**The Great Car Conundrum: Finding the Perfect Vehicle for a Growing Family**

As a parent, one of the most daunting decisions you'll ever make is choosing the right car for your growing family. With children ranging from 6 to 2 years old, and another on the way, it's essential to find a vehicle that can accommodate all their needs while keeping in mind range, size, and affordability.

**Model Y or Model X: The Verdict is Out**

Ben, a seasoned car enthusiast, recently shared his thoughts on the Tesla Model Y and Model X. While Ben has two kids who currently fit comfortably in the Model Y, he warned that adding a third child might be a stretch. He joked about using inflatable jump seats to make do, but acknowledged that it's not ideal. For families with multiple children, Ben recommends considering alternative vehicles.

**The Kia EV9: A Promising Alternative**

If you're looking for a three-row full-size SUV that won't break the bank, the Kia EV9 is an excellent option. With its impressive features and impressive build quality, this vehicle promises to be a reliable choice for families. However, it's essential to note that the EV9 will only become available in the future.

**Volvo XC90: A Luxurious Option**

For those who can afford it, the Volvo XC90 is an excellent option. Ben had the chance to experience the upcoming model year XC90 and was impressed by its quality, design, and features. However, due to its high price point, it may not be a feasible choice for many families.

**The Rivian R1S: A Luxurious Option with a Price Tag**

For those who want the best of both worlds, the Rivian R1S offers an unparalleled level of luxury and functionality. With its impressive performance and advanced features, this electric SUV is sure to turn heads. However, its price point – a whopping $100,000 – makes it out of reach for many families.

**Gas Cars or Plug-in Hybrids: A Viable Option?**

As the market continues to evolve, gas cars and plug-in hybrids have become increasingly appealing options for families. The Kia Sorento Plug-in Hybrid is one such example that offers a 40+mpg rating when combined with electric power. While it may not offer the same level of luxury as the Model X or Rivian R1S, it's an excellent compromise between range and affordability.

**The Minivan Dilemma**

Ben's current car is the Tesla Model 3, but he hasn't ruled out getting rid of it in favor of a minivan. While minivans are often associated with family-friendly vehicles, Ben acknowledges that electric options like the Model Y can still work for families – albeit with some limitations.

**The Verdict: Making a Decision**

Ultimately, making the right decision comes down to individual preferences and priorities. With so many great options available, it's essential to weigh the pros and cons of each vehicle. As Ben joked, he'll have to make some tough decisions next year as new models are released. For now, families can only hope that their dream car will become a reality soon.

**Ben Sullins: A Final Word**

Before signing off, we'd like to thank Ben for sharing his expertise and insights with us. If you're interested in learning more about the latest car trends or would love to see some of these vehicles in action, be sure to check out Ben's YouTube channel or find him on social media.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enforeign welcome back to another episode of the macrame show Hartley you're not where I can't touch I can't you're not with me anymore it's very sad no sadly not yeah although in the future wink wink there's gonna be some episodes where we are once again together and by the way uh no we didn't plan to all wear white shirts um in a white room with silver you know and whitish products that was not none of that was planned we literally for those of you who are um interested we all had like a giant house together in which you know a lot of the Mac Rumors team was together and I just came downstairs like all right man you ready to record these uh these podcast episodes I didn't notice at all that we were wearing the same like kind of shirt it was just a plain white shirt like it had no idea until after we filmed it I don't I don't think I noticed until after people started commenting on it honestly so well we well needless to say we got the message yeah yes we were wearing the same color shirt so needless to say you're going to probably be seeing some very similar you know just pull the shades back we recorded a couple of episodes at a time um some really cool episodes we have the founder of Mac Rumors Arnold Kim he's going to be talking all about Mac rumors and like the history and some super interesting stuff that honestly I've been at the company for like five or six years now and I had no idea about Hartley you you know you learned some great things even Arnold learned some things that he had no idea about uh and so uh yeah we're gonna be having some episodes like that and today we were planning on doing you know our basic format with the news and then jumping into our main topic which is all about Apple car and we already filmed that segment with our guest Ben Sullins and we realized that we had an insane amount of content there to where I think we just don't need to do the daily Roundup of news because there's just so much so with that said we're gonna jump in to our pre-recorded version here with Ben Sullins about the Apple car and kind of the history of EVS moving on to our main topic you might notice that we actually have a guest Ben cell Collins thank you so much for joining us we really appreciate it you are our expert on all things electric vehicles which is our main topic the Apple car um I never thought we would actually be talking about this in all like seriousness because in my mind Apple's just not making a car and that's kind of how it started with the rumors and everything for many years but now it's become something that actually seems like it's on the trajectory of happening but before we get into the Apple card specifics why don't you tell everybody more about your channel and like your history with EVs and you know kind of your expertise on them yeah sure so I stumbled into YouTube I think like a lot of people where I did something that took off and I started to do more of that and that thing was I bought a Tesla back in 2016 and I looked at how much money I was saving by owning it on fuel and people really liked that message I think maybe it gave them more validation about their own purchase or whatever you know uh Obsession people already had I kind of validated that for them and then so I just kept covering you know my owner experience being a Tesla owner back in 2016 and then that grew into Lots like a whole YouTube kind of content business and then eventually other companies started making interesting electric cars they weren't just Nissan Leafs and things like that and so then I started covering um and doing all that so now you know in some circles I'm a auto journalist where I get invited to anytime there's a new EV coming out and I go review that or whatever but I've sort of shifted away to where now I just wait for them to give me a press loaner and they'll bring one of these new EVS to my house they let me have it for a week and then I get to drive it like a real car I get to daily drive it and you know I'm not the first to post about it but I think my posts and my reviews are much more authentic and real than just hey they flew me to some exotic destination for three days and I sat in it for 30 minutes it's like no I lived with this I've got two kids a wife I live in in Southern California so I get to use it like a more common use case than just hey I'm A Car Guru right so it's kind of a different perspective well yeah um but yeah especially with like events like that where you're kind of being pampered and like you're in a nice totally yeah I mean it's it's definitely gives you you know we're human so it gives you a different perspective on the product or in your case the car that you're out there to see um and so it's nice that you get them at home where you're not being pampered you've got your kids you've gotta you've gotta do the pain that I know all too well of taking out the car seats putting the car seats in the new car trying not to go insane during that time frame and so that was kind of one of the main reasons why um we were excited to have you on is because like we wanted to talk more about the state of EVs and then kind of drop in some of the news that we've heard about Apple and see like what is it going to take for Apple to like make an actual successful vehicle um and so with that said what are you currently driving right now are you still in Teslas or have you moved on to something else yeah I I sold my my Model S uh just over a year ago and I got a rivian r1t so I have a truck now and it's perfect for where I live for my situation with the family it's a smaller truck but it's super fun um I will say it's not as good as the Ford Lightning the electric F-150 in terms of its truckness but it is so much more fun and where I live parking spaces are tight roads are small so it's really great so that's what I have and then my wife drives a Tesla Model Y and we've owned at this point every Tesla they make of the exception of the original Roadster so lots of experience as an owner of there and of those and then I've driven probably any EV you can name out there with the exception of maybe some of the latest ones so with regards to Apple car if indeed it is going to be cool with that we've seen quite a lot of these rumors developing over the years and it really seems like Apple's Ambitions have changed as time has gone on um where initially they were looking at something that was perhaps uh without a steering wheel without pedals without conventional seats are more like a limousine configuration inside the car and it looks like now they have sort of repositioned the vehicle to be a little bit less ambitious so now we are expecting it to be effectively just set up like a normal vehicle at least with a driver's seat a steering wheel and pedals so in terms of design and what we could expect this interior to look like where do you think Apple needs to take this vehicle in order to separate itself from the competition as it stands but also stay realistic within what is going to be possible within the next five years or so yeah it's a good question I think it's a smart move for them to sort of scale back those ambitious plans and you guys would be more in touch with this than I am but I mean apple as I you know and I've been working in Tech since 1998 so I've been in the tech industry as like a database engineer and data scientist for many many years and apple I've never really I mean early days was different but nowadays I don't see them as major Risk Takers with the products they develop and I say that because their products are so Mass Market that they can't to do things that are so wildly out there that like they would risk it being a failure so I think it makes a lot of sense for them to scale it back to a design that people won't like like you're saying originally like or more limousine style configuration no pedals that would be a huge leap for them and for the consumer and I think that would be very risky and at their size and their scale I don't know or at least from my experience following them it doesn't appear that that's something that they have the appetite for so I think it's smart what they're doing in terms of How To Succeed uh I I have no doubt that uh the quality is the thing that would separate them from everyone else um if you guys have driven EVS or you know the different um Spectrum out there you have the Teslas of the world who are still innovating like it's 2012 and like if they have to you know they take away the gear stocks they don't even give you a whole steering wheel anymore they're making these things that are still really boundary pushing when people like me that have been following them for a long time argue they don't need to like they've won right they're there it's almost like when the iPhone came out what it did to the smartphone market you had a lot of people that made fun of it there was no keyboard oh my God how could anyone blah blah blah and now basically every smartphone is either an iPhone or something that is looks identical to it right you can argue features to you know the cows come home but the point being they won and everyone else needs to get on board and so I think Tesla did that as well in the EV space and that's what you see with almost all the other traditional automakers is they're trying to play ketchup they're trying to be more tesla-like so I think Apple could do a really good job here by looking at what Tesla's done and sort of one-upping them in areas that they are better at and I would say the number one area that I think they would be better is in quality one of the things like I have an iPhone now this is my my first iPhone um and the thing I do love about it is that I can rely on it whereas a pixel phone will crash if you open too many apps or dumb things like that where you're like I can't have that happen now Tesla has famously it all infamously all over failed in the quality Department again and again they make incredible products but there are a lot they have a long ways to go that's why when you see things like Mercedes making the eqs or BMW making the i7 like their top tier highest end sedans you know that those are going to be better cars they may not be as good on the tech side but the people buying those cars would rather have the quality vehicle versus the super advanced technology so I think Apple has the opportunity here to kind of kind of eat Tesla's lunch in a way if they do it properly because clearly they'll have the tech side of it especially in and I saw some notes I don't know if I'm assuming basically the next iteration of Apple carplay which is much more um like like hardwired into the into the car not just like a an app that runs um I assume that they would use that or some variant of that maybe something you know beyond that which would make it even better in the technology inside of the the the car and then if they can deliver on a quality vehicle then it's it's going to be a serious headwind for Tesla I would say no one else has really given Tesla a run for their money in fact if you look the recent stats they still are something like 80 percent of EVS sold are Teslas so like they own the market especially here in the US um the only one that I've even thought of that could give them a run for their money is Apple um and so quality I would say would be the big differentiator for them so if that's going to be key to the Apple car's identity one thing I'm really intrigued to get your thoughts on Ben is obviously all all car brands sort of have this identity not only in terms of perhaps the things they're known for but also just in the in in terms of the way these cars feel and particularly with EVS we've seen automakers try and layer on certain gimmicks maybe with uh like the BMW I4 and the sort of the the the sounds that they've engineered for the uh for the vehicle to make and this sort of thing and even just in terms of the the handling and the just the feel of the car ultimately so I wonder if you had to speculate on what we could expect an Apple car to actually feel like to drive where would you expect that to go are you just expecting it to be uh like a Tesla or are we expecting it to be a bit less playful perhaps I don't know what what are your thoughts on that yeah they would need to have good acceleration because that's all EVS um that but that should be easy to accomplish just because of the physics of how the motors work and everything uh I would hope that that the handling would be better than Tesla's I actually and I think most car enthusiasts not if you talk to you know Tesla Twitter it's a different animal but if you talk to actual car people they hate how Tesla's Drive they're really poor but it doesn't matter because they excel in so many other areas that people the majority of people who came from a Honda Civic or Toyota Camry or Ford Focus to them it's a magic vehicle right but to actual car person they're like oh my God I can't even ride in this thing so I would hope that it would be better but I still think and you guys correct me from wrong but Apple's market is the mass market so I don't think they would be trying to say compete with a BMW or Mercedes or Porsche or somebody like that who have very distinctive sort of feels about them I would imagine that it would be be hopefully a comfortable ride and then maybe you have different driving modes but in terms of suspension all that I mean this is honestly the biggest question for me about Apple making a car is how do they I mean I guess they have all the money in the world but still you have to have a factory that factory has to have a supply chain behind it and you know Apple obviously is tremendous at this with the other products that they make but this is like a whole new product line I would I would argue going from an iPhone to an iPad the the supply chain is probably there's a lot of overlap whereas going into a vehicle it's a totally different ball game not that they can't do it but that to me is the biggest hill to climb here so how they come up with that brand identity and that feel and all that I would imagine it would be something that just is mass Market targeted not something that is super niche in terms of Ultra Luxury Ultra performance or anything like that because that's that's really hard to pull off um and then also it may uh sort of you know just enfranchising people some people may not like how it feels and then that I don't think would be in their marketing plan if I were if I were imagining if I'm sitting in that room you know what they're thinking Hartley the company that they're working with is Hyundai correct not Honda well this is this is one of the opening questions so yeah uh Hyundai has spoken about this they were the only automaker to actually explicitly say when they were not supposed to say that they were in talks with apple about some sort of collaboration on this vehicle but it's it seems like Apple has been in talks with virtually every major automaker because it's it's not capable of setting up this supply chain um so realistically it will have to rely on some sort of major automaker um as a partner um whether that's Hyundai whether it's Honda there's been talks of working with um several smaller slightly more Niche Brands um just to bring in that expertise it looks like that's something that's going to happen but they possibly are not even nailed down to a specific partner yet um because we're still looking at we're still years away from this thing so it's still realistically uh in in a design stage at this point and any discussions that are going on with automakers are going to be whether they are capable of meeting these requirements well isn't the current launch date rumor 2026 which I mean is probably not going to happen but like usually on this show whenever we talk about anything in the future I'm like that's way too long that's way too long but with a car and especially with something that we know like we know a lot about but also kind of feel like we know very little about a car in 2026 that's three years two and a half maybe um that doesn't that doesn't seem like that long from now and so I'm a little confused like they need to have that kind of like partner you know nailed down uh pretty fast and then in my mind is like Okay so let's just say it is Hyundai or Hyundai like how Hartley would uh pronounce it I still don't I still don't know the correct pronunciation I've heard it like six different ways so so are we looking at more like an ion day exactly so are we looking at more like an ionic five six are they gonna like have to rely on stuff that already exists well I guess in that time frame it'll be whatever their next iterations are of those cars but like you know usually they don't drastically change the body design that far from now so like is that what we're looking at or is Apple just going to be like yo you use your stuff but you make this design that we have um is that what you guys are thinking is gonna happen well yeah it would have to be a their own design right I mean but Hyundai is a great partner the Hyundai group who owns Kia um and Genesis and a handful of other brands you probably haven't heard of like tremendous partner if that's who they went with in fact I would argue right now their uh their products in the US uh anyways are absolutely crushing it right the ionic five just want SUV of the year which I still argue it's not an SUV but whatever SUV is a very loose term there but yeah yeah it's like a fuzzy definition but no I I that would be a great partner and that makes all all the sense in the world to find someone like that and I don't know I mean I guess Apple's big enough if it would even make sense but they could like just buy the company probably and force them to do whatever they want you know at their scale the batteries might be a question but I was thinking about this more leading up to this you know because batteries are hard to come by but you know Apple like they sell gazillion iPhones and they sell tons of things with batteries already so in terms of supply chain I imagine it's not too hard to get those um and if they're partnering with you know Hyundai or someone else they can figure it out but I would have to imagine have to be their own design and yeah built by someone else like that because I mean they don't like own the factories that buy that make iPhones right isn't it Foxconn and these other companies and things yeah yeah so that makes that makes all the sense in the world to me the question I really have about this is go to market strategy because you know I remember the days when people would stand in line for the iPhone you know in the rain in New York or whatever and it didn't matter but now I mean Apple's not like Tesla in the fact that like if they say they're gonna make something generally it's gonna happen I know there have been some products where they've sort of teased them or whatever and then they never came to fruition but point being like they're not in the same game where Tesla can you know the Cyber truck is a great example right like hey put your deposit down here it is it's been through it's three years late and it's still like oh it may come next year we're not sure you know and it depends who you ask but it's one of those things where it's not very Apple like the current say go to market strategy from Tesla and others so I'm curious how they'll handle that like if it's 2026 are they gonna say here's the car it'll be you know on your doorstep in two weeks or is it going to be here's the car put the order down and then in two years we'll have it to you because that I think would be a much more reasonable time frame and it's sort of I think what people expect now in this new world where companies sell direct to Consumer uh cars and things of that nature I think it's going to be a very different strategy to anything that Apple has done before ultimately because not they they need this uh this whole new infrastructure they're not going to be able to put these things uh in Apple stores on tables so that they're going to need to also have the the service set up for this which is why a partner would make perfect sense but I think the issue that apple is encountering with these negotiations with Partners is the partners are concerned about Apple taking their lunch because if Apple's EV is better than in terms of at least design and software than the EVS that these Partners have on offer then the partner is just at risk of becoming just this compliant manufacturing supplier and they are concerned about this particularly some manufacturers like um uh Mercedes are supposedly very cautious about this which is why they don't want to offer this next Generation carplay experience because they don't want to get the C Apple's experience in people's mind um at this stage so yeah that is one of the the big open questions is how exactly it will come to my my bet would be that it will be a very limited production run initially that would fit a little bit more into Apple's strategy of constraining the supply albeit not intentionally in this case but to have it as a more desirable item um and that would develop more enthusiasm for it if say unlike a cyber truck where it just simply isn't available even if you want to get one the Apple car will be so hard to come by but you you may see them around and certainly it will only be in the you which is unusual um at least for EVS which are mostly the platforms for them are developed for a worldwide market and I wouldn't even be surprised if it was limited to certain states where they got regulatory approval for it initially just to try and keep the production run um as exclusive as possible I don't think we're going to get you know a two weeks to launch on a on a worldwide scale at least not in right hand uh left-hand Drive markets uh yeah you right and drive markets well they don't have to either you know what I mean it's totally fine to start with the US which is a giant market even if they just started in California that's still a huge car market right I mean if you look at the the size of of California in a lot of metrics it's bigger than the UK in a lot of ways in terms of the number of people the the GDP and all those kind of things so it's a it's a it's a big enough market I think that it would be a good play and smart for them specifically around things like service like you're saying if they're trying to figure out parts and all that because it's a whole new ball game getting into cars I have no doubt in my mind they would sell every single one that they could possibly make though I think it would be a long time before we saw any demand waiver at all just because of their brand loyalty and the brand Affinity that people have you know I mean I don't know your guys thoughts but I mean Apple hasn't every product they've made hasn't been the best in class product of that category but it doesn't matter it really doesn't matter you know I mean Tesla's the same way you know throw that back on them too like in a lot of ways their cars are inferior to some of the newer ones coming out but it doesn't matter because you have such that a strong brand affinity and this also goes like how are people buying um Audi electric cars and things and it's like well because people love Audi you know same with Mercedes and these other ones so I think the brand of Apple is so incredibly strong that it wouldn't matter uh whatever their go to market strategy is it'll succeed um the question is scale because scaling cars is much harder I would imagine than scaling smaller devices that require far fewer resources to make um you know and and then service and those kind of things but I'm excited for it I really am um I have no idea what what it you know when it'll come out other pricing and all that but I think I think they could really sort of you know change the game in a lot of ways and really give Tesla a run for their money so you mentioned price which was what I actually wanted to jump into the rumored price was like around 120 000 which is a lot of money for a car um you know rivians can get up that high a lot of like what lucid and some Teslas can get up that High I mean maybe if you really can figure it up there but like over a hundred thousand dollars for a car I would I would say for the average consumer for an average person uh over a hundred thousand dollars your car is insane and so um you know one of the things that makes Tesla so appealing is that you know when the model 3 launched what was that 2016 um that that was affordable by all metrics it was still expensive and then it dropped and it's you know that 35 000 Price Market not really there but kind of if you look at the savings and however they manipulated that whole price thing um I I have a model three right now it's like 48. that's not bad for a car but that's still kind of a lot of money for a lot of people who are looking at their car to just get them from point A to point B so my main point here is that you know now the price is under a hundred thousand dollars what does that mean is that 99 that's still obviously a ton of money like where do you think the price point would need to be for this to be a mass mass hit you know similar to iPhones in in the sense like to have that hip product where everyone's trying to adopt one uh 79 999 dollars okay because eighty thousand dollars eighty thousand dollars is the cap for the federal tax credit uh so your car has to be under that um and then I think if it's a truck or an SUV it can be more expensive or whatever so it depends on what it is if it comes out as a car like a sedan versus a crossover then that changes the math on it all uh I would imagine the first ones are going to be uh like you said hardly like sought after they're going to be exclusive they're going to be scarce and so the price is going to be pretty high and that's fine it's not bad at all I mean that's the fact that's how Tesla goes to Market this is one of the funny things I see people that are these hardcore cyber truck fans out there is they're saying oh man I can't wait to get my forty thousand dollar cyber truck and I'm going man good luck that's never happening the Tesla Works no nope it always starts with the most expensive version and then kind of the mid-tier and then for a very small window they sell that promised one that 35 000 model three the uh forty thousand dollar model or sixty thousand dollar Model S uh you know whatever it is it's a small tiny window they sell the cheap one and then a couple months later they say you know what hey no one wanted it let's go back to the more expensive ones uh so Apple I think could follow a similar strategy the very first ones could be uh I don't know what the true if there's an apple term for this but in Tesla world we would say founder series cars you know they have some sort of special label or special whatever and yeah you can price those well over 100 Grand because the people buying them you know aren't they don't care right you have so many people that are going to want this thing uh then I think they can work backwards into it right like I don't remember I mean what the original price of the iPhone was uh but even now I mean I just bought my wife now granted I buy the iPhone with a terabyte in it so she never runs out of storage and yells a good move good move uh so it's like it's like 14 1500 bucks or something you know it's it's a very expensive product now granted you can buy I know they make cheaper versions of the iPhone and stuff so I think that the price the the norm the average prices would I would imagine put around mid 70s hopefully um I don't think they're going to go for the cheaper markets you know I mean in fact if you look at worldwide smartphone sales as sort of a proxy here uh last I remember it was something like 80 85 percent of worldwide smartphones were Android phones and the big reason why is that they're so cheap because there's thousands of them and they're a fracture you can buy one for 200 bucks and I don't know what the cheapest iPhone is there but I know it's a lot more than that so it's one of those things where I think they will they will always probably want to be in that premium price point which I would the cheapest I could imagine them going is maybe in the the like mid 50s now granted at that price you're getting the the tax credit and you know you said your model 3 was 48 you're right in line with that um and also to think about that when you're talking about electric car you also have to consider the the real total cost of ownership I do this a lot on my channel where I look at it and I say uh Porsche ticon an electric F-150 uh Tesla Model y compare that to a gas car and what you end up finding is that you're saving 60 or 70 or even more uh percent per month on fuel so that means across five or ten years you're going to save sometimes 10 15 even 20 000 across that time across the your ownership period so when you look at that original price a lot of people think how much is my monthly payment going to be four or five 600 bucks whatever it is then you see a Tesla 50 60 000 and you're like dang this is approaching eight hundred dollars for my lease or my loan or whatever but that four or five six hundred thousand or four five six hundred monthly payment on a gas car you didn't factor in that it's gonna cost you two three hundred dollars in gas right and if you go over uh uh to to Europe and the UK and everything gas is even more expensive over there so I think when you look at the total cost they could have a car in the fifty sixty thousand dollar range and it's gonna be like a thirty five thousand dollar gas car comparison so I think it's one of those things when and this is what I really try to focus on my channel is like let's do the math here and let's look at look at all the factors not just that monthly payment because that's not everything that you really need to consider when it comes to your budget I'm gonna need you to make a video for me specifically talking to my wife when it comes time to to re-up on a car be like listen it says it's a thousand dollars a month but but it's not that bad yeah just just listen to Ben I'll tell you right now I've had a lot of people stop me on the street and say that exact same thing like you know what my wife wouldn't do it and I showed you your video where you broke down the math and now we have a you know Kia ev6 or Tesla Model y or whatever it is yep so we've talked quite a bit about how Apple needs to really challenge Tesla in this space and that seems increasingly likely given this sub 100 000 price point it's quite believable to imagine that this vehicle could be a direct competitor to the Model S and if that is the case what do you think Tesla will need to do to try and Claw back uh some territory here because apple as you say could be a very serious challenger but I wonder it I I I'm skeptical of Tesla really perhaps stepping up their build quality and Tesla is also not going to be able to rival the software expertise and software experience of Apple so where do you think Tesla will go if indeed it is a direct Model S competitor you know uh there have even been talks already about whether or not they should keep selling the snx um because the the numbers are so small and it's so expensive and make it sort of more of an of a niche vehicle but then the problem with that is they're losing out to Lucid because if you want the most Niche electric performance car you can get it's elusive you know I guess the remac Navarra is a different animal for a couple million dollars but like you know looking at it the model S Future Days may be numbered honestly it may dwindle down even further and my bet would be that if the finance team had anything to say at the finance team at Tesla had anything to say about it they would say who cares just let it go man like we make 80 of our money on model 3 and model y let's do more of that you know if you rewind the clock when Tesla was had a strong mission that they talked about a lot it was to help accelerate the transition to sustainable Transportation originally then energy but if you think about that accelerate that transition the high-end sedan Market has already gone electric like I said BMW Mercedes Tesla Lucid Audi Porsche they all have incredible offerings so the very high-end sedan Market is already there if you're not there then you're losing there's just you have nowhere to go right if you're uh if you make high-end expensive sedans they're and you're not electric we're not going electric just forget about it now I'm not talking about the economy cars of the world which will always be around and things like that like Toyota Honda for example but even if you look at like Lexus and Cadillac and some of these other ones so point being I don't know if Tesla has uh a dog in that fight and they honestly might just say forget it you know we're going to keep iterating on this increasingly Niche vehicle maybe make it a little bit faster maybe add a little bit more range but I don't know what else they could do like you said increase the build quality but they've sort of proven that build qual quality is not a huge selling factor for a lot of people you know what I mean and not to dog on them too much but I mean seriously if you go get in a Model S a brand new one and and you drive it around and you feel the bumps in in the creeks and and the noises it makes and then you go get in a brand new eqs the the electric S-Class for Mercedes it is night and day now you may not like the look of it you may not like the interior or whatever but it is undeniable how much better of a car it is and that's because Mercedes been making cars since cars existed right so it's one of those things where I don't know if Tesla has a way to come back from that but I don't know if they care either they may just say great Apple's here let's do that Apple may have a hard time even because they're new all the all the people that love apple and their brand uh their fan base will absolutely buy all of them but in terms of scale and long-term success of a car in that price point it might be tough because it's a pretty crowded market now if they came out with something else like say a minivan which doesn't exist in the electric space but is still super popular even if they came into the crossover space it would be smart because right now yeah well the VW ID Buzz is like officially the first electric minivan but it's not marketed that way you know they're like oh it's fun it's California it's all this and I'm like it's a minivan dude you have sliding doors three rows it's a minivan the first the first time someone actually markets a electric minivan I have no doubt and if it's like relatively affordable you know keep it in line with the current minivan prices maybe a little bit more because you're getting that you know electric they would go they would be gone there would be none you would not never be able to find one because there are people like me who has I have my Tesla but we also have a minivan because we're transporting all these kids around and it's like every day I get into it I'm like I wish this was Electric in some sort of fashion like I'm so sick of going to filling gas I'm sick of the way it drives we would we would all be lining up to purchase them all the men in the world or even women that were very anti-minivan would want one yeah no no doubt so you know there's a lot of space there to run right because it's sort of an untapped Market this is where I sort of applaud rivien how they change their strategy Midway through uh you know they won't say this but if you ask me they basically realize that uh Tesla owned the sedan space and so um let's not try to compete there let's go trucks you know and now they're they're dominating you know now granted Ford and Chevy are kind of gonna conquer that like they've owned it already but point being yeah I think Apple would be smart to find areas and markets that maybe uh segments that aren't completely saturated um otherwise they will they there will be a ceiling of how many per year they can sell now the the interesting thing in that space would be if Apple somehow is able to take market share from the established automakers right from the Mercedes and BMW if that's where they're targeting or if you go to the mid-tier like the acura's Infinities Lexus of the world so that would be interesting if they're able to take that market share away but um Tesla I don't I don't know that they care about the model S as maybe as much as as much as their marketing might say because if you look at the finance side of it it's not really doing much for them let's also real quickly just touch on the like interior the tech um you know what's this is where I start to like you know I like all cars for the most part you can kind of tell between like driving an electric car and going back to a non-election you can tell the way it feels and whatever but for the most part in my world when I get into a car it all kind of feels the same um and over time you know I just become numb to the way it feels when I drive but the interior the tech the the infotainment that's where I'm like okay this is important to me because this is the stuff that I interact with on a daily basis have you you said you just got an iPhone so have you had a chance to like use carplay before in the past oh huge I'm a huge fan of car play okay okay cool I mean my stance on Apple has always been like they make great products but the company always annoyed me how they lock you into certain things like the the home pod only playing Apple music and stuff like that I just so it angered me so much I'm like ah but their products are undeniably great so I got an iPhone uh this is my first one and I really do enjoy it I think it's great I do miss some of the things on Android that I had but whatever the point being yes I do use car play when I can carplay doesn't exist as you know in Teslas or rivian's uh Lucid just added it smartly and all the Classic Auto all the Legacy automakers have it already so when these guys come drop these cars off and I have them for a week I have a week of car play and it is like a breath of fresh air it is so nice to not have all these little dumb software issues or have to log into an app or find the podcast that I want to listen to because it's all already there that's to me the main point that I make anytime ask me about the software and Tesla I say it's as good as it gets but it totally sucks compared to carplay so right now thinking of an Apple car of of course it's going to have car play or some other more advanced version of that and see so so for most people my argument is that that your phone is the center of your Digital Universe right it's where you take your photos you you do social media you do all your things from here so something like Apple carplay or Android auto just makes total sense that when you get into your car it's just an extension of your phone in terms of the tech in there Apple's car will obviously do that exceptionally well I would actually question whether or not they'll support Android auto or something like that because if they don't that would you know you don't think so no chance so this is a question for you yeah yeah see so so that would be a bummer and I think a lot of those people would be like well I'm not buying the Apple car maybe they weren't going to buy it anyways I don't know um but it won't matter right right Hartley you agree with me right there's zero percent chance that that that's gonna happen that's the same thing as if like Android users being like why can't we have iMessage it's just not going to happen at least not right now if ever yeah yeah so Apple's happy to put their services occasionally on all the devices so it's like apple music coming to Tesla or yeah it's like um I mean it is even allowing car play in in non-apple vehicles obviously because there is no apple vehicle at the moment but the minute it comes to putting another ecosystem in Apple's walls Garden that is the that is the big No-No um so I don't think that is that is ever going to happen so because Apple will yeah apple will upsell you to it that that's the intention it will be it appleball wants to make you feel bad for wanting to use Android auto so the question I had is and this is the one I got to ask Elon Musk directly on a call he basically poo pooed on the idea at the time but I think they're coming around to it is um would the Apple car have an app store so if I did have an Android phone I I don't have apple carplay but I still use Spotify and Pandora you know Waze or whatever else maybe they won't support Waze actually I don't know but point being so I can log into the apps and have them feel native it's not on bluetoothing everything to my phone like it's a old Nissan Sentra or something um do you think that they would have a built-in app store or would it basically be like plain vanilla you just get nothing or Apple carplay only do you think they would lock it down that hard well I think one way or another whether it's via an app store or whether it is via carplay you would still get those third-party app experiences because that's effectively the way that carplay works right now if you uh plug your car in or you connect your uh your uh you you plug your phone in or you connect your phone wirelessly to carplay you still get your third-party podcast app you still get Waze um you get all of these services and apple every year is adding more and more to what developers are able to achieve in car play so it's already got this framework it's already got those apps ready so even if it isn't a full-blown App Store it will want those apps to be available because that again gives it a competitive advantage to the experiences that other automotives are able to deliver because it's a it's a true first party experience right yeah I know I completely agree yeah and that is a differentiator I think right there I also feel like some apps will be available like you know they can't deny Spotify that's just too popular they've tried doing that and other products and they've given up um slowly but surely like the homepod kinda works with Spotify but still not really but it's like Google Maps maybe I I see that's the thing I don't know because they make you know Apple music and because Apple Maps is a thing I feel like it's gonna really like in the car itself because in car play you plug your phone in and it has those apps available and you can use that but like natively it might do one of those things where you need to like it's not gonna work you know getting a link sending it to your car I can't imagine it's gonna immediately yeah natively open up in Google Maps unless they you know allow you the option like they did you know now where you can finally set a default mail app in the Mac like I don't know I think it could go either way I wouldn't be surprised the reason why I think they will is because you can do that now with carplay which means you will be able to do that with the Next Generation version of carplay that will be in vehicles at the end of this year so by the time we get to 2026 when this apple vehicle will be available there will be hundreds of other vehicles on the market that offer this um carplay experience including EVS where those apps will definitely be available because they are available now so unless apple is going to strip away functionality that is currently there which would get them very bad press that would dissuade people from moving over the whole point of car play is to be a sort of feature that introduces you to the Apple ecosystem so that you don't want to leave so if they offer an inferior carplay experience in the Apple car then people will think well I will just stick with whatever EV I've got now because I can use Google Maps because both will be on the market at the same time so yeah I I have a I have a thing so okay I I have car play in our minivan but that's the first time I've ever had a car that's had car play but it's not my car like my own personal car I've never had carplay before um and then I've gone from like a BMW X1 that still didn't have car play to a Tesla that was like the jump that I had and in that jump like Tesla's operating system for the software you know compared to any other car's built-in infotainment system I believe the car I had before the BMW was a Buick or a Ford like those were the cars that I've had beforehand like it feels night and day there is nothing better than that but like I talked to people who have used car play as they're on a regular basis and they're like I want car play in my Tesla and I can't my brain can't fathom absolutely because coming from one of those older cars I'm just like this is there's nothing better than this like I've got Spotify I've got everything I need for the most part like it's touch responsive and it's not super laggy like it works well like what could I possibly want so you are saying um you you want like in your rivian they don't have car play you would you would welcome that like you would use it on a regular basis if it came in I mean I bereted them online constantly that they don't have it it's beyond just wanting it amazing I mean it is it uh okay at this point Tesla I think there's they're in car software is good enough to where you can live without carplay and it's fine right it's passable I still think it's lame that they don't have it but at least they are sort of opening up to the idea of having an app store uh for example people maybe don't know but in your Tesla natively you have Netflix and you have YouTube and you have 20 games you can play natively so they have sort of an app store but that app store is like bespoke right it's not like anybody any developer out there can just go make an app it's like Tesla has to work directly with Netflix or twitch or whoever to create the app for the car so they seem to be embracing that and as they roll that out it will get better and better I still don't think it's as good as car play because I have to log into these apps it doesn't know me it's not the the device I already have with all of my preferences and my whole world that I've and you know my digital profile my digital stuff that I've been building since the internet was created it's like the phone has all that it knows me so it is carplay is still so much better plus it has hundreds of apps that are it's I saw like 200 plus apps supported maybe there's more I don't know but it's like so anything you can imagine exists and it just works great so like Tesla at this point I get and I I I could side with them and say how they're saying look forget it we're we've we've evolved past it but rivian when I talked to them and I talked to their PR team about this their excuse for not having car play was they feel they can make better integrated digital experiences than carplay offers and I spit out my coffee because what you're saying is you can make better software than Apple and Google and I'm sorry you can make a better truck than Apple Google for sure today but software I'm sorry guys no you can't it also has uh the Amazon Voice Assistant built in I don't want to trigger people's speakers um or mine but it has that built in which is atrocious it is it is so incredibly bad is it really bad and I I don't know well you can imagine how it works right so you get in you TR you use the the trigger word and then you say navigate home well when I first got my Amazon Echo it was when it first came out and my home address was my work address from nine years ago so it's navigating me there despite me plugging into the car my actual home address and saving it as home so like it's a very disjointed thing and I would ask it to play music and it would start playing on my speaker in my studio it just didn't know what was going on it was completely disconnected or or dysfunctional so yeah it's one of those things when you look at it you go guys I'm sorry you make an incredible vehicle but you cannot make better software than Apple and Google you just can't you know uh Tesla I would argue still doesn't make better software uh but their software is good enough I would say for most people most people like you said probably get in there you're just like oh my God mind blown right right if you live with carplay for a while you realize how lacking it is like a good example is I like Waze wait for me for taking my kids to school there are three different routes I can take depending on traffic that could be a 20 minute difference in the commute 20 minutes that means I'm like either on time to drop my kids off at school or I'm now late and my kids are rushing to get in and it's just a nightmare and then I'm late for a call or something else so that one difference there the built-in Tesla app while it does have traffic and it does use some of that it's definitely not as good as Waze and so for where I live anyways I'll say so that's one of those things where it's like yeah you just need to support it because and and you know for proof of that just look at the iPhone itself imagine if Apple never created an App Store if they only said we're going to create the apps and that's it imagine where we would be like in the world like I think Android would have probably completely crushed them at some point you know because you go God I can't get anything on this damn phone you know but they smartly very early on said look we can't make all of the software we can't think of all of the ideas we don't have the resources even if we we did so let's open up an app store and so I think Tesla's slowly wading into these Waters very cautiously but car play and app and in Android auto to that same extent will have already done this and so it's it would any new car any new EV maker in my opinion must support it otherwise you are really really swimming Upstream trying to compete with everyone else that just does it like Kia is a good example all the Hyundai group itself every one of their cars has car playing Android auto natively wirelessly in in most cases so you're looking at it going wow this little Kia has 200 plus apps that are already on my phone and this brand new fancy Tesla has six it's not as you know it's not the same thing not the same experience not to say it's bad but I but this one is definitely more familiar and better in almost every way in my opinion so I'm a huge fan and me not being a huge Apple fan but having carplay like this is amazing so whenever I get these other cars dropped off and I have them for a week I'm just like God it is so nice not having to find my podcast or find that Muse that Pandora station or whatever it's like it's just already there so another key Dimension to these vehicles software is self-driving functionality or you know purported self-driving at least so one thing I'm interested to get your thoughts on Ben is where we will be with self-driving from some of these big players like Tesla by 2026 and whether that will be something where Tesla by then can actually offer a meaningful competitive advantage over Apple which while Apple has vehicles on the road at the moment they are test Vehicles they are not actually the the vehicle itself and it will not have the same uh access to the same amount of data that Tesla will by that point and maybe by then Tesla will be a much more formidable uh much more formidable in terms of its self-driving capabilities yeah yeah it's a good question um I think there's there's two ways to think about it there is the um this car is going to be a robo taxi that makes me money which Elon has went on stage and said many many times um and then there's this is just a better Driving Experience for me as the driver and so that would be I would fall into the kind of safety side of the equation right is my car safe and does it offer me safety features which we kind of categorize or Tesla has correctly incorrectly labeled as self-driving so those are kind of two separate things Robo taxi versus just a safer better Driving Experience I think by 2026 Robo taxis are still 10 to 15 years away a true Robo taxi and then honestly the economics of it don't even make sense uh in terms of an actual like I'm just gonna click button my car goes out there or whatever it's I don't think it's going to deliver on that promise it's kind of like that dunning-kruger thing where it's like oh yeah everyone's super hyped on it and then as you get into the details your confidence just drops all the way to the bottom so Robo taxis let's just exclude that from this part of the conversation and talk about uh Advanced Driver assist systems systems as you'll see them called um Tesla currently is level two and their functionality the uh autopilot and enhanced autopilot I think are best in the industry they are incredibly good at what they do the full self-driving side of it which is where Tesla's trying to go with I assume I mean if you believe their marketing they're talking level five autonomy which is complete like you don't have a steering wheel like you you often say level four or five meaning you never need to have a human intervene ever level two is where we're at now where it'll speed up and slow down keep you in your lane and then maybe do some Lane changing or some light other Maneuvers but that's about it you still have to have your hands on the wheel so have to be paying attention that kind of a thing that's where we're at now in 2026 you said I think we'll still be in that same place the the confidence in those Maneuvers and those things will probably be better but we won't I don't think be at true level three yet level three is where the driver rarely has to intervene and this is the real really dangerous area where already at level two people just put it in autopilot and just hop on their phone texting watching a video Whatever not paying attention at all bad news right that's not good and then level three is where that is actually should be okay you should just occasionally have to pay attention and take control that's the real danger zone because this is where people are gonna you know figuratively fall asleep at the wheel and you're gonna over trust it and it's gonna lead to some bad results uh from time to time the you know just think about airplanes and the progression right you don't even think about the safety of a of a flight now but 50 60 years ago different animal right it wasn't uncommon to hear about a crash and so it was definitely in your mind so I think we're still you know 20 30 years away from the idea of a truly autonomous vehicle that you hop in and the fact of it crashing is like unheard of that'd be major worldwide news so 2026 uh if if Apple could deliver on essentially where Tesla's at today uh with their autopilot the basic autopilot functionality I think that would be enough for almost everybody um if you look at the the polls on people's trust in self-driving cars it's still extreme low and so there's you know social kind of hurdles that people have to get over psychological hurdles that companies have to get over before the technology can even be adopted so self-driving is one of those things where the hype is you know at a maximum and it has been for a long time but the reality is not even close to that and the road in between is going to be a long one um the one thing I like to say though is it doesn't mean that this Pursuit is not worthy like we should pursue this because there are great benefits and things that we we we will eventually realize and the road between here and there can bear a lot of fruit even if you think about um automatic emergency braking which I believe Volvo came out with in like 2009 or something like that that alone right there has saved a lot of lives and so even though that's not full self-driving it is a feature that you need for full self-driving that does help people and does make the road safer so I think it's a worthy Pursuit I think we will get there eventually but it's on a much longer time Horizon than anyone online is going to tell you really um and and you know between now and 2026 that's really I don't think it'll be much different than the world we live in today in terms of what's possible I completely agree with you um there's just no way I can see that ever happening in the next three to four years there's just no way and I can explain to you why is because when I'm in my car and I have autopilot on and all of a sudden at 75 miles an hour I come to a screeching halt on the freeway because my car accidentally feels like something's in front of me which nothing was in front of me that's the stuff that I have a hard time like wanting to ever move away from you know and until you can regain trust for many many years like you said you know like an airplane crashing is Major World News because it just so rarely happens um but you know we've I've seen videos I think a lot of people have seen that video of that Tesla just having a mind of its own and flying through at 100 miles an hour because the car just took off and like you know I don't know whether the details of that were like that was user error and somebody just explained what even if that was software and the car just took off and did its own thing and crashed inside I'm not interested in that at all like I barely use autopilot because of my own you know terrifying experience and I know a lot of people have had have you had any crazy autopilot experiences where you're like okay that's enough for me today oh yeah absolutely uh my wife won't let me use it at all if the family's in the car um a good example was my wife just went out to I'm in San Diego she's in Phoenix it's a straight 400 mile drive across the desert it's flat basically as you can imagine it's straight drive uh she told me last time she was on autopilot on the way back 11 times it slammed on the brakes and we're talking there's nothing it's not like there's an overpass or a shadow on the road literally just straight desert like almost like in a movie you would imagine just a straight Flat Road across the desert and it just so that right there erodes your trust now now the the interesting thing is I think a lot of people that talk about this online that that talk about oh my God it's going to change the world look at how great it is blah blah they don't own these cars they don't live with them they don't have these experiences so it's almost like somebody getting parenting advice from somebody that doesn't have kids it's like okay guys whatever like until you've been there know what it's like yeah you can't really your your opinion you don't have a fully formed opinion on it um and yeah you're totally right it's I've had a lot of scary experiences I've also done a lot of testing with it um Tesla's even given me early access to certain features before to do you know like a video on so I can launch it when the Embargo lifts and that kind of a thing and and in those experiences I've had to call them and say guys I don't know because this isn't working right you know um I I I fear that they have oversold it and it is a much longer time Horizon and so you know a lot of people I think that as you get the car and as you live with it you you really start to realize how far off it is now it is amazing at what it can do it's not to discredit what they're are able to do but to assume that it is anywhere near ready is just naive at this point I would say so yeah I've had a lot of scary experiences I mean in my rivian it doesn't have it it has a basic form of autopilot and they've this is like one good thing they've said is they basically said we're going to let someone else figure that out and then once it's like totally safe and good we're gonna try to adopt that but right now we're rivian stances hey we're the adventure vehicle company we want you to drive because we want you to be off-road we don't want you to be you know just just be your commuter we want you to go see the world and explore and all that so I applaud their approach being much more reasonable and humble about it Tesla's I think is where they get themselves into into some trouble in fact I mean there's class action lawsuits I know one in Germany which was funny because they were selling people full self-driving level five autonomy in Germany and they got sued for it and they lost because the court said well that's actually illegal so you know you're selling something something that is technically illegal by our current laws so uh no you know um but yeah it's a it's going to be a much slower progression than I think anyone on Twitter wants to believe Hartley do you have anything else we're very pressed up against time but it's been great just a lot of conversation I completely lost track of time honestly um I have just like three or four random very rapid fire questions that I have for Ben but that's about it but if you have anything you want to touch on Hartley um let me know now no go ahead go ahead okay okay so um just real quick and you don't have to go into any crazy responses if you don't want to um what is in your opinion the best Eevee on the market right now and taken to mind price um you know build quality software and Hardware features Etc and driving obviously like what do you think just without thinking too hard is the best one that you've driven so far uh I think the one most people will be happy with is the Kia ev6 or the Hyundai ionic 5 which are basically the same car with different uh styling interesting okay um yeah do you think so my I guess this is kind of a follow-up question do you think uh those cars could surpass let's just say apple doesn't come to anything in the next you know five to ten years do you think those cars in this current trajectory with everything else on the market could pass up Tesla's popularity that'd be tough um they are incredibly good vehicles and they have good brand loyalty people know them Tesla has been for a while I believe eroding a lot of consumer confidence in them with how they treat certain issues um and you know the quality issues like you're talking about autopilot Phantom breaking that's called uh you know so if that continues to proliferate and people's trust and confidence in Tesla continues to to wane then I don't know that KIA or Hyundai will do it individually but they Tesla may lose a tremendous amount of market share overall to let's say the Mustang Mach e which is in the same category the Nissan Aria which is an incredible vehicle especially at a good price point I mean there's a lot of vehicles in this space so um the the the overall market share could be very mixed as these other cars really really come to Market in kind of Full Force you know imagine like when the iPhone first came out and they just dominated and then now you know they own a small smaller percentage of the worldwide Market but a monster share of the profits right so you look look at that and you go well okay when Android came out yeah there was like one phone and it sucked so you know but as that proliferated over they eventually overtook Apple in terms of worldwide sales so I could see a similar thing happening where Tesla is more of a niche product um and not to go I don't want to go too too much of on a tangent but I had a conversation with MKBHD about this and we were tossing around this idea of of Tesla becoming more of like Google Google when it comes to phones where they do make phones but they're pretty Niche right they're more known for Android for making Android and so you know Tesla could kind of be the same where they they have four or five models that they make of cars and they sell but more so they provide batteries and powertrains and software to everyone else I thought that would have been a smart charger kind of become yeah yeah like they have some very distinct advantages that if they wanted to truly scale and grow they could do so much more rapidly let the like making cars to the people that have been doing it forever and just do the stuff that they're really good at and you know really dominate the market so whether or not they are selling the individual car it doesn't matter because they're still selling the the kind of the guts of it so I thought that would be an interesting idea but I don't know that Kiara Hyundai could individually overtake Tesla but maybe Tesla will not become the the majority of EVS eventually to everyone else and that was kind of the last thing that I wanted we didn't even touch on this and so real quickly what do what does Apple need to do and this also kind of just extends to anyone else um is Apple going to need to try to make their own proprietary charging or do you think they're going to work off of Electrify America or I think Tesla just needs to bite the bullet and work with everyone like they are doing now but like really ramp that up to where they're are more superchargers there's more available in every single there just needs to be one standard charging thing um so do you think that's the route that they would go or do you think Apple will try to do the Apple thing and make its own proprietary nonsense that would be hilarious like a lightning cable just for your car you're saying you gotta put you got to plug it into the bottom you got to plug it into the bottom like the like the mouse you have to have a lift oh God that'd be hilarious no no uh absolutely not that would be I would go down there and yell at them personally if they did anything stupid like that um but no what they need to do in the U.S anyways is adopt CCS um I think it's ccs2 and then in in Europe you have CCS one anyways uh it's a standard charging um uh uh interface and Tesla I don't know if that's what you're alluding to but Tesla has now started opening superchargers to non-teslas Via an adapter that they install themselves and all that so I think Tesla's going to continue to do that um and that's going to hope hopefully that will be a fast adoption I cynically think that they're only doing that to get that government money uh whatever the incentives are for and maybe there's like hey if you have X percent of your network available that's enough here to take all the money and they may just say cool we're going to do the minimum and take all the money and be done I hope that's not really what their intent is but if Tesla opens up the network to everyone Apple car has to be CCS because that's just this it's literally every it's like Tesla has their own every other car in the US has CCS with the exception of the old Nissan Leaf or the current Nissan Leaf as well and that's just because the Nissan Leaf was like the first electric car the first mass-market electric car and they had a standard that was popular in Japan and didn't exist out here so they just went with what they had right so yeah totally CCS has to be uh you they'll use every single Network out there all the fast charging networks um and then Tesla's Network as it grows Maybe by 2026 a good percentage of the supercharging network will be available and if so man what what a game changer that is for everyone else because charging a non-tesla does suck um but I think the the miss understanding by a lot of people is that you have to go to a charger to charge it at all where ninety percent of the time you're just charging at home yeah the only time that doesn't happen is if you don't have a place to charge at home or at work which isn't a insignificant percentage of the population you know like imagine like I have a lot of friends in New York they just they don't have a garage are you kidding me they just park on the street so yeah for a lot of people millions and millions of people in this country that you do not have a place to charge at home where it works so that sucks and that's where the charging really needs to come up but for a lot of people that have a home or an apartment or work with a charger you never even think about a fast charging Network unless you're on a road trip you know once or twice a year on average so it's one of those things where I think it's overblown in the media like you have to have as many as many fast charges as you do gas stations just not really the case you know what I mean because most people can charge at home and and my last final question a personal question but maybe this will apply to anyone else out there who's listening um I my lease is up next year with my model 3 I would like something that can fit all three kids uh preferably I don't want to be in a Tesla anymore but I'm also nervous about charging and now you're right I 99.9 of the time charge at home but that's because I have very low mileage in my car in terms of how much range I can get and I also don't travel anywhere with this car that much besides my own personal stuff because I can't really fit all three kids comfortably um so in theory if I did have a car that could fit them in there comfortably I would like to take it on road trips uh and drive around more so keep in mind range in size and affordability what would you would you recommend just biting the bullet and get a model y or if not what car do you recommend uh how old are the kids what's the age ranges so right now they're six four and about one and a half gonna be two here at the end of the year okay so they're all in car seats still Yes um which is so that that adds yeah so the model y I would say not even a good candidate anyways uh I have two kids in the model Y and that's enough uh I don't even know if you could fit a third one maybe on one of these like inflatable jump seats or something well we transitioned we transitioned our oldest into like a normal booster um where it's a very yes it's it that's kind of low profile very small and then our daughter would be in one of those like high back boosters but she'd still need the harness so really my my youngest is the one who needs the giant thing still flipped around the other way and all that yeah yeah yeah so so I would say look at considering that um if you did want to stay in the Tesla space you'd have to go model X this is the only thing I would recommend uh which is much more expensive vehicle and all that it's really cool but has its own kind of quirks and stuff um I would probably hopefully uh probably not by the time your lease is up but the Kia ev9 is coming out and that's a three row full-size SUV uh it's Kia it'll be relatively affordable it'll be really well built it'll have car play it'll be it'll be great in in a lot of ways uh the on the higher end the next level up I would go the Volvo ex90 but I think that's still maybe two years out um like they invited me to the launch of it and I said no just bring it to my house they said we'll have it for you the end of next year for a press loaner which means yeah so I'm like uh but that thing's I mean it's a Volvo so again if you know Volvo very nice Vehicles very well built you know good design all that stuff high quality so that will be a great three row SUV um but if I had to get one today so Kia ev9 and Volvo ex90 future today the only one I could think of that would even be worthy is the rivien r1s um problem is it's 100 Grand you know yeah that's the thing so like in my mind so the the real brief follow-up question is do I next year bite the bullet and go back to a a a a gas car uh until more things come out in the market that are affordable well you have the minivan still are you getting rid of the minivan or no no no my car is just the model three so that would be we would it would just be yeah yeah I mean it's tough uh yeah because like I said in in the in the electric space right now three row SUV full that that can fit the kids because you can buy the model y with the jump seat but it it is not really I mean it's tight back there it can work but it's more like in a pinch I wouldn't want that to be your everyday driver model X is the only option but then you're going to be buying used unless you want to spend 150 Grand you know and at that point if you are spending 100 Grand plus I'm gonna go rivian r1s it is so much better in terms of that kind of functionality so um it's tough right now yeah so maybe a gas car or maybe a plug-in hybrid like a uh Kia Sorento plug-in hybrid or there's a few in that space that are still kind of like full-size SUVs but get 40 plus miles to the gallon when you add it all up and you know something like 40 miles on pure electric so plug-in hybrid might be a good option to fill that gap between now and Kia ev9 and Volvo ex90 although the Volvo ex90 is going to be expensive vehicle as well so Kia ev9 is probably the only one um that should be really on your mind as far as all those constraints those conversations making me sad because I'm gonna have some very very bad decisions to make next year um man thank you so much this has been this has been great so much information um do you want to plug anything that you have coming up your Channel find me on YouTube yeah yeah just Google search Ben Sullins or YouTube search Ben solins we'll have it all Linked In the description so everybody can check it out um and Ben thank you so much for coming on man absolutely pleasure guysforeign welcome back to another episode of the macrame show Hartley you're not where I can't touch I can't you're not with me anymore it's very sad no sadly not yeah although in the future wink wink there's gonna be some episodes where we are once again together and by the way uh no we didn't plan to all wear white shirts um in a white room with silver you know and whitish products that was not none of that was planned we literally for those of you who are um interested we all had like a giant house together in which you know a lot of the Mac Rumors team was together and I just came downstairs like all right man you ready to record these uh these podcast episodes I didn't notice at all that we were wearing the same like kind of shirt it was just a plain white shirt like it had no idea until after we filmed it I don't I don't think I noticed until after people started commenting on it honestly so well we well needless to say we got the message yeah yes we were wearing the same color shirt so needless to say you're going to probably be seeing some very similar you know just pull the shades back we recorded a couple of episodes at a time um some really cool episodes we have the founder of Mac Rumors Arnold Kim he's going to be talking all about Mac rumors and like the history and some super interesting stuff that honestly I've been at the company for like five or six years now and I had no idea about Hartley you you know you learned some great things even Arnold learned some things that he had no idea about uh and so uh yeah we're gonna be having some episodes like that and today we were planning on doing you know our basic format with the news and then jumping into our main topic which is all about Apple car and we already filmed that segment with our guest Ben Sullins and we realized that we had an insane amount of content there to where I think we just don't need to do the daily Roundup of news because there's just so much so with that said we're gonna jump in to our pre-recorded version here with Ben Sullins about the Apple car and kind of the history of EVS moving on to our main topic you might notice that we actually have a guest Ben cell Collins thank you so much for joining us we really appreciate it you are our expert on all things electric vehicles which is our main topic the Apple car um I never thought we would actually be talking about this in all like seriousness because in my mind Apple's just not making a car and that's kind of how it started with the rumors and everything for many years but now it's become something that actually seems like it's on the trajectory of happening but before we get into the Apple card specifics why don't you tell everybody more about your channel and like your history with EVs and you know kind of your expertise on them yeah sure so I stumbled into YouTube I think like a lot of people where I did something that took off and I started to do more of that and that thing was I bought a Tesla back in 2016 and I looked at how much money I was saving by owning it on fuel and people really liked that message I think maybe it gave them more validation about their own purchase or whatever you know uh Obsession people already had I kind of validated that for them and then so I just kept covering you know my owner experience being a Tesla owner back in 2016 and then that grew into Lots like a whole YouTube kind of content business and then eventually other companies started making interesting electric cars they weren't just Nissan Leafs and things like that and so then I started covering um and doing all that so now you know in some circles I'm a auto journalist where I get invited to anytime there's a new EV coming out and I go review that or whatever but I've sort of shifted away to where now I just wait for them to give me a press loaner and they'll bring one of these new EVS to my house they let me have it for a week and then I get to drive it like a real car I get to daily drive it and you know I'm not the first to post about it but I think my posts and my reviews are much more authentic and real than just hey they flew me to some exotic destination for three days and I sat in it for 30 minutes it's like no I lived with this I've got two kids a wife I live in in Southern California so I get to use it like a more common use case than just hey I'm A Car Guru right so it's kind of a different perspective well yeah um but yeah especially with like events like that where you're kind of being pampered and like you're in a nice totally yeah I mean it's it's definitely gives you you know we're human so it gives you a different perspective on the product or in your case the car that you're out there to see um and so it's nice that you get them at home where you're not being pampered you've got your kids you've gotta you've gotta do the pain that I know all too well of taking out the car seats putting the car seats in the new car trying not to go insane during that time frame and so that was kind of one of the main reasons why um we were excited to have you on is because like we wanted to talk more about the state of EVs and then kind of drop in some of the news that we've heard about Apple and see like what is it going to take for Apple to like make an actual successful vehicle um and so with that said what are you currently driving right now are you still in Teslas or have you moved on to something else yeah I I sold my my Model S uh just over a year ago and I got a rivian r1t so I have a truck now and it's perfect for where I live for my situation with the family it's a smaller truck but it's super fun um I will say it's not as good as the Ford Lightning the electric F-150 in terms of its truckness but it is so much more fun and where I live parking spaces are tight roads are small so it's really great so that's what I have and then my wife drives a Tesla Model Y and we've owned at this point every Tesla they make of the exception of the original Roadster so lots of experience as an owner of there and of those and then I've driven probably any EV you can name out there with the exception of maybe some of the latest ones so with regards to Apple car if indeed it is going to be cool with that we've seen quite a lot of these rumors developing over the years and it really seems like Apple's Ambitions have changed as time has gone on um where initially they were looking at something that was perhaps uh without a steering wheel without pedals without conventional seats are more like a limousine configuration inside the car and it looks like now they have sort of repositioned the vehicle to be a little bit less ambitious so now we are expecting it to be effectively just set up like a normal vehicle at least with a driver's seat a steering wheel and pedals so in terms of design and what we could expect this interior to look like where do you think Apple needs to take this vehicle in order to separate itself from the competition as it stands but also stay realistic within what is going to be possible within the next five years or so yeah it's a good question I think it's a smart move for them to sort of scale back those ambitious plans and you guys would be more in touch with this than I am but I mean apple as I you know and I've been working in Tech since 1998 so I've been in the tech industry as like a database engineer and data scientist for many many years and apple I've never really I mean early days was different but nowadays I don't see them as major Risk Takers with the products they develop and I say that because their products are so Mass Market that they can't to do things that are so wildly out there that like they would risk it being a failure so I think it makes a lot of sense for them to scale it back to a design that people won't like like you're saying originally like or more limousine style configuration no pedals that would be a huge leap for them and for the consumer and I think that would be very risky and at their size and their scale I don't know or at least from my experience following them it doesn't appear that that's something that they have the appetite for so I think it's smart what they're doing in terms of How To Succeed uh I I have no doubt that uh the quality is the thing that would separate them from everyone else um if you guys have driven EVS or you know the different um Spectrum out there you have the Teslas of the world who are still innovating like it's 2012 and like if they have to you know they take away the gear stocks they don't even give you a whole steering wheel anymore they're making these things that are still really boundary pushing when people like me that have been following them for a long time argue they don't need to like they've won right they're there it's almost like when the iPhone came out what it did to the smartphone market you had a lot of people that made fun of it there was no keyboard oh my God how could anyone blah blah blah and now basically every smartphone is either an iPhone or something that is looks identical to it right you can argue features to you know the cows come home but the point being they won and everyone else needs to get on board and so I think Tesla did that as well in the EV space and that's what you see with almost all the other traditional automakers is they're trying to play ketchup they're trying to be more tesla-like so I think Apple could do a really good job here by looking at what Tesla's done and sort of one-upping them in areas that they are better at and I would say the number one area that I think they would be better is in quality one of the things like I have an iPhone now this is my my first iPhone um and the thing I do love about it is that I can rely on it whereas a pixel phone will crash if you open too many apps or dumb things like that where you're like I can't have that happen now Tesla has famously it all infamously all over failed in the quality Department again and again they make incredible products but there are a lot they have a long ways to go that's why when you see things like Mercedes making the eqs or BMW making the i7 like their top tier highest end sedans you know that those are going to be better cars they may not be as good on the tech side but the people buying those cars would rather have the quality vehicle versus the super advanced technology so I think Apple has the opportunity here to kind of kind of eat Tesla's lunch in a way if they do it properly because clearly they'll have the tech side of it especially in and I saw some notes I don't know if I'm assuming basically the next iteration of Apple carplay which is much more um like like hardwired into the into the car not just like a an app that runs um I assume that they would use that or some variant of that maybe something you know beyond that which would make it even better in the technology inside of the the the car and then if they can deliver on a quality vehicle then it's it's going to be a serious headwind for Tesla I would say no one else has really given Tesla a run for their money in fact if you look the recent stats they still are something like 80 percent of EVS sold are Teslas so like they own the market especially here in the US um the only one that I've even thought of that could give them a run for their money is Apple um and so quality I would say would be the big differentiator for them so if that's going to be key to the Apple car's identity one thing I'm really intrigued to get your thoughts on Ben is obviously all all car brands sort of have this identity not only in terms of perhaps the things they're known for but also just in the in in terms of the way these cars feel and particularly with EVS we've seen automakers try and layer on certain gimmicks maybe with uh like the BMW I4 and the sort of the the the sounds that they've engineered for the uh for the vehicle to make and this sort of thing and even just in terms of the the handling and the just the feel of the car ultimately so I wonder if you had to speculate on what we could expect an Apple car to actually feel like to drive where would you expect that to go are you just expecting it to be uh like a Tesla or are we expecting it to be a bit less playful perhaps I don't know what what are your thoughts on that yeah they would need to have good acceleration because that's all EVS um that but that should be easy to accomplish just because of the physics of how the motors work and everything uh I would hope that that the handling would be better than Tesla's I actually and I think most car enthusiasts not if you talk to you know Tesla Twitter it's a different animal but if you talk to actual car people they hate how Tesla's Drive they're really poor but it doesn't matter because they excel in so many other areas that people the majority of people who came from a Honda Civic or Toyota Camry or Ford Focus to them it's a magic vehicle right but to actual car person they're like oh my God I can't even ride in this thing so I would hope that it would be better but I still think and you guys correct me from wrong but Apple's market is the mass market so I don't think they would be trying to say compete with a BMW or Mercedes or Porsche or somebody like that who have very distinctive sort of feels about them I would imagine that it would be be hopefully a comfortable ride and then maybe you have different driving modes but in terms of suspension all that I mean this is honestly the biggest question for me about Apple making a car is how do they I mean I guess they have all the money in the world but still you have to have a factory that factory has to have a supply chain behind it and you know Apple obviously is tremendous at this with the other products that they make but this is like a whole new product line I would I would argue going from an iPhone to an iPad the the supply chain is probably there's a lot of overlap whereas going into a vehicle it's a totally different ball game not that they can't do it but that to me is the biggest hill to climb here so how they come up with that brand identity and that feel and all that I would imagine it would be something that just is mass Market targeted not something that is super niche in terms of Ultra Luxury Ultra performance or anything like that because that's that's really hard to pull off um and then also it may uh sort of you know just enfranchising people some people may not like how it feels and then that I don't think would be in their marketing plan if I were if I were imagining if I'm sitting in that room you know what they're thinking Hartley the company that they're working with is Hyundai correct not Honda well this is this is one of the opening questions so yeah uh Hyundai has spoken about this they were the only automaker to actually explicitly say when they were not supposed to say that they were in talks with apple about some sort of collaboration on this vehicle but it's it seems like Apple has been in talks with virtually every major automaker because it's it's not capable of setting up this supply chain um so realistically it will have to rely on some sort of major automaker um as a partner um whether that's Hyundai whether it's Honda there's been talks of working with um several smaller slightly more Niche Brands um just to bring in that expertise it looks like that's something that's going to happen but they possibly are not even nailed down to a specific partner yet um because we're still looking at we're still years away from this thing so it's still realistically uh in in a design stage at this point and any discussions that are going on with automakers are going to be whether they are capable of meeting these requirements well isn't the current launch date rumor 2026 which I mean is probably not going to happen but like usually on this show whenever we talk about anything in the future I'm like that's way too long that's way too long but with a car and especially with something that we know like we know a lot about but also kind of feel like we know very little about a car in 2026 that's three years two and a half maybe um that doesn't that doesn't seem like that long from now and so I'm a little confused like they need to have that kind of like partner you know nailed down uh pretty fast and then in my mind is like Okay so let's just say it is Hyundai or Hyundai like how Hartley would uh pronounce it I still don't I still don't know the correct pronunciation I've heard it like six different ways so so are we looking at more like an ion day exactly so are we looking at more like an ionic five six are they gonna like have to rely on stuff that already exists well I guess in that time frame it'll be whatever their next iterations are of those cars but like you know usually they don't drastically change the body design that far from now so like is that what we're looking at or is Apple just going to be like yo you use your stuff but you make this design that we have um is that what you guys are thinking is gonna happen well yeah it would have to be a their own design right I mean but Hyundai is a great partner the Hyundai group who owns Kia um and Genesis and a handful of other brands you probably haven't heard of like tremendous partner if that's who they went with in fact I would argue right now their uh their products in the US uh anyways are absolutely crushing it right the ionic five just want SUV of the year which I still argue it's not an SUV but whatever SUV is a very loose term there but yeah yeah it's like a fuzzy definition but no I I that would be a great partner and that makes all all the sense in the world to find someone like that and I don't know I mean I guess Apple's big enough if it would even make sense but they could like just buy the company probably and force them to do whatever they want you know at their scale the batteries might be a question but I was thinking about this more leading up to this you know because batteries are hard to come by but you know Apple like they sell gazillion iPhones and they sell tons of things with batteries already so in terms of supply chain I imagine it's not too hard to get those um and if they're partnering with you know Hyundai or someone else they can figure it out but I would have to imagine have to be their own design and yeah built by someone else like that because I mean they don't like own the factories that buy that make iPhones right isn't it Foxconn and these other companies and things yeah yeah so that makes that makes all the sense in the world to me the question I really have about this is go to market strategy because you know I remember the days when people would stand in line for the iPhone you know in the rain in New York or whatever and it didn't matter but now I mean Apple's not like Tesla in the fact that like if they say they're gonna make something generally it's gonna happen I know there have been some products where they've sort of teased them or whatever and then they never came to fruition but point being like they're not in the same game where Tesla can you know the Cyber truck is a great example right like hey put your deposit down here it is it's been through it's three years late and it's still like oh it may come next year we're not sure you know and it depends who you ask but it's one of those things where it's not very Apple like the current say go to market strategy from Tesla and others so I'm curious how they'll handle that like if it's 2026 are they gonna say here's the car it'll be you know on your doorstep in two weeks or is it going to be here's the car put the order down and then in two years we'll have it to you because that I think would be a much more reasonable time frame and it's sort of I think what people expect now in this new world where companies sell direct to Consumer uh cars and things of that nature I think it's going to be a very different strategy to anything that Apple has done before ultimately because not they they need this uh this whole new infrastructure they're not going to be able to put these things uh in Apple stores on tables so that they're going to need to also have the the service set up for this which is why a partner would make perfect sense but I think the issue that apple is encountering with these negotiations with Partners is the partners are concerned about Apple taking their lunch because if Apple's EV is better than in terms of at least design and software than the EVS that these Partners have on offer then the partner is just at risk of becoming just this compliant manufacturing supplier and they are concerned about this particularly some manufacturers like um uh Mercedes are supposedly very cautious about this which is why they don't want to offer this next Generation carplay experience because they don't want to get the C Apple's experience in people's mind um at this stage so yeah that is one of the the big open questions is how exactly it will come to my my bet would be that it will be a very limited production run initially that would fit a little bit more into Apple's strategy of constraining the supply albeit not intentionally in this case but to have it as a more desirable item um and that would develop more enthusiasm for it if say unlike a cyber truck where it just simply isn't available even if you want to get one the Apple car will be so hard to come by but you you may see them around and certainly it will only be in the you which is unusual um at least for EVS which are mostly the platforms for them are developed for a worldwide market and I wouldn't even be surprised if it was limited to certain states where they got regulatory approval for it initially just to try and keep the production run um as exclusive as possible I don't think we're going to get you know a two weeks to launch on a on a worldwide scale at least not in right hand uh left-hand Drive markets uh yeah you right and drive markets well they don't have to either you know what I mean it's totally fine to start with the US which is a giant market even if they just started in California that's still a huge car market right I mean if you look at the the size of of California in a lot of metrics it's bigger than the UK in a lot of ways in terms of the number of people the the GDP and all those kind of things so it's a it's a it's a big enough market I think that it would be a good play and smart for them specifically around things like service like you're saying if they're trying to figure out parts and all that because it's a whole new ball game getting into cars I have no doubt in my mind they would sell every single one that they could possibly make though I think it would be a long time before we saw any demand waiver at all just because of their brand loyalty and the brand Affinity that people have you know I mean I don't know your guys thoughts but I mean Apple hasn't every product they've made hasn't been the best in class product of that category but it doesn't matter it really doesn't matter you know I mean Tesla's the same way you know throw that back on them too like in a lot of ways their cars are inferior to some of the newer ones coming out but it doesn't matter because you have such that a strong brand affinity and this also goes like how are people buying um Audi electric cars and things and it's like well because people love Audi you know same with Mercedes and these other ones so I think the brand of Apple is so incredibly strong that it wouldn't matter uh whatever their go to market strategy is it'll succeed um the question is scale because scaling cars is much harder I would imagine than scaling smaller devices that require far fewer resources to make um you know and and then service and those kind of things but I'm excited for it I really am um I have no idea what what it you know when it'll come out other pricing and all that but I think I think they could really sort of you know change the game in a lot of ways and really give Tesla a run for their money so you mentioned price which was what I actually wanted to jump into the rumored price was like around 120 000 which is a lot of money for a car um you know rivians can get up that high a lot of like what lucid and some Teslas can get up that High I mean maybe if you really can figure it up there but like over a hundred thousand dollars for a car I would I would say for the average consumer for an average person uh over a hundred thousand dollars your car is insane and so um you know one of the things that makes Tesla so appealing is that you know when the model 3 launched what was that 2016 um that that was affordable by all metrics it was still expensive and then it dropped and it's you know that 35 000 Price Market not really there but kind of if you look at the savings and however they manipulated that whole price thing um I I have a model three right now it's like 48. that's not bad for a car but that's still kind of a lot of money for a lot of people who are looking at their car to just get them from point A to point B so my main point here is that you know now the price is under a hundred thousand dollars what does that mean is that 99 that's still obviously a ton of money like where do you think the price point would need to be for this to be a mass mass hit you know similar to iPhones in in the sense like to have that hip product where everyone's trying to adopt one uh 79 999 dollars okay because eighty thousand dollars eighty thousand dollars is the cap for the federal tax credit uh so your car has to be under that um and then I think if it's a truck or an SUV it can be more expensive or whatever so it depends on what it is if it comes out as a car like a sedan versus a crossover then that changes the math on it all uh I would imagine the first ones are going to be uh like you said hardly like sought after they're going to be exclusive they're going to be scarce and so the price is going to be pretty high and that's fine it's not bad at all I mean that's the fact that's how Tesla goes to Market this is one of the funny things I see people that are these hardcore cyber truck fans out there is they're saying oh man I can't wait to get my forty thousand dollar cyber truck and I'm going man good luck that's never happening the Tesla Works no nope it always starts with the most expensive version and then kind of the mid-tier and then for a very small window they sell that promised one that 35 000 model three the uh forty thousand dollar model or sixty thousand dollar Model S uh you know whatever it is it's a small tiny window they sell the cheap one and then a couple months later they say you know what hey no one wanted it let's go back to the more expensive ones uh so Apple I think could follow a similar strategy the very first ones could be uh I don't know what the true if there's an apple term for this but in Tesla world we would say founder series cars you know they have some sort of special label or special whatever and yeah you can price those well over 100 Grand because the people buying them you know aren't they don't care right you have so many people that are going to want this thing uh then I think they can work backwards into it right like I don't remember I mean what the original price of the iPhone was uh but even now I mean I just bought my wife now granted I buy the iPhone with a terabyte in it so she never runs out of storage and yells a good move good move uh so it's like it's like 14 1500 bucks or something you know it's it's a very expensive product now granted you can buy I know they make cheaper versions of the iPhone and stuff so I think that the price the the norm the average prices would I would imagine put around mid 70s hopefully um I don't think they're going to go for the cheaper markets you know I mean in fact if you look at worldwide smartphone sales as sort of a proxy here uh last I remember it was something like 80 85 percent of worldwide smartphones were Android phones and the big reason why is that they're so cheap because there's thousands of them and they're a fracture you can buy one for 200 bucks and I don't know what the cheapest iPhone is there but I know it's a lot more than that so it's one of those things where I think they will they will always probably want to be in that premium price point which I would the cheapest I could imagine them going is maybe in the the like mid 50s now granted at that price you're getting the the tax credit and you know you said your model 3 was 48 you're right in line with that um and also to think about that when you're talking about electric car you also have to consider the the real total cost of ownership I do this a lot on my channel where I look at it and I say uh Porsche ticon an electric F-150 uh Tesla Model y compare that to a gas car and what you end up finding is that you're saving 60 or 70 or even more uh percent per month on fuel so that means across five or ten years you're going to save sometimes 10 15 even 20 000 across that time across the your ownership period so when you look at that original price a lot of people think how much is my monthly payment going to be four or five 600 bucks whatever it is then you see a Tesla 50 60 000 and you're like dang this is approaching eight hundred dollars for my lease or my loan or whatever but that four or five six hundred thousand or four five six hundred monthly payment on a gas car you didn't factor in that it's gonna cost you two three hundred dollars in gas right and if you go over uh uh to to Europe and the UK and everything gas is even more expensive over there so I think when you look at the total cost they could have a car in the fifty sixty thousand dollar range and it's gonna be like a thirty five thousand dollar gas car comparison so I think it's one of those things when and this is what I really try to focus on my channel is like let's do the math here and let's look at look at all the factors not just that monthly payment because that's not everything that you really need to consider when it comes to your budget I'm gonna need you to make a video for me specifically talking to my wife when it comes time to to re-up on a car be like listen it says it's a thousand dollars a month but but it's not that bad yeah just just listen to Ben I'll tell you right now I've had a lot of people stop me on the street and say that exact same thing like you know what my wife wouldn't do it and I showed you your video where you broke down the math and now we have a you know Kia ev6 or Tesla Model y or whatever it is yep so we've talked quite a bit about how Apple needs to really challenge Tesla in this space and that seems increasingly likely given this sub 100 000 price point it's quite believable to imagine that this vehicle could be a direct competitor to the Model S and if that is the case what do you think Tesla will need to do to try and Claw back uh some territory here because apple as you say could be a very serious challenger but I wonder it I I I'm skeptical of Tesla really perhaps stepping up their build quality and Tesla is also not going to be able to rival the software expertise and software experience of Apple so where do you think Tesla will go if indeed it is a direct Model S competitor you know uh there have even been talks already about whether or not they should keep selling the snx um because the the numbers are so small and it's so expensive and make it sort of more of an of a niche vehicle but then the problem with that is they're losing out to Lucid because if you want the most Niche electric performance car you can get it's elusive you know I guess the remac Navarra is a different animal for a couple million dollars but like you know looking at it the model S Future Days may be numbered honestly it may dwindle down even further and my bet would be that if the finance team had anything to say at the finance team at Tesla had anything to say about it they would say who cares just let it go man like we make 80 of our money on model 3 and model y let's do more of that you know if you rewind the clock when Tesla was had a strong mission that they talked about a lot it was to help accelerate the transition to sustainable Transportation originally then energy but if you think about that accelerate that transition the high-end sedan Market has already gone electric like I said BMW Mercedes Tesla Lucid Audi Porsche they all have incredible offerings so the very high-end sedan Market is already there if you're not there then you're losing there's just you have nowhere to go right if you're uh if you make high-end expensive sedans they're and you're not electric we're not going electric just forget about it now I'm not talking about the economy cars of the world which will always be around and things like that like Toyota Honda for example but even if you look at like Lexus and Cadillac and some of these other ones so point being I don't know if Tesla has uh a dog in that fight and they honestly might just say forget it you know we're going to keep iterating on this increasingly Niche vehicle maybe make it a little bit faster maybe add a little bit more range but I don't know what else they could do like you said increase the build quality but they've sort of proven that build qual quality is not a huge selling factor for a lot of people you know what I mean and not to dog on them too much but I mean seriously if you go get in a Model S a brand new one and and you drive it around and you feel the bumps in in the creeks and and the noises it makes and then you go get in a brand new eqs the the electric S-Class for Mercedes it is night and day now you may not like the look of it you may not like the interior or whatever but it is undeniable how much better of a car it is and that's because Mercedes been making cars since cars existed right so it's one of those things where I don't know if Tesla has a way to come back from that but I don't know if they care either they may just say great Apple's here let's do that Apple may have a hard time even because they're new all the all the people that love apple and their brand uh their fan base will absolutely buy all of them but in terms of scale and long-term success of a car in that price point it might be tough because it's a pretty crowded market now if they came out with something else like say a minivan which doesn't exist in the electric space but is still super popular even if they came into the crossover space it would be smart because right now yeah well the VW ID Buzz is like officially the first electric minivan but it's not marketed that way you know they're like oh it's fun it's California it's all this and I'm like it's a minivan dude you have sliding doors three rows it's a minivan the first the first time someone actually markets a electric minivan I have no doubt and if it's like relatively affordable you know keep it in line with the current minivan prices maybe a little bit more because you're getting that you know electric they would go they would be gone there would be none you would not never be able to find one because there are people like me who has I have my Tesla but we also have a minivan because we're transporting all these kids around and it's like every day I get into it I'm like I wish this was Electric in some sort of fashion like I'm so sick of going to filling gas I'm sick of the way it drives we would we would all be lining up to purchase them all the men in the world or even women that were very anti-minivan would want one yeah no no doubt so you know there's a lot of space there to run right because it's sort of an untapped Market this is where I sort of applaud rivien how they change their strategy Midway through uh you know they won't say this but if you ask me they basically realize that uh Tesla owned the sedan space and so um let's not try to compete there let's go trucks you know and now they're they're dominating you know now granted Ford and Chevy are kind of gonna conquer that like they've owned it already but point being yeah I think Apple would be smart to find areas and markets that maybe uh segments that aren't completely saturated um otherwise they will they there will be a ceiling of how many per year they can sell now the the interesting thing in that space would be if Apple somehow is able to take market share from the established automakers right from the Mercedes and BMW if that's where they're targeting or if you go to the mid-tier like the acura's Infinities Lexus of the world so that would be interesting if they're able to take that market share away but um Tesla I don't I don't know that they care about the model S as maybe as much as as much as their marketing might say because if you look at the finance side of it it's not really doing much for them let's also real quickly just touch on the like interior the tech um you know what's this is where I start to like you know I like all cars for the most part you can kind of tell between like driving an electric car and going back to a non-election you can tell the way it feels and whatever but for the most part in my world when I get into a car it all kind of feels the same um and over time you know I just become numb to the way it feels when I drive but the interior the tech the the infotainment that's where I'm like okay this is important to me because this is the stuff that I interact with on a daily basis have you you said you just got an iPhone so have you had a chance to like use carplay before in the past oh huge I'm a huge fan of car play okay okay cool I mean my stance on Apple has always been like they make great products but the company always annoyed me how they lock you into certain things like the the home pod only playing Apple music and stuff like that I just so it angered me so much I'm like ah but their products are undeniably great so I got an iPhone uh this is my first one and I really do enjoy it I think it's great I do miss some of the things on Android that I had but whatever the point being yes I do use car play when I can carplay doesn't exist as you know in Teslas or rivian's uh Lucid just added it smartly and all the Classic Auto all the Legacy automakers have it already so when these guys come drop these cars off and I have them for a week I have a week of car play and it is like a breath of fresh air it is so nice to not have all these little dumb software issues or have to log into an app or find the podcast that I want to listen to because it's all already there that's to me the main point that I make anytime ask me about the software and Tesla I say it's as good as it gets but it totally sucks compared to carplay so right now thinking of an Apple car of of course it's going to have car play or some other more advanced version of that and see so so for most people my argument is that that your phone is the center of your Digital Universe right it's where you take your photos you you do social media you do all your things from here so something like Apple carplay or Android auto just makes total sense that when you get into your car it's just an extension of your phone in terms of the tech in there Apple's car will obviously do that exceptionally well I would actually question whether or not they'll support Android auto or something like that because if they don't that would you know you don't think so no chance so this is a question for you yeah yeah see so so that would be a bummer and I think a lot of those people would be like well I'm not buying the Apple car maybe they weren't going to buy it anyways I don't know um but it won't matter right right Hartley you agree with me right there's zero percent chance that that that's gonna happen that's the same thing as if like Android users being like why can't we have iMessage it's just not going to happen at least not right now if ever yeah yeah so Apple's happy to put their services occasionally on all the devices so it's like apple music coming to Tesla or yeah it's like um I mean it is even allowing car play in in non-apple vehicles obviously because there is no apple vehicle at the moment but the minute it comes to putting another ecosystem in Apple's walls Garden that is the that is the big No-No um so I don't think that is that is ever going to happen so because Apple will yeah apple will upsell you to it that that's the intention it will be it appleball wants to make you feel bad for wanting to use Android auto so the question I had is and this is the one I got to ask Elon Musk directly on a call he basically poo pooed on the idea at the time but I think they're coming around to it is um would the Apple car have an app store so if I did have an Android phone I I don't have apple carplay but I still use Spotify and Pandora you know Waze or whatever else maybe they won't support Waze actually I don't know but point being so I can log into the apps and have them feel native it's not on bluetoothing everything to my phone like it's a old Nissan Sentra or something um do you think that they would have a built-in app store or would it basically be like plain vanilla you just get nothing or Apple carplay only do you think they would lock it down that hard well I think one way or another whether it's via an app store or whether it is via carplay you would still get those third-party app experiences because that's effectively the way that carplay works right now if you uh plug your car in or you connect your uh your uh you you plug your phone in or you connect your phone wirelessly to carplay you still get your third-party podcast app you still get Waze um you get all of these services and apple every year is adding more and more to what developers are able to achieve in car play so it's already got this framework it's already got those apps ready so even if it isn't a full-blown App Store it will want those apps to be available because that again gives it a competitive advantage to the experiences that other automotives are able to deliver because it's a it's a true first party experience right yeah I know I completely agree yeah and that is a differentiator I think right there I also feel like some apps will be available like you know they can't deny Spotify that's just too popular they've tried doing that and other products and they've given up um slowly but surely like the homepod kinda works with Spotify but still not really but it's like Google Maps maybe I I see that's the thing I don't know because they make you know Apple music and because Apple Maps is a thing I feel like it's gonna really like in the car itself because in car play you plug your phone in and it has those apps available and you can use that but like natively it might do one of those things where you need to like it's not gonna work you know getting a link sending it to your car I can't imagine it's gonna immediately yeah natively open up in Google Maps unless they you know allow you the option like they did you know now where you can finally set a default mail app in the Mac like I don't know I think it could go either way I wouldn't be surprised the reason why I think they will is because you can do that now with carplay which means you will be able to do that with the Next Generation version of carplay that will be in vehicles at the end of this year so by the time we get to 2026 when this apple vehicle will be available there will be hundreds of other vehicles on the market that offer this um carplay experience including EVS where those apps will definitely be available because they are available now so unless apple is going to strip away functionality that is currently there which would get them very bad press that would dissuade people from moving over the whole point of car play is to be a sort of feature that introduces you to the Apple ecosystem so that you don't want to leave so if they offer an inferior carplay experience in the Apple car then people will think well I will just stick with whatever EV I've got now because I can use Google Maps because both will be on the market at the same time so yeah I I have a I have a thing so okay I I have car play in our minivan but that's the first time I've ever had a car that's had car play but it's not my car like my own personal car I've never had carplay before um and then I've gone from like a BMW X1 that still didn't have car play to a Tesla that was like the jump that I had and in that jump like Tesla's operating system for the software you know compared to any other car's built-in infotainment system I believe the car I had before the BMW was a Buick or a Ford like those were the cars that I've had beforehand like it feels night and day there is nothing better than that but like I talked to people who have used car play as they're on a regular basis and they're like I want car play in my Tesla and I can't my brain can't fathom absolutely because coming from one of those older cars I'm just like this is there's nothing better than this like I've got Spotify I've got everything I need for the most part like it's touch responsive and it's not super laggy like it works well like what could I possibly want so you are saying um you you want like in your rivian they don't have car play you would you would welcome that like you would use it on a regular basis if it came in I mean I bereted them online constantly that they don't have it it's beyond just wanting it amazing I mean it is it uh okay at this point Tesla I think there's they're in car software is good enough to where you can live without carplay and it's fine right it's passable I still think it's lame that they don't have it but at least they are sort of opening up to the idea of having an app store uh for example people maybe don't know but in your Tesla natively you have Netflix and you have YouTube and you have 20 games you can play natively so they have sort of an app store but that app store is like bespoke right it's not like anybody any developer out there can just go make an app it's like Tesla has to work directly with Netflix or twitch or whoever to create the app for the car so they seem to be embracing that and as they roll that out it will get better and better I still don't think it's as good as car play because I have to log into these apps it doesn't know me it's not the the device I already have with all of my preferences and my whole world that I've and you know my digital profile my digital stuff that I've been building since the internet was created it's like the phone has all that it knows me so it is carplay is still so much better plus it has hundreds of apps that are it's I saw like 200 plus apps supported maybe there's more I don't know but it's like so anything you can imagine exists and it just works great so like Tesla at this point I get and I I I could side with them and say how they're saying look forget it we're we've we've evolved past it but rivian when I talked to them and I talked to their PR team about this their excuse for not having car play was they feel they can make better integrated digital experiences than carplay offers and I spit out my coffee because what you're saying is you can make better software than Apple and Google and I'm sorry you can make a better truck than Apple Google for sure today but software I'm sorry guys no you can't it also has uh the Amazon Voice Assistant built in I don't want to trigger people's speakers um or mine but it has that built in which is atrocious it is it is so incredibly bad is it really bad and I I don't know well you can imagine how it works right so you get in you TR you use the the trigger word and then you say navigate home well when I first got my Amazon Echo it was when it first came out and my home address was my work address from nine years ago so it's navigating me there despite me plugging into the car my actual home address and saving it as home so like it's a very disjointed thing and I would ask it to play music and it would start playing on my speaker in my studio it just didn't know what was going on it was completely disconnected or or dysfunctional so yeah it's one of those things when you look at it you go guys I'm sorry you make an incredible vehicle but you cannot make better software than Apple and Google you just can't you know uh Tesla I would argue still doesn't make better software uh but their software is good enough I would say for most people most people like you said probably get in there you're just like oh my God mind blown right right if you live with carplay for a while you realize how lacking it is like a good example is I like Waze wait for me for taking my kids to school there are three different routes I can take depending on traffic that could be a 20 minute difference in the commute 20 minutes that means I'm like either on time to drop my kids off at school or I'm now late and my kids are rushing to get in and it's just a nightmare and then I'm late for a call or something else so that one difference there the built-in Tesla app while it does have traffic and it does use some of that it's definitely not as good as Waze and so for where I live anyways I'll say so that's one of those things where it's like yeah you just need to support it because and and you know for proof of that just look at the iPhone itself imagine if Apple never created an App Store if they only said we're going to create the apps and that's it imagine where we would be like in the world like I think Android would have probably completely crushed them at some point you know because you go God I can't get anything on this damn phone you know but they smartly very early on said look we can't make all of the software we can't think of all of the ideas we don't have the resources even if we we did so let's open up an app store and so I think Tesla's slowly wading into these Waters very cautiously but car play and app and in Android auto to that same extent will have already done this and so it's it would any new car any new EV maker in my opinion must support it otherwise you are really really swimming Upstream trying to compete with everyone else that just does it like Kia is a good example all the Hyundai group itself every one of their cars has car playing Android auto natively wirelessly in in most cases so you're looking at it going wow this little Kia has 200 plus apps that are already on my phone and this brand new fancy Tesla has six it's not as you know it's not the same thing not the same experience not to say it's bad but I but this one is definitely more familiar and better in almost every way in my opinion so I'm a huge fan and me not being a huge Apple fan but having carplay like this is amazing so whenever I get these other cars dropped off and I have them for a week I'm just like God it is so nice not having to find my podcast or find that Muse that Pandora station or whatever it's like it's just already there so another key Dimension to these vehicles software is self-driving functionality or you know purported self-driving at least so one thing I'm interested to get your thoughts on Ben is where we will be with self-driving from some of these big players like Tesla by 2026 and whether that will be something where Tesla by then can actually offer a meaningful competitive advantage over Apple which while Apple has vehicles on the road at the moment they are test Vehicles they are not actually the the vehicle itself and it will not have the same uh access to the same amount of data that Tesla will by that point and maybe by then Tesla will be a much more formidable uh much more formidable in terms of its self-driving capabilities yeah yeah it's a good question um I think there's there's two ways to think about it there is the um this car is going to be a robo taxi that makes me money which Elon has went on stage and said many many times um and then there's this is just a better Driving Experience for me as the driver and so that would be I would fall into the kind of safety side of the equation right is my car safe and does it offer me safety features which we kind of categorize or Tesla has correctly incorrectly labeled as self-driving so those are kind of two separate things Robo taxi versus just a safer better Driving Experience I think by 2026 Robo taxis are still 10 to 15 years away a true Robo taxi and then honestly the economics of it don't even make sense uh in terms of an actual like I'm just gonna click button my car goes out there or whatever it's I don't think it's going to deliver on that promise it's kind of like that dunning-kruger thing where it's like oh yeah everyone's super hyped on it and then as you get into the details your confidence just drops all the way to the bottom so Robo taxis let's just exclude that from this part of the conversation and talk about uh Advanced Driver assist systems systems as you'll see them called um Tesla currently is level two and their functionality the uh autopilot and enhanced autopilot I think are best in the industry they are incredibly good at what they do the full self-driving side of it which is where Tesla's trying to go with I assume I mean if you believe their marketing they're talking level five autonomy which is complete like you don't have a steering wheel like you you often say level four or five meaning you never need to have a human intervene ever level two is where we're at now where it'll speed up and slow down keep you in your lane and then maybe do some Lane changing or some light other Maneuvers but that's about it you still have to have your hands on the wheel so have to be paying attention that kind of a thing that's where we're at now in 2026 you said I think we'll still be in that same place the the confidence in those Maneuvers and those things will probably be better but we won't I don't think be at true level three yet level three is where the driver rarely has to intervene and this is the real really dangerous area where already at level two people just put it in autopilot and just hop on their phone texting watching a video Whatever not paying attention at all bad news right that's not good and then level three is where that is actually should be okay you should just occasionally have to pay attention and take control that's the real danger zone because this is where people are gonna you know figuratively fall asleep at the wheel and you're gonna over trust it and it's gonna lead to some bad results uh from time to time the you know just think about airplanes and the progression right you don't even think about the safety of a of a flight now but 50 60 years ago different animal right it wasn't uncommon to hear about a crash and so it was definitely in your mind so I think we're still you know 20 30 years away from the idea of a truly autonomous vehicle that you hop in and the fact of it crashing is like unheard of that'd be major worldwide news so 2026 uh if if Apple could deliver on essentially where Tesla's at today uh with their autopilot the basic autopilot functionality I think that would be enough for almost everybody um if you look at the the polls on people's trust in self-driving cars it's still extreme low and so there's you know social kind of hurdles that people have to get over psychological hurdles that companies have to get over before the technology can even be adopted so self-driving is one of those things where the hype is you know at a maximum and it has been for a long time but the reality is not even close to that and the road in between is going to be a long one um the one thing I like to say though is it doesn't mean that this Pursuit is not worthy like we should pursue this because there are great benefits and things that we we we will eventually realize and the road between here and there can bear a lot of fruit even if you think about um automatic emergency braking which I believe Volvo came out with in like 2009 or something like that that alone right there has saved a lot of lives and so even though that's not full self-driving it is a feature that you need for full self-driving that does help people and does make the road safer so I think it's a worthy Pursuit I think we will get there eventually but it's on a much longer time Horizon than anyone online is going to tell you really um and and you know between now and 2026 that's really I don't think it'll be much different than the world we live in today in terms of what's possible I completely agree with you um there's just no way I can see that ever happening in the next three to four years there's just no way and I can explain to you why is because when I'm in my car and I have autopilot on and all of a sudden at 75 miles an hour I come to a screeching halt on the freeway because my car accidentally feels like something's in front of me which nothing was in front of me that's the stuff that I have a hard time like wanting to ever move away from you know and until you can regain trust for many many years like you said you know like an airplane crashing is Major World News because it just so rarely happens um but you know we've I've seen videos I think a lot of people have seen that video of that Tesla just having a mind of its own and flying through at 100 miles an hour because the car just took off and like you know I don't know whether the details of that were like that was user error and somebody just explained what even if that was software and the car just took off and did its own thing and crashed inside I'm not interested in that at all like I barely use autopilot because of my own you know terrifying experience and I know a lot of people have had have you had any crazy autopilot experiences where you're like okay that's enough for me today oh yeah absolutely uh my wife won't let me use it at all if the family's in the car um a good example was my wife just went out to I'm in San Diego she's in Phoenix it's a straight 400 mile drive across the desert it's flat basically as you can imagine it's straight drive uh she told me last time she was on autopilot on the way back 11 times it slammed on the brakes and we're talking there's nothing it's not like there's an overpass or a shadow on the road literally just straight desert like almost like in a movie you would imagine just a straight Flat Road across the desert and it just so that right there erodes your trust now now the the interesting thing is I think a lot of people that talk about this online that that talk about oh my God it's going to change the world look at how great it is blah blah they don't own these cars they don't live with them they don't have these experiences so it's almost like somebody getting parenting advice from somebody that doesn't have kids it's like okay guys whatever like until you've been there know what it's like yeah you can't really your your opinion you don't have a fully formed opinion on it um and yeah you're totally right it's I've had a lot of scary experiences I've also done a lot of testing with it um Tesla's even given me early access to certain features before to do you know like a video on so I can launch it when the Embargo lifts and that kind of a thing and and in those experiences I've had to call them and say guys I don't know because this isn't working right you know um I I I fear that they have oversold it and it is a much longer time Horizon and so you know a lot of people I think that as you get the car and as you live with it you you really start to realize how far off it is now it is amazing at what it can do it's not to discredit what they're are able to do but to assume that it is anywhere near ready is just naive at this point I would say so yeah I've had a lot of scary experiences I mean in my rivian it doesn't have it it has a basic form of autopilot and they've this is like one good thing they've said is they basically said we're going to let someone else figure that out and then once it's like totally safe and good we're gonna try to adopt that but right now we're rivian stances hey we're the adventure vehicle company we want you to drive because we want you to be off-road we don't want you to be you know just just be your commuter we want you to go see the world and explore and all that so I applaud their approach being much more reasonable and humble about it Tesla's I think is where they get themselves into into some trouble in fact I mean there's class action lawsuits I know one in Germany which was funny because they were selling people full self-driving level five autonomy in Germany and they got sued for it and they lost because the court said well that's actually illegal so you know you're selling something something that is technically illegal by our current laws so uh no you know um but yeah it's a it's going to be a much slower progression than I think anyone on Twitter wants to believe Hartley do you have anything else we're very pressed up against time but it's been great just a lot of conversation I completely lost track of time honestly um I have just like three or four random very rapid fire questions that I have for Ben but that's about it but if you have anything you want to touch on Hartley um let me know now no go ahead go ahead okay okay so um just real quick and you don't have to go into any crazy responses if you don't want to um what is in your opinion the best Eevee on the market right now and taken to mind price um you know build quality software and Hardware features Etc and driving obviously like what do you think just without thinking too hard is the best one that you've driven so far uh I think the one most people will be happy with is the Kia ev6 or the Hyundai ionic 5 which are basically the same car with different uh styling interesting okay um yeah do you think so my I guess this is kind of a follow-up question do you think uh those cars could surpass let's just say apple doesn't come to anything in the next you know five to ten years do you think those cars in this current trajectory with everything else on the market could pass up Tesla's popularity that'd be tough um they are incredibly good vehicles and they have good brand loyalty people know them Tesla has been for a while I believe eroding a lot of consumer confidence in them with how they treat certain issues um and you know the quality issues like you're talking about autopilot Phantom breaking that's called uh you know so if that continues to proliferate and people's trust and confidence in Tesla continues to to wane then I don't know that KIA or Hyundai will do it individually but they Tesla may lose a tremendous amount of market share overall to let's say the Mustang Mach e which is in the same category the Nissan Aria which is an incredible vehicle especially at a good price point I mean there's a lot of vehicles in this space so um the the the overall market share could be very mixed as these other cars really really come to Market in kind of Full Force you know imagine like when the iPhone first came out and they just dominated and then now you know they own a small smaller percentage of the worldwide Market but a monster share of the profits right so you look look at that and you go well okay when Android came out yeah there was like one phone and it sucked so you know but as that proliferated over they eventually overtook Apple in terms of worldwide sales so I could see a similar thing happening where Tesla is more of a niche product um and not to go I don't want to go too too much of on a tangent but I had a conversation with MKBHD about this and we were tossing around this idea of of Tesla becoming more of like Google Google when it comes to phones where they do make phones but they're pretty Niche right they're more known for Android for making Android and so you know Tesla could kind of be the same where they they have four or five models that they make of cars and they sell but more so they provide batteries and powertrains and software to everyone else I thought that would have been a smart charger kind of become yeah yeah like they have some very distinct advantages that if they wanted to truly scale and grow they could do so much more rapidly let the like making cars to the people that have been doing it forever and just do the stuff that they're really good at and you know really dominate the market so whether or not they are selling the individual car it doesn't matter because they're still selling the the kind of the guts of it so I thought that would be an interesting idea but I don't know that Kiara Hyundai could individually overtake Tesla but maybe Tesla will not become the the majority of EVS eventually to everyone else and that was kind of the last thing that I wanted we didn't even touch on this and so real quickly what do what does Apple need to do and this also kind of just extends to anyone else um is Apple going to need to try to make their own proprietary charging or do you think they're going to work off of Electrify America or I think Tesla just needs to bite the bullet and work with everyone like they are doing now but like really ramp that up to where they're are more superchargers there's more available in every single there just needs to be one standard charging thing um so do you think that's the route that they would go or do you think Apple will try to do the Apple thing and make its own proprietary nonsense that would be hilarious like a lightning cable just for your car you're saying you gotta put you got to plug it into the bottom you got to plug it into the bottom like the like the mouse you have to have a lift oh God that'd be hilarious no no uh absolutely not that would be I would go down there and yell at them personally if they did anything stupid like that um but no what they need to do in the U.S anyways is adopt CCS um I think it's ccs2 and then in in Europe you have CCS one anyways uh it's a standard charging um uh uh interface and Tesla I don't know if that's what you're alluding to but Tesla has now started opening superchargers to non-teslas Via an adapter that they install themselves and all that so I think Tesla's going to continue to do that um and that's going to hope hopefully that will be a fast adoption I cynically think that they're only doing that to get that government money uh whatever the incentives are for and maybe there's like hey if you have X percent of your network available that's enough here to take all the money and they may just say cool we're going to do the minimum and take all the money and be done I hope that's not really what their intent is but if Tesla opens up the network to everyone Apple car has to be CCS because that's just this it's literally every it's like Tesla has their own every other car in the US has CCS with the exception of the old Nissan Leaf or the current Nissan Leaf as well and that's just because the Nissan Leaf was like the first electric car the first mass-market electric car and they had a standard that was popular in Japan and didn't exist out here so they just went with what they had right so yeah totally CCS has to be uh you they'll use every single Network out there all the fast charging networks um and then Tesla's Network as it grows Maybe by 2026 a good percentage of the supercharging network will be available and if so man what what a game changer that is for everyone else because charging a non-tesla does suck um but I think the the miss understanding by a lot of people is that you have to go to a charger to charge it at all where ninety percent of the time you're just charging at home yeah the only time that doesn't happen is if you don't have a place to charge at home or at work which isn't a insignificant percentage of the population you know like imagine like I have a lot of friends in New York they just they don't have a garage are you kidding me they just park on the street so yeah for a lot of people millions and millions of people in this country that you do not have a place to charge at home where it works so that sucks and that's where the charging really needs to come up but for a lot of people that have a home or an apartment or work with a charger you never even think about a fast charging Network unless you're on a road trip you know once or twice a year on average so it's one of those things where I think it's overblown in the media like you have to have as many as many fast charges as you do gas stations just not really the case you know what I mean because most people can charge at home and and my last final question a personal question but maybe this will apply to anyone else out there who's listening um I my lease is up next year with my model 3 I would like something that can fit all three kids uh preferably I don't want to be in a Tesla anymore but I'm also nervous about charging and now you're right I 99.9 of the time charge at home but that's because I have very low mileage in my car in terms of how much range I can get and I also don't travel anywhere with this car that much besides my own personal stuff because I can't really fit all three kids comfortably um so in theory if I did have a car that could fit them in there comfortably I would like to take it on road trips uh and drive around more so keep in mind range in size and affordability what would you would you recommend just biting the bullet and get a model y or if not what car do you recommend uh how old are the kids what's the age ranges so right now they're six four and about one and a half gonna be two here at the end of the year okay so they're all in car seats still Yes um which is so that that adds yeah so the model y I would say not even a good candidate anyways uh I have two kids in the model Y and that's enough uh I don't even know if you could fit a third one maybe on one of these like inflatable jump seats or something well we transitioned we transitioned our oldest into like a normal booster um where it's a very yes it's it that's kind of low profile very small and then our daughter would be in one of those like high back boosters but she'd still need the harness so really my my youngest is the one who needs the giant thing still flipped around the other way and all that yeah yeah yeah so so I would say look at considering that um if you did want to stay in the Tesla space you'd have to go model X this is the only thing I would recommend uh which is much more expensive vehicle and all that it's really cool but has its own kind of quirks and stuff um I would probably hopefully uh probably not by the time your lease is up but the Kia ev9 is coming out and that's a three row full-size SUV uh it's Kia it'll be relatively affordable it'll be really well built it'll have car play it'll be it'll be great in in a lot of ways uh the on the higher end the next level up I would go the Volvo ex90 but I think that's still maybe two years out um like they invited me to the launch of it and I said no just bring it to my house they said we'll have it for you the end of next year for a press loaner which means yeah so I'm like uh but that thing's I mean it's a Volvo so again if you know Volvo very nice Vehicles very well built you know good design all that stuff high quality so that will be a great three row SUV um but if I had to get one today so Kia ev9 and Volvo ex90 future today the only one I could think of that would even be worthy is the rivien r1s um problem is it's 100 Grand you know yeah that's the thing so like in my mind so the the real brief follow-up question is do I next year bite the bullet and go back to a a a a gas car uh until more things come out in the market that are affordable well you have the minivan still are you getting rid of the minivan or no no no my car is just the model three so that would be we would it would just be yeah yeah I mean it's tough uh yeah because like I said in in the in the electric space right now three row SUV full that that can fit the kids because you can buy the model y with the jump seat but it it is not really I mean it's tight back there it can work but it's more like in a pinch I wouldn't want that to be your everyday driver model X is the only option but then you're going to be buying used unless you want to spend 150 Grand you know and at that point if you are spending 100 Grand plus I'm gonna go rivian r1s it is so much better in terms of that kind of functionality so um it's tough right now yeah so maybe a gas car or maybe a plug-in hybrid like a uh Kia Sorento plug-in hybrid or there's a few in that space that are still kind of like full-size SUVs but get 40 plus miles to the gallon when you add it all up and you know something like 40 miles on pure electric so plug-in hybrid might be a good option to fill that gap between now and Kia ev9 and Volvo ex90 although the Volvo ex90 is going to be expensive vehicle as well so Kia ev9 is probably the only one um that should be really on your mind as far as all those constraints those conversations making me sad because I'm gonna have some very very bad decisions to make next year um man thank you so much this has been this has been great so much information um do you want to plug anything that you have coming up your Channel find me on YouTube yeah yeah just Google search Ben Sullins or YouTube search Ben solins we'll have it all Linked In the description so everybody can check it out um and Ben thank you so much for coming on man absolutely pleasure guysforeign welcome back to another episode of the macrame show Hartley you're not where I can't touch I can't you're not with me anymore it's very sad no sadly not yeah although in the future wink wink there's gonna be some episodes where we are once again together and by the way uh no we didn't plan to all wear white shirts um in a white room with silver you know and whitish products that was not none of that was planned we literally for those of you who are um interested we all had like a giant house together in which you know a lot of the Mac Rumors team was together and I just came downstairs like all right man you ready to record these uh these podcast episodes I didn't notice at all that we were wearing the same like kind of shirt it was just a plain white shirt like it had no idea until after we filmed it I don't I don't think I noticed until after people started commenting on it honestly so well we well needless to say we got the message yeah yes we were wearing the same color shirt so needless to say you're going to probably be seeing some very similar you know just pull the shades back we recorded a couple of episodes at a time um some really cool episodes we have the founder of Mac Rumors Arnold Kim he's going to be talking all about Mac rumors and like the history and some super interesting stuff that honestly I've been at the company for like five or six years now and I had no idea about Hartley you you know you learned some great things even Arnold learned some things that he had no idea about uh and so uh yeah we're gonna be having some episodes like that and today we were planning on doing you know our basic format with the news and then jumping into our main topic which is all about Apple car and we already filmed that segment with our guest Ben Sullins and we realized that we had an insane amount of content there to where I think we just don't need to do the daily Roundup of news because there's just so much so with that said we're gonna jump in to our pre-recorded version here with Ben Sullins about the Apple car and kind of the history of EVS moving on to our main topic you might notice that we actually have a guest Ben cell Collins thank you so much for joining us we really appreciate it you are our expert on all things electric vehicles which is our main topic the Apple car um I never thought we would actually be talking about this in all like seriousness because in my mind Apple's just not making a car and that's kind of how it started with the rumors and everything for many years but now it's become something that actually seems like it's on the trajectory of happening but before we get into the Apple card specifics why don't you tell everybody more about your channel and like your history with EVs and you know kind of your expertise on them yeah sure so I stumbled into YouTube I think like a lot of people where I did something that took off and I started to do more of that and that thing was I bought a Tesla back in 2016 and I looked at how much money I was saving by owning it on fuel and people really liked that message I think maybe it gave them more validation about their own purchase or whatever you know uh Obsession people already had I kind of validated that for them and then so I just kept covering you know my owner experience being a Tesla owner back in 2016 and then that grew into Lots like a whole YouTube kind of content business and then eventually other companies started making interesting electric cars they weren't just Nissan Leafs and things like that and so then I started covering um and doing all that so now you know in some circles I'm a auto journalist where I get invited to anytime there's a new EV coming out and I go review that or whatever but I've sort of shifted away to where now I just wait for them to give me a press loaner and they'll bring one of these new EVS to my house they let me have it for a week and then I get to drive it like a real car I get to daily drive it and you know I'm not the first to post about it but I think my posts and my reviews are much more authentic and real than just hey they flew me to some exotic destination for three days and I sat in it for 30 minutes it's like no I lived with this I've got two kids a wife I live in in Southern California so I get to use it like a more common use case than just hey I'm A Car Guru right so it's kind of a different perspective well yeah um but yeah especially with like events like that where you're kind of being pampered and like you're in a nice totally yeah I mean it's it's definitely gives you you know we're human so it gives you a different perspective on the product or in your case the car that you're out there to see um and so it's nice that you get them at home where you're not being pampered you've got your kids you've gotta you've gotta do the pain that I know all too well of taking out the car seats putting the car seats in the new car trying not to go insane during that time frame and so that was kind of one of the main reasons why um we were excited to have you on is because like we wanted to talk more about the state of EVs and then kind of drop in some of the news that we've heard about Apple and see like what is it going to take for Apple to like make an actual successful vehicle um and so with that said what are you currently driving right now are you still in Teslas or have you moved on to something else yeah I I sold my my Model S uh just over a year ago and I got a rivian r1t so I have a truck now and it's perfect for where I live for my situation with the family it's a smaller truck but it's super fun um I will say it's not as good as the Ford Lightning the electric F-150 in terms of its truckness but it is so much more fun and where I live parking spaces are tight roads are small so it's really great so that's what I have and then my wife drives a Tesla Model Y and we've owned at this point every Tesla they make of the exception of the original Roadster so lots of experience as an owner of there and of those and then I've driven probably any EV you can name out there with the exception of maybe some of the latest ones so with regards to Apple car if indeed it is going to be cool with that we've seen quite a lot of these rumors developing over the years and it really seems like Apple's Ambitions have changed as time has gone on um where initially they were looking at something that was perhaps uh without a steering wheel without pedals without conventional seats are more like a limousine configuration inside the car and it looks like now they have sort of repositioned the vehicle to be a little bit less ambitious so now we are expecting it to be effectively just set up like a normal vehicle at least with a driver's seat a steering wheel and pedals so in terms of design and what we could expect this interior to look like where do you think Apple needs to take this vehicle in order to separate itself from the competition as it stands but also stay realistic within what is going to be possible within the next five years or so yeah it's a good question I think it's a smart move for them to sort of scale back those ambitious plans and you guys would be more in touch with this than I am but I mean apple as I you know and I've been working in Tech since 1998 so I've been in the tech industry as like a database engineer and data scientist for many many years and apple I've never really I mean early days was different but nowadays I don't see them as major Risk Takers with the products they develop and I say that because their products are so Mass Market that they can't to do things that are so wildly out there that like they would risk it being a failure so I think it makes a lot of sense for them to scale it back to a design that people won't like like you're saying originally like or more limousine style configuration no pedals that would be a huge leap for them and for the consumer and I think that would be very risky and at their size and their scale I don't know or at least from my experience following them it doesn't appear that that's something that they have the appetite for so I think it's smart what they're doing in terms of How To Succeed uh I I have no doubt that uh the quality is the thing that would separate them from everyone else um if you guys have driven EVS or you know the different um Spectrum out there you have the Teslas of the world who are still innovating like it's 2012 and like if they have to you know they take away the gear stocks they don't even give you a whole steering wheel anymore they're making these things that are still really boundary pushing when people like me that have been following them for a long time argue they don't need to like they've won right they're there it's almost like when the iPhone came out what it did to the smartphone market you had a lot of people that made fun of it there was no keyboard oh my God how could anyone blah blah blah and now basically every smartphone is either an iPhone or something that is looks identical to it right you can argue features to you know the cows come home but the point being they won and everyone else needs to get on board and so I think Tesla did that as well in the EV space and that's what you see with almost all the other traditional automakers is they're trying to play ketchup they're trying to be more tesla-like so I think Apple could do a really good job here by looking at what Tesla's done and sort of one-upping them in areas that they are better at and I would say the number one area that I think they would be better is in quality one of the things like I have an iPhone now this is my my first iPhone um and the thing I do love about it is that I can rely on it whereas a pixel phone will crash if you open too many apps or dumb things like that where you're like I can't have that happen now Tesla has famously it all infamously all over failed in the quality Department again and again they make incredible products but there are a lot they have a long ways to go that's why when you see things like Mercedes making the eqs or BMW making the i7 like their top tier highest end sedans you know that those are going to be better cars they may not be as good on the tech side but the people buying those cars would rather have the quality vehicle versus the super advanced technology so I think Apple has the opportunity here to kind of kind of eat Tesla's lunch in a way if they do it properly because clearly they'll have the tech side of it especially in and I saw some notes I don't know if I'm assuming basically the next iteration of Apple carplay which is much more um like like hardwired into the into the car not just like a an app that runs um I assume that they would use that or some variant of that maybe something you know beyond that which would make it even better in the technology inside of the the the car and then if they can deliver on a quality vehicle then it's it's going to be a serious headwind for Tesla I would say no one else has really given Tesla a run for their money in fact if you look the recent stats they still are something like 80 percent of EVS sold are Teslas so like they own the market especially here in the US um the only one that I've even thought of that could give them a run for their money is Apple um and so quality I would say would be the big differentiator for them so if that's going to be key to the Apple car's identity one thing I'm really intrigued to get your thoughts on Ben is obviously all all car brands sort of have this identity not only in terms of perhaps the things they're known for but also just in the in in terms of the way these cars feel and particularly with EVS we've seen automakers try and layer on certain gimmicks maybe with uh like the BMW I4 and the sort of the the the sounds that they've engineered for the uh for the vehicle to make and this sort of thing and even just in terms of the the handling and the just the feel of the car ultimately so I wonder if you had to speculate on what we could expect an Apple car to actually feel like to drive where would you expect that to go are you just expecting it to be uh like a Tesla or are we expecting it to be a bit less playful perhaps I don't know what what are your thoughts on that yeah they would need to have good acceleration because that's all EVS um that but that should be easy to accomplish just because of the physics of how the motors work and everything uh I would hope that that the handling would be better than Tesla's I actually and I think most car enthusiasts not if you talk to you know Tesla Twitter it's a different animal but if you talk to actual car people they hate how Tesla's Drive they're really poor but it doesn't matter because they excel in so many other areas that people the majority of people who came from a Honda Civic or Toyota Camry or Ford Focus to them it's a magic vehicle right but to actual car person they're like oh my God I can't even ride in this thing so I would hope that it would be better but I still think and you guys correct me from wrong but Apple's market is the mass market so I don't think they would be trying to say compete with a BMW or Mercedes or Porsche or somebody like that who have very distinctive sort of feels about them I would imagine that it would be be hopefully a comfortable ride and then maybe you have different driving modes but in terms of suspension all that I mean this is honestly the biggest question for me about Apple making a car is how do they I mean I guess they have all the money in the world but still you have to have a factory that factory has to have a supply chain behind it and you know Apple obviously is tremendous at this with the other products that they make but this is like a whole new product line I would I would argue going from an iPhone to an iPad the the supply chain is probably there's a lot of overlap whereas going into a vehicle it's a totally different ball game not that they can't do it but that to me is the biggest hill to climb here so how they come up with that brand identity and that feel and all that I would imagine it would be something that just is mass Market targeted not something that is super niche in terms of Ultra Luxury Ultra performance or anything like that because that's that's really hard to pull off um and then also it may uh sort of you know just enfranchising people some people may not like how it feels and then that I don't think would be in their marketing plan if I were if I were imagining if I'm sitting in that room you know what they're thinking Hartley the company that they're working with is Hyundai correct not Honda well this is this is one of the opening questions so yeah uh Hyundai has spoken about this they were the only automaker to actually explicitly say when they were not supposed to say that they were in talks with apple about some sort of collaboration on this vehicle but it's it seems like Apple has been in talks with virtually every major automaker because it's it's not capable of setting up this supply chain um so realistically it will have to rely on some sort of major automaker um as a partner um whether that's Hyundai whether it's Honda there's been talks of working with um several smaller slightly more Niche Brands um just to bring in that expertise it looks like that's something that's going to happen but they possibly are not even nailed down to a specific partner yet um because we're still looking at we're still years away from this thing so it's still realistically uh in in a design stage at this point and any discussions that are going on with automakers are going to be whether they are capable of meeting these requirements well isn't the current launch date rumor 2026 which I mean is probably not going to happen but like usually on this show whenever we talk about anything in the future I'm like that's way too long that's way too long but with a car and especially with something that we know like we know a lot about but also kind of feel like we know very little about a car in 2026 that's three years two and a half maybe um that doesn't that doesn't seem like that long from now and so I'm a little confused like they need to have that kind of like partner you know nailed down uh pretty fast and then in my mind is like Okay so let's just say it is Hyundai or Hyundai like how Hartley would uh pronounce it I still don't I still don't know the correct pronunciation I've heard it like six different ways so so are we looking at more like an ion day exactly so are we looking at more like an ionic five six are they gonna like have to rely on stuff that already exists well I guess in that time frame it'll be whatever their next iterations are of those cars but like you know usually they don't drastically change the body design that far from now so like is that what we're looking at or is Apple just going to be like yo you use your stuff but you make this design that we have um is that what you guys are thinking is gonna happen well yeah it would have to be a their own design right I mean but Hyundai is a great partner the Hyundai group who owns Kia um and Genesis and a handful of other brands you probably haven't heard of like tremendous partner if that's who they went with in fact I would argue right now their uh their products in the US uh anyways are absolutely crushing it right the ionic five just want SUV of the year which I still argue it's not an SUV but whatever SUV is a very loose term there but yeah yeah it's like a fuzzy definition but no I I that would be a great partner and that makes all all the sense in the world to find someone like that and I don't know I mean I guess Apple's big enough if it would even make sense but they could like just buy the company probably and force them to do whatever they want you know at their scale the batteries might be a question but I was thinking about this more leading up to this you know because batteries are hard to come by but you know Apple like they sell gazillion iPhones and they sell tons of things with batteries already so in terms of supply chain I imagine it's not too hard to get those um and if they're partnering with you know Hyundai or someone else they can figure it out but I would have to imagine have to be their own design and yeah built by someone else like that because I mean they don't like own the factories that buy that make iPhones right isn't it Foxconn and these other companies and things yeah yeah so that makes that makes all the sense in the world to me the question I really have about this is go to market strategy because you know I remember the days when people would stand in line for the iPhone you know in the rain in New York or whatever and it didn't matter but now I mean Apple's not like Tesla in the fact that like if they say they're gonna make something generally it's gonna happen I know there have been some products where they've sort of teased them or whatever and then they never came to fruition but point being like they're not in the same game where Tesla can you know the Cyber truck is a great example right like hey put your deposit down here it is it's been through it's three years late and it's still like oh it may come next year we're not sure you know and it depends who you ask but it's one of those things where it's not very Apple like the current say go to market strategy from Tesla and others so I'm curious how they'll handle that like if it's 2026 are they gonna say here's the car it'll be you know on your doorstep in two weeks or is it going to be here's the car put the order down and then in two years we'll have it to you because that I think would be a much more reasonable time frame and it's sort of I think what people expect now in this new world where companies sell direct to Consumer uh cars and things of that nature I think it's going to be a very different strategy to anything that Apple has done before ultimately because not they they need this uh this whole new infrastructure they're not going to be able to put these things uh in Apple stores on tables so that they're going to need to also have the the service set up for this which is why a partner would make perfect sense but I think the issue that apple is encountering with these negotiations with Partners is the partners are concerned about Apple taking their lunch because if Apple's EV is better than in terms of at least design and software than the EVS that these Partners have on offer then the partner is just at risk of becoming just this compliant manufacturing supplier and they are concerned about this particularly some manufacturers like um uh Mercedes are supposedly very cautious about this which is why they don't want to offer this next Generation carplay experience because they don't want to get the C Apple's experience in people's mind um at this stage so yeah that is one of the the big open questions is how exactly it will come to my my bet would be that it will be a very limited production run initially that would fit a little bit more into Apple's strategy of constraining the supply albeit not intentionally in this case but to have it as a more desirable item um and that would develop more enthusiasm for it if say unlike a cyber truck where it just simply isn't available even if you want to get one the Apple car will be so hard to come by but you you may see them around and certainly it will only be in the you which is unusual um at least for EVS which are mostly the platforms for them are developed for a worldwide market and I wouldn't even be surprised if it was limited to certain states where they got regulatory approval for it initially just to try and keep the production run um as exclusive as possible I don't think we're going to get you know a two weeks to launch on a on a worldwide scale at least not in right hand uh left-hand Drive markets uh yeah you right and drive markets well they don't have to either you know what I mean it's totally fine to start with the US which is a giant market even if they just started in California that's still a huge car market right I mean if you look at the the size of of California in a lot of metrics it's bigger than the UK in a lot of ways in terms of the number of people the the GDP and all those kind of things so it's a it's a it's a big enough market I think that it would be a good play and smart for them specifically around things like service like you're saying if they're trying to figure out parts and all that because it's a whole new ball game getting into cars I have no doubt in my mind they would sell every single one that they could possibly make though I think it would be a long time before we saw any demand waiver at all just because of their brand loyalty and the brand Affinity that people have you know I mean I don't know your guys thoughts but I mean Apple hasn't every product they've made hasn't been the best in class product of that category but it doesn't matter it really doesn't matter you know I mean Tesla's the same way you know throw that back on them too like in a lot of ways their cars are inferior to some of the newer ones coming out but it doesn't matter because you have such that a strong brand affinity and this also goes like how are people buying um Audi electric cars and things and it's like well because people love Audi you know same with Mercedes and these other ones so I think the brand of Apple is so incredibly strong that it wouldn't matter uh whatever their go to market strategy is it'll succeed um the question is scale because scaling cars is much harder I would imagine than scaling smaller devices that require far fewer resources to make um you know and and then service and those kind of things but I'm excited for it I really am um I have no idea what what it you know when it'll come out other pricing and all that but I think I think they could really sort of you know change the game in a lot of ways and really give Tesla a run for their money so you mentioned price which was what I actually wanted to jump into the rumored price was like around 120 000 which is a lot of money for a car um you know rivians can get up that high a lot of like what lucid and some Teslas can get up that High I mean maybe if you really can figure it up there but like over a hundred thousand dollars for a car I would I would say for the average consumer for an average person uh over a hundred thousand dollars your car is insane and so um you know one of the things that makes Tesla so appealing is that you know when the model 3 launched what was that 2016 um that that was affordable by all metrics it was still expensive and then it dropped and it's you know that 35 000 Price Market not really there but kind of if you look at the savings and however they manipulated that whole price thing um I I have a model three right now it's like 48. that's not bad for a car but that's still kind of a lot of money for a lot of people who are looking at their car to just get them from point A to point B so my main point here is that you know now the price is under a hundred thousand dollars what does that mean is that 99 that's still obviously a ton of money like where do you think the price point would need to be for this to be a mass mass hit you know similar to iPhones in in the sense like to have that hip product where everyone's trying to adopt one uh 79 999 dollars okay because eighty thousand dollars eighty thousand dollars is the cap for the federal tax credit uh so your car has to be under that um and then I think if it's a truck or an SUV it can be more expensive or whatever so it depends on what it is if it comes out as a car like a sedan versus a crossover then that changes the math on it all uh I would imagine the first ones are going to be uh like you said hardly like sought after they're going to be exclusive they're going to be scarce and so the price is going to be pretty high and that's fine it's not bad at all I mean that's the fact that's how Tesla goes to Market this is one of the funny things I see people that are these hardcore cyber truck fans out there is they're saying oh man I can't wait to get my forty thousand dollar cyber truck and I'm going man good luck that's never happening the Tesla Works no nope it always starts with the most expensive version and then kind of the mid-tier and then for a very small window they sell that promised one that 35 000 model three the uh forty thousand dollar model or sixty thousand dollar Model S uh you know whatever it is it's a small tiny window they sell the cheap one and then a couple months later they say you know what hey no one wanted it let's go back to the more expensive ones uh so Apple I think could follow a similar strategy the very first ones could be uh I don't know what the true if there's an apple term for this but in Tesla world we would say founder series cars you know they have some sort of special label or special whatever and yeah you can price those well over 100 Grand because the people buying them you know aren't they don't care right you have so many people that are going to want this thing uh then I think they can work backwards into it right like I don't remember I mean what the original price of the iPhone was uh but even now I mean I just bought my wife now granted I buy the iPhone with a terabyte in it so she never runs out of storage and yells a good move good move uh so it's like it's like 14 1500 bucks or something you know it's it's a very expensive product now granted you can buy I know they make cheaper versions of the iPhone and stuff so I think that the price the the norm the average prices would I would imagine put around mid 70s hopefully um I don't think they're going to go for the cheaper markets you know I mean in fact if you look at worldwide smartphone sales as sort of a proxy here uh last I remember it was something like 80 85 percent of worldwide smartphones were Android phones and the big reason why is that they're so cheap because there's thousands of them and they're a fracture you can buy one for 200 bucks and I don't know what the cheapest iPhone is there but I know it's a lot more than that so it's one of those things where I think they will they will always probably want to be in that premium price point which I would the cheapest I could imagine them going is maybe in the the like mid 50s now granted at that price you're getting the the tax credit and you know you said your model 3 was 48 you're right in line with that um and also to think about that when you're talking about electric car you also have to consider the the real total cost of ownership I do this a lot on my channel where I look at it and I say uh Porsche ticon an electric F-150 uh Tesla Model y compare that to a gas car and what you end up finding is that you're saving 60 or 70 or even more uh percent per month on fuel so that means across five or ten years you're going to save sometimes 10 15 even 20 000 across that time across the your ownership period so when you look at that original price a lot of people think how much is my monthly payment going to be four or five 600 bucks whatever it is then you see a Tesla 50 60 000 and you're like dang this is approaching eight hundred dollars for my lease or my loan or whatever but that four or five six hundred thousand or four five six hundred monthly payment on a gas car you didn't factor in that it's gonna cost you two three hundred dollars in gas right and if you go over uh uh to to Europe and the UK and everything gas is even more expensive over there so I think when you look at the total cost they could have a car in the fifty sixty thousand dollar range and it's gonna be like a thirty five thousand dollar gas car comparison so I think it's one of those things when and this is what I really try to focus on my channel is like let's do the math here and let's look at look at all the factors not just that monthly payment because that's not everything that you really need to consider when it comes to your budget I'm gonna need you to make a video for me specifically talking to my wife when it comes time to to re-up on a car be like listen it says it's a thousand dollars a month but but it's not that bad yeah just just listen to Ben I'll tell you right now I've had a lot of people stop me on the street and say that exact same thing like you know what my wife wouldn't do it and I showed you your video where you broke down the math and now we have a you know Kia ev6 or Tesla Model y or whatever it is yep so we've talked quite a bit about how Apple needs to really challenge Tesla in this space and that seems increasingly likely given this sub 100 000 price point it's quite believable to imagine that this vehicle could be a direct competitor to the Model S and if that is the case what do you think Tesla will need to do to try and Claw back uh some territory here because apple as you say could be a very serious challenger but I wonder it I I I'm skeptical of Tesla really perhaps stepping up their build quality and Tesla is also not going to be able to rival the software expertise and software experience of Apple so where do you think Tesla will go if indeed it is a direct Model S competitor you know uh there have even been talks already about whether or not they should keep selling the snx um because the the numbers are so small and it's so expensive and make it sort of more of an of a niche vehicle but then the problem with that is they're losing out to Lucid because if you want the most Niche electric performance car you can get it's elusive you know I guess the remac Navarra is a different animal for a couple million dollars but like you know looking at it the model S Future Days may be numbered honestly it may dwindle down even further and my bet would be that if the finance team had anything to say at the finance team at Tesla had anything to say about it they would say who cares just let it go man like we make 80 of our money on model 3 and model y let's do more of that you know if you rewind the clock when Tesla was had a strong mission that they talked about a lot it was to help accelerate the transition to sustainable Transportation originally then energy but if you think about that accelerate that transition the high-end sedan Market has already gone electric like I said BMW Mercedes Tesla Lucid Audi Porsche they all have incredible offerings so the very high-end sedan Market is already there if you're not there then you're losing there's just you have nowhere to go right if you're uh if you make high-end expensive sedans they're and you're not electric we're not going electric just forget about it now I'm not talking about the economy cars of the world which will always be around and things like that like Toyota Honda for example but even if you look at like Lexus and Cadillac and some of these other ones so point being I don't know if Tesla has uh a dog in that fight and they honestly might just say forget it you know we're going to keep iterating on this increasingly Niche vehicle maybe make it a little bit faster maybe add a little bit more range but I don't know what else they could do like you said increase the build quality but they've sort of proven that build qual quality is not a huge selling factor for a lot of people you know what I mean and not to dog on them too much but I mean seriously if you go get in a Model S a brand new one and and you drive it around and you feel the bumps in in the creeks and and the noises it makes and then you go get in a brand new eqs the the electric S-Class for Mercedes it is night and day now you may not like the look of it you may not like the interior or whatever but it is undeniable how much better of a car it is and that's because Mercedes been making cars since cars existed right so it's one of those things where I don't know if Tesla has a way to come back from that but I don't know if they care either they may just say great Apple's here let's do that Apple may have a hard time even because they're new all the all the people that love apple and their brand uh their fan base will absolutely buy all of them but in terms of scale and long-term success of a car in that price point it might be tough because it's a pretty crowded market now if they came out with something else like say a minivan which doesn't exist in the electric space but is still super popular even if they came into the crossover space it would be smart because right now yeah well the VW ID Buzz is like officially the first electric minivan but it's not marketed that way you know they're like oh it's fun it's California it's all this and I'm like it's a minivan dude you have sliding doors three rows it's a minivan the first the first time someone actually markets a electric minivan I have no doubt and if it's like relatively affordable you know keep it in line with the current minivan prices maybe a little bit more because you're getting that you know electric they would go they would be gone there would be none you would not never be able to find one because there are people like me who has I have my Tesla but we also have a minivan because we're transporting all these kids around and it's like every day I get into it I'm like I wish this was Electric in some sort of fashion like I'm so sick of going to filling gas I'm sick of the way it drives we would we would all be lining up to purchase them all the men in the world or even women that were very anti-minivan would want one yeah no no doubt so you know there's a lot of space there to run right because it's sort of an untapped Market this is where I sort of applaud rivien how they change their strategy Midway through uh you know they won't say this but if you ask me they basically realize that uh Tesla owned the sedan space and so um let's not try to compete there let's go trucks you know and now they're they're dominating you know now granted Ford and Chevy are kind of gonna conquer that like they've owned it already but point being yeah I think Apple would be smart to find areas and markets that maybe uh segments that aren't completely saturated um otherwise they will they there will be a ceiling of how many per year they can sell now the the interesting thing in that space would be if Apple somehow is able to take market share from the established automakers right from the Mercedes and BMW if that's where they're targeting or if you go to the mid-tier like the acura's Infinities Lexus of the world so that would be interesting if they're able to take that market share away but um Tesla I don't I don't know that they care about the model S as maybe as much as as much as their marketing might say because if you look at the finance side of it it's not really doing much for them let's also real quickly just touch on the like interior the tech um you know what's this is where I start to like you know I like all cars for the most part you can kind of tell between like driving an electric car and going back to a non-election you can tell the way it feels and whatever but for the most part in my world when I get into a car it all kind of feels the same um and over time you know I just become numb to the way it feels when I drive but the interior the tech the the infotainment that's where I'm like okay this is important to me because this is the stuff that I interact with on a daily basis have you you said you just got an iPhone so have you had a chance to like use carplay before in the past oh huge I'm a huge fan of car play okay okay cool I mean my stance on Apple has always been like they make great products but the company always annoyed me how they lock you into certain things like the the home pod only playing Apple music and stuff like that I just so it angered me so much I'm like ah but their products are undeniably great so I got an iPhone uh this is my first one and I really do enjoy it I think it's great I do miss some of the things on Android that I had but whatever the point being yes I do use car play when I can carplay doesn't exist as you know in Teslas or rivian's uh Lucid just added it smartly and all the Classic Auto all the Legacy automakers have it already so when these guys come drop these cars off and I have them for a week I have a week of car play and it is like a breath of fresh air it is so nice to not have all these little dumb software issues or have to log into an app or find the podcast that I want to listen to because it's all already there that's to me the main point that I make anytime ask me about the software and Tesla I say it's as good as it gets but it totally sucks compared to carplay so right now thinking of an Apple car of of course it's going to have car play or some other more advanced version of that and see so so for most people my argument is that that your phone is the center of your Digital Universe right it's where you take your photos you you do social media you do all your things from here so something like Apple carplay or Android auto just makes total sense that when you get into your car it's just an extension of your phone in terms of the tech in there Apple's car will obviously do that exceptionally well I would actually question whether or not they'll support Android auto or something like that because if they don't that would you know you don't think so no chance so this is a question for you yeah yeah see so so that would be a bummer and I think a lot of those people would be like well I'm not buying the Apple car maybe they weren't going to buy it anyways I don't know um but it won't matter right right Hartley you agree with me right there's zero percent chance that that that's gonna happen that's the same thing as if like Android users being like why can't we have iMessage it's just not going to happen at least not right now if ever yeah yeah so Apple's happy to put their services occasionally on all the devices so it's like apple music coming to Tesla or yeah it's like um I mean it is even allowing car play in in non-apple vehicles obviously because there is no apple vehicle at the moment but the minute it comes to putting another ecosystem in Apple's walls Garden that is the that is the big No-No um so I don't think that is that is ever going to happen so because Apple will yeah apple will upsell you to it that that's the intention it will be it appleball wants to make you feel bad for wanting to use Android auto so the question I had is and this is the one I got to ask Elon Musk directly on a call he basically poo pooed on the idea at the time but I think they're coming around to it is um would the Apple car have an app store so if I did have an Android phone I I don't have apple carplay but I still use Spotify and Pandora you know Waze or whatever else maybe they won't support Waze actually I don't know but point being so I can log into the apps and have them feel native it's not on bluetoothing everything to my phone like it's a old Nissan Sentra or something um do you think that they would have a built-in app store or would it basically be like plain vanilla you just get nothing or Apple carplay only do you think they would lock it down that hard well I think one way or another whether it's via an app store or whether it is via carplay you would still get those third-party app experiences because that's effectively the way that carplay works right now if you uh plug your car in or you connect your uh your uh you you plug your phone in or you connect your phone wirelessly to carplay you still get your third-party podcast app you still get Waze um you get all of these services and apple every year is adding more and more to what developers are able to achieve in car play so it's already got this framework it's already got those apps ready so even if it isn't a full-blown App Store it will want those apps to be available because that again gives it a competitive advantage to the experiences that other automotives are able to deliver because it's a it's a true first party experience right yeah I know I completely agree yeah and that is a differentiator I think right there I also feel like some apps will be available like you know they can't deny Spotify that's just too popular they've tried doing that and other products and they've given up um slowly but surely like the homepod kinda works with Spotify but still not really but it's like Google Maps maybe I I see that's the thing I don't know because they make you know Apple music and because Apple Maps is a thing I feel like it's gonna really like in the car itself because in car play you plug your phone in and it has those apps available and you can use that but like natively it might do one of those things where you need to like it's not gonna work you know getting a link sending it to your car I can't imagine it's gonna immediately yeah natively open up in Google Maps unless they you know allow you the option like they did you know now where you can finally set a default mail app in the Mac like I don't know I think it could go either way I wouldn't be surprised the reason why I think they will is because you can do that now with carplay which means you will be able to do that with the Next Generation version of carplay that will be in vehicles at the end of this year so by the time we get to 2026 when this apple vehicle will be available there will be hundreds of other vehicles on the market that offer this um carplay experience including EVS where those apps will definitely be available because they are available now so unless apple is going to strip away functionality that is currently there which would get them very bad press that would dissuade people from moving over the whole point of car play is to be a sort of feature that introduces you to the Apple ecosystem so that you don't want to leave so if they offer an inferior carplay experience in the Apple car then people will think well I will just stick with whatever EV I've got now because I can use Google Maps because both will be on the market at the same time so yeah I I have a I have a thing so okay I I have car play in our minivan but that's the first time I've ever had a car that's had car play but it's not my car like my own personal car I've never had carplay before um and then I've gone from like a BMW X1 that still didn't have car play to a Tesla that was like the jump that I had and in that jump like Tesla's operating system for the software you know compared to any other car's built-in infotainment system I believe the car I had before the BMW was a Buick or a Ford like those were the cars that I've had beforehand like it feels night and day there is nothing better than that but like I talked to people who have used car play as they're on a regular basis and they're like I want car play in my Tesla and I can't my brain can't fathom absolutely because coming from one of those older cars I'm just like this is there's nothing better than this like I've got Spotify I've got everything I need for the most part like it's touch responsive and it's not super laggy like it works well like what could I possibly want so you are saying um you you want like in your rivian they don't have car play you would you would welcome that like you would use it on a regular basis if it came in I mean I bereted them online constantly that they don't have it it's beyond just wanting it amazing I mean it is it uh okay at this point Tesla I think there's they're in car software is good enough to where you can live without carplay and it's fine right it's passable I still think it's lame that they don't have it but at least they are sort of opening up to the idea of having an app store uh for example people maybe don't know but in your Tesla natively you have Netflix and you have YouTube and you have 20 games you can play natively so they have sort of an app store but that app store is like bespoke right it's not like anybody any developer out there can just go make an app it's like Tesla has to work directly with Netflix or twitch or whoever to create the app for the car so they seem to be embracing that and as they roll that out it will get better and better I still don't think it's as good as car play because I have to log into these apps it doesn't know me it's not the the device I already have with all of my preferences and my whole world that I've and you know my digital profile my digital stuff that I've been building since the internet was created it's like the phone has all that it knows me so it is carplay is still so much better plus it has hundreds of apps that are it's I saw like 200 plus apps supported maybe there's more I don't know but it's like so anything you can imagine exists and it just works great so like Tesla at this point I get and I I I could side with them and say how they're saying look forget it we're we've we've evolved past it but rivian when I talked to them and I talked to their PR team about this their excuse for not having car play was they feel they can make better integrated digital experiences than carplay offers and I spit out my coffee because what you're saying is you can make better software than Apple and Google and I'm sorry you can make a better truck than Apple Google for sure today but software I'm sorry guys no you can't it also has uh the Amazon Voice Assistant built in I don't want to trigger people's speakers um or mine but it has that built in which is atrocious it is it is so incredibly bad is it really bad and I I don't know well you can imagine how it works right so you get in you TR you use the the trigger word and then you say navigate home well when I first got my Amazon Echo it was when it first came out and my home address was my work address from nine years ago so it's navigating me there despite me plugging into the car my actual home address and saving it as home so like it's a very disjointed thing and I would ask it to play music and it would start playing on my speaker in my studio it just didn't know what was going on it was completely disconnected or or dysfunctional so yeah it's one of those things when you look at it you go guys I'm sorry you make an incredible vehicle but you cannot make better software than Apple and Google you just can't you know uh Tesla I would argue still doesn't make better software uh but their software is good enough I would say for most people most people like you said probably get in there you're just like oh my God mind blown right right if you live with carplay for a while you realize how lacking it is like a good example is I like Waze wait for me for taking my kids to school there are three different routes I can take depending on traffic that could be a 20 minute difference in the commute 20 minutes that means I'm like either on time to drop my kids off at school or I'm now late and my kids are rushing to get in and it's just a nightmare and then I'm late for a call or something else so that one difference there the built-in Tesla app while it does have traffic and it does use some of that it's definitely not as good as Waze and so for where I live anyways I'll say so that's one of those things where it's like yeah you just need to support it because and and you know for proof of that just look at the iPhone itself imagine if Apple never created an App Store if they only said we're going to create the apps and that's it imagine where we would be like in the world like I think Android would have probably completely crushed them at some point you know because you go God I can't get anything on this damn phone you know but they smartly very early on said look we can't make all of the software we can't think of all of the ideas we don't have the resources even if we we did so let's open up an app store and so I think Tesla's slowly wading into these Waters very cautiously but car play and app and in Android auto to that same extent will have already done this and so it's it would any new car any new EV maker in my opinion must support it otherwise you are really really swimming Upstream trying to compete with everyone else that just does it like Kia is a good example all the Hyundai group itself every one of their cars has car playing Android auto natively wirelessly in in most cases so you're looking at it going wow this little Kia has 200 plus apps that are already on my phone and this brand new fancy Tesla has six it's not as you know it's not the same thing not the same experience not to say it's bad but I but this one is definitely more familiar and better in almost every way in my opinion so I'm a huge fan and me not being a huge Apple fan but having carplay like this is amazing so whenever I get these other cars dropped off and I have them for a week I'm just like God it is so nice not having to find my podcast or find that Muse that Pandora station or whatever it's like it's just already there so another key Dimension to these vehicles software is self-driving functionality or you know purported self-driving at least so one thing I'm interested to get your thoughts on Ben is where we will be with self-driving from some of these big players like Tesla by 2026 and whether that will be something where Tesla by then can actually offer a meaningful competitive advantage over Apple which while Apple has vehicles on the road at the moment they are test Vehicles they are not actually the the vehicle itself and it will not have the same uh access to the same amount of data that Tesla will by that point and maybe by then Tesla will be a much more formidable uh much more formidable in terms of its self-driving capabilities yeah yeah it's a good question um I think there's there's two ways to think about it there is the um this car is going to be a robo taxi that makes me money which Elon has went on stage and said many many times um and then there's this is just a better Driving Experience for me as the driver and so that would be I would fall into the kind of safety side of the equation right is my car safe and does it offer me safety features which we kind of categorize or Tesla has correctly incorrectly labeled as self-driving so those are kind of two separate things Robo taxi versus just a safer better Driving Experience I think by 2026 Robo taxis are still 10 to 15 years away a true Robo taxi and then honestly the economics of it don't even make sense uh in terms of an actual like I'm just gonna click button my car goes out there or whatever it's I don't think it's going to deliver on that promise it's kind of like that dunning-kruger thing where it's like oh yeah everyone's super hyped on it and then as you get into the details your confidence just drops all the way to the bottom so Robo taxis let's just exclude that from this part of the conversation and talk about uh Advanced Driver assist systems systems as you'll see them called um Tesla currently is level two and their functionality the uh autopilot and enhanced autopilot I think are best in the industry they are incredibly good at what they do the full self-driving side of it which is where Tesla's trying to go with I assume I mean if you believe their marketing they're talking level five autonomy which is complete like you don't have a steering wheel like you you often say level four or five meaning you never need to have a human intervene ever level two is where we're at now where it'll speed up and slow down keep you in your lane and then maybe do some Lane changing or some light other Maneuvers but that's about it you still have to have your hands on the wheel so have to be paying attention that kind of a thing that's where we're at now in 2026 you said I think we'll still be in that same place the the confidence in those Maneuvers and those things will probably be better but we won't I don't think be at true level three yet level three is where the driver rarely has to intervene and this is the real really dangerous area where already at level two people just put it in autopilot and just hop on their phone texting watching a video Whatever not paying attention at all bad news right that's not good and then level three is where that is actually should be okay you should just occasionally have to pay attention and take control that's the real danger zone because this is where people are gonna you know figuratively fall asleep at the wheel and you're gonna over trust it and it's gonna lead to some bad results uh from time to time the you know just think about airplanes and the progression right you don't even think about the safety of a of a flight now but 50 60 years ago different animal right it wasn't uncommon to hear about a crash and so it was definitely in your mind so I think we're still you know 20 30 years away from the idea of a truly autonomous vehicle that you hop in and the fact of it crashing is like unheard of that'd be major worldwide news so 2026 uh if if Apple could deliver on essentially where Tesla's at today uh with their autopilot the basic autopilot functionality I think that would be enough for almost everybody um if you look at the the polls on people's trust in self-driving cars it's still extreme low and so there's you know social kind of hurdles that people have to get over psychological hurdles that companies have to get over before the technology can even be adopted so self-driving is one of those things where the hype is you know at a maximum and it has been for a long time but the reality is not even close to that and the road in between is going to be a long one um the one thing I like to say though is it doesn't mean that this Pursuit is not worthy like we should pursue this because there are great benefits and things that we we we will eventually realize and the road between here and there can bear a lot of fruit even if you think about um automatic emergency braking which I believe Volvo came out with in like 2009 or something like that that alone right there has saved a lot of lives and so even though that's not full self-driving it is a feature that you need for full self-driving that does help people and does make the road safer so I think it's a worthy Pursuit I think we will get there eventually but it's on a much longer time Horizon than anyone online is going to tell you really um and and you know between now and 2026 that's really I don't think it'll be much different than the world we live in today in terms of what's possible I completely agree with you um there's just no way I can see that ever happening in the next three to four years there's just no way and I can explain to you why is because when I'm in my car and I have autopilot on and all of a sudden at 75 miles an hour I come to a screeching halt on the freeway because my car accidentally feels like something's in front of me which nothing was in front of me that's the stuff that I have a hard time like wanting to ever move away from you know and until you can regain trust for many many years like you said you know like an airplane crashing is Major World News because it just so rarely happens um but you know we've I've seen videos I think a lot of people have seen that video of that Tesla just having a mind of its own and flying through at 100 miles an hour because the car just took off and like you know I don't know whether the details of that were like that was user error and somebody just explained what even if that was software and the car just took off and did its own thing and crashed inside I'm not interested in that at all like I barely use autopilot because of my own you know terrifying experience and I know a lot of people have had have you had any crazy autopilot experiences where you're like okay that's enough for me today oh yeah absolutely uh my wife won't let me use it at all if the family's in the car um a good example was my wife just went out to I'm in San Diego she's in Phoenix it's a straight 400 mile drive across the desert it's flat basically as you can imagine it's straight drive uh she told me last time she was on autopilot on the way back 11 times it slammed on the brakes and we're talking there's nothing it's not like there's an overpass or a shadow on the road literally just straight desert like almost like in a movie you would imagine just a straight Flat Road across the desert and it just so that right there erodes your trust now now the the interesting thing is I think a lot of people that talk about this online that that talk about oh my God it's going to change the world look at how great it is blah blah they don't own these cars they don't live with them they don't have these experiences so it's almost like somebody getting parenting advice from somebody that doesn't have kids it's like okay guys whatever like until you've been there know what it's like yeah you can't really your your opinion you don't have a fully formed opinion on it um and yeah you're totally right it's I've had a lot of scary experiences I've also done a lot of testing with it um Tesla's even given me early access to certain features before to do you know like a video on so I can launch it when the Embargo lifts and that kind of a thing and and in those experiences I've had to call them and say guys I don't know because this isn't working right you know um I I I fear that they have oversold it and it is a much longer time Horizon and so you know a lot of people I think that as you get the car and as you live with it you you really start to realize how far off it is now it is amazing at what it can do it's not to discredit what they're are able to do but to assume that it is anywhere near ready is just naive at this point I would say so yeah I've had a lot of scary experiences I mean in my rivian it doesn't have it it has a basic form of autopilot and they've this is like one good thing they've said is they basically said we're going to let someone else figure that out and then once it's like totally safe and good we're gonna try to adopt that but right now we're rivian stances hey we're the adventure vehicle company we want you to drive because we want you to be off-road we don't want you to be you know just just be your commuter we want you to go see the world and explore and all that so I applaud their approach being much more reasonable and humble about it Tesla's I think is where they get themselves into into some trouble in fact I mean there's class action lawsuits I know one in Germany which was funny because they were selling people full self-driving level five autonomy in Germany and they got sued for it and they lost because the court said well that's actually illegal so you know you're selling something something that is technically illegal by our current laws so uh no you know um but yeah it's a it's going to be a much slower progression than I think anyone on Twitter wants to believe Hartley do you have anything else we're very pressed up against time but it's been great just a lot of conversation I completely lost track of time honestly um I have just like three or four random very rapid fire questions that I have for Ben but that's about it but if you have anything you want to touch on Hartley um let me know now no go ahead go ahead okay okay so um just real quick and you don't have to go into any crazy responses if you don't want to um what is in your opinion the best Eevee on the market right now and taken to mind price um you know build quality software and Hardware features Etc and driving obviously like what do you think just without thinking too hard is the best one that you've driven so far uh I think the one most people will be happy with is the Kia ev6 or the Hyundai ionic 5 which are basically the same car with different uh styling interesting okay um yeah do you think so my I guess this is kind of a follow-up question do you think uh those cars could surpass let's just say apple doesn't come to anything in the next you know five to ten years do you think those cars in this current trajectory with everything else on the market could pass up Tesla's popularity that'd be tough um they are incredibly good vehicles and they have good brand loyalty people know them Tesla has been for a while I believe eroding a lot of consumer confidence in them with how they treat certain issues um and you know the quality issues like you're talking about autopilot Phantom breaking that's called uh you know so if that continues to proliferate and people's trust and confidence in Tesla continues to to wane then I don't know that KIA or Hyundai will do it individually but they Tesla may lose a tremendous amount of market share overall to let's say the Mustang Mach e which is in the same category the Nissan Aria which is an incredible vehicle especially at a good price point I mean there's a lot of vehicles in this space so um the the the overall market share could be very mixed as these other cars really really come to Market in kind of Full Force you know imagine like when the iPhone first came out and they just dominated and then now you know they own a small smaller percentage of the worldwide Market but a monster share of the profits right so you look look at that and you go well okay when Android came out yeah there was like one phone and it sucked so you know but as that proliferated over they eventually overtook Apple in terms of worldwide sales so I could see a similar thing happening where Tesla is more of a niche product um and not to go I don't want to go too too much of on a tangent but I had a conversation with MKBHD about this and we were tossing around this idea of of Tesla becoming more of like Google Google when it comes to phones where they do make phones but they're pretty Niche right they're more known for Android for making Android and so you know Tesla could kind of be the same where they they have four or five models that they make of cars and they sell but more so they provide batteries and powertrains and software to everyone else I thought that would have been a smart charger kind of become yeah yeah like they have some very distinct advantages that if they wanted to truly scale and grow they could do so much more rapidly let the like making cars to the people that have been doing it forever and just do the stuff that they're really good at and you know really dominate the market so whether or not they are selling the individual car it doesn't matter because they're still selling the the kind of the guts of it so I thought that would be an interesting idea but I don't know that Kiara Hyundai could individually overtake Tesla but maybe Tesla will not become the the majority of EVS eventually to everyone else and that was kind of the last thing that I wanted we didn't even touch on this and so real quickly what do what does Apple need to do and this also kind of just extends to anyone else um is Apple going to need to try to make their own proprietary charging or do you think they're going to work off of Electrify America or I think Tesla just needs to bite the bullet and work with everyone like they are doing now but like really ramp that up to where they're are more superchargers there's more available in every single there just needs to be one standard charging thing um so do you think that's the route that they would go or do you think Apple will try to do the Apple thing and make its own proprietary nonsense that would be hilarious like a lightning cable just for your car you're saying you gotta put you got to plug it into the bottom you got to plug it into the bottom like the like the mouse you have to have a lift oh God that'd be hilarious no no uh absolutely not that would be I would go down there and yell at them personally if they did anything stupid like that um but no what they need to do in the U.S anyways is adopt CCS um I think it's ccs2 and then in in Europe you have CCS one anyways uh it's a standard charging um uh uh interface and Tesla I don't know if that's what you're alluding to but Tesla has now started opening superchargers to non-teslas Via an adapter that they install themselves and all that so I think Tesla's going to continue to do that um and that's going to hope hopefully that will be a fast adoption I cynically think that they're only doing that to get that government money uh whatever the incentives are for and maybe there's like hey if you have X percent of your network available that's enough here to take all the money and they may just say cool we're going to do the minimum and take all the money and be done I hope that's not really what their intent is but if Tesla opens up the network to everyone Apple car has to be CCS because that's just this it's literally every it's like Tesla has their own every other car in the US has CCS with the exception of the old Nissan Leaf or the current Nissan Leaf as well and that's just because the Nissan Leaf was like the first electric car the first mass-market electric car and they had a standard that was popular in Japan and didn't exist out here so they just went with what they had right so yeah totally CCS has to be uh you they'll use every single Network out there all the fast charging networks um and then Tesla's Network as it grows Maybe by 2026 a good percentage of the supercharging network will be available and if so man what what a game changer that is for everyone else because charging a non-tesla does suck um but I think the the miss understanding by a lot of people is that you have to go to a charger to charge it at all where ninety percent of the time you're just charging at home yeah the only time that doesn't happen is if you don't have a place to charge at home or at work which isn't a insignificant percentage of the population you know like imagine like I have a lot of friends in New York they just they don't have a garage are you kidding me they just park on the street so yeah for a lot of people millions and millions of people in this country that you do not have a place to charge at home where it works so that sucks and that's where the charging really needs to come up but for a lot of people that have a home or an apartment or work with a charger you never even think about a fast charging Network unless you're on a road trip you know once or twice a year on average so it's one of those things where I think it's overblown in the media like you have to have as many as many fast charges as you do gas stations just not really the case you know what I mean because most people can charge at home and and my last final question a personal question but maybe this will apply to anyone else out there who's listening um I my lease is up next year with my model 3 I would like something that can fit all three kids uh preferably I don't want to be in a Tesla anymore but I'm also nervous about charging and now you're right I 99.9 of the time charge at home but that's because I have very low mileage in my car in terms of how much range I can get and I also don't travel anywhere with this car that much besides my own personal stuff because I can't really fit all three kids comfortably um so in theory if I did have a car that could fit them in there comfortably I would like to take it on road trips uh and drive around more so keep in mind range in size and affordability what would you would you recommend just biting the bullet and get a model y or if not what car do you recommend uh how old are the kids what's the age ranges so right now they're six four and about one and a half gonna be two here at the end of the year okay so they're all in car seats still Yes um which is so that that adds yeah so the model y I would say not even a good candidate anyways uh I have two kids in the model Y and that's enough uh I don't even know if you could fit a third one maybe on one of these like inflatable jump seats or something well we transitioned we transitioned our oldest into like a normal booster um where it's a very yes it's it that's kind of low profile very small and then our daughter would be in one of those like high back boosters but she'd still need the harness so really my my youngest is the one who needs the giant thing still flipped around the other way and all that yeah yeah yeah so so I would say look at considering that um if you did want to stay in the Tesla space you'd have to go model X this is the only thing I would recommend uh which is much more expensive vehicle and all that it's really cool but has its own kind of quirks and stuff um I would probably hopefully uh probably not by the time your lease is up but the Kia ev9 is coming out and that's a three row full-size SUV uh it's Kia it'll be relatively affordable it'll be really well built it'll have car play it'll be it'll be great in in a lot of ways uh the on the higher end the next level up I would go the Volvo ex90 but I think that's still maybe two years out um like they invited me to the launch of it and I said no just bring it to my house they said we'll have it for you the end of next year for a press loaner which means yeah so I'm like uh but that thing's I mean it's a Volvo so again if you know Volvo very nice Vehicles very well built you know good design all that stuff high quality so that will be a great three row SUV um but if I had to get one today so Kia ev9 and Volvo ex90 future today the only one I could think of that would even be worthy is the rivien r1s um problem is it's 100 Grand you know yeah that's the thing so like in my mind so the the real brief follow-up question is do I next year bite the bullet and go back to a a a a gas car uh until more things come out in the market that are affordable well you have the minivan still are you getting rid of the minivan or no no no my car is just the model three so that would be we would it would just be yeah yeah I mean it's tough uh yeah because like I said in in the in the electric space right now three row SUV full that that can fit the kids because you can buy the model y with the jump seat but it it is not really I mean it's tight back there it can work but it's more like in a pinch I wouldn't want that to be your everyday driver model X is the only option but then you're going to be buying used unless you want to spend 150 Grand you know and at that point if you are spending 100 Grand plus I'm gonna go rivian r1s it is so much better in terms of that kind of functionality so um it's tough right now yeah so maybe a gas car or maybe a plug-in hybrid like a uh Kia Sorento plug-in hybrid or there's a few in that space that are still kind of like full-size SUVs but get 40 plus miles to the gallon when you add it all up and you know something like 40 miles on pure electric so plug-in hybrid might be a good option to fill that gap between now and Kia ev9 and Volvo ex90 although the Volvo ex90 is going to be expensive vehicle as well so Kia ev9 is probably the only one um that should be really on your mind as far as all those constraints those conversations making me sad because I'm gonna have some very very bad decisions to make next year um man thank you so much this has been this has been great so much information um do you want to plug anything that you have coming up your Channel find me on YouTube yeah yeah just Google search Ben Sullins or YouTube search Ben solins we'll have it all Linked In the description so everybody can check it out um and Ben thank you so much for coming on man absolutely pleasure guys\n"