Personal Enthusiasm and Final Thoughts

Hello and welcome to VerRgecast the flagship podcast ofQadriceycles I'm your friend David Peerce and today on the show, we're going to talk about EV's, but not EV's like we normally talk about EV's. There's this new kind of burgeoning trend of these cars that are essentially golf carts that are trying to become everybody's second vehicle. Sure, own your pickup, own your giant SUV. but maybe instead of buying a second car by one of these. It's a new kind of car, it's a new kind of electric car, and I think there's something big happening here. Vversus Andy Hawkins is going to come on to talk about it We'll get right to that, but first, here's everything else happening on the verge today. This is ninety seconds on the verge for Tuesday, july twenty first, twenty twenty six Light, the company that you might have heard of that's made minimalist phones over the last decade or so, announced its first flip phone, the Light fllip. It's roughly what you think. It's a light phone in flip phone form. But I keep thinking about one thing Light's cofounder told me, that they made a flip phone specifically because people actively didn't want to be seen using a smartphone. Something big is changing in our relationship with technology And this phone is right out in front of it I'm gonna buy one of these, and then I'm gonna buy whatever insanely expensive foldable Samsung launches tomorrow and just live in full on phone extremes. I'm very excited about it Meanwhile, a judge officially approved a settlement that will see A Throbic pay one point five billion dollars to a group of authors who accused it of using more than seven million of their books to train AI models That is a big number, obviously, but there's a bigger story here too. There are a lot of copyright lawsuits out there just like this one, accusing AI companies of stealing data to train LLMs This one is a settlement, not a guilty verdict, and the specifics of the case were actually kind of messy. It's about how the books were copied and stored, not that they were used specifically in LMMs But it still sets a high price for settlement and it sets an important precedent for all of those other suits and the many, many, many ones still to come Finally, the Virgin' Jistine Kalma has a big story out today about the real environmental cost of data centers, or even of one single GPU I feel like it's often hard to understand how much energy, water and other resources are being gobbled up by the AI industry, but also by our technology everywhere, including like the phone in our pockets You should check it out and see what it really costs You can see more on all of this at verge. com That's ninety seconds on the verge for Tuesday, july twenty first Are you a pet owner Every six seconds, a pet owner in the US gets hit with a vet bill over a thousand dollars Always an unwelcome surprise. That's where Fetch comes in Fetch is the most complete pet insurance for dogs and cats, according to consumeradvocate dot orgot you get paid back up to ninety percent of vet bills at any vet in the US and Canada, with claims paid back in as little as two days. Go to fetchpet dot com slash save right now for your free quote. That's fetchpet dot com slash save Support for the show comes from Mongo DB AI asssisted and Eentic Codating is helping you build faster than ever But if your data layer is still a bottleneck What's the point Instead of wrestling with rigid schemas or translating data formats MongoDBi's native data model mirrors the language LLMs already speak. It ships at the speed of AI, is acid compliant and scales to handle massive fortune five hundred workloads Developers have a word for that kind of reliability. Actually, five words It's a great fricking database. Start building at Mongob dot com slash AI Let's talk EV's that aren't exactly Join me now, Andy Hawkins the Virtus T transportation Ootder. Hello sir. Hello So I want to get into sort of the big picture stuff going on here, but I want you to start by telling me Just sort of the story of this new company called Chip Motors that you've been writing about So let's start there. Tell me who Chip Motors is and kind of what they're up to. Yeah, so they're a Miami based startup. I was just talking to the CEO the other day. And he talked about how you know, he's been like in the tech sector for a long time and he sold a camera company to like a scooter operator in Europe and had some money to play around with. So he was interested in this sentence. I know, right And And he's been very interested in the idea of like right right sizing American cars, you know, because it seems like everybody has to buy big trucks and SUVs for sort of every kind of use case that you can imagine and he thinks that that's not really the right idea. And he's been sort of paying attention to this kind of like quuiet underreported growth in like golf cart sales. Because if you look at like microcars specifically, like tiny little cars like Microolina and Fiat, those aren't doing too well in the U.S. but golf carts Low speed twenty caps at twenty five miles per hour are actually selling at increasingly higher and higher rates. you're seeing, especially in these warm weather markets like in Florida and the sunbelt where people are using them as second cars, right? They still have like the escalades in the F one fifties in their driveways, but then they use these golf carts specifically for short trips, grocery trips, dropping the kids off at school, taking them to the park, soccer practice, what have you And so his idea was, okay, why we don't have to just rely on these like ugly you know, sort of def feeatured golf carts for everything. There needs to be some sort of like middle ground between the F one fifties at the golf carts. And so his idea was Chip, which is a very small. U Captain twenty five miles per hour sort of looks like a Jeep Wrangler got hit by a shrink ray. It's a little bit boxier. It says That's a really good description. It's taller than your average golf cart has like a tall windshield, can seat four, can be specked out to seat six actually. But no doors on it and isn't sort of subject to the same regulatory requirements that most vehicles would be. So which is like this is kind of like kind of, I feel like is at the center of all. this is this sort of regulatory loophole, which we could talk about in a second. But his idea was let's give him something fun, give him something quirky. Obviously it's going to have like self driving operations and AI integration and sure all of that that you know, everything has to have in this cursed year that we live in But I do think that the idea gets at something that is original and interesting, which is that you know people are looking for secondecond cars, there aren't actually cars and this kind of like seems to serve that market. Yeah there's a trend happening here that I feel like we're literally sort of at the point now where a three is a trend, right? You covered this company called Ambble, which I think is based in Portugal that is building something very similar maybe the single raddest looking golf cart I've seen. Oh ye, it's like, it's soick If the other one is like a Jeep Wrangler hit with a shrink ray, this is like a golf cart from Mad Max Fury Road. And I mean that in the best possible way. L it rules. And then there's the Fiat Topolino, which is this another sort of tiny little adorable guy designed to be on the streets. What is sparking this trend? Like whyy is this happening right now? do you think I think that a lot of people are going to shop for second cars and are finding themselves unsatisfied with their options because there has been this long gestating trend shift away from from sedans. There's also obviously, we have this affordability crisis going on in the auto market today where prices, average transaction prices have been steadily increasing Uh, pretty much, you know, on a hypers scale since like the pandemic. We're now they're sitting somewhere around like the fifty thousand dollars range for the average price of just, you know, whatever car you want to buy. There are just no cheap cars available anymore. We have you know, many outlets have covered this phenomenon And so I think people are going to their dealers and coming away dissatisfied with their options. They don't want to spend that much that much money on something which they see as a second vehicle. And so they're looking for something else. And I think these companies, some of these startups They have different business models. they have sort of different ideas of how to different kind of customers that they're thinking about But they are sort of all sort of centered around the idea of like, what if you don't have to buy you know, a giant four door SUV or truck you know, what if you can have something that's smaller and fits a little bit better with the types of trips that you're trying to take? And then I think as a side of that, there's also sort of like electrification, the rise in popularity of e bikes and sort of how all of that is kind of converging with people looking for alternate transportation methods The idea of having this both as the you know, drive to the grocery store car and as the one the kid can take. it's sort of the dumb phone version of a car. and I mean that as a compliment. It is It is it's safer, it's simpler, it's less complicated to manage and maintain. It is a thing you can feel much more comfortable turning your kid loose with I find very exciting. We've tried this in the US many times I like going way back I have been thinking about and a proponent of all of these various last mile solutions for forever, right We talk all the time about how most trips are short and your' giant Ford F one hundred fifty is massively overkill for the two mile drives that most of us do most of the time And yet, especially here in the U.S None of it has really happened More people are biking than ever, this is your chance if you'd like to to once again extol the virtues of a cargo bike All that is well and good and yet At least as far as I can tell, we are still as much a big car economy as anything. So I guess next to all of that How would you handicap the possibility of these as a real mainstream phenomenon in the United States, which is very different from a lot of the other places that we're talking about here. Yeah, I think that there's absolutely still a long road to travel. and it's very much uphill, which I think a lot of these vehicles would struggle with because of their torque capabilities. But at the same time, as long as it's a gentle hill, a slope You know, generous say But no, I do think that we're starting to see some examples of you know some market penetration. I think, you know, I mentioned how in Europe teenagers are driving some of these vehicles. Here in the U. S, I think what we're starting to see some of these sunbelt communities, Florida and elsewhere, you go to some of the high schools and you'll see just like golf carts in the parking lot as opposed to traditional vehicles. L the teenagers are driving them to and from school. They're driving them to football practice. They're driving would have been so pumped to drive a golf cart everywhere. Like truly, this is such a victory of an idea for teenagers. I mean, like go into it. It is kind of like the solution. I mean, everyone's sort of like tearing their hair out about this like emoto problem with teenagers, especially, right? They're driving these sort of like very powerful, very fast electric motorbikes. and there a lot of states are starting to crack down on that. they're getting kind of freaked out. I think the solution is these, you know, sort of like more golf cart style vehicles, these low speed electric vehicles that can cap out at twenty five miles per hour, right? They're not legal everywhere. They're only supposed to be driven on roads where the posted speed limit is thirty five miles per hour. But that said it is I think it's starting to emerge. you can see these communities are seeing this as a solution. But you know, that's not everywhere, right? That's That's warm weather communities, beach style communities. It's not going to be the same for, you know a dense place like New York City or Washington DC or elsewhere. But you know I talk to these guys from Amble and from Chip and they're talking about, you know, like ways that they see they could sort of kind of squeeze starts to squeeze in. they see the phenomenon potentially spreading to more and more communities. It might not be the right fit for everywhere. But I do think that they're optimistic about the long term prospects What is the regulatory environment here in that front in the US? And maybe the answer is this is new enough that no one quite knows. but You have trained me over the years to understand that a big part of what is happening with EV's in general, broadly defined is as much a regulatory problem as it is a technology problem U what is going on with these things in terms of what it will take to get them been running in sort of a mainstream way in the United States. I think that's why some of these companies are as optimistic as they are because they see the regulatory sort of threshold as being a lot lower than it is before you know, your average vehicle, your average electric even your average electric vehicle U So you know, a lot of these vehicles Chip and Amble and others would qualify as low speed electric vehicles under the federal motor safety standards. And basically that means They don't have to have all the things that your traditional car has to have. They don't have to have airbags, crumple zones, antil loock brakes, advanced driver assist systems, backup cameras, all these things because they have these extreme limitations, right? They're kepped at twenty five miles per hour. and that's basically all they basically have to have headadlights, tail lights, a turn signal. rear view mirrors, side mirrors, parking brakes and seatbelts. Interesting. That's it. And so think it got a long list. It's not. That's easy. so I mean I talked to the CEO from Chip Motors. He's like it's basically two pages of regulations. So I think that that's why they think that they have maybe a little bit more breathing room in terms of who they can market these vehicles to. And also they can play around with the design, right? Like you see with Amble hiring designers from Apple to build this very gorgeous looking open air buggy with like you know nice materials and things like that because All they have to do is is sort of follow this very short list of regulations. So I think it's an interesting sort of gray area that these vehicles sort of find themselves in that's sort of leading to some of the excitement around Are they also as a result, much easier to manufacture? Again, the other thing you've trained me in is that boy is it hard to build cars? And boy do most companies fall apart before they figure out how I would assume just looking at these things that they must be much easier to actually build and that that might be a huge boon for these companies trying to pull this up. Yeah, I think so. I think that that is the assumption. I think we still have to wait and see. a lot of these companies are still very new And for more established automakers like Fiat, which is bringing the Topolino the fifteen thousand dollars Topolino back to America, you know, that they they have obviously the margins to absorb any any losses that they might experience there. But yeah, I think it's they're going to be using contract manufactrs. Maybe they'll assemble it here in the US but they'll be getting, you know, off the shelf parts for a lot of this kind of stuff And I think a lot of the innovation will come through the design and how sort of they differentiate themselves from like your typical golf cart, right? which so inaps in Chips example, you know, it's designing something that kind of looks like a Jeep Wringler, but also has sort of like, you know, a spacious frunk for groceries and a big LED screen on the front bumper with like kind of like winking u like digital eyes that could kind of give it like a kind of a quirky personality. Yeah, there's a picture on the website that it looks like it's doing sort of a half smile in a way that is I can't I can't tell if I would grow to hate this after about two weeks of seeing it Or if it is genuinely the most adorable thing I've ever seen on a car. Yeah. I don't know if there's necessarily a market for that. That to me is a little bit less interesting overall than the idea of there being an actual viable market in the US for these vehicles. You can slap your agentic AI and your remote parking you know features on it. That's fine. I think that that's a way to differentiate yourself from the competition I think the real question is, do people want these vehicles? Are they going to buy them? And if so, how are they going to use them? Support for the show comes from Shopify. Landing on a good idea for a business is basically catching lightning in a bottle What are the odds that' happen more than once You have to jump on every opportunity to make it work. and the last thing you need is to get slowed down by clunky logistics. You want tools that are ready to go right out of the box. And if your business involves e commerce, you need Shopify. 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I promise you're gonna have a good time. Now on the Vox Media podcast Network. This is the downside. If this works It seems like There is a huge set of stuff you could in theory do along these same lines, right? I think I think back to the early days of self driving when question was are we going to end up completely redesigning the car as a result. And you look at like a Zex, which invented a very different looking thing to carry you around based fully on self driving I think in general, Self driving is probably too new and we just haven't pushed all the way down that road But it strikes me as this being another huge possibility for that. that if if indeed These folks are right that there is space here for something that is deliberately slower that is substantially simpler and smaller This might be another chance to kind of reinvent the idea of what these are supposed to be Is your sense that these companies are thinking about that? I mean, all of these like you said, everybody calls them golf carts because they functionally look like golf carts Do you think that's where this lands or is there some potential for weirdness and innovation here I'm hopeful that there's potential for weirdness innovation because's our that's where the verge operates, right?'sue. That's fun That's where we live. And I do think that there's going to need to be some sort of like psychological shift in the American mindset towards how they shop for cars and what they buy. And I think that whichich car companies have been trying to make happen for with very little success. Very little success Exactly. And we're starting to see that now with sort of a lot of the reversals that we're seeing in the electric vehicle market. That said, there is still an electric vehicle market. It still exists. People are still buying these cars. Tesla is having you know a little bit of a resurgence. And you know, I think things are starting to stabilize in that market. That said I do That we need to sort of wrap our heads around why it is we've allowed the auto industry to convince us for so long that we need an F one fifty just to go to the grocery store for like five bags of groceries, right? It It's not necessary when you live in the suburbs to have this giant hulkking SUV that doesn't even or truck that doesn't even really fit in your garage that was built in maybe like the nineteen fifties So it is kind of like this idea of like right sizing our transportation needs. and I think that It's going to be a tall ask. I just you know, we're such a big country. We're so spread out. It's much different value proposition than it is in Europe, which is denser and closer together. the cities in the communities are much cler closer together. And we just have all this wide open space. So there's there is going to always be you know, people who want vehicles that can take them long distances. The question is, I think in that second vehicle market is where I think you're going to start to see A lot of this weirdness and innovation. Is it an e bike? Is it a quadricycle? Is it a golf cart? or is it just another smaller, you know, Toyota, you know, Rv four or Honda CRV or whatever. So I think that that's going to be sort of the challenge, right? They're not going to be maybe necessarily competing against your escalades and your F one fifties. They're going to be competing against your Kias and your Hyundais and your sort of more compact vehicles that are kind of serving have been traditionally serving those needs and whether or not people are going to be willing to downsize from those compact vehicles Yeah, I have to say that actually makes me feel slightly more optimistic about these things chances because again What we've learned over and over is that you will not unsee the giant pickup trucks. They will get ever more giant, they will get ever more expensive and they will keep selling. And that that is that is just where we are. But it does seem like everything else is kind of getable at this point. Like the idea of builduilding the sort of cheap sedan seems to just get harder and harder, especially in an EV world when people have range anxiety and are worried about what these things cost. And so if you can come in and say, well, we have and this is to some extent, the same pitch for the slate truck, right? Yeah exxactly. We do less, but you don't need a car that does everything. Like that that feels like When you're coming in is sort of the second complimmentary vehicle an actually really compelling case to be like, you have a car that does all this other stuff. We are going to be really perfectly tuned to a much smaller set of things. And by the way, we cost one third of what that other one costs. and it just feels like Mbe that space is more open than we realize. I have no idea how good a business that space is, right? That has tended to be lower margin and a very different kind of customer than a lot of these other car companies are looking for But it does seem like The logic of that market has been the same for a very long time and no one has in some time. And especially with EVs, especially if you can have You can solve people's range anxiety by saying, lookook, you're only going to take this thing twenty five miles an hour and you're only going to drive it a few miles at a time. So the idea of running out of power in the middle of a highway in Idaho is nonexistent because it's not going to happen. Yeah. So I don't know, there's something about that that seems to me But that same thing has felt right to me for a very long time and no one has quite cracked it yet. So I'm both optimistic and pess And something I brought up to the CEO of Chip was that, you know, it's not like there aren't any sub compact cars. We have Honda Fishs, we have Nissan versas, we have, you know Mini Coopers and what have you. and they can drive with the highway, right? They can go over twenty five miles per hour.. And his his response was that, you know, a lot of these are European spec cars you know, and they're sort of made for European driving and maybe they found like a market here in the U.S. but this is a car that we're building for the U.S specifically. And what he said was I thought was really interesting was there are these communities in Florida and elsewhere that have started to build infrastructure for these cars, right? There are golf carts specific roads that connect schools and communities and parks and things like that that are kind of bike lanes and also used by some of these low speed vehicles as well. the fact that there's that doesn't exist nationwide, right? These are sort of very highly specific to some of these warm weather communities and you're not really seeing same kind of diversity and infrastructure in a lot of these other communities across the country, which I think is maybe going to be some of the limitations that some of these companies run into as well. If we want to see more micro, you know, sort of like form factors, we're also going to need to sort of shrink down our expectations around our roads and our infrastructure as well. Totally. Do you think these companies are also thinking about a U Robotaxi or even just rides sharing future here. I mean, you talk about these golf Kart communities you can pretty much easily imagine the world in which these become useful, simple, relatively low cost ways to move people around. And again, a lot of the last mile things people talk about are things like college campuses and these these relatively dense, relatively contained communities These things strike me as Perfect for those. Is that part of the plan here? Yeah. so the chip CEO spoke specifically about this. He's like as Autonomy gets better and better and more and more people are going to be relying on shared autonomous vehicles, whether they're robot taxis or shuttles or whatever it is. He can see this as being something that graduates from being your second vehicle to perhaps your primary vehicle and the only one that you actually own Because it does you know maybe fit more in the use cases that they see it where you're taking your kids to school and all this kind of stuff. You don't want to necessarily have to pay a subscription or what have you or a fare for roobo taxis. But then you know maybe when you get home, you can summon the Robot taxi to take you to work or what have you So I do think that they're trying and he's trying to factor that into the actual feature technology that is being embedded in this car. Right now it's a tele operated remote assistance system where they have remote operators who will park the car for you. I haven't really seen that work at scale. so that's something I'm a little bit more skeptical about than some of the other ideas that he's proposing. But he says that eventually they'll have some sort of autonomy feature level four, fully driverless that you could summon the car to you when you want it, send it to go park itself. you know, it'll drive you to where you need to go U And because again, you're dealing with something that is more lower speed and has these sort of guardrails, it becomes sort of a very much maybe a better proposition for autonomy because you don't have to worry about going on the highway. You don't have to worry about going seventy miles per hour. and I mean speed is not sort of like the end the end of everything, then you it sort of opens you up to sort some more technological innovation, I think This all sounds so good and this is the thing. Okay, before I let you go here, I need you to accurately calibrate my enthusiasm here because I look at something like the chip or like the Able one and it actually fits perfectly into my day to day life Right? we have we have a a Hyundai SUV for when we need to go visit family or when we want to go far, but most of my driving most of the time. is a mile and a half to my son's daycare and then six blocks to my other son's preschool and then about a mile to the coffee shop and then home And that's I do that circle twice a day every day all week. and that plus the grocery store accounts for most of my driving that isn't you know, it's trips like that