Sunday Open Thread: Dealers Block EVs, China Perfects Them, Can They Kill The Smartphone?

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Gotta love the dealers, don’t you? Out there tirelessly etching the catalytic converters on electric pickups. Just think — it was only a few years ago that the famous “wall job”, where you pay for service that doesn’t happen, was unfortunately (and unfairly) limited to the “back of house”. Now you can get wall-jobbed on your new car, too.

Before someone pipes up about TruCoat, by the way, I want to note that I did a lot of business with my local Ziebart franchisee when I sold Fords in 1995 and 1996. I can’t speak to how every Ziebart operated or operates, but the one on Henderson Road in Upper Arlington, Ohio performed a wide variety of services in really diligent and thoughtful fashion. If they said they undercoated something, they really did. And when they cut a sunroof, which for some reason was also part of their menu, it was cut straight and dry.

Did I get it on my factory-ordered black-over-grey 1996 Taurus GL? Fuck no. Alright, let’s get started.

If there is hope, it lies in the proles dealers

What qualified me to be an “automotive journalist”, when I was one? If you’d asked me back when I was ignoring supermodels at press events, I would have given you some egotistical rant about being a Very Fast Driver Who Buys Upscale Cars With His Own Money. In truth, however, it was the few years I spent working for Ford Credit, BMW Financial, Infiniti of Columbus, and Bob Keim Ford. That taught me how the business really works. Why people buy what they buy. How they pay for it. Why they trade their old car in. And so on.

Like it or not, dealers run the automotive world in the USA. They are the real customers for every new car that isn’t custom-ordered. They store the cars, at their cost — one of the biggest scams in the world, relatively speaking, has to be how Ford bullies their dealers into taking inventory, then finances that inventory for them at above-prime rates. Are they often ruthless, predatory, and downright evil? Absolutely. But you might be, if you had to operate under their conditions.

They’re also providing an unexpected last line of defense against the Biden Administration’s push for early EV adoption. 83% of dealers just told Automotive News that they don’t want the governmental EV timeline. Late last year, an organization of 3,882 dealerships told the Biden Administration that they don’t want EVs as anything other than an additional customer choice.

I’m not sure where the President gets his advice nowadays — I’m not sure this comedic portrayal was all that far from the truth — but I’d think twice about going head-to-head against nearly 4,000 of the most prominent, and wealthy, local businessmen and dealer coalitions in the country. Did the Administration think it was a done deal just because the manufacturers were so eager to kiss the ring? Maybe they should have hired someone who knows something about the market. Hey, maybe they could hire me! I’m an occasional registered Democrat with the kind of personal scandals that the media would just love to aggressively ignore. Write your Congressman, please.

It autocrosses itself, letting you focus on collecting Tilley hats

Imagine a car that was kind of a collaboration between General Motors and Alibaba. Sounds, uh, horrifying, right? But the L6 doesn’t look too bad. It’s from IM, which is a joint venture of China’s SAIC, which is Mary Barra’s global “daddy dom”, and the Alibaba Group.

It can “crabwalk” and autocross all by itself, as seen above. What really has people talking, however, is the top-of-the-line “Max Lightyear Edition”, claiming a 620-mile range from a massive 130kW pack of semi-solid-state batteries. That beats all the Lucid, Mercedes, and Tesla automotive offerings and is basically the same as the Ford Lightning. Further claims: the ability to charge 249 miles of driving in 12 minutes, and over 6,000 charge cycles before the battery gives up.

Weight is not yet quoted but the non-Lightyear weighs a bit over 5,000 pounds. Presumably this won’t be any lighter, because while the semi-solid-state batteries are 30-40% lighter than Li-Ions of the same energy density, this is a pickup-truck-sized pack.

You’ll likely see this called a “solid state” car — Reddit and the minor tech blogs are already eagerly doing so — but in truth it works with solid particles suspended in electrolyte. What’s actually in the battery? That information is harder to find, even from other sources on the technology.

IM’s announced price for the Lightyear, with the long-range batteries and the unmanned swerving and crabwalking and all-white interior and so on, is $45,000. This has the American EV press hysterically excited as they imagine trading in their used bus passes Bolts on sweet Chinese tech that never, ever, not one single time, employs any of the people who made fun of them in high school and instead comes from a distant land of indistinguishable people whose only goal in life is to make lazy Americans happy. The reality is likely to be very different.

To begin with, at the risk of sounding like a xenophobic and ignorant nutjob, China is the kind of place where companies can test some pretty bleeding-edge stuff with a reasonable amount of disregard for the consequences. And while they lead the world in consumer-level electronic tech, they struggle with precision manufacturing to a degree of which most people are unaware. I have approximately zero confidence that an IM Lightyear will hold up under the sort of conditions faced by Civics and even Teslas in the United States. Prediction: a lot of these will “brick”, some will catch fire, but SAIC will learn a lot from the process, just like the Russians are currently learning how to fight American defense tech in Ukraine.

The most unfortunate thing about the L6 Lightyear from a Western perspective, however, is the magical Moore’s law astrology thinking it will encourage in tech journos and autowriters. Lacking any genuine experience with technology beyond closeout iPhones and the Fleshlight, most of these people really still believe that “science” marches forward at a predictable and inexorable rate, delivering miracles just when they’re needed. I mean, computers keep getting better, right? And never mind the fact that they seem to be redlined well below 5Ghz for reasons that, uh, magic and stuff.

The arrival of the L6, whether any of its claims work out in reality or not, will simply confirm the belief in media and government that the magic battery is just around the corner. The unpleasant fact is that even if the magic battery did appear, it would quickly expose the limits of everything from our mining capacity to our power grid. In very short order, we’d get a lot of passionate essays in the WaPo about how, for the sake of democracy, these Lightyears need to be made available to only the most important people in the Party. Everyone else can take the (propane-powered) bus.

Is there an alternative to the phone?

A few of you have emailed me about the Rabbit R1 and Humane AI Pin, two devices that offer a new way of interacting with technical resources. The AI Pin, which is already getting a bad rap from the usual suspects, attaches to your clothing and talks to you via natural language recognition and various GPT-powered capabilities. The Rabbit R1 does about the same thing but adds a camera and a screen in a much-smaller-than-smartphone capacity.

On the surface, both of these are fairly goofy gadgets that shouldn’t have much mainstream appeal. “This could be an app”, one reviewer has already said of the Pin, and an early criticism of the Rabbit is that it’s a bit harder to execute certain smartphone-friendly tasks on it. It occurs to me, at least, that it wouldn’t take much more than a 100-person outsourced dev team and a solid year of Agile meetings to add 100% of this functionality to the Apple Watch, which many deeply uncool people are already wearing, like, every day.

Feel free to dismiss the Rabbit and the Pin on those grounds — but don’t dismiss the societal shifts that have brought them both into existence. The smartphone has taken society on the equivalent of a three-day coke bender. Think about it. What do you do with smartphones? You waste time looking at meaningless shit, you have vapid conversations you can’t recall after the fact, you have sex with people you didn’t know before you picked up the phone, and you spend money you don’t have. And when our phones break, we go into the sort of insane paranoid shivering that Christine McVie exhibited right before she physically attacked Colbie Calliat’s dad for knocking a fake bag of coke off an amp stand as a prank.

The promise of these smaller devices is that you’ll just talk to them and get your tasks done. “Rabbit, navigate me to Duane Reade.” “Pin, what’s the highest speed recorded by the SR-71?” Which leaves your eyes and hands free to interact with the world. It has the potential to turn the microcomputer device from taskmaster to the assistant that was envisioned in all the sci-fi books. Think about it. You can read a thousand sci-fi novels and never, not once, find the equivalent of “doomscrolling”. That’s because no sane human ever envisioned such a thing being a desirable part of the future.

Those of us who grew up without smartphones likely can’t quite understand the antipathy young people often have to the devices. They have never known a world where they didn’t take marching orders from a shining rectangle — via everything from Taskrabbit to Slack. The best part of the Pin, as far as I can see, would be the ability to say,

“Pin, don’t bother me about work or anything else until I tell you that you can.”

Housekeeping

We’re gonna try something this week. I have a new series of guest posts, as well as a few one-offs from people. Two of them will show up in the week to come, along with a “Flashback” and a “Harambe”. I’m sending email for all of them. And we’ll see what it does to the numbers. As always, thank you for reading and commenting. When I look at other Substacks, I see one-way communication, like a priest on Sunday morning. When I read this place, it's not like that at all. For which I am grateful.