The Bodybuilder's Secret

Transcript

Welcome to The Inevitable A podcast by Motor Trend. Welcome to yet another episode of The Inevitable. This is Motor Trends podcast on the Future of the automobile. Where are we going? How are we gonna get there? What are you gonna do when cars don't have steering wheels when they drive themselves? I'm joined as always by my co-host Johnny Lieberman. Hello, Johnny. Hey, Ed. And today we are joined by our coworkers, Christian, Siva and Scott Evans. And I'm a little nervous about this one because, well, you know, just for me a little bit of job security, like, you know, what if we got some coworkers in here who, you know, did a better job than me and you try to replace them. But luckily it's these guys. So they're not going to do a better job than me. But, um, these are, these are our, uh, they're kind of veterans. Now, at this point, it seems like yesterday when they first joined the team. But, uh, Scott Evans and Christian are, uh, senior, senior editors on the team. And, uh, if you don't like this episode, you can blame me. This was kind of my idea I was chatting with John, I was texting with Johnny and I was like, you know, we should probably have Scott and Christian on and the, the spark to this actually came from some recent stories that we've done and really, it was kind of Christian uh leading this. He had kind of two in a row on the E V uh front. He wrote a really good piece. He ran down a story on Tesla's new semi truck and then that like took off on the site, it kind of went viral. And then the following week, um he did a story with an irresistible headline about how it can cost you like $18,000 to install a home charger charging for your Ford F 1 50 lighting pickup truck. And that also took off. And then I got to thinking like, well, who else on staff has done a lot on E V and is very knowledgeable and he came up with Scott Evans as well because he's done a bunch of stuff. And I said, hey, this is a great idea because not only do we have that angle but it's not like these guys got into the business to be uh electric car evangelist, you know, they, they wanted to write about like mustangs and, and, and, and, and Camaros and Fierros and Vipers and stuff like that, like literally the opposite of what they're kind of really becoming expert at. And so I, and and, and same for me. I mean, I, I honestly just wanted to drive Veron. That was, that was my whole thing for going pro when writing about cars. I'll never be able to afford one, but I could probably mooch my way into a bunch of them and, and yet I've now kind of without thinking about it really, like, become I, I, I co-host uh an E V podcast or a Future Car podcast. So, just same stretch for me. I, I got into it for the minivans and now here I am, I have to do an E V. So, you know, it's very true. Right. Well, how about we get these two in here and we'll talk to Scott and Christian. Scott and Christian. Welcome to the inevitable. Yes. So, Ed has this dumbbell that he thinks is really funny that any time you say the word inevitable, the bell gets wrong and I'm, I'm gonna throw it away when he's not looking, but this is a new thing, best $8 I've ever spent on Amazon the happy face. It's menacing, right? Um We will, uh, we have already introduced you guys, so we'd have to talk about who you are and, uh, but let's talk about um, why you're here and we can, we can set up a little bit like How you got to motor trend. Let's go 1x1. So, Scott, you're a little bit. You guys have like us have um you work at the best place in the, in the, in the universe, in the known universe. So many, many of our listeners, all four of them are, are dying to know. How do you make it? How do you make it to the uh to, to the promised land? Like what, what was, what was the journey? Let's start with Scott. Yeah. Not only are we here but we are, we're both like we're all lifers here basically. Um I got started here because I knew somebody who knew somebody. Um I found out my mom called me one day and she goes, she went to the hospital and she said I was talking to Dr June and did you know his son writes for a car magazine? Turns out Roy and I went to the same high school. We were two years apart. Never knew each other, never even heard his name and turns out Rory's dad is a doctor that heart surgeon. And they, so I go get me his email, his phone number or something like so she did and I wrote him a nice email. I didn't ask for a job or anything. I was just like, how, what did you study? How did you get there? How did you get in this industry? And he emailed me back a nice email and he also passed my email to Mike Floyd who has done 90% of the hiring at motor trend. So basically, everybody who works at motor trend. With the exception of I hired a Lisa Priddle. Uh I hired Eric Ting. I hired Miguel. I should hit the for that is awesome. Uh I didn't. Angus hired you with my approval. Yeah. Right. Right. So, so you got you, but you didn't set up. Where were you at the time you were in college? I was finishing my last semester of college at San Jose State And he just emailed me and was like, hey, we're starting this daily news blog. We're calling it Wide Open Throttle. And we need people to like, write just simple news stories. We'll send your press release. You do some research, write a nice little thing. We'll pay you $20 a blog and this is 2000 spring of 2008. And so I was at auto blog at the time and I think we were getting $25 in news stories. So motor undercutting. So you started as a freelancer writing for and throttle? OK. But, but, but you didn't you work at a scooter magazine or something? I was interning at a, at scoot magazine, the number one scooter magazine in the country. What was number two? I don't remember. Um But it was great and it was actually a, a heck of a learning experience because the editor in chief who also worked at Starbucks for the benefits at the same time and he just worked at Starbucks. No, it was a super small operation and tragically he got in a, in a big accident, some kid in a trying to drift his Lexus, like, hit him on his scooter and put him in the hospital. And so I kind of ended up like the only person in the office, which was about the size of this podcasting room for every day for like the whole semester. I was like doing all like the mailing people, their T shirts they bought and they're filling their subscriptions and things because everybody who worked there had a, had a job somewhere else and this was a passion project that they did on the side. And you, you were a intern, you were a paid intern, paid in free swag. I got a helmet and a jacket and pants and boots. Like, were you a scooter enthusiast at the time? No, I was in motorcycles so I didn't really know anything about scooters. But, um, it was really interesting and they were, you know, they were really cool people. I'm still friends with them today. Like, they're, they're really great and I've since, like, ridden scooters and aren't motorcycles way cooler than scooters. Like, how, how could you, have you met Scott? Ok. All right. I was, I was, I held my tongue. I was gonna say I didn't know anything about scooters. I'm like, it's a lame slow motorcycle. But, um, but, and you sit on it like you're on the toilet. Um but they love him in Italy. And were you with your big injury? Was it on a scooter or a motorcycle in Italy? Uh The one in Italy was on a scooter. That was a full circle. Although I have, I have a motorcycle also put me in the hospital. So I'm two for two. Did, did your injury on the scooter in Italy? Make the pages of Scoot magazine. Scoot magazine is unfortunately no longer in Britain. So, ok, so how long did you freelance before we brought you on about six months? And yeah, Floyd said come to L A. Let's talk about doing this full time. So I flew down here wore my dad's suit, uh rented a car, went and met everybody took myself to the Peterson Museum because I had way more time than I thought. I knew this was, we were still at Scott predates me. That's right. So we were on the, uh, we were at uh fif 14. What's the address? I didn't remember. It was like, yeah, a tall building it now the building I think, but Peterson used to have the whole thing. And uh at the time I was there, we were probably the, we had the 76 or seven to like the 15th floor or something. That was all the former company is huge. And I tell people that like I started a month to the day before the Lehman Brothers collapsed and I was sure having only been there 30 days that like, I was going to get laid off so fast and I was gonna be like, well, at least it's on my resume. I worked for, for a month. That'll help me get a job somewhere else. What Lehman Brothers was, October September of 2008. So I'll tell y'all never fired me. I'll tell you a funny story. I don't think anyone here knows this. So I was gonna be working for automobile and it was supposed to and I remember it was, it was like December of 2008. I was gonna start doing something. I don't remember, I don't remember who I was talking to and then I remember the L A Auto Show which was November of 2008. Whoever it was was like, yeah, it's not happening. I'm like, what? Like I planned to leave like, nah, it's not happening. So that's, that's great. They kept young. Yeah. So then, ok, when did you start May of 2011? Oh, really? That, that, that much farther. But you, and you came in, you weren't an intern, you were part of the team. Yeah. Right into the white team and still existed back then. Right. Right. Right. And we were already down in. Yeah. Yeah, I, I was, I've never been to the Wilshire. I started, I started July of 2010, uh, July 27. We interviewed you at one time. No. No, no, no, no, I never went to, I never went, I never went was like old school corner if you, if you had an office because all the offices had windows. You had great views of L A, I guess, I guess Mackenzie had a corner office and looked down Wilshire and it was just the coolest thing. You just look at you like you felt very mad man built ins, like, just great, like this weird sort of desk with all the built ins and all four of us were in the, in the middle of the building where, like, we couldn't see anything. My, my first one, I'd like, go, like around in, like a maze, like in a circle to get over by the copier where a great place to start. Well, then we moved into the big bullpen where we also had the, uh, the Wii tennis tournaments. Uh, that's right. That's right. That's, we had the air of the Nintendo wii God. I've been there a long time. Uh, so wait, so Christian, you started in 2011 also news team and you came from where school? Uh, I was a journalism major in college. Bona University. Middle of nowhere. Western New York. Near Buffalo. Yeah. Good basketball team. Right. That same garbage back then. But, uh, yeah, hockey player. And you were a Floyd hire. I was a Floyd hire. Yeah, Floyd, I've applied my senior year. Like, I think maybe January and then Floyd emailed me back saying, hey, we'd love to have you come for an interview and I panicked. I call my mom like, hey, I need to get to L A and then, you know, just like why you can't do it over the phone, you can't do it on Zoom. We had Doom or I guess it would have been Skype back then. Yeah. So I called Floyd up and explained to him. he's like, oh, yeah, no worries. And then Skype interview. And, uh, yeah, I put my mohawk down. I had a mohawk at the time. What color? What color? No, no color. Yeah. Um, but, uh, yeah, he was foolish enough to hire me. Oh, wait, uh, for those of you who maybe read Motor Trend magazine or look at the website on occasion, uh, cushion is, um, the hot blonde, uh, in all of the pictures that end up on the cover. Like we get letters every now and then say, who's the blonde driving the car? Well, that's, that's one of my favorite stories. I think you were both there. So we were, we were in, uh, Colorado Steamboat Springs, Springs and we, we were at a winter driving school, Bridgestone, I think. And there was, I think it was a female instructor. Well, they, no, they paired us up but they students. Yes, but there was a female instructor and there was a young, I think she was 15, 14 years permitted named Britney and, and uh like every time she was trying to talk to Christian just because long blonde hair, long blonde hair, she kept saying, hey Britney over the radio, Britney, no, Britney slowed down. And so we called her Britney for like years. It's great. After that years later, we were at the car of the year and um well, he was sitting in a box store making notes and I walk past and I'm like, sweetheart and he goes, it's Britney b***h. That's great. All right. So, ok, we established that how you guys got here. Um And let's also talk about how they literally started on the bottom uh and worked their way up. They're both senior senior, right to the middle. And I remember you don't know this story. This is one of my favorite stories. Um I used to have lunch with Floyd a lot and we were talking about uh you know, promoting some people and blah, blah, blah. And he had told me on Wednesday that I think on either on Friday or Monday, he was gonna promote you Christian and um you drove me and my wife to the airport on Thursday and I'm like, how's it going? Because I hadn't talked to you in a while and you're like, oh, I don't know, man. Like I kind of want to like, I don't know, I think I'm out of here and I was like, oh yeah, I'm like, just wait it out. Wait because I knew it was coming like the next day and then you got your promotion. I don't remember that conversation. I remember that drive and that, that C T S V and I almost stalled it like four or five times. I was so nervous TV. Wagon. Long term. That's how long ago was that was, that was 2009. It would have been in the conversation happened because it was, you were so upset after a year of two years, you get a big promotion. Come on, come on. It was, it was, I kept them, I'm telling you. Oh, that was the year I was, I got editor in chief. I was promoted as associate editor right before you got editor in chief. And how, oh, how we fallen? Uh Anyways. Uh So why are we, why are we here? Why are we here talking to you guys? Um I was thinking about this thing, you know, we do this uh podcast called a book All about Electric Vehicle, uh All about where we're going. And, um, you know, we can go backwards in time, we can go forwards in time. I don't know. But both of you have actually done a lot in the space a lot recently. Um We are, we are laser focused on, you know, talking about this stuff covering the adoption, mass adoption and, and just finding interesting storylines and, um, I guess we can start with the one that you both were involved, all three of you except for me were involved in, um, and it was Christian's, uh, brainchild, which was, we did the Rian Transamerica Trail. Is it two years now? August of 2021. This was sorry, June of 2021. Um, well, you set it up. What do we do? Uh, we, we drove coast to coast off road, uh, in an electric pickup truck. Um, barely any pavement, I think. Uh, only when we had to, um, yeah, like a few months a day just to get to a hotel to charge. It was usually to get to your hotel or your campsite or wherever you were going to like sleep and charge. Yeah, I went from the outer banks of North Carolina to, I don't even remember where we ended up. Port Orford, Oregon. It was 7700 miles off road. Yep. 43 days, 42 43 days. Which is insane. We'll get to that. Who you came up with this idea? Yeah. Originally I was gonna do it with Jeep when the New Wrangler came out and I kind of pitched it a little bit to Jeep and they seemed sort of interested and then it kind of fell apart. Um, the, the time there's a huge time suck and New Wrangler probably wasn't worth sending someone out for a month and a half. Um, and then RJ, uh, the Ceo of Vivian. Yeah. He came by our office to show us the R N T with a virtual reality goggles. You remember that? Yeah. And um, you know, I saw it and started asking a question about it being off-road capable and it looked like it could do, you know, nice off-road things. And um I kind of just went from there. I was like this, this could be the car to, to do it. So you mentioned it to him, you know, I just, I thought about it um and I brought it up eventually to uh was it would have been Amy. No, actually it was before her. It would have been uh mchale. Oh yeah, when he was for a hot second. So, but, and originally this was planned for like 2020, right? Or maybe even 2019 pre pandemic and then they kept delaying it and then he left and I worked with, I work with Amy on it. Um she's at Ford. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean long story long uh yeah, it uh it took three or four years. It, well, it got pushed pandemic and production delays with Rian, right? And they, they had a whole thing. It was gonna be do the thing, but they would have the, the, the r Adventure Network to do the charging that didn't really happen. It never panned out. So OK, fast forward. So you hang on, hang on. So, so I will say, and I actually owe Christian, a huge apology because I was super sour. I was just like, I've been involved in so many of these things where a startup at the last second, just like pulls the plug. And I was being really mean, I remember on, on, uh in one of our slack and I was like, you know, this is not happening. And you were like, well, then you're not going, you know, something, you said something like that. And I think I told you you didn't have to go. Yeah. And I was just sort of like, oh, I kind of want to go if it actually happened. I didn't say anything but I owe you an apology because it was brilliant and you pulled it off and, and it was, it was such a fun. I, I wanted to, I remember like flying home and telling my wife I'm like, I'm gonna buy one of these damn things. It's incredible. It was insane when it was proposed. I was like, how can this take, how can this take so long? Like I started looking at this thing and I was like, we're gonna get, we're gonna get annihilated the fastest somebody's done. The T A T is like little over two weeks, 17 days I think. And I was like, this thing when it first got spec it was like, it's gonna be like 40 days and I was like 39 or something I think, definitely patted it a bit, we could have if we didn't have their support and ignoring anything that broke down, you know, we could have done it quicker. I'm pretty confident in that. So you do it to charge the things that is, that is the problem. But I mean, most of the time, I mean, I don't know about your leg or your leg, but on the first and the fifth, we charge mostly at night like we maybe did one or two, we had to do two. Uh We did a big distance. We didn't do, we weren't doing like crazy, that many crazy obstacles. You went from Georgia, we went from Georgia to Oklahoma, which is, it was a big so five waves, five weeks, the first wave would have been uh North Carolina to Georgia, Georgia to Oklahoma, Oklahoma to Utah. Utah, back to Utah, went into Utah through Nevada, back into Utah. And then the last bit was Utah to Oregon. And uh you know, completely as 90% 95% off road the entire way. I, I did sort of parachute in, in Utah halfway through and I got to hang out with R and drive the truck over some of the, some of the trails out there. And sort of that was, I just, it was a movie, I really wanted to see the truck, drive the truck and also just sort of hang out with RJ because the guy is like the second coming of Elon. You're also leaving at the best part where you cooked us all tacos on the camp kitchen. Right. Oh, yeah, I did do that. That was, that was also the, that was also the thing I wanted to try out this, this camp kitchen. And uh, and also the barbecue. We had a barbecue, we had a Canadian lady. I think she was Canadian, took us tacos and me and Miguel were just like, so horrified about trying to be nice because she's Canadian or yeah, or I can't remember. She's very sweet. Her name is Lily. She's wonderful. But it was like, I'm gonna make tacos and was just like, oh no, I, no, I remember now that you, you brought it back. I totally forgot about that. I had to, I was, I had to like chop, I had to chop like a bag of onions in this uh in this tent with like a dull knife and like a little, this weird cutting board uh to make. Uh and we were making guacamole and stuff too, but that was pretty fun. That was the best part about it is that we had stopped on the way down from the airport. We went to a liquor store in town and bought like two bottles of whiskey to like share with everyone at the camp that night and we opened one of them, we drank it and the other one just walked away at the end of the night with, uh, with, I think one of the people like just, and I was like, oh, well done. Don't bring it, you know, we'll open it tomorrow night at the next stop. Never came back, right. So, um, Let's, and then we're just gonna bounce around you because why not prior to? OK. So you've been at 2, 2008, So what was the first electric car you drove, Scott? The first one I drove was actually a prototype back in, I wanna say, oh nine Chrysler wanted to show that, you know, they, they were forward thinking they just come out of bankruptcy and they did this event where they had taken a grand caravan, a Wrangler unlimited and a lotus Europa and put electric motors and batteries in them to show that they were gonna make electric cars. They did this whole thing. They did a lot, but I was doing it too right. They basically just copied Tesla. They put a Dodge badge on the front of it and they, and they did it at the Rose Bowl parking lot and they're like, look how fast the, the lotus isn't a straight line. The Jeep guys couldn't stop talking about what would be the Rian concept. They're like someday this, you know, this one, it just, we just put an electric motor where the transmission used to be. But someday you could have four motors, you could have one on each wheel and man, imagine when you go off road and each wheel is controlled by each motor and you could do all this stuff and then nothing happened for like 12 years. And then here comes ribbon with a four motor that did exactly what they have been talking about. Ok. Uh, first thing on the way in, I think it was probably a Mitsubishi. I, yeah, I went on that or a one of those two. I think Kota was first, would have been 2012 the year. Yes, it was one of those two and I was helping out for a car of the year. I think it was, I think it was the, because I went on the, I went on the i of launch, which is, I mean, if we ever do a show just about like press launches, which we should. Uh it was the most like the, the, the, the, the guy that was our guide through Japan who was an American guy who spoke like good Japanese was let out of an insane asylum. Uh because they wanted an American guy that could speak proper Japanese and then went back to it once we were done. Perfect. Yeah. And man, that was a poor car. Yeah. Lift throttle under stairs. Very interesting. So, wait, that was your, that was your first TV? No, no, no, no, that was my, I went on the, the first trip to Japan to drive the, the first one, I mean, I drove a Roadster so I guess, I guess in 2008 or whenever the Tesla Roadster came out and I remember just like, loving it except for the fact that, you know, I left with, you know, 100 miles of range and I went really, really fast and then I had, like, you know, I had like, 30 miles of range left and I was like, oh, oh, you know, and so that was, I was like, whoa, they have a long way to go. Where would you have even charged it back then? Oh, you wouldn't, I don't know, look, first of all, I mean, I, I, I didn't know anything. I, I just kind of was like, I wasn't thinking about it as an E V. I was thinking about it like, this thing is so fast and I, like this is so I'm gonna take it on a, I'm gonna go from, you know, the Tesla showroom right off the four oh five um on Wilshire, Santa Monica, whatever it is. And I'm gonna go to Malibu and I'm gonna wing wing. Yeah. And then like, I had not driven very many miles and I had like, burned 70 of my Santa Monica. So I had to come back at like, like five miles an hour to make it back to the showroom. I remember it would have been around the same time. We had a original Tesla Roadster at the Wilshire office and we couldn't take it. I was like, much too junior just like taking cars and running away with them at that time. But like, we were able to like, drive around the block and the real like thing was, it was a privately owned car and they had some module on it that lets you change the horn to like animal sounds and like sound effects and things. So we just like drove around the block around the Wilshire building just like making cow noises at pedestrians on the street and confusing everyone. And now that's the uh the who it comes from the factory. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you guys came into this? I don't remember, to be honest, it's probably, I, I can't remember if I actually drove the Roadster. You remember? It was pretty good. I I it would have been, I definitely drove a leaf. Uh I famously got ran out of uh went into turtle mode and we had fully discharged the battery at car of the year in the leaf on like classic, like this is like a a bugs bunny cartoon. Like we ran out of batteries on the train tracks into hatcher and I had to like get on the radio. I had like get on the radio and like guys, guys, the the car is on the train tracks. How did you hai is a train town? So like there was going to be a train coming. So, like, like Brian and the other guys had to come up and they had hopped out of the car. We had to push the thing across the track. Yeah. Yeah, we got, it was thank God because, uh, we, we got it, we got it across the track and to the Charger in limp mode. Uh, but yeah, I mean, I Dakota, um, Kota surprisingly. Ok. Going left or right. Everybody kind of clapped on it and, and you know, we had, we had the only car I've ever been with like the sea weren't straight on the scene. Not a good car, but like, I remember taking her on the figure eight and I'm like, you know what, like have this advantage. We had Zinger here and Kevin Zinger and you know, it singer was the CEO of Cota the nine years later. I'm like, wow, that's a vision but visionary, right? And he came when he was here telling us about it, it was, it was nothing about the car itself. It was about how do you get the battery, find a battery with the right chemistry that get charged quick enough and this and that and then hit the price. He, he basically proved Elon correct in that you got to go premium. You have to go for an expensive, a higher end car to have the profits. You can't because everybody's been saying like E V only for rich people. So, but Kodo is a failure of trying to, to do the volume car first. Right. But also the car wasn't that competitive for the time compared to a leaf. I don't remember the range. They caught off hand but it was about 100 80 85. Yeah. Yeah, I wasn't making a really big deal that Porsche design had consulted on the design of the hood and the grill on the car. Well, because it was a Mitsubishi and every other panel. So you guys came to motor trend though. Why, why did you and I have a, I have a longer point to this, but what was the interest? Christian? I loved cars. I mean, what, what specifically, what, what kind of cars? What about cars? I mean, growing up, I had pictures, I would print out pictures of like Dodge Vipers and put them on my wall. Um I loved uh muscle cars. I really wanted a, I loved W R X si really wanted one of those. Um uh I just, I just always want to be around cars when I was a kid. We didn't have a car until I was probably 11 because we grew up in New York City. Um And whenever I go to my grandparents house, I'd always go missing and it'd be found in the garage. My uh grandfather had a 9 11, probably 83 Target and I would just go sit in it and uh you know, make sounds and work the shifter and, yeah, I wanted to drive everything and, well, I didn't have an, an, a car and driver. So, um, no, it's no, but like very similar, sorry to Christians. Right? Like, you know, I made like hot rods out of my legos when I was a kid. I like, you know, I could tell you every car on the road at night based on like the tail lights and the headlights, right? Like you just, and neither of my parents were super and my dad had a couple cool cars when he was younger. But like it, it wasn't like, oh yeah, we were in the garage every weekend. Like it was really self taught. I just loved cars. I really wanted a uh in high school. I wanted the fourth gen f body like Firebird Fire Hawk, like the six speed and like I said, they're both meat heads and, but, but, but, but again, so I, I, I look, uh, I, I didn't even know it was called this, but I think my favorite issue every year was the buyers guide issue because it had the engine specs of every single car and that therefore I could memorize them so I could go to my mom when I'm 10 years old. Like, oh look, it's a, it's a, I don't know, a geo prism and it has a, you know, 1.6 liter L S it's, it's overhead valve. It's, you know, eight valves, you know, and, and like, you know what I mean? Like, and I, and I literally knew every single fact about every single car. Uh So it's sort of inevitable that I wound up. Uh I was gonna smack it that I wound up like doing this. But like you two, I sort of got into this. Um, you know, I didn't want to write the minivan comparison tests. I wanted to like, I know they're so much fun. I know you, you're very pleasant on them. Um But like I wanted to do big smoky burnouts and dumb things and burn a lot of gas and everything. And I have found myself kind of becoming this uh champion for E V s and, and trying to do it, I think in a logical way, maybe with a little bit of passion. But like, did you ever see either of you think like I'm gonna be like the guy, my best article this year is because I wrote about an electric vehicle or how to install a charger. Yeah, my best article if you're talking about average of my home panel, like it's in. Well, yeah, so that, that is, that is um that is why again, as we talked about in the intro, why they're here. Uh These guys have done a lot of the most recent coverage on motor trend dot com. Uh You know, that's going to appear in the magazine on this, this weird moment. We're in where people are, you know, mass a mass E V adoption. It, it's starting to take off. Right. We passed the 5% threshold in the summer of 2022. This is, uh, in, in terms of all new vehicle sales, 5% of them now are E V s and that's a critical, uh, sort of gateway, uh, as we said in, during our last, um, podcast with France, you know, the, the early adopters have adopted, a lot of them have adopted um leafs or iev most of them, a lot of, but now we're, now we're hitting sort of the, yeah, like, so sort of the fatter part of the curve. And it's getting really interesting because I think the patients um that the, the patience, the understanding uh of for like the some of the difficulties or challenges around E V ownership uh is, is a lot lower. Um But like, like, like let Christian answer ed if I may pull you for a second, excuse me. Um Like if your 14 year old Christian self found out that you were like writing about home charging for electric, pickup trucks for a living. Like, how, what would you make of that nerd? I mean, like, I'd be like confused, right? Because my first car was a, was a 67 beetle and I lived in Santa Cruz was like beetle capital of the, the country. And every song you hear about somebody who converted one to electric because those were some of the first cars you would convert, you just stuck an electric mode right to the transmission and like a couple of lead acid batteries under it and it weighed £10. It didn't matter. And so I'd be like, oh, but like, why would I, like, I, I know about this. I've heard this but like, why would I care? Like, there's, there's L S ones over here, why wouldn't he be writing in a scooter magazine? Uh, because I find myself in that, in this weird position where it's like, you know, I, I still like to think of myself as like an expert on super cars and stuff like that and, but I get all this stuff like you hate, you know, you hate gasoline. It's like, no, I don't hate gasoline. I'm just conscious of the fact that an E V is 4.5 times more efficient and that's just like a mathematical fact. You can't, you can't ignore that. It's like a yes and it's not like a either or, and so many people feel like it's an either or situation like that. I like that. Um, but hang on, I just, I just want to confirm one thing because I, I just want to confirm the meat head. Uh, just make sure it's, my first car was a mustang G T I daily drove it into the snow in western New York. I mean, and I know you like and I know you like, but here's, here's, here's the, uh, look, I paid my own money for like the first. I, I got a speeding ticket in that car when I was taking on the test drive. You guys, are you guys are missing the, here's the question of the meat head confirmation. The car selection is fine. Great. What, what's in the tape deck of your, of your car? That this is, this is the part that this was, this was early two thousands. There was a CD player first. OK. What's, what's on, what's in the position? One? What's CD one in your sixties? Once, once I got the, uh the face of the CD player out from under the seat where I hit it and put it back on the, I think, uh I don't know, I, I, everything that you hear on like her nation right now on Sirius X M like, that's what was in my, like a lot of that. My wife and I still have a joke where uh I had a white snake CD in one time and she went to like, turn it down or change it. And I was like, don't touch the white snake. And she still says that to me, like on a regular basis, there's so many ways to go with that Christian. Uh Honestly, I was a contrarian, that's why I'm an auto motor journalist. So, uh in high school. I listened a lot of hair metal. Um So, but when I first got my, my first car, I was in college. So at that point, I probably would have been, yeah, Guns and Roses like Crew Van Haen, but also like Black La Society Metallica, maybe Slayer Ozzie Osborne. All right. Um So you guys are now writing confirmed meat heads. You guys love your muscle cars and the high performance stuff and you're writing about this kind of content. And I think, look, admit we're all professionals at this table and that's what I, that's what I like about the team that the, all the, all the editors are able to sort of um take themselves out of the story per se, separate their personal feelings and write about topics that we think are interesting to a broader audience uh as, you know, evenhandedly as fairly as possible that to me defines sort of professional journalism, stripping that away personally. Are you guys, are you converts? Are you guys, you, you're now and we should clarify right now as one of the perks of landing at the best job in the universe. You both have long term vehicles and they both happen to be electric pickup trucks. Christian is shepherding. Motor trend's 2023 truck of the year, the f 1 50 lightning and $85,000 Lariat, right? And um Scott had the pleasure and is about to turn in the 2022 Motor trend truck of the year. The Vivian R one T that I'm sure has gotten you a lot of looks at different parking lots and grocery stores. Um, you guys have driven these trucks. You're now very, you've driven all sorts of Teslas and other stuff. You add one of these to your personal stable. Is this, is this a thing? Are you like? Hm. I work at motor so I can't afford a 1 51. Here we go. Yes, you could. You could. Yeah. No, honestly, for me, um, my, my wife has a plug in hybrid, a cross track, uh, hybrid. Um, in my, if I didn't work in this job, that's probably, I, I do a plug in hybrid just because the family aspect, the long distance travel is a commitment and I'm not quite sure my family is ready for that, that commitment. Uh, I mean, you're living with the ID four right now and I think you're experiencing some similar things. So, um, but, you know, I personally wouldn't buy another vehicle that wasn't at least a plug and hybrid. Ok. So we'll get, actually that's a good, that's a good path. But, so you are, but you're still like, you're not like, I want to buy a new Mustang dark horse. I mean, if I was going to buy a, a gas powered vehicle, it'd have to be really good, like, and really good in what way? Engaging, fun because the thing is, I don't care about speed anymore because all E V s are so fast, it just kind of works your perception and it doesn't matter, you can't go fast anyway. I'd rather have a good handling of car. Um, so, I mean, maybe a Camara has one only. I mean, um, I, I, I keep looking because there was that, remember that, like slime green paint they did that, those, those resales are like way less than all the other colors and like, they're kind of at, like under 25. But the person who bought that color, we're not expecting ss one. No, no, no, it was, I think it was a one color at least. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it was, it, those are cool. Yeah, that's really neat. Yeah. But, yeah, I mean, I, I would buy a, a, probably a used performance like a car. Yeah. Well, Scott has a used, you got a, my wife still drives her 1993. Miata used is you need a bigger return. Yeah, that car can rent itself. That's all. Um, but yeah. So are you, but how about you? Are you like E V now? Are you a full convert? Are you kind of still on the fence? Is this something that you would do if you asking me this? But he knows that, like, he and I, and motor trainer, like, in this three way bidding war to buy this R one T when it uh, when it finishes its loan here, I wasn't aware that I, that I would somehow like in competition, isn't it just mine? Like, don't I get, yeah, you told me you looked the door handle like nine months ago, so. Yes. Ok. All right. So, so you want, you, you're, you're all about, I love this truck. I, I would absolutely like keep this truck on it honestly, but I would also, if I was gonna buy like two cars right now, I would have this truck and the other car that we always talk about we want to buy is the car that we drove on our honeymoon that you actually hooked us up with, which was a 2011 Maserati Grand Cabrio and it just has a special place because we, we drove it on our honeymoon for a couple of days and it looks beautiful. It sounds beautiful like that's just a special car and the new, you know, as beautiful as the new grandeur look like they don't have that Ferrari V eight anymore. And yeah, so I'm somebody who wants a, a electric truck and also a Ferrari V eight and a impractical Italian coup. Well, the good news is you can probably buy one of those Maserati for less than a 1993. You say that I've been watching, they, they kind of pull a toad around 40 grand as, as low as they got Johnny and I keep sending each other, those are basically free. But no, the, the, the grand tourism and especially the convertibles are just not taint quite as much. Well, I love my Irwin t, although I'm very annoyed with it right now because it has a cracked window which cannot be rep. Oh man. Uh So the, the, the cover is on mine is just, is just broken, broken, broken, been replaced a bunch. And I finally said, could you just permanently open it? Because it had like my kid had tried to close it and it got stuck. So the mobile Rian guys came over and they were just gonna, they're just disabling. They're putting it back in and a new solutions coming in a few months, blah, blah. So my wife goes to them, hey, the windows have been, I shouldn't told me this, but the windows have been acting funny like sometimes like it won't power up and I notice that once in a while she goes and then sometimes it goes up, stops halfway and goes back down. Could you reset it now? Because it's a software defined vehicle? And the tech guys aren't really like, you know, body guys because I noticed this is the second they left, they just said, oh yeah, we'll reset the windows. But I think that the window would come off the track a little bit. It was. And so as it starts to go up, it gets a little resistance thinks it's a human arm and lowers back down. Right. So, you know, I like grabbed the window and I pulled it up with both hands and it, you know, I thought it was, I'm like, don't open it. So, uh, she went, we, we went to Big Bear. She drove separate. I, I had to, I had to do a, uh, something. I, I came up anyway, she opened the window and then didn't close it all the way. It got into the twenties overnight. And I think something moved in the door when it froze and the window wasn't seated and it cracked. The annoying part is they're like, yeah, we can, this is like last week they're like, we can take you in on February 24th and this was like on February 2nd. And so I'm like, that's kind of unacceptable because I wanna, it's raining and I want, like, it's, it's, it's not leaking water, but we just don't want to drive it when it make it worse. So I'm a little annoyed at that because that shouldn't be like a, a four week sitting around or three. Well, what's really annoying is that like, this is ribbon Windows are a sort of a known thing and there's a procedure in the digital owner's manual in the infotainment screen of how to reset the windows. And it's literally like, put it all the way down and hold the button down for like five seconds and that resets the, the software. This was the guys plugged in a laptop. Uh, and no one did as I watched it, not only did all the windows start going up and down, but the seats in the front started moving and doing just reset all that stuff and the stair wheel was moving. I don't know, some procedure, but I was a little annoyed that it broke after these guys quote unquote, reset the window and it hadn't broke before that. So early adopter early adopter. Now, Scott's not actually so much an early adopter of the people at the table. You actually have the most experience in E V ownership because you are also the, the shepherd of the shepherd of the bolt when it was our 2017 car of the year, right? So tell us about that because did you didn't, did you have a home charger at that point? So at that time G M was running a promotion and if you bought a bolt, they would include the charger and installation as a, as a package deal. So when it one car of the year, they're like, they just handed it over to the same team that was doing all the deliveries for customers. And so they just put me on the list of like, oh yeah, well, obviously you need a charger. So we're gonna put a charger in your house and it was like the, The whole package was like $1,200 for the charger plus like 30 ft of wiring. So it had to be that close to your, where your panel was, your panel was. Yeah. So you had it and this time you were in, you were in your home and you, so this is, this is 2018 when you had it probably somewhere around there. Yeah. OK. So you have the charger. So what, this is a level two, it's a level two. It's a 30 amp. It was like the original like the arrow environment, green and white ones that were everywhere. 6.5 or something, something like that. 6.6 kilowatts. It's not, it's not fast, but for overnight it's perfectly fine. The bolts don't charge particularly. No, they don't. I think they even on fast chargers, they max at like 50 kilowatts or something. They're not the quickest. How long does it take to charge? The, there's a huge as, as always, it depends on how long, you know how empty it is from 20% to 70%. Um I'd have to look at our charging log honestly, but I know like most of the time if I'm gonna charge it at home because it's low enough that I actually, I'm gonna plug it in By overnight. It's, it's fine. So you're not. OK. So when you are, because this is, you know, the world's moved on since 202018. You must have been the only guy with an E V in your driveway in your neighborhood. There was no Tesla in the neighborhood. My neighborhood is, um, a lot of retirees and they just weren't running out to spend Tesla money on cars at that time. Did you get a lot of certainly the driving around and the thumbs up experience was a little bit different in a bolt. No, any, any, what were the, any remember any key takeaways people like giving you the finger or interested perhaps or not? That, that one didn't attract a lot of attention because it was sort of, that was the one weakness of it, right? When we, when we voted for a car of the year, was it like the, the advancement design wasn't as strong as some of the other high high dork factor? Pretty dorky. And, and, you know, I mean, for, you know, when I, I got a preview of the, and that was one of those things was like, we didn't want to build a Chevy bolt. We didn't, we want to build something that was like had dramatic design was in Ford's mind, quote unquote cool, which is why they tagged it with a Mustang badge and all that. Um Well, and Chevy did it himself. The bolt concept was cooler than the bolt production car and they actually made it like less cool when they put it into production. But damn good car though. It was a great car. I really, I really liked that car and that was the car where I really learned that It's not actually range anxiety anymore. That was what we were calling it. Everyone was worried about range anxiety. The problem wasn't the range, that car went 230 miles or so on a charge. The problem is charging anxiety. It's chargers and it still is today that is there going to be a charger where you're going? Is it working? There's a real question which is getting worse even if it's there and it's working, Are there four other cars in the line ahead of you waiting to use it? Because there's only one that I've learned to driving an EV every day. It's, it's not range. It's, it's charging. Yeah, because you know, I, I can charge it at home but there are certain times when say my spouse, uh, decides not to plug it in for God knows what reason or even I'm like, OK, the trucks at 50%. I want to just pop it up to 85% because I have a thing I wanna do. I'm gonna run to the charger. I run, they're all broken. Uh, there's, there's 15 ionic fives trying to charge and I go to the other charger and one's broken and there's six cars waiting for two chargers. So it really has become charger. And then on top of that, you have the people that are plugged into the 3 50 that can't ID four on the 3 50. That's, that's Ed's signature move. I will say that's mostly because, well, it's super fast, you know, it get, it gets, it goes right up to the, to the limit like 11 49 on my cart has 15 minutes of life. But uh it, it's, it's, it's mostly because the other chargers are taken. Like I'll be honest, like the three of these open. That's weird. Um, no, hang on. But Christian, Christian's interesting position because you, you, you guys own, uh, cross track plug in which is what, 14 miles of range, 17 miles of range. And then you got this F 1 50 but you do not have a home. So the cross track, we bought it years ago when we rented still. Um, and we plug it in with the mobile 1 20 outlet charger. It's not a really tiny battery. It's 8.8 kilowatt hours. It's nothing effectively. How long does it take to charge overnight on a 1 28 to 12 hours? Give or take? Which isn't bad. It fine. Your wife's car and what's your commute? Uh, none anymore. But it used to be like, you know, uh 50 miles. How many times, how many tanks are you putting in a year on that cross track? I filled it up recently and I looked at, we have a fuel log story. I hadn't filled it up since like I want to say October or maybe September of last year. I think that probably has a 13 gallon tank. You gotta, like, once a year, at least, like, go through the gas. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it gets enough gas. Yeah. But, yeah, it's, uh, yeah, so I've been living with a level one charger. I haven't been able to install a level. So then what do you, what do you do with this 300 mile range? F 1 50 with 100 and 110 is about 130 130. Yeah, it's pointless to charge it on a level one outlet. It's just why bother to maintain the charge overnight. Sure. Yeah. Uh, but uh thankfully there's a 3 50 kilowatt station literally a half mile from my house and go. So it works. Johan Levy would love that. He was, he's ac O C Chief commercial Officer from E V. Go on. Um, where is the E V go? Is it at a gas station? No, it's like a, a grocery store. Ok. Yeah, it just opened up pretty recently and it mostly works sometimes it doesn't, but it's 23 50 they can actually split and so you'll, I had a Tesla pull up to me and then it started pulling, you know, 100 and 20 or something kilowatt hours while I was pulling or kilowatts and I was pulling 1 50 which is pretty impressive. I haven't seen a 3 50 tower do that before. And then there's 200 kilowatt towers next to it. And what's the, um, what's the experience like driving around in an f 1 50 lightning do people? Here's what I, I did have one. I took one from Colorado Springs, from Denver to Colorado Springs, uh for a family trip. And, uh, you know, it's kind of like being, uh, let's, I tell people you guys won't get this at all. It's like being a Chinese guy when you go to Japan. Um you walk around and yeah, no, nobody looks at you or says anything actually. Sorry Chinese American guy go walk around Japan. So you open your mouth and they're like, they're not Japanese. Nobody, nobody cares about the f 1 50 lightning until you either pull up to a charger and pop that door or you open the front. When you open the front, people lose their mind. Uh It's very popular wherever I go. Typically I agree with you. Like when I'm driving around, no one really bothers me. But it's when I pull up some place or I stop and someone has a chance to stare at it like I was getting, picking up my mom from the airport uh the other week and I had my dog in the back seat of the windows down and you know, I'm looking for my mom for my mom. All of a sudden there's someone talking to my dog like, excuse me, excuse me? Is that the electric one and I was like, yeah, can I see the front? I mean, I'm in the white zone but sure I'll out and tell you that is my favorite thing though. Like, especially like grocery stores to put all my groceries in the front because it blows people's minds when suddenly you pick up a bag and put it in the engine. They're like, what, what do you do? I, I had a woman come up to me asking me if the car had broken down. Can you help? And I was like, no, I was putting like bottles of water in the fry. That's when you go, I do. Where's my engine? Where, what happened? Did she probably lose her mind too? I have people that don't say anything to like kind of creep up and, and then they like, look around the side of the car to like peek in like, what are you doing? And they, oh, well, I had to, I actually had to like sit down and, and give my wife bullet points because she's like, people come up and they ask me all these questions. I don't know. Ok, here's what you say. You say this, you say that because it's like, yeah, people surely you didn't tell her the truth, right? Tell her, tell her to say anything. Say yes, this is the cyber truck. This is like just, just have a, you get this. My number one question is, well, it goes like this, it goes, what, what is that? It's a who makes it? No, no, no. Who makes it does make it? And then they just, like, dumbfounded. Like what? Ok. So literally two days ago at a coffee at a drive through like Starbucks, I got like, what's a right? So we'll come back to, to you, you with the Christian? Sorry. Um, they're all, you're, you're, you're charging at go. Um, you have a L one, you're plugging in at home for the cross track, but you recently tried to put in a well, a sun run bidirectional charger that would allow your F 1 50 to power the house, but also you to charge the car, correct. This is the, this is like the number one story on motor trend dot com for like a week. So can you just a brief summary of this through the story? So this big selling point that Ford has a lightning is the bidirectional capability. So they partner with which is what, which is what? So that means you can use the battery of your truck to power your house and event an emergency. Like right now it's primarily for if you there's a blackout and Ford is done to their credit. Uh They started this actually, they learned about this with regular gas F 1 50 they put the onboard uh generator on it. And very cleverly this happened, what was it two years ago, two winters ago in Texas. It was the F 1 50 hybrid. Yeah, that deep freeze that they had where all the power went out. Uh, Jim Farley Ceo got on the horn and said every Ford dealer in Texas, if you got a hybrid on your lot, deploy those into the neighborhood to charge people's homes because that is actually a genius move and everybody knows the industry for the, for the gas pickup trucks trying to copy them. Because if you think about it, an onboard generator and a thing that already has a giant motor and a huge gas tank could power your home for like seven days. Yeah, that's, that's a genius idea. They've moved this ability now sort of to the lightning where they make use of the giant battery and allow you to theoretically charge home. It could be like standard residence, I think three days or seven days. They're saying if you really stretch it, they, they told us up to 11 days. If you really like that about your fridge or something. Yeah. Well, in the case of the, like the F 1 30 hybrids and things, they have plugs in the bed then so you would, you would run an extension cord but in the case of the lightning, you can get this special charger. Yeah. So the special charger uses a CCS adapter which is a fast charger adapter, uh plugs into the lightning, it charges your, your car, uh your truck, excuse me. Um but that's paired with a sunrun inverter. Uh And so in the event of an outage, the inverter clicks on, it automatically starts taking energy from your lightning's battery and into your house. Uh And right now it's just for an outage. But like long term, there's no reason this couldn't be used for like a, a virtual power plant to sell energy back to the grid or to support the grid during, you know, the the four or nine hours where that the peak load. But you need, first of all, you need to have a lightning, you need to have a lightning, you need to have the do you need to have the big battery? You do need to uh actually I thought that that you did but I was reading on some lightning forms the other day that apparently you can opt in and subscribe to the future with a a standard range battery. Ok. And then what other is there another package you need from from for the truck or? No? I think that's it. It comes with this big, this Ford charge pro charger. It's an 80 amp charger which is a huge draw like Scott was saying 32 amps for his. So yeah, mine is on a 60 amp circuit. I have a little two. That's a pretty standard. Yeah, it's a yeah, I mean just to out and I know I really know the words I'm about to say I just know, I've been told this, but most people run a 50 amp circuit and you get 40 amps to the charger. Someone said, why don't you put a 60 amp? Because it's 80% efficient. That way you'll get 48. And I said, ok, and I made my electrician change it out, but 80 is big. Yeah, it's huge. I mean, Ford says that that charger out at 80 amps can charge the lightning from empty a full in, I think eight hours which is, yeah, yeah, that's versus 22 hours on a 32 amp probably. Um but it's not all gravy. No, it's not, it was cheap and easy, it's not cheap and easy. So to do this Ford partner with Sunrun um which is a solar and energy storage company. Um And so um you know, they send you this charger, they say hey call and actually someone reached out to us, they emailed you asking. So yeah, I got in contact with them. They're super nice on the phone. They're, they're super nice. They told me like you about to say initially, I mean, they were always nice maybe in later but they were always nice to me. Um The sun is a solar company. Yeah, solar company. They do battery backups. Um Many things to say. Go ahead. Yeah, so uh Yeah, they, they told me that just to install the charger, they will, they'll do that uh no backups or anything that was like $2,000 plus any modification you need to do. No backups. I mean, no backup battery, no backup battery literally just literally installing the charger on your wall. But that's, that's for the, that's for the price of the charger. The charger comes with the truck. Yeah. 2000. Oh my. That, that should be like 450. Is there anything weird about where they're trying to install it? That's like that's crazy because the electrician, my guy, I believe he charged me 4 35 to physically install the charger and wire it. The cost is as I understand it, there's a, there's a labor rate. So you're an electrician, you know, your your union electrician guys will be 100 and 80 to $200 an hour and then it's material costs to run it from the panel to where we want to put it. Ok? Hang on real quick. So just, just so for me, it was 10 ft, it cost about 800 bucks. So, so for two hours time for mine, I I when I had to get a new panel before I got the charger because we had, we had to get a new air conditioner for the house. So I when he was put in a new panel and I said, hey, run two lines because I have two driveways at my house. I said run two lines so I could put in two chargers eventually. And So it was just, it was a line sitting there waiting for the charger to go in. So it's time and distance. Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, he charged me two grand would mean you were trying to put this thing from like really far away just in general and includes a standard, I think 20 or 30 ft run if there's that much run. But remember it's AD M charger. So it takes a lot of electricity. So I think that's part of it, that the code is gonna be more stringent for. It should just be a bigger, uh, circuit breaker and bigger in the. Yeah, I mean, 2000 sounds nuts. If that's all they were doing, that's all they were doing. So that if you wanted to use it to back up your house too, they'll sell you the, install the charger and install the inverter and give you the inverter for about nine grand and the inverter, uh, just a box that sits on the wall, the bat. I mean, the battery is in the truck. I mean, that's what you're like, no, like wall storage or anything like in your house. Why is an inverter $9000? And then, yeah, and then you're not, and then sun, you're not even calculating the sun part of it. Right. And honestly, I never even got jumping ahead. I never got to the point where getting a solar quote on top of that, which would be where were you when you were all sudden and done? Like how much were they quoting you to do your house? Well, yeah. So this is just, just the basic quote they're giving to every lightning owner, um, from my house, which is like a, you know, a 50 a single family home detached garage. Uh, it would be $17,000.17 638 something like that. We round it up to 18,000 $18,000. Uh, and that's because I have 100 a panel because my house is older. Uh, but, you know, then again the average age of a home in the US is probably about 40 50 years old. So it's not, you know, uncommon. Um, there's a 20 ft, little less run to the garage to bury overhead line. Um, and then a sub panel in the garage. Um, you have to do a sub panel. Yeah, because I don't have a panel in the garage. So I get that. No, not much. It's not 18 grand, you know, and even taking them for their word, like, let's say it's an eight grand inverter, which it isn't. Um, you know, that's still an 11 grand estimate. 10 grand estimate. Uh, I had an electrician come by and, um, also I live like, like three electricians. It's super weird. Um, it's super bizarre. I don't know why they haven't just like, like, hey guys, I'll give you a six pack, like, upgrade my panel, I'm sure they would, I don't want to take advantage of my neighbors. But yeah, I mean for science, I mean for motor trend for, but so to do it the right way to do it, you know how motor in general is recommending people to do it uh to do a sub panel, do panel upgrade um and like a N MA 14 50 outlet and all that stuff. That's six K which is much more palatable and it's, you know about talking to other people in the neighborhood and electricians in general, like so there was not, is there anything proprietary about the equipment they were trying to sell? You could, you could, you could you have done, done this with? So yes, you can do this on your own. Um The automatic feature um From what I tell I can tell isn't, it's very, very difficult to do on your own. Most lightning owners are doing. Um What, what you guys were just talking about the F 1 50 hybrids, they are getting a manual transfer switch installed next to their panel and then in a power outage, they're just walking out to the garage, plugging the lightning into the, in the bed to the manual transit switch and then turning it on. And that meaning using, using the big there's a 2 40 in the, in the, in the bed. Not because what, what the sun you would actually use the J 117 cc for the charges the truck, it also sends the power back. Right. So, but you don't need to do it. Exactly. And people are doing this for maybe two K or so. You know, it depends on the house and your, your house is low and everything. Right. Because anyone who's ever had a generator at their house that live out in the sticks and they, they've got a backup generator. Like you have the transfer switch, they're not that expensive. They've been around for a long time. So you just settle technology, you just run an extension cord to your truck basically. So this, I mean, the only advantage I could see the sunburn system would be, uh, if a, you have money that's burned and you or you're in a newer house, uh, and it, it's easy, but a newer house would have a 200 in theory it should be fine. Um, but I mean, it, the automatic ability and also the fact that there's probably going to be a case in a couple of years where you can sell the energy from your lightning battery back to the grid because sun run is already trialing that in, in northern California and in Florida. So, I mean, I don't know if this is, is coming up, but I imagine the, there's a breaker in the, the truck, even if you're in a power boost tire or whatever like that 2 40 volt plug in the bed can only put out so much ampage. Yeah. So if you're trying to run too much off of it, you're gonna blow the breaker in the truck. Yeah. But that's the thing because I, I don't know the ampage off the top of my head. But if you run it from the CCS from the, you know, home integration system, there's still a breaker and you're still limited to the circuit, you can power. True. I just imagine that I would hope that the big giant, you know, charger for the whole truck that's running at AD A S could, you know, do a lot more than the, the plug in the bed that's meant to, you know, run power tools. I mean, it's tough to say without direct first hand, I could run a fridge and yeah, I mean, AD AMPS is a lot. I mean, there's nothing in the only thing in your house that's 100 amp is the, from the pole to the house is 100 amp. But also, I mean, you could charge a, a vehicle at a level two rate from the bed of an F MD lightning. So like it, it is a full, like I think it's six point or 7.6 kilowatt, you know, output in the, in the bed. Um So it's, it's a good amount of electricity and for most people, you know, that's fine if you're just trying to run the fridge. And so So two comments. So one, I mean, in my experience getting solar panels, it's the solar industry is one of the worst industries in terms of competence, maybe, maybe electrify America for just to bash them a little bit. Um but like, yeah, I mean, I remember like, you know, signed the papers in November right before Thanksgiving. I said, when am I gonna have these solar panels up and running? December January 1st week of January at the latest April middle of April. I'm screaming at this woman like I'm gonna stop paying you and I want you to pay my power bill because they, they were, you know, they just still weren't working. So yeah, so it doesn't surprise me that you ran into that. It's a shame. It's such a great idea like and it's, it's just sitting there like, I mean, why not use it for something? Right? And, and yeah, so speaking, well, speaking of solar, you did your own install. I did. So and why cost is, is, is it's 20 grand to put solar panels on your roof including the materials or uh yes, 20. It's kind of the floor like depending on how many things you can go up from there. I wanna say ours was like 23,000 and it was, but we did one where we took out like a 30 year lease on the panel. So it's just, it's just like I pay 100 and 12 bucks a month is, is what we paid. Oh, it was either sun run or so. So I don't, it was such an awful experience. I just put it out of literally at one point when, when it failed DWP inspection for the third time because like one of the rules, you know, the Power department has, is the line has to be like four or six inches from the side of the house, the corner and they put it on the corner and I said, how do you not know that? And the guy turns around and looks at me, he goes, we're not a very good company. And I said, you know what? Cool. All right. But wait, but why did you, I, I, when I meant, why, why did you even bother? Like, what's the interest? Why, why not? Like, like it's expensive? But it's the right thing to do. And, uh, you know, and it was, well, look the way it was, it was I was looking. But did you, you wanna put, put power back in the grid? You want to make money off of it? You just like, what, what was I wanted to use green energy to like, you know, wash my dishes, you know, that was, I, I, I didn't, you know, I wash my hair well, you know what I'm saying? Um, but, but so, so we looked at a bunch of things and I just found this program and it was like, you know, they, they came out, they said, ok, you guys use, I'm making these numbers up but you use 7.6, uh you know, kilowatts a day or month or whatever, whatever it was. Um, you know, we're gonna put enough power panels to give you eight kilowatts and your average bill, your electricity bill for this year was 100 and $12 on average. So, you know, for that money, uh we'll give you solar panels and you lease them from us for uh you know, 20 years or 30 whatever it was. And then when you go to sell the house, you know, just, you know, put the, the payout amount into the price of the house and blah, blah, blah, it raises the value of your house. It also actually helps keep your house cool because like all that sunlight is not hitting your roof, it's hitting the panels and they're elevated, shades your roof and that, that air gap makes a big difference. So why did you do it? I did it because I wanted to reduce my personal energy consumption. Like everybody who's listening to this has heard that California had some blackouts like having more. We have the like the most sunshine of, of many states. Like basically here in southern California, we have all this free power just coming out of the sky that all you gotta do is put in a thing and, and you get it and it reduces your power bill. And it means that when you have a distributed system where lots of people have solar panels on their roofs and backer batteries and things when there's peak demand, when they're telling people to turn down, turn out their air conditioners and unplug their cars and things like your powers going back into the help, feeding back the grid to reduce the strain on the grid. So that we don't have blackouts. If everyone had solar in California, we probably wouldn't have the same blackouts that we're occasionally having because you wouldn't be relying on just the power plants running at absolute maximum capacity trying to keep up with everything. If everybody's feeding a little bit back into the grid themselves or at least covering their own air conditioner power and that sounds very virtuous, but it's also really expensive. But you, so you and your solution was, you did do it was a company here in Southern California called Gold Green Solar. And they design a system and sell you the parts and you install it yourself. So my all in start to finish was about $11,000 and I installed it on my own roof. I had to call out the, the you had father, father in law, my father in law came down and uh and helped me, I'm just trying, I'm poking holes. That's what I'm doing. How long did it take you guys to um I mean several weekends um, the main part of it, my father-in-law came down and helped, like, especially lifting the panels up onto the roof, probably should have rented like a, a lift or something for that. But carrying them up by, uh, trying to lift them up a extension ladder was not the best idea. But, um, yeah, I mean, we hear a lot of it was sinking anchors into the roof, mounting the rails, mounting the things to the rails, running the wiring, like bending Conduit. It was a lot of stuff that my, my dad was a, was a firefighter and a, and a licensed contractor. And he taught me a lot about like how to do household electric hole. And you're literally a boy scout, an eagle scout also that, so this is something that's, do you think it's out of reach of the average person to do this themselves? The average person probably, I don't think the average person has ever wired an outlet in their house. But if you have that experience, if you've ever done home electrical repairs, you feel confident in that the gauges of wires are thicker, but it's, it's the same thing. You're splicing the wires together the same way with wire nuts and things that you would anyway, I had learned how to bend Conduit. I'd never done that before, but that wasn't you, you got that metal, that kind of thing. Look. Ok. Uh Right now my home is generating 2.47 kills watts of energy. Today. It's produced almost 12, 11.9. This month, I've generated 100 and 35 kilowatts. How much money making off that? Oh, nothing because we have an electric vehicle. But, um, uh, but here it's a real thing, environmental benefits. So, since we installed them in, uh, 19 2019, uh, we've saved 38,229 £0.9 of CO2, which is the equivalent of planting 289 trees. It's 15 dolphins. But you know what I mean? Like, it's, it's just kind of the right thing to do the, the number that you quote there too. Like, so I have an 80 year old house. It does not have central heat and air. Um We have a couple of like electric space heaters and things, but on average, we use less than 10 kilowatt hours a day. So my three kilowatt system Like, basically covers our household usage for the day, but our use goes away and I'm not paying, you know, sunrun or anyone else to lease their panels. I own it. In fact, because my usage was so low. I didn't qualify for any of those deals. I mean, the people that approach you out to home depot, we had, I didn't, so I couldn't, I couldn't use any of that. So I had to buy my own stuff because no one would give me one of these 30 year lease deals. Could you add in a battery to that system if you wanted to? Yeah, so you, OK. So let's just back up. You got this, what was the name of the company? Green? Go Green. How many panels had to install? Um, mine was eight and they're, how big? Four by four by eight? No, 623 by six. Somewhere around three by seven. Somewhere around there. Yeah. And they're how, how heavy, how much would they feel like £40 each? So you had to drag 868 £40 pound, mount them, run the condo and the wiring into your head. You, I'm just trying, I'm just trying to explain this. It's a lot of work. Yeah. No, it's, it's absolutely a lot of work. Is it worth it ultimately? Is it worth it because I was comfortable doing it? Like it was absolutely worth it. It was a couple of weekends of time, some frustration with, you know, I'm not an electrician, a licensed electrician. So I don't know all the, the, the code rules. We had to go back. I had a failed inspection three times. You're like my company, except that I was doing it. It was like, oh, well, the way that this plan is written, um, it could be interpreted this way or that way and this way is right and that way is wrong. So you need to clarify it and then resubmit it and we'll come back to understand how terrible the company that I hired was because you do it, your first time failed as many times as they did. And that's all they do. Did you mount the condo on the corner? I did not on the corner. Well, ok. So, but you ran it, it, so it goes into your, this, you don't have a storage battery. So what the, the, it goes right into your, so what it does, it goes into the box where, um, it monitors the system. That's where you connect to your wifi, you get your app on your phone that tells you how much power you're making all that. And from there it goes to a big manual cut off switch where you can disconnect it. And then from there into a breaker in your main panel. And in, in my case, I was very lucky my house was flipped when I bought it. So they had already upgraded it to a 200 AMP panel. So I got away with not having to do all the work that Christian is going to have to. So your, your energy you're producing, just blended in with the grid stuff. Yeah. So we produce a little bit more and I think the little, well, we used to now with the E V we don't, but, uh, the, the little bit more was, you know, the company was selling it back to DWP. Are you able, will you be able to do that at, at any point or no, it does. I mean, anything, the extra does technically go back to them but it's, you don't get, you don't get anything from that. No discount. No, no, I'd have to, they make it as, as, as difficult to understand as possible. Like if your power bill can be way, way, way simpler, but like, they like to break it down into all these different terms on this and you got to quit that and, and, and the pricing changes depending on the day and the time of the day, all these, all these things. So yeah, in theory, I'm getting credits on my, on my bill, but my system is small. If they, they also, you don't just go to the city and be like, I want to put this in that. You also have to clear it with the power company and they get to like veto the size of your, your system. So like they looked at how much power I use. Like you can have a system this big. It's not like I could put in a system and I can just sell them all kinds of, they don't want to buy power from me. They wanna like have their monopoly on it and they really don't like having to pay. They just lobbied the state very, very hard to cut the amount that they have to pay. So, and part of its nimby too, people you don't want like solar farms, like taking over the neighborhood. Like every, every I could put, you know, in theory, more, make more power. But like Edison literally will not let me what it was. How does it work? They, they got some, some guy running around, like what if you had done this and not told anybody? Well, they're gonna find out it's gonna figure out they've got smart meters now, they're gonna figure out that the meter's running backwards in the middle of the day. No, no. Couldn't you just install a completely separate system that you just put it out? Yeah, you could, you could, they, they can't stop you from doing that. Right. I'm sure. I mean, they could just send the, send the city after you. For what though? The code violation? Like you have to get approval to do all. Like I need an electrical permit. I need a bunch of, you know, I need multiple inspections there, a lot of things. So, I mean, they don't like, they don't like playing people playing with that. Totally. Totally do it. Yeah. Ok. So the next step. So is there, is there a coming upgrade? Are you going to put a battery in at some point someday? That'll be a nice thing to, to add. Honestly, before that, I'll probably upgrade the, the charger like air environment doesn't even exist anymore. They got bought out this 6.6 charger is like lowest. Yeah. You should get a charge of 48. You know, I'm, because I'm, I'm, I'm like, yeah, I should get a battery then. I'm also like, well, what if, like, you know, one day they just do an over the update where it just runs backwards and all I have to do is just put an inverter in. They're talking about it. No, I know that. Trust me, I know they're talking about it. So I'm like, maybe I don't want to buy, uh, however much they cost $10,000 battery, man. You know, I already have the truck, you know, so you already have 100 and 31 kilowatt hour battery. Well, so, so that's, that's my last question on this topic for you both. Is there any, is this at all offsetting the charging of your electric pickup trucks? Is this not at all? No, I mean, I mean, look, I, I could tell you like, so, you know, today, uh, come on phone open up. Uh, we are at, uh, 11.9 kilowatt hours the truck takes, I don't know what, 70% of 100 and 35 at high noon. You know, when the sun is directly overhead in August, you know, that my system is making 3.2 kilowatts. If it's, everything's working perfectly, The truck's pulling down double that per hour while it's charging. So, yes, it offsets like, you know, my bill is less than it would be if I was just pulling it all straight off the grid, but like it's not making it free but like lifetime uh 24.7 megawatt hours of energy. So, you know, the last, last question, it generates a lot of power over time. Would you do it again? Johnny Lieberman solar panels. Not only would I do it again, I would figure out a way to put in way more panels because like the tiles or something I like right now. Well, my house is cool. You've been there. Uh, you can't see the panels at all because it's a Spanish style house and so you can't see them, but they were only, you know, they said, hey, you make seven, whatever, whatever the metric was, we're only gonna put in this many panels and it covers a third of the roof. I would like the whole roof covered in solar panels because why not? Like, you know, so that's what I would do. And I, yes, I'd love a battery backup if I had unlimited funds and I'm sure there's a way around it if you have unlimited funds, put as many panels as you want. Part of the reason I did it too is that in my, like I said, my house doesn't have central heat and air, like we bought a portable air conditioner after this, that, you know, works great in the one room that it's in. But like it was a ok, if we're gonna get an air conditioner. We know those add a lot of straight to the grid like it's, you know, just making it worse for, for blackouts and things it's gonna cost us, who knows how much I, I've heard horror stories from friends who live up in the valley who run their air conditioner 24 hours a day in the summer and it's $300 a month. Like, if we could put solar panels up, at least that would offset the cost of having ac or having the heat in the winter and things too. Like it would really help us in other ways besides just, you know, being nice for the planet. Absolutely. Any changes I'm trying to get Christian to, to do the same thing. I thought I'll come over and help him like I want to do solar. I'm when my roof is ready to be replaced. That's honestly when it makes the most sense, I think. But yeah, I think it's a no brainer. I would for sure, do it. All right. Let's change gears and talk about the other big story of the year that you did Christian. Uh And then we'll, we'll go a little broader into Tesla. So electric vehicle wise, you, uh now famously, and this is a huge credit to you. You, you were tracking Tesla Semi since launch and you found out that one of the first publicly announced, um, Tesla semi vendors, uh a division of Pepsico, like they were doing an event up in their chip making factory in Modesto. And, uh, you got, you were the only automotive outlet. If there's anyone there, they're really late in the story. Um, who else was there? Newspapers? It was all newspapers like the congressman for that district. Was there? How many people were out there? I would say 100 120 10 set up and everything in their parking lot. It was a whole, but this is a demo of the Tesla semi to be fair. They just revamped its whole entire factory to be net zero. So they have a huge solar farm there. Uh They have uh on uh they have batteries on backup batteries on hand. Uh They installed a bunch of chargers for their fleet of B O ID. Uh yard tractors which move the trailers around. They do last mound deliveries with Peter built uh E V box trucks and then they have uh these Tesla semis uh at the time it was six, but they're supposed to be getting up to 15. I believe the rest are going to Pepsi in Sacramento have snacks. No, what Brandon and I were like, where's the gift shop? Where the chips? There was a display in the back that looked like, don't touch it. And Brandon and I seriously brand of our photographer and I were like, ok, we need to maybe get this is the worst show. So no, Pepsi free and like baked LA. If there was there, I didn't see it other than that big display and, yeah. Ok. But this is a day long. At least they do gooders. But you didn't get a drive or ride, no driving or riding. I asked multiple times before and at the event I figured, how could you say no to this face? They did, um, I know how they could say what, what, what did they did? They give you a reason why they wouldn't do it long story or they, they set him up for the event, they had like little displays, they didn't want to move anything. So, you know, whatever you saw the Tesla semi hooked up to trailers. Uh I saw it at their new uh super charger which Tesla fans called the mega charger. Um And I mean, the truck is pretty cool because they had, they had a whole fleet of uh natural gas bales that they use for long distance travel there too. Uh And that looks like a normal, you know, Volvo semi, this Tesla semi is otherworldly. It's cool, which is, you know, why is, why, why is the charger positioned on the Tesla semi in a way that you have to detach a trailer to charge it because it's wasted time for the trailer. I mean, they have so many trailers they would, they would, they, what they do is they unhitch they at, you know, the loading dock and the trailer gets loaded while the trucks are charging, it's better use of the trailer's time than being stuck there. I initially thought the same thing. I was like, this is so stupid. Why would you not have a full who charger? But they're doing out and back to like San Francisco and San Jose, they're not driving across the country for the, Well, the thing is, I mean, as much as these are like snack food companies, they're also logistics companies. Like, they have got a lot of data on where their trucks and trailers are and what they're doing at every minute of the day. Yeah. So right now they're only using them on little routes 90 miles one way out and back and then coming back and, you know, charging and what's the range? Uh Tesla says 500 miles, the truck drivers I spoke with said that sounds right. But they don't, they don't really know the battery size. They're guessing. I don't care, what do we, what do we guess the battery has to be 1,000,000 hours? So one megawatt. So it's 10 model S S model S is stacked in the, between the rails of this truck underneath the cab and everything. Yeah. Yeah. And then, uh, it uses a, um, a model S or model X plad powered train but flipped around backwards. So the front motor of the model S uh, the single motor is the back axle and that's just the highway drive unit. And then the dual mode or rear axle of the model S is the middle axle of this M I and that is the acceleration unit and that the, you must use like a Rian like clutch. Uh you know, because in conservative mode, you disengage the rear axle and the R so they disengage that axle when you're, they're cruising at a highway speed. So this is a, this is a, uh, three, a two, it's a three axle truck including, including the front wheels, including the front wheels, the front wheels are not power, there's a front, it's all power electronics in the front. Um, and there's nothing, yeah, driving the front wheels at all. Um, so, I mean, it's like a typical semi, apparently doing research. A lot of them are actually four by sixes. So a four wheel drive and is it, is it four motors or two motors? Three motors, three motors? So it's two in the, in the central axle and then one in the, in the back axle. So just one model s front wheel drive unit is enough to keep it an £80,000 truck moving, moving 65 an hour. Pretty, pretty wild. Yeah, I mean, a lot of torque needed to get it moving, but you're moving. I just came with the idea to break the internet. We should do a world's greatest drag race with semis. I mean, the drivers, I talked to, said it drives like a car. And so, I mean, it's probably quick. I don't break the internet but a lot of fun. I mean, they done, they did, didn't they put out a video where they had them, like, it was just passing all these other sub mines, like up the, the pass through, like, up highway 80 from zero with a burnout. Yeah, I think that's what, that, there's still no gears. It's just, it. Can we take a, uh, a Tesla semi semi racing down like in South America where they still like race like the, uh, uh cab over semis. I do that. Is that the coolest Tesla uh event you've been to? Um, it was the most organized Tesla event I've ever been because it was not organized by Tesla. What other, what other notable Tesla events? Have you, have you, uh, I went, I mean, we did the background in the Cyber truck. We went and watched that be built. Um, we went twice to go help them on that. I don't know if we actually did or not. But, um, uh, I was the first journalist to ride the model three. Um, uh Hawthorne at the design center, the big reveal at, uh, at the Fremont factory for the model three where they had the big, you know, the stage and like 1000 you know, Tesla owners there and a big program with lasers and the whole, the whole nine yards it was a, you know, a big giant party and, you know, Elon was like, the rock star coming out on stage with all these adoring fans, you know, going nuts for him. Johnny would, I mean, I, I've actually mercifully avoided a lot. You've never done. The only I went in 2009 before I was at Motor, I went to spacex to see the model S debut when it came out and moved about one mile an hour. And everybody was like, and Elon was like, he just looked like he was like, I don't know, he looked like, I think he hadn't slept in about two months basically. And I interviewed him and I remember my, I, I use this all the time but it was like the most and still to this day, the most insane line I was like, so are you like a car guy? And he goes, no, not really. Well, I had a mclaren F one and I'm like, that's like, like, are you into art? No, never mind the Kinsky over the fireplace. You know what I mean? Just like, like, you know, just French, I guess, but still you don't accidentally buy a mclaren F one. I mean, that's, you know, that's, uh, you're in, you're in the cars if you buy that or you're just rich. Um I, no, even if you're just, it's a weird little, there's a first thing you can Google it. There's a 60 minutes clip of him where he and his new newlywed bride, Justine, his first wife. He's, he's, it's on the episode. He's taking delivery of the F one and they hop in and they go for a drive, like around the corner and you can tell it's just like I just sold, uh, X dot com to paypal or whatever. Uh, I'm like one of the world's richest people or one of North America's richest people. What should I buy? What's the fastest, most expensive sports car out there? What's, that's, that's how we got it. I guess so. But you still have to like, like cars a little bit to get. But I feel like they were at that, that time period because that would have been like the do do IFF- one was like, like even people who didn't know about cars, I heard about the McLaren. So how would you hear about it? Where would you find a dealer? Like it takes now he's reading motor. You'd ask one person. The only tells the story is um and I like to tell this one because nobody cares who remembers. I went to the battery swap uh event I went, oh I know some guys that care a lot. They care a lot at the F E C. No, no, no. Uh You know the guys that write, like the guys that write the Tesla's failing today blogs. It's famously, I don't remember where it was but they showed how the super charge up there. Yeah, you can pull in and yeah, four bolts, battery comes, comes out. So the controversy was like one of the reasons they got the bridge loan from the Obama administration was because it was, it was hot swappable. And um like Tesla's stance as it always is was like, yeah, it is hot swappable. No one's doing battery swap stations and we're sure hell, I'm not gonna do it. And everyone was like, no, no, no, you have to make sure it remains hot. Swale. I, you know, customers need to be able to swap batteries if they want to. But that's, I mean, that's, you know, charging is a fine way to go with. Well, uh, I think, or Neo are, they're still hot on pot swapping. They're still, they're still trying to make that work. Yeah, I mean, we're just at a point where like, you know, with, with big chargers and you just don't need to swap again. A battery weighs £2000. The swapping introduces so many issues, right? Like, besides the actually making the machine do it, like then you get down to the, what was trying to do, right? Whether you're gonna lease the battery, you're not gonna actually own it because then it's like if you own this battery, you bought it with your car, but then he took it to the station and they swapped it. Well, now you got a different battery. Well, what was the one you got? Was it as good as the one that was Jimmy's battery? Jimmy's battery is a little bit degraded. Jimmy needs it back eventually to sell his car. It's a whole nightmare. It's a nightmare of like chain of ownership and like the cost and everything else. Like it was, it's just because they partnered with that Israeli company. I can't remember the name but they did a trial in Israel with. Yeah, and it was really company that, but you know, it's a tiny, that's like there's two cities in Israel. You know, it's like it's very easy to do. It's not a technical challenge. It's a logistics nightmare. Yeah. Legal nightmare. Ok. You guys are now wait 2008, 2009, 2000. Ok. So between you guys, there is over almost 40 but over 30 years, 30 years of motor trend, right? You um I would say there's 37 30 well, 15, ok, plus two plus 1, 38 years of motor trend experience. Plus you, you, you, you guys, you guys, you guys write, you write for this audience, you've been writing for them for a long time in print and online almost exclusively. Um You all are now sort of owners of electric vehicles. What is the advice you have for anybody who's listening, who's on the fence? Considering it, they got their eye on an ionic or an F 1 50 or maybe a, or even a model. Y what do you want to tell them? Uh, I don't know, like if they're like, I don't know, I, I kind of want to get one. It's my only car. It's gonna be the primary car I drive. Yay. Anything. Just make sure you have this in mind, make sure you have a charging plan. Um, you know, that charging at home is gonna be difficult for a lot of people in this country, especially those that live in apartments or that rent. Um I'm excited that we have a, you know, Alex leans driving our long term ionic five pub charging it publicly exclusively because he lives in an apartment. Um They have a charging plan. Um So let's talk to that person and assume that they do not have the ability to charge at home. So if you don't have the ability to charge at home, um you know, pull up Google Maps and literally type in E V charging, see what's nearby. You see, you look the higher the kilowatt hour, the better unless you have 94 in which case you want to stop on 1 50. Um You know, it, see what's around you. Um And see if it, it works the for your, for your, you know, can you treat like a gas station and pop in there once a week? I I know, you know, half a dozen Tesla owners. So that's how they, they do it. They, you know, go to work every day. They don't have a charger at home and then they go to Supercharger once a week. You can do that with other cars other than Tesla's. So just have a charging plan in place. Yeah, look at and not just home, look at work, look at the gym, look at, look at the places that you go to regular opportunity. Charges are key like I don't need to charge every time I go to Whole Foods. But, you know, I'll just pop, you know, the charge, the level two charger on and get an extra 56 miles in the, you know, half hour I'm in there. You know, it, it's, it gets you going, I only am charging probably every two weeks or so and I'm not charging at home yet. All right, Scott, that's the most, the most important thing. But I would say on top of that, um, by adapters, there are a lot of different Nema plugs out there. Different 240 volt plugs every 120 volt, you know, plug in your house, you can stick thing into that. And with these big battery E V s, like we said, it basically doesn't do anything useful. It'll take a week to charge it. But 240 volts houses are all different ages. They've got all they've had plugs installed over the years. The, the standard has changed, some have four prongs. Some have three. Sometimes they're arranged in a circle, sometimes they're arranged in a triangle. There's all these different things and it's helped several times from visiting friends or family. I've plugged into my, my friend's dryer in what you plugged in. The level one, the, the portable charger to see the, the charger is coming today like the one in the Is swappable. The part that goes to the truck has the standard G 1772 plug on the other end that plugs into the wall, you just pop it out and it could be 100 and 20 volt outlet. It could be at 2 40. So you're talking about bring the, if you don't have one, make sure you unplug your friend's dryer, plug your truck in, right? And what you need. But you need to do this is different adapters because there's a whole bunch of different kinds of plugs out there. I charged off of, you know, on a my in-laws like rural property in the middle of nowhere off the power drop because they have a, you know, 14 30 or something plug on it. And I had the right adapter where I could plug it in the middle of the field effectively for how long uh like two hours we were there. We did that on the, on the trip, um which we should talk about a little bit more, I think. But um we went to an R V lot and just juiced up for a couple of hours while we ate pizza. Right. But the point of this is that like, there are lots of different plugs out there. So don't just be like, oh, well, I have a mobile charger. I can just plug in anywhere I go. Like, you're probably only gonna get like one adapter with your vehicle, the most common one. But you go to, you know, any, any like R V Park or things like that. It's not standard. Where do people get Amazon? Amazon Home Depot, Los like any like hardware store, they start to like 40 bucks. They're like 40 bucks. They're about like a foot and a half long. They got, you know, the two different plugs on them and you just a couple, throw them in the, throw them in the trunk and then you have it when you need it. I'll add to that. Something that turned me on to is that you can get adapters for the J connector into a Tesla connector. So if you are in a non Tesla E V and you're desperate for a charge, you can plug this thing into uh your, your, the Tesla charger and it plugs into your truck. It doesn't work at the super charger. But like chargers, if your friend has a Tesla charger at home and a lot of hotels like installed Tesla wall chargers because those are the only things that people were bringing, grab one of those. They're, you know, the size of a banana and you just plug in 40 bucks. Like I used it when I went to, to cover the Tesla semi. It was, I'm so thankful to have it. Yeah, I would say, you know, we spend a third of our lives sleeping. Uh, imagine how much time over your life you spent at gas stations. Now, imagine never doing that again. You never, and this, this is, it was funny because my wife, she wanted an E V because, you know, better for the planet. And that was her giant revelation. She's like, I don't go to gas stations anymore. She's like, it's great and, and my wife, I don't know if she's like most women, but she always hated gas stations and getting gas and like now and yes, we're very lucky. We have a home charger. Um, you know, and, and we, you know, the road trips, we do, we can do it in our truck. We don't have to really worry about public charging too much. Uh, and just you have all that time back. But are you? So this is a very pro E V uh, table here. You're still, if it's the, let's, let's change the question. If it's the only car you're gonna have and you do, you need it for everything for and you live in the suburbs. So neither a real city nor on a farm somewhere. You just kind of, you you can assume that you have a, ok, not awesome access to chargers, but you also want to go across to do a 300 mile road trip. Once or twice a month, you can buy one car. You want to spend no more than $60,000. Are you guys all three of you recommending an E V? No, I'm not. I mean, I honestly, I think A P is the, a good bridge technology and for 40 K or would you say 60 K, 60 K, this is called 60 and I chose that because that's about, that's enough to get you a model. Y or it's enough to get you a nice, a pretty good. Oh man, I honestly, I don't know. Um probably a Mitsubishi Cherokee four by a Grand Cherokee for. But yeah, I like those a lot rav four prime. If you can find those are great too. I would say getting E V apps if it's a 300 mile road trip, who cares to do that with your, in your sleep charge? Once? That's true. That big of a deal. I've learned that too. Any, any road trip we have to charge multiple times is a huge pain in the a*s. But one charge is usually not that big of a deal. I don't see that's the thing. I don't find it and maybe I'm just different but like, I don't find it to be that big of a pain. I've done a lot of road trips and I've been to, yes, that's true. I've been to, you know, the bar in California, I've been to Tucson Arizona. I've been all over the place where I've had to stop multiple times to charge and look with a 300 mile range, you're going 200 plus miles before you really are thinking about stopping and that's about where the chargers are spaced anyway. And at that point you've been driving for 2 to 3 hours. You want to get out and you're not like rushing to put gas in the car as fast as you can get back in the car and go like people like that, you're at Starbucks like you're doing, you're doing a NASCAR pit stop and you're out of there as fast as possible. Like, no, you're gonna, you're gonna put gas in your car, you're gonna like wander inside, you're gonna use the bathroom. You're gonna, I see what kind of chips they have maybe you want Coke or Diet Coke. You're gonna wait in line to pay for it. I, I disagree because I did so I over the holidays I had, I have the ID four, right? It's supposed to get 270 ish miles. And I went, I went from two small towns in California. No one's ever heard of Los Angeles and Sacramento. Ok. I, it added over an hour on the trip up to do, I had to stop twice. Because I drive too fast. Uh, and on the way back down it, it added two hours because not only do we have to stop twice, we had to search for and wait for chargers on the five, we did the 99 on the way up and the five on the way back. And again, these are not, these are not like unpopulated. No, that's, I mean that the waiting for the chargers is a huge problem. There are not nearly enough chargers in California for how much E V there. But, and we'll say your ID four maxes out at 100 and 50 kilowatts, I think charging the ribbon does 2 20 the Hyundai and Kia do 2 30. Yeah. But, you know, most of the time I was watching, I, I, you'll get the first 5 to 10 minutes, you'll get over 100 like even, I'll get to 1 41 30. Not to have to, if you really, about your time, don't charge to 100%. But also to a point that I hit on indirectly, the speed really matters. I notice the light. If I drive at 80 miles an hour, I'm getting like 1.6 miles per kilowatt hour, which is awful. And I'm doing 200 miles on a charge. That's it. Whereas if I do 70 miles an hour, it's maybe two and I can go like, it's really sensitive. Like, yeah. No, but like with these things, like, I mean, I've, I've done the test. You can charge a ionic five from like zero to like 80% in like 18 minutes on a 350 kilowatt charger that's running right. And it's giving you the full, the full beans. Like if you are that worried about, you know, how much time you're spending at a stop And you're trying to get to your destination six days away as fast as possible. Like, yes, get the biggest battery with the best charging system and yeah, you can be in and out of there. It's under 15, but it's also like, you know, humans just lack the ability to think this way. OK? Yeah, an hour to your trip that one time, but you saved countless hours never going to a gas station and charging at your house. Like your, your trip sucked. It was inconvenient for one hour of your life. But you also got back all that other time on the other end. You know, it's like, you know what I mean? It's, it's like you, you're banking Americans are give me convenience, you give me, I will say it was, it was difficult and I imagine it probably was for you to, to, to get your mind around the idea of not charging to 100%, right? Like you go to a gas station, you fill to 100%. Why would you not? Why would you ever fill your tank halfway and then keep driving. But with E V s with a, any decent route planner, you don't do that. You go as far as you can. You get to the charger, you charge to whatever it tells you, maybe it's 50% maybe it's 70% maybe it's 12% so that you get to the next spot and it keeps you moving much faster. So you spend five minutes at the charger and then you spend five minutes on the next charger and five minutes on the next charger instead of spending an hour at the first one. Yeah, and that's something I, I did need to sort of wrap my head around. My, my big problem is we, we charged the, the car on the way up, we charged it home to A, I push it to 100% because I was like, oh, why, why not? I drove too quickly and the route planners because I had the app and the car, the, I was using a better route planner and the Volkswagen app and I was checking out, um, one of the other ones, plug share. Uh, but the one in the car kept moving the, the next charge location on me based on how fast I was driving. I was driving too quick. I was depleting the battery too quickly. And of course, I was like, I got plenty of range and what I ended up doing was I basically, I didn't overshoot but I made it so I had so little range when I pulled into that charging stop and they were all full or broken that I had no other option. Like that's the, the key learning I have, which is like you can't do that, just pick, pick one closer charge a little bit and then they get that, it keeps your options open. And this is what I was talking about when we first started. This is like this is, this is charger anxiety. There aren't enough chargers. And I think that, you know, once it's as easy to find a fast E V charger as it is to find a gas pump where this conversation will cease to exist, any, any exit on the freeway and find a charger that's free and ready to go and you can charge up in 15 minutes and be gone like no one's gonna care anymore. Well, my, my advice to my own question, uh if it was under, it was like say $40,000 or less, it would be to get a P if it's $60,000 or less. My advice to anybody who's listening and who probably lives in the state of California or on the coast of where is to get a Tesla because the chief annoyance for me was every time we pulled over to stop, to charge, it was usually at a location that had superchargers nearby and they were shining clean 10 times, 10 times as many, they were only 20% full and they're under an awning that was well lit and there was no garbage anywhere. You don't have to use an app. You don't have to sweat. So if you're, if you're an impatient, if you're an impatient American, the answer, truly, you might not like it. The answer is still probably Tesla. I will say that you can get plug, plug in charge in a lot of newer vehicles. It's starting to. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And it's, it's really, is, it needs to be the future because like if, if you had a different app for every gas station you went to, you would lose your mind. Like customers would not accept it. So we cannot keep doing this way that we are. I've got nine different charging apps on my phone from all the different, like road trips I've been on over the years, so I've needed to download the app so I can turn on this one super charger that I'm never gonna use again. Right. Right. Right. Right. Well, I don't have any more questions. You have more questions I can come up with some more. I mean, I had, I had, I had one but I go on, go on, go on, go on. This is a good one. Uh, and this is my last question for Christian because we got to go. Um, Christian is a, is in charge of, um, one of his many duties is in charge of the letters section. Um, for motor, the people still write us letters. Uh, we also get a lot of emails. So, um, every month, 30 days or so he puts up on slack. Like here's all the letters and we talk about, um, the fun ones, the threats, the ones from prison, uh, that come in. Anyably, anything worth comment. Any, what's any favorites you want to share, related to our coverage of E V s, our coverage of uh truck of the year. Perhaps we got a lot of crap for picking electric pickup trucks two years in a row. I mean, honestly, it's all people who seem to get their, their, their news from the same spot and they're, you know, disputing the same talking points. Uh You know, why are you picking this truck? It can't tow. Well, no, I mean, you can physically tow. We've, we've done it before you can tow far. Uh You know, that truck takes, you know, energy or stuff, you know, Cobalt and stuff from Congo. It's like you never knew where Congo was until five minutes ago. Also, I learned something great the other day because I'm researching another article I'm gonna write. But do you know that all gasoline, all gasoline, all the word is all is refined using Cobalt. Every single drop you've ever burned in your life is refined using Cobalt, every single drop, every device on this table for some reason that is not a good argument because it, it uses less. So it's, it's a little bit of slave labor is ok. So, yeah. But, yeah, it's just a lot of stuff like that. Um, honestly some of it, what about all the death threats? I got. Those were fun. Yeah, those were a lot of fun. A lot of it though is really just comes down to anxiety. It's like the fear, uncertainty and doubt. It's, you know, I, and a lot of these letters are coming from older readers who have lived their whole entire lives going to the gas station with a, you know, V eight under their engine under the hood rather, and it's, it's changing on them and it's changing so fast they can't keep up and it's scary. Um, but I, I, I mean, it doesn't need to be scary. It's a new thing. I mean, we, we're not really a country that has been afraid of new things traditionally until recently. It seemed the thing that the argument that I always make that I think about when, when I hear these arguments, the, what about is I'm like, what about the, what about the thing? The point, the point of the inevitable decision, the point of electric electrification of vehicles is not just like that we're going to make this big change, but it's sort of like what it unlocks as we get there. Right. If we just say no, we can't do it because this and that we will never innovate. We'll never, we now have a lot of really smart people working towards a solution and we're unlocking new paths all the time. Petroleum, great internal combustion engines. Great. We've kind of maxed out pretty much. We've maxed out the efficiency there. Or at least there's not, there's not gonna be any of these huge gains in that technology. The big, the big gain for years was going to be uh, less engines. Right. You'd have electronics that could work so fast. You wouldn't need valves. It would become 20% more efficient. Well, you know, like E V s are, you know, 4.5 times as efficient. So, like even getting a 20% gain in petrol, like, really isn't, you know, it's just, it's just, it's, you know, it's just off the table that I, that I point out to people a long time too is that it's not just about saving the planet of the efficiency or anything else. Every single car that's driving around Los Angeles right now is a little mobile power plant. It's burning a fossil fuel and it's making exhaust. So that makes your car go. So that means any time you're standing around, any time you're in traffic, there's something next to you that's just putting pollution in the air and it's a lot cleaner pollution than it used to be, but it's still pollution and we know that the places in cities have the absolute worst quality or air quality or in your freeways, they're in your ports like, so every time you take a gasoline engine off the road and replace it, electric water, that's your local air quality. That's the air that you are breathing every single day that your kids are breathing, that your parents are breathing. That's getting a little bit cleaner. And what no one can talk about is that the, the grid can be made cleaner. Yes, sometimes you're using coal. But, but you know, it's a decision, we could decide not to use coal. You know, we could, we could use, we, you know, the grid can go 100% clean. So it's possible for E V s to be 100% clean, especially if we, you know, get our, our collective hands around battery production, which right now is the biggest sin when it comes to electric vehicles is that most of the batteries are still made in China that you burn coal to make the batteries so that you have to drive X number of miles before it's, it's a clean vehicle, but it can all get better. Whereas with petroleum, as you said, you're always burning something, always, always, always, I will say like speaking to the enthusiasts, like there are some things that an E V is just better at like the the fine motor control you get like if you like to off-road, like the R I mean, you guys know like that, I drove that back to back with the T R X on, on the train trail and it was just, I love the Ram. That Ram is fantastic. We were both like, is this the greatest vehicle in the world has ever? Because before the, before the R, the T R X was our, was our truck of the year and I remember me and you were like, it's got to be the greatest vehicle ever made. Right. Yeah. And it's just like, you know, off roading back to back, it's like ignoring the suspension, just focus on the power train. Like to get that, that same control to, to not lurch to, not to, to get up every obstacle smoothly. It's, it's, it's amazing like what it's capable of again, it blew me away because I did the same thing. I drove the ram a little bit and, and the ram is a lot of fun. But like, it's, it's just old this, even though it's a brand new cutting edge, you know, 700 horsepower, blah, blah, blah. Like the ravine makes more, you know, and it's, it's just, yeah, and even translating into road performance, like electric race cars can be more consistent. I rode along in a 78 Porsche 7 18 e whatever they're called e performance or whatever. And you consistently bangs out fast laps every single time. It's all in the driver. It's, it's just, uh Johnny wrote. This is the last question for everybody. Johnny wrote, uh you, you're being lied to you about electric cars. It was the best performing article of last year. I, I, I think of all time. It, it might now be on unique visitors. Great headline, great subject. Well written argument. You just say something real quick. So, so, so, so Alex, well called me boss our CEO of motor train and he goes, you know, and, and this just shows, you know what great teamwork we have because whoever came up with the headline in the deck and I was like, actually I came over that too. Sorry. Just a personal moment of did you? No, no, no, I got it on my laptop. Ok. Well, what's the follow up to? What's your next? Because this will be out in about a month. So call it, call it a March early March. So my next one is the grid you're being lied to about electric vehicles. Part two, the grid. And um preview is that Uh to if every car magically became an electric vehicle overnight in the us, the consumer grid, I didn't know this. There's a, there's the grid, 80% of the power in the us is for like industrial applications or businesses. But the consumer grid, in other words, to charge at home or apartment complexes would have to be increased by, are you ready? 27%? That seems doable. 27%. California's plan with which, you know, uh Governor Newsom is budgeted for, we're gonna increase the grid 2% starting, I think a year or two ago, 2% a year up through 2035 which would be like 28% or whatever. So it like 100% doable and it's just gonna be about the grid hysteria and, and the other thing was, and we had a lot of employees at motor trend fall for this. But remember when it was like, California says, you can't charge your electric cars. It was like, well, what they said was, don't run your air conditioning or your washing machine or your dryer uh from four PM to nine PM for seven days for seven days. That's all they said. And let's not forget, like for those three out of four of us who grew up in California, we've been doing this for decades. This is the new thing like the, the, you know, reduce your power, you know, spare the air out whatever they call it. Like from four nine PM, we've been doing this forever. This is not a new E V thing. We were doing this, you know, back when everyone had a car Raiders and, and remember it worked, we didn't have any power outages it, everyone just said, ok, from 4 to 7, I won't run the AC I won't wash my clothes. I won't charge my car and that's the most expensive time. Anyway. So like I literally have the BB programmed. So it charges between nine pm and four pm like the other way. So it starts at nine PM and it goes around and it turns off at four PM and it stays off during the most expensive part of the day. And I still get 19 hours of, you know, charging time. Well, in a cheaper rate in L A, it turns out that the cheapest rate is, is on weekdays is eight PM to 10 AM. And then it's is cheap all weekend long. But so mine program never charge unless I wanted to. I turn it off if I need to charge at home. But, you know, but anyways, so yeah, you're being lied to you about the, I'm gonna do, I'll give the what I in my head and then the third one I think they're gonna do three or I'm gonna do four, but the third one would be about um uh mining materials needed and also like, you know, recycling, um you know, and also, you know, like we've already a lot like Tesla has moved away from using Cobalt and a lot of conflict minerals. And then the fourth one is gonna be that uh basically V twelves are gonna be around a lot longer than you think. And, and the idea is that we're, we're entering the thoroughbred period of the internal combustion engine where, you know, not a lot of draft horses uh, you know, walking around lots of thoroughbred racehorses. And so, you know, I, because, um, E V s will replace the draft horse. Well, yes. Yeah. My, my, you know, my argument to meat heads is like, do you really care if a Corolla is electric? Do you really want that two liter turbo? That's, that's something you're like, you know, emotionally tattooed. But, uh, it's just more ok if you have to go, you know, 40,000 miles on a E V before it becomes clean based on the battery production, how many V twelves have 30 or 40,000 miles on them? None. You know, like the highest mileage Veron ever I think was like, you know, 20 or maybe 30,000 miles. So there's really no environmental reason to phase out V 12. The gas will become more expensive, the cars will get more expensive, but just like race horses, they're a fortune rich people have it. It's the Thurston Veblen's theory of the leisure class, you know, can you also do like 1/5 part on like the false promise of hydrogen? That's the whole thing in alternative fuels because like, and I won't go all the down because I know we're, we've been talking forever, but like, took the, I took, took the Tota Marae that we had as a long term car for Christmas like a year and a half ago. And that car is the size of an Avalon on the outside it is the size of a old Corolla on the inside because hydrogen takes, take up a ton of space. Like, even if we could get hydrogen, which we can't, even if it was economical, which it's not even if it took less power than it, it, it creates which it doesn't, it takes more like they're just, you would make these wildly inefficient cars that have to be huge to fit enough hydrogen tanks to also have seats in them for, you know, three rows of seating. Like it's not a consumer solution. It's a, it's an, it's an economic solution. You should write that. But, and, and I would say, you know, I, I would honestly throw biofuels onto that too, you know, right now, if Porsche has figured it out $1000 a gallon and they're treading water because you're like, oh, yes. Well, they, they, we're using carbon to make carbon and just going in a circle. Great. Except that the whole idea is that we want to take more carbon out of the system. Like we just, we're just treading water. We're not actually accomplishing anything. So, and it costs a lot of money. So, is that what you're working? The question is, what are you working on? What's the next, what can we expect out of Scott Evans in the next month or so? Just 11 story. Don't give me five. Like Johnny did any, any big story, any big stories. It is the number one story in the history of, I only want, I only want the second one, the third one. Sorry. Um, I want to do a E V tour of California. I want to start with any electric bicycle or a scooter and I want to take it, put it in the back of the Rebbe and drive it up to northern California where Joy Aviation is building an electric powered plane that's almost FAA certified. And, and just up the road from them is zero motorcycles that made the first real uh electric motorcycles and up the road from them in the San Francisco area is Candela. They're Swedish company making an electric power boat and up the road from them, there's solar tech that's building electric tractor for agricultural use. It, it's a great idea. I don't want anyone else to take it. So, so, so, so this is, this is, you know, car driver listens religiously. Let's, let's get this one tour from Michigan. We have an electric ice fishing rock, uh Christian. I already know you're, you're following up on Tesla semi on that uh on the meat head aspect. Uh By this time this, this episode airs rather, I'll be having driven a S N95 Mustang and a Cobra 92 Cobra R uh which I'm not. Yeah. Yeah, but I have tons of stuff on the F F D lightning. Uh If you are a semi driver reach out to me at I know I have a, I have a, I have the whole thing, the whole big long complaint about this ID four and how really, I don't think, um, I just thought I've been kicking around. We've talked about it. The, the E V manufacture, there is no luxury car manufacturer that should consider building or selling an electric vehicle unless they get the charging sorted. They have to build a supercharger network. They have to do what Mercedes Benz just announced, which is they're gonna build a premium charging experience. Yeah, it's just, it is a deal breaker. I, I I watched this guy when I was up in on again on the way to Sacramento or on the way back. I forget which, which station it was that I was behind a shell station. Uh There were six electrify America chargers. Uh The 3 50 that was, there was broken but nobody you can't tell and it was raining. So somebody had tried to put like a post it note on it that said broken, but it had washed off. We were in the metaphor that should be their logo. We were, we were in the Taco Bell or whatever with my kid and I watched this poor old guy in 100 and $70,000 lucid pull up to it And try to park. He spent 20 minutes parking and re parking on both sides of this charger while other people sitting next to him didn't bother telling him it's broken and he's like this old guy trying to charge his thing and just looking at it thinking what's going on. And I'm like that is the, that is a non premium experience and this is, this is horrible. This is going to put so many people off. The other thing I want to write is like the biggest impediment to electric vehicle adoption today is the charging that it's not the cost of the cars, it's not the range. It's, it's the charging experience. I was, I was, I was looking at my phone on camera because I was trying to find a picture to show Ed. There's I think not Colton, maybe Colton, my wife found a uh electrify America and Evie go. But there's like a Lego store and there's a thing like, you know, like the, the, the claw that grabs the stuffed animal, they put your kid in like uh like a thing like, you know, they move whales around like your kid he can grab. So like that killed, you know, a half hour. Like I will say on some level, I do like the idea of an E Q s owner having to mix it with the regular folks at Walmart. I mean, it's just kind of, you know, democratize the electric car in a way. So then we really do need to like transport the, the the good parts of the gas station experience to like E V chargers. Like there's nothing worse than like that E V charger that's at the back of a Walmart parking lot and it's like a half mile walk just to go to the store to like, buy a Coke. Like give me a convenience store with a clean bathroom and like we're set charger. There was a company the other day they announced they can charge, uh, in five minutes fully charge 100 kilowatt hour battery in five minutes. I sent it to Frank Marcus, our technical director. He's checking it out and he's like, yeah, actually it looks pretty legit in a couple of years. That's how charging stations will be. Somebody will, you know, it'll, it'll just be like a gas station. Can we get some roofs over them? So when it is raining or when it's a million degrees outside the toilet first shade on the windows for the roof, for bathroom. All right. Well, on that note, thank you guys for coming in on short notice and helping this drink this brown water that we had. Uh Thank you for bringing it Johnny. Of course, of course. Yeah, but yeah, this is great. I mean we, you know, we'll check in with you, you guys in a while, see how I want. I want, I want you to get a home charger. I I'm working on it actively. Um hopefully in the next couple years, Ford reached out and been like, hey, you know that article you wrote that like blackened our eye. No, no sun run. I heard from them since I got the docu sign too stone to go your name and we, I can, well, I'll tell you off air, but thank you guys for coming. This is awesome. Yeah. Thanks for having us. Thanks guys.