Mazda Dives Into the EV Pool, GM Stores Maintaining Teslas, Mr. Beast Goes to College

The Automotive Troublemaker w/ Paul J Daly and Kyle Mountsier

It’s the Tuesday before turkey day and we’re talking about Mazda’s plans to zoom their way into the EV race. We also talk about the thousands of Tesla’s being maintained by GM dealerships, as well as the new college course by…Mr. Beast?

• Better late than never, Mazda is the latest OEM to lean all the way into an EV future as they commit over $11B through the year 2030 to a number of partnerships to develop hybrid and BEV products including potential North American manufacturing
  • CEO Akira Marumoto said the company is partnering on motors, chips, batteries and more in an effort to speed up development to stay competitive in the developing space, noting that US manufacturing may happen as soon as 2025-26 to take advantage of recent tax credits for Evs
  • Mazda expects 25-40% of sales to be comprised of EVs by 2030
  • Expect 60% of the market to still require combustion by 2030 “We are not dismissing internal combustion vehicles,” Marumoto said. “We will have to respond flexibly.”
  • Mazda currently has one hybrid and one BEV
  • A 5% profit margin is targeted throughout the transition
• GM President, Mark Reuss, surprised some investors when he announced that a small number of GM dealers have been providing maintenance to thousands of Tesla’s since 2021 at the recent GM investor day
  • Since 2021 Reuss reported that over 11k Teslas have been repaired by GM dealers citing their EV expertise from the Chevy Bolt as one of the reasons they are familiar and qualified with the tech, and chuckled as he said “It’s a new business, and it’s great.”
  • Customers seem to love it too as they have a physical location to bring their vehicle with an established system to schedule and fulfill appointments
  • According to Reuss, Tesla is investing millions to build more service facilities near GM dealerships
  • There are several example of Tesla owners being quoted exorbitant prices and waiting months for service like a $16k repair a local EV shop was able to do for $700
• The recently crowned most popular YouTuber in the world, Mr. Beast aka Jimmy Donaldson, is growing up and has teamed up with East Carolina University (ECU) to offer a YouTube creator course that teaches the fundamentals of YouTube creation
  • Course will not require full enrollment and will be the first practical vocational training to prepare a more professional level skill set for the content creation platform
  • Donaldson, who employees over 100 to operate the Mr Beast empire is looking forward to the prospect of the course preparing new hires for him as opposed to spending 6 months training new recruits
  • His primary channel currently has 113M subscribers and growing

Hosts: Paul J Daly and Kyle Mountsier
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