AM Show Hr 3 | On Why The Electric Vehicle Failed To Take Off

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
It's that time, time, time, time, luck and load. So
Michael Arry Show is on the air. First it was

(00:29):
in ron Field, and then in two thousand and two
the Astros called Minute Made Park Home, which was nicknamed
the Juice Box, and now with Dyke In, the air
conditioning manufacturer, getting the naming rights, it will be called

(00:52):
the Ice Box, a deal that will begin in twenty
twenty five for the next fifteen seasons. The company opened
the Nike in Texas Technology Park in Waller in twenty sixteen.

(01:12):
Speaking of Waller, email from a fellow ZAR. My name
is Christopher Oldham, and I am the principal of Waller
High School, a six A high school with over three
thousand students located northwest of Houston, just past Cyprus Fairbanks.
I'm also a United States Army veteran. I've been a
loyal listener of your program since its inception. I wanted

(01:35):
to take a moment to share something. I'm incredibly proud
of what my school is doing to honor veterans and
support our military community. While many public school districts receive
criticism for questionable decisions, I can confidently say that Waller
ISD and Waller High School in particular, prioritize honoring those
who have sacrificed for our country. Every year on Veterans Day,

(02:00):
we host a program unlike anything I've seen in any
other Texas school. Our event is a heartfelt celebration of
our veterans and it is a tradition we take great
pride in. This year, we partnered with Commanding General Michael
Shanley to create something truly special. I have included links
below to showcase our efforts. I'd love for you to

(02:21):
attend to our event next year if your schedule allows. It
would be an honor to host you and showcase the
ways we strive to teach our students the value of
service and sacrifice. Thank you for your wavering advocacy for
veterans and for making my daily drive home so much
more enjoyable. Best regards, Christopher Oldham, Principal, Water High School,

(02:42):
the United States Veterans cell Phone eight three, not pilot.
That makes me happy to hear, makes me very very
happy to hear Democrats in Pennsylvania are stealing the Senate seat.
By the way, we just had a Harris County District

(03:03):
Court judge seat flipped right here now, it flipped from
the Democrats winning on election day to Republicans winning after
the provisional ballots came in. You believe that, of course
you don't. You already know exactly what happened. We all

(03:26):
know thing about it is. It's like Sultan Eatsen's quote.
We know they cheated, they know, we know they cheated.
We know they know that we know they cheated, and
still they cheat. That's the important part. The seats are

(03:49):
so important that even though they have to do this
and be criticized and questioned and threatened, although really nobody
threatens them, they still do it because winning is everything.
Winning is everything. We are the gracious losers. Again. We

(04:18):
won a lot of the seats where we put a
candidate up in Harris County. Harris County is not lost.
People believe it is, and the Democrats want you to
believe it is. And by keeping Democrats in offices, they
had a Democrat county official who hadn't shown up to
the office in over three years, and Democrats still won

(04:41):
that seat. Of the seats they won, the majority of
those seats were seats that we didn't even have a
candidate in. And I'm going to tell you how that
happens because people keep asking me, here's how that happens.
This is my suspicion. If you're a Republican elected official

(05:03):
or a Republican wanting to run for a seat, you
don't want to have a contested primary because you got
to win in March to get to face a Democrat
in November. So the Harris County Republican Party, my suspicion is,

(05:24):
here's from a lot of candidates and officeholders, and does
not go all out to recruit candidates. Because I've heard
every excuse for why we don't recruit candidates, and they're
laying the Democrats filled every seat when Republicans dominated the county,
and that's how they woke up one morning in twenty eighteen,

(05:46):
November twenty eighteen and Jaila, who is lennahd allgo? You
had to have a candidate on the ballot to pull
that off, right. You got to have a line in
the water to catch a fish. We have races where
we don't put anybody on there. I believe that is
I'll say at a minimum, it is because an insufficient

(06:06):
effort is made to get candidates. At a minimum, So
let me say this, what if instead of doing mailers
at election time. What if you did a mailer that says,
now's the time to sign up for office. Now, right

(06:27):
now is the time to sign up for office. We
are looking for candidates. You know why that doesn't happen
because then you would have some Republican incumbents who would
have primary opponents, and you would have folks who want
to run a see, because you don't get to choose

(06:50):
exactly the right number of people. It's like people who
do artificial in seminad? What does that call? It? A term
for that? And so that that's why you see when
when he's sixty five and she's forty one and they
have four kids, well they fertilize six eggs, and four
out of the six took Because you can't just do one.

(07:12):
It's a pretty elaborate procedure. So since you can't get
it just right, you decide, all right, how many eggs
we're gonna put in there, I mean, how many eggs
we're gonna fertilize. And it's an inventory management system, right.
This is this is why United Airlines has revenue analysts
trying to figure out you want to maximize what you

(07:35):
get for each seat but you don't want any seat
to go vacant. Hotels restaurants, you want to maxim A
hotel wants to get the maximum amount of money they
can get for each room. But if a room goes
vacant one night, that's people who don't ed at the restaurant,

(07:55):
don't pay for the parking, and don't do all the rest.
So it's it's this constant balance of what to do.
I'm not saying it's an easy process, and I don't
want to be a party chairman. I wouldn't do it.
So I want to be very clear, but I do
want us to have the best results, and I believe
that we get the best results by people criticizing when

(08:16):
they see something they don't agree with. That's I hope
we can all agree with that, and if we can't,
then I'm still going to say what I'm gonna say.
I think the party should take out billboards, should do mailers,
should do radio ads instead of focusing the efforts only
on November when you got all, look think of all

(08:39):
the seats that wouldn't matter how much we spent money on.
We could not beat the Democrats because we didn't have
candidates and get your best candidates and fill every race,
and then we would have won more seats. Sound the
Warehouse announces if give them the stars sale including show only.
Sound Warehouse Bobby asks, you know what a hysterectomy is.

(09:04):
That's an operation where they take out the baby carriage
but leave the playpen. You know, we're talking about the
electric cars earlier. The fallout from the electric car debacle
will never be properly covered. But here is an interesting

(09:27):
little side note in all of this. And yes, I'm
doing the I Told you So dance because several years ago,
maybe five years ago, I had listeners tell me give
it up, it's all going to be electric five years,
give it up. You're holding on to that old fashion.
And I said, whoa, you're one of those people that

(09:52):
gets suckered by the promo, the hype. And I noticed
a lot of people the market's got and what they
were hoping was that the hype leads to other people
losing their minds and if enough hype could occur coupled

(10:13):
with governmental control of what you could buy. Right, Because
at the end of the day, if the marketplace was
deciding we want internal combustion engines, there's no doubt about that.
There's no doubt about that now. I will say I
wrote in Chance McLean's Cybertruck, I find those things to

(10:34):
be hideous. They give me anxiety. I'm serious. I'm told
it's supposed to look like a spaceship. I don't find
spaceships to be warm and inviting. Tucker Carlson did a
whole episode on this, and I think it was really
well done, talking about how architecture as an art reflects

(10:56):
a mood, and it can drive a mood. You know,
you ever walked in somebody's house and it feels warm
and inviting, and you walk into somewhere else and it
feels cold or harsh. And he was talking about the
move toward the bullpen and the low dropped ceiling and

(11:17):
the harsh elements on the side. The materials that were
used were meant to convey that you don't matter, You're replaceable.
The individual is nothing. Nobody gets in office. You're seeing
that happening, right, That's the trend of big companies. Nobody
gets their own office, nobody gets their own space. You

(11:37):
jumble everybody out in the middle in a bullpen. You
don't personalize anything. There is no individual within the organization,
which is meant to convey that you can be replaced.
They'll tell you it's meant to convey teamwork, but it's not.
I couldn't work in a bullpen. I couldn't work. I can't.

(12:01):
When we built our studios out, Ramon laughed because you
got to get through three doors to get to my
studio and it was all soundproofing. Well it was some
security too, but door door door, actually four doors. And
because I don't want while I'm talking to have to
hear some other noise. I don't know how people do it.

(12:22):
I see these sales pits. Good on them. If you
can do it, good for you. But back to the
electric car issue headline CNN Hurts CEO out following electric
car quote unquote horror show. Trouble and turmoil continue at
rental car company Hurts. The company, which announced in January

(12:45):
it was selling twenty thousand of the electric vehicles in
its fleet, or about a third of the evs it owned,
is now replacing the CEO who helped build up that fleet,
giving the company, giving it the company's fifth boss in
just four years. Think they might be having a problem there.

(13:05):
The company announced that Steven Cher, who came to the
company two years ago after nearly thirty years at Goldman Sachs,
is stepping down at the end of this month. He'll
be replaced by Gil West, former chief operating officer of
Delta Airlines and General Motors Cruise Unit. Oh, you got
back to somebody that understands how to deploy assets and

(13:29):
finance them and then sell them when you're done, and
handle keeping them clean and keeping them running, when before
you had a money guy who didn't have any understanding
of that. Imagine that in the most recent quarter, Hertz
took a two hundred and forty five million dollar hit
to its earnings due to a drop in value of
the electric vehicles it was selling. While the number of

(13:53):
evs bought by American consumers surged forty percent last year.
Remember that's a year year over year of a low
number to top one million for the first time, there
was less demand than some of the traditional automakers had
expected as they moved to offer EV's. As they moved
to offer evs, Tesla, the leader in US EV sales,

(14:17):
started a price war for EV's just over a year ago,
driving down the value of both new and used evs
such as those in Hurtz's fleet, and the drop in
prices hit Hurts's bottom line since it reduced the money
it could expect to get from reselling the vehicles. But

(14:37):
the problem for Hurts wasn't necessarily that the cars were
electric and consumers simply do not want to drive electric cars.
The problem was how Hertz handled the fleet in general.
According to industry analysts, the execution and marketing of EV's
by Hurtz was a horror show across the board. It's

(14:59):
a black eye they could not recover from. And there
you have it. I've got a list of the value
of Tesla compared to a number of other legacy brands. Now,

(15:23):
this value could evaporate overnight. I really understand that because
it's all stock market dependent. But it is a list
of all the companies which, when combined, add up to
less than the overall market value of Tesla. Let me
see if I can find it real quick. Oh, here
it is. All these companies combined do not add up

(15:46):
to the market value of Tesla. According to John Erlickman,
and I forget his story, but it seemed it seemed
to check out General Motors and Ford combined do not
add up to the market value of Tesla. Add to
General Motor and Ford. All these combined Mercedes, Benz, Toyota, Honda, Volvo, Volkswagen, Hyundai, Ferrari, BYD,

(16:13):
what's BYD? They might have been j They might have
been JYD, Junkyard, Dog, Aston, Martin, Kia, Rivian, Renault, Stilantis, Suzuki, BMW, Lucid, Polestar, Nissan,
gielen I, Subaru, Mazda, Nicola, Mitsubishi, Harley, Davidson, VinFast. It

(16:36):
amazes me how amateurs think that they know more than
what is proven and has been proven for a long
period of time. How many people college kiss this twenty
three twenty four year olds. When I found out AOC

(16:59):
drove a Tesla, that's all I needed to know. She
was mad at Elon Musk because she had bought Tesla.
What Elon did is he recognized there's only so much space,
there's only so much market share for an EV. Right,
there's people that will take the risk for an EV.

(17:19):
So what he did is from the lowest price EV
to the cyber truck, which is I rode with Chance
mclann and his It's amazing full service driving, full self driving.
It's incredible. But what he figured out was while people
are making these choices, I'm going to drive the price
down and these companies can't get their legs out, they

(17:41):
can't get their legs underneath it. So I'm going to
create a price war, and these companies are going to
run out of cash. And those companies are all going
out of business. Fisk, They're all going to go out
of business except for Elon, and the US automakers are
going to get out of the electric business, and he's
going to be what's left Colley milling Golly, when we

(18:11):
lonely see we Chansdento and we're high and did it.
Sein's been sufferin. We call it perseverance. So we begin
meg excuses when we black Wool, a ride sharing startup

(18:32):
that gained fan through TikTok, says they are hoping to
launch in Texas by the end of this year or
early twenty twenty five. This is a ride share service
with armed drivers, hoping to launch in Dallas, Houston, and Austin.
The armed drivers are required to have at least four

(18:55):
years experience in the military, law enforcement, or other secure positions.
So what's going to happen. Well, first of all, if
you've ever traveled to a third world country, especially in
Africa and the Middle East, when you plan your trip,

(19:19):
they assign you an armed guard, You're assigned to bulletproof vehicles.
You travel around like you're a head of state, and
I'm not a head of state. Because of the danger
in that community and their fear that something bad will

(19:39):
happen to you. That's now what we're doing in Dallas,
Houston and Austin. You know the fact that services like
this are coming about. This is what it looks like
to live in a third world country. What they don't
tell you in those fake dentist stories is how much

(20:02):
of that involves illegal immigration. See everybody, they've frightened people
with these attacks. Don't talk about making Texas Mexico. Don't
talk about making Texas Honduras or Guatemala or El Salvador.

(20:25):
Don't do that. That's racist. Then you go live in Honduras,
you go live in Guatemala. Oh that's not true, Michael.
I went down to Honduras, I had some of the
I had the best time I've ever had, best vacation
I've ever had. Really, and let me guess you went

(20:46):
to the Dominican Republican had the same. How'd you know?
Because you stayed on a little heavily fortified island. You
have no idea what life is like in there. Honduras
has this little I forget what it's called Rotan. Yeah, uh,
that is not Honduras. And then people come back. Yeah,

(21:07):
so we had a wonderful vacation. We decided to go
to Honduras. You did go to hon Duras. You went
to a little no man's land that is not Honduras.
You you go marching into Tegucigalpa without security, and you
stay there for a week and you come back. Tell
me what, Tell me how that went for you if

(21:29):
you survive. The company says they're looking to hire thirty
five to fifty drivers in each city. Drivers must have
spotless background checks and at least four years experience in
the military, law enforcement, or other security positions. So here's
what's gonna happen, because this already happens with the police.

(21:49):
So black roll will start and there will be much
hubbub about it, and then some people will try it
out because it's kind of cool. That's pretty cool. You
got to you got a driver, he's got a gun, okay,
and he's gonna maybe they will maybe he will have
four years of experience in the military, which is very

(22:10):
different than four years experience in law enforcement. Just because
you served in Iraq or Afghanistan does not mean you
have the same training or experience of being a police officer.
In fact, part of the problem with the Iraq and
Afghanistan is that we sent warriors in to be police officers. Now,

(22:32):
some of those people have a training that a police
officer will never have. They've had to walk amongst the
general public, any one of whom could kill them at
any time in a police function. See, this is the
whole problem with Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq is that we

(22:52):
train warriors for war and we put them into a
police function. And that's awful. That is an untenable position.
But anyway, so you've got military veterans which are very
different than law enforcement. There's a lot of overlap, I understand.
And then your third one is or other security positions,

(23:15):
which tells you they're not going to be able to
get everybody they need out of military law enforcement depends
on how much it makes. But no matter what happens.
You're going to have some good guys that have a
unique skill set, and you're going to pay a premium
for this, and there will be people who'll try it out.
Like the first generation of EV buyers. There will be

(23:37):
people with money who'll try it out and they'll you know,
this is going to be cool, and they will go
out and they'll be coming out of a bar, which
was why they hired these people in the first place.
And there will be a thug who will come up
and start causing them problems. And rather than your traditional

(24:00):
uber or left driver, this driver will pop out because
he's ready. This is what he's trained for, and he
will pop out and tell that guy to back off,
and that guy will continue to advance, now probably on him,
and he will create a situation where there's a battle
for the gun and he'll either kill the driver or

(24:24):
more likely, the driver will kill him. And how do
you think that will be reported by the local and
national news? A black wolf driver has killed a man.
Dear God, let him not be black. Yes, he's killed
a black man. Oh man, they're doing it again. Slavery
all over, that's how this happens. You will not be

(24:51):
allowed to be free in this country from violence, because
you will not be allowed to protect yourself. You will
not be allowed to run your business without theft. Not
because you can't stop the theft. We could stop the theft,
because when you go to stop the theft or protect yourself,

(25:11):
those people creating the problem do not simply turn around
and walk away. They engage. And when they engage, you
got to engage. And so if you die, that's fine.
We don't mind that. Media doesn't mind you dying. It's
another story. We may not even cover that. But when

(25:33):
you kill them. Oh and by the way, this is
part of the Soros plan. That's where black lives matter
to ploys. That's where this whole group of activists ploys.
This is all part of a bigger plant capacity to
discussions Michael Berry's show The New Compact Desk bro It
simply works better. One of the great problems with having

(26:04):
a discussion today, and maybe this was always the case,
is that people internalize the discussion as a way to
tell you a story about them. Example, I get an
email from a fellow I heard you talking on the
radio today about most electric cars are priced above fifty

(26:27):
thousand dollars and are too expensive. This is incorrect. The
sticker price for a Chevy Bolt Evy is around thirty
thousand dollars. I bought a used twenty twenty Chevy Bolt
recently and paid twenty three thousand for it. I heard

(26:48):
you talk on the radio today about most electric cars
are priced above fifty thousand dollars. But that's not true.
You say most are above fifty thous but I bought
one that wasn't under fifty thousand. That doesn't disprove my point.

(27:11):
Most Americans stand and walk with two legs. That's not true.
I saw this guy, he only had one leg. It's
not true. I have an experience. I live next door
to him. He was my Let me tell you my story.
He goes on to say, also, for a new Tesla

(27:32):
to qualify for the purchaser to get the seventy five
hundred dollars tax credit, the sales price of it must
be below fifty five thousand. So if Musk gets the
tax credit repealed, he can charge more for his Tesla
because the tax credit limitation on sales price would not apply.
That is true. Musk is engaged in strategic pricing and production.

(28:01):
Nobody else is when Chevy and Ford got into the
EV market, they got into something they knew nothing about.
They got into something where they had no brand equity.
Do you think anybody is thinking to themselves, Well, for

(28:21):
ten years, I've been thinking back getting one of them teslas,
you know, electric car and all I been thinking about it.
But what I'm gonna do, because I'm a Ford man,
is I'm gonna wait around till Ford's got an electric. No,
they didn't do that. What they did do is you
got your Ford truck guys, and you got your Chevy
Silverado guys. You got your f one fifty or two

(28:44):
fifty or three fifty, mostly f one fifty. You got
your f one fifty people, and you got your Silverado people.
And they're out there and that's what they do, and
they're consistent, and their daddy before them might have been
now this year when they go to the dealership because
they've had their truck a year two years, and a
lot of people that turned their trucks every two years,

(29:05):
especially guys that owned small business on their own businesses.
Then they went in and they said and the dealer said, hey,
I can work you a deal on that electric. And
they said what kind of deal because they're trying to
get rid of them, And they said, well, it was

(29:27):
what there it was ninety thousand dollars, and now I
can do it. I'm making up numbers. You don't have
to correct me. Now I can do it for seventy
whatever the deal was. And they got in and the
first time you hit the accelerator on an electric car,
do not doubt me on this. It is a life

(29:49):
changing experience. You cannot imagine how it feels the first
time you hit the gas pedal. It's a rocket ship.
And what's weird about it? In fact, Tesla as a
brilliant move because some people like me grew up on

(30:13):
muscle cars. They were done making them. But my uncle
was a mechanic and when he would always have some
Barracuda or Camaro or something he was working on, and
he'd come pick me up and we'd go for a
ride in it. And you know, you got it. You
gotta feel that the rumble in your launch as this
thing goes right, and you gotta you gotta get that

(30:38):
that roar in the rumble. Ah, that's an American muscle car,
Vinny Tortorella, and and that well, that's the field. Well,
the electric car doesn't give you that. Now, for young
people that won't matter, but for me, they actually have

(30:59):
a setting where you can get the feeling like you're
driving an internal combustion engine, believe it or not, and
it'll give you the shake in the whole rumble, so
that you got that whole Yeah, it's crazy, it's absolutely crazy,
but they do. So anyway, you go in and they
knock a bunch off the price, which they'll hopefully sell

(31:19):
more of them because of it, but they're not making money.
Toyota announced, like two days after the election, Toyota announced
they were suspending electric car production for a period of time. Well,
how long do you think that period? You think you're
going to all of a sudden suspend production and you
know why because nobody's going to buy this year's year

(31:43):
end model when they know they got a new one coming.
So what Toyota was signaling the consumer market was, if
you want a Toyota electric, why would you you better
buy it now because they're going to run out supplies
limited act fast right because there won't be one for

(32:04):
a while. Do you think that if they were selling well,
they would say, hey, this scene's going so great, we're
gonna shut it down for a while. The entire ecosystem
political media got caught up in the electric vehicle nonsense.

(32:31):
And just like the election, the one group they left
behind was the consumer slash voter. They never had the
hearts and minds of the consumers. They kept talk, They
kept talking at the consumer, the industry, and the media,

(32:54):
and then they've got their influencers and they would say, yes,
everyone's gonna be driving an electric car within ten minutes.
He has electric cars. And then you got all these
guys out here that actually the people that have to
actually buy them, not me. Let's do my file. I've
the last one I got. I know people that bought
classic vehicles during all this. A nineteen ninety Ford truck.

(33:17):
I know people now buying. Do you know what those
four trucks have gone for? My nephew, Kyle Hazelwood has
one and he likes it because he works on it
on his own. People are buying the last years of
the non diagnostic systems. They don't want anything that can
go wrong. They want cars, so they buy. It depends

(33:39):
on the automobiles. Some of them are late eighties, some
of them are into the nineties. They want vehicles without
all the electronics and then there's a whole separate like
a later generation. They don't want anything that could be
shut down from the factory. My buddy Michael Robinson, we
drove over to Orange together and his truck started shutting down.
We had drive thirty on the freeway because it determined

(34:02):
that you know, Green New Deal and all this, and
it was it was limiting how fast we're driving thirty
on the freeway. He just took the whole system off.
Oh as this thing goes ah,