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and we are live for a new episode of the electric podcast i am fred lambert your host and as usual i'm joined by seth winchell how you doing today seth i'm good all right so as we discussed last week during the holidays and and um with the new year coming there's not that much news the news cycle dies down a lot companies don't put much things out there and people
People are on vacation and everything. So there's not that much news coming out. But we have still a few news items that we want to discuss today. But then we're going to spend probably the majority of the show just basically sharing our thoughts on the year for electric vehicle 2022. How was it? The highlights and whatnot. And then moving to what do we expect or hope for the EV industry in 2023, right?
And we hope for it to be interactive. So that's why we're going to keep it for the later half of the show, sometimes for people to come in. But if you guys have any questions for us regarding those subjects, just put them in the comment section right now. We are live. And same thing goes for if you have specific subjects that you want to discuss, especially looking into 2023 or even just rewinding.
reminiscing on the year. But a few news items kind of still this week that was notable, like Tesla finally releasing a production rate for the 4680 battery cell. So that's big. That's especially looking into 2023, speaking of.
The 4680 is going to become a bigger storyline for Tesla. It's going to support more of Tesla's growth in terms of production, vehicle production. And this is the first time that they're making battery cells. And they've been keeping the data very close to their chest. Haven't been releasing much. We knew from the fact that Tesla switched a lot of the production from the Model Y in Geek Factory, Texas, from the 4680 to going back to the 2170. We knew that it wasn't going great because of that.
But they never released actually. They just said, oh yeah, of course, it's early in the production. We're going to have some bottlenecks and whatnot. But they kept saying that we're working through them. They didn't seem to be too worried about it. But that's what the company does really. They don't want to set any panic into like, hey, this program is actually failing right now. Yeah.
But the only thing that they released was in February of this year, so almost a year ago at this point, that they said that they produced their first millionth sale at the pilot plant in Fremont. But that was a million two days, so that doesn't give us anything about the production rate. In between then and now, they did say a few things about, oh, we increased the output by 10%.
whatever percentage from last quarter and whatnot. But again, we never knew what the first output was in the first place. So they might have went from three cell to nine cell. That's a 300% increase, but it's not that impressive. So now for the first time, they confirmed that they produced, uh,
868,000 cells in seven day periods. So they have a production capacity of over 800,000 cell over seven days and 800,000 cell is good enough for over a thousand cars. Presumably the, the mobile Y it's not a standard range. They call it the whatever the, the medium version basically producing at the gigafactory Texas.
So, yeah, I mean, in February, they had a million sales. Now they can basically produce that in a week, like a week and a half, and they have over a million sales. So that's good. Though a thousand car, good for a thousand car is still not significant, obviously. But at least going into 2023, it shows that Tesla is able to produce it in decent volume. And hopefully they can get that to over 5,000 cars by sometime next year. Any other manufacturer, that'd be a big deal.
Like, you know, Chevrolet is going to make 77,000 bolts next year. They could fill up all those bolts with 4680s. But Tesla just makes so many more cars that that's not. Or if you compare it to a battery startup, like if like QuantumScape right now was producing enough cells to build a thousand cars right now, it would be like giant news. But since it's Tesla and we don't see it like that as much.
But obviously, QuantumScape would be a different deal because they would be producing enough solid-state cells to sell in cars. And we're nowhere near that yet in the solid-state market. Maybe something to discuss later on when we're talking to 2022 if we think that solid-state will finally play a part in the EV landscape.
Breaking news that just came out a few hours ago. I have a source that confirmed that Tesla for the next two days, today and tomorrow, they're offering a $7,500 discount on the Model S and X. So we reported on a bunch of discounts that came out from Tesla this month in the U.S., but they were mostly for Model 3 and Model Y. There was a 10,000 free supercharging miles that was for all cars, but there was no direct discount on the Model S and X.
And for the Model 3 and Y, there was the $3,750 discount and there was a full $7,500 discount. And we noted that those were kind of compensating for the federal tax credit coming into effect next month. And they were the same amount that Tesla could have received from that based on later on when the...
Battery requirement was pushed back to March. Tesla was expected to get the full credit and then shortly after, Tesla offered the full credit. But now Model S and X is different because Model X and X were never going to receive the credit at all because they are way too expensive. They start at $105,000. The limit is $80,000 and that's for SUVs. So only the Model X would apply, not even the Model S.
So this is clearly like a demand issue type of thing. Now, not that big of a deal, obviously, because there's two days left in the quarter and Tesla just wants to kill their inventory, basically. So...
It's going to affect some car. But if you are in the market for a Model S or Model X right now in the US, that's probably your best deal that you're going to get, in my opinion, because it's not like you can expect to have any kind of incentive coming. Is that for like the four models and test vehicles as well? Or is that just new cars?
I would assume that it's for everything. Interesting. What my source told me is that everything that's a new order place right now, that you can take delivery by basically tomorrow night, I guess, because they want it to be by the end of the quarter. Oh, top comment. It's about the end of quarter push. Yeah, we're going to get into that too. We have something about that also.
Tesla has been very generous with sharing data lately. We have the data point of the battery cells and now we have for the first time Tesla confirming how many people bought full self-driving package, sort of. The exact phrasing was they said that it was part of all their achievement, all the milestone that they achieved in 2022. They released a series of threads on Twitter about that. And part of most of it was like it
everything that we already knew and we reported on as it happened, but enabled anyone in North America who has purchased FSD to request FSD beta. So we knew about that. And then Tesla had reaching 285,000 vehicles.
So now there's a few ways to interpret that. So it either means that 285,000 people bought FSD beta. Well, I mean, it at least means that. It means that at least 285,000 people bought FSD in North America. Now you could also interpret it as, because now everyone can request FSD beta if you bought it.
So it might be 285,000 people that requested FSD beta. It's not clear from the phrasing. Obviously, it's a Twitter thread and the economy of words and whatnot, and of course, characters really. So it's one or the other, but at the very least, it confirms that 285,000 people in North America bought FSD beta. Or a subscription to it.
Yeah, they made no mention of Scripps. How many people do you think actually subscribe to that thing? It's so useless right now. I get buying it with the hope that it's going to get better in the future, but buying it right now to test it, like you're paying $200 a month to better test something, that makes no sense to me. I'd be surprised if there's any significant amount of people that are subscribing to FSD right now.
But 25,000 people likely bought it. And so we tried to figure out the take rate, but it's hard because it's hard to confirm exactly how many cars are in North America right now that have FSD. So it's at some point in 2016. So it's every car delivered in North America at some point in 2016. I estimate that it's at least 1.5 million. It might be a little bit more than that, maybe.
by a few hundred thousand max, I would think. So it would give it, if we take the 1.5 million number, it would give a take rate for a full self-driving package of 19%, which is actually higher than I would have thought. But again, there might be a few more vehicles with that. So it might be closer to like 15%, which I think would make a little bit more sense in my opinion.
um but still i mean if you take 25,000 people and you multiply that by let's say 8,000 it's 15,000 right right now but obviously it changed a lot over the years 8,000 might be low as an average because tesla obviously delivered a lot more car lately and lately it's been between 10,000 and 15,000 so it likely pushed the average a little bit higher but there's again no way to know that um
It would be over $2 billion in revenue, just in FSD for Tesla. Of course, they are not declaring all that revenue yet. They are deferring it because they haven't actually delivered on everything. But...
We discussed a few weeks ago, remember, with the lawsuits coming in and potentially the new hardware, retrofit and all that, how expensive it would be if they have to reimburse people to do the retrofit. When I say that it's going to be in the billions of dollars, if it's a recall, you have it right here. All right, lawyers. This is your notice. Billions of dollars. Oh, don't say that. I see them salivating. I know.
oh, this is a $2 billion class action potentially right now. I'm not saying that that's what's going to happen, but it's like... It would be nice if Tesla just went ahead and said, hey, we're worth hundreds of billions of dollars, maybe $2 billion to our best customers. A voluntary return. Yeah, reimbursement. I mean...
Yeah, that's a black eye on Tesla for not offering that really because just for the fact that they've been late on this program, that they promised things and didn't deliver and they keep moving the goalposts. They should at least say like, if you're not happy about it, we understand. We screwed up. You should get your money back. And then some people, a lot of people won't even do that. So it wouldn't be $2 billion that they would have to give back, but it would be a good will at least.
All right. The IRS this week, they updated their list of vehicles eligible to the federal tax credit following the deferral of the requirement, the battery sourcing requirements. So now we have a little bit more details. So starting with Tesla, there's a little bit of a surprise. So obviously Model S and X not in there, not a surprise. But okay, Model 3 rear-wheel drive makes sense. Model 3 long range though, yeah.
Let me see. I forgot to check real quick, but does it start at $55? Not being much. It starts right around where it starts. Oh, yeah, yeah. It's not even available to order right now. That's right. I forgot. So, yeah, they don't even put the price in right now. So I would assume that
The price would be under 55, like the, the inform because the Tesla had to file some paperwork. So I assume that they are bringing the price down to 55. I kind of want to say that it was over 55 before. But you can't buy a model three right now. Not, not a long range one. You can, you can order it. Yeah. Yeah. Weird. Yeah. It's been like that for a little bit. Probably the more interesting thing is the model Y and the seven seat variants are the only ones that get the, you know, the, the limits up to $80,000. Yeah.
Well, it's that it doesn't make sense the way that they put the limit because they put the Model Y in there that don't have the 5C2. So they are in there, but they are in there with the $55,000 price limit, which is – it is not $55,000. Let me see how much it is. It makes no sense. There's a lot of inconsistencies in the IRS as a –
So it starts at $66,000, but it's in there as if it's eligible, but with the 55 limit. But how are you going to get the 55 limit if it's not offered? So unless Tesla signal that they're going to do something about that, maybe reduce the price or whatever, I don't know. I'd be surprised about that because I think Tesla was expecting to get the $80,000, but like Seth said, it's only in the seven seats limit. You know what's kind of funny is the...
Third row is a $3,000 option. So you could get the third row and qualify for the $7,500. Yep.
Yeah, because you cannot get, unless you go with the performance, even with the performance one, I don't think you get past 80 with third. You cannot get a third row. That's the other thing too. Yeah, the performance third row is in there, but I don't think you can get a third row with the performance one. Yeah, you cannot. There's a lot of things that don't make sense in this. It just doesn't make sense. Jamie had a theory about this. He said that it might be related to the weight of the car, not actually the seventh seat.
So if you pass the $6,000 mark, then maybe they consider you an SUV and then you get the $80,000 price limit. And that could explain this because the other thing is that the ID4, so we can get into all the vehicles too because Scooter did a post about it. All the ones that have done the paperwork. Some companies haven't done the paperwork yet. Slackers. Yeah.
Yeah, GM. And we have the list. There you go. And the ID.4 does qualify. And the ID.4 doesn't have a 7-seat. So it cannot be related to the 7-seat. And it is a little bit heavier, the ID.4, than the Model Y. It comes in at just over 6,000 pounds. So that might explain the whole thing. Yeah.
And then the third row seat, which probably weighs, I don't know what, 100 pounds or 200. I don't know what the third row would weigh. But with all the mechanics and stuff, probably a couple hundred pounds pushes it over 6,000. Yeah.
So Tesla is basically incentivized right now to make their Model Y heavier. Yeah, just put a big brick in the back or something. Yeah, it makes no sense. I would expect things to change a little bit. But right now, for now, you have to just follow the website. So if you are expecting in your budget to get the federal tax credit,
I would go with the website, but I'm pretty sure it's going to evolve in the next few months. So we're going to keep a close eye on it and most likely going to change a lot in March when they do release the guidance about battery sourcing, battery material sourcing, battery component making and all that. There's another one here that I didn't put in there that I should have is the...
And one of the other changes in the IRS this week that they did is that they opened the door for people to get access to the incentive if they do the buy. Well, it's not buying a car, I guess. If they get a car through a commercial lease, so a business lease, they could get access to the tax credit even though the car is not made in North America, which…
is kind of a weird loophole but there's a bunch of people that are interpreting the update in the IRS filings this week like that now it would be surprising if that's actually the case but for now there's a possibility to interpret it like that just putting that out there um
It would be a big change, but at the same time, it could make sense because the U.S. has been getting a lot of pressure right now internationally from Europe and Asia about...
about the fact like in Europe, a lot of places that do have incentive electric vehicles don't care where the electric vehicle is made. It does make sense to a degree. Like if the idea behind the incentive is to convince people to go electric over gasoline and the goal is to burn less gas, well, the provenance of the vehicle does not matter for that. So the US, it's both an incentive vehicle
to accelerate EV adoption and also to encourage production in the U.S. And they've been extremely successful in doing that already. There's a bunch of companies that have announced major investment into EV production in the U.S. It kind of already did its job before it's even in place, really. So you could technically open it up, really. Like, hey, you can actually open it up to vehicles built in other countries.
It's just that people already invested a ton of money in building them in the U.S. now. Yeah, I mean, that's one of the big themes of 2022 is like that IRA plan got everybody to want to build factories and battery factories.
car factories and battery factories in the U.S. I don't think I've ever seen so many companies announce U.S. plants. And not just the U.S., in Canada and Mexico too, because North America accounts for it. Yeah, that was definitely a giant storyline for the year. Like basically every other week, there was a major announcement about a battery factory or a vehicle factory. Yeah. All right, our last piece of news that we're going to discuss before getting into it.
And please put your comments in the comment section right now for us to discuss any subject related to EV in 2022 and looking forward into 2023.
Uh, we got an email from Elon Musk this week where, uh, it was the usual end of the quarter push email where he says, I mean, he always says the same thing. He always used the words all out. Let's go all out. So he told employees to go all out by the end of the quarter where Tesla is trying to push deliveries. And obviously we reported a lot on that lately with the discounts and then, uh, selling the display model and the test drive model and all that. So he pushes employees to do that. Thanks to employees for the hard work. Uh,
But then he added something about, please don't be too bothered by stock market craziness. As we demonstrate, consider the excellent performance. The market will recognize that. So he's basically telling people not to worry about the stock price crashing and
which is kind of ironic because in the line before that, he says, let's go all out for the end of the quarter. And the only reason that they go all out for the end of the quarter is for the stock price and the stock market, because Wall Street doesn't look into the future and goes quarter to quarter. And Elon himself admits that it's super inefficient to invest
to do these hand of the quarter pushes like that. Instead, they should try to manage the deliveries throughout the quarter. But because they need to have as low inventory as possible in the quarter for it to look good on the balance sheet, they do these hand of quarter push. That's kind of ironic. And then he asked against people to volunteer to help with deliveries on their off times during the holidays. He's asking a lot of these people.
Yeah, you know, it really doesn't make sense at this point. Like, I know the stock price is down, but, like, we know that they do this thing at the end of every quarter and they get rid of, like, a bunch of extra inventory just to get their numbers up that extra few percentage points. Like, we know that happens. Why do we have to go through this charade every quarter? It just seems kind of silly. And, Jamie, and you guys, I know we're talking about this in the –
in the Slack room. Like the, the cars that go on sale next year, uh, the federal government's going to give $7,500, uh, to, you know, a lot of the customers that are buying those, like why, why sell them now? Like why, why not?
you know why give you know they're giving customers 7 500 off the price if they wait two days uh they can get the the government will give them 7 500 and they can sell it for the same price that they were you know originally planning to yeah it's just it's that big of a difference that it makes on the balance sheet if they have the car in inventory if they paid like because that's the pace for all those cars to be made so it's like it looks really bad
and i guess they're willing to give that that money instead of the government giving it just for that crazy yeah no definitely but yeah and there's also something like so we haven't talked about that enough probably but we've talked a lot about this stock price obviously but it doesn't just affect like regular investors that affects this employees a lot too because a lot of teslas
compensation is attached to stock options for employees. And that's something that Elon has even bragged about several times, especially when there was union pushes at the Fremont factory. They were like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Every employee is a stockholder here because everyone gets stock option. And also we give when people were complaining that the pay at Fremont factory wasn't very good, especially compared to other automakers, especially compared to the fact that most of the automakers build in the South and build in Michigan and things like that, where the cost of life is much less expensive than in the Bay Area. So if you get paid $20 an hour in Fremont, you don't live the same as if you get
paid $20 an hour in Tennessee, though Custon, Tennessee has increased a lot too lately. But you get my point. So he's used that saying that actually they get paid more than any other automotive workers because they all still get stock options. But the stock options are not worth that much if the stock is falling, like free falling, like it has been all year. So there's something a bit wrong that feels wrong when a billionaire CEO says,
Tells the employee, don't worry about the stock crashing right now. When he's a big part of the reason why the stock is crashing is he's been selling tens of billions of dollars worth of it all year. And then there's the Twitter stuff like you cannot quantify it, but whatever. And he's telling people, don't worry about it, even though he's going to be OK, obviously. And he's the reason for it.
So I feel like I could understand that employees would be actually worrying about it. Like I said, this is not if, if, especially if it's a big part of your compensation plan and then yeah. And the same bread, it has you to volunteer to go get deliveries to that's that's that I, if we get into the, we can get into the stories into 2022 and 2023, but that's one for me regarding Tesla. Cause obviously I'm, I focus on, on Tesla and my reporting, but yeah,
I want to see Tesla stick to the mission because if employees are volunteering right now during the holidays on their time off to go help with deliveries, they're not doing it because they love Elon Musk. They're doing it because of the mission. They are the true believers in Tesla's mission to accelerate the advent of sustainable energy and transport. It's not for Oculus? For Oculus? Sorry, Tesla.
The robot. Optimus. Optimus, sorry. It's getting a little late in the year. They're giving out free VR headsets. That would be nice. Yeah. Backseat. Yeah, so I want to see Tesla in 2023 stick to its mission, like focus, like especially the leadership, obviously, because Tesla is delivering on it. They're delivering a lot of cars.
And that's probably the biggest story in 2022, I would say, is the growth in volumes. The growth in volumes and the growth in market share in EVs, and that's not just because of EV volumes. That's because gas vehicle sales have been going down, and they have been down since the COVID really changed the game because...
Everything went down during COVID and then people thought it would come back. But for the automotive market, it came back through EVs. People just switched to EVs. Then this year, the big change too was also Russia invading Ukraine and the price of gas shooting up. That was also a giant story in the EV industry.
And the COVID aspect came in 2020, and then 2022, the gas prices, these two combinations were a big inflation point, I think, to convince people that EVs are the future. And I would like to see Tesla leadership just come back to the original mission of
Instead of whatever distraction of the moment is when it comes to Elon Musk. That would be a big one for me. Yeah, it would be nice if Tesla could separate itself from the right-wing tweets and stuff. I mean, he's currently saying Greta Thunberg is cool. So at least he still has that... Yeah, but he doesn't think she's cool because of her...
environmental activism. She probably thinks she's cool because she had the zinger this week on Andrew Tate is his name, whatever. Yeah. She used Twitter for it too, so he was like, oh. That's money. It's obvious too, right? That's what's really attracting him to her. He's never talking these days about...
Any kind of... You used to like it. You know, I remember that Elon did a presentation at the Paris... Right. Environmental... Was it COP whatever? COP 18? Whatever it was? It was 20-something, but yeah. Maybe not. I don't know. No, that was before that. That was in the COP 21. It was...
I don't remember which, but it was the big, when the Paris agreement was signed, basically, I think that he did the presentation that he was like a true environmentalist back then. Now he's like, ah, I mean, we should drill more oil. And then now, yeah, which, I mean, no one is arguing that we, we stop oil production right now. Like everyone know what would happen. Like if I shouldn't say everyone, because there are definitely some hardcore environmentalists that just don't understand how the world works. And they think that that would be a solution. Uh,
But like, yes, environmental disaster can...
completely annihilate the human population, but there's other things that can annihilate the human population too and stopping oil production right now would be one of them. But most people that understand how the world works know that. So you don't really need to argue for more oil production. And especially the CEO of Tesla doing it, it's just, it looks bad. It sends the wrong message.
So I would like Elon to come back to sending the right message, really. Yeah, I mean, the other option, I guess, would be just to divorce himself from Tesla. And, you know, like, hey, you can be a board member and you can come up with some neat ideas. But, like, you know, just you can have your crazy Twitter scene.
And other people can run Tesla and be the face of Tesla. And the PR can go through like normal channels instead of going through a Twitter account. You know, and that thing really bothers me. Like he hijacked Tesla's like internal and external communications and made it all go through his Twitter account. Like I probably wouldn't even follow Elon if like the Tesla news didn't come out.
uh, through that. And there's not much these days that can do that. Right. Well, it's just like the noise, the signal to noise ratio is like nothing, like 0.01. Um, you know, it's, it's like very selfish. Like they, this is a company with like 10,000 or a hundred thousand employees, uh, that really needs to like communicate to the public. Um, everything shouldn't have to come, you know, go in and out through your Twitter account. That's, that's,
crappy and it's an exciting company and it's a, you know, company that's changing the world, but it's not Elon Musk's, you know, third job or whatever. So, uh, that's, that's a real disappointing thing. And I hope that's something that, you know,
Tesla Twitter account starts operating again. Well, they do. I've actually seen the Twitter being a little bit more active lately, and I've seen even the blogs, a little bit more blogs. So I think that's related to... I think someone at Tesla actually woke up and was like, I think we need a little bit more of our own communication. But I think there needs to be more than that, obviously. Because what pisses me off the most, really, other than, again, Elon Musk
not putting Tesla's mission first, is actually that Tesla, the board, is not doing anything to just reining him in
The way that they would do for any other employees, like if any other executive at Tesla would be tweeting the nonsense that he's tweeting right now. And I'm not talking about like the free speech stuff. And I'm talking about like insulting people online. Like this week there was, I don't know. I don't even know who he did that to, but I don't care. Like he said someone had like small testicle or something. Like if you have...
An executive of your company that has a prominent Twitter account, so when he tweets something, it goes out to a lot of people, and he tweets shit like that, you have to reach out to him and be like, hey, that's not cool. You're an executive of our company. You represent a company at the public. You shouldn't comport yourself. You should behave in a way that is respectable and not tweet things like that. And he had a bunch of those lately.
that if there was any other employees at Tesla, they would be reprimanded. As far as I know, the board hasn't done any of that for Elon. No. The board's all in his pocket anyway. We know that. Yeah, that's the other part of disappointing. Elon has been disappointing for a little bit, obviously, for us that have been following closely and haven't been blinded by the cold for a while.
But now I'm pushing some of the blame to Tesla's broader Tesla and the Tesla board really for not doing anything. I don't even know what they're thinking because there are sensible people on there. I mean, it literally has its brother on the board and whatnot. Like, obviously, I'm not thinking –
I'm not putting all my money on Kimball, especially he's his little brother. So if it was a bigger brother, maybe he's like, hey, how about you chill a little bit or something? But anyway, I would – yeah, I lost some respect for the people on there that are not just speaking out. And I don't know what they're thinking. Are they thinking like, oh, it's a phase and it's going to turn around at some point? And maybe it will, but –
It's a phase that if you've been following closely, we saw it coming from a long time. I mean, I come back to my article from 2020 where I said that the super fandom is corrupting Elon's feedback loop. I think I'm going to pat myself on the back a little bit. I think I called it on this one. I think the feedback loop has broken. I think you're the one who sent me the Elon alerts thing.
Yeah. Okay. So that's interesting because this account follow what Elon likes on Twitter. And that's fascinating because you see him like a bunch of tweets that are just people praising him. Like nonstop, like all day long. I'm sure if I look like that, I open my phone.
Yeah, sure enough. I have a, can I show it? There's nothing sensitive information on this. Like, so I have my feedback and every time I look at my phone, I'm a notification. And one of them is going to be from the Elon's alert. And I click on Elon's alert right now. Uh,
Okay, at least it's not praising him. It's about Tesla. But I decided today that once I receive my Cybertruck, I will immediately do a road trip all across the United States and document it on Twitter. Who cares? How about you deliver the truck about that? You know, I have a ton of plans too for my Cybertruck and my Roadster that I'm not sharing with anyone until I know that I can have them. I don't see that happening anytime soon.
Yeah, that was, yeah, go ahead, Sid. No, I was just, it's just, yeah, the Twitter thing is, and it's a distraction for us because we'd rather be talking about electric cars and getting, and getting more green infrastructure and
And there's a lot of cool things like, you know, I kind of want to change the subject because we can probably talk about Twitter all day. But like one of the things that we really started talking about is vehicle to load and the Ford F-150 getting, you know, kind of like the ability to kind of power a house for multiple days. And actually Ford gave us an F-150 to try it out and work really well. It's called Ford Pro Power.
And then, you know, it's also in the Hyundai EGMP platform. Those those cars can put out about two kilowatts that can back up a small house for a little while or it can power a work site or do some camping stuff. So those are all cool things. Where's Tesla on that? Like they know how to do, you know, backup batteries.
You know, I understand like, hey, they have another product called the Powerwall, but like maybe not everybody wants to buy a Powerwall. Maybe, you know, having the car power the house in the one or two times a year that your power goes out makes a lot more sense. And the fact that Tesla is getting beat in this area and people are buying cars that do this rather than Tesla's.
It's something, you know, right now it's not a big deal, but as more and more manufacturers get on board with this, Volkswagen's ID4 is eventually going to be able to do this according to Volkswagen, but, you know, they're not really great with software. So.
been a lot slower than they've told us. But once every car can do this and Tesla's can't, like that's going to be kind of a, kind of a, I don't know. It'll, if I'm on the fence between Tesla and another car and the other car can power my house during a power outage, they're going to lose. Yeah. I'm going to call it right now. I'm thinking Tesla will, will never go vehicle to home, vehicle to grid. Really? I think, I think they will go, they will be output,
energy output that you can plug directly into the car but it will be more about like using outside the home like powering work stuff power tools and all that i don't think is that just because the power business partly about the power business it's just about because let's be honest um
Those things are good, like the Ford and everything, for power outages and stuff. That makes sense. They are like lifesaver and that stuff. And that's a great feature and it should exist for sure. But I think when it comes to the Powerwall and when it comes to Tesla's
of energy inside the home, they have a little bit bigger vision in terms of like, they want to be an energy retailer. We saw it with Tesla Electric launch a few weeks ago. They want to be an energy retailer. And for that, the vehicle to grid doesn't work very well. It's not ideal to use your car for that because it's a lot more frequent and it's all the time really. So I think Tesla is really pushing for Powerwall,
And solar, when it comes to that, I think that's going to be the way to go for Tesla. That's the way they see it. What really I think would be the ideal solution for that, personally? Because here's one thing we don't know, unless that changed recently and I missed it. But do we know how much the Ford Pro Power stuff costs at the home to install? So two things about that. One is like if you have the Sunrun...
invert but it's not even yeah it's like a setup it's like a certain cost i think it's like 5 000 bucks extra along with having everything else but the ford pro power will put out 250 uh and at 10 kilowatts 250 volts or 240 volts so you can just get a generator like if you have a generator outlet in your house you can for the price of a cord plug in your
car to your home and run everything your generator would run. So you really, I mean, it won't flip over automatically like a power wall will or, or like the sunrun solution will. And that, that is cool. And that's worth extra money, but a lot of extra money. We were hearing though, like thousands of dollars, right? So, you know, for the price of a cord, you,
you're basically able to go out to your house or go out to your truck, plug it into the generator port and your house is back online. And, you know, when, when the house goes,
back online, you just unplug it and go. So for me, that's a lot of value. People pay tens of thousands of dollars for generator setups that can power their house for days. But you have that in every single electric vehicle out there. My dinky little Chevy Bolt with its 65 kilowatt hour battery pack can run my house for multiple days. So I don't know why this isn't a big thing that
Because inverters aren't expensive. Like you can get an inverter, you know, at Amazon for a hundred bucks, that'll put out a kilowatt or two peak. So, you know, build that into a car. It's gotta be, you know, better, you know, for bumps and it's gotta be way, you know, earlier, but like for a thousand dollar option to have a 240 volt outlet in your car, that would be a no brainer. And it's not like, it would be super easy to set up.
To me, it's frustrating that it's just Ford and Hyundai right now. Yeah, my idea was, and I'm putting it out there. If anyone wants to steal my idea and do it, go for it. The perfect product for that would be a product that doesn't need to be as powerful or energy dense as a Powerwall, but you have some energy capacity in there.
You have – like you could cover for – because most of the power outages are short-term, relatively short-term. So just to cover you for like the hour or two hours, like I had a bunch lately. Over the last week, especially during the big storm, my power would go down like three times in a day but only for like 10 minutes at a time or something like that.
So you could cover something like that. So a small battery, but in the device, you have the battery pack for that. You have the inverter and you have an EV charger charging station for bi-directional charging. So you have basically a bi-directional charger with a battery pack connected to it. And then you can isolate the home on that so you can switch back and forth from, you can island your home basically.
And for a short period of time. And then if you need to, if you need, like if something happens and it's going to be like a few days without power, then you can plug your car into it and then grab the energy from your car to power your home. I think that would be like the, it would be definitely a more expensive device, but it would be worth it because at least you get some energy capacity where you don't need to charge.
necessarily use your car when you don't have to and you can use your car if it's for an extended period of time and you can even maybe do something like a dc fast charging on it like a quick dc fast charging if it's a even if it's just like 10 15 kilowatt whatever it is uh you you can power that real quick if you have to it can be useful or not again
So how big would the battery be? Like kilowatts? Yeah. That's what I'm saying. I'm probably 10. 10 kohan hours. Yeah. Cause 10 will cover like most vast majority of power outages. Right. So let's do that. Someone, someone like, uh, what's the, the, like the Tesla engineers that went into the electrical panel, uh, thing, uh, smart, spam, spam. So, so that guy I've been talking to, uh, Evie extend.com. Uh,
He has a product like that, actually. Really? The cheap one is the... Can you share the page? I want to see. Yeah, let me see. But our friend... Oh, I cannot show it to me. I cannot remember. Yeah, but something that looks good. So, yes, it needs a little bit of, you know, but it's like a small Powerwall, really. And it's, you know, $3,000. So you're saving some money.
So that's basically just two marine cycle, like heavy duty batteries, you know, 24 volts going into a big inverter and powers the house while it's offline. And it looks like it's around three to $4,000 for something like that. And that's in addition to your Chevy bolt or Nissan leaf, you know, sending power into that system. So, you know, when you have like the big spikes with your air conditioner or your refrigerator, you know,
this thing can kind of handle those things. So, I mean, those are the options out there. I think that makes sense. Your product makes a lot of sense. But 10 kilowatts is pretty expensive. I mean, Tesla's charging how much for Powerwalls? No, it's going to be not cheap. But if it's a charger at the same time, a vehicle charger? Yeah, that's true. Yeah, you just save $1,000 with the installation right there.
And then at the same time, if it can be like an inverter too for your solar system or something like that, you can combine a lot of these things together, I think. Yep. Yeah. Then we're going to see more of that. All right. Should we get into some questions and then talk about – because I think a lot of them are related to the subject of – Sure. So first of all, sorry, some of you missed it because the Moscow, Idaho, USA quadruple murder –
a thing has happened thanks dan for clarifying that uh that's why our views are down yeah it's only 69 viewers right now i want to start and say that the ira suv classification makes no sense so everyone who waited for the 2023 ev tax credit are all getting third row model y now we talked a little bit about that yeah yeah it is it doesn't make sense here you know what i was thinking though instead of the third row what if you got a tow hitch i wonder if that would
all that material would put you over the weight limit, 6,000 pounds. Anyway. Roller 20, we've been watching you guys for two years, finally got an EV. Oh, wow, congrats. Specifically, an ID.4 all-wheel drive. Love it more than any car that I've ever owned. And apparently doesn't do a lot of road trips, which is probably a good thing. Actually, that's not a bad car for a road trip. 250 miles, relatively fast charging, not that bad.
Much better than the Bolt. Mgram1964 says, if you have an enhanced autopilot, it is only $99 a month to try FSD beta. I'm trying it out for one month. Yeah, I mean, it's worth probably $100 just to try it. But I doubt that you're going to want to keep it $100 a month.
After that, maybe in a year or something, that would be something worth it. But right now, it's again, you're paying $100 a month to basically train the system. It makes no sense. I mean, you have to give it a test. I'd be convinced 285,000 people to do that. Including both of us. Yeah, including ourselves included. Though I don't actually use it. I don't train it that much. I just test it every now and again when there's a new update. I'm not allowed to use it.
But, yeah, I mean, it's probably one of the business moves. You know what? Save yourself $99 a month. Go find yourself a six-year-old. Put him in the driver's seat and tell him. Give them no instruction whatsoever. And just say, let's go to the store. All right. Let's see. The IRS makes no sense. That's true. Sometimes, usually. Nick Cedar's question. Is there any way to buy a new Bolt without going to a dealer?
Oh, man, I wish there was. Not a new one. Yeah, you could probably get one on like Carvana or whatever. It won't be new though, no? No, it won't be new. But they sometimes like buy a bunch from dealers and just sell them as used even though they have like 12 miles. But yeah, you just got to plug your nose and go there and try not to get swindled.
Yeah, the Jose, we were talking about how the ID4 five-seater is under $80,000, possibly because of the weight. Tesla could offer the Model Y for $55,000 and software cap it, kind of like they did in Canada there, to a 100-mile range to qualify for the $7,500 incentive, and then have the rest of the remaining available mileage range as a software upgrade package.
Yeah, I mean, normally I would be against that. Like the way they did it in Canada, I don't think was good. In this case, because the Model Y should be in it anyway, like if the ID.4 gets it, like the Model Y should get it. Like it just doesn't make sense. It's the $80,000 or whatever is the actual criteria for it. If it's a 6,000 pounds, well, I mean, there's just as much space and utility in a sports utility vehicle
uh id4 that is in the model y so my you should get it so if tesla does that though i'm not so sure it's gonna work but if i wouldn't be mad at it at least now right yeah i mean you just like right now people might as well just get the third row like uh third three thousand dollars third row will save you seventy five hundred dollars uh do you think cyber truck will finally start production in 2023 do you think model 3 will refresh
Two questions. Multi-refresh looks extremely likely at this point. The timing of it, I don't know exactly, but extremely likely that's going to happen in 2023. The Cybertruck production, that's the big question. I'm actually personally extremely confident that production will start this year.
but it's all about the volume. That's the harder part to predict. Based on what we're seeing from Tesla installing production, taking delivery, we reported last week of a bunch of robots to build it. They have the press that's taking delivery right now, the 9,000 pound pressure press. Based on those, it looks like Tesla is investing right now for the production of it. They should be able to start it, but
So starting it and getting to 1,000 units per week, that's two way different things. So yeah, production should finally start in 2023. Reaching volume production, that's the biggest question. I think that's for next year, I think. Sounds good. I agree. And yes, volume production will be probably 2024.
uh bolt sales okay back to bolt uh 2023 i will guess 77 000 because gm has said they will make 77 000 well i would be a little bit more cautious i would be probably 70 000 70 000 units would make more sense i think um but yeah that's that's about right uh tesla really needs a new ceo in my humble opinion i have
Very common theme. All right. Our own Mikey G asks, would you say your opinion of Elon Musk and his management has changed recently? If so, do you also reflect on past views in a different way? That's a very general. Yeah, I did. That's a good point for Mike. It did. Like, I mean, it did raise some doubts about him in terms of like seeing how he runs Twitter and you just throw.
Throw things at the wall and hoping that it sticks. And it does open the door to the idea. It's like, has he been doing that all along and it's just worked? And now it's just not working? But no, I mean, I think that's an exaggeration saying that. I do think that Twitter is a completely different problem that he's never faced before.
that uh i don't think he's equipped to do it because it's a sales twitter is a salesman's job like we have probably people at uh it's selling ads we have people on 925 that probably are better equipped at running twitter that not the engineering side of things obviously but i mean twitter has been running somewhat smoothly engineeringly like i know that it's kind of uh uh
he kind of found some problem or exposed some problem where he was like, oh, you know, in India, it sucks. Like India, it takes you minutes to open a page on Twitter. I solved that. I'm like, okay, I don't know many people in India. And if it made your experience better, I'm happy for it. But in the US, at least I've seen no difference whatsoever on the actual engineering experience, like how smoothly it runs.
so it's more about the business side of things and the business side of things twitter is selling ads that's their business model now subscription i guess but that was a flop if they were ever once won the the blue thing i mean they had to relaunch it like three times so really at the core of the business is still selling ads at twitter maybe elana has some ways to change that but for now it is and uh
Do you see Elon as an ad salesman? No, I don't think that's his expertise at all. I think that he's way too polarizing for that. So yeah, that was my take on that. All right, Dan Oberst says, Tesla deserves to have a CEO who has the company's mission statement on their top 10, three priorities. Elon has let it slip out of his top 20. I agree. Yeah, yeah. When I was really starting to get concerned is when he said like,
um my top priority number one right now is the woke mind virus like that's top of my list of concerns for the world right now that's when i was like really that's if that's on if that's in your top 10 and then a lot of other people that i respect too i've said similar ways too but i think i think some like joe rogan has been big on that for a long time like he's been a big concern for him i'm like i was always a bit disagreeing on that uh but i think a lot of them are easing it up to it a little bit like they're
If you're not online, if you're not like Twitter and all that, if it doesn't seep in that much into your world of virus, wouldn't it be that great if all virus was the same way? Like they all propagate online. And if you have a good hygiene, a good internet hygiene where you don't show yourself into dark corners on the web, you don't actually get infected by that virus. Wouldn't that be nice if they were all like that?
It wouldn't be a top concern, really. This may not be a great idea, but Roller20 says, I wish Tesla was private so they wouldn't do these insane 10-quarter pushes and also they can develop long-term products. I mean, a lot of people would wish Tesla was private right now so that the stock price wouldn't be free-falling. But the public market until recently has been very good to Tesla. Yeah.
Yeah. And what is it up today? I know it was basically flat today, but it was way up yesterday. But that was the only time it was way up in the last few. Right. It's still way down over the last few months. And the markets closed tomorrow or it opens for a little bit tomorrow. Tomorrow. It's Saturday. So it's definitely close. I was thinking the 31st. But all right. So that's probably how it's going to end the year.
Oh, yeah. All right. Well, any prediction on what's going to be big in the EV market in 2023? What's going to be the big storylines to follow in 2023, Seth? So, again, I'm kind of big on the vehicle-to-load thing. I think, you know, can the Hyundai put out, like, real numbers of vehicles? Like, they haven't been sending many vehicles to the U.S.,
but can they ramp up their production? Um, you know, Volkswagen kind of seems like they're stalling out a little bit. They were really high on getting some big numbers out. Ford, uh, wants to put out six, uh, wants to have a run rate of 600,000 EVs a year. By the end of the year, uh, Chevy has, uh,
you know the bold ev which they're gonna make 77 000 of but in the spring they're doing silverado ev in the summer they're doing the blazer ss ev and in the fall they're doing the um equinox uh you know supposedly 30 000 ev so there's some competition but i don't you know none of these companies really have the the battery bandwidth that even close to tesla like all of them combined aren't even
you know i don't i don't know that they can match tesla so
For me, that's the storyline. Does Tesla continue to be the dominant player? Yeah, I completely agree with you on that because I think unless the Elon trajectory keeps going that way and I can see Tesla having major demand issue next year if it keeps going that. That's the big hit, obviously. Well, I think next year, 2023, it's going to be a big year for models. We're going to have a bunch of new EV models that's going to come to market.
But I don't think it's going to be the big year for volume other than Tesla. I think Tesla is still going to be dominant in terms of volumes because a lot of these vehicle programs that you just mentioned are very attractive. I know a lot of people would be willing to buy them, but are they going to be able to buy them? That's the big difference. And I don't think next year they're going to be the kind of volume that we need to. The only launch this year, the only
It's not launching in 2023, but the F-150 is going to be higher volume. But are you sure about that, Seth, that it's 2023 that they want 600,000? Because from what vehicle? Because I know they want to be at 150,000 with the Lightning by the end of next year. So they wanted at the end of the year to have a run rate of 600,000. So I think their Q4 2023, they want to have 150,000 vehicles.
lightning production capacity for the lightning by the end of the year? Lightning, Mach-E. You said 600,000. So the run rate, so a run rate for 600,000 per year run rate at the end of 2023. 150,000 is going to be the lightning out of that? What are going to be the other models? Well, the Mach-E and the...
e-transit i don't know if they're gonna have another model yeah that's i i don't because the back is not even gonna beat 150 000 they're gonna sell some uh some uh meb platform stuff in europe oh that's right that's right i don't know that's yeah that's really that great to brag about yeah but that's that's the thing so even if like maybe a lot of the growth is going to come at the end of the year and then
2024 is going to be the year of volume, I think, especially all of those GM programs that you mentioned, the Altsion factories coming online. 2024, that's going to be where the volume comes in. So if you're planning some purchase to update your vehicle, I would aim for mid-2024. That's when you're going to have probably a lot more options.
But at the same time, I think that 2024 is also going to be the year where a lot of people are going to... The few people that are... I shouldn't say the few, but the core...
group of people that are still say that evs are not the future and all that they're going to completely disappear by 2024 i think and they're all going to switch to like actually my next vehicle is going to be an ev and that that that's what changes the game it doesn't need to be a hundred percent of new car purchase the electric just yet you just need to be people are like okay my next purchase is going to be an ev and once that happened like
You have, once that information is out there, you have to kill all your production of gasoline, production car, internal combustion engine. So I don't think necessarily that's going to, I think a lot more people obviously in 2023 are going to realize that. But I think 2024 is going to be when like almost all people are realizing it.
In most countries, I should say, obviously, some countries don't have the infrastructure yet. They're not advanced enough into electrification. A lot of South America, for example, is not quite there yet. Africa, obviously. Some Asian countries. But a lot of Asian countries, like Southeast Asia, you see some...
some movement recently but still like it's still so early that they have to deploy the infrastructure so it's gonna take some time but uh yeah a lot of exciting stuff people a lot of exciting stuff into 2023 so hopefully another great year for electric and electric podcast too i hope that you guys are going to keep following us into 2023 we appreciate every single one of you and i hope that you're gonna have a fun and safe new year i'm gonna see you in 2023
