 Oh my god, this is a 1978 F100 Ford pickup truck. It's got 480 horsepower, 634 pound feet of torque, and it is all-electric. But you'll never be able to buy this car. In fact, you'll maybe be able to buy one of its motors. A crate motor is an engine sold separately from a vehicle. They have predominantly served as a way for car enthusiasts and hobbyists to modify their cars. You know, make them go faster. Give them more power. And they are incredibly common, with most major car brands selling them directly from their performance parts or accessories brands. But what most of these crate motors have in common is that most of them run on some sort of fuel. That wasn't until last fall at least, when Ford announced it was going to begin selling an electric crate motor, part number M9000 Mach E. The exact motor that is in Ford's all-electric Mustang that came out in 2021. The GT model, to be exact. In this F100, there are actually two of these motors. And it may not seem like a big deal, until you imagine a world where that motor isn't available to buy anywhere. And neither are any of the other parts you need for an EV conversion or even repairs, which is sort of where we're at right now. Ford taking the initiative here and offering a crate motor, or e-crate motor I should say, for the aftermarket is a pretty big deal, I would argue. Because up until now, people are stealing a motor out of a forklift. My name is Chris, and I'm the CEO of Electrified Garage. At Electrified Garage, Chris and his team repair, restore, and modify electric vehicles. They are a non-Tesla-affiliated EV repair shop that rose to fame when they completed a Tesla-quoted $16,000 repair for only $700. The way in which I was able to do what it is I do, and what Electrified Garage is able to do, what it does is by having a lot of Tesla technicians that no longer work for Tesla. So we already have the background, we already have the factory training, which is something you can't get anywhere else. Tesla is more a software company that has a car than a car company that has software. They control who can repair the vehicles, who can't. And so that makes it very difficult for a third party like us to provide any level of service, never mind anybody that doesn't have the specialization that we already have. Historically, independent mechanics have been able to get parts and instructions right from car manufacturers in order to repair cars at the local level. All right, Becca, so obviously Teslas, you don't use your brakes very often. So what happens is they get mucky and gummed up and they don't seem to work as well. That's Travis Foundren. He's the lead technician at Electrified Garage in Ocala, Florida. He's walking me through the repairs he most commonly does on EVs. The filters on the Teslas, they're kind of outboard. They're a little bit underneath the hood. So you get some funky humidity and funky moisture smells going on. See the brake fluid doesn't get used a lot, so it just kind of puddles up at the end of the calipers, gets old. The antifreeze only has a life usually around five years. In terms of supercharging, they use the air conditioning system to cool the batteries. So if your air conditioning system is not up to par, you won't be able to supercharge. You'll be stuck on the side of the road charging like an electric 150 Ford. Common failure points, obviously, as everybody knows with this old car, you have the battery pack. If you see here, it takes up the hole underneath of the car. So what'll happen is that you'll get a module that'll go lower than the rest. And there's a certain methods and procedures that we use to repair them and get the people back on the road again for a fraction of the cost from Tesla. But if car companies start taking Tesla's lead, making parts hard to get and training even harder, fixing common issues such as these may feel less like fixing your car and more like trying to fix your phone. And I happen to know somebody who knows a lot about that. A repair ecosystem does not happen by accident or in a vacuum. It has to be intentionally created. That's Kyle Weins. He started the online repair community. I fix it. He and his team have taken apart countless pieces of tech to both see how repairable they are and to teach folks how to repair them themselves. Tesla has been sabotaging their own repair aftermarket by not making available the tooling and the parts that repair shops need. I think you have a lot of former Apple folks who are at Tesla who are trying to run the Apple playbook at Tesla and saying, we can control the entire experience. We're going to design and craft the ultimate repair and service experience. It's not possible or practical for any manufacturer to control what happens with their product at every step of the product's life. If you think about what it means to be able to get your car fixed at a local mechanic, that mechanic needs to have access to be able to buy parts. If there's computer software that you need in order to program a part, they need that. They need access to service manuals, wiring diagrams. There's a whole ecosystem that you need in order to be able to repair a thing. With new electric vehicles, it's much more unclear what's going to happen. We don't have that robust aftermarket and it's not clear whether the independent repair shops are going to be able to retool to repair the cars of the future. The F100 Illuminator can be seen as Ford hinting to a less walled garden approach to EVs. It encourages folks to get out into their own garages and modify or someday even repair the electric vehicle that they own. Before the fuel crisis happened and emissions was a big deal, there were all these crazy horsepower muscle cars running around. We're kind of at that same point again, but now the next phase is going to be all these electric cars. Way more powerful. You can go much faster. It's easy. It's clean. I would say the only thing about it is it's kind of a sterile situation where it doesn't make any noise. There's usually not a transmission, so you're not shifting gears. All the diehard manual transmission guys are going to be like, boo-hoo. But ultimately, I mean, anytime somebody gets in my car and I go and take them for a ride, they giggle like a little girl all the way down the road. To bring that to a classic car or something that somebody's like, you know, family heirloom, it was my grandfather's car, whatever it may be, you know, that's really cool. But also being able to do it for modern day cars with all the different electronics integrations and things of that nature is really, I think, what the next step is going to be. But you need a degree in computer programming and software engineering to do that stuff. So as great as an E-Crate motor option from Ford may seem, there are still large hurdles that both hobbyists and mechanics will have to work through in order to get it working at all. So the difference today when you order an E-Crate motor, for instance, like the Ford Illuminator, you're only buying a motor and a gearbox. Now you need to figure out the inverter, you need to figure out a controller, you need to figure out what type of battery you want to use. So it's a much more complex puzzle to put together and have it actually work when you plug it in and make sure that it produces the type of power that you want, as well as get the type of range that you're expecting out of the vehicle. Ford isn't the only one selling E-Crate motors. In 2020, Chevy announced plans to sell the K5 Blazer E, the same motor that is in the Chevy Bolt. And there's a whole host of third-party vendors that sell additional parts for EVs. But when Ford unveiled the F100 Illuminator and its dual E-Crate motors at SEMA last year, a large automotive aftermarket trade show, it made it clear that it, too, was committing to joining the EV aftermarket space. And it proved that Ford is at least willing to let people outside of its walled garden tinker with and potentially fix its electric vehicles. Everybody kind of is going to have to get on board and figure this stuff out and try to work together. And I think that's the biggest thing. When large companies such as Ford break down these walls, it drives competition, competition that will undoubtedly push technology further. We didn't have 100 plus years to kind of figure this out individually. It's all coming very quickly. And there's not enough resources to go around for everybody to try to be by themselves. So if these things are so, like, world changing, why are they not mainstream? Why are they not available for everybody to use? It remains to be seen just how many parts and how much information Ford is going to make available to the general public in regards to its EVs. But an E-Crate motor is certainly more than what we've gotten from most manufacturers, including the largest, Tesla.