How Tesla Plugged In America (feat. Chad Schwitters) | Tesla Motors Club Podcast #9
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Hey, good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for joining us on another Tesla Motors Club podcast. I'm Mark. I'm Lewis. And I'm Mike. And on deck today, we got a few things to talk about. We have a guest, Chad S., from the Tesla Motors Club Forum. We're going to talk about his history at Plug-In America. It might be some good stuff there. We're going to have some more topics come about charging issues with Chad.

Not that Chad, but the Chadimo. And also, if we have some time, we'll talk about this forthcoming New York Times documentary entitled Elon Musk's Crash Course. All of this and more on TMZ Podcast Episode 9, which starts now. ♪

As always, thanks again for joining us. These two lovely gentlemen here, Lewis and Mike. I mean, brother. Hey, Mark. Good to see you guys. How you doing, Mark? Hey, man. It's always a pleasure. So tonight, we have a guest, as I mentioned earlier. His name is Chad. He is the past president and former board member of PluginAmerica.org. So we're going to bring him in now. Come on in, Chad.

Join the party. It's so bright in here. Welcome. Chad, thanks for joining us tonight, my friend. How are you, sir? I am great. Thanks for having me on. Hey, man. It's our pleasure. I think you bring a lot of EV things that a lot of our listeners may want to be interested in listening to. So can you give us a walkthrough? Let's just jump right into it. Can you tell us more about how you got into the EV world and where you are now from leaving where you're from with Plugin America? Sure.

Well, if you want the long story, I won't make it that long. But it did start in 1990 when GM announced the impact of the LA Auto Show. And I remember reading the article in the newspaper the next day and being so excited. And my wife even took a picture. Well, my son had just been born, so I think that's what she was aiming at. Congrats.

And then 10 years later I hear they're actually selling cars in California and I called a dealer in Northern California trying to figure out how I could get one and they hung up on me. So, um, now, now back then, back then were you involved with anything EV related or were you just doing something totally just, no, I w I was in computers at the time, uh, working on handheld software. Um, I just thought it sounded cool. Um, I've,

It's less that I like electricity and more that I hate gas. I just always hated gas. You know, they had the shortages in the 70s shortly before I was getting old enough to drive a car. And, you know, I was just really disappointed and wondering about my prospects. So I've always looked for alternatives. I've, you know, taken the bus. I've moved close to work so I can walk to work. You know, carpooling. I've tried all sorts of alternatives. I just thought electric cars...

well i still thought of it as a penalty car as many people do because i'd never seen one but i wanted to get one but i kind of forgot about it after the dealer hung up on me i thought i'm not going to fight that hard then in 2006 my my hobby is actually human behavior and i was reading a book from a university of washington professor who i later ran into picking up his second tesla

And he mentioned something about climate change and referenced a book. And I read the book and thought, oh gee, you know, maybe I should start following companies doing EVs. And so I set up a spreadsheet, my wife hates this.

I mean, like every other day I'd be on all these websites looking to see if there's any updates. And, you know, after several months I figured out, you know, no one's going anywhere. Nothing's happening here. Uh, Tesla was one of the companies I was tracking, but kind of ignoring because it was so expensive. Um,

And in fact, Tesla in 2008, I think, they brought a roadster up to Seattle near me and they were having a ride and drive event. And I put it on my calendar and I didn't go because what's the point? I'm not going to drive something that expensive. All my gas cars were cheap economy cars. And it wasn't until my wife converted her car and

You guys still there? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I'm, I'm, I'm at the edge of my seat. I'm like, did you convert it to like the, uh, vegetable oil? Is that what you're saying? Um,

Well, actually, I had a diesel Golf that I ran biodiesel in for a while. Nice. And yeah, except it did clog the injectors and I had some other problems with the car. But still, at least I was off gas. My wife's car, she was the first one in the Seattle area to get her Prius switch to be a plug-in hybrid. That was in 2008.

And, you know, since nobody was selling electric cars, I thought, well, that's good enough. You know, I've got my biodiesel car and she's got her plug in hybrid and we'll be fine. And, you know, we converted her car and, you know, I drove it for a few days and I was really excited for about three days. And then I started to realize, wow,

I love it when it's on electricity and I hate it when that motor comes on. I've got to buy an electric car, you know, and Tesla was still talking. But, you know, still too expensive and nobody else was getting anywhere. So I started putting bids on eBay for used California cars.

I bid on a whole bunch of them and kept losing them. And some of them were going for well over $70,000 just because they were so rare. I finally got one. It was a Toyota RAV4 electric vehicle. It was six years old and it didn't have a charger, but I got it pretty cheap and I managed to get a charger. And I drove that for about three weeks and I was really happy. It was much nicer than I expected, but then my wife took me over.

That happens, by the way. And so at that, you know, because she had said, you know, don't you dare mess with my Prius. You experiment with your car all you want. But I don't want to have anything to do with this RAV4. And, you know, she quickly realizes it's nicer than her car and she's driving it. So I had to retaliate somehow. And I actually, so I started taking a second look. I said, okay, nobody else is producing electric cars.

"But who's going to be producing interesting electric cars?" I started looking at future plans, which I'd been previously kind of ignoring. And that's when I came across Tesla's master plan. And that's what really got me excited about Tesla and realizing they actually have a plan that sounds like it could work,

And so I remember I'm excitedly sitting at the dinner table talking to my wife about electric cars as I often was and she was usually not listening. But I remember saying, I hope Tesla does well with the Roadster 'cause I want about, they didn't name them, but I figured the Model 3 is what I really want. Maybe we could consider the Model S when it comes out. But I hope there's enough people interested in the Roadster that they can live with a two seater and they know it exists and they wanna go electric. And I just hope there's enough people like that

All of a sudden I realized I'm one of those people. So I bought the Roadster. It was, you know, five times as much money as I'd ever spent on a car before. The nearest sales office was 800 miles away. The nearest charging station was 800 miles away. Wow. There was no service center. You had to pay in cash up front. They had just laid off a significant portion of their staff. Everybody I talked to said, do not do this. This is really stupid.

And I think my stomach hurt for three days after I wrote the check. But boy, everything's been good since then. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You've owned every Tesla model since then, right? Right. And what was your favorite one? S3X.

It depends so much on your situation. I mean, at various times, usually when I'm owning each car at the time, it's my favorite one. I mean, the Roadster definitely was when I had it. But then, you know, my mom needed to be driven around and she couldn't get into the Roadster and superchargers became available and the Roadster couldn't use it. So now suddenly the Model S was my favorite car. And then, you know, I get the Model 3, which I'd always wanted a cheaper one. And it handles a lot better. And the Model 3 was my favorite car.

But, you know, now I can't haul my bikes and, you know, we just got a trailer and stuff. So I just got a Y and I'm hoping that will soon become my favorite one, although I'm kind of missing the handling dynamics of the three right now. Of course. Did you get the performance model Y or just the long range? I got the performance. Of course.

Which, yeah, it's so funny. When I bought gas cars, I always got the cheap ones. But, you know, I had a Roadster. I had a Performance S. And the Performance S was, actually, nobody believes me on this. It was the cheapest way to get a Model S at the time.

I knew the Model 3 was coming. I wanted a Model 3, but I needed something that my mom could fit in. So I said, okay, I'm going to lease a Model S, and what's the cheapest one they've got? And I'm looking for like a used 60, a demo 60 or something like that. And they pretty much don't have any, and they've all got a bunch of equipment on them.

And then they were just, they were two days away from announcing the P100D. And so they still had some P90Ds. I wanted a P100D, but I never got it. They had just changed. Since the man's getting a plan. Anyway. So the nose cone was different. They were about to announce a new performance model. This one had been a demo model for a year and had 14,000 miles on it.

And so they added all these discounts and they took all the discounts off the top price. They did not take them off the residual. So the cheapest lease I could get was a two year lease on a fully loaded performance P90D. Oh darn. Oh darn, yeah. They got me on the other end though. Every car since then has to be a performance now. Of course, that's the only way to go. I mean, my three is a performance. Yeah. That's half the reason to own an electric car.

That's the reason why I got the car. I didn't get it because, oh, it saves environment and it puts out there. No, I got it because it goes zero to 60 in 3.2 seconds. You know what, Mark? I'm going to laugh all the way to the bank because I bought mine as a standard rear-wheel drive, and my insurance is very cheap because of that.

I think I pay $200 a month for Tesla insurance. I pay less. Yeah. Well, that was the first question the insurance asked was, do you have dual motors or single motor? I said, I have a single. And they go, good for you. Or

Hey, man, it's a price to pay for everything. Okay, Chad, sorry. Us boys, we get carried away. We get sidetracked. Yeah, we get sidetracked. So, sorry. The focus is... This is Chad. Okay, guys, this is Chad. That's right, Chad. Focus. Okay. All right, Chad. So, cool. So, you fell in love with EVs. Tesla was like, okay, this is where it's at. But there were also other...

manufacturers that were, you know, GM, you mentioned. There are other manufacturers who are also thinking about electric. What do you, do you think, and I don't mean to jump over your time over at PluginAmerica.org. We'll get to that. But to jump ahead a little bit, what do you think

Do you think Tesla kind of paved the way for all these other people to speed up and like, oh my gosh, look what Tesla's doing? Or do you think they already had their own plan and they were trying to like, you know what? Who cares what Tesla's doing? We're going to go our own way and make our own thing. I know Nissan was a big proponent of EVs back in the day, weren't they? Yeah, well, the earliest ones were the Nissan Leaf, the Chevy Volt, and the Mitsubishi i-Meat.

So those were the first three to market along with, you know, around the same time as a Tesla Roadster. And they all had kind of different stories. According to Bob Lutz's book, once he heard Tesla saying they could make a high performance EV, he went and yelled at all of his technical guys who told him it was impossible. And he really, he didn't care about Tesla. He just wanted to show up Toyota and produce, you know, some, something that had a,

something that was green, but still was a good car that people would want. Nissan, so what I've heard from industry sources is basically they used to get credits for hydrogen research and the month that Carb stopped giving credits for hydrogen research, they started an EV program, which was basically converting their cheapest gas car to electric.

the Nissan Versa. They ended up doing more work to it. It wasn't a bad car. So that was Bolt. And Mitsubishi at the time, I mean, their showrooms were empty. They almost went out of business in the US and their dealers were clamoring for something, anything. And they thought, well, we've got this. They had an electric car they'd already been working on in Japan and they just modified it to come to the US.

Now, it's also so of those four manufacturers, another interesting fact that not everybody knows is in the US, all automakers have to sell through dealers and dealers. We can get into this later if there's time, but dealers for various reasons, it doesn't fit in with their business model to sell electric cars. So what these four companies did, Tesla did not use dealers. They sold direct.

Nissan sold direct, even though it was illegal. Nobody cared because volume was so low. Then they initially then they switched over at some point and let the dealers take over. And if you look at the sales chart, you can tell exactly when that happened because the numbers suddenly dropped. GM

didn't make a fully electric car. They thought if we stick in this gas engine, then the dealers shouldn't have any problem with it and customers shouldn't have any problem with it. And we don't have to worry about infrastructure. I mean, it really, it kind of, it made a lot of sense at the time. It's just too bad the car kind of became a political football and it didn't work. Um,

And Mitsubishi, at the meantime, it was just their company was in such a disastrous state at the time that the dealers wanted anything in their showrooms. So that's kind of how they got around things in the beginning to get things started. I just want to... Something interesting you said, I thought, was that...

You know, Nissan, they went and took their cheapest car and they tried to convert it to electric when really, you know, thinking about it from a new technology and the costs and the challenges of all that stuff, like Tesla started high end and worked their way down to how cheap can we make it. So it's kind of an interesting approach how the traditional manufacturers, they were trying to do the cheap mass produced car. They didn't start with high end, whereas, you know, I shouldn't say high end, I should say expensive. Yeah.

Whereas, you know, Tesla started expensive and then worked their way down. Do you think that played into, you know, where Tesla maybe had more success than some of the others early on? Certainly. Well, as a small company, I mean, that was the only business model that could work. There's no way they can make a cheap car as a small company. I mean...

In the auto industry, obviously, there's a lot of variation, but just a rough number. If you're launching a new car platform, it's going to cost you about a billion dollars in fixed costs before you sell a single one. That doesn't include building it, distributing it, sales and service. That's just getting ready to sell it.

And if you sell 10,000 cars, what's that? $100,000 in overhead per car. You're not going to be making money that way unless it's really high price. If you sell a million of them, it's $1,000 per car. That's a much more manageable number. This is why volume is so important in the audio industry.

But in the early days of EVs, nobody was making them in high volumes. So that's why they had to do other things. They had to do compliance cars or conquest cars or halo cars or something like that to justify it more as a marketing expense. Makes sense. Actually, let's dig on that a little bit. So I understand your numbers in the world of ICE, you know, internal combustion. That is a pretty well-known technology.

So you've got your tooling up costs and your assembly line costs and your overhead of putting together something you already know how to build. But now EV turns out completely on its head. You've got to learn how to build batteries. You have to learn how to build a whole new frame structure. You need to learn how to build electronics that can work reliably across the board. That's a very different model. And I would expect the capitalization costs to be much higher just to get out the door.

If they were doing fully electric built ground up models, I completely agree. That's partly why most of them didn't at first. They mostly did cheap conversions for the quote unquote compliance card. I like that cheap. My experience tells me that when you try that, it never ends up being cheap because you either pay on the front end or you pay on the back end.

Right. But it's since they weren't planning on selling a whole bunch of them, the fixed costs were more, more important to them than the variable cost. That makes sense. They're trying to reduce the fixed costs by putting as little developed. So like Ford was just stuffing batteries in the trunks. Oh yeah. Basically zip tying it in place and calling it the day. Although they did sell as many as, you know, some of the other cars at the time, you know,

You know, they just had these regulations they had to meet. They had to sell a certain number. And, you know, they didn't know in their defense, they didn't know if there was going to be banned for the cars or not. They didn't want to be the first mover because that means they'd have to do a whole bunch of work, make a bunch of mistakes, educate the consumers and then have everybody else jump in and do the same thing. Yeah.

And they had the whole problem with the dealers. And I'm not trying to dump on dealers here. Dealers have perfectly good reasons for this. - I'll dump on them. - Yeah, you and me both. You and me both. - I enjoy not going to them, but they don't make money selling cars. They make money on service and on some used cars. They don't make money on new cars.

And so if you tell them, well, gee, you've got to do a bunch of training. You've got to buy some new tools. You've got to install charging stations and you're going to spend more time with your customers selling these cars. How many do you want? You know, they don't want a volume car like that because that's just going to make things worse for them. It's going to cannibalize their existing customers. They would take things like a halo car.

because they don't actually have to sell that they just put it in a lot and have people come in and look at it and then try and sell it some something else they'd also consider a conquest car which is something that's new to the brand that's trying to bring in people from other brands you'll say we've never had this kind of car before and so now they're willing to sell put in extra work to sell to a new customer that they're hoping will come back

Chad, what do you think? Because let me mention there is a PDF you made, which is very, very interesting, back in 2016. And it brought a lot of things from research you did when you were at Plugin, which we'll get to your time there. But what was the main thing? And it was very interesting when I read. But what were the main couple of points, if you can just tell some of our viewers, that made the transition to EV so slow? Like what were things that consumers were more concerned about?

about trying to get into an EV from tried and true ICE car? Okay, so what we were looking at there is we're trying to figure out, you know, more what makes people buy them. And so we're trying to find the holes in the market. And, you know, one of them is the manufacturers not making enough cars. Another one is the dealers being reluctant to sell them. Another is the high costs. Another is lack of charging stations. Okay.

And there's a whole long list of things. A lot of it's perceptions. A lot of it's people not knowing they existed, the automakers not wanting to advertise them, especially not wanting to advertise them as better than the volume cars they're selling.

So I kind of went, there was a whole bunch of studies done. I went through and read all the studies and tried to summarize something and collect all the evidence. And I think one of the more interesting things we found is, you know, unfortunately everybody wanted a silver bullet. Let's, let's do one thing and then EV sales will take off. And it just didn't work. There's, there's a whole bunch of things you had to do. And, and the,

I call them all incentives, whether they're financial or otherwise, but they seem to add almost linearly. If you build a bunch of charging stations, you get a whole bunch more sales. If you add a financial incentive, you get a whole bunch more sales. If you do both, you get double the sales.

And then you can add all sorts of other ways, lower electric tiers for your rates at home when you're charging and things like that. There were a lot of holes to be done, although I think frankly the biggest one was simply awareness. None of the other stuff matters if people don't know the cars are even there.

True. Yeah, so your PDF was interesting to me, and it hit some points home because you would say things like, you know, well, let's get some of these dealers to sell these cars. And the dealer's like, well...

hmm, I got to take money out of my pocket because now I got to train people on this car. I got to get stock and inventory for parts or whatever. And so that's eating into my already bottom line that's eroding away. So I can see how dealers were kind of like, eh, to do it. And then also mentioning that there's no infrastructure to charge. Like, okay, how do I charge it? Will I be able to go...

over to the next county just to see my cousin or will I be trying to find some place to charge? So I can understand how the perception that, well, where do I charge this car? Plus, the car costs more than a typical car when EVs are trying to come out. I can see how back then it was kind of a gray area and people were like, well,

why should I get, why should I invest in? Cause, cause as you said, you know, some of these cars cost more than are close to people's houses, homes back then. It was a lot of money to invest for, for something that was kind of an untested technology at the time. The Roadster did cost a thousand dollars more than my first house. Different times, but still it was just, just one of those ironies. Um,

right yeah the the the early days were challenging even you know as i said most people didn't know they exist you know you can put all the information you want on a website and it doesn't matter if nobody's going to go to the website which is why i tried to do a lot of in-person events and try and get in front of people where they already were like at auto shows um but even then it's really hard because they've got all the questions you know why should i spend more um you know what do i do if and

But, Frank, I mean, really looking back at it, though, and looking at a bunch of the objections and then later reading more about behavior research, really a lot of it comes down to nobody else is doing it. I don't want to be first. I might feel like a fool. People want to do what everybody else is doing. Let me ask you a question. And I'm going to show my age here a little bit, aside from the gray. Mike, you're barely over 35. Come on. So I remember...

Vividly, the smog wars in the early 70s, mid 70s, where the state of California basically mandated to the manufacturers, if you want to sell your car here, you will comply and you will put widgets on your motor to help with smog. I kind of wonder in the back of my head if that whole episode and the bad blood that transpired kind of bled over into the EV world.

When you have the state of California again saying, oh, EVs are great. We really ought to be doing this. The manufacturer's going, ah, you burned me once. You know, I'm not that interested in getting burned a second time. What's your thought? What's your thoughts on that?

- The automatic, the automatic has certainly fought the rules tooth and nail. - Bitterly, bitterly. - And I mean, they have some good arguments. There were some good reasons to oppose it, but they used good arguments and bad arguments and outright lies as well. - True. - They just didn't want the extra regulation. And who wants their industry with more regulations? It just makes things harder. I can understand that. But at the same time, I don't condone lying.

A lot of the problem though, I think, is they realized how hard it was going to be to move it through their dealers. And again, not the dealer's fault, it's just not the dealer's business. So you think that was really the central linchpin to the argument, trying to protect the dealers and keep them happy without alienating everybody else in the process?

I think, I mean, I'm just guessing here. I think most automakers would be happy to get rid of their dealers if they could, but they can't. Yeah. So publicly, it's not that they're nicely trying to help their dealers that they love. It's they realize they need them. And yeah, so they're, they're trying to do things. They, they can build a million EVs, but if the dealers don't sell them, you know, they're just stuck. So, right.

So, Chad, tell us how did, you know, so you're good with EVs now. How did you get into PluginAmerica.org? How did that transition happen? And can you tell us, because I want to know, can you tell us how that process was and the things that you learned out of that and how that company, the organization kind of helped move EVs along?

Okay. Well, as soon as I got my Prius converted to a plug-in hybrid, I joined the local EV association, Seattle EV owners. And, yeah,

And I took my RAV4 down to the meetings and I quickly realized that I was excited about the RAV4 because it was so much fun. It was such a nice car and it wasn't what I expected. I expected it to be a penalty car. I'd never seen one before. I didn't know anything about them. And I remember thinking,

going to the meetings and thinking, well, this is great, but you know, these people, most of them had done conversions, but they already have EVs. These are the wrong people. If I want more people to buy EVs, I need to get in front of them somewhere. Um, so I went to some street fair in Seattle or something and parked my RAV4 there and had great big EV stickers on it. Um, you know, and kind of sit there waiting for somebody to come and talk to me and, you know, everybody just walked past me, of course. Um, that crazy guy with the RAV4. Exactly. Yeah.

And of course, nobody knew there were EVs at the time in Washington. So I tried putting up my hood so maybe people would see there's no engine in there. And I had two people quickly come up and ask me if I needed help. I also, I did end up getting, I started pulling people in in different ways and starting conversations. This was some sort of an environmental green fairs of some sort. I don't remember exactly what it was, but I do know even there,

As soon as I started talking to people about the environmental benefits of this car, their eyes would just kind of glaze over. They weren't going to buy a car because of that. And certainly talking to family and friends, it's not working. It's not the argument that you need to get people to switch.

So I started looking for other organizations that were out there. And unfortunately, mostly I did find a bunch of people with websites saying, gee, EVs are great and you should buy one. But that seemed to be most of what they were doing. The only one that really seemed to be getting out there and doing things, organizing events, talking to automakers, and especially they did a coordinated thing where like several of the various types of tricycle makers were

whether you're doing motorcycles and tricycles, they all got together, Plug in America, organized them all to have the same notice and link saying, let's all sign up here and send a letter to Washington, D.C. saying that we want, I don't remember if it was an incentive or something like that for this type of vehicle.

And I was interested in an organization that was actually getting their hands dirty and getting something done. So I joined them in 2010.

So once you got in there, you quickly became the beta president at some point. So how, you know, were you like one of the more aggressive ones from everyone else who was kind of there like, oh, these EVs are cool. But were you like, no, no, this is the future. This is where things should be. And so did they see that in you and just get you to that level? How did you get to be the president of the organization? Yeah.

I would love to say it's because I'm so wonderful. But I think the truth is that, I mean, I am wonderful. Your wife thinks so. She doesn't like the EV talk, though, so that's not the part that she enjoys. Right. The group at Plugin America was just a group of fantastic people.

And but I think the basic problem was it's a volunteer organization. Some of them had already been working on it for many years. And I think anybody that came in and volunteered, they would let do the job. So I think that's really the truth of how I got there.

And and I quickly got out. I picked somebody else to be president and talked about how good it would be on their resume. You know, but then I was still vice president and helping that we all work together. And, you know, we had like a part time assistant that was paid, the only person that was paid for a while. It was it was hard raising money back then.

First of all, nobody was coming, wasn't looking for our website. Almost nobody had heard of us. The automakers, whenever we try and reach out to an automaker and talk to them about some issue,

always the contact we'd get back, the person who would come and talk to us was somebody from the communications department. It was never product development or something like that. It's, you know, go handle this problem and keep these. They saw, and justifiably so, perhaps they saw Plug in America as an activist organization. And, you know, they're worried that we were going to go down and protest in front of their office and they didn't want that sort of publicity. Right.

And this is something we discussed at our board meetings, and we decided we wanted to be seen more as an advocate rather than an activist. Because we wanted to reach a large audience. And if you're painted as an activist, a lot of people are going to avoid you to not be seen in that light.

There's just a fascinating study on light bulbs of all things. You tell people about, you know, LED light bulbs and all the advantages and saving money and using electricity and all this and the longer life. And then you give them some money and say, hey, you can use this money to buy something from our virtual store, you know, including LED light bulbs. And people buy a whole bunch of them. And then you stick a sticker on it that says environmentally friendly. And they buy a whole bunch fewer of them.

You know, everything else is exactly the same and nobody's going to see the sticker other than you. But, you know, you just don't want to be associated with that sort of thing. So it all goes back to, you know, I think a lot of the people, certainly a lot of the early people in the EV movement were environmentalists and it was important to them. But if you're trying to sell to a mass audience, it's just the wrong message. It doesn't move cars.

Did you have any inner turmoil with you and some of the members? Did some people want to take the organization in different directions from others? Or was it mostly kumbaya and I was like, yeah, let's just go the same direction. Was there any kind of issues while you were there? Mark loves the dirt. He wants to dish.

Well, we did have to kill one person that talked too much. It was mostly pretty good for as hard as we were working, for getting paid for nothing. I thought the whole team worked together pretty well. There was certainly at least one person that when we had the whole discussion about are we activists or are we advocates, there is one person that wanted to be an activist and

He parted ways friendly. He said, I see the difference between us and he left. And I think I honked off a couple of the people that wanted to spread the environmental message and I was trying to tamp them down and talk about

I said, let's divide the benefits. There's the societal benefits, which include greenhouse gases and cleaner air and water. But there's a personal benefits that they're cheaper to own. They're more convenient to fuel up and they're fun to drive. Let's focus on those. Those are the message we should be getting out.

which I still now, I think in retrospect, I think I could have done better than that, but that's what we were pushing at the time. And, you know, not everybody agreed with that. You know, some people still thought the environment's important enough issue. We should talk about it. A lot of it,

Depends on the audience. If you're going to a Greenpeace meeting, certainly you can talk about the environment all you want there. But if you're writing an editorial that's going to be in the New York Times, I think you need a softer message, a more personal message.

Do you think that, or what's your opinion on EVs? Do you think EVs have improved economies since now they're starting to make more of a stronghold in the market now? Do you think they're actually improving things? Yeah.

Certainly improving my life. Mine definitely improved. I love driving these things. I'm generally the kind of guy that'll tell you, oh, yeah, material possessions don't make you happy, but don't take me out of my car. This one works. I'll drink to that, brother. Yeah, and...

I think a lot of it, this is improving over time, but it's, and it's, it's, it's gotten a ton better than at the beginning when like the Tesla roadster was the only thing available. This was impossible. It's just, you know, they're expensive at their play things for the rich. They'll never go anywhere. They'll never work. You know, why should we spend money on this? I think people are starting to realize that, you know, it can make sense. You can save money by owning one. If you really look at your fueling and maintenance costs and,

um but there's also there was another piece of piece of work that i did um where we were studying uh for a local economy you know either a county or state size is is the sort of thing we were looking at and uh what are the benefits there and again i didn't do the the primary research myself i was just reading a whole bunch of studies and condensing and combining them yeah i see the website that's

So I didn't create the website, but I did put together those numbers from the studies. And this is one sample for one area. And it varies a whole bunch by area. And we were working with, this was mostly done for utilities. And we worked with a bunch of utilities, mostly in the Midwest.

And so we use different studies for the different states and different states have different average lengths of driving and average cost of electricity and things like that. So the numbers were different in each place. But I think the point was everywhere we looked, it was like a thousand dollars or more per car per year in terms of economic benefits to the local economy.

And this has really made a huge difference. I mean, the big cities are already getting in on this whole EV thing. But if you go into a small town and they're trying to say, hey, you guys should do some work in this area and help us advocate for EVs. And the first question is why?

And then you show them the economic argument and say, you know, how many cars are there in your area? And what happens if, say, half of them get converted to EVs? What do the numbers look like? And, you know, typically the eyes go like this. And, OK, we get it. We see see the benefits here. Good for everyone but the local auto mechanic and the gas station. Yeah, I don't agree with that. I don't agree with that. Yeah.

And to build on something you were just saying, Chad, you know, you're talking about local benefits, local economy, all good stuff. And you're absolutely right. But there's another side to that. And I just had a conversation with a small town over in Arizona about putting in charging pads. So they're on Route 66, 960.

They're feeling the pain of being bypassed by the I-40 and all that. And I actually reached out to the town and I said, look, you guys have got this prime location. You've got prime history. There's a lot going for you if you were to put in a small pad of chargers. And I said, you really don't need to put chargers in. Just put in the power. I said, most people on road trips charge.

have their own portable charger. I said, even if you gave the power away for free, you know, say five or six kilowatts of power, it's pennies on the dollar. You've got those people pinned in your town for an hour, hour and a half. They're going to have lunch. They're going to have dinner. They're going to shop at the general store. I mean, there's a lot you can do with a very small investment that just brings a lot of money on to the, to the town with hardly any work on your part. And the reaction was kind of funny because it was,

When I started, it was like I was from Mars. And then as we progressed through the conversation, you could see the light bulbs going off incrementally. Again, benefit because of the EV. Not directly from what you were talking about, but some more, I'd call it the indirect benefit. Or the EV tourism benefit.

And what really kind of got their eyes to open is I said, think about this. I said, if you put that charging pad in, let's say you've got 10 chargers, you don't need the EPA's approval. You don't need to get environmental impact studies done because you're not dealing with the groundwater. You're not dealing with toxic chemicals. I said, all you got to do is find a good electrician and get a building permit. So it was a fascinating conversation.

there is a guy, he lives near me now. He used to be in the Eastern part of Washington, um, which is mostly small towns, mostly fairly rural. Um, but they have really cheap hydropower electricity. And, um, so he, uh,

I mean, well over a decade ago, he was working on convincing people in his community, you know, if we build it, they will come. You know, let's build these charging stations. Let's do some advertising. And we'll get people to come visit us. We'll charge your car. You get the great outdoors. Yeah, they can get here. And let's not make the chargers too fast. We want them to get here. Smart, smart. This is, I had...

So back in 2011, uh, yeah, 2011. Um, in, in 2010 I took my roadster from Seattle to San Diego and back. Wow. And, um, for the most part there weren't chargers. I used a lot of campgrounds. It was, it was not fun. It was a pain. It really was. I was mostly doing it to see if it's possible, see what I could learn. Um,

And it sure made a good story later because, you know, then 2011 to 2013, you know, I'd be an event. I'd have my roadster. They say, great, too bad. You can only drive it around town. Well, I've taken it to San Diego. You mentioned that, you know, just their heads would explode as they didn't realize that was possible. But so some of us, there was Jack Bowers from the forum had placed a couple of roadster chargers in Northern California and

Tesla had put some in Southern California. Tom Sachs from the forums had put one in Northern Washington and there was another one in Washington. So I started calling places towns in Oregon. We can cover the whole coast here if I can just get a couple charters in Oregon. And I spent months

um just calling businesses all over the place and basically trying to make that argument of you know if you build it we will come we will spend time there and just but there aren't any evs here yeah because you don't have a charger if you build one it just took forever it finally got done but man that was a pain things things are getting easier people are starting to understand that's a good thing ted do you think it's a good idea or what's your opinion

on the fact that Tesla is now opening up their superchargers to other companies. Do you think that's, you know, with your hat on from all these years of being in this industry, do you think that's a good idea for Tesla? Excellent segue, by the way. It was fantastic. I learned from you. Oh, no. Mark is the master. I think, like pretty much anything else, it depends on implementation.

If Tesla says, hey, anybody can charge here and they'll pay the same price as Tesla owners and doesn't make any other changes, that's going to kind of suck because there's going to be a lot more cars using the same resources. Yep. But they have Tesla has said in the past, if we allow cars, we're going to collect some money up front to expand the network.

If they're either taking money from the automakers saying, hey, we'll allow Nissan's in if Nissan pays us this money or we'll allow your leaf in if you pay us this money or we'll charge you higher rates, whatever they do, however they get extra money. If they take that money and they quickly use it for expansion, I think this is going to be great for everybody. But we'll have to wait and see which way they do it.

And so while you're doing all of that, you know, CCS is coming out eventually at some point for Tesla. So now, you know, when we have all these new people coming, these other cars, Leafs and whatever, coming into Supercharged, now, at least here in California, especially down near Culver City, I mean, there's like lines of people lining up to get to Supercharged. So now you're going to add more to that equation. So the CCS is a good thing. But Mike...

thinks that, oh, no, no, no, no, no. CCS, maybe a year. It's not ready for prime time. And Mike kind of went off into the Chatham-O area. I used to have a Chatham-O. I bought a Chatham-O just because I thought it was cool looking. But I was never going to use it because I'm not going to travel anywhere. But it was a cool looking little, you know, water can looking thing. I ended up selling it. But,

You know, but now, you know, with the CCS, how it is and how Tesla's opening up their place now, maybe, you know, Mike, maybe you can kick in on this. Maybe having a Chatham-O adapter might not be, you know, because people are like, oh, you know, Chatham-O is not going to make it. But now maybe it's a good it might be a good time to maybe find one and hang on to it. So let's clear the air. It's not a question that Chatham-O is not going to make it. It's a dead protocol.

I mean, bottom line, it's a dead protocol. However...

There is a good-sized footprint of Chatham-O chargers laying around in a variety of places. I mean, and even we just had eight chargers put in a couple miles from here, brand spanking new chargers, CCS and Chatham-O. Go figure. Now, a Tesla connector to be found. But not fully dead then. Well, I did send them a letter. I sent them a note and said, what the hell were you doing? Oh, man.

But be that as it may, I mean, I actually bought a SeaTac CCS adapter and then canceled the order. I went to Chatham-O because it's a Tesla-approved part. It works for the Tesla reliably. I don't have to play games with the software. I don't have to, you know, kind of go back door to get my car to charge. I don't have to worry about my car going up in flames. Yeah.

There is a CCS adapter that Tesla's making. It's Korea. We all know that. There's one that's come out of the Ukraine. That one's interesting, but EVgo came out and said straight up they're going to block it. They've already got blocks in place on their chargers. They figured out some way to see that adapter, and they said there's a safety issue with it that you can unplug it while under load and cause some real heartache, potentially, potentially. So they're blocking it.

And my opinion, and this is strictly my opinion, that CCS on a Tesla, especially the older ones like mine, is at least a year out. On the newer ones where it's built in, it's already got the boards, that's a different topic. But for those of us that would have to upgrade, I think it's at least a year out. And even if it is a year out, it's going to be

Call it a couple hundred dollars for the board, a couple hundred dollars for the adapter. You're at $400, $450. The CHAdeMO adapter on eBay is not much more than that if you shop around, and you can have it right now in your back pocket. So, I mean, I was able to pull into a CHAdeMO station today. I mean, literally, pull in, charge immediately. No wait, no mess, no fuss, not waiting for another Tesla to clear out, and time's money. So, yeah.

I'm extremely happy that it worked. I have a Chattamo adapter too. I think I've used it four times. I think it worked twice. But the two times that it didn't work was quite a long time ago. So hopefully things have improved. Mine's been pretty reliable, I have to say. I think it's safe to bet though, if you really want to like not have charging woes at this time, have adapters, have the ability. Like if you're doing a long road trip-

Plan it out or make sure you have some flexibility. But that is the Achilles heel to EV adoption because people like my in-laws, for example, they don't want to have to have six apps on their phone. They don't want to have to have three adapters in the trunk and try to keep it all straight. They're used to their ice car, their gas car. They go into a gas station. It's the same nozzle everywhere they go. It goes into the opening and it works. By and large, it works. I mean, that's what they're looking for.

I mean, somehow we have to get the best network. They do. They do. Yeah. In my opinion, they do. It works. And if they opened it up to everybody else, I'm not convinced that's a good idea. Well, Mike, you got it. You got a chat. So, you know, it doesn't matter if it was a line across the street or not. You was like, oh, I'm also a Boy Scout. So, you know.

I've been in places where the supercharger, there was only six stations, and out of the six, three were dead. And there was quite a line to use the three remaining stations. And there was a whole lot of nothing between Casa Grande in Arizona and my next destination charger. So, you know, again, I'm a Boy Scout, so I like having that little extra comfort that I can go find a Chatham somewhere. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, I know, yeah. Chad, so kind of in this conversation,

cut this a little bit so before i was going to get a tesla for like two seconds i thought about getting the toyota mirai because it was a hydrogen fuel cell i thought that was the coolest thing i look at all the education that y'all have okay i was like wow a thing that runs on water i mean i looked at the they had this nicely done video on youtube have you seen where you fill those

At the gas station, right? Isn't that where it is? No. It's not here. Well, I saw one in Sherman Oaks. So I saw one in Sherman Oaks. It was a shell station. They had a hydrogen station.

spigot right there in the gas station. That's the only one I saw. But hold on. My point is, it was the coolest thing. I thought it was the coolest thing. I thought it was great, but it looked like a Prius though. And I was like, I ain't about to drive in a Prius. So that's why the two seconds. Mark, I almost did a hydrogen fuel cell conversion because I think the technology is very interesting from a science standpoint. However, there's a lot of dangers to it. So I know why it's not as mainstream.

So Chad, maybe Louis, you can tell me because, you know, I gave it maybe a day or two and then because they were giving you like free money. I mean, free. Was it really the styling that turned you off, Mark? Yes.

Okay. So, and the second version came out, it looked like a nicer car, the second version. What was the name of the car? I don't think I've heard. Mirai? Mirai. Mirai. So, Chad, do you know anything about the hydrogen engine?

The hydrogen cars. And what do you think? Do you think those might, Louis, you can jump in too. Do you think those might be a viable thing in the future? Or you think it's just that's just not going to be practical? It's been a long time since I've looked at it in depth. Kind of my general feeling is transportation in general is...

is enormous. There is so much stuff involved in transportation, so many different types of transportation. I'd be really surprised if there's one fuel source that's going to be the best solution for everything.

I would agree with that. I support hydrogen research. I believe there might be places where it makes sense, especially places where you need really high energy density and your fueling locations are very few, you know, long haul trucking, for example.

I don't think it's unless there's a couple a couple of breakthroughs. I don't think it's going to make sense for passenger cars if for no other reason, just how expensive it is to build the stations for it and how expensive it is to make the fuel if you want the fuel to be reasonably clean.

It's interesting because the trash trucks and a lot of the school buses around here are hydrogen powered. Really? Yeah. Interesting. It is. It is. And I got to say, it's surprising for me as a runner to go running next to a trash truck and not fall over gagging from the diesel fumes. Yeah, but the ones here run on natural gas, which essentially they're probably getting the hydrogen for years from natural gas. Probably. Probably.

But, yeah. No, I had a friend that had a hydrogen Honda, I think it was. And the only place that we could fuel it that was anywhere near his house was in a very industrial part of town. And he said straight up he wouldn't let his wife go there to refuel the car. It was absolutely not. I mean, that was typical. Yeah.

Honda did sell a in-home hydrogen fuel station for a while. It was named Phil to fill your car. And many years ago, before I left the car, I didn't look into it. And you thought 50 amp circuits were bad for a whole load of air to fill the place? So here's the thing. That's why I considered doing a conversion because I was like,

I have a physics background. That's what I went to school for. I've worked in labs. I was like, man, I could produce liquid hydrogen at home or do compression, use solar panels for the electrolysis. It's dangerous as hell. You're not the neighbor I want. It's super dangerous. I mean, I'm the guy that'll build his own particle accelerator in his garage, too. So you definitely don't want me as your neighbor. It's like if you're the student out of The Martian where he blew up the habitat. Yeah.

It's super dangerous, but I was genuinely interested in that years ago, which I think I agree with you, Mark. It's an interesting concept, but it's unfortunately hydrogen at high pressure, which is what you need it to be to effectively have some amount of it in your car. That's the problem, right? It's a gas. So you got to compress it or have it in some really dense form. And as soon as you do that, it's dangerous. Yeah.

But yeah, in the county where I live every year there, the county puts on a green fleets program and, you know, they invite a bunch of the local large fleet owners and have some people from industry come and talk to them. And I've I've attended a few times.

And I remember one year, this was eight years ago, nine years ago, something like that. There was somebody from one of the auto manufacturers talking about hydrogen cars and he was extremely upbeat and he went over a bunch of the technology going into the cars and saying, you know, we've got this done, we've got this done. You know, we don't have this yet, but we know the approach and things were sounding pretty good. It really did sound nice.

But then somebody out it says, okay, great. So we can get the cars. But you know, what about the feeling infrastructure? How is that going to be handled? I said, I'm sorry, I've got absolutely no idea. And later after the meeting, I was talking to some of the fleet managers, and you know, one of them was even cussing. I mean, that hydrogen, it's, it's never going to happen. They're just wasting our time.

Even with the big, like you said, the big rigs and whatnot, I would think it might be a good fit for that. Just the energy conversions are not very efficient. It probably isn't worth it. Interesting. If Tesla's battery tech works out in the semi and all that kind of stuff, as we've been seeing, that's most likely going to be a better solution for that problem. Yeah.

Yeah, and for me, you know, I probably would have ended up not liking it because the Performance 3 is so fast, man. You know, so Doug, which is one of the producers, you know, Doug said, yeah, you know, we would give people the radio test in the Teslas, you know. And so he told me that. So, you know, I asked him in the car, I said, hey, man, go over there and adjust the seat. We're going to have knobs in the 3. So go over there and adjust the seat temperature. So they'll reach over there and I'll put the

pedal down. They just, so you can't, you can't get that in an, in a Mariah or a hydrogen car. I'm just, so I'm very happy that I have my, my three. Um, let me, let me ask a question. Uh, let me, let me see this question. There, there's a question from a forum member from TMC and we always encourage you guys listening and watching to please, um, leave us questions that we can answer for you. Uh, and I'm gonna tell you what the question is. It says, hi, hi,

Can you talk about the battery on your show? Compare the 82 kilowatt hour with 4860 battery. If Tesla will increase range with 4860 battery, a test drove a Model Y long range. The energy app calculated greater than 81 K. It felt more powerful. It probably had for a 4860 battery, but the car they were probably really give most customers is a less powerful, smaller battery.

75 kilowatt battery i'm thinking about trading in my car i think it only has a small 75 kilowatt battery that's been degraded about two percent for 3p get the 3p bro ylr or yp or maybe yp but i want the best range and battery does the 4860 degrade quicker than the 82 kilowatt if i trade my car in i don't want to get stuck with another poor battery what you guys think

I would ask to define poor battery because anything he has today has heads and shoulders over what we had five years ago. I agree with that. Yeah. I don't know. I can dive in. I mean, there's a number of things on this, right? So one –

Measuring the kilowatt hour capacity of the battery is their estimate of what you're going to get for helping your range and all that kind of stuff. More is generally better when making that comparison. If you have a larger battery pack, you're going to have more range. If it degrades, it'll take longer to degrade to be as small as the smaller battery pack.

There's always a new feature. There's always a new technology. You can wait for days and months and years. Believe me, I ordered my Plaid in January. I already have it. They've given me two VINs, but I had the old headlights. If I hadn't waited, I'd be...

knocking my socks off already. So I mean, so that's really up to you if you want to wait for that. As far as the technology itself, there have been a number of improvements. Most of the improvements are really for Tesla. It has to do with cost, ease of manufacturing, those kind of things. What will be beneficial to you in a car,

Again, keep this in mind. There's a caveat. It's a brand new technology. It has not been used at scale, mass, everywhere. So we're really working off of theory right now. We don't really know, right? Like there's the theoretical what it could be and then there's the what it actually is. But theoretically, the claims that Tesla has made, you know, their head of research did something like, oh, they did 15,000 cycles on their battery, you know, on a cell. I don't want to say on a pack, but on a cell.

and it only went down to 90% degraded battery. If that's true, if that could hold across production and everything else, yeah, your batteries are gonna degrade much slower, so the 4680 cells will be much better in that case. Obviously there's the weight improvements and the range improvements as far as Mike had talked about this in a previous show, with being structural, that's really helpful. But again, mostly in the cost and the manufacturing of the car.

At the end of the day, it's really up to you. It's your decision of what you want to do. There's a number of improvements. Chemistry, the cathode doesn't use cobalt anymore, which is a huge, again, benefit for a number of things. It could hopefully degrade slower. As far as power and performance, you made a comment, I guess there was something in there about it felt faster.

I just have to say, that's either in your head or that was a software thing because the power in a Tesla is mostly driven by the torque of the motors and the traction on the ground. And that's it. And the torque of the motors, they mostly control with software. Even in a Plaid, you're not getting the full torque. They limit it because traction is your limiter. It's too much power. So having the new batteries, will it make the car faster? No. Now, again...

Again, they may do things where they, in software, allow more torque because the weight profile is different or the charging capacity is different or things like that. But yeah, it shouldn't increase that. But I agree with Mark. Get the performance. Again, keep in mind, coming from a Plaid guy. So performance model is the way to go. That being said, I do not believe the 4680 batteries, if you care about them, are going to be in performance models.

I think they're only in the Model Y SR, which is the only ones being produced in Giga Texas. So that's your choice if you want the new batteries. But again, brand new technology maybe will be better. It theoretically should be much better. But even like the plaids and the Xs, the Model S, Model X, they don't have these batteries either.

it was rumored the Plaid Plus might get them and they ended up due to supply they can't so we'll see what happens in a year or two but anyway I can go into much more detail on the batteries but I think that's enough for this episode we can talk about it in the future but yeah always hey Chad so we can close to wrapping up but tell me what's your thoughts on the Cyberchuck what do you think about the Cyberchuck alright Mike come on

It's unattractive. My wife has one reserved. Did you get a reservation? I was going to say, he's owned every Tesla model they've had. He has to buy one. He also has to buy a semi. He also has to buy a semi when it comes out. And the new Roadster. I am legally obligated to buy those cars. We recently bought a travel trailer. The only gas car that we've missed at all was a camper van.

And nobody's making electric camper vans. So we recently bought a travel trailer, and we're pulling it with my wife's Model X right now. But we're thinking something like a Cybertruck with more range might be more suitable for that. But we've also got a Ford reserved and a Chevy reserved and a Rivian reserved. I was going to say. How many kids do you have?

I have 10 kids and they're all getting EVs. That's right. So if they were all available now, Chad, which one would you get? Well, it'd probably be my wife's car and my wife would probably want the Cybertruck. I kind of like the Rivian. GM hasn't given enough detail.

I'll take the Ford. I'll take the Ford. All right. So Mike's with the Ford. Mark and your wife are on the Cybertruck, and I'm with you on the Rivian. That's probably where I would go if I was a truck guy, but yeah.

If there's a poster child for someone who doesn't need a truck, it's me. I have no reason to have a truck at all. I'm only getting it because it's so ugly, it's so hot. It's so ugly, it's so hot. You just want to crab walk into your parking spot. Brother, that's it, man. I want to summon this big, huge behemoth of a thing out from the park construction and just pick me up. That thing is just the coolest thing ever.

Really quick, can we talk about this documentary just for a couple of seconds? The New York Times is going to do a documentary about, it's called Elon Musk's Crash Course. And in the article, they talk about how Tesla have been

Hush-hush on some deaths that were not made public now. I looked at well I mean, I don't know if that's true or not, but I know Tesla have published on their blog there was an X a Model X where I think was an Asian gentleman who Hit one of those dividers and then there was a Model S back in 2016 whenever was who went up on the trailer which that was just like the the timing of that was just crazy, but

What do you guys think? I mean, you know, Tesla have also saved a lot of people's lives in their cars. And the Model 3 has been deemed like one of the safest cars in the world at one point. So, you know, why do you guys think people are just always trying to pull out negative... I mean, a lot of people hate Elon. He just bought Twitter. So people are trying to get off Twitter. Like, you know what? I'm done with Twitter. You know, and...

I don't know Elon personally, but he's got a bunch of money. He's probably on the spectrum. He can do what he wants to do. But the thing is, he's given us these nice cars that are very fast and really cool. And he set out to say, look, I can make an electric car that doesn't look ugly. I can make a car that looks really nice that you want to take your honey out for down to town. And he brings out the truck. Okay.

All right. So, you know, Chad, maybe you can jump in too. Why do you guys think people just hate on Tesla? So I want to hear Chad's thoughts on this. But first, I just need to say, I think I need to make a T-shirt that says, I didn't use Twitter before Elon bought it. You know, some of us. Sorry, I just had to say it. But go ahead, Chad. No, if you make the shirt, I'll buy one of those. All right.

It's, you know, the hate obviously is for multiple reasons. One of them is just, you know, the backlash against EVs in general. And, you know, I could spend, I won't, but I could spend a couple hours talking about that. I have spent a great deal of time on analysis. Unfortunately, while I think I understand the problem better, I don't necessarily know solutions.

Musk in particular invites a lot of scrutiny because of his bold claims, not all of which come true. And also his constant claiming that he's doing things for all the right reasons. It just happens to line up with making a lot of money in his business.

So what's his real motivation? Is it the good one? Is it the bad one? Is it a combination of both? Probably. Yeah, I don't like it. I don't like the severe backlash. Not many. Most people are actually pretty receptive to the cars in person. There's a lot of hate online. But in person, most people are pretty nice. I did have one guy yell at me once. I was in my Roadster and he said, how far can you go in that? And I told him and he said, you're lying.

I saw a cop here. He can only go 55 miles. A lot of it's just they've heard bad things somewhere for some reason. Right. And so they assume you're lying and they don't like that, which I don't like liars either.

Yeah, I guess I should say that we don't know what the doc is going to come out with. But I read the article. It just seems like it's like, oh, yeah, Tesla, there's deaths that they didn't talk about. I don't know if I believe that. I think Tesla's been – I'm not –

you know, trying to stand for them. But, you know, I think they've been pretty forward about these things because they have a lot of, a lot of stake. They got their full set of driving out there and they really want to get that traction off. I mean, Elon's mentioned earlier this, this, this year that, you know, he wants, he encourages people to, to get onto the FSD beta to experience it for themselves. So it seems like, you know, and also he mentioned in Ted talks that he feels that it's going to be ready or,

towards the end of the year. He'll have a major breakthrough. So, we'll see. He's a comedian.

Right. But, but the point is, it seems like, you know, uh, Elon knows he gets hate, you know, and he knows that, but it seems like that's not slowing him down. And, you know, I think any publicity just, it's just good publicity for them. I don't, I don't care what you say. They, people, people are still lining up to get these cars, you know, you know, when I was getting my second Tesla, there were people waiting months just to get a standard version of a, of a model three. So, you know, I, I,

You know, I think people are just out to get them. I don't get the hate. I just don't get the hate. I don't hang out with Elon. I don't know what he does. But, I mean, you know, again, he gave us his great cars, you know. Haters going to hate. Right. And, you know, Chad, you've had all of them, you know. So, obviously, you think there's something good about them. So, you know, I don't know, man.

I don't know. There's Waymo. Waymo has been trying to do their thing too. I guess I could talk about them, but maybe I shouldn't. I know it's getting late. All right. I should probably wrap this. We can get into in-depth discussion. How about after we watch the documentary, we can talk more about it, and then I will happily get into the nuanced details of Waymo versus Tesla self-driving. We could do Tesla after dark. Tesla after dark. I'll bring the scotch. It would be TMC after dark.

So gentlemen, it's been a pleasure. Chad, I want to thank you for coming out tonight and thank your wife for us for letting us come to our playpen. Louis and Mike are fantastic dudes. I love hanging out with these guys. And we want to thank you for coming out and giving us your input on what you thought about EVs and where it was several years ago to today. Can you tell us really quickly what you're doing now and if you have any links you want to plug for people that are listening? Well,

Well, first, my wife thanks you for getting me out of her hair for the evening. That's right now. I'm just a local for people in Washington. I'm working with a drive electric Washington.org. Um,

And that's that's mostly for communications. Other states like Oregon and California are much luckier and they have statewide organizations that are coordinating efforts. And Washington so far doesn't have a really good one. So we're in a volunteer capacity forming one. Is there anything you want to just tell people that is there some someplace that you'll help out, you know, or lend some support for you? Yeah.

They can sign up for the newsletter on our website. But most importantly, just drive electric. That's what it's all about. Fair enough. Fair enough. Okay. All right. Well, again, Chad, thank you so much for coming out. Lewis and Mike.

My brothers from another mother. Love y'all. Thanks for coming out. People out there in TV land, if you're watching us on YouTube, as always, please like and subscribe. We want to hear what you have, any questions or comments you might have. Please share them on the website, testamotorsclub.com or here in the YouTube comments. If you would like to support the site,

Please consider becoming a supporting member on TMC website. And you can also follow us on social media. Those links are down below. As always, we thank our people behind the curtain, Danny, Doug, Adam, James, and Joshua. So again, guys, this is Tesla podcast, teslamotorclub.com podcast number nine. Ten is coming up.

And, you know, I think Doug's going to give somebody his official team. I'm going to say that. But anyway, guys, I hope you have a good night. Thank you guys for coming out to watch us. Please tell people about this site. If you have questions, like I just said, go to the site. And we'll see you guys next time. Thanks a lot for joining us. Good night. All right. Bye, guys.