Jonathan Ward's Critique of Tesla | Joe Rogan

People want more story. Well, that also speaks to the kind of stuff that you do. People like things that are crafted by artisans. Yeah. I love that. Me too. We're seeing that revival right in the last 10 years. Yes. It's just growing and growing and growing. It's so great. I feel like as the world becomes more digital and people become more disconnected with each other, there's something about... When I drive your Bronco, first of all, I really like you. So I love the fact that I'm driving your truck. And then two, I feel like it's a piece of art. Yeah. I feel like it's a functional piece of art. That's somehow how I look at it. Highly functioning sculpture. I smile when I'm in it. It makes me feel different. When I'm in my Tesla, I'm like, this is a bad ass motherfucking piece of invention. But you're still in your own head. It's a piece of plastic. It's plastic and glass and metal and it's beautiful. It's amazing. It's spectacular. It's so innovative, but it will never be art. Are you in it? What do you have, an S? I have the P100D. Yeah. If you're setting the back seat? No. Don't. Why? The noise coming out of that third point shoulder seat belt retractor is so unacceptable for modern car standards. That's such a geek thing to say. Literally, the shit's coming up through the plastic wheel well and a noise and a cold breeze is hitting your outboard ear. And I'm like, okay. A breeze? How did this shit happen? There's a damn draft that comes up through there and you're hearing road noise through it. You're hearing road noise through the seat belt? Through the cavity through which the retractor spool sits. And air gets in there? Next time you're too stoned to drive, you sit in the back seat, let mama drive and report back. You send me a text. It's that annoying, huh? For guys like us, dare I go out on a limb and say us, yes, it'll annoy the piss out of you. Interesting. If he didn't have a call-in number when Elon was here, I would have chewed his ass about that. Would you, that one thing? Who the fuck is this asshole? He already knows who this asshole is. Years ago, I developed a concept that I called the Helios. I don't know if you ever saw that. So I love design challenges. They're like framing things, right? So I was like, all right. Let's do a revisionist history approach to car design. So what if electric cars had remained predominant in the late 1800s, early 1900s? What if we had taken inspiration from aircraft design a couple decades prior to when the industry actually did? And then what if after he did the experimental plane, the H2, I think it was, what if Howard Hughes had sat him down and he couldn't get that last starlet to go out with him? Right before he lost his mind completely, what if he, Buckminster Fuller and Gordon Burig, sat down and did a napkin sketch after too many martinis? What would that car look like? So that was my stupid pile of questions around which I framed my design. And I designed it to work on the, at the time, a P85 platform. And basically, I received a copy of a letter that's titled, like, Peanut Butter and Chocolate that was written by Elon's core engineering team, begging him to allow them to support me to do the build. And like, since day one, like my launch was, I don't need your money. I'll go to the dealership. I'll buy the damn car. I need y'all's back in support on the software because they're super shitty about any repurposed or pride Teslas. And Elon never addressed it. It was like, oh, that gentleman right there with the glasses, the larger bobblehead, that's rich rebuild. Rich Benoit. I know Rich. We just did a speaking panel together in Texas recently. That's his major beef with Tesla. He's bought a couple of them and pieced them back together again. Yeah, they cock block them. Yeah, they cock block them left and right. They won't let them supercharge. But six, about in the last two or three quarters, there have been major gains. Honestly, I think due to Rich and due to the community that rose up around him, that shit's been hacked now. Really? And now people can open source, hack the CAN data chain and people are repurposing Tesla components. I use Tesla batteries, but I haven't been using their motors or planetaries or anything else because again, what do I tell my client when the client needs an update or a part? You go to the dealer, they're like, what's your VIN? And you're screwed. You can't get in. Come outside. But yeah, like Stealth EV in fact has this new setup that they just started marketing where you literally take that IRS apart where the electric motor is built in, there's a little access door, you pull out a little circuit board, you put in another one and voila. It's hacked. Is there a setup like crate engines or do you envision a setup where because you know that the new Hummer is now going to be an electric vehicle, which is really interesting. And there's going to be a bunch of other electric vehicles that are coming out from Volkswagen that are really cheap and a bunch of different companies are jumping in. Do you envision there being some sort of a crate engine option for people that want to? I do. I do. And I think there should be now proof in the pudding to this point is that everyone's focusing on the do it yourself market. Therefore also on the cheapest possible equation, which leaves a lot of, in my opinion, a lot of safety issues completely unaddressed and they can get downright nutty. So the other issue is they're all for ease of installation and conversion. Everyone's thinking about doing kits that literally are a spud plate and a short shaft to go where the engine used to be put an electric motor to a bell housing adapter to the stock transmission, which is stupid because electric cars going through manual transmissions. There's a lot of scavenging of energy. It's bad enough to go through a ring and pinion doing a right angle gear displacement of power. You lose so much efficiency and the best EVs in my opinion are transmission lists or go through planetary set for gear reduction. The Merck is to my knowledge the first retrofit EV that being the goober that I am like, I was like, okay, we've done a couple EV builds, but if we're going to keep doing them, I want to do them our way. I want more safety. I want more performance. I want more range. I want dedicated thermal management networks for the batteries, the controllers, the motors, and all that. And none of it existed. How long did that build, Ty? I've got four. Yeah, just a little bit over four years. And the scale of technology shit's changing so quickly in the EV space that as we were building it, suppliers of key components came out with another generation that's infinitely better than the V1 or V3 already had. So even before we could finish that car, we were backing up and updating and updating and updating, which really if you put sort of a marketeer hat on, I'm so proud of the value retention in my vehicles. And I'm proud of our foundation of taking something that in essence a lot of people would think is at the end of it's already usable life cycle and upcycling it and breathing your life so it's good to go for decades again. But now with EV, stuff is moving so quickly that am I like making iPhones all of a sudden? So in two years, it's totally worthless because the tech is outdated. That is the weird thing about tech, right? Is that the exponential growth and improvement, it just makes like no one wants an iPhone one. They're useless. So look at internal combustion engine development cycles. What I put in today is still relevant in a decade. But with electric, it's a whole new space to consider. So AEM is like well known in racing and aftermarket for engine management electronics. They just at PRI and at SEMA made a fair bit of noise about coming out with a full array of EV retrofit conversion systems. So they seem to be the first ones entering the field that are going to offer a comprehensive suite of products and solutions. But then again, being that it's part of this industry, you know, I go grill the dudes at their trade show booth and they're like, well, it's something we're working on. You know, all these press releases and all that. I'm like, sell me some shit. Hello. They can't sell it to you. I think I trust it will come out. When you see Elon coming out with like that new Roadster is going to have a 600 mile range. That is when things get really interesting. And Volkswagen claimed with that vehicle that you noted earlier that they were going to make the platform shareable and they were going to make it available to many different manufacturers large and small. But I've heard stories like that over the years from you name it from Faraday was claiming the same thing and so much of it's bullshit because now it's like I don't want to say vaporware but it's so much of that like VC money. Don't worry. We'll be profitable one day and we're worth a billion multiple of nothing today. So buy in and then it's like so many of these EV startups and retrofit companies come to the scene looking for that elusive FedEx fleet contract that everyone thinks is going to be easy to get and none of them get it and then they all go belly up. So I just think we're at that point in history where not only is the tech moving forward so quickly and not only that but the likes of predominantly only due to Tesla. It's proven the viability in the market. Now there's purists and traditionalists and everyone's starting to poke at it and I see exponential more interest. So I think you know for the next five years or so it's going to be a bit tumultuous but I definitely think it's the future of hot rodding. I imagine within five years I imagine probably half of my client builds will be electric. Wow that's a big that's a big statement. Well I'm totally pulling it out of booty but that's the vibe that I get. Have you seen there's a 68 Porsche 911 that has a Tesla engine in it? Yeah is that the one EV West built? I don't know who built it. I think Mike built it. I was scanning through Instagram the other day and I saw it a green 68. That's very interesting when they do stuff like that to old cars. And there's so many guys bringing up out of the woodwork. Like nationwide to various levels of price expectation, range expectation, etc. But I think that's a really it's a lovely community too. I've noticed it's much more open than the conventional automotive community is about sharing information and suppliers and knowledge and helping one another. And it's there's a really nice camaraderie within that community. There's like movement motors and Austin's doing really nice retrofits. Oh yeah? EV West has been around forever. They were really the granddaddies on the scene. Movement motors in Austin? Do they they're the ones that did that Mustang? I think they've done a staying. They just finished doing a 2002 BMW. They did an early GTV alpha. They've done all sorts of different like pretty cool diverse range of platforms. And then of course Z Electric down in Orange County that started out doing just the bugs. Now the bugs in the buses and now 911s. And it's like there's such a large and welcoming kind cool community of people in that space. Now when you charge a Tesla it's easy. You know you look for the Tesla superchargers. They're all over the place. You press a button on your screen and it shows you where they are. It'll navigate you to them. When you try to get one of those you can't charge a regular car at a Tesla super station. Can you? No and there's different so there's this standard I forget the Enacra and we could call rich the J blah blah blah connector but there's a standard municipal connector and then there's also the new fast charge network. But it depends on where you live but for example around here it's a joke. They're everywhere. So like I have an app when I'm driving that 49 Merc and you know I was speaking at Barrett Jackson and had it there in town for while I was visiting. And then you network the apps and you find it. But we made that one supercharger compatible because the client's going to install one in his house and bunk the system. Otherwise you try and go to a public Tesla charger. It has to do a handshake and it says no. Oh is that what it is? You may not charge here. So you can have it supercharger compatible for like I have one on the wall back there for my car so it would work with that. Yes that's my understanding but not a public installation. Those have to go through a whole handshake protocol. Yeah it's interesting that you decided to do it that way. Well it's fun. We put one behind the front license plate. So we did one of those old school articulating plates like remember on the gas floors behind the plate. So that has the one interface connector and then the other one I machine this unnecessarily groovy sort of gas cap under the original fuel door on the Merc and then that's for the other style charger. So do you oh so you can charge it with different ones. The supercharger is one. So depending on to increase the versatility of it you had a supercharger fast charge compatibility and then you had the more widely distributed municipal format charger and then there's just two different pigtail adapters so you can go either way with it. Do you anticipate upping the range on that thing? Do you think that someday you'll swap the batteries out? Definitely I think the reality is any EV project I build I have to not only do I anticipate but like I've lost many clients because I'll be super blunt about managing their expectations that look you're going to spend a lot of money to have me do this and trust I will geek out and do the best of the state of the art that is available to us but in a year that might all be garbage. So you have to understand either you're cool with this moment in time and the range and the performance and is what it is or you're a tech geek like most guys that are engaging in that and you're going to be hemorrhaging money then coming back every couple years for us to upgrade and evolve as the sciences evolve. But you know we build on sub-modular even like your Broncos sub-modularly built so your powertrain the electrical network for your powertrain goes to a two single Deutsch tech 26 pin connectors aerospace connectors so one day when that powertrain is no longer relevant but your truck still has good platform value unplug that yank it out and put in the hydrogen or the micro capacitor or whatever the hell is working at the time.