What Sets the Final Price of a Car in California | Karl Brauer

There is a new law that changes how dealerships and customers do business in California. How will this impact the process of car buying? There shouldn't be five thousand dollar differences between what you are told the car costs and then what the car really costs you. Today we sit down with Carl Brower who's a car industry expert. He's going to tell us what's going to happen to car dealerships and car buying in California. He'll also tell us about the EV mandates in California and how realistic are they for the industry. Car companies are very aware of changing political winds so they shouldn't put all their eggs in the EV basket but they don't want to go all about internal combustion either because... Carl it's great to have you on, welcome. Thank you, thank you for including me. There's a new law for auto dealers in California. Yeah. Actually this has been a big pain point for some of the consumers that when people see prices of new cars and is advertised we go to the dealership we get a different price yeah we come out with a different deal and this happened to someone that that he saw an advertised price yeah he got to the dealership and he paid five thousand dollars more and then he went to a state senator Senator Ben Allen who proposed this law and now there's a new law in California that the way car selling and advertising is going to change. Can you tell us more about this? Yeah, and it's really good to see this because this is a longstanding problem where they call it the bait and switch is the most common word, which is they attract your attention or they bait you with a very low price advertised somewhere. And then when you go to the dealership, they switch you to another car or they somehow switch what you thought you were going to pay and you end up paying a lot more. It's a very common practice. It's been going on almost since car dealers existed. And I think California and the senator have realized, okay, we need to make something more concrete that doesn't allow dealerships to do this. And so that's what they're going with. And so this CARS Act is going to, first of all, require that everything that you would pay for for the car is included in whatever advertised price there is. So you can't advertise the price and leave out a whole bunch of things that you're going to charge as the dealership fees and add-ons that you're going to put on Because one of the things they'll do is they'll say, well, yeah, the car costs this much, but like the wheels, we put on special wheels, so they cost more, you know, or we gave this car a special treatment to its paint and that adds $1,200 that, you know, wasn't, well, you're still paying this for the car, but the total cost is this because of all these things. so now you have to tell the total cost and it doesn't necessarily have to include taxes or maybe not even registration because that can be different from people but all the things that are fixed about the car's price has to be advertised up front you have to know it up front before you ever get to the dealership so i think that's that's huge because there shouldn't be five thousand dollar differences between what you are told the car costs and then what the car really costs you really it's just taxes you're gonna have to watch out for now what about the negotiation part do you think this is going to change the way we go to the dealerships and because it's a hassle to go for some people it's a hassle but i've talked to dealers and they told us sometimes the buyers like it what do you think of that well so there's all this stuff going on so first of all it's really sad that people when they're going to buy a new car often compare the new car purchase process to going to the dentist they just dread it you know you're getting a new car this should be an it's the second most expensive thing most people buy after their housing is their car. And I hate the idea that you're going to get something like that, some big element and big cost in your life, and you dread the process. So hopefully this will fix a lot of that. The negotiation is what people hate because they're like, I don't know what I'm going to end up really paying. They just feel like there are so many things going on. So another example where the negotiation will be impacted by this act is what they call the F and I room, which is the financing and insurance room. So you go in there and in theory you're just supposed to be talking about insurance but if you already have it you don't really need their insurance and financing which by the way you can also get before you ever get to the dealership you can go to your bank or credit union and go in there and in theory you could go into the finance and insurance room and say my financing is already handled I got a loan and my insurance is handled I got an insurance company so there's really nothing for me to talk about in here but this is a profit center for the dealership so they are going to you know say well what about gap insurance you know which is theoretically what the cars market value is versus what you owe on it. In theory, if you got in an accident in the first year after you bought a car, the car's value could have dropped so fast that the insurance would only pay for a certain amount of the car's value if it was in a serious accident, and your loan could be higher than that. So gap insurance is theoretically going to bridge that. Now, that can be tricky because a lot of times it's already written into your own financing with your own company that the loan would get paid off so you might not even need gap insurance if that happens to you but I think what happens in the F&I room is people feel pressured and they think they have to buy things there so the CARS Act is also going to make it so the dealers have to be very overt like they have to say by the way this is optional you don't have to buy this because they never said that before they're like so you got to get your gap insurance well you don't really got to get it but they'll say it that way you know and you've got to get your financing and the rate that you get may or may not be competitive. So you now have to be much more as a dealership upfront about what the price is without any options added on or options that they've already added on has to be advertised. And the negotiation has to say, these are all optional and make it clear that you as a buyer don't have to buy any of them. And how much does this impact the dealers? Is that going to impact them significantly? Because I assume marketing will become harder because now they have to each individual car they have to probably market each one before they would just advertise some low price and get you to go to the dealership now they have to go no you're right like you would think they're going to have to work harder to make sure each car has the right pricing on any advertisements that show up whether it's print or online and they have to I think what's really going to be tricky is they got to retrain all of their personnel right like all of these tactics that relied on kind of high pressure sales and being maybe not totally upfront about all the costs and the fees, you got to retrain your whole staff now. And so you're right. They've definitely created what I would call like a smaller margin. You know, they've got a narrower area that they can play in versus a wider area where they could kind of do interesting things, creative things to try to get more money. That's gotten a lot more narrow because of this CARS Act. Do dealers make a lot of money from the new car sales or car sales in general? or do they make most of their money from the service? Their best profit center is their service center where you come after you buy the car and used cars have much higher profit margins. So new cars don't have, relative to the rest of their business model, the new cars don't have a very good profit margin, which is why they try so aggressively to make money on these high profit margin things. The car might not have a lot of profit margin, but if they can get a higher interest rate on your loan or if they can get you to buy, you know, Scotchgard for the seats or paint protection film or gap insurance, they can have a much higher profit margin on those elements. There's another part of this law that allows people to return the car within three days. For used cars now, there's what they call a cooling off period where you have a certain amount of time to return the car after you purchase it. And it's interesting because I think the dealerships are just going to be like, oh my gosh, you know, they have to like put up with someone who bought the car maybe on a spur of the moment or just fell in love with the car and then got home and realized either they don't need it or they can't really afford it and they want to bring it back. That's going to be really kind of a nightmare for the dealership because they never had to worry about that before. What are your thoughts on damages and things like that? Because sometimes people may buy a car and then they decide to take it to a party and then come back. Well, and that's written into the law that I think the car can't have more than 400 miles put on it and it can't have any damage to it if you bring it back within that cooling off period. So they're trying to look out for the dealer, too, on this law a little bit. And dealers were upset about the law that got vetoed last year where they were going to charge more for the paperwork. I think they have a limitation of eighty five dollars for the documentation documentation. Yeah. And they wanted a higher fee, but they didn't get it. Yeah. And that's another that's another area for profit for them. You know, and I always tell people, you know, information is power when you're buying a car. And so if you're going to go to a dealership, even before this law, there were some basic things you should really do, right? Like you should get your financing set up before you ever go to the dealership. And you should have multiple vehicles at different dealers that you want to consider. You should identify three at least cars that you would go look at and seriously consider. So that when you go to each dealership, you can tell them, I've got financing and this is my terms and my rate. Because what you find with dealers is they'll say, oh, we can get financing for you. Here's what we got. And then you say, oh, well, I want a lower rate. Well, we can't get that. well i've actually got it from my from my thing oh wait let us yeah yeah we can do that you know that happens all the time and then you know if they know you're about to buy a car and one of the things that people don't realize is how much power they have they think the dealer's got all the power i can tell you right now if a dealership knows you're a serious buyer that some dealership is going to get tens of thousands of dollars from you in the next 72 hours next three four or five days and you look at their car and their and their sales tactics and you don't like it and you say I'm going to one of the other dealerships now to look at some other cars they are watching a very potential buyer walk away and they're some other dealer is going to get those tens of thousands of dollars they hate that so you make it clear to the dealer this is one of several cars I'm looking at I'm going to visit some other dealers I'm a serious buyer in the next couple days but of course I have to find a good deal I have to be treated right I have to make a have to have a price that is market correct and if you can do that I'd buy the car here if you can't I will buy the car somewhere else and once you've stated all that they know okay this person's educated they're knowledgeable and they haven't fallen in love with the car and have to get this car that they're willing to leave and go get a different car and how much is the margin for the negotiations is it five percent is it ten percent is it seven percent because there's the back and forth you know and is it it's hard to tell well i think if the car's priced at MSRP then like i've said the new car profit isn't that great. So if the car's already starting at MSRP or below, which you'll find that out there, then it's going to be a tighter margin of negotiation. But I would still negotiate. I mean, if I was buying the car and it was a $35,000 car and it was priced, they said they'd sell it to me for $34,000 or $33,000, I'd still look at all the factors and I'd say, you know, how much, you know, I want to pay $32,000, $31,000 for the car. I would still try to push it down, especially if I feel like I could go to another dealership and and get one somewhere else so there's always room to negotiate no don't let the dealer say oh we're hardly making money on this car don't forget too there are these things that dealers hated if you even are aware of these things but they're called stair step programs you may have heard of these so if a manufacturer is trying to sell a lot of a given model in a given month they will tell the dealership if you sell 10 of these we'll give you an additional thousand dollars for each of those 10 if you sell eight or nine, you get 500. But if you sell 10, you get a thousand. Well, if you're the one buying that car and you're going to be the 10th buyer, you're helping them make 5,000 more dollars on that car because they're going to get an extra 500 bucks off each of the 10 that they've sold. Now you're never going to, not going to tell you, Oh, if we sell this to you, but that's another element that can be going on. And so never assume that the dealership, even if they're saying, look at how much we, this car is even on by invoice. And we're barely selling it to you for over invoice. You Then you want to say, well, what about your holdback and your stair step? You might not want to say that because they're going to get very angry because you're not even supposed to know about that. But I talk about this the whole time. I feel bad for people who don't want to go to dealerships because to me, I love it. I love going in there. But again, I have a fair amount of knowledge about the whole process. And half the time I'll go in there and I'll say, by the way, I've been the editor-in-chief at Edmunds and the executive publisher at Kelley Blue Book. And then they usually just go, all right, what do you want to pay? so are we going to see these negotiations going away from car buying anytime soon i think we're going to see like a tighter negotiation i think we're going to see less we're going to see and more straightforward so i think the consumer will hopefully feel less powerless or less disadvantaged because they feel like there's all these numbers flying around and they don't know which ones they have to pay or how much they should be paying that should be reduced by this law hopefully and in general do you think the people are tired of the negotiation or do you think people like it people don't like it dealers want to say no no people want to come in and argue you know that i've never heard a dealer say yeah we really make make consumers lives hell because that's how we get our best profit they're never going to say that they're going to say you know oh we don't do that anymore i've heard this for decades you know it's like oh all those bad old practices we don't do that anymore and then i hear from my friends and family and through my social circles yeah they tried to do this to me it's like they keep saying they don't do that anymore you know so they're going to sell the process as something that consumers love and everything's fine and then you go talk to your survey consumers who buy go to buy a car and they're like yeah i hate it it's terrible what about the dealers they've been kind of struggling from what we've gathered how are they going to get impacted after this law well i think dealers it's hard for me to think they're struggling too much you know you go to the National Auto Dealers Association meeting they have every year. And there's all the dealers and then there's all the vendors that go there. And what are all the vendors that go to the NADA? Oh, the high price jewelry and the airplane and stuff like that. I mean, these guys are doing fine. And so will they have to be a little more careful or else risk running across legal issues? Yes. Are they going to suddenly not be able to make their bills every month because of this law no they'll do they'll do fine you're an expert in the car space and you know one of the things that's been happening we want to go zero emission so there's been a rise of electric cars how are you seeing the car market in California in general well it's fascinating because California is the most aggressively uh pushing electric vehicle sales and the truth is California whether it's their infrastructure how many chargers they have per resident, or the weather, which is relatively temperate here, this is a very relatively EV friendly location in that the weather's good and there's a lot of places to charge your cars relative to other parts of the country. With that said, there are still a lot of people, a lot of consumers who are not interested in electric cars for various reasons, whether they don't want to pay what they feel is additional money for the same car, but it's battery powered, so they have to pay more money for it. The insurance is often higher for electric vehicles. The repairs are often higher if you get in an accident for various reasons sometimes they've got more advanced items like in their bumpers and their headlights and their grills because of their advanced tech and then when those things get damaged it costs more to fix them but also because they make fewer electric vehicles so you know cost amortization if they're only making 10,000 of this model or 20,000 this model and they're making 100,000 or 200,000 of another model obviously the parts for the higher volume model are going to be less expensive because they make more of those cars and they make more of those parts so there are cost disadvantages for electric vehicles and and those were trying to be offset by various incentives but the federal incentives are gone they're trying to you know they put back some of the state incentives in california but a lot of consumers nationally and in california still are not interested in buying an electric car for various reasons and i'm a big believer in just letting consumers buy what they want i don't think we should be telling consumers they have to buy this car or that car i think we should have electric cars try to be as cost-effective as possible and internal combustion cars be as cost-effective as possible and let consumers buy what they want. And why do the consumers not want electric cars in your opinion? I think it's because beyond the cost issues, I think consumers want a sense of freedom. A lot of people forget, I think especially the politicians forget. One of the greatest aspects of living in the U.S. and has been this way for a hundred plus years now is the freedom of movement, is the ability to do what you want and go where you want Whenever you want and that's kind of ingrained in the American psyche and we've got these big vast areas Even in just the state of California look how big California is on all the different places There are to go without ever leaving the state and when you tell someone, okay, here's this car It gets hopefully 300 miles might get less might get a little more But when it's out of energy, you got to find a place to charge it and it might take you 20 minutes It might take you an hour, depending on how low the battery is and how much you want the battery topped off. You've just gone against that ingrained sense of freedom and liberty and personal movement that I think the average consumer in the U.S. enjoys. And people wonder why the EVs are doing better in Europe or in other countries, in the Asian countries. And I think it's because that inherent sense of freedom and go where I want, you know, vast travel, the horizon's the limit. Let's go wherever we want. And if we need more energy in the form of fuel, there's always just pull off the exit at the highway. There's probably going to be a gas station to fill up at. You don't have that sense of freedom of movement with an electric vehicle. I think another thing that people forget about is that they assumed electric vehicle sales would just keep growing organically, that they would just keep getting adopted here. And what they don't realize is that it's hard to get about 8% or more of the population to want to buy an EV. And I saw this at IC cars. We were looking at individual cities and states. And if the city or state was down in the like sub 5% new vehicle EV market share, it would grow year after year. It would go from 2 to 3 to 5 to 7. Once any given location hit about 8%, it would totally plateau. It would go to 9 or 10, but it would get from 8 to 10% much slower than it would get from 5 to 7%. and I was watching this over like several years and I thought what's going to happen when we hit 8% nationally because we weren't there yet well we hit 8% nationally this is 8% of new cars 8% of new car sales nationally and we got there in the fall of 24 months before for instance there was a presidential election that changed anything and EV sales new EV sale and market share flatlined it it it plateaued at around eight to nine percent it was very hard to get more than eight and a half percent of the people to buy a new ev and this was with all the incentives that were still in place it was before any presidential administration shifts and a lot of people don't want to pay attention to that a lot of people are blaming the only reason evs aren't succeeding in this country is because we're not properly supporting them we they had full they had full support in fall of 24 still and they were already plateauing around eight and a half percent because it's about eight to nine percent of the population that will give up the freedom of movement that they get with internal combustion or hybrid vehicles and will play the game that is getting a home charger having your ev charge at night feeling that you're kind of tethered to your house you know remember if you've got a 300 mile range ev and you have a home charger great you can go up to 150 miles away from your house because nobody really not that far you really go up to about 100 miles no one wants to come home with zero percent on their batteries they roll into their driveway. So if you have a 300 mile range, you still have around 100 mile limit to where you can go. And well, how many people need to go more than 100 miles? Most days, probably that solves most people. Then all of a sudden, grandma gets sick. Your kid at college has an emergency and they're 400 miles away. If you're in an internal combustion vehicle, hop in, go get them. You're in an electric vehicle. Okay. Where are the chargers? What route do I got to take? When will I be going? It's a whole nother thought process when you need to go farther from your house when you're in an EV. And most people, around 92% of the people in this country, they don't want to deal with that. And what's the percentage now? Well, now that we've lost the incentives, we've lost down to about 6%. And we were at 6% consistent. Well, we really fell to like 4% to 5% because there was the shock. We always have the pull forward sales. So a bunch of people bought their cars before September 30th of 25 when the incentive was going away and they knew it. Then they crashed in October and November, December sales because all those people had bought their cars by the end of september i knew it would settle in i figured somewhere halfway if we were at eight percent with no incentives and we fell to four percent when the incentives went away we'd probably settle in when the whole shock was done around six percent well that's where we were for most of the past summer and then don't forget fuel prices are extremely high in this country and they've been high for months and i have plenty of people saying so high fuel prices evs back in huh actually no the story is that after seven months of high fuel prices evs have crept from six to six and a half percent market share after seven months of elevated fuel prices. To me, that's the story. Even high fuel prices aren't pushing people back into EVs. A lot of hybrid sales, but not EV sales. To people, the cost of losing that freedom of driving, it justifies paying higher for gas. Yes, they'd rather pay more for gas. Also, don't forget, nobody likes to talk about this, but the truth is gas at $5 to $6 a gallon in 2026 is like $3 a gallon 30 years ago because of the cost of inflation. In other words, gas is relatively cheap now. It's funny, you go to any other country, we still have like the cheapest gas of almost any first world countries. I mean, the Middle East, Saudi Arabia has got pretty cheap gas, obviously, but we have very cheap gas even today relative to the rest of the planet and relative to inflation and relative to the average person's income. I know nobody wants to hear that. None of us are happy about the bill we pay when we see it, but that's because we're used to what we've been paying for decades. And relative to that, it's higher relative to what we make as a typical American gas is still kind of cheap. And in terms of car companies, I was told by some engineers in car companies that it's easier to make the electric ones versus that the gas ones. Can you tell us about that? Electric cars certainly have fewer parts than internal combustion vehicles. So they are, in theory, simpler to make, which you would think makes them cheaper also. However, they also have expensive battery packs in them. And the battery packs have been an impact on, is the greatest impact on car cost on an electric vehicle. They can be half the total cost. If it's a $30,000 electric car, 15 of that could be potentially the battery pack. And they're trying to get the costs down and there's all this effort to you know come up with alternatives you know solid state batteries and batteries that don't rely on so much rare earth metals which of course China China controls versus most of the other nations in the planet and so if you're producing a large number of electric cars and they all need expensive battery packs you're kind of at the mercy of the current cost structure for batteries and it's expensive and the country that most benefits From battery production globally is China. So they have to go and buy the batteries from China Is that that's the infrastructure is there right or if they buy the batteries outside of China? They're gonna be more expensive to build because we don't have as much supply for things like lithium and you know Platinum and all these rare earth metals that you need to make batteries with China's got the bulk of those Natural resources tied up they had a longer-term vision and they locked up the global supply of a lot of these rare earth metals Then they started saying we all have to go electric which is ironic because what's one of the biggest polluting countries on the planet? Right now, but anyways, so in terms of the electric cars adoption We had these mandates to to reach there by 2035 What what is it like right now in the car industry? So So what we are seeing now is that there's been a real pullback in the government regulation and kind of requirement and fines that you have to pay if you don't meet certain fuel economy standards and air quality standards or emission standards. Those have largely been unwound over the past year and a half. And the result is that we're seeing car companies go much more aggressively back into cars that, believe it or not, people want versus the government wants. So we've gone from a government-oriented product plan to a consumer-oriented product plan. And in that transition, we've seen a lot of electric cars that were planned to be built canceled or volumes of production that were meant to be produced reduced. and a lot of larger engines and internal combustion powered vehicles and higher performance vehicles with traditional exhaust systems and exhaust notes, those are all becoming more prevalent and they're being kind of rushed to market or prioritized over electric vehicles. Do you think that's going to last? How do you see that? So the car companies are very aware of changing political winds, so they can't put all their eggs, they shouldn't put all their eggs in the EV basket and they found that out because they've lost billions by having to write down how much investment they put into those, and then the cars wouldn't sell, and now they're not even producing them. They had to take a big loss from going so heavily EV to heavily EV. But they don't want to go all about internal combustion either because we could have a different political environment in three, four, or five years, and all of a sudden the EV thing could be back again. What's interesting is that what's the middle ground between those two things? Hybrids, right? They get far better fuel efficiency than a traditional internal combustion-only vehicle, But they don't have the range anxiety and the lack of movement that I talked about that an electric car has so hybrids are skyrocketing in volume and in Availability every car company that either doesn't already have a lot of hybrids is rushing to get them out Some of them are behind the curb There's a few of the big automakers in the US that they were like no, it's hybrids are a half measure We're just going all EV and now they're having to backtrack on that statement and quickly try to catch up whereas someone like Toyota they've been doing hybrids for over 20 years the Prius of course but now everything coming out from them is hybrid the new RAV4 is all hybrid every version of the RAV4 is a hybrid and it gets very good mileage and then there's plug-in hybrids that actually act like an electric vehicle for people who have 30 or 40 mile commutes per day they don't even have to burn a drop of gas with these plug-in hybrids so that seems to be the winning formula right now is have the low-emission, high-fuel efficiency hybrid and plug-in hybrid as an alternative to traditional gas cars, which when you have higher gas prices like we have right now, that helps you out. But don't go so heavily into EV that you're committed to this very expensive technology that a lot of Americans aren't interested in. We wanted to do 100% by 2035. How realistic is it from you that you're a car expert? what does the car market tell you yeah you're just not going to get there remember full-size trucks are still one of the most popular vehicles in this country and they are popular because they get things done they accomplish things people want to get work done with these things and that doesn't just mean driving around locally that means long distances and heavy loads that you carry and an internal combustion still has the advantage there especially diesel powered ones but even traditional gasoline ones, because of the distance they can cover and the horsepower they can produce and the quick refueling. They tried electric trucks, and they just didn't sell. Everyone thought they seemed to make total sense. All this low-end torque, low-speed torque from an electric motor, it's perfect. Yeah, and when you start driving it like a truck and treating it like a truck, the 280-mile range they're telling you turns into half of that because you're towing or carrying something. So as long as trucks, for instance, are a huge component of the purchasing of consumers in the state of california and nationally i could not see those being 100% electric now remember the 2035 mandate said that everything had to be electrified that meant it either had to be a pure electric vehicle or it had to have some kind of an electric motor that might drive the wheels but you could have a gasoline engine that say powers the electric motor or powers keeps the battery charged that keeps the motor running so these range extending vehicles which Ram was the first to announce and I thought it was brilliant and of course I wondered how long before the other two two domestic truck makers rushed to do that and they're both rushing to do that but in this case you're having an electric motor that drives the wheels and theoretically it's emission free when it's running on the battery but you have an internal combustion engine also on the vehicle to make sure that you never it's like the hybrid hybrids work so it's like a hybrid whereas a normal hybrid that can run on internal combustion or an electric motor or both these range extending vehicles. They only run on motors, but there's still an engine on board so that you never have range anxiety. You never run out and get stuck somewhere. How's the adoption of those? Are they becoming a big percentage of the new car sales market? Hybrids are skyrocketing in the percentage of new vehicle sales because whether it's something like the Camry or the RAV4, these are two high selling vehicles in this country and you can't get a non-hybrid version. Toyota has gone completely 100% hybrid on the new RAV4 for 26 and the Camry a couple years ago so that that alone makes hybrids more popular is because you can't get a non-hybrid version of these high volume vehicles but every car company is following Toyota's lead Honda's got a whole bunch of hybrids coming soon GM is rushing back into hybrids after walking away from them so you're going to see hybrids you know continue to grow as a presence in the market and what about the Chinese EVs some people are wondering why are they so cheap and the quality is okay yeah what i want to remind people of is that China can produce electric vehicles for very cheap because they've got all those global uh sources for batteries all the rare earth metals locked up so they get the best price for building the batteries and they have a system in China where whether it's no minimum wage no labor unions you know no medical coverage uh no overtime and the government completely kind of in bed with the auto industry and kind of directing things and subsidizing it that's how they build electric vehicles for half the cost that europe and the u.s can build them for and when people say why can't we compete with china it's like because we would have to do the same things i don't know how many americans would support destroying all automotive labor unions destroying all overtime destroying all benefits packages and turning over our auto industry to the government to decide what cars we're going to make do you think it's justified to have big tariffs on on the chinese evs i think it's absolutely justified if time if china is going to leverage their advantages which is the the natural resources the that they've got the rare earth metals and a communist government that's willing to fund their auto industry we should leverage our natural advantages which is a lot of oil supply on our own continent and more than we've ever had we've got more oil production here than we've ever had and the wide open spaces that people want to travel and refuel in seven to ten minutes and we've watched europe which has not had had as much barrier for china coming in and their automotive industry is getting slaughtered so i have no interest in trying to compete with china in this country on a level playing field it'll kill our auto industry and it's not really a level playing field because of what they're willing to do remember we have laws against monopolies and why do we have those because if you don't have that the biggest company can run at a loss and afford to and drive all the competitors out and then once all the competitors are out are they going to keep having cheap products for you when there's no one else to compete with them no what is china doing right now they're destroying all the other automotive industries in all the other countries, do you think when they're done doing that they're going to keep their prices lower than everyone else probably not coming back to California, we are, a lot of people look at us when we make laws and policies. What do you think is realistic for these emission mandates? Should they be removed? Should they be there? What do you think the car market would look like here or should look like? So I think it was absolutely a benefit to have a certain level of required emissions controls and fuel economy requirements that the EPA has done from like the last 50 years, from the 70s until maybe 10 years ago. But I think the rate at which we were expecting to increase the fuel economy numbers and or zero emission vehicle sales got unrealistic under the last couple administrations. And I think that's why we are in a better place now. And, you know, you look at the air quality in the U.S. and in cities like Los Angeles or Denver where I grew up and there used to be just constant smog and when you look at the number of people living in these cities now compared to 50 years ago and the air quality we have already benefited tremendously and I feel like we've kind of hit a point of diminishing return, you know I always remember a story in Automotive News about 25 years ago, early 2000s and it was about how the EPA was asking for a lot of money to upgrade their testing equipment and their emissions measuring equipment because cars had gotten so clean they were essentially incapable of measuring the exhaust emissions this was in like the early 2000s if you had a graph right now in front of you a bar graph that showed emissions out of a 1950s vehicle and then every 10 years till now you'd have to have a really tall graph in that first bar for 1950s because because there'd be there's effectively nothing a car that's running on an internal combustion engine vehicle it doesn't produce zero emissions relative to 20 even years ago and certainly 40 or 50 years ago it does produce zero emissions cars are so clean now and they can do that with a lot of the technology the fuel injection technology and the exhaust treatment technology and that is why you can have far more people living in Los Angeles and Denver and have almost no brown cloud and smog days because what is coming out of internal combustion engines is very clean so I feel like we've done our due diligence. Cars are clean. They're very efficient, also fuel efficient compared to 50 years ago. We can look to other things. A lot of people are like, when are we going to go after, you know, buses and industry and trucks and stuff like that? We can look into that stuff because the personal car is very clean now. Carl Brower, it was great to have you on California Insider. Please come back and share more insights with us in the near future. It was fun being on with you guys. Always fun talking cars. Tell us what you think about the car buying process right now. Do you like negotiating at the dealerships or do you just like to just pay the price and get out of there as soon as possible? Make sure to tell us in the comments or email us at [email protected]. We read all of your emails and comments. I'm Siyamak Karami, this is California Insider. We'll see you next time.