S1E4: Transcript
Free Wheelin’
with
Hannah Elliott
Dana Thomas: This is Dana Thomas, and you're listening to The Green Dream, a podcast about how to green up your life.
Climate change is bearing down on us like a mighty hurricane. And it's scary as hell, but it doesn't have to be. I'm Dana Thomas, a leading voice in the sustainable fashion movement. On The Green Dream, I welcome global experts, creators and change makers from politics, business, and the arts for dynamic conversations on how you can green up your life. The Green Dream is the podcast of hope.
This episode is sponsored by Another Tomorrow, a women's fashion brand that redefines luxury with a commitment to ethics, sustainability, and transparency from farm to fabric to atelier. Find Another Tomorrow on its website, anothertomorrow.co, at its flagship boutique, 384 Bleecker Street in New York City, and at select stores.
My guest today is Hannah Elliott, the automobile writer for Bloomberg Businessweek, based in America’s ultimate driving city, Los Angeles. I first came across Hannah on Twitter. I thought her tweets were savvy, smart, and on occasion, gently snarky. That led me to her writing, which is some of the best in journalism. In her review of Bentley’s Flying Spur hybrid with the V8 engine, she wrote, “It offers a drive quality that lulls one into a blissful gluttonous stupor, like red wine after a feast.” And at 70 mph, she said the car was “flying like a Concorde jet.”
Like Hannah, I’m a Gearhead, thanks to my father. He used to boast that by the time he was 21, he had already owned—and sold—30 cars. Or something like that. I spent much of my Saturday and Sunday afternoons hanging out in the garage or in the driveway, watching Dad work on the family cars, and he taught me how to change the oil and spark plugs, clean the carburetor, replace the belts, bleed the brakes, and set the timing. If you don’t know what that means, you don’t know cars.
By the time I was 21, I too had owned my share of used cars—a VW Rabbit, a Ford Pinto wagon that was pumpkin orange, a Ford Capri, a yellow and white Ford Bronco like the one in “Three Days of the Condor.” Plus, I had use of Dad’s silver 914. But it was when I was 22 that he gave me the wheels that turned me into a Muscle Car devotee: a 1968 Cougar with a 302 engine. One of my favorite scenes in cinema is Tom Cruise in War of the Worlds, when he shows off a car engine that happens to be sitting on his kitchen table. “It’s a 302 V8,” he explains as if everyone should understand. I surely did. And so does Hannah.
These days, Hannah finds herself mostly writing about Electric Vehicles, or EVs as they say in the automobile industry. So we’ll talk about that—particularly why they are all so ugly. But we’ll also look at what’s going to happen to the vintage car market once cities ban gas-powered automobiles. In Paris, where I live, that is supposed to happen in 2030. Will I have to park my 1964 ½ convertible Mustang for good? Or swap out the 289 engine for an EV motor? That sounds like a crime against Detroit. Hannah will explain it all.
Hannah Elliott, welcome to The Green Dream. I've had so much fun reading your adventures on Twitter as you test drive cars. Most recently, you did a road trip down through California in a new EV, and you had to stop and charge. Can you tell us about this adventure?
Hannah Elliott: Sure. I can. This was the Lucid Air, which is an EV that is a company started by basically ex-Tesla employees. It's based near Palo Alto, California. They haven't made very many; they've made fewer than 400 of them, but they are a public company. They do have a factory in Arizona. They're very much real, and they have a very strong following.
Hannah Elliott: People are obsessed with something that they haven't even driven or most people haven't even seen in real life. So I was so curious to drive the car, and I really wanted to do it in a way that felt real. I did not want to have to carefully plan each stop to coincide with a specific charger, a fast charger, or to coincide with an overnight stay. I just wanted to drive like you normally would, down the coast, going the scenic route. I didn't want to have to take the 5 all the way down, 'cause that's ugly and boring.
Dana Thomas: Ugly and boring!
Hannah Elliott: Yeah! I wanted to go on the 101, where it's pretty, as you normally would.
Dana Thomas: Exactly.
Hannah Elliott: Yeah, yeah, I flew up there, you know, funny thing: their offices are in the old Theranos building, which is, there must be something symbolic there. I don't know what yet. I think Elizabeth was actually physically present when they were doing their final walkthroughs before the purchase. So there's something to be said for that. I don't know what yet. Time will tell, I suppose. Picked up the car and then met with them, saw the design studio, got the download on the company culture, and goals and all that. Did the drive, made it, not in one charge. I didn't actually expect that we would. I'm someone who likes to pass people swiftly and convincingly. I don't want to have to hypermile my electric car. I also want to be able to use the air conditioning, use the radio, use the seat massagers. I didn't want to have to be chintzy on any of that. So, did the drive. It took 11 hours in what is normally closer to a six-hour drive.
Dana Thomas: And what took so long? Was it charging the extra five hours?
Hannah Elliott: The charging. Yes. So basically my plan, my non-plan plan was: Get in the car, start driving down the 101. When I get to about a hundred miles of range, I'll start looking for a charger. We'll just see how far I can get.
I parked the car with 411 miles listed on the battery. The next morning, when I picked it up from the hotel garage, it had 389 miles. So either the valets had a lot of fun with it during the night, or it did drop a little bit of charge. Maybe a mixture of both. People are very curious about the car, so I wouldn't put it past the guys in the garage. Left the next morning with 389 miles left on the charge, and I just thought, "Okay, I'm going to drive and get down to 100, and then we'll see."
So I did do that. Got down to 100 miles, found a charger in a Hampton Inn Suite in a very obscure, remote area in the middle of a windy parking lot. Not a great place to hang out. That charging station was like a ChargePoint station that required downloading an app, giving your credit card information, and I waited for two hours and got 26 miles of charge, which was not great. And I also really had to pee. So I was not in the mood to wait longer in a random parking lot. I started Googling, and I was like, "You know what? I'm going to have a beautiful lunch at the Ritz. I'm just going to drive down the road, I'll go to the Ritz Santa Barbara and have a beautiful lunch." I knew the Ritz would probably have chargers there for guests.
And so sort of rolled down the hill another 30 minutes or so. They were very nice at the Ritz, but they did say, "Oh, the wait time for the charger, you'd get it tomorrow. So, either you can book a night here." They were very nice, but there was a wait time for the charger. But they did direct me to a third location, a shopping center in Santa Barbara that had a bank of chargers. These were fast chargers. These were the Electrify America chargers, where I parked, I charged for an hour and 23 minutes, and in the meantime bought some plants and went to a Home Goods store while I killed time.
I'm on a plant kick right now, because you know, I've recently moved to Los Angeles, and this is what one does when you move to LA, you get into plants. So I loaded up on flora, and at that point, I did get a full charge and then drove the rest of the way to LA.
Dana Thomas: So basically, electric cars right now are a bit like cell phones were 15 or 20 years ago, where you were spending a lot of your day looking for a place to plug in and charge–before they were plugs everywhere and before we had USB cables that you could plug into things everywhere too.
And that you would just be like, "Oh my God, I'm running outta juice." Or you'd have to have two batteries in your pocket, and you'd pop one off and you'd pop one on. And life became, I mean, it still is about charging, but it really did become about, "Am I going to have enough juice in my phone to be able to do all the things I need to do?" before we had smartphones. It sounds like cars are sort of at that place still, aren't they?
Hannah Elliott: Yeah. That's a very good comparison. There is some real anxiety that does exist. Even for me, in that moment, who had nowhere to be. The only task of the day was to get back to LA at some point. And even still, you know, you're like this, kind of just watching the miles tick down on the screen, and it does instill a sense of clutching. Like, okay, how is this going to work?
And the other thing I would say is: I had the car for a few days after the drive, and I did a drive up Angeles Crest Highway, Highway 2, which is, basically, I drive 26 miles up. It's a very windy, hilly drive up to a place called Newcomb's Ranch. And you know, driving up, You burn through quite a bit of battery range. Now, you can gather the range back when you go back down the hill, thanks to regenerative braking and energy recuperation. But just driving up, watching your miles deplete is a bit of a nervous feeling. Like, you realize, if I get up there and I want to keep going up higher, you're kind of outta luck.
Dana Thomas: It kinda reminds me of driving my 1964 ½ Mustang, which I think gets about eight miles to the gallon. And if I find driving up a hill, it's probably four miles to the gallon. And I just watched the needle go down, down, down.
Hannah Elliott: Yeah.
Dana Thomas: Was it a full 15 minutes ago? Why are we already at two-thirds of a tank? And then you go, "Huh, is there a gas station around now?" Thank God we have iPhones now, we can type in "Gas station nearest to me." That anxiety does exist when you drive old muscle cars, too. Now you drive an old car too, don't you?
Hannah Elliott: Yeah. I love that we have that in common. I drive a '75 Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow, which probably gets about the same mileage as yours. It may be even worse. It's a long wheelbase. It's just a big hunk of metal.
Dana Thomas: And you're 12 cylinders? Yikes, that's a beast.
Hannah Elliott: Yeah.
Dana Thomas: Yikes, that's a beast.
Hannah Elliott: I drove that to work today, and I just watched the gauge go like this. But you can't beat it for personality. But you know, back to your point about the cell phones, I do think one interesting thing about these new auto maker startups, for lack of a better word—I’m thinking of Rivian, Lucid, Tesla—I sense, an ambivalence within the company about whether they think they are tech companies or automotive companies. And I find it very interesting that a lot of the executives, a lot of the PR people, a lot of engineers even, and the employees come from a tech background. These are Silicon Valley guys, these are Twitter guys, Facebook guys. They're not from Detroit.
Dana Thomas: They're not Lee Iacoccas.
Hannah Elliott: No.
Dana Thomas: Or even Shelbys.
Hannah Elliott: No, and thank goodness for that. Let's be honest. The world doesn't need any more Carroll Shelbys. Women, especially. But that's another topic I could really go off on. Before the Tesla Model S came out, I literally remember Elon Musk showing me a prototype of that car in New York on the West Side Highway. And he was the first person who said to me, "I want it to feel like a computer with wheels." And it sounded like the weirdest thing ever. It just sounded like he's kind of crazy and who would want to drive that? And it's going to be an appliance, et cetera, et cetera. But he did have the vision and the foresight. I still really remember that, and now.
Dana Thomas: And it is like a computer on wheels.
Hannah Elliott: Completely. And for most people, that's not a bad thing. For car guys, that's considered a bit of a dish. Just a computer on wheels, or it's an appliance. But actually, for most people, that's cool. You want a seamless life where you can transition from your cell phone to your car seamlessly. It's all one computer.
Dana Thomas: This is the future, right?
Hannah Elliott: Yes.
Dana Thomas: We're all going to be driving EVs.
Hannah Elliott: Yes.
Dana Thomas: And how far off are we from that?
Hannah Elliott: That's a great question. You know, let's not forget that EVs in the United States are 3 percent of the cars on the road. Lincoln will be unveiling a car tonight, and I was looking at some of their findings, and Lincoln believes that among luxury brands, EVs comprise 20 percent of new car sales. In mainstream brands, they're about 2 to 3 percent. So it's low, mainstream. But in luxury, it is higher. And I think luxury is leading the way for where we all will be. It's coming. It's not here yet, by any means. Let's not forget the vast majority of cars on the road are combustion engine cars. But it's coming.
Dana Thomas: Or hybrids. There are a lot of hybrids now.
Hannah Elliott: There are a lot of hybrids—the New York Auto Show was all EVs. You know, that just happened in the first part of this month. It was all EV debuts. All the new stuff is going to be electric. But also, let's not forget these cars are not being produced in mass numbers yet. Every major automaker has some electric offering. But if you really dig into how many they're actually selling and how many they're actually able to make at this point, it's very, very small.
Dana Thomas: Now, Ford is about to introduce or has just introduced a pickup truck, right?
Hannah Elliott: The F-150 Lightning.
Dana Thomas: Now, have you tried it out yet?
Hannah Elliott: So, my job at Pursuits is really to focus on the luxury brands, which is the fun stuff. It's the beautiful things that none of us need, but all of us want. I haven't driven the Lightning, but I have driven the EV Hummer, and recently drove that in the desert for a few days in Scottsdale, Arizona. Now the Hummer is a truck, although I don't think it'll be competing directly with the Ford. But that was quite an experience, to feel a 9,000+ pound vehicle that is a thousand horse-powered, powered by batteries. And they even have a launch mode on that, which was incredible.
Dana Thomas: Explain what a launch mode is.
Hannah Elliott: Launch mode is something that nobody needs, and only rude people use it on public streets, because it's a mode that you activate in a car to let it go from a standstill stop to maximum acceleration, where you engage the mode, you push your foot on the brake and the accelerator at the same time, and then you lift your foot off the brake. And the thing is floored. So you just shoot like a bat outta hell.
Dana Thomas: Like a drag race.
Hannah Elliott: Like a drag race! And this is something that exotic cars have had for a long time. It's less heard of in a Hummer/truck/electric vehicle. It's to bolster your ego and make you feel like you got your money's worth.
Dana Thomas: Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness.
This episode is sponsored by Another Tomorrow, a women’s fashion brand that redefines luxury with a commitment to ethics, sustainability, and transparency. From farm to fabric to atelier. Find Another Tomorrow on its website AnotherTomorrow.co, at its flagship boutique, 384 Bleecker Street in New York City, and at select stores.
If you are enjoying this conversation, you’ll love my sister podcast on the Wondercast Network, Fashion Conversations with Bronwyn Cosgrave. Fashion Conversations is fashion’s equivalent to Inside the Actors Studio—an in-depth interview podcast with fashion and luxury’s leading creators that explores their craft and creative process as well as their personal journeys. Find Fashion Conversations wherever you get your podcasts.
Dana Thomas: So tell me, how did you get into car writing?
Hannah Elliott: I always say I'm not a car guy. I'm not a car person. I don't come from a car family.
Dana Thomas: I'm not a fashion writer.
Hannah Elliott: I know, we are like the yin and the yang of each other. I don't come from a car background. No one in my family had interesting cars.
My family was into sports. I'm from Oregon, a very small town in Oregon, and didn't grow up with it at all. But long story short, I got a journalism degree in college and was hired by Forbes magazine, because I was cheap, number one, as a cub reporter. You know, reporters don't make any money. Number two, because I had no real bad habits. I was just out of college, and the editor who hired me was the automotive editor, and he was so tired of dealing with car guys who knew their way around an engine but actually could not communicate or articulate anything, especially for a global news organization, on a level that someone with a passing interest in cars might want to read.
So anyway, he hired me and I really give him a lot of credit for just hiring someone who was a child who knew nothing about anything. And he taught me the beat. And, you know, I always say cars are a beat just like any other beat, just like sports or fashion or tech or food. And I actually think it's an asset for me to not come from a car background, because, number one, when I was starting out, I had no qualms about asking dumb questions to really try to understand what people were talking about, because I didn't know the language. And number two, because I still know what it feels like to be on the outside, trying to understand what these crazy car people are talking about.
Dana Thomas: Like your readers.
Hannah Elliott: Yes! So that editor who hired me, unfortunately he was laid off in 2008 when the markets went down and we had layoffs across the board in the media industry. Because he was expensive. And at that point, I wasn't. So they kept the little reporter that didn't cost them very much. That became the beat that I grew into.
Dana Thomas: That’s fantastic.
Hannah Elliott: Yeah, I kind of always thought, "Oh, I'll transition into something else eventually, because this so isn't me." But then I just never did. Now I'm at Bloomberg, of course, and very proud and happy to work here. And I just think there's a lot of room for critical journalism in the car world, because there are a lot of fanboys writing about cars in a way that maybe the rest of us don't care about or know about. The other thing I've always thought is: More people are interested in cars than think they are interested in cars. They just don't know yet. But if you present the car as something that's beautiful or a piece of history or a tool to use, more people are interested in cars than you might think.
Dana Thomas: Absolutely. I mean, I grew up, like I said, the daughter of a car guy. My Dad used to race cars with his friends and take me to the races when I was kid. And his best friend was John Harter who used to write for a magazine in Washington called Regardies, reviewing cars. And he also was the first TV news reporter to do a regular segment reviewing cars for the news. And it was syndicated across the country. And he would go out and test drive cars and tell you what he thought about them. And it was exactly that. People wanted to know.
Then I worked at the Washington Post with Warren Brown, who was the most magnificent writer, and he was a really important reporter at the Washington Post, on the car beat. And then of course, on NPR, Car Talk, my Dad, when he drove us to wherever we were going, Car Talk was on in the car.
Hannah Elliott: People love that show.
Dana Thomas: Those two guys, they just took it apart. They said, "Listen, what's wrong with your car? You gotta jack up the radiator cap and drive a new car under it. Like, don't be so silly." But so people do want to know more about cars than they do, but they don't want it to be super crazy technical. Because in the end, they get in the car, they put the key in it, they turn the ignition, or now you blip it or whatever you do, and you go.
Hannah Elliott: I do not think your car should be the most interesting thing about you, and it's great if you can appreciate cars and talk about cars…
Dana Thomas: Like fine wine, right?
Hannah Elliott: But you know what? People who that's their only thing–even I get bored with that. My first editor told me a great thing. He said, "Hey, don't worry about doing deep dives. You know, we're not Road & Track. We're not Car and Driver. They do a great job of what they do. We're not that. We're going to be writing to the same person who might want to buy a watch or a piece of art or a bottle of wine. Money might not be an issue, but time is an issue. It's important to articulate concisely, and if you can be clever, be clever too.
Dana Thomas: So why are most EVs so ugly? I mean I saw the Mustang, the new Mustang, when it came out. What is that car? And why does it bear the name Mustang on it? And it's interesting, because I was having to talk with a friend of mine who's on the board of a major luxury automobile company, can't say which, and she was talking to the chairman and saying, why can't we take the signature car of this company, which everybody loves, and just make an EV version with that old classic body? And he said, "No, they all look alike because everybody's afraid that it might sink, and you have to put so much money into developing the EV that you can't take the chance of losing money. So they all kind of follow the same model." Is this true? Is this why they're all so ugly? They've just honed it down to such a plain looking, commercial, sensible–it's like the sensible shoes of cars?
Hannah Elliott: Well, I do think there's an element of truth to that. I think, on an existential level, automakers are unsure about whether to make this new technology look new and look really different and crazy, or to make it look just like the car used to look. And the reason why is because it's already asking consumers to make a leap into risking this whole range thing and risking a new form, which is the electric thing. So you're already asking the consumer to make a step ahead, to get out of their comfort zone a little bit, with the idea "I have to do an electric thing now." Asking them to do that step, and then adding on this car's gonna look really different, it might be a step too far. So that's one part of the argument. The other side is, if we make this new technology, which is already asking them to take a risk, look just like normal cars, maybe they'll be more ready to accept it, because it's not asking them to change too much, and I don't think anyone's really figured out what the best thing is. It might be a different answer for a different brand. The other thing, unfortunately, that is determining the looks of some of these cars is…
Dana Thomas: The efficiency thing.
Hannah Elliott: …the efficiency thing! And we all know the cars we love from '60s and '70s were not created to maximize gas mileage. They were created to look awesome. And they do look awesome. When you have a windtunnel deciding how a car is going to look, sometimes that doesn't look amazing. And when I say windtunnel, I mean, they're trying to get the maximum range out of the shape of the car for the battery life. If that is your 100 percent goal, sometimes they don't look very good.
And then you've got the whole idea that the batteries in the car are flat along the floor of the car, which means that you don't have the engine taking up space. So this is a whole new model for the designers to work with. Just yesterday I was at a Lincoln debut and was talking to their designer. He claims it's fun. "We have a lot more to play with." But I also sense that there's a little bit of indirection with: How do we handle this skateboard platform, where there's a whole board of batteries on the bottom, and we've got these motors driving wheels? I'm not sensing a firm direction of this is the way to handle that set up.
Dana Thomas: And again, because it's a bunch of tech guys designing it, and not these really cool designers out of Detroit from the 1960s and '70s, or in England. Now I thought what was really interesting — the new Tesla pickup truck.
Hannah Elliott: The Cybertruck.
Dana Thomas: The Cybertruck. It looks crazy. It's a little bit the other direction, right? It's like the Bricklin of pickup trucks.
Hannah Elliott: Yes. To me, it almost also has like, Blade Runner vibes, which is kinda cool?
Dana Thomas: Got a Blade Runner vibe, well so did the Bricklin back then.
Hannah Elliott: Yeah. Completely, very cool looking. And also, doesn't exist yet. I keep coming back to this idea that we're talking about all these really cool things, and everyone loves the Cybertruck. Hundreds of thousands of people have put their hundred dollars down to reserve one, but we don't have it. It hasn't even started production. Will it ever even start production? There's no guarantee. I wish more companies could do something just really crazy. But also it's very easy to do a one-off concept and unveil it at a rock show and get people to give you a hundred bucks to reserve theirs. Years later, we are still waiting.
Dana Thomas: Still waiting. Still waiting.
Dana Thomas: Now the other thing I'm very concerned about, of course, is the vintage car market. I have a 1964 ½ convertible Mustang, 289 engine, four speed. Hard and heavy car to drive, but God, I love it. It's fun. And people say, "Well, that's not sustainable." Eh. The car is 58 years old, okay? That's something already. I've given that car a lot of life. The other car we have in Paris is a 1968 Fiat 500 — one of those tiny little Topolinos with the two-cylinder engine, which kind of makes up for the eight cylinders in the Mustang. It's like a sewing machine on wheels, this car. I put gas in it maybe twice a year. The dipstick is about three inches long. It's the most adorable car.
Hannah Elliott: That's adorable.
Dana Thomas: And in the manual, we have the original manual, it says "air conditioning" and there's an arrow pointing towards the window.
Hannah Elliott: Love it.
Dana Thomas: It's actually probably the greenest car I'll ever own.
Hannah Elliott: Love it. Personality.
Dana Thomas: But Paris is talking about outlawing gas-powered and diesel-powered cars 100 percent by 2030.
Hannah Elliott: London, too.
Dana Thomas: Now Paris is a small city, so they could actually probably pull it off. But does that mean that my poor little Fiat will just be worth nothing? And the same with the Mustang, should I be unloading the Mustang pretty soon, because eventually, the vintage car market is going to collapse?
Hannah Elliott: I don't think any market is going to collapse, and I'll tell you why. number one, Porsche is working to develop e-fuels, which are synthetic fuels that have no emissions.
Dana Thomas: Interesting.
Hannah Elliott: And the idea is: 70 percent of all Porsches ever made are still on the road, so Porsche understands that they need to figure out a way to keep these cars on the road even when regulations mean you can't drive ICE engines. They just announced they bought a stake in a company in Chile where they are working to develop what they're calling e-fuels. Bentley has also experimented with sustainable fuels, where they're developing fuels that you can run through an internal combustion engine but will not have emissions.
Dana Thomas: Super interesting.
Hannah Elliott: So that is one thing that's happening that would allow us to keep our cars–our beloved old girls–on the road, past whatever regulations might come in the future. I really think about mechanical watches. No one needs a mechanical watch anymore, and yet the market for those beautiful timepieces.
Dana Thomas: The Swiss market still makes them.
Hannah Elliott: Exactly. And they're still making them.
Dana Thomas: And they're a fortune!
Hannah Elliott: And they're worth a fortune. They're actual collectors' items. Obviously, cars are, too. I can definitely see a future where we collect mechanical old cars and drive them for fun occasions, for beautiful drives, for track days, on the weekends, and we park them in the garage, and then we have our electric car appliance that we use for our daily life.
Dana Thomas: Zipping around.
Hannah Elliott: We can't underestimate the passion of people with cars, even young people. I don't see the market dropping anytime soon.
Dana Thomas: And then what about the idea of taking these beautiful old cars and swapping out that 289 engine for an electric engine? I mean, Meghan and Harry drove silently off from their wedding reception in that E-Type Jaguar that had an electric engine that had been swapped out. Now, if you don't the sound of the Jaguar, is it still a Jaguar? If you don't hear boom-boom-boom when you start the Mustang, is it still a Mustang? If you turn on the Mustang and it's silent–part of the Mustang is the horse breathing.
Hannah Elliott: I love that.
Dana Thomas: And I tell you, that car, it does sound like that. I don't know how they made it sound like that, but it sounds like a horse breathing as it's running. I mean, is it worth doing it? Do you have the same drive? Do you have the same power? Do you have the same oomph? Part of the beauty of those cars, the weight of those cars, is that thing in the front end.
Hannah Elliott: I completely agree.
Dana Thomas: So if you switch it out, does it work?
Hannah Elliott: Electric power is definitely going to be faster than internal combustion power, and more efficient. It's not going to feel the same. It's just going to be a new thing. There's no way they can approximate your horse breathing sensation in your Mustang. You just can't!
Dana Thomas: You just can’t.
Hannah Thomas: It might drive faster, but to me, honestly, and maybe I'm getting old, but speed isn't everything. I want something I can interact with. You know, Plaid Mode on Teslas are incredibly fast, but is that the only thing? I don't think so. I think, in terms of converting to an electric engine, maybe eventually we'll be forced to do it, I'm certainly not ready to do that yet.
Dana Thomas: And then will auto companies ever take those beautiful old forms, like the DB5, the Ford Mustang from the '60s? And re-issue them as electric?
Hannah Elliott: Yeah. In fact, Jaguar is already experimenting with this internally. They're doing things called continuations. They'll take their old XKSS and do a continuation of it, where it's all new components but made to look exactly like the beautiful old Jags. Land Rover's also experimenting with that. So I think it would be very easy for them to just simply do that and drop in an electric motor.
Dana Thomas: It's going to be a bit like getting your Kelly or Birkin bag but made out of mycelium mushroom leather as opposed to cowhide.That's what they should be doing. It's very clever, because people always buy those beautiful classics.
Hannah Elliott: Of course.
Dana Thomas: But they will be hesitant to do so if it's hard to find gasoline or if they think it's polluting.
Hannah Elliott: I actually think that driving something old that has already existed in the world for many years requires less waste and manufacturing than buying a new thing. Even if that new thing is electric.
Dana Thomas: Absolutely.
Hannah Elliott: I'm such a firm believer in use what already exists. Use and repair old things rather than buying new products all the time. Let's not forget, auto makers exist to take our money from us.
Dana Thomas: Exactly. Like fashion companies.
Hannah Elliott: I was just going to say: It's like runway shows. Every auto show, there's a lot of pressure to show us something new that we can buy and get excited for. That doesn't mean the world needs this stuff. I even have a hard time keeping track of all the different variants of all the different BMWs and all the different Mercedes. There's so many of them now. I'm a big believer in: Use what already exists in the world. Repair it, cherish it, take care of it, cultivate it, and leave it for the next generation.
Dana Thomas: Which is exactly our point of view on The Green Dream. That's it, 100 percent. Thank you so much, Hannah Elliott, for being on the program. It's just been a delight.
Hannah Elliott: Thank you so much.
Dana Thomas: This episode is sponsored by Another Tomorrow, a women's fashion brand that redefines luxury with a commitment to ethics, sustainability, and transparency from farm to fabric to atelier. Find Another Tomorrow on its website, anothertomorrow.co, at its flagship boutique, 384 Bleecker Street in New York City, and at select stores.
If you are enjoying this conversation, you’ll love my sister podcast on the Wondercast Network, Fashion Conversations with Bronwyn Cosgrave. Fashion Conversations is fashion’s equivalent to Inside the Actors Studio—an in-depth interview podcast with fashion and luxury’s leading creators that explores their craft and creative process as well as their personal journeys. Find Fashion Conversations wherever you get your podcasts.
Dana Thomas: New episodes of The Green Dream come out the first and third Tuesday of the month. This episode of the Green Dream was sponsored by the sustainable fashion brand Another Tomorrow. Written by Dana Thomas. From Talkbox Productions with executive producer Tavia Gilbert, with mix and master by Kayla Elrod. Music performed by Eric Brace of Red Beet Records in Nashville, Tennessee. You can find us online at wondercast.studio or at WonderCast Radio. I’m Dana Thomas, the European Sustainability Editor for British Vogue. You can read my monthly column, also called The Green Dream, in the magazine or online at Vogue.co.uk. You can follow me on Instagram and on Twitter where my handle for both is @DanaThomasParis. Thank you for listening.
