Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - A Virtual CES, the Samsung Galaxy S21 Event, & EV Cannonball Record Holder Kyle Conner

Episode Date: January 15, 2021

Like a lot of things, CES looks slightly different this year. We take a quick look at some of the tech items making their way into the news from the virtual trade show. Then, we discuss our first virtual smartphone event of 2021, the full Samsung Galaxy S21 line, and the final design of the new S21 itself. Finally, we speak with our special guest Kyle Conner, who was previously featured on last week's episode. He currently holds the EV cross-country cannonball record and tells us how he got into EV's and exactly how he planned for the lengthy trip in the Porsche Taycan. Links: https://twitter.com/wvfrm https://twitter.com/mkbhd https://twitter.com/andymanganell https://www.instagram.com/wvfrmpodcast/ shop.mkbhd.com Music by KamrenB: https://spoti.fi/2WRJOFh Kyle Conner: https://twitter.com/Out_of_Spec https://outofspecstudios.com/ https://bit.ly/3bDS4AS Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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90 days in advance. Perfect for all you forward thinkers and planning gurus. Reserve your Uber ride up to 90 days in advance. Uber Reserve. See Uber app for details. All right. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform Podcast. We're just changing the intro up every time. We're your hosts.

I'm Marques. And I'm Andrew. And in today's episode, we'll react to the full announcement of the Galaxy S21 lineup. It's officially official now. And we also have then special guest Kyle Connor, who was the one that broke the electric cross-country record that we were talking about last week in a Porsche Taycan. So we'll talk about that experience and what it was like for him, because he's also the one who set the previous record in a Tesla Model 3.

So that's a fun chat. But first, it's CES week, isn't it? It is. It doesn't feel like it. It's kind of nice. This is the first CES you've quote-unquote missed in, what, nine years? So yeah, I guess technically you can say that. It is the first CES you've quote unquote missed in what, nine years? So yeah, I guess technically you can say that. It is the first ever digital CES. We don't all want to descend upon one city with 100,000 people internationally going

into one building. So it is digital CES. But I'm not super in the weeds like I usually would be. And I feel like it would be kind of a lot to just be going to virtual CES stuff every day. Yeah, I'm not exactly sure how it's even all working. There's just a bunch of breakout rooms, but I can't imagine they're scheduling them all great

to meet for every creator to have easy days to sort through it all. So the way it kind of is working is there's been a lot of meetings leading up to CES week, so not necessarily happening this week. And then there's a bunch of embargoes during this week. So now the companies are going to make their announcements of their CES showcase, and also people who have been previewed on those things can share their impressions of those announcements.

So just a ton of embargoes and a ton of meetings and stuff happening. Some of them overlap. That's fine. It happens. Yeah. I think my like initial reaction to seeing it kind of play out. I mean, like you said, we haven't been that invested in it this year as we have in previous years. But the first thing I thought of knowing this was going digital was like, I think all the big companies, your Samsungs, your LGs, your Razors are going to be fine they're going to get the same amount of hype as they always get pretty much maybe not as great b-roll of lg making a 50-foot wall of tvs that like tower over you but honestly they're saving money they're probably saving a ton of money um but like all those small companies that you've never really heard of but

happen to just make a really nice booth with something that's really eye-catching and that really just makes a cool two-minute video, they're the ones who are going to hurt from this. I feel the worst for all of them. I don't know how they're going to get their stuff out. Yeah, that's the thing about CES is that was their chance to do more than just an email. that was their chance to do more than just an email. And right now, obviously all they have is email, but before we'd go to CES and we'd be walking on our way from LG to Razer, you have the big staples, you would pass by something that catches your eye,

and that's the whole point of CES, is they have these demos, they hook you in, they've got this giant keyboard, they've got this random segue, whatever it is, and you see it and you try it and you were never going to even go, but you sort of stumbled across it on your way to other things. And that seems very hard to pull off in a virtual way because it's not the same. It's in person. I mean, we've stopped at booths where they said, oh, I've emailed you a couple of times.

You probably have. Yeah, and sometimes things don't just come across as well on an email as they do when you see them right in front of you. I think my other wonder is what's Dr. Fuji doing right now? Do you think he's just doing a 48-hour continuous live stream of his? Bender. What is that even called? Well, that one last year year i guess he had this like fitness tool it was like you stand in this rubber band that would like shake you back and

forth it's like those old 80s like aerobic ab machines i hope dr fuji is doing a live stream that'd be fun that would be that would be amazing is there anything actually good noting from ces have you come across it that's what i tried to dive into the last couple days is like what is really going i think it started when we saw austin post like hey what's your favorite seat tech from ces you've seen and we looked at it and there were not a lot of good answers thank you austin for posting that because i was reading through the replies trying to figure out like what do people care about from ces and nothing really stood out there um i so what i did was i found a bunch of different websites listing their favorite CES items they've seen so far. I think a telltale sign was when I was scrolling through one from Wired.

The best gaming CES gadget was Razer's RGB N95 mask. And I was just like, this is where we are for CES 2021. This is the best gaming accessory. So I did get that that briefing i saw you got the briefing for yeah yeah i read through the whole press release and saw the product photography and everything i was like razor okay if anyone ever consistently makes a splash at ces 100 it's razor right we always know to just check out their booth and see what they're doing they'll have all their other products there but but their random Vaporware CES announcement,

or maybe sometimes it eventually happens, you can count on it. So I was like, all right, Razer has a CES briefing, let's check it out. And sure enough, yeah, it's like the, there's two other products, and then there's this RGB N95 mask, which is exactly what it sounds like.

It's a mask with lights and it's got a Razer logo. And sure enough, that made the headlines, that made the rounds, but putting it in a mask with lights and it's got a razor logo and sure enough that made the headlines that made the rounds but putting it in a best of ces i don't know if that actually makes sense is that i think that's just going to tell what is the the quality at ces this year um i mean i think it's kind of neat but i don't think it should be in gaming accessories but either do you wear that outside like i'm imagining you have lights on your mask. Are you inside wearing it with other people wearing masks that light up?

What is this? My theory on it is I think it is cool and I would never have the confidence to wear it in front of anybody. Heelys. There you go. The Razor mask is the Heelys of the tech world right now. There you go. Glowing endorsement. Print it on Heelys of the tech world right now. There you go.

Glowing endorsement. Print it on the box when you sell it. Marques Brownlee. I said it. The Heelys. Yeah, I think, see, other than that, it's pretty standard CES stuff. You see a bunch of 8K TVs. You see a bunch of robots. You see a bunch of new gaming laptops and gaming accessories and headphones and all that.

That's not that fun to just read articles about. gaming laptops and gaming accessories and headphones and all that that's not just that fun to just like read articles about it's fun to go see and physically test them out exactly and test them all out in a row and be like oh i tried out three different gaming monitors today this one definitely felt the best yeah and don't get me wrong like that stuff is cool like i've seen some of the showcases when i went we'll talk about samsung in a second but when i went in to go shoot the Galaxy S21, I also got a peek at a lot of their CES stuff, and it's like, dude, there's a 90-something inch TV that's 8K.

I think it's micro LED. It's got a 99.99% screen to bezel ratio. It's incredible. It's just like how much of a video, what can I even say about this? It's like, look at it. It's sweet, right? Okay, yeah, moving on.

A lot of that is more fun for us when we go and we just kind of tweet about what we're doing on the show floor the whole day. And you're kind of following the footsteps. And the other thing I think about with those giant TVs is like every year when we go to see them, you can like feel the people shoulder to shoulder on you trying to wade through the crowd to get one picture and that just makes me feel disgusting it's different yeah it's a lot different yeah um i will though pull one thing out of ces that does seem cool and go for it would hands down be the thing we go like uh like must go check out if we were there. Last year we saw TCL with their rollable phone, but it was like a paper model. This year they did a new, I wouldn't call it a model, but like a display case of how the rollable screen works. Instead of physically being in like a phone prototype model, just imagine like a display case with two pillars and then the screen kind of like a scroll, and the display case would pull

and push the pillars back and forth, out and in with the working display, I believe, at least on it. So could you say we're one step closer to a rollable phone? That's exactly what I would call it. But it's weird because it's like you're not seeing it in the body.

So I guess we had a model prototype followed by the working screen, but now that has, because obviously that display case has a ton of electronics underneath it and stuff that couldn't fit into a phone. Yeah, that's really interesting to me. So a lot of times you see these concepts sort of quickly come to life when they have any sort of traction.

You realize, oh, you know, this was really popular. People really liked the idea. Let's put the dollars in R&D and work on it. And to me, you know, every year at CES, we see all kinds of crazy screens. They're like bent and twisted around a pole. And there'll be a screen that's like bent in half over a cube. And then a screen that's, you know, the size of a table. There'll be a hundred foot wall of screens, like all this crazy stuff. The fact that the rollable phone has gone from a paper display idea to a rolling display not connected to a phone

is a little slower than I expected, and I wonder if it's harder than they anticipated because getting phone pieces to cooperate with that form factor sounds really hard. I mean, if you think about it, two years ago we were all mesmerized by LG's rolling TV and that was gigantic, like three or four feet wide and even just the fact that now we have it

in this like around one foot box that rolls, where the screen's showing the whole time and rolls sideways, like that feels like a big step but yes, when last year you saw a phone model that you held in your hand and kind of got the feeling of what it looks like, I think that made us just feel like we were way closer to it than we really were.

Yeah, we were thinking, oh, all we gotta do is put the phone inside this screen. We just need the screen there and the screen in that and it's good. Yeah, that'll be interesting to keep an eye on. I saw a couple rolling phones. I'll obviously be trying to get my hands on one this year. We'll see who ends up making an entire working rolling phone first seems like it's tcl

versus lg right now okay and i want to say tcl seems like they've shown more off so far um i have to also say tcl always seems to be like one of the underdog booths at ces it's like not quite samsung or lg but they always have a huge booth with a ton of stuff and all the stuff they have there is like similar specs to all the stuff that is in samsung and lg it's just they're not as well known of a brand and they might not be pushing the limits quite as more but they're making a uh they make some good stuff over there they're not as well known they're not as well known of a, but they are a sneaky, huge company. Yeah.

So, all right. That's a little CES bug. But we did, of course, have our first event of the year, our first actual, like, unveiling, which I think technically puts it at the top of our power rankings to start the year, which is Samsung Unpacked January 2021 Galaxy S20 series, S21 series, gets unveiled. Okay, what are your thoughts?

I've had the phones here, I've held them already. You're seeing them for the first time. You said you'd hold your judgment on the spec sheet till you see it. Yeah, so I guess let's talk about design first. Yeah, what do you- I think design to me- I'm gonna hand it to you right now. This is the, just S20, right? S21 plus right there it to you yeah this is the just s20 right s21

plus right there that's 21 this is plus i think so actually let me hold it maybe that's i feel like this is the smaller one that might be the small one they're kind of hard to tell apart until you hold them 6.2 on the s21 i think this is just regular s21 okay right there you go okay it's the lilac color actually yeah the back is it's a phantom violet phantom violet is what they call it official name just that name is really funny it's like super aggressive slash super cutesy like phantom violet powerpuff girl yeah that would be like the that would be the new age grown-up powerpuff girl like comic book um it's nice i'm not a huge fan of this purple color violet color uh but the gold accents make it look good i do actually really i like how it

rounds into the edges you were mentioning how like if you just looked like if i put my two fingers on both of where the edges go down on the camera bump, it just looks like a really thick phone. Right. But I would be okay with it being that thick the whole way around. But then it like melts into a thinner phone. Yeah. And looks like sort of, it's like an overlap basically.

I talked about it in the video. I was trying to describe it. I think it's kind of polarizing. I think you see a lot of different reactions of people going, wow, that's a huge, weird looking camera bump. It's up in the corner and doesn't look like anything I've seen. I like, one, that it's unique.

I don't think I've seen anything else that looks like this. Two, I like that it's a very well considered blend into the rest of the phone because on that violet one you're holding, that gold color of the camera bump turns into the color of the side rails of the phone. So it's actually very

well i was looking forward to other like color combos just like that like make a body one color make the color on the rails another color that would have been cool uh so i i kind of like it i was digging it i think a lot of people looked at it and said whoa that's weird it's different i don't like it but we say that about a lot of camera bumps and they end up being kind of fine so yeah one thing i do really like about them in terms of functionality standpoint is that the bump is majority metal, and the cameras are a little recessed down. So if you're putting the phone on the table, you're not scratching the glass that's covering the lenses.

And probably not smudging it quite as much either, which just seems nice. Less times you have to wipe your camera off to get a sharp picture. It's a nice little underrated design tweak right there. Other than that, the Ultra just seems like too big of a phone for me, but the black color is so good. Okay, let me just give my two cents on the Phantom Black, right? Number one, I like Matt Black. I don't know if I've ever mentioned this.

Wear your royalties on this phone. Like, in this video. Like, I don't know if I've ever said this out loud in a mic before, but I'm a big fan of Matt Black. My car is Matt Black, and I named it Phantom, just for some perspective. So I'm holding this Matt Black, the Phantom Black Galaxy S21 Ultra.

Huge fan right off the bat. As soon as I took it out the box, I was like, this is sick. This is a great looking phone, a great looking color. Very curious to see how it holds up over time against fingerprints because matte black, matte gray,

dark phones in general with these like matte finishes notoriously look the worst with a bunch of fingerprints on them. So if it was Matt White, we wouldn't see any of this. We'll see. It's going to be about a week before my review. We'll see how it holds up. So far, it doesn't look too bad. Like initial trying to put fingerprints on it didn't seem to get as crazy. I always faintly see some stuff based on angles. Like

Matt always has a weird angle compared with wherever your light source is coming from where you can see things you just don't see normally. But I mean, like I would obviously take that over a mirror finish any day of the week. Mirror finish, you can see fingerprints if you've literally never touched the phones. So yeah, color. I think the only other thing I want to say about color is

they quickly glossed over it and it probably took us like 20 minutes to confirm. But there's special colors you can only order on samsung.com and not necessarily that i think it's titanium silver and brown no titanium navy and brown yeah right so the cool thing about those is the camera bump is carbon fiber randomly yeahly. Yeah. But just from Samsung.com though. Yeah, so apparently the, if you order from Samsung.com, it doesn't cost anything extra to get the custom colors, but it takes four to five weeks extra to ship. I do think the colors look nice.

I think the carbon fiber camera bump looks sweet, and I think it's a travesty that they don't offer Phantom Black with the black carbon fiber camera bump looks sweet, and I think it's a travesty that they don't offer Phantom Black with the black carbon fiber camera bump. That would have been nice. Right? Like, I feel like that's just a huge missed opportunity. I get they're trying to do special production, like limited edition, but it's a travesty.

All right. Well, we've talked about design a lot. I think the big feature, the big story with these phones is actually the price and just sort of what they've done with the whole lineup. So let me just break it down. Galaxy S21 lineup is three phones, S21, S21 Plus, S21 Ultra. Last year, the lineup started at $999 and went up to $1,299. This year, the lineup starts at $799 and went up to $1299. This year, the lineup starts at $799 and goes up to $1199. So drop everything by $200. So that's really great right off the bat, just for all the starting prices. But if you're Samsung, to pull that off, you have to find some things

to tweak and to change to make that possible. So clearly the phones are better than last year. The Snapdragon 888 chip, you've got 8GB of RAM in the S21, 12 to 16 gigs of RAM in the S21 Ultra. That's sweet. They've got these big, gorgeous 120 hertz adaptive refresh rate displays, awesome, really thin bezels, hole punch cutout cameras, triple camera system on the S21, which is a main ultra wide and a telephoto 3X. And then the S21 Ultra's got four cameras on the back. which is a main, ultra-wide, and a telephoto 3X. And then the S21 Ultra's got four cameras on the back. It's a main, it's an ultra-wide, it's a 3X telephoto, and a 10X telephoto, which will combine to give you that sweet space zoom again.

It's a periscope camera. But there are a couple things to note that I think end up getting you that lower price. One, no expandable storage. This is a little bit minor. I think, I think there's going to be some headlines about it, but I think there's going to be some headlines about it, but no more micro SD card slot on the Samsung flagship. So you're, you're, you're clocked in at whatever you buy. So keep that in mind. Two, the S21, just the smaller one is plastic. So it's not going to match the glass on the S21 Plus. So that's a little bit of a noteworthy point, and I think when you hold them, you kind of feel it. Like the S21 is lighter.

It's a little bit of a different finish. You might not ever know if no one told you, but it's true. Yeah, I think that's a totally personal thing. That doesn't have to be a downgrade you can look at that and say i'm fine with that there are people who might think it's a downgrade but i mean holding it i'm totally fine with it i would not be i would not prefer that over a glass or glass over that if i were given the choice yeah i think there's like we've had this connotation about plastic being cheapo or whatever and in like a 1400 phone it starts to seem weird that it's plastic.

And I don't even know if there's a good reason for that. But yeah, in a $799 phone, I'm okay with that. It's good plastic, at least. It's not like $300 Pocophone plastic, which I was still not that... I wasn't upset with that because it was $300. It's cheaper. That plastic, I can barely tell. If it's less breakable,

I could maybe say I would prefer it almost. Yeah. And then, yeah, I think it'll be, you know, there's a 4,000 milliamp hour battery in the small one, 4,800 in the S21 Plus, 5,000 in the big phone. It's not really a whole bunch of other critical things that are missing.

It's just like, oh, okay, now it's plastic and now it's like a slightly less max storage because no expandable, but still IP68, still really well built. I think it's a good set of things that they've done to the phones to land at this new price. I love it. I think it's well done. The question for me is, I'm holding the Ultra here like this. This is the phone I'm going to put my SIM card in and start using right off the bat, is how good are the cameras? Because these are some new camera stuff going on in here. They looked pretty good for my first hour of playing

with the very initial hands-on. Now that I've taken it out the box, they look pretty good, but we'll be testing that for the review. And yeah. That phone's gigantic. I'm just looking at it in your hand and it is enormous. It's such a good-looking phone. It's because seeing it from the top,

so we're sitting across from each other, so you're holding it, and the camera bump's facing me, and you just catch the glimpse of the camera bump melting into the edge, and it just looks so thick and just so big. It's a big phone. I honestly think I would, if I had the choice, I would just go for the regular S21 here.

I'm not like, I like bigger phones, but some of them are getting too big and now all the smallest versions are almost as big as my... Big phone? Yeah. It's not that much smaller than my Pixel 4 XL. Yeah, and that was called the XL literally extra large the Excel literally actually look if you take the forehead off it's literally the same

yeah screen size probably yeah Wow yeah okay so s21s got your I mean I'm I will see so there's also some new software going on there's a new one UI 3 which is on the latest version of Android. So there's some slightly tweaked UI stuff going on that I got to give a shot. Some new animations, some new stuff here and there. I think it'll be fine. Still, I'm not seeing a gigantic major difference in the software, but I like the tweaks and updates. And what else was I going to say? Oh, the S Pen. Okay. They added S Pen support to the S21 Ultra. Yeah, we talked a lot about this last time,

but now we actually got to, I don't think we had any renders of what the case looked like. Right. So we knew that the Note was always like the dedicated S Pen phone. The S21 Ultra now can work with any previous S Pen, but they've also made a new thicker S Pen that works with the S21 Ultra now can work with any previous S Pen, but they've also made a new, thicker S Pen

that works with the S21. It's not a great experience. It's fine for me. I don't really use an S Pen very often, but for me, my number one use case was pop it out of the Note and start writing on the screen to take notes, and it takes a note in Samsung Notes.

It doesn't work that way on the S21 because you're using it passively, right? It's just a Bluetooth stylus. So it's just sort of clipped into this rubber case on the side. You pop it out, the phone doesn't know you took it out until you start like using the screen. So that feature is gone from this phone. Second of all, it doesn't pop into the phone itself. So it's like you need to buy a $40 S Pen, and of course you need to store it somewhere, so you sort of buy this $40 case. So you spent, I think it's a $30 case,

so you spent $70 now on the whole thing just to attach your S Pen to the side of the phone. And yeah, it's just not the most elegant, like well done solution. If you're so into having, number one, a super high-end Samsung phone, and number two, you gotta have a stylus. This is an objectively worse experience

at both of those things. Just get the Note. Yeah, I would just wait for Note 21. I can't imagine you're that dire of a need. If you're in that dire of a need of a stylus, buy that cheap Moto G stylus and wait till the Note 21 comes out in probably August. It's crazy.

I would just say get the Note 20 Ultra now because the price is already going to start going down now. Do you think they're only doing the S Pen in the large one because it's their luxury model, their top-end model, and they want as many accessories for it as possible? Or is it just because they assume S Pen works best on a bigger screen and that's the biggest screen? Good question. I think they assume S Pen works best on a bigger screen and that's the biggest screen? Good question. I think they added S Pen support to the Ultra because they

need to do as many things as possible to justify the higher price of the Ultra over the S21 Plus. And right now that difference is, it's a couple things that sort of add up to a $200 difference. There's no one major thing I point at and go, that's why you need this phone. The 10X periscope lens, right? Okay, well, how much do you really need the extra additional telephoto for your Zoom photography? Not that much, right?

But it's there. The sweet colors, cool, they're there. The slightly larger display, it's 6.7 versus 6.8 inches it's there right it's a 1440p at 120 hertz which i didn't even mention it's only 1080p on the two smaller phones uh and it's also a 10 to 120 hertz adaptive refresh rate instead of 48 to 120 so it's slightly bigger see it's a bunch of little things this is like uh if the s21 was a gtx 3080 that this is the gtx 3090 it's like yeah you're buying this because you're willing to just throw down extra money for like knowing you have the best thing no yeah knowing it's the best like

the the s21 plus is going to do every single thing any person could ever want to do, and the other stuff's going to do it a little bit better, and you have spec bragging rights, pretty much. So if one day you end up being like, yeah, you know what, I kind of do want an S Pen, you just know that you can add it, and that's something that you can... You can drop $80 and have a poor S Pen experience. So good for you, you have that extra feature,

but yeah, like I said, I think it's just a bunch of smaller things that add up to eventually be worth a separate phone so they've made it the ultra all right i have one last thing i want to say quickly and i feel like i've already seen cases for this and they don't do it but all all the cases on this should somehow melt into the camera bump and then flushly sit, like connect to the way it connects to the rails. I can't believe Samsung's case didn't do that. I know.

It's really surprised me. It would look so clean if it just was flush with the camera bump and then you just had one flush back of a phone. Yeah, definitely. Whoever's making cases for the S21 right now, give me that flat back. It's gonna be sick.

Somebody's gotta make it. I wonder, Lou, what is his case company lou later case later case later case better that's it's a lot of engineering for a smaller company but go for it somebody somebody please make a nice flush case for the back of this phone i remember uh the d brand grip case got close last year with the S21. Yeah, it does. I mean, the dbrand grip case, though, is meant for a ton of protection. So I'm not going to expect something with a huge amount of protection to go that flush with it.

I'm thinking of a thinner case like a later case would probably do it, more of a minor protection. Prepare your inbox. I bet they're out there uh last thing about the s21 line none of these will come with a charging brick in the box this is the new normal i know we've used that phrase a lot lately but uh yeah it sort of started with the iphone 12 this environmental angle of we're protecting you from all this extra stuff in the landfills we only have one planet let's save it look i'm all for that but at the same time if i spend 1199

on the ultra phone and i want all the extras and all the best stuff i don't know i feel like you should just throw a fast charger in there maybe but. But this doesn't come with one. It will wireless charge at 15 watts, which is okay. And it will wired charge quickly if you happen to have a fast charger already. Quick question. The last couple Samsung phones, did the charging brick, was it USB-A or C? A, I believe it was A.

So this went down the same, like my attempt at defending Apple was A. So this went down the same, like, my attempt at defending Apple was, you probably have this wire already, but they gave you a C to lightning cable in there, which not a lot of people have bricks that have C connections. And Samsung did the same thing. They did a C to C connection. So it's...

So it comes with a C to C cable in the box, and most of the previous people buying samsung phones have a usb a charger yeah so just like roof apple and samsung both here use this excuse and then give a cable that doesn't fit to their excuse you know what's really interesting xiaomi gave an option to include a free charger for those who request it with the Mi 11. I think the easiest, so like, first of all, that's great. I think a lot of places should do that. I could see that being a logistics and communications nightmare of having to, whatever. But include a coupon in the box to go to a Samsung store or your carrier or your Apple

store and get your free charger. A recyclable coupon. Yeah. Like it would just, it would take a, it would still eliminate all the waste. It would not, I'm sure you can find a way to charge your phone in a like not ideal solution for a week or so that you could get to the, get to wherever. But that, that seems like the easiest option to not have to deal with people calling in to get one

or I don't know. This kind of brings me to the topic of how quickly these OEMs can copy the Apple trend. And I'll land on a question, ready? So when we saw the headphone jack get deleted, it was like a full gap year of everyone making fun of Apple before the next year they all went, you know, we have been working on wireless headphones. And then they get rid of the headphone jack. And then I saw, you know, the small box with the iPhone 12. That was September, October,

right? Already in January of the next year, there's several phones out who have done the same thing with the same environmental angle. That's a couple months delay. When Apple gets rid of the port on the phone, what is the lag time there? So the port one's a way bigger scale. If I were trying to think of something small, like charger in the box is an easy one. In fact, we had rumors of Apple not including charger in the box. And before we confirmed that, we had rumors of other companies already following suit. So I'm waiting for the day where there's rumors of Apple getting rid of something as the first rumor, and then an Android product gets rid of that thing and releases before the Apple product that does that release.

It's like that preemptive no cop, no hold phone or whatever. They quote unquote copy Apple before Apple even does it in the first place. It does happen. Well, we do have Samsung giving us a little smart tags product before Apple's rumored smart tags come out. I think we're going to test it by putting one on Mac's collar and just letting him out outside the studio.

Go chase some of those cats out there. See how long it takes for us to find them. Yeah, no, we did get some other products. There's also Samsung's new Galaxy Buds Pro wireless noise canceling earbuds. I have those as well in the studio and we'll be checking them out. Let me know if you guys tweeted us what you guys want to see separate reviews of. Definitely let us know, but we're in the review process now. We're testing all this stuff. We've got the phones here at the

studio. It's a good time. So let's take a quick break. We'll come back and we'll talk about Porsche Taycan, cross-country driving, and a lot more. Be right back. This holiday season, the Center for Addiction and Mental Health is counting on your support. CAMH is on a mission to make better mental health care

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Like the holiday season, Popeye's $25 Festive Family Box deal will be over before you know it. Love that chicken from Popeyes. All right, Andrew. Yeah. Remember how last week we talked about that cannonball record of the fastest time driving across the country in an electric car? Yep. So the person who did that, he actually did it both in a Model 3 and then in a Taycan. He also happens to have a podcast and a great mic

and is fun to talk to. And we talked about it. So we actually broke down a lot of like the strategy that went into his planning, which was how far he would go between stops, how much he would charge the Taycan. Just how he did it. Exactly. How he pulled it off. A little bit of comparison to the Model 3. It was a fun conversation. I really enjoyed the behind the scenes. I've seen a lot of videos about how they do it in gas cars, but getting a little window into how they did it in an electric car. And I actually learned a lot about the Electrify American network and how fast they're building. So it's a really fun conversation. Let's go ahead and listen. All right, Kyle, Connor, thank you for joining us on Waveform.

Of course. Thanks so much for having me. So we talked about on the previous episode of Waveform, the cannonball run set the record set by the Porsche Taycan for all electric vehicles. But you reached out to us. You want to talk more about it. We're super happy to. So I'm glad you have the time. First of all, what's your background? How did you get into cars and EV evs and and what's the uh what's the run like yeah so a lot to unpack there a huge car enthusiast since i was a kid but then started to actually get into it as a job so like you review tech products and things like this i review cars on my side so which is really fun uh Crazy to think that it can be a job, but we review everything on our side. We have a little media company called Out of Spec Studios. We have multiple channels,

but our largest channels are electric vehicle outlets. And so we really have gone full in-depth with really nerdy testing of electric vehicles from range testing to charging curves and things like this. And so I had a Porsche Taycan coming up on loan from Porsche to do some testing with, and we had worked with them to get the right spec for what we needed, which is like the aero wheels, which you never find on a Porsche, of course, because everyone wants the big wheels that look good. And I talked to our friends at Porsche and I said, hey, do you mind if I just shred this car across the country? And they said... Oh, so that was with a loaned car? It's with a press car, which is even crazier that we didn't even do it with an owned vehicle. And

this is like sort of pushing the limits as to what's allowed, because as you know, you get cars to review. They need to stay perfect. They're going to other people. So I was amazed that Porsche said yes. Of course, officially, they can't condone any event that's speeding. All they allowed for us to do was to go across the country and put 8,000 miles on their Taycan. And that's basically what we did. Okay, so do you do you drive an EV for your daily car? Yeah, I actually drive a BMW i3 every day. My girlfriend drives a Model 3, which we switch on and off depending. And I have a little electric smart car

to cruise around the city in, which is a blast. Nice. I've had a little fun in the i3. I think I tried it at CES maybe two, three years ago and they told me they had these automatic braking systems. They were like, I want you to drive at this concrete barrier and floor it. And so I did.

I floored it, and the car broke by itself, and that was fun. It was a fun time. Yeah, love testing safety systems. The i3 is a seriously underrated car because it looks really weird, but the engineering is just so cool. Not sure what BMW is doing these days. Nothing interesting, unfortunately. Yeah.

All right, well, before we talk EVs, I just want to talk about what Cannonball is. I mentioned I sort of dove in this YouTube rabbit hole. From what I understand, Cannonball is a point A to point B, as fast as possible race. That's kind of all you need to know, but you're going from New York to California, and you have any number of modifications allowed to your car. You basically just have to just drive as long as you possibly can and get there as fast as you can. Is that accurate? Yeah, extremely accurate. The traditional start and end points that most people are using for cannonballs right now is Red Ball Garage in Manhattan on East 31st

Street, all the way to Portofino Hotel Marina in Redondo Beach, California. It's the traditional car and driver cannonball route from the 70s. There's a lot of history there. And the times are getting insanely low. I mean, people are averaging over 110 miles an hour, including stops across the country. I mean, it is truly insane. And so that didn't really interest me so much. I said, you know, I don't want to go to jail, but I do love electric cars and wanted to push the limits. So a year and a half ago, my friend Matthew and I jumped in a Model 3 that I owned at the time. It was a long range rear wheel drive, the most efficient configuration. And we tried to beat the electric record, and we did.

We just beat that again with the Taycan. The electric record is really interesting to me. In the gas cars, essentially, you can go for... We know how a gas car works. You can just go for a while. You know how many miles per gallon you'll get. You're at a set rate of speed. You're trying to be efficient. We'll even talk about some of the modifications to the cars a little bit later. But for a gas car, road trips are a process. You have to think

about where you're going to charge. You have to think about how much you're going to charge. You're talking about charging curves earlier, how fast you charge at different rates. It's a little complex, actually, to be able to pull off the best possible EV run. So what do you think was the hardest set of considerations? Was it planning the trip and where you would charge when? Yeah, you're totally right. The EV runs are just a giant math problem, and you're calculating everything along the way. One of the hard things ahead of the drive is you're not sure of your efficiency on each leg. There's a lot of elevation changes that

you can kind of account for, but also weather and headwind really affect a car's efficiency. And as you know, and I'm sure most of your audience knows, electric cars really only charge quickly from, let's say, dead to 40%. And then they start to slow down there. So we prioritized multiple charging stops stops more than we needed, but then only charged up to about 50, 60% of the battery pack and then went to the next one. And it's actually faster for us to stop more often as long as the chargers are right off the highway,

which they are, and charge only when the car can accept maximum power. The big story here with the Taycan, I think, is it's the first time the electric record has been beaten not in a Tesla, because we're off of the Tesla supercharger network with no access to it. Have you experienced Electrify America yet, by the way? I was going to say, this surprised me. We do have an Electrify America charger near us at the studio, and we also have a Tesla supercharger. So,

we don't have so much of a difference near me. But if I were to drive straight south, it would be a while before I found another Electrify America charger. I think there's a pair of them on 95 South in New Jersey, like 45 miles from me. So, there's a lot more of the Tesla supercharger network. I guess, yeah, I'm curious what your experience was planning around that network versus the way you planned with the Model 3. Yeah, you're absolutely right. I think Tesla's been at this for, let's say, eight years of installing fast charging infrastructure, and EA's only been at it for two. Certainly, there are physically more superchargers than there are electrify america

dc fast chargers right now but the rollout rate of electrify america is far surpassing the rollout rate of superchargers so they're kind of just dumping them everywhere and so uh the the first priority was major highway routes you have to connect dots to dots so what are corridors dc to boston and then you have los angeles to san francisco what are corridors? DC to Boston. And then you have Los Angeles to San Francisco. You know, the big ones where EVs will travel. They got that done within the first six months. And then it was, let's do more obscure routes, routes like cross country routes. There's two of them that they have. A third one's coming online now. And it's happened so quickly that most Tesla owners, especially, but most people don't realize that you can get a non-Tesla across the country because they've just plastered this network across the country in record time.

And that was the story we wanted to tell. We wanted to say, look, on these long distance routes, I-80, I-70 across the northern route from New York to Los Angeles, there's chargers every 100 miles. And it's all Electrify America. And we were like, it's faster power than Tesla. It's up to 350 kilowatts. Tesla is mostly up to 150 on the cross-country routes. The new ones will do 250 kilowatt version three superchargers. And part of it's like a CCS success story, which is let's show that the public network's actually getting better. I love that being a success story and not a let's show that the public network's actually getting better. I love that being a success story and not a fail, because we need the competition. We need that to be built up. It's just that it's so new. That is fascinating. I have a bunch of nerdy questions for you, just about the run itself. So you start off from New York.

I'm assuming you have pretty much all of your stops planned on the map before you start? For this particular drive, yes. I do a lot of EV road tripping just in general. We have a whole series that we do trips, and I never plan those. But for something that's as important as the run, yep, we knew every single station we'd be stopping at. Did you end up hitting every single station the way you expected, or were there any scares or diversions at the last minute?

You get a little too low, got to stop early yeah part of the the plan we created like this charging docket we had backup options along the way whether a charger wouldn't work some of them had other dc fast chargers nearby like an ev go station that had slightly less power that would have been okay but no it went perfectly. I would say we had a lot of bugs with charging, with software, with handshake communications. But occasionally we'd get to a charger, have to unplug, try a different unit and plug back in. It doesn't happen very often on the supercharger network. It's much more reliable, but it does sometimes. This was certainly less reliable, I would say, than the supercharger network. But yeah, that was it. Every stop we hit pulled in between 1% and 4% on average. And

the best way to increase your range in an EV, if it doesn't look like you're going to make it there, is you just drop the speeds down a bit. Right. Huh. 1% to 4% on average is scary to me. I got down to one mile left in my car a while ago, which was 0.3 percent, and that was a little bit scary. So you charged up to 50 percent usually because that's how you charge fastest. How many miles did you get from those 50 percent? Were you, I guess, stopping like literally every hour? Yeah, this is a good question too. Basically, like literally every hour? Yeah, this is a good question too. Basically, Taycan is EPA rated, I think at 203 miles for the 4S version we were driving. However, I had done some range testing ahead of the drive in preparation to say, okay, we do 70 mile per

hour EV range tests. And the car did about 280 miles on the highway, which is amazing that it far surpassed EPA. Most cars, especially Tesla, it's impossible to match your range at highway speed. So, yeah, 50% charge cruising at the speeds we were cruising pretty much was roughly 100 miles. A hundred miles. OK, I mean, yeah, that it's not think, like, you don't necessarily have to drive seven hours straight before you charge to get the best possible record. If you were to do this again in, like, a future EV, what would you prioritize as, like, the number one way to lower your time? Would it be charging speed, or would it be range time between charges?

Yeah, the range actually doesn't matter too much because there's enough charging infrastructure at this point where really pulling off the highway to stop and charge is not a big thing. Our average charging time was around 12 to 15 minutes, maybe 16 minutes for the Taycan. So very often, but quick stops. The biggest thing is how much range you have but after the charging curve drops so once you come off of peak charging power how much range do you have at that point really determines this drive not how much range is at a hundred percent because again it could take an hour and a half to full charge a car in some cases right i. Yeah, I'm such, so the modifications I saw in my YouTube rabbit hole dive were like some of the winners of the Taycan, or the, sorry, the Cannonball run, they would have like these

modified gigantic gas tanks in the backseat of their car. So it'd be two drivers, they'd switch on and off and they'd have like 150 gallons of gas in the car and they would just cruise for hours in a row. I kind of wonder if something like, you they would just cruise for hours in a row. I kind of wonder if something like maybe the Tesla Roadster, maybe you get to something with three or four times the range of what you were accomplishing in the Taycan, would cut down the amount of times you need to charge. Maybe that first run to the first charger is 500 miles instead of 100. Yeah, this certainly makes a difference. And this is

something we've calculated because in the Tesla world, one of the hot topics is, is the Model 3 the fastest car or is it a Model S long range plus with more available energy capacity in the battery pack? And because this drive is so long, I actually don't think you get that much of an advantage up front. Certainly some, if you can start with a big tank, essentially a lot of energy in the battery pack. But what really matters is charging speed and for how long can you pull those speeds. And I really think the ultimate car, again, we don't know the exact charging curve, we can extrapolate it though, is going to be the Lucid air might be the real next thing now tesla also has their plaid model s with uh you know 520 miles of range and a whole bunch of

great specs that are claimed the problem is uh the infrastructure from new york to los angeles for tesla is significantly lower power than the electrifyify America network. Certainly some routes like New York, or I should say from LA to San Francisco, the Tesla might demolish it. We don't know for sure. But at least the cross country route where you're going through Missouri and Nebraska, they're not putting version three superchargers at any time soon, I don't think. Right. That's a great point. So your experience was you found mostly the new high poweredpowered chargers along your route. Not just found, but you planned based on seeing those super high-powered chargers through all of those middle America states already. Yeah, I think we had 27 individual stops. It might be 26. I haven't counted.

But every single one of those except for one was 350 kilowatts and the one that wasn't 350 kilowatts was baker california it's a brand new site they're getting them there but it was 150 kilowatts and we only stopped there for four minutes so you know it's not uh we had the best charging situation here the one of the challenges we faced though was the winter time of course evs are less efficient in the winter but i think you mentioned this on last week's podcast too once the car is warmed up it doesn't really matter um so you know evs are very inefficient in cold weather for short trips but once they burn the energy to heat everything up all you're really doing is maintaining it and if anything it led to

potentially faster charging speeds because the car didn't have to work to keep itself cool every charging session. Right. I love that. The success story makes me really happy, because now this competition spins up and Tesla's building a lot more. But also, if we just talk about the difference between driving a Model 3 across the country and a Taycan across the country, as much as I love the Taycan's interior, it is a little lower, a little sportier, a little firmer. Did you find that to affect your drive at all? Did you arrive at the end of the Model 3 trip a little more comfortable?

Yeah. So I think ride quality in itself, the Porsche wins because it has softer dampers. So it's able to soak up the bumps. But seat comfort is a whole nother topic of conversation. Also rear seat comfort, because we had three drivers, so we rotated out of the back seat and this is where we had some problems. There's different spec of seats you can get in the Taycan. We had the 14 way powered with massaging option. The massage helped a lot, but still the bottom seat comfort was quite hard. So yeah, we definitely

were feeling it at the end. Hard to remember at the end of the Model 3 drive if we were in a lot of pain. Something about the Model 3 seats in particular, I've owned a Model S as well. The Model 3 seats are just so good. They're not fancy, they don't massage you, but they just work. Yeah, they're less sporty, but more pillowy. So like in a sportier drive, they might be less ideal, but in a cross country drive, I imagine it's actually kind of great. It's probably a good sign that you don't remember it. Right. Yeah. I think that's probably accurate. You know, the Porsche has other tech, which is good, like really good lane centering and adaptive cruise. We didn't really use a lot of these things. Neither did we use

autopilot on the Tesla run that much, only if we were in traffic, because typically the speeds are higher than what the Tesla system allows. But also when you're driving quite quickly, you need to stay 100% focused and you really don't want the distraction of the driver assistance systems. Awesome. Well, I guess my last question to you would be, do you think that you will try to do this again? Because this is sort of an unofficial record, but as far as we know, that's the fastest anyone's ever gone on that route in an electric car. Do you think you will be up to try again with your fellow drivers when maybe a more efficient

long-range EV comes out? Are you up to it? Well, hard to predict the future, but I think at this point, I'll probably stay out of it for a little bit. I know of 12 attempts, 10 for sure, but likely 12 to break our previous record, the one that we just broke. And so there are people out there that are trying this.

And really from my point of view is, I don't really care to hold the record. You know, I don't need to hold that. That's not a personal pride thing. What I really like is just the technology being pushed. So as long as there's other people that are telling the Tesla story, telling the CCS story and making sure that they're doing the runs properly and safely and things like this, then I'm quite happy staying out of it, but certainly we'll be writing about it when, when those happen. Awesome. Well, Kyle, thank you for, for all the information, of course. And I, if you, Hey, if you ever do try it again, you're invited back on the podcast to tell us about how it went. Thanks for, uh, thanks for talking to I can cross country trip with us.

Yeah. Thanks Marquez. Thanks to you guys. Love the show. And we'll be listening in on the next one for sure. Awesome. Thank you again to Kyle Connor. If you guys want to check out more of what he does, you can find him online at Out of Spec Studios. But he also hosts a weekly podcast at Inside EVs.

So if you want to nerd out way more about not just Tesla, but all kinds of EVs, more than we do here on waveform we'll have all the links in the show notes so you can check that out as well either way that's been it thanks for listening we'll catch you guys next week waveform is brought to you in part with studio 71 and our intro outro music was created by cameron barlow