different cars that all started at the exact same time. We had the Tesla Model S Plaid. We'll go over all the details in a second, but that's the roughly highest range available Tesla using Tesla superchargers.

We went with the Ford Mustang Mach-E California Route 1 Edition, which is, from what I understand and from what our research showed, the highest range non-Tesla EV. Yeah. And so that would be using its own set of chargers. It's also just one of the best-selling EVs that are non-Tesla right now. Yeah. It's hotcakes right now.

And we had a gas car as a control. Kind of wanted to use just like some sort of a full-size, popular, normal car to go on a road trip in. We ended up renting a car, and that car was the Audi Q5. Yeah. So sort of a, I don't know, would you say crossover? It's super comparable to the Mach-E in terms of price and size. Um, it's definitely a little higher cause it's, you know, a little more expensive. Audi's a little

more expensive, but it was just wound up. We thought it was a perfect comparison to the pretty similar in price too. Yeah. Yeah. that's something around 25 to 30 miles per gallon, something like that. And the way we did it was we divided up the entire studio into three teams, and we had these teams all, I'm using air quotes, race, starting from point A, doing a loop around points B, C, D, and E, and ending up back on point A. So we drew this 1,000- mile loop around New York and Pennsylvania and New Jersey. And that's how we did it. So the teams were myself and Hayato in the Tesla. We had your

car team, Gasolina. What was your team? I had Adam and I had Tim. So it was a three person car. And then we have a representing the gas car. We'll pop in, or sorry, representing the Mustang Mach-E, we had Brandon and David. So let's bring in David. David, welcome. Welcome to the Waveform Podcast. We're glad to have you back. Thank goodness. I'm glad you're here.

I'm glad you made it. Wow. We have a lot to talk about because there were quite a variety of experiences and i feel like if you were if we were guessing at the beginning what was going to happen uh and we kind of were at this point it's kind of like when we do the blind smartphone camera test we're kind of like guessing behind the scenes as i set up the brackets what might happen i would have guessed that the gas car would come in first because there are gas stations everywhere and that the tesla would come in second because there are a lot of tesla superchargers but it's just not as long as not as many as gas and it takes longer to charge and that the mustang

mach-e would come in shortly after that because there are even less electrified america high powered stations especially in certain parts of the country and that would have been sort of the end of my boring prediction yeah can i also just add something quickly to how, so I made the loop, why I kind of made it how we did. Yeah. So the first thing we wanted to do is make sure we all hit a thousand miles, which was just like a number we picked out that's just easy to extrapolate data from. And then in order to force that, I had to pick a bunch of specific points. We made them fun just because, you know, we still have to drive for two straight days and we want to pick a bunch of specific points. We made them fun just because, you know, we still have to drive for two straight days

and we want to be a little entertained. But we didn't want any shortcuts to happen. We didn't want people like finding some certain ways to cheat the system. So this guaranteed everyone hit a thousand miles. I'm pretty sure everyone definitely hit the thousand. I think we were, 1,025 was right around where we ended.

It was a little bit different for every car, which we'll get into, but it was right around where we ended. It was a little bit different for every car, which we'll get into, but it was a little over 1,000. Yeah, okay. It was a little, yeah. We'll definitely get into that. Pretty over 1,000 for me. Yeah.

But so what I did was I wanted to force that 1,000 miles, but I also wanted to have all the places as places that are either frequently traveled to or frequently visited. So we started going to Lake Placid. Um, also we're starting in New Jersey, so it has to be somewhere near us. Our starting point, super, super useful. One Wawa, so food stop that happens to have a gas station, a Tesla super charger and an electrified America charger right there, basically in that parking lot. So that was perfect. All pretty much top off. And then started 100%.

Yeah. So we went to Lake Placid. Then we went to Niagara Falls. Then we went to Cornell University in Ithaca, down to Scranton, and then back across to work. It was a little over a thousand miles. It is also in a fairly like remote area as well, though. But for us, it is still a place where people like we would travel to. People go to Niagara falls from here all the time all the time lake placid it was a past olympic site it's like all pretty obvious driving um but again it wasn't going to be an easy trip by any means yeah i mean like for a gas car you have no worries about it um but for the rest of it we weren't really sure and we did make a rule where you were not allowed to pre-plan charging or gas stops or pit stops or whatever beforehand you weren't allowed to until you got into the car we wanted to make it like yeah most people don't do a whole ton of planning like that

yeah like you were going to get in the car and you're just going to see where the car told you what to do pretty much yeah so i want to do let's do like a quick two three second two three minute recap of each car's experience just to set the stage for what actually went down right so i think gas car should probably start because that's what everyone's familiar with we were the control so i guess that's what everyone should be familiar i mean it went smooth uh we definitely had all of the advantages on our side we had as many stops as we wanted to because almost even out there in the middle of the Adirondacks, we could get a gas station pretty much wherever we wanted. We could stop for food when we wanted.

It wasn't taking up a whole lot of time. We had three drivers, although I wound up doing most of it. I was just on a roll. Tim was creating a thumbnail. Adam was our best cameraman. So it just kind of settled into rolls and went that way. But we uh yeah we cruised that was pretty much it no surprises you ended up no surprises we we trivia we did split it up into two days just for clarity so we did yeah day one was start at the studio head up to lake placid then head over to niagara falls pause leave your current state of charge, or in your case, state of fuel, and then day two, wake up in Niagara Falls,

finish the rest of the loop from there, and we'd keep the time delta from each car. The Tesla, oh, I want to ask, was there any sort of autopilot cruise control that you were taking advantage of? A lane assist and cruise control, nothing that was attempting to be full self-driving by any means. It was more of just like a, hey, I'm helping you stay in the lane. I'm keeping up with the car in front of you. You can set travel distance. It was coming from an older car with 180,000 miles on it. It was nice

to just be in a newer car, but it wasn't anything I was assuming both of the Mach-E or the Tesla would have. It's not like anything we've talked about. I enjoyed it. It definitely made driving a little easier, but that's good. Yeah. Okay. Uh, yeah, I'll, I'll go for the Tesla car. Um, I've done a lot of road trips in the Tesla before, so I was very familiar. And even without any pre-planning you get in the car and you're able to plan pretty easily on the map, on the touchscreen in the car. You get in the car and you're able to plan pretty easily on the map, on the touchscreen in the car. So, yeah, we didn't have any sort of issues. I'm looking at my charging stops here, which I've written all of them down.

We had six total charging stops, three on each day. Okay. None of them were over 46 minutes. And they were all pretty fast. Typically, we would get, you know, 60% to 80% battery pretty fast. Typically we would get, you know, 60 to 80% battery pretty quickly. Our most dramatic experience was the first one where we went directly from the studio all the way up to the top of the mountain in Lake Placid, where I arrived with 0.3% battery left, which is one mile left on the car. Yeah. Um, so I was, I was chilling. I was definitely going very slow up that hill to make sure that worked out. But once we got there, that was our first stop where we charged for half an hour and got to 275 miles.

So I was definitely trusting the Supercharger network with that one. For sure. Yeah, for sure. Other than that, yeah, autopilot was great. I learned a lot about the limits of Navigate on autopilot. I still wish I had access to the full self-drive beta where it would take exits. Because you didn't have it on this. I didn't have have it but it was great for highway stuff okay which was nice how was uh maki all right well first of all thank you guys for for beaming me in here because

i was still stuck in vermont and uh and so i'm gonna shave real quick oh wow that feels better okay all right for those who are listening to audio David had a fake mustache on this time we mixed up the two intros we wanted to do and just put them together

and I realized we left the mustache can't break the fourth wall man okay yeah so you know I think Brandon and I

were in the monkey we got a little screwed over at the very first stop and that kind of set the pace for the rest of the first day and even though we were originally going for like kind of

not like a race but also just like it's sort of a race but not trying to like drive fast right we capped out at 75 miles per hour on each car but we had to pull off... Actually, I was very surprised by the Mach-E. Something the Mach-E does really well is

the range estimate is extremely accurate and you actually get more range than it says you're going to get, which is not something Teslas do. And the Ford guy that came to hand off the Lightning to us told us that they do this on purpose because they would prefer to give customers lower expectations and then pleasantly surprise them. That's something we definitely saw in the Mach-E.

We got more range than it said we were going to get, which was great. The problem was we got to the first Charger with like 30 miles remaining on the car. And the chargers were all down. And I guess it was something weird where they were like switching over systems over the weekend. And they hadn't finished switching them over or something. But the problem with that was in that area of upper New York, there's nothing around there.

There's that charger, and that is it. You needed that charger to work. We needed that charger to work. Just to be clear real quick, that was an Evolve New York charger? It was an Evolve New York charger, which is, I believe, run by the New York state. But I need to field check that.

But they were kind of freaking out when we tweeted about it. And they were like, it's going to be operational by 3 p.m. And by that time, though, Brandon and I had to drive to Vermont, which was literally the opposite direction that we needed to go, but it was the only one we could make it to. So we had to drive into Vermont.

We finally made it to a charter there. There was one charter. And I don't know if you want to get into this now or if we want to get into this later as a broader discussion about the network yeah uh would you rather do that later i like i kind of like diving into like some of the more general points and like findings from this because i didn't know what i would want to say after we do this trip like i figured we'd end up with this this number at the end of like, okay, we did the trips, we did all three cars. Here's how much time it added to the trip in the Tesla.

Here's how much time it added to the trip in the Mach-E. And those were obviously still our findings. And it's something like an hour or two for the Tesla for a thousand miles. And it's, depending on your experience, anywhere from three to seven hours in the Mach-E depending on if you have a remote area where there's nothing else and you got to go the wrong direction you ended up not being able to even hit Lake Placid because you're on

your way to another charger yeah we had to skip it but another thing I was interested in was what you were just mentioning which is the accuracy of the range estimate in the car yeah I've driven a lot of gas cars where you get a decent range estimate, but you're not really trusting it with your life because there's so many gas stations out there. It doesn't really matter. Yeah. But the Tesla, when I drive any Tesla,

it's pretty notoriously giving me a buffer, but the range estimate is perfect conditions. And in perfect conditions, my car with the 21 inch wheels said it would get me about 345 miles i have never gotten that ever yeah and i've never gotten perfect efficiency which i think would probably be around 260 watt hours per mile i pretty constantly at highway speeds average over 300 typically 300 to 350 and in this car you know we're just doing cruise control sometimes you're drafting behind a truck you know hills will affect it a little bit. We did that near the end. Yeah. It's

very useful, very useful by the way. But like I will, I'll set off to a charger and if the charger is 30 miles away and the car says I have 40 miles to go, I'm actually thinking about it a lot more than you would think because you think 10 miles, wow, you have way, you have a ton of buffer, but as you're driving that buffer also shrinks because it's not perfect efficiency and i was really impressed when you were i think we were on a twitter space or something and you were talking about the range of the mach-e and it was definitely going down much slower despite our same speed we would go like two miles and it would only drop a mile like i think every trip between chargers we would get like

20 to 25 more miles of range than it said we were going to get that is and I think that's what Ford should be doing that's like what I think that's awesome what these electric car manufacturers that like the number one concern for most consumers is the range anxiety of electric vehicles and the best way to curb that is to like set expectations really low and then beat them. Yeah, that is something I was really surprised by. And I think it's a really good thing that Ford did that when they dropped off the Lightning.

They told us they do this where like, even in the Lightning, they assume the mileage range based on a thousand miles in the bed. Or a thousand pounds of cargo, yeah. Of cargo in the bed. And so like they want to under promise and over deliver

and that's what they definitely did with the Mach-E too. We gained like 20 to 25 miles or like we got 20 to 25 miles more than it said we were going to get. Yeah. And I'd much prefer that

to like a Tesla where you just like it says you have the range. Yeah. Like just to go from my apartment to here it's 11 miles but I burned like 20 to 22 miles getting there.

Exactly, exactly. So, and I noticed this with the Taycan. A lot of people have had the same experience. Like it gets way closer, even though it's saying, oh, we'll only do 225 miles. It'll get 220 miles, which is pretty impressive. The California Route 1 edition of the Mach-E, I think is rated at 305 miles.

Yeah. I don't know if you ever saw that number on the dash. No, I was very confused with that because online it says 305, but we only ever got up to 265 max. Interesting. But we have the Route 1 edition, so I don't know. But there's also a feature in the car that we saw on the dash where it was either going to estimate your range based on previous driving or not,

and we left it on. So it's possible previous driving knocked that estimate down. It only had like 1,000 miles on it, though, so it shouldn't have shouldn't be too crazy too crazy yeah but yeah so it was giving you 250 ish and you got every ounce of that yeah which is pretty crazy yeah um yeah i think i remember so we we left uh the studio the tesla had 340 miles on it the mach e had 240 miles on it and during that same leg of the trip, I was down to 50 and you were down to 30. Yeah.

It was like very, very close. We almost had to charge at the exact same time. Yeah. So that was pretty impressive and I wanted to note that. Yeah. The other thing is the accuracy of what's on the screen. So this was one of our points is we wanted to plan our road trip based on the info that the car or the app was giving us and so that's what i did in the tesla that's i mean with a gas car you

kind of just go on site because we could have yeah we could have done whatever we wanted you didn't really have to plan too much not at all so the evs were thinking a lot about planning and the difference between the information and the accuracy of it that you get on the tesla screen versus the mach-e is probably the biggest story and learning from at least my experience. With the Tesla, it'll go, all right, here's all the superchargers on the map. You can filter by speed. You can filter by how far away from you they are. You click on one on the map, it'll tell you how much it will cost per minute to charge there if you don't have free charging. It'll tell you how many stalls there are, how many are occupied, how many are out of order, and how long you'll have to charge there. If you don't have free charging, it'll tell you how many stalls there are, how many are occupied, how many are out of order and how long you'll have to charge there

to get to your next destination. Yeah. That's perfect. That's like, and all of that information has been notoriously very accurate for me. And so I relied on it. I would literally go, okay, Lake Placid is a, is a 250 kilowatt charger. There's eight stalls. They're empty. I will get there with 1% left go yeah and guess what i got there with one percent left time to time to hit that charger yeah and what we found in the maki was uh oh you can tell the story yeah it's very different yeah it's very different um the maki's ui is like good in some ways but extremely confusing in a lot of other ways and i think i think a broader problem with this whole thing is just the amount

of charging companies that there are there are like 19 different charging companies right and ford uses like all of them and they have a filter for like ford approved um which didn't really change anything when we when we turned it on because i assume that they just want to say their network is as big as possible, right? I think that's what it is. Yeah. So it didn't really change anything when we turned on FortiProve. We did find there is a setting for like prefer fast charging.

Okay. Finally. But we kind of went into this like just so everybody knows, like I got so many comments on Twitter just being like, why didn't you use this app? Or why didn't you go on this random website? And like we went into this, I wanted to see what the experience would be like, if I just bought this car, I didn't really know anything about EVs. And I just like put in my destination and let it do the rest. Yeah. And that's what ended up like kind of wrecking us

because we didn't go into the filters the first day and put like prefer fast charging or anything like that. We just kind of like went and yeah it's like we well you would get to a trickle charger and i have this photo um that i'll have out and put on the screen where like and brandon and i at like 11 p.m ended up at this truck stop in the middle of nowhere we almost stayed at this uh random motel in this creepy area in the middle of nowhere we did no idea where we were. And I plugged in because the car was like, oh, there's a charger here.

You're basically out of range. There's a charger here. Please plug in. And it was like a trickle charger. So I plugged in, and I got a notification on my watch, and it was like 2,900 minutes until 16% charge. And I was like, holy smokes. Yeah, and that's kind of brutal. The fact that you can go through the filters and that's yeah and that that's like kind of brutal the uh the fact that you can go through the filters and that you did do that for the second day

made a pretty big difference i think yeah although to be honest we mostly just used the electrify america app on our phones because the second like the thing is there was like 19 or 20 different charging networks but electrify america is useful because every single electrify america charger there are at least four right the biggest problem we ran into and actually the reason why we had so many issues was we would stop at fast chargers with like 30% left. But so many of these chargers only have one hose. Like one thing to plug into. Oh, one stall, one charger. One stall, one charger. Okay.

Right? Whereas like every Tesla charger has like at least like six. A bunch. Minimum. And Electrify America, which is owned by Volkswagen Group, actually has four minimum, right? And so the second day we figured like, okay, the chances of all four of them being out are much lower.

And we did cut it close yesterday on our last charge because three of the four were out. But the biggest issue we were into yesterday was that all of the fast chargers we would route to, there was one. The first day, there was the Evolve New York one. There were four to six, but they were just all down because they were like switching to some other thing i don't even know what that means um but yeah most of the fast chargers it would be like you'd pull

into a truck stop somewhere and there would be literally one yeah and not ideal yeah and and like half the time more than half the time they were broken yeah and i remember i called the number on the thing because someone on Twitter had said like, oh, just call it. They can reset it for you. I called the number and she's like, oh, yeah. Yeah, that was reported being broken like a few days ago. A service technician should be coming out at some point. And it's like, you can't do this. So this is the problem is like it's so decentralized, right? Like there's obviously a good,

there's good things to be said about fragmentation sometimes because it can cause one company to not have too much power. But when it's so decentralized like this and there's no like universal like hub or server that says, hey, these are out of order. Send that to the Ford app and the app says you can't use this. There's nothing like that. And if you pull into a fast charger and you have 30 miles remaining,

what are you supposed to do? The closest thing you can get to is either nothing, Vermont, or a trickle charger that will take 2,900 minutes to get to 16%. It's very important with an electric car for that sort of thing to work. And you also think about in the future when there's going to be way more electric cars, having a station that it's guiding you to that has one charger where you don't know if it's being used or not is going to become a problem too. Even if it works.

And it's so like, sorry, I will stop talking in a sec. But the last charger that we went to yesterday, the last day, it was an Electrify America because we hit only Electrify America chargers on the way home just because we wanted to play it safe. And on the Electrify America app it said one of four available. And I was like, okay, well and this is like before we left

our last charging location so it was still going to be like 200 miles till we got there. So I was like, oh well like three out of four of them are being used by the time we get there, I'm sure there will still be one available. We got there. That didn't mean they were being used. It was it meant they were broken.

So one was not broken. And it's just like if you have more than one electric car in a 200 mile radius, you're going to have to wait for the person before you to finish. And then you're going to have to wait the 30 to 45 minutes for your car to charge. And like that's just that's not acceptable yeah and electrify america is the best of all of these services the best available yeah yeah well i want to take a quick break but when we come back i want to talk about both the charging and refueling experience but also how it combined with the human refueling experience. So we'll take a break

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The guide is free to you at netsuite.com slash waveform. netsuite.com slash waveform. Welcome back. I think we left off with David telling us about getting to a charger that only had one left, which is kind of terrifying. I think we can all agree on that. I think it's something that I'm always interested with in EVs though, is just like number of stalls.

Because this is, as the gas car, when we were driving, we stopped at gas stations. I don't think we ever went under half a tank because we almost played it similarly to how you guys did, where like we tried to make every break as efficient as possible, where we have a bathroom break. Let's just fill up while while we're here i don't think any break we had ever

took longer than 10 minutes um some were just for food i think we had two stops that were only for food and we didn't fill up because it was we had gone to the bathroom recently enough where we we were pretty solid but we never went under half a tank of gas there were gas stations though where like when we pulled in no pumps were available and you know gas station they've got eight to ten pumps but waiting for that still means you're only waiting for some two to three people to finish and then you're in there and out of there in less than five or ten minutes like ev charging is which i think in this trip we were in were in a situation where there are less chargers. I think, I mean, I'm getting way ahead of myself,

but I just had this thought of, it would be really interesting to do this trip again in places where EVs are super, super popular and you're getting to potentially the point where you're pulling up to a charger that's full. Because we've all seen those videos of like wines, right? Yeah, I mean, basically just California. Yeah.

But not to get too off track. I just had that thought. Like we never spent more than 10 minutes. And even though we would go to places where there's a line for the bathroom, a line for the gas pumps, like a line for food. We went to the slowest Wendy's ever because they were short staffed and still nothing we ever did took longer than 10 minutes. Yeah. and still nothing we ever did took longer than 10 minutes. Yeah, no, I think the goal of electric charges should be to match the current gas car experience,

which would be two things. One, speed of charging has to get way faster to match the time. And two, the amount of them that there are in the country has to be way more. Because I feel like with your gas car trip, you can actually just go straight to your waypoints and your food destinations

and not even think about where you're going to charge because you can charge at any point or fuel at any point that you need to. But with the electric cars, it was a little different. And even in the Tesla, I found it where you are planning around your chargers. And I think around this thousand mile trip, we kind of hit every type of charger

as far as things that you can do at that charging stop. Typically you want like something to eat or somewhere to use a bathroom, something like that. So we got up to Lake Placid. That one was a top of a mountain grocery store and that was pretty much it. So I think, yeah, at that grocery store we got snacks and like donuts or whatever, and that was fine. I think we stopped at another one that was a mall and we wanted to eat. So with that stop, we went into the mall and found the food court in the middle of the mall and ate at a Wendy's there. And then came back all the way out the mall to the parking lot because it was just in the mall parking lot. We had another one that was at a hotel.

And it was really interesting because we weren't about to go in this hotel because we didn't have a reservation or anything. But I imagine there wouldn't have been much to do. That was our short, that was an eight minute stop. We didn't really do much there. But like if you were looking for food there, there wasn't really an option. There wasn't really anything. We would have had to go somewhere else.

That's actually surprising. There was another one that was in a strip mall with tons of food. We happened to pick one of the like eight options and had a bite there. So we kind of had every version of it, but it was when we were deciding to be efficient, we weren't driving to food or driving

to the waypoint and then happen to have a charger nearby it was look on the map we're going to scranton where's the charger near scranton we're going there first yeah then we will figure out what to do yeah there is um on the tesla website if you look it up on your phone you can see what foods around there but even with that knowledge you're pretty at the mercy of what because generally you're planning that trip already like that's your option that's what you get yep i will say i do i think you benefited on the lake placid one on getting food there because we made the mistake of let's let's get going we're pretty close we're not going to grab food here because we're not that hungry and then the the distance between lake placid and like close to niagara

there was nothing so all of us were just like we we played that bad game of waiting for like to try and get something better to eat and there was absolutely nothing so we were starving we ate at like a gas station or no we've we found a really nice cafe that was nice but it took a while and yeah it was kind of it's kind of nice to get forced into planning to eat and whatever but other than that it was nice that we could wait find something hop off the road grab something eat hop back on the road in a couple minutes yeah part of the reason we did thousand miles by the way was just because that's obviously way more than twice the range of both electric cars it was just so we would have to definitely stop multiple times for various things, just sort of

getting more variables involved there. I feel like we had a good variety of different stops. I don't know, was the Electrify America charger, where would that usually be? Okay, so like when we, on the first day when we were just doing whatever chargers the

board app told us to stop at, it was pretty random, like everything but Electrify America doing whatever chargers the board app told us to stop at. It was pretty random. Everything but Electrify America is sort of like in a forest, and there's sort of a little convenience mart, or just in very random locations. We stopped in this very cute town where we ended up getting sandwiches, but it was just one EV charger in some random lot down by the lake.

And it was just really random. All the Electrify America chargers definitely play more like Tesla does. The reason there was an Electrify America charger near the Wawa was because that's also a Walmart parking lot and they have a relationship with Walmart. But they put a lot in the Walmart parking lots. We stopped at one that was in an outlet mall. So that was kind of crummy for the food's sake

because all we really wanted was, there was basically no food there. There was a fro-yo shop and we wanted coffee, but there was actually no coffee in an entire outlet mall, which was surprising. Impressive. Anyway, yeah, definitely not quite as good, but I feel like the Electrify Americas are a little bit better.

And at least you could go into Walmart and maybe pick something up there if you needed to. It's not enjoyable necessarily. Walmart has food. Exactly, they have food. Yeah, I feel like the Tesla, two things. One, there are destination chargers on the Tesla map, but they're all gray. So if you look for a charger by default, I feel like the Tesla, two things. One, there are destination chargers on the Tesla map,

but they're all gray. So if you look for a charger by default, it's going to show you all the superchargers, which are all fast. Usually most of them are V2s, some are V3s. So that'll be 150 kilowatts or 250. If you want to, you can tap on the gray ones and it'll show you some of those like random charge point chargers

or like single chargers in a parking lot of a bagel shop or whatever. You probably don't intentionally want to go to one of those, but if you are in a pinch, they're on the map, and you can find one that's nearby. But also, yeah, I remember on the way to Lake Placid, we had a moment where we could choose about an hour short to stop at the last supercharger for a while and I looked on the map and I saw a bunch of mountains and I was like that could be a problem

But you know what we're an hour away, and we've got barely enough range. I know we're doing this we're going we're going all the way up to Lake Placid on one charge and It was kind of just like once we got past that last charger. We were fully committed There was nothing else around. There were no destination chargers. We were going through a forest. It was like sheetrock walls to rivers and single lane roads up the side of a mountain. One of the questions you usually get is, okay, well, what do you do if you run out in an electric car?

If you're in a gas car, you can get towed, obviously, but also if you get someone to bring you a can of gas, you can pour it in the car like if you're in a gas car you can get towed obviously but also like if you get someone to bring you a can of gas you can pour it in the car and actually just keep going yeah battery doesn't work that way not quite the same a lot of people keep bringing up like a generator like that's not very efficient you could in theory get a mile or two out of a generator but that's a big generator that runs on gas people really bring that up yeah well i mean that's like the only it's the only thing that kind of works in your head of like okay portable fuel yeah if you're in a gas car portable fuel is just a can of gas if you're in an electric car what's the answer the theory there battery checks out but

it honestly makes no sense it doesn't makes a thousand word it would be nice if if there were some sort of battery you could plug into your car just to get an extra range but it doesn't exist um so yes you do you have to get towed and i've seen it happen i've never gotten to that point i'm jinxing it but i've been down to one mile many times yeah also we met somebody uh who worked for tesla and this is not the first tesla employee who has told me that there is a small reserve underneath zero miles probably don't want to go there all the time it's probably bad for your battery but multiple people have told me numbers between 10 and 25 miles of extra range if you are absolutely in a bind and you've run out and have nothing around that's that's handy to have good to know yeah good to know but i got to one mile and the car was fine so okay that existed

maybe it hangs on that one mile for like quite a while. It turned to one mile, like about a mile from the Charger. I think we have footage of us getting up. I think Hayato checks in every couple of minutes where it's like, oh, nice. We've got 13 miles left on the ride and 13 miles left on the car battery. Great.

Oh, look, we've got five miles left on the car going up a hill and we're six miles away from the Charger. Oh, great. And've got five miles left on the car going up a hill, and we're six miles away from the charger. Oh, great. And then we got to like one mile left, and it happened to be like we get to a downhill, so there's a little bit of regen. I go nice and slow. I get all the battery back, go back up the hill, and it was just perfect. Yeah.

Dang. Yeah. It happened to work out. happened to work out um i have our our total deltas at roughly an hour and a half for the tesla behind the gas car and then if we include all of the adventures of vermont and not having a charger available the mach-e on this particular trip was about five hours behind five to five and a half hours behind yeah i mean it's only because of that first situation. If we only count the second day, we were actually only like 20 minutes behind you guys.

Yeah, it was like 20 minutes. It was really close. And Brandon and I made a sort of inefficient coffee shop stop once, which probably took about 15 minutes. Yeah, I think it's really interesting when you isolate the second day. So the second day, we all left from Niagara Falls somewhere around 11 in the morning.

And the Tesla had about 70 miles on it. The gas car had some bazillion miles. How many did you do? We had a half a tank. It was like 450. Or no, maybe we had more. We had like 450 miles to start. That's a lot.

And you had somewhere around 180, I think. Yeah, yeah. And so- 184 or something like that. So we had to make a pretty early stop because we were already at 70. And we stopped at Chictahuaga, which had a great level three charger.

In 15 minutes, we went from 40 to 198 miles. So it was quick. But that last leg was about 450 miles that day. And we all arrived within about an hour of each other yeah is that right yeah the first like maki came in before tesla correct probably oh sorry the second day okay yeah but if we go to first stop ithaca i think you beat them by we did by like 15 20 minutes theoretically theoretically before stop, it should not matter because we should all be traveling at 75 miles per hour

and leaving at the exact same time. Yeah, there was charging differences. I guess you were starting at different ranges though also. Yeah, we started with low battery and immediately went charged. They charged right before they went to do the clock photo. We charged after the clock photo. Did you charge once before the clock? No, we went straight there.

I thought you did because we were neck and neck with you guys and then there was a turn at one point. Because that was the only time we were together and you guys stopped to charge, I think, right? Oh. I think they charged twice before Ithaca. You charged once. I think total on the second day, we only charged twice.

Yeah, we charged twice before Ithaca. Once at Che a day. I think total on the second day, we only charged twice. Yeah, we charged twice before Ithaca. Once at Chictahuaga because we started with low battery and then once basically in Ithaca. Yeah. So that's our, but then we had one more stop just to get home. Yes, like under ideal conditions, if you only go to Electrify Americas and they're available, which luckily this one was,

it is pretty much almost one-to-one with tesla like the charging rate of most electrified americas are either 150 or 350 which the 350 like tesla doesn't even offer yet but also there are no electric cars that offer anything near that yet yeah 275 is the fastest charging car on the market it's the taikan um so like the fact that it charges at the speed of a v2 desla is pretty good right like but it's just the volume and and the thing that kept ringing in my head yesterday was you build it and they will come but the they haven't really built the charging infrastructure yet and, but there's this huge push to build electric cars. And weirdly, it's like there's not a lot of car manufacturers

that are really heavily investing in the charging network. They're kind of taking the, like, it's not really our problem approach. Even Volkswagen, like, only made Electrify America because they had to. The US government forced them to make their own charging network because of the emissions scandal. And like it's funny

that like they were forced to and then now it's the best network that is not Tesla. But yeah, it's like there's all these random charging companies that are sort of trying to get a piece of the pie.

And like, yes, company, electric car companies are investing in these other companies, but they're not, I feel like they need to do more. They really need to do more. And also putting a single charger in a location and being like, we service this area is not acceptable. It's just not acceptable.

Yeah, it's tough. I almost kind of framed this at the beginning of like, if I were to put my parents in this car and say, drive to this place exactly what i was thinking yeah how would it go for them yeah and obviously the gas car they'd be fine they drive a gas car if we put them in the tesla i think they would have no problem being very conservative and just stopping at like every supercharger along the way and just just being safe with battery and i wonder if they decided to just pick whatever route the mach-e laid out for them how it would have gone yeah um but a lot of parallels keep

coming up in my mind between like almost like ios and android i'm trying to like crystallize this more in my head probably by the time i make this video but like yeah tesla controlling the whole stack yeah which is they build the superchargers for teslas yeah they they have the length of the cable perfectly to to match up with where the charge port is on every car they make and like obviously this is all it's all thermally optimized and it's it's online and it talks to the cars and it bills you later like it's very streamlined um the fact that that works so well seems like an impossible target for another company that isn't building their own yeah um and you can get close and there's the there's the pixel of the experience which is maybe a volkswagen owned car yeah on electrify america only yeah

maybe a taiken and here's a hot take there is a route somewhere there is a world and a route that you can take where the Mach-E wins probably beats the Tesla maybe even ties the gas car yeah because if you follow Electrify America's 350 watt maximum chargers and even I would say the Plaid Model S with those big wheels which has 350 miles on the dash doesn't quite get 300 miles and the 305 mile mach-e would probably get 305 miles so if you take off from the same place and you hit electrify america's fast chargers there's a world where it wins yeah and you only hit 150s in the tesla and i think that's the best case like you could possibly find for it but if you're if you're giving the car to my parents and saying

go to Saskatchewan like it's not going to be the same experience. And this is an it is extremely like iOS versus Android actually because CCS which is the one that everything's sort of converging to is a lot like USB-C it's like it offers all of these things and most cars are starting to use it and

whereas Tesla it's like they're lightning they're in a lot of places and like they offer a lightning to usbc connector right but actually the usbc ccs offers like more things it can go up to 350 watts right it's kind of like how there's some benefits if you get the right cable you can get the fastest thunderbolt 3 speeds but there's a lot of cables that look like it that don't get Thunderbolt 3 speeds. And you pull up to the wrong charger and get slow speeds. You can go up to 350.

Tesla doesn't even offer that. Right. At this point, their fastest charging is 250, which is the newest Model S and X. And Taycan's better than that. Just a little bit, yeah. So there's going to be USB-C phones out there that charge faster than the iPhone. But are they ubiquitous and work every time like lightning? Right.

Interesting. And when your friends ask you at a party if you have a charging cable and you hand them the USB-C cable and they say, oh no, I have an iPhone. Yeah. Maybe I need to draw that comparison in the video. I like that. There's one other thing in charging that I thought was really interesting

that I would like, I feel like we need to do the math on for the final video, but it's the charging curve that we found out between the Mach-E. I think that's going to be totally dependent on the car. Well, yeah, but if we just compare to Mach-E right now, which what we found was it goes full blast right until 80% and then just

tanks. So it's not right until 80%. I noticed yesterday, the last Electrify America charger we used actually showed the kilowatts that it was outputting. And when we first plugged in at 30, it was actually going at 157, which was weird to me because I can only take 150. I think maybe it was accounting for heat loss or something. But it was outputting 157.

But then once we got to 60, it actually dropped to like 87. So it dropped fairly significantly. There's a curve. Same thing in probably all these cars, and this is the same with smartphones. You get peak charging briefly. If you're rated on your phone to charge at 80 watts or something crazy,

it doesn't charge at 80 watts from zero to 100. You go ramp up to your peak charging, and you'll get peak charging from like 10 to 30%, and then it'll slowly, you probably could find a graph of this, it'll slowly slow down all the way to 100%. Then you have this weird thing where after 80% on the Mach-E, it like

capped you at 10 kilowatts. We can see it on this graph here. Which is very slow. Really slow. It's weird. I'm not sure why functionally it would decide to do that other than like protecting you from touching 100%. But if you're at a fast charger, you want to charge at a fast. I know that most cars

will start trickle charging after around 80, but it's not that low. It goes to under 50 after 80%. 10 kilowatts is so slow. For 20%? It seems pretty obvious that any charger outside of your house, they don't want you there to 100% either.

You're just taking up more spots. You're generally not charging up to that. But if you charge me up faster, I'll leave faster. This is almost like a right to repair thing because it's like we're forcing you to not hurt your battery by only charging to 80% ever. Even though you could charge to 100%, we really want you to only go to 80%.

Also, every car treats it a little differently. The Taycan, I'm trying to remember the specifics. With the Tesla, you can slide a slider right to 100% and it'll charge the car to 100%. And it'll warn you, hey, don't do this every time. We don't want you to degrade your battery life quickly. But if you go down to 80%, that's your typical everyday state of charge.

Leave the garage with 80%, and that's like a safe way of doing it. The Mach-E, you also have that control. But I believe the Taycan has a bit of extra battery that it doesn't charge every time. So if you charge to 100% on the Taycan, you're actually going to keep hitting that 100% every single day. And for the life of the car, it will feel like it doesn't degrade because there's extra battery above it that it's preserving for you. It's hiding. Interesting. So it takes that out of the equation for the Taycan owner.

They believe they're charging to 100% every time and they get the same experience every time. That's kind of smart, to be honest. It feels like a gas car. I fill my tank every day and I don't have to worry about the tank shrinking or something weird. The thing stops when it stops. Exactly. So there's different ways different companies have attacked that,

and I'd be curious if there's a written reason why it decides 80% it's going to slow charge instead of stopping. I don't understand that. Yeah, I assume it's some sort of battery chemistry thing that we did not go to school for. We might have to talk to someone from Ford. I'm sure they're raging at the keyboard right now trying to tell us exactly what it is. But I am very aware that I can charge to 100% on the Tesla as many or as few times as I want to.

And that's in my control. And if you're an enthusiast, you'll probably appreciate that more. So there's that. But yeah, I would love to know. I bet there's a world where we can plan an exact trip where the Mach-E wins. Like a 500... I'm sure there's that yeah but yeah i'm i would love to know i bet there's a world where we can plan an exact trip where the mach-e wins like a 500 there's multiple a 500 mile trip where it is yeah where there is only 150 kilowatt superchargers for the tesla yeah and there is you know all

electri america for the mach-e and you just ride it out and it's just you know it's just so hard that teslas can use so many non-tesesla chargers to and adapt to them. And obviously, I don't think they can use all of them. I think you had mentioned they possibly can't use Electrify America. That's something we have to look into a little bit more. And that would make sense for Volkswagen to do that. But when you can have the Tesla network, which is like so big already. And yes, technically, it is not the same size as

the entire non-Tesla network but also it's kind of bigger because you can adapt to a lot of those right right and like every non-Tesla car company CEO is like our network is actually bigger and it's like not really and then also if you only have one at your station and there's a 50 chance of them being broken like the first electrify america charger we went to yesterday the first one we plugged into was broken luckily there were three other chargers we could plug into the second one worked second one we went to three of them are broke it's like none of these are like have really good uptime and electrify america likes to say that they have 97% uptime or something. And clearly that's not true from our referential data.

It could be true, but even 97% is probably not enough. I can see on the map when a Tesla supercharger is down, and maybe it's down for a day. But if you say in an entire year there is 1,000 chargers, Like if you say in an entire year, there is a thousand chargers and three of three percent of them, that's 30 of them are down for the entire year. That's pretty bad. Yeah, that's pretty bad. You want 99 percent plus, I hope. Even if we're just talking about the Mach-E's trip on the first day, if let's say everything was like just the worst coincidence possible.

let's say everything was like just the worst coincidence possible. Anybody who is new to EV and had that experience in a new EV car would regret their decision and be probably never buy an EV again. And that's just not a place we can be right now. If we're trying to fully adapt to EV cars because of emissions, like that's not acceptable at all. And I think that would, you're not only ruining the experience for one person who will stick with gas for the rest of their life. All of the people that they talk to that might be thinking of that decision is

possibly ruining. Right. That's something we were talking about earlier in the studio is just like the power of recommendations from your friends and family for so many people outweighs doing your own research on the internet. So many people will say like, Oh, I know this says that it's the best on the internet, but my friend told me

that it's not great. And it's like, that is so powerful. And it's something that they talked to us about with the lightning, which is that pickup trucks right now are probably the most resistant to changing to EV. Which is hilarious considering they benefit the most from it, but. Yeah, that's a whole other argument. That's a whole other argument. But like, if we're talking about pickup trucks coming in if pickup truck drivers were to have that experience that they just had with

it would be it would be hugely detrimental to just not just ford and the f-150 but i think to pick up in general because this is going to be one of the first really big ones we see and i think they have a year to no six months ish maybe six months to a year to really figure this out before the next the f-150 launcher else i think it could be really really bad for just evs and this is it's the heart it's the hardest thing right like i want to know again like the the maki is like a pretty decent car actually like a lot of its parts are really nice the interior is pretty nice it was pretty nice to drive blues blue cruise not blues. I was about to ask about that. Blues cruise.

Yeah, we can talk about that a little bit more in a sec too. But like it's a pretty decent car. And if you are not going on a road trip, if you're plugging in every night and you only go within 200 miles, it's fine. A lot of these cars never have to do that. You could use this every day and they would not have any problems. Yeah. A lot of people take one road trip once in a while. It's a very small consideration and you plan very heavily around it.

Right. So most people aren't buying the car based on the road trip. Yeah. But also, I just want to mention there's a couple variables for each car that could affect. Obviously, we're on different roads at different times, different amounts of traffic, things like that. The wheels and tires I wanted to mention because people always want to bring this up. The 21-inch wheels with the sport tires on the Model S Plaid

are rated for 350 miles. The 19-inch wheels would have aero caps, and it would be rated at 390 miles. That's a fun fact. There's also a long-range Model S that gets 402, something like that. So that exists um we also could have used a longer range gas car and they probably would have never killed the

mileage yeah when you guys left and it was like over 400 miles of range i was like what i was surprised i just had i set a trip for the whole thing it just like counts your range and your miles per gallon and that thing's rated it was 23 city 28 highway i think we were averaging like 32 33 miles per gallon now most of our driving was all highway highway like for all of us there was very few back roads which was very handy for the uh for the blue cruise as well yeah it was it was great to just like go on and although we had a lot of we were all because you know oh yeah you did and also yeah our back roads were basically like highways though i mean like not a lot of back roads. Because, you know, Vermont. Oh, yeah, you did. And also, yeah, yeah. Our back roads were basically like highways, though.

I mean, like not a lot of cars. There was a point where we didn't see a car behind us for probably like an hour. Yeah. I also had like 200 miles in a row of a single lane road. Yeah, yeah. It was great. That was between Placid and Niagara. Yeah, that was crazy.

Yeah. So we'll land on this last point, which is like quality of life. Yeah. Which is like, of life which is like okay once in a while let's say you do go on a road trip how comfortable is the car like we were talking about Hayato was like I've never

done a thousand miles in a car like this but these seats are great and I feel fine after a thousand miles which is like pretty great I feel like the fatigue factor of like going a thousand miles and having to think for a thousand straight miles about the steering wheel is reduced by having some sort of adaptive factor of like going a thousand miles and having to think for a thousand straight miles about the steering wheel is is reduced by having some sort of adaptive cruise control experience

i've seen some videos about blue cruise yeah i've never tried it so i'm really curious i'm gonna watch your footage later but how did that go with the yeah so um yeah so for those who don't know ford has kind of a autonomous driving it It's not autonomous driving. People get mad at us all the time for saying this. Yeah. But it's sort of like a cruise control thing called Blue Cruise. And what you told me when I told you about it yesterday was that it's very similar to early autopilot. Yes. And so basically, you can turn it on, and it'll drive for you, and you can set a speed.

There were so many weird quirks about it though because like you can set a max speed but then randomly later like you'll just be coasting and we would set it at 75 because that was the max speed we agreed we would all go randomly it would just kick up to like 90 yeah and every single time it would kick up it was always 20 miles over the speed limit and i was like why is it doing like is this legal initiating ticket mode yeah it was very weird and it would just do it without asking you and it was just it was so confusing um and then they have like these weird animations to show like when it's in full blue cruise mode when it's in like you don't have to use the pedal

but you still need to steer that kind of mode. And you had told me that like you saw a video or something where anytime it would start to go around a curve, it would just freak out. It would just disengage. This was better than that. It was much worse at going around the curves because it would not turn nearly enough. And it would almost always the wheel would almost always touch like the bumps on the road that tries to like keep you off the rumble strips or like the yellow strip or whatever it was. It would almost always touch that. And multiple times when it was like in full blue cruise mode, I have my hands on the wheel and it would kind of go around the turn but it would not take it tight enough, nearly tight enough. So it would kind of do this thing

where it would start to turn but then it would recognize that it didn't do it nearly tight enough and then it would like jar to the right. And like it just kept doing this and it got really uncomfortable a couple times where we would go on those rumble strips and it would just start going or there'd be like, you know, we were

going super far across like America so there's just tons of trucks everywhere oh yeah and there was the there would be these trucks in the lane next to us and we'd get like really close to that truck and i just feel like i just it didn't feel super comfortable to use yeah um but for like for the instances where we would just be going pretty much straight, maybe a few curves for an hour, it was really nice. Your brain doesn't have to be 100% on. It has to be 80% on. So I have a couple comparisons with autopilot that I want to ask you about. Number one is early versions of autopilot would sort of have this weird like ping pong behavior.

They'd bounce back and forth between the side lanes, which is sort of sounds like what you're describing, especially in a turn. And the newest version on this car is very, very smooth, which is nice. Even sometimes it would approach a curve and slowly slow down a little bit to make that curve a little gentler and then speed back up to speed. So I like that. back up to speed so i like that but there is also uh a certain length of time where it will ask you to just like touch the wheel or just like apply a light force to the yoke in this case just to make sure you're still paying attention yeah you told me yours was very different of an experience because mine will start it'll start like flashing on the dashboard and then it'll like beep at you yeah and if you actually go enough time where the car is in autopilot and you don't engage and you

aren't paying attention it will actually disable auto steer until you put the car in park and then it'll be enabled for your next drive. How did the Mach-E handle that? Okay. So we were making this joke yesterday because I was sort of telling you about this. It doesn't like to make noise. This car doesn't like to make noises. And I don't really know why. Yeah.

From using the stock to like put your turn signals on it. You can barely hear the turn signal at all. Like I didn't know it was on a lot of the time, especially if we were like playing music or just talking. And that was uncomfortable. But as far as the Blue Cruise thing goes, there's a little camera that is like watching you to make sure that you are paying attention to the road. that is like watching you to make sure that you are paying attention to the road and if i was like had blue cruise we were going on a like quite straight away and i would like look over to the screen to like change the song or try to reroute us or something it's like if you're if you got a giant tablet screen you have to use it right so it's not like you're

going to be paying a hundred percent attention to the road if you have to use the screen um so it would be like, pay attention. But instead of making a noise, it would just break check us. What? It would just like, and this happened over and over again. This is so weird to me. In order to like snap your attention back to the little dash and also the road, it would literally just like do a quick break.

That is so weird. But it wouldn't play any noises and it would just. Just beep at them. Yeah. Or like play a beep break that is so weird but it doesn't it wouldn't play any noises and it would just it was just beep at them yeah or like play a beep in the speaker yeah it like break checks it break checks you and i'm wondering if i am wondering if like that's a fail safe in case it thinks you're falling asleep yeah it sounds like a jolt kind of thing i'm wondering if break checks the right term but it's break check is like a full-blown. It would tap the brakes. Tap the brake, I think, sounds better. It would tap the brakes pretty hard and then just keep going.

That, to me, is wild. It was weird. That's what it shows. I mean, I'm sure there's some reason for it, and there's some engineers who have just studied this, but if you've seen videos on YouTube of going a long time without. There's videos of people falling asleep behind the wheel of a Tesla and it just keeps driving. Like if you do that for more than a couple minutes,

it'll pull you over and beep at you and make you wake up. It's not gonna tap on the brakes. It's just gonna get off the road because you're not paying attention. So that's weird to me that it shows that. But yeah, no, so the auto steer, it was helpful for me. Obviously the Audis had. It's just like a lane assist,

but it does like take just a little bit off your like mental fatigue. It's just like kind of have it going with cruise control. The two together are nice. Didn't you say you encountered your first overpass? Yes. Like kind of break. Yeah. I had, I had a very, very good autopilot experience.

I don't autopilot very much, but this is like, I probably put in a couple hundred miles of autopilot and near the very end of our trip in like perfectly reasonable weather, I've seen this example on the internet a few times, never experienced it. Approaching an overpass,

which has a shadow on the road, it slammed on the brakes. Oh man. Approaching this overpass with a pickup truck behind me, it slammed on the brakes approaching this overpass with a pickup truck behind me, mind you. And luckily, even in autopilot, if you just hit the throttle, it'll just accelerate and stay in autopilot.

And so I did that, but it apparently sometimes, sometimes thinks that the shadow of the overpass on the road is a car and thought it was about to crash into the back of the car and slammed on the brakes. Very odd to me.

Everything else about autopilot the entire trip was great. It would change lanes for me. It would take the exit off of the highway and then tell me, hey, in 500 feet, take the wheel. You're going to have to drive. And that's fine, but that was one weird one. I've never experienced that. I do want to come back to the quality of life thing just overall.

And I know that a lot of reasons that people kind of rail rail on tesla is because especially in like a model 3 for example it's way more about the software experience it's way more minimal you know we did that um that other really really fancy car uh we're getting the remap oh the eqs yeah and like it's just all about luxury and i felt like the mach-e was actually a pretty good in between like uh like i have a model 3 and you know it's very basic the seats are basic everything's basic and it's like i've never really cared about that after driving a thousand miles in this car like i was pretty surprised at how night like the seats are really comfortable they're pretty wide um just a lot of the like things in the car feel nicer overall all of our cars had

wireless chargers right yeah this also had a had a wireless charger sort of in a similar situation to where the newer teslas have it like right in the front they're smart only one instead of two the second seat little area was just for your keys or whatever the audi's actually if i want to complain about something the audi's wireless charger was the dumbest thing I've ever seen. We didn't even use it because of how stupid it is. So in the center console, you know, like, and then it has the piece you flip up, which has your armrest. So there's two cup holders in front of that.

When you flip the armrest up, that's where the wireless charger is. So you either are charging, if you have anything in your cups you have to put your charging it under the armrest yeah but also when it's there you can't get to the space underneath it because it slides forward so you either can have your phone over top of the cup holders wireless charging oh but now you can't use your cup holders and there's no other ones in the front or you slide it back and now when you lift the armrest up your phone's there wireless charging you can't see it while you're driving or doing anything and also um it's covering all of the space underneath it so i was like to shove my the receipts we were taking in there i had to like pull my water bottle out slide it

forward put the receipts in like it was i did we didn't use it at all yeah luckily i was just plugged in for android auto so that's why i was charging the whole time but oh yeah and this had this had android auto and it had apple carplay that is that's another benefit because like especially with android auto i love android auto because you can be like finding coffee shops along my route yeah whereas with like tesla you can't really do that yeah um so that was nice and it had a USB-C and a USB-A outlet right in front of the wireless charger which I really am annoyed at Tesla for getting rid

of the USB-A chargers in the car there's like one USB-A charger in the dash box glove box that's mostly for dash cam but you can charge other things in it but it's like very annoying that there are no like for example for example, like the Apple Watch,

the charger that it comes with is USB-A. Yeah. And so if I want to. That's Apple's fault. Yeah. I know it's Apple's. Yeah, totally. I think everything should switch over to USB-C.

But yeah. But it's the exact same conversation we had about like removing things before, like the yoke, right? Right. Like you're changing, you're eventually want to remove the steering wheel instead you make the steering wheel were arguably worse before you remove it i will say we haven't gotten to my full review yet but i've hit the point where i don't miss the buttons anymore it took me 2 200 miles before i really thought to myself i've stopped missing the buttons interesting without

looking you mean uh the blinkers oh like physically missing yeah sorry i thought you're used to it now i'm fully used to driving not checking the wheel check my mirror i'm hitting the blinker without looking i would like you to mark down every time because you know there's going to be like that situation you come to like once every three years i want you to mark down every time in the future from when one thing is just a little off and you did it wrong because of the yoke. Oh, yeah. I want to see how long that goes.

How long that keeps going. What that situation is. It's going to be like I had to do a K-turn. And turn my headlights on and flash the headlights. Yeah, something weird like that. I just want to know randomly when that happens. Yeah, that's definitely still happening. know like randomly when that happens. Yeah, that's definitely still happening.

But the, the just getting used to it part, 2200 miles. Okay. Interesting. I'm used to it. All right. Good to know.

So, there you go. And last thing I will say too is like the amount of people who just like, we would drive through little small towns and the amount of people

who would just like stare at our car. Oh, interesting. Was like, there'd be like, what? And we had multiple people both at charging stations

and just getting coffee who were like, what car is that? And then we'd be like, it's a Mustang Mach-E and they'd be like, there's a Mustang electric car? We had so many people asking about that. I know there's a lot of people who just don't want a Tesla because they just don't want to be part of the Tesla thing.

That's interesting. There's people who have Android phones because they don't want an iPhone. It's not about what's better about the Android phone, which there are many things that are better about Android phones. I forgot about that, yeah. But there are many people who just don't want an iPhone. That's fascinating. Yeah, there's people like that.

And so the amount of people who would probably buy this Mustang Mach-E because they like the Ford brand and it's not Tesla because a lot of people just don't like Tesla, that's a thing they got going for them too. But we turned so many heads with that car. And it's a Tesla because a lot of people just don't like Tesla. That's a thing they got to go for them too. But we turned so many heads with that car. And it's a pretty good looking car, especially from a 45 degree angle. Yeah, that's a whole other topic. I'll take anything but a Tesla.

That'll go for literally any company out there. I don't like this company, so I'm buying that company. I'm sure there'll be a point where there will be people who like Teslas and won't buy something else even though it might be better for them because they want oh yeah oh absolutely yeah that's an even stronger just right right now in terms of where we're at there are people tesla is the number one right now so people don't like it the same reason like exactly yeah it's the contrarian thing exactly the underdog that The underdog. That's a psychology podcast topic, I think. Maybe you can,

that would be fun to have you on a podcast like that to talk about tech fanboys. Maybe that's our end for this episode. If we're at this point right now. We'll talk about that another time. But it's fun. Yeah, the first day was pretty dang stressful, I will say. We're glad to have you here.

If you're doing a road, thank you. Yeah, we're glad you made glad you i should have known from the beginning when i got placed in the maki that it was going to be the most didn't you pick it we well we debated it you know two thoughts i'm willing to be in pain for the cause well our thoughts though were do we put two people because we picked the teams already was it two people who are you two both drive evs our car and the gas car none of us drive evs so it's like do we put people who are brand new into it or people who are it's beneficial that brandon and i both already have model threes because then we can compare the difference between a similarly priced car right we also thought you had the advantage of just knowing about charging in general yeah that's we too. We put it in there. Which, yeah, totally cool.

I'm glad I had Brandon with me. It was fun, you know. Sick. I'm glad we're all back and we're working on the full recap video so you guys will get all the data. I'm trying to find the best way to package all of this

and explain all of it. If you heard typing, this is the first time all the cars have really sat down and talked. So I think Marques is taking notes at some point. And we have two videos coming out that should be awesome um studio behind the scenes i can't wait for it and then you can just see brandon and i's devolvedness into madness like yeah i can't wait to watch that but anyway that's been that's been it for waveform this week

of course it's tech timber like we're in it we're in it guys there's there's some phones around the corner there's some phones around the corner. There's some stuff coming out. There's going to be a lot more videos coming up, so definitely stay tuned for that and subscribe if you haven't already. But that's been it. Thanks for watching.

Thanks for hanging out. Catch you guys in the next one. Peace. So Waveform was produced by me, Adam Molina. We are partnered with the Vox Media Podcast Network, and our intro outro music was created by Vain Sil.