- 4 months ago
Welcome back to The Inevitable by MotorTrend—where we dig into the future of the automobile. Fresh off IAA Munich 2025
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00:00:00Welcome to The Inevitable, a podcast by MotorTrend.
00:00:15Hi there and welcome to The Inevitable. This is the MotorTrend podcast, the video podcast,
00:00:21where we talk about the future of the automobile. Where are we going and how are we going to get
00:00:26there? Before we get going though, this guy, Ed Lowe, has got a message for you. I'm Ed Lowe for
00:00:31MotorTrend and I'm excited to tell you that MotorTrend's Software Defined Vehicle Innovator
00:00:36Awards is back for its fourth year. Nominating is very simple. Just go to MotorTrend.com
00:00:41slash STV survey and complete the form. Join us in honoring the trailblazers redefining what's
00:00:48possible. Nominations are now open for the 2026 STV Innovator Awards.
00:00:56Today's topic, IAA Munich. It is a car show that happens in Germany. I just got back. You didn't
00:01:05go, but you went to the first one. I went to the one at the height of COVID and our guest very
00:01:10humorously said, oh, you went to the bicycle show because the year I went, I want to say there was
00:01:14seven cars at a car show and about 1500 alternate forms of transportation, which was so boring.
00:01:22And then it was also Germany at the height of COVID. So every single human being had a mask on. They
00:01:27were, they were so happy. Um, and it was, it was, I haven't even like thought about going back.
00:01:33My favorite part was they had, um, really nice lawn chairs, uh, in between the buildings and I was
00:01:39just laid down, took a nap because it was, after 10 minutes, there was nothing left to see.
00:01:43Right. Well, slightly different show here. Uh, I haven't been to IAA since it was, I guess the
00:01:51Frankfurt. Frankfurt and Paris. Yeah. They go back and forth. Yeah. So it was great for me to go.
00:01:55And I ran into our guest on the show floor, uh, multiple times, uh, also at one of the, uh,
00:02:03introduction parties for Polestar. Uh, so let's bring them on. We're going to talk real quick
00:02:08with Kyle Connor about his experience at IAA Munich. And then we'll go to a special segment
00:02:15that Frank Marcus, Motor Trends technical editor and I, uh, that we recorded on the show floor at
00:02:21Munich, uh, after we talked to Kyle. But first up, let's get Kyle on. I just, first of all, great to
00:02:27see you as always. Great to see you guys. Second of all, I've watched about 700 of your IAA videos
00:02:31already. Oh, damn. That's about how many we've published. And you were in the same movie. Oh yeah.
00:02:36I don't, I mean, I'm still on the trip. I haven't been home yet. So it has been through
00:02:40the wash. Okay. I don't care. Are you sponsored by a hoodie manufacturer? No, but we need those
00:02:45just like the inevitable podcast needs a sponsor. Kyle needs a hoodie sponsor. You do. I think
00:02:50there's a company called American giant that makes really good hoodies. You can also do something.
00:02:54Aviator nation would probably be a good one. There may be you. Johnny needs a bourbon sponsor.
00:02:58All right. Um, so yeah, let's go. Sponsorship to go. So, okay. I guess my big question would
00:03:04be, uh, and you seem to really get into this would be, uh, uh, GLC, Mercedes GLC versus
00:03:12the Neue class of BMW iX3. Is that, am I saying those right? Those were two IA Munich did. And
00:03:18they seem like to me, like the real hot product. Am I wrong in saying? That was the whole show.
00:03:22I thought from my perspective was iX3 versus GLC 400 E, whatever they call it. GLC. Yeah.
00:03:28That's GLC electric. Those two head to head. They launched a couple of days away from each
00:03:33other. BMW went first, then Mercedes and BMW kind of took the cake specs wise.
00:03:39So tell us about that. What, what, what, in terms of the specs, like what did, what did,
00:03:43uh, what did BMW so much, do so much better than Mercedes did?
00:03:46Yeah. So I think more than just the iX3, the new Neue class, uh, situation, that platform
00:03:53will underpin like the next 40 BMWs between now and 27 or 28, like a huge amount. And so it's a bit
00:04:01like when they had the E chassis cars, then the F chassis cars, then G. Now it's like, you know,
00:04:06this new platform that will underpin everything. So I was really excited about it because it's not
00:04:11just iX3. It's also a three series. It's the next five series. It's the so on and so forth.
00:04:16It's the brand. I mean, that's it. Yeah.
00:04:17But the specs on that iX3 alone, like that platform can support a bunch of configurations
00:04:22insane. So it's, it uses a, a, from a construction standpoint, a really big can of 4695. Uh,
00:04:30so they've gone to cylindrical cells now, which is new for BMW. Cool. How are they cool? Uh,
00:04:36yes, they're all in a water jacket. So they each have like, it's like early Teslas used to do this,
00:04:40but this is probably better thermal management. Uh, and so we'll have to test it,
00:04:44but each, each cell has like its own little encasing, which isn't great for energy density,
00:04:51but is great for repeated performance, which is what BMW has been needing in their electric cars.
00:04:57Uh, and so you have a cell to pack, which means there's no modules in the pack. It's just a battery
00:05:02pack filled with cells and they're sort of wire bonded together and they have their own bus bars and
00:05:06stuff. Let me, sorry to interrupt. Is it, would like the iX3 have a different size pack than the
00:05:12three series? Well, that's the thing, you know, without modules, the module approach was always,
00:05:17we could arrange these modules however we want to fit the platform. That's what General Motors did,
00:05:21where you have like that Ultium brick and then they can arrange it. Lucid does that, right?
00:05:25Lucid does it. They pull out two and you got a big back seat, put them back in, you got more range.
00:05:28Absolutely. BMW, no longer. And so they're going to sell the pack, uh, very similar to Cybertruck,
00:05:35very similar to 4680 Model Y. Uh, it's a really interesting construction. Uh, and so I don't know
00:05:41how they're going to handle different pack sizes. That pack might underpin like all of that class
00:05:45of vehicle and then they might have a bigger one or smaller one. But it's a huge battery pack. It's
00:05:50108.7 kilowatt hour usable battery pack in an X3. In a small compact SUV. So just to give people
00:05:58context, I believe Model S is about a hundred and a Lucid Air is about a hundred and twelve. Yep,
00:06:04exactly. That's almost Lucid Air. So that, and that means if you make an efficient thing, you could be in
00:06:10the 500 miles of range neighborhood, depending on anything else. Yeah. So IX3 is 500 miles of WLTP
00:06:16range and it's going to be around 400 EPA, which is huge, huge for every, I mean, everyone's kind
00:06:22of like clustered around 300 is like, that's acceptable for the next four years. But now,
00:06:27you know, like GM's just blown through that. Well, yeah. You know, and they did it in a very
00:06:33unsophisticated, but effective way. Um, but that's great. If you can get like four, it's probably
00:06:38more than 400. It's probably like, you know, 425 or something. Yeah. I would think, uh, we'll have to see
00:06:43how it does. BMWs have always been super efficient on the highway. That's thanks to a specific type of
00:06:49externally excited synchronous motor that they use on the rear axle. They are actually now using
00:06:53an induction motor for the first time on the front axle. Um, so no flux related losses while cruising.
00:06:58I'm excited for it. Um, back to pack construction really quick. This is really cool. They're doing
00:07:03cell to pack and then pack to body. So the whole underside of the car comes up with the battery.
00:07:09So it's a hole when you pull the battery out, essentially. Okay. So the battery is the floor
00:07:13plan, uh, floor pan, which is again, really cool from a construction standpoint. And, uh, I'm just
00:07:19thrilled that they've done it. It seems to me that's the advantage of that construction costs.
00:07:24Just cheaper. Is it, are they going to be, is it the idea that they're going to also, um,
00:07:28mount the seats, the floor and everything goes in. This is, this was, this is Tesla's model for
00:07:34construction, right? So they're essentially copying that whole setup. That that's my understanding
00:07:38is on the production line. I'm pretty sure you can build up the battery pack with the interior
00:07:42needed and it all just slides in. Okay. And then, um, any other stats that stand out about the
00:07:49Neu Klasse? Yeah. I mean, the electrical architecture is all new. It's similar to like we discussed,
00:07:55I think previously the gen one versus gen two Rivian back in the day, uh, this is using a
00:08:00zonal architecture. So they've gone from domain controller to zonal controller. They now have
00:08:05four main ECUs for the Neu Klasse. One of them is called the heart of joy. It handles all driving
00:08:10topics. Sorry. That's such a German name. Sounds better in German. Yeah. Uh, and, but this will handle
00:08:15like, you know, take driver assistance input, ADAS stuff, take human desirability, what the vehicle's
00:08:21doing, and then spit out through AI, what the output of the vehicle should be. And I have no idea how
00:08:27it's going to work, but knowing BMW, I hope they tuned it well. Uh, to me, it just feels like BMW
00:08:32skipped a whole generation. Yeah. Yeah. Are they now, would you say they're now leading or now
00:08:38competitive? I think they're leading all German automakers right now, which they were trailing
00:08:43for the longest time. I mean, I put them on globally though. Do you think that they're,
00:08:47you think that they're now in, in direct competition with the Chinese and Tesla or
00:08:53Yeah. So I think, I think they're directly in competition with them. The worry that I have
00:08:59is they've developed this entire new architecture and it's coming out now as maybe being matching or
00:09:05slightly ahead, but BMW architectures last seven, 10, 12 years. Um, do they have the headroom in that
00:09:11platform to keep up with the innovation? Like it's great that it charges at 400 kilowatts. That's
00:09:16awesome. Uh, but Chinese cars are going way faster than that, for example. And switching
00:09:21to Mercedes, before we get to the GLC, I saw with the, whatever the orange thing, X, X, AMG.
00:09:27Oh yeah. That thing is sick. They, yeah, they charge it at like a megawatt for like a couple
00:09:33minutes. Yes. Explain that. 1024 kilowatts for two and a half minutes straight. And what,
00:09:39how much power does that onboard in two minutes? It's like just over 40 kilowatt hours in it. So
00:09:44it's basically, you can go zero to 80% on a model three in two minutes. Yeah. Is the way
00:09:49to think about it. That's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. It's insane. So this, um, so that's, and that's,
00:09:53that's production intent. I mean, I saw them dancing around you in the video where they
00:09:57wouldn't answer a question, but it sounds like that's like a production intent battery pack.
00:10:01Because one thing you told me on the show floor was, uh, huge battery pack, small vehicle styling.
00:10:07You were like me, like you, you're into the, yeah, I'm not a design guy. I mean,
00:10:11I leave Johnny, we've been arguing out in the parking lot over, you know, escalate IQ versus
00:10:16IQL and you're clearly wrong. But, uh, the, uh, the, the Neue Klasse looks better in person
00:10:21than photos. It's very like monolithic. It looks strong and it stands. I've seen it in
00:10:26person. Small grill. Yeah. The, um, the, the Neue Klasse three series, I think it's actually
00:10:31pretty sharp design and the, the I three, it's just, it's what another weird looking three series
00:10:36is going to, if they put that battery in a three series, dude, it's going to have huge range.
00:10:41That's like lucid air range, right? Yeah. Yeah. In the three series. Yeah. So thoughts on GLC?
00:10:46Yeah. Um, so if GLC launched first, we would have all been super excited because it's, you know,
00:10:5394 kilowatt hours. And again, that's a pretty big battery in a smaller model wise 81 82. Okay. So
00:11:00bigger battery Mercedes, again, very efficient. Super efficient. You know, they use a new
00:11:05architecture. I think it's MBEA for that one. Okay. Um, but regardless, it should be a very
00:11:11efficient platform, heat pump, heat scavenging, two speed on the rear axle, I believe, which is
00:11:15weird. Uh, so they're taking G wagon technology and putting it on the street, but it's an active
00:11:20shifter. It's a bit like Taycan. So you don't actually hit low range like the electric G. Yeah.
00:11:24But it was just another two speed for, I mean, the Germans love to solve their electrical problems
00:11:29with mechanical engineering, but, uh, there's some of that there. And as you got to experience
00:11:34and I did, again, I watched, uh, I watched that video, uh, like the, the low range on
00:11:39the G wagon is insane. It's insane. It'll go up anything. It'll go up anything. It's mechanically
00:11:44advantaged. Yes. It's so cool. It's really wild. So, okay. But so are you, so you're, sounds
00:11:49like you're kind of like the BMW is like kind of pants Mercedes a little bit. Totally.
00:11:55Small SUV. Totally. And that's just the spec sheet comparo. The spec sheet comparo is
00:12:01iX3 smokes the GLC. I mean, GLC is 330 kilowatt charging with a 94 kilowatt hour pack. Still
00:12:08impressive. But then iX3 for the same money is 108 kilowatt hours and, you know, 400 kilowatt
00:12:15charging. Mercedes gets rear steer and air suspension optional. BMW does not. Yeah. The other thing
00:12:21is BMW is allergic to air suspension. It's very strange. Very strange. Uh, but their interiors
00:12:26are where the biggest difference are. So I sat in the new GLC and I think it might be the
00:12:31worst modern interior. What? Really? I really do not like it. Can you compare it to any other
00:12:36Mercedes that, uh, that are on the market? It's a bit odd. So, you know, they took the approach
00:12:42of let's put a giant screen across the car. Sure. And so I'm generally okay with big screens.
00:12:47What I'm not okay with is in all the photos, I thought it looked pretty good on the inside
00:12:51because they have this low angle looking at the screen. But when you sit and I can send
00:12:55you a photo, maybe we can overlay it here. When you sit from the POV of the driver, you're
00:12:59looking down on a screen that's completely vertical. It's not angled towards you at all.
00:13:03And then the software that went in it, at least in the car I played around with, super laggy.
00:13:08It's like this little window that you're operating in this big screen. I hate that. And it
00:13:12is like not optimized. If you're going to have a big screen, have big software. Yeah. Um,
00:13:15yeah, that's, that's, that's Lincoln did that with, uh, Lincoln Digital Experience.
00:13:20No, with, uh, what was that thing that won SUV of the year last year? Oh. Uh, Nautilus.
00:13:24Nautilus had that one screen that was like this. I hate that. It was, it was, all the other
00:13:28screens were fantastic. Yeah. And it had one screen that was like, could not see it. It's
00:13:32like, it's always reflection-y. And so I thought the same from BMW. Yeah. Uh, so from
00:13:36Mercedes. Interesting. The BMW had like a really cool infotainment system. Well, hang
00:13:40on real quick. So if you haven't seen Google iX3 screen right now, because it's
00:13:45like, it's a deck of Hydra. What is that shape? I don't know. Looks terrible in
00:13:50photos. Yeah. Okay. It's cool in person. Yeah. Because the wheel perfectly fits with
00:13:54the curvature. So I've, I went on the thing you went on where we played around
00:13:58with the software early and I was like, Oh, this is fine. Whatever. The screen's
00:14:02ugly. Okay. But like sitting in the car, feeling the materials, the seating
00:14:06position was great. I'm like, damn, BMW is kind of back. So what about, cause I know I
00:14:11saw you talking with, uh, you talking with, uh, Wassim Bensaid in front of the VW.
00:14:16Oh yeah. That's a little thing. So let's talk about VW group in general. So you said
00:14:20BMW just maybe pantsed, or by the time I said pantsed, uh, Mercedes, but you said
00:14:24leapfrog the Germans. We were out here with some Audis. We had some Audis, our car of the
00:14:29year, the new e-tron, blah, blah, blah. Like what's the, what's the perspective on Audi and
00:14:32also broader VW group? Yeah. Good, good, good topics. I don't know if the show can go that long.
00:14:38Uh, but, but in general, what's your opinion of Stellantis? Oh, we need six hours.
00:14:44Let's just, just a high level on VW group. Yeah. And then I'm gonna talk a little about
00:14:48Polestar five and then this thing you did also in Germany, which was you had a Sapphire.
00:14:52Yeah. Yeah. We'll get to that. Okay. Yeah. And then, yeah. Okay. So let, let's talk software
00:14:56in Volkswagen group. Yes. So to paint the picture, uh, about four years ago, Volkswagen created
00:15:02a division called Cariad. Yeah. And what they basically did was they took the software guys from
00:15:07Skoda, from Volkswagen, from Audi, from Porsche, from Lamborghini, Bentley, blah, blah, blah.
00:15:11And they stuffed them all in one building. And culturally this did not work inherently.
00:15:17Shocking. And so I have some friends that worked there and that anecdotally were like, you know,
00:15:21the Porsche guys were like, do I have to drive a golf company car? Uh, and so it was a real,
00:15:26it was like, that was the biggest problem. Right. Uh, and then you've got to get all of those
00:15:30guys to talk to each other. The end goal essentially of Cariad was to create a uniform user experience
00:15:37and electrical architecture for the entire group. Uh, clearly that failed or could not happen
00:15:42because they went to an American startup, Rivian, to essentially purchase their newly developed
00:15:48zonal architecture that they did for Gen 2 and future Rivian products. Uh, that sort of...
00:15:54For U.S. and Western facing markets. Correct.
00:15:56And then they went to XPeng for everything in China.
00:15:59Yes. And that is an interesting conversation we should dig into. So all of my comments will be
00:16:03geared towards the Western cars. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Um, and so with the Rivian Volkswagen
00:16:08collaboration, uh, the first I heard of it was, I don't think that's going to work because you've
00:16:14got a scrappy fast paced startup dealing with the weight of the Volkswagen group organization,
00:16:19slowing things down. There's nothing more that Germans love than having meetings. And that doesn't
00:16:25mean... No, wearing masks. They really like me. Sure. I mean, I was over there during COVID too. I agree.
00:16:30And, you know, it's just the culture clash was the biggest thing I was worried about because
00:16:35clearly, technically, uh, Rivian has, and Waseem's team, I have nothing but the most respect for
00:16:41Waseem. Yeah. It's an incredible software. It's incredible. They can do the, the architecture
00:16:45and the software. They've proven it in their vehicles and, and it's great. Can they do that
00:16:49scaled up for the entire group, which means all brands, all classes of cars. Yeah.
00:16:54Audi to Skoda. Yeah. It's crazy. So the answer is they kind of have done it. And the first
00:16:59car is launching. It's called the ID everyone. And, uh, and it launches in 27. So it's, uh,
00:17:08that uses one ECU for the entire car. That's wild. I heard you say that in the video with Waseem
00:17:13like that. So, so if a car real quick can use one ECU, why does any other car need two?
00:17:21I've asked this question before of some of some of these experts and it's, some of it
00:17:25is you, while you, it's a good idea to have a lot of it centralized. There are certain things
00:17:30you would, you would want to have at the corners of the car and you don't have to run a cable
00:17:35back and forth to a certain sense. So wiring length is one big one. Then you can run like
00:17:40a high speed. ID everyone is like polo size. It's a small, it's single motor. It doesn't
00:17:45need torque vectoring. It doesn't need air suspension control. So there's just a lot less
00:17:48going on with that car, but gorgeous car. Cool looking car. Isn't it great? Really? I mean
00:17:53that I was looking at that. I'm like, why, what BMW should have been doing, you know, they bought
00:17:57a towel design 15 years ago. And where's that been? And Andreas mint is the lead designer.
00:18:03And I talked to him about the ID one. I actually talked to someone about design. He said it's
00:18:07going to, it's like 90% there. So I'm like, great. It's already A minus right out of the game.
00:18:12It sounds like the early success of the Rivian tieup has, has really, uh, has led to more
00:18:19investment by VW group in Rivian. Yeah. I think it's 5.8 billion total, but they still have to hit
00:18:24certain benchmarks. At what point is it just buy them? Well, that's the thing. Scout, what do they
00:18:29need Rivian for? Yeah. That's also the thing. Uh, I think the original partnership between
00:18:35Volkswagen and Rivian is, uh, intention was just on the hardware. It sounds like they're
00:18:42becoming a little bit more closely. They're doing sourcing together now. Oh, well that,
00:18:46I mean, that, that's what Rivian wanted out of the deal was like, instead of paying, I
00:18:50don't know, you know, a hundred dollars for a chip, they'll pay the Volkswagen price, which
00:18:53is $7. Sure. Sure.
00:18:54Scale. Okay. Hang on real quick. Polestar 5. Oh, okay. Yeah. What'd you think? You were
00:19:00at the party, you did the sheet drop. Cool party. I mean, so like the whole theme, great
00:19:05alcohol. Wow. The theme of Polestar has been trying to push up market, which I don't think
00:19:13actually works. I don't, they're charging Porsche prices for cars that don't warrant that
00:19:19much cost. I think I've, I've been saying that since the, since the two dropped. Yeah.
00:19:22One was neat. Yeah. Two is like, we're a luxury performance brand. And by the way, this car
00:19:27doesn't have luxury or performance and it looks weird. Yeah. So, I mean, I love the one.
00:19:31I own a one. It's one of my favorite cars. One's great, but it's a weird thing, which
00:19:35is cool. Yeah. The Polestar brand in general, you know, the whole theme of the party was like
00:19:40anti everyone else. So you walk up the staircase and it's like no hybrids, no diesel gate, no
00:19:46blah, blah, blah. And so they're like pushing it back against the whole industry. Meanwhile,
00:19:49they're part of Geely group. I was going to say, they have range extended vehicles or
00:19:54their human rights abuses. They got other issues, but they're just ignoring that. It feels very
00:20:00Chinese. We're like, this one's doing this. But if you say no diesel gate, it's like,
00:20:03well, hang on. They had quotes from every like automaker CEO that was like, we are going back
00:20:09into combustion cars. You'll have a choice by 2030 walking back all their EV. So then they
00:20:14launched Polestar 5, which is their, think of it like electric Panamera type vehicle.
00:20:19It's a GT. Big Taycan. Yeah. Yeah. Big Taycan. It should actually, you know, do okay in terms
00:20:25of specs. Like it's going to have 350 kilowatt charging. It's 112 ish kilowatt hours, somewhere
00:20:30around there. How much power? 800 horsepower. It's like, you know, it's all good until you
00:20:36hear that it's 160,000 US. And then you go, well, you could buy a Plaid for 70,000 less than that.
00:20:43US pricing not released, but that was, that's converted. That's the converted.
00:20:46But also you can get a, you know, Audi RS e-tron GT, which at 160 is like one of the nicest
00:20:51things. Or used for 40. Well, yeah, sure.
00:20:54There's a reason why. That's why I knew first. Polestar sells in 28 markets and they're launching
00:20:59in 24 of them first and the remaining for US, Canada, Korea, and China. And you think about
00:21:07it? Cause I was, I walked, I was on the Polestar trip. It was a great trip with the great people.
00:21:12Cool car. It looks really cool. I also went to the XPeng press conference. I was looking
00:21:16at their new next generation. It looks amazing, which looks also similar size class will probably
00:21:21not be $160,000. Right. It's going to be like 40 grand. Right. And I think that's, that's
00:21:27Polestar's biggest problem in the volume markets, China, definitely. And the US, cause I don't
00:21:32know the US is going to pay that much money for it. My big question is why wasn't this
00:21:36an SUV? And I know that was a long time ago when they made this decision, but yeah, you
00:21:40know, maybe the volume model. Polestar's kind of like, okay, ignore the numbers on paper.
00:21:44It should drive well. And so that, that's the thing though. So if they're going to make
00:21:48a driver's car, $160,000 in whatever the number is, say it's 150, uh, enthusiast driver's
00:21:54car, there's no way to fully defeat ESP. There's no limited slip differential. And so I'm
00:21:58going, my buddy Christian, like brake, brake based torque vectoring on $150,000 plus vehicle
00:22:04performance vehicle. So they're like, the steering is going to be amazing. Chassis is
00:22:07going to be good. They left some room. They said they might have that high performance
00:22:10version coming. Like they had the Polestar. That should be at that number. I don't think
00:22:15they can get to under grand for, you know. And again, I mean, if you're going to be a luxury
00:22:19performance, if you, they want to be an electric Porsche competitor, like you got to have
00:22:23the basics are everything can be turned off and some kind of, you know, differential
00:22:28taming or something. Yeah. And thermal management, it needs to be, you know, lap after lap. It
00:22:33needs to be consistent. Do you know anything about the thermal management on that? Yeah. I heard
00:22:36it's okay. And, and when the engineers tell you it's okay, you know, we're going to run
00:22:41into limits. Yeah. And I'm like, I really, I saw it. I thought it was beautiful. I thought
00:22:45it was going to be 90 grand, 85 grand. I'm like, that could be my next car. I can do it. But
00:22:49then I was like, oh, it's twice that price. All right. Last thing you did or last thing,
00:22:54last topic on Munich, you, you somehow got your hands on a Lucid Air Sapphire. Yes. And
00:23:01went and did some top speed running. Did you hit 200 miles an hour? Yeah. 204. Well, on
00:23:06the Autobahn. Yeah. Allegedly. Remember when we used to do cool stuff like that? Hey, hey,
00:23:09hey. Okay. Sorry. Why? What was the reason? And did you run? What do you, why? Did you run
00:23:15with something else? Did you, yeah. I had an Aston DBX as well. 707. That moved pretty good.
00:23:20Actually. It's a thing. Probably top to only get top down like 190. Yeah. I, it was on
00:23:24winter tires. Oh, so I did like 180, but you shouldn't do that on winter tires. Well,
00:23:29winter tires are good to like 275 kmh. It was like a buck 75. So you're right there. You're
00:23:33right. I didn't check the rating intentionally. So I played Ignite. You know what? Tires have
00:23:36a lot of bandwidth. Yeah. I figured, you know, if I did one run, they wouldn't have been
00:23:40overheated. We should be okay. Check the pressures. But no, the Lucid was cool. I had never really
00:23:46spent time with a Sapphire. And, uh, there was one there and I talked to Lucid and I'm
00:23:51like, Hey, one of my colleagues is with me. Who's never been in Germany, never like experienced
00:23:56200 miles an hour. Let's boogie. And, uh, yeah, 204 and the thermal management was way better
00:24:02than I expected. I thought it was going to overheat after one run because they use the same battery
00:24:07that's in the grand touring, which is like an energy dense cell, not a power cell. They do
00:24:11the cooling on like the bottom, right? And that's a quarter. I mean, I remember Peter
00:24:15Rawlinson talked to me for hours about that. He's like, that's the solution. Whatever anyone
00:24:19else tells you for performance, it's bottom cooling and he had a hole. Well, that's where
00:24:24the cells generate their heat. So you want to cool that, but they still get gradient temp
00:24:28up top. And once the top of the cells get hot, then there's nothing you can do.
00:24:32Well, also, can I ask what were you checking? Like when you're checking the, the pack performance
00:24:36after a 204 mile run or you have, you have like a, where are you looking for the, uh,
00:24:41for temperature data? Um, well, you can tell by the way the vehicle D rates, if it's battery
00:24:46or motor, uh, motors tend to, to hold very little heat. So they'll spike in heat and recover
00:24:52very quickly. Um, so inverter tip would be typically the weakest link motor stayed nice and chill.
00:24:58And I'll tell you how I know that. And then the battery pack after, you know, on the Autobahn,
00:25:02you never just can get on and go rip. You have to find a space. You get up to like
00:25:06170, then you got to back off and wait again. And so we were trying to be as gentle on the
00:25:11car as possible before we knew we could get it up to, to top speed. Uh, Sapphire also comes
00:25:16with a track preconditioning mode to cool down the battery pack for endurance driving. We
00:25:21had it in that mode as well. Um, but, uh, after we hit 200 miles an hour, which was great.
00:25:26We then put it in full power mode, ripped it back up to 170, gave full power, then launch
00:25:32controlled it back onto the Autobahn full power. And only after that and many attempts of high
00:25:38speed did it start to derate. Once it derated, it was a slow recovery. It recovered, but it was slow.
00:25:43This is the pack cooling down. Yeah. So my, uh, buddy pulled the logs off the car who works for
00:25:48Lucid. He's like, motors were cold the whole time. Yeah. Batteries what got hot. And I'm like, yeah,
00:25:51that's exactly what we experienced. And then when you go in from 170 to 204, was that, did it take a
00:25:57while or was that like pretty much like? So if we had it in full power mode, which we did later on,
00:26:04it rips right up there. It's insane. So it's so powerful. Yeah. We had it in the smooth, the
00:26:08standard key up setting. Cause we wanted to, in case we couldn't hit it. Yeah. We're trying to
00:26:12limit the max output of, of the motors to keep the battery cool. Was 204 max? No, I heard 205 is max, but
00:26:21you, did you, did you have to get out of it because, or there was, there was an error. Oh, it was traffic.
00:26:24Okay. But also that's like, that's in the, you didn't, did you have the 204 was off the
00:26:28speedometer? Yeah. So it's probably like 200 GPS. There's always a bit of sway. It can go,
00:26:33it depends. Sometimes it goes over, under. Yeah. Lucids are, are at least at 70 miles an hour. I think
00:26:38we go 71 GPS, 71 indicated go 70 GPS. So it's pretty close, but there is some sway. And so yeah,
00:26:45kids, if you're ever trying to go 200 miles an hour, you know, you want more horsepower. I did it in a,
00:26:51in a, in a Bentley Continental. Yeah. I forget how much it made six something, but like rip up to 185
00:26:57and then 185 to 200 was just like, dude, come on. Yeah. Come on. Cause it's just lucid did not feel
00:27:03any of that. It was just like, 1200 horsepower. Yeah. It was insane. And the stability of the air
00:27:08chassis, like it, I was through a corner and things just locked in, not like a hard corner,
00:27:14but you know, an autobahn corner. Yeah. Yeah. No, no. When I hit, when I was 201, yeah, it was,
00:27:19yeah. And you're just like a little bit of steering angle and you're just matted.
00:27:22And the whole thing is just dead stable. That's awesome. It's the most stable experience I've ever
00:27:27had. Don't try this at home. Well, I mean, unless you live in Germany. Right. Then, then it's safe.
00:27:30Just make sure no one's around, check tires, check, check brakes, make sure the car is happy. We did a
00:27:35full thorough check, put everything away in the car, not saying it's safe, but it's not illegal.
00:27:40All right. So, uh, just to wrap on IA Munich, is it really now become CES for Europe? Is that the fair,
00:27:48or like, what's the equivalent? It's not, it's no longer like just a car show.
00:27:51This year felt like a really nice show. I think we're back from the days of the weird mobility
00:27:56stuff, the bicycle show, which I'm glad I skipped that one. But I've been to IAA. This is probably
00:28:01my fourth IAA. And this was the best one. From, from new, from actually having cars launches,
00:28:06because there's a, it's a ton of other suppliers, a lot of technology. I mean, Mobilize Air, Qualcomm,
00:28:12like all the big, all the CES players, all the CES players are there. The booths are smaller.
00:28:18They're not like, like whatever Frankfurt used to be, or Paris, or Okio.
00:28:22Oh, remember Mercedes at Frankfurt? Right.
00:28:23Yeah. Frankfurt shows were insane. They had like escalators in their stuff. It was crazy.
00:28:27So, okay.
00:28:28Um, I was gonna ask, um, did they do the thing where there was tons of off-site stuff,
00:28:36or was everything still kind of in the... Yeah, we are. Yeah, we are downtown to get to other stuff.
00:28:40So that was cool. Like, a lot of it is open to the public. Yeah. And you could see, like,
00:28:44you go and look at cars and all that other stuff. But, yeah. We're gonna transition now. Yes,
00:28:48sir. And we thank Kyle for coming on for this, this special, uh, special guest here. Because
00:28:53we're at, uh, Motor Trend's SUV of the year program. We're actually at Hyundai Proving Grounds
00:28:56here recording in one of their conference rooms. So thanks. Thanks. Shout out Hyundai.
00:29:00Uh, we're gonna go to a clip that, uh, I recorded with Frank Marcus, Motor Trend's technical editor,
00:29:05uh, from the halls of IA Munich. Actually, we were right outside Qualcomm's booth in a steel case,
00:29:15little privacy pod that we had hijacked, uh, for about 30 minutes, for a chat on something Kyle
00:29:20talked about, which was sort of a zonal architecture in vehicles, and basically what's happening in
00:29:26software-defined vehicles, especially as AI is now like the hot topic. So let's go to Frank and I at IA
00:29:32Munich. We are coming to you live and direct from Munich, Germany. We're at IA Munich 2025,
00:29:44which is a big show devoted to mobility, devoted to automotive, the industry, OEMs, suppliers.
00:29:52I went with an OEM. Our colleague, Elisa, went with a different OEM. You, however, uh, were invited
00:29:58due to our coverage of all things automotive tech, SDVs, etc. So that's what we're going to talk about.
00:30:03Right. I've been a frequent guest of theirs at CES. I used the right forks and said the right things,
00:30:08so they invited me again. Right. Uh, so big deal because, um, quite expensive to get all the way here
00:30:14from the U.S. Uh, but this is a very interesting show. I haven't been here in a long time. I can't,
00:30:21I actually was trying to figure out the last, what do they used to call the show? Is Frankfurt?
00:30:25It was the Frankfurt Motor Show. It was always the IAA, but we always called it the Frankfurt
00:30:29Motor Show. And then for a while, didn't it switch, it switched back and forth?
00:30:32I think this is maybe the third year, second or third year here.
00:30:34Okay. So I was telling my wife that I'm going to basically the CES of Europe, which is what IA has
00:30:39become, uh, which is perfect because of, as you all know, we're really into covering the future of
00:30:45automobiles and future mobility. So, um, let's dive in. Obviously for our listeners who are interested
00:30:53in cars, there were a couple of really big debuts here, all of which you can go to
00:30:57MotorTrend.com and check it out. I think the two stars of the show were the Mercedes-Benz, uh, GLC
00:31:04and the BMW iX3. Um, we saw those make their stunning debuts. Actually, we went to events prior
00:31:14to their debuts here. So we got the down and dirty. Yes. I drove it in Southern France at their
00:31:19proving ground, uh, some months ago. Drove which one? The iX3. Okay. Yes. And, uh,
00:31:25I mean, it's a, it's a stunning car. I, I, but it's also kind of a ground breaker in some other
00:31:32ways, especially in the software defined vehicle space. Uh, and we're learning more about that at
00:31:37this show where Qualcomm has made it public that they have been a development partner,
00:31:42uh, co-developing all of the ADAS and infotainment and so forth systems with BMW. Okay. So that's
00:31:50great. That's, that's a great lead in. So there were several other, um, OEM launches. Not a lot here,
00:31:59other than those two vehicles we mentioned, the GLC and iX3 from a, from a U.S. market perspective,
00:32:04uh, several Chinese manufacturers. I attended like all the, the Chinese,
00:32:08Europeans reductions of Chinese cars. Yeah. So I went to, uh, ITO. I went to, um,
00:32:14XPeng and I checked out BYD and they all kind of, I didn't do LEAP, but LEAP is here. There's a couple
00:32:20others and they all kind of said the same thing. Hey, we're coming to, to the European market with
00:32:25these vehicles that you've all seen and been super impressed with in the home market. So that was kind
00:32:30of the shtick and they gave their old business update. So overall been a great show, super
00:32:35interesting, lots to learn, but let's dive deep into, uh, some of the things you have covered with
00:32:41Qualcomm because I only saw their booth and actually their booth is literally about 20 steps that way.
00:32:48And they're getting prepared to, um, have a very special visitor. Uh, Chancellor Mertz is going to stop by
00:32:54today. I actually saw the, um, police dogs going through the rooms, I think, sniffing for strange
00:33:00stuff. Uh, anyways. None of it was me. Yes. Frank, let's, uh, let's dive into, uh, what Qualcomm
00:33:07showed off here at IA Munich. Yeah. Well, one of the things that's kind of different here, Qualcomm
00:33:12is essentially a chip manufacturer, uh, but with the BMW, and so quite often, they're not a tier one.
00:33:19So in most cases, their chips find their way into cars by way of a Valio or a Magna or one of these
00:33:27other companies. Yeah. Another supplier. Right. But BMW, because they're a full line manufacturer
00:33:36and they've got a lot of experience in ADAS tuning and infotainment tuning and all that,
00:33:42they felt comfortable doing that development directly with Qualcomm. So this is a kind of an
00:33:48unusual situation the way it worked out. And it's, it's especially interesting because, uh,
00:33:54a lot of those systems, the, the, you know, the future of driver assistance systems is machine
00:34:01learning. And that's what it's not rules. We don't, when you come to this kind of intersection,
00:34:06you do this, that, and the other it's learning from doing and whatever. So it's millions of miles
00:34:11of testing data going up to the Amazon web services, you know, cloud, uh, flywheel data,
00:34:19flywheel, they call it because it's, it's, it gets a lot of momentum from this data.
00:34:24And so they have a, some unusual data sharing situation. So Qualcomm and BMW both own all of that
00:34:32data. But, uh, and, and, and Qualcomm has the ability to sell the ride, Snapdragon ride elite
00:34:40to other manufacturers, and it will benefit from the development data that was developed with BMW.
00:34:47So they don't have a, uh, an exclusive ownership of, of that ADAS data. Okay.
00:34:53So that's very kind of unusual. And it's, it's the wave of the future going forward as we,
00:34:58uh, the iX3 is not a centralized compute. They said, they talk about having four brains and,
00:35:04uh, you know, uh, Qualcomm is in at least several of them. The ride is doing all of that ADAS stuff.
00:35:10Uh, the, uh, Snapdragon digital cockpit is, uh, working the, the, you know, the cockpit,
00:35:16that cool screen they have at the base of the windshield, the sound system, all that stuff.
00:35:22Okay. So that seems like for the casual listener, that's like, uh, oh my God,
00:35:28what are you talking about? Um, you've been covering the industry for a long time, but we,
00:35:33we've joked how you're a mechanical engineer by training. And a lot of this stuff is,
00:35:39well, if it's doing, if it's flying over your head, it's about 10 feet above mine. So,
00:35:46you know, for the lay person, and I feel like we're going to be talking to
00:35:50multiple different levels here at one end, hopefully it's a bunch of automotive,
00:35:54you know, auto curious consumers who are super into the state, the current state of the automobile
00:35:59and where it's going. But also I think we're starting to attract another audience of more,
00:36:03more technical people, hopefully within the industry. How do you talk to that first layer?
00:36:08Like what's the best way? Cause you just talked about, they're not central compute. They have four,
00:36:12you know, systems. And I, this is something we've, we've been trying to talk about like domains.
00:36:15Right. And that's a huge step forward from, you know, the, the, um, anti-lock brakes had their own
00:36:21little brain and the parking sensors had their own little brain and the, you know, the power windows
00:36:26had their own little brain, everything, there was a zillion brains in the car. And the more you get
00:36:30those centralized, but more critically, and the BMW message here at IAA is we developed all of this
00:36:40ourselves with help from Qualcomm and some others. But all of the things you feel when you drive that
00:36:47BMW are BMW. It's no supplier designed the way the ABS works. No supplier designed the way the
00:36:54stability control controls you in a corner. BMW did that. And for where the rubber reached the road,
00:37:01there are some interesting things. I I've done a story on how, uh, a lot of their, uh, driver assist
00:37:06systems are vastly less annoying, right? I mean, so many ADAS systems we've paid for this stuff
00:37:14like automatic parking. Do you ever parallel park with those things? Never. Right. Because it seems
00:37:20to take too long. If I pull up now, I've got to go in the screen and I've got to do some things and
00:37:24someone behind me is honking and you know, I never do it. I'm a good driver. I can do that. Their system
00:37:30it's since it always knows, you know, all those sensors are always looking. It always knows when you slow
00:37:35down and you're going kind of slow, it'll say, do you want to park? Do you want to park in that one
00:37:40one that's right behind there? You just say, yes. And boom, it just goes right in there.
00:37:44Probably faster than I would do it myself because it already knows where everything is. It doesn't
00:37:48have to turn its head and look over its shoulder. It just goes right back in there. So it's stuff like
00:37:53that. It's things like, okay, uh, I think we can make a lane change over there. Are you okay with that?
00:37:59All you have to do is look at the mirror. When it sees that you've looked at the mirror,
00:38:03it says, okay, we're going, I know it's clear. I don't want to do it until you say,
00:38:08you know, you're happy with it. Okay. Let's go. Uh, you know, things like that,
00:38:12that just make it so much more user, user friendly, symbiotic is the word they use.
00:38:17Right. And actually this brings to mind a story you did recently with, uh, on the,
00:38:22on some robo taxi evaluation that we did. And I think the key line that from we, we compared two systems,
00:38:29Canada, the one was Tesla. The other was Waymo's. And I think, uh, you and our colleague in the cars,
00:38:34you noticed that the cars are actually surprisingly aggressive, particularly in the vehicle,
00:38:39the Waymo that had LIDAR, uh, plus camera, because, and this, this was a unique insight from the story,
00:38:46you know, unlike a human, we got two eyes, but you know, they're on our head.
00:38:49Always facing one direction. Always facing one direction. And if you need to check a mirror,
00:38:52check another mirror, maybe if you're a good driver, look over your shoulder before you make a lane change.
00:38:57You know what doesn't have to do that? The autonomous vehicle, because it's got a spinning array
00:39:01that's seeing, it has a point cloud for several like hundred meters, right? Going all around.
00:39:08So there's none of this half a second, second and a half delay of checking whether it's safe to go.
00:39:14If it's clear to go, you can go. Yeah. It whips out of rocking lots, you know, startably fast.
00:39:21And this is kind of the future that we're, we're all looking at as we get more and more of these
00:39:26software defined vehicle systems in the car, but also more tailored to, um, what we actually want.
00:39:33Right. And another thing on that one, we've all felt like that the, um, the, the Tesla seemed to
00:39:40accelerate and brake more smoothly and more like a human. And that's another thing that you get when
00:39:45you have all this really good large language model learning and all this, you know, redundant data
00:39:50on the flywheel in the cloud or whatever, uh, you, you get all those little cases and you, the car is
00:39:55never, it's a lot less jerky. Now, oddly enough, the, the Waymo seemed to be a little jerkier, but there's
00:40:02probably other things involved. They probably just didn't program it to try and do that. Right.
00:40:08You know, it's all a matter of priorities and whatever. Right. Right. Right. So back to this, um,
00:40:13the iX3 and with Qualcomm on board, um, you mentioned the head up display, which I went to
00:40:20BMW's, uh, reveal of that, that which was at CS and it was this big dark, they have this whole theater
00:40:27shtick. Um, how did they, did you get to, did you sort of explore with, uh, Qualcomm how,
00:40:35what their involvement is in the HUD? Not a, not a ton because really, uh, all of that is,
00:40:42you know, BMW decides what they want that user interface to be like and whatever. They just power
00:40:47that they make it all possible and they give you the compute power to be able to, you know,
00:40:52move a million different things up there and tailor it the way you want it. Right. And that,
00:40:56so that's part of, again, back to the, the lay person that's listening, you know, when we talk about
00:41:02software defined vehicles, fundamentally we're talking about how, um, and I've heard this analogy
00:41:07a lot and actually on this trip, somebody said, it's not a great analogy to say the smartphone on
00:41:12wheels, but it's the easiest thing to understand. Like the cars are becoming a lot more like your
00:41:16mobile phones. You get over there updates, you can add apps to them and all this functionality
00:41:20based on the sensors that is equipped in the hardware. Um, when we talk about HUD, when we talk
00:41:27about Qualcomm powering systems, like the head-up display, um, some of the other things you were
00:41:32mentioning, that's one domain of digital cockpit. Right. Right. And, um, we were talking to the
00:41:41larger editorial group about this. There's some elements now that we're coming into, which we've
00:41:46been promised for a long time, uh, into digital cockpit, um, augmented reality. Yeah. Like AR,
00:41:51right. Which is, I just experienced in another German manufacturer, an Audi. Um, you know,
00:41:56we've had HUDs for what, I think, uh, Corvette was the first one? C4? Was it C4? Maybe. Maybe.
00:42:02It's like cheese ball, like blue light shining up onto your, onto your windshield. But now I was
00:42:10actually surprised to find in these newer vehicles, they're getting a lot better, a little bit more
00:42:14useful. Um, things like showing you what the coming, uh, speed limit in what zone you're entering into.
00:42:24So you can slow down and not get a ticket, but in a very elegant kind of way, like the Audi system will
00:42:30put like, if you're in a 35 mile an hour zone, it'll have a little white sign. This is 35. But when you
00:42:36head to a 30 or a 25 zone, you will see it pop up sort of offset and behind the 30 mile an hour sign.
00:42:43And then as you approach the 25 or the lower limit, it comes forward and then it replaces it. And it's
00:42:50quite right. And it's really useful on those places where there's, you know, a couple of, um,
00:42:55optional turns and it puts the little arrows directly on the one that you want, you know,
00:43:00superimposed on exactly the one you want. And it shows you the buildings sometimes that are right
00:43:05there, some kind of landmarks and whatever. It's, it's really useful because a lot of times,
00:43:09uh, regular navigation, I'm like, I, I, which of these is it? I don't know.
00:43:13Right. And that makes it clear.
00:43:15My wife has a, we, we, we argue I'm a big Waze user. She likes, uh, Google, Google maps. But
00:43:20one of the things I think Waze is better at is telling you which exact lane to be in
00:43:24when you're going to make a turn, but that's eyes on the infotainment system.
00:43:28Right. The AR in the, the augmented reality in the head up display, what literally put it on the
00:43:34dashboard, which is super useful. And again, all of this requires a lot of computing power.
00:43:40Right. It requires massive amounts of data and then a lot of fine tuning.
00:43:45Sure. From very clever UX engineers to make sure it actually works well and not super annoying.
00:43:51And some of that, the job of those people is made a little easier by the Qualcomm's of the world,
00:43:56which when they design this digital, uh, cockpit, Snapdragon package or whatever,
00:44:02it can come with a Bose center point loaded on there.
00:44:06What is that?
00:44:07Bose center point is a branded audio DSP situation.
00:44:11Digital signal, digital signal processor. You don't have to use it, but if you decide to use it,
00:44:16it's a lot easier. If you don't do that, it comes with a thing. I had to look it up. Audio Weaver.
00:44:21Quite often that's built in, which just makes programming a DSP simpler.
00:44:26It's like a tool kit that's already in there. And now you just use the graphic interface of the
00:44:31computer and you know, it's, you don't do it from scratch.
00:44:34But I'm missing, I'm missing something. What's the, uh, what's, what is the Bose center point?
00:44:37What does that mean for, is that for the audio?
00:44:40Yeah. It's one of, if you've got a branded audio system, that is their latest one.
00:44:45Although the, the forthcoming one is Dolby Atmos, Bose with Dolby Atmos.
00:44:50They're working on that in the next generation of these things.
00:44:52So they build that, somehow build that into the chip. So it's easier for a manufacturer
00:44:58to turn it on or program the speakers that they have and the amplifiers that they have
00:45:03based on what's already in the silicon.
00:45:05Okay. Okay. Um, so what else, what else did you see with the quotebox?
00:45:11Uh, well, I, I, we should also mention that some of these things are in those Mercedes products.
00:45:16Okay. Also, um, you know, one of the things I really like too,
00:45:22though I found on the BMW and I, which I think we'll probably see in these other cars.
00:45:26Um, I hate nothing more than I've just started driving and maybe I've had to look around and
00:45:33I've strayed a little bit and it says, are you ready for a coffee break or whatever?
00:45:37You know, I am not ready for a coffee break. I want that turned off for sure.
00:45:41And a lot of that is because it's not paying attention as well. But, uh, the system,
00:45:46these systems, and I use a thing called Toby, I guess is a driver monitoring software system
00:45:51they build in that uses these driver monitoring cameras quite often. They're in the rear view
00:45:56mirror, whatever. That's another set, a hardware set that's in there, but the software or the chip,
00:46:01you know, uh, integration looks for that. And it looks, it tracks your eye focus.
00:46:07What are you looking at? Because you know what, if I'm looking at the rear view mirror
00:46:10because there's an ambulance coming up behind me, that is not distraction.
00:46:13Right.
00:46:14That are some bad distraction. That's useful, helpful distraction.
00:46:17If I'm looking at the mirror because a lane splitting motorcycle is coming along,
00:46:21that is also not bad. And it will allow you that that BMW won't tell you to put your eyes back
00:46:26on the road. If you're looking at something, you know, a high value target, if we will.
00:46:32Right. Okay. So this is for, for those who haven't been in a modern car in a, in a little bit of time,
00:46:38uh, Frank is, Frank is talking about, I think Mercedes pioneered it first, which was the,
00:46:43they had some crazy German name for it, attention, something, something, awareness thing, basically
00:46:49a camera looking at the driver and noticing when you got drowsy or sleepy. And also I think,
00:46:54uh, was measuring the duration of your journey.
00:46:57Sure. And then it would give you a little coffee cup icon and say, Hey, why don't you pull over,
00:47:00take a break, right? Get, you know, take a load off. Um, these are now everywhere in modern vehicles
00:47:07because of the advanced eight S the advanced driver assistance systems, uh, the adaptive cruise
00:47:13control. We're getting into like things like super cruise and blue cruise where you can be hands off
00:47:17the wheel, but they still want your attention on the road ahead. So there's a camera. I just saw it
00:47:23in the Polestar. There's a camera on the A pillar, but like Ford puts it just off the corner of the
00:47:27giant multi-information display. I think that's where most manufacturers have it. Occasionally,
00:47:32I think, I think like Subaru eyesight might be a little bit higher in the, in the, the rear view mirror
00:47:37array, but it's always looking at your face. It's always looking at your eyes. It's always figuring out
00:47:42that you're not looking at your phone, that you're not, that you didn't close your eyes and go to sleep.
00:47:46And then it will send you alerts and warnings somewhere in the car. It might sound an alarm.
00:47:52Yeah. It might vibrate the seats. It might threaten to pull you into the lane and turn the car off
00:47:58because it thinks you fell asleep or in the distress. And on the, even the eye closing thing,
00:48:02BMW is interesting there. We'll see if it comes to the U S it's not confirmed, but if you're in a
00:48:08traffic jam, stop and go situation and you come to a stop, it will allow you to close your eyes and rest
00:48:16for a moment. When the car ahead of you goes, it will not go until, and it may buzz the seat or it
00:48:22might do something to say, um, you know, we could go now, but only if your eyes are open, but it won't
00:48:27turn off and it won't holler at you while you're stopped. It's like, Hey, take a moment. You know,
00:48:32this has been a long trip. You know, you'll be better if you've rested your eyes for a few minutes.
00:48:37It's that kind of neat. And other things, um, like if you're in on cruise control, sometimes,
00:48:43okay, I can see there's a lane merge up there and I need to slow down a little to merge in behind
00:48:49this guy over here. You can use the brake and it won't unset the cruise control light brake.
00:48:54And then you pull over in there, take your foot off the brake. It just goes again because it knows,
00:48:59okay, I see what you're doing. I get it. Let's keep going. You know, if you stab it or if you push
00:49:04cancel or whatever. Okay. So they don't have a resume button. There's just an on off button.
00:49:10It, uh, it hit the on off button again. It resumes if you're still driving. So there's a lot of this
00:49:15just smarter, more symbiotic, less annoying. Uh, also they, they have steering wheel sensors
00:49:24that do not ever require you to put torque on the wheel. Uh, we, we need to get away from that
00:49:28as soon as possible. Either watch that my hands are on there with a camera or sense them with a
00:49:33capacitive touch. All of these systems support that. So they know when your hands are on the wheel,
00:49:37because the message at IAA this year is still level four, level five for consumers way off in the
00:49:44future. Level two, two plus, two plus plus. We're going to still need to know when your hands are
00:49:50on. We're going to need to know what your eyes are doing. So here's all the neat stuff we're doing in
00:49:53terms of hands and eye monitoring. And just to, for the, uh, again, for the lay, the lay person,
00:49:58Frank is describing the SAE standards related to ADAS systems all the way through autonomous, where level five
00:50:06is fully autonomous, no steering wheel needed in the robo taxi, robo taxi. You essentially, you could
00:50:13go to sleep on a drive to San Francisco or turn, turn the seat around and talk to your, your mates
00:50:18because you know, there's, there's no steering wheel in the car. Um, that would be level, level five.
00:50:23The current goal, I think in the U S is level four, uh, level three plus four. Yeah. Four is only in
00:50:31certain conditions. So you still have a steering wheel because of the rain, whatever, if there's certain
00:50:35times and places where it won't do it. So you have to, yeah. It's funny because that's funny for you
00:50:41to say that that was what the, the message here from, I think predominantly the German manufacturers,
00:50:46because a lot of the Chinese manufacturers, like we've got an L four coming next year, which is like,
00:50:52maybe, um, okay. Covered a lot of ground so far, but we surprisingly have not talked about AI.
00:51:00Was there anything AI related to IAA or Qualcomm that you ran into that was particularly interesting?
00:51:08Well, the new word that I came to learn here is agentic AI, right? So this is artificial intelligence
00:51:15that will do things on your behalf. You can act as an agent. Yes. Act as an agent, agentic AI. So
00:51:23Qualcomm did, uh, uh, announce, uh, a program with Google cloud and Google Gemini. Um, and it's a,
00:51:30uh, an integrated system to make it easier for companies to, to deploy this. So Gemini is an,
00:51:38an agent, uh, you know, an artificial intelligent agent that, uh, lives generally in the cloud. Although
00:51:43with the, uh, Qualcomm, they've got enough compute power and enough large language model programming,
00:51:50you know, uh, storage space on the chip to do a lot of that on the edge. They say,
00:51:56which means in the car. So if you have lost your connection to the cloud, it'll still answer
00:52:01questions and so forth only with whatever it was programmed with. If you ask, well,
00:52:05who's the mayor of Seoul, you know, and you don't have a connection, it's going to give you whoever
00:52:09it was when it was programmed or last updated or whatever. Um, so yes, that is an interesting,
00:52:16uh, Mercedes introduced that on the Google booth, but their system was not done with Qualcomm. It
00:52:23uses the Qualcomm chip. So it's entirely in the cloud, but that one, you know, they did some demos
00:52:29where, you know, instead of saying, um, you know, can you recommend a restaurant near such and such
00:52:35where it will go and just do a Yelp look, you know, for who's around there. You can ask it more,
00:52:41you know, in depth questions. Like I'm looking for a high end restaurant to take a client
00:52:47and one client is vegan and another is an enophile wine snob. And it will read the, all that
00:52:54conversational stuff and figure out what it wants and say, well, these, here are three recommendations.
00:53:00And then you could pick one, you could ask it. And this is the, this is where it will really be
00:53:05handy for people, you know, with modern cars. Um, a light might come up on your dash, like the turtle
00:53:12light on a, you know, on an EV that's getting low on power. And you could just say, um, hey Mercedes,
00:53:19what's that turtle light on my dash? And it will explain all of that. And it can also put up the, um,
00:53:25the owner's manual page on your infotainment screen explaining that if you've got a, a
00:53:31malfunction indicator light, it'll tell you, it can query, you know, the, the OBD2 sensors and
00:53:38whatever, figure out what it is and go, you know, okay, yeah, it's this, it's not mission critical.
00:53:44I can make an appointment next week for you. Do you want me to do that? So it can do those kinds of
00:53:48things on your behalf. Right. So this is a gentic, this is sort of the current state of a gentic AI.
00:53:54And just again, if you're sort of new to AI, right, the, the one that everybody knows the,
00:53:59the, is the, the previous, uh, hot news in AI, which was generative AI, right? Generative AI is
00:54:05like mid journey. It was the original chat GPT. It was like, Hey, uh, uh, write an email for me.
00:54:10I, I, you know, I'm tired of, of, uh, or do a drawing. If you're in mid journey, like you,
00:54:15you explain a scenario, draw a picture of me and Frank in a booth in Germany, recording a podcast,
00:54:20and it would spit out sort of a clunky image. The, the, the next level of AI has been a gentic,
00:54:27which is take the ability to generate, look up and generate stuff and respond to your queries,
00:54:33but then act as a virtual agent for you, which is what like these assistants that are coming to cars
00:54:39can do. And then the next level after this appears to be, um, I've heard it explained a
00:54:46a bunch of different ways. The most recent term I heard is embodied AI, which is basically robots.
00:54:50So you're putting the agent, which is either on your phone or in your car or on a computer on your
00:54:56desk. Now you're putting it into a robot walking around, which everybody has. A lot of the Chinese
00:55:01guys are showing off these really wicked robots. So is Tesla. Um, but a gentic is the sort of the
00:55:08hot button phrase right now within automotive, because the AI, um, I guess the power of AI has
00:55:17been developing so rapidly. And a lot of it now is sort of filtering into the vehicles.
00:55:22Have you though, personally been impressed with any AI assistance in the cars? Cause I've been,
00:55:28I've had very, very mixed results. Well, you know, sort of, they want to make cars your friend.
00:55:35Yeah. Right. And so my China trip, uh, driving around in that Neo ET9 with the,
00:55:42they've got a little round screen on the top that turns and looks at you and blinks its eyes and
00:55:48blushes and strums a guitar to the music and all this stuff. Those things are very endearing.
00:55:54Right. I mean, it's, it's half exciting, half depressing that I'm afraid there's like a generation
00:56:00here that has grown up on a phone and has not interacted with people and is going to be more
00:56:05comfortable interacting with these avatars. And the iX3 actually has one of those too. I think it's
00:56:10just built into the screen, but it looks at whoever's talking and it blinks also. And so it's,
00:56:15it's trying to do some of that too. Does that have a name? I, I'm not sure. Yeah. Okay.
00:56:21Maybe you can name it. I saw, yeah, I, it's the same. I, I've, I played around with,
00:56:25with the Neo system. It's, it's, you know, pretty clever. I think the,
00:56:29some of the interesting, the example you gave about asking for a restaurant recommendation
00:56:34and providing more depth. I think the, some of the hardest challenges with some of these AI
00:56:39assistants doing that is actually the general one. And you, you, you go the other way. You say,
00:56:46like, Hey Mercedes, or I was in a, Hey Audi, I'm hungry. And then, then it starts listing and then
00:56:51you can, you can have a conversation and say, okay, what do you want? No, no Mexican food.
00:56:55Uh, I'm feeling kind of like a hamburger and then I can list them off and then you can pick one,
00:57:00but it's, it's, we're a long ways from the current sort of mass market vehicles,
00:57:09having that level of, um, ability, um, it seems to be coming out with a lot of
00:57:14luxury manufacturers first. Um, no doubt because it requires a lot of computing power, but also,
00:57:21um, software designers, UX designers to make sure this stuff works. Cause you know,
00:57:26it's been very spotty. Right. And we've all heard that AI involves these server farms that,
00:57:32you know, require all this power and so forth. So, you know, even in the car, it takes a lot
00:57:37of computing power. And of course, you know, a lot of these that we're talking about are EVs,
00:57:40so they've got a lot of onboard power and a lot of that happens in the cloud. So we're offshoring that
00:57:45power, uh, consumption, but yes, it is not, uh, dirt cheap for, uh, affordable little light cars.
00:57:52Right. Anything else in the AI realm that caught your eye here? Or is it mostly
00:57:56Gentic? No, that's, that's been the biggie. Um, yeah. And, and it's multiple, you know,
00:58:02I'm going to talk to, um, a competitor early later today, that's got a whole different system,
00:58:08uh, based that uses, uh, the, the Microsoft world. So, uh, you know,
00:58:12Azure for the cloud instead of Google cloud. Um, you know, gotcha. Yeah. The cloud piece is
00:58:19something that we're very curious, uh, to explore because it is, I think it's something that most
00:58:24consumers don't realize is it's, you know, if you're at all connected, not just to your car,
00:58:29but with your mobile phone, if you're buying things on Amazon, if you're going to any retail spot,
00:58:34if you're using, uh, common apps like, uh, Apple maps or Google maps, or even things like Yelp,
00:58:41like you're, you're sending vast amounts of data to the cloud and it's enabling these great results
00:58:47that you're getting back. And to your point on edge compute, right? If you think about,
00:58:52I mean, we might think of, it's just the stuff I am, um, consciously doing in the car, like
00:59:00inputting in a destination or looking up, looking up a restaurant or even tuning like, uh, some music
00:59:06or infotainment, but there's actually a thousand, I don't even know what the proper term is, megabits
00:59:12or whatever, kilobytes, not kilobytes, megabytes of information going back and forth from all the
00:59:18systems within these vehicles, right? From the GPS, navigation, uh, anything related to keeping the
00:59:26car between the lines, cruising down the road. It's, it's just constantly going back and forth.
00:59:31And this is part of that, the, um, edge computing that you were talking about, which again, I wanted
00:59:35to explain when you said it, right? Like there's so much data going back and forth and not all data
00:59:41is equal, right? Like you don't need, you don't need access to, to page, uh, 204 in the user manual.
00:59:49That's now on three folders in on your infotainment system. That is not going to be necessarily in the
00:59:55edge. The edge is going to be sort of mission critical stuff that you want instantaneous access.
01:00:00Although they did say mayor of soul whenever it was trained on board. I mean, you know,
01:00:07they did mention too, like if you're driving along and say, you can say there's, if there's a prominent
01:00:12building there, that's obviously a landmark, you can just ask what it is. And the car has the camera
01:00:17view and it, it'll, it'll tell you. And they said a lot of that stuff is on the edge. It's on the car,
01:00:23you know, the, the large language, which was also photo libraries and whatever built in. I'm,
01:00:30I just can't imagine how many ones and zeros are stored on that car.
01:00:33That makes sense to me because having, and this is this, I can't remember the manufacturer that,
01:00:38that told me this, but like, you know, I just looked at this Polestar. It's got 11 cameras on the
01:00:44car just for the eight S system. And then another two exterior, because there's no rear glass. So
01:00:52they have a, they have a virtual rear window and there's a, then there's another one in the car
01:00:55looking at you. So there's so many cameras, right? And the cameras are all outward facing.
01:00:59So in the future, there's a, you could be traveled to a new place. Like here, I'm in Munich. I've been
01:01:04here a long time and you can just ask the car to give you a tour and the car based on the cameras
01:01:09can point out that, Oh, that building. That's the, that's the government building over there.
01:01:13This is a famous, whatever it used to be like, whatever famous thing that's going on.
01:01:16All right. Um, that makes sense to me that you would want that information on the edge, because it's,
01:01:24it's, it's going to be anywhere you can change. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Okay. Um, fascinating stuff.
01:01:34Uh, you, we are recording this sort of midway through your journey here at Munich,
01:01:40IA Munich. Uh, you're going to talk to Qualcomm's president, Nicole DeGaulle. Yes.
01:01:45Uh, and we'll have to catch up with you after that. Right.
01:01:49But what are you most curious to ask? Well, one of the things I want to talk to him about,
01:01:53um, you know, in Shanghai, we saw Neo and Expun show off, uh, chips of their own design and
01:02:02manufacturer. Right. And so I have been curious about, you know, is that a trend? Are we, you know,
01:02:08was that just based on, Oh, there's a chip shortage and whatever, you know, is that going to kick in,
01:02:14you know? And I, my sense of it is from talking to a few of the other people, um, uh, it's not really
01:02:21cost effective to do that. To build your own. No, it's easier if you're a Neo and your car,
01:02:26your program products are mostly all upper end. So you don't have a giant, you know, line of,
01:02:32uh, you know, long line of different car types that you have to satisfy. But if you're a Volkswagen
01:02:37with everything from Polos to, you know, Bentleys and whatever, very difficult. Right. The one thing
01:02:43I'll say, I think, Nicole may not be able to answer is, uh, why the Chinese manufacturers are
01:02:47doing that is the, the chips act, right? Like we're supposed to, U S supposed to be only U S
01:02:52hardware and software within the car. And the Chinese have sort of implemented their own plan.
01:02:56So a lot of these companies are putting their own systems in it. I do think what's interesting about
01:03:01the Chinese vehicles, the manufacturer that we've talked about, they love bragging about the number
01:03:05of, uh, Chris, the top, yes, teraflops, uh, per second, floating point operations per second. Right.
01:03:12But also the number of chips and who make them because that audience is very savvy to the highest tech.
01:03:19I got, we got this many LIDARs. We've got this many radars, this many cameras.
01:03:22U S consumer doesn't really seem to care at all. No. Um, okay. Well, we're about to be kicked out
01:03:28of this beautiful recording space. So we will have to catch up with you, Frank, after you chat
01:03:33with the president of Qualcomm and see how that goes. So thank you so much for listening. Uh,
01:03:40this has been Ed Lowe and Frank Marcus, Frank Marcus. And we've been at IAA Munich 2025,
01:03:46talking all about the latest in the future of mobility. Thank you very much.
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