EV Data Made Fun with Allison Sheridan

[00:00:21] Hello everyone and welcome to Kilowatt, a podcast about electric vehicles, renewable energy, autonomous driving, and much, much more.

[00:00:27] My name is Bodhi and I am your host. And on this episode we sat down, or I sat down, with Allison Sheridan of the NoSilicast podcast, EverythingGoodStartsWithPodfeed.com if you want to check out what she is doing.

[00:00:41] Allison sent me a message sometime in October and said, Hey, have you ever seen the U.S. Department of Energy's website for alternative fuels?

[00:00:52] And I said, I have not. So she sent me the link to the U.S. Department of Energy Alternative Fuels Data Center.

[00:01:01] And this, we're going to talk about it in the interview, but this site has a lot of very useful information in terms of electric vehicles, the laws and incentives around electric vehicles.

[00:01:15] And there's also alternative fuel vehicles, which includes more than just pure electric vehicles, but gives information on light duty vehicles, heavy duty vehicles, so, and everything in between.

[00:01:27] It is a very useful website, and it gives you the data. You don't have to go shopping for the data. It gives you all the data in one easy-to-find place, which I think is really cool.

[00:01:41] So having said all that, let's welcome Allison to the show.

[00:01:45] Well, howdy there, Bodhi. How are you today?

[00:01:47] I'm good. I'm good. And you know why I'm good? It's because I'm talking to you.

[00:01:51] We haven't gotten together to chat in what seems like a month of Sundays, so I am super stoked about this.

[00:01:56] How long is a month of Sundays?

[00:02:00] I don't know.

[00:02:01] Is that four weeks? Is it just like a month?

[00:02:05] 30 months, maybe? I genuinely don't know.

[00:02:09] 28 months in February and 31 in July? I don't know.

[00:02:15] Well, we chat all the time, so I feel like I talk to you in our snarky little chats, but other than that, too long.

[00:02:21] Yeah. It's not enough. It's not enough.

[00:02:24] So, Allison, while you were gallivanting across the internet, you came across a really cool government website that showed some stuff.

[00:02:33] And this is, I mean, we should probably warn people, more specific to North America, or not even North America, the United States than anywhere else.

[00:02:41] But there's some really good information on here, and why don't you tell us about it?

[00:02:46] I have no idea how I found this, but it's the Alternative Fuels Data Center put out by the United States Department of Energy.

[00:02:54] And so this section is on energy efficiency and renewable energy.

[00:02:59] And it's a fantastic source because you can download data sets, and if you're nerdy like us – oh, Bruce used the data, man.

[00:03:07] He's going to love this, right, Bruce Wilson?

[00:03:09] So you can download these data sets.

[00:03:11] You can filter it by the kinds of things you want to see, but it's all about alternative fuels.

[00:03:16] And I had a bunch of fun making some tables and doing pivot tables and then realizing I'd pulled the completely wrong set of information and having to go back and fix it.

[00:03:26] But, you know, anytime I could be making a pivot table about something, I'm pretty happy.

[00:03:31] Yes.

[00:03:32] As somebody who's been a firefighter his entire career, I don't know what a pivot table is.

[00:03:37] Well, okay.

[00:03:37] That's probably good to tell people.

[00:03:39] So I think of a pivot table as a way of taking data and turning it into information.

[00:03:44] So let's say, for example, one of the things I downloaded was all of the electric vehicle stations that are level three chargers.

[00:03:53] And that's just, you know, a gazillion lines of data.

[00:03:58] It's tens of thousands of lines.

[00:04:01] But with a pivot table, it's a sort of cool drag and drop thing where you just drag in the titles of the columns into rows and columns, and it summarizes the data for you.

[00:04:11] So I was able to say, okay, I want to see in the rows, I want to just see who did that one.

[00:04:18] You know, was it Tesla?

[00:04:19] Was it Electrify America?

[00:04:20] And then it just gives me the sum for each one of those.

[00:04:23] And it's a funky kind of an interface.

[00:04:26] But if you learn to just play with it, you just move things around and go, whoa, that's not what I wanted.

[00:04:30] That's the exact opposite of what I wanted.

[00:04:31] Let me fix that.

[00:04:32] You can get the data to look like something that gives you information.

[00:04:36] You know, it tells you what are the top five companies that have level three charging stations.

[00:04:42] You could do that by doing like a count A at the bottom of a column, you know, count A if equals Tesla, then blah.

[00:04:50] You know, it's really tedious.

[00:04:52] But a pivot table will do it for you instantly.

[00:04:54] So they're super fun.

[00:04:55] I think I have a beginner's tutorial on pivot tables.

[00:04:59] Maybe I could give that to you.

[00:05:00] Yeah, absolutely.

[00:05:01] We'll put it in the show notes.

[00:05:03] If you're expecting me to use it.

[00:05:05] I use Excel never or any sort of Excel spreadsheet type product.

[00:05:11] Okay, but I like pivot tables so much.

[00:05:13] If you have a pile of data and you want to know something from it, send me the data if you're allowed to.

[00:05:18] And then I'll do the pivot tables and everybody wins.

[00:05:20] Okay.

[00:05:21] I mean, that's fine.

[00:05:22] I've been running it through ChatGPT.

[00:05:24] So I'll run it through ChatAllison.

[00:05:26] Yes.

[00:05:28] Don't take the fun from me.

[00:05:29] Don't take my job, AI.

[00:05:32] Just another reason why we're all against AI over here.

[00:05:36] I'm just kidding.

[00:05:37] Love AI.

[00:05:38] Okay.

[00:05:38] So what you found was, well, to be more specific, there's level two chargers in this, but you weren't really interested in that.

[00:05:48] You're really specifically focused on the level three chargers, the CFast chargers.

[00:05:52] Yeah, that was just kind of something interesting to me was to see how many of them are out there and how prevalent are they by company.

[00:06:03] And then as I did more and more pivot tables on this and downloaded different data, I realized you could look at it by date.

[00:06:11] So, you know, in the United States, we had the Infrastructure Act where companies were given money to build out electric vehicle stations.

[00:06:20] And I don't know how much of the money has actually been put out.

[00:06:24] I don't have any idea what would have happened if that money hadn't been given to companies, the big incentives to do that.

[00:06:29] But I thought maybe what if we looked at from middle of October of last year to middle of October this year to see what has been the increase and how have the different companies compared to each other in what the percentage increase.

[00:06:43] So in 2023, there were around 35,000 level three chargers.

[00:06:49] There's now 47,000.

[00:06:51] And that's an increase of 35%.

[00:06:54] So 12,254 stations were added.

[00:06:58] Tesla was the number one in every one of the last year to this year.

[00:07:05] But it's like Tesla, Electrify America, EVgo, Chargepoint.

[00:07:09] That's kind of your top four big ones.

[00:07:11] And while the industry did 35% more, Tesla only went up 28%.

[00:07:17] Electrify America was 17%, EVgo 29%.

[00:07:20] Some of the littler ones, like have you ever heard of FCN?

[00:07:24] No.

[00:07:25] No, me neither.

[00:07:26] Well, they went up by 111%, but that's because they only went from 423 to 892.

[00:07:31] So it's one of the smaller ones.

[00:07:33] Chargepoint, though, was a big gain.

[00:07:35] They went up by 45%.

[00:07:37] Now, they only have about 10% the number of chargers that Tesla has in the level three charging space.

[00:07:46] So they've got like 2300.

[00:07:48] They went up to 3310.

[00:07:49] But still, they had a 45% increase.

[00:07:53] So it's getting bigger.

[00:07:56] Excellent.

[00:07:56] I see Rivian had a 65% increase from 323 to 532.

[00:08:03] Yeah, they're coming along.

[00:08:05] They're still a tiny player.

[00:08:06] But yeah, every one of those is better, right?

[00:08:09] That's always, it's all good news.

[00:08:12] Yeah.

[00:08:12] Yeah.

[00:08:12] And, you know, as far as the infrastructure money goes, I think I've talked about this on the show before.

[00:08:19] I work in government and trying to get the smallest thing done in the government that I work in is there's a lot of layers of bureaucracy you have to go through and a lot of parties that you have to please.

[00:08:33] What?

[00:08:34] Bureaucracy and government jobs?

[00:08:36] I'm shocked.

[00:08:37] I know.

[00:08:37] Almost as much as democracy and government contract jobs.

[00:08:40] But the thing is, with this, is when you're bringing that much power anywhere, you know, you have to satisfy a lot of regulators and utilities and property owners.

[00:08:56] And it's not an easy process.

[00:08:59] And I did not expect that we would have very many chargers that came out of that money even now.

[00:09:07] You know, I would imagine by 2030, we'll see the fruits of it.

[00:09:12] Or maybe we won't.

[00:09:13] Maybe we'll see that it failed.

[00:09:14] But one year in, I don't think that's a fair assessment of how that program did.

[00:09:19] So that might not even be any infrastructure money for all we know.

[00:09:25] From what I understand, there's a handful of chargers that have been brought in through the infrastructure money.

[00:09:31] Now, there is individual states like Tesla got a bunch of money from Texas.

[00:09:37] I think Electrify America got some money from Texas as well.

[00:09:40] Texas actually had a pretty good – now, I don't know if they still do.

[00:09:44] But a couple of years ago, they had a pretty good incentive program for electric vehicle charging companies to come in and set up networks.

[00:09:55] I don't think that came from the federal government.

[00:09:57] I think that came specifically from the state government.

[00:10:02] Okay. To give people an idea of how big this money is, of the infrastructure bill that was bipartisan, by the way, shockingly, they're going to invest $7.5 billion in EV charging.

[00:10:16] So that's pretty good.

[00:10:18] Yeah, no, it's really good.

[00:10:19] Maybe $100 has been deployed towards it so far. I don't know.

[00:10:22] Yeah, no, very small percentage for sure.

[00:10:25] And it's worth also noting that each state gets to bring up their own – make their own plan for how they're going to deploy these chargers.

[00:10:32] But there are rules. They have to be so many miles apart.

[00:10:35] They have to be along major thoroughfares.

[00:10:38] They can't be in the middle of the mountains in North Carolina, for instance, because while there might be a need up in that area, this is specifically to get you from one part of the country to the other if you wanted to do such a thing.

[00:10:55] Well, what about those people up in the mountains?

[00:10:58] Well, and there's probably money that you can get. There's a fine line between jumpstarting an industry and then also maybe tilting the scales one way or another.

[00:11:13] There's not a lot of companies that can afford – there's not a lot of companies that can afford to do this kind of thing.

[00:11:20] So, you know, do you favor Tesla because you know they're going to put the chargers in or do you favor, you know, FCN because they're the little guy?

[00:11:29] We don't – I mean, that's a much, much harder conversation to have in the time that we do and also the limited knowledge that I have.

[00:11:39] But, yeah, I mean, I think the goal of this program was to put them along major thoroughfares.

[00:11:46] So, if you wanted to drive from Tennessee to North Carolina, which is admittedly not that far, you should be able to.

[00:11:53] And I just picked those two states because I know that that could sometimes be a problem trying to find a charging network in between those two states.

[00:12:00] Okay. Okay.

[00:12:02] I want there to be more stations between Austin and Houston because that's where my friend David Roth keeps trying to drive.

[00:12:11] And he actually had to sell his first EV because it didn't have the range to get him there reliably because there's one station and it's got like four – it's an Electrify America with four chargers and usually two of them are dead.

[00:12:23] He's been there when like an electric bus was being charged.

[00:12:27] Oh, no.

[00:12:27] Okay, come back tomorrow.

[00:12:30] Yeah.

[00:12:30] And he had an Audi if I remember right, right?

[00:12:33] Yeah, an Audi e-tron.

[00:12:34] He just bought a Cadillac Lyric.

[00:12:37] Oh, good.

[00:12:38] At least he went from one EV to another.

[00:12:42] Didn't give up on it entirely.

[00:12:44] Oh, not at all.

[00:12:45] He's a believer.

[00:12:47] But he just – the car he bought only had like a 200-mile range when he bought it and that was just a big mistake.

[00:12:53] Yeah.

[00:12:54] Yeah.

[00:12:54] Those Audis, a friend of mine, his mom has one and it is a really nice car.

[00:13:00] Yeah, it was beautiful.

[00:13:01] The range is great.

[00:13:02] They might have had a better range version later, but not the one he had.

[00:13:08] So, that was kind of sad.

[00:13:09] Yeah.

[00:13:10] I mean, it happens.

[00:13:12] So, what's your biggest takeaway from this site and what you kind of looked up here?

[00:13:18] This is – you know, there is so much data I should let everybody know.

[00:13:20] There is so much information you can pull from here.

[00:13:23] It goes years and years and years back.

[00:13:25] This is just a small example of what could be done on that site.

[00:13:30] Yeah.

[00:13:30] I think I already talked about what my big thing was, that it was a 35% increase in the number of stations in a year, which I thought was – that was pretty big.

[00:13:38] Especially if it's – like you say, it's not from the infrastructure money.

[00:13:41] But you pulled some completely different statistics I didn't even think to look for.

[00:13:45] You sent me a couple of charts.

[00:13:47] What were you looking at?

[00:13:48] Yeah.

[00:13:48] So, if everybody goes to the website that's linked in the show notes – it's pretty long, so I'm not going to spell it out for you right here.

[00:13:57] But if you go to the link in the show notes – and Allison, I sent you the file.

[00:14:01] So, if you go to the laws and incentives –

[00:14:04] Uh-huh.

[00:14:05] This is specifically, again, for the United States.

[00:14:07] But you can put in and you can say, I want all of the laws – EV laws and incentives for Arizona.

[00:14:15] I want them to be – I should pull up the actual website.

[00:14:20] So, I can – there's just a bunch of dropdowns that you can customize.

[00:14:23] And then you get this big, huge spreadsheet that goes all the way across to V.

[00:14:31] What is that, 24 numbers?

[00:14:33] Something like that?

[00:14:33] 22 numbers?

[00:14:34] But it's only 28 lines long.

[00:14:36] Yeah, yeah.

[00:14:37] It's pretty short.

[00:14:38] But it will tell you, like, there's a zero emissions test exemption in Arizona.

[00:14:45] And then it will describe what that is.

[00:14:48] You'll get a reduced alternative fuel license tax.

[00:14:52] So, you can get $100 off your assessed value of your vehicle when you go to license it.

[00:14:57] Like, there's all of the stuff in here that shows you what –

[00:15:02] That's fun.

[00:15:03] Yeah, it's just like if you want to use a time of use rate plan for SRP, which I'm an SRP customer.

[00:15:11] I do use a time of use plan.

[00:15:12] It tells you kind of where to go to find that information out for what works best for you.

[00:15:20] There's some stuff on here for fleets.

[00:15:22] It just goes on and on and on.

[00:15:23] It's really valuable information.

[00:15:25] And it's one place to look it up because when I got my EV, I looked up what kind of incentives were available for, you know, helping me install the wall charger, for instance, and the $7,500 federal tax credit and on and on and on.

[00:15:42] And I got just a very small amount of information.

[00:15:47] But with this, you know, we're looking at some pretty detailed information.

[00:15:54] And then there's links to go to get more information, like electric school buses.

[00:15:59] If you are in that world where you would purchase an electric school bus, you can go and look and see what the statutes are.

[00:16:07] And it gives you a link right to the law.

[00:16:10] Okay, I'm not going to pay any more attention to you because I'm looking at all these different.

[00:16:14] I'm going to pull the laws for California.

[00:16:16] Yeah, jurisdiction, you get to choose the state or you can do all what kind of technologies.

[00:16:20] I'm just going to choose electric vehicles, incentive types.

[00:16:23] I only want to see the tax ones and what kind of regulations.

[00:16:26] And is it for a personal vehicle owner or anybody else?

[00:16:29] You can choose whether or not to have expired ones in your database, the file format.

[00:16:33] And then you have to tell it a little bit of why you want it, why you want it.

[00:16:38] Use description and you give it your name, email and that's it.

[00:16:43] Yeah.

[00:16:44] And the nice thing about this is if you download, like I downloaded the laws and incentives first.

[00:16:49] If you go and you want to now download a list of like light duty vehicles that are EVs or whatever, alternative fuel vehicles, you don't have to re-put your information back in.

[00:17:01] Which is great because so many of these, you download one thing and then you have to go back and re-enter your name and your email address and the whole thing.

[00:17:08] You don't have to do that.

[00:17:09] It just stays in there and you download the next thing that you're interested in.

[00:17:15] Oh, you muted.

[00:17:18] Sorry, I have a cough and I'm being nice to the audience by muting when I cough, but I got to unmute.

[00:17:23] I didn't know that you could get these laws by state.

[00:17:27] That's really cool.

[00:17:29] You downloaded light duty vehicles, you were saying.

[00:17:31] So when you look at this, so this is a case of some, this one's hundreds of lines long.

[00:17:36] What would you like to know from this?

[00:17:39] Okay.

[00:17:39] So the nice thing about this, okay, the one that I downloaded, I just let it just vomit everything out at us.

[00:17:49] So this would not necessarily be the best methodology for trying to find a car, but we have friends who build these elaborate spreadsheets of the battery range.

[00:18:01] You know, the model of the vehicle who makes it on and on and on.

[00:18:04] Right.

[00:18:07] In, in this light duty vehicle, we have, I think I did.

[00:18:11] This one was for all alternative fuel vehicles, but which, you know, admittedly was probably a mistake.

[00:18:18] But, um, when you go through this, you can see like a 2024 Audi e-tron, uh, Q4.

[00:18:26] It'll, it'll give you some basic information.

[00:18:29] It's got electric motor, 210 kilowatt, um, electric motor.

[00:18:33] It'll give you links to the manufacturer so that you can go and look at the vehicle.

[00:18:38] It gives you a range of 288 miles.

[00:18:41] It's a rear world drive in this case.

[00:18:43] And it just goes on and on and on.

[00:18:44] It gives you the, the charging, uh, DC fast charging speed, which is 150 kilowatts.

[00:18:50] And, you know, it's just, if you're somebody who's looking to buy a vehicle and you want to compare a lot of this stuff, you can delete columns to make this a little bit more, um, easier to read.

[00:19:04] But it gives you like the battery capacity of 81.6 kilowatt hours and a seating capacity of, uh, five people.

[00:19:11] If you wanted to build yourself a spreadsheet of the vehicles that you liked.

[00:19:16] And again, you don't have to do the thing that I did, which was, you know, all manufacturers basically, and all, um, alternative fuel types.

[00:19:24] You can actually find yourself a vehicle that fits your price range, but also you don't have to build your own spreadsheet.

[00:19:32] You can add to it if you want to, but you don't have to build your own spreadsheet.

[00:19:35] You could just use theirs.

[00:19:38] Yeah.

[00:19:40] You know, what we need to do is, uh, we need to have me with you telling me what you want to know and I'll build you the, uh, pivot table.

[00:19:49] So you don't have to build the whole thing yourself.

[00:19:52] Okay.

[00:19:53] Okay.

[00:19:54] So, um, do you want to do that right now?

[00:19:57] That would be fascinating for the people I think.

[00:20:01] Okay.

[00:20:01] I'm in.

[00:20:02] Let's try it.

[00:20:07] Um, okay.

[00:20:08] I do think this, and another thing on this is I, I've started this off with saying that folks who live in different countries may not find these useful.

[00:20:15] This light dude or this, um, uh, I don't know what it's called because light duty vehicles is what I printed out, but that's not actually what it's called in the thing.

[00:20:25] But, uh, this use is actually, uh, beneficial to anybody who lives anywhere.

[00:20:32] You would have to convert miles to, um, kilometers obviously, but this would be beneficial to anybody who would like it.

[00:20:42] Yeah.

[00:20:42] It's just called light duty vehicles and the thing.

[00:20:44] And then you got heavy medium to heavy duty vehicles.

[00:20:46] If you're looking for that kind of a vehicle as well.

[00:20:48] Oh, I like this.

[00:20:49] Yeah.

[00:20:49] So we can do, I'm looking at, uh, that should not be.

[00:20:55] I'd have to think about how this would work, but yeah, you could get all of these vehicles and sort them by EV range, for example.

[00:21:02] And have separate columns by pickup trucks, uh, sedans, wagons, or SUVs or vans.

[00:21:09] Yeah.

[00:21:10] It's really cool.

[00:21:12] And it's, it's, it's, it's probably for our more nerdy friends like Bart and Bruce, uh, this is probably not going to be nearly enough, but it's a good place to start so that you can get, um, you know, if you, if you're looking for a five seater crossover vehicle, but you don't want anything under 300 mile range.

[00:21:31] You know, the first thing that comes up is the BMW, they got to scroll across cause there's so many columns, uh, X drive 40.

[00:21:43] That would, that would be the first vehicle in this list of there's probably 15, 20 vehicles there.

[00:21:48] So you can, you can go that way.

[00:21:51] You know, it's just, it's just full of information.

[00:21:54] Yeah.

[00:21:55] Yeah.

[00:21:55] I love data like this.

[00:21:56] Anybody who wants to try to do a pivot table with it, if they want to write to me at Alison at pod fee.com, I'd love to show you, you know, help you do it.

[00:22:05] It's, it's just candy to me to get to do this.

[00:22:09] Yeah.

[00:22:09] Yeah.

[00:22:10] I think, I think this is, this is a really useful tool that I didn't know existed.

[00:22:18] Now I will say, cause when you sent this to me, I was like, oh, I've seen other websites pull this information, but I didn't know where they got it.

[00:22:26] And it's actually, it's actually quite a, um, and then, you know, who knows if I'm getting in the most updated information when I do it, when I read that those articles.

[00:22:35] But it is nice that they have, um, something that you can go through, even though if it is a data dump, sometimes you can go through and kind of pull something that makes sense for you.

[00:22:46] Like, obviously if you're not in the market for $160,000 car or an $80,000 car, you don't put the Lucid and the Rivian in there and most of the BMWs.

[00:22:55] So that will significantly, uh, you know, shrink down the, the amount of cars you have to go through.

[00:23:02] Yeah.

[00:23:03] Can you eliminate and do specific vehicles when you, when you do this data dump?

[00:23:07] Cause I didn't go through the light vehicle one.

[00:23:09] Yeah.

[00:23:10] So you can, you can search by model year and you can say, I wanted a sedan pickup SUV or van.

[00:23:16] And then electric vehicles.

[00:23:18] Now you can't go through models, but you can say, I want everything from Audi, uh, Chevrolet, Kia, and Lamborghini.

[00:23:28] So you get a nice range and then you just download the, the spreadsheet.

[00:23:33] Okay.

[00:23:34] Or maybe you don't specify it and that lets you start knowing about, Hey, wait a minute.

[00:23:39] I didn't consider this kind of car.

[00:23:41] Yeah.

[00:23:42] Yeah.

[00:23:42] I mean, Lucid, Lucid's really winning the range battle though.

[00:23:46] Oh, they are.

[00:23:47] Lucid does so good on their efficiencies.

[00:23:50] One, two, three.

[00:23:51] Yeah.

[00:23:51] It'd be nice.

[00:23:52] They, they were able to do a little bit better on their, their marketing and making it a little bit more approachable for regular folks.

[00:24:00] But yeah.

[00:24:01] Yeah.

[00:24:02] But dentist's wife has one.

[00:24:03] So, you know, what do you think?

[00:24:06] It tells you how lucrative dentistry is.

[00:24:08] Yes.

[00:24:09] Yes.

[00:24:09] If anybody is curious, I got a FaceTime analysis sitting inside this Lucid.

[00:24:15] She goes, look where I'm at.

[00:24:16] Oh, I got to go.

[00:24:17] She, she's getting caught.

[00:24:22] So yeah.

[00:24:22] Actually, my dentist's wife was really nice.

[00:24:24] I asked her, I saw this car sitting outside the dentist's office and I said, there's a Lucid Air out there.

[00:24:31] Do you know who owns that?

[00:24:32] And she goes, I do.

[00:24:33] Do you want to sit in it?

[00:24:34] I said, yes, I do.

[00:24:36] So I sat in it and we played around for a while.

[00:24:38] And she goes, do you want to drive me to the bank?

[00:24:40] Why?

[00:24:41] Yes.

[00:24:41] I would like to drive your $120,000 car to the bank.

[00:24:44] It was so fun.

[00:24:45] How did you find it?

[00:24:47] Let's, let's get our first Lucid Air review.

[00:24:49] Oh, it was fabulous.

[00:24:51] I mean, it is a big, you know, your, your dad's Buick kind of a size vehicle, which I'm not used to driving.

[00:24:57] But the, she said the acceleration was around three seconds for zero to 60.

[00:25:04] And I was like, she doesn't know what she's talking about.

[00:25:06] And I looked it up and it is, it is as fast as my model three.

[00:25:10] It was luxurious.

[00:25:11] It was beautiful.

[00:25:12] I mean, it was just a gorgeous car.

[00:25:14] It's fabulous inside.

[00:25:15] I really liked it.

[00:25:16] It was fun to drive.

[00:25:17] Yeah.

[00:25:18] Yeah, for sure.

[00:25:19] It is.

[00:25:20] I'm like a much smaller car myself, but.

[00:25:23] Yeah.

[00:25:23] But the interior, and I know this sounds weird and creepy, but it's very lickable.

[00:25:29] Like you just want to lick everything in that car.

[00:25:30] It's so smooth and so shiny.

[00:25:32] It's like candy.

[00:25:34] Yeah.

[00:25:35] Yeah.

[00:25:35] And the display was beautiful.

[00:25:37] The overhead look when you're parking and stuff was really nice.

[00:25:40] The graphics were good.

[00:25:42] I had no complaints with that car other than I don't have $120,000 I want to spend on a car.

[00:25:48] Right.

[00:25:49] Or a little hitch my giddy up on that.

[00:25:51] You can still get a really good car for $80,000 with Lucid.

[00:25:56] Oh, you can?

[00:25:57] Okay.

[00:25:58] I think it's, they say they start at $79,000 and it still has range over 300 miles.

[00:26:04] So there's always that opportunity the next time you go to upgrade if you want a bigger car.

[00:26:11] I want a littler car.

[00:26:13] Yeah.

[00:26:15] I don't want, I used to have the Mazda CX-9, which you were in.

[00:26:19] It's nice.

[00:26:20] It's too big.

[00:26:21] I don't want a car that that's that big, but.

[00:26:23] Yeah.

[00:26:25] I could use a little bit bigger than the Model Y for sure.

[00:26:29] Really?

[00:26:30] What do you got to put in there?

[00:26:31] Yeah.

[00:26:32] I mean, your kids are getting bigger.

[00:26:33] Yeah.

[00:26:34] Nothing.

[00:26:35] I want.

[00:26:36] Well, okay.

[00:26:37] So we've got to get mats for our little gym podcasting room that we have here.

[00:26:41] We've got to get new mats.

[00:26:42] And I can't, I can't put the tractor supply mats in my car.

[00:26:46] I have to borrow my wife's van to do that.

[00:26:48] Even with the seats folded down?

[00:26:50] Oh, okay.

[00:26:51] So Allison, I probably could, but I don't want to damage anything in my car.

[00:26:56] So we just easily go in my wife's car, which is already damaged.

[00:27:00] So, okay.

[00:27:01] If I had a truck bed, that wouldn't be as big of a deal.

[00:27:06] I love it.

[00:27:06] Buy a car for the one time you need to do that.

[00:27:08] Could you also have those delivered?

[00:27:10] No, I don't think so.

[00:27:12] If I could, I could buy a bunch of them and just be done with it.

[00:27:15] But I don't know how to look that up.

[00:27:19] So, all right.

[00:27:20] So we've talked, this has been a fairly nerdy, data-driven episode.

[00:27:26] What are your Jerry Springer final thoughts on this?

[00:27:29] Jerry Springer final thoughts.

[00:27:31] That's not my baby.

[00:27:34] Yes, it is.

[00:27:35] I love data.

[00:27:37] I love Excel.

[00:27:39] And so this is candy for me.

[00:27:41] But it is nice to, like you described, is having this one source of data done by the Department of Energy.

[00:27:47] So, you know, it's not put out like by Tesla or something like that.

[00:27:50] So I think it's probably fairly believable information and, you know, gives you a guideline.

[00:27:56] Like you say, the idea of using it to help choose a car, I think that's a terrific idea.

[00:28:00] There's a way to manipulate this data to learn whatever you want to know about EVs that are out there.

[00:28:07] And chargers.

[00:28:08] I think the charger thing is interesting, too.

[00:28:09] You could look up, say, filter it.

[00:28:11] I believe you can filter it by state and see where are the EV chargers, you know, who's got EV chargers.

[00:28:17] And I think it gives all the locations, too.

[00:28:19] So you could mess around with it by date, by location.

[00:28:24] Just anything you want to know.

[00:28:26] It's super fun.

[00:28:28] Yeah, I would agree with that.

[00:28:30] And as a person who's not interested in anything that involves data because it makes my brain melt, I did find that I got quite a bit of detailed use out of it.

[00:28:41] And it's, you know, it also includes public and private data or stations, which I thought was interesting.

[00:28:48] Yeah.

[00:28:48] Yeah.

[00:28:50] Planned stations, stations that are coming up.

[00:28:53] So it really.

[00:28:53] Oh, and it's US and Canada.

[00:28:55] I did not know that either.

[00:28:56] Oh.

[00:28:57] So our Canadian friends can look at this.

[00:28:59] Dissing our Canadian friends.

[00:28:59] I was correct when I said North America.

[00:29:01] Not Mexico.

[00:29:02] Sorry, Mexico, folks.

[00:29:03] But yeah, this is awesome.

[00:29:06] Allison, how would people find you to see what you're doing?

[00:29:10] And, you know, give them your email one more time if they want to make a pivot table with you.

[00:29:15] Everything good starts with podfeet.com.

[00:29:18] I've got a bunch of podcasts there.

[00:29:20] My flagship show is the NosillaCast, which is a technology geek podcast with an ever so slight Apple bias.

[00:29:25] And I've got a programming podcast I do with Bart Buchatz where he is teaching the audience to program through an audio podcast, but with terrific show notes that are tutorials of exactly everything that he's teaching us.

[00:29:38] That's been a lot of fun.

[00:30:08] If you're a Mac user and you've always wanted to learn how to use the terminal, Bart and I did a 40-part series on learning to use the terminal.

[00:30:15] And that was a lot of fun, too.

[00:30:17] And that's still live.

[00:30:18] It's just we taught everything we think you need to know.

[00:30:23] And my email, allison at podfeet.com.

[00:30:27] Excellent.

[00:30:27] And we should give a shout out to Bart's Let's Talk Apple podcast because you were on recently, right?

[00:30:33] You're on October's episode.

[00:30:35] Yeah.

[00:30:35] Or it would be September's episode, but it was recorded in October.

[00:30:41] I don't know.

[00:30:42] Time travel is hard.

[00:30:44] So Bart Buchatz is the person I do programming by stealth with and did time in the terminal.

[00:30:48] He's also on my show talking about security stuff.

[00:30:51] But he has a couple of shows of his own.

[00:30:53] He has Let's Talk Photography and Let's Talk Apple.

[00:30:58] And boy, I'm blanking, Bodie.

[00:31:00] What did I talk to him about on Let's Talk Apple?

[00:31:02] That was the Apple event.

[00:31:04] No, we didn't just go through the Apple event.

[00:31:06] That would have been boring.

[00:31:07] Everybody does that.

[00:31:09] Wow.

[00:31:10] I'm bad.

[00:31:11] I can't remember.

[00:31:11] Bart does a monthly recap of Apple News, and then he does a monthly show for the Let's Talk Photography.

[00:31:17] That's what's wrong.

[00:31:18] I was on Let's Talk Photography.

[00:31:20] That's why I can't remember it.

[00:31:21] Oh, that's right.

[00:31:23] Yeah, what we were talking about in Let's Talk Photography is how our phones now capture,

[00:31:29] phones and other digital devices for taking pictures are now taking pictures better than what we can see.

[00:31:37] So a lot of people publish pictures of how cool the Aurora Borealis was,

[00:31:40] but a lot of people confess to me, oh, I couldn't see that.

[00:31:43] Those colors, those weren't, I couldn't see.

[00:31:45] I'd see like a little greenish glow, but I take a picture,

[00:31:48] and all of a sudden there's purple and red and all these other crazy colors.

[00:31:51] So it was just kind of a fun talk about how the digital signal processing and the digital sensors are picking up things we can't see,

[00:31:57] but we get to say, hey, look at this cool photo.

[00:32:01] I gotcha.

[00:32:02] Yeah.

[00:32:02] Yep.

[00:32:03] You are correct.

[00:32:03] I remember that now.

[00:32:05] So sorry, Bart.

[00:32:05] Let's-talk.ie.

[00:32:07] Yep.

[00:32:08] Yep.

[00:32:08] So I'll put Bart's links in the show notes.

[00:32:10] I'll put Allison's links in the show notes.

[00:32:12] I hope you all go take the time to check out what they are doing.

[00:32:16] Allison, thank you so much for coming on.

[00:32:18] Thanks, Bodie.

[00:32:19] Always fun.

[00:32:21] All right.

[00:32:22] I want to thank Allison once again for coming on and being so generous with her time,

[00:32:26] and then also just kind of sharing this with us.

[00:32:28] And of course, I'll put the link to the U.S. Department of Energy Alternative Fuels Data Center.

[00:32:36] I'll put that link in the show notes as well.

[00:32:38] If you want to play around with the data sets that they have, it is pretty cool.

[00:32:41] And if you find a use for it that's something different than what Allison and I talked about on the show, send me an email.

[00:32:47] It's bodie, B-O-D-I-E at 918digital.com.

[00:32:50] I'll also put links in the show notes where you can find Allison and Bart and take a look at what they're doing.

[00:32:58] And oh, and Allison taught me how to use a pivot table.

[00:33:02] So pretty good stuff.

[00:33:05] There was a lot of learning accomplished on this episode.

[00:33:08] I hope you all have a wonderful week, and I will talk to you on a Tuesday.