Tesla Cybertruck getting close, Tesla Solar shift, Hummer EV Earthcruiser, and more
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I took a lot of the live button to show up for me, but we are live, everyone, for a new episode of The Electric Podcast. And look who's back from Japan, Seth Wintraub. How are you doing, Seth? I'm great.

All right. Spent two and a half weeks in Japan. Did you see any cool electric vehicles there? No, not enough, unfortunately. I saw a few and this whole category of vehicle called K-cars, K-E-I, that I love. Suzuki makes some really interesting stuff. I probably should write a story about it, but not a lot of EVs in Japan, not like compared to California or Europe or China.

hydrogen cars did you see a bunch of them i did see some hydrogen cars and didn't didn't uh didn't love that oh boy um i mean nissan nissan hasn't has never got into hydrogen though not it's a thing it's just it's just a toyota and um

Yeah, Toyota's super into it. I think Honda, maybe? I don't know. Yeah, no, no, that's right. No, Honda had some, yeah. So, yeah. There's a whole different world of cars, though, like Daihatsu, Suzuki. Like, we don't get Suzuki's over here anymore, but we used to have, like, the...

Suzuki Samurai. They used to. My brother used to have a Suzuki. Yeah, that car was pretty neat. A little Jeep like thing. They have this one called the Suzuki Hustler that we got to ride in one time. And it's it looks like a SUV, but you get inside and you're just like in the back. So it's kind of hilarious. Yeah.

All right. We have plenty to discuss today. We're going to start, as usual, with the Tesla stuff. Specifically, we're going to get into a Tesla Cybertruck update because there was a lot of things that came out this week. I mean, nothing too big, but kind of it's aligning into a better look at the start of deliveries today.

And then we're going to have a few non-Tesla stories that we're going to get into. And then we're going to take you guys' questions. But first off, I want to say thank you to IAA Mobility Show 2023, which is coming to Munich September 5th through the 10th. And we are a media sponsor for the show. So we're going to be there. You're going to see myself, Seth, and Micah also going to be there because there's not just electric vehicles. Well, I mean...

It's also electric vehicles, not just electric cars and trucks. There's also mobility stuff, so scooters, bikes. We've seen some cool stuff. But not last year. It's every two years, the show. So we're really excited to get there. You can go in the show notes right now to pick up some tickets. We're going to be there the 3rd through the 7th, I think. But the show runs from the 5th to the 10th. Are you getting there on the 3rd? I'm going to be there on the 4th. Oh, yeah, the 4th. Yeah, yeah, you're right. The 4th.

But the 4th is just a media day, I think, right? Yeah. And then the 5th. So it's not open to the public. So it's just going to be for us. 5th to 10th are the big days. Yeah, yeah. But we're going to be there the 5th. We're going to be there the 6th. Maybe the 7th. All right.

So there was, like I said, a lot of stuff about the Cybertruck came out this week. They have been cited all over. While you were gone, Seth, it was the Cybertruck citing mania. There was these batches that Tesla produced at the Gigafactory Texas and then shipped out all over the U.S. They were seen in the Midwest. They were seen in California, of course, in Texas, in Arkansas. They were seen all over the place.

And the speculation is that Tesla is sending them for a crash testing and validation with regulators primarily. So that has had us hyped up. And also we've seen it in Iceland. One truck was sent to Iceland, clearly for promotional purposes. They were filming something there. So if they're filming something with a production intent vehicle,

Things are lining up for the launch. Then Elon Musk chimed in too, teasing on X that he tested out the Cybertruck production candidate. He shared this picture that you're seeing now. We have the high-resolution picture on the electric. You can really zoom in on the details too if you want. So that's pretty cool. He didn't say anything other than it's the best product ever, you think, from Tesla? No.

This was general hype. And when he was asked, also when he posted the picture, he was asked to share pricing and specs, and he refused to do that. Says that they're going to do that when they're ready. That doesn't sound like good news. Yeah, I mean, it sounds like they just want to stick to the event, I think. Yeah. The delivery event. I see the big wiper up there.

Yeah, your crazy wiper is still pretty much there. But other than that, if you zoom in on all the different parts and everything, the fit and finish look pretty good on that model. Obviously, you would expect that with the vehicle that they are showing publicly here in this picture that Elon Musk decided to share. But that leads us to the next story, which was an email that leaked an email from Elon to Tesla employees.

And in that email, Elon emphasized the need for a high quality level for the Cybertruck due to its nature. So I'm quoting Elon here. Due to the nature of the Cybertruck, which is made of bright metal with mostly straight edges, any dimensional variation shows up like a sore tongue. I think that's a good point.

All parts of this vehicle, whether internal or from suppliers, need to be designed and built to the sub-10 micron accuracy. So he's pushing for a level of accuracy that is next level for Tesla. That means all part dimensions need to be the third decimal place in millimeters and tolerance needs to be specified in single-digit micron accuracy.

If Lego and soda cans, which are very low cost, can do this, so can we. Precision predates perfectionism. So, Elon, it's not the first time that he mentioned manufacturing progress from Legos. He likes that they're able to manufacture at low cost, high volume with insane precision. So that's what they're pushing for here for the Cybertruck, which is obviously a much more complex product than a Lego. I don't think I have to point that out to anyone.

But I think his point, though, the main point is correct. It would stick out like sore thumbs because of the straight edges and the stainless steel finish. That makes a lot of sense. However, I don't know how saying I achieved the sub-micron things helped, like the single-digit micron tolerance, the

I'm sure they were already aiming for that. So it's not like the email is like groundbreaking. Oh, Elon is such a genius to has this team to have extremely high accuracy, which is basically what he's doing here. Yeah. And we talked about how he previously sent out like in 2018 email saying we got to get precision and our model threes. And, and you know, at that time and for years afterwards, model three and model Y subsequent model Y precision was left something to be desired. So yeah,

Just because there's an email out doesn't mean it's going to magically fix it. But to be fair, it has improved over those years. The Model 3 was completely poorly reviewed over the fit and finish model.

the first few years like that and that's a lot when you start the first few years but obviously back then the aim was the production ramp and volume because literally it was life or death for tesla model y also had some issues at the beginning but a lot quicker to to fix them and to nowadays tesla is mostly well reviewed for its fit it finishes uh which i mean there's going to be debate around that i'm sure but for the most part i mean i think people know me to be

quite fair with Tesla. The Tesla Q people are going to say, no, that's not true. You're too kind to Tesla. And the Tesla super fans are going to say, no, I'm not fair. I'm against Tesla, even though I own share, even though I own the cars and everything. But anyway, the more reasonable people will say, I'm pretty unbiased on that front. And I think the sentiment has improved greatly over the fit and finishes. But the Cybertruck is a completely different product.

as Tesla admitted several times, Elon admitted several times too. And I think, like Elon said, the nature of its design does open the door to make any kind of default and any kind of defect very obvious. And what do you think about Douglas Weiss in the comments thing saying he must say this knowing it's going to be leaked, knowing where they are already? Yeah.

When you send an email to everybody at Tesla, like that is going directly to the news orgs. What do you think about this as a marketing tool email? I'm not that suspicious on that front, to be honest, because there is like...

Elon is the boogeyman at Tesla in many ways. So when he says something like that, things move. They're going to double, triple check and things like that for at least for a period of time. So there is, even though, like I said, I'm aware that just saying, hey, be accurate doesn't make you more accurate. There is still value in sending out an email like that to employees to just emphasize things. So I don't think it's,

purely a media thing a marketing push or some kind of strategic leak and again that i don't think there's that much value that i think it's it's it's more of like lighting a fire under the staff under the managerial uh staff to to to push things for accuracy but i might be wrong yeah and then also uh we we believe that uh tesla is gonna eventually or at some point have wraps for these things that'll kind of

mute the need for as significant precision. Do you think they're going to launch with wrap options? It would be smart almost to do it at launch, I think, because it's going to get a hold pretty quick. Obviously, third parties are going to do it, but I think there's value for Tesla to get involved.

And theoretically, it should be easier to wrap that thing because it's flat surfaces. Yeah, it is. It's three digits. But sorry, at the same time, I think that's not going to be a priority at Tesla. But the fact that we've seen them wrap vehicles already and even with those joke wraps like the F-151, I think that's a good sign that this might actually happen. I don't think it's going to be a priority, but I think it's not. I would say I'm like 30% chance that it does happen. Yeah.

Finally, it's still on the Cybertruck. The last thing that was surprising here is that Tesla had it this week, the Cybertruck delivery event invite to the referral awards. They didn't announce the actual event. They didn't announce a date or anything like that, but they did announce

add the reward for 30 000 points you can get an invite to with a plus one to the cyber truck delivery event and that's just the invite to get into the events not like travel hotels or anything like that it's just the ticket basically so that's basically a 2500 tickets because if you if you convert i mean you cannot convert the credit points perfectly but like if i convert them to the

The ones for like the wall connector, for example, it does add up about $2,500 for 30,000. So how many cars do you need to sell to get 30,000 credits? These days it's three because it's 10,000 per now. I have my 30,000 ready to go. Oh, can I be your plus one? Yeah, but I'm waiting for them to announce like an actual date. They say that they're going to open more of them soon.

closer to the event. So when are they going to announce the event, which makes more sense because at least we know where it's going to be. 99% sure that it's Giga Texas. Oh no, they wrote it there. Austin, Texas. We know for sure it's going to be there, but we don't know when. But did they say the fourth quarter? No, did they say the quarter? I don't think so. They previously said the third quarter, but

We don't know how that goes. Yeah. I mean, but everything I've seen this week, though, so all that happened around the Cybertruck that we just discussed, leads me to believe that at least we're in the right direction for it. I think it could be getting quite close. So we've seen at least two batches of nine Cybertrucks coming out of Gigafree Texas.

In the last few days, it looks like there's a few more, maybe not a whole nine, but a few more. So it looks like Tesla is right now testing production with a few batches. So that's a very good sign. Still a month before the currently somewhat announced timeline of the end of September.

In an interview with Reuters, now I'm trying to get that right because we lost a star set while you were gone. We lost a star on one of our reviews and the only bad thing that the person had to say for not saying a five star was my mispronunciation of Reuters. Oh, man. I didn't think that they deserve one star to be lost there, but.

I took the feedback and I'm going to try to improve. All right. So they did an interview with the NHTSA acting administrator, Ann Carlson.

And there's not much there, but she basically hinted that they're about to end their big autopilot investigation involving the emergency first responder vehicles that it looks like to be a bad one on

on paper at least there's been plenty of probes into uh tesla autopilot over the years for the most part there's not much that came out of it but this one it looks like there's a political wheel around the whole situation if you listen to what's the the guy the mayor that is in

Pete Buttigieg.

And obviously, this investigation has been going on for almost three years now. And it had up to 16 crashes. And there's a recent argument around it that there, I mean, there's this on a ground on ground where it's not necessarily, the autopilot doesn't say that it does something that it doesn't do. It's not like that. It's more like driver, there should, can Tesla do more?

to make sure that people are paying attention when they drive. And that's what Carlson indicated. She said, it's really important that drivers pay attention. It's really important that driver monitoring system take into account that humans overtrust technology. So with that indication, she kind of opened the door that NHTSA might force Tesla to improve on their monitoring system. Now,

Switching to my own opinion here, what I think is going to happen is what happened many times before with Tesla recalls, where they're going to announce a giant 800,000 car recall in the US, every car that has autopilot.

And by then, it's going to be all over the media and everything. And by the time that the news comes out, the fix was already being pushed. And I think the fix is already being pushed right now. And it is this camera-based monitoring system that Tesla has that has been first introduced to FSD beta, but now is making its way through

autopilot features a whole it was like opt-in features before i think tesla will make it like completely like you have to use this if you use autopilot now and not just fsd beta and that's the monitoring system that tracks driver's attention

Personally, for me, it works very well to the level that it gets annoying. At times, if you just don't pay attention long enough, if you look at your screen instead of the road for a few seconds, sometimes it will pop up. For me, it's working very well. You should be paying attention at all times.

I mean, it's normal that you're going to change the song for a second or something like that. But if you start looking at the screen for too long, if you pull out your phone, it'll also detect that. So I think that's good. I think that's, I mean, if you don't want that, don't use autopilot. Simple as that. You shouldn't be using these. People complain about that all the time. I don't want a camera looking at me and all that. And that's fine. Don't use autopilot.

So will the TikTokers and YouTubers get like a dummy to like sit in the driver's seat and look forward while they're sleeping in the back? To be fair, there's already ways to beat it. Like if you have like sunglasses that are somewhat taken off, like that you don't actually see the eyes clearly over it, the system won't tell you to like, hey,

take off your sunglasses or anything like that. So it stops giving you the alerts. So there's already plenty of ways to beat it. It's not a perfect system, but I mean, there's a limit of what you can require an automaker to make sure that someone is doing what they should be doing. So I think it's going to be something like that. Like they're going to announce like, hey, it's a recall because it's actually is a safety requirements that Tesla didn't have before. But by that time it's going to come out. It's already going to be done, I think.

That's something to keep an eye on. I think it's going to consume a big part of the news cycle for a little bit whenever it comes out. Yeah. Do you think it will be out like this week? Well, she said relatively soon, whatever that means. It was a weird article from Reuters. They talked to us a little bit and they said, oh, it's going to happen soon. Yeah.

Big news for Tesla Powerwall owners in Texas. Now, the Tesla Electric is expanding into actual virtual power plants that have been approved by the Public Utility Commission of Texas. They are in Houston and Dallas. So if you have a Powerwall in those regions, you can opt in now to the new Powerwall.

Aggregate Distributed Energy Resources pilot project, which is basically Powerwall's VPPs, the virtual power plant. And you can get compensated for specific events that you send electricity back into the grid through your Powerwalls and get compensated. So it complements Tesla Electric, but it's not a complete electricity retailer program. It's specifically for

the virtual power plant, the sending back electricity for specific events, which right now is happening a lot in Texas because I know Austin, they just break their concurrent days with over 100 Fahrenheit. I think they did a new record of like 46, I think, 45 or 46 days in a row over 100 Fahrenheit.

Crazy. So, of course, that puts a lot of pressure on the grid because I think everyone in Texas has air conditioning. Right. It's like a necessity. It's not a luxury there. So, yeah, they say that the public administration said that already 2.3 gigawatts of small energy storage capacity. Well, put together, it's 2.3 and 300 megawatt was added this year alone.

And that probably is more than just the Powerwall, but they specifically just mentioned Tesla and Powerwall in these two virtual power plants. So I think it's just Tesla that's approved right now, but I'm sure that others will join in as soon as they can. I've been saying for a while, I think those VPPs, the Tesla Electric is some of the most underappreciated products from Tesla. I think they're going to have a big...

And that leads me to... And also, Vermont Power also has... Green Mountain Power also has a big virtual power plant going. Yeah, they were early. They deployed Powerwalls specifically for that purpose for a while too. So they were early with that. I'm lagging a little bit. You can still hear me okay? Yep. Okay. So next story is...

A little exclusive that we had on Electrek this week about the shifting is solar strategy, laying off a bunch of workers and doubling down on the strategy to use certified installers rather than their own crews. They're still using a little bit their own crews right now, but from when I'm hearing they are letting go.

as much as half the workforce for the solar roof installation. And that will trickle down to other crews that install solar panels, which has been the lifeblood for Tesla as solar roof has been very hard to ramp up. So certified installer has been something that Tesla has used early on with the Powerwall. And then...

started deploying a little bit more with the solar roof and now they even shifted more recently or last year to the whole ecosystem especially with the launch of the tesla solar inverter so the goal here is like tesla wants to own the brain of your home energy system and they can do that through a solar inverter or they can do that through the power wall they can ideally do it through both so

And if they have that, then they can deploy things like their Tesla electric plan, VPPs and all that, which I think is ultimately what Tesla wants to be a player in the energy industry. They don't want to manage installation crews, which is notoriously some hard work to do internally.

Just on the hiring side, on the managerial side, on the logistics side, it's just a lot of work. And big companies, it's not really what they strive to do. It's not honing or operating a bunch of international crew. It's not the easiest thing to scale. They want things that scale. Yeah.

That's the Elon Musk has made it clear several times. Tesla is a manufacturing company. So they want to manufacture those powerwall, those solar inverters, those solar roof. They're not giving up on the solar roof issues. They're leaving that to other people to install it. And other people have proven to be pretty good at installing it. Um,

We've highlighted companies like Good Faith Energy in Texas. They've been doing some insanely beautiful installation. A few other companies in Florida, too, have been doing great. They've also been working a lot with new homes, new home builders. So Tesla doesn't have any expertise in that field. So instead, they will work with those companies to just

give them the solar roof and they install that. And then just after that, they just take care of the software experience through the power wall and solar inverters. So we reported on just a closing in the office that is responsible for energy appointment and design, solar system design in North Carolina. Another one in Maryland.

I think both facilities, it's over 50 people in each that are being let go, are going to be let go by the end of the year in the case of Maryland. And like I said, the solar roof crews are also being let go in masses. You know what's interesting? The car equivalent of installers is a dealership. And I wonder if Tesla is ever going to let go of the...

the tesla stores and let somebody else sell their cars and and service their cars yeah i i get your point but at the same time if elon is true with his word and when he says that like the best service is no service like with with a system with an installation of a solar roof you need to install it there's no other way around it technically tesla's goal would be like one day we just

We just sell the car and it never comes back into service. Obviously, that's impossible. But a very small number come back into service and that makes...

that makes Tesla more profitable while on the other side of things if you use the dealership model they are the dealership are basically incentivized for like they make more money if the car breakdowns more so like they feed off of each other like that so I think it makes sense for automakers to own the service side of things because they are incentivized to not

have the car break down unless they do want to make money on service. And theoretically, Tesla is, you know, with the autopilot or, you know, full self-driving, like maybe their long game is like, hey, the car comes out of the factory, drives itself to your house. And then when it needs repairs, it drives itself to a repair shop or something like that. As long as it's still drivable while you're there. Right, right.

All right, this I thought was interesting, and there was a lot of debate about this article when I wrote it on X. I think people are missing the point here, even though I made it clear in the article, but let's get into it. So Tesla is paying up to $20,000 a year to be on X, and even though the amount for Tesla sounds like nothing, as it's a $700 billion company, it's not clear what Tesla gets out of that $20,000.

And the problem with it is that it makes it look like there is mismanagement between Tesla and X. And that's a slippery slope to go down into that. You don't really want that. I mean, I'm not saying that's like SolarCity. Exactly. Exactly. Mismanagement between the two companies like that. But yeah.

It is a separate slope that you don't want to get involved in. And my point on that is like I started to look into the whole badge thing when you have, they call it verified organization. So the verified organization thing costs an organization $1,000 a month. And then it's $50 a month per affiliated account. So if you want to have an affiliate account, so the Tesla account is the main one.

And then you can have another account that gets the Tesla logo next to it and the gold verified badge next to it. That's all you get out of it. By the way, we should note that Electrek has a gold verified badge next to it. But for whatever reason, they're giving that to us for free. So we didn't pay for any of that.

Yeah, we didn't. But from my understanding, it's not related to what I was. I think it's because we were in Tesla Blue before. They're giving all the people who were in Tesla Blue before badges. Because Tesla Blue used to be like a verified news organization. You got me so confused, right? You mean Twitter Blue? Twitter Blue, yeah. Sorry. Twitter Blue, we were in. That's not what I heard, though, from my side. Oh, from Twitter? From Aaron. Aaron.

Oh, what do you say? I don't know if we want to get into it on the live, but that's not what I heard. Oh, we got the gold badge. Well, we're not paying for it. I know that. I heard that, but it's not like that. Anyway, getting back to Tesla here. Okay.

But we are paying for the accounts separately, though. We're not paying the main one, but we're paying the 50 for each one after that, the affiliated ones. I don't think so. That's what I was told, though. Because the way it works is...

thousand dollar amount for the main account each account affiliated with it after that pays under 50 and it looks like what's happening right now is that elon is using tesla as like the best example of how the he wants companies to use x and how he wants it is like as many affiliated account as possible because keep in mind that a normal now it's called x premium or twitter blue like i mentioned

That's $8 a month compared to like $50 to have accounts affiliated to your account that already pays $1,000 a month. So again, what you get out of it is this. You have the priority on X, so that's the same thing as premium. You won't get into the show more replies, basically. The badges I mentioned, hiring data, I don't know exactly what that does. It's probably...

trying to get back at LinkedIn, probably something like that. I know there's been some tension between Elon and what's the CEO of LinkedIn? He was all over that Ronan Farrow article. LinkedIn? Asting? Asting or I think it's Asting. I don't know. He's a people mafia guy. It used to be Reid Hoffman, but. Oh, yeah, you're right. I don't think it's. Oh, Asting is the Netflix guy, I think. I'm confused.

Anyway. Oh, Reed Hastings? Yeah. Okay, yeah. He used to be Netflix. Yeah, Netflix. I get those confused, all those big shot tech people. So I was trying to look into how many...

affiliated account Tesla has. And I found, it could be more, but I found 13 of them. So 14, including the Tesla account, but 13 affiliated to Tesla. So at $50 per month, that would be $1,650 per month or roughly $20,000 per year. And where do I, what do I think that there's some waste there is that if you start looking at some of those accounts, like the Tesla Optimist account, for example, they're,

If they are paying for it, they're paying $50 a month for it. And it has posted once in eight months since it launched.

A lot of these accounts, too, have been created after that program has been put in place, after Elon has taken over Twitter. So it's like it's a new strategy that Tesla is implementing on X right now. And it seems to be quite wasteful because some of the others account, like especially three executives have affiliated accounts to Tesla. Elon's account is not affiliated to Tesla, though, because he's doing it through an X affiliate.

But we have Franz is on it. Drew is on it. Tom Zhu is on it. And by the way, I have nothing against these guys. It's not these guys following that. I'm sure they get associated. Tesla puts it on there. But technically, Tesla is paying $50 per person

per each of these executives to be associated on X. And for the most part, all these guys do because people with X and Elon and all that, they don't like to post things about Tesla too much. They mainly just retweet Tesla's account. So there's not much point to have them affiliated if the main account is the one where the tweets come from anyway. So my main point was, can you imagine...

If Tesla was doing that on Instagram, like on Instagram, Tesla, on all other social media, which is mainly Instagram and YouTube, because Tesla is not on Facebook, at the request of Elon, they deleted their Facebook, even though it was a useful promotional tool for Tesla. They...

Imagine if on Instagram they created like 13 different accounts and they had to pay $50 per account, which by the way, Tesla could do that and not pay on Instagram to do it. They could literally be verified each of these separate accounts and not have to pay for it. This is very much an X model. So I think that if Tesla was doing that on Instagram, Elon would shut that down pretty quick. But on X, it's okay.

to have this mismanagement thing and waste of funds, really, even though I understand it's not that much fun for Tesla. But what where I'm concerned is that it opens the door of mismanagement between X and Tesla, which you don't want because that's a slippery slope. Yeah. And also, you know, the connection, obviously, 20,000 a month isn't a big deal. But

What could happen is like Tesla could start advertising with X, you know, on the order of, you know, millions and hundreds of millions of dollars a year. And is it really advertising or is Elon just moving some money from one company to the other? And that's like the first step towards that. It feels like.

And Elon seemed to be very conscious of that when the whole we'll dip our toes into advertising thing came out. He did note like, oh, advertising on X is kind of preaching to the choir. So I think he knows that it wouldn't be a great look for him to do that, especially after already dumping money.

tens of billions of dollars worth of Tesla stocks into Twitter. I know that is not exactly the same because it was his Tesla stock, but it still had an impact on the company and on the share of shareholders. So something to keep your eye on, I think. All right, let's talk a little bit about IAA. All right. So, yeah, we don't have really a prepared message, but I'll read some from the post I did this morning.

So this is the last call. Join us at the IAA Mobility Show in Munich, September 5th through 10th. Fred, myself, and Michael will be there, along with Natalie Portman, who's going to do an address there, and tons of auto industry CEOs, some bike industry folks. Let's see, Mercedes, BMW, Samsung, Qualcomm, Renault, BYD from...

China is going to be there. LG is going to be there with the batteries. Porsche, specialized recent Mueller from bikes, Rosa, um, Bosch is going to be there.

Pretty much all the big names. There's going to be a lot of product releases. We've heard Mercedes is going to show off a new concept car. Those are always fun to look at. For us, one of the most fun things to do is go on test rides. So they have bikes there. They have cars there. You sign up and you go on a test drive. If you're going to IFA in Berlin, like I'm also doing, it's just a short four hour train ride.

um, down to, uh, Munich, which is a great city. We're, we're talking about pre, uh, Oktoberfest. It's going to be a fun time. Um, lots of fun stuff to do. Which is in September, by the way, if you guys didn't know, I didn't know. End of September. So it kind of like reaches into October, but, uh, you can tell that the party's already starting there when, uh,

E-I-A or I-A-A is going on. So, yeah, if you have any, you know, desire to go to Munich or your nearby Munich, we certainly encourage you to come see the show. We'll be there. Hopefully, we can meet some of our readers. Yeah, it's a fun time. Yep. It is. They have a nice, at least the last time, two years ago, they had a very nice fleet of vehicles there. Yep.

Speaking of, that's the first time there that I tried the EQB from Mercedes-Benz, and I was not impressed by it. I was not a fan of the EQB. I thought it looked cheap for Mercedes. It is. I don't think I'm the only one, too, because in the U.S., they've sold through the year so far fewer than 3,500 EQB, while they sold over 5,000 EQS, too.

Much more expensive vehicles. Twice as much expensive. AQB is a very popular segment of midsize SUVs or compact SUVs, depending on how you look at it. And it was not very popular. But now they have a new 7C upgraded 2024 facelift version and...

Big improvement, at least on the exterior that I've seen so far. It looks a lot more like a Mercedes to me, a lot more luxurious. The fascia looks a lot less plasticky, a lot less cheap than it did with the previous version. We have new paint finishes. And then this one, the gray one, the silver gray one, I think looks very good. They have a new red one too. That's not bad.

The exterior, unfortunately, though, they didn't really upgrade the drivetrain or the battery, which was, in my opinion, kind of the weak point. You know, it definitely looks nicer inside and out, but the range is still going to be low 200s miles. Yeah, they still have a 70 kilowatt hour battery pack here. And you're talking about 288 horsepower output for the fastest one, which is, you know, like not not great.

Yeah, it's not the best specs out there, but you get the luxurious feel of a Mercedes-Benz with an electric powertrain that's going to be good for city driving. If you want to go longer distances, yeah, it's not the ideal vehicle. But the price is there too. It starts at $52,750.

Which is basically the average sales price of a new car these days in the US. And you get an all-electric Mercedes SUV. So it's not bad. I have to admit, 188 horsepower doesn't sound great, but it's not bad.

So I was pleasantly appreciated the update. It's coming normally in 2024 model year come at the end of 2023, but it's coming in the first half of 2024 in the US. I think they're going to focus a little bit allocations to... Yeah, and we need cheap, well, relatively inexpensive three-row SUVs. That's something that people, for whatever reason, need the third row.

you got that option there all right this this uh guy that grabbed a lot of the headline yesterday when it came out the gmc armor ev earth cruiser which is a a camper that get on top of the armor ev uh pickup uh truck this is a pickup right this guy has to be in the suv version and uh look it looks basically like uh

uh, the skyscraper of the camping world. It's pretty high. I mean, the truck is already like so wide too. Like, so the fact that it looks so high with the width of the Hummer EV, like, uh, I'd be very curious to see it in person. Is there a picture of it with someone next to it? That would be interesting. Not even, I would be curious to see what it looks like. Obviously when, when you're driving this, this top is, uh, is down, uh,

It's still higher than the normal version. It still looks like at least a feet higher, but it doesn't look as crazy as this, obviously. But this is pretty cool. So this gets its own 605-watt solar power system on top. Yeah, we see it here. You have a solar panel system on top. So that's what it looks like when it's on.

Like it still looks big when it's closed down. Then you get a 6-kWh 12-volt lithium battery system that's going to power your off-grid for the refrigerator, freezer, and some other electronics on board. You have an 80-inch headroom at the entry, 76 inches in the hallway. What's that? What's 76 inches?

Inches and feet? 12, let's see. That's about six feet. Yeah, okay. So a six-feet tall person can just stand in there. That's good for a camper that goes on top of a pickup truck. That's pretty damn good. 35-inch bed. You can see the inside here. You have a little kitchenette area, bed, freezer. You have even some options for a toilet. You have a flat-packed toilet that you can put in there.

Yeah, I mean, it's a full camper that gets on top of the Hummer EV. And the Hummer EV has a pretty good range too. So even though you're going to lose quite a bit with that, you still can do some long distance with your camping equipment here, which is pretty cool. I don't think they gave us pricing on this. No, and with the amount of Hummer EVs that GMC is putting out,

We're not going to hold our breath for a lot of these. We're not going to expect to see these on the road too often. Yeah, I mean, the economies of scale is not going to be there. It's not like they can all produce a thousand of them and make some economies of scale with it. So it's going to be expensive. Yeah, and as the top commenter noted, that 600-watt solar panel,

It's going to take 350 hours in noonday sun to charge up. Yeah, but it won't even charge the battery pack of the car. They have a separate battery for the camper. The six kilowatt-hour battery is for a camper, which is not bad. A six kilowatt-hour battery for a camper is pretty good. Yeah, that's solid. Yeah, I mean, this is probably, we're talking about a $300,000 vehicle, but if you've got that kind of money, this is going to be a fun time for you.

These things are quite new now for EVs, at least. I think we're going to see a very early market and the market is in fancy right now. I think it's going to be a big market in the future because people like the idea of the van life, the off-road, the camping with electric vehicles. If you're about freedom, and these things normally are about freedom, the fact that you're not a slave to the pump

is a whole new level of freedom. It had solar to it. That's another level of freedom. So I think those things are popular, are important to people because of the freedom that it gives you. And the electric powertrain, solar is just more freedom. So I think the van life, the camping people are going to embrace electric vehicles soon enough.

All right, Kia unveiled this thing here, the entry-level Ray-EV. It's $20,000. This is kind of what you were talking about earlier. Yeah, that's a K car. A K car. So it's for the Korean market right now at $27,000,000, but the equivalent of $20,000 US. And yeah, it's a fun little city car. Spec-wise, 200 kilometers of range. Okay, there you go. 32.2 kilowatt-hour LFP battery.

Good for 127 miles of range, 205 kilometers. They say it's up to 144 miles of range in the city because you're probably just mainly going to drive that in the city, not on the highway that much. But you still have a 64.3 kilowatt hour of electric motor here, which is basically half of the EQV that we were just complaining about. Less than half still.

Yeah, and you have a bunch of different options here for the configuration of the interior. You can have like a four-seater, a two-seater, or even just a one-seater if you want to use it more like a commercial vehicle to move things around. So these things...

They have a place, I think, on the market for Citi. You probably can talk a bit more about it. You've seen them in operation in Japan. These things, they're not taking off in North America, but we've seen them a little bit more in Europe and in Asia, obviously. Do you think the North American market will ever embrace this segment of the...

EV market? As I learned in Japan, it's not just consumers. In Japan, it's cheaper to register these things. There's parking specifically for this, so you get really close parking. You pay, obviously, less for fuel. You get a special license plate, so the license plates for the K cars are yellow and the regular license plates are white. There's all these little incentives that make it

make more sense. And I know in the U S they have that a bunch of weird laws that like make heavier vehicles actually incentivized, which is idiotic, but you know, our government's such a wreck that I can't imagine them getting involved in this. So if you want one of these, you're going to have to do it just for the love of having a small car. And you know, you're also going to be driving around in the same lanes as, you know, 17,000 ton Hummer EVs. So good luck.

Yeah, so what you're saying basically is that for these to become popular in North America, we would have to implement similar legislation as they have in those markets because that makes a difference. And I mean, those regulations, they make sense too because these registration costs and things like that are supposed to be used for the road management, the road maintenance and things like that. And the heavier vehicles are the ones that destroy the roads, not these tiny little things. So it would make sense to adopt that. But

If you're going to wait for legislators and regulators to make things happen, you're going to wait a long time. All right, let's get into the comments. If you guys have any questions for us, any subjects you want us to discuss, we still have a good 15 minutes for the show. So we're going to get into it. Sorry, let's go. Event, which is fun to see. Dan Oberst, a single-digit micron tolerance does sound expensive. Well, Lego does it.

And they're pretty cheap. I think the Lego thing is... Yeah, I think Elon probably has a very big interest in Lego because my understanding is when you touch a Lego out of the package, you're the first human to touch it. It's never been touched by a human. It goes through robots and stuff. You remember the first head of the Gigafactory Nevada too was the manufacturing executive at Lego.

Oh yeah, that's interesting. I had forgotten about that. Yeah, so razzle dazzle wraps would solve a lot of fit and finish problems. It's true. I don't know how much the wrap would impact the fit and finish because it's the sharp hedges. If you have panel gaps and things like that, you still see them with a wrap, no? Yeah, I think, well, you know how they have those wraps that are when a car isn't supposed to be out in the wild, they have a prototype out and they have all kinds of wavy lines and stuff.

It kind of felt like the wraps that we saw with Tesla, the white and black camouflage. That's not the type of wraps. The camouflage, the weird patterns, they screw with your eyes. You don't look at

add the shape as well as you would if it was like a clean like single color or or multi-coat paint or something like that but in terms of the fish finishes like at the end of the day a wrap is on the body panel anyway so if the body panel is not aligned the wrap won't be aligning also so i don't know how much of an impact that's gonna have to be honest all right uh brian weiss says they should put the semi-charging port haha um i'm trying to figure out when that was 411

What were we talking about at that point? Yeah, I'm confused. Oh, with the Cybertruck? Cybertruck, yeah. I think the Cybertruck is just going to have the regular NACs. Yeah, probably. Invite says Austin's, and that's news, and that's kind of what we recorded. I think we already expected that's going to be Gigafactory Texas since it's where it's being built. And that picture on the invite, was that like a picture from the... I think it was Investor Day, I think. Okay. Yeah.

Question, is there a good estimate of how many 4680 cells a Cybertruck requires versus a realistic estimate of cell production volume? No, we don't have the battery capacity of the Cybertruck yet or the battery capacities is going to be a few different models. Maybe not at first, but eventually. So no, unfortunately, we have no idea of that. But yeah.

Now, I'm vaguely remembering that I think that Drew said that Cybertruck won't be limited by 4680 cell production, which makes sense because there's so many other bottlenecks. And Tesla has been working for 4680 for a while too for the Model Y. So I don't think that that's going to be the biggest bottleneck. I'm sure there are going to be plenty of other things that are going to slow down production while they ramp up production.

Right. And they can also kind of shift the 4680s into and out of the Model Ys as well. Yeah. Which is also produced with 2170s. Right. Easier to handle. All right. Spikes43, how does Tesla get to have a virtual power plant in Texas when they don't allow net metering?

Yeah, I mean, that was part of the demonstration that Tesla did. They wanted to show the Public Utility Commission that they can do it all on their side. I mean, they don't allow net metering, but it's a completely open market. So I guess they can...

you are your own virtual your own power plant and you can sell electricity on the market if you have a virtual power plant so uh it's it's not net metering anymore because it's it's like every time it's like a deal with the the grid so i guess it's sort of net metering but it's separate separate yeah without without clear rules like it's just like a free fall basically yeah yeah

All right. Nico D says six kilowatts for an E-van is just enough for one person. I mean, I guess it depends on how much electricity you use. Yeah, I'm sure it's good enough for two person. Jesse C Strand. I've never heard you mention the Lotus Electra before. Just wondering if you both have your thoughts on it. I mean, Lotus was bought by a Chinese company recently. Not recently, but it sounds like

You know, it's going to be a fun car. I think we covered it. I think Scooter wrote something about it. Yeah, Scooter has covered it recently. We've talked about it. It's just, I mean, it's not on top of our list. Like, it's just... Yeah, they're not going to make a ton of them. It's kind of a... All right. I saw this week that the base price of the Model 3 Highland is going to be $27,000. Did you see that? I didn't see that. Yeah, I think that might be... Is this the low price contract? Yeah, I think that might be a rumor. I doubt it's going to be... I would have seen that if it was anything...

Serious. Notable. Yeah. All right. We have kind of a weird request here. My kids love it when Fred talks about MagicDuck. They think he's saying MagicDuck. Could you say hi to Rowan and Charlotte? Hello, Rowan. Hello, Charlotte. I cannot hear the difference in my head within MagicDuck. Say that again. MagicDuck? MagicDuck and MagicDuck.

Magic duck, magic duck. Did I get it right? I think so. I can barely hear the difference. It's my first language is French and French.

I can say Canal Magic if you want. That's the name in French. Magic Canard. Yeah. All right. Well, I appreciate everyone that was listening this week to this week's episode of Electric Podcast. I hope you had fun as much as we did. We're going to be there same time next week. And if you did enjoy the show, please give us a like, a subscribe, and hit that notification button. And we're going to see you same place, same time in seven days.