B/F: The Drive Thru #19

• Ford and GM Warn Dealers to Stop Charging So Much for New Cars
• Ford unveils Mustang GT3 plans for 2024 IMSA season
• GM is investing over $150 million to produce electric motor components in New York
• Chevy Corvette Celebrates 70 Years with Anniversary Package
• Chevy Spark Discontinued, Production Ends This Summer

• Here's A Beautifully Designed Alpha Wagon To Join The List Of Nonexistent Alpha Vehicles
• Future EVs That Deliver: Electric Delivery Trucks and Workhorses
• Bollinger Suspends Plans for Electric B1 SUV and B2 Pickup
• Rivian: 8 modes, all terrains, one R1T. Ride along, off-road and on.
• The Land Rover Defender with the Heart of a Tesla

• American Haas F1 team first to reveal new 2022 car

• The Toyota GR GT3 Concept Leaves Us With Questions
• The Hyundai Ioniq5 Is One of the Best Affordable Electric Cars Yet
• Subaru Revives the WRX Wagon, but Not the One We Want
• 7k-Mile 2000 Acura Integra Type R - Sells for $112k on BAT
• Hyundai and Kia tell owners of nearly 500,000 vehicles to park outside due to fire risk

• This Is Definitely the Cheapest Dodge Viper GTS on the Internet Right Now
• LS-Swapped Geo Metro Is In Need Of A Brave New Owner

• 2023 BMW M2 Reveals Normal Grille Size In New Spy Photos
• 2023 BMW 3 Series Touring Wagon - spy shots

• Flying car cleared for takeoff, but you'll need a pilot's license

• Isabelle Galmiche: From Math Teacher To Rally Monte Carlo Winner
• All the 'Gran Turismo 7' Details: Music Rally, 3D Audio, Starry Skies

• All The 2022 Manual Transmission Cars
• 2022 Performance Car of the Year

• 2022 Lego Speed Champions Lineup Adds Lamborghini Countach, Mercedes-AMG F1
• Tesla Cyberquad for kids - $1900, 10mph

• Tesla Won't Bring Cybertruck, Roadster, Semi to Market in 2022
• Tesla launches ‘TeslaMic,’ a microphone for in-car karaoke
• Elon Musk launched his own Tesla roadster to space four years ago. Where is it now?

• Volkswagen Passat Reaches the End of the Line
• PORSCHE SETS RECORD WE DIDN'T EXPECT ON 1,400-MILE DRIVE TO TOP OF PIKES PEAK
• Twin-Turbo Lamborghini Huracan Runs the 1/4-Mile Quicker Than You Can Read This Title
• NINE FACTS YOU MAY NOT HAVE KNOWN ABOUT THE PORSCHE 959 | PCA TECH TIPS

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

If you’re interested in becoming a sponsor of the Drive-Through, look no further than www.gt motorsports.org. Under about and then advertising and sponsorship. Thank you again to everyone that supports Grantor Motorsports, our podcast Break Fix and all the other services we provide. Welcome to drive-through episode number 19.

This is our monthly recap where we’ve put together a menu of automotive motorsport and random car Jason News. Now let’s pull up to window number one for some automotive news. Before we head into automotive news, I wanna make a special announcement. Guess what folks? This is the last [00:01:00] episode. Of season two, not the last of the show, but the last episode of season 2 56 episodes into this season.

We are wrapping it up with drive-through episode number 19, and as always we aimed please, so it’s gonna be a fun one and we’ll talk more about what season two looked like in case you’re tuning in maybe for the first time and don’t know, or maybe miss some episodes along the way. I think we gotta start off this month following up with last month.

And so, you know, we talked a lot about cars that were becoming zombie cars and disappearing and you in a number of station wagons that aren’t being produced this year and next year and things like that. And we missed something really, really important vehicles that are still available in 2022 with manual transmissions.

My one question is, can you still get a 2016 Dodge Dart with a manual transmission? I believe you can, with a warranty that your local Dodge dealer, I’m surprised by the M three and the M four because the previous [00:02:00] generation, a lot of the reviews that came out about them said that the car was better with the dual clutch, I guess the, the auto transmission setup right compared to the manual.

It said it was just a better driving experience. So I’m actually surprised that they are still catering to the enthusiast by putting the manual in these two cars so clearly. Brad hasn’t scrolled through the entire list. If he’s being off taken off, off the bat, they taking shocked off the bat with that one because I didn’t know the Chevy Spark came as a manual.

Wait, isn’t the Chevy Spark a an electric only car, or is it a hybrid? Either way. That’s weird. No, it’s an econ box, right? It’s the, it’s the generation of the geo metro. You know that, that heritage, that, that made the vault. The vault is the, is the little electric one. So you brought up the spark, the Camaros on this list, the Challenger is on this list.

But aren’t all these cars headed to the graveyard? Didn’t they stop production of the Camaros? So what, these are the ones that are, to your point about the Dodge Dark, the [00:03:00] ones that are left over on the lot in the article, there’s an entire list of all these cars. There’s actually 34 vehicles in 2022. I think that’s pretty impressive that still come with a manual transmission from the factory.

I agree with you on the B M W, but there were rumors, not really rumors, so much as complaints a couple years ago by B M W owners saying, why did you get rid of the manual? You know? And then you heard the other side of the coin, B M W say, we’re gonna be the last ones with the manual. We’re gonna be the last ones, you know, with a petrol engine and all this kind stuff.

So I, I don’t know what’s truth and what’s not. I’m glad to see B M W sticking to offering a manual transmission. I will say it’s better for the track, especially with the gyros and safety software. I’ve coached some of these M four s and stuff and tracks like Shenandoah. You know, you get up on an embankment and the car freaks out.

I thinks it’s flipping over, shuts down. At least, you know, with a manual you can pop it in neutral, keep going. And it is not just dead in the middle of the track. Like I experienced with one of my students. I’d say things [00:04:00] that did surprise me on this list were the two Cadillacs. See y’all are boring with your things surprising you.

I’m surprised to see that there are Mitsubishi, they’re still being made here or not made here, but being sold here. What’s a Mitsubishi? I don’t know what that is exactly. Y’all are getting hung up on Cadillac. Meredith. There is a Mitsubishi. Mitsubishi and you can get a manual. Folks, what really surprises me is the Ford Bronco.

I didn’t realize, I didn’t, that was the manual. Like you, I I knew the Jeeps. I mean I had a couple manual Jeeps, but I had no idea you could get the Bronco with the Eco-boost motor and the, the manual transmission. That is pretty surprising. Didn’t That’s cool. Didn’t, I didn’t think that was a thing. Now all the rest of these, the Hondas, the Hyundais, the GTIs and the Subarus, there’s no surprise there.

There’s always gonna be some car with a manual transmission. Same with the Porsches, right? The nine 11 seems to always, you know, despite the p dk being better, there’s always gonna be a manual option for the enthusiasts. The car I’m most excited [00:05:00] about on this list, because I wanna go test drive one as soon as they come out, is the, The, the spark, no, the Z 400.

Right. The Nissan. I think that’s really cool and that the dollar value that Z is coming in at, that’s gonna be a driver’s car, that’s gonna be an enthusiast car. And I, I’m really excited about that. I think the only other one that, that got my attention that was a little outta left field and still in the realm of the Bronco and the Jeeps, was that you can get a Tacoma in 2022 with a manual transmission.

Always. Oh, I think I’ll like the Wrangler. You’ll always be able to get a manual Tacoma as long as they make the Tacoma. I will say that there, there are is a car that’s not on this list that is sad Panda. It’s the, uh, the Corvette. It’s a shame that they don’t offer the Corvette with the manual transmission.

We knew that the CA eight, we knew, but I mean, if you think about, I wonder what cars were on this list before, like the previous year or the year before that, that are no longer on the list. And which, which ones of those are disappointing? You’re right. And, you know, we should, we would need to do that [00:06:00] comparison, or maybe some of our listeners already know that information.

But you know what, you’re right about the Corvette. I, it didn’t even dawn on me. I kept thinking maybe there was a manual ca out there, but I guess there isn’t. So again, Some of this is, uh, no surprise, like the Miatas and the Mini Coopers and stuff, and they, uh, there are a few shockers on here to include the, uh, the Mitsubishi that Tanya pointed out.

Something else that we missed during the whole shuffle of last month. In the winter recap, a rodent track announced the 2022 Performance Car of the Year. At what point do they say what it is? There’s like 15 cars listed. Let me break it down for you. This is classic T L D R. Too long didn’t read even. I got bored about a third of the way through this article and I was like, just get to the point.

Ah, found it. I’ll get to the point. The winner was the nine 11 wuh, whatever. But if you look [00:07:00] at this list of cars, it is such a just menagerie, just potpourri of, of different vehicles. It didn’t make sense. How can you declare a winner when on one end of the spectrum you have the Volkswagen, g t i, and on the other side you have the latest Lamborghini and then all these cars in between like the Merck and the Cadillac and the Be and a Bentley.

I’m like, whatever, because this was no ordinary Porsche. As it says, it’s God’s own Porsche. Oh my God. Yeah, whatever. Much like the consumer report stuff that comes out every year when you enter the same car twice, a k A, the Burrs and the furs, right? The 86 Subaru and the Toyota as two separate entries in a contest like this.

I’m like, yeah, you don’t know what the hell you’re doing. They’re the same car end of the story. I think they put this list together. These were the only cars or manufacturers had microchips for them. So they were, these were the only cars they were able to deliver at the time. And I love how the [00:08:00] Subaru B RZ weighs more than the Toyota g R 86.

And it, it weighs more and costs less. So it’s a better value. You get more for less money. That’s awesome. More for less money. Oh, what a mess. So, so which one’s the winner? Which one’s the winner? I mean, it was the, I know she said the nine 11, it was the Porsche. Yeah. And, and, and if you look at it from the hypercar on one side or the super luxury cars like the Bentley, you know, continental GT and all that stuff.

And then the Econo boxes basically on the other side, the Porsche sits in the middle almost by itself. It’s gonna win in almost every category between speed handling, styling, all that kind of stuff. And it’s like, was this really a fair fight? And the other thing I thought that wasn’t fair about this article is we’ve got two entries that are the same car, and we’re talking about performance vehicles, let’s, let’s call it what it is, sports cars.

There’s not a single mention of the Miata. On this list or the C eight COR Corvet Corvette. [00:09:00] Exactly. And I’m like, What? So, so you, you replace one of the burs furs with a mi with a Miata. You replace the g t i with the Corvette because it’s the only hatchback hot hatch in this. That’s, it’s a hot hatch.

It’s not a sports car. If they’re trying to do sports cars. The G T I I love the g t i I have one. You have one that everybody we know has one. It’s not a sports car though. No, it’s a compact hatchback. It’s cool. They’re fun, but it’s not, it doesn’t fight in this fight, right? Everything else on here is rear wheel drive.

It’s the only front wheel drive car. I’m like, I don’t know, whatever. Oh, I, I would think the Bentley’s all wheel drive true in the la the Lambo too rear wheel bias, right? So, yeah. But yeah, I, I agree with you though. The g t I doesn’t fit for me and the double burrs separated should be combined and then add the C eight in other news.

We gotta now talk about our showcase this month. And for the first time ever in the drive-through, we have Ferrari as our showcase brand. So Tanya, let’s talk about what’s going on [00:10:00] over our favorite manufacturer from man. Apparently our friends at Ferrari, uh, you know, trying to keep up with the Joneses even though they shouldn’t.

And I think they had alluded to this a, a while ago, but unfortunately what could have just been a rumor and a concept is apparently coming to fruition. So say it ain’t so, say it ain’t so, but the Ferrari, s u v. On its way.

Yes, I did say the word s u v and Ferrari. In the same sentence I have blasphemed is didn’t Ferrari’s, c e o over the last like decade say that they will never make an S u V? Never say never. This is the automotive equivalent of when the roof on Notre Dame fell in. Like we’re, this is sacrilege Ferrari’s building an s u v, you.

You’re lying to me. I will say, based [00:11:00] on the picture, its stance makes it look less s u v and more slightly smaller compact crossover. No, that’s even worse. That’s even worse. That means it’s a fiat multiply with a freaking Ferrari badge on it. At least if it was the Maserati rebranded it or a Stevia or something, I could get over it.

But no compact crossover for get outta here. I mean, get outta here mean it’s, it’s very much camouflage to the point of they didn’t put vinyl camouflage on it. They literally had like, A car cover on it. All you can really see is the windshield. So the true body lines are hard to discern. However, it doesn’t look like, you know, a Ford Explorer or something terrible plastic.

What are they, what are they calling this turd? The pure blood as it’s translated The Yes, yes, the pure blood. Can you believe that could really, really, Really That is, [00:12:00] that’s a terrible name for a Ferrari SUVs. Terrible idea. This is Anus. This is, this is a bunch in the eye. This is like that company that we thought died.

That’s still around Mitsubishi naming theirs U V, the eclipse. Oh stop. Anyone wanna wager how much it’s gonna cost? A hundred thousand dollars? How much does the Lamborghini cost? And then add like a $50,000 to it. So apparently this thing is gonna be north of, well, it could start as high as 350,000.

What’s come on? So I can expect to see these in my kids’ schools parking lot.

They make a lot of bespoke Ferraris. If there’s truly this demand, which I’m curious to know, is there demand for, like, are people clamoring to have an S U V? If not, they should have just made some bespoke ones. Like I could have lived with like, oh, there’s only three in the world, but not something we’re actually, [00:13:00] Ferrari owners are tired of driving their Porsche McCanns.

That’s That’s what it is. And BGAs and whatever else they have. Alright, so they’ve lost their minds and it seems like there are a list of other things that they’re trying. Ferrari is also busy reinventing the wheel, if you will. Not the literal wheel, but the windshield wiper. It has to look out. You got some competition to your laser beam.

Are they partnering with Tesla? No. Their idea is using. Compressed air across the windshield, which I like better than the laser beam. Cause at least I’m not gonna have like my retinas burned. Yes, the laser’s not gonna be that strong. They actually still plan to have a wiper blade. So it’s this weird like compressed air plus wiper blades.

They want a smaller blade that’s lower profile that’s not affecting their aerodynamics, which most of the days the [00:14:00] windshield wipers tucked down underneath. You know, the top of the hood kind of tucked in under the cow. Anyway, so what, how are, is it really impacting aerodynamics? I mean, if you’re using ’em and you’re going that fast, it doesn’t matter anyway.

You’re losing speed somewhere else. I said this the last time, if your car is slippery enough, just like we talked about the cyber truck, you don’t need the windshield wipers. Put a little rain next on there and the uncompressed air as you’re driving will dissipate the water off of your windshield.

Here’s the problem with this. This is literally cutting your nose off despite your face. We’re gonna develop this highly intricate, compressed air miniature wiper blade system space technology. To save on something totally idiotic and add 150 pounds of gizmos, that’ll break when I can go to Walmart and buy a regular wiper blade for 11 bucks.

I mean, this like anything else, is just them having an idea. And what do you do when you have an idea? You [00:15:00] patent it so somebody else can’t take it. Doesn’t mean they’re actually ever gonna use it in this application, but it precludes anybody else from doing it. So I mean, yes, that’s, they’re doing exactly what they should do now.

Okay. In 10 years if they actually do this, we can criticize them more. I mean, like I’ve said before, the patent trade off is full of bad ideas. What I’m wondering though is you guys know what it sounds like when your wiper blades are like worn, worn out. So what does it sound like when you’re driving in the rain and your micro wiper blade is worn out and you’ve run out of compressed air?

Is it like, It’s nothing cuz you creamed off the road cuz you couldn’t see. But what we’re not discussing is how 99.999% of Ferrari drivers their cars never see Rain Street or the rain or anything. Never see the outside of a garage. So who is this wiper for? This is not the only [00:16:00] thing they’re patenting.

Oh really? So they’re on a patent from Frenzy role, whatever forefront of innovation. And they will not be left behind just like they will not be left behind with this whole S U V thing that’s decades old. Even though they’re last, they’re not gonna be last on EVs. What they are patenting. A battery layout for midship mounted batteries.

Whenever they do unveil whatever ev they’re working on, they wanna retain the weight balance of their Ferraris today that are all mid-engine, et cetera, et cetera. So they, some I, I don’t know enough about. The battery placement and how it warrants the patents, but they’re patenting the location, uh, or I guess the setup, the assembly of these batteries to be quote mid engine in their, in their cars.

This is something I can get behind. This is something that makes sense, uh, outside of these other just things that are completely lunacy because if they can make the battery [00:17:00] pack dimensionally fit in that space and way about the same as the petrol motor that they’re pulling out with some sort of transaxle direct power to the rear wheels and all that, I think it makes sense because they’re gonna have a performance.

EV something that can actually handle, unlike a lot of these, you know, I get it, they do it low center of gravity and they try to disperse the weight across the car. But if they can make a a one for one, what does Ferrari care about? Range. Because to Brad’s point, these people are either, maybe they’re using ’em at the track, driving to somewhere, or they sit in the garage a lot of the time, so why not make something as close to the OE as possible?

And lastly, in case you are now getting that little itch for all things Ferrari, it was announced very recently, director Michael Mann, if anyone’s familiar with. His work. I’m not, he and I think the person who wrote script on the Italian job are [00:18:00] collaborating for this Director’s Passion project, which is a movie about Ferrari the men.

So this movie apparently is gonna take place back in the fifties and be focused on Mr. Enzo himself. I like this idea. I looked at the cast photo and I thought this was an article for that new House of Gucci movie. Cuz isn’t it like the same people? Is this the sequel to that movie? Like what is this?

It’s, it’s not the same people. It is the same main male character. So Adam Driver is again playing an Italian gentleman. He was playing Mr. Gucci in House of Gucci and now he is gonna play Enzo in this movie. But instead of Lady Gaga, we have Penelope Cruz playing, I guess the name I haven’t, his wife or whatever the name I haven’t heard in about 20 years.

Yeah, she hasn’t really done much. Has she didn’t, yeah, she, what was the last movie she was in? I can’t, I can’t remember. Vanilla Sky? No, no, the Pirates of the Caribbean movie. It was terrible. Oh good. [00:19:00] The car Caribbean, the car rib Caribbeanos. Well, before this turns into, uh, you know, Steve Izzy show, shout out.

We’ll have to catch this one with them in, in the future. However, this eventually Absolutely. Whenever this eventually comes out, not much to report on this, but it is a movie that’s coming. They got getting it all lined up, so it’s not in production yet. It’s like Rush or Ford versus Ferrari, something like that.

It could be fun. You know, it’s one of those sort of mockumentary, almost types of films. So there’s no bad guy here. I mean, who are they gonna, who’s, who’s gonna play the villain, right? I mean, I, whatever. We’ll see. It could be, it could be fun, it could be entertaining. I guess we gotta move on and we gotta talk about Porsche, Audi and VW News.

So what’s hot right now? Or maybe what’s not right now. Well, a little bit of sad news to start off. I guess it depends on your point of view. Some people probably care less. Some people might be happy, and then there’ll be some that are, are sad to see. The, I don’t know that it’s iconic, but [00:20:00] it’s been around for quite a long time.

The Volkswagen Passat finally taking its last cruise as a. Finally discontinued that model, and the last vehicles have rolled off the assembly line down in Chattanooga, and they’ve been fitted as Chattanooga anniversary edition. So there’s, and I know we talked about this some time ago, that they, they said they were gonna do this, so there’s a bunch of Tennessee touches and, and inside and, and things like that for the, the last model.

But essentially the Passat, even though it was not the Passat when it first came over, has been in. The US at least since the early seventies. Yes. When it was known as the Dasher and then it became the Quantum, and then it became the Passat. So it’s had a long history here. It’s taken a couple body shapes to get to the most recent rendition, which has always kind of been the larger sedan.

It was always class larger than the Jetta in terms of size. But, and now the Jetta, I guess is the new Passat cuz [00:21:00] they’re the same size. But we digress. There’s an interesting video in this article where they ha, they found like the original clip from like 79 or something like that of when the Passat came to the United States.

Cuz it came here later than when it was introduced in Europe, obviously. And if you watch it, it’s like this yuppy guy in California and this and that and you, the guy, he breaks the fourth wall and the narrator asked him, well why are you buying a dasher? And he is like, well it’s better than buying a Buick.

And I immediately, I thought to myself, How that was foreshadowing at that time because Passat just basically became a big old marshmallow Buick in, its, its last runs. I mean it’s, it’s the rental car of rental cars. It’s the German Camry. I mean, it’s just like blah. And what I think they failed to do with the Passat, they should have gone in the direction of Cadillac with like the V cars.

Like they never had a sport version of the Passat that was worth anything. They had a [00:22:00] few trim packages and the W eight and every once in a while they’d throw us a bone. But in general, uh, as Tanya would say, it was vanilla. It drove like vanilla. The Passat was just boring. It was always boring. Even as a VW die hard VW guy, I’m not sad to see it go.

And unfortunately to, to make matters worse, the best and last Passat, in my opinion was the B five and a half. But even that was an Audi and not really a passant. So it’s like, eh, whatever. Those are the ones that came. Four motion. The first four motions. Correct. That was also the one that came with the WA eight motor.

Those were nice. They were a good size. They were good looking. They were the equivalent of the, the eighties Volvo. I mean, they were, that, you know, kind of exciting. But we, to me, they were vol, they were Volkswagen’s version of the E 39 BMW five series. Exactly, exactly. So there was just like a nice handsome, mid-size sedan, sports sedan.

Like I said, there’s sort of other cool passats, like the one with no [00:23:00] grill, as long as it had the VR six. Right, because it was one of the early VR six cars. That was cool. But like some of the other stuff, you’re just like, yeah, whatev whatever. Like nobody cares. And that’s why it’s not sticking around. I hate to say it because nobody cares.

They, they kind of replaced it with the a Aron or the A, whatever the hell that car is called. The Aton. The Aton, the, I was behind one of those. I was behind one. Those. I was like, oh, look at you. Yeah. The Artian, is that what it’s called? Yeah, the, the, the, the Una. Yeah. Yeah, that one. I mean, so is it, is the Passat really dead?

Who, who knows? But even then it got weird with the Fain and all this other stuff and it’s like, is it an A, is an A six? Like, I don’t know. It’s like who cares? I think the Faan was more Bentley than anything else. Yeah. The Faan was actually a really cool car for features and everything. I think it was far past an a eight of its time because whoever commissioned that car to be built, I can’t remember the names of [00:24:00] anybody that worked at the VW at that time, but they wanted that car to be the best car on the road at all.

Yeah. That, that was Ferdin And Peck’s like mission is to make the smooth Yes. You know, to beat Lexus, to have the smoothest, most luxurious all steel construction vehicle, the fate, and weighed like a semi-truck and it’s basically an A eight underneath and the sheet metal on the outside, it was like a bloated B five Passat.

It still had the same styling cues. So that was what was hard to swallow. If that car was like, I’m gonna pay, it was bland looking. Yeah, you’re gonna pay 90 grand for a fat Passat. I’m like, yeah, whatever. Get outta here. Well, if you waited a year, you could pay 10 grand on the Yeah. And then all the maintenance on the W 12 would’ve cost you 80 grand again.

90. 90 90, yeah. 80, 90 grand on maintenance. For the first year. But other things that confuse me and disappoint me, just like the Passat, is this next article, yet another Pike’s Peak, Porsche e-Tron records. Like I tried to read this article, I read it three times and I’m confused. Hopefully our audience will get it cuz I, I [00:25:00] sure don’t.

The Porsche won the record for the largest elevation change in one trip. Is that what I’m understanding? Is that a record we were looking to beat? It’s like a baseball record, you know, with greatest, like most hits wearing two left shoes or most, uh, strikeouts wearing tennis shoes with red laces. I don’t know.

It’s, it’s all That’s insane bullshit. I mean, I didn’t understand that. One picture of them looks like they’re in like a coal mine or something. That’s What is this? Yeah, that’s, I think that, I think that’s the point. In order to hit that altitude record, they actually started down in this mine and they drove out of the mine.

Oh, okay. So it had to do a little bit of varied light off-roading, if you will. It’s a record Porsche now owns, it’s also a record that Porsche is the only one who’s attempted. Right. This whatever the Guinness Book of World Records is full of that shit. But speaking of records being broken, apparently Lamborghini, somebody aftermarket tuning people, they took a [00:26:00] twin turbo, Lamborghini Huracan to the drag strip and they took it to Bradington Motorsports Park in Florida to do a quarter mile run.

And they, as it says, cross the finish line clock at 7.54 seconds with 186.41 miles an hour. Top speed. Understood to be quote. A new best and that that time is enough to humiliate the fastest stock production cars out there, including the current King, which is the Rimac Novera. This is not a production car, first of all.

It’s on Mickey Thompson Slicks. Thank you. It’s got, uh, yes, if you put a rimac on Mickey Thompson slicks and you slap however much money was spent on this kit into one of those cars, I’m sure you would beat it up. I don’t even think you’d have to do that because the Rmic on summer, Michelin Pilot Sport Tires did an 8.58 in the quarter mile.

So put drags on that [00:27:00] and let’s see what it does. Yeah. Put put drag slicks in. Yeah. None of this is important because an eight second car is slow as dirt. I don’t give a crap if it’s a twin turbo Lamborghini or the rim back seven and a half to eight and a half seconds just like you know, Totto. You owe me a ten second car.

That’s slow. I mean, there’s Teslas that are faster than this. There’s other cars that are faster than this Caveat with, this was it’s street legal car. There’s plenty Not on Slick. No, that’s bs. And there’s plenty of pro stock cars out there and plenty of American muscle big block cars that’ll blow the doors off of both of these that are street legal quote unquote.

So this is, this is a bunch of hype and that that twin turbo kit, that’s what the same twin turbo kit that’s available for the R eight because it’s basically the same motor and all that stuff. I mean, who cares? This is old news. Speaking of old news, we ask a lot of times on the pit stop. If you were the last person in the boardroom to cast a vote and the vote is between the 9 59 and the [00:28:00] F 40, which would you choose?

So far, all of our guests have answered. 40, but have given a justification for why the 9 59 is quote unquote, technologically superior. And so I found it interesting that our friends over at the Porsche Club of America, who by the way, have kicked off their own podcast recently. They put together an article talking about nine interesting facts that you might not know about the 9 59.

And what’s really important about this article and the research that went into it is that. When you stand back and look at what is being shown, you have to put it into the context of the time period. So you look at, oh, twin Turbo, big deal, four-wheel drive, whatever, manual transmission and all these different kinds of things.

You know, off-road capability, you’re like, whatever. There’s tons of cars that have that now. But when you bring this back to late 1980s, technology built on top of seventies, nine 11 [00:29:00] chassis, this was a supercar. This was Porsche’s first real production supercar. These things are record setting. These are real records being broken by Porsche.

These are pushing the boundaries of what could be done at that time in the automotive and, and really in the motor sports world as well. And so, When you compare the 9 59 to the F 40, the 9 59 is hands down, technologically superior. The F 40 was primitive. It was still based on, you know, like the 2 88 GTOs and things like that.

It had some Formula One technology in it, but not in the same way that the 9 59 did. So I think this is a really solid read and my good friend Manny Alban, who I’ve known for many, many years put this together and I, I gotta give him a shout out. So when you have the chance, be sure to check out Porsche Club of America’s new podcast.

It’s called the PCA Insider. And Manny is also one of the hosts on that show, and I wish them all the best of luck as they’re building out their platform. So I think that wraps up our Porsche, Audi, and VW News for the month. Let’s [00:30:00] transition now to the rest of Lower Saxony and talk about what’s going on over at Mercedes and B M W.

Somebody woke up what? They woke up and realized those ugly kidney, not kidney grill things. Beaver teething, not a good look. No. The buck tooth beaver BMW might be sunset lies. Newer models have smaller sized proportionate grills. Those two giant grills, at least on the car, were only on the M three and the M four.

I don’t think I saw them on any of the other regular. The X, the Xs and the sevens. Not really. I don’t remember seeing those giants, but the trucks have those huge grills. Remember they compared them. The grills on the front of an X five are bigger than the whole front end of an E 30. Like they’re just ginormous.

Maybe this goes in line with them returning the manual transmissions or the M three and the M four. Maybe they’re starting to listen to their customer base. You know, the enthusiasts saying, Hey bmw, what the hell are you doing? [00:31:00] We thought the Bangal period was bad. This stuff is just insane. And I know we’ve had guests on that sing the praises of the new BMWs, early adopters, all that kind of thing.

And I have to agree with some other folks that have been on the show. People buy with their eyes. And if it’s ugly, it’s ugly. They ain’t gonna buy it. People buy with it. Well, I don’t have to see it when I’m sitting on the inside. That’s very true too. But I would be embarrassed. All kidding aside, I mean, I’m glad that they’re changing back to something that is more, I iconic bmw.

I don’t wanna call it pleasant to the eyes or more appealing. I wanna label it as iconic B M W. I looked at that car and I went, it looks like a bmw. Like every good concept, prototype, spy photo, what is there and what is reality? They might slap those huge grills back on it again, so you know. No, cause I’ve seen some other, they’re gonna do it with the eight, they’re gonna do it with the four.

They’re gonna do with a bunch of other models. They’re already showing the new models coming out and they have the smaller [00:32:00] grills, not these big monstrosity things that’s gonna make those giant grilled cars, collector’s cars. It’s a very limited run. Maybe that was their plan this whole time. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. If you’re in the, uh, market for a touring wagon, B M W will Sure to delight you with the upcoming 20 23 3 series wagon. Just as long as you don’t live in the United States and you live in Europe, pop, well, they’re even making an M three version as well. I’m okay with all of this. You had me at Wagon and I will say previous Generation three series and even five series station wagons are good looking wagons.

They lend themselves well to the B M W physique, to the design. I like them. I’ve never not liked them. I, I haven’t seen an ugly wagon yet, and thankfully I think the wagons missed the whole weird front end phase, so. I’m okay with this. Now, I will say this, it looks a little big. The belt line looks a [00:33:00] little high, kind of Remo reminds me of the Volvos, where they’re just sort of stretched up, you know, maybe with a set of nice wheels like an M two has or an M three or some sort of M Sport package or whatever.

I, I’m excited for this, and I don’t say that very often about B M W, but I am excited about this. We can now finally say that there is no STIs news this month. So we’re gonna take a moment of quick silence in honor. There being no Stell Lanis news this month. Well, none that we’re apparently aware of. I mean, we already talked about STIs news.

The Challenger comes with a manual again. Oh. Oh, okay. All right. All right. So yes. All right. The record is is still in place. There is always Mopar News to talk about, but we do have to switch to our other domestic news sponsored in part by American muscle.com. Your number one source for OE performance and replacement parts for your Chevy Ford or Chrysler product.

Ford and GM warned their dealership network to [00:34:00] stop overcharging for brand new cars. Somebody posted the other day and I was completely flabbergasted by this. One of the sticker ads for a brand new Ford pickup truck. Now I know the prices of vehicles have been going through the roof, but to see a $52,000 dealer markup, I get the 1997, you know dealer.

What was that? That destination charge we talked about the last time, but 52 grand for what? I’m gonna buy another car with that money. What the hell? I get angry at the $595 pin striping charge. Who the hell is gonna pay $52,000 over sticker? Well, the best part is the pinstriping charge is for the pinstripe you didn’t want on the car to begin with.

Exactly. It’s already there. Terrible. Exactly. You gotta pay money to get it off. The pickup truck that was posted about it put it like well into like $130,000. I’m like, why? Who, how, how? I mean I [00:35:00] get that, that Ford trucks and, and trucks in general and high demand and things like that. But it’s a $52,000 markup.

I mean, let’s bring a trailer. Crazy levels of, of asking price and money at your local dealer. Hopefully something course corrects or the factories can push back on the dealers and say, Hey, you can’t, you can make a profit, but you can’t make this much profit. Or I think it’s gonna have to take government legislation to step in and say, you’re gouging people, you’re ripping people off.

People buy with their eyes, like we said, but they also buy with their wallets and their hearts. And if you walk in and you see that you gotta walk away, you should walk away. But you won’t walk away because the dealer will slap one 15 year auto loan for a mirror six and a half percent. Oh, it’s like a mortgage.

Yeah, no thanks. Flipping that coin a little bit and talking about the motorsports world, I am a little bit excited because as I’m diving more into the new changes that are coming for the classing, especially for [00:36:00] 2023 lamonts, we’re seeing a lot more GT three and GT four entries. Right. And there’s this whole series like SRO that’re devoted to GT three and GT four, and Ford has now officially announced their GT three plans.

For ssa, and I’m like, awesome, this is great, but we have to wait another two years. I feel like this is a carrot that’s being dangled out. I don’t think that the Mustang’s ever gonna go away, like the Camaro’s gone away. But then again, I’m like, what’s going on here? How’s this gonna work in two years? Is that Mustang gonna be a hybrid?

Is this still gonna be a v8? Is the V8 gonna be a thing? How does this work with the Corvette, with the whole balance of power thing? The Mustang’s at a disadvantage right now against other cars that are in its class. And so I’m really curious to see how this all plays out. I’m really excited that Ford is coming back.

I just wish they were coming back in 23 to compete with everybody else that’s gonna be on the big stage. We don’t know if they’re gonna [00:37:00] be an L M D H, you know, with some sort of prototype. I mean the, the Cadillac was re revealed again with some new videos and things like that, and it looks super cool.

I’m really excited about that. I mean, go gm. That’s awesome. I think coming to the stage in 23 without something big from Ford is, uh, it’s, I feel like it’s a mistake. Maybe they did the latest iteration of the four GT a little too soon, and they should have timed it from a marketing standpoint a little differently to coincide with the a hundred years of the and and all that.

I’m excited for a GT three Mustang, uh, mainly because in 30 years when they’re all on racing junk for 15 grand, I can go ahead to pick one up. Nice. I I like that, that, that’s forward thinking. That’s, that’s solid strategy there. I like that bold strategy. You know, I don’t generally commute a lot, especially into the city, but uh, I did this month many, many times and, you know, gave me an opportunity to see what’s hot on the road, just kind of scanning traffic and, and you know what I [00:38:00] spotted?

I spotted a Taurus X. Can you believe it? What is a Taurus X? Exactly. It’s not a new car. It’s a quite an old car. And it’s like this Taurus that’s not an S U v is a station wagon, but it’s sort of like the original Pacifica when they reintroduced it. Remember that thing that like up on stilts, but it’s a wagon but it’s an S U V.

And I looked at it and I said, yeah, somebody actually bought one of those. I was real, I was actually really proud of that guy and I was also proud of the fact that it’s still on the road after like, 20 years it was been produced. But again, I didn’t know. Oh, you, you, you mean the Ford Freestyle? Is that what it’s It’s exactly what it’s, yeah, it looks like a flex too.

It’s weird. Yeah, it was the Ford Freestyle and then I guess they re-badged it as the Taurus acts to give it, you know, some clout, cuz you know the Taurus name carries with it some pedigree. But it replaced the freestyle. Yes. We’re just gonna leave it right there. It was. Yes it [00:39:00] was. Yes. So that being said, all kidding aside, I actually saw.

Two Mavericks this month on the road, brand new. Here’s my first impression. Explore Sport track. Look at that. And I went, oh no wait. It’s Maverick. It looks like a sport track at first glance, you know that weird S U V in the front mini pickup truck in the back. Size wise, it’s like a step up from the previous Ford Ranger, like when they stopped making the Ranger.

So it’s actually a decent size. It’s not F-150 big and it’s not as big as the Ranger. So I think as a, as a small pickup, it’s good. It’s bigger even than the sport track was, but it’s got that shape. The front is reminiscent of the last generation Ranger, the pre Eco-Boost ranger and all that kinda stuff.

I’m not sure what to think of it, but one thing did get my attention. The Maverick on the back is huge. I mean, it reminds me of like a square body Chevy. I mean, it just takes up the whole tailgate. And then it kind of dawned on me, I was like, [00:40:00] well, where does the license plate go? And then I, I spotted it.

It’s off to the right side of the receiver where the trailer, you know, where the trailer hitch goes. It just looks so awkward. Everything’s out of proportion because the license plate sits off to the side really low too. And it, it’s, it’s kind of bizarre. That’s the one kind of styling cue that I was just weirded out about.

I don’t know that I’ve ever seen one on the road, but I don’t know why they needed to make this if they have the Ranger. Like when I’ve heard people talking about this, I thought they were just, it was a trim level of the Ranger maybe? No, no. I didn’t realize that it was its own standalone truck because looking at it, it, I mean it looks like it’s not body on frame.

It looks like it’s unibody. Yeah, so, so I guess the Ranger’s body on frame, this is unibody for all we know. It could be a sport track, just, you know, with new sheet metal. Yeah. Cuz the sport track was based on the Explorer. Overall I liked it. I will say the first one I saw, I wasn’t a fan of the color. It was this weird blue, the ones you kind of see in the press [00:41:00] pictures, it doesn’t look as good in real life as it does in picture.

And the other one was like a, I gotta say it this way, it was like a diarrhea brown, but, but it wasn’t, it wasn’t bad. I mean, I was actually okay with that. It’s like a paper bag color. That wouldn’t be the first color I selected, but you know, whatever. So I was, that was cool. I thought that was neat to see a maverick on the road this soon after us talking about it coming.

I was like, that’s cool. Curious to see what else comes out here in the next year or so. So when does the Raptor version. Oh, the Maverick come out how soon till we start seeing them in a, in an H P D E event. Hey man, send it. We gotta talk about our friends over at gm. So they’re doing some investment, obviously they’ve gotten into the electric car race as well, and they’ve got a facility in New York, Lockton components that makes a lot of parts specifically for GM radiators, condensers, HVAC oil coolers, things like that.

And so this facility is actually going to get a [00:42:00] big upgrade thanks to GM dumping some money into it to build a bunch of EL electric motor components there. So expanding kinda, there are component train in, in US based in, in bringing jobs and, and investing in their EV future. We talked about it on a previous drive-through where GM was using 3D printing technology to make race parts.

Will they be incorporating some of this technology into these EV parts? That’s a very good question. Time will tell. I guess I also feel like GM is spending a lot of money every time we turn around. I hear the word GM and investment in the same sentence. Remember they invested a ton of money in Nikola.

They invested a ton of money in the Lorton factory. They, and they invested a lot of money in all these things. What’s coming of it? I mean, I get that it takes like a decade for this stuff to come around full circle. There’s less, what counter is, they’re not paying taxes. There’s that, right? They’re taking a loss on this.

But I feel like. Even Ferrari’s gonna come to the table with this ev c Uuv [00:43:00] monstrosity Pure blood thing before GM gets their first legitimate EV out there. That isn’t the Volt. So there was the Volt and the Vault? No, because they, they’re coming up with the lyrics. So Cadillacs is supposed to be coming out Yeah, within the year or Uhhuh late this year or next year.

And the Hummer’s still gm, right? Nobody else bought it? I don’t believe so. It’s, it’s, I think it’s gm. Which is gm. It’s, it’s all the same. Well, Brad, you know, I’m glad that you’re back because we haven’t had a lot of Corvette news since you’ve been absent from the drive-through, and, and, and suddenly you come back and now there’s all this Corvette stuff in the news.

What’s going on? Now, I’m not saying I inspire all this Corvette stuff, but GM kind of does it for me only. So the Chevy Corvette is celebrating 70 years. And how are they doing that with an anniversary package, which I haven’t read this article yet, but I’m guessing it’s just a tr a bunch of badges and colors and bullshit like they did for the fifth year.

Uh, so let’s see. Mm. Putting as unique badging, special colors [00:44:00] and lots of red trim. Yeah, so it’s a, it’s an appearance package. GM is all about the appearance package. They did the same thing with the Camaro for the Camaro’s 25th anniversary. The Corvette 50th anniversary was a special maroon color, I think with the magnesium wheels and, and whatever bullshit.

I just said it, it’s bullshit. This is, you’re, you’re paying, you’re gonna pay $52,000 markup at the dealer for a base stingray if you can get one now, I will say I, I like it. I think it looks good. Those wheels are really nice. And the little red trim, especially because it’s coming in black and white, I think it kind of reminds me.

In a weird way of like the G t I trim package, right? Where it’s like the, just that little thin red line makes all the difference and it just, it looks, it actually looks pretty cool. That’s a lot. Cause I’m not, I’m not the biggest fan yet of the c8, especially the back, those profile shots. I, I think it looks pretty slick.

Good on them. No, no. They, they, I mean they definitely do a good job with them. I don’t see anything about the price for this package when it comes out, [00:45:00] but I can tell you that it’s not going to be worth the price. It’s a good looking car. It guaranteed it’s not going to be worth the price. One last sad bit of Chevrolet News, which we kind of, which we tying it in all together with our first story.

That’s right. We are, we mentioned how surprising for that Chevy sparked. We offered an manual. The folks, you better jump on it. After August of 2022, there will no longer be Chevy Sparks available off the line. They are being car alerts. Just continued collector car alert. Funnily enough, the picture in the article even shows the manual version if there was an automotive investment opportunity.

This is it. I I, I gotta get your normal spark. I gotta ask, would you drive one, like as a rental? No, not at all. Why, why would I be buying this? I would totally get the Carola hatchback. I, I agree. I saw one of those driving around this month too. They’re pretty [00:46:00] cool looking. It was in a weird blue color like this, like robin’s egg electric color.

I, it was striking. I was like, man, that’s the new Corolla, like sport hatchback. You can get the midnight murder packages on it too. Yeah, I was just gonna say no because I do not fit. I would drive a spark under one condition. If it was a fully prepped B spec race car, I would drive a Chevy Spark a thousand percent because the, it would be a lot of fun.

This wouldn’t even be BS spec. This would be DS spec. He’s using the Forza Class five system. Yes. You buy one, the base model is FS spec and then you, you drop 150 grand into it to get it up to D. I didn’t say I was building the race car. I said it would drive it and this over, so like the Honda Fit, I do love.

Okay, so all jokes aside, you can pick up a brand new one of these cars for it’s 15 grand. Yep. Yes. Okay. So I, yes, I would buy this. If I was in the market for a new [00:47:00] car and I was not six foot four, then I would totally consider one of these for just a putting around town, normal commuter car, 15 grand when the average base.

You know, average cost of a car right now is close to 50. Let’s take that back. That Maverick is something like in the twenties. So would you rather have the Maverick or the Spark at that point? Well, the Corolla hatchbacks 20. Yeah, I think I’d still go with, that’s the closest I can get to a Yaris, right?

Without, so we basically just explained why the spark is going away because of the Corolla hatchback. Wasn’t there a spark turbo, wasn’t there like some goofy add-on thing for the factory, like special version or something like that? I, yeah, I think it came with the tornado. That you used to see on infomercials that would help the fuel economy.

You, you hit a slap chop on the dashboard and it spins up the turbo. Yeah. Yeah. It came with a tube that came from the engine compartment into your, into your, your cockpit, and you blew into it and it forced induction into the motor. [00:48:00] That’s awesome. Oh man. Lean it, lean as mean. Keep blowing that air in there.

Is gm, is Chevy going to release it with a special appearance package? They should, they should sunset it with some special trim packages. It’s black and white with little red lines. It’s the what, what year anniversary? Does anybody even care They could call it 10 years. 10 years this year. One 10 years decade.

The 10 year anniversary of the, the spark the car let existed, let’s, let’s take this. Nobody knew was leaving. Let’s take this back. Let’s take this back just one more time. By a Passat or a Spark. I mean, I think the sparks got more style, so I would totally buy a Corolla hatchback.

That’s awesome. No, the answer is, Toyota Gs it, it always will be, that’s for sure. Yes. So this has actually been a great month for news. We’ve had Corvette stuff come up. We’re talking about manual [00:49:00] transmissions, people are breaking records, appearance packages, all this stuff. Fun stuff. We don’t have any STIs news to really talk about, but you know what we do have instead, we’ve got JDM News.

This is awesome. So let’s j let’s dive into this. And the one that got me right off the beginning of the month, Toyota, the Gazoo racing team, has unveiled their GT three concept car. And just like the title of the article says, It left me with questions. It looks like the Batmobile. My first question was, is this a Toyota powered Mercedes?

Yes. Cause it looks like a S sls, right? Yes. I was like, what is this? Is this like Toyota is all about partnering with and, and because of that to, to save them money and because of that I like it. It’s looking like that Mercedes is not a bad thing. No, it’s good looking. I’m really shocked that something like this would come out of the Toyota Design studio and I’m just like, wow, this is cool.

Who [00:50:00] knows? To Brad’s point, maybe this is some cooperation like they did with on Thera, right? Between, hopefully it isn’t a b w and they’re not going back to that well, yet again. He’s right on point when he says that because all of their sports cars, whether it’s the 86 or it’s the Supra or whatever, it’s in combination with somebody else.

Right. It’s a cooperative effort. So I’m really curious to see where this comes from. Doesn’t look or read like it’s Lexus with different sheet metal like they’ve tried to do in the past, like the R C F and things like that, which we’ll talk about more when we cover Rolex. And this is cool. I’m, I’m curious to see where this goes.

I think it’s just going to go as a race car in the G three class, much like that Mustang. Yeah. I would love to see something like this e eventually end up into production. I don’t see that ever happening, but Marie May have to if this is gonna be a real race car, but, or it ends up in Grand Tomo before it ends up on the street.

You know what I mean? That kind of thing. Kind of like the, the Mazda ri, which was super cool looking scene kind of thing. Like just blows you away. Even if you look at it today, you know, 10 [00:51:00] years later you’re like, oh, the Ferri is awesome. Just never came to fruition. It never happened. So I wanna spend a little bit of time talking about the next car on our list and it’s, it’s a car that’s come up before, and Tanya talked about it when we talked about new EVs and concepts.

You know, before we devoted more time to the Japanese market, it was the Hyundai Ionic five, and it’s now being titled as one of the best affordable electric cars. Yet. I have to take a pause here because I’m gonna say something I didn’t think I was gonna say. I like this. It looks good. I like it a lot.

And the more I read about it, the more I like it. It would be a hard, hard decision to make between this and the machi because I’d like the machi as well, like the way it looks, especially in certain colors and things like that. Again, buying with my eyes, but I started to dive into the numbers a little bit because I will be honest, you know, I’m not a dinosaur.

I do love my petrol. I wanted to do a little bit of homework because if this is one of quote unquote, the best. What’s so good [00:52:00] about it? So I wanted to dive into the numbers. I wanted to do some comparisons between the driving I’ve been doing this month with, you know, an older petrol car against something like this.

Ionic Five. And you can read all about the Ionic five in our show notes and, and figure out how wonderful it is. But I wanna get. To a deeper conversation here. And so one of the things that I think has alluded us for a while when we talk about range anxiety and things like that, is that there is no simple way to convert and compare a gallon of gas to unicorn farts, right?

And so I actually found there were some equations that were put out by Stanford about like E M P G and like how it converts and all this kind of things. So I kind of boiled it back and I got down to a single, very important number, one gallon of gasoline, has a hundred percent of the energy of 33.7 kilowatt hours.

And I went, whoa, wait a minute. Okay, that’s something tangible. I can work with this. So starting to break it down a little bit further, I’m not trying to [00:53:00] go into a whole math lesson, so I’ll kind of tell you what I discovered here and why this is, this is important to the, to the larger discussion and the future of EVs and, and how we grasp this as car enthusiasts, right?

So 33.7 to one is the ratio. The ionic five has a 77.4 kilowatt hour batteries. So you kinda look at that with 77, that’s a low number. A hundred is good. Triple digits, like we think like horsepower, right? Bigger numbers are better. But in reality, 77.4 kilowatt hours is roughly equivalent to 2.3 gallons of fuel.

So it has a 303 mile range. People start flipping out about that number. A lot of gas cars have about 300 miles of range. So they’re trying to give you this equivalency. That’s 2.3 gallons into 303 miles is an average of 132 miles per gallon. There is no gas motor or diesel motor on the planet right now that can achieve those numbers.

I’m sorry. I finally have come to this realization. Okay, fine. Here’s the [00:54:00] downside. And it dawned on me in a conversation that I had with one of our previous guests, crutch, who’s been on the show a bunch of times. He has a Volkswagen ID four. He mentioned that his ID four has the equivalent horsepower to about 225 gas horsepower.

And I said, okay, wait. Hold on a second. I took that back to the Hyundai again and I said, okay. The Hyundai’s single motor model manages 225 horsepower, just like the ID four and 258 pound feet of torque, roughly the same as a two liter Volkswagen t d i. Now I know what that feels like, I know what that drives like.

So whatever the ionic weighs almost 4,000 pounds. So that got me thinking like a eraser power to weight ratio. So the power, so powerway ratio of the ionic is 92.96 because it gets all converted to watts per kilogram, right? And all this kind of thing. I, I wanted to know, without going to drive one of these, what does it drive like, what’s it gonna feel like because it’s a heavy car at the end of the day with, let’s think about it as a small motor, not really [00:55:00] about the battery or the range.

So when I started to kind of back calculate and figure out what cars that were equivalent to this, I couldn’t find something that was like right on the money. I could find things that were close. And in my mind then I could wrap my head around the whole idea, because I’ve driven these vehicles before.

So let me put it in perspective for the listeners. A Pentastar 3.6 liter Jeep Grand Cherokee is roughly faster than this Hyundai. Also in that same category, the 2.0 turbo Audi Quatro Q five. So if you’ve ever driven one of those, you know, kind of c Uuv, S U V, then you have an idea of what this is roughly going to feel like.

Obviously power delivery is different cuz the electric power plant, all this kind of stuff. Cool. So we kind of put that all in perspective. It’s just like any other mid-sized C U V V6 or high strung Turbo four cylinder. So then it got me thinking, well how much is, would it cost to operate? In general. So to fill it from zero is 11 bucks because the [00:56:00] average in the US is 14.19 cents per kilowatt hour.

Right. So I just took the number and just multiplied it out. It’s 11 bucks to fill from zero and the driving that I’ve been doing this month, rough mileage and kind of figured it all out, it would basically cost me $18 a week to operate the vehicle running the mileage that I ran, just basically charging the car every time I got home.

And I ended up spending close to, with the current, you know, price of gas. Right now I was up in the neighborhood, a hundred dollars in fuel. So the cost savings overall better, the upfront cost of the vehicle. Obviously there’s that, there’s a lot of things to weigh in here, but if you’re considering an EV or you’re digging your heels in about how petrol’s better, I kind of encourage you to sit back and do the math and I’ll, and I’ll share my math in the, in the follow on article if you wanna take a look at it.

Just kind of how roughly I got. You can tell me I’m wrong too. I’m totally okay with it. I am not a scientist or a mathematician, just an average Joe. Like you try to figure out how this makes sense and what the future does look like. Okay. [00:57:00] Thanks for joining my TED talk. My only thoughts on all that is yes.

So you save savings came to $82 a week and your test case $82 a week, so that’s what, $240 a month? Mm-hmm. How much is a car payment gonna be on a $40,000 car? Yeah, that’s, that’s the part I didn’t wanna look at as opposed to a vehicle you already own. Correct? Well, that’s the thing with any, I know car purchased though, right?

Like if you already have a car, it really makes no sense to ever change your car. You can never recoup it. Right? So unless you’re in the market, you’re in the market for a new car. If you are in the market for a new car, go electric. But if you really want a W R X station wagon, move to Australia. That’s right, because we’re not gonna get one.

Sorry folks. That’s okay. This thing’s about ugly. What? I was just thinking, it looks hot take it looks just like the Buick. That’s what I, yes. Although I think the Buick looks better. The, so Subaru is selling a Buick [00:58:00] wagon in Australia with the C V T transmission. This thing is a waste of time. Why are we talking about it?

I, I don’t know, but you know what else is a waste of time? How about spending $111,000 on, bring a trailer for a 2000? Acura Integra. I’m going to defend this a little bit. Oh, please do. No, I’m not defending $112,000. But this Integra, the engineering that went into this car when Honda created it, is very similar to the amount of engineering and over-engineering that Toyota put into the mark four Supra as far as overbuilding the motor and, and, and everything like that.

This particular Integra type R model is actually a very special car. Still only had like 200 some odd horsepower or whatever it was, but Honda overbuilt. You know, the car and use special materials and, and engineering when they created the car. So I, I say they are collector’s items [00:59:00] and they are worth something.

I don’t think it’s worth $112,000, but I’m also not in the market. I, I don’t know what to say because I, I am a fan of front wheel drive cars, but I could never see spending this kind of money on the equivalent of basically a shit box. I mean, as good as it is or was or whatever it, to your point, it’s still a 200 horsepower front wheel drive car that any other car in the year 2000 obliterated this thing.

I can name 12 of them right now to include the E 46 M three and any nine 11 and just about anything is better than this. And you could buy one of those used right now for less money or the same, especially the BMWs E 46, M three s, you know, they’re starting to gain some traction on the used car market, but you can still buy a reasonably priced BMW from the two thousands and have a way better car.

Don’t know if it’s necessarily a way better car, maybe a way better driving car. If I would, wait, hold on a second. Can’t you buy a brand new [01:00:00] Corvette for like 60 grand? Yes. Yes. No, so you could al you could buy two almost. Well, dealer cor, dealer markup at 60. You’re right, right. 60,000 dealer market. Right.

So you could buy one Corvette for the price of this Integra. Yeah. I mean, someone’s buying this as a collector piece that has 6,600 miles on it. That’s the only reason it’s clean. It is. Otherwise this thing is worth move the decimal point a couple places over. Yeah. Yeah. These, these cars, 11 grand, 30, 35 grand when they were brand new, which was actually a lot of money in 2000.

I wouldn’t have paid that then. I mean, it, I don’t know. I, I’m wrong. I know, I’m know I’m wrong, but I don’t know. But you know, speaking of, of wrong, Toyota builds autonomous self-driving supra. Why They built it to test their autonomous driving capability, which is pretty cool actually. When you consider what they’ve done is they are autonomously drifting a car around a course.

So it does know where the [01:01:00] barriers are, but it doesn’t know how to navigate the barriers. So it navigates them drifting. So it’s still able to negotiate the changing speeds and the changing traction by itself. So, so in terms of their technology capability, that’s pretty cool, but how many pedestrians did they avoid?

Well, they didn’t hit the barriers. It’s plus one for Toyota, but I love that we’re excited about this. But isn’t this the same thing Audi did like five years ago with the tt where they’ve made it run on track at full speed with nobody driving it, but driving under control is different than driving. Yeah, than drifting.

I mean, they just, they just did a thing at the Consumer Electronics show too, where college kids or whoever they were, they took the indie cars basically and they made himself driving around the oval or whatever that they had set up in Nevada. So it’s, it’s like, okay, but they had a fixed course. They weren’t trying to drift, they weren’t trying to be on the edge of traction.

Yeah. And control. Right. [01:02:00] I would rather be on a racetrack with this than Andrew Bank and fours a seven any day just gonna put it out. I mean, they’re not saying, this isn’t about like, oh, the new Supra is gonna be autonomous and you’ll be able to like drift. No, that’s not the point. It’s just, yes, they use the Supra to do this.

It’s a testing apparatus for them to test autonomous driving and not just beta test it with people driving through San Francisco. Had they done this with a Camry, we wouldn’t be talking about it. I mean, I’d still like to see a Camry drift. I think that would be pretty exciting. I mean, if you read through the article, apparently someone’s already done this with a DeLorean.

So yeah, I did, I did see that. Yeah, I mean, that, that’s pretty, that’s pretty cool. Come on now. The fact that a number. No, because you know why it’s cool. That’s the fact that it’s a, the fact that it was capable of drifting. There you go. Because it DeLorean weighs like 9,000 pounds. It makes like a hundred horsepower.

Those things are like terribly underpowered. I know that’s an exaggeration, but if you look at the power to weight numbers, not to go back into that math lesson around the DeLorean, it is terrible. Like it was not a [01:03:00] joke in that movie. It struggles to get to 88 miles an hour. The top speed on the DeLorean is like 106, and I think it has to be going downhill with a semi-truck pushing it because it just, it’s so pathetic.

Granted, I love those cars. I think they’re fantastic. I’m not, I’m not hating on them. I am still waiting for my EV version to come out, but you know, it’s all good. But speaking of flux capacitors, Apparently there’s a recall on high Hyundais and Kias, anything from 2016 to 2018, the Santa Fe, the FA Sports, the Tucsons, the Tucson, the Kias, and the same year range, even a little bit older, 24 to 2016, there’s sportages are all being recalled.

Cause apparently there’s a defect in the, uh, anti-lock brake system and something short circuits and essentially they can turn into flaming balls of fire. And so it’s being, and so it’s being suggested, strongly recommended that you not park your vehicle inside a garage or, or [01:04:00] anywhere that could light your house on fire, as that is a potential.

However, it is still perfectly safe to drive these down the road. This is becoming more common. Have you guys realized almost every month. Even over the last course of season two, we’ve talked about Chevys that could spontaneously combust. There were uh, Toyotas, there was the Chryslers, the Hyundais. It’s all a plot.

It’s all a plot. I ev right? It’s all a plot about the dangers of gasoline cars. All they do is spontaneously explode all the time in the combustion chambers. You’re right. They spontaneously. Yeah. Nevermind. You know I mentioned earlier about spotting cars in the wild. The Ford Taurus X and the Maverick were not the only things I saw on the road.

I did see some interesting JDM cars, as I mentioned. I did see the Corolla Sport hatchback. I thought it was really cool. I gotta see that several times. That guy was easy to spot in traffic every day. And then I actually noticed something outta the corner of my eye and I sped up to take a look at it cuz I’d never seen one before.

And I [01:05:00] thought it was another Toyota Corolla hatchback. But actually it was the Hyundai. Elantra Sport. And if you haven’t seen this car, it’s like better than the Veloster. Not maybe performance wise, but it’s more of like a G T I, I thought it was a good looking car. I was like, man, Hyundai’s really putting out some neat stuff.

We’re not hearing about it. Or maybe we’re just not in that, that circle, you know, of Korean cars and whatnot. But I, I kept looking, I kept looking at, I was like, man, that’s the coolest G t I that Hyundai’s built yet. So anyway, yeah, the Hyundai Elantra GT Sport, there’s an inline version as well. Like, like an in a GT sport.

Yeah. Yeah. In, that’d be kind of cool. That would be kind of cool. And the Veloster end is a neat car. I mean, uh, the looks you gotta get used to, but performance wise, I’ve said it before, it’s a really good performing car. It’s surprisingly good. I think it would be a hard tossup for me. Between that and the Civic Turbo.

The Civic Turbo is a much bigger car, but the Veloster N is, is actually a really [01:06:00] capable vehicle. But you know what else I did see on the road? I saw the newest Prius pretty angular. I, I don’t understand it because the previous Prius is, they weren’t beauty queens by any stretch of the imagination. But what I don’t get is the back, like they took the previous Prius and it’s like they just grabbed it and squeezed it and yanked it and stretched it.

And it’s just like, you know when you watch a kid with a marshmallow and it begs the question, why do they have to continue making it look so strange? Why can’t the Prius just be a Corolla sedan with an EV power plant in it? Like with maybe some, I don’t know, different wheels or something. Like why does it have to look so weird?

It stands out. Maybe that’s the point is people get people to go, Ooh, ah, Now there was another, what I’d like to call Asian car on the road that I saw that I don’t understand, and I say it’s Asian because it’s made by Tata. And Tata is an Indian company and it was the Jaguar Ipace EV 400. [01:07:00] I honestly felt like I could drive underneath of it.

It was, the backend was so tall, the rear glass was so short and so angled in that sort of like, uh, what do they call it now? The atlas or whatever sport back thing where the, I don’t even know why I had rear glass. It was, it’s bizarre. Glad somebody bought one. Good for Jaguar, that this thing’s out there.

That back is like a nice bench. Yeah, you could definitely sit up there. But it’s also flat like a wall though. You could eat your lunch on the back of it real nicely. Oh yeah. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. The birds will perch up there and poop down the side of it. It’ll be perfect. So that wraps up our JDM news. So now we need to move into Brad’s favorite section, lost and Found.

So what do we got this month? I wanted to go ahead and go back to cars.com and see what the oldest. They have categorized brand new vehicle you can buy is, oh, right now on the market. And as of today, you can purchase a brand new, [01:08:00] again, it’s categorized as brand new, 1988 Cadillac Deville base for a whopping $18,000.

What? Yeah, there’s no picture. You know, we should send John Cai to this dealership because it’s in his hometown. Oh, gray Chevrolet in Stroudsburg, PA. Wow. Another quote, unquote brand new car that they’ve listed is a 2005. Ford gt, if anybody remembers, that’s when they brought back the GT the first time.

Yep. It’s got the, uh, the 5.4 liter motor from the Ford Lightning, obviously souped up with the supercharger and all that good stuff, uh, with a, a bigger supercharger and all that 450 grand. It’s a steel and it’s low mileage because it never ran. Oh yeah. Yeah. This is Jeremy Clarkson’s own, so it never ran.

So, no, it’s got 13,000 miles. So that’s actually probably high mileage for one of these cars. It’s like, uh, some guys used to say, you know, you never buy a Jag that doesn’t have high mileage. Cause you [01:09:00] know it didn’t run. We’ve got put it in the bank. I tried convincing Andrew to buy this car. He was not interested.

Sadly, I think he really should, he could use it. There is the cheapest Dodge Viper G t s on the internet right now. It’s in Albuquerque, New Mexico for $16,000. It’s a 2002 Dodge Viper, g t s basically backend. It starts at the windshield and goes back, but there’s no motor, there’s no anything with this car.

I mean, there’s an exhaust. There’s parts, yeah. Yeah, there’s like a bumper or. Something I, I don’t know. Yeah, this is like a, what, what were those model kits? The, the Siesto model kits or whatever they were. Yep. It’s gonna need a windshield though. That’s a hundred percent. I love that you’re looking at this and you say it definitely needs a windshield.

I, I, I love that. Well, I wanna leave, I wanna leave something to the audience’s imagination because you definitely need to check this out in our show notes because [01:10:00] Yeah, I definitely would not put this in the bank, that’s for sure. I would save my pennies. I might almost buy that Chevy Spark instead of this Viper.

But if any of our listeners are on Instagram, please DM to the bank and make sure d him this ad and let him know that it is still for sale. And he should buy this because he does not have enough Dodge Vipers as it is right now. A thousand percent. And if you wanna learn more about that, check out this month’s episode with Havoc performance all about Vipers and Andrew and his vipers.

Oh yes. There is a geome. Ooh, our favorite car. Yeah, this is a, a fan favorite here at G T M. This one’s kind of special because it takes two fan favorites. It takes the Geo Metro and it takes the LS conversion and it put them together. So yes, there is an LS swapped Geo Metro. Sadly, it’s not the convertible that would’ve been two.

Perfect. I was gonna say, Nik has the [01:11:00] brown Volvo wagon. We’ve got the LS swap, geometric convertible. I wanna know, is it still a geo with the Chevy badge or is it the aveo? Is this that weird period? But none of that’s important because it, it is a geo with the Chevy badge. But what is important is when I scroll down to about the third picture and you see the view from the trunk, I, I just, I’m speechless.

I don’t even know how this works. Uh, lemme describe it for the folks that are gonna be like, you know what, I’m not gonna waste time. Like the article, think of it this way. The motors in the trunk and it’s in their transverse and it’s still an ls. I, I don’t understand any of this. Yeah. I don’t think they ever mounted an LS motor transverse in any vehicle.

I’m trying to think what transmission this, I mean, I, I’m way too much. Mental effort on this, that is necessary. It does have an automatic transmission, though. It comes with the four T 80 E from a Cadillac, so I don’t know, I, I don’t know how they made it that. Maybe a custom bell housing your [01:12:00] bank. Please buy this car too.

Target it on top of your Viper. Oh, this is the best part. This car is listed for sale for a $7,000 firm price. I know what I have. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. All things considered, I would almost say that this car is worth buying it for the motor itself, except it’s just the 5.3 liter. It’s not the, not the six liter.

Okay, let’s back it up for one second before we move on. I wanna know the conversation or the bet or what that started this like who literally said I got it out there? Bored LS in that geo backyard to waste the time and the resources and the effort and all the custom fabrication. I mean, unless this guy was bored.

I don’t understand. Daniel, are you listening? I can build it myself. I can build it better. Daniel, you need a motor for that BMW you bought. With all that said, I think it’s time we move on to random new EVs and concepts. And first up this month is an Alpha [01:13:00] wagon, but this is an Alpha A L f, A as in Alpha Romeo.

This is Alpha as in A L P H A, A brand none of us have ever heard of before. So continuing on this whole thing that’s been going on for the last couple of years in boutique brands, here’s yet another one for the list. The click bait got me at the wagon part and then when I opened it, I didn’t read it and clicked the clothes tab as fast as I could.

This thing’s terrible. I think it’s awesome. What? Look, looks wise, it looks like a wagon. Rocco. It looks like I took it and bent it over my knee. I mean, what is this thing? I love the fender flares. I love the backend. I love the profile of the whole thing. Oh, sign me up. Ooh, I love the off-road version. Down below the Stuy tires.

There’s worse things than this. I think it could be cleaned up, a couple lines could be cleaned up on it. The side profile reminds me of like something from decades [01:14:00] ago, a Volvo maybe. I don’t know, something. It’s just, yeah, the corners. I, it does remind me of something old school, but it looks really cool.

Yes, it looks like, yes. I see. It’s curved. The, the surfboard on the top that’s curved. It follows a curvature. You can tell it looks. Bent. It’s just, just, they say coupe, they say wagon coupee. They need to pull the nose forward so it doesn’t triangulate back. That’s what’s drawing the line. Weird, because that’s not even a very steep hood compared to No, it, it’s not other things.

I mean, the, the back is reminiscent of some older astons, in my opinion. From the side, from the straight, straight on view of the back. It’s just kind of blah. I mean, it has those four round lights like an old Ferrari. It, it, it has inspiration from different vehicles, but I don’t know that we needed to marry an Outback with the Ferrari station wagon and whatever that front end is off of a, you know, off of a dasher, it’s never gonna get built.

Let’s be serious. Who the hell is [01:15:00] Alpha that isn’t Alpha a male? Well, before we move on, I will say Alpha is taking reservations for this car. What dealer? Network? The same dealer network as Tesla. Oh, okay. www.alpha.com. Probably. Well, if you’re interested in, in other EVs that aren’t cars, but trucks and other workhorses if you will, there’s a car and driver article that goes through a long list of other EVs that we didn’t even know were coming.

So there’s a bunch of different buses or vans, things of that nature. Apparently Amazon has a deal with Rivian delivery trucks. They’re cute. They’re so cute and they’re very futuristic. They’re very cute looking. There’s even Honda has a, a work vehicle that’s. It looks like they, looks like the things are run around the airports.

I don’t know what you call those, but little guys, the guys drive ’em pulling the luggage and all that kind of stuff. The interesting one on here too is the John Deere autonomous tractor. That looks like a Pokemon, like I was, what is this? It looks so weird. It’s got [01:16:00] like alien thing coming out the front.

I don’t know. It’s bizarre. Bizarre. There’s some off-road snowmobiles. The Polaris, it’s got an ev, which just sounds frightening. It looks like they’re out in the Arctic. They hate to have that battery die. The Polaris, they didn’t do a whole lot. They put a EV in an existing Polaris and it’s like, all right, well, no.

Yeah, it looks like any other one. And then the, the last one is interesting is the freight liner tractor trailer. It looks like it’s out of Tron. That thing is awesome. I know it’s an appearance package, but I, I’m in love with that tractor trailer for the tron livery that’s on. I think it’s cool. I will say I was delighted to see a brand returning to the list.

We talked about them last month, and that’s our friends over at Canoe. Yes, they have it. Mp, dv, whatever that stands for. This is a vehicle that I built when I was five years old outta Lagos. It does one brick and four wheels. It does. It’s a very, it’s very utilitarian. [01:17:00] I like deli delivery truck, I guess is what you would use it for.

I mean, it’s, it could be a vehicle, it could be a minivan or, or light duty. So it, yeah. M P D V is multipurpose delivery vehicle. Give it some, some knobby tires. Lift it a little bit and then there you go. Take it off road. Mm-hmm. Hashtag you know, van Life. Take a camping. Yeah. How’s that? Green life. Speaking of utilitarian vehicles, so we’ve talked about before.

Bollinger another, you know, off-brand that nobody’s ever heard of and they were coming out with the B one and, and the b2 and basically it looks like a really utilitarian Hummer and the pickup truck’s not any better. Well, apparently they’ve pulled the plug on this and they won’t be bringing these to production as they said they would.

Instead, I, I guess they’re kind of shifting their focus to the platform that they develop. It’s not clear who they might be partnering with. I guess whatever this platform they’ve developed is at least good enough to have that keep going and, and partner with other people. So they’re [01:18:00] gonna focus on that side of the business versus, you know, designing this horrifically ugly u v and pickup truck.

And this is what I used to always say that Tesla should have done, is they should have designed and perfected an electric vehicle platform and then sold it to all the other manufacturers to put their own body on top of. That’s the same model that Mercedes did with the Sprinter vans and why they sold ’em to everybody under the sun and why there’s a freight liner and a Dodge and a this and a that.

That’s the model. And I think that makes sense. We just talked about these vehicles last month, you know, hot to trot on the EV list of EVs to get. And now it’s already dead. I became completely disenfranchised and I went straight to the comments looking for some levity in all of this, and I found my favorite troll post thus far, which is, don’t feel bad about the loss of the B one and the b2.

If you really want one, just check out your local Lego store for 39 99 plus tax.

I, I very much enjoyed that, so that, that made the, the article that much [01:19:00] more worth it. But sadly, Bollinger B2 pickup or cyber truck, cuz I’m leaning towards this Lego truck. You know, I have to agree with you on that. But there’s something else I would lean completely towards and I think that’s the new Rivian that is a handsome, and you know me, I’m not a fan of pickup trucks.

Ok, so here’s question for you. Which one are we gonna see first if this, that we already know is suspended or. The cyber truck. Which one? His production first. Ooh, it’s hard. That’s hard to say. The, the Bollinger has regular windshield wipers, so you know, it might come out first. Has three of them. Three of them extra.

That was their mistake. That’s why they had to pull the plug on this end. One. One extra windshield wiper. We wanna talk about the rivian, other than the way it looks. I think it’s a handsome little pickup truck. I, I mean, I think it does a good, it looks like a pickup truck. [01:20:00] And that’s what I kind of wanna see with these electric pickup trucks.

I want them to remind me that it’s a pickup truck, not an N 64 game, but then it changes the style enough with the front and the lights that it has, that futuristic ev vibe to it. I like it, but I like it in the same way. I like my Jeep in that it looks like a little hippopotamus. And that’s okay because it does right with this big, those big nostrils in the front.

It looks like a hippo, but that’s okay. It’s proportioned. Well, what I think is deceiving about the pictures, Is that this is probably the same size as the Maverick. I could be wrong. I don’t think it’s a 1500. I think it’s slightly smaller. And if GM is involved with Rivian, this might be like a, Jimmy might be that smaller, the S 10 or the, the resurgence of the S 10 or something like that.

I’m okay with all of that, but to your point, I like it as well. What bugs me though is [01:21:00] this latest ad campaign on the Rivian site because it feels like we are following in the Broncos footsteps talking about the goat modes and all this stuff, and the eight modes and the trains and this and that. And I’m like, I didn’t take, let’s just sell it.

I didn’t take, I didn’t take it that way. I thought it was an interesting video because I think, okay, Bronco Ford, they’re doing it for their goat mode, but I think to some extent someone making an electric pickup truck has to come out with a video like this because everyone who’s a pickup truck enthusiast is gonna be like, what a piece of crap.

You’re not gonna take that off the road with electric motor, blah, blah, blah. And they have to demonstrate, right? And they’re not doing anything really. Fuck wild, right? From a layperson’s perspective, you know, Brad, you can correct me cuz you’re more off-road. I think it showcased well that it’s going to be competent in different types of terrain and I think they need to do that.

I think they need to show that to people. Yeah. It shows that it’s as good off-road as any other standard pickup truck without any major offer [01:22:00] modifications or anything. One kind of impressive thing is when it does a little bit of rock crawling just because of the, I guess the approach angles or that of, you know, very similar to a Bronco or a Jeep.

At least on the front, the back end departure angle is not very good cuz the, the bumper hangs off so far. I agree with Tanya. It’s to put the naysayers to rest before they can naysay. Um, I’m gonna put it this way. When Tanya decides to go test drive one, I will go with her and it’ll be a pleasant experience.

But you know what? It’s not gonna hold a candle to the next car on our list that we wanna talk about. Hey, that’s a little mountain goat. It’s big bad granddaddy is this Land Rover defender that has been converted to an ev and I know there’s a lot of people that are against doing that. This is a classic, you know, kind of old school defender.

This thing is bad ass. This is the off-road of off-road right here, right? That you can still fix with a spoon and a dull knife. This is cool. You gotta check this article out, guys. I mean, it just looks awesome. It is awesome. [01:23:00] I mean, if you’re a fan of Landys, this is the way to go right here. I I, I don’t see any fault with this.

You, you aren’t totally wrong by being able to fix it with a, a sharp spoon and a dull knife. And because you can fix the Tesla power plant at Home Depot with some copper wire and, and you know, a plastic tub and some, some wood bits. Now this is a Tesla conversion, so you can pull up to any Tesla charging station and all that kind of thing.

But this is really cool. You know, if you ask me, I would rather spend the kind of money that people are spending on converting old astons and stuff like that, you know, to ev on something like this. And the interior. This thing is beautiful. This is $300,000 again for the money that is being spent. You could get a Ferrari s u v in two years and a Corvette even with the markup church, but it’s not a Landy and this thing’s pretty badass.

You could buy 20 Chevy Sparks. All right. [01:24:00] Well we would be remiss and the done. This is a great segue into we would be remiss, I would say, yes. So speaking of Tesla Motors, And we alluded to this, I think last month when we mentioned how suddenly you couldn’t put place orders anymore on the cyber truck and whatnot, but it has now been officially confirmed that there will be no production in 2022 of the cyber truck, the Roadster or the semi.

They are going to apparently be focusing all their attention on full self-driving. That’s going to be better than a human asterisk and Elon’s new rocket so he can go into space, which is ironic when the news this week has been showing footage. I guess it was finally released of a Tesla crash from I think like a year ago where it got confused by the police blinking lights and it just sideswiped a cruiser that was parked on the side of the road, nearly taking out the two officers that were standing next to it on the side of the road.

Mind you, a lot of damage. [01:25:00] Anybody out there that’s looking for a cyber truck I have for sale a day one reservation reach to me with your best offer. No low $1. Bob. I know what I have. $1 Bob. $1. No, it has to be at least a hundred of those. So on your uh, pre-order that you placed on your cyber truck, let’s pretend one day you actually get it.

Are you gonna try and see if you can get a little add-on feature to it? A little bit of, uh, a little bit of mood setting in your cyber truck as you’re cruising down the road. Yeah. Yeah. Brad, are you gonna, are you gonna play with your butt hole? I think you mean tickle and No. So you would not be interested in the, in the turn on butt hole, I mean, sorry.

Turn on Tesla mic feature that, uh, can be offered with your Tesla and turn your car into a karaoke machine. Way big. What? Have you all heard my voice? I do not have a voice for singing or karaoke, so No, I, it looks like No, you’ve got that deep baritone. [01:26:00] Yes. Yes. But not quite barely. But you could have a barbershop quartet in his Tesla, so that’s, that’s perfectly perfect.

Yes. He’d be back there. Boom, boom, boom, boom. I mean, apparently like we’re just. Late to the party here. It’s not offered in the us This is something offered in China. Software update feature something, something, something like that. And you can order special microphone with Tesla written on it and then, yeah, apparently you can karaoke in your car.

I have nothing against karaoke. It’s, it’s very fun. I don’t know why you would be driving down the road and karaoke, cuz that implies a lot of times you’re reading the lyrics to songs that you’re less familiar with. Cause you can karaoke already in your car without a microphone in. This is needed. This is needed because Tesla owners realize that the last thing they want to actually do is drive a Tesla.

So they try to do everything else under the sun so they don’t have to. Tesla’s also celebrating an anniversary, right? Yes it is. And not being under the sun, [01:27:00] but sort of around the sun, around it. Hundred hundreds of millions of miles away I guess. But closer. The Roadster was launched this week, four years ago.

So the Roadster and Spaceman are still out there orbiting, waiting for service at their local, waiting to be crash. Landed back. I guess eventually. I don’t know. There, there’s n nothing useful, no useful information to gain by like, I think positioning any telescopes or anything, like check what this thing is doing so nobody has so, but they are speculating that it’s probably been like wrecked a few times.

In the sense that like asteroids or other meteors or objects have like hit it. I don’t wanna see that. I know. So now I’m like, can we please turn a, a telescope in his direction or something? Can we see if there’s like door panels missing or the, the spaceman is what if the spaceman has like no head? He’s just driving.

Oh my gosh. [01:28:00] So I can’t tell you what it looks like right now, but I can tell you where it is. And it is 234,675,760 miles from Earth, moving away from Earth at the speed of 2,455 miles an hour. And it is 197,769,713 miles from Mars. Technically, I guess. It has a record of most miles traveled. Cause it’s traveled like 2 billion miles almost.

I’m, I’m sorry, Porsche. But it also has the elevation, the longest elevation change. So you lose again two Tesla ho-hum. But I will say this car is no longer. Within it’s 36,000 mile factory warranty. So if you have to replace the battery, you might as well just blow it up. Did they shoot it into space with the hazard lights on?

Cuz that would’ve been so awesome. Just like blinking away. No, but the radio was playing, you know David [01:29:00] Bowie so pretty sure that cut out a couple years ago. Yeah, I was gonna say it probably cut out when it left the atmosphere. Yeah, exactly. Well, my expectations have been thoroughly lowered. What else is in the news?

I do have one expectation that I want to explain. It’s more of a PSA about the Jeep Grand Cherokee. I think last month I panned the way the new Jeep Grand Cherokees look saying that they were too long and they looked stupid and I didn’t like them or whatever. I will say that I have seen more of them on the road, and the more that I see the new Grand Cherokee.

Granted, I’m not talking about the Wagoneers. I think I’ve only seen one Wagoneers on the road, but I have seen several of the Grand Cherokees and I’m coming around on their design. I’m starting to like them more. I’ve seen them, the different trim packages, little bit bigger wheels, some Navier tires. They definitely, look, I’m starting to come around on the design, so yeah.

Yeah, you’re, you’re right. I mean, after a while of seeing so many Geico caveman commercials decided that he was charming and [01:30:00] cute, you know, it’s the same thing with the Grand Cherokee. It’s got this weird, it’s the grill because it bends back in on itself. It’s, I don’t know, it’s odd, like I, it hasn’t grown on me yet, but then again, I, I’ve seen a bunch of them in the wild, I, I mentioned it last month when we talked about it.

I mean, good for Jeep. I almost wish that the Cherokee Nation had come through and said, do not call this a Cherokee, because I don’t feel it should wear the badge. Right. It feels like it’s a step away, especially with the three rows. It should just be the wagoneers, like I, I don’t know. It’s my personal opinion, but they should just bring back the commander name.

That seems to be what a lot of people are doing when they move from Native American names to, yeah, exactly. Now, the other thing I did see, To your point about the Grand Cherokee, I also happen to see the new Cherokee on the road, kind of the smaller version. They’ve made it bigger. It’s more like the old Grand Cherokee.

Not nearly as big. It’s not bad. It’s proportioned. Well, they [01:31:00] got rid of the, you know, the three headlights and all this crazy stuff that was going on. They continue to refine it. They’re playing a little badge engineering, I feel like, but we’ll, we’ll see what happens. Who knows, right? You ever get tired of driving in traffic?

Just wish you could, you know? Yes. Have a helicopter and yes, just zoom to where you need to be. Avoid all the, the congestion. Well look out another disruptor on the way. Thinking EVs are the future. Well, what about the air car? No. What about a car that transforms into a small aircraft so you can take off, take flight, get to your destination, land back down, convert back into a car, drive that final distance.

How many times is this idea. Going to come up in the history of the automotive world and never get off the ground. Like what? They’ve been trying this since the sixties. It’s been successful because it has passed the Slovak Transport authorities rigorous flight [01:32:00] testing in Slovakia. Oh, okay. Which that testing is equivalent just for anybody who’s in doubt equivalent, sorry.

Compatible with the European Aviation Safety Agency standards. So we’re onto something here. How big is the no-fly zone as Slovakia? Also, this thing is powered by b w engines. Does that change your mind? Yeah, cuz then it’ll fall out of the sky halfway through flight. Well, we know it’s an inline motor, so we’re good there.

Bad enough driving and having to worry about the person next to you, the person behind you, the person in front of you, the deer that could run out. And now you have to worry about the person above you. I mean, this is great reason to have a moon roof so that you can be constantly checking above you to see if an air car is gonna fall on your head.

Well, when we get a little further into this episode, we’re gonna hear more about you having to worry about the people above you anyway. But I’m looking at this and I’m wondering how does it convert? [01:33:00] We’re the wings. I don’t get it. It’s a helicopter. It’s called a helicopter, and I see a picture of it without wings, but I don’t see, you get out and you converting, pull the panel off and then it has a track that you slide it in the back, in the trunk.

Yeah. I, I trust an aviation device that I’ve. Put together. Yes, that’s exactly what I want. It’s just like those guys in Japan where you see them walking away from the train station with their 11 by 17 briefcase and it suddenly turns into a mountain bike. There’s nothing else in the briefcase. I don’t know where the wheels were stored or anything else, but it’s just like that.

It’s just like that. Except it’s nothing like that. A hundred percent. But here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna retire this thought. We’re gonna put a pin in it, and we’re gonna invite our guests to jump on a special Patreon minisode where we continue this conversation completely unfiltered for your enjoyment to not suck up the entirety of the drive-through.

We implore you to jump [01:34:00] over to patriotic.com/gt motorsports to continue that conversation. Well, I think it’s time that we move on to rich people. Thanks. I don’t know if this is really rich people. Thanks. But we’ve lumped it under this category for anyone who’s a fan of Lego, which, okay, I mean, some Lego sets are definitely a rich people thing, but they have a speed champions line in the Lego brand, and they’ve come out with a new lineup in 2022.

So if you’re looking to add to your collection this year will be releasing the Lotus Veja, the Lamborghini Kunta in 1970. Ferrari five 12 M, the Mercedes A M G F one W 12 E performance. Alongside the Mercedes a m g project One, I think that’s two in one set. And then the Aston Martin, Valkyrie, a m r Pro, along with the Aston Martin Vantage GT three in one set together.

That’s a heck of a lineup there. These range about $20 for the [01:35:00] single, but the, when they’re in the two pack, it’s 30 or $40. I forget the scale. Like they’re almost like one 24th, so they’re about six, seven inches long. Not as big as a one 18 scale car. So it’s actually a good size model if you’re not interested in, you know, die cast or anything like that.

And, and if you wanna play Legos or whatever, it’s, that’s pretty cool. I, I have a couple myself. I haven’t unboxed them yet. They’re pretty neat. I’m glad to see that Lego’s putting some more attention and effort into supporting the motor sports community with Legos. I think that’s pretty neat. So the other rich people, Fang, which I definitely opinion rich people, fang or not, I think it is Cyber quad for kids.

What? Cyber what? Huh? Tesla? Yes. Cyber wad. Quad four Wheel A T V. And it’s cyber. So it’s got the look of the cyber truck. So it’s the cyber quad and obviously it’s battery powered electric. It’s got the lithium ion battery has 15 miles of range, top speed of 10 miles an hour. It’s is suitable for eight years old and up.

These are [01:36:00] no longer available. They’re out of stock right now. Uh, they just start Are they ever in stock? They were, they were, they started shipping out the end of 21 in December, so I believe people have already started receiving them. You can actually go on eBay. People are already trying to resell them for more, but what do you think this costs, this Power wheels.

Power power, power wheels. How many Dogecoin do I need to spend to buy this? You say that, but the item number on this is 1 4 1 35 Doge. So then it’s, it’s 1400, 135 Doge. That’s how much it cost. Okay. Well then I guess the equivalency in U S D is 1900. What. Actually for a quad. Is that right on par, Brad, what do you think?

No, no. What’s a quad cost these days, Yamaha or something? What do they cost? So the top one to get the razor, I believe the razor dirt quad, which does also does 10 miles an hour is $700. Wow, okay. And it’s an electric atv that’s a [01:37:00] bit of a dealer markup there on that. So, oh, I’m not sure what you’re getting for $1,900 that you couldn’t get in the razor.

Well you’re getting the actual cyber quad, I mean Okay. You’re getting a Tesla product for your kid. So I wanna know how the wiper blades work on this. I have wiper blades. Oh, perfect. Excellent. Excellent. Work Doesn’t, it Doesn’t need ’em, it doesn’t have a windshield. So on our special breakaway mini, so of this particular drive-through, we talked about all sorts of crazy people and driving in the city, but I think we have to return to our normal crazies down in Florida, you know, and in defense of Florida, we love you.

Um, just as we love every state. I did try to find news out of other states. I tried really hard. I looked through a lot and unfortunately, once again, a lot of the good stuff’s coming out of Florida. You know, I can’t help that. Okay. Can’t hold me responsible for this completely. It’s not all Florida news.

So I’m gonna save, there’s some good ones that have not come out of Florida, [01:38:00] actually not come out of the United States. Spoiler alert. So we’ll get to those. But we’ll start with this guy. You know, this is like the stupid criminal file. Like you, you clearly have done something wrong because you have an ankle monitor and you’re out and about in a red side by side, and then you start knocking on people’s doors because your ankle monitor battery’s running low.

So of course you need to get that bad boy charged back up. Cause if it runs outta juice, suddenly the alarms are gonna go off and poppo gonna come after you. Right. Well, you know, I guess people started reporting like, Hey this, you know, dude’s coming around. Yeah. You know, that side by side was stolen, so, uh, yeah, he got arrested trying to charge his ankle monitor up while going around on a stolen, I’m, I’m thinking his original felony was probably also grand theft, but hey, yeah, he, he also has an extensive history including battery burglary and grand theft.

He’s a standup guy. Standup guy, you know, [01:39:00] he’s just misunderstood. He’s a class act now. This next one also involves some, some grand theft. Split a little bit of a different spin. So, you know, people like to go out and party and it’s Florida, there ain’t no rules. So hey, everything’s open. So you know, you’re out at the bar late one night doing as you do, unfortunately, you’ve had a few too many, and the responsible person would pick up the phone, although maybe they’ve used it as a sun visor too many times during the day.

And you know, the battery’s dead. I don’t know, he’d call an Uber, get you home. No, this guy, you know, upon exiting drunk, he couldn’t find his car and you’re thinking, yes, you shouldn’t be driving anyway. No, no, no. This guy’s a problem solver. Can’t find his car. Let me just steal a car and go look for my car in the stolen car.

But while I steal this car. And I believe it was like, what was it? Was it Honda Fit? So anyway, he steals this car, proceeds to, I don’t [01:40:00] know, stall it somehow on a railroad track. And then a train comes along and the train hits the car and launches it into somebody’s house. And this is at night. Whoa. So as the picture shows, this car is like up on its tail smash, demolished by the train in the side of this person’s house.

And then he proceeds to run away on foot, vandalizes a fruit cart, and then tries to steal Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. How does one vandalize a fruit cart? He vandalize the fruit stand and then he stole the forklift that was at the fruit stand and tried to get away. Cause the money was in the banana stand.

That’s why he’s saying vandalized not sodomized. Oh, that’s brutal. But he told the cops, he made sure to let them know that he was looking for his stolen car. It’s all good. It’s [01:41:00] all good. It’s all good. He flagged them down to tell them he was looking for his stolen car. So it’s all, okay, where’s my car?

That’s because two wrongs make a right. Right. Oh my goodness. I don’t know where a. Too, too, too much, too much to drink. That person had apparently not enough to drink. That person had that person shoulda have had enough to alcohol, can’t delay to fruit carve. Florida. Florida. People in general, I guess apparently are gonna get very disappointed here pretty soon, because I think up until very recently, Florida is one of the few states remaining that essentially doesn’t have rules around what you can write on your vanity plate.

Oh no. And so now they’re changing their minds on that and they’re gonna regulate, it might be recalling people’s tags that are already out there and they’ve already denied 500 applications last year, I guess, when they started cracking down on bad vanity plates. And, and [01:42:00] some of ’em, it’s like, okay, clever 2020 W t f be U 2020.

Okay. Haha. And okay, slow. P o s Shitbox was another one. Like, all right, you’re just having commentary on yourself. I don’t know, like, and then they just get a little bit weird, you know, there’s some political commentary ones in there. Then there’s drug Man. I don’t think you should probably be advertising for your possibly legal habits.

Um, man, that’s, that’s marketing. Marketing, right? Dead af. Not sure what that is supposed to signify. I mean, killer. Here’s another one that could be marketing for themselves. Not in a good way. Fat AF F T B S T R D. It’s Fat Bastard. Yep. FK Diet. Okay. These people, they’re like personally attacking themselves.

It’s very strange. Then the weirdest one T Bundy, like really? I get this one though. I get it though. Own [01:43:00] Volkswagen Beetle. Yeah. I’m gonna give the shout out to the girls over at Sinister Hood. You need to listen to the Ted Bundy episode or multiple episodes on Ted Bundy. So this all gets explained on their podcast, and that is, well, they didn’t, that is clever, but also creepy.

They didn’t say that it went on a brown Volkswagen. They’re saying, how creepy would it have been? Had the application been on a I skim. I skim. No, I, oh, and then I wonder if, okay. Yeah. Reading. Yes. Creepy. So, yeah, apparently they’re cracking down on on that. So can’t imagine what the other plates that have gone through in the past must say, way to Go Florida.

Way to try and class things up. Well, apparently there’s some other states that are Buck Wild already, so there’s a tag idea right there. Buck wild. Buck Wild. That’s safe though. There’s nothing bad about that. I don’t think. Don’t think. All right, so now we’re gonna go north to our Canadian friends. Oh, the Canada ones are always good, you know, because they always, [01:44:00] I think, so much better of Canadians.

And then when I see stuff like this, I’m just like Canada. Okay? It’s all like letter Kenny. It’s letter Kenny. Oh, it’s not. I’m a kid. I, I love Canada. I enjoy visiting there. This woman somehow, bless her heart, ends up some sort of frozen water body, I think a river. She ends up on this river in her bright yellow scion, from what I can tell in that picture.

But then the ice breaks and so the car starts sinking. Now you think a sane person would be like, time to get the F O G T F O, this thing? No, no, no. She stands on the back of the car, proceeds to take a selfie as everybody else is trying to like come to her rescue and call police and do whatever. She’s just chilling as her car is sinking, taking selfies.

I mean, you gotta capture the moment. That’s for the Graham, as Brad was saying. For [01:45:00] Graham, what other time in your life would you get the opportunity to stand on a sinking Scion and take a picture of yourself? I mean, you know, this one Twitter person, I think summarize it pretty well. You know, she captured the moment with a selfie while people hurried and worried to help her.

Like, yeah, a hundred percent they should just left her there. But then the best part is it’s like inception, right? Because there’s a picture of some other per with their cell phone, taking a picture of her on her cell phone doing the selfie thing. So it’s like this cascading failure for the Graham. I have saved the absolute best.

I think for last. I think this has got to be tops. And this comes from our friends across the pond in the uk. Oh, where apparently an Englishman’s home is his castle, and that pretty much stands up in court as defense, really? So this man who’s got this estate farmland or whatever, he’s a farmer, not Jeremy Parkson, fourth generation hill farmer.

[01:46:00] This man. Cutting to the chase. He uses essentially a telehandler, so like a forklift telehandler with a fork on the front end. So like a forklift. And he flips and pushes some guy’s car off his property that refused to move his car out of his driveway. Watch the video. There’s a video of it. This is epic.

This dude’s car got like a flat or broke down, asked him repeatedly to move the driver, I think. Didn’t get into an altercation, but this other dude that was his friend showed up who was drunk and shirtless and like allegedly punched the guy first, which I guess, which he was like, Nope, forklift telehandler thing.

I’m gonna take care of y’all. And he pushed it out into the road, turned it onto the side of the road and just like left it there. That is awesome. And he was taken to court, but the charges were all dismissed because he was protecting his. His castle. Oh, before we move on, did you all watch the end of the video?

He hit the guy with the [01:47:00] forklift. Oh yeah. Yeah. Well he turned the forklift and the guy was standing there. Yeah, no, he, he hit the guy with the forklift. Yeah, the guy was standing there. He knew the guy was standing there and he turned the, the forklift pretty rapidly, more power to him. You know what? Get off my lawn.

Get off my lawn. Well, that being said, I think it’s time that we go behind the wall for some motor sports news. So what’s going on in the world of NASCAR time? Not something you usually report about. No. Um, it’s just something that came across Netflix. Apparently on the 22nd of February, they’re gonna be airing a docuseries.

It’s six episodes. It’s called Race Bubba Wallace. So it’s, um, a docuseries on the NASCAR driver, Bubba Wallace and his NASCAR journey thus far. Not really much other information in, in the preview for it, but one can only imagine, well, maybe we’ll have to take a look at it and talk about it on the next drive through.

Right. But speaking of other dramas on television, what about Formula One? What’s going on over there? Brad? What’s the big news? Uh, uh. All the manufacturers [01:48:00] are, or all the teams are releasing their new 2022 cars. I think Haas was the first team to do it. And yeah, I mean all the cars pretty much look the same.

They’re all cool. I, I believe the wheels are bigger. I mean, the tires are bigger than they have in previously, so that should help. So I’m just gonna have to wait and see how they perform on, in some way, make the racing more exciting. We’re gonna go ahead and see, we always say that every year I, I hear that phrase, we’re gonna make the racing more exciting.

Has that ever proven to be true since Bernie Eckles, Ecclestone or Clete, whatever his name is, is no longer in charge and that other guy, sports or whatever take, took it over? They have made some improvements and actually this year is the first year where they implemented a lot of different changes, especially to the cars and stuff.

So I think it could be good. Last year they were, they were playing around at a lot of the races with the sprint race as a qualifying race. I think that was really cool. Inadvertently, or with, without their even trying. Some of the races ended up almost in like a reverse grid because of red flags and stuff like that on the [01:49:00] restart, which was super exciting.

But that wasn’t anything that they actually did. It was just kind of a coincidence thing. They are trying to make changes. Some of them make it more exciting, but it depends on what you’re looking for in racing. Some of our F1 fans hate the idea of the sprint race cuz it takes away from the qual, the actual qualifying and, and it adds nothing really.

It discourages someone from actually trying to qualify, you know, and have the fastest lap. I’m gonna watch anyway. I like F1 racing. I think it’s much more exciting than the IndyCar. I thought the new formula cars were Indy cars. They really looked similar. They, I mean, I’ve looked at, they look identical, but they’re, I mean, the McLaren’s, the Astons.

I was like, man, that’s a cool livery on that IndyCar. You guys got there and like, whatever. But to your point about making the racing more exciting and, and the changes, my hot take on this is if you want the racing to be more exciting, get rid of all this balance of power nonsense. What the people want, what the fans want is not.

Everybody to be the same. This isn’t go-kart racing. This isn’t even NASCAR for that respect. [01:50:00] And NASCAR, I think should change too. Let people build their cars. We’re gonna talk about here with Rolex, and actually we should probably maybe transition to Rolex at the same time. You know, when they did the balance of power on the Corvettes.

If you can’t build a car that competes, build a better car, stop penalizing everybody. If you’re hitting, if you’re following the marks of the rules, build a better car. The only caveat to that is I would say institute some sort of budget to keep some of the, I mean, there’s a huge disparity in the amount of money that some of these race teams have.

Like obviously the factory teams like Mercedes are going to have a significant budget compared to a team like Haas. Why don’t we split F1 down the middle and do like they did in WRC, where it’s WRC one and WRC two, so there’s F1 A and F1 B. That’s essentially what it is. There’s the, the best and then the best of the rest.

But that’s an unofficial thing. It’s not official. Yeah. But yeah, I would, I would agree with that. That’s, but, but, but look at it this way. If it was cheaper for Williams to develop like they did in the seventies, like a six wheeled formula [01:51:00] car and have it be a v12, let him do it. Who cares, like this whole cookie cutter, everybody’s got the same car with different skin on it.

It doesn’t do anything for me. This is why I stopped being interested in Formula One was right after the V 10 era where all the cars were basically the same and, and during the V 10 era it was D it was still different enough. Ferrari still had their motors. B W had their motors, Reno had their motors, and they were all different enough and they performed differently.

Some were better than others. To your point, Ferrari has deep pockets, you know, things like that. But once they decided to make all the F1 cars cookie cutter, I’m done. I checked out, I don’t care really. I see that in a lot of other racing and it, and it hurts me because I think it takes away. From the technological progression, it takes away from the ingenuity, it takes away from the originality.

And when you’re looking at the cars, you’re like, well, what’s the difference between the Aston and the Honda? There should be a clear delineation between what they are and what they’re capable of. Not the same thing. Here it is. It, it’s, so there is [01:52:00] a team spending gaps down to 140 million from 1 75 in 2020.

Oh damn. Is that all to, to help level the playing field for smaller teams like Haas? Cause they go up against outfits with relatively unlimited resources like Ferrari and Mercedes and Red Bull, which used to spend upwards of 400 million annually. So yes, they’re instituting that as well as all these other changes to kind of more, here’s the underdog story, right?

Ferrari spends 400 million and they get their butts handed to them by Williams, who can only spend 1 75. So who cares? Let them spend a billion dollars if they want to, but build a better mouse trap. Figure out a way to do it and, and you know where it comes from. The bitter engineers are the ones that do more with less.

That’s been proven time and time again. The cars that succeed are the ones that were built with less. And they got more out of them than the folks that had deep pockets. That’s the Porsche story. That’s the early Italian sports car stories where they didn’t have anything and they built from nothing. So I think we’ve, we’ve gone away from that and it, and it, it takes [01:53:00] away from the racing, in my opinion, because it, it’s like watching a video game.

Right. And we’ll talk about that in a minute too. I wanna talk about Rolex before we transition to some W R C news. I’d mentioned that, you know, balance of power a couple times we, we talked about the Corvette. I, I thought that was, I hate to say sort of pathetic. Like I really felt bad for teen Corvette. I don’t know why they were trying to, like, or they were forced to step down and meet the new rules or whatever.

Maybe the Corvettes in this weird gray area where it should really be like a GT two car, which doesn’t exist. You know, this kind of, I, I, I just felt like me, it didn’t really help. The, the field was bigger than it’s been in a number of years, but, I also wasn’t impressed. I’m not happy with this LMP three thing.

It just feels like there’s more of the same cars on the track and there’s no variation in, in on the theme, you know, stuff like that. What’d you think, Brad? At least of the lineup and stuff like that for Rolex? Uh, I thought the top level was fun. Was fun to watch. The, the per the DPI class was a lot of fun.

I can do that. The Acura and the Cadillacs go at each other. That was [01:54:00] cool. Corvette, I don’t know cuz I, I don’t know if I fully understand the rule changes with that, but it was my understanding that both the G T D and the G T T Pro cars are basically classed the same now. Yeah, the only difference is the driver’s skill really, that that’s the case.

I mean, again, with the balance of power or balance of performance or whatever, whatever it is, I haven’t looked too much into it and how it affected Corvette, this race. I don’t know. Overall, I thought the race was fun to watch. The bits that I did watch, yeah, the end with the nine elevens was insane. The front of the pack, end of the race wasn’t nearly as important as the battle between those two nine elevens.

That was legitimately awesome racing those last 18 minutes where they’re battling back and forth, bump drafting, pushing each other, and inevitably it ends in a cloud of smoke and disappointment. It was, it was epic. The, the front of the pack, I could have cared less what was happening between Acura and Cadillac and all that stuff cuz that race was already over by the time the second place car had dropped back a couple seconds.

I was like, they’re never gonna make that up. And I’m [01:55:00] glad the cameras turned their attention to the GTLM cars because that was, that was exciting. I waited 23 hours and 40 minutes for that 20 minutes of action and, and it’s a shame that it had to come at that point. And there was cool stuff that happened in the middle of the night, but I think the thing that made.

The race, a complete drag was these extended yellows and I watched most of the race. I only got a couple hours of sleep and so I was, I was tuned in for a lot of it. It was incredible. I think there were over 20 yellows in the whole race, but they like went on forever and it was just like, what are we still doing under yellow?

Then we come out of yellow and then we go into another yellow and it’s like, oh, holy crud. And it just, there were parts of the race that were just painful, but that, that ending definitely made up the difference. You know, going back to the balance of power, I felt bad for Corvette, and this isn’t a slight against Lexus, but when the Lexuses are walking away from the Corvettes, I was like, something’s wrong.

Either cars are busted or whatever and, and again, it’s not a slight against Lexus, but it’s just that [01:56:00] Lexus has been riding that same car for what feels like forever, and I’m sure they’ve made advances and whatever, but I don’t wanna say that the Lexus isn’t competitive, but it’s not winning G T L M. The front runners have been Porsche and Corvette and BMW and things like that.

They’re always just sort of there. But to see the Corvette just getting walked by the Lexus, which is tried and true. You know, it’s kind of always there. Like I said, it just, it hurt a little bit to see that, and I, I don’t know what’s going on. Hopefully they’ll figure that all out. Uh, a couple things that I thought were interesting.

The safety car was that color was heinous. I mean, I, I know that it has to stand out, but that b w did not look good in whatever that yellow was. Uh, please repaint that car. Rewrap it. Oh god, that was awful. The other thing was I had a hard time differentiating between the new Benzes and the nine Elevens, because from behind they look a lot alike.

The rear end of the nine 11 is so big now. Ah, I don’t know. So that was hard to like tell them apart when they were in traffic. But the other thing [01:57:00] that I thought was interesting was John Pearson, apparently he’s 15 year old. He, next year he’s gonna be the youngest driver in Rolex history. So I thought that was pretty cool.

They did a spot with him for a couple minutes, kind of interviewed him. I’d love to know what his backstory is at 15, you know, going to be 16 years old next year. How do you go from high school to driving? Well, yes. Okay. The answer is obvious, but I still think it’s pretty cool. I’d love to know what that backstory is.

So, 23 is gonna be an awesome year. There’s a lot of new cars coming. I am really curious to see how Rolex shapes up if the teams that are gonna go to Lamonts are going to use Rolex as their test race, because it’s gonna make for a really exciting Rolex next year. I’m cautiously optimistic. But I think it’s time we switch to some W R C news.

What do you got Tanya? Isabel Gish, a French co-driver in rally. She teamed up recently with Sebastian Loeb and has [01:58:00] become, I guess maybe the second woman, or at least the first woman in the last 25 years to, uh, co drive at Monte Carlo rally and be in the winning car. So, congrats to her. And she’s got an interesting story that this is not her full-time gig.

She kind of moonlights as a co-driver and she has for, for many years. It’s a first time, uh, competing with in the right seat with Sebastian Loeb. So good for her, her her day job is a math teacher. That’s awesome. And she’s very humble sounding. She doesn’t want to have a lot of awesome muss about any of this or bring the trophy in the school to show anybody.

She just kind of wants to go about her day. And, you know, a lot of people that may not be intimate with how WRC works and rally, you know, there’s two people in the car. They’re going flat out, you know, crazy on these mountain roads. And the navigator’s job is super important. It’s actually even more difficult than the driving in the sense that they keep the pace and the rhythm of the run [01:59:00] itself of the pass.

Right? They’re giving out instructions to the driver in advance because there’s. On many occasions, the driver only sees the run one time, and it’s usually in a passenger vehicle at lower speed. And what they’re doing on that one run is taking notes about the course, about the elevations, the camber, where there’s holes where you need to turn in, where to watch out what’s on the exit of the corner.

And those hieroglyphs, those instructions that they write are super important. It’s a very complex type of shorthand that they use and they need to be able to obviously remember that, but also come to an agreement with their driver on what the turn is, what they’re gonna do. So she’s got a really difficult job working with any of the drivers, but even a, a world champion like Sebastian Loeb, I mean, it’s an honor and a privilege, but also it’s, it’s a challenge, right?

So obviously they don’t have a, uh, language barrier cause they’re both French. I’m proud of her. I mean, it, it’s a tough job and, and being in the right seat and not really looking also where you’re going and just reading that book line [02:00:00] after line and, and, and being on those difficult stages and, and crazy weather conditions and, and all that.

It’s a tough job. I don’t think I could stu, I don’t think I have the stomach for it, honestly, because I probably get sick, you know, just trying to do that. Yeah. Uh, in the passenger seat. But to your point about the last time it was done, and I, I might be wrong about my WRC knowledge, but I think it goes almost as far back as Michelle Ton and Fabrizio Ponds as winning female co-driver navigator at Monte Carlo.

It might be that far back, which is 35, said it was five years. You said it was FIA Pans with Piero ti in, uh, 1997. So after she left Michelle? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. But it was FIA then. Yeah. Still the same navigator as it was for Michelle Ton. So there you go. I mean, she’s famous as, you know, one of the early female rally navigators, so that’s awesome.

It’s good to see that and we wanna promote that. And I know she doesn’t want the glory, but, you know, I’m, I’m proud of her. That’s awesome. It’s, it’s a tough job. It’s a thankless job, that’s for sure. So a little bit of news from the [02:01:00] eSports world, right, Brad? Yeah. I guess if you’re, uh, PlayStation person, which I’m not, but GT seven grand seasonal seven is coming out, so it is going to be released on March 4th of this year.

It brings with it 400 cars, the 34 different locations with 90 different layouts. It’s gonna be available on both the PS four and the PS five. And yeah, if you play Grand Temo for some reason over Forza, then you know, this is your bag here. You, I’m just curious, how long have they been waiting for this new version of Grant Temo to come out?

I mean, the last Grand Temo I saw was Grand Temo Sport, which that one was, I think it was all supposed to be like multiplayer online racing based. And not much of like a campaign or anything like you get with all the other fours and everything. I don’t know. Apparently this one, they’ve, they’re going back to the heyday of Grand Tourisms, which I guess would be like what Grand Turmo?

Three, two. Two or three. Something like two. Two, yeah. Two, two or three. So I think they’ve kind of gone back to that campaign mode [02:02:00] style. Nice. And they’ve gone, added back in a lot of the other, I guess, side features that that had, which were kind of the nifty, silly things. That was Grand Chimo, like buying the used cars.

And I thought that was the coolest thing doing mods and like all that kind of stuff. So they, they’re bringing that back in. I like the wheel swapping was my favorite. You could get wheels off of other cars washing your car. Yeah, I Oh yeah. You could wash your car. That was pretty cool. One of my. Biggest gripes with the most recent Grand T was the track selection.

I guess because Forza has so many tracks under contract and are under licensing or they own licensing to all these different tracks. As H P D E people, we drive a whole bunch of different tracks around the country and everything, and you couldn’t drive some of those in Grand T because they just didn’t have ’em.

I don’t know that there were any tracks that I was actually interested in. In Grand. I think that’s still the case in seven. Cause I had pulled up a track list and they really don’t, it seemed like a high percentage of. What seemed like made up tracks versus [02:03:00] Yeah, actual tracks. Forsa seems to have a lot more actual tracks.

When I was a kid, I used to love driving those made up tracks cause I didn’t know any better. But now that I’ve actually been on the real race track, this doesn’t interest me at all. Oh, you don’t, you don’t wanna drive Autumn Valley or whatever that is. You know Forsa has Maple Valley. Right. So it’s all good.

Auto Grove. Yeah, whatever. I don’t, I don’t care. So let’s switch over to our H P D Junkie Trackside report. I got a note from Dave Peters the other day. You know, they are still backfilling tons of events into the system for the 2022 season. It feels like a lot of people are making up for lost time. He told me the other day that at Thunder Hill alone, they just entered 75 events and apparently there’s like 80 more for that track itself this year.

And I’m like, they must be doing something every day of the week out there in California. So he’s keeping up to date on them, that kind of stuff. So there’s a lot more information being pushed to the website right now. So if you wanna know what’s going on in February and March, hop over to hpd junkie.com and [02:04:00] search by track to make it much easier to say, Hey, what’s going on in my area?

And you can actually see what’s going on from now until the end of the year. And obviously it continues to prune itself, expand and contract and all that. But I do want to announce on behalf of our sponsors over already hooked on driving. As a reminder, they’re gonna be at v i r at the beginning of March, on March 3rd and March 4th.

This is like one of the earliest events in the D M V on the schedule right now that there might be something a little bit earlier, but that’s pretty early for this area to have a track event followed very soon after by New Jersey Motorsports Park. They’re gonna be at Thunderbolt on April 9th and 10th.

And then, Two weeks after that, they’ll be at Watkins Glen for a three day spring fling from April 29th, 30th, and May 1st. So they’re doing their fall event in the spring as well. Now three days at Watkins Glen and then the, it goes from there, right? They’re at Pocono a couple more times. They’re at Limerock and Summit Point.

You know, summit Point is back on the [02:05:00] schedule. They’re at Shenandoah for June 18th and 19th and things like that. And I also want to give a shout out to Mike and Mona. They’re actually gonna be on the show next week, kicking off season three. So you get to hear all about H O D and what their program is like, and some really cool behind the scenes content where Mike actually turns the tables on me and interviews me during that behind the scenes Patreon mini episode.

So be sure to check that out next week when it hits our uh, main server. You know, I mentioned this is the end of season two. This is the last episode of season two, and I just wanted to kind of just do a quick retrospective for the folks that may be listening to the show for the first time. You know, this is going to be the first episode at the top of the list.

If you wanna go back and wanna know when season two started. Look for the Vet Motorsports episode with Peter Klein, right, where we talk about their program to get disabled veterans back into the motorsports world and all these kinds of programs [02:06:00] that they have and how they facilitate that and whatnot.

We also had, what should I buy, ugly cars, parts one and two and nineties cars. We kicked off an entire crossover month in the middle of the summer. We had Brian from Take Two podcasts on. We talked about a bunch of car related movies and shows and things like that. We had Steven, Izzy from Everything I learned from movies on twice this season.

We had a lot of fun with them. We look forward to doing more projects in the future. John Warner of the fourth author of the Little Anton series and noted Porsche historian. He also has a podcast. We did a crossover with him and a shout out to Carolyn Ford and Mark Sunnel from the Tech Transforms podcast, where we talked about the intersection of it and the racing world as a crossover episode as well.

We also had a ton of interviews, awesome interviews with Rob Holland, Bobby Parks, David Middleton, Chris Bright from CP X and our favorite. You got a guy, Paul Willam Moske. Yeah, we did a ton of technical episodes too. We had Andrew Rains on from Apex Pro. We interviewed the folks over at Li Cual. We talked to Blackstone Joe over at Blackstone Labs, which was also a [02:07:00] crossover episode.

We interviewed James Clay, both for Powerflex and for Bimmer World, and we talked to South Finale over at Porsche Diesel U S A, and to prove that we do more than just take laps and do H P D E. We talked off-roading. We talked drag racing. We talked to lunar racing. I mean, who talks lunar racing these days?

We do. That’s who we also celebrated Gingerman Raceway’s 25th anniversary, and we did a retrospective with Summit Point. Looking back over their 50 year history, dove into both of the backgrounds of those tracks and their evolutions and what the future looks like for those two facilities. There are 56 episodes to catch up on from season two alone, not counting all of the bonus and behind the scenes content.

If you sign up for Patreon, you know I can’t pick a best of articles for season two because there are 640 drive-through articles that we have reviewed on this particular sub arc of the Break Fixx podcast. So there’s a lot to catch up on there. They’re a lot of fun. [02:08:00] And don’t forget, one of our favorite links to the drive-through episodes has to be, this year’s we would be remiss retrospective, where Tanya rant about all things Tesla.

And we would love to give some big shout outs to all our guests hosts during season two. David Drew Andrews, David Al, Middleton, Donovan, Laura, mark Shank, mountain man, Dan, and especially Tanya. Again, we have to shout out Tanya for helping us out, especially while I’ve been away. And if you’ve missed out some of the winter episodes on the podcast, we celebrated our 100th episode with a crossover with our friends, Steve and Izzy.

From everything I learned from movies where we reviewed the seventies, Cult Classic Corvette Summer, Andrew Bank and Mike Vic from Havoc Performance told the Tale of two Vipers, and we cranked up the way back machine by revisiting a Patreon OD called Toro Toro, where we chat with Jason Kennedy from auto interests about their humble beginnings in the Ford Tourist Club.

Thank you to [02:09:00] everyone that came on the show this month, and please look forward to more great episodes this spring. And don’t forget, March officially kicks off season three. Can you believe it? I don’t know. Can you believe it? So we do have some new Patreons for February. What do we got there, Brad? We gotta give a big shout out to, uh Todd, the Saber-Tooth Goat Tiger Lilly, and he’s also the recipient of this year’s G T M Award.

So if you’re a Patreon member, you would’ve heard the G T M Awards night, uh, that was recorded during Rolex. Uh, he would’ve heard his name. Uh, we also have a special thanks to our new sponsor, Mike Kucha of Havoc Performance. That’s right. And remember folks, everything that we talked about on this episode and more is available on our website, gt motorsports.org.

So be sure to check on the follow on article so you can dive into all the Florida man stories, Tesla technological advancements, or maybe that Ferrari s u that we talked about. So that’s all available on our website. There’s links pretty much everywhere. And remember, there’s bonus and behind [02:10:00] the scenes contents on patreon.com.

So that’s patreon.com/gt motorsports. And we would be remiss if we didn’t shout out some anniversaries. This year is eight years with gtm. It’s Tanya and I. Eric of course, is a lifelong g tmr, but officially eight years as well. Uh, we also have some, some other OG original gangster GTMs like Mountain Mandan, uh, and Porsche Al.

That’s it. Well, we didn’t have a special guest host this month as we close out season two, but look forward to other returning guests in season three. Some really cool stuff that we have planned, some exciting new interviews, racers, and other ideas that we’re gonna put together for season three. As we’ve mentioned before, if you have an interest on being on the show, don’t hesitate to reach out to us, call or text, email us, et cetera.

But if you’d like to be a guest host on the drive-thru, we always have a spot and you’re always welcome to come on and share your opinion, share your stories. We’d love to have you. So I guess I got [02:11:00] a shout out to Brad. Thanks for being here. Closing out 56 long episodes of season two, and I’m looking forward to where season three takes us.

Well, thank you for having me back. I appreciate my spot not being permanently taken. Um, but also let’s, it’s a big spot, my man. Big shoes. It’s a very big seat to fill, I must admit. Uh, and then also a shout out to the executive producer, co-host, uh, and owner of the podcast. Whether she likes it or not, Tanya, whether she knows it or not.

The drive-through wouldn’t be the drive-through without Tanya, that’s for sure. We’d all be living in Florida. Yeah. And all the members who support gtm. Without you, none of this would be. That’s right. Well, until next season, I guess this is us signing off. Thanks for being aboard for all of season two.

Watch out for that sunshine and we’re out.

Well, here we are in the drive through line. Me [02:12:00] and her cars in front of us, cars in back of us all. Just waiting to order. There’s some idiot in a Volvo with this bright son behind me. Ilene out the window and scream, Hey, watch your trying to do Blind me, my wife says.

If you like what you’ve heard and want to learn more about gtm, be sure to check us out on www.gt motorsports.org. You can also find us on Instagram at Grand Tour Motorsports. Also, if you want to get involved or have suggestions for future shows, you can call or text us at (202) 630-1770 or send us an email at crew chief gt motorsports.org.

We’d love to hear from you. Hey everybody, crew Chief Eric here. We really hope you enjoyed this episode of Break Fix, and we wanted to remind you that G T M remains a no annual fees organization, and our goal is to continue to bring you quality episodes like this one [02:13:00] 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 little as $2 and 50 cents a month, you can keep our developers, writers, editors, casters, and other volunteers fed on their strict diet of fig Newton’s, gummy bears, and Monster. Consider signing up for Patreon today at www.patreon.com/gt motorsports. And remember, without fans, supporters, and members like you, none of this would be possible.