Um, you know, it's a film that doesn't really explain everything to the audience as you just mentioned, but as a producer, um, What convinced you that this was a story worth fighting for? You know, besides your relationship with Darren, professional and personal, what was there that made you feel that, you know what, we got to make it like this as a producer and make sure Darren gets his vision across to the screen for the audience? A

lot of ways I can go because it was a big endeavor to make the film and had a lot of challenges.

But I'll just give a little bit of the genesis.

Sure.

We had read a book, a short story by Roald Dahl called The Adventures of Henry Sugar, which is kind of a box within a box story.

There's a story within a story in that.

And it's a great short story.

I would love to hear that.

And so I, I'm curious what some of those lessons learned are, and maybe one way to ask the question is what popped up over the last 10 years that you never would have guessed you needed to be good at when you first started launching these systems in 2016?

Yeah.

You know, we started off delivering life-saving products, right? And our customers need, need life-saving products all the time in all weather conditions.

And you would think it's, you know, wind, these things, but one of the weirdest things is actually solar weather.

So there's solar flares that happen on the sun, so basically big explosions that send radiation to the Earth.

They can mess with the ionosphere, and that can cause basically the RF signals coming from GPS satellites to be faster or slower than you expect, and that can lead to degradation and challenges in navigation systems.

And so here's one example that we, when we were starting off, we didn't think that this was gonna be something we have to figure out.

And you had to show your ability to manage all these aircrafts that are flying, so you wrote systems, you built systems.

Should I know it?

Yeah.

There were a lot of...

Uh, in our, in our year at AFI, um, Doug Ellin was there, um, Scott Silver, um, Mark Waters, um, and, and a, and a few other filmmakers who went on to be pretty successful, um, in different ways, um, who were in that year with us.

We had a pretty strong year, um, of st- of student body, and AFI was kinda like, had some real issues.

And our year was very militant, and we kind of changed the system, which benefited students that came after us.

Um-... collectively.

Mm

How does the EV3 kind of fit into that broader strategy?

I think things are settling down in the EV market so we've had a lot of disruption really over the last couple of months we've started to see our sales slightly start to increase I think some of it in the last 30 days has been driven by the gas price increases but we see moderate growth moving forward in our EVs but it's part of a holistic strategy we have to electrify our lineup not only with battery electric EVs but our hybrid sales have been really increasing so Last year we grew our hybrid sales about 80%.

We're looking to do that again this year, almost double the number of hybrids that we have to offer.

We talked today about bringing the Sportage hybrid production to the U.S. and the new Savannah plant, so we're looking forward to that increased capacity.

But we're looking to grow our entire range of vehicles, whether it be an ICE vehicle, significant growth on our hybrids, and moderate growth on our EVs.

What does it take now in this market today to sell an EV? The EV3 coming in at that kind of compact entry point, that kind of attainable price point, is affordability really the most important thing now to a customer that doesn't have the tax credit to help offset? Is it a mix of different things?

I don't think your buyer looking for an EV is looking for the most affordable car option from a purchase price or the monthly lease payment, maybe the total cost of ownership.

And if you're able to charge at home, it really lowers the cost of operating that car.