Episode 358: Chalk It Up On The Slate

On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy goes a bit deeper on the way that the Slate Electric Truck company is setting up shop. We get deeper into the idea that different levels of shop certification mean different types of work getting funneled to those shops. We also get into some of the broader market ramifications as well as how AI thinks this is going to go. There is a lot going on here, but it is going to be so fascinating to watch and we are rooting for them from the bottom of our hearts. 
 
 Also Uncle Jimmy struggles mightily with the word, “proprietary’

This Episode of Grease the Wheels is brought to you in partnership with Surfwrench Digital! For more on Video MPI Training Visit https://www.surfwrench.com/video-mpi-training-landing/ to learn more. Video MPI Training built in the shop, by your Uncle Jimmy. Use code “GTW” for 50% off your training access!  

Transcript

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All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome once again to Greased Wheels, your automotive technician podcast coming out of the rock and roll garage. Courtesy of your Uncle Jimmy. That's me. Hey man, before we get started, gotta say thank you. Uh thank you to everybody out there who is doing the work, building it and fixing it. I appreciate it. I hope that y'all had a real good 4th of July. Uh, this is one that you're gonna want to remember the 250. These things don't come along every day, okay? Uh I'm old enough to remember the bicentennial, the 200. That was a blast for me as a uh as a kid. And uh so the 250, well, I I played it a little closer to the vest. No, I didn't blow off any fireworks. I still have all my fingers, so I hope all of you do too. Nobody celebrates with high explosives like I'm the fucking Americans in the US of A. What I wanted to do this week is pick up where I left off last week and bring you some more uh information on the slate, the little slate truck that's coming out. Now, before I get too far, I want to remind everybody of what it is and what it isn't, okay? The slate's a little tiny pickup truck, probably about the size of an S10, and it is plain looking, really. I mean, it's as plain as a glass of water, but that makes it infinitely customizable. And if you buy uh certain accessories, you can turn it into an SUV. So this thing is going to be popular with a lot of people who don't really want to spend a lot of money on a car and might want something electric and might want to just uh haul stuff, you know, or haul people. You can do either one. Range is not extraordinary, but it's good, and uh it is spartan. To say the least, it is spartan. You don't get any audio system and you got to crank up windows. And I would imagine that uh companies such as uh you know Domino's Pizza or maybe some auto parts stores are gonna pick these things up by the dozen. At least if I was running a part store, I would, because uh we all know, uh as technicians, we know that electric vehicles require one heck of a lot less maintenance than an ICE vehicle, uh, internal combustion engine vehicle that runs on gas and has oil and and assorted other things to uh to deal with. This vehicle doesn't really have any of that. You run a part store and maybe you put a couple of uh uh wall chargers on the back or on the side of your building, and then you pull them up at the end of the day and you charge them up. And you may, depending on how busy how busy you are, really, how successful you are, how much, how many deliveries you make, and how much you use this thing, you may have to charge it in the middle of the day. But if you spring the money for a DC charger, that's always a good option for you. DC, the DC fast charge is called a level three charge, and that shit goes in there in a hurry, folks. If you're not familiar with that, uh level one is the little ones, the little chargers that plug into your 110 outlet and take uh a fucking seriously, uh a solar century to they take a long fucking time to charge your charge your uh EVs, and then uh they're really just good for maintaining a healthy charge if you're gonna be parked overnight. Then there's the level two, which is still an AC charge, but it it uh it uses a little higher of an amperage kind of a setup and it will charge faster, not much, uh, but it is faster. And then, of course, the granddaddy of them all is the DC fast charge. That shit charges you up pretty fucking quick depending on how many amps you have available. Okay, so um, and I would imagine that if uh somebody at Slate said, Well, geez, what you know, what kind of chargers should we have? Uh, they're probably gonna be prepared to host all three of those types of chargers and probably use the Tesla network. I'm not sure what it's called. Uh, it's got a special name, uh, you know, Charge America or some shit like that. Some some marketing guy came up with a name for it. Whatever it is, they will probably be able to use it too. So uh if you are traveling with one of these, and and I, you know, I wouldn't I would not say to you that you couldn't do that, uh, you would have to stop uh probably every couple, two, three hours and top off your charge so that you can get where you're going. And uh you want to use an app on your phone to make sure you could get at a charging location and uh just take a look and see how busy it is and when you want to get there and what's nearby. I mean, it the optimal situation would be to uh roll into a town that has a restaurant near a Walmart where you can charge your Tesla and or your slate and or anything else that's electric on their network, and then maybe have some uh some lunch or some dinner or even maybe breakfast at at a restaurant while you're while your vehicle charges. Um and that seems that seems pretty reasonable to me. I mean, you know, obviously uh people had to adapt to get going to gas stations, and of course, the infrastructure has been there for a hundred years for gas stations, so uh we haven't had to worry about this kind of thing then. But right now, the infrastructure for charging electric vehicles has uh expanded greatly, and so is not the huge deal it was uh 10 years ago when a lot of EVs really started to uh start taking off. And uh even five years ago when there were competing networks, and now the competition really the competition is pretty much all over, and Elon Musk won again. But uh that's that's certainly fine. Uh he has uh he's a vested interest in putting chargers in a lot of different places and uh having them be accessible and uh probably making some money from it. I don't imagine it it's gonna be uh eclipsing the money he made from from the IPO for SpaceX, but uh you know it's still it will pay for itself, it will amateurize itself after a while, uh hopefully for him anyway. I mean, you don't want anybody to fail at business. But what really intrigued me the most about the Slate automobile is not so much that you know it has uh an enormous uh financial backing or that it's going to be built in Indiana and that they they hire tons of people to do all sorts of different jobs for them, and they all uh jump up and down and are uh solid cheerleaders for the Slate brand on LinkedIn and other such social medias. What I'm interested in is the service side of it, the fixed side of it, as they call it in most of our dealerships. Um, and I really gotta be honest with you, my head has been spinning like a centrifuge about this. This is so far out of the box that the box has just been trampled and run over and it's not even a box anymore. And what they have come up with uh for offering service on these things is uh, well, I want to say it's a roll of the dice, really. It's a gamble. And uh I gotta, and like I said last week, I'm I'm hoping that it works for them. Because what they're gonna do, really in a nutshell, is instead of having a dedicated service center and dedicated dealers, and and instead of hiding all of their information and not letting anybody add it unless they pay for uh a subscription to get at their information, their proprietary diagnostic software and whatever else they have, they're just gonna let everybody have it. Here, here it is. This is this is how you fix them. This is what you you update it with, and uh this is how it goes. It's it's a real gamble, folks. I mean, I'm not I'm I can't like I said I'm I'm having a little trouble wrapping my wrapping my mind around it. I mean, it's like putting the kids in charge of the cookie jar. And uh honestly, how it works is gonna be in the hands of probably just a a few thousand individuals working in uh shops that repair pal has pointed out and uh certified to work on these vehicles. I wanted to have some answers to some of the questions that I have uh floating around in my head. Like I said, there's a thousand questions uh and and honestly, what can happen here can go several different ways. It can go, it could be great and it could work nearly flawlessly, and it could change the paradigm at every dealership with every brand, and it could also uh fail horribly and leave a lot of people uh who are in the automotive industry right now saying, I told you so. Now I'm not gonna be one of those people. I'm not gonna be one of those people. You can't uh as somebody once said, the first guy through the wall takes all the hits, folks, is the first thing through the wall. This is the first time anybody has really attempted something like this. And like I said, I'm a fan. I am a fan and and pray that it works. And it's not gonna, I gotta be honest with you, it's not gonna affect me all that much. Uh, what I do and where I work is pretty well locked down on what they do and how they do it, and they seem to like it, and it works well for the brand. Uh, the dealers, uh they sometimes get fucked around by the brand, and it just happens. In this particular case, the dealers are not going to get fucked around, and their fixed departments are not gonna get fucked around because they really don't have any direct tie, per se, as a franchisee of Slate or Amazon for that matter. They are independent repair shops, they do what they do, and if they get the certification to work on slates, yeah, they'll work on them. But guess what? If there's other shit in their shop, well, they're gonna be working on that shit too. So, this is not gonna be one of those deals where they tell other people that don't have slates to go F themselves, they're not gonna do that. Well, nobody should really do that anyway, but they are going to be able to take on the slates on top of whatever service and maintenance is and repairs that they perform on their neighbors' cars, on the cars for the people who live in their neighborhood, for the people who live in their town. All right. So the slate's just kind of glomming on to a network that's really already always honestly always been there. It's just that now uh they're going to uh trust these people to do work for them. Now, here's what I uh I wanted to get some answers, and I didn't want to get the answers to some of these questions that I have from Slate because obviously they're gonna paint them with a paintbrush that makes everything look rosy and everything's great and everything's really, really good, and rah-rah. You know, it's it's everything's everything's gonna be cool and and it's gonna be fun, and it's good, it's just there, you know. I just I just don't really want a whole big bowl of super sugar crisp of how how great slates are. And I kind of wanted to uh get some information that I'm probably not gonna get from their website, that I'm probably not gonna get from anybody who works for them, but I wanted to get some information. And so what I did was you know, I did what I've been doing. I uh hit up Gemini, got a little AI involved here. And here's the first question that I asked them, okay. And I think that this is a question that might be on your mind too, and I wanted to see what they said about it, okay. Uh, the question that I posted to AI on this was if the service solution for Slate is successful, what are the other automobile manufacturers going to do? And this is what came back. This is the answer that came back. If Slate's service solution, which blends an open source approach for DI wires slash independence with no paywalls on diagnostics, manuals, or wiring diagrams, with a third-party certified network like RepairPal proves highly successful, it will force a massive reckoning across the automotive industry. I think that's an understatement. It will force a massive reckoning. It will be a game changer, folks. I'm I'm I'm convinced of that already. Traditional legacy OEMs and first wave direct-to-consumer EV brands like Rivian and Lucid and Tesla will likely respond in a few distinct ways to protect their market share and adapt to changing consumer expectations. This is really what's going to change is how the consumer views this product and their attitudes towards the people who repair them. Now, if they don't have to go to a dealer, if they could go to Joe's auto service, you know, maybe three, four, five blocks, maybe three, four, five miles up the road and have them work on us on their slate if they happen to own one. Uh, I think that they're it's it's it's still up in the air, but I think it's gonna be a really good thing, okay? Because anybody who is gonna sign on to work on these things, it's probably gonna have to make some sort of an investment. It's not gonna be just, hey, you want to work on my car? Yeah, sure. Okay, you know, it wasn't just one of those deals. There's gonna have to be some sort of investment in certain uh scan tools and certain tools. There's definitely gonna be some special tools. There always is. I think that day one, when you know the first automobiles came out, they said, Oh, here's a special, you know, screwdriver or a pry bar or hammer that you need to fix this this fucking vehicle, and it's just exploded from there. And now you'll find in a lot of regular uh dealerships that service a brand that they have an entire tool room full of tools just for working on that particular brand's cars. I know we do, obviously. Uh, in our case, our dealership is about two days away from being two years old, and so all of the tools that we have are pretty much brand new and don't fit anything made 10 years or older. Uh, so if we need to fix something that comes in and it's you know a classic, you know, 25 years old or older, uh, we either have to figure out how to fix it with the tools that we have, or we have to order the tools, or sometimes we have to go with an aftermarket brand of tools to provide us with what we need for it. Uh, here's what it says about the right to repair strategy. Okay, this is one of the things uh that is going to happen. The right to repair strategy pivot. Currently, legacy manufacturers make massive profits by keeping technical data, proprietary diagnostic software, and security gateways tightly locked behind steep subscription paywalls. I think if you work for a brand and you know some people who don't work for that brand and do work as technicians, they will cry and moan and complain about how you have access to all that shit, and they don't. And if they want it, they have to pay big fucking money. Buku dinero, seriously, and it kind of sucks, but I also understand it at the same time. So here I am, your Uncle Jimmy on the fence. It's like, look, they built the cars, they know how to fix them, they have the software. Why would they give it away for free? Uh, as far as the slate goes, they're gonna give it away for free to their customers and to the shops because they're trying to flip the entire paradigm on its on its roof. And uh that's that's a major, major, major fucking component of it is giving people the information to fix their own cars. Hasn't really been done for a long time. I I'm imagining that they will be able to program your car remotely so that you don't have to go to one of these service centers. Uh, that's pretty much standard of the industry. Now they don't have, and this is this is kind of funny. Uh, they don't have any audio or infotainment or any kind of uh connected services for you to use to get information from anywhere. Uh you're not even gonna have nav. Okay, nav is gonna be Google Maps on your phone. All that stuff is stuff that you bring with you. However, what I found from reading about this is that these vehicles are still connected. They're still collecting data on you, folks. They're not gonna not do that, okay? It's Amazon after all. They collect data there and they're gonna collect data in their little pickup trucks that they're building for all you guys out there, all you people out there who want these things. Okay, they're gonna collect it and they're gonna know that certain things are going on, but they're gonna give you, they're gonna hand you the keys to the information to fix them. Now, here's what it says here if slate succeeds, other brands will face intense consumer and regulatory pressure to lower or eliminate these paywalls. Yeah, well, maybe, okay, just maybe. I mean, what we're talking about here is, and I want you to grasp the scale of this, okay? This is a little tiny pickup truck that you can turn into an SUV. It's electric and it's got crank-up windows and no audio system. It's going to appeal to a certain group of people. There are still gonna be certain other groups of people who want power windows and power seats, and they want an Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, and they're gonna want navigation, they're gonna want air conditioning, they're gonna want heated seats, they're gonna want all kinds of shit that you're not gonna be able to get on a slate. Okay, they're gonna want that stuff. The slate is not gonna take the place of a of a hundred thousand dollar car that is designed to do everything except scratch your balls for you. And if you wait long enough, I'm sure that's coming. Those uh top-of-the-line luxury automobiles, they serve a very tremendous purpose, and people buy them for a very specific reason, and they've earned they've earned the right to drive a luxury automobile by being successful in whatever it is they do in business, and so they're gonna do that. They're gonna do that. So there's a lot of people who are not gonna be customers of this little automobile, but that doesn't mean that this thing isn't gonna flip the script on them. There are gonna be people who go, hey, you know, why can't I have the information? And they're gonna say, because really there's not much you can do with it. And I feel better about saying something like that than perhaps what Mr. Farley at Ford said, ah, you're not smart enough. And he was a little kinder than that, but not much. I get the feeling that if he keeps uh insulting his customers the way he does and and talking about how he needs people to fix them, and then all the recalls keep coming out. I'm pretty sure Jim Farley's gonna be living in a van down by the river if he keeps it up. He's just not in a position to say some of the things that he's saying. He really needs to kind of lay low and and try to put his company back on track and get it on the right road to success. And some of the things he's doing, I don't believe honestly, in my personal opinion, some of the things he's doing uh aren't helping with that at all. Now, here's the the response to this, okay. And then this is, you know, if if Slate succeeds, other brands will have to follow through with some of these things or or at least make them a little bit less expensive so that people can fix their own stuff or that shops can at least fix their stuff. The response is to keep tech savvy and budget conscious buyers from jumping ship. Some manufacturers may offer tiered access, providing basic diagnostic software and standard repair manuals for free while keeping high voltage or complex programming software proprietary. Now, uh I've got a little bit of insight on this and I want to kind of hand it off to you. Vehicles I work on have a feature called remote software update, whereby they allow the customer to install their own software. There's certain parameters that they need to adhere to before this will work. Now, I I don't have any numbers on how successful customers are at downloading their own software through their phones into the car and then having it update the car. I don't know how many people are successful. I only know that there are a good number of people who are not successful and cause more problems than they solve because of honestly several different factors, which I can't even I can't even wrap my mind around on. I can't even, I'm not even aware of what they are in some cases. They just say, oh, uh, you know, this is doing this now, and it never did that before. And then you ask them if they tried to do this remote update, and they'll they're gonna say no, that they didn't try to do that because they're afraid that if they did claim that they did it and it failed, they might have to pay for whatever repair it is. And it typically, I mean, if you're under warranty, obviously that's not gonna happen. If you're out of warranty and you're doing these updates and they go south, yeah, it's gonna cost cost you if I have to fix it. And I have to fix them. I like I said, I don't know what the percentage is, but I seems to me that whenever they come out with a new one, I have a rash of cars that they couldn't get it in, they they couldn't get it done. And then I have to go in and actually do a manual programming to straighten it out. And it's not this is what I do, I fix them, and I don't really want to say that I'm complaining about it, but I would really prefer that the manufacturer I work for let me program them. Uh make it, I don't know, make it cheaper or something. I I don't it's not even a function of what the brand manufacturer does. You know, it's just it's a function of the dealership, and some of them out there are. Are fucking outrageous at the labor rates they're charging. So I can understand why uh having remote software update capabilities in the vehicle for the customer to do would be something that they would want as a manufacturer to keep from having to pay the dealer to do them and letting the customer do them. Now, I got you know, I I could like to say that I'm good with it, but I'm a little bit butthurt at the same time that you know people can update their own software and I don't get to do it and I don't get paid for it. I only get I only get paid when it fucks up. And like I said, I don't know how often it fucks up. So I mean, I don't know what the percentage is. I know that I I see them. I see them and stuff goes wrong all the time. And uh I have to go in and a lot of times I just have to reprogram it, hardwire it, hook a battery charger up, and do it the old-fashioned way, you know, through a J uh, what is it, uh 2754? I forget what it's called now. They uh they have a uh uh an ICOM that they use to get uh information, software information into the vehicles. I forget what it was called. I almost bought one. I would have probably never used it, but there you go. Here's what it goes on to say here to number two, that was point number one, the right to repair strategy stuff. Yeah, it would be a good thing, just personally, if the manufacturer would put some of this stuff out there. They don't have to put it all out there, but some people are bright enough to fix their own stuff. You know, they got that hundred thousand dollar car with every accessory known to man, including you know re-entry uh heat shields. You might not want to screw with that. And if you're that kind of a buyer, you're probably not going to anyway. But should it be cheaper for a shop to get their hands on that information? I believe so. I believe it should be. Uh, the right to repair has been being bounced around in the Congress. Uh SEMA is behind the uh ability to get right to repair. I'm sure that the dealers are not behind that, you know, the NADA and those types of people uh and the manufacturers, they would like to keep that shit out of our hands because they're well, let's just say they're afraid of what we're gonna do with it. Uh moving on here, number two, moving away from costly proprietary service networks, building out dedicated corporate-owned service centers, the Rivian slash lucid model, or relying entirely on a rigid dealer franchise network is incredibly capital intensive and slow to scale. Boy, talk about slow to scale. Shop I'm in has been just really slowly and steadily uh gaining gaining customers. And uh it's it's kind of driving me a little wild, but you know, it's it is what it is, as they say, okay. Um it someday we'll be busier than it's so busy we you know we'll be like a one-legged man at an ass kicking contest, but for right now, there's no ass kicking contest going on, and we all have two legs. So uh we're just gonna have to wait it out. And uh what a lot of things that we have going for us is that uh in the particular shop that I'm in, they are selling a lot of cars, so that's building a uh customer base for us. It's two years old in two days, so obviously there's not that large of a customer base just yet. And also, too, we're doing, I think, a pretty good job of taking care of the people who do come in. And uh we we have uh pretty pretty good marks all across the board as far as what we do. Uh, we could certainly stand to sell more of our recommendations that I've complained about quite a bit, but uh it's a tough, it's it's a tough road to hoe, folks. Uh we have a fairly, I don't want to call it inexpensive, it's not uh we have a fairly expensive door labor rate. I know it's gone up a few dollars since we showed up. Uh it was a little low in the beginning, obviously, uh, because we were trying to make a name for ourselves and that, but what ended up happening was, and this happens to a lot of your shops, just so you know, if you have a low labor rate, you can tell right away uh if your labor rate is too low if you're working on a lot of junk. If people are bringing you cars that are 20 years old and you know filled all the way up to the windows with garbage, and there's every system on the car is fucked over, and you know, the brakes are bad, the tires are bad, and they just they just want you to tell them what's wrong with it, and then they're gonna leave and fix it themselves, and it only costs them, you know, whatever your labor rate is for an hour or so. Uh that's happened a lot, and that's gonna happen a lot when you have a brand new facility because you you want to get people used to coming to you for certain things, and you got to get them in the door. And the first time, and this is the thing too with a new shop or with a shop that's just opening up, or maybe even changing hands, is that it's very difficult to get people to go there the first time because they have no idea what they're gonna experience. But as soon as they get there once, and even if it's just to, I don't know, drop off a buddy or get a part from the parts department, or maybe to look at a car on the lot, or maybe to visit the the collision shop if you have one, or maybe the details shop, for whatever reason, if you get people to just come there one time, then they're more comfortable coming to you again and again and again. And that's the secret. The secret is you're brand new. Nobody wants to, you know, they're not gonna roll in and go, hey, this place looks great. And it doesn't really happen. Okay, when you have a new facility, you have to entice people to come see you. Sometimes you have to give it away, sometimes you have to do what you can to get them in the door at least one time, and then treat them right, make them feel comfortable, make them glad they came, and then they'll come back. Uh, what we're talking about here though, building out dedicated corporate-owned service centers or relying entirely on a rigid dealer franchise network is incredibly capital-intensive and slow to scale, definitely slow to scale, leading to severe backlog issues for consumers. Now it goes on to say here if Slate succeeds, it proves that an EV manufacturer can scale service almost instantly by vetting existing infrastructure. And folks, there's repair shops everywhere. That infrastructure actually exists. There's and some of you have no problem finding it. Uh, your buddies work at some of these shops, maybe your your neighbor works at one of those shops, or or some guy you know, and and they specialize maybe in who knows? They specialize in euro, they specialize in Japanese or domestic, or maybe there's some shops out there just specialize in everything. And now there's going to be shops out there that are going to specialize in slate. So it proves that an EV manufacturer can scale service almost instantly by vetting existing infrastructure, it's a very good idea. Everybody's already out there already, everybody already has the tools, they already have the shop, the lifts, they they may even have other services that dealers have, you know, loaner cars and this such a thing. So yeah, uh, glom on to what's out there by all means, please. And as I said last week, really, if you were thinking about leaving the shop that you're in and you have any kind of uh electric car training, any kind of electric knowledge, you may be able to start your own shop and maybe, I mean, I don't know, I haven't looked into it, and I probably should. You might be able to get yourself uh a small shop and uh get certified by RepairPal to do repairs on slates, and if they blow up, and folks, I'm here to tell you it looks like they're gonna blow up. I mean that in a good way. There's just there's an awful lot of excitement around them, okay? And you may not want to wait. You may not want to wait to try to get in the front door. Here's what it says here: the response expect other direct-to-consumer startups and mid-tier manufacturers to bypass building physical brick and mortar centers altogether. Instead, they will copy Slate's playbook and sign enterprise agreements with established independent service networks, specialized franchise chains, and or mobile service platforms. This, to me, honestly, I think the last one, the mobile service out there. If you're a mobile mechanic, this could be the thing that puts you over the top. If you if you could get yourself certified to do repairs on slates and they could look look to you to solve problems for them and and to run a tight ship and and be good to their customers and fix their stuff wherever the fuck it is, you could do very, very well, I believe. Okay, because what's gonna happen here, let me just tell you, I don't have a crystal ball, okay, but I'm gonna make some predictions anyway. These things are gonna come out, people are gonna go crazy for them, and there's gonna be one or two or maybe half a dozen fucking big problems. And if you're Johnny on the spot as a mobile guy, or even just an independent uh shop, if you're there, if you're willing and ready to handle these problems, whatever the fuck they are, then you could you could really come out looking like a Marvel superhero. Okay, let's just say something goes wrong with I don't know, some component on the vehicle, and they're having a hard time trying to figure out how to fix them, and you're on the front line, and maybe you come up with a fix for it. Because I'm telling you, you know, as I do this podcast, one of the things that I really fail to tell you, all of you that listen to this, you are some smart motherfuckers. Okay, and I mean that in a really good way, and I love you for it. I'm telling you, I talk to smart people in this business all the time, and and I I love it. I love it. I don't really feel like I'm all that smart myself, honestly, but I have met some smart sons of bitches who get the job done and can do heavy work and light work and every kind of work. And I point it out when I see them, I say, Man, you know you're you're a really good technician. I tell that to the guys I work with all the time, all the time. I don't hold back. I'm not the boss, I'm not the owner, but man, these guys do a good job and they need to hear it. And even if they're just hearing it from some old bastard like me who's dumb as a rock, it's still got to be good. So if you're running a mobile service and you get your hands on these things, you maybe you get certified to fix them, and you get your hands on these things, and all of a sudden you just come up with a solution to a big fucking problem that they're having, and you you phone it in and just say, Listen, this is what this is what I did on this car, and it seems to have fixed it. And I don't think it's coming back because of what I did. Man, you could be a hero, you could be a hero, and maybe who knows, maybe they would offer you a job working for them in some sort of department that they have that comes up with solutions because that's all technicians ever do, anyway. Okay, if you are a good technician, and I'm telling you right now, you are, and what you do is you you come up with solutions every motherfucking day, and it's never the same from one day to the next. I had some I went, let me just give you a little a little brief synopsis of what I spent my day doing. I had a goddamn great big fucking huge heavy SUV truck that came in today is fully electric. There's no motor, there's no engine in it, it doesn't take gasoline. This guy was driving it. He was in the drive-on, or excuse me, he was in, let me try this again. He was in the drive-thru for Chick-fil-A when this truck just shut itself right the fuck off and would not fire back up and would not move. And he caused a bottleneck at the Chick-fil-A. The light, I mean, to hear the service advisor tell me about it, I'm like, oh well, there you go. And you know what it was? You got it towed into us, and I had to honestly this morning, I had to break my fucking balls big time to get this fucking thing into the shop because there's no way to put it in neutral, and you really you can't drag it. It's not gonna be a good idea to drag it. So I had to jack it up and put these fucking wheel things on there that let allow it to roll without any of the movement of the vehicle. And uh, it took me an hour and a half, but I I mean it I'm moving at what 300 feet, 400 feet? Took me an hour and a half, and I was drenched with sweat after that because it was about 97 degrees this morning. Anyway, once I got it into the shop, as near as I could tell, it just ran out of gas. Okay, you heard me correctly. I mean, I'm being I'm being figurative here. I'm I'm not being literal. He didn't charge a fucking thing up, he just kept driving it and driving it and driving it, and finally there was no energy left in the fucking thing, and it just said, that's it, that's as far as we go. And he ran out of energy, he ran out of juice, and it took me the entire day to convince that. I'm not I'm not kidding you either, it took me the entire day to convince that vehicle that that was all that was wrong with it. I ran through all kinds of test plans, I tried all kinds of things, I looked at this system, I looked at that system, and I couldn't find anything wrong with it. And the more I looked at it, the more it occurred to me that the guy just did not fucking charge it. It came in and it had like 7% and a high voltage battery. I'm like, I know that's not good. So it's sitting at work right now charging, and after I got about two or three hours of a charge in it, I was actually able to get it to move and operate the way it was supposed to. And actually, after I did get it to move, all kinds of faults went away. They just all said, Oh, I'm sorry, was I bothering you? Jesus Christ. All this guy to do is charge a fucking thing, okay? So there's still some idiots out there. I'm not sure if uh proprietary information would have helped him with what he had going on. Uh, this was new on this was new to me. I've never really had anybody run one of these things out of energy. I mean, I I say he was out of gas just because that's what we always used to say. And you've heard you've seen that before. If you've worked as a technician, people drive a car and they don't trust the gas gauge or they don't look at it, or it's buried in the dash somewhere, and they just keep driving, all of a sudden it stops and they can't figure out why. Gee, Charlie, I run on this liquid called gasoline, and uh I haven't put any in a while. Uh, yeah, there you go. Anyway, let me get back to the subject on hand here. Number three, it says legacy dealers evolving into certified independent hubs. Uh, we'll see what happens. This is something that's gonna be further down the road, okay? Uh, here's what it says here. This is what AI came up with. Franchised dealerships rely heavily on the service drive for profitability. Not if you ask them, they won't tell you that, but it is true. Particularly through routine internal combustion engine maintenance, uh, oil changes, flush services, as such, as EVs reduce the volume of these routine mechanical failures, dealers will have to change how they compete. Well, let me tell you something right now, okay. Um, like I said with this gentleman who ran his EV right out of juice. Yeah, you you don't have all of the oil changes. You don't have to flush that there's there's flushes you don't have to do, but these vehicles still have cooling systems, so you may need to flush those in the future. And I'm not sure as to any kind of a maintenance schedule for that. A lot of the fluids that we use now are called lifetime fluids, and I'm always curious as to whose lifetime it is, and then also too, there's still brakes, so there's brake fluid flushes. You always want to do brake fluid flushes on a regular basis because, well, you know, as a mechanic, the brake fluid is hygroscopic and absorbs moisture, and when it does absorb moisture, it lowers the boiling point, which is the whole entire reason for having a dedicated brake fluid, is that it has a high boiling point because when you crank the brakes down, you are changing your forward motion into heat because energy cannot be destroyed or created, it can only be changed. You're changing forward motion into heat, you're using the brakes to do that. The brake fluid has to resist boiling when it's got water in it, boiling point goes down, and well, you know what happens if it boils, it turns into a gas, and you think, well, who cares? Yeah, who cares? Have you ever stepped on a brake pedal where there's air in the brakes? Yeah, you'll care. So there's still going to be those flushes. Also, too, there will be air conditioning still. And air conditioning, I'm not sure how it works in this particular vehicle. I know a lot of EVs use air conditioning to cool the battery if you're in a hot climate, like the one I'm in. And also, two, the air conditioning will cool the passengers, which is almost as important, and in some cases, maybe even more so. Here's what it says here to capture the business of uh fleet vehicles or out-of-warranty cars from other brands, legacy dealer networks, may open their doors to work on competitor vehicles. In other words, they're saying that if you work in uh let's just pick a brand and say Audi, you may have to start working on Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs and other Volkswagens, even though you don't want to, or probably don't want to. You're probably gonna have to uh just because the business is flipped on its, it just flips upside down. Uh, I don't know if that's gonna happen. Uh, that certainly could happen. Um, if you are a successful business, a successful dealership that sells a very large number of cars every year and has a dedicated customer base of people who own the cars that you sell, then you could probably continue to just service those cars. And as always, and this kind of drives me nuts, but as always, there's gonna be people who buy used cars from you that aren't the brand that you service, and when they break or they need maintenance or repairs, they bring them to you because that's where they bought them, which is fine. Uh, we can certainly do it. I mean, an automobile is an automobile. If your guys are if you guys are like me, if it's got fucking wheels, I can fix it. I mean, it I might have to do do some radical things, I might have to look at some YouTube videos or read some manuals or something, but I can usually get the fucking job done, and I'm sure that you guys are smart enough to do the same thing. I just don't see dealers turning to that unless unless they lose their franchise agreement and in order to survive, they have to start working on everything. And I have actually seen that in the past. There was some uh Chrysler dealer in my hometown that got their franchise yanked away by Chrysler, and they just continued on selling used cars and fixing cars. So, you know, they didn't really seem to give a rip. Manufacturers will likely modernize, they might seek multi-brand certifications, turning a legacy single-brand service bay into a generalized EV or high-tech repair hub to keep their base full and technicians billing hours. I think what's what's gonna happen, and again, I don't have a crystal ball, and anytime I say I think what's gonna happen means I don't really fucking know, but I'm gonna take a stab at it here. If you start to see, if you have a franchise and say you're working on Audis, and all of a sudden Audi just kind of, you know, you just they don't sell as well as they used to, and you don't have that many out there, and your customer base is shrinking, and you just don't have enough to work on, yeah, you could certainly kind of move into a general EV or a high-tech repair hub to keep your uh business afloat, to keep your technicians working, keep your base full. You could certainly do that. Um, I don't think that that's gonna be something that's gonna happen to a lot of places, though, because there's there's definitely uh a set few major players in the automotive manufacturing genre, you know, Toyota and Honda and GM and Ford and you know, BMW and Mercedes and Audi Volkswagen, and then everything else, it's just kind of out there on the gray area a little bit. I mean, obviously Subaru's a big player, but what I'm talking about here is having a specific franchise that works on really almost nothing but those cars and not having to work on anything else. I don't see I don't see a lot of dealerships having to give up on their on their brand or on their franchise. Okay. Uh that's that's just something that AI, I don't think they got it right. I don't think that that's gonna be. I mean, I know it's happened, and I've told you that I know it's happened, I've seen it happen, but it's just not uh super common. All right. Number four, it says here over-the-counter parts commercialization. If slate makes it incredibly easy for independent technicians and DIYers to purchase OEM parts, let me let me spell that out for you. DIY is a do-it-yourselfer, in case you didn't know. And then OEM stands for original equipment manufacturer, which means that Slate is going to make it incredibly easy for independent technicians and DIYers to purchase original equipment parts directly at fair prices, which was in quotes. Other manufacturers will have to compete on parts availability and cost. Yeah, you know what? No, they won't. If parts are cheap for anything, uh let's just pick a car, a Toyota Corolla. If parts are cheap to fix a Toyota Corolla, it is gonna have no bearing whatsoever on how much parts for a Mercedes-Benz cost. It is not the same fucking thing. AI got that wrong. It's it mean, yeah, if if some place is selling parts at a fair price, that's just fucking great. Are they selling parts that fit a Mercedes-Benz? No, then who gives a fuck? Really? Who cares? If Mercedes-Benz wants to sell an OEM part for their vehicle and mark it up a thousand percent, they can fucking do whatever they want. Guess what? They're the OEM. Now, what that does is what that does do, however, is spur the aftermarket on to make that part at a more reasonable cost. But that's a completely different thing as far as RA OE REM. Sorry about that. It's the end of the world as we know it. As far as OEM parts go, there's only one place you can get OEM parts from, and that's from the original equipment manufacturer. And those are typically, in almost every single case, the best parts to have. There are actually very few aftermarket parts manufacturers who make a part so well that the OE would look at it and go, No, that's fine. That's perfect. They would never do that. I mean, I'm sure it has happened in the past for some parts where the OE can't make it right no matter how hard they try, and then the aftermarket comes along and says, Oh, yeah, all I had to do is this, and their parts are superior. But that, my friends, is like jacking the beanstalk. You know, he didn't know what them beans could do until he fucking threw them in the ground. Here is the response to that, as far as parts goes. The response is manufacturers will likely modernize their e-commerce parts platforms, reducing the standard dealer markup on common components, brakes, suspension, cabin filters, to prevent third-party aftermarket companies from completely dominant control of the EV repair market. Now, again, here when you're talking about OEM parts, there's only one place to get them. Uh, aftermarket parts don't have a real good reputation. I can point out to you, this is funny too. If I say to certain technicians that, oh, that part's available from Dorman, okay, and they're a famous aftermarket parts company, those some of those technicians will wretch right on the spot. I mean, throw up blood because sometimes Dorman parts are not that great. Now, I've used a lot of them, and I've found that from my experience, and I remember so, so, so far back when the shit they made used to just be called help. You went to a help aisle in your parts store, and they had all kinds of dumb shit that you needed to fix your car. You know, maybe a set of exhaust manifold studs or a a fucking hatch strap for a Volkswagen Rabbit Mark I. They had all kinds of dumb stuff like that. And yeah, you can go to the dealer and get it, but if you got it from help slash doorman later on, it was a lot cheaper. And in amount of cases, it did the job just fine. Okay, now they expanded quite a bit, and some of their some of their stuff is really good, and some of their stuff is not so good. And you uh you guys all know that. And so if you want your shit fixed absolutely 100% properly, you're gonna want to go OEM. Now, I myself personally, and and and that's a that's like a professional point of view, okay. Personally, I'll use whatever the fuck I can get my hands on. And if I get my hands on it and I don't like the quality of it, I won't put it on. I don't want to have to do it again. And I have had cases where I've bought stuff that was dormant stuff or cardone rebuilt stuff or whatever, uh, because I use rock auto an awful lot, and that's all you're gonna get from them is uh aftermarket parts. And I have had extra I've had tremendous luck with a lot of the parts I've gotten from them. Every once in a while I get a bum, a bum part, and every once in a while one of them goes bad. I had uh it wasn't that long ago, well, probably actually honestly, it was about eight years ago. I had replaced a water pump on one of my little cars, and I had gotten a Gates pump, which had a lifetime warranty on it, and that's what I look for a lot of times. And this pump failed, it failed massively too, by the way. It was kind of kind of nuts. And so I got they gave me another one, and I put that in, and that's been working perfectly for the last eight years. But the one that was on there that I it probably had been on there, oh, how long have I had that car? By that time, I'd only had that car six, seven years. So and I put that, so I probably had that pump for five years, and I put a hell of a lot of miles on that car. I can't complain really, but that pump went bad, caused all the coolant to leak out, and I couldn't go very far. And I got it, I got it replaced, I got it repaired, and it's all good, and they took care of it. But that's an aftermarket part, not OEM, it was a lot less expensive, and that's one of those things that I know as a as a mechanic that I have to deal with. Now, if Slate decides they want to make the parts for their cars reasonable, which would be fucking fabulous if you're gonna buy one and they say, hey, we're gonna make the parts you know inexpensive or at least affordable, and we're not gonna mark the shit up out of them, that would be a change of pace. Okay. But as far as uh, you know, having somebody make an OEM part or an aftermarket part, the OEM is always gonna be better, even if it's a slate, even if it's an Audi, even if it's a Toyota. Here's what it says here ultimately, if Slate proves that an open, decentralized service model sells cars and keeps customers happy, the rest of the industry will be forced to transition from a model of forced retention, locking you into the dealership, to earned retention, competing on convenience, speed, and transparency. Folks, I just want to kind of take that last statement and kind of flip it on its side. I don't think that customers nowadays feel like they have forced retention. There's always somebody else out there who can fix your shit. You guys, all you guys are smart enough at whatever shop you work at to work on the shit that I work on. Maybe there's some crazy stuff out there that I have to know or that I have to do that you either wouldn't want to do or couldn't do, but there isn't a real lot of it. The automobile has been pretty much the same for about 125 years now. There's wheels, there's a steering wheel, there's seats, there's seat belts, there's an engine of some sort in an electric car, there's a motor, there's batteries. Batteries are the same, no matter what the fuck kind of battery it is. You have positive, you have negative. You stack them up, you hook them up in series, you get quite a bit of voltage. You hook them up in parallel, you get a lot of amperage. There's nothing that that sets these things really so far apart from each other that you can't just say, yeah, it's it's personal transportation, it gets me back and forth. Okay. Earned retention is something that you all have a stake in. And this is why I I have a tendency to beat you guys up about the videos, because that's going to help you earn retention. It's going to help you impress your customers with your knowledge and what they need and showing them and what they need and what they don't need and how it looks and why it matters. And if their tires are good, they're good. If they're bad, this is why you need them. This is how much they are. That's how you go from a forced retention where they feel like they have to come to you to an earned retention where they want to come to you. And I don't think Slate really is going to invent that. They may, they may do it better than anybody else does, but I don't believe they haven't reinvented the wheel here. Now, the next question I asked them, because that was the end of the first one. The first question was if the service solution for Slate is successful, what are other manufacturers going to do? Uh, that they really didn't answer that question now, did they? Because I believe that uh manufacturers may have to go to a slate type setup where instead of having franchise dealers that have technicians that they treat poorly, by the way, and parts departments to uh independent repair shops. I think honestly, what could happen, I talked about this last week a little bit, is that let's just say you as a person are, you know, pick a brand, we'll call it Mercedes-Benz this time. Let's say you're a Mercedes-Benz master technician, you do the job correctly, you do the job thoroughly, you know, everything that has to be done, you do it right all the time. What if instead of working for a goddamn dealer who's going to give you maybe 20, 21% of all the money that they make off of your fucking labor, and you decide to open your own shop? What if Mercedes-Benz called you up and said, Hey, you know, we know you do a good job. Can we send you some warranty work? You'd be like, uh fuck yeah. Because they probably pay, and then I mean you know, we talked about it last week too, they probably pay a good chunk of money to your dealer for warranty work, and your dealer keeps 75% of it. What if they could give you 25% more, spend 50% less, and get the same fucking results? Because guess what? The same fucking guy is doing the job. Holy shit, snacks. You see where they're headed here? This is and this is slate flipping everything on its roof. This is they're fucking flipping it over and they're setting it on fire and they're fucking doing a black magic dance and sticking pins into a voodoo doll. They're gonna change this. This could conceivably change everything like that. People would bring you the cars either on a flatbed or drive them to you. You'd fix them and they'd come and get them, run them through a car wash and get them back to the customer. And they could save a lot of fucking money because they don't have to pay any money to the dealer. And you get to stay home and help raise the kids, put them on a school bus, maybe make lunch, maybe do laundry while you're waiting for something to program. Imagine how how beautiful your life could be if you could do your job from home. How nuts would that be? That's one of the things that that they're really that Slate's really trying to do here. The next question is the next question I put to Slate was how does Slate intend to control the quality of the repairs performed by these independent shops? It says here, to control the quality of repairs across a decentralized independent service network, Slate is bypassing the traditional factory dealership model and using a specialized strategy built on structured certification tiers, open access technical education, and standardized diagnostic infrastructure. What that means is they're going to certify you to work on their cars. All the information is going to be available, and you can learn how to you can learn every anything you need to learn. The technical education is going to be there and it'll be available for you to fucking use it. And then there will be a standardized diagnostic infrastructure. And then what I went on to say, this was I thought this was really cool. Are we there just yet? Uh no, we're not there yet. Let me uh let me get through this real quick. Here's what it says here after that. Rather than letting any shop work on any part of the vehicle, Slate manages quality control through several specific mechanisms. Number one, a three-tiered service structure, and this is through V, it says via RepairPal. Slate is partnered with RepairPal to utilize their existing network of independent shops, but they strictly control who can perform what types of work by breaking down by breaking service down to three distinct tiers. Number one, high voltage slash complex tier, obviously the top-of-the-line stuff, complex high voltage repairs, battery work, and advanced powertrain diagnostics are going to be heavily restricted. Only a smaller subset of the repair pal shops that possess specific EV specific credentials and have completed slates full factory certification program are allowed to perform these repairs. So they have a mechanism in place to determine if you can actually perform these repairs. But you know what? If you're already EV certified for some other brand, you could probably slide through this certification program that they have pretty easy, I would think. Okay. Now, you and I know that EVs have high voltage batteries and other high voltage components in them, such as the electric uh air conditioning compressors and uh some sort of uh smart electronics that uh keeps you from zorching yourself and uh other other uh electronics that monitor everything and how much voltage is available and how to charge it and where to. Um, if you're familiar with all of these things, there I don't feel like there's gonna be any reason why you couldn't get Slate's full factory certification. Okay, and and that could be as an individual and that could be as a shop. I'm not sure what the parameters are. I'd have to look into that a little farther. Okay. Then the next tier that they have is uh tier two, low voltage, general maintenance tier, standard mechanical items, low voltage uh electrical systems, and minor component replacements are open to a broader pool of shops. So some shops will just do easy stuff, and then there's a wear and tear wear items and accessory tier, basic wear items, brakes, tires, cabin filters, and bolt-on accessory installations require the lowest level of restriction as the truck is designed from the ground up for easy component swapping. Yeah. Uh standardized. This is this is going to talk about the training to ensure technicians know how to handle the vehicle correctly. Slate uses Slate University, a centralized, free, online tutorial hub and video library. This platform is designed to serve both DIY owners and independent technicians simultaneously. So repair instructions will be the same for Joe Blow as it is for Joe Blow's automotive. It provides identical step-by-step written instructions, wiring diagrams, and high definition, high-definition how-to videos for every repair and factory modifications. And then it says here, such as their SUV conversion kits. Uh, I don't know. I think probably, I mean, by the looks of it, you might need one or two heavy hitters to lift up the SUV conversion kit. Uh, what do you want? What do you want to call them? The back shell. They've got two shells, one's chopped off a little bit like a almost like a gremlin, and the other one's straight back, almost like a Bronco or a blazer would be. Uh, and all you'd need to really do is just have somebody help you lift the fucking thing on there and then drive in a few bolts. I mean, I'm guessing, but it doesn't seem that difficult to me. And it's probably made out of fiberglass, and there's seals on it, and the seals probably go bad, and you'll have to replace them every once in a while. And you know, with something like that, if the vehicle twists, you're you maybe get some moisture in it at some point. Who knows uh what the build quality is gonna be? I don't know. I'd have to drive it for a little while before I could even begin to say anything about that. Uh, here's the part that I was interested in. A major point of failure in independent repair quality is technicians using generic or outdated scan tools that can't read proprietary manufacturer codes. Yeah, monkey. There's a heck of a lot of that shit going on. Slate eliminates this by using an open source OBD2 data port. They do not lock vehicle data or bidirectional controls behind a proprietary high-cost software gateway. In other words, it says here that you're going to be able to use your autel on it, your snap-on scanner on it, and you're going to have access to everything. They do not lock vehicle data or bidirectional controls behind a proprietary high-cost software gateway. They're not hiding the information from you that you need to fix the car. Let that sink in. Okay, because if you're working in an independent, you know right now that if you have some of that proprietary high-cost software that you need to fix some of the cars that you fix, that shit costs a lot of fucking money. A lot. And hit or miss as to whether it's worth it. You'd have to work on an awful lot of those cars. And I'm no, I'm not uh privy to the uh amount of money that they make off of that, but I would imagine they make a lot. I'm guessing, of course. Warranty service restrictions. Here's what it says here. While any shop can theoretically use the open source data to fix a slate truck, warranty work is strictly locked down. Okay, cool. I would expect that, really, because when you're asking a car company to pay for the repairs to their car, they're not just gonna write you a blank check, okay? It's not gonna happen. I don't give a fuck who you work for, it's just not the way it works. Only independent shops that have completed slate's full certification process and meet their tooling requirements are authorized to perform warranty repairs and receive reimbursement from the OEM. This financial leverage ensures that the shops wanting steady fleet or warranty business must maintain slate's exact service standards. Okay, now uh in their own words, Slate said that if you wanted to fix your car and it was a warranty type of a situation that they would send you the part. I didn't ask about that, okay. Uh, and I probably I should have, and maybe I'll cover that a little later. But this is a pretty interesting thing that we have going on here. So to see a breakdown of how the vehicle's physical engineering supports this open source repair model, you can watch a video. Okay, so I would suggest to you that you go into uh whatever AI you might have on whatever browser you have and ask it some questions about Slate and have them bring up this selectable looks like it's a video overview, Slate EV fleet customization and design overview, which highlights how the truck's modular design is intentionally simplified for field technicians and straightforward fleet servicing. Uh, I I think this thing is gonna be pretty cool. I think it's gonna be popular again. I'm not uh I'm not no Stradamas here. I I can't predict the future. I would love it massively as an American car company if it succeeded beyond its wildest dreams. I would also love it if the service model that they have put into place works, it will change things for the rest of us. It will have to. There's no way you could ignore somebody who is saving themselves hundreds of hundreds of thousands of dollars by using people that they're not tied to, by not having franchisees fix them. They're gonna have more reasonable repair costs, more reasonable warranty costs than everybody else out there. Just think it's a real game changer. And I I I kind of I honestly I can't wait to see how it goes. And like I said last week, uh for those of you out there who might be listening to this, if you're gonna be working on these things, I beg you to do, I beg you to do the best job possible and to help work through all of the problems that are going to arise, whether it's with the truck, whether it's with the people who own them, whether it's with with the people who build them, whether it's with the warranty department, or what kind of or any kind of a technical uh hotline they might have. I just need for all of you people to mesh, to work together, and to make this look as good as possible so that other people can glom onto this idea and do it themselves as well. Okay, because like I said, uh and and I I hate to keep going on and on and on about this. Uh this, you know, obviously I wanted to kind of uh close this up a little bit here. If this if this model works, it could change the model for everybody, and it will it will allow us to earn more because people who are earning our money now and aren't doing anything will be cut out of the out of the plan. They'll be out of the picture. That they're gonna help us basically murder the middleman, and I'm all fucking for that. I'm all for that. I uh the less people who get their hands on the money that I earn, the better. So uh let me just wrap this one up here. Uh this thing is gonna be a game changer, there's no question about it. How much it's gonna change the game, uh, how little it's gonna change the game, when it's gonna change the game, none of that. Uh, I can't tell you any of that. All I can do is uh wait it out like the rest of you and see what happens. There are gonna be problems. Uh are they savvy enough to fix those problems? I think that if they if they rely on some of you out there, some of the the honest to god wrench twisting bastards out there in Grease the Wheels Nation to fix some of the problems that they're gonna have, they'll be alright because you guys are smart motherfuckers. You're smart because you listen to Uncle Jimmy. No, you're smart. I know you're smart. I know there's a lot of smart guys out there, and uh, I'm kind of hoping that everybody gets their due because of this, okay? All right, so that's enough for me. Uh, I want to sign off and just uh uh wish you all a happy 4th of July if you haven't, you know. I mean, it's it was a couple days ago. So, but man, listen, just real quick before I bug out, all these people visiting us from around the world to watch these uh World Cup soccer slash football matches, they're finding out that they love America. And it should remind each one of us as Americans that we should love America. Yeah, we got problems, things are wrong, some people are bitchy as hell, but this is a great fucking place. It's 250 years old, and let's hope for another 250 years, and uh let's let's get along and get it done. All right, and I'm gonna get off now by saying.