Welcome back to the podcast. Today, Ford Humbolded by its competition, Mercedes-Benz GLB and the Tesla Model Y plus.

Also, today I'll tell you later how GM want to wean themselves away from Chinese parts.

I'll start with news of Ford's CEO, Jim Farley, saying that when they took apart rival EVs,

it forced Ford to rethink about engineering in their entire organization

on the Office Hours Business Edition podcast. He said that Ford engineers disassembled Tesla's

Model 3 and Chinese EVs and found major differences versus how Ford thought they knew how to make

electric cars. They compared the Mustang Mac E. At that point,

the second best-selling EV in the US, to the Model 3 and found the Mac E's wiring loom alone

was 1.6 kilometres longer, adding 70 pounds of copper. And every pound in an EV consumes battery

capacity and the extra wiring was $200 more per battery to carry the added

mass as well. Those findings helped prompt Ford's reorganisation back in 2022, creating the Model E

unit focused on entirely new ways of thinking about how to build electric cars. Mercedes-Benz are next in the news.

They're going to rename the EQB. The EQB will now be known as the GLB with EQ technology.

And I imagine over time that whole EQ thing will just get swept under the cup. It'll be called the GLB.

The new model will debut on the 8th of December. It'll enter markets in early

2006, expected in the US as a 2027 model year. Mercedes-B is publishing technical information and

images ahead of the reveal. This puts the GLB between compact and mid-size. We think the cockpit

is shown. Exterior bodywork, though, is all concealed under heavy

camouflage. Mercedes did release cabin images showing the GLB on the MMA modular architecture

looks a lot like the CLA, and that's no bad thing. Very dense, electronics-focused layout

with three dashboard screens, the MBUX Superscreen, which is not the hyper screen on the EQS and EQE.

The centre console is a floating design with physical switches beneath the central display and door panels similar to the CLA, which again, no bad thing.

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