B/F: The Drive Thru #15

• Ford planning 4 new EV factories Kentucky/TN
• Chevy Shows the Corvette Z06 Early
• The 2022 Ford Maverick Is An Honest, Cheap, Multitool Of A Vehicle And I'm All For It
• Ford F-150 Taillights Have A Feature Previously Unknown In All Of Taillightdom

• Gordon Murray's Unborn T.50 Sports Car Set to Get Cheaper T.33 Sibling
• Piëch’s New 603 HP GT Brings Classic Sports Car Looks to the Electric Age
• A student-built solar camper van completes a 2,000 km trip across Europe
• Volvo Will Drop Leather in Favor of a New Material

• Could changes to Formula 1 attract another new car company?
• Connecting the Dots on a Possible Michael Andretti F1 Team Ownership Deal
• F1 CIRCUITS THAT WERE SCHEDULED TO HOST RACES BUT IT NEVER HAPPENED

• Yes, You Can Buy Pablo Escobar's 1974 Porsche 911 Carrera 3.0 RSR IROC
• Plugged-In Aston Martin DBs: British Company Launches EV Restomods

Long Lost AMC AMX III

• 19 two-tone color M4 to be produced using BMW's new innovative overspray-free paint
• Daimler splits off

• A Porsche 917 Made Out of Butterflies
• Ford Removes Minimum Credit Score For 84-Month Loans
• The United Nude Lo-Res Is the Polygon Car You Can Own
• California Enacts Ban on Gas-Powered Lawn Mowers, Leaf Blowers

• Ricciardo to demo Earnhardt NASCAR Cup car at US GP

Fassbender’s “Road to LeMans”

• Tesla moving headquarters to Texas from California
• Tesla tempted drivers with 'insane' mode and now is tracking them to judge safety. Experts say it's ludicrous.

1000hp McLaren vs Tesla Plaid

• Taking delivery of a new air-cooled Porsche at the Atlanta Experience Center
• Bugatti Battle: Veyron Drag Races A Chiron For Hypercar Crown
• Lamborghini's vision for an alternative-fuel future
• Rally World Champion Stig Blomqvist: “The RS e-tron GT Gives Off a quattro Feeling Through and Through“

Ken Block Audi Video #1

Ken Block Audi Video #2

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

If you’re interested in becoming a sponsor of the drive-through, look no further than www.gt motorsports.org under about and then advertising and sponsorship. Thank you again to everyone that supports Grantor Motorsports, our podcast Break Fix and all the other services we provide. Welcome to the drive-through episode 15.

This is our monthly recap where we’ve put together a menu of automotive motorsport and random car adjacent news. Now let’s pull up to the window for some automotive news. That’s right, everybody donovan’s back and congratulations. First up to Brad and his wife. For having their little baby boy [00:01:00] delivered this week as we’re recording.

So Donovan has graciously come to fill in for Brad while he is now officially on paternity leave. So Donovan, thanks again for coming on the drive through and let’s jump into it. Awesome. So this month we are gonna kick off with something we don’t normally do. We’re talking about Japanese cars. First up, the new civic type R I took a look at this.

I think the camos super interesting. That’s about the most interesting part of this car. And it’s got a new wing. Aren’t we excited? But in reality, when I looked at this new type R, there’s really not a whole lot of words to put around it other than the fact that I see it as foreshadowing of the new Integra.

I thought the civic was sunsetted. I thought they were done with it. That’s where I was going with this. We said that like two or three months ago that they were done with the Civic. Maybe that was just the two-door Civic didn’t have a different name. When it gets here, maybe it’s not gonna be called a Civic anymore.

’cause there’s this type R, which is a sedan, and there’s also the 2022 Civic SI [00:02:00] four door that’s coming out. So that’s two civics. When I thought we were done with Civic, I am gonna fact check that, but I guarantee about three episodes ago we said the civic was no more. But if you’re getting 25, 35 K over sticker on the special editions, you’re gonna keep making them, right?

I suppose so. But the two-door civic and the hatchback civic. Look like they’re no longer available. So this four-door civic, I mean, the more I look at it, especially that nose, the more I see the new Integra. Is that the line? Is that the pitch line? Yeah. Yeah. Integra, I, I love, I absolutely love the camo. I can’t stop looking at it.

It’s really appealing compared to the normal black and white, something about the red. But red also throws off your depth perception. So it’s really hard. It’s certain angles of the pictures to really discern what it is. I feel like the front end looks more like a skyline. Oh, interesting. I can see that. I could definitely see that.

R 32, whichever one it is. I don’t remember the numbers. You know, one of of those type of skylines, like that’s what that front looks like. There’s nothing about this that says civic to [00:03:00] me though, and I don’t know. You know, like with all the brands, right? You see A B M W, short of the new hideous S, but you know, and you’re like, oh, those are all BMWs.

Or you see an Audi, like those are all Audis. Like this car to me doesn’t look like. Anything and not in a good way. Like I don’t recognize this. If you took the badge off, granted it’s camouflage, but I wouldn’t recognize it as a Honda or I don’t know what a in, in that Bolton Wing from 20 years ago. Fast and Furious is, why are we keeping that stuff around?

Can somebody explain it to me? I feel like that’s a type R thing. The wings have gotten audacious in the last several iterations. They’ve just been ridiculous. Even like, well, is that because Subaru doesn’t make stupid wings anymore? Because they make sedans now. But the difference is, you know, usually they’re like molded pieces.

Very nice looking. This looks like they ran out of time and they were like, just go down to AutoZone and grab what you can find and bolted onto the back of the car with the scaffolding. Back in our day was order from the JC Whitney catalog. Now it’s just, I was gonna say Jags. Yeah, yeah, Jags. Right. Just like we talked about last month with the new W R X [00:04:00] and the W Rx SDIs and all that, they were starting to look Honda esque.

Maybe Honda had to make a quick change so people would stop comparing the new Impreza to the Civic. I don’t know. ’cause if you look at the SI version that’s coming out, which is not in camo or anything, the shop from the rear end, it’s an Acura, call it the next whatever, Acura three letter, Integra, no, it doesn’t look like an Integra, but it looks like it could be any other Acura from the rear, from the front.

I think it’s gonna have the same front end as. This Type R. Yeah, or the type R is gonna have the same front end as the si, which should come out sooner. I’m not seeing any spectacular numbers either. I mean, I’m guessing it’s gonna be the same 300 ish horsepower, turbo four cylinder. That has been in the Type R for a couple years now, so I.

I mean, I’ve ridden in one of the new civics. They’re not gentle on my eyes. I’m not a big fan of the way they look. They’ve been kind of weird for a while now. But as a performer, keeping with front wheel drive, it is really, really good. I would say, and this is, this come means a lot coming for me. It’s better [00:05:00] than the G T I and, and I have my issues with the G T I, but in reality, both the Civic and the Veloster end, having been in the right seat of both of these cars as front wheel drives, evolving that technology, they’re really, really good.

Out of the box, is there something extra special about the C pillar on these cars? Because I noticed they’ve disguised the little kink in the back for some reason. Does that give it more horsepower? It’s where you put the stickers. That’s the sticker location. Oh, it’s reserved for, I see. Yeah. Yeah. That’s a big claim though.

Better than G T I. But you know, it’s been a while since I’ve been in A G T I, you know, I wonder if it’s a case where Honda is doing something special, so they really wanna ring all the performance out of it. Where G T I is kind of table stakes, right? It’s their, yeah, kinda Mustang gt and it’s just like what it is.

If they would do, and I’m not aware of any special edition GTIs, maybe they would do that too. Are there any Well, the Golf R. The golf R, right? So, no. Yeah, but still kind of similar, like if there was like a super special limited edition G T I or golf R or something, that would be No, no, they, we don’t do that anymore.

They used to have the Fahrenheit editions and all this kind of stuff that, that’s, [00:06:00] that’s, we don’t do that. It’s too, too risque for the Germans. Now. I will give them that. I’m impressed that the si, and I guess I would assume the Type R will as well. Is keeping a manual transmission? Yes. That’s the big news about the new Integra is that it’s gonna have the six feet manual because it’s a Civic, and the Civic has a manual.

So I mean, they’re not saying it, but let’s face it, they’re gonna share the same chassis, the same platform. Maybe the Acura gets lucky and it gets all wheel drive or something different, but that’s gonna add. Four to 500 pounds if they go down that route. I mean, I’m just speculating here a little bit, but I will say just really quick before we talk a little bit more about the Integra, I re-looked at the Civic type R and immediately my mind went to mid two thousands.

Nissan Sentra, ss e r. That’s the front end. Hmm. Interesting. Going back to the Integra for just a moment, this new spy photo of the rear end, I’m really disappointed compared to the copper car that we talked about a couple episodes back. It’s starting to look like a [00:07:00] Infinity G 37 from behind. I am not a fan of that.

I wasn’t a fan of it on those cars, and I don’t think it’s the right move for this Integra either. That is weird. That’s exactly what I thought of too when I saw that. Has there been a full reveal of the entire car yet? I’ve only seen bits and pieces of it. No. It’s all these renderings from different angles and, and the only one that looked like a full car was that copper one that we talked about on the last episode.

Yeah. It’s gonna be interesting if, if it is, hey surprise, it’s the G 35 from 15 years ago. It’s gonna be, it’s just smaller now. Ugh. It’s gonna be, is it though or is it the size of an accord? That’s what we really wanna know. Right. I, I mean, I’m, I’m not trying to throw stones because the jettas as big as a Passat, so whatever.

Right. They’re all getting bigger. I guess there’s other news from Honda this month. Apparently they’re gonna guess they’re gonna follow in the steps of like B M W how B M W has their I series for their electric platform. Honda is going to have an EV sub-brand, but I don’t think it’s coming to America.

Sounds like it’ll stay in Asia. [00:08:00] Eco N. Eco N, what does that mean? Did Elon and Grimes name this thing is, is that what we’re doing now? Just letters and symbols and stuff? Well, it does sort of look like maybe Elon helped them design it. So I will always call these the eco now. Right? You know the thing that, that, as soon as I see the picture of these though, it frustrates me because you know, they’re not gonna look anything like this and I will give Tesla credit for that.

Right? The Tesla truck, when you first saw that, you’re like, yeah, that’s just a concept. They’re never gonna build it. They actually are, but these, they’re not gonna build these. But I will say, kind of something we talked about the last time I was on the podcast with you guys was, you know, we talked about EVs and where can they go, right?

They’re only gonna get so fast. You’re gonna have grocery getters. They’re all gonna do three seconds. Zero to sixties, top speed’s not a factor anymore. I think styling is where it, where it’s at. And I think they could actually get away with these kind of radical designs now because drag all those still exist.

Doesn’t really matter anymore. If you’re doing three second zero to 60, you can still get there just as quick. So that would be pretty cool if [00:09:00] they did keep this really very angular styling and, and do something different. I think that’d be pretty in contrast to what we’re just talking about with the Civic, right?

That looks like everything else. I have a a response to that with respect to these ecos. Could we make one vehicle and now this would be the Modern Inspector Gadget car, and two, by looking at the nose on the three of these, the coop, the gt, and the SS U V concept, are they amphibious? They look like Dr.

Evil’s ship. They’re a straight. Up rip off of Nissan’s I D X concept that they never built. Look at the front end of an I D X. Somebody was heavily inspired, I think by that vehicle. I think they were inspired by the duck boats in DC That’s what I see. That too. But I do have an answer for eco ends. Okay.

Oh God. Not that it’s good or bad. So the E is from Ecolon technology, the collective brand name for Honda’s electrification technologies. Then the n stands for new or next [00:10:00] representing new value creation for the next generation of mobility. So they’re trying to energize people, energize your colon and drive a, an electric Honda Hondas, up until this point that I’ve used as rental cars, I, I always joke that there’s a little needle that comes out of the headrest and anesthetizes you ’cause they’re just so numb.

But maybe this one gives you a colonoscopy instead. It’s more exciting. Meanwhile, what else is going on? Apparently Mitsubishi is coming out or has revealed their, they’re still around. Thank you. That’s my takeaway. We’re not even gonna get into this article. ’cause my whole takeaway after reading this was they’re still selling cars in America.

What Nice. Nice. But hey, if you’re looking for a plugin hybrid, a Mitsubishi is bringing the 2023 Outlander as a At what dealership? I haven’t seen a Mitsubishi dealership since the lancers disappeared and there weren’t many dealerships. Then I’ll give you 20 bucks. If you can name three Mitsubishi models other than this one right now, [00:11:00] 3000 gt?

No, I’m talking about current models. Oh, forget it. Nevermind. None. I had a 97 Eclipse. G S T loved that car. That was before, you know, we got the Evos. They did like Nissan did. Although Nissan recovered with the skyline, they waited way too long to bring the Evos over and then they neutered the eclipse to me.

They did it to themselves. Right. And then I was talking to somebody recently that was talking about, I guess they had a deal back in the early two Ks where it was like zero down, 0% interest for so many years, and that really kind of screwed them financially. But yeah, looking at this, what is this thing called Outlander?

Again, I think the design is wrong. Look at companies like Kia and Hyundai that you know were nothing. Right? And then they started getting some nice styling and everybody’s like, oh. And even when they were still garbage and I’m sure they’re a lot better now, people were like, well, okay, I, I buy with my eyes.

I think it’s cool. This thing, I don’t know, it looks like another two things. Made it in the front and there’s extra, what’s the Nissan Duke, it looks like? Yeah, Duke’s bigger brother. I think so. Which by the [00:12:00] way, is a Reno, Cleo, but we’ll get into that in another point. Really. But you’re right though. You bring up a very valid point.

A lot of people ask me all the time, why do you guys talk about aesthetics so much? Why do you talk about the way the car looks? And you’re right, people buy with their eyes. So it’s really important that when you’re shopping for a car that it’s appealing. Granted, you’re gonna sit on the inside and you can’t see it while you’re driving, but everybody else has to put up with it.

So this is kind of a mixed one between Toyota and Solanis. They’re both announcing that they’re going to build battery factories in North America to supply American EVs and hybrids. Interesting. Now, I’ve heard, and people could correct me if I’m wrong, a lot of the hybrid technology out there, the patents are all owned and basically controlled by Toyota.

So even if Ford has a hybrid or Chrysler has theirs or whatever, it’s some derivative of Toyota’s older technology and they’re all kind of licensing it and modifying it from there. It, it’s almost like open source, right? Where it’s like, well, we’re done with the code and uh, now you can take it and modify it and do whatever you want with it, you know, based we’re, we’ve already [00:13:00] moved on to the next generation.

That’s really interesting to see Solanis and Toyota partnering up to build batteries. Any indication of where they’re gonna be doing that? I believe Solanis might be a year ahead of Toyota. In 2024 Toyota following in production in 2025. But it’s unclear where that’ll happen. I mean, we do know that I believe Ford has production in Tennessee and also Kentucky.

So question would be, would it be somewhere kind of in that belt or somewhere new? I mean, we do know Tesla’s got their battery factory that they’re trying to build in Texas. Oh, that’s right. They’re on the move. When are people gonna start protesting battery plants? That seems like kind of the next move, doesn’t it?

Yeah, I mean we do all these environmental impact studies of a lot of other factories and things and carbon credits are necessary. But I mean, when you’re building batteries, you’re dealing with chemicals and precious metals and and rare earth metals and it’s gotta be caustic and toxic. ’cause I’ll get out.

To build batteries on a massive scale like this, I’m still wondering where all the raw material is coming from. Maybe we’re harvesting it off of the moon or from Mars or you know, whatever [00:14:00] SpaceX is doing this week. Maybe more interesting is, I don’t know your comment about Toyotas and their patents and all that stuff, but they’ve been very, other than the Prius, which they’ve had for a long time being a hybrid, they’ve been a little bit more reserved or closed around going full ev.

I feel like they’ve had the Prius, they’ve had that, but there really hasn’t been the seemingly huge push from the brand, but they have pushed hydrogen. In the past and currently and they have that marai, which is their hydrogen fuel cell vehicle. Right. And that’s been around since like 2016 at least I believe.

However of note more recently it has hit a Guinness World record, the Toyota Marai for a 845 mile journey on a single tank of hydrogen. It took only five minutes to fill. Wow. The record is the journey, but to note, five minutes to fill that hydrogen tank and they took it down the coast of California for an 845 mile journey.

How fast is it? Did it take five days to get there? I can’t imagine hydrogen’s that fast two day [00:15:00] trip. I’ve always thought that hydrogen would be kinda the ideal way to go. Right? For obvious reasons. And you wonder, obviously we were doing batteries a hundred years ago, but you know, did, did we go to batteries now because the performance is there and it was easier, it was quicker.

Or there can’t be too much research involved in hydrogen. I mean think about all the research we’re doing in batteries, like why hasn’t hydrogen caught on more? It’s obviously very readily available. It, it’s gotta be a performance issue is the only thing I could think of. Right? Part of the problem is getting hydrogen ’cause you, you’d have to do some electrolysis processes and things like that, but I think there’s also big stigma around the safety of hydrogen because of past Hindenberg Hindenberg to name one, and I don’t know if they’ve worked out, hydrogen is highly flammable, so there is definite need for very good safety around the hydrogen fuel cell and and whatnot That.

Someone’s in an accident, and you know, it’s always stupid when you see in the movies that car rear ends somebody else, and it violently explodes into flames, right? Mm-hmm. That very [00:16:00] rarely happens, but I don’t know, with hydrogen, you know, two metal objects create a spark and the tank opens, and now you got pure hydrogen floating out that it’s very flammable.

Mm-hmm. So, I don’t know, it’s been a while since I’ve gone back and dug through kind of where the research is on it. You wonder too, about the people, you know, just filling it up, you know, I’m sure they would figure out a way to do it, but somebody’s smoking a cigarette. Like you see the guys at the gas station that still don’t understand, hey, it’s not just a liquid.

It turns into that scene from Zoolander, except with hydrogen. I don’t even know that we’d get that far. Right. You wouldn’t get soaked in it before it, it combusts. There’s also compression that has to happen, right? ’cause it, it’s a gas that’s gonna occupy a huge volume. So in order to get the amount you need as fuel, you have to compress it, right?

Uh, propane, all, all that stuff is in compressed cylinders. And obviously that could be expensive to manufacture as well. Right? It’s a cool idea. I just, I don’t know. I’d love to see, you know, some of maybe the hybrid technologies that they use in Europe coming to the table. I mean, they’ve done diesel propane, they’ve done propane [00:17:00] gas, they’ve done all these other kinds of things, but over there they’ve been playing with propane for what feels like forever maybe.

You know, we have a lot of C N G compressed natural gas here in the states. Maybe that’s an option or an alternative to hydrogen. Granted, natural gas is not fast. You have to partner it with something else. One of the best pairings is probably with diesel, but we know there’s a huge stigma. It’s very taboo now to talk about diesels.

I have to remind people they can be run on other types of fuel. It’s not necessarily the engine that’s dirty, it’s the fuel that we run through it. That’s pretty gross. And then how we deal with it, because you, if you run a diesel on veggie, Runs a lot cleaner than it does on this low sofa or garbage that you’re buying at the pump these days.

It’d be interesting to maybe research a little bit more as to why the hydrogen’s not taking off into cars. Because actually there’s a lot of metro buses, city type buses that actually run on hydrogen. They’re actually, I think like a hydrogen electric kind of hybrid. So clearly it’s possible. And there’s vehicles out on the road today and I think that’s a great use in public [00:18:00] transportation.

’cause gosh, those petrol buses are huge polluters. Uh, and, and smog generators. So these buses running around cities. Churning constantly clean energy I think is a great alternative for them. So it would be interesting to understand what the difficulty is on the car scale. So I wanted to dovetail real quick, Tanya, off of something you said before about Toyota quietly working in the background.

You know, that’s really been their MO for what seems like a very long time. I watched some things on History Channel recently on a MotorTrend that we’re talking about the history of Honda and Mercedes and you know, machines that built the world and Toyota was part of that. And it’s always kind of been their MO to be quietly in the background and all that kind of stuff and innovating and then suddenly shocking us with something new.

And you said, you know, they don’t have a whole lot of hybrids outside of the Prius. They’ve quietly released the Lexus RX hybrid. The, well, yeah, I was gonna say you, you gotta count on the Lexus side. They have the number X series, so the ux, the nx, the rx, the CT 200 H, which is a [00:19:00] Corolla or whatever. Well, that they don’t, they no longer make it.

That’s, yeah. Already however many years old. But the current lineup is the the X Series, so the UX nx RX in increasing size, and those are electric hybrids. And I found out that the Pacifica is no longer the only hybrid minivan. Toyota just released the New Sienna as a hybrid as well, and that was pretty quiet launch as well.

So it was pretty surprise. And we’ve been talking for the longest time. Why haven’t Honda and Toyota come to market with a hybrid minivan? Why is Chrysler the only one? Maybe it was a licensing agreement, maybe something there to give Chrysler a boost. Who knows? I’m speculating. But the Sienna is now here as a hybrid as well.

Granted, it’s not a plugin. It’s more like the Prius. The Pacifica is a, is a plugin using apparently Ford’s technology to make all that work. So very curious to see where that goes in the future and how it’s gonna evolve now that Toyota’s pretty much put both feet in the water into that hybrid space with vehicles pretty much in every category between the Lexus, the [00:20:00] Prius, and the minivan.

But I guess we gotta move on to Volkswagen and Audi and Porsche news. So last month we talked about B M W and their. Motorcycles not to be outdone. Porsche has revealed their new air cooled model, and I thought this was absolutely hilarious. Came across my desk from P c A, the Porsche Club of America, and Porsche is also developing a bicycle.

Can’t tell you how irked I was when I clicked on this article. Clickbait, right? I mean, it it is what it is. Bikes are cool. I remember, you know, kind of fi first getting into the automotive bikes when Lotus was doing ’em back in the nineties. Things pretty cool. Yeah, I think it’s cool. I, the video is, is kind of cheesy and corny, but I think it’s neat, you know, and, and, and people will snatch those up.

They’re destined for somebody’s wall to hang his, you know, wall art for sure. But it was cute. I suppose I, I was the same way. I was like, air cold Porsche, what now? Like, this is super cool, you know, maybe some ev or something because it maybe they figured out a way to do it without liquid. I don’t know.

And then they reveal it and they made it look like a car, which was cool. It was actually two bikes [00:21:00] together and I was like, oh, okay. Yeah, we’re, we’re just going back to Porsche design from like the eighties. I’m like, they’ve had bikes over the years. I mean, it’s not a first for Porsche to have a pedal bike.

I’ve only ever seen one in person. I’ve never ridden one. But it’s also not uncommon for bicycle manufacturers to have been tied to auto manufacturers. Take Bianchi as an example, right? Alto Bianchi is the automotive arm of Bianchi, the bicycle company. But it, it’s cool. I mean, it’s a good looking bike. I honestly, I gotta say just like in real life, I think the Porsche bike looks better than the P m W one, but I’m not gonna spend 25 grand on a bike.

If I am, it’s gonna be. Something really awesome. So it’s funny, I didn’t even pick up those details because I only watched enough of the video to see that it was a bike and then I got pissed and went away. But it’s interesting, you talk about the way it was covered, you know, with the race car, they just came out, whether you’re talking about it on garage ride, I can’t remember what it’s called, like the R 300 or whatever it is that’s supposed to be a Cayman or something.

So to me it was like, oh, well if they came out with that car, that doesn’t look like any of their production models. Maybe this really [00:22:00] is some kind of new version of an aircooled car. And you’re right, the way they had it covered, it was pointy and, and weird. And I wasn’t expecting the bike at all. And I was like, is this some kind of, the manufacturers do that?

No roof, no windshield. Mm-hmm. Kind of thing. I was like a spider. Yeah. No, but it was, it was a bike. Like I said, I didn’t go far enough to see that it was $25,000. That’s, it’s all crazy. But it goes along with your $95 T-shirts, I guess. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And $7,000 sunglasses and stuff, you know, whatever. But you know, hey, they’re made of magnesium so you know, super light because you know, aluminum isn’t good enough.

Part of the Black forest, right. Special order as a Porsche part number, just like the sausages that Volkswagen has. So speaking of other things, Volkswagen yet another King of the Hill moment, the Veron versus the, and I gotta question this. Is it the Sheron or the Chiron, but they’re pitting them against each other for the hypercar crown.

Does anybody actually care? Uh, wrong. Is it, is that the French Way? ’cause the Greeks say Chiron. That was, you know, that was the most interesting part of this whole [00:23:00] thing. I’ve heard every version. I actually was in a Bugatti dealership in Zurich with the Sharon. She said it. That’s how she said it was out and she told me not to take pictures of it.

I did. Anyway, I’ll send ’em to you. But to me, this video, again, it’s almost was as frustrating as the bicycle one. It’s like, hmm, let me take a car and one that’s 10 years newer and see which one’s faster. Which one do you thinks gonna be faster? Right. It’s like so dumb. But I like the headline. What does it say?

The way to embarrass the Bugatti owners to bring a, a faster Bugatti. That’s, again, I wanna remind people they are French, you know, sounds Italian. They are French. They’re the most famous French auto manufacturer, probably on the planet in terms of race cars. I mean, right there with Renault, right? But still they are part of the V a G family, you know, they are on an aging R eight platform.

We’ve already covered that, but, you know, on that note and kind of sidebar that same trip, and speaking of Bugatti, there’s a museum in France over on the eastern part of France called the Schlump Museum, and it’s the largest Bugatti museum in the world. They have 132, I [00:24:00] think. Nice. Um, they had a bear on there when I was there, but if you ever get the chance, uh, it’s, it’s pretty cool.

So Donovan, I jokingly mentioned the aging RA platform, so I would be remiss to use Tanya’s phrase to not talk about Lamborghini. So what’s their vision of the future? You know, it’s hybrid, which, okay, they’re easing into the electric, right? We all know they’re gonna go there. I mean, what do they say by 2024?

They’re gonna be hybrid, I guess. That’s cool, right? I mean, you think F one’s been doing it. Everybody’s kind of easing into it. So it got the engine there. But I think we’ve all known that the charm of these cars, right? Is the big B 12 in the back or the B 10 or the sound. You know, I’m fortunate enough to have a, a guy now, and you know, the sound of it alone.

That’s why I wanna drive that car, right? It, yeah. Performs great. But just that sound, so once they start to lose those kind of things, I think that’s concerning. Imagine 20 years from now somebody gonna go to the Lamborghini dealership and go, oh, I want this car because it’s beautiful. But it sounds like the win.

So I don’t know. You know, I really wonder, you know, what’s gonna happen to the supercar hypercar market when all this [00:25:00] happens? I mean, the Bugattis we were just talking about, you know, when they don’t make any sound and you’ve got a $250,000 Tesla rotr, that’s faster. You know, that makes no sound either. I think those companies are gonna be in real trouble.

But I did wanna point out the, the most interesting part of that article, they say in there that one out of every 11,000 cars in the world is a Lamborghini. There’s no way that’s, no, that’s BSS a flag on the play. There’s no way Baldy the guy, or however you wanna say it, Italian says that one in 11,000 vehicles in the world is a Lamborghini, which is tiny compared to a massive automaker like Toyota Honda.

I find that hard to believe. I know they made a lot of guy Urdo and they made a lot of hurricanes and now they’re making a lot of Uri or ris or however you wanna say it. But if so, take, I wanna say Torg. Yeah, yeah. Slash Panama. The exciting part for me about this is, okay, cool. EVs aren’t alternative source vehicles anymore and right.

Combustion engines are, Kunta is now are half a million dollars. You know, give or take. Can you imagine what they’re gonna be worth once you can’t buy a a V 12 Lamborghini [00:26:00] anymore, so buy ’em up now. A hundred percent Ken Block, we talked about ’em last month. He has transitioned from Ford over to Audi and it’s kind of more of the same as he’s making his foray into the Audi world.

They’ve taken him through the history of Audis in a multi-part video series that I was watching. They’ve given Ken the keys in these videos to multiple, what they call Audi legacy or Audi Heritage tribute cars, like, you know, the D T M V eight and the Audi Sport Quatros, you know, from the rally era and the IMSA I t U nineties and things like that.

In typical Ken Block style, what does he do? He puts him on track and goes completely sideways. The one that hurt me the most is watching him drive Hach Stooks, V eight d t m car, trying to drift it around this road course. And I’m just like, this car was never intended to do this. That flat plane V eight doesn’t like that and neither does the car and it’s too big.

And I’m like, I can’t believe Audi’s letting him do this stuff. And he’s getting it [00:27:00] done. But I’m just like, I feel for those cars. I mean, if it wasn’t a rally car, it’s not supposed to go sideways. I, I think it’s kind of disrespectful, honestly. I mean, yeah, it’s cool, it’s pr hype and, and maybe do that to rally cars, but like you’re saying, I think there’s certain cars that you just don’t do that to, you know, you wouldn’t take a, a nine 17 K and try to drift it.

That’s what is, you know, wasn’t designed that way. There should be some respect for the history of the vehicle and things, but it was pretty crazy and I didn’t know that hidden, uh, what is it called, the tradition center or something mm-hmm. Existed. That’s pretty cool. And obviously none of us can get in there.

It’s super secret, uh, air quotes. But the car that I can, I was most taken by, and I can’t remember the name of it. It’s the one that’s in the thumbnail, that white one to the right, the bug-eyed one. Oh, at the group A car. Yeah, the prototype that never ran. That was pretty crazy. Yeah. But you know, it was pretty cool to see a lot of these cars.

It was interesting too, when he walks in and he skips that whole first set of cars and then just pretty much wants to focus on the quatros and everything else was, was interesting. But yeah, I mean definitely a PR stunt, right? For Audi and for him. But, uh, it’s pretty cool. I’m excited [00:28:00] to see some, something different in his videos and I know there’s gonna be tons of people who are, oh, well, whatever, just drive the car, send it, blah, blah.

The problem is if you take like a D T M car or like the I T U car or any of those that were designed for road racing, the types of lateral pressure you’re putting on those suspensions, they were not designed for that. They don’t have the steering articulation. You’re taking a 30 year old car or older out on track and then just abusing it.

I mean, granted it’s Audi, they can just make more parts, but their job in life at the museum is to not go then and repair Hans race card that’s been in storage pristine forever. I mean, it just, I don’t know. It hurt me to watch that and I’m like, yeah, I get it Hogan, and bring everybody with you from Subaru and try to convince ’em that Audi is awesome, but I think they need to reinvent the way they’re doing this.

We can’t do more of the same hats off to Ken. Hopefully maybe something cool will come of this. I, I don’t wanna see history, repeat it. You know what I mean? What would the Audi version be of the Ford F 100 pickup that he. [00:29:00] Uh, it, it, it’s gonna be the RSQ eight or whatever that thing is that they’re running around the Berg ring right now, which we’re gonna talk about a little bit.

What’s the old, what’s an old sixties, early seventies Audi that he can put huge fenders on and Yeah. Yeah. Old Audi 100 or whatever. They’re all sedans back then. Yeah. That cool. I think it’s gonna do a lot for the brand though. I mean, I think, you know, there’s a lot of younger people that watch that and I think they’re gonna be Audi fans after it, so I think it was a pretty good move for that pr y.

Yeah. The only disconnect there is the price range. Audi doesn’t make anything that young people could just go buy. Right. And even the G T I is starting to escape people’s grasp, and that’s why cars, like the Civic that we talked about at the top of the show, their price point is still higher than it’s ever been, but still lower than some of the German entries.

The low end, you know, even the low end three series BMWs, which used to be attainable now 50, $60,000. I mean, young kids can’t jump into that. Like they couldn’t E 30 and the resale value on a lot of those cars, because people are leasing them, it’s high, it’s a catch 22. So, you know, Ford has done the [00:30:00] young drivers a disservice as well by doing away with the Fiesta and the focus and other cars, you know, we’ve seen ’em all disappeared.

So I’m really curious, you know, maybe when my daughters start driving the car that they’re gonna drive at 16, 18 years old hasn’t been created yet. So I’m kind of curious to see where the market is and, you know, what will be a used car when they’re old enough to drive granted. Right. It’s a, it’s a huge PR move for Audi, but you know, was it.

Audi Germany. Was it Audi us? Because obviously in Germany, Audis are more attainable. Yeah, because they have the lower range stuff, but that’s kind of a narrow focus. So surely Audi, you know, corporate was thinking broader than that, but that’s, I mean, you make a great point that I never really thought of before.

With Ford, you could go buy an inexpensive Ford or an inexpensive used version. Audi not the case. Subaru still. But yeah, I mean, and unless they’re gonna try to do something else with the market. I mean, think about all the PR they got from kicking everybody’s butt in Lamont for years. Maybe that’s all they’re on is just a big PR machine.

I’m confused and I find both videos pointless. Yes, it’s better done in the York queue, an actual rally [00:31:00] car. However, the U R Q and Audi doesn’t need Ken block to prove that it’s a rally car. Audi F-ing proved that already 30 years ago and they changed the game now. It’s super cool. I guess with. Ford that’s not known for that.

I mean, yeah, they had the Cosworth and things like that, but the types of cars that, you know, the Hogan crap. Ford isn’t known like Audi for revolutionizing rally and being a world champion, unless I’m mistaken. The heritage, the pedigree, the infamy of Audi, I don’t know. It speaks for itself. All you need to do is just see the U R Q in his rally livery and everyone should just shut up and I’m not impressed because he barely could fricking drift the U R Q and the IMSA car.

The D T M car doesn’t want to be drifted. Correct. That’s why I keep saying it was such a forced effort. It’s like why? What is the point? It’s not like you said, it is not designed to do that. I had a thought, I wonder if it applies here. So we were talking recently, and I think we might’ve talked about it in the last podcast too, but talking about B M [00:32:00] W, we were talking about it this weekend.

I was at A B M W meet. There is heritage and history with B M W. Right? Just think about the M three for example. The, the original M three, the only reason we had one is they needed them to race, right? Yep. The E three, they were two-door cars. Rah, rah, rah. So through the years, they sort of kept that heritage until the four-door version came out as the current M three, which should have been M four, you know, and there’s been other missteps along the way with the way they number their cars and things.

But the, the whole point of that conversation was, do you think that a lot of these manufacturers now have gotten to the point where maybe generations have moved on and newer generations are going off the bus, but they’re not thinking the tradition of the vehicles. Right. So, right. The marketing team for the current.

M four isn’t thinking, oh, that should be an M three because of this. The problem with that, Donovan, is the marketing team that’s doing this right now is our generation of Petrolhead. So where did we go astray. We’re gonna get lost. Right. Well, I agree with everything you said, Donovan, and I think that makes sense because that speaks to how everything that was once old is new again, all these [00:33:00] remakes and redos, even in the movie world where it’s like, okay, sure it’s new for the new generation, but you know, some of us have already seen it.

If Audi or anyone else is trying to market to the new generation, like you’re saying, why are you bringing back a car from 30 years ago that these people have no idea existed? Correct. Well that’s what I’m saying though. I think part of it is the market they’re trying to reach, but I think partially internally as the corporation, those people don’t get it.

To your point, Tanya, about, you know, we all remember a group B and we know Audi’s Heritage in there and they kicked ass. But let’s say the new marketing team is, you know, millennials or Wise or Qs. Or Rs or whatever they’re called now, all they know is there were a bunch of cool Audis and video games.

Let’s go get the mothballs off and have Ken Block, who’s a current cultural icon, drive the crap out of ’em. ’cause those things seem cool and split ’em this guy and they’re awesome. Instead of somebody going, whoa. To your point, Eric, that was Hoch Hook’s car. Right. That car was important. It’s still important.

We know that it was important. We knew it existed for what it was. Let’s not touch it. I feel like there’s [00:34:00] a disconnect these days between whatever it is, the marketing group or Yeah, whatever in the history of the brand. I think a lot of that’s getting lost. And I think about the book that let’s wrote when he worked at B M W about them wanting to change the Round Bull.

And he was like, no, no, no. That’s the heritage of the brand. They’ve changed it now, of course since, but you know, they wanted to change it to something completely different. It was kind of that. No, that’s what people recognize, right? Yep. And my point in that is I think, you know, people have gotten lost in that.

And I wonder if that’s out here because you’re taking, and Tanya, you nailed it again, right? You’re taking these cars that we already know we’re right. We don’t need to prove it anymore. They’re still in our memory and our in our minds and trying to do something different with them just because it’s cool.

There’s these old cars that I’ve seen, you know, elsewhere, so I feel some brands are losing their way. But if we flip that, Coin over and look at the other side. A well done version of this Heritage Meets the Future video was actually between Stig Bloom fist, one of the original group B drivers, maybe not as well known as Walter, rural Michel Mutton, but he was one of the key players on the team along with Han [00:35:00] Micala and a lot of other folks that ran for Audi back in the group B days.

So they brought out Lucas Degrassi, who runs the formula ecar for Audi, and they did a driver swap. They had Lucas Drive, Walter Ru’s, UR Quattro, not STIGs. I looked at the tag on the side of the car plus the numbers and I’m a geek. So I figured all that out. And then Stig drives the new e-tron gt the quote, unquote, let’s call it a two-door, but not a two-door, all electric.

I thought that was really cool. That was the past meeting the future. And both of them gave their opinions on the car. They drove it around this European road up in the mountains or whatever, and they drove the same track at speed. And I thought it was fantastic. And what was great is, and I always enjoy as mild mannered as he is in soft spoken Stig, the real Stig Stig Blum fist is still the man and he can drive and he’s so smooth.

And I wanna point out one important thing, ’cause I studied this video. He shuffle steers and I’m just gonna leave my microphone right [00:36:00] there. That’s interesting. It’s the, it’s the past meets the future and it reminds me too of the swap, not the past meets the future, but, you know, Hamilton and Rossi doing the, the swap.

That was really cool. Maybe there is something in it, Audi, if you’re listening, I want some cred for this. But put Ken block in one of the old rally cars and put him on one of the old rally stages and check his time against them. You know, do stuff like that where, yeah, a lot of people didn’t watch rally back in the day.

Right. So they’re not gonna know the drivers that set the time, but you know, Hey, this was the record in this car. That would be really interesting. And I think that would probably be a better use of, of some of this. Well, that happened earlier this year, so I talked about it in one of the other episodes.

Yaari Matala drove his father’s. Toyota Celica from the post group E era. So the early nineties, the Carlos Steinz car and he drove it and he goes, I can drive this just as fast as a modern Toyota. And people are like, what do you, you don’t know what you’re talking about, blah blah. You’re a madman. ’cause he is the madman of W R C and he did it.

I mean he got close his times were phenomenal. He’s a phenomenal driver. Granted, he’s now pulled out [00:37:00] of W R C, he’s a team owner. He is not driving anymore. So he’s basically retired to sunset your career like that and go, look, I’m driving my dad’s car and it can still kick ass against a new rally car. I mean, what does that say about new rally cars?

It says a lot about the old cars too. Right? And so again, the past meets the future and stuff like that gets your attention more so than some of these other publicity stunts. You know, the other part is, you know, Kim Block is actually a good race car driver. Right? He’s not just a drifter guy. Right. And you see, what is it Stadium Cross, is that what it’s called?

When they’ve got the joker loop and all that stuff on? Yeah, the Rally Cross. Yeah. Yeah. And he’s actually beaten some current champs and stuff. What? You know, it’d be nice to see him and I know the donuts are what sells and things, but again, right, he’s kind of in his element there. So let him do something that’s worthy.

But the hats off the Stig for still getting behind the wheel of an Audi. Now I, I was wondering if that was his original driving suit or not. I’ll leave that where it’s, alright, so let’s move on to the rest of lower Saxony, shall we? How about some B M W and Mercedes News? Yeah, so now B m W has this very special [00:38:00] painting process where they can paint very fine lines and patterns and things without having to mask, uh, off the rest of the car.

That I think that’s really special. You know, the, the m fours they’re gonna release, I guess they’re gonna release a handful of ’em with stripes and, you know, special designs and liberties and things. I’m excited to see where that’s gonna go. Somebody’s gonna get crazy with it and have, you know, we’ve got all these wrapped versions of cars.

I saw one the other day, it was these silhouette ghosts on a Lamborghini, which was really cool. It would be really interesting to see if you could go in a dealership now and say, I want this painted on the side of my car. And, you know, do paint to order that way. Just means there’s gonna be some really overly priced, hideous cars on the market.

But I think it’s gonna be a pretty cool feature, and I’m interested to see how it’s gonna translate the rest of the automotive world if it works, you know, if it turns out to be another GM process with the, what was the white. Vehicles, you know that five years later the paint was falling off. That’s gonna be just, yeah, well, I mean they can do a lot now considering the advances in technology with three D printing and lasers and things like that.

So I can see these bespoke BMWs being a thing. Like we mentioned on a couple other episodes, I think [00:39:00] the fail point is always gonna be, I can’t order what I want, right? I can’t go on the website and I want it purple with green stripes and the joker’s face on the side of it and, and all this kind of thing.

It’s gonna be, oh, well you want a purple one? Well, it only comes with yellow stripes. Are you okay with that? And you’re like, ah, man, again, and, and the Germans have been doing that forever. You know, you want a black interior, well you can only get it with a silver car. Like, well that stinks. I want triple black.

You know, move on. Speaking of moving on, yeah. So Mercedes or the parent company is, uh, Daimler Ag is spinning off the truck division. It’s pretty interesting. I guess they feel like it’ll be more successful when it’s off on its own and focusing more on, you know, where the technology of hauling cargoes going to go.

So, you know, they’re testing these long haul trucks using liquid hydrogen as we tie that back into this part, you know, fuel cells and everything else. So I think it’s gonna be interesting. It seems like an odd move to me though, that they’re spinning off one of their divisions, particularly one that seems to be pretty successful.

So not sure what that’s really about, I don’t know. But that sounds a lot like d [00:40:00] a spinning off, you know, all their trucks into man m a n, right? So it kind of makes sense to divide it up. Dodge did the same thing, right? Ram is all the trucks and they’re not gonna cross brand them anymore. So, Curious to see how Daimler does.

I mean, obviously they’re probably gonna be still sold through the same dealer network and all of that service at the same locations. I mean, all these sprinters that are running around, even the Dodges and things like that, they’re still Mercedes underneath, right? Re-badged and whatnot. So good for them.

And if they’re gonna experiment with all electric, they’re probably gonna have it before Tesla does. And if they’re going hydrogen, I’m really curious to see how that works too. I mean, I think hydrogen might make sense in a semi right, maybe slightly more protected than a passenger vehicle. But then again, you’ve got a like kind of rolling torpedo there.

You know, you get into some of these accidents with a semi truck. So, you know, again, safety’s the biggest concern with hydrogen at the end of the day. So moving on to STIs. Now, STIs, as we know, you know, we have been partying hard with STIs for like 18 months now, and we had that moment about two drive-through episodes [00:41:00] ago where, you know, mom and dad were flicking the lights.

You know, if anybody remembers those days of house parties flicking the lights, It’s time to go home, everybody. They said, no more charger, no more challenger. No more hemis. We’ll, we’ll let you guys know what’s coming next. The news in Solanis has been really, really quiet over the last couple of months.

I’m not really worried, but there’s nothing new to report except for the guys over at Miltech Racing decided to put a brand new Dodge, T R X, which is the 702 horsepower Hellcat engine, basically Ram 1500 on a lap around the nerve Berg ring. Hold my beer. I think that’s really cool. I, I was late to really appreciate the T R X I guess.

And in fact it was just on, uh, Lena’s garage last week. Really cool. I had no idea that, you know, they were making something like that, and I think it’s still zero to 60 in like three seconds or under three seconds. It’s crazy fast. Anytime you get a truck like that, you know, on a performance course or a racetrack, you know it’s gonna [00:42:00] roll like crazy.

But I bet it was a lot of fun in the Straits. What they did is they set up, there are two Miltech cars. One is a miltech prepared Audi, like R S Q eight or something like that. Basically the big SS u V, so big V eight twin turbo, eight pot brakes, like all this crazy, you know, Audi stuff that you expect. And so he is chasing this T R X, which is basically stock, stock tires, you know, for the factory.

All this. They put an exhaust on it, which it sounds really good. And then it’s got the regular old Chrysler Supply tu pot break that they’ve been making for like a hundred years. And that was one of the things they were joking about. They’re like, we don’t know that this thing’s gonna stop. It weighs like 9,000 pounds.

Right. Watching the video, especially from the Chase Audi, when he would get on it, he was outrunning the Audi. And I’m like, that’s a pickup truck people. And then you, you’re seeing like, you know, little, you know, BMWs and people getting outta the way and it was just like, you know, it’s like three tons of coming.

Right? And I mean, Then he is at the point where the front breaks are smoking going into the turns. ’cause he’s trying to stop that mass. And it was, it was just hilarious to watch this thing. [00:43:00] And, and the guy in the Audi, I mean he was kind of like, whatever, I mean I, I was kind of annoyed listening to him just the way he was talking and almost felt like he was making fun of Americans in a way.

But then he was like, dude, look at the back of the truck, like leaning over. You’re about to flip. I’m like, he’s not about to flip. Uh, the one thing I thought was interesting was it was limited to 190 kilometers. And for those of you that don’t do metric conversions in your head quickly, that’s 118 miles an hour.

So it’s not as fast as a challenger or nine 11, it’s governed to 118. But it gets there quick. That’s for sure. How did they come up with that number to govern? That’s probably the point at which things get stupid. Once you cross one 20 in a, in a pickup truck, it probably gets really, really dangerous. You know, you’re breaking distance is half a mile at that point.

To Tanya’s point about the earlier videos, does it have a point? Absolutely not. The point is why the f not so if he’s got the truck and they’re gonna let him run it, ’cause that was their concern, whether they’re gonna let him on the road or not. The one thing I thought was shocking was how much [00:44:00] traffic there was on the ring.

I mean, they might as well have been on the beltway. I mean they’re like bumper to bumper going through there. I mean at a hundred miles an hour. But still, I was just like, it’s craziness. So is the next I racing season or are, are virtual racing gonna be. TXs I, I think that is a good plan. I like this 40 elap, but I think it’s time that we move on to some more domestic news.

And our domestic news is brought to you in part by american muscle.com, your number one resource for Chevy, Ford and Mopar performance parts. So check them out when you get a chance. American muscle.com. So Tanya, what’s up for Ford and Chevy? Well, it kind of gave it away earlier when we were talking about Toyota and STIs plans around factories being built.

So Ford also announced, uh, earlier this month they’re planning I think to spend over $11 billion to build, I think four factories split between Tennessee and Kentucky that are dedicated to ev. I think the Tennessee campus is gonna be where the F-series pickup truck and battery will be assembled, whereas I believe in [00:45:00] Kentucky they’re gonna actually be manufacturing lithium ion batteries, um, with their partnership with ssk.

Pretty interesting. We’re talking about they’re doing battery factory. Tesla’s doing battery factory Toyota. Everybody’s doing battery factory and I guess it kinda makes sense thinking about it ’cause how are they shipping these batteries? From Korea. ’cause that’s where SK and lg, which are the two big battery producers.

How are we even moving these things around? ’cause there’s a lot of restrictions around the shipment of lithium batteries to the point that a lot of lithium batteries can’t be shipped if they’re not in the product that they’re designed for. There’s a lot of restrictions, especially for air ’cause it’s considered hazardous and dangerous material.

So if they’re not being able to be shipped within the product, which we know they’re not, the trucks are coming off the assembly line in the us these companies are then must be having to either pay. A lot of premium to go buy land as much as they can, and then maybe by sea if the restrictions are different or they’re having to pay maybe a premium for proper [00:46:00] packaging, somehow these batteries, if they are doing air freight.

So I guess it kind of makes sense when you think about it that more and more factories are gonna be popping up in different parts of the world to satisfy demand in those markets. I just wanna know when I’ll be able to buy the knockoff battery on Amazon for like a 10th of the price. Batteries plus version.

Exactly. It’s only gonna work for three charges and then they’re like holds 20%. But, but yeah, to your point, you’re right. I mean, and if they’re moving ’em by ship, like a lot of cargo, which is still tied up in ports because remnants of covid, right. The fallout from that. I don’t know how that’s done. And then I wonder too, like let’s say God forbid we have another Valdez type of incident where it’s a shipping container or a ship full of lithium batteries, if I remember correctly, electricity and water don’t mix right.

So that can’t be a good idea, you know, if something were to happen tragically. I mean as long as there’s no fire. That’s the other thing. And that’s what I was saying in the beginning, you know, I’m not a super [00:47:00] crunchy tree hugger guy, but I am to a degree. You know, the process, you know, all the lithium and stuff that they mine and and all those.

And you got these batteries that, you know, what do we do with them 30, 40 years later? I mean, you know, I know they can recycle. I think it’s what, 70% of them or something through process. But it’s really expensive. Will we actually do it? But really concerns me about places like Kentucky and stuff that’s very green.

And you know, like you said, if something was to catch on fire, Was the rimac, and I’m not gonna say it the way you’re supposed to because I think it’s pretentious, but the rimac that, uh, no, no, no. What is it? What is it? It’s mosh. I guess what it’s, oh, I thought it was the Rimac. I thought it was Rimac too.

Mash rimac. ’cause I’m American, but Kyron, you know the, the one that, what’s his face wrecked on Grand Tour and they said that it burned for four days because the batteries would start to ignite and they put ’em out and the next one would start. So you think about something like that, you know, in the Appalachians and you know, something happens with all those trees around and that bourbon and all that other stuff, and something catches on fire and that could be catastrophic potentially.

You know, it’s, it’s really [00:48:00] scary to me. I don’t know. That’ll be the next California wildfire was started from Tesla that was burning for six days or something. It’s not funny, but it’s funny. I’m sorry. Insert your favorite Ev I mean, it’s not funny. Feel sorry for poor Californians that a hundred percent idiots starting these forest fires because I.

Of stupid reasons. I mean, it’s a legitimate concern actually. What if something happened? You know, like that incident in Texas, you know, allegedly, we don’t know who was driving or not driving and who was in which seat of that Tesla when it slammed into a tree and burst into flames. And allegedly the fire department had some trouble putting out that fire too, that it raged for several hours or whatever.

Someone’s driving somewhere and has an accident and then they set a forest fire. It’s conceivable. Well, that’s the other thing too, that I don’t think we’ve considered E either. It’s the other ev. The emergency vehicles now need to be equipped with additional hazmat and electrical fire capabilities, like dealing with that.

And I think. Firefighters are gonna have to retool their suits, you know, for electrical discharge, [00:49:00] increased BTUs from the fires. ’cause electrical fires are very different than, you know, fuel fires and things like that. So obviously a lot of them are getting training on that sort of stuff. And I’ve talked to some individuals that are volunteer firefighters and what they’re going through, but now there’s an added expense to the fire departments to have to deal with that.

You know, halan systems, like all this kind of stuff that they have to now incorporate onto the fire trucks when they get a report that there’s a Prius that’s, you know, burning on the side of the road. Well, and now imagine half of a factory is on fire. What do you do? Yeah, exactly. What do you do? Yeah, just let it burn.

I think we need to send mountain man, Dan to protest. I’ll paint a fly, we’ll fly him there and just, he’s gotta stand there with How about naked with his boots on, with a sign that says no EV factories and on on the back of a square body Chevy. Like, yeah, I mean for now, if they’re number one method of quenching the fires just continuous deluge.

That’s one thing. Hopefully we don’t now create some other sort of firefighting foam specifically for EVs, which then has a chemical impact on, you [00:50:00] know, the world. Because we see that now with the current firefighting foams that there’s groundwater contamination and these. P FOAs in everybody’s drinking water that are forever chemicals, essentially.

They don’t break down and they just tend to build up in your body and whatnot and then can lead to adverse health effects. Ah. It’s like, okay, I mean, it’s great as long as it’s water, water’s, water’s life, right? Of course. Where are we getting all this infinite amount of water from also right? Mountains.

It’s always a catch 22. There you go. It’s gonna become like demolition band where your wreck and the car just turns into styrofoam and that’s the end of it and you crawl out of it, right? I’m, there’s seal. It’ll just air seal everything and that’s the end of it. I’m sensing something here. I think we’re gonna put together a garage riot, G T m protest, and we’ll all go to the mountain with our signs on the back in boots.

I don’t even own cowboy boots, but I’ll stand there naked with Will you show me how to use the three seashells as well? Speaking of weird reveals, Chevy has said, enough is enough. It’s time to reveal the z o six. And guess what [00:51:00] folks, if you’re listening to this on the day that it airs October the 26th, 2021, today’s the big day, the z o six has finally been revealed.

They leaked spy photos on Instagram this month showing everybody what it was gonna look like. And I don’t know, here’s my bigger question. They can’t even fulfill the orders of the regular Z 51 Corvettes, the stingrays. How are they gonna fulfill the orders of the zero sixes? And I thought we weren’t making Corvettes.

I thought there was a stop order on those just like there was on the Camaros and everything else. I am so confused. That’s bizarre. I, I will say though, they talk about in the article, they’re not sure what the engine’s gonna be. I don’t know if you guys happen to see that. Was it Instagram feed where somebody was a party and they cranked one up flat plane crank?

Yep. I mean, just. Incredible. So whoever that was, I’m sure got fired the next day. But I mean, if that’s really what it’s gonna sound like, and I’ve always preferred, I think everybody does, right? The Z six versions over the stock versions for their looks and things. I think that’s gonna be fantastic. But, [00:52:00] you know, the question I have is this one, the next, you know, version, the, the, the ZR one.

Like how are they gonna get faster than what they already are? I mean, you know, you got the hybrid, the stingray one, I mean the stock one’s already what, three seconds? Zero, 60. So what is it gonna be? 2.9 and 2.8 and 2.7. So I wonder if they’re having kind of a crisis, again, similar to what we’re talking about before with okay, we came out with the news, you know, C eight and it’s super fast and everybody’s going, oh my God, it’s super fast.

But now where do we go? We can’t go much faster than this. So there’s, there’s two problems with the new Corvette outside of the million recalls that we joked about throughout this year that the C eight already has. The other problems that it has are, I still argue that the Corvette community isn’t prepared for this car.

Right? It’s really leaning towards a younger generation of folks, and I’m not trying to like stereotype Corvette drivers on all jokes aside, right? New balances and gold chains and gray hair and all that, but it’s just so different. I still argue they should have a classic front engine rear [00:53:00] drive Corvette.

The C seven was just so good, like the C eight. I haven’t gotten a chance to coach one yet. Maybe I will. I just, I’m not convinced. The other thing that doesn’t convince me is they tried really, really hard to copy the Ferrari and the, and the N S X and I don’t like split exhaust. V eights flat plane V eight or otherwise, I don’t think they sound right.

It’s ’cause of the short headers and everything else. It just sounds like two really angry, four bangers running together and I just, ah, I don’t know. I don’t think though, you know, you talk about are the, are the credit owners ready for it? I think a lot of these, they’re gonna be really expensive, right?

I’m sure they’re gonna be a buck and a quarter, you know, one 50. I think they’re gonna go right from the showroom right into somebody’s garage. You know, some retired folks that keep it and take it out to their cars and coffee. So what happened at the 69 Grand Bargain basement entry Corvette that was supposed to be so affordable for everybody?

Is it because of Covid that now they’re all 150 grand? Well, I mean, ’cause even the regular Corvettes right [00:54:00] now, if you can get one, are ridiculous. What happened, what they say they were losing 20 grand per car on the original ones. Something like that. So, you know, they knew they were selling ’em under market.

I think they realized, oh, we can ask a lot more money for these cars now that we’ve got the initial PR buzz out of ’em. But let’s do ’em. I see ’em all the time now, which is crazy and I don’t know how, ’cause they, you know, if you still can’t get them, there’s three in the Mazda dealer lot down the road.

You know, I, granted now they’ve been out for a year or something, but if they’re in that high demand, so I, I think they’re pretty cool. I think they still have an identity crisis, front end, rear end kind of thing. But, uh, I’m kind of excited to see, oh, that rear end is just tragic. I, I don’t think the Z six is gonna make it better from that spy photo though.

The Wing looked different. So much like that Civic type R we talked about, it’s getting another ridiculous wing upgrade on the back. So maybe that’ll help that Camaro, they grafted onto the back of it though, just ugh. And the perception though, did you see the, the picture I posted on Garage Riot of the guy that was behind that said L Lambo on his tag.

Oh yeah. Yeah. I don’t know about that. Yeah, I don’t know about that either. I mean, at the end of the day, what I do [00:55:00] know and I’m still holding out hope for is the 400 z. If they’re right about the price and the car is as fast as they say it’s gonna be, it looks good. It’s gonna sound good. It’s gonna be good.

I’m putting a lot of faith in Renault, right. The parent company Nissan, to get this right to do the heritage thing. They’ve done a good resto on that. If the price point is anywhere between 50 and 60, I think that car is gonna sell like crazy and it’s gonna be that replacement for the Corvette, right, that folks like us want unless you buy a used C seven.

Switching gears back to Ford for a moment. Remember last month I mentioned the Maverick and we talked about the factory in India that was closing and Ford was losing money and apparently the Maverick was supposed to build there. Guess what? It’s gonna be built in America. And the guys from Jalopnik have already driven one.

I thought the article was rather entertaining. He does a really good job of comparing this maverick to what it could be. So he compares it to like a Spitfire that’s a triumph. For those that don’t know, he compares it to, uh, previous generations F one [00:56:00] 50. He compares it to the Ford Capri. He compares it to all sorts of other things to say where it got its design inspiration.

I look at it and go, this is the Ranger, the real ranger that we were supposed to get, not this other thing with a four cylinder that’s the size of an F one 50. I think it’s cool and I do agree with him in his early part of the statement where he compares it to the VW Combi, which is for those that don’t know the Type two Vangen as a pickup truck without a cap on it.

The Maverick has a very similar look to it. I think it’s kind of cool and you could do some really tasteful mods to it to give it that comb be kind of feel, especially out in California with some surfboards and different kind of rims and things. If you’re looking for a pickup truck of that style, is it useful for every day?

I don’t know, but it’s still gonna be relatively large. Probably Canyon, Colorado size. Like I said, the way the Ranger should have been, not the size of the old F one 50 me, [00:57:00] that blue didn’t help. Yeah. I don’t know man. I mean it’s boring to me. I, you know, I think the article’s kind of neat, but I think it’s a little bit of a stretch where, you know, he talks about the Capri front end piece, but he’s, he’s trying to jazzercize it.

Right? You’re like, ah, that’s so exciting. And you’re like, yeah, I mean, I’ll say this, I think this is all you really say. It starts at 19 nine. Yeah. You know, it is your go to Hertz and rent a car, that’s what they’re gonna pull around with. I mean, most of the ones in the picture here have the steel wheels on ’em.

So Yeah. The shape’s a little odd though to me. It’s kind of like first gen ridge line. Yes. Yeah, I see that too. Yeah. I mean, I do like where Ford’s going with the trucks and stuff. They like the, the Broncos are cool. Even the little one, I think it has potential, man. I think like this to me could be the next like kid tuner truck.

Exactly. You know, what was in the, the nineties, the little C 10 or whatever that everybody has, the C tens and the Tacomas and all those, the Jimmys and whatnot. Yeah. So I think this has a place in the market for sure. I didn’t see all the engine options. What it’s a four cylinder, was there boost, like from the Mustang and from the Bronco and all those.[00:58:00]

So I mean, it, it’s fine. I mean, this would be like your 16 year old son needs something new and reliable. Go buy him one of these and be done with. Exactly like everything else. Ford is changing, right? We’re starting to see, I heard somebody say the other day, they understand now my comment about why the Mach E looks just like an escape.

’cause it’s built on it. I mean, there’s some platform sharing going on with Ford. Good for them. You know, that’s a good thing. That’s a smart move following after the Germans. But they are innovating and there’s some really cool features on the F one 50 that we didn’t really know about. Another funny article from Jalopnik, it’s kind of a lesser known capability of the F one 50 and they’ve been teasing this idea of self scaling trucks for a while.

And Ford has actually done it. And the only way you can tell that it’s active and working is by looking at the rear taillights. There’s a set of LEDs buried in the inner part of the rear taillight that light up like a progress bar to let you know where your tow limit and your tow [00:59:00] capacity is. And I actually think as somebody who tows all the time and towing the race car and everything, I think that’s brilliant because I don’t have a way of judging that other than with my eyes.

And then my air suspension kind of takes care of the rest of it. So I’m kind of wondering, you know, when can I adapt this to something else? You know, I think this is really, really cool. I think the F one fifties are super cool. Always have. I, I think it’s amazing and I, what I think is really cool, like with the scale and the taillights and a lot of the things that truck manufacturers are doing, they’re trying to outdo each other in all of the features they can come up with, right?

How many ways can I create a foldable tailgate that has speakers in it and steps in it and everything else? To me, you know, it’s crazy to think that in a lot of ways they already are pickup trucks out. There are some of the most technologically advanced vehicles on the road, which is pretty crazy and, and what is it?

Ford sells 2,500 F one fifties a day? Something like that. That, yeah, it’s like the fastest selling car in North America. Good for them. And, you know, I think, and you know, that that market obviously is very competitive. Not as much for them ’cause they’re crushing it, but it’s these little things that are gonna keep them, you know, ahead of the pack.

That, you know, there’s all these [01:00:00] little neat little features that people need. You know, it’s neat. You, you, like you just said, you could use that in towing. Or you imagine somebody doing something like that. It’s not just a flashy something, it’s not LEDs under the, you know, neons underneath. It’s something usable.

So I think it’s really, really cool. Now it’s time to move on to Brad’s favorite section Lost and Found, which covers Hidden Secrets, historical News and things like that. So first up, this month a video came across my desk, I believe it was from Garage Riot, and it is the most interesting overdramatized and boring video I have ever watched.

It all wraps itself around a long lost A M C American Voter Corporation, a M X. Three, for some of you, you’re all groan and going, oh, the Gremlin. Oh the pacer. Uh, you know, yes, they’re all crap. I get it. However, the AMX three is special in the fact that it is a prototype that was built from 19 69, 19 70.

There are six different versions of it that were publicly seen and released. There were nine total. [01:01:00] And apparently the backstory on this car and, and the story, this whole story could be told in like three minutes, but they drag it out in this video. But some guy is, I don’t know, on Facebook marketplace or something, and he stumbled across this dude with this giant like, Clown bow tie thing.

I don’t even know why he is shopping for this in the background. He happens to be a car guy and he’s like, wait, is that an A M X? And they had heard some rumors about this car being lost in Michigan somewhere and this and that, and then they discover the car, right? And so the car was actually built by Carmen in Germany, who’s famous for also building many other famous cars like the Rocco and, and, and some of the Audis and BMWs and things like that.

So they’re a coach builder. And so they helped a m c build this mid-engine two-door sports car that very much looks like a Pantera, just smaller, right? So a ditch Mazo Pantera. And so pretty cool car. Not a lot of history on it. Only resources out there outside of the A M C club and things like that. You go to [01:02:00] Wikipedia and there’s a big writeup on these cars and their evolution and B M W was involved with them and, uh, in Carmen and Volkswagen, et cetera.

So a lot of hands in building these prototypes that just never really went anywhere because a m C didn’t last too much longer. Into the seventies before they got absorbed by Jeep and Chrysler and the Lee Coca era of Dodge, right? And Plymouth and all those, those companies being rebranded and reformed and amalgamated.

Which by the way guys, if you didn’t know Jeep was part of a C a long time ago, which is why Chrysler bought them. But at any rate, moving on from that, what other things. Did we find that we can buy on places like bring a trailer and cars and bids there, Donovan? Oh, there’s a fairly low mile g t I right now it’s an 84 with 63,000 miles that I’ve got my, uh, papers on car’s.

Beautiful. It looks, you know, from the pictures it looks almost mint. It has horrible, horrible. What are those Chrome side panels on the side? Mm-hmm. That [01:03:00] je, was that a factory option? I don’t remember it being one, but it could have been. But all the ones I knew were, they only came in three colors. Silver, red, and black.

And then your interior choices were black, blue, jean or pumpkin? Pumpkin. I don’t, don’t think I’ve seen the pumpkin win. So I’m, uh, let’s see, we’ve got three days left. It’s a 27 5, um, 27 5 for a mark. One g t i. Are you nuts? You can buy a golf bar for that price. I’m betting this car goes over 40 0 3 days left.

So, uh, pretty cool. But, uh, yeah, I’d, I’d like to, I’ve been looking for one for a while and I think, you know, it’s probably gotten to the point where they’re more than I’m interested in, in buying particularly this one. But we’ll see. You never know. Maybe when I, I mean, I hate to say if I was standing in your garage and you have the keys to the guyo in one hand, the keys to A G T I on the other one probably gonna pick the g t I just letting you know.

That’s a car enthusiast though, right? Then, you know. That’s, that’s exactly it. But there’s also, I just saw there’s a 32 mile B M W M four G t s on here, which is pretty interesting as well. I don’t need another F 80 B M [01:04:00] W, but I actually shopped those before I bought the guyardo. That was consideration and uh, I’m glad I didn’t.

And it’s only $4 million on bringer trailer, right? They’re in the nineties usually, but this one, yeah, with 32 miles, it’s probably gonna be something stupid. But yeah, it was too close to what I already have. The other thing on here, I’ll just mention, because I saw it, is there’s an old B M W bike on here.

If anybody listening has one or knows of one, I want one. I don’t want it running. And if the engine doesn’t work, that’s cool. I just think they’re cool to look at. I like to park it in the man cave somewhere, but yeah. Anyway, you’re talking B M W motorcycle, right? Like a K, yeah, motorcycle. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sorry, not bike like we were talking earlier. But yeah, three 19 motorcycle. I also saw that Pablo Escobar’s. Nine 11 was for sale. Yeah. Everybody’s going through the jokes right now in their head for sure. Right. So the back history on this thing, I looked at the pictures and go, oh, I know that car. That’s Emo’s car and what do I mean by Emo’s car?

Emerson Fit Aldi’s car. So that was a Penske built nine 11 iroc, R S R International Race of Champion, something we don’t do anymore. And I miss [01:05:00] deeply. I thought IROC was super cool to see all the champs from all the different disciplines going at each other in different cars every year. Emo sold that car to uh, Porsche fdo, who ran a Rolex almost kind of thing.

And I don’t know how it ended up in Pablo Escobar’s hands and then eventually made its way back to the States in the nineties. Apparently the car has gone through a heck of an evolution to get it back to its original state. Apparently Escobar had a wide bodied it to a 9 35 style, you know, a bunch of other stuff.

You know, nothing that I would take issue with because it’s all classic nine 11 stuff, but for the purist to say this is Emerson Aldi’s IROC car, obviously we gotta bring it back to standard. The going rate on that auction. At the time of reading the article was a low, low, low price of $856,000. So, yeah.

Let me, I’m gonna get two, but speaking of other weird things, what I bring up the word Winkle. What do you think? Not wanker. Not wanker, wanker. Oh, oh, okay. That’s different I think [01:06:00] in the auto mechanic shop. Wanker working on the winkel. Um, or you think Mazda. You immediately go RX seven. Anything rotary powered For those that don’t know?

Was it Fred? Not rot. Oh, sorry. What is it? Frederick Winkel or whatever his name is Fred Winkel. He designed this engine apparently when he was 17 years old, probably playing with a Spirograph, but actually it was invented in the 1920s. He patented way back when. You know, the first Winkle powered cars or rotary engine cars came from N S U and Mazda just about the same time.

19 61, 19 64. As I’ve always said, if the Germans thought it was a good idea, they would’ve hung onto it. So, you know, the Winkle has forever lived on in Mazda’s portfolio into the RX cars. But did you know that there was a motorcycle powered by a Winkle? Is that better or worse? So when you watch this video, which is kind of weird because it’s got a male Siri voice.

Narrating it, and then there’s actual footage of bikes [01:07:00] running at like motocross events and things like that. At first, I was like, that’s just a regular old two stroke. Like why do I what? What do I care? And then suddenly it does like 27,000 RRP m and you’re like, well, I, that’s really, really different. So as you dig into this very long video that came to us via Mountain Man Dan, part of his whole mountain view thing that he’s doing, but it’s a single rotor Winkle powered dirt bike.

It’s mounted horizontally in there. It’s all this really interesting engineering to make it work and make it fit. So it’s not super huge and doesn’t have like 12 spark plugs hanging out from it. It’s actually quite compact. It almost looks like an AC motor attached to the bike and the way it works and made by a company called Hercules, which I know Hercules from the pedal bikes from England.

So I didn’t do enough research to see if there was a connection there between the two brands. They were, it was just neat. But at the end of the day, I’m like, uh, what? Whatever. It’s. It’s a rotary and it’s a dirt bike, and I wouldn’t know what to do with it. Couple fun facts, right? He was not trained at a university.

Pretty interesting for a guy that created that. Like Dr. [01:08:00] Porsche. Yeah, he was big time Nazi sympathizer participator guy, but did give us the 7 8, 7 B. So cool. Well, indirectly, I suppose. Indirectly. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That’s, that’s by, uh, by proxy. Well, that wraps up, lost and found for this month. Well, now it’s time to move on to random new EVs and concept cars, but we dovetail right into Resto Mod and there’s another British company converting classic cars to EVs, and this time it’s Aston Martin dbs, and we’re talking dbs, fours, fives, and sixes.

They’re starting with the DB sixes, which not to be confused with the famous James Bond. DB five is a slightly larger version with similar lines to it. What I got out of this super awesome, but the price tag is extremely hefty because a number one, you have to buy a rare Aston Martin to begin with, and then you have to convert it.

It’s gonna cost you upwards of, anybody wanna take a guess? Million bucks. Yes sir. That’s a [01:09:00] million dollars for an ev. How many Teslas can I buy for that? So, okay, I’m gonna compare this to a nine 11. How many nine elevens do you see these days that somebody cut and put wide fenders on and ruined a car that was once valuable?

Because at the time they thought that was the cool thing to do and now you look at it and go, oh my God, you destroyed that car. That’s what I see. But you have to look at it for the time period. If you’re looking at the seventies and eighties, they made a lot of nine elevens. There’s a lot of nine elevens.

You could say the same thing. Why’d you turn that piece of historical, you know, investment into a race car. There’s a lot of nine elevens that have been thrashed and trashed, so there’s so many of them. Unless it’s Emerson Fit, Aldi’s nine 11. Does it matter if it was cut up? It was just somebody’s base model nine 11 At the end of the day, not, yeah, you’re right.

Not at the time, but now, but you know, to me it’s like, you know, I looked at, I think we talked about this on graduate as well, you know, I, I’ve been looking at EV swap in the nine 11, the 73, and you know, the thing that appeals to me about that is, you know, there’s a company EV West that does a swap. But the thing that’s great about it is a, it’s a [01:10:00] direct bulletin.

There’s no cutting the body, there’s no modifying the chassis That really appeals to me. Right. And the kit is something like $15,000, which is basically the cost of a rebuild of the motor itself. Right. That’s very true. So you got, you got a car like mine that the motor’s been sitting outside the car.

Since 1986. Maybe that’s the way to go. But what I really like about that is you can take it back out. You didn’t hurt anything. I have to assume that’s what they’ve done here. But I don’t understand the million dollar price tag. If I can convert a nine 11 for under $20,000, what kind of batteries exactly are we using for this Aston Martin here?

That’s a million dollars. They’re shaken, not stirred. They’re special, right? Special ones. Or they’re doing some special body work and some reconfiguring of this car that, you know, is gonna take it out of collector view in the future years if they try to cut it back. So, or, or turn it back. So, I don’t know.

Sounds cool. But then again, you know, it gets back to lots of things we’ve talked about. If a real car enthusiast wants that feel, wants that sound, I think you’re going the wrong way. In the DB six. And again, after 2030, somebody’s [01:11:00] gonna look at this when they’re, all of their cars are EVs and go, man, I wish this still had the, the petrol engine in it, because that’s different.

So how much does it devalue? A classic even they’re gonna turn around and sell it for a million bucks. It’s not gonna be worth a million dollars. Right, because let’s face it, it’s no longer. In American terms, a numbers matching car. Not that older European cars had a whole numbers matching system like the Americans did, but it, it kind of takes away from it.

But, so yes, from the outside it’s still DB six or DB five, but yeah, it’s not James Bonds. Right. Even though Q might have built an E V DB five for, for Sean Connery. Well, and it’s crazy ’cause DB sixes are half a million dollars right now. You know, you buy one and you do that to it and then you know you go to swap it back.

But it’s crazy. Well I heard that Volvo’s making a game change. Apparently they’re getting on with the EV revolution as well and I think they’ve made a commitment to go electric only by 2030. But along with that, they’re also making a sustainability commitment and so they’re switching some of their interior [01:12:00] materials of construction to more sustainable textiles.

So I am kind of surprised, I didn’t realize that Volvo was still offering real leather interiors. ’cause I thought pretty much most everybody had moved away from real leather to, you know, synthetic leather, which is something the plastic, aside from your Ferraris or your Porsches or, or you know, something very high end.

So kudos for them, but also more kudos for them, I guess for not. Wanting to continue to slaughter cows to make car seats. I think they’ve got a whole slew of materials that they’re going to use that are more sustainable. Recycled pet bottles, polyethylene, not pet like an animal, but p e t bottles, corks from wine industry, materials like that that are more bio and recyclable they’re going to use to make interior textiles essentially.

And apparently they will still offer some, I didn’t realize either. Apparently they have wool interiors. I guess maybe they use some wool in, in some of their fabrics, but they, well, that’s gonna be itchy. Ugh. They’re, well, it depends. [01:13:00] Some, some of it can be woven quite smooth, but Yeah. Well, if people complain about leather being hot in the summer, what is a wool set of seats gonna be like?

I don’t know. There’s so many things shocking me in this, in this article. They’re also committing to making sure that, I guess who, whatever sheep farms that they’re getting their shear wool from, certified responsible wool sourcing. They’re making sense. Does the Volvo come with like a. Full history, medical shots and like adoption papers too.

I mean, it’s like an episode of Portlandia when you go and buy a new Volvo. Right? Who’s the problem though? What does it smell like? Like sheep? What? Well, your seats might smell like maybe a fine aged wine if it’s coming from the corks. Just kidding. Well, they’re calling this new textile Nordic Co, if I pronounce that correctly.

And And you’re right, it’s made from a combination of different recycled materials. I just have a feeling that you’re gonna get in the car and go, cool. This feels like when they make a playground out of recycled tires. No, you know, probably it’s gonna feel like pleather. I also think [01:14:00] it’s a lot along the lines of that Mini Cooper that we talked about, where they call that the strip, where that guy designed things out of cork and other materials in that Mini Cooper that we joked about, you know, who’s gonna buy that strip down race car.

But now it sounds like Volvo might be taking a page out of that book. I mean, honestly, as long as the touch sensation isn’t gross, weird, you know, can’t be any worse than that soft touch stuff from the early two thousands that every European car had, which is great until, you know, 15 to 20 years later it becomes this sticky, nightmare mess that stains everything.

But anyway, digress. I mean, as long as it’s not a weird feeling, who cares? I mean, it’s better that we find a use for all this plastic and waste that we’re generating that’s, you know, more sustainable and, and if they can then re recycle the materials in the future. I mean, that’s just a wind for the environment.

So, I mean, as long as it’s not terrible, I don’t see a problem with it. I mean, good on them for innovating in that space. What does it smell like? I don’t know, [01:15:00] crayons. That’s what everybody says Volkswagen smell like after a while. They do smell like old crayons. It’s weird. It’s gonna have a smell, right?

Every car has a smell and like all E 36 M three smell a certain way, all you know, certain whatever, smell. Same way it’s gonna have a smell, especially as it starts to break down. And it, well, as long as it’s not offensive, who cares? I don’t know. What does partially broken down plastic smell like? Not good.

Well, moving on, I’m going to bring up a name that some of you may know and others may not. Gordon Murray awkwardly paused for you to guess who that is. Former designer of McLaren has spun off and started to develop his own cars. The very first one he designed, he calls it the T 50, and now he’s introducing a cheaper version, even though the T 50 isn’t available for anybody called the T 33.

So I’m already kind of thinking like Tesla Ss versus Tesla three and all this. I bring this car up, I was digging around a little bit and maybe it was the gods of the interweb. You know, targeted ads and things like that, and things coming across my desk. I happen to be having a [01:16:00] conversation with, and spoiler alert here, Gonzalo, the c e o of heel tread.

And he mentioned this as his, you know, sexiest car of all time. Poster on his wall. This is the car he strives to get. He wants this T 50 Gordon Murray. And so as I was digging around, I, I discovered all this other stuff about it. I think it’s beautiful. The first time I saw it I was like, wow, it looks like the modern interpretation of the F one in that orange, that bright orange color, I think is.

Is gorgeous. The silver a little less, but let’s be honest, it is the, it is a newer version of the F one, which I think is really, really cool. In the back I think is fantastic. It’s interesting how much is the T 33 going to be? And I don’t see any effects on like performance wise. Nope, I don’t, I don’t think there’s really anything out there.

’cause there’s not a whole lot of information on the T 50 either. I know that production will be limited to about a hundred units. So you know that when they’re building cars boutique like that, you know, sub 1000 numbers, they’re going to go for astronomical pricing. I mean, I’m gonna guess here, 250 k easily.

It’s gotta [01:17:00] be, gotta be more than that. I’m looking at the T 50 Nick Lauda version with the four liter B 12. There we go. That’s gonna be incredible. That’s the big, is there a fan in the back? I can’t quite figure that out. Yeah, that’s like this weird chaparral thing that they’re doing with the fan in the back.

And if you notice this, like you mentioned about the F one, because I believe Gordon Murray was involved even way back then with McLaren. It has that almost centered seating position with the offset driver’s seat and all that. So it’s almost a single seat cockpit and you know, Lambo style doors and whatnot.

So it is an interesting design, you’re right, it’s kind of a modern version of the F one, not a fan of low offset wheels. I just, I, I, I miss the deep dish wheels of the, the eighties and nineties. It has some paani look to it too from the rear. I mean, he’s definitely borrowing some design cues. I think the headlights look like he stole ’em right off of a nine 18, you know, it, it’s just, there’s only a couple designs at the end of the day.

Right. I, I’m not saying it’s ugly, but I feel like I’ve seen some of this before. I think that’s a good point. The more you look at it, I saw it [01:18:00] a few weeks ago and then I saw it again earlier this week. It does start to look a little bit familiar, which is concerning. Right. You know, you see something and maybe the first time you’re like, ah, I don’t know.

And then it grows on you and you start to appreciate this is kind of the opposite. To me it was, it was kind of hot flash at, at the beginning. I wonder how sustainable that is. Right, right. You start to like really looking at the side view now you’re like, is the proportion. Right. But yeah, I love the interior.

You know, obviously being kind of an independent. Boutique manufacturer, they can’t do all the crazy electronics. So I like all the toggle switches on the right. Yeah, like the old style, just flip switches is really, really cool. I bet it’s amazing to drive. Ah, it’s not my cup of tea. And the rear end is not particularly attractive.

Kind of reminiscent of the G T 40 that has that angry bird’s rear end look. I give you that. I give you that. I mean, like I see, I see the pagani in there too. You know where that fan is? Think about those four exhaust pipes coming up the middle. It’s like the same thing, you know? So it’s odd, but I’m curious to see what the numbers are.

Again, nothing about whether it’s gonna be a hybrid or if it’s gonna be an EV or or whatever. [01:19:00] Cool to look at for the moment. You know, you need to have the Matchbox car version in my case, that’s in my collection, that’s for sure. But kind of switching gears to another car that triggered an emotion for me on multiple levels.

The Pek or the, however you don’t wanna pronounce it, some people say Peach, et cetera, but Pek as in Ferdinand Pek, the cousin, nephew, the Porsche Pek family, there is now a Swiss manufacturer using the Pek name to come out with a classic sports car. Look for the electric age. So this is not. Ev rest Oma.

This is a ground up designed in their, you know, laboratory car. They’re boasting 603 horsepower and it’s supposed to be a GT Cruiser, right? A Boulevard Cruiser Gran Touring car. The Swiss Mark Pek was founded in 2017. I think that coincides right along with when Ferdinand Pek passed away. But I was also kind of thinking, you know, what other Swiss brands have there been out there outside of Isra, right?

The ator and all the prototypes that they built and stuff like [01:20:00] that. You don’t see a lot of cars coming out of, out of Switzerland or the Swiss Alps because all the restrictions they have. Obviously it’s gonna be an ev, it’s gonna be quiet, right? So that’s important. I thought it was low weight. 39 68 is the curb weight on the car, which compared to a lot of other EVs, you’re hearing Teslas and some of these Audis weighing five and 6,000 pounds with their battery packs and whatnot.

Tanya knows more about the kilowatt hours and they’re claiming a 75 kilowatt hour battery that’s gonna allow up to 310 miles of range. So I thought that was pretty good. Zero to 60 numbers of three seconds and zero to one 20 in nine seconds. Before I give you my hot take on this car, I wanna get your guys’ feedback on what you think it looks like.

The profile looks like a Ferrari that I can’t remember the numbers of. I think the side profile nailed it. I think it’s gorgeous. To me it’s kinda Aston Martin ish Ferrari, California ish, but better. And then in the article, as I start to go down, I start to see other angles. The front end reminds me of [01:21:00] the t v r was the, one of the late nineties T vs.

Tuscan. I think the back’s okay, but then when you see the Threequarter front shot, I’m like, Nope, I’m out. It’s like, uh, nope, I’m out. Love it. Vanilla Aston Martin looking kind of car, but side profile is beautiful like that. That’s wall art, like, you know, poster. The rest, not so much. So I, I agree with the front end, very astin lotus, look like the old LANs with that big kind of gaping, you know, hole.

And in some angles if you close one eye kind of looks like Miata from the front as well. The back has that look like, uh, 400 z It’s got a similar tail to it, which I actually like that coming together of the, of the wide hips and the, the integrated ducktail and the lift pack and all that. The side profile, I agree, dead on looks really good, but you know, which cart reminds me of the most?

And Tanya’s gonna go, oh yeah, that one, the alpha male. Eight C I can see that. Yeah. Window shape maybe. Yep. Yeah, it has a very similar style of look. Even when you look at the headlights and stuff, you’re like [01:22:00] really? Looks like the Alpha Rome male, and I’m okay with that. I think this car would look better in a different color other than this tungsten that it comes in maybe with some accents and things.

I think it would look kind of cool in something else. I’d like to see some other pictures of it, but I would drive one. I think this is really neat. I don’t see any interior shots. Something about the back is very familiar and I can’t quite place it. Is it another t v r, like the server z Z car? It looks like an old Z car.

Yeah. You know, and you gotta give ’em props though. I mean that, you know, a lot of concept cars come out or you know, these, these boutique manufacturers and they’re like, eh, you can’t actually, this looks like something that could be built right away and sell really well. So they’re saying we’re gonna have to wait until 2024 though.

So we’re a little ways off before we get to see final production, get to see the car, you know, behind, you know, with Chris Harris behind the wheel on on top gear or something like that. But I’m really curious to see what happens. I don’t know that they listed a price tag on this yet, but I can only imagine that this car is gonna cost a hundred grand, if not more.

I mean there’s, you nailed it. 99,000. Oh [01:23:00] no, sorry, that’s the competitor. Yeah. Yeah. They’re gonna compete against the Audi e-tron gt, which we mentioned earlier with the Stig. So kind of cool. Something different, you know, very definitely pretty to look at. I, I would also add that to my Hot Wheels collection if there was one available.

Me too. So the last one isn’t something that’s going to be mainstream or coming to the market or something you can purchase anytime soon, but I think it’s pretty impressive feat by these engineering students essentially. Apologize for mispronunciation, but at the end, Hoven University of Technology, 22 students designed and built a hundred percent solar powered camper van.

It took them nine months from design to build, which is pretty impressive considering their students and they don’t have access, you know, necessarily to forward manufacturing or equivalent. And they took it on a, what was, I think technically supposed to be a 3000 kilometer journey from the Netherlands to Spain.

But the vehicle actually only did 2000 of, [01:24:00] of the kilometers. So just over 1200 miles. I believe. They, they had to tow it the first a thousand miles of the journey due to some sort of drivetrain issue, which remarkably they were able to solve and fix and, you know, reprint a part or whatever that they needed to get it, you know, up and running.

So I think it’s a, it’s a good testament to these students and the capability of their solar powered car. We can easily get into rah rah, solar power. How stupid when it rains. You don’t have sun takes two, three days for this thing to, you know, fully charge. You say, eh, that’s so stupid, blah, blah. Take it for the engineering feat and the capability of these 22 individuals.

I think it’s pretty impressive and, and good on them. So I have two questions. One of them I’m gonna ask for Donovan, which is, what does it smell like? That’s a.

The, yeah, burning Electric. And the other one is, I applaud them for their ability to build this thing. [01:25:00] ’cause it’s pretty epic with like the West Flia roof and these wings that like come out, I guess, which are solar panels and all this crazy stuff that it has. But why is it shaped? I. Like a giant Johnny Cab slash suppository.

I mean, what is going on with this thing? I mean, they must have had some sort of design reason. Maybe, you know, they’re, if they’re students, maybe they did some aerodynamic calculations that told ’em that that’s what they should be doing. I don’t know. Or maybe they wanted something funky, futuristic looking.

How heavy are those doors? Those things are huge. So they say the whole thing weighs 3,700 pounds. No way. The specs listed put the weight at 1700 kilograms or 3,748 pounds. Wow. That, I mean, like any other RV that’s made out of tinfoil and, well, it’s fair strips. It’s supposedly aluminum chassis with glass fiber and aluminum foam core on the arrow shell.

So there we, so I’m gonna give him, I’m gonna give him this. If their solar technology is [01:26:00] what we’re really focused on here, which it is, it’s not the vehicle, no. If that, if that solar roof works and if those, whatever those butterfly wing things are, right. When it’s fully extended work, you have my attention because you know, this is something we’ve been talking about, you know, Tesla, and it was a Fisker promised, you know, these solar roofs and they really never went anywhere.

Wouldn’t it be really cool if you could charge the batteries while you’re driving around and use the battery power at night or when it rains, yada. Yeah. Blah, blah, blah. Like you were saying, if this works, that’s the point of this. At the end of the day, not the fact it looks like a Johnny Cam. Well, and I believe that there’s a time and a place for everything, so to speak, right?

Diversification of the energy portfolio is not a bad thing. There can be a good use for this. Maybe it’s not on the roof of your Tesla or Tecan or whatever as you’re going to the grocery store, but let’s go back to those. City buses that are doing nothing but sitting around or crawling through traffic.

What if they had some solar panel wings that [01:27:00] came out and they’re able to capture some of that sunlight and, you know, transfer to battery recharge or things like that. Maybe there are applications for it and we can diversify the energy portfolio that not solely bound to one thing or the other. You know, they probably would’ve gotten that first thousand kilometers distance if they hadn’t been charging their iPhones on the trip.

I wanna know how they got 22 people inside that Johnny Cab. No, no. So in fairness, the issue was allegedly had nothing to do with the solar panels, but was a mechanical issue again, with the drive train. And there’s only room for two people. Wait, that thing’s the size of a school bus and it can, well, it’s designed for two people because they have like fricking like pull out double sofa bed thing in there and all, and all this other stuff.

It’s a camper van, right? It’s, it’s not designed like a big RV to bring, you know, you and your family of six and the dog. It’s maybe two, maybe three people. I don’t know. But so the real question is, which of the two of the 22 got to take it on the journey, [01:28:00] Donovan? I know what it smells like. It smells like Ikea.

It smells like Swedish peoples. Uh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, you have, Ikea has all that like super lightweight furniture that you gotta assemble. But this is, but this is the Netherlands, not Sweden. So it doesn’t, it doesn’t matter. I mean, what do you think they put in that thing? It’s all like three pound tables from like Ikea and stuff.

So I guess we gotta move on since we’re already talking, you know, we’re talking about these new EVs because we would be, we would be remiss not to bring up Tesla. Oh Lord. I mean, nothing bad this month. We already knew that Elon moved to Austin, um, personally or a year or so ago, I guess now. And he lives in one of these solar eindhoven things.

No, there’s too many round edges on, on the, uh, eindhoven solar. The glass won’t break if you throw something at it. Yeah, there’s not, they didn’t put the laser beams on the windshield, so to wipe the water away. Yeah. So he personally moved to Texas to be closer to SpaceX and all [01:29:00] this other stuff. I’m sure he had issue, you know, other issues.

Being angry at California has been recently announced that he is going to move the headquarters. Out of Palo Alto to Austin. Nice. So is every other Californian along with every other big California company. And part of it is citing the fact that California is just ridiculous in different ways in terms of just congestion and cost of living, you know, aside from the very stringent regulations that they have in place and whatnot.

So, uh, it’ll be interesting to see how happy those California workers will be to move to Texas. They don’t plan on shutting down the facilities they have in California, if anything, they’re, you know, alleging to ramp up production in the, in the manufacturing plants there. So what I am hopeful here, On this one is Tesla moves to Austin.

Steve Wynn owns DeLorean, which is also in Humble Texas, not too far. They get together and we get an Evie DeLorean. This is what I’m waiting for [01:30:00] people the way it should have always been a hundred thousand percent on, but in other Tesla news, there’s another drag race. And it’s this 14 minute video that you gotta fast forward to the nine minute mark and then again to like the, I don’t know which minute mark you’d see anything remotely interesting.

But it’s between a thousandth horsepower and McLaren, whatever the hell it is. And a Tesla plaid SS version. I believe they did three runs. They did a standstill drag race run, which the Tesla obliterated the McLaren, which off the line to no one’s surprise. Right? I mean I, and who was to, no one’s surprised that was present for this drag racing.

I mean, off the line electrics have the advantage, we already know this. Then they did a rolling start drag due to the fact that of course the McLaren’s gonna suck off a, a dead stop line and the Tesla still really obliterated it. Yeah. And then their third one was a rolling start with advantage to the McLaren.

So I think it started with however [01:31:00] many feet ahead of the Tesla and the Tesla still caught up basically. And I think it was ended up being like a nose to nose kind of finish. Hey, I gotta add to the funny part of the end of this. Not only did the Tesla outrun the McLaren, it also apparently has better brakes.

Yes. Because the guy in the McLaren must have had a code brown moment. ’cause essentially he ran out, he was still racing. He ran outta runway or whatever they were drag racing on. He ran outta drag race. Space and, and apparently literally managed to stop the McLaren an inch from hitting like a, a fence or a wall or something.

The barrier at the end of the end of the drag strip, I I, he did some late breaking, I have to say. I mean, you know, we talked about Ken Block earlier. Obviously he’s sold off Hogan. This is another Hogan video. He’s kind of distanced himself from that, even though he is kind of still affiliated or whatever.

It’s still Hogan stuff, it’s whatever. You’re right. The first like seven minutes is all about like cleaning products and, oh, isn’t my car cool? And all this kind of thing. It’s, it’s whatever. I looked at the clickbait, you [01:32:00] know, McLaren versus plaid, and this is the same as the Corvette one they did, which the Corvette also got obliterated.

It was some like 2000 horsepower, you know, nitrous injected quad turbo Corvette or whatever. And it was like, all right, yep, the, the Tesla wins every time. And I went, great. Hey, look, yet another stupid drag race between a Tesla and something else that’s gonna get crushed. But you’re right, that ending made the whole video worth it.

So I just tell you guys to skip like the first 13 minutes and just watch that last poll. ’cause it’s the best after. I lost interest after about five seconds. ’cause like you said, there’s a bajillion of these. I had an idea. That’s not drag racing anymore, right? Nobody cares. I wanna see a triumph. T R seven and a Fiat X one nine drag race.

Yes. Old school stuff. Do you think that video was long? Wait until they figure out how to keep those running long enough to get to the end of the, that’s the drag race. I wanna see what do they smell like? Like fire and oil and. They’re running rich, that’s for sure. There’s other Tesla news this month, which [01:33:00] is kind of funny, but also kind of scary.

Uh, you know, honestly, this is more, I feel like sensational clickbaity than anything else. The way the headline reads Tesla attempted drivers with insane mode and now is tracking them to judge safety experts say it’s ludicrous. Honestly, that title has nothing to do with the point that’s trying to be made here.

And so what’s happening is Tesla’s doing another beta test of their, you know, full autonomous driving bullshit that again, even Elon is admitting doesn’t really work yet. Okay? It’s not full self-driving. They’re doing like another beta rollout. They want to do actual testing with Tesla owners as opposed to just dummy vehicles going around.

And so he’s created this vetting process where he’s created this checklist, if you will, of grading scale for judging who will be allowed to beta test this new software update. So essentially he is tracking how people are driving. It’s a very [01:34:00] stringent grading scale to the extreme of any kind of like hard braking.

You get docked points. And so you have to get like a perfect a hundred, a hundred score or however a scale is to be allowed to beta test the new full self driving software. And he is doing this because he only wants safe, trustworthy people to be trying this out to be the Guinea pig, if you will. So it’s not so much that he’s trying to spy on everybody and, and, and track their every moves and control their driving habits.

Not to say that things don’t morph into other things, but it’s supposed to be this vetting process for people to pilot the new beta software. And honestly, this isn’t new. If people are gonna get all in there, oh my God, everybody’s spying on me, me, me, me. Guess what? Who was it Progressive? Did this already like.

Five, 10 years ago where they gave you that little sensor to plug into O B D port and they were tracking how you drive and you were supposed to save on your car insurance and all this bullshit. So guess what? People, it’s already been out there, been there, done that. Let’s not go conspiracy theory.[01:35:00]

Ancient automotive enthusiast contend that it is Skynet at the end of the day. But Donovan, go ahead. How many ways can we rip this part article apart? Right? It’s just, um, first of all, experts say it’s ludicrous. That was, that’s obviously a Tesla mode, right? Yeah. So either somebody scanned an article and they’re like, oh, there’s ludicrous.

Let’s give somebody the fastest mode in the car, and if they don’t drive it safely, then we’re gonna do what? I don’t think it even has anything to do with the mode in the car. It’s just nowhere have I seen where it says the beta’s being tested in the cars with the ludicrous mode and, and, and whatnot.

It’s just a thousand Tesla owners. Are going to get to pilot the new software and he is vetting them by tracking how they’re driving. So, so two things on that. First of all, all those dudes from Hogan that we just talked about, they’re out, they’re off the list. Second of all, I’m wondering, can you game the system by using the current, we’re gonna put air quotes around autonomous driving, you know, level whatever to get the perfect score.

So you’re actually using the current system to qualify yourself for the [01:36:00] new system. Probably not, ’cause I assume he’s able to track that. We definitely need Edson for these particular articles, but you know, I don’t know if you guys have ever noticed, like every TE Tesla article you read is. Something they’re doing wrong or something That’s great.

And then you, you get in the actual cars and realize they’re doing it all right. And this article looks just like another attempt to twist it. Tanya, like you were saying, around to make it seem like, oh, they’re at it again. They’re doing something dumb. They’re, you know, you don’t wanna buy a Tesla. I don’t understand why everybody has the hate for the Teslas, but.

I know, I think Etson Paul’s, we keep calling him Etson, on, on Garage. Rat, you know, showed me things like his, in his model three, where, you know, there was a, a feature somebody asked for, Hey, can we get these cameras now? And, and I’m gonna butcher it for the Tesla owners out there. But there’s like the rear view and then there’s like the corner ones that weren’t normally on and somebody tweeted it or something and Musk was like, oh, that’s a great idea.

Sent the software upgrade and boom, now they’re there. He also thought that Open Butthole was a good idea. I mean, come on now. Yeah, you don’t remember [01:37:00] that for the gas tank. It’s like, yeah, you open the gas tank voice command, you say open butthole and then it’s open my butthole to like open the trunk or something ridiculous.

He, he thinks everything’s a good idea, but still, you know, the fact that we’re quick to market with something, somebody made a suggestion, that’s a great idea, let’s do it. That to me makes Tesla the winner in, in the automotive market. So yeah. But it’s also kind of scary too that your car is controlled by a over the air software update so they could render you useless.

I also heard about something that came across my desk earlier about that uh, Tesla is also talking about the cars will put in their own orders for maintenance parts. Can you imagine if the car ordered its own set of tires suddenly and then you got docked, you know, 1200 bucks? ’cause it’s the only tire that’s available for a Tesla.

No, thank you. There’s certain parts of that I want to be disconnected from. There’s all kinds of, and you should get Paul in here and do maybe just a specific Tesla interview, but there’s all kinds of things about eventually, like he can’t buy his car. My understanding is he can only lease it because they plan to have this back as a fleet later automated.

That’s the Ferrari, that’s the Ferrari pyramid scheme. [01:38:00] Well, it’s a, it’s so they can basically have ’em as automated Ubers down the road and they’ll be able to go, you can send it, pick up your dry, clean, all kind of crazy stuff. So I, I don’t know. It it, I think it’s pretty interesting, but I’ll take that 84 g t i you were talking about earlier.

Me too. That’s all I need. Me too. And with a big sigh, we move on to our next segment. Lowered expectation. Oh, it’s got, it’s the last time you’ve been on, things have evolved. You’ve got my attention now. So, you know, I’ve gone to a few Porsche parades over the years and you know, we’ve all done the car show and the swap meets and things like that.

And there’s always, you know, there’s always that one guy kind of back in the corner. He is selling like, you know, his hand painted art of, you know, Steve McQueen in the nine 17, or you know, even Dr. McDreamy and his nine elevens and all those kinds of stuff. But this latest one that I came across this article in Autoweek, where there’s an artist that’s using these natural mosaics to.

Paint pictures of legendary race cars. And I [01:39:00] thought this one of the nine 17 made of butterflies was actually quite beautiful. It’s, it’s really cool looking and it’s one of those things that you can just kind of continue to stare at and kind of move your head and just see different things and you kind of zoom in and out of the perspective.

And I really do appreciate stuff like this. And I know it’s, it’s kind of car adjacent and probably well out of the all posters.com price range, you know, to get a full print of that or whatever. But I just thought it was kind of neat. It is cool. I feel bad for the butterflies that died. I hope you didn’t kill them to make the work.

Yeah. And that’s why I qualified for lower expectations. ’cause that’s where my brain went to. How do you stage that? ’cause it’s not painted, it’s actually made, you know, these different, uh, renderings that he does are done with, you know, natural materials and things like that. So it’s cool. But on the same token, I’m like, wow, that’s, that’s a lot of effort there.

It’s sad at the same time. Exactly. Right. How many butterflies were killed in the making of this? I was like, it’s gotta be several hundred right. Can you imagine? This guy’s out there? I mean, people collect butterflies. I mean, it’s a thing, but I mean whatever. It’s very creative. So right along with [01:40:00] that, but on an entirely different side of things, begging the question what could go wrong?

Ford removes the credit score qualification requirement for 84 month loans. First of all, I didn’t even know seven year loans were like a thing, but good god. I mean, what could, what could possibly go wrong? Everybody gets an F one 50. It’s like an episode of Oprah and you get an F one 50 and you get an F one 50 and you get an F one.

That’s okay. I don’t want an F one 50. Thanks. I mean, 0% a p r on a seven year loan on a $70,000 truck. I mean, it’s not going to suck me in the door. But for somebody that’s looking to buy a truck right now, if you can get one despite the semiconductor shortage, that’s really not a bad deal. I, I don’t know how I feel about 84 months of of interest though.

It’s gonna be one of those, you’re gonna go down there and they’re gonna go, oh, that was this one particular stock model and we don’t have that one anymore. It’s the maverick, right? You, you came in for the F one 50, but you’re getting the Maverick how long before these end up at title loan, right? That’s crazy.

Yeah, you can do, I know you can [01:41:00] do longer finance on, you know, exotics and things, so not crazy, but 0% a p r. That’s right. Amazing. But, you know, and the other thing that’s crazy is, you know, all of these particularly right now are holding their value. There’s a good chance you buy that, drive it for two years and sell it back to Ford for what you have in it or more.

That’s true. And the other thing I will warn people about is when you’re sitting at the table, there’s always a lot of pressure to buy a new car, especially if you’re excited about it and the sales rep wants to get their commission and all that kind of stuff, even though they tell you they’re, they’re not paid on commission.

One of the things my wife did many years ago, and I, I still will never forget this, we were buying a VW and it was one of their promotion, you know, weekends, we just happened to be there at the right time. There’s always that, you know, zero down, zero a p r, blah, blah, blah, blah, get the cart for free, you know, you know, drive, arrive and drive.

You know, that whole campaign that they had. So we’re there, and she’s sitting down and she’s kind of furiously scribbling on a piece of paper and this and the, uh, right in front of the financiers desk. And she’s like, what are you doing? She’s like, we need to change the terms of this loan. And she’s like, what do you mean?

She’s like, your [01:42:00] 0% a p r loan is actually more expensive than if I take the shorter, more aggressive loan with a higher yield. I will end up paying less over the period than I will with the zero. And, and she was like, the, the lady that was there was like, that’s the first time somebody’s actually sat down and done the math.

And I’m like, yeah, that’s my wife, right? So I still give her mad props for that. And I like to share that story as a reminder to people to just take a minute when you’re sitting there and take the pressure off and breathe and think about what you’re signing on the dotted line on. So do the rough calculations yourself.

If you do the math, see where you end up. ’cause some of these things are not to your advantage over the long run. I, I have many stories along there. I’ll give you two quick ones. First of all, I’ve, I’ve discovered money factor and lease. If you guys don’t know what that is, you need to, that’s how they calculate your finance rate and they hide that from you.

So do your research there. But one of my ex-girlfriends, we went in and, uh, she was buying a car and I, I didn’t think about it at the time, but they said, yeah, yeah, go ahead. You know, take it, we’re gonna have to have you come back in a couple days to finish up the paperwork. So she took [01:43:00] it and when they came back, they had dropped her credit score and, oh, we made this mistake and did all this.

And, you know, we told ’em, give back the keys. And she was in love with the car. I’d never seen that scam before. But, you know, another, this apparently is my Paul Etson podcast night, but we’ve been, I think I’ve, I’ve talked to Eric, we’ve been looking for off roaders. So we went to Jeep and, and been trying to buy some Jeeps.

So Jeep currently, and they might still have it on their website, has this 2 75 a month deal for their hybrid four xe, which of course doesn’t exist. I went into three different dealers called all of the metro ones. Nobody has the stock. So we found a dealer that had two and we had gone into a previous dealer and said, we’ll take two.

But they didn’t have any. So we went to this dealer and said, if we can do the, if do the numbers right, we’ll take both of ’em. At the end of the story, first of all, the, the first numbers they came back with on a 2 75. A month loan was $890 a month, right? So we looked at the paperwork, said, no, that’s quite right.

Paul’s m b a super smart guy. Before it was all said and done, I kid you not, he was teaching the finance manager how to quick calculate [01:44:00] costs and figure out factors and stuff on the loan in the dealership. So I say that for two reasons. One is Paul’s super smart, but to your point, the people that that are pulling the numbers don’t always know, right?

Sometimes they’re just given a calculator or a, or a formula or whatever, or they’re, they’re trying to stick you. So yeah, definitely do those numbers and, uh, I, I’ll give props to Honda, uh, another future sponsor of your podcast, hopefully for leases. They’re the only, as far as I know, they’re the only manufacturer that does not allow their dealers to change the money factor on a lease.

So that’s how they, they, the dealers make more money. They have to do what corporate gives them, which gets us back to this Ford, uh, 0% a p r. How are the dealers gonna make any money off of this? Right? Again, shopping. Recently I went into a Nissan dealer and they had dent proofing as part of their add-ons.

Dent proofing. Right. Good luck. Yeah, they’ve got the undercoating, all that. So I, I would have to believe that any kind of zero A P R F one 50 probably has dent proofing and muffler bearings. Does it come with muffler bearings and blinker fluid? Yep. [01:45:00] Blinker fluid. So, oh Lord. The, see, this is why it’s on lowered expectations.

Speaking of lowered expectations, how about the United nude low res? You have me at nude. Another art piece. You know, I’m a big fan of Tron. I mean, if folks know me, they know this to be true. I like all the things about that movie, both the original and the new one. You know, those super angular, futuristic cars.

But when I saw this, I was like W T F, and apparently this is a real car. And the part that really got me about this, like I could have. Care less like, oh, this is some, you know, Ray Night Rider or BSS for a movie that somebody made publicity Sunday. It was made for a united nude, which apparently they make like sports apparel and all this kind of stuff, you know, you know, yoga pants and all that kind of, it’s shoe company.

Yeah. Whatever. But, but their definition for this car is and abstract low resolution version of the Lamborghini Kunta. And I’m like, what? [01:46:00] I mean everything is square. Even the steering wheel is like a hexagon. I’m like, I don’t understand. At le it was, it’s bogus. I mean, when they lift the lid on this thing, ’cause it’s like a big old like, you know, single cockpit Lotus seven underneath or whatever.

It’s ridiculous. And then I’m looking at these numbers and I start laughing and it’s like boasts power numbers of a five kilowatt electric motor paired with a single speed transmission. And I’m like, this is like the Bugatti baby two. What does it do? Like 30 miles an hour and it goes like 10 feet. This is ridiculous.

Yes, exactly. It only goes 31 miles an hour. It’s insane. Right. And you can’t wear pants in it. Apparently it’s, I know you have to be united and nude, whatever that means. It has to be low reds, everything’s blurred when you drive it. Right. But the best part is the part that gets me and goes back to what I always say about auctions on bring a trailer and other places like that, that people have lost.

They’re ever loving minds. I mean, this isn’t even like a piece of history, right? This is a publicity stunt car, 111 grand. I’m like, [01:47:00] really? I wouldn’t give you 111 bucks for this thing. Like, it’s, it’s terrible. What’s crazy is if you look at this, the winner of the auction, it’s, uh, United Low new. No, I’m kidding.

But what does it smell like, right? I don’t wanna know in that one. I don’t, I don’t wanna know either. As we continue to lower our expectations, Tanya mentioned California earlier. What’s going on? This is, I guess, car adjacent, if you will, for fuel adjacent. We already know California is very strict emissions laws.

They’ve got their California Air Resources Board, a k a carb regulating a lot of things around passenger cars and whatnot in the state. But they’re going further and saying that starting in 2024, there will be a new law passed, banning gas powered lawn equipment. Stop. The world is done. It’s over.

Lawnmowers and leaf blowers will need to be electric because allegedly, what I guess the scientists or whomever have calculated is that one hour [01:48:00] lawnmower use is equivalent to driving 300 miles from LA to Vegas, and one hour of leaf blower use is apparently equivalent to driving 1100 miles from LA to Denver.

What economy of scale did they calculate that on? Because either my, my lawnmower literally uses a gallon in an hour. So what it also says is that they’re saying that they’re, the, the bestselling commercial lawnmower for an hour emits as much smog forming pollution as you would by driving a 2016 Toyota Camry around 300 miles.

It doesn’t really matter because everybody’s gonna be in Austin by the time this, uh, law passes anyway. There’s no grass there anyway, so it doesn’t matter. Right. So at any rate, if you’re in California, you better start stocking up on your electric leaf blowers and lawnmowers before you can’t find any. I mean, so with that ban that’s gonna hurt the landscaping industry, agriculture industry, it’s gonna hurt the residents.

It’s gonna, I mean, there’s gonna be a lot of riding lawnmowers for sale, which would be awesome. We’re just gonna have to go to California to [01:49:00] get it. Whoever’s starting that, you know, cars and bids version for lawn equipment, let me know. I wanna get in on that early. No, what we need is somebody who’s going to retrofit batteries onto the gas powered lawnmowers.

I think it’s just a solar powered. Blower. I think that, there you go. Problem solved. We need those guys and gals in the Netherlands to help us. That’s so terrible. But let’s live in the mood a little bit and talk about our favorite section, most anticipated section of the show, the Florida Man stories.

Well, our first one is, More of a public service announcement and kind of sad, not kind of sad. It is sad. So, we’ll, we’ll start off low and then end it on a high note. I, our expectations were already low, so, so this is a Florida man story, unfortunately, and a man killed two people by driving a Tesla through a house.

At 116 miles an hour and this has nothing to do with Tesla. Whoa. But with the stupidity of some people, apparently [01:50:00] this car had just been purchased several hours before the incident. It wasn’t even the owner driving, but he let his friend drive. And then there were also two other passengers in this Tesla and they were in a 30 mile an hour zone, essentially in a neighborhood.

And I guess decided 30 was too slow. And the report says the car was doing 160 miles an hour. When it, he blew through a stop sign ended up over the curb up and embankment saw one article say he kind of shot in the air, went through the roof, through the house. Very sadly, the house owner and her dog were in the house and they were struck.

Oh obviously so violently were found in the front yard of the property, outside the house. And obviously they’ve not survived this incident. So don’t be a dumb ass. Why are you doing 116 miles an hour on road saw McLaren, he saw McLaren. He had to take the challenge. That sounds more like though they didn’t know how to drive the car.

There are breaks but not really. Right. You, you decelerate by kinda letting off the pedal and [01:51:00] things. I mean, to be that egregiously stupid. You think it was just. Error. Error. Maybe they couldn’t figure out how to slow it down or something. Right. I mean, it’s possible. Maybe they realized they were going a still too fast on the road speed, but nowhere near that aggressive and then made a mistake and further accelerated.

Maybe he thought the flex capacitor was working when he hit 88 miles an hour, they would go back in time. Uh, I bet he wishes that that was true. But, um, catch on fire. Think he’s in jail now, rightfully so. If he was an idiot. Yeah, that is really unfortunate. So be careful if you’re in Florida, we could digress into EVs and it’s, it’s a whole thing when they accelerate so fast.

Wait, hold on, hold on, hold on. Wait a second. Wait, I, I just realized I had this mental picture. First of all, how tall was the house? Because this, this Tesla went airborne. I mean, it’s Florida, so I imagine it’s probably one One. Oh, okay. Kind of looked like a one tour. I was thinking like two story Victorian or something.

Like chop it off a tur. It, it’s Tampa, so it looks like a [01:52:00] one, like a rancher. Oh damn. I thought it was like the car from Harry Potter, you know, where like flies around. I, I think it kind of like, definitely probably came airborne and came like clipped the roof and then like came down in, in the house probably.

That’s definitely sad. And, and I think, I think I need a hug now. I know, right? You drop me down. Yeah, I started So you need a hug. Well then why don’t you head on over to Texas where a Houston woman known as Pink Celebrity, there’s not much text. You just need to watch the video and it’s. N Ss f w I would say she is a very scantily clad woman riding in various positions on the exterior of, I believe it was a charger, as the driver is doing donuts in some parking lot and she’s barely dressed, twerking, hanging out the side of the car on the windshields, wherever she can, hold on.

Just twerking it as [01:53:00] he’s drifting. I just wanna know, is this an actual legitimate news? It’s Fox. This is an actual news channel. It says they only show the best news on Fox. They, they show her twerking, right? Her ass is all out. And the, and the, the tagline reads, the pink celeb twerks her as on a car. They actually put that on the broadcast.

Really, you know, somebody was having way too much fun with this and they slipped that in there probably last minute on Leo. We’ll put that on a see, but I don’t know. It’s talent. She’s hanging on and she’s, I mean, both the driver and her, I mean, this is pretty awesome. I’m not gonna lie. This is really good.

How you supposed to get the dollars to her though? I, that’s, she’s moving too fast. It’d be funny, there were a bunch of guys running behind the car throwing dollar bills at her something. But the paint job is, leaves a little to be desired though. Like, I’m not a fan of the baby blue and the pink, but, you know, I mean, better than the, the woman in Britain that was doing the same thing and fell out onto the highway.

I dunno how she’d kill herself, [01:54:00] right? I mean, so, I mean, wow. I mean, mad props mean, I mean, at least, yeah, they were confined to a parking lot trying to keep it safe, doing it for the gram, you know, but doing it for the TikTok, I don’t know. Now, now Eric, you wanna know what that car smells like? Peaches and sin.

So that smells like she, it says she’s the c e o of the car cloud. Alright, what? Imagine that board meeting, uh, my goodness. Uh, what’d y’all do on Friday? So, in other News Fargo, huh? So we’re going north for this one, and, uh, obviously if this is. So Fargo, uh, I believe is in North Dakota, right? Mm-hmm. It gets cold up there.

Animals like to hibernate sometimes in the, in the cold months, they like to store food because obviously when everything dies in the winter. So one, you know, entrepreneurial little red squirrel, the owner of his, uh, Chevy Avalanche, great s u v there, found when he decided to open the hood of his [01:55:00] Chevy Avalanche, or maybe tried to turn the car on and started hearing some weird noises or something.

I don’t know. He discovered 42 gallons or 150 pounds, which is more meaningful. 150 pounds of black walnuts stuffed everywhere in the engine bay on a Chevy ambulance. Why are so weird? I’m, I’m gonna regret this because I know you’re gonna tagline it out somewhere else, but those are the biggest nuts I’ve ever seen.

They’re huge. Those look like they look like lemons. Yeah. So I have black walnut trees here on my property, and they’re about the size of tennis balls when they’re fully mature. And by the way, they are hard as rocks. You could run them over with that avalanche and they will not bust open. I do not know how squirrels open those things up.

They are just insane. They might as well have made us cement. But yeah, 150 pounds of black walnut. That’s a lot of walnuts. I mean mad profs of that squirrel. He was busy. But this guy [01:56:00] never drives his car, right? Or has he been driving around town accumulating nuts? Apparently, I guess a few days had gone by.

That’s quick. So I mean this squirrel, I mean shit, apparently he started giving the walnuts away to people. How rude did that? Poor squirrel did all that work, all that heavy lifting to have his spoils just unceremoniously removed from, from the treasure chest of the avalanche. Well 48 hours later it was full again.

I’m sure. ’cause that squirrel is industrious. I must resist. I’m trying so hard not to comment on this any further. You guys are just lobbing them up there. Alright, this next one, I don’t know. It came to us courtesy of garage ride. I’m gonna just say that apparently came to us courtesy of garage ride’s.

Kind of first laying my eyes on this one. Headline man Arrested after shooting at Car Thieves on the, on the headline of it. I’m kinda like, okay, I’m not sure. I think the funniest part ish is apparently Backstory is this is some dude in New Jersey who’s c e o of [01:57:00] Meat Innovations Incorporated, whatever that is.

Innovating meat in Innovat meat. Uh, sure. Um, yeah. Okay. Clearly he’s got a lot of money ’cause he is got an exotic and luxury car collection that apparently has been, had attempted robberies on it 18 times in the last two years. Good night and the most recent attempt, which this is a recent article, but it’s commenting on the March 25th, 2020 attempt that woke him in the middle of the night, which had him running out of his mansion in the nude.

Now we know why it’s called Meet Innovations. In the nude with his AR 15, nothing but his AR 15 strapped around him. Is he, is he in the same car club as the pink celebrity?

So what gets me is about this article is like Donovan said earlier, by going to the protest and his cowboy boots and nothing else but the [01:58:00] sign, this guy’s already there he is got his AR and his and he’s running out after his car, he’s ready to go. You know? He is serious too. He is like, this guy is crazy.

He’s naked AR 15. What we really learned here is that he sleeps in the buff. Maybe we don’t know what he was doing. Amazing. Well that’s true. You’re right. It was the middle of the night. We don’t know what he was doing. I don’t wanna know what he was doing, but he got all his guns confiscated. I’m not sure they necessarily were all, so he is arrested for guns in decent exposure and then he still got his car stolen and it was a bad day in New Jersey.

Oh man. Well, they keep talking about these cars have been attempted. They’ve attempted to steal these cars. 25 times since 2019. So stop haring them on the road, right? Or move them or get a better security system. Or, I mean, there’s so many things you could do here before you run in the nude with your AR 15 confronting in the middle of the night too, right?

You’re like, come on, [01:59:00] uh, you can’t make this stuff up. Well, and then you have the guy in Missouri who serves as a public service announcement for everyone. Well, not everyone. If you’re gonna sell catalytic converter online and you’re gonna take photos of your catalytic converter, post them, be cognizant of what’s in the background of your photos.

Oh, no, probably not a good idea for your bag of meth to be on, to be on display. I don’t know anything about meth, but that looks like a big bag of meth. We all about meth from breaking bad. Come on now. You should know. You should get expert now. I still have yet to watch that. I need to catch up on this.

I’m right there. Drive. You need to watch that and I’ll watch Drive to Survive. All right. Alright. Alright. So apparently it was 48 grams of meth, which probably is a lot. I don’t know. And he had a pistol that he wasn’t supposed to be having, so it was a bad day for that guy. All this on Facebook marketplace, all of this caught on Facebook marketplace by someone who could, by someone who could [02:00:00] recognize a bag of meth and report it to the police.

Good point. How come they didn’t put a, a stop on this is, uh, not appropriate for, it’s probably the same guys that were searching for the big clown bow tie and happened to find that AMX three that we talked about earlier. I mean, you know, Facebook marketplace. Nevermind, I’m not, ain’t gonna go there. Well, we’ll go back down the new Craigslist.

We’ll, we’ll go back down to Florida real quick. And you know, this is just Florida men doing what Florida men do and I’m pretty sure there’s been other reports of this. But again, there’s a Florida man caught mowing and going as they say. So what? He needed something from seven 11 down the street and he hopped on and was riding John Deere tractor and just pulled up to seven 11.

What’s wrong with that? Apparently the legality of riding your lawnmower on a public road. But aside from that, the neighbors just think it’s good fun. Where he screwed up is he should have cut the grass while he drove along and then he would’ve gotten glued. Right, exactly. Two more things to add to [02:01:00] this.

Number one soon. This will be illegal anyway if California has their way. So he’s gonna get as confiscated. And two, at least he didn’t end up like that other guy that was driving a tractor on the road and somehow managed to flip it over. If you remember last year, have you seen the video? There’s the video of the guy that gets the D U I on his lawnmower, his riding lawnmower.

That’s a good, how is that even a thing? I, I don’t know. You have to look. It’s on YouTube somewhere, but yeah, he’s hammered and on a dirt road somewhere and they, they give him a D U I. So speaking of tractors, and we’re gonna go down under for this one, like quigley down under, so we’ve got one coming out of Australia and yeah, this gentleman really wanted to steal two motorbikes from a dealership and thought that a big yellow tractor, like construction tractor, would be the perfect theft vehicle and getaway vehicle for this.

So he was quickly intercepted, at which point dropped the bikes, but then proceeded to bring the police [02:02:00] on the chase, which if you think about it, he had a pretty good vehicle. ’cause he cut across lawns and farms and train tracks and all this stuff before abandoning on foot. I mean, you wouldn’t have been able to do this in a car.

So maybe he didn’t have the wrong idea after all. And to be fair, that’s a wheel loader that’s not at track. And I’ve actually driven one of these. They’re really cool to drive. But yeah, I’m with you. He’s got basically a lift on the front, so there is nothing getting in his way. He wants a house, he just picks it up, tears it apart.

So did they say he got caught or he get away? No, they did arrest him. 41 year old man with several offenses. Hold on, hold wait, hold on a second. Okay. First of all, the tractor wheel loader skid loader, that dump truck made by Rolls Royce from last month, it doesn’t matter. I’m gonna ask a very pointed question.

What is the suspected top speed at said wheel loader? 25, maybe. 25. Are you kidding me? Yeah, let’s be real. He’s probably doing like [02:03:00] four. Okay. So the, the Mounties or whatever they’re called down there, they can’t catch this guy. Seriously, you could probably run and catch this tractor, let alone whatever it is.

I, I, I mean, and they’re dirt bikes, right? And I don’t know, it’s been a while since I’ve been on one. Do they have keys? I mean, he busted the window. Could he not just driven the dirt bike away? That’s, I was listening, but he wanted two of them. He couldn’t drive two of them at same time. That’s where his plan failed.

I I, we know that those motorcycle chariot races, you can run two of them at the same time. I was gonna say he’s not aware of the chariots. That would’ve been the true getaway vehicle. Is he an expat from Florida? Because he has another friend? If so, why didn’t friend help them out? Or maybe that’s the problem.

Maybe he was trying to get a friend and do a good deed and then the police screwed it up. I think that’s what it’s again, like four miles an hour. Okay. I just wanna reiterate the fact that this is a tractor. I mean, if you’re not well versed in driving one of those, there’s no way he’s gonna go like top speed, even if it is [02:04:00] 25.

But 25 is still slow. Even those freaking astro diesels or whatever they use over there, they’ve gotta be able to catch this tractor, right? You see, he takes that turn and picks the front wheel up off the ground. He almost rolled it over. Oh my God. That would’ve been a better end of the story. Maybe that explains how the guy flipped that other tractor over from last year, Tanya.

You know, that’s all. I mean, he was riding that thing full sin, so, so nobody’s even asking where he got the wheel loader from. So he obviously stole that. So it was a chain of offense. Right, exactly. There was a whole lot of screw it up going on. Lemme schnitt, like unfortunate events or whatever it’s called that that’s part of the multiple offenses he’s charged with.

Well, I guess it’s time for us to go behind the pit wall and talk about Motorsports news. Apparently Ricardo won a bet or lost a bet, but it ends in him driving one of Dale Earnhardt’s NASCAR’s at the American gp. So I don’t know if he’s being punished or being praised, but apparently he’s gonna be campaigning one of Dale Earnhardt’s, 1984 [02:05:00] Monte Carlos at the American Grand Prix.

So, woo-hoo. What’s the American Grand Prix talking about the F one track? Yeah, he’s gonna drive a NASCAR at the F one track. Yes. Nothing about that makes sense. Nope. And he is gonna do it like they do all those other parade laps and you’re like, yay, whatever. I was like, I was like, how did this even make news?

But I was like, ah, well, okay, fine, whatever. I mean, there’s so much drama in Formula One every week, but I was like, this is NASCAR adjacent. Normally Brad like follows all that kind of stuff and, and reports on it. So I, I didn’t spend a whole ton of time, but I was like, oh, that’s cute. That’s fun. I don’t think he’s actually.

Competing in a race. I think he’s just doing a couple laps in it. Maybe he’ll drift it. We can get Ken Block to go sideways around the Dale earns, uh, Monte Carlo there. Last month we talked about Volkswagen and F one and, you know, talked about the whole, you know, hybrid system and how they’re looking to use Volkswagen technology to replace the current system that they have and all these fun, really technological things.

And you can go re-review that episode and go re-review that article, this [02:06:00] new article that came out about two weeks later from the one we talked about last month. The only important part that came out of this article that’s super important to F one is something that I have been hoping, wishing, and praying for for many, many years, which is, Audi or Porsche coming to Formula One, and that’s the speculation right now from F one Insiders are saying, if Volkswagen makes this move to provide power plants and whatnot, we may see Audi and Porsche or maybe Porsche, Audi, like in the old Can-Am days branded Formula One cars, but we’re not gonna see ’em until 2026.

So I’m really excited about this. I’ve seen different snippets of articles and things, and I can’t tell one article looked like they were gonna come separately, is two different teams, and then I’ve heard kind of together. I think if they were different teams, that would be amazing, but it would be Alpha and Ferrari at that point.

It’s like, what’s the difference, right? Red Bull Toroso and Red Bull. I mean, come on. Speaking of Alpha Romeo, you know, there’s been a lot of connecting to the dots from, I’m gonna put air quotes around it again, formula One insiders [02:07:00] about Team Andretti, which we talked about last month, and basically it looks like Andretti might be making a minority interest investment or maybe it’s going to be a majority interest investment.

Alpha Romeo, the former Salur Formula One team. So maybe that’s how they’re gonna fast track their way into Formula One next year. I mean, they’ve already signed up Gross John, or Gross Gene, however you pronounce it, for 2022 under Team Andretti. So I was wondering how they were gonna, you know, get a kick of adrenaline here and get it done.

But you know, if they’re gonna buy into Alpha or male, maybe that’s the way to do it. So I didn’t understand this article either, because they were talking about, they’ve been looking to get into F one for a long time. There’s at least two teams that have changed hands in the past couple years, right? Yeah.

So what were they just not eligible? And are they gonna, and then you look at Porsche, the conversation we just had. Pity, my understanding is right. There’s only so many available spots for teams in Formula One, right? So you got two teams potentially coming in. One maybe is gonna buy [02:08:00] one. So what’s gonna happen the other, are they gonna expand or how that’s all gonna work.

I think it’s gonna be really interesting to watch, especially with the new cars and everything next year. I think the next couple years are gonna be exciting, especially with this year. The one thing I thought though that I, I’m still confused about is I thought Williams was done and then I just hear their name being thrown around again and Oh, Williams for next year.

And I’m like, I thought they were like bankrupt or something. Like they were bought. Yeah. Yeah. They bought by that investment group. Yeah. Yeah. Those guys. And then, uh, racing points. So Force India or whatever they were called before that and all that, that kind of thing. I just wish the big brands would come back.

You’d have Team Lotus and all this kinda stuff. Not all these like, you know, it companies basically plastered on the side of the cars. One other article that came across my desk from the formula one side of the house that I thought was kind of interesting were races that were planned for the last couple of years that didn’t happen because of Covid.

Obviously the big one, everybody knows Vietnam was supposed to happen on the street circuit that they built there. It looked kind of cool. We saw these drone footage of where the cars were gonna be and how they were gonna, you know, navigate the street course. But I was like, okay, whatever. But then as I was scrolling through this list, [02:09:00] I see things like zhi.

That’s cool. Ontario what? Port? Imperial Street Circuit. That’s pretty interesting. ’cause that’s. In New York. Not sure how that was gonna work. A street circuit in Rome, the course looks absolutely mental. And then you had the alo, so they were planning on like six new tracks up through the 2022 season that none of these are now gonna happen.

I mean, I’m glad they brought back like Zandor and some of the other classic Formula One tracks. I’d love to see like Zolder and some other stuff return to the schedule as well. You know, formula One does need to mix it up a little bit. I mean there are a lot of tracks that have just been walked away from, and it’s a shame, you know, IMSO will run their, occasionally prototypes, will run their other forms of racing, you know, T C R and things like that.

But, you know, it’d be nice to see the big boys, you know, bring it in. It’s kind of like, you know, when the Olympics come to a new town, it brings in tourism, brings all this other kind of stuff. And I think, you know, F one is the messenger for that and I think it’s a good thing for those economies. So. So they did bring Zandor back, right?

Which was pretty cool. Yep. It’d be [02:10:00] cool to see them come back to South America. I just saw the other day that this is, it’s either this year or next year is the last year for Sochi, and they’re moving to St. Petersburg. I think a new track somewhere else in Russia. But that’s a new old track is, didn’t they run St.

Petersburg like a million years ago? Oh, is it? I thought it was a brand new purpose or maybe, or No, I’m thinking about the Indy Track in Florida, which was St. Petersburg. My apologies. Yeah, well then you got Miami coming next year. So yeah, I think it’s cool to see some tracks. They haven’t been on in a long time.

A couple this year. They were just somewhere they hadn’t been since 2010 or something. So I like that track though. The Rome track. That looks amazing. That looks like something straight outta Forza. Yeah, and that should be in Forza. Like some of these are in project cars, which I think is pretty cool. Like I’ve driven Zu High, some of the other ones that are on this list in that game, which is kind of neat.

I’d love to see this in fours of Motorsport eight, whenever that comes out. So who knows? Right. But I guess we’ll talk about more about the V R L as we head deeper into the fall. Outside of that, the only other thing that came across my desk that I thought was actually interesting was coming from the IMSA side of the house or the W e C side of the house.

Michael [02:11:00] Fastbender has a new. Set of videos. It’s like a, almost like a drive to survive. They’re on YouTube, he calls them the Road to LeMans, and I hate to say they’re not drive to survive, and they’re not quite truth in 24 either. You know, there’s no Jason Statham narrating or anything like that. If you’re into following Michael Fastbender or any of his stuff, or you wanna see, get introduced to LeMans, watch it.

I’m not discouraging anybody from doing that. It’s just, I’m, I’m kind of like, okay, I already, I already know a lot of this stuff, so it’s not really for me, but, you know, hey, check it out. Something different. Something to kill some time in the evenings now that we’re heading into the fall and into the winter.

So, switching into our final section, kind of wrapping up with some local news here. Our year is coming to a close. We have not yet set the date for awards night. And if you’re listening to this, the Watkins Glen, h o d three day is already over with. So it pretty much wraps up the season for most of us as it’s getting to be colder and colder.

There’s a few events left out there, you know, thanks to H P D junkie taking care of keeping the all those track dates up to date all the way into [02:12:00] the end of the calendar year because there are events going on in the south, especially where it’s warmer and at West and things like that. But for us here in the mid-Atlantic and the Northeast, you know, tracks are start beginning to close down.

And so you still do have the end of year events, you know, with Audi Club, you know, traditionally at V I R in November, you know, things like that. So keep an eye on the schedule. Helmets off the heroes, uh, with S E C A is at Shenandoah again, the beginning of November, very close to Veterans Day, not on Veterans Day, you know, look for those types of events.

And obviously there’s still gonna be some autocross events as well in the DC area because they’re doing Track Cross hosted a lot at Summit Point, which is really cool to watch. And some of our members actually do that, but there’s some other big news coming this fall, right, Donovan? Yeah, that’s right. So Garage Riot is moving platform, so Eric’s been helping out, uh, a lot with that, doing a lot of the work there.

So we’ve been working pretty closely together, but pretty excited to announce that, uh, we’re moving sort of, we are definitely changing platforms. Our old one’s been around for five years. It’s served us well, but, uh, we’re excited some of the new features coming and, [02:13:00] and some new stability in the platform.

So, If you haven’t already can visit the, uh, the new platform. Uh, there’s links on the current.com site. We hope to have everything built out and switched over officially sometime in November. So look forward to seeing you all online. That’s right. And there’s a new phone app coming out as well, right? So we should be looking for some big changes.

That’s right. Yeah. Those will replace your existing apps. Uh, should just be a regular update from the, the app stores. So yeah, looking forward to it. Very cool. And if you have any feedback, there’s still a bit of an open beta left, so reach out to Donovan if you’re an existing Garage r member. Go ahead and check out the old site for details on how to get to the new one.

Do a password reset and get in on the new platform now. And, you know, start making your transition over early because we are accepting. Early access into the new platform. Now, outside of that, what else is exciting going on? Donovan? We’re going to road Atlanta. That’s right. Petit Lamont coming soon. Petit Lamonts.

Right. And we are looking to get together with some of our friends that have been on the podcast before. Folks like David Middleton from my [02:14:00] racing, uh, episode that’s gonna air here in November. We’re gonna see Rob Holland from Roec Racing. We’re gonna see Phil and Brendan from Max Speed Track days. We’ll probably run into Mark Hicks from Chin as well.

Everybody’s located down in the general Atlanta area, so it’s gonna be good to get together with some of our guests. And our plan is to take photographs and maybe do some live streaming from down there between, uh, garage Riot and G T M while we’re on site at the Petite Lamonts for those two, three days that the races are going on.

So we’re looking forward to that. It’s gonna be a lot of fun. Yeah, definitely. We’ll have to get you up to some of the mountain roads too while we’re here. I get to pick keys from a, from a bowl, right? Is that how it works? Uh, it’s not that kind of party, but. Hey, you never know outside of that sneak peek, a little bit of a spoiler alert of some other things that are coming online here in the fall.

Look forward to some really cool podcast episodes like we did last year. Some look backs, some retrospectives. Also our holiday shopping guide coming out, but also we are looking forward to going out west and reporting [02:15:00] live from the Mint 400 in December. So stay tuned for details on that and look for some upcoming episodes in the following weeks on what that’s all about and why that’s super important to the Motorsport landscape and to Motorsports history.

So I’d also like to remind everybody a shout out to GTMs newest sponsor american muscle.com, your source for Mustang, Camaro, and Mopar performance parts. So remember to check out american muscle.com for details and we look forward to having them on our show on a future episode. So stay tuned for more on that.

And if you have any questions, reach out to us, reach out to them. Their logos are on all our websites. But remember american muscle.com for all your high performance, domestic parts, accessories, and performance needs. In case you missed out. Check out the other podcast episodes that aired earlier this month.

We went on the attack with Emra, chatting about time trials and global time attack and a double episode. And remember, if you want early access to part two, be sure to check out our Patreon. You might still be catching up on episodes of Clarkson’s Farm. Did you know Porsche made diesel [02:16:00] tractors? Neither did I until I listened to this month’s episode with Mountain Man Dan, who interviews Sal Fanelli, president of Porsche Diesel U s A.

And finally, as we prep for Fall Motorsports, we revisited part two of Drew’s all the Torque Gums episode called Jesus Take The Wheel as we got his opinion on the future of off-roading and some great pit stop banter. Thank you to everyone that came on the show this month, and please look forward to more great episodes this fall.

So no new Patreons this month, but a big shout out to Donovan for working together with us on this project on Garage Riot 2.0. We’re gonna call it. So thank you again for that. Some other shout outs this month to folks that are celebrating anniversaries in G T M, Doug Turner, six years. Ben Scherf six years.

Chris wait from the DC area, is celebrating his third year with the club. Mike Ruber is celebrating his first year. And Nate and Emily who we were introduced to by way of garage ride and also by the Crutchfields are celebrating their first year. And I do want to take a moment if Nate and Emily are listening to this episode, we [02:17:00] wish Emily a speedy recovery from her recent car accident that she was in.

So we wish it the best and we hope that this podcast is helping you spend some time as you recuperate. So again, big thanks and big shout out to Donovan for coming in, filling in for Brad. We always love having you on the show. You’ve been on a multitude of break fix episodes. You can actually find all of the episodes Donovan has been on, on the new Garage Riot platform.

There’s a special page for them and future episodes that he’s gonna be on. We’ll also be listed there, so if you’re a Garage Riot member, check ’em out. Go back into that time capsule and, and see where Donovan’s participated and, you know, added massive value to all these episodes, and look forward to really cool episodes coming this winter and early spring as we collaborate more on some new ideas that we have.

And again, you know, I wanna remind everybody that we can’t do this without you. So we wanna thank you for all your love, your support, the fans, the families, the friends, the members, everybody that makes this happen. Without you guys, it absolutely wouldn’t be possible. Yeah, thanks for having me on, guys. And, and Brad, thank you for letting me keep your [02:18:00] seat warm.

I, I still haven’t gotten my check from the last one, by the way, Eric. So if you wanna send that to me, that would be awesome. But I, I get paid in, uh, noodles and hugs and kisses too, so I don’t know where that was going. No. So what’s his dressing room smell like? Anyway, no, I, I appreciate the G t M community and, and especially those right now that are helping us beta test the new site.

And I, I look forward to meeting guys in person hopefully soon and, and seeing you online and, uh, spread the word. Right on. Oh yeah. And Tanya, our executive producer. Thank you as always. Thank you. All right. That’s a wrap.

Well, here, we’re in the drive through line. Me and her. Cars in front of us, cars in back of us all just waiting to order. There’s some idiot in a Volvo with his brights on behind me. I lean out the window and scream, Hey, what you trying to do blind me? My wife says Maybe we should park.

If you like what you’ve heard [02:19:00] and want to learn more about G T M, be sure to check us out on www.gt motorsports.org. You can also find us on Instagram at Grand Tour Motorsports. Also, if you want to get involved or have suggestions for future shows, you can call or text us at (202) 630-1770 or send us an email at Crew chief@gtmotorsports.org.

We’d love to hear from you. Hey everybody, crew Chief Eric here. We really hope you enjoyed this episode of Break Fix, and we wanted to remind you that G T M remains a no annual fees organization, and our goal is to continue to bring you quality episodes like this one at no charge. As a loyal listener, please consider subscribing to our Patreon for bonus and behind the scenes content, extra goodies and G T M swag.

For as little as $2 and 50 cents a month, you can keep our developers, writers, editors, casters, and other volunteers fed on their strict diet of fig Newton’s, gummy bears, and Monster. Consider [02:20:00] signing up for Patreon today at www.patreon.com/gt motorsports. And remember, without fans, supporters, and members like you, none of this would be possible.