I'm Matt Miller and I'm Hannah Elliott, and this is Hot Pursuit.
Okay, today we have a pretty fun and interesting show I have here with me in our New York studio. Ali Javidan who runs Range Energy. It's a business that powers trailers. Of the tractor trailer duo we all know so well, and we'll talk to him about that for a second. But I just had him on my TV show and it was really cool because, you know, Katie Greifeld and Shanalie Basset co anchor my show with me,
and it's all about markets. We mostly talk about, you know, finance, but they were both enthralled with the tractor trailer story. And then I found out that they also have, like me, dreams of becoming a truck driver one day.
Awesome.
I think a lot of people have that, Hannah.
Do you ever, No, no, no, no, that's my nightmare.
But I do think a lot of people have like a secret fan want to see about that lifestyle.
I'm sure.
I mean, I don't get it seems like horrendous to me.
To me, it seems great, just because I spend so much time driving anyway, I listen to the radio a lot, So Alie, I want to first before we get into cars. Obviously it's a cars podcast. Hannah and I talk about cars all the time, and it's it's not a business related thing. It's just like what we love, you know, the passion for the industry and the hobby. Really, but I think your business story is just so fascinating that people would like to hear about what you've come up with.
And then we'll get into your history with Tesla and everything.
But yeah, tell us.
About the range energy trailers and all of the things that they can do beyond just extending the range of a diesel tractor or even a n EV tractor.
Yeah. So the range story basically actually started way back in around two thousand and eight, two thousand and nine, when I was at Tesla and we were just kind of talking about all of these different that's a hint of how we met Hannah in the first time. The first time boy about just all of the different things that need to be true for electrification to kind of
be all over the place. And supercharger networks were one of the ideas, and and uh, and this kind of thought of an electrified trailer to extend the range of one of our evs was just kind of bounced around and a couple of people even looked at it, and it just kind of died off. And as I started to kind of progress through my career, I came to this point to where I said, I went from Tesla to Google, then from Google to Zekes that then got
acquired by Amazon. And after the acquisition at Amazon, I started to think, well, what else can I work on that I'll actually have a more near term impact on our environment than than what we're hoping to have with Level five or level four point five autonomy. And the commercial trucking industry kind of came up and and I started to look around and to see what the technology suite that was being developed for the trucking industry looked like,
what would the effectiveness could be? And I noticed that.
One thing was being left behind.
It was the box, the trailer itself. And I'd been driving trucks and trailers literally since I was fourteen years old, you know, through my career in racing and in the automotive space, one thing that's always been there is been the trailer. And in all of these early days, I was the only one that knew how to drive a truck and a trailer. So I was always driving these things around. So I know about you know, overheating brakes, and I know about going up a hill when you're
fully loaded. I know all of these kind of pain points that the drivers have, and so that was kind of this like aha moment for me was, well, nobody's developing an electric trailer. We're now at the point with things like our understanding of functional safety and other elements that are enabling the autonomous world to put robots out on the roads. Well, essentially, what we're building is a robot and the safety driver is the tractor, and we don't care if that tractor has a human driver in
it or a robot driver. We just care to follow that tractor and make the trailer feel completely weightless. And so that's kind of that idea that sparked in twenty twenty one, and we spent the first year going through the technology to say is this real. We built a couple of small scale trailers to toe behind things like Rivian's and F one to fifties and it really worked.
And so over the last couple of years we focused on the Class eight industry because we know the commercial space is really where this can have the biggest impact on our roadways, not only for efficiency and the environment, but also for safety as well, because we're adding a secondary braking system here with these trailers. The idea here is to help in every single way possible.
And the traction I think is so cool because when you're going up a hill now you have essentially all wheel drive for an eighteen wheeler, that's right, And you've also managed to torque fill at a time when the torque is so important to the driver. Right when you're doing only twenty miles an hour and you're up a grade and shifting.
It's a little scary, it's totally scary. I mean, if you're on a between a six and eight percent grade where there are plenty of those passes out there. The grape Vine is a six percent grade, and if you're fully loaded going up the grape Vine in southern California on I five, you're lucky if you can get above forty five miles an hour in a brand new big block tractor and your foot to the floor and you're
hoping that you're not burning out the motor whatever. And what we did, we did the same we did that same route with our trailer off, and we did it with it on. And with the trailer on, we were able to maintain sixty percent throttle and climb that mountain at fifty five miles an hour. And then when we got to the backside of that mountain, we actually used the axle and region to hold the system at bay at fifty five miles an hour, didn't have to use
the friction brakes at all. We didn't even have to think about runaway truck ramps, and the driver went all the way down the hill with their full breaking capacity in case somebody cuts them off.
Can you just enlighten me a little bit about what exactly range energy provides. Are you you're selling electrical batteries that attach to diesel trucks. No, the actual service.
If you think about the tractor and the trailer that's rolling on the highway, the tractor is the part that the driver sits in. It's the truck, the cab, many different names for it. The trailer is the box. And what we're doing is we're one hundred percent focused on
the box itself. We add an e axle replacing one of the passive axles in that trailer, and then we clip a battery pack underneath the box, and then we have an intelligent drive system that looks at the interactive forces in real time between the tractor and the trailer, and then like and then it makes real time decisions on how much assists to provide either in propulsion or in regent to make the trailer feel weightless to the tractor. And we do this without any can connection. We don't
have any data connection in between the two. We use all legacy connections that allows us to hook this up to an old Peter built long Hood or a brand new Tesla Semi, and we're getting efficiency numbers like going from six to eight miles per gallon up to fifteen plus miles per gallon on an old diesel or a
new diesel. And we're almost doubling the range on the Tesla Semis and the electric semis that are coming out and really helping expand the utility of the tractors that are already out there as well.
So how do you, guys sell, I mean, do you approach individual private drivers, do approach fleets? What's the business side of that?
It's a great question.
Yeah, we approach the fleets, and we talked to the fleets and you know, small and large fleets. This could be the Walmarts and Amazons of the world, or this could be like our current customer, Pedaluma Farms, which is a local northern California egg farm, and we provide trailers to them, and our system can be installed on a Great Dane trailer or Wabash trailer, any of the brands. And what we're doing is essentially creating a smart electric
trailer out of whatever form factor you already use. And one of our biggest current form factors is the refrigerated trailer, because we are the only solution that can continuously sustain the refrigeration unit while providing drive, and we are currently the only path. You know, Thermo King just signed with us a big contract and we are currently the only path that gets them to pure electrification with the refrigeration units.
And don't forget those refrigeration units. It's kind of like this like thing that gets scabbed to the front of a trailer. If you look close, it's only about a third the refrigeration. The bottom two thirds is a diesel engine burning about two gallons an hour just sitting there. Keeping the box cold and so, and it's making noise. So you can't even do your food deliveries at night
in cities because of the noise. So we kind of fix a lot of those problems with the power platform that we build into the trailer.
This is why I think it's such a cool company because when you when I heard about it first, when Ali was testing the Ionic five N with a bunch of Moto journalists, I just thought, Okay, it's a range extender, and range is in the name of the company, but actually it provides extra traction torque fill when you're changing gears. Plus you can power whatever the trailer is doing, for example, the refrigerator trailer instead of burning diesel, you can do that.
So I thought that was very cool. By the way, you started out at Tesla, which I learned about you back then as well, and I know that you worked closely with Elon and developing a number of their early early models, from the Roadster to I think the Model ass. And but how did you meet Hannah because.
All right, so the story goes, so Hannah and I kind of I know Magnus. I'm not friends with him, but we kind of run in the same circles, and we've kind of met each other a few times, and you and I have met like in passing at like Pebble Beach and things like that.
But where we first.
Met was actually at Classic Car Club here in Manhattan when you came to see the Model US for the first time. I was the handler for Elon. I was the engineer and I was sitting in the backseat while you and Elon and the video and the camera guy.
Wow.
So that was the first time.
What year was that? Was that like two thousand and eight.
Nine ten timeframe?
You know what? That is wild?
And I remember that, you know, I remember that because that day Elon was talking about cars being computers. Yeah, and it was the first time I had ever heard that idea, and it was just kind of weird.
It was. It was like a very It was a new thing, you know.
He was trying to explain how it's going to be seamless from your phone to your car to maybe your house, and like a car could be a computer of a type. It was just so radical.
It was crazy.
Because you know, one of the cool things about that is that most people don't know Elon knew. I knew that night actually, so all of the infotainment in that first car was run on Mac Mini's and and so then you imagine the connectivity from your Macmini to things like your iPhone and or your your phone and your
laptop and all of that stuff. And that's where that thinking started to come, where where this should be a completely seamless experience and don't forget, like whatever we say about Elon, and especially in the context with Franz and other designers that he works with, the obsession is the experience.
It's not about some specific piece of technology. And so that's when that's that exposure was that you know what we can we can actually really see a connection here if we start using the right platforms for some of these things. And that's that thinking kind of bloomed from.
There philosophically, like thinking back to those early early days to now, would you ever have expected the path of evs to.
Go that it has gone?
And what is your what is your outlook on where we are now with electric vehicles compared to what you thought it was?
Then that's a great question. I thought we would be where we are today in twenty twenty, so about five years behind where I originally thought we would be. I think there's a couple of things here. I think, you know, Hannah, you see this. You guys see this as well as
anybody else. There was this phase of you know, kind of copycatting Tesla from everybody from Mercedes to not so much Toyota, but even Toyota fanboid on Tesla with the Raft four EV project, right, And so there was this first phase that I thought was gonna you know, like I didn't think Diamond or BMW or Volkswagen Group would fall into that trap of like me too, copycat, but we all see it, and they're still struggling with infotainment like today with all of this stuff, and that set
the entire industry back at least five years instead of focusing on what they can what they did really really well, and then just layer the technology in piece by piece, and so anyways where we are today. I also thought that Tesla wouldn't be the only and primary charging network out there. We knew when we were looking at the seventeen seventy two connector back then that it was not being utilized to its full potential and it was actually
under engineered for what we would need today. And so we actually predicted that there would be some shift back away from seventeen seventy two. I also thought that was going to happen a long time ago. But you know, the biggest surprise to me is the lack of charging network from other people that actually works as nearly as well as the Tesla network.
So why hasn't that happened?
Frankly, I think we don't have enough uh And I hate to say this, but I don't think we have enough unity in the regulation space. And I think there's a lot of different philosophies and thought processes, and no regulator wants to put their foot down and say this is how it should be done, and this is how we're going to ensure again the experience. It comes down to the charging experience. Like we have a mutual friend
Alex roy right, and he talks about it's the experience. Yeah, And so it really comes down to that experience, and nobody that's building a charging network that's not Tesla prioritize the experience above everything else, other than maybe Rivian Rivin is actually doing it.
You have to also acknowledge that there aren't many people who are willing to do what most people think can't be done. And I know that Elon Musk is a controversial virtial figure, but I remember driving the first roadster with Jason Harper. We drove up to Bear Mountain and almost you know, ran out of juice on the way back. But it was still at that time, Tesla stock was like ten dollars and everybody was like, this guy's crazy. He's going to take on GM and Ford like in
your dreams, dude, never gonna happen. Yeah, And obviously the same thing when it came to rockets. You know, he's gonna take on NASA and Boeing. You gotta be kidding me. And now he's gonna cut two trillion dollars out of the budget. Now I realize that hasn't happened yet, right, And I know it's very controversial, but I'm just saying there's not many people in the auto industry who were like,
screw it, I'm just gonna do this. I'm gonna go build a supercharger network, even if it sounds expensive and unbelievable, legally difficult, you know, from the real estate aspect to the investment, Like he just did it.
Yeah, I think it's it takes a few things. First of all, you have to have like an obsessive first principle's view on life, like everything. It really has to be like, well, we can't do this. Why can't we do this because the material science doesn't allow it? Why not can we go talk to some universities to change what the thermal conductivity of this material is to help with you know, more current through these IGBTs for example.
Whatever it is like, there's a bunch of different things where he would never stop until it got to a physics limit. And he had the guts to do it. Obviously he had the funding and the money and the backing to do it. That's a big piece of where you get those guts to do it. But he just never lets off the throttle when it comes down to why.
By the way, this is one of the things that made me initially think we got to get Ali on the show because you're you are that scientist, right, you don't tell people a lot, but you went to mit right, And at the same time you're like a race monkey. You're like a race car guy.
Yeah.
Yeah, So I think that, uh, you know, that dichotomy is so cool. And the roadster that I drove I know at the time, I thought, oh cool, it's a Lotus, you know. Yeah, And actually when you finished, when you finished engineering on that, it went back to Lotus and then they adapted your technique.
Yeah.
I think one of my first interactions at Tesla was actually as a contractor because there was something really funny, Hannah. You remember the red roadster they had was like the first prototype that they let the media look at.
Yes, and I drove with Elon in that in La.
Yeah.
Do you remember how agro that suspension felt. It was like choppy and all of that. So my first job was to get that vehicle ready for the second round of media tune the suspension, and that was as a contracting position, and so I went through, I revalve the dampers, I changed a few little tiny things in the geometry, and that ended up becoming roadster sport suspension baseline and so then that and then they were like, well, who did Roadster, who did this? Who fixed this problem? Let's
hire them instead of having them on contract. And that's that was my end to.
Tesla, speaking of how much you got like Tesla was considered an underdog at the time, I was working for Forbes and we really had to fight to even cover Elon and this little startup in California called Tesla. I mean, it was a fight to convince editors to even cover it, and eventually we kind of got around to it and I ended up writing a cover story on Elon. But I'm curious, like, is the person that you worked for then the same person that we see in the news now.
It's hard to say, Like, you know, I didn't. My interactions with Elon were very kind of mechanical. We didn't really spend a bunch of time with each other. It was always kind of in meetings and in just hallways about talking about different types of things.
I still see.
That Elon there, and I imagine that a lot of that is still there day to day in the office. Beyond that, you know, I don't know, I you know, it's it's he didn't have such a public presence that he does now back then, so it may have.
Been back then.
Yeah, I mean they were there were, Yeah, we would when we were building. You came to the tent in the back of SpaceX when we were doing Model Less too, I think, and when we were in that tent, it was just random people coming by, like Elon was just like two or three. We're working literally twenty four hours a day, sleeping in cots in the corner of SpaceX to build the first models, which is in the Peterson now.
But we would just be like three in the morning, Uh, hey, Jon Favreau is coming to scout the spot for Iron Man, like okay, and it's just Elon and John just walking through. So there was a lot of these like crazy crazy times back then where was his guard was down. He was just really about having fun and showing off that he was having fun.
All right, let's talk about the cars that you like and drive. And you mentioned that you sometimes would drive the truck around because you're towing race cars, and I know that you spent a lot of time on the track beyond the Ionic five n Yeah. Yeah, what how did you get started in that? I mean, was it just the suspension, the you know, the technology that got you interested or what was it.
I was always obsessed with cars, like since I was a little kid and I found my first little pile of hot wheels in a dumpster, I was like, yes, I was so happy. Because we were an immigrant family, we didn't have any money to buy stuff like that, and so I just kind of it was from there that I just never let.
Off the throttle. I guess I'm sorry for the pun.
In college, I studied civil engineering, I got bored with that went into mechanical engineering, and as I joined the mechanical engineering team, I noticed that they had a race car project and that was Formula SAE. So I immediately dove into that, and I ended up running the SAE program at the school, and just racing just kind of
got into my blood. And as I graduated, I went and worked for a suspension company that built a bunch of suspensions for BMW and race cars and a bunch of other stuff, and I got into touring car North American Touring Car with Speed Touring and NASA and a
bunch of SECA racing. I did that for a while as a race engineer, all the while like thinking I could be a fast driver and all of this, but I really just kind of was yet to discover that my true passion was building the cars and then watching a really good driver going and extracting the most out
of it. And then I just kept going into racing, and you know, I would move up to different series and you know, I was running different race part racing teams for dine In, for BMW, for a bunch of different teams, and it got to the point to where I had to move out of California. It was either go to North Carolina or go to Europe to England and be on an F one team. And I just said, you know what, it's maybe time for a career change.
I kind of want to settle down. And I looked for something that wasn't so much traveling, and I took a really basic tech job. And right after that is when I found Tesla. And I was sitting at a boring tech job, somebody called and said, Hey, you're the closest engineer to us that no suspension in Redwood City. Can you please come and fix this project or problem that we have?
So cool, I'm not to take it back to the trailers, but I want to take it back to the trailers, because like with all the racing, did you just sort of pick up the skill of being able to drive a tractor trailer just by necessity basically, so because that's not a normal skill to have.
Well, it was mostly most of the stuff was all kind of smaller scale, like not it wasn't full uh Class eight stuff. But my cousin, who I'm closest to, uh and I kind of grew up on my uncle's farm and so there was like always towing something around with a tractor. And then it was like, okay, you
could do that when you're like eight or ten. Now when you're like twelve or fourteen, you can take the pickup truck and take this, like, you know, this trailer across the street to the neighbor's house because they need the trailer. And then you just drive. And when you're in a rural neighborhood, you kind of like all bets are off. And then it became my cousin and I were the go to for all of our friends, like can you help us tow this boat? Can you help
us move this thing? And then by the time I was around nineteen, my cousin and I had a towing company where we had our own tow trucks, recovering cars for the CHP and for Triple A.
Yeah we're eighteen or nineteen years old.
Yeah, So for all of the people who have the fantasy about being a truck driver, what do you want to tell them? Is like the one thing that's going to be really a surprise and a lot harder than they may expect.
So is there something.
Yeah, First, I will preface all of this by making sure that everybody understands I'm not claiming to be a big, like, you know, multimillion mile Class eight truck driver. I'm you know, I have an incredible amount of empathy for those those folks, and they are some of the hardest working folks in the entire country, and New work and we work with a lot of them, we employ them, that we love them,
they and everything that we're built like. We actually have a tagline that says our innovation is driven by empathy, and that's empathy.
For the driver.
So we actually start We start by building a system that gives the driver the most comfortable and safe driving experience possible, and then we look at how we can extract efficiency numbers from that. And that's where we get these drivers flocking to us and saying, oh my gosh, please don't take this track this trailer away from us. My old peter Bilt feels like a brand new Tesla Semi.
I love it.
So I just learned when I was talking to you earlier in the green room about the lack of a torque converter. I had no idea that the transmission was so different.
In a big rig, you have.
A ton of torque that's either coming out of the motor or needs to be reacted on by the weight of the whole system, and so there's no true automatic trans Actually, I think Allison is just now releasing a new automatic transmission soon that has a torque converter. But a Class eight tractor trailer has a semi automated manual
because of the big torque transitions. So what that means is that if you're on an eight percent grade with a full load, you can't get above fourteen to eighteen miles an hour because you can't tolerate the time that it takes to shift, and it's always monitoring torque and it doesn't want to blow the transmission up and it doesn't want to burn the clutches out, so it's in this kind of perpetual back between first and second or
second and third gear. What we do is we sense, because we can kinematic again first principles thinking, we can sense the interactive forces and we categorize that, oh man, this trailer or the tractor is trying to shift. So now we do our torque fell algorithm and so we kind of as the torque is dropping from the tractor, we fill the torque on the trailer intelligently because we're looking at those forces in real time, and then we
make sure that we make that feeling seamless. And now you get a shift that used to take one second or one point two seconds down to like zero point three seconds now. And it's also extending the life of the transmission too, So there are all of these other knockdown, knock on benefits that that show up.
We're back to the trucks.
I mean, you're right, Matt, Like it's it's like surprisingly fascinating. Yeah, you're completely sight about this. I'm like, wow, okay, And I mean I got more questions about EVS, but.
And it's so multifaceted. I want I wanted to ask about. So what I find so interesting is suspension engineering and the transmission technology, right, and because I think what what we all want, and especially a purist like Hannah, is really good mechanical grip. Right, And that's what I heard you and Matt talking about a couple of times when you're testing that car, but also in reference to your GT three and to the most successful kind of cars that that we like that we like to talk about.
I find I think maximizing mechanical grip is good. It's you know, it's kind of the mission of all the new super hyper mega cars. But I think for me, as a pure driving enthusiast, what I would prioritize is actually feeling the level of grip at all times over maximizing the grip I would rather have. So, for example, I have a nineteen seventy one BMW two thousand and two with weighs two thousand pounds as about two hundred
and eighty horsepower. It is the most fun car I've ever driven, and I've driven all the great seventy three rs and all of this stuff. I actually went from a two oh five that had pretty good two five section tire that had pretty good grip down to a one eighty five, So that and my lap time's went down a little bit because I can actually now predict when the car is uh is coming off off of
its grip. Like you know, Hannah, you do all of these vintage rallies, like how good does a proper bias ply tire that sized properly for the car feel and how predictable does that feel when you have the right amount of grip, not too much grip.
That's everything. That's everything.
I mean, that can make just what you're saying, like a car that doesn't have gobs of horsepower a really fun car to drive, because then you're working with weight and momentum. Yeah, and that's to me actually more fun.
And the more grip you have, the more it masks all of the different things that are happening in the car.
It's so funny that we focus on at least I do, you know, horsepower and torque and you know the traction control systems and all this stuff. But when we hear I mean you're at the Formula one race right when we hear drivers talking, or I watch Motor GP more when I hear pilots talking, it's all about the tire. I mean the tire. There should be a podcast that's just about tires, you know.
I'm sure there is hire Dead yet.
I was just listening yesterday to getting ready to talk to Alexander Rossi and he's got a podcast mostly about IndyCar. But there they talk all the time just about tire degradation. That's like fifty percent of their conversation.
Really, it's true, but it's also the feel like you know, if you if you can tell when your front end is about to wash out, then you know when you can be at one hundred percent.
Exactly, like you can start feeling like I mean, that's the brilliance of an early nine to eleven is that steering is so direct and you're sitting on top of that, that steering axis and you actually feel feel the little differences in weight when when you're kind of in a rut and you come out of a rut in one little lane and like the most insignificant thing that you would never feel is just such an event. In the
nine to eleven. It's a positive event because you always feel like you have control if you're driving it properly.
But it's it's there.
And I think that's one of the challenges of you know, when you do a restomod, for example, if you do it balanced and correctly, you can kind of translate that feel up uniformly. But a lot of these folks that kind of hit and miss are the ones that are putting too much grip too much roll control and too much power in a platform that really needs more l Again.
It's never meant for that, that's right.
Yeah, Like, if you look at the nine to elevens, like the Singer versus a nine to eleven k that Tuttle's building, it's like insane, Like I would take you know, one Tuttle car over four or five of the Singer cars as beautiful and gorgeous as they are just everyone.
I've never driven a tuttle car, but like the seriously serious nine to eleven guys are all about Tuttle forget any marketing. They don't need to market like, which that is legit.
Completely, That's that for sure.
I mean I have to ask Ali, you're you really sort of saddle two worlds between the EV's. But then also, like we're talking about classic cars and air cooled Porschas.
That junxtaposition is so interesting, right.
I mean, yeah, can can the two exist happily together sustainably, you know, forever in the future? And like, are you optimistic about EV's when all we hear about and I admit I'm part of the media writing these stories, but that EV sales are going down?
Yeah, I think I'm still very optimistic about EV's. I think, say, EV sales are going down because we have market saturation, plus a little bit of an ambiguity of what the next phase of EV's are going to look like. You know, Volksmen, is no good charging network for it, and what's the charging network going to be to support what I'm building? So I think, you know, for me, the way I balance this is, I will I love all of my environmentalist friends, but I will never give up my my
old cars. But they they're used in context, right, And and my commuter is a Rivian, and I love my truck, and I could never imagine driving another truck now that I've had this Rivian. And so I think if we contextualize these these tools, then there's plenty of room for you know, I actually envisioned an amazing world where we could go drive up in the La Canyons and we have no commuters up there because down in the you know, taking the the express lanes on their EV only highway, right.
Right, great, great scenario. I love that idea.
So imagine a world like that. And I actually think.
Where the Angelus Crest is.
Yeah, yeah, I think at the end of the day. We have to make room for both. We have to otherwise, otherwise nobody's gonna win and nobody's gonna give in.
It's just so interesting that so you are, at the same time someone who loves and appreciates you champion the analog sort of feel of, you know, the pure experience, and as a technology innovator, you're like pushing the envelope of the future. So you're like, you've got one hand.
I'm trying to offset all my old cars.
But is there is there like a technological innovation that you absolutely love and would want to put on your BMW two thousand and two.
Yeah, I mean, I'm actually going through a full tear down and rebuild to put a modern CANbus twelve V backbone in the two thousand and two so that when I'm gone, my kids can know how to service it and deal with it with whatever future tools the mechanics are going to have. So I think that there's some room for modern modernization and a lot of these new restorations that are out there. But I also think that there's some room for electrification in some of these restorations
as well. I personally don't think at nine to eleven is the right car to electrify. But like we're all the Cadillacs and lowriders and like Lincoln's and like electrify those don't put some LS motor in that, Like that's what needs to be electrified. Electrify some of these old trucks that are driving around that are just kind of like show pieces, Like those are the things that we should start thinking about electrifying as resto mods. And and I think again there's room.
For all of it.
We just can't look at it as kind of an absolute and and you know, I would love to have an old electric Bentley or an old Rolls Royce that's been converted to electric and just works every single time. And but I wouldn't want an old electric Mira forget that.
Yeah, would you electrify a roller Hannah?
Never? No, No, I mean I can support your your viewpoint, but for myself, no, I would never.
I wouldn't do it or Rolls Royce either.
Don't worry, Yeah, I just it comes to me. It comes back to the charging network at this point. You know, it's less about like how I think it would drive and more about the reality of trying to live with that. I would hate it. I would just hate it. I get a lot of stress trying to charge in LA.
Even that reminds me of one thing that I had I've been wanting to ask you. I spent the last week driving GMC Sierra EV and I think it's a great use case for electric vehicle. Like it's the truck is so big. I can fit my two daughters car seats in the back, and you know we can fit this strollers in the bed obviously, you know, for a family vehicle. I think everyone now understands that a pickup truck is a fantastic solution. Sure, and you know, the
EV propulsion system means it's not as herky jerky. It's very smooth and quiet. And the one thing I've noticed though in and I love I love, by the way, the infotainment that GM. I think and Mercedes are the two manufacturers that really get it right.
But are you sure about that? I really think, I debate you.
Yeah, do you think there's another one that's better?
Mercedes is horrible? Probably we love it.
I think it's I love Mercedes. I am die hard Mercedes Benz. I think the three hundred SL is the greatest car ever made.
What's the problem with the inbox?
I think, so we just bought a g l E sixty three S. We got Lemon Laude A a year ago, and then we went after the Lemon law we went to go a new one and they went from the push buttons to the capacitive touch. And then I started to spend more time with the new version of MBUX. And before this I had an s FI fifty or a five eighty sixty whatever S class with that same infotainment.
It was frustrating the number of redundancies that they had for interactions in the vehicle, where you just started to get confused about what interaction should I prioritize over the other. And in fact, I don't want redundancy. I want this to do something different. And so there was redundancy but no flexibility in the infotainment layout. In addition to that, it's frankly just too much. It's too distracting for at
least for me. And I think like, for example, if you look at the previous generation g Wagon where it's relatively simple, there's a screen there, I think the bus, Yeah, I think that hit it. Well, Like for me, this kind of two thousand and fifteen and through twenty twenty. Time frame twenty nineteen kind of was the sweet spot, and they've gone a little bit too far on the
current model. And that's literally why I don't have an S class right now, because I don't want to buy that infotainment system.
The thing with the redundancies is I can see your point, but to my mind, it's like, oh, there are different ways to get to the same spot, which is to me more convenient.
Sure, Like I don't have.
To go through only one There's not only just one channel to get to whatever I want to do.
I can find it a couple ways.
There's this philosophy called paradox of choice where when you're under pressure the you know there's a bunch of different elements to paradox of choice, but you don't want to hand the customer too many options. And the reason that I'm confident in saying what I am is because then I went out and bought a Cayenne and the new Cayenne, which is a little bit more sparse and it does have a little bit of redundancies, but it's straight into the point. The buttons do what the buttons need to do.
Capacitive touches there for the more deep interactions, and they've layered those interactions in such a way that do not distract you from the point of driving to drive.
I do think also especially for an S class, like on a nine to eleven, I sort of want the volume control on the steering wheel as well as the knob right, But on the S class it can just be the knob. I don't need the steering wheel volume control.
I think it should be on both well.
But I also think that like these little elements, like for example, one of the things that we we learned in the early days of Tesla was that different manufacturers will put the volume on the different side of the steering wheel, and like, why does Mercedes put the volume on the right side when there's another knob in the center console and sometimes in rob on the dash, it
should be on the left side. When you're one hand driving with your arm on the on the on the windowsill and your other arm is you know whatever, holding your partner's hand or whatever you're doing, you want to have the volume kind of so you want to distribute that interaction so that you always have a way like if you have a soda in one hand, and you want to turn the volume up on the radio, Like, what are you going to do if it's in your right hand?
You tell you it?
Ali, are you right handed or left handed?
Left handed?
Me too?
The best people are, okay, So this so a counterpoint to this though, I think you want a left handed roller button because you're left handed. Because for me, one of my favorite little inventions ever is the right handed on steering wheel volume control in a Mercedes because I don't have to take my hand off the wheel. I mean, I don't know about you, but I'm nine and three. All the time, I never remove my hands from the yeah, right.
But yeah, I just see it as an efficiency thing where you can play with the volume with either hand.
Maybe I'm biased.
I just want to quickly interject that Dodge has the best system with the knobs behind the steam hearing wheel for channel changing of volume. Anyway, Anyway, we could debate
this forever. I wanted to ask you an ENVH question, which is I've discovered in the GMC Sierra EV that I'm driving it was also the same in the Hummer GMC Hummer EV and the F one fifty Lightning that I hear a lot more cabin noise and kind of rattles and squeaks of the headliner and all that stuff in these big electric trucks than I ever have in a gas truck or a diesel truck. And it just made me wonder, does the motor drowned out somehow the sounds of the car in a way that the EV doesn't.
Is that a problem that maybe Tesla worked on.
Or I think it's a multi So there's it's a compounding problem. So there's what you said. So you haven't an engine in there, no matter how smooth it is, when it's under torque, it's vibrating and it's making some noises and things like that above about thirty to forty miles an hour, unless you have like a real performance car,
everything comes from tire and wind noise. So that being said, when specifically, the vehicles that you mentioned now are being built with stiffer structures because now they have batteries in them, and the vehicle structures of these things that used to be trucks are now much more like SUVs and vehicles.
And if you don't treat the other elements that you know, the interior MVH pieces, it's almost kind of like the vehicle was engineered and the NVH was kind of pasted on, and then the next generation is going to have purpose built. And I'm not in these companies. I'm not making any claims or any of that stuff, but that's the perception
that I have. But you know the reason I say that is that when we built those first handful of modelsses, we actually had to hire more people into the NVH team to really kind of come back and say, Okay, how do we actually fix this the right way? And we innovated a lot in NBH, even on those first models's in ways that you know a lot of the different car companies started to follow. So there is both sides of that.
Can I just jump in and say, for anyone who doesn't know, NVH is noise, vibration, and harshness Basically whatever noise comes in through the car, through the engines, tailpipes, road.
Noise, break, squeal, interior rattles, all of that.
And in the EV obviously there's no underlying motor I mean engine sound to mask anything, so it's very quiet. I of course put the fake sound on in any EV where I have the option, and I usually love it. And this is the thing, and I think I'm ridiculous, but you know what, the Chevy has a great sound.
Mercedes I love their fake you know, engine sounds. And you were saying that I think the Ionic n which is by the way, totally different from any other EV and that you can shift it, which is also a very cool thing that I'd love to have you explain. But you said you like the noise that the totally fake noise that that makes too.
Yeah, I mean that was fake enough and to where it was not cartoony but not trying to be engine. Yeah, the the Ionic five end was a really cool experience.
You know.
The thing that we always say a lot of people talk about the kind of the simulated shifting or the fake shifting, it's actually not that. It's actually simulated torque and power curve then that you can then shift through.
And so that's the real key element here is that when you're on the track or even driving in the canyons or whatever with an Ionic five V and even in the traffic, you actually feel that torque and power curve rise and then drop back down, and then your natural intuition is I need to shift, I need to shift and it almost just comes as like second nature
in that vehicle. And it's because not because of the noise, not because of your ability to interrupt torque with a shift lever, but it's because it's following a very very specific torque and power curve. And one of the things that Matt and I, Matt Farah and I were talking about with the Macon and we talked to the Hundai engineers about this is put a dial in here so
that I can actually go through different engine maps. So I want to see what a V twelve swap is like in Ionic five N or if someone LS swapped it. So then you have all of these different power and torque curves that you can experience in your Ionic five in or you know, Portion wants to do it with a Macon or something like that, and it really it amplifies the experience beyond just you know, some some noises with shifting fun.
All right, dude, let me just get your favorite cars and then we'll go. Okay, I mean, I know you mentioned a few that you have, and the two thousand and two I imagine would be at the top.
Of your list personally.
Yeah, but you have a GT three or you had a GT three as well, And.
Yeah, you had a nine nine one GT three. Uh, sold that and then bought a car that had back seats, which was a nine nine one dot two Targa GTS and mint Green.
And did you like the Targa better? Because I feel like, for NVH, the GT three is like too much for a daily.
The Targa's got its fair share of squeaks and rattles, but it's not a stiff. It's not as stiff. But you know, I so obviously my my cars are never stock. So my Targa has like roof suspension and wheels, and alois kind of blessed the car with a bunch of his cool parts. But the reason I like that Targa is there's a bunch of history with Targa tops and Porsche, and I'm I really really love the history of Porsche.
I love the history of BMW, which is a whole different subject, but the Targa was always something really special to me. And the first Porsche that I really fell in love with was a nine sixty four Targa in mint Green when I saw that as a kid. And then you see all the cup cars and all the fun colors and nine sixty four cup cars back in the nineties. I was like, oh my god, now I
love porsia. And so then I literally was in the middle of the pandemic on my birthday scrolling and I was on peak car market and I said, oh, look at this mint Green manual nine nine one dot two Target with zero miles on it on this auction site and it closes on my birthday today. Click done, And so I bought it. It was I was like, I looked at my wife at the time. I was like, hey, I'm buying this and she said, are you okay? And so anyways, I bought that car. I love that car.
So anyways, that's my That's the car I put the most number of miles on. It's got over forty thousand miles now in three years. I've driven it up to Jasper and Vamp and back a couple of times. And yeah, yeah on LA from the Bay area San Jose.
Wow, Yeah, that's impressive.
I drive that car a lot.
That's great.
As Magnus says, dirt don't slow you down.
And so and then my other car is my nineteen seventy one BMW two thousand and two that I've had since ninety seven. It was my college cheap beater for five hundred bucks and it's been rebuilt a couple of times, and then it ended up being in the BMW Museum in Spartanburg and it was it won a bunch of events during Pebble Beach Car Week when I finished it.
So that's kind of my favorite car ever. Now the car that's missing from my collection is an Early nine to eleven, and I would say, for me, the ultimate early nine to eleven is a seventy three RS and then second place is nine cc four career RS, And both of those are kind of on my radar right now. Whichever one I find. There's a lot of seventy three rs is out there, but I kind of really want a nine st four RS the most.
I'm with You do well on your hunt. You'll have to come back and tell us when you find one. Oh yeah, I would you find the one for you?
Well? We do.
We do one of these the fun things that we do at Range is we do community days for the drivers and for our partners, and we do these community days at big racetracks, and so we rent the racetrack for the whole day we did. The last one was at Sonoma Raceway. We'll invite you folks to come out. We'll have some fun cars to drive around and you can bring whatever you want.
I look forward to it.
Royce is welcome absolutely. Okay, good, Well we'll have Matt bring his Bentley out.
All right, dude, so great to meet you. Thank you so much for coming in. It's been such a pleasure and it.
Was so great to see you.
Yeah, all right, Well that was a great conversation. I'm so glad we could get him in and on the show and on my TV show as well.
Yeah, we need to have him back. He's really fascinating.
Yeah, I look, I feel like there's a font there's a well of stuff still to come from him. He was explaining like how Ken Block when he was first doing an EV, Jim Conna realized that there needed to be a torque curve, an artificial torque curve, and that's how like they got to that. And also how like he realized there needed to be torque phil in a big rig transmission. Like all this stuff that's way beyond my brain.
But I also like how he he like doesn't shy away from answering questions about Elon and the early days at Tesla. Yeah, because that's what I mean for me, that's I want to know all the gossips.
So that's cool.
Elon Musk has such great hair now, and in the early days of Tesla he was like as bald as I am. I gotta find his guy, find his guy. I gotta find his hair guy. All right, Well, that does it for today's show. I had a great time, so thanks for joining me.
Me too.
I still don't want to become a truck driver, but I'm interested.
I'm in a think it's fascinating.
I totally want to. I mean, if if something were to happen to my wife and kids, you know, I can't. I like, your bed could be behind you. That's so awesome. You're driving in a cab that has a whole thing. I would love it, just chasing that a long white line.
What would your name be on the ceber?
My dad's uh, my dad's handle was Snowball, which I don't know if that had any kind of double entendre. When I was a kid, I didn't really think about it, but I think I might adopt that for some reason.
I like that inherit it love it on the internet.
I'm shower fan in any of the forums that I hang out in.
Oh, no baths for you.
I just when I was a kid. I love to take showers. I could have spent hours in the shower. I still can. My wife yells at me all the time.
Hours in the shower.
The Matt Miller story, Yeah, that's my that's my autobiography. All right. Cool. Uh. We'll be back with you, same time, same place next week, and as usual, shoot us any emails if you like. Hot Pursuit at bloomberg dot net is our address email address. And that's how I knew that it's not Angeli's Crest because somebody emailed me and was like, dude, you're you're wrong.
You know what?
That is a Tomato, Tomato Porsche type of thing. I don't think you should feel bad about that.
I if it's Tomato Tomato, I have no problem. But if it's Porsche Porsche, I have an issue because the name is Porschae. That's a family name, Porsche.
I know, but I am not going to be so pedantic as to call someone out for quote unquote saying it wrong. If they say Porsche because sometimes that just flows better when you're speaking. You know, we naturally do you say Caribbean or Caribbean, Well, it kind of depends on what I'm saying in the flow of my conversation.
True, Also, sometimes it just sounds cooler, Like when Tom Cruise says Porsche in Risky Business. I wouldn't correct him.
I'm not going to correct Tom Cruise.
I am pretty pedantic when it comes to language a lot of times, but not on that issue.
Okay, well, I got questions for you that we're going to talk about later.
All right.
I'm Matt Miller and I'm Hannah Elliott, and this is Bloomberg