Tesla Cybertruck news, Rivian and Lucid earnings, and more
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We are live for a new episode of The Electric Podcast. I am Fred Lambert, your host. And as usual, I'm joined by Seth Wintraub, coming to us live from Paris again this week. How are you doing, Seth? I'm good. All right. I hope you are, because we have plenty to talk about this week. We have a couple of Cybertruck news. Then we're going to jump into the supercharging peak charge rate going up.

And Rivian and Lucid Earnings, BYD, Dodge, Charger, Daytona, EV Pricing being available, and a little bit more. So stay tuned for that. And at the end of the discussion around these pieces of news,

We are going to take your guys' comments. So if we are live and we are taking questions, so if you guys have questions for us about any of the topics that we're discussing today or any other topics in the EV world you want us to get into, you can put it in the comment section right now and we'll get to it in about 30, 40 minutes or so. All right. So just yesterday, I was posting about the fact that the Tesla is working through its giant backlog of reservations for the Cybertruck pretty fast.

Supposedly, Tesla had over a million reservations for the Cybertruck, but we always noted, just a little caveat, that it's not the biggest show of interest in the vehicle because for the first time, the Cybertruck went to Sunfield in 2019. They requested only a $100 deposit for a reservation, which prior to that, it was $1,000.

Between $500 and $40,000, depending on the vehicle program, like the Roadster, for example, on the RN. Model 3, Model Y was even more than that, even though the Cybertruck is a $60,000 to $130,000 truck. I was just $100. So we never thought it was...

There was not a million-dollar demand for the Cybertruck. I'll just put it like that. But still, you know, giant backlog that would take a while for Tesla to work through. And even though we estimate that Tesla only delivered between 15,000 and 20,000 Cybertrucks so far, we saw that the delivery delay between placing a new reservation, not an order, a reservation, and getting the truck was pretty fast. A bunch of people on social media reported that

Even their second Cybertruck reservation that they put after the first one, after getting the first truck, was getting approved for order. We had someone that reached out that put a new reservation just two weeks, well, last month, like a few weeks ago. And two weeks later, they received the request to configure the vehicle and they could get deliveries within days.

So we're like, oh, this is looking like Tesla might be at the end of, it might be exhausting its backlog of reservation orders for a Cybertruck in the U.S. because obviously the vehicle is only available in the U.S. Sure enough, today Tesla launched a vehicle in Canada and also opened up in the U.S. orders directly. So you don't have to have a reservation anymore. You can just go straight to the order page and order directly.

Again, just the dual motor and the Cyber Beast, not the single motor one just yet. In Canada, you still have to have a reservation. So Tesla is reaching out to reservation holders to configure the vehicle. I'm a Thursday reservation holder and I still haven't been reached out to, but I haven't seen anyone else from Quebec getting it too. So maybe it's only a few other markets in Canada and the whole of Canada.

Not that I would order one if they offer it to me because the prices are pretty crazy. The Cybertruck AWD Foundation Series starts at $138,000 and the Cyber Beast $166,000. That's before taxes and before incentives, but these are not subject to incentives because of the price.

And these are, you apply the luxury tax on this, which I think is like $8,000 or so for the Zoll motor. So you basically cannot get this car for less than like $150,000 in Canada right now, which is pretty crazy. Obviously, this is with the...

The foundation series that basically bundles all the options available in the Cybertruck for $20,000 on top of the price. So it's a little bit of a discount on these options because these options can go over $20,000, but still, it's not an easy sell. I would be surprised if Tesla can sell more than a few thousand Cybertrucks in Canada.

I'm very, very surprised because we have some other good options because Tesla is basically exchange rate.

the price in the US exchange rate price in Canada and you know that's not always advantages for buyers in Canada but other automakers like the F-150 Lightning has a range between $60,000 Canadian and $110,000 Canadian this is a Rado EV 75 to 118 literally like both of those the top end is cheaper than the base available Cybertruck right now so yeah not really an option for the vast majority of people

So it doesn't sound like Tesla is really trying to sell cyber trucks in Canada because it's a lot more expensive. And you said the luxury tax as well. Yeah. Maybe the base version is going to be a little bit more popular once they send the real drive of 60,000 USD. So it's going to be under 100,000 CAD. But still, it's still going to be super expensive. All right. This was very controversial last weekend. Yeah.

This came out. So Whistling Diesel, not familiar with him. He's a giant YouTuber, very popular in the car community on YouTube. Mostly known for his crazy car stunts and getting caught by the police on purpose, sending out a parachute behind his vehicle and things like that. He got a Cybertruck and he did a little review. Well, he called it a durability test, but it was kind of an absurd test.

torture test and at the same time it was a side-by-side comparison with the f-150 another lightning with a gas powered f-150 and yeah it was a bit controversial because the entire frame snapped off with the uh towage so that's the big headline obviously but it's controversial because it's a little bit more complicated than that if you've seen the video you you know but

There was a few things controversial about him because he's a big YouTuber to start with, so a lot of eyes on him. And then he starts off basically complaining about the fact that he spent all day charging the Cybertruck, which...

It was kind of a misleading situation because he couldn't actually start the charging of the Cybertruck. He didn't really explain why, but from what I gathered from the video, it seems like we don't know how he got the Cybertruck, by the way, but it looks like it wasn't on his Tesla account or it wasn't on a Tesla account that was linked to a credit card. So that kind of, you cannot charge at the supercharger without that. So that kind of screwed the situation and you had to contact service and all that to make it happen.

So not that big of a deal really, but it wasn't a good look for electric vehicles because of that, even though it has nothing to do with the car.

So when I said that the torture test, it was a torture test and not a regular zero validity test. I mean, the guy started off the video by dropping the, getting the Cybertruck and the F-150, to be fair, off of the flatbed. And instead of pulling out the RAM, they just drove off of it. Like just that ridiculous, stupid. Yeah.

Yeah. But I don't think that's what really broke the towage off. So they have this thing here. So I think you call that like cement, like culvert, culvert, culvert, something like that. Basically big cement pipe, like concrete pipe.

And they did that as a simulation of potholes, going through potholes. Again, makes no sense. But if you see it at the end here, you can see that as they drove off the Cybertruck of that thing, it hit pretty hard to concrete right at the tip of the back of the Cybertruck. And again, on the second concrete thing here, there's like two big hits like that. And obviously, this is not like a normal way to hit.

a vehicle like the 7,000 pounds and more from the, you know, the impact all on the tip of the frame, really bad. And then what happened is that after that, they, uh, they tried to do the same thing with the F-150, but the F-150 couldn't even get past the last, uh, last one. So they had to tow it from the back of it. And as they tow it from the back with the Cybertruck, uh,

You can see here the tow hitch pull off of the bumper. But more than that, you can see the actual frame here completely separated. So a lot of people are like, this is pretty bad. You cannot have your frame separated. And in the video, they also complained, they were like, what would have happened if you're just towing a 11,000-pound trailer on the highway, which is heavier than the F-150, you would just snap off the frame.

Obviously, it's not as simple as that because those two hits were not normal at all, probably weakened the frame a lot. And when they did attempted toe with the toe hitch, that's where it blew off. So obviously, I'm not a structural engineer. I don't know exactly exactly.

Like what happened here, but it looks like it was a significant impact that you cannot really underestimate. And I'm not willing to say that like any other pickup truck, the same thing would have happened with it. So, you know, I'll be controversial. Now, there are other parts of the video, though, where the Cybertruck looks pretty bad, like this one, for example, when he started pulling on these trims around the vehicle and he could literally just snap them off by hand.

ugh, that's kind of a bad look. I will give him that. He also slammed the doors and the doors get stuck because the trims can get stuck on the frame of the door. But the way he was slamming the doors, I've never seen anyone do that, but it's really just to be honest. This guy is pretty wild. The thing about pulling the sides off is that he's showing people how to vandalize a Cybertruck pretty easily. Yeah.

Yeah, I guess you could basically do that. We don't recommend doing that, obviously. Obviously, yeah. But it's not a great look. The Cybertruck is supposed to be like this super rugged vehicle that you don't care about someone like dinging with the opening the door on it or something like that. But, you know, you can pull off an entire trim, exterior trim just by hand pretty easily. Kind of crazy.

All right. This is really cool. So we learned that Tesla is testing the supercharging at over 300 kilowatts. We're not talking about a children's toy at 350. You know, this was a classic tweet that Elon responded to me back in 2016 where he was talking about Supercharger V3 back then.

And I asked him, like, what power output are we talking about? 350 kilowatts, which was what people were starting to come up with back then. And Elon responded, a mere 350. What are you referencing? What are you referring to? A children's toy? So pointing at Tesla, actually being way above 350 with a supercharger V3.

Unfortunately, when it actually came out a few years later, it was only at 250, limited to 250 kilowatts. So I don't know what he was talking about there. While plenty of other charging stations are now at 400 kilowatts. So this is, I mean, obviously we're a giant fan of the supercharger network here. We think it's by far the best charging network. The only thing where Tesla is falling behind with the supercharger network is actually the peak charge rate. This is not...

where Tesla Excel, the Supercharged network, it's more the extensiveness of the network, the location, the charging stall per location and the reliability of the network. That's what makes it great. It's not the top charger. I just tried out a few weeks ago, the Ken Power station at 400 kilowatt. A friend of mine had one installed at his charging station and an incredible charging station. It just works great.

So then you have the supercharger V4 that Tesla has been deploying for a while. And we learned that the supercharger V4 would be capable of 250 kilowatts. The only problem is that Tesla has been, we've seen the supercharger V4 stall being installed, but the stall is not where the power comes from. There's cabinets in the back. That's where Tesla has these chargers like all stacked up together. And that's where the power comes from.

And so far, we've seen almost entirely V4 station with still V3 cabinets. That's what I call those V3+. So V4 stall charger with a longer cable, which is a nice upgrade. Sometimes the credit card station on it to the credit card readers. But the biggest change is the cable. The capacity in the back remains the same.

But now we learned from Wes Morrill, who's a Cybertruck engineer, that Tesla is running a trial on a few different V3 plus stations. So the V3 cabinets with V4 charge posts and that they are trying to push that to over 220 V3.

um kilowatt is it trend yeah to over 320 kilowatts at those stations so they're seeing they are testing out the capability of these v3 plus supercharger station to charge at over 220 kilowatts and we've seen a super cyber truck charging at 323 kilowatts there so this is this is pretty cool there's no word they said it's just a trial on this but i would assume that uh

If it's successful, it would be pushed to the entirety of the V3 Plus station fleet out there. And it will be interesting to see if it's right now just a Cybertruck that's going to be able to take advantage of that charge rate. So if the latest Model Y, Model 3 would be capable of, because we've seen...

We've seen Tesla, you know, Tesla likes to share parts between all its products. And we've seen like the onboard charger on the Powerwall being bidirectional and capable of higher charging. And we've seen the batteries getting improved charging capacity too. So it would be interesting to see if the actual fast charging capacity of the other Tesla V-Kildren and Cybertruck are capable of taking over 300 kilowatts. We should have some answers on that soon.

Our last piece of Tesla news before we move on to Rivian and Lucid earnings. Tesla today has launched a new bundle for the full self-driving. So full self-driving, you know, used to be supposed to be appreciating asset for Tesla. Tesla, Elon said that Tesla would keep increasing the price as the system gets better. And that price got increased to one point at $15,000. And yet Tesla started to...

reverse course and cut pricing and earlier this year the price was cut down to eight thousand dollars almost half of the top price it was last year uh but even with that big price cut we uh

We don't think that Tesla is getting a very good take rate on this. I think Tesla is having issues selling those. And we've seen evidence of that with Tesla launching a program earlier this year where Elon said that all Tesla employees need to conduct an FSD test drive with each delivery.

And then there was the month-long trials for existing owners right after that. So Tesla is trying to push that hard and is having some issues. So now Tesla is putting a bundle together where you get the full self-driving for three years, free supercharging for three years, and premium connectivity for three years, all bundled together for $5,000. So $3,000 discount on the $8,000 price, but you only get it for three years, but you also get supercharging and premium connectivity for three years.

So if you don't want to do the math, I did it for you to see how this value adds up. So obviously we have the FSD subscription, so we can estimate the value of FSD over three years at $99 a month, $3,600 over three years.

Then premium connectivity, you have $100 a year bundle that you can get. So you add up to $3,900. So this means that the value of the three years of supercharging is basically $1,100. That's what you pay for, for free supercharging for three years. Now I'm going to give like a rough estimate of like how this adds up because

obviously this, you know, everyone has different pricing on the supercharger, different users of the supercharger. So just to give you an idea of like when this could be worth it for you, obviously you need to want the full self-driving and the premium connectivity. If you don't want that, obviously this is not going to be worth it unless you're like a crazy high user of supercharger. But if not, an average of 40 cents per kilowatt hour, so you would get $2,000

750 kilowatt hour for that $1,100. So that's about 27 full charge. By the way, this is just for Mullen SNX right now. So I assume Tesla is testing it out with that to see if it works fine and then move it to Mullen Y. So 27 full charge of Mullen SNX. So if you use the supercharger network more than about 30 times in three years, 10 times a year, you would probably get your money worth. Again, if you want the full self-driving package and premium connectivity.

So, yeah, maybe it's worth it. It's not for everyone. Most of the charging obviously happen at home. So, you know, depending on your use case, I probably use supercharger about 10 times a year or something like that. So unless I'm doing like some crazy road trips, it's, you know, it can make sense, I would say. Also depends on how long you want to keep your car, obviously, too, because then maybe it's different worth. Yeah, I guess it would make sense if you're doing like a three year lease. Yeah.

But then also, you have to take into account... So it depends also on your belief in the full self-driving system too because I guess what Elon has stated, he lied about that because Tesla ended up cutting prices. But when you go with the subscription-based service, he also says that the subscription service will go up in price as Tesla gets closer to full self-driving or actually delivers full self-driving. So when Tesla actually delivers full self-driving, it's not going to be $100 a month, the full self-driving package. It's going to be like...

$300 a month, $1,000 a month, whatever. That price will go up if you choose a subscription service. If you buy the bundle for three years and let's say that in two years Tesla delivers for self-driving, will you get a year of that in the bundle without having to pay the crazy price that's going to come with the subscription service or the new full package? Maybe something to think about. I don't know.

All right, moving on. We have some Rivian earnings I want to discuss real quick, but we're going to go pretty quick over them because we'll get into that. Lucid earnings, and then a few more pieces of news, and then we jump into your guys' comments. So if you guys have questions for us, you can put them in the comments section right now. I want to get to them in just a few minutes.

If you're a fan of the podcast, we do appreciate if you can give us a five-star rating. That helps a lot. If you can hit the like button, the subscribe button, those things help the show a ton and we appreciate when you do it. Thank you very much, guys.

All right, the Rivians are in anyway. I think we're going to go over them pretty fast. It's just because there was a big change to the R1 lineup during the quarter. We talked about it extensively. I went to Seattle and tested out the new generation that comes with giant improvement in cost for Rivian, both reinitiating supplier deals, cutting a ton of wire harnesses, wire mileage inside the vehicle, new computing platform that's

a lot more efficient, a lot of big changes. But those changes happen like midway through the quarter. There was a factory shutdown to make it happen and all that. So these cost improvement are not really reflected into this quarter.

because the only metric that we really care about with Rivian right now is the loss per vehicle. And when they reported their earning, it's at 32,705. Significant improvement from 38,000 the quarter before that, but not even the best ever because in Q3 2023, Rivian was down to 30,500 and 32,600 in Q2 2023. So right direction, but still some problems

improvement to be made. There was, you know, $1.15 billion in revenue, which met Wall Street expectation and the loss widened to $1.46 billion or $1.46 per share. But again, this is the metric that we really are tracking here. And if they are at $32,000 loss per vehicle, that's

And they know right now where they're at with these next-gen R1 improvements into Q3. And they reiterated their expectation, their guidance for Q4 for a slight positive gross margin in Q4. The fact they are reiterating that now, you know, with having some good insight into their current costs in Q3, I think this is pretty positive because

If they were already at 32,000 per loss without a big chunk of the improvement of the next gen R1, I think looking into Q3, we could see something closer to like 10,000, 15,000 loss per vehicle. And then into Q4, higher volume coming in. I think we can get pretty close to the guidance of a slight, again, slight positive gross margin. And once you're there, then it's...

It's a game changer, obviously, because now you're actually making money off of the vehicle you sell. This is not profits, by the way. You're not at profit. But as you widen that gap, as you increase those gross margins into the positive, then you increase your positive cash flow from the sale of the vehicles. And that can start to compensate for your operating cash flow, your operating expenses, capex and all that.

and obviously RIVIEN is still, you know, maybe investing in RNDs and CapEx as they move to build the dictionary, not the dictionary, the R2 program. All right. Then we also have Lucid. Yes, Seth. I was just going to say, I mean, the big picture on RIVIEN is that they're trying to get to breakeven and the curve of the graph of the losses per vehicle

it doesn't seem to be bending toward breakeven very quickly. So that's the concern. It's in the right direction, but it's, you know, just to wrap it all up. Yeah. But last year they had the jump from like 60,000 plus loss per vehicle to like 30,000. So they had, they done a quarter to quarter cut of over $30,000 per vehicle. So, you know, this, this is encouraging to me. Like, this is like, I know that,

The closer you get to it, the more difficult it gets because you already cut. You take care of the low-hanging fruits first. But I think it's definitely feasible at least. As for Lucid, Lucid is in a similar yet smaller scale, bigger loss but lower volumes. Bigger loss per vehicle but lower volumes than Rivian. They add a pretty big...

Well, they beat expectation on revenue, but they were under expectation on earning per share. So beat revenue at $200 million versus $191 million. And they are losing $0.29 per share versus $0.26 expected. But the good news is that they got another $1.5 billion from IR Third Investment Company, which is another Saudi affiliate. We know that Lucid is the Saudis, is their sugar daddy.

And they are keeping them alive. So that was our concern. And I remember we talked about that. We were like, all right, Saudis have a lot of money, but at some point they can get tired of just financing them all the time. Then you could cut the credit card. But they haven't done so yet. Another $1.5 billion would be a commitment. And Lucid sat last quarter at $4.28 billion in liquidity. So they still have some room to go. And

The story with Lucid has always been they need to get this. They need to get the gravity. They need to get to their SUV because right now, just the sedan and mainly the US market, it's hard to survive with just a sedan. So they need the SUV. I'm looking forward to it. But like I said, the Lucid, the gravity, there's something wrong with it. Design-wise, I don't know why.

I'm just not a fan. But, you know, they've been doing pretty good. And they've been doing a lot. The efficiency UI is Lucid is the great leader. And they've been, well, this is this projection here. I'm not sure about, but, you know, they are far ahead right now enough that it makes sense that it's going to be hard to catch up. I don't know if it's that linear of improvement going on.

I mean, I have to think that at some point, relatively soon, we're kind of going to reach the limit of efficiency for EVs. Not a limit, but like at a point where there's not going to be that much more room for improvement. You know, some battery technology improvements and all that. But those, you know, you hear about a new battery breakthrough every other week. But the impact on actual energy density, cost, all that, it's a lot more rarer to see.

All right, good news coming from China. Their new energy vehicle, which is what they call their EVs and plug-in hybrids, has for the first time outpaced the total volume of fossil fuel powered vehicles in the country. So what are the actual numbers here? I don't remember exactly. So China saw a total of 1.73 million passenger cars sold.

sold in july jeez just in july that's insane so well that's insane it's in the and it's a 3.1 percent decrease over uh last year and uh the percentage of again new energy vehicle evs and ph evs uh 50.7 percent so officially the majority of evs sold in china which is

Pretty wild. I mean, we're not talking about Norway, 95 plus percent number just yet, but we're also talking about China, which is a giant market, the biggest auto market in the world. And I would have liked to have the PHEV's EV breakdown in there, but I wouldn't be surprised if EVs are a big chunk of that because we look at BYD, for example, and we can...

talk about them next actually they uh they are pretty close nowadays between their evs and phv cells their bvs and phvs and they expected to ramp up their bvs a lot more especially with this car here that's been making a lot of um waves in china the seal ev a lot of marine uh animals that they like to use for the use for their naming skill naming schemes

They have also like a Sea Lion and things like that. The Dolphin. Yeah, the cheap one is a Dolphin, I think. Kind of mean to Dolphins to make their cheapest EVs. But yeah, so this still has been achieved for itself for a little bit in China, but it was only like the top version, the equivalent of the Foundation Series for the Cybertruck, for example. Honor, the Honor Series, it's called.

So it was a little bit more expensive because it was like an early version of the vehicle. This is the new interior too that they unveiled, by the way. That's for the cheaper version, which looks pretty good.

And yeah, now they announced the full pricing for all the different trims of it. And it's undercuts like the price for the Model 3 here in China. Basically, the most expensive version of the BYD seal is basically the same price of the cheapest version of the Model 3 in China. And it gets about the same mileage based on the CLTC mileage, which is...

than the EPA, but it starts at just $25,000, the equivalent of $25,000 for over 300 miles of range. I'm sure if it was like EPA, it would be closer to 250, but still, I don't know. A lot of people would be interested, I think, in the US and the $25,000 car at over 250 miles of range.

and then you get the 400 miles range version for just a thousand dollar more and three thirty thousand dollars if you want the the version that has the smart driving uh and another three thousand if you want the all-wheel drive with the smart driving or the intelligent driving i don't know if there's a difference between the smart and intelligent i would assume so here's another picture of the new interior you know it looks a little bit yeah it looks pretty good maybe a little bit cheaper than than tesla

But I mean, a lot of people don't like the Tesla Integra 2. They think it's too minimalist. I don't know. But yeah, BYD is a serious company. And it works with Tesla now. It's a Tesla supplier. All right. Lastly, before we jump into you guys' comment section, we have the Dodge Charger Daytona. So the first EV from Dodge.

we had the official pricing so we already you know there was an unveiling earlier this year we got all the specs and all that now we have the price so the dutch charger detona rt with standard zero connection stage one upgrade i'm not sure what that is we'll start at sixty thousand dollars uh this stage what's the stage one upgrade so it's uh 496 horsepower 0 to 16 4.7

Sport suspension. Okay. And then you have the Dodge Charger Daytona EV Scat Pack. Scat Pack. What name is that? With the direct... Sorry? That is a weird name. Yeah. The Direct Connection Stage 2. So this one starts at $73,000 and you get a little bit of a boost of 670 HP versus 496 HP.

They claim that it would be the world's quickest and most powerful muscle car. I guess, yeah. I guess if you stick with muscle car. And then you have the SRT-like performance version with 0-60 in 3.3 seconds. Would you consider the Mustang Mach-E a muscle car? Nah, because it's an SUV, you can't, I think. It's just so close, though. It's also weird to say that.

The Mustang Mach-E is not a muscle car. It's also weird to say the Mustang Mach-E is not a muscle car because Mach-E was always, or the Mach whatever, was always a muscle car. Yeah, that's right. You can get the tax credit when you do a lease rather than a purchase, and it's going to hit the dealership in end of 2024 for the two-door model and then the four-door model. Sorry, the four-door model is going to come next year.

That is going to be a weird looking vehicle, the four-door charger. Yeah. You should make a special General Lee version. I guess we're not doing that anymore. Sorry about that. All right, let's jump into the comment section. All right, we got a, probably not a big EV fan, Jeff, saying, when will vehicles like Tesla start paying their fair share of highway tax? Well, it turns out that electricity is also taxed at a pretty high rate. So, yeah.

they are already paying tax yeah and that would be the solution though if if it actually becomes a problem which in the us it's it's far from being a problem right now but in countries where they actually have a decent adoption rate for electric vehicles um the uh people are looking at that and saying now right now you have you haven't said the states looking at the registration

of vehicles, adding a tax there for EVs, which I don't think is the right approach because it's completely dependent. It's not dependent on how much you drive, but simply on registering a vehicle. So it doesn't work like the gas tax works. But yeah, obviously the solution is taxing electricity, which has already been done.

All right. PSA, the U.S. federal tax credit for used EVs is limited to one per three years, unlike the new EV credit. Stinks for middle-income folks wanting to go electric. I mean, you're buying a lot of cars, I guess. You know, one per three years doesn't seem insane. Yeah, it seemed pretty reasonable to me. But so, I don't know. I don't know how many used cars people are buying these days, but...

Could dual motor Cybertruck be at 70k start within 12 months? Doesn't seem to be going in that direction, but... Dual motor. So the dual motor without the financial series start at $80,000. So you wouldn't want to see Tesla cut it by 80 within 12 months. Not impossible because...

Historically, Tesla cuts prices when demand is not there for production to meet demand. Within 12 months, I do see Tesla being at $250,000.

capacity for the cyber truck per year and i don't see the demand being close to that just because you know not everyone likes it first of all specs not really where it was supposed to be based on the unveiling and certainly not the pricing so yeah i could see tesla within the next 12 months starting to cut prices on the cyber truck i would not be surprised

All right, Dan Overstay. Question, what is the peak miles per hour rate for the Cybertruck charging at current V3? My three gets over 990 miles per hour at the start of a charge for a minute at least. I mean, obviously, it's going to be below that based on efficiency. Exactly. Yeah.

Well, if you get the new 320 plus kilowatt charge rate, maybe it balances out to something close to that. But yeah, I mean, the Cybertruck's charging, like I wrote in my review, probably is not as much like the peak charge words at first, but

it goes down during the charge curve very fast. So past like 40, 50% state of charge, you start dropping like crazy. So that's more of the issues I've seen than the actual peak charge rails on models per hour. Yeah. And you said earlier, but we should probably expand that out is the reason that the Model 3 gets a really high charge rate is because it's so efficient. So every kilowatt hour that it's

or every kilowatt that's being put in gets double or even more miles than the Cybertruck per kilowatt hour. All right. I think the prepayment for that FSD combo deal is a great idea. All right. We have a fan. Dan, in the video, the Cybertruck is reporting that 320 kilowatts responds to 830 miles of charge. So not quite as much.

Makes sense. I just got back from a cross-country trip. I have FSD version 12.4, but constantly switched back to simple autopilot lane keeping because FSD kept cutting people off changing lanes. Same for nav on autopilot. Then FSD ain't worth it. So FSD started for me for the longest time. FSD would not go back into the right lane.

I would have to force it to go back. Yes. I had that too. I just recently drove back and forth from Nashville.

And it would just hang out in the left lane like American drivers. Yeah. So you would think like maybe a strain on that data. It's trained on Americans, which is frustrating. With 12.3.6, it started going back into the right lane, but only if you have a car in your back. Like I realized, so I wouldn't even know because normally I hate being in the left lane if I'm not passing someone. So right away I would just initiate the lane change myself.

But then I was shocked when I was passing someone and I'm like, I see it do it by itself. It goes right in front of the car that I passed. I'm like, perfect. And then I realized I have a car behind me when I did that. So it probably is coming. I passed another car.

I'm like 50, 60, 80 feet, 100 feet in front of the car and going faster than the car. And it doesn't go back in the right lane. So I'm like, all right, I don't know what happened there. Maybe it was the car. And then sure enough, I do it again. And there was a car behind me. And now it goes back to the right lane. So it only does it if you have a car behind you, which is not how you're supposed to drive. And

We're net picking a specific issue here because you mentioned it, because obviously there's a lot of other issues with FSD.

All right. Here's an interesting one. A good question. The concept remains a big advantage of something like the Model X versus a Rivian. The X can add a lot more miles per minute of charge due to better efficiency or Tesla saying it has better efficiency and not always the case. That holds me back from getting a Rivian knowing I'm signing up for 45 minute charging sessions to get three to four hours of highway driving. The X does way better in this respect. I mean,

The Rivian doesn't get as, it's not as efficient as the Model X, that's for sure, but it has a much bigger battery. So you can probably go for longer in a Rivian than a Model X, even though Tesla may say that they have similar range. And then Plus Rivian continues to refuse to add local MP3 and FLAC playback off the USB. I don't know. I think that's kind of an edge solution.

scenario there most people are not listening to flack and mp3 files off of a local drive um but i guess rivian doesn't do that yet all right uh we got a question from max i paid 300 for a car registration and that's per year while my gas cars registration is 75 per year so in a lot of states they are collecting taxes at the registration point for evs

which I don't think they've done the math too correctly on that. I feel like that's a lot of money, $225 extra. And that's Texas, so Elon should get on that. Here is pretty close to the governor in Texas, so maybe he should change that. I don't know where that is from. He pays as much tax as a car that gets nine miles per gallon. Makes no sense whatsoever. Yeah, obviously the tax should be at...

electricity rather than which you know also encourage people of having solar and things like that because then yeah i try to tax my electricity i'm producing it myself uh you know that's that's one of the main that's one of the main thing that got me into electric vehicles is like

People always say, oh, yeah, you're in Virginia. You're charging from coal power anyway. So like it's not even producing. It's like, no, no. If you're in Virginia and you have a gas powered vehicle and a home, you don't have a choice. And you're like, you know, powering your home with coal power and powering your car with whatever the gas station is going to sell you. If you have an EV vehicle.

your options are limited, but you at least have an option on how you're going to power your car. You can power it from your house with your grid electricity, which is limited to however your utility is producing electricity. Or you can get your own solar system and now you just choose to power your car with the electricity from the sun. Just to have that option is so cool. And yeah, so...

And a way to get around the taxes too on these EVs. But yeah, that's it for us this week. A short and sweet show. We're going to let Seth go to sleep because he's on European time right now. One more week in Europe for Seth, and then we're going to get back in the US of A. All right. Thanks a lot for listening, everyone. If you do enjoy the show, please give us a thumbs up, like, and subscribe. And we're going to see you same place, same time next week.