That’s Slightly Right
Damn it, John.
I was about to read that.
Nope.
Save it for later.
Is that how tonight's going to go?
I have that covered later in the follow-up section.
It's all in there.
See, this is what I get for messing with the King's follow-up.
My apologies.
All right.
What do you think follow-up comes with?
The follow-up fairy comes at night?
That's the notes.
You wake up, it's like Christmas morning, wow, this follow-up under the tree.
You don't question where it comes from.
No, I know it comes from the king.
So, king, would you like to start our follow-up about the apple of cars?
Only if you give me a nickname that's distinct from Marco, who you also called the king.
That's true.
Wait, I'm the king of something?
Start calling Declan the king.
We'll see how that goes.
What am I the king of?
Yeah, I don't know.
Mufflers?
Fracture app icons?
Something like that.
So the first item is a tweet from Daniel Silva talking about whether Tesla is the apple of cars.
And he gave a link to a Consumer Reports owner survey asking about repair experiences.
And I was saying that independent repair shops outscored dealership services and
With one exception, and that exception was Tesla, which had excellent customer sat, which totally makes it the apple of car.
We need a sound effect for that.
Maybe just like a thud.
Seriously.
What is the sound of one customer sitting?
Customer sat.
yeah see thud yeah oh that's so bad john all right so yes so tesla has great customer sat thus they are the apple of cars i mean to be fair as people pointed out on twitter like since this is a thing about repair experiences teslas have only been around for a short time so they're all pretty darn new so maybe the repair experience is great just because they're all under warranty and are relatively new so maybe it's not particularly fair but anyway i thought i would throw that in there as a little uh appetizer for automotive followers
All right.
Well, what's our salad course then?
Yeah.
So now we have Apple.
Apple's making a minivan.
You know, the whole minivan rumor.
And I don't remember where I read this, but as with a lot of things in the Apple car rumor stories.
It's just sort of said, it's like, did someone see a minivan?
Or did you just hear from these unnamed sources that they're making a minivan?
Or like, we don't even know from whence does this minivan business come.
It's just, anyway.
And we were talking about why that might be.
Maybe it's just kind of a snub-nosed thing or stuff like that.
And I think Keith Huss was the first person to point out
um that the possibility that i think this is in his follow-up but anyway other people said this as well that it might just be a test mule like you know where they're testing drivetrain or internal stuff or whatever and that the outside shape of the car has nothing to do with what's inside it kind of like columbus the set top box that apple is almost certainly going to introduce in 1998
is a flat black rectangular box of course columbus turned out to be the imac turns out uh as with computers and cars of course the outside shape of the thing can have absolutely no bearing on the product that you actually make and i think that one of the other examples that someone gave was like look at those iphone prototypes they were crazy and they were big uh i think columbus is an even better example because that was such a great fake out of
The internals of this computer have to fit in a certain size, but nobody but the industrial design people knew that the thing that was wrapped around that was going to be a translucent teal gumdrop type thing.
And so car companies do have sort of test mules that are either heavily disguised or actually bear little resemblance to the final car.
I think maybe, Casey, if you've read a lot of car magazines or Mark are like, do you remember a case where someone like a car manufacturer was testing the drivetrain for a new car by wedging it into something that looked like their old car?
I have vague memories of that.
Well, even just last week, BMW announced they're going to do a seven-seater SUV, the X7.
Oh, God, I was just about to bring that up, you jerk.
Yeah, like a few days ago, there were these spy shots of what they basically took an X5, I think, or an X3.
They took one of their existing smaller SUVs and just bolted a bunch of weights to the roof and the hood and are testing it that way by simulating the bigger car that would be on the same chassis and drivetrain and everything.
That's slightly right.
So I have a link, which we'll put in the show notes.
BMW X7 testing using modified 7 Series prototype.
That's right.
It was a sedan, right?
Exactly.
So yes, this looks like a next generation G11 7 Series prototype, but look closer and you will see BMW has ingeniously added weights to the roof and inside the car.
And raise the hood to accommodate a different engine slash intake setup in order to air quotes test the basic X7 drivetrain package.
And so, yeah, that's exactly what I was going to bring up, Marco.
And that sounds very similar to what you're describing, John.
And Keith Huss's additional thing is like, look, if you're going to be testing internal stuff like screens or whatever.
and you will have to have a bunch of equipment hooked up to it to monitor it a minivan type shape leaves lots of room for sort of engineers to be sitting with their little equipment or laptops or connected to the thing with cables or whatever and monitor everything while you're in the car like so it's sort of a mo if it's just internal stuff it would be like a mobile lab for stuff that happens inside the car and if it's a whole car type thing then it could be a drivetrain mule or any other type of thing and it
that anyone seeing anything looking like a minivan may have nothing to do with anything that the final product is going to look like.
Well, and also, I mean, there's a lot of popular car shapes these days, especially in the U.S., that look kind of like minivans.
Like, if you say, like, it's kind of like a minivan, that could encapsulate lots of crossovers, large hatchbacks, things like the Prius V that I don't think they called a minivan, and it's pretty small for a minivan, but it's kind of minivan-shaped.
Uh, like there's a lot of cars that are near that shape or near that profile.
Um, actually probably even more in Europe because they like hatchbacks so much more than we do.
Well, there's another great example with the BMW i3, which a few people wrote in, uh, justifiably a little annoyed that we didn't bring that up.
We did though.
I like, I thought, we thought we mentioned the i3 and when we were in the discussion of the i8, one of you briefly brought up the i3, but no, we didn't talk about it in the minivan type thing.
Although I did mention the spark car and like other cars that don't have a lot of front overhang because there's no engine.
Right, right.
And so anyway, the point being the BMW i3, in case you're not aware, is there, I believe it's either a hybrid or pure electric.
Is that correct?
I think it's hybrid.
Suffice to say that it looks like a very, very shrunken minivan, almost like a bigger smart car.
So to kind of build upon what you were saying, John, that you could construe the i3 as a minivan if you didn't really know what you were talking about, even though it's half the size of your average American minivan.
uh do you want to talk about poaching you can poach a car these are in the category of stories that broke since we recorded last week's episode which we recorded on a wednesday as we always do recording this one on a wednesday shortly after we recorded it there were more stories that put you know even more smoke to this this rumor and i the new york times one was uh you know getting engineers to build a
And, you know, an automaker type engineers, well, those people might have expertise in also helping them build phone and iPad batteries.
Sure.
But probably their expertise is much more involved in very large batteries for things like cars.
And if you're doing CarPlay, you probably don't have any reason to get people who have expertise in building car sized batteries.
So there's a little bit more smoke there for like, are they doing something other than just extending CarPlay or doing maps or something like that?
And I think the big one is, again, last week we were talking about, oh, they hired a bunch of these people.
But I was saying, wouldn't they be hiring more people who are like mechanical engineers or drivetrain engineers or people know about building cars?
Because all we saw was like, all right, fine, some executives, like someone's got to lead these car people.
So get some executives.
They don't know how to do anything anyway.
They just tell people what to do.
Yeah.
executives from Ford, head of R&D at BMW.
That's all we saw with those, like the couple, a handful of big names.
And then everything else was just an amorphous number.
It's like, oh, and they're hiring a bunch of employees and poaching from Apple teams.
Like, well, where are the people who know how to build cars?
And so 9to5Mac did this huge breakdown of, here's a bunch more names.
Instead of just the names of the bigwigs that we're saying are in charge of this, here's a bunch more names.
And if you go through these names and look at what their experience and expertise are in, they're in things that have much more to do with
building cars or working on cars like the car part of the cars it's i mean again it's a it's still a short list it's not hundreds of people it's not an exhaustive head count but uh it sure looks a lot more like people who would be working on an actual car and not people who would be working on car play
Yeah, I agree.
I felt the same way that, man, this could be construed as a car, but I'm not so convinced.
And especially after this nine to five Mac piece, if nothing else, they got to be toying with the idea of building an actual car.
Otherwise, all these hires just seem kind of silly to me.
But yeah, it's weird.
Last week, I would have told you there's a 10% chance this is actually happening insofar as that they're actually even trying to build something, even if they scrap it.
Jason Snell actually had a really good piece on six colors where in short, he said, well, you know, a lot of companies will try things and throw some spaghetti against the wall, if you will, and see what sticks.
And, you know, sometimes it doesn't stick and that's OK.
And that certainly it certainly seems as though Apple is at the very least seeing if they have anything to contribute here.
And this nine to five Mac piece further corroborates that in my mind.
Yeah, assuming it's true, because it's not like Apple is confirming these people.
But just to pick one random name out of this list here, this is David Nelson.
He's from Tesla.
And according to his LinkedIn at Tesla, he served as the mechanical engineering manager leading a team responsible for modeling prediction and verification of motoring gearbox performance and efficiency.
You do not need a mechanical engineer who knows about motoring gearbox performance and efficiency if you're working on CarPlay.
Or a street view thing.
Like...
And people like this, I don't know how you would explain that these people exist at all.
It even kind of kills, again, if this is true, the idea that, oh, Apple's just going to partner with somebody and take over their entire interior and do it.
Like, why the hell would you need someone for, you know...
for reliability and warranty projects and modeling gearbox.
And like, this is people for building a car like that.
And that's just one list for one person from this page is you just go through them all.
And I don't know how you can finish it and say, Look, if Apple hired all these people, what are they doing with them other than building a car?
That's the thing.
We got so much feedback, really good feedback this week, people giving us all sorts of ideas, some of which I'm sure we're going to talk about in the next few minutes.
All sorts of ideas.
A lot of people are saying, what if Apple is not quite building a car, but what if they're addressing the problem of transportation in a bigger way?
Maybe it's a non-traditional approach, something like car sharing or transportation networks of different sorts, and these bigger picture ideas that all kind of begin like, well...
they they're going to solve something in a totally different way and another common explanation is well maybe they're going to you know build the car os and license it to car makers and or partner with somebody to make the car for them and i think just looking at this it is it is much more likely that they're going to actually that they're actually trying to build a car than anything else like any any other alternative explanation of like what they might be doing with all these people instead is
It is just looking more and more likely – the more attention you pay to this, the more information that comes out in bits and pieces and rumors, the more it looks like there's a lot of smoke behind this and that it is way more likely than any other explanation that they are just actually trying to build a car.
And then to address like the what if they do something different or what if they do something nontraditional or solve a bigger problem –
I think that's a lot like... We have to look at every previous Apple launch, and before the watch came out, we were talking, well, what if they do something different, and it's not really a watch, it's some kind of wearable that's not a watch, but it does other things, and then it came out, and it's like, nope, it's a watch, it's just done well.
Same thing when the iPad came out, and...
Me and other bloggers at the time were talking like, if they do a tablet, how do they solve the input problem?
How big is it?
How do they solve the problem of it being between sizes?
And the answer was they didn't solve those problems.
They just made a good tablet.
Typically, when Apple solves problems like this, they don't do something that no one's ever heard of.
They just do a really good job with things that people generally have heard of or that are cutting edge.
And so if they make... You know, looking at this project, these rumors and these people and everything else, it sure looks like, as I said, it sure looks like they are making a car.
That's what all these people are probably for.
And if they are making a car...
Rather than having some kind of grand reinvention of everything, it is far more likely that they're just going to try to make a really good car in the traditional sense of how we know cars.
And maybe it'll be pure electric.
That's fine.
That's still within the realm of a car.
And it's very different, and we'll get to that later, but...
It is just so much more likely that the story is more boring than we all think and more boring than a lot of people are trying to predict.
People are thinking that, oh, it has to be something crazy.
It has to be some cockamamie scheme to do some crazy thing.
And the answer is probably no.
It's probably just a car that they're hoping is going to be really good.
Yeah, I certainly agree that there's a lot more smoke around this potential fire than there was even just a week ago.
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all right so we're like two items down in the 300 item follow-up no we gotta be past a whole bunch of them like we can skip this one that the bloomberg says that apple wants to start producing cars by 2020 because that one is just more of the classic like you think you have rumors we're gonna tell you when they're gonna ship it in fact and if it doesn't ship by 2020 it's late
the slug in the url is apple said to be targeting car production as soon as 2020 which just leaves them open to say well we didn't say 2020 could be as soon as 2020 if it's sooner they'll be like well that kind of fits if it's later like we just said as soon as 2020 like what does that even mean anyway i don't like that one um uh what did you just remove you just removed the next one i was gonna read yeah but it's it's unrelated follow-up battle
No, it's real.
They're all related to car stuff.
It was the sugar water when you just moved.
Yes, but I thought we could cover it at the end.
But since you brought it up, John, I guess we'll talk about it now.
Yeah, well, you know, Marco jumped the queue by taking the thing I deleted from the show notes and talking about it.
So this is chaos.
This is chaos today.
This is why I don't edit the show notes.
Well, you should at least look at them.
Anyway, the sugar water thing that Casey just deleted.
These two.
I moved it.
I didn't delete it.
I moved it.
The title of last week's show was something like, do you want to sell sugar phones for the rest of your life or something?
That's a reference to a line that we said in the show.
And Marco and Casey asked, hey, do we want to put a link in the show notes that explains that for the people who don't know?
And they were adamant that we not do that.
I thought we should put a show notes link, but that's what the show notes are for.
If you hear something on their show and you're like, what the hell are they talking about?
You go to the show notes and click the link and it will explain it.
Every joke and reference has to be explained.
It doesn't have to be explained.
There just needs to be an explanation.
And if you don't get it and are seeking an explanation, like you defined one, so you can follow along with everybody else and get it the next time we reference it.
Can we write it at the bottom of the page upside down?
It'll be a swipe thing.
Swipe to read, you know, to highlight.
It's white on white text.
So we didn't get any feedback about that.
So I guess everybody understood it because, you know, you're listening to a tech nerd podcast for, you know, people who like Apple and stuff, you know about this.
And if you didn't, I guess you could Google it or you don't care what the title was.
anyway uh if you're wondering what the hell we're talking about the worst show yeah well i'm we're explaining things how do people how do people become like we have a shared history and knowledge and culture of this apple stuff how do people gain that knowledge so they too can share in these jokes someone has to tell them or they have to experience it like you have to you have to invite people into your culture by explaining your shared heritage so then they can put anyway this is how it works you don't just be like we can't tell them because they're not one of us um
Step one, watch every episode of The Simpsons from the last 25 years.
Yeah, just watch Triumph of the Nerds, Robert Cringley's PBS series, which is where this quote is from.
I don't know if it was published before that.
Anyway, Steve Jobs, when he was at Apple the first time.
uh was trying to recruit a new ceo for the company and he went to john scully who was working at pepsi and was trying to get him to come to apple and leave his cushy job of pepsi and his pitch to him as they were strolling through garden or whatever was you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or do you want to come with me and change the world and that's what got john scully to come and then john scully eventually
uh, ousted Steve jobs in a, uh, in a boardroom battle.
So that was not a great move on Steve's part using her persuasion to bring the guy who would kick him out of the company.
But anyway, that's what happened.
Everybody knows that sugar water quote, because it's such a, you know, whatever you're doing at your company, like Pepsi, selling people sugar water and giving people diabetes, you're not doing anything good.
You're wasting your talents, uh, come to Apple and we'll change the world.
And, uh,
the comparison to tesla was like if you just want to make like well you're making smartphones and they already did change the world but if you really want to change the world now you should be making electric cars so come to tesla and we can do that um and that's how tesla lure people away from apple how apple could get them to stay is you don't have to go to tesla to make electric car we're doing that here
So the link we'll put in the show notes is actually a video from this documentary, which is great.
You should watch it.
Triumph of the Nerds from the 90s or something.
This is before Steve Jobs came back to Apple.
Yeah.
If you haven't seen it before, you definitely should watch it.
Yeah, I really enjoyed it.
I know a lot of people are critical of it.
I actually really liked it.
Yeah, I mean, it's overly dramatic and silly.
That's where the no taste quote was from, too.
I love that.
Yeah, but it has footage.
For whatever you may feel about the story that it slaps on top of the history of PCs to make it interesting and dramatic, there are interviews with important people in the industry where they get asked interesting questions and give interesting answers.
So you can just ignore the surrounding silliness and just watch the interviews.
And even just for that, it's great.
All right.
Do you want to talk to us about what Helmut wrote in?
I'm surprised we didn't get more feedback about this because we were discussing in the last episode lots of different possibilities of Apple working with car makers or not working with them and how car companies wouldn't want Apple to come in and become the most important differentiator in their car because then what are they doing?
They don't want to have happen to them what happened to the music industry or...
The cell phone carriers where Apple is the valuable part and they're just sort of like the stuffing or whatever.
And I guess we didn't get feedback on this because people either didn't know about this or understood that we understood this, but...
Every car company has parts suppliers that make things that go into the cars.
You name any car company, they probably don't make the transmission or the radio, the speedometer, the seats.
They're different.
The fancy sensors, like the rain sensors and the automatic headlights.
All that stuff is usually from outside.
Clear bags.
Right.
Everything comes from some other vendor, but that's how the auto industry works.
I make parts for whatever.
I'm a separate company.
I'm not part of GM, but the whole purpose of my company is to make parts for GM or these other car makers.
And there are a few well-known brands that
you would say, okay, well, these cars from Audi, BMW, Mercedes, Chrysler, what do they all have in common?
They all have ZF gearboxes.
Who the hell is ZF?
The reason this didn't come up is if you're a gearhead, you know about ZF, you know about Bosch, and you know about all these other companies that make things, but
none of those companies end up being the differentiator you're like i want the car with the zf transmission from year to year the same exact car can have a different transmission it's like oh well this model year this car has this transmission and next model year has a transmission from an entirely different vendor that's not advertised it's not an important model changeover just like oh they changed the transmission like it is not a headline feature you don't usually regular people do not know who makes the transmission in their car
They only know that maybe they changed to an 8-speed automatic instead of a 5-speed or whatever.
That's how the car industry works.
And that is an acceptable relationship for everybody involved for probably historic reasons.
And a great example is for infotainment systems like the...
BMW iDrive and the Mercedes command system and all the things that have like a screen and some little wheel that you move or a touchscreen or whatever.
There are only a few companies that make those things.
And in fact, a single company makes those systems for BMW, Audi, Mercedes, Chrysler, and one other company that I'm forgetting.
It's Harman in Connecticut.
It's the same company that does Harman Kardon, I think.
They make the infotainment systems for all of those cars.
As you say, well, I don't like I like BMW system.
I don't like the Mercedes system.
They're both made by the same manufacturer to to the specifications of the car company to some degree.
But those companies aren't making the screens and little dials and the software and everything and the operating system that goes on.
This is one company doing this.
That's how the industry works.
But the very important part is.
That's not you don't know that you don't know who supplies these parts.
And from year to year, the car makers can change suppliers who do these and they can decide to bring this in house and outsource this to a different company and pit suppliers against each other in the same way that only super nerds know that like Marco's computer has like the bad LG screen or whatever that has their image retention issues.
And the good one was like the Samsung one.
Like nobody else knows that.
Apple is not afraid that people are going to decide that Samsung is the important differentiator in their products.
Like nobody knows that Samsung makes the system on a chips for iOS devices for years.
But in any kind of relationship where Apple is going to do stuff, Apple is not going to be content to be merely a part supplier to the auto industry.
I mean, even CarPlay is...
distinctly an apple thing when you when they were on the road promoting carplay and you sure as hell knew that apple was bringing you carplay and that it worked with your iphone and that was what always was 100 an apple thing even if they're not giant apple logos all over the screen there is no hiding that the fact that it was apple whereas nobody knows who makes the you know do i have goodyear tires michelin tires like you don't even know what the hell the tires on your car are unless you're a gearhead so
If you don't know about the auto industry and you read about this and get confused, yeah, why can't Apple be one of those things?
Because that's just not how Apple operates, but that is how the auto industry operates.
So there's a disconnect with Apple being involved in the auto industry in any way because the relationship that the auto industry is used to is one that Apple is not interested in.
Do you have any idea how much of that approach is also true of Tesla, for example?
Are the motors designed and built in-house?
Are the batteries designed?
I think the batteries are designed, if not built in-house.
Aren't they building a huge factory for batteries or something like that?
Yeah.
What they're going to do with the batteries is we start with raw materials and out the other end comes out a battery, which is reminiscent of the Macintosh.
One of the original codenames was sand for their thing.
It's like...
sand goes in one end and completed macintoshes go out the other because you know sand silicon stuff like that anyway uh that's actually an interesting comparison like so for first of all for tesla they i mean their whole freaking car practically was from lotus in the beginning because they just took a lotus they they bought like a rolling chassis from lotus and they just jammed their battery pack into it right
These days, I'm assuming they're doing the same amount, if not slightly more, in-house stuff than everyone else.
But yeah, they have other suppliers.
I don't think they're making their brake rotors and their brake assemblies.
I think they're operating like any other car manufacturer where various parts suppliers make things.
And if you...
they can make things to your specifications into your design or if they have something previously available like we already have this brake rotor in this size if you just want to buy it from us like you don't have to design your own special brake rotor or maybe they think they need to for their particular car but i'm assuming that they are uh using part suppliers in the traditional way because that's how they started i mean you just you know getting a whole rolling chassis from lotus and then shoving their car inside that
I don't know if this is a further follow-up, but it's good to bring it up now.
Apple, of course, does the same thing.
If you look at an iPhone, you can say all the different manufacturers, like Broadcom makes the Wi-Fi chip, and Samsung was manufacturing a system on a chip until recently.
this company makes the the io controller and this company makes a screen controller and who makes the screen this year and where is the cameras coming from sony this year and they change the supplier all the time then nobody knows who those controllers are and where did they get their memory from do they get it from hynix or whatever that company is or did they get the memory from samsung and like nobody knows that it is not a differentiator that apple is giving up no value by by not making all these things itself apple doesn't own the factories that make them is it being made by foxconn it's been made by uh what is that other one
Quanta or what is the one that starts with the Q anyway like that's that's how Apple operates as well even more so because it's like we don't want to go to hands dirty by actually owning any factories we will spend millions possibly billions of dollars letting people install equipment in the factories
They will slowly pay off through some complicated relationship of manufacturing stuff for us, but they let someone else handle that.
So part of this rumor is that Apple is talking to this... What is this company called?
Magna... Magna Steer and Deason?
I can't pronounce this name.
It's the name I've seen in car magazines for years, but I've never had to say it out loud for a variety of reasons.
A company that makes parts for fancy cars.
And why would Apple be talking to them?
Because they're not going to make their... I mean, I suppose they could, but like...
Their inclination would be to operate somewhat like the rest of the industry is like if there if there are part suppliers and manufacturers and assemblers for the automotive industry who already do this, Apple can contract them to say, can you make some stuff for us, too?
And they can.
The other option is, you know, getting back to Marco's.
retelling of the grand theories that readers have is like I bet they're going to do it all in the United States and they're going to bring manufacturing back to the United States and they're going to make their own factory with all US people because they're always talking about employing people in the US and I suppose they could do that and that does fit with some of the things that Apple's been doing but on the other hand
Every other thing that Apple makes tends to be made by what Apple thinks is the people who can make this best.
And if the people who can make this best are a company in the United States, then fine.
But if they're in China or if they're in Germany or if they're in any place else, I think Apple will be talking to all the best people who already know how to make car-sized things.
We'll see you next time.
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so john if apple wasn't making a car could they be working on something car related like maybe road signs or something like that you're skipping your own real-time follow-up about magna making whole cars yes the magna or they count as like an assembler or whatever they don't just make transmissions or little parts so they ship to someone else to get the sound magna will put your stuff together and i'm not sure if they entirely manufacture and high-end cars or do most of the assembly or anyway
Oh, well, they created the 4Matic, Mercedes all-wheel drive.
Doesn't that suck?
I didn't think it sucked.
I'm not saying it's particularly remarkable, but I didn't think it sucked.
Yeah, like the point about the auto industry is that the car that you think is made by a single company that sold to you under a particular brand is mostly made like as in assembled, the parts made or whatever by companies other than the company whose name is on the thing.
Right.
They're ultimately responsible for the car.
They design it.
They decide what goes into it, so on and so forth.
But who who makes that transmission?
Who makes those wheels?
Who puts them all together in the right shape so that a car runs like a surprising amount of that process does not involve GM, BMW, Mercedes.
audi any of these companies because it's all outsourced to a bunch of other smaller companies it's mostly a symbiotic relationship because those companies like they they don't no one else wants an eight speed automatic gearbox except for people who make cars so they necessarily need to sell their parts to car makers and no you know i have the capability to assemble completed cars from a bunch of parts
only you know they need car makers to use their capacity to do that so this is the relationship we we can build cars and we can build parts that go into cars we need car makers to buy our parts or to tell us to assemble their cars and of course you know there's the toyota and you know honda and all the japanese things where they you know they run their own factories and they have a special way of doing it that assures quality and so on and so forth but even they outsource things and i think who's it that licensed tesla's drivetrain and battery technology i think toyota did like
Well, they tried to.
I think it fell apart.
Yeah, well, there's a surprisingly incestuous relationship between all these car companies.
I mean, to the point where, like, the Ford Probe and what the hell was it?
The Ford Probe and the Mazda... 323?
No, the 626, maybe.
At various points, there have been cars.
I mean, we even have it now, the Toyota Beru.
Right.
It's the same car sold by Toyota and Subaru because Subaru does the engine and Toyota does the rest of the car.
I believe that's right.
There was a there was a relationship between Mazda and Ford where they were essentially selling the same car with different skins on it.
I think I also couldn't remember the name of this car.
MX6.
Yes.
I couldn't remember this back in neutral either.
I still can't remember it.
uh the probe and the mx6 were the same car with different stuff on i mean this happened so many times over the years so the auto industry is super weird like if this happened in the tech industry it would be like well you know the uh the samsung uh s3 and the iphone are the same phone right they just have a different skin on them like what that would never happen uh happens all the time in the auto industry
Yeah, my favorite was the Mitsubishi 3000 GT and the Dodge Stealth.
Oh, yeah.
And it totally crossed, like, cross-country lines, cross, you know, foreign, domestic, like, just Asia, Europe.
There is no rhyme or reason other than just these executives, you know, deciding that there are certain deals that make sense in terms of, you know, engineering resources and manufacturing capacity and, you know, I need this and you need that and we can cross-license and sell them to each other.
By the way, I always liked the Mitsubishi better than the stealth, styling-wise.
They look so similar.
The only thing they changed was the headlight and taillight treatment and the weird fake Ferrari side strikes on the thing.
Did you ever see... There was a made-for-TV movie, Knight Rider 2000, which was like five, ten years after Knight Rider ended.
Hasselhoff came back and did this made-for-TV movie.
And the kit 2000, I think...
was uh a custom movie or you know tv car but it was based off a dodge stealth if i'm not mistaken i think i did see that but i don't i can't i can't picture the car oh i loved it as a kid i'm sure if i watched it again today i think it is just a waste of film but man i was obsessed with that little tv movie as a kid i thought they just took the firebird and just tacked a bunch of greebles as they say in the business to the thing so it looked different but i might have been thinking of something else greeblies is it greeblies yeah
I don't know.
A while back, I had actually read like a behind the scenes on the car.
But I don't I don't have a link handy for for that story.
But we'll put a link in the show notes to Wikipedia for Knight Rider 2000.
It's a wonderfully bad made for TV movie.
Wikipedia says Grebel.
I think I got it right the first time.
I'm so glad there was no other tech news this week because it's a disaster.
All right.
So, yeah, now that sidetrack aside, you're talking about this is getting into the meat of all the many, many very grand ideas that listeners have about what Apple could be doing.
And like Marco said before, the general theme was it's not about cars, man.
It's about transportation.
Yeah.
They're going to reinvent something somehow.
Don't really know how yet.
Well, no, they had specific things.
So one entire angle is that Tim Cook loves the environment.
Apple loves the environment.
They're building solar farms everywhere.
Therefore, the reason they would be interested in doing a car is because electric cars are better for the environment.
and so because apple is so environmentally focused uh it makes perfect sense they would want to do an electric car because it fits perfectly with those attitudes the company i agree that that fits with the attitude of the company that's not the reason you do a car because if you are going to try to be better for the environment of all the things that produce greenhouse gases cars are significant but you could get more bang for your buck by getting rid of cows or buses or the many other things or crude something i saw some crazy internet stat that may or may not be true that like
the 12 biggest shipping like boats that they go across the ocean with shipping containers on them like the 12 or 20 biggest ones of the world uh ones of those in the world produce the same amount of co2 as all the cars in the world really it was on the internet who knows if it's even true i saw it that sounds ridiculous yes it does it sounds like one of those things that you read on the internet that is totally not true so next week i'm asking people to
tell us whether that's true or not once yeah just one person do it everyone get together and agree amongst yourselves which one of you is going to email no i don't care send a million uh different uh kind of confirmations only five people are going to look it up anyway um so i agree that that is that that fits with apple's motto i don't agree that it is a strong motivating factor in deciding whether or not to build a car uh
you know it could be contributing factor but it's like it's in a long list of reasons they would make a car because you could say that about a lot of things like this is good for them why don't they make why don't they make something that you know uh that produces electricity like electric power plants that would do even more for the environment well because apple doesn't not into making power plants well you know but then why should i make a car um
Another thing is, if you're going to make an electric car, one of the big impediments to electric cars has been infrastructure.
Like if I take it on a long trip, where do I recharge it?
How do I recharge it?
Tesla obviously has been tackling it with its supercharger stations that it's trying to put all over the United States.
This is the infrastructure problem.
If I can make an alternative fuel vehicle...
How do I how do I make it a viable thing to drive across the country with?
You need some place to refuel it.
And infrastructure like that is, you know, how many gas stations are there in the United States?
It sounds like a tech job interview from 2003.
How many Tesla supercharger stations are there?
Far less.
And so, hey, Apple's got a lot of money.
They could tackle this.
They could, you know, they can make sure that there are places where you can charge the electric Apple car all across the entire country.
uh i think they could do that tesla has shown how difficult that is apple has a lot more money than tesla they could do a better job in fact i think they may have to do something like that but like tesla they will be forced just by reality to start start doing it in you know just in the san francisco area just in the new york area just in the eastern seaboard just up and down like
It's just a humongous problem.
Someone says there's 388 supercharger stations, right?
So how many gas stations are there in the United States?
Slightly more than 388.
It is a very big problem.
Look how many Apple stores have opened.
Obviously, a supercharger station is easier to open than an Apple store, but
Boy, that's a long road and it will have to be addressed sort of collectively.
If Apple makes a bunch of charger stations for its car and Tesla makes a bunch of charger stations for its car and stuff like that, that's terrible because it would be like, well, if you get a Honda, you can only go to Honda gas stations.
We need a common standard for this.
And, you know, we're in early days of this, but hopefully this will shake itself out.
I don't think Apple's not going to try to address this need because if they sell electric cars, you're going to have to need somewhere to charge it.
But don't expect like...
Boy, now that Apple's doing it, no matter where you live in the United States, I'll be 10 minutes away from a place where I can charge my Apple car.
Unless you plan on going into people's houses and breaking in and plugging it inside their house and waiting 12 hours to charge off their house current illegally, that is not going to be the case.
What else do we have from the grandiose ideas?
Oh, the thing about, it's about transportation, not about cars.
What about a kind of ride-sharing thing where you don't own the car, the community owns the car, and well, let's just throw into this the autonomous cars.
The cars, of course, are going to drive themselves, all our listeners agree.
uh not apple's cars specifically but just all cars will be will be self will drive themselves who don't need a driver and once they're autonomous you don't need to own a car you just need to have like an app that can make the car arrive and we'll all just share cars together and whenever you need a car we'll come and pick you up like what people are doing is slow motion fantasy uh reinventing public transportation for first principles only using cars and roads which is perhaps the least efficient way to get lots of people from place to place uh
I think we talked about this last show, self-driving cars.
Yeah, they're probably going to happen.
Are they going to happen if Apple introduces a car in the next five years?
I'm going to say no, no, no, no.
Yeah, I'm going to agree with that ridiculous pronunciation of no.
i mean like because we all agree like self-driving cars are a thing that's probably going to happen maybe when we're alive like in our lifetimes like do you think we that seems reasonable maybe i wouldn't even say definitely yes i'd say maybe i mean like it may be in limited circumstances and so on so but i you know the technology is good enough now where you can see this is a feasible thing that could happen because effectively do we have self-flying planes
pretty close like we have planes that do a lot and you know can almost land themselves and almost take off themselves and almost fly from you know there's a person involved so and so self-driving cars are an easier problem because you you know well self-driving cars are much more a regulatory and public perception problem than a technology problem for the most part uh like i i think we're gonna have the technology i mean we're not that far off today we're gonna have the technology to do them reasonably well
relatively speaking, fairly soon.
In the grand scheme of things, fairly soon.
Probably within the next decade, the technology will be pretty usable.
But it might take a lot longer for not only regulation to allow them in different states and countries, but the first time one gets in an accident and kills somebody, that's going to set them back 10 years in regulation and how the public perceives them.
Yeah, I mean, I think they'll be pretty resilient to that because, like, during the time we were doing this podcast, like, X number of people die in car crashes driven by people.
But people aren't rational.
Like, people know, like, you know, it's the same thing.
Like, people freak out about driving to the airport or about flying and then, you know, drive to the airport and not even think about their risk of dying driving to the airport.
Yeah.
It's like people are not logical and rational with calculating risk and something that seems totally out of their control, like a self-driving car made by the people who want you to reset your password constantly.
Like a self-driving car like that's that is that is a very scary concept to a lot of people, myself included.
I'm a technology guy.
Like it would be very hard.
It's going to be very, very hard for people to be willing to trust self-driving cars.
And the first time anything goes wrong with one, that's going to tarnish their image for years to come.
Like it's going to be, I think it's going to be a tough battle.
Yeah.
I mean like a couple of things from the chat room.
One talking about, I was saying that electric cars, you know, are self-driving cars in limited scenarios.
Like we already have that in some degrees, like as a very limited scenario and very big definition of cars, all those robots that drive all over factories.
Right.
That is obviously very limited.
I would imagine the first place you're actually going to see self-driving cars is probably someplace like Disneyland, like an amusement park, where it's technically not really a car.
Like, it's all contained within the park, going unknown routes.
Like, they basically have things like that now.
You know, it's like a monorail, but without the rail, right?
That type of technology is coming quickly.
And Google's ones are able to do their area because they have mapped every inch of the terrain and stuff like that.
it'll just expand outward from there and i i made a comment about self-driving cars being easier than planes mostly because and this is contentious in the chat room but i'm gonna say mostly because if there's any kind of problem with a self-driving car it can stop and pull over
That is not an option in a plane.
Like, say there's no human available to drive.
The failure mode of a self-driving car involving slowly coming to a stop and pulling over, that is not available to you if the AI driving a plane loses its bearings and has no idea what the hell to do.
There is no, okay, well, I'll just do nothing.
Like, you know, I'll just turn myself off and I'm sure we'll be fine.
Like, that is at least a viable option in a self-driving car.
Granted, cars behind you could rear end you, so on and so forth, but you don't fall out of the sky.
Whereas the AI driving a plane, if there is no human available and you are over the middle of the ocean and the AI is super confused and has no idea what to do, it does not have an option of saying, I'll just turn myself off.
I'm sure we'll be fine.
That's mostly true.
But, you know, there are whole plane parachutes that will... I'm serious.
I feel like Cessnas.
They will let you drift slowly down into the middle of the Atlantic.
Exactly.
And you'll be fine.
Wait, that works?
Yeah, I'm not kidding.
This was actually on the news a few weeks ago that...
Some like very, very small light aircraft like Cessnas or things like that.
You can apparently get an entire parachute that will that will keep the entire plane, you know, from from plummeting to the ground and rather just floating its way down to the ground or in this hypothetical, the middle of the Atlantic where at which point you drown.
And people are posting the thing of like the pilots who are, you know, that self-flying planes are causing problems with pilots because they get out of touch with the plane itself.
And that's totally true.
Self-driving cars will make people worse drivers, for sure.
And if they become super commonplace three generations from now, no one will know how to drive anymore, but no one will care.
It'll be fine.
But we'll all be dead, so you don't have to worry about it.
I don't want to give up on driving, though.
I like driving.
Well, so that was my meta point here.
I was going to use a reference that neither one of you are going to get, but what else is new?
The whole idea is of self-driving cars and ride sharing, and you use an app and a self-driving car just shows up, and you don't have to own a car like we all own the cars, man, or whatever.
That whole sort of utopian future of driverless cars not owned by anybody runs up against one very big problem.
Aptly pointed out,
by the seminal 90s movie that you two have never seen.
And that reason is people love their cars.
I don't even know what you're referring to, but I agree with that statement, literally.
Yep.
That was a running gag in this movie.
I think his idea was called Super Train.
I'm not entirely sure it might be.
You should actually watch it to find out if there's this deep, broader connection.
But he had an idea for a super train that's going to transport everybody.
I don't remember if it was super, but anyway.
And he kept pitching it to people, and the people would look at it, and he had a scale model, and saw how it would be great, and reduced commute times, and blah, blah, blah.
And they'd be like...
Yeah, it looks like a good idea, but people really love their cars.
That would undercut him constantly.
The chat room is saying it really was Super Train.
Anyway, we'll put a link in the show notes to this movie, but in the grand tradition of not telling you where sugar water comes from, we will not tell you what this movie is.
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Looking at the origins of Supertrain, the fact that it was from a movie that was about grunge people in Seattle makes me think that it is almost certainly either unconscious or conscious origin of Roderick's Supertrain thing.
Because I can almost guarantee that he saw that movie.
and internalized it in some way so i'd be interested to know actually if uh if he was consciously referencing that super train or uh or he has never seen this movie oh you're rocking my world man next year next year you're gonna know you're gonna say bmw doesn't make most of their cars
They do the important part, but pushing on the logo, the little propeller logo on the front.
They make the engine.
Yeah, sort of.
What do you mean sort of?
We watch them make the engines.
Seriously.
Yeah, yeah.
A lot of parts go into an engine.
Do they make the spark plugs?
Do they make the wires?
Do they make the belts?
I don't know.
I don't know.
It doesn't matter.
It's a BMW car.
Right.
It takes a village to make a car, really.
all right so where are we in this follow-up because i'm lost now i think we're still in people's delusions of grandeur about what apple can do when we just passed by the guy who was thinking that like we're all share the cars they'll be autonomous and you'll just get in with your iphone and the car will become your car because like your interface will spread out all over it yeah but then you get to like sit on someone else's fart cushion and smell their cigarettes and their cat hair on the seat like come on yeah well it's san francisco nobody smokes right i hope
I'm led to believe the other one.
It's the next.
The next fantasy scenario is like there's so much more to driving than just the car.
You have to think about everything else, like the traffic lights, the signs, the speed limits, communication with all of those things, communication with all the other cars, Apple traffic lights, Apple.
I'm reading from email people unless you think I'm making fun of something.
Apple traffic lights, Apple stop sign.
Wow.
The list goes on.
What a world.
What a money earner worldwide.
Yes, if Apple could snap its fingers and have interactive electronic traffic signals, signs, and own every car on the road so they could all communicate with each other and all could communicate with the traffic signals and detect things from the signs without having to OCR the speeds off them like a Marcos fancy car does.
that wouldn't be an amazing utopian scenario i think it's a little bit of a tall order to think that app i mean what's next why not just tell say that apple should lay superconducting supercooled superconducting magnets throughout every road in the entire world then we could have levitating cars like all these things are technically possible well also like if you imagine like the the actual reality like can you imagine the business of selling traffic lights and stop signs to like every municipality around the country like that's probably a terrible low margin business it's like
It's like, wait, wait, so hear me out, okay?
Step one, replace every traffic signal and sign in the United States.
Wait, now hear me out, because it's a big payoff at the end of this.
All right, step two, replace every car in the United States with an Apple car that I'll communicate with you.
Now, now, once you've done that, that's the prerequisites.
Now you can have a car that can talk to all the other cars, that can talk to the signals, that can make traffic flow intelligently.
It's like, all right, then.
Yep, yep, okay.
I'm going to say that that is probably in line with...
The idea, like Marco was saying, that I think it's worse than the iPad being some amazing thing and not just being a big iPod touch.
All this stuff, these are all technically possible.
They're all happening slowly like this stuff happens.
Looking for Apple to be the savior to snap its fingers and make all these things that are going to eventually happen happen on a much abbreviated timescale.
I can understand why people look for that because look what they did with the smartphone.
We probably would have gotten to where the iPhone was eventually, but Apple sort of accelerated that massively by making a phone that was just...
leaps and bounds ahead of where everyone else was and then everyone else said oh yeah we should do that and then it took them a couple years and they all did and we're all moving along with smartphones looking like iphones now uh can apple do that with things at the scale of traffic signals and signs the best i think you could hope for even if apple was aiming for this is to have something like this working on
where the rich people live in California as a proof of concept in the same way that Google's have self-driving cars driving around in a limited range to show that, yes, this is something that can be done.
But it's a big leap to go from getting this to work in Disneyland or where the rich people live in California, which is probably a lot like Disneyland, to this works in the entire United States, to this is the way transportation works in the entire planet.
So I'm not holding my breath for any of that.
All right.
Um, do you want to talk about China in the Apple car?
Because clearly if you can't sell it in the United States, China is the answer.
I think the China thing for this feedback from Rob Lewis is, uh, all the manufacturing, uh, Horace went into this on a Simcoe as well.
All the manufacturing capacity in China, if Apple was looking for someone to build their car, there's a lot of car manufacturing capability and know-how in China that is ready to be tapped.
Uh,
they're talking to magna and i think magna has locations in north america and europe but not in china maybe but uh as rob points out apple has existing relationships with a lot of big manufacturing capacity in china so surely some part of the apple car is going to be made or assembled in china because like
you know that's i don't think apple is building a gigafactory to build its battery starting from sand in the united states i assume they're going to contract out to somebody else to help them to make the parts for their stuff and so yeah i'm sure china will be involved will apple be selling their cars in china does china need electric minivans probably they've got a they've got a booming middle class it's a growth opportunity there are a lot of people in china um
I'm not sure if their entire strategy will hinge on China, but surely they'll be involved, as they are with everything having to do with manufacturing these days, it seems.
So is that it?
Did we make it?
We're down to the sugar water and the ASIMCO link explaining auto capacity utilization.
He tweeted something.
It was like a graph of who has unused capacity for automaking, and China is at 64% capacity.
And everyone else is like it's 70 or 80 percent.
It has a smaller overall capacity.
So if you're looking for somebody who's got excess manufacturing capacity for autos, China is it.
So about that Pebble time.
I kept reading that name in the tweets and thinking, is this like a pun or a joke or is this the name of the product?
But I guess.
Stop.
Pebble time.
Yeah.
That's the name of the product.
I mean, I guess it's a good name for a watch.
Yeah.
I mean, I think everything Pebble is doing right now is smart.
They are in a tough spot.
And given the tough spot they're in, they seem like they're making the right moves to not die or at least to prolong death.
Right?
I mean, because they started out with the smartwatch that is basically a notifications display for mostly iPhones.
Some Android people bought them, but I think most of the buyers probably had iPhones.
It became pretty clear pretty quickly that Apple was never going to give them the level of access they needed to the notification system to have any kind of two-way communication or any kind of rich functionality.
And so they tried having their own apps and their own SDK to custom integrate with it, but...
And they still do, but I think the reality is that's really not going to go incredibly far in the Apple ecosystem just because of the limitations imposed by iOS and the hardware.
And Apple's never going to open that up.
Once Apple makes a watch, then it's time for people to go, all right, well, never mind then.
And so, you know, they're not stupid.
They saw this.
And they, I think, pretty smartly are much more embracing the Android side.
And I think that's wise, you know.
And I don't want to go too far into Pebble stuff because our friends over at Connected covered it way better than we could because they actually, at least Mike, actually has used a Pebble.
I don't know if the other guys have.
I forget.
But, you know, Mike has actually spent a lot of time using one as far as none of us have, right?
Yeah.
I have not, no.
I've only seen one in real life and it looked so incredibly giant and nerdy.
That's even too nerdy for us.
And that's really saying a lot.
Don't you think that's a continuing problem with the Pebble?
I know they have the Pebble Steel, which was an attempt to be fashionable that I think mostly failed.
Because it wasn't very fashionable.
It just looked like someone trying to be fashionable.
And I've seen people applauding.
Maybe it was you, Marco.
Applauding the idea that the Pebble Time doesn't try to do that anymore.
And it just looks like... No, I didn't say that.
A gadget.
Maybe it was Gruber saying it just looks like a gadgety thing again.
It's like, I don't understand.
Like, it's fine.
to say you're not going to go like the fashion route like this is not a fashion accessory it's a gadget accessory it's fine like you're smelling you're selling these in a small volume uh nerds like android it's like a kickstarter type thing like yeah does it have to be so darn ugly though like you can make something that looks like a tech nerd toy that like i just all the pebbles the the original one the steel and this new one
do not look attractive to me and i'm not demanding fashion wise i just want it to like if they just made it an unadorned box it would look better because these things just look like weird weird thermoses with like bulges and borders and things poking out of anyway yeah i've seen a lot of pebbles in real life uh they haven't particularly appealed to me but you know the smart move that pebble is making here is
not even attempting to compete with any of the smartwatches because they're going to say our differentiator is our battery lasts for seven days because we have an e-ink screen period the end done is anyone else going to do that i don't even know if they have any competition and i think it's also fairly it's also more waterproof right i'm not sure i mean i suppose it could be because like you know there there's less stuff inside it the screen is you know the
The CPU is super weak.
Everything about it is like we are going the opposite extreme because Apple is not going to make a watch in their first outing with the battery last seven days.
They're going to be lucky if you can get through a day without charging anything, right?
Pebble says we can go the whole week.
Why?
Because we have an e-ink screen.
An e-ink screen you're not going to be watching video on.
What do you mean video?
Forget it.
We're just, you know, we're showing you information about calendars and notifications, stuff like that.
that's what they're trying to do and even that like you know what was the kickstarters of like 15 000 phones or 15 000 watches or something like that apple sells 15 000 iphones like every three minutes or whatever the hell it is like it's you know the volumes are very small this is a boutique thing for gadget nerds and it has found a way forever it's already like past 50 000 it looks like it's raised almost 10 million dollars for whatever it's worth at the time of recording and it's going up still yeah so how many how long does it take apple to sell that many iphones like a day or two
Sure.
I mean, it's not the same game.
That's what I'm saying.
They started out as a small company.
It started on Kickstarter.
And in many ways, it looks like that's just the route they're going to continue on as long as they can.
And it might be indefinitely.
It might be a long time.
They might be around for a while.
There are a lot of gadget nerds, obviously.
I mean, look how quickly this thing... It reached its goal in something like 20 minutes.
And now it's way... As I said, it's raised almost $10 million right now.
And there's still a month left in the campaign.
So...
This thing, obviously, and this is all just pre-sales.
Once it's out, if it gets good reviews, maybe people will buy it more.
Once it's out, the Apple Watch will be out, and that's going to take a lot of wind out of the sales here.
But still, if they embrace the Android ecosystem, the Android ecosystem is freaking huge.
And if you look at the Android Wear watches that they're competing with in that ecosystem...
The Android Wear watches really have not gone very far.
Everyone who has tried them so far has had pretty mixed reviews of them.
None of them have really taken off.
They're obviously not going to win on style.
The rest of the Android Wear watches have a better chance than this does, and that's not saying a whole lot.
They're not going to win on style.
But for all the other things, the battery life, the possible water resistance, the durability cost, I mean, these things are really cheap.
I think they're at $200, something like that, a little under $200.
Yeah, about $200.
So these things are, you know, there's a big market for this if smartwatches are going to be a thing that takes off.
And I think it's pretty clear that's probably going to happen.
So I think they're going to do okay for quite a while.
And I think it's wise for them to push further into the Android ecosystem because iOS is just not going to go that far for them.
Yeah, and I think it's really important that, like, you know, saying, oh, this is a small market.
It only applies to gadget nerds.
You can't even get the gadget nerds if what you try to make is a gadget that is like the Apple Watch but worse.
Because even the gadget nerds don't want that.
Like, nobody wants that, right?
So that's why it's so important.
It's like, well, if it's just, you know...
50,000 100,000 people or whatever who cares like you know these people obviously like it to be all gadgety and cool but if you made something that was had an lcd screen needed to be charged like it was basically just a worse apple watch nobody wants that not even the gadget nerds want that like they'll just buy android wear if they want like an android powered watch so you have to do something different than everybody else even if you just have a small market and so that's why they're being super smart here because it seems like as far as i know no one else is even trying to make a color e-ink
smartwatch like are they the only one in the entire world like regardless of how they're doing it with the specific technologies seven day battery nobody making an apple or android wear style smartwatch would ever say seven day battery there's no way in hell you're getting seven day battery from your apple watch that is a big difference and that will actually appeal to gadget nerds whereas if you made just a worse android wear watch now you're competing with motorola now you're competing with apple now you're competing with all of them so
Very smart move by that Kickstarter.
And what they're essentially doing is exploring an avenue for wearables.
Because at this point, we don't know.
Like, is it a deal breaker that you have to charge your Apple Watch every day?
Or do people not care?
And we don't know yet.
That's the real answer.
We don't know.
Yeah, and Pebble has shown that, at least among gadget nerds, I see a lot of people wearing the original Pebble.
You can't miss it.
Yeah, exactly.
That was enough to get a bunch of people to wear smartwatches.
I have only seen one other person wear an Android wear smartwatch, and that person happened to be reviewing that product.
So I don't know if that counts, but I see many Pebbles in my travels in Nerd Circles, so...
uh pebble may be onto something and if they are onto something uh it's bad for them because then uh all all the android manufacturers and maybe even apple will just make a watch like that and eventually it's bad for them because presumably eventually the apple watch will have at least a multi-day if not seven day uh battery life you know five seven years from now but uh gather ye rose buds pebble this is your time
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, CocoConf, Harvest, and Lynda.com, and we will see you next week.
Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin, because it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, cause it was accidental, it was accidental, and you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C, USA Syracuse.
It's accidental.
Accidental.
They didn't mean to.
Accidental.
Accidental.
So, Marco, for the first time in your life, you actually did some homework?
I did.
It was very hard.
It was a lot of work.
I really struggled through to do it for the show.
I feel for you.
It's a difficult task.
Yeah.
So after the last show, we were talking about electric cars and what Apple might do and the Tesla and everything.
And we got a number of comments in the chat and a number of emails immediately afterwards saying you should really drive an electric car to know what you're talking about.
So I had to do this.
I had to go and test drive a Tesla this past Saturday, just so I could know for the show what we're talking about.
It's so kind of you to take one for the team, because God knows I would hate to have to go and drive a Tesla.
God, would that suck.
I had to drive like 20 minutes to go to the place each way.
It was hard.
So...
Let me preface this by saying I'm a big fish fan, as you know from listening to our show.
I like fish music, not the fish that you eat or that swim in the ocean.
I don't like them at all.
I can't wait to see how this connects.
Yeah, me too.
Yeah.
Now, even though I'm a fish fan, if you can think of what you think of when you think of fish fans...
I don't care that much about going to the live shows, even though I listen to all the live shows.
You're not a pan man.
I'm not a pan man.
I don't do any drugs.
And the one time I did go to a fish show, I didn't do any drugs there either.
Well, you know, not directly.
Exactly.
Okay.
But according to other Fish fans, to the things they like, the things they value, I'm really like a terrible Fish fan.
I'm just terrible.
So similarly, I'm also a fan of BMW sports cars.
But among them, so I really prefer all-wheel drive.
I never bring my car on a track.
I don't take it anywhere and do donuts in parking lots.
I always drive with traction control on and I generally prefer luxurious luxuries like, you know, comfy seats, even though they're heavy, you know, stuff like that.
Like,
motorized, sunroofs, heated seats, all that stuff.
It's all this heavy luxury stuff in cars.
I like that.
So similar to how I'm a terrible fish fan, I'm also a terrible sports car owner, according to the priorities of most other sports car owners.
So I went to this Tesla driving thing where they had a table set up at some health club, and you could sign up and go in and test drive it for a certain time slot.
So I went up to this thing, and I was told it would be the new P85D model, the super fast one that had that crazy reactions video that has the all-wheel drive and the super fast motor.
And it was, although unfortunately, it was white.
So going into this drive,
I knew that I was about to drive this giant, heavy, but very fast all-wheel drive electric car, right?
Now, I knew going in, academically, I knew it was going to be significantly faster than my car.
But I also, what I expected based on how we were talking about it and what I've heard from other people and what I saw in a Tesla mall showroom like two years ago, I was also expecting it to have, you know, a less luxurious interior or
um and more importantly to just be less sporty like i knew it would be fast but i also was not expecting it to be sporty i i expected it to be just kind of more you know tame handling more cushy um and a little bit less luxurious on the inside so the interior of the car that i saw was actually very nice um i would say it is not as nice as like a decked out high-end 5 series but it was it was a lot less far off than it used to be it was pretty close i
I immediately got in and backed up out of the parking spot.
I really, really missed the heads-up display and the top-down parking view.
Top-down parking view.
Boy, we're talking about the automated cars make us bad drivers.
You can't even drive without a simulated bird's-eye view of his car.
No.
Well, look, with the bird's eye view, I've never scraped a rim.
Not once.
I do a lot of parallel parking in really tight city spots.
I've never scraped a rim.
I don't scrape my worms the old-fashioned way by parking way too far away from the curb.
Well, yeah.
Anyway, yeah, because Boston's known for its wide, spacious roads, especially now with all the snow.
Yeah, roads are really wide now.
we give it one car barely through if that yeah all right so it doesn't have a heads-up display it doesn't have the side cameras to offer the top down view so that's that's unfortunate in a car of this class at this price range but um oh well move on they do offer some of the luxuries that i that i uh come to enjoy like a heated steering wheel very few cars offer heated steering wheels um once you have a heated steering wheel it's quite like even my three series had it before this and it's oh it's so nice it's amazing way better than air conditioned seats those are mostly useless
Anyway, I didn't have a lot of time to play with the controls, the touchscreen thing and everything, because it was mostly just about, it was like a 15-minute drive around this course they had set up around these roads.
Now, let me interrupt real quick.
Do you find that 17-inch monitor, whatever the crap it is, in the center console, does that look ridiculous to you?
Because it looks freaking ridiculous to me.
It looks completely ridiculous when you look at it.
In the drive, like while driving, I never had much of a reason to look at it because it sits pretty low.
And this is like part of the problem is that the climate controls, which are probably the most commonly accessed things for me, are at the very bottom of that screen.
And so if I wanted to adjust the climate, I didn't try doing this during the drive, so take all those with a grain of salt.
um if i wanted to just adjust the climate i have to like look pretty much like almost at the floor to do like you have to look so far off away from the road i'm not i'm not crazy about that and we'll see in practice you know maybe that'll change or maybe maybe i don't know about some option you can turn a lot of this stuff is customizable and i i spent no time playing with the controls i was all about driving so i can't really discuss the controls on any on any reasonable authority
I would say that, though, the touchscreen control do look a little bit dated.
The whole theme of the UI is very much like pre-iOS 7, pre-Metro.
It looks like iOS 6, basically, but less cartoony.
Anyway, so, get to the test drive.
It's in insane mode, so I get to fully experience the speed.
And so we stop.
I have a clear road ahead of me.
I slam on the gas.
And... Wow.
Yeah?
That good?
Wow.
Like...
holy handbrake wow so the hard so like it only does that super hard acceleration like if you're if you're in the insane mode at a complete stop and you floor it i've never felt anything like that before there is no the reason why it's so jarring is that there is no transition from zero like you're like you're at zero and then all of a sudden you're just going and
And once you're going, it just feels like an insanely fast car.
But from zero to going, it almost feels like I'm getting hit in the face.
It was actually unpleasant.
I actually didn't like it.
It was actually uncomfortable and unpleasant.
It feels like you're getting hit in the face.
If I actually owned this car, I don't think I would really ever do that.
Except to scare passengers.
Yeah, except to scare passengers once, because it was actually unpleasant.
It's too fast.
And I did it a few times.
I did it at the beginning and the end of the test drive, just so I would have some perception of, is it just the first time that it's unpleasant?
Do I get used to it?
Is it less bad?
Nope, it actually is unpleasant every time.
So to put things in perspective, according to Tesla's website, the P85D does 0-60 in 3.2 seconds.
Just as a rough equivalent, the Aerosmith Rockin' Roller Coaster at Walt Disney World does 0 to 57 miles an hour in 2.8 seconds.
So they're approximately equivalent.
This roller coaster takes pictures of everyone on the ride every single time the ride starts because everyone freaks out.
As a matter of fact, reading from Wikipedia, the riders experience 4.5 Gs as they enter the first inversion.
And a lot of that is, I believe, a combination of the acceleration and the turn itself.
That's basically you're driving a roller coaster.
yeah it's i mean as i said yeah this that speed going from zero to full and insane mode i mean it's a gimmick you don't have any reason to actually do that in practice ever um but my god like it was it was so fast and as i said like i mean that was actually unpleasant like i actually don't have any need or want to do that i think the 911 turbo does it 0 16 2.9 or something so it's not even the fastest production car that you can get from 60 like there are there are below there are sub three supercars out there
Yeah, but not a lot of them are these big, heavy four-door sedans.
I mean, that's the big thing.
I think this is the only one.
Yeah, you don't expect it to come out of them, but what I'm saying is that the three-second being in the low to mid threes has been a thing for supercars for a long time, but it has not been a thing for a very long time for four-door sedan-looking things.
Right.
I mean, my car is ridiculous, and it does it in, I think, 4.2, 4.3, something like that.
So it's a pretty substantial difference.
Once you're going, when you're just driving normally, it just feels like a really fast sports car.
I would say it is similar but faster than the M5.
It feels very similar on the highway.
If you're passing somebody, it actually isn't that different going from 60 to 80.
It feels about the same.
There actually is some responsiveness lag when you're already going fast and you want to push it to go around somebody.
so it actually is very similar to a gas engine like at highway speeds it felt very similar to me do you think that might have just been the uh the uh the acceleration curves on the uh the pedal like you know the i don't figure what they call it but like they have different curves like how much do you have to press the pedal to add some proportional amount of uh engine and like a lot of the what car makers do to make their car feel more or less sporty is to change like
what happens in the first inch of travel does is the second inch of travel and seven times as much gas as the first inch of travel or the reverse you know so i can imagine that like especially since because it's all electronic or like they can decide how that curve like they can do a software update to change it or maybe it's the the driving mode type of thing because it's one thing i wouldn't expect from a tesla is anything that is perceptible's lag having to do with
nature of the drivetrain as opposed to just programming at a curve because there's no turbo spinning up right there's no gears being changed it's just merely give more juice to the electric motors i mean like maybe the maybe i was slightly decelerating right before i did that and the regeneration thing was kicked in so maybe i had to like disengage the regenerative motor or the engine thing something like that oh yeah and that's it's weird that the with the one pedal driving how'd you like that or were you doing that
So the M5 has a lot of engine suction.
So compared to the M5, it just felt like it had a little bit more engine suction.
I didn't do all one-pedal driving.
I was using the brakes like a normal person.
But you could do it.
I could see how you could do it.
I didn't do it really to come to complete stops.
I was just doing it to slow down the way I do with engine braking.
So it was fine.
But...
Yeah.
Anyway, so like driving around the handling this now, John, you had mentioned that the handling feels like nothing else because it has the battery pack very low, this giant heavy weight sitting very low.
So the center of gravity is very low and it handles very like the car stays very flat.
Is that a fair assessment of what you said?
Yeah.
And it doesn't feel the suspension doesn't feel overly stiff because normally the car is flat.
It's like, you know, because they have very stiff suspension.
And then when you go over bumps, you feel like you're being jostled.
Right.
Going through the turns, I would say that it actually didn't feel noticeably different than my car because good sports cars have always tried to achieve that.
They always try to have very little body roll and they'll play tricks with bars or the suspension.
They'll play tricks to make it better and to just minimize body roll and keep the car flat during cornering.
so like it it didn't it didn't feel it felt great but like it didn't feel dramatically better in cornering than than a good sports car would did you go over potholes though because that like i think that's where you notice because like i've driven your car for short distances and driving your car over the totally destroyed roads of massachusetts i could feel that this whatever mode you had it in that this car has sports car suspension because like going over those potholes felt way rougher than it does in my accord with its smushy like every man's suspension right whereas
And the Tesla on the same crappy Massachusetts roads, it felt flat like your car in turns.
But then you go over potholes and it would also suck them up a little bit better.
So I feel like the spring rates are softer on the Tesla because they can afford to be because the center of gravity is so low and it's less jostling.
But it may be a close thing.
But, you know, having been a passenger in the Tesla and having driven your car.
I think that Tesla wins on comfort over terrible roads.
And I would assume yours wins in handling, but I haven't driven either one of them to say what the handling is like at the extremes.
Well, okay.
So the Tesla does have electric power steering.
Now, I said a couple shows ago how I've never heard anybody say that electric power steering was even as good as hydraulic steering.
Everyone's always like, well, it's getting better, but no one ever says it's as good.
So this has electric power steering.
I would say it's as good.
Really?
I wouldn't say it's better, but I would say it's as good as the steering in my car.
Now, again, this was only a 15-minute test drive.
And so maybe if I owned one of these things and drove it all the time, maybe I would have a different opinion of it.
But in that test drive, I had a lot of nice turns at low and high speeds.
And...
I did not notice the steering.
I asked halfway through, I'm like, oh, is this electric power steering?
I realized, oh, this is probably electric.
And I asked, and the guy said yes.
And I was very impressed because it felt like a good sports car steering system.
And the suspension... I would say the suspension felt like it was very advanced because...
I was able to have a lot of fun with the steering and everything and the suspension and the speed.
And it never felt either too marshmallow-y like a Lexus or too uncomfortably firm like the 1M was.
It just felt good, but you still felt the road.
You still felt what was going on.
And so I really had... I have nothing bad to say about the steering or the suspension.
Now, the grip.
This... So this is an on-wheel drive car.
As I said earlier, I'm a fan of all-wheel drive.
This car has, in my 15 minutes of test drive, in 20 degree weather on snow tires, this car has the most advanced all-wheel drive system I've ever felt.
By far, by far and away, the best all-wheel drive I've ever felt.
As measured by?
By my previous X-Drive 3 Series and a couple of Lexuses I've driven for parents and stuff.
And I think that's... I don't think I've ever driven a Subaru to its extreme.
The secret is they have a whole separate engine for the other set of wheels.
The all-wheel drive system in this thing was shockingly good.
I have... Like, it was insane.
And the traction control system...
Now, again, this was cold weather, so the tires were a little bit hard.
Cold weather, because it's New York and it's the winter, there was a bunch of gravel all over a lot of the roads.
And I would do things like turning left at an intersection, so making a 90-degree turn from a stop, just really irresponsibly quickly.
Just seeing if I could, trying to lose grip.
And I was able to lose grip occasionally, but what's interesting about it is not only is it very hard to lose grip, but when it does, it's not like the gas systems where they just cut the engine power for a few seconds, which really kind of ruins the fun and makes people want to turn off these systems.
Or they use the brakes to break individual wheels.
If it was doing that, I don't know if it was.
If it was doing that, I couldn't tell.
It just felt like... It was the best feeling system I've ever felt.
I mean, it was the best all-wheel drive system ever.
I cannot say enough good things about that all-wheel drive system.
And I don't know how it does in the snow.
I didn't try it in the snow.
I didn't have the chance.
I've heard it's very good, but I don't know.
But just...
Trying to drive it in a fun, slightly irresponsible, spirited way, it was amazing.
It didn't feel like a nanny.
It felt like it was helping me do what I told the car to do.
When you're doing that insane mode acceleration from zero to a million, and it hits you in the face with how fast it is.
At no point in that did I ever feel like it was unsafe or about to lose control and go off the road.
I have to imagine that a big part of that is this auto-drive system.
When you go from zero to going so quickly, you think, like, how can the tires even do this?
Like, it feels like it should be beyond the limits of the tires of the grip they can offer, but it still does it.
So...
traction control system all-wheel drive system incredible I would even like I would like I would intentionally like take a quick turn around like a little bend and like intentionally put one of the rear wheels on gravel so that when I floored it it would it should lose grip and it did but it would it would regain it so quickly and you would you never felt like you were in any real danger of like being of going off the road or even slightly losing control I mean it was incredible
Overall, driving this car, I would say it is an amazing sports car.
I knew it would be fast.
I did not know it would be this sporty and this fun.
It was just an incredibly fun, sporty, fast, exhilarating drive.
I cannot say enough good things about how amazing this car felt to drive.
It's like the apple of cars, really.
Oh, here we go.
Here we go.
Anyway, I do have some concerns.
If I were to own one of these things, I, of course, do have range anxiety.
It goes like 260 miles in ideal circumstances.
They have a calculator on their site, and it's like, okay, well, if you set the air conditioning to this and you actually drive this fast on the highway, how much range can you actually expect?
And mine was more like 200 miles.
Uh, cause it's like, all right, well, what if it's a hundred degrees?
I have the air conditioning on and I'm driving 85, you know?
So then it's like, then it's down to like 200.
So, uh, it's not a deal killer, but it's a big issue.
I'm not sure I would want this to be our only car in our family.
You know, I know, I know people who do that and, but I'm not sure I could do that.
The bigger issue with this, and this ties back into what Apple might possibly do in this, because I think the answer is Apple would do something pretty similar to what Tesla's doing, because there's not much else.
Because the problem is, a bigger issue, I think, is charging speed.
And the reason why is because electric cars...
Beyond the battery tech, in order just to move a car like this this far, they just need a ton of power.
By household electric power standards, they just need a ridiculous amount of power.
The limitation is not how quickly the batteries can accept a charge necessarily.
It's much more limited by how much charge your household wiring is able to give it with the kind of outlet you have installed.
That's the big limitation with these cars.
and you know and they have special high power charges you can install but biggest thing like for me like my concern with a road trip would be you know problem one would be range but then the problem two is like where do you plug in when you get there to give you some point of reference i did a little bit of research here so the uh the common north american you know 120 volt outlet uh chargers if you plug into that with a model s you gain three miles of range per hour three that's not very good
It takes about four days to charge your car up all the way.
So suppose you drive your car to somewhere where the only place you can plug in is through some long extension cord into somebody's house or some hotel.
You can plug into a regular outlet.
Okay.
Then you have to stay there for four days to fully charge.
that's probably not a great option for people right now what you're supposed to do if you have one of these in your house is you're supposed to get a basically a dryer outlet installed a 200 volt 40 amp outlet installed which is common for dryers these days into a dryer outlet you can charge the car up fully in nine hours which is great so that's fine but like you know i drive frequently to places like upstate to in-laws house or my mom's house i visited you guys at your houses before
How likely is it that you're going to drive somewhere and you're going to be able to plug into somebody's extra dryer outlet and have that be within like 30 feet of where your car is parked?
Did you look for supercharger stations along your normal routes?
That's what I was going to say, because there's one very close to our house, like 10, 15 minutes away.
Now, to be fair, that doesn't necessarily mean you would want to ditch your Tesla 20 minutes away from the house, but
oh just leave it there well the superchargers charge it in less than an hour though right yeah they gave you i believe it's an 80 charge in about 40 minutes so it's not a full charge but you know it's enough um and something like 40 minutes now so so i asked a couple tesla owners and i did some reading of you know what do what do tesla owners do you know how do you take road trips because chances are you're you're not gonna want to like arrive at someone's house nearly empty and then just you know not having to plug in that's that's not great
um and you're also probably not going to want to be bugging your hotel or your friend's house or your parents to be like hey can i run this giant extension cord to your dryer outlets like if they if they even have how many people do who have a spare dryer outlet period you know let alone uh one that you can use that is in range of your car like physical range so
it's that's not a great solution that's not a great position to be in and i've heard from a number of people uh thank you for all those people who've responded to me heard from a number of people who who have told me about various like there are apps and and maps and like there's a thing called plug share if i remember correctly there's like a like a site where like people can volunteer their houses to other ev owners like you can use my charging point at my house when you're if you're passing through like
That's all cool and everything, but I really prefer to be independent and to not need to rely on going around some weird neighborhood at night trying to figure out, hey, where's the nearest charge point?
Can I charge up here?
Trying to bum something off somebody.
That's not my style.
I really feel very uncomfortable doing that.
So you can do it, but it's not easy and it's not convenient and it's not great.
And from what I gather, what most people do is you basically supercharge right before you get somewhere.
And then when you leave, like on your way out, you supercharge as you leave.
And that way you have enough charge to do some local driving while you're there.
and then you know on the highway you're fine but either but you know every time you stop at a supercharger that adds like an hour to your trip you know like you're you gotta get there stop plug in hopefully there's nobody already taking up all the spots that's a big problem if there is because that adds another 40 minutes to your trip you wait for them to come back uh
hopefully you plug in you get 40 minutes of charge there you know you go and have some lunch whatever but that's that's a big delay for a road trip especially if the trip's on like this is only every 250 miles or so so like it's only like every every three or four hours you got to stop for an hour like that's that kind of sucks
Now, did they ever actually start doing the five-minute complete battery swap?
You know what I'm talking about?
Yeah, they talked about that.
I don't know if that's actually deployed anywhere.
And I'm not sure that I would do it necessarily, but it's an interesting idea.
Because, again, the problem here is just the speed at which you can deliver this much power into such a tremendous battery pack.
And that's going to be hard to solve.
And this is like...
Apple, if Apple does a pure electric vehicle, you could do a fuel cell.
You know, fuel cells are options.
And Toyota announced, I think, today that they're doing a fuel cell vehicle.
So that's interesting.
But then you need hydrogen everywhere.
That's kind of that's had its own set of challenges and issues.
And anyway, so this is a problem.
You know, it's not a deal killer for a lot of people.
But it is certainly a major inconvenience.
You know, the fact that you can't just fill up anywhere and that filling up takes so long.
That is really a problem.
And again, not a deal killer for a lot of people, but a significant problem and a significant barrier to adoption.
Anyway, so I have some reservations about whether I should own one of these things.
The practical side of it, that would concern me.
But you don't have any reservations about whether your wife should own one of these.
Well, she likes her car a lot.
If we bought one of these, it would have to be my car.
Did you look at the luggage space and the general 3GT-ishness?
I feel like the space in this car is maybe not as cavernous as her current car, but it's in the ballpark, right?
Yeah.
I think it might have more total space, even though the 3GT has a pretty nice wide opening to the back.
But the Tesla might have more overall space.
Anyway, I would say it was the driving experience of this overall was the best driving car I've ever driven.
Period.
Better than yours.
yeah wow i i really would like to have more time driving one of these things even though i have reservations about in practice um so anyway after the test drive i went back to my car to drive at home for 20 minutes going from the p85d to an m5 it made the m5 feel like two words that nobody has ever used to describe an m5 slow and light and
Those are two words that no one has ever used to describe an M5.
You're absolutely right.
I would add a third one, noisy, but that's just the radio anyway.
Yeah, that's true.
Yeah.
Now, yeah, so going back to the M5, first of all, I immediately missed the all-wheel drive.
Immediately.
Because, you know, it was a cold day on the hard tires, even though both cars had winter tires on them, but I immediately missed the all-wheel drive.
Going back to shifting gears.
Now, I have discussed many times, and Casey, you too, I love manually shifting my gears.
I do it with the DCT now, I did it with the stick in the past, and I do this because I don't like the way automatics feel and behave, and they make the decisions for you.
I want maximum responsiveness for what I intend to do with the car, and I can only really get that by shifting gears.
I don't shift gears manually because I like the actual work
of managing what gear the car is in and how it matches up with the engine power and everything.
The actual work of shifting the gears, I don't care that much about, which is why I had no qualms going to the DCT from the manual and why I don't regret that move at all.
I want the car to behave the way I want and to have the power available the way I want, not necessarily do I need to be shifting gears constantly.
Having no gears at all and having infinite power available at any speed with very little lag, I can honestly say, after 15 minutes of driving at least, that's just better.
Like, it's simply better.
Like, I thought it would be less fun or less like a driving experience, but it wasn't.
It just felt better.
And, you know, it really...
Overall, it really felt like, when I went back to my car, it immediately felt like the clunky, bad hack that gas cars really are.
Like, gas cars are such terrible hacks.
Piles and piles of terrible hacks on top of terrible hacks.
And, you know, John, as you said last week, like the Tesla has so many fewer parts.
It's such a simpler mechanical thing.
You feel that like you can really tell that this, you know, this all electric drive train, it is something else.
It is really something else.
And unfortunately, this something else I think has ruined me forever.
Like just having driven it once, like now I'm ruined.
Now every gas car seems like an old clunky hack.
Did you look in the frunk?
i did yeah and the back that's why i say like where's the car you open up all the doors and you open up all the things you're like this is like a magic trick i know well and like they have like in my mall showroom which i went to i went to the mall a few days ago for something else so i stopped at the showroom to look at their paint and stuff they have one they have like a disassembled one where it's only the the drivetrain so and they had these i'm sure in most of their showrooms it's just like this giant silver rectangle of batteries with wheels on the corners and that's about it like there's not much more to it and it has but it has the the the motors though right
yeah yeah yeah and so like it's like you think okay well this is just the chassis and then you'll have to add like the engine and it's like no that's you could drive that thing if you put a steering wheel on it right it's the car it's the wheels it's the suspension it's the battery and it's the power sources for all of the wheels yeah exactly so i mean it it really i would say don't drive one of these because
Because it will ruin you.
My lease is coming up in a year.
And an all-wheel drive M5 is probably going to come out in about three more years.
But I think by the time an all-wheel drive M5 comes out, I will probably already be driving one of these.
And I won't want to go back to a gas car, no matter how good of a gas car it is.
Once you've driven one of these things, it is shockingly different and shockingly good.
Like, again, I thought there was going to be major trade-offs in fun and sportiness and handling, and there just weren't at all.
Like, it was just better.
It was so much better and so much simpler and so much... It's almost more pure, you know, from a purist perspective.
Like, it's more pure because there's like less...
There's less stuff like managing all these different like hacks and levels of power delivery.
It's just you just push the pedal to go and you can do whatever you want with the steering.
And and it's it's just amazing.
And so I think, you know, if I can make an analogy to conclude this whole long rant that's now been almost a half hour long.
electric cars are a lot like ssds and the transition to ssds uh where you know as soon as you use an ssd for the first time it ruins you you know like as soon as you see an ssd you're like oh man i can never go back to this and as soon as you have used one any spinning disc that you use after that it's just like
oh this is horrible it's so slow it's such a hack you know it's terrible so once you have you once you've driven an electric car it's very similar it's like you just it ruins everything else for you but like the ssd transition uh it also comes with significant cost and significant limitations up front so
And maybe eventually, years down the road, maybe we'll be past that.
But it's going to be slower than the SSD transition was.
And so pure electric cars are incredible in a lot of ways.
Inconvenient and limited and expensive in other ways.
But they're just so much better.
at the core driving experience in so many ways that I think a lot of people are going to be willing to accept those costs and those limitations, just like SSDs.
And I think it's very, very likely that I will get one of these when my lease is up.
Yeah, I said last week, referencing Tesla, that they were the first company that actually made a good electric car.
Not like good for an electric car, but a good car that happens to also be electric.
And it sounds like you agree.
Totally.
I mean, completely, totally agree.
I've already looked at, I've priced it out with the options I want, and it is actually more expensive.
But what I'd like to do, I'd actually like to, if I can find a dealer that has one, I'd like to test drive the non-P version, just the 85D.
uh so it's still the all-wheel drive but just it's less power um because i don't intend to do the insane mode acceleration from a stop like ever because i actually didn't like it as i said like it was unpleasant um so i'm curious like the the non-pe one it still has all-wheel drive and everything that is like 20 grand less and a good few hundred dollars a month less on the lease so i might i'm gonna look at that and see if i can drive one of those and see if i care about the difference um but i'm pretty sure i'm gonna be getting one of these things
And Casey, never drive one because this will ruin you too.
Like this, this is how the manual transmission is going to die.
We all thought that it was going to die because everyone moved to automatics.
In reality, the manual is going to be killed by the lack of a need for a transmission.
Yeah, you're right.
It's wild to me that you liked it that much.
The fact that you liked it, not really surprising at all.
The fact that you liked it this much, I do find surprising, especially because, you know, I feel like BMW and Apple, and I know you guys think I'm crazy for comparing them and saying they're similar, but I really do feel like they are in a lot of ways.
Yeah.
And Apple, in a lot of ways, tries to get you invested in the experience of owning an Apple product with the retail stores.
And I'm trying to think of other examples, but I can't.
But just the whole experience of owning an Apple product.
Similarly, BMW, maybe they don't actively try to get you in a similar position.
But, you know, when you and I and underscore went to the performance driving school.
That was certainly an actual event that we learned things, but you could also say it was a two-day BMW sales pitch that we paid for the privilege of going to see.
And so in a lot of ways, I feel like you and I have bought into the whole BMW air quotes culture.
And plus, we both drive like jerks, so that helps too.
A little bit, yeah.
But the point is, you know, I feel like you and I are slash were all in on Apple, all in on the BMW like experience.
And for you to just violently say, oh, my goodness, this is definitely like your head is swiveled around entirely.
And I'm not saying that's a bad thing at all.
In fact, that's probably a good thing because I think this is the future.
But I'm surprised how enthusiastic you are over this experience after having spent so much time going to Munich, going to the performance driving school, owning three different BMWs in the last 10 years, whatever it's been.
I'm surprised that you are this into it this quickly.
Well, this is true disruption.
True disruption is something that makes everything else seem totally irrelevant and useless and old.
That's how good this was.
It was incredible.
And as I said, the handling, the speed, and the all-wheel drive system were just incredible.
Um, this is, this is, this is going to be ridiculously successful, I think, you know, among anyone who can afford it, which is admittedly a very small group, but it's, it's going to be really good.
Um, you know, I think what you just said though, about, you know, buying in and, and being, you know, maybe, maybe a fanboy, maybe that's the right word.
Just like, you know, like buying in a lot to one company's, you know, culture or products or, uh, identity.
Um,
This is one of the reasons why... Right now, I'm a huge fan of coffee and Apple stuff and BMWs, but there's a reason why my Twitter username doesn't include... It's not like CoffeeMarco or AppleFanMarco.
That's...
I never try to tie my identity to something that could so easily change over time.
And I think it's important for everybody to consider this with your own identities and with the teams you think you're on, what you think makes you.
And if you consists of a set of brand names and foods you like, don't tie too firmly to that because that stuff can change.
You know, what if tomorrow I develop a digestive problem and I can't drink coffee anymore?
Like, I don't want to have coffee have been this giant part of my identity that all of a sudden I feel like I'm losing part of my identity.
You know, if BMW starts making cars I don't like, I have no problem buying something for somebody else.
If Apple starts making computers I don't like, I have no problem buying computers from somebody else.
I hope that doesn't happen with Apple because these somebody else's out there are not that good.
But, you know, like...
If that happens, I'm fine changing those things.
It is very important that I never lock my identity to some external affiliation to a brand or a thing that I can't easily get away from.
That's unwise.
And it makes people make bad decisions and have stupid conversations and leave stupid comments in people's comment forms.
So...
So, yeah, I mean, look, right now, I have a BMW because it was the best car in the world that I could get at the time that I got it.
And I worked hard enough to get it, and I was really happy about that.
And I still am very happy with it.
But...
Now, I found something that is substantially better in a few key ways that matter a lot to me.
And again, in some key ways, it's substantially worse.
You know, my car can go 300, 400 miles easy on the highway, and then I can stop and I can fill up in 10 minutes anywhere and go.
and you can't do that with a tesla and that's not going to be the kind of thing that all of a sudden comes next year like that's going to be a long long term thing that you might never be able to do like it's not even guaranteed like oh eventually they'll charge in 10 minutes it'll be fine like that might never happen uh certainly within the lifetime of the car that you buy today that you own within the lifetime of anything you buy today that almost certainly won't happen
but you need to be open to the possibility of something better might come along, right?
And I think in this case, something did.
If there are any wealthy benefactors listening to this show, please keep in mind that I still want the mid-engine V8 Ferrari, whatever the current one is.
So that's 488, you know, and just keep up with the model.
So just that has not changed.
Wow.
Now, Marco, I think just to close this, this post show, just let this show you that every great once in a while doing your homework is actually worth it.
Eh, probably not.
That was really long, I'm sorry.
That was incredibly long.
Talking about brand affiliation and everything, everything you said is true, but in your case specifically, I think that what it highlights is that the aspect of your personality and your dealings with sort of
products and brands that wins out over brand allegiance is your desire for new shiny things and so that is the that is the primary motivator of your actions and that oh this is better oh is there something better oh that's better oh that's better that that sort of nature of like which doesn't manifest itself in your programming language things but totally manifests itself in your choice of foods uh
cleaning materials like things that you buy you know what i mean like the the the cars that you drive the the computers that you use oh i gotta get a new mac pro now the new iMac is shinier like just you are always looking for a product that's better than the product you have testing a million light bulbs is there a better light bulb than these eight
light bulbs i've already tried is it better in some subtle way i need to find the best light bulb it's been a while with light i gotta find a new i gotta look at light bulbs again you don't have any brand allegiance to light bulbs you're just like i just want the best light bulb and if there's a better light bulb out there and i don't have it i'm just replacing every light bulb in this damn house like i got m5 now it's crap i need an electric car it's not crap but it's just like i found something that's just way better i know i know but like it was saying that that that your personal drive to find the best one of whatever for the things that you're into
is is overriding what it is i think you do have some allegiance to like you know you really like bmws you like what they do you bought multiple bmws or whatever but it's only until you find something that's better than them like it doesn't that overrides the the loyal because you did have loyalty to bmw for you know the tesla has existed and if you had test drive
test-driven, the non-insane mode, non-high-powered one of these years ago, you might have had the same reaction.
Maybe without the part where you felt like you were being punched in the face, but you might have had the same reaction.
What was keeping you from doing that?
Well, but it only had a lot of drive like two months ago.
And the high-powered motor and everything.
Yeah, I guess so too.
But again, you'd have to...
drive the two-wheel drive one see if it's right you already have a two-wheel drive car now you bought a two-wheel drive m5 so there is a little bit of like the whole brand loyalty and you know and the fact that you don't want to keep looking for a new thing like once you find the thing you have you want to enjoy it for some period of time before you revisit but i would say that that is the dominant part of your personality over overriding all the other parts
this is why i lease cars and also because i stress out too much when i don't because i oh god oh i hate whenever i had a car that i owned i was such an incredible ball of nerves and just total wreck about it like any any little scratch oh my god i'm gonna look at this for 10 years like even when you own crappy cars yeah yeah because it because then it when i owned the crappy cars it was less about this is going to destroy value and make me lose a lot of money and more about i'm gonna look at the scratch of the next 10 years
yeah no i'm resigned to that i have crappy cars and like i tried to keep my new car nice for a long time but it's just i'm it's impossible like for this winter like i can't imagine what my car is going to look like when i finally clean it off in the spring and see what the hell is underneath all the road salt and grime and disgustingness but yeah
I can tell you, it's going to look like a very average, completely forgettable car.
I already established it's not average.
It is so average.
It's more of the average from a decade ago.
But anyway, I keep my cars until they die or until their resale value is almost zero.
Like, you know, oh, we better sell this because if I don't sell it soon, I'm going to have to give it away and that may be difficult.
Like, that's how long I keep my cars, right?
So I'm not a car leaser.
Uh...
My Ferrari, though, I would drive very little, just so you know, and I would try to maintain its value.
So I don't feel like you're giving me a Ferrari.
Okay, now somebody will buy you one.
Wealthy benefactor who's listening, I will take good care of it.
And you won't park under the acorn tree, right?
No, no, never.
I will buy a different house for it to live in.
So this is why you buy used cars, because by the time it arrives in your garage, it's already been nicked or dinged in some way, shape, or form.
And so the bet's already off at that point.
You just have to embrace it.
I don't think you can do the 85D.
I think you'd have to do the P85D, because the performance difference is...
substantial it's it's a large difference yeah if it was if it was like if it was like in the four second range versus 3.2 i'd do it oh that would be plenty but yeah it's it's a pretty substantial difference yeah i think you're right unfortunately i mean you don't have to turn on insane mode you can you'll try it because it may be what you like is the fact that there's no pauses or noise or like just the sort of the whoosh
you know the electric so try the slower quote unquote slower one and see because again like is the slower one all that much slower from 50 to 80 maybe not that much that you would notice yeah well i'm a little concerned because the the super p one it mentions a different suspension in its description and what i liked so much about it was the suspension of the auto drive system so i i suspect i'm just gonna have to go with the big one well just you know test them all i'm such an asshole
well you know that you overcame that part that part of you that was embarrassed to buy like the ridiculous car you overcame that for the m5 so i feel like you've crossed that hurdle now you'll be easier to pull the trigger on just give me the whatever the most expensive tesla you have is i want that one well and this is actually like driving around my neighborhood like i i do feel a little self-conscious because my car is very loud because the m5 is like the m cars are all they're they're extra loud you won't have that problem i know and yeah exactly like and my neighbors have even made comments like oh we can hear you coming up the block like
Well, that might also have to do with you not shifting before 5,000 RPM.
Why would I?
Just saying.