Hands-Free Trucks, Vanishing Pennies and Life Beyond Earth

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Doug Pike (0:52)

All right, here we go. Welcome to yet another edition of Fifty Plus. Thank you all for joining me. As always, I greatly appreciate that.

Quick little housekeeping note, I have room for maybe one or two more sponsors in the program if anybody's interested. If your company could use some connections to people who actually are about 35 plus, not just 50 plus, I would be happy to talk to you about making that happen. And you don't have to deal with anyone but me to make it happen. So shoot me an email, dougpikeatihartmedia.com.

So maybe a little rain today, maybe a little rain tomorrow, not a whole lot on Friday or Saturday, and then it flips back around. Best we've got right now is a 50-50 chance, and I think that's for today.

Highs in the low to mid-90s, lows in the high 70s, straight through it all. So just more of the same. This may be the longest stretch of really warm afternoons and semi-warm. I guess you can't really call them cool overnights that I can recall in several years. I doubt seriously that any of this is record breaking, but at least it's something to talk about around lunchtime or dinner time or any other time that the conversation kind of dies off and you need to bring something up. And speaking of bringing something different up, stepping into the near-term future, I saw a story yesterday at Yahoo Finance about how Ford is stepping up the technology on the eternally popular F-150 series. Next year's models will have a host of new features, one of which, and I'm not sure I'm ready for this, hands-free towing. I still haven't even tried hands-free driving yet, and I'm not so sure that I really want that, but it really would kind of frighten me to know that there are a bunch of trucks on the roads to and from the beach, to and from the lakes, that are pulling boats, and the driver's just reading a newspaper in the front seat. To me, hands-free driving sounds like driverless driving, and you can call me old-fashioned all you want, but I'm really not ready for that. But Ford is, and they're trying to recover from kind of a hit they took in early 26, with the F-Series sales going down more than 13%.

Much of that was attributable to a shortage of aluminum, like I read yesterday, after fires at the Novellis Aluminum Plant, wherever that is and whatever it might provide. Interesting about those trucks, really, though. Nation's best seller for 49 years, and through which, by the way, I've owned a couple of them myself. The 2027 150, though, said to be just what the brand needs to boost sales and hang on to its dominance. They're adding power, too, if you're interested, with a 5.0-liter V8 available in the King Ranch and Platinum trims, and the outgoing 2.7-liter EcoBoost, that's what I had in my last one, is being replaced with a 3.0-liter engine that pumps up the torque by at least 10% in everyday driving, which is about how often I drove my last F150 to work, dropping kids at school for carpool, taking kids to sports practices and tournaments and games and hauling groceries, because that's what grown men with nice trucks do.

I might go test drive one of those new ones if the opportunity comes up. Not gonna lie, I'm a little bit curious. But enough for the auto report. Let's slide out to California and get about Gavin. With Gavin Newsom actually fly fishing somewhere up in Montana, talking with CNN's Jake Tapper. They're standing in the middle of a river, talking about his plans for 2028, while both of them pretend to know anything about fly fishing, and were surrounded, by the way, by full camera and sound crews in the middle of nowhere. They were on pretty water, at least. I wonder if their security teams had to shut down five miles of river for those two to stand there playing make-believe fly fishermen. Never did see either of them catch a fish, but we did hear Gavin Newsom, I believe, kind of pretty much confirm that if Kamala Harris runs, he's gonna step away from the race altogether. He said they have too many mutual friends, too many mutual donors, and the early Democrat debates among all the candidates with those two on the stage together could be pretty disastrous.