Hi everyone, welcome to another episode of Men Row Live. Here in the new year, I'm Jordan Roacho with Sandy Men Row. We had a lot happen in 2023, both in industry and at Men Row. And we just kind of wanted to start off the new year talking about some major topics, things that we had learned and seen in 2023. And moving into 2024, maybe talk about what we envision for the future, what we're seeing in the industry, and maybe make some predictions about what we might see from different OEMs and different industry attributes.
So a few of the topics that we'll cover today are looking at the intense competition among global automakers. What EVs are massive right now, it's a major race to the finish line to see which OEM is going to be coming out on top. And 2024, I think, is going to be telling in that regard for sure.
There's rising consumer expectations, right? So with the onset of autonomy, a lot of additional features, ADAS coming, you know, really to the forefront of design. Everyone's talking about new features, how to implement what the best practices are. There's going to be a lot coming this year in that regard.
Regulations, you know, NHTSA is obviously ever-present and they're driving up the bar in terms of what's necessitated from OEMs and the way of design and hardware that a vehicle must be equipped with.
And lastly, you know, another thing that's really pressurizing the market is Silicon Valley among, you know, other places to include other regions, especially China, for example. OEMs are coming out of the woodwork, right? And that's really pressurizing the automotive space specifically in the EV realm. And so we'll talk a little bit about these things in, you know, from Sandy's perspective, what your perspective is on those and kind of start the new year out with some predictions and thoughts.
Well, I thought we were going to start about what happened in 2023 first, but we can do whatever you want. You're the guy in charge now. So my predictions and thoughts, I think that 2024 is going to be a watershed year. Lots of the North American car companies have backed away from the EV world, you know, but basically because they're listening to what Wall Street has to say. But I think that there's going to be a shift, probably somewhere close to the election when people kind of understand who might get elected. And that'll probably be more of a determining factor than pretty much anything that makes any logical sense.
So I'm going to say that some companies are going to do phenomenally well. One of them already made a big announcement. Ford, Jim Farley put out a note just recently saying, you know, the F-150 is still the number one truck and it's also the number one vehicle as far as sales is concerned. And I know a lot of people were thinking that the lightning was going to basically cannibalize some of that and it obviously did not. I see, and they also, I mean, there's a myriad of things that they've turned out to have the number one vehicle on. And I think that's because of good judgment on Jim Farley's part. He and his team just seem to have their finger on the pulse and you know what the automakers are going to want to buy and whatnot. I'm not 100% sure. I like the idea that the dealerships are telling Ford, no, I don't want to have an EV on my floor. No, I don't want to have, and I know why because EVs have no maintenance and that means their profitability is going to drop like a rock. I mean, there's no point to have a dealership if they can't do oil changes or fix your blown head gasket or something like that. These are things where they make the real money. They don't make any money on really selling new cars. Used cars, yes, not new cars. So at the end of the day, I think that we're going to see a lot of upside for at least Ford. And I'm also predicting that we're going to see some serious problems with places like Volkswagen and Germany in general.
Yeah, it's interesting, Sandy. You talk about the lightning and its success and how Ford's handling that and how tuned in to the market, the customer base and how they've deployed their vehicle. Recently, you spent some time down in Texas at the Tesla event. You've got some first hand experience behind the wheel of the cyber truck. Speaking of being tuned in and competition coming in the year, maybe as it relates to the lightning. What were your thoughts getting behind the yoke, I should say, the cyber truck and sitting down with those five folks from Tesla, the five executives? I guess what are your kind of two or three takeaways, both from the drive and the experience in the cyber truck and then also with the conversation with the Tesla folks?
Well I think that when you drive that vehicle, it is a new driving experience. Because of the electric steering and because they can, you know, a very little bit of steering is all I need when I'm going fast.
And so the way they've got it calibrated, the steering system in a parking lot gives you the ability to basically spin the thing on a dime. I mean, that's figuratively. I'm telling you, it'll spin like as if you were driving a Prius or something. It turns really easily because even though I'm only going, I think it's like 320 or whatever, lock to lock, even though you're going a really small amount, the car compensates because it's got electric steering or sorry, steer by wire, you turn remarkably quick.
And that comes from two things. You've got the electric steering, sorry, drive by wire in the front. You also have drive by wire in the back because it's got four wheel steering. So it turns really quick and it's fabulous to drive a big vehicle like that, like any other pickup truck, it's big and it just makes everything wonderful. So it sounds like Tesla, I mean kudos to them. It sounds like not only do they have the right hardware in the vehicle, but they took it a step further and they calibrated really well. They spent a lot of time and they really dialed in that tactile feedback and the customer experience.
So as you move up in speed, the characteristics of steering changes. Now when you first get in it, it takes a bit because I'm expecting that I'm going to need a huge sweep to get into a parking spot. And you find out, whoa, I'm staring right at this guy's rear bumper. So you have to take a few things into account when you first get into the vehicle, but it does not take long to acclimatize yourself, your body, your eye hand coordination, all that stuff comes really, really quite quickly. And this is where the yoke really shines.
A lot of people used to complain about the model S plaid especially, you know, oh man, this doesn't really work. I think the next thing that Tesla should do is put, if they can, put the drive by wire into the model three.
Sure. Yeah, I mean as we talk about competition and we'll get into cost a little bit further down the list here, but you know it's one of the things that's when we're looking at ways to take out costs, steer by wires, definitely one of those. And weight. And weight, absolutely. And actually there's a whole bunch of features and functions that you get by steer by wire, with steer by wire, that people don't take into account when they're making it determination.
So when you start fooling, as you know, when you start fooling around developing a new product, there's always somebody that's going to say, well, how much is that going to cost? How much is that going to cost? But they don't usually look at the cause and effect that some of these things happen.
So you've got steer by wire, which means that basically I'm going to take the whole steering gear and all the other mock that goes along with that. A big long shushkabab pole that comes from the front of your car, right pointing at your heart.
So I'm a big fan of, have been a big fan of getting rid of mechanical steering for a long time. Because we work on aircraft. The F-18 doesn't have anything like that. The F-35 doesn't have it. None of the commercial, big commercial airplanes, they almost steer by wire, why is it we can do it on a huge plane, but we can't do it on a small car? And mostly it's because people were afraid of the cost, but they didn't take into account everything that goes along with it.
So the weight goes down. When weight goes down, that means efficiency is going to go up. It means that you're going to go further. The electronics are going to move faster and more reliably than what you're going to have with a normal vehicle. And it basically allows me now to have an AI kind of driving experience. If something comes along, some people have very, very, I have very quick reflexes. For an old guy, we had a little thing going on here and somebody bumped a cup off the edge of a table and I caught it before it hit the ground. That's the exception. It's not the rule. My age shouldn't be able to catch that. But it just happens. Some people are lucky, but most people are not. And having steer by wire means that as the sensors pick up the potential for an accident that's going to happen, instead of having time to only scream, your car could steer itself out of the way. And this is where I see the biggest opportunity.
Yeah, absolutely. Well, it's good to hear that there's some positive remarks from the Cybertruck driving experience. You know, in the whole steer by wire, it seems like it was well executed based on your experience there. From the discussion that you had with the Tesla executives, what are some of your thoughts or takeaways from that conversation?
Well, the biggest thing for me was the leap of faith into 48 volts. Every engineer has known that 48 volts should be the way we do things probably forever. I mean, when I was at Ford, what's that, like 40 years ago, 45 years ago, we were talking. Why don't we go to 48? We wanted 42 volts. But why don't we go to something different? And it was always the same thing. Oh, not in the marketplace. Oh, that's good enough. And like I said, if you want to get ahead in a car company, all you got to do is say no. You'll be promoted because you'll never take a risk, never. And the people who say no or the people who get in the way of progress always get promoted.
That's one of the reasons why, no matter which OEM you're at, except for Tesla, saying no is the fastest way to the top. So for me, I look at 48 volts as a giant enabler. And again, what do I get? I get a lot less weight. When I can decrease the wire diameter down to a quarter of its normal size, when I can get power distribution at much, much easier rates, I'm winding up with what? I get less weight. I get more or quicker. The higher losses are way better. Like nothing. I mean, all these things add up. And they say, well, there's no suppliers. Well, I can tell you right now, it's kind of like a lie. It's been out there for a long time. 48 volts is used in lots of different applications. It's just that they're not the same suppliers.
And I think Tesla executed at an intelligent time, meaning they didn't start out the gate with 48 volts. They waited until they had industry clout. They had enough firepower from a capital perspective and otherwise to go and deploy something like that. But the benefits of it are, you're refutable to your point. Well, and it enables one other thing. Or let me rephrase that. It just goes hand in hand with one other thing. And that's the ethernet system that they've got. So in the old days, we wanted to have something where we could reduce the amount of wire going into different parts of the car. And we invented this stuff, or it wasn't invented by Ford. It was kind of like universally known, but it was called multiplexing. And what you'd do is you'd have a couple of wires that would go to a small box, and that little box would run, would take the place of a big box somewhere else with long wires going to it. And that little box would then make your windows go up. The window regulator would go up and down. All kinds of different things could be done with multiplexing, but it was slow. So as soon as you push the button, it had to think about it, and then it would go up and down.
So with the new ethernet ring that Tesla's got, I mean, again, we're looking at giant reductions in the amount of cabling that I need. Now I need to get to the cable, to the ethernet cable, and I'm running very small communication wires. And then I've also got small wires because I'm at 48 volts, and all of a sudden now, what have I got? I got more weight savings. Weight savings is cost savings. Weight savings is range, on and on and on. It's just a smart way to go. But again, look at it in isolation. Oh, no, no, we can't do it. Can't do it. No, no, no, no. And some engineer or engineering manager, whatever wins. They get a promotion and a big bonus and a pat on the head. These kinds of things in isolation mean nothing but collectively. When you look at the 800 volt, we didn't talk about that, but going to 800 volts is a good deal as well. Because my cabling, again, gets smaller and on and on. But you've got 800 volts, 48 volts for the inside of the product, the car, the vehicle. And then you've got the ethernet ring. Shit. These things combined are, to me, Okay, I can shoot a machine gun at the side of the cyber truck. Well, that's Okay. Fine. I don't think I'm going to get into a situation like that, but that'd be good anyway. But at the end of the day, I look at what did they bring, what technology did they bring to the party? And for me, the big thing was the looking collectively at 48 volts, 800 volts, the ethernet ring and drive by wire. Those things collectively make a big, big difference.
Yeah, absolutely. And I think Emilelet's mentioned it as a view. It's not like these technologies don't exist in the world. They do. No one is applying them to the extent that Tesla is in a vehicle. And so I think Elon said he's like, well, why not? And that's a good question. Why not? And I think to your point, Sandy, there's a lot of folks in the industry and it's, well, we've always done it that way. And you're not going to get heads and shoulders above of anyone trying to go that route.
But you know what's funny about this is when you look at an ad for a car or whatever, they like to focus on things that really have been around for a long time and you're basically polishing a turd. Oh, look at the seat. Oh, look at the instrument panel. Oh, look at these blue lights that we've got all over the place. What does that really do for me? Right. Okay. That's marketing's way of making you think that even though it looks the same and it does the same as what you had before, it's new and exciting.
And maybe that works. I don't know. It certainly doesn't work for me. I want to know what's going on underneath the vehicle. I want to know what's underneath the skin anyway to tell me whether or not I'm going in the right direction. And that's where, like I say, I was very, very impressed with the driving, the technology and the openness of the folks at Tesla. I mean, I don't know if you're, I don't know if we ever mentioned it, but you know, nobody reviewed any of those, no one from Tesla reviewed any of the videos we made. None. None. I mean, and everything's one take. We don't have, we don't have like, oh, let's do that again. None of that stuff. So what you saw was in real time and right now. It's, yeah, it's pretty raw. It's pretty from, you know, it's on the spot, no doubt about it.
You know, so still on the topic of the Cybertruck, you know, and as it relates to the industry as a whole, so let's say the Cybertruck is a smashing success. I suspect it will be, right? It already is in many respects. How do you think that other automakers are going to respond? Like what is a reaction that you could foresee in this calendar year and beyond? Anybody that's got a car in the design phase. So either in bubble up or phase one, if they're not, if they're not moving to 48 volts, there should be, you know, an execution or at least a shaking hand and good luck at your next job. That's number one on the hit parade. So I think that that'll roll out faster than anything. And based on what I've heard from at least three different car companies when I've talked to them, they are scrambling to try and see if they can get that going as fast as possible. Yeah. The main news is that Elon and his infinite generosity decided to hand out how to get involved or how to get started in 48 volts. That design guide cuts a year, maybe 18 months out of the process. Here's how you do it. Here's who's doing it now. Here's the suppliers we're using. All this stuff's available for free. Anybody that doesn't take advantage of it is a fool. There's no reason in a world why you wouldn't want to do this. And anything that doesn't have 48 volts in four years will be an antique. It'll be difficult to try and find replacement parts. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's certainly disruptive. And it's kind of unbelievable, you know, sitting here, knowing all the stuff that Tesla puts out to the public what they do, right? Most of our customers, as you well know, right, they keep, they play that stuff quite close to the vest and Tesla is sitting here saying, Hey, here it is. Here's what we know about it. Now they're not going to go and engineer it for you. But I mean, they're giving you quite a bit relative to most of their OEMs out there. I think then in tandem with releasing something like a Cybertruck 48 volt ethernet, you know, exoskeleton gigacastings the whole nine, it's like, yeah, I could absolutely see some OEMs, especially like your, to your point in the design phase saying, well, holy crap, we got to go figure some stuff out quickly.
Well, and you mentioned gigacastings. The gigacastings, the first one we saw was that one over there. And now it was in 2021. And now everybody's ordering machines. I mean, and it's not just in North America. And it's also in China. The Chinese are in the process of like scrapping whole under bodies completely and replacing them with castings, scrapping, stamping, stamping lines. I mean, this is a big deal to move to move quickly into what they see as the future.
Well, and that's a great segue into the next point here. You know, Tesla fans and, you know, pundits, if you want to call them that have said competition is coming for a long time. And recently, you know, we see China's BYD surpassing Tesla and electric car sales in the last quarter of 2023. Yeah, in the last quarter. But if we look at this little chart, we can see here that for the whole year, Tesla sold more than BYD did. However, BYD did beat Tesla in the last quarter of last year. Now, what does that mean? Well, I've already, in my interview with Elon Musk, I said my prediction is that BYD will be the biggest car company on the planet. That isn't just in EVs. I mean, it will take the place of Toyota and Volkswagen and General Motors. They will not have a chance against BYD, no way, no way.
So you look at that, but when you say just the last quarter, it's also important that you keep track of what happened for the whole year. This is the same thing as when all the financial analysts said, oh, the third quarter, the EV sales have gone down, oh, this is it, this is it. And, you know, sell your stock or sell short and all that sort of. When you get into these kinds of things, you have to take a much longer view of what's going on than just that. And if we look at last year, we're looking at how many EVs were sold percentage-wise, and you look at this year, and if you read the Wall Street Journal or Bloomberg or what have you, it comes along giving you the impression that EVs are all done. It was a fad, it's gone now. Let's see it back to, you know, let's get back to gas guzzling, whatever. At the end of the day, it's not really that way. Actually what you do is you look from year to year instead of day to day, and you'll find out that, hey, EVs went up quite a bit this year. Next year, I believe it's going to be even more. And I believe about halfway through the year, you're going to see people saying, well, you know, we shut that plant down or we cut the production of the plant, but I think we're going to be pumping that back up a smidge. And that's what I'm going to see.
And the reason for that is because day by day, more people are figuring out that, hey, EVs don't cost as much to charge up as it costs to fill up. Hey, there's no maintenance. I don't need oil changes. I don't need a radiator flush. I don't need on and on and on. Sure. Hey, my tires last longer. Hey, I don't need. My brakes don't. I don't use my brakes that much because I'm using Regen, which makes me go farther, and it also slows the car down, but it doesn't tear the wheels up and it doesn't affect the brake pads. So at the end of the day, you start getting this information out and there's no such thing as range anxiety. And of course, when, again, back to Ford, leading kind of the big companies in the right direction, saying, we're going to use the Tesla charging system. And the reason for that is because they work all the time. And I don't have to fool with that, and that's not my core competency anyway. So now with people being having access, at least with Ford, and, well, actually, almost all of them now, except for Volkswagen and a few others, everybody has access or will have access to the Tesla.
Yeah, the North American charging system. That gives the world a whole different perspective on range anxiety, which I never bought into anyways. I mean, I went crisscrossed to 8,500 miles and did it in 11 days, and I never had any range anxiety. I don't know what they. I don't know where that ever came from, but it was obviously some marketer, not a real person.
So as we wrapped up the last quarter, BYD started to get the edge on Tesla in terms of sales. Going into 2024, presumably BYD is one of the OEMs that we'll be keeping an eye on. Is there anyone else in industry, any other OEMs that you would see as posing a significant challenge versus Tesla, for example?
Well, what we need to do occasionally is look at somebody else's data, and this, by far, is one of my favorite charts out there. I've shown this about a dozen times, and this is from car industry analysis. These guys did a great job, and you can see here that Geely's got 25 different EVs in the marketplace right now, all over Europe, all over China, all over South America, all over everywhere, right? Coming in second is Atlantis. Now we don't see much going on here in North America, but then I've kind of predicted that Stellanus is probably going to abandon ship on North America. Their headquarters is for sale right now. They want to get out of that.
I don't see, I haven't heard anything about a new 300, or what are they going to do with the RAM and the charger, or sorry, another RAM, but the challenger and the charger? I haven't seen a RAM truck that's going to compete with a lightning, or I can't even hardly imagine it competing with the cyber truck. So what's happening? So we were talking about predictions. I believe that Stellanus is probably going to move Jeep and RAM somewhere else, probably China. And I believe that they'll just kind of like diminish their involvement here in North America. Yeah, it's interesting, right?
Depending on which vehicle line you look at it, Stellanus, right? They just, they announced the RAM charger, so they use a 3.6 liter as a range extender. And that I know for sure has created a lot of industry buzz because of the range that it offers, right? That range anxiety thing that you had mentioned, it truly does get rid of that. But you look at other car lines, like I think the Chrysler 300 about a month ago, more or less, I think is at the tail end of 23, they announced the last Chrysler 300 coming off the line. So yeah, I think there's definitely a question mark out there in some respect with Stellanus. Like, what's the next major sedan? What does that look like? And in what capacity? Meaning how well will that compete with a Model Y or anything else in North America specifically? It's interesting.
Well, the North American market is tough. There's no question about it. It's a very difficult market to enter, but when you do get in, if you do make a big splash, you make a lot of money. There is nothing, there's no other market out there where you can make as much money on volume as you can here in North America. And that's why most people are trying for it. But if you don't understand the market, that's when you lose. And you can lose big if you don't understand the American market. Absolutely.
You know, in terms of making money, it's interesting. Tesla's had a trend of continuing to reduce prices. Do you anticipate over the coming months or this calendar, do you anticipate any other OEMs out there trying to do the same thing in order to keep up with the Joneses as it were?
Well, I do know that Volkswagen has reduced their cost, Ford's reduced their cost, GM has reduced their cost. Now GM reduced the cost on the bolt, which I thought was just brilliant. That's a great idea. I thought the regen on the bolt or the relaunch of the bolt, I thought, hey, this is it. These guys got it by, you know, they've got to buy a margin here. This is good because all their investment costs were now all gone. So when people say they can't make any money and whatnot, it's because you've folded in the investment cost associated with it, development costs and whatnot. Well, the bolt had sold enough that it was ready to go. Why they folded up their cards and moved away as beyond me? Because now that you've got something in a marketplace that really is a competitive vehicle, why would I shut it down and run away? Is that to, I mean, again, it must be something to do with making Wall Street happy. I'm not sure. But to me, looking at General Motors doing that, it just, I see, I see no sense in that at all.
Yeah, I too thought it was an odd move from GM. I didn't necessarily see that coming. But they did fill an interesting void in the marketplace in terms of a small lower cost and a Bev application. Do you see any other automakers right now, like if you had to pick one that would maybe fill that void that is well poised to do so, to fill that lower cost, small EV niche that the bolt offered to the market?
I don't know what's on the drawing board. I'm hoping that General Motors has got something else coming down the pike, but it doesn't sound like it because they aren't reworking the plant. That's the Lake Orient plant, I think, right? So I haven't heard anything about, for many of the machine tool guys, about doing any kind of rework. Maybe they can pick up on the same pins or something like that. Maybe they can just reprogram the robots. I'm not sure, but at the end of the day, we don't, I don't hear or see anything there.
I know that, I know that for sure Ford and Volkswagen and BMW and Mercedes all have small cars that they're trying to crank out. But I think, like I said, I don't care who gets in as president. 2024, they may be able to keep the trainees out, maybe, but I doubt it. But 2025, that'll be it. Because once there's a new administrative administration in, or even if it's the same one, there's going to be a public outcry. Hey, how come, if these eyes aren't giving us any cars, how come you can't give us any car? I can't give you any car cars.
Remember, I was alive and cognizant of what was going on when the Japanese started bringing their cars in. And it was public opinion, especially California. Actually every area that's congested, California and New York City, they kind of said, hey, you know what, we're tired of the air pollution. We're tired of high prices for crap cars. And that was the reason that the Japanese got in. And it wasn't because of, oh well, we're negotiating or anything. That wasn't baloney. These guys all get elected by people. And if the people are screaming and yelling and saying they want something and you don't deliver, you don't get reelected. Right.
And I believe that the Chinese will get in because their products are certainly superior to what we've seen here from the guys at Volkswagen. I mean, they're just really good vehicles, really good. So I believe that the Chinese will come in and that's where the void will be filled.
Yeah, interesting. There's a whole slew of OEMs out there that are not, I'll say, maybe they're industry household names, I'll call them that right now. But certainly, you know, if I were to talk to someone who's not in industry and like, hey, what do you think of the BYDC? They'd be like, what are you talking about? But they don't know that, you know, there's a lot of vehicles and a lot of them are quite good. Yeah, they're all good. I mean, I spent a lot of time in China, along with a whole bunch of other people, training them how to design product. That's what we did. Training them how to design product and mostly design of what? Yeah, electric cars. Then we had all kinds of Europeans, Americans, Japanese that were over there showing them how to build a perfect car every time. And the Chinese are very, very good at learning. They don't make junk. Pretty much everybody on the planet is using one of their appliances in their house. No question about it. I mean, you think, oh, I'm buying a GE. No, you're not. You're buying higher. Oh, I'm buying Samsung. Well, no, you're not. That's made in China as well. Well, I'm buying, it doesn't matter what you think you got. It's all made somewhere else. It doesn't matter whether it's a microwave or a rice cooker or a coffee pot or a big giant refrigerator or a stove. It doesn't matter. It's all made in China and they make good stuff. They don't make junk anymore. They've never. There's no doubt about it.
So, the connotation lasted for longer than maybe it should have. Going back to, you had mentioned closer to the intro, this dynamic, kind of attention right now in the news and everywhere else. I know Detroit Free Press has talked about Ford, for example, saying only half of their dealerships, I think it's just over 1,500 or something, are going to sell ice in hybrid only. They're not going to sell EVs. What's your reaction to that? What do you think that sort of indicates in the market today? And maybe it's more indicative of dealerships and how they operate. I'm not sure.
Well, there's an adage about the tail that wags the dog. And I think that that's what's happening right now. The union is a tail that's wagging the dog. The dealerships are the tail that's wagging the dog. And when you follow the rules, or sorry, not the rules, but if you follow the dictates of the servants, the master is going to fail. Simple as that. That's the way it works. When the worm turns, your ability to figure out what's going to be the right way to go is going to be hampered. And the reason for that is because the people, let's use the unions, they're looking at, hey, I want more money. So what impact is that going to have? We won't sell as many cars. Well, we want more money. Well, as they can't sell cars because they're too expensive, then that means that we won't need as many workers. Yeah, but we want more money. So they've got one voice that has one view of the world, one view of the automotive world. And when in reality, when you get to the top of the house, people complain it, that guy made a million dollars. What did he do? What impact did he have? Yeah, but our guys are putting nuts and bolts on. Yep. And that's an honorable kind of job. No question about it. Does it create more wealth for the company so that we can make more cars so that there's more guys putting nuts and bolts on the car? That's lost. When you look at the dealerships, hey, that's going to affect my profitability if I can't maintain vehicles. I don't want those guys doing that. I want, well, that's their viewpoint. And when you have a single source of viewpoint, when you have one viewpoint and you don't see the rest of what goes on sooner or later, it's going to hurt the dog and the dog will die. So that's kind of like the way I see it. When the tail wags the dog, the end isn't too far away.
No, and it's something that we're seeing pop up, right? Like dealers having a certain disposition towards EVs. And it's hard to say chicken or the egg is that because they're not moving as many vehicles as they had hoped. They don't like dealing with them. They don't get to your point the oil change benefit and the after-sale sense. It is difficult, but there's no doubt that it's got an impact in the industry as a whole. And how. It'll just hurry on the application of the Chinese getting their products into the marketplace. Sure.
So speaking of trends, Tesla, Cybertruck, Gigacasting is something that is an industry term. Tesla has cleaned it. And now everyone is looking to your point. There's folks scrapping whole under body lines trying to replace with castings. China is certainly an area that we're seeing that are there any other automakers like maybe such as Toyota or others that you would envision really trying to aggressively pursue this and deploy this and their vehicles moving forward?
Yeah, well, right now we know that because one of their gig of casting machines was at the show that I just spoke at, the casting show I spoke at. And there's a Ford machine and there's a Hyundai machine and Honda machine. And I mean, they're right there. I can't miss them. They're huge. So we know about that. We know that General Motors has already got castings in a couple of their vehicles. They're more like this type of casting here, not die castings, but they're. Yeah, the cellophane was coming out and there were some images.
Yeah. Yeah, so we know about that. We don't know. And we know that some of the German companies are moving in that direction. All of the Korean companies, most of the Chinese companies, and I'm pretty sure that Honda and Toyota are going to be coming out with their versions in the not too distant future based on rumor and innuendo. Yeah, and we see this with our clients also.
And you talk about in Hearts and Minds, which is something that I've been roe, Sandy, and other folks will give in terms of talking about sort of the ethos of Monroe and how we look at things and how we should look at engineering something, for example, or how you should go about designing it. And you say that, you know, maybe I'll get the percentages wrong, but, you know, engineering is 90% psychology and 10% technology.
And what I see, I know, when working with clients is often that for something like a giga casting, they could have all the data in the world. And they still would not go for it. There would be someone to your point that would say, no, because we don't have, we've never done it. There's no one out in the competition that's doing it successfully in production that we can confirm and look at. So we're not going to do it. But Tesla comes along and, you know, over there on the floor, we've got giga castings kind of all over the building. And then now all these OEMs, you know, the eyebrows raise and everyone says, we need to know about that. We need to go do that and it becomes this huge buzz.
Do you think that psychology is really all, you know, it's interesting to me. It took just one person or one OEM to go out and do this. And all these other OEMs start getting on board quickly. Do you attribute that to the psychology technology or do you think that the technology just happened to spring up? No, it's the same thing. It's the psychology. 90% of the people will say no faster than anything. They don't want to get involved with anything that's different because it'll affect my bonus, it'll affect my, it could, it's the car career. It's good for the car and good for my career. It's an easy path. If it's good for the car, bad for my career, it ain't going to get in. If it's good for my career, bad for the car, it'll probably get in. And that's kind of the way things are, is just it is what it is. And those options, if you like, are the things that people consider continuously if they want to get ahead inside of an organization.
Yeah. Okay. But Tesla doesn't think that way. Right. Tesla thinks, hey, if we come up with something new, Elon is going to say, hey, you did a good job. And that, and the other thing coupled with that is that the mentality over there is, if you don't fail, you haven't been doing anything. Right. Right. And so you've got a different psychology. That culture, cultures are very, very difficult to change inside of organizations or countries or companies or even amongst people. Cultures are hard to change. But when they do change, if you can make them change, there's always huge, huge improvements, and that's kind of like what's going on with the psychology. You have to change the mind when we say, if you change the mind, the ass will follow. Something along those lines. But it's true.
Yeah. Once we've shown this and once people see it, and once they see the documentation, the numbers, because this is now real, it's not a guess, then they're willing to sign up and move ahead. Yeah. And a similar vein is with the gigacastings. Something that I think Tesla in many respects pioneered in the OEM space, but the Chinese market is now following is the rapid development pace that they're setting. Right. We used to speak in terms of five or six year life cycles to develop a vehicle. And now people are doing it in three years, two years. Two years and 18 months.
So if we look at what Tesla's been doing, okay, with the three, the Y, the revamping of different things, they seem to have somewhere between an 18 to 24 month schedule.
Now, the cyber truck was different, so I asked Elon about it, and it's in the interview. I said, well, how come it took four years? Well, I said, well, a little bit had to do with COVID. That slowed us down. We had to change the supply community considerably to go to 48 volts. We had to find a lot of stuff. So they weren't just creating a car. They were creating a new form of industry. And that is a much bigger...
job, much more challenging than just, okay, we're going to reskin the car. And that, in the olden days, would take at least three, sometimes four years. And now, the Chinese are swapping stuff out. They don't have that same perception that you have to hang on to assets.
So the big thing that we always heard was, well, I got to make sure that we get our money's worth out of these old piece of shit machines. Why? They're old, and they are inaccurate. And the money that we saved by not buying a new machine, we lost in productivity and, you know, excessive labor for trying to fix whatever came out of that machine. That's where things, again, fall apart when you listen to the wrong people. And the wrong people are usually in that situation.
Most people are usually people who understand only one thing. If I don't spend any money, I'll get a bonus. If I spend money, I'm going to get my hands slapped. Yeah, they're quick to fail, quick to cut their losses and move on to the next thing.
Exactly. And that mentality, again, that's a mentality, that's a culture. And again, you get back to which classification you put that in. Is it a technological thing or is it a psychological thing? Anything to do with culture? Anything to do with changing your mind? Anything to change the course of how things are done or the rules or regulations for that course, that's all psychology. Nothing to do with technology. Absolutely.
Kind of changing gears, you know, going back to EVs and what we see for 2024 and also looking through the lens of what we saw in 2023. There's been any number of small attempted OEMs, startups that have come out and said, you know, I'll say, trying to be the next Tesla, trying to come up with their own vehicle and do their own thing. You know, do you believe that some entities like Lucid and Rivian will stick around through 2024 and beyond? Or do you think that they're kind of destined to go into the ground? Like what do you envision for some of these startups? Because there's no doubt that it is just the market alone, North American market stuff, but the industry is tough.
Yeah. Okay. So when it comes to Rivian, I believe that they'll be fine. They have enough diversity in their product that as long as they can get rid of a tremendous amount of weight and redesign the products a little bit more so that they're easier to put together. And maybe what they might have to do is negotiate or maybe take in some of the componentry that they currently outsource to suppliers. Maybe they need new suppliers, maybe they need to take it in-house. I'm not sure, but they've got a higher cost than they should have. But these things are overcomerable. You can overcome this. It's not that hard.
When you look at Lucid, you've got a different kind of a problem. They've had a lot of, there's been a lot of noise, but there hasn't been a lot of, I don't know, performance. And I've said it dozens of times and I'll say it forever. The air electric motor system or the drive system is absolutely brilliant. The best there is out there. But it's expensive and the rest of the car is outrageously expensive. Now they've got the new one coming out that's supposed to be less expensive and whatnot, but I don't see them flying off the showroom floor. And so consequently, I'm not 100% sure, I don't know what they're going to do. But I do know one thing. They're funded by Saudi Arabia, the country, Saudi Arabia.
And people were throwing rocks at Mary Barra for making money. Peter Rolensen made over $200 million. And I really don't see much in the way of results. So I believe that some companies might have to get bailed out or maybe they'll just pack up the whole thing and ship it off to Saudi Arabia and try and sell it to the Arab nations. I'm not sure, but I know one thing for sure. I know one thing for sure. I don't see how Faraday is going to make it. I don't see Lucid being hugely profitable anytime soon. There's a few of them out there that are like that and I don't see a way forward for them. But you never can tell. Something could happen, but they don't look to me as being anybody who wants to put another luxury car into the marketplace and wants to try and compete with a new electric EV Bentley or Rolls Royce or whatever, you've got a really tough uphill battle with that. I don't know how you're going to do it.
But if you look at, actually one thing we should look at is the new technologies that are out there and one of them being, hey, guess what? We've got sodium batteries now. Don't need any lithium. Oh, if we need lithium, we've got new processes like Energy X. We've got a new process there to take lithium out of salt water or brine. It's different than salt water. They take it out of brine and guess who's doing it as well? Oh, Exxon. So we're looking at lots of different new things that are coming up that could change the whole complexity or everything basically associated with the most expensive part of any of the electric vehicles and that's the battery. If the battery price goes down significantly because we're going to use sodium or lithium now as cheap or any number of different things that could happen, if we've got that, who's going to stand in the way of EVs then?
Yeah, absolutely. If one of these guys can, I mean, it's a race to get to that technology and implement it in a vehicle. You get there first, I would say your future is certainly much better than it was before and everyone's scrambling to get there for sure.
In a similar light, but away from the product and looking at manufacturing, AI is coming about a lot of robotic technologies are maturing quicker than ever. Things like these humanoid bots that look like people but are certainly robots are entering the manufacturing line. What do you anticipate for this year and beyond for robots being implemented on the line? What types of savings, not in a quantity amount, but do you think the savings could be drastic for the OEMs as it relates to manufacturing costs by deploying these robots on the line?
Well it depends. The original idea behind the robots that Tesla cranked out was to attack the 3D's dirty, dirty, drudgery and dangerous and that's good. I've never really been, I've never really seen one of these things live and in person working, but I did see a video on a guy's phone when I was in Texas, in Austin. Now the video was probably 3 to 5 minutes long and it showed me a vastly different robot than what I saw from Tesla. And that robot, that robot was phenomenal. If that robot is put into the marketplace with silicon fingers and stuff like that, that will make a huge difference. And I can hear the Union screaming right now saying, we don't want those robots. And it's going to be a tough decision for them to swallow because hey, if it's expensive, we've got to try and figure out how to make it less expensive. If that robot can do what a human can do, why have I got a human? That guy works in the dark. And by the way, he also sees at the back of his head instead of the front of his head. I mean, I now have peripheral vision. I'm never going to have a guy trip over anything. He's never going to walk backwards into a forklift truck. This robot can see all the way around him. He can do tons of things that an average man can't do, or human. But I'm telling you what, things are going to change a lot if these new robots that are being developed come to play. But I'm glad you brought that up because some people said that I saw this at Tesla. I did not. I did not see anything. I only saw one guy, or I don't even know it was a man or a woman. I was so shocked at what I saw that I can only remember what I saw. How was it? It was really, really fascinating. From somebody like myself, I worked on the very first robots, the Unimate robots when I was 16. I'm telling you what, this is a huge step change. It's a different thing. Yeah. Totally different.
Yeah. Well, Sandy, thank you for your time. I know this has been an interesting discussion looking ahead at 2024 and kind of what we saw in 2023. Do you have any closing remarks or anything that you'd like to close out with?
I think that 2024 is going to be kind of a, like I said, a watershed year. This is where people I think are going to either come to grips with the fact that, hey, you know what, the ice engine is dead. Yeah, there may be applications for something like a hybrid or something for a while. But to me, a hybrid is going to be the pet rock of the future.
I mean, people that will have them and whatnot. Sometimes people like to grasp at the good old days. They like to say that, well, we can, let's get back to the good old days. Well, first off, the good old days weren't all that good because I'm old and I know what the good old days were. And the second thing is, I just don't think that, I don't think that no, I don't think anyone really wants to go backwards.
I think what we want to see is what's the future. And that's why I think that the cyber truck from a styling standpoint definitely looks like the future. And from a technology standpoint, it really is the future. I mean, that's what people are going to want. Whether everybody runs around inside of a cyber truck, I doubt that very much.
Whether it affects the, like when the tourists came out in the 80s, everybody wanted a jelly bean. Instantly, that car, everybody wanted that vehicle, right? And it had a giant effect all the way around the world. Everybody went from one brick sitting on top of another brick to the jelly bean, the swoopy, curvy, whatever kind of model. I don't think you're going to see that with cyber truck. I don't think that that's going to happen. I don't think everybody's going to immediately dance into that kind of a product. But I think it's going to have some kind of impact. Yeah.
Yeah. It's interesting. I'm very curious to see how 2024 unfolds with the elections, right? That impacts regulatory and a number of other things, just economy in general. So it'll be interesting, but I know we'll be tracking it closely. If you are interested in anything else that Monroe does, certainly we have reports for sale. And we do work with a lot of these OEMs to help them solve these issues and focus on that psychology piece that we're talking about.
Obviously, we have to be in tune with technology, but psychology at the end of the day is really what makes or breaks some of these companies culturally speaking, and ultimately their profitability. So if you are interested, contact us at sales at liendesign.com. And other than that, we'll stay in touch with you throughout the rest of the year. So thanks, everyone. Thanks, Sandy.
There's one more thing. One more thing. Okay. So our cyber trucks are coming through, and we're going to be getting them shortly. The cyber trucks are going to be coming in, and we are going to be tearing them apart, one of them anyway. One of them is going to be mine, but one will be torn to pieces, and we will be filming it. We will be analyzing, and then we'll be costing weight. Every material, science, everything comes in in those reports. So they'll be coming down the pike here shortly. So the good news is that we will be working on that. Hopefully we'll get it done by the end of the first quarter. Yeah. Excited to get our hands on it. Thanks, Sandy. Yeah. Okay.
So that was the thing. So we do not need any cyber trucks from anybody. There's like 350 people that have sent me notes, and we couldn't do anything because we, our lawyers couldn't figure out what would happen if we did take one of those cyber trucks and do what we needed to do. I don't want to be a scab, kind of a guy, and basically piss off the guys at Tesla. I don't want Elon as an enemy. So we have our cyber trucks coming up. And so thank you very much for sending all your notes in, and anybody that bought one of those little bottle opener things. Thank you so much. We still have them, but we really are now on the way, and we'll be getting these trucks are going to cost $120,000 a pop. And I don't know how much the taxes and delivery fees are going to be, but if you buy those pop bottle openers, that'll help us out a smidge. So anyway.