I mean, so how do you navigate all of that as a consumer?

Yeah, it's a real tough time right now, I think, for a lot of people trying to balance their budgets.

We look at all these skyrocketing costs and we try to see what we need to do to get that under control.

And for me as a car person, if you're in the market for a car, I... uh you know strongly strongly strongly beg of you to go and do some a little bit of research um on you know what first of all on what these cars cost now because you're going to be shocked if you haven't bought a car in the past six years um and two maybe consider uh doing some fuel economy math The government publishes a list of every single make and model, I think, down to the trim level and what it would cost to fill up that car.

Car shopping websites typically have a fuel economy calculator.

We just built one for Edmunds.

So if you want to Google it.

So listen, what does this mean for auto companies and the auto industry? Will these new standards make them less competitive in the global market? Also considering the transition to electric vehicles?

I mean, automatic emergency braking, better headlights, all these things are pieces of technology and computers that obviously drive up the price.

Yeah, and that's one of the things that's sometimes missing from the discussion, right? The car f- from 20 years ago is so much more underequipped than a car from 10 years ago even.

Um, around 10 years ago is when we started seeing the legal requirement for a backup camera on all new vehicles sold in the United States.

Um, we started seeing Android Auto and Apple CarPlay be a- adopted far and wide for most vehicles around 10 years ago.

So if you compare, you know, even a car from 2016 to not even that far back from 2016, 2013 even, maybe the same car, one s- feels significantly more modern and better equipped than those cars from, you know, maybe even two, three years before that.

And so that is something that we have to consider.

But at the same time, you know, automakers have had supply chains in place for effectively a century now, and so they know how to build cars to a cost.

Wow.