The Last 50 Ft

New car sales have held at about 15 million a year for 50 years, and Cole Potamkin doesn’t expect autonomy to change that in the next five. Cole is CEO of Potamkin Companies and runs Hyundai’s largest dealer group in the US, with 14 dealerships.

In this episode, he tells Cam Hering why AVs will replace rideshare and the second car, not the car you own. He compares Waymo at $4 a mile with $800 a month of car ownership. He also explains why parts and service earn 50 to 70 percent margins while selling a car earns just 2 to 3.

Cole also covers AI agents negotiating car deals and why he’s bullish on Autolane.

Find Cole at https://www.potamkin.co/ and on LinkedIn.

Founder Conor Begley joins us to discuss building Fathers Brewing alongside software ventures, scaling distribution, and turning one-to-one customer relationships into brand growth. He also explains clean beer, its organic, glass-bottle approach, and where autonomous delivery could solve costly emergency restocking gaps.

Conor spent $25,000 testing the top 20 beers and found lead, arsenic, glyphosate, and PFAS. Now Fathers Brewing is in Costco, Whole Foods, and Total Wine. Fathers Brewing is up to a million beers a year. On The Last 50 Ft, he breaks down:

• What the $25,000 test found and the three fixes behind clean beer
• Why a $500M beauty exit taught him the internet’s real magic is one-to-one
• How a DM to every follower builds a strong brand
• Why Philly launched in hundreds of locations overnight, and the repeat purchase problem that followed
• Why every brand needs autonomous delivery for the emergency Friday-night keg run
• How Hamei’s restaurant became Fathers Brewing’s first customer

Saimah Chaudhry, Co-Founder of Zevo, joins Cam on The Last 50 Ft to break down the EV car sharing marketplace built for gig workers. Saimah explains how Zevo connects directly to Tesla and other OEMs for keyless, contactless rentals, how it builds trust between hosts and drivers, and why maintenance is the hardest part of scaling an EV fleet. She also covers charging and battery health, host education on depreciation and unit economics, and how Zevo sees itself as an infrastructure layer for autonomous vehicles. Plus an animal left in a car and the do it yourself duct tape job on a car.

Learn more at Zevo.com

Oakland chef and owner Paul Iglesias (Parche, Jaji) discusses the future of intentional hospitality, the realities of running modern restaurants, and his culturally rooted menu design.

Paul walks us through industry pressures like rising labor costs and delivery margins while showing how Oakland's energy, influences his concepts. He also shares insights into menu design as cultural translation, the storytelling power of small plates, and what it takes to keep full-service dining sustainable.

Most people picture drone delivery as the flight. Alex Norman, COO of Matternet, says the hardest part happens before takeoff, when an order has to get from the kitchen into the drone.

Alex went from aerospace engineering in Austria and big aircraft at Airbus to one of the earliest drone delivery companies. Matternet started out flying medical samples between hospitals in Switzerland. It now operates in the US, Switzerland and the UK, and works with partners like UPS. Food is quickly becoming its biggest source of volume.

What started as a joke about opening a nightclub turned into a career in the kitchen. Chef Nelson German, the chef behind alaMar and Sobre Mesa in Oakland and Meski in San Francisco, joins The Last 50 Ft to talk about the night at the Copacabana that sent him to culinary school, how Top Chef Season 18 reconnected him with his roots, and the Afro-Latino flavors that define his restaurants.

We get into opening Sobre Mesa just ten days before the pandemic shut everything down, partnering with World Central Kitchen to feed laid-off hospitality workers, and why his team is everything. Nelson also shares his new book, Caribbean Cocktails, and what it takes to get great food from his kitchen to your door.

Before Autolane, Hamei spent 15 years in hospitality and ran his own restaurant. In this episode he talks about what delivery apps did to restaurant margins, how COVID changed what customers expect, and why autonomous delivery gives operators, big and small, control of the last 50 feet again.

He also covers why people skills still matter most, the time autonomy frees up for operators, and advice for owners weighing new tech. Plus celebrity visits, favorite shift meals, and why a cold burrito can ruin the experience.

David Richer, founder of Orbital Kitchens, joined Ben and Cam this week. While most pandemic-era ghost kitchens collapsed, Richer's flagship Union Square location in New York does a reported $30 million a year out of a single kitchen, and his in-house fleet delivers at more than double the industry's rate. He gets into the missed payment that forced him to build that fleet overnight, what he thinks everyone else got wrong about scaling a virtual brand too fast, and the bowl-building robot already running in one of his kitchens.

🏁 goautolane.com I orbitalkitchens.com

Garrett McCurrach, founder of Pipedream Labs, joins the show to talk about the underground pipe network he's building to move food and packages straight to the curb, no roads required. We get into how the system actually works, what it took to get real pipes running under drive-thrus in Texas and Georgia, and what property operators stand to gain once the last 50 feet moves below ground. If you've ever wondered what's happening beneath the sidewalk, this one's for you.

Van Tucker has spent over two decades at the intersection of technology, creativity, and commerce. He's helped brands like Nike and Disney and is currently head of AI at CMG. He is helping businesses adopt AI through his venture, AI Wrangler.

In this episode, Van traces his path from building his first website in middle school (to promote BMX biking) to creating a locker ecosystem with Harbor Lockers. He worked to bring locker networks to U.S. cities to help emerging business. Van also shares how AI Wrangler started as a joke on Linkedin and turned into a real business after people kept asking how he was actually using AI.

Tune in for a conversation about entrepreneurship, reinventing yourself, and where AI is headed next.

🏁 goautolane.com

https://vantucker.com