Tesla Roadster: Engineering genius or PR stunt?

All right. So it's been one week since Tesla announced this. It's Roadster making headlines around the world with promises of cold glass thrusters and leaping concept technology out of science fiction. But beyond the flying car claims, the auto industry is undergoing a shift with AI taking over dashboards, self-driving tech, expanding and major changes to how we buy cars. For more insight, we welcome Brian Moody from Capital One Auto Navigator. Brian, Thanks for joining us. Yeah, of course, always happy to talk about cars and especially the cool future of cars. Yes, for sure. All right, so first, I do want to get your reaction to the Tesla unveiling of this Roadster here. What do you think of this? What are you hearing from industry insiders about this? A lot of people said things like, well, the car doesn't really, and I'm like, listen, this is called marketing. That's how that works. Look at all the attention he got i mean the idea that it's going to lift off the ground and then shoot off into the sky you know like the DeLorean from Back to the Future that's of course not realistic but what it shows is that they have a propensity for high tech they can bring interesting and innovative things to the market and i do think that half of it the suction part of it could actually be a real thing that will improve the handling of the car for those that want that would you drive one would you Would you do what this is doing here on the screen right now? I wouldn't do that. I mean, I would do the part where it sucks you down to the ground. But didn't you hear in the beginning, he said something like, yeah, there's not a real person in there because it wouldn't be safe. There was a, yeah, he said that and it was remote control. So not yet. It's cool though, we're talking about it, other people are talking about it. It looks to me more like a controlled fall versus actually flying. But, you know, I don't want to get nitpicky on something that everybody else thinks is pretty cool. Exactly. All right. Let's talk Mercedes. We're talking about AI integration in the cars. Mercedes is integrating ChatGPT. Hyundai is debuting its Glio assistant and off-road AI terrain assistant. So AI technology is coming to vehicles. What is this going to look like for us in the future? So we're not there yet. The cars that we have don't have AI in them. Right, for the most part, some cars that have self driving can use some AI. The way that AI is gonna work itself out in our lives in the near future is by use of large language models, which is just a fancy way of saying you can speak naturally to the car and it will know what you mean. I don't know who out there has a car that you can talk to it, but you often have to say audio, radio, channel. And if you don't get all that right, it won't work. A large language model as part of an AI in-car thing, such as what Hyundai has just introduced on the new Tucson, is you can just say something like, make it colder, make it warmer, put the windows down, or I'm hungry. And it will know what you mean, and it will say, do you wanna find someplace for lunch? Here are some choices nearby. That's the most immediate, helpful way that we're gonna see AI impact our lives right now. So it's mostly like you can have more of a conversation with your car instead of like a robotic discussion type of thing. Yes, because that's frustrating when you don't hit the exact cue. But also on the Hyundai that I just mentioned, they have AI terrain assist for off-roading. That's a little bit more sophisticated where it looks at the terrain and it makes suggestions about how the car ought to approach or what equipment ought to be enabled. One thing that's not true today and that it might be a while is you can't use AI to control things on the car such as speed braking um turn left turn right that's no we're not we're not there and i don't know that we would ever be there i don't know how that would work okay gotcha all right uh let's talk about uh you know self-driving cars we're talking about Waymo Zoox right now they're expanding driverless commercial rides here in San Francisco uh you know we've already known about Waymo but now Zoox is everywhere. They have slightly bigger autonomous vehicles that are all over. While consumer brands like Ford, GM, Tesla continue upgrading their driver assistance systems, what do you foresee fully autonomous tech shifting from tech hubs into everyday personal vehicles? Do you see that happening a lot more now, you know, kind of similar to what we see with taxis, but in someone's own garage, like a car that can just take me where I have to go? It could. People often use the term autonomous for example i think maybe automated is a better uh word to use autonomous would be if i say hey i need to go to work today and the car says i'd rather go to the beach that's autonomous right like that's a separate thinking system but what we're talking about is automated i think it can work because we already see something very similar with um gm has something called super cruise on a highway when you're on say uh highway 80 and it's a mapped road you can turn it on and it will change lanes, accelerate, and brake for you. But you do have to be paying attention. And by the way, the car does monitor where you're looking. And if you're not looking, it will turn itself off. So that's maybe the bad part of technology. Yeah, the Tesla does the same thing, too. You have to actually be paying attention to it, as far as I know, in order for it to keep going. It tracks your eyes or something like that. Right. Make sure it's going properly. All right, we're seeing luxury brands like Porsche move a higher up market while mainstream brands introduce simplified base models or entry level things. Is the middle ground new car pricing disappearing here? You know, we used to have back in the day, you always look for that car that's in the middle that you can afford, that's comfortable. What are you seeing here since Porsche is going like really up market for the people that have a lot of money? Where are the rest of us? Right. So there's always going to be a fertile middle ground. But what's happening is because there's a lot of pushback in terms of price sensitivity. A lot of consumers are very price sensitive. The truth is there are many new cars that are low price that are available for lots of equipment. I mean, there's plenty, Kia, Nissan, Hyundai, Honda, there's all of these, Toyota, same thing. There's all of these, but people aren't often picking those. So sometimes having a lower price alternative is good. Meanwhile, the people who have money are like, hey, I want something even even better, even higher performance, even more exclusive. And the reason that can work is because with those more exclusive brands, think like Ferrari, there's a higher profit margin, and so they don't have to sell as many. Honda has to sell a certain number of cars. If you have a million dollar car, maybe you can sell 20 and still make a decent profit. Like a Bugatti or something like that. Yeah, exactly. You sell just a few of those a year and you're good to go if you're Bugatti, right? not many people have the kind of money to spend on one of those really cool cars. All right, Brian Moody from Capital One Auto Navigator, thank you so much for joining us and providing your insight. I wish we could talk a little bit longer about what's going on in the car industry, but that'll do it for us. We'll check in with you again next time. Thank you again. We're going to take a short break here on Mornings on 2 to 9. We'll be back right after this. Stay with us.