Episode #18 of Drive Thru News: Brad's Return

First Drive: Pininfarina Battista

Toyota Tacozilla off-road 'micro-house' camper revealed

Dmitry Mazepin Buys Son New F1 Chassis to Compete with Haas' Mick Schumacher

Alfa Romeo NIVOLA rendering

Tesla Raises Prices on All Models
Hertz deal isn’t just tipping point for Tesla and EVs, but car rentals in climate change era
Tesla Cybertruck order page no longer mentions a 2022 production estimate
Tesla to pull plug on letting drivers play video games after federal investigation
Rather than pay $22K to repair his Tesla’s faulty battery, the owner decided to strap dynamite to the car and blow it into smithereens

Executive Producer Tania: [00:00:00] The Drive Thru is GTM’s monthly news episode and is sponsored in part by organizations like HPTEjunkie. com, Hooked on Driving, AmericanMuscle. com, CollectorCarGuide. net, Project Motoring, Garage Style Magazine, and many others. If you are interested in becoming a sponsor of the Drive Thru, look no further than www.

gtmotorsports. org. Click about and then advertising. Thank you again to everyone that supports Grand Touring Motorsports, our podcast, Brake Fix, and all the other services we provide. Welcome to drive thru episode number 18. This is our monthly recap where we’ve put together a menu of automotive, motorsport, and random car adjacent news.

Now let’s pull up to the window number one for some automotive news.

Crew Chief Eric: And tonight we’re going to party like it’s 99.

Executive Producer Tania: 1999? You’re only a couple decades late.

Crew Chief Eric: No, no! Our 99th Break Fix episode. Can you believe it? And guess [00:01:00] what folks? Rejoining us tonight is the one, the only, our resident Viking. The return of the Brad.

What’s up, Brad?

Crew Chief Brad: What’s going on, everybody? I’m glad to be back. I see that our listenership has grown so much during the time that I was gone. I thought maybe I should just stay away.

Crew Chief Eric: Is that how it goes? Is that how

Crew Chief Brad: it works? You guys did so well when I was gone that I thought maybe I just won’t come back.

Crew Chief Eric: You know, speaking of things that might not be coming back, that’s actually our showcase this month. In honor of the winter recap, I think we need to talk about cars that are headed to the graveyard for 2022.

Crew Chief Brad: If we’re going to talk about cars that are headed to the graveyard, can we also talk about cars that should be headed to the graveyard?

Crew Chief Eric: Absolutely. So what’s on this wonderful listicle that we’ve been provided by MarketWatch?

Crew Chief Brad: Well, this one’s sad to me. The Toyota Land Cruiser. Is the first one listed here because I’m always so prepared for these drive throughs as our listeners know. [00:02:00] I don’t know if this is just in the U. S. or if this is across the board.

Now the Land Cruiser in the U. S. was a bit of a hard pill to swallow because it was 90 grand. I don’t know who was paying 90 grand for a Toyota that didn’t have an L badge on it. Yeah, so the Land Cruiser is going away.

Crew Chief Eric: I am not sad to see the next vehicle on this list going away. That is the Land Cruiser.

Probably worst looking car that we’ve seen the last 20 years, which is the BMW i3.

Executive Producer Tania: No, I don’t wouldn’t say it’s the worst looking car. And you know, it has normal sized grills for BMW. So already it looks better than the new BMWs.

Crew Chief Brad: These are little grills compared to BMW. I

Executive Producer Tania: mean, if they put the new grills on this thing, it would just be grill in the front

Crew Chief Eric: ones from the 7th year.

I

Crew Chief Brad: grill

Crew Chief Eric: the grill. I think Apple patented that terminology, the eye grill, plug it in your iPhone. But, you know, on this list to no one’s surprises. All of the Volvo station [00:03:00] wagons. I mean, very handsome vehicles, but they just didn’t sell.

Crew Chief Brad: They’re beautiful. The V90, I thought when it first came out was a gorgeous wagon.

The problem was you couldn’t get a V90 unless you special ordered it. You could get cross countries or cross tour, whatever they called it. You could get those on the dealer lots, but the V90 had to be a special order.

Executive Producer Tania: That one’s not going away apparently. So not

Crew Chief Eric: all Volvo wagons are leaving. We test drove the smaller one, I think it was the V60 when that one came out.

And it was cool. The price tag was hefty. I think the only problem, because we had some very specific shopping criteria, was the cargo space was pretty small and the roof line was pretty low slung. So it made it kind of cramped compared to other vehicles we were looking at. It’s not a surprise. We’ve talked about this on our, what should I buy a station wagons episode where it’s diminishing returns in terms of manufacturers making station wagons.

Right. And as we know, everybody’s in love with SUVs, but they’re just giant hatchbacks. I guess say lovey. Right. And along with [00:04:00] that hatchbacks that are going away or CUVs, I guess you want to call it the short lived CX three by Mazda to no one’s surprise,

Executive Producer Tania: but it’s being replaced by the CX three zero.

What exactly is the difference?

Crew Chief Eric: I thought that was their weird rotary hybrid thing that we had talked about a few months back.

Executive Producer Tania: The CX 30 is not hybrid. They run on

Crew Chief Brad: gasoline. Does that have that holy grail motor that they came out with? I don’t know. It’s listed

Executive Producer Tania: as a Skyactiv G 2. 5 turbo engine, 250 horsepower, 324 pounds of torque, 93 octane fuel.

Crew Chief Eric: But I thought we reported on them using that same chassis and body to put in a rotary hybrid. They were working on some experimental. Something rather, but it’s never come to fruition.

Crew Chief Brad: Sorry, Tom. They’re not bringing back another rotary anytime soon.

Executive Producer Tania: Yes, but this is a car you can buy today and it’s replaced the Mazda CX3 and they look the same.

Crew Chief Brad: This is the Mazda CX3 is replaced by the Mazda CX3

Executive Producer Tania: Zero. It must be like zero

Crew Chief Brad: people will buy [00:05:00] it.

Executive Producer Tania: It must be like two inches bigger. I don’t know.

Crew Chief Eric: On that list also includes. Mazda six. I haven’t seen one of those in a while. There’s other cars like the pole star by Volvo, which was a cool, I didn’t know that it was going to be a real car.

I thought it was a concept. I think it’s neat, but you know, the days of the two door coupe are pretty much dead. And on this list are two cars that are also quite similar. So One we talked about, I think almost a year ago, and it’s not the Honda Civic, it’s the Volkswagen Golf. Obviously the two of our golfs are already gone.

Volkswagen is leaving behind the GTI and the Golf R. And along with that Hyundai is following suit by leaving behind the Veloster N and killing off the rest of the Veloster line and models and packages that were available. So that rounds out like the top 10 cars that are dead for 2022. All of these are ICE cars, right?

There aren’t any hybrids leaving this list. But. The future is electric as we know. So there is, there is the

Executive Producer Tania: Honda

Crew Chief Eric: Clarity is leaving. Oh yeah. Sorry. I forgot about that. Just like [00:06:00] I forgot about, you’ve got a blind

Crew Chief Brad: spot for Honda’s period. You just read Honda and it’s just one, one, one, one, one, one, one. You didn’t bother reading the rest.

Crew Chief Eric: I feel, I apologize to the three and a half people that bought Honda Clarity’s. I didn’t even know they existed. I thought they were like, it’s,

Crew Chief Brad: Honda does this weird thing where they come out with these really innovative forward looking vehicles and they release them in Calabasas or like one small section of the country.

This is a California only car, a fuel cell. I think they had some propane cars. They had some hydrogen cars. Everything is. California only. So I’m not sad to see it go. Cause I wasn’t around to see it here.

Crew Chief Eric: I feel like it was a soft launch and there wasn’t any big hubbub about it. Or maybe there wasn’t, we missed it.

It’s just something that’s not on the radar. It’s not the most attractive car in the world. I mean, from certain angles, you’re like, yeah, it kind of looks like the new. Integra, like you said, I’m not gonna be sad to see it go.

Crew Chief Brad: You know, to me it looks like a maxima.

Crew Chief Eric: Okay, let’s say that’s the only EV on the list.

There’s [00:07:00] five other EVs or more that are gonna replace it, and those are also on a listicle provided by car and driver. So what’s on our list here of new and expected EVs?

Crew Chief Brad: The Audi A six E-Tron,

Crew Chief Eric: yet another e-tron.

Crew Chief Brad: The Audi Q4. Yeah.

Executive Producer Tania: I saw an Audi A3 e tron the other day, and I was almost thinking the guys just stuck a badge on the side of it.

Crew Chief Eric: That was the first e tron outside of like the race cars and stuff. It was like the e golf and it was yet again, like the clarity, a car that. They didn’t really advertise. I actually rode in an A3 e tron. A friend of mine owns one in California and I was actually pretty impressed with it. Bragging about all the numbers and all this kind of stuff, but it’s one of those deals where it was kind of like a zombie car.

And we’ll talk about those in a moment where they couldn’t sell. They were sitting on lots forever, but the markup was so high that nobody was going to buy them. I mean, if you’re into it for the California credits, you know, absolutely go for it.

Executive Producer Tania: The non surprises [00:08:00] are on this list are yes, All the trons, all the, the numbers are coming.

Crew Chief Brad: Well, the, the next one’s the BMWI four e-tron

Executive Producer Tania: and the, and the, and all the I, all the numbers of the I, the BMW, even though the I threes going away, the

Crew Chief Eric: I four, the I seven, the ix, we get it. The, the

Crew Chief Brad: Germans know their vowels. We get it. The E’s and the i’s, they’re all coming.

Crew Chief Eric: I owe you and sometimes why ? I think Y goes to this Bollinger B one and B two.

Which I believe we talked

Executive Producer Tania: about a while ago, maybe. Very utilitarian, very geometric. I mean, how do you make an old Land

Crew Chief Eric: Rover uglier?

Executive Producer Tania: Uh, it’s, it’s very simplistic. Two and a half people might buy this. I mean, it’s also starts at 125, 000. Oh, that hurts. It’s going to be a niche market nonetheless, but you have your choice of the B1 or the B2, the B2 being the pickup truck.

Crew Chief Eric: Are they both greenhouses? Like, are you guys seeing this roof? Oh yeah.

Crew Chief Brad: It looks to me like they took [00:09:00] an old British phone booth and put wheels on it and then they called it a rain roof. Turned it on its side. I feel like they missed an opportunity to call it TARDIS 1 and TARDIS 2.

Crew Chief Eric: Pretty much. And then we have like three or four entries from GM that all look the same.

Well, do you think the Buick Electra looks the same as what? I mean, it’s got that same snout as the Lyric and the Celestique, however you pronounce that, and the Trailblazer and the Blazer and the Equinox, they all kind of just look the same, especially the Equinox and that Buick, they got almost the same beak on them.

Executive Producer Tania: I would not say that at all, but they are reminiscent of each other, but this Buick is very angular in the

Crew Chief Brad: front. Yes, it is. It looks more like a Mazda CX 3 that’s leaving.

Executive Producer Tania: If you had just shown this where there’s no badging on this car, cover the wheels, I wouldn’t have known it was a GM product. I would have guessed it was Japanese.

Crew Chief Eric: I don’t like those doors. I think that is totally useless.

Executive Producer Tania: They’re like double sided scissor doors, [00:10:00] meaning the back and the front both, both scissor for all your passengers. I doubt the

Crew Chief Brad: production model would ever come like that.

Executive Producer Tania: Probably not, even though that’s space savings and parking lots and things like that, that’s never actually ever come to fruition on anything but a hypercar, so.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah, I don’t see it passing NHSTA standards or something. Some law. Without a B

Crew Chief Eric: Tiller, no way.

Crew Chief Brad: But I do have to say, we’ve talked about the GM products, boring. I found my next vehicle right here under the GM products. It’s the canoe.

Crew Chief Eric: All right. All right. Okay.

Crew Chief Brad: That cab over pickup truck looks really, really legit to me.

I think that’s really

Crew Chief Eric: slick in a sort of Jurassic park was the future 25 years ago sort of way. Like I think these look really cool.

Executive Producer Tania: These are the futuristic renditions of what we think in the year 2050, which is like around the corner, everything was going to be Jetsons. Like these are the vehicles that would have been

Crew Chief Eric: [00:11:00] driving.

The van version of the canoe definitely looks like a Renault is fast. I mean, that’s,

Crew Chief Brad: that’s Brett’s next tow vehicle. What are you talking about?

Crew Chief Eric: That’s the equivalent of the church fan for the

Crew Chief Brad: Korean writing on the side.

Executive Producer Tania: There are some bands right now that are very similar and I don’t think they’re made by canoe or canoe or however it’s pronounced that are running around doing autonomous testing, delivery vehicles and things like that, particularly in California right now.

So, you know, who knows what the future of this is. Those wacky Californians. Since you’re a Chrysler fan.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, this airflow looks really nice. Like it’s reminiscent of the 200 a little bit. I like the back too, except for the C pillar, or actually I guess it would be the D pillar is kind of oddly cut, but I understand, you know, that’s the way now with these weird angular rear windows and stuff.

But the back of it is reminiscent of an e tron of all things, but I like the way it looks. It’s, it’s, it’s, It’s very Italian. It’s not very Chrysler, but you know, like we speculated in months past, [00:12:00] Chrysler may be the rebirth of these EVs because the brand doesn’t really have anything right now when you compare it to Ram and Dodge and the other offerings that are under the same umbrella.

I think this is a good opportunity for them to capitalize on the EV space.

Crew Chief Brad: I want to know why there’s no Chrysler EV PT cruiser.

Crew Chief Eric: I have no answer for that. And my mind immediately says Mach E when I hear that combination, just like, no, it’s not happening.

Executive Producer Tania: I mean, this list goes on basically in alphabetical order, manufacturers, A through Z, essentially, you know, some of these aren’t anything new because they’re, they’re. We’re already known to be expected this year, so hopefully they should be coming out this year, barring hashtag chips, others are 23, 24, 25 and things we’ve hit on already before some of the offerings from like Hyundai and Mercedes as well.

Crew Chief Eric: You’re right. I think there’s a couple surprises on [00:13:00] here. I would say like the Fisker SUV. Made me give it the hairy eyebrow because I’m like, Fisker is not known for building a CUV SUV. So I’m like, I don’t know, stick to building Aston Martin competitor. Cause that’s what Fisker is kind of known for is the sporty coupes and those convertibles.

But really going into the SUV market, I’m almost like to stop.

Executive Producer Tania: What about the Lagonda?

Crew Chief Eric: It confuses me. Cause is that an Aston Martin or is that just its own thing?

Crew Chief Brad: Aston Martin spun off the name.

Crew Chief Eric: As their electric luxury brand. Again, there’s some stuff that’s undercover here. There’s some entries by Volvo, the new Porsches.

To your point, Tanya, things that we’ve talked about, I will say one of the coolest things on here is probably this Rivian again, we’re pretty excited about that and we’re going to talk a little bit more about the Sony Vision S. show. And the thing I think that did surprise me because it was going to be my hot take this month.

You know, where is Subaru in the next five years? They are finally coming to the table with an EV expected this year known as the Solterra. I can’t say I’m a fan. of [00:14:00] the body cladding, but I’m glad to see that, you know, super is doing something cause I was afraid that they were going to be the way of the dodo bird here in the next couple of years because they just, there was no talk around Subaru producing anything in the EV space

Executive Producer Tania: to just piggyback off that for a hot second.

Apparently A couple of days ago at the Tokyo auto salon, they unveiled a 1, 073 horsepower STI ERA electric track car that is supposed to spank all records of electric race cars on the Nürburgring or some crazy thing like that. So they might not have. Held their cards out yet, what they were doing, but clearly they’ve been doing something in the background.

Crew Chief Eric: I mean, I am wholly certain that even though it’s electric, it will find a way to spin a rod bearing. So, you know, it’s just tradition within the halls of Subaru, but you know, Hey, whatever, we’ll, we’ll see how it turns out. Now I will say this as you go through the list. I didn’t realize that the Subaru entry and they have done cross work with other manufacturers before the Toyota BZ4X [00:15:00] and the Subaru Solterra look a lot alike and the dead giveaway is that front clip.

Crew Chief Brad: It actually says the Solterra will be based on the same platform as the Toyota BZ4X electric. Well,

Crew Chief Eric: see, there we go. Good job, Brad. Welcome back

Crew Chief Brad: because I had the exact same thought and I went back and I was like looking at it and then I saw, oh yeah, Toyota before. Yes. So it’s,

Crew Chief Eric: it’s basically a wrap for which they already have a hybrid wrap for now.

So, all right, whatever,

Crew Chief Brad: which by the way, Toyota, I saw a commercial earlier today for a Toyota Corolla cross. Basically a RAV4 rebadges a Corolla Cross. I don’t know if they’re keeping the RAV4 name, but there is a Corolla SUV coming to the market that nobody wanted.

Executive Producer Tania: Why just, yeah, you have your RAV4. Make it a wrap three.

I don’t know.

Crew Chief Eric: I think my biggest question about everything on this list, I mean, and this spans the gamut, right? From the Tesla cyber truck to, you know, [00:16:00] the Chevy trailblazer to everything in between. How many of these are going to be sub 40 K for the everyday user? For the, you know, the driver that’s just starting out or maybe even the, you know, now newly minted professional college graduate who’s looking for their first, you know, kind of adult car that isn’t a hand me down from their grandparents or their parents.

Where is that sub, I guess now by 2022 standards of inflation, 40, 000 car. I just, I don’t see it yet. You know what I mean? A lot of people have complained about that because it’s just, everything’s way too expensive.

Crew Chief Brad: So what they’re doing is instead of a sub $40,000 car, they’ve got longer loan terms.

Seven to 10 year loan terms are gonna take over for the more expensive vehicles. .

Crew Chief Eric: I’m gonna leave that where it is to tease up Brad’s favorite section, lost and Found. We’ve got some zombie cars that are still for sale of dealer lots.

Crew Chief Brad: Before I go further into these zombie cars, they should probably just start dismantling them because [00:17:00] nobody wants them in the first place and start using the chips hashtag chips in the newer cars.

Can they do that? Can they retrofit the chips?

Crew Chief Eric: You know, I would think that they double dip

Crew Chief Brad: their chip,

Crew Chief Eric: never double dip your chip. I often wonder if they could recycle some of the cars from the last five years and reuse some of the chips that are there. Like everything else have to have the snap dragon 12 core because the eight core isn’t fast enough and the automotive world.

None of the gear that we really use in the cars I feel is that sophisticated and there’s probably chips that can be reused from even 10 or 15 years ago to get some of this stuff done.

Crew Chief Brad: Zombie cars, cars that are discontinued, but still brand new onto your lots.

Crew Chief Eric: What do we got Brad?

Crew Chief Brad: We’ve got a BMW 6 series.

They sold 55 BMW six series. And when did they stop making that car? 2019 there’s another BMW on this list. The BMW I eight, when did they stop making that? I don’t know. I don’t even know that it was sold. Whatever. Yeah. Right.

Crew Chief Eric: Only person I know that has one is James Clay. And he admitted that when he was on the BMW episode.

Crew Chief Brad: [00:18:00] No, this is so, you know, two people that had one because, uh, What’s his face from HOD had one.

Executive Producer Tania: Oh, yeah, yeah, you’re right. The total sales number here, they discontinued the car, and then how many they’ve sold, brand new, since discontinuing. Is there a number here that’s like, maybe they shouldn’t have discontinued it?

Because my least favorite car, the Impala, is on this list. I

Crew Chief Brad: was, I was like,

Executive Producer Tania: Apparently still sold 750 of them last year. That was 750 last year. According to that is a very small number in the grand scheme of car sold

Crew Chief Eric: for the year. That’s 750 more than you expected to be sold.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah. Is this because these car manufacturers are saving these turds from the wrecker because they can’t put newer models on the lots, so dealers are going around and finding these other cars that they can sell as new.

I’m

Crew Chief Eric: also wondering, what’s the threshold on the demo cars? Don’t they have to exceed a certain mileage before they’re considered used, but they can still [00:19:00] be new, even if they have like 300 miles on them or something. I don’t

Crew Chief Brad: think the mileage has anything to do with it. I think if it’s titled in anything other than the dealership, then it’s considered a used car.

Crew Chief Eric: Oh, so then there you go. So I’m wondering if maybe some of these Impalas were demo cars on the lot that were just never sold. So 750 dealerships in the U S that still had one Impala doesn’t seem too impossible in the grand scheme of things. There were

Executive Producer Tania: 750 people that wanted that car.

Crew Chief Brad: I’m going the other way.

It was one dealership that had 750 Impalas. They doubled down on the Impalas. They shorted the Impala market.

Crew Chief Eric: The Chrysler ones are no surprise, right? The, the 200, the Town and Country, the Dart. Again, those are all feel like loaner cars that just never sold. And the numbers are so small, 15, four and 10. I mean, shoot.

I think there were. 10 of them at the local dealership here, you know?

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah, the Dodge Viper sold four total sales. Two of them went to Andrew Bank. [00:20:00]

Crew Chief Eric: We’ll talk about more on that in a couple weeks.

Executive Producer Tania: So the award on this list for the oldest new car goes to the Toyota FJ Cruiser. I

Crew Chief Eric: know,

Executive Producer Tania: right? Apparently some dealership kept one on the lot since 2014.

It finally sold it last year.

Crew Chief Eric: I mean, there’s some other interesting surprises on here. The Patriot. I’m, I’m shocked. There’s still some around that are new, but I think the 370 Z out of all these cars got my attention. I mean, the Viper, we joke about it every month. And then I’d say right behind the 370Z was that there were 51 total sales of the Fiat 500 last year and they stopped producing that car like a couple years ago as well.

And it’s like, really, I guess the Fiat 500 maybe isn’t a stretch because it wasn’t that popular unless you lived there. Buy yourself with three cats and didn’t drive anywhere.

Crew Chief Brad: Well, I was going to say the Vipers, the only one on this list that actually makes sense to me because it’s such a low volume vehicle, it’s such a niche market that of course, there’s going to be some that are hanging around.[00:21:00]

Crew Chief Eric: I learned a super fun fact about the Viper, which we’ll talk about more in the coming weeks. They only produced roughly 32, 000 Vipers in the entire run. Of the Viper line from generation one to generation five, that is less than the total number of Corvettes that are produced in a single year. To wrap all that up, if you are not interested in an EV, not sad that any of these cars are going away and you’re not interested in buying a zombie car, Jalopnik put together an article, the top used cars that you should buy in this used car craze that’s going on.

And they just happened to be,

Crew Chief Brad: let’s see, we’ve got the PT Cruiser,

Crew Chief Eric: the economical family hauler, one

Crew Chief Brad: of my personal Favorites, the PT cruiser, we’ve got the lap of luxury car is the, uh, the PT cruiser, which is a little bit nicer. It’s got the chromed out wheels and the pristine metallic paint and the plastic bumper covers for the raucous hot hatch.

We’ve got a competitor to the H H R S S the [00:22:00] PT cruiser SRT four, which is basically a Dodge neon SRT for, Oh, excuse me, a Dodge SRT four is not a neon, even though it looks like a neon and talks like a neon and it’s a neon.

Executive Producer Tania: I didn’t even know there was a PT cruiser GT.

Crew Chief Brad: What? Oh, yes,

Executive Producer Tania: yes. It’s five

Crew Chief Eric: different models of the PT cruiser.

It’s amazing.

Crew Chief Brad: But if you’re looking for something low mileage and a collector piece, you can look at the PT cruiser.

Crew Chief Eric: And finally, if you want some of that summer vibes, drop top action, what should we get Brad?

Crew Chief Brad: Well, you can opt for the Nissan Murano cross cabriolet, but if you can’t find one of those, because they’re so desirable and hard to get, you can get yourself.

Crew Chief Eric: So I got to admit, you know, what’s cool about the PT cruiser convertible that I just noticed now, well that it’s, you know, like an SRT for neon. That isn’t a neon. It’s actually two door.

Crew Chief Brad: I was just about to say it’s two door.

Crew Chief Eric: It’s [00:23:00] still stupid, but you know, Hey, whatever. I mean, well,

Crew Chief Brad: it’s the PT cruiser convertible.

Turbo is only 4, 700.

Crew Chief Eric: That’s a value for money. All things considered, in

Crew Chief Brad: a car market where cars are selling for three or four times their actual value that you can get a PT cruiser convertible for 4, 700.

Crew Chief Eric: But look at those wheels. I mean, those are some sporty wheels. Talk about a hot take. The used car market is so crazy right now.

A friend of mine actually told me the other day, he was like, do you think it makes sense to purchase your leased vehicle and then go resell it yourself? Like on cars. com or autotrader or something like that? Brad, as a money guy, do you think that’s a viable option for somebody?

Crew Chief Brad: It depends on your car. I mean, if you leased a PT Cruiser , then no, you don’t wanna buy out your lease and resell it.

But if you lease like a ca, like a B, like a BMW four series or something, like a BMW three series, ’cause those are lease [00:24:00] cars all the time by the lower level executives and stuff like that, companies lease ’em out for their people to give company cars and then, yeah, it could be worth it. You’d obviously have to do the math on that, but it’s gotta be a car that.

I mean, check the prices of what cars are selling for and check what the least buyout is. And if one number is higher than the other, then yes, do it. If one number is lower than the other, then no, it’s not a good idea.

Crew Chief Eric: So you have to do a little bit of prospecting, right? You got to do your research. You can’t just say, Oh, I got this car and I’m going to buy it out and then I’m going to flip it.

It’s not like flipping houses, although some people equate it to that, but to your point, you got to do the legwork and look into it. One other thought did cross my mind, especially when you talk about all these EVs and, you know, I mentioned, where’s that sub 40, 000 vehicle for that entry level driver and not necessarily the teenage driver, but that newly minted professional got me thinking because I just recently watched the new show that just aired called American auto.

One of the episodes was about this 10, 000 car. And what hit me was that they [00:25:00] said. If you can’t afford a 10, 000 used car, why would you want to buy a low cost brand new car? Like what are you getting for 10 grand? And it kind of got me thinking, maybe next month we take a look at some really top value cars and In that 10 to 20 grand range and pick those out for lost and found.

What do you think, Brad?

Crew Chief Brad: I think that’s a great idea. I can tell you what I’m going to do right now. I’m going to come back with a whole slew of formerly a hundred thousand dollar luxury cars that you can get now for 9, 500 and it’s going to be a terrible idea and nobody should ever take my advice when I do that.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, because it cost you 100 grand to fix them, right? At the end of the day, 100,

Crew Chief Brad: 000 car. You may buy it for 9, 500, but it’s still 100, 000 car with 100, 000 car maintenance,

Crew Chief Eric: or maybe we spin it off into a, what should I buy episode looking for the best bang for the buck? How about that?

Crew Chief Brad: Actually, the best car to buy is a Volkswagen Phaeton.

You’ll thank me. Either a Phaeton or the V10 diesel Touareg. I hear those [00:26:00] cars are as reliable as a Swiss watch.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, that’s a great transition into Volkswagen and Audi news. So what’s hot or maybe I should say What’s now considered not so hot.

Crew Chief Brad: Apparently the new Lamborghini Countach is not so hot.

According to Marcello Gandini.

Crew Chief Eric: And who is this fabled Gandini? It’s probably the first time people are hearing his name. He’s the guy who designed the original one. What?

Executive Producer Tania: And he’s saying, nope, I do not approve.

Crew Chief Eric: I put

Executive Producer Tania: my name next to this one.

Crew Chief Eric: We have mixed feelings about the new Kuntosh. It’s either love it or hate it by a lot of people, but when the original designer of not just a Kuntosh, but the Diablo and the Miura comes back and says, uh, what does that say?

What does that mean?

Executive Producer Tania: Probably be an indication. That they shouldn’t have made the back side view look like something from Michael Bay’s Transformer movie. [00:27:00] I just

Crew Chief Eric: love the fact that, as it says in the article, the design icon makes an official statement distancing himself. From the limited production supercar like, wow, that is damn, I mean, that speaks volumes.

Crew Chief Brad: Personally, I’m a huge fan of the new Lamborghini Countach, although it could have been a Lamborghini, whatever the hell it didn’t have to be called the Countach, but I am sensing some sour grapes here that maybe Mr. Gandini hadn’t been consulted. On the new car and he’s throwing shade at Lamborghini or Volkswagen because they didn’t reach out to him for his input when they were doing this retro version.

Crew Chief Eric: That would be a very Italian thing to do. So, you know what, you might be right. So what else is going on in the Volkswagen out in Porsche world?

Executive Producer Tania: Apparently, there’s more

Crew Chief Eric: Pikes Peak record breaking. Uh, you know, that’s a bit of clickbait. So you want to know what that’s all [00:28:00] about? A gentleman drove to the top of Pikes Peak out in Colorado Springs and realized he only had 12 miles of battery range left in his Taycan.

Decided, well, we’re going to ride the brakes the whole way down or use the regen and see how far we can get. And actually, His test was pretty cool because it was twofold. And I think what was more impressive than anything else was that when they come down to about 11, 000 feet from the summit of Pikes Peak, there’s actually a mandatory break check and the cops, you know, won’t let you go and things like that.

They seem, you know, numbers as high as like 900 degrees coming from breaks and to take him because it’s using the region system instead of using the brakes. And it. Plus it has those big PCCB ceramic, you know, ridiculous Porsche racing brakes. Anyway, it was like 67 degrees on the rotor. It was like ambient air temperature.

And he said, by the time he was done with it, all reached the bottom. He had like region, something like 45 miles of range. And then he goes,

Executive Producer Tania: They went from having 12 miles of range left to get back to the top or wherever to when they got down to [00:29:00] the Colorado Springs, they had over a hundred miles. Yeah,

Crew Chief Eric: I was going to say it was in two phases the way he wrote.

He’s like, we had X amount when we reached the bottom of Pikes Peak and because it continues to go down into the city, then they regen even more and they had about a hundred miles of range left. So yeah, you’re absolutely right.

Executive Producer Tania: So, I mean, I think, you know, yeah, it’s a little bit misleading at first, what, which records were broken.

It was a record for the brake temperature, basically, and then maybe even the brake regeneration, since that’s obviously new and specific to electrical vehicles, but that’s pretty cool in terms of the capability of the brake regen.

Yeah.

Executive Producer Tania: Your everyday user is not going to see that because we don’t, we don’t commute from the top of Pike’s Peak

Crew Chief Eric: down.

Yeah, exactly. And the other thing too, is if those brakes are anything like the ones on the Cayman GT4, I’ve heard from owners that, you know, we’ll convert to steel rotors because, you know, for track use and stuff like that, because those PCCB rotors are almost 1, 500 a piece. I mean, can you imagine, I mean, I wouldn’t want to [00:30:00] wear out a set of those rotors coming down off of Pike’s Peak.

on a regular basis. That would be insane. You know, Pike’s Peak is famous for rally and little known fact, Porsche entered cars like the 911 SC, the 959 Group B, and then there was an alternative to that known as the 953 that they campaigned back in the 80s, and they’ve been hinting for years. And now they’re saying that in 2022, Porsche may release a limited production package known as the Safari 911.

I’m just thinking about why anybody cares, right? What’s the point of this? I don’t know. Because if you look into the specs, it’s a 911. That’s lifted. It loses a bunch of the features of the 911’s typical suspension. Nothing else has really changed the car. They did widen the hips a little bit to put bigger tires underneath of it, but it’s ascent and descent angles are garbage.

You would never use this off road. So the folks that are buying it or driving where with it again,

Crew Chief Brad: they’re driving to their temperature controlled storage unit [00:31:00] to flip the car in about 10 years.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, I just feel like Dr. Ferdman Porsche is like rolling over in his grave hearing about this. I’m like, good God, this is terrible.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah, this, this is purely a collector car. Nobody’s actually going to buy this to drive.

Crew Chief Eric: And

Crew Chief Brad: it looks awful.

Crew Chief Eric: I mean, it just looks like a 911. It looks like a lifted 911. Yeah, it looks terrible. Not a fan. But there’s some news coming out of Bugatti. You know, Volkswagen’s crown jewel as they present themselves is now being run by a 33 year old.

But not just. any 33 year old. It’s the head of RIMAC. And I actually learned something really important about this article because there wasn’t any content in it that was of any value other than learning how to properly pronounce his first and last name. When you read it in English, it reads mate RIMAC.

Like we’re pretty used to pronouncing RIMAC, but apparently the formerly Yugoslavian born now You know, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Croatia, you know, it’s like change names like 10 times it’s pronounced [00:32:00] Matti and the last name is remats remats. I mean, it’s not remosh and all these other rimac and all these variants we’re talking about, but you know what, I’m just going to continue saying remac because it’s easier and I’ll fumble over it a lot less often, but one other piece of.

Golden nugget inside that article that I pulled was a quote where he talked about how he got started. And I thought he was quite ballsy walking up to Koenigsegg and saying, Hey, I want to design a TV. What do I need to do? Like, damn, dude, that’s pretty cool. So he’s seen as this like prodigy, right? He’s seen as Kind of like Ferdinand Porsche reborn type of deal.

And so this marriage, you know, between Rimac and Bugatti, and obviously with VAG behind the scenes with, you know, 45 percent of the controlling stock is, is awesome for them putting a lot of money into the companies. And there’s two companies, there’s Rimac automotive and there’s the Rimac technology branch and all this kind of thing.

But one thing I thought was interesting personality wise, he tends to run very hot and cold on a lot of things. And he’s very upfront about the things that he talks about, [00:33:00] but. I like that he realized kind of up front and it took a stab at companies that we’ve talked about on previous months of the show, where he says that he quickly realized putting electric motors into old cars wasn’t a viable business plan long term.

So he decided instead that he would engineer his own high performance electric cars. From the word go. And I’m like, we’ve talked about this a bunch of times, you know, taking an old Aston Martin, like DP six and retrofitting an EV, you’re doing a disservice to the collector car market. You know, some people would call them an abomination or whatever, but I just, yeah, I agree with him.

I don’t think it’s a viable business solution long term.

Crew Chief Brad: Good for him. I’m glad. I like to see this. I think it’s cool.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah. I’m excited to see where Bugatti goes. And one of his other quotes was Bugatti has been around for 112 years and he’s here to usher Bugatti for the next 112 years. I mean, that would make him a total of 145 years old if he makes it that far, but Hey, you know, you never, it could happen

Crew Chief Brad: as long as it [00:34:00] doesn’t SUV.

I’m perfectly happy with it.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, what’s going on in the rest of lower Saxony, our friends over at Mercedes and BMW.

Executive Producer Tania: There’s things coming, right? We’ve got all the, the eye variants, BMW, we’ve got some Mercedes. So we’re going to talk about later, I guess, the most interesting thing, maybe at the consumer electronics show a week or two ago, BMW debuted their technology for color changing paint.

Crew Chief Eric: You have my attention.

Executive Producer Tania: Oh

Crew Chief Brad: my God. No way. What was that movie? What was

Crew Chief Eric: that movie where the lady was sitting at her desk and like changing her fingernail colors? Like with like a pen, like she would tap her fingernails. You guys remember that?

Crew Chief Brad: Yes, I do. I do not remember what movie it was. Some,

Crew Chief Eric: it was some sci fi or some show or something, right?

Crew Chief Brad: Yes, it was. It was. Yeah. But that’s immediately where

Crew Chief Eric: my mind went when I saw this. I was like, dude, this is going to be so cool.

Executive Producer Tania: Yes. And no, right now it’s limited [00:35:00] to gray scale essentially. So you can shift between black, white, and gray. And the reason is it’s actually using e reader. E Ink technology. So that’s why

Crew Chief Brad: it’s a wrap.

Executive Producer Tania: It’s literally, yeah, some sort of wraps. It’s basically Kindle screens all around the car. So you’re able to manipulate those, but only in a gray scale, right?

Crew Chief Brad: You can display your favorite book on the outside of your car as you’re driving by.

Executive Producer Tania: This is where the problem would lie in because if this technology expands and they’re able to color or not color, right?

And people now somehow. Gain the ability to put inappropriate pictures on the side of their car at will as their what’s gonna happen. We don’t need that as a society, you know, as much as I wish I had sometimes letters that I could make magically appear in my rear glass of the car to give them pointer, don’t follow me so closely survivability, you know, we don’t actually need that ability.

It would cause [00:36:00] much more problems than

Crew Chief Eric: there’s a positive flip side to this. If it works, it could be implemented on the sides of metro buses and things like that, where they could now do changing advertisements rather than those stationary things or those power consuming led panels, right? Because this stuff is so low power and whatnot.

Again, I’m with you once that happens, you know, all of Vegas is going to turn into that and then it’s going to get hacked and it’s just going to be a free fall, especially during black hat and Defcon. Right.

Executive Producer Tania: And, you know, the other space you could see an application for this is. Billboards camouflage and being able to instantly camo vehicles and things like that.

But mainstream society, do we need this? No, no, we don’t. So is this

Crew Chief Eric: the verge of like stealth technology yet? Another like star Trek technology coming to life, right?

Executive Producer Tania: Well, that’s another thing we don’t need to really people already can’t drive and we’re going to cloak a car into [00:37:00] it. Like really

Crew Chief Brad: they’ve been working on that before trying to use mirrors and TV screens and stuff.

Yeah. I mean, there’s

Executive Producer Tania: definitely scientists out there that are working on the, I

Crew Chief Eric: want three things. I want three things from this cloaking technology, a car that’s called a defiant, and I want my GPS to sound like wharf. And then it will be perfect. Just be like deep space nine. All right. Let’s move on from BMW to the world’s fourth largest auto manufacturer.

No longer part of the big three, Stellantis.

Crew Chief Brad: So they put all these brands together and now they’re fourth largest.

Crew Chief Eric: I mean, when you go from these microcosms, I mean, you see,

Crew Chief Brad: when,

Crew Chief Eric: you know, we talked about months ago, I think Brad, you were still here, right? The party was over. The end is nigh the end of the muscle car.

Dodge says time to go home, pack up your kids go. Well, that’s not exactly true because as we know, there’s zombie cars and Chrysler [00:38:00] lots all over the place. So that means. By the math that they’ve projected here, the Chrysler Recharger will now officially be gone by 2024 with EVs arriving sometime in that time period to replace them.

But as we discovered earlier, they’ll be for sale six or eight years from now as well, right?

Crew Chief Brad: So I know what Dodge is doing. So they’re going to create a huge backlog or surplus. Of zombie cars, they can say, yeah, we stopped making those cars in 2024. Yeah. We’re still padding our bottom line with these cars because we built hundreds of thousands of them in the last three years and they’re still selling, but yeah, we stopped making them.

They shouldn’t count against our, our gas, I guess, uh, our miles. My MPG or whatever our regulations

Crew Chief Eric: and the year 2049, you’ll still be able to buy a Viper. You know, it’s, it’s,

Executive Producer Tania: it’s fine. So y’all are upset because, Oh no, they’re not going to make their 10, 000 billion horsepower gas guzzlers anymore, blah, blah, blah.

But it’s [00:39:00] okay. Cause they’re, they want to make EVs, which just means they’re going to make some 9, 000. Gigawatt atrocity that is way more power than you need. So it’s fine.

Crew Chief Eric: I mean, Dodge is synonymous with idiocy and tire smoke. I mean, let’s just, let’s just boil it back. Right. So, I mean, yes, your point. Yeah.

9 trillion gigawatts and it’ll just blow the tires off of anything. Now. You know, maybe they’ll call it the Hellcat, Thunder, Cougar, Falcon, Bird, Red Eye, Demon, Wide Body, Big Dick, Energy Special Edition. You know, that’s what it’s going to come out with later. But this whole Never Lift campaign that they’re starting to do is their new marketing thing for the next couple of years.

I just don’t get it. It’s like they’re talking out of both sides of their mouth. You know, on one hand, if you go back in time and look at some of these articles from like Reuters, you know, they were allegedly fined like hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties, you know, for the cafe fines and things like that because of the Hellcat and other engines and this and that.

And then here we are, you know, still doing all these ridiculous. [00:40:00] Ads and they’re talking about muscle cars and I’m like, this is such an oxymoron, folks. Hot take electric muscle car. The point of muscle car is big engine, little car, all that kind of stuff. We just need to take all that out of the vocabulary.

Like we need to just put it to bed. What

Crew Chief Brad: about the Porsche? Take in turbo electric, turbo, non turbo turbo car.

Crew Chief Eric: The turbo rotambulator. Yeah.

Crew Chief Brad: The turbo flux capacitor.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, exactly. How do you have a turbo on an EV unless it’s a hybrid turbo? What? Whatever. I think it’s one of those things where they’re trying to ingratiate people because people understand turbo means it’s better than the regular one or, you know, Muscle means better than plastic.

Because people are dumb. Yeah, exactly. It’s all marketing bullshit. In that comes a little ray of light.

Crew Chief Brad: Please tell me it’s a new Dodge Dart.

Crew Chief Eric: No, it’s not. The Peugeot e Legend. Have you guys seen this thing? A while ago, right? Yeah, but now they’re talking about [00:41:00] actually making it. And I’m like, wow, it is a good looking car.

The only, the only downside, it’s a two door. It does look like it’s based sort of on the Challenger, but I thought we were done with two door. I mean, I’d drive it. I would too. Now, some other news coming out of Stellantis. And I’m going to read this. The international automaker that owns brands like Jeep Chrysler, Fiat, Ram, and Peugeot have entered in a wide ranging agreement with Amazon.

The deal will put Amazon software in Stellantis vehicles, and we’ll also put Stellantis electric vans into Amazon’s delivery fleet. I mean, you’ve already seen the blue Ram vans running around that Amazon bought, so whoopie do there. What I’m wondering though, is all Mopar products from this point forward are going to be Alexa.

Executive Producer Tania: Alexa, turn on car.

Crew Chief Brad: Alexa, send the coordinates that I just drove to my mistress’s house to my wife.

Crew Chief Eric: That’s the wrong website. It’s the wrong Alexa. [00:42:00]

Crew Chief Brad: Alexa, please report to my insurance agency that I just did 95 in a 60.

Crew Chief Eric: And add a loaf of bread to my shopping list. So there’s always renderings flying around.

There’s some pretty cool ones out there. A team put together a rendering of what the Dodge Superbird would look like based on a current Dodge Challenger. And I thought that was pretty neat. Although I don’t think we’re in an era anymore of the big nose and big tail of the Superbird. I mean, that’s a cool throwback, but I couldn’t see parking that at the local Walmart.

Crew Chief Brad: Superbird is one of my favorite cars of all time.

Crew Chief Eric: It’s just so long. I mean, I guess it’s like an F 150 or a Silverado, right?

Crew Chief Brad: No, I think they’re longer.

Crew Chief Eric: Now, that Alfa Romeo Nivola that was floating around for a while, a video link that was out there on YouTube, we posted in our show notes, I think that’s a really cool reimagined Combination of the four C and the eight C competizione.

I think it’s a cool looking car. There was a version of that that I actually posted out on [00:43:00] Garage Riot recently where they took that same Nivola and redesigned it yet again, kind of put this, you know, Milan sad clown kind of face on it. I think it’s a cool looking car. It’s just, I don’t think alpha is ever going to build it.

Crew Chief Brad: This is that guy that does the Volkswagen renderings.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah. And he does a really cool job. So I like them. I like looking at these, you know, they’re a lot of fun, but you know, don’t get my hopes up like that. Don’t tease me. The front end

Crew Chief Brad: almost looks like the Maserati MC12 or whatever.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, exactly. I think that’s where he probably got his inspiration from.

And the back is reminiscent of older alphas as well with the big round lights and all that kind of thing. I think it looks cool. I think it does.

Crew Chief Brad: I can dig

Crew Chief Eric: it. So what else is going on in the world of Stellantis there, Tanya?

Executive Producer Tania: Sounds like they’re still having an odor problem.

Crew Chief Eric: Wait, what? In their cars?

Executive Producer Tania: No, at their factory.

Crew Chief Eric: You know, there’s some weird stuff going on, explosions and smelly factories and things like that, that we link to in our show notes. But there’s also this really weirdly I’d say almost stupidly named vehicle coming out [00:44:00] called the ASNOM and it’s based on a ram.

Crew Chief Brad: I think they misspelled Amazon.

Executive Producer Tania: Looks like a Bentley got smashed.

It’s pretty freaking. Terrible.

Crew Chief Brad: This is the new Aztec.

Executive Producer Tania: And hence the name, I suppose. I mean, the interior isn’t terrible other than like that weird bubbling seat looks stupid, but the rest of it isn’t even horrible on the inside, but the outside is awful. I mean, you have like wine glass holder in the back.

It looks like how

Crew Chief Eric: luxurious

Crew Chief Brad: rich people doing rich people things. I mean,

Crew Chief Eric: I’m going to because I figured one of you two were saying what kind of. As whole is going to buy this as non

moving on. So it’s time for us to move on to our traditional domestic news, which is all Chevy and Ford based our Chevy and Ford news brought to you in part by American muscle. com your number one source for Mopar Chevy and Ford parts. So if you’re looking for something new to spruce up your [00:45:00] GM Ford or Dodge this winter, before the track season starts off, remember to head over to American muscle.

com so what’s going on in the world of GM.

Executive Producer Tania: Well, it looks like the automaker is going to be dethroned as the number one auto seller in the U. S. I don’t know that that’s necessarily, we’ll see if it sticks. Toyota is beating them out to be the number one car seller, but given the chip shortages and all the supply chain issues we have had over the last year and whatnot.

Maybe this is a short term thing and they’ll regain control of their kingdom. I think it’s a little too early to tell. I

Crew Chief Eric: feel like those ratings are somewhat misleading or somehow inflated because when we looked at that world map at the end of last year, about the top manufacturers in the world, Toyota seemed to come out on top, regardless of all this.

And I mean, if Chevy’s still selling Impalas and whatnot, zombie cars, I mean, I just don’t get it. Toyota is

Executive Producer Tania: above them in global sales.

Crew Chief Eric: Oh, so this is America’s [00:46:00] largest. It’s just

Executive Producer Tania: America. So global sales is Toyota versus Volkswagen. They passed GM like a long time ago, Toyota. This is just American sales. So GM is number one or was number one and is about to be passed by Toyota.

But a lot of those numbers, 30 plus percent down sales, I think Toyota, but. GM had 40 plus percent down sales, right? And a lot of that’s all driven by the car shortages and this, that, and the other. So does it stick or not? I think remains to be seen over the next year or two. Right.

Crew Chief Eric: So I’m going to ask this.

What about the F 150? I thought that was like the best selling vehicle of all time in the galaxy, in the Milky way.

Executive Producer Tania: But that’s the only thing from Ford.

Crew Chief Eric: Oh, okay. That makes sense. Do they sell anything else?

Crew Chief Brad: I don’t think the F 150 sells very well overseas either. Right.

Crew Chief Eric: But this is, this is North America, right?

Executive Producer Tania: Just American sales.

Crew Chief Brad: They’re all in Texas.

Crew Chief Eric: Big state. It’s a big state. It

Crew Chief Brad: is a big state.

Crew Chief Eric: To continue that thread on GM, it makes sense in a way, if Toyota’s [00:47:00] surpassing them because they’re wasting time on things like A 10. 4 liter V8 as a direct response to the Dodge elephant crate engine.

Crew Chief Brad: No, I’ve got to say here, anytime you’re building a thousand horsepower motor, it’s not a waste of time.

I don’t care who you are.

Crew Chief Eric: What do you need? If, okay. Okay. A hundred horsepower per liter. Is that really that

Crew Chief Brad: good?

Crew Chief Eric: Shouldn’t that thing be making like 10, 000 horsepower at 10 liters? I mean, I don’t understand.

Crew Chief Brad: There was a BMW. It would, but then it would blow up every 5, 000

Crew Chief Eric: miles. Well, you know, that’s, that’s true.

I just, I don’t understand why they would waste the time. Again, we’ve talked about this before. I feel as though despite the list that we reviewed earlier in the episode, Chevy’s like late to the party on this whole EV thing, even worse is The irony that Dodge is like, all right, we’re done parties over.

And you know, there’s always that one guy in the back going, well, my glass ain’t empty yet, so I’m gonna hang out till I’m done drinking. That’s what I feel. Chevy’s doing right now with this 10 liter V8. I just, I don’t [00:48:00] understand. I mean, because nobody’s

Crew Chief Brad: buying their cars. So they’ve got to sell motors instead.

Drag racing is still a thing. People still drag race and street race and everything. And they’re putting these motors in, you know, after they blow up their Camaro SS motor, they’re going to go and replace it with one of these.

Crew Chief Eric: I suppose so. Make it completely undrivable.

Crew Chief Brad: Not everybody wants to put a 1. 8 T in everything, Eric.

Crew Chief Eric: I think that’s very true. You know, I want to make big power out of a small displacement. It’s like the genie from Aladdin. But speaking of other things, GM, what do we think? You know, the new Z06 came out during the winter. What do we think?

Crew Chief Brad: The C8 I think is cool. The Z06 is just a more cool version of it.

Could you tell me the

Crew Chief Eric: difference between the two? Nope.

Crew Chief Brad: Uh, the big wang.

Crew Chief Eric: Oh, is that, oh, okay, cool. I got it. This is a Z06 wing.

Crew Chief Brad: Got aerodynamic stuff. It’s got more power.

Crew Chief Eric: I don’t know. We’re going to dig into that a little bit more, but you know, as much as there was so much hype and, Oh, they released it early and they didn’t do that on purpose.

I [00:49:00] feel like it fell on deaf ears. It was like the same thing as when Volkswagen announced the new Golf R during the reelection. And it was just like, yeah, nobody cares, dude. It’s like yet another Golf R, you know, yet another Z06 show us something different. Granted the new C8 is different enough being a mid engine Corvette.

What I want to see though. Does the IMSA Corvette get an upgrade because of the advancements they’ve made with the Z06? How does that change the race cars in the future? I,

Crew Chief Brad: I think that goes the other way. I think they did the development on the IMSA car and it’s trickling down to the Z06.

Crew Chief Eric: You know, that might make more sense.

You’re right. Speaking of things that were developed and trickling down to cars. Did you hear about Ford?

Crew Chief Brad: They developed a retractable exhaust tips.

Crew Chief Eric: I have one question.

Executive Producer Tania: Why? Yep.

Crew Chief Eric: That’d be it.

Executive Producer Tania: I mean, and the answer someone would probably give you is why not?

Crew Chief Eric: In the era of the Ford Lightning and EVs, why are we dealing with, you know, retracting exhaust tips?

Crew Chief Brad: What would it do? It’s for off road mode. They’re probably going to put this on like the new [00:50:00] Raptor or something to give it more approach angle or, Whatever the rear angle is, you retract the exhaust. So it’s not like directly under the bumper or whatever. And if you slam the tail down on a rock or something like that, because jeep guys do that shit all the time, then you’re not going to like destroy your exhaust.

Crew Chief Eric: All right. But they’re coming out with the new Bronco DR.

Crew Chief Brad: Which

Crew Chief Eric: is the V8 powered Baja monster that apparently you can buy based on the Ford Bronco.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah, so this is probably going to be a feature on that. And it’s, it’s, it’s for, I mean, it says in the article, it’s for off roading to help give you better clearance.

Crew Chief Eric: Why not just make a shorter exhaust or with side exit or something else?

Crew Chief Brad: Because then maybe a permanent shorter exhaust might not qualify or again, pass government regulations.

Crew Chief Eric: And so all the aftermarket guys are going to do what with their stock exhaust?

Crew Chief Brad: Throw it away.

Crew Chief Eric: Okay, just wanted to make sure.

Crew Chief Brad: When they put their Chevy crate motor, you know, to keep, that’s how you make a fast Ford. You put a Chevy motor in it. [00:51:00] Uh, if you listen to Bobby Parks,

Crew Chief Eric: one of our former guests, we talked about the Chevy crate motor. Did you guys hear about the new Ford crate motor? That’s coming out? Oh,

Crew Chief Brad: no. Oh, it’s called a new term new.

Uh, what is it? Terminator? No, they call

Crew Chief Eric: it the illuminator. It is an EV crate motor that people can buy to retrofit into whatever vehicle they like. So see, that’s a step in the right direction. 10. 4 liters. Of whatever that cast iron thing is, or this, which would you buy

Crew Chief Brad: 10. 4 liters?

Crew Chief Eric: I already knew that.

Depends on

Crew Chief Brad: how expensive this is and how compact it is. Cause if you can put one of these at each wheel, then you got something.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, that’s, that’s true. That’s be hotness. You know, Stellantis isn’t the only one that’s got fans doing renderings and things like that of vehicles and coming up with really cool concepts.

And I tell you what I. And really in love with this Ford Ranger that was modded with a Mustang [00:52:00] face. What do you guys think? I think this looks slick.

Crew Chief Brad: I can dig it. You got to get rid of the Mustang logo or the Mustang icon.

Crew Chief Eric: That’s the Mach T. You didn’t know that? That’s the Mustang Mach T. It’s the pickup truck.

Crew Chief Brad: The Mach trash.

Crew Chief Eric: I think it looks cool with the Shelby stripes. It looks super aggressive. I mean, how they did that running the flares. I just like all of that. The big wheels. I mean. Yeah, that’s pretty cool.

Crew Chief Brad: I can, I can dig it. I like it.

Crew Chief Eric: I don’t hate it. Wait, wait, you don’t hate it? You pick up truck you don’t hate?

Crew Chief Brad: Tanya, think of all the mulch.

Crew Chief Eric: Gosh, wow. So then if you don’t hate that, what do you think of the 70s retro inspired vintage pickup electric that they came out with?

Executive Producer Tania: I don’t hate that because I don’t hate the concept of taking the old cars and making them new again and electrified. I don’t necessarily love it because I don’t think it’s a particularly good looking pickup truck to have done this with, but they have.

I also don’t think that’s ever going to happen [00:53:00] other than the one they’ve built because there’s no way it would pass any safety regulations because I mean, it is essentially the original, but with an electric motor inside. And so there is thin ass door cards and, and the roof liner and all that. And I was just thinking from a safety aspect, how could you actually mass produce this?

The thing would become huge because there’s no room for the. 1800 airbags that we need in the cabin.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, no, you’re a hundred percent right. You know, this is right along the lines of what Hyundai did with the pony when they kind of brought it up to speed and did the EV. I think everybody’s doing these heritage pieces.

You’re even starting to see some things like that now from Audi with Ken Block where they’re, you know, You know, taking all the Audi Quattros and doing some stuff like that. I think it’s cool. I think you’re right. If this had been the Ford, the F 100 that was in like the expendables, Stallone’s pickup, that would have been super cool.

This is just some boring blocky, like whatever I hate to say. It’s like Ford square body. It’s like, whatever man, man, man doesn’t like it anyway. So [00:54:00] it’s all good. It’s a Ford.

Executive Producer Tania: Oh, they didn’t do it themselves. Any favor with like the kind of blandish color.

Crew Chief Eric: Those wheels. Oh my God. I know those are the original hubcaps, but there’s more news about Ford in this past winter.

What’s going on?

Executive Producer Tania: They finally released the new F 150 lightning price. So if you’re looking to order one of those,

Crew Chief Eric: what’s it going to cost? What’s it going to cost?

Executive Producer Tania: Well, they got four variations. They’ve got the pro that comes in starting at 39, 9, 7, 4. So you were asking for that sub 40,000 ev. Here you go.

You’ve got the pro model at 39, 9 7 4,

Crew Chief Brad: which you’re forgetting about the 9 75 destination charge.

Crew Chief Eric: Oh, and you want floor mats and you want a bedliner and you want wheels and headlights. Yeah. Yeah. I mean,

Executive Producer Tania: actually the. 1, 695 destination charge that they listed in the article as well. But it is eligible for a 7, 500 federal tax [00:55:00] credit.

So booyah still sub 40, 000 now.

Crew Chief Eric: Wait, so it’s the

Executive Producer Tania: pro the base after the dealer markup. So, all right, so we got the pro and then we’ve got the XLT at 52, 9, 7, 4. That’s a huge jump. Well, you’ve jumped from 230 mile range to. 230 mile range in the XLT SR version or 300 mile range with the XLT ER. Is

Crew Chief Eric: that 80, 000 for that?

Executive Producer Tania: No, no, no. This is all, well, you know what? They don’t differentiate the, those SR and ER. Price differences. So I don’t know.

Crew Chief Brad: Uh, my guess is the, the XR. That’s the, the lower range. That’s the 52, nine 74 plus 1, 600. And then the other one, the ER is probably 60, which bridges the gap to the next version, which is the Lariat.

And how much is that one?

Executive Producer Tania: 67, four, seven, four. But now we’ve gone to 230 miles of range [00:56:00] or 300 miles of range,

Crew Chief Brad: but you get your leather seats and your navigation.

Executive Producer Tania: If you’re feeling real bullish, you can get the platinum

Crew Chief Eric: 100 grand, right?

Executive Producer Tania: No boys. Lower 90, 000, seven, four, and you will get 280 miles of range

Crew Chief Brad: and you will get a 10 year car note.

Crew Chief Eric: Speaking of a hundred thousand dollar vehicles, right? We were out in Ohio recently And walking through the parking lot of a Meijer, we spotted a brand new Grand Wagoneer driving my old, you know, what would be considered old school by now, you know, WK2 Jeep Grand Cherokee. And I told my wife, I said, Hey, look, it’s the new Grand Wagoneer.

And she stopped dead in the parking lot. And she looked at it and she goes, and she just didn’t say anything. And I said, what are you thinking? She goes, It doesn’t say anything. And I said, you know, that’s 100, 000 plus dollars. Right. And she’s like, why? And then just turned and walked away. Like, she didn’t understand it.

And I’m like, that’s the 1st [00:57:00] time I’ve ever seen her have that reaction to like a car. Normally it’s just guy. It’s ugly. It’s this. I don’t like it. I don’t like, you know, the cut of the back or whatever it might be, but she just stood there and like, didn’t say anything. She goes. Why, but I will say it is bigger than I thought it would be.

I mean, I know that the new Grand Cherokee is big, and I’ve seen those on the road, but the Wagoner, for some reason, looks time and a half wider just because of the way that nose is and the cut of the back. And it’s just, it’s big, real big.

Crew Chief Brad: I have to say the the new, I’ve seen the Grand Cherokees. I think they look terrible.

They look so misproportioned.

Crew Chief Eric: It’s that reverse angular nose, like an old BMW that it just doesn’t look like. It looks like Cro Magnon. It’s just very strange. Yeah, it’s very strange that they’re not good looking at all. I’m

Crew Chief Brad: your model was definitely the last good looking grand Cherokee.

Crew Chief Eric: I mean, and take that and multiply it out on that grand wagon here.

Cause I mean, granted, they’re all basically the same underneath, but I was just like. Dang, it’s more grand. Well, and the other thing too was with that whole front with all those LEDs, like we talked about stuff because [00:58:00] we saw it at night. She’s like, is that an EV? And I said, no. And she’s like a hundred grand for what?

And I’m like, it’s a Jeep. I don’t, I don’t know what to tell you, but you know, who just announced yet another EV, a brand nobody cares about because they’re not on top anymore. GM. Yep. They announced the new electric Silverado again, late to the party, right? How long have we been talking about the lightning and talking about all this other kind of stuff?

GM comes to the party and says, Oh, we’re going to have an electric Silverado in two

Executive Producer Tania: years. 2024.

Crew Chief Eric: Great. Awesome. Hopefully it’s not as bad as that hybrid suburban that came out with like 10 years ago.

Crew Chief Brad: I was going to say it does come with a destination charge of 1695 too.

Executive Producer Tania: But they swear that any resemblance to the avalanche is purely coincidental.

You noticed that, right? Yeah. Even though it has the folding mid gate tail, like the avalanche head, that’s the only, you know, that yes, is like the avalanche, but otherwise

Crew Chief Eric: It’s not the Avalanche. It’s a

Executive Producer Tania: coincidence.

Crew Chief Eric: There was [00:59:00] one last bit of domestic news that I wanted to cover because it was super clickbaity.

I think it is the most clickbaity thing we have ever had on this show. And oh, by the way, folks, if I have a moment to point it out, we have covered well over, I believe the number was 550 articles on this show. So as we plow through these. This one came across my desk and it reads Ford beats Tesla for best growth performing auto stock in 2021.

And I said, wait, what? So according to the article, you know, Ford stock grew 140%, this and that and the other thing. And I wanted to compare the stock prices.

Crew Chief Brad: 6 to, I mean, yeah,

Crew Chief Eric: the big, the big three has always been the same. It’s like, it’s a 20 stock. It hasn’t really budged. Stellantis stock has changed significantly from when it was Chrysler to FCA and so on down the line there, they’re actually doing really, really well.

But to say that your stock is doing better than Tesla, who’s sitting at like 1, 100 a share, and you’re coming in at [01:00:00] 25 and 16 cents, yeah, good try, you know, MSNBC. Whatever. I get it. If you play with the numbers, we made a dollar more. So it’s like 150%. In reality, Tesla stock is the highest grossing automotive stock on the planet at a four digit number.

I mean, nobody’s in that range. I mean, granted Audi and Porsche, you know, they’re in the multiple hundreds of dollars. Per stock, but, you know, traded on the NASDAQ Tesla’s where it’s at. I guess we got to wrap out that domestic news with some domestic adjacent news by talking about JDM news and Toyota’s got some cool stuff

Crew Chief Brad: they unveiled or revealed the taco Zilla and no folks.

It is not a giant burrito or taco that you would get at your stand down the street.

Crew Chief Eric: I was thinking it was like the Oscar Meyer wiener van. When I read. I read the article title,

Crew Chief Brad: you know, they could sell these as food trucks and to [01:01:00] taquerias, the owners should buy these and sell food out of their taco Zilla.

And they, I think it’s cool. It’s a, an off road version of the Tacoma with a camper on the back. It’s not earth shattering or groundbreaking by anything like that. Biggest pays homage to the Toyota Chinook from 1976, the versatile convertible wagon.

Crew Chief Eric: Oddly enough, I was out in Phoenix not too long ago. And I actually, I drove from the mid 400 to Phoenix as a matter of fact, and I saw one of those old school Toyota campers.

Out on the highway because out there they don’t rust and it never snows. And I was just like, I was kind of chuckling to myself going, man, that old Toyota still running, you know, it’s like a Camry engine. It’s the old taco, you know, like I said, I think this is cool as a throwback. I just don’t know who’s going to buy one.

Executive Producer Tania: I mean, the van life market’s pretty. Small, but the people in that, you know, subculture are pretty serious. So

Crew Chief Brad: there are people that do this themselves to big, like Ford F [01:02:00] 350s and stuff like that, which is a terrible vehicle. If they actually take it off roading, cause it’s way too big to fit in those little tight places on the wilderness.

This is more believable. As one of those overlanding type as a motor home

Crew Chief Eric: slash off roader. Yeah. But my question is, you know, with COVID being where it is right now, right. It keeps kind of bouncing up and down. Has the van life RV market plateaued or is it still on the rise like it was, let’s say in 2020.

Crew Chief Brad: I had a friend that was looking for a van before COVID and he could not find one. So he waited and then after COVID, he started looking again and prices were double what they were. When he was originally looking, actually one of our members, Andrew, he just bought a van, he bought a transit to transport his ailing mother.

It took him forever to find a van. He couldn’t get anything he wanted. He couldn’t, he got a transit. He couldn’t get EcoBoost. He couldn’t get all wheel drive because they just didn’t have them anywhere. The vans that he would call the dealerships about, he would schedule an appointment [01:03:00] to go look at it.

And then it would be gone before he even gets a chance to get there. Essentially bought the first one that he could actually set his hands on.

Crew Chief Eric: Wow. So

Crew Chief Brad: the market is just terrible. It’s terrible. If you’re looking to buy anything,

Crew Chief Eric: I keep saying this, there’s tons of used cars to go around. So there

Crew Chief Brad: are a million PT cruisers out there to choose from and they fit all kinds of lifestyles.

Andrew Banks next car should be a PT Cruiser.

Crew Chief Eric: Not a Neon. He needs a PT Cruiser painted like his Viper sitting next to it in the garage.

Crew Chief Brad: Convertible, you know, so he can let that fro blow in the wind.

Crew Chief Eric: We’ll talk more about Andrew in the coming weeks for sure. We have some news for our friends on two wheels.

Crew Chief Brad: Oh my God, two wheel news, Crichton CR700W motorcycle brings the rotary engine back into production. Why?

Crew Chief Eric: I hate, I know there’s diehard rotary people out there, but I’m with you. I keep saying it, if the Germans thought it was a [01:04:00] good idea, they would have kept with it.

They don’t abandon things. I mean, just look at the 9 11. They think it’s a good idea. And they keep going at it with that motor hanging over the butt.

Crew Chief Brad: This is right up there with that jet turbine motorcycle. As far as just bad ideas.

Crew Chief Eric: I mean, the Viper motorcycle was a bad idea too, but that’s hella cool. I mean, you got a V10 between your legs.

It’s kind of neat.

Crew Chief Brad: That’s what she said.

Crew Chief Eric: But on the other end of that pendulum swing,

Executive Producer Tania: Bugatti is revealing a motorcycle? Well, Bugatti’s revealing an electric two wheel apparatus. What do you mean

Crew Chief Eric: apparatus? What is it, a medical device?

Executive Producer Tania: Mode of transportation. It doesn’t look

Crew Chief Eric: like that Mercedes we talked about.

Executive Producer Tania: No. So this is actually scooter, not like a moped scooter. Think razor scooter. But before you make that face, this is the best looking razor scooter. Ever. I give them [01:05:00] props for a hot little razor scooter. Like this thing is sick looking, but it’s just the fricking scooter. But it does have a sport mode. You unlock it with the key.

No, just kidding. But it does have a sport mode.

Crew Chief Brad: And how much does it cost? Yeah, that’s the bigger question.

Executive Producer Tania: It costs so much that they had to leave the price out.

Crew Chief Eric: Oh, typical, typical. First of all, is this actually now the baby one? Because it’s the electric, you know, for children. But two, I thought the coolest thing about this is that LED that puts the Ettore Bugatti logo on the ground, like that rear light.

I think that’s the coolest. It’s got

Executive Producer Tania: ground effects. Yo, Razor Scooter didn’t have ground effects.

Crew Chief Eric: It is pretty slick. Would I pay the 97, 000 that this probably costs?

Crew Chief Brad: I can’t write it. I don’t fit.

Crew Chief Eric: I love it. It’s the answer to everything.

Crew Chief Brad: I’m looking at the weight ratings right here and yeah, I don’t. [01:06:00] But

Executive Producer Tania: the funny thing is it says it takes its styling cues from the Devo.

Crew Chief Eric: Oh, stop.

The band.

Crew Chief Eric: No, the, Oh, you weren’t here for that episode. We talked about this 40 run Bugatti. They only made 40 of them. It was called the Devo. It looks like it was made by Lego.

Crew Chief Brad: Say no more.

Crew Chief Eric: I thought it was kind of neat actually, but you know, since we’re talking about oddballs, why don’t we jump right into lost and found Brad, your favorite section,

Crew Chief Brad: lost and found brought to you by the Dodge Dart best selling 2016 car of 2021.

So apparently there’s a Ferrari powered boat for sale right now. It’s the world’s only, allegedly, Ferrari powered boat. You can pick it up for a cool 15 million dollars.

Crew Chief Eric: This thing is slick. I mean, this is handcrafted all wood speedboat built in the fifties with a Ferrari power plant. This is old school.

[01:07:00] Awesome. Old world. Awesome. I love this thing. Now. I think it’s funny that this came across our desk and about a week or two later. Just happened to turn on Motor Trend and there was an episode of Phantom Works Garage, where they were building a replica of this thing. And I thought, Oh man, I mean, I guess it’s targeted advertising.

Who knows? It’s the internet doing its thing. Skynet. I think this is cool. I think this is neat.

Crew Chief Brad: Well, I like the fact that you can buy. A smaller version of it. If you want the, it’s called the baby too. It’s called the, it’s not called anything, but you can get a one eighth scale model for a modest 8,

Crew Chief Eric: 500. Oh, nevermind.

Crew Chief Brad: 1, 600 destination charge.

Crew Chief Eric: The answer is always Miata.

Crew Chief Brad: This thing’s cool though. I would, I would rock it. I don’t, I probably don’t fit, but I would rock it. So yes, if you’re in the market for a used vehicle, you missed out on this one. You can still buy your PT Cruiser, but you can no longer buy your car of your dreams.

The [01:08:00] 2000 Chevrolet Metro.

Crew Chief Eric: Is it a coupe or a cabriolet?

Crew Chief Brad: It’s a hatchback.

Crew Chief Eric: Oh, it’s an egg.

Crew Chief Brad: It’s an egg. It’s a white egg. It’s a hatchback. 400 miles on it. This thing was pristine, perfect specimen really of the automobile. And it’s sold for a whopping, you know, I hope you’re sitting down 18, 000, 200

Crew Chief Eric: for a geo Metro.

That’s 22

Crew Chief Brad: years old. Yes.

Crew Chief Eric: Oh, what are people thinking?

Crew Chief Brad: Says here, the buyer is Andrew bank.

Crew Chief Eric: So with only 400 miles, then it qualifies to be, you know, top spot on bring a trailer. So that should easily like I should double his money by listing it immediately. Right.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah. Here’s a question for you. What do you think is more ridiculous that this car sold for 18, 200 or that E30 sold for an astronomical amount of money back when it sold?

Crew Chief Eric: For a quarter million bucks for [01:09:00] that M3? Yeah. I mean, just the numbers are insane. I talk to Donovan all the time about this because, you know, he’s in that market and he’s always looking at stuff and we, you know, we could bounce ideas back and forth and it’s just the bring a trailer stuff is nuts and I hate to call them out all the time, but it’s just.

I don’t know. It’s insane. And the conversation I had with like Chris Bright about the things they’re doing over at, you know, Collector Part Exchange and stuff like that. It’s just such a weird world right now with all these online marketplaces. And, you know, bring a trailer used to be the place where we’d go and salivate over cars going, Oh man, I wish I could buy that.

It’s actually pretty reasonably priced. Now you go there and go, what the hell are they smoking? Like, what is this? It’s nutty. You know, the same is true of eBay and a lot of those other sites that they just, Suddenly get out of control, you know, when they’re self managed and whatnot. But I hate the fact that bring a trailer has now become this, you know, high watermark litmus test for when you’re selling a car.

It’s like, well, what is it? What’s it worth on bring a trailer? You know, what did the last one sell for? And it’s like, that’s like saying, what did the last Camaro sell for a Barrett Jackson? I’m not going to pay that kind of price [01:10:00] for your,

Crew Chief Brad: your Camaro is not that Camaro.

Crew Chief Eric: Exactly. Exactly. And shut

Crew Chief Brad: up. I know what I have.

No lowballs. Don’t

Crew Chief Eric: lowball me, bro. But speaking of lowball offers, we have a new, I guess, subsection of the Lost and Found. We’re calling it

Crew Chief Brad: The Andrew Bang Question.

Crew Chief Eric: And how does that work exactly, Brent?

Crew Chief Brad: Basically, you pick the most expensive car you can find for the cheapest price you can get it.

Crew Chief Eric: Oh, so you sort from lowest to highest?

Crew Chief Brad: Yes. Yes.

Crew Chief Eric: What can we put in the, what can we put in the bank?

Crew Chief Brad: A Lamborghini Gallardo for 35, 000.

Crew Chief Eric: All right. That’s a good deal. So what’s the catch?

Crew Chief Brad: It’s been stolen a handful of times. It was a drug mule? No, I don’t know. It may have been. It ran and drove when parked.

Crew Chief Eric: You know, every great ad starts that way.

It’s been repainted twice.

Crew Chief Brad: It’s not the most pristine Lamborghini out there on the market. Convertible top doesn’t

Executive Producer Tania: work.

Crew Chief Brad: Eh, it’s just wind resistance anyway. We top up, you’re good.

Executive Producer Tania: It’s probably a [01:11:00] 30, 000 fix right there.

Crew Chief Brad: You pay 35, 000 for the car and another 30, 000 to fix the convertible top.

Crew Chief Eric: You know, I’m going to be honest with you.

I don’t want a convertible supercar. For whatever reason, none of them appeal to me. Whether it’s the Ferraris, the Porsches, the Lamborghinis. I just, I don’t want any of them.

Crew Chief Brad: They’re the only ones I fit in.

Executive Producer Tania: Think you’d want the extra structural rigidity for when you crash it. Not you, but the use the crash them, you know,

Crew Chief Brad: Andrew bank. If you’re listening, you can go buy this car. You should sell both the Dodge Vipers that you’ve purchased and buy this car.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, I’ll pass. But more on put it in the bank. Maybe that’s what we should call it. Put it in the bank next month as we look for more of these hot deals. So not just the lost and found, but what’s the best, cheapest thing you can find.

It’s some sad news since I like to cover historical things and you guys know I’ve mentioned many times before about Lotus and the Lotus. Family, you know, the Chapman’s and whatnot. Unfortunately, the late Colin [01:12:00] Chapman, his wife outlived him by many, many years. Colin Chapman died in 1982. His wife, Hazel Chapman, finally died at the age of 94 here during the winter of 2021, leading into 22.

Crew Chief Brad: You say finally, like you were hoping or expecting about to die. It’s she finally did it. She finally kicked the bucket, that old bag. She finally died.

Crew Chief Eric: Probably wrong choice of words, but the sad reality of all that is she is the legacy of Lotus. She inspired Colin. He built the first Lotus race car for her.

There’s a lot of stuff that goes around her story, their marriage, the company, and the one still secret that has now gone to the grave is that she’s Is where does the name come from? Nobody knows that. And the family, I guess, is under oath to not disclose it. It was something very personal to Colin. And I was just kind of hoping that maybe we would find out the secret.

But, you know, sad day for the automotive world because she was a huge [01:13:00] influencer. Both of them, obviously, you know, big parts of Formula One and things like that. So our hearts go out to the Chapman family. And on that comes news of new Lotus EVs and things like that in the future. So. We’ll see where the brand goes.

I don’t think it’s going anywhere anytime soon. It really has survived, you know, the trials and tribulations of, of war and economy and racing and everything. But I guess that’s a great segue to talk about the future since we are kind of dabbling there with the future of Lotus. Let’s talk about new random EVs and concepts.

Crew Chief Brad: The Pininfarina Battista. Okay. So of course I’m going to like it because Pininfarina, you know, famed for styling numerous Ferraris. Over the decades. Did you look at those

Executive Producer Tania: specs? Seems like it’s gonna be pretty slow. I mean, 1900 brake horsepower. That’s it.

Crew Chief Eric: The new Dodge will have 9, 000, so it’ll be okay. I think it’s cool looking.

The price tag is, the price tag is hefty. I mean, two and a half million dollars for this thing is what

Crew Chief Brad: it is.

Crew Chief Eric: It’s considered a hyper EV. It is very [01:14:00] Ferrari esque because obviously Pininfarina penned so many Ferraris and whatnot over the years. I think it’s a good looking car.

Crew Chief Brad: More than you can afford, pal.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah.

Crew Chief Brad: Pininfarina. I would buy one if I was in that market. And then Nissan revealed an electric pickup truck. What?

Executive Producer Tania: Yes, they did. And you know what? I will give them props for saying, BMW, let me show you how it’s done. You want to make your grills bigger? Well, screw you. We’re just going to make the whole front end a grill.

That thing is heinous. It’s even see through.

Crew Chief Brad: I’d love to see the women that drive this wearing a skirt. That would be great.

Crew Chief Eric: They all wear yoga pants now, Brad. Nobody wears skirts.

Crew Chief Brad: True, true, true. Lululemon by stalking them. I mean,

Crew Chief Eric: it’s Athleisure wear.

Crew Chief Brad: Excuse me.

Crew Chief Eric: I mean, it’s ugly from every angle. The color is ugly.

The wheels are ugly. What? This thing is

Crew Chief Brad: awesome.

Crew Chief Eric: What are you talking about? It’s, Oh my God. It’s the definition of fugly.

Crew Chief Brad: No, you can write

Executive Producer Tania: words.

Crew Chief Brad: Awesome. Put the birds [01:15:00] in the Microsoft on the

Executive Producer Tania: do that, but we shouldn’t be allowed.

Crew Chief Brad: Oh, the little heart emojis. Oh, I love the cap. Oh, this thing is awesome. The, uh, the cap looks like a Nissan 200 or 300, 200 SX or whatever.

Two 50, two 70 S whatever. The one that’s a drift car now.

Crew Chief Eric: Oh, I know what you’re talking about. Yeah.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah. It’s like a 200 x or something like that. Yeah. That’s terrible. This thing’s cool looking, man. I mean, it’s a concept

Executive Producer Tania: car. All right. Like it looks like what? It is a concept. Okay. I I, the

Crew Chief Brad: concept is

Crew Chief Eric: awesome.

I, I get it. But I want, I know that concepts are not supposed to be functional, and I understand that the grill is the entire front end of this thing. Do those headlights actually work the way they’re laid out? Probably. I wanna see it to believe it. , but let’s move on. It’s, it’s horrible.

Crew Chief Brad: There are no headlights.

It’s just a Nissan.

Crew Chief Eric: It’s, well, that’s my point. Like, do they actually work?

Crew Chief Brad: No.

Crew Chief Eric: So here’s two things that I never thought I would hear in the same sentence. And I got to get your take on this, Brad, because I know you live in the [01:16:00] Toyota Lexus camp. Hydrogen off roader. Let me say that again, hydrogen off

Crew Chief Brad: roader.

Why not? I mean, you can do an electric off roader. Apparently they’re proving all of that. The thing I find more interesting is it’s a Lexus side by side.

Crew Chief Eric: I was wondering if we were going to get to that. It looks like a rebadged Can Am or any of those. I mean,

Crew Chief Brad: we have a couple. Side by side enthusiasts in the club here.

And I’d be really curious to find out what they think about the Lexus hydrogen off roader.

Crew Chief Eric: This is another vehicle that begs the question. Why the answer is probably why not? No, thank you. I’ll pass. I

Executive Producer Tania: mean, it’s Toyota doing Toyota things.

Crew Chief Eric: This is very true.

Crew Chief Brad: What do you do when you’re the number one manufacturer?

Whatever the hell you want. You throw hydrogen bombs into side by sides. I mean,

Executive Producer Tania: they’re the only ones really trying to develop hydrogen technology in cars. So for them to just extend that to this, isn’t really a shocking. [01:17:00] All right. I

Crew Chief Brad: would want to keep this away from Daniel’s square body though.

Crew Chief Eric: A thousand percent, but let me, let me put it to you this way in light of Betty White and you know, everything that’s happened in the last couple of weeks.

So picture it Florida, 2022. The Lexus hydrogen golf cart. That would have made more sense to me than whatever this is. Right. And

Crew Chief Brad: they, they wouldn’t, they wouldn’t even have bothered with the hydrogen. It would have just been electric.

Crew Chief Eric: Oh, when I looked at it, it kind of looks like a funky golf cart anyway, because it’s, you know, it’s more upright side by side and like the sportier ones that are out there now, these UTVs and stuff that exists, I kind of made me wonder why.

The big brands haven’t gotten into luxury golf carts for some of these retirement communities. I think people would buy a Lexus electric or hydrogen golf cart. Wouldn’t you? I

Crew Chief Brad: think their customers all

Crew Chief Eric: die before they take delivery because chips. Moving on, Tanya mentioned earlier she wanted to talk about Mercedes.

Executive Producer Tania: They had unveiled [01:18:00] that, I don’t remember what it was, but it was heinous looking. The

Crew Chief Eric: EQS, it looks like a suppository as Mark Shank said.

Executive Producer Tania: Yeah, unfortunately, but now in their whole EQ line, because that’s going to be their electric line vehicle, they’ve unveiled a new concept. I don’t know how I feel about the way it looks.

It doesn’t scream Mercedes, but it screams vintage Aston or something. I

Crew Chief Eric: agree. I agree.

Executive Producer Tania: The interesting thing about this, which is going to be the EQXX or something like that, the vision EQXX is I guess it’s concept name. It’s claiming on simulation to get 620 miles on a single rage. So that would outpace everything available right now, if they could actually do this in production versus simulated on a computer.

So the question is what has Mercedes unlocked? Right. We’re not unlocked.

Crew Chief Eric: And who are they getting their batteries from? Right. Cause I’m hearing a lot lately about, you know, Tesla and Panasonic partnering up, things like that. They say the drag [01:19:00] coefficient on this thing is super low. It’s like 0. 17 to 0. 2, depending on where you read.

The more I look at this thing from the different angles to your point, reminiscent of an Aston, it actually reminds me even more so of the new McLaren long tail. It just has that look to it, especially from the rear, the front from certain angles. I love it. And other angles, I sort of hate it. It’s got a weird like Sauber C9 thing going on for me for the front.

It looks kind of like a race car, but it’s not, it’s just, it’s big. I think that’s the issue I take with it. It’s like, I want it. It’s like those Mercedes from like 10 years ago where it was like, we’re going to do the low roof line on a four door to try to make it look small. But in reality, it’s like a limousine or my Bach or something.

I’m like, I don’t know the wheels. Take away from it, give me those manhole covers from like the late nineties and stuff like that. Like even something retro would look better than what’s on here. I don’t know. I’m not sold yet. I’m intrigued, [01:20:00] not just from the technology standpoint, but even this design, there’s so much room for improvement and knows

Executive Producer Tania: what this would actually turn into given it’s still in a concept form and we already know how concepts never end up looking like the real thing, but.

Mercedes is, in fact, doing things.

Crew Chief Eric: And you know who else is still doing things? Sony. And I hear it’s not the PlayStation 5.

Crew Chief Brad: Well, you can’t find one of those, but you can find a Sony electric car. What?

Executive Producer Tania: Well, not yet. Those are still concepts too. However, we talked about So is the

Crew Chief Brad: PS5.

Executive Producer Tania: We talked about a while ago, which I think it was Two years ago at CES, Sony unveiled the vision s their possible entry into electric cars.

And this past year at the Consumer Electronics Show, they unveiled the vision S zero two, which is their SUV. entry if they

Crew Chief Eric: actually ever do this, right? First things first, they put the Vision [01:21:00] S1 in a trash compactor, right? I mean, that’s what this thing looks like. It looks like they washed

Executive Producer Tania: it. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Okay. Cool. Unfortunately for me, they look better, sort of, but they look too much like Tesla’s.

Crew Chief Eric: I think the front of the Vision S1, let’s call it that, looks like a Taycan. Which I’m okay with. I like the fact that it has like legit wheels, stuff like that. I mean, kind of re reviewing this car. Now looking at it, you know, side by side with the other one compared to the original, like, you know, auto show debut pictures that we saw at CES and whatnot.

Here’s the biggest problem I have with these EVs. They have so much power. And we talk about it, you know, many times, you know, who needs a grocery getter that goes zero to 60 in two seconds and all this Aesthetically, why do we need these heinous freaking wheels? I mean, it makes the cars look like hot garbage.

The Vision S, the original one, I think it’s understated. I would drive that if you told me that was a Sony, I wouldn’t [01:22:00] believe you. I would tell you, Oh, that’s like a Hyundai or that’s, you know, some sort of other, maybe Toyota or something like that. I just, I don’t know, but this other thing it’s redeeming value is not the outside.

I think the interior is super cool. I’m even a fan of this. big, ridiculous Star Trek dashboard that’s in it. I don’t know how I

Executive Producer Tania: feel about all these new dashboards that are nothing but screens, but the seats look like they, uh, would cradle you quite nicely.

Crew Chief Eric: I’m not saying these screens aren’t going to break.

I just think aesthetically. Sony has done a good job. It looks cool.

Executive Producer Tania: Well, and we should expect that from them. If anything, this thing should have a killer sound system in it.

Crew Chief Eric: I

Executive Producer Tania: agree with that. And a really good display systems, right? Because that’s what they know how to do. Exactly. And I mean, the other interesting thing where he, who shall not be named Musk refuses to use technology, you know, we’re still using camera technology, like literal cameras for the, you know, all the sensors and all that stuff.

Sony’s like, nah, we’re doing [01:23:00] LIDAR.

Crew Chief Eric: Nice.

Executive Producer Tania: It takes a combination

Crew Chief Eric: of all those things, right? Well, it

Executive Producer Tania: does, but certain folks, Musk refuses basically. Has said that he’s not going to use it. And it’s like, why it’s more advanced than anything else. Who knows what those reasons are. I don’t recall at any rate, it’ll be interesting to see, you know, again, I think what we said is, you know, this is more about the technology versus the actual car, so this is a way for them to showcase to all the other auto manufacturers.

This is what we bring to the table. Do you want to come by our dashboards, our sound systems, dah, dah, dah. Oh, Hey. And also our LIDAR sensor technology for autonomous driving is. And that goes

Crew Chief Eric: back to what the guy from Rimac was saying as well, where that’s part of how he got his start was licensing some of his ideas and his technology to other companies.

So this is an opportunity, not for Sony to make cars, but license some of their ideas. So I agree with you there. Sell

Crew Chief Brad: their, sell their technology. Now

Crew Chief Eric: I will say this about the Teslas. From a business [01:24:00] perspective, it makes a thousand percent sense to not retrofit the LIDAR into the cars. Because if you look at it from the perspective, like the big three, how much it takes to make a change on a vehicle, it’ll cost them probably 200, 000 to figure out how to put in one LIDAR sensor on one corner of the car.

If they’re trying to minimize and maximize like their profits and stuff and all the, you know, costs and profits and all that, it’s going to It’s not advantageous for them to go back and redesign the Model 3 right now.

Executive Producer Tania: No, but he could have already put the LiDAR in. That’s part of the point. He, like, refuses because it’s not like LiDAR just came out last year.

So he had opportunity, because since he’s been building cars from the ground up, to have started with that technology. And he’s refused so far for whatever the reasons are would need to investigate it.

Crew Chief Eric: It actually is a great segue into we would be remiss since we’re already talking about it. Tesla’s raising their prices yet again.

Executive Producer Tania: Yes, which is, you know, there’s never a reason. Fine, probably supply chain chips, [01:25:00] the moon phase climate change, who knows, but yes, the prices on all their models at the same time are increasing. Believe it’s like two to four grand depending on, on the model, which is in a lot, but it’s not insignificant either.

Right. And it kind of pushes that model three that I thought was supposed to be this entry level, low priced vehicle to almost mid forty thousands now, which. I don’t know about anybody else, but 40 plus thousand for a car is pretty fricking expensive.

Crew Chief Brad: They’re raising their prices because home depot prices went up.

Crew Chief Eric: Damn, the cost of plywood is pretty expensive these days. It’s

Crew Chief Brad: true. It’s true.

Crew Chief Eric: Zynga. But then they’re going into

Executive Producer Tania: partnerships with companies like. That’s a little bit misleading because they’re not going into a partnership with Hertz. There’s no contract apparently between Tesla and Hertz, but Hertz has put in orders for A hundred thousand Tesla’s model threes and whys, or maybe they’re all model threes, basically to have on their lots as rental cars.

And you can, in fact, [01:26:00] already rent Tesla’s from Hertz facilities. I don’t know which ones, but if you’re flying into LAX at any time, I did check and you can reserve currently a model three, the model whys are sold out or rented out, you know, I looked at the price and at first I was like, dang, that’s expensive.

But then I’m like, well, is it really? So it is really expensive.

Crew Chief Eric: So my bigger question is, do they still ask you to prepay for the fuel on return? They got to charge it up when you returned it to the airport, right?

Executive Producer Tania: That’ll be an interesting question is how much they, you know, make it a premium. If you prefill, you always end up paying a little bit more than if you got your fuel on yourself.

Before you returned it. So I don’t know what they’ll do with the electrification, but you find yourself in LAX, believe my rental dates were, I’m sure they won’t change, but I was looking sometime at the end of February for giggles for 125 and 35 cents a day. You too can rent a model three standard range Tesla.

Crew Chief Eric: I mean, that’s the level where you can rent like the [01:27:00] upper luxury cars when you’re paying, you know, 120, 150 a day. I mean,

Executive Producer Tania: at this Hertz, you could rent the elite sports car. Which is a v4 from the picture Camaro Charger or Mustang for 133. 85 a day. You could also rent the premium sports car convertible, which shows a picture of a Camaro for 145.

58 a day.

Crew Chief Eric: I think at the end of all that, I would still take the Tesla, but want a four cylinder Camaro.

Crew Chief Brad: And I still get a Chevy Impala for 15 a day.

Crew Chief Eric: I heard a seven. Birdspot 750 of them recently.

Crew Chief Brad: No, that was budget.

Executive Producer Tania: 125 a day is pretty expensive. If you’re on a budget, you’re not going to spring for that. I mean, granted the cheapest vehicle that you could rent right now on the days I chose at LAX is an economy two or four door and they show a Chevy of AO two door in the picture.

No, sorry. A Chevy spark [01:28:00] in the picture. 81 and 27 cents a day.

Crew Chief Eric: I mean, that’s LA prices. I mean, if you were in the middle of Omaha, it’s like 12 a day, like Brad was saying, but you can buy a lot of gas at 125 bucks a day, you know? So in the rental car world, and you got to look at how renters use rental cars.

I mean, unlike my trip from the mint to Phoenix, where I was putting on hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of miles for the person that’s, you know, flying into town, buzzing around, doing meetings and whatever, is it really worth renting a Tesla?

Executive Producer Tania: I don’t know. I mean, obviously it would depend on what city you’re flying into, because if they don’t have a good charging network, you don’t want to have to be dealing with that hassle of you’re in a new city that you don’t know, and you’re got to run to meetings or do this, that, and the other.

No crap. The dude before me left it empty.

Crew Chief Eric: Now, I will say this. There is an upside to this. The more I think about it. The Zipcar business model would have really worked well for this in the sense that if you could drop the Tesla off at a charging station and then pick up another one somewhere else, just by maybe using like an ID card that says, Hey, I’m a Tesla [01:29:00] subscriber or something like that.

Boop, jump in the car and drive away. So you just

Executive Producer Tania: steal someone else’s car while they’re in the Starbucks. Okay, this is gonna work good. But at any rate, depending on the city, if you wanted to see what the fuss is about a Tesla, but aren’t ready to commit to one, you could go rent one for a couple days.

Crew Chief Eric: That’s a solid plan. Still cheaper than committing.

Executive Producer Tania: So moving on, the Cybertruck, which was, you know, Coming soon to garages, nowhere because it can’t fit apparently on their website earlier this month or the last couple of weeks has removed everything saying production 2022. Basically, it’s like up in the air.

I guess you can still reserve them, but. question mark when you would actually get it. So it sounds like they’re delayed yet again. Who knows why? There’s never a reason. Sounds like the windshield wiper blades could be a reason

Crew Chief Eric: or lack thereof. They’re going to laser beams.

Executive Producer Tania: Apparently they’re trying to do like a [01:30:00] single wiper blade and Musk himself has said that it’s troubling.

Crew Chief Eric: Mercedes figured a single wiper blade out in the eighties on the one nineties. I mean, come on.

Executive Producer Tania: Everyone figured wiper blades out. How many decades ago? Like seriously, just put fricking wiper blades on this thing. I don’t know. I don’t know. He can do all these things, but I can’t put a wiper blade on. Well,

Crew Chief Eric: the problem is this, right?

If you do the basic math, I mean, we all took like some form of trigonometry or I don’t know what in school. If you look at the width of the vehicle to use two blades, they would never reach the top of the windshield and they would probably come below your nose. So they would be totally ineffective. So I get why he’s got to use one wiper blade.

But the problem is the wiper blade is six feet long. So where do you mount it? It doesn’t make any sense. Like the whole design is terrible. It is on the list of cars yet to be released that we should all be looking out for on that article we talked about at the beginning of the show. It’s still listed there.

Hot [01:31:00] wheels has gone as far as to release cyber trucks. That’s the only place you can buy a cyber truck right now at every Walmart and target. I seen them, I had them in my hands, but if you’re dying to get one in your garage, even though it won’t fit, you’re going to have to wait. So

Crew Chief Brad: you can buy my reserve spot

Crew Chief Eric: double down on that 200 bucks.

Crew Chief Brad: You know, I feel like they are missing an opportunity here. They just need to go to Home Depot and buy a six foot long squeegee like the window washers use and just put a little arm from the center of it straight up and it pulls it down and pushes it straight up and it pulls it down straight up, pulls it down, but you have these at gas stations.

Why can’t Tesla get one?

Crew Chief Eric: If this thing wasn’t shaped like N64, Star Fox, and it was more like that Mercedes EQXX we were just talking about, maybe it had a low coefficient of drag, because you can’t tell me that angular design is streamlined in any way. You probably wouldn’t even need a wiper blade. Like think about some of those IMSA cars where, you know, the prototypes where it’s like, they’re going so fast.

They’re so [01:32:00] slippery. The rain just flies off the windshield. It could be the same thing. But when you’re trying to drive a brick. Through the air, it’s, it’s not going to happen.

Crew Chief Brad: They just need rain X.

Executive Producer Tania: Nobody’s driving that quickly to have the rain beat off and fling off. Like if you’re crawling at 20 miles an hour, I don’t care what your coefficient of or angle of windshield is.

It doesn’t work that way.

Crew Chief Eric: We could use tear offs. Like on helmets, right? That’s all they need on the cyber truck. It’s just tear off. So you get out, reach around the A pillar, yeah, reach out with the A pillar. Just

Executive Producer Tania: rip it off. How are you reaching out? You’re like getting out, like put it in autopilot and you crawl out?

Like that’s

Crew Chief Brad: it? No, you, you, you use a windshield arm. You, you need to use a windshield wiper arm to reach up and tear it off. Or you use normal fucking windshield wipers. You idiots. Maybe

Executive Producer Tania: the real hold up is that laser. Technology. I think

Crew Chief Eric: it’s the lasers. The lasers are the answer. The laser is the lidar.

Executive Producer Tania: In good news though, how this was ever a good idea. Apparently Tesla will stop [01:33:00] allowing drivers to play video games while driving in their car. They have that gigantic touchscreen, right? And so they have passenger play. So in theory, the idea is your passenger can amuse themselves by playing. Whatever on the screen, but there’s nothing built in to prevent the driver from using it while driving, which, of course, normally that stuff is turned off by the fact that the car is in motion.

The car is in motion. Your passenger can’t play either. So it’s

Crew Chief Eric: like,

Executive Producer Tania: why is this even an option? Well, it’s an option because

Crew Chief Eric: you put it in self driving autonomous mode, 12, and you play 12. Pokemon go the whole time. It’s amazing. No,

Executive Producer Tania: because even according to Tesla, you’re supposed to still be watching the road and maintaining your hands on the steering wheel, so you shouldn’t be playing, putting the wheel.

I need one

Crew Chief Eric: hand to hold the steering wheel and one hand to throw the poker ball. I can prove this allegedly. Just gimme a Tesla. I’ll prove it to you.

Crew Chief Brad: I feel like we needed this option when we went to NCM .

Crew Chief Eric: The radio didn’t work. For like 11 hours, it was ridiculous.

Crew Chief Brad: We [01:34:00] had NPR and then we had nothing and then we had church and then we had nothing and it was just 12 hours of awkward, best friend ness.

Crew Chief Eric: But that was an epic trip and we have a story to tell about it. So there you

Crew Chief Brad: go. But

Crew Chief Eric: you know, it lowered our expectations, didn’t it?

Crew Chief Brad: Lowered expectations,

Executive Producer Tania: which this last one sort of straddles that line, a gentleman in Helsinki got very upset that his Tesla broke down. Something happened with the batteries or some fault.

And then I guess because he did some mods on the car, it was out of warranty or out of Tesla careness. It was a 22, 000 repair bill. He didn’t want to pay that. Apparently this guy’s got lots of money and he decided instead of paying that, he was going to blow his car up. And so I don’t know that the Finnish guys that’s, I think they got a YouTube channel and they go [01:35:00] around basically blowing stuff up there, the bomb dudes or something like that.

I guess somehow I got in contact with them and they strapped 66 pounds of dynamite to this Tesla in like this. Rock quarry, and then proceeded to blow it to smithereens. And there’s a video of this explosion.

Crew Chief Eric: Top gear level of excitement right there. That’s something they would have done on top gear for sure.

The old, the old top gear.

Executive Producer Tania: I mean, I don’t know why you do it. I mean, I guess it was a 2013 model S so you could say it’s 10 years started out, but that’s

Crew Chief Eric: kind of stupid. There’s something to be said about that, right? You hear these people all the time that I drove my Tesla 400, 000 miles and I had not a single issue.

I mean, there’s the other end of this. Swing as well. People don’t maybe necessarily talk about all the time. So this is, you know, something interesting now that I think about it, to your point, 2013, it’s, you know, 10 years old and it’s going to cost 22 grand to get that car back on the road. You know, that’s the half the cost of a new model three, right?

Do you cut your losses? And then what do you do with a Tesla that needs 22, 000 worth of batteries? Nobody’s going to buy that as [01:36:00] a used fixer upper. You’re still on the whole 22 grand. You know, what were they going to do with the car? Take it back and recycle it? Like, is there a plan for that? So I can see this from multiple angles.

So it’s not totally out of the realm to say, well, screw it. We’re just going to blow it up. What was the alternative? Now, granted there’s the hazmat side of this, like blowing up a car. I don’t condone this, especially in EV because of, you know, all the lithium and all the stuff, but still I’m kind of like, all right, well, there were worse options, I suppose.

Executive Producer Tania: I mean, if nothing else, it’s kind of interesting to see. how it exploded and all the bits and pieces, which then they had, they went and collected and put into a giant pile. The

Crew Chief Eric: bigger question is for how long did it burn afterwards? I mentioned Top Gear a moment ago, maybe sad news or maybe a want, want, but for the folks out there that are fans of Top Gear.

Clarkson Hammond and May, you may recall that in 2016, they spun up their own social media network known as drive tribe. Fortunately [01:37:00] for us, we’re huge fans here at GTM of the old top gear. And Brad was such a big fan. He actually got us in on like day two, and we were one of the earliest tribes on drive tribe, and we’ve been, you know, consistently posting there and things like that.

You can say what DriveTribe, what’s DriveTribe or I haven’t gone to DriveTribe. There’s not a whole heck of a lot going on there. Well, folks, sad news after five years of being in service, they are finally shutting down DriveTribe here at the end of January. So if you need to, you know, pull down your posts, grab your pictures, whatever have you, DriveTribe will be no more.

It is morphing into an Instagram only, you know, kind of like schwag. type of marketing thing. So that’s what it’s turning into, but it is no more. So I will say this. It’s also a great opportunity for folks to maybe go and check out one of our partners, Garage Riot. You know, Garage Riot is a social media platform for car enthusiasts and petrol heads and whatnot.

It’s a free of charge based here out of the United States, but [01:38:00] very similar to other social media platforms that you’re used to, you know, like Instagram and Facebook, et cetera, but designed for petrol heads. Buy Petrolhead. So check out garage riot.com when you get a chance. So I spent a lot of time looking at posts on Instagram and most of my feed is full of car stuff and tuners and wheels and rof formm this and you know, Centerline that, this and that and the other thing, it popped on my feed not long ago.

Somebody posted that the infamous. And slightly cult classic, Ronald teddy bear wheels were making a comeback. In the used market or new? New, no price. I didn’t say who, you know, if Ronal was going to make them, but there are images or renderings of what they would look like today, a deep dish wheel, which is uncommon these days with high offset wheels coming on pretty much every car, gold rivets, you know, they actually paint the caricatures of the bear in black instead of just the traditional all silver wheel that they created.

You know, back in the eighties and nineties, you know, famous and all the mark three [01:39:00] Volkswagen, all those folks, they, they love those wheels, but yeah, apparently the Ronald teddy bear might be making a comeback. So I am definitely going to give up my spot in line for those to anybody else.

Crew Chief Brad: Those only look good on a mark three Volkswagen

Crew Chief Eric: pretty much. And you know, there’s been some other interesting wheels. I’m going to call them interesting that have come out lately. Like the new, um, I think they were rotiforms that they’re square, but they’re Harlequin. So they look like waffles. They look cool.

I’m like this big Atlas Toreg. Harlequin thing that they did, but I’m like, I don’t see the application except for this one specific bill that I don’t think it would look good on my car. And I think it just looks silly. These things are cool. If you’re building a specific type of style or look, but yeah, definitely not for me.

It would be cool. Like in a paperweight size key chain, I go with key chains. I would memorabilia type stuff. It would be pretty slick. My daughters would love this. So other things that lowered our expectations here over the winter, there was a gentleman that broke the motorcycle cannonball [01:40:00] record, and basically he was quoted as saying, when interviewed, you know, what did you think?

He goes, I would not recommend.

Crew Chief Brad: Well, that’s just because he wants to keep his record intact.

Crew Chief Eric: Maybe, but I mean, there’s no other way to say this. It’s gotta be a ball buster. To ride cross country like that nonstop on a motorcycle. I mean, not even that, I

Crew Chief Brad: mean, cause there are some comfortable motorcycles, but to do that, it’s dangerous as hell.

I mean, he had an average speed of almost 87 miles an hour with stopping for fuel and everything. His average. was 87 miles an hour. That means he must have been flying. Yeah, he was booking. It took, what, 36 hours for him to do this?

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah.

Crew Chief Brad: 35 hours and some odd minutes. I mean, he’s driving through the night and doing 90, 100, 150 miles an hour and some stretches.

No bueno, no thank you.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, no thanks either. And can you imagine the noise that motorcycle made at wide open throttle for 35 hours?

Crew Chief Brad: That alone would drive me insane.

Crew Chief Eric: Right, [01:41:00] but it would also get you a hefty fine in New York.

Crew Chief Brad: New York is cracking down on loud exhaust because they’ve got the, the straight pipe, people were straight piping their cars, cutting out the mufflers and cutting out the, uh, the catalytic converters.

You know, and straight piping their cars to sound like gunshots and it’s dangerous around the city of New York and pedestrians and all the homeowners there are so scared of these cars. It sounds so terrible. So New York is fining people for loud exhaust aftermarket exhaust thousand dollars if they don’t impound your car.

Executive Producer Tania: Well, they also said that because of lockdowns and because people being bored, there were people street racing down the streets and very loud cars, which was disruptive. Now I get. Their civil liberties get their feelings hurt and they should be allowed to have as loud a car as they want. But sometimes when you go home and you’re done dealing with the BS and stupidity of people, you want to retire to your home in [01:42:00] silence and peace and not.

Have morons doing burnouts at 2 a. m. waking you up in the middle of the night. All

Crew Chief Brad: right. But if there are more on street racing and doing burnouts at 2 a. m., their exhaust is not the problem. The problem is that they’re doing burnouts and street racing at 2 in the morning.

Crew Chief Eric: We’re avoiding the fact that this is all, I’m not going to say all, it’s probably 90 percent Mark 7 and Mark 8 GTI owners, right?

That all sound like gunshots because do you know any other car that has that stupid feature that you can do it from idle and everything. It’s like every third freaking video on TikTok is some GTI making that sound all the time. It tries to be nuts. It doesn’t, we don’t need that. It feels like it’s all vague products to me, but you know what I’m, I’m hating on my own kind, but I think they sound like shit.

I’m just going to be totally upfront about it. Speaking of stupidity on roads, if they’re not making noise, What’s happening on 395 lately?

Crew Chief Brad: They’re driving [01:43:00] backwards. Wait, what? You heard that right. To avoid traffic jams, people are driving backwards. So they’re reversing on 395 in D. C. and Northern Virginia.

Executive Producer Tania: To go where? Because they missed their exit. Into another traffic jam. To go back the,

Crew Chief Brad: you have to go back to the previous exit that they passed.

Executive Producer Tania: So you’re driving through a traffic jam, so that would imply cars in front of you. Cars beside you, cars behind you.

Crew Chief Brad: No, they see the traffic jam ahead. So they put it in reverse, then go the wrong way.

At

Executive Producer Tania: speed,

Crew Chief Brad: which

Executive Producer Tania: your automatic won’t let you do. Okay. So they slam on their brakes, come to a stop, quickly thrown in reverse. They get the arm over the seat, rest

Crew Chief Eric: or a backup camera. Nobody does that anymore. Boomer back.

Executive Producer Tania: Okay. So two hands on the wheel backup camera. Steering left and right because they don’t know which way the car turns when it’s in reverse, which way the steering wheel [01:44:00] goes.

So they’re confused. They’re slaloming to get to the exit ramp

Crew Chief Brad: so that they can back down the wrong way on an exit ramp.

Crew Chief Eric: So the public service announcement here is they may have changed the laws about driving on the shoulder, but it is still illegal to back up on the highway and then take an exit ramp.

Executive Producer Tania: Oh, they’re on the shoulder doing this. I thought they were in the lanes of traffic.

Crew Chief Brad: They’re in the lanes. Oh, there are the lanes? I understood it

Crew Chief Eric: as backing up the shoulder, which is technically illegal, but whatever. Backing up

Crew Chief Brad: anywhere is illegal, unless it’s into a space or your driveway. It’s illegal to do on a public road.

Crew Chief Eric: You know what could be causing these traffic jams? Forcing people to back up on 395 and take an exit ramp?

Crew Chief Brad: What?

Crew Chief Eric: Florida, man.

Executive Producer Tania: A Florida man tractor trailer driver, uh, not adhering to the clearance restrictions for the bridge he’s about to drive under. That never

Crew Chief Eric: happens.

Executive Producer Tania: That didn’t happen and a bridge didn’t shift in Georgia.[01:45:00]

Crew Chief Eric: Well, in this particular case, it happened to be an Amazon semi truck and now explains why my package has been marked lost. So I was just

Executive Producer Tania: trying to like, You know, pull back the top of the truck so you could access the packages quicker. Like Santa

Crew Chief Eric: Claus, just

Executive Producer Tania: throw them out there.

Crew Chief Brad: He’s just opening the can.

Executive Producer Tania: Which is literally what it looks like.

Crew Chief Eric: Now this next one made me smile and it’s just so Italian.

Executive Producer Tania: Why not? A car that has not moved in 47 years. It has earned its right to become a monument. Just like all the other piles of rock that are left randomly in places.

Crew Chief Eric: I love the fact that this gentleman, Angelo, who is now 94 years old, parked his car in front of his house in 1974 and has never driven it since.

Damn, that’s awesome.

Crew Chief Brad: You know why he’s never driven it? Because it’s a Lancia.

Crew Chief Eric: It is a 62 Fulvia. It is a car that is slightly sought after, even though it is kind of boxy and utilitarian, but I just think it’s [01:46:00] hilarious. And you know what? The next time over in Italy, I’m going to go get my picture taken with this new monument.

And this is a monument to petrolheads. This is awesome. So what

Crew Chief Brad: does this monument say about petrol heads? So the fact that it hasn’t moved in 47 years,

Crew Chief Eric: Hey, it ran and drove when it

Crew Chief Brad: was I know what I have no low balls.

Executive Producer Tania: So there was some rumors that Brad Pitt was going to be making some sort of formula one movie and that, you know, Oh, maybe Lewis Hamilton was going to Or somehow consult on it or something like that, you know, it was all very fresh at the time, but as the weeks go by, we’re getting a little bit more information.

And now we’re learning that apple. So, I guess this will end up on apple TV. Apple and Brad Pitt are working together on this project. Formula one kind of inspired drama. When this was first announced, I actually made the comment. What is this just going to be driven with formula one cars, which was that Stavuster saloon, hot [01:47:00] trash movie, where they were driving Indy cars around whatever the hell city it was, which allegedly I think that movie was originally supposed to be formula one car.

So we’re finally making the movie we intended to make back then, but with Brad Pitt starring in it. So we know it’s just going to be.

Crew Chief Brad: No, I’m always down for a car movie, good, bad, or whatever. I mean, we’ve started an entire sub show of break fix where we review bad car movies. So I’m going to add this to our list when it comes out.

Executive Producer Tania: It’ll be interesting to see as this progresses and we learn more, what exactly it’s going to develop into. It’s not looking, I feel like it should

Crew Chief Brad: be Tom Cruise.

Crew Chief Eric: Wait, we already did that movie too. I feel like this is going to be Troy with helmets. That’s what this is going to be. Can

Executive Producer Tania: Eric Bana play the bad guy?

At least he’s a car guy. So this last one is pretty interesting. I think speaks very badly for humans because when you’re goldfish. can [01:48:00] successfully drive its fishbowl tank, and you can’t even navigate to the grocery store without hitting something. I think we need to reassess ourselves.

Crew Chief Eric: I am so confused by all of this.

Executive Producer Tania: Scientists trained a goldfish to drive a fish operated vehicle, which was their little fishbowl on like wheels, essentially. This is Life Aquatic. When does Bill Murray pop out? But they tested this in different ways to see if it was like the fish just picked up the routine because I don’t know, like where the fish looked is where it went.

It’s fish bowl drove apparently. And so I think they did something with like colored lights on the ground. And, and so they were trying to get the fish to go somewhere and the fish followed the route. And if they changed the route. It followed the route, it understood the directions and could do it. It wasn’t just like, Oh, it did it once.

And it just kept doing the same thing over again.

Crew Chief Eric: So I can destroy this whole [01:49:00] grossly overpaid government grant in one move. All I need to do is put a plastic castle in the middle of wherever this thing is. And suddenly you will see that goldfish just doing doughnuts.

Executive Producer Tania: No, but what’s that? Interesting, though, and fascinating to learn more about.

I didn’t know that a goldfish’s vision was that great. And now consider the fact that it’s seeing everything so bizarrely twisted through the water and then the glass bowl and the surface reflections and the curvature, but it could drive its fishbowl successfully to its destination. I

Crew Chief Eric: mean, do you remember Drew Carey’s glasses from the Drew Carey show back in the day?

I mean, that’s probably the equivalent, right? He’s allowed to drive a car.

Executive Producer Tania: In his defense, he has gotten laser, but oh, wow. Yeah. Anyway, these are what some scientists are doing lately, getting fish to drive their fish holes.

Crew Chief Eric: Oh, you’re tax dollars at work.

Crew Chief Brad: And [01:50:00] that is why COVID is still a thing.

Crew Chief Eric: Speaking of both of those things, because we’re teaching

Crew Chief Brad: fish to drive.

Crew Chief Eric: I mean, speaking of both of those things, your tax dollars at work and COVID being a thing.

Why don’t we talk about Florida main stories while we’re at it?

Executive Producer Tania: We

Crew Chief Brad: don’t have any rich people doing rich people things this time. Because that

Executive Producer Tania: razor scooter hasn’t gone into production yet.

Crew Chief Brad: Actually, I would say the Dimitri Mazepin buys son new F1 chassis kind of qualifies for rich people doing rich people things.

Crew Chief Eric: You know, you’re right about that. You are absolutely right about

Crew Chief Brad: that. You can beat with his own

Crew Chief Eric: teammate. Terrible. I mean, it’s about as terrible as this limousine. This record setting 100 foot long Cadillac limousine is the world’s largest limo, and it is in the hands of a Florida man, and it is currently being restored.

Yeah, it’s bonkers. [01:51:00] It’s got a helicopter on the back. So

Executive Producer Tania: I quickly lost interest in that when I saw that there was a Ferrari. F40 with 10 wheels.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, that’s way cooler.

Executive Producer Tania: An eight seater, and I’m like, why? That’s actually a Fiero, don’t even go there. It’s made to look like a, I mean, the frickin Ferrari symbol’s like three feet long on the hood, I mean.

And then there’s that double wide, I don’t even know what that thing is, it’s like two cars conjoined twins together, and it’s got like a swimming pool in the back, and.

Crew Chief Eric: This is all stuff I would see in the kids. Part of Hershey park, like they all look like amusement park rides. I mean, they’re just, they’re insane.

Executive Producer Tania: Where did these come from? Like, I’m disappointed that the article didn’t explain like the history of these bizarre cars that apparently were on display somewhere because there’s like, even fricking like the American dream, Jay. Orberg Star Cars, Hollywood, California. What? There’s even like a model that [01:52:00] like stands in front of them and stuff.

Crew Chief Eric: I think my favorite though is the Pepto Pink Mercedes with the heart shaped hot tub in the trunk. That thing is legit awesome. Although I’m easily distracted and there was a Haggerty ad with a Corrado on it, so I clicked on that and I kind of moved on from this pretty quickly. Wanted to see what that was all about.

So what else is going on in Florida?

Executive Producer Tania: Moving on, so. We’re in Florida again, of course. Now say you get into, I don’t know, a little parking dispute. You’re angry at your neighbor’s parking habits. It’s happened to all of us, right? Sometimes you’re just like, who is this joker parking their car in front of my property, even though I don’t own the street there, I don’t want your car parked in front.

How would you, as a normal person, as a non Floridian, handle that?

Crew Chief Eric: I’d piss and moan and stomp my feet and do nothing about it. Nunchucks.

Executive Producer Tania: Have you thought about a flamethrower?

Crew Chief Eric: Damn. Is this guy Charles Bronson?

Executive Producer Tania: He’s Andre [01:53:00] something. And he decided to get himself three counts of felony aggravated assault with a deadly weapon with intention to kill as he brandished the flames from the flame thrower at his neighbors who parked in front of his house.

Crew Chief Eric: Was the neighbor in the vehicle at the time of the offense?

Executive Producer Tania: Yes, unfortunately. Oh, okay. They were like teenagers getting out of the car and he like turned the flamethrower on on them. That

Crew Chief Brad: is This is like the ultimate get off my lawn.

Executive Producer Tania: That’s some buck wild manure right there. Wow. That is, that’s intense.

He denies of course targeting them, but.

Crew Chief Brad: Don’t park in front of my house.

Executive Producer Tania: The

Crew Chief Eric: char marks on the side of the car weren’t evidence enough of this, of the assault.

Crew Chief Brad: They said they wanted to add.

Crew Chief Eric: These Florida man stories play out like people’s court.

Executive Producer Tania: Also in Florida. So I think too many Fast and the Furious movies, too many of these, uh, what was the other one with Statham with the [01:54:00] transporter movies?

Drives the Audi out of the parking garage and all that stuff. Well, for reasons unbeknownst, somebody drove off an eight story parking garage. Yes! How did that end? You know what? He lived. Don’t know why his 2015 Ford Explorer. It’s always a Ford, isn’t it? Apparently it was like in the middle of the afternoon and it happened to like, I don’t know, it landed upside down, was caught in like a cable was also like hanging off.

Maybe that helped smooth the impact. Yeah. No real explanation. I don’t think

Crew Chief Eric: drugs is the explanation

Executive Producer Tania: probably because. Flew off a building, landed upside down, he got out of the car and ran.

Crew Chief Eric: Two blocks. Is this the automotive equivalent of when people throw shoes on the power lines? Like you just throw your car on the power lines?

Crew Chief Brad: Looking at this car, how the hell did he get out of it?

Executive Producer Tania: I don’t know how he survived.

Crew Chief Brad: I love his wheel studs. They’re like [01:55:00] three inch long spikes.

Crew Chief Eric: Boat a seer spikes. Right. I noticed

Executive Producer Tania: those

Crew Chief Eric: the first

Executive Producer Tania: time. I mean, good on him that he survived. Who knows what that story is, but only in Florida.

Crew Chief Brad: I don’t think good on him.

It was a failed suicide attempt. That’s what that was.

Executive Producer Tania: Oh, I hope not. Well, you wouldn’t have gotten out and ran. Physics

Crew Chief Eric: people, physics, pay attention.

Executive Producer Tania: Well, they’ve, they’ve definitely beefed up that rollover capability of the Ford Explorers, if nothing else. Stealing cars, not a good thing, shouldn’t do this, right?

Everyone has their own way of doing it. I think we talked about the guys that went with a front loader, forklift, steal motorcycles or something, right? And then drove whatever it was, cross railroad tracks on it. And it’s always ballsy when they’re stealing them from dealerships, right? Versus parking lot or something like that.

What if you went to the dealership to steal the car naked?

Crew Chief Brad: This brings us to our sub segment of Florida Man. It’s naked Florida Man. [01:56:00]

Executive Producer Tania: You know, he just somehow was there naked at the dealership, got into a 2021 Ram truck that was in a painting booth, acted out, and drove it off. I mean, if I was the

Crew Chief Eric: sales guy and it was a Dodge Dart, I would have just given him the keys.

I’m like, man, you really need this.

Crew Chief Brad: You really need to go away.

Crew Chief Eric: He stole it out of the paint booth.

Crew Chief Brad: Was it his own truck? Was he stealing it back?

Crew Chief Eric: Like that guy from New Jersey who came out running with the guns

Crew Chief Brad: naked. There’s a picture of this guy.

Executive Producer Tania: Clothed or not clothed.

Crew Chief Brad: To answer everybody’s question.

drugs.

Executive Producer Tania: It’s always Florida man, right? We give the Florida man a hard time. Then that’s not fair to spread the joy a little bit here. And to be fair, how about Florida woman? And how about a Florida woman leading police on a wild golf course chase? And not in a golf cart.

Crew Chief Brad: Oh?

Executive Producer Tania: No, in an SUV.

Crew Chief Brad: Looks like a Toyota [01:57:00] 4Runner.

Executive Producer Tania: It does look like a Toyota 4Runner. It doesn’t say what it is, but it does look like a 4Runner. So something of that nature.

Crew Chief Brad: She’s doing a little off road.

Crew Chief Eric: She looks like when Lieutenant Weigel from Reno 911 does the prostitute bit. Like, I don’t, what is this outfit?

Executive Producer Tania: Take a look at it, and that, you don’t even need to talk anymore.

What is she wearing? She looks drugs again and she led a police chase on a golf course in not a golf cart. This just hurts so much. Watch out Florida man, Florida woman.

Crew Chief Eric: I will say that’s the most off roading that that Toyota has done in its entire life. So there you go.

Executive Producer Tania: Round out the women here a little bit.

Texarkana or Texarkana. This woman in her Camaro, this orange Camaro with black stripes, these are important details, was stopped for, I think, something minor, so to speak. Felony forgery charge, not minor, but minor compared to how this turned out. [01:58:00] One could argue. Relatively speaking, so she’s pulled over resisting arrest.

She doesn’t turn her car off, which you’re supposed to do when you’re pulled over. She locked herself in her car, et cetera, et cetera. Cops come up, you know, get out of the car. No, no, no. The police officer being savvy as he was pulled out some spike strip, put it down. Presumably in, I don’t know where in front of his cruiser.

As he’s going back to his car to do whatever, and then she decides she’s going to make her break, reverses the Camaro into his cruiser enough, or at least wherever he put, maybe he put the spikes directly behind her car. She blows out three of the four tires on the Camaro, but this does not stop the Camaro.

This does not stop whatever tires were put on this car from the factory. So props to those tires, because she proceeds to get on the highway going a hundred miles an hour. with three spike strip blown out tires and one good tire till eventually she exits the highway the car becomes disabled [01:59:00] presumably the tires are by

Crew Chief Eric: on

Executive Producer Tania: star

Crew Chief Brad: three and a gas

Executive Producer Tania: she’s on the side of the interstate when they catch up to her her foot planted as the article says Her foot planted firmly on the accelerator as the wheel spun uselessly.

What did she break? All of it. So not only does she have the felony forgery charge, she also had evading arrest and resisting arrest. So good on you.

Crew Chief Eric: All of the fun facts and figures, the super fun facts of this article, are all negated once you reach The comment section of the article, which I will not repeat any of them, except for maybe one.

I mean, the one that got me though, is the guy who says I’d buy that car from salvage, fix it up and park it in front of the jail. Oh

Executive Producer Tania: my dude. They’re,

Crew Chief Eric: they’re pretty, they’re pretty [02:00:00] rough.

Executive Producer Tania: You know, I had not looked at them.

Crew Chief Eric: You will be in tears. And for anybody that wants to see them, they’ll be in the show notes when you click on there.

Executive Producer Tania: Well, we will end Florida man on a good note, which we normally

Crew Chief Eric: do.

Executive Producer Tania: You know, this is a good hearted Florida man. And I’m not saying that in any way that this is going to turn funny, but, you know, back in December or whenever it was those horrible tornadoes that. Level parts of Kentucky, this Florida man with his tractor trailer was taking donations, filling up his truck with food items and other necessities.

And he was going to drive all the way up from Florida to those folks in need and deliver all those items before Christmas time. So look at that nice heartwarming. That is

Crew Chief Eric: awesome. Round of applause for that Florida, man. Good job. Thank you. Thank you for redeeming. All the previous sins of the year, you, sir, are a saint.

Well, I guess it’s time for us to go behind the wall and quickly talk about motorsports news. The [02:01:00] racing season ends for us here locally. Usually around the late October, early November timeframe, but in other parts of the world where there’s lots of sand and no ocean, you know, they’re still running formula one races and, you know, Dakar and all this other kinds of stuff.

And so there’s always little tidbits of news here and there, but as we lead into the opening. Of the next racing season, which Rolex is right around the corner, January 29th and 30th weekend here in Florida yet again. So maybe some interesting Florida stories, the news from the NASCAR world is Jacques Villeneuve, former Formula One champ and IndyCar 500 champ is going to make a run.

At the Daytona 500, which is coming up after Rolex. So curious to see how that turns out. I mean, he’s basically kind of coming out of retirement to go run in NASCAR. I mean, yay. Cool. So let’s talk a little bit about open wheel news. What’s hot and what’s not. An IndyCard Formula One.

Crew Chief Brad: What’s not hot is that [02:02:00] Williams died.

Frank Williams, the, uh, I guess the team founder for the Williams F1 team. He passed away at age 79. His daughter was, I think it was daughter or granddaughter, was running the team and knowing the team. And I think the Williams team sold last year. To an investment firm, Doralton capital. And they’re still going to

Crew Chief Eric: be the back marker is back marker team of all the formula one, right?

Crew Chief Brad: Well, they’re going to have some competition with Haas.

Crew Chief Eric: I was going to say,

Executive Producer Tania: they’ve been doing pretty well,

Crew Chief Brad: but also they’re losing George Russell because George Russell is going to be Lewis Hamilton’s teammate for the coming season. So they’ve got the new. I think they’re the ones with the new Chinese driver from Formula 2 that’s, that’s moving up.

So who knows? They’ll be battling for worst five.

Crew Chief Eric: But there’s other sad news in Formula 1. The king has been dethroned.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Lewis Hamilton lost. He is no longer [02:03:00] the reigning champion that title has gone to Max Verstappen due to some late lap final race heroics on his part was a complete farce.

And I mean, whoever camp you’re in, you’re not completely happy, I guess, unless you’re a Max Verstappen fan, but whatever Daniel Riccardo want to, want to let race this year, so I’m happy. Any podium. Yeah.

Crew Chief Eric: And I mean, there’s lots of memes and lots of stuff. I mean, people are even posting about, Hey, don’t forget about science.

You know, you had a great year despite all the drama that’s going on. So I don’t know, maybe I’ll pay attention next year. You don’t have to convince me.

Crew Chief Brad: If you’re looking to pay attention this year, coming up, you would like to know that come February, the team started unveiling their new cars for the 2022 season.

So the schedule goes Aston Martin’s first on February 10th, then McLaren on February 11th for our. Is the 17th and then Al Alpha Romeo is to be announced along with everybody else. Alpha, sorry, Alpine, Alpine, Haas, Mercedes, red [02:04:00] Bull. They’re all, you know, after those dates.

Crew Chief Eric: So once I see the first one, I’m good.

Right.

Crew Chief Brad: Basically, yeah. All the cars are, because of the new regulations and everything, all the cars are, should be very close to each other. Yeah.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah. And I’m sure there’s silliness and chicanery about all of them that, you know, ridiculous wings and all that kind of stuff.

Crew Chief Brad: If you watch Aston, the Aston Martin, then it’s going to be the exact same car as the Mercedes.

Cause that’s what they got in trouble for.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah. Right. I just wish formula one would go back to the old days where they could build their own chassis and their own bodies and do their own engines and be all over the map. I mean, I just feel like. You know, it’s like, I rock, they’re all in little go karts and they’re all the same and, you know, change the paint color from red to Pepto to green.

And you call them a different team.

Crew Chief Brad: It’s basically the NASCAR of the open wheel world.

Crew Chief Eric: Oh, wait. Yeah. Nevermind. Cause some people were saying for a while there, you know, IndyCar was the hottest thing on TV. It the racing to watch and still have a hard time believing that. I still think IMSA is. Is the way to go.

It’s some [02:05:00] of the best racing. I mean, outside of a race, like the mid 400, you know, and some of those big off-road races where you can get really close to the trucks and the drivers. IMSA is the same way. There’s just this 10 foot pole between us, the fans, and the racing itself. And it feels too marketing heavy and just, it’s too much of a circus.

And I don’t know, it’s, it’s kind of turned me off. I mean, granted in the WRC world, you can’t get close anymore, you know, because of the deaths and the safety and all that. And it’s still, they’re just. Bonkers. WRC is absolutely nuts. I got to tune in because Finland and on all those big races in Sweden and whatnot are happening now here in the middle of winter.

So I’m looking forward to WRC season kicking off, you know, tuning into Red Bulls coverage. They do an excellent job for those that are probably gonna work. And I watch a rally race. I’ve said it time and time again, Red Bull TV for free in 4k. Check it out. There is some exciting news coming for IMSA. And that would be that the pony wars kick off again in 2024.

So team Corvette versus Ford. I mean, [02:06:00] they’ve had it rumored for a while that with these reclassings, they’re going to be able to merge GT four cars and et cetera, into the IMSA series. So it’d be cool to see Corvettes go against Mustangs. Although that’s kind of like apples and chainsaws, in my opinion, should be

Crew Chief Brad: Camaro’s

Crew Chief Eric: yeah, for Mustangs and Camaros for sure.

I would love to see return of the Ford GT, but that’s not on the horizon anytime soon, at least not from the news that we’re seeing. So curious to see where that goes, but I feel like it’s a day late and a dollar short, like all the big names are showing up for the hundredth. They’re all showing up for 23 Ford.

What are you waiting for? You know, put a car in GT three or, or GTLM or, or whatever. Whatever it is now and go for it. I mean, what, what are they waiting for? You know,

Crew Chief Brad: I’m holding out hope like much like the reveal of the four of the most recent Ford GT, it was a complete surprise, nobody knew it was coming.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they do something like that for Lamar. Then 2023.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, but this is saying 2024. That’s too late. Nobody cares, right? I mean, [02:07:00] the hundred and first is just as important as the hundredth, but you know, whatever, but let’s talk about other firsts as in the 61st running of Rolex. Uh, they say it’s going to be the biggest field in years.

There’s currently 60 cars on the roster. I mean, it’s a good round number. It’s better than previous years. It’s been kind of want, want, I mean, I watch Rolex religiously along with little moms and the petite and things like that. It’s been a bit of a bummer when, you know, you do look at the GTL unfilled, especially in Porsche’s pulled out and so on and so forth, and it’s just Corvette running around.

So to see more cars in there is great. When I looked at the field and I’m like, LMP three, and I’m like, yeah, just so we need, you know, more cookie cutter LMP cars, but you know, I’m still going to watch it. It’s still going to be entertaining. And, uh, we have some really cool things planned for that weekend.

So stay tuned for more news on that. And in the virtual world, there’s been some big news, a bit of a shake up there. iRacing has always been kind of off on its own, doing its own thing, you know, keeping up those Xbox 360 graphics that it’s [02:08:00] known for. And they made an announcement recently that they bought Monster Games.

Teasing that they’re going to make things that are more appealing to a broader market like console. So you might see things like iRacing come to your PS5 or your Xbox series X that you can’t buy in stores. I’m actually really happy about this because I do think that as good as iRacing is, it needs influence from some other parties that can bring higher quality graphics and things like that to the platform, better UI.

I mean, everything feels. I hate to say kind of kludgy and, and really dated, you know, when you look at it, it doesn’t have that fresh look that like a Codemasters platform has or Forza or something like that. So they definitely need a facelift. The physics engine is good, but they could do with a little bit of help.

So switching gears really quick to local news. Uh, as I mentioned, Rolex is coming up here the weekend of January 29th and 30th. It’s the 61st running. And because of everything that’s going on in the world these days, [02:09:00] it still seems we’re a little bit hot and cold on COVID. We’ve decided that instead of holding our traditional Rolex viewing party, which is usually hosted by Brad and his lovely wife, we’re going to go back to virtual this year and we’re going to make it an action packed weekend.

So if you go to our website and you look at club events and click on the Rolex 24 hours weekend, you’ll see that we’ve packed in there several virtual races. Uh, we’re doing awards nights and happy hours viewing parties. We’re even getting together with the folks from garage riot for a soft Relaunch of their new platform.

Talk about that. You get to meet Donovan and things like that. So it’s a lot of fun. We had a lot of things planned for that 24 hour race. And obviously it’s going to be centered around the Rolex. And so that’s a lot of fun. So look for more details on that. We’re still planning out the rest of the year.

So look forward to events like summer bash and animal house and the cannibal run and all these kinds of things. As we look at the. Bigger schedule. And we get our information from our friends over at HPD junkie. com. So a quick HPD junkie [02:10:00] trackside report, you know, what’s coming in February, March. Well, you know, I caught up with Dave Peters recently.

I spoke to him and he said right now they have over a thousand events loaded into their system. And they’re looking at nearly doubling that number by the end of January. So right around Rolex weekend, the database should be fully loaded and they’re capturing events from all across the world. North America.

So that’s the US and Canada combined. And, you know, all your favorite providers, you know, be it hooked on driving PCA, AMRA, SCCA, you know, NASA, whoever, all of that information, all in one spot, you know, search by the date, search by the location by the provider, and then figure out what your schedule looks like.

So now’s a great time to do that. And just know that they’re loading more and more information in there. And if you’re a track event provider and your schedule isn’t on HPD junkie. com, reach out to Dave Peters and get your information out there because there are so many eyes looking at that site every day, every week, every month to try to plan out what our calendars look like.

So always a great resource. We love working with Dave and [02:11:00] we look forward to seeing him again this year at one of the events. We got together with him at Carolina motor sports park. So we’re hoping to do that again this year.

Executive Producer Tania: And in case you missed out, check out the other podcast episodes that aired earlier this winter, we talked all things BMW with Donovan from garage ride and James clay from Bimmer world, David L.

Middleton from MIE racing returned to the show. It introduced us to BTCC pro racer, Rob Holland. We learned about the oldest off road race in America known as the mint 400. And our guest Matt Martelli also gave us the inside scoop on Jim Kana and growing up with Ken Block on our bonus patron, Minnesota.

We went shopping with Heeltread and Petrobox and learned about fire safety with up and coming brand PMX. You would be remiss if you missed out on our All Tesla Retrospective from last month. We talked collector cars with Chris Bright of Collector Part Exchange, CPX, and not so collector cars with our B Sides.

Ugly Cars Patreon re release and stories about The Compound with Nate and Emily. And finally, we learned about the [02:12:00] history and evolution of our home away from home, where else? Summit Point Motorsports Park. Thank you to everyone that came on the show this month, and please look forward to more great episodes this spring.

Crew Chief Eric: Big shout outs to our new Patreon supporters. Who do we have?

Crew Chief Brad: This winter we’ve added Emily Fox, Romano Conti, Brett Sonnerby, Sam Arrington, Andrew Maureen,

Crew Chief Eric: Very cool. And thank you guys for supporting GTM, supporting BreakFix. You know, without you folks, none of this would be possible and every little bit helps.

And remember as a Patreon subscriber, it gives you early access to behind the scenes content, bonus content, minisodes, all sorts of other things that we post every day. Out on Patreon first. So we want to reward those folks. Obviously we design also special swag and there’s other giveaways and things like that gives you access to all sorts of other perks, part of being a GTM supporter through Patreon.

So we appreciate everybody doing that and we look forward to your help in the future.

Crew Chief Brad: In addition to our Patreon supporters, we’d like to shout out our anniversaries. [02:13:00] We’ve got Marissa Cannon, Mike Pepitone, Chris Schaub, and Sean Roberts.

And a

Crew Chief Brad: special thanks to our guest host, me, for coming back. Yay, Brad.

Crew Chief Eric: We love having you back, Brad. It has been too long and it’s good to have your voice on the radio with us. And you know, it hasn’t been the same. We’re glad for you and Adrian, your boys happy and healthy and all that. And we look forward to seeing them at the track and to the next, you know, break, fix episodes.

So welcome back. Welcome back. Thank you. Thank you.

Crew Chief Brad: And thank you, Tanya, for, uh, putting this all together for us.

Crew Chief Eric: Our executive co producer.

Crew Chief Brad: Sorry, we ran out of time for Matt Damon. You’ll have to catch him next week

Crew Chief Eric: and until next month. Bye.

Executive Producer Tania: There’s some idiot in a Volvo with his

Crew Chief Eric: bright son behind me. I lean out the window [02:14:00] and scream, hey, what you trying to do

blind me?

Crew Chief Brad: If you like what you’ve heard and want to learn more about GTM, be sure to check us out on www. gtmotorsports. org. You can also find us on Motorsports. Also, if you want to get involved or have suggestions for future shows, You can call or text us at 202 630 1770, or send us an email at crewchief at gtmotorsports.

org. We’d love to hear from you.

Crew Chief Eric: Hey everybody, Crew Chief Eric here. We really hope you enjoyed this episode of Break Fix, and we wanted to remind you that GTM remains a no annual fees organization. And our goal is to continue to bring you 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 GTM swag.

For as [02:15:00] little as 2. 50 a month, you can keep our developers, writers, editors, casters, and other volunteers fed on their strict diet of fig newtons, gummy bears, and monster. Consider signing up for Patreon today at www. patreon. com forward slash GT Motorsports. And remember, without fans, supporters, and members like you, none of this would be possible.

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