Chapters
Shownotes Transcript
- This is Tesla's former director of autopilot testified. - Well, everybody's former now. Tesla sending a driver assistance update to your car and it has nothing to do with FSD. - And some new Model Ys are getting a 60 plus mile range boost with just a push of a button. - Plus Tesla's supercharger team is getting dismantled. But what does that mean for the supercharger expansion? - Let's get right into it.
Okay, so let's get right into it with these new software updates that are going to be coming. Looks like they were discovered by the hacker GreenTheOnly, which we've heard about a lot. He's one of the biggest Tesla hackers out there. And it's basically the cars are going to be getting new voice commands.
Voice assistant. So we have voice commands, right? When you press the scroll button on the steering wheel, it activates it and you can tell the car what you want. Now you're going to have a personalized assistant that'll speak to you. There's going to be a wake word involved as well. So what exactly is a wake word? So when you think about Alexa, you say, you know, hey Alexa or hey Siri, these sort of triggers are wake words for those devices. And that's exactly what Tesla is going to have. There's no word on exactly what that word is going to be to wake up your Tesla, but it's going to be fascinating to see what they come up with.
So what do you think it will be? Any ideas? Maybe it could be, hey, Grok. It could be, hey, Tesla. That's the simple. I mean, Grok would be like, make sense. But I feel like Elon's not going to do that. Yeah. It's going to be like something funny. Or maybe he'll let you choose. Knowing him, it'd be like, hey, 420 or... Hey, 69. Yeah.
Yeah, it'd be like something kind of like, what do you guys think it'd be and what do you want it to be? Put that down in the comments below. And this will give you features to control your music, your wipers, but you can say the hey word essentially and then have the car do what you want it to do on command. It's always going to be listening in that sense for that particular set of words. I saw that they said that it's going to be Microsoft's Jenny neutral voice. Yes.
What voice is that? Yeah, not to be confused with Jimmy Neutron, but Jenny Neutral. Yeah, Jenny Neutral. Is it a neutral voice?
Because when I typed in Jenny neutral, it came up gender neutral voice, which I don't think is what it is. I'll play it for you. I have it pulled up. Immersive Reader in Microsoft Edge simplifies a web page layout, removes clutter, and lets you customize your reading experience in Windows 10. So it's neutral. It's a neutral. It sounds very similar to Alexa. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And then also with this update, we're going to have some more features added.
Like teen driver style features. Yeah, additional features there for restricted driving options, limiting speed and such that are already in place, but enhancements based on the source codes that at Green the Only found. That'll actually come in with 24.14.3. So that's the version that we're looking forward to. No word on exactly which models. What are we in right now?
couple steps below that maybe 24 14.2 or one i don't even know i don't know at this point some people get super into it and i'm like i don't know we just get them when we're sleepy and i don't even think about it really unless it's like one of these big ones that i'm waiting for and then i check i also read that the voice assistant is already out in china and some of the vehicles over there and it won't go to every single tesla because some of the older teslas
are not able to get these kind of the hardware is not on board yet they haven't been clear on exactly which models i'd imagine the most recent last few years say three or four years get this but there's a chance that those you know 17s 18s 19s may not yeah i i've read that it was vehicles with amd processors so mcu3 okay so that might be 2021 yeah so not the older intel based mcu2 cars okay um at least that's how it is in china so i'm assuming it'd be the same here
Yeah, and there's additional features too. Amazon Music Playback support is there now. New track mode windows are included. The source code also shows the two new wheel options called Wishbone wheel options, which kind of looks like they're available in 19 and 20-inch wheels. Lots of new stuff. I feel like they're slowly rolling out some kind of update right now for the Model Y, maybe Project Juniper. We're seeing these kind of updates, new wheels, and then...
We're seeing new paint colors. Yeah, that does bring up an interesting point with Project Juniper because Tesla made it pretty clear that they're not going to be introducing that this year and it's going to be sometime next year. So the Osborne effect kind of becomes an issue, right? Of people trying to hold off, wait for that next Model Y. It's their best-selling car. We know sales have already kind of tapered a little bit so far this year. So are people holding off for this new version? I would personally, if I was in the market for a Model Y. I would hold off because one,
I want the new paint color, which I guess is coming here now. The Quicksilver. I absolutely love that. But I feel like Tesla is trying to kind of manage the Osborne effect, like you said, and kind of doing like a slow release with this update. Some of these things like the new wheels that will be coming and they're not going to like release all the new features all at once. Did you see what they did with the rear wheel drive Model Y? Yes. Range upgrade.
upgrade and it looks like the older or the Teslas that are here now the Model Y's that are here now can get it because the range was just software locked so you can pay a little bit more and get it as well yeah you all made it sound like it was the most recent deliveries that purchased a rear wheel drive 260 mile range Model Y by the way that Model Y no longer is going to be available in the configurator so you're now going to be able to get a 320 mile range Model Y rear wheel drive
So that's a 60 mile range boost. And Elon basically said in the next couple of months, those most recent deliveries that got the 260 mile version can pay between $1,500 to $2,000 and bump the range up to about 320 miles. I like the way they're doing this, where the people that maybe just got their Model Ys have that option. Because a lot of times you feel a little bit jaded when Tesla announces something new and you just took delivery and you're like, oh,
had i just held out a little bit longer but this is like okay this is an interesting way i mean obviously tesla has that ability with being such a software integrated vehicle not with every feature can you introduce it later on but this is one they've kind of learned that they can transition it out and then retroactively give it back to those people who just this really makes me think about the cyber truck with like the batteries being half empty half full however you want to look at them and like how many of their cars are just software locked with range
Yeah, I mean, Sandy Monroe talked about that being a crumple zone, additional added space. So, I mean, we don't know that for a fact. That's a good guess. But we'll see exactly what there is more. The range is definitely an area that I still have a hard time believing that range boost battery pack thing that takes up half of your bed is the right choice. It kind of excites me. I feel like whatever this Project Juniper is,
could be our next car. I feel like our Model 3 will go to our kid that's 12 now and he'll be driving and then we'll end up with
a new Model Y for you or for me. Something I do want to mention here before we go too far is a 60 mile range boost for $1,500 to $2,000 is incredible bang for your buck. Six, seven years ago for 30 or 40 miles, you'd have to pay $10,000, $12,000. So obviously we know the cost for the battery cells have dropped significantly, but it's mind blowing to think how far it's come because 60 miles would have been like a $30,000 upgrade just a few years back.
All right, before we move on, one more update involving FSD. According to Elon, the steering wheel nag while you're on FSD is going to be removed starting in V12.4. Now your Tesla does need to have the cabin camera that's used to detect your eyes if you're actually paying attention to the road. And this won't entirely be the end of the nag for like if the camera can't confidently determine whether the driver is paying attention, like when you're wearing sunglasses or hats, but it's definitely a good start. It's true.
- Really good point. All right, so I want to move into talking about FSD and RoboTaxi and kind of what's going on with all that. I know that Elon has made some posts over on X about it recently. - Some fascinating insights. You know, a lot of people think about FSD and they say, "Hey, you and I are giving Tesla all this free data. We're driving it on full self-driving, giving all this data back to Tesla to use for their neural network." Elon put out this post saying that actually one out of every 10,000 miles driven on FSD are useful for its training
it's using. He said this might actually come as surprisingly low number to a lot of people, but FSD is no longer AI training compute constrained and it's more related to driving circumstances. That's the most limiting factor. So it's not necessarily the driving that we're doing. It's the computer teaching itself based on the data it's fed. So it's not, do you understand? So it's kind of confusing when you think about it. It's like, I have to read it twice to really like wrap my head around it. So I think
Up until this point, it was more about our driving, but now it's not. It's about the computer teaching itself. Is that what it's saying? Yeah, exactly. He says basically interventions are becoming so rare when people are using FSD that it's the camera and video-based training that the car is learning from itself, essentially.
The initial data may have come from some drivers and people driving it, but right now it's literally one out of every 10,000 miles driven. So think about going New York, Los Angeles, back to New York, back to Los Angeles and to Arizona.
And one of those miles that you would have driven on FSD would make a difference. Yeah, that's kind of opposite of the way I had thought it was. I think we had even talked about it on this podcast before because I really thought one of the reasons they were pushing FSD and, you know, lowering the costs and giving everyone these trials was
had to do with the fact that they wanted more of us driving to help teach it. You thought we were doing all the hard work. I'm like, we should be the ones getting paid to be the beta. Speaking of which, they dropped beta. It's no longer beta. It's now supervised. It's been like that for a little while. But yeah, the verbiage, the moniker quickly moved away from beta to now supervised.
But there's a lot of misconception around it because of course, LIDAR was in there as well in the discussion of a lot of automakers wanting to use LIDAR. Tesla saying vision is how we see and process and vision is how we're going to be doing this.
Well, Luminar, I think is the name of this company that came out and said Tesla was their biggest customer for purchasing LiDAR in Q1 of 2024. Elon jumped on to say, it's not what you think it is. We're not transitioning to LiDAR. It's kind of like a misconception there because they purchased it more to validate the vision system and show that, hey, it's actually better. So it's not like they're going to continue to be purchasing LiDAR anymore.
you kind of see how some of these articles that pop up and even images and sightings of Tesla's out there with LIDAR being tested, which I think there was one in Florida a couple of years back. And people thought, oh, Elon's given up on vision. See, the other OEMs are correct. But I will say one thing. I think that it's getting so good now that the government, everyone is starting to really pay attention to it. I know that the U.S. Justice Department is now like opening up a new probe into it. Like there's a lot.
going on. I find it fascinating that like the Justice Department now is putting a probe and opening it into FSD. It's like FSD wasn't really that good a couple years ago. Now everyone's like trying to go after it with lawsuits when it's actually closer. Well, they're like, wow, this is going to be the future. This is going to disrupt everything that we know. Reuters said that investigators are exploring whether Tesla committed wire fraud.
which I think is an interesting word to use because this is not what I thought wire fraud was. They say that it involves deception of interstate communications by misleading consumers about its FSD systems. Well, you had me at Reuters because we know the articles that have come from that particular publication directed towards Tesla are always kind of extremely negative.
and often misleading as well. Essentially saying that Tesla promised FSD all these years and hasn't delivered on them and people have paid for them. So we're digging deeper into it. But again, Tesla's finally gotten as close as they ever have. And some of the commenters I noticed Kim are saying that Tesla never claimed that full self-driving is something that you can go in the backseat, take an app and it'll do everything for you. While others are saying that's exactly what they kind of read the configuration page
to Tameen where you click on full self-driving and you pay a ton of money and you're expected to get some level of full self-driving. Yeah. Which for a lot of years, it was little to none. So I'm kind of torn on this to be completely honest with you. Like I can see both sides here with this one. And for me, I feel like it should have been transferable until it was actually available.
full self-driving, meaning that it's completely autonomous. And up to that point, or even the point it's at now where they dropped the beta, it should have been transferable. Yeah. And we actually were both listening to the recent earnings call where someone directly asked Elon about that.
about having this transferability come back because it's come and gone over the last couple of months. And he had a definitive, very on the nose, no, we're not going to ever, he didn't say ever, but he said, no, we're not going to make it transferable. And I disagree with that. And hopefully, I mean, Elon doesn't follow me on X, so he can't unfollow me. But at the same time, I don't know, like people are saying that Tesla knew it wasn't
as good as it was and they were calling it full self-driving. There's even that lawsuit about the Apple employee that was in an accident. The Apple executive that was in an accident passed away in a Model X in California. I think it was 2018. Actually, Tesla's director of autopilot testified. This was Tesla's former director of autopilot testified. Well, everybody's former now.
Yeah, testified against Tesla. So they basically used evidence from a 2016 video that's still on Tesla's website that shows a Model X full self-driving. This was in a version that, of course, wasn't really available to anyone until very recently. Now we've kind of been able to see the car do these kind of things. But this was in 2016. This former executive testified that that footage itself that Tesla had on its website way back then
was actually staged and Tesla could not by itself stop at those stop signs, accelerate out of green lights. Some of those things weren't really exactly what was being depicted in that video. So that was used in that lawsuit for the Apple engineer that passed away in his car accident. So a lot of these are being taken into consideration when it comes to this probe by the Justice Department about how much
that Tesla really know all these years they've been taking people's money for FSD that it wasn't as ready as it finally is now. Right. Now, Tesla could say that like that video is to say what it will be capable of at some point. And it's sort of like the whole thing with concept cars, right? Like you go to these shows, you see these concept cars and like they're saying what could be the possibility, not necessarily what is.
But then on the other hand, you know, you could say Elon keeps saying by the end of this year, FSD is going to be ready. By the end of this year, we've heard that over and over and over again, that song and dance. So...
you know, there is that side to have a lot of people feeling a little bit jaded, like I thought we'd have it by the end of the year. That's why I paid, you know, XYZ, because I thought it was coming. Yeah, one of the commenters made an interesting point in that if the Department of Justice actually has a current or a former Tesla employee, that claims that Tesla had a way longer timeline, Elon and Tesla themselves knew it, this timeline before FSD is going to be ready. And of course, they were kind of pushing its
around the corner nature for all this time. If they have someone that could testify that that was the case, then that definitely could validate. - There was another comment that I read. If you read the mail to OpenAI, Elon knew exactly that FSD is nowhere near as close to release as he publicly claimed. For that alone, he should be convicted, he said. I haven't read that and I don't really know what he is referring to, but I'm curious if you guys do and if you could link it in the comments.
I don't know. I don't know if that's true or not. I really hope not. I hope that it wasn't something where he knew it wasn't close and he was just kept saying it. It doesn't seem like it. We know he's optimistic by nature, right? He's been optimistic on Mars timelines and all these different things. That's, I don't, some could say, you know, I don't think that's misleading. That's just,
a nature of an extremely optimist and goal-driven person that is not afraid of taking risks. And if everybody's brain worked like Elon, it probably would have been here by his timeline. So that's the other thing to think about. Remember this, there was an update to autopilot. It made it super annoying. It was like about a year ago. It was like late last year, yeah. Yeah. And what happened was it constantly would like blink at you and flash at you and
It just made it really hard to drive autopilot because you're constantly having to like... Immediately after you turn it on. Before you even had a chance to do something wrong, it was telling you you're doing something wrong. And they did this because there was a recall on autopilot saying it didn't do it enough. So what Tesla did was have the software update to fix this.
But now NHTSA has reopened it up, the investigation, to see if that really was enough. - Yeah, basically this is just a query to see if that was an effective update that Tesla put in place. And as an owner who's been driving on autopilot since that's been put in place, it's effective to the point where it's annoying. - Yeah.
Does it make me pay more attention? Probably because it drives me bonkers. And if anything, it makes me want to use it a little bit less than I would otherwise. I know. I would say like what I would prefer is to have, and I don't think it has this option, but I would like it to have like a seat vibration. Yeah. And like, and then you push a button or something or like...
Yeah, that would require hardware. Or maybe they can do it with the new voice commands. You're paying attention as opposed to having to jiggle the steering wheel or whatever. I don't know if I like that. You wouldn't like that? I wouldn't want to actively tell the car I'm doing my job, so leave me alone. You say whatever your keyword is. 420! 420!
I'm paying attention. I don't know, what do you guys think about that? So I think the point to a lot of this stuff is that FSD is getting so good that everyone is kind of taking notice of it and they're like, wow,
robo taxi might actually happen now so really what it boils down to is fsd is getting so good now people are realizing that robo taxis are actually going to happen tesla's offices set a date for them china has now told elon we want to test them and now we're seeing all the oems going we don't want another model y moment yeah we need to get our ducks in a row for us what are we gonna do
So we're seeing Chinese self-driving developer, this is Mementa, they're backed by GM. They just filed for IPO in the US and then Hyundai are working with a startup called Aptiv and they've put almost a billion dollars recently into their self-driving endeavors as well. So there's just so much on the line here. And in fact, IONIQ 5
did a robo taxi type demo recently as well, where it passed a typical US driver's exam in this test. So they're all trying to flex their muscles. - Even Waymo has like now has broadened their reach of where they're gonna be serving in the area. So it's definitely like that next step of if you don't have some kind of driverless car or robo taxi, you're gonna be left in the dust. 'Cause we have to go into that because obviously the future
for them is going to be about this technology, right? We're seeing this FSD is robo taxi. That is what is important to them. And so they're kind of cutting the fat out right now. But I think what a lot of people are upset about or confused about myself included is the supercharger team. Yeah. So Ilana said with these multiple layoffs we've seen in recent months,
He's basically said that the recent rapid growth of the company and duplication of jobs with multiple factories coming online, that's what's led to just having too many people on staff, which is why we're getting these 10%, 15%, 20% cuts that have happened so far this year. But now the supercharging team, which is the one team you would think would be protected. How is that the fact? Like,
That's the team you think would be protected, right? Because we have now seen NACS adoption widespread. So we know superchargers are going to expand. Elon has come out publicly and said the expansion is happening, but at a far slower rate than maybe initially expected. And it's happening in the already existing stations, expanding those versus maybe laying out new ones. So we'll see. What does that mean when you have
additional EVs beginning to pull into Tesla superchargers. So here is what I am thinking. Like the only way I can make sense of it is that Tesla doesn't want to be the one to build out all the chargers. They're saying NACS,
is the North America charging standard, but other charging stations need to adapt that, not necessarily Tesla. So there will be more charging stations. It's not necessarily Tesla. They don't want to have the department that is responsible for that. They want to put their resources into other things like robo-taxi. Yeah.
And maybe there's some white label charging going on here as well. Remember we heard about the $100 million deal with BP buying Tesla superchargers, branding them differently. So maybe the expansion happens with other parties buying Tesla's hardware, labeling it as they see fit. Exactly, exactly. So Tesla doesn't need to have the department internally like themselves because they can license it to BP or other places.
and they'll do it. Yeah, because a lot of people are kind of the OEM supporters were not on board maybe with having Tesla's logo on these chargers that's promoting another vehicle. But maybe, you know, GM will have its own superchargers that are GM branded at other third party stations that they purchase. Yeah. So we'll see what happens with that. Obviously, like anytime someone gets laid off, it's
hard and a lot of people commit their entire lives and like uproot their families to go work for a new company and that definitely stinks and I feel bad for everyone in those situations. I do think we're going to have a lot of new Tesla YouTubers and content creators coming out because
A lot of times people from Tesla come on and they know all the goods and they're able to share it in a concise way and have a lot of interesting insights. Yeah, and if you are out there and you were laid off and you want to join our team and you have any of those insights...
please send us a message look at kim on a hiring frenzy you never know you never know might work out i mean we have the iona network coming that is seven major car companies that have all grouped together to form this we're gonna have 30 000 new chargers and that's all nacs so does tesla need to be the one putting out these chargers i think that's like what we're getting at here is that
That's probably why they're laying off their team. That's a really interesting point to consider. One of the things I keep seeing a lot has to do with Elon Musk is having these layoffs because he wants more money. His payout package isn't what he thought it was going to be. Do you agree or disagree with that? Yeah, I don't think it's a significant hindrance to his bottom line. I think Elon has made it very clear that money is not a motivating factor for what he wants to accomplish.
And so, yeah, I don't think at all that pay package is the reason for some of these decisions. I agree with that. And I honestly think he personally has so much money. I mean, even like $1 billion is like an insane amount, right? And he is so wealthy that you get to a certain point that it's like,
That doesn't drive you anymore. It doesn't drive you anymore. Exactly. But at the same time, you know, they are reopening all that stuff to get him his pay package. So, but I think what he wants to do with that money is invest it in his other companies, right? Like that's why he wants it. It's not necessarily for him.
And I think also, you know, he has a lot of pressure with a company like Tesla to make sure that it is successful in making money. So he needs to do those layoffs for that reason alone. We also had one of Tesla's largest individual shareholders. His name is Leo Koguan. I'm probably butchering that, but he's really gone on X and kind of had some rants why he's against this whole payout thing with Elon. This one really irked me. He said that Tesla's
Tesla's mission to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy was just a ruse to suck in naive investors and engineers. Yeah, he's basically criticized Musk saying that he sold about $39 billion worth of his Tesla stock at the peak in 2021 and essentially calls all of his supporters brainless suckers and this proposed package is a robbery attempt. And again, I think that
it has nothing really to do with the money is the money. But I think the main thing that Elon wants is the control of the company. And it's about kind of his fear of AI, right? Like he doesn't want a terminator type thing to happen. So he wants to have that control. He wants to be the one in charge of it. So it really is all about the humanity and all the. Yeah. I mean, that's if you're on that side of it, right? So, I mean, maybe we are the suckers that are falling for it is what his perspective is.
that whole vision of grandeur is not necessarily what Elon's... I mean, Elon did post on X, I'm going to pull this up. This is my concern regarding Tesla voting control. Money doesn't matter if powerful technology goes awry. He tweeted that or posted that on X.
So I think that I, you know, unless he's like has split personalities and like everything he posts is not actually how he really feels. And, you know, this is like a major like.
I don't know. But I don't think that's the case. I really don't because he would crack somewhere during one of his interviews and we would see that side of him. On a positive note, Cybertruck, they've added some new things for it. Yes, now we've got a new tactical gray interior, kind of like a headline or a dash cover change, which had been previously just white. Now we've got the gray option, new wheel option introduced on the Cybertruck, 20-inch core wheels.
That kind of look a lot like what we saw with the previous design But these ones have a new tire compound with improved efficiency as well. So with smaller wheels you do get better range Yes, and then with this new compound it's more weather resistant Yeah, all seasons, you know It is pretty interesting to see how quickly Tesla made this change right because we had the sidewall being damaged with the previous design They now have this newly designed version. It is slightly smaller and
and helps with the range issue as well. - And hopefully with some of those layoffs, Tesla will still be able to make these quick changes. All right, well that is what we have for this week's podcast. Let us know in the comments if there's anything specific you wanna see in our next podcast or just comment if you wanna have a conversation, keep it going with us.
And I really want to thank our patrons for keeping this going. Yes, Patreon members get exclusive content, never before seen footage, early release of this podcast, one-on-one Q&As with Kim and I as well. We'll link how you can get on board here down below. Really makes a lot of these videos possible. So I want to thank some of those members right now. Those are Daniel Rader, MCRD05, Martin Waszynski, Jack Stocker.
And a big thanks to our highest tier members, Joshua Taylor and Filippos Avramidis. And thank you to our newest member, Drew, for making videos like this again possible. We'll link all of what you need to know down below. All right, we'll catch you next time. Oh my God, why does it do that? I'm not sure I understand. I'm not talking to you. Oh, hey, Jenny. Can you hear the painters? Maybe. Should I ask them?
Speak a little bit quieter. Okay, well, I think it'll be fine. We're getting our house painted downstairs and we have a little party going on down there. A little party down there, yeah. Okay.