How One Dealer Monetized Charging, BYD Battles Discounts, Google’s Nano Banana

Kyle Mountsier: 0:02 Good morning. It's Tuesday, September 2 that Labor Day weekend is done. This is the automotive State of the Union. I'm Kyle Mountsier. Co hosted with Ben Hadley. Today we're talking about EVs. Everyone's gone. EVS everywhere. And we're talking about a banana. I know. I know we have to talk. Did you really wear a banana shirt this morning, and do I come prepared? Or what did you even know that we were talking about bananas this morning? Or did you just let that, that just kind of happened? How could we not talk about, how could we talk and not talk about bananas if we're talking, if we're on a show about the world of everything, we have to talk about bananas. People are so confused. Everyone sideways. Gotta wait. Gotta wait till the end. You gotta wait till the end. Hey, we got a so do edge webinar coming, coming up with V auto mining your misses to make deals and win inventory on Wednesday, September 10, at 2pm you can scroll down on asotu.com register for that. Also, you gotta check out name ad sessions by Mia. It's our new podcast. PAUL JAY, Daly Errol, Bomar the third, had guests like Jonathan smoke, Ashley Cavazos, Patrice Banks, Perry Watson the third, and Jim colon and a whole bunch more. They were at name ad last week. So you can search that anywhere where podcasts are found and check it out. But this morning, you just get me and Ben, and that's what you get. So no, no, no fancy Paul, he's on vacation. Just just, we're good. We're good at this. We can do this. Let's get into the news. So back in 2021 friendly Chevrolets. Mark Eddin saw a gap in the EV experience and decided to go and fill it. GM started to roll out EV standards, and he went all in on a totally unique charging Park open to all EV brands today. EV HQ is paying off in his brand loyalty, new customers and revenue, what they're calling EV HQ. You can see a photo of it there. Open in March 2023 near downtown Dallas, with 820 kilowatt fast chargers under a canopy, and it's staffed 24/7 it offers a lounge style experience, movie room, Corvette cafe, Wi Fi, play area, dog park and even roadside charging. The unique thing about this is it's not just for the Chevrolets that they sell as new cars, but it's for everyone. Free membership gets 20% off retail charging, and a new app is launching soon. Last year, in 2024 they hit 300k in revenue. On pace for 400k this year. The total cost of the project was right around 600,000 so a pretty, pretty great startup revenue path there. Ed and said, I wanted to be one of those guys that had something nobody else had. It's beyond my wildest dreams. Quite frankly. Ben Hadley: 3:00 Can you imagine if your marketing paid for itself? Just, do you, I mean, this like Kyle Mountsier: 3:10 this is so forward thinking. The best long tail, Ben Hadley: 3:15 absolutely. I mean, part of it is, how do you set yourself up to win, even if you lose so much so that you just start winning and you encourage the losing. Yeah, it's like, could I please, could test a couple sell a couple more? Please. You know what I mean? Like, Kyle Mountsier: 3:31 that's exactly and now, like, you know, you're opening this marketing to all different brands. And here's the, here's the crazy part about sales. This is the one stat that I didn't throw in there in the first read is 2024, to 2025 they've doubled in EV sales when everybody else is not doubling, like EV sales in the US are not doubling, but they're out gaining the market share because they've created this flywheel just naturally. Ben Hadley: 4:00 Yeah. I mean also you think about the branding, if EVs today has been so much around, you know, oh, like, good for the environment and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but the initial burst of EVs was sort of like, all about this is just a better experience. Yeah? A lot of people were like, I don't care. I mean, I do care about the culture play, yeah? It was like, Look, I just time is money I need. Like, just let me enjoy myself, you know, let me have an enjoyable experience. And this is, like, hearken back to that, mix it with Tesla, who's like, yeah, anybody can use our chargers, right? And taking a little smidge of that playbook and trying to localize it, yep. What a win Kyle Mountsier: 4:46 well, and win and mix it with like Tesla opening up their their like restaurant EV thing, right? Yep, the fact that back in 2021, they saw this as an opportunity to like. Create a moat around themselves, right? Is, is kind of mind boggling when now all of the EV manufacturers are going to these, like micro experience centers, right? Where are they based? In Dallas. Ben Hadley: 5:14 All right, cool. Next time in Dallas, gotta go Kyle Mountsier: 5:17 check it out. It looks dope too. Throw the photo back up there. Nathan, it looks like it's definitely an EV looking HQ, like, you know, it's got all the, all the bright lights, all the, you know, how good it is. Unknown: 5:31 I thought it was AI. Dude, Kyle Mountsier: 5:33 it's not AI. It's so good. Can't be real. So good, so smart. Speaking of EV growth, Ben Hadley: 5:50 oh, man, I should have been like, hey, where is it? Is it in Beijing? No. But, speaking of Kyle Mountsier: 5:57 Beijing, hey, even as BYD pushes aggressively into overseas markets, taking a bunch of market share overseas. The EV giant in China is taking heat at home, a brutal domestic price war. Cut deep into profits last quarter, despite record sales and growing international presence by these q2 net profit dropped get this 30% year over year to only 891 million even as revenue Rose 14% the company blames excessive marketing and fierce price cutting across China's EV space, retail prices in China have fallen 19% on these new EVs over two years, triggering concern from regulators. The first half revenue still jumped 23% with record new energy vehicle sales in Europe. By these July, registrations hit 13,000 up 225% year over year. So they're rolling in Europe, Ben Hadley: 6:54 yeah, I mean, and by the way, like they're good, you know what? I mean, yeah, the craziest part Kyle Mountsier: 7:00 about they're the governments. They're the government's, you know, little little kid, so Ben Hadley: 7:06 you can lose as much money as you want, and to blame it on marketing is so hilarious. I mean, it's like, you don't accidentally, oh, we just accidentally increased our paid search 30, you know, and what, come on. Kyle Mountsier: 7:20 Well, I think, I think it's somewhat the like, the the overall marketing of the industry, you know, they've gone from zero EV manufacturers to, I think someone, I think I saw somewhere, they've got 115 different ones in in that area, and they're all aggressively increasing, you Know, decreasing trade cycles, increasing consumer adoption, trying to find net new places to sell into and like competing in that type of market is going to be increasingly hard until there's kind of the reckoning where it goes from 115 down to 2530 manufacturers. But that's still three, four years out, so it's going to be the ones that ride that and BYD, because of their positioning globally, is probably the best position to ride that out, just because they're not only competing in the Chinese market. Yeah, the Ben Hadley: 8:10 fascinating like sub story here, though, is the is the ability for, I mean, if you think about this as an attack on America, which sounds dramatic fully is, but it is, yeah. And you go, Okay, where are we the weakest? It's like, well, dang we love temu. Dang. We love some we love ourselves some cheap, cool Chinese stuff. You know what I mean. And I've been to one of these dealerships when I was in Curacao. Yeah, remember that video. There's nothing better than ordering something from temu and being pleasantly surprised about how high quality Kyle Mountsier: 8:52 it is, right? You're like, Oh, I got a good one. Yeah? Ben Hadley: 8:55 You're like, Oh, my God. This is like, for 999, like, This is crazy. And then that experience for me was like, you can't, why is everything so high end? Why is everything the fit and finish so good? It's like, everything is just taken to a next level, yeah, but again, it's a it's a way to attack what we're known for. And, you know, I just, I hope we, I hope we figure it out on our end, on the right way to combat that, because we still want to have free enterprises, right? Yep, but it's going to take some collaboration with our government to, like, make sure that this doesn't destroy our our our industry, Kyle Mountsier: 9:39 and it doesn't seem like the progress is happening currently, so we'll see, we'll see what the competitive matrix looks like on this but BYD is definitely taking it down globally, that's for sure. Yeah, speaking of taking it down, segway, a new challengers in the ring go. Rules, nano banana, image generator, recently added to Gemini, might just be the first serious rival to chat, G, B, T, S, viral image dominance, and it's got some surprising strengths. Nano banana delivers sharp realism, faster generation and better character consistency. Keeps visual details intact across prompts and its images often look more natural and less AI generated Gemini model also handles real photo uploads better, especially when combining images or changing backgrounds, so they can actually, like, take an image, keep the image, and then change the background, change what's over it. A one reviewer said, if you want something that's very quick and gets the job done in most in the most realistic way possible, Geminis nano banana is the queer clear winner. Ben, do you know how it got the name Nana banana? Ben Hadley: 10:52 No, I don't. So the Kyle Mountsier: 10:55 like you all of these AI tools have kind of like a playground that they live in before they release. Like, you'll hear of you'll hear people kind of figuring out, like, oh, we think that that's GPT is playground for developers and things like that. And nano banana was its code name, but it got so popular in these developer in this developer web space, that that Gemini was just like, yeah, we'll just call it Nana banana because it got so popular. Yeah, so it's so that's and it's even got a little banana. Banana there Ben Hadley: 11:27 probably Google AI name, and probably AI names in general, like chatgpt is just so bad at naming their models, but Right? It's like a crowdsourced one that makes the most sense to me. It's like, yeah, we let we love it. I mean, to me, if you go to my profile right now, my profile pic is nano banana, right? Like, I just took a regular image of myself, and then I was like, Oh, but I really like this artist. Cause, actually freaking out, what is speaking of? Wish. What a weird day. That's cause that is actually, I was like, put him in the put him in the put some of his art in the back. You know what? It's Kyle Mountsier: 12:06 so good. I've got a little, I've got a little interesting, interesting play here. I decided to take this only took me a total of three minutes. That's That's how fast the generation is here. But we've got a little surprise for you. This is Ben's profile image in a lab coat with a lab behind because I was like, Ben's kind of like that lab nerd. But then I was like, no, no. Computer Lab nerd flipped it real quick, put the Oh no. We need some engineers in a full body shot, because he's a tech entrepreneur. There he is, and now he's releasing a product on a stage for web tech. That was the next one, and then we just flipped real quick into VO, and about 80 seconds later, this is what Unknown: 12:49 we got and how we approach web development, making it more intuitive, efficient and accessible to everyone good, just Kyle Mountsier: 12:57 like that. And that took me just less than three minutes with Nano banana and VO combined. Kind of wild. Yeah. Ben Hadley: 13:04 I mean, okay, first of all, I'm a dealership. I've got something 35 days or older. Go throw your car images into it. That first image, yes, nano banana, the background done. If you have a kid, like, there's a, it's a in Gemini, there's a thing called a gem which is sort of like what GPT calls their gpts, like the little like pre made ones, yeah, go check out the one that's called storybook. And for whatever reason right now, Gemini just does not care about copyrights. If your kid loves PJ Masks or loves bluey. Just be like, hey, put my kid. Take a picture your kid. Put my kid in a bluey story, and we'll just do it. You know, it's insane right now. Man, they're gonna obviously shut that part. Kyle Mountsier: 13:55 Oh, it's the Wild West. It's like when, like, when LinkedIn would allow, like, any music to be in a video and not, like, copyright block it, or, like, throttle it. Now they're throttling that stuff all over the place, but that's that's definitely the reality of the world that we're living in. So yeah, but hey, you got to go play with Nano banana today. We never thought we'd say nano banana on a on a podcast, but we never thought we'd say a lot of things on a podcast. Hey, look, create experience centers, places where people flock to you. Create that flywheel of effect and serve someone today. You.