Bugatti Veyron 2.0?; Racetrack for Sale; E-Ray Conclusion; Q&A

Matt Farah has conclusions on the Corvette E-Ray; another amazing racetrack is for sale; Bugatti has reimagined...itself; how to choose the right tire; and we answer Patreon questions including: Was the Geo brand a player? What makes an engine sound "raw"? How can Chevy improve the ZR1? Perfect car for twisty road living <$100k Is any car "douche-proof"? What's the deal with empty rooftop boxes? Best car to eat in How to find yourself a Lemons team to drive with And more! Recorded January 27, 2026 Show Notes Hello Fresh Go to https://HelloFresh.com/smokingtire10fm to Get 10 free meals + a FREE Zwilling Knife (a $144.99 value) on your third box. Offer valid while supplies last. Free meals applied as discount on first box, new subscribers only, varies by plan. MudWtr Start your new morning ritual & get up to 43% off your @MUDWTR with code tire at https://mudwtr.com/tire #mudwtrpod DeleteMe Get 20% off your DeleteMe plan when you go to https://joindeleteme.com/TIRE and use promo code TIRE at checkout.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Matt Farah?

  What up everybody? Matt Farah here with my boy Zach Clapman. Welcome to the Smoking Tire Podcast. And today's episode is, as always, brought to you by Off the Record. We love Off the Record because they're out there on the road looking out for you. Every week, not a week goes by that I don't get an email from somebody or DM on Instagram saying, "Man, Off the Record saved my bum." I was about to use them myself on this past road trip, but I got away with one. I thought I got nailed, but actually, the guy was just checking out the Corvette. But if you get nailed, don't plead guilty. That's for suckers. Go to offtherrecord.com/tst. That's offtherrecord.com/tst.

• 0:41Matt Farah?

  They will connect you with a qualified attorney who will fight that ticket in the jurisdiction in which you got it, right? They'll send the right person to do the job in the right place. And if you use offtherrecord.com/tst, you will get 10% off all legal services booked through Off the Record. If you get a ticket, big, small, or in-between, don't plead guilty. Fight it with Off the Record at offtherrecord.com/tst. They've got your back. All right, on this episode of the show, one of our local racetracks, another one of our local racetracks, is for sale. I did 1,400 miles in the Corvette E-Ray.

• 1:22Matt Farah?

  Bugatti has thrown back to itself, and also, ice can suck my ass. Hannah rented a Ford Maverick in Fort Collins for her trip.

• 1:34Speaker 01

  Oh, cool.

• 1:35Matt Farah?

  She calls me from the rental lot and asks me what she should get. And I used to go, "First off, no Nissans, no Mitsubishi's." From there, from there, we want to go wherever we want. We're looking for like a Hyundai, or a Toyota, or a Ford, or maybe a Kia is kind of where we're at. And so she was like, "How about a Ford Maverick?" I was like, "That sounds great. Get that." And then she realized that she's essentially never parked a car with like a bed before.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04Matt Farah?

  And it has a backup camera, but because it's like the base model, it doesn't have like sensors or really anything else. And so she's like, "Yeah, I'm not good at parking this thing." But...

• 2:12Speaker 01

  But I feel like if the camera doesn't have sensors and stuff, doesn't matter if there's a bed or not. The camera, I feel like, has gotten rid of the whole.

• 2:18Matt Farah?

  I don't know what the camera looks like in a Maverick.

• 2:22Speaker 01

  Could be a shitty camera.

• 2:22Matt Farah?

  It could be a bad camera. Like, it could be on the top of the cab and not on the tailgate.

• 2:29Speaker 01

  True.

• 2:29Matt Farah?

  I don't know where it is. I've no idea.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  Uh, I think like if she had a hatchback, but it had a bad camera with no guidelines, you still have to go mirrors and cameras.

• 2:37Matt Farah?

  Yeah, and Hannah's also like, bad, generally, of like, she's not a bad driver, but she's a, she's bad at like, knowing exactly where her wheels are.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:48Matt Farah?

  You know what I mean? She has, she has trouble straddling potholes that aren't like, right in the middle of the lane. You know what I mean?

• 2:57Speaker 01

  I can understand that.

• 2:58Matt Farah?

  Yeah, she'll, she'll often go fully around a pothole rather than straddle it because she doesn't think she can actually straddle it when she can.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:07Matt Farah?

  Yeah. Are we live? Do we exist?

• 3:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, we do. They say the sound is good. Does she like the Maverick now? Or have you not, you've not heard back?

• 3:15Matt Farah?

  Uh, she said it's fine. She said it's fine. Um, I don't think she'll be buying one, but she said it's fine. Uh, hey, everybody. Welcome, uh, welcome to the program. It was our last show, me in, in Arizona, it was, right?

• 3:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:27Matt Farah?

  Sorry about the hotel-ass audio of that one. I hope it was okay, but it was, it was a show. Uh, man, um, a few things have happened since then, and, uh, without going into great detail, I would like to give a quick shout-out to the commuters in Minneapolis. The, if you know who you are, you know I'm talking about. The people commuting in Minneapolis right now, they're doing the fucking work. And, eh, eh, eh, eh, these are some very brave people that are, commuting is what they call the people that are following ICE around.

• 4:03Speaker 01

  Oh, the legal observer.

• 4:05Matt Farah?

  Legal observers. These people are doing very dangerous work.

• 4:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:10Matt Farah?

  They're helping their neighbors. They're helping their neighbors who don't look like them, which is very Christian of them, in case you do that sort of thing, and, and they're, they're...

• 4:21Matt Farah?

  Non-violently opposing a violent invading force in their city. They're getting creative, they're incredibly organized. It's fucking cold there.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  It was like six degrees.

• 4:32Matt Farah?

  It's fucking cold there.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:34Matt Farah?

  And these are some tough ass people. So, I'm not that tough, I'm a fucking pussy. If I was in this situation, what would I do? I'd feed those people. I'd set up a fucking barbecue and I'd feed those people, that's what I would do.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  I mean, every movement needs a system.

• 4:48Matt Farah?

  That's all, and I'm sure some people would appreciate that food. I wouldn't be the ones out there taunting those fucking pussies with fucking big guns and masks. I wouldn't be, but there's fucking hard ass people that are doing that work right now, and that's fucking legit as fuck.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, the protest was super, I mean admirable and sadly necessary.

• 5:08Matt Farah?

  Well, there's the protests, and then there's like the helpers, and then there's the...

• 5:13Speaker 01

  The observers are important because the documentation's important because we, through this again, we've learned that like the official narrative will be like, da-da-da-da-da, and they go, here's the video showing it's not at all like that.

• 5:24Matt Farah?

  Yeah, they're gonna murder you, and then they're gonna call you a terrorist on television.

• 5:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:29Matt Farah?

  And even when there's like 12 angles of fucking ICE shooting you in the back, or in the face.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  Or the video of his handgun was taken away, but the official story, yeah.

• 5:41Matt Farah?

  Oh, love the 2A guys, they're, oh boy, are they saying he had it coming now.

• 5:46Speaker 01

  No, the NRA came out and was like, this is not good.

• 5:49Matt Farah?

  Finally, the NRA does something consistent with itself.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  Well, they have, they're a pickle there.

• 5:54Matt Farah?

  They're up against the wall.

• 5:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:55Matt Farah?

  But, I mean, fuck, the people, all I'm trying to say is the real fucking folks out there that are fucking freezing their balls off and chasing these bitches out of fucking town in their cars with whistles and horns and fucking air horns and shit.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  That requires a lot of bravery.

• 6:12Matt Farah?

  Fucking, dude, guys walking around the streets with leaf blowers to disperse tear gas.

• 6:17Speaker 01

  That's so good.

• 6:18Matt Farah?

  Bro, I'm reading articles from journalists, you know, who have been there and have talked to these folks, talking about going to a guy's house, he's got a living room full of leaf blowers. Going to a guy's house, he's got fucking twenty megaphones.

• 6:30Speaker 01

  So they're gonna call him an arms dealer.

• 6:32Matt Farah?

  Right, right, yeah. And these guys are, they're fucking, there's no, it's like the Malibu Cars and Coffee. There's no central organization. It's all decentralized on Signal chats and shit like that. It's just people helping people. And it's fucking amazing to watch. It's like, it's terrible, obviously. I spent most of the weekend in this sort of alternating state of like, you know, dread and not fear specifically, but just this sort of like, it's gonna come for all of us, sort of thing. But also like, then I started reading stories about like Minnesotans, um, who are like, hardcore, like, just fucking getting it done.

• 7:17Matt Farah?

  And organizing and talking to each other and feeding each other and helping each other and hiding each other.

• 7:23Speaker 01

  There's a great interview on Channel 5 News, do you watch that guy? Um, Channel 5 News is great, it's a YouTube channel, but probably like, the best unbiased journalism videos out right now and like, uh, I don't, you would like him a lot.

• 7:37Matt Farah?

  Alright, I'll check it out, I'm down.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  And, but he, he went, he usually lands in these places right as it's happening and someone just talking to camera was like, you know, the political party's not coming for you.

• 7:47Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  Like, we have to do this together.

• 7:48Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  And that's always true. Um, Chris Hedges, do you know him?

• 7:51Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  Fantastic journalist, I mean, he preaches this a lot, like, you have to do nonviolent, organized stuff and it has to be the people because, you know, there's no, there's not gonna be an organization of like, law enforcement on the side of the people or like, law enforcement, I mean, law enforcement is gently resisting, there was a bunch of police chiefs in New York that spoke out together publicly about ICE harassing their citizens and they were like, what the fuck?

• 8:16Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  Like, this is not how you do this, but they can't like go to the ground, so.

• 8:21Matt Farah?

  There, I mean, there's... There's a, there's a non-zero possibility that there could be a violent confrontation between federal and local law enforcement.

• 8:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:33Matt Farah?

  I mean, there's really a decent.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Well, I had a.

• 8:36Matt Farah?

  A lot of people wrote really interesting stuff this weekend. Hamilton Nolan, Wes Siler wrote a really decent, uh, really, really interesting piece, I thought. Um, garbage day, as always, was fucking on it. Yeah, that's a must-read. Um, and of course, popular information, uh, is a must-read. Of course, Judd Legum, very important, um, accountability newsletter.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  My tinfoil hat thought this weekend was ICE has changed their uniforms to say police instead of ICE.

• 9:02Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  Because then if federal and local show up at the same place and have a discrepancy, it's harder for local police to identify who's their guys and who is ICE.

• 9:12Matt Farah?

  That's, that's crazy, cause that's criminal thought. That's, that's what people doing crimes do. Dress up like cops. Like, that's, that's crazy. Um, I don't want to spend the whole show on this, but I just, you know, you gotta fucking, I had to get the thoughts out about, first I was like, I'm gonna come and fucking say a bunch of things about how ICE are a bunch of pieces of shit, which is true. But it's more important to focus on the people that are like, doing the fucking, the good things down there.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:44Matt Farah?

  So like, shout out to those people, and I hope there's someone right now, driving around Minnesota, listening to this podcast, and fucking honking air horns at ICE. That would be, that would make me so happy. If someone sends me a video of a fucking car chasing ICE out of town while playing this podcast, fucking dinner's on me, Habibi. Let's fucking go.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  I, I just think it's a great celebration of the fact that, you know, we the people can get things done. And it's just, cause this force shows up with all the gear. All the rifles trying to intimidate and all that stuff and it's like just the simple and it's amazing to see people's organic organization of like, oh, we're gonna follow them, document stuff, here's how you do that, like it's just, it's impressive how quickly those methods have come to be in the last six months.

• 10:29Matt Farah?

  Well, it depends, fascism depends on people staying home.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 10:33Matt Farah?

  It depends on a pre-fear of a fear of what's gonna happen, so you don't do the thing you were gonna do.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  Well, that's why they call everyone a terrorist, cuz they go, cuz they're saying, they're not, yes, they're accusing the person that they shot of being a thing, what they're really doing, in my opinion, is they're informing the whole audience of the news going, this is what we're gonna call you.

• 10:51Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  This is how it's gonna go for you.

• 10:52Matt Farah?

  Yeah, for sure, and we have Palantir now to watch you.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:57Matt Farah?

  We have all the money and we have absolutely warrantless data tracking software. Remember that software I told you about, I told, talked about on the show, cuz I met my friend who is a commercial, has a commercial real estate business and he showed me his phone with this app that showed everyone who came into their stores and where they were coming from and where they were going, and it was like not expensive to get this, and he was just like a commercial fucking real estate guy, and it didn't just show his stores, it showed all the stores, it showed every commercial business in this region he purchased. It was like thirty, forty thousand dollars for the year, which is both a lot of money and not a lot of money.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  That's not a lot of money to track every single person in a neighborhood.

• 11:44Matt Farah?

  Yeah, and it's not a lot of money if you own a hundred shopping centers, which this this person does, and it's not a lot of money for the fucking government, and this software, which the, which they can now use, government's now using without, without warrants, they don't need warrants to use it, can, can fucking just track phones, just where they're going. Oh, you're at a protest, could track you right to your house, like, so that's why, you know, Wes Siler's article this, this weekend was like, what do you do? If your house isn't the safe place anymore. Folks taking a quick break for HelloFresh supporting us today. I love HelloFresh. You know what? Nobody tells you about weeknight dinner. It's the thing that never goes away.

• 12:28Matt Farah?

  Every day around 5:00 PM, there it is again. HelloFresh doesn't make you a better cook. It just gives you your nights back. What are they talking about? It's not about being good at cooking. It's about the mental load of figuring out every now and then, what are we gonna have? What are we gonna eat? No, no, no. You're already exhausted. This happens with me and my wife like every day. And you know when it happens for me, not at 5 o'clock, but right after lunch. A lot of time we have lunch together. We'll finish lunch and then it's, and then we have to talk about food again. HelloFresh has over 100 recipes every week. You pick what sounds good, not what you can figure out how to make. And there's got bigger portions now. And HelloFresh removes that problem ingredient completely with pre-portioned ingredients,

• 13:12Matt Farah?

  step-by-step cards, meals made in 30 minutes, and it's great. You got sustainably sourced seafood, antibiotic-free chicken, seasonal produce that actually tastes like something, steak and seafood at no extra cost, more seafood options before. Man, are they using the word seafood a lot in this script? Plus 35 high-protein recipes weekly with Mediterranean and GLP-1 friendly options. The reason I like this is because I can cook and I like to cook. I like to try new things. I like to make new recipes. And HelloFresh gives me the right ingredients to make the recipe, easy instructions to make the recipe. There's never any waste. I have the exact amount of food.

• 13:54Matt Farah?

  So I'm not buying stuff and then it's rotting or I'm not buying expensive spices and using them once. And then I keep that recipe card so I can multiply the recipe if I want to make the same thing for a party or something later because it's usually really delicious. And I've had some really good meals with HelloFresh. But it's not just dinnertime, it's energy. You're getting the ability to sit down instead of standing at the counter, stress eating while you cook. And when dinner tastes this good and takes so little Effort, you finally get your nights back. I can totally relate. Go to hellofresh.com/smokingtire10fm to get 10 free meals and a free Zwilling knife,

• 14:36Matt Farah?

  a $145 value on your third box. Offer valid while supplies last. Free meals applied as discount on first box. New subscribers only. Varies by plan. That's hellofresh.com/smokingtire10fm for 10 free meals and the free Zwilling knife on your third box. All right. Support also coming in today from Delete Me. We love Delete Me. Been using Delete Me for months now. And what they do, as I've said, is they make it easy, quick and safe to remove your personal data from the internet at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everybody vulnerable.

• 15:17Matt Farah?

  It's so easy for anybody, bad actors, good actors, people who want to sell you stuff, to get information on people outline, online. Your address, your phone number, and your family members' names, all hanging out on the internet can have actual consequences in the real world and make everyone more vulnerable. And listen, I, we're seeing this happening in real time now. You want to get your personal information off the internet and data broker websites as best you can. And Delete Me does that. It's what they specialize in. All you do is you make an account, you fill out their survey with all the information that you want them to search for, root out, and delete. They then go to work, and you don't hear from them for a little while, but then they

• 15:59Matt Farah?

  come back with this crazy list of stuff that they've deleted and stuff that you need to maybe do a little bit of extra clicking or signing in order to have it fully deleted. But then, it's not just once, because they're going to keep buying your data from all these websites that you shop from or sign up for and use. So they keep going. Every month, they send you a new report saying, here's what I found, here's what I deleted, here's what you need to do. And it is a great way to get your sensitive information off of these data broker websites. The New York Times Wirecutter named Delete Me their top pick. For data removal services. So you can take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for Delete Me.

• 16:42Matt Farah?

  Now at a special discount for our listeners, you can get 20% off your Delete Me plan. When you go to joindelete.me/tire and use promo code tire at checkout. The only way to get 20% off is to go to joindelete.me/tire and enter code tire at checkout. That's joindelete.me/tire code tire. You know, how do you sort of, what is the, what if, what does a prepper's mindset look like? In, in that type of case, you know? Cause for most people like home is safe. Like that's, but, but between ICE following people home, using fucking shady ass tracking software.

• 17:28Matt Farah?

  Sold to them by Palantir. Or whether they are, um, fuck it, I, I mean, I completely lost my train of thought. I'm so fucking just discombobulated by this, but like. You can just be followed to your, like to your house, like, you know, so that, or I'm sorry. Whether they're following you doing that, or whether they're just doing fucking warrantless, warrantless raids now, which apparently is a, is a thing. So, so the first amendment, that's gone. Uh, second amendment, kind of on ice, cause fucking this dude, Preddy, Alex, Alex Preddy, legally fucking carrying. And didn't pull it under major threat, helps a woman.

• 18:11Matt Farah?

  And they fucking disarm him and shoot him in the back and say he was there to murder everybody.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:16Matt Farah?

  Legally, I mean, doing the, literally the good guy with the gun.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:21Matt Farah?

  The fucking choir boy nurse helping a woman.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  Veterans Affairs nurse, yeah.

• 18:27Matt Farah?

  Yeah. That's, there is no gooder guy with a gun who in the face of that violence doesn't pull it.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  Which I think is very smart and I, you know, I think and a lot of people talk about it's like. If they instigate a violent confrontation, like then do they get just, then can they justify martial law? Then can they suspend elections?

• 18:49Matt Farah?

  Well, that's what Trump wants.

• 18:50Speaker 01

  Right, exactly.

• 18:50Matt Farah?

  He's just...

• 18:51Speaker 01

  So I think the restraint being shown by all the people that go to these protests and all the people that are there is really admirable. And Chris Hedge is, again, like, amazing, nonpartisan journalist, does fantastic work. He put out a video that's just like, nonviolence is the only way because the state can always exact more violence on the people than the people will ever be able to exact on the state.

• 19:14Matt Farah?

  Well, and how about Kristi Noem's fucking podium? You see, do you see Kristi Noem's podium?

• 19:19Speaker 01

  Mm-mm.

• 19:20Matt Farah?

  She fucking is up there with a podium she's speaking from and on of it, written on the back of the podium, it says "One of us, all of you."

• 19:30Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 19:31Matt Farah?

  This, this wasn't some AI thing, this was on CNN. She gave a speech, you see, you see it? The "One of us, all of you" podium? I believe that's the exact wording. "One of us, all of you" or "One of us, all of them." Either way...

• 19:44Speaker 01

  "One of ours, all of yours."

• 19:45Matt Farah?

  "One of ours, all of yours." Excuse me if I didn't get the exact fascism words right. But, think about that. Think about that. Do you know what that, that's, the implication is collective punishment, right? If you get, if you injure or kill one of ours, we're gonna kill all of you, right? That's literally a war crime. Like, she's up there giving a speech with a fucking declaration of a war crime written on the podium. Like, that's how little these people give a fuck about...

• 20:23Speaker 01

  So that podium was, that was, the picture I found was from January 8th. So I don't know if she's using that podium continually.

• 20:28Matt Farah?

  January 8th is not very long ago.

• 20:30Speaker 01

  No, it's not. I thought you were saying that the podium was made during, like, as a reaction to this weekend.

• 20:36Matt Farah?

  No, it was not made this weekend, it was not made this weekend. No, no, no. But still, the, whatever head of fucking, you know...

• 20:41Speaker 01

  It's still saying that, what it's saying.

• 20:43Matt Farah?

  It's, yeah.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:44Matt Farah?

  That's, that's like, that's, you know, that's where we're at right now, is with like, people in charge going, "We're gonna do some war crimes."

• 20:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:53Matt Farah?

  And like, there is just nothing you can do about it.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  That's how fascist intimidation works, or tries to work.

• 20:58Matt Farah?

  But Minnesota has shown, I think, so far, that... They can't control a whole city, actually.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  No, they can't.

• 21:06Matt Farah?

  They think they can, but they can't. And they picked the wrong fucking city. They didn't pick a fucking city full of pussies, did they? They picked a fucking tough city to try and run amok in. It's not working so good.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  You know, these observers, they were doing this in LA when ICE first showed up here. And there was some great Instagram accounts that were doing the same thing.

• 21:26Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  Cars, whistles, and there are people, they'd go to Long Beach, they figured out where ICE's base was.

• 21:32Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 21:32Speaker 01

  And they'd just watch them, and then they would follow the cars when they left, and follow them to the neighborhoods, help provide advice to neighbors that are getting approached and stuff like that. So it's this, these methods have just evolved and developed and spread really quickly, and it's fantastic to see. And I think, if you live in Minnesota, you're tough. Like, it's cold. You are a tough person, and usually very nice people. So, they got fucked with.

• 21:56Matt Farah?

  I went to college with some folks from Minneapolis. Let me tell you something, all of them had super ethnic fucking names. None of them were like, "Minnesota white people." None of them were that. They were all fucking Hispanic or African-ish names of folks, who were Americans, by the way. Isaiah, they were children of immigrants, who were Americans that just had very ethnic, you know, last names.

• 22:20Matt Farah?

  And it surprised me back then, I was like, "Minnesota? You guys are in Minnesota?" And they're like, "Minnesota." Like, they were hardcore about being from there. And when they graduated from college, none of them, everyone else, New York, Miami, LA, everyone, them right back to fucking Minnesota.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  My friend Jim Claps from Minnesota, and so, very white name, but he was the guy that would wear shorts in January in Colorado. And it would be 12 degrees.

• 22:43Matt Farah?

  I know that guy.

• 22:43Speaker 01

  And he's like, "I'm not cold." Just because he's used to it. And we're all, I'm bundled up.

• 22:47Matt Farah?

  Yeah, yeah. He's got the Tevas, the shorts and the Tevas in the winter.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, literally cargo shorts, and maybe one puffy jacket.

• 22:55Matt Farah?

  Yeah, they're hard as fuck up there.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:57Matt Farah?

  Shout out to Minnesota.

• 22:58Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 22:59Matt Farah?

  We fucking respect you guys. Um, alright, cars. Should we do cars then? How about that? Uh, where do we want to start? Oh, should we start with the update to my lemonade rant?

• 23:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, definitely.

• 23:10Matt Farah?

  So, two shows ago, we talked about this company Lemonade that was offering sort of discount rates for Tesla FSD users, right? And they implied that using Tesla FSD is so much safer that that we did, we had 25 minutes on this. About why it's stupid and medium level bullshit. Well, we have a, a letter from a listener, uh, who preferred to not be, um, identified by name, but has been an auto insurance, uh, industry representative for 20 years. Okay? I have pursed, this is from the letter, "I have personally tested just under a dozen telematics platforms that insurers use.

• 23:55Matt Farah?

  Even without autonomous driving being a factor, a huge challenge with these systems is figuring out who is driving and the mechanisms that they use this to determine, uh, the mechanisms they use to determine this are sometimes goofy. When the stuff first came out, and I'm gonna paraphrase a little bit, because a lot of words here. When the stuff first came out, you plugged the dongle into the OBD port to gather driving data. In these cases, uh, it was evaluated based on the car. As time went on, the dongle went away in favor of monitoring, monitoring the behavior of your phone using the accelerometer, uh, and GPS, which presented new challenges. You could get dinged for speeding while being on a train, or you could be pegged as driving aggressively as, while you were the passenger in a car."

• 24:40Speaker 01

  Amazing.

• 24:41Matt Farah?

  "One of the many janky ways they controlled to identify for being a passenger was using your phone's accelerometer to determine if you lowered yourself down into the right or down into the left." Some programs have dozens of such indicators which will, taken together, create a directionally correct picture of what's going on, but with many obvious exceptions and errors. Which, editorial, I suppose makes insurance telematics and AV driving a match made in heaven. The end game for all this is that every OEM will provide connected vehicle data to a centralized data exchange that will operate exactly like a credit bureau.

• 25:23Matt Farah?

  The only reason there's any hope of this not happening in our lifetimes is that insurance regulation is convoluted and administered at the state level, which makes it very difficult to pull off on the national level. To be clear, this is not a take accepted nationwide, but one that I personally carry in many insurance boardrooms. P.S. Your assertion that there is no data of FSD being safer, aside from what Elon says, is correct. If this data did exist, the industry would price on it, and aside from tech bro insurance startups that don't actually have to make any money, the industry does not.

• 26:03Matt Farah?

  So, not necessarily should be taken as gospel, but that's an insider's take as to why these sort of driver-tracking-based insurance programs are just bad across the board, and why this one that claims all this stuff with Tesla and FSD seems to be medium-level bullshit. So, thank you for that one. Yeah. We appreciate the insight. That's fantastic insight. That's fun. But speaking of which, Alex Roy did actually, along with two of his buddies whose names I forget right now, sorry, did actually go from LA to New York using FSD with allegedly zero interventions or disconnections. That's right, they did that.

• 26:47Matt Farah?

  Yeah, so, I was reading up on this. It was like 58 hours, which sounds fucking awful if you ask me, but...

• 26:56Matt Farah?

  But I guess FSD has, and this is probably what Camisa experienced when he was texting about it as well, they changed something in the FSD algorithm, or not algorithm.

• 27:12Speaker 01

  Who changed?

• 27:13Matt Farah?

  Tesla.

• 27:14Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 27:15Matt Farah?

  Changed something in the way it operates. So if it would get confused previously, it would, you'd have a disconnect. But now it has a new sort of methodology where it tries to solve its own problems a few times first, before disconnecting. And one of the things that Alex said was, without this update, there would have been a couple of disconnections on this drive, but because they're now, I don't know if it's more computing power, I don't know if it's just a changing of parameters, but they have, and if you scroll down in this story, they have the actual, they casually call it try, try again, but there's a different, wait, there's a, keep going, keep going.

• 28:00Matt Farah?

  There is an actual name for it. Uh, keep going. Guys, one more quick break because Mud Water is coming in hot. Now, here's the thing about Mud Water. It's a coffee alternative that's made with cacao, chai, turmeric, and functional mushrooms like lion's mane and reishi, okay? You get this sort of warm focus boost without a wired buzz or a crash that usually tags along with coffee or other caffeinated products, right? And I've had problems with caffeine in the past. I've had literal panic attacks as a result of being overly caffeinated. And so when you want to get your morning together, a little less chaos, less jittery

• 28:41Matt Farah?

  energy, and more of that kind of locked in feeling that gets you going, but when I don't, I can't have that kind of caffeine in the morning, that's where the Mud Water comes in, right? And if you're still craving that taste of coffee, which, you know, you're in luck, I like it, they just launched a low caffeine coffee made with organic arabica, Swiss water decaf, L-theanine, and the same functional mushrooms you get in the other blends it's rich smooth and only 45 milligrams of caffeine so you can get the flavor you love without the jitters crash or spiraling thoughts spiraling thoughts is usually where you would find me in the peak of being overly caffeinated so I don't want any of them so whether you're mixing up the original blend or easing into

• 29:25Matt Farah?

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• 30:05Matt Farah?

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• 30:46Matt Farah?

  the show oh it doesn't have it okay never mind it's it but the way I described it is essentially how it works it just makes further attempts to solve its own problems before actually disconnecting which I mean on the one hand it makes you wonder why it wasn't doing that before but on the other hand like

• 31:05Speaker 01

  well they they always roll things out sure a little early you know take them out of the oven before they're really done

• 31:10Matt Farah?

  I also think they it wasn't

• 31:15Matt Farah?

  Number of disconnections, or lack thereof, seem to be an indicator of the system being good or not. And so, my guess is, they prioritized... I'm not saying they like, bullshitted or finagled, but they prioritized reducing the number of disconnects.

• 31:36Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, that's a good point. I mean, I could see them doing that. I think then the question would be, from people like Alex's side, you almost have to have this subjective observation of, okay, did it do... Did it make more mistakes, or do anything weird, but remain connected? You know, to the point where he's... He goes, "Okay, six months ago, it would have disconnected here." But right now, it's staying connected and figuring it out, and wandering in the lane a little bit, or something. Or if he says it was actually a lot more flawless, then they've improved both sides, you know?

• 32:07Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 32:11Matt Farah?

  Look, I don't disagree, or that they have slowly improved this system. I don't think I've ever really argued that there was a slow incremental improvement of this system. I just... I don't... I still don't fucking... It's still a level-two system. Like, it's, you know, and I still... I would not ride in a Tesla that didn't have a very attentive human operator monitoring such a system. If I would... Any day of the fucking week, Zach, absolutely any day of the week, would I ride with Alex Roy in his Tesla, using FSD? 100%. I trust that person to use that system responsibly. But like, would I be comfortable with like,

• 32:55Matt Farah?

  any fucking Uber driver just hitting it? And like, zoning out? Like, nah. I don't think so. And would I be comfortable in a driverless taxi that had this system? Absolutely not. Not compared to what I've seen with Waymos.

• 33:09Speaker 01

  Well, I'm sure you saw the story too. The Tesla's in Austin now. They don't have observational drivers in the car anymore. But they have cars following the robo-taxis that are observing.

• 33:20Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  So...

• 33:21Matt Farah?

  So they're like, eight years behind Waymo-ish?

• 33:24Speaker 01

  They definitely are. And I mean, I think the article... They're attacking Tesla a bit for the creative wording, which I do understand. But also, they have now let a car out into the world where no one can grab the wheel if they are... If something goes wrong with it. So it seems like a step towards, you know, letting these things just drive around, like Waymo did.

• 33:44Matt Farah?

  Yeah, it is a step towards, but I just, I can't, I can't stress enough how

• 33:54Matt Farah?

  redundancy of sensor suites is so important.

• 33:57Speaker 01

  I agree with you. I totally agree with you.

• 34:00Matt Farah?

  I just can't stress that shit enough.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  Well, it would be so smart if they, if they wanted to go all in on the robo taxi thing, is if they could have like bolt-on radar stuff, like take the existing car. It's got the cameras, it's got that suite, then add on the lidar radar. It'll stick out just like it does on the Waymo, but it would be a safer thing to operate. But that would hurt their stock because it's not something you or I could buy at the dealership.

• 34:23Matt Farah?

  Right, yeah. I mean, and still, we, we still have the, the thing of, I mean Tesla can self-insure their cyber caps, right? They got, they got lots of money. They don't need insurance. They can self-insure. Waymo self-insures. They're fucking Google. They don't need regular car insurance. But like you, Zach Latman, there, there is no path yet for the individual to

• 34:52Matt Farah?

  purchase, really at any price, a policy that will cover a car that's being driven autonomously. And we, and we have no, no one has stepped up, and even Mercedes, if you saw, pulled back on that level three car.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  The little four thing?

• 35:09Matt Farah?

  Yeah, they, they, maybe not. No one has stepped up and said, "We will stand behind our technology when being used by the general public." And I don't see that happening fucking anytime soon.

• 35:23Speaker 01

  Well, the insurance is all about risk, and they want to reduce as much, I mean, they, they stopped covering a lot of houses in California because of fire.

• 35:30Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 35:31Speaker 01

  Like, they're not going to cover autonomous cars, I think, until the data is really, really clear to them.

• 35:36Matt Farah?

  Yeah, and it's like not anywhere close.

• 35:38Speaker 01

  Right, it's not close, and it also needs to be made, well, maybe not public, but at least given to them, and they probably want, you know, millions of miles of data, like Waymo has, so. They have to be very cautious.

• 35:49Matt Farah?

  And Waymos aren't, I mean, Waymos aren't, aren't perfect, but um.

• 35:51Speaker 01

  No, they're not. They're, they're, I think they're the frontrunner right now.

• 35:54Matt Farah?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 35:54Speaker 01

  They're the leader and they're, they're by Google.

• 35:57Matt Farah?

  They're not misleading. That's the, the difference to me is that Waymos aren't misleading. You, they operate in a fucking area you can see the map of, that you know what they are. They're, they, I mean, I, I can't believe I'm defending fucking Google of all people. They're like, they're, they're as evil as anybody else, but like, I, I think it's a more honest product.

• 36:21Speaker 01

  I think they just, they approached it more cautiously. And whether it was because they saw Elon's method and went, ooh, okay, that hasn't gone well for him. Or it's just not in the nature of Google and the people that work there, that they're a different person than Elon Musk.

• 36:34Matt Farah?

  Well, they certainly didn't go, buy this today and it'll work tomorrow.

• 36:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:38Matt Farah?

  For six fucking seven, or seven years.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  I don't know. They also just, they don't grab the headlines like he does. I mean, he, for years, he was, everyone was like, it's our Tony Stark. It's the real thing. And then he went totally crazy and that's, that shine has worn off.

• 36:51Matt Farah?

  There's an entire road and track column about why a fucking huge red flag for any news article is if in the headline, it says Elon Musk says. Just anything that follows that is gonna be deeply horseshit.

• 37:07Speaker 01

  Like I, this, I've told this story before, but I, I read an article once where it was like Tesla crashes into Nissan. And I was like, oh, and it was during the fervor of a few years ago when everyone was paying attention. I clicked on it and it's a video of a Nissan crashing into a Tesla.

• 37:21Matt Farah?

  Right.

• 37:21Speaker 01

  The Tesla is stopped at a red light and I went, oh, they're just using Tesla was the headline grabber, right? So I don't, maybe Waymo didn't ever have that kind of cultural cachet. So I'm wondering like, did, were they?

• 37:33Matt Farah?

  Well, cause you can't buy one.

• 37:34Speaker 01

  Were they more cautious in how they talked about or promised their future? Or did they just not get the attention in the headlines? And so I think that's what it was.

• 37:43Matt Farah?

  Right. If you bullshit the future, your stock goes up like a lot.

• 37:52Matt Farah?

  But it's also like deeply irresponsible. And so only fucking Elon could get away with it. No other publicly traded company could have leadership that would lie to everybody like that and still be in place.

• 38:07Speaker 01

  Well, Sam Altman's doing a pretty good job.

• 38:09Matt Farah?

  Well, yeah, for sure, for sure. Yeah, I mean, what's his name? Sam Bankman-Fried, I guess, you know, who's doing real good, right until he wasn't.

• 38:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:18Matt Farah?

  But I don't think any company in the world could bullshit for 15 years as convincingly as Elon Musk has. And I don't know why, because a lot of the things he say to me sound catastrophically stupid.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  Well, it's also cars are in our wheelhouse. I'm sure there's, you know.

• 38:39Matt Farah?

  Well, you saw the fucking tweet, right? People said, people called Elon Musk a genius because of his cars, and I didn't know cars, so I assumed he was a genius. And then they called him a genius because of his rockets, and I don't know rockets, so I assumed he was a genius. But I know software, and then he started talking about software on Twitter, and I saw the stupidest motherfucker I've ever seen talk about software. What did I learn? Don't go near his cars or rockets.

• 39:02Speaker 01

  That's really funny.

• 39:02Matt Farah?

  Like, one of the most concise explanations ever written.

• 39:06Speaker 01

  Well, but I also think, I don't think you could, like, I won't write off his rockets because his Twitter text sucks and Grok is, you know, and he's like a terrible person.

• 39:16Matt Farah?

  No, the point is that he professes genius and people, people label him a genius. In areas, he is absolutely not a fucking genius.

• 39:27Speaker 01

  And I think that is a flaw of inhuman nature. It's, we ask celebrities what they think about XYZ. Some celebrity, and celebrities, actors, I'm just going to say actors, and it's because we celebrate them for doing this thing, they make us feel a certain way when we watch a movie or a TV show, and we go, well, what do you think about this technical problem? And then they say something and we go, I can't believe that this person said that. And you're like, that's, you shouldn't, you shouldn't be amazed by this. They trained in acting, they're an entertainer, they might not know everything about COVID vaccine molecular biology, or whatever, or spaceships. But that's, that's the thing, is we just go, you're good at this, are you good at all these other things? Because we all want a god.

• 40:07Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 40:08Speaker 01

  And that's a dumb thing to do.

• 40:09Matt Farah?

  It's a really dumb thing to do. Really dumb. I mean, your god, pretty soon, your god's gonna start talking about white genocide. You know, like, it's fucking. You know what I'm saying? Like, it's not going well over there.

• 40:22Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 40:23Matt Farah?

  Imagine being that rich and that miserable. It'd be crazy.

• 40:26Speaker 01

  It's a common thing, apparently.

• 40:27Matt Farah?

  I know. I aspire. May I, may I have the wherewithal to be a Tom from MySpace? You know?

• 40:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 40:36Matt Farah?

  Should I ever get that much money, all you're gonna see from me is pretty ass landscapes. That's gonna be the end of my Instagram. Here's a landscape of somewhere you can't.

• 40:47Speaker 01

  Fred Durst, man, it's just wagons, right? For a while, it was just like old wagons.

• 40:50Matt Farah?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 40:53Matt Farah?

  Uh, should we talk about the E-Ray? I should review the, the E-Ray.

• 40:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, you've spent a lot of time in it.

• 40:58Matt Farah?

  Corvette Array. Um, there it is on the right. There is, there is a picture of the Array in there. Um, 1,400 miles in, uh, three and a half days solo in the E-Ray. Uh, so I think that qualifies me for learning about it. Uh, for those who don't know, the E-Ray is, uh, it's a, it's a hybrid, sort of. It's kind of a hybrid. It's not a hybrid in the way that most people will think about a hybrid. And in that regard, I think it's actually a bit of a failure of GM to even call it a hybrid. Because the truth is, or call it the E-Ray, I don't think the E-Ray is the kind of

• 41:40Matt Farah?

  name that will attract who GM is probably trying to attract to buy this car. Cause those people are probably like, hybrids are for queers or something like that, right? And I drove this car a lot. You don't plug it in.

• 41:58Matt Farah?

  You'd have to convince somebody that this car is actually a hybrid. Like, there's nothing about it that acts like a hybrid car. Really, there really isn't.

• 42:10Matt Farah?

  There's a small battery that powers the front drive for, it's a single motor for the two front wheels, so it's all-wheel drive. In order to really activate the all-wheel drive system, you either need to have a situation where you're beyond the limit of grip in a corner, and it's activated by the stability control and those kind of yaw sensors and stuff, or you have to be at like over 50% throttle. Okay? Now, remember, the E-Race output is rear wheels, gas power, front wheels, electric power. There isn't some motor generator in the gearbox that does a torque-filly thing, or a sort

• 42:54Matt Farah?

  of off-the-line shove, the way that Porsche's systems, or Lamborghini's systems, or McLaren's systems do. So, what I'm saying is, if you drive this car around on a clear day, at under 50% throttle, it's a stingray. Through and through, Z51 stingray. You will not activate, nor really do anything with the electric motor. There will be a little bit of regenerative braking when you brush the brakes. It does regen first, if it has battery, before going to caliper, a little bit, but you don't notice it much. If you get into the pedal, and it does the "rrrrr" sound, and you can feel the extra thrust, then now you know you've got... And this fucking thing goes.

• 43:39Matt Farah?

  In a straight line, this car boogies. It is a fast car. I mean, 655 horsepower, it goes like a motherfucker. And if you launch it, it's in the 2s. You know, it's a very fast car. But, Temerario, McLaren Artura, Acura NSX, Porsche 918, all these other cars, because they've got those two motors up front that can do that incredible, infinite torque vectoring, brake vectoring, in this car, you don't have the magic steering that you have in those cars. And actually, because it's motor into differential into, hm, you have a heavier steering than you would have in a stingray or in a Z06. So, the weight of the steering is a lot, and most of the time, the trade-off in power

• 44:24Matt Farah?

  doesn't give back. Most of the time, it feels like a dirty and heavy steering stingray. Which is, it doesn't mean it's bad. It just means that it was sort of pitched as sort of the road tripper's Corvette. And actually, I think if I was road tripping, I'd rather just have a regular Stingray. The front tires are two seventy-fives in this car, and I think it may have had a sort of journalist spec alignment on it because it was dirty. And fourteen hundred miles in a dirty car, my, I don't know what this muscle is. It's part of either where my peck meets my armpit, just from holding it straight for that long.

• 45:07Matt Farah?

  This was a two hands on the wheel drive for all this. Was a lot. I would hope that you can dial the alignment more relaxed a little bit if you're really gonna do these kind of miles in one of these cars. And it sounds like I'm getting down on this car. Here's why you shouldn't. This one is fully loaded and it's a hundred and thirty-three thousand bucks. It's with all the carbon, it's with all the ceramic brakes, the upgraded wheels, the upgraded interior, like, all that stuff. And it's a ton of car. It's super fast, even at that price. I think I'd rather have a ZO6 for the same money. That's where I would go. But like, I get it, and if you really did want to drive one of these through the winter, the all-wheel drive would help you if you had the right tires.

• 45:50Matt Farah?

  I drove it in the ice and on PS4S's. The all-wheel drive was not substantially helpful, as helpful as a set of the proper tires would have been. Okay, having said that. The Stingray powertrain, the LT1 engine in that gearbox is still great. I mean, the engine isn't, doesn't have the fizz of the flat plane motor, but it's still, it sounds tough on the cold start. You know, it revs very smooth, the power band is very even.

• 46:26Matt Farah?

  It's an excellent engine for what it's being asked to do. The ergonomics of the car are largely very good.

• 46:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:33Matt Farah?

  Very comfortable. I will say that the binnacle, which is where the roof meets the windshield, is a little bit low for taller drivers. And I only noticed this after a lot of miles. Two, three, four hours, no big deal. Days, I found myself doing this. Which is where-

• 46:53Speaker 01

  The viper posture.

• 46:54Matt Farah?

  The viper or hurrican posture, which is where you just droop your head down a couple of inches. Subconsciously, you don't even notice it, so that you have a more level vision through. And my neck started to hurt. And we're talking days. Not hours, days of driving, that would be. The new interior, they've gotten rid of the wall of buttons. Much better.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:15Matt Farah?

  This actually, if you're going a long distance solo, this driver's cockpit is so well set up for you. Everything is just right at your hands. And GM's UI is really, really, really good, clear. What's the TV doing? It's flickering. And it's an easy car to use. Everything just sort of falls where you want it to be. The seat is pretty well adjustable. It doesn't have that thigh support thing that I like, that the BMWs and the Porsches have. But it has good lumbar, it has good side bolstering. I cannot get behind the square steering wheel.

• 47:59Matt Farah?

  It really doesn't do it for me at all. And really, over long distances, it did not make my hands feel very good. I think the fact that I had to really hold the car straight also didn't help. But I'd really like a round wheel. That mod that I saw in Texas, where the guy put the Cadillac black wing wheel on one of these. Did I not show you that? I don't think I put it on Instagram. But there was a GM engineer at the race in Texas that had a prototype, C8 prototype.

• 48:30Speaker 01

  Oh, you told me about it.

• 48:31Matt Farah?

  That they just had, they'd done up as like a track car. And it had a round wheel on it, and it was amazing. So that you need, you definitely want a round wheel. The digital rear view mirror. Click over, so on the one hand, keep going, keep going. Look at that, look at that sunrise in the digital rear view mirror. So, the digital rear view mirror, on the one hand, can brighten up very dark environments, or, or, or, or kick down very bright environments. It, it has a much wider field of view than just looking out the back window. And, and you can adjust the camera angle a little bit. So that's okay. And, and also, you don't have to use it. You can also, this can be used as a regular mirror if you flip it up, okay?

• 49:15Matt Farah?

  But, so, here's something I noticed about the digital mirror. And it actually relates a bit to Tesla and AVs and camera, camera only systems. When you have this digital rear view mirror, and then you have your real side mirrors, and you can see kind of the same scene from both, when it's clear, like this. The digital mirror, I could see that there's trucks behind me and cars behind me. If I look at that same, from the same distance, same scene, I can see that that's a Peterbilt truck. When I see cars behind me, in the, in the digital mirror, I could see that it's a car.

• 49:59Matt Farah?

  But in a, with the regular glass, I can see much more detail in the individual cars. And I can go, okay, go, I can go, that's a Volvo, that's a BMW 3 Series, that's a, that, that, that, that, that, all the way back where they're just, they're just dots in this. Cops? You can't fucking see a cop car for shit in this digital rear view mirror. All the extra lights and all the detail and stuff that you would use to pick out a Tahoe or Explorer as a cop car, you can't see nothing. Side view mirror, no problem. Flip off the digital mirror and look through the dirty ass Lexan, no problem. Right. Because your eyes are just so much better than cameras. Yeah, no kidding.

• 50:40Matt Farah?

  Which is why, like, all this camera only AV shit, it drives me crazy. You just have to look at a fucking camera compared to your eye, almost any camera, especially them piece of shits they're using on Teslas, and, and go, the amount of detail that I can see about the world is just so much more, so.

• 51:01Matt Farah?

  So this ca- the digital camera, bottom line is, it's good for certain things, it's bad for other things. I hadn't found something that it was particularly bad at, until I got fucking rolled on by a police Tahoe. And I didn't know this motherfucker was a cop until he was eight feet behind me. I didn't get pulled over, I just got like a whoop whoop and kind of a shocker like cool car. But this motherfucker snuck up on me in a way that if I had a regular mirror, they never would.

• 51:31Speaker 01

  Now, why didn't you just run the regular mirror?

• 51:33Matt Farah?

  After that, I did.

• 51:34Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 51:35Matt Farah?

  Oh, actually, I'll tell you why. Because you see how my Valentine 1 cables wrapped around the mirror? I couldn't get the mirror to the right angle. And also have the cable wrap around it.

• 51:48Speaker 01

  That is a thing with the cables, uh, yeah, you should, you should wrap it around like your rocket mount or something like that.

• 51:54Matt Farah?

  I, yeah, no, there's a, yeah, I, I, after that, I was like, fuck this and unwound it and wound it around something else.

• 51:59Speaker 01

  Or actually, if you set the mirror before you wind the cable, like it won't shove it in.

• 52:02Matt Farah?

  Can't do it, it won't, you can't shove the cable up there, it moves the mirror.

• 52:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, you couldn't shove it in there, you'd just be showing a little bit.

• 52:08Matt Farah?

  It didn't fit, yeah, so, anyway, that's.

• 52:11Speaker 01

  I always, I mean, Sarah's car is this, but other cars that I've driven one that have, I like, I like the improved field of view, especially on mid-engine cars or, you know, SUVs, like, especially the long three-row SUV, looking through the regular mirror past two rows of seats.

• 52:24Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 52:25Speaker 01

  I mean, you get this tiny little window and, but yeah, I'll switch to like the side mirror if I need to verify something, but.

• 52:32Matt Farah?

  It just, it ma- it got me thinking about camera-only AI or ca- camera-only AVs.

• 52:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 52:38Matt Farah?

  Just like, how does nobody with a fucking brain go camera, eyes, and the camera, despite a wild field of view, the, the, the amount of detail in the image is like so much worse.

• 52:51Speaker 01

  Well, I think it depends on what they need to see, because if, if the A, if the AV or whatever just needs to see, there's a car, it doesn't need to care. Is it a Nissan, is it a BMW, is it a police officer?

• 53:01Matt Farah?

  No, but it needs to see small things too.

• 53:03Speaker 01

  Sure, is it, is like, is there a ball that rolled out and then they know a kid's gonna follow? Or can they identify the difference between a child up ahead and a fire, uh, like a fire hydrant at 200 feet? Like, that's when it would definitely be important.

• 53:16Matt Farah?

  Yeah, but like, you know, anyway, fucking, I didn't, I didn't.

• 53:22Matt Farah?

  There are instances where the digital mirror is better and the digital mirror is not new. It's been in the Corvette for five years, so it's not a new thing. But this is my probably longest experience with it, like over, you know, days and days and days. What else about the E-Ray? Did I write? I would say that it's definitely not the Corvette for me, right? I'm a Z06 CR1 guy, obviously. I do sort of struggle to guess who it's for. It looks really good. The body colored stuff is really nice. It's not as practical as I'd want it to be.

• 54:07Matt Farah?

  Like you actually, I couldn't fit a rollerboard bag in it. I had to pack with duffels, which is okay, but because of the front powertrain, I couldn't actually get a, you know, and so that's sort of a point against compared to some other all-wheel-drive cars, although having a front and back trunk is definitely helpful. It's generally a very good car. It just is, it's surrounded on the lower end by a car of unbelievable value that it feels almost exactly like most of the time. And above it is a car that's super fizzy all the time and is only slightly more expensive.

• 54:51Speaker 01

  And the all-wheel-drive system, someone asked in the patron chat, like if the front motors only kick in above 50% throttle, then why would it help in like snow? But I'm sure there's a snow mode.

• 55:02Matt Farah?

  There's a foul.

• 55:03Speaker 01

  Or it detects low friction.

• 55:05Matt Farah?

  Yes.

• 55:06Speaker 01

  Stuff like that. But that, we know that tires will help you more than almost anything. Now, if you had an E-Ray in snow or, you know, ice or something on snow tires versus a regular Z51 Stingray on the same tires, the E-Ray would have an advantage, for sure. But I hear what you're saying, like the number of people that are going to have that situation and would benefit from having all-wheel-drive instead of just driving a little bit more, like, you know, you can kind of pre-plan how you drive in the snow for your traction, a little momentum here.

• 55:34Matt Farah?

  Sure.

• 55:35Speaker 01

  Early braking. And if you do that, you'd be, you know, 99% as set as you would if you had an E-Ray. So it's kind of a weird thing to spend the money on.

• 55:42Matt Farah?

  I haven't driven an E-Ray in the snow, but the way I was told at the launch was if you put it in snow mode. It makes it more all-wheel drive, which makes sense. You know, but it doesn't need to be more all-wheel drive the rest of the time. Like, it's not like it, it's not like driving on a canyon road when you are within the limits of grip. It doesn't need to be all-wheel drive then.

• 56:07Speaker 01

  No.

• 56:08Matt Farah?

  So it's not.

• 56:09Speaker 01

  And what's funny is, we and every magazine before we even got into this job have tried so hard to inform the American public that tires are more important than all-wheel drive. And that message still doesn't land. So it's actually, it's GM going, "Look, we know they're not going to buy snow tires, most of them, or all seasons." We have a question about this later in the chat. Someone's friend is driving their car in New England in the winter on PS2s, or on Pilot's Sport Cup 2s. So it's like, that person doesn't even know. So that kind of person might benefit slightly from all-wheel drive, even though it won't really affect their braking distance.

• 56:44Matt Farah?

  Sure. I think the E-Ray is a good car. I wonder what kind of customers it will end up in. And I certainly appreciated that I got to go do 1,400 miles with it. I was scouting the Road and Track Desert 600, which is April. There's a few spots left. It's going to be unbelievable. The roads are so good. The drive from Zion to Sedona is so beautiful. The hotels are amazing. The food is really good. We've got Las Vegas Motor Speedway, Outfield, which is the better road course to play on. We're doing Valley of Fire, Lake Mead. It's like, it's such an awesome trip. And also, I think, I think it's going to be an awesome trip for passengers, because there's a lot to see.

• 57:29Matt Farah?

  It's not just like driving through the woods. There's like, big, big vistas. And it's a lot of open sweepers, so the passengers aren't going to get nauseous from tight and technical roads. So, experiences.rodentrack.com. If you want to come drive with me in April and do this route, it's fucking sick. I will not be doing it in an E-Ray, I'll be doing it in something else. But, thank you to GM for letting me put 1,400 miles on your car. That's, that's a cool thing. And the Lucid Gravity I was supposed to drive, it got bumped. I don't know why. They really wouldn't tell me. It didn't seem nefarious, but we'll get back to that car as soon as we can. Before we get to questions, did you see that Chuck Walla is for sale?

• 58:13Matt Farah?

  Chuckwalla Valley Raceway, which is one of the other racetracks in Southern California, an hour east of Palm Springs, in the middle of the fucking desert, is for sale. I think they want 26 million for it, which, you know, I don't know if that's a lot or not a lot.

• 58:33Speaker 01

  I have no idea.

• 58:34Matt Farah?

  There's a lot there. I mean, there's a beautiful racetrack, there's a big skid pad, there's the cabin, a runway.

• 58:42Speaker 01

  There's cabin now.

• 58:43Matt Farah?

  There's the 40 cabins, there's a bunch of garages that have condos on them.

• 58:50Speaker 01

  Wow, solar everywhere.

• 58:51Matt Farah?

  It's a lot of solar, and it's really, um, it's really a fabulous track. Um, it's really, really good, but, um, it's so far in the middle of nowhere.

• 59:03Speaker 01

  That's really, it's, I mean, it's a funny point against because like Willow Springs isn't close. You know, it's 86 miles, I think.

• 59:10Matt Farah?

  Dude, it's so much further than that.

• 59:12Speaker 01

  It's further than that, but it's also, there's a big section, getting there is middle of nowhere. Like Willow Springs is, you know, Palmdale, Lancaster, like it's populated, populated, and then you're there. It's just far from Los Angeles, but Chuckwalla is far from Los Angeles, then you get to like Indio, then you turn left, and then you go out into the middle of nowhere.

• 59:29Matt Farah?

  I mean, it's 50 minutes east of Indio. That's fucking far.

• 59:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm gonna see what the miles is.

• 59:34Matt Farah?

  I just, I passed it the other day, in the E-Ray on the way home. I passed the exit for Chuckwalla, and it was 3 hours 0 minutes to get home from there.

• 59:45Speaker 01

  That's twice as far as Willow Springs.

• 59:47Matt Farah?

  It's twice as far as Willow Springs, and it's 2 hours to get to Buttonwillow from LA. So it's like, it's really far, um, which is too bad because I love it as a racetrack. It is such a fun place to drive a car, it's a great place to do slides.

• 1:00:04Speaker 01

  200 miles from here.

• 1:00:06Matt Farah?

  Yeah, it's really far.

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  It's got such nice like little bits of elevation. The bowl turn is if you drive that bowl turn and then you go back and you do Streets of Willow Bowl. You went, oh, that's what the streets one wants to be when it grows up.

• 1:00:17Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:17Speaker 01

  I mean, it has some speed and it looks like three lanes wide. Uh, it's a fan, it's just whoever designed that track did such a fantastic job. Like with the terrain that was available or they modified it a bit.

• 1:00:27Matt Farah?

  It's also very flowy and it's easy on brakes.

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:30Matt Farah?

  There's only two big haul downs and then you have long periods of, uh, sustained like third gear where you're cooling the brakes. So they, even on a very hot day, which they get out there is it's not too bad.

• 1:00:46Speaker 01

  It's so great.

• 1:00:47Matt Farah?

  If I had 26 million dollars, I'd fuck with it. Sure.

• 1:00:51Speaker 01

  I would need more and then I'd buy and I'd just live out there for a while and.

• 1:00:53Matt Farah?

  Well, you don't have, it's got the runway, so you don't really have to live out there. I mean, it's 200 miles, which is like an hour in a, you know, recreational plane.

• 1:01:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:02Matt Farah?

  Right? An hour and 20.

• 1:01:03Speaker 01

  Tanner Faust should buy this place.

• 1:01:04Matt Farah?

  He fucks.

• 1:01:05Speaker 01

  He's got a plane. He knows how to drive.

• 1:01:07Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  I don't know if he has 26 million dollars. Um, that's, well, it's a great place. I have no idea if it's priced high or low, but it's a fantastic facility. And the, the people that I, I worked with there, I mean, years ago, we used to rent it a lot for filming TV shows. The crew were the best of like, they were so kind, kind, welcoming, let us do what we wanted. They just kind of trusted us. Uh, it was so good.

• 1:01:31Matt Farah?

  Yeah, it's a great place to.

• 1:01:32Speaker 01

  Good memories there.

• 1:01:33Matt Farah?

  Yeah. Sun, the sunset there is epic.

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:01:35Matt Farah?

  It's a great, it's a great place to shoot until sunset.

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

  And at night, if you look south, I think, uh, Osprey takeoff, like the, uh, military aircraft. And they've got these green tracers on them. So you just see these green circles spinning. You go, what the fuck? And then you realize what it is.

• 1:01:50Matt Farah?

  And then the fucking mushies kick in and yeah. That's a good, that'd be a good place to do some mushrooms, actually. It would, right? The cabins out there?

• 1:01:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, it would.

• 1:02:00Matt Farah?

  Yes, stargazing, a little campfire. Go walk the track at 2 o'clock in the morning. No?

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  No, I'll tell you a story later.

• 1:02:09Matt Farah?

  Good times. Should we go to the people?

• 1:02:11Speaker 01

  Not trying to get somebody fired for that story. Yeah, we can go to the people.

• 1:02:14Matt Farah?

  Let's talk to them over at patreon.com/the-smoking-tire-podcast. They're the best over there, keeping this ship afloat. You can ask questions for the show and then check out the live stream. You can get the show the day it's recorded, not have to wait until Tuesday, Thursday. You can get the show without ads. You can get extra show. You can get access to exclusive collabs and things like that, such as the frozen berry notice canyon that's coming out. Wes from notice sent me some color samples. And he tried to ask me, like, which one I thought was the closest to the fact. And I'm like, dude, I am literally colorblind here. You need to take charge on deciding which of these colors most accurately

• 1:02:58Matt Farah?

  represents the factory paint. It's not easy to get, like, to get the this color right. It's hard.

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I bet.

• 1:03:07Matt Farah?

  So, let's go to those folks. Toyota i4skin. It's pretty good. Thoughts on the quote new Veyron? Yeah, do you see this? Some they're doing, they're doing, they're doing a let's keep the billionaires happy over there at Bugatti. You got to keep the billionaires happy, otherwise they'll destroy society.

• 1:03:27Speaker 01

  Well, they have, there's a turbine coming, which keeps them happy. So is this to keep them happy until that's ready?

• 1:03:32Matt Farah?

  No. So what one of the things that Bugatti is doing is full on coach building. They're building people one of one cars. So not this. This is not correct. They built a new car.

• 1:03:44Speaker 01

  This is not the story?

• 1:03:45Matt Farah?

  This is not the story. They built a new car, a car, one car on the Chiron's architecture, but that looks like a Veyron. Like, it took me a few looks at the photos to figure out, like, what I was looking at. Top, uh, that's it. FKP homage. That's it. So, so look at this thing. So Bugatti, that. So you look at that and you go, huh. Well, that looks like a Veyron. And it does look like a Veyron.

• 1:04:19Speaker 01

  It looks like a Chiron.

• 1:04:20Matt Farah?

  Right. It's like halfway between. It looked, to me, at first, when I looked at the small photo on my phone.

• 1:04:26Speaker 01

  The back is, the back is Veyron.

• 1:04:27Matt Farah?

  That was the first photo I saw. And I went, well, that, that kinda looks like a Veyron, but like.

• 1:04:31Speaker 01

  Very much so.

• 1:04:32Matt Farah?

  But then the front is like, well, those headlights are different. And then the interior, you go, well, that's a little.

• 1:04:37Speaker 01

  That's not Chiron.

• 1:04:38Matt Farah?

  That's not Chiron. It's more like Veyron.

• 1:04:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's awesome.

• 1:04:41Matt Farah?

  And then you keep going. So, so they've built this one-off car that is a Chiron, but looks like a Veyron.

• 1:04:49Matt Farah?

  So now you, they have a photo of it next to an actual Veyron, and you can see the differences.

• 1:04:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's lower. It looks a little longer.

• 1:04:56Matt Farah?

  It's got the chrome strip that runs, uh, from the base of the A-pillar around the sort of big scoopy thing.

• 1:05:02Speaker 01

  It's a little bit longer than the headlights, of course, but I mean.

• 1:05:05Matt Farah?

  Roof scoops are bigger. The wheels are bigger.

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  If you park that next to a regular Veyron that's made in, you know, the same color, they're gonna go, oh, which one's the kit?

• 1:05:12Matt Farah?

  Yeah. They're gonna think it's a fake, right?

• 1:05:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:05:15Matt Farah?

  Interior's dope with that fabric, this diamond-y fabric. So like, I mean.

• 1:05:19Speaker 01

  So what is the point of this? They just, it's a special.

• 1:05:21Matt Farah?

  Go back. Look, there's an AP, there's an AP open work. There's a dash clock. Look at the top. That's the very top. I don't know if you can take it off and wear it, but it's, it's there. I don't like the take it off and wear it. I like when it stays in the car, but, but.

• 1:05:34Speaker 01

  Well, it always looks huge, because they have to have like a mechanism to hold it in the car, right? Uh, okay, so. Oh, FKP named after Ferdinand Piek.

• 1:05:43Matt Farah?

  Yeah, so the second model to come from, uh, Bugatti's new Solitaire program. One-off customer commissions, built on existing engine and chassis architecture with coach-built bodywork and highly customized interiors. Limited to two projects per year.

• 1:06:01Matt Farah?

  So, I mean, look, dude.

• 1:06:04Matt Farah?

  Keep the billionaires happy. It's very important. Otherwise, they're gonna make the rest of our lives terrible.

• 1:06:09Speaker 01

  They're doing that anyway, man.

• 1:06:10Matt Farah?

  Shit. It's not working.

• 1:06:11Speaker 01

  It's not working.

• 1:06:12Matt Farah?

  So, so that's, I mean, what do I think about it? It's not ugly. It's better, it's a better throwback than Lamborghini's Countach.

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:06:21Matt Farah?

  Or than anything Ferrari's doing right now.

• 1:06:23Speaker 01

  Very true. Cause it's subtle.

• 1:06:25Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:25Speaker 01

  And they've, Bugatti's done this pretty well. I mean,

• 1:06:27Matt Farah?

  Other than that EB110 thing they did that was real ugly.

• 1:06:31Speaker 01

  You mean like the original one?

• 1:06:32Matt Farah?

  No, no, the new one. They did the Ciento, Dacia, whatever the fuck it is, the Anniversaria. It's, it looks very weird. This is, this is pretty, pretty classy, though. I'm kind of about it.

• 1:06:43Speaker 01

  Well, I, I think the Chiron is a fantastic looking car. And so they've, they've blended two pretty subtle, very aerodynamic designs together, and they did a good job of it.

• 1:06:53Matt Farah?

  Yeah, it's cool. I'm into it.

• 1:06:55Speaker 01

  Sure. Okay. And they're gonna make like one?

• 1:06:58Matt Farah?

  Yeah, one.

• 1:07:01Speaker 01

  You know what they're doing? They have to offset the cost of, uh, Vergara sales, I think.

• 1:07:06Matt Farah?

  This is Bugatti.

• 1:07:07Speaker 01

  I know, doesn't Bugatti own Remax?

• 1:07:09Matt Farah?

  Oh, yeah, maybe, yeah. I think they're selling all of them because they're the keys to the Torbion.

• 1:07:14Speaker 01

  That's,

• 1:07:14Matt Farah?

  That's what you had, you had to buy a.

• 1:07:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's so weird.

• 1:07:17Matt Farah?

  You have to be a Bugatti or Remax in order to get a Torbion.

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

  It's so funny that even, at whatever level, it's the Porsche Macan thing, it's the Ferrari California.

• 1:07:25Matt Farah?

  Allocations are heroin. Uh, okay. Uh, let's see. I don't know what that is. Uh,

• 1:07:39Matt Farah?

  front-wheel-drive NSX was the Geo brand as bad as everyone made it seem. I mean, Geo was, were, were Korean cars sold in America under GM, right? It was, that was basically what they were, what they were doing.

• 1:07:57Matt Farah?

  And uh, yeah. Yeah, some of them were not bad. I think the, I think the Geo Storm was sort of decent. Uh, the Tracker was a Suzuki sidekick or Samurai sidekick.

• 1:08:11Speaker 01

  I mean, they were, they were very cheap cars that I think they, they captured the essence of what they were trying to be really well. And they sold it for cheap. Like the Tracker was this tiny off-roady thing that weren't that bad at it. But it was like right when SUV craze happened and they new convertible version. I saw all of these cars like in droves and I think, I mean, the commercials were everywhere. Super Bowl, like they had money. I think they weren't great cars, but yes, in the nineties, these Geo was a player. I think they sold, they sold a ton of them, which is, it's wild to think back on.

• 1:08:44Matt Farah?

  Yeah, but all their, I mean, pretty much all their cars were like, you know, badge engineered other cars, right?

• 1:08:49Speaker 01

  And cheap.

• 1:08:50Matt Farah?

  Yeah, and cars that like, cars that sold as Chevys in other markets that we never saw. They didn't want to like tarnish the Chevy brand, so they sold them as Geo's here.

• 1:09:01Speaker 01

  I don't know, what, what, what could you even compare it to today? I mean, this was like a.

• 1:09:06Matt Farah?

  Saturn, I mean, it was like a Saturn, uh, Scion, like a Scion.

• 1:09:10Speaker 01

  Scion, or if you took an accent and like made an, if you made an accent into an off-roader and then made an accent into like a convertible.

• 1:09:19Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:19Speaker 01

  I mean, that's the kind of cost or the price they were at.

• 1:09:23Matt Farah?

  Did I say Korea? I don't, I don't know if they were Korea, but they're foreign market GM vehicles that they didn't want to sell as Chevys in America. Like a bunch were like Isuzus.

• 1:09:35Speaker 01

  Oh yeah. The Geo Storm was made by Isuzu, or at Isuzu's plant in Japan.

• 1:09:39Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:41Matt Farah?

  The Tracker is obviously a Suzuki sidekick. Um, the Geo Prism was sold as the Chevy Prism in other companies. The Metro also was a fucking Chevy Metro. So it might've been Europe, um, or, or Asia, but there, it was like terrible fucking Chevys. Uh, what else we got?

• 1:10:06Matt Farah?

  Uh, oh.

• 1:10:09Matt Farah?

  Dude.

• 1:10:09Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 1:10:10Matt Farah?

  I don't know about this. Uh. Okay, Chris from Colorado watched the P. Cody video on YouTube. Yeah, go watch that. It was a good video. We had, we had a lot of fun making that and it's, uh, it's very well made. Aaron did a fucking awesome job and the boys. Uh. With the ZR1 winning, winning, what are three things you think Chevy could improve for the next gen ZR1? Um, three things that they could improve for the next gen ZR1. Uh, it could sound better. The, the ZR1 doesn't be, you know, it doesn't sound all that amazing compared to the Z06. Um, I'd like a little more sound.

• 1:10:52Matt Farah?

  Um, the current ZR1 had the old wall of buttons, uh, because it was a 2025, not a 2026. So the next one, they will improve the regular to the, to the current, uh, interior instead of the wall of buttons. That's good. And they could get rid of the square steering wheel. If they did all those three things, you'd have a fucking no notes car for me. That would be ace. Uh, oh, but your part two, does the 9,000 RPM red line of the GT3 feel more raw than the 10,000 red line of the Temerario?

• 1:11:24Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:11:25Matt Farah?

  I mean, yes, because it's a stick. And because it's naturally aspirated, you know?

• 1:11:30Speaker 01

  I also think, you know, the more cylinders they have, plus the higher revs, the pistons and things usually get really small or the stroke gets really small. It's like the sound gets smaller, tighter, closer to, you're approaching Zinger. You know, the, the Zinger had this like, it was so smooth that you couldn't even hear the exhaust pulses at all, whereas the 911, it's a pretty, it's a pretty big engine in terms of displacement with only six cylinders. And I think it just, it does sound more raw to me.

• 1:11:57Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:58Speaker 01

  It's angrier.

• 1:11:59Matt Farah?

  Yeah. Uh, bull taco soup. Uh, how would you choose the appropriate tire? I have a 2021 BMW M2. I live in LA. Uh, I only use it for driving canyons. I do 2,000 miles a year. Should I go with something really sticky like a Potenza RZ or a Cup 2 over the standard PS4S? I've been told that the sticky tires will pick up stones from the road and cause paint chips. True.

• 1:12:26Speaker 01

  True.

• 1:12:26Matt Farah?

  Also will cause paint chips on whoever's car is following you.

• 1:12:29Speaker 01

  True.

• 1:12:30Matt Farah?

  Also, um.

• 1:12:34Matt Farah?

  Also, you will not see much of a real difference in the canyons, frankly.

• 1:12:40Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:12:41Matt Farah?

  Your difference will be marginal, your tires will wear faster. If you get caught in the rain, you won't have a very good time.

• 1:12:48Speaker 01

  It's louder, they're louder on the road. Uh, the sidewalls, you know, on my Bridgestone race tires, the sidewalls are really hard. And we've talked to, we talked to Steve Dine about this and other people too. Like, the more aggressive the tire, the harder the sidewall, they want to take flex out of them for the most part. So your ride around town, when you hit hard edges, will also be worse.

• 1:13:07Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:07Speaker 01

  I feel like this is nothing but negatives. You should keep the PS4s, they'll operate better in most of the situations you will ever be in.

• 1:13:15Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:18Matt Farah?

  Oh, Murray Long Last Name, what ammo product should I use to clean and condition leather? And is it sold to WCCS? I can't, I'm sorry, I can't remember the name. Larry has these whimsical ass names for his stuff. We sell the full line of Lammo, I think it's called Cream, actually. I think it's C-R-E-M-E.

• 1:13:38Matt Farah?

  Every ammo product is sold at WCCS, both our locations. And my detailing staff knows exactly what everything is and what it is for. I'm sorry, I think it's called Cream, but, um, but whatever it is, we sell it here. Yamaha BB. That's funny.

• 1:13:59Matt Farah?

  If you live near Tail of the Dragon and wanted a pure fun car, what would be ideal for that area for under 100K? I would say a re-gear'd Boxer GTS.

• 1:14:11Speaker 01

  Re-gearing is the answer for that area. It's not a high-speed area.

• 1:14:14Matt Farah?

  Low-speed area.

• 1:14:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:16Matt Farah?

  Yeah, so you'd want something light, something small, and something with relatively short gears. And, and so for me, a Boxer GTS with short gears would just be about as perfect as it gets, or a Spyder with both, with short gears.

• 1:14:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:30Matt Farah?

  My en, my car with my engine is too much power. But my car, my chassis with my gears would be perfect.

• 1:14:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think a re-gear'd, anything with NA2, like, I was thinking re-gear'd M2, but I just feel like the power band of that car, it's just, it's almost too much power for those roads for the most part. So I would go like a really nice E90 or... Corvette's too much too.

• 1:14:52Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:53Speaker 01

  Grand, like a C7 Grand Sport, but it's, that just seems like too much for those roads.

• 1:14:57Matt Farah?

  No, I wouldn't want a front engine, long-nosed car in that road.

• 1:15:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's too big.

• 1:15:02Matt Farah?

  I'd want mid-engine. I'd want, I mean, yeah, fucking.

• 1:15:08Speaker 01

  I think Boxer came in, uh, Evora.

• 1:15:12Matt Farah?

  Oh, Evora, yeah. I mean, Amira, you're getting, Amira's are under a hundred grand.

• 1:15:19Speaker 01

  They're 80, or less.

• 1:15:21Matt Farah?

  I mean, maybe, maybe an Elise or an Exige, um, something, something small like that, yeah.

• 1:15:29Matt Farah?

  Ripping Dodge Darts. I'm looking to buy a new Mustang this year. I specced one out online. It came to $67,000 when a quote stock Dark Horse cost $64,000. Uh, editorial here. I drove a Dark Horse two weeks ago for a story. It was $84,000.

• 1:15:49Speaker 01

  MSRP or?

• 1:15:50Matt Farah?

  MSRP. It had, now it had options.

• 1:15:53Speaker 01

  Was that base or options?

• 1:15:54Matt Farah?

  It had options. It had a good paint color. It had, uh, and it had Recaro seats with the contrast leather, which is really the only options.

• 1:16:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, base is 63, though.

• 1:16:05Matt Farah?

  Yeah. So the question is, would you rather get a loaded up GT Premium Performance Pack, etc., or a base Dark Horse? I want a manual transmission, so the Tremec difference does come into play. I want a weekend car for North Carolina not to track.

• 1:16:20Speaker 01

  Oh, then I'd get the GT Premium Performance.

• 1:16:24Matt Farah?

  I would, I probably would get that too.

• 1:16:26Speaker 01

  The base Mustang seats suck.

• 1:16:28Matt Farah?

  You do not want a Dark Horse with base seats.

• 1:16:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, because now you have a sticky car, even, even on canyon corners in North Carolina, they're not comfortable, they don't support you, they're terrible.

• 1:16:39Matt Farah?

  Can you, hang on, there's an in-between. You can get a Dark Horse with Recaro seats.

• 1:16:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh, sure, but I just don't know if they can afford that option.

• 1:16:48Matt Farah?

  Well, so the spec was 67K. The, the Recaro seats on a Dark Horse are like 2,500 bucks. So if you get a Dark Horse, you know, with Recaro's, you're in the same place.

• 1:17:02Speaker 01

  Might retain its value. I mean, well, then, yeah.

• 1:17:04Matt Farah?

  I would rather have a dark horse with a Tremec gearbox, the different engine, the better suspension, everything with Recaro's, not in a good color and not with a tech pack.

• 1:17:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I agree. So it depends on how much, how important the electronics and color and all that stuff are to you. So it's like, it's driving versus, I guess, all the options.

• 1:17:29Matt Farah?

  Okay.

• 1:17:32Matt Farah?

  Andy's Woody said, Camisa recently said on his podcast, Camisa loves it when we talk about him on this show, by the way, it's his favorite thing, said that wagons are douche proof.

• 1:17:43Speaker 01

  Nothing is douche proof.

• 1:17:44Matt Farah?

  Citing that they're more rare, cost more, and are exclusively an enthusiast purchase now. To me, flexing a wagon for just the sake it's weird or rare is a douche mood, move. It's comparable to counterculture hipsters with some obscure music taste that normal people just wouldn't understand. I don't think it goes that far. I don't, does...

• 1:18:08Matt Farah?

  I mean...

• 1:18:10Speaker 01

  I don't think anything is douche proof. I think it's because it depends on the attitude. I mean, it's hard, like, to find douche, the attitude of the person driving it. And then, like, I think the douchebag movement is like, if something gets popular, and then a lot of people who don't, aren't really into the thing grab onto it. So, but that can happen to anything. So if a bunch of people decided that wagons were the new GT3 RS, you would get a bunch of people buying wagons and driving them, and just because they wanted to buy the cool thing, and a lot of them could be douchebags. So it just, it just depends on, like, the social pressure and definition of what is cool. So right now, I mean, yeah, most people don't like wagons. They still see them as, like, a sort

• 1:18:53Speaker 01

  of domestic vehicle, and it's an island in enthusiast land that you can go to. But also, one person could be the only person that owns a car, and if they're an asshole and a douchebag, then it's still a douche car.

• 1:19:07Matt Farah?

  You only need, if you say something is, the Titanic is unsinkable. You only gotta hit one iceberg to disprove that. So if you want to say something is proof, one example will disprove that, and I guarantee you, you can find one.

• 1:19:25Matt Farah?

  In my experience, that the people, most of the people that I know who buy fast wagons don't actually need the wagon. They're just, they just like how it looks. Um, I own a sport wagon. My wife insisted on it. And she was right, because actually, we throw shit in the trunk of it that we wouldn't be able to, to put in a sedan. So like, we, we use our wagon for wagon things.

• 1:19:52Speaker 01

  I think the Taycan wagon also looks way better than the Ringa.

• 1:19:55Matt Farah?

  It does way better. But, yeah. Uh, Dre from Houston, what were the market positions of brands from the eighties and nineties? Like Mercure and Sterling, Alfa Romeo and Peugeot? Well, Alfa Romeo's, has been the same. It's always been Italian sports sedans, marginally reliable, you know?

• 1:20:17Speaker 01

  It's a Miata that'll get you blown. That's, that's their marketing.

• 1:20:19Matt Farah?

  People have repeatedly told Alfa Romeo that they would in fact be able to sell cars in America. Several times now. It's not been largely true.

• 1:20:29Speaker 01

  Same crowd that says they'll buy a wagon.

• 1:20:31Matt Farah?

  Right. Um, Peugeot, same thing. In the eighties, French cars were about, were, they, they tried to make French cars happen. Renault and Peugeot both tried to make French. I think the, I think Peugeot in the eighties probably would have been about the equivalent of Audi. Peugeot and Audi made cars that like, looked kind of the same.

• 1:20:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:53Matt Farah?

  Audi had all wheel drive, but other than that, they were kind of the same genre of car. Um, I don't think they were quite BMW or Mercedes. In, in the eighties and nineties, BMW and Mercedes were, were it.

• 1:21:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:06Matt Farah?

  When it came to a high-end sports sedan. Like, that was, that was it. Um, until you were, until you were talking about Rolls Royce, right? You had Rolls Royce at the very top. Below them, it was all about Mercedes and BMW. And then below that, you had a sort of, the sporty European sedans that were alternatives to those. So you had Saab, you had, uh, Peugeot, um, you had Alfa, but also you had-

• 1:21:34Matt Farah?

  Volvo, you know Volvo was sort of trying to be in play in that in that world as well a little bit. And then you have the Japanese upstarts. Acura came in hot in the 80s and 90s.

• 1:21:48Speaker 01

  And Honda started seeing huge success in the 70s. It was like, oh, the cars are reliable and super frugal on gas during the gas crisis, oil crisis. I think that probably took a lot of market share that Peugeot was hoping for.

• 1:22:00Matt Farah?

  Yeah. Mercure was Ford essentially doing, figuring, going, how can we sell our European product in America? Which was, the fact that they thought that we couldn't just sell them as Fords was so strange.

• 1:22:15Speaker 01

  Well, it's going back to Geo. It's the same thing. They're like, we make these over here, but we don't want to tarnish their brand. It won't fit in the dealership. So you got to call it something else.

• 1:22:26Matt Farah?

  Yeah. Instead of launching the Ford Sierra, they made all these dealerships carry a, do a Mercure franchise, selling Ford Sierras. It was crazy.

• 1:22:36Speaker 01

  I mean, but it worked for Genesis. But a lot have tried and failed.

• 1:22:41Matt Farah?

  Yeah. Harlequin E63 MG, help choose a Valley of Fire run car for an upcoming Vegas trip. Audi RS3 or Lucid Air at a reasonable price? Well, look, or an Amira V6 at an outrageous price. Or wait until Enterprise opens. Oh, this is a rental car. Okay, Turo options.

• 1:23:05Speaker 01

  Turo, they can get the car early before sunrise. Enterprise, they have to wait till it opens at 8. They missed that sunrise through Valley of Fire.

• 1:23:12Matt Farah?

  Okay. I mean, I would say get an RS3 for $125. That seems like a good one. I would not spend five times that to drive an Amira.

• 1:23:26Matt Farah?

  I think that would probably work. The thing about the Lucid is if they have a big battery, they go with a long range, but you're driving out in the middle of the fucking desert. If you decide to have a very heavy foot and rip through the battery much faster than you think you're going to, you may find yourself in a bit of a pickle. Just saying. Rental cars and EVs don't necessarily go hand in hand so well because you're because when you're on vacation, your time is worth a lot of money.

• 1:23:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:23:56Matt Farah?

  You know, like, part of me was disappointed that I couldn't do the Gravity on this trip because I really wanted to drive the Gravity. It would have been very comfortable. I wanted to check out the different networks. The two hotels, both hotels were like, Mr. Ferrer, we've saved you a charger. And I was like, that is awesome. I'm sorry. I don't need it. But at the same time, I was able to complete the trip a half a day faster. Like, I was able to save like cumulatively like an hour to an hour and a half like a day.

• 1:24:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:30Matt Farah?

  By not, by A, being able to drive faster and B, not having to deal with the actual charging. So like, yeah, I would just, I'd just fuck with the RS3 and go rip Lake Mead, Valley of Fire. Great drive.

• 1:24:46Matt Farah?

  Okay, um, let's see.

• 1:24:53Matt Farah?

  Quadrafoli Oface, your takes on sleek aero rooftop boxes. They look cool when color-coded, but can you really get any use out of them except for skis? My rap guy wants me to put one on my Taycan.

• 1:25:09Speaker 01

  Do you need?

• 1:25:10Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:11Speaker 01

  Quadrafoli Oface, do you need a box? Like, forget what the rap guy says. I think the aesthetics work when they're needed. Like Jeff Swart has this car that comes here a lot. He's got a box on it because he puts shit in it. And aesthetically, it works with long roof cars.

• 1:25:27Matt Farah?

  Right.

• 1:25:28Speaker 01

  But to do it just for style, it's kind of like, I'm not trying to throw you under the bus, like the whole Tully rack on cars. When you don't put things on the roof.

• 1:25:37Matt Farah?

  Oh, I do. I did that.

• 1:25:38Speaker 01

  I know you did.

• 1:25:40Speaker 01

  You did it in high school.

• 1:25:41Matt Farah?

  Cause it was his fucking style.

• 1:25:43Speaker 01

  A style, but like putting it on there, cause the rap guy thinks it would just look cool on your. Which it sure it would, but do you need one?

• 1:25:50Matt Farah?

  It's probably gonna reduce your range by like five to 10% first off.

• 1:25:54Speaker 01

  That's a lot.

• 1:25:55Matt Farah?

  It's a lot.

• 1:25:55Speaker 01

  That's a ton.

• 1:25:56Matt Farah?

  And that's like an arrow box.

• 1:26:00Matt Farah?

  And I mean, could you get used out of them like, yeah, they fit other shit besides skis, but like, is your car full to the point where you need more like? It's pretty lame to drive around with anything strapped to your roof that you're not immediately using.

• 1:26:14Speaker 01

  Or using frequently. If every, if every weekend, I don't know, you, you go.

• 1:26:20Matt Farah?

  If you go mountain biking every weekend, leave the rack on your roof. That's fine.

• 1:26:24Speaker 01

  A hundred percent.

• 1:26:24Matt Farah?

  But we have a friend, I'm not gonna blow up his spot, who don't camp all that much and drives around with a fucking rooftop tent on. I know a couple of people that do that. Holy shit.

• 1:26:37Speaker 01

  One person that does it, I, I, once I showed him the numbers on the MPG, he took it off. But for a while, he used it once a year and I said, why is it on there all the time? Cause he was complaining about the fuel, uh, the mileage he was getting out to shoot.

• 1:26:47Matt Farah?

  Sure.

• 1:26:48Speaker 01

  And he's like, well, I just, you know, and it was part of his identity. He's an outdoorsy dude. But I don't, I don't know what the box will do for you. It doesn't, it doesn't even do that.

• 1:26:57Matt Farah?

  There are, there have been plenty of studies on your aerodynamic drag on the box and one, if one very interesting one. Where a guy, I think it was with a model three, mounted the box backwards. And got better results. Because the boxes are pointy at the front and then, but actually flipping it around.

• 1:27:15Speaker 01

  Cause then it made it like a long roof. Thing. But I, uh, to go back like, so is this gonna give this person, even at the shallowest end of the pool, is it giving them any like? Identity cred, you know, rooftop tent, you go, I'm an outdoorsy person. You got your gas tanks on there. You go, I'm a four wheel person. This is like, I'm a carry more stuff person.

• 1:27:35Matt Farah?

  It's one of a million things that looks cool for one Instagram post and then you have to live with it forever and it's dumb.

• 1:27:42Speaker 01

  But that's a, the CT is a great looking car.

• 1:27:46Matt Farah?

  It doesn't need it.

• 1:27:46Speaker 01

  It doesn't add.

• 1:27:47Matt Farah?

  Admittedly, it probably would look cool with a color matched one. If you were using it.

• 1:27:52Speaker 01

  I still don't think it would.

• 1:27:53Matt Farah?

  John Olson. You know, got it, you know, but I would say skip it if you don't need it. Ha, wait, Ha BBKing Blues. Oh, Ha BBK.

• 1:28:06Speaker 01

  Ha BBK Blues, that's good.

• 1:28:07Matt Farah?

  Ha BBKing Blues. Okay, wow, okay, there we go. Uh, not counting big SUVs and pickup trucks. Can you recall any cars good for eating in while parked? Nah, dude.

• 1:28:20Speaker 01

  Uh, anything with a bench seat.

• 1:28:21Matt Farah?

  Sure.

• 1:28:22Speaker 01

  Then you can put food next to you.

• 1:28:23Matt Farah?

  Sure.

• 1:28:24Speaker 01

  And it won't, you know, tip over into your cup holder.

• 1:28:28Matt Farah?

  I don't wanna sound like a fucking holier-than-thou, but I don't like eating in cars at all.

• 1:28:34Speaker 01

  I do when I have to, I don't care.

• 1:28:35Matt Farah?

  I try to avoid it. Even if I stop on a road trip at a fucking In-N-Out or something, I'll put that tray on the roof, I'll stand, cuz I'm in the, I mean, I don't wanna, you know, I'm also using that as an excuse to stand up and not be in the car. That's that, and like the grease of touching the car in your hand, like, to me, eating in the car is like a pretty gross thing I don't do.

• 1:28:55Speaker 01

  I think I used to be more inclined to like to keep the road trip going, but now with back things like it's better to get out and move around.

• 1:29:02Matt Farah?

  Now it's more important to have an excuse to not be in the car?

• 1:29:05Speaker 01

  I think there's a lot of new cars now that are really great for eating in cuz the dash are so deep.

• 1:29:10Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:10Speaker 01

  So, most of them have a built-in shelf.

• 1:29:12Matt Farah?

  Throw a whole piece on the dash.

• 1:29:13Speaker 01

  Really, you could.

• 1:29:14Matt Farah?

  Doesn't the Ford like shifter, the Ford F-150 shifter like goes out of the way? And then you can make the whole center console into a table?

• 1:29:21Speaker 01

  It's clever, it's like the work area.

• 1:29:23Matt Farah?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, we've, we've said it a bunch of times, but back in the day when we were working at Gotham Dream Cars, the 2013 GM Single Cab 3500 Dually, two seats, eight cup holders. Now, that's how you have a fucking big gulp and a big old fucking large fries and, yeah. Let's say LL Cartier.

• 1:29:45Speaker 01

  LL Cartier.

• 1:29:45Matt Farah?

  LL Cartier. Uh, I'm a karting driver coach with a lot of international racing experience, meaning karting, but very little car experience. If I wanted to do a race in Lemons or Chump Car, how do I find a good team and how much moolah should I expect it to be? How do I find a good team? That's a question that I don't have the answer to.

• 1:30:09Speaker 01

  Uh, if, I think if races happen near you, going to one is fine.

• 1:30:15Matt Farah?

  Real quick, Arrive and Drive Lemons Racing.

• 1:30:22Matt Farah?

  So this is the search term I would start with. The 24 Hours of Lemons may have like teams on there. Oh here, look. Lemon, go back on this Facebook group. Lemons Team Builder Arrive and Drive Matchmaker.

• 1:30:35Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 1:30:36Matt Farah?

  So I would start with the search terms, "arrive and drive", and then, you know, whatever series is...

• 1:30:45Speaker 01

  Oh wow, this is a very... This is a... The group is current. There's posts from a day ago.

• 1:30:50Matt Farah?

  Yeah, this is a Facebook group for people who have teams and are looking for drivers, or who are drivers and looking for teams.

• 1:30:56Speaker 01

  Fantastic.

• 1:30:57Matt Farah?

  So there we go. Okay, stupid Lemons Team Builder Arrive and Drive Matchmaker, Facebook. I would say, you should expect to spend 2 to 5 grand for a seat in a weekend. And a weekend is gonna probably be 2 to 3 or 2 to 4 stints, plus a practice day, if the race goes well. Right? You think that's about right?

• 1:31:22Speaker 01

  I think closer to 2, yeah.

• 1:31:24Matt Farah?

  For Lemons, it might be closer to 2. For a competitive car in Champ, it might be closer to 4 or 5.

• 1:31:32Speaker 01

  Yes, correct.

• 1:31:33Matt Farah?

  You know, I think to run in WRL might be a little more. Running WRL might be 7,000 or 8,000. But if a team is well managed, you write that one check and you don't have to write any other checks. That's it.

• 1:31:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I would also be selective, as best you could. Like, I would go with a team that is very experienced doing this, because they've probably worked the kinks out of the car and they work well. A car that might be more reliable and is less of a science project, you know, Japanese car, great. People have been having a lot of success with E36s. Just, I wouldn't jump into something where people took like a V8 from this thing and put it in that thing, and yeah, it's rad, but how much maintenance does it require? Because that will dictate whether your weekend is learning to wrench and become friends with these people you were hoping to drive with, or are you guys gonna drive?

• 1:32:21Matt Farah?

  You also, I mean, this was a 5-minute Googling, but I think you may be able to start on the website. Oh look, here's a fucking, here's teams. If you just keep scrolling down, there on this page, there's teams looking for drivers.

• 1:32:35Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:32:37Matt Farah?

  Yeah, okay. Cool.

• 1:32:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:39Matt Farah?

  This is dumpster. Yeah, look, this is three days. There's plenty of, plenty of, plenty of drives here.

• 1:32:45Speaker 01

  1600 for a race with Dumpster Fire Motorsports.

• 1:32:48Matt Farah?

  Yeah, there you go. It's trash can, not trash can't.

• 1:32:51Speaker 01

  Love it. That's why I love Lemons so much, dude. The cleverness abounds.

• 1:32:56Matt Farah?

  Yeah, so that's a, that's a good place to start.

• 1:32:58Speaker 01

  They're providing comms, breakfast burritos.

• 1:33:00Matt Farah?

  Fuck, yeah, dude.

• 1:33:01Speaker 01

  All consumables and a test day.

• 1:33:02Matt Farah?

  Fuck, yeah.

• 1:33:03Speaker 01

  Lot of seat time. With four drivers, I mean, that's a lot of seat time.

• 1:33:06Matt Farah?

  Yeah, if the car works, you're getting a lot of driving.

• 1:33:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's rad.

• 1:33:09Matt Farah?

  That's a good time.

• 1:33:10Speaker 01

  Great resource.

• 1:33:11Matt Farah?

  Yeah, and if that doesn't work, I would go to the Lemons website and the Champ Car web. If I ran a, if I ran a, an operation where I was selling arrive and drive seats, I'd want to be on their website as a place to get arrive and drive seats. Okay, Sweden Low. Favorite white-faced tool watch for roughly 10 Gs.

• 1:33:34Speaker 01

  What's a tool watch?

• 1:33:35Matt Farah?

  A tool watch is a watch you wear if you're a fucking tool. No.

• 1:33:40Speaker 01

  So if you drive a wagon?

• 1:33:41Matt Farah?

  A wa- a tool watch is a medium fancy but sturdy steel sports watch. It should have some water resistance, some shock resistance. It should be able to be worn outdoors, knock it around. But you could probably dress it up just below the suit level.

• 1:34:03Matt Farah?

  The, the, the gold standard of tool watches is a Submariner, although that's moved up market since like the 80s. Now, tool watches are like Tudor, IWC, Seiko, your Divers, stuff like that. I would say that the Notice Canyon could be a tool watch. It's tough.

• 1:34:24Matt Farah?

  So, 10 Gs, white-faced speedy, used Rolex Milgos, or get on the list for an Explorer 2, those are your big ones, right there.

• 1:34:34Matt Farah?

  For 10 Gs, those are the ones you, I would say of those three, if you can only get one, Explorer 2, if you've got a big wrist, Milgos, if you've got a small wrist, Speedmaster, if you're a science dork. And I say that as someone who owns two of three of those watches, including the Speedmaster. I just sent my Speedmaster to the dial artist. Fucking, it's on, baby.

• 1:34:56Speaker 01

  To do what?

• 1:34:57Matt Farah?

  To turn my, my, I told, didn't I show you what I was doing with the dial?

• 1:35:00Speaker 01

  Mm-mm. Wait, with a white dough?

• 1:35:02Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:03Speaker 01

  The one you just bought?

• 1:35:03Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:04Speaker 01

  Oh, I didn't realize you were gonna modify it.

• 1:35:05Matt Farah?

  The one I'm fucking up? Oh, this is gonna be great, dude. The audience don't get to see this, but I'm gonna show it to Zach. We're gonna have, Zach's gonna get, gonna get the fucking sneaky peaky. Look how dope this is.

• 1:35:17Speaker 01

  Oh, that's cool.

• 1:35:17Matt Farah?

  Isn't that fun?

• 1:35:19Speaker 01

  Oh, I see.

• 1:35:20Matt Farah?

  You see what it is now?

• 1:35:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. Wow, that's incredible they can paint that.

• 1:35:24Matt Farah?

  Yeah. Isn't that fun? This is a, this is a rendering. The, the, some of the colors are different, some of the little things are different, but that's gonna be fucking sick.

• 1:35:35Speaker 01

  That's cool. I don't wanna blow up what it is.

• 1:35:36Matt Farah?

  Don't blow it up. I'm gonna show it, show it when it's done, but it's fucking really cool. He sent me a render of one before that he didn't know I bought the white one.

• 1:35:44Speaker 01

  Does he print those little graphics?

• 1:35:46Matt Farah?

  No, that's hand painted. It's micro artistry, it's hand painted.

• 1:35:49Speaker 01

  That's wild.

• 1:35:50Matt Farah?

  Yeah. This, these are done on a computer. This is not painted.

• 1:35:54Speaker 01

  Right, but like the final one will be wild.

• 1:35:56Matt Farah?

  Yeah, yeah, it's hand painted. Yeah. Isn't that awesome? So excited about this. Uh... Let's see. Uh, Kurt May, "How did I like doing dinner with racers?" I liked doing dinner with racers, it was fun. Uh, it was easy. They, they asked me a bunch of questions that I had very easy answers, or, uh, doing, talking about me is so easy. On someone else's show, that's great. But I love Sean, and I love Ryan, and those shows, those guys are great. Um, and, uh, I think the, the way that they do, like, record like 10 of them and then make it a secret is like kinda fun, you can, yeah. I think it was a fun show, we drank a little bit. Go, go listen to my Dinner with Racers podcast, it was fun.

• 1:36:43Matt Farah?

  Mark Far... Oh, no. Is that really true? This one from Mark Farah?

• 1:36:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I got a DM from, uh, one of the guys at Automation.

• 1:36:54Matt Farah?

  Oh.

• 1:36:55Speaker 01

  Well, I don't know if there's a lawsuit going for it, but they DM'd me and they're like, "Hey, check this out," and there's a screen grab of a message from...

• 1:37:01Matt Farah?

  That, that said what?

• 1:37:03Speaker 01

  Uh, I don't think it's gonna be on my phone anymore.

• 1:37:06Matt Farah?

  Okay, the question is, did you see that Mark Farah, the tired smoker, says Jim Glickenhouse... Oh, it says nearly, I missed the word nearly. Jim Glickenhouse nearly decided...

• 1:37:19Matt Farah?

  Or assume, maybe, maybe that means threatened to sue.

• 1:37:22Speaker 01

  There was a threat.

• 1:37:23Matt Farah?

  Threatened to sue Camshaft Software. Makers of, we know these guys.

• 1:37:28Speaker 01

  We do.

• 1:37:28Matt Farah?

  Makers of automation. This is a company that 10 years ago brought us to New Zealand.

• 1:37:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:37:32Matt Farah?

  Because some guy built a car in the game that looked vaguely Glickenhaus-esque.

• 1:37:38Speaker 01

  True.

• 1:37:39Matt Farah?

  Did it? Did it look?

• 1:37:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, vaguely, but like, I feel like with those kind of, and I'm speculating, I'm not a lawyer. Not, but video games always get like, close to a design that you kind of remember, but they change little details and you go, that's definitely not that thing.

• 1:37:54Matt Farah?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:37:54Speaker 01

  And their rendering that they, that they DM'd me, I was like, it's definitely not his SCG, whatever.

• 1:37:59Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:59Speaker 01

  Like, there's elements of it that are probably inspired by, but there's a lot of it that looks different, and, I mean, I don't know.

• 1:38:07Matt Farah?

  It's, that seems-

• 1:38:08Speaker 01

  My snide remark was, has Jim delivered any of those cars to his customers?

• 1:38:11Matt Farah?

  That's, that is fair. That is extremely fair. I, and I do not know the-

• 1:38:17Speaker 01

  Let me see if they have-

• 1:38:19Matt Farah?

  I think the Instagram, is the Instagram Automation Game or Camshaft Software? Yeah, Automation Game. Do they take down the Instagram post? Is it still there?

• 1:38:28Speaker 01

  We'll take a little peeky-peek. Is this the car?

• 1:38:32Matt Farah?

  Oh, that does look kind of like it.

• 1:38:34Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:38:35Matt Farah?

  I mean, not really.

• 1:38:36Speaker 01

  That has a different one. That's not the one they sent me. The one they sent had like a center, like-

• 1:38:40Matt Farah?

  That's not it. That looks like a, somewhere between a Koenigsegg and a-

• 1:38:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:45Matt Farah?

  An old Koenigsegg and something else. Anyway.

• 1:38:47Speaker 01

  Anyway.

• 1:38:47Matt Farah?

  I didn't, I didn't know that until right now, but I hope that that, I, I-

• 1:38:53Speaker 01

  This isn't anything-

• 1:38:53Matt Farah?

  I hope he realizes how lame that is. Like, that's just a fucking, that's just a loser move.

• 1:38:58Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:38:58Matt Farah?

  Like-

• 1:38:59Speaker 01

  It is.

• 1:38:59Matt Farah?

  I hate when fucking rich people do loser moves like that. Like, why? What are you doing?

• 1:39:06Speaker 01

  Stop it. It's just a waste of their time.

• 1:39:07Matt Farah?

  Stop it. Um-

• 1:39:11Matt Farah?

  Let's see.

• 1:39:14Matt Farah?

  Oops. Alright, now go down, uh, keep going, keep going, keep going, sorry. Did we talk about, I don't know, we'll do it again.

• 1:39:23Speaker 01

  What?

• 1:39:23Matt Farah?

  Left is best. Why do you think so many grown men, deep into their 40s, continue to build race cars for the road, ruin any comfort and functionality, sell them, and then repeat?

• 1:39:33Speaker 01

  We definitely, if Left didn't ask this question a month ago and forget about it, which I would do, uh, then someone else did, but that's parallel thinking, and that happens.

• 1:39:43Speaker 01

  I think it's, I think it's like any, vehicles are interesting because I think a lot of us build something for what we aspire to do. It's lifted Wrangler that doesn't go off-roading, like, it can express a part of yourself or your personality. Uh, you want to be a race car driver, you like these things. People do it with any sort of mechanical hobby all the time. And I just think it's an example of that. And, like so many of those mechanical hobbies, what's funny is a lot of times it makes the vehicle worse for the environment they actually drive in. Um, and there's a, there's always a period where like, you're excited about this, and you might go do the thing, and then you don't go to the track, but you drive the thing around, and then you eventually get tired of the ride, and you sell the car. And then maybe they do it again, because they, once again, have the same dream.

• 1:40:29Matt Farah?

  Yeah, I mean, everyone has this fantasy of race car for the road, and it takes a mature consumer to go, "Actually, actually, I don't want that. Actually, my, my inner id wants a race car from the road, but in reality, I don't drive like that. In reality, that rides like shit. In reality, I have to give up this other thing that's annoying to have that." Um, but because cars are such an emotional purchase, we, we, it takes a lot of emotional maturity to go, "Actually, that, that seems like fun, but nah, I think that's kinda..."

• 1:41:10Speaker 01

  I think I'm really, there's also like, um, when, when, like, if you read an article that says that, you know, GT3RS, the trackiest version of something, really improves turn-in. Zooms in on turn in, you're like, my turn in could get better. And it will be great in these moments where, and you just, you focus so much on improving that part of your car that you don't stop, zoom out and think, how often is that type of driving important?

• 1:41:33Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:34Speaker 01

  Does it show up in my weekly life?

• 1:41:35Matt Farah?

  Sure.

• 1:41:36Speaker 01

  You know, 2%, oh, maybe I don't need to improve my turn in.

• 1:41:39Matt Farah?

  Sure. I mean, it goes the same way with SUVs. How often do I need the third row? How often do I need four-wheel drive? You know, how often do I need whatever? How often do I need this pickup truck bed? And it's like, single-digit percentages, you know, or less, you know? I mean, even, uh, anyway. Can't Unshitbox this says, okay. What would be my best option to do a Demand 4.5 engine? Should I get a 2016 Cayman GT4? That's a 3.8. A 718 Cayman GTS? That's a 4.0. Or spend 20 to 25K more for a 718 GT4?

• 1:42:24Matt Farah?

  What is the best and why? Does the premium for the GT4 badge matter in terms of money in, money out? Mostly street driving, second fun car, some track days. Some track days, to me, says the GT4 will be worth it. Because on the track, the wing, the front end, the we, the stuff that they do does come into play. For sure. And in the canyons, it does too. It's like in road trips where you'd rather have the GTS. And if it's a Boxster. Cause a Boxster GTS has a power top. And so if it's really a street car, a Boxster GTS might actually be the move because it's a super hot rod, but with comfy seats and a power top.

• 1:43:10Matt Farah?

  That's kind of the move. But if it's just for canyons and weekends and you're gonna do a hard top.

• 1:43:16Matt Farah?

  Then it's gonna be a GT4. So is it gonna be a 16 or a 718? The differences are, a 718 with a demand engine will make about 40 horsepower more than a 981 with a demand engine. The 3.8 engine versus the 4.0 engine, as starting points, the 4.0 gets you further. That's the upside. More power, more torque. 30 to 40 more horsepower and torque for a 718. And that's power you can't get from anywhere else. So you have to spend that. And because of money in, money out, I think if you consider the cost of Porsche horsepower

• 1:43:56Matt Farah?

  and factor in money in, money out, spending 20K to get a 718 GT4 is probably worth it. Asterisk. A 981 GT4 has a single muffler. A 718 has two. They make completely different sounds. The 718 sounds like my car, like WWII aircraft. The 981 car sounds more like a GT3. That high pitched that you get from the collective muffler. So how do you want it to sound? And is it worth a little more horsepower to have this sound if you really wanted that sound? So, in my opinion, because you're already going, you're going in. In for a penny, in for a pound. You're about to buy a $50,000 engine.

• 1:44:40Matt Farah?

  You're probably gonna get gears too. If you've got the money, just get the best car you can, which is gonna be the 718 GT4. Especially because you're going to the track. Be a fucking nasty motherfucker in a track car, though. Two more, and then we'll fucking call this a show. Explorer, I hardly knew her. Did Ford make a mistake by pushing the F-150 Lightning as a consumer vehicle instead of what I think it is, which is a municipality, government, fleet vehicle that could act as dual-purpose rolling battery backup for storage for emergency response scenarios, or maintaining functionality for small corporate or government infrastructure?

• 1:45:24Matt Farah?

  I don't, okay, a couple of questions here. I do think these electric pickup trucks make good fleet vehicles. And you see them in California being fleet vehicles. EA has the electric Silverados. Tesla, I was at, I was just in, uh, fuck it, somewhere on my road trip, and I saw a Tesla Supercharger. And the service vehicle working on it was a fucking Chevy Silverado EV. Alright, so EV trucks do make decent work trucks if they're not towing, right? And if they're driving the same route predictably. Now, rolling battery backup storage

• 1:46:03Matt Farah?

  is a good use of these trucks in a camping, average workday with power tools sort of situation. And potentially with vehicle to grid, if you, as a backup generator for your home, if you have the appropriate hardware. I don't know if that will work in commercial situations as well as, as well as a fucking giant Ingersoll Rand diesel generator that could just run forever. Because the truck can't run forever. If you're talking about emergency scenarios and stuff like that, you might get a day or two out of the truck, but you know,

• 1:46:41Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:46:42Matt Farah?

  You, you, you might get days, weeks out of that diesel generator.

• 1:46:44Speaker 01

  And then you have to charge the truck. And if the grid is down, like they're saying, you know,

• 1:46:48Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:48Speaker 01

  governmental infrastructure, like, bring in a diesel truck from wherever, fill it up, and you keep going for a long, long time.

• 1:46:55Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:59Matt Farah?

  Honey, we need a new roof.

• 1:47:02Speaker 01

  That's good.

• 1:47:04Matt Farah?

  Does the 911 range need to split? With the new hybrid Cabriolet models being over 4,000 pounds? It seems like they need a GT line and a sport line. It seems like there's a pretty hard line between the turbo customers who want to go fast and the GT3 customers who want engagement. A split would allow them to downsize the GT3 and maybe have a larger line of NA high-revving models? I disagree with this assessment of the market. Um, I don't think splitting the 911 is, I don't, I don't think that works at all. I don't, I don't, I don't see how that, why would you do that?

• 1:47:51Matt Farah?

  There's a pretty hard line between the turbo customers who want to go fast and the GT3 customers want engagement. I also disagree with that assessment. I have three clients here at WCCS who have 991, or excuse me, 992 Turbo S's. All of them own GT cars also.

• 1:48:08Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:48:08Matt Farah?

  So, I disagree with that assessment. I think that an individual who is looking at a Turbo S wants engagement. I think they do want engagement, and that is an engaging car despite its weight. It's probably the most engaging car in its class despite its weight. The Turbo S Hybrid. I don't know if we ever said it wasn't engaging. It feels heavy.

• 1:48:35Speaker 01

  But it's still fun. I mean, the steering is still reactive. The steering feel is pretty good. The suspension is pretty taut. So, yeah.

• 1:48:43Matt Farah?

  And it'll say, and it said a split would allow them to downsize the GT3. That represents to me a misunderstanding of why the 911 is shaped like it is. Part of the reason it's shaped like it is, is to move the engine further forward in the car. That's part of the reason it keeps getting bigger, which benefits mostly the GT3.

• 1:49:02Speaker 01

  Benefits the racing team.

• 1:49:03Matt Farah?

  Benefits the racing team. Yeah. So, the car getting bigger and the engine moving forward in the car versus older 911s, that comes right from racing.

• 1:49:12Speaker 01

  Well, not to mention the cost of making one unibody to, and both on all these different parts and all these different models. That saves them a lot of money. If they downsized just the GT3.

• 1:49:23Matt Farah?

  Versus what, a mini 911?

• 1:49:24Speaker 01

  A slightly smaller one that it was only the GT, that would actually make the GT3 much more expensive.

• 1:49:29Matt Farah?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:29Speaker 01

  Like prohibitively so. So, that wouldn't be, they wouldn't do that for the business case.

• 1:49:33Matt Farah?

  Yeah. And the reason they don't have a larger line of NA high-revving models is emissions. And there's even a story.

• 1:49:40Speaker 01

  And noise, yeah.

• 1:49:41Matt Farah?

  There was a story up yesterday or the day before that they think the next GT3 and GT3RS are going to be turbo.

• 1:49:49Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:49:50Matt Farah?

  They might have, I mean, they might have to.

• 1:49:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:52Matt Farah?

  That, that, the engine that they're fucking with in that car is at the end of a 16-year life cycle.

• 1:50:00Speaker 01

  Right. Well, and I mean, the, the EU regulations, which we probably talk about really quick, very like lightly, but that dictates a lot of the sound, gearing, and power, and engine displacement and configuration of the cars that come from Europe. You know, so when the, when the Porsches show up, the 911s, the GT3s, and they're kind of quiet, or we go, this car's too quiet, it's because there's this big filter on the back of the muffler, or like in the exhaust system. So we wouldn't have that here if, because our EPA wouldn't give a shit. But the car coming from there, it has to match those reg, or meet those regulations.

• 1:50:34Matt Farah?

  And Porsche is fighting the good fight, you know, trying to keep the stick, trying to keep it, but pretty soon, they're gonna have to choose, well, we're gonna keep this NA engine, but it's gonna have to be paired with a hy, a plug-in hybrid, right? Because it's gonna have to be zero emission sometime.

• 1:50:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:50:49Matt Farah?

  Or we go turbo and we don't have hybrid. Like, they're, they're gonna have to make that choice.

• 1:50:54Speaker 01

  Yep. I'm sure that will bring down the values of, you know, the NAGT3 cars.

• 1:51:00Matt Farah?

  Yeah. That's, I mean, you know, we, we hadn't talked about it before, we could, we could talk about it a little now, you're gonna see in the videos of our giveaway car, because we're doing a giveaway of a 992.1 Turbo S, that's a brand-new car, but it's not a hybrid. And we first started driving it to create content for the giveaway, right after I had driven the hybrid Turbo S. And so, my takeaway from going back, for going back to the old car was, really twofold. One, the hybrid 400-volt shock controllers on the new car are magic. The, the ride is crazy good with that new suspension, and the old car doesn't ride as well.

• 1:51:40Matt Farah?

  B, the old car feels crazy light compared to the old car. You can feel it in two seconds.

• 1:51:46Speaker 01

  Compared to the new car, yeah.

• 1:51:47Matt Farah?

  I'm sorry, the old car feels much lighter than the new car. And you can feel it from behind the wheel, totally. So, long-term, there will probably be more desirability for the 992.1 because of that lighter thing and because of lower potential maintenance concerns because it has less shit in it. But for now, the new one, that ride, oh boy, that is a fucking delight to get one of them when they come stateside.

• 1:52:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:52:13Matt Farah?

  Maybe I could take one of those for the fucking desert event.

• 1:52:17Speaker 01

  That would be perfect.

• 1:52:18Matt Farah?

  Sick. Oh, I gotta see if there'll be one here by April. That would be the jam, wouldn't it? I don't know if they'll let me do that many miles, but they might.

• 1:52:25Speaker 01

  They might.

• 1:52:26Matt Farah?

  They might.

• 1:52:26Speaker 01

  They might.

• 1:52:27Matt Farah?

  Um, that's our show. Thank you, everybody. We appreciate y'all, especially your patrons. The patrons keep the ship afloat around here. Thank you for all of your good questions today. One more shout-out to the commuters in Minneapolis doing the fucking good work over there. We love ya. Keep it up, and we'll see you guys on Thursday. Bye.