Elon Musk's Twitter effect hurts Tesla on new level, Tesla Electric, F-150 Lightning, and more
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Welcome to a new episode of the Electric Podcast. I am Fred Lambert, your host, and as usual, I'm joined by Seth Wintraub. How are you doing today, Seth? I'm good.

All right. Before we jump into the news this week, I'm going to just let you know the format of the show today, because I know it's been very frustrating talking a lot about Elon's Twitter antics and all affecting Tesla and everything. But it's also hard to deny that it is affecting Tesla and more so this week than any other week before. And there's a lot of important storylines about it that I think we need to discuss. And we will, but we will do it at the

end of the show this time around the same times that we take your comments and everything because we want you guys to be involved in that discussion too but at the same time by pushing it at the end of the show those that I know are so frustrated with it that they don't want to hear about it again I understand you guys and I won't be mad if you just

click away by the time we get to it. But first of all, we'll try as much as possible to keep everything that's related to that away. But there was a lot of Tesla news this week too that was good news that wasn't related to that. Unfortunately, what's so bad about it is that's what we see here from our own thing. There's a big news that come out on Tesla we posted out, but it's get drowned into all that Twitter drama articles coming out all the time. That's very annoying.

But let's start out with probably the biggest one of the week. The Tesla Electric was launched. So this is the very beginning of Tesla's product, true energy product that we knew they wanted to release. They've been playing around with the VPP, the virtual power plants, for a while now.

And this is very much like that, but it's a little bit different and we'll get into it. But you know, when Elon was talking about Tesla being a global distributed electric utility that might become bigger than Tesla's vehicles business? Well, this is it. This is the product that you're talking about here. This is truly becoming an electricity retailer.

through their distributed energy asset, in this case, primarily the Powerwall, but also, of course, solar, though the solar may or may not come from Tesla. That's not really the thing. The product itself is the retailing of electricity through those assets.

And that's what the Tesla Electric is. And it's been launched now through select few customers in Texas first. And Texas, like, it's a really sweet spot right now to launch this product because first of all, the market does need it there. Like, it needs it bad. The electric grid there has had a lot of issues over the last few years, especially in the summer when people crank up their EC. They've been brownouts, near blackouts several times over the last few years.

And at the same time, one of the reasons for that, people are about these two sides, of course, that are bickering about this. But a lot of people are saying because it's an extremely deregulated market that they have electricity wires. Well, it's also allowing Tesla to release such a product because they were approved as an electricity retailer in that market. And now we reported earlier this week that they had the approval for...

What they call it, the phrasing on it was very particular. It was a statewide market design pilot for small distributed energy resources to provide grid service export. So basically being a electricity retailer through distributed small energy system.

Tesla already has big ones with their mega packs and everything, but this is for the Powerwall. So it's very similar to the VPP that they launched in California earlier this year that we discussed a lot. But instead of responding to specific events that the grid needs, it's basically the grid and electric utility, the grid lets Tesla know,

"Hey, we expect like having a lot of demand issues around this particular period. If you can get your VPP to provide us services to make that not as bad, we'll pay them good money." And that's how the VPP works. But in this case here, it's an electric plan. So you get on Tesla's electric plan and Tesla basically buys and sells your electricity for you through their Powerwall.

and the electricity that you produce, that you store in the Powerwall and produce on your own solar and then store in the Powerwall. And Tesla, with the energy market in Texas, optimized it for you, so shave your peak electricity rates and sells it at the peak and vice versa.

This is basically Tesla being an electricity retailer. On a small scale right now, only some people in Texas that have a Powerwall are eligible. But we expect this to be like the first step of Tesla Electric being this global distributed electric utility.

Yeah, so a couple things. One, you know, we've been kind of calling this for a while, like it just makes sense. And they've kind of alluded to it. I remember at the Gigafactory Nevada, they were talking about, you know, when they had Panasonic, and they were talking about batteries, and the new cells are actually at the time, it was the, the old new cells. And they were talking about, you know, the new cells, and they were talking about the

they kind of made a reference a few times to being an energy company. So we've been expecting this for a while. The other thing is I'm really surprised at this point that Tesla is not doing bidirectional charging on their cars because while there's a lot of solar out there and while there's a lot of power walls out there, there's a real lot of Tesla vehicles out there. And if you could say, hey,

uh when my vehicle is connected to the grid and you know prices are really high go ahead and take 20 of my battery you know at a very high price and you know you could probably get free electricity in some markets by doing something like that so this is kind of one of those things where i'm not i'm not certain why tesla hasn't done the bi-directional at this point and i know you know a lot of people say well they won't sell any power walls

But I kind of feel like the upside is going to be so great when they have them, you know, they're their own energy company. And I guess at this point they can turn off charging, which, you know, would save a lot of electricity. But I still think like the power of the battery would be really nice to have. Yeah, that's load control versus vehicle to grid. Yeah.

No, I understand what you're saying. I think one of the big hurdles right now is, I mean, for a long time also, obviously, there still was like, we're somewhat worried about the longevity of the battery pack in the vehicle. People are worried about that versus using that for your home. But I think one of the big hurdles is the actual device between the vehicle and the grid. That's something that has been figured out yet. You know, Wallbox had the

the quasar for a while now but we haven't seen heavy deployment on that and apparently it's quite expensive too so there's i think i think there might be there might need to be a breakthrough on that front to to lower the the friction and the cost of installation of such a device so that you can take full advantage of a vehicle's battery pack i don't think we're quite there yet

Yeah, and I agree with the people who say that, well, you don't really want to waste all of your car's battery balancing the grid. The car's battery is way too valuable. Use a Powerwall. But I think Tesla and other companies, there should not be an electric vehicle on the market right now without vehicle-to-grid just for backup the house, just for going out to a campsite or whatever.

you know, lighting up tools or whatever. It's a super easy thing to do. You know, it's like buying an inverter, putting it on the battery and putting a plug on it. That's really all they have to do. And, you know, really the only people doing it right now are Ford with the F-150 and the Pro Power. And, you know, the EGMP platform has like a two kilowatt out, which isn't a lot of power, but it's something.

But I just don't understand why every EV doesn't have something where you can just shoot a lot of power out and put it into a house or a campsite or a work site or whatever. It's just such an easy thing to do, and nobody's done it. And when you add the vehicle-to-grid component to it, you don't want to do it every day or even every week. But in those super peaks, when you can put money back in and get 10 times what electricity costs, that might be worth it.

no i understand i think with the cyber truck tesla is going to start doing with the cyber truck and then going forward we're likely going to see it in other vehicle programs but you know that's those vehicle programs right now are quite old really uh yeah the i mean model three more why it's not brand new anymore and uh mall s and x i mean there was a refresh last year but even more s and x are extreme luxury vehicles so it's not

You don't see it do that as much. Like a work vehicle, like a pickup truck, which is why F-150 Lightning is leading on that front. It makes sense to start going with that first. All right. Then the holiday update happened. Tesla released their big holiday update, for those not familiar.

Tesla every around the new year mid-December late December or the the release this what we call the holiday update where they bundle up a lot of the features especially more fun feature rather than functional though every now and again it does it does match with like a bigger like step change in Tesla software where

Some user interface updates come with it, but at this time, there is some user interface improvement, but it's nothing major. Actually, it's not major, all of the updates, to be honest. There's a few fun things, but it's nothing huge. So some of the biggest ones here, you have Apple Music, probably the biggest feature being added. So there's an Apple Music integration.

see if you have an apple music account this is going to be useful for you if you prefer that over spotify and title which is our two main streaming apps right now inside the test of eagles now you have um native apple music integration inside this of eagles so that's good for that mahjong for uh the uh people that like this game um the older ladies yeah

There is a new version of an integration between dog mode and remote live view. Remote live view, if you turn on sentry mode on your car, you can, from the mobile app, you can view inside, you can view

the cameras around your vehicle now they add inside the vehicle the reason they do that because i mean there's not much reason to look inside your vehicle but they combine it with dog mode so if your dog is inside your car you can check on your dog through the remote live view because of the cabin facing camera that hasn't gotten a lot of use until uh more recently

Again, sticking with the more fun feature versus functional, this updated its light show, which is they match the music to headlights, like light show and sometimes the doors too, especially with the Model X and things like that. Even though even though like the Model Y and everything, they have the back also open and things of sort. Now they added that feature, they added the scheduling feature so you can schedule it up to 10 minutes in advance. The main reason these things to give that is that if you want to

put several cars together and do it like bend them together and do something with like that you can time it exactly so they all start at the same time not a big deal in my opinion but uh some climate control improvement to automatically switch between easy make it easier to switch between low medium and high volume fan control

MyQ connected garage, so that's the home link. Now they also have MyQ, so if you have a garage door open and that's based on the MyQ Wi-Fi system, then you can now sign up through your car to control it directly from the vehicle rather than having a little buzzer or your app. I thought that was kind of pricey. It's like over $50 a year. Yeah, I don't know how it compares to HomeLink. Yeah.

i would have to check that i'm not familiar with that i don't use it myself really yeah we have the myq and you know obviously you can use it from your phone so i don't know if i'm going to spend 60 bucks a month on having it built into the car but i don't know yeah yeah and you probably can put like uh and was it uh if if this and then that type of thing yeah automatically once you get your wi-fi or whatever it's uh opens the door once you arrive

Auto-turning signal, so now Tesla removes the turning signal after the lane change of 4-core and merge. That's nice. Now it's going to ask you to confirm that when you are on the phone call and you approach your car, you know, sometimes it automatically switches to your car audio. Now you have... It's going to prompt you to ask you, do you want to switch it to car audio? That's nice because often it's annoying when you don't realize it in switch.

Some media improvement for user interface. Emission test mode via a mobile app. Emission test mode is the fart mode. It makes your car fart.

I mean, it sounds dumb, but at this point, I've already saw like a few people just crack the hell up with the fart mode. So I'm like, good for Tesla. If you can make people laugh, man. Yeah, it was a big, big fan favorite. Yeah, for a long time. Yeah.

And Rainbow Road, so this was like an Easter egg before, but now you can put it that every time you're on autopilot, you see the Rainbow Road as your user interface for people that want that. Now, also part of the OLED update, but separately because it's not for everyone, because most of those features apply to everyone, but Steam Beta has launched on Tesla vehicles, but it's only on Model S and Max.

Not only that, I was a bit surprised by that, but actually only the very most recent Model S and X, apparently it's not like all the refreshed vehicles have been produced over the last two years. I mean, though Tesla has been like marketing it with having the latest computer in it, apparently it doesn't. So they're going to need a ritual fit a lot of computers. So that's no big surprise coming from Tesla. But it's not related to Autopilot. This is the entertainment computer that was like competitive with the PS5 and the...

Xbox, I'm so confused with Xbox. It's like the X or One X, I don't know what they call it anymore, the latest generation.

So now you have Steam. I mean, it's impressive that you can play Cyberpunk. You can play a bunch of high-level, high-graphic video games straight from your MLS or X. And you can just use a controller. You can even use a mouse and keyboard if you want. If you're a mouse and keyboard player, you just might have to find yourself some kind of way to comfortable setup here because I don't know if there's much room for a mouse pad or anything.

But I already saw a few people making themselves a little table and everything. People are resourceful when they want to game. But at this point, I feel like if you're a keyboard and mouse gamer,

you might as well just bring a laptop in your cars right you know uh so all these things are really cool like i love that tesla's doing this stuff but uh somebody i was telling somebody about this and he was like you know most of the stuff you can just do on a 300 ipad right you can just buy that for your

you know your stupid little chevy bolt and you can have like most of the netflix and all the stuff that tesla does but steam is like the first thing that isn't really on well you have this steam deck that you can buy which is a thousand dollars and uh and it's a lot more portative than portable than that and uh like you can literally have a model 3 and a steam deck and save a lot of money over obviously there's other things involved so i'm not

I'm not hating on anyone buying a little S because of these cool features, but there's definitely alternatives that are much cheaper. Alright, now in the less fun Tesla stuff. So this was an interesting case here. Someone is basically showing a path to get the upgraded self-driving computer.

with the subscription without paying for the $1,000 upgrade that we've previously reported is kind of shady for Tesla to ask for that because of the fact that they said that all the vehicles since 2016 equipped all the auto vertical self-driving. But that was reported last year when Tesla launched their subscription program for FSD asking $200 a month to get the FSD features.

If you don't have the self-driving computer installed in your car there, so if you have like a 2016 to 2019 vehicle and you've never purchased FSD before, so you didn't have the included retrofit, then Tesla is asking for you $1,000. It used to be $1,500 and then they bring it down to $1,000. And now one of these owners, Mr. Ian Hickman,

Ian Jordan, I think. Yeah, Mr. Jordan. He didn't like that, like a lot of people did. And he actually took Tesla to small claims court. And to be fair to you, he reached out to Tesla's resolution department first.

and tried to work it out with them but after no response for a while, he took it to small claims court and he had two separate claims so it was a little more worth it for him. He also had an issue with... and this one is also a fair one too if I might say so, where he had a vehicle with an MCU1 computer on their warranty and you know, a lot of people with MCU1 has lost features over time with the software update and

Tesla is acting like this is a software bug with no actual timeline to fix it. Basically, they don't plan on fixing it. It's just their optimization of the computer. But they remove features for people that have MCU1. And their suggested fix is just buy an MCU2 for like $1,200, something like that. So since it was under warranty, it took them to like, no, you took away my features.

It's a weird situation because we know it's not an actual bug. Tesla is just playing with the words here. Since they claim it's a bug, they'll fix it under warranty and then they're not fixing it so it's a breach of warranty. It took that to small claim cards and it was an easy win, especially Tesla didn't even defend itself. The second claim was a more interesting one, in my opinion, because it's the one that's a little bit more touchy where it's a self-driving computer and he's like, how on earth

To use it with my subscription at $200 a month subscription, but you're asking me to pay $1,000, which he did pay.

And he was like, you shouldn't because it would be false advertising because you told me that my car was equipped with all the hardware to achieve that. And now it doesn't. And now you're asking me $1,000 for it. It doesn't sit right by me. And the judge agreed. He called it false advertising. He said, furthermore, PlanSafe purchased a second Tesla Model 3 relying on advertisement from the company that all Tesla 3... All Tesla 3 Model 3... It's probably like...

didn't know how and didn't know there was model three uh come with all the necessary hardware for self-driving different defendant learned that in fact installing the self driving function would cost one thousand one hundred and six dollars in further upgrade uh hardware upgrades in violation of tesla's false advertising so judge literally called it false advertising and uh to test us credit they uh they paid him real actually pretty quickly apparently within two weeks jordan said so

He showed a clear path that if you want to make that happen, you can make it happen through the small claims court. Obviously, it's not the ideal situation. And he said it went pretty smoothly for him. But my understanding is like small claims court, your experience can vary greatly depending on your jurisdiction. So if you think it's worth it, go for it. If not...

I wouldn't bother. Obviously, it would be ideal if Tesla would just not do that, not charge people for something they said they wouldn't. And funny enough, he actually used our article on this as evidence in court, the article that we released after Tesla announced this charge that would come with the subscription. The infamous article. Well, infamous article.

I mean, we don't know it for a fact, but we were blocked by... I was blocked personally, even though I didn't write the article. But a lot of people assume that everything that comes out of Electric is basically me. And I mean, I'm the editorial lead on Electric, so to a degree, I'm kind of responsible. But it blocked my personal account and Electric's account. I'm talking about Elon, obviously. After this article came out and...

Even though we cannot prove for a fact that that's why we were blocked, there was literally like nothing else negative about Tesla that we posted around that time. Nor did we even have any interaction with Elon Musk or any negative interaction for Elon Musk. Like I DMed with him like a few weeks before that and it was positive or something like that. So it's not very strange. We assume it's because of that. And...

And now it's being used in court to get Tesla to pay $1,000 back to customers.

All right, still on the self-driving stuff. And I mean, this is kind of a fun little challenge that I sent to Elon Musk. I know that I think that he will really pick me up on it. But I think it's worth doing because we're doing that for self-driving people that bought the self-driving package. Because I think they're owed some data at this point, especially now at the end of 2022, where we're supposed to have a million robotaxi on the road by now.

And instead, what we have, it's kind of unclear. Like the current situation with the FSD program right now is very unclear because Tesla has missed timelines and also more recently moved the goalposts, really. You know, it was a million taxi, robo-taxi by the end of the year. And the robo-taxi meaning was Tesla vehicles being turned into robo-taxi to a million people on FSD beta to...

Now, anyone who purchased FSD beta in North America can get it, which is probably hundreds of thousands fewer than a million. So the goalpost has moved a lot and it's still so far, so far from actual self-driving capacity that have been promised since 2016.

And we want a clear path to... I mean, a clear one is maybe too much, but just a path. Give us a path to achieving that promise. So...

Why I posted that is like, let me see like what is the clearest, the best data that we have right now that shows improvement in Tesla's FSD beta. And it's terrible the data that we have right now. It's just, it's awful data set. Taylor Hogan, I know people see him as a Tesla hater and everything like that. And you can see him whatever way you want.

Look at the data. Just focus on the data itself. You can attack the messenger, but how about you attack the message first? I have an argument against it here. And all he did is he plotted the data, the only data set that we have, which, again, is an awful data set. It's...

I put it here, 72,000 miles of FSD beta self-reported by Tesla FSD beta user over the last year or so. And he tried to plot the disengagement, the miles per disengagement, which is one of the only few data that we can compare. And

Again, putting it in perspective, I'm not necessarily... I think it's worth comparing just so you know the difference between Waymo, Cruise, and Tesla at this level. But I understand it's not a good comparison just because of the nature of...

full self-driving data versus Waymo, where full self-driving data doesn't have like highway driving, for example, doesn't have all that stuff that's autopilot. So it's not exactly the same. And then you have the fact that Waymo and Cruze are geofans, which is Tesla going in all different kind of environment. So obviously I would expect Tesla to be lower, but we're talking about lower. Tesla being right now at just over four miles for this engagement.

which also represent my own experience with FSD-Beta, to be honest. But again, that's based on 72,000 miles versus over 60 million miles that Tesla has. So the actual real data set, the full data set might paint a different picture, but that's why we released that. We made an article about that. It was like, release the data. If this is not representative of the FSD-Beta program right now, show us. There's nothing to lose.

uh unless it is exactly as representative of the full set and then that's why maybe it's even better yeah maybe the set is actually worse it's not impossible at this point because tesla has no excuse right now for not releasing this some people some like ardent tesla super fans are like this is not going to receive this proprietary information this is trade secrets everybody else is releasing that information and

I can understand the fear of, oh, it's going to be misrepresented compared to Waymo and all that. And I'm like, at one point, you just have to trust people. Like some people are going to report on this correctly. Like us, hopefully, I would think we would put it in perspective. If we had the more granular data too, that would be nice. Now we have very like small data set, very superficial data, self-reported data. If we had it straight from Tesla, it would be,

Obviously, it would be better, though obviously a lot of people wouldn't actually believe it, too, I would guess. Tesla and Elon particularly has been losing credibility with a lot of people at an extremely fast pace, essentially. We'll get into that later. I've been pretty good right now, 27 minutes in, we haven't touched it too much, the Twitter stuff.

So yeah, I mean, post it. Post the data. Show us a clear path to Tesla improving. So yeah, that's what I was going to basically. I'm not even like asking like, oh, let's compare it to Waymo and everything like that, which by the way does tens of thousands of miles between this engagement. What I want more is like he's been claiming that FSDB has been improving super fast. That's not what we've been seeing. On the contrary, it's up and down, up and down, and basically the same as it was last year right now. And anecdotally,

Anecdotally, you and I both have it. We know that there are some improvements in some areas, but I feel like there's also some regressions in some areas. I haven't since May, and I don't see a significant improvement since May. Here's some information. I was actually at a Ford event, and we'll talk about this later this week. I ran into Sandy Munro, and he was talking to a bunch of journalists.

And he said that full self-driving is like driving with a six-year-old, which I was like, what? Like you, you said like a lot of nice things about it. Um, and then, so I was like, um, you know, is that on the record? Can I talk about that? You know, in a story and his, uh,

you know, like assistant guy or, or, you know, show dude, uh, was, was like, well, to clarify, um, full self driving when Elon and Sandy were talking about it was actually a lot better. It was more aggressive. It was more, uh, you know, it was, it was just like, uh, more aggressive, I guess. And they've actually scaled it back according to him, uh, because more people are getting it.

And I mean, this could have been just him trying to walk back something that Sandy said. But I thought it was pretty surprising. And, you know, Sandy said it in a car full of journalists. So, you know, it's easy to back up. But, you know, he called it like Sandy Monroe, one of Tesla's biggest cheerleaders, said that full self-driving is like driving with a six year old. And I don't know.

many six-year-olds that I would want to drive with. I mean, driving... Do you mean the six-year-old is driving, just to be clear? Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's not like the six-year-old whining in the back of the car. Yeah. Because that guy's got the way to do it. That's annoying, yeah. That'll slow you down a little bit. No, I mean...

So that's why anecdotal evidence is not good. That's what you mean saying because you hear a lot. I posted this story, okay? And how many times I've heard people say, don't listen to this story. Just watch Omar's blog, which I hate this name. Omar, just watch Omar's video, okay?

And I'm like, yes. Like anecdotal evidence from one guy in California too. It's not – that's not good. Like literally this – Yeah, and he's not posting the six times he tried it before and it didn't work. He's only posting the one that for some reason worked. Yeah. I mean obviously no credibility whatsoever to that guy. But still, this pile of –

the dataset that we have here is better than any other noctil evidence that you're going to get from any FSD beta tester. But it's still a pile of... So, testers should release the actual dataset and we can have a clear look at possible improvement, but that might be why testers are not releasing it on Progen. They might not be any improvement, sadly. All right.

Tesla wall connector. I mean, this thing is getting cheaper by a second. Earlier this year, we reported when it got down to $400. Now, it's $350 on Tesla's website. $350. Let me check, by the way, because I'm not sure if it's like temporary or something because Best Buy also had it like reduce the price. Yeah, but they said it was going to be five days or something. Yeah.

Yeah, no, it's not. I hate those retailers that do that. Because I'm on the site right now. Now it's just $3.50 and without any time limit on it. There's a screen grab at Best Buy below. Yeah.

yeah it says like not in six hours it was like six hours but it's it's still on the price and now this is gone so there's um that's like the new price then I guess yeah it's a new pricing is just sometimes they do that like to create some injured urgency but it's not even true it's all I don't even know like how this is legal but anyway the price is down to 350 now which is like as cheap as it gets if you want a 48 amp

a charger with wi-fi connectivity and all that it's cheaper than that it's by far the best price on it yes i mean you can go on amazon right now and look at the juice box the wall box and all that and it's all like twice the price at least for the same or even less capacity than the tesla connector obviously it's a tesla connector it's not a j1772 and if you want tesla also has the same with the j1772 it's 550 which is also cheap for that

But I think Tesla is trying to prove a point here, obviously, since opening their connector as the standard. Now it's called the North American charging connector. And they say like, yeah, it can be a lot cheaper. And we talked about that before, but most likely part of the difference here.

Significant difference must be a licensing fee for the specific connector, CCS J1772 connector. How much are those J adapters that you can put on Tesla destination chargers? They're not cheap. They're not cheap either. Are they less than $200? Good question. I can check, but they might be, but not. So it's a Tesla to J1772 or 1772 to Tesla?

Well, Electron has one. Oh, Electron, yeah. Why is it not working? Okay, Tesla's own one. Let's look at Tesla's own one here. It's $50. It's not too bad. But that's going the other way. If you want to go from Tesla adapter to...

So it's $159 at Amazon for the Electron version. So you could actually buy a Tesla charger and an Electron adapter for cheaper than a Tesla J172 charger. I wonder why Tesla's not selling on Amazon.

Jeff Bezos. That's the reason. It's the only reason because Best Buy is not really the go-to place. We talked about that last week when we launched. That was a rhetorical question. You played it right. I didn't detect the sarcasm. Ford F-150. Sorry about that. Ford F-150 Lightning got another price increase, but just for the base model.

uh which makes sense because we didn't see them making money on that on that model but that model now is up 40 in price since its launch because if you remember they launched at 40 000 but we had our doubts about that when it launched the first place we thought was more like about like competing with tesla's cyber truck which also started at 40 000 but

It was delayed and all that. So over time with inflation, they gradually increased the price. And now they did another $4,000 price increase this week. So it starts at $56,000. They didn't change the pricing on all the other versions. If you want the extended range version, so if you want the longer range version, you still have to start at $81,000 with the XLT version because on the pro device version, you cannot get the bigger battery pack.

But yeah, $56,000 now for the base version. Starting to a little bit more in the, like, make sense in terms of trying to make money off of it. But it is unfortunately a lot more expensive than originally announced. I mean, if you've got one at $40,000, you got a hell of a deal and an appreciating asset. Yeah. But at $56,000, still not a bad deal. Yeah. Yeah.

It's a lot more bare version. They call it the Pro because it's basically just for commercial purposes. It's not like a nice consumer vehicle. The F-150 Lightning gets XLT, especially the Lariat version going up. It's a plushy car that you get.

And F-150 is ramping up production. They are having a third shift of the Detroit SMD plan where they're producing F-150 Lightning to increase production. And we know they want to achieve... They only produce just over 13,000 vehicles this year, which is not as many as we thought they would. But they are ramping up right now with this new shift.

They aim to have an annual production rate by the end of next year of 150,000. So they're not going to produce 150,000 MW this year. And that makes sense because going from like, let's say that they produce, probably produce fewer than 20,000 units this year. We're going to see by the end of the month, but maybe even fewer than like 18,000 units.

next year with the new shift and they want to hand that year at over 150 of capacity but also they're also expanding the capacity of the floor to 78 000 square feet which is huge yeah but you know what's weird is like they announced this but they they the 150 000 next year run rate was already announced so i don't know if they they decided like oh i don't think we can make that many uh pickups in this amount of space or what but

We already knew the number. We just didn't know how they were going to get there. So now we know how they're going to get there, I guess. Next year is going to be the year of the electric pickup with that big ramp up here from Ford. Of course, it's the Verado coming, the Cybertruck coming. Cybertruck is really the wild card because you have to give credit where credit is due. Tesla has been able to ramp up

impressively their vehicle program speaking the model y has reached 3 000 units a week now at gigafactory texas so that's starting to be a significant volume production here and uh of course we reported a few weeks ago that test is aiming to output 75 000 otherwise gigafactory texas in q1 2023 it wasn't that clear how they're going to achieve that based on the production rate that we knew back then but now ramping up to 3 000 this week it's starting to make more sense that because

it could be achievable it would be just over 5 000 units a week average over q1 so if tesla hits 5000 like mid q1 then you have it here and it and it's possible to see it so that would be like two within the next two months in going from three thousand to five thousand it's a significant ramp up still but it's uh achievable a lot more achievable now that we that we see now all right are we ready to get into it

Almost 40 minutes before we got into this. So if you don't want to hear about Elon Musk, Twitter, and obviously we are going to put it in the context of how it's affecting Tesla, because it is affecting Tesla. And we're going to get into it about that because there was a lot of things this week that they're including to the Twitter story. So we're going to do that. But yeah, it was a crazy week for Elon and Twitter stuff.

And obviously now the story is still developing as we speak because a lot of journalists are giving old Twitter timeout. I think that's what Elon is saying. But obviously, it's a very murky situation where people are...

are seeing elon they're they're losing trust in elon really and i know a lot of people already didn't have trust of elon way before he acquired twitter they saw him as this kind of autocrat character this billionaire and they didn't see much value as as we did and we like like we did we saw a lot of value in elon for all the the brash uh talking and the

full pause and all that i think electric we always saw more of like this contribution to electric vehicles and space and all that that that always been my the lens through which i viewed him on musk but in the last few weeks that has been eroded pretty fast unfortunately and it's it's sad it's sad to see like one of your heroes right now just

kind of losing it quite a bit and i know seth you're you're in a similar position though you i think you you you've uh the the pink color glasses have been off for a while yeah kind of moved on a little bit it is it is like you said it's it is sad uh when you're heroes and you know like he's an engineer like well i guess i don't know you know if he's an engineer but you know he's

Like a doer, a maker, you know, building things. So it was like really exciting to see like this guy getting a lot of attention. You know, it's somebody you can look up to. And then, you know, around COVID, I guess, is when things kind of, the wheels fell off a little bit. Was that it, you think? I mean, for sure, that's when he started going more political and obviously more to the right or cozying up with,

the Republican Party there's just no way around it which I have no issue with in general for like personally for a person to do

But it is undeniably a ridiculous idea for someone in this position that – because I'm not even looking at it as left and right. Like if people want to know, by the way, I'm as a centrist as it gets, and I'm not even American. So I love America, though, and I love going there, and I lived there before, and I loved it. But I don't have – what's the term? The dog in play or something. What's the – there's an expression like in –

Oh, you don't have a dog in the race or whatever?

is badly affecting Tesla's neutrality because he's so attached to Tesla that now people cannot detach him for Tesla and this is affecting the brand. And that's where this week has become as obvious as it gets. So we started out the week reporting on a bunch of surveys that came out. And so let's not use any kind of anecdotal data because that's what people have been using for the last few weeks.

And I mean, it has been trending pretty obviously towards Tesla starting to being badly affected. Obviously, the stock price is the biggest example. And I know a lot of people like, yeah, but the market is going down. Tesla and the market are not tracking or not correlated right now at all. And I mean, Tesla today.

It's trading at like maybe three or four times next year's revenue. It's that crazy. Like to talk about Tesla like that three or four times next year's revenue is wild. And yet, so a bunch of surveys came out this week saying that the people's opinion of Tesla in general has gone down. And then obviously, if you go more granular and you go with self-described Democrats versus self-described Republicans,

Just put it in context, both sides have a negative view of Tesla right now. So it's not like – so that breaks your theory from a while back when you were like Elon was actually exhausted his Democrat clientele and now is going after the right-wingers.

They both have an unfavorable view of Tesla, but it has been going down with Democrats and a little bit up with Republicans. But overall, it's down. And the overall view of Tesla is down. And the timeline match, obviously, Elon's antics on Twitter right now.

Obviously, the stocks has hit a two-year low right now. We just talked about it. And Elon just sold more shares again yesterday, $3.6 billion Tesla share, which we cannot say for a fact, but we assume it's because the amount actually matched.

some of the riskier Twitter debt that Twitter has right now. So we assume that he's selling that to cover this high interest rate debt that Twitter has. So it's, again, directly transferring money from Tesla to Twitter. And it hurt the stock again this week.

So, let's talk about it a little bit. Like, what is actually... So, the transfer of money is obvious. This is like Elon transferring money from Tesla stock to Twitter. It's hurting Tesla stock. But now, the bigger issue, it looks like it's the demand. Tesla's demand is being affected by it. Like, where you see a lot of people, they don't want anything to do with Tesla because they attach it to Elon too much.

And obviously last week, last weekend was the big tweet that upset a lot of people was the, my pronouns are prosecute Fauci. So obviously that's... So my thing on that is like, I think Elon used, he's not, he's in a weird situation where he used Twitter like a comedian would use Twitter.

And, you know, a comedian says that, and I know some people will try to cancel them anyway. There's a part of the population that just like don't tolerate these kind of jokes, which, I mean, you can have your own opinions on that. But if you're a comedian, like the intention was trying to make fun. It didn't land. It was not a good joke, to be honest. I don't think anyone like chuckles at that. Maybe like a few people.

It's not even a chuckle. A lot of people linked it to the QAnon people. The QAnon are loving this, but that's not even a chuckle. They think that Elon is sending him messages. It's not about comedy. It's about mental illness to a degree. Right. So...

But you can be forgiven for that if your intention is just trying to make people laugh. But people are not going to Elon's Twitter for that. They're looking for direction right now. I just talked to Leo Koguan, Tesla's third biggest investor in Tesla right now. And we've been texting today. And...

He had a very interesting point. I asked him, because he's been going back and forth about calling for Elon to be replaced as CEO of Tesla. And I asked him, can you give me, are you still undecided? Because I keep seeing going back and forth on Twitter. You should follow him on Twitter if you're not following me. He's very entertaining. Now, he said, Elon has moved permanently, I think, from Elon the engineer par excellence to Elon the supreme political kingmaker.

And I have to agree a little bit on that. You know, Twitter used to be

It's just like promoting climate initiative. It's about Tesla engineering stuff. It's about SpaceX engineering stuff. Now it's about political stuff. And I understand some of it is coming from like, let's make fun of people kind of point. I have no problem with that at its core. But obviously, it slants a certain way right now that is upsetting a lot of people. And it's not funny enough to be worth it. That's the thing.

It's not funny enough to be worth it, I think. And now there's that. Again, you can put it as like, it's a joke that didn't land and upset some people. And I'm sorry. It's not me to be sorry. It's him that should be sorry. But then there's the other thing where...

Now, this week, a lot of people are saying he's silencing journalists that are reporting on him where he's banned a bunch of journalists. And I kind of have a little bit of a different take on that from some people here because I think what happened, obviously, that started all of it is apparently we don't have all the facts on this. But if you listen to Elon, and I don't think anyone has proven otherwise, is that someone...

knew that he was landing his private plane was landing somewhere through the plane tracker that was on Twitter and other platform run by the guy behind Elon Jet and some someone has been described as a crazy stalker by Elon tried to stop the car and jump on the vehicle. And it was his child X that he's called that was in the car. So and then

All hell broke loose on Twitter after that, meaning that he banned Elon Jet. And then a few hours later, he banned other billionaire jet tracking people a few hours. And then he changed the doxing rules on Twitter. There's a problem there. The order of operations. If you're going to start banning people, you got to set up the rules first and then start blocking people.

Obviously, we can understand where he's coming from to a degree because if his child was at risk, like security risk, safety risk of your own child, then you can understand where someone would just go nuts. And like you start calling your Twitter people and you're like, damn that guy. I don't want a guy like you start calling your lawyer. And I've seen Enon did tweet that he was going to take legal action against Sweeney, I think is the name of the guy behind. Yeah, Jack Sweeney.

But I don't even know if I trust Elon anymore. He might have just gotten pissed off at this guy. This guy has the nerve to follow my jet and then ban him. And then later on, his people are like, all right, we got to come up with a policy reason for doing something like this. Yeah. The cover up is the problem here.

The core of it, like you said, the order of action is definitely the problem because even though anyone can understand the feeling of, I mean, you can understand the logic behind someone going nuts and taking action that they shouldn't take.

after the feeling of your child safety being at risk, and like you're going to make some mistake, maybe that can be excused. But then at the same time, what it shows, if you distill the whole process down to its core, it is someone having their personal feelings affecting them.

the action of Twitter, which is supposed to be this free speech platform, according to Iman. And then those feelings resulting in a bunch of journalists being banned. And so at first, it looked like every journalist being suspended, I should say. Now he says it's only a seven day. But that's the other thing, too. Everything looks like he's just

- He's just making it up. - Making it up as he goes. As he goes. And I think that's part of what is affecting the credibility beyond Twitter and affecting Tesla right now where I think a lot of people are like, "Is this just like how he's been all the time?" "He's just been making it up as it goes all the time?" "And it just has mostly worked out at Tesla so far?" "And mostly worked out at SpaceX so far?" "And now it's not working out at all at Twitter?"

And are through Twitter, I guess. And now people are like, it's affecting his entire credibility at this point. Yeah. And with respect to Twitter, with respect to Tesla, it's even more so because Elon made the decision to kill the PR department

Kill, like, press releases and blog posts and make Tesla route every bit of information in and out of the company through his Twitter account. So, you know, and I believe that, you know, he was doing that to get more followers and more, you know, very selfish, very, like...

you know, it's just not a good look. Anyway, he did that, but now the company is inextricably tied to him. And now that he looks like a jackass or more of a jackass, everybody's like, well, you know, Tesla is basically Elon. Even if, you know, Elon could probably not show up at Tesla for a month, which he probably hasn't. And the company seems to be running just fine. But publicity wise, Elon has, you know, kind of kidnapped Tesla's

you know, any kind of public relations and tied it to his personal Twitter. And so everybody thinks like this, this nut job is running Tesla and like, I don't want to put my money in that stock. So, you know, it's, it's just kind of a bad situation. Like I'm actually for the first time thinking about buying Tesla, which is like,

At this level? Yeah, like I said, three to four times, depending exactly where it lands next year, it's three or four times next year's revenue. It's pretty, pretty low. But yeah, you have a very good point. And what you just described basically is in Tesla's own going concern in this SEC filings where a lot of their marketing power is attached to Elon Musk. And if for some reason Elon is not like...

feeling his duties as that he put on himself to to to embody tesla's marketing department then uh then we were in trouble and tesla writes that like black and on white in um in their acc filings and this is what's happening right now we are seeing it happening live and uh and it's it's uh so

Try to make it positive, though I'm not promising that I can. It's like, how do we turn things around right now? Because Tesla is still the biggest force in electrification. And if things don't start training that way, it's going to affect electrification in a bad way overall. So I've been trying to rack my brain on how can we make a difference. Obviously, I have very little...

influence on this situation, but I mean, as a whole, but more specifically, we've been directly blocked by Elon on Twitter. So I have no way to contact him directly, to talk to him directly. And you know what? And I'm going to pat myself a little bit on the back on this. I've been predicting this happening for a while now. Early in 2020, when I wrote this article, like the super fandom is going to badly affect Tesla and the electric revolution.

by corrupting Elon Musk's feedback loop, this big article that I wrote in 2020 that upset a lot of people, but predicted exactly this happening. Exactly this, where the feedback loop of Elon on Twitter, this use of Twitter being corrupted by Tesla superfans is creating a situation right now because he's not listening to the right people. He's just stuck in this echo chamber of praise and anger

I mean, I don't want to hammer on Omar so much, but he's one of the last few that are standing by Elon right now. A lot of, because that's a funny thing too, because a lot of these people were diehard liberals. And right now, if you're an Elon super fan and a diehard liberal, you are in a very weird situation at this point. And so he's put a lot of his super fan in this position. Omar, less so. I think Omar was probably a liberal, but I think the Tesla or the,

It was less of a liberal thing to start with, and that made the difference. So it was more of a test of fun than a liberal always been. But I don't even care about that. So my point to that this week about Omar is that a lot of other people that he used to listen to and everything, but now I've moved away from him a little bit with the latest comments and all that. People that are...

Like Gerber, Ross Gerber, Gary Black, huge Tesla investors that were always praising him on Twitter. Now, less so these days. And now they're also talking about the board should do something about even replacing him, some are suggesting.

So now Elon has completely blocked out those people. He's not listening to them anymore. And even though he must... like he used to see their comments on Twitter all the time and respond to them, but now that they are... he doesn't like what he sees, he's not responding to that even though they are calling for him to change the direction that he's taking right now with Tesla and how it's affecting Tesla. Instead, this week, he decided to respond to Omar

Because he's been completely silent on how this is affecting Tesla for weeks right now. And obviously, it peaked this week with the stock going super down and some demand issues are starting to flare up. Like we've seen the 10,000 free supercharging miles, the $3,750 discount. All of that are showing demand issue.

And instead of responding to, and by the way, they were not like insulting, you know, they were like pleading for him to address the situation. Instead, he decided to respond to Omar saying, unpopular opinion, no, ****.

Elon Musk owning Twitter elevates Tesla's brand and reach in marketing. All right, unpopular opinion because it's false. It's just straight up false. We've seen all the metrics go down in terms of Tesla's reach and popularity and really the demand has been doing now. Elon decided to respond to that instead of all the pleas from his

until recently super fans he said i will make sure there's a shareholder benefit from twitter long term and that's been bugging me because he decided to respond to that instead that i just that basically lowball question it's not even a question but it's it's

He used it as an opportunity to comment on the situation that everyone has been asking him to comment on and use like the most, the thing that would bring the less bad attention to the situation. And then he responded that it will benefit Tesla long term. And I just racked my brain and like see how, because let's be honest, $500 billion in Tesla's value has lost. Half a trillion dollars. Yeah, half a trillion dollars.

How is Twitter going to create that back? Let's say that's not all Twitter, obviously it's not, but let's say $100 billion. How is Twitter going to help Tesla create $100 billion in value? I cannot think of anything. It's just, it can't. And also all the damage that's been done, you won't get, a lot of those people you won't get back. There's just some people who hold grudge and everything.

And it's unfortunate. Like, Elon could right now just turn around and say, yeah, I apologize. Some of my comments, I try to make jokes. They were a bad joke. I was too harsh this week in terms of the bans and everything because I was emotional because my child's safety was at risk. And I became emotional and I took some...

I made some actions that weren't appropriate as a CEO of what I aim to be a free speech platform. So I will remove all the bans and all that. He could do that right now and it would have a tremendous impact. But the fact that he's decided not to do that instead, he does this saying like, oh, you'll see like I'm keep going that way and it will turn the ship around.

It's just hard to see happening because I do think his feedback loop is corrupted, completely corrupted, and he's stuck in this echo chamber. I haven't tried to reach out to people around Omar. Omar has always refused to talk to me directly. He's a coward. Always insult me online, even though I tried to call him and all that. He refused to talk to me.

But I try to reach out to people around him and see, like, I literally think that even though he's part of the reason for this happening, I don't blame everything on him, obviously. It could be part of the solution, though, if even like if his biggest fan, his biggest like supporter on Twitter would just stop.

Just backing him up with everything. Oh, I think Elon would move on to the crazier and crazier people. I don't think there are. I don't think there is crazier than Obama. There are. The alt-right is just full of nutters. And he's falling in line with those folks. Yeah, but the nutters, nutters, like the crazy nutters, they're also not on board with Tesla. That's the thing, though.

I think Omar is like Tesla. He's Elon, of course, but he's like also Tesla first because he's invested in the company and all that. I think that's an aspect to it. I mean, it was a long shot. I'm going to admit it was a long shot, but I just don't have a solution right now. I just see this going worse and worse and worse.

And it's hard to see the other way. Like he's really stuck in this thing. He's been like sort of captured really by this idea. And I don't see a way out of it. Yeah, it does seem like we're coming to some sort of conclusion to this situation. I think if Twitter went under, that would be...

you know, maybe a domino to fall. And then, you know, I don't know that Tesla's board would ever replace Elon unless they all got ousted by the shareholders. But in the last few days, we've seen like,

some major, like a lot of people have a lot of influence in the retail shareholder community. Oh yeah. And like Tesla Reddit or TSLA Reddit is like way against Elon right now. Yes. And also they're putting pressure on institutional investors to do something because obviously they have more impact than the retail investors. So yeah, I mean, obviously a lot of, since a lot of his language that he used are problematic for people,

like the whole walk mind virus and all that uh the is a lot of institutional investors are you know they were very careful about that stuff so i wouldn't be surprised if they decide to act on it and i just i i think elon's like at his core like at first i was like very open to the idea of him like buying twitter making a free speech platform i'm like obviously twitter in the past has taken partisan uh action that they shouldn't have taken and

He's exposed that and everyone is on board with that. But not everyone, I should say. Obviously, the Democratic Party might not be, but...

reasonable people understand that there's value in doing those things. It's just that it doesn't have the credibility level right now as like a centrist or like a neutral person to do it. It just doesn't. Well, that's the thing from both sides. His credibility is gone, right? So, you know, him promising full self-driving next year used to like mean something sort of. And now it's like, come on, dude, you're just

it's not even funny anymore like you're just it's kind of sad yeah so you know at events when he says hey we're gonna build the cyber truck next year you're like no you're not you're not you're not gonna do it like i don't like i don't believe a thing he says and and neither do tesla investors and neither do like the old super fans um you know like the frunk puppy dude and you know they all hate him now so i don't know like this i think this is irreparable damage

Thank you, Ham. You know, the guy has surprised us a lot in the past, though. It could be just like a come-to-Jesus moment. He decides just to do a mea culpa and everything. I think that would work, honestly. I think if it's honest, if it's good. But right now, he literally said fighting the woke mind virus is his number one priority right now.

So as long as this is... he sticks to that, it's gonna be hard for him to do a change because now he's like a warrior on one side when you do that. And I think... and it's because you're taking a side when you use that kind of language too because... not that I'm not saying that there's real problems on the extreme left but call it that, call it the extreme left because otherwise,

this this this whole woke mind virus thing when you when you say that it's it's charged for a lot of people and what you're really saying is like there's uh a huge problem in the discourse and the mindset of the people in the extreme left of things but there's there's the same thing in the extreme right too like i mean for me like the the people that are uh are saying like the

they're anti-science and type biology and all that in the extreme left they're the same as the q anon people on the extreme right like this there's a a thing that doesn't work in in their their mindset like they it's it's religious almost and it's not it's not based on facts and science and all that uh but there's the problem when you focus just on the mo the like

woke mind virus is the number one issue that the universe is facing right now you're not seeing the real picture i think um so he's he's not he lost credibility as a centrist that can bring a free speech platform in my opinion and in doing so and making it is uh is big uh

uh his big battle over the last few months he's lost credibility overall and that's badly affecting tesla because of like you said he is tesla marketing in in large parts um yeah so at this point unless a big turnaround from elon i think the only pat would be pushing for and i think that's what we're gonna

do a little bit more in the next few weeks, I guess, is going to report on the possibility of him stepping down as CEO and replacing him as CEO and then bring back the PR department, bring back all that stuff. I think we're going to have to. All right, let's get into the comments real quick. All right, Jed Anderson asks, are you guys worried your Twitter accounts might be shut down or blocked? They're already blocked at Electric after...

must ban 12 journalists last night from Washington Post, New York Times. I actually was thinking about this. I think you're almost in a way protected, Fred, and the electric account because he can't see you. Yeah, he cannot see what I'm saying. And he looks like he's directly responsible for a lot of these banning and all that. So yeah, I'm not too afraid about that. Right. Also, I'm not like...

I think I'm pretty neutral the way I see things. Like it's not – I'm not even out there like calling for him. It feels like he's more into politics right now than technology. Yeah, and I'm so not into that. Like I said, I'm as centrist as it gets. I'm as little political influence as it gets.

All right. Hey, here's the tech question. Shana Sullivan says, you would imagine that it's only a matter of time before stationary storage moves to LFP chemistry, especially in Powerwall, as it likes to sit at 100% state of charge. Yeah, I think that's right. LFP is kind of built better for and, you know, it's cheaper and it's not as dense.

and doesn't catch on fire and all the other stuff. So LFP makes a lot of sense for stationary storage. Yeah, you're going to see a ton of different chemistries taking bigger space than the nickel-based ones. Nickel-based ones are always going to be a big thing too for the more energy dense you can get. So

Obviously, cars right now, trucks, maybe eventually planes too. That's going to be like all nickel based and all that. But yeah, you're going to see a lot of other solutions being used and they're going to be optimized for specific things. Yeah. And some of those like Anker and BlueEddy batteries that are out now, you just get standalone batteries for when the power goes out or LFP batteries.

He continues the wall box quasar is an inverter, which is why it's expensive. Whereas Hyundai uses onboard inverter for vehicle to load. I don't think an onboard inverter is any cheaper than an off board inverter. But VW also using onboard inverter and no directional charger should be cheaper. Yes, Volkswagen in the ID4 is supposed to have a software update that allows them to do.

a vehicle to grid but um they are so bad with their software right now it's just it's kind of horrible horrifying to watch like they can't even get uh plug and charge working on their own I mean Volkswagen owns both sides of the thing and they you know Ford's been using plug-and-charge for a year and a half they just promoted um this is former chief uh information officer

oh as um as the new head of cariad the software arm yeah volkswagen i mean the guy was already working there but he wasn't you know like the top position now he has the top position so maybe a little bit more impact we'll see all right jp slimo says the first thing i thought about was how twitter tesla would be negatively impacted if twitter was badly managed most surprisingly is either that a elon didn't anticipate this or

cool emoji he doesn't care that much uh i have a feeling neither of those are true um oh i mean elon probably didn't anticipate this that's that's probably true yeah that's probably true because i mean the the way that he acquired it was wild in itself like it looks like he was honest in his mission like to what he wanted to do with twitter at first and then he but

He did anticipate it too late after making the offer. I think he was like, oh, this is going to be a show. And it was. And then he was like, let's back away from it. And then he couldn't back away from it. And then the economics of it got worse too at the same time. And then he had to sell more Tesla shares to make it. And then it all tumbled away. It's wild.

all right green gold says most tech stocks like amazon meta and tesla are down over 50 year to date because of rising interest rates nothing special about tesla stock guys not true tesla's down 50 in the last three months uh you know the other stocks went down earlier

Also, the demand. Tesla is doing discounts now, which they never did before. And now 10,000 free supercharging miles. These things are... The demand is being affected negatively right now. There's just no way around it. Yep. All right. From LinkedIn, Daria Correa says, internal cabin cameras will be used for the driverless taxis.

That was mainly why they were intro'd. I mean, she's basically repeating what Elon said originally. Like, that's what he said that they were going to use it for originally.

Obviously, that has not been the case because there's no driverless taxis. And there has been more traditional news to it. Like right now, there is actual driver monitoring through the camera. I mean, if you have this data and you're using your phone or anything like that, it detects it right away and it tells you not to do that. And Tesla has been kind of moving away from the whole taxi thing with a purpose-built driverless taxi that they're talking about.

Jay Anderson, it's not just interest rates. Amazon is down due to the end of the pandemic. Buying frenzies. Meta is down because of Zuckerberg's obsession with the metaverse idea and Apple changing data tracking. Yeah, no, it's specific to Tesla. Let's see. We'll move on from that discussion.

Would love for you all to take a close look at Lilium. That's the German vertical takeoff and landing plane company. Lots of skepticism around Lilium, but it reminds me of Tesla early days in some respects. We've talked about Lilium when they have some announcements. Vertical takeoff and landing is cool. Obviously, you need really light, really dense batteries to make that useful. Yeah.

when that happens we'll talk more about them i guess yeah also i'm just not that into that space the hv could take off and landing like it's there's a lot of problems with it but uh if they can make it happen we'll take a look all right uh gerber kawasaki elon has now erased 600 billion of tesla wealth and still nothing from the tesla board of directors that's wholly unacceptable yeah so what is the board of directors supposed to do they

They can vote him out. They can reprimand him. I don't know. I don't see them doing anything, to be honest with you. I mean, it's his brother, his buddies, and a hand-picked chairwoman, Robin Denholm. Yes. But it is still strange that a lot of top investors, like top shareholders that normally have

discussions with the investor relation department and the head martin vieca who's been a lot quieter these days he used to like he started in the last few months he started like posting on twitter and on linkedin and all that and now it's a lot quieter these days because he's getting a lot of questions from people and he's not answering those questions so it is uh it is a sad time for tesla right now

Jed Anderson says, what do you guys think about the news that Lear is planning to build a 120,000 square foot EV parts plant in Michigan solely to supply GM? I think GM is going to build a lot of EVs in the next few years. That's their plan. So these secondary parts manufacturers, not a big surprise. Mm-hmm.

All right. Spikes43 question. I thought that the third gen AMD MCU and the 3 and the Y lacked the powerful GPU and the S and the X. Are the MCUs the same now? I don't think so. I think the S and the X. I've heard some rumors about that, but I don't think we'll ever be able to confirm that the

that the 3 and the Y are... I think he's asking, or they're asking, I don't know, Spikes, if the 3 and the Y have the same GPU capacity as the X and X right now. I think that's what they're asking. And we've never been able to confirm that, but there's been some rumors that, yes, that's the case. Yeah, and I guess the idea is, like, why would Steam only be on the S and X? Maybe it's just a high-end option or something. All right, Stu, question. We kind of talked about LFP. We'd love to...

More coverage about LFP batteries and EVs, what's available in North American EV market with LFP. Basically, the standard H-plus model 3. The base Mach-E is going to be LFP. Yeah, that's right. I think next year or the year after that. We report on that when it comes. It's just there's not that many...

Moving on that front, I think a lot of companies are still outside of China. In China, there's more options, obviously. LFP option, I mean. But I think in North America, people are still more familiar with the nickel-based, the NCA and the NMC chemistries. So they're sticking to that for now. But you're going to see more options, and we're going to report on them as they become available and are announced.

All right. I'm going to try to move through these because we got a lot more and we're out of time. All right. C-Doc, love my S plaid, but will be my last Tesla. The Elon I met when I ordered the Roadster in 2008 no longer exists. He must go from Tesla. So there's a longtime Tesla guy. Jonathan Root, another longtime Tesla guy. I'm so ready for another CEO. Elon's blatantly lying on multiple fronts from selling the stock to banning people. He said he wouldn't.

it's true i systematically banned twitter accounts of critics last night the plane talk was over cover yeah the the i haven't looked into the lizette thing that you sent me today uh i haven't seen the the article yet because apparently like there's no nothing about the plane and she was she was banned too with a critical article on the non and tesla so i don't know we'll we'll see

There's one thing I want to discuss real quick because I got that a lot this week where people were like, "Hey, you're always just reporting negative things on Tesla because it makes you money and everything."

And I just want to clarify something real quick and credit to Ariel Elwani for that, who's one of my journalistic heroes. One of my other passions other than the electric vehicle is actually martial art. And Ariel Elwani is the leading journalist when it comes to martial art. And he was attacked by...

Roughly attacked last week. Patty, right? Patty and UFC president Dana White. I have a long standing relationship and everything. And he had like the master of the masterful

Just shut down of everything that Patty said, including the thing about where Patty accused him of making money off of fighters. And I mean, you have to give it to Ariel. He's a better journalist than I'll ever be. And he's so by the book with that stuff. And you have to give it.

On our side, there's no doubt about it. Well, first to admit it, we make more money, Seth makes more money, I make more money when we have more clicks. The way that we're set up, that's how it works. It's always going to be that way. Yeah, it's always going to be that way. That's how it works.

we make more money when we have more clicks however i want to be as clear as i can get that i don't make more clicks from articles that are negative about tesla on the contrary all of my biggest articles are all positive about tesla and by a long shot like a long shot like this month my biggest article by far was on the tesla semi was a positive article about the tesla semi on the 500 mile runs that was

by far my biggest one. All of my biggest articles are all positive about this. It's a complete misconception that my articles, my negative articles on Tesla get more clicks. Completely false. In fact,

I would basically make the same money that I make now if I would just do puff piece on Tesla all the time. Probably make more money if I would just do that and my life would be a hundred times easier. Like a hundred times easier. All I had to do is ignore the Tesla shorts and all that. How easier that... So we... It's not about... This whole thing is not about money at all. If we were just about money...

You would tell. It would be so obvious. We have a responsibility to our readers to try to give you guys the best information possible. And obviously, we are a partisan publication in the sense that we are pro-electric vehicles and we want to see... We are pro-climate initiative and...

We have a bias in that front, if you want to call it that. There's no doubt about it. But there's nothing about making money off criticizing Tesla. Show me some proof because I can show you proof on my side.

Like Ariel sells, I'll show you the receipt. We have a receipt on the other side. Our biggest articles are all positive about this. It just doesn't work like that. That might change in the future, but not because, not our fault. Like let's say that for some reason, there's just more people that wants to click on negative stuff like that. That might happen. But for us, it's not the case right now. Never been the case. And it's not what's going to drive our content, unfortunately. C-Doc saying France should replace He-Man. I don't think it's going to be the top guy to replace He-Man right now.

I can tell you though that Leo, which I mean, if someone is going to have any impact, it's going to be Leo. He's the third biggest Tesla investor. Might become the biggest one if Elon keeps saying all that. He's asking for...

He's open to Elon naming the next CEO or at least bringing someone in. But of course, he wants an independent search from the board, which that's always the case anyway. And he wants at least interim CEO to be either Drew or Zach. So, of course, that's Zach Kirkhorn, the CFO, or Drew Baglino, the senior VP of engineering, which I'm both very okay with. I think that would make a ton of sense. What about Herbert Diess?

I mean, yeah, as an outsider, yeah, it wouldn't make sense. Yeah, I would love for Herbert to come in and take over the day-to-day and then you keep everyone like you, maybe you make, Drew should be CTO really, he deserves it, I think. Drew Baglino should be made CTO and still focused on the engineering part. And then you keep Elon around too. Elon has had a good impact on Tesla's product, there's no doubt about it. So keep him around, but find a way to detach him

from Tesla's marketing right now because I think that's a big issue. All right. We ended on that? We've been on an hour and 20 minutes and we've been talking about this like 40 minutes. There's just a lot of the same, which is, you know, gotta go.

All right. Well, thanks, everyone, for listening. Thanks, everyone, for watching. If you are watching right now, you can give us a thumbs up and subscribe. And if you're listening on your podcast app right now, you can give us a five-star review. Only if you liked it, obviously. That helps the show tremendously. So thanks a lot, everyone. And we're going to see you same time, same place next week. Bye-bye.