“On the Road” with Jonny Lieberman

“On the Road” is a podcast produced by JC Whitney. Every other Thursday we bring you interviews with a cavalcade of figures from across the world all united by one thing: their undying love of all things automotive. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

In this interview, Jonny Lieberman, Senior Features Editor at Motor Trend and co-host of the podcast “The Inevitable,” dives into the fast-paced evolution of the automotive world, with electric vehicles (EVs) leading the charge. He shares his expert take on the cutting-edge trends in electrification and how the industry is racing toward an electric future. Lieberman doesn’t hold back on the need for more affordable EVs in the U.S. if widespread adoption is really going to take off. Throughout the conversation, he offers a fascinating glimpse into what’s next for cars, from EVs to software-driven innovations that are reshaping the way we think about driving.

Jonny Lieberman: Yeah, so Motor Trend is your meat-and-potatoes car site with an eye to the future. We drive every single thing. Today, I had a review of the new Ford F-150 Tremor go live. My Raptor review goes live tomorrow. But you know, the idea of “The Inevitable” was initially called “Project 2036.” The idea was that cars are going to change a lot—you know, whether you like it or not, they’re going to change a lot in the next 20 years. Reading the tea leaves, it really looks like the world is moving towards electrification. Gasoline, as we know it, is going to—you know, especially in other countries—it’s going to go away as far as new vehicles go, new passenger vehicles. So, we wanted to get a handle on it. We wanted to say, “Okay, well, what are we going to be reporting on?” You know, 0 to 60 used to be a really big metric. The little sedan I have in the parking lot can do 0 to 60 in 1.8 seconds, so that’s sort of done as a way to measure cars, you know what I mean? So, what’s a good EV? What if a car doesn’t have a steering wheel—how do you review it? That type of thing. And so, that’s what “The Inevitable” was born from. Then Ed, my co-host, came up with the name because the E and the V are big—the inevitable—because it’s just happening. So, like I said, we cover the car industry as it is, but we’re also looking at where it’s going to be.

Angel Sala-Belen: I also feel like you’re giving a solid introduction to people that may not know about EVs, right? You’re giving a new image or understanding of what these vehicles are compared to what we’re traditionally used to.

Jonny Lieberman: Yeah, and we talk about this a lot, but even most other people that do my job—my fellow car journalists—they can’t review EVs because they don’t have a charger at their house, right? So, you read the review, and it’s like, “Man, charging sucks.” And you talk to people, and they say, “I don’t want to buy an EV because where am I going to charge it?” But you talk to any EV owner, and they’re like, “Yeah, I wake up and it’s charged. I charge it maybe once a week, maybe once every two weeks, because I only drive 20 miles a day and I have a 300-mile battery, so I don’t really worry about that at all.” Yeah, once a year when I go on a road trip, it takes a little while maybe to find a charger, but I have a Tesla, and it’s really easy on the Supercharger Network or whatever. So, there’s this huge disconnect from where the—you know, a million new EVs were registered in the US in 2023, and despite whatever you’re reading, that number is still going up. So, there’s just a huge disconnect with how it’s communicated. We try to cover that, and also, we talk about things people—car enthusiasts—are interested in, in this space, like synthetic fuels. What about hydrogen? What about this, that, and the other? So yeah, we try to give everybody a fair shake and education, but also get a handle on what’s coming. Like, what’s the future of the car going to look like? You know, because remember, what Wall Street’s pushing for is that every single publicly traded auto company has a level five autonomous vehicle that, when you’re sleeping, can go out and be a robo-taxi, right? So, what does level five mean? No steering wheels. What’s that going to look like? So, it’s just trying to get a handle on it.

Angel Sala-Belen: Yeah, I don’t even think most people in the audience know what these levels are. So basically, these levels allow these vehicles access to public roads at a certain capacity.

Jonny Lieberman: Yeah, so everyone’s really familiar with level two, you know, the Tesla full self-driving—that’s level two. What that means is you’re sitting there, and it doesn’t matter what the car does, you’re at fault. If that car suddenly decides to turn off and smash into a school bus and kill them all, it’s on you. Level three means the OEM, the manufacturer, assumes the liability. The first people to do that, right, is Mercedes in the S-Class. I forget what it’s called—some drive—but it’s level three, meaning when you turn the system on, you’re not driving the car. You’re sitting behind the wheel, and Mercedes is now liable for what happens. And that’s a huge step. Now, it only works on sunny days, on freeways, and it has to have a current 3D map of the road. You have to be going, I think, under 37 miles an hour. So right now, level three is really traffic jam assist. It doesn’t work in bad weather, doesn’t work at night, doesn’t work once you exit the freeway. In fact, the Mercedes vehicle has to have a barometer on it because when it has a current 3D map, if it’s suddenly like 50 feet up, well, it went up an off-ramp or down an off-ramp. So, they really take the liability part seriously, which Tesla obviously doesn’t. And then level four is just that, but it works in all weather, at night, wherever. And then level five is you don’t need a driver—the car is just level five autonomy, robo-car. So, it’s all coming soon, and again, what we’re doing is just understanding it. That’s what the Society of Engineers came up with. That’s the definition. I just want to explain to people what it is, and here’s what’s going to be happening, and here’s what the manufacturers want for various reasons.

Angel Sala-Belen: “The Inevitable” is talking about bleeding-edge technology, but at the end of the day, it’s just a bunch of guys around a campfire making other guys aware of, “Hey, what is this? What are we talking about?” So, EV hot rodding—dude, I have no idea what this is. Please tell me.

Jonny Lieberman: I barely have any idea what this is! I mean, look, there are ways to go about it. There’s a company like Unplugged Performance—they’re basically a Tesla tuning company at this point. They’ll lower the car, they’ll put it on better tires, they’ll fix the suspension, they’ll change the aero, they can pull weight out of it, but they don’t touch the motor. You might say, “Well, with a Model S Plaid, why would you want to touch it? It makes 1,020 horsepower as is—nothing to touch.” There are other people that say, “I want more power, or I want the battery to discharge faster,” or whatever. That is a smaller thing that’s going to start happening more and more, but that’s really like coding. Bisimoto is down in Orange County, and he is building his own 911s that have Tesla power plants in them, but with different coding. So, he’s able to say, “If this battery holds 100 kilowatt hours, discharge it 10 times faster than Tesla can do it,” and that can spin the motors quicker. A good OEM hot rod was the e-Tron—that was Ken Block’s car. It’s the batteries—it’s got four batteries out of the Audi, it’s the Q7 hybrid, so it’s four like 16-kilowatt batteries put together, and they discharge instantly. And what they can do is, those motors on the thing, if you’re up in level five—and I got to drive it—it’s insane! They spin at 28,000 RPM.

Angel Sala-Belen: What tire can even stay on that?

Jonny Lieberman: Oh, the tires! When I drove it, the guy was like, “Alright, guys, listen up. We’ve only got 36 tires.” And then it turned out we needed them because the tires last about three minutes. It’s insane! Plus, that car has the ability—whatever speed you’re at—you hit a button on the steering wheel, and it instantly reverses the motors. And because they’re electric, I mean, you know, max torque is at zero. So, you have a split second of no traction, but then boom! You’re going backwards at full speed. It’s wild. But anyways, my point is that those batteries—it’s not the software from the Audi Q7; it’s using the hardware from the Audi Q7. The motors are actually out of a Formula E car. It has, I think, two out of a Formula E race car. And then it’s the software.

And that’s the other thing we’re really trying to explain to people on The Inevitable—SDVs, Software-Defined Vehicles. It’s really hard to explain this to people, but do you remember—well, you don’t look like you’re that old—but do you remember before there was an iPhone, there were different sorts of phones? People had them—they did this, they were like little bars of soap, flipped open—all of it dead. Blackberry had 47% of the handheld communication market. Gone. They have zero. So, from half to zero—what changed? Software-defined phones. It was the iPhone. So, here’s just a screen, and you let the software dictate its functionality. No going back from it.

And I think once people really start to experience software-defined vehicles, it will click. Apple had the key advantage of having awesome hardware—the hardware was just great. When you have a software-defined vehicle, the only limit to the thing is how well the software is written. This is why Consumer Reports had this thing recently where they had a lady talking about the Rivian—I think it was the SUV, the R1S—and she’s like, “Ah, it’s the worst, I can’t stand how it drives,” blah blah blah. It’s funny because, in terms of owners or our readers, it has the highest satisfaction rating of all. But she hates it. And so, like, she doesn’t own it, so she doesn’t get to experience it.

Rivian, which I happen to own an R1T, is a software-defined vehicle, meaning it has the hardware, and then overnight, they can make it better with software. I went to bed one night, and I had 270 miles of range on the off-road tires. I woke up, and I had 285. There’s a camp mode—when I bought the truck, camp mode wasn’t there. Camp mode’s very useful. I went camping at the beach the other week, and I used it. They’re constantly making the product better, just like how your iPhone updates. And it’s a game changer. So, software is going to be the defining thing in cars going forward. Hardware is kind of there—again, I’ve got a 1,234-horsepower vehicle sitting in the parking lot, you know? That’s pretty good hardware. You know, like the Corvette Z06, right?

Angel Sala-Belen: Love it. Love the LS motor.

Jonny Lieberman: Right! And that motor—670 horsepower! In fact, that’s the most powerful naturally aspirated V8 ever put into a production car. Ever. That Lucid Sapphire out there has three 670-horsepower motors in it, and it has a 427-mile range, which is further than the Corvette can go on a tank of gas. So, my point in all this is that cars are changing fast. It’s all about software.

Angel Sala-Belen: So EV hot rodding is a combination of battery, motor, and software?

Jonny Lieberman: I mean, there’s an inverter and stuff like that—AC to DC things, and you know, you have level two and level three charging. But yeah, it’s just… Ford hired this guy, Doug Field—he came up with the iPhone, I think he was the project leader on the iPhone. Then he did the Tesla Model 3. Now he’s at Ford, cooking up the next generation of Ford EVs. And he’s a software guy. And who’s Ford hiring? Software guys. They know the hardware part. So, the race is on now to get people that are writing apps to stop doing that and start writing vehicle software.

And the U.S. is behind, which sucks. China has gotten this giant leap on us in terms of software-defined vehicles. Part of it is consumer mentality. Like, here, tell me about your car: “Oh, it’s got this much horsepower.” You go to China, and it’s like, “I have this processor, and I have full AI plus this new Nvidia graphics chip.” And people will go back to the dealer like, “Hey, I heard the new version came out, I want the new chip. Put the new chip in.” It’s completely different. So, China soon—I don’t know when exactly—they’re going to stop selling gasoline-powered cars. Europe is set to do that real soon. California, plus 11 other states, are set to do it. So, we’re going to be behind. And as a proud American, America should never be behind. We’re good at leading, you know? The Space Race—that was us. We won. Well, actually, we were like a month behind—the Soviets got there first—but then we went to the moon, and you know, they’re still… whatever they’re doing.

Angel Sala-Belen: You started going into my next question, which was: the American EV market compared to the rest of the world?

Jonny Lieberman: Five years behind. Although, we did cross this threshold in 2023, where it was over 8%. So, the U.S.—14 to 15 million new cars are sold a year. 1 million of them were EVs in 2023. Tesla, and I think a lot of this has to do with people that would buy EVs being kind of turned off by Elon Musk’s political behavior lately, and the kind of people that might, you know, be like, “Hey, I want to put out less CO2, less emissions. I don’t want my kid to have lung cancer.” Those kinds of people.

Angel Sala-Belen: If you’re going through that thought process, then yeah, you’re going to look at the company that you’re buying from.

Jonny Lieberman: So, Tesla sales—you know, there’s this narrative going around that EVs aren’t selling well. Teslas aren’t selling. Every single other EV maker—BMW, Mercedes, or companies that make both EVs and gasoline cars—their EV sales are up in 2024. Tesla’s sales are way down. Part of it is that Tesla keeps slashing and raising their prices, and everyone’s confused. We’re about five years behind the rest of the world. Like, in China, I think 60% of the new vehicles sold last year were EVs. They have really good EVs, and a lot of them. China is finally making great cars at a low cost.

Right now, part of the problem in the U.S. is that there aren’t a lot of cheap electric vehicles on the market. So, everyone with money who wanted an EV maybe bought one years ago. Even Rivian—I think they sold around 57,000 vehicles in 2023. Rivian sold about 55,000–56,000, and their forecast for 2024 is 57,000. So, they’re not going down, they’re increasing a little, but it’s not what Wall Street wants. They want them to sell 120,000 or whatever. But you know, the price point of a Rivian is like $70,000 and up. There’s no sweet spot in the market for a $35,000 to $55,000 Rivian yet. There will be in a couple of years, so the rush is on to get these cheap EVs out. That’ll start to change things, plus cheaper two- and three-row electric SUVs.

Chevy is there, but GM can’t get out of their own way. They had battery production problems. Ford did the Mustang Mach-E, which wasn’t something boring, but the thing is, most cars that sell are boring. Pickup trucks are the best-selling vehicles in America, followed by something like the Rav4. Actually, the Model 3 might have surpassed the Rav4, or maybe it was the Model Y. But people want boring, appliance-type vehicles—that’s what most people buy.

Angel Sala-Belen: I’m sure the American market will be similar when we start accepting EVs at the same level that China does. I think the market will evolve in the same sense, where people will want the best firmware, software, and hardware to support their vehicles.

Jonny Lieberman: Look, we’re a weird country. We’re very bifurcated—a split-up country. In San Jose, which is the second-biggest city in California, 42% of the vehicles registered in 2023 were electric. In North Dakota—where you can’t even think of a city big enough to announce—1% of vehicles were electric. So, are EVs ever going to take off in North Dakota? Nah. But in California, with 40 million people—California and New York combined have the same population as around 28 states. If California and New York say, “No more new gasoline cars,” that’s a huge part of the market, you know what I mean?

We also want to sell cars to the rest of the world. Norway, for instance—I think next year they won’t allow any new internal combustion vehicles. You can still buy used cars, but as for new ones, they’re going all-electric. Right now, in Norway, 90% of new cars sold are electric. And by the way, Norway is a really long country with long driving distances, and it gets really cold, yet it works just fine. Everyone out there saying, “Well, it’s not the Midwest,” needs to understand that Norway is colder, and people there have no problem with it because they don’t have a political axe to grind. We have a lot of political axes we want to grind in this country.

Angel Sala-Belen: I think it’s more about education and introducing people to EVs.

Jonny Lieberman: It’s fear of the unknown. If you don’t know about something, you fear it. If you fear something, you hate it. You know, it’s all that stuff. But again, it’s going to be very different trying to get Kansas on board with EVs—that’s going to be slower than San Diego. That’s just how it’s going to be.

Angel Sala-Belen: The Inevitable podcast has all sorts of guests and topics. Do you have a guest or topic that’s your favorite?

Jonny Lieberman: Well, okay, a couple. We had this guy, Carl Dums, who’s not dumb, but he’s the head of synthetic fuels at Porsche. In Chile, they have a lot of wind and not many people, so they have all this energy. If they put up windmills, they could harness it, but where’s it going to go? Well, what if they liquefied that energy and, through a couple of processes, turned it into gasoline? And when I say gasoline, I mean gasoline. Like, if you put it under a microscope and looked at synthetic versus real gas, a chemist would say it’s the same element. It’s molecularly identical, right? So, they can do that, and they’re going to start doing that.

That was fascinating because Porsche’s view is that, yes, everything will be electric, but there are currently 1.5 billion cars on Earth that still burn gasoline. Well, you don’t want more carbon dioxide being released, so this is carbon capture. In other words, you’re taking existing CO2 that’s already in the atmosphere, turning it into gasoline, and then burning it, so you’re not releasing anything new. It’s cool, but it has some problems. One issue is that it’s in Chile, so if I want to burn that gas here in LA, how do I get it from Chile to here? I’d have to put it on a boat. Well, what if that boat is hydrogen-powered? Okay, but how do you get the hydrogen? Ah, you have to burn gas to make it. There are logistical problems. Is Porsche going to open up a gas station? No. And it sounds like what they’re really doing might be part of a larger greenwashing process, where Chevron says, “Man, everyone’s passing laws against us. What if we stuck some synthetic gas into our real gas, so the gallon you buy at the gas station is 80% from Saudi Arabia, but 20% from Chile?” Oh, okay, it’s a little bit cleaner. That seems to be where it’s going. But hey, every little bit helps. That was a cool episode; I learned a lot.

I don’t know if you know who Kyle Connor is, but he runs a review channel, Out of Spec Reviews. He’s like 28, and this guy knows more about EVs than anybody on the planet—it’s the craziest thing. He’s just fascinating. Normally, our shows are an hour long; this one was over two hours with him. He was just fantastic. That episode hasn’t aired yet, but it’s airing in a couple of weeks.

One of my personal favorites was when we talked with car designers. If you talk to a designer—like a car designer employed by a company—they know what’s happening even if they won’t talk about it. So, for a podcast that’s focused on the future of cars, it’s fascinating. ArtCenter has a transportation department, and almost every designer in the U.S. went to ArtCenter—it’s a juggernaut for car design. We had two students on, and it was fascinating to talk to them because the odds are they’re going to be designing the cars we’re driving in 10 years.

Then I had this wonderful moment with my friend Maddie Walker. We asked her, “Where do you see yourself in 10 years?” And she said, “Oh, I’d love to be working on a Volkswagen, working on the new GTI.” Then we asked, “Where do you see yourself in 20 years?” And she said, “I’ll be 40.” So, I was like, wow! Just a perspective shift. But yeah, those were some good episodes.

Angel Sala-Belen: That’s cool. And then, what’s new or what’s next with you and The Inevitable?

Jonny Lieberman: The Inevitable—more of the same, sadly, for a future show. But I’m on this other podcast called Spike’s Car Radio. So, Spike Feresten—he’s a TV writer, he wrote for Seinfeld, and he wrote the “Soup Nazi” episode of Seinfeld. So, he’s pretty funny. Jerry Seinfeld’s on our podcast, and this guy Paul Zuckerman, who’s even funnier than all of them. It’s a really fun podcast. I’d say, if you’re like, “Man, I hate EVs,” fine—go listen to Spike’s Car Radio. It’s Porsches, feces, and Nazis—it’s the greatest podcast of them all.

Angel Sala-Belen: Do you have a defining moment in a vehicle, maybe an EV, that led you down the path you’re on right now?

Jonny Lieberman: Oh, definitely not in an EV. Well, okay, I can answer this a couple of ways. I’ve seen some stuff with EVs where I’m like, “Why are we even bothering with other kinds of cars?” I remember Lucid—they had me out before the Air went into production. They had some prototypes at Laguna Seca, and I was in the passenger seat. We were going around Turn 5, which is a huge left turn with a big run-out. It was a two-motor car, and it was dead silent. I think that car was making about 1,100 horsepower at the time.

Now, I’ve been lucky enough to have driven Laguna Seca probably a thousand laps, but I’ve also been in the right seat a lot because we used to film a lot of videos there. We’d have Randy Pobst, a pro race car driver, who used to hold the Laguna Seca production lap record. He’d be driving, and I’d be sitting in the right seat, talking to him as he drove. So, I’ve been through Turn 5 in Ferraris, Lamborghinis, McLarens—you name it, I’ve done it. I remember the first time, at full speed, silently going through Turn 5 in this EV, and the thought popped into my head: “Why do we need gas? This is crazy.”

Also, between Turn 5 and 6, for you racing nerds, that’s where the sound meter for Laguna Seca is. The protocol is, if you don’t have a high-decibel limit day, once you get through 5, you have to lift until after 6 and then start accelerating again. But it didn’t matter for this car because it didn’t make any noise, so that was interesting.

Another defining moment was in 2013 when we gave the Tesla Model S our Car of the Year award. It was shocking—like, wow, here’s this new thing that everyone kind of wrote off as vaporware, but it just blew us away. I remember 11 people were voting, and 11 hands went up. We got one as a long-term vehicle for a year, and I remember it had air suspension. When I got to my street, there was a spot where it was good for the car to raise up—I have this bad driveway situation. Anyway, it would do that, and then one day, it just started raising up by itself. That was the first time I experienced the power of over-the-air updates and software-defined vehicles. Someone wrote new code: “Hey, every day at this location, this guy is hitting the button to pop the car up—just do it for him.” That was like, “Oh my God!”

As for cars, one of my earliest memories is my dad had a Datsun 280Z. He used to drive me to Malibu—he loved driving. I remember being strapped to the front seat of the Z, and that was fun. You know, I’ve always been very bold, yet stupid, and I had the chance to try and take a Bugatti Chiron up to 250 mph. I thought I did it—I got to like 245. Then they checked the tape, and they were like, “No, that was 245.3.” What I didn’t know was that there was a crosswind hitting me, stopping the car from accelerating. So, I was like, “Oh, I’ll just do it again.” I should’ve changed the tires, taken a break, and waited for the wind. But I got up to like 240 mph, which was really fast. There’s a big difference between 210 mph and 240 mph for some reason. I remember the crosswinds hitting me, and at 240 mph, I had to make adjustments. I saw my kid’s face in my mind and thought, “What am I doing? Why? Who cares?” Just writing that the car goes 250 mph is as good as experiencing it. So, I’ve kind of run the full gamut of things you can do with cars.

Angel Sala-Belen: Jonny, thank you so much for joining us today. Looking forward to your 250 in the Bugatti, and we’re going to need footage—if you didn’t film it, it didn’t happen!

Jonny Lieberman: Well, it’s filmed. I don’t know where the footage is, but yeah, it was 245.3 mph. Close enough.

Angel Sala-Belenl: If any of the audience wants to get in touch with you or watch what you’re doing, where can they find you?

Jonny Lieberman: Yeah, I mean, go to motortrend.com—we’ve got a lot going on there. The Inevitable, wherever you get your podcasts, and we’re on YouTube. Spike’s Car Radio—it’s wherever you get your podcasts, and also now on YouTube. Or, my Instagram’s a pretty good spot. It’s just @JonnyLieberman, and yeah, that’s where you can find me.