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Matt and Sean talk about Matt’s CES 2026 visit, the good, the bad, the funny … including Donut Labs solid state battery.
Watch the Undecided with Matt Ferrell episode, The Most Controversial Battery at CES 2026 https://youtu.be/Kt4c0o_3eyY?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi7uzySCXq8VXhodHB5B5OiQ
Matt and Sean talk about Matt’s CES 2026 visit, the good, the bad, the funny … including Donut Labs solid state battery.
Watch the Undecided with Matt Ferrell episode, The Most Controversial Battery at CES 2026 https://youtu.be/Kt4c0o_3eyY?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi7uzySCXq8VXhodHB5B5OiQ
Follow us on X: @stilltbdfm @byseanferrell @mattferrell or @undecidedmf
Undecided with Matt Ferrell: https://www.youtube.com/undecidedmf
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Creators and Guests
What is Still To Be Determined?
Join Matt Ferrell from the YouTube Channel, Undecided, and his brother Sean Ferrell as they discuss electric vehicles, renewable energy, smart technologies, and how they impact our lives. Still TBD continues the conversation from the Undecided YouTube channel.
Sean Ferrell: Today on Still To Be Determined, we're talking about Matt's trip to CES. We're also taking a look at your comments on our most recent conversations. Thank you everybody for checking out Still to be Determined. This is of course the follow up podcast to Undecided with Matt Ferrell. I, sadly for all of us, am not Matt Ferrell. I am his older brother, Sean. I am a writer. I write some sci fi, write some horror, write some stuff for kids. And with me, as always, is the aforementioned Matt, who is recently back Yes, from CES. How you doing, Matt?
Matt Ferrell: Tired, Sean. Yeah, CES. CES is exhausting. I heard one tech reporter from Engadget, when somebody asked him like, how. What do you feel about CES? He's like, I. I call it Hell on Earth was how he described it, which I thought was really funny. Yeah.
Sean Ferrell: Do you find it Hell on Earth or do you find it like a technophiles Disney World or somewhere in between?
Matt Ferrell: It's actually both. There's a certain aspect of it that I just find it's so not me. You and I have joked about the Ferrell DNA, Ferrell energy.
Sean Ferrell: Yes.
Matt Ferrell: Get sleepy and lay on a couch. That's how we're built. So the idea of walking 20,000 steps a day and walking miles and miles and miles around Las Vegas, which I can't stand in Las Vegas, just the number of people, there's like 150,000 people or something insane at the convention, I don't like that. But I do enjoy talking to the people and meeting new people. And I had a bunch of people come up to me and say hi. And going to the booths and meeting new people at the different companies and seeing the cool tech, that's fun, but it comes with a whole bag of stuff I wish wasn't part of the process. Yeah.
Sean Ferrell: And I imagine there's so I find just hype exhausting.
Matt Ferrell: It's hype. Hype, Hype. Yeah.
Sean Ferrell: And that's all that CES is in some cases. Some. You know, some of the. Some of the booths, I'm sure, are nothing but hype. And then there are other booths that actually have content, but some of them are just like, hey, we're the future. What do you got? Well, nothing yet, but come back in a day or two of that. Yeah.
Matt Ferrell: Yeah.
Sean Ferrell: So before we get deeper into Matt's exposure to the throngs of techies in CES in Las Vegas, we're going to jump into the comments on our latest episode, which was 290 the State of Perovskite Solar Roundup. This one, almost like Darth Sirius doesn't want us to talk about this video. It wants us to talk about CES. Darth writes, you guys are always talking about game changers. Donut Labs new full all solid state battery they announced at CES a couple of days ago. First gen, 400 watt hours. He goes on from there. Well Darth, thank you for jumping in the comments on Still to be Determined to say that. Guess what? Matt and I are going to talk about that. Yeah, we are, because Matt saw that at CES. So stay tuned. Babarudra jumped in the comments to say, what a shock. Where does Matt think billionaires should invest batteries? He's probably right though. After having been at CES, let me ask you this, you don't have to go into any details, but did you see anything there that you were like, oh yeah, this is also a good place to invest?
Matt Ferrell: There were some things around some nuclear tech that I saw and I was like, that makes sense. As well as geothermal stuff I saw that was there. Same thing, right? So it was. Yeah, it's most of the stuff I typically talk about on the channel. There was stuff there I was like, yeah, there you go.
Sean Ferrell: John Revere Anderson says please explore regulatory progress in regard to vehicle to home installation. I own an EV fully capable of supplying most of my small farm's electricity for four days in case of a power outage. But I can't yet connect in Ontario, Canada as there is no authorizing regulatory framework permitting it. Thanks for your very interesting work on perovskite advancements. So this falls right into the category. We talk about this quite a bit on the channel. We talk about all these things, but all these things are not equal to everybody around the globe. A lot of our commenters, they show up from all over the globe and they always bring with them their specific context where they say, oh, here in the Netherlands we do X. And we're like, oh, that would be great if we could do that here in the U.S. but here in the U.S. no, that's not an option. This is yet another case of the regulatory framework in this specific context in Ontario, Canada, keeping a consumer from being able to do something that somebody who lives elsewhere could probably do pretty easily. Do you want to talk about vehicle to home power supply first?
Matt Ferrell: Yeah.
Sean Ferrell: And then talk about what you understand as far as whether there is advancements in the regulations or a change in the thinking around the actual design of those vehicles. Is this something they are continuing to think about as an option for vehicles like this or is this just becoming a yeah, it didn't work out.
Matt Ferrell: Oh, no. This is definitely. This is definitely, from my opinion, coming. It's going to be kind of ubiquitous at some point. It's just frustrating how long it's taken to happen. There's quite a few EVs on the market, and they've been on the market for years that you can buy that are capable of this. And it's just frustrating that either you have to use that company's very specific charger infrastructure hooked into your home, which can be very expensive, or there just isn't any charger available for you, even though your car can do it, or there's regulations. Even if you did have the unit, you still can't do it because the regulations haven't caught up to what's happening. So it depends on where you are. Like, I didn't know that in Canada that they don't even have the regulations to allow you to do it, because, like, here we can do it. It's just the hardware to do it has been limited up until now, and it's becoming a little more commonplace. Not commonplace, but there are several options on the market now that can do this, and there's more coming. So it's like, I've seen and talked to companies that are doing this exact thing. So it's definitely not a failed technology. It's just taking way longer to roll out than I would have ever thought. It's just very frustrating.
Sean Ferrell: Do you think it's. Is it time for people to start considering when they have an electric vehicle, that they might in fact be driving a battery around, and that there might be ways that they could take advantage of that in their homes? So that if you, say, had solar panels on your roof and you've got a couple of batteries in your garage, could a third battery in fact be the car? So that you drive around a bit, but also that battery ends up capturing some of your solar production, and then later in the evening, maybe it's actually adding to what you're pulling from for your home?
Matt Ferrell: Well, I mean, think about it this way. I've done videos on my solar and battery installation, and my whole setup was very expensive. And I've got 20 kilowatt hours of batteries in my garage. 20 kilowatt hours. My car has something like 65 to 70 in it. So it's got like three to four times the energy storage is in a car versus what you typically would put in home battery storage. So where that home battery might get me through 24 hours, my car could get me days and days if I want that. I want to be able to tap into that if I need it. And I think anybody with an EV does need to think about the use case of you're driving the largest energy storage device you will ever own. It just happens to be on wheels. You should be able to plug this in and use that energy any way you want. So I think consumers need to be more aware of this. And I hope as more customers are aware of it and they see these cars of like, they have a choice between two cars and one can do this and one can't, they choose the one that can. It's those kind of things that will really start to probably move the needle faster. I'm hoping it's been very slow so far.
Sean Ferrell: And then of course, local advocacy as well. Yeah, reaching out to, like, for our friend here, John, who is writing in with this comment, maybe reach out to people in your community and see if you can't get a local council member or somebody in elected government to actually listen to you about this as something that you would hope to see changed. Because it sounds like that's the hurdle that's standing in front of you. So best of luck on that. Brendan Cummins jumped into the comments with a question about repurposing, and we see this a lot. How much do you think it would cost to swap an elevator motor into a motor generator? Turn every elevator into an energy storage system? This is something we've talked about in the past. This, in fact, is done.
Matt Ferrell: Yes, it is.
Sean Ferrell: So you want to talk about that a bit.
Matt Ferrell: This is actually pretty common, and I didn't know that this is common. Like, there's a hotel I visited in Connecticut that is a passive house kind of certified building. And one of the things that they threw. He just tossed it out there like it was nothing. As he's walking, the owner's walking me through the building. He's like, yeah, in our elevators, they do regenerative braking and we, we can store them up high at night, and then when we need energy, we just drop the elevator and we get a little boost of energy. And I was like, wait, wait, wait, can you back up and just like talk about that? Because I didn't know that was a thing. It's a thing. And I've, I've heard that more and more at different buildings do similar things. So this is much more common than I expected. And you don't have to. It's not an expensive thing to do. It's like an electric motor can do this. It's just hang and reversed. Basically becomes like a dynamo just generating energy. So it's. It's something that is very easily doable. It just. It's a matter of making sure that you have the proper, like, circuits set up, and if you need energy storage or anything like that. So there might be additional cost beyond just the elevator itself, but it's a low cost that pays for itself from the energy savings you get just from the elevators going down every time they go down. And the more people and weight you have in that thing when it goes down, the more power it generates.
Sean Ferrell: Right.
Matt Ferrell: So it's interesting. It's really fascinating.
Sean Ferrell: That is interesting. And it also taps into a couple of other things we've talked about previously on the channel. And I'm going back pretty deep now, a couple of years at least. We've talked about flywheel technology, which is, of course, taking a great big wheel and spinning it up, and then you just put on a brake, and that wheel holds all that energy until you need to release it. Well, an elevator connected to some kind of flywheel technology would be doing this as well. So you could have the elevator with its own regenerative braking, but you could also have a flywheel attached. And then another thing we've talked about in similar fashion, using gravity as your energy producer, and I remember we had a conversation around repurposing coal mine shafts along the same. Along the same line, you got this great big hole in the ground. Well, why don't you just start dropping some stuff down that shaft that's connected to a wheel? You can spin it up, and it's just a turbine. That's all it is. So I find myself thinking about, well, you get these turbines, you get these flywheels, maybe connect some of that to solar panels to use that solar energy during the day to actually lift the weights back up. All sorts of ways of connecting these things. It becomes very Rube Goldberg. But the fun thing about Rube Goldberg is Rube Goldberg is really cool. So that's where I land in all of that. Thank you so much for the comments on that episode, everybody. We appreciate it. On now to our conversation about Matt's most recent. This is, of course, the. Matthew has landed solidly on both feet at CES. And here we are. The image of this video, as you will see, that I captured, that is not, in fact, Matt in the middle of that image, that is a robot, and I believe it's a breakdancing robot, if I remember the video correctly.
So, Matt, let's just start right off with a couple of first impressions around CES. I did not go with you. Somebody didn't invite me. That's fine. I'm not hurt, Sean. I'm not hurt.
Matt Ferrell: People. People asked about you, Sean. Some people asked about you, probably trying to notice that you weren't with me.
Sean Ferrell: But you were not alone. I understand you were being followed around with people gathering evidence. So do you want to talk a little bit about the entourage you took with you?
Matt Ferrell: This was, you know me, Sean. The way I would describe this is. This is awkward. I was followed around for a couple hours by a documentary film crew. And so I had a dude all decked out, big boom pole, big fuzzy shotgun microphone following me around. Cameraman, producer, Just like I was being followed around, right? And it looked like Matt Ferrell was walking in going, look at me. Don't you know who I am? I'm a big deal. That's what it looked like. So it was super, super awkward.
Sean Ferrell: That's really. That is your personality in a nutshell. Yeah. That's just like. That's who you've always been.
Matt Ferrell: Always. So the other aspect of it that I found really, really funny was it was like documentary Inception, because I'm walking, they're following me, booth to booth, as I'm talking to people, and I've got my camera, so I've got this little DJI Osmo pocket cam, and it's this little stick about this big, and it's got this little dinky camera on top. It's like a little gimbal, and it looks like a toy. It looks like a joke. It takes great footage, and it's very smooth. So I've got this little camera, and I'm talking to somebody at this one booth, and I'm talking to the engineer and asking him questions. And behind me is a film crew filming me film that guy. So it was like this weird, right? Like, what is happening here? Thankfully, they kind of stayed out of my periphery as much as they could. So as I'm talking to people, I didn't see them, but occasionally I would see a big fuzzy thing bop down in my vision. I'd be like, oh, yeah, I'm being followed by a film crew. Yeah. Really, really weird.
Sean Ferrell: To make it weirder to know that you were on security cameras at that time.
Matt Ferrell: So somewhere there's a camera filming a.
Sean Ferrell: Filming security guy watching a monitor, where you've got a film crew filming you film a guy.
Matt Ferrell: Yeah. But to explain what this was, it was. It was. There was a documentary film being made. I'm not the subject of it at all, but they're following several different people around the country that have really kind of uprooted and changed their lives around sustainability and technology and climate change. And they're following them as to what they like to do. And their style of filmmaking is something called cinema verite, which is A Day in the Life. So they, they don't do sit down talking head interviews. They like to kind of be a fly in the wall and follow somebody through their life and then extract the bits of the. What happens over the course of a day to tell a story. And they wanted to go to CES for booths and companies and see what's happening for sustainable tech, but they wanted kind of like an avatar, somebody they could follow for that cinema verite style to go booth to booth and hear what people have to say at those booths. And so they reached out to me saying, are you going to CES? And I was like, yeah. They're like, can we follow you around and just film you talking to these companies? And I was like, okay. So that's what that was. It's like, I'm not the. The movie may be finished and I may not be in any of the footage. It's like, if I am in there, it may be like 10 seconds, just like, boom, and I'm gone. So who knows what's going to be used? But it was very funny on the show floor because as I would leave, the producer would stay behind and have anybody I talked to had to sign off permission, rights, waivers. Yeah. To be able to use that footage. And I heard later through some people that were there with me is. It was kind of. There was a lot of people talking about it. Right. Like, several of the companies were like, wow, like, Matt's a big deal. No, no, this was not what that was. No.
Sean Ferrell: Well, let that rumor go out. Let it be heard across the land that Matt Ferrell is a big deal.
Matt Ferrell: Yeah.
Sean Ferrell: At least in my heart. So.
Matt Ferrell: Oh, Sean.
Sean Ferrell: Oh, yes. So we've already heard from a commenter on the Still to be Determined comments talking about the Donut battery. So here we are on this video and somebody jumps in immediately. Anari Gillen jumps in to say about the Donut battery. For what it's worth, here in Finland, all the experts are very skeptical. The baffling thing is that they seem to also claim that the thing is already in small scale production. So the truth should be out quite soon, which in turn means that there is not much money to be gathered from the risk investors. So here's somebody landing, it seems fairly close beside you in your video. You're like, I'm going to wait and see. You've been bitten by the. Like, we've got a big announcement to make. Bug before and I think it's once bitten, twice shy. You're looking at this and saying, I'm not going to talk about this in that way again. So what? Without. There's nothing about this conversation that should be interpreted as we think Donut's lying. That is not what we are saying here in any way, shape or form. What we are saying is how do you begin to believe or question the claims of companies in this field when you as a consumer are coming to a product and you see it's got brand new, all new, best tech ever. This thing does this. How do you begin to parse that? How do you begin to look at that and say, is that in fact what's really happening?
Matt Ferrell: Donut was the talk of the town when I was there with all my friends. I'm friends with Ryan from the channel Ziroth and Ricky from Two Bit Da Vinci and Alex from Ticker Symbol you. And like we had dinner one night and like we talked about this a lot. And my friend Ryan was like a dog with a bone with the Donut folks. He kept going to their booth talking to them. Then he'd leave and do research and he'd come back and ask the follow up questions and then he leave and do research and he come back. He did that all day, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And in fact Ricky, when he went and talked to Donut they said, yeah, Ryan just, he kept coming back. He just kept coming back. So it's like. And I did the same thing when I was there. I spent maybe 20 minutes talking to different people and I tried talking to different people at the booth asking them similar questions to see if I could trip any of them up to get any of them to reveal anything. And they were clearly on lockdown because they like, like same thing. And not all of them worked for Donut. There were partner companies, one called Watt and another one called they were making, I think it's called the Velociraptor motorcycle. I think it's what they're making. Talk to them, try to see if they get them to give any hints. And it was like, as soon as I would get into like what is this battery? They'd be like, oh, you should talk to the Donut guys. And then you talk to the Donut guys and the Donut guys are like, at this time we are not saying anything about the chemistry or the manufacturing methods.
Sean Ferrell: And I, once it's out, they won't be able to stop that, right? Once it's out in the wild, somebody will tear it apart and they'll just be like, this is what's going on.
Matt Ferrell: But that's the interesting thing here is because like, asked the CTO, I asked him some very pointed questions and I kept asking numerous times in different ways of like, do you have third party verification against what you have? And he basically said, yes, they've been doing third party verificate validation all along. But he said it's not shareable because there's proprietary information. They're not, they don't want to share yet. So it's not shareable. I said, are you going to put something together and obfuscate some things for proprietary reasons, but share some third party validation with the public? And he basically said yes. Reading between the lines, he basically said yes. And when that's going to come was not. He was not going to give a date to when that was going to come. But he alluded to the fact it was going to be a few months, like three or four months, which is kind of in sync when those motorcycles are due to start shipping to customers. So it's like, it makes sense why they're not releasing things until that point because as soon as the products end up in people's hands, somebody's going to buy one, somebody's going to tear it down and rip it open and find out what's inside. So it's like, it makes sense that they aren't going to release that information until customers like you and me would be able to get our hands on it, because their partners already have their hands on the batteries. They're already being manufactured right now. That was the other thing the CTO confirmed for me was their factory will be at 1 gigawatt hour scale by the sometime this year, which means they are already producing a fair number of cells right now, which is shocking. And when I asked him why, I kept saying, you surprised everybody.
Why did you choose this method of surprising everybody? And he said, without naming names, he said other companies have taken the other tact where you announce like, we got a solid state battery, but it's still an R&D. And he was, Quantumscape's a perfect example of this. They've been around for years and we've been very frustrated with how slow it's taken them to come up with their battery. But we're seeing progress being made as this very slow progress. And they're still not out of pilot testing right now. So it's like he was saying, we didn't want to come out until we were not just saying we have an idea for a battery, but we're actually making it right now. Our partners have it. They have products that are about to come out. Right. And he wanted to do that. And you can understand from a marketing perspective, because that's going to get a huge amount of buzz. Yeah. And it's going to get more interest from other potential partners to want to use their batteries. It's not like a, oh, Quantumscape. We might be able to use your cells in two to three years where donut you're going to have stuff by the end of the year we can use. It's like, I can understand why they're doing that, but it makes me have my skeptic hat so firmly tight because it's like I. It's one of those. It's going to have to do what it says on the tin or they're screwed.
And the fact that they're being so bold in their claims and are shipping cells to partners right now says to me that there probably is something here.
Sean Ferrell: Right.
Matt Ferrell: But I won't. I am gun shy to even say holy cow. But if what they say is true, Sean, it's not an exaggeration to say this is an absolute game changer because they're claiming it's cheaper than lithium. As my friend Ryan found out, he thinks it's a capacitor, not a battery. And I find his argument very compelling as to that. Basically a super capacitor or super battery, whatever you want to call it. Which would explain a lot of the interesting things they got going on. But if that's the case, calling it a solid state battery makes me go, ooh, boy. Even if it does what it says on the tin, calling it a solid state battery, if it's actually some kind of capacitor, it's kind of bending the truth a little bit or playing fast loose, which is what Yoshino did. That I got. You know, when I did the Yoshino solid state battery video, that's what they did. They have a semi solid state battery. They called it solid state, and everybody got up in arms. What if this company has a groundbreaking energy storage technology? They're calling it a solid state battery, but it's actually a capacitor. It's going to flip people out. But I'm in the camp of who cares, right? If it does what it says on.
Sean Ferrell: The chemical perspective, if it is in fact not using chemicals in the way a traditional battery does.
Matt Ferrell: Correct.
Sean Ferrell: Solid state is what it. If it walks and cracks like a duck. It is a solid state battery. Like.
Matt Ferrell: Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's like a capacitor doesn't have liquid to usually. So it is a solid state form of energy storage. So it's like you could kind of see why they're doing it. But that's the marketing side of it. I'm more interested in just the technical side of like, what's going to be delivered to customers. Is it a. If this battery lasts as long as they say it does with no degradation like they say, this is literally a lifetime battery. Like if you got this in your car, your car will rust apart and fall apart before this battery would ever need to be thrown away. And in fact, you could take that battery and put it in a different car and have it go another 20 years. So it's, it's incredible if this is, if this is real. But we'll know not too long from now talking months, because these are going to start hitting customers hands very soon.
Sean Ferrell: Yeah. And the products that you've mentioned that it's going to start landing in the marketplace include. You mentioned motorcycle. What were some of the other things that you expect to see Donut batteries roll out in?
Matt Ferrell: They talked about drones because drones, every ounce matters. So you want the most energy dense battery you can. And there's a company I also mentioned in the video, it's Amprius. They have a battery that's even more energy dense than what Donut has, but it's very expensive. But if you're trying to fly a drone and you needed to fly a long period of time, that extra cost makes perfect sense. So they mentioned drones at Donut. I don't think they necessarily. I don't remember them saying that they had a partner. But Watt is a company that designed a EV skateboard platform. So imagine a company like Ford could say, we want to use the Watt EV skateboard platform and we'll just design car bodies that sit on top of it.
Sean Ferrell: Cars to go on top of it, right?
Matt Ferrell: Correct. So the motor is part of the skateboard, the battery's part of the skateboard. It's literally like it's your working vehicle and then you just design what you want to put on top of it. Watt doesn't have any announcements right now as to actual partners to use this skateboard platform, but they alluded to the fact that they're in discussions right now with people to potentially use it. So those were the two things. It's basically that skateboard platform and the bike. And the bike is shipping to customers very soon.
Sean Ferrell: Do you think it's possible there have been some headlines lately that have been around us car companies ending their research into EV stuff. Do you think it's possible that some of those announcements are true? But they're true because those companies are starting to maybe partner with, with groups like this. Where does Ford say, oh, we're not going to keep doing in house research, we're going to partner with Watt instead and just use or potentially even buy a company that already has a thing like that. Do you think there's. And I'm asking you to read tea leaves here. Yeah, but do you think there's a possibility that that's going on? Because what ends up in the headlines is always such an abbreviated version of the. They are walking away from this entire field. And I find myself thinking, I don't think that can be 100% wholly true. Because those companies that make internal combustion engine cars cannot think that that is the future of car manufacturing. They have to be looking down the road and saying, well, they don't. Electric is eventually going to be here in a way that we need to be able to compete with. So we're ending our R and D does not necessarily mean we're not going to build. So do you see potential partnerships here?
Matt Ferrell: I do to a certain extent. I'm not going to say the big GM and Ford are doing this, but there are definitely companies that are going to because it reduces their risk and companies are risk adverse. So if somebody's taking the risk of figuring out the expensive battery technologies, the expensive motor platforms, all that kind of stuff, somebody's figured that out being like an OEM kind of a deal, that's something that they're open to. They already do stuff like that already. So it's like that's not something new. So it wouldn't surprise me if some of that is part of this calculation of we're not going to pour 5 billion more dollars into this thing where we're still not seeing returns and we won't see returns for a decade where we can just save that money instead partner with this OEM over here that can give us a platform that will allow us to release EVs at a much lower cost, full stop. So it's like I can see that being part of the equation. But to kind of a tangent, companies like Ford are taking their foot off the gas, so to speak, on this. But they're not stopping production of EVs, they're rethinking it. So it's like the Ford electric pickup truck was a huge disaster. It did not sell like they were hoping for, and it was very expensive to make because they found out truck buyers don't want full electric vehicles. Well, what if you designed a Ford F150 that still had a big battery in it, but it also still had a diesel engine, a diesel generator. So it's an electric truck, but you can fill it with gas that runs a generator that charges the battery. It's like that is kind of, I think, what we're seeing American car companies kind of pivot towards because it allows them to give a truck to a customer with all the features they expect today, but yet it still gets them a step towards the future of a cleaner vehicle.
Even though it's not pure EV, it's still going to take.
Sean Ferrell: Diesel is better than gas. Right. And the other advantage there is that is not, in fact what our older hybrid electric vehicles are. It is a new design, the idea of using a diesel generator as opposed to those cars. My understanding is that hybrid vehicles were legitimately, you have a gas engine driving the car and you have battery power feeding the energy needs of the car. But this is. You're using electric, but you're powering the electric through a diesel generator.
Matt Ferrell: Some of them, yes. Some of them, no. Like a good example would be the BMW i3, I think. No, not i3. The BMW had their first EV, had a. They called it a range extender that you could get for it. And it was literally basically a motorcycle engine that was in the back of the car that would just act as a generator that would just basically top up your battery as you went. So it's like that's all it was. So that technology, this technology is not new. Some companies have been doing this for a while. So it's just interesting to see that I think some of the American companies, especially because we sell so many huge honking trucks here, they're rethinking how they're approaching electric large trucks so that you don't take the range hit, you don't have range anxiety problems, and you can still sell them and get customers to get used to electric technologies. I think that's kind of what we're seeing. But on to build on that, I think the donut platform, skateboard kind of thing is another reason why they may be pivoting away from it. Because they don't need to take the risk.
Sean Ferrell: Mr. Roth jumped in from the Netherlands to say we use triple layered glass around here in the Netherlands. Blocks most of the noise and is much cheaper. This is in response to a moment in the video in which Matt shared technology, which is a device mounted to a window which effectively turns the window, for lack of a better term, into a speaker then creates an inverse sound wave to the sounds coming through the window so that it can negate sound, thereby being the window that I wish I could put in my son's room. He has a room right on the street. So if he had the ability to cut out all that traffic noise, I'm sure he would love it. Mr. Roth goes on to say, here we use triple layered glass, but then again, our construction methods are based on energy consumption reduction. Nice burn, Mr. Roth. That's throwing a very subtle shade at the US context and I did not miss it. And I also agree heartily. Yeah, triple layered glass, energy consumption reduction and also soundproofing. Yeah, that's great. But I think that the tech that you were looking at, Matt, that's the kind of thing that regardless of where you are some places, regardless of how well insulated, they're going to be noisy. So that kind of device would be the kind of thing you'd want to see in maybe an airport or a bus terminal or a train yard, those kinds of places where limiting that noise might be well received regardless of how thick the glass is.
Matt Ferrell: One example would be my house. I have triple ping triple glazed windows. So I have the same thing they have in the Netherlands. And it does an amazing job. Blocking sounds, somebody walking outside, a dog barking you can barely hear. It sounds like it's way off in the distance at the worst. But I live right next to some train tracks and it would be awesome on the windows that are kind of facing that direction if we had stuff like this. And it could help reduce the sound of the train when it goes by even more. It doesn't go by that often, so it's not too bad. We've gotten used to it. But like, I totally saw this as a potential solution, even for that. And to be clear, I asked them about does it work with triple paned windows? And they said it could. It would change how they would have to design it because you'd have to have sensors on all three panes. But he said it is doable that you could do use this same exact technology on a triple glazed windows. So if you're in an airport or something like that or near trains like I am. And you still have these great windows. You could still potentially modify them to make them even better.
Sean Ferrell: Finally, this one. And I include this one. This is a note to you, Matt, right now I didn't highlight this for you in our pre call chat. If you don't want to respond to this, let's just, you can say, no, I don't want to talk about that. But there was this.
Matt Ferrell: Yeah.
Sean Ferrell: From Samuel Breslow who raises a question that I, I believe I know the answer to. I think there may have been a misinterpretation by some of the viewers of the video and Samuel nicely puts the misinterpretation forward in this way. I'm disappointed, he writes, by how you blur the line between sponsored and non sponsored content in this video by having the sponsors product be a part of your coverage. We watch your videos because we trust you to distinguish between marketing hype and actual innovation. If you sell out your credibility, you will lose your audience. And there was a good response to this comment and there was a lot of back and forth between various commenters on this comment. So I wanted to let you first respond to this and then we can chat about it as a topic.
Matt Ferrell: Yeah, I hear you, but at the same time, I didn't look at this. Sponsored content is different from any of the other sponsored content I do. It's clearly marked before I even talk about it. I talk about today's sponsor is this sponsor. So it's like I made clear it was a sponsored segment and it's no different than anything else I would do on any other week. So I get it. On the flip side, if I didn't have a sponsor like this, I wouldn't have been at ces. This is, I have traveling out to Las Vegas and spending a week out there for CES is expensive and I need sponsored content to be able to afford to even go in the first place. So it's kind of a. I'm kind of stuck. I guess I would say one of.
Sean Ferrell: The things that in the comments on this comment, some of the discussion went back and forth, some people basically making the argument you just made for you saying, well, like he did point out that it was sponsored, but there were some people who were pointing out things like a change in framing on the video, something to highlight sponsored content around the perimeter. So there was a bunch of feedback on this point that I thought was interesting and well thought so I just wanted to raise that for you as part of the conversation on this one.
Matt Ferrell: That is a good point. That was not intentional. I usually have across the bottom of the screen. I usually have this bar across the bottom during the sponsored segment. And for this one, I don't know why I didn't put it there. Yeah, I should have put it there. It's a clear indicator of like, this is sponsored. So I should have done that. Yeah, yeah, Lesson learned, man, that was good.
Sean Ferrell: Or maybe just have a baseball cap that says sponsored content sitting next to you and just throw it on when you're talking about your sponsor. And then you can take it off and put it to the side. So there's always that technique as well. Well, thank you everybody for your comments on both our previous video and on Matt's most recent. We appreciate your comments and as you can tell, we take them seriously and we want to engage with you all in our conversations. It really does drive the content of this program and helps shape undecided with Matt Ferrell. Having said that, jump into the comments here. Let us know what you thought about this conversation. We look forward to hearing from you. And as always, liking subscribing, commenting, sharing with your friends. Those are all very easy and free ways for you to support the podcast and we appreciate all of that. And if you'd like to support us more directly, you can go to stilltbd fm or you can just right here on YouTube, click the join button. Both those ways allow you to throw coins at our heads. We appreciate the welts. And then we get down to the heavy, heavy business of, well, guess what? We didn't talk about breakdancing robots. Maybe we'll talk about that next time. Thank you so much for taking the time to watch or listen. We'll talk to you soon.