NC_2023_09_20
[0:00] Music.
[0:06] Technology Geek podcast with an ever so slight Apple bias. Today is Wednesday, September 20th, 2023.
And this is show number 959.
Well, since the show is coming out super early on a Wednesday, this is your big hint that there will be no live show on Sunday, September 24th.
We've got a great show this week because of some awesome Nocilla castaways.
PDX Kurt will tell us about TrueNAS. Jo from the Northwoods will tell us more about how she uses Notion to manage podcasts, and then we'll have an interview I did with Steve Uell about his decision process on replacing his gas car with a planet-friendly vehicle.
He's a data-driven guy, and it's a really interesting walkthrough of how he came to a very different answer than what I chose.
But first, let's start with a tiny tip that's also not by me.
[0:52] Music.
Tiny Tips on iOS 17 But Not From Me
[1:02] When the new OS has come out, like everyone else, I struggled to learn all of the new features on my Mac, my iPad, and my iPhone.
The first thing I do is I review all of my notes of what I was so excited about at WWDC, but then I realize my notes weren't all that good and they don't actually tell me exactly how to use the cool features that were announced.
[1:22] At some point I go to Apple.com and I look for a feature list and maybe I try a couple of things, but then I just move on.
Pretty soon, I'm only using the stuff I learned in the first few days, and I never uncover all of the new tricks.
But this year, I found Jacob Woolcock on Mastodon posting about his YouTube channel called iPhone Quick Tips, where he teaches tips and tricks, as you would expect from the title.
What's interesting is he's put together a playlist of 45 tiny little tip videos focusing just on iOS 17 and all of the kind of more hidden features, not the big flashy stuff, but the little things.
Each of these videos is no more than 1-2 minutes each and they are fantastic, just bite-sized.
I binge-watched them over the course of a day or two, but you could watch just a couple of days so they sink in a little better for you.
I have to tell you, I've learned so much from Jacob.
The things I like is the production quality is very high and he gets right to the point immediately because he's only got 1 or 2 minutes to get the entire concept across.
The videos are fun to watch because the left side is an animoji of Jacob talking and he's He's got this fabulous British accent, and then on the right side, he's got an iPhone demonstrating what the tip and exactly how he's doing it.
He's got all kinds of fun graphics, like a little tiny hand that taps the buttons on the screen.
If you want to get up to speed quickly with iOS 17 and learn all those quick little tips, I can't say enough good things about Jacob's playlist of iOS 17 tips.
Personal Voice (no blog post)
[2:50] If I may step in for a moment, this is Allison's personal voice created using the new accessibility feature of iOS 17. I learned how to create a personal voice in one of Jacob Woolcock's videos.
I thought you might be interested in how it works. In Settings, Accessibility under the Speech section, you select Personal Voice. Then you tap Create Personal Voice and begin the training. The training to create this voice required reading 150 short phrases with a pause in between each, so it took quite a bit of time. The phrases were odd in that they were about just a few things. They seemed to fall into a few categories. There were.
[3:26] A lot about government institutions with sentences like, he was in the US Senate for 12 years.
The questions seemed to be obsessed with pronunciation of years. For example, they'd have me say, this happened in the 1970s. Finally, the creators were obviously hungry because there were many phrases about snacks. You'll notice that this voice sounds very deadpan. I think that's because most of the sentences were quite dull. There were very few phrases that were excited, like that puppy is so cute. When I was done recording the phrases, the phone told me to leave it alone and on a charger while it did the math to create the dulcet tones you hear now. I don't know how long it would have taken but I let it work overnight and it was ready when I woke up. In order to actually use the personal voice, you need to enable live speech in in the same section of accessibility.
Finally, triple click the side button on iPhone, select live speech, and type into the field that pops up and it will speak what you've entered.
I hope you've enjoyed learning about personal voice from iOS 17.
[4:27] Well, I'm not sure that's going to replace my voice any time soon, and it's not quite as good as the 11Labs voice I used when I lost my voice back in show number 930.
But considering this was all done on-device, it's pretty impressive how much it does sound like me.
If you're in danger of losing your voice, it would be an awesome tool to record your voice as it is now, so you have it just in case you need it.
Getting Your Feet Wet with TrueNAS — by PDXKurt
[4:53] Hi, this is PDXCurt, bringing you an introduction to the open-source operating system for network-attached storage systems, called TrueNAS, maintained by the company ixSystems.
TrueNAS manages disks and runs network applications, and offers volumes over the network to client computers.
It's thus similar in function to the operating system that runs on products that you might buy from Synology, for instance.
[5:22] The problem to be solved here is, how can I get Network Attached Storage, or NAS, for not much money, using hardware that I have laying around?
Like a Synology NAS, a TrueNAS box is usually a small computer server containing multiple spinning hard disks that sits on your network and offers self-healing, redundant storage space to your computers that connect to it.
Once you install the software and set up how you want the storage organized, the volumes that your computer sees on the TrueNAS appear as locations in the Finder sidebar, and you can copy files to and from the NAS through the Finder in the usual drag-and-drop way.
[6:07] You can also set up a NAS volume to be available over the network as a time machine destination and let your Mac computer store backups on it.
As Allison would put it, these are all table stakes functions for a NAS, and TrueNAS performs them capably.
Configuring TrueNAS is done through your web browser by navigating to a local network address.
The web interface is sensible and easy to navigate, and includes monitoring pages where you can see instantaneous graphs of things like processor load, network traffic, and other important parameters.
TrueNAS can be set up to scrub your disks for errors and send you an email if it finds problems.
Again, these are table stakes for being in the NAS market.
The next level of access is when TrueNAS files are made available on the go, at locations other than your local network.
While this is definitely possible with TrueNAS, it is a bother to set up.
Set up. You can either install Tailscale in a virtual machine within TrueNAS for Finder access on the go, or you can install NextCloud as an all-around collaboration solution that that provides features like document editing, calendar, contacts, and more.
[7:26] I should probably mention at this point that TrueNAS comes in two flavors.
The original TrueNAS is based on FreeBSD and is now called TrueNAS Core, while the newer version of TrueNAS is based on Linux and is called TrueNAS Scale.
Which one should you use?
Well, either product will work fine for local file sharing, but if you want to install apps such as Nextcloud for document sharing or Plex for media delivery, then TrueNAS Scale is a better choice.
TrueNAS Scale uses Docker containers for hassle-free app installation, while installing an app like NextCloud in TrueNAS Core is a decidedly manual command-line affair.
The user interface of TrueNAS Core has one-button app installation solutions in the web interface, but it appears that they no longer work consistently.
TrueNAS support comes in two flavors. Paid support from ixSystems, either because you bought ixSystems hardware or you bought a support contract, or free community support through the TrueNAS forum. Forum support for TrueNAS is like forum support for any other open source project. Sometimes great and timely, sometimes snarky, condescending, and or slow. A lot depends on the attitude and and quality of information submitted by the supplicant seeking help.
[8:51] IXsystem sells hardware with TrueNAS pre-installed. Unfortunately, even iXsystem's most affordable box, the TrueNAS Mini, is much more expensive than a comparable Synology product. The TrueNAS Mini starts at $1,150 versus about $819 for a 4-bay Synology box.
And older Synology 2-bay NAS products start at less than $250.
So, I'm not making a very strong case for TrueNAS over Synology so far, am I?
A commercial TrueNAS box costs much more, the free version requires you to get support from potentially cranky volunteers, and remote access isn't built-in and seamless.
Why would anyone ever use TrueNAS?
[9:40] Well, there are reasons. For one thing, TrueNAS can be downloaded and installed for free just about any 64-bit x86 computer released in the last 10 years. So that old Mac Pro or PC tower sitting in your closet could be repurposed into a useful home server just for the cost of the hard drives. The most practical host boxes are ones that have bays for multiple SATA drives and at least 8 gigabytes of RAM, but in a pinch you can even use a Mac Mini and a couple of USB drives.
Raspberry Pi and Apple Silicon owners are left out, however.
TrueNAS only runs on Intel processors.
The TrueNAS website has a whole forum section devoted to hardware advice for different scenarios.
I'm running TrueNAS on a modest 2010 4-Bay HP N40L micro-server microserver that I picked up off of Craigslist for $100.
[10:41] The main draw for TrueNAS, however, is probably something that few outside the sysadmin community know or appreciate. TrueNAS, like FreeBSD that it is based on, uses the ZFS file system to store all its data. I will have to defer a detailed discussion of ZFS until another time, except to say that it's well-designed, feature-complete, easy to administer down to the disk level, and obsessive about data integrity.
TrueNAS does a very good job of exposing nearly all of the features of ZFS in a logical way in its graphical interface, and the context-sensitive help dialogs will help you over any humps that you encounter.
[11:23] At this point you might be thinking, what's the big deal? Why get excited over a file system?
Synology has a file system and supports many of the same core features like data correction and encryption.
It turns out that this is actually one area where TrueNAS has a significant advantage over Synology products.
While Synology offers many of the same features, it achieves these only by stacking together ButterFS and a couple of other Linux technologies in series.
It's very much a don't-worry-your-pretty-little-head-about-how-we-do-it approach with Synology, whereas ZFS is clean and straightforward and accessible and comprehensible from top to bottom.
It's a little hard to explain, but if you're the sort of person who's detail-oriented and willing to dive into the technology, it's like finding a tool that fits your hand perfectly.
[12:18] So that's the skinny on TrueNAS. Free if you want it, a bit of tinkering to get the most out of it, incredible ZFS file system under the hood.
Pull an old computer out of your closet and give it a try. This is fantastic, Kurt, and I know a lot of no-silicaster ways are just nerdy enough to want to try this out.
It sounds really fun, and I really wish I had an Intel box lying around, but you make a compelling argument if you could get something for a hundred bucks just to play with this.
That sounds like great fun.
Get Organized with Notion — by Jill from the Northwoods
[12:50] Hi, this is Jill from the Northwoods. You know how much I love getting organized, but I had a problem on my hands. I was a OneNote user, and a couple things going on there.
One, I'm hoping to get away from using Office 365. Yes, I hear all the anti-Windows people cheering out there. I'm going to do it. It's just not going to happen right now.
But OneNote has significant problems as a notebook. It is a freeform notebook. It is about putting everything everywhere and so eventually the organizational structure falls down and it's just kind of a gigantic mess. I was looking for something a little bit more structured because if I'm gonna have my podcasting empire I need to be organized about what I need to record and do. I looked at a couple of other note-taking what they call second brain you know you have your first brain which is filled with all your knowledge you have to put it in a second brain so that you can organize it and retrieve it. Any kind of an organizational structure will do. Tried a bunch of them. Some good ones out there.
Craft was one I was really interested in for sure. But you know what? In the end I picked Notion and it is my new best friend. Everything in my whole life, except for things like tasks and calendar, everything else is in Notion.
[14:10] Just to give you an idea, I used to have Pocket where I saved all the articles that I wanted to read later, but it was so filled with things and there was tags, and other ways I could filter it. But now that I put all those articles in Notion, I have many ways I can filter it. And not only that, I was saving articles in Pocket that I meant to do podcasts about. Now those particular notes can be associated with the proper podcast, so I'm even more organized with these, miscellaneous articles I hope to read later. I also have a situation where my best friend and I go shopping, out to eat quite a bit, and we're always wondering, how much money does my friend owe me? Because honestly, I just pay for most things. She ends up sending me money every once in a while. So I created a Notion database of money-owing. And I also have fun places to travel, places I'd like to eat and places I'd love to go camping. See, I just use it for everything.
[15:14] But what I'm going to talk today is how I organize my podcasts.
Because even though you might want to organize something else, I think my podcast example shows a lot of different uses and a lot of different ways to store information that might be useful to you too.
When it comes to my podcasts, again, this is the one that's the most structured.
In fact, I think that my podcasts are so organized, I have so many views, I might even release this template of my podcast tracker out to Notion themselves.
They have a repository of templates that other people build and share with everyone.
You can either set a price for them or most of them are free and you can download them, play with them a little bit, use them if you like, or not use them.
In my podcast tracker, there's a few things I keep track of.
I have one page that's meant to capture all my technical details.
This has my tokens, my URLs, my RSS feed information, anything that has to do with the structure of the podcast.
Also has some information about the website that I use to host my podcast.
[16:23] Then there's the graphics and media page, which keeps track of my intro, my outro, and all the different graphic images I use for my podcast.
So they're all right there in case suddenly I sign up for some new service and it wants a round icon for my podcast.
I created one. Now it's in this notebook, so I can always find it easily.
And I also have some information anytime I get details about who's listening to my podcast, which podcasts tend to do a little bit better than the other podcasts, and I'm keeping track of it.
[16:58] That's all been nice and it's fine. Again it's a good notebook for keeping track of those things but where this has really been successful to me is that I have one called the episode list and in this episode list I'm able to keep track of all the podcasts that I've recorded.
[17:15] What status they're in, do they need to be written, recorded, or are they done and I don't have to pay attention to them anymore. It also has a place that I can put the quote I used, the resource material I used, so I don't accidentally review the same book twice.
This helps me make sure that I am not leaning into a particular topic a lot and that I don't repeat anything that I once did. And once the podcast has been released, it has a release date so I can remember. So when I go back in my podcast and say, remember in podcast 9 on August 23rd, I can actually find the link, find the topic and talk a little bit more about when I talked about this topic in the past. Makes it very easy for me to refer to my older podcasts. Another nice list I have is ideas. So when I first started podcasting I was afraid that I wasn't going to have enough ideas to talk about. I have a list of over 200 ideas for my Start with Small Steps podcast. If I run out of ideas there's a, bunch of ideas written there. Notion has a web clipper, which is a little bit like Pocket's web clipper, where you can take a web article and send it to Notion and.
[18:31] Pocket will store the article for you if you pay a premium price. With this I can embed the whole article and so I can read it later, whether I'm on a plane or in a hotel with terrible internet. My notes are always with me and so if I'm thinking that might not be a bad topic. I certainly can pull it out and use it.
[18:52] Then you're able to create joined table views. So I created this one view that shows all the podcasts that I have and I called it podcast to record. So it just lists from each of the podcasts every episode list that the status is to record. I also have one for podcasts that I need to publish to the web and podcasts that I need to write. So again, anytime I sit down looking for some work I have to do for my podcast, my lists are right there across all of the different podcasts. So it's not just me looking at one of them, I'm looking at all of them, knowing what tasks I have next.
Notion has a free tier and so that you don't have to pay for it But you certainly get additional features if you do pay for it, With notion free you get these workplaces where you can create these little.
[19:47] Databases I hate to call them databases because they can be a lot more simple than that, They could be as simple as an Excel table with items across the top and along the side, But they can also get a lot more complex where you can do all sorts of.
[20:01] Database queries and other things. So it can do a lot of things if you don't know how to do some of the advanced things. It's fine. You will get a long way with, it. But if you want to do more creative things, that part is also free. You'll be able to do everything that you need. And you can invite up to 10 guests to your notebook. So again, my friend and I share that notebook so we can keep track of who owes each other money. That's all part of the free account. With the plus subscription that is $8 a month or 10 if you bill it every month but that gives you the ability to do teams, file uploads, and I can invite a hundred guests to view my information that I have. I'm thinking somewhat of having some databases out there for my podcast listeners if they want to look at some of my reference materials, thinking about doing variety of different ways that I can help my listeners find more information about what it is I talk about, review, and how to find other authors they may be interested in reading.
I'm not a fan of the subscription things, but Notion has helped me so much in organizing almost every piece of data, other than the calendar and the tasks, I find it worth every dime.
I probably, in the end, don't need the PLUS plan, but I do love supporting a company that that made something so wonderful.
[21:26] With the PLUS account too, you get 30 days to restore a history.
Like if you screwed something up and you made a mess of it, you can get a restore of that for 30 days.
With the free account, it is seven days.
You also have the ability with the PLUS account to get custom domain groups so that you can make this your homepage.
There's a lot you can do. I've seen people sell coursework, training materials on their Notion page.
I think that's amazing, but I haven't tried it yet.
And then comes integrations. You'll be able to do various synced databases. With the free account, you get one synced database and a hundred rows of data per sync. With the plus account, you get unlimited syncing databases and 20,000 rows synced. I hope the concept of synced databases and all that doesn't scare you. You do not have to get that technical.
With the free accounts, you can create dynamic links, use the public API, and both the free and the plus support HTML, Markdown, and CSV.
[22:32] With Notion, there are some integrations with Slack, GitHub, Asana, Dropbox, Google Drive, Google Workspaces, If This Then That, two integrations that do automations, Make, and Zappier, which sounds intriguing to me. I haven't tried them out, but I'm excited to try it, probably when I get a little bit more time this winter. So for me, keeping track of my podcasts, especially since I want to have a podcasting empire, has been so helpful to me. All right.
[23:02] Everyone, thanks for listening. Again, this is Jill from the Northwoods. You can always find me on Allison's Slack channel. I hang out there quite a bit, or you can email me at jill at at startwithsmallsteps.com.
[23:14] I have to tell you that having a friend like Jill who finds cool solutions to problems you didn't even know you had is super valuable. She's been teaching me what she learns about Notion, and what I've learned from her has become invaluable. I don't do half of what she does with Notion—I'm not that organized—but she did teach me how to set up a database for the articles for each show for the NocillaCast. Then she showed me I could view it in a calendar view so I could drag and drop articles around by date. When all these little holidays started coming up, She showed me how to create a database view that creates little cards by date, so I have little columns for every date for each show.
For each article, I enter the estimated time it will take in the show, and then I can drag them around to make sure I don't end up with a two-hour show followed by a 20-minute show.
Now, you're about to hear a conversation between Steve Ewell and me, and this is a nice, long, beefy conversation, and I've been sliding it around using Notion, trying to find the perfect spot where there was enough time for you to be able to listen to the whole thing. A lot of the other shows had a lot to fill up, so I had trouble getting it in the right spot, but using Notion I was able to get it where it's just going to fit in perfectly.
So thank you so much to Jill for everything she's teaching me, and you should go check out Notion.
I'm still on the free plan and it's doing everything I need so far.
Support the Show
[24:33] I talk a lot about supporting the show financially, but if you can't justify becoming a patron or making a one-time donation through PayPal, consider supporting the show by doing reviews like PDXCurt, Jill, and Steve Uell. It gives me the gift of time and that's often more valuable than money. I like the money too, though. That does help. But if you have time to do a review, that really can be a fantastic way to give me that gift of time. I'd like to welcome to the
Choosing an Environmentally Sound Vehicle — a Discussion with Steve Ewell
[25:00] the show, Steve Ewell, you've probably heard his name a bunch of times before.
He is the executive director of the CTA foundation and he chose an environmentally correct vehicle, but he didn't choose what I chose.
And I thought his process was really interesting. I know a lot of people are thinking about if they wanted to get an EV or a plug-in hybrid, what would they do? What's the decision process?
So Steve, you are welcome to the show.
[25:22] I listen, I'm so thrilled to be here. I love listening to the show and happy to be able to join and, you know, share a little bit of a different vehicle than gets coverage all the time, necessarily. So, glad to be here.
Well, before we go on, can you give us your elevator pitch? What is the CTA Foundation?
So, yeah, so the CTA Foundation is the charitable foundation that's affiliated with the Consumer Technology Association, probably best known to your audience for the group that runs CES, but our foundation focuses on using technology to help older adults and people with disabilities.
So we fund nonprofits all over the country and run several programs, uh, looking at spreading the innovation and using technology to, to make a good impact.
So thrilled to be here. Uh, but you know, as far as we don't endorse any specific products.
So, uh, as we're talking, uh, today, uh, I'm, I'm just talking about what selection I made, uh, not necessarily saying anything good or bad about others.
Okay. So this is just Steve talking, not the CTA foundation. Exactly.
[26:26] Okay, cool. So you got to start with the problem to be solved, maybe some sort of requirements list. What were you looking for in replacing your vehicle?
Yeah, so I had, you know, I'm someone who tends to drive cars into the ground. So I had a, you know, 2012 Toyota Camry, which I was using a hybrid Camry, almost 200,000 miles, and it was running fine. But I was, you know, ready to start looking at, you know, where, where I wanted to go from here and looking at new vehicles.
And especially as I listened to you and as I listened to Bodhi and others talking about the great vehicles out there, I was like, I think I may be ready to look at an EV or a plug in EV or, you know, look at going kind of that direction.
So, by the way, the most environmentally sound thing you can do, I understand, is run your car into the ground, right?
Because it doesn't have to be built. And the building of these vehicles actually uses a lot of energy and natural resources.
So you're already doing the right thing.
You started with a hybrid that long ago is impressive and driving it into the ground both both good metrics and and real quickly Everybody Bodhi he's talking about his Bodhi grim of the kilowatt podcast, which is a fantastic EV podcast. You should listen to I.
[27:38] Completely endorsed that as well and I'm a proud patreon supporter of both the nozilla cast and the kilowatt podcast So really that's been helpful just to hear the the experiences that each of you have had their Tesla's now but also Chris Ashby with his Ford F-150 Lightning and others, just the various vehicles that have been covered.
Yeah, Steve and I kind of had mono vision only about Teslas until we started listening to Bodhi and now learning about all of the different vehicles out there.
It's really good to understand there's a lot of options, more and more every day.
It is amazing to see what is out there. So, but yeah, I needed a vehicle, you know, driving into the office for me.
I live a bit outside, you know, the city here. So I'm about 33 miles from where I live into the office each way.
Perfect typical commute distance, right? They always say 30 to 40 miles.
That's typical. Exactly. Only with Northern Virginia traffic, that's like an hour, hour and a half drive.
But you're in Southern California, so that probably doesn't sound too bad to you.
[28:43] But so I need something that could be kind of fuel efficient to get me back and forth.
I needed something as well, my wife and I have a farm that she basically runs and we have a cidery there.
And so I also needed something that I could kind of pack with a bunch of stuff and bring out to the farm and move stuff around. And, you know.
Jamming all that into my Camry was a little bit of a challenge.
So I wanted something in the back seat.
Well, yeah, you joke, but there was a lot of times there was mulch in the back seat and, uh, you know, all kinds of other stuff.
So, um, I need something that I could, uh, really kind of pack with things.
I didn't necessarily, like I was looking at pickup trucks as well, but I at least needed something with a bit more storage than what I had, you know, I was looking at as far as, you know, we do take a few road trips a year.
I have family kind of up and down the East Coast, so being able to drive and visit them on longer trips.
We also tend to like to go out and visit some of these Virginia wineries around here, and they don't tend to be in the areas that have a big charger network.
So we were looking at different options as far as making sure that we can get out, but also get back after that.
And I'm not quite ready to fully go self-driving, trusting that to get me home after a winery or two, uh, we're getting there.
[30:06] Oh, I cannot wait for that day. I think honestly, just from an accessibility standpoint, self-driving is going to be an amazing innovation. Right.
That's the dream. That is the dream. Cause you know, if we live long enough, we will all need it. Absolutely.
So yeah, no, I think there's some, some exciting opportunities there and looking at some of these vehicles.
And then obviously I want something reliable. I didn't want something that was going to be in the shop all the time.
So did a lot of digging into that kind of data.
Um, you know, I have a garage on our house that's not the biggest garage out there.
Honestly, my Camry just kind of fit. So I also wanted something, you know, I have several neighbors who just kind of park in their driveway, which I could do, but I really was hoping to get a vehicle that would fit in the garage, be able to keep it safe that way.
[30:53] What kind of price point were you looking at i was hoping to keep it under sixty thousand that was kind of my my goal you know and ideally less than that but i did have you know i had the trade in but i knew it was kind of an older trade in with a lot of miles so i wasn't expecting a whole lot there so really just looking at what i could get for a decent price while meeting a lot of these different criteria Okay, so a lot of no-sill castaways are rabid about their car has to have CarPlay.
Are you in that camp? I was interested in CarPlay. I at least wanted something similar to that.
You know, with my old Camry, it had a system that didn't always work all that well, so I made it work, but I wanted to try that out.
Now, I had tried CarPlay in a number of rental cars, and a lot of them had these little tiny screens that they put CarPlay on.
Yeah. So I, I, I was kind of like, I don't know that that is going to win me over, but I wanted something that I could easily connect my phone into a, you know, I listened to a lot of podcasts as I'm commuting, of course, I'm listening to your podcast as I'm commuting back and forth.
[31:59] So I wanted to have something that was easy to just control that.
And that way, honestly, I always had to kind of like fiddle with my phone to control it, my old car.
And I would prefer not to be touching my phone while I'm driving.
So having something that projected it up on the dashboard was something that wasn't an absolute requirement, but it was kind of up there on my list.
Well, I think CarPlay actually is good. I've gone from it's meh to it's good.
It's not great, but I do still think it's good.
But I think a lot of people's opinions on this are formed by the fact that the old systems we had were so bad.
So they went from that to a CarPlay and not realizing there can be things that are also good, maybe not the same good as CarPlay, but you get in your head that like everything else must be like the car I used to have. That's not necessarily true. But anyway, so now you didn't narrow it down between EVs and plug-in hybrids, right? Originally, I was pretty convinced I was going to get an EV. I had, you know, kind of in my head that I was going to get an EV. I do have a colleague who has the Audi Q4 plug-in and she really loves it. So I was like, all right, I need I need to take a look at that.
So I had... Open the door to that. As I was doing research, I had plugins in mind, but at the time it was more of, oh, I guess that's something I should look at.
[33:21] But I was pretty convinced I was going to go the EV route just based on everything that I had read before I had actually done any real research on this yet.
Okay. Now, when you talk about reliability, one of the things I wonder is, my father was a big proponent of it. He would always say, well, that's just another thing to go wrong, like, you know, electric windows. But, you know, he's right. Every time you add complexity, you add something else. When you have a hybrid, aren't you really getting the worst of both worlds on reliability.
[33:50] Because you have all of the components of a gas car, so you have to change the oil, you have to do all the things you do with a gas car, but you also have whatever could go wrong in an EV, which is sort of narrowed down some of parts. But now you've got both. You've got all the advantages of both, but you also have the reliability, right? That is absolutely a risk. Yeah, I agree. That's one of the challenges. You know, it's something that, I guess, having driven a hybrid now, not a plug-in hybrid for the last, you know, 10, 11 years.
And I had very, I really had no issues with the hybrid system.
Obviously, that's an N of one as far as the case. But, you know, that made me a little more comfortable going that route.
But yeah, it is something that there's potential challenges there.
And I'm recognizing that going into this.
OK, so now when Steve says he did research, I actually thought you were, Bruce, used the data because he is such a data nerd.
[34:46] When I was, I kept getting the two of you confused getting ready for this.
And because when I looked at your spreadsheet, it's how many lines long?
It's like 150 lines long and it goes to like B, N, I think, in columns on the right.
So it is a massive spreadsheet of vehicles.
Bart has a spreadsheet as well, but it is nothing like the banana spreadsheet you created.
You look at least online.
I wanted, I basically went through, you know, as many websites as I could online of what are the top, you know, electric or plug-in vehicles out there.
But I also just kind of pulled who are the major manufacturers that you can get here in the U S and just went to their sites and looked at, you know, was there anything that even remotely appealed to me?
Now, there were several, uh, on, on my list that put on there.
I did a little research, but knew the minute I saw the price tag that, uh, yeah, I wasn't going to get anywhere close to, uh, you know, being able to afford, uh, one of these vehicles.
[35:46] Highlight this row in red. If above this number, I'm big on color coding everything.
So I had managed to like put in pricing both for the starting price, as well as kind of, I'd go in and build on their website.
What my ideal car would be. And then if it's over 60, it would be in red.
If it was between 40 and 60, it was kind of a blue. And if it was under 40, it would be in green.
So I could just kind of easily see, you know, okay, stop looking at that.
I know it's really pretty.
I know it looks like it has everything I'd possibly want, but it also is twice the price.
And I think I would be in a lot of trouble if I came home with a hundred thousand dollar car. So.
[36:29] There would be words. So, we're going to go through line by line every single one of these, then?
Absolutely. I'm happy to put your audience to sleep, so.
[36:38] Actually, not to not to put you on the spot, but would you be willing to share that publicly? I think so.
Let me take one quick look at it again, just to make sure there's nothing too personal or anything in there that I don't think there is.
But I mean, it's mostly, it's mostly links. I did research into, you know, all the various review websites and their ratings.
I started to populate a bunch of the different features.
I didn't end up doing that for everything, because honestly, I just lost attention span and realized I was going to see a bunch of these cars in person.
And a lot of things like Apple CarPlay and Android Auto and all those, it's pretty much universal now. Not everyone has it, but I was finding, you know, as I was...
It wasn't a differentiator. No, it was just kind of the, you know, if they didn't have it, they had something similar that would work similarly.
[37:34] Okay, so let me tell the audience, if you see that I have linked to the spreadsheet in the blog post, then he said yes.
If it's not there, then it didn't turn out to be something he was willing to share. Probably, I would think.
So you narrowed it down. What were the cars you narrowed it down to?
So yeah, I had originally narrowed it down to, well, I wanted that F-150, but the price tag on that kind of ruled that one out.
So, but I really had narrowed it down to the Tesla Y, the Genesis GV60 and the Hyundai Ioniq 5.
[38:10] I looked at the Audi as well. And then I was gonna take a look at the Kia EV6.
So once again, almost all of them were electric, fully electric vehicles. Pure EVs.
And then, you know, ultimately as I was going around testing, actually it was interesting.
I had one dealership that I went to and went to go look at their car.
And the dealer talked me out of buying an electric vehicle from them.
Cause he was just like, oh, I wouldn't buy an electric vehicle these days.
Uh, you know, just not the infrastructure. There's not like all this.
And so I was like, okay, well, if you don't want to sell me the vehicle, I'm more than happy to keep moving on.
I think maybe his manager got on him later because I started getting all kinds of emails from him asking when I was coming back in to look at vehicles.
So, but when I went to the Kia dealership, which honestly, I, I really was just looking at the EV6 cause I thought it was an interesting car, it was fairly highly rated and it didn't jump out at me when I looked at that car, but while I was there, I was like, you know, I should look at their plugins just to see what they have, that really won me over pretty quickly.
[39:21] The Kia Sportage is the plug-in, well, the plug-in version of the Kia Sportage, which is kind of their midsize SUV. And it just had the, it was a bit bigger than a lot of the full EVs that I was looking at. So it had a bit more cargo space, which was something that was important to me. Just, I liked the look of it. I thought it had both the outside of it, as well as The internal setup worked really well for me and it kind of matched.
I mean, maybe it's because the electric range for it is right at that 33 miles, which is what I need to drive into work.
Now I knew I wouldn't necessarily get, you know, that means I might have to pay or do a little bit of gas to get to work.
Although amazingly enough, I've been getting to work with a little bit of charge left.
So I'm guessing at some point during my commute, it takes a little bit of gas or It's just getting enough from regenerative braking to, uh, that's what I was wondering, whether you're getting regenerative braking.
And it, my understanding was it uses.
[40:25] Electric getting up to speed, but, or they, I should say hybrids plug-in hybrids do, uh, electric getting the low end torque and getting up to speed, but it might use gas to keep going.
No, it can do that. There's various settings. So I have mine pretty much set to operate as an electric vehicle until it runs out of charge and then it will move into more of that hybrid model.
You can set it so it works more like what you're describing where it will kind of start with, you know, electric, but then move over to gas at various times.
So that's the other thing. Maybe it's the techie in me, but this vehicle has so many settings, like you can dive in and, you know, adjust the color scheme inside and, you know, what's showing up where on the dashboard.
And I also liked, I think you had talked on one of your previous podcasts about having custom buttons.
This has a couple buttons on, in the vehicle. There's one on the steering wheel.
There's another kind of on the like center console area and another in, in the kind of main display, um, that you can actually customize what those buttons do.
Now, I wish it was fully customizable. Basically for each one, you can go into a menu and choose from like eight.
[41:44] Different options for, for what those buttons can do. That's still pretty good.
You want you wanted to be all of my i want to be able to fully say you know run a macro when i press this button probably don't want macros running on my car but a shortcut support yeah so you know it's one of the i do want to tell the audience something i keep forgetting to tell them after the most recent time that i complained about the fact that i can't use any kind of button to control the temperature in my car that i have to use the touch screen.
Tesla came out with an update that does allow you to assign one of the buttons on the steering column to change the temperature.
[42:22] And I think there's a couple of different things you can change it to. I don't think it's as many as eight.
The sad part is, because Steve and I are on the beta track for full self-driving, we haven't gotten that update yet.
So Pat Dangler's got it, and Bart's got it, and Stéphane Lesage has it, Mark Pauly has it.
All these people have it, and they're all excited they're changing their temperature with the thumb wheel.
And the one person who complained the most about it doesn't have it yet, but it's coming.
That's the way it goes when you're on that cutting edge.
Right. Hey, so let's back up just a little bit. We're getting a little bit into the weeds.
Describe the Kia Sportage. I've never seen it. Is it a car? Is it a truck?
[42:58] What is it? So it's an SUV. So it's kind of the midsize SUV for Kia.
It is kind of two rows of seats.
So it's not, it doesn't have the third row, but it has a nice big, you know, back area as far as, you know, storage and cargo space.
Because it is a plug-in hybrid versus full electric, I don't have the frunk.
I was kind of looking forward to a frunk, but, but it's got plenty of space far as kind of in the back area, you know, as far as, you know, design of the vehicle.
It's got, you know, it kind of has the electric, the LED, you know, front lights and back lights and everything.
So it's, you know, uh, stands out a little bit, although you see so many cars with those now. That's cheating. That used to be how you could tell if something was an EV and now it's like the, the gas cars are doing it. Oh, come on.
[43:51] Yeah exactly i know i my father was asking me to be able to explain you know how we knows a sportage that's electric vs one that's not and honestly the only way you be able to tell i think right now is mine has it looks like gas entries on both sides of the vehicle cuz one side is the gas one side is the electric plug in, Otherwise it would only have the one.
So you'd have to encircle the car to be able to tell if it's a plug-in hybrid.
To tell if it's the plug-in hybrid or not.
But yeah, it's your typical SUV, but I like the setup on it.
It's pretty, I just look up the picture.
Okay, so you can go the 33 miles on electric pretty much. What about your full range with gas? Have you tested that out yet?
So I haven't necessarily tested it fully. I've done a couple road trips.
In fact, actually that's one of the nice things is I've now had the car two months and driven about 2,400 miles and I've just, I just put in my third tank of gas to the vehicle.
So, and two of those were because I took a road trip to Richmond for a weekend.
And so I topped it off to go down there and then refilled it coming home.
So, I think when I fill it up, it tells me I have both a full electric charge and a full gas charge. It's got like a 450-mile range, something like that.
I like how you just called it a gas charge.
[45:20] Yeah. You know, I'm moving over to the electric world. Well, yeah, the words get hard.
Like, you want to say, I press the gas pedal. Well, no, it's, is it, in your car, what is it?
We'll call it accelerator.
I was going to say, I think at this point it's an accelerator.
But yeah, so I, you know, it's not a big gas tank. I think they do that just from a weight, weight issues.
You said it had 400 mile range on gas.
So yeah, it's about that. Not a big gas tank.
My last gas car was three hundred it's eleven point one gallon so i know when i've tried to so it's got good mileage because it moves into hybrid mode when it's not doing full electric it does have you know pretty good you know miles per gallon on on the gas that's a big advantage i hadn't thought about that yeah because that's not a very big tank at all i think mine was 15 gallons And and I mean if I got 300 miles 320 that was a good a good tank, But that was mostly around the city. So whatever what other high-tech features does it have?
[46:20] So I mean this one does have you know all the you know What you'd be looking for as far as it does have the Apple CarPlay in there One of the things I do like about it though is it's got a really long kind of display for that. So So you're able to, you know, Apple CarPlay has where you can put like multiple apps on the screen at once.
So you can have your ways going for maps while having your podcast going.
It always seems to insist on putting whatever's next on my calendar on there, even though I don't want to know, I really wish I had more control over what shows up where there.
I think that's an Apple thing as far as, you know, being able to control all that, but because it's such a big screen, it doesn't feel like it's cramped and little.
It's really easy to see and control everything on there. So that goes really well.
That's been my biggest complaint with CarPlay is I feel like crammed all this stuff together and you've got little tiny boxes of stuff. And again, most of my experience, actually, possibly all of my experience has been in rental cars.
The one exception being the Chevy Bolt had a nice big screen, which is crazy in a $28,000 car.
So they could be doing it in the other ones.
[47:31] Yeah, absolutely. Um, and yeah, that was my experience before it as well.
So I wasn't sure, um, you know, about going that direction, but this one really kind of won me over.
It does have a lot of like, you can adjust the modes of driving.
So I tend to leave it in eco mode, which does give you a little better miles per gallon.
But if you want to, you can go into sport mode and got a little more, you know, pep to it coming off the line and all that it's not a Tesla at all.
That was the one thing I definitely noticed I was giving up by not going with the Tesla is just the horsepower of being able to start up when the light goes green, but it's got a decent amount.
Let me describe that a little bit to people and have you tell me what your experience is like in the Kia.
In the Kia, the interesting thing about driving an EV, and most of my experience in EVs has been on the Tessa, is that it's a linear torque curve.
So, you know how in a gas car you start to accelerate and it kind of goes, roar, and it jumps up.
You can tell the curve is not linear. It kicks in. On the electric vehicles, it's just linear.
You just press on the pedal and there's a direct connection from you to going faster, and the acceleration is phenomenal on it.
So even if the acceleration isn't phenomenal in the modes that you're talking about, is.
[48:48] It still that linear feel or do you feel more like with a gas car?
It depends on whether you're running electric at the time or if you're running on the gas at the time.
So you don't know what you're going to get. So when it's on gas, you can, well, I mean, if you know you have electric charge, you're going to get the electric unless, I mean, you can kind of shut it off or tell it you want to run gas.
[49:09] The only time I would think of doing that would be if I haven't filled up my gas tank in a really long time.
You need to burn some. Now the dealer said that it could probably go about six months with the gas in there.
And supposedly the car's smart enough that it knows to start burning more gas if you need to do that. Gas gets stale, right? Yeah.
Yeah. And I don't understand what stale means. Do you know, is it a chemical decomposition in some way?
This is over my head. I don't know. I know there's, you know, various treatments you can use for it, but, you know, and evidently it's a pressurized tank and that's supposed to help prevent it from getting stale water vapor or anything. But yeah, I, you know, I kind of have it in my head that I'm going to be a little more conservative and if I haven't filled up my gas tank in three months or so, I'll probably plan to go to a winery, exactly, go out, have some experience. And then, you know, unfortunately need to fill up the tank. But if I only have to fill up the tank quarterly, I think that'll be a win. I'm happy with that. So yeah, no, there's another question. Somebody was just talking to me yesterday, we got a chance to see a Rivian. And we ended up talking about all kinds of different cars. And you have to change the oil as well on your car. Is that right? I do. So you have to know to do it even though you haven't.
[50:34] Driven on gas very far. Yeah, so that is one of the other downsides that I was looking forward with an EB of not having much maintenance at all.
[50:47] But because I have the gas engine as part of it, I do still need to do the various maintenances, change the oil, do all that.
MARY LUCIA That's important for people to remember, right, is that even if you're not using the engine very much. So I assume that you would not need to change the oil very often because usually it's because you get little shavings of metal as the gears are hitting each other and stuff that affects the quality of the oil.
But my understanding is just it's sitting in there for a long time. You need to change it too.
Yeah, so usually they, based on time, they also, I mean, and how often they want you to do it versus how often you absolutely need to do it.
Uh, I'm not, I'm not a mechanic. I won't say for sure, but yeah, you still need to, even if you're pretty much only running an electric, my sense is you still need to change the oil every so often.
Yeah. My father-in-law really instilled in Steve and me that you really want to change the oil as often as they say, like they say, every 3000 miles, we used to do it every 3000 miles and that you just, if you want your car to last a lot longer, it's a good idea to actually do, you know, it's not like how often they tell you to floss at the dentist or anything like that.
[51:54] So back to electronics, what about cameras and things like that?
So yeah, it's got the surround sound cameras.
Now this was, or surround sound, the surround cameras, the 360 cameras.
And this is something my wife had in her car.
And I really kind of fell in love with that and said, you know, that was something that was high on my list to get, because just pulling into a, and I don't know, it's one of those things I've been driving for many, many years now and, uh, never needed it, but once you have it, it just, it's so nice to see, oh yeah, I'm well within the lines and, you know, not, you know, have plenty of space behind me, I'm not sticking out of the space spot at all.
More cameras is safer, right?
More views. Oh, absolutely.
Fewer blind spots.
So, yeah, so it, uh, I really liked that feature. Um, it also has all like so many of the different like safety sensors of like, if you go to try to back out and someone's coming down the parking row, it'll beep at you and stop you and, uh, same if you were pulling forward watches for pedestrians, it will yell at me if I'm, you know, moving out of the lane the wrong way and, and all that kind of stuff.
So, it's got a lot of those kinds of safety features built into it.
I feel like that. So, the little kid on a tricycle is going to live.
Yeah, I really hope so. It keeps backing up.
[53:15] What about driving on the highway? Automatic cruise control, any adaptive cruise control, that kind of thing?
Yeah. So, it does have, it's got the automated lane assist. So, it'll keep the car within the lane, even as the road is.
That actually, you know, driving home from when I picked up the car, I ended up picking it up from a place that was a couple hours away.
So I was playing with that the whole, it now it yells at you.
If you try to take your hands off the wheel, uh, you're doing that, but it was amazing how well on some fairly windy roads, it was sticking right to the lanes.
It also has its highway drive assist, which basically takes that lane assist and then adds kind of the adaptive cruise control to it.
So, you know, it will adapt to what the car in front of you is is doing to keep a proper space there.
I wouldn't say it's, you know, like Tesla's self-driving at this point.
That's most of the features that we use, though, to be honest, is the staying in the lane and the adaptive cruise control.
Now, in our cars, if you're in true stop and go traffic, it'll come all the way to stop and actually accelerate back up as cars start to move. Does yours do that?
[54:23] It has something like that. I think, depending on how long you're stopped, At some point, if you're stopped for too long, I think it kicks out of that mode. Oh.
[54:33] Honestly, I haven't really experimented with that all that much.
There's so much construction going on on our roads right now as I'm driving into work that I'm still not convinced I fully trust it around all the orange cones and everything.
So I'm usually maintaining control as I'm doing that.
But I know there is some features there, but I don't want to say for sure how well it doesn't work. Okay.
Okay. What about any kind of remote control? So, yeah, that was something that, you know, well, there's a couple different things there.
One, um, the guy that was selling me the car kept highlighting, you know, with the app, you can remote control this vehicle and you can turn it on, even if you're like at an amusement park and it's way out in the parking lot, you can turn on the vehicle, get it started.
I was like, I don't know that I want to do that, but I guess there's a use case.
Maybe you want it to not be 2000 degrees when you get inside.
That is true. So, um, but, so it does have that, but, uh, then it has with the key fob, you can actually back up or pull forward the vehicle.
So basically if you're in a really tight parking spot, you can get it to kind of pull out for you.
[55:44] You can get in and then drive off. I've experimented with this kind of at home in my garage and driveway.
I haven't quite pulled the trigger on trying that in the real world yet.
Mostly because there was one actually we were out at a concert and I was looking at doing this But the line of cars trying to get down Was so long. I didn't want to be there trying to play with this and get it working.
[56:07] You know blocking traffic. So I haven't really tried it out And in the wild yet But I've only tried that twice in my car and it was because I had to because some bozo parked.
[56:19] You know, a sixteenth of an inch from the driver's side, and I just pulled my car out.
Interestingly enough, I've tried to do it in my own garage, and I have a lot of trouble with it, and I think it's because of the cellular signal confused with the Wi-Fi signal, because the car's still inside my garage, and so it's hit or miss whether it works.
But both of the times I actually needed to get it out, it was there for me, so it was good to have, I think. Yeah, it seems like it's a nice feature, so yeah, I've liked that. I'll tell you one other feature I really love about the car, the cooled seats. So I'd had heated seats before, but I had never tried cooled seats, the ventilated seats. That is, I mean, it gets hot and humid here in Virginia and I, that feature alone I think stands out to me. It seems like it's very basic, but I love it. My son just got a Honda, which is, what is their minivan called? Odyssey. And it has cooled seats and he lives in Houston, he is a fan of the fans.
Fans on your fanny.
Yep. So, we've been talking all great things. There's got to be some downsides to the car to balance it out a little.
I mean, certainly there's things that are kind of little pains about the vehicle.
You know, I'll tell you one thing that, like I said, I ended up going a couple hours away to pick up the car because there's actually not a lot of them available.
I ended up using their website to look and basically pull up every car from New Jersey down to North Carolina to find who had them. When I showed up to get this car, I didn't realize it was.
[57:47] This matte paint, which I've seen a bunch of cars on the road with this matte paint.
[57:52] And I was like, okay, fine.
It looks okay. I'm, I'm good with it. But then they make you sign a whole nother document saying how to take care of matte paint.
And you can't go to a carwash to wash your car. You need to get special soap and microfiber and whatever else.
And here I am thinking every weekend I'm driving out to a farm on a dirt road.
So we'll see how long this paint lasts.
I don't know, but that I'd never even heard of this. Yeah.
So I don't know. Uh, we'll see. I mean, I don't mind the look of it, but they made me think delicate paint.
I was going to say, I, if anything, I want a more hearty paint, not a more delicate paint, but, so that's one kind of a little annoyance.
Um, it did come with the tire mobility kit, basically a patch system instead of a spare.
Is it that goo that squirts on the tire? Yeah, exactly.
And it seems like from, from doing my research, a lot of EVs and plugins are going that route just because it reduces weight in the car.
[58:52] Yeah. Well, you're one step ahead of the Tesla. We didn't get a spare tire and we didn't get a tire mobility kit.
We had to buy that separately for another $200. So, you know, we only paid 70 grand for the car.
Why would we get something like that for free?
Well, when I test drove the Tesla and asked about that, they basically said, well, you know, you're just going to call and someone will eventually show up.
And I was like, okay, so, you know, if I have a flat tire, I can't just get on the way myself, but yeah. So that, you know, at least I guess I do have the kit to patch, but that is something that, you know, if I had my way, I would have still had the spare.
[59:27] Yeah. You know, one thing, and once again, this is in, I think, all EVs now, but when you back up, it's got the backup beeper, which from working in accessibility, I'm fully on board with.
I don't want, you know, I don't want anyone to walk out and back at me, even if my car should know to stop. I will say, you know, 6 a.m. in the morning when I'm backing out of my garage and wondering how my neighbors feel about my, you know, backing up truck, not quite that loud, but that is something that I'm always a little self-conscious of. I feel like I'm the big Mack truck backing up in the morning.
[1:00:02] What's charging like charging? That's probably the one other area is it only does level one and level two charging.
So, so not to a DC fast charge. Yup.
So it doesn't do the DC fast, or at least I'm pretty sure it doesn't, I don't have a connector for that.
There may be some kind of adapter, but I haven't figured that out if it does, but you know, level one charging is even though it's, you know, much smaller battery than a full EV, it's still pretty much charging overnight.
So that's when you say level one, that's just off the 110?
Plug it into a 110. And, you know, actually when I first got it, it, it comes with a level one charger and the charger, you can actually adjust the wattage on it.
And I didn't realize that at first. So I plugged it in and ran it for about 24 hours and it hadn't fully charged because it was down on this like really low trickle charge level that basically just kind of, I guess, keeps the battery, um, slowly charging.
[1:01:06] But, you know, once I realized that and adjusted the setting, um, you know, it basically is, I think like six or eight hours, it's overnight to, to charge that way. Now I have, do you know what your battery capacity is?
That's a good question. I know I've seen that and I'm not remembering.
Probably in your spreadsheet, right? It's probably somewhere.
Yeah. Um, I'm not remembering it off the top of my head.
Now, level two charger, we have one of those at my office and I'm looking at installing one. So level two charger is like, uh, 220 and maybe 40 amps.
Yeah. Something like that. And that it'll charge fully in, you know, probably about two hours.
I think it averages about two hours.
So, you know, once again, it's not something where I can just like stop on the side of the road and, and charge, unless I'm doing kind of a longer stop somewhere.
[1:01:56] So like when I took the road trip down to Richmond, you know, the hotel we were staying at had a charger, so I plugged it in there and was able to charge, uh, fairly quickly there, but it's not, I mean, as much as people talk about being able to charge on a road trip, it's a little bit long, even if I find level two chargers to have to stop two hours each time to charge it.
And then that's the other thing I realized about the plug-in hybrids, because at first I was a little worried of, I've been fully charging this vehicle and I know with EVs you don't necessarily want to fully charge it all the time.
Turns out the way the plug-in hybrids tend to work is the battery actually has more capacity than what they're necessarily showing you.
So when you're fully charging it, it's actually at that about 80% level, at least according to what I've read online.
Okay, well that's better to trick you in that way, because it turns out it's bad for batteries to be charged to 100%.
That's a thing. So we do it before we go on a long road trip, but the rest of the time, we keep it set at 80.
[1:03:01] So essentially, when I think I'm fully charging the vehicle, it still has potentially some capacity. I just don't have access to that.
It's still level two in two hours. That's got to be a little bit better because ours takes a lot longer at level two. So the DC fast charging is definitely a better deal.
Yeah. Well, it sounds like this is a really nice car, really nice alternative. It gives you the size that you were looking for with all the storage.
You've got the advantages of being able to drive to work without using any gas, but you can on the spur of a moment decide, okay, we're going to go to a vineyard and you've got the range with the gas assist in that case, right?
Absolutely. So, yeah, this is a I've been very happy with this vehicle so far.
So. Oh, and how much did it cost?
[1:03:43] Oh, 60 K. No, it was 43. Forty three. Forty three.
And that was, I think, before, you know, trade in and all that kind of stuff.
Forty three out the door. Or is that before tip and toe? that's before tip and tax.
And I think actually, ultimately it ended up being about 43, uh, you know, once I got my trade in, uh, taken off, but then all the tax and all that stuff added on one thing I will say, if anyone's looking at, and I don't know if this is just Kia's or if other, I assume other dealers do this as well, but the first dealership I went to, to buy, uh, from, they had what they called a market adjustment fee.
Uh, basically there's a lot of demand for electric vehicles in Northern Virginia.
And so they actually wanted an extra $10,000 for the car.
[1:04:33] And so I was like, I'm, I'm not paying $10,000 and they were not willing to negotiate, uh, on that.
But what I found is every dealership sets their own fee. So there was one other, I went to nearby and they were at like, I think it was was like $3,500 for their adjustment fee, which was better.
But when I went up to Pennsylvania to buy the car, I learned that, you know, when you go to an area where basically the dealer even told me he can't sell an EV where he is, they had no market adjustment fee.
He was, you know, happy to get it off the lot, I think. So, you know, that was an interesting kind of lesson learned as I shopped around a little bit for the vehicle.
I learned from Chris Ashley when the Ford F-150 first came out, a bunch of dealers were starting to tack on $10,000, $20,000 fees, and Ford came down and slapped them and said, No, you're not.
[1:05:29] And i thought that was really interesting that impressed me that ford said no.
When i would imagine for the vehicle manufacturer i mean that's suddenly all these vehicles you know if they get the reputation for being too expensive and it's all because of these extra fees added on that's not good for them so right right and and of course they don't get any of that extra market adjustment fee but i think what they did was they said okay fine you can do that but you are getting another one.
That'll be the only one you ever sell, so not a good deal.
Well, this has been very cool. Well, you've got a pretty good write-up on this that we're going to publish as well, and it sounds like a lot of fun.
I think this is cool. I like learning about all the different alternatives because I'm very brand loyal.
The chances of me changing out of TESA, well, given certain circumstances, possibly, but I tend to buy one kind of thing and then I just stick with it forever.
I only ever owned Hondas and Acuras before this car.
So I like learning about things that I don't know anything about. This was very cool.
Yeah, well, happy to share a little bit of an alternative here.
And yeah, I mean, there were, like I said, it came down to me between the Kia and the Tesla were my final two. And I think I would have been very happy either direction, but ultimately I think I found the car that was the right fit for me.
[1:06:51] Very cool. Now, if anybody wants to chat with Steve more about this or anything else, he's pretty active in our Slack community over at podfeed.com slash slack.
That's perfect. I was gonna say, I'm not as active on the various socials anymore, but yeah, Slack is a great place to find me.
I had so much fun doing that recording with Steve. And yes, he did give us the spreadsheet.
It's linked in the blog post that's linked in the show notes.
That is going to wind us up for this week. Did you know you can email me at dallasandpodfeed.com anytime you like.
If you have questions or a suggestion or a review, just send it on over.
You can follow me on Mastodon at podfeetatchaos.social.
Remember, everything good starts with podfeet.com. If you want to join in the fun of the conversation, you can join our Slack community like we just said at podfeet.com slash slack, where you can talk to me and all of the other lovely Nosylla castaways, including Steve Huell.
You can support the show at podfeet.com slash Patreon or with a one-time donation at podfeet.com slash PayPal.
And if you want to join in the fun of the live show, not this week, But normally you can head on over to podfeed.com slash live on Sunday nights at 5pm pacific time and join the friendly and enthusiastic Noosa family.
[1:07:58] Music.