Barra on TikTok, Uptimes on Chargers, and Elon on the Move

Paul J Daly: 0:00

You. That's it. It's Wednesday. It feels like a Thursday to me. Is that? Can we say that? I don't know. Today we're talking about Mary Barra on a tick tock account up times on charger, study and Elon on the move one more time, not the last time, but it's for this time.

‍Kyle Mountsier: 0:28

So interesting. You know, this is the the we've we mentioned this often, but the world of news, like, when you're really steeped in it, and you're trying to figure out, like, all of the moves, and you kind of see everything. Because, you know, we get like, I, you know, I either like, read our daily email at night or in the morning. Plus we're scouring the news in the morning. Plus there's like, always things getting shared with us that other people, that's true, want us to share. And it's like you, you start to realize, like, the world is kind of nuts. You know what? I mean, kind of just a little bit nuts. And it's

Paul J Daly: 1:03

okay. We're here. It's always nuts. That's right, yeah, we're here for it. I whether we like it or not, we're all here for it, aren't we? Oh, man, we have a webinar going on today, in just a few hours from now. What time is it? 1pm Eastern, where is it? What time's that webinar? No two. Nathan's in the back, just showing us two fingers. It's due to Eastern we're gonna talk about what's going on with the cars rule. We've actually been seeing some chatter on LinkedIn about this. Jennifer blunt, she posted a thing. We have a webinar on it, just saying, Hey, this is coming back to the surface. Go to asotu.com you can register. We're gonna be with Jim ganther from Mosaic, talking about what's been going on under the service with the cars rule, and what the potential outflow of it is, how you can be ready for it, how you can be thinking and training your teams for it now. So when it comes out, you're already ready, already. You don't want to be worrying about this in September and October now. Now we're getting into that August lull, right now, right? This is a what

Kyle Mountsier: 2:01

August? Lol, what kind of August? Long is happening in a dealership? No, no, but it definitely, yeah, it's time to get I mean, August

Paul J Daly: 2:10

is nuts, yeah, especially September. It's a lull in, like, it's the beginning of August.

Kyle Mountsier: 2:16

Like, Oh, everyone's back to school. Dealership. World nuts. Bananas, actually, yeah. We

Paul J Daly: 2:22

were just talking to somebody how everyone had a good last month. Who we were on the line with Todd Caputo, and he's like, everyone had a good month last month, and this month is shaping up to be another good month. I guess is kind of what I heard yesterday from Todd. I don't know what are you hearing? It's

Kyle Mountsier: 2:38

going to be great this. This is going to be a good month. I'm telling you right now, every recession,

Paul J Daly: 2:44

who cares about that we've been you think about it. Who's who told me about Mr. CEO Greg, CEO senior. He said, You know, you talk about recession long enough you're going to find yourself in the middle of one. And I feel like people have been talking about recession for, like, so long. Yeah, five years now, yeah, it feels like five years. It's been a strong three.

Kyle Mountsier: 3:05

And I don't know. I don't think we ever. I don't know people are there's different arguments whether or not

Paul J Daly: 3:11

make your own economy. We'll talk about, was it? David Long, right? Make your own economy. Make your own economy, either way, join us in the webinar today. No, um, it's at two o'clock. Go to asotu.com register, even if you can't make it at two o'clock, we want you to be there at two, because you can heckle us in the comments. But if you're not, you still get the recording. You can still be a part of the thing at the follow up, emails, all of that stuff. So Nathan, our producer, types in the comments. This show has also been around three years, helping stave off reception. That's right. I think, can we take credit for that? We're the recession proofers.

Kyle Mountsier: 3:43

We came right around when people were like, there might be a recession. We were like, no, we'll talk about it

Paul J Daly: 3:47

every day, knowing all that we will, we will talk it out of existence. And so we're still going over 800 episodes of talking recession out of existence

Kyle Mountsier: 3:58

and counting. Oh, just go straight into it and counting. Okay,

Paul J Daly: 4:05

so we had, we've had a pretty eventful week, and it's only Wednesday. Uh, Monday was a Tuesday. What day did we go on the shoot? Monday? Monday was about the sportiest shoot we have ever been on. It was wild. We were we were already coming in and out of a hot Lz, I was driving in with Nathan. You were flying in with Jim. Here's a picture of us in the elevator with the thing of Greg lick and Andy welcher, you know the old, the old point five lens shot in the elevator. We ran with a skeleton crew southwest messed up half of our bag, which had half of our equipment. But it's okay, because we figured out, you know, Jim, Jim, our, one of our producers from natural, he was just like, it's gonna be like an adventure today,

Kyle Mountsier: 4:46

right? It's just gonna be an adventure, like an adventure. And

Paul J Daly: 4:49

so we were Mohawk Chevrolet filming some stuff for for the to wrap up our fourth episode of more than cars. Here we are with Nathaniel, Greg like but the reason Mohawk Chevrolet has been in the news so much. Late is because of their Tiktok series called The dealership, which is a spoof off of the office and hit millions and millions of views on Tiktok, tons on Instagram, on YouTube, and got so much attention that they were invited to go out to film an episode at GM headquarters with including GM CEO, Mary Barra and so they were just coming off that trip. It was covered in automotive news today because the episode just launched yesterday, or actually, actually, yeah, Monday night, right? But, but Tuesday. So here's a photo of grace Kerber, the star of the show, the creator of the show, one of the creators with Mary from the episode. Basically, it's a parody of the office. And, you know, Grace, from the very beginning, started calling Silverado as a Rado, right? And you gotta go check out the episode. So they really played off that she's in the board room at GM with the whole executive team like the the CMO Chevrolet, suggesting the 2026, campaign for the Silverado. She was sitting in Mary bar seat. And Mary's like, Can I, can I help you find somewhere to sit? This is usually where I sit.

Kyle Mountsier: 6:08

The cameo is just right too, right? Because they could have gone over with the cameo, right? But the cameo was just, just the right amount of timing. It was great, yep. So

Paul J Daly: 6:16

you know, we got, we got to actually spend some time and interview grace. We were hanging out in the office with her and Ben as they were doing some editing. And so we have a little bit behind the story with her coming out in the next episode. And boy, did we have a lot of fun, because this dealership is all about competition. I mean, we have, yeah, here's a little, oh, we got a little clip. Just a little clip. There's a little clip of us stacking lug nuts. There's Andy Andy, the GM, one of the owners going against grace. We had a team thing. We can't tell you who won, because there was team Paul, Team Kyle, but it was, it was about as close as it gets. Something like, what I'm not I mean, 99 point differential in the midst of 1000s of points is pretty close.

Kyle Mountsier: 7:00

Okay, okay, okay, I'll give

Paul J Daly: 7:03

it the whole thing. No, no, no, hey, hey there, who won? But Nathan was saying, Nathan was saying that could have gone the other way easily, because there should have been points awarded for winning the last game, not just for the points differential. Like, hey, if you win, you get x amount of points, and the bonus is the differential in the thing which would have even it was 100 points, I'm saying it would have swung the other way. So it was close. It was close. Maybe we can add bonus points in post, like, we'll see what happens. So think

Kyle Mountsier: 7:34

we can add bonus points. I don't think we can do that. I

Paul J Daly: 7:36

mean, movie magic. Movie magic. Oh man, I know why we're talking to than car series. If you haven't seen it, go to more than cars.tv you gotta go to our soda or just go to asotube, asotu.be see the episodes. We got some awesome news from our distributor yesterday that the show might start popping up other places that you may be poking around on your streaming services. More to come on that soon. You know, Grace, oh, we have to give Grace's quote. Grace quoted in the article saying, We're so honored to be invited by Chevrolet to visit the GM headquarters. Meeting Mary was such a cool experience. She was so kind and fun to shoot with. So love it naturally. One little Chevy dealer in upstate New York making waves over at GM headquarters. That's, that's the beauty the industry. All right, how are we going to transition from that? I know bunch of fun about that whole one randomness to let's get into the engaging world of up times of EV chargers. Hey, this is a big topic of conversation, though. As EV infrastructure rolls out of new studies uncovering significant gaps between reported and actual uptimes of EV chargers shedding light on reliability issues potential solutions for public charging infrastructure, basically charger, charger helps report, analyze over 19 million data points to assess EV charging reliability, actual uptime, they said, is frequently lower than reported uptime, which erodes driver confidence. Even more, older charging stations in the longer established states actually have higher downtime. Right? The older charging infrastructure technology is moving forward so fast, reliability varies widely across the 20 different charging networks. Or, I can't believe there are 20 like, I can only like name like, five, some networks having as much as 20% downtime. Major causes, component failures, communications issues, no surprise there. And payment system malfunctions. You gotta think all those three things are at are at play, right there. Professor Gil tau, Director of EV Research Center at UC Davis shared, he said, quote, the discrepancy between reported and actual uptime is a major challenge. Accurate data, local technician support are essential for improving reliability. Got to fix this one.

Kyle Mountsier: 9:53

This is interesting because there's well one. Tennessee has been a fairly established state when it. Comes to this specifically Nashville, because of the Nissan LEAF, and then Tesla was here pretty early. And I, like anecdotally, see this across Nashville where you see, like, out of order signs, or, you know, even just like watching people struggle with actually charging like you, you can, like, staring at the phone, staring at the thing, kind of like journal in their eyes, yeah. But the other piece of this, and this isn't one that I had thought of until this, but when you think about a gas station like they're always manned, right? So the reporting isn't just a software reporting of outage. It's a real person to a real person to go put the sign on to make the call to get the technician out, reset it. You never see one out of 10 or one out of five gas pumps out for longer than a day. Yeah, right. And so this is just a part of the upskilling and upscaling, and the local technicians, the awareness, the ability to fix fix on the fly, is still kind of a scale thing that we also haven't solved, alongside of how many chargers are actually available. Yeah,

Paul J Daly: 11:05

I mean, it's a point. I mean, we have, again, I talk about it. Sometimes we have an EV charger right outside my office here. We installed it when we renovated the building, and we've had, we've had a couple little issues, right? Like a SIM card went at one point, it was flashing an error code. But we're right here, literally, I can see it from where I'm standing. So it's like, it's easy for us to fix, because there's actually a place to be, like, hey, is this thing? We haven't had a lot of issues, but it was brand new when it went in, you know, two years ago, two and a half years ago, but still, even so, like, if people aren't on, it's the EV go charging network, I think, is who we're with. And you know, you still see people like, you can see when something's not working, they eventually use that charging network an app. Yeah, yep. So, I mean, hey, it's one of those challenges. Is, as we develop world, it's interesting, the early adopters, though, are just hasn't been, it hasn't been that long, but they got to change tech out.

Kyle Mountsier: 11:54

Probably, yeah. I mean, when you when are you going to have 2020, charging apps on your phone? Gosh, hopefully never. Maybe there's a centralized app ecosystem that someone needs to create that

Paul J Daly: 12:05

that seems like a really reasonable solution. Oh

Kyle Mountsier: 12:07

my gosh, that's a genius solution. All right, see you guys, we

Paul J Daly: 12:11

gotta go build a business speaking to see you. Bye segway, thank

Kyle Mountsier: 12:16

goodness, because the first one struggled. Hey. Elon Musk is closing Texas San Francisco headquarters mark the end of an era for a company formerly known as Twitter. The move will impact a bunch of employees as they transition, primarily, actually to new Bay Area locations. So similar area just not right, downtown San Francisco. The Office will close over the next few weeks, according to an email from CEO Linda yacorino, um, they'll transition to offices in San Jose or a new engineering Focus, focus space with x ai in Palo Alto, so still fairly local, they're going to be working on things like how to transport employees, or transportation options to get them out of that bay area or out of the San Francisco area X has been headquartered there since 2011 due to a tax break that originally eliminated one and a half percent of payroll tax despite must previous commitment to stay in San Francisco. He was actually pretty bullish about it. He now said it's impossible to operate in San Francisco if you're processing payments. So if you know they're like, obviously processing a ton of payments, and primarily through stripe for X's premium platform. That's why stripe block or cash app and others had to move. They all moved out of San Francisco for that reason. What

Paul J Daly: 13:38

is the deal? It's wild. I mean, that's,

Kyle Mountsier: 13:40

that's a great Ross has in charges, yeah,

Paul J Daly: 13:43

why? Just in the city limits? And there's so they're moving stuff out of there. You know, this is one of the things that doesn't work in Elon's favor, is, you know, why people don't believe what he says, but he keeps delivering enough on the flip side, because back when he first bought the company, he said, you know, he's talking about their commitment to staying in San Francisco, and he said many have offered rich incentives for X to move its headquarters out more over the cities in a doom spiral with one company leaving after another, therefore they expect X to move too we will not. Period, you only know who your real friends are when, and I guess he's not. Clearly they're

Kyle Mountsier: 14:19

not real friends anymore. You

Paul J Daly: 14:21

know, things change, times change, but look where are your real friends? We are. Please let other people know about the podcast or check out the email out of soda.com but whatever you do, go care about some people. Grow your business. We will see you here bright and early tomorrow. You

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