Digital Transformation in Automotive w/ George Ayres

AR:
Nice. Well, I like to ask my guests what are they most passionate about in life? And it doesn't have to be anything work-related, but if it is, that's obviously a bonus for you.

GA:
Sure, yeah, I have a few passions like most people outside of my work. One is motorcycle riding. I like to do that. I've been doing that since I was a little kid, believe it or not. And in fact, I just came back last weekend from Asheville, North Carolina, which is a beautiful place to ride motorcycles on the Blue Ridge Parkway.

AR:
Asheville is very beautiful.

GA:
Yeah, my wife and I went together and we spent the weekend up there. It was really fun and one of the most exciting things. Ridden all over the country actually. And then also maybe very different than that, I like to collect poetry books, so I have about 450 poetry books.

AR:
Wow.

GA:
And I have written and published and try to focus on that space as well. That's more my part-time job.

AR:
So you collect and you write and publish your own?

GA:
Yeah.

AR:
If you don't mind me asking, what got you into poetry? It's very different than automobile technology.

GA:
Yeah, it's funny. I think in the early nineties I was one of those climbing the ladder corporate types. I worked for a large car company and I was trying to read all the business books. And so I was on airplanes every week and I was reading every kind of business book you can imagine and I was super one dimensional. And one day at a airport kiosk bookstore, I basically saw this, I don't know, poetry book anthology, and looked at it and I thought, "I need something else that's not all that business stuff." And I just got pulled into that whole space, that whole world, and it's really been really great.

AR:
So you picked up this book at the airport and it spoke to you and you just felt like ...

GA:
Yep. Still have it.

AR:
That's amazing. What book is that, if you don't mind me asking? Do you remember the name?

GA:
Ironically, it's makes me laugh every time. It's called The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry, and there's actually a second edition.

AR:
The Vintage Book of-

GA:
Yeah, So it's vintage publishing. I think.

AR:
I see.

GA:
But vintage and contemporary don't seem to go together in my mind, but ...

AR:
From that point...

GA:
They have a second edition actually, and I bought that too, just so I could not have the worn copy so much.

AR:
Wow, that's very cool. Yeah, I think staying in touch with their creative side is really important, especially for the work that you do. All right. So awesome motorcycles and poetry. I don't think you could get any more varied than those two things. So tell us about your time in the automobile industry. The landscape has changed so much in the last 10 years, especially with Tesla coming in and disrupting. So from a high level, how has the industry changed as far as your experience goes?

GA:
Sure. I've been in the industry four decades at this point, so really, really interesting. Of course, the whole concept of automobiles has come full circle. We're talking about electric vehicles today, but electric vehicles were running around in the early 1900s. There was a time when electric and internal combustion were competing for which was going to win. And back then just because of the distribution ability of fuel versus electrons, the internal combustion engine won. And that ended up being the dominant mode. But there certainly was a lot of EV experimentation even way back then, a hundred years ago. And now where come full circle and EVs are where things are at. So I've seen that shift happen just in the last 10 or 15 years and accelerate. Right now it's accelerating.

AR:
And what would you say is the primary driving factor, no pun intended, behind the shift to electric? How much of it was Tesla showing that it can be done really well versus technology for batteries and things like that was finally where it needed to be to make it a sensible investment?

GA:
Sure. I think there's three moving pieces to three big ones. One is the first one, yep, Tesla's winning. Other car companies don't want to just let that happen, and so they start to follow the lead. Second, yes, the technology readiness is high. It's much higher than it was 10 years ago. Battery technology alone is much different and it's changing even in the last year, much different again.

And then third is just the environment, the idea of sustainability, climate change, all these ideas that were not here 20 years ago. Car companies were not really paying attention to any of that. And so they know there's customers that care about that, that use their wallet to fuel purchases that align with that or don't, and they need to serve that market and they recognize that. So I think those three things. If the first one hadn't happened, if there hadn't been anybody that was successful yet, I think we wouldn't be moving so fast as we are now. But showing that success, I think it pulls everybody forward. I'd also say the US is still behind the rest. China and Europe are way ahead of the US on EVs, for example. I think the software side in the US is actually ahead in many ways, but it's usually many factors and I think that's the case today.

AR:
So at least for me, when I saw Tesla validate the EV market in the US, I noticed that 10, 20 other EV startups came out of nowhere, like Lucid and Rivian and then there are a lot of lesser known ones. And a lot of people were saying, "Oh, it's vaporware," or, "These companies will never see the light of day." Was this more of a salient factor or did I notice them more because of Tesla? Or were they always there and working in the shadows? Can you speak a little bit to that?

GA:
Yeah, no, that's a good point. So I think when you start to pay attention, of course you notice more things like that, I certainly am that way. And there are a lot of them out there now because of course investors realize, well, this is where the market's moving. And so they try to find vehicles for their investment and startups get funding. But I started working in the EV space in 2009, 2008, and it was companies like Coda Automotive out there, which were electric vehicles, startups, et cetera, which turned into some Chinese company ultimately. I worked with a company for a brief time called Mission Motors. Mission Motors was making electric super bikes really interesting battery powered. This is more than 10 years ago. There wasn't as many back then. I think now that investor money, and then we have some financial tools like the SPAC movement and things like that that fuel that.

They call it special purpose acquisition corp company, I think they call it, which is where they get all the investors together and they say, "Okay, we have two years to spend our money and invest in something, so go find something." And so that drives a lot of things to happen. We just saw this week, Lordstown going out of business just this week because they couldn't get their deal with Box-Con to happen. On the other hand, I was an early cynic on Tesla because I thought for sure they could do the battery side. I'm not worried about the battery side, but cars are more complicated than just the battery. There's a lot of other issues.

AR:
And what specifically about the development of a car is difficult? It's probably everything, but what would you say is the most difficult?

GA:
Yeah, I've been in many car factories and watched cars get put together, and every time I go, it's just blows me away that 30,000 parts can come together and drive off the end of the assembly line. It starts with nothing and then drives off the end of the assembly line. It's amazing. And then do it with quality and craftsmanship and reliability. Automotive engineers are super conservative for a reason. They're building products that carry people. So there's a whole safety idea there that's not there with a cell phone. And they have to test those parts and those connections to minus 50 Fahrenheit, 120, 130 Fahrenheit. It's got to work in that whole range.

And so there's a really good reason why we say automotive grade. There's a supply chain and then there's an automotive grade supply chain. It's a different animal, and that's okay. The car business has seen ups and downs of companies leaning into safety or not doing it right, and there's famous examples of not. And now I think it's great that everybody's focused on that. But it's hard and complicated and it's not really the same as a normal consumer product because it carries your family.

AR:
On that note, what do you think, because there's a lot of talk about how Tesla is innovated, not just in terms of using batteries, but also in terms of their assembly line, the process fabricating the different units and making, for example, the pack that houses the batteries is the structural pack as well as the housing pack. So they've streamlined some of those components. Do they have that luxury because they're a newcomer or is this something that other manufacturers just ... What I'm trying to ask is why haven't the other manufacturers taken these steps? Are they doing that? Is it just too expensive to retool or what does that dynamic look like?

GA:
Well, they certainly are trying to do that. First of all, I think Tesla comes at it from a software company point of view, not an auto company point of view. So they come at it with a different way of thinking generally in how to put things together and how to work with suppliers and how to do more than one thing at the same time and all kinds of agile development, all kinds of ideas that we talk about in software. And the car company comes at it from a manufacturing point of view. Car companies historically are manufacturing, finance, engineering companies. That's what their skillset is. They're really actually really good at manufacturing.

AR:
And there's pros and cons to that, I assume, because I people complain about Tesla all the time.

GA:
Yeah, sure. And it's about stability of parts and control, and it's not about changing, it's about keeping everything simple, stuff like that. Now I think Tesla's done a great job and if you look at even just their model line, reducing complexity, for example, you can buy today an F-150 internal combustion engine, F-150 that's ridiculously complicated in terms of its order. You could order a million combinations of the F15-0. But on an F-150 lightning, the EV version, you can order six eight. Simplify. Why? Because they're chasing Tesla's approach and Tesla's way of thinking. Lexus did the same thing when Lexus came out. Toyota famously made Lexus very simple, two models, not too many combinations because they didn't want to have that complexity.

AR:
And it seems like the differentiator now is more on the software side than anything because of the move towards electric and simplifying the dashboard and all the different buttons and features.

GA:
And customer expectations. So you and I are used to swiping right on a screen. We're used to that touchscreen idea. We expect to see that in our car. I think the big challenge for most automakers now is learning how to be software companies being good at it, but differentiating themselves within that experience. Because if they're all the same, when you think about CarPlay and AndroidAuto, you plug your phone in, it works the same, doesn't matter what car you're in. All of a sudden it's not differentiated. And they're historically used to trying to focus on differentiation, through sheet metal and interiors and performance and all kinds of other ideas. Now they're forced to try and differentiate through software, and it's really hard for them to think about that.

AR:
And that's because primarily the differentiating factors are ... It's easier for companies now to compete in terms of performance, especially with EVs. The torque is all there, so now they have to find other ways to compete. Is that the primary reason?

GA:
Yeah. Yeah, that's right. So the experience, which can be the driving experience, it can be the riding experience for the passengers. It can even be the experience while you're waiting for your EV to charge. You're waiting 20 minutes, 30 minutes because you're plugged into the supercharger and they're going to put video games on the front dash. BMW just launched that a few weeks ago where you can basically use your smartphone as a game controller in the front seat of your car while it's charging. So it doesn't work while you're driving, but it works while you're waiting.

AR:
Yes. And I know Tesla has tons of games on their screen that you can play and you can plug your controller in. I have a very contentious polarizing topic. So BMW, I'm sure you've seen this, they've announced that they were going to experiment with subscription-based features. I personally am pro free market. I want them to test it out. I want to see how it goes. I think there's a lot of pros to doing something like that. And there may be a few cons, but a lot of people are freaking out over the idea of subscriptions in cars. What is your take on that?

GA:
No, it's really interesting. Okay. So it was heated seats, I believe that they started out with. So you could download heated seats essentially and use them if you were going to go to the mountain skiing for the weekend, you could subscribe to that. And so that idea of pay per use, I pay when I need it, I don't pay when I don't need it. I think that's a pretty compelling idea. We do that within smartphone world. We do it within computers, all kinds of things. I have subscriptions on my computer for little tools and utilities that I use to make my experience better. And I pay every month for these little tools that are valuable to me. They're not maybe valuable to other people, but to me they are.

AR:
What do you think of the argument that just since they've already put in the hardware and spent the money, the customer is entitled to accessing that hardware?

GA:
Well, I think the car's capability is there and you pay for the capability and then you can pay to turn it on or not. And I think that's reasonable. The car maybe has a downloadable software, I know Mercedes just did this recently, to make the performance improve. So I have a car, let's call it an old school car that when I upgraded the performance, I checked the box when I ordered it with the performance exhaust on it. It cost me, I don't know, a thousand dollars or something for the performance exhaust. I got another five horsepower. But that was hardware. Now I can download performance and get it instantly. That's pretty interesting.

AR:
And I think the main benefit is the economies of scale that comes along with churning out hopefully maybe half the number of models. And then with the economies of scale, the cost of each unit might go down a little bit and then ultimately the consumer can turn on the feature later even if they weren't intending to buy that feature to begin with, right?

GA:
Sure. And there's another big idea here, which is the car companies used to build a car, sell it to a dealer, and the dealer sold it to you. The car company didn't sell it to you, the dealer did.

AR:
Dealership, that's a huge topic.

GA:
So the dealer sells it to you. And the car company's responsibility at that point was very simple. It was called warranty. If their car broke, they had to pay the dealer to fix it. The dealer still had to fix it, not the car company, but the dealer got reimbursed by the car company and you didn't have to pay anything 'cause it was under warranty. But that's the only relationship fundamentally that the car company had with you was paying for repairs.

Now, in a way, as they use software and other experience, ideas and subscriptions to stay tied to you, the car company has a direct relationship with you for maybe many years, maybe as a second owner or a third owner. So for example, in my world of connected vehicles, which I spent quite a bit of time in some of these car companies, BMW's another good example, they turned connected services on for 10 years, which means third owner and fourth owner is going to have connected services. That means the data from those cars are going back to BMW. And so you don't have to even be the original owner anymore to do that.

AR:
So how do you think that will affect the relationships with dealers? It sounds like they're taking a page out of the playbook from Tesla who has a direct to consumer relationship and for example, over the air updates. So historically that's been very difficult for vehicles. They'd have to literally go to the dealership and sometimes pay thousands of dollars to upgrade the software. And I know that some of these manufacturers or some of these vehicle manufacturers, they can't do that, or at least not in the same way with the dealers because of this relationship. But how do you think that's going to change?

GA:
Well, I think you're going to see more and more what we call OTA, over the air updates. For sure. There's going to be different ways of doing it. So we've seen, for example, Ford Sync. They had an update, let's call it, and they couldn't do it over the years. So they mailed owners USBs, which they had to take into the dealer to have the update install.

AR:
So they mailed the owner, the USB, and the owner still had to drive to the dealership?

GA:
Yep, yep, yep.

AR:
Wow.

GA:
So really old school kind of ways because they didn't have the capability. Why? Because the car didn't have the onboard modem capability that it needed. On the other hand, the McLaren F-1 when it came out was over the air update able on purpose. They did that. Now they're not selling very many and they can carry those really easily, hold the hands of the owners, so to speak. And so somewhere in between is where you're going to see a lot of the right answer. What car companies are doing more and more is what we call rolling out campaigns, update campaigns. So they might say, "Okay, this 500,000 cars all over the US, they need this update." And they would use the connected car platform they have, they would use AT&T or Verizon typically as the telecom carrier to help them, and they would start to send that data to those cars.

Some of those cars are driving around, some of them are in parking garages, some of them are not turned on. And so until they're turned on, they're not going to receive that data. Some are deep in parking garages, six floors under the ground that are never going to see that signal until the car comes out. So there's all kinds of issues that the engineer runs into where they can't just simply guarantee that when they push the button, all those 500,000 cars get that update. It's a rolling thing. And so it's still better though to have that rolling update than to drag the customer into the dealer and have them deal with all that. And even, in fact, I think it was GM recently made an announcement. Mark Royce, I think a GM made an announcement that as they do software updates at GM, they're going to include the dealer in that and the dealer's going to get some credit for that. They're going to participate in that.

AR:
So the dealer that originally sold the car?

GA:
Yeah. Why? Because they're bypassing the dealer in a sense. And so there's a way of modifying the dealer base a little bit by including them, which is pretty interesting.

AR:
That makes sense. So I want to take a step back and talk a little bit about the startup world of auto.

GA:
Sure.

AR:
Can you explain what is the competition like? Do they ever hope to see the light of day or is this mostly a play overseas outside the US where it's a little bit maybe easier to enter this market that's ultra competitive?

GA:
You mean for EVs or generally for automotive?

AR:
Generally, yeah, the startup world of automotive.

GA:
I think you can think about various car companies over time that started and didn't survive in automotive. There's a lot of brands right now that aren't here anymore. Plymouth, not here. Mercury, not here. I started at Ford. Mercury was a brand we had. It's not here anymore. And there's brands like Tesla that are here now that weren't here before. So there's a little bit of change, but then there same times Ford was 120 years old last week, I think on the 16th of June, 120 years old. That's pretty amazing when you think about it, as a brand.

So typically the barriers to entry are high because the capital investment is really high. We talked about manufacturing, building a manufacturing plant. A bunch of engineers to help you design and develop the product. Cycle times, how long does it take? Five years, seven years. Automotive cycle times are very long because just the testing is a year, 18 months. All those parts I talked about minus 50 Fahrenheit, 120 Fahrenheit. I got to take the car to the Mojave, I got to take the car to Bemidji, Minnesota in the wintertime, all those kind of things. So there's a lot of barriers like that that are just general barriers to most investment. And then you layer in EV. On the one hand, well, I don't have to worry about an internal combustion engine and all the parts in an engine plant to go with my manufacturing plant, but I do have to worry about a battery plant, battery supply, rare earth minerals. Where are they coming from? There's a whole supply chain that's different there and complexity in testing all those batteries and make sure they don't catch on fire and all kinds of things like that.

And then you have to design. You still have to build a car that is appealing on the outside, that's comfortable on the inside. So you need traditional suppliers to give you seats and steering wheels and all the usual pieces, plus non-traditional suppliers to help you with the software side and do all that work. No one company can do all that, so super complex effort. And that's why you see, I watch Lucid very closely lucid. I was following a Lucid Air the other day on the road when I was riding the motorcycle and a beautiful car. It's a beautiful car. And Peter Rollinson and company have done a great job, but it's really hard to put together a car with high quality that everything fits together, everything works for a hundred thousand miles, no matter whether it's powered by batteries or powered by fuel or hydrogen. I don't care. It's still hard. And this idea of craftsmanship and quality is really important. And consumers like you and I, our expectation is much higher today about that than it used to be. What you could get away with in 1950 is different.

AR:
So barriers to entry is even higher now?

GA:
Barriers to entry I think are high. But on the other hand, automotive as an idea is more interesting to investors than it used to be because of Tesla, because of EVs, because of climate change as a context, much more interesting. So the money's flowing into the industry, and so there's always going to be startups there that say, "Hey, I can do that. I have a better idea." I think one of the things I've learned is think back to when the Japanese launched their luxury brands, Lexus, Acura, Infiniti, they all started with two models. Remember they didn't have just one, they had two. Because you got to have enough starter scale to get the dealers and other participants to be successful as well. You can't do it by yourself. And so what you see Tesla with four models, you start to see Lucid working on other models. Rivian has more than one. That's really important to have that portfolio of vehicles. And that means you got to do maybe one per plant, but you got to do two or three designs of different vehicles and there's different parts, all kinds of things there.

AR:
So tell me about the work that you guys do as advisors. Do you work mainly with startups or mainly with bigger companies or all across the board? And do you have any cool stories about some of the work that you've done that you're allowed to share?

GA:
Sure. Yeah, sure. So I would say mostly startups and smaller companies, typically a hundred people or less size company, usually five years old or less, not always. We have a couple of clients that are bigger companies, clients that are in the digital engineering space, or they have particular solutions that are automotive relevant. And that's because people find us and they say, "Hey, can you help us do this or that?" And that's pretty fun.

AR:
Are these US based?

GA:
Our clients are mostly US and Europe at this moment. We have clients in Italy, for example, and Switzerland. Mostly US and Europe, I would say. We certainly communicate and speak with OEMs that are in Japan, that are in Korea, that are in Europe. But our particular clients at the moment are US and Europe primarily.

AR:
And are these startups companies that eventually we'll hear about as consumers? Because you don't really hear of new car companies very often.

GA:
Yeah, most of these would be what we call B2B companies. They're suppliers to the companies that you're going to know. So they're going to be working with, I don't know, Ford or GM, but you're going to be driving the Ford Light, F-150 Light. You're not going to necessarily be interacting with these companies directly.

AR:
They're developing, not the platform, but some of the features or their developing the car and then GM will take it in white label?

GA:
Right. So I'll give you an example. Working with a company that does what you might call digital smart key, for smartphones using your phone as a key. Well, some manufacturers have that already sorted out just for their brand, but there's other entities like rental car companies and fleets that have many brands that need digital smart key capability for all of their vehicles and for lots of reasons. So it might be the case that you can use your smartphone to walk up to a car that's on the side of the road or in a parking lot and open the door, get in and drive away and rent that car without anybody else being around. So now they can stage in place rental cars, places all over a city, people can access directly and they track when you start, when you end.

AR:
So an evolution to Zipcar.

GA:
Yeah, similar. And Zipcar was an early model of that where you had to do a lot of extra energy and bolt on a lot of things. It actually had a credit card reader on the side of the window, you may remember. So this is much more modern than that and it's available to fleets and rental car companies. But what's also interesting is there's a whole ecosystem of third party providers to allow you, for example, if you have an EV to swipe right and summon a concierge to come and charge your car, or receive a package to the trunk of your car while you're in your office, or get your car washed in the parking lot while you're at your office. So what one might call remote services. You can do these remote services because I can send a message to somebody else's cell phone, the third party provider's cell phone, and say for 15 minutes you have access to this car to open the door, wash it, put it back together, and then you get a message back that says, "It's all complete. Car's, locked engine's immobilized, et cetera."

So there's an example of a component digital smart key that has many uses within the automotive space, and they need to work with OEMs or car companies to get that data directly. But you need to be able to do it on multiple brands. And so you actually need to have wide relationships to make that happen.

AR:
Oh, that's very interesting. So what is most exciting to you about the future of automotive in this industry? These are really cool, self-driving features, autopilot, automatic or digital entry, these are all really interesting things. What do you envision for the future of automotive that excites you?

GA:
Well, I think the experiences we have in our homes, entertainment experiences we have now, how we interact in a personal way. Our smartphone is a personalized device. So ideas where I can get in any car and it knows me, it knows my preferences, it tailors itself to me instantly without me doing anything. Right now you have plug and charge, for example, on Smart EVs, so I don't have to fiddle with anything. I just plug it in and the billing happens in the background. Those kinds of things are happening. Of course, I think when you start to look at VR and all kinds of game ideas that we associate with games and we start to put them in the world, and you're starting to see that now. I think there was a recent launch with somebody, I can't remember now with some goggles and wear it in the world.

All of a sudden that starts to become interesting in the auto world too. Why? Because the car can drive itself. The windshield is a screen. A Mercedes showed that at CES a couple of years ago. They had a windshield essentially where you could swipe or point. So while you were driving down the road, it would show a restaurant that you were going by and it would show that your friend was in the restaurant and you could point to the window. You didn't even have to touch it, and it would light up a message to your friend that you're nearby, stuff like that.

AR:
I don't know if I should be excited or terrified, but that's a very interesting idea.

GA:
But that idea of gesture control and the way we interact in other parts of the world, like the game world now bring that to automotive. Now, I don't want people to be distracted, don't get me wrong, but you can take advantage of that when the car can start to drive itself. And we're pretty close to that now. All of a sudden it's just a pod that has a whole bunch of options on the inside of it. The seat in the front swivels the other way. There's no steering wheel now, and you can face your friends in the backseat. And it's a much more interesting experience. When I was a kid, I watched The Jetsons. You've probably seen The Jetsons before. And this is essentially where we're going, I think.

AR:
Cool. So do you have any stories about your experiences with clients that you can share?

GA:
Yeah, a couple of them. Maybe one interesting one, I worked with a company that does battery data analysis, which was interesting. And there was a famous recall a couple of years ago by a large, I'll say American car company, where they had to recall all the vehicles. I think it was 140,000 vehicles for catching on fire, these battery electric vehicles. Some of the batteries weren't so good, so they had to worry about that. So they had to bring all the owners back in. They spent a billion and a half dollars to do this recall. And this company that we worked with, really interesting, they basically did what the army would call an after action review. So how would you have won the battle? That kind of thing. And you talk about it afterwards.

AR:
Postmortem.

GA:
Postmortem, right. So they took the sample of the data and they basically said, "If you'd have done all this front at the front end, if your battery supplier had given you this data on the front end, you would've only had to recall 1% of those vehicles. It would've cost you 99% less. Because you could only worry about the ones that were manufactured incorrectly that had the problem and not everything." And to me, that highlights the old school mindset versus new school for automotive. The old school was, we don't really know and so we'll just bring everything back and let the dealer fix it. We think some are the problem. And that's a very classic recall problem. And the new school of analytics data, more precision algorithms, we can figure out with super high confidence exactly what the problem is and only deal with that particular subset. And I think that's where we're going to get. We're getting much more precise generally as an industry because of things like that.

AR:
That's very interesting. So last question I'll ask you is-

GA:
Well, I'll give you some other thoughts on the issues around the new way of doing business with automotive and the old way. Three examples that I thought about. One is there's a big car company called the Volkswagen. Volkswagen invested in this software group called Cariad, C-A-R-I-A-D, a few years ago, which is their software team, which is great. Okay. We have a software team.

Well, about a year ago, the CEO of Volkswagen was shown the door because he had some problems getting that software team to deliver the software in time for the vehicle launches, and it affected Porsche and Audi in particular vehicle launches and delayed them by about two years. So software was the blocker for this new modern vehicle. These are electric vehicles in both cases. And so they basically swapped CEOs. This poor CEO is now the Volkswagen group CEO, Oliver Bloom. And so that's one. Number two, not too long ago, Toyota had a 2 million customer data breach for 10 years of connected data. So their connected cars over 10 years, they had basically a hack problem. And three, you've heard about the Kia challenge, the Kia challenge on TikTok?

AR:
Yes. Was it Kia or Hyundai?

GA:
Kia and Hyundai are both because they're the same company fundamentally, two different brands, but the way they build their products, they're very similar. And they forgot, or they left out the engine immobilizer feature, which is that digital key when you used to have your key and it had the codes changing constantly, that feature. They took it out of some model years and somebody figured that out, and you could basically go get a USB and plug it in and start the car and steal it. And so they just launched a 9 million vehicle owner campaign to spend $200 million giving people money to go buy alarms or get their car fixed in advance of worrying about it being stolen. So there's technology there, engine immobilizers and theft deterrent, things like that that are pretty important. And when you forget to do that, you have a big problem later on. So car companies are really learning the hard way how to deal with technology.

AR:
Yeah. And there's always something new to address or do to be competitive, so it never ends.

GA:
Yeah, absolutely.

AR:
Yeah. Well, George, thanks so much. This is a really enlightening conversation. Anything you want to leave to the listeners, maybe managers, business owners, any type of advice you would have or see levels that are working?

GA:
Yeah, I think the only thing I would say is that in the world that we live in now, this is too complicated for any one company to do it all themselves. And there's always, I think, the need to work together with other partners, other collaborators, technology partners, and we like to help companies do that, put those systems together, those ecosystems together. And I think it's important to let people who are really good at certain things be good at that, and then use their capabilities to enhance your product or service as well. So try not to be all things to all people, but bring it all together, work together. I think that's what's more fun anyway.

AR:
More collaboration.

GA:
More collaboration. Yeah.

AR:
Where can people find you online?

GA:
Sure. Automobilityadvisors.com. And there's a whole spiel there about me and the rest of the team and look forward to interacting with any of your listeners.

AR:
Awesome. Thanks again, George. It's been really good talking to you, and we'll catch you another time, hopefully.

GA:
Thanks, Amin. You have a great holiday weekend as well.

AR:
Thank you. Take care.

^{Transcribed by Rev.com}