Supercars & Hypercars w/ Spike, Jay Leno, and Lukas Czinger

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

Spike's Car Radio starts now.

Jay Leno (0:08)

Well, you all know Spike's Car Radio.

Spike Feresten (0:10)

Hi, nice to see you all.

Jay Leno (0:12)

If you don't know this, this is Lukas Czinger. Are you familiar with the Czinger automobile? Everybody's seen it online. Well, I will explain exactly what we have here. But to me, I find it to be just a revolution of the automobile. I get a little tired of all the exotic stuff coming from Europe. This is built in, they built the car on Hawthorne, California. The whole car, engine, suspension. It's not an assembled car in America, it's built in America. And the thing that made me buy one is the fact that you've got all these T50s and all the, I like the Koning's eggs and all these cars, but you come to America and oh, you got to get show and display because it doesn't pass this, it doesn't pass that. Their car with an engine, they built themselves, made the block, the whole thing, passed emissions, passes every test. It's like buying a Ford Focus. You go down, what's that? Zinger, boom, boom, they stand, and you're fine. You don't have to pretend to live in Montana.

Well, no, that's what I mean, you know what it is?

I mean, even, even Bruce Kanapa said he can't bring the two T50s anymore because he can't get them to meet him, which to me, and the fact that they do it in a, God, in a building that much bigger than my garage, and they build the whole car, and the thing is, and it's a new way of manufacturing, it's called additive engineering, is that what it is?

Lukas Czinger (1:42)

Exactly.

Jay Leno (1:43)

Okay. Thank you, Jay. Yeah, just a brief, most people start with a block of aluminum or steel, and you keep eliminating it until you get where you want. What they do is they start with nothing, and they just keep building up metal, 3D, to make the product exactly as strong as it needs to be. So it's the right weight, it's the right height, and whatever thing you have. But tell us a little bit more. Go ahead.

Lukas Czinger (2:09)

Yeah. Thanks, Jay. You hit so much of it.

I'm very, very happy to hear all that. But we're out of California, Los Angeles. We've been around for over a decade, and we actually started as a manufacturing business. So essentially, we built the tools to ultimately build the car, and we started by building those tools. So I think 3D printing is the layman's term. For us, this is metal additive manufacturing, so it's really a laser welding process, layer by layer, in a machine that's probably the size of this tent. So this is an industrial process. The machine itself, we actually built that machine, engineered that machine from the laser, so the optics, the way that we melt the metal. And as Jay said, we print or additively manufacture a good portion of the car, and we supply also to other automakers. But what we've done in Zinger is taken a clean sheet approach to a vehicle, said it's time for an American OEM, that's a true performance OEM, that goes all the way with it. So we have all the systems knowledge in-house, all the software knowledge, all the powertrain knowledge, and system by system, through the full vehicle architecture, built the 21C. We got two of them out on the lawn. One's the Roadster, one's the VMAX. Go see them, check them out.

If you don't know about us, you'll read up and you'll see these cars that perform very well as well. So we have a few track records across the US.

Jay Leno (3:30)

They took one of their cars. They drove it to every prestigious track in California, Laguna Seca, and broke every record.

Lukas Czinger (3:40)

Yeah. Five days, five records back to back, and we drove them in between. I didn't trailer it to it.

Jay Leno (3:46)

I mean, it's really amazing because the way we beat the Chinese is not in labor. They can pay people a dollar a day. We're not going to beat them there, so you got to do it with technology. You've got to be able to get machines to build it cheaper than they can get slave labor to build it, and that's really the key. I was at the Corvette plant in Bowling Green, Kentucky, and that's an amazing place. It's a union shop.

Everybody gets a union wage. A lot of the workers live in houses near the plant, which nobody can afford to do that in California. Nobody can live where they work anymore. Teachers can't live in the town they're teaching, but because of their effective manufacturing, they build a supercar like the ZR1X for what, a 10th of the price of a Ferrari or a McLaren or anything? I mean, for less than the sales tax in California on one of those cars. No, no, but I mean, that's what I find generally amazing. I mean, the fact that the manufacturing is so efficient that this is no waste. It's just boom, boom, moves smoothly, you know, they build, in fact, the guy that built the engine, my ZR1X is coming to visit me next week. I invited him and his family come out because his name is written on the engine block, which I kind of like. Spike, you got a feeling on it?