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And we are live, everyone, for 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, this episode of The Electric Podcast is brought to you by the Electric American Solar Challenge 2024 coming up in just a few weeks. A very cool student electric solar car challenge that we're going to tell you a little bit more about later on the show, so stay tuned for that. But today we have a big show for you. It's the first week of a new quarter, and what that does mean, that means delivery result across the board. We're going to start with Tesla's result because they are the bigger one in North America, but we also have
for GM BYD and some cool tidbits of information around it. If you are a fan of the show, we do appreciate when you click that like button, that subscribe button, that notification button, all that stuff. It does help push the show to more people. It does flatter the algorithm in our favor and all that stuff. So just bring it on. We appreciate it. All right. Let's start with Tesla's delivery result.
Q2 2024. Expectations were 438,000 vehicles delivered during the last three months. Tesla beat that with 444,000 vehicles. So, you know, that's good. The stock went up on that.
But it's still down year over year since Tesla in Q2 2020-2023 ended up delivering 466,000 vehicles. So, you know, you're 22,000 vehicle year over year down for a company that's all about growth. It's certainly not ideal to say the least.
The stock is way up. It's up 50 points in the last few days. I don't quite understand that because it's certainly above analyst expectations, but it's down year over year. Still a lot of great news. Production also down 411,000 units. So it's definitely like
you know, tempering down production. Like it's not just letting like, it's, it's not the whole strategy of just let's keep producing as many cars as we can and just, you know, adapt or sell strategy or prices to sell them all. Now it's like, all right, let's tempered our, um, sorry, the thing was beeping around. Uh, let's tempered our, um, production in order to match, uh, product, uh, deliveries, which was the other way around before. And, um,
Yeah, down year over year. I think part of the thing that really helped boost the stock with that is the energy storage department of all things, which has been growing fast for a few years now, but it never really contributed to the stock that much.
However, the jump from this quarter was just so huge that I think now the biggest thing is that I think it's now officially on everyone's radar. Like everyone that's covering Tesla right now is like, all right, we need to take that seriously because it's pretty insane. They deployed 9.4 gigawatt hour of energy capacity last quarter. So I posted an article just on that actually because it's quite significant. Yeah.
So I asked, is the Tesla's energy business finally boosting the stock, finally contributing the stock? Because if you look at these numbers here, last quarter was four gigawatt hour and that was itself a record. So now they more than double the last record, which was just like last quarter. So quarter to quarter, double last record. It's absolutely insane. And now you need to look at the actual like revenue slash profit potential from that and
That's why it hasn't been taken seriously. Even though there's been tremendous growth over time, even though the last quarter was actually just a 4% growth, so even though it was a new record, Tesla also had a giant Q1 last year at 383.8 gigawatt hour. So...
the revenue was still very, very small at 1.6 billion over Tesla's overall, like almost 20 billion in revenue that they do every quarter. It's just a drop in the bucket. But now at 9.4 gigawatt hour, I think I did those. I calculated that this is making about $400 million in revenue out of every gigawatt hour of energy storage. So that brings them to about 3.7 billion. So now it's starting to be,
you know significant part of it's probably going to be over testless service and order revenue this quarter
which was 2.2 last quarter. They also said that the energy division is now profitable. So there's positive gross margin and it's overall profitable. And they even said that the gross margin is similar to the one in the auto industry. So we can expect now that the energy storage side of things is going to actually significantly contribute to Tesla's both revenue and profit. So I think that's part of why the stock shoot up, I think, almost 20% in the last week, something like that.
But going back to the delivery results here, this is still the main core of business. Tesla reported 386,000 Model 3 and Y production, 422,000 deliveries. Other models, which you know it's sad, Tesla doesn't break down per models anymore. They include Model 3, Model Y, Cybertruck, and Tesla Semi, all in the same category. 24,000 units produced, 21,000 units delivered.
So, yeah, the production is significantly down, deliveries down year over year. And that's the delivery side of things, you know, that slight beat on expectation down year over year is accounting for like 46,000 vehicle discrepancy between production and deliveries the previous quarter. And now it's the other way around. In the other way around by just 33,000 units.
So there's still a big discrepancy between production and deliveries over the last year. Tesla has worked through that a little bit there, but there was a large inventory last quarter. I don't think we can go around that. All right. A few things that are interesting here is Cybertruck. So Cybertruck is in the other models, but thanks to the recalls lately, there was two recalls last week that gave us an idea of the production over the last quarter, production slash deliveries.
We can infer that the Cybertruck might have become the best-selling electric pickup truck in the U.S. last quarter. So how do we work that out? Because Tesla says 21,551 other vehicle deliveries. It's vague. Sorry? It's vague. Yeah, very vague. But Tesla confirmed that they had produced, as of June 6th, 11,688 Cybertruck vehicles.
In mid-April, they had confirmed 3,878 Cybertrucks. So if you take the few more weeks in April, but that was like mid-late April, so there's probably just one week or two of production. And then in June, you have to have almost four weeks of production. I would safely assume that this will deliver between 8,000 and 9,000 Cybertruck last quarter.
And then if we compare that to the competition, Ford delivered 7,902 F-150 Lightning. So it's pretty close, but there is a good chance. We cannot confirm it, but there's a good chance that Tesla actually beat that. Then there was a Silverado EV at 2,196 deliveries in Q2. Silverado is fairly new, still ramping up, so not too surprising. 2,921 from the Omer EV, but that's pickup and SUVs. They don't separate the two, but...
still impressive for a vehicle that expensive. And then you have Rivian. Rivian, like Tesla, is one of the only one that doesn't break down vehicles per model. They include the R1S and T in the same 3,790 vehicles delivered. But we know that the R1S accounts for the majority of these cells. And then you also have the delivery van. So it's
It's almost certain that Rivian has delivered fewer than 7,000 R1T last quarter. Most likely, probably around 4,000 would be a better guess, I would think. So yeah, it looks very likely that Tesla delivered... The Cybertruck has become the best-selling electric pickup truck in the US, which personally I don't find too surprising. And Tesla's ability to ramp up vehicle programs is second to none. So...
And they enjoy a large backlog of orders. So the demand is there too, even though now I think the demand is waning for the 100,000 plus version of the vehicle. The better question is like, how is it going to fare now?
Once everything is ramped up, F-150 Lightning is ramped up. I should say the F-150 Lightning next generation is ramped up because I think the next generation is going to be a bigger impact. Silverado, I think is a great competitor to the Cybertruck. And then you have the Rivian R1T, which has proven not to be able to achieve high volume as high as the Cybertruck already. So we can forget about that one. But the Silverado, next generation F-150,
Once the Cybertruck is fully ramped up and has its cheaper versions, it would be interesting to see. So I follow everything with that. Makes sense. The only thing that makes me think that they didn't pass another thing is that Tesla and Elon would absolutely have announced if they had passed.
been the most popular. After I wrote my article, I saw they sort of announced it, but not quite. Someone else tweeted that assumption without the breakdown on idea. They just announced that iSat might have become the best-selling vehicle. I cannot confirm it. I have no confirmation. There's an account on Twitter, like a classic Tesla super fan account.
said that it became the best-selling electric pickup truck. And the official Cybertruck Twitter account retweeted that with the eyes or something like that. So, you know, it's not a confirmation. It's not an announcement, but it is sharing the assumption that they have become that. But you're right. I would have assumed that Tesla would have made an official announcement if that was the case. Right.
Now, the interesting thing is, with this little deduction of where the Cybertruck was at last quarter, we can start to remove that from the other models at Tesla and get an idea of what's happening with S and X. Not a lot. Yeah. Tesla Samurai is also in there, but I don't know. Best case scenario, it was low double digit. Yeah, I was going to say, I don't think it even hit triple digits yet. Yeah. So...
remove those 8,000, 9,000 units from the 21,000 units of Cybertruck, and you end up between 12,000 and 13,000 more SNX sell globally last quarter. So, you know, that's low. That's quite low. It's, you know, depending on if it's 12 or 13, it's between 31 and 37% down year over year. Quite significant.
Now, I know, well, S&X is not necessarily like it's not they're not even even without that 30 percent, 30 plus percent decline year over year. It wasn't already like a significant program for Tesla in terms of contributing to overall capacity and both financial and overall deliveries. But.
It is, you know, they are important vehicle programs and they might be a glimpse at the future of Tesla's other programs if Tesla cannot update things and be, you know, keep being competitive with the rest of the market. What I mean by that is that I feel like Tesla, like I feel like one of the only thing that legacy automakers are better at at Tesla when it comes to electric vehicle programs and vehicle programs as a whole is
is that they can jungle a lot of programs at the same time. They have a bunch of programs in the works that are coming out, but they also have their existing vehicle program and they keep updating them and every year, every model year, they get better. Tesla also makes these cars better. The Model S and X have become better over the last few years. But there's a clear lack of focus on them as Tesla focuses on Model 3, Model Y, and Cybertruck. So these things end up with...
with becoming slowly and surely less viable product i still think the moless in x is somewhat competitive in their segments but they are now you have every premium automaker out there especially the german automakers that have vehicles in those segments uh you have the revian r1s also that competes with model x and the region r1s is a very popular you know large suv uh you have the kia ev9 now you have a lot of competition in that market and i think that
Tesla's vehicles are not as attractive as they were before compared to the competition. And we are seeing what happens when that's the case. You go down 30% in sales. It's pretty significant. And I think that if Tesla is not careful, the exact same thing could happen with Model 3, Model Y, and even Cybertruck in the future. Unless, obviously, you solve self-driving and then everything changes. But...
Well, what if they solve self-driving and everybody else solves self-driving too? Yeah, that's a good point. I guess, you know, the Elon's thing is that he doesn't even see anyone that's getting close to solving self-driving. That was his argument.
i really wish that uh you know would would take his own advice about like oh just try fsd and then you'll be convinced like just just try way most service and you'll be on this and some people are getting close too it's it's not fred you're still pushing the broken growth story what does that mean i mean i i report on tesla cells yeah it's just going down year over year it's just simple truth there uh kirk i don't know what you mean
All right. Yeah, we already did the Tesla Energy business boosting. That's awesome. You know, that's not broken growth. That's a ton of growth there. And I give Tesla credit for that. It's absolutely incredible. We talked about it a little bit ago. Cybertruck electric motor.
So I see that Tesla is reaching out to some early Cybertruck owners now to tell them that they're going to change one of their motors. They don't specify which one because all Tesla Cybertrucks are either dual or tri-motors right now. So Tesla says that it's doing a study on early Cybertrucks and they're selecting some of them to take their motor away and replace it. But they replaced not with the same one, but a new one.
A new production version. That doesn't sound like a study. That sounds like a recall. Yeah, that's where I'm going at this. So Tesla says that the new version is more efficient and more reliable, which is good. But the fact that they are going back and replacing older ones...
makes me think that there's maybe more than a story. So there's two possibilities here. There's a possibility that Tesla, you know, seriously wants to just learn more about their early motors deployed last year and they are bringing back. And the way to bring them back without bringing the whole truck back is to replace it with another one. And they have another one that, you know, has improved over the last six months and is more efficient and reliable. Possibility. However, we haven't seen that from Tesla a lot. So the other possibility is that
Tesla is starting to see an issue with the motor and they have a new version that is better and they are replacing it, an older version, and they are not ready to call it the recall yet. They're not ready to replace all of them. So they're doing that. And the communications employees, to be fair, Tesla does say that there's no danger to using the current motor right now. And I've seen also some report of people having motor replacement even before that. But I assume that it was just like normal, like...
production ramp problems. Tesla started to push a new software update this week with a decent, decent new amount of features, specifically new music apps. So YouTube Music is now included in the 2024.26 software update. They're going to join Spotify, Apple Music, TuneIn, and Tidal that are all native app within the Tesla vehicle. And then
You have Amazon Music that is also being added to that list. So both Amazon Music and YouTube Music. I don't really use those. Do you? I do just because, you know, for instance, Rivian's got Amazon. I, you know, we have some of those Amazon devices around the house that uses Amazon Music.
so if you have amazon prime do you get amazon music uh included too or you don't get you don't get amazon music but you get like a a freemium version of that but um youtube music is it's nice because um i pay for you know initially i paid for google music and i got in 7.99 a month plan and then some grandfathered in for 7.99 then they added youtube
premium to that subscription. So I get that for $7.99 and then I change Google Music to YouTube Music. So I'm in that Spotify and I'm just paying way too much for music. Yeah, I just use Spotify and I really like it. Yep, same. There's also all the new parental controls. So just like the valet mode, now you have the capacity to lock with a pin the vehicle to set the maximum speed limit and limit of acceleration to the chill mode.
You also can turn on safety features, so that's speed limit warning, automatic emergency braking, forward collision warning. So you can basically lock all that in in the car so that if you loan the car to one of your kids, they can be somewhat limited. Next thing, they're going to let you geofence the car so they cannot go too far away. That would be interesting.
And you navigate to sub-destinations. So now places like airports that have a lot of destination within the broader airport destination, you're going to be able to choose as you click on the airport, for example, the terminal, the departure, the arrivals and all that. So this is something that's been in a lot of other navigation systems. So Tesla's catching up with that. That's pretty good. You're going to also in the status bar at the top, now you're going to get the weather forecast and the air quality status. Also pretty cool.
There's new ways now to schedule charging and pre-conditioning. Instead of going through the app, you can go through the vehicle menu system. So they redesigned that one in the app, but they also have it now directly from the vehicle. That's nice too. This update has been starting to being pushed out to the Tesla fleet this week, but don't hold your breath. It can take a while before it gets propagated to the entire fleet.
All right, last piece of this news before we move to other delivery results and more. Tesla India, the situation we reported on that a lot. India is the biggest auto market where Tesla is not operating yet. And they've been talking about entering the market for years and years and years. They came very close a bunch of times. There even was a bunch of Tesla vehicles for validation testing in India.
It just never happened. And that had to do with the import duties that India has on electric vehicles that come from other countries. And Tesla was known to be negotiating a deal with the government to find a workaround because the government was like, yeah, if you...
Just build them there. The goal was like build them in India and then you won't have any important duties. And Tesla was insisting that like normally our approach is to build a market infrastructure in terms of sales and then charging with imported vehicles first. And then if the market is there, we find there's a market, then we build locally like they did in China, for example. This was Tesla's approach in China.
So there was a compromise that was met. We reported on this earlier this year. There was a deal that was announced where basically automakers, foreign automakers would have the opportunity to deliver. There was a limited number of vehicles for a few years, a few tens of thousands per year for a few years, I think, if the automaker would commit a few hundreds of millions of dollars into building a factory in the country.
So you would get much lower import duties on those vehicles for a few years as long as you will build a factory, I think, within three to five years. When that deal was announced, we assumed that that was like
what Tesla negotiated with them. And sure enough, Elon even announced at the time that he was going to India. So we assume that was announced right after the deal. So we assume, okay, he's going there and he's going to announce an official factory for Tesla in India and the launch of Tesla in India because of that factory announcement.
But this week, Bloomberg report that the whole project is completely cooling down. I should say that Elon ended up canceling that last minute visit to India.
so now bloomberg reports that must team has been basically ghosting indian officials they're not responding to inquiries anymore uh so the now indian officials in new delhi are saying that they don't they don't expect that this is going to invest in the country anytime soon because of the current situation and the current lack of communication
I would note something. It might be that Tesla side sells go down two quarters in a row now year over year quite significantly. And Elon has been cooling down in the vehicle production as a whole, focusing on the high, focusing on self-driving. So this might simply be Tesla's shifting strategy, not specifically looking for more vehicle production anytime soon. So backing out of this potential deal in India.
Or it could also be when Elon announced that he was going to India and then canceled at the last minute, he ended up going to China instead. So I wonder if he got some pressure from the Chinese side because Tesla is getting very cozy with the Chinese government in the last few years. And the last few months, really, it was just today we reported that Tesla vehicle had been added to the government, the approved government purchase list. So now government entities can...
by Tesla vehicles, which wasn't the case before. And Tesla is the only foreign automaker on that list. There's Volvo on it too. So there's a foreign brand, but Volvo is owned by Geely, so it's Chinese. So Tesla is the only foreign-owned automaker, but the vehicle approved from Tesla are the ones coming from Gigafactory Shanghai. So they are locally made. Yeah. So-
Could this also be Tesla playing hardball with India saying, hey, we want a better deal. We want a better deal. And they're not giving them a better deal. So they're like, OK, well, call us when you're going to give us a better deal.
It is possible because, to be honest, it was not the best deal in the world. It's much lower, but lower. It's on zero import duties. And I don't remember the exact numbers. Now, I would need to go back to my report on it. But it wasn't tens of thousands of units. It was not that many that you can get. But that's not too bad, too, if you're going to have local production in the next few years. But it needs to work, too. So it's a bet on the market.
All right. We have a bunch of other news to discuss, but we can talk a little bit about the Electric American Solar Challenge before we do. All right. Yeah, we're just like a week and a half away from the first stuff. So basically, the schools will all get. So the Electric Solar Challenge is a bunch of
top universities across the US and Canada, and I think some others, are all getting together with their solar cars. And we're sponsoring it. We're the title sponsor. And that all starts happening on July 12th. And that's actually in one week, Friday, July 12th. So in...
Kentucky and Bowling Green at the Corvette Museum racetrack, they are going to have a race. And that's going to start Tuesday, July 16th. And that's going to go through Thursday, July 18th. So that's called the Electric Formula Sun Grand Prix. That's just a round-the-track race. It's fun to watch. If you're anywhere near Kentucky or Bowling Green or even Tennessee, you should come out and check it out.
Um, then, uh, from Friday, July 19th to, you know, Saturday, July 20th, um, we are going to start the electric, um, American solar challenge. And that's going to be a race, not just across, you know, Kentucky and Tennessee, but it's going to go all the way to Wyoming. So these cars are a street legal and they're going to go on regular streets and they're going to cross the country.
I don't know exactly how many miles that is. I probably look it up, but let's see if I can find the schedule here. 10 stops. I don't see the mileage. Yeah. It's on the site somewhere, but all the way to Wyoming. So if you're anywhere in the Midwest, St. Louis, Kansas, Michigan,
I can list some of these stops so that people, if they know these locations, they can try to match it. So on July 19, it's the Adventured Science Center in Nashville, Tennessee. On 28th, it's the Paducah, Kentucky. I don't know the specific location. It doesn't list it. 21st, the Sarton Illinois University in Edwardsville, Tennessee.
that's the 21st and the 22nd it's the mystery state capital in jefferson city jefferson city is the capital of missouri yeah you would think it would be st louis or kansas city then on the 23rd we are in uptown farmers market in independence missouri 23rd uh pawnee express national museum in st joseph missouri
24th Homestead National Monument of America in Beatrice in eastern Nebraska. Is that it? Yep. Kearney Archway in Kearney, Nebraska on the 25th. And Scott's Bluff National Monument in Gearing, Nebraska on the 26th. National Historic Trail Interpretive Center in Casper, Wyoming on the 26th.
Is it 26 too? Or is it 27? That's pretty much it. So if you know any of this location on those dates, you're going to be able to see all these cool cars like this picture here. It's pretty cool. Yeah, it's a lot of fun. A lot of cool kids should come out and check it out. Yes, sir. All right.
We have a few more news items to discuss before we go into the comment section. If you guys have any questions for us about any of the topics that we discussed today or any other topics in the electric vehicle and renewable energy world, you can put them in the comment section right now. We're live on Facebook, YouTube, X, LinkedIn, all the good stuff. All right, Ford. Let's go into the Ford sales. We already talked about the Lightning a little bit, but Lightning is not their top seller. So what we have here, Mustang Mach-E.
And a 58% year-over-year growth in Q2 2024 with 12,645 units. Oh, no, that's the first half year. So the quarter-to-quarter year-over-year growth is 46%, 58%. They have now delivered 22,000, over 22,000 in the first half of the year in the U.S. Lightning we talked about before, just short of 8,000 units. They are up to over 15,000 in the first half of the year.
And then the e-transit is still selling pretty good at 3,400 units. That's way up. They had a big upgrade last year, so it makes sense that they are selling a lot more now than they did last year. It's up 116% year over year for the first half. So yeah, still not super high volume stuff, but the Mackie is saying through pretty well. The F-150 Lightning is
I think it needs the new, the 2025 version, you know, next generation. I think it's going to be the bigger update. GM now. GM also is doing pretty good. But again, because it's easier to do good when you don't have that much volume before. We didn't have, no, we didn't have a chart on this one, but I remember checking the numbers.
All right, GM delivered 21,930 EVs during Q2 2024, up 35% versus Q1. Year over year, 17%, which is not bad considering the last year GM had the Bolt EV that was contributing most to their sales. All right, specifically the models, GM sold 6,634 Chevy Blazer, only 1,000 Equinox.
That's surprising. 2,196 Silverado EVs, but all of these vehicles are still being ramped up, so it's not too surprising that they're a bit behind. GM like to specify that 40% of the Blazer EV buyers are coming from other brands than GM, so it's letting them expand to new customers. And then on the Cadillac side of things, the Lyric is still selling pretty good at 7,294 units.
It has become Cadillac's second best-selling model behind the Escalade. The Escalade IQ is not for sale, right? Is it? No. No. It's coming soon, though, right? Yep. And then on the GMC side, I think the Armoury EV is at its best quarter yet at 2,921 units. 70% of Armoury EV buyers are also new to GM. That's a lot. Makes sense. It's kind of a unique vehicle. It's not like...
But still, GM is supposed to be at hundreds of thousands of cells per year now, and they are at 22,000 units a quarter. So not even 100,000 a year annualized just yet. But it is growing. So this whole idea that EV cells are going down is not true. Everyone outside Tesla is growing right now. And I guess about Rivian had a factory shutdown this quarter, so it didn't help.
And now Tesla's biggest competitor in terms of overall volume is BYD. Now we have this BYD report here, but BYD posts monthly sales rather than quality like Tesla. So it's more like they announced that last month they had
They sold 341,000 NEVs just last month, but 145,000 of those were all electric. So I see a lot of like big shift between BYD of its percentage of EV sales versus the rest. Like sometimes it's like 50% and now it's like quite below 50% here. Yeah, I forget a lot of times that BYD doesn't make or makes internal combustion vehicles and hybrids as well. Yeah.
But its all-electric cell are up 13% from just from the month of June last year. So that's good. They are up year over year. They are now adding up to 726,000 fully electric vehicles sold in the first half of 2024.
So they are still behind Tesla. They're up year over year. So they had a better quarter than a better first half of the year than they did last year where they did 616. So they're already over 100,000 vehicle up. So that's the big thing. People want to know because Tesla lost the title like the last quarter of the year to BYD as the
volume the biggest volume all electric vehicle manufacturer in the world but the overall year of 2023 Tesla was still king uh so the assumption myself included the all right if BYD and BYD beat Tesla by a lot last quarter so I think okay the last quarter then you know they continue ripping up and they'll beat Tesla in 2024 but even with Tesla having two bad first quarter
Tesla is still up a little bit over BYD in full electric vehicle this year. However, BYD had a giant second half last year. So assuming they still have a giant second half this year and Tesla doesn't reverse their current downtrend, which has been going on for the last two quarter, BYD could still beat Tesla in 2024, but it remains to be seen. All right. Finally, before we go to the comments, we have a quick article about Xpeng.
that debuted a new AI-centric M03 sedan under the new Mona brand. So both Xpeng and NIO in China have launched sub-brands that are a little bit cheaper. So these vehicles start at just 200,000 yen, and that's equivalent to $27,000. So it's pretty cheap. And this one, if you haven't realized the...
uh m3 it's uh it's a it's an official the the admitted that it's a little wing to tesla model 3. so it's an homage to the model 3 they called it and if you know about the history of xpeng xpeng you know as was was uh
shamelessly copying Tesla at first, copying the old Tesla AI. Tesla even sued former employees that went to Xpeng because they claimed that they stole the autopilot source code when they went there and Xpeng had the very same autopilot UI as Tesla and everything. But
Company has evolved a little bit since, has distanced itself a little bit for Tesla, but the co-founder is still a Tesla fan and even admits that he started the company because Tesla opened up their patents. So there's a lot of similarities between the two companies.
But yeah, this new card is not much known about it. They released a few stats. For example, they released a drag coefficient that says 0.19.4 CD, which is very good. There's two single motor variants available.
140 kilowatts, 160 kilowatts. So this thing looks pretty cool, looks pretty luxurious, but it's probably like not a lot of power in it. We know not a lot of power from that, but we don't have the battery and the range just yet. But I would assume it's not a ton based on those early specs that were released. But you can expect that much too at starting price at $27,000 either. That thing kind of looks like the Volvo from the front, the EX30. Yeah, I agree. Mono.
The Mona EV, but it still has the Xpeng logo on it and everything. So the same thing with NIO there. I don't even remember what's the sub-brand of NIO launched last year, but they call it a sub-brand, but it's all branded with their official brands and everything. It's not like GM having Saturn, for example, and Chevy and all that. It's not the same thing. Actually, I don't even understand how all this works. All right, that's pretty much it for us on the news this week. Let's jump into the comment section.
All right, Carlton San Diego's there early. I watch live on YouTube and notice I always miss the first minute or so. Not sure if that's a YouTube glitch or what. You know, I do notice our numbers. We're at like 674 live watchers now. It starts out kind of slow. So I wonder if YouTube's late in that. I think the notification thing goes late sometimes, though. Yeah, maybe that's why.
All right. Happy Canada Day and U.S. Independence Day. Too bad Supreme jerks. All right. We get political. And then energy storage business is like selling luggage. You pay a lot for it when you need it, but it's generally overpriced and overvalued. Grid storage should be done with anything besides lithium ion batteries. I don't know if I agree with that. I think we use it all the time. Yeah. What other alternatives? Like I used my Powerwall this week. They're great. Yeah. Energy smoothing.
Also, Kyle Connors having motor changed on a Cybertruck. I think we talked about the motor change. Yeah, we did. So, I was telling him they are interested in inspecting it because he racked up early high mileage. It's a little bit different. Yeah, but he's not the only one getting that email. I saw a few people getting that email, actually, or that service message. Yeah.
Yeah, for sure, Cal has put a lot of money on his. But like I said, it's a possibility that Tesla is just studying early drive units. But it would be a first for Tesla to just do it like that, to retrofit it. Yeah, and the messaging is a little bit different, it sounds like, to Kyle. And it's not just an academic study.
All right. An 80K vehicle is not going to sell well in this market. The Cybertruck may sell more at 80K, but not much more. It will end up selling less than the Model X and S. I don't know if it's like the Model S and X is selling like fewer than 50,000 units a year combined now at this current rate. So that's pretty low.
Yeah, 80,000 is still high. I think if Tesla can bring down the price a little bit in the future, I would see more potential for the hundreds of thousands of units per year. But yeah, the more I think about it, the more I wish Tesla would have gone another way and would have gone maybe more of like a Maverick-type size vehicle, cheaper, smaller, still with some towing capacity. Yeah.
Especially now the Cybertruck has to compete with something with the Silverado EV, which if you actually want to use it as a work truck, Silverado EV wins almost everything. Because of the battery or other stuff? The battery, the usability to the RST as the mid-gate version, which is really nice and everything, but that's really the more expensive version. But for $80,000, having the Wanda version with the...
over 400 miles of range almost. It's pretty nice. Yeah, totally agree. But I think Ford's going to come out with something new in their next generation. Lightning. Yeah. Oh, yeah. We talked about the broken growth story. And then also, please put aside your Elon hate and animosity for the good of the world and your reputation.
For the good of the world and my reputation. That's a gaslighting comment if I've ever seen one. I don't hate Elon, first of all. Even animosity. I don't have any animosity towards him. I just criticize some of his moves, like firing the entire team that built the best charging network in the world by far. Is that hate saying that? I don't think so. Yes, I am French-Canadian, Robert. Thank you for noticing.
I don't have an accent, though. I don't know what you're talking about. I speak with perfect English, y'all. Are you knowing all there? All right. All right. All right. We're not going to go there. All right. Strange because dealers are full of unsold EVs. All right. We got some interesting comments this time around. All right. Let's talk about Elon. All right. Mike, the car geek, says, can you explain the Cadillac Lyric relatively strong sales? I did not notice huge incentives or advertising. Could Cadillac dealers be good at selling EVs?
That's not where my mind went. Not impossible, Mike. But once an EV sells well, my first thought, it's not generally like the dealers are probably the one doing it. Not impossible, though. But what I'm hearing on my side, and to be honest, I've never driven the Lyric. I don't know who on our staff tested it. It's been a while. Have you ever driven it? No.
You did the test? I'm the one who tested it, yeah. Yeah. I drove it out in Utah. So you're going to be best to answer that. But talking to people that have tested it, everyone says it's a great car. It's actually a pretty good car. I love it. It was a great car. It doesn't have a frunk, which is kind of dumb. But overall, really good. They had to rush some stuff. So the heads-up display was very basic.
some stuff like that, but that's all going to be fixed. And it's, you know, the size is perfect. It's kind of like a, you know, SUV with a big, big storage in the back. So I think it'll do well. And of course it's, you know, Cadillac-y, so it's got lots of luxury stuff. So I like, all right, burn your driveway. I don't know what's going on. BYD versus Tesla is false competitive narrative. They barely compete. The real story is disruption of ICE by both BYD and Tesla.
I mean, they do compete in China.
Specifically, for sure. They have vehicles in the same segment, so that's definitely false to say they don't compete at all. I do agree with you that the bigger story is the disruption of taking away EV sales. I've heard now that the EV market has matured, there's people that are already convinced about EV that do decide, "I want this one rather than this one." You're not necessarily always taking sales away from ICE sales.
So I think, and I don't think there's anything wrong about like BYD and Tesla competing to be the king of EV volumes. I think that's good for the market. I don't think that narrative is bad for anyone. All right. Kia is coming with the Tasman and there will be an EV version. What do we know about that? Oh, is that Tasman? I don't even know what that is. Yeah. Tasman pickup. Sorry, I clicked on it. I was trying to copy the name. It's a pickup vehicle.
I guess. Yeah. We need to look at that. Hmm. Yeah. I would love to. Yeah. But I guess there's going to be an EV version. But, you know, Kia does that quite a bit with the two versions. It's a midsize Forza in there. Hmm. I don't see much about the, uh, uh, an etched version, but sure. Normal looking pickups are more acceptable for work. Cybertruck draws bad attention. Hmm.
I think that's all going to calm down now that I know there's 11,000 of them out there. So the excitement around it is already dying down a lot. You see it happening, but it's the actual usefulness of like, you know, you have to have like racking system. There's a good thing on the cyber chart that works well, but yeah,
the off the shelf accessories and all that, that you cannot use with a cyber truck. It is, it is a bummer for a lot of actual work people. Like a lot of, a lot of the work person, like they just, they transfer their accessories to new pickup trucks when they get one, two for work and that. And it's a lot of that you cannot do like with the racking system and things like that. You cannot do on the cyber truck. So it is, they should shut themselves in the foot with that a bit. All right, let's move on. Are you going to buy the model three performance, the new one?
It's hard to justify for me right now. I still I love my my Model 3 so much. Like I went actually this week and drove my Model S for a while. My old Model S, which is still a good car, even though if it's 12 years old at this point. You know what I didn't remember? I like I opened the front. I haven't used the front of that car.
For years, I forgot just how huge it is. The Model S, the original Model S, and it's a giant frunk. We posted it on Electric's Instagram. It is huge. It's massive. But I do still love my Model 3 performance. When I went from my Model S to my Model 3, I'm like, man, this improves so much over that time, over the six years between those two cars. I do like the new Model 3 performance a lot, though. I think it's an awesome car. I just...
I don't know. I drove the F-150 Lightning this week, too. I kind of want to pick up next. And I saw the Silverado EV at my friend Sylvain. And that's an interesting truck to have. So I don't know what I'm going to buy yet. I'm still undecided. That's interesting. I'm surprised GM hasn't reached out to you because I think they would be excited if you were interested in buying the Silverado. Yeah. I mean, I tried to test drive the Silverado or the...
Yeah, Armour last week, and you couldn't get one for me in Quebec. All right. Seth, did you get to preview the 2025 Taikan? I actually would like to do that in Los Angeles in August, so I'm trying to get that set up. But if it's available before then, sure. We'll see. All right. I paid $99 a few weeks after my free trial, expecting a new FSD release to try during that month. Have you tried?
Got a recent new release. Are they releasing slower than usual? I haven't got one recently. Have you? Yeah, I haven't either. The 0.2, I'm so confused now on the actual numbers. It was, so point, yeah, the V12.4.2,
kind of like didn't make it to the wider release uh and now they're already switching to that three so it looks like they are finding a lot of issues and it's preventing them like they don't they don't find they cannot find a more stable version to wide release so they keep they do release to some customers like the usual early beta testers even though it's not in beta anymore supposedly
And then it goes back to internal testing and never gets wider release. So, yeah, it looks like Tesla is having some issues right now with the latest V12 updates. You haven't gotten anything yet, too? No, I haven't driven my Tesla in a while. Has Maserati quietly become the legacy company with the highest proportion of EV versus gas? I think Scooter said they have three EV models now. They do have quite a few models. I don't know the numbers if they...
if that's going to really knock out their ICE sales yet. It is important. Maserati's part of Stellantis, is that right? Yeah. Yeah. They did came out a little bit out of nowhere recently with a lot of them. Stellantis has a reputation for being a lagger when it comes to the G vehicles and they haven't released anything for a long time. And at least now with Jeep,
The Maserati, they both came out swinging in the EV space in the last few months. So yeah, maybe they are someone to keep an eye on. Like I've never taken them seriously until now. And I think maybe now they deserve like a closer look. We'll start looking. But that scooter has done a lot of reviews of their vehicles lately and it seems to enjoy them.
All right. I look younger without a beard. That's true. All right. Tesla offered free trial too soon. They should have waited for a more convincing experience. I thought they offered it at a pretty good time because that version that they offered the free trial on was pretty solid. It's pretty solid, but still, for most people, they don't see a lot of value in it. That's the thing. You need to show it when there's a lot of value. Some people see it in value, but
If you come from maybe the regular autopilot and now you have like lane change on the highway and things like that, there's some good value. But if you have like, if you already had enhanced autopilot or if you, even if you had just a regular autopilot and not the lane change,
and you're a fan of autopilot on the highway, and then you start using FSD on the city street with the free trial, you feel like a better tester. You feel like you don't see a lot of value for yourself at $100 a month. Yeah. I'm going to actually drive to the Solar Challenge from New York to Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Kentucky. So
that'll be a good opportunity to try. I mean, it's on the highway, so it's not hard, but it'll be a good opportunity to try the latest version of everything. Well, even then, on the highway, I've seen like a regression almost in the last update. So it'd be good for you to test it out too because I haven't been impressed in the last update. All right. Last question or comment. All these non-Tesla EVs are being sold at a loss. No one is making money and reducing EV program. How do you think these companies will survive except the Chinese OEMs?
I don't know that Hyundai, Kia are losing money. I think there's a few companies out there besides Tesla profiting. Yeah, I mean, it's all a volume thing too. All these low volume vehicle programs, it's hard to make money off of them. So they need to ramp up. And I think that's what they're trying to do.
With varied, very varied level of success. Like GM was always the one that, you know, thought that their approach made the most sense, but
Since the Bolt EV, the volume has completely filled up. Carl says BMW claim profitable EVs too. That's right. And, you know, BMW is also ramping up significantly in Europe. They're starting to get some decent volume. Now they haven't really penetrated much in the North American market that much just yet. Though I've seen INEX. What's the production version of it now?
ix i actually yeah so i saw an ix in the little saint florida country village yesterday so but um but yeah i think i think once a lot of them they're talking and i know they've been saying that for a while so it's not always super convincing but the next generation ones are going to be the the higher volume one and therefore the profitable one and there's some credibility to that from the standpoint of
A lot of these automakers, it's the first time that they invested a lot in a more higher volume vehicle program. Let's take Ford, for example, with the Mustang Mach-E and the F-150 Lightning. It was their first time building a jeep vehicle from the ground up to all electric. Now they learn a lot from that and they can launch new versions of them
for cheaper or at least cheaper to their costs and achieving higher volume. And that's when they achieve profitability. So I think we're going to see from legacy automakers, a lot of their next generation EVs being the profitable one. And then once they have the profitable one with the volume, that's when also the higher volumes comes because no one wants to make high volume of something you're losing money off. Right. That makes sense. All right. I think that's it for the questions.
All right. Thanks, Eliane, for listening to the Electric Podcast this week. If you do enjoy the show, we'd appreciate it if you can give us a thumbs up, a like, whatever it is on the app you're watching. It takes a second to do. It's free and it helps the show more than you think. It helps push the algorithm out there. And if you're listening right now on your podcast app, whether it's Spotify, Apple Podcasts or whatever, if you can give us a five-star review, that also helps the show a ton. It takes a second to do. We appreciate when you do it. And that's going to be it for us this week. I hope to see you next week. Have a good one.
Bye-bye.