Tesla Cybertruck launch?, Tesla delivery expectations, Kia EV9 price $$$, and more
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And we are live, ladies and gentlemen, for a new episode of The Electric Podcast. I am Fred Lemberg, your host, and as usual, I'm joined by Seth Winchell. How are you doing this week, Seth? I'm good.

All right. This week's episode of The Electric Podcast is brought to you by Thess Camp, a manufacturer of coolers and mattresses for your Model Y. We're going to have a little bit more to say about them later on the show, but you have a link in the show notes and the articles that comes with the episode if you want to check them out. All right, let's jump in. We have plenty to talk about this week, and we're going to start out with...

some data coming out of S&P Global about the first half of the years in terms of EV sales in the US. So this is always a little bit interesting because as we've been saying for a while, Tesla basically is the US market in terms of volumes. It has changed a little bit over the years. For the longest time, it had like 80 plus percent of the market. It has gone down to in the 60% range now, but it's still the majority of the EV market.

And since Tesla doesn't break down its sales per region, we don't actually have the exact number.

But S&P Global produced an estimate that should be fairly accurate. I looked it up and it looks like it makes sense. And here's the thing. So it produced these two charts that visualize just how much of a lead Tesla still has on the market. Because what you're looking at right now is the first six months of the year, six months of 2023, over a decade into this year.

uh ev revolution this this like renaissance of electric vehicles obviously electric vehicles had their moments several times in the history of the auto industry but there's this latest one where it's the takeover let's call it uh we're 10 years into it right now and this is still the u.s market right now with tesla in the first half of the years the year even if it's off by 20 because again it's an estimate tesla is outselling the next 19 competitors put together isn't that crazy

I mean, it's basically every competitor, right? It's like everybody else. Yeah. That could save you 19 automakers in the US. Yeah. I mean, they own 60% of the market or more. So they make more. The rest of the market makes 40%. They make 60%. Yeah. It's just when you say 19, it sounds like a lot. A few things that were interesting to note, like Rivian is now top five.

That's cool. Which as a startup within just deliveries within only the last few years, it's already in the top five again for six months of the year. So that's kind of like,

like a kick in the nuts for the for the automakers really like the like a rivian like that can just come out of nowhere with a few billion dollars like it was very well funded let's admit it though rivian they did an excellent job in fundraising so it's they came out as a big player pretty quickly but still it's not it's not a hundred year old ford it's not a however whole like chevy is and and all those

or a powerhouse of the Japanese, like Toyota and the Koreans, that have been doing cars and doing them well for a long time. They just came and already grabbed the top five. And then obviously you still have Tesla at the top that is untouchable, literally, in terms of volumes. We have the same thing. If you can do the breakdown with the models, and it still looks like crazy with Tesla in green here. Obviously Model Y,

took over everything. Model 3 is still a very good performance in terms of volume, destroys everything else that doesn't have Tesla in its name. And, um,

And probably will start doing better next year with the Highland. Once the Highland is ramped up, it's the Model 3. Yeah, a lot of people are waiting for that one. Yeah. Obviously, I think the Model Y will still stay on top just because of the segment, the crossover segment. It's just so powerful. Even though I would say the Model Y has way more competition than the Model 3. Good point. I mean, how many sedans are there out there? Just a few. But the rest of those vehicles are...

All kind of SUV-ish. Mm-hmm.

You have a more S and X are a little bit further down the road there though. I think more X will do a lot better in the second half of the year in the U S with the new price point that it is just achieve. And that gives it the tax credit for the base model. That's, that's always a big game changer. People just don't want to leave that money on the table and now they're going to go for it. But yeah, it's just, it looks, it looks pretty bad for everybody else. Now looking at the bright side a little bit, we know that.

There is some more appealing, more mass market, and hopefully, though we've taught that before and hasn't been the case, higher volume EVs coming from these other manufacturers.

GM is one that we're pretty hyped about with the Equinox EV and the Blazer, maybe a little less so high volume, but in the Silverado. Again, Silverado is like, what kind of volume is it going to be available at and how quickly? I don't think that next year you see 100,000 Silverado electric, do you think?

Am I being too pessimistic? Yeah, no way. No way. We're on the same page on that. So it's similar to what happened with the Lightning. Lightning hasn't taken over and everything. It's been doing okay. Obviously, they had the recall and all that. A lot of these vehicle programs have some issues at first. Now, GM coming a little bit later with that. Maybe they're going to have a little bit smoother RAM. But there's no one that has delivered in a high volume, like in thoroughly high volume electric vehicle in the US other than Tesla. It's just...

That's just the truth. So until legacy automakers can prove they can do that, they can't. It's interesting that the Rivian R1S is the only Rivian on there. I don't see the R1T. It's the first six months of the year too, June. I think the R1S, you're right. The R1T I would think would have been there too because the R1P up earlier this year, the first half of the year, I even think the R1T would be a little bit more popular. The R1S was ramped up a little bit later.

Yeah, it's interesting. And obviously the Chevy Bolt's going away. So like the next biggest vehicles are the ID4 and the Mustang Mach-E. Both of those seem like they're doing okay, but like not flying off the shelves. Yeah, not super high volume either. And they were like the first like fully built EV ground up for these two automakers. Yeah.

I mean, a lot of it's at the dealership. Are they supplying the dealers with enough inventory? Are the dealers trained? I mean, it's going to be a slog a little bit for these guys. Yeah, there is an argument to be made that the dealership model is one of the main things holding them back. Obviously, if they're not making them, they're not making them. But the dealer model is also...

They are the middlemen between the customers and the automakers. And if both, if they are not like pushing for it or if they're not giving the automakers feedback, like, hey, people are asking for this, then you can slow everything down literally. All right. Sticking with Tesla and deliveries, we have some delivery expectation because on the next podcast, we're going to most likely be talking about Tesla's delivery numbers for Q3.

because they are expected we're the 29 today yeah early next week probably and the expectation are kind of all over the place with this quarter because there was the warning that production is going to be down because the factory shutdowns we have seen those factory shutdown relatively short one in

And in Texas, it's been a weirder one. Parts of the factories have been at least slowed down or shut down for about a month and at least a full week, a complete shutdown. So obviously, Texas is not the biggest producer of Tesla. It's actually the smallest producing factories for Tesla. But still, it's going to have an impact. And so just as a reminder, Tesla has been consistently delivering products

record breaking deliveries every quarter for the last two or three years, basically. And last quarter was another record with 479,000 vehicles produced, 466,000 delivered. So 466,000 is the record to beat. Now with what Elon warns during the last earning calls, most people think that Tesla is just not going to

beat that record. So we're expecting something below. But like I said, the estimates are still all over the place with Bird saying 493,000 deliveries. So a giant beat over last quarter. I think we can forget about that, but maybe not. Then at the lower hand, you have a Dutch bank saying 440,000 units.

And then you have RBC Capital, another big Wall Street firm, saying 462,000 units, which is actually the overall consensus of all the Wall Street together. It's right on that. So Wall Street is expecting only a slight decrease in deliveries in Q3 of about 4,000 units less than the last quarter, which, again, was a record. So it's still going to be a big record for Q3.

versus Q3 of last year, which was in itself a record. And then you have Troy Testlike on X. He's a pretty big following for his quarterly estimates, which are, I think, always within a 5% or 10% range, if I'm not mistaken, other than maybe a few outliers, quarters that didn't go well.

But yeah, he's at 442. So he's much lower range than everything else. And he's typically optimistic too. I don't know about that. He's always pretty close. I don't know if he's exactly optimistic. But I think for this one, I think he's probably closer to the truth. I think Wall Street is kind of setting up

setting up tesla for for uh like disappointing with uh with 462 000 deliveries especially with elon warning that oh it's might be a backwater normally when that happens it's like e uh you you should you should check your numbers again so yeah in the 442 000 thousand units range i'm uh i'm uh i think it makes more sense

All right. Going back to what's happening with the legacy automakers. So there's the UAW strike going on right now. It's been two weeks now that it's been ongoing. It's not a full strike. Like for some reason, the media kept warning us about how it's going to be a full strike. Everything's going to shut down. It didn't turn out to be the case. It's more of a gradual strike, though it did increase today. They did some more closures at Ford and at GM, not Chrysler for some reason.

And even though they said they kept saying all week that they made some progress with Ford. So I don't know what's happening in this case here. But yeah, some more plans on both sides. And what I thought was interesting this week, and it was a very interesting note that prompted this article that I wrote from Morgan Stanley about how Tesla looms large over the UAW strikes. Obviously, Tesla is not directly involved. It doesn't employ any UAW union workers.

But because of that, it's sort of like the example of like, what can you do without UAW workers? And first of all, let me preface this, but I'm not anti-union in any way. Like the concept of a union of like collective bargaining power makes sense to me. I think it's generally a good idea.

uh idea but like a lot of good ideas people run with it and then uh it's not true to its original nature at times and uaw is probably one of the worst example i think of a union like it has i mean you i don't have enough fingers to count major uh corruption scandal that happened at that union over the years

Now, it does have a new leadership, which actually most people say is the reason prompting this new massive wave of striking that's happening right now. But what's interesting is Morgan Stanley did a comparison between

This and the latest strike was a 2019 with GM, with the UAW. And at that time, Tesla was not a... Well, it was getting, starting as a somewhat of a big player, but it was not a profit machine that it is right now. So they didn't have that as an example. Now they have Tesla, for example, as the most valuable automaker in the world. The...

One with the highest gross margin in the world. And then they can compare that with the labor costs of the big three in Detroit versus Tesla. And Tesla has lower labor costs. However, to be fair, the labor cost is not a giant percentage of the cost of the vehicles that the big three are producing right now. It's about between 5% and 8%, depending on the automaker. So it's significant, but not massive. Tesla is apparently...

Around the same spot is just that you have to compare Tesla differently because Tesla is much more vertically integrated than those other automakers. So the fact that they have the same percentage makes Tesla still more efficient because Tesla produce more of their own vehicles than the big three, which over the years relied increasingly on suppliers and they outsource a lot of their parts.

But yeah, I thought it was interesting because obviously Elon couldn't stop himself of commenting on the situation because the UAW, what they're asking in...

In general, what is being reported a lot is a 40% pay raise and a four-day work week as well as improve overtime and retirement benefits. And obviously the four-day work week works with the overtime because if you put a four-day work week, then it's going to make more overtimes available because the automakers cannot switch rapidly to a four-day schedule without changing their complete business. So it's going to...

boost that pay raise on top with the overtime. That's kind of surprising they're asking for a four-day workweek, isn't it? When did a four-day workweek become something? In the US too. In Europe, I would be like, of course, they're asking for that. But in the US, it has been historically work, work, work a lot more, I feel like. Right. A four-day workweek seems kind of like... It's a big push. It's a big push. I'm assuming they stay at eight hours a day. Yeah.

But I think the idea is the overtime. They're going to secure more overtime because now anything past 32 hours is going to be overtime. Oh, okay. So they actually work 48 hours. Yeah, I think at first, at the very least, at first, unless they start to more efficiently implement it, at first they're going to have to have just a ton of overtime. So they're going to make bank decisions.

So Elon commented on that and said that these pay increase and for the work we would put all the automakers on a fast lane to bankruptcy.

which I'm not completely disputing that, to be honest. But the other thing that's important that people are not noting enough is that the electric vehicle transition is also a big part of the reason behind that strike. And that's they are asking for protection against factory closure because of electric vehicle transition. And the reason behind that is that

while we thought that the legacy automakers will quickly invest into converting their existing factories into electric vehicle producing factories and use the same workers or mostly for the most part

It's not has been the case. They have had a tendency lately of building separate factories. Ford is a big one, obviously. New factories to produce electric vehicles because electric vehicles are produced differently and also because they require less labor to be produced because they are simpler to build. And that is also scaring UAW. So the concept of itself of building an electric vehicle is somewhat threatening to the union.

which is counterproductive to the goal of transitioning the industry. It's a weird situation. There's no clear way out of this right now. Obviously, I don't think they're going to get the 40% pay, probably even going to have to give up the four-day work week also. But obviously, you come into one of those situations like asking more than you actually want to. It's part of a negotiation tactic. I don't think I'm surprising anyone here.

But what I thought was interesting with the Morgan Stanley note here is that Morgan Stanley actually believes that even if the UAW doesn't get anything, they don't see a path to the legacy automakers selling EVs in a high volume at a profit, which is wild. Now, one caveat to that is that Morgan Stanley has a...

a volume estimate that is much lower than the big threes management target for EVs, one third to one fourth lower than the...

No, no, one third to one fourth of the targets of management, so a lot lower. But it's kind of a safe bet for Morgan Stanley because in the past, that has been true with the EV goals of these legacy automakers. So it's kind of a wild guess that they're making.

uh but like you could read between the line of that uh adam jonas post on automakers this week on the ua strike and how tesla's plays into it and basically it sounds like tesla is

going to turn them into like niche automakers, like EV automakers. Like they're not going to be big John Garnett anymore if they survive it. Yeah, I mean, that's the way kind of things are pointing. Like Tesla is almost doubling year over year. They have no, there's no signs of stopping. And the union, strangely, like you're going after the companies that are suffering the most or, you know, that are shrinking and that are going to have a hard time keeping up.

like frankly if i was uh the uaw which you know i have feelings but you know pro and and and you know anti-union uh i would be like doubling down on you know getting tesla workers uh unionized like that that is where the money is at for the uaw but they tried before and it didn't work too they tried it didn't work uh they don't just you know when wouldn't

But maybe they should try now. When I say that, I say that from their perspective. I'm not necessarily thinking that it would be a good thing for Tesla. But I'm saying from their perspective, they should probably try now because the Tesla stock, like the big thing for Tesla

Tesla workers is that they all have access to stock options and you literally have some production associates that have been working at Tesla for a long time that probably became millionaires off of that. So that is great. However, that was early on. Now the big rise in Tesla stock is not there anymore. The stock has stabilized. It's still a big stock, but it's not...

There's no 1000% anymore. And that is how you get a lot of money out of stock options. So it's less attractive. They have diminished some of the contribution as of late because of the microeconomic situation. So maybe it would be easier right now to do a unionization push. I'm not saying that it would be good. I'm just saying that it might be easier.

But yeah, but to the defense of these, of the automakers, like you say that they are going after the ones that are having the toughest time. The problem with that is like not on paper. On paper, they're having record profits right now. So the unions want to go after the automakers right now because they say, hey, look at all the money you're making. You're making record profits. But if you look at where the profits come from, it's...

it's coming from their ICE business. It's coming from selling parts for their ICE business. When I say ICE, I mean internal combustion engine. So it's not the future of the industry where they're making profit. So if you have a good understanding that the future is electric and they are struggling badly right now to make money off electric vehicles, you see that, yeah, they are making a lot of money right now, but

That money is slowly and maybe even rapidly going away over the next decade, and then they're going to be screwed and they're going to have these union contracts with UAW that won't make sense with the economics at the time when they don't have that highly profitable business of selling parts for their big fleet of gasoline vehicles.

Yeah, it's kind of a really bad. The fact that they're even, you know, giving 20% raises, I kind of feel like the union should take the money and run and, you know, double down on Tesla. Yeah, they have offered 20%. Yeah, they've already offered 20% raises, not four day work weeks, but, you know.

Yeah, I mean, that might be if they want a chance of keeping their job long term. Because the thing, if Ford and GM are not there anymore, UAW doesn't exist either. And UAW's numbers have been dwindling for years too already. It used to have like 1.5 million members. Now it's like, I don't even know if they have 200 or 300,000. I'm not sure.

All right, moving on. The Tesla Samai traveled over 1,000 miles in a single day of work. This is part of the North American Council for Freight Efficiency. They are doing this study. It just concluded yesterday, over 18 days. We don't have the full result just yet, but we have the data. And for the second to last day, one of the three Tesla Samai that's part of the Pepsi fleet that is participating in that study

the number three, the Tesla Soma number three, traveled 1,076 miles in a single day, which is pretty awesome. I don't know why they say like total miles and then average miles per day, and it's the same because it's not. Like that truck has traveled anything from zero miles in, because the one day that it actually didn't travel, up to now, that was the record at over 1,000 miles.

You can even see the data of like the battery charge versus the speed. So it was mostly driving at highway speed at 60 miles per hour. But here you can see the charge too. So it stopped twice for a full charge and twice for like a half charge. And a lot of people say, we don't know if it was carrying a load on everything. We don't know exactly the load, but in the study, the agency said that

On average, they were over 70,000 pounds, which is less than 10,000, within 10,000 pounds of a full load. But they were carrying tens of thousands of pounds, basically. I thought it was interesting because I remember when I read that, I saw the update on the website that said that one of the Tesla Samaysa traveled over a thousand miles. I remembered just a few weeks ago, I read that Michael Loscheller, the Nikola Motors owner,

I don't even know if he's still the CEO. Like, Nicolas Motors has changed CEO so much in the last year that I don't even know if he's the current one. But he was earlier this month, and he said that the new hydrogen fuel cell truck of Nicolas traveled over 900 miles in a single day. And then he had the balls to say, I defy anyone to find another zero-emission vehicle truck anywhere that can run up to 900 miles in a day.

Well, Michael, I found one. It's a Tesla Semi. And actually with independent study, they were able to confirm over 1,000 miles, over 100 miles over your goal. So do I win anything from your... I didn't even know that Defy is like... That's your challenge? Is that what it means? Yeah. And I don't know. It's hard to take Nicholas serious about anything right now. Yeah.

Those 900 miles, were they downhill all the time? You have to ask. You really have to ask them. That's long downhill. Yeah. All right. This thing is actually happening, Seth. The Tesla drive-in dinner theater and supercharger location in Hollywood, it's happening.

So this project, if you are not familiar with it, has been in the works since 2018. Elon announced it and he announced it and everyone was like, all right, are you, is it one of your real project or is this just like something you see on Twitter? Uh, it was real. They, they tried to do it at first in Santa Monica, but it didn't work out for permitting reason and everything. They ended up just building a supercharger there. Then they moved it down the road, uh, on Santa Monica Boulevard, but in, but in Hollywood. So just a few miles away. And, uh,

The plan, I don't know what they're doing here exactly, if this is just like a one-off or if it's like a see how it goes and maybe this is something that we can replicate other places. But the goal is a big supercharger station. So the original plan said 29, but I was looking at the newer plans and it looks like it might be 32 stalls for the newer plan. And then you have this circular looking station.

Diner on two stories, but the upper story is mostly a terrace, like a patio, and you have a covered area. And it's a retro style diner with two giant movie screens. So they're going to show movie scenes or full movies, I'm not sure. And you can park, charge your car, go grab a burger or whatever in the diner. And by the time you're done to eat, you can leave. So...

I don't know. I'm not sure what the goal is here. It might be just a one-off or it might be Tesla testing a concept to literally get into the restaurant business. We know that Kimball Musk, Elon's brother, who also sits on the board of Tesla, is in the restaurant business. He has his own chain of restaurant whose name I'm – geez, I knew the name of that. Country, natural, something. Yeah.

It was a sharp name, like a weird sample. I forget it. But I think he sits also on the board of Chipotle, I think, or one of the big restaurant chain. So he's deep into the restaurant business. So maybe he could help Tesla launch this new division of literally a restaurant division.

Obviously, the idea behind it is creating anemones for the supercharger network. For the most part, Tesla tries to deploy the supercharger, especially the supercharger for longer distances, so like between cities, on roads that are highly traveled. They try to put it someplace where there's as much anemones as possible, so like a few restaurant options at a truck stop or something like that. It is enjoyable for people while they wait for their car to charge.

Now, it's not always the case. Sometimes it's just they don't have a great spot for it. So maybe this would be a solution where...

When we don't have enough enemies, but we have a great location, like maybe we do our own enemies and we do one of these. In Europe, they start straight over the things. They partner with a company that have like an automated lounge area where there's machine that you can like do your own pizza and things like that. We have one here actually at Roulet Electric in Trois-Rivières that has its own. Sorry. I've been to that one. It's got a bunch of stuff.

The one in Europe actually had a swimming pool for a little while during that heat wave. I think that might have been another one in Europe that had a swimming pool, but...

Yeah, the one you went to, though, has changed a lot since you went. It was a few years that you came. Now they have one of those automated pizza machines there, too. They make the pizza automatically with a robot. By the way, Fred, kind of late-breaking news, but it looks like StreamYard is now putting us in Twitter as a...

whatever uh a space a space i think it does kind of looks like a space with a video or no just the audio no no video okay but it says we're hosting a thing are there people in the space right now that are yeah it's like a screen that's interesting the video is there

But people, the space is also like you can like bring people in to have them talk to at the same time. So we would be able to take calls eventually, like take people, like talk to people through the space live on the podcast.

I guess. I'm not sure. That would be interesting. It doesn't look exactly like a space that I've seen. Anyway. Are you logged in right now as electric? No, I'm logged in as. Okay. So if you were logged in on electric, maybe you would be able to control the space. I don't know. Let me see. All right. Let me move on in the meantime. Okay.

So, like I said, the Tesla Gigafactory Texas was shut down for a while, but it reopened this week with employees coming back in. And as soon as the employees came back in, something else came out of the factory and this new Cybertruck. And we get some insider information from...

from Joe Pechmeyer, who flies drones there almost daily and often talks to employees. And he says he got some inside information that says that those are master candidates. So not just release candidates, they are master candidates. And he posted a video of them and they look

They look pretty refined. They look very good. It's definitely the best looking Cybertruck prototypes that we've seen to date. Looks very finished, very polished. There's this still massive windshield wiper, obviously. The seats are also covered in plastic. So it looks like it might be like something that's ready for delivery, basically.

There was two of them. There was this one and there was the other one at the supercharger station here. They look sharp. It looked like the trims, the finish on it are sharper. Obviously, it's a drone video, so we don't have like close-up shot. I saw this already saying when these things came out, they says the new Cybertruck comes out with perfect fit and finish. I'm like, okay, can you tell that from a drone shot that's inside? But they do look, to be fair, they do look more refined.

You know, it's kind of interesting. We've said this before. That dashboard is crazy. Yeah. I just wonder, like, you could probably fit a full, like, rooftop solar panel. You can see, like, the solar panels above it. You could see that that would almost fit on there. I wonder if that's going to be it. Like a full, like, 420-watt panel. Yeah. It is massive. Like, look, there's people in the truck in this picture here, and they –

This looks like you could fit a full human being like laying down there easy. Obviously not in thickness. The crush between the windshield and the dash. But it is weird looking. I don't know how weird it would be. Like we haven't been in a Cybertruck in a while, so we don't remember. But when you're sitting in it, if it looks as big, like obviously this angle from the sky makes it look giant. Yeah.

Yeah. I don't know. Well, it definitely looks more refined. And I guess the ceiling is going to be black or the roof is going to be black. I think that's also like the light lighting situation makes it looks like darker and certain angles. I don't know. And sticking with the Cybertruck, we have kind of a cool indication that the launch might be very imminent. Some Tesla employees on the forum, the Cybertruck forum posted new launch apparels, launch team apparel for the Cybertruck.

Tesla distributed them to employees apparently this week. If it starts hanging out, launch apparel for the Cybertruck this week, you might expect that the launch is within the next few weeks.

or at the very least we get a launch announcement in in the next few weeks and i would expect even the next few days i wouldn't be surprised if like this weekend or early next week tesla starts sending out invites for the for the launch event for the cyber truck especially since like already already sold uh well with tesla credit but sold the invites to the to the event uh i haven't yet to announce the actual date

That Cybertruck stitching is a little bit hard to read. Yeah, I mean, it was like one of the trademarks that they did originally when they unveiled it back in 2019. I remember it was the first one. For a while, we thought that's maybe how they're going to spell it, but it looks like they're sticking with it to a degree.

Yeah, the kitchen. So it's just called the Kitchen Kimball Mosque. Thanks, Ian and Doug, for letting us know. The Kitchen Restaurant. There's one in Boulder. That's the first one. But I think now it's in the south, too. I think they have like in Tennessee. There's one in Chicago, I believe, as well. Yeah, I think you're right. All right, we're going to have a few more items to discuss. But we can do a quick read about Test Camp.

I think he sent you a few products to check out. Yeah. So Test Camp sent us out a refrigerator. It's called the Tesla Fridge. It fits in a Model Y. It fits in the back seat between the two front seats right underneath the vents. If you scroll down, you can kind of see the Tesla Model Y Fridge there. Yep. You got to click on it. Oh, it's at the top too.

Anyway, it's nice. You put a six pack in there, a bunch of water bottles, just nice to have. You don't have to leave it on. And yeah, it doesn't take up too much power. I've driven around with it for a few days. Didn't really notice any power drain. It plugs into your lighter adapter. It kind of just wraps around. So yeah, nice little product there. And then of course, we've seen before Tesla,

campers like to have a camping option. So instead of, so we've covered a couple of these mattresses in the past. This one's a little bit nicer, I would say. It's basically two sides. So if you're, you have a companion, 325 bucks, you get like a nice cushy mattress, comes in a nice pack that fits in the front.

Or, you know, in the back underneath the seats is just kind of nice to have around. You can get stuck somewhere. Just, you know, start camping. Yeah. So two nice products. A company called Test Camp. Check them out. We have a link in the show notes. I think it's a small, like, $5 off coupon as well. Check it out. Yep. Thanks, Test Camp, for sponsoring this week's episode of The Electric Podcast.

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So any subject you want us to discuss, go ahead. And we're going to get to it in about 10 minutes. I'm going to go real quick and be right back. I'm going to let Seth talk about the EV9. I'll be right back. All right. Fred's going to pick up a iPad, I think. All right. So Kia announced their pricing on the EV9 electric SUV, which I think is going to be very popular. The EV9 is a kind of Rivian model. Sorry, Rivian R1S sized SUV.

uh big uh it kind of looks like it could go off-road but you know maybe not with the the base trim uh seven seater so it's got a third row and um it's kind of like a real suv not like a cuv that we've kind of seen model wide type stuff um so this is a bigger one um and the price at 54 900 uh according to kia is a wake-up call to the industry um

Yeah, I don't think Rivian's coming down to this price. I don't know that the Jeep Scout thing is going to be this inexpensive. The problem is these are built in Korea, so there's no tax credit. So a Rivian that, for instance, my R1S costs around $70,000, then after the tax credit, it's down to $60,000, and it's got way more range. This base price...

So EV9, the base price is, or sorry, the base range, I believe is like 220 something miles, 230 miles. So you're not getting a ton of range for your money there. Obviously, 220 miles is great for some people, but you're going to have to pay a little bit more if you want to get close to 300 miles of range.

Um, and again, that tax credit isn't probably going to come until, uh, Kia makes these in the U S which, uh, we think will be in a year or two. Uh, so that look forward to that and, and maybe some price cuts there, or at least some, uh, tax credits. Yeah. And that's the thing that's sad about it. Like even if the price is good, some people won't buy it just because they feel like they're leaving money on the table with the, without the, um,

Oh, yeah. And the EX90 is kind of another competitor there, although that's not built in the US either, the Volvo. Yeah. There's always the leasing if they lease it, but normally they don't launch the lease option at launch. Maybe they will in this case because of that. Or do we have the pricing for the 300 miles version? I don't know that they announced that yet. I feel like they announced it in other geos and we kind of extrapolated that it was going to be a little bit more. Yeah. 80,000.

That's the EV. No, no, no. Yeah. Yeah. It should be closer to probably like 65, 70, something like that. All right. Moving on. Nordvolt had a big announcement this week. If you're not familiar with Nordvolt, they are bigger in Europe. They have a few factories already in Sweden and one in Germany. I don't think the German one is in production just yet, but they are building it out. And they are one of the earliest player in the...

the new wave of battery startup that came on. And it was founded by two of the early executives behind Gigafactory Nevada. So they were working for Tesla and working closely with Panasonic to set up production of the battery cells for Tesla by Panasonic in Nevada. And they left Tesla, I don't remember exactly when, but

But quite early on, and they were like, hey, I think we could replicate that success of Gigafactory Nevada in other places by building other Gigafactories. And they started Nordvolt, and they did that in Sweden. But now they are coming to North America with an announcement that a new massive 60 gigawatt hour factory that's going to be on the south shore of Montreal between...

If you know the region between Saint-Basile-les-Grandes and McMasterville on the 116 highway there, it's actually exactly where I grew up. And if you're familiar with the place here, that's going to be the view now from the 116 highway with the Mont-Saint-Sylvan in the back. You're going to have this giant facility from Nordvolt that's going to employ over 3,000 people apparently.

It's going to be a $5 billion U.S. factory, $7 billion Canadian. Now, the craziest part of them all, I'm not even sure exactly how it's going to work. They are getting, it sounds almost like they're getting more money from the government than the thing's going to cost. The Quebec government announced $2.9 billion in incentive for the factory, and the federal government announced $4.4 billion. That's Canadian money, by the way. So...

It's pretty wild, but it's going to be a giant factor. We don't know exactly where the sales are going to go yet, but Nordvolt already has a giant list of clients from Volkswagen to BMW. I mean, a very deep client list, so I'm sure they're going to have a lot of clients.

of people lined up to buy those cells, especially for the North American market now because of those increasing every year requirements for the tax credit that the cells or at least components of the batteries in majority comes from North America or countries that have free trade agreements with the US. Speaking of factories, Lucid also unveiled its latest factory and it's at a place that is

completely new for an ev factory uh saudi arabia so if you uh didn't know lucid took a giant investment from uh the saudi uh uh what do you call the pif i think the the fund yeah the the i only knew it by its uh acronym pi p i f but it's the big fund that uh is backed by saudi arabia and uh let petrol money right there

And I think they own now a majority of the stocks, even though Lucid is still black. 60% or something. Yeah, I think PIF owns most of it. And as part of that investment, it came with, hey, you're going to build your next factory in Saudi Arabia. I didn't think it was going to come that fast, but they unveiled it this week. It's there. And the first phase is only about like 14 cars a day. So nothing crazy, but Lucid right now with the current vehicles that they produce with the air, it's not bad.

high volume vehicles anyway. But the whole factory at one point is expected to be able to produce 5,000 vehicles per year, which is somewhat significant, especially for the region. Now the country itself has ordered like 100,000 Lucid. So it would take a few years to produce them from there. We'll see. I think it's an interesting move. Obviously, like

I don't think it's a big surprise to anyone. So it's a risky horse in some way to attach your wagon to. And we talked about it, Seth and I, in Germany, and you had a point where you said that the Saudis are big on the Saudi market.

on like showering people with money, but when the investment doesn't work, they're quick to cut the hose too. But my counter-argument to that was like, at least with this factory, it kind of solidified the investment where...

Saudi Arabia has an issue of transitioning to other industry than petrol now as the world transition to renewable energy. They've been aware of that at least, and they are trying to make their best. And this is one of the first example of like, all right, let's try something new. Let's try to build electric vehicles there. Let's try to attract other companies to build electric vehicles there. And yeah,

And they need this project, the first one to work in order for that transition to work. And now with Lucid being invested in them, if it doesn't work, they're going to probably... I mean that by the fact that if you look at the Lucid's financials statesman lately, it looks like it's in the fast lane to bankruptcy. But...

with fascinating to bankruptcy without further investments that's what i mean um and now it's sort of guarantee them further investments like if they need to go back to the well they can i would think all right yeah we get into the questions do we have a few questions i think so all right starting with mr turkey neck uh what effect will the uaw strike have on the sales of non-unionized ev manufacturers i think we got to that after the question was asked but

I think the sales aren't super strong anyway. So maybe if the strike is slow, maybe they'll catch up. Hopefully it's not too big. But to be fair, there's more non-unionized EVs than Teslas. So it might help those two areas.

Yeah, basically it's just Chevy and Ford because Stellantis doesn't make many EVs at all. So only Chevy and Ford are really effective negatively. But also, I would assume that the question stems from the fact that the strike is going to stop the production of some of these union-made EVs. The truth is right now it doesn't have a huge impact.

They haven't targeted the plants that are producing EVs. Also, like Ford, most of their EVs right now, they come from Mexico. So that's already out of the UAW's touch. And I don't think... I think they sell more F-150s. No, F-150s, yeah, are less than Mach-Es, so...

Yeah, and I don't think they have strike at the plan that is making Lightning just yet. Unless they did today, because I know they announced a new factories from for today. I didn't check which vehicles they're producing from there. All right. What's your call on deliveries this quarter? Consensus is around 440, 450. The Wall Street consensus is 460, 462,000 to be precise.

I think lower than that. If Tesla can deliver like over 450,000 vehicles this quarter, I think that would be good. Now, it wouldn't be good for their stock, apparently, if the Wall Street expect 460, but I think it would be a good quarter within the current situation with factoring in the factory shutdown and all that. And what do you think the whisper number is? Like what is...

What is the market kind of expecting behind the scenes? Like I said, I think the 462,000 is too high. I think, I don't know what's happening with that. I would be surprised if that's really what they are expecting. I think, like I said, closer to 450 would make sense. All right. Does the Highland Model 3 have the large air filter with bioweapon defense mode? Did we ask about that? I feel like we asked.

Somebody in Germany about that one. Yeah, I think it has a bigger air filter. I don't know if it's big enough to have the HEPA certified. Yeah, the front was all realigned and the actual storage place looked like the same size. So I would say so. I would say it's likely.

It would make sense because Tesla has doubled down on that feature lately, especially with hair quality being a problem in many cities around the world. Not just cities, not with all these forest fires and whatnot. There's a lot of places that it's a lifesaver, really. Yeah.

good feature and more to ask the question is there any chance tesla plays to unionize in the near future i can imagine musk pushing back on this back hard on this it's not hard to imagine yeah it's not hard you don't have to imagine he's done it in the past yeah i mean he's been sued for it in the past before doing it illegally um yeah i mean

There is a push right now in New York for the autopilot, the data labelers. I haven't heard about that in a little bit. I don't know how this is going. For the most part, like I know that Tesla has this year. I've heard from sources that they are not giving any performance based bonuses this year for non-autopilot.

for salaried employees, so not for hourly workers. So that, I guess, helps a little bit on that front where at least the hourly workers, which are generally the ones being unionized, are still going to get their performance base, but not the higher ups, not the people that are paid by the year. So

So yeah, and Elon's approach always been like, yeah, but even though that's why actually he was sued for saying, for insinuating that if you do get unionized, you don't get stock option, which I don't remember if it was actually, I think that he was actually fine for that or the company was fine or whatever. Because that's a threat basically. Does it make sense? I don't know if it makes sense to like,

Is it a mostly exclusive where you're in the union or you're part owner of the factory of the company? You cannot be both? I don't know if that's clear. Oh, yeah. That's a good point. All right. Carl in San Diego, I would say there are signs of stopping. We're talking about the demand with Tesla. It's the first year they had to struggle to create demand. They're dependent on production and already overcapacity.

I mean, they had to lower prices a little bit. There's still quite a bit of margin to go through. They could probably lower prices again. If there is more demand issues, I think with the Model 3 coming, that'll be in pretty good shape. The demand actually had to be created for the Model S and X mostly. So I don't know. Model 3 and Y also got down in prices a lot. Yeah, I mean...

Obviously, I'm beating a dead horse here, but the macroeconomic situation is definitely the biggest contributor to this reduction in demand. Because when the price comes down,

they sell so it's not like it's not an issue with the products and the issue with ev demand the same same thing is happening with non-evs too like it's hard to sell a car right now because the monthly payments are so high like everyone i talk to nowadays like that that are thinking about buying cars or people that can afford to buy outright or the even i've heard people talking about

going into the retirement fund and like I prefer to get some of that money out and pay the car outright because I need a car than paying those crazy interest rate. So it's a harder discussion right now to buy a new car than it normally is when you can just grab a

a loan with a few percentage points of interest and doesn't kill you on your monthly payment. So the only solution to that is like Tesla has to slash prices so that those monthly payments or compensate the price cut, compensate for the interest rate, or it's easier for people to buy the car outright.

Yeah. Because when the price point is there, Tesla sells. That has been very clear. So I don't think there's a very big problem with demand right now.

Model 3 Island should help a little bit too just for like the new people. A lot of people just like to have the new toy from Tesla. Tesla is like at least a core membership of like 100,000 to 200,000 people that just always have the newest Tesla. Just like Apple with the iPhone. Did you get your iPad, by the way? Yeah, I just got it.

All right. Colin San Diego, has Elon ever seen how a drive-in theater works? Apparently, the architect didn't understand the draft assignment. Well, first of all, the picture that I showed is a render from an architectural modeler that's not affiliated with Tesla. However, he did the renders based on the original plan that were published.

Carl, are you some kind of like restaurant designer here? Are we really like criticizing the architectural plan for a diner? It looked fine to me. I mean, given the space constraints, I mean, clearly like it's not a drive-in movie theater. Like you're not going to have that kind of situation. But yeah, I guess. We talked about Kimball's thing called the kitchen restaurant group.

Hedgerow, American Bistro, and the Kitchen Bistro. Still too much focus on making DC fast charging entertaining, terrible business model, and just a weird thing for so-called sustainable transportation to focus on. In a way, I kind of understand that as DC fast charging is getting quicker and quicker. It's hard to even just run in, go to the bathroom, grab a bite to eat, grab some food, and get out, and your car's already charged. So, yeah, I don't know about the...

the dc fast charging entertaining you know the lounge model especially to be fair this one is like in town like it's it's not it's not a spot necessarily where uh having lived close to there it's not like all right you're going from like san diego to san francisco and like let's stop there uh on our way on our way up like you you need like it's it's quite of a detour off the highway to get there so i think this might be more maybe a situation for like

uh, EV owners that live in the city doesn't have like a little, there's a parking problem in Los Angeles where like, there's a lot of the people that have street parking now. Uh, and if you want to have a EV, you have to have a place to go charge like regularly. And that could be one like, uh, uh, you with the kind of range that cars are getting these days. Like if you're not driving that much, if you're just like driving to work or something, uh,

Your charge can last you a week. So maybe on Friday night, you come back to the Tesla diner and you charge your car for the week and have a burger and then go home and park your car for the week at home. Yeah, so the Tesla diner, you would spend, what, half hour, 45 minutes there? Yeah. Maybe you make these –

Not as fast too for that reason. Like you want the 250 kilowatt charger. You want them on the highways where you – Yeah, that makes sense. These are more like the urban 70 to 100. There's no one size fit all for charging. There's going to be different solutions. All right. Doug Grinberg's founded in 2004 by Hugo Matheson and Kimbo Moss. The Kitchen Restaurant Group is based in Boulder, Colorado. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Bear in mind, charging your car at the Hollywood Supercharger only secures your stall for the brief time that you're actually charging, as always. So you'd have to park elsewhere to hang out. Yeah, so that's kind of along the same lines about charging. Yeah.

This is their fifth vehicle launch. Why Cybertruck launch feels like less professional effort than a startup. Carl in San Diego. Yeah, he's being a downer today, Carl. Yeah, come on. We don't know yet. I do understand where he's coming from, though, because it is super weird that this car was unveiled in 2019. We're now four years later.

weeks away from the first deliveries and we still don't have specs and pricing so if you're familiar with how other people other manufacturer launches their car it is uh weird so i don't know about professional but um yeah i mean i think tesla is almost more like technology no even though i'm gonna destroy my own argument by saying that because they are certainly more professional but when apple launch a product normally it's like

They unveil the product, they launch it and like, ah, it's coming out next week. Like you're going to have it next week. I feel like Tesla is like looking more to that. Like you get the information when it's available right there. I think that's what they're trying to do. But at the same time, yeah, it is like you're not buying a $1,500 phone. You're buying probably a $70,000 truck. Is that your guess on base price? I think the first one that's going to be around that price, yeah. Yeah.

All right. Polestar is also now a thing in Nordic countries. I think they've been. Apologies. You already mentioned before. Yeah, I think we knew about that. Where you grew up, that's the battery factory. In Saint-Basile. Right next to the new factory. Maybe you get some insights. I guess, like, what's so exciting about a battery factory? Well, I'm going to go. They're going to have a meeting at the place where I used to play hockey all the time, like the local arena in Saint-Basile. They're going to have a meeting there next week. So I'm going to try to go.

And I learned about the, the plants with the factory and whatnot. Maybe shoot some goals while you're there. All right. Eric Williams, any idea when Highland model three starts productions deliveries in the USA? Nope. Uh, we haven't had the, um, roll of 20 says predictions are next year.

but we might know better. I think we've heard similar, but nothing solid. We haven't heard of a factory shutdown in Fremont or anything like that too. So I think you kind of need that to happen for that. And the Model 3 on the configurator in the US is still the old one. We know that Shanghai right now is in production, but Shanghai doesn't deliver it in the US for import reasons in

access to the tax credit and whatnot. So you might, I would think that next year too. Turkey next says gas has exceeded $8 a gallon in SoCal. I didn't know about that. This will convert thousands more regardless of Elon hatred. I see more and more Teslas and EVs every day.

Yeah. It's, it's weird that the dichotomy between like driving around California or even, you know, Westchester, New York, there's tons of EVs. And then I go to, you know, like Ohio and you, like, you don't, they're just not there. Um, you know, my mom's still like with her bolt, uh, people stop her on the road saying like, what do you know? Like, what's that like? It's like, it's like going back five years. Uh, it is, or 10 years, but you know, it's like that. It's that with everything, fashion, uh,

food, everything. Yeah, but no, but turkey neck as a good point because historically there has been a strong link between gas prices and interest in electric vehicles. Like every time there's been a spike in gas prices, you've seen a spike in EV demand. And a lot of people that didn't think they would want an EV started wanting an EV. Like it works very well. It's one of those

few things that, uh, are, have been pretty consistent in, in tracking EV demands that has been increases in gas prices. Yep. All right. Uh, Tesla really needs an LFP standard range model wise since the 4680 version is gone. Plus I'd rather have LFP a hundred percent charging for the win. Uh, I mean, we don't even know why the, uh, the Texas model wise have stopped coming out. Yeah. But, uh,

Yeah, it's one of those mysteries. But I agree that, I mean, for a long time, Tesla resisted doing a standard range Model Y. They did it briefly. And then Model Y takes this with the 4680 cells, sort of replaced that as not a standard range, but as like a mid-range version. I think there would be demand for cheaper, shorter range LFP models.

Obviously, it would be closer to 200 miles of range, but I think it would still be a viable vehicle for other people. All right. We have a correction. Ian Smith says Cybertruck is actually the sixth vehicle launch. Someone forgot the ROG Roadster. The Roadster, yeah. Now, the Roadster counts. The Roadster had an impact. It wasn't a...

Tesla design and build vehicle from the ground up, like it was kind of a Frankenstein vehicle, really. I kind of consider the Model S to be the first like real Tesla vehicle. But yeah, you should still count it because it did have major impact in the EV revolution. All right, last question and then we're going to go.

Any prediction about the Cybertruck float like a boat? Elon tweeted about that on September 29th, 2022. And they could be doing that right now in New York City. What's happening in New York City? It's floating. Everything's flooded. Oh, yeah. Oh, it has been an hurricane or? No, just climate change. It's sinking into the Hudson River. Yeah.

That's one of the things that I hate. There's some of these big Tesla X accounts that keep posting videos of Tesla vehicles driving into water. And you're like, this is incredible. A Tesla vehicle drives in water and everything. Everyone should do that. Read your Tesla warranty. You're not supposed to do that. And it looks good on video for a second.

But the video doesn't show after that, the Tesla service visit where they're like, "Hey, your motor is screwed up, your battery is screwed up or whatever." Sometimes it works out fine, sometimes it doesn't.

don't do that. Respect your warranty because Tesla will force it on you if something happens and you're going to have to pay big money to have things replaced. So keep that in mind. Now, the Cybertruck, I know Elon said that, but Elon says things and then Tesla writes things in their warranties that are not the same as Elon says sometimes. So I will wait until I see

On paper from Tesla that you can take your Cybertruck and use it to cross a river and they won't void the warranty, then I'll believe it. Before that, I'm going to stick with probably not a Cybertruck boat or whatever you want to call it.

All right. Well, that's going to be it for us this week. I appreciate every single one of you that listened to the show to the very end. You're a real electric fan, a real EV enthusiast. And we're going to see you same time, same place next week. Have a great weekend. Bye-bye.