Jaguar Roars, GM Sells, and we are Filming More Than Cars

Paul J Daly  0:00  
Oh, come on. Oh, come on. The producers not rolling the music. Are we live streaming? We're live streaming. We're at Bozar Ford in the service department. Today, it's December 3. We have Michael Wood on the show today to talk about Jaguar, but first we're talking about the people the battery factory sale. There's a sale on battery factories

Kyle Mountsier  0:22  
on Monday. That's brutal. So

Paul J Daly  0:24  
obviously, if you can see us, you know we are not in our home studio. This is not a fake background. How many technicians are in here right now? Yeah, there are about 60 technicians behind us right now, working in a 1234, rows of lifts at Bozar Ford Lincoln in Saint Augustine, Florida. It's a chilly morning in Florida.

Kyle Mountsier  0:46  
It's chilly, which is weird for Florida, but it's chilly all over. I like us in our warmth,

Paul J Daly  0:51  
we're shooting our third episode of season two of more than cars. Uh, we're fired up. But of course, we gotta do the show this morning. There's a lot of stuff going on. We do want to remind you, though, this Friday, we have another ASOTU Edge webinar. These have been amazing, especially if you're in the marketing side of the business, or you're paying attention to the marketing side of the business. It's going to be part two with our friends at stream companies. This is building your 2025 ad strategy. You can go to asotu.com sign up so you can get the recording or we hope you can be with us on the live stream, because it's so much fun when we do the live streams. Absolutely

Kyle Mountsier  1:22  
speaking to being with us. We would love for you to be with us at at our nada party, or find all of the other nada parties. You can go to nada parties com right now, throw in a party. You can submit it. If you want to come to our party, you can be there. Please come. Uh, we're doing it Friday night of nada. It's going to be unbelievable. Partnering with upstart and clairvoy to throw that down. I think there's no we always throw down. There's

Paul J Daly  1:48  
one more thing we forgot to do yesterday. More thing. Listen, we had a Black Friday sale, oh, on a soda con tickets. And if you were on the list, and we told you 1000 times to get on the list, you got half off of ASOTU CON tickets. That is the cheapest they are going to be. We sold a bunch of tickets. Thank you so much to our friends who bought the early tickets. It got me so excited to be like these people are definitely going to be coming. We're still five months away. Is it five or six? Five months? I

Kyle Mountsier  2:15  
don't five. I think what? No, four and a half.

Paul J Daly  2:18  
We gotta go. No, it's not five, five and a half. Nathan goes four and a half. I'm like, we gotta go.

Unknown Speaker  2:26  
Gotta plan some All right, let's

Paul J Daly  2:27  
talk. Talk about speaking a plan and something. Go ahead. Hit the segway into the Segway, no because of Black Friday or Cyber Monday, but GM is going to sell its stake in a $2.6 billion Altium cell battery plant in Lansing, Michigan to LG energy solutions. The facility, which is now nearly complete, is going to become wholly owned by LG and supply batteries to another auto maker. GM expects to recover its full $1 billion investment in the plant. It currently has about 100 employees. It plans to scale to 1700 when fully operational GM CFO Paul Jacobson stated the moon lines with improving EV profitability and efficiency, emphasizing quote, We believe we have the right cell and manufacturing capabilities in place to grow in the EV market in a capital efficient manner. It doesn't affect their stakes in the other UL team battery plants they have in Ohio and Tennessee in its planned partnership with Samsung SDI in Indiana, they're going to continue GM and LG continue to co develop tech and battery cells to get costs down. But LG executive Wuhan su noted deepening collaboration, saying, together with GM, we've already made tremendous progress. So they're going from four plants down to three.

Kyle Mountsier  3:43  
Well, what's interesting to me is that LG is picking this up and going to be supplying another manufacturer. So it's clear that GM just sees that they don't need the battery building capacity for themselves at the four plants, right? And so it's it's definitely a move that we've seen over the course of the last nine to 12 months, with manufacturers kind of looking at their EV production facilities and pipelines and kind of like trimming them up, getting them more aligned with what demand is looking like. This is a pretty shocking one, though, especially before the plant even goes online, but it is still cool to see a tech company pick it up and still supplying another manufacturer yet to be named, and obviously LG isn't going anywhere. From building batteries perspective, if

Paul J Daly  4:26  
you think about when the announcements came out, it was a bit of a gold rush mentality for battery manufacturing capacity. There was money being thrown around. There's EV incentives. All of the cultural hype was like, EVs are going to take over the world. If we had our 2030 button, we would press it twice right now, but it's obvious that that's not going to happen. And so I think, like, everyone is realizing, okay, we needed to get what we could when the getting was good. And now they're realizing, like, we need to back off, because we're going to be lynched by shareholders well. And

Kyle Mountsier  4:53  
this is a strategy like, even from a financial perspective, to recoup an investment in a retail facility and warehouse is changing. All the time, all the already in multiple different verticals. So, you know, I don't think anything too shocking every I think everybody's kind of seeing the writing on the wall like, Hey, we gotta diversify, make sure that, like, our, our, you know, our real estate transactions are in the right place or in the right structure for the P and L, you know,

Paul J Daly  5:20  
speaking about the P L,

jaguars latest concept car. The type? Is it 00, double O, I don't know. Ask Michael, well, in a second, was unveiled at Miami Art week, showcasing a radical design departure for the iconic brand. The design cues will inform Jaguars electric Grand Tour, starting slated for 2026 we're just going to forget the show notes here. We've all heard about we've all seen the Jaguar rebrand. There's been much ado about it. So we couldn't think of anyone better to join us on the show than Mr. Jaguar himself. Michael Wood, that's pretty long to the show. There he is. Michael, thanks for joining us today to talk about this.

Michael Wood  6:01  
Thanks for having me on guys. Okay, so

Paul J Daly  6:03  
look, you're a Jag dealer, you're a fan of the brand. You've, I'm sure feel that no less than 400 calls and texts over the last week about all the the rebrand and where the what the direction of the company is. So I think it'd be great to just get your thoughts overall on what's happening with the brand and what you expect. You know,

Michael Wood  6:25  
honestly, I'm super excited about what's going on. I mean, at the end of the day, for the last 20 to 30 years, jaguars tried to be something that it's not, which is a mass, volume type vehicle. And it's about time that we return back to our heritage of of pushing the limits in our design cues and creating something that's polarizing, which we've done. I mean, at the end of the day, some are going to love it now, some are going to love it later, and some are never going to love it. And that's exactly the point. So what? So

Paul J Daly  6:50  
what do you think about the the new vehicle that had come out? Did you did you get a sneak peek at this? You knew it was coming?

Michael Wood  6:56  
I did? I last year when I went to the UK for the global retailer conference, I got to see not only this vehicle, but the other vehicles that will be produced. And this looks very much like what we saw in the UK. I can't really elaborate too much because I am bound by an NDA, but what I will tell you is that the the vehicles that will be released to the public, this is not going to be one of those instances where the vehicle that's made is a far difference from the actual concept vehicle. A lot of the design you see in this vehicle will be in the production vehicles. Wow,

Kyle Mountsier  7:27  
that's that's kind of impressing, because a lot of times you see a concept car and it's like, it's going to be a massive departure, but it's clear, like the concept car is close to the actual production releases. You had stated in in a couple LinkedIn posts, particularly that the alignment with the my Miami Design Week, or Miami's art week, and this release was a very unique decision, and clear why they made a decision like that. Can you speak to like how aligning a brand with a cultural icon like Miami Art week actually makes sense for, you know, creating a niche, sure. I

Michael Wood  8:04  
mean, let's just take Rolls Royce, for instance. I mean, when's the last time you've seen them at an auto show? They don't go to go to yacht and plane shows, because that's the customer base, and that's what we're doing right now. I mean, at the end of the day, if clients were still buying jaguars, there wouldn't be a need to reimagine the brand. We've got to start a new and that means that, yes, some clients will get left behind, and that's okay. It's not designed for everybody. We're not trying to sell 500,000 cars globally. You know, we're going to sell, I think, 8500 to 9000 vehicles in the US this year. And that's kind of the intent of the future, because we're upstreaming the vehicle, and at the price point of which we're going to be offering it to the public, you can't expect to be to have mass adoption. So

Paul J Daly  8:45  
what, what do you think the the Jaguar buyer that you think is going to actually transition from current to future? What percentage do you think that is of buyers in general? Is this going to be largely new buyers that are just coming onto the brand, or people who have loved Jaguar for years and now they're going to make the transition. Which one do you think is going to be a higher percentage?

Michael Wood  9:08  
I definitely think there'll be a higher percentage of new entrants into the into the brand. Which is exactly the point you know, there's going to be some avid fans that are going to absolutely want to stick with the brand, and those that really know the heritage, that know what Sir William Lyons is talking about when he said, copy nothing. They're going to be the ones that actually stick with the brand. The stuff that you see out there on social media where people are talking about they've lost their way, they've lost their heritage. They don't know crap about our heritage. Then, quite candidly, I mean, at the end, we are, we are going back to who we are. Think about the E type, the x, k1, 20, the XJ s when they were released, they were polarizing. That is the point. I

Paul J Daly  9:45  
think it's easy to forget that when those came out, yeah, because now they're just very iconic, and you just accept it as like what it is. But at the time, it probably elicited the similar, similar response social media was around this, minus the ability to. Pour jet fuel on it and pile on because of social media,

Michael Wood  10:03  
exactly name another auto maker out there right now that's producing an EV that is kind of the opposite of what EVs are thought to be like. Look at the bonnet on the type 00, it's a nice, long bonnet that you don't typically see on an EV vehicle. Or take the 23 inch rims that are on there as well, alloy you don't typically see those things on an EV vehicle, and that's kind of the design cues that they were going after, to be the opposite of what EV it stands for currently, and to be beautiful. And I really think the vehicle is beautiful. Well,

Paul J Daly  10:31  
do you know, like in that concept, how many people can fit in the bonnet?

Michael Wood  10:37  
I don't know. We didn't get to see inside there at all. Swiping our

Paul J Daly  10:40  
next mafia. No more in the trunk.

Kyle Mountsier  10:43  
There's definitely a little mafia to this vehicle. Uh, well, Michael,

Michael Wood  10:46  
thank you so much for

Kyle Mountsier  10:49  
spending a little bit of time with us. Clear that we need to keep our eyes on this rebrand, because I think it is. It's something that could be, it's at least polarizing. And I don't think that's a bad thing for some brands to look at, especially when you're only looking for 9000 buyers a year, right? You don't have to go get,

Paul J Daly  11:10  
yeah, you're going to have, I mean, it's even, like, the same principle as, like, what the cyber truck is when it first came out, right? People wanted it because it was so different and it was so unique. And I think about the plane show mentality, you had a plane show, and you see the roles which everyone knows what it is, and there's more familiarity. And then you see this crazy jag sitting there. And you know, the people who are going to want it are going to be like, I need to be one of the first people that have this. It's going to be just immediately identifiable.

Kyle Mountsier  11:36  
Yep, exactly. Well, Michael, thank you so much. Have a great day. Sell some cars. Love some people. Yes. How we do? Oh, that's

Paul J Daly  11:44  
always so good. We don't do we don't talk to him. We don't do that enough. Yeah, we don't talk to him enough. Well, look, we're about to go. You can roll the music. We're about to go and fill a docu series. If you haven't seen it yet. By the way, it's my videos, or you go to more than cars.tv to see the first season. We're going to go film something. We'll see you back here tomorrow morning. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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