Welcome to Go/No-Go. I'm Jon Bruner.

And I'm Alex Hao.

Go/No-Go is a podcast about design, engineering, manufacturing, and the calls that can make or break great products. It's brought to you by Lumafield, which makes an AI-powered manufacturing platform that gives engineers complete confidence in the products they're shipping. You can learn more at lumafield.com. Alex, do you notice what's missing in our podcast studio?

The airbag is gone. I'm so happy about it.

I'm so sorry to have exposed you to that. Two episodes ago, episode 12 of this podcast, Alex and I were handling very uncomfortably an old Volkswagen airbag module that we noticed had been manufactured by Takata.

Yeah, and it was terrifying at the time. I had been trying to look up if it was recalled, but I wasn't able to find it because I could only find recalls by VIN. And of course, it wasn't in any car.

That's right. It had its own serial number, but none of the recall tools would let you look up the serial number of the airbag module. So after we recorded that podcast, we CT scanned that airbag module. And when the podcast came out, we got an email from none other than John Keller, who is one of the central figures, one of the whistleblowers at the heart of the Takata recall saga. He offered to take a look at the CT scan for us and help us interpret what was going on inside this airbag. He confirmed that it's one of the airbags with ammonium nitrate propellant and no desiccant, which was at the heart of the recall. So it was definitely one of the airbags that needed to be recalled. Fortunately, it turns out that they're not ambiently dangerous. They're not really at risk of just exploding spontaneously when they're sitting on a table in a podcast studio. But I did go ahead and give the good people in the service department at our local Volkswagen dealership a call, and they offered to take it off our hands for safe disposal. So it's back with the fine people at Royal VW San Francisco.

Yeah, it was just so cool that we heard from John Keller. I had watched his documentary in order to prep for our podcast episode. Really inspiring work to not only ensure that the recall took place, but that the part after the recall where you actually have to ship all those parts back somewhere was handled responsibly.

These things are much more complicated than just saying that something's been recalled, especially when the thing you're recalling is actually a dangerous explosive. Well, let's take a look at some headlines. Today we're going to talk about what's going on in the world of manufacturing.

The first headline I have today comes from the Financial Times. Alarm spreads among road builders as Iran War bitumen shortage bites. We see increased gas prices, talking about how oil is impacting supply chains generally. But one surprising element for me was realizing that it's such a key component in bitumen, which ultimately goes into roads.

So what is bitumen?

It's a hydrocarbon that's used as a binder in asphalt. This shortage and the increased prices are impacting countries' abilities to fix potholes and to build new roads. In India, they have a government target of building 100 km of highway a day. This past March, they only received 7,000 tons versus 32,000 tons in March of 2025.

Huge difference. So this is really blocking their ability to build paved roads.

Yeah, and bituminous works account for 8 to 12% of the cost of public-private partnership projects awarded by the National Highways Authority of India. So a lot of the budget is allocated towards this particular component that is now unavailable and extremely expensive when it is available. I didn't realize that bitumen and asphalt are not the same thing, because one of my close friends is Australian, so they'll call what I would call asphalt bitumen. They're actually both in the pavement.

I think of bitumen in terms of those diagrams of how an oil refinery works, where you take oil and crack it apart into different petroleum products. You've got indoor cooking gases at the top, then fuel for cars and kerosene, jet fuel, and you go down to diesel fuel, and at the very bottom it's bitumen. That comes out as a sludge at the bottom of the oil refinery. So this is a byproduct of the oil refining process. A little bit like how we've talked in previous episodes about how decreases in fertilizer demand have decreased production of carbon dioxide and caused a shortage because that's a side product of the ammonia production process. Here you have disruptions to the petroleum supply chain disrupting the bitumen that goes into asphalt.

It's really impacting so many countries. India is the focus of the Financial Times article, but they also cite construction delays in South Korea. In Italy, contractors are trying to renegotiate their contracts because the price of the material has changed so much that it's no longer profitable for them to do the projects.

This is a big deal. I think about asphalt all the time because I ride my bike here in San Francisco and I always look at how the asphalt has deteriorated in different ways. There is a crisis going on in road surface maintenance right now because vehicles are getting heavier. This is accelerated by the fact that light trucks like pickup trucks and SUVs are continuously getting much heavier, but also by the emergence of EVs, which are much heavier than gas cars. Road damage rises proportionally to the fourth power of axle weight. When you double the weight bearing on a vehicle axle, you increase the wear on the road by a factor of 16. On top of that, EVs accelerate and decelerate so much faster than gas cars. Asphalt has an always-slightly-liquid aspect to it. When you accelerate really fast, the wheels on the car start to push the asphalt back. It's a little like pushing a tablecloth. You'll see a rippling effect in the asphalt near stop signs where bus routes stop. Buses are extremely heavy, and as they come to a stop, they push the asphalt forward and cause it to ripple. EVs are exacerbating this issue.

That's so fascinating. I had no idea.

I'm a fan of figuring out why a city might have used a different road surface in a different place. This is why bus stops typically have a concrete pad instead of just having the same asphalt surface treatment as the rest of the street. Anyway, that's your asphalt fact of the day.

Speaking of EVs, another headline we have is about the secret team blowing up Ford's assembly line to make a $30,000 electric truck. This comes from Sharon Terlep at the Wall Street Journal.

So what is Ford doing here?

Ford has been running a secret EV development program since about 2022. It was previously led by Doug Field, who previously worked on the Apple car and the Tesla Model 3. They had a skunk works out in California that was insulated from the broader Ford organization. The idea was to make an affordable electric pickup, thinking about Tesla and the Chinese competitors and all of those players that are really focused on price. We talked about Slate recently. Whereas most of the EVs coming out of the American automakers have been extremely expensive and really reliant on government subsidies that have gone away.

Ford's flagship EV up until now has been the F-150 Lightning, which is one of these very heavy, full-sized EVs. How does this program differ from that?

They're really looking at reconfiguring their entire manufacturing architecture. They're doing a modular assembly tree that uses two large aluminum castings and a battery that are merged, rather than a traditional iterative line. This eliminates thousands of feet of copper wiring, cuts a lot of parts, and it's a lot more aerodynamic.

And they had a different development process for this whole thing.

Yeah, they really tried to have a different culture of innovation around developing this product, trying to channel a quintessential Silicon Valley engineering mindset. The article talks about how they looked for Ford's internal misfits and malcontents, put candidates through more of an Apple-style interview process, and really protected them from the broader organization so they could run a little more free. The Tesla veteran running it estimated that 20% of Ford employees could adapt to this approach. A 30-year Ford veteran on the project said only 2%.

There are a lot of techniques described here that make you think of the difference between waterfall and agile software development. Creating a new car program is the most waterfall type of engineering program you can possibly imagine, maybe like introducing a new jetliner. You come up with a design, then there's a separate design-for-manufacturing process and a separate factory layout process, and it all happens in a somewhat sequential way. The process described here with this new Ford group is much more agile. It describes a few cases where an engineer discovered an improvement and was able to implement it really quickly, or was able to tell the factory to hold off on tooling until the very last minute, which is something a company like Ford isn't accustomed to in most of its normal programs.

It's interesting to think about how much baggage these types of products can carry. One of my favorite examples in the article is that they scrapped a window lip that was designed for cigarette smokers that added aerodynamic drag. That definitely feels like a holdover. I don't think they're still designing around cigarette smokers these days.

We talked about car cigarette lighters in a previous episode. It's amazing that that is still the predominant power delivery form factor for a car. Now you have cars with USB-C ports, but even those often still have a DC 12-volt socket that's in the shape originally developed for a bimetallic leaf spring to pop out once a resistive wire had been heated enough to light a cigarette.

Have you ever seen a Tesla Semi on the road?

No, never. Have you?

Yeah, sometimes around this area, more like the South Bay.

I'm not cool enough to go to the South Bay very often.

The next EV-related headline comes from Tesla. They have their EV semi truck finally ready to join the trucking industry. There's been a lot of innovation in this space, both on the sustainability front, trying to improve trucking so it's not so dependent on diesel. Diesel prices today are significant. You've had other attempts at renewables like Nikola, which was supposedly working on a hydrogen solution but wasn't actually.

It was working on a truck that could roll downhill and self-power.

Yeah. And then also on the autonomy front. The Tesla Semis are equipped with all the cameras that could support full self-driving. I don't know if that's planned to be launched initially when they first start shipping. There have been a lot of startups in that space as well, such as TuSimple.

The charging they're promising here is astonishing. The Tesla Supercharger network is very impressive. They have chargers all over the place that can add 300 miles of range to a passenger car in 30 to 45 minutes. They're promising a new generation of supercharger for these trucks that can add 300 miles of range to a truck in 30 minutes, which is staggering. Some of the superchargers out in the world now are 100 to even 500 kilowatts. 500,000 watts is something like 10 to 20 or 30 times more wattage than a typical single-family home uses. To do that for a truck which weighs many times what a Model 3 weighs must involve an incredible amount of current.

I'm curious what that does for battery life. BYD has been facing scrutiny because they said they're going to have ultra-fast charging to go from 20 to over 90% in as little as 12 minutes, and people are asking whether that kind of cycling degrades the lifetime of the battery. I'm curious about the longevity of this, but we'll just have to wait and see.

Fast charging is supposed to be worse for the batteries than slow trickle overnight charging. It was something people were worried about a few years ago as secondhand Teslas started to reach the market, especially secondhand Teslas that had been part of their rideshare leasing program where they were leasing Teslas to Uber drivers. In that scenario, if you're driving an Uber all day, you're going to be fast charging it all day, and that puts a ton of wear on the battery.

Another thing about the Tesla Semi is that it's also very affordable for this type of vehicle. It's priced at around $290,000 for the 500-mile version, roughly 28% below comparable electric heavy trucks from Daimler and Volvo, along with having a longer range.

Another automotive headline: we've been reading about how BYD gets their cars around the world. It turns out they own a large fleet of vehicle-carrying ships themselves. They can move about 300,000 cars a year to Africa, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. In this era of supply chain disruptions, this can be a huge advantage.

Shipping prices have continued to rise, even before everything with Iran. We were talking about how the removal of the de minimis was causing a lot of air freight prices to increase. And now with oil prices and ships getting stuck, after Covid we've just seen many years of shipping prices being volatile but always trending upward.

It's a little bit like what happened in the trucking industry after Covid. There was a huge shortage of truckers and trucks. A lot of people went and got their commercial driver's licenses and bought trucks. There were huge waiting lists for new trucks, the value of used trucks was going up. They increased supply, at the same time demand fell a little, and so the value of these trucks and the overall volume of trucking needed really crashed. A lot of people who had taken on debt to buy trucks wound up hung out to dry. However, that's recently been reversed, and demand for trucking is very strong again. Shipping is an incredible boom-and-bust industry around the globe.

It's amazing the degree of vertical integration BYD has. They make 75% of the components in their most popular models. They mine their own lithium, make their own chips and batteries, and now they own shipping. That's incredible.

It's very much the opposite direction from a lot of the big western carmakers, which have become system integrators for the most part. A company like Ford or General Motors doesn't manufacture their own brake calipers and hubcaps. They source those from a very broad, sophisticated network of tier suppliers. In a way, BYD is going back to the Henry Ford model of total vertical integration.

I saw one when I went to Mexico City a couple years ago that I always think about. It was this pale pink. They call it the Dolphin. It's a compact car. And BYD stands for Build Your Dreams, so it had Build Your Dreams spelled out on the back. It was adorable.

I hear great things about them. I do see BYD buses here in San Francisco. They're pretty popular.

Do the buses have different import restrictions than cars?

They do, they're categorized differently. But also BYD has a bus assembly factory in California in Lancaster, which is just northeast of LA, out in the scorchiest part of the Southern California desert.

That's crazy. I had no idea.

They seem to be very popular as small-scale shuttle buses. The UCSF hospital employee shuttle bus is run with BYD electric buses. Some of the tech company shuttles that take people down to the South Bay are BYD buses. I started noticing them popping up. They're becoming very common. Remarkable for a brand that is otherwise completely blocked from entering the US at the moment. Speaking of BYD, just a quick pitch for listeners. There's a new Scan of the Month that we just published last week featuring scans of several BYD car parts, including a window controller, a key fob, a battery, and a charger. Check it out if you want to see how one of the world's most important rising EV automakers designs its parts.

Talking about supply chains, Amazon is also moving into a new line of business. AWS is very famous as a service initially built internally and then opened up to the world. Now practically every company seems to be built on AWS. Liz Young at the Wall Street Journal has written a piece about how they are now entering the third-party logistics market with Amazon Supply Chain Services.

So they're not competing exactly with the consumer-level services of UPS and FedEx and DHL, but more like the midstream logistics services that would take raw materials to a factory or bring finished goods from a factory to a distribution center.

The idea of Amazon Supply Chain Services is to simplify shipping. Rather than doing piecemeal services across planes, trucks, ocean freight, you can just use one platform and have it all done. This is going to open up their global network of warehouses, planes, trucks, and last-mile delivery to any business. You don't have to sell on Amazon to access it, and it'll do fulfillment, ocean and air freight, and truck transportation.

So everything stays on the Amazon platform the whole way.

You can place the orders through any platform. It'll support orders placed through Walmart, Shein, Shopify, TikTok. They're already the world's largest third-party logistics provider by gross logistics revenue and the largest parcel carrier in the US by volume, ahead of UPS, FedEx, and USPS.

Amazon Air has also become a pretty formidable freight airline. They're thought to own something like 100 aircraft. That's not anywhere near as big as UPS, which owns almost 300 airplanes, or FedEx, which owns almost 500 airplanes. But it's starting to get into that order of magnitude.

I'm also really fascinated by what they're developing in terms of drone delivery.

Yeah, this is always on the horizon. Speaking of shipping, barnacles are back in the news.

Going back to the Strait of Hormuz, there's a new problem for the ships that are trapped out there in the Gulf. Alice Hancock of the Financial Times wrote about how ships trapped in the Gulf, where the water is so warm and the ships are stagnant, are accumulating barnacles, jellyfish, and algae.

Why is this a problem for a ship? Can't it be in the water and deal with things that are in the water?

The amount of growth is actually incredible. Someone who recently got out of the strait found they had 40% fouling coverage on the bottom. This has a material impact on the drag of the ship. When they were able to leave the strait, they had to move really slowly because they are no longer hydrodynamic. On top of that, the added fouling increases the amount of fuel the ship consumes as it moves. It has to move slower, it costs a lot more, and we just talked about how expensive oil is. It can clog up the gratings that protect internal pipework and lead to other mechanical issues.

I'm going to use that as an excuse next time I'm late. I have barnacles on my car and it slowed me down. Last headline we have is about the Trump Mobile phone, which has finally shipped. Nine months ago, the Trump family announced that it was launching a mobile phone service and started taking $100 deposits to reserve what they promised would be an American-made phone handset. It finally started shipping this week after a lot of delays. The phone sent to an NBC News reporter is gold, has an American flag on the back with notably 11 stripes instead of 13, and uses language on the box that says "proudly assembled in the USA," which is a little different from saying "made in the USA."

Assembled in the USA is a funny workaround. When I used to work in a different industry, thinking about country of origin, a substantial amount of the manufacturing has to take place in that country to have that as the country of origin. And assembled in the USA basically means probably all of it is made elsewhere and that very last step, which is not significant, takes place here.

Two things that experts have pointed out. One is that the US really doesn't have the infrastructure to do mass manufacturing of large volumes of mobile phone handsets at low cost. This is not a very expensive phone, about $500, which is on the low end of handsets these days. There are really no factories in the US that produce that kind of phone. The other thing is that it is almost identical to a mainstream HTC phone called the U24 Pro, which is definitely made in Taiwan.

There's been so much speculation since this phone was announced about how they were going to deliver on this promise because it just sounded so outlandish. And it seems that they have at least delivered something, which was a big question mark for a long time. But what it is is not that compelling.

You can take an HTC phone and have it made in a different color. In this case, gold. The person who described that similarity to the HTC U24 Pro is friend of the Go/No-Go podcast Shahram Mokhtari, the lead teardown technician at iFixit, who we were pleased to see gave his interview to NBC sitting in front of his Lumafield Neptune scanner.

Yeah, I love that they've named the scanner Scanlitucci.