Sandy Munro vs 2021 Electric Car Tech

it's that time again when cindy monroe comes on this channel and blows my mind about something but this time around we're gonna talk not about one but five different topics five different electric car technologies in 2021 and we're gonna start right now [Music] welcome to e4 electric your number one source of electric car scoop if you are interested in all of my conversations with sandy monroe previous and upcoming that's a good reason to hit that subscribe button and the bell notification icon so you don't miss anything moving forward alright so we're going to talk about five different topics five different electric car technologies some are cutting edge that are just getting on the market this year and some have been around for a while but i believe may need some refinement so it would be interesting to see what sandy thinks about those but before that a quick reminder that this video and this channel is sponsored by xbong motors check out the p7 a beautiful electric sedan i just got to enjoy myself the other week it is equipped with x pilot 3.0 self-driving tech with navigation guided autonomous driving feature and even some cool games my full review is already posted check that out and also check out the xbox motors on facebook both links are down below hey cindy how are you uh first of all congratulations on that little thing that's hanging behind you the youtube 100 000 subscribers play button congratulations well thank you so much um we uh we were very happy we could get that um and between that and the uh two million of people that have come to have a look at the uh elon musk interview i mean we couldn't be happier with uh with youtube so we're we're we're golden right now we're very happy about things going on all right well so today we're going kind of uh we're going to do a a lightning round i'm going to throw some topics at you and we will uh we'll talk about them um so and i wanted to start with something that i already know you're not going to agree with me most people don't but i want to talk about the battery swap as you know um you know neo in in in china has a 150 plus stations there to swap batteries it is technically not technically it is the fastest way to refill your battery um ample here in san francisco just unveiled their technology which is a little different um i know you're not really a big fan so tell me where am i going wrong where i'm thinking hey i can lose any size of a battery i can change it takes me less than five minutes to to get a brand new fully charged battery where am i going wrong okay so i traveled all the way across the united states twice and i didn't need a battery swap and i never spent much more than about 15 or 20 minutes ever and most of the time when i jumped out of the car i needed to hit the restroom i needed to buy a hot dog and i needed to get back into the car in 10 15 minutes i was up that 80 percent at 80 percent that's good for uh that's good for batteries they they don't like to be drained and they don't like to they don't like to be charged to the max so i don't see any reason for that i also have a real problem an even bigger problem with connectors connectors are the number one reason why electronic stuff fails so why would i want to pull out a battery which is means i'm going to have to disconnect the connector and then put it back in and how long before that connector fails my battery is not going to fail but my connectors will fail they absolutely don't in fact the number one rule for uh for electronics is attach it don't touch it again and and to me battery swapping is nothing more than uh hey i got an idea how do i screw up my car so i'm not going to i'm not going to be on the on the side of battery swap there's another thing too i uh i i have i may have mentioned this before but i i have a barbecue right and my barbecue requires a propane tank i had a brand new propane tank and um and i went in and i said oh you can swap it right here oh no kidding so i bring my brand new prop and i look down and he's going to give me this rusted out piece of junk nope that's all right i'll go and have it filled up over here i want mine to stay mine i'm not interested in sharing battery packs with anybody so i'm not a fan i will never be a fan i think it's goofy and i the only swapping is if we start talking about hydrogen and even then i don't know at the end of the day there's some solid state battery or sorry solid state um hydrogen that we can utilize uh that i i'm really kind of interested in where i wouldn't have any of any tanks and i wouldn't really be carrying raw hydrogen i'm carrying discs that i can i can extract from i like that idea i'm not really a big fan of battery swap sorry next crash our players okay all right now i do have to say that i think there are quite a few other you know i i understand the mechanics obviously anything that's going to be swapped out and bolted down every time is going to go wrong but i'm just thinking from a consumer perspective right uh because like one of the biggest things that i like about is that you know i'm dragging this huge let's say 80 kilowatt hour battery with me when i only need 20 miles out of my car most of the time uh and i would prefer not to have i i only need 20 kilowatt hour battery most of the time but when i do want to go across the country when i'm brave enough you know i i will go and swap it out to 100 or 150 kilowatt hour battery so as a consumer i like that you know um all right all right well i'll let you respond if you want to uh just or you could just laugh at me okay that's fine no no i i'm not laughing at you i'm laughing with you all right i i i will move on to the next topic because i think next topic is actually fun so um you know we've kind of all kind of got to know this new company called arrival i know they're not the sexiest company out there they make buses and in vance though they already have a 10 000 van order from ups kind of reminds me of the review on amazon deal but the way they make their vans and buses is very unique right they they can convert a warehouse with a 50 million dollar budget um and and turn out a thousand buses or ten thousand vans uh in in a in a year because they don't use paint their paint is built in baked into their panels they don't use welding they use you know adhesives and fasteners and bolts um and they they you know they go they're going public so it looks like it's it's going to be successful what are your thoughts on uh you know micro factory specifically for arrival but just generally as a concept well a long long time ago when henry ford uh the first was running around he had what he called cottage factories and those cottage factories were built so that he didn't have to do as much shipping as what everybody else did so what he did was um he invented the kd the knock down and so the knock down in fact he would have things that were stamped and painted and whatnot and then they would go to little boroughs or little towns and in there they would have a um a self-sufficient like maybe an old um an old grist mill that would be using uh water and uh and he would turn that into um into a like a hydro hydro as in water generating plant and then that would have enough power for the people inside to do what they needed to do in order to put a small car or a truck or something or a tractor together so you ship the parts and then somebody else puts them together in a different part of the world and they were they were kind of popular and they did the trick in the olden days now fast forward to about maybe 10 years ago another guy came up with a good idea he decided that south america could use some manufacturing so what he did was he created a vehicle and with about a 50 million dollar investment he would ship you the parts and then you would put it together and he sold them to different areas inside of um inside of argentina and chile and um peru different different places i'm not sure maybe columbia anyway it was a good idea the only unfortunate part was that um it wound up costing a little more money than what everybody thought um you're still shipping a bunch of bits and pieces but sometimes the all the pieces weren't there and slowed things down then you had to go and train the the people to put them together properly i mean there is these things aren't intuitive you don't just start picking stuff up and putting it in place now if this guy does decide to do um to do this kind of work then what you need to do is you need to have a good strategy a strategy that's going to um going to allow you to be successful and with that um there's a um there's a a video that we made a while ago about um a light source that that can go down and identify the part identify the tool identify um where the the parts supposed to go and why not and i actually put together something very complicated the uh i put together the um we call that thing the electronics bay for the tesla model y and um and it was it was brilliantly easy with that with that system so if you're going to do that i would suggest that that's one of the things that you're going to have to invest in that type of that type of assembly aid as far as having the parts pre painted and stuff like that it's too bad he just didn't go with maybe any a product that was plastic and and came in in color i i'm not a fan of paint as as you probably know or chrome or any of that other stuff so it would be great if someone could just um move that into plastic now when you move to a plastic panel you can make snap fits that that are you know very rugged a one-way snap fit is a good idea and if you wanted to go one step further well then you could make it a one-way snap fit and and you'd have adhesive that as you put it together it would burst a little capsule and boom now it's going to glue itself together over time that way that works really really well for me i know that you can do this kind of a job i'm not sure that not really 100 sure that you'll be able to make as much money at it as what you think but um i mean what's old is new again let's let's see what happens i know that there will be some some downsides but uh i'm i'm big on trying trying new things so let's see what and and by the way the one good thing is it puts people to to work in in certain areas so that was one part of their strategy they're saying you know if you have a big factory you have to hire so many workers it's hard to find qualified workers in one area but they only need about two or three hundred of them and it's much easier to find really good talent yeah and and that's the the whole reasoning behind um henry ford the first what he did was he wanted those uh those factories because he felt that um that he diversifying the product would basically make it easier and better for the company in that one strike won't shut everything down and um and the second thing was that um people people that build the product would be more likely to buy the product and tell their friends to buy the product so there's a there's a there's a bunch of add-on effects there that that makes it potentially anyway a good idea all right now let's move on to the next one and i don't think a lot of people think of the next item as a technology and i'm talking about the front the front trunk right but nevertheless uh you know there are some cars that are coming out even now like an id4 which i'm thinking about getting actually that somehow couldn't figure out how to get the franc or you know the the new volvos they have a tiny little almost lunchbox um you know talk a little bit about how easy or difficult it is to have a frunk uh for the car because obviously you have to still have air conditioning and other things secondly there there is a motor sometimes up there as well for the two or three uh motor vehicles and also there's safety and you know that's a very important part of the car to be safe with the crumble zones and and so forth uh tell me a little bit about why some you know cars have huge trunks like lucid and tesla and some don't at all what's what's involved the only thing that's really involved is the engineering's profit and well you um when you design a car the everything is it's always the same it's always about um it's always about trade-offs i want this i'd like that something has to suffer over here so when you do these trade-offs uh the frunk is one of those areas of the car where you're going to say do i want this or do i want that do i want my my air conditioning system to be up there do i want to have all my all my electronics in one area and and quite frankly the the frunk is a nice to have it isn't i have to have it um so that's that's kind of how it would work but for me i uh kind of like the tesla model three frunk um it um uh it is handy when corey and i went across the across the states it made things quite quite easy for us to have the frunk as uh as uh the the quick access if you like to to uh carry product or because we we came prepared to go into cold weather testing it didn't happen but we came prepared and so that that takes up a lot of um luggage for that kind of thing um so to me the frunk is a good idea we actually have a product on the floor right now that we're working on and what we're trying to do is get smaller inverters because it's got wheel motors and we want to have smaller inverters so that we can have a front that's of some size if we can do that and put them in the correct spot then we can have a bigger area for for storage and people love storage in any kind of a vehicle whether it's ice or ev or what have you even aircraft they they want as much storage as they can get so i think it's a good idea to try and do it but everything's uh everything's based on making making choices does it at all jeopardize the safety obviously you know that's a pretty important part no no safety is designed in you don't um it's not like a guess so when you do the analysis on the vehicle you do something called cae computer-aided engineering and when you do that your simulation in um well in almost every material you can think of we have a modulus and we know how much it's going to crush and we know what it's going to look like even before you run it into a barrier or have a barrier run into you so um that that has nothing to do with safety it's all in the hands of the engineer all of it all right now next i want to talk about what i think is the most exciting technology in the last 10 years for me as a consumer and i'm talking about head-up displays especially now that they're you know some of them are coming out with augmented reality which is just you know where stuff just appears in front of your eyes now obviously there's a lot of software involved though i'm not really sure how much i feel like it's still pretty simple but as far as hardware to me it looks like your cell phone projection thing that that people do like when they watch movies on on the wall um am i wrong that head-up displays are more complicated because i don't see that many cars i mean tesla doesn't even have one uh i think lucid may not have one are they complicated they're not complicated but but what turns into a problem is being able to see them um because the if you have the military ones the one that's like an f-35 or f-22 or something like that all pilots want to have heads-up huds and um and so um and they're used to them and they're made they're made of exotic materials so that no matter whether it's bright sunshine or dark you're going to be able to see what's going on and they also have augmented reality uh they want to let you know where your bogey is and things like that so um they're not really difficult but they are kind of expensive and they do have issues especially in a car where you're trying to save money or reduce the cost of things and and when you're doing that a hud turns into a luxury do i really need this is this going to be something that that a customer is going to be willing to pay the extra money for and things like that um but as far as as far as complexity and why not no it's not a really big deal it's uh it's just another projector now when we first got a hold of the model 3 the first model three i said why did they just go to a heads up display and then we did a cost analysis and found out that the screen is much much cheaper and people will like it better and you can see it better so we didn't we never made a video on that it's tough when you uh when you and by the way it's only going to cost you know x more money for something that's kind of inferior but if we can go to something that's uh a little closer to what we would find on an f f-22 or an f-35 or an f-16 even then f-18 i should say then then we'll look actually the f-16 has its own hud system the israelis by f-16s like there's no tomorrow and they they develop their own uh hud system which is uh quite good i have one order myself actually it's just i gotta get the things figured out with my credit union otherwise it's it's gonna be great yeah all right so am i understanding you correctly head up display is actually more more expensive than having a regular flat screen display yes what's what's making it so expensive they're just a projector yeah the the bits and pieces that that go into the projection um there's a gazillion screens made huds are in the thousands um so you're looking at you're just looking at economy at scale so that's kind of like what's happening here all right let's move on to the next one and i know this one you can probably talk to you know about for a while and it's been kind of controversial for i'm not really sure for for whatever reason but let's talk about lidar as it's used for self-driving i'm sure yes i know but listen i just i we all go we all want to go home at the end of the day so we can you know we can but uh you know so so uh x-pawn motors one of our sponsors of course i have to mention that you know they're just about to unveil the car they'll have a a a lidar and it's going to be in production obviously uh companies like waymo and pretty much everybody else uh are using them for their self-driving tech that they're developing um tesla you know elon said we don't need that as a matter of fact he tweeted you know last month saying um you know we're not even gonna use radars forget about lidars um what's your you know and there are two things of course right one is it necessary and two are the prices coming down because you know luminar is ready to sell them 400 500 which i think is pretty reasonable what are your thoughts on that my thoughts are that that's a technology that will be remembered as a footnote in history i i think that that fleer dark matter technology a colorized flare with dark mantle dark dark dark energy technology is probably going to take its place and that's why elon musk is saying that and the reason for that is because we do work in the auto industry in the aircraft industry and blah blah other kind of but we also do work for the department of defense and and um fliers forward-looking infrared are kind of popular because that's what we put on bombs smart bullets believe it or not we have bullets that guide themselves in the u.s we have all kinds of cool things that are out there and they have to be able to hit a target and they have to be able to hit the target whether it's raining or snowing or foggy or anything else and forward-looking infrared is kind of what is the popular choice now everybody has seen night vision right you see things and you see this fuzzy orangish or reddish image and and you say ah that's that's forward-looking or that's infrared vision systems but it's not really really what people are working on is um is uh dark energy so everything even things that go down to absolute zero have some energy in them and that energy can be tapped and you can tap that energy and and there's some very cool technology out there that's taking it and taking it from just this reddish blurry image and turning into crystal clear color that's what i want because flir is 3d i can i can make that work really really well i think lidar um i've seen i've seen images of lidar from the people that we work with the defense contractors and it um uh i don't know what the right words would be but if you had a disco ball or whatever that's what your car looks like and so the government ain't going to buy that i don't think anybody in the defense department wants to have anything that looks like that stuck too stuck to the stuck to any kind of a military vehicle so they want something that's going to be accurate they want something that won't give a big signature and they're willing to spend a lot of money to get that so that's where that's where dark energy fliers are are taking over and i believe that they'll be in the market in about a couple years something like that and they'll be cheaper than the 500 so to me everybody keeps telling me oh light or lighter and i'm keep saying no no no i don't want it i don't think it's i think it's goofy and i don't uh sorry so you're saying neither lighter and maybe no radar is gonna be on self-driving cars in the future you're talking about the front-facing infrared uh technology yes wow i i i've got to tell you like this is the first time i'm even finding out that it kind of exists and can be used in cars so we'll we'll we'll see i mean if you're right i mean i've i i if i'm right oh my god if i'm right i'm just saying like you know if i if if people invest into stock that that would be good inside that's you know but okay all right that's awesome yeah well thanks once again for uh you know i have to say every time we we talk and i have to go and do some soul searching and maybe some therapy because like you know like for example like the battery swap right like i i think this is the best ever like i'm so excited about our swap and you just like you just crushed my soul so all right um i didn't mean to crush i didn't mean to crush you but at the end of the day i still like you even if you do like battery swap i uh i think that it's uh it's never going to happen for any length of time there's going to be a lot of things that are going to happen for a very short period of time like hevs i i i was talking to a bunch of reporters this morning and he said well what about hevs and i said they're going to be people five years from now that are going to work why did i do that what was the rationale what was the what possible what was i thinking and and actually i'll tell you one other thing um i said that what people need to do if they're going to try and figure out what the future is go and ask a 15 year old kid go ask him what do you want what do you want in life and and quite frankly he's going to come back with answers that um that are going to astound and amaze all the marketing people right now they're going to be choking on shrimp and champagne because it's going to be different than what they thought and i'm telling you battery swapping no kid is going to want to do that and hevs nobody no kid is going to want to have that they're going to have a really fast electric car that they can impress their girlfriend with and they only want two seats that's it so great that's what it's going to be in five years our future is in hands of 15 year olds i'm i'm even more depressed now so i'll met on that note before yeah on that note i want to thank you once again congratulations on the on the success of your youtube channel uh thank you uh and uh i will uh i can't wait uh to see how you're gonna depress me the next time around i'm here for you all right i appreciate it and of course don't forget to subscribe to sandy's channel i put the link to it down below in the description of this video alright looking forward to all of your comments other than that see you guys next time and remember to stay charged you

Channel: E for Electric

Views: 66,373

Keywords: sandy munro, sandy munro tesla, sandy munro interview, electric vehicles 2021, electric cars 2021, electric car tech, electric car tech 2021, battery swap, frunk, munro live, e for electric

Id: vbaqrI-xDvo

Length: 27min 10sec (1630 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 22 2021