Is Silicon Valley impressive or delusional as a carmaking hub? (Roadshow AutoComplete, Episode 3)

Welcome to Auto Complete, the weekly news digest from Cnet's Road Show. I'm Brian Cooley with Road Show editor-in-chief, Tim Stevens. And this is only our third go, Tim and I think For and I it's only our second time. [LAUGH] Second time, I should be in together even well I guess we only should do one together but yes. Yeah. The same time I should be in digitally together anyhow so it's good to be with you again- Yeah, we did Detroit together. That was our inaugural and then you are on the On the road. Briefly, where were you last episode, last week? Yeah, so I was off in Monaco at the Monte Carlo Rally. It was the first event in the 2016 WRC calendar. It was a good race, a challenging field for, well it was a challenging set of conditions for the field. Monte Carlo's always interesting because it's an asphalt rally, so they've got Paved roads. But it's always icy and snowy and you never know what you're gonna get basically when you head out on the stages. Real cars are going really fast, real roads and really awful conditions as it were. So yeah, there were a lot of crashes, a lot of broken hearts and broken wheels and broken suspensions. [LAUGH] But it was a good event. Look for it up on the site in the not too distant future. That's why rally remains my favorite kind of racing. Okay, let's get into our headlines. Apple's car project, which is of course, still very amorphous, we don't know a lot about it, it's mostly speculation, but the latest speculation has come from both Apple Insider and The Wall Street Journal, saying that they have gotten some kind of rocky road going on. They've put a hiring freeze on what is reported to be almost a 1,000 person team right now, And recently Steve Zadesky, who's the head of the organization, again, as far as we can tell, has resigned from Apple for personal reasons. So the idea here is that perhaps Apple's running into its first rocky shoals in whatever Project Titan is going to be. Right. And this is all speculation heaped on top of speculation because nothing is confirmed at this point. We do know that Esqi worked at Apple. He came from Ford. He was an engineer there before joining Apple. The speculation was that he was heading up this nebulous project Titan, which is supposedly the code name for their Apple car. Which would be an actual electric self driving care in theory. Again, none of this is confirm, so all this is based on rumors and speculation and inside source and all that good stuff. ut yeah, this is a really big pain and apparently they are running into the sorts of headaches that honestly a lot of people in the auto industry said that they probably would run into. So I think there are some people in Detroit right now kinda chuckling to themselves, and saying that this was what everybody expected. But again, we don't really know exactly what's going on. So who knows? But it is interesting to hear that maybe we can start going as well. And also, Johann Jungwirth, who was the Mercedes-Benz R and D head in Silicon Valley He had also gone to Apple, and he has since left Apple and gone to Volkswagen. So I don't know if that's in any way related to this, but maybe things aren't going so well. Yeah, there's almost been a bit of a revolving door at the head of Project Titan and it's revolving pretty quickly as well, so that's what's interesting. Steve Zadesky, who's the most recent to leave the company, again for personal reasons he says, not because of anything wrong with Project Titan. It's a former Ford guy. So, he comes out of the automotive business. Another rumor, again this is a rumor, is that they are in talks with BMW to perhaps base this car on the i3 platform to speed development. And the last we'd heard in the speculation mill, I almost feel bad about all this speculation, but it's all we've got to work with, is that they expect to have their field trials, and lock engineering by end of 2019 has been the The estimate to get a car on the market 2020, maybe a little bit after that. So that's kind of the time frame we're working on. What's interesting here is that this is also news coming out at the same time that the head of Daimler Dieter Zetsche had recently toured Silicon Valley just three days ago, was telling German press in particular how impress he was by the progress that's been made, in particular by Google and by Apple in their efforts to become car makers. So he saw something impressive even while we have these stories now that perhaps, Apple at least, is Is running into some hurdles in becoming a car maker. Right, and we don't know exactly what he saw, but he did come back and basically start to sound the warning knell to the European manufacturers, which is kind of interesting, that ultimately they need to raise their game or they're going to get left behind. Which is something that a lot of Silicon Valley insiders have been saying for a long time. And a lot of people who cover the start-up industry who think that You know Silicon Valley is going to become basically the new Detroit in the U.S. It's all very early to make any sort of dire predictions on that front. But it was very interesting to hear that he left that tour and he was quite impressed by what he saw. Again, what he saw exactly remains to be seen. Google of course, we've seen there autonomous cars driving around. They look a little bit like clown cars to be honest with you. [LAUGHS]>> It's interesting to point out, I think, that Google doesn't manufacture those cars. In fact those cars are built in Detroit. It remains to be seen what exactly Google wants to do. You know there's a lot of speculation maybe Google just wants to be a provider for autonomous systems. And they want to be ultimately involved in that way but not actually build the cars themselves. Whereas we're hearing from Apple it definitely sounds like they want to be an actual manufacturer of automobiles, so. And coming on the heels of all the speculation this week that Apple needs its next iPhone desperately, it makes this automotive division that much more interesting. And not so much something that could be the next AppleTV but that it could be if not the next iPhone something of that caliber, because that's the buzz on wall street this week, is, okay, Apple's become even more top-heavy. Of an iPhone company, and iPhone seems to have hit its ceiling for the foreseeable future, which makes this story that much more interesting. Deter Zetsche of Daimler said, our impression, these are his words, was that these companies, Apple and Google in particular Ticketer can do more and know more than we had previously assumed. So he came away there giving them their props, for whatever reason. There may be partnerships involved as well. Clearly you don't speak that magnanimously about someone who is just a competitor. Yeah. But, again, everything is happening behind very, very thick closed doors. And it remains to be seen exactly what's gonna come out of all this. We have reached peak iPhone it seems. You know, everybody knew there was gonna be a point where the market was going to be effectively saturated. The Apple watches being successful but it hasn't exactly blown up the way the iPhone did. And yeah, it was the iPhone that really made Apple into the company that it is today, at least in terms of volume, and they need other markets. So, we'll continue to see them make investments, like they did with the acquisition of Beats, trying to branch out into other areas. But cars, it seems to be at least, Takes a longer term vision for it, a big step forward for Apple, and this is maybe not good news on that front. Yeah, if you're looking for the next iPhone, it would seem that automotive is one of those places to do it, as well as something in the streaming TV business. Here's the place you don't want to go if you're looking to have success in the future In the airbag business if your name happens to be Takata. They've added another 5.1 million cars with air bags that are now considered defective to the list in the U.S, that are out there sold and in people's hands. This is the new news this week. The 11th death now, to add to the list of 10 already, has now been reported as likely related to Takata, and this is happening in a Four that we'll talk about in a moment. And there is now, apparently, the bag Takata airbags in cars as late as 2014 models. This was thought of as something in cars that were older. And now it seems to be as recently as just a model year back. This would bring us to 24.5 million Actually, before this we were at 24.5 million cars out there with bad airbags. This, I believe, would bring us closer to 30. Ford is one of the few companies that has so far identified that they're part of the new five million with 400,000. 04 to 06 Rangers. And people are always intrigued by what cars on the list, and am I driving it. And this latest 11th death that is now being attributed to Takata airbags being defective and throwing shrapnel, was in an 06 Ranger. It's, I believe, the first Death attributed to a Takata airbag that wasn't in a Honda. All the rest I believe were in Honda cars. And this recall also includes Volkswagen, Audi, and Mercedes-Benz, so they are getting pulled into this as well. But yeah, it's another huge increase in the number of cars that need to be recalled. And it ultimately resulted in us having The worst year ever in terms of recalls last year. Right. Which was also some kind of sad news we had coming out of this week, but yeah it's just another terrible, terrible addition to the story. It makes you wonder if we're indeed at the end now, or if there will be more models identified going forward. Yeah. I know we don't know. I know a lot of folks email us and say where is this going to end, when am I going to know for sure if I've got a car with a bad air bag or not, because we keep hearing these other shoes drop, people say, okay, well I don't know where the limit is, I don't know if I'm driving a bomb on wheels right now. We stay on top of this story for you and let you know, but the latest edition that we know of is five million more cars within that. 400,000 '04 to '06 Ford Rangers and that's in recall now and your Ford dealer would have information on that. Speaking of Ford, if you think auto start stop is just for little weenie green cars or is still kind of a nitchy thing that Germans love to put into their cars forget about that. Ford is about to go wall to wall auto start stop on any of their F-150's that have Eco boost. Which is more than half of all the F-150s they sell. Yeah, absolutely and I think this may even be coming to the Raptor as well because we're talking about getting turbo charged motors on those for the first time, which would be an interesting contrast. To Raptor of course. Auto start-stop on a Raptor. Yeah. The Raptor's the big brawny off-roader racing truck, and it has a little bit of fuel economy mixed in there. But a couple years ago I think this would've been a problem, because purely auto stop-start systems were pretty clunky, and They weren't really very good when it came to driving dynamics, but now they're so quick and so seamless. I don't know, I don't really see this as being an issue. Does this bother you, Brian? No, and especially that Ford has mentioned, if I have this right, that when you're off-road in any of the off-road terrain modes, I believe when you're towing, as well, [UNKNOWN] is automatically defeated. So for folks that really drive their trucks like trucks. They're saying, wait a minute, I don't want power coming and going when I'm off road or pulling a big old payload. This would be automatically defeated. You wouldn't even, as I understand it, even have to press the button, So they're recognizing that real truck use Sometimes says no. I want the engine staying on so I've got complete tractability. Yeah. And that's good. And I think that makes perfect sense. And I think ultimately it shouldn't be a problem. Again, the kind of thing, these systems are so advanced at this point, you hardly even notice it. Except that of course things get a lot more quiet at red lights. But yeah, I don't think this will be an issue. Issue for anybody and especially with them being disabled automatically and telling Moz that kind of thing. I think it'll be ultimately a good thing for everybody. And by the way, in the next episode of CNET on cars, that is episode 82, we have a car tech 101 on how auto start stop works, and you can find that as part of Roadshow at theroadshow.com or you can Shortcut right into it at CNET on www.cars.com. Now we talk a lot about these kind of efficient cars. With auto start stop, or with greater electrification, but a lot of them are pretty pricey. A legislator in California has what could become a controversial idea on getting them into more hands of people that don't make a lot of money. It's an assemblyman from Whittier in southern California. And in the California Assembly he's putting out a brand new bill that was introduced yesterday, to try and make it easier for low-income people to buy cars that are zero emissions, particularly those cars that have either plugin or pure electric battery power trains. His reasoning is, yes, there is a Nice Federal and California State Credit to bring down the price by about $10,000 combined. But he says that the price of the car is still too high to even get into these vehicles, which all start at $30,000. After credits and then go way up from there. He says we need a state program to reduce the MSRP and let you capture the credit on top of that. So, in other words he wants to see these cars come down into Toyota Corolla price range, effectively, after lots of credits. Including a new one that would actually reduce the MSRP for low-income people. And its good help a lot of ways of course older cars are exempt from emissions regulation or at least have much a lenient Yeah yeah pre 75, 75 and earlier here California. Yeah so that just means that ultimately those cars that are still on the road and still limping along. Are putting a lot of pollution up in there air. So, certainly, getting those cars off the road would help in terms of making the air cleaner. But also, of course, getting people into newer cars would help the economy, more people buying more cars would definitely help get more money into the economy. So that could be a good thing, as well. And we saw a lot of success from Cash for Clunkers, this obviously would be a much smaller program, but ultimately it could help to get some of those cars off the road that are doing the worst pollution. And also get more money into [UNKNOWN] hands. That's right, Cash for Clunkers was a big hit. I mean, that got tapped into real fast. Helped to really reinvigorate the auto industry during the down part of the economy. What I was thinking about here is, if you're going to incentivize people of low income to buy advanced technology cars Nice idea. Good idea. Do you want to incentivize these low-emissions cars, or is it almost better to incentivize them to be able to afford cars that have advanced driver assist for safety. Because I'm thinking a lot of people who don't have much money are also driving older cars. Cars that have maybe not even anti-lock breaks and stability control, let alone things like forward emergency breaking and things of that nature. I'm wondering, what's better for society? Where do you put the money? On emissions or on safety? Yeah, that's a very good point that Cars that were just 10 years older have much worse, even passenger, safety systems when it comes to crash structures and air bags, and things like that, compared to what we have today. And, of course, you mentioned the active safety system as well. We just got a new result from the IAHS today, a new survey, that shows that those active safety systems' automatic breaking and even collision warning systems Has a huge impact, a 40% decrease in collisions in those cars that have those [CROSSTALK] That's a massive savings of life and hoping that we inconvenience and everything else that comes along with crashing cars. I definitely see that having a greater impacts, having cars that have those active safety systems. The good thing is you ultimately kill two birds with one stone. Even if one Bird that just happens to be flying nearby, and getting caught up in this. Yeah, right. Your car would have better safety systems regardless, which is great. But yeah, I think in terms of the immediate impact, you gotta say that active safety systems are much more valuable to the health and wellbeing of your average driver than the emissions coming out of the tailpipe. Yeah, I guess there's more social benefit. I guess these are to sell at the legislature, to say look, we're gonna clean up California's air. As opposed to we're gonna save a few thousand people's lives. It's a broader story. But I still like to see people get into cars that have advanced safety. Like you mentioned, even 10 years ago, cars were night and day. Stability control alone has Fundamentally changed the way that people survive accidents out on roads, especially in SUVs and trucks. And things like the active lane avoidance systems that we're seeing in more and more cars. Given the number of people actually driving in California texting on their phones while they're driving, that would be a nice thing to have. You noticed that, did you? I did. Yeah. A few times. This is an interesting one to people that really wanna be on the cutting edge, and merge technology in their car. BMW has just started supporting If This Then That. So, this is a BMW Labs Add-on. I'm not familiar with how this program works. I don't have a BMW, so I haven't been able to try it. But they're the first car maker that will let you go connect IFTT via your connected services in the dash of your BMW, so you can create macro commands on IFTT that you can operate From your car and again it's truly a lab's thing like you might do in your chrome browser or something were they say, look all bets are off and this maybe rough, this may not work all the time but of course it's not gonna touch power train or drive controls. Right, and that's the first time I've seen an auto maker puts something in the car like that, hey this might actually crash. I've never I [CROSSTALK] In the lower case c. Right, and I've been there in cars and have had infotainment systems give me error messages and things like that, but ultimately I've never actually had the manufacturer come up front and say, hey this is something we're trying out, give it a spin if you want to. But if you're not familiar with it, it's this and that, but basically it's really advanced means of triggering activities in your phone so you can say, when I get to this area, this Located on a GPS coordinate, send an email to my wife that I've picked up the kids from school, or when I get home start up the Spotify playlist. That kind of thing. You can do a lot of really advanced stuff and to have that tied into your car now is pretty interesting because you can then have other things that are based on your location in the car If you have a smart garage door opener, for example, you can have the garage door opener automatically open for you when you pull into your street. Pretty interesting stuff like that. I haven't had a chance to play with it either. I'm curious to see how seemless it is. Of course a lot of this is going to be based on the accuracy of the GPS and everything else but- Yeah. A pretty cool idea. Yeah, it's pretty amazing what you can do once you start pulling other services into your car's NAV system There's a whole lot of interesting things that you can do, like you're mentioning. There's some real power here, this isn't a gimmicky thing, I don't think. If you're a beamer driver, and your car has got connected drive services, and BMW online, you have to have those two Technologies in your car, which is pretty common on the last model year or two. You can then go to labs.bmw.com, and you'll find the information on how to connect your car to your IFTTT account, which you'll have to have already, and then start playing with it. And if you do that, let us know. Send us email to, what is our email for Roadshow? We've got lot of emails. Probably the best one is tipsattheroadshow.com. You can send us anything you like through there. That'd be a great way [INAUDIBLE]. Yeah, we would love to see what you're up too, especially videos of your garage door opening automatically and things like that we'd love to see. [LAUGH] Garage door via Geo boundary would be very cool to see. Tipsat Theroadshow.com. We're gonna come back in just a moment. We've got more for you here on Auto Complete Episode Three, including the possible return of the much loved diminutive Opal GT and what Xerox is doing with the transportation app that is the first ever when Auto Complete continues. [BLANK_AUDIO] Welcome back to Auto Complete the technology and automotive news show from Road Show at Theroadshow.com. I'm Brian Cooley with Road Show editor-in-chief Tim Stevens. Before we get back in the headlines Tim, what's new at the site? Well, we've got a lot of great stuff coming up this week. We've had a lot of great news, some beautiful pictures of the new Jaguar F-type SVR, a ridiculously high horse power version of that car. The R-type was already massively overpowered. But who cares, let's get more power in there. Sure, why not? We've also got some great reviews coming up. And also there'll be a feature on basically talking with GM's head of cybersecurity about how they're securing their cars and how they are being more adaptive to all the sorts of exploits and hacks that we're seeing. Look for that feature on the site, as well as, Brian, our shootout of the best luxury sedans. If all goes well we should have that up on the site this week as well. Brian and I had a lot of fun testing out the BMW 7 Series. And the Mercedes Benz S Class. And who wins? Well, you'll have to tune in to find out. Yeah, that wasn't the worst duty we've ever had.>> That was pretty comfortable.>> Yeah.>> I must say, that was pretty good.>> Okay, back into our headlines. Speaking of coming cars, here's one that's down the road aways, but it's gonna take you back. Can you remember the Opal GT, right? I do. A beautiful, beautiful little roadster. Kinda like a little shrunken down early 70s Corvette. Absolutely gorgeous. Yeah, it's a absolutely beautiful car. One of the most beautiful Opals if not the most beautiful Opal that ever the road. You don't hear Opal and beautiful mentioned a whole lot. Hm, not very often, no. Not much, so this is gonna be something very tasty out there. We've go ta great slide show of this over at Roadshow, and a few photos that I think we're showing you right now, of this concept, obviously. But brought along with a 1-litre in-line three in today's current engineering fashion, but still delivering 145 horse to a car that comes in not much over 2,000 pounds. And has definitely the old opel gt D N A dramatically brought forward. But there's no mistaking what they're harkening back to. Yeah, it looks absolutely gorgeous. It's the first car I think I've ever seen where the body color actually matches the color of the tires. It's got two red front tires. [LAUGH] I saw that. The first time, I've seen colored tires on cars before, but I've never seen it coordinated in such a way. I think it looks fantastic. Yeah, I'm absolutely in love with this concept. It's a little two seater. It's front made engine so the engines situated well back, but it's a front engine car. A long, well relatively long nose in given the proportions of the car, which is very, very small. The one thing is I'm not sure exactly how you get into the car. The doors seem to flow right into the fenders which is interesting. Maybe it's like Charles has done a sort of sci-fi thing where the doors sort of open for you when you get there but no mirrors, of course. Of course not. As is the de rigueur for concepts these days. It's got cameras instead of mirrors. But yeah, absolutely lovely concept. And it's a GM product so in theory if it were to be built maybe it could come here as a Chevy, maybe. Probably not but it is a beautiful thing Yeah so check out the full slide show over at theroadshow.com. Xerox has a new transportation app that does some interesting things here. It rolls up, they say for the first time, and as far as I know it's for the first time, every possible way you can get around, and sorts those routes by every possible concern you might have. So here's what it does. It's launching in LA, it's called GoLA, is the app. And what it does is it takes in how You might get there by walking, riding a bike, driving your car, driving a car share, taking public transit, or taking any of the TNCs like Lift or Uber. And it's able to seam those all together into a route plan. I don't think anyone's ever pulled all of those together into a route plan. You can do it on Google or Ways and you get basically transit, walking, biking. But no one rolls in every possible way into a single optimized trip, and you can optimize for getting there fastest, getting there cheapest, or getting there the most green method. This is pretty interesting stuff they're doing with data here. Yeah, it's great. We hear a lot about multinodule transportations these days which is basically getting you from A to B. Even if A to B involves multiple means of transportation like you were just discussing and Volkswagen in a few of many tankers have played with in car navigation system. They kinda hand off to your smart phone when you get out of your car But nothing anywhere near as advanced as this in terms of rolling together everything from public transit to Uber and Lyft, as you mentioned. And ultimately also then categorizing that based on cost and efficiency is pretty amazing stuff. It's unfortunate that it's only in LA. I'm guessing there's a lot of hooks that need to be programmed to make something like this work. Plus, it's interesting that it's coming from Xerox. Xerox of course was a huge pioneer in the technology industry for a long time. It's pretty cool to see this coming from them. Yeah. I think this comes out of their park, their Palo Alto research center in Silicon Valley. What this doesn't have, which is a big glitch right now is, even though it may say, Okay, this leg of your trip should be Uber or Lyft, you can't book the Uber or Lyft in the app yet. They say that's coming As well as the payment platform as you mention they have to get those hooks from Uber to bring into the app to allow it to become part of the actual booking and transaction system at Uber and Lyft. But it's largely baked but if you want to play with it, it's over at Go LA App. .com, and it is out already for iOS and Android. We've driven cars that have adaptive gas pedals before. Infinity has something called ECO pedal. If you're goosing it too hard and wasting gas, the pedal will push back and keep you from dumping too much fuel for a given driving scenario, but this is more advanced. We've got one here coming from Bosch that It's almost like a haptic game controller in the variety of things it can do. Right. It can of course increase resistance as well, so if you have a heavy right foot, we can deliver you a heavy pedal to match that. But it can also vibrate, much like a An ABS sensor might vibrate the break pedal for example and they can basically kick the pedal back at you as well to give you more stern feedback if it needs to which is interesting. [LAUGH] So yeah, you can imagine the car pushing back if you are asking for a little bit too much and driving in too inefficient a way. The easiest way to get better fuel economy from your car is to just go a little bit easier on the right pedal and this could be another way better than Vines growing on your dashboard and lights blinking at you, [LAUGH] things like that, this might be a little more easy for people to understand, and maybe more effective. I think it's a great simple idea. The cost, probably not adding a lot of cost in terms of technology here, but I think it actually would be quite effective for a lot of drivers. Yeah and it's interesting like you mentioned, it could give you a A pedal that is aimed at efficiency but it could also give you a pedal that gives you the right feel for performance driving. They mention how it could be interfaced with the sensors around the car so as you're heading into a corner and if you're giving it too much, or you need to give it more which a lot of drivers are hesitant to power through a corner, this might almost encourage you with a lighter pedal to dip in deeper into the power. A lot of things, once you make that pedal smart. You can kinda go anywhere with it and again its also sort of the ultimate way to handle both performance and efficiency so Bosch is developing that and of course they'll be shopping at the car markers. One of the places where you love to get into the pedal is of course a Dodge Viper which production is ending next year and Viper aficionados of course are very sad about that they only sold like I think 600 of them last year its a You know, it's a low seller for them. Sergio Marchionne the head of Fiat Chryslers. Once again saying, You know, we may bring it back but on a different platform from Alpha. And we loved the performance cars that Alpha is putting out these days. Yeah, absolutely. Marchionne had a lot to say this week on a lot of different topics including that they're gonna be building a lot more trucks and jeeps and all sorts of other things. But, yeah, this was maybe some encouraging news for the future. That the Viper unfortunately [UNKNOWN] While, you know, a beautiful car, and continuing that great Viper lineage, ultimately has not been a big sales success and has been kind of a tough sell when you look at things like the Corvette, which is offering nearly the same level of performance for a lot less money. There are Other issues, safety-related issues, you can't get enough airbags in a Viper, things like that. Viper, it sounds like does need a new platform, and maybe indeed will get something, based on something like the Julia for example, which we are still waiting on. The Julia unfortunately part of that news also this week, that the Julia's gonna be delayed until next year now in the US, which is really unfortunate. But who knows. Alpha's doing some great things. They make some beautiful cars and maybe they can make a nice, new front engine rear drive platform that can handle a big, beastly V10 from the U.S. I'm sure it just galls Viper owners to no end that their car is ending because of side curtain airbags. [LAUGH] Of all the things. [LAUGH] Yeah, vocally you've seen a guy in a viper with a sleeper bags. Yeah, seems like a modern thing but it's a shame that the selling on new viper I think it's fantastic. The driver dynamics of course is fantastic so it is a bit of shame Interesting note here for those of you who are wondering. What cars are made in England anymore? Well a lot of cars are made in England, about 1.5 million a year but one of the rising stars is Jaguar Land Rover. After a lot of rough years in the last decade, new 2015 numbers for you Jaguar Land Rover lovers be proud. They are now the number one. British carmaker that actually makes cars in the UK. They're up 3% last year. They now make nearly half a million cars a year in England under the Jaguar Land Rover line. A huge part of that growth came from the US. We are in love with UK-made cars. We bought 27% more of them in the United States in 2015 than we did from the year before. For a big gain and so Jaguar Land Rover has overtaken Nissan as the biggest U.K. based auto maker. Actually creating products there.>> Yeah the new F type from Jaguar's amazing, the new XC looks fantastic, and this year we have a new F taste, which is going to be their compact SUV, which Should be on the market before the end of the year. And it's hard to imagine that thing not selling well also. So things should just continue to be looking up for Jaguar in particular. And of course Land Rover is doing a lot of great things too. The new SVR is a pretty amazing package in a big SUV. So a lot of great products coming out of there. Certainly, yeah, we're seeing a bit of a renaissance for the love for British motoring. I have a Triumph motorcycle myself so I can appreciate it. Not wasted on Tim, by no means. No, not at all. Let's wrap up with a tip of our hat to our friends in Detroit. Interesting, this is not about a car, but about an iconic building in the biggest car city in America, and that is the Renaissance Center, which everyone knows as these multiple cylindrical towers right there in the heart of Detroit. It's been General Motors headquarters for A couple decades, about to get a big redo, there on the front of this iconic building in Detroit. Including a 70 by 80 foot video wall, a completely new transit station in front. And most interesting to us, is that they're going to creat a whole new, what they call, GM World inside, where they currently have a lot of their cars displayed. But I'll be honest, it's not It's not a great layout. And they're gonna redo that whole area. We've seen some renderings and we have some photos that we're showing you right now. And that would create a place. It occurred to me Tim, are they thinking about having a daily A display of cars, which I'm sure they are, that is much cooler than the current one. But are they also gonna take a turn, like Apple and Samsung and others, and say, you know what? We need to have our own events and do major [UNKNOWN] that aren't at auto shows. As well. It makes a lot of sense. We're certainly seeing that trend where more and more manufacturers and ultimately large companies of all shapes and sizes making all sorts of products, saying that we don't need to go to these big industry events anymore. We can do our own thing. And ultimately, that could be a productive thing for them. If only, if they do piggyback on top of the Detroit Auto Show, or that kind of thing. To have a nice place they can own, and basically control the entire experience. That remains to be seen, but ultimately, this does, or it could give them an opportunity to connect with buyers on a day to day basis. If they create a nice place that people can wander into, can go through the museum. To see what kind of new products are coming out on the market, then just go in and have a coffee, and check out the new Malibu or whatever without having to go to a dealership. Yeah. That again could be a great thing, especially for the downtown area of Detroit. The red center is this kind of futuristic looking building, despite the fact that it is getting up there in its age, but it's also a very confusing building to get around in. Yeah! You've spent some time in there as well. It's very easy to get lost in the Rent-A-Center, so I hope as part of these renovations, they do have some kind of a means of getting around. Good point, yeah good point. Please improve the navigation of the building while your busy creating this new front because It is so easy to be in the wrong tower and have no idea how to get to the other towers. It's like the mall from hell, but it's not a mall. It should be an easy thing but it is a very complicated place to get around. But I think this could do great things for the downtown Detroit area, which is getting better and better by every day. And having more new cars and also vintage cars on display Could make for a really cool place to visit while you're downtown. I didn't know this. I was doing a little bit of research on the building. That was originally a development by Ford, that building, and General Motors bought it in '96. I always thought of it as forever a GM thing, and I was wondering this morning Who built the Ren Cen? It was actually a Ford building and then General Motors purchased it. Yeah, I didn't know that either, that was actually pretty surprising to me to learn. I always think of it. Whenever you go to Detroit during the auto show they always have a picture of whatever car is coming out. This year they had the Malibu printed on the side of the building with giant headlights beaming out. It's just sort of iconic as a G M product to me so it was interesting to learn this was actually a Ford at one point. But you know, I guess it shows how tight the families are there in Detroit. [UNKNOWN] Auto town. All right. Okay, that's it for AutoComplete episode three. I'm Brian Cooley with Tim Stevens, editor in chief of Roadshow. Stay on top of everything going on with automotive, technology, and culture at the site that maybe you haven't discovered yet, but you absolutely need to, theroadshow.com, the brand new car destination from CNET. We'll see you guys nest week with the latest news in the automotive world.