Episode Transcript
Don Mock 0:20
Alright episode 86. We’re back with Rachele. How’s it going Rach?
Rachele Mock 0:24
It’s going okay.
Don Mock 0:25
That’s good to hear. Can you believe we’ve done 86 of these things?
Rachele Mock 0:28
Well just wait until we do 87
Don Mock 0:31
Oh my god, it’s gonna be amazing. It’s gonna be absolutely incredible. All right, What are we talking about today? You tell me.
Rachele Mock 0:37
I think my love of automobiles.
Don Mock 0:40
Okay. You’re such a gearhead
Rachele Mock 0:43
Im such a gearhead.
Don Mock 0:44
Yeah, I mean, constantly down in the garage wrenching, till two o’clock in the morning. It’s embarrassing.
Rachele Mock 0:50
I mean, the amount of grease I get under bedsheets because I can’t see the GOJO at night on my hands.
Don Mock 0:56
I know. We’re the only people I know that has black linens. Everywhere we go. Shout out Massimo for the black linens. Alright, no, I thought we talked about electric cars and sort of advertising and marketing electric cars.
It’s all the rage, lithium, cobalt, all sorts of fun stuff, right? But then also our own personal experience with electric cars and sort of what’s going on with that, and especially with the interesting news that Toyota released about kicking ass and some new battery technology.
Rachele Mock 1:28
Now remind me, is there cobalt involved with the Toyota?
Don Mock 1:30
You’re asking the wrong person. I don’t know. I don’t know if they’ve officially announced it.
Basically, for those that don’t know, Toyota announced that they have had a revolutionary breakthrough in battery technology, someone like Jack Black saying that. Right now the high end sort of battery/ electric cars can go about 300 miles, roughly, right? And there’s different configurations and how many motors,etc ; they can go about 300 miles.
Toyota has basically announced that they have the technology that will allow charging for automobiles to go over 700 miles.
Rachele Mock 2:09
We have the tech now.
Don Mock 2:11
Yeah. And also, can fully charge in 10 minutes. So you can go 700 miles and then make a stop for 10 minutes, and then boom, you’re back to 700 miles. So that’s incredible. It’s great for the environment. We should stop burning dinosaur bones and get with the program on the electric side of life.
Rachele Mock 2:30
Right.
Don Mock 2:30
But it’s also interesting to think about, we have from a design perspective, well, I guess from an advertising perspective, first, it’s this mad dash, it’s this rush, right? It’s this Hey, Ford’s got the Mach-E, and they’ve got the Lightning. We’ve got Rivian trucks, we’ve got Chevrolet, which seems to be behind the ball on EVs? They’ve got the Silverado truck that they’ve been promoting for a couple of years now but I don’t see him anywhere and I don’t even know if they’re available; then you’ve got all of these, like poll stars and other sort of offshoot luxury $100,000, cars and whatnot and I haven’t even mentioned Tesla, which would kind of be the most synonymous with electric cars, I think.
Rachele Mock 3:13
Right. Was there a mandate that all car companies had to have some sort of a car going into 2023?
Don Mock 3:21
I don’t know. I know that California, some of the West Coast states, California and whatnot, have passed laws, but who knows if any of this is going to actually happen, they’re not going to allow selling combustion engines. I think it’s in the 2030s.
Rachele Mock 3:35
That’s right.
Don Mock 3:35
Maybe 2035. Now you’re still gonna have grandfather things.
Rachele Mock 3:35
Sure.
Don Mock 3:40
We think about cars for us driving, but really, it’s more about semis and the logistics side of life. How does a law like that affect the “Oh, I have to transport things from this state to that state” or whatever the case may be.
Rachele Mock 3:56
Right. Right.
Don Mock 3:56
I think it’s interesting the Battle of the advertising wars of electric cars, because they still are expensive.
Rachele Mock 4:08
Right, even though they try to roll them out and say you’re gonna get this for 24.
Don Mock 4:13
Yeah, 24?
Rachele Mock 4:14
Why did I think the lightning base number was like, 32?
Don Mock 4:18
Well, It was in the low 40s or like “Starting at 39.99”
But then, by the time it goes through the dealership, and all the different things, it’s like, oh, yeah, it’s like $90,000 for a truck.
Rachele Mock 4:30
Right.
Don Mock 4:31
Which, surprisingly, actually, isn’t that much different than a regular Ford truck. I mean, those things are remarkably expensive, for some reason, which is interesting.
Rachele Mock 4:39
What have you seen on the advertising side? Because I assume with you watching more sports than I do, and things like that. I’ll see like, a brief Volvo ad or something and I’d be like, well, you could do the hybrid, you could do the all electric, you could do the such and such or the more fuel efficient.
Don Mock 4:56
Yeah.
Rachele Mock 4:57
Where they kind of roll out all of their cars, but mention that they have something electric? What are you seeing when you watch football or soccer? Are you seeing others kind of stuff like that?
Don Mock 5:07
Well, it seems like there’s two sides of the coin on this one. There is the luxury electric vehicle, right? It’s the badass Audi, it’s the badass BMW, it’s the badass Mercedes.
It’s like, hey, get all the awesomeness of the luxury vehicles that you love and oh, by the way, they’re electric, and they’re badass; they go super fast charging and that kind of stuff.
I don’t see a lot of hybrid advertising at all anymore. The sort of the hybrid aspects of it’s half and half, that messaging seems to be dying.
But you also have companies like Vdub, that have decided, they’re going all in on electric and there’s a cut off point where they literally will not manufacture any more combustion engines for Volkswagens anymore. They’re just gonna go all in. As of right now, I’d say 2023, that I’ve experienced, personally, it’s really more the high-end luxury aspect. Tesla doesn’t advertise, they’ve never advertised, that’s part of their interesting strategy.
Rachele Mock 6:17
How do you test drive a Tesla if you think you want to buy it?
Don Mock 6:22
You got to do everything online, you email and do different things.
Rachele Mock 6:26
You have to find, like one of those little pop up shops or whatever they have?
Don Mock 6:30
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
But Tesla’s been around so long now, you can buy them used through Carvana; and there’s all these different methodologies of how to get Tesla’s and how to service them and things like that. I think from an advertising perspective, it’s really more of the existing brands we are familiar with, that are leaning into the luxury aspect of electric cars, because again, the price points are still so high. Ford, to me, is the only real big domestic scenario that’s leaning into, but I don’t see lightning ads.
I still see Built Ford trucks. Built Ford Tough, excuse me and things like that. There was such a delay with the chip manufacturing, with logistics, coming out of COVID and all that good stuff that it’s not necessarily as much for the masses yet.
Rachele Mock 7:13
I don’t think I’ve seen a single electric Ford ad, ever.
Don Mock 7:17
Yeah. I’m not surprised by that because they couldn’t fulfill the orders that they all had and everybody was delayed like two years.
Rachele Mock 7:24
Right, it’s kind of like the car that sells itself. If you wanted one. You were gonna sign up for one and order one.
Don Mock 7:24
Yeah.
Rachele Mock 7:25
That’s interesting.
Don Mock 7:32
Yeah.
Rachele Mock 7:32
Why spend your money on that?
Don Mock 7:33
Yeah, I think we’re at an interesting tipping point where I think in the next two to three years, it will become more affordable for the masses. I think, the low-end Tesla, the Tesla Model 3 is more affordable, but I do know, they have a lot of manufacturing errors and there’s the Elon factor and things like that. They’re not going to have exclusivity on that market anymore, which I think will be good for competition, but also interesting to see how the world of advertising and design for electric cars move forward. I think that’s a lot of advertising chitchat. The design or industrial design of electric cars, too, has gotten so much better. If you think about the original Prius, the hybrid that it was like good for the economy. But man, is that thing ugly.
Rachele Mock 8:23
You really had to buy in on the environmentalism and the fact that you might wouldn’t be getting as much.
Don Mock 8:30
Yeah, Malcolm Gladwell has a series of great books, Blink; one of the theories put forth in that book is that every single decision you make as a human is an emotional decision. Like everything in your life is an emotional decision.
Rachele Mock 8:48
Yeah.
Don Mock 8:48
And then what you do is, subconsciously, or consciously, you basically immediately justify your decision by, and again, I’m paraphrasing here.
Rachele Mock 8:57
I know.
Don Mock 8:58
Justify your position by making a quick pros and cons list. I think in that book, actually, he uses a car analogy of like “Oh, you have an immediate visceral reaction to the car” it’s a big expensive thing, but you can see yourself in it, and then you go “Oh, yes, I can justify spending all this money because it gets good gas mileage, it does this, it’s got that feature”.
Rachele Mock 9:23
When I bought my minivan, it had a third row and folders!
Don Mock 9:28
Yeah, the original design of a lot of these sort of eco friendly scenarios was lacking, I think it’s that we’re trying to look like the future but kind of flopping a little bit. Although, the Prius was an incredibly successful car, and modern day Prius. I remember going “Whoa, What car is that? Holy smokes! That’s a Prius? Okay, awesome. They’re catching up now”
Rachele Mock 9:53
I remember Larry David was driving, in the early days, he was driving one on his show.
Don Mock 9:53
Curb your Enthusiasm?
Rachele Mock 9:53
Yeah, and what Is he supposed to be like a billionaire or something for him to drive it? Also environmentalism is very important to that character.
Don Mock 10:01
Yeah, for sure.
Rachele Mock 10:04
In general, but I remember thinking that. Like if him or maybe Ashton Kutcher, people like that.
Don Mock 10:15
Yeah.
Rachele Mock 10:15
I don’t know if it’s Ashton, but somebody like that. People were making them cooler.
Don Mock 10:21
Yeah, for sure. I think the Tesla design looks cool, I’ve had multiple clients that have come in and said “We kind of want Tesla’s from a design perspective” In terms of like, if you were a car, what kind of car would you be? That type of thing; also interesting to note, and no client ever notices this until I mentioned it to them is that the Tesla type and Tesla T never lived together. It’s always like, the hood ornament is never near the actual typography. Totally different, which is interesting, I dig that.
The design, it has picked up, the lucid looks cool. Looks like a cool, I mean, it’s a sedan, let’s call it what it is, but it’s a cool looking car, the pole stars are cool, the rivian is badass, it’s a totally awesome truck. Yeah. So I think where we’re going from electric perspective, where we started as the expensive sort of high end scenario, and now I think we’re going to move past the novelty and it’s going to become more utilitarian in the next 10 years, for sure. I mean, it’ll be more sort of economical.
Rachele Mock 11:41
And if all those work men throughout Atlanta, I mean, if 50% of them were driving lightnings versus the regular F 150 or 250. That’d be pretty amazing.
Don Mock 11:51
Yeah. So I think our personal experience with electric cars, it’s the only time I’ve ever leased a car. I’ll never lease a car again. But we leased one of those fun. BMW A3.
Rachele Mock 11:52
Yeah, very early.
Don Mock 12:07
Way back in the day, it’s a little bit of a clown car. But man, that thing was a rocket. That thing would shoot out like crazy. It was awesome. Super fun. It was a fun novelty car, I drove it for a couple years.
Rachele Mock 12:20
But why did you decide to go with that? Because I feel like it had a little bit of an early adopter.
Don Mock 12:26
It had the range extender and the one gallon gas tank in it that didn’t power the drive train. It just generated more power for the batteries.
Rachele Mock 12:36
Right. So you felt like that was a way to creak.
Don Mock 12:38
It was a bridge. Yes.
The problem with that car here is that the city of Atlanta, the roads are absolutely atrocious.
What kind of wheels it had?
It had teeny little golf cart wheels. BMW did not release the specs on those tires, to any third parties so I kept popping tires left and right because of the steel plates here and then every single time it was like a five or a seven day experience because you got to get it back to BMW they gotta order the tire. It was a total pain in the ass.
Rachele Mock 13:09
Isn’t it funny how huge some things I just jettison and forget about them.
Don Mock 13:12
It’s practicality. But the couple years of like never been to a gas station. This revolutionized my life. This is absolute incredible. I’m never going back.
Rachele Mock 13:27
I want to say it was one of those stretches of oh my god, gas is $4.50. We don’t have especially expensive gas here in Atlanta. But yeah, it was one of those years.
Don Mock 13:39
Yeah, that was a good transition for us and then it was hey, I’ve always wanted to have an electric car
Rachele Mock 13:45
If you can have two cars, you should always have an electric car. It’s very luxurious.
Don Mock 13:49
Exactly. God, we sound like we’re these high falutin advertisers. No but it wasn’t expensive. I mean, it wasn’t any more expensive than any other sort of car.
Rachele Mock 14:03
Yeah, that car really depreciated quickly. Because remember, when it was time to re up or something.
Don Mock 14:10
Yeah, I was like ok take it back, please.
Rachele Mock 14:13
Yeah, take it back and if we wanted to buy one on its own used or whatever it was…
Don Mock 14:17
Yeah, it was like half the cost. It was pretty funny. I think BMW had the A3, A5 and A8 or the A8 was the weird Batmobile looking car.
Rachele Mock 14:26
Yeah, I didn’t know about an A5.
Don Mock 14:28
Okay, maybe they didn’t have a A5 maybe I’m making that up.
Rachele Mock 14:29
The A8 you’d see around town and that was pretty cool.
Don Mock 14:33
They discontinued that a few years back, they still have some around. We still have the BMW charger that I got with the car and we use that all the time.
Rachele Mock 14:33
We do. Why do we use it? So do we have another electric car now? Because we said we should always have an electric car.
Don Mock 14:49
We do have and electric car.
Rachele Mock 14:50
What’s your experience with electric cars?
Don Mock 14:53
Well, I just shared my experience. What do you mean?
Rachele Mock 14:55
No but I mean your second, what’s your second experience? What was your big COVID project?
Don Mock 15:00
Yes, so hey, we’re all hanging out in our underwears in our houses
Rachele Mock 15:06
There’s no sports on
Don Mock 15:09
Exactly. So I have always had an affinity for 60s design. I love the space race. I love the Atomic Age of design. I love old 60s, late 50s, early 60s design so I ended up buying an old 67 Ford Econoline pickup truck during that time, beautiful color like a mint green. Super awesome.
Rachele Mock 15:30
We call her mentee.
Don Mock 15:31
Yeah, yeah, three on the tree actually it was four on the tree when we got it. My buddy Kevin, shout out to Kevin, had to teach me how to drive it because I haven’t driven that thing in forever, so during COVID we would go drive the truck around the church parking lot and all that good stuff.
Rachele Mock 15:48
Do you remember when you first got it? Kevin, I think gave you the first lesson, but you and I would get up at like 5:30 in the morning to drive around our neighborhood before anyone could see us.
Don Mock 16:02
Yeah, the joke in Atlanta is all roads lead to Peachtree, right? Peachtree is like a main artery through the city
Rachele Mock 16:09
We were telling our kid the other day that it is, in fact a highway.
Don Mock 16:12
Yeah, exactly. So I was like, oh my god, I do not want to stall out on Peachtree, I’m gonna be a sweaty, nervous mess. So during the summer, I would get up early, and then drive around, I go on my Sunday morning drive at six o’clock in the morning, in case like I crapped out, and I wasn’t blocking traffic with everybody honkin.
Rachele Mock 16:36
But one of the first things I noticed when we were going on those early morning drives was black smoke coming out of it. You’d be in the cab and you’d be choking and then I think about what what’s happening to the people behind us. How are we ever gonna get this through emission?
Don Mock 16:51
Yes, it’s a 60s in line six original Ford Motor so it definitely had some belching. I don’t know that it was like a cartoon of blackness to me.
The truck too is a cab over engine so the armrest between both passenger seats actually is where the motor and engine is. There were definitely times were smoke will come into the cab because the engine is in the cab and our son’s like, Dad, what’s going on?. I would say the car is not catching on fire, don’t worry. Somebody made the suggestion, you made a suggestion of what if we convert it to electric? So I was like Oh my God, this is amazing. So, yeah, I started the research, did a whole bunch of internet deep diving into stuff.
A lot of phone calls that we we didn’t know where they’re gonna go.
Yes, it’s a crazy long story and maybe that’s a topic for another podcast, but basically ended up finding this magical company, Green Shed Conversions, down in Crystal River, Florida, Steve and Audrey Clunn who helped with the conversion. We sent it down to Florida for a couple months and they basically ripped everything out, kept it as a manual transmission, but converted the entire thing to electrics and now I have this bitchin’ 60s truck that is totally electric, which is super awesome. I drive it to work fairly often, probably not as often as I should, because it’s 10,000 degrees outside now.
Rachele Mock 18:27
I would say it’s a little bit easier to drive because you can sort of stay in second. You don’t necessarily have to do downshifting.
Don Mock 18:34
Well, again, it’s a maybe a topic for another pod to go through the whole thing.
Rachele Mock 18:38
Yes, why don’t we do a pod of just that whole conversion. I mean, that’d be really fun.
Don Mock 18:41
Green Shed? Yeah. It’s got a WarP 9 motor in there. It’s got a Zilla controller, and then we went with Nissan LEAF batteries, actually, because they were a little bit cheaper, they’ve got a little bit more runway versus Tesla in terms of data, longevity of the batteries, etc; you can go about 70 miles or so, but it’s a big old heavy American 60s truck, right. So it’s not a light nimble little thing, no one’s winning any drag competitions when the light turns green.
Rachele Mock 19:11
You are winning the competition when I want you to take me to Lowe’s and fill up the back with Mulch.
Don Mock 19:17
Yes, it’s a super fun project. Super fun truck. I absolutely love it. And it’s a fun little novelty. It is a little Frankenstein, in terms of how you drive it and shift, you mentioned downshift, there’s no gear ratio in an electric motor, right? It’s not an engine, it’s a motor. In the city of Atlanta you got a lot of stopping and starting, you got more hills than you think so it’s actually remarkably easy to kind of just put it in a second and drive it like an automatic, you can shift first, second, third and if I take it on the freeway I do; but you kind of can’t downshift while you’re coming in for a stop, you might as well just leave it in gear come to a complete stop and then shift back to first. Because you don’t want that like clunk of the transmission. It’s been 2-3 years now.
Rachele Mock 20:09
Yeah, I think we got it back in early or maybe end of 2020.
Don Mock 20:15
It’s been a ton of fun working on it for a while.
Rachele Mock 20:18
Yeah, you’ve done some really cool projects to it. You’ve made it look really pretty.
Don Mock 20:21
Yeah, put in the wood bed, drive it now on the Georgia Tech wreck parade.
Rachele Mock 20:26
Yeah and you won an award. Let’s do another pod just on the whole conversion, but moving forward we ended up buying I guess third now.
Don Mock 20:38
Well, hold on, let me just drop this little nugget in there, since this is an advertising and design podcast, our friends at BASF actually did an entire campaign about “We don’t make the water.. we make it bluer” the giant chemical company, but trying to spin it as a magical place; they did an entire campaign with Steve and Audrey and minty, the truck, is actually in the commercial. It’s super cool, right? So they shot me the YouTube link and I was like, oh my god, this is amazing, it’s only in there for like a couple seconds but it’s super cool. So, making the world a better place, making the world a greener place, saving the environment, all that good stuff. That’s how we tie minty into advertising and design.
Rachele Mock 21:24
Right and just so y’all know, Don’s the guy who has everything so it’s hard to buy the guy a gift, if I can find anything 1967 Econoline like an old dad or this or that, I try to scoop those kinds of things for him as a gif for another collection
Don Mock 21:40
Yeah, I can’t stop. It’s a disease. Too many hobbies, that’s why I don’t play golf. I don’t have enough time to do all the things I want to do.
Rachele Mock 21:49
Yeah, somehow I knew I was gonna hear that today.
Don Mock 21:53
Well, so you had teased? We do have one more electric car.
Rachele Mock 21:58
We do, it’s really funny. I got rid of my minivan in the summer of 2021. We literally used it to drop kiddo off at college and then Carvana came that afternoon and gave me way too much money for it, so that was wonderful. I sort of started going car shopping, we thought we were going to get the lightning but the lightning kept getting delayed and delayed. We were on one of those lists for that, and that might be my car so we were going to figure that out so I went to the Ford dealership to drive just an F 150, that car was so huge but they happen to have 2 of the Ford Mach-E on the lot, I went for a drive on it and I was like, this is effing amazing, this is so great. I can’t believe it.
Don Mock 22:47
Yeah, super great car.
Rachele Mock 22:46
I think we ordered it almost immediately, we thought on it and I joined all these groups on Facebook of people who love the car, to know what does it do and nobody had anything bad to say about it, it’s amazing. A few weeks later, we went and picked it up and you had not even driven it, you hadn’t been in it and I remember you just being at it and sitting in the back while we were getting the little lesson from, shout out Sean at Ford, you were like “This is so fucking awesome. Oh my god, this is awesome.”
Don Mock 23:24
That’s all I was saying. It was awesome
Rachele Mock 23:24
Yeah, you were like look at the screen and look at this.
Don Mock 23:24
Yeah, it was cool. It’s a fun new toy. It’s like driving a computer.
Rachele Mock 23:30
Well, what’s wild about it now is you see them way more often. I mean, they were not rolling out quickly at all and I don’t know how I ended up scooping this one up, I think somebody backed out on their order. I got it and just like minty for you, it is a car that you cannot be an introvert when you are driving around and going to the grocery store.
What kind of car is that? Why does it have a Mustang on it? That’s isn’t a Mustang, etc.
Don Mock 23:59
It is weird that they branded as Mustang. I don’t know how I feel about that.
Rachele Mock 24:03
Yeah, I remember the guys at Home Depot when they were like they should have called it an Appaloosa
Don Mock 24:07
Appaloosa? It was like Coulter’s. I don’t know we’ve got Broncos, Mustangs
Rachele Mock 24:12
Or just call it the Mach-E. So again, I’m a carpool driver, I love not having to buy gas ever, but I love being able to just sit in the Atlanta heat and carpool line and staying in my 70 degree conditioned car while everybody else is turning the cars off and rolling their windows down, that’s pretty luxurious. But I didn’t realize sort of the whole marketing and the brand around Mustang really ever if that makes sense.
You weren’t a Mustang consumer, right?
No.
The Mustang car, the Steve McQueen, bitchin badass
To me i’ts a pretty crossover SUV. That’s what I would say.
Don Mock 24:54
That’s why I don’t understand why it’s a Mustang. It’s pretty bizarre.
Rachele Mock 24:57
Some people will tell me Oh, you got that Mustang truck, but I will go places like maybe to get it washed or stopped somewhere and the younger guys who are into cars will be like, Oh, does this baby go fast?
Don Mock 25:11
Yeah, yes, it’s an electric car, it goes super fast.
Rachele Mock 25:14
Yeah, but I always say grandma here doesn’t know. That’s one of the weird things about it, I don’t think I’m the demographic but man, I love that car. And I mean, we’ve gotten it to 340 miles on one charge. It just depends again, on how you drive it, if you’re driving it like a grandma, so that’s our latest experience. I’ve had it over two years, I want to say I have like 15,000 miles, I’ve had a remarkable amount of miles on it. The only thing we’ve ever had to pay for was when I accidentally hit, I think a curb, and blew out the tire.
Don Mock 25:53
It’s been great, I think electric cars it’s cool topic. I think we could do a whole nother podcast about minty, we could do a whole podcast about design, holistically it’s a really interesting place to plan. It’s only going to get more interesting as we move forward. So that’s a quick little sort of snapshot on our bizarre experiences with electric cars.
Rachele Mock 26:22
Let us know what do you think about it or what are you driving that you love.
Don Mock 26:28
Yeah, for sure.
Rachele Mock 26:29
I’d love to hear that
Don Mock 26:30
For sure. All right. I think that’ll wrap it up. Where can everybody find us Rach?
Rachele Mock 26:33
I’ve heard of these interwebs. And I think it’s mocktheagency.com.
Don Mock 26:39
Is there a .com on there?
Rachele Mock 26:40
mocktheagency.com is our website and @mocktheagency on all the interweb.
Don Mock 26:47
All right. Thanks, everybody. We’ll talk to you next time.
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