GLENN: Hello. Welcome to Friday.
I got a lot of things -- I got a lot of things that I want to talk about. You know, the Al Franken stuff. The tax cuts. But I would really like to talk about the new Elon Musk unveiling of the -- the semi-automated semi-truck yesterday and the roadster.
STU: Yeah. Let's be honest about it, it's all about the roadster. Who cares about the stupid truck?
GLENN: I actually care about the stupid truck. But --
STU: You know what, if I'm a trucker, I really do, because it could be one of those things. If you can get a long range without having to spend all the money on gas, there's --
GLENN: There's a lot to be gained there.
STU: And the good thing is, you know, the electricity that powers it actually comes from elves in the walls. And they run on little hampster wheels, and it generates the power.
GLENN: Not exactly. You know, it's so good for the environment.
STU: It is. Because this energy comes directly from these elves. And these elves are organic. They're grown in farms in -- in the Netherlands.
GLENN: Free-range elves.
STU: Free-range elves.
They're shipped over here. They go into your wall. They get in hampster wheels, and they run around. And that generates the electricity that powers these things.
GLENN: And they do not burp, they do not fart. So there's no gas coming from the elves.
STU: No. They don't need to be fed.
GLENN: Yeah. Now, a lot of people think that the electricity doesn't come from magic elves in the wall.
STU: Deniers? You're going to bring up deniers?
GLENN: I want to bring up deniers, just to show how stupid they are. They believe that the electricity that comes out of the wall, that you would plug your electric car into, you know, believes from some sort of coal-fired electricity. Or, you know, some plant that's just belching a lot of smoke in the air.
STU: A natural gas is part of the equation?
GLENN: Yeah. They think that you can dig up these little black rocks and then burn that. And it will make the elves' job nonexistent.
STU: Ridiculous. These pathetic people.
GLENN: These elf deniers.
STU: But I will say the roadsters, zero to 60 in 1.9 seconds.
GLENN: No car has ever gone 1.90 to 60. 2.0, I think is the fastest ever. And typical Elon Musk, he was just -- this is what we have in the prototype. Inferring that it's going to get better than that.
STU: Yeah. Now it doesn't come out until 2020. But you can put your 250 grand down now to get a Founders model, for when it comes out. You got to set aside the quarter mil, you know, for a few years, and that will give you not the car, but the opportunity to buy the car.
GLENN: Oh, wait. Wait. Wait.
STU: When they tell you what it costs.
GLENN: It doesn't go to the car?
STU: No. I mean, it's a down payment on the car, but you will still owe more money on the car.
GLENN: They have no idea how much it will cost yet.
STU: That's only for the Founders model. You can put $50,000 for a regular one. And I guess at that point, it's a couple hundred thousand. It's not going to be Bugatti level. Because the Bugatti Veyron -- you know, you can get into $2 million for that. That will do zero to 60 in 2.3, I think. So this is faster than that. They think the top speed will be around 250, which would be slower than the Bugatti.
GLENN: No, no, no. He said, I don't want to get into the top speed now, but it is over 250.
STU: Over 250. But you can get up to almost 300 in the Bugatti now. Electric cars are never going to be -- they're not going to compete necessarily as well at a top speed level, but they're faster, zero to 60. The things that you would actually use in a car are faster with the electric cars.
GLENN: Uh-huh.
STU: You don't use 300 miles an hour. That's not a usable --
GLENN: Yeah, I would agree with that. But I don't know if I use zero to 60 in 1.9 either.
STU: Oh, absolutely. You can do that getting on the highway. You could do that -- when they brought them in here and test drove them, and one of my favorite things to do, which is really safe, by the way --
GLENN: Sure. Sure.
STU: -- is you -- you know how you get on the on-ramp? And what you do is you slowly accelerate it in traffic. That's certainly one way to go.
GLENN: Sure. Sure.
STU: Let me give you an alternate plan here.
GLENN: Okay. All right. Sure. All right.
STU: This is how I do. What you do is you know how sometimes let's say you were to spill cup of coffee, right?
GLENN: Yes.
STU: You would probably pull over to the side and stop.
GLENN: I wouldn't.
STU: Really? You would just keep going?
GLENN: No.
STU: Just let it sink into the carpet. Okay. So, you know, you drop something. Whatever. You need to make a phone call, something like that.
GLENN: Sure.
STU: Kids are acting up in the backseat. You pull over to the side of the road. So let's just say that happened on the on-ramp, for an undisclosed reason. And you were to stop on the side of the on-ramp. And things are clear around you. And you just kind of wait. And you look kind of behind you.
And you wait until a car going at full speed passes you, going 70 miles an hour, and then you mash on the gas pedal, which is not a gas pedal in this particular case, and you pass it before the end of the ramp. That's the sort of speed I'm talking about. Is legitimately how fast these things go. And it's incredible. Because it jerks you back like you're on a ridiculous six flags rollercoaster.
GLENN: People don't understand the constant acceleration. When you first drive a Tesla, it doesn't have a gearbox. It's constant acceleration. So you're expecting the (sound effect).
STU: It doesn't do that.
GLENN: It doesn't do that.
STU: No.
GLENN: And it's just constant. And it peels your eyes back. It really does. And this, I can't even imagine.
STU: And this, we've never driven one that's near that fast. The one we drove was like around 3 seconds, 2.9.
GLENN: Yeah.
STU: But, I mean, anything under six seconds feels pretty fast. Like, if you get, I don't know, a decent Mustang, right? That you could buy from a Ford dealership is going to go somewhere under six seconds maybe. Under four seconds is like world class speed. Like, you're talking 600-horsepower. I mean, those are, you know, really, really like super cars, under four seconds.
Under two seconds is insanity.
GLENN: Yeah. Has never been done before.
STU: And Elon Musk is obsessed with Spaceballs.
GLENN: Yes.
STU: The movie Spaceballs. It's so weird.
GLENN: He said, if anybody is a fan of Spaceballs, you know that there's only one speed above ludicrous.
Now, ludicrous is the speed that you type on your screen of a Tesla. You pick the kind of -- you know, you want an economy speed or whatever.
STU: Yep.
GLENN: And you can ludicrous, which means, I don't care about how long the battery is going to last. I just want it to just go fast. So you hit ludicrous. And that's when you hit the top speeds. This one doesn't have ludicrous. This has economy, you know, highway --
STU: It still has the other ones from Spaceballs 2. And ludicrous speed was the fastest speed in Spaceballs, with one exception.
GLENN: With one exception, which is plaid. So this one has a setting of plaid.
STU: Plaid speed.
GLENN: I love his sense of humor.
STU: Yeah. I think there's a lot -- this audience when it comes to politics and talking about the environment, like, Elon Musk would be very annoying to talk to about these topics, because he wouldn't agree with us at all.
GLENN: Agree.
STU: But I like the idea that this guy is living the billionaire life the way I would live it. He's just like, you know what, I want a giant bank tube that goes from Los Angeles to San Francisco in four seconds. And then he just starts building it.
GLENN: Yeah. It's not just because he's a billionaire -- I mean, that helps. It is also because he's so super damn smart.
STU: It is that he's super smart, I will say. However --
GLENN: Come on. You listen to that guy, and he's like, no, of course, we all know that you can bore under somebody's house. And if you're 100 feet below, you can't feel anything. I mean, you know, you won't even notice that there's a whole highway underneath your -- you're like, what? No, I didn't know that.
STU: Right. You're parsing this thing in a way that's not making my point exactly. Because, yes, his ideas are better than mine. But my point is, if I had billions of dollars, I would try stupid crazy stuff.
GLENN: Yes. Okay. So he tries stupid stuff. But it wouldn't necessarily be successful.
STU: Right. They would probably fail all the time. And I think a lot of Elon Musk's ideas would fail, and that's okay. I mean, I don't know that his solar plans will be hugely successful. I know it's really important to him. He's tried a lot of crazy ideas. And not all of them have worked. Some of them may.
GLENN: You know, I'm going to build some solar panels. I'm also going to build a rocket ship and have it land again. When that one works, I kind of give you a pass on everything else. You know.
STU: What's the normal billionaire thing to do? I'm going to start a hedge fund.
GLENN: I'm going to build a wing on a hospital.
STU: Yeah. Those are all great goals. Right?
GLENN: Yeah, they're great.
STU: I'm going to find real estate to invest in.
GLENN: Yeah.
STU: Those are all fine. This guy is trying to make lasers.
GLENN: This is the first guy that has said, we're going to Mars. By Tuesday. By Tuesday, we're going to Mars.
STU: He may do it in the roadster too, which is kind of amazing.
GLENN: I know. So here's the audio. He rented a big aircraft hangar out in California, to introduce his new driverless truck. And at the end, the truck opened up. And a roadster drove out. Because he did the Steve Jobs thing. Oh, you know what, there's one more thing, I think. Open up the back of the truck.
And this roadster came out. The crowd went wild. This is him at the end of it, in full-fledged ludicrous mode for Elon Musk.
ELON: Six -- these numbers sound nutty, but they're real. 620-mile range. That's 1,000-kilometer range. This would be the first time an electric vehicle breaks 1,000-kilometer. A production electric vehicle will travel more than 1,000 kilometers in a single truck at highway speed.
But you're able to travel from LA to San Francisco and back at highway speed without recharging.
(applauding)
But the point of doing this is to just give a hard-core smackdown to gasoline parts.
GLENN: Unbelievable. Elon Musk.
We live in such an exciting time. We're just concentrating on all the wrong things. We're concentrating on all these scumbags.