Unscripted with Wheelsboy (ft: Ethan Robertson)

good afternoon everybody uh welcome to another video i'm here with ethan from wheels boy he's been kind enough to meet with me here at the beautiful molar villa in the french concession of shanghai thank you for joining me sir it's good fun to meet you man it is a pleasure to meet you thank you for having me yeah so uh what i wanted to do is just kind of chat with you and find out what you're all about if you don't know wheels boy his channel deals specifically with the chinese auto market and you know my channel i've been talking about that a lot i'm a big fan of yours by the way so yeah i mean your knowledge base and you know about the technology about chinese cars and everything is fascinating i watch it and i learn so much and then it's funny i'll tell you this you did a video on the jili jiaji yes and uh a week a week later i did a video on the jeep really yeah and i haven't released it because it's compared to yours but i actually learned so much from your video and i found myself regurgitating the exact same words that you were using in your videos like okay this is wrong i can't do this well no i'm that's that's very nice of you to say that's kind of what when i started doing this i was almost afraid that was what was going to happen to me because i have been on watching youtube videos of cars since like 2009. yeah and to whenever i got in front of the camera i'm like who am i because you don't know who you are in front of a camera until you actually start and so i'm like am i going to suddenly start talking like matt farah from the smoking tire or something or am i going to try and do like a jeremy clarkson impressions like this quirks and features i i swear if you go to the comments section of my videos that is one of the most commonly said things it's like you're the next doug that would be super nice we have again a very short term guest we appreciate him appearing have a good day just goes to show you how an independent blogger uh can make youtube videos and become wildly successful it's it's all about finding the niche to finish my previous thought because i do want to talk about niches but yeah i know the two people it's doug demero and then logic the rapper i don't know if you know about logic i've heard of logic uh who knows the white rapper um i do get compared quite a bit to logic people are like yo i didn't know logic was reviewing cards and i had to go and look it up and they're not they're not that off i mean honestly when i wear my glasses it's we're both vanilla looking white guys so where are you from so i'm from north carolina okay and uh how long you've been in uh china i've been in china six and a half years now from 2014 until now okay and you went to school out here is that right correct first time i came to china was in 2013 when i was still doing my undergraduate uh in north carolina i did a master's degree in luhan university and that took that was four years so a year of continued chinese language study three years of the degree itself okay all right that was taught he was international relations but it was taught so your chinese is really good it's okay it's okay everyone's so humbly yes it's a fascinating language fascinating culture so i'll tell you what when i was in high school i tried to learn spanish and there's nothing against spanish it's a beautiful language i just couldn't get into it and espanol that was a weird kid who was like reading the economist when he was you know like 13 years old your mom gets a haircut right there's a bunch of magazines if there wasn't a car magazine that's what i was gonna go for okay and so when you're reading about these kinds of things politics and economics china's gonna come up sure even in 2006 2007 and so i decided then i was gonna well once i started reading books and stuff about it i decided i should try and learn chinese and my my parents were very supportive of that my dad always said trying to figure out some skill you have that can separate you and when you saw how bad i was in spanish he was like maybe try chinese okay because that's not something you normally hear you know that's you know if you're that bad at spanish maybe try the hardest language let's get back to the car thing here because okay we were talking about niches and this is a very interesting thing and this is something we talked a little bit about before which is that there are so few people talking about the chinese car market in english in china very very cute in 2019 like it was a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend kind of thing i was having lunch with him and he said hey you know your chinese is pretty good i have a couple of chinese friends that are automotive like media that are looking for a foreigner to do car reviews in chinese and i said i was born for this let's go okay so you started doing chinese car videos in chinese correct on the chinese platforms correct okay and so that's where i got my start and it was it was a huge gift to me because when we started to do english language videos almost a year after that i'd already done you know more than a dozen videos at that point and so i had i was comfortable in front of a camera you had that camera presence right now yeah i mean whatever whatever camera presence i have but it was um i was comfortable i had kind of somewhat found a voice and so being able to do these reviews in english was almost like like you random okay you just ran half of a marathon in a weighted vest now take that off and run the rest it was it was like i felt supercharged okay yeah yeah because all of a sudden i could express myself exactly how i wanted to unless i messed up the script which you know i sometimes do but i notice you keep some of those imperfections in your videos sometimes too yeah which is great i think it's wonderful yeah we have what is called a full review which is something where i have a vehicle that i have maybe a week to drive around to take notes to absorb my and really think about how i feel about it and then put out a video that's a scripted video but it turns out when you point a camera at me and you don't give me a script and you have me talk about a car i cannot shut up okay so our quick reviews were 14 minutes well then you're a producer's dream man because i'm serious the producers no script and you're going to keep talking freaking go for it create all the content and yeah yeah it's it's it's a dream to have enough content to work with um it's just trying to sift through all of it yeah what do your friends think about that man they got you can't shut them up about cars you got performances well yeah i mean everybody everybody that uh everybody that knows me knows that if you're walking on the street with me i'm going to interrupt you at some point in the middle of like you talking or me talking just like hey did you see that thing that drove by that you probably as a friend my friend do not care about but i'm going to talk to you about for a full five minutes yeah a funny fact you know but yeah and on and on and growing up that's exactly what i would do riding in the car with my mom for example and you know it must have been half a dozen times she would turn to me and literally say like what are you gonna do with this you know like we're driving and i say like that's a mercedes-benz sl i mean that's that's like whatever rl or whatever something something generation did my mom is she's like what are you gonna use this for why are you filling your brain with all this stuff and and finally i can go to my mother and be like look mom okay i'm doing something mom what was the first car you reviewed so our very first car when we first started out we did what so many automotive channels do which is we did the the cheapest and easiest thing um lowest investment thing we could which is that we happen to have a secondhand car dealership near our office and so we went over to the boss and we were like hey will you let this white guy drive your car and talk about it and then we'll just mention the fact that we got it if somebody wants to buy it it's over at your dealership and he said of course sure very nice guy free marketing exactly and and so the very first car we drove was it was a 2004 lincoln town car uh okay was it l series s series you know was it the it was like was it a former like airport kind of you know oh no town car i think i think it was a private owner but like because it was imported from the us yeah yeah they didn't have the no it doesn't like not that generation yeah on uh on this lincoln town car we have a han gong rotating group of guests that's okay they're a little distracted and so it's china right it is but it was not edit no i'm not editing it i'm keeping that in man totally keeping that in mind yeah so this is the this is where we do vlogs anyways yeah well i just it was it was a lincoln town car and for me it was it was awesome because was it black no sadly well color was it was like a champagne the other very classic my grandfather growing up had a crown victoria a forecast victoria which is the same car right it's just different badges and a little different interior yeah the cop car um and yeah well he would tell stories about getting people thinking that he was a cop for sure but um and so it was awesome because it was like it was like going back in the time machine and being in my my grandfather's crown vic from 2003 with the phone in it and being like wow i would have been like or 13 at the time and i was just just like great it's just the coolest thing i've ever seen one of the things that sets our channel apart is we do car to car filming so i saw that yeah yeah we have a volkswagen polo that we got literally just to do like that's the work car just a super cheap look so i can pull up a bunch of gopro mounts on all over it's even better even better my that when we when you film let's see if you're getting footage of the front of a car for us that means that my videographer is in the back seat with a hatch open with his like gimbal right like this over the back seat holding it for you know 25 minutes at a time he's a boss what do you drive i drive a havel h6 yo you have an h6 yeah i love it it's a stick with a stick it's a it's a 2012 oh shoot and i bought it second hand um it's currently got about 130 000 kilometers on it nice and um i bought it just needed a new clutch bearing and threw that in there new tires new brakes everything everything runs like you actually know how to work on cars right uh not so much no i mean i i can thank god that's fine i probably know you do i'm not a big um no i'm not i don't i don't turn wrenches or anything like that you know i just there's the other great thing about owning a car in china is that the maintenance costs oh yeah are night and day compared to that in america i did a video um uh i was a chinese language video there's a lot of videos i do on like um going right for chinese audiences will be like what's the difference between chinese car market u.s car market or chinese american car culture and american car culture and one of the ones i did was how much does it cost to maintain a car great content yes and it's yeah it's definitely some of the most popular stuff but the example i gave was so the average like hour labor costs in china let's say it's 100 rmb is it is it pretty good it could be less than that it's not an 80 yeah right what city you're in yeah yes and so whereas what i did is i actually got my my brother is a technician at a bmw a private um bmw shop in the us so they make like 1 000 horsepower m5s and stuff it's he does what i wish i could do if i had any skills with my hands but i can't so i talk um but he i got him to record a short video where he was like hi i'm ethan's brother and we charge a hundred and fifteen dollars an hour oh my gosh and and the the the chinese audience was like get out of here that's like 750 rmb or whatever every time i go take it in for an oil change or anything and i get the bill i'm like are you sure this is it actually so owning a secondhand car everyone told me don't do it don't do it you spend so much money and time with this car in the shop and that has not been my experience at all it's been a wonderful experience owning a second-hand car and i don't have the depreciation of the vehicle yes that first year i can probably turn around and sell it for the same price that i paid for it right now you're a new car guy right well i'm a new car reviewer but at heart i am i am a secondhand car lover don't get me wrong i i um tell me about the cars you've owned what kind of cars have you owned oh see this will be a short conversation because the um the only car that i ever drove in the states the only car i ever quote unquote owned in the states was what i had at drove in high school and through university was a 1998 mazda b2500 pickup truck regular cab or extended cab regular cab wow single cab stick shift nose little floor banger in there yeah okay okay basically yes apart from the automatic transmission my truck was quite literally the most base model you could possibly can't see benches oh no no three o'clock okay literally only two people in the car with me though i was on crows on the cross country team i was a lot thinner than and i had a lot of very thin friends and so we we would cram four sometimes more people i had a regular i had a regular cat toyota pickup 91 pickup four by four nice during this time uh and uh yeah we crammed quite a bit of us in that yeah dude it's amazing yeah the one i had a stick shift too so you had to like okay like move your leg over okay three seconds between your buddies okay go to fifth now right all right you shift it i can't reach back with you sitting there you you you're in charge you're in charge that's exactly what it was like let me ask you this um growing up as a kid in north carolina what cars were you exposed to what kind of cars did your family have you'd get driven because that influences a lot on our adult life and what cars we like to drive so growing up we were a van family so minivan or full size minivan all right we didn't have an astro or anything we first start out with a a chrysler uh the og chrysler minivan okay um it was a plymouth voyager actually now defunct yes and then my mother upgraded to a wind star and then growing up my dad would always have a car and so it was like a toyota camry he bought a volvo i think it was a 740 sedan okay um this which is that thing is made of like pig iron that thing was an absolute my mom my mother had an s80 yes for for like 15 years super typical suburban lifestyle with the minivan and yes sedan in the driveway yes um how many how many brother sisterships three yeah i'm the youngest you're the youngest and so my brother and i were the ones that shared the passion for cars and and my dad my dad also likes cars i mean he's probably not as kind of lunatic as my brother and i are but you know at some point my brother and i split off where as i mentioned though he's he's a professional automotive like modifier and repairmen and stuff like that technician is the word they use do you plan on staying here long term yeah i mean the the channel is going well i'm enjoying it and so i i don't really have a lot of incentive to to leave if i were to go back to the states um certainly my chinese partners that i work with wouldn't be they'd be fine with it in some level because i could just do chinese language videos in the us i'll tell you one of the most viewed videos i ever had on chinese platforms was when i was stuck in the states back in february and i just took my phone out and i went this is my dad's f-150 pickup truck and i just spoke in chinese about it no script off the top of the head just showing people the inside of it and stuff and i think across the platforms we got music 500 000 views or whatever and so it was it was incredibly popular it's amazing the f-150 being the most popular vehicle in america my pops has two of them you know he's got he bought one in 2000 and the damn thing's still running almost like 300 000 miles on it and he went and bought a another one and i tried to convey the not just popularity but the size of an f-150 supercrew or super duty does he have an extended camera he's got the he's got the four-door you know he tows a big trailer with this thing you know a typical retired american yeah yeah fifth wheel good for him yeah so camper yeah very very this thing is a beast and it's so big i see a couple raptors here and there they're so rare so i did a video i did a review of an f-150 in shanghai okay a chinese language one driving an f-150 in shanghai is an insane thing to do i can't imagine and i wasn't like i wasn't in shanghai proper in downtown i was out in the suburbs and still it was it was nightmarish was it was it just the navigation of the roads or did you get a lot of gawkish views and well it was definitely navigating the roads because you take up the entire lane right but the other thing i made the mistake going into a parking garage how do you park that thing yeah i tried to find a parking spot inside of a parking garage and it was at that point that we realized that we had to we were coming off on one of those things that hangs from the ceiling and tells you two meters no more than two meters right and it was that point we had to look up the stats on the f-150 and it was 1.97 meters tall right so hopefully you didn't have new tread on the tires right yes seriously and then we realized we couldn't find a parking space in that stupid underground parking so then i had to get out and i'm trying to i'm making like 75 point turns to get around it was crazy it was crazy i would never drive back one of the things i get questions about is uh okay teslas are very popular here yeah right is people back home want to know what do the chinese really think about american funds because i ask my students they always say german cars german cars yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah german cars are good you know no doubt and if they break you got to sell your house to fix it so um now i've driven the chevys here you have to pay my brother your house to fix it [Laughter] so i've driven the chevys and the fords here and i'm less than impressed compared to the chinese so i'm curious what the cause i see buicks are very popular obviously there's a whole thing about buick and china yes but the teslas are sounding like hot cakes here even though it's not the best selling ap card in china that would be the mini ev right which is also a gm product it is yes it all comes together to look something like a pug on wheels from the start as a general rule if you say to a chinese car buyer to generalize a little bit the chinese car buyer here's a chinese brand here's a foreign brand if they cost the same they're going to buy the foreign brand almost definitely because the foreign brands have a more of a reputation for quality and engineering and all these things and and that is increasingly untrue or the gap whatever if it exists now is increasingly small between the two the gap in engineering but also the perception as well as the perception gap yes for sure the other day i was talking to a friend of mine and they were saying that they wanted to replace their um audi q5 so i might want to get a q7 i said okay q7s are cool big tanks i said have you thought about getting a byd top which is a similarly sized like big suv and you can get one for in in this market let's say it's like fifty five thousand dollars right a three hundred thousand rmb you get a really top of the line one that is that will do zero to sixty miles per hour in four and a half seconds and yeah you were quite taken by that car i like that car yeah i mean i i definitely had criticisms of it because i joked about how the steering was like the video game like a video game from the 80s like an arcade yeah i remember that it was good but overall i mean it's incredible what you get for the money but and then and the audi is twice the price at least and so i said to him have you considered that and he goes right that's not going to say yeah i'm not going to trade my house they're taxi cabs a chinese guy yeah and so yeah yeah exactly depending on the city you go to exactly so uh what what cars are the taxis where you in jungshan and zhongshan um which brands they're mostly the old hyundai because they're old ones oh no they're uh gac js yeah they're doing that now the quan cheese right here the hybrid electric electric ones oh okay so ion is it ion is their electric sub okay okay so it's a it's a mix you still see the old hyundai sonatas sure you know driving around let me go to shenzhen they're all byd exactly is byd beijing is uh hyundai because um that's where the joint venture hyundai's headquarters is there and i know this is i'm sorry at the at the airport they're all rollway yeah oh my god i was like i was like i was like what's the railway thing about you know whatever because then i guess yeah i get here and it's like they're everywhere because that's yeah yeah what is the proof what is the correct pronunciation of that uh because i've been calling it sayoc and bayak and i know that's incorrect i say s-a-i-c i have another friend who's uh does car use and stuff in english guy that calls it psych okay and then there's if you say baic which is beijing automotive industry corporation like i guess in the pinging that would make sense though yeah actually it would i mean his ai is ai yeah that's another thing people don't realize is the joint venture thing about the markets here and it's becoming less i think tesla's not a joint venture here tesla is tesla got a really really really good treatment yeah the thing that interests me the most about joint ventures and this is something that you don't see in other markets well i suppose it's just kind of a different version of the badge engineering that we see timer like your ford your ford crown bacteria victoria and your lincoln town car you will see um two cars from the same company say honda honda has the crv here in the chinese market and they have the honda breeze and the honda breeze you look at it and you go it looks that's a crv with a little bit of a different front end and a little bit of a different rear end but that's a crv and the reason that that exists is because honda has two different joint venture partners chinese local manufacturers in in china and in order to um basically to as a benefit mostly to honda but also to their partners they will say okay here's the version that you get to sell you sell the crv here's the version that you get to sell these are both uh it's going to be called the breeze but it's essentially the same car they're both produced in china um by their joint venture partners is that the same with the toyota levant yes it's really interesting i've never seen that in in other places and you might see like a badge engineering within a company right but like for to have their exact same models we just uh we're at the uh shanghai auto show great show this year right yes i think there were some serious debuts um like the volkswagen id6 and um all the mercedes-benz eq stuff eqs and eqb audi had their a6 e-tron a lot of electric car stuff one of the interesting things and i don't know if you noticed this how many cars did you see with lidar a couple actually i saw the we saw the the the xiaopong yeah the p5 maybe neo has the new neo sedan the 907 does yeah the et7 i believe and again i could be wrong i believe the et7 has it the arc box alpha s or a as it comes that's when i get confused with which one has the huawei technology inside huawei inside it was kind of low-key the show of lidar because lidar technology when we think of lidar previously it's the google mapping cars or whatever with these massive things on the roof and now these lidar panels are quite literally the size of a cell phone and they're just on the corners of the car or yeah they're integrated into the design of the vehicle exactly they're they're pretty subtle i saw that the the amount of camera systems in these little sensor panels they're just everywhere on these cars it's insane the p5 specifically has 32 perception sensors like 13 cameras 12 different sensors like millimeter five like millimeter wave radar pretty close whatever whatever happened today's with the when we had the volkswagen beetle it's just a simple engine speaking of the volkswagen beetle yeah speaking of that okay let's talk about this let's talk about that because i freaking loved it i think it looked awesome v and volkswagen discontinued the beetle so in my opinion hey it's up for grabs the olaf punk cat which in a second we'll talk about the lightning cat um those will be in our electric car video but that thing is it's something and and it's i did another video that was it was a doughy video in chinese about one of foreigners think of internet chinese like auto ships international auto shows and one of the things i had to address is the unfortunate fact that for a lot of foreigners one of the things that they love to see from these other shows is well what car did they copy this time right which car did they ever blatantly copy yeah and that was almost the only thing the chinese manufacturers came out with maybe a decade ago and it's increasingly not the case but there are still cases like sure ola for example it took me back because yeah because the chinese manufacturers know that they have the stigma of copycatting and so they they what they do is they go and they hire the designers this is the this is the thing this is the loophole yeah so in the case of the so the in case of uh ola it's porsche yeah the designer for a former porsche designer which is why the um good cat which we drove uh is kind of porsche esque in the front and so it was a great car i really liked it so when i saw them come out with this thing i have to i was a little bit disappointed because i really didn't i wanted them to continue down the vein that they had but instead they came out with this thing that looks like a volkswagen beetle and it's cool i mean it's pretty fun it's hard because it looks like a blue beetle and people love them like an old villa and then the other one next with the lightning hat which was kind of a mini panamera yeah it looks like something out of the cars you know yes cartoonish yeah they both did a little bit the naming of it too the marketing i mean you had the big dog you know with all the different dog breeds coming out right we got to do i'm sure you saw the videos we had to do a video we did the big dog and then the next video was the ola good cast i love the chinese car market yeah they're wonderful you know and then but they also have the other aura of coupons are like black cat white cat and good cat so you know the reason that they have a black cat white cat good cat right no don't ping in the 1980s this was when they were doing their form and opening up in china and he said i don't care if the cat is white or black as long as it catches the mouse it's a good cat so white so first cat her first car black cat then white cat then good cats so that was their little thing and then of course they're just keeping going with the punk cat and the lightning cat and i i am all about it i i love it that's one of the things that i love so much about chinese car manufacturers is they will they will come out with stuff they're fun they're so fun yeah the interiors are but have you been inside of a lincoln co for example yeah incredible the lincoln the the graphics and stuff like that on the dash yeah and all this stuff yes it's not my taste i think it's a little more millennial so it's not really for me i'm more of a minimalistic kind of look to it but i do appreciate 1991 88 chevy beretta i'm sorry i'm sorry the big talk right now in america about chinese electric cars and the electric car starts i mean the big the big dogs are coming in we know that we've got four coming in toyota announced their new electric cars look all right then they have the three big startups right that everyone's talking about there are more the chinese the chinese ones you've got the league uh sure you've got uh the neil and you've got the shelf yes so these are the three the big three that everyone in the west is watching to see which one of these am i going to be able to drive in north america um what's your impression of these three and their rapid growth over the last decade so i will uh emphasize what you said there for a second about how everybody wants to know when they can drive it because every time i do a review of a neo or or an xbox or something like half the comments or what can i drive this in my country x country right i get the same thing yeah and sure and so i will say i haven't gotten to drive uh a a lease young one yet so i'm gonna i know you have so i want to hear what you have to say about it um but i have by the way you can watch that video here if you want to get hit please hit the link um i love doing that it's up in this corner over here somewhere right i did that for the first time uh i did that for the first time on the ford evos video we just put out and i was i was enjoying it so much getting the timing perfect yeah so i have been impressed very impressed both by xbox or yeah xbox and and by neo um having driven both i think that they operate in slightly different markets those too i mean we'll start with neo so with neo the impression that i got with the ec6 i wanted it was a more top-of-the-line version but those things are very very interesting yeah it's clearly trying to offer a more premium experience than the more affordable chinese evs we usually drive on this channel as i said in my video i mean apart from a mercedes-benz um eqc what's that what's the the i can't believe i'm blanking on there yesterday yeah well um the apartment mercedes-benz electric car they are i don't think you're going to be able to find a more premium interior on a full electric vehicle tesla's obviously not going to do that that's not what they offer yeah um well you haven't driven the the leash i haven't yet i haven't yet and they also obviously have a lot of innovations with the battery swapping and stuff yeah um well let me stop you for that for a second this battery swap technology yes is it real or is it a gimmick it's it's legit it's legit it's legit but long term so that's the question [Music] you

Channel: Walkabout Rojo

Views: 4,593

Keywords: Wheelsboy, Wheelsboy Interview, shanghai auto show, shanghai international auto show, wheelsboy h9, wheelsboy nio, wheelsboy geely, wheelsboy byd, wheelsboy uni t, wheelsboy china, wheelsboy ethan robertson, wheelsboy youtube, chinese auto show, chinese auto market, chinese electric car review, chinese car reviews, wheelsboy alphard, wheelsboy, wheelsboy cars, wheelsboy interview, wheelsboy wuling, wheelsboy l9, wheelsboy xpeng, chinese auto industry, wheels boy, china car

Id: bUKsFo8Oh30

Length: 30min 25sec (1825 seconds)

Published: Thu May 06 2021