Jeff Bezos steps away as Amazon CEO / Ford's electric Mustang Mach-E / Apple Car rumors

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, Sean O'Kane, and Becca Farsace discuss driving Ford's electric Mustang, what's next for Tesla's product line, rumors around Apple's Car endeavors, and Jeff Bezos stepping down as Amazon CEO. Further reading: Scientists want to know if vaccinated people can still become COVID-19 long-haulers If you’re starting an online class, check to make sure your professor is alive Volunteers built a one-stop website to find open NYC vaccine appointments Amazon will have a new CEO as Jeff Bezos transitions to executive chair later this year Bezos’ Amazon: from bookstore to backbone of the internet Meet Andy Jassy, Amazon’s next CEO Amazon’s electric Rivian vans will start making deliveries in 16 cities this year Ford Mustang Mach-E Kuo adds fuel to Apple-Hyundai electric car rumors Apple and Hyundai-Kia pushing toward deal on Apple Car Tesla’s new Model S can go up to 520 miles Tesla Roadster production delayed to 2022 Tesla agrees to recall cars with failing displays Tesla’s next car will seamlessly unlock with UWB, FCC leak suggests Don’t buy Teslas during a production ramp, Elon Musk says Another SpaceX Starship nails clean test flight, but explodes on landing Elon Musk’s shot at Amazon flares monthslong fight over billionaires’ orbital real estate The Alpha 1 is Sony's new flagship camera with monstrous iOS 14.5 tries to solve Face ID’s mask problem with your Apple Watch HP’s Spectre x360 14 review: the best 2-in-1 you can buy Rad Power Bikes raises $150 million to grow its electric bike empire Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  This week on the Vergecast, we got a car show. Becca Farasace and Sean O'Kane join us, talk about the Mustang Mach-E review. There's some Apple car rumors, some Tesla news. Also, Jeff Bezos stepping away from being the CEO of Amazon. That's coming up on the Vergecast now.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:03Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of America's auto industry. Wouldn't that be great if we were like a trade car podcast? I mean, we're gonna try for it today. Yeah, but I meant like, we were like, deep in the weed, like, we were actually the trade group podcast. And it was all just like endless hyping of cars, like specifically American cars. Nonstop differential discussion. Yeah, exactly. No one thinks this is as fun as I do, but I think it'd be hilarious. Anyway, I'm Neil, I'm your friend. Dieter Bohn is here.

• 1:30Speaker 02

  I'm your compatible charging plug. I don't know.

• 1:34Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna, we actually are gonna talk a lot about cars today. So Sean O'Kane, our senior transportation reporter is here. Hey, Sean. Hey. And Becca Farsace is here, because she got to drive a very cool car this week as well.

• 1:44Speaker 03

  I did. I still don't understand how y'all let me do that, but we're here to tell a tale.

• 1:49Nilay Patel?

  I'm excited. So yeah, Sean and Becca worked on our Mustang Mach-E review, which is up on the site on YouTube. We're gonna talk about that in great detail. There's a ton of like, Apple car rumors all over the place. There's Tesla news. We're gonna have a car show. It's gonna be great. Also, you might have noticed that Jeff Bezos, the- One of the richest men in the world, the CEO of Amazon, has stepped down. So we're going to talk about that a little bit. And there's some gash stuff to talk about, too. So a packed show. First, as always, the biggest story in the world continues to be the pandemic, which hopefully, if you're looking at the numbers, that some of the numbers are going down, which is good, but we're not through it yet. And we have a bunch of stories on the side this week about what I have constantly been thinking of as like

• 2:30Nilay Patel?

  second order effects of the pandemic, like not the thing itself, but what is happening around it. So vaccine distribution is in full swing. Hopefully that gets even faster. Hopefully all this can back. Look, the verge is turning 10 in November. And if everyone isn't vaccinated, I want people to throw a party. So I've got, there's just a lot of pressure I'm putting on state and local authorities to get this done. But one of the major stories of pandemic is there are some people get COVID-19 for just a very long time. They're called long haulers. And so there's still some research to be done about whether vaccinated people can just have a low grade COVID for a while. That's a great story. Kind of a big question to ask. The shift, this is like an incredible Monica story. Monica's doing a lot on e-learning and remote learning. The shift to remote learning means a lot of people are just watching videos of classes. And she found

• 3:15Nilay Patel?

  some students who'd been taking a class, and it turns out the professor of their class has been dead for quite a while, which is just remarkable. Just a remarkable second order, remote learning COVID effect. And it really just did, just a great story. So go check that out. And then, again, vaccine distribution is kind of the story of the moment for COVID. It's hard to get a vaccine, particularly in New York. New York State's not doing so great. Like in Wisconsin, where my parents are from, random pharmacies have vaccines and just tell people and then random people get vaccinated. Holy crap. A lot different than that here. So volunteers in the city have built websites and other community kind of organizations to help people find vaccine appointments that's on the site. So check that out. Still the biggest story in the world, something we're tracking very closely. Nothing gets vaccine normal until.

• 4:01Nilay Patel?

  This pandemic, it's under control. And then, like I said, we're gonna throw a verge 10 year party. I've got, I've got big goals, you know?

• 4:08Speaker 02

  Here in San Francisco, it might be familiar to some of us, Moscone Center, where all the conventions were held. They're setting up currently to be a vaccine center and they've got like road signs. Our friend Brock Keeling has been tweeting pictures of they're changing out all of the parking rules around Moscone to prepare for mass vaccination effort there.

• 4:28Nilay Patel?

  That's amazing. New York, New York State and City, very different situation. Hopefully it gets better. All right. Arguably, the biggest news of the week, although it's hard to, it's hard to say what to say about it. But Jeff Bezos, who's the founder and CEO of Amazon, announced alongside Amazon earnings this week, which by the way, were extraordinary. Amazon is just printing money. Later on this year, he will step away from being the CEO of Amazon. He will remain the executive chairman of Amazon. So still involved in a lot of things. And Andy Jassy, who is currently the head of Amazon Web Services, will become the new CEO of Amazon.

• 5:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, the, the big new, big earning news of the day was supposed to be that Google's finally breaking out its numbers for the Google Cloud Services and how they're not doing great. And so everyone's like, oh, wow, we know what Google Cloud Services are. We can start tracking that. That's gonna be the thing we're all talking. Just kidding, Jeff Bezos.

• 5:26Speaker 04

  Do you think Google like, like slipped a message there? Like, we heard through the grapevine that you were planning on doing this. Could you bury our bad cloud numbers? I guess that doesn't make sense because Bezos would want people to look at it. He actually kind of stepped on his own, his own business there.

• 5:42Nilay Patel?

  I think he'll be okay.

• 5:43Speaker 02

  I always wonder, like, it didn't leak. There was not even a whisper of it. There wasn't a steady drumbeat of news that, you know, Jeff was getting bored, which they're often, like a good example, radically different context is Jeff Zucker, who runs CNN, announced today, like this morning that we're recording, that he'll be leaving CNN at the end of the year. There's been like one year's worth of drumbeat of news around that decision.

• 6:10Nilay Patel?

  We knew it was happening. He said it's happening. It's a big deal. And then he's it's gonna happen. Thank you, AT&T. AT&T owns CNN. That's just a thing that I think about all the time, which is a remarkable fact. But with with Bezos, it was just a complete bolt out of the blue surprise. And I always wonder, like, who in the Bezos circle knew?

• 6:28Speaker 04

  Right.

• 6:28Nilay Patel?

  Like, did he tell the staff of the Marvelous Mrs Maisel that he was leaving Amazon? They just like held it like, ah, it'd be great.

• 6:36Speaker 04

  It is like, it's a really interesting question in the sort of afterlight of him being like hacked by Saudi Arabia over WhatsApp or, you know, like, I'm sure his already tight circle of trusted folks is even tighter now. So it was probably nobody, or like one person.

• 6:57Nilay Patel?

  Well, he wrote a really, it's a pretty remarkable letter, actually, to the staff of Amazon, saying he's proud of how many things Amazon has invented, which is incredible list. Amazon itself, selling things on the internet. The Kindle, by the way, all these things are at once, like, amazing and wonderful and paradigm shifting inventions and businesses. And then there's like a laundry list of things that we can talk about. They're like, the Kindle ushered in ebook DRM. And now we live with that every day. Like, yeah. But on the whole, the Kindle market, that entire kind of business that exists, he invented it. AWS, Andy Jassy, who's taking over Amazon, was the founder and leader of AWS. That is a remarkable business

• 7:39Nilay Patel?

  that even a company like you're saying, Dieter, like, Google can't just walk into.

• 7:43Speaker 04

  Or Microsoft.

• 7:44Nilay Patel?

  Or Microsoft. I think over the past year, there've been like a handful of like big AWS outages, right? And we would like notice because like, the internet would go down.

• 7:55Speaker 04

  Right. Yeah.

• 7:55Nilay Patel?

  Because the internet just runs on AWS. It's like this incredible backbone service, which we will talk about more. Just there's this. Fulfillment by Amazon, where third-party sellers could use the Amazon platform. A company like Anchor does not exist unless Amazon is there to enable this business. So a pretty amazing collection of things to have invented. And then Bezos is like, keep inventing, I'm out.

• 8:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, so the, I think part of the point of that letter was to remind people that Amazon is not a tech company you can just take for granted as infrastructure. They have become infrastructure for many things on the internet. But they also like, yeah, Apple's got the iPhone, but we did Alexa and we did, you know, this fulfillment thing and we did AWS. It's like a reminder that Amazon has done a bunch of stuff and shouldn't be taken for granted. It sort of like elevates them in people's eyes as a tech company as Jassy takes over. I think that was part of that point. But both Bezos and Andy Jassy have this thing, this day one thing, right? Like, I think there's just to be a ton of continuity between these two guys. Andy Jassy is like, is, he believes all the same things Jeff Bezos believes in terms of

• 9:03Speaker 02

  being aggressive and needing to keep on inventing things. He, he gave this whole speech at Amazon's Cloud Services Convention, reinvent something, something. And it was basically just like 20 minutes of him giving what sounded like a pretty generic leadership discussion, you know, what, how do you run a company, blah, blah, blah. But now, like a month later, he probably knew that he was gonna maybe like be the CEO or at least knew he was next in line or whatever. And so now you look at it and you watch it again. It's, it's in the story that Nick Stat wrote up at the bottom. And you could just see it's him basically saying, I believe in all the things that Jeff Bezos believes in terms of how to run a big company and make sure that you're continually making stuff and not resting on your laurels.

• 9:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think so. One of the challenges with Amazon generally, and like I said, almost every one of its businesses has some meaningful controversy associated with it. Whether that is as small of a thing as ring cameras and surveillance and giving the footage to the police or ring cameras being hacked, like that's real. Product people love, and then there's like a controversy next to it. AWS is like a monopoly provider of cloud services in a competitive market, but absolutely dominates to make it just because of the way it works. It's like hard to leave AWS.

• 10:21Speaker 02

  I would argue that, I mean, there's other places for Parler to have gone, but I think AWS deplatforming Parler, that was the thing that I think that that was the gut punch they couldn't recover from. Like, they eventually got deplatformed by stuff further down the stack. But I think that that was the moment where it was like, oh, you're like, it's gonna be really hard for you.

• 10:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And that's like a level of controversy we've talked about a lot. There's, I promise you, people find things to complain about with AWS. Besides, I wanted to run an unmoderated social platform that like fomented an insurrection. But they do have an awful lot of power, right? The store itself, how many stories have we run about either sellers on the store getting their products copied by Amazon? Or workers in their warehouses who are trying to unionize or being treated poorly? Like, the store has its own enormous set of controversies. The one thing that is true across all of them, which I think is absolutely remarkable. People love Amazon so much that some of these stories just never get any traction.

• 11:24Nilay Patel?

  So we haven't done this for a while. We need to do it again, but on some cadence, we run a survey. How do people feel about tech companies? Amazon is by far the most beloved tech company. It's usually Amazon and Google in some order because they provide such an immediate, constant utility to people and they do it compellingly well. Right? And like, surprisingly to me, Apple is like usually lower on the list than you would expect. Because you have a phone, but you're not like constantly asking your phone for things and having this relationship with Apple. Like, you only really think about, like, you have an iPhone, you might love it. You only think about Apple in that context if like the phone breaks. Or like, it doesn't work the way you want it to. Google, you're like, what, what's the weather? And like, Google tells you.

• 12:07Nilay Patel?

  Or Amazon, you're like, I need, I don't know, I need ice skates. And Amazon's like, here's some weird ones. Like, here's a company you've never heard of that makes a knockoff of the famous ones. They're cheaper, the ice skates will be at your house tomorrow. I think that is just a remarkable achievement to be so beloved that very real issues and controversies, which are very real, I don't mean to discount them at all, but they often run up against the fact that people love Amazon so much, they don't want it to change. And I think one of the challenges for Jassy is can he handle the challenges without getting distracted by them or shoving them aside while maintaining how beloved Amazon is in all of the spaces that it's in.

• 12:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, I also think it's interesting, it'll be interesting to see how people feel about Amazon and how Amazon is positioned in the media now that the CEO is like Andy Jassy, who's a great guy and charismatic, but you know, he's no Jeff Bezos, right? There's not like the charismatic founder that everyone's eyes like light up with stars when he walks in the room because it's Jeff Bezos.

• 13:06Nilay Patel?

  Andy Jassy can't just buy you if he's mad at you, right? Like Jeff Bezos, like his presence is like, huh, what if I buy your town and then evict you, like I can just do it, right? Like he is one of the richest and most powerful people in the world. Andy Jassy is an executive who worked for Jeff Bezos, who now is one of the most powerful people in the world, but hasn't demonstrated that and doesn't have that aura.

• 13:27Speaker 02

  Right, but Andy Jassy isn't spending his off hours, you know, running, like looking at the Washington Post or trying to build rocket ships or, you know, spinning up his charity because he has to, because everyone, somebody finally realized that you make millions upon billions of dollars and you don't have a good charity, which are all things that Jeff Bezos was needing to do. And so, you know, the, the parallel here is such a over at Microsoft, right? Like the services guy becomes the CEO and smart, intelligent, don't mean to denigrate him because you're not the charismatic founder, but people feel a little bit differently about Microsoft now than they did under Ballmer or Gates.

• 14:08Nilay Patel?

  Wait, so I, wait, let me, I'll make a different comparison because Bezos is going to go be the executive chairman.

• 14:13Speaker 02

  Right.

• 14:13Nilay Patel?

  Which is what Gates did to Ballmer.

• 14:16Speaker 02

  Right.

• 14:16Nilay Patel?

  And so Ballmer still had Gates as like, his technical advisor, Gates was still in the company and

• 14:21Speaker 02

  Doing stuff.

• 14:22Nilay Patel?

  Ballmer's job for better or worse was to like sell more copies of Windows to the detriment of every other thing that happened. Yeah, I don't know. Like, whereas I think Nadella, Gates was already gone, the bomber era had come to a close. Yep. They knew the future was services. Nadella, like, see change in the company's value proposition to people without a real change in its culture, because he was like the ultimate insider. Right, but they did have change in their product strategy. Like, Nadella had to, like, offload Nokia.

• 14:54Nilay Patel?

  He had to do stuff to change, like, what they're, what they, what Microsoft was to consumers. I don't see any radical shifts in Amazon. Like, they don't have any albatrosses that they need to drop. They've got a bunch of controversies to deal with. Yeah. But they don't have Windows Phone. You know what I mean?

• 15:10Speaker 02

  They did. They had the Fire Phone.

• 15:13Nilay Patel?

  They did have the Fire Phone, that's true. The Fire Phone is one of those, like, when you think about a company's corporate culture, it's a less well-managed company would have still been trying to ship the Fire Phone. Yeah. Right? They would have been like, "We need this, it has to happen. We don't want to be on, on Apple and Google's platforms forever."

• 15:33Nilay Patel?

  Like, Jeff Bezos was like, "Yeah, that sucked. I'm killing it. Like, I'm very sorry we did this." And that team rolled off, like, rolled over and made Alexa, right? Yeah. And they, they just made a better thing. And they, like, they will all happily laugh at the disaster of the Fire Phone. Whereas, like, if you talk to Microsoft people at Nokia, like, they're still pretty, like, prickly about it. Right. Yep. And, and we're like, "No, that was horrible. Like, you, you destroyed the Finnish economy." Like, I don't... You should just be okay with the fact that it didn't go well.

• 16:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think you're right. I mean, look, there's a huge antitrust case against Amazon. AWS, well, one of the remedies proposed in the case is AWS could split off. Yep. Which would be remarkable. So, like I said, big challenges, but, again, the company is so beloved that I think he just walks in with a card that most new CEOs don't have. Yep. Right? It's not beset by challenges. The founder is still there. He's still going to be involved in a bunch of stuff. In many ways, he might end up being more of the face of the company, uh, which is a thing that happened with Gates. Like, he, he just became a symbol of the thing without having to do any work, which sounds great. And if somebody could get me that gig. I'd be very happy about that. Just be the mascot. But he's got a bunch of stuff to solve. And I will see. Sean, I want to ask you, Dieter mentioned the Washington Post, he

• 16:51Nilay Patel?

  mentioned Blue Origin. In this letter, he said, I'm gonna, Bezos said, I'm gonna devote my attention to my other passions, including the Washington Post, his day one fund, his charity, his Earth Fund, and Blue Origin. Do you think he's gonna like, like, he's pretty far behind Musk and SpaceX, right? Is there a path for him to be more competitive there?

• 17:12Speaker 04

  In some ways, he's behind, but in others, they're targeting in the near term, a much different sort of business than SpaceX is because they're focusing on sort of suborbital flights. And they're really looking at a longer term picture for deeper space travel. So I think the really interesting thing to pay attention to, now that he'll have more time to devote to it, is, does he change the pace of development at Blue Origin? Because right now, Blue Origin has been the very sort of steady, we don't really mind if we appear like we're behind SpaceX kind of company. Whereas, you know, Elon Musk is out building

• 17:57Speaker 04

  metal rockets on the Texas coast and like, just letting them fall into gigantic explosions. Because like, that rapid prototyping is the way that he likes to try to learn things. And so, does Bezos sort of stick with the plan with Blue Origin? Or now that he has a little bit more time and a little bit more focus on it, and maybe sees like, you know, maybe the competition of just the two companies incenses him a bit more? Does he change things? And so that's definitely what I'm going to be paying attention to.

• 18:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think it would be good if, right now SpaceX's real competition is like, ULA and like, they just seem so big that they can't get anything together. It would be good if like Bezos was like, all right, you get more than one day a week from me, which is what he had been giving to Blue Origin. And he like, can you imagine if he walked into his rocket company and was like, we need 100% customer obsession? People are like, who are the customers?

• 18:55Speaker 04

  He always has the cowboy hat on for Blue Origin stuff?

• 18:58Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I get it. I appreciate it. I appreciate the entire Bezos metamorphosis from like extremely nerdy guy. You should go watch early Bezos videos.

• 19:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:09Nilay Patel?

  Where he's got like the bad hair.

• 19:10Speaker 02

  There's a really good, I think it's PBS NewsHour.

• 19:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 19:13Speaker 02

  Did it, or one of the PBS programs did a big thing about that. And it's just, you know, in an hour and a half, you really get to watch him go from, from one end of the spectrum to another.

• 19:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And now, now he's just like a cartoon character. The other thing I'll say, and then we should move on, we should talk about cars. I did watch some of the early Bezos stuff where he was, he talked about why he picked books on the internet. And it is just the most like laser focused, sharp, clear, what is the internet for? And how can I build a business using this tool thinking I have ever heard? Right? Like, he's like, the biggest bookstores in the world can only hold 175,000 books. There are 3 million books. Our modems are bad. Our computers are slow. If you want people to put up with this shit, you have to offer them value. And the value is the entire catalog. And so he didn't come to books because he was passionate about books. He was like, how do I make people use a crappy

• 20:06Nilay Patel?

  computer to buy stuff? Which is just not how anybody thinks.

• 20:10Speaker 02

  Well, and also, like, he saw that you can, books, books last a while, like thousands of years, if you store them right. And so you can have, you can warehouse books, have a huge selection, and it costs less than warehousing dog food, right? Or whatever else was going on in the early 2000s.

• 20:28Nilay Patel?

  That's true. I just like, we spend so much time thinking about, and the show talking about products where basically the idea is, what if we put a computer in it? And you're like, well, no, that's a coffee maker. Like, I don't need to worry about what version of Android my coffee maker runs. Like, please, I'm, I'm good. That other flip of how, how can I deliver you so much value that you'll use a bad computer? Like, I honestly wish more companies thought that way. Like, I wish more companies just accepted, yeah, this computer is slow, this broadband connection is not valuable, but it's so worth it. Like, I think a lot of products would be better if people thought that way. That said, laundry list of controversies associated with thinking that way for the past 25 years, but we'll see how it goes. Anyway, we're gonna take a break, and we're gonna talk about some cars. We'll be right back.

• 21:17Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's Chief Investment Strategist, and Colin Martin, Head of Fixed Income Research and Strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 22:04Nilay Patel?

  All right. So Becca, I know Sean reviewed the Mustang Mach-E.

• 22:08Speaker 03

  True.

• 22:09Nilay Patel?

  I would like to start with a story you were telling us before we came on the air.

• 22:13Speaker 03

  I knew I shouldn't have brought this up.

• 22:15Nilay Patel?

  Look, I once, I've told this story on the show before. I once crashed a Mustang into a bank as a young boy.

• 22:23Speaker 03

  Were you trying to rob it? What's going on?

• 22:25Nilay Patel?

  No, I was racing a friend and I'll tell you, 90s Mustangs did not handle well. They were not, they were not made for turning. And I just understeered through that turn, hopped a curb, the impact, it didn't hurt the car, but the impact was such that the car cut off. And then I just slowly rolled into the side of it, like very slowly. We just like, we were all so surprised that we just kind of like watched it happen. And then we're like, well, the bank's cool and the car's cool. And then we continued driving to high school. That's how that ended.

• 22:57Speaker 03

  My story is not so slow, to say the least.

• 23:00Nilay Patel?

  See, there you go. Okay. So you got to drive a Mustang Mach-E and you got in some trouble.

• 23:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, I was really focused on getting the shot and I do not own a car in Brooklyn. So I did not realize that there are cameras on most streets watching for speed. And I just kind of, you know, put the pedal to the metal. Wanted to see what would happen. Wanted to get a really good shot of us driving through Brooklyn and um, saw a lot of flashes.

• 23:28Nilay Patel?

  Oh no.

• 23:28Speaker 03

  And then proceeded to freak out and call one of our producers, Sophie and be like, Sophie, I don't know what just happened. I saw a lot of flashes. Yeah, it was a total newbie moment, but uh.

• 23:40Nilay Patel?

  Well, you got a speed camera ticket?

• 23:42Speaker 03

  I got a speed camera ticket, man.

• 23:44Nilay Patel?

  Like not an actual cop?

• 23:46Speaker 03

  Uh, not even an actual cop. Like there was no.

• 23:49Nilay Patel?

  Oh my god.

• 23:50Speaker 03

  Robocop. True Verge fashion.

• 23:52Nilay Patel?

  Amazing.

• 23:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:53Nilay Patel?

  This is why a camera should be outlawed. See? I knew I could bring it all the way around.

• 23:58Speaker 03

  Totally on that side now. It's changed me.

• 24:00Nilay Patel?

  That's so funny. Alright, so you two have been driving the Mustang Mach-E for several days. It obviously inspired Becca to just gun it through Brooklyn. Sean, tell us about, tell us about your experience with this car, because it's a big deal.

• 24:14Speaker 04

  It's a very big deal. Um, I think the, the most interesting thing to me to know, sort of like off the top, if you don't know much about the Mustang Mach-E, is that a couple of years ago Ford, you know, Ford is one of those companies that had made electric cars before. They made like a really not so great electric uh, version of the Ranger, which is a smaller pickup truck a bunch of years ago. And then they made a, you know, an electric version of the Focus. They've been making hybrid cars for years, so they've been dabbling in the technology for a long time. But they've never really made a full sort of long range electric car. And so they set out to finally kind of do that a couple of years ago. And originally, and the wild thing is that they were doing it at the same time

• 24:57Speaker 04

  that they had announced that they were throwing $11 billion into this whole new sort of electric vehicle push. And yet they were going to just sort of make a longer range Ford Focus. It was not really going to be something terribly exciting, most likely. But the team that they put on it sort of realized that right away. And they sort of also, at the same time, got a message from then CEO Jim Hackett, whose whole deal was kind of shaking up the company and starting a big restructuring effort. And so suddenly the idea was let's change it to something that's more Mustang inspired. And then that sort of cascaded into let's make it an electric Mustang.

• 25:37Speaker 04

  Because I think Ford was, saw the opportunity to sort of turn the Mustang into its own brand in a way that it really wasn't before by just being sort of one car that had been iterated on. And so that's the thing that I think about a lot and was thinking about a lot when I had this car is just like how close we were to not having it, which is just really fascinating to me. And so, yeah, so the Mustang Mach-E, we saw it for the first time in November 2019. Funny enough, the same week that Tesla announced the Cybertruck. And so we're talking about almost like polar opposites as far as what those vehicles are like. But it's now finally here and it's starting to ship. The very first few customers have them in the US.

• 26:21Speaker 04

  But the rest of some of the first delays or deliveries are being delayed. Because it's just hard when you're working on a totally different sort of platform and a totally different kind of technology to power vehicles. You just run into stuff. Volkswagen's had this problem, Audi's had this problem. A lot of car companies that know how to make cars and deliver them are having trouble with some of their early mass market EVs. But it's here for all intents and purposes. There are a whole bunch of different models and a whole bunch of different trims we could get into if you want to talk about that. But the one that I tested out was the premium version. It's basically, it's pretty much the mid-range spec, especially because I had the all-wheel-drive configurations. So it had two motors on it, one on the front, one in the back.

• 27:04Speaker 04

  And the extended range battery pack, which has about 98 kilowatt hours of energy, but only about 88 of that is usable. And that's good for about 200 70 miles. And so this is basically this, this version of the Mustang Mach-E, the premium version starts at $47,000, but with all of those options and a couple of other little bells and whistles, the trim I had was $55,000. So certainly not cheap. Ford's cars are still eligible for the federal tax credit, at least for a little while longer. So if you are one of these early buyers, you'll be able to get $7,500 back. And then plus whatever state incentives, depending on where you live.

• 27:44Speaker 04

  So while it's not super affordable, it can get closer to that in a way that Tesla's vehicles no longer can, because they're not eligible for that federal tax credit. Or even Chevy's vehicles aren't, GM's vehicles aren't. So the Chevy Bolt is, you know, stuck at that sort of base price of $37,000, unless they decide to change it and take a bigger bath on it.

• 28:07Nilay Patel?

  They're like giving bolts away right now, though.

• 28:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I don't know. It's a weird, it's a weird sort of situation where like, we could talk for a very long time about how I don't think Chevy has given and GM has given enough love to that car, because it's just perfectly cromulent. But, but the Mach-E is a much more exciting vehicle. I think it, you know, so I had it for a week. I think it is the most competent EV on the road that's not made by Tesla or Porsche. Almost, we actually had to like, make sure we had this in the video because I hadn't even really mentioned Porsche. The first few passes through the edit, just because I'm not really considering it. Because for most people, I mean, a lot of people talk about, oh, you know, Teslas are really for, you know, rich Silicon Valley bros.

• 28:51Speaker 04

  The Taycan is extremely expensive and, you know, in many cases is like three times the price of the Mustang Mach-E. So I wasn't even really considering it, but they do get credit for making, that is a really good car, sort of across the different versions that they have. So, you know, I think Ford really accomplished something great in making something that sort of stands toe to toe in a lot of respects to those vehicles, but particularly Tesla. Easy to want to try to get away from, and I think valid to try and get away from just comparing all EVs to Tesla, but Tesla is the standard bearer for sure. And the Mustang Mach-E, in many ways, lines up really well against the Tesla Model Y as far as comparison sake

• 29:34Speaker 04

  goes. So it's hard to sort of avoid that. But I think Ford did a good job. It's going to make a lot of people think about making that decision in a way that no other vehicle right now really kind of was. I mean, the only other options right now in the market are from the luxury automakers, so Jaguar, Audi, Mercedes-Benz, and those are all, in my opinion, just worse off. And the Model Y just sort of like leaves them in the dust if you were trying to consider, and they're more expensive, so.

• 30:03Speaker 02

  Well, we've also got the ID.4 from Volkswagen and the Polestar coming, sort of.

• 30:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, the ID.4 will be interesting when it gets here. It'll be really interesting to see if Volkswagen has any of the software issues that, I mean Volkswagen, so for Volkswagen, really quickly, their whole new lineup of electric vehicles that's coming out is like the ID lineup, and it'll basically be eventually from number two, which is like an extreme subcompact, all the way up into bigger size vehicles and numbered accordingly. The ID.3 is a hatchback that launched in Europe in the middle of last year, but the ID.4 is the first one that's going to come to the United States because they just didn't think that a hatchback was going to succeed here, which I can't really blame them because no one buys sedans or hatchbacks anymore in any appreciable numbers. The problem that

• 30:51Speaker 04

  they've had is that when they shipped the ID.3 last year, the software was in such a poor state that they actually shipped the ID.3 without a lot of the software on it and said that much of it was going to come in and over there update later. And that was sort of a big black eye to them. And so like if it's going to have, they better not have the same kind of issues with the ID.4 here because it's just not going to, it's not going to stand. But yeah, that will be a sort of similar competitor too. And there's a lot more coming. So Ford can sort of be happy about putting out a really competent EV that is one of the sort of few in the affordable-ish range for right now, but it's not going to be long before they'll be, they'll be company.

• 31:32Speaker 02

  So here's my question. We talked about this when it was first announced, but now Becca and Sean, you've driven it. Is it a Mustang? Does it have the soul? Does it have the essence of a Mustang? And I know Neel has emotions about this. Maybe he can tell us what a Mustang is. What is a Mustang? To me, it's just like a knockoff Camaro. But what is a Mustang? Well, the show's gonna go sideways. I want to know from the people that actually drove it, if it is a Mustang.

• 31:58Speaker 04

  I mean, you know as well as anybody on this call that words have meanings.

• 32:06Speaker 04

  I'll put it this way. I think people who hold extremely dear the things that they thought a Mustang was before this car will probably have a hard time wrapping their minds around sort of attaching that branding to this one. There are very many things different about it for all the sort of styling choices that Ford made to try to make it seem like a Mustang to putting the, you know, only the pony logo on it. There's not even a Ford logo on the car at all. They did a lot of things to sort of in some ways justify it. But, you know, there's no engine noise. There's no rumble from the combustion engine. There's none of those things. You know, the ride height is higher, which I think is good in

• 32:50Speaker 04

  some, you know, some sort of just general respects for vehicle safety and things. But, you know, it's not that sort of low riding feeling that you would get from a Mustang. You don't really get that feeling of like, you know, having that gigantic hood in front of you that is containing the combustion engine that is powering your Mustang. So I think if those things really matter to you, then no, you're not really going to consider this thing. And we've already seen a lot of feedback just on the review on Twitter and in the comments and stuff of people saying that. And then those kinds of people sort of split into two camps of, well, I'm still really interested in it, or that's enough for me to never consider it ever again. From a pure like

• 33:33Speaker 04

  business perspective, I think it was extremely, I think there was a risk to the bet, but I think it was an extremely smart move by Ford, especially and not even really that risky when you look back

• 33:45Speaker 04

  Think about like 10 or 15 years ago, there was no Porsche SUV, there was no Lamborghini SUV, there was no Aston Martin SUV, there was, you know, the idea that any of those companies would do those kinds of things, even though they were known for being, you know, sort of, again, different iterations on similar vehicles and having this sort of solid sports car brand. There was no way you could think that that would happen. And now, you know, Porsche's SUVs are its best selling models and, and that's why all these other luxury and sports car manufacturers are following them into the space. So I think Ford was smart to do this and let, you know, really pin this sort of new lineup of electric vehicles on the Mustang to start, especially because like if it falters and it doesn't perform

• 34:30Speaker 04

  well, the next one coming is the F-150, which is probably, they're gonna have a whole different issue trying to sell F-150s, electric F-150s to sort of, you know, maybe classic truck buyers. And that's a whole different kind of dynamic, but it's probably set up for better success in some ways than maybe the Mustang. But I don't know, I think, I think it was a really smart bet from a business perspective. That's a really long way of not answering your question. But like, it's not a Mustang and it's like, that's a good thing. But like, it is a Mustang because like, in 10 years from now, like, I wouldn't be surprised if there are like a couple different Mustang models in a way that there never really were.

• 35:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, this is what Ford, like Ford broadly is doing this, right? Like,

• 35:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:12Nilay Patel?

  The Bronco is two cars.

• 35:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:15Nilay Patel?

  And one of them, one of them is like a ridiculous not car. Like, there's a Bronco Sport, which is like, it's a little itty bitty. And there's a Bronco, which is like the halo car that takes on the Jeep Wrangler. They're like, obviously, they're much more interested in people buying those brands than buying a Ford.

• 35:32Speaker 04

  Yeah. It's a Mustang, but the definition of Mustang is changing. So, and, you know, for the most part, you can get a lot of the same, you can spark similar joys in this car that a Mustang does, but, you know, it is made for very different things. Like, the goal that Ford had with this car was to sort of approximate that performance that Mustangs are known for, but add in all the utility of an SUV and make this the kind of thing that you can use every day in a way that you maybe can't with like a two seater Mustang or something.

• 36:03Speaker 03

  Sean, you have a line in the script that's, um, in the video script, that is, that's about like you can eat, you could feel comfortable eating a cheeseburger in this car. And I think if I remember correctly, you ate a cheeseburger in this car.

• 36:14Nilay Patel?

  I did.

• 36:14Speaker 03

  And I also ate a cheeseburger in this car. And so there's something very approachable about this Mustang that I don't know if I would feel comfortable eating a cheeseburger in a more historic Mustang.

• 36:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, if we gave you like a, like a sixties Mustang, like do not eat a cheeseburger in this car, but like, Dieter, I think my answer is, first of all, there have been so many crappy Mustangs, like. Yeah. The Mustang I owned was legitimately a crap Mustang, like it had a V6 engine that made, I think 165 horsepower and it couldn't turn very well. Yeah. Did I love the shit out of that car? Like every day, right? It like, it was just a fun car to have. But it drove poorly and was slow, but it was, it was a Mustang, like it was that thing. Every, I think right now that we're going through the cycle where, um, people who were like kids in the eighties

• 37:11Nilay Patel?

  now have money to blow. And like, when that happens, the cars from their youth get expensive again. So like Vanilla Ice nineties Mustangs are expensive right now, which is a horrible mistake. Like you should not spend $30,000 on a white 1988 Mustang GT. You just should not do it, but that's how much they're selling for because they captured that moment in time. I'm telling you, this is one of the worst cars ever made. Um, I hope I get some angry, I hope Vanilla Ice go like, like Rhett's. Ice, if you're listening, you can come on the show and defend the 88, or I think it was 92. I think he had a 92 white GT.

• 37:56Nilay Patel?

  Ice, if you're out there, baby, the floor is open. I think the question, I think it was brilliant for them to call this car Mustang. Get all the attention, make every review contend with that question. Make people on the street, this is like the best moment in Sean's video, make people on the street see the logo and freak out. They would not have gotten that with a focus. If they'd called it the Ford Electrobolt or whatever horrible name, the Ford ID.4, right? Like, they're not gonna get that. They put this, they put the whole weight of this brand on it. And now we're saying it's really good and it's a competitor to Tesla. And that's like, that's gonna work from the marketing perspective. The question is,

• 38:39Nilay Patel?

  I don't think anybody generates the kind of memories or cultural moments in their family SUVs that you generate in a Mustang. Like ICE, again, if you're out there, come on the show and tell me, if you were gonna make ICE as baby today, would you put this Mustang in that video? Like, I don't know the answer to that question, because it is just kind of a midsize crossover SUV. And that's like, I think that's the big question for them.

• 39:05Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, it, I mean, as Becca can attest, it definitely can, the speed can sneak up on you in a way that could maybe make some of those memories. But I think that's a good point.

• 39:17Speaker 03

  It's very good. Very, very quick, very quick. The amount of heads that this car turned, I did have the brightest blue I've ever seen in a car.

• 39:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that powder blue one is great.

• 39:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:29Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, try, try driving it, though. It's like everyone's staring at you. And, you know, they definitely, cameras definitely got me. No hiding in this car. But the amount of heads that this car turned with the badge on it also is, is insane. I mean, everywhere we parked this car, somebody stopped to take a photo and to tell us how impressive this, you know, to have that badge on there. And then, you know, we got really lucky that Sean was rolling on the GoPro. And this is in the YouTube video where a woman rolled up to it, what, a stoplight?

• 39:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, but stopped at a stoplight on like a divided highway.

• 40:02Speaker 05

  What are you driving?

• 40:03Speaker 02

  An electric Mustang.

• 40:05Speaker 05

  What the, that is so sweet. I was like, it's got ponies on it. It says mock.

• 40:10Speaker 04

  There is something, I spent a good amount of time in the video and also in the written review, trying to sort of parse this out because there is something really kind of intangible about the design and it's been polarized. I know a lot of people don't love the way it looks, but I think Ford pushed the design of the car enough to the point that it really does stand out. Like, they could have made something more boring looking and still tried to call it a Mustang. And I think that actually, the thin line between those two versions is really, it's kind of crazy because I think they could have failed really hard with it. And they may still, but like, what they did with the design is, I think, you know, just enough to really make it stand out in a way that it's going to

• 40:52Speaker 04

  make people notice it. And it looks just different enough that people are going to sort of naturally understand that there is something different about it in a way that a Tesla vehicle does. And not really in an off-putting way like some other EVs, like the sort of older Nissan Leafs, or even the BMW i3, which I personally like, but I know a lot of people don't. And so it's this, I think they really just struck this interesting balance of being able to make it really stand out, make it look a little different, make it look a little, give it that sort of quality of when people see a new iPhone that makes them feel like they need the new iPhone, even if they don't wind up getting it, maybe they trade their phone in for something else.

• 41:30Nilay Patel?

  The i3 looks like, literally, like, like three C-cell batteries on wheels. I don't know what you're talking about.

• 41:35Speaker 04

  And yet, it's one of the better, you know, electric vehicles on the road the last couple of years, which is kind of insane. And insane also that BMW never really followed it up with anything.

• 41:44Nilay Patel?

  So we think the car is good, right? It like drives well, it's fun to drive. The design and the name give it this opening against Tesla. There are two things that I saw people reacting to with our review. One is the obvious one, which is the charging situation, where they seem to lag way behind Tesla. So, Sean, you're in Austin, Becca, you're in Brooklyn, what were your charging experiences like?

• 42:09Speaker 04

  Well, I was to the thing that got me really almost angry was like I was just expecting a much better charging scene here in Austin. I figured, especially with, you know, now such a big booming tech scene that they would have been kind of ahead of that curve, but it's really not great. There's, I think, I guess it just comes from the fact that so many people live in houses here. So a lot of people are able to charge at home in a way that they wouldn't in, say, New York City, or even like a more sort of mid-range city. And so it's really, there's like a real dearth of options. There's a ton of old, really slow Level 2 chargers around the city. There's one Electrify America station, which is Volkswagen's sort of answer to Tesla Supercharger network, though I always try

• 42:53Speaker 04

  not to give them too much credit for it because they only did that network because of Dieselgate.

• 43:00Speaker 04

  And, but even, even superchargers, I was looking at the map the other day, there's only really like three or four real supercharger stations in Austin, and they're all in North Austin. So, and I'm way down in South Austin. So like, it would be a hike.

• 43:13Nilay Patel?

  North Austin's where the tech campuses are, right?

• 43:15Speaker 04

  Right. So that's where a lot of this, that's where the Electrify America station was too. But, so, I mean, anyway, so the, the, the long story short on the charging situation is that Ford is definitely just coming from a disadvantage here, like many other automakers that are making EVs that haven't gone out and done the work of building their own charging networks, because the charging scene in the United States is like a real bummer. And it just, there are a bunch of different networks that started up over the last decade or so. They all work in sort of slightly different ways and have slightly different quality. They may, some of them are on the older spec that charges slower, some of them on the newer spec that at one point was called Fast Charge, but is now really

• 43:57Speaker 04

  kind of, you know, almost embarrassingly, embarrassingly not fast enough compared to these newer networks like Teslas and Volkswagens. And so you really, you run into this problem where the biggest frustration that I've ever had, and I've had it repeatedly with electric vehicles that aren't Teslas, is you already are budgeting time in your head.

• 44:18Speaker 04

  Whether it was based on like using the PlugShare app or whatever that's telling you how long you're gonna have to stop somewhere to charge up to how much. Or that your vehicle is telling you, you're already budgeting that time and, and you know, it takes a certain type of person to sort of like start from that point and accept that. Then you get to the place and one of the, you know, the first plug you plug into isn't working. Or it starts charging, but it's charging more slowly than it's supposed to, and it never really quite ramps up to that top speed. And then you start wondering, okay, should I switch to another plug? And you know, you, you sort of wrestle with it because you're like, if I switch the other plug and I get the same speed, now I've wasted more time.

• 44:58Speaker 04

  And it's just like every option that you face after that first sort of problem you run into just sort of like starts to compound and take a lot more time to charge. And so Ford really doesn't have a solution to this because there's really no solution to it other than better infrastructure. The only thing that they tried to do is they have, you know, created quote unquote, this thing called the Ford Pass Charging Network, which is essentially just like coalescing all of those disparate networks into the Ford Pass app. And also through the main screen of the, the Mach-E. So that it seems almost as if all of the charging stations are at your fingertips. Which is a nice idea in theory, and they're also trying to go even further than that by partnering with Electrify America and some of the other networks.

• 45:42Speaker 04

  To basically make it so that eventually you'll just be able to pull up to those stations, plug in, and you won't need it. And you know, a separate app, you won't need to create a separate account, which is another thing that happens if you're not really up on what you need for electric vehicle charging. Sometimes you pull into a station and you realize, oh, great, now I gotta download an app. I just create an account. So they're trying to solve that part of the problem, but it's a tough one to solve because it just doesn't quite work yet. And then even when it does wind up working, you're still in many cases going to be stuck with slower chargers. You can sort of mitigate some of this if you buy the more expensive Mach-Es, which have, you know, like I said, the version I tested had 270 miles. The rear wheel drive version of that spec or that model would get 305 miles.

• 46:27Speaker 04

  And I think that would be, you know, obviously even better. And the ultimate solution here. If you're not talking long road trips is being able to charge at home, which just, you know, like I said, here is an option. It was an option for me. I was able to plug in just to a 120 volt outlet on the outside of my house and I was able to get like 65 miles in a little under 24 hours, which is not a lot, but enough to cover, you know, what I was using on daily trips. But the, the actual out there while you're in the world and, you know, making sort of short to medium, or I guess even medium to long trips, it's just a real, it's a real issue. And I know, Becca, you had a different experience,

• 47:12Speaker 04

  but also not necessarily a great one.

• 47:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Alex, who's the video director that helped me on this shoot and I had, neither of us had ever driven an electric vehicle or charged one, for that matter. And so when they dropped it off to us, they're like, please just leave us with 60 miles left in the car so that we can get it back to where we need to go. So great, no problem, whatever. I'll just plug it in for half hour or something and, you know, juice it up for you. I had no idea about what it actually takes to charge one of these. So we drove, I think like 60 or 70 miles out into Long Island to shoot. And we're out there, we're shooting all day, cars on all day, we're driving around all day. And by the end of the day, we had like

• 47:57Speaker 03

  70 miles left. And it was around like six o'clock, seven o'clock. And, and we were like, oh, let's just go charge up really quick out here before we get back to the city. Cause I don't, I'm sure that charging in the city is going to be way harder. So I went on the forward pass on the app and you're right, finding a charger was actually very easy. It propagated all the chargers within the area. I found a charger. I went to, I think a quick charging station because I think it had like a lightning bolt and a plus sign and something told me this was going to be fast. And I was like, great, we're good. And we we roll up to a Harley Davidson store that's closed on the side of a highway. There's like maybe one light in the parking lot. We roll up to the charger. There is like, I could barely see anything. It's a pretty

• 48:40Speaker 03

  dark parking lot. Um, I plug it in, I get in the car and I'm like, okay, we'll just wait for 20 minutes or something. I had no idea. And Alex and I are sitting there and it's going up slow, like very slow. And we had this moment where we're sitting there in an empty parking lot on the side of the highway, uh, that is dark. Two young women, uh, just like, this could go really wrong really fast. Like, I don't know if I feel wonderfully safe, sitting here. And then I called Sean and I was like, Sean, how long is this gonna take? And Sean went on to explain the charging problems. And I was like, yeah, I'm experiencing this charging problem right now. And I think we sat there for like an hour.

• 49:25Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God.

• 49:25Speaker 03

  And we ended up getting up, the whole time we were sitting there, we're like, we just need to get to 130 miles. Because then it'll take us 60 miles to get back and they'll give us still an extra 10 mile buffer on the 60 miles that they wanted. And we're just sitting there doing this crazy math of miles. And we both came to the conclusion that unless I had a charger at home and I had a garage, this is so not practical for someone who lives in the city.

• 49:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Meanwhile, like with Tesla, there's a supercharger network and you roll up to it and it's like a party at every single one because there's a, there's a line now, like, all the most popular supercharger stations have lines. So they just turn into like Tesla owner club coffee talks. And then the thing works really well. And you're like on your way.

• 50:11Speaker 04

  I mean, I will say there are, I I've definitely had issues with Tesla superchargers where you do run into that same problem of like, wow, it's only going at like 50 kilowatts. Do I move to the next one to try to get like as fast as I should be getting? So like there there have definitely been times where their supercharger network, you know, has similar problems, but it doesn't have like the full scope of issues that a lot of other charging networks have.

• 50:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but Tesla, I mean, not to, not to hype them up too much, but Tesla also owns that network. And if you're mad at them, you just like tell them that it's broken and it's Tesla's responsibility to and there's like a lot of Tesla owners. So like one company is getting a lot of reports about one broken thing.

• 50:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 50:56Nilay Patel?

  Whereas like the weird charge plus station at the Harley store, like who is accountable for it is like a very different problem.

• 51:03Speaker 04

  One thing that never really hit me until I was running into the issues at the Electrify America station was that so many, especially the really fast chargers, but so many of the, you know, sort of medium to fast chargers that do exist are located near highways, you know, for good reason, because they're they're most needed for people on long range trips. But the problem you run into is like when you when you have an issue at one of these stations, then all of a sudden you're on customer service call with these companies and you're like screaming over the din of the highway. And I was just like, I was sitting there thinking about it. I was like, I'm not going to call because I don't really need to call. One of these stalls is going to work and no one else was there. So I was fine. But I was just thinking like, man, if I had to get on the phone right now,

• 51:46Speaker 04

  all I would be able to think about is how loud the highway is and how just gross it is that I have to like scream over the highway to be able to like have this terrible conversation about how stall seven isn't working up next to the coals.

• 51:58Nilay Patel?

  So that's the charging situation. You guys have mentioned Ford Pass several times now, which brings me to the other thing that everyone caught in our video in our review, which is that in order to make this car, Ford Motor Company was required to develop and ship software.

• 52:16Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I I on a Ford, I know what their software is like. That screen in the middle is a new version of Sync. I everyone I I saw this comment on our site. I saw on YouTube. In our video, that screen looks laggy. Is it laggy?

• 52:30Speaker 04

  Yeah. You know what? It looked like the the version that or the model that Becca had might have had more issues than the one that I had. There were definitely some like slightly chuggy animations on mine, but I didn't really have too much problem with it. And actually, I I'd say in the review, for the most part, I just used CarPlay because there's wireless CarPlay and wireless Android Auto, which is just like, I don't know why you wouldn't want to use either one of those. But you know, I'd used Ford's system as much as I really kind of wanted to and then just stuck with CarPlay. And CarPlay's animations were really quick, like extremely fluid. So like, you know, the display can certainly serve that up. But yeah, I think Becca's had probably a little bit more of an issue than mine.

• 53:11Speaker 03

  It's funny, I saw a lot of comments about this as well, but while I was using the interface, I never thought it was laggy because I'm not expecting it to be my iPhone or like, like, I, I don't know, it felt, it felt very to the speed that most cars infotainment systems are.

• 53:29Speaker 02

  But that's bad. That's like, the floor is low.

• 53:32Speaker 03

  The floor is low.

• 53:35Speaker 03

  But then once everyone said that, I was like, you know, maybe it was pretty slow. Like, I don't expect the refrigerator to be fast, you know?

• 53:42Speaker 04

  The floor is like Fiat Chrysler's Uconnect, getting your car stuck in a boot loop.

• 53:45Speaker 02

  Dude, my, oh god, that Uconnect shit is so annoying.

• 53:49Nilay Patel?

  And I would just, like, I own a Jeep with the Uconnect system. Until 2019, they were shipping resistive touchscreens, like,

• 53:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 53:57Nilay Patel?

  Cars is a low floor, a low, low, low floor.

• 54:00Speaker 04

  I think that the, the way that I thought about was, about it was, so it definitely could use some work. You know, it's early, these are just shipping, I'm sure they were probably rushing to finish it. You know, for, for people who are curious, this is still the version of Sync that is built on Cunix, which is the BlackBerry sort of underlying operating system. Sync is, Ford will tell you in very explicit terms, Sync is not an operating system. It is, you know, the, the sort of infotainment layer that runs on top of Cunix and that is important to know because they just announced a deal with Google to where Sync is basically going to switch over to running on Google's native Android Automotive OS by 2023, though we don't know exactly.

• 54:39Nilay Patel?

  I just want to point out that what Ford has announced is that it's skinning Android and the skin is called Sync.

• 54:45Nilay Patel?

  Like, I read this announcement, I was like, this is what I'm reading, like, where it's 2011 again and Motorola is telling us that, like, Bubble OS is the new.

• 54:53Speaker 02

  Also, like, I hate to say this, but Cunix is fast as hell. It's super fast on its own. And so if you can't make your skin fast on Cunix and you think you're gonna make it fast on Android, I have some stories to tell you.

• 55:07Speaker 04

  The Surface, Dieter, you'll probably get a kick out of this. The Surface UI, like, what you're actually interacting with is HTML5 too.

• 55:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. No, that's pretty common, actually. Like SpaceX is using HTML5 for some of its interfaces.

• 55:18Speaker 04

  Right, yeah. So, I mean, I think they're, what I was getting around to is like, they're, they're starting from a better place than almost any other legacy automaker would with. You know, existing versions of infotainment software, let alone something that, you know, needs to look good and work sort of well on such a giant screen. So, you know, if you haven't seen this screen before, look at the site. It's a 15.5 inch portrait touchscreen that sort of like almost kind of floats off the dashboard at the top. And so, yeah, I mean, it definitely, it needs a little work. There are definitely some like UI issues that like I didn't really love. You know, I think our friend Mike Murphy tweeted something when he got his review unit just about like the menu and how imposing it looked and how

• 56:00Speaker 04

  sort of ridiculous it seemed to have so many options. But I, the thing that I liked about it is I think Ford did do a good job of designing the UI for the size of the screen in the sense that there are very like forgiving hitboxes for all of the UI elements. You know, you're not really like squinting to see some of the the menu options on there. It's, it's, it's pretty big and easy to read. And so I think they, I think they're starting from a really good place. They say they're going to do over the air software updates for this car and that that's going to be, this is going to be the sort of first one where they really start supporting that kind of process moving forward. So it'll be interesting to see how they actually do that and whether they live up to the sort of, you know, what

• 56:42Speaker 04

  people have come to expect from like Tesla with over the air software updates. And so they could make some changes that could make that a little bit more fluid. But I was happy with where it was at, but if only because the floor is so low. And I didn't have any like real problems. The only thing that I really, really, really got annoyed with was there's a wireless charging pad in this car and my iPhone was sliding around during, you know, excited driving, but also not even the most excited driving. And so it would, when it would slide, it would trigger this error message that would like pop down from the top of the screen that says like, you know, charging disconnected or whatever. And, and that, which is fine, like if you can't fit all the phones, even if it's the most popular one, but.

• 57:27Speaker 04

  It would happen and then with the error message would go away and then it would come back again. And then it would go away and it was just like, listen, I understand that there's a problem here with the design. You're popping up the alert, do it once and then like make it go away. And then like, maybe there's a deep menu setting somewhere that says like, only alert me once that wireless charging got disconnected. But that was the only thing that really, really kind of like bummed me out with with the new thing for.

• 57:52Nilay Patel?

  Becca, you're using it with Android Auto, right? You have an Android phone. Is it as smooth?

• 57:56Speaker 03

  At the moment, I'm using an iPhone, which is very strange for me. Very strange for me. I don't want to talk about it. But I am using an iPhone right now.

• 58:04Nilay Patel?

  It's my fault, by the way.

• 58:06Speaker 03

  It's all Dieter's fault.

• 58:07Nilay Patel?

  I'm sorry.

• 58:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, I use my S10 as like my home remote right now because I didn't feel like downloading Hue and all of that. And God, I just can't wait to go back. Anyway, I was having also the same charging problems. Just kind of all over. It just, I mean, you'd be driving in a straight line. I don't, there was no disruption happening. It would just go in and out a lot. I was wishing it was more of like, I know the new Cadillacs do this where you put your phone kind of into a slotted, slanted holder. That just seems like a better design to me.

• 58:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. You know, it's funny, we've been talking about all these things and it reminded me that two CEOs ago, Mark Fields was the Ford CEO in 2016 and he was at the Code Conference. And first of all, I asked him over and over again, why Ford cars couldn't get over their updates and he yelled at me, which is why I remembered it. And two, in 2016, Ford and Google were about to sign a gigantic deal to use Android and they backed out at the last minute because Google wanted too much in Ford so they could build their entire own system. And now it's 2020 and they're like, we're gonna, we're gonna just let Android be the thing that we run. But it's remarkable. Like that is a long,

• 59:19Nilay Patel?

  that's two CEOs, it's a long journey to get to the point where they're finally, four years later, going to the platform that enables more over the updates, more feature updates, faster development. And I think they signed a big deal to use like Google's cloud services. Well, and depending on how heavily they skin Android, it could be really compelling because like Andy reviewing the Polestar, right, has been talking up Android Auto as like the when you have it as a native system.

• 59:45Speaker 04

  Ford's not the first to do this. Google, the first vehicle to have it like sort of on the market is Polestar, Polestar 2, which is a car made by a car made by a Chinese company called Gili, which also owns Volvo and shares technology across Polestar and Volvo. And but but is going wider with that with GM. And there have been a bunch of other bigger deals that have been signed with Google for this Android Automotive OS. And so, yeah, I think that probably all of that movement probably helped inspire Ford to finally just give in.

• 1:00:19Nilay Patel?

  All right, we should take a break. I want to come because there's more car stuff to talk about. There's Apple building a car. Potentially, there's a new Model S. Let's take a break and come back and talk about all that stuff.

• 1:00:33Speaker 06

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• 1:01:07Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. So I think I'm clear. Everyone should have a Mustang Mach-E. But there's this other company called Tesla. They have a very famous car called the Model S. And Sean, there's a new one.

• 1:01:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, this has been rumored for a very long time. Fred Lambert over at Electric, who was sort of the like the ur Tesla blog and has been covering them. Obsessively for years, had run a story two or three years ago now about how there was a Model S and Model X design refresh coming. He had a render of the inside of the car that had more of a Model 3 style sort of landscape screen and changes to some of the other interior bits. And it was something that sort of loomed for a while and Elon Musk shot it down. At one point, he said, you know, there's no redesign happening. We make constant improvements to

• 1:02:00Speaker 04

  our vehicles, et cetera, et cetera. And then, and then lo and behold, last week, redesign, not a super big overhaul on the exterior of either vehicle, just some sort of aerodynamic changes, but enough to probably be able to sort of notice the difference if you look at the vehicles side by side. But the big changes come inside. And, and the interior is basically the same between the two new versions of each car. It has that sort of same horizontal display now as opposed to the portrait one that was embedded in the dashboard in the original, you know, longstanding Model S and Model X. So that's new. It's also a more like

• 1:02:43Speaker 04

  bezel-less design than the one in the Model 3. It's actually really more akin to what we saw in the prototype of the Cybertruck. So, you know, it looks a little bit newer, a little bit fresher. And then the sort of more polarizing aspect of the changes to the new S and X is that they both have these U-shaped, almost like butterfly racing steering wheels. So not your typical oval steering wheel. There's no top to the steering wheel. And there's been a lot of talk over the last week or so about whether that is going to be safe. It appears that Tesla did not let the federal safety regulator, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, know about this ahead of time, which is appropriate

• 1:03:24Speaker 04

  and unsurprising if you follow the sort of long history of Elon Musk's interactions with that agency. And, but, you know, and so that's a whole conversation. Another part, another change that they made that was less obvious in the moment is that they are, Elon Musk said that they are trying to And will be automating shifting between park, reverse, neutral and drive on these new vehicles and that there will be an override function in the touchscreen, but the physical controller, which previously was on one of the stocks in a Tesla to shift between park, reverse, neutral and drive is gone and it'll be, they'll be using autopilot cameras and

• 1:04:08Speaker 04

  software and sensors to just guess, he literally said guess when you should change between those, those drive modes. And you know, it was funny. I was like, I'm pretty sure we covered this extensively, you know, in my earlier days at the verge, because I know that there was a big controversy over some of the other automakers really changing the designs of, of these shifters. And I was like, I gotta find that. And I looked for it and I was like, oh, right. Neil, I did this video in his Jeep.

• 1:04:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. My, my Jeep has like

• 1:04:37Speaker 04

  Outside our old headquarters.

• 1:04:38Nilay Patel?

  Extremely bad shifter that killed people. Yes.

• 1:04:40Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, so those are the big changes. They're more expensive, about 10 grand more each, improved range because they've made some changes to the battery pack and the cell design. These are not using the new cells that we saw Tesla debut at Battery Day last year. That's still something that's on the horizon for its vehicles and it's unclear whether those, those new batteries will ever come to these cars. But, you know, sort of changes all around, mostly on the inside and certainly making the vehicles a little bit better than before, which is an interesting move because the, oh, and I should say about the, the Model S especially, but also the Model X, they both have new, in addition to new battery packs, they have new powertrains, specifically a three motor

• 1:05:21Speaker 04

  version, which they've been calling the Plaid Powertrain, because Plaid is one step faster than Ludacris in space balls. But this is a three motor powertrain that they were developing sort of with the new roadster in mind over the last couple of years, but had put it in a Tesla Model S and run it at like Nürburgring and Laguna Seca. And it was just like, those tests were happening at the same time that the Taycan was being announced. And so there was, you know, Porsche had had the Taycan at the Nürburgring and there was this like month or two where there was just this like Constant update of like whose lap time was faster and stuff. So that new powertrain is in and it's really, it's absurdly expensive. If you want that model, it's like a hundred and $30,000 or something crazy like that.

• 1:06:05Nilay Patel?

  Um, I want to run through a bunch of, the steering wheel to me is like the ultimate example of, first of all, it's like, that's the steering wheel that Michael Knight had in Knight Rider in his.

• 1:06:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:06:15Nilay Patel?

  Like, I get why he'd want it to look like that, but turning, you actually often go hand over hand and you, you can just see that that's going to get regulated out of existence.

• 1:06:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:06:25Nilay Patel?

  The shifter, I'm like 50 50 on.

• 1:06:28Speaker 04

  Really? I know. I just, have you ever been in the wrong gear and pushed on the gas? Yes, you have. It's terrifying.

• 1:06:36Nilay Patel?

  Well, presumably, you know, it's going to guess right. I mean, I have to make a three point turn just to get out of my garage. So there's a part of me that just wants a giant shifter. There's a part of me that's like, I'm just going to press the gas and you're going to figure out the rest of this would be great.

• 1:06:47Speaker 03

  I just, I just can't help but think about car washes. Is it gonna, how's it gonna know to put it in neutral?

• 1:06:53Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:06:54Speaker 02

  Really good point.

• 1:06:55Speaker 04

  If it sees rainbow foam, then it goes into neutral automatically.

• 1:06:59Nilay Patel?

  Let's see. Tesla owners only get their, they, they rub them with a diaper and that's it. Um,

• 1:07:05Nilay Patel?

  that's my favorite Spula reference for the day. I just want to, Sean, quickly go through a couple other Tesla things. I want to talk about Apple. They are in the middle of like a couple recalls right now. And you mentioned in the Mustang review, like Ford is good at making cars and Tesla is still like trying to figure it out. And then Elon this week was like, don't buy a car while we're ramping up production, which is an incredible thing to say.

• 1:07:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, I, this was really incredible. So the recall is for another sort of longstanding thing with older Model Ss and Model Xs that we've known about for a while. It was first reported by motherboard, I think in 2019, uh, is that they were built, the, the sort of overall powering of the, the displays in those vehicles had this particular flash chip in them that it was just all sort of architected in a kind of way that eventually that flash chip would burn out. And so in 2019, people who had bought their Teslas in like 2013, 2014, or whatever, started seeing their. Model S displays blackout and just like stay blacked out even after they like rebooted their cars a couple of times. And that cuts access to the rear camera. It also severs access, obviously, to anything else through the touchscreen.

• 1:08:14Speaker 04

  But like Tesla put so much of its sort of vehicle controls through the touchscreen that that was possibly a pretty nasty safety risk in certain situations. And so last year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration started an investigation into it. And then that wrapped up in January. They sort of took the unprecedented step of publishing a letter that they had sent to Tesla, asking Tesla to recall the vehicles. Tesla is sort of famously not keen on doing recalls. And so I think they were trying to find a way around it. They were trying to sort of only replace these things as they were burning out. And what was really wild in that exchange that NHTSA, the agency, posted in January

• 1:08:57Speaker 04

  was that Tesla just basically admitted straight up that like, no, all of the vehicles that had this chip are going to suffer from this problem. It wasn't like, oh, maybe it's likely. So now this past week, Tesla agreed to do the recall. They're contacting owners. They're trying to upsell owners on replacing the whole media unit with the newer version that they had started shipping a couple of years ago, which cost $1,500. And a lot of people got up in arms about that. Though it is like an appreciable, like new thing that would add new features. So you could go either way. But you can get the, if you have a vehicle that's affected by the recall, you can get it fixed for free. And there's information on sort of NHTSA's website. And you can go to our post on the site, too.

• 1:09:41Speaker 04

  It sort of gives customer service numbers and everything. But yeah, it's not, it's not great. And it's another version of these sort of long tail effects that Tesla doesn't seem to understand might be an issue despite having.

• 1:09:56Speaker 04

  Had many people in the industry tell them that they would run into over the years and sort of, you know, the, the, like you mentioned, Elon Musk was on this podcast earlier this week with this industry analyst who was famous for sort of criticizing the Model 3's build quality in 2018 and in like pretty crazy ways, like he was like, you know, it's as bad as Kia was in the 90s. And Musk on, in this podcast interview was like, oh, you know, I agreed with your criticisms, basically saying he was right. And then was explaining to him that he was, Musk was asked why a new Model 3 that was produced, because it's pretty famous at this point that there were problems as Tesla ramped up production of the Model 3. They were trying to make a new car they had never, never made before and

• 1:10:41Speaker 04

  scale it up as quickly as possible so that it could become the first mass market EV they sold. They ran into a ton of issues doing that. And, you know, I think a lot of people probably think that like, maybe they've gotten past that now because there are so many on the road and they've been making them for a couple of years. But this analyst was saying, you know, hey, I bought a new one late last year. We were next to a guy who had a new one from a month later and the paint job on his was like so much better. And Elon Musk was saying that, yeah, we're still figuring out how to get the paint right. And we were making cars so fast last year, he didn't say this, but to make the goal that, you know, he had set for the company of 500,000 vehicles shipped last year, that they, the paint was getting messed up because they were making them so fast and they weren't

• 1:11:25Speaker 04

  giving them proper time to dry. And then on top of that, he was saying, he also said that as he was talking about these production ramp issues, which they're still having during moments when they do continue to scale up production, he was like, you know, friends ask me, when should I buy a Tesla? And I tell them, buy it right at the start of production or when it levels out. And basically saying, don't buy it in the interim because it's going to have issues. He was like, which is just a, you know, a wild admission. And then he also said, you know, some things about, he always like caveat some of these things with like, you know, if we had known about it, we wouldn't have designed it this way. And it's like, with the paint issue especially, it's like, these are things that people definitely have told him about. He never really wanted to hear them. But it's

• 1:12:07Speaker 04

  just a sort of repeating pattern that we see with the company. And it's, you know, it's something that, you know, a lot of people have been. Looking at the Mach-E review and asking me like, you know, the Mach-E really doesn't match up on range and you had all these issues with charging. Why would you ever consider this over a Model Y? And I think that's really the crucial trade-off because the prices are similar enough. But for me, the consideration I would have to make is, is it worth it for me to sacrifice a little bit of range? Because it's not a lot, depending on which model. But is it worth it for me sacrificing a little bit of range and making sure that I really have to charge at home or find that charger near me that is the most reliable versus access

• 1:12:48Speaker 04

  to the supercharger network? But trade-off, if I go the Tesla route, trade-off really just super unknowns about build quality. I mean, the issues that they've had, even with the Model Y, which you feel like they would be better at, now that they've had a lot of experience building cars, they're all over the map. I mean, it's everything from seatbelts being detached from the sort of anchors on the bottom of the vehicle to one guy's glass roof flew off. So like, you really have, it's like a grab bag kind of thing. It can be sort of anything. And they're doing things to make them more reliable in how they're building the Model Y. But you know, it's just, it's, that's the trade-off

• 1:13:31Speaker 04

  for me that I would have to consider. And it's not reassuring to hear him come out and say sort of so coldly that there's a whole, you know, months-long stretch where their vehicles are not up to par for his friends. And if you wouldn't recommend him to his friends, then like, yeah, it was a lot.

• 1:13:47Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I would say the counterpoint here is Ford software is like part of the equation. Tesla's pretty good at software. They've had bugs, no doubt, it's software. But, and yep, there's a lot of Ford dealers out there to help you if something breaks. But they also get trained up on how to fix this car.

• 1:14:06Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. And exactly how dealers are gonna approach the Mach-E is still kind of tough to know. Theoretically, it may be something. We've seen this with other electric vehicles where dealers are reticent to really push the vehicles because You know, over the lifetime of a car, an electric vehicle is going to need less maintenance and therefore that means less money in the pocket of the dealers that typically do the maintenance. So we've seen them sort of not really want to put them out there as like an option for people to buy. You know, there are other reasons why there may not be attractive to people. But yeah, that's one of the things that's definitely unknown about that. But again, the consideration is like, do you feel like Ford can scale that sort

• 1:14:46Speaker 04

  of service fast enough and good enough to meet or beat the level of customer service you can get from Tesla right now, which is also a crap shoot and something that the company has said repeatedly for months, years even, that they're going to improve. And yet they're still at the point where they're just not really there. And that, you know, on their earnings call last week, they were asked about this again, thankfully, because they hadn't faced this question in a while, about like, when are you going to improve your customer service? And their answer was that the first answer was, we're building the cars to be better so they don't need to be serviced, which like is a great idea in theory, but like, whoop. And then the second answer was like, and you know, we're also making sure our mobile service vans and you know, et cetera, et cetera. But

• 1:15:30Speaker 04

  like, you know, Elon Musk said this was a big priority for him over a year or two ago. And it's just still a problem. So those are the kinds of considerations that I think people are really going to wind up having to make when it comes down to buying, you know, if they're looking at those two vehicles.

• 1:15:45Nilay Patel?

  All right. I want to make sure we give Dieter five minutes to talk about gadgets at the end. But big, I told you it was going to be a car show. This is like a big story. It's not a story yet. Right? Like, there's no other way to describe it. Like, the noise around Apple making a car is getting real loud, like really loud.

• 1:16:03Speaker 02

  Really loud in like, the last month, kind of just bam, I'm going to talk about it now.

• 1:16:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And there was also like, I don't know, like, there's rumors of what they're going to do, of who they're hiring. There are, there's long been Apple test cars, like lighter rigs on the roof, like floating around. But the rumor that's gotten really hot is Apple's either going to make a deal with Hyundai, or make a deal with Kia, and Hyundai and Kia are owned by the same company. So it's like, it's a little wonky in there, to build a lot of cars in Georgia.

• 1:16:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:16:35Nilay Patel?

  Which would basically make Hyundai or Kia. Like Apple's Foxconn for cars.

• 1:16:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, or I saw the comparison to, you know, I guess Apple took a some sort of stake in LG when they made the display deal.

• 1:16:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:48Speaker 04

  I've seen that comparison made too, and I think there there is an element of truth to that. Yeah, it's really honestly, it's hard to it's hard to really wrap my mind around. It looks like what happened is that, you know, within the last couple of weeks, there was some sort of, I forget exactly who wrote the story, but someone basically went to Hyundai and Kia, a Korean news outlet, I think, and and like asked them about this. And and, you know, they just, it's that sort of journalist dream where like they got the right person who was like, yeah, it's happening.

• 1:17:18Speaker 04

  And then that set off like alarm bells, you know, like Hyundai's stock went crazy in Korea. It happened sort of overnight here and then it got picked up by Business Trades here and then they were sort of linking to the story in Korea, but then the story in Korea got edited so that like a lot of the details were suddenly gone. And and so, you know, it seems like the there's been just a lot of cleanup happening in the press over the last couple of weeks, probably from Apple's side, but also from Hyundai's side a little bit. But then it also has this vibe of like, you know, it feels like kind of the cat's out of the bag that they were in talks. And so people on the Hyundai side, I think, you know, obviously have a lot more to gain of this being public. And so we keep hearing more details like so now, you know, it's it's they're still close on a deal. But now we know that it's, yeah, it's probably going to happen at the Kia factory in Georgia.

• 1:18:03Speaker 04

  It could be as many as 100,000 cars a year, but eventually up to 400,000 cars a year. The report we saw yesterday before we recorded this was that it's going to be electric autonomous vehicles that are Apple branded, but are focused on last mile travel. So last mile being a sort of industry buzzword that really makes you think that this is necessarily not necessarily going to be something that people drive, let alone own, which is really interesting. And we know, looking back at like the scope of coverage about this project, which was started in 2014 and was originally supposed to be like a car, like an electric car, but

• 1:18:46Speaker 04

  then was pivoted a couple of years later to autonomous vehicle software, sort of broadly, and then moved into just like autonomy software more generally. And but the the idea now being

• 1:19:02Speaker 04

  That Apple is going to make some sort of, you know, almost like robo-delivery vehicle kind of thing. I don't know. It's really hard to know exactly what's going on. The CNBC report from yesterday was like, yeah, electric autonomous vehicles that could be last mile, but are designed not to be driven. So exactly what that means is not super clear. You could say the new Model S is like designed not to be driven eventually because the steering wheel is so impressive. Or we could be talking about a vehicle that, you know, is no steering wheel and pedals. You know, we know Apple has tested AVs, like you said, over the years in like California, but they haven't been like an extreme, extremely busy tester. And the way that all this news continues to be framed is like, there is no deal yet, even

• 1:19:47Speaker 04

  though they're close to a deal, and Apple's still in conversations with other companies. So it's hard to know exactly what's happening right now. We do know that, you know, Apple's played the field and has entertained basically every idea. I was looking back today as I was sort of getting ready for whenever whatever happens, happens. And, you know, they had been talking to Volkswagen at one point, to BMW, to Mercedes-Benz. I reported last month, I think, that they tried to buy Canoo, which is an electric vehicle startup that just went public, that was started by the people who left Faraday Future when Faraday Future first almost collapsed. So they've, you know, they've really run the gamut of their, of the options out there. I think because they're a big enough company that they, all the options

• 1:20:32Speaker 04

  are available to them. You know, it would be really interesting to go this route. I mean, it would obviously be huge for Hyundai and Kia, which have sort of grinded over the last couple of decades into becoming, you know, sort of the most reliable foreign budget car. But it would, this would obviously elevate those two companies and their sort of parent company to a much different height. But yeah, we know a lot more, but we also still don't know exactly what we know with all these reports. They're all, they're all so similar and it's just really strange.

• 1:21:03Nilay Patel?

  It's just weird because Cars are hard, you know, like not even from like a making a car like Tesla makes cars and it's hard and the cars are of somewhat inconsistent quality, but just like what car should they make? Should they, should they make a convertible? Like, should they make a truck like?

• 1:21:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, we've seen so much reporting over the years about them not being able to really figure out. I talked to, to somebody who worked there a couple of years ago and that, you know, they were just describing that, you know, one of the things that got really, people really excited about it in the early days of the reporting on this project was that Apple had a lot of its own veterans working on it, but also had hired away a lot of industry veterans from the automotive industry. And, and so while in theory you think, wow, they're going to make something great, in practice, it was more like they were all given their own like little fiefdoms of the different part of the car that Apple wanted to make, you know, originally, and then that turned into a nightmare because none of them wanted to play well with the other parts of the project. And so it was never really going to come together. And that's why they sort of pivoted away to autonomy

• 1:22:04Speaker 04

  software. And, and so now they're back somewhere in the middle or something. I don't know. It's kind of hard to peg.

• 1:22:09Nilay Patel?

  The Apple executives do not drive sensible cars. Like, Eddie Q is on the board of Ferrari.

• 1:22:15Speaker 04

  Like, yeah, um, Phil Schiller is like a fan of like British racing cars, like just down the

• 1:22:22Nilay Patel?

  line. Yeah. Like you can't imagine Apple being like, we've made a sensible midsize crossover. The main interface is CarPlay and if your baby throws up in the back seats, it's easy to clean up, which is like the market for cars.

• 1:22:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:22:38Nilay Patel?

  Right?

• 1:22:38Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, it's, on one hand, you kind of think, well, they have to go consumer passenger vehicle because like, who wouldn't want to own an Apple car? But then on the other hand, you're kind of like, well, that, yeah, that sounds really difficult in many ways. And like, maybe they're, you know, they've been waiting in the wings because they want to make this bigger play of an electric autonomous vehicle that, you know, I guess maybe turns into a robot taxi of some sort, and then it becomes this much bigger transportation play.

• 1:23:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but that's just not Apple. I don't know. I'm dying to see what this turns into like, Apple making an autonomous taxi is just not very Apple, right? Like,

• 1:23:14Nilay Patel?

  It that that's a very utilitarian product in the end. Talk about a car that people have to be able to throw up in. If you make a cab, like the number one thing you have to deal with is like, someone's gonna throw up in this car. Alright, that's a lot of car news. I'm excited. I'm trying to I'm trying to get the CEO of Ford on Decoder, and I'm trying to get them to send me all kinds of cars right now. So hopefully, we have more on the Mustang and more from that coverage. And we'll see. We'll see what Apple does with this car. Before we end, though, I promised the beginning, we're gonna have some gadget gadget talk. Dear, you got a lightning round. Let's do it.

• 1:23:44Speaker 02

  Okay, so Monica just reviewed the HP Spectre X3 6014, which is the sort of two-in-one Windows laptop that, you know, it's got a weird shape and you would be, it would be natural for you to just ignore it. Be like, oh, HP made another Spectre laptop. It looks like it came out of Battlestar Galactica. I don't need it. But it turns out, it is stupendously good. It's one of these evil laptops. It actually lives up to the claims. It's probably going to be one of the best laptop Windows laptops of the year, like, full stop. And it's January, or February now. Wow. So go read that review. It's again, it's like one of those laptops where you look at it and you're like, shrug. But actually, it's very, very good. It makes me want to buy buy it. But I'm not gonna, because I'm being responsible

• 1:24:27Speaker 02

  in 2021. iOS 14.5 betas, developer betas are out. And the big news is it supports the new DualSense and Xbox controllers. And they're giving you the option to unlock your iPhone with your Apple Watch.

• 1:24:41Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 1:24:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. My suggestion to you, by the way, so you have to have it on it like if it's long it stays connected to your wrist, your Apple Watch stays unlocked. My suggestion to you if you do this, or gonna turn this on, is to switch your Apple Watch PIN to at least six digits, instead of the standard default four. Because that's just a lot more secure. I want to talk about e-bikes for like, an hour, but we're not gonna do it. Which is not. But Rad Power got a big investment. And so I'm excited to see them make make some new bikes. And then

• 1:25:11Speaker 02

  Becca, just the Alpha 1, Sony's flagship camera. It just looks like Sony finally did the thing where they stopped making compromised parts bin cameras and they just made the camera. Is this true? Is this the camera?

• 1:25:25Speaker 03

  You know, it might be true. We gotta put it to the test. But on paper, this is fast. This is a fast camera. And I have spent, since this dropped, I have spent a lot of time thinking about the fastest thing I could photograph in New York City. There's a lot of fast things in New York City.

• 1:25:43Speaker 02

  There's people driving Mach-Es through intersections.

• 1:25:47Speaker 03

  I know. I know. What the heck? But Sony claims you can get 155 full-frame compressed RAW images, or 165 full-frame JPG images, at up to 30 frames per second with the electronic shutter and still get the full autofocus, which, that's nuts. That's nuts. And of course, there's the 8K30, which is also very cool. I'm excited to see how hot this camera gets. That's been a big issue with these, with getting up to that resolution. So yeah, this seems like it's gonna be super fast, and I'm ready to put it to the test. We'll see. Although their parts bin cameras, not so bad either.

• 1:26:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're both Team A7C, right?

• 1:26:31Speaker 03

  Oh, we're both Team A7C, yeah.

• 1:26:33Nilay Patel?

  All right, I'm ending this podcast before we do an hour on the A7C. Sean, Becca, it was lovely to have you. I'm excited that we did a car show. It's been a long time coming.

• 1:26:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, happy to be here.

• 1:26:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, thanks so much around us.

• 1:26:44Nilay Patel?

  You can tweet at us. Sean, you have a bad Twitter handle, so you have to say it yourself.

• 1:26:47Speaker 04

  I've been working on it, man. No one answers me about it. SOK1.

• 1:26:51Nilay Patel?

  Becca's @BeccaForSache, Dieter is @Backlon, I'm at Reckless. Talk about bad Twitter handles.

• 1:26:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, what the heck?

• 1:26:58Speaker 02

  We're not getting to Backlon, but it's a good story, but I'm never gonna tell you.

• 1:27:02Nilay Patel?

  Words have meanings.

• 1:27:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh, man, can I get at Mustang?

• 1:27:07Nilay Patel?

  All right, well, if you can get me at Mustang, please send me an email or tweet at me. I'm at Reckless. We're back next week on Friday. That's it. Rock and roll.

• 1:27:14Speaker 02

  Wear a mask.

• 1:27:34Speaker 07

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every 5 seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash apple watch series 12.