[0:02] Next year i'm going to give up spreadsheets for 40 days and 40 nights it's going to be excel lent, but it's not because you'll be giving up spreadsheets it'll just be lent yes uh did i tellyou i've just bought a van gogh coffee table yeah it's in great condition it's just missing a bit of veneer oh yeah great look my whole career has been a very thin veneer of of nonsense overthe top of absolutely nothing and it's got me this far.   
Don't tell everyone. I'm only telling Mark at this stage.   
Right, here we go. When does Friday come before Thursday, Ben?   
I don't know. In the dictionary.   
That's not a joke so much as a fact.   
I think you're fine. Shall we do an intro then? Yes.   
Who's doing the intro this evening? I feel like it's not me.   
I think it's Blanford. I only think it's Blanford because I don't want to do it and use the Blanford.   
I'm quite happy to do it. It's fine. Just think of this as a learning opportunity.   
Thank you for the opportunity. you should say thank you for the opportunity ben your thoughtfulness never fails to make me feel better also uh you and i hope you're taking notes for nexttime you do zero takes absolutely good job finally i've made ben happy life achievement unlocked no you haven't made me happy you've made me less unhappy happy hello and.   
  
[1:17] Music.   
  
[1:33] Welcome to 361 a podcast about mobile tech and the world around it my name's rave bunford i'm ben smith and i'm ewan mcleod this is season 21 episode 6 and this week we'retalking about electric vehicles and the parallels to smartphones.   
  
[1:48] Music.   
  
[2:05] Welcome back, chaps. It's good to see you. It's been a longer break in recording than it has been between published episodes.   
As ever, we'll do the social chit-chat and logistics at the end.   
But you and McLeod, I think we have to acknowledge that you are in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, as we record.   
That's right. Now, you don't have to acknowledge that. I mean, it's kind of you.   
Well, I want to acknowledge it because it provides us with some unique technical opportunities for us to discover the bounds of how our software works.   
Works so right this evening we're brought to you by a slightly different combination of software blue tacked together than we normally are that's right so let's strap in and if it all sounds abit vague and disjointed that's either the fact we've just lost our touch or it could be the tools listeners can decide so gentlemen uh it's lovely to see you and i am and you very excited totalk about a topic that i have an inkling that we are not evenly knowledgeable and briefed on unlike like usual.   
  
[2:57] And this might be your or my opportunity to teach Ralph Blanford a thing or two, which has been quite many years coming.   
We're going to talk about electric cars, electric vehicles this evening.   
And there's two reasons for that. One is the new 361 rule that we're going to talk about stuff that we're interested in. And I am interested in this at the moment.   
And secondly, very much a sense that now's the time to start considering this as kind of mobile and the world around it kind of stuff, because EVs are the hot product.   
They are beginning to sell much more, lots, absolutely, sell much more than they ever were.   
And they're also seeing kind of an innovation curve, much like the mobile industry in recent years.   
So gentlemen, let's just level up before we start the episode, fess up.   
Rafe Blanford, you're making a face at me, so I'm going to pick on you. Can you drive?   
Yes. Do you have a car? No.   
  
[3:53] Have you owned or driven an electric vehicle?   
Yes. Owned or driven? Driven. Right. You want more than just yes or no answers? Okay, then, I'll try.   
As an interview subject, you're really making me earn my money here. Okay.   
Actually, we need to talk about the money. So you've driven an electric vehicle.   
Which one have you driven, or ones have you driven?   
I have driven a Tesla, and I've driven a BMW something that has -- it's a hybrid.   
Was it a big one or a small one, the BMW?   
It was a big one. A big one. Okay, excellent. That's great. That's great. The Rafe is up on this.   
  
[4:28] That's me out of follow-up questions. Yeah. And then a Prius.   
So I've driven rental cars that are electric and then family cars.   
But because I live in London, rely on public transport, I have opted not to own a car.   
So let's put a pin in the hole, our hybrids, electric cars, because I think that's a topic we can come back to in a minute.   
I wouldn't mind mentioning them, but I think our main plan is to talk about pure electric vehicles this evening. Actual electric, yeah.   
Actual electric vehicles. because you and McLeod, there's literally oil bubbling out of the ground yards from where you're sitting as we speak.   
Are there any EVs in Saudi Arabia, as far as you're aware? Yes.   
Yes, there are lots of EVs in the region. Not so much as you would see in, for example, Norway or across Europe or certainly in the UK.   
  
[5:11] But every time I drive into Terminal 3, I pass a fleet, and I do mean a veritable fleet of Teslas.   
This is Terminal 3 in Dubai. yeah so there are quite a lot of electric cars there's quite a lot of those really fancy e mercedes i forget the name equal eos eq eq somethings yeah yeah so it'sbecoming more and more uh apparent you see a lot yes you see lots of teslas in dubai or equivalent and just to pose you the same question i pose ralph lamford i think i know that youhaven't ever owned an ev including in denmark but you've driven evs i've driven many evs in denmark actually in fact that's exclusively in denmark and that's because there was a therestill is a a drive now equivalent you know car sharing scheme they're quite popular in denmark they're introduced quite early so i used them a lot i mean i mean almost every day i wouldtake a drive now to the office or back from the office or to this thing or whatever i was doing so and those were typically.   
  
[6:10] Bmw i3 is it the little kind of small multi-purpose ones i3 was the little kind of bug car with what what they call the suicide doors that open, you know, out, you know, the back dooropens the wrong way, as it were, which was cool.   
Again, it's interesting, actually, that, because when we visited you in Denmark, when you lived there, Because there was so much cycling and so much great cycling infrastructure, therewere car clubs were really popular to sort of fill in that people didn't want to own cars.   
But that almost encouraged, you know, kind of car clubs into greater existence.   
Whereas obviously in the UK, where I am at the moment, and Rafe is, there's much more culture of owning vehicles.   
Right. So selfishly, I'll ask myself the same question. And the reason I'm so giddy and excited about this is I've had a plug-in hybrid car for a couple of years now. and we got our first fullelectric vehicle in December last year.   
Because of boring reasons, I probably will get rid of that vehicle on its first anniversary.   
  
[7:03] And so I'm actually in the middle of looking either to buy or lease our second full electric vehicle.   
Ah, so you're in the market. So yes, in the market and also feeling brave in as much as willing to experiment a bit and perhaps I mean, you can hardly be an early adopter for EVs now, butto try some stuff perhaps that's a little less mainstream or try some stuff that I haven't tried before because it'll be our second car.   
So we have a plug-in hybrid and so there's not the same range and reliability anxiety that people get when it's their only vehicle and they need to know that it's definitely going to chargeup and it's definitely going to work.   
Right right now i have a genesis gv60 for those who don't know genesis that's a brand that's manufactured by the hyundai group so hyundai make hyundai cars kia cars and genesis andthey're kind of three different segments i think it's fair to say that genesis is a little bit like what lexus is to toyota you know kind of very much the same underpinnings mechanically butit's a good looking vehicle good looking but also kind of with a few more bells and whistles and toys and things on, but actually underpinned by so the GV60 is the same as the IONIQ 5and the Kia EV6 for those following along at home.   
  
[8:17] And in terms of things we're looking at, I've been getting very giddy, but everything from Polestar's to BMW's to the one I'm sort of deeply tempted by, but actually just may not beable to access is a Fisker. F-I-S-K-E-R.   
Of what? Oh, I think I've heard of that, right? Is that like a Rivian kind of thing?   
Well, so most people I speak to who are kind of car enthusiasts or vaguely car adjacent know Fisker because it's the kind of the wacky kind of looks like a mega car from the future kind ofsports car thing that you sometimes see in movies when somebody's driving something really outrageous and futuristic.   
And, you know, I watched a film the other day. Is this the Force E?   
Yeah, I forget the name actually.   
Yes, I watched a TV show the other day where the bad guy drove the Fisker to show how incredibly wealthy and out of touch he was.   
But that Fisker went bust because selling incredibly high-end luxury vehicles to that small market didn't work.   
And now they've come back and they're starting to make consumer SUVs.   
I would describe them as fun cars.   
  
[9:22] There's quite a lot of personality. Are they available in the UK?   
They are available in the UK, and they're advertising pretty hard over here, but they don't have a great presence in terms of dealers or service and those kinds of things.   
And then the other brand that I'd like to talk to, and we'll come back to it in a minute, is BYD.   
They're advertising a lot in UE. Yes. Now, BYD stands for something bonkers, something your dreams.   
Like, all their early cars had something your dreams. Believe your dreams or… Build your dreams.   
Build your dreams. and you look at that and you think it's a Chinese brand and I think maybe in the very early vehicles sort of.   
  
[10:01] Whatever the Chinese kind of branding just got translated into English and moved across the continents.   
I think they're rebranding, but BYD are a very interesting company because they're one of the largest motor manufacturers in the world by virtue of all that they build in China.   
So lots and lots of choices. And I thought that was a great opportunity to have a bit of a chat.   
I want to know what your impression is anecdotally in the UK.   
What's happening? What are you feeling? because look when i'm in the school car park dropping the children off when i'm in the uk it's like 30 to 40 percent of the vehicles are electric sorafe you will help me with this because you are mr stats but we have to acknowledge that in the uk and other places as well in similar time scales sales of new petrol or gas fuel vehicleswill be banned from 2030 there'll be some exceptions but for the most part 2030 is when sales of gas cars won't be allowed anymore more.   
So obviously, that's driving people thinking about actually, we need to have product and we need to have things out there in the market because we need to be able to address everyone'sneeds.   
But I think also I saw some stats that say across Europe now, 60% to 65% of all new vehicle sales in sort of consumer car segment is electric now, which is off the charts.   
The numbers are going up and up and up. And it's very, very noticeable.   
  
[11:25] I think one of the things that I kind of have been curious about, actually, is if you look at the press, at least from my perspective, you see all these electric cars, you see carseverywhere.   
I mean, you can sneeze and hit three white Tesla Model 3s in the school car park, for sure. There are just so many of them.   
I think, Rafe, if you read the press, most of the press about vehicles is either the 2030 ban will will be chaos and terrible.   
Electric vehicles have terrible range or are very awkward to recharge and all those sorts of things.   
And then particularly for those of us in the south of the UK, there's been a huge argument about the ultra low emissions zone, which is a sort of an area of London where they're trying tocontrol vehicle emissions because pollution has been well above safe levels.   
And that's very much affected the conversation.   
So Rafe, I'm out of London and I'm in the suburbs, you're you know right in the center of london does that sound a sort of a fair summation in terms of evs everywhere i think there maybe a bit of observer bias going on here that's potential i hate to hate to come back at you with stats and things like that what i'll say is in london my observation would be a lot of the kindof ride sharing or taxi equivalents are using electric electric vehicles and there's some specific circumstances in London around congestion charges and low emission charges that actuallyencourage that kind of behaviour.   
  
[12:52] Just as a general observation, also when traveling, taxis often seem to be electric vehicles.   
And I think a lot of that is to do with running costs and things like that.   
And then absolutely, there has been a rise in electric vehicles.   
You see that in London as you see it anywhere else.   
  
[13:09] But I think it does depend on the ability to charge. And a lot of people living in flats or on the street, it's kind of less popular.   
  
[13:16] And that's something maybe we can dig into in a bit. but um you talked about the uh z mandate and in different countries there's different versions of this but in the uk the zmandate comes into force next year so 2024 alongside the kind of emission targets that are already there and in the uk the government wants to i'll use this ban with bunny ears the said ofmost petrol and diesel cars there are going to be kind of exceptions to that and lots of grandfathering yes going on but initially the kind of zed mandate or the zed ev mandate there's atarget of 22 in 2024 of sales being electric vehicles that goes up to i think 28 in 2025 33 in 2026 and so on until by the time you get to 2030 it's 80 and depending on what stats you readlast year it was about 15 to 17 percent of cars being sold so you can see that even in that kind of initial next year that's quite a jump and then looking at some other research that kind ofvaries around the world and the uk is one of the leading markets western europe in particular particularly the nordics they've been a little bit more advanced in their kind of governmentmandation but globally ev vehicles are still only around 15 percent However.   
  
[14:40] There is an interesting point here that we are kind of at an inflection point and there are various research studies that are coming out now which are comparing it or describing thetipping point and saying that by 2030...   
  
[14:53] There's between 60 and 80 percent depending on which scenario you follow will be electric vehicles so there's kind of a hypothesis here that it's a really interesting time to talkabout this because we are on the switch point and you know it's taken about 10 to 15 years to go from the first vehicles were being sold back in 2010 you know we're almost 13 15 yearslater it's taken that long to get to 15 in the next seven or eight years we're going to jump to the 70 mark mark so i think that's why it's interesting to have that and it's a typical s curveadoption that we've talked about in the past for technology cycles is starting to apply to ev and the reason behind it is basically battery technology has improved and we may come back tothat because that's interesting for other reasons but the battery charging and the ability to charge so yeah the uk is absolutely going to see that change but i think we're probably not quite asfar ahead and i think there's a bit of observer bias from you and on the school run and ben maybe in the cars you happen to notice absolutely i mean this is the difficult thing as wellbecause you've got observer bias you've got you know kind of our respective locations as well in terms of you know like of course the school car park is going to have a different mix ofvehicles to what's going around the motorway and those sorts of things i think there's that kind of confusing factor of the mix of commercial vehicles but i do want to just sort of comeback to this thing that But I think there's an aspect now that electric vehicles are now of a quality that they're good enough to talk about.   
  
[16:22] They're good enough to be interested in because it's not anymore just a thing of specs.   
You remember in the early days of smartphones, you'd get the processor speed, the RAM, the screen, and a lot of conversations about whether something was.   
  
[16:34] Music.   
  
[16:38] Good would be very much rooted in the gigamegs it had.   
You know, how many flops, how many megabytes, how many lumens or whatever.   
And early conversation about EVs was much the same.   
But actually, if I observe the, you know, kind of like, I'm watching a lot of reviews about cars because I want to buy one.   
And if I think about my own sense of what matters to me and friends and things, there's increasing sense actually that, you know, there are enough vehicles now that are good enough. andwe can talk about, we will, Rafe, come back to charging in a minute because I really want to have a chat about that.   
But actually, increasingly now, it's about, as well, the intangibles.   
I'm trying to put my finger on it.   
Like, I love my relatively new electric vehicle because it is such a calm place to be.   
It's really quiet. It's really calm and a nice place to drive.   
  
[17:32] You know, you don't have noise. You don't have rumbling.   
You don't have, you know, kind of screaming engines, all that kind of stuff.   
And actually, no one's sort of saying, oh, you know, EVs are nicer to drive.   
But actually, I think a lot of people who are buying them actually enjoy the- So you prefer it.   
Actually, in the past, perhaps you might have said, oh, I only buy German cars, or I only buy sports cars, or I only buy American cars, or I only buy this brand of trucks.   
I mean, depending on where you are in the world, that would vary.   
But for me, it was, oh, I really like German cars.   
  
[18:04] For some of my friends, it's, oh, are you a Ford or are you a Dodge person in the States or whatever?   
Or whatever you know like people you know buying f-150s is almost like a religion in in north america as far as i can tell but here i think now people are starting to sort of get into thatmindset of actually i only want an electric vehicle and as rave said earlier often because it's associated with disproportionate kind of comfort and quality and silence and those sorts ofthings and obviously because many of the early evs are expensive they've started off as relatively luxury vehicles premium and so people sort of see electric vehicles maybe not aspremium anymore but as kind of having premium characteristics you know like even of your regular brands does it free you ben does it free you from the traditional it must be a germancar style approach do you think yes totally so is it freeing you or is it causing you to have to look elsewhere well what's really interesting is if you had said to me would you like a chinesecar yeah trying you know being being very honest, I would have said, I don't really think so because I've never owned one before.   
I don't know anyone who owns one.   
I mean, I know there's Chinese electronics in nearly everything I produce, but I've never owned one. I don't really know much about the design.   
  
[19:18] If I had to guess, I would say that what I know about vehicle manufacturing in China was very, very high volumes, relatively cheap. It doesn't really speak to me.   
But actually, looking at some of the vehicles that are being produced and now available in the UK market, they are incredibly impressive.   
The BYD SEAL vehicle is arguably competitive with the Tesla Model 3, and that's incredibly impressive. And it's a really nice, attractive vehicle.   
So actually, sorry, Rafe, and I will shut up in a second.   
  
[19:50] Previously, I would have only said, said, oh, you know, sort of German brands.   
Actually, South Korean, Chinese, you know, some of the Japanese brands have done a terrible job of bringing EVs to the market.   
So, you know, it's almost like sort of shaking the dice and starting from fresh, you know, forming all your brand opinions all over again.   
  
[20:09] I think the interesting thing here is the rollout of EV vehicles is a mirror image of what happened with smartphones.   
And you alluded to this connection earlier, Ben, because some of the old manufacturers are stuck in their way.   
And the CEO of BMW recently commented on this, almost saying that they're running out of time because their lunch is being eaten by either startups and obviously the Tesla, forexample.   
Example but actually probably more serious is the chinese and the south korean attaches in these new brand names coming in are almost unrecognizable to the traditional car marketespecially when you look at what the big sellers were in ice 20 years ago and it's you can't help but draw that parallel between the kind of scandinavian mega mobile phone matriarchs andto be fair the early smartphones as well the nokias the ericssons of this world who are basically nowhere now because they got got displaced by apple and something it's not a perfectanalogy but it's been disruptive enough or different enough and while it's still got four wheels and everything else some of the fundamentals have changed in that it's the batterytechnology that's driving a lot of it and then software as well and it's so interesting to see that software thing in particular because again it mirrors what happened with smartphones andhere you've got someone like ben who i can totally see as a a traditional, you know, I'll buy a German car and go, I'm trying all sorts of other things now.   
  
[21:33] That kind of disruption hasn't happened in the car market for arguably 70 or 80 years.   
  
[21:39] It's really worrying. I really, I have a problem because I really respect Tesla for the products that they make.   
But I also think Elon Musk is a giant idiot.   
  
[21:49] You know, self-sacrificing. Sometimes, occasionally, and allegedly.   
Consistently and persistently, he's an idiot. But actually, I think Rafe's hit the nail on the head, and I want to come back and talk about some of the other aspects like software in a second.   
But Tesla manufacture electric vehicles with battery technology and management and drivetrains that are so much more efficient than the competition.   
Position, you may choose other vehicles, but you have to acknowledge that you will get better range and better performance out of a Tesla in many, many cases.   
They're not as far ahead as they were now, but it is night and day when you look at some of the performance of this, and this is a little bit like how I think that...   
The iPhone wasn't the only phone around at the time, but with the launch of the iPhone, what people cared about completely changed overnight.   
All of a sudden, everyone was being measured on new criteria.   
  
[22:44] You wouldn't have said that Apple would be one that would move the market in that regard. It doesn't have a keyboard.   
Exactly. No one will buy it. And Tesla, for all of their problems and their history, you know, also, you know, kind of still have some of that first mover advantage now.   
And they're really setting the benchmark in terms of range and, you know, charging and the efficiency of their motors and those sorts of things.   
Building on Rafe's point there, you are an absolute nightmare for these German brands, right?   
I like them, yeah. For as long as we, Rafe and I, have known Ben, he has purchased German brand cars and has taken great care, delight and pleasure from it.   
And I think we respect that and that's lovely.   
  
[23:29] You were never, ever, ever going to not drive a German car, Ben.   
Right so five years ago ten years ago uh rave and i have we ever if we said look what kind of cars are you going to have across the next 20 30 years the answer would be and was up untilthe last two years was always german now and this is when when you hear the the german manufacturers saying look we you know warning warning this is existential yes well yes andthey said when you hear ben going, okay, do you know what? I don't need that German one.   
  
[24:08] B-Y-D, Ben. B-Y-D. Yeah. Right? What?   
Amazing. It's even worse than that, though, because whilst you had all that hierarchy of vehicle manufacturers, and obviously everybody in different markets have got their ownperceptions, but for me, in this part of Europe, German brands were seen as luxury, they were seen as prestigious, but they also came with relatively high quality.   
Some of the German brands have done such a poor job of releasing EVs, And Volkswagen is the obvious example.   
Their first set of products, which were sort of our golf-sized vehicles and small SUVs, those sorts of things, so the ID.3, 4, and 5 in their first race, have been completely panned.   
And actually, Rafe made me think of this when you were talking about software, Rafe, because the fit and the finish and the build was fine.   
Not VW's reputation, but fine.   
The drivetrains were fine, not exceptional, but fine.   
But the software, Both the software to manage the vehicle and the software for drivers was so awful that combined with it only being fine in those other respects, they've really struggledto sell.   
And now you have people saying, oh, don't get the VW. It's terrible value for money.   
  
[25:21] Now, it's not quite overnight, but that really has turned things on its head.   
And I think that mediocre vehicles, mediocre drivetrains, mediocre build quality, but with really amazing software inside that was really easy to use or was really pleasant to use, youknow, would turn that on its head.   
And, you know, kind of, I suppose the example I would give would be Android Automotive, which some of the brands are putting inside their cars now, which means you have Googleand Spotify and Maps and all those sorts of things out of the box, but also to a quite a high standard.   
So yeah, it has absolutely turned things on its head.   
Rafe, software is a tricky one to master.   
  
[25:58] Do we have any inkling about whether or not there's an ecosystem lock-in yet?   
I'm wondering if people are starting to buy the cars that have the software they like.   
And the whole reason I'm saying this is, in North America, General Motors said, we're not going to put CarPlay in our electric vehicles. And the internet lost its mind.   
And this was universally considered a bad thing.   
And the guy from Ford basically said, they're mad. We don't do software.   
  
[26:28] We will get our money from vehicles and services for vehicles.   
We're not going to try and put software on cars. We'll always support things like CarPlay.   
And it was like, it almost felt to me like it crystallized the whole conversation that actually EVs are kind of smartphones with wheels on now.   
I think it's a good question, but actually I think in some ways you should look at software through three lenses on this, and one of which is what you're talking about there, the CarPlay orthe infotainment system, kind of the interface that the driver sees.   
And there definitely seems to be evidence that people will favour CarPlay and Android Auto and for the last 10 years there's been this question of who is going to win that battle.   
But clearly there are alternatives to this and some of the manufacturers have their own systems which are... Like what?   
Like what, Rafe? Who in their right mind? Well, I mean, Tesla... Okay, alright, fine.   
So hold on a minute, what happens when you plug your Tesla in?   
You don't get CarPlay? No.   
Famously no. Okay, because I've not experienced that. That would irritate me dramatically.   
  
[27:30] So if that's the first one, the other thing is like, you can't draw this comparison too far because there is this thing around touchscreens and safety and actually BMW in particularwere famous for having the kind of the control stick in the car that was haptics and tactile and everything else.   
And I still think there's lots of room there.   
  
[27:50] The car doesn't have the same limitations as a smartphone in terms of everything turning into a glass slab so i think there is an unwritten story there yet in terms of that humancomputer interface in the car and at the moment things are focused very much around the driver some of the concept cars i've seen at ces in the past talked about the passenger and thenboth front seat and back seat but i think that's just one lens of the software the second one is actually what most people don't realize is that's only one bit of the software in a car now thereare There are literally hundreds of suppliers.   
And in some cases, the cars have many, many chips. And we're talking 10 hundreds of chips and kind of hardware system.   
This is not the old days where it was sort of a physical car.   
You could relatively simply understand and all the bits and how it worked.   
There's miles of cabling. I mean, there are tales of, and I think sometimes they're apocryphal, of work being done to strip out wires and taking 10 kilos off a car, a bit like you get withairlines as well.   
What is undoubted is that some of the more traditional car manufacturers have relied on a system where they get components from loads of different spas.   
And, you know, you can talk about Toyota just in time and all the different approaches to building a car.   
And a lot of them replicated that with software and they'd get it from 20, 30, 40, 50 different suppliers.   
And that wasn't really a problem when you're building a physical thing.   
But with software, that becomes a nightmare of federated development, of integration.   
  
[29:20] That makes problems for over the air software updates, for everything else.   
And Ben, I know you've got a few tales around that. I'll come back to the third lens in a moment on software.   
I was just going to interrupt and say it really amused me that going through the menu of my Genesis car, which obviously is manufactured by Hyundai Group, it says NVIDIA, like mycar's interface for the entertainment system and also then to see battery charge and to plan, you know, route planning with charging and everything.   
  
[29:46] It's the NVIDIA drive platform. So NVIDIA produce, you know, chipsets and software to go into these cars.   
And it looks looks like a computer game and i mean not just in terms of the visuals but it has really slick you know accelerated graphics on huge screens you know with lots and lots ofoverlays and interplaying elements and these sorts of things and as you press buttons on the steering wheel various elements move around but they all are sort of you know correctlyaliased and everything it's not like the bad old days of sort of the ltd screens and i was absolutely amazed but it made made total sense to me that an organisation that was so rooted ingaming in its origin is now making in-car systems because it feels like a computer game when you're navigating around it.   
It's really evident that when you look at what's come from smartphones, a lot of the names, not just NVIDIA, actually inside the cars as well.   
  
[30:37] And to draw the parallel back to smartphones, a lot of the issue with Symbian was that it came from, or bits came from, different vendors and suppliers for different things and tosome extent then the different manufacturers then had their own versions of Symbian and you can kind of see where that got disrupted by Android and Apple but also even Applecontrolling their software stack top to bottom and it's been doing the same with hardware it kind of does everything whereas Android had the Samsung did something and then things gotadopted in and then there's Android open source and and and and so I don't want to draw it too much but that software thing has added a level of complexity that i don't think isappreciated and it's also a lot of it is in kind of the hidden systems it's all the embedded software and processes that make a car like that work and that's actually been going on regardlessthat's not really an electric vehicle thing that's just general that computers have been coming into cars and the diagnostics and you'll hear tales about garages.   
  
[31:35] But the third software lens that I think is worth thinking about is innovation through software.   
And so you can almost get two things here, different versions of the car, depending on what software package you had.   
  
[31:46] Tesla has made this famous with, you know, buy and get the kind of self-driving mode or get the ultimate mode for extended range and things like that.   
And Ben, that's caused a few problems, including with the licensing, right? Yeah, two things.   
One is Tesla have broken my brain because now when I look at something thing that I know is a software feature for another manufacturer and they want me to buy a whole pack or they'llonly let me have that feature if I get the big alloy wheels or the you know the sports edition of the car it drives me mad because I'm now programmed to know that there should be somefeatures that can just be turned on and off in software and you know have enough understanding but also I was talking to a friend the other day who hopefully this is an an accurateretelling but increasingly people who are buying electric vehicles and then adding software features onto them as part of the buying process and paying serious money in some cases forthese upgrades are realizing that in some cases when they sell the vehicle they won't also sell the license for the software that's linked to them so you can have bought i'll say tesla but i'mnot picking on them particularly you can have bought a tesla and put ludicrous mode or or something, you know, this extra feature onto the vehicle.   
And it's not a given that when you sell the vehicle, that feature will travel with the vehicle to the next owner.   
  
[33:08] Because you might think, well, I bought a car for £50,000 and I put £5,000 worth of extras on it, therefore my vehicle costs £55,000.   
You might expect to see some of that value realised in the resale price.   
  
[33:21] Different world, no? Well, the world of software licensing has been a murky way for people to sell the same thing twice. When I sell my iPhone, they don't get my Apple Oneaccount, and they don't get my Dropbox.   
No, they don't. But I think, interestingly, when you sell your iPhone and you buy another iPhone, you can install all that software that you were either paying for on a monthly subscriptionor you'd bought outright onto a new iPhone. It remains yours.   
So if you buy a new Tesla, can you then... That is the question.   
And that's the point in the conversation where I'm not yet sure if this this person knows whether or not they can transfer their features.   
  
[33:56] Music.   
  
[33:56] But I think the default answer may have been no when he spoke to the manufacturer about this.   
And actually, that sort of makes sense because I imagine that for motor manufacturers maintaining kind of like compatibility, as it were, with these features, the next Tesla vehicle he buysmay not support ludicrous mode or whatever else.   
It may not have the hardware in order to do it. And smartphones or computer platforms, and obviously vehicles, as Ray said earlier, that's where your analogy starts to break down.   
  
[34:29] Rafe, BMW got laughed at when they suggested that they might license heated seats on a monthly subscription basis.   
I thought that was slightly unfair because they clearly were doing it as a trial.   
In their market, often who purchases the vehicle would be a leasing company and who runs the vehicle would be a consumer.   
So actually, to let different entities add things to the car does make sense.   
If you're a bit more charitable about it, you say, well, actually, you know if my job gives me a car i might like to pay to enhance it but only for the time that i've got the car in mypossession it's not completely bonkers but they got laughed out of town on that one they didn't i agree with you it feels a bit unfair but people's expectations have been set by the currentcar market so the idea of subscriptions doesn't get very popular i think it's partly also because the manufacturers do rather seem to take advantage and you know in In the old days, it wasabout what maps you got with your GPS system.   
And when you went abroad, suddenly you had to pay £500 for a map of the continent or something like that.   
But I can actually see it being a positive in some ways.   
And just as with other kind of avenues of consumer electronics.   
  
[35:39] The rise of subscription seems to be something that will come into cars.   
And Ewan, I'll get you to talk about what you did in Copenhagen a little bit.   
But you can basically, it's an unbundling of the functionality of the car.   
And in some cases that means you'll get better value for money because you won't be paying for those extras which is always like something people complain about when buying cars butalso the concept of do you turn on ludicrous mode or extended range when you're doing a holiday or something like that could you do it for a period of time or you know self-driving thathas yet to really be explored i mean ultimately it will be a way of extracting more money from customers customers but I don't think that's always a bad thing because sometimes it canhave advantages for the consumers as well and actually the cost can sit with the appropriate audience in the sense of what development is but that push towards subscription or fractionalownership I think is only going to get accelerated by that and Ewan I know you did that when you were in Copenhagen.   
  
[36:38] We did we used a lot of subscription capability and I had my drive now card it's not available in Copenhagen anymore but in London I was a drive now customer and what wasreally cool for a period for a couple of years I was able to yeah I would come into Copenhagen Copenhagen airport and use my UK drive now card to unlock the BMW i3 and there'susually about eight of them in the airport car park you just drove away drove home really cool and then sometimes it would be there the next morning if it wasn't I would just walk to thenext one drive it was really really effective But I can see the market changing real-time.   
When we moved the family back to the UK, we panic-bought an XC90.   
We leased it. That's a Volvo SUV.   
  
[37:20] That's quite a panic buy. Yeah, we panic at least one. Because what are we going to do? Don't know, don't know.   
XC90, safe. Safe both in the road safety sense, because it's a Volvo, but also safe in the sense of it's so large I can fit everything I own inside of it.   
  
[37:36] Well, this is quite important. And coming from Oman, where we were driving Ford Expeditions, which are trucks, nine-seater trucks.   
I drove a Ford Expedition once, and it was ever so slightly larger than my student flat at the time.   
Yeah anyway so we had to make sure hetty wife was comfortable so we leased just through an online leasing click click and we found one for a year great okay we'll push off the panicabout what kind of car we're going to get by just done right so that's been going fine and then just recently hetty got a phone call from the leasing company saying hey uh look you knowyour lease is coming up yes have you had a think about what you'd like to do and hetty said well yeah let's keep the same one no you can't do that fair enough for various differentfinancial reasons you know they want to sell the car on she then said well just another xc90 then lady at leasing company said no sorry try something else and he said no no no volvo xc90euro or equivalent and the lady said no we can't give you a volvo you need to go direct sorry it needs to be something else volvo have just launched a vehicle subscription service actuallywhich is interesting because as you were saying that, I was just thinking, we rarely talk about cars on this show, but last time we talked about cars and you talked about that app for leasingthem, we sort of said, oh, it will change.   
You'll get much more into getting cars as a service.   
  
[38:58] And we were certain about that because all our software was becoming like a service.   
And it's very noticeable that BYD, Polestar to a bit of an extent.   
  
[39:08] Definitely Genesis, Genesis, definitely Tesla, don't have huge traditional dealerships, physical presence.   
I mean, they do have some presences, but they're very different from 20 years ago when you were buying a car where nearly every major town would have every major brand representedwith a franchise, certainly where we are in the UK.   
And you thought, oh, they're turning the car market upside down.   
They're getting rid of dealerships. They're doing remote service and those kinds of things.   
But I sort of felt that we sort of then got stuck, which is actually they discovered that people are quite willing to buy or lease vehicles that they've had very little exposure to and haven'thad a salesperson sell.   
  
[39:49] I mean, my mate drove down to Southampton docks to collect his Tesla, which is sort of rolled off the ship from wherever it was manufactured, you know, kind of in a tent.   
You know, this is a luxury vehicle you sort of collect in a car park where they throw the keys at you and there's none of the, oh, sign here.   
You know, would you like us to whip the covers off and would you have a glass of champagne and, you know, kind of all of the… Photo?   
Exactly. And the dealership who sold me my last Porsche was, you must have a photo. I mean, it's an important moment we should capture.   
  
[40:19] People are willing to give that up. But we haven't got to that point of where manufacturers now are sort of saying, no, we won't sell you a car, but we'll lease you a service orwhatever.   
Because these leases, like the ones that Volvo do, they're just traditional vehicle leases.   
They might wrap it up in some nice branding that it's a Volvo subscription.   
But if you look at the price on these sorts of things, it's not any different to sort of traditional vehicle leasing. And so in the UK, Onto, who is one of the kind of short vehicle leasecompanies, not the on-demand ones that you were talking about.   
Yeah, the electric one. But this is the, I need a vehicle for a month-by-month basis, and I'd like flexibility.   
Yes. Which is the kind of thing that we thought these new manufacturers would give.   
They're in some financial difficulties, I think, at the moment, because effectively they haven't really been able to compete on price with what people are comparing them against, which issort of the standard lease yeah yeah cost of financing and purchasing a car on long duration finance agreements we're just running a little over on time i just wanted to move us on and ipromise i'll shut up in a second privacy so something else that's come up with electric vehicles you know sort of related to software is privacy mozilla foundations published a report in thelast month which has panned you know most of the vehicle manufacturers for collecting what What they say is huge amounts of intrusive data, including things as horrendous as sexualpreferences.   
  
[41:48] Sexual activity, voting intentions.   
  
[41:51] Family structure, medical information, and these sorts of things.   
And they have really criticised electric vehicles, particularly in the manufacturers, for effectively saying most people don't pay this any attention when they get an EV and basically accepthuge huge amounts of data collection, perhaps far more than with traditional vehicles because these are giant computers and they tend to be very connected vehicles as well with internet-based services.   
I mean, does it give you any pause for thought, Ewan, in terms of picking vehicles on this?   
I don't want any of that. That really worries me and I'd be looking to some kind of service to give me some comfort.   
We've analysed the following, wire cutter style, to say, don't buy these ones, do buy this.   
I would be worried a little bit about that. But then.   
  
[42:42] You know, what are you going to do with it? What does it really matter?   
I have to say, when I read it, I mean, the Mozilla Foundation is doing good work because it's raising that kind of creeping commercialisation.   
And if you look at where the television industry has gone, most of the people selling you a television have no interest in selling you a good quality screen or a nice experience.   
What they're doing is selling a cut price device to get a data collection into your house so that they can sell data to to broadcasters and advertisers.   
  
[43:12] It's quite hard to be rid of that with smart TVs. I think there's a sense that that's the way the electric vehicles are going.   
But Rafe, I'm not an expert, but I just didn't think that it was possible to collect that type of data.   
So I wonder if what they're observing is that the legal agreements that you sign, the leases and the terms and conditions of these vehicles, cover all of these sorts of things because thesemanufacturers are hoovering up all this data and in the mix there might be all these various characteristics all these various types of data but not because they're actively seeking it out butbecause they're sort of capturing it in an uncontrolled way and are worried about sort of you know kind of being found out later to have i don't know perhaps recorded some audio ofsomeone talking about voting intentions for example yeah i mean i think that's right people are not going to read through the terms and conditions when they buy a car the kind of shrinkwrapping on software gets ignored it's even more true of cars and typically in these situations you know belt and braces on the legal front could that data be collected absolutely becausethe number of sensors in those cars are absolutely insane but then the cost to process all of that would be pretty interesting and so i think it's how much do you trust any corporate entityand cars are a concern but the stuff on your smartphones i do do wonder a bit like apple is doing in the smartphone world where there might be a this is a privacy compliant car could therebe a standard that comes in interesting.   
  
[44:41] And that could be a way that traditional manufacturers kind of fight back a little bit against some of the Chinese or South Korean things.   
But if I was going to worry about privacy, I would probably be more concerned around the number of cameras that are in these vehicles and probably going to remain the case just asmuch pointing outwards as pointing inwards and inadvertently capturing things.   
Now, you can sort of imagine a world where the police might go and request for CCTV for a crime reason and go and collect it from all of the self-driving cars that were around in thatperiod and be able to collect things together.   
I mean, this is the sort of thing that, you know, it's easy to kind of be a bit conspiracy theory about this, but machine learning and the ability to mine through data like that, I don't see anyreason why that isn't possible in the future.   
  
[45:26] Now, whether it's cameras or other LiDAR sensors is really interesting.   
The reason I kind of bring this up is I just want to very quickly refer back to something earlier we said about software and the advantage Tesla has made a great deal recently of the self-driving stuff and being able to pair it with a neural network that relies on having captured hundreds of millions of videos of the Tesla's inaction.   
And now there does appear to be a leap forward in the self-driving capability and they have an advantage over a lot of the other car manufacturers because they've been in that position.   
  
[45:59] Of having cameras everywhere for a few years more vehicles and kind of a fresh start that you know the connection to privacy raises some interesting questions and we aren't goingto get into the ethics of self-driving now because that's a whole nother episode no gosh yeah but it is interesting thing to think about that these cars are you know a bit like smartphoneshave more sensors more capability to know about you and frankly the world that you're in and the world that you're around than people perhaps realize and so as with all things digital theconcern is probably does the legal and compliance framework keep up because there isn't really anything to stop bad actors doing bad things and you know a lot of people don't have a lotof trust for corporates and the car manufacturing world this is the world which faked emission standards and everything else this is true so they're not exactly in great standing with umconsumers so i definitely think this is an area of concern maybe around privacy in general but how they may use and abuse some of the stuff that they're collecting because let's make nomistake it is going to be valuable and the time you spend in a car is not insignificant and understanding where you've been how long you've taken to get there whether you've had people inthe car with you it's not i don't think quite as powerful as a smartphone but it.   
  
[47:16] Certainly gets interesting and you could probably argue there's less of a constraint in terms of energy consumption and everything else in the car compared to the smartphone i meanyeah very easy to put your tinfoil hat on but i think it will be a thing that becomes a differentiator for consumers to understand what that is in the the same way it's just starting to get therein the smartphone world.   
  
[47:39] So motor manufacturers are already offering discounted prices or insisting on having black boxes in vehicles for younger drivers and less experienced drivers.   
I think when we talk about electric vehicles in particular, capturing a lot of information because they are giant computers.   
  
[47:55] I could well see that insurance companies may start to demand access to that data before they'll insure you and that then they would have you know speed location turn you knowangle g-force uh you know kind of video recording of accidents and that you know in some respects could be great because it would give more information to make correct insuranceclaims but it also could have a very sort of a chilling effect in terms of how the people feel free to use and enjoy their vehicles You know, I mean, obviously, everybody needs to drivesafely and within the law, but there's a great deal of space in that to say, well, you know, I'm not going to impose the legal limits, I'm going to impose lower limits on you so that you canhave this insurance policy.   
The other thing that occurred to me, Rafe, when you were talking is law enforcement agencies routinely approach organisations like Amazon to secure recordings from ring doorbellcameras, because there are so many of those ring doorbell cameras out there now that huge amounts of crime and criminality or just information are being sought.   
I forget if I told the story on the podcast, but a couple of years ago, during the depths of the pandemic, one of our neighbours went missing.   
And there was a huge missing persons search across Hampshire where I lived.   
And unfortunately, when he was ultimately found, he wasn't alive.   
  
[49:15] But there was thousands of people and hundreds of police officers combing through forests and roads and those sorts of things.   
And they said, if you have a CCTV camera, if you have a ring doorbell or something like that please share the footage we need to try and locate this chap well and because obviouslyeverybody wanted to and because they wanted to help and it wasn't a criminal thing it wasn't a scary thing it was a everybody clubbing together to try and help find this chap you knowkind of we talked to our neighbors and i think nearly every house down this road has some kind of doorbell camera and certainly you can almost maintain continuous cctv coverage downour tiny little rural road, you know, in the back end of Hampshire.   
So, you know, imagine what kind of coverage you would have in a suburban area, perhaps, or in places even where you might consider CCTV doesn't cover.   
  
[50:07] I still think choosing an electric vehicle at the lower end of the price bracket is a more testing question.   
I think, and again, we're going to do a very lightweight job of discussing this, but the thing that we haven't discussed, or I've talked about all the things I like about EVs, are the challengesof EVs. And the first thing that I wanted to talk about there really was about charging.   
The Teslas from the get-go understood that charging was a problem, and whilst offered chargers you could install at home, and they offered the superchargers, which are in lots of popularlocations across the UK.   
I know there's even more of them in North America, which offered convenient charging and also sometimes free, sometimes integrated payment.   
So they're much more reliable. I don't think it is fair to say that charging in public charging infrastructure that isn't Tesla can be a pretty patchy experience in the UK.   
The machines are broken or out of service or blocked or unreliable.   
And it's confusing to me that so many businesses seem to have made good money out of selling fuel for so long that there hasn't been a sort of a rush to build charging infrastructures intopetrol stations and garages to the extent that you would imagine.   
I mean, our local BP garage has some chargers, and the only thing I've ever noticed about them is that they're always broken.   
I think if it was a petrol pump, it would have been fixed within 24 hours.   
It would have been a seriously constrained revenue. So let's just talk about charging.   
  
[51:31] Have you got a thing at home? I charge at home and it's a dynamic that people rarely talk about because people say, well, you know, kind of what about if you need to charge outand about on the go?   
But I think the thing I would say is that most of my journeys are less than 100 miles on a regular basis, you know, for my commuting and work and those kinds of things.   
You know, we do make longer journeys sometimes, but they are rare.   
And the thing with an EV, particularly if you have home charger is I start every journey fully topped up so I have 200 and something, 220, 240 miles of range in my particular vehicle andevery time. So it's not like I'd have to take a gas vehicle out and go and fill it up with petrol before I could drive it at a petrol station.   
  
[52:10] But Rafe, I was thinking about you the other day, because obviously we talked about how difficult it would be for you to charge a vehicle in central London with an apartment.   
You have a parking space, but it's not adjacent to your home and you're not able to install charging infrastructure in there.   
And I saw this really interesting solution called Trojan chargers.   
I don't know if you're aware of them.   
I'm not, no. So if you live in a place where you don't have a driveway and you can't charge your car directly, if you park on street, this is a company that will come and basically put a holein the ground and give you what they call a lance.   
And so you park somewhere along the road and then you put this lance into this hole in the ground and it connects you to your home supply and it allows you to then plug your vehicle inso that actually you can charge street side without trailing the cable all the way up to your front door and through a window or something like that.   
That's cool. And that was really interesting, I thought, for a couple of reasons.   
First of all, it was a local authority, Surrey County Council here in the south of the UK, encouraging people to install infrastructure on the roads and helping them to sort of own a piece ofinfrastructure.   
You know, that's my charger there outside my house, but in public land, you know, on the pavement.   
  
[53:23] And then secondly, the manufacturer of this type of charger had sort of coded these lances so that you could use the lance in any one of these sockets.   
So if you had to park down the road, you could put the lance in, charge in one of those sockets. Oh, that's important, yeah.   
And the lance is almost like a key. It's coded to your account, and then that charge is applied to your electric account.   
So it's not a case that if someone parks in your space, you're toast.   
It was really fascinating to see, actually, previously, local authorities would have been very resistant, I think, to putting things on the street.   
It's incredibly difficult to get permission to zone a new parking bay with a car charger in it or something like that.   
So, you know, there are more innovative solutions being looked for.   
And I think that's, again, another parallel to smartphones where charging became a bit more of a thing when battery life only lasted a day.   
The accessories came along, wireless charging.   
So I think there's a lot more space for that infrastructure network, which is way, way more important for cars.   
And it's, again, one of Tesla's competitive advantages.   
  
[54:27] But, you know, we have seen in Scandinavia, you know, roads that charge you as you go along.   
Long there's definitely interest around wireless charging and some of the standards have been developing there but um something that we did want to touch on but i think we're probably,over time so i'm just going to mention it as maybe a leaving a last thought if we're trying to play out that analogy a little bit more smartphones at the center of an ecosystem i think cars aredoing that same thing and there's lots of things we can talk about but since we've just been talking about charging there is one thing here that um the electric vehicles have really really bigbatteries in them and that can actually be interesting for the electricity grid in a couple of ways you have this concept of being able to do things where you are taking from the car andputting it into the grid powering your house and that's known as vehicle to grid that's still early days but that's really interesting when we talk about smart electricity grids and balancingthe network because you can use cars as a storage thing and like a fully charged ev battery can actually power your home for four days if you look at the kind of usage there's also vehicleto home which is more about the storage solutions all of that are labeled for a more balanced grid and you can smooth out the demand and we've touched on this in previous episodeswhere we talked about sustainability so i think it would be something to maybe interestingly come back and touch on on another episode when we look at that in general and energy usageand things but cars are going to be part of that ecosystem in a way that they just haven't been before and i see that as similar to.   
  
[55:56] The smartphone being central to your kind of smart home ecosystem or things like that and so it's a topic we could probably talk for another half hour on yes i won't string this out ithink it's interesting to see that the national grid in the uk which is the organization that runs the transmission network for power in the uk has said that they are confident they havesufficient capacity and can enhance the grid at enough speed to support the forecast demand for electric vehicles, because that was always one challenge was the grid will dissolve into aheap with all this new demand.   
  
[56:28] But I think some of that, Rafe, is about using smarter vehicle-to-load, vehicle-to-grid solutions.   
  
[56:33] And the charger I have does support some communication with certain cars where if you had a battery solution, for example, like a Tesla Powerwall or something equivalent to that,you can actually draw power from the vehicle, although I've never tried to do it.   
Just one other thing so long time sort of friend of the show slash friend of us individually ed lee who you might remember runs a business called charge fairy as well which i love a pinkvan will come to your house with an enormous battery in the back of it and will do emergency or routine scheduled charging for your evs with a cable really good idea it's the sort of theequivalent of the green can of fuel for run-out vehicles but i think they also support commercial vehicles and things where remote charging is needed and it's been really interesting to seethat but it feels to me like charging and and the challenges of charging are probably one of those places that are the constraints along with batteries as you said ray for charging will be oneof those things that unlocks it but i think i personally am now of the opinion that most of the people who raise it as a blocker as a constraint either have exceptional needs you know lotsand lots of long-distance travel or are trying to solve for the case that they don't have, you know, that actually most people could charge from home or charge with local infrastructure atplaces of work and those sorts of things, certainly, you know, soon if not now.   
  
[57:59] Right, that feels like an unsatisfactory way to end an episode that should have lasted a lot longer, but we will because we're well over time.   
Yeah, I think this is one where our listenership will have a great deal more knowledge than we do in this one.   
I'm interested in your EV stories, please. What do you use?   
What do you own? Why did you choose it? And what's your horror stories and what's your wins? Because like I say, I think that what I've been really surprised about is the extent to whichthe things that I fixated on, like charging, before I got an electric vehicle, seem to have melted away.   
They're not nothing, but they're not top of my mind. Things I never even thought about in terms of, you know, drivability and pleasure and the quality of the vehicle and even the cost andthe affordability of running it have become much more factors for me.   
So, yeah, interested in your stories there.   
Gentlemen, we'll revisit this as Mr. McLeod returns to the UK and the saga of the vehicles goes on.   
We'll find out what it is you ultimately choose to get and whether or not it's an EV or a plug-in hybrid.   
Stay tuned. Will Volvo let Ewan have another vehicle or has he been blacklisted by the Scandinavians?   
  
[59:04] We're nearly to the end of this season. We have a couple more topics, but as ever, we'd really welcome your feedback on what you've enjoyed hearing about.   
We had a big long break and we've come back to talk about a much broader range of subjects than we have previously.   
So what was interesting? what don't you want to hear ever again?   
The sound of my voice, I suspect, at this point.   
Anyway, gentlemen, thank you very much for joining us today and all your expertise.   
It's been a pleasure. Thank you, listeners.   
Thank you. I'm just busking now because I could tell Ralph Blanford wasn't paying attention.   
  
[59:29] Nice, nice. But you can get us on X.   
Or not really. Don't encourage them is what Ben says. So you can find us at 361podcast.com.   
There are links to all the ways you can contact us there including a private email if you prefer for that a couple more episodes left in this season we are going to be talking about uhnostalgia in part of anything we're going to talk about blackberry and nokia on tv some more we're going to be revisiting smart homes and we might even be talking about virtual realityand augmented reality some more all of those topics on the list many more others to go i'm also feeling like a very old man so i'm going to wedge in the topic of wellness and ofergonomics as well before we we end up this season.   
As ever, gentlemen, thank you very much. Love you. Thank you, Ben. Thank you, listeners.   
Hey, Rafe Blanford has woken up and we will be back in a couple of weeks. Bye-bye.   
  
[1:00:28] There we go uh so not car related i am livid okay uh this evening oh dear why well as we record this i mean this will go out well after but as we record this it's sort of new iphoneseason i deviated from my normal plan of just giving my iphone back to apple yeah normally i just return it to apple take the trade in and and trade up and this year i had 10 minutes so iwent online and i did a comparison thing you know there's one of those aggregators you can say i've got an an iphone and it says oh here are 10 people that will you know let you trade itin with them and here's the prices you'll give it's great the prices are pretty good and i'll pick this one not a name i know but lots of reviews and on the creator and i filled in the form andthey sent me a pack to return the phone and actually it was all very smooth very efficient they sent me a shipping label and everything and i literally boxed it up this evening ready to gooff tomorrow.   
  
[1:01:22] Please return it within 14 days i think i'm on day five so you know well well within the the timescale, requested.   
And this evening they've emailed and said, I'm sorry, we don't need any more of your phone. Deal's off. Oh, what a pain. What a pain.   
Because crucially, I suspect what's happened is, well, what I've discovered has happened is they've probably realised that the prices of that phone have dropped because lots of people aretrading them in.   
And you locked in a good price before the... Well, I mean, I felt I was happy with the price.   
I don't know whether it was, you know, sort of particularly in my favour or not, but it was the same. It was a close price to what most of the other purchasers were offering.   
It wasn't like one place offered £1,000 and everybody else offered £500.   
It was £10 more than the next one, so it wasn't loads.   
But yeah, that's really annoying. I think it's very frustrating because, of course, throughout the transaction, they're very keen to remind you that you are bound to this offer for 14 days. Youmust return it within 14 days.   
This is the price. It's only guaranteed for 14 days. Yeah.   
I'm not entirely sure how they can back out of that deal once I accepted it.   
I'm sure there must be a clause somewhere in some legal agreement.   
Oh, I bet, yeah, due to, you know, force majeure.   
Well, I don't know, yeah. And us not making as much money as we want, we can back out of it.   
Well, I think there's the answer, but I'm feeling I should have just done the easy option.   
I should have accepted less money and done the Apple trading version because this was just a pain.   
  
[1:02:45] That's a no, yeah, don't use any of these. but I always use Envirophone and across many years they've never failed me.   
Yeah, I've used Envirophone in the past. I mean, a good few years back now I have used Envirophone in the past and I also sent a lot of things off to I think it's Mizuma is another brandand they were fine and actually this site looks like and is reviewed like and offered a similar price to all of those.   
  
[1:03:11] I'm not going to name them just in case I've made a terrible mistake and it's me that's in the wrong.   
We'll find out. out but you know kind of certainly it was very much of that ilk you know wasn't anything special and it's deeply frustrating because it's faff and i don't need faff you knowso that's that's deeply deeply deeply annoying move on that's my irritating story i'm busy creating a huge bonfire of lightning cables in our house actually no i can't because nearlyeverything on my desk will charge a usbc but nearly every other device in the place still needs lightning so you know i I think we're saddled with lightning for the foreseeable.   
I got a message from my gadgets, oh man, guy. Of course, I'm not a man anymore.   
I'm in re-ad at the minute. Yes. Saying, hey, we've got two iPhones, two watches for you, more or less, because he knows I always buy them from him.   
Yeah. We've held them back. You know, yeah, are you ready?   
And I had to say, no, sorry. So this Saturday, he says that we'll have them either Friday or Saturday. Yeah. Right. And we'll rush them to you.   
What a great service that was. I loved that. Loved that.   
  
[1:04:13] You paid a slight premium, slight premium, to get it the opening weekend.   
But anyway, I said, look, I might be in Muscat soon, but I think I'm going to try and use Vary to buy my new iPhones this time.   
Yeah, I mean, we promised you wouldn't talk about iPhones anymore.   
It's just, as always, I just buy the new one with the cameras because whilst the child is small, you have to take lots of pictures. So I want the best possible camera.   
But I upgraded to iOS 17. I have been enjoying the standby mode with the widgets.   
It feels very much like a precursor to a HomePod with a screen, for sure. Right. It really does.   
I haven't really heard, yeah. Oh, I've got one more thing to tell you, one more interesting story to tell you.   
Go on. Ralph Bamford's nearly swallowed his own head. He's falling apart. He's yawning so hard.   
Go on, what are you going to tell us? Did you ever notice that sometimes when you run your hand across your Apple MacBook, it feels like it sort of vibrates or it slightly tinglessometimes?   
No. Yes, I've noticed that. And also, Ewan, do you know when we were recording sometimes, when you're recording with your setup at home with a proper microphone rather than aheadset that you're using now, sometimes we just get that hum.   
I've finally worked out what it is. Okay. It's the difference between grounded and ungrounded power supplies.   
  
[1:05:32] So Apple's larger power supplies, you know how the top comes off so that you can put in US pins or UK pins or European pins and they plug in.   
You notice when that comes off, the little tab that everything slides onto, sometimes it's plastic and sometimes it's metal, silver.   
So when it's silver metal, that's providing a grounding through the plug.   
Some of the cheaper or smaller power supplies, or crucially, some third-party power supplies, most third-party power supplies, just come with like a standard two-wire lead.   
I'm going to hold this up for you, Ewan, like the figure of eight connector, like in the back of the charger.   
Yes. There's no grounding in that charger. And there's nothing wrong with that charger. That's a good, high quality charger.   
It works fine. Yeah. But it's no grounding. So when you touch the metal case with your hand, you are the grounding loop.   
  
[1:06:27] Exactly. So when you take your hand off, there's the buzz.   
When you put your hand on, you provide the grounding loop.   
And I thought, I am going mad with feeling this little tingle and also with hearing this buzzing noise in certain headphones and realise actually it's down to the chargers and it's specificallya challenge with Apple laptops, although the other brands are affected, basically brands with metal shells.   
So you need well-grounded chargers or you need to not mind too much.   
And I typed it in and there's a whole segment of the internet of people going am I going mad or does my laptop tingle when I touch it and like you know kind of long conversations I'll linkit up in the show notes but I was just like so it's like for 20 years I haven't known why this is happening why like sometimes you just put your fingers down on your laptop it just feels verytingly like why is that tingling today it's the grounding there you go there you go so I've done a terrible job of explaining the physics I'm sure Ref Blanford if you hadn't spotted his headyawning would explain it better to me but if you fuss about that you need grounded chargers and that's why my fancy charger at home that I'm normally plugged into is fine because rightit's got an earth pin and why the travel charger is all tingly there you go well thank you yeah I've used up all my corrections for the day sorry ben wow okay.