B/F: The Drive Thru #14

• Ford Performance Enters Crate EV Motor Fray With Eluminator
• Ford is ending production in India and taking a $2 billion hit in the process
• GM, Ford halt some production as chip shortage worsens
• Ford Mustang Mach-E Gears Up for Police Duty

• Lamborghini and Ferrari are dealing with changing times by building scary-fast hybrids
• EV start-up Rivian beats Tesla, GM, Ford as first automaker to produce electric pickup
• 2022 Lucid Air Dream Edition R Exclusive First Drive: An Absolute Mic Drop
• The All-Electric Lucid Air Just Received A Staggering EPA Range Rating Of 520 Miles
• Alpha Motors Wolf Debuts As Real-World Prototype, Launches Q4 2023
• The Cupra UrbanRebel Concept Is The Electric Hot Hatch The World Needs Right Now
• The RML Short Wheelbase V-12 Is a Splendid New-Old Classic Ferrari GT

• Verstappen penalised for Monza clash with Hamilton

• Cosplaying a Civic: Twitter roasts the new 2022 Subaru WRX
• 2023 Acura Integra: Everything We Know About the Compact Sporty Car
• Nissan Skyline Four-Door Coupe And SUV Could Arrive: Report
• 2022 Toyota GR 86 Named Official Pace Car for NASA Championships Presented by Toyo Tires

• No Reserve: 1993 Geo Metro LSi Convertible
• AMERICA'S SCRAPPED MULTIPLA, THE SATURN CV-1
• Magnus Walker, F40 and Countach... VANS!
• 'Rust Valley Restorers' is holding a massive auction of tonnes of cars
• 5 OBSOLETE FEATURES AND THE LAST CARS TO HAVE THEM
• The World Has Finally Stopped Using Leaded Gasoline. Algeria Used The Last Stockpile
• Here’s A Close Look At Gordon's Volvo P1800 With Three Million Miles
• Exploring the Saab Heritage Car Museum

175 car “barn-find” in London

• 'UFO' seen on Florida Turnpike turns heads
• Astro Flyer? Life sized “red wagon” conversion

• Grosjean set for Andretti Autosport move in 2022
• Crash Spa-Francorchamps Fórmula W Series 2021

• Ever Wonder If You Could Outrun a Police Pursuit? You Can Now Pay to Try.
• Volkner Mobil Performance S Is A $2.4M Motorhome With Room For A Bugatti

• Opel Rocks-e Squeezes More Range Out of Ami EV
• Former Ford, Honeywell executive Christine Feuell to become CEO of Chrysler brand

• A West Virginia city is taking a Tesla patrol car for a test drive
• Tesla obtains patent on its wild idea to use lasers as windshield wipers
• Another Tesla in autopilot hits parked emergency vehicle (state trooper)

• Beetle-Style EV on the Way, Whether VW Wants It or Not
• VW ID.3 EV Hatch Will Be a Police Car in Germany
• VW Unveils ID. Buzz as a Robotaxi Prototype
• VW ID.Life Concept Is an Electric Mini-SUV That Will Eventually See Production
• F1 TO DROP MGU-H, SETTING UP LIKELY RED BULL VOLKSWAGEN TIE-UP
• The Audi Grandsphere concept is the company's vision of a self-driving luxury future
• Ken Block Signs with Audi to Help Develop Electric Cars
• 1073-HP Porsche Mission R Previews the Electric Future of Customer Racing
• 2025 Porsche 718 Will Be Electric and 'The Most Modern Porsche'

Audi Water balloon Fight!

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Gran Touring Motor Sports Podcast Break Fix, where we’re always fixing to break into something motorsports related. The drive-through is GTMs monthly news episode and is sponsored in part by organizations like H p d junkie.com, garage riot, american muscle.com, hooked on driving and many others.

If you’re interested in becoming a sponsor of the drive-through, look no further than www.gt motorsports.org under about and then advertising and sponsorship. Thank you again to everyone that supports Grantor Motorsports, our podcast Break Fix and all the other services we provide. Welcome to drive-through episode number 14.

This is our monthly recap where we put together a menu of automotive motorsport and random car adjacent news. Now let’s pull up to window number one for some automotive news. That’s right, Tanya. And this month Brad’s not with us. He’s out on paternity leave, but we have a special guest [00:01:00] host. It’s Mark Shank, petrolhead extraordinaire, who some of you might recognize from our nineties.

What should I buy? Episode? So welcome to the drive-through Mark, and thanks for coming on. Awesome. It’s great to be back. I’m looking forward to it, having gone through the notes. This should be a lot of fun. Well, we’re gonna kick off this month like we do every month with a showcase brand, and we’re doubling down with respect to the episode you did where we talked about Mercedes and B M W.

So we’re gonna hit up both right away. Mercedes has revealed their. GWA electric concept, which apparently is not really a concept, but a near production version. Gwa, I am geeked about this. This is with their whole EQ platform. They got the E Q S that’s coming out, that’s the sedan and the E Q G here now.

And unlike the other EQ versions [00:02:00] that stray a little bit from what we normally see from Mercedes, the GWA is looking like classic G wagon. It’s boxy. It’s got some round headlights, so it already sold me square body round lights. I’m good with it. I like it. It looks good. This is, we talked Hummer did it first.

This is what we talking about. Mercedes is doing it better. Well, there’s that, but this is what we talk about every month. We talk about the fact that if you do retro right, you can take a lot of these cars and make them super cool EVs without reinventing the wheel. Not everything has to look like a spaceship.

One of our members in our group, one of the veteran off roaders, he actually off roads, a G wagon. It’s a two thousands era. They all look the same from like, you know, world War II up until today. And even this thing, there’s not much difference. But you know, probably independent suspension all the way around and all those electric goodies and things like that that Drew was actually talking about on his episode.

I think this is cool. This is the right. Move. They don’t get a choice. Right, right Move. Wrong move. [00:03:00] It’s a move they gotta make. It’s like Pepsi not doing diet. It’s gotta happen. I think the LEDs like all over might be a little much. I mean they’ve just gone all the way in on that grill, which is hysterical.

That’s true. That is true. I mean it started with the SS class coop and it was kind of like, oh, it’s like the Starlight Grill and now they’re just like, nah, screw it. Well we’re just gonna put an l e D in each component. It’s really a third headlight. I think it’s so is is that the, is LEDs the replacement for Chrome?

Is that like the new thing? Oh yeah. It’s like LEDs. Are they gonna be like the fins from the fifties? Uh, you know, I could be okay with that. ’cause you could turn the LEDs off, but you can’t turn Chrome off. You can spray paint it though. It’s true. So I haven’t read about this. Have they announced anything particularly spectacular about it?

I mean, I see 577 horsepower, like at least with a Hummer. When they came out it was like they had just like crazy hyperbolic type numbers all around the Hummer. And this is, well that’s the European Hummer, right? This is their military vehicle made civilian. Although this is a lie now, the current version [00:04:00] is not a military vehicle, but, So is the Hummer so, well, I don’t, I don’t think the 5 77 is this vehicle that’s the current top rated G class Mercedes, which is gas powered.

Because really all they’re talking about here in Car and Driver is that it’s got four motors on each wheel and it’s all wheel drive. If it’s got four electric motors, it’s probably doing pretty well. That thing’s gonna rip. Plus that will be electronically controlled, all-wheel drive where you can send a hundred percent of the power to 25% of the of the vehicle.

That’s pretty slick. I’m curious to see how that would work in an off-road condition. And I know a lot of people that buy GWAS or going to and from their private schools and whatnot or, or the soccer field, but. There are folks out there like Drew that do run them off road. So I’d be curious to see how this holds up against one of the legacy gwas.

It has a, a well-earned reputation for an authentic off-road capability, and, and they were trying to preserve that with a Hummer launch. So hopefully when we get more details, they go in a similar direction. So what else [00:05:00] is in the news from Mercedes there, Tanya? Well, we started out strong with a lot of excitement there around the gwa, and then you hear Mercedes Maybach.

Oh, okay. All right. And then you look at it and then I’m done. Like, I don’t even care to read the rest of the article. This thing is ly you’ve always been ugly. They’re all fug. What’s a Maybach that’s not f uh, Touche. Like why? Like you have this gorgeous gwa and then you have this sad, weird looking, like when Buick was making ugly things, you know, that you hit the nail on the head.

This reminds me of a early two thousands Buick. It screams Park Avenue Buick Regal, like with a massive grill that just, I, I don’t know how to explain this thing, but even if you took. The old My Bach, which was basically, you know, the E-class like on steroids and just blown up. This doesn’t even come close.

It doesn’t look like anything. It [00:06:00] just looks like a deformed M class, like an ML three 50 or something like that. It looks, it looks like a suppository on spinners. I don’t get it. And you know what, I, you know what I think throws me off the most, more than even the LEDs, it’s the two-tone paint reminiscent of like a 63 beetle where they did the same thing and kind of painted the belt line down burgundy.

And the top was black and, and the fenders were, I just, I don’t, I don’t know. I don’t like it. You could, you can tell from the pictures the grill’s fake. Well that, I was gonna say that too. There’s no, there’s no depth on the grill. Yeah. It’s fake throwing me too is how it’s just like a painted grill. It’s like, I get it.

You don’t wanna mess up the aerodynamics. Hence the giant ugly wheels. I mean, how much do those wheels weigh? 800 pounds each. They’re they mean outta magnesium. Yeah. There you go. Right, exactly. They’re off of a tractor. Moving on from this, I found something else that just blew me away. And this is a little bit of a teaser for our lost and found section that’s gonna be coming up here in a little bit.

I found a [00:07:00] 2011 Mercedes A M G. That was a hell of a deal. It’s listed as a C eight. In quotations, the might M I G H T. The ad was subsequently pulled down very recently, but I managed to scour the internet and find the pictures. It might be hot trash. I mean, this is so bad. I feel like it’s rolled over like an integer that’s just gone over the top.

I mean, you gotta respect whoever was committed enough to do that. They’re batshit crazy. Yeah, I don’t want to hang out with them. But I have a degree of respect for them. Somewhere deep down there is something weird like that going on. Like I want to hate this with a passion that burns with a fire of 10,000 suns, and then there’s just like a sliver of, but wow, somebody did this.

I’m confused by the intakes. Is it a mid-engine conversion? That’s where I was going. How many motors does this thing have? Right? Because it’s got snorkels in the front, in the [00:08:00] back, facing the wrong direction, by the way, and then it’s got a big ass Mercedes grill on the front, which looks like they glued it to the coyote from Hard Castle in McCormick.

Like, I do not understand this car. That’s a double tape, double-sided tape. That’s what’s on there. I think the only thing I could appreciate are the wheels, but then you realize it’s got this like almost bode seer thing in the center of it. I don’t get it. The way, the way they butchered the A pillar, it thinks it’s like a golf cart.

They tried to make look like a Corvette. Like it might not even actually be required. It might not even be a, it might not even be a Mercedes. I mean, it might be one of those gators. They just welded all this fiberglass onto the front and back of it. I mean, it looks uncomfortable as all get out. I mean, if you look at this dashboard, I mean all of it is just painless.

I mean, but, but with the a, with the Angie emblems, I mean this, this guy knows what he’s, whoever did this has to be a guy. You know what I really appreciate though, and this is a shout out to our member Andrew Bank. The exhaust [00:09:00] tips on this Mercedes are as twisted and messed up as his, were on his Mercedes.

So I guess they got something in common, except we wish this one was in a flood. So, moving on to B M W B M W, not only making their, you know, ier electric cars, et cetera, et cetera, they also are unveiling an electric bicycle. Excuse me. What it also gets the I designation, apparently it’s called the. I vision Ambi A M B Y.

I do not know what that acronym stands for, however, it’s an electric bicycle that can go 186 miles as a speed of 28 miles an hour. Is that a bike or a motorcycle? At that point? They’re considering it. A bicycle. Does it have pedals? Yes. I’ve looked at these in Maryland and other, because I wanted to get something similar like this.

Not for any valid reason, just because [00:10:00] it was crazy and a bad idea. I thought it would be great to do. The law is vary state by state. They’re hard to get registered. Some people say it’s a moped and it got, mo has moped rules. Some people say it’s not, it’s, it’s got pedals. It’s bicy. It’s so hard. I mean, I give him credit.

At least he’s got discs in the front and the back and it’s got suspension and does it get an M version in the future? M M Sport. M sport. Yeah. M Sport and B, whatever the heck gets called. This goes back to what I’ve said many times before in the B M W world, there is an ass for every seat and now there’s a bicycle seat for that ass.

So there is a high speed pedalec, they call it mode. It goes to 37 miles an hour. That’s fast On a bicycle. Yeah, you’re hauling butt. That’s motorcycle territory. It has a version without pedals it looks like, and more of like a cafe racer style seat than a bicycle seat. Do you actually change gears or is it a double clutch?

I mean this TK on your bicycle, [00:11:00] this is borderline bicycle and very slim line moped. It’s not unattractive, like they’ve done a good job in terms of the look and everything. I think it’s, it’s cool. I’m a little suspect of that rear swing arm. It has no rear fork. I thought that was kind of odd. That’s a little bit more like dirt bike style, but I’m also looking at the first image going, I, I just don’t understand if that’s a rendering or if that’s defying physics.

They have pictures of somebody on it, but I think the pictures are all in the pedal version, not that little race one. I think I would try it though. In all honesty, I would give this thing a go. Being a bicycle fan I’d, I’d give it a turn. The unfortunate part is probably cost, like, you know, 25 grand. Well, yeah, I’m shocked.

It gets that many miles on those huge tires. I mean, the rolling resistance on tires, even on the street one as opposed to the knob one. Those are pretty, pretty. Well look at some of those mountain bikes these days. Pretty chunky boy tires. A lot of road noise though. Woo, woo woo, woo woo. You know the big [00:12:00] tires, speaking of a lot of road noise.

The Rolls-Royce hybrid dump truck. Well first of all, that is a B M BMW product. But what? But it’s hybrid so it shouldn’t be making noise. Right. Rolls-Royce makes dump trucks. Let’s just start with that. Is this D Rolls-Royce or is it, ’cause they split the company like a while ago, right? Like how does that work?

It’s all B M W at the end of the day, isn’t it? It looks a lot like, well no, ’cause remember when B M W bought Rolls Royce, they screwed up and didn’t buy the ability to use the Rolls Royce logo. ’cause they split Rolls Royce commercial from Rolls Royce automobile. So, so it sounds like the Rolls Royce is providing the engine, but the dumpers themselves are by different manufacturer sore, just putting a motor in it.

So my other question is, are they authorized to pass under bridges on interstates in Georgia? Um, depends on their height and whether or not Georgia needs the bridge moved. That doesn’t even look like a dump truck. That looks like one of those mining operation type vehicles. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Staging based on the height of those safety rails on the side.

I mean that thing is, [00:13:00] it’s two stories. I think 10 foot tire, it’s probably one of the Rolls-Royce turbines. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was turbine hybrid. That’s actually kind of a cool combination. I’d like to see how that works and how that operates. I’m sorry, I should read the article before I talk.

It looks, I will say styling wise, the Rolls-Royce Cullen in and this dump truck. Really not too different. In defense of the comment, this was unveiled at a mining convention, so. Like right before the show, I was just scouring the M three wagon. Looks like it’s coming. This generation really? Probably not to the us it just popped up some, uh, photos of the camouflage.

You know, they put that crazy black and white. Um, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Camouflage the spy paint. The question is, have they run it around the Berger yet? ’cause then, you know, it’s legit when they do that, the car’s coming out. I mean, they’re just photos of it on the streets in Germany, not around Nuremberg, but it looks pretty cool.

We’ll have to keep tabs on that then see if we can beg to get it over here. We talked about wagons a while back. It’s, it’s one of those things where it’s diminishing returns. The [00:14:00] numbers of wagons every year are getting smaller and smaller and smaller and being replaced by CUVs and SUVs and gigantic hatchbacks, what’s called what they really are.

Right. Unfortunately, that’s all the news we could come up with for Mercedes and B M W this month. So we know they get, they gotta do something a little bit more exciting. They gotta get out there. But these are, these are pretty interesting. But I think we need to move on to Volkswagen, Audi group. Do we?

Should we? I am very annoyed. Sadly, the Beatle, they put it to rest. It’s a very unfortunate, and I hope with the resurgence of, you know, retro and electric cars and retro electric, that the Beatle, I will say it again, is the perfect candidate for an electric car. Stick those batteries back in the back where the original air cooled engine was.

Get that fr Volkswagen. You need to do this and you need to do it soon before. The fricking Aura Ballet cat comes out. Remember? Wait, [00:15:00] what if we remember that hideous punk cat, this Chinese knockoff of the Beatle that we talked about several months ago? Apparently now there’s the EV version that they’re calling the Aura Ballet Cat, and it’s also ugly.

And the problem is apparently there might not be patents on the beetle design, and if there aren’t fricking people in Wolfsburg need to get on this, what is that even possible? Either need to dig up something to block the use of this design, or I don’t know what quickly throw some battery packs in the back of a new Beetle or an old Beetle or an original beetle, whatever, get it done.

We, we shouldn’t be surprised the uh, people’s wagon is popular in the people’s Republic, but I mean, somehow they managed to make it uglier, which is hard, I think to do. They did it though, so maybe commendable, but still, and that’s a huge debate too. I mean, we talked to somebody recently that was like, you know, Hey, tell us you know what you think is an ugly car.

And they’re like, the Beatle. And I’m like, really? I’ve never heard anybody [00:16:00] say that before. And they’re like, yeah, but it’s ugly. But it’s cool. I guess you could say the same thing about the Fiat 500 or the Mini or anything of that era that we’re all designed similarly. But I’m with, I’m with you Tanya.

This copycat, let’s call it what it is. It needs to stop. It needs to go away. I mean, yeah. I mean, it looks like a bloated crossover interpretation of a beetle. I mean, the beetle has proportions and it has some things going for it, certainly. But this is bad. It’s like we’re trying to modernize it and make the lines more modern.

But it’s like they did that already with the new beetle. Yes, twice. But this is just. Elongating it, making it more sedan ish, almost. I don’t know, more like a wagon. I, I, it’s just not right. It’s like we’re taking the front end of an original beetle, but then trying to still modernize the side view and the rear.

So we’re taking a new beetle and an original beetle and morphing them together and we just need to stop and we just need to take the new beetle ish design and put an electric motor with a VW badge on it. End of story Volkswagen for the win. Done. [00:17:00] Done. Alright, so let’s talk about VWs ID series, which are gaining popularity here in the States as well as overseas.

Yes, apparently the ID three hatch, which is, you know, the more golf sized version, which we’re not getting it here yet, if at all, who knows. But in Germany, the lower Saxony police department has already ordered 215 ID three electric hatchbacks to use as police cars. The lower Saxony police department knows who pays the taxes that fund them, so they gotta keep the jobs program that is Volkswagen going.

Nonetheless, it’s pretty cool. We already talked about a remote island in Greece that was using ID fours as police cars. I just find it funny that they’re using the bigger version on a smaller locale, and then they’ve got these little, you know, tiny little [00:18:00] microcar that they’re, they’re running around in this police cars.

I hope this is parking enforcement or something. Like, come on guys, you’re in the land of the auto bomb. Like, what are you gonna do? They’re gonna run outta juice. That’s what they’re gonna do. Yes, and we’re gonna bring this back up a little bit later. Excellent. But there’s a lot of buzz right now around the ID buzz.

There was a sighting of a, of an ID buzz, so that’s the van. The new kind of Vanna. Again, for those that don’t recall what the ID buzz is in a Robo Taxii guys, as they call it in the article. Essentially I think they’re testing self-driving capability. So it’s a self-driving test vehicle. Johnny Cav has a very similar kit load out to the Waymo cars full lidar spectrum up front and Yep.

Or on top. Pretty cool though. So what got me about this, when I saw this come across my desk from Garage Riot, I noticed something really important. All the previous renderings of the ID buzz, it seemed a lot [00:19:00] smaller. This thing literally looks like a previous generation Eurovan that’s been updated. Now I’m confused.

How big is the ID buzz gonna be? I don’t know. I don’t think we know being still a concept. They obviously have rain to, to make changes, especially if there’s issues with safety compliance and whatnot, that they have to increase the size. Or maybe some market studies said that people were unhappy if it was too small.

I don’t know. We talking about a banana for scale. Yeah. Right. Well and that’s a good point too is it’s tricky in, in the photo sometimes is when you don’t have something next to it to reference. Sometimes these things look bigger or smaller than they actually are, but you know what’s smaller than we think it is this new.

VW called the ID life. Oh yes. This is their little mini, it’s like a hatchback, like a rabbit, the bigger, so it’s trying to be like this little mini SS u V. But it’s way, I mean it’s hard to tell in this picture ’cause they say it’s a mini s u v and I look at this and I’m like, this is very small. Ss U V is a [00:20:00] stretch.

Compact crossover, since that’s the new flavor of the day. Maybe a normal size golf. I mean, if you look at, look at where the rear door handle is, it’s over the center point of the wheel, which means your ass is sitting on the rear ax. It’s the axle. You can get away with that packaging in an electric car for sure.

But no one’s been that aggressive. Right? I mean, the volt is pretty small. The little Chevy, the minis. The minis are that small where you’re basically sitting over the rear wheels. That thing has no trunk, which Yeah, exactly. It’s akin. Akin to a mini, but it also kind of reminds me of that Honda concept.

The Honda E. Exactly. So it reminds me of that kind of reminds me of that Fiat 1 26 concept, that rendering we talked about a couple months back. I mean, I like the fact that it’s cute and small. It’d be fun in one of those ancient cities in Italy where you can barely get a Fiat 500 through these alleyways.

So I understand why this thing exists. I just don’t see it really working for, let’s say, our shores as an example. Yeah. And they went with the yolk [00:21:00] for the steering wheel. Uh, that’s a hard pass. Yeah. I don’t understand why cars are doing that, because I wanna feel like I’m driving a 7 37 very sporty, except okay, you know?

Yeah. I mean, this isn’t a formula. Car your hands. Yes. When you’re racing, oh, don’t move your hands. Let’s not get into that can of worms, but. In the streets, you often are making a turn that’s more than 45 degrees. Yeah. I mean unless, yeah, unless the steering ratio’s insane. In which case it would be very twitchy.

There’s another new Audi prototype that’s coming to the table. The Audi Grand Sphere is what they’re calling it. It’s a concept right now, and it’s what they’re using to launch their vision of a self-driving luxury car. So who knows if this will actually come to any sort of fruition. I mean, when you look inside of it, it has nothing.

I mean, it’s full self-driving. There’s no dashboard. But where the dashboard would be, it can project a screen there. There’s no steering [00:22:00] wheel. I mean, it’s like you’re in the fanciest first class Qatar Airways playing in your own private pod there. So the question is, this does not grow or shrink, like the Audi we talked about last month.

No, I believe not. This one they’re saying is essentially as long as an A eight L. Oh, that’s huge. Mm-hmm. Because they has no, you know, if it’s electric and all that, they’re actually probably getting even more cabin space because they don’t need, you know, the room for the big honking V eight or whatever that’s in that car.

So it’s a giant limousine with four seats. So yeah, with four seats. Yeah. But they, they turned, they all. They all turn around in different directions, right? They’re like swivel chairs or whatever. So yeah, I think the pictures look like the, that would be hard to do just based off the picture. Yeah, the backseat definitely cannot, it’s one giant bench.

I realize people would worry about motion sickness, but you might as well take the crash advantages of facing backwards. It’s so much safer. Let me ask you this about Audi’s current line of concepts, right? And I feel like we’re in this era of concept cars, and I wrote an article [00:23:00] about this I think a year or two ago.

It’s like good ideas and bad execution and the evolution of some of these concepts that never come to fruition. And then people forget about ’em and then eventually they find their way. I mean, you can go back as an example to the Audi Avis in the early nineties that found its way into the Nardo and eventually into the Bugattis and the, and the R eight and all this kind of stuff.

And they’re part of that family tree. But what I’m starting to notice with the Audis, and I feel like they’ve been doing this for a while, they restyle all their cars so they look the same. And you can’t tell the A five from the A four from the seven from the eight, except for the number of doors and the length of the wheel base.

But every new Audi I’ve seen so far, I’m like, wow, that’s cool. And then I go, are these gonna all be on the new Batman movie? All feel like Bruce Wayne should be driving them. I just, I don’t get it. You know what this front end of the grand sphere reminds me of? And I know it doesn’t look similar, but it’s just like you kind of look at it at first glance and you see it.

The Audi Avis. I, I mean I, I think we’re definitely in an era where 50 years from now they’ll be [00:24:00] making jokes about the prototype cars, like we did about prototypes from the fifties that we’re like, oh, we’re gonna fly everywhere and we’re gonna do all kinds of crazy stuff. I do think it’s a reflection of how scared, not just the automakers are the entire supply chain.

I mean, I’ve seen crazy stuff coming out from tire manufacturers. Like everybody’s so afraid of being disrupted and existential kind of changes to the business model that they’re getting really ambitious with where this might go, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is sometimes come across as a little ridiculous.

The concepts. These days are just getting more attention, right? Concept cars have always been ridiculous looking, especially the ones that actually never go anywhere. I mean, if you go looking through concept cars, they all are, are ludicrous. You go back and look at, you know, 50 years ago the concept car we’re laughing at ’em like, oh my God, and someone thought this was a good idea.

I don’t know what to say in that regard. If this comes to fruition and would it actually look like this or not? [00:25:00] Hard to say. Keep it going there, Bruce Wayne. But speaking of other futuristic Blade Runner 2049 looking cars last month we talked about Audi’s proposed entry for the Dekar rally. The Decar fighter that they built is pretty wicked looking.

I mean it definitely is like the 13th silent. I mean it’s all sorts of angles and LEDs and whatnot. We got a hold of this teaser video and we’re like, this is really cool. This is really epic. It also conjured up a lot of questions about how are they gonna run a car in the desert on just electric, where they gonna stop and quote unquote fuel up and things like that.

But there’s an interesting bit of news that also popped up surrounding this. A name synonymous in the world, rally World in the Jim Kana world, in the world of Ford is Ken Block. Now Ken Block has signed with Audi to help develop this Dakar fighter and I think that’s super exciting and I don’t wanna spend too much time talking about this.

Spoiler alert. We actually have a guest and an [00:26:00] episode coming up later this fall where we talk to a very close friend of Ken Blocks and get some inside scoop on what’s going on in to Ken’s past and projects they’ve worked on together and where he’s going with Audi. So stay tuned for that. But I also want to talk about another VW Motor sports development.

’cause you don’t normally hear about VW in motor sports like you do Porsche, or you do Audi v Volkswagen’s always just kind of the parent company, you know, setting up the funding lines for these racing series. You know, the last VW only racing series I think I watched was Hansuk during the the Beatle Cup racing in the UK about 20 years ago.

Right now there’s talks that in 25 and 26 VWs setting up to partner with Red Bull to make a play in Formula One to provide the hybrid systems for the Red Bull Formula One cars. I think this is awesome. More people participating. More manufacturers participating is always, always awesome. That’s the constant [00:27:00] struggle in F one.

Nothing but good news as far as I’m concerned. So part of the article that we posted, and it’ll be part of the show notes, they talk about this thing called the M G U H, the Motor Generator Unit Heat. It’s a really fancy hybrid electric internal combustion engine. And just think of it as a giant electric turbocharger.

I’m gonna, I’m gonna summarize that, I’m gonna give you the bluff on the rest of that article. But Volkswagen is in development to provide that type of technology for Red Bull in the 20, 25, 26 season. So really looking forward to seeing Volkswagen plastered on the side of a formula car for the first time ever.

So you could see that being very portable to Lamborghini and therefore the Audi R eight platform. I mean, if you look at the Kunta, the, everybody jokes about its little 33 horsepower electric motor, which is worthy of joking about it’s capacitor based and not lithium. You know? So that, I mean that, that’s kind of the whole point of, I mean, you’d have to think in racing that kind of situation.

It’s, it’s not gonna be a battery based. Type system ’cause [00:28:00] that’s gonna be too much weight for something like F one. So I think that could be very portable for both Lamborghini and Audi from that perspective, which is, you know, which is very cool and possibly even Porsche. Not to lead into the next topic, but I mean, uh, we’re absolutely going to, and as our Porsche aficionado on this particular episode, let’s jump into it.

Let’s talk about the seven 18 and the mission R as they’re calling it. It’s super cool. I mean, you want a thousand horsepower Cayman. Like who doesn’t want a thousand horsepower Cayman? Everybody with a nine 11 doesn’t want a thousand horsepower Cayman. Any self-respecting person with nine 11 wants a thousand horsepower Cayman.

I think, you know, they’d be disappointed to be embarrassed by one. They’d wanna buy one. I think it’s obviously race only. They’re setting up what? Like this single make race series. It’s totally badass. I mean, I’m a little biased. I obviously am a big Porsche fan, but I mean, the car looks badass. The wheels are unfortunate.

But hey aerodynamics, you know, the car is totally badass. You can see the tech coming out of that translating into the [00:29:00] all electric seven 18 that they announced. So I mean, these two things are very complimentary. They’re making a one make seven 18 race series. They’re making an all electric seven 18. And so you can see the technology being extremely portable.

The gauntlet is gonna kind of be laid down for any seven 18 turbo Ss what GT two versions that they come out with for this electric version. Everyone’s gonna know what the RC could do ’cause the RC came out first, so you have this crazy benchmark to go up against, which is insane. Couple of the data points that I thought were interesting to talk about that all electric seven 18 was their weight target, quote unquote, only 3,650 pounds.

Oh God. Uh, it’s portly for a Cayman, that’s for sure. But as far as, uh, all electric cars go, it’s lightweight. It’s not. It’s very light. Yeah. I mean, short of like, you know, that little Volkswagen, we were just looking at some kind of postage stamp of a car. I thought it was interesting. You know, they were very transparent.

The most important seven [00:30:00] 18 buyer is a 31 year old man in China. I’m like, that’s pretty good age to be buying your first brand new Porsche. They’re more worried about price, weight, and performance than they are range. And so they have a relatively modest range target of 250 miles for a race car. That’s pretty good.

Yeah. The other thing I’ll say about this, I, I’m in total agreement about these wheels. Uh, they are just atrocious. But the styling of this, especially in the race, trim, big wings and, and all that kind of stuff, and splitters and then canards and whatnot. I really like this. Like quite a, I don’t look at this and go, that’s a Cayman.

I look at this and go, that’s something special. It’s something different. It doesn’t look like any other Porsche. It’s not an evolution of something else. I mean, I guess it retains the windshield and maybe the a pillar and, and some of the silhouette of a, of a Cayman. But I, I just don’t see it. It’s a badass.

It’s, you know, the Arnold Schwarzenegger of, of Caymans. It’s, it’s totally buff in its prime. It’s like, this is, this is cool. I’m really shocked though politically that Porsche [00:31:00] would allow something like this to even be built, and I kind of understand why it’s being targeted to a specific COP series where they’re running against each other.

Because like you alluded to at the beginning, You don’t wanna embarrass the nine 11. The nine 11 is the flagship. Just like when the nine fourteens came out, 9 44 turbos and other cars where they were like, oh, they’re just good enough to be better. Then they find a way to neuter them, put a dorky motor in them so they can barely perform or something like that, because they never wanna show up the flagship car.

And I feel like this is in that same weird area where it’s like, yeah, it’s gonna be awesome. We’re gonna hamper it. And then when finally a privateer gets their hands on it and you know, finds a way to fit it into a class, whether it be an IMSA or W B C or something like that, then I really wanna know. I.

How this car stacks up against the venerable nine 11. It is interesting. Porsche’s had these moments in their history. You know, everybody loves to tell the story about the 9 28 and it was like, oh, you know, this is when the nine eleven’s gonna end [00:32:00] and the nine 20 eight’s gonna take over and blah, blah blah.

I think someone at Porsche said, you know, nine eleven’s for boomers, so we’re not gonna go hybrid. You know, it’s not gonna get an electric version, which is a very bold statement to make in this period of time. Of course, the buyers of the nine 11 aren’t clamoring for an electric version, but you have to think about the future of the brand and, and the buyers that are gonna be there down the road.

So this may be the passing of the torch, right? Or they’re sitting there and they’re saying like, look, we can let them compete. I don’t think an all electric seven 18 that’s faster than a GT three or turbo SS or whatever. I don’t think the one person who buys the one is cross shopping. The other like, if you want a stupid fast electric sports car, you can buy a Platt or you can get a Ty can or what?

I think it’s really interesting from where they’re going with the brand. Are they saying the 9, 11, 20 years from now is gonna really struggle as those buyers start to age out? They never won electric, they never catered and the 17 takes [00:33:00] over. I mean, and cer Well, and if you look at certainly one of those things, And if you look at it from a Motorsport perspective, you know, we joke all the time that the nine 11 has been consistent, especially in the last, let’s say 10 years.

Because just like the nine 11, uh, GT one from the early two thousands, the motor suddenly magically found its way towards the middle of the car. And then they said, okay, oh, we’re gonna put it back in the back again. It’s gonna hang out over top of the rear wheels. And then every year, every season, it, it finds a way to just migrate forward towards the driver somehow.

So I, I’ve always been, I’ve kind of joke that I. It’s a logical conclusion that they’ve been evolving a bad idea for like 60 years and they need to move away from this pendulum, this hammer that’s going down the road with all that weight over the rear end. And it needs to be more of a mid engine sports car.

So you’re right, maybe it is the passing of the torch. And I’m gonna continue to say that I’m very happy that the nine 14 finally gets its day in the sun. Let’s call it what it is. Let’s call it what it is. It is a nine [00:34:00] 14. Fair enough. I totally agree. I mean, it, it’s really frustrating when Porsche makes a product for a slot in the lineup and not for what the platform is capable of.

We might be able to have her cake and eat it too. I don’t think this means that there isn’t some R ss r version of the nine 11 in the future, and that engine gets moved forward like it has been in Motorsport, right? Can stay naturally aspirated or turboed or whatever. At least an i c e component to me, would be the best of both worlds.

They, they actually, you know, advance that forward a little bit. Go follow motorsport, do what they did there and do electric and. Or take a page out of, what is it, the nine eighteens playbook, you know, with the LA Ferrari style or the N S X, where the nine 11 still has a petrol engine in the rear, like you’re saying, but maybe is four wheel drive no longer turbocharged going back natural aspirated, but has that electric motor upfront to help propel it and get it there.

So maybe a cross between this seven 18 and the nine 18 supercar. Yeah, I mean it’s not like the nine eighteen’s depreciating, you know, [00:35:00] there’s still costs. It’s not a Carrera gt. You know, we could, we could, we could kill this whole show on this topic. Absolutely. So it’s probably good that we move on to something lighter hearted, but also.

Keeping with the theme of staying with tradition and following through. And we mentioned Audi earlier and obviously Volkswagen, Audi and Porsche have been together since the very earliest days. And for those of you that don’t realize that the auto union started at the turn of the century, that’s the 19 hundreds, not the two thousands.

You know, there’s a long pedigree there. There’s a long involvement with these three families together, and it’s actually two large families, the Porsche family and the Pek family. But we won’t get into that whole history. If you wanna learn more about that, listen to the little Anton episode that we did during this month.

But what I’m getting at here is Audi did this heritage video and it’s really cool and we’re gonna include it in the show notes. And if you haven’t seen it yet, check it out. It’s a little bit long, but also check out the bloopers at the end because it really, really makes the [00:36:00] film. Tanya, I know you watched it.

What did you think? I was admittedly confused in the beginning. Agreed. Really wasn’t sure what was happening. I was totally into it. Once they went vintage with all the older cars, especially the IMSA and the Rally Quatros and all that, and then seeing Schook and whatnot in this short film, I think the one thing that was missing, or the one person that was missing was Michelle Mutan.

Absolutely agree with that. Because with all the legends that they were showing between cars and person, she needed to be there a hundred percent. So I think that’s unfortunate that who knows what reason why she wasn’t, but I would’ve liked to have seen that representation. It sucks that Doug DeMiro makes the cut and she doesn’t.

I, I agree with you on that as well. I freaking joke. We need to read on that one. Definitely have to have Michelle in there. And I will say, I agree with you. When the vintage car showed up, that’s what did it for me. And a couple things were really important. I really, really [00:37:00] enjoyed the scene between Walter Rural Hauck and Hurley Haywood and when Hurley stands up and he’s like, you guys have been holding me up for 30 years, you know, and he’s like chucking water balloons at them stuff.

I busted out laughing ’cause it’s so true. And a lot of people forget that Hurley started with the Audis, not just with Brumos Porsche, right. He ran the Audis in TransAm. But the thing that really got me that really pulled at the heartstrings, because it’s gonna be one of those moments where you read about all these celebrities now that have passed because of Covid and all this kind of thing.

It’s that moment where you realize Hauck Jr. Is driving his father’s. Auto union, you know, 16 cylinder developed by Ferdinand Porsche, Sr. They pulled that car out of mothballs and used it in the film. I mean, that alone, just that scene of him driving down that wooded road, kind of leaving that parade, I was like, I.

I just stopped. It was just, it was absolutely incredible. And it, it just, it just pulls at the heartstrings because you realize that’s, that’s a whole legacy [00:38:00] that’s two generations in that same family of epic race car drivers and, and epic cars and things like that. So I guess what I’m getting at here is if you don’t know the Audi history, dig into it a little bit more, more.

It’s absolutely fascinating and it’s got many tributaries and Ritz that you can go down. When it comes to the Volkswagen story and the Porsche story and how they’re all intertwined. At the end of the day, what it really says is that they do have real enthusiasts, real fans that work there and that, that have that kind of passion.

And that’s how every now and again, they actually come out with a really amazing product like the, uh, e-tron gt. They just need to lower the price tag on that thing a hundred percent. It wouldn’t be a drive-through episode if we didn’t talk about the fourth largest auto manufacturer in the world. STIs, and I got a call.

Shenanigans. There’s a always a lot of drama, especially with, you know, Fiat and Ferrari and all these things, and you hear about it in Formula One and you hear about it in racing, they always like, well, if they’re not winning, let’s change the rules. It’s a very, you know, f i a sort of thing to do. But this latest [00:39:00] one is just mindbogglingly, kind of idiotic.

I was reading this article and it’s in the show notes and it says, and I’ll paraphrase it for you guys, the Italian government is in talks with the European Union to exempt supercar manufacturers from a gas engine phase out. On their way to electrification. So what does that mean? They wanna get outta jail free card so they can continue to build Lamborghinis and Ferraris and all these other supercars that we love and we enjoy and sound amazing without having to worry about turning them into EVs.

Which is kind of funny considering all these concept ev supercars that they’re still kind of proposing. But I just had to laugh and I I flag on the play yellow card. Get these guys off the field. I couldn’t disagree more. I, I think it’s exactly what they should do. We’ve gotta be realistic about if we’re gonna claim the environment, then we have to be realistic about what’s driving greenhouse emissions.

And it’s the quantity of meat that people lead at completely unregulated engines they use in the, uh, naval shipping. It’s not [00:40:00] your V 12 Ferrari that gets driven 1500 miles a year that still manages to be emissions compliant. Hell, we let the Elise come into the country without a passenger side airbag.

God help us. You know, we did. We can’t, we can pass on regulations when it makes sense. I agree. I agree. Just think it’s funny. I think it’s awesome. I hope they get away with it. Let’s just say I, if they could fight it and win more power to ’em. I’m not saying, I’m just, like I said, I just had to call shenanigans on that.

I was like, oh my goodness. I mean, yeah. No, it’s, it’s newsworthy for sure. I just hope they win is all. I mean, if anyone could do it, it would have to be these hyper cars that, you know, a hundred or sold or something. Right? Because they aren’t being driven. So on the one hand, it is kind of like, what’s the big deal?

The reality is, is yes, everybody’s moving to full electric, but will we really. Time will tell, right? Diesel’s making a comeback. That’s all I’m saying. Yeah, I mean, all those regulations that came up in California, which California’s done the math on [00:41:00] what electric, what the electric car switch will do to their grid, they’re creating regulations around the power efficiency of your personal computers.

They’re getting hard on the electrical grid because they know that as the electric creation of cars come, they do not have the capacity or anywhere near it today, and it will cost billions and billions to build. And we have no great way of really building it because we won’t go nuclear, which is, you know, I don’t wanna open that can of worms.

In Europe, there are a lot more nuclear power plants than there in the us. I just know, mark, that if you and I were being taxed on the number of computers that we had in our house, it would be a very large bill. If you look at my network and all the devices connected, I am surrounded by screens like the Batcave.

It’s insane, but there’s some other good news over in the STIs world. Yeah, so the Chrysler brand has named their new C e o. So it is a female, Christine Ell coming from a Honeywell being their chief commercial officer. And apparently she also had a stint [00:42:00] in global marketing with Ford a decade or so ago.

So she’s got some interesting background and hopefully she’ll bring good things to the Chrysler brand. Yeah, I’m just trying to figure out what Chrysler actually slaps their badge on other than the Pacifica right now. So, you know, Hey minivans. That’s cool. I also, when I first saw this come across my desk, I immediately thought, Lee a Coco.

Right? Similar background came from Ford, went to Chrysler twice, you know, save the day. Not that Chrysler’s in bad shape right now because it’s part of Solanis. I think she has the remit over Dodge too, right? What’s Dodge making? Again, many hemis that are very future proof. I think the bigger thing is if they’re naming c e O to the brand, then they have some sort of commitment, short term strategy to say that we’re gonna try and revitalize this brand or try to have something other than the Pacifica or maybe the Chryslers 300 under the moniker.

Right? So who knows? Maybe. Unfortunately it, it tanks probably not necessarily through [00:43:00] any fault of her own or maybe she’s able to use her past marketing and strategic roles in various companies to help create something new that we haven’t seen yet from Chrysler or, or, or bring back something from the past.

But let’s not bring back the K a R as an ev. Okay? We do not need Aries EVs. I’m just gonna lay it out there. It’s not a good idea. They were a good idea. Off the top of my head, I really can’t think of what Chrysler should come back. Like, which Chrysler model should make like a retro reappearance. It’s interesting, like what’s at the top of her list, right?

Because if she’s the c e O of the business unit of Chrysler, then her bigger problem is Dodge than the actual fact that Chrysler is a joke. I mean, Dodge is where they have all the volume is also having, where the most aged platform is reading the article. I mean, it looks like she, she has the unit, which is really cool.

I mean, it was called Fiat Chrysler, not Fiat, Chrysler and Dodge. I’ve been in their headquarters and done some projects for them in my professional [00:44:00] life. Similar to the comment about what brought up the Audi video, tons of enthusiasts work there. I mean like everywhere I went from vice president executive of whatever down to people, you know, managing relationships with the, with the dealerships, very passionate about their product, loved their hemis, loved what they were doing.

But I mean, man, all that stuff is so old. I would classify it like a turnaround strategy. Like, you’ve really gotta turn this thing around if you’re gonna keep the brand going forward. The Mopar stuff hasn’t been bad. I mean, I think Fiat did a better job with Chrysler than Mercedes did. Now, granted, to your point, they’re all running around on a hundred year old, you know, c and e-class chassis and all this kind of thing.

And we, we’ve joked about that before, especially with the Challenger and the Charger. But from the aesthetics perspective, you could really tell when the Italians took over and they face lifted the Jeeps and they face lifted this, the charger, which wasn’t anything to write home about for quite a long time.

And so they’ve done a good job. The Pacifica’s not bad looking either. I mean, and I’m a little biased ’cause we have one, [00:45:00] but whatever. But it’s just, but it’s just, you know, they do need to do something with, they do need to do something with the brand, that’s for sure. And, and just, I’m just not sure what that is yet.

But I’m, I’m very curious and I’m cautiously optimistic about where they’re gonna go. Okay. It’s not to bring back the PT Cruiser. Nope. In any, in any shape or form, get out. So it’s not to do that. What it could be is to bring back the Chrysler 300 sedan as a luxury. Mercedes Cadillac Fighter with the right styling and enhancements.

Could that be a competitor in that? I agree with you there, and I’ll say this, despite the early gangster style of the 300, you know, when it was revitalized in the two thousands, every one of those I’ve had is a rental car from the, the very first reintroduced to the current ones. I enjoy them. They’re very plush, they’re nice places to live.

They don’t have the best motor to write home [00:46:00] about. It’s the same pen star that you get in the, the Dodge Caravan or whatever. Unless you get the Hemi version, the R the RT or the SS R T eight or something like that. They do need to take it a step up to Mark’s point, it’s classy, but it’s classy for Mercedes in like 2010.

You know what I mean? At at at its best. And so they really do need to do something different to step it up. Apparently though there is a 20 22 300 coming, so that is still in their lineup. What I am thinking though is Chrysler, if the trajectory is to kind of turn it and revitalize it, not that it’s doing poorly, but.

Pacifica has an advantage over the other minivans in that it’s the only hybrid minivan that’s out there right now. So if they take that momentum and it has been selling well and they propagate that into other Chrysler models, maybe Chrysler becomes the EV arm of Dodge Solanis. They can use that as a jumping off point, because right now they don’t have anything that’s really easy.

And they’ve talked about, you know, they’re sun setting the charger and the challenger. We talked about that on the last [00:47:00] episode. And the plans for the future of those two cars are completely unwritten. As you know. They said it’s the last hoorah for the Hemi. We don’t wanna see the muscle cars go away, we want to keep them around.

But what are they gonna do in the EV space? And I think GMs now leapfrogged Chrysler because we were joking for a long time. What’s, you know, what’s Chevy gonna do? Da da da. Ford’s way ahead of them, you know? And I guess that leads us into our domestic conversation a little bit as we kind of transition into Ford and Chevy a little bit more.

One of the things I discovered is we used to have the horsepower wars. Now we have the kilowatt wars For a long time Resto mod and and restoration type shops have been taking like Tesla packages and putting them in RetroCars and doing all these kinds of things. There’s a rumor of like an e Copo from GM that’s coming out, but Ford has put out and has teased and EV crate engine.

There’s not a ton of details on this. There’s a lot of schematics, a lot of really interesting stuff. The one thing that I thought was really cool is it only measures [00:48:00] about 22 and a half inches at its longest dimension. So that’s really, really compact, which means you could put it in a lot of things, be it a front wheel drive, an old type two bus, you know, whatever you wanna jam this EV into.

The problem is they’re not telling you what the power output is and the comparison they made in the article was, well, the Tesla makes the equivalent of 577 horsepower in this new magical number. So I’m really curious to see where that goes. The one thing they article alluded to was that we’ll know more at CMA this fall when CMA finally happens again, you know, here post covid.

So really curious to see where that goes. I think the whole concept of getting into the parts business around this is great. Obviously the, the battery becomes a more important component than the engine. And I don’t know enough to know why the, the mileage per kilowatt hour is so different between like Teslas and every other ev It is a significant enough gap that I think it’s worth mentioning.

They have a huge efficiency gap there. Would you have to think in the, [00:49:00] in this kind of custom space would be a real advantage if they could figure that out. Now unfortunately, all of these plans are now beholden to shortages, changes in production, obviously Covid, chip shortage, all of that. We hope every day that this stops and every month goes by and it actually seems to get worse.

What I’ve heard is now because of that, Ford was gonna introduce a new pickup called the Maverick, which I think was a little confusing ’cause there was a Ford Maverick way back when, which is actually a bit of a two-door coup kind of a variation on the seventies Mustang. But they decided they’re gonna scrap that because it was gonna be built in India and that’s a $2 billion hit to Ford ’cause they’re shutting down that production.

And, and you know, some of that is to do, to chip shortages due to personnel and, and labor laws and all that. And it’s just, Sad to see. I actually really like the spy photos of this Maverick truck. I think it’s pretty cool. It’s more attractive than the current Ranger. I think it’s a better size. I mean, the F one 50 has gotten huge and the Ranger is kind of the size of the old F one 50.

And [00:50:00] I, I, I, I hate to say, comes with some weird engine packages. Like, who wants a pickup truck with a 2.3 liter turbo, four cylinder? I’m like, I just don’t get it. Please convince me that I’m wrong. Uh, I’ve heard that the, you can get the V six now, but yeah, whatever. But yeah, so this Maverick’s kind of cool.

Maybe it’ll get built, maybe it won’t, but it ain’t gonna get built in India. I admittedly didn’t understand the, uh, I guess the link between the two because apparently Ford’s been in India with two plants since 1995 and has essentially operated at a loss this entire time, which is. Equated to about $2 billion as they haven’t been able to pick up any market share there.

So, um, clickbait, that’s what it is. Clickbait, they’re just cutting their losses. It, it’s, it’s the best excuse in the world. You guys said it on the show last month, that the chip shortage is the best excuse in the world to optimize your business. Hey, sorry. Gotta lay you off. Uh, you know, chips. Hey, sorry.

Gotta exit your country. You know, chips, Hey, sorry. Oh, we gotta get rid of the Camaro. Gotta drop this product line. Chips. I mean, you know, the gloves come off. They’re like, Hey man, I got the best excuse in the world. No [00:51:00] chips, barbecue, sour cream and onion, or what, what are we talking about here? Salt and vinegar every time.

So just like that, GM is also shutting down plants due to chips. So I, that’s all we really need to say, but I think there’s, well, I don’t think it’s permanent shutdown. I think it’s, again, they’re having to temporarily close down factories because, Chip because chips, can we start that? Hashtag? Hashtag copyright because chips.

Because CHIPS price like got a new C E o because chips ’cause chips. But there is a positive coming out of this and actually goes back to something you mentioned earlier, Tanya, about police cars and EVs and in the UK they are going to use the car we will not refer to as the Mustang, the Mach E as police vehicles.

And I believe they’re replacing the aging Opal Astra diesels. Police officers over there are famous for running around in. I’m really curious to see how that turns out in the UK as well. I kind of feel that compared to Germany, the Mach e larger car, considering the British roads and all that, [00:52:00] there’s a lot more towns that are closer together and not massive amounts of highway.

Obviously there’s the A one and things like that. There’s such different environments, right? You compare. German and British culture like Germany, they deal with the legacy of the Stai and so they’re, you know, they’re not as big into cameras everywhere, looking at everything all the time. They have more of a kind of personal freedom bent, you know, hence the Audubon.

And so, I mean, in the uk, like, what the hell do you need a machi? It checks all the right boxes, I guess, for them. It’s a big car for us. We think of it as like, you know, not a large car, medium sized, but for them it’s a big paddy wagon type thing where you could build a police barrier in it and throw people in the back, but soccer hooligans in there.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Pick up your hooligans and and toss ’em in the back. It’s probably more of that perspective in regards to like a s u Vish electric car, what are your other options besides, well, besides, besides a Maquet as well as Tanya’s alluded to, there’s a lot of [00:53:00] options in Europe, from Renault, from Nissan, a multitude of manufacture, situ, eo, et cetera.

Now they’re under this Solanis banner, so there’s a lot of. Choices over there that we don’t get us even on the Volkswagen side of the house. So I think it’s interesting that the Mach e’s gonna go over there. I just wonder like, you know, we hear all the time again because chips, how are they producing all of these?

Or is it because they stopped producing something else and now they can suddenly start building Mach E’s? For the UK police department, it’s even more interesting because these kind of fleet sales never have good margins. Price is always a big part of the negotiation. On the fleet sale. The British do love Ford.

They’ve got their Ford Rally Cosworth heritage. So that might have been part of it. Like if you’re a cop, do you wanna be driving around in some French electric turd or would you at least have something that has a prancing pony on the front of it? I don’t know. I mean that we won’t ever call a Mustang on this show.

Still has the pony on the front. Maybe the pinto least worst choice. And you know what’s funny? Something we don’t talk [00:54:00] about on this show very often, and I think it’s because there’s not a ton of excitement coming out of the Far East, and that’s j d M vehicles and we’ve actually found a collection this month of vehicles that we can talk about.

We do need to revisit one from last month. So what if I said Integra, the spy photos, the renderings are out. What do we think. Oh, I’m sorry. You didn’t say Honda Accord. I thought it was a really cool looking two-door civic. This alleged 2023 Acura Integra. Let’s ignore the name for right now and look at the photo.

This is a very handsome two-door Acura. Very handsome. Handsome. Yes. Does it? Have anything to do with an Integra zero? No. I guess maybe I’m a little lost. I had an Integra as a kid. I love Integra. I ask a question, why this? Why does this have nothing to do with an Integra? Like, I mean, Integra is just a little, a little ura.

I mean, other than it being two doors, I’m very sensitive to, if you’re gonna reuse the name, then I want it to be more reminiscent [00:55:00] of the car’s namesake. And I don’t see, if you had just shown this to me, I would’ve been like, oh look, the new tsx. It’s a two door and it’s quite handsome and I like it very much and, and look forward to seeing it on the road, but I never would’ve said, oh, it’s an Acura Integra or an R S X was supposed to be the next Integra.

I mean the, the front headlights are a little rectangular, like the Integra up until, I don’t remember the designations unfortunately. ’cause it’s not German. It’s the one I drove. It was like a 94. It was before they went to the round headlights and after it was super boxy. Yeah, the kind of early, mid nineties Integra.

I could see the front end a little bit there. Obviously not the aggressive air scoops and everything underneath. Maybe I’m stretching, but I feel like that headlight line a little bit. But the other rendering, the black one from the artist, not from Honda, that one looks more like the Integra you’re talking about.

If you kind of scroll down through that article, and if you’re listening to this, you know, check it out in the show notes. [00:56:00] Yes. That one is more reminiscent of an Integra to me than the orange, the, the copper car that they’re showing. Exactly. So at at the bottom there’s recommended stories. In the middle one there is.

You know someone’s rendering. Oh yeah, that one. That one definitely. And that screams to me Integra, R S X. And that is a car that needs to be built. A thousand percent. Yes. Absolutely. Yeah. Going back to the copper Integra, ’cause it’s the one they will probably build, am I crazy? Or like look at the stance and the setup, kind of the geometry of the back of that car.

It doesn’t have that weird civicness humpy dumpty thing going on. Yeah, yeah. Like it actually looks like it might have some suspension in the back that could move. That would be nice. I mean, the new Civic type R turbo, whatever the heck it is. Making umpteen trillion horsepower now that’s got i r s, I mean, the Hondas have had i r s for a while.

I mean, I’ve ridden in one. They’re fantastic. They’re a little big compared to the, what I grew up with and what you grew up with as civics and integras. Yeah. Which were small, compact. G T I sized cars. Now they’re kind of huge. And we’ve joked before you look at this and you’re like, man, that’s a [00:57:00] really cool two-door accord.

But now the Accord is massive. It’s like, you know, the size of an Avalon, it’s like a Buick. It’s just, just huge. So, I mean, I guess it’s, it’s a coming of age thing. The cars get bigger, we get older, you know, whatever. But I, I guess I’m with Tanya. I wanna see it in person. ’cause again, like we said earlier, sometimes photos are deceiving and renderings too.

To Mark’s point, you gotta get a banana for scale. So you don’t really know like where things are at and what it’s gonna measure out as. Now, if this is a re. Type R Civic. I’m very interested because it is a performer, and I tell you what, those cars out of the box, turnkey on track, on street tires are phenomenally good with a slightly better physique.

I’m very, very interested in checking it out. Hopefully the price point won’t be something astronomical, but get ready, folks. Get ready. A new skyline is coming. It’s gonna have four doors. It might be an S u V. Can I, can I throw up on air a little bit in the back of your throat? Yeah. [00:58:00] I mean, you can surely make the noise.

We’ll understand. Again, going back to names, if it isn’t, it’s proper G t r. Don’t put a skyline badge on it. I mean, I’m very annoyed by the Mustang Mach E. Let’s not call that thing a Mustang. All right. Can we not? So I mean, this is the same thing, like a skyline is not an SS u v, so let’s just stop to go backwards a little bit.

You wait till the Chrysler 300 is an SS u V, the next one that comes out, that’s like the Ford Taurus. The Ford Taurus, S U v Ford Taurus, SS u v Isn’t there also like the Mitsubishi Lancer, S u v or something? Yeah, it’s DeVos U v or there’s Ecse Eclipse Nos. The Eclipse. S u v. It’s like, no, it’s so wrong, so wrong.

What gets me about this car is I look at it and I just see a QX 50, and I’m like, come on guys, you could do better than this. Just slap some badges on an existing Infinity and pass it off as something else. I’m, I’m sorry, this doesn’t cut the mustard. And you wonder why we don’t talk about Japanese cars.

I mean, so, so to be fair, the skyline [00:59:00] wasn’t the G T R, although a lot of people Yes. The G T R is a trim package. The, the skyline was, was kind of a luxury version. I mean, Nissan’s version of it. They never brought it over here, but. So it’s like, okay, you know, uh, I, I, I never understood that market segment.

That’s where that market segment is. But if you try to make that A G T R and bring it over here, I’m not gonna buy it. I’m gonna make fun of anybody who does. So there pretty much, but let’s switch gears a little bit. So, little bit of tease to the motor sports world to 22. The gr, the GAZOO racing version of the 86, the new one that’s out is going to be the official PACE car for nasa.

That’s not the rockets and satellites, that’s the National Auto Sport Association Championships in September of 22. So, looking forward to that. I like the kind of paint rendering scheme they’re gonna do on the car. We talked about the new GR 86 a couple months ago versus the new B R Z. They’ve done a facelift on ’em.

I’m not convinced that they’re not the same car still. I still think they need a turbo. I still [01:00:00] think a lot of things need to happen with that platform because it is the Japanese 9 44, as I’ve said many, many times, they are phenomenal cars on track. They are a lot of fun. I wouldn’t throw one away if you gave one to me, you know, I, I’d run the hell out of it.

But it’s kind of cool to see that NASA has chosen the 86 as their, uh, as their PACE car. Since we’re talking about Subaru, let’s just go straight for the throat on this one. What do we think about the new W R X? Alright, we’re gonna skip the whole PACE car conversation. We’ll go straight to the ww. I mean, what is there to say, right?

We gotta get to this W R X. I mean, I was surprised it could go fast enough to do the job. Fair enough? No, I mean the W R X at first, especially in thumbnail, I thought it was a civic, right? Mm-hmm. I think the entire. Interweb inter thought it was the new Civic and we were all being punked by Aston Kutcher.

I just, I don’t get it. Is it the legacy? Is it the Impreza? What is this thing? I don’t know, but the internet is very upset by those plastic cladding around the fenders. Yeah. Because it takes a round fender and makes it [01:01:00] angular like a Lamborghini. Like what is that? It’s a rally. Well, there’s, there’s, there’s also no reason to have plastic cladding on the fenders of A W R X, but rally bro.

But rally, no chips. Chips. This isn’t an s t i, this is just a W Rx regular. Is that still because chips. I mean, ’cause chips just, just rock chips. By the way, is copper the new color for Japan? You know, this is like Volvo from 1999 and the C 70. No, like, what is this? The Acura was a nice marigold. This is, this is like a, a, a tangerine.

Is that the official color of Honda Marigold? The only thing I like about this are the rear taillights. I actually kind of like that, but to your point, they look like they’re off of a Honda. They’re totally like a civic, especially the, the taillights are the most civic looking. I like those. I’m okay with that.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess that’s, that’s a fair reason to like it. The article title said it. All right. Cosplaying a civic. [01:02:00] Here’s the thing, right? I’m from the VW world. I’m a dubber through and through. Call me a boomer. I don’t care. I grew up in a different era. Mark two, g t i is freaking awesome, right?

And when you see one, you go, that’s cool. Those cars were just, they were badass. They were hella dope. The Subarus had their time too, where in the early days of like Colin Gray rally and things like that, those early Impreza, the 22 B, you know, those kind of cars, they’re amazing and they have a cult following.

But just like the Volkswagens, they’ve strayed away from the original ness, the uniqueness and that grassroots enthusiasm and the people that are behind it. And so, yes, your point, this is a big old Bloaty sedan and it’s kind of, man, the, the specs suck. It’s three extra horsepower for the previous one.

Kudos. It’s got a six feet manual. God bless Subaru for keeping the manual around. I gotta give ’em props for that. Go back to your roots, give us another 22 B. Give us something that we, that we want, that would be interested in. I mean, granted, I, I don’t want a flat four, but [01:03:00] that’s discussion for another day.

I just think this is the wrong direction. I mean, I do appreciate how the Japanese auto manufacturers have just like noted out of the horsepower wars. They’re just like, no, it’s, it’s good. It has, it’s like Rolls Royce power is sufficient. I don’t know. I mean, I guess because Lexus gave everything a really big grill.

They need a hood scoop to look aggressive. I, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t know. They need to put the hood scoop in, because then you wouldn’t discern this from the legacy. If, if you’re, if you’re a, if you’re a soccer dad in the Northeast and you make whatever, 70, 80 grand a year, you’re gonna buy an Outback.

You’re not gonna buy this thing. I know a lot of guys that have bought these things, like they’ve been horrible for a long time. Right? I mean, that wasn’t one or two generations ago. These platforms have been bloated and, and tough for a little while now. Yeah. They’ll, they’ll get a non S T I W R X. Why? Why?

Because it’s better than the Outback legacy. I don’t know. I mean, I’m struggling here. I just, I’d rather having call or a Malibu, I think at this point. No, I work, I [01:04:00] work, I work with these guys and they’re, they’re all in Rochester, New York. They all drive Subarus, you know, in case they’re listening to this.

I love you all. I don’t know why you make the car choices that you do, but they will probably buy this. What Mark’s saying is you live in a place that snows, buy an Audi, get on with it. Speaking of, you know, Asian cars in the Asian market and whatnot, another brand that we just don’t talk about because they haven’t produced anything that really.

Gets us excited in a long time. Is Hyundai and Kia right? They’re both the same company. For the folks that don’t know it’s the same company, different badges. I happen to see a brand new Tucson on the road the other day. And I know this is not the kind of car we generally talk about on this show, but like Conversation Street on the grand tour, we wanna talk about like the de sandero of the us.

So we have the Hyundai Tucson. At first I thought it was a Mach E and I got super excited and then I realized actually the back is even more aggressive than the Mach E. And I like it. I like those lights, I like those, you know, carved in three LEDs on each [01:05:00] side. I thought it was really cool and I’m in traffic with it.

I was in a different lane, so I pulled ahead. I gotta see the front of it. I hadn’t seen the side yet, so I saw the front of it. And it has these really interesting L E D pyramid lights, albeit super expensive because it feels like it’s like a 50 pieces of Lego that you gotta put together and if you break one of ’em, the whole thing has to come apart.

But it looked really cool. It was like, this is kind of futuristic, really kind of angular and whatnot. And then I saw. Silhouette and oh my God, who the hell designed this? Were they from the original star Fox team from like the Ss n e s days? Because it is all polygons and like weird angles. Like it looks like it’s already been in a digital accident on Forza.

Like I don’t understand the design of this car. Like it makes asshole. He, he was transposed into two dimensions and then brought back into the real world poorly. Oh, somebody did like a pinch on their phone, like when they were designing this or, I mean, it makes no sense at all when you see it in profile, but from the front and from the back you’re [01:06:00] like, That’s pretty cool.

But what really took it home for me, please, somebody explain it to me. What’s up with the new Kia logo? I, I’ve not seen the logo. It’s this wacko kind of K and it looks like a backwards N and I thought it was like something from like mass effect where it’s like N seven or you know, like, like that whole thing, like the Normandy.

But instead they’ve redesigned their logo too to go with this whole angular thing they have going on with the Tucson. And now I’ve seen it on the latest like version of the Telluride, other models that they have. And I’m like, I don’t understand. I just pulled up the pictures of the new Telluride. Holy shit.

That’s polarizing. Um, that’s, I mean, you know, you gotta give them credit since winded automakers get so edgy. It’s like they’re in a competition with each other. Exactly. I’m gonna make, make, I’m gonna make a grill bigger than you. I’m gonna make a logo that looks like a throwing star weapon. Those Kia and Hyundai, like that Telluride.

Those Tucson. Like if you’ve got a three, four year old kid, you’re picking up from your little [01:07:00] preschool man. You see a ton of those and Absolutely. I’ve talked to some people like they were selling those at M S R P a year or two ago before Covid, before the chip shortage where it was like, ’cause chips.

Yeah, no, I’m saying before because chips, they were selling those cars at M S R P without discount. People were buying them like on like they were so popular in that parent crowd. Yeah. People. And they were all powered by 1.6 liter turbos copying after Mini Cooper, which I didn’t understand. We actually went and test drove one when we were shopping around.

We were, when we got the Pacifica instead. And I was surprised how peppy it was for as big as the cars are. But I’m still like, I don’t know, longevity of a high strung four cylinder turbo in a vehicle that big. Just, ah, no thank you. I’ll, I’ll take my Tor Ss. Yeah. So I would clarify an earlier statement.

You made it the very beginning that there’s nothing exciting coming out of Hyundai, Hyundai slash Kia, whatever. I don’t think that’s true because besides the Stinger of course, fine, but Hyundai we talked about already a while [01:08:00] ago, their electric vehicle brand ion, they actually have some pretty cool cars in that lineup that are coming out.

Well, when with the press releases come out, we’re gonna talk about ’em because we want to address and talk more about JDM and the Asian market as well. And the cars that they’re developing. It’s just, they got, they gotta get your attention right. I mean, I mean we have the, the Iion five, we had a member have a sighting of one that was in camouflage and we’re pretty sure that that’s right.

It was the i EQ five, so, and it’s on our Instagram, so you can go back and check it out. So that car is supposed to be coming into production here, here soon. We’ll follow up on that. And obviously they did the pony ev, which we thought was really cool, that retro, uh, rest mod that they, they put together. So we’ll see what happens.

And I, and you’re right, the stinger is pretty cool. I wish that car had a manual. I’d love to see a new genesis come out, like something different that three eight Genesis. The last one they had though it was a bit bloy, they were a lot of fun on track. I got to ride in one and, and I thought that was fantastic.

And I [01:09:00] mentioned on a previous episode, I got to coach in a Veloster n which was one of the cars on my list, oddly enough that I wanted to ride in and I wanted to coach in. And I’ve said it before, it’s the best G T I that was ever built in Korea. It’s a fantastic car overall. So hats off to Hyundai. I just feel like they’re the dark horse right now.

A little bit understated, you know, we need something flashy. I just think it would be cool. Hyundai Supercar, right? Or Hyundai Super ev or something like that. Really kind of bust the news out and be at the front page and not just Integra. I think we gotta move on a little bit to Brad’s favorite section, lost and Found, which also encompasses all of our historical stuff.

I have to start this month off with just something that boggles my mind. And I’ve said this a million times. The people on bring a trailer, God bless all of you. You have lost your minds. Okay? And the proof I have, you’re part of the problem. Yeah. To back that statement up is a mystic, magenta, metallic, geo metro convertible with [01:10:00] 43,000 miles, selling for $4,300.

I wouldn’t give you 43 bucks for that car. My budget is 50 for a geometric convertible. We still want one. So this I tell you, is living proof that everybody I bring a trailer is insane. And you know that somebody will end up bringing that to like Chu car or lemons or something being like, no, no, it was cheap.

I swear. I swear. Brutal. Well roll cage to it. Brutal, horrible. We are still trying to find one in that color for a really good price as a gift for one of our members who is dying to get one. But I, when I saw that come up, I was like, ah, I got a bid on it. No, no, no. I’m not going into this insanity. You went all the way up to $44, but then, then you got 52 was as far as I was going on the reserve.

So that was, that was it. In addition to that, a car that we have to add to our ugly cars list, this one I didn’t know about came across my desk from, I believe Garage Ride or Drive Tribe, or one of those this month. America. Took a [01:11:00] stab at the multiply. That’s a fiat, by the way, one of the ugliest fiats ever built.

One of the ugliest cars of all time, like top five ugly cars with the Saturn CV one. Now, I’m sure you guys looked at this article and there’s something I really wanna hone in on, but I wanna get your gut reactions on this first. Uh, it looks like something that they would’ve put in a future movie in the nineties.

Like what was the one where Sylvester Stallone, they brought him back to fight. Wesley Snipes demolition man. Yes. This is what they would drive in. Demolition Man. Right here. This is, this is it. Everybody was driving around in one of the, no airbags. All foam. Exactly. Uh, are is vomiting still on the table?

Looks like somebody already vomited on it. Basically. Dude, the color is atrocious. That, I mean, that’s the one thing about cars. Colors make a big difference, especially if you’re trying to introduce something radically different. I mean, stick with a navy blue or a black or gray, you know, something a little subdued or, or go go [01:12:00] street.

Go red. Go copper, obviously, but not puke. No, I mean, or cream corn, marygold. This is Saturn through and through, isn’t it though? I’m liking the underhood though. That’s what got me. What are all these knobs? Is this like the Fisher-price? Playmobile like boop boop, b boop, boop boop. And it’s gonna be like lights and sounds.

It’s the cozy coop. Your three year old can work on this thing. It is absolutely nutty. Like I’ve never seen an engine compartment. So clean. Even show cars aren’t as clean as this. But yes, with all these colors and knobs, I was like, How, how do you work on this and how long does it take to get to the actual motor?

Wow. Are these like fluids? Like is that what each of these, like six knobs are on the side? Like I get the one on the o on the left is a battery negative and positive sign. But what the hell? I have no idea. The hell is the rest of this. You know what, we’re gonna leave that. It looks like, it looks like the Fisher-Price car.

We definitely have to leave this up to the audience’s [01:13:00] imagination and their comments. So let us know what you think about the CV one and where it ranks on our ugly car list. A couple other pieces of historical news. This is what’s mind blowing about this particular barn. Find it’s 175 cars and it was found in London.

Now Mark, you’ve been to London many times. Yeah. What, what about this doesn’t compute? I never, I never saw a barn. I can’t recall a barn, you know, I could think maybe if it was like an abandoned disused church, like a lot of time the, you know, church infrastructure falls into disuse. You could park 175 cars in one of those.

No, no barns. No barns that I can recall. Yeah. And my second question was, where are you gonna hide 175 cars in London? That’s not in a parking garage, one of the old warehouses. I mean, there’s so much, just like every city, so much gentrification as they turn the old warehouse districts into the coolest place to live or eat or whatever.

As soon as they get the asbestos out of there, I would imagine it was probably some warehouse. I mean, if you look at the video, there’s some really cool [01:14:00] cars in there. It’s a mixture of, you know, classic British stuff. Mgs Minis. Fiats, there’s Beatles in there, type two buses. There’s some actual like W 1 23 Mercedes station wagons, stuff like that.

I mean, it’s an interesting assortment. I wouldn’t say they’re really classics or anything of super high value unless, you know, maybe there’s a Cooper Works meeting in there with low mileage or you know, a really early Beatle or something like that. I just was kind of perplexed when I heard 175 cars basically hidden in London.

I was like, how the hell do you do that? Not so hidden in a large collection of vehicles as our friends up British Columbia up on the Transatlantic Highway, the voice from Rust Valley restorers. I don’t know what’s going on because as we pushed on our Instagram a while back, season three was supposed to hit.

Every time I look on Amazon and I look on Netflix and I look at other places we can’t get it. History channel’s not covering it. I know it was produced by History Channel in Canada. We seem to always get the previous seasons a little bit late, and I was [01:15:00] okay with that. I’ve been following the show for a while and I really do enjoy it.

There’s this article that came across my desk that they’re gonna be auctioning off all the cars on the property and they actually tried to sell all the cars and the property in one go. And I’m like, well that’s really interesting. And it says deeper in the article that this auction is going to happen during season four of the show.

So I’m like, wait, what? Excuse me. So I’m a little confused on how this is working. I wanna see what happened in season three at this point. It was supposed to be picked up by Amazon, uh, transferring over from Netflix, all that kind of stuff. So I’m a little disappointed. Again, one of my top five restoration shows.

I feel really bad if this is a result of like Covid or something like that, where maybe they’ve, they’ve really had to thin the herd, you know, things like that. I, I really thought the premise of this show was raw and it was very genuine. I mean, a little bit produced, but I liked it. It was different than everything else.

It was different than counting cars and all these other things on TV because chips on all these cars from the sixties.[01:16:00]

I, how many chips on? I haven’t, I haven’t checked out the show, but your impassioned pitch for the show tells me that I have a couple seasons to check out. Sounds pretty cool. I mean, is it worth going up there to try and participate in the auctions and actually done online? And they’re talking about international bidders.

There’s no reserve on any of the cars and it’s highest bidder takes whatever vehicle they’re bidding on. And I’m like, that’s pretty cool. Now granted, of those cars, it’s gonna be all the one in what they call the field of dreams. So these are all project cars. There’s, and they go up and down the project field all the time.

There’s some really cool stuff out there. They did an episode where they restored an alpine sunbeam and they did a Ford Capri V six swap on it, stuff like that. There’s some really neat vehicles out there that could turn into something else. That’s really cool if you’re into restoration And rest mods. A lot of muscle cars, a lot of Canadian versions of popular American muscle cars.

And I highlight some of those in the articles when I reviewed the previous seasons. [01:17:00] So if you haven’t checked out Rust Valley Restores, I highly recommend it. I recommend it to you, mark as well, if you’ve got some extra cycles to burn. And I know Tanya’s watched the show as well. Yes, I very much enjoyed it.

And in uh, effort to help them as a plug, you can visit their website@rustbrosrusto.com and you can actually see a lot of the cars that they have for sale currently right now. They’ve got photographs of a bunch of ’em, but not photographs of all of them. ’cause they have a lot of cars. There you have it.

Switching to other historical stuff, something I thought was kind of fun. Five obsolete features in vehicles and the last cars to have them. So I’m gonna run through these real quick just for our listeners. And if you’re watching the behind the scenes video of the episode, you get to see Tanya and Mark’s reaction to this.

Did you know, do you know what the last car was to have a cassette player? My car. Not kidding. Yeah, right. Well, it would have to be a car after 2005. Yes. ’cause your car is a 2005 and it has a cassette player. [01:18:00] All right. I’m not gonna make you guys guess. 2010 Lexus SC four 30 still came with a cassette player.

It was the last car to have one from the factory. Wow. Lexus. That’s pretty baller. I would not have said Lexus except as an SC four 30. Maybe the ugliest car ever made. I mean, it’s on our list, that’s for sure. You know, we need to put that list on our website like that people can just go to and we need to change it like the leaderboard on, on top.

Do do your own version of a cool wall, you know? Yeah, we’re, I think we’re gonna do that. We can make that happen. Alright. Last car to have popup headlights. It’s actually a tie Popup headlights, because you know, pop-up headlights are legit. Cool. Right? Remember when they were? I can’t think of anything right now.

My head is just like miada miada Miata. So, so what was after the C five that still had pop-up Headlights. Ding, ding, ding. Dinging. Dinging. It is the C five Corvette. That is the last car. Mm-hmm. To have pop-up headlights outside of the lotus’s spree. Felt like it was too obvious. 2000, 2004 was the last one.

All right. The last vehicle to have a [01:19:00] carburetor car truck. Help me out. Doesn’t matter. All the above. This one’s a tough one ’cause you’re really reaching back. Carburetors are pretty paleozoic at this point. I mean, the, the, after the late 1970s, the five liter Mustang had a carburetor until like 86 or 85.

Yeah. Where they finally went to fuel injection. So you’re looking what would’ve had a carburetor after that. All right. You ready? Chevy Square bought it? No. Going. Well, those still got those. Still got carburetors. Everybody converts ’em back to carburetors, actually from the factory with a carburetor. The 1994 Isuzu pickup.

Ah, I knew it was gonna be something like that. Dammit. All right, Tanya’s gonna love this. Next one, the last car to have a front bench seat. This is one of her favorite cars. It’s gonna be a Buick. No, it’s gonna be a Buick. No, no. The real que I’ve never said, and I’ve never said that about a Buick. No. The real question is if by favorite cars, [01:20:00] he means cars that I hate.

Yes, a hundred percent. Because if it’s cars that I hate, then it’s gotta be either an Impala or, or a Malibu. Which are basically the same thing, the same car. So I, I’m at a loss right now and get this, this is pretty recent. It is in fact the 2013 Chevrolet Impala was the last vehicle to have a front bench seat.

Rental turds of rental turds. I’ve driven that turd, I think. All right. Now for the bonus, the bonus, this is a tough one. The bonus, the last car to be produced, I can’t even get this out. The last car to be produced with a hand crank start. We know the Landy had one. That’s true. That was in the seventies though.

And Matt reminds us constantly of the ultimate party trick, his hand starting his Land rover. This is a tough one. I, I can’t, I can’t think of anything after the seventies that would’ve had answer. I mean, it’s probably, it’s probably [01:21:00] some, for a practical reason, some kind of work vehicle where they, maybe they wanted to have it.

That’s, you know, I, I would consider this a work vehicle. It’s very utilitarian. I would almost say it’s an SS u v. I’ll give Mark a hint ’cause I’ve looked ahead. ’cause I had no idea. See, I was good. I, I didn’t think outside the country. Outside the country, outside our country. That’s why this was the bonus question.

You’re, you’re gonna gimme a global challenge. Oh, Jesus. Mm-hmm. Yep. Um, it’s hard. Like, like a Toyota helix or something, you know, that’s the right kind of body style. But I won’t, I won’t torture you anymore. ’cause even our, even our listeners are probably going, oh my God, get it over with already from the Russian block, the 1990.

Lata Neva still had a crank start. Can you believe that? Of course. A lata. Of course. I had a crank start. ’cause lata, that’s cheating. You can’t say communist cars ’cause chips. That car does not need chips. It just has a crank start. Yeah, there’s no, there’s no chips. Oddly enough, it runs on [01:22:00] chips. It’s got a crank start, but it has fuel injection.

So like wrap your head around that one for a second. In other historical news, I just gotta read this, we don’t even need to dive into it. Apparently we have finally stopped using leaded fuel. Yes. Let me repeat that. We have finally stopped using leaded fuel. Algeria has used up their last bit of stockpile in 2021.

I posted this and talked about it with some of our petrol heads here at G T M and they were laughing saying that according to some S C C A racers Summit Point has about 5,000 gallons of leaded 110 octane underground. That’s still available for use. So maybe we’re not quite done with leaded fuel yet, but I just wanted to throw that out there.

That’s just, what were they putting it in? Like I, I don’t know what runs on leaded fuel anymore. I mean, who shows up to the track with like a Hudson Hornet? You know, I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t get it. At any rate, so switching gears, we don’t talk about Swedish cars very often. [01:23:00] No, we do not. However, who knew?

Although now is not the right time to be going there, but maybe in like 10 years. If you find yourself in Sturgis, South Dakota among having bike rallies and whatnot, there is apparently a SOB heritage car museum that has an extensive collection of immaculately kept classic sobs, and one fiat, and apparently one fiat.

So I look through these pictures. This is really cool. I also feel like the pictures did the museum a disservice. ’cause now I don’t need to go there. Hmm. Because I’ve kind of seen everything, but I also have a bigger question that needs to be answered. If this is a sob museum, which I’m totally okay with, I mean, everybody’s got their thing.

Where are the jets? Well, they were born from Jets. What does that mean exactly? It’s a sub car museum. Oh, okay. Okay. Now we’re gonna qualify it. Yeah, I mean, I’m just like [01:24:00] South Dakota of all places, but hey, Swedish migrants, I guess in that area, like an an enthusiast. There was an enthusiast and he collected all these cars.

Apparently they all run. It’s a very large assortment and I’m sure the two stroke ones are very difficult to get started up there when it’s cold. I looked at all the pictures and some of them definitely rank on my ugly car list for sure. Or, or the uncool wall, let’s call it that. I’m proud of people that do stuff like this.

I mean, go for it. I mean, do your passion and if you can get ’em for pennies on the dollar, so be it. And I’m, I’m happy that they all run and I’m, hopefully they’re being driven. The fiat still confuses me, although I still think that’s the prettiest car in that whole museum. I’m the same way. I feel like, particularly in this time of change with electric, and I feel like when we were younger, you know, growing up in the nineties or whatever, it was more like a music culture.

Like if you liked this car, then you didn’t like that car. I feel like a more broadly inclusive automotive enthusiast culture is kind of what we need if we want this, [01:25:00] uh, hobby to survive. Absolutely. So, yeah, man, you do you very proud of that guy. Good job. Speaking of incredible feats and being proud of something.

What about a world record holding Volvo? And what do I mean by that? Gentleman, by the name of Gordon, who has long passed away, his Volvo continues to live on. I think we talked about this car on a previous episode. The odometer has now turned over 3 million miles. It is a P 1800 as seen in the original Saint.

Uh, for those of you that are old enough to remember that show, not the movie with Val Kilmer, I think this is epic. This is really cool to see a piece of European engineering still on the road, you know, 65 years later, let’s call it. And with that many miles on the clock, still being enjoyed, still being driven, being maintained.

And I think what it is above all, outside of being record breaking, whatnot, is a testament to maintenance. If you do your regular maintenance intervals, you keep track of things and you don’t let cars sit, then they will [01:26:00] literally run forever. It says that it, it has the original engine intact at 3 million miles.

Caveat, it did have two engine rebuilds across 3 million miles and two paint jobs. Otherwise the car is original. Uh, can you imagine, you know, there’s that Greek, I don’t know what you wanna call it, legend story. The ship of thesis. Yes. The Volvo is definitely, the ship is definitely the ship of thesis there ever was one.

Everything has been replaced by the, maybe not everything. The enemy in that situation has to be rust. Absolutely. Right. Like you can fix things that break. Fine, but like preventing the car from completely falling apart. That has to take a lot of consistent diligence in regards to how the car’s maintained.

It reminds me of cars that I’ve seen get sold by people or be abandoned by people where it’s like I didn’t wanna put the money in it to keep it going. And it was something dumb like, oh, I needed to change the, the lock cylinder. I needed to change the spark plugs. And I just decided I’m gonna go buy a new car.

And I’m, I [01:27:00] feel for those cars, maybe I’m, I’m impassioned for these inanimate objects, right? I, I, I, I personify them in some way. It’s just like if you do that little bit of maintenance, you put up that little bit of money up front. How many more miles could you have gone? How, how much longer could you have stretched your dollar?

This Volvo owes Gordon, even though he is passed away, it owes him nothing at this point. I mean, can you imagine buying this car new in the 1960s and it’s still on the road today for $4,150? Was the sticker price convert that to today’s dollars? That was a 1966. Doesn’t, that was a fair chunk of change.

Doesn’t, it? Doesn’t matter. It went over 3 million miles. I don’t care if it was a 20 grand car. I mean that like, holy moly. And it’s probably worth more than what’s been sunk into it now because it’s still a running, driving P 1800, which they didn’t make a ton of those cars Anyway. That was the sporty two-door Volvo Sports Coop, beautiful [01:28:00] car.

I really like those. I’d, I’d love to drive one if somebody’s got that one out there. I’d, I’d love to get the behind the wheel of yet another one of my heroes and be completely disappointed. But that’s not the point. It’s just, it’s a testament to doing the maintenance, putting in just a little bit of effort and, and taking care of cars and not abusing them.

They’re not appliances. They’ll, they’ll last you forever. Yeah. That’s $40,000 in current value. I just jumped on the, uh, C P I inflation calculator. There you go. That’s not bad. 3 million miles for 40 grand in 1966. Mark, we gotta wrap up this because chips. Because chips, sure. Let’s put a cap on it. Although we’re about to get into EVs, so I don’t know.

Maybe not. I guess technically it happened at the end of August. But when I was kind of going through the, the topic list, I thought it was worth mentioning T S M C, which is the world’s probably largest Silicon Foundry, they announced a price increase of 20%. And it just goes to show kind of the longevity of this challenge.

Your more profitable [01:29:00] devices, the more profitable uses of that silicon are gonna absorb that 20% and keep on chugging, right? Your iPhones, your consumer graphics cards, you know, your, like, whatever. Those kind of things that have, you know, your higher retail margins. Where in the automobile world where they’re trying to buy in bulk, they’re trying to buy discount, they’re trying, you know, they operate at much lower margins, it just puts them at the back of the line.

They don’t have the space to so easily absorb that kind of price increase. And, and it does cause some, you know, broader concerns around the transitory nature of the inflation that we’ve been going through for the last several months. But just thought it was worth noting. It’s certainly newsworthy. It’s out there.

I mean there’s lots of other kind of, if you wanna look at the topic a little more broadly, there is certainly look at government investment in regards to opening some of these foundries in the United States. It’s billions and billions of investment. There’s certainly been a push in the Covid area to get our supply chain a little more consolidated and to move some of these foundries back [01:30:00] into the United States.

Now that they’re all mostly automated anyway, the labor costs and things that originally moved them over there aren’t as big of a deal. It’s certainly is gonna impact the auto industry. Yeah, and you bring up a really good point, and it’s also why we heard during this month that the iPhone 13 is finally debuting, and yet there’s oceans of F one fifties and Silverados that are sitting unfinished because they can’t get chips.

So you’re right, they’re gonna prioritize the profit margins before they prioritize, you know, sometimes the need that’s a little different. Like Apple was really smart in consolidating their supply chain. Tim Cook is not Steve Jobs, he’s not a product guy, but he is a supply chain guy. And so, you know, they did the acquisitions they needed to do and as they moved into arm, they make all their own chips.

They’re not licensing anything from Qualcomm or whatever like everybody else. And they’re even getting into, you know, their own radios and stuff now. So their consolidated supply chain has really insulated them from that more broadly and the high margins of their devices. Obviously. That’s actually a great segue [01:31:00] into our EV section where Tanya’s gonna run us through some new concepts and some upcoming news on all the EVs that are coming out here in the next couple of years.

So I think we’ve talked on and off about Rivian, if everyone recalls, uh, that EV automaker the deposit on one of those years ago, Did you? I did. Well, you’re in luck because they finally rolled off their first production vehicle. First customer sale, hot damn. And that puts them at the first or electric pickup truck.

Um, first to market. It’s unclear, you know, how many sales orders they actually have fulfilled and how many more they’re gonna make because chips. But nonetheless, they can claim that they are the first ones to roll an electric pickup truck off the line. And I’ve always liked the look of the rivian. I’m not a pickup truck person.

Most people know that does not fit my hashtag the lifestyle because it maintains a pickup truck look. And it’s a little bit [01:32:00] futuristic, but not overly. I don’t mind it. It’s got that ev vibe on, like the goldeneye N 64 Cyber Truck. Polygon. Polygon. When did it get the goldeneye? That’s amazing. Tarbucks. Oh, you, you haven’t seen that meme or that cliff where someone actually created one inside of a, a goldeneye uh, RO or whatever.

That’s amazing. That’s awesome. And it fits in perfectly as if it was designed to be there. So designed this car, you have 12 triangles go. It’s like, it’s like an interview question that then somebody was like, that’s genius. Let’s, let’s actually build it. You’re like, no, no. This is just one of those brain teasers we use in interviews.

No, no, we’re doing it. Like animals, like make a lion out of three pieces of triangle and two squares kind of thing. And you’re exactly right. That’s how they designed the cyber truck. So anyway, I mean that’s the news with Rivian. So it’ll be interesting to see kind of like where their sales go and, and how the, the company bottom line gets affected [01:33:00] by this in other news, speaking of Rivian, which I just came across this evening, so their plant is in normal Illinois where this rolled out.

But I guess they also have some offices because I think their headquarters are actually in California. But there was somebody, a company employee test driving, one in camo geared whatnot. And the incident is being reported as driver error. Oh man. And, and honestly hopefully, because that’s a bad look for them as they just roll off their first production vehicles to have one be in an accident, if there was any sort of, you know, self anything going on.

But nonetheless, from the pictures and whatnot, the person was driving maybe would’ve needed to negotiate kind of a right-hander, 90 degree ish turn, missed the turn and kind of kept going straight up the curb, up the grassy hill through bushes into a parking lot. I call that under steer normally. At least it’s got some torque, you [01:34:00] know, and then it through all the obstacles.

And then slammed into a parked Ford Explorer. At least the Ford could stop it. I mean, no Ford tough then, which then the Ford Explorer hit a parked Mercedes that was next to it. Ah, the did the battery then burst into flame. There was no injuries, no claim. It’s, it’s a success. Actually. There was very little damage to the Rivian.

There was significant seemingly damage to the Ford Explorer, so I’m not sure in terms of safety, what that’s saying, good or bad about the rivian. Maybe it weighs 9,000 pounds like some of those other trucks we talked about. I mean, it’s likely ’cause a lot of EVs are just ridiculous in weight. But nonetheless, it’s very unfortunate to hear that they’ve had their first accident.

That sucks. It’s like, sorry guys. It’s like the guys that bought the hellcats that wrecked ’em 10 feet from the dealership. I mean, this is like right on farm. I, I mean, it really [01:35:00] sounds like it. And if it was driver error, I could totally see, you know, this thing is capable of, you know, zero to 60 in less than whatever seconds that someone just got buck wild behind the wheel and essentially lost control, which also isn’t a good look for the consumer that I don’t know.

That’s, that’s a problem with all the EVs too much power. We, we saw that report in Europe where that tecan or, or something where he launched it up the, the driveway like it, that was pretty bad. He hit his own house with his car. It is brilliant. Something like that. You don’t have the sens same sensation of speed.

Correct. It’s, it’s a legit problem. There’s super powerful and you don’t have the same sensation as speed. There’s a million videos of that. I think the problem is, is because the torque is instantaneous. Rather than in a petrol engine where you build up and you can feel it, you know where the torque curve is coming on, you know, at what R P m it’s gonna unload and all that.

With it, with the ev, it’s like it’s, it’s a light switch. It’s all or nothing. Moving on to Tesla’s number one rival. Yes. The [01:36:00] Tesla fighter, if we will. So Lucid Air, apparently there’s some articles that are saying that it is basically phenomenal to drive. I don’t know. But the more impressive piece that has more recently come out is that the E P A has given the Lucid Air Dream, a 520 mile range, which puts it at over a hundred miles over the model SS whatever their best.

Tesla version is so, holy moly, that’s pretty impressive. And this thing weighs like just over 5,000 pounds. Again, not a light vehicle by any stretch of the imagination. Do you think we’d get more mileage if they made these things a little bit lighter? Uh, I mean, that’s a rhetorical question, right? This thing has apparently 1100 some odd horsepower.

So I mean, how heavy are the batteries required to make a thousand horsepower at 520 mile range or whatever, right? Or you know, maybe [01:37:00] at that horsepower, I think the range actually falls to like four 70 something. But nonetheless, that still would be the highest range ev um, period. Yeah. And that’s quite impressive.

I mean, and who isn’t gonna be like, oh, you want me to sacrifice 50 miles for a thousand horsepower? Okay. And it still has 966 horsepower. If you want the full five 20, that’s pretty decent. Last I check 9 66. I mean, I mean, that’s ridiculous. I mean, that’s, who needs that? I mean, I, I do need, what is this need?

What need you speak of? It’s the want. The want is strong for the thousand horsepower. So, I mean, that’s pretty cool. I believe it’s the 2022, so it should be coming out soon, coming around the corner pretty soon. So it’ll be, it’ll be interesting to see. I thought if I recalled the history here, one of the main guys at Lucid was a former Tesla person, I believe.

Yeah, I believe that’s right. Yeah. I guess that’s unfortunate that they [01:38:00] lost him. ’cause he must be doing something right. I am still not sold on the look of the Lucid air yet. You know, whatever. We’ll see it in person. It’s unattractive. And the interior is not that cool either. I mean, if you compare, I mean, those are per, those are personal, those are personal preferences.

I mean, it’s still better looking than that Maybach thing, so, oh God, no, that, that’s, that’s called the suppository on spinners. And, um, is that like the ballet cat or whatever that thing was. But anyway, so I feel like this era of car manufacturing has actually brought us back a hundred years and hear me out on this one.

If you look back over like the 1920s and 1930s, there were a lot of very boutique manufacturers. You have all these crazy names, like, oh, you have Oakland and obviously you have names like Packard and things like that. But it felt like everybody and their brother, literally in some cases, like the Bentley brothers, were developing their own brand of car.

And so there’s all these little boutique manufacturers and now they’ve, you know, been absorbed by [01:39:00] the big names and, and, and whatnot. But we’re starting to see in the EV revolution, more boutique manufacturers coming online. And one of them came across our desk, alpha Motors, and I’m like, who the hell is Alpha Motors?

I guess Beta Motors is next, followed by Charlie Motors. I don’t know. But they put out something that really got my attention. They call the wolf. And it’s an electric pickup truck. Now. I know Tanya. I love it. And why do we love it? Because it looks like the Toyota from back to the future. Yes, a hundred percent.

A hundred percent. I would buy this pickup truck. It’s awesome. Ladies and gentlemen. I have said it. A pickup truck that I want, it has, it has a range of five miles. That’s, I mean, look, that has gotta be the least aerodynamic thing ever made, but it’s hella cool. It doesn’t matter. Yeah, yeah, I agree. It looks totally badass.

I want one. I’d take that over Rivian. Yes. Yes, I would. I would. I would take that over Rivian. That thing is sick. And if you don’t know what we’re talking about, check out the show notes. All the information is there. The pictures are, there’s pictures from every [01:40:00] angle and it looks good from every angle. It is that classic Toyota Four Runner style like you’re used to on back to future.

It’s a three box with big flared fenders and big knobby tires. It looks badass. What else do we need? What we don’t need though, is our next car. Oh my. And our next car is unclear what its name is, but apparently it’s made by Opal. And its name is Rocks E. Like a boulder like a rock. Rock, like rocks as in the things you step on.

Dash e. Is this the Roxy or the Amy? E v? Maybe it’s both. Like they, they had a baby or something. ’cause this thing is weird looking It, it has a ING 5.5 kilowatt hour battery. That’s like a laptop, right? It’s opals. Okay, here we go. So Citroen has what is called the Amy a m I. Ami, sorry, the friend Ami. It’s Ami.[01:41:00]

The Ami Evie. So opal’s version is the rocks E and it’s about the size of a power wheels. Yeah. This is a, this is a power wheels with our roll cage. This is a joke, like it’s a smart car. And then I don’t know what happened to that smart car. It wasn’t an accident or something. I mean the seating position alone, the dashboard, just the interior cockpit would turn me away from the car outside of its overall aesthetics, just being ultra French.

But it’s just like, I would be uncomfortable in this thing from the word go on the cobbled streets of Europe and some medieval city. Oh man. I’m sure it’s totally fine in America you will die a hundred percent. Don’t do it. Don’t do it. Service announcement, spare yourself. This one is because chips, it’s not coming to America.

We won’t see this one in America, but um, there’s another boutique manufacturer, they’re known as Cupra and they have what they’re [01:42:00] calling the urban Rebel. And so they developed a concept which is essentially a. An electric hot hatch, and I can’t honestly say that I hate it because it is definitely the epitome of hot hatch, like Fast and the Furious Hot Hatch.

I’ve got one of these in Grand Theft Auto. Exactly like it’s something from like need for speed underground where you go into the garage and you put all your ground effects lights on it, you know all that stuff. Like it’s with those wheels. It’s the scene from cars where when you buy every possible accessory, those look like the wheels from that seven 18.

Actually, the nose does too. Here’s my take on this. First of all, You had me at Cupra. ’cause I immediately started thinking about the Ts, which for folks that don’t know what Sayat is, it’s the Spanish arm of Volkswagen. They’ve had the Cupra, which is the Leon is a Leon, which is basically a g t i. The Cupra R’s are fantastic cars.

They’re, they’re a lot of fun. They’re, they’re actually, they’re some respects more powerful than a G tis that we get here in the States. They’ll never bring ’em, but that’s [01:43:00] okay. What killed me on this article, it’s Jalopnik, right? So it’s the typical kind of clickbait and they go, and I’m gonna read this verbatim.

The Cooper Urban Rebel concept is the electric hot hatch the world needs right now in my best William Shatner impression. And I said, hell no. What the world needs right now is the gr Yaris. I’m standing up for Tanya on this one. Scrap this turd. Bring over something that already exists that we already want.

I don’t need a boutique car. We need the gr yaris. I, we’ve said this a thousand times. This is not what the world needs. Yeah, but this is apples and oranges. Gris is a petrol car. This is electric grs. We still need. We do still need the grs, but it’s on a totally different level. I think if any other manufacturer that we recognize badged this, we’d be having a different conversation.

Yes, because we don’t know who these folks are. They could be a skunk works for Sayat for all we [01:44:00] know. Maybe they aren’t. It’s at least it’s not a lot of, I think we mentioned earlier, who knows? We’ll keep an eye on it. Maybe it’ll come to nothing. Maybe it’s just a rendering. I mean, it’s a concept car, so only time will tell.

Speaking of concepts that aren’t concepts that are actually resto mods, we bring ’em up every month because there’s been some really cool ones. We talked about the e legend, which was an homage to the original Audi Quatro. We talked about Morgans being redone as EVs, Alfaro males, Opal Mantas, all sorts of really cool stuff.

There’s now a company that’s doing a short wheel base for Ferrari to 50 remake, and it is. Absolutely gorgeous company by the name of R M L. Not a ton of details. You can check out the pictures and salivate over them via our show notes, but really cool. I like that more of this is happening. I am a huge proponent for this style of EV and this style of just car design in general.

Bring back [01:45:00] classic designs that people will buy hand over fist. Good Lord, that hits you right in the fields, man. That is gorgeous. Even in the white, which the Ferrari’s never came in, it’s just, it is just beautiful, beautiful car. How they’re able to do that without Ferrari breathing down their neck is beyond me, but wow.

That is gorgeous. Geez. I’m just, I’m like, I’m in awe. Well, I guess it’s time to transition and we’d be remiss if it wasn’t a drive-through episode where we didn’t talk about Tesla. That was your best Siri voice yet. Yeah, that was pretty good. Thank you. I tried Tesla. So what, uh, you know, it’s, it’s kind of a quiet month for Tesla in a way.

I mean, the cyber truck’s still delayed. They’re not doing this, they’re not doing that. The little Roadster, who knows, it’s still floating in space hashtag with those chips. However, They’re still dealing with a little teeny problem with their [01:46:00] autopilot and the autopilot hitting parked emergency vehicles, particularly police cars.

And yet again, another Tesla that is not fully self autonomous, even though they think it is sideswiped, the police car nearly hit the police officer who I think at the time happened to be getting outta the car, so thankfully he wasn’t killed or severely injured, but it’s just adding to the list for the N H T S A to investigate what the heck is going on, where the cars are seemingly getting very confused with the combination of, it’s always happening in like low light settings.

So this was like early morning, so it was still dark outside, and it’s seemingly like darkness. Plus the flashing of the emergency vehicle lights is just, it’s like a, a fly to the electric bug zapper.

And they’re just, they’re just going. They’re just going. And you know, again, the morons. [01:47:00] Offense or no offense, I don’t care because you’re not paying attention. What are you doing that you’re letting your car sideswipe? A parked vehicle? Yeah. You must wanna leave it there. I can’t believe I’m falling in the role of Tesla apologists.

I’m definitely not one. But it doesn’t make national news when anybody else sideswipes a cop that’s pulled over on the side of the road, and usually they don’t pull over very far. Sometimes they do that defensively to try and protect the car in front of ’em. They. Hang their ass out over the line or whatever to Right.

And in a lot of states it’s illegal for you to stay in the lane adjacent Correct. To the pulled over emergency vehicle. And if you cannot exit that lane, you have to reduce your speed by like 50% or something. They do definitely need to program something into their autonomy that would move the car in the opposite direction.

Not towards the way, then it would just sideswipe the car in the lane next to him. So what difference? Fair. Fair enough. But it doesn’t make national news when a Ford escape doesn’t. Right. I think the problem is it’s not, it’s not so much Tesla. It’s so much that it’s [01:48:00] always the car is in self-driving mode.

That’s the problem. That’s the always the common denominator. Yeah. Because if it was just like, oh dumbass Tesla driver was driving and texting and they sideswiped a car. Yes. That’s no different than Ford Explorer. Driver dumbass was texting sideswiped car, car. You know, when you are somebody like Tesla that’s claiming how awesome their self-driving capabilities are and they’re fully autonomous, you’re putting a target on your back and you are making it such that you are gonna be the attention of every little thing that happens because.

You’re claiming you’re something that you really aren’t. See Mark, this is the lesson we all learn about the drive-through. Remember I mentioned in our, in our pre-session, we just don’t go there with the Tesla. You let Tanya do her thing. You let her rant, let her get it outta her system. It’s like, I haven’t heard the actual empirical argument yet.

It’s pretty simple. Insurance companies insure all these different cars. How many payouts do they make relative to mile [01:49:00] driven on these cars? Autonomous driving, no autonomous driving. Is it doing better or worse than other expensive sedan? I haven’t seen anybody release that data set. I don’t, I don’t know if that, I mean, obviously they have the data.

They absolutely have the data. You know, I haven’t seen any, any news around that. I mean, certainly, what do they call it? Autonomous level three or whatever. It’s, it is a very dangerous point where it’s, it’s hard for a human to, it’s hard to have the discipline to pay attention. It really is. So you either turn it off so you have to pay attention all the time, or you try to have the discipline to pay attention the entire time while you’re also kind of screwing around because what else are you gonna do?

I was gonna say, it’s called driving, but I mean, I’m not gonna open that can of words. Yeah, I mean, I, I don’t disagree with you that we don’t have the numbers and there’s a lot of unsubstantiated claims that just say that there’s far less accidents with, you know, the self-driving this, that and the other, and all these nannies and aides, that lane assist and all that stuff.

And, and then that might be very true. ’cause I do think there is a subset of the population that is incapable of clearly [01:50:00] keeping their focus on a single task at hand, which would be driving. And some of these aides are beneficial to the people around them to keep them safe. But I just get very annoyed by, I love the way you worded that, right?

That was awesome. Are you a lawyer? I have no idea what you in real life. That was very, that was very specific wording. I just get irritated by the, the ignorance or arrogance of people just self-driving. Like stop calling it fully autonomous. It’s not, we’re not there yet. It does not exist. It’s full autonomous is called a monorail.

It’s something like a rollercoaster where the thing is tied to a track that is full autonomous. But we are not yet at a point where we can just take a nap in the driver’s seat, roll the seat back, put on Netflix and chill, and not kill somebody going down the road at two o’clock in the morning and you’re on a country road and you wanna go risk your life.

And drive off a cliff or into a tree. By all means, live your best life for as long as you can. I don’t know, [01:51:00] don’t put other people’s lives unnecessarily in danger. And, and maybe one day we’ll get there, but we’re not in. Yeah. You know, it’s only like 11 accidents, Mar, Mar Mar and the grand scheme shore.

But it’s a black eye in the whole autonomous vehicle thing. And I hate the way that they face the market with it, where it’s like, if they were just going to the market where they’re like, yeah, accidents are happening, and they do happen. They will happen and pay attention to assholes, uh, hang up and drive, use the future responsibly.

But instead they react so defensively and so aggressively against whoever ba, you know, whoever raises concerns. Like, Hey, there appears to be a pattern to these accidents. If they were more just transparent about the challenges with the current software Exactly, I think they would get a lot further. I, I wanna say this, and I don’t wanna belabor the point, but the one thing that I take from all this is I approach it the opposite way.

You know, I was jokingly saying, hang up and drive. You talked about, you know, being respectful of the future and the technology and stuff like that. When I look at driving, [01:52:00] I think about the era in which we came up as drivers. Again, petrolheads of a certain age. We were the last of the analog generation, so we didn’t have a lot of tech, but we were early adopters of technology.

But I see driving still as a freedom, as a privilege, things like that. And I don’t want to get into that debate, but what I also see it as is that moment, those 20 minutes, those 40 minutes, whatever it might be, where I get to disconnect from the grid. I don’t have to think about work. I don’t wanna answer emails, I don’t wanna see your text message.

I just wanna turn on the radio. You know, my mixtape cruising in my five oh with my carburetor and my hand crank and get where I’m going and just have a moment of decompression and driving. Gives you that opportunity. So think about it that way. Disconnect for just a moment. Even if it’s to go to the local target or drop your kid off at school, put the phone down and just focus on driving it.

Actually driving becomes very much second nature. And you do relax. It’s, it’s not a high stress thing as long as you’re [01:53:00] situationally aware. We talk about that a lot in racing, keeping your eyes up and just being aware of what’s going on. But you do kind of let the rest of the world fade to gray. And it’s a moment of clarity that I don’t think we can get or harvest in a lot of other ways these days.

Unfortunately. We could tangent on, on that train of thought for a long time. ’cause I flat out, there’s people that have said they just hate to drive. So that for a person that just does not wanna drive or be positive with it, I then get an Uber. Right. You’re not, you’re not gonna, you’re not gonna sell them on.

It’s their moment to disconnect because they don’t wanna disconnect. They don’t even wanna be behind the wheel. I gotcha. Like if they could have somebody else driving them, they would. Right. So And that’s for those people. Yes. Self-driving when it actually happens, we’ll be wonderful. So let’s, uh, let’s switch gears.

We’ve hit on this already a couple times. Electric cars and police cars and apparently West Virginia. Yeah, the city of Nitro, West Virginia. I didn’t know such a city existed. What a fancy name, which is near Charleston. For those who are geographically not challenged for West Virginia has bought a Tesla [01:54:00] model three.

To be used as a police cruiser. Hold on. I got questions. I got questions. And they spent an additional 10,000 on top of the 40,000 to buy it, to outfit it with the lights, sirens, and additional police equipment. Whoa, whoa, whoa. So not the sport model then. None of that is important based on the previous topic we were just talking about.

We have a Tesla that’s a police car with lights and sirens and we’re gonna use it on patrol day night weather withstanding. Does it just like implode? The second autopilot’s engaged, it actually collapses in on itself in, in like a black hole. And it just, it disappears and the police officer becomes like, quantum leap, just, it’s all downhill from there.

And there goes, he now goes backwards in time to right histories, wrongs. Oh my goodness. I think that’s all we need to say about that. I just, I, let’s [01:55:00] follow this and see where it goes and how long this car actually lasts. I mean, my biggest question with all these electric police cars and, and I believe we’re gonna hit on, on this topic actually later, what do you do in a high speed chase?

Like if you’re outrunning the cop? I mean, you probably could get away with it now because you only gotta outlast the battery charge. And I tell you what, a ba a Tesla full tilt. I’ve done this on track and I wrote an article about it. It doesn’t last a half an hour at wide open, we’ll call it wide open throttle.

Well then you gotta consider the battery was probably not fully charged to begin with. Ing dinging, ding ding. I mean, you can’t outrun Motorola. I’m not condoning any of this, but No, you can outrun those batteries. I’m not saying you should outrun the cops, but we know it happens. It’ll be a Florida man story coming up.

I mean, it’s fine. It’ll be a West Virginia, man. Tesla. The bit of Tesla news is interesting. Not necessarily indicative of anything. electric.co. They issued an article that says Tesla obtains patent on [01:56:00] its wild idea to use a lasers. Lasers as windshield wipers. And there’s just. So much fear one could unpack.

This is definitely Austin Powers like sharks with fricking lasers on their head. Exactly. And if they need to put one of those sharks like a, like it’s a windshield wiper. Yes. Back and forth it, it’s all very confusing. And the take that it could just be that they came up with this idea and they’re patenting it because that’s what you do.

If you think you have an idea, put a patent on it so nobody else can take it and you might not yet know what you’re actually going to use it for, but they framed it in this manner that really makes no sense. Talk about it specifically for debris on your windshield. So think dead bug, mud bird dooo, if you will.

I see it all falling apart very quickly. So my windshield wipers are misaligned, so my car blinded me. Then my windshield melted from the heat. Oh. And then the car got confused [01:57:00] by the laser beam lights that were flashing at night during the rain. And then you crashed. Yes. It’s obvious and very apparent that the patent trade office is full of bad ideas and this is just yet another one on that list.

I would’ve thought they’d use it for heat in like some kind of anti fog. No, it’s to give you, it’s to give you like LASIK and cataract surgery while you’re gonna down the roof. We’re gonna burn dirt off of your windshield. That just can’t be efficient. That can’t be energy efficient. It can’t be efficient.

And it sounds like they would not have a traditional windshield wiper blade going across the windshield. It almost reads that way. But that would be impossible because what do you do during a torrential downpour? There’s no, you shoot the la you shoot, there’s no amount of lasers. There’s no amount of lasers that are gonna clear the water and to do it, the laser would be so powerful that yes, it would burn your retina.

Like, looks like a freaking, like Calvin Harris midnight rave. It’s like [01:58:00] lights everywhere, laser pees and shit. You might as well get off the glow sticks at that point. I mean, it’s gonna, it’s gonna be a travesty though. It does beg the memory. The cyber truck does not have windshield wipers, I believe. No, it has that, it has that etcher sketch thing where it moves, does some crazy thing on the, on the windshield.

Absolutely mental. And the cyber truck was delayed. Maybe it’s delayed for laser beams. Chips because laser beans, the Model X was the falcon doors and the cyber truck will be the. Stupid windshield. As you guys remember from last month, we decided to split up. We would be remiss and introduce something we like to call lowered expectations.

That’s right. And I gotta ask a question. I mean, we’ve, we’ve brought up Magnus Walker before he put out on his Instagram feed, and they kind of, one of them went viral. The other one sort of fell to the darkness. It was the Lambo van. It was a rendering that he put together of. Basically taking eighties Lamborghini [01:59:00] Kosh and morphing it onto a BW van.

Again, as you can see, the core vehicle through this, and he also did one of an F 40 and people went nuts like, oh my God, this is the most awesome thing in the world, actually, I think got more press in a way than the release of the new Lamborghini Kosh that we talked about last month. But I wanted to get your guys’ opinions.

What do you think about this? Well, mean one, the Kosh definitely looks better than the F 40. Yes. Like, like definitely. It’s funny that the F 40 got a lot more attention. I guess I have to be inclusive along my comments earlier that we need a broader accepting car culture. I would certainly take pictures of this if I found it out in the wild.

Absolutely. That’s for damn surely. I mean, it’s the coolest van again I’ve ever seen. I mean, if you told me that these were gen one transformers, totally be all over these. I would have both of them on my shelf and like expect them to transform into, you know, some robotic dude. Hang on. If it’s this or a Pacifica, I’m definitely taking the Kosh version of the Mangan.

Oh wow. [02:00:00] Shoot. Shots fired. I tell you what, Pacifica’s legit take the Kosh hand in one of those Crate Ford electric motors. Exactly. Hey, now we’re talking. Now these would be really cool as ring busts up like a pantera. Can you Well, that too, right? Can you imagine? But take these on the berg ring, like they have the ring taxis.

These would be pretty slick to go around it. I mean, I would pay to go around in a Lambo van on the Berg ring, so that’d be pretty slick. Feel like if I made it all the way out there, I’d have better uses of my time. That’s very true. That’s, I can’t argue with that. I mean, if you have infinite days of the track, if I’m gonna live the Berg rig.

Sure. On the other side of lowered expectations, this one came from a friend of mine. She sent it to me and it was a TikTok link and a gentleman converted a vehicle into a life sized little red wagon, also known to many of us as the Astro flyer. It’s cool. Oh, I thought it, at first was I saw [02:01:00] the handle and at first I was thinking back to that dude.

That made the Yeah. Yeah. The, the, the trolley, the hand pump trolley train car thing. At first I was like, holy crap, is that this again? And then I thought it was a pedal cab kind of thing. But then I also thought it was one of those duck tour boats. Right, right. Things. Nope. It’s a life size little red wagon.

Okay. Different strokes for different folks, I guess. So. I mean, check it out for yourselves in the show notes. Leave some comments. We’re really interested to see what you think about this thing. I think it’s kind of cool, but also just begs the question, why parade float? A hundred percent. Well, now we gotta move on to rich people thing.

This one pulls at my send it button pretty hard and the title got me right away and then I dug into it. Ever wonder if you could outrun a. A police pursuit. You won’t have to wonder for very long if that police is a Tesla blah. [02:02:00] You can, or an ID three or whatever. Yeah. Or any electric vehicle. But now your wish can come true because in the United Kingdom, you can pay to try.

So wait A, so wait a second. And the very next subtitle to this article is It’s you and a Porsche Boxer or Mazda Miata versus a law enforcement Dodge Charger. G T F O. Right? That’s what I said. A Miata versus a Dodge Charger on a racetrack, on a highway. Different problem, on a racetrack on the first off ramp, and then Miata would be gone.

But, but here’s the deal. Let let, let’s give you the bluff, right? The bottom line up front, an hour and a half includes the introductions to the basics, right? So they’re assuming people don’t have track time, whatever. So they go over safety racing lines, throttle or breaking, you know, typical H B D E and H B D C type of stuff.

Testing on the track, getting familiar, and then you get to choose between the boxer or the [02:03:00] Miata. I would personally choose the boxer knowing what Miatas are like. No offense to Miata lovers just saying, I’m in a police pursuit. I think I want the Porsche. Yes, it’s a 15 minute police pursuit. So think about it as a shortened track session, and you’re being chased by a dodge.

Charger in your attempt is to escape where you’re escaping to. I don’t know, because you’re lapping the track. I feel like I do this on any given weekend at the track anyway, and it probably costs a lot less, but I like the idea of the cherries and berries chasing me around, but not in a Miata, that’s for sure.

That is for sure. Now, if you had told me, come to the track with your own car and outrun the cops, hell yeah. Let’s do this. I’m in it to win it. Yeah. I mean it, it seems, it seems a little gimmicky. I I was the, the headline was so cool. I was like, oh, this is gonna be awesome. I think it was one of the old top Gear episodes, maybe it was Top Gear Us, where they had like a military base where they’d abandoned the housing mm-hmm.

Section and so they ended up doing some little contests where they’re [02:04:00] running from Stig or STIGs chasing them around the housing section. And so you had this kind of residential setup, but of course there’s nobody there, so if you jump a curb or run into a house or something, it’s not a big deal. I was hoping it might be something like that.

It seems like just a way to play flashlight tag. Yeah, on a racetrack. Yeah, exactly. And in a Miata, you’re not gonna get very far in 15 minutes. I hate to break it to you folks, especially with a Hemi charger behind you. It’s not gonna work. It’s not gonna take him very long to catch you. You better have like a three minute headstart or something, but Well, if you’re in the market for a luxurious motor home and you happen to have a cool 2.4 million burning a hole in your pocket, you could check out a German brand called Volkner Mobile.

That makes a very luxurious motor home for which you could also slide your Bugatti. Or other high performance luxury car underneath in its own private garage. I love that. The second pictures an I eight, that’s a [02:05:00] bit of a change. I mean, we see picture number one, bti, Sheron, picture number two and I eight, we picked up for five bucks.

We’ve seen these before on the old top gear where they showed this being done with a Morgan Arrow eight, if I remember correctly, and they, they had an older ulner on there, so I’m glad to see that they’re still around. Didn’t realize there was a huge market for these things, redefines the toter home and, and the toy hauler and whatnot.

But, uh, yeah, if you got 2.4 million bucks to burn, what, what the hell not send it. I mean, it, it looks super nice inside. I don’t know if it looks 2.4 million. Nice though. And maybe if 2.4 is. Too steep. Maybe the stereo system is an option. ’cause that would save you 355,000. Whoa. Brings it down to a cool 1.9 million all right before taxes, tags and insurance.

Woo. But it wouldn’t be a drive-through if we didn’t finally reach. Our most anticipated part of the show are Florida man [02:06:00] stories. So the first one is very interesting and unexplained. Uh uh, uh, no pun intended, or was it a U F O cited on the Florida turnpike and apparently legit was not photoshopped. But there’s no explanation as to why this gigantic metal circular thing was driving down the turnpike.

I mean it’s, it’s right in the name U f O. There’s no F here. It was driving, it was a Udo o un unidentified driving object was seen on the floor turnpike. I just wanna know which VW Beetle this was built on. Top of the thing is tragic. It’s just, and I love the fact, what makes it even better is the cover photo, which is in our show notes.

Looks like every other alien Bigfoot [02:07:00] sighting photo. Yes. Where every freaking person now has like triple and quadruple high definition cameras on their cell phone. And this thing is grainy as shit. Like it was taken on an Olympus from like 1982. Like, I do not understand. Yeah. These people are taking 25 megapixel photos on their whatever phone.

This thing looks like it was a Polaroid from God. It’s terrible. The favorite Instagram comment was New Tesla.

It’s the Model U. It’s the Model U baby. I bet Its the, it’s the cyber. Oh, oh man. But you know what? I bet this has Home Depot parts in it as well. This is guaranteed to be made in someone’s basement with Home Depot parts. A hundred percent. Dude, that cockpit alone just is comically cartoon-ish. Like can you imagine driving this freaking thing down the highway?[02:08:00]

It’s just brutal. It’s brutal. I mean, the aerodynamics, like at what speed do you start generating lift? I mean, look at the shape like you’re going to, that thing is, it’s, it’s genuinely dangerous. It looks so unstable. Oh, it’s guaranteed. It’s like some 72 year old man driving to the flea market, like, you know, pick up cucumbers or something.

It’s just, oh, it’s tragic. It’s like, like that Mercedes from 2000 or whatever that just flipped up in the air. It’s like as soon as that guy hits 55, he’s taken off. Oh, the C L K G T R. Yeah, yeah, yeah. From uh, Lamonts. Alright, what’s next? You’re killing me. So we’re gonna take a detour real quick. Out of Florida, we’re gonna go north to Vermont.

Whoa. We haven’t been to Vermont yet. We’ve never been to Vermont before and honestly this seems very uncharacteristic of, of a Vermont Ian. But hey, there’s all types everywhere. So apparently there was a man in Vermont charged with stealing five Teslas. Oh, but [02:09:00] also lighting it on fire on Lake Champlain.

So he bought them with initial small payments and then started doing a whole multiple bank accounts and all different places trying to bullshit his way out of paying for ’em. And then the fifth one, apparently, ’cause I guess he couldn’t get the right paperwork to turn around and sell these cars right away after he bought ’em for nothing and didn’t finish the payments, he drove it out onto the lake when it was iced over and then it allegedly just caught on fire spontaneously, I guess.

Was there like an ambulance or something nearby with its name? There might have been like an emergency vehicle out on the lake that it slammed into and then combusted. But he tried to file an insurance claim, holy cow. Which of course he did. Which, which was rejected. So kudos to that insurance adjuster, uh, or insurance agent.

The vehicles apparently totaled $607,000. Good god. So these were high-end Teslas. I guess this [02:10:00] is where the, uh, direct to consumer market is good because normally a dealer would have to eat that. Yeah. A relatively small business would be stuck with that payment to the bank. But nope, that comes right out of Elon’s pocket.

So, How do you feel about this guy when he puts your name? You are allegedly friends with this dude, and he puts your name on these purchases. I mean, that’s like your buddy signing you up for porn magazines too, right? I mean, it’s as a guy. Anyway, same thing. Who knew these people were in Vermont, but they’re there too, ladies and gentlemen, so, oh my goodness.

You know, it could have been worse. He could have done like that Porsche guy we talked about last year who printed his own checks on the printer at home and then went and bought ’em with that. So, you know, hey, there’s all different ways to approach this. Well, let’s go back down to Florida real quick. So there is a link out there of a Facebook video of a fabulous.

Bystander who stopped, observed this and recorded it. So thank you to those people. Was it [02:11:00] grainy or was it actually like visible? No, it’s pretty good. I mean, he, I wish he was a little bit closer so I could see better, but it’s enough. So Florida man was pulled over in the middle, you know, whatever the highway there was road, minor, highway, not major.

And uh, he got out and then instead of just. Staying in the car or just standing outside the car. You should never get outside the car unless the police directed you to. He starts twerking in the middle of the road and it’s raining outside, so there’s a Florida man twerking in the middle of the fricking road, and then the police.

Him to sub him. I, I can’t un I, I cannot unsee this. And I want, and I want to, you don’t want to unsee it. It’s fantastic. This is just, oh, it’s epic. I mean, the restraint from the officer’s pretty good. Like he could have tased that guy a couple minutes earlier. Yes, he could have, but, but he let it go, you know, thinking maybe he’d twerk himself out and get a little [02:12:00] tired, I guess, and get compliant.

Like, I mean, I’d rather see this guy twerking in the middle of the traffic than those assholes we talked about that are doing donuts in the middle of the beltway. You know, oh God. I, I stopped, I stopped for the twerking. I mean, you know, it’s entertainment. Whew, so brutal. What the hell is going on in Florida?

And, and the next one, it must have been the Vermont guy’s cousin or something, but you know, these are more like dumbest criminal files. So Florida guy, he, uh, steals a car from a Chrysler Dodge Jeep dealership. All right? Then he turns around and tries to trade it back into the same dealership because we’re never gonna check the bin, which they did do, and realize that the car that went missing on their lot just a few days earlier was in fact this same car now trying to be traded in.

Oh my God. So good job on you. I do love the comments, so you always gotta read the comments. Did he have the dealer tag still on it?[02:13:00]

That was your first clue. Hey Bob. You know that dealer tag that went missing just came in for trade-in God, Lord. But if that wasn’t bad enough, oh, please, please tell me there’s more. I mean, you could just read the title and it just explains the whole article, right? So Florida man, arrested for indecent exposure after driving naked through seven toll booths.

Well, I mean, was it summertime? Because, I mean, it’s hot in Florida. I mean it’s, it’s, you know, it was aug. It was late August, early September in Florida. So yes, it warm. Was he so fat that he covered his private parts? In which case, I mean, is that really indecent exposure? The toll workers could apparently, See those areas, that area.

That’s unfortunate. He was Anu. That’s the one time we’re being really overweight. Could be helpful. He was nudist. He was a nudist. That’s his defense. It’s a reli, it’s a religious defense. It’s part of his, his religion. The hi hilarious [02:14:00] part is the gentleman Philia, his last name Phil. Y’all was identified through photo comparison and security footage.

I’m just gonna let exactly photo comparisons of what leave it up brings a whole, brings a whole new, uh, definition. I’ve seen that dickhead before.

People just get the freaking easy pass, right? I’ve seen that asshole before. Damnit, he’s back to round out the Florida. Man. I kept this one for last. Well, I thought this one was amusing. And you know what? He, this got this person, you know, he got fed up, he got tired. You know, he is probably tired of bending money, having to repair his car.

And he’s, he’s clearly an environmentally conscious individual. Oh God. So I give him props because he got tired of the private road that he drives on being in poor condition riddled with potholes. So what does he do? He takes [02:15:00] matters into his own hands and he plants a banana tree in the pothole.

What? So now, instead of driving over pothole. Yep. Yes. So in the, and you know what he considers himself warning other motorists that the potholes there because you’ll see the tree. You might not have seen the pothole. Oh right. So there’s some definite upsides here. Right. So number one, you’d have a really easy measurement for how long the potholes remain unfixed.

’cause you could see how tall the tree is. Exactly. And if you click on the picture, it’s surprisingly tall. I’m surprised no one just ran over the damn thing. It’s like four or five feet tall, which is crazy. Um, I kind of think a downside would be the root system wouldn’t be so great for the road. Is already obviously imperiled all by itself.

I have to think that part is maybe not great. That’s true. Long term. This tree is gonna cause more damage than good. But you said it was a private [02:16:00] road and I don’t know what that means. Probably not maintained by the city or the county or the township. So, right, but what is that? Is it, is it, is it his own road?

Then I’m gonna go out on a limb and say it’s a trailer park in Florida with an h o a that is somehow shockingly behind on its dues maybe ’cause it’s a trailer park in Florida and they can’t afford to keep up the roots. So we put in a banana tree. You can afford the banana tree, but obvious solution is you plant a banana tree in the puddles because the money is in the banana stand.

Right. I, you know, there’s a little arrested development for you. He’s got a business going here, so kudos to him. He’s being environmentally conscious because it does say, the idea came to his mind after having to fill holes in the street with cement multiple times. So this gentleman has been taking it upon himself to do road repair that hasn’t been working.

He’s been pouring quick re into, into poles. And oddly [02:17:00] enough, I think what saddens me the most is that regardless of whatever he’s using, quick read concrete dog manure. I don’t care. Banana tree is somewhat cheaper than all of those items that you’d be putting in a pothole. Yeah, it just baffles my mind.

I mean, how, I don’t even know how the seeds on it. Where do you get the seed for banana? Did, did he use like a, a split or did he take a cutting from a, I mean, I am not, I am the furthest thing from a botanist. So he went to the local, he went to the local garden center. He picked up the pre restarted, pre grown potted banana plant probably and just plopped it up there, threw in there with some miracle grow.

Miracle grow is not cheap though, you know, again, solid logic, environmentally friendly approach to fixing the road. Ah, Florida, you delight me. Every month there’s just so much going on there, but unfortunately we have to go behind the wall very quickly for some motor sports news and this month we concentrate mostly on open wheel racing.

And I’m just gonna do a couple quick things here. First up, we talked about Michael Andretti starting his US-based Formula One team last [02:18:00] month. He has apparently signed Gross John, or Gross Gene, or however you wanna pronounce it, to run on the Andretti Auto Sport team in 2022. So that’s solidifying some dates, solidifying a, a name driver.

I’m really excited to see how that goes for Team Andretti and wish them the best of luck. In addition to that, there was a pretty epic crash that we posted the video for on our show notes that happened at Spa After Spa has now finally been reopened during the Formula W Series. It’s a pretty bad pileup.

There’s in multiple angles, slow motion in real time, et cetera. All I can say is there must have been debris on the track and somebody, or a liquid that they didn’t see and that one of the flaggers didn’t catch it. It happened basically right at O Rouge. Pretty bad accident there. My other big thing was Formula W question mark, but we can save that.

We’ll put a pin in it and talk about it on another episode. Meanwhile, more drama in Formula One land. The, the non-drama side [02:19:00] is that Kimmy Reen has finally announced his retirement, but with that brought a whole shuffling of drivers as he leaves the seat at Alpha. Much to the correct speculation of folks.

BOTAs leaves. Mercedes fills the seat from Kimmy in Alpha. George Russell is moving to Mercedes to team with Louis Hamilton and they’re bringing back Alban to fill the now vacant Williams seat from George Russell. And we got gross Jean going to Andretti next year. So there you go. But the real drama came at the Monza race where there was another incident between Affan and Hamilton, which took them both out.

I don’t know my Monza turn numbers, but as they’re coming down, you know, past start finish pit, laying out the Righthander Sharp Righthander into the, you know, 90 degree, right? 90 degree left that quick chicane right there. Hamilton came outta the pits. He had established front wheels in front of her steppen, who [02:20:00] was already, you know, hot on track.

Hamilton came in on the inside into that first turn for Saan. Tried to take the outside, of course, you immediately have to come over to the left to make the next turn. There was a pinching off that happened. Essentially the, the tires of first Sapen hit, hit Hamilton’s that shot for Stepan up on top of Hamilton where his car then ended up coming to rest.

And when you watch kind of the replay, you actually see that if the halo hadn’t been there, Lewis Hamilton would probably either be dead or very critically injured because the front or back tire of Tappin’s car actually bounced off his head. You know, most of that force was. Luckily absorbed by the halo, but there was still impact.

So had that halo not been there, that would’ve been a catastrophic incident. Good on Formula One for making these safety improvements to help save these drivers’ lives. At the end of the day, it was deemed that Tappin was more at fault. In this incident, being a little too aggressive, I think was the final ruling.

He’s, I think, [02:21:00] receiving like a three place penalty at the start of the next race to no one’s surprise, right? I don’t even follow Formula One that closely, but that accident certainly made it into my, you know, news cycle on, it’s just, I. That kind of safety stuff, if they can make those improvements they need to.

Yeah. And a lot of us laughed about that halo and how goofy it looks and it impairs the driver’s vision and all this kinda stuff. And I, I was still skeptical on whether or not it works because it’s very rare that a formula car like flips over or you have an accident like this. I mean, this is reminiscent of some like weird carting accident where one goes underneath the other one kind of deal.

But I often wonder too, that they make these safety improvements, they make some of these drastic changes and then that gives the drivers a false sense of invincibility where they’re like, well, I can risk, because now we have this added safety thing and so maybe, you know, we can try a little bit harder.

So I often wonder that it comes at an expense and there’s a balance there. And so maybe if it wasn’t there, then they would know, Hey, I’m not gonna take that risk. I’m gonna back off. I’m gonna give him the space. Like you didn’t, even in the [02:22:00] proce days when they would battle it out and take each other out, it was never like this.

Like I feel like they’re a lot more aggressive now. Or maybe just for stoppings more aggressive in general. You know, he is a former Carter and things like that. He is just, maybe it never got out of his system. I, I’m not trying to make excuses, I just, I’m glad it’s there. Hamilton’s still around and all that.

But, uh, well I think there’s been some other accidents though that haven’t been necessarily contact on contact like this, where the halo has probably saved the driver’s life. That’s the whole rugby versus football, you know, analogy relative to the protective equipment. And do American football players take more risks?

I think there’s pro, there’s probably some validity. Is it? It’s not mutually exclusive. It can be both of those things. Well, unfortunately, we don’t have a ton of other Motorsport news this month. You know, we’ve been so busy with everything else that’s been going on, including Florida Man stories, but we wanna just wrap up this show here with some local news and shout outs and whatnot, and reminders of things that are coming up.

So for anybody that’s listening, this is obviously airing on the 28th [02:23:00] of September. Our town hall is the 29th. It’s our open general assembly meeting. If you want to come and meet some of the crew here at G T M, some of the region chiefs, other members, it’s a bit of a happy hour type of format. We talk about things, it’s your opportunity to voice your opinion or come check us out and see how you like it.

If you want to become part of the team and become part of our ever-growing organization. Details for that are on our website, gt motorsports.org. Look under club events and the information is there readily available for you onto our track side report, sponsored by h hpd junkie.com. What’s coming up in September, October.

The two hottest things that have come across My desk right now is hooked on driving, has added another date to their calendar, kind of last minute. They’re going to be at Palmer Motorsports Park the weekend of October 9th. It’s been a while since h o D has been to Palmer. I was at the last time that they were there and I loved it.

It’s the fastest mountain road you’ve ever raced on. It actually blew off the top of a mountain to build this racetrack up there. So [02:24:00] if you haven’t experienced Palmer yet, there’s this little bit of added risk and and awesomeness ’cause it’s very different than any other racetrack you’ve been to. But even if you just want to go and check it out and you live in the northeast, head on up to Palmer and see what it’s all about and meet the friendly folks over at Hooked on driving.

Now for us here at G T M, a lot of us are wrapping up our season. We got folks at Indianapolis right now at the S C C A Runoffs. We got events, you know, now through basically November where we wrap up with the Audi Club. But for those of us here on the show, we’re probably wrapping up our season this year at the end of October.

October 22nd through 24th at Watkins Glen. So if you’re gonna be in that area and you wanna kind of check it out, we’re gonna go visit with our friends at Hooked on driving up at Watkins Glen. So be sure to join us up there October 22nd through 24th. Now I also wanna give a big shout out to our newest sponsor, american muscle.com.

American muscle.com is your source for Mustang, Camaro and Mopar performance parts. So be sure to check out american muscle.com for details and [02:25:00] we look forward to having them on our show in the future to talk about. Everything they offer, how they came to be and how they can help you with your Ford, Chevy, or Mopar Performance car.

So stay tuned for more on that. And in case you missed out, check out the other podcast episodes that aired earlier this month. This month was filled with crossovers. We got our drink on with Health and Hydration consultant Ken Newbill, as we discussed techniques for beating the dreaded track, hangover, intrigue, espionage, and the occult was the theme when we spoke with author and historian John W.

Warner IV about his book series Little Anton. And be sure to check out the follow on Patreon pitstop episode where we go beyond little Anton hashtag Aliens. And in the biggest no prep drag race event of the season, we lined up original verse sequels in a movie showdown with Steve and Izzy. From everything I learned from movies.

And if we didn’t have enough crossovers this month, tune in for a bonus episode with Carolyn Ford and Mark Sunnel of Tech Transforms podcast, where we speak [02:26:00] about the intersection between racing and information technology. Thank you to everyone that came on the show this month, and please look forward to more great episodes in this season.

That’s right and some quick shoutouts anniversaries within G T M. Sam Harrington, seven years. Brian Shaw, our Northeast Region Chief, six years, Dave, she from the Southern States region six years. Bobby Paul Shocki, Jeremy Riner down in Southern States as well, two years. And new member Ben Smith, also from the Southern States region has joined us.

And everything we talked about on this episode will be available on gt motorsports.org as part of the show notes that follow along with this episode. And you know, if you’re looking to be a part of Break Fix, you have some ideas, do not hesitate to reach out. Give us a buzz, send us an email. And also remember that when you listen to these episodes, although the drive-through is a little bit on the longer side, don’t forget to smash that like button subscribe.

By doing that, it really helps us move up the ranks, beat the [02:27:00] algorithms, and get more exposure for our ever-growing Petrolhead Fueled podcast series. And I do wanna take a moment as a special thank you again to Mark Shank, our returning guest from the what should I buy nineties episode for coming on putting up with all the antics and all the topics that we went through.

It was an absolute blast. And thank you again for coming on the show and filling in for Brad. Thanks a lot. It was a ton of fun. Glad to do it. We would be remiss if we didn’t thank our executive producer, Tanya, for all the hard work she puts into organizing the show and keeping us on track and keeping us honest.

Thanks.

And on that bombshell, again, for all the folks, all the members, the fans, the families, the subscribers, everybody that supports Gran Touring motorsports. Without you, none of this would be possible. Thank y’all, and we’ll see you next month. Bye. Thank you.

When here we are in the [02:28:00] drive through line, me and her cars in front of us, cars in back of us all, just waiting to order. There’s some idiot in a Volvo with his brights on behind me. I lean out the window and scream, Hey, what ya trying to do? Blind me? My wife says Maybe we should park.

If you like what you’ve heard and want to learn more about G T m, be sure to check us out on www.gt motorsports.org. You can also find us on Instagram at Grand Tour Motorsports. Also, if you want to get involved or have suggestions for future shows, you can call our text us at (202) 630-1770 or send us an email at crew chief@gtmotorsports.org.

We’d love to hear from you. Hey everybody, crew Chief Eric here. We really hope you enjoyed this episode of Break Fix, and we wanted to remind you that G T M remains a no annual fees organization, and our goal is to continue to bring you [02:29:00] quality episodes like this one at no charge. As a loyal listener, please consider subscribing to our Patreon for bonus and behind the scenes content, extra goodies and G T M swag.

For as little as $2 and 50 cents a month, you can keep our developers, writers, editors, casters, and other volunteers fed on their strict diet of fig Newton’s, gummy bears, and Monster. Consider signing up for Patreon today at www.patreon.com/gt motorsports. And remember, without fans, supporters, and members like you, none of this would be possible.