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

[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. Wait, where’s the button? 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. 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. And that’s just next week. Yeah, 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. The update is there’s no update. Oh, come on. Have you been able to ditch that? Allotment yet. 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 markup profit.

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. 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. And players going to play. Haters always going to hate. Yeah, play is going to play hate is going to hate. 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? 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.

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? 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.

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. That’s debatable too. Exactly. 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. 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. 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. 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. We’ll catch back up with Eric in season six. 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.

For those of you following at home, I believe this is Eric’s 15th transmission in this Pacifica. You’re not far off. I think you get transmission bingo! 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. Didn’t it also brick itself in your garage at some point? 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? 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. 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. You can get a wagon here. At a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Yeah. You know, you guys should just get a Hummer. Well, just sell them your Cybertruck thing. Yeah, you guys can have my Cybertruck allotment. Yeah. 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. You can’t charge it yet. That’s true. And I think the Hummer’s too wide to fit in my garage. Yeah, but once you pull it in and then you crab walk it around so you can perpendicular. 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. 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? We don’t know. We really don’t. I think we do. It’s called expensive. That’s what it is. You need a side hustle just to pay for your EV.

You know, it’s starting to look that way. It really, really is. 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. 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 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. 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.

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? 183, 000.

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

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. 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. 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? I don’t think Tesla does. I mean, I know Ford and like all the, all the traditional ones.

Yeah, but if people are buying Teslas and Rivians, I mean, if they don’t have a leasing option, then you’re screwed. Yeah, for sure. If you’re buying a Tesla or Rivian, you’ve got money. 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.

We really meant 111. 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? 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 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 Toyota Sienna? No, it’s the Alfa Romeo Giulia EV. Dude, that is just Oh, you’re looking at the, uh, no.

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. Well, until the battery dies. And the upside is, it doesn’t look like it came out of the Jetsons. 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. Only in [00:33:00] Formula One they have those problems. Shush, shush you. 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. It is a Stellantis product. It would be like a Range Rover EV. 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.

The Chevy Bolt. I thought that went away. Or was it the Volt? Dude, that is such a hokey pokey. It’s coming back in 2025. 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, my youngest is almost out of her booster and my eldest is completely out.

And then why not? The A6 e tron dude, that thing is sexy. 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. 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. I didn’t even know Fisker was still a company. 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.

Then there’s all the N versions of the 5. Yeah. What about this Lexus EV supercar? That is interesting looking. 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? There’s a lot of Cadillacs on this list talking about the elderly people.

Yeah, I do like the Celestique. I think we talked about it because it looks very, very French. It looks very Citroen. 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. I like the canoe pickup truck. Yes.

That thing is freaking brutal looking. Guess what? There’s a Mercedes Benz EQG, and it looks like every other G Wagon they’ve been making for a hundred years. And I’m okay with that. I’m okay with that. God, these Mini Coopers are huge. 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. 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 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. Well, before we switch into some Volkswagen, Porsche and Audi news, we have some sad news to report, right Tanya? 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. 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. Oh, this isn’t farmer needs a wife. Sorry. No, no, no. Farmer needs a BW Polo. Apparently. Sorry. Haha. Why is this a farm vehicle? I don’t get it. The same reason the smart car was turned into a, a vineyard runabout. Yeah, but that makes sense because it’s basically a glorified golf cart, but a VW Polo, like really?

I mean, I guess they’re trying to be like, be a panda. 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. How much does this thing weigh? 73, 000 tons because it’s German. Oh my god, I would smoke it. On foot. Would smoke it in my Audi. 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. This should just be a street car, but with more power. 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. I mean, this is rich people things. Right? He’s trying to sell the car carrier with the six Porsches. 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. It’s the package. It’s the six exclusive [00:40:00] Porsches and the truck. He’s trying to sell them like a Hot Wheels collection. Yes! It’s the car hauler with six 911s! 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. He would make more money breaking it up, given the portions that are in this collection. 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. The Sultan of Oman or something, you know, whatever. 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. 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. It’s literally the Hot Wheels grab bin of whatever 911s were available at that time. That’s all. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And why was he going to take them to Goodwood?

Does he work directly for Porsche? No. He’s just a dealer. It’s time we go to Lower Saxony, talk a little bit about Mercedes. Oh my god, we have Mercedes news. Yes, they still make cars. And every once in a while, they make something that definitely gets my attention. I don’t like the back though. What? This is hot.

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

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. This thing’s got hips. You can’t see them in this color, I guess. 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. And it’s real drive. 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. Still a lot of a two liter.

I [00:43:00] wonder what it sounds like though. Cause AMGs have that guttural earth shaking. It better sound amazing. It’ll sound like half that. It’ll sound like that, but it’ll be two octaves up. Just better not sound like a Honda with a fart can. I’m not impressed. What? Ah, I guess maybe I’m a fan of the 928. So I like stuff like this.

The 928? What did the 928 have? The V8. Ding, ding, ding. You lost me. I’m okay with turbo fours. Not for a hundred grand. There it is. There’s the problem with this. 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. 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, 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. 1, 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 like you said, you love V8s and for a hundred thousand dollars, Tanya, what else could Brad get?

Mustang. You could get the Jeep Wrangler V8 final edition. For only 101, 890. 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 about gas mileage these days? If you had 100, 000, which would you buy?

Oh, I’d buy the Benz. 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 mean, he has a point. No, actually, I would buy a CLK AMG Black Series. But you’d have the coolest sort of Hellcat Jeep Wrangler to take to the mall. Or I would have the coolest blacked out Mercedes to take to the mall.

100, 000 and you can get you the correct Mercedes. 100, 000 get you a four cylinder Mercedes. How fucked up is that? 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. So going back to our Chevy Bolt B.

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. And then the Colt is a Tesla thing. We’ll 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. That’s impressive! Good job, Chevy! I mean, you got a ways to go with your diesel, apparently. 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 nothing. They’re trying to convince themselves that they have a good car. I mean, it’s not a Prius, right?

I mean that you know what you’re getting there, which I have seen a Prius at a track event. I have two. They’re not allowed anymore, though, from what I understand. Certain tracks, at least. 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 at the same speed too.

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. 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?

Well, This next one, I am still scratching my head. 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] 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 car. Yes. Oh my god, I didn’t know that. Okay. Yeah, it’s a Buick Wildcat 2 door. Am I the only person in the world right now that is surprised that Buick still exists?

Not your grandparents car company anymore. They say it’s because of the Chinese market. They really, really like Buicks for some reason. I don’t get it. American weirdos. 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 like the Camaro logo now. 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 as old people.

So when do we see a new Grand National? 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? So apparently Kia is winning in the affordable mass market EV category. Duh, they’re winning in the affordable ICE category too.

Yeah, 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.

Like Toyota Lama. 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. Some people think it looks like an AMC Gremlin. If you’re listening, you need your eyes checked.

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. If you take the Mark II Rally Golf Oh, it’s a carbon copy. Just put a roof rack on this thing. 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 about. Well, they’re saying 2027. How absurd is it that they’re winning the most affordable EV 54 nine base price for an EV nine. The EV9’s big though. That’s a sedan. But the EV9 was their big SUV. Oh, is it the SUV? What’s the cheapest electric, like all electric vehicle out right now?

The Chevy Bolt. It’s like twenties, I [00:52:00] think. Twenties? Well, I don’t know what the new one will be because they stopped making it, I thought. Nope, it’s back. You can pick up the used ones. You can pick them up with real low mileage for in the twenties. Yeah, but that’s. But I think even new, they weren’t anything over.

I don’t think 30. The Volt is a plug in hybrid. No, no, but the Bolt, the B. Oh, 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. You can get a 2023 Chevy Bolt EV.

I think they stopped. So I don’t think there’s a 2024. No, there isn’t. 26 5. Why aren’t they on this list for winning? Because they have the most affordable. 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 a good deal! Oh, like the Tesla Model 3. Allegedly. So we’ll see what actually [00:53:00] happens. This R3X is cool. I’m sorry, this is so cool. It 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. Got a nice silhouette.

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. Uh, it doesn’t have a nice profile. Not at all. 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. Square but round.

Tell me I’m wrong. It’s very rectangular. [00:54:00] It’s rectangular round. And I will submit Exhibit A, the fenders. Oh yeah. Look at these fenders. They’re round and then just cut straight. know what 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. Why do the fenders of the Ioniq 9 and 7 have LEDs in them? What is the purpose? Federal mandate. Look hella cool. The same reason the Ferrari 360s have to have those stupid side markers in the U. S. Yeah, I was gonna say, it’s no different than a side marker that just moved it 8 inches forward.

Why is it so fugly though? Well Because it’s Hyundai. You know? 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. You know, speaking of kids. I saw an ionic 6 I saw it on the road sob. Yeah, I saw one and was Kevin Bacon driving 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. Ev, like Ev. So dumb. Stupid commercials. Well, speaking of cars you thought were dead. I thought the GTR was gone. They still make it? Because of the Gran Turismo movie. We gotta bring it back. I thought it went away. But apparently you can get a 2025 one, or at least in Japan you can.

It says here, this could be the end of the line for the 17 year old Godzilla. 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? 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. I don’t know. I guess. Here’s another car that’s 100, 000. Do you buy a GTR? Or do you buy the Mercedes?

I buy the GTR. What? I buy the Mercedes. I buy a Nissan Z at this point because I say 50 grand beats you all out. No, I still buy a used 911 or a Dodge Viper. 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. Oh yeah, I haven’t seen any of those. I thought I saw one the other day, I remember, but it wasn’t. 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. You want that baguette holder? [00:57:00] Well, yeah, they’re stale, aren’t they? But this is so cool. What about the Renault R5? So 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. It’s never coming to the United States. So it all doesn’t matter. 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? Brad is looking for that low cost EV and you might find it in a domestic.

I see Ford is said to be [00:58:00] planning on a $25,000 compact EV for 2026. BBBB. Did you read the fine print European market?

There you have it. Nothing good comes here. 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.

Oh, no. We already have an Explorer here that is. EV or will be EV was listed in the upcoming. We need to come up with a new name for this. This it’s not going to be sold as an explored. 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. Why not? Mustang something. The Mustang mock D’s

mark D’s. Something along the lines of the car. No, this is too big. 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. 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. 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 Ben Affleck and what’s her face? And Jennifer Lopez. Was that called Geely? It’s called Geely. It’s called Giggly. 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?

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

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. 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? No, no, no. How can you not love an Italian hot hatchback?

That is twin charge, supercharged and turbocharged make it 300 horsepower plus all wheel drive. I mean, I like it. I don’t a hundred thousand dollars like it. I hear they steer like a bus. You’re not selling me on it. 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 you spend 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. No, a hundred thousand on this or the Mercedes.

Yeah. What do you buy? That’s a good question. Mercedes has air conditioning. This probably has a rat blowing over an ice cube. Mercedes has AC, but this car has more windows. What makes this car 93, 000? It’s a Lancia Delta Integrale HF Evo one. That’s it. Should it really be? Thank you. Thank you, Tanya. Thank you.

It’s wrong with you people. This is an icon. I know this is like a fashion statement. Is it $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. This is hard decision. No, it’s not. It is a simple decision. You take the Shield and the Lance 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. All day, all night. I’m in agreement with Tanya. This is where auctions get out of control. I could not believe this.

Is this even a turbo? No, it’s a regular 944. F that noise. Piece of crap. 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, 500. 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. No, thank you. 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. Was that the Law and Order music? What kind of shenanigans is Elon up to this time? Not much, just a quick check in with Hertz and their, their mis investment.

I love that the most exciting thing we have to talk about with Tesla’s rental cars. This is amazing. 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.

Wow. They took a bath on these things. So if anybody’s looking to buy a used Tesla, 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. 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 years. 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. Do you have to take out extra fire insurance? 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. 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. Well, I wonder if they ask those kind of questions now when you’re filling out your home insurance, right? I mean, Chrysler tells you not to park your EV in the garage to begin with. Just leave it outside. What is the point of the house I bought for my car to not put the car Is that what the garage is for?

Oh, you bought your car a house. Yes, the garage is the house for the car. No, the garage is for all your crap that doesn’t fit in your house. No, it’s for the car. 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. How many Porsches were they towing in this exercise? They towed [01:09:00] some 3, 200 almost pound camper trailer. All right. The real question is who comes in second. Okay.

Because we already know who comes in first. No. Who do you think comes in first? Go bottom up. Who’s number three? I think the Lightning is at the bottom. Ooh, I was going to put the Lightning at the top. 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. We haven’t seen a real life test with the Cybertruck of the Rivian. No, it’s towed a 9 11. That’s all we needed 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 far is your home depot from your house? About 4.

5 miles. There you go. That’s as far as you need to go. That’s it. But then can you shovel mulch over the side? 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. 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. 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? 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? Who do you think is number two? I’m gonna roll hard. I’m gonna take a chance. And say the Rivian beat the Tesla. I have to abstain from voting because I saw the result.

Oh, dang. All right. So what, what happened? The Rivian is number one in this comparison, followed by the Cybertruck and then followed by the F 150 Lightning. Logic prevails.

Yes. So. 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 that, that’s a daytime running light.

Exactly. I thought that was the headlights. Oh my God. That makes the truck. Even stupider 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. Oh, so speaking of the wiper blade. What does that wipe your ass? I thought it, Brad said it. How does this work?

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. Wow. It got really poor marks in terms of like visibility.

Apparently you can’t see out of the thing. 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. 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 that they got, you know, like whatever.

I also like the borderline dangerous secondary trolls. Yeah. Like that windshield wiper is great. It never [01:13:00] ends. 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. 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. I don’t, I have like, it’s just like, yeah, it looks dirty. It’s just awful. Like, disgusting. 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. 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, oh god, it’s terrible. It’ll be interesting the day we finally see one on the road. 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. What Ferrari movie? 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. 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. I thought you were going to say because they suck. There’s always that potential too. 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. 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. 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. That was what Sam said. 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. 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. 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. How? Nebraska woman used a rewards card loophole for 7, 000 gallons of free gas?

She ain’t ever changing to EV. 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. How does she do this? This woman is accused of improperly using her rewards card from Pump and Pantry in Lincoln, Nebraska, at least 500 times over six months.

What does that mean? I don’t understand. 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. So if you had a 14 gallon tank, that’s 500 tanks of fuel that you could fill. That’s a lot of driving. Where was she going to Canada and back? Fill up say twice a month, then that’s 24 times a year.

That’s almost 21 years. [01:18:00] Wow. She was filling semi trucks or something like I don’t get it. That’s ridiculous. 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. 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 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. How did they not notice this sooner? This woman’s going with like 18 gas cans. I’m gonna say it again. Pump and Pantry, Lincoln, Nebraska. Is that the name of a city? No, that’s the name of the [01:19:00] gas station. Where are you from?

Oh, I’m from Pump and Pantry, Lincoln. That’s in Nebraska. Oh, it was Lincoln, Nebraska. Got it. Okay. Sorry. No offense to anybody from Nebraska. My family’s from Nebraska. 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. Why? It would have been in your bed. That’s when you pay with cash. You could have gotten 7, 000 gallons of just watered down crap too. You know what I mean? Yeah, you could have been in for a rude awakening.

This could have been a Florida Man story. It’s right there. It’s borderline. [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 section. No, I don’t know that we do, unfortunately. Does that mean we gotta go down south for alligators and bear?

Was this one in Flowrider? No, this was in Arizona. We’re adding states. We add Nebraska. Let’s say that other one gets an honorable mention. It counts. 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.

We’ve hit a lot of states. We are missing some. I ran a report. We figured out where all our stories are coming from. Did you use the Power BI? Used Excel, like Williams. Nobody needs [01:21:00] that sophisticated AWS, just use Excel spreadsheets. Tried and true, baby. You can do a lot with Excel. I do try to look in the lesser known states in this segment.

The best stories come out of Florida. Have yet to find South Dakota man, you know, but I’m looking, I do try to look. They don’t have communication out of South Dakota. You have to actually go there. You have to go to Sturgis to. I might have to be more specific. I might have to be like city specific. Like a pump and pump and pantry, South Dakota pump and pantry.

This story is a lot like the carjacking story, though. 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. Let’s also be real, this ain’t Smokey and the Bandit. That thing is slow. Exactly! I mean, the cop probably could like, run up next to him. 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. 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.

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? Where was the truck? Where is this truck in the middle of a freaking desert? Where was he?

According to the story, allegedly the truck was parked at the Wilcox Lowe’s truck stop in Wilcox, Arizona. Oh, so this is where they caught him. This is the [01:23:00] picture they’ve apprehended him at this point. No, 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.

So he turned down this random dirt road and then got caught. That’s where he got caught. Yeah. He had missed a seal in the truck, but not the Corvettes. 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. If you think about it, how many counts of Grand Theft Auto is he going to be charged with?

I guess 10 vets in a truck. Oh, it says 11 accounts of theft of means of transportation. What’s the thing in Monopoly? Do not pass go, go directly to jail, do not collect 200. Yeah, he got out of jail just to return revolving door [01:24:00] right back. Oh, well. Do we have a real Florida? We have a real Florida man. Yes.

Sweet. We’re diverging a little from the norm. It’s a motorcycle. What? Those are the best. Florida man with mullet. Wait, say that again. That’s not really shocking. Florida man with mullet. Oh, damn. Oh, okay. Florida man with mullet. Fleece from cops with mullet. Will Run license plate. Wow, advertising. Yeah, so there’s a video of this, and there’s a picture of him and his glorious hair.

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 don’t know. 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.

And there’s a video. He passes the Daytona beach signs. So you fast forward to minute 10. Of the video. And it hit play. Is he by the track? Yeah, he’s by the track. Where we walked across that bridge. Right? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you see [01:25:00] the Hooters. He drives by the Hooters. Oh, yeah, that’s right by Daytona International Raceway.

The best part, this chase goes into the night time, they find, like, the helicopter’s like, Really? 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.

I thought they weren’t supposed to pursue. They pursued him with the helicopter. Oh, okay. 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.

Yeah, man. That’s a real, real strong on the motorcycle. He goes, yeah, man, you’re real strong with the motorcycle. 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. I think you fell asleep. Oh, I you slept. More F1 races this year than I have. 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. You pretend that Max isn’t there. And then it’s who is coming in second place.

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, no, one. And what happened? Same thing? Lathering’s repeat? 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. So what you’re saying is the secondary quarterbacks are better than the guys that are out playing the game all the time.

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? You know what veteran means? Oh, 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. Again, for like the sixth time. He hasn’t done shit since he left Red Bull. He’s been trash, but he’s your heartthrob, Brad. I mean, how are you going to [01:28:00] give up on your man? What have you done for me lately? Oh, is that how it is in the Ricciardo household?

I see 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? No, he needs to really cut that mustache and No, he doesn’t. It is a maze balls. But sadly, he’s not built for the famous Ozzy Watts. That mustache makes him look like Harry at your bachelor party.

Doesn’t it though? For me, the star of the commercial is the car. Mullet aeration technology. And the fan behind him. The fan. It’s fucking awesome! Budgie smuggler drying system. That is, I love this. This is great. 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.

Did I miss that he retired? Or is he still driving? He’s still driving. What? Yes, he’s driving [01:29:00] steak because it’s not alpha anymore. 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.

I thought he had like the same personality as the ice man, like Kimmy. Like he was never talked or did anything. No, Voltaire is hilarious. There’s pictures of him. He’s always naked recently. Laying naked in a creek. That’s all for two girls, one formula. That’s just for them. It’s not Steak. It’s Kick Sauber now.

They changed the name again? 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. 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.

Okay, there’s Steak F1 Team Kick Sauber. Sure. That’s like Visa, Cash App, MoneyGram, Chipotle. Visa, Cash App, RB [01:30:00] Formula One team, yes. 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. Can you go back and re watch races? 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? Yes, and as a reminder, you can find tons of upcoming local shows and events at the ultimate reference for car enthusiasts, TheCollectorCarGuide.

net. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 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. Tonya, thank you for nothing, 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.

Are you a cardboard cutout like Daniella Ricardo? Daniella Ricardo. You ran it through that Facebook app that turns him into a woman, right? No. Who’s Daniel? Yeah. Daniel who? Tell me of this Daniel. Who have you seen mommy with?[01:37:00]

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.

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