Electric Vehicles going offline as companies go bust

Electric Vehicles going offline as companies go bust

Drivers of electric vehicles are finding their cars are going offline if the parent company is bankrupt. Smartphone apps linked to the cars, which control many features, don't work and when something goes seriously wrong, then there's no garage that can fix the problem. China, the world's biggest market for EV's, has seen government subsidies disappear as well as intense price wars between companies, leading to many startups failing. SOEP speaks to one driver in the UK who is facing similar issues after the California based car manufacture filed for bankruptcy.

AI pen that can read Braille
A pen that uses algorithms, a camera and a 19 channel sensor has been developed to help the visually impaired read Braille. The number of people who can read Braille is declining, yet it is used in many public spaces including lifts and transport hubs. Named the "Braille-tip", the compact soft tactile sensor can be added to a normal pen to help read Braille. Lead author Dr George Jenkinson from Bristol University in the UK is on the show.

The programme is presented by Gareth Mitchell and the studio expert is Peter Guest.   

More on this week's stories:
EV shutdowns in China
A sensory pen which can read Braille could improve literacy amongst the visually impaired
A robot that can detect breast cancer?

Transcript

00:00:00 Gareth Mitchell 

Hello folks, it's Gareth here. Welcome along to the Somewhere on Earth podcast for Tuesday the 17th of September 2024. And we have voices from, let me just kind of scroll down.  Somebody’s from London here and somebody from Bristol but who was speaking to us from somewhere that wasn't Bristol, but so there we are. So people from different places. And us in the studio, what an intro that was. Here we go. 

00:00:31 Gareth Mitchell 

And with us today is the excellent Peter Guest, very much here in our studio in London and thriving. But only just. I think it's fair to say, bit tired maybe or not too bad. 

00:00:41 Peter Guest 

And also kind of all over the place like your introduction and so. 

00:00:45 Gareth Mitchell 

You cannot be as all over the place as that introduction was. I'm amazed they kept it, but I think they’re just so desperate just to crack on with the rest of it, they'll make do with that. So let's hope. All right, here we go. It gets better, folks. I'm really selling it aren't I. Yeah, it's gonna be a brilliant one today. Here we go. 

00:01:03 Gareth Mitchell 

And coming up today. 

00:01:08 Gareth Mitchell 

The Chinese electric vehicles that stop working when the companies that develop them go bust. What on earth is going on? I mean, when you buy a car, you kind of expect it to keep going despite what happens to the manufacturer, right? Well, that might have been the case back in the day. Is it necessarily the case these days? We have a cautionary tale for you. 

00:01:27 Gareth Mitchell 

Also in this edition. A pen that reads Braille? Yes, indeed. You just press it onto the dimples and you trace it across the Braille, and that is converted to text. And of course, once it's text, it can then be potentially converted into audio, or just about anything else. So, really clever piece of technology. We’ll tell you all about it right here on the Somewhere on Earth podcast. 

00:01:53 Gareth Mitchell 

Now, when Pontiac cars were discontinued after hitting financial problems in the late 2000's, the cars still operated absolutely fine. I mean, they were cars. People drove them out of the showroom. No worries at all. Despite the brand having been discontinued. Well, you'd expect the same really, when any car maker goes bust, you'd hope so, wouldn't you?  

00:02:12 Gareth Mitchell 

Bye. Bye. Company. But hey, I still have one of your cars, but not so with some Chinese EV's that seem to stop working. Or certainly bits stopped working when the company that made them, when that company goes bust, you don't have support anymore. What happens when you have software problems. You know it’s, it is, 

00:02:30 Gareth Mitchell 

yeah, it's a bit of a nightmare. So Pete, you're quite interested in all this. Can you just explain to maybe some of our puzzled and potentially worried listeners, what might be going on? You know they buy an EV and perhaps it's not all that good. 

00:02:43 Peter Guest 

So I think the main story here we're talking about is about WM Motor, which is an EV company based in China. And like a lot of EV’s it is a melding of hardware and software, right? The car itself is obviously mechanical and batteries, but everything from the air conditioning, the locks, the ignition is electronic, and it's also often served through an app. Now in this particular case, users suddenly find themselves unable to use their cars because there was a server problem and they could no longer access the basic things like the dashboard. 

00:03:18 Peter Guest 

This is obviously just one example of it, but it's becoming an increasingly common problem. We've seen it with lots of different electrical vehicle brands. Tesla, you know, people struggling to get in and out of their cars when something has gone wrong with the software. Other companies, the Swedish company Fisker has had some problems with it and, you know, software problems, some of them remote, some of them direct to the vehicle, a couple of real problems all the way down to the brakes. Suddenly something working when the software has gone wrong. 

00:03:42 Gareth Mitchell 

Bit scary. I suppose at least with something like Tesla, the firm is still going, so you can get some support. But some of these other companies have been talking about, the company goes out of business and then who do you call when your brakes don't work anymore or when the car starts doing something weird? 

00:03:56 Peter Guest 

Well, it's a problem for obviously companies that have gone out of business, but it's also sometimes a problem for companies that are still in business because you need to find someone who's able to service the vehicle that you've got and deal with the problem that you've got. Now in the old days, you know, a mechanic could probably figure out how to fix almost any vehicle that he had in front of him or she had in front of her right. 

00:04:14 Peter Guest 

It's a basic set of mechanical problems. Suddenly you need a software engineer with access to the API at the back end of the software that runs the vehicle to be able to do it. Now you might be able to get that in your city, but if you're a long way away from that who do you call? 

00:04:27 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah. Who do you call. A brief digression but I'm sure listeners will sympathise with this, whether you're a biker or not. But you know, I've just bought, it's a used motorcycle, but to me it's a new motorcycle. Absolutely love it. Just took it out for a bit of a spin. Everything's going really well with this motorbike. It's a modern motorcycle. There's lots of electronics on it and 

00:04:49 Gareth Mitchell 

then over the weekend, I disconnected the battery to add some little toys to it, like an automatic chain oiler and all this kind of stuff that bikers will know about and will probably bore everybody else to tears. But anyway, reconnected the battery and then I got the service warning light coming up on the instrument panel of the motorcycle and, you know, and the bike doesn't need surfacing but for some reason me disconnecting the battery made the bike think it was back to the year 2000, so the bike suddenly thought it was 24 years old. 

00:05:16 Gareth Mitchell 

And the only way I can get that little service light off is to take it back to the dealer so somebody can just plug a laptop into the OBD port and reset the bike. Or I can just get some device off eBay and just do it myself, but I'm just worried I might mess it up and completely mess the bike up, so I don't know, so that's about motorbiking and this might seem like a digression, but it just ties into that whole thing now. 

00:05:40 Gareth Mitchell 

Basically, when you ride a motorcycle or you're driving a modern car and especially an EV car, effectively you're driving a computer, aren't you? And everything's fine when the software is all right, when it isn't, you can have a few issues. But anyway, enough of me and my motorbikes and all that, why don't we hear from London-based car owner who's been talking to Ania. He doesn't want us to name him, but, well, he has his own tale of woe. Here he is. 

00:06:07 London-based car owner 

So the car is called a Fisker Ocean Extreme. I procured it in just before Christmas. The reason I went with the Fisker over any other cars is because of its green credentials. The car is actually made from recycled disused cargo nets,  

00:06:27 London-based car owner 

fishing nets that were reclaimed from the sea, and disused plastics and that. There's no car like it at all. And some of the features that it has, a solar sun roof, which was retractable. California Mode, where all the windows come down. It was, it was a good sell. Put it that way. It was a good sell and and it's a sustainable car. So it ticked all the boxes as far as I'm concerned. 

00:06:51 Ania Lichtarowicz 

But you didn't arrive today for this interview in the car, did you? You came by bike. You've had some problems with that car, haven't you? Tell me about those. 

00:06:59 London-based car owner 

Most of the problems I've had are to do with either the software and some of the software features, or the software that can control the hardware. 

00:07:13 Ania Lichtarowicz 

But why can't the company just update those then? 

00:07:15 London-based car owner 

Some issues have been corrected via the over the year updates. 

00:07:21 Ania Lichtarowicz 

But you now have a problem with these updates and with your app because the company, 

00:07:26 London-based car owner 

It's, yeah, it’s gone bankrupt. 

00:07:26 Ania Lichtarowicz 

It's gone bankrupt, hasn't it? 

00:07:29 London-based car owner 

Yeah, they filed for Chapter, what they call in the States, Chapter 11. We're gotta make sure we understand the makeup of the company. The car is actually produced in Austria by a company called Magna Steyr. 

00:07:43 London-based car owner 

But the company’s actually registered in California. So it's an American company, but the car’s actually manufactured in, in, in Austria. Now Magna Steyr, they produce cars like the Aston Martin and BMW, so quality wise, 

00:08:03 London-based car owner 

the build quality of the car is very good, yeah. Software-wise, has not been developed fully. So I think it was brought to market prematurely. A lot of the features needed more testing and more validation in terms of how they interoperability with other parts of the car. 

00:08:20 London-based car owner 

I no longer have access to the app. Certain features like unlocking the car from the app I don't have. I only have one key fob, so if I lose that key FOB, I'm stuffed. There's some quirks with the car. Like now recently, the air conditioning system knocks, it does a strange thing before the car is ready to take off and it takes a long time for things to, the entertainment system, for instance, it takes a long time for that to to boot up when it should be instant. 

00:08:53 Ania Lichtarowicz 

And obviously now this company has filed for Chapter 11. 

00:08:57 London-based car owner 

Or Chapter 7. 

00:08:58 Ania Lichtarowicz 

Or Chapter 7. Let's let's not get into the the the technicalities are are, are, but basically they've gone bankrupt. So there's no one working for them anymore or a skeleton crew. 

00:09:09 London-based car owner 

Yeah, I mean, they’ve probably got a skeleton crew working for them at the moment. There have been recalls on the car. There's something to do with the cooling system which would render the car to lose its power, so there's going to be a recall on the on all the Fister Oceans that are out there. I haven't received a letter to say yet, can you bring your car into XYZ. Because I don't know how they're going to do it because I haven't got service centres to to actually do the actual work. 

00:09:43 Ania Lichtarowicz 

So what now? Are you drivers gonna get together? Have you? Have you got advice? Legal advice? Now what's, what are your next steps now in trying to either get your money back or to see if someone else is taking over the the upgrades of the car? 

00:09:59 London-based car owner 

I am exploring my options with other drivers and in actual fact another Fisker owner came and knocked on my window the other day while I was parked up, and says Ohh yeah, he's got a Fisker Ocean. He doesn't know what he's gonna do, but we've all agreed that it makes sense to join the Fisker Owners Association. It's called FOA, F O A. They're based in the States, but they have a global reach. So that all Fisker owners that have the car 

00:10:29 London-based car owner 

can sort of band together and to keep the car out on the road and also get compensation for some of the things that they've experienced, as well, as well as share tips and hints of any issues that you have and how to resolve them. 

00:10:52 Gareth Mitchell 

Oh dear, that London-based car owner of a Fisker car who's having a few problems to say the least. By the way. We have contacted Fisker. We've tried to anyway, I've not heard back, so I suspect Pete, our message is probably ended up in some black hole somewhere, accompanied by endless messages from very disgruntled drivers saying that the windows don't work properly anymore, and the entertainment system just has a mind of its own. 

00:11:17 Gareth Mitchell 

What a nightmare. What did you think listening to that apart from thank God I didn't buy one of them? 

00:11:20 Peter Guest 

Well, exactly. But I think , I think it speaks to your experience with the bike as well though, that there's a big question here like who actually owns the stuff that you bought, right?  So this is obviously an example of where that the service centers have been set up for a company and the assumption that they will last forever and no one else could fix this. This isn't a classic car in the sense that it's all just mechanical, but this isn't just happening in  electric vehicles. 

00:11:44 Peter Guest 

There was a company called VanMoof which was an ebike company which went bankrupt last year and they actually I think just started to relaunch. But there was a year in which anyone who bought one of these very swanky, very expensive ebikes wasn't sure they were going to get them fixed because you could only get them fixed at the service centers. No one else could do it. The app was suddenly not being updated. 

00:12:04 Peter Guest 

And you weren't clear if you could even like, use your bike, cause you could lock your bike. You could, you know, access all the different services on it. 

00:12:11 Peter Guest 

And so they're almost like, have we figured out how to deal with, first of all, who owns the hardware you've acquired. And secondly, is there a kind of an end of life plan for this if the company doesn't survive, how do you make sure that the thing will? 

00:12:23 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, indeed. And there's that other, there's a quite well known example of the John Deere tractors and I think other tractor manufacturers, but yeah, and just people who don't know that story that you have, farmers who might have an issue with one of their John Deere tractors and are unable to get into the software or whatever to sort their tractor out. So that it has to be, often quite expensively dealt with. 

00:12:44 Gareth Mitchell 

By the way, we haven't spoken to John Deere about this item. We don't have a right of reply from them. They're very welcome to send us one if they want, but anyway, but it's a well known, it's in the public domain. There have been these kinds of issues with ownership or questions over who owns what and what kind of owner do with a piece of technology and John Deere has come up in that discussion a lot as well. So yeah. 

00:13:07 Peter Guest 

There’s this whole idea of something, of effectively subscribing to your tractor which is, which is a model that's kind of common, but I think even beyond just vehicles, we're talking about, this is a a problem for the Internet of Things in general, like the Internet of Things means that your fridge is connected to the Internet and run by an app. Your wearable tech is connected to an app. But, you know, I've thought about the various different types of wearable health monitors you've got. And all of them require a subscription. What happens with that. 

00:13:34 Peter Guest 

There are even Internet of Things medical devices. Now you can get pacemakers attached which are run through the Internet and by software that is owned by a company. What happens when that stops working? 

00:13:44 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, actually I I seem to remember back in our dim and distant past that the, back in the Digital Planet days at the BBC, and producer Ania is nodding through the glass there, of issues with that very thing, sort of implantable medical devices where they've become obsolete or for whatever reason, they're not being supported anymore. And people have these things and they're wearing them and maybe in some ways, their life kind of depends 

00:14:04 Gareth Mitchell 

on them. So yeah, what an issue that is. So I've learned many things from this programme, including that in certain cars, you can have California Mode. Didn't you just love that? Just how aspirational is that? You can put the car into California Mode. As a good boy from Mid-Wales I was thinking I could have a Mid-Wales mode where the windows automatically come up and the wipers start as soon as you go across the border because basically it will rain. 

00:14:25 Gareth Mitchell 

There we are. Thank you, Pete, for that. 

00:14:28 Gareth Mitchell 

Now let's hear about the Braille-tip, this device. Now it's a pen that can translate Braille into text. Now it's just a prototype at the moment, so I think it's fair to assume that once you have that Braille in text form, of course it can be translated into audio or into other very useful means. So in this case the user just runs the pen over those dimpled characters on a page of Braille. 

00:14:53 Gareth Mitchell 

And the pen will then read out the words and sentences in real time. The plan is to improve literacy among visually impaired people. Doctor George Jenkinson is a Bristol-based robotics researcher, and he's been leading the research on this. And in fact, you may just remember, George, if you're a frequent flyer on this podcast, in fact, he was on our very first  

00:15:14 Gareth Mitchell 

edition of Somewhere on Earth and back then, this is back in October, he was talking about a tactile sensor for examining the breast for diagnosing lumps and possible cancers. So this whole field of soft senses? Well, that's that's very much George's thing. 

00:15:29 George Jenkinson 

The area that I work in or have been working in is soft tactile robotics, so it's soft in the sense that it's physically soft. So the the tip of this tactile sensor is made of silica and rubber. So that's, you know, soft, squishy rubber that's soft to the touch. 

00:15:46 George Jenkinson 

And the way that this sensor works on a kind of fundamental level is that there are areas within that rubber that are filled with liquid. 

00:15:54 George Jenkinson 

And as the liquid area comes into contact with something, the rubber compresses and the liquid behind it moves and we can film that using a camera. I've explored other means of sensing, but the most basic form and most successful and easy to implement way that I've been doing it is by using a camera to watch how this liquid moves, and then using computer vision algorithms,  

00:16:15 George Jenkinson 

we can work backwards and say, OK, if if this if this liquid here is moving then that means that this particular area on this soft rubber membrane must be being touched right now.  So we can basically, what I've done with this piece of work is militarize that so that the areas that the movement in the liquid corresponds to  

00:16:32 George Jenkinson 

is actually a little bit smaller than a Braille bump, so that when we pass this over some Braille text, we can see with quite good resolution where the bumps on the on the paper or cardboard or perhaps metal or wherever the Braille is embossed. Where those bumps actually are. 

00:16:49 Gareth Mitchell 

Right. OK. So it's, and then you can calibrate it all up and so yeah, so the tip goes over a bump, then the liquid, the fluid changes, the camera picks that up. So in other words, it's a bump or no bump detector. I suppose is what what you've made, albeit on a very small and very sensitive scale, and I guess the other part of that is that the tip needs to know where it is. It needs to understand that, for instance, the user has traced from left to right as it kind of progresses through the Braille. 

00:17:02 George Jenkinson 

Yeah, this is something that at the moment is a kind of assumption on the way that the, on the way that it's operated. 

00:17:28 George Jenkinson 

So to make all this data essentially, I've done a proof of concept. So when I was gathering all this data and testing the pen, I was making sure that it travelled in one direction from left to right and I was just trying to apply a reasonably constant amount of force. And this might not, this might sound a little bit removed from usual lab conditions where everything is incredibly precisely controlled in terms of,  

00:17:50 George Jenkinson 

you know, particularly in robotics, we tend to use very precise forces and very precise trajectories, but I wanted to get something that would reflect the real world use of this device. So I deliberately kind of tried to use it well, but I deliberately operated it by hand so that any areas or any shortcomings of the design in a realistic scenario, we're actually obvious in the results. 

00:18:08 Gareth Mitchell 

And how well does it work then? Can you give me an idea of, you know, just what happens when people use it? 

00:18:15 George Jenkinson 

Yeah. So when I was using it, I got something like a, I think it was an 86% success rate in terms of identifying characters. And when I examined where it went wrong, it tended to not be wrong by very much. So just as a very brief crash course in Braille for, I'm assuming probably most listeners who won't know perhaps know how to read or indeed write Braille, 

00:18:35 George Jenkinson 

is that it's a, there's a two by three grid, so 2 columns, 3 rows of sites where there's potentially a raised bump. 

00:18:44 George Jenkinson 

So if you imagine it's like essentially like a number six on a dice, you know where there's six dots. That's kind of like all of the dots are raised, and then you can lower or raise any of those dots and the particular combination in which you do that correlates to a different vector. So where this Braille-tip went wrong, it tended to only be wrong by one or two bumps. 

00:19:03 George Jenkinson 

So let's say there's a character that's made-up of five raised bumps or four raised bumps it tended to get three out of four or four out of five of them right. And it either missed one, or it put one in a slightly wrong location. So I'm I'm I I'm quite happy that with a few kind of technical improvements, we'll get a higher accuracy rate. Ideally, you'd get as close to 100% as possible. 

00:19:25 Gareth Mitchell 

How significant do you think this is? So how is this going to help people who use Braille? 

00:19:29 George Jenkinson 

The target audience for this is actually people who want to use Braille but can't learn for whatever reason. So there's something that's very widely reported, kind of anecdotally, because I think it’s on one hand, difficult to study and on one hand slightly under-studied, is that Braille literacy is in decline and like  

00:19:49 George Jenkinson 

one reason for that you might think, oh, well, you know, audiobooks and audio description and other digital solutions now are very good, which is I'm sure that's part of the reason why fewer people are electing to learn Braille. But in studies of participatory studies,  

00:20:05 George Jenkinson 

people who are visually impaired or blind and can read Braille often say that this is one of their most valued skills? You know they love being able to read Braille so, and at the same time there are lots of people who say they'd like to read Braille or in fact have tried to learn how to read Braille, but they can't find a teacher or they can't find independent learning 

00:20:25 George Jenkinson 

resources that would help them with this kind of scale acquisition and we're trying to provide a tool that can help with this independent skill acquisition, so if someone’s feeling a particular Braille sentence, 

00:20:38 George Jenkinson 

Traditionally, kind of at the moment there's no real, they'd have to wait until someone who can read Braille, or perhaps someone who can convert between Braille and written text to kind of help them with that. Whereas this pen bridges that gap and it means that people are able to, or you know, this pen in an ideal form, what I'm imagining it will be in the near future, bridges that gap and helps people to be able to learn how to read Braille independently. 

00:21:00 George Jenkinson 

So ideally it's a it's a stepping stone. Eventually, you know, you'd have it for a matter of months while you're learning and once you’ve learnt of course you don't really need it anymore. 

00:21:07 Gareth Mitchell 

 Where do you hope to go next with this product? Will you try marketing it? 

00:21:14 George Jenkinson 

Yeah. So I think there are  some clear improvements to be made. It would be nice to have,  so for example one of the advantages of this is that it's very low power and at the moment it uses a camera which is really nice in terms of the fact that they're really cheap and you know, I think because of things like smartphones, they're getting smaller and cheaper and better. 

00:21:31 George Jenkinson 

But one downside is that with a camera you kind of have to have a focal length, so that's kind of like a minimum size that you can make the sensor is actually reasonably big. So I want to move away from using a camera so that we can miniaturise this more and make it really, truly the size of a pen so that you can carry it around in your pocket. So there are a few other technical things I want to improve as well. 

00:21:52 George Jenkinson 

So I think in the, for the kind of next step near future looking to improve these two factors and from there, yeah, hopefully we can make a, you know, a viable product that people will want to use. 

00:22:07 Gareth Mitchell 

All right. There you go. So that's George Jenkinson telling us about that Braille pen and listening to that was Pete Guest.  What do you reckon then Pete? 

00:22:15 Peter Guest 

Well, the first thing I thought, which was just how amazing a technology Braille is. And I looked it up earlier just to make sure I knew what I was talking about. And depending on when you decide it was invented, it's probably 200 years old this year. 

00:22:29 Gareth Mitchell 

 Wow. I didn't realise it was that old. I'd have thought ohh it's Victorian probably. 

00:22:35 Gareth Mitchell 

OK. Yeah. So, so that's one thing that strikes you about it then? 

00:22:39 Peter Guest 

So yeah, absolutely. So I think I think it's definitely fascinating. And I think as you mentioned there, there's this assumption that new technologies, particularly where you talking where artificial intelligence, character recognition, you know audio readers and so on are going to supersede these old technologies. 

00:22:56 Peter Guest 

But we've just had a 10 minute discussion about what the dangers are in relying on other peoples platforms and actually something I've come across a few times in my career is stories of people who find themselves left behind when technology moves on and actually Braille is a really a good example of this. I was working on a story a couple of years ago with some amazing journalists in South Korea who were trying to get 

00:23:19 Peter Guest 

those Big South Korean technology companies that produce fridges and cookers and televisions and entry pads for houses to stop making them touch screens. 

00:23:29 Gareth Mitchell 

Right. 

00:23:30 Peter Guest 

Because of course, if you're visually impaired you may struggle to use a touch screen, but of course they look great and they move forward and it's all, but actually it leaves people behind and so sometimes the actual kind of the old technology was working perfectly well for accessibility, but we need to find new ways to kind of integrate it into the way we work. 

00:23:44 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah. So and just make sure the right people are in the room or a diverse group of people in the room when people are coming up with new products. Yeah. And just one I'll throw in as well. Listening to this on the technology and the engineering side. You know, some of my my background is in electronics and when Ania said we were first going to be doing this story about a, you know, little tip that can run across some Braille and translate it into text and other data forms,  

00:24:08 Gareth Mitchell 

and of course, my engineering brain immediately thought, how would I design something like that? And I really struggled with it, so I was thinking, well, would you have like a little piezoelectric tip or something? So this is a material whose, that effectively generates like a little voltage every time it's in contact with something. And you can use the technology in microphones, for instance. And I was thinking, well, you know, that it probably wouldn't have the sensitivity you need 

00:24:29 Gareth Mitchell 

for Braille and so then I was thinking well, could you use a camera, but literally just on the Braille surface. But then you just wouldn't have the contrast. So I thought maybe you'd have to light the Braille in some way. So it it has a bit of a relief to it as it were, you light it from the side and then you get some contrast. But then that would make it very cumbersome to use. And then of course, when we got into the interview  

00:24:49 Gareth Mitchell 

with George and he talked about this tip that has some fluid in it that moves, and then that's the thing that a camera then does go on to detect. And by the way, the cameras are cheap and ubiquitous. I was thinking, oh, that's why he's doing this and I'm just sitting here talking about it. But it's a nice elegant solution. 

00:25:05 Peter Guest 

It is, but it's also fascinating to see the amount of engineering you have to think of to replicate something which is a perfectly natural movement, and this is the glory of the soft senses that you can replicate something which is extraordinary sensitivity of the human skin and the fingertips and so on, which otherwise would require vast amounts of engineering. 

00:25:23 Gareth Mitchell 

Absolutely. Great. Well, thank you very much indeed, for that. That's Pete Guest you've been hearing from today and me Gareth Mitchell, it's been a while since I've given you a shout out for the old socials. So here they come. If you can call e-mail a social media, maybe it's an anti-social media cause it's just you and me on the old e-mail. Either way, it's hello at somewhere on earth.co, that's hello at somewhere on earth.co. On WhatsApp  we're code 44 for the UK, 748-632-9484 and everywhere else most social media we’re pretty easy to find. Just look for Somewhere on Earth or S.O.E.P or soaptech or something like that.  

00:26:02 Gareth Mitchell 

So we have sound today by Dylan and Keziah. The production manager is Liz. The producer and editor is Ania. And well, I've already introduced Pete and I. We're at Lansons Team Farner and we're signing off for now. See you soon. Bye bye.