Morning, good afternoon, good evening, listening to the All Talk Car podcast, Christmas Special. On behalf of Helil Ross, the roving reporter, security and everyone else who has helped us put the show together, we wish you a merry Christmas. We would like to thank our guests and listeners who have reached out to us and made their cars available for live drives. Thank you to Mercedes, Boomer, and the team at Tesla for being good friends at the show.
And furthermore, we thank you for listening and making this fun for us to make. As a special treat, we will play the interview from an American Shoe Cool Scagit Talks, KsVR FM, 91.7, covering news from the region where I was recently interviewed by Anne Nash during my time at SEMA. I hope you enjoy the interview and we'll see you again in 2023 with bigger live drives and reports from some of that and many other shenanigans that we get up to. This is Anne Boedle Nash for Scagit Talks.
The SEMA Car Show, Specialty Equipment Show Association, recently held in Vegas, offers an attendee experience like No Other Trade Show on the planet, so they say. It's the best place to see thousands of the newest automotive performance products from new and iconic exhibitors, discover the latest product and vehicle trends and develop essential skills by attending any one of the 70 free education sessions, all of which are led by top industry professionals. Well, one of the exhibitors at the show this year is from our area, Bellingham specifically, APP EV Systems, a company which is designed to kit to retrofit classic cars with electric motors. In fact, they received two awards during the show, runner up in the Best New Electric Vehicle Product 2023, and a SEMA Global Media Award winner as selected by a panel of international media judges.
During the SEMA show, industry visitors from around the globe were in attendance and one of those was Peter Ronas of an Australian podcast called All Talk Car. Peter was invited as a global media judge and had to go to the new product showcase and select 10 new products that would succeed in his country, Australia. I'd like to welcome Peter Ronas to the show. Hi, Peter.
Thanks for joining me. Good day, Anna. To all your listeners. Thank you.
Can you give me an overview of your take on the SEMA show to our listeners and its importance to the aftermarket car part industry? Well, the US is synonymous with cars and car accessories and it's basically the whole world coming together in one place to showcase their latest wares. So you've got buyers, you've got sellers, you've got media. Apparently the statistics with this year, there are 65,000 registered buyers coming to see 1,900 exhibitors and they're from all over the world, from your end of the woods, from APP-EV systems to Australian companies and Mexican companies and from Asia as well.
So it's a way for everyone to get together face to face. There's so much you can do over the net and by emails, but sometimes it deals done by a handshake and a meet and greet and SEMA provides that and it's been going for over 50 years and it's become one of the largest conventions and shows in Las Vegas and it's not open to the public. Except I understand on one day at the very end of the show. And that's tonight.
So it's called SEMA Ignited. So from about four o'clock to about seven o'clock, all the cars that are on display have a circuit that they come out and parade in front of the public. So the demand was high. Everyone is in the car world and knows it's heard of SEMA and it's a way for them to connect with the public and they can get an opportunity to see all the modified vehicles from big tour trucks to EVs to hot rods and rat rods to any car you can think of and truck and truck.
Yeah. So tell me why are Australians in particular interested in EV electric vehicle innovations in particular? It's the way of the world. We have governments and they are telling us that gas is bad and electricity is good.
So I'm not going to get into arguments as to where the electricity comes from, whether that's good or bad, etc, etc. But I own an electric vehicle. I own a Tesla Model 3 and I know there's a lot around here. And to compare a gas vehicle with an electric vehicle, especially traffic, there's no noise, there's no gearbox, there's no, it's just a smooth glide on your commute to work.
It's great around town. I haven't paid for gas in the last two months since I've had it. EVs are great cars, but they're meant to suit your lifestyle as well. If you do a lot of commuting, dropping off kids and running around the city, it's the ideal where if your salesman on long trips interstate, they're not there yet.
You need an infrastructure to support such a vehicle, you need a charging network. But to answer your question, I'm not sure instead of Washington what mandates they got on the sale of electric vehicles compared to gas vehicles, but in Australia, they're trying to put targets like 2030 that all new vehicle souls will be electric. Yes, and in Washington State also, I think it's a little after 2030, but it's not that far down the road. I know I've been surprised.
And recently, I've read a little pushback on that that buyers of automobiles are not so crazy about the idea, although probably most people understand the value of it from a lot of aspects, but you're right, the infrastructure is part of the problem. The cost also. Normally, things are consumer driven or demand driven, but when you've got a government that legislates and says, you must do that, then things like the infrastructure has to catch up. They're forced to and whether the government gives grants in Australia, there's grants being given to companies to set up the infrastructure.
That's one thing to roll it out. The other thing is to maintain it. So you're creating jobs to maintain infrastructure and it is a being maintained. I've heard of stories where people go to a charge network and they swipe their card and there's no one there.
It's not like a gas station where there's someone there controlling the pumps. You're in the middle of nowhere with a spotlight and you're swiping your card and you're hoping to get power. So you're right. I think the infrastructure may not be there, but we're talking eight, seven, eight, nine years time.
A lot can happen when people are forced to or there's opportunities for companies to see an opportunity to make money out of it as well. So in Australia, there are certain gas stations that are now introducing charges at a gas station, but with that, they're promoting a cafe-style gas station where you can spend 20 minutes having a coffee, having a quick bite, and then on your way. So when you think about it, it takes five to 10 minutes to fill up your gas car. By the time you're the guy in front of you moves on and you go inside and prepay like you do in the States and then fill it up, then maybe go back and get your change.
You'd be surprised if five to 10 minutes have gone by where with these new supercharges, you can get close to 50 to 60% charge up about 150 miles in 20 to 25 minutes as well. So and the funny thing is with my Tesla, I've got Netflix and YouTube on my screen. So if I really want to catch up on a 20-minute show while it's charging away, you can't do things. You're multitasking my friend.
So quite funny that when I first saw that feature, I thought why? And then when I was sitting there for 20 minutes, I knew why. So it's quite interesting the way cars are being designed to fit that lifestyle and that's what we're talking about. And just curious, you mentioned the cafe-style because I don't have an electric vehicle, but I have noticed the charging stations at places like casinos here and near restaurants and grocery stores like Walmart seem to have charging stations.
And I mean, I tend to, when you look up your navigation, your GPS, it does show where the nearest charge points are. And a lot of them are the slower ones are in shopping centers. And guess what? My wife and I went shopping at that particular store.
It can attract clientele. So if you are a business and you, I think Tesla gives incentives to set up their network. I'm not sure about other companies in the United States. It's Electrified, America, I believe is one of the other chains we're forward involved with.
I'm sure if you're a retailer or a store owner and you want to attract some business, by putting up a couple of charge stations and it's kind of a peer on everyone's GPS, you're going to attract new clientele and I'll visit your store because it's not that on Netflix, I guess, on the dash. But people tend to get out of their vehicles and have a quick coffee or spot a shopping. Now, in particular, APP EV's products are designed to electrify classic cars. This is the company in Bellingham.
What's the future or what's the classic car culture in Australia like? Is there interest in bringing electrification to those cars? Well, there may be force to. That's what we're saying earlier with the mandate.
I mean, I walked around CMR and I interviewed a lot of companies that would appeal to the Australian market and APP caught my eye. And that is because yes, you can buy a new electric car, we've mentioned a few of the brands before. But you're right. What caught my eye is the classic car aspect of that business.
They had a 60s, 70s, Mercedes and a lot of these cars are going up in value. A lot of them are family early. They get handed down to the next generation. It's dad's car or pops car.
And the problem is, and even when things like unleaded fuel came out in the 80s, a lot of these old older engines were leaded. And even now, today you have to adapt. If you were to run your classic car, you'd have to put some kind of lead replacement formula in the gas before you fill it up. I had a classic car and I used to put a few drops of magic liquid, whatever it does, in order to protect the engine.
If we get to a stage in the future where governments are mandating pushing electric cars, and a sure way of making that conversion is by pushing gas prices higher. So they may add taxes. They may force you to change because either limiting the supply of gas or they're taxing you out of the market. And a lot of these older cars are not fuel efficient as your normal runaround Honda Civic is today.
A lot of them drink a lot of gas, because back in the 60s and 70s, gas was cheap. So sometimes it's a financial decision. You want to keep these classic cars. They've got the same look.
So what they were selling is battery packs. APP have developed a system where you can convert your classic car with their battery pack. So that way there's no need for any engine gas or oil. You've literally electrified your classic car.
You plug it in and you drive it like any modern electric car and you'll have probably better performance. Electric cars are pretty quick. And you may lose that sound, but at the same time, you still got that look. And if you want to go down in your 60s or 70s classic Mercedes or soft top or whatever it may be.
And if that's the way you can bring these drag these cars into the 21st century and keep them mobile, why not? That's what appealed to me. And you've mentioned something that I hear from some classic car people and that is that they love the sound of them. You know, they want to be able to rev them up.
What do you say to those guys? This is the thing going back on your original question about Australia. We do have a large classic car collection in Australians. It's very similar to the States that they love their V8s.
We used to have cheap fuel. We're not like Europe. We're Europe is still double the price. I mean, people complain in the States and Australia about expensive gas prices, but you go to Europe and it's almost double.
So we're sort of lucky with what we've got. However, you're right. A lot of these older cars are big engines. They make a lot of noise.
I think they'll probably be the last to convert. There wasn't an exhibitor at Cima that had an electric vehicle with a sound of a V8. And it wasn't very convincing. But there's always a work around.
But maybe they may develop a, maybe a P P may develop a system where you've got half battery, half engine. So perhaps you can run your vehicle like a hybrid, run the vehicle on electricity when you have to and need to, and then turn the engine on when you're allowed to. Possibilities everywhere with the engineers out there. So yeah.
Yeah. Okay. Let's jump a minute to your podcast because I'm curious. What does your podcast focus on in Australia?
Well, we want it to be a little bit different. There are a lot of car podcasts out there. And this is the brand new Chevy and it costs $29,990. And it comes with power windows.
We didn't want to go down that way. We wanted to. We've got sort of two styles. We like interviewing unique people in the car game.
We had an interview with a family, it was their second generation, they had an ice cream van. They go around selling what they call it in the States. Is it an ice cream van? Food.
I'm thinking of food. No, we don't call them vans. Food truck. They played the tunes.
So we interviewed them and how they convert the van and what they do. And they had celebrities come and buy double chopped up. So we had a lady who had a company called Gal Matty, a Australian company. And she goes around to high schools, originally started teaching young female teenage females, but then it became teenage kids in high school, explaining what 95, 87, all the numbers at a pump station.
What do they mean? How did it change your tire? How do you check oil? So, we interviewed people like that, that are sort of just niche type scenarios.
So yeah, it's a good podcast. We've been doing it for four years. We've got over 150 episodes. The second part is we put the mic in a car and take particular cars, listen to cars out for a live driver call it.
And we just talk about the particular car and let the listeners have a listen as well. So yeah. Wonderful. Peter, how can people find your podcast?
Wherever you listen to podcasts, if it's iTunes or Spotify, it's all talk car podcast. Now, I don't know if it translates all talk. We tried to do a part of the word talk as in talking, but I don't know if it translates with our accent in the States, but it's all T.O.R. QUE car podcast.
And recently, I'll leave a show 30% of our listeners are in North America. So we resonate. I think you can sort of hear from our accent. It's quite easy to follow.
But yeah, no, no, it's fun. And that's why we try and come out to see more and meet people in the States because we have a bit of a following here. And it's interesting to listen to the other side of the world. What's happening in the car world generally.
Yes. Well, Peter, Ronis of all talk car podcast from Australia. Thank you so much for joining me today and giving us some little insight into the CMA show that most of us will never be allowed to attend. You're in a privileged position, my friend.
Thank you for having us. And thank you for your listeners and good luck. Go Washington State. Thank you.
Yeah, this is Anne Podel Nash for Scatchitox.