B/F: The Drive Thru #30

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VW ID.7 Reveal - CES 2023, Las Vegas NV

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Gran Touring Motor Sports Podcast Break Fix, where we’re always fixing the break into something motorsports related. The Drive-Throughs GTMs monthly news episode, and is sponsored in part by organizations like H P D E junkie.com, hooked on driving American muscle.com, collector car guide.net, project Motoring Garage style magazine, and many others.

If you are interested in becoming a sponsor of the drive-through, look no further than www.gt motorsports.org. Click about and then advertising. Thank you again to everyone that supports Gran Touring Motorsports, our podcast Break Fix and all the other services we provide. Welcome to drive through episode number 30.

This is number 30, right? Mm-hmm. . This is our monthly recap where we put together a menu of automotive motorsport and random car adjacent news. Now, now let’s pull up to window number one for our winner recap. Oh, [00:01:00] goodness. Goodness me. I’m excited. It’s, it’s been a minute since we’ve done a drive through, right?

We got this nice winter break, so this is gonna be good. Yes. I like the winter break. gives us time to collect our thoughts, you know, was it a break? Yes. Did you get anything good for Christmas? Nope. Yes. Did you get anything off of our holiday shopping guide? No. What ? Yes, actually yes I did. What’d you get?

I got the Rally Nets Watch. How do you like it? Now that I’ve got a band that actually fits my giant arm, did I like it a lot? Very cool. I actually got a couple things off the list as well. My wife was paying attention. I got the new Proto Tepo RSS by Pilate. They’re excellent shoes. I cannot say enough good things about those.

And , it was kind of an interesting situation. I realized through Don over Garage out Pilate was also releasing their new line of coffee. So we had two deliveries coming from the same company almost at the same time. And we were like [00:02:00] not knowing each other at Goddess was like, which box is it? You know, this and that.

Checking the names, all this kind of thing. So we have the Pilate coffee and the shoes and both are excellent, by the way. So I’m super excited about that. So what you’re saying is you could have received shoes beforehand and gotten coffee for Christmas. That’s very true. And And vice versa. I don’t think she would’ve been happy with the shoes though.

Yeah. Are they pink? No, they’re red and black. So they’re pretty neat. Yes. Yes. That’s nice. Since it’s our winter recap, we gotta talk about what’s hot and what’s not in 2023. And this year is gonna be an epic year for us here at G T M because we got all sorts of field trips in store, all sorts of really interesting races to go to.

And Tanya set the stage by taking us to all places. Sin City. Sweet. You dig that? We’re going to Vegas. Mike Vegas. You think we get there by midnight? Money? We’re gonna be up 500 by midnight by Vegas. Vegas, baby Vegas. Actually, you know what? I can’t talk about what happened in Las Vegas because it was Vegas.

So there [00:03:00] really is nothing to recap here. I think we just move on to the next, uh, topic Lies. You got the opportunity and I’m so jealous to go to c e s. And for those that don’t know what c e s is, I don’t know where you’ve been this entire time. It’s the consumer electronic. show. So that was your first time going to c e s.

Tell us all about it. Yeah, work brought me there. Coincidentally, who knew first time being there? Obviously we’ve covered big reveals throughout the past years with c e s, you know, Sony and their electric car, which we’ll talk about cuz it was there again. But you know, it’s a huge convention. Something like over 110,000 people like in attendance.

I think over 3000 different vendors. Obviously the focus isn’t cars, but there’s a pretty big area in the convention center that’s dedicated to everything automotive related. It’s consumer electronics. So you’ve got, you know, LG there and Samsung and you know, IWA and RCA [00:04:00] and you know, Frigidaire and you know, people like that from everything from, you know, mini fridges to satellites in space.

There was even like a NASA booth showing off these really cool cameras that if you’ve got a million dollars they can do all this above earth photography. Which I think is, it sounded like listening to the guy a little bit. Going off tangent. It’s more for like movies. So like, you know, the next Top gun three Tom Cruise can pay the NASA satellite to take super amazing kind definition photos that can all be spliced back in together into the movie.

So you had the full gamut of things there. Towards the end of my stay there, once the business stuff was out of the way, I did take advantage and snuck back over to the convention center, um, and kind of perused automotive floor again, taking more pictures, taking in the sights and sounds again, the focus isn’t.

Necessarily, you know, the latest car from each of the marks. There are a few key brands there and it’s, you know, the focus is more on what the gadgetry is, what the electronics is, what the technology [00:05:00] is. So there was a lot more than, you know, Sony Volkswagen was there, Mercedes, there were even brands you’ve never heard of that are like can canoe level that are making these small little ba bizarre little trucks that are electric and you’re gonna ride ’em around in the forest or something, you know?

And there were tons of electric bicycles of all shapes and varieties, miniature motorcycles or mopeds. I mean, they had some, could envision them in narrow downtown streets, not America, but in foreign countries. And you know, they had racks on the side that, you know, they’re worker bikes and people have got two by fours on ’em and they’ve got a big tool chest on the back hanging off these bicycles that are elec electrified, right?

Y you put the two by fours. Perpendicular to the bike right now. Yes. And we have seen that that’s done. If you’re in Florida, that’s how you do it or whichever state that happened with the two by fours through the bag glass? Yes. No, when you’re in other countries, they run parallel with the, oh, bicycle

Those must be the countries [00:06:00] where they drive on the other side of the road. Okay. Yeah. Got it. , it’s a standard verse metric thing. Yes. . It’s a Florida verse. Everywhere else thing. No, but some of the cool things I will say Volkswagen was there and so Ooh, what were they unveiling? Unbeknownst me cuz I really wasn’t following anything leading up to the event.

So lo and behold, coming out the backside of the convention center, there was this pube outside all orange and purple colors and it had Volkswagen on the side of it and I was like, oh, interesting. Eventually made my way out there. Had a big ID seven sign on. There was a line of people, they were like waiting to go into this building and then like four minutes later you’d see the line of people come out the building

I was like, okay, let me go stand in this line. went in. It was a big reveal for the ID seven. It was a epileptic person’s worst nightmare. . It was actually like a seizure warning when you went in. They like briefed you before, like if you’re susceptible to like seizures or anything like that, like please.

Leave. It was this whole like light show in [00:07:00] a 15 by 15 foot box, essentially with the car in there. Music sounds, the car was spinning. You had took a video of it, which is included in our show notes. Yeah. But I said I couldn’t , so I, I filmed the whole thing. So if anyone’s interested, you can check it out.

It’s on the G T M YouTube site as well, and you can find it in the show notes. So the ID seven is bigger than the ID four. I would, I would think so because of the number, the ID seven’s a sedan. It’s a sedan. What the what? It’s like a giant Passat. The ID four is more like a, it’s crossover SUV V. It didn’t get to go inside the car or anything like that, but still, Ooh, the big unveil.

And you can find press lease info and all on it as well. The other interesting thing was, I was not expecting to see, but was very happy to see was the ID buzz and the ID buzz is at the van. So that’s the new microbus or the wannabe van again rather. Right. So it’s the retro re-imagination of the van again.

And it was there on display with the Audi Tron and the [00:08:00] Tecan. There was a reason all three of them were together. It wasn’t necessarily a bag thing, it was a technology thing of all of them. So, I mean, it was obviously the electrification of those cars, but they were open. You could sit in the ID bus. I sat in it.

I looked all over it. Took a bunch of pictures. Trunk was open. You could see how all of the storage and everything, I really liked it. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Whoa. Hold on. You like a van truck? S u v thing? That’s not possible. Van. It’s a van. Van. We’re gonna call it a van. It’s a large hatchback.

It’s a taller, longer hatchback. Mm-hmm. . I very much, I like the, the seats were super comfortable. , like I had really nice seats. You won’t get those in the US model. That’s prototype only. Probably not like the interior was like super clean, super simple lines. Had like a lot of good room in it, you know, it had big center console, center screen thing that like everybody’s doing.

But it still had like a center screen as well where your [00:09:00] typical gauges would go. I mean the color of it was like gorgeous. Like it was two tone obviously cuz that’s all how all they were. So it was this dark denim, midnight kind of navy color. And then it was white on top with the darker blue and it had like some black accents and the wheels were black and silver and the lights themselves had like black accents in them with the red taillights and all this stuff.

So overall it was a very nice package. I thought. I like it. It’s super cool. More importantly, yes. How many bags of mulch can you transport in the ID bus? You know, quite a few. Quite a few. It’s got some trunk space and I assume the seats in the back would fold down and so you could fit a lot of mulch back there.

So when we talked about the ID buzz before, we talked about the relative rear seating position to the door arch and all this kind of thing, making it seem like it’s smaller than it appears to be, but now that you’ve seen it in person, how big is it next to the e-tron? It wasn’t that, [00:10:00] I don’t know. Like it, it didn’t dwarf the e-tron.

This being the tron gt, right? The tacan based car? Yes. Which, how does that look in person? Right. I mean that was a gorgeous car as well. I didn’t get to go in it. The doors were all closed. I don’t think I saw did that in Taan. People might not have been going into, cuz I’ve never saw the doors open on them.

But people were allowed in and out of the id buzz. I mean, it would, it’s definitely taller, obviously, but I don’t know. It didn’t feel massive. It didn’t feel like, I think in terms of interior cargo space, like I, granted I’m a petite, I’m not short, but I’m not a sort of petite ish I guess. So like, I had plenty of room and there were other people like getting in in the back and I, I felt like they had plenty of like leg room and head room and things like that.

So, uh, actually to take a selfie myself, , I’m looking at it right now, sitting inside the front seat. I’ve got like , I’ve got like beetle head room in it. So there’s, there’s definitely probably acceptable for taller folks. did they tease the price yet? So there were no price tags. There [00:11:00] were like QR codes you could have scanned.

So maybe they gave you more information. I didn’t do that because it’s not a car show. Right. So they didn’t have any of those details on display. I haven’t seen anything saying what the price is either. As we were chatting back and forth while you were at the show, you also recognized another brand that we talked about on a previous drive-through, which was VIN Fast.

They had a huge display actually. They even were like tricky about it. Cause at one point I like came around a corner and like there’s. Avast. I’m like, oh, okay. Except then you like you came around another corner and then there was like five of them. And bicycles, apparently they make as well. I mean they had a huge display.

They had signs hanging like down from the ceiling and everything. I’m sure they spent a pretty penny to get there. But they’re all like sort of these compact de crossover minis U v looking things. I mean, they’re not horrible looking, honestly. They had the VF eight, the VF nine, pretty interesting. They all kind of looked similar.

They were an eye popping colors, emerald green and [00:12:00] this honey yellow kind of color, whatnot. I was surprised. I didn’t know they made bicycles. So they had quite a few of those on display as well. And then you got the opportunity to talk to the designer of the Mercedes EQ XX prototype. Right? So what happened was I was actually walking down the street from the convention center back to wherever the flow of traffic passing me.

I caught the rear end of a car and I said, that is not correct. That doesn’t belong here. And then had a European tag on it. And I said to myself, that’s the Mercedes concept, ev that can’t be here. And I couldn’t get my phone out fast enough, but unfortunately it was coming up to a red light in traffic.

But then the light had turned green and it disappeared and I never saw it again. And I was like, That’s interesting. Maybe I had a hallucination. . It is Vegas after all. I dunno. They pump in the air later, going back to the convention center came around. Mercedes has a huge booth [00:13:00] as well. Of course they do.

And boom, there it is. on display, everyone’s around it. And I was like, okay. And there was a gentleman, he had his badge hanging on it, Mercedes. And I said, okay, like, let me ask him . So I went up to him and I said, Hey, like, do you guys have one of these running around? Because I’m pretty sure I saw one on the street.

He’s like, oh yeah, yeah, we do. We just got it, you know? Yeah. It’s exactly just rolling around town, just getting it out there, testing it, driving it. And I was like, oh, cool, you know, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, we’re chatting, yada, yada. And then halfway through the conversation he was randomly like, oh yeah, I designed this.

I was like, whoa, wait a second. So yeah, unbeknownst to me, I was sitting there talking to the designer of this car, and I don’t know if that’s overall designer aesthetically, or engineering wise or what, or if he’s program lead, but nonetheless, had a little conversation about it. He was super excited.

Obviously geek to have his car there on display. The sad thing is, He said it, so I guess it’s [00:14:00] fine, is blah, this car’s never being built . Ah. It’s merely a research tool. So it’s got all this fun crazy tech in it for them to do their research. So it’ll be, I guess, interesting to see in the next couple years.

What of the technology trickles down into production vehicles or race cars or anything? Right. I mean this thing’s insane with its lowest coefficient of drag. I think of anything right now with its whole shape. Cuz I was like, oh, you know, it was really interesting. It was hard to tell in the photos. It looked like it was kind of gonna be like a small more coupe type car.

But you know, it’s a four door so it’s not, he’s like, yeah, you know, it’s five meters long and I. . Okay. And then an Audi eight L is actually longer . So this thing is long, but it’s not as long as an Audi A eight felt still a big, just to give you some perspective on how, but you know what? It didn’t feel that big in person.

So it still has that boat [00:15:00] tail to it. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean it’s very Silver Arrows feeling. It feels like it’s a car from another time. Like it belongs back in early Aston Martin days or something. Like James Bond should be driving it. I don’t know. Maybe it’ll be in the next bond field. They gotta do something with that car.

I mean, that would be super cool. We know you have a special affinity for Mercedes anyway, so it was right up your alley. . We already heard about the Sony vision. That’s what they were calling it a couple years ago, unveiling all their super tech and they’re working with Honda to develop it. And we said back then, this is just Sony being able to put Dolby around nine point 11, blah, blah, blah.

surrounding the sound in their car. You know? And and yes, that that’s still part of it, right? But now Sony and Honda have, I guess, labeled the brand for the ev. So I don’t know that the car is called this, but it’s the brand. But the A feel is what they’ve come out and said, that’s spelled exactly how it’s being pronounced.

Ama feel like, [00:16:00] I don’t like this. I’m a feel like. I’m gonna forget how to pronounce this cause I keep saying aleia. Cause I, I want aleia away from this. Like, it’s just terrible. You know what, I’d have to go back and pull up a year or two ago when they first unveiled it. I feel like it looked better. It looks like a cheap lucid.

He is what it looks like. Yeah. I’m not too big of a fan of its styling. In in picture or or in person? Nope. Nope. Good for them. It’s got something ridiculous like 45 sensors on it. To do what? To sense 800 trillion operations per second with a Qualcomm trip because it’s gonna do one day autonomous level.

Wow. Three and four driving. Got it. Because yes, you probably do need like a hundred million sensors and not like one , no cameras. Or you can just make it up and say that it self drives itself. Right. We’ll get to that later. . I got super excited when you sent me the picture of the Lanis [00:17:00] keynote, so that was cool.

So I actually sat through the keynote of Lanis, didn’t know what to expect. Again, I didn’t go into this with any preconceived notions, had no idea that Kujo was going to be announcing or revealing anything, but they did. So they had like the vice president of Pojo and they rolled one of these out onto stage.

The allure, I guess is what they’re calling it, a much better name than afl, Fila, Adidas, whatever it’s called. I mean, yes, a hundred percent. Anyway, so they roll, you know, they rolled this thing onto the floor. Again, it’s another concept car. I don’t know that it would actually be built. It is probably not everyone’s cup of tea.

It is very angular. So French. So French, not a lot of sharp edge. Exterior and also interior. If you look at the interior, it’s triangles and squares put together. And I’m not trying to actually like be mean to it, but it does kind of remind me of like if you were a kid and you were playing with blocks and you stack [00:18:00] them

Oh, so it’s not starfox like the cyber truck. It’s the other way. I mean, this is so angular that it’s very N 64 polygon graphics like it. This would fit in also. But this is 10 times I thought, no, sorry. This is like a thousand times better looking than the cipher truck. . hands down. But on the other side of this, you sent me some pictures.

You got to see the replacement for the charger in person. What’d you think of that? Yeah, so they didn’t roll one of those out on stage, but they just had like a video playing and they had sound, it has sound, so they have fake sound on this charger. Like people were like oohing, ah, I’m like this thing, this is not what I should sound like guys.

You know that right? Like , like it was okay, but it was this weird like, I don’t even know how to describe, describe it. It was it. Yes, it was electrical sound, not electrical sounding, but it was like, yes, this isn’t a combustion engine sound. . They did all this revving and they had like kind of [00:19:00] obscure picture of it and they had like a little video, blah, blah, blah and that that’s what they, that’s how they revealed it.

But then in their display at the convention center, they had one sitting there like hermetically sealed. You couldn’t open the doors, nothing. It was pretty cool looking though. What about that front spoiler thing we talked about where they carved into the hood? Yeah, it has the reverse like scoops or you can’t see them when you’re looking at the front of the car, but the hood comes down like into the bumper and then it has that weird little, I guess I don’t know if they’re doing with that cause it’s not the Dodge symbol, but they have that weird like triangle rotary thing from back in the day.

It’s an old Chrysler thing. Okay. . Yeah, there’s a name for that symbol. I, I don’t remember it off the top of my head right now. But yeah, that’s the legacy thing. And the other car that they, or the other vehicle that they revealed was the ram, whatever they’re calling it, Ram concept electric five pickup truck.

And someone drove that out on stage as they revealed it with all the music and lights and blah, blah, blah. And I mean, as far as pickup trucks go, I [00:20:00] guess it’s pretty cool. It sounded like it had a lot of neat features. Sounded like some of them weren’t necessarily new, they were carryovers from previous models, but it sounded like there were some unique things that I haven’t heard being done on obviously the cyber truck or even.

F-150 Lightning or any of the smaller trucks, Rivian, et cetera, whatever it’s called, where the interior gate folds down the cab gate, whatever that’s called. So that folds down. So you could stick an item into like your back seat area. Right. But because there’s no motor in the front, you can actually like fold down all the passenger side seats and then like open up a door into the engine bay compartment and they said you could fit something the length of 18 foot with the rear lift gate closed.

That’s a worker’s truck. I mean if you’re buying 20 foot long, let’s say two by fours, that’s still a little too short. But you know, I think they come 16 is what I’ve seen at the hardware source. So that’s, that’s not bad or [00:21:00] conduit or piping or anything you have. Yeah, I don’t know. But I mean granted, I don’t know how many construction workers are really gonna be using this kind of like an electrified pickup truck, but nonetheless, no, we’re gonna put ’em on the roof, which is only two and a half feet long and then bungee cord them to the front grill and the tailgate like we’ve always done for like a hundred years.

I mean you can’t even like put anything in a cyber truck, right? It’s like a triangle in the back. . I’m not sure what you think. What perpendicular it goes. Perpendicular. Ah, that’s how it’s supposed to go. Yes. That says it creates down force. Yes, yes, yes. There were some other interesting things about them as well.

The charging feature is unique. So I don’t know if anyone’s heard about this yet, cause I hadn’t heard about this. So we’re familiar with most electric vehicles or you plug ’em in to charge ’em right. This has to have that also, because I can’t imagine if you’re somewhere doing a road trip how this would work, but when you’re at your home, there’s this whole charging robot system.

Imagine a Roomba, and that’s how you charge it. What? So the charger comes out [00:22:00] autonomously from its dock and goes under the car and it lines up underneath the chassis, wherever that point is, and then connects and charges the vehicle, and then it disconnects and then Roombas itself back into its. Little doc in, away you go.

So it’s funny you mentioned that, cuz I think that’s a new take on an old idea because when Don was on here on his first episode, I asked him about what the Garage of the future was gonna be like. And he talked about a concept that Rolls Royce had come up with many years ago where they had this plate that you would drive either over top of, or would come out and go underneath the vehicle and almost act like the magnetic charging that’s now available on cell phones sort of sounds like they’re going for a giant version of the Mac magnetic charger in, in this case.

So it’s, it’s kind of cool to see that they’re catching up with this idea that, you know, at the time nobody was really interested in, they’ve literally taken from robotic vacuums [00:23:00] and lawnmowers to do this. So it was, it was pretty interesting. I haven’t seen anyone else, granted Rolls Royce might have been trying something like that years ago, but modern day, I don’t think I’ve seen anyone else.

At least if they are doing it, they haven’t unveiled it and yeah, Ram has so very cool. Well, there’s one last little bit of your Las Vegas experience that you gotta tell us about. Yes. So I didn’t even think about this the entire time I was there that it existed. It totally escaped my mind. The Hyperloop system.

Oh, Tesla Time, which is no longer called Hyperloop, it’s just called the Vegas Loop. Again, it’d come out of the convention center and we were on the wrong side of it and there were a bunch of buses lined up and we’re like, oh, we’ll take the bus back to, you know, wherever. Except our bus wasn’t where we were.

One of the bus drivers was like, oh, just, you know, you can walk all the way around there, or, and, and then he is just like, or you can take the Tesla. It was right there, . [00:24:00] And I was like, oh shit. didn’t even see it. Walked right by it. Whoops. So yeah, so we, we all said, okay, yeah, sure, why not? I was expecting it to be a nightmare, to be like super crowded, to be lines.

It wasn’t, you walked over, you took an escalator down, kind of felt like you were at the Metro essentially. You came down into what almost felt like a nightclub, cuz there were all sorts of different color lights and there was I think music and there were big TV screens and crap. And there were just like people, not like guest people, but like worker people kind of everywhere.

And there’s just like Teslas everywhere. and, and what you do is you go down and there’s people directing you. Essentially there’s, I don’t know, there was like maybe 10, 12 different lines. You could go stand in and little cues to where there was like a little parking space that a Tesla pulled up into and then you know, a party of three or four could fit in a Tesla depending, right?

You can’t fit that. There’s three in the backseat and one [00:25:00] passenger, so you can’t fit that many people in. But they had like model threes, model Ys, whatever the SUV one is, right? Xs I think. I think they had a little variety of everything, smattering of all of them and they had like coming in and out and then you had people there at the car opening the door for you, getting you in and blah, blah blah.

It’s like cool, okay. I don’t know. It took like not no time at all. Our group had to split into two cars cuz we all couldn’t fit fine, but we didn’t wait that long. There was really, honestly hardly anybody there. You got in, there’s a driver, he backs out, he starts driving, he kind of do a quick loop around the pickup area and then we shot into a tunnel, very narrow tunnel.

I think we got up to like 27 miles an hour, which honestly kind of for a minute there I was like, this feels a little bit quick for this narrow ass tunnel where there’s like three inches on each side. But I asked the guy, I was like, so are you in full control? It autonomous in any way. Lane assist to make sure you don’t accidentally smash into the side of this tunnel.

And basically, no, he’s fully in control. They’re not allowed to use any of the nannies on it. And he literally [00:26:00] drove us, what did I say? It was like half a mile. , but it took like two and a half minutes. They dude the whole thing. And it was, yeah, I think like two and a half minutes, almost three. And so it was faster than I had.

We walked it according to Google Maps, that same walk, cuz it was from one side of the convention center down like to the other end of that same side of the convention center. Would’ve been like an 11 minute pedestrian walk, but it would’ve been a straight shot. You went on this crazy, we did do some weird shit underground.

When you look, knowing the route I took and then seeing the above, like where you would’ve walked, I was like, dude was a bit circuitous, . And I’m sure there’s reasons for that cuz you’re tunneling underground where there’s tons of buildings above you and streets and you know, yada yada and water lines and God knows what else, right?

So I’m sure they had no choice, but so technically it was faster, it was free. So there was that. I don’t think I would’ve paid for it. I would’ve used my free legs. I think I would’ve got to the other side, got on another one and went back and then got in another. It’s like being on a [00:27:00] roller coaster, amusement park.

I mean, I guess you could have, you could’ve just tried to get into like get every driver, collect them off. You gotta try every Tesla. They’re different. You could’ve gotten in the front seat on one of ’em in the back seat and another one, the middle seat and the, you know, you’ve just been there all day.

It’s different in the back of the rollercoaster than in the front. You gotta, and I sat in the back, I didn’t get this in the front, so you know what? I should’ve gone again and sat in the front. That being said, your whole adventure is documented either between videos and photos and we’re gonna make those available through the show notes and you can check out the vault.

There’s like hundreds of pictures from your trip to ces. So it’s super cool and we’re obviously gonna talk about more stuff as we go through this drive-through episode because we wanna talk about what’s hot and what’s not in 2023. So let’s transition to the next big thing we always talk about in every winter recap, which is every new car you can still buy with a manual trans.

Car and driver put out the list not too long ago, and there are what? No surprises on this list. There is a surprise on this list. Oh, they’re [00:28:00] the Cadillacs, right? No, it’s the number of cars on this list. I think it went up from last year. I counted these. There’s 28 of them, not counting the extra three SUVs that you have to click into a separate article to add to this list as well.

So 31 cars in total and the first one on the list is my favorite. Integra offered in a manual transmission, and you go from there. It seems like almost every manufacturer from Acura, Honda, Hyundai, Volkswagen, Porsche, you name it, everybody’s got a manual transmission. I think the most surprising one on this list is the Kia Forte.

Yeah, I, I would agree. Uh, no, it, it’s in the Conno box. I don’t know. I’m torn between the Nissan Versa needing a manual transmission and a Kia Forte. I think I’d rather have a Kia Forte with the manual transmission. No, you want the GR Corolla that’s on this list. We know that. Oh, well, I’m not surprised by that.

It’s fine. I think the biggest surprise, but I know somebody that owns one of these is the Hyundai Elantra [00:29:00] N. So that does come in a six speed manual. And I think that’s pretty cool for a full size sedan to still be available with a stick because cars like the bigger BMWs, the A four things like that, they ceased having manual transmissions years ago.

And it’s only the N that comes with the manual, isn’t it? Only the performance. Elantra N has a manual transmission. The regular Elantra N does not have it anymore. Yeah, I was just seeing, I was just seeing that too. Boohoo. So you give the very, very specific, I didn’t even know there was an Elantra in, what the hell is that?

See, that’s why it’s a surprise. Surprise. There’s Elantra N and it’s got a stick. How is that different from Elantra? ? It’s like the GTI version. Oh, is it the golf golfers gti. Oh, I like how they’re stealing golf livery colors. Yeah. The WRC Blue that they use. Yeah. I like it though. I think it’s cool. Yeah.

The only thing that’s, that shocks me on this list, and I wouldn’t even say it shocks me, I’m pleasantly surprised, is the Black Wing Cadillacs that you can get them with the manual. Well, it’s good to [00:30:00] see though, that there are still cars available this year with a stick shift if you wanna buy something new.

Yeah, but there are some cars that are leaving us. Oh no. Yes. As Eric has alluded to, there are five cars that were discontinued in the year 2022. The first one on the list is one that I’m sure everybody is heartbroken about the four gt. I thought they discontinued that like a couple years ago. , I thought it was a one year run.

I didn’t realize that they had continued making it. I thought 2016 was the only year they made it, but apparently I was wrong. Yeah, so the first two cars on this list are rich people doing rich people things. So the Ford GT and the Acura nsx, I’m actually pretty surprised that the NSX has already gone.

Although I think the NSX, again, like the four GT, has been around for six years. So I’m sort of like, wait, it’s already been six years. They were both unveiled at the same show. Right. But it feels like the Acura came out later and it’s one of these, like, here today, gone tomorrow. Like, I [00:31:00] feel like the N S X just didn’t get enough time with everybody and, and now it’s gone again.

Right. So I, I don’t know. I saw an original one on the road like couple days ago. I’ve seen a couple of ’em flowing around Maryland. We’re all sad that the Honda Insight is going away. You know, breaks my heart. Honda Insight, they still made that. Again, it’s no surprise they’re discontinuing it. Uh, the bigger question is people bought those.

I, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen one on the, no, I’ve seen one on the road, but I couldn’t tell you the last time. Dang, skip the stinger. I’m coming back to it, is I feel like the stinger got rebadged. Like you can’t buy a stinger, but there’s a new Kia N seven or Normandy or whatever the heck they’re calling it, the Shepherd or whatever it is.

Like they, they gave the stinger a new name and that’s what’s available as it’s replacement. Like I, I literally saw one the other day on the road and I’m like, oh, that’s the new Stinger. That’s pretty cool. Oh, the K five, it’s probably not rear wheel drive. One of the desirable things about the stinger or unique things about the Stinger is it was rear wheel [00:32:00] drive and you could get it with a turbo motor producing over 300 horsepower.

It was supposed to be very much an enthusiast car and enthusiasts did not flock to the dealerships to buy it because it didn’t come with a manual transmission. They missed the mark. Exactly. Isn’t that what Kia and Hyundai always do? I mean, not so much now with the end models, but they always kind of miss them.

They always go just up to the line, but they never fully make, but it doesn’t make sense because it has the running gear from the Genesis. So putting a manual transmission and it shouldn’t have been a big deal. So the 2023 Stinger, which is the last year they’re making it, is an all-wheel drive. Yay. And the K five is now all-wheel drive.

So if they were a rear wheel drive, they’ve already stopped making them. Making it rear-wheel drive. Yeah. The last one on this list, the charger and the challenger. We talked about it all last year and, and before then, you know the party’s over. We’re done. Good. The muscle car era is bending. Well not for that, but, but now we’ve got the electric charger coming out and all that kind of stuff.

Here’s the crazy. About this particular [00:33:00] car going away. The Challenger is a little long in the tooth. It’s built on a 900 year old Mercedes chassis, as we know, along with the 300, which is on its way out and all those kinds of things. But Dodge said, you know what? Just a mess with y’all. We’ve been making the Challenger the same way forever, and in its last year, we’re gonna do a limited run of convertibles.

Seriously, like you waited 20 years to finally reveal the convertible. Like we couldn’t have done the Barracuda five years ago, six years ago, when the Challenger, what is at its peak now on its way out, I guess they’re just trying to, to drum up sales. I, I don’t get it. Maybe they just had a lot of convertible tops lying around from what they literally had to engineer it.

It was never designed as a convertible. Come on, this is Dodge. Are they actually engineering anything? They’re taking the shit from the Jeep Wrangler and they’re slapping the fucking thing together with the saws, all with the saws, all Home Depot parts and zip ties, and it’s gonna sit on top of the Challenger.

But you know what’s funny about that? It’s not [00:34:00] the first time Chrysler’s done that because back in the Aya Koka era when there were no convertibles for sale in the United States, in his autobiography he talks about going down to the floor and the new LeBaron was coming out and he asked the guys to literally cut the roof off and just kind of slap something on.

And he wanted to drive it around and see what people thought about the potential of a new convertible. And I. So I guess they’re just following tradition. Yeah. Speaking of the GT 40 Florida man, and we’re not getting ahead of ourselves here cuz it’s not necessarily a funny Florida man but just happens to be a Florida man who had bought a brand new 2006 GT 40.

Ever since then he’s been trying to hold the record for Fastest Street legal car. He has been modifying it apparently forever. He held the record for a bit of time back in I think like 2012, but then he got beat out 2017 and then Covid and he was looking for [00:35:00] parts cuz Engine blew or something I think.

And lo and behold, finally hashtag chips. He got his parts and everything and he, I think has the record again for 310.8 miles an hour in a GT 40. Wow. And you, you know what’s awesome about that? From traffic light to traffic light, he still gets smoked by a stock. Tesla three just gonna put it out there. I think he said on that run.

And he wasn’t even trying, like you would think it was just like a shakedown run with like the new motor. Where in Montana? In like the flat land, salt land, something? I don’t know. I mean, there’s no Crown Vic on this earth that’s gonna catch him. He was on a um, A runway. Yeah, on a runway. Cause he said on that run, he, he’s got a parachute on it to help him stop and he skidded over 1100 feet and like barely like stopped at the end of the runway

So he is hoping, he thinks he can get 322 miles an hour out of it and then die because [00:36:00] he gets, and then like, I don’t know, I guess has he thought about this? Cuz if he couldn’t stop at 310, like is he gonna pave more runway insane. He’s gonna get an extra parachute reverse thrusters. I don’t know. Extend the runway in.

But here’s my thing. Why would you do it on a runway and not if you have that kind of money, just rent Daytona International Speedway and get up on the bowl. I don’t get it. I don’t know. I guess then risk your life and break the car. At least you can slow down in a controlled fa, I mean, I don’t know.

Whatever. Huh? But getting back to what’s hot and what’s not Car and driver has already put out the 10 best cars of 2023. and I saw that title come across my desk and I asked myself, how is that even possible? We’re only like three weeks into 2023. And then it dawned on me the 2023 models came out in September.

So they’re able to sort of make this claim of the best cars of the year before we’ve even made it through the year. It’s the best cars to look forward to in 20, let’s think about it that way. How about, yeah. Yeah. None of ’em are a surprise. But it was also like [00:37:00] mp, like this is what we have to choose from

Yeah. You’ve got the B M W I four, the Cadillac CT four, the Corvette, the Accord, the Civic, the seven 18 Cayman, the Burrs and the Furs, the GR Corolla. That’s the only one I went. Yeah. All right. And then the GR supra. So you got these 10 cars that we’ve been talking about for a couple years now, other than the Corolla, which just hit our shores in October.

The only one on this list. I’m interesting . I mean, the Cadillacs could be interesting, but I’m not, A above middle-aged man. So the interest only go so far. Can we talk about B M W for a second? Sure. That unveiling that they did, they had a huge social media campaign about it last week. I think it was while Tanya was at c e s.

What is the the car? The, the, the me too or whatever the hell. I don’t know where that car was. I didn’t see it. They didn’t have a booth. No idea where it went because it was allegedly there. Maybe it was on the road, maybe you couldn’t see [00:38:00] it cuz it was changing colors. That was the one that I found that Twitter video where they had a Herbie and they had it.

Michael Knight Kit Car. Yes. Were were going down the Vegas strip with whatever that B M W was. Yeah. It’s supposed to be an extension of your personality. Like it, it’s you, it, I can’t remember what it’s called. It was something stupid. The iVision d Yeah, the d d e e. Yeah. D e e. It’s D um and d e e stands or something.

Driver experience something or something? Yes. So is it like you upload a photo and it then mimics whatever it saw? Or what is it do or is it like a mood ring? . It’s a mood ring. Yes. ? Yes, actually, yes. It’s like a mood ring. I think like it’s like the minis. You can scroll through different interior lighting accents, right?

There’s like a thousand different colors except that’s on your interior and it’s just l e d lights. This is your paint changes color. . You plug it into your cerebral cortex and sing [00:39:00] and link it to your body. It’s straight outta cyberpunk. 2077 is what? It’s . I mean, in order for it to work like a mood ring, there has to be an orifice on the dashboard that you stick your finger into.

Do you own your finger ? No. I don’t know. It’s not, it’s not. Apparently there’s like 32 colors. That you can choose from, I guess. And then also you can harlequin it so you could do different patterns or body panels with with different colors they call it. I think E Ink Tech, straight outta Kendall sounds expensive.

Like what happens if you get a rock chip in this thing? I haven’t seen any videos of it actually working. The only videos I saw on social media were stupid animations. So does it even actually work? They’re releasing the car for sale in the Metaverse. . Second life you can get it. That’s an add off Second half life.

Yeah. Here’s my question. You go do something bad and Oh, where looking for a BMW [00:40:00] I for all blue color and then like you hit do do and your car’s like, I dunno, green . I mean that’s the opening of Cannonball Run with the Lamborghini, right? They just wash off the black paint and it’s white or whatever.

Exactly. It’s like every old movie trope where they’re like, oh, I’m gonna peel the paint off my car and suddenly no one’s gonna find me. so terrible. Now you can do it with your iPhone . I don’t know that the Gen Z people or whoever the hell this car is targeted to is actually pulling bank Heists. . So I don’t think that’s really a problem.

That’s more of like a Gen X kind of thing. I don’t know. I heard recently about somebody who stole a Kia to to steal an ATM machine, so. Is that a Florida man story coming up? maybe may have some foreshadowing here, . But speaking of things that are maybe working, maybe not working, and some foreshadowing, we have talked over and over again and we mentioned Hyundai earlier, the N 74 [00:41:00] vision concept.

And another article came out and remember we were so excited. And then the next month it was wa wa, they’re never gonna build it. It’s a rolling lab. And here we go. After the winter break, another article comes out where a gentleman interviews Gito Giro himself, and they’re like, yeah, yeah, the new car and this and that, and the Heritage of the Pony 74 and blah, blah, blah.

And I’m like, all right guys. I, I looked at the timestamps of this article, and it’s not old news, it was after they had already said that they’re never gonna build this thing. And here we are talking about it as if it’s going into production. So I’m a little bit. Pissed off at this point because I’m being teased.

I wanna know if it’s gonna be built right because I’m gonna save my pennies if it is, because it is super cool. This might be one of those things where the demand, the reaction from the public is dictating. Yeah, maybe, maybe we should make this thing. Maybe it wasn’t originally in the plans and then now, I mean, this would be like a Nissan Z killer.

Yes, a hundred percent. This thing is gorgeous. I’d take this over the Z. [00:42:00] Every review I’ve seen from random people on the internet and people I’ve talked to about this car are all like, where did this come from? This is amazing. Are they gonna build it? Da, da, da da. There’s like a lot of enthusiasm around this and I think it’s just foolish for Hyundai not to try to come out with this car shit.

At this point, they could build like three and probably sell them for like a ridiculous amount of money to some rich person. Oh, thousands of, but then they’re just gonna sit in somebody’s temperature controlled garage forever. The next classic car. Hi Hyundais. What should I buy? Eric will have to buy it off of, bring a trailer for like 2.5.

We do have some very important and very sad news to tell everybody here at the end of our showcase. It’s not necessarily hot or not, it’s definitely not. And that is the sudden and tragic accidental passing of legendary Jim Kana and Rally Driver Ken Block. So if you haven’t heard about that, it has been plastered from seed to shining sea on every social media platform out there.

He was [00:43:00] unfortunately killed in a snowmobile accident on January the second. People are still posting their memories and their tributes to Ken. We even have a special episode that we relaunched out of our vault where we sat down with one of his childhood friends talking about how they filmed Jim Kana one, two, and three and all that kind of stuff.

So our hearts and our thoughts go out to the block family and interesting to see what happens with Hogan in the next couple of years. And I guess what Audi does next, right? Yeah. At least he went out doing what he loved. I mean, it sucks. It’s terrible. Good for him doing what he loved until his last dying breath.

Absolutely. Well, with that sobering news, I guess we should move on to other things that are clinical and utilitarian. Let’s talk about Volkswagen and Porsche yet again. , so I’m not really sure where. This next article should fall, whether it’s JD M or Porsche, but somebody decided to take a nine 11 GT three and put a Subaru WX motor in it.

So how many laps are they gonna to get before they get [00:44:00] towed in ? This story belongs under Florida. Man, suppose the motor in the GT three was blown up. It’s pretty expensive to replace one of those. So how many Subaru motors do you have to blow up before you could. Bought a new GT three motor. Yeah. Why replace a blown up motor with a motor that’s going to blow up?

It’s not even that. It’s sort of like why would you put a four cylinder in that car? I mean the GT three motor’s making what, 300 8400 horsepower, whatever they make normally aspirated. They sound amazing. They’re designed to rev to 10 billion r RPM all day long because apparently it weighs 170 pounds less than the flat six and could be tuned to explode at 415 horsepower stock.

Yeah, that doesn’t make sense to me. Stock my ass. 415 at things gonna churn Noble about being like reimbursed with NASA metal. Oh yeah. It’s gotta be a completely built engine. I know all the Subaru people are crying right now, but we’ve seen it. Stock Subarus do run forever [00:45:00] because they’re built to do pedestrian things, but the high performance Subarus, when they’re stressed out, it’s not if it’s when.

I don’t wanna get into that debate, but what I wanna get into is you took a GT three and did this. Why not a base model nine 11 or or 9 96 or something else. You have a high end limited production Porsche. This thing’s worth nothing. Now guess worth something to somebody. I mean, it seems totally point.

Speaking of totally pointless. What about Porsche testing their Safari nine 11 on the side of a volcano in Chile? Where else would you test it? Bolivia, like top gear. Why do you have a Safari nine 11? Why don’t you have a Safari nine 11 after all these decades, , because that’s something people want. Of course, when you have a lot of money, isn’t that called a cayenne?

But I can’t take my wife’s cayenne to uses to pick up the kids and get the groceries. Ah, so take your daughter’s McCann. This is again where we get back to refining bad ideas. , [00:46:00] right? We’re gonna put all this research and development into building an off-road nine 11 perrera for us when you could just sell a cayenne or buy a tour egg or whatever atlas or whatever it’s called.

It’s nostalgia, right? Nostalgia for what? The factory never built the freaking first. Safari nine 11, but they did rally the nine 11 and it was an Audi underneath. It was, doesn’t matter. Nobody knew that. Nothing knows that. Nobody cares. They just see the emblem. Marsh . Aw, it looks like it’s so cute from the front.

It’s like a little frog. Got it. terrible. Tanya’s lost her marbles. , it looks like a Hot Wheels thing, right? Yes. I mean, I’d buy it for 94 cents at Walmart to add it to my collection, but other than that, forget it. Little bit of foreshadowing of the upcoming sports car season. Former Formula One driver groan is now driving for Lamborghini.

His stenton, uh, [00:47:00] Andy car didn’t work out. Nope, it did not. So he’s going to sports, car racing, so he’ll be at Rolex. Yeah. . So it’s time we move on. We actually have news this month from Lower Saxony. We wanna talk about a little bit more about BMW and Mercedes. I guess there’s an aftermarket company that claims to address the B BMW grill issues.

Nah, that looks like trash too. . All right, enough said . Uh, yeah, they’re smaller ish. Ah, man, dude, it’s been three years of b BMW owners and enthusiasts trying to justify this front end to everybody else. It’s really not that ugly. Guys, if you look at it after I punch you in the eye three times and you’re half drunk, it looks amazing.

Trust me, it looks great. I mean, it’s horrible. Un unpopular opinion. I think the, the redesign, this body kit or whatever looks pretty snazzy. I would totally do this If I had one of these fours, the car might [00:48:00] cost as much as the car probably. Yeah. I mean, why can’t the fact just do this to begin with? If this is what everybody actually wants?

And here’s the thing that just blows my mind and it relates back to these grills. I was in the DC area pretty recently. I was in traffic in my old car, which sits below everybody and all this kind of thing. And up in my rear view mirror suddenly appears, fuck tooth beaver. Yeah. Couldn’t identify what it was cuz it’s so big.

It just eclipsed me and I’m like, what the hell is this? You just saw grill in the back glass. That’s all there was. And I’m like, it’s a b m, but I couldn’t tell what kind of BMW it was because it wasn’t really a grill, it was a faux grill. So I got over a lane and let the guy go by and I realized it was the new ix.

So then I’m like, oh, I’ve never seen one of these in person. I’ve only seen how ugly it is in pictures, so I gotta get the close up. So I’m like, I’m buzzing around him. I’m kind of looking and at the same time, a dude with an a [00:49:00] brand new X seven merges onto the highway. And now I’m, I’m sandwiched between them and I’m like, holy cow, I, I’m totally dwarfed.

It was like being between two tractor trailers and the IX is really big. It’s not as long as the X seven, but they’re massive. But I tell you what, the grills who, between those two cars, I think they could have swallowed me and three other cars inside ’em. They’re just ginormous, absolutely ridiculous looking.

And I could identify more with the X seven, like, okay, it’s squareish. I’m not a big fan of the rear lights. There’s some design cues there that are carries over from the previous versions. I could live with it, but the ix, I didn’t understand what it was trying to be like. It has these things reminiscent of the Volkswagen, like Sportback atlas that they tried to do and like crazy angles.

And I, I just don’t get it. I don’t like it. Have you seen the new X seven? The one that’s coming out in 2020. The 2023 model. [00:50:00] So they’ve added, you know, like the football players, they paint the line under their eyes for the glare is got that now. Ah, is very bizarre. Which I think is, they’re pulling it off the I seven because I seven started doing that, where it’s got like this second row of headlights, I guess.

Weird. I don’t know. I’m not a fan to each their own. So more bmw. AC Schnitzer is back who? One of the mod houses like din and others that specializes in B M W. They were really popular back in the eighties and nineties. It’s sort of like the roof is to Porsche AC Schnitzer is to BMW schnitzel, but yes, Uhhuh.

Yeah, the schnitzel. The schnitzel is back Love schnitzel. We’re not being mean with a German bullied eye, but that’s the police pursuit vehicle. Ooh, I like it for the German Highway patrol. The lights on it distract you from the grill, so it’s good. D don’t they? They blind you so you can’t see the grill, so it’s all good.

Well, like all AC Schnitzer products, the car is [00:51:00] highly modified, makes a trillion horsepower, all that fun stuff. I just don’t see a police officer actually using this. Why would you go to ah Mod house to build a police car when you need them to be workhorse? You look at why the Crown Vic was so popular.

The motor is under stressed, it can run forever, all this kind of stuff, and then you want to give the police officers a high performance pursuit vehicle. I don’t understand why, because I heard rumor that they’re going to start implementing speed limits on the autobon. Is it to chase people down or is it just to have a lot of fun?

Hmm. Yes. There’s just cooler police cars in Europe, so I’m not even sure the relevancy of these comments. Watch any television show on the B bbc, Astra Diesel by Vox Hall, Volvo V 60 Cross Country. Those are the ultimate police cars in Europe. What are you talking about? Okay. Or Fiat PTOs or Lamborghini have seen those.

Those are so fake you’ve never seen. Yes, I have at the [00:52:00] airport, the ca do not drive Lamborghini. They’re parked . It’s like a police car shows. I took a photo from the plane of the Lamborghini in the airport. They park hard. Okay. It was stopped. . Exactly. I’ve never seen a police Lamborghini in motion. It doesn’t happen.

But you know what else doesn’t happen? Especially if you don’t pay for it. You don’t get the faster acceleration of the new Mercedes EVs. This is just a dirty, dangerous slope called it. Told you so knew this was coming a year ago when we started talking about even the BMWs putting stuff behind paywalls.

We’re like, they’re gonna start to limit the speed you want that ludicrous mode. You want that sport package subscription, subscription, subscription, and Mercedes being Mercedes, they’re throwing on $1,200 annual. If you want to get maximum acceleration and speed out of your ev, I mean, if you could probably afford a Mercedes [00:53:00] ev, I’m gonna guess the $1,200 annual a hundred bucks a month.

Well, well, well hold on. Let’s look at the demographic here. People that buy Mercedes, do they really wanna go that fast? Is that why they put it behind the paywall? They’re like, for the footballers, we’re gonna charge him. But for the retired podiatrist that has a Mercedes, does he really care to go zero to 16 2.9?

or maybe there’s people that’ll just feel special because like, I have a subscription for speed, you know, and the need for speed this month, or, look at this, I have the perfect Christmas present, honey, here’s a subscription. You go five miles an hour faster. Terrible. Did it specify which Mercedes models?

It was just the EVs. It’s the EQ series. Yeah. Remind me to never buy a, it says, according to Mercedes, the yearly fee increases the maximum horsepower and torque of the car, while also increasing overall performance. Acceleration from zero to 60 is said to improve [00:54:00] by 0.8 to one second. and overall characteristics of the electric motors are supposed to change as well.

The extra performance is unlocked by selecting the dynamic drive mode. If I’m in a street race and I’m trying to win some monies, I call up Mercedes cause I need to get this extra boost so I can go ahead , and then I start the race. Cause I’ve put down my credit card and then halfway through the race they’re like, sorry sir, your card is declined.

And then I lose that power and I lose that race and I lose the girl and I go and cry in a corner somewhere eating my tuna sandwich. Is that how that’s gonna happen? That’s fast. Furious 10. Yep. Yeah. They’re all calling on their cell folks to get more horsepower. instead of knobs. no more ludicrous with the speed shop.

Yeah. No, no, no. Ludicrous is, he’s the computer hacker guy too. Right? So he’s sitting there hacking into Mercedes to get you that unlocked power. Oh, that’s right. That’s right. Yeah. Yeah. There’s a whole cyber thing here going on. Yeah. Oh, now you got, yeah, there you go. I [00:55:00] forgot he was, yeah, he’s the hacker.

Since you brought up cyber, that’s actually a great segue into STIs, but we’re not gonna talk about anything dealing with STIs here in the United States, but we’re gonna bring up a name from the past, a company that hasn’t manufactured a car in quite a a while, and that’s Lancia. They are coming back as the ev arm of STIs, like Hummer.

I do not understand this concept Car. It’s a sculpture that is meant to preview some of the design language that future models will use. It is a sculpture that looks like a playschool pit bull car. Where I stick you in the hole. No, no, no, no. It looks like a mouse. It’s not like a, not like a rodent. It looks like one of those fancy ergonomic computer mice.

I was gonna say, it looks like the, the remote control from the movie. Click . No. So I, I think you’re supposed to use your side of the brain for artistic creativity and [00:56:00] look at that. And imagine sweeping lines. Curves clean and it’s got a rudder. . It’s a sailboat. It’s got a, it’s got a rudder . Because having just come off of the recently released, what should I buy?

Italian card episode you all mentioned when eventually Valencia did come, You mentioned, I believe both. Well, one of these two vehicles, and if you read this article, it says, the design language of this newlan shot will draw on the classic FLA mania and Aurelia models for inspiration as the brand plans new Ypsilon in Delta models.

So there you have, it’s, is the design language based on you hitting me over the head with a full bottle of Yeager? I don’t see the connection between this remote control made by Logitech and not long LA and those cars you just mentioned, like there’s nothing [00:57:00] similar. That is a, what are they called? Ink?

The Roshak Tech Ro Roshak Test Roach. Yes. Thank you. What, what do you, what do you see when you look at this ? I see a butterfly. All right. Well, as we dive deeper into the domestic news, brought to you by American muscle.com, your source for Forge Chevy and Mopar performance and OEM replacement parts. The winter break is quite long, so we have things going back to our very last drive-through episode in the October, November timeframe and things like the new 2023 Ford Super Duty can tow 40,000 pounds and has 1200 foot pounds, dork, and 500 horsepower and all this craziness.

And people are rejoicing about how they can tow trains and aircraft carriers and stuff with it. I’m like, great. I’ve never seen people do that at Home Depot. , as you dive into this, everybody’s rooting and roaring and hooping and hollering about how awesome Ford Truck is, and it’s powered by, of all things [00:58:00] a diesel.

Yeah, that’s all I’m gonna say. That’s how the full size truck market works. You know, you get the, the massive towing capacity from the diesels. Those are the, the bro dozers, uh, of the world that are out there. But my favorite part is the 8,000 pound available maximum payload. Think of all that mulch. 8,000 pounds of mulch.

You could redo the entire landscape of condo complexes down the eastern seaboard, probably . I don’t know. Some of these guys use a lot of mulch. They like to really pack it in thick . Oh, yes. My only question is why, why do I need to be able to tow a 40,000 pound? Locomotive engine because you need to tow your quadruple decker toter for your 18 race cars you’re putting in there.

Oh, I mean, that’s true. But aren’t you just gonna use an 18 wheeler? You’re gonna, if you have that kind of money, you’re just gonna hire a driver and you’re gonna have an 18 wheeler with a full [00:59:00] on trailer. Right. Where do you draw the line between just getting a Freightliner Renegade, something like that, or buying an older Kenworth or whatever and just, well, cause you’re not gonna drive the Freightliner to the grocery store.

Have you seen some of the things that pull up at the grocery store these days? You used to live in Texas. Of course you’ve seen some of this shit. Everything was a Freightliner compared to what I was driving when I was in Texas talking about being swallowed alive by shit. It’s the same thing as in like with the Dodge Challenger, Hellcat and everything, 707 horsepower.

It’s just because we can, it’s all, all bragging rights, it’s all this is. Nobody is ever going to use that. First of all, I think legally, D O T, regardless of what truck it is, it’s a weight restriction. Correct. You need a CDL to drive something. Which gross vehicle weight is the, actually, I don’t know what the actual number is, but there, there’s a weight requirements, which is by of all.

So yeah, if you’re gonna tow your 40,000 pound, if you’re just gonna take your home and you’re gonna tow it around the world [01:00:00] or around the back roads of Texas, then yeah, you’re gonna need a CDL to do it. I don’t care if you got a three 50 or a four 50 or what. Here’s the farce in all of this. When you read the article, I think somebody was confused because they, did you see the M S R P.

How is it? Only $45,000. Bingo. Thank you. Because I thought people have been saying like, oh, one 50 y’all, 70 grand for one of those. How the hell is this? 45,000 then? So you, the $45,000 is not for that. The $45,000 is for the base. Base. Base Super duty. It’s just for the tires. So you get the base super duty with the 6.8 liter gas motor work truck.

You can probably get a M S R P 45 7 and. $25,000 destination charge. That seems super low. The prices of everything are inflated right now, like this truck should be. I think there’s a one missing in there. Like it should be $145,000 based on everything else we’ve seen in the last year. Well, I don’t know why you’re poo-pooing on this.

How is this any different than like all the cars [01:01:00] where it’s like, yeah, we should have 900 horsepower. Why not? Cause can hell, yeah. Yeah, that’s what, that’s what I just said. Like they had the Hellcat and all that. This is just the truck equivalent of that. No, because all the haters come out and say, oh, you don’t need that diesel, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Diesel is terrible. Ah, and all this stuff. And then here they are praising the ability of this truck, which is a hundred percent dependent upon that motor. I don’t think you’re talking about the same people. I don’t think the people that are praising this truck are the same people that are saying diesel’s bad.

I think they’re two different camps. There’s a whole ecosystem here. My man. My point is though, you hear the arguments all the time. You don’t need the diesel. You can do it with the gas motor and you can’t, you cannot tow these types of capacities without this type of engine. We’re like, we’re praising the dinosaur here.

And I’m all, I’m all four diesel, don’t get me wrong, but there’s a lot of things I don’t understand about this, and it all revolves around the price because. If it is 45 grand, well, shit, I’m gonna go get one because that’s a, that’s a [01:02:00] bargain for a diesel Super Duty guarantee you the 45 grand is for the base without the diesel, probably two-wheel drive work truck.

The diesel version, especially the high output diesel giving these amazing numbers is probably closer to 90 or more. Yes. Yeah. I like the fact that there’s still a diesel option available out there if you need it. That’s all I’m saying. And, and, and how about this, how much would you say one of the space shuttles weigh top of your head?

Tanya probably has a good idea. You’re telling me this thing can tow the space shuttle? No, I’m, I, I’m, I’ve got a point I’m trying to make you say you need the diesel to do this shit, to tow all these massive things. Toyota did a whole campaign where they towed the, a space shuttle around with their regular lowly little 5.7 liter v8.

So you don’t need this. You don’t need it. Which you didn’t see were the 37 tugs from the airport that were pushing the space shuttle. Like behind the Toyota, [01:03:00] there’s something to be said about something that’s on tires that’s rolling. In that example though, there’s almost zero tongue weight. When they were pulling that he was literally laterally pulling the space shuttle.

Cause I saw that video. It’s not that the space shuttle was attached to the gooseneck and then there was all that weight on the back of the truck. So that’s a little bit unfair to say that the tundra is capable of towing the space shuttle because it’s not towing the space shuttle the way it should be towing it.

It should be towing it the way Daniel tows a shed . It’s a hundred percent right on the ground. No trailer, no nothing, no wood, no nothing. I can pull your. Tundra with a Fiat 500. If we’re all on the ground flat with a tow strap. It doesn’t take much to tow you, but to load you up and tow you is a whole different ballgame.

It says there’s XL xlt, Lariat King Range Platinum in Limited. The XL is 45,000. The XL is the base model. But is that gasoline or diesel? I guarantee you it was [01:04:00] gasoline only. The standard equipment is gonna be the gas motor. Okay, so then, and then that’s not all-wheel drive cuz all-wheel drive apparently starts on X L T and Lariat.

The prices increase all the way up. The limited, the highest package is 97 99. Starting price before options I guess. And the diesel is considered an option. It’s always more drop another 10 grand or more on top of that. Cuz there’s a tax that you basically pay to buy that diesel. Yeah, because of the diesel and the trans and all that other bullshit that goes along with it.

Exactly. That’s $125,000 truck all day long. Good on Ford. I’m not in the market for anything like this. I don’t plan to tow my garage around. Okay. I’ll stick with my But you fit in it though, . I fit in my truck that I have now, so I’m good. Things that we probably don’t fit in, let’s talk about the new Corvette.

Oh, E ray. E Ray. I was wondering that was gonna be a joke, . Yeah, of course it is now. I [01:05:00] mean, . Cool. One thing that bugged me about this, the reference to the tires, the rear tires, these are the widest all season tires ever fitted to a production vehicle. And then I had to go back and I had to do some research because I distinctly remember that the Vipers.

Started with 3 35 s and they went to 3 45 s and they went to 3 55 s. But I couldn’t find anywhere that referenced that they were all seasons or summers. I think for the most part they were summers but had to be an option for all seasons at some point. Right. So I, I mean, I think it’s a stupid stat to be proud of.

We’re so proud. We’ve got the widest all season tires ever fitted to a production vehicle. I was a little perplexed by the whole front wheel drive, all-wheel drive. So I, I didn’t see that anywhere in here. I did not see where it said front wheel drive at all. So it can run in front wheel drive mode if it’s electric only.

Oh, cuz the mo Yeah, the electric motor’s in the front. I just saw that as you do. Okay. At the end of the day, [01:06:00] the co. E array is becoming more like the N S X that it was modeled after , at least jokingly. Mm-hmm. . So with that hybrid system, with all that, I just, I’d like to see the performance numbers of the e array against, let’s say the zero six or is some of its other base brethren like the, you know, the Z 51 Stingray, stuff like that.

Is it really worth it? The battery’s not that big. It’s not a car designed for commuting and range and all this other kind of stuff. So it’s really that curves electric turbo thing, you know, that we joke about. So it’s, it’s giving it the assist just like it does in the N S X. You know what this is, this is the gas crunch back in the mid two thousands when Chevy said, oh, we’re gonna make a hybrid, and they show out the 5.3 liter V8 with the hybrid whatever, stupid hybrid Tahoe.

Yeah. And some suburbans that they went out with. It’s basically just to say, you got it. It’s probably also to check a box for greenhouse this and reduction of that and, and all those kinds of things. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. [01:07:00] They, this is so they don’t have to buy credits from Tesla or they don’t believe that they could sell a fully electric Corvette or they don’t know how to build one and so they’re compromising and going, well, let’s like get people interested but not get them a hundred percent there.

We’ll go hybrid, fully electric, Corvette, front wheel drive, all that. That was the Chevy Bolt. That being said, you hit on something Brad, that I’ve been thinking about that I’ve been kind of, you know, mulling over which. You mentioned that gas crisis era with the hybrid Tahoe, which was a complete failure.

I mean, they sold like all of three of those. I feel like we’re in another malaise period right now. If you look at the cars, they’re all just sort of like whatever. But we’re emphasizing the gadgets and the luxury. Granted, we have performance that we didn’t have in the malaise era with the electric motors and stuff, but the cars are just sort of just, nah.

And I wonder if we look back 20 years from now at the 2020s and we go, man, all those cars are just [01:08:00] junk. I’m glad we finally figured it out, or whatever the next evolution is that comes after this. The next evolution is gonna be no cars at all. Exactly. It’s gonna be Jetsons. . Yeah. We’re all gonna be working from home.

The next evolution’s gonna be ready player one. We’re all gonna hang out in the the metaverse and the metaverse, the peripheral . And maybe I’ll get my Hyundai N 74 vision that way. So whatever works, you’ll just need to accumulate 900 billion trillion, uh, Bitcoin credits to uh, purchase it. Yeah. I don’t know if this is April Fools or not, but along with the whole e ray conversation came this announcement.

Corvette to launch as its own brand in 2025 with a four door and an S U V. Didn’t we prove that was a spoof or something? I mean, there was a November car and driver article that says Corvette to launch as a brand in 2025 with a four door and an S U V. The next move from GM with its valued Corvette nameplate, will be to launch a Corvette sub-brand to include a [01:09:00] four-door coop and a sporty high performance crossover to partner with the upcoming two-seater Corvette ev.

So it sounds like the Tacan and it sounds like the Ferrari PK or whatever it is. Sure. Blood . This is one thing I disagree with gm, you got so many other cars, the lyrics and the this and the that and the whatevers and the Cadillac Black Wings. You don’t need this. Like I feel like you’re watering down Corvette.

Leave Corvette alone. They are in direct contrast with everything you just said recently. To quote the article, sports cars are useful image builders and sometimes very profitable. But as Porsche proved in the early two thousands with a Cayenne s u V, there’s a lot of profit to be made stretching the brand into other vehicle segments played intelligently and with authenticity.

The name Corvette should be a license to print money at a point in time when Ferrari and Mazara and Porsche are all offering one or more SUVs, the antithesis to the hardcore sports cars that [01:10:00] put them on the map in the first place. Why shouldn’t Corvette also consider building sedans, crossovers, or heaven forbid pickups because they shouldn’t.

Yeah. Oh, I don’t disagree with that. I, Ferrari has no business making an u v. This brings me to the first line of the car and driver ere article that says, this isn’t your grandfather’s Corvette. In fact, he’d probably decry this car using the nameplate in the first place. Eric, are you that grandfather, did they talk to you?

Did they interview you when they create with this article, because you are old man yells at cloud. Pretty much I see this as like complete sacrilege. And this is in a different way than the Mae was to the Mustang, right? The Corvette is the Corvette. The take hand and the nine 11 are not the same thing.

Let’s be real people. The take hand is an A eight. Nobody knows that. You think people know these things, but it’s not a nine 11. We’re gonna call it the nine 11 ee. It’s a different model. It’s the [01:11:00] Tacan. This is exactly the same thing as Mustang Machi. Okay, sorry. The Machi should never be called a Mustang.

That’s not a Mustang. So putting Corvette on anything other than a Corvette, a co. . It doesn’t make any sense, but I guess where are the people wrong? I don’t know. Well, I also see it as the new blazer, which by the way, the design cues that it provokes is a Camaro, S U v. When you look at it and it looks terrible, you mean the Equinox?

Same difference, right? But yeah, it’s the same thing. Again, here we have a proliferation of models. It’s all the same garbage, right? And you’re like, whatever. Okay, fine. It’s, except it’s badge engineering, a hundred percent different form. That’s all. They’re just relying on you to spend your money on the machi, because it says Mustang.

Ooh Mustang. We know what Mustang means. Well, it has nothing to freaking do with that compact crossover. S U V, right? Really tells you what they actually think about their product. It’s like we don’t think the product is good enough to stand on its own. As [01:12:00] the Mae, we have to market it this way to try and pilfer some of those buyers that want a Mustang.

We have to try and tap into that market because it’s not good enough to sell on its own. I don’t want to hate on the Mae because I do like the way it looks. I’ve seen a bunch of them in person. They’re great value for money, all those kinds of things. Their name is a debate unto, unto itself. But at the end of the day, those of us in the know know that the Mae is pinned on top of the Ford Escape and all that stuff.

It’s not a ground up. S eight 50 chassis unique like the Mustang is that with the new S seven 50 that just came out? So the Corvette, putting that badge on an S U V is an example. What I’m worried about is, to your point, Brad, is it’s an Equinox. It’s a blazer that they’re gonna slap Jake on the side of, and they’re gonna call it a Corvette, and that’s not a Corvette That’s watering down the brand and recycling stuff from one of the other [01:13:00] verticals, and then just saying, we have to have this because everybody else does.

Corvette should be left alone. Going back to the Machi for just a second. I saw something the other day, again, on my trip to the district. I didn’t know this was a thing and I didn’t know if somebody did this or if it came from the factory. It was a MA e g t and it had Mustang GT badges on it. So if you go to Ford’s website, they show a 2023 Mustang Mach E G T.

So then it was brand spanking new, starting at 69 8 95. Whoa. And what makes that so special? It has 270 miles of range, 3.8 second, zero to 60 in GT performance editions. Seating for five 20 inch machine, face aluminum wheels with high gloss Ebony, black painted pockets performance gray active seating material with unique miko, preferred reflective insert and metallic stitching.

Fixed position, front row head restraints, instrument [01:14:00] panel with aluminum apli, Magna Ride, registered trademark damping system. So does it have the same battery range and performance and all that? Because then it’s just a styling package to your point. It’s badge engineering. Okay, here’s the regular Mae.

Starting at 46 8 95 with an estimated 247 miles of range, so that’s slightly less and 5.8 seconds of zero to 60 miles an hour in the standard range battery with E all wheel drive. It has a drainable front. Ford Mobile Power Cord and a Sync four a, I don’t know. Those are the key features that list for this

Okay. Eric, let me ask you a question cuz you’ve purchased brand new vehicles before. Mm-hmm. Tanya, I don’t think has ever purchased a brand new vehicle. Not in 20 years, but no. . No, I never have. I’ve never bought a brand new car. I’ve never seen Tanya’s car. She’s never had a brand new vehicle ever. Um, but Eric, you bought a brand new GTI before you bought your R 32, right?

Right. How much did you pay? So back then, the VR six, with all the options and the leather and the quote [01:15:00] unquote, what was the moon roof at that time? I think with taxes and tags and everything, it was like 27, right? $27,000, which was kind of expensive for a car. Correct? Then, because who is, who is buying all these vehicles?

$45,000 cars and $70,000 cars? Why are cars so expensive now? Who can afford that? Can’t? I mean, I can, but I can’t. The first car I ever bought myself with a gti, you know there’s a theme here on the show. A and my gti, I was 20 grand out the door. Yep. $20,000 out the door. 180 and 2001. I don’t understand who can afford to spend $40,000 willy-nilly on a, on a car A, and that’s the best part.

That’s where the R 32 was a bargain because for 3,500 more dollars or four grand or whatever the difference was between my VR six, which was fully loaded with the winter package and all the options that I could get, the bigger wheels and all that stuff. When I went to the R 32, dude, I got 50 more horsepower.

I got all wheel drive, I got the Konik race seats, I [01:16:00] got, you know, all this really cool stuff that came specifically on the R 32, the body kit, the exhaust, all that for four grand, $32,000 in 2003 was a lot of money, but. It was just like, wow, what a car. I mean the performance difference was huge. This, you go from 46 grand to $69,000 and you’re giving me 25 more miles of electric range and a couple of seconds on zero to 60, which I’m never gonna use anyway.

It doesn’t seem worth it for a body kit. But you have aluminum aplique because if you talk to our parents, they’re like, oh, we bought brand new cars for less than 10 grand. The first vehicle I ever drove was a Honda Civic, and my father bought it brand new for $10,000. I understand inflation, you know, times are different.

Material costs and all that stuff. Everything changes over time. It still seems ridiculous. $70,000. I don’t see it. The math is not adding up. I guess longer loans this people are doing. And [01:17:00] that’s true. Cause we’ve talked about the Lending Auto, you know, lending Market, subprime Auto lending, . Yeah. This, this is subprime auto lending market.

No, it’s subprime is removed because it’s the whole market now. It’s just the auto lending, it’s market. It’s offset prime. Yeah. Everybody’s taking. You know, six and seven year loans and stuff like that. Why? Why? Why? I mean, I understand why because they have to have a vehicle, but that doesn’t make any sense to me what people are spending their money on.

We do have to move on from our raging debate about the history of names and cars and badge engineering. As this episode airs right after Rolex, there’s gonna be a whole bunch of aloo about the new cars and the L M D H and the prototype classes, and we’re gonna cover that next month as part of February’s drive through.

But there’s been a lot of testing. Over the winter months at Daytona and other tracks, and we’ve got a couple of videos in the show notes. One from Acura with a new L M D H card and one from Cadillac with a full technical review with one of the authors from [01:18:00] racer.com. The reason I’m bringing both of these up at the same time is there’s actually a third card that’s very similar to both of those, and that’s the B M W that we talked about last time, because at the end of the day, they’re all Dels underneath with different skin on ’em and their own unique engine packages.

If you wanna check out those tests, you wanna check out those reviews of the new L M D H cars if you don’t have the time to follow Rolex. But Brad, speaking of that, we’ve got a teaser for lost and found. Yeah, so I just got on my soapbox about 45 and $70,000 cars and who can afford this and all that. For those people that can afford those for a little bit more, you can pick up an Acura, A R X oh five d p I race car, the Konica Minolta Acura car from previous seasons.

My guess is it recently ran in December. You can pick this up on Bring a trailer. Right now. The current bid is 563,000. Dollars. That’s a steal. Is that Montoya’s car? [01:19:00] Uh, it’s the number seven. It might be either way. I mean, shoot 500 grand for a D P I car. Yeah, and you can go run that in H P D E, . You can go run it with Morgan Performance Group over in their prototype celebration class and stuff.

So that’d be pretty cool. Yeah. But for $563,000, I would want to take out a 30 year loan. Ah, yeah. It’s a mortgage. Uh, I’ll do a a five one arm for my Acura race card. , can I, can I get a f h a loan for that or what? You, you can get a Va . Since we stumbled backwards into Lost and Found. What else is going on before we get into this article?

I did search, I scoured the interweb. Mainly cars.com for new vehicles. Vehicles that they have listed as new. Looked for the oldest models for sale. There are two here. Let me guess that Cadillac and the GT 40 that have been on there for like a year. , before I get to [01:20:00] them, , there are two brand new 1965 AC Shelby Cobra Mark three s.

Ooh. And I say 1965 AC Shelby Cobra Mark three s. They’re not actually Shelby Cobras, they’re kit cars. Oh, okay. But as you mentioned, the 1988 Cadillac Deville base model is still out there looking for its bright and shiny owner, 17,988 at Gray Chevrolet. You can’t buy a brand new Ford GT anymore cuz we, we’ve already discussed that those are discontinued.

So what can you do? You can go on down to Lewisburg Ford and get yourself a 2005 Ford GT base yellow with black stripes for the cool price of $450,000. And then add another $450,000 so you can go 300 miles an hour. How many Dodge Darts? Uh, zero. Sadly I do not see any. Oh, there’s a Chrysler 200 so it’s close enough to a Dodge Dart.

[01:21:00] Boom. Found it. 2015 Chrysler 200 brand new 16,995. Get on down to Santa Monica Chrysler. But if you’ve got 160,000 ducks sitting in your bank account and you don’t know what to do with them, or you’re just an idiot, you could buy a Dodge Viper stretch limo. a what? I suspected the person that made this vehicle, or the group that made this vehicle saw the top gear episode where they created the limousines.

No. And they really, really enjoyed Richard Hammond’s sport limo. No. So they made themselves a Dodge Viper RT 10 stretch limo. Did we go to Florida? Man already? That’s terrible. Does it have a hot tub in the middle? Cuz it looks like you should have one. It does not have a hot tub in the middle. It also does not have the pole string with the little cart to get you to move between the front and the back.

The dumb waiter yes. Gives you the dumb waiter. . This thing is so terrible. I’m nominating it for our uncool wall and we’ll see what people [01:22:00] think. No, no, no, no. This thing is so terrible. I’m nominating it as our contender for what should I buy? Andrew Bank , because he did just sell his C eight Corvette, so he’s in the market.

He had it all of three minutes. I mean, come on. That’s a story for another episode. Yes, there’s something else on this list. We talked about towing and what we can tow with and upgrading our toe rigs and 1200 foot pounds of torque. So this one actually caught my eye because this is something I actually thought about doing.

I would never do it because I’m not a moron, but I have thought about it, and that is turn my regular pickup truck into a. . Now this person took a GMC Canyon. That’s right, folks. That’s the smaller of the pickup trucks and went ahead and just turned it into a dually, but he didn’t add upgraded axles or anything like that.

He literally just added wheel adapters, eight lug adapters and some wheels from eBay. Oh, [01:23:00] okay. Then he bolted on some vendors and stuff like that. So it’s doey conversion ish. It’s a doey light. So he has worst performance cuz now he’s got two extra rotating masses creating drag. Well, yeah, and when you say worst performance, this is already an anemic 2.5 liter four cylinder with a whopping 200 horsepower and 190 foot pound twerk.

This guy can’t tow 400 pounds, let alone 40,000 pounds. I was under the naive assumption that someone would do this properly, and that sounded like a lot of work. Like people that take front or real wheel drives and turn them into all-wheel drives. It’s like, why wouldn’t you just buy the all-wheel drive version?

Why wouldn’t you just buy a Dooly truck? Did you not read the title of this article? No, I didn’t. I was just listening it. It says, for our audience that may not read it either because it’s really not worth your time. This homemade G M C Canyon Dooly wasn’t a great idea. So now it’s for [01:24:00] sale. There are some homegrown people that, that know how to fabricate and do things.

To Tanya’s point, there have been people that have done this to Ford Rangers and to Chevy Suburbans, and I’ve seen it on Tahoes and things like that. It’s been done before properly. This is just total ass. Yeah. This person cut a lot of corners. He didn’t upgrade the axles like he should have. I don’t even know what the equivalent of this is.

He just strapped on two extra wheels and, and glued on some fenders. But to Brad’s point, none of this matters. Even if he did it correctly, you know, 73 bolt rear end and blah, blah, blah, and 9,000 pound, you know, leaf springs and all this stuff, it could still only tow two bags of mulch because it’s pathetic.

Well, that’s my point. Like, why would you go through the trouble and not just go buy a dually if you want a dually, I believe the word that Don Weiberg likes to use on what should I buy is. Oser. Oh yeah, that’s, that’s, this fits correctly. [01:25:00] Shocker. In the ad it says that the truck vibrates at speed, , but it also says that the truck vibrated before the conversion.

So it’s not the conversion’s fault. That’s because it had the Chevy Shimmy up front and now it’s got the dually wobble in the back. dumps like a truck, truck, truck. Guys. Like what? What , let me see. And since we’ve been talking about what should I buy is kind of throughout this episode as well, along with CES and all those other things, I gotta tip my hat to Mark Shank.

He is a soothsayer. That man is a prophet. Cause a new article came out from CNN that. Why some cars from the nineties are soaring in value. And why is that? Because those of us, as Mark likes to say, at peak earning potential, go back to the cars of our youth, which would be the nineties. And we’re looking to buy, restore, and do things with these [01:26:00] wonderful pieces of nineties engineering

Now, I will say, I’ve seen some really cool stuff lately where people are spending money on third gen Supras from the late eighties, early nineties, doing some wide body stuff reminiscent of that Hyundai we were talking about. Think that is super cool, but that’s our generation looking at those cars going, it’s time to buy the cars we couldn’t afford then we were too young, we weren’t driving, whatever.

But now, before they get too expensive, invest in those. So I think Mark’s right, but you gotta pick the right car. Just like we talked about on the nineties. What should I buy episode. I missed my chance because the Eagle talent has increased 45% in value. So now I can’t buy one because it costs $4,000 instead of like 2200

Get it while it’s hot. I guess we would be remiss. Is it that time again already? I mean, we’ve been on break. Is there Tesla News? Yeah, I mean there’s like a little bit of [01:27:00] Tesla news, I guess. Just a little bit, huh? Some news from the UK over the Christmas time holiday, people were upset. There was apparently chaos at some sort of Tesla charging station.

Dozens of electric vehicles forced to wait in three hour cues at charge stations across the uk. Can I quote Brad on this one, please? Uh, Dedo . Well, you know, and that’s the first reaction. Well, like, duh, it’s like, was it like super cold? And, you know, batteries hate the cold. Uh, Uhhuh, no one ever thought of that, right?

Except apparently, I don’t know, there’s a little bit more to the story. I don’t know what massive road closures were happening. There was like funneling people all down back roads, and it sounded like there was also an abnormally higher volume of people going to these stations and normal. And yes, they were waiting three hours in line because there were just so many people backed up.

And it’s not like a gas station where, oh, okay, after five minutes I’m full. And I go. It’s [01:28:00] obviously a lot longer than that. As also the component that the chargers were charging slower, given the colder temperatures. Is anyone surprised that batteries don’t like the cold? No. But the electrons, if anything, I guess it shows there’s more Tesla owners than infrastructure that meets that volume, and so they’re gonna have to increase.

Tesla stations? I don’t know. Well, I mean that goes along with that guy who was complaining about the EV that he bought and he is charging it on one 10 and he realized it was gonna take a week to charge it. Let me rig up some nine volts, string them together and try to turn my blow dryer on. Okay. Like

dry my hair faster. Just lazy. Look at Eric, it’s officially dying. the funniest version a while. Brad’s just like can, [01:29:00] uh, we keep going. So in other TUSLA news, couple months ago there was a headline for Reuters exclusive. Tesla faces US Criminal Probe over self-driving claims. Yes. And you know, that’s been brewing for a while.

States like California really getting under the gun, they do not like the false advertisement of fully autonomous Tesla vehicles, which is not true. We’ve talked about this over and over again at nauseum. Essentially, the US Department of Justice has launched probe at the time of this article into the claims that were made back in 2016 in marketing promotional material that touted the, uh, the autopilot capabilities and quote unquote, it drives itself and blah, blah, blah.

And they had this whole route through wherever in California, Menlo Parks was somewhere, something like that. They had the person in the car and, oh, but the person’s just there because they have to be there. The car is driving itself. You know, this was a couple months ago and the articles going on, all these probes, all this stuff.

Well [01:30:00] fast forward to present day from that article, and two days ago, an article was released regarding that 2016 promotional information video touting the autopilot, the headline being, Tesla staged 2016 self-driving demo. According to the senior autopilot engineer. Nice. Eric, what do I use? What do I say?

Uh, Dedo. So now the guy who apparently was involved in that whole thing has gone into the courts and said, no. In fact, I guess he did it. Whoever, someone actually pre-programmed the car to go on its little journey. So no, it was not self-driving. And I also saw something to say that on one of the attempts, the thing crashed.

like into a fence or something. So here’s what we’re gonna do. All right. Fans of the show, we’re gonna start trending a new hashtag cuz I think it’s justified in this case. Hashtag Tesla gate cuz that’s what this is. And this is [01:31:00] retribution for all the diesel bull crap. We went through Tesla Gate hashtag Tesla gate.

You better trend that hashtag put it. We’ll see what happens. Igate, I mean, it’ll be interesting to see what unfolds out of this, cuz those are big allegations for someone to come forward. In all this time, it self drives. You can sit in the back seat and watch yourself wrap around A Texas tree lies, blah, blah, blah.

And now, oh yeah, it, it was, it was fake. It was really just intended to show you what we could do. What you could do, what you could do was use a computer program to program a remote control card that didn’t prove anything, but they got all the other manufacturers into a tizzy up off their butts, trying to design all sorts of systems that also don’t work.

But all the other manufacturers have good legal teams and they’ve never claimed to be fully autonomous, self-driving. Go recline your seat, take a nap, and then have your Tesla drive underneath the semi truck. Well, continuing on hashtag Tesla gate, there’s also news regarding the gigafactory that they built in Texas [01:32:00] where there have been complaints filed to the Federal Department of Labor alleging wage theft and falsified safety training documents.

Basically fake OSHA certificates to construction workers who were building that plant.

the hole keeps getting deeper , so it’ll be interesting to see kind of how all these scandals, if you will, are gonna start to unfold. But I guess on the bright side, there was a post from some sort. Fan group. Well, Brad is super excited about this one because he might not have wasted his dogecoin, the quote unquote of this posting.

Tesla cyber truck design is ready. Production may start in mid 2023. Cor, the chief designer. Can you repeat that? Tesla cyber truck design is ready. Production may start. Wait, stop, stop right there. Back, back up. Production may, oh, stop there. What? What was that word? Production May. Oh, oh . Oh, okay. So [01:33:00] 2033. All right, cool.

Got it. So T b D. So you got that a hundred dollars deposit. You might be able to use it lies. Looking forward to my new cyber truck. You have thoroughly lowered my expectations. Brad doesn’t sing anymore. It’s 2023. He’s like, we’re done. We’re done with that bit. New, new year, new me. No lowered expectations.

I don’t even know what to think about this because I have a problem with most YouTube car reviews, hence why I don’t do them. But a YouTuber wrecked a brand new G M c Hummer ev after just nine miles. I mean, you’re an nashat. Good for you. Titted for the views, and that’s all one of these. They had one at ces.

They’re quite large. But are the grills as big as a bmw? No. Despite this thing being the size of like three stories of a building, no, they were proportional. . I love this article. I mean, what kind of an as hat. Are you? [01:34:00] Well, if you watch this, it’s insane because basically it’s your typical YouTube review video where it’s like, oh man, dude, let’s talk about all my car care products.

Talk about the car for three seconds. Oh, car care products, flame thrower, blah, blah, blah, craziness. Here’s my buddies. Let’s do some GaN crap. Right? And you’re like, okay, fine. So he’s doing zero to 60 launches to see if he can get the three second time or whatever, the watts to freedom acceleration mode or whatever, you know, ludicrous mode that they all have, and then decides at the five minute mark to go down a gravel road, a bunch of dips and jumps and whatever, and basically face plants the humer in a rut and destroys it.

But he does this with passengers. Yeah. What it did for me was not really critique his ability as a driver or as a YouTuber or just anything. What it did was it brought into question all the reviews and speculation about the competency. Of the Hummer as an off-road vehicle, [01:35:00] because if I can’t withstand a jump at 50 miles an hour, I like that the camera cut out.

So you didn’t even, or he cut out. Maybe in the video you can’t even see, like the crash just like goes black. You’re never going 50, 60 miles an hour off-roading. This isn’t the the car rally. Yeah. What, what else would you use this for? Baja, come on now. Trophy trucks. No. And then those idiots that bought the first Raptors did the same thing.

They went off-roading and then cracked the frame. Your morons, you, you don’t just go out in a regular production vehicle, start thinking that you’re Ken Block and Decar rally. No, that’s not how this works. What these vehicles are actually made for. Well the Raptor was marketed as that, so shame on Ford.

But this wasn’t marketed as something like that. This was marketed as like an off rotor like the Wrangler or the Bronco? No, this was marketed with cartoon crabs and LeBron James. So whatever. It’s a 9,000 plus almost they say weighs 9,000. This thing weighs closer to 10,000 [01:36:00] pounds. That’s a lot of weight at 60 miles an hour to slam into something.

Sorry. I doubt it’s designed, sustain that impact. No, no. It’s designed for slow off-roading. Slow rock crawling. Yeah. You’re, you’re going through the valleys just kind of rolling. Not like I’m, yeah, not like you said, I’m not on the car with reinforced suspension. Like this guy’s a hat. This guy is an ass hat He deserves.

He wrecked his car, did it for the views. I must drive flat out. Oh, what do you tell your insurance company? You don’t Because he’s a YouTuber and they probably gave him the vehicle anyway so he doesn’t actually own it. So it’s on loan from GM and now they gotta deal with it. No, no way. No way. GM’s legal team is like, yeah, this is a great idea.

Take it and just like crash it. That shows how great our vehicle is. To your point of people who would think like, oh it should be indestructible. It’s a Hummer. Well, speaking of cars jumping and not falling apart, we’ve talked in the past about movies like Gone In 60 [01:37:00] Seconds, A Seven Ups and others, but there’s also another famous movie with a car jumping through San Francisco.

I’m hearing that it’s about to be rebooted. Is that bullet? That is Bullet. Steven Spielberg is working with Bradley Cooper in a direct reboot of the Steve McQueen Classic bullet. I just don’t know what to say. Why we need to do this Is Beyond Me. Why not? Because the movie is so old that the new generation has never seen it.

So it’s a totally new movie to them. I don’t know anybody that’s actually seen the full movie. Anytime you talk to anybody, they’ve only talk about the car chase. So why not just recreate the car Chase? Why do you have to recreate the whole movie? Cuz the rest of the movie I’ve heard is trash. But isn’t that just become like those John Wu web shorts from like back in the day?

What’s wrong with them? They were great. That’s what I’m saying. But they were like a che scene and they were over. Redo those or just, uh, just do something like that. Well, speaking of a blast from the past, like you’re talking about, I mean, again, I don’t see why you can’t just go on any of the streaming [01:38:00] services and watch Bullet.

I mean, it’s there. It’s readily available in every catalog. Save yourself the trouble and just watch the Chase . Maybe they could make the movie better because the movies of those errors. Was there dialogue in that movie? No. That’s what made it fantastic. Movies with talking and cars are crap. You want movies of cars or movies of talking cars.

So you wanna watch a race? Yes. Yes. But not, but not a race. I don’t want, you wanna watch Laman? You wanna, you wanna watch Laman? You wanna watch the Daytona Rolex? Exactly That. The movie Lamonds McQueen’s Lamonds. For any normal human, it is three hours of absolute grueling medieval torture. But for those of us that are petrolheads and enthusiasts, it’s the greatest film of all time.

There’s about six minutes of dialogue. Do you think that the current generation of young folk would have the attention span to sit through a silent movie? It’s not silent. It’s not. It’s full of Ferrari and Porsche. Yeah. No. No. Dialogue doesn’t mean silent. Yeah, [01:39:00] but if I strap them down, clockwork Orange Style, , another movie that they’ve never watched.

They have no idea of any Kubrick movies too, I’m sure. But you know, whatever. But speaking of Blast from the past, I don’t know that any of us have ever proposed this question before, except for maybe in Forza, where Brad dries a cevo that’s highly modified, just to piss us all off. But somebody brought your fantasy Ciro in to reality, and took a B BMW motor rod motorcycle engine and powers his two CV and then takes it to the track.

Okay, here we go. Here we go. So this is a motorcycle engine in a cevo. Yep. I wanna say he’s haul ass, but he’s also not catching up to like, what is this? Is this like a Ford Escort but not the good ones? Oh, did you see the STA zero to 60 under nine seconds? That’s pretty good for Docebo. That is. Oh, here we go.

He’s coming up on an E 36 bitch. Get outta my way. Get out the way. Get out the way. Oh, he can’t. He can’t. Oh, he can’t. The E 36 can’t get away. [01:40:00] Oh, he’s out breaking him. Son of a bitch. This is epically good. Oh my God. . I finally gotta the outside view. Oh, that’s hilarious. Okay. That’s. Epically good. I’m seeing it not from the cockpit, from the third party angle.

That makes it all worth it. Look, he’s running down on that Miata Al breaks it too. Shit, it’s almost on three wheeling. I feel like I’m watching a Uhoh, a seventies like French getaway movie. Look at it all on the inside line around that remote Cat R Oh man, there’s two people in that thing. He needs the ballast or beyond the door handle.

Who? Wow, that rear-end drift. He almost like clipped that launch. I think it’s very useful. Anyway, that’s impressive. We’ll leave it to our listeners’ imaginations, or they can check it out on our show notes, but I thought that was a gem that I needed to share this month. So it’s good stuff. Speaking of gems and sharing and maybe sharing too much, Amazon is [01:41:00] reportedly likely to drop Jeremy Clarkson response to some stupid asinine comment he made about Angela Markle again.

So, wait, wait. About, about who isn’t it? What, what’s her face? German Chancellor, right? No, no, no. Megan Markle is, is Prince Harry’s or former Prince Harry wife. The actress suits . Angela Merkel. That’s Angela Merkel, isn’t it? Merkel. Merkel. Thank you. Angela Merkel. . Oh my God, whatever. It doesn’t matter if he made a comment about the deceased Pope or the astronauts.

It, it, it’s all, it doesn’t matter. Jeremy Clarkson is who he is. But my point is this. I don’t know when the last time you guys watched a grand tour or one of the movies or whatever, I do love old top gear, but even those are getting harder to watch because, you know, you’ve just been along the ride for 20 years.

is it to get attention [01:42:00] because nobody cares anymore are Clarkson Hammond and May even relevant anymore. I mean, may is being successful doing his other shows, but he always has something like that. Richard Hammond is, I don’t know, I watched half of the last grand tour with the, the Subaru and the Ebo and whatever.

Oh, the scan flick or whatever it was called, which I haven’t even Yeah, there’s a Scandinavian flick. Yeah, I, I saw half of it and I haven’t gone back to it cuz it’s, it’s more of the same just shit. It’s, it’s the same stuff over and over again. Like Top Gear was perfect as it was for a long, long time and they had to ruin it.

But even before they were kicked off Top year, it had started just becoming more and more the same. And the Grand Torch, it has not lived up to the hype. And what top year was they? Like Top year is one of those things. I think it’s just, it was great when it was, but it’s time to kind of move on. Yeah. And yeah, the [01:43:00] adventures that they went on, on top Gear were really original.

Like, you know, when they went to Bolivia and the North Pole and all that kind of thing. But then it’s like they just tried to replicate and replicate, replicate and then it got old because we all knew what to expect, you know? So yeah. I feel you. But you know what’s gonna be even worse than this? And I don’t understand why this is even a thing or why somebody’s spending money on this.

Please tell me why they wanna make a Grand Tomo movie. Because movies based on video games are highly successful. Didn’t you know that , look at all the Doom movies, , resident Evil movies, they, you know, they say that the last of us is breaking that trend. Maybe it’s also not in a movie. No, it’s a show now or whatever on hbo.

Yeah, that’s true. You’re right. It’s not a movie, it’s a series. That’s it. That we need a Grand Teresa series problem solved. It’s called Drive to Survive. But here, but here’s, here’s the thing, the last of us. If you played the game, like it’s like playing a movie. I dunno. [01:44:00] Yes. They’re redoing the footage that they already created for the game.

This is as dumb as the Need for Speed movie, and I never saw it. Oh, that was horrible. I watched it was really bad. What kills me about this is the new grid that had come out. Grid legends. There’s a whole cinematic in the career mode that’s actually quite good. They use real actors and they try to set up the drama of the whole thing or whatever.

I enjoyed that. It’s probably two hours long, but do I really want that to go pay for that in movie theater? No. If you wanna see the cinematics and the gameplay of career mode, by the way, it’s on our YouTube channel because I, I live streamed all of it, so it’s all sitting there in the vault. They did a good job, but Grand Teresa of the movie, there’s no story in Grand Tomo, so I don’t understand what they’re doing.

It just doesn’t make sense. It’s a fast and the Furious movie, but it’s stupid with a different theme. But it’s stupid. I’m not saying it’s not. I apologize for sounding like I’m justifying it, but, and and maybe it’s not what we think it is. I [01:45:00] originally thought, oh, this could be cool. This could be like a documentary kind of about how they had the grand charisma tournaments and stuff and they actually found drivers tried to give them racing careers.

I thought I would watch something like that. That could be interesting. I’ll give you that. But if this is some over-dramatized Hollywood bullshit based on the video game, which you’re right has no plot and no story, you’re not running over pimps and hose in that. I want to know, is the scooter Pike’s Peak or whatever car is that gonna be in it?

That should be in it. That would be amazing. That’d be the only reason to watch it if it was live video of that car. Yes. Well, we gotta move to rich people. Thanks. Something super cool. Probably cost more than the real thing. Somebody built a working life size Lego Chevy. V 8, 4 54. Big block. What’s it run on?

Uh, it runs on Legos. . Is it electric? I don’t know. It is running. They have it all moving. It’s use that little electric [01:46:00] brick. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It’s very big though. I think it’s a little AC motor or whatever. But yeah, the whole thing spins. It works. The valve train, the cams, all of it. It’s got square pistons, which are kind of hilarious.

It’s a life size Lego Chevy 4 54 big block. It’s pretty cool. Why don’t they put this in the e ray? Right? . But now it’s time we go south and talk about alligators and bear.

Oh, we’re not only going south, we’re going Midwest. . Yes. There’s some nuggets in here. We’re gonna start across the pond, actually. We’re gonna go to Germany. Uh oh. A driver in Germany apparently had his license taken away. He was driving a Tesla on the Audubon at 70 miles an hour, which on the Audubon, that’s, that’s nothing.

I mean, [01:47:00] that’s slow. That’s, yeah. So it was Sunday drive. The kicker here though, was that it took 15 minutes for him to pull the vehicle over with the cops around him because he had reclined the seats tricked the autopilot with a weight on the steering wheel and was sleeping. I was just about to say, there’s no way this story is false because he wasn’t driving his Tesla.

Tesla drives itself. Was it bouncing off of the other police cars? You know what? Given all of the incidents where the Teslas have gotten confused with flashing emergency vehicle and police vehicle lights, it’s a wonder it didn’t crash. . All right, so now we’re gonna come back over to the States and we’re gonna go to the Midwest to O I O, where from the video footage.

Kind of funny, thankfully they weren’t hurt, but apparently some youths, 16, 17 year olds tried to dine and dash from an Ohio Buffalo Wild Wings. and somehow [01:48:00] one of the Buffalo Wild Wing employees ended up on the hood of this B M W as they’re speeding away and then eventually crash, I think to like a snowbank.

Is this the Ohio thing? . I mean, it’s comical from the video. Like luckily that guy’s not hurt, but also it didn’t explain how that guy got on the hood. He jumped or was they attempted to run over in one or the other. Right. I’m thinking probably the run over and he had no choice but to strap on and pray, , why does this look like the mall scene from Back to the Future?

Right? It does, right? Totally. Expecting a van again to run out and you know, like some terrorists or something like, what is this? I’ll tell you what, if I was employed by a Buffalo Wild Wings, I would tell them in the interview process, if someone dies in Dash, you can go get your own money. I’m not jumping on the hood of a car to get your money for a $30 check.

You can kiss last. . Yeah. Yeah, pretty much. Right? That was the Ohio man. Ohio people. Apparently, [01:49:00] in certain areas in Florida, you are prohibited from parking your pickup truck in your driveway. Maybe if you’ve got extended cab, big Horn, King’s Ranch, Quadro, whatever, that’s like larger than your driveway sticks out into the street.

I could maybe understand. However, this person has a Rivian, like that’s a little baby pickup truck, and it’s so cute and he’s not allowed to park it in the driveway. I think he needs to move. This is not exclusive to Florida either. People that live in Maryland are probably very familiar. Montgomery Village has very similar HOA laws where basically anybody with a pickup truck, you’re not allowed to have it parked in your driveway overnight.

You have to park it on the street because it’s considered, uh, it’s seen as like a contractor vehicle and they don’t want that type of. Image in their town. How is the image not there? If it’s parked in front of my house looking like it’s someone who [01:50:00] doesn’t belong there and is there to service my house,

So usually if somebody’s there to service your house, they’re not gonna be spending the night. So the truck’s not gonna be there overnight. You can have it in your driveway during the day, but it, it cannot be there overnight. But I can park my personal vehicle in front of my property overnight, not according to the hoa.

So then where the hell do I park my car? There are streets designated for parking trucks. This is why HOAs suck. Period. Now I think an argument could be made that a rivian is not decreasing the aesthetic appeal of a neighborhood. Nope. Pickup truck. It’s, it’s black and white pickup truck. Plain and simple, but whatever a quad druley is.

Yes,

That’s the future. That’s Tanya’s truck. When she designs what? That’s what that Ford is called. The Ford F three 50 Quadro. This is why I don’t have a pickup truck yet, because they haven’t built the pickup truck that I want. I don’t just want two wheels on the back of [01:51:00] each rear. I want four effing wheels, eight wheels in the back.

You want an eight wheel rivian? It’s quadri. You want four up front, four in the back, . That way it’s business and business. It’s none of this business and party nonsense. It’s just . I got loud mulch to hold. All right. I need my quad. Quad, quadri, Twilio. It’s the Alpo or male version. Lio

I will say that if I owned a hundred thousand dollars Rivian, I’ll be parking it in my garage. Right. Well, how else are you gonna charge it? You gonna run an extension cord out to your pickup truck in your driveway? Let’s go back. Gonna go back in time, a little northwest here and go to Indiana. I don’t think we’ve heard from Indiana before.

Nope. We should hear more from Indiana. Indiana man dressed as Pikachu ran from police on lawnmower. [01:52:00] Is he running or is he on a lawnmower? And you know, when you read the article, there are just puns. At this time. We believe Pikachu acted alone. No other Pokemon characters were involved in this incident from the police department.

However, we are not opposed to catching them all. . The police officer wished he had a poke ball in order to help him catch the wild Pikachu. The deputy attempted to pull the lawnmower over, but the man dressed as Pikachu responded with a shock by flipping off the deputy as he sped away best he could.

Police said the quote, pursuit of lawnmower. Pikachu went for a few blocks before the deputy broke off the chase. Due to the driving of the lawnmower becoming more erratic and dangerous, even at one point, attempting to hit the deputy’s vehicle, which high school creative writing class was this submitted for.

This article is awesome. It’s got, it touches everything. . There’s drama, there’s profanity intrigue, and there’s intrigue. . [01:53:00] We need to hear more from the people of the great state of Indiana. They, they got some winners there. So let’s go back down to Florida Now. I, I almost passed this one up because the headline said Florida men arrested driving with quote, stolen tag, written on cardboard plate.

And I had just glossed over it. I was like, okay, Florida men arrested driving with a stolen tag. Yeah. And big deal. No, no, no. You read on . It was a piece of cardboard hovering the license plate of this pickup truck with the word stolen tag written on the cardboard

Are you kidding me? This belongs in Woe. Was that, do they still do that in world’s Dumbest criminals or whatever? That was stupidest criminals file. Like, really? Why don’t you just like spray paint on the side of the car? Pull me over. And then the best part is, so they get pulled over dash cam on the cop cars is recording to everything every right.

And there’s two people in the car. So the guy trying to get his passenger falls [01:54:00] out, stop onto the ground. Another dame, wherever, only in Florida. Them, them people in Florida, they be different. They just do things differently. I saved the best for last. Oh boy. Okay. Just listen. Don’t click the link yet. The way it gets, it gets better than this.

No, no. Don’t click the link yet. Let me, let me take you on this journey and we go to Michigan. Here’s the headline. Michigan man gets drunk watching owls poops on his PT Cruiser tells nurses his blood is pure natural ice

What?

How many articles is this? I wanna unpack this a little bit. So he was watching owls, so is the comma in the wrong place? Was he watching owls poop on his PT Cruiser off ? Was he pooping on his PT cruiser? As the [01:55:00] officers were doing sobriety tests on the man, the Natty Ice apparently hit him pretty hard, and according to the report, he dropped his pants and began taking a dump on the bumper of his car.

On the dumper of his car, he severely improved the aesthetic of the PT Cruiser. So . Oh my God. So when he got to the hospital and the nurses were gonna take blood for more of the sobriety test work, he told them it’s all beer. Not gonna lie to you. Pure natural ice. Pure na. Yes. . Oh my God. The bigger question is how much Natty Bow do you have to drink to get that stupid?

I think if you’re drinking Natty Bow, you started out stupid . You’re in the Gordon State Gamer area in Kalamazoo County, Michigan, which your PT cruise. Listening to owls with couple [01:56:00] cans and Naty bows. Naty eyes. . What the hell does the owls at the, he was in the, he was watching the, he was watching wls. He was al watching at night.

Do you guys remember like season one drive-through? There was a terrorist group out of Michigan that used PT Cruiser. . Do you think this guy belongs to that? He’s the mastermind. I love the picture of the owl. That’s like the headline picture. The owl is just like, what the fuck? Owls are always like, what the fuck just happened?

Yeah, but he just washing grown ass man shit on his car. I be, he said to the owl, lemme show you how it’s done. beer, hold my beer. Wonder if that’s what he said to the cop. Hold my beer a second. , I gotta take piss. The police asked him what scale he was one to 10. He said, I’m at a five. I’ll be honest, I’m drunk.[01:57:00]

Daddy Bow didn’t really get to you Well on that. It’s time we go behind the pit wall. Talk about first horses. I need more floor. Man. The winter break did not disappoint. It did not, but at least nobody was throwing turkeys in the pool are beating each other with Christmas trees, so you know. Hey, that said,

In other interesting news, we talked about, you know, Bradley Cooper and Grand Tomo movies and apparently, what is it, Malcolm in the Middle Star or Frankie Moon? Is now trading his TV career to become part of a NASCAR race team. And I don’t think it’s actually like nascar. Nascar, I think it’s like a smaller division of nascar.

Yeah. Nonetheless. But he says quote, finally making my dream a reality. Well, and he’s been racing cars for a long time cuz he was doing like touring cars I thought for a while. At one point. Yeah. I think he had a medical condition that stopped him from racing for a [01:58:00] long time. I mean, good for him. If he’s over that and is able to get back into it, he still looks like he’s 15 years old.

thousand percent on that one. And you know, I, if he made the money in Hollywood to be able to do it, and that’s what he’s always wanna do. I mean, I’m, I’m not here to stop anybody. I think that’s awesome. I mean, good for him. There’s been plenty of other, I mean, look at Dempsey, right? I mean, he did his whole Grey’s Anatomy thing and now he owns a Porsche racing team.

So you know anybody, if you got the passion, you got the ability go for it. In the same family of people and same generation as the Ken Blocks and the Tony Hawks and whatnot. We have Travis Pastrana coming outta the motocross world and now he’s going to attempt to race the Daytona 500 here in February.

Cool. Apparently he tried to do it 10 years ago or so. It didn’t really get anywhere and nobody, I guess, was really paying attention or doesn’t even remember. So it’s, I guess the 10th anniversary of that attempt. And so we’re gonna try again here in 2023. I’m declaring right now. I’m going to try and run into Daytona 500.

Good for you. I will not be successful, but I’m going to try. You gonna run on [01:59:00] foot ? Yes. Okay. That. That’s one way to do it. So we closed out the year with our Formula One retrospective, our crossover with two girls, one formula. We even had a speech by Dr. James Miller about the evolution of Formula One in our Formula one Celebration week.

So you guys are our resident Formula One experts. It’s been a couple of months. Why don’t you get us caught up? Where are we? How’s the season looking? It looks great. , uh, I mean, we already talked about all the driver changes and who’s going to what teams and stuff like that of notes. We will again not have a Chinese Grand Prix thanks to Covid.

Yeah. They already canceled that. It’s not like four years in a row. It is four years in a row actually. I mean, why even announce that? It’s like who cares if it’s not gonna happen? It’s not gonna happen. Well, they announced it a while ago and now they’ve lifted all their restrictions on Covid. Mostly they’ve opened back up for travel, yada, [02:00:00] yada.

So why? I’m not sure why they would need to still have it be canceled unless they had like a five year deal and they have to cancel it every year. They, they’ve been going back and forth with their covid restrictions and they had a spike and then it would go down and they had another spike. And it’s, I mean, it’s been really inconsistent there where like, I think the rest of the world is kind of,

I don’t wanna say put Covid behind us, but Right. Covid is almost like an afterthought now in some places where I think China’s still very much dealing with the repercussions of what happened. Yeah, of course. For anyone paying attention to the schedule. So just to highlight that testing starts in late February, and the first race in Bahrain is on March 3rd through fifth qualifying practice, et cetera, et cetera.

I think the interesting thing, note in tying back to the beginning of the show, being in Las Vegas at one point, ended up in an Uber going around trying to go somewhere passed by the future site of Formula One. It was all taped off, had the [02:01:00] Formula One banners when everything the Las Vegas race is supposed to debut this year.

It is a late season race. It’s the second to last, so it’s November 16th, 18th. They better get working. Because that construction area, ain’t nothing happen. No, not there. They’re gonna do like the Baltimore Grand Prix and throw up some Jersey walls and fence and say here’s a racetrack. Oh, I know. I’m sure.

But they still have to build their facilities and whatever else. Grand stands here there in Paddock area. Right. Where are the cars? They do pit stops in Formula One. They’re just gonna pull into the casino now. Yeah. Oh, they’re gonna drive through the Venetia Underground parking. Yeah. Well they’re gonna drive through Pit.

They’re gonna take the Tesla tunnel. Oh, they should totally add that in. That would sound amazing. Can you imagine? Oh my God. They would probably These cars deaf. Yeah, that’s true. They don’t sound that great. But since you’re talking about Las Vegas, they said it’s basically sold out and if you wanna get a spot, would you like to guess how much it costs?

Gotta be worse than Miami. I’m sure [02:02:00] they’re saying seats at the wind are currently going for 1 million. What? Uh, that’s not, I mean, it’s kind of accurate, but not entirely accurate. The wind has put together a $1 million ticket package. You can still buy tickets for, for 500 bucks? No, not for $500. Cause those are all gone.

You can still buy a ticket for less than a million dollars though. There’s a large range between $500 and a million dollars. I know. Cause I’m closer to the $500 range And a bank account. I’m much further from the $1 million range. But the package. Is to include four nights in an encore, three bedroom duplex, a Jira of Dom Perol.

Exclusive access to opening ceremonies. Dinner for six at Delilah v i p. Access to exclusive WIN Race Week Events. Six Win Elite Tickets to Awakening Golf Spa [02:03:00] Treatments and Salon Reservations for six. Even though yeah, you can take up to five different. Airport arrival and departure to and from the F1 pad deck.

My guess is they’re gonna use the viper limo and then lifetime membership and private access. None of that seems like it adds up to a million dollars. Eric, I tend to agree with you. This looks like it should cost probably about $25, not $25 million thousand dollars maybe. Yeah. Yeah. I will say in terms of things being sold out immediately, if anybody was looking to go to France this year, you missed your opportunity in October.

Lamonds is completely sold out and they’re releasing some weird v i P packages for folks trying to tantalize people to come to the race still because what they’re left with is v I P packages for qualifying on Wednesday. Hmm. I’m like, I don’t wanna be v i P on Wednesday for qualifying. That seems just lame.

So yeah, Lamonds is packed. It’s gonna be [02:04:00] amazing. I’m very fortunate that, you know, I’m able to go super stoked, but racing this year I think is gonna be bigger than it’s ever been. Just like Rolex they said is the largest field in years. So here’s one other F1 tidbit that just got announced today. So KM Mag was due to be at the Daytona race.

I’m racing in the Mdk Motorsport, Porsche nine 11 GT three, and apparently he has had to pull out so he won’t be there. He had hand surgery and he’s been advised to not participate in the race. In other Formula One news, there are rumors, some Instagram posts from Andretti Autosport teasing a potential entry into Formula One with Andrei, as we know, and we talked about most of last year, you know, is he gonna buy Haas?

Are they gonna do this? Are they gonna do that? But it’s the other side of that coin that was a little bit puzzling to me. And they’re looking to partner with Cadillac. I mean, we talked about Corvette building an S U V in a four-door. Why can’t we have a Corvette formula car? Why Cadillac? , why is [02:05:00] Cadillac the racing division of gm?

Does that make any sense at all? I don’t think it’s what would be top of mind for most people. I mean, I know in the olden times, Cadillacs were raced and there’s a whole kind of pedigree there, but the way Cadillac has evolved the way it’s perceived, to your point, I just, I don’t get it. Maybe they’re trying to go back to their roots.

Meanwhile, the drama Lamas are all excited, drive to survive. Season five starts on February 20. On Netflix. I’m not gonna watch it New Year, you’re missing it out. Not gonna happen. In other racing news listed under the category of, I didn’t remember that this happened, I know that Codemasters bought slightly Mad Studios, which means they had absorbed games like Project Cars into their catalog alongside titles like Dirt and Grid and all those, you know, formula One and all that kind of stuff.

And we were all kind of excited when Project Cars three came out and then it was unfortunately a dud somewhere in the middle of Covid in [02:06:00] 2021, EA purchased Codemasters. So now that they’re under the design studios of ea, they’ve like a lot of different companies in the tech industry right now, they’re downsizing.

You’ve heard about this at Microsoft, you’ve heard about this at Google, you’ve heard about this at Amazon, et cetera. EA is kind of scuttling redundant, you know, developers and whatnot. And they’re downsizing. And they’ve said along with that, certain titles are not gonna be coming back and that’s gonna include Project Cars.

So I don’t know necessarily if any of the Codemasters titles are gonna get dropped, because I feel like F1 Dirt and Grid in some ways have been pretty popular. You know, they launched Grid Legends just after Project Cars, and I thought the new grid was way better than Project Cars. Was curious to see what happens in the virtual side of the house.

I’m still playing a set of Corsa competition, so whatever. I just don’t wanna pay $80 a game. That’s what I’m worried about with ea. Upcoming local news and events brought to us by collector car guide.net, the [02:07:00] ultimate reference for car enthusiasts. We have our first big field trip since Covid. Thanks to our new Northeast region Chief Marissa Cannon, we’ll be visiting the Semina Foundation Museum on Saturday February 25th.

Details on our field trip and happy hour available on club do gt motorsports.org. So let’s see what’s coming up for late winter. The Best of Britain event celebrating a hundred years of MG kicks off on February 11th through February 26th at the Semina Foundation in Philadelphia. Brian Redmond’s Target 66 event is scheduled for February 17th through the 19th spoiler.

We plan to talk more about this event with James Redmond in the near future Motor Ramo 2023 will be held at the Farm Show Complex in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania on February 18th and 19th. One of the largest indoor shows and even includes indoor racing events. And if you live on the West coast, the Zimmerman Automotive Driving Museum has announced their event schedule.

Starting with Sunday Sweetheart [02:08:00] rides on February 12th and the Muscle Cars show on February 18th and tons more events like this and all their details are available over at Collector Car Guide. Do. Thanks, Brad. Now it’s time for the h hpd junkie.com Trackside report. So let’s talk about what’s coming up here in early spring in our area, we got an announcement from our friends over a track shaker that a new racetrack is coming online In 2023, we get to welcome Flat Rock Raceway in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Can we go? Can we go? Can we go? Can we go? Can we go? Can we, can we, can we, can we, can we, I, I think we should. I, there’s no doubt that it’ll be on the chin schedule almost immediately and then followed by just about everybody else. So, flat Rock Raceway seems to have taken place of the proposed Oak Ridge Raceway we had talked about, about a year or two ago now.

So looking at the aerial view of the track looks pretty complex. Nice twisty sections, some nice long straightaways. I’m really, really interested to [02:09:00] check this out. They’re talking about potentially using this for professional races like IndyCar and Sports car. So we’ll see where that ends up. It exists on Google Maps.

Yeah, it is a real thing. News from Hooked on driving Northeast, they announced two new events for their 2023 schedule after posting their original official schedule. And they’re gonna be held at pit race. They’re both in the fall and we’ll be talking about them again later in the season. But details for those events can be found right now@hookedondriving.com.

I believe you can actually register for those events even now, many months in advance. Their first event of the season, however, kicks off at Virginia International Raceway on March 2nd and third. So we’re looking forward to that and hopefully favorable weather for that event as well. Emira, the Eastern Motor Racing Association has also announced their schedule that’s posted up.

You can find that on h hpd jackie.com and on collector card guide.net. And the Audi Club just released their track schedule on the 19th of January and they announced [02:10:00] that they’re running five events March 11 and 12 at Summit Point Main April three, four at V I R. They’re doing a high performance driver’s clinic on April 22nd at Summit Point, and then they’re running an advanced only on Summit Point, Maine on September 25 and 26th.

And then they return for their fall finale, which we may join them for at V I R on November 4th and fifth. I did speak with Dave Peters from H B D Junkie. He said the system is being loaded with events every day with an expected 2000 plus listings in for 2023. The database is completely dependent upon the organizers getting their data out into the wild and should be fully populated by the end of February.

So all the usual suspects, be it Chin, h o d, and so on, have already published their schedules and will be reporting on special events or schedule changes throughout the season. So stay tuned for more and you can find that information on h hpd junkie.com. . And there’s also some exciting news [02:11:00] for the folks that live in the deep South, especially that are close enough to drive all the way out to New Orleans Motorsports Park, or Nola.

For short, they’ve announced that there’s some big racing leagues coming to their venue this year. People like World Racing League, S R O, world Challenge Pan America Superbike, two Extreme Monster Trucks and many, many others throughout the season. So we will post that schedule in the show notes as well.

So if you live in that area or if you frequent Nola, all sorts of really great stuff coming to that racetrack this year. In case you missed out, check out the other podcast episodes that aired this month. We closed out December with Formula one week, which included three episodes, our drive through to survive 2022 retrospective, a lecture by Dr.

James Miller on the evolution of Formula One, brought to us by the International Motor Racing Research Center and the Society of Automotive Historians, and our crossover with Kate Nicole from Two Girls One Formula. January kicked off with Bill Warner’s story about transitioning his career from mechanics [02:12:00] gopher to photographer and writer for many major automotive magazines.

To the founder and operator of the Emilia Island Concore. We followed that up with a 42nd birthday celebration for Motor Week when host John Davis stopped by to share some memories. Elizabeth Blackstock from Jalopnik and A Girl’s Guide to Cars shared her journey as a writer and talks about her new book co-written with Alanis King about the 2019 Formula one rich Energy scandal.

Our panel of Petrolhead return for another. What should I buy this time covering Italian exotics. If you haven’t checked it out, buckle up because there’s some hilarious stories in that episode. As a bonus, we also re-released a Patreon exclusive pit stop episode with Chris Bright from Collector part exchange called Romeo Romeo.

Where Far Art Thou Alpha Rome. And lastly, we rounded out the month with former Rice President of VP Racing Fuels, now author, JK Kelly and his new series of books, deadly Driver and the Sequel [02:13:00] Spy Driver. Thank you to all the guests that came on the show this month. Season three is almost over wrapping up at the end of February right before the racing season kicks off, so you’ve only got roughly 185 episodes to catch up on.

Stay tuned for the next drive through as we kick off season four. We do have some new Patreons for the month of January, so we wanna give some big shout outs to our new supporters, G tmr, Romano Conti coming out of New York. A shout out to team D N G for supporting us as well, and the friendly folks at the Green Grand Prix based outta Watkins Glen.

Again, thank you all for your support. Every dollar helps keep the show on the road and we couldn’t do it without your support. And we have a couple other shout outs. Marissa Cannon and Sean Roberts are celebrating their second anniversary with G T M and Mike Pepitone is celebrating three years. And also, if you’d like to become a member of G T M, be sure to check out the new clubhouse website@club.gt motorsports.org to learn [02:14:00] more.

Special thanks. We did not have any guest hosts, so no special thanks to them. But if you would like to be a guest host, please be sure to reach out. We’re always looking for new voices to take off some of the load from all the work that we have to do on the show. That’s very true. And I wanna give a special shout out to one of our latest recruits.

We got Mike Carr coming on board. Team Break Fix to head up our golden era of sports car racing, where we’re gonna be interviewing folks from Imso, TransAm, camel gt from the heyday of sports car racing, running from the seventies through the early nineties. That’s really his passion. He loves talking to those folks.

He knows a lot of folks, and so we look forward to more episodes with Mike and interviewing drivers and teams and so on from that era of. . And of course we would be remiss if we didn’t thank our co-host and executive producer Tanya. That’s right, Brad. And remember folks, for everything we talked about on this episode and more, be sure to check out the follow on article and show notes [02:15:00] available@gtmotorsports.org and all the members who support gtm.

Without you, none of this would be possible. Vegas. Vegas, baby Vegas. Can I say deuces or is that a weird Florida man reference? That’s what the PT Cruiser guy said. No, that’s a Michigan man reference. Oh, the Michigan man. Yes, the, the Michigan. Michigan militia . And with that kind of motivation, you can feel my enthusiasm.

Another successful drivethrough. Peace.

Well, here we are in the drive-through line. Me and her cars in front of us, cars in back of us all. Just waiting to order. There’s a idiot in a Volvo with us. Bright son behind me. Hi Lena. The window and scream. Hey, watch. Trying Do blind me, my wife says Maybe we should park.

If you like what you’ve heard and want to learn more about gtm, be sure to check us out [02:16:00] 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. 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 GTM remains a no annual fees organization, and our goal is to continue to bring you quality episodes like this one at no charge. As a loyal listener, please consider subscribing to our Patreon for bonus and behind the scenes content, extra goodies and GTMs 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 [02:17:00] www.patreon.com/gt motorsports. And remember, without fans, supporters, and members like you, none of this would be possible.