In a candid outburst, an excellent summary in one breath: socio-economic ethics and suppression, pathological consumerism and planned obsolescence, monopolistic practices, creeping expropriation, destruction of the middle class and society, and much, much condition of loose cannon, in the form known as short-sighted greed.
All geared towards a single goal: ‘you'll own nothing and be happy’...
You’ll own nothing and be happy? They're trying to destroy us!
By:
Edison Motors
Canadian Semi-Truck Manufacturer
Built by truckers, for truckers
Edison Motors' Youtube channel
Transcript:
All right, this video, I want to talk about something that means a lot to me and one of the core values of Edison Motors is, we're in an investment raise right now, and I want to make sure that no investor comes in here that does not believe in the values I believe with.
That starts with right to repair, planned obsolescence and let's talk about the inshittification that's happening to the automobile manufacturing industry...
Subscriptions for brake pads? Now. To start with, I saw a news article from the drive the other day, and believe it or not, you're not allowed to change your own brake shoes anymore. At least not without paying a monthly subscription. So, if you want to buy a car and you want to change one of your brake pads, you know, a brake pad, a simple thing that wears down like a tire, you use it, you wear it down, it's maintenance, you replace it.
Sure would love to do my own. No, you got to buy a $2,000 to $6,000 computer. And then you need to pay a monthly subscription to have access to the computer to allow you to change your brake pads in your vehicle.
So, what does that mean? Well, most people aren't going to do that. Most people don't have $2 to $6,000 on top of the already stupid high price of a new car just to change your brake pads. Means people either aren't going to change their brake pads when they should, or they've got to go back to a dealer and pay a dealer.
They're just trapping you into this monthly subscription that doesn't need to occur. Sorry about my language in this video. It's going to be a little spicy. I'm a little bit worked up cuz this is horsehit.
Now, to start with, I have seen this in our trucking career, and me and Eric had a trucking company. We had a truck, needed a new turn signal. My turn signal stopped working. Pretty important on a truck, can't go to work without it. I go to buy a turn signal. They tell me that this turn signal, it's molded into this plastic steering column. So, in order to replace that, I needed the one that goes with a molded plastic steering column, that custom mold and it's canvas and it plugs in and it works off of that. You need that specific one.
Whereas back in the day, do you realize that all of these trucks behind me, this 1962 Kenworth has the exact same turn signal as this 1984 Kenworth and has the exact same turn signal as this 1998 Kenworth. My 2010 Western Star had that exact same turn signal. That's a common turn signal. It's been in trucks for years. It costs about $40 to $50. They're normally in at every LordCo, every little local parts, Napa distributor, the dealership would have them in stock. They didn't have this custom one for my truck. We had to wait 2 days to get that turn signal in. You add up the $500 turn signal. Then you add up the $3,000 a day that we were missing and lost revenue from having that truck down. And that is a $6,500 turn signal that that cost us, that I should have bought for $40 and had on the shelf.
It's just, this is becoming stupid out there. They are pushing the middle class out of work. Used to be you were able to buy a truck old blue. That 1969 Kenworth we got back there. I bought that off the original owner in 1969 who bought it.
How ownership built the middle class, Old Bob Murphy, Bob Murphy bought it. He restored it. Now it may be a bit of a truck of thesis in that... well it's on its third motor. I think it's got four transmissions, two sets of rear ends. So, it's been changed out, but he could change it and he could send that truck off to work. He bought it, he ran it until he retired and then I took it over and I've been, was running that truck since then.
But that's what you used to be able to do. You used to be able to buy a vehicle and hold on to that vehicle and then get ahead. Now, as an owner operator, say you buy a truck, you go in the first four or five years, that truck has a payment, you pay that truck off, you've still got a good truck for another four or five years, another 10 years even. Well, now you can afford to buy a second truck. You can grow your business, you can grow your company. If you don't want to grow and you're a single one-off owner operator, well, now you got a little bit that you can save away for a rainy day fund.
You used to see the same thing in agriculture. Guess what? There's no farmers out there that have rainy day funds anymore. Ask how many farmers you know that have rainy day funds because the equipment is getting so goddamn expensive that you've got to go to a bank. You've got to get it financed. You got to keep it. The equipment's going to lock itself down. You need to pay the dealership. And we're losing all the small town farmers, the truckers that bring us the stuff we need, the farmers that bring us the food we eat. We're losing that middle class.
And think about it this way, too. Why does it mean so much? Right now, we are producing more than we ever have in human history. Our levels of production, producing more, but having Less: we've got computers, we got robots, we got AI, we got stuff that our grandparents never dreamed of having. We can produce so much crap, but we produce crap.
My grandpa, he used to be able to support a family of five off of one income. My grandma didn't have to work, stayed at home. They had a five-bedroom house in the city, 1 acre, and he was just a truck driver. He used to drive a gravel truck.
What family can do that anymore? Why? We're producing more, but we're producing crap. I've seen an article in the paper of... um... it was basically tech companies. Uh, I forgot what phone company it was, but it was complaining that people were hoarding their devices and hoarding their cell phones because they weren't replacing them every year.
Tech companies & planned obsolescence, that's it. They were complaining that their cell phones were being held on, for some people hold on to their cell phones for 2 to 3 years and they despised those people.
You could tell that the attitude in there, they were getting mad. Why weren't people buying junk? Why, why do I need to buy a $2,000 cell phone that I got to replace every single year for one mildly upgrade? Like, it's not like there's big progress upgrades. The next year cell phone is only slightly better than the previous year, but you just got to keep buying, you got to keep financing it cuz it's expensive. You can't fix it yourself. And if it's something like a cell phone, where does it impact things like trucking, things like farming, things that our economy and our entire way of life survive on? And it's being pushed down.
Corporate greed & Wall Street pressure. And I have seen it now myself. There is so much corporate greed. The reason why they're doing these subscriptions is that they're trying to satisfy these investors sitting on Wall Street, sitting on Bay Street, that want to just shovel this stuff down. They want a subscription. It's easy. You just pay somebody to set up the subscription for that car program and then that person pays $60 a month forever. You sell the car once, but you can sell the subscription as many times as you want for very little.
But it's shortsighted. It's greedy. It's destroying the middle class. It's making everybody broke. And what's going to happen is eventually we're going to be able to stop affording things. People are already doing it. Like 10-year truck payments, 15-year truck payments, like stop. It's enough.
I've had my share dealing with investors with The "Heart Medication" investor horror story at Edison Motors. So, I think I have a very unique perspective on exactly what is happening here because I've met with these types of investors and we've told them, "No, we don't want them."
So, there was one investor. I'm definitely not a big ass fan of this guy, but he flew us all the way down to meet with us. And then he came into that board meeting. We're sitting there and he said, "Why should I invest in you?" You're like, you're... I normally invest in healthcare. I'm like, I don't know. You tell me. You were the one that brought us down here.
So this guy, he was bragging. And this is the scary dead scary part to me is that he was proud of this. So this isn't a scary story. This is something that this guy was bragging to us about what a smart investor was. But he told us that he likes to invest in healthcare and pharmaceutical companies because you can increase the price on it. And he was saying that how he found this one pharmaceutical. They were making a heart medication drug that basically helped people that have heart conditions. And when he bought that company, they originally selling it something for about 20-$30 a month is what somebody was paying to get that heart medication.
He bought it out, took those patents. He's like, I was able to get that relisted between $500 and $1,000 a month for that healthcare medication. He's like, here's the great thing. He's like, "That's why I invest in that because what are they going to do? They're going to spend $1,000 a month on their heart pill or they're going to die." He's like, "You can just trap people into paying forever because they die if they don't pay you. Why would I invest in a truck?"
Pump and dump schemes. There was other people we met, that investors that wanted us to lie about, not lie, give the best possible scenario about our truck production, our future goals, and be like, can you say that you're going to be at 5,000 trucks a year within the next 2 years, uh, 3 years? We're like, well, no, because we're not going to be at 3,000 or 5,000 trucks a year within the next 3-4 years. And they're like, "Well, it doesn't really matter because here's the thing, is we can promise that and then we can go out, we can get listed, we can raise some more money and by the time you don't get there, you can blame things like, you can blame the market, you can blame the economy, you can blame supply chain. There's all sorts of reasons why you didn't miss the goal, but then you can raise all that.
That's a pump and dump. Like just zero foresighted. Push a product out to market that's not ready. Push a product out there that's not ready to go and then just leave somebody else holding the bag. Leave somebody else. Cuz guess what? The big institutional investors will get in. Then that company will go down. The company will collapse. And then who's left holding the bag? The average retail investor that gets screwed when the big guys leave.
It's this kind of thing. Wanting founders to lie, wanting founders to misrepresent the truth. Investors with no value whatsoever are one of the large reasons why we're seeing this crap today. The only thing they give a crap about is their returns on their investment. They care about that so much that they are willing to brag to us in a board meeting how they let people die because it's more money for them.
So, we are raising money right: Edison Motors' investment philosophy now, and I just want to be very very clear that nobody, nobody should invest in Edison Motors unless you want it done the way we're doing it. We are gonna build trucks like those you see behind me. Simple turn signals, simple to repair. Am I going to be the richest guy in the world? No. No. As the guy that uh co-founder of Edison, I am not going to be the richest guy in the world doing it this way. But I'm going to build a truck that I believe in, a truck that I want to drive. I've seen it myself.
We could make more money right now. We could do a lot more. I've The Right to Repair, & Diagnostic Subscriptions, seen examples of this. There was a company that pissed me off the other day. It was a little while ago actually, but they had this program software and they wanted us to sell our customers an optional subscription package for $250, $300 a month. And what it would do is when the engine and the truck had a fault code, they could automatically read it for $300 a month. you would have access to the program to read the fault code on our truck, or it could send you an email if you had sell service. It could send you an email to the office with the fault codes.
But here is the thing. They were trying to get us to sell that forum under right to repair. They're like, you could put that under the guise of right to repair because you're giving people access to this information that they would normally only get if they went back to you, back to the dealer and back to the warehouse. So instead of coming back to you, they can just pay $250, $300 a month, and they get it. Now, keep in mind that company was going to take like a 15-20% cut of that. So they're going to make a ton of money, too.
But you know why? This is horsehit. It's not for right to repair. It's not served as sold as a convenience because the truck already knows what's wrong with it. This truck knows what's going on with this computer system. If it's throwing a check engine light, the truck knows why it's throwing a check engine light. It could say, "It's that sensor. It's this sensor. This is what's going on. Here's what the issue is." The truck knows it.
They're just making you pay more every single month or every time you got to go in there to know what's wrong with a truck that already knows what's wrong. LCD screens are pretty cheap. It's easy to put in there. It's easy to have that information displayed. Why would you pay a monthly subscription for a vehicle that you already own just like no, cuz that's just it's reoccurring revenue. It's great cuz then every time you sell a truck, you'll get $300 a month in perpetuity for the life of that truck.
I don't want that though. I don't want $300 a month in perpetuity from the guy I sell the truck to. I want a person that says, "Hey, I bought that truck. It's been a good truck for me for the last four or five years. I've got that truck paid off. I'm going to go buy another truck and expand my fleet." And then he comes back to me for another truck. And then he grows those trucks and now he wants to buy two, three trucks. So over 20 years, I can sell that guy multiple trucks or I can trap him into a monthly payment with one truck that he like it's just but it's the way they look.
It's short-sighted. It's easy money. It's greedy easy money. It's easy to sell a subscription. It's harder to sell a good truck over the long run, but we need to do something. The world is getting shittier and shittier. We are producing more than we have ever had in our entire civilization. But people are struggling more than they ever have. Our generation right now is struggling more than our grandparents. But we're producing more. But we're just producing. We're producing junk. We're producing plastic.
That Hyundai. When people get tired of that subscription, tired of those brake pads they can't change. It's been a few years. It's on a few sets of brake pads. And then they buy a new one, they send that one off to the wrecker. That's why we have so little cuz we're not putting any of our resources into building stuff that matters.
We could be building bridges. We could be building railways. We could be building MRI machines, hospitals, schools. But no, we need to keep this giant capitalist structure going to just keep building us junk after junk after junk till the middle class is gone, till we're not owning a damn thing in our lives. We're only renting stuff.
I've had enough. So, if if you are an investor that's thinking about Edison Motors and you're thinking you're going to make a ton of money and we're going to put all of these things first, don't invest. Don't come here. I don't want that money. We'll do things slower, but we'll do things the right way. We'll build a good truck that lasts. I don't know what else to do because if we don't do it, nobody else will.