B/F: The Drive Thru #43

• Chevy Bolt — The New Record Most Miles!
• Buick Shows A Revamped Wildcat And Unveils New Tagline
• Ford Said to Be Planning $25,000 Compact EV for 2026, Delays Three-Row EV SUV

• Renault R5 Returns As An EV, And The Price Is Right
• Here’s What The Polestar And Volvo Breakup Means For Consumers

• Verstappen Wins Again... by huge margins, surprised?

Bottas doing Uber Share Ads?

• Kia will beat Rivian and Tesla into affordable mass-market EVs
• 2025 Nissan GT-R Debuts In Japan

• For Sale: Stellantis Design Boss’ 1992 Lancia Delta Integrale

Say What?

• The Lionheart

• Jeep Wrangler V-8 Drops the Mic with a $101,890 Final Edition

• Hertz CEO Resigns After Big Bet on EVs Fails to Pay Off
• 2024 Tesla Cybertruck vs. Rivian R1T vs. Ford F-150 Lightning: The Only Comparison Test You'll Need

• VW Is Making a Stripped-Down, Beefed-Up Polo Just for Farmers

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

gtmotorsports. org. Click about, and then advertising. Thank you again to everyone that supports Grand Touring Motorsports, our podcast, Brake Fix, and all the other services we provide.

Crew Chief Eric: Wait, where’s the button?

Crew Chief Brad: Welcome to drive through episode number 43. This is our monthly recap where we’ve put together a menu of automotive, motorsport and random car adjacent news.

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

Crew Chief Eric: This is our season five kickoff heading into a long run of a hundred different episodes coming your [00:01:00] way. If tuning in for the first time.

Crew Chief Brad: And that’s just next week. Yeah,

Crew Chief Eric: right? We have a very aggressive schedule here. No, season five is action packed.

But first, before we jump into our automotive news, Brad, we need a cyber truck update.

Crew Chief Brad: The update is there’s no update.

Crew Chief Eric: Oh, come on. Have you been able to ditch that? Allotment yet.

Crew Chief Brad: Nope. But I will say I saw on cars and bids that somebody is selling a cyber truck. And the current bid is up to 150, 000 just for the allotment.

Well, no, that’s for the actual truck. I believe they took ownership and then they’re selling it. Is Tesla suing them yet? I don’t know. It didn’t say in the ad whether they were being sued or not. But if you think about it, that’s actually not that. I mean, I guess it is a lot. It’s 33 percent

Crew Chief Eric: markup

Crew Chief Brad: profit.

Crew Chief Eric: The Cybertruck is definitely not out of the news. I actually avoided putting it into this drive thru episode because we talked about it so much and it’s just unending. I mean, the internet is obviously full of trolls, but it’s also relentless. In terms of the things that are going on with the Cybertruck.

There’s literally like a plea out there to say stop [00:02:00] abusing Cybertrucks. Like people are doing the craziest things to them and say like, see, they’re just big pieces of junk. And it’s like, all right, guys, give it a rest.

Crew Chief Brad: The same shit happened when the Ford F 150 Raptor first came out. There’s a lot of hate because people were taking them out to sand dunes and stuff and literally.

Jumping them five, six feet in the air off these jumps. Then the trucks were landing and the frames were cracking. Like the bed was separating from the body of the truck. I mean, the cab was breaking. I mean, there are all kinds of problems. And this is the original Raptor with the V8, not the EcoBoost Raptor.

At that time, that is how Ford had advertised the truck, but Ford was getting a lot of hate for the Raptor. Haters going to hate, I think is the key term here.

Crew Chief Eric: And players going to play. Haters always going to

Crew Chief Brad: hate. Yeah, play is going to play hate is going to hate.

Crew Chief Eric: Jokes aside, we kick this off talking about the cyber truck again, because the showcase for this month is a little bit different.

It’s a little bit more personal. And I wanted to touch on some homework that I’ve done about what is the [00:03:00] real cost of ownership of an EV in the year 2024? What I’ve done Come to realize is there’s a lot of hearsay and speculation and tinfoil hats about what’s going on in the EV world. And there’s just some real concrete information that I’ve come across.

And I’m going to get into this as we go along. I got to first start off by saying, if you’re listening to this for the first time, we do own quote unquote an EV. So does Brad now you have a hybrid, we have a plug in hybrid. Both of us have vans. My wife’s had hers since 2019. The plug in hybrid tries to be all electric all the time.

And then it switches the gas 16 kilowatt battery, get 33 to 36 to almost 40 miles out of the battery, depending on the temperature. You know, if it’s summer versus winter, stuff like that. You know, she loves it record setting miles per gallon, you know, almost 50 miles of the gallon. She’s gone almost 1100 miles between Phillips, like all this astronomical stuff, like blowing our previous diesels completely out of the water, right?

Like, wow, this thing’s [00:04:00] incredible, but here we are. Five years later, and what’s it really like to own a plug in hybrid or an EV or whatever it is?

Crew Chief Brad: Oh, we’re going to qualify this, but what’s it like to own a plug in hybrid EV? And then what’s it like to own a Chrysler plug in hybrid EV? Cost of ownership and convenience expense and things like that.

Crew Chief Eric: We’re going to get into that. But what kicked off this entire investigation? Actually goes back to many drive through episodes we’ve had in the past, talking about the electricity availability, the infrastructure in our homes, the infrastructure commercially available, the power grid states that can’t even maintain their air conditioning in the summer because the grid is overstressed, all this kind of stuff.

And people are like, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, we’ll put up some more windmills or, you know, we’ll make up the difference somehow. But the reality of the situation is. We live in a house that was built in the late seventies, early eighties. A lot of stuff that was to code back then doesn’t meet the code of a house that was built, let’s say in 2019 [00:05:00] when my wife’s Pacifica was built.

And so we got a letter in the mail. Yeah, we still get those, you know, like paper mail. So I got this letter in the mail from our utility company and it was talking about upgrading, adding a level two charger to your garage and this and that. And I’m reading this letter and it sounds really good. It was very technical and not a lot of marketing.

Fluff. So I was like, you know what? You’ve got my attention. I’m going to reach out, contact this number, fill out this form, all this kind of stuff. And in this solicitation, it says 1, 100 and I’m like, that’s the magic number. As we know, working on race cars, everything’s 1, 100 every time you turn around. So I’m like, you’ve got my attention.

Let me see how bad this is going to be. What started as an 1, 100 offer has turned into an 11, 000 nightmare. And let me explain. So real talk, there is a lot of moving parts when it comes to upgrading the house to make it acceptable to have an EV. Not just a plug in hybrid that has a small battery, but imagine a Tesla.

[00:06:00] Or a Rivian or a Volkswagen ID where it’s got a much larger battery with that extended range three, four, five, 600 miles. You don’t want to wait a week like that guy in Canada with a Hyundai to be able to charge it. Level two charger is sort of the minimum. Now we’re still in a level one hundred and ten bolt charger and we can get the van charged roughly overnight.

So how did we get to 11, 000? Well, let me explain like a lot of people, especially on the East Coast where houses are a lot older, but there are new developments popping up all the time. But if you have a house from the 1950s through the early 2000s, a lot of the code and all that kind of stuff was the same.

The service to the house ours is on the one 50 side because we were built in the late seventies. So the first hurdle became, well, your service is too small. We need to upgrade the entire fuse panel in the house. Okay, well, what do we got to upgrade to? Well, technically. 200 in the house to be code just for the house to future proof the house.

You got to upgrade to 200 amp, but realistically you need a separate 200 amp service in the garage [00:07:00] because of the way the house is built and this and that and yada, yada, and then we got to make sure that the power lines underground are enough to deliver 400 amp to the house. You know, maybe we have to run new service underground.

That’s on us to do that, but maybe there’s a hidden cost there too. We’re not a hundred percent sure yet. It started to compound and then you need this, and then you’ve got to buy this And then because you have two separate services, one on the garage side and one on the house side, then you need a kill switch because the code says that you have to be able to terminate all the electricity in one spot and more and more and more and more and all this stuff.

The next thing you know, the guy comes back and he goes, well, here’s your quote. It’s 11 grand. Obviously your mileage may vary. It could cost you five grand. It could cost you 12 grand. What I heard from the utility company was the average was about 8, 800 bucks to do the upgrade if you don’t have 200 amp service and all this other stuff, right?

You don’t have a much more modern house. So that’s still, let’s say 10 grand. And I’m like, what? I don’t think I’m special. We live in a modest home. And I think a lot of other people, not [00:08:00] just in my neighborhood where the houses were built at the same time, but across middle America would be faced with the same problem if they’re trying to go to EV and just solely EV, not just a small battery plug in hybrid.

And I’m like, this is an astronomical amount of money for people. Not everybody has. 11, 15, 20 grand sitting aside to make this massive utility upgrade to their houses. So I’m scratching my head going, how is this tenable long term?

Crew Chief Brad: Well, two things. One, I must be the luckiest guy in the world because my garage already has a separate power account with a 200 amp board.

So I’ve already got 200 in the garage separate from the house, completely separate, separate account, separate everything to that’s what home equity loans are for bud. You overextended up to detonate to their eyeballs. Remember that old commercial? The guy’s like, I’ve got a mansion and I live on a golf course and I’m riding my lawnmower and I’m up to my eyeballs in debt.

Crew Chief Eric: And that’s true. And that’s [00:09:00] where, again, it becomes this total cost of ownership thing. And we talked about low budget. EVs before Hyundai’s got some all the way up to 40, 000. That’s like the low budget now, right? We’re like the Mach E all these other kinds of cars that sort of fit in that window between 25 and 40, 000.

I’m sitting here going, you go and buy this EV and you have this fantasy that I’m going to get free electrons at the library. Well, guess what? You got to swipe a credit card there. I’m going to get free electrons when I park at Ikea. Guess what? You got to swipe a credit card there because it’s all.

AmeriCharge and CradlePoint and all these different services, it doesn’t cost nothing. It’s very rare to find free electrons anymore. And so I’m like, okay, well, do you want to sit in the parking lot at the library for 45 minutes to charge? I mean, it’s a long time. Granted, you could be doing other stuff.

Maybe you could go for a walk, take the dog, you know, whatever it is fine, but you’ve got to go out of your way to get power. If you don’t have like you have the 200 amp extra service to set up that level two charger at home. You just bought a 30, 000 Model 3. That’s what they’re supposed to cost. And now you’re faced with an 11, [00:10:00] 000 bill, maybe a 20, 000 upcharge on that.

So now you’re 50 grand in the hole on this EV. And Tonya and I talked about this, how much gas. And diesel for that matter, can you buy for 10, 000? So these are things you got to think about. Yeah, I get that. We’re saving the planet and all these kinds of things.

Crew Chief Brad: That’s debatable too. Exactly.

Crew Chief Eric: I’m still interested because I want to future proof my garage.

I’ve got some other things I want to do. Some heavier equipment that we’ve had issues with, you know, mountain man, Dan brings over a welder and it’s like a minor brownout. You literally cannot run a vacuum cleaner in the garage while the van is charging, because it’ll knock all the circuits out. Like it’s just, it’s a mess.

So I’m sort of like, well, if I make the investment, maybe we’ll get it back out of the house later if we sell it, because you can come in and say, look, we’re already set up for EV and we have his and her chargers on both sides of the garage and you know, all this wonderful stuff. Still, it’s hard to get away from a five figure price tag.

It’s like, ah, that hurts. If we take that [00:11:00] off the table and say, everybody’s just got a tax return. They got an extra 15 grand to spend on upgrading their house. So they can, everybody can get an EV in the future. What about the grid tax returns? Are these getting 15 grand back? We’re living in fantasy land now, right?

Yeah, we are. Pull our pennies, but let’s just say you could find the money to upgrade your house. Do you do it? Do you not? But then also the stress on the grid. Are there parts of the country that are better prepared? Like Tennessee, especially like Chattanooga near TVA, stuff like that. They have the self healing power grid, very modern, very progressive, but that doesn’t exist everywhere.

We know California struggles. We know Texas can struggle. The East Coast, maybe not so much. But I think if everybody here from Massachusetts to Florida converted their houses to be EV ready, we’d have a really big problem.

Crew Chief Brad: We’re also just talking about houses. There’s also people that live in apartment complexes and things like that.

Are they excluded from being able to have an EV because they live [00:12:00] in such a facility? Or are we going to require these landlords to upgrade their service? Not only For one family, but the entirety of their property and their unit.

Crew Chief Eric: And that actually is a really great segue back into the episode we did with Henry Grabar, because a lot of those complexes, the apartment buildings and condominiums and all that is predicated on parking availability.

And so I won’t get into all that, go back to that episode from the end of last year. It’s fascinating. He wrote a whole book about it, about how parking changes the world. And it really explains how parking dictates. How houses are built. But we did talk about it on his episode about the EV grid, how this is going to work, parking lots are going to have to be changed over.

So that’s another whole layer of complexity, but you’re right. Apartment buildings, not everybody lives in a single family home. Here’s the other thing. It’s not an overnight process. They make it seem like it’s going to take a day. They can come in and do it. Sure. If you’re already set up for it, they’re going to add another breaker.

They’re going to install the level two charger, which by the way, you have to purchase separately. [00:13:00] So you’re looking at a juice box, you’re looking at a whatever, and that’s another six to eight hundred bucks that you gotta spend. But they’ll sell it to you, you know, they get them in volume, you get a slight discount, it’s like fifty bucks less than what you’d buy for on Amazon if you ordered it.

Okay, fine, sure. You’re gonna be without power for multiple days. Because they got to do this whole upgrade. Not only are they changing my main service panel, they got to change my meter box on the outside. They’re like ripping everything out down to the bare wires to be able to do this project. If the underground wiring is insufficient, which they still have to figure out at this point because they have to do a service call and this utility has to get involved and all these kinds of things.

If they have to add more power underground, they got to go all the way back to the transformer. They might have to upgrade the transformer. Now there’s all these other moving parts. It takes almost two months to get that part done. So we’re still waiting for their initial survey to be completed to see is there enough service underground?

Because we don’t have power lines in this neighborhood. It was one of those like early, we’re going to do everything underground sort of deals. So they got to go investigate all that. And then once [00:14:00] they get that done, it could be another month before they can get us in the loop to schedule the process, to even begin to take the house offline for a couple of days, change out the service and add all this stuff.

Then they’re punching holes in the walls, you know, all this kind of thing. This is going to be like a 90 to 120 day effort.

Executive Producer Tania: And I would have zero expectation that anything happens in two months. Because you as a residential query are very low on the order in the utility company’s work list, the priority who is going to go to hospitals or other things like that, they’ll get the priority of the work.

They might have said two months, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re dragged on for months and months and months.

Crew Chief Brad: We’ll catch back up with Eric in season six.

Crew Chief Eric: A hundred percent. Yeah, we’ll still be talking about my level two charger that I don’t have. Again, just bought my EV. I don’t have my charger. I want to upgrade the house.

I still got to go to the library, you know, to go find free electrons because I still can’t charge at home. That’s the other thing. Time is [00:15:00] valuable. How much is it costing me to sit there to get my electrons at the library? And then how much is it going to cost me later when my bill spikes? Because they got to do some other metering and all this kind of thing when you plug the EV in to say, we’re not going to charge you at the maximum rate because the price of electricity has also gone up.

This is all getting really, really complicated very quickly. And I already noticed that our electric bill had gone up when we got the Pacifica, but five years ago, our electricity, you know, negotiated rate and all this kind of stuff. It was low. It was like, Oh man, what’s an extra 40 bucks a month. I would pay more than that in fuel.

But now Five years later, our electricity bill has doubled. Is that a result of the van? Is that a result of the price of electricity? It all plays a factor and we’re not getting any special sub metering or off hours when we plug in the band. We’ve asked, we have a level one. Can we get the exemption? You know, when it runs between these hours and the power company’s like, nah, it’s just like, you’ve got a stove running for 13 [00:16:00] hours at a time.

And that’s exactly what it is. It’s like a stove running with the broiler on. All night. So it’s costing a ton. I’m starting to wonder, is it worth it? What really brings into the question, is it worth it? You made jokes about the cost of ownership of an EV versus the cost of ownership of a Chrysler EV. So this is where it gets ironic.

President’s day, everybody’s off from school. We’re home, got the day off, you know, that kind of thing. We’re like, what are we gonna do? President’s day. And my wife goes, Hey, you know, there was a recall letter from the dealership. This is a great day to take the van in to get it done because I could drop you guys off and you know, the whole thing, right?

We took it in for this recall and it’s had something to do with power control module and all this kind of stuff. And we’re like, oh, okay, cool. She mentioned to me the week before. That the van was doing something weird. It would flash the check engine light and then would go away. It wouldn’t stay on.

It’s like an intermittent code. My wife’s got an Autel scanner. She hooks up her phone, Bluetooth to it, pulls down. She showed it to me later. She goes, it kind of aligns itself with the [00:17:00] recall. This is perfect timing. We’re going to take the van in, get the recall done. Then check engine light goes away.

We’ll report the whole thing and blah, blah, blah. And the service writer’s like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Great. This is awesome. Nobody shows us the scan codes and whatever. And they did their own scan and their own stuff. A week goes by. You don’t hear anything. It’s like, what the hell is going on? Chrysler service is neither here nor there.

I’m not gonna badmouth the dealership or anything like that. They’ve been good to us. But we were smart to buy the super extended max care 12 year warranty on this thing. Because I knew going into this, it’s not Chrysler’s hybrid. It supposedly, allegedly is Ford’s. It’s not their transmission, you know, all this kind of stuff.

So yaddy yaddy. I don’t want to have to work on this, nor do I want to have to pay when something goes belly up. We finally get a phone call and the guy’s like, Hey, been meaning to call you, put in a ticket to Chrysler. Star, which is the organization that does all the parts distribution, is sending a new transmission.

And I’m like, what? So it’s sort of like went in for a health check, had to amputate your arm. What the hell is happening here? So the guy’s like, it’s [00:18:00] all just intertwined and we got to put a new tranny in it. Because the hybrid is in the transmission. A lot of people don’t know that. So if your hybrid’s going, your forward motion is going to go because it’s all built into the trans.

Crew Chief Brad: For those of you following at home, I believe this is Eric’s 15th transmission in this Pacifica. You’re not

Crew Chief Eric: far

Crew Chief Brad: off. I think you get transmission bingo!

Crew Chief Eric: To bring everybody up to speed, it is not the original trans. The first trans, the stock one, I don’t know what happened to that because it went bonkers to the point where you would put it in drive and it would either decide to like lurch forward like the parking brake was stuck on or it would just go backwards at maximum speed.

You had a hard time stopping because the brakes are electrically connected. It was a nightmare and we literally beached it on the side of the road and told AAA, or actually we called Chrysler, take this directly to the dealership. Not our problem. So they put a new trans in it then, but they put an updated transmission in it.

So we’re like, Oh, cool. This is going to be awesome. This thing is going to last forever between trans two [00:19:00] and this one. It’s only been a year and a half. She’s only put maybe like 15, 000 miles on it, maybe a little bit more, 20 or so. So it hasn’t been that long, right? We’re like, Oh, this is nuts that they’re telling us we need another transmission.

Then two more weeks goes by. So the van is gone for three weeks. We were talking about time is money. Luckily she’s driving my car and I’m driving my hoopty that, you know, sits for long periods of time. So we got an extra car. We’re very fortunate in that respect. Not a lot of people are fortunate with that, but it’s something to think about.

You hear these. Horror stories about Teslas and accidents. And they’re out for months and months at a time because the parts just aren’t there and because chips, and in our case, the van was down for three weeks. The first time the trans went, it was down for a month. Again, no communication. Suddenly we get a call one day and it’s like, van’s ready to be picked up.

Uh, okay. So we go through all that and we come home. And, but I’m reading the sheets. Not one sheet that says transmission replaced, did service check at 80, 000 miles or whatever, right? No, it’s [00:20:00] pages of stuff. What I sort of discern from all this is, I think they pulled the trans. Because inside of this whole combuberation that they’ve created, there’s some auxiliary water pumps and it was leaking.

And I don’t know if that interferes with the electronics. I’m sort of like trying to read between the lines. I’m trying to do some homework. And it’s one of these deals that like a proper German car would be. You can only reach it. When the service position is engine out, they got to get the hybrid out.

And I’m looking at the parts list and all this stuff. They changed. Luckily, we didn’t have to pay a cent for it, but I asked the guy, I was like, how much would it have cost if I had to replace this thing? And here we are. We’re back to that magic number, 11, 000. That’s parts and labor, right? And I’m like, this is insane.

So thank goodness we had the foresight to buy the extended warranty and they’ve been super awesome about covering everything and any problem we’ve ever had with it. To your joke from earlier, the Chrysler has been amazing. So I haven’t been paid for anything. And it’s actually been, except for this.

Which I [00:21:00] don’t blame Chrysler for, because it’s really not their hybrid. It’s been trouble free, but the trouble it’s had has been debilitating, right? So it’s Sketch 22.

Crew Chief Brad: Didn’t it also brick itself in your garage at some point?

Crew Chief Eric: That happened within the first month we got it. And what that was really all about was, we bought it as a 2019.

It was an S model, de chromed, like all this kind of stuff, and a special paint color, whatever. Apparently it had been sitting on the lot. Where we got it from for like an extended period of time and they weren’t running it or whatever. And I guess there was a drain on the main battery. Basically the main battery, the main 12 volt battery, like any car has shit the bed.

It bricked itself because it wants to be an EV first. It wouldn’t even try to kick over to gas, run the alternator or anything like that. We were stuck. So they came and hauled it. They replaced the battery for free and it’s never been an issue. So I’m like, you know what? That happens on a regular car.

Batteries go bad. They have bad cells, you know, summer to winter. I don’t [00:22:00] fault them for that either. It’s like, man, you’re going to replace the battery. Big deal. What was happening in those three weeks though, was a really big discussion between me and my wife. And it became a three week long. What should I buy?

Because we said, and we asked Chrysler. How many more times is this going to happen? When does this become a lemon law problem? When do we get a new one? Or when do you buy it back from us and we get something else? And so we’re sort of running those permutations going, if we got to get something else, what do we get?

What is there to buy right now? What are our options? Are we screwed? I brought my wife into van life sort of kicking and screaming because she was a wagon girl. Before that, she had a hatchback and kind of this progression of the vehicles are getting larger, but basically the same thing. So now we’re at van life.

She loves the van. The sliding doors sell it, which is why I make jokes about kids and SUVs. It’s like, dude, you don’t understand how glorious sliding doors are until you have them. And the cargo space of a van is amazing. You just went through this, Brad. There’s three options, right?

Crew Chief Brad: At least for me, there was only one option.

Yes, [00:23:00] technically there are three options. There’s the Honda Odyssey, which runs a traditional naturally aspirated V6. There’s the Kia Carnival, which I don’t know the powertrain, but I’m assuming it’s a standard naturally aspirated V6. Then there’s the Toyota, which in 2021 switched over to a hybrid. For me, we went with the Toyota, one, because of the hybrid, and two, because the backseat design in the Honda didn’t leave enough room for us to put the car seats in.

And have the seats go all the way back. My wife and I are very tall and we could not put the seats back to our comfortable position and have the car seats in. So we would have been in the same issue that we were in, in the Honda pilot. The backseat is just, it does not have enough room. The Toyota was, we didn’t even consider the carnival for you.

I think the Toyota is it. You’re not going to get 50, but you’re going to get over 30, 30, 35 or so. My brother in law with his Honda Odyssey does not get 30.

Crew Chief Eric: Again, if we had the level two charger, do we wait for the ID buzz? The Volkswagen all electric van, which is [00:24:00] bigger than I realized until I saw it at person.

So I know my wife likes that. She thinks it’s cute. Tanya’s seen it in person as well. The inside is very well appointed. And then we’re back in the Volkswagen family. I’m scared of that thing because I never want to be the first. One to buy the first new thing. It’s sort of like software or a computer.

It’s like, we’ll wait a generation or two until they figure it all out. You always wait for Windows service pack two. The other option that I threw on the table for her, because she’s driving my Jeep every day, was what about the 4XE? The hybrid Jeep. I don’t know whose hybrid that is. It’s because that’s a totally different layout.

It’s longitudinal. It’s all wheel drive. It’s not that borrowed Ford technology or whatever. Maybe it’s Chrysler’s own or they developed it alongside of Toyota because Toyota, a lot of people don’t realize owns the patents for a lot of this hybrid technology. What they do is then they license it out to other manufacturers.

But it’s never the most current [00:25:00] generation technology. It’s always like a couple generations old. So you’re getting the old software. You’re getting Windows 7 and not Windows 11. You know what I mean? That was another option because those are getting in the 30s from what I understand. And then all wheel drive and all those kinds of things.

Now the price tag on the Jeep is hefty. Don’t get me wrong.

Executive Producer Tania: You can get a wagon here.

Crew Chief Eric: At a hundred and fifty

Executive Producer Tania: thousand

Crew Chief Eric: dollars. Yeah.

Executive Producer Tania: You

Crew Chief Brad: know, you guys should just get a Hummer.

Executive Producer Tania: Well, just sell them your Cybertruck thing.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah, you guys can have my Cybertruck allotment. Yeah.

Crew Chief Eric: The problem is I don’t think the Cybertruck will fit in my garage.

Although I know a Suburban will fit in my garage, but I don’t think the Cybertruck will fit.

Crew Chief Brad: You can’t charge it yet.

Crew Chief Eric: That’s true. And I think the Hummer’s too wide to fit in my garage.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah, but once you pull it in and then you crab walk it around so you can perpendicular.

Crew Chief Eric: That also brought into question, do we get something older?

Do I go look for another diesel Grand Cherokee? Do we go find an older Chevy Nomad, Chevy Nomad, or Jetta station wagon with the TDI? And I go back to diesel because you [00:26:00] can still get diesel everywhere. Granted, it’s 4 and something a gallon here on the East Coast, but diesels of diesels run for freaking ever.

So it’s like, okay, whatever.

Crew Chief Brad: Like, what’s the conclusion for that? Did we ever close out the conversation of true cost of ownership or did we just kind of leave that twisting in the wind?

Crew Chief Eric: We don’t know. We really don’t.

Crew Chief Brad: I think we do. It’s called expensive. That’s what it is. You need a side hustle just to pay for your EV.

Crew Chief Eric: You know, it’s starting to look that way. It really, really is.

Executive Producer Tania: Just like any car purchase, unless you absolutely need a new car, it’s not financially advantageous to change from what you already have unless it doesn’t run or it was in an accident and doesn’t run or you have disposable income and no bigs if you go change to a 60, 000 car.

But if your car If you already have one and the mileage is reasonable, even if it needs whatever service [00:27:00] interval major work done to it, it’s not going to be 60, 000.

Crew Chief Eric: And I think where people misconstrued the whole mathematics is replacing the engine is a quarter of the value of the car, you know, the car’s 20 years old or whatever.

But you don’t think about it that way. Think about how much the car is costing you over the long term. And if the car has been trouble free for a really long time, it owes you nothing. It is more than paid for itself. It’s paid off. I mean, unless you bought like that lady did, what was it? That. Ford Escort ZX2 and

Executive Producer Tania: there’s somebody else who just bought a Camry and they have like a 72 month loan at 630 a month or something.

Poor person. Oh my God.

Crew Chief Eric: But the point is, the longer you keep your car, if it is relatively trouble free and you keep up with the maintenance that’s required and you can do maybe some of it yourself, that car will pay you dividends. Even if the motor transmission blows up, you’re like, man, I get another motor for 500 bucks, throw it in there and go another 150, 000 miles, you know, like who cares versus that car [00:28:00] note.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah. And people also are in a very bad habit. Listen, cars of today are not the cars of the seventies and eighties. That a hundred thousand mile mark is not a death sentence. It’s not the nail in the coffin. Oh my God, I’ve got to get rid of this car. Tanya, how many miles are on your diesel right now?

Executive Producer Tania: 183, 000.

Crew Chief Brad: I had a diesel that had, when I had it, it had turned over 300, 000 miles. And to this day, I believe the person I sold it to is still driving it up and down the East coast to different track events. And granted, those are two examples of diesels.

Crew Chief Eric: My station wagon is a VR six. I got 226, 000 miles on it. It still runs.

Crew Chief Brad: I’ve got 130, 000 miles on my R. 100, 000 miles is not a death sentence. 100, 000 miles is usually a turning point for inexpensive maintenance, a timing belt, a timing chain, things like that. But as long as you kept up with the regular maintenance of the vehicle, it’s probably been trouble free up to that point.

You do that. Do you put. A couple hundred dollars to maybe a couple thousand, depending on the car. And you should [00:29:00] get another a hundred, 150, 200, 000 miles out of it. Again, as long as you keep up with the maintenance, just because your vehicle has a hundred thousand miles on it does not mean you need to run out.

And as Tanya said, spend 60, 000 on something new, which is close to like the average price of new vehicles, especially these days, shit is expensive. It’s wild. What vehicles cost right now.

Crew Chief Eric: I have never advocated for this in the past, but I can see the value in it today because of the expense of the cars.

If you’re the type of person that likes having a new car a lot, or you’re like, you know what? Do that a hundred thousand miles. I’m not really interested. You know, blah, blah, blah. And keeping it all that kind of stuff, lease the car. And here’s why. And again, I would, I don’t usually condone this. But it makes sense with these EVs or these spaceships where it’s like, you know what?

I had it for three years. I had fun. I’m going to get another one for three years and another one for three years. Because if you sort of amortize that because of how expensive they are, you’ll pay the 60 grand over 10 years or whatever it is, [00:30:00] but you’ve had three or four cars. In that span of 10 years that have always been kind of fresh and kind of new.

And now there’s somebody else’s problem.

Crew Chief Brad: Two questions about leasing though. One, if you lease a new EV, do you still get the federal tax credit? I don’t think so. Do manufacturers like Tesla even have leasing programs?

Crew Chief Eric: I don’t think Tesla does.

Crew Chief Brad: I mean, I know Ford and like all the, all the traditional

Crew Chief Eric: ones.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah, but if people are buying Teslas and Rivians, I mean, if they don’t have a leasing option, then

Crew Chief Eric: you’re screwed.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah, for sure.

Executive Producer Tania: If you’re buying a Tesla or Rivian, you’ve got money.

Crew Chief Eric: Maybe. Or you’re just in debt up to your eyeballs, like you said before, Brad. So there’s a lot of really interesting.

Permutations to sit and calculate. Now it used to be really straightforward. You’re like, I got 30, 000 to spend. What can I buy for 30 grand? I’m going to go to the, you know, blah, blah, blah. But now there’s so many different types of cars, power plants, drive trains. What can I buy for 30, 000? Next to nothing, unless you want like a base model Corolla, [00:31:00] it’s really hard.

And that’s where, again, I go back to that squishy center of the population, the gooey marshmallow between the graham crackers and the schmores that makes up the middle class. And it’s like, this cannot sustain longterm. This is not tenable. Between what we were talking about, upgrading the infrastructure in your house, the power grid, the cost of cars, it’s just coming to a head in a really, really interesting way.

So to answer your bigger question about where does this leave us with total cost of ownership? I don’t have an answer yet, and I’m not at the end of this journey, and I won’t be surprised going back to the earlier conversation. If the utility company comes back to me, says, remember what we said, 11. Well, we really met 17 and at that point, I’m checked out.

Crew Chief Brad: We really meant 111.

Crew Chief Eric: I’m not calling it a bait and switch or anything like that. It’s just the realism of the situation and all the different moving parts that are involved. It’s not just, Ooh, I’m going to buy a Tesla today. You know, it’s not that simple. Not anymore, but that actually leads us. [00:32:00] Into our very first article.

And so where I’m going with this whole discussion and Tanya brings this to the table and answer to my question. What do we buy future electric vehicles, EVs that you’ll soon be able to buy. So within this year, talking about new cars in 2024, what do we think?

Crew Chief Brad: Tanya, do you have any thoughts on what Eric should buy for Jess?

It’s Jess’s car. You have thoughts. I know you do. What do you think she should

Crew Chief Eric: buy? I have no idea. I know what I would buy off of this list, though. The second car on the list? Hell yeah! The Alfa Romeo? The

Crew Chief Brad: Toyota Sienna?

Crew Chief Eric: No, it’s the Alfa Romeo Giulia EV. Dude, that is just Oh,

Crew Chief Brad: you’re looking at the, uh, no.

Crew Chief Eric: That’s awesome. Come on, I thought Alfa was gone. Now they’re teasing us with this? But we’re gonna get an Alpha Julia EV, that’s gonna be faster than the Quadrifoglio, I guarantee it.

Executive Producer Tania: Well, until the battery dies.

Crew Chief Eric: And the upside is, it doesn’t look like it came out of the Jetsons.

Crew Chief Brad: It looks like a regular Julia Q4.

Don’t Alphas have electronics problems to begin with? And then they’re doubling down with the EV.

Crew Chief Eric: Only in [00:33:00] Formula One they have those problems. Shush, shush you.

Crew Chief Brad: No, no. People can’t even get in and out of their driveways because the car bricks itself trying to get in when it goes to a certain angle.

People, driveways are a little steep.

Crew Chief Eric: It is a Stellantis product.

Crew Chief Brad: It would be like a Range Rover EV.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, well there is a Bentley on this list. The rest of this list is interesting cars that we’ve actually talked about throughout the year, the BMW 3 Series EV concept, a bunch of other BMWs on here, the Buick Electra, which they teased a while back.

Executive Producer Tania: The Chevy Bolt. I thought that went away. Or was it the Volt?

Crew Chief Eric: Dude, that is such a hokey pokey.

Executive Producer Tania: It’s coming back in 2025.

Crew Chief Brad: Apparently. So Eric would get the second car. Hell yeah. Before I can make an informed decision based on the cars on this list, how close were the girls to Being out of car seats,

Crew Chief Eric: my youngest is almost out of her booster and my eldest is completely out.

Crew Chief Brad: And then why not? The A6 e tron

Crew Chief Eric: dude, that thing is sexy.

Crew Chief Brad: Yes. The Audi electric cars are whatever. [00:34:00] Eric’s about to spend 25 million to upgrade his panel. I mean, what’s another. Yeah, right. 100, 000 for an EV.

Crew Chief Eric: I love that there’s three Fiskars on this list and they can’t even fix the ocean, but they’re going to introduce three more cars.

I’m like, nope, hard pass.

Crew Chief Brad: I didn’t even know Fisker was still a company.

Crew Chief Eric: But there’s a lot of stuff. The Honda Prologue is on here, which we’ve talked about. The Honda Saloon actually looks like the Wraith. Yeah, it does. And there’s the new Ioniq 7 and the Ioniq 9, which we’ll talk about a little bit more as we go along.

Executive Producer Tania: Then there’s all the N versions of the 5. Yeah. What about this Lexus EV supercar?

Crew Chief Eric: That is interesting looking.

Crew Chief Brad: Why do they always have to throw out rappers and shit when they talk about the Escalade? It’s popular with 70 year old white women too. Why not talk about them?

Crew Chief Eric: There’s a lot of Cadillacs on this list talking about the elderly people.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah, I do like the Celestique. I think we talked about it because it looks very, very French. It looks very Citroen.

Crew Chief Eric: I really like the lucid gravity. Did you guys see this thing? [00:35:00] Yeah. Looking for it. I didn’t know that they were going to make an SUV. This thing looks cool.

Crew Chief Brad: I like the canoe pickup truck. Yes.

That thing is freaking brutal looking.

Crew Chief Eric: Guess what? There’s a Mercedes Benz EQG, and it looks like every other G Wagon they’ve been making for a hundred years.

Executive Producer Tania: And I’m okay with that. I’m okay with that.

Crew Chief Brad: God,

Crew Chief Eric: these Mini Coopers are huge.

Crew Chief Brad: By the way, did you guys see the Rivians, the R3 and the R3X? The electric Fiat Panda looking things?

Those things look pretty cool.

Crew Chief Eric: But what’s really interesting about this list, then there’s like 30 cars on here. The Toyota Tacoma. EV now it looks like a regular taco, like anything else. And they got rid of the grill and all that. But again, we talked about Toyota, not really playing in the pool with everybody else and here they are.

Here’s another one we didn’t know about. And if they’re really going to come to the table in 2026 with a taco EV, maybe they are pulling back hard on what they said before

Crew Chief Brad: they’re testing the waters. They’re big enough where they can test the waters [00:36:00] of vehicles and not go completely all in. Do you never go full Tesla?

Look how it worked out for Polestar.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, before we switch into some Volkswagen, Porsche and Audi news, we have some sad news to report, right Tanya?

Executive Producer Tania: Earlier this month, we lost a legend in the automotive design industry of Italian fame, Marcello Gandini, who died at the age of 85. He is known, or he is responsible for a few cars you might’ve heard of.

The Lamborghini Diablo, the Lancia Stratos, the Mark I Polo, you know, a couple things like that. He was part of the Bertone company.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, he designed some really ugly cars. I mean, this guy. Really ugly. Yeah. No, all kidding aside, a legend in the automotive design world has left us. And he lived a good long life.

He designed some really, really cool cars. And the ones that you mentioned are just a few in his portfolio. Maybe not as epic as Giugiaro. But Gandini will definitely be missed. But I’m really curious [00:37:00] to see what comes next though, right? And what comes next is Volkswagen is making a stripped down, beefed up version of the Polo available only for farmers.

Not farmers only. Don’t be confused. They’re just making it for farmers.

Executive Producer Tania: Oh, this isn’t farmer needs a wife. Sorry. No, no, no.

Crew Chief Eric: Farmer needs a BW Polo. Apparently. Sorry.

Executive Producer Tania: Haha. Why is this a farm vehicle?

Crew Chief Brad: I don’t get it. The same reason the smart car was turned into a, a vineyard runabout.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, but that makes sense because it’s basically a glorified golf cart, but a VW Polo, like really?

Executive Producer Tania: I mean, I guess they’re trying to be like, be a panda.

Crew Chief Eric: Okay. First of all, it’s as big as a Mark 4 GTI was 20 years ago. So it’s not a small car. Let me throw some specs at you. One liter. One liter. Normally aspirated three cylinder making 84 horsepower and 75 pound feet of torque with a five speed manual.

Well, it doesn’t need to be fast. Here’s where the article is misleading. Okay. They [00:38:00] call it the Polo Robust. That ain’t robust. There’s nothing robust about this.

Executive Producer Tania: How much does this thing weigh?

Crew Chief Eric: 73, 000 tons because it’s German. Oh my

Executive Producer Tania: god, I would smoke it. On foot. Would smoke it in my Audi.

Crew Chief Eric: I’ll never forget driving my grandfather’s Alto Bianchi YDH, which is the Y10.

It was a one liter engine, four cylinder, five speed manual. The whole car weighed like 900 kilos. I mean, it was like a shopping cart with two seats in it, right? Even that if you wanted to pass somebody, it took like a half a mile of preparation and wringing its neck at 9, 000 RPM to get the stupid thing to move to like 60 kilometers an hour.

It was insanely slow. So I can’t imagine a 3, 200 pound VW Polo with a normally aspirated one liter, not even a diesel petrol. There are probably mark one rabbit diesels that are faster than this. Seems [00:39:00] sad. Volkswagen has lost their minds.

Executive Producer Tania: This should just be a street car, but with more power.

Crew Chief Eric: With a big turbo, like a Yaris.

That’s also a three cylinder, but it’s got a turbo. Big turbo. Big snail under the hood is what this thing needs. Well, you know what Volkswagen would do though? Nah, they’re gonna go, Oh, I know the solution. We’ll put a supercharger on it and call it a G40 like they did 20 years ago because they did have that for the Polos and it’s going to be pathetic and it’ll blow up and nobody will want it.

Bad, bad ideas, bad ideas. My reaction to this next article was, well, at least they’re not stuck on a carrier ship sinking in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

Executive Producer Tania: I mean, this is rich people things.

Crew Chief Eric: Right?

Executive Producer Tania: He’s trying to sell the car carrier with the six Porsches.

Crew Chief Eric: Headline reads, there’s a truck full of Porsches that a dealership just can’t sell.

This is like, what, two million dollar package to buy this? Each one of these 911s has got to be 300 grand.

Executive Producer Tania: It’s the package. It’s the six exclusive [00:40:00] Porsches and the truck. He’s

Crew Chief Eric: trying to sell them like a Hot Wheels collection.

Executive Producer Tania: Yes! It’s the car hauler with six 911s!

Crew Chief Eric: And they’re different 911s, although that top row, they look oddly similar.

This is some Austrian rich people stuff. The collection includes a 2018 911. 2 GT3 Club Sport, 2016 911 R, A 2018 911. 2 GT3 Touring, 2019 Wysock, a 2018 911. 2 GT3 Cup, and a 2018 991 GT3 R Carbon. Apparently he was going to take them to Goodwood to celebrate Porsche’s 70th anniversary. So he’s been sitting on these cars for six, seven years.

And the truck, let’s not forget, which is a man. TGX. Good luck, man. There’s no way he’s going to sell all these. He’s got to break this up.

Crew Chief Brad: He would make more money breaking it up, given the portions that are in this collection.

Executive Producer Tania: Who’s he going to sell it to? He’s only going to sell it to some celebrity who’s got millions of dollars or [00:41:00] something like that.

Or I don’t know, some sort of king.

Crew Chief Eric: The Sultan of Oman or something, you know, whatever.

Executive Producer Tania: I mean the picture right underneath the little wooden Porsche. It’s cute. Hauler with the, the cock, you know, even that is probably out of price range.

Crew Chief Brad: To me, the cars don’t even make sense together. There’s no cohesiveness between the colors or theme.

Like if they were all white, the truck’s white or all black. It seems kind of cool to me, but it just seems like a weird buffet of Porsche goodness.

Crew Chief Eric: It’s literally the Hot Wheels grab bin of whatever 911s were available at that time. That’s all. Yeah,

Crew Chief Brad: yeah, yeah. And why was he going to take them to Goodwood?

Does he work directly for Porsche? No.

Crew Chief Eric: He’s just a dealer. It’s time we go to Lower Saxony, talk a little bit about Mercedes.

Crew Chief Brad: Oh my god, we have Mercedes news.

Crew Chief Eric: Yes, they still make cars. And every once in a while, they make something that definitely gets my attention.

Executive Producer Tania: I don’t like the back though. What?

Crew Chief Eric: This is hot.

This is the scaled down [00:42:00] version of the GT three.

Executive Producer Tania: It’s all good until you get to the back. And then you’re like, what are these mom jeans with the 15 feet of like ass cheek? Okay. It’s in a terrible color.

Crew Chief Eric: A lot of people like yellow. That’s fine. I’m not a big fan of yellow cars. Imagine it in dark gray or in black.

Executive Producer Tania: And maybe the color would help, but there’s just something about the other AMGs with the haunches. I don’t know. It’s like this swooping rear and maybe it’s the angle and the color.

Crew Chief Eric: This thing’s got hips.

Executive Producer Tania: You can’t see them in this color, I guess.

Crew Chief Eric: No, you can’t, but it’s definitely got wide hips. Now, what are we talking about?

We are talking about the new 2025 AMG GT 43.

Executive Producer Tania: And it’s real drive.

Crew Chief Eric: It’s like the AMG version of the A class, except the A class is front wheel drive and a turbo four cylinder, two liters, something like that. This is. Still a four banger, rear wheel drive, but it makes 416 horsepower.

Executive Producer Tania: Still a lot of a two liter.

Crew Chief Eric: I [00:43:00] wonder what it sounds like though. Cause AMGs have that guttural earth shaking. It better sound amazing.

Crew Chief Brad: It’ll sound like half that. It’ll sound like that, but it’ll be two octaves up.

Crew Chief Eric: Just better not sound like a Honda with a fart can. I’m

Crew Chief Brad: not impressed.

Crew Chief Eric: What? Ah, I guess maybe I’m a fan of the 928. So I like stuff like this.

The

Crew Chief Brad: 928? What did the 928 have? The V8. Ding, ding, ding. You lost me.

Crew Chief Eric: I’m

okay with turbo fours.

Crew Chief Eric: Not

Crew Chief Brad: for a hundred

Crew Chief Eric: grand. There it

Crew Chief Brad: is.

Crew Chief Eric: There’s the problem with this.

Crew Chief Brad: I would pay 45 to 50 grand for this car. There you go. Thank you. I’m not paying a hundred thousand dollars for this fucking thing.

Crew Chief Eric: Yes, the price is the problem.

A hundred thousand dollars for a four cylinder AMG when you could go buy a turbo civic for 45. That’s a hard conversation. This is,

Crew Chief Brad: this is in a completely different league than a civic. Oh, let’s not get it twisted, but still something just irks me about paying 100, 000 plus for a two liter instead of the Honda civic, you could get a Volkswagen, which I [00:44:00] think would be in a closer league luxury wise.

You get a Golf R with similar to more horsepower and you put. 500 into it or 1, 000 to a chip.

Crew Chief Eric: 1,

Crew Chief Brad: 100. Yeah. 1, 100. And then you’re making 600. How, how much torque did Bruce get out of his car? It was 460 some odd torque. Yeah. And that, that wasn’t even an R. So

Crew Chief Eric: like you said, you love V8s and for a hundred thousand dollars, Tanya, what else could Brad get?

Executive Producer Tania: Mustang. You could get the Jeep Wrangler V8 final edition. For only 101, 890.

Crew Chief Eric: Finally. Atlantis money. Woo! It does come with a 392, 470 horsepower, 6. 4 liter V8 engine. Standard. Zero to 60 in a Wrangler in four seconds, brah. But it gets 13 miles to the gallon. I mean, who cares

Crew Chief Brad: about gas mileage these days?

Crew Chief Eric: If you

Executive Producer Tania: had 100, 000, which would you buy?

Crew Chief Eric: Oh, I’d buy the Benz.

Crew Chief Brad: If I had 100, 000, I’d buy a used 911. Or an Audi R8 or like a Nissan [00:45:00] GTR or something like that. I

Crew Chief Eric: mean, he has a point.

Crew Chief Brad: No, actually, I would buy a CLK AMG Black Series.

Crew Chief Eric: But you’d have the coolest sort of Hellcat Jeep Wrangler to take to the mall.

Crew Chief Brad: Or I would have the coolest blacked out Mercedes to take to the mall.

Executive Producer Tania: 100, 000 and you can get you the correct Mercedes. 100,

Crew Chief Brad: 000 get you a four cylinder Mercedes. How fucked up is that?

Crew Chief Eric: Well, let’s Let’s continue our domestic news brought to us by AmericanMuscle. com, your source for OEM performance and replacement parts for your Ford, Chevy, or Stellantis vehicle.

Executive Producer Tania: So going back to our Chevy Bolt B.

Crew Chief Eric: Is that the Colt? Oh, they need to bring that back. Or Colt. Colt? Or Colt? The Colt is the square body, people, but that’s another episode to itself.

Crew Chief Brad: And then the Colt is a Tesla thing. We’ll

Executive Producer Tania: So this guy who purchased his new back then [00:46:00] 2018 Chevy Bolt Ev has now amassed 240,000 miles Wow. On that little grocery gutter.

And the only thing he’s done, he says, is the battery was replaced under a safety recall at 150,000, but no other problems. Besides, like, brake maintenance.

Crew Chief Eric: That’s impressive! Good job, Chevy!

Crew Chief Brad: I mean, you got a ways to go with your diesel, apparently.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, I gotta say this, and the Green Grand Prix is coming up again this year, and plan on being there, live streaming and doing some other stuff, but I was really impressed by the Chevy Bolts.

Regardless of stock or modified like they had at the Green Grand Prix, especially during the autocross, if you go back and look at the live stream that we did, they were quick and they handled well. And everybody kept saying like how fun they were to drive. And I’m like, Chevy Volt, are you, are we talking about the same car?

And these guys, man, they were hooning it up with these Chevy Volts and they were loving them and they couldn’t say enough good things about them. And I’m like, man, [00:47:00] like, what am I missing here? Absolutely

Crew Chief Brad: nothing. They’re trying to convince themselves that they have a good car. I

Crew Chief Eric: mean, it’s not a Prius, right?

I mean that you know what you’re getting there,

Crew Chief Brad: which I have seen a Prius at a track event.

Crew Chief Eric: I have two. They’re not allowed anymore, though, from what I understand. Certain tracks, at least.

Crew Chief Brad: According to a track test by Jeremy Clarkson, a BMW E46 M3 is more fuel efficient than a Prius to get the same track time

Crew Chief Eric: at the same speed too.

Executive Producer Tania: Speaking of that tangent, I don’t blame them for banning the EVs. at track day events. Because you have one catch on fire, and then 1900 years later, when they put it out, everyone’s track day has been ruined.

Crew Chief Brad: And what damage does it do to the asphalt, the surface, you know, wherever it’s parked, when that thing melts down and just goes full scorched earth?

Crew Chief Eric: Well, This next one, I am still scratching my head.

Executive Producer Tania: This was, I think, a concept a couple years ago, but it’s like back, they’re still doing something with it. What is this Buick? It looks like something from that show Viper. [00:48:00]

Crew Chief Eric: Yes, which I love. Was this generated by like Mid Journey or one of the other AI programs?

Because it’s almost Forza quality supercar that we’re looking at here. And I don’t associate Buick. With something like this and especially the name that they chose the wildcat, which as we know, Tanya, our cousin’s dad had a wildcat and that thing was 11 million feet long. It was like the biggest car to this day that I’ve ever seen.

I mean, it was literal land yacht. So to call this the wildcat, I’m going to get it because it’s like a fun name and it’s aggressive. If I think about the original one, I’m not the red

Executive Producer Tania: car. Yes. Oh my god, I didn’t know that. Okay. Yeah,

Crew Chief Eric: it’s a Buick Wildcat 2 door.

Crew Chief Brad: Am I the only person in the world right now that is surprised that Buick still exists?

Executive Producer Tania: Not your grandparents car company anymore.

Crew Chief Eric: They say it’s because of the Chinese market. They really, really like Buicks for some reason. I don’t get it.

Crew Chief Brad: American weirdos.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, right? I’m just, I don’t [00:49:00] understand it. But, I saw another Buick the other day and I don’t remember the name of it. And I thought it was a Polestar.

It had the same sort of shape and same sort of look to it. And Buick has also revamped their logo. So it just has those three like downward facing pennants instead of the ring and all this stuff. And they silently changed that

Crew Chief Brad: like the Camaro logo now.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, exactly. And so we actually kind of were buzzing through traffic to see this car because I was like, what is this?

And I’m asking my wife and she’s like, I don’t know. I don’t know. And we finally got close enough to it and we’re like, Oh my god, that’s a Buick? I feel like Buick is silently changing their cars over. Maybe they’ll make something that we’re more excited about, or because we’re getting older, they’re building stuff that appeals to us

Crew Chief Brad: as old people.

So when do we see a new Grand National?

Crew Chief Eric: Right? Let’s switch to Asian domestic news and talk a little bit about Kia and Hyundai and some other manufacturers here that we [00:50:00] alluded to earlier. What’s going on in Korea, Tanya?

Executive Producer Tania: So apparently Kia is winning in the affordable mass market EV category.

Crew Chief Brad: Duh, they’re winning in the affordable ICE category too.

Yeah,

Executive Producer Tania: I don’t know what they’re comparing to. They only mentioned the Kia EV3, so I don’t know what they’re saying. Second one is, which is weird though because I guess they’re comparing it to EVs that don’t even exist yet because the R3 aren’t even out yet. So cool. You’re winning in a category that you’re only in.

Crew Chief Brad: Like Toyota Lama.

Crew Chief Eric: The important part about this article has nothing to do with Kia. It’s zooming in laser focused, hypersensitive. On what? To the Rivian R3X. Tell me that’s not a Lancia Delta or a Golf GTI Mark II silhouette.

Executive Producer Tania: Some people think it looks like an AMC Gremlin. If you’re listening, you need your eyes checked.

Crew Chief Eric: It looks like [00:51:00] anything designed by Giugiaro from back then. The Golf. The Panda. Just the way the back door is cut, the back glass, the B pillar.

Executive Producer Tania: If you take the Mark II Rally

Crew Chief Eric: Golf Oh, it’s a carbon copy.

Executive Producer Tania: Just put a roof rack on this thing.

Crew Chief Eric: It is so cool. Like, this is the coolest new EV I’ve seen in a while.

Like, if this is gonna be for real, and I like the little hippo nostrils front end that the Rivian has, that’s neat. The problem is that’s never gonna come here. That’s going to be for the European market because that appeals to all the launch a Delta lovers and the Volkswagen people and the Renault Clio folks out in the world.

But man, that’s what I’m excited

Crew Chief Brad: about.

Executive Producer Tania: Well, they’re saying 2027.

Crew Chief Brad: How absurd is it that they’re winning the most affordable EV 54 nine base price for an EV nine.

Executive Producer Tania: The EV9’s big though. That’s a sedan.

Crew Chief Brad: But the EV9 was their big SUV.

Executive Producer Tania: Oh, is it the SUV?

Crew Chief Brad: What’s the cheapest electric, like all electric vehicle out right now?

The

Executive Producer Tania: Chevy Bolt. It’s like twenties, I [00:52:00] think.

Crew Chief Brad: Twenties?

Executive Producer Tania: Well, I don’t know what the new one will be because they stopped making it, I thought.

Crew Chief Brad: Nope, it’s back.

Executive Producer Tania: You can pick up the used ones. You can pick them up with real low mileage for in the twenties.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah, but that’s. But I think even

Executive Producer Tania: new, they weren’t anything over.

I don’t think 30.

Crew Chief Brad: The Volt is a plug in hybrid.

Executive Producer Tania: No, no, but the Bolt, the B. Oh,

Crew Chief Brad: Bolt. You’re saying Bolt. Oh, the one that’s the size of an Air Force One Nike. Yeah, your left shoe. Okay. Okay. So that’s more reasonable, but just, I’m just flabbergasted by the cost of brand new cars.

Executive Producer Tania: You can get a 2023 Chevy Bolt EV.

I think they stopped. So I don’t think there’s a 2024.

Crew Chief Brad: No, there isn’t.

Executive Producer Tania: 26 5.

Crew Chief Brad: Why aren’t they on this list for winning? Because they have the most affordable.

Executive Producer Tania: It probably has to do with number that are being sold too. Which doesn’t make sense because I don’t know why they’re listing the EV9 because the R3, the Rivian, allegedly is going to be 35, 000.

That’s

Crew Chief Brad: a good deal! Oh, like the Tesla Model 3.

Executive Producer Tania: Allegedly. So we’ll see what actually [00:53:00] happens.

Crew Chief Eric: This R3X is cool. I’m sorry, this is so cool.

Executive Producer Tania: It

Crew Chief Eric: is. We have another article in the show notes that has more pictures of it. This thing is cool. The interior is cool. Everything about this is cool.

Executive Producer Tania: Got a nice silhouette.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, it really does. Well, continuing to talk about the Koreans. We talked about the EB 9 being the biggest one in the fleet. As we know, Hyundai is the parent company of Kia and also of Genesis and a lot of other brands. It’s not a stretch of the imagination to say that just like Audis and Volkswagens are based on one another, there’s Hyundais and Kias that are based on one another.

So Hyundai is rolling out the IONIQ 9. It’s big, it’s bold, and it’s green, but I don’t like it.

Executive Producer Tania: Uh, it doesn’t have a nice profile. Not at

Crew Chief Eric: all.

Crew Chief Brad: It’s very square, unless you’re looking at the windshield. The windshield is at like a 60 degree angle, and then the rest of it looks very square but roundish.

Executive Producer Tania: Square but round.

Crew Chief Brad: Tell me I’m wrong. It’s very rectangular. [00:54:00] It’s rectangular round.

Crew Chief Eric: And I will submit Exhibit A, the fenders. Oh

Executive Producer Tania: yeah.

Crew Chief Eric: Look at these fenders. They’re round and then just cut straight. know what

Crew Chief Brad: that is. That’s, I don’t like it. The front end too. The front end is very perpendicular to the ground and then like slight curve and then parallel to the ground.

You put a level on it, it’s going to be level.

Crew Chief Eric: Why do the fenders of the Ioniq 9 and 7 have LEDs in them? What is the purpose? Federal

Crew Chief Brad: mandate. Look

Executive Producer Tania: hella cool.

Crew Chief Brad: The same reason the Ferrari 360s have to have those stupid side markers in the U. S.

Executive Producer Tania: Yeah, I was gonna say, it’s no different than a side marker that just moved it 8 inches forward.

Crew Chief Brad: Why

Crew Chief Eric: is it so fugly though?

Executive Producer Tania: Well Because it’s Hyundai. You know?

Crew Chief Eric: I don’t see this selling well. And there’s no pictures of the back, which means it must be absolutely heinous. If you’re not willing to show it from the back It must be really really bad and just looking at that d pillar and that weird glass They’ve got all this.

Yeah. I mean the pencil broke when they got to the back of the car There’s just no way this thing [00:55:00] looks good.

Executive Producer Tania: You know, speaking of kids. I saw an ionic 6 I saw it on the road

Crew Chief Eric: sob.

Executive Producer Tania: Yeah, I saw one and

Crew Chief Eric: was Kevin Bacon driving

Executive Producer Tania: it It was coming at me. So I really only saw it from the front And then as it passed me, I recognized it immediately.

I was like, Mmm, that’s that Saab ish thing.

Crew Chief Eric: Ev, like Ev. So dumb. Stupid commercials. Well, speaking of cars you thought were dead.

Executive Producer Tania: I thought the GTR was gone. They still make it?

Crew Chief Eric: Because of the Gran Turismo movie. We gotta bring it back.

Executive Producer Tania: I thought it went away. But apparently you can get a 2025 one, or at least in Japan you can.

Crew Chief Eric: It says here, this could be the end of the line for the 17 year old Godzilla.

Executive Producer Tania: I thought it already was! I’ve only seen one, maybe two, in the last 17 years in the real world. Did anyone buy these?

Crew Chief Eric: I’ve seen a handful of track days and it’s never the same person twice. I feel like they take them to the track one time and then that’s it.

They put them away in storage or something. And they’re big cars. I mean, they’re huge. They’re [00:56:00] rolling arcades. They basically drive themselves. But did it come out in 2007? That feels like a long time ago.

Executive Producer Tania: I don’t know. I guess.

Crew Chief Eric: Here’s another car that’s 100, 000. Do you buy a GTR? Or do you buy the Mercedes?

Executive Producer Tania: I buy the GTR.

Crew Chief Eric: What?

Executive Producer Tania: I buy the Mercedes.

Crew Chief Eric: I buy a Nissan Z at this point because I say 50 grand beats you all out.

Crew Chief Brad: No, I still buy a used 911 or a Dodge Viper.

Crew Chief Eric: Overrated. Okay, now you have my attention. Again, I didn’t know the GTR was still being made. So, okay. Good job, Nissan. Your marketing department wins again.

If you’ve seen three GTRs, that’s three more than the Nissan 400s. I have seen zero on the road. Like, they do not exist.

Crew Chief Brad: Oh yeah, I haven’t seen any

Executive Producer Tania: of

Crew Chief Brad: those.

Executive Producer Tania: I thought I saw one the other day, I remember, but it wasn’t.

Crew Chief Eric: So this next one, as we talk about random EVs and concepts, this is an all Mon Dieu moment.

This is one of those, don’t tease me, because I want this so bad.

Executive Producer Tania: You want that baguette holder?

Crew Chief Eric: [00:57:00] Well, yeah, they’re stale, aren’t they? But this is so cool.

Executive Producer Tania: What about the Renault R5? So

Crew Chief Eric: I saw the Alpine version of this when I was at Le Mans last year, and it is just the hotness. It is sick. This is cool. I can’t wait for the R5 to come back.

Having driven an original R5 Turbo II, this speaks to me. Is it as cool as like the Peugeot 208 and 308s and some of the new ones that are out? I like those better from a modern aesthetic perspective of a hatchback. But this being a retro car and being an EV, man, it checks all the boxes. And how much is it going to cost?

I don’t care.

Executive Producer Tania: It’s never coming to the United States. So it all doesn’t matter.

Crew Chief Eric: It’ll be a dollar nine. When I buy the hot wheels version at Walmart, that’s how much it’s going to cost. True. That’s what’s going to happen there. What else we got going on?

Executive Producer Tania: Brad is looking for that low cost EV and you might find it in a domestic.

Crew Chief Brad: I see

Executive Producer Tania: Ford is said to be [00:58:00] planning on a $25,000 compact EV for 2026.

Crew Chief Eric: BBBB. Did you read the fine print European market?

Executive Producer Tania: There you have it. Nothing good comes here.

Crew Chief Eric: Nope. And it’s going to use the new lithium iron phosphate battery, blah, blah, blah, all this kind of stuff. And that’s great. But here’s the problem I have with it. They’re going to take it to Europe, and they’re going to call it the Explorer. That’s not an Explorer.

Executive Producer Tania: Oh, no. We already have an Explorer here that is. EV or will be EV was listed in the upcoming.

Crew Chief Eric: We need to come up with a new name for this. This it’s not going to be sold as an explored.

Crew Chief Brad: Okay. Let’s do it. Let’s, let’s come up with a new name. I only see the one picture. What do we think it should be called?

If the pickup truck is maverick, I think this should be goose.

Executive Producer Tania: Why not? Mustang something.

Crew Chief Brad: The Mustang mock D’s

Crew Chief Eric: mark D’s. Something along the lines of the car.

Executive Producer Tania: No, this is too big.

Crew Chief Brad: A Mustang is a wild [00:59:00] horse. What is a wild mini horse? It’s the Pinto. Oh, we figured it out. It’s the Pinto. The Mustang Mach E too.

Crew Chief Eric: And just like the Pinto, if you hit this thing hard enough in the back, it’s going to explode and melt to the ground.

So it’s perfect. Done. We figured it out. Ford, we’ve solved your marketing problem at this. See, that’s what we’re here to do. Solve problems.

Executive Producer Tania: We mentioned Polestar earlier as new EVs coming in this year or next year. However, Volvo has lowered its stake in Polestar, relinquishing more of the control to the parent company Geely or Geely, however that’s pronounced.

She reminds me of that movie. With

Crew Chief Eric: Ben Affleck

Crew Chief Brad: and what’s her face? And Jennifer Lopez.

Executive Producer Tania: Was that called Geely?

Crew Chief Brad: It’s called Geely. It’s

Crew Chief Eric: called Giggly.

Executive Producer Tania: At any rate, they’re relinquishing part of their stakes, or they’re not completely going to zero. They’re around 18%. So what does this mean for Polestar? Who knows?

Crew Chief Eric: [01:00:00] Means they’re still going to have cars that look like Volvos.

Executive Producer Tania: I know. Anticlimactic. Time will tell, I guess. It’s not apparently impacting their plans for the upcoming three and four crossovers, et cetera, et cetera. So we’ll see what is in store in the future for Polestar.

Crew Chief Eric: Alright Brad, it’s time for your favorite section of the drive thru, it’s time for Lost and Found, where you scour the internet looking for the newest old car available on dealership lots.

Crew Chief Brad: Well, I already told you about the Tesla Cybertruck Founders Edition that was on Cars and Bids. I think the current bid was 150, uh, let’s see here. God, I feel so sorry for the person who owns this 2005 Ford GT, the yellow and black one, because it is still for sale. 450, 000 estimated payment, 7, 365 a month.

Wow. Still cheaper than an EV. Taxes, tags, title included. Woo! Yep. That’s all. There’s nothing really exciting out here. [01:01:00] Nothing fun.

Crew Chief Eric: Are you kidding me? I found the newest old car for sale. You want to know who the previous owner was? Eric. Nah. The former design boss at Stellantis. He sold his 1992 Lancia Delta Integrale HF in Tornado Red.

This thing is The sickness. Yeah. It was on bring a trailer. There you go. It’s an Evo one and not an Evo two. And guess what? It’s sold for 93, 000. So going back to our question before, if you have a hundred grand to spend, what do you buy? You buy this?

Crew Chief Brad: No, no, no.

Crew Chief Eric: How can you not love an Italian hot hatchback?

That is twin charge, supercharged and turbocharged make it 300 horsepower plus all wheel drive.

Crew Chief Brad: I mean, I like it. I don’t a hundred thousand dollars like it.

Crew Chief Eric: I hear they steer like a bus.

Crew Chief Brad: You’re not selling me on it.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, I mean, it’s 1980s technology wrapped in a 1990s shell. So, you know, you get what you get and you don’t get upset.

I’m not going to kick it out of the garage. I would take this car [01:02:00] hands down. Not for a hundred thousand dollars. Tonya, would

Crew Chief Brad: you

Crew Chief Eric: spend

Crew Chief Brad: a hundred thousand dollars on this car? She’s got to think about it, Brad. Look at that face. For 93, 000, she’s just trying to find the article.

Executive Producer Tania: No,

Crew Chief Brad: a

Executive Producer Tania: hundred thousand on this or the Mercedes.

Yeah. What

Crew Chief Brad: do

Crew Chief Eric: you buy?

Crew Chief Brad: That’s a good question.

Crew Chief Eric: Mercedes has air conditioning. This probably has a rat blowing over an ice cube. Mercedes has AC, but this car has more windows. What

Executive Producer Tania: makes this car 93,

Crew Chief Eric: 000? It’s a Lancia Delta Integrale HF Evo one.

Executive Producer Tania: That’s it. Should it really be? Thank you.

Crew Chief Eric: Thank you, Tanya. Thank you.

It’s wrong with you people.

Executive Producer Tania: This is an icon. I know this is like

Crew Chief Eric: a fashion statement.

Executive Producer Tania: Is it

Crew Chief Eric: $93,000 though? It was like $93,000 when it was new in 1990 $2 when you converted. So it’s a, it’s a bargain.

Executive Producer Tania: This is hard decision.

Crew Chief Eric: No, it’s not. It is a simple decision. You take the Shield and the Lance

Crew Chief Brad: and you put your 93, 000 in the bank.

Well, there’s that. So there is a car we haven’t [01:03:00] talked about yet. What’s that? Do you spend 100, 000 on the Lancia Delta Integrale or do you spend 100, 000 on a 1985 Porsche 940? Oh my God. I can’t believe it.

Executive Producer Tania: All day, all night.

Crew Chief Brad: I’m in agreement with

Executive Producer Tania: Tanya.

Crew Chief Eric: This is where auctions get out of control. I could not believe this.

Executive Producer Tania: Is this even a turbo?

Crew Chief Eric: No, it’s a regular 944.

Executive Producer Tania: F that noise. Piece of crap.

Crew Chief Eric: No, I love 944s. The base model ones are probably the most boring car I’ve ever driven, and I mean that in the most positive way. They don’t do anything you don’t expect. They’re not nervous. They’re very calm. They’re subdued low gear ratios.

Like it’s just an Autobahn cruiser, but on the same token, just like my M3 was, it doesn’t excite me, right? 944s have never gotten me excited. Even the turbos. You’re like, Ooh, that was fun. Great. This is again, where auctions get out of control. 100, 000 for a base model 85 [01:04:00] 944? Okay, it’s got Fuchs on it.

Whoop dee doo, so does every other 944 on the planet. I don’t see it. I think they messed up. This is a 15, 000 car. I could see maybe paying 10,

Crew Chief Brad: 500.

Crew Chief Eric: There’s a typo here. There’s no way this sold for 100, 000 bucks. I mean, the car better have, like, 12 miles on it, but at that point, you’re gonna have to rebuild it.

Anyway, it’s going to need a head gasket as soon as you look at it.

Crew Chief Brad: No, thank you.

Crew Chief Eric: You know, talking about Daniel and square bodies and stuff. I saw a square body with the camper attachment thing. You’ve seen those back in the 80s. They would put that like literal physical box in the bed with like a door.

Like, I don’t even know what you call that, right? It just looks like a bio dome that you carry around with you in the bed of the truck. They had 1 of those sell at me come. For like a hundred thousand dollars. It was absolutely bonkers. I’m like, where are people coming up with the money for this stuff?

And that’s where I say, if you spend a hundred thousand dollars on an 85, nine 44, I will go down to the Mercedes dealership tomorrow and go buy that GT 43, because it doesn’t make any sense. [01:05:00] 944, they literally made hundreds of thousands of these cars. It’s the car that saved Porsche from going bankrupt in the 80s.

It’s a mass market car. And you want to tell me it’s a collector item at 100, 000 now? No freaking way. If you’re gonna spend 100, 000 on a 944, it better be Cup car? Yes, cup car. It better be an S2 Cabriolet, like the last year, like a 92 and a half, with all the options, and the blue leather, and like all that crazy stuff that you could get, the pearl paint, and you know, they only made like three of them kind of deal, but a Guards Red, Black Leather, Black Fuchs, 944, this is like the most basic vanilla latte Starbucks Porsche on the planet.

Come on, 100, 000. Get the f out of here. Take your 944 and go home. Well, we’ve reached that part of the episode where we would be remiss. We didn’t talk about [01:06:00] Teslagate.

Executive Producer Tania: Was that the Law and Order music? What

Crew Chief Eric: kind of shenanigans is Elon up to this time?

Executive Producer Tania: Not much, just a quick check in with Hertz and their, their mis investment.

I love

Crew Chief Eric: that the most exciting thing we have to talk about with Tesla’s rental cars. This is amazing.

Executive Producer Tania: So we recall a couple years ago, they hedged a big bet. Went all in buying 100, 000 Teslas into the Hertz rental fleet, high expectations on this, and now that CEO has resigned from Hertz after he grenaded the company into a hole and the new CEO has to dig themselves out of this huge investment to divest all of these Teslas.

Crew Chief Eric: Wow. They took a bath on these things.

Crew Chief Brad: So if anybody’s looking to buy a used Tesla,

Crew Chief Eric: no, that guy’s looking for a job. That’s what he’s looking for. If you want to hire a CEO that will ruin your company, check the Hertz website. That’s the [01:07:00] guy.

Executive Producer Tania: And they bought high and they’re having to sell not as high.

Cause there’s been a number of price reductions on Tesla’s over the

Crew Chief Eric: years.

Executive Producer Tania: Claim high repair costs. Like, well, what does that mean? The maintenance shouldn’t be Depends, though, because people rag on rental cars. So if they’re bashing them into things, and suddenly you have all these EVs that have been in mild accidents, and then they have to get checked out, maybe brought back to service dealers to make sure everything’s All good.

God forbid you rent it out and lights on fire or something because there’s a problem with the batteries. Wonder what the rental insurance liability is for the EVs. I couldn’t have been cheap.

Crew Chief Eric: Do you have to take out extra fire insurance?

Executive Producer Tania: I don’t know because I’m sure the rental was really expensive per day on these.

So it’s like who are you expecting was going to go Buy these. Most people are trying to find the cheapest rental car they can.

Crew Chief Brad: Eric, you got to add that into your total cost of ownership. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Does your homeowner’s insurance [01:08:00] go up because of the risk of fire if you’re parking an EV in your garage?

That’s true. It has, Matt.

Executive Producer Tania: Well, I wonder if they ask those kind of questions now when you’re filling out your home insurance, right? I

Crew Chief Eric: mean, Chrysler tells you not to park your EV in the garage to begin with. Just leave it outside.

Executive Producer Tania: What is the point of the house I bought for my car to not put the car Is that what the

Crew Chief Eric: garage is for?

Crew Chief Brad: Oh, you bought your car a house.

Executive Producer Tania: Yes, the garage is the house for the car.

Crew Chief Eric: No, the garage is for all your crap that doesn’t fit in your house.

Crew Chief Brad: No, it’s for the car.

Executive Producer Tania: All right, well, enough of that. Now, the more interesting thing. So, Motor Trends has done a comparison test. Before you read the answer, between the Cybertruck, the Rivian R1T, and the F 150 Lightning, which truck do you think came out on top?

And, of course, they looked at the real world mileage. They looked at off road capability, acceleration. They did some like figure eight tests.

Crew Chief Eric: How many Porsches were they towing in this exercise?

Executive Producer Tania: They towed [01:09:00] some 3, 200 almost pound camper trailer.

Crew Chief Brad: All right. The real question is who comes in second.

Executive Producer Tania: Okay.

Because

Crew Chief Brad: we already know who comes in first.

Executive Producer Tania: No. Who do you think comes in first? Go bottom up. Who’s number three?

Crew Chief Eric: I think the Lightning is at the bottom.

Crew Chief Brad: Ooh, I was going to put the Lightning at the top.

Crew Chief Eric: No, we already know the Lightning’s second. It sucks at towing. Like we’ve seen those real life tests with the guys with the tampers and all that stuff.

I think that’s at the bottom.

Crew Chief Brad: We haven’t seen a real life test with the Cybertruck of the Rivian.

Crew Chief Eric: No, it’s towed a 9 11. That’s all we needed

Crew Chief Brad: to know. It beat a 9 11 towing a 9 11. You can tow a 9 11 down a quarter mile, not 300 miles down the interstate. How

Crew Chief Eric: far is your home depot from your house?

Crew Chief Brad: About 4.

5 miles.

Crew Chief Eric: There you go. That’s as far

Crew Chief Brad: as

Crew Chief Eric: you need to go. That’s it.

Crew Chief Brad: But then can you shovel mulch over the side?

Executive Producer Tania: You laugh. But in the cargo carrying category, they commented that the Cybertruck, you can’t easily shovel mulch out over the side rails as you can in other trucks. Boom. Mulch.

Crew Chief Eric: I’ve never seen anybody shovel mulch out of their truck.

Is that a [01:10:00] thing? Like all these guys with their pristine bed liners. I’m like, you buy bag mulch. Come on.

Executive Producer Tania: I don’t think they actually put mulch in these. I think it’s just a funny way of saying like the way that the bed sides are angled. It’s not really great for getting stuff out. Anyway, so you think number three is lightning.

So who do we think is number two?

Crew Chief Eric: I don’t want it to be the Rivian. Is this one of those like, it’s slanted in favor of the Cybertruck because everybody’s given it so much grief?

Executive Producer Tania: Who do you think is number two?

Crew Chief Eric: I’m gonna roll hard. I’m gonna take a chance. And say the Rivian beat the Tesla.

Crew Chief Brad: I have to abstain from voting because I saw the result.

Executive Producer Tania: Oh, dang.

Crew Chief Brad: All right. So what, what happened?

Executive Producer Tania: The Rivian is number one in this comparison, followed by the Cybertruck and then followed by the F 150 Lightning.

Crew Chief Eric: Logic prevails.

Executive Producer Tania: Yes. So.

Crew Chief Eric: So what I learned from this, just from this opening picture, because I didn’t scroll any further than that. I didn’t realize the [01:11:00] headlights are in that gap, which I assume is a panel gap between the front nose and whatever that thing they call a bumper is at the bottom. Like, so that streak of light across the front of

Crew Chief Brad: that, that’s a daytime running light.

Crew Chief Eric: Exactly. I thought that was the headlights.

Crew Chief Brad: Oh my God. That makes the truck. Even stupider

Crew Chief Eric: so ugly and then now that I’m scrolling down. This is the first time I’ve gotten a very clear Picture of the wiper blade.

Executive Producer Tania: Oh, so speaking of the wiper blade.

Crew Chief Eric: What does that wipe

your ass?

Executive Producer Tania: I thought it, Brad said it. How does

this work?

Executive Producer Tania: Here you go. So a new driver venturing into a big puddle will learn that with the wheels and windshield so far, so commenting on Tesla, Tesla presents a curve. That’s so steep. We worry about Turo renters who may not get much familiarization. So stepping into a cyber truck versus something more normal, a new driver venturing into a big puddle will learn that with the wheels and windshield so far forward, visibility can be completely obscured.

By the splash of potentially muddy water. A [01:12:00] terrible time to learn the two step process for activating the Giga Wiper. Thumb the tiny button on the steering wheel with the windshield washer icon, then look down and choose your wiper setting from a pop up menu on the screen.

Crew Chief Eric: Wow.

Executive Producer Tania: It got really poor marks in terms of like visibility.

Apparently you can’t see out of the thing.

Crew Chief Eric: They summarize it in two words. It says further in the article. Bunker visibility.

I also like the other comment in the con column. Cosplay quote unquote off road tires.

Executive Producer Tania: Apparently they were horrible. They mudded up immediately and it went like spinning and sliding. Whereas like the Rivian and the Ford on their like, Whatever normal street tires were, it was like, fine. And they’re Cooper’s

Crew Chief Eric: that they got, you know, like whatever.

I also like the borderline dangerous secondary trolls.

Executive Producer Tania: Yeah. Like that windshield wiper

Crew Chief Eric: is great. It never [01:13:00] ends.

Executive Producer Tania: Like there’s a reason why, and it goes back to the manufacturers now also back peddling on the whole infotainment. Let’s control everything with this big, huge. iPad in the middle of your console, the tactile, the levers behind the steering wheel, knobs that you can intuitively just reach for, feel, and you don’t have to look at them.

I shouldn’t have to divert my eyes to use my windshield wipers. I should just be able to flick if they’re on immediately.

Crew Chief Eric: I feel like the Cybertruck is this giant social experiment. We’re gonna throw the craziest crap at this and then see how people react to it. Who’s the engineer that said, you know what?

I’m going to make the windshield wiper work like this. Let’s see what they think about it. It’s like, here, hold my beer. Like the whole truck is here. Hold my beer, right? It makes no sense whatsoever. But again, these are some of the clearest pictures I’ve gotten of the windshield wiper, the side mirrors, the headlights, some other things about the truck.

Everything else has sort of been obscured. And what’s also fun about the picture of the [01:14:00] cyber truck just above the pro and con column. Look how gross.

Executive Producer Tania: I don’t, I have like, it’s just like, yeah, it looks dirty.

Crew Chief Eric: It’s just awful. Like, disgusting.

Executive Producer Tania: It looks like, you know, you haven’t washed your car in a month and it gets that grime that’s like streaking down the sides.

I’m like, just go look at your stainless steel appliances in your kitchen.

Crew Chief Eric: Come on. And that roof line, I mean, it looks like combination Frank Lloyd Wright meets a kindergartner. Like who wants their car to look like a house? In profile. Like, it doesn’t make sense. I could make something less angular out of Legos, and with better precision as we know, than this Cybertruck.

Like,

Executive Producer Tania: oh god, it’s terrible. It’ll be interesting the day we finally see one on the road.

Crew Chief Eric: We’re never gonna see one on the road. There’s only like three Crest Cybertrucks running around. That’s what it is. Nobody actually owns these things. So bad. Well, enough of that. My expectations are once again [01:15:00] lowered.

Lowered expectations. I told you guys I would check in. Did you watch the Ferrari movie? Nope.

Crew Chief Brad: What Ferrari movie?

Crew Chief Eric: This is becoming like Drive to Survive. So is it going to be one of these deals where if I watch an episode of Drive to Survive, you guys will watch the Ferrari movie? Is that where this is going?

Yes.

Executive Producer Tania: No, I’m not, not watching it for any particular reason. I’m just not watching it. For the same reasons I’m not watching a lot of other movies that have just come out. I just haven’t made the time.

Crew Chief Eric: I thought you were going to say because they suck.

Executive Producer Tania: There’s always that potential too.

Crew Chief Eric: Whatever. I’ll get your guys opinion on it eventually.

If you didn’t have enough things to watch or review with Steve and Izzy from Everything I Learned From Movies, here’s another one to add to the list. This one’s called The Lionheart and it’s on HBO Max.

Executive Producer Tania: Yes, it is about Dan Weldon, who was a British motor racing driver and he was in the IndyCar series.

But he died in 2011 in a racing incident.

Crew Chief Eric: And I have been told by some folks that watched it, they said, quote, if you haven’t watched it, I’m ashamed of [01:16:00] you. You need to watch it now. Okay.

Executive Producer Tania: That was what Sam said.

Crew Chief Eric: All right. So that’s on my list to watch and report back on and see what that’s all about. I don’t know that story.

I don’t follow IndyCar that much. I’ve heard that it’s good. So I’m curious. I did see it pop on my feed the other day and it kind of glazed over it because I was like, Oh, IndyCar. Yeah, I’ll get to that now that it’s been reinforced. I guess I’m sort of feeling guilt tripped into watching it.

Executive Producer Tania: I think I remember when this happened.

Obviously I don’t know all the particulars and I didn’t follow the series that closely, but I think I do recall when it happened.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, this next one, it was a toss up of where we were going to put it. Is it Florida man? Or is it lowered expectations? It’s pretty close.

Executive Producer Tania: How? Nebraska woman used a rewards card loophole for 7, 000 gallons of free gas?

She ain’t ever changing to EV.

Crew Chief Eric: So now you know, we talked about how much gas can you buy for 10, 000. Well, for 27, 000 equivalent, that’s 7, [01:17:00] 000 gallons of gas. That’s a lot.

Executive Producer Tania: How does she do this?

Crew Chief Eric: This woman is accused of improperly using her rewards card from Pump and Pantry in Lincoln, Nebraska, at least 500 times over six months.

Executive Producer Tania: What does that mean? I don’t understand.

Crew Chief Eric: It says here, there’s usually nothing wrong with using a rewards card, but police say the woman took advantage of a software update from November 2022 that managed orders and rewards cards at the fuel pump. She hacked the fuel pump, I think is what we’re saying here.

Dang. According to this, She used the rewards card 510 times. She’s accused of being paid to give her card to another woman to get free gas.

Executive Producer Tania: So if you had a 14 gallon tank, that’s 500 tanks of fuel that you could fill.

Crew Chief Eric: That’s a lot of driving. Where was she going to Canada and back?

Executive Producer Tania: Fill up say twice a month, then that’s 24 times a year.

That’s almost 21 years.

Crew Chief Eric: [01:18:00] Wow. She was filling semi trucks or something like I don’t get it.

Crew Chief Brad: That’s ridiculous.

Crew Chief Eric: So if you two know how to hack the TV based gas pump, like they have it pump and pantry, you can get some free gas apparently.

Executive Producer Tania: But you got to unload that gas pretty fast because Right? Where did she store 7, 000 gallons?

How do you launder it? Oh my god, it’s like the Sonny and

Crew Chief Eric: Philadelphia episode. He shows up with a 90 gallon trash can and then he starts trying to sell it door to door, you remember that? Same thing, or those crazy people. What was it, we were having the gas shortage thing, like temporarily there for like a minute during COVID and everybody’s like buying gas and people are trying to put it in trash bags.

You remember that? How do you move 7, 000 gallons in six months? That’s a lot of gas.

Executive Producer Tania: How did they not notice this sooner? This woman’s going with like 18 gas cans.

Crew Chief Eric: I’m gonna say it again. Pump and Pantry, Lincoln, Nebraska.

Executive Producer Tania: Is that the name of a city?

Crew Chief Eric: No, that’s the name of the [01:19:00] gas station. Where

Executive Producer Tania: are you from?

Oh, I’m from

Crew Chief Brad: Pump and Pantry, Lincoln. That’s in Nebraska.

Executive Producer Tania: Oh, it was Lincoln, Nebraska. Got it. Okay. Sorry. No offense to anybody from Nebraska.

Crew Chief Brad: My family’s from Nebraska.

Crew Chief Eric: The other thing is if she hacked the machine, maybe she found the Easter egg, touch this corner, dance on your head, pick your nose at the same time.

Noob Saibot. Yeah, right. But it doesn’t usually work that way. If you’re going to hack the thing. So she’s out there with her laptop, plugging into the card reader and like hacking into the machine. Like how did, or is it like, you know, you see in like blacklist and she puts the thing and it starts beeping and 93 million numbers start going.

How do you hack a gas pump to make this happen? I don’t know. But this is also why I don’t buy gas from no name gas stations.

Crew Chief Brad: Why? It would have been in your bed. That’s when you pay with cash.

Crew Chief Eric: You could have gotten 7, 000 gallons of just watered down crap too. You know what I mean?

Executive Producer Tania: Yeah, you could have been in for a rude awakening.

Crew Chief Eric: This could have been a Florida Man story. It’s right there. It’s borderline.

Crew Chief Brad: [01:20:00] Yeah, the fact that it didn’t make it to Florida Man leads me to believe that we’ve got something really spicy in the Florida Man

Executive Producer Tania: section. No, I don’t know that we do, unfortunately.

Crew Chief Eric: Does that mean we gotta go down south for alligators and bear?

Executive Producer Tania: Was this one in Flowrider? No, this was in Arizona.

Crew Chief Eric: We’re adding states. We add Nebraska. Let’s say that other one gets an honorable mention. It counts.

Crew Chief Brad: I feel like we need a map of the United States behind one of us with little pins on where these stories are from. Tanya and I talked about this. We’re going to put it on the website.

Executive Producer Tania: We’ve hit a lot of states. We are missing some.

Crew Chief Eric: I ran a report. We figured out where all our stories are coming from. Did you use the Power BI?

Executive Producer Tania: Used Excel, like Williams.

Crew Chief Eric: Nobody needs [01:21:00] that sophisticated AWS, just use Excel spreadsheets.

Executive Producer Tania: Tried and true, baby. You can do a lot with Excel. I do try to look in the lesser known states in this segment.

Crew Chief Eric: The best stories come out of Florida.

Executive Producer Tania: Have yet to find South Dakota man, you know, but I’m looking, I do try to look.

Crew Chief Brad: They don’t have communication out of South Dakota. You have to actually go there. You have to go to Sturgis to.

Executive Producer Tania: I might have to be more specific. I might have to be like city specific.

Crew Chief Brad: Like a pump and

Executive Producer Tania: pump and pantry, South Dakota pump

Crew Chief Brad: and pantry.

Crew Chief Eric: This story is a lot like the carjacking story, though.

Executive Producer Tania: This is stupid criminal file. So guy gets out of jail needs the way home somehow randomly comes across Like a Volvo car hauler loaded up with over 1, 000, 000 worth of Corvettes. So that’s how many Corvettes were on this thing. And he steals it to drive home to wherever Pumpin Pantry, [01:22:00] Arizona.

There must be like 900 lojacks on this thing. And like satellite tracking to make sure the million dollars of merchandise doesn’t get stolen.

Crew Chief Eric: Let’s also be real, this ain’t Smokey and the Bandit. That thing is slow.

Executive Producer Tania: Exactly! I mean, the cop probably could like, run up next to him.

Crew Chief Brad: Look at the road that they’re on.

I can’t imagine that there’s a lot of traffic. So this is probably his only option.

Crew Chief Eric: You know what would have been really funny though? This guy gets in the truck, locks himself in there as the story says, and then he just drives away, blah blah blah. But what would have been really funny is, He gets in it and looks down, and it’s a manual, and he goes, Ah, shit.

Executive Producer Tania: What’d have been really funny is if he knew how to use the hauler, and he took one of the vets off and then drove the vet away. Well, that’s what he should have done.

But how gullible was the truck driver, too?

Executive Producer Tania: Where was the truck? Where is this truck in the middle of a freaking desert? Where was he?

Crew Chief Eric: According to the story, allegedly the truck was parked at the Wilcox Lowe’s truck stop in Wilcox, Arizona.

Executive Producer Tania: Oh, so this is where they caught him. This is the [01:23:00] picture they’ve apprehended him at this point. No,

Crew Chief Eric: no. Where’s the Lowe’s? No, Love’s, the truck stop. It says here, Oh, Lowe’s. When Walker, not to be confused with Texas Ranger, began to strike up a conversation with the truck driver at the truck stop, the driver attempted to climb into the cab of the truck, And Walker grabbed the driver and threw him to the ground, at which point Walker got into the truck, locked the doors, and drove out of the parking lot.

Executive Producer Tania: So he turned down this random dirt road and then got caught.

Crew Chief Eric: That’s where he got caught. Yeah.

Executive Producer Tania: He had missed a seal in the truck, but not the Corvettes.

Crew Chief Eric: No, it’s like Ron White. I was not drunk at all. In public until you put me in public, right? He didn’t steal the Corvettes, he stole the truck.

Crew Chief Brad: If you think about it, how many counts of Grand Theft Auto is he going to be charged with?

Executive Producer Tania: I guess 10 vets in a truck.

Crew Chief Brad: Oh, it says 11 accounts of theft of means of transportation.

Crew Chief Eric: What’s the thing in Monopoly? Do not pass go, go directly to jail, do not collect 200. Yeah,

Executive Producer Tania: he got out of jail just to return revolving door [01:24:00] right back. Oh, well.

Crew Chief Eric: Do we have a real Florida? We have a real

Executive Producer Tania: Florida man. Yes.

Sweet. We’re diverging a little from the norm. It’s a motorcycle. What?

Crew Chief Brad: Those are the best.

Executive Producer Tania: Florida man with mullet.

Crew Chief Eric: Wait, say that again.

Executive Producer Tania: That’s not really shocking. Florida man with mullet. Oh,

Crew Chief Eric: damn. Oh, okay.

Executive Producer Tania: Florida man with mullet. Fleece from cops with mullet. Will Run license plate.

Crew Chief Eric: Wow, advertising.

Executive Producer Tania: Yeah, so there’s a video of this, and there’s a picture of him and his glorious hair.

Crew Chief Eric: Hold on a second, is that a mullet, or is that like, just got out of bed hair? Cause like, my hair looks like that some days. I

Executive Producer Tania: don’t know.

Crew Chief Eric: Like, you know, you’ve been laying on a pillow the wrong way, and then you get up and your hair’s like all feathery and large. Like, is that really a mullet? His hair doesn’t go to his shoulders.

Executive Producer Tania: And there’s a video. He passes the Daytona beach signs. So you fast forward to minute 10.

Crew Chief Brad: Of the video.

Executive Producer Tania: And it hit play. Is he by the track?

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah, he’s by the track. Where we walked across that bridge. Right?

Crew Chief Eric: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And

Executive Producer Tania: then you see [01:25:00] the Hooters. He drives by the Hooters. Oh,

Crew Chief Eric: yeah, that’s right by Daytona International Raceway.

Executive Producer Tania: The best part, this chase goes into the night time, they find, like, the helicopter’s like,

Crew Chief Eric: Really?

Executive Producer Tania: Well, into the night time, I don’t know, because it went into, like, night vision at the end of the video. I don’t know what time of day it was, but the best part was the last, like, seconds of the video, I think the cop complimented him.

Crew Chief Eric: I thought they weren’t supposed to pursue.

Executive Producer Tania: They pursued him with the helicopter.

Crew Chief Eric: Oh, okay.

Executive Producer Tania: So they weren’t chasing him at speed. I think the helicopter was pursuing him, but then they kept having cops in the vicinity and then like, I don’t know why he finally like stopped and then they rushed him. There you have it.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, man.

That’s

Crew Chief Eric: a real, real strong on the motorcycle.

Executive Producer Tania: He goes, yeah, man, you’re real strong with the motorcycle.

Crew Chief Eric: Whatever. It’s Florida, okay? It’s like, none of it makes sense. It never will. But we need to go behind the pit wall and talk about motorsports news. So, I have to admit, I finally watched an F1 race.

It must have been a blue moon or something. Would you like to know my [01:26:00] reaction?

Hello.

Crew Chief Brad: I think you fell asleep. Oh, I you slept. More F1 races this year than I have.

Crew Chief Eric: It was boring. And I thought it was stupid. I can’t watch F1 anymore. I mean, max for stopping plus 20 seconds ahead of the rest of the pack. I was like barf Bahrain, not the most interesting layout either.

And I kept saying to myself. You know, and there was a bunch of us watching it together, kind of did a little viewing party. And I’m like, how do you guys watch this manufacturer’s championship? That’s what it is. I don’t get it. It’s not the formula one I grew up with.

Executive Producer Tania: You pretend that Max isn’t there. And then it’s who is coming in second place.

Crew Chief Eric: I’ll stick to sports car and rally. Sorry. So boring. There’s been like what? Two other races since Bahrain? Since the last time? Uh,

Executive Producer Tania: no, one.

Crew Chief Eric: And what happened? Same thing? Lathering’s repeat?

Executive Producer Tania: I think so. Oh, that’s the race that signs got appendicitis. Right before. And unfortunately he couldn’t race. And so Academy Ferrari driver, [01:27:00] Ollie Beerman, British racing driver.

He stepped in as the reserve driver. He qualified in the top 10 and then finished in the top 10. So what a debut for his first time in an F1 car and he only had one practice session to acclimate to the car, essentially.

Crew Chief Eric: So what you’re saying is the secondary quarterbacks are better than the guys that are out playing the game all the time.

Executive Producer Tania: I wouldn’t say that. I would, I’m pretty sure Saenz would have done much better than what he did, but I think it’s pretty impressive for what he was able to accomplish versus some of the other veteran people on the grid, right?

Crew Chief Eric: You know what veteran means? Oh,

Executive Producer Tania: well, yes, there’s Alonzo, but then there’s people that have been there for years now, like Stroll, and Okon, and Ricciardo, who’s back, and it’s like, that guy just, I’m sorry, no offense to the people who love him, but he’s a personality.

Otherwise, he’s doing crap, and he’s gonna lose his seat.

Crew Chief Eric: Again, for like the sixth time.

Crew Chief Brad: He hasn’t done shit since he left Red Bull. He’s been trash,

Crew Chief Eric: but he’s your heartthrob, Brad. I mean, how are you going to [01:28:00] give up on your man?

Crew Chief Brad: What have you done for me lately?

Crew Chief Eric: Oh, is that how it is in the Ricciardo household?

I see

Crew Chief Brad: how it is. I just posted in our show notes, a commercial it’s F1 adjacent. Have you all seen this Uber car share commercial with Valtteri Botis?

Executive Producer Tania: No, he needs to really cut that mustache and

Crew Chief Brad: No, he doesn’t. It is a maze balls. But sadly, he’s

Executive Producer Tania: not

Crew Chief Brad: built for

Crew Chief Eric: the

Crew Chief Brad: famous Ozzy Watts.

Crew Chief Eric: That mustache makes him look like Harry at your bachelor party.

Crew Chief Brad: Doesn’t it though? For me, the star of the commercial is the car.

Executive Producer Tania: Mullet aeration technology.

Crew Chief Brad: And the fan behind him. The

Executive Producer Tania: fan. It’s fucking awesome!

Crew Chief Eric: Budgie smuggler drying system. That is, I love this. This is great.

Crew Chief Brad: For the listeners at home that don’t know what we’re talking about, Volterra Bodas, recently retired, is now doing commercials for Uber share.

Executive Producer Tania: Did I miss that he retired?

Crew Chief Brad: Or is he still driving?

Executive Producer Tania: He’s still driving. What? Yes, he’s driving [01:29:00] steak because it’s not alpha anymore.

Crew Chief Brad: Oh, okay. So let me rephrase that. No, you get to keep that one. Okay, that’s fine. I thought he was retired. He should be retired. I thought he started a new career in entertainment.

Crew Chief Eric: I thought he had like the same personality as the ice man, like Kimmy. Like he was never talked or did anything.

Crew Chief Brad: No, Voltaire is hilarious. There’s

Crew Chief Eric: pictures

Crew Chief Brad: of

Crew Chief Eric: him.

Executive Producer Tania: He’s always naked recently.

Crew Chief Brad: Laying naked in a creek.

Crew Chief Eric: That’s all for two girls, one formula. That’s just for them.

Executive Producer Tania: It’s not Steak. It’s Kick Sauber now.

Crew Chief Eric: They changed the name again?

Executive Producer Tania: I noticed, because I was pulling him up and seeing where he placed in the last race, and it said Kick Sauber under his name. And now I’m on the team’s roster on F1. com, and he is part of Kick Sauber.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, there was also rumor that Audi’s gonna put their livery on the car like a year early too, but I don’t know how true that is.

Executive Producer Tania: Okay, there’s Steak F1 Team Kick Sauber. Sure.

Crew Chief Eric: That’s like Visa, Cash App, MoneyGram, Chipotle.

Executive Producer Tania: Visa, Cash App, RB [01:30:00] Formula One team, yes.

Crew Chief Eric: Oh my god, terrible. Well anyway, in other disciplines of motorsport, can confirm WEC can be watched on HBO Max. And the best part is it’s the same feed as overseas. So you get all the awesome stuff that they would have over there and not some Americanized version.

It’s legitimately from overseas. So if you have HBO Max and you’re a fan of Sports Garden Endurance Racing, especially the World Endurance Championship, check it out on HBO Max. Highly recommend.

Crew Chief Brad: Can you go back and re watch races?

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, it’s all there. Our motorsports news is brought to us in partnership with the International Motor Racing Research Center out of Watkins Glen.

A quick reminder, this is the last month to get in on the sweepstakes for the Corvette E Ray. I have seen pictures of it. It is real. It is out of production. It is ready to go. It is gorgeous. It is silver with blue stripes, beautiful interior. It is a Corvette E Ray. Ray three LZ convertible. There is a couple [01:31:00] promo codes floating around.

The latest one is on racing archives.org. In the news and events section, pull up the blog and you’ll be able to get the latest promo code so you can double down on your chances to win that array. You still have a month to go before they declare a winner. And I’m hearing some rumors about what the next sweepstakes car is going to be, but I can’t say it just yet.

So stay tuned for further updates in May and throughout the summer on what the next sweepstakes car is going to be, but you still have an opportunity to jump in there and get that 2024 Corvette E Ride. Meanwhile, the couple events that are important to the IMRRC schedule and regardless of what motor sport you’re interested in, opening day at Watkins Glen is April the 6th.

So there’s a couple different meetups there. I know the Audi club’s doing something at opening day at the Glen. There’s a lot of stuff happening that weekend at Watkins Glen. On May the 11th, they’re going to be doing a center conversation called as we go. Supers a legacy of speed at the steel palace, and they’re going to have the Purdy deuce on display at the center [01:32:00] during that time.

So that’ll be May 11th on June 22nd. They have another center conversation scheduled called the greatest Corvette story ever told. And it’s about the Camerati Corvette, which will also be on display at the center. And then later in the year, September 12th, they’re going to have the Cameron R Argettsinger award for outstanding contributions to motorsport.

The nominee is going to be announced later this year, and that will be followed up in November by the eighth annual Argettsinger symposium on November the 1st and 2nd, which we will be live streaming yet again, this year, we’re still doing all the planning. We have not figured out the schedule, who the presenters are going to be.

The keynote is being kept under wraps, but it’s going to be pretty exciting. So we’re really looking forward to the IMRC schedule. This year, we appreciate their continued sponsorship of Brake Fix and the Motoring Podcast Network. And now it’s time to wrap it up and take us home, right Brad?

Crew Chief Brad: Yes, and as a reminder, you can find tons of upcoming local shows and events at the ultimate reference for car enthusiasts, TheCollectorCarGuide.

net.

Crew Chief Eric: And if you’re still [01:33:00] planning your HPDE schedule, don’t forget to check out HPDEJunkie. com. And you can get a list of all. All up to date events from across America and Canada on their website. And you can filter by location and find the perfect HPD event for you. So get up off the couch and get out on track and drive your car the way is intended to be.

And be sure to keep an eye out on our motor sports calendar on gtmotorsports. org forward slash events to learn about other special events and happenings in various other disciplines of motor sport that you shouldn’t miss.

Executive Producer Tania: This month we celebrated International Women’s Month with 11 new episodes featuring women from all over the autosphere, so be sure to tune in to Brake Fix to learn about fascinating people with fantastic jobs helping to continue spreading vehicle and motorsports enthusiasm.

Meanwhile, we just crested 321 episodes of Brake Fix while you’ve been listening to this episode, but more importantly, we’ve expanded our catalog as part of our new motoring podcast network, where you can enjoy programs like The Ferrari Marketplace, the Motoring [01:34:00] Historian, the History of Motorsports Series, BrakeFix, and others.

Search for Brake slash Fix, or Gran, no D, Touring, everywhere you download, stream, or listen. And be sure to check out www. motoringpodcast. net for reviews of the shows, new episodes, bios of our on air personalities, and descriptions of the services we offer.

Crew Chief Eric: And thanks for bringing that up, Tanya, because we’re also adding Evening with a Legend, sponsored by the ACO USA.

That’s the ACO, the governing body of the 24 Hours of LeMans to our motoring podcast network. And I am, as you guys heard in the past, the new MC for Evening with a Legend. We did our first one in February with Rick Newp, who’s actually the special guest of the ACO this year, returning to LeMans for the first time in 40 years since his second win there.

Not only that, little spoiler alert, we got some awesome news. Awesome names and some former guests of break fix coming to talk on evening with a legend in subsequent months here throughout season five of our show. So look forward to some really cool evening with a legend [01:35:00] episodes and also some special guests.

So if you’re not a member of the ACO today, you can check how to become a member by going to motoringpodcast. net.

Crew Chief Brad: Hey, did you know you can sign up for our Patreon for free, lots of great extras and bonuses, even on the free tier. But if you’d like to become a break, fix VIP, jump over to www. patreon. com slash GT motor sports and learn about our different tiers.

Join our discord or become a member of the GTM clubhouse by signing up at club. gtmotorsports. org. Drop us a line on social media or visit our Facebook group and leave us a comment. Tell us what you like dislike and send us ideas for future shows. Please. We need help.

Crew Chief Eric: That’s right, brad and good point.

Don’t forget to follow our new instagram handle and on facebook at motoring podcast network Where we’ll be dropping all the latest updates of break fix episodes evening with the legend for our marketplace all that kind of stuff Make sure to follow at motoring podcast network

Executive Producer Tania: And remember for everything we talked about on this episode and more, be sure to check out the follow [01:36:00] on article and show notes available at gtmotorsports.

org.

Crew Chief Brad: Tonya, thank you

Executive Producer Tania: for nothing,

Crew Chief Brad: for being a great co host and executive producer on the show and to all of our fans, friends, and family who support GTM without you, none of this would be possible. Oh, true. Cue the music. How did I end up in Volvo? You’re way too far. You’re way too far. I had to click the show more and then it just took me to the bottom.

Crew Chief Eric: Are you a cardboard cutout like Daniella Ricardo?

Crew Chief Brad: Daniella Ricardo.

Crew Chief Eric: You ran it through that Facebook app that turns him into a woman, right?

Crew Chief Brad: No. Who’s Daniel? Yeah. Daniel who? Tell me of this Daniel. Who have you seen mommy with?[01:37:00]

Crew Chief Eric: We hope you enjoyed another awesome episode of Break Fix Podcast brought to you by Grand Touring Motorsports. If you’d like to be a guest on the show or get involved, be sure to follow us on all social media platforms at GrandTouringMotorsports. And if you’d like to learn more about the content of this episode, be sure to check out the follow on article at GTMotorsports.

org. We remain a commercial free and no annual fees organization through our sponsors, but also through the generous support of our fans, families, and friends through Patreon. For as little as 2. 50 a month, you can get access to more behind the scenes action, additional Pit Stop minisodes, and other VIP goodies, as well as keeping our team of creators Fed on their strict diet of fig [01:38:00] Newtons, gummy bears, and monster.

So consider signing up for Patreon today at www. patreon. com forward slash GT motorsports, and remember without you, none of this would be possible.

Skip ahead if you must… Here’s the highlights from this episode you might be most interested in and their corresponding time stamps.

• 00:00:00 Introduction and Sponsorships
• 00:00:35 Season Five Kickoff
• 00:01:08 Cybertruck Update
• 00:02:54 Real Cost of EV Ownership
• 00:05:39 Home Upgrades for EVs
• 00:16:05 Chrysler Hybrid Issues
• 00:32:06 Future Electric Vehicles
• 00:36:14 Remembering Marcello Gandini
• 00:37:01 Volkswagen’s Farm-Ready Polo
• 00:39:33 Porsche’s Unsellable Collection
• 00:41:41 Mercedes’ New AMG GT 43
• 00:45:55 Chevy Bolt’s Impressive Mileage
• 00:47:55 Buick’s Surprising Comeback
• 00:49:52 Kia and Hyundai’s EV Innovations
• 00:57:50 Ford’s Affordable EV Plans
• 00:59:22 Polestar’s Future with Geely
• 01:00:16 Lost and Found: Classic Cars
• 01:04:34 The $100,000 Porsche 944 Debate
• 01:05:52 Tesla’s Rental Car Fiasco
• 01:08:32 Electric Truck Showdown
• 01:15:05 The Ferrari Movie and Other Must-Watch Films
• 01:16:37 Nebraska Woman’s Gas Rewards Scheme
• 01:24:01 Florida Man’s Motorcycle Chase
• 01:25:50 Motorsports News and Updates
• 01:32:46 Wrapping Up and Thank You