¶ Jamie Butters
All right , Cerillo is out . This is Auto Collapse . Jordan Cox tag team you are in , let's do it .
What's so perfect about him ? Tag teaming right now is the main place where you see tag teaming happen . Oh , here we go . Is in a , is in a ring , you know ? Like , like WWEWWS .
Oh my gosh , and they know anything about or Nate pants is definitely a requisite .
They love or Nate pants and you ? You won't know this in the poor video , people won't even know this , but right now Jordan Cox is wearing or Nate gold stand up , Jordan .
We don't time for this .
So the tag team is just like the perfect reference for this one .
But what if I stood up and was like naked right now ? You ?
won't , you won't do that .
That was a family show .
Jordan , you're just listening .
He's got shiny , shimmery gold pants on and we'll tell you the story . I was doing high kicks now not like Nathan , nathan and Greg like , but it doesn't have anything to do with today's guests .
Actually , jordan and I were met Jamie Butters , today's guest editor of automotive news for the first time at a David Kane event and I think we both were kind of blown away by just his his level of insights and his kind of chill vibes . He's kind of got Bill Pullman vibes . You ask me ?
Yeah , especially like this suit jacket he was wearing . Oh so classy . So like that classy jacket with the patches Like , oh man , that was it , it was , it was just fit is personally perfect .
It's funny to have a guest that we all read on a regular basis .
His work is like on our computers auto news day in and day out , and so we thought we would definitely want to get him on the podcast and ask him you know , maybe some of the questions that they don't ask him in the regular shows , because that's how we're going to ask him the tough questions and see if he can handle it .
It would probably won't be that tough .
We're just not that mean .
He's a class . Yeah , he's a class . Well , we hope you enjoy this conversation with Jamie Butters .
Hey , Jamie , it's good to be with you again . Thank you so much for joining us here on auto collabs , you bet Paul glad to do it . All right . So a lot of people probably recognize your name because everyone reads automotive news and you know you're kind of running the show over there , the .
There's a texture to your story , though , that I heard a little bit of when we we met for the first time at the David Kane event and I we love to talk about how people like , how did you get here into automotive to begin with ? Give us the background . The people need to know who you are . Oh my gosh .
Do you want the two day version ? The two day version .
Well , you give us the two day version of a soda con over cocktails .
Yeah , I'm trying to keep it a little focused . You know , I started my dad was a journalist and I always loved hanging out in newsrooms but I kind of thought I wanted to do something different . I was really interested in business and economics but then I got to college and it's sort of like I want to study journalism .
I feel like it's something I want to do with my life . I can , I would feel good about , but I man , I did not enjoy journalism school . I loved doing it . I worked at the radio station and the newspaper and kind of really struggled in my classes .
What is journalism school like ? What assignments do they give you in journalism ?
You know , it's like you go out and you write stories . You come up with ideas and you interview people and you write stories , but they go nowhere . I mean , maybe if you turn it in , maybe the teacher likes it , they'll show it to the rest of the class .
You know , I would go write something for the student newspaper and it'd go to , you know , 20 or 30,000 educated people . The next morning you get your feedback .
Yeah .
Serious feedback from the audience , you know , and it was even in those print days when we didn't have all the interactivity . It was a very direct feedback loop , you know , from our college community in Iowa City , iowa University of Iowa .
So I did that for a while , stopped going to school for a little while it's a tending bar and thinking I wanted to get a real job , but not quite getting around to it . My parents said , hey , smart guy , there's a job .
You know , cedar Rapids Gazette has an opening and so I ended up getting hired there , kind of started back to school then , because I couldn't get the writing job that I would want Until I had a degree . I could get a job because of my talent , my hard work , but I couldn't get the jobs I wanted . So I started back to school .
Luckily , I met a woman at the Cedar Rapids Gazette . She got a job in Lexington , kentucky . After some negotiating . I followed her down there , ended up getting my degree in finance from UK . Oh , it's okay , it's all good . We worked out . We got married , three adult lovely daughters , everything's cool .
You know , I was just like I don't want to move to Kentucky unless we're gonna get married and have kids and everything's gonna work out .
Amen Great place to start . I feel that way .
Kentucky's like the armpit of Ohio is the way that I see it , lovely things about it .
But I was wary as a Midwestern or of moving to the South . But it was a lovely place and a great experience for both of us .
And so then I got my degree in finance and the business desk at the Harold leader had just lost like three of their five reporters a bunch of really good people , going off to Nashville and Chicago and places like that , and so I kind of stepped in and started covering everything until we filled in the rest of the team and part of that ended up being , you
know , going to cover the job one at the Sienna at that Toyota Georgetown plant in central Kentucky and that's , that was my first auto story and I did that . You know I started writing a little about Toyota . I ended up getting to go to the Tokyo Motor Show in 1997 . That was my first ever auto show .
That's a heck of a one to start on right One .
my editor was so cool and smart , you know she had been a business writer , Went in earlier in her career , and so she said you know she had a little money in the budget and could send me . She said don't try to cover the show . You don't know what you're doing , we don't know how to edit it , the time zones are all against us .
We'll just run AP like we usually do . But go , you know , fill up your notebook , learn all you can , come back and we'll figure out what the story is . And I got to come back and write about this new kind of car called a fuel cell and I'm sorry , you kind of car called a , called a hybrid .
That was this stepping stone toward EVs and ultimately something called a hydrogen fuel cell . So I got to learn all about that and try to explain that I also .
The other two stories were like let me try my hand at this super simple thing .
He's back . That was like Jetsons mode , right .
Oh yeah , yeah , it was , it was . Well , it was so cool that first gen Prius and you still see it in some . But they had the little graphics , the video .
You know that they're just very simple graphics , but it was on the little energy's going from the wheels to the engine , from the engine to the battery .
Yeah , and that whose power and what here , and you you know , and it was really Let you understand what could be a really complicated process .
That's okay . So when did you decide ? You liked auto . What is it Like ? Are you a car guy at all ?
came later . I'm . I like cars . I don't consider myself a car guy .
You're a good company .
I do like cars , but I'm like I don't know if I , when I buy cars , I really want the value . I'm like a lot of regular American consumers . I want a reliable car that's gonna get me where I need to go , do what I need it to do , cause me as little headache as possible . But I was there .
It covered autos about 20% of the time in Lexington and then the Detroit Free Press called me up there had had a strike and a turnover of their team and the strike was settled and I was like all right , I can come to Detroit . And Well , I thought like that was the pinnacle of journalists , business journalism , right , covering autos for the Detroit Free Press .
Yeah , that seemed that was pretty big deal for me and it was still , you know , really hard to get by , even though you know the auto riders tend to get paid better than a lot of other reporters .
It's kind of like every other position in auto . Why is that though ?
Oh , it's so competitive . It's so competitive and ours Not that other reporters don't work hard , but our hours are so routinely grueling .
Oh my gosh , it's so funny how automotive journalism Really does reflect that in my mind . You can literally go and say all those things about all the other positions in a dealership , and whether it's marketing management . This is all right , we're already on a good collaboration .
It's going absolutely so .
Okay , so you're a Detroit Free Press , right . You're working the long hours , You're doing the work and it's still there's something there that is like so more yeah , and I was .
I was probably getting a lot closer to burning out than I was aware that I was . And then I was fortunate enough to two things . First I got to go to China and work on a project about General Motors and its strategy in Asia , and that was Super experience , great to get to , you know , write something that long .
Get to go to a place I'd only ever read about before . Really fascinating stuff . And then that work really helped get me into the night Wallace Fellowship at the University of Michigan .
So I got to take like a school year off from the Daily Grind and I woke up one day in like November and it's like , oh , this is what it feels like to be caught up on your sleep . I was catching up on some sleep .
My wife , unfortunately , was not so .
Came back to the Free Press . I then became auto editor and kind of ran that coverage for a while through another round of UAW talks .
Then I went to Bloomberg news and spent about 10 years there and I was like I'm gonna go to the next one , I'm gonna go to the next one , I'm gonna go to the next one , I'm gonna go to the next one , I'm gonna go to the next one , I'm gonna go to the next one .
I went to Bloomberg news and spent about 10 years there here in Detroit Running mostly running the auto team and other transportation coverage . Of course , I started there right before you know GM and Chrysler's bankruptcies and it was a really incredibly turbulent and working around the clock and Really intense but very great learning experience being there .
And then almost five years ago I came to automotive news and it was sort of it's this different ? You know we're all I covered . I've done so . I've covered autos for now , for 25 years I've covered autos exclusively since basically the day after the bush versus gore election and .
But at the Free Press , you know you're writing mostly , mostly for employees and Also for consumers and the general public , politicians and stuff . But but employees , employees of the manufacturers employees yeah , employees of the manufacturers Yep , there are big readers and employees of suppliers . You know you a w members salary folks .
Yeah , that's our , that's our core audience at Bloomberg . Of course it's the financial markets , it's the bond market , to a lesser extent the stock market , again policy people . And then here at automotive news , like we have a huge footprint , of course , with dealers there , you know a big chunk .
They're not even half of our readers , but they're a much bigger chunk than they are for anyone else , any of the other . You know big players . So it's been a great opportunity for me to learn a lot more about dealers , get to meet a lot more of them . Then I really got to in the other jobs .
Gee .
I want to go back to , because it's fascinating to me that you we were in a Toyota dealership the other day and Not to like give away all of the you know there's not a of the Toyota dealer meeting but you said , hey , I was kind of the first on the scene , I was there writing about this new technology that was gonna be the hybrid technology and being in
the Toyota Prius and and Toyota having been in the game for a significant amount of time and still being a massive leader in the hybrid game and I'm sure , your perspective on the industry because you're seeing everything that's going on with EVs and with the , with , you know , the new entrance to the market and that's the massive push , with Toyota still staying in
this like Very heavy hybrid game . The majority of their their vehicles . How how is that going from ? Like I covered this first thing , now Everything's about EVs and Toyotas over here . Like remember the one time when we were doing the thing back in 97 and we're still doing it ? Yeah , like what is that ?
What does that feel like to kind of cover those things in that , in that world of you constantly being in that ?
Yeah it's . I mean it's . It's been a fascinating journey in a you know I . Of course you only can benefit from all that perspective by spending all that dang time , but it's been really fascinating .
¶ Toyota
Toyota is definitely in the crosshairs of a lot of environmentalists now because they've stuck with the hybrid strategy and I think they've just been trapped by a lot of traditional thinking . You could call it logic if you want . I mean , evs are money-lick-lick .
He goes traditional thinking , thinking logically , that was great , that was great .
But because the tech world sometimes is a different kind of logic , we're going to lose money on everything until we suddenly become huge and awesome and then it'll all turn great . And that worked for Elon and it worked for Bezos , but there's a lot of cats it doesn't work for especially if you also factor things .
So if EVs are going to lose $5,000 each during a ramp-up period of five years , 10 years , you look at Tesla's own curve from deep losses to significant profits . If you're Toyota and you make $10 million a year , you can't even lose $1,000 a piece or a year . That's $100 billion You're going to lose every year .
I'm sorry , $10 million times $1,000 would be $10 billion . $10 billion a year in losses would be devastating for Toyota . That's not the way they roll . I think Toyota and Honda and the other Japanese really had a light bulb moment this spring when they went to the China show and saw all the EVs that were coming out of China .
I think they've seen in the West Europe mostly , but also in the US a lot of excitement and enthusiasm around EVs to where they're now saying , okay , maybe it is a losing business proposition for the short term , but this is where the market's going . It is where enthusiasm from consumers is . So we've got to do it and now they're really buckling down .
Toyota has already added 20% to their investment on EVs . It's going to take some time , of course , because everything takes time , but they're going to come back . I think they're going to come out real strong eventually , late this decade maybe I mean , toyota is definitely one of those .
It's like well , maybe we didn't do it first , but we're definitely going to do it best . Yeah , that's usually their play and some of their batteries solid state battery technology , like they might just come out of the back and be like oh , how does 700 miles of range sound ?
Now we would be remiss if , in the middle of the UAW strike , we didn't say something about it .
So here's my angle for you , here's my question , because I feel like we need to play this for Jamie because he probably hasn't heard it yet , but we have a little sound track that we play every morning when we update it , and it sounds like this UAW update .
We had to do it we had to do it .
Does that opening riff ? Is that from like Johnny Carson ? Is that ?
Bob Barker prices . Oh right , yeah , you got it .
Something from the 70s ? Yes , yes .
So here's my question for you and the angle , because we see all the updates .
Everybody can read that , but when you all are thinking , especially at Automotive News because you have readers and audience in dealer partners , dealers , uaw and union workers and OEMs , right that , like all of those , are a massive part of the audience that's paying attention to what the news cycle is how do you honor and also keep all of that updated in a way
that serves them but also recognizes that the other side is listening and watching , because it's the central source of truth for the majority of automotive . What does that look like ? What's that conversation look like behind the scenes ? Give us a peek into what that feels like right now .
Right , some of it . I don't want to sound like a cop out , I mean , some of it is just doing what we always do , which is just try to get the facts , put them in context , be fair . We expect every story to be read , scrutinized and prosecuted by management , shareholders , labor and everyone else .
That sounds like a low stress position you have there .
It goes with the territory , because you don't want to do harm to anybody by short changing them or being flipped with their situation . But you also need to be interesting . And again , it's about being relevant and being right . We also I think I've talked about this before .
I think I talked about it , probably at the cane thing , paul , but I reorganized the newsroom around what used to be my formula for the front page Still kind of is , but the idea of what I call making , selling and thinking .
So we have our automaker team , we have our retailer team and then we have our tech and innovation mobility team and of course , it affects the tech and innovation group less , but right away it's like , hey , what's happening with dealers ? Retail team , be out there talking to your dealers . What are you hearing ? What are they hearing ? What are they worried about ?
Ok , if something's happening with UAW , let's get out there , let's see it , let's hear people and , of course , let's talk to our sources at the companies .
Let's talk to all the experts , all the historians , all the labor pros , and really it's just trying to know as much as we can and then really to tease out the stuff that we don't know , the stuff we don't understand . So we have a story I guess I could talk about it still in the works , but hopefully it'll be out before this podcast Right here .
Well , hold on a minute Before you do that . Why are we launching this ? Because it could be tomorrow . We're switching on tomorrow morning , OK good . No , this won't be out before then , Right Good ?
So we're looking at one of the big issues . When you see Sean Fain , when he's been out during these rallies and when he's been at the picket lines , he wears a red t-shirt that says no tears . Well , I mean , we had a contract already where we eliminated the tears there used to be . If you were hired after a certain day .
You could only get to a certain way .
I was trying to make sense of that shirt today when I saw it .
It's frustrating , but to them they've sort of . I mean , it's frustrating to me that the semantics have changed and they redefined what tears are apparently .
But they have this issue where if you get hired at a McDonald's like Wage , it's eight years before you reach the top pay and it used to be 90 days , no-transcript , that's a long time , that's two contracts really , before you can get to the top pay and that's that's a lot to expect from people and it's really not competitive in this labor market .
So I would certainly expect the bottom , the entry pay , to come up and they've already offered the automakers have all offered to cut the ramp up time in half . They may have to come down further .
I mean , to me it's like there the UAW has a couple of really major non starters in their demand list the four day work week , the return of defined benefit , pensions . You know the automakers just can't do that , as I keep saying , you know they why they might run into a get fired if they came out with an agreement like that .
So maybe if they can give up some of that , maybe they can gain some more on this issue of tears , you know . But it's just , it's like it's a , it's a puzzling one , because the truth or the reality , or the perception of the reality has shifted over the years . So that's it's challenging , but that's what makes it interesting .
Certainly interesting .
No , no small tasks , so kudos to you and your team for just keeping us aware and and serving the industry in that way .
The Mike Martinez and Nick Bunkley , of course Vince Bond and Lindsay Van Holy as well . But Martinez , you know , in addition to being a top notch forward reporter , has really owned the UAW coverage and super proud all the great work he's been doing . It's so good .
It's quite a team . Well , it's been fun to get to know a little your journey . Take a peek behind the curtain and of the real time stuff . Right now I'm excited to to hang out with you at a Sodu con and hear your perspective there amongst panelists , and it'll certainly be fun . So thanks for joining us on our website . Absolutely glad to do it .
Ok , he handled that UAW question with all the boys in the world . I was like what he said .
He was like what .
No , but he actually gave some some really cool insights into like hey , some of the things that you don't see and we've got to figure out as journalists and we do this work too here at a Sodu is like wait yesterday and then four years ago and but now today , and mapping all that to together across teams serving dealers , serving you know all of that .
The experience that he's had for the past 25 years in auto sets him up for that and I like I for one , the when he goes prosecuted daily , for I'm like , yep , that sounds right , but the way that he handled it seriously .
So how knowledgeable and humble he was and the fact that he just basically said we cover the story the way that you should like , that was mind blowing .
That's pretty mic dropping . I know we're his new fan club , if you haven't noticed , and he's like what number one ? He's like you got a soda , kind of like you're making a bigger deal than I get around here and we're like , yeah , we're just trying to help you build your resume so you can leverage it into your next contract negotiation with Casey Crane .
So , that's all we're trying to do really on the show today . Thank you so much on behalf of Kyle Mounts here , jordan Cox in standing in for Michael Cirillo and myself . Paul Jay Daly , thank you so much for listening to Auto Collapse .
Sign up for our free and fun to read daily email for a free shot of relevant news and automotive retail media and pop culture . You can get it now at a so to dot com . That's aso tu dot com . If you love this podcast , please leave us a review and share it with a friend . Thanks again for listening . We'll see you next time . Welcome to Auto Collapse .
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