Rapid-Fire Automotive News: AI, EVs, Autonomous Vehicles, and the $19B Trade School Boom [RR 1107]

0:00This is the Automotive Repair Podcast Network. Hey everybody, Carm Capriato, Remarkable Results Radio. Good to see you. 11 years in, or I think we're working on 1,100 episodes just in RRR and Town Hall Academy together. Don't forget about our great listening app. If you don't have this on your smartphone, shame on you, cuz it's very powerful, very impactful. All the shows on the network, Every one of them from all of our great talent is there.

0:34You can save them, share them, create your own playlists, watch the video. Listen, if you get your podcast stuff on Spotify and Apple, great. God bless you. Stay right there. But if you want something different, more fun, more focused, arpn.app. Thank you so much to NAPA Autocare and NAPA Trax. Hey, you know, the technician shortage is real, but NAPA Autocare has a solution at no cost to members.

1:01The NAPA Autocare Apprentice Program builds tomorrow's technicians through a 2-year, 9-stage curriculum. Learn more at member.napaautocare.com or talk to your NAPA representative today. Hey, did you know that NAPA Trax has on-site training plus 6 days a week support? It all starts when a local representative meets with you to learn about your business and how you run it. After all, it's your shop, so it's your choice.

1:27Let us prove to you that Trax is the single best shop management system in the business. Find Napa Trax on the web at napatracs.com. Hey, we appreciate our great partners, and of course Tom Hamm is here. Hello, Tom. How we doing, Tom? We are great. Theautomotivemanagementnetwork.com, a fabulous newsletter that you have to be part of. And then of course AutoCentric Import Specialty Shop in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

2:01And of course, the creator of thelaborratetracker.com. How's that going? Going along. Hey, we keep doing little things to improve it here and there and getting a lot of folks updating rates. A lot of areas clearing the $200 hurdle now, you know, starting to go into there. And once, just like with the $100 one, way back when, we get enough shops going over that, then it'll kind of be a land rush and it'll probably go up rather quickly.

2:29And we're going to touch on some of that stuff today and some of the news stories we're talking about, why. Yeah, you're right. LaborRateTracker.com obviously is a litmus test for your business because you can not only look around you in your zip code and in your marketplace, you can look around the rest of the country. Look, Tom Hamm has been here Tom, I counted up the number of episodes, right or wrong, one or two, about 27 times in the last 11 years.

2:55I'm sure when people see you in, in the, uh, out in shopping malls, they ask for your autograph. I'm sure of that. Yeah. There you go. Tom brought me this idea a while back to do a really fast-paced show and talk about a whole bunch of topics. And this time we're gonna do 12 topics that are relatable to our automotive service industry.

3:15And Tom's done the research. No matter what you may hear, the topics will always relate back to our world, our life, our business, our people, our industry. And you're gonna love these. You're gonna absolutely love these. We're gonna talk about autonomous vehicles, batteries, education, government vehicles, and AI and all that neat stuff that really do impact us. Let's start with the first one, Thomas.

3:36Autonomous vehicles. What's going on? As that expands, one of the coolest things going is Waymo. And obviously Tesla's into it too, but Waymo's already got, I think, 22 million miles. You only hear about Waymo when there's some kind of weird accident or something. You know, they stopped for a squirrel or something stupid, but these things are darn near bulletproof. The statistics are staggering.

4:00When you take a driver vehicle compared to a Waymo vehicle, the Waymo vehicle has 94% less rate of injuries? Less. 94% less. Yeah. So it's just amazing to drop anything by 94%. It is unheard of. So it's amazing you can do that. And then you think about, well, who would be opposed to this? Who would be opposed to having vehicles like this where you can— you know, we have 30,000 to 40,000 traffic fatalities a year in the United States.

4:33So who would be opposed to it? And you think about it a little bit, all of a sudden the light bulb goes off. I think I could guess. Yeah. Trial lawyers. Trial lawyers. Yeah. Yeah. Because it's about roughly $200 billion of lawsuits. Reduce that by 94% and we have a problem with buying a bigger boat. You know, apparently they've been working on this.

4:57They've been opposed to it for over 10 years already, and they continually develop their case on why it shouldn't be. There's some labor opposition to it also because of drivers and so on. But that's the big one is the trial lawyers. I think ultimately they're going to lose, but it's just fun to see who would be opposed to something like this because it really, driverless cars that are fully ADS, not ADAS, but ADS are really just an amazing thing to cut down on traffic deaths and injuries and all the other stuff.

5:28Your insurance rates go down. I mean, everything goes down because just all the massive money in injuries and health-related stuff and so on. So it's a good thing and I think it'll come. You know, Tom, in your research, you sent me 40,000 deaths a year from US car accidents. And I think about that and I think about heart and cancer and all these other things that are probably, you know, taking more lives than auto accidents, but we have the power to reduce that 40,000 through this autonomy, this vehicle.

6:01And today I had to take a drive on some newly paved highway, superhighway road, and they only put the center stripe on. And the vehicle that I'm driving in isn't an autonomous vehicle. It can't tell me, you know, but my daughter's car, if they're sensing left and right sides of the roads, and I'm not sure if they're using the edge of the road or they're using the painted stripe to warn you, beep, you know, to put you back on or even the automated lane keep.

6:28And I'm wondering if the roads aren't striped right in the newly paved roads, they're so wide that there's no real super end unless it's the guardrail. If some of these autonomous systems are going to work correctly unless they get these roads back striped and edged off, I guess. Interesting thing here. Wow. Oh, the safety thing. I don't know if we ever touched on it before at one time.

6:50It's just a, a little quick side note. The accident rate in Michigan is lower than any other state, and the second place state is a long ways off. And they do it through 3 different things. One is almost all 4-way stop signs have a red flashing light on 'em, almost every one. And the other thing is almost every Michigan road has about at least a 4-foot road shoulder.

7:14I think the third thing is the rumble strips. I'm not sure on the third one, but by doing those 3 things, they've had the accident rates just absolutely drop off like a rock. So there's lots of safety stuff that can be done. And as we get more into technology and AI, I think there's all areas are just going to improve so much with this stuff.

7:34I love this opening topic of yours. It was just great. Now let's talk about batteries. Oh, batteries. Batteries are mad. I'm blown away by this article. Batteries used to be just this kind of oddball thing and everything's going electric and the whole battery thing is just getting really cool. One of the problems they've had is with catalysts. Of course, a catalyst does what a catalyst does.

7:56You go back to science class, so on and so forth. But, and to get improvement, they've had to do, they're trying different metals and so on and so forth. And they came up with a breakthrough where by changing the environment, the electrical environment around the catalyst, around the catalyst without changing the catalyst, they got massive increases, over triple the catalytic performance. So we end up with just batteries that are way, way, way better.

8:26That's story one, fuel cell performance up 300%, over 300% just by doing a different thing as far as how you surround the catalyst. Amazing. And oh, by the way, let me stop you for one moment. I want you to keep moving into that topic. Tom's topics that I have in front of me that you're gonna hear all about, he's got who wrote 'em.

8:47He's got what magazines these came from. This isn't just something that Tom was scanning and figured it would be nice. This is all researched and named, researched, verified, documented. But the, the first one came out of a publication called Marginal Revu— Revolution that was on the trial lawyers. And then this battery one, I'll try to mention these quickly as we go, is out of a publication called Interesting Engineering.

9:13And there's so much stuff out there nowadays. The 3rd topic, batteries. Again, we're still on batteries, and this comes out of Visual Capitalist. Commercial battery development has been held back but should be accelerating soon. What's happening is they're going to solid state instead of lithium is where we're going in the next few years. Much more effective, a higher energy density, faster charging, improved safety, longer driving ranges.

9:40There was a problem with the internals of these batteries cracking and then bleeding over the negative and the positive touching, so on and so forth, and lithium growth. And again, you can get into these articles if you really want to learn all this stuff. But in one of the recent experiments, Mercedes-Benz with one of these solid-state batteries went 750 miles. And had, oh, 50 to 100 miles left over after their 750-mile trip in Europe.

10:08So that's the kind of thing. Now we, we start talking that same kind of mileage where you get with a car when a gas fill-up. Now we've really gotten into where they become a normal car without the limitations. Toyota's expected to launch some solid-state batteries vehicles next year and Honda the year after that. And everybody else is going to be jumping on board because of the massive improvement in what you can do with a solid state over a lithium.

10:31Wow. I'm wondering if we have to start doing lithium mining anymore. Yeah. With the application there, everything is batteries now. It's just amazing. Everything you buy has some kind of a battery. It's cool. It's fun. In fact, they're gonna have a, probably a new screening at the airport to see if you have any lithium in you or on you. All right. I think talking about batteries and EVs and stuff, I know you have something coming up on that.

10:58Let's go into the education piece, which I am huge with. Tom, thank you for bringing this here. Yeah, here we go. 43% of American college graduates are now employed in jobs that high schoolers could land. Oops. All right, stop for one minute. I'm going to have to get on my soapbox because about 5 years ago, I started to say that the degree that I got way back in the day, the high school and the college today, the bachelor's programs are no better than the high school I got back in the day.

11:33That's my point. Right. And in order for that to be quote unquote dumbed down, you can take exception with me if you're a teacher or anything or professor or an educator in any way, but they had to dumb it down in my opinion, because they needed to sell master's programs. And it was easy to sell a master's program because they convinced every employer, you need to hire our master's peoples in doing these jobs.

11:58And now we've got all this money in debt. We have all these degrees, and to your point, can't even get a job at Walmart. Yeah. The college education industry is in for some trouble. This, by the way, this comes outta Bloomberg is where this one's from. Gen Z men with college degrees have the same unemployment rate as those without. Colleges are accepting and graduating way, way too many people.

12:28And it's not just the oddball degrees like basket weaving and all this, but too many engineers, too many business management, too many logistics, too many for medicine, too many for accounting. They're flooding the market with too many degrees. Lots of unhappy folks in their 20s. Customer service, marketing jobs being turned over to AI. What colleges are teaching is not in demand. Very simply, computer degrees are one of the best examples here because over the last 10 years, the demand for computer-related jobs that required a computer degree in college, demand's up 6%.

13:05College graduates in that area up 110%. Oops. And job turnover is dropping, which is kind of nice for employers. People are staying longer, but when jobs do come open, they're often looking for people with experience instead of fresh outta college. And I think the expectations are too high. Self-presentation is also too low. I mean, the students coming out, their expectations are extreme and the way they present themselves is insufficient a lot of the time.

13:33Culture, education, drug use are 3 of the big ones, but this is an absolutely huge deal. Yeah. Uh, you've got 2 more, uh, topics along this education piece. Actually, I think 3 more, but let me stop for a moment. As you're listening to this, you're a shop owner, you're a specialist in the industry. Listen, there's opportunity out there to talk to our clients, to talk to the friends and the parents and the aunts and the uncles that we know.

14:00And listen, we've been talking about this forever. I am the biggest advocate for career Skilled careers. We need so many people in skilled careers so that we can live life, move where we need to move, build homes. We have to have 'em. And I think the romance, that's the word I'm looking for, the romance of college is waning. And I think they did it to themselves.

14:24That's the party. I did a little of that. Yeah. I've suggested to kids, One of the best things you can probably do at this point is when you got a kid coming outta high school is tell 'em, okay, next 2 years float around and take various jobs that are in careers that you sound interesting, whether it be medicine or auto mechanics or, or a cashier or a waitress, whatever sounds like fun.

14:49Spend the next 2 years doing that. Do a couple part-time jobs, work a couple, 3 different places. Now after a couple of years, now what do you want to do about college? Do you want to go to trade school? Do you want to go to college? Do you just want to keep working? What do you want to do? So we'll take that break in there.

15:04And I think there's a lot of maturity that occurs between 18, 19, and 2021, especially if you're out there in the real world earning a living. So anyway, a little off topic, but next one here is from Cypher. When a kid with a master's degree can't even get a job at Walmart, there's this guy, this guy with a video on there. You watch the video and he's just absolutely beside himself.

15:2612 years of college, 300 applications, $120,000 in debt, which isn't that much nowadays. And you get a rejection letter from Walmart for a cashier position. Well, obviously they thought he was way overqualified. Yeah, I guess so. It depends. You would think that they could use— but I guess not. But, you know, I wonder what was his plan? I mean, who advised him with all these people in college?

15:47Why do they not have a part-time job in that field? I don't care what it is in the career that they went to school for. Yeah. Whatever the major is, you got to be able to get a part-time job in that field. So by the time you go through the college thing, you're getting a feeling whether I'm really going to like this or not, instead of coming out of college and then, oh, let's go find a job now.

16:07And then find out 3 months later, this sucks. I hate this. You watched it too. The author here made the comment that I don't think the tattoos on his neck are helping. Probably, you know, when you're fresh out, it's just, it depends what kind of job you get. But if you're going for master's degree jobs, Probably tattoos in your neck probably won't help.

16:27That's just an opinion. Maybe I'm wrong, but just the other thing is, and we don't know, but I'll bet if you offered this guy a GS job at a shop, I'll bet he wouldn't take it. You're probably right. Yeah, I wouldn't take that. That would be beneath him. He wouldn't do that. No, I wouldn't take that bet. Hey, you know, it's no secret the automotive industry is facing a technician shortage, but NAPA Autocare has stepped up with a powerful solution.

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19:36Next one is from Epic Times Students seek to AI-proof their careers with trades over college. Employee demand, job security, major infrastructure projects going on all over the country, and they need hands-on skills. Huge surge this year. Trade school revenue in 2026, $19 billion in trade school revenue. So it is going up. The increase from 2025, '26, was actually double what that was predicted.

20:08So it is going up quickly. So I think technology and so on is allowing these schools to catch up fast, put, you know, with expansion and put things in place. The payback for the college stuff, often not there anymore with job security and a path to entrepreneurship. And we'll talk about this a little bit more too, is that this is a great way for it to become a business owner is to start out, you know, at the entry level in one of these jobs.

20:31We're talking auto technicians, You can't replace, at least not yet. Elon's working on it, I'm sure. But right now you can't replace an auto tech with an app. You can support them, but you can't replace them. Exactly. A lot of these jobs, pay is very similar to college degree jobs. A big one, heavy duty mechanics are in really super high demand. As far as mechanic demand, the prediction, you know, everybody's got a number they predict, but by 2029, which is what we're 3 years away, 2.5 years away, they're talking a 1.2 million person shortage in auto repair.

21:09That's staggering. Tom, in our college that I'm on the advisory panel for, Erie Community College here in the Buffalo area, we are full this fall for students in our program at capacity. And the only problem we have is facility. We're getting an architect. We're trying to find the money through the state. To add onto our facility so we can add more students.

21:30So I do think it's happening, but I think we're gonna have to do more apprenticing ourselves, more internships ourselves while we're waiting for the education facilities to catch up so we can start educating a lot of these young people. And I'm not saying they have to be young, but the people that actually wanna stop in a dead-end job because the skilled careers, it's our future.

21:53The next one is right from Newsweek. The title is The Real Reason America Is Short of Automotive Technicians. It's kind of something we kind of already know, but just covering it anyway. Public educators are still steering students away from great paying vocational jobs into college degrees. You know, part of that I was thinking, why? I was thinking, well, misery loves company. I got sucked in.

22:14Why don't I suck everybody else in too? I'm being a little sarcastic there, but good grief, guys. You know, just because it didn't work for you, you don't have to take anybody with you. But a lot of these jobs are clean, versatile, specialized, well-paying. Another thing that almost nobody mentions, which just ties into what you just said, the other thing that's in short supply is instructors.

22:34You got to have instructors. And the people are retiring out of this industry and they're retired and they're heading for Florida in a mobile home on a golf course. Now we need them to— Florida's got plenty of trade schools down there too, but the As people get older in this industry, we need them to transfer into instructions part-time, full-time, become instructors. There's a lot of opportunity out there.

22:55Older techs need to know that this is a possibility. It's not like, well, I don't have a teaching degree. They won't let me do that. Yes, they will. So look into that. Let us stop for a moment and catch that entrepreneurial spirit thing that you talked about. Okay? Because if an individual had that in them and no matter what it was, welding or plumbing or carpentry or automotive, they could potentially at the end of that light see themselves in an ownership role or maybe even find a succession program, or there's so many opportunities.

23:28So I love that part of where careers, skilled careers could lead to entrepreneurialism. I love that. When I was going through it today, even this morning when I was looking at this, I, uh, po— the question that popped in my mind, I thought, well, if we take small business owners in existing businesses today, how many of them have college degrees? I'll bet if we asked the man in the street, they'd guess, I don't know, 60, 70, 80% or whatever.

23:5020. My guess is 20. Well, 4-year. Oh, all right. 4-year college degrees is 52%. Really? Wow. More than I thought. But that means 48% did not get a 4-year college degree, but they own a business. So I'm sure a lot of people, they would see a group of business owners and they would think, well, they all went to college. No, they didn't.

24:15Only about half of 'em did. I mean, they, they may have some part-time college, but as far as a degree. Thank you so much for these tips on education. I think hopefully it's the motivation that we want from our listener. Listen to learn just one thing, and if something you pick up, implement it. But listen to what Tom has brought to us and use them for talking points inside of your network and your people.

24:38I think there's just some great talking points here. It's changed so radically from, I mean, you've been in this industry a long time and so have I. You know, I have a shop too. And the people at our shop, they work 40 hours, not 41. They work 40 hours, period. That's everybody in the building from service advisors to techs. That's it. That's one thing that's radically changed.

24:57It used to be 50 plus. It was a 50 to 60. The shop here in Michigan, it's fully air conditioned. So, I mean, they're in a comfortable climate year round. It's extremely well lit. We happen to be, we've got 9 bay doors and they're all glass. So it's an extremely bright environment. But if you just compare the whole job environment and everything to the way it was when I was first in this, which is like, you know, 40, 50 years ago, it's way different.

25:23And Tom, you're bringing up such a great point about the environment in the facility. That again, our industry has been shed on, cast on some bad light from Hollywood. And a lot of people, you don't wanna be a grease monkey. You don't want, I wanna go work in a dark and dirty place, but that's what Hollywood and the media shows when there's ever an issue with a vehicle or they're doing.

25:48Again, it goes back to, we need to get out there as the top leaders of our industry. And start talking sophisticated professionalism. Absolutely. We'll move on to government here a little bit. No government. No. Always one of our favorite topics. Auto industry trade group urges the feds to scrap the gas tax and replace it with a vehicle weight fee. This is from Fox Business.

26:14The federal gas tax is 18 cents, and that's been that way since 1993. I believe it sunsets this year in September. It hasn't been adjusted for inflation. It hasn't increased at all. So right now there's been a, if you take it adjusted for real dollars over the last 30 years, there's been a 60% reduction decrease in income to the federal government for highway tax.

26:45So they're making up the difference with money outta the general fund. Because they're way, way, way short on this. And this makes sense. I mean, you got electric vehicles, you got all different kinds of stuff out there. You know what makes sense really logically? I can see that is with a vehicle. I mean, how much does the vehicle weigh and how far does it go?

27:03You support that idea of a weight? I support the idea of a combination weight and distance traveled. Yes. Wow. And so now it's our job to do this reporting. We have to report the miles per year. Oh, the government already knows that. If you have a car that has the equivalent of OnStar, you know, the GM thing. I totally get it. But let me ask you another question about the weight.

27:27Is that, I have to pay that every year then? The weight tax? It'd be a vehicle registration fee. So it'd probably, if you have an annual vehicle registration, be the same thing. Yeah. Okay. I'd be paying some pretty heavier bucks instead of paying a gas tax. Yeah. But your gas tax would, would go away. There would be no more federal gas tax.

27:45No, I don't believe it would go away. I would believe they would figure out what to do with that 18 cents and keep it there. No, that's not part of the deal. I know what you're saying, but I'm sorry, it's the government and I'm here to help. That would be fair if you got somebody in these, one of these little tiny econo boxes and it barely sips gasoline or whatever, and they only drive it, I don't know, 5,000 miles a year or whatever.

28:11They really shouldn't pay that. This is kind of a use tax. This goes back to the original taxes in the United States of America. We're at our 250th anniversary. So if we go back in the 200 to 250 range there, taxes were use taxes. That's how the government got money is by when you use something, you paid a tax on it. And that's really coming full circle back to this concept of when you use something, you pay for it.

28:34If you don't use it, you don't pay for it. You know, I don't know how much simpler something could get, but that would be a, fair way to do it. I just wish they would fix the roads here in New York State. Oh, you have no idea. We just drove from Florida to Michigan. I try to avoid interstates. We took US highways all the way, which was a challenge in itself for a whole bunch of reasons.

28:53But I'm sorry, I'm getting you started. Oh, some of the terrible roads in Georgia and Tennessee and Kentucky, just Indiana. Unbelievable. The condition of some of those. The good news is, is they seem to be rebuilding or replacing a lot of bridges. We ran into detour after detour, bridge out, and when you went by there, they're putting a whole new bridge in.

29:16So I think that's been talked about for the last 10, 20 years and how the bridges in America are deteriorating. Looks like they're starting to fix a lot of them. So I did see that. That was a positive sign. Plus that stupid federal gas tax. I always liked this. I learned this years ago when I was a gas station dealer, is when you pay sales tax on something, whatever state you're in, and probably almost all states do this, they put the federal gas tax in there first.

29:38So you pay sales tax on the tax. Tax on the tax. Only in America. Oh, you know what? If you're not careful when you do a tip in a restaurant, if you're not careful, you're going to give a tip on the sales tax if you don't look at the net. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. If you just look at the big number, this is why it's big.

29:59But in a lot of credit card statements that you get at a restaurant, and, and I started to do this, Tom, I started to check the math. They give you an example of 18, 20, or 25% tip. And I'm thinking, are they doing it on the tax, sales tax, on the grossed up number? Sure they are. No, they're not. I was just at one this past, last Friday, and I looked and I did the math and it was on the net.

30:24I think you need to be careful. And if you're just doing quick math in your head, you need to do it on the net. Not that if the waiter, waitress, the server did a great job, damn it, reward 'em. But otherwise, be careful. DOJ subpoenas Apple and Google to learn the identities of the people who use a car tinkering app to bypass emission controls.

30:47This is a weird story. I read through it about 3 times and I'm still not quite sure I fully grasp it. There's an app out there called EZ-Link Auto Agent. Over 100,000 people apparently bought this thing or paid for it. The government's alleging people are using it and that the purpose of the app in the first place is actually to bypass emission controls, which may be, again, the article's a little short, didn't go in a lot of detail.

31:11There's got to be more to this story, but part of it seemed to be clearing out all the codes before you went in for emission testing when you went to get your sticker. You just stop a couple hundred yards from the test station and clear all the codes. Run your app, clear the codes, and you get rewarded with a good health certificate.

31:29Yeah. Yeah. It's called EasyLyk with a Y. So anyway, if you know anything about that, you might check on it. This, that was from Gizmodo, uh, was the publication on that one. All right. All right. Off the charts on that one. This is number 10 now, guys. Oh gosh, this is fun. These are the car brands with the fewest problems, 2026. This is my favorite story in here.

31:54Maybe my second favorite, but anyway, we'll save the best for last. Yes, that's what I thought. You know it's coming. I know. The problems per car set another record this year. In other words, if you go over the last 20, 30 years, it goes up every year. The problems per car Not down, it goes up. Just ship it. Yeah, ship it. Most new ones, it's high-tech stuff.

32:19It's infotainment. It's all the gadgetry. It's all the electronics that they're still trying to refine. Lexus was number one. When I say number one, the best, lowest number. Lexus number one, 4 years in a row. You know, people say, what's the best car? Yeah, it's a Lexus. I really want to know. I got to have a couple of them and they work pretty good.

32:39Number 3 is Mini, which strikes me as odd. We have them in the shop there and they must have improved because they weren't that good. Blow me away. There's no way when you say Mini, don't you think BMW, right? Yeah, exactly. So they must have done something here. Either that or somebody got into the numbers. But here's where it gets fun. Number 2 is Buick.

33:02Number 4 is Cadillac. Number 5 is Chevrolet. Now GM used to have 6 different cars. They're down to 3 now. They got rid of Oldsmobile, Pontiac, and Saturn. So they only got 3 left. And out of all this list of all these car makes, all 3 are in the top 5. There's 2 things that amaze me. I grew up in Michigan and everything else and Big 3 and GM was the big dog.

33:31When I was a kid growing up, Chevrolet alone, Chevrolet division of General Motors outsold Ford, Lincoln, and Mercury altogether. That's how big Chevy was, and GM was absolutely massive. And then of course things went south and it's been deteriorating. And now here we are, and I don't know, is this Mary Barra? I don't know. Is she it? And I don't think most people know it.

33:54The concept that of all the car makes in the world, GM has 3 makes and they're all in the top 5 is weird. How did they do that? It's really hard to understand. It really is. What amazes me most right now, and I call the biggest failure that I see in here, is in GM's marketing department. Because I should see an ad every day on the radio or TV or whatever that says what we just talked about.

34:22And I don't know, what are they doing? I mean, they're completely missing it. But just to, uh, cover, make sure we cover the other brands here, not shocking here. The worst 3 are Land Rover, Volvo, and Volkswagen. If you go back in our shop, there you go. Guys that go, yeah, that makes sense. The least dependable vehicles are plug-in hybrids. The vehicles that are showing the most improvement are ICE.

34:45Interesting. This came from The Visual Capitalist. Yes. Visual Capitalist is a really good site to check. I find it interesting when you, you know, GM's in the top 3, isn't it? Top 5 with 3 other vehicles. They're 3 brands. And when I think of Buick, Tom, every time I see a Buick commercial, I see They're not touting the fact that we're one of the most reliable.

35:06I see life experiences. It's like, oh my God, I can take my world of content YouTuber and I could bring it into my car. And I've got this wonderful life driving a Buick. Again, I don't know. This is about Buick's problems. I'd like to know how many cars are they selling? You know, Buick sells a whole lot of their— I believe they're the number one import in what country is Buick the number one import?

35:32I'm going to guess Japan. I remember reading that a while back. The Buick is huge in China. No. And I'd have to revisit that. Make sure, you know, you know how your memory gets when you get to be— No, I don't. Not at all. You forgot already? Yeah. Okay. All right. Next one here. This is under the category miscellaneous. This comes from Jalopnik and it just proves you can buy anything on Facebook Marketplace.

35:55And I heard that this is your wish for your upcoming 80th birthday. You're going to pick on me my 80th birthday. I mean, that's eons away. Oh, I thought that was this fall. Oh, wow. I thought you were my friend. Yeah. Well, we're going to have to modify your Acura a bit to accommodate this. What you can do is you can get a 3D printed Lamborghini Aventador body.

36:19I'm not pronouncing that right. It's a Lamborghini and I know I'm pronouncing that part right. And toss it on top of my car? Yes, it will retrofit your Acura with a Lamborghini body. A glove fit, maybe? There's some reinforcement required, but you can get the whole thing. The base unit's like $5,000, and then if you get the pieces all glued together and you get the whole monocoque and the whole deal all together, it's about $8,500.

36:43And then you gotta supply the drivetrain and the chassis and so on. But the body, if you look at the article, it shows you, and the whole thing's all there. And it's all 3D with 3D printer. Oh, the 3D printers. What is it that we can't 3D print today? I don't know. In fact, we know. And in fact, Tom, thank you for mentioning that.

37:01What I really should do is if anybody's listening that you're doing any 3D printing in the shop and you've got some software that gives you the kinds of plastic attachments that we can't get in a dealership, we can't get into the parts business, and you're starting to make your own stuff. We know it exists out there. I just love to have someone on the show that's doing it.

37:21Oh yeah, it sounds like it's really cool. It's, it's really fun. Now this is your last article and it's your favorite. Yeah, this one I'm actually gonna read a little bit. I'm not gonna read it word for word. I'm gonna clean it up a little bit 'cause it's a family show. There's a lot of quotes in here from Elon. Elon's a pretty cool dude.

37:38It's a post of his from X, am I right? Well, it's a post from a guy by the name of Dustin from X, and he's recounting Elon in a podcast interview. So, you know, I'm sure things change a little bit here, but the concept is here. Reading doesn't work good, but I'm going to try it anyway and see how well I can do.

37:55But I think the reason you want to read some of these things, because you have to understand the context of this, and it is a very powerful, makes you deep think about what this is all about. And, you know, when I read this, Tom, and I realized This whole GDP thing could just be a scam. But go ahead, tell a story. Elon Musk just used a joke to perform an autopsy on the American economy.

38:242 economists go for a hike. They find a pile of poop. One pays the other $100 to eat the pile of poop. They keep walking, they find a second pile of poop, and the other economist pays the first one $100 to eat that one. They stopped. Neither man gained a dollar. Both ate poop for nothing. And somebody else made the point that they also had to pay taxes on this, but on paper they just generated $200 in GDP.

38:55Oh my God. Yeah. And Musk says that basically would count as a job. This is to illustrate the absurdity of economics. That's not a punchline. That's the operating system of the US federal government. Every time a politician celebrates record job creation, this is what they are describing. Not output, not value, not progress. All they're describing is motion. The entire bureaucratic machine exists to manufacture friction and then invoice for it.

39:28Compliance layers are built to justify the next compliance layer. Oversight committees that produce nothing but the need for more oversight. Consulting firms are hired to audit the work of other consulting firms. And trillions of dollars are circulating through the system that have never produced a single thing you can hold in your hand. But the GDP number keeps ticking up, so everybody applauds.

39:53The poop gets eaten. The scoreboard moves. Nobody asks what actually got built. And this is the big one here. This is why Washington treats AI like a 5-alarm fire. AI does not play the friction game. It does not form a committee. It does not schedule a review. It does not file 400 pages of paperwork no one will ever read. It just solves the problem.

40:18And that's the one thing the machine cannot survive. The government does not tax results. It taxes process. The longer the process, the deeper the cut it gets. AI compresses a 10-day workflow into seconds. There's nothing left to bill, nothing left to tax, and nothing left to skim. I love it. So they will spend the next decade warning you that AI threatens the economy.

40:43What they will never say is what it actually threatens. The illusion that activity equals progress. The $200 economy where both men ate poop is called a job. The machines are not coming for your purpose. They're coming to prove that half the economy never had a purpose. I read that twice. Goes back to this committee after committee to prove this, that the committee was right or wrong, and all that money transpired, but nothing got done.

41:14And that's where this whole What was it called in the beginning where they were just trying to uncover, you know, the monies that are being spent that had no value or purpose? Oh, Doge. Yeah. Doge. That's right. That it was Doge. I'm glad you brought that up. I'm sad that you brought that up because it's that slap upside the head. Okay. Now don't be depressed.

41:35Have a great, you know, weekend and enjoy your world. Enjoy your life. Grow your business, but don't let this kind of stuff drag you down. 'Cause you gotta, you gotta do your own thing. Don't get depressed over this 'cause if not, you're gonna lose your life, your business. You just can't. Yeah. If you want to have some fun, you want to learn a lot and you want to be at the front of the line as the future unfolds.

41:56AI, AI, AI, learn about it, study about it, find out what's going on. Understand, learn what an LLM is, learn what compute means, learn what distillation is. Learn all these terms and what's actually happening with it. It's just gonna amaze people. I was telling the guys today, they were talking about, talking about ordering parts, and I said, you know, we're not that far away, guys.

42:20Think about the technology already exists. When you look up a part, it's gonna tell you within a minute or two of when it's gonna be here. There's no doubt. Thanks for really making this whole AI piece at the end of our discussion. We've done a lot of episodes on AI and we have more to come. Go to my website, type in artificial intelligence in the search bar at remarkableresultsradio.biz and start realizing the AI episodes that we're doing is about how it integrates into what we're doing in our business.

42:52I would have to say this, that every single company that has some kind of API connection to your software, be it your accounting software, or be it your point of sale system, your SMS. AI is now huge. The whole voice phone answering is so good. I did an episode with Promotive in April and I tested their AI recruiter. Go, go to my website, type in Promotive and look for Carm Talks to Paige.

43:24They've never let someone do this before. And I, I had the phone up to the microphone. And I was trying to shake this person up and she wouldn't let me do it. And I got to the point, Tom, and I said, I'm sorry, I'm being so sarcastic. That's okay, Carmen. Let's go on with the interview. Okay. And I find that it's improving and improving and improving and improving every single day.

43:49It's getting better. And you gotta learn to have AI be your partner. You can't have it tell you what to do. You have to be in control of AI. That's some of the things that I'm learning. Yep. You have to start integrating it into everything that you do. Wow. This was fun. Thank you. I always enjoy getting together with you and talking about these crazy topics that— does Debbie let you just sit up in the office at night and read all this stuff?

44:15Oh yeah. My favorite new thing, if you want a fun thing to watch every Friday, today is Friday. Oh, that's great. Because they do it on Thursday and they drop the production about 7 or 8 o'clock on Friday, 7 or 8 PM. And it's the All In podcast. It's usually 4 guys. And if you wanna just watch 4 billionaires chew the fat on what's going on with AI and everything else, there you go.

44:41And it is fascinating. All right. Well, we just chewed the fat here for the last 45 or 50 minutes with my friend Tom Hamm from automotivemanagementnetwork.com, thelaborratetracker.com, and Autocentric. His import specialty shop out in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Tom, this was a blast. Thanks so much. Oh, thanks a lot. I enjoy it every time. I really appreciate it. Thanks for being on board to listen and learn from the premier automotive repair business podcast, Remarkable Results Radio.

45:13Get your episodic education on the ARPN listening app at automotiverepairpodcastnetwork.com. Also enjoy the podcast on our CARM Capriato YouTube channel. CARM is all for advancing the professional automotive service industry. Until next time.