Tesla Cybertruck wrap, steer-by-wire, Rivian news, and more
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And we are going live for a new episode of The Electric Podcast. I am Fred Lambert, your host, and as usual, I'm joined by Seth Winchop. How are you doing today, Seth? I'm good. All right, all right, all right. All right, we have plenty to talk about today. A bunch of, like, smaller news that we're going to get into, like, big news.

Big news like last week, but a bunch of interesting stuff and set us some personal news and this EV fleet happening. This personal EV fleet is changing, so we're going to get into that too later on and how it's going to happen. We don't have a sponsor this week, but we can remind you that the last week of June and the first week of July, we're going to be in Kansas City.

in Topeka, Kansas for the Electric Solar Race Challenge, which is a very cool event where we, not we, but a bunch of school, a lot of student engineers in different schools all around the country and Canada too. Is there an international team beyond Canada in the U.S.? I think there is another team. I can't remember off the top of my head, but there's somebody from like Europe or something.

But mainly the U.S. and Canada, they are building solar cars or solar vehicles and racing them to test their efficiency. And it's something that has been happening for years. And a lot of companies in the EV world, especially Tesla, has recruited for them. So it's a very cool thing that Electric is sponsoring right now. And you can come check it out. It's over a whole week at the end of June, the end of June and early July in Heartland Raceway.

at Topeka, Kansas. Check it out. All right, let's jump in. I'm going to share my screen real quick so that we can get to the news. There you go. All right, we're going to start out with this thing that earlier this week has created some rumors, some speculation, and that's the Cybertruck with...

A very cool looking camouflage, I got to say. It's a wrap job. And we've seen plenty of Cybertruck prototypes over the last three years, basically. But more so, obviously, over the last year as Tesla gets closer to production. And Tesla never bothered to camouflage the car. Now, camouflage is something very common in the auto industry for prototypes ahead of production. But not so much for Tesla, obviously.

Tesla virtually never used it other than more recently for the Model 3. But that makes a little bit more sense because Model 3 is a car that is currently in production.

Tesla doesn't want to have the Osborne effect, right? Is that it? Yeah. The Osborne effect where when a new version of a product is coming or a new product altogether can affect the sales of the existing products currently in sales. So they want to hide that stuff. And Tesla's camouflage on that new Model 3 is not traditional camouflage that you see on other automakers. And the main reason that Tesla does differ from the rest of the industry there is

I would assume is because just actually stick pretty close to a prototype on build and the production version, like from the outside, there's not that much thing that changes. So Tesla doesn't bother camouflaging them while the rest of the industry, the prototypes that they unveiled versus a production version a year or two later can be wildly different. So it makes a little bit more sense to like keep something new for the launch or whatever. But now,

Tesla showed up this week with this prototype, Cybertruck prototype with camouflage. And it's bringing a speculation that, well, there's two theories here. The first one is Tesla is putting camouflage on it right now because this is the production version. And they want to camouflage the production version for whatever reason, even though it looks pretty much like the prototypes we've seen, which is with a cool camo on.

The other theory and the one that I personally subscribe to is Tesla. And it might be a stretch too, but I feel like it's less of a stretch than the one that I just presented to you. Tesla might be testing wraps.

on the Cybertruck, either testing them for longevity, just exposure testing and all that, or maybe just factory wrap testing, like the actual process, and then this one is made out of the shop.

So we know that the Cybertruck is not going to be offered in any other color. It's going to be stainless steel only. And the way to change it, because you're going to have a million of these trucks around in a few years, and if you don't want them to all look the same, you're going to have to wrap them.

And there's a possibility Tesla opened the possibility of it, though they didn't confirm it, that they might offer to wrap themselves. And that would be obviously a big deal because it would lower the cost of wrapping the car. Even though I would probably assume that the Cybertruck is going to be in the easier side, maybe in wrapping or the sharp edge more difficult to wrap.

then the round didn't i think they're because they're flat i think that might be easier but honestly i don't know yeah i was gonna think the same as you but now that i think of it maybe like cutting a sharp edge on a car might be more difficult to wrap maybe if we have any wrapping expert in the chat right now you can comment on that but i'm just i just confused myself for a second but i would um

I wouldn't be mad at that. And personally, I think this wrap looks pretty cool. It's like modern camo. Okay, there's a third theory. Also, people say that Tesla is testing the Cybertruck for the army or for military use, but

Let's be honest. That's the help of the three theory. That's my last one. Also, we recently reported for the first one, the theory that this is a production version. We did report that Tesla doesn't plan to have release candidates of the Cybertruck until the end of August, around the last week of August. So I would be surprised if this is anywhere near. I mean, the prototypes that we're seeing are pretty close to production version, but it's not a release candidate just yet. I have a fourth theory.

This is a deep fake. And if you scroll to the bottom, there's like a three-year-old Instagram. That looked exactly... Can I play it? I don't know how to remove the sound. I'm listening. It is a very similar design of camo.

But it is a render. Yeah, yeah. That's a render. And this one, even though the Cybertruck in real life kind of looks like a render, it has been spotted like two or three times. I think four times even this week. So it would be quite the feat to coordinate all that CGI. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, it's exciting. Like if you were to get a Cybertruck, you think you'd just leave it stainless steel? Or would you wrap it?

I don't know. I guess it depends on how much the wrap costs. You don't really need protection on stainless steel, I guess. Yeah, you don't need it. But I think my main concern will literally be like, there's just too many. Maybe not a year from now, but like two, three, four years from now, it's going to be way too many stainless steel Cybertrucks out there, no? No.

Yeah, I guess it would be cool to differentiate it a little bit. I mean, if it's easy and not crazy expensive, it would be kind of cool to do. It's going to be a few thousand dollars for sure. It's kind of like the Tesla's paint upgrades. Right. We can maybe do like the electric color grade. Yes. We'll do something like that. And we'll write it off.

All right. Next news is Tesla is offering free superchargers, three months of free supercharging, actually, on a new Model 3, inventory new Model 3. Again, that's not always the difference with Tesla lately when it does an incentive on a Model 3. It's on a new inventory vehicle and not on the custom orders, which leads us to believe that

Tesla is liquidating the new inventory ahead of the refresh coming. And now adding to that is Tesla put a deadline on this one. So it's a new inventory orders delivered by June 30th. Of course, that also matched the end of the quarter.

But this time, but it's also just for new inventory. So there's still some waiting on the refresh side of things. So we were already suspecting that the refresh was coming right at the beginning of next quarter. So this is adding to speculation. Obviously, three months of free supercharging as an incentive is nothing quite significant. Like unless you're a heavy supercharger user, like this is worth a few hundred bucks of...

of incentives. All right, this is an interesting one that came out today. Tesla has filed a new patent for a steer-by-wire system. And we've been reporting for that for a little bit, but this is the first time that a patent has showed up. So in 2020, I found out that Tesla was building a team in Austin, a team for a new motor and gear team. And the specific goal was to develop a new steer-by-wire system.

And then a year later, Elon confirmed it amid some of the controversy around the yoke steering wheel when the yoke steering wheel came out in 2021 and people complained about the

the turning ratio being the same as the round thing, even though it's not ideal because of the shape of the wheel, that Tesla is working on a steer-by-wire progressive steering that would be adapted for the Yoke, but he said it was still a few years away. Now, the Cybertruck has been rumored to be the first vehicle of Tesla to get the steer-by-wire system.

And now it's getting a little bit closer to reality with Tesla having this patent file that shows that they have a technology for it. You have a little drawing here that shows the system. And unlike some of the other systems that still rely on mechanical linkage as backup,

Tesla has like two electronic systems instead. So if one fails, the other takes over. So they have like zero mechanical linkage. It's all just stair-by-wire. And they also added that the system can further include a set of position sensor assemblies, including two magnetic and one inductive sensor assemblies. So they're going full-on stair-by-wire here.

And the Cybertruck makes sense, especially in the prototypes that we've seen. The dash position is very open at the bottom, which points to a different sort of steering column or lack thereof. So it could make sense that the Cybertruck ends up with one. Would you trust the steer-by-wire? I mean, just in what sense? I don't know. Just like if you're driving around and you're going 65 miles per hour.

And, you know, sometimes things don't go so well, like power steering goes out. And I feel like steer-by-wire could be like, I don't know, a little bit more dangerous. Well, they do have the redundancy of them. I think it's something that people will build confidence into pretty quickly, I feel like. I mean, the thing you always hear with steer-by-wire is people like being scared of like hacking the car.

Then a hacker could get access to the steering. But there's already that in virtually every car out there. Even though you still have mechanical linkage, you have actuators that control the steering wheel and everything. So on the hacking side of things, if you have a concern about that, you should have a concern with basically any car other than... I think the Lada is the only car that is purely mechanical at this point. So...

in terms of the actual like, um, reliability of the, of the step-by-wire, I feel like that's something that you can nail pretty well. And you just, you need to be able to see those. There's just no, no way around that. Oh, Tesla updated us this week on the number of power walls installed. And what was that? Um,

And it's growing fast. So we've been tracking that. This list practically released some milestone for the Powerwalls. And the first one was 100,000 units in 2020. So it took them about four years of deployment to get 100,000 units. They got to the second 100,000, so 200,000 total, a year later. So it took them just a year to deploy 100,000.

November 2021 was when they reached 250,000. So it took them six years from launching the Powerwall to reaching 250,000 units. How much time did it take to get from the next 250,000 units, so 500,000 total? Less than two years, about 18 months. So this is a very good ramp up. And that's thanks partly to the...

Gigafactory Nevada's ramp up. We learned last year that Tesla was producing as many as 6,500 Powerwalls per week.

Of course, that's like the production capacity. It's not produced at 100% efficiency all the time because it would be a little bit more than 250,000 units a year. But still, at the current efficiency, that's what they're deploying. And it's not just that. It's not just the production, obviously. The power wall, I think, depending on battery supply constraint, which goes up and down all the time, the installation, I would assume, is the biggest problem.

bottleneck, but Tesla has been expanding a lot lately to have more third-party certified installers install the Powerwall. So that, I think, has been a big game changer for them. So what's their... If Tesla's global virtual power network, how big is it right now? If they got 500,000 Powerwalls at

What are they, like seven? Well, yeah, it depends. That's the thing. It depends on which one because they have several different models with different capacity. But I think seven is probably a good average. So, yeah, that would be 3.5 gigawatt of output. Gigawatt? Yeah, well, I go by gigawatt. Because it would be kilowatt, then gigawatt, then I think it's terawatts, isn't it?

It's 3.5 million kilowatt. Right. So it was 100,000. If it was 1,000, it would be gigawatts. Killa, giga. But I did 500,000 power walls times 7 kilowatts, no? Yeah, I think it's like... That would be the power output of the entire fleet. 3.5 gigawatt of output. Makes sense.

I mean, it's nothing compared to the mega packs, but it's completely distributed and both advantage the homeowners and through the virtual PowerPoint, which is a great segue into our next post here, where Tesla confirmed, well, actually, Drew Baglino commented on Twitter. So it's a rare time that someone other than Elon Musk at Tesla is revealing things about Tesla on Twitter.

He confirmed that Tesla is preparing to launch new virtual power plant in Puerto Rico and Texas. So he even revealed the current, we're just talking about the fleet capacity of the Powerwall. I clicked on this by mistake. That in Puerto Rico alone, they have 350 megawatts of power output. So it's quite significant for a relatively small territory. Puerto Rico is a territory. Yeah. Yeah.

um so yeah and they they need it a lot like it right now it's it's basically just making the life of those homeowners that have the power wall or also a lot of business owners to have them and but if you can bend them together you can actually save the grid uh on some brown and some brownouts like that happen when the surge in demand so yeah

There's a lot of things that the Ketosa can do there in terms of helping the electric grid. And then obviously you can, through the virtual power plant, you can compensate these people that bought the power wall.

And same thing in Texas. But in Texas, we knew it was coming because Tesla has a lot of plans for Tesla Electric in Texas because Tesla has launched a new division there because it's an electricity retailer officially in Texas. And they have their unlimited overnight charging, of course. But now they are moving also to have a virtual power plant. And I would assume that they have also a lot of Powerwall owners in Texas because –

Last few years, Texas had some issues in both the summer and the winters too in their electric grid. So every place is like you probably see a huge surge in demand in places where they have brownouts or blackouts due to weather and also due to just like the grid being overloaded.

All right, we have a few more news items to discuss. But before that, I want to remind everyone, if you do enjoy the Electric Podcast, if you can give us a like, it takes a second, just smash that like button. Actually, maybe not smash it. I'm not responsible for any damage, but you can just say click. Works perfectly fine. Takes a second of your time and helps the show a lot more than you can imagine. You can actually subscribe, hit the notification button.

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has got a little bit of a price increase and it's starting to add up because there was another price increase earlier this year. So it basically up 30% this year.

And Tesla cannot blame inflation too much because last year it went down a lot too. So I'm not sure what Tesla was trying to do here. If you remember when Tesla first announced NAX as the standard, the slash the price of the wall connector, it also came at the time that Tesla also stopped offering the mobile connector as part of every car that they sold. So it created a different landscape when you buy a Tesla. So you needed to buy

buy a mobile connector or a wall connector or both or whatever the situation, you couldn't just rely on the included mobile connector, which a lot of people would do. I still do with my mobile 3S. Same. Yeah. So I don't need much. Of course, Seth and I have a different need than most people. We don't have a commute every day and all that, but still, it's doable. It's completely doable.

Now you have to find a different solution. And the wall connector is a very sensible solution because in terms of pricing, it was already good at 500 bucks when Tesla was selling last year, uh, before the price caught because, uh, 48 amps, there's not a lot of 40 and amps wifi capable connectors on there. It starts much higher pricing than that. Uh, you have some solution that on that price and cheaper solution, but most of them, we cap out that 30 amps, which is also good. Like it, especially, uh,

depending on your situation with your electric panels and also where you want to install the charger, how much cable you're going to need. A lot of times you're good just capping it at 30 amps because it's going to cost you a lot cheaper to installation too. But

At the same time, Tesla was making NAGS the standard. And now it was getting interesting because there was a big... Tesla was also selling its wall connector with a G1772 connector, which is based on the CCS combo.

So Tesla was creating like the discrepancy between the CCS and its own charger, which at one point was selling it for $250 in December. So that was like a $200 difference between the exact same chargers with just different connectors. So Tesla was kind of showing the difference there. But now it creeped back up earlier this year to $425. And this week it went back to $475.

So I don't know exactly how to read into that. More than $100 increase over the last six, seven months. I mean, could it be as simple as that they're just, you know, their inventory? They just want to lower and keep their inventory at almost zero. Yeah. You know what else I'm thinking too? What's that? Just a little breeder for charging station companies. Because now with the switch to NACs, like obviously...

All the Tesla connectors are going to be a lot more popular. Right. So like literally that you could be soon buying a Ford and be thinking like, I might as well just buy, like I buy a Mustang Mach-E and I buy a wall connector to go, a Tesla wall connector to go with it. Like that could make sense soon because of the cost. Like if you compare it to J1772 chargers, they're much more expensive. Yeah.

So now at least with that price up a little bit, it's more competitive, even though I think even at $475, I think just the wall connector might still be the best option right now, to be honest. Yeah, the only thing that maybe other people think about is the length of the cable. Some of the other manufacturers have like, let's say like 25, 30 foot cables. Oh, this is a 24 foot. Yeah. That's decent. That's pretty good.

Yeah, I actually like Tesla's cables. They're usually a little thinner and more flexible than the other manufacturers. Tesla does a good job. I mean, obviously, they have been thinking about this a lot longer. They've been building these forever. They have an order of magnitude more applications, so it makes sense. Yeah, I have a wall connector installed at my parents' house.

Has to be six years ago at this point. It's still working perfectly fine. Elon gave us a little bit of an update on Tesla Semi production this week. Not too big of a surprise here. The CEO said that the company doesn't expect to begin producing its new electric semi truck in larger volume until the end of next year. So that's different than the 50,000 units in 2024. Yeah.

that he talked about before. And when he said that, we were already like, yeah, really? Like it's, it didn't sound, it sounded even, even for Elon, it sounded overly optimistic. Um, and this one is actually a bad look for him, I think, because like, it's almost sound like when he said that, which was last year when he was about to start, when, when they were starting production of the truck, uh, he thought like they could grim up to 50,000 units within two years. Uh, and,

And now he's backing up to the, no, actually, we won't even start the ramp up until late that year. It's kind of, he wasn't really aware where the program was at. Obviously, Tesla changed its plans a bunch of time with the Tesla semi-production. Electric first reported that Tesla had a small, low-volume production line and building outside of the FIU Nevada in 2022.

that as far as we know is able to produce a max five units per week so it's nothing and um and at first that's i was thinking of moving production to texas to austin but earlier this year they announced that instead they're going to build it in an expansion of giga factory nevada um which makes sense but the expansion is yet to materialize so it doesn't make sense that tesla would ramp up anytime soon so yeah if tesla produce more than like

a thousand truck in 2024, I would be surprised because it would require the expansion to happen fast, like by the end of this year, and then build that production line throughout 2024 and start producing on that production line because on the current one, you cannot get to a thousand units a year. But something to keep an eye on because even though it's not like a big volume vehicle, like Tesla literally makes more

uh, more why in a month than, than it will ever do, uh, in a year with the, in like an hour or a day. Yeah. Maybe even so, uh,

I think proportionally though, for emissions, semi trucks are much bigger contributors. So everyone that you take off the road and you replace by this one, that's a, that, that, that's a big deal. So for that, so I'm very excited. Like when that ramp up is that he's going to happen, I'm going to be all over it. I'm very happy about that. Um,

We also had this week a little bit of tiny little news to another recall of the Tesla Semi. It was a software recall, but still an official one in its details, which confirmed to us that Tesla was now 36%.

Test of Semi as of March and up one from February. So like the production is extremely slow right now, which makes sense because they're still like testing out the early releases one. So I'm not super surprised by it. All right. All right. All right. Moving on. Some exclusive news coming from our own Seth Wintraub.

So I'm a little bit worrying, but it looks like in your report you kind of quenched the worries about Rivian acquiring the company behind the Better Route Planner. Yeah, so for people who don't know, Better Route Planner is a really handy tool for routing to cross-country where you're going to need a charge because they have...

A really good database of chargers, a really good database of how much energy it takes to get from one to another. Lots of different cars, lots of different variables. And a few companies already use them. Polestar 2 has a better route planner built into its system. And so does... There's a couple of European cars, I think Cupra or something. Anyway...

We had gotten word about, I don't know, three months ago that Rivian was working with Better Route Planner and that they were looking to buy them. But it was kind of an anonymous tip. We didn't really have much to go on. Fast forward, there was a guy on Reddit who had a similar thing. And I went...

kind of down a rabbit hole with him uh he told me you know who the person was and all the all the stuff and then um you know i i kind of uh got rivian to you know like when you call rivian and they point well when i called the guy the ceo of abrp bow his phone number is like on the

on the website. So I was like, Hey, Hey Bo, what's going on? He's like, yeah, I can't really talk about that. You got to call Rivian. And I was like, okay, this sounds, sounds like something's happening.

So when I talked to Rivian, they put me in charge of their European policy guy. So this is all sounding like something's going to happen. Anyway, I got it confirmed and we ran the story yesterday. My understanding is that they're probably going to announce it within a week. It might even happen like later today over the weekend or early next week. And I think like, you know, we're not.

at liberty to talk about it, but I think there's going to be more announcements with that. And,

You know, there's obviously there's a lot of stuff going on in the charging space right now. A lot of companies are consolidating on stuff. But I think Rivian wants to become like a, you know, a leader in the EV space in terms of like, hey, use our tools, use our chargers. We want to be like a resource for all EV owners, not just...

not just Rivian owners. And you know, that's a good way of marketing yourself, getting new customers, perhaps. Um, you know, we're going to, it sounds like Rivian is going to be sharing its adventure network. So good way to get people into that. And then, you know, there's some precedent in the industry, um, plug share or the company that owns plug share got bought by Evie go, the charging network, um, previously, um,

And, yeah, so, you know, my understanding is that they're very far along in integrating Better Route Planner into Rivian's own

mapping system. It's not going to replace, it's not going to be like, you know, pull out that, put in this, but it's going to use the backend information to route plan for Rivian. And I think Rivian, if I understand their intentions right, I think Rivian wants to kind of give this to other

EV makers. So, you know, maybe they make it part of the Rivian app and you can, you know, make it part of CarPlay and Android Auto, which would be ironic because, you know, Rivian wants no part of CarPlay and Android Auto for better or worse. But you could see them, you know, right now a better route planner is available on the Polestar 2 via Android for Automobiles. So it's all kind of

questionable, but what they want to do with this. But we've known from the beginning that Rivian wants to be more than just, you know, a electric vehicle manufacturer. And a lot of that aspiration has to do with mapping.

You know, they're mapping not just roads, but off roads. They want to take all their vehicle data and kind of do what Tesla has done. Or you could even say Google has done as well as using the data they get from their users to build out these, you know, robust up-to-date maps. So all that added together means that Rivian is going to be a bigger player in the general EB world, theoretically, as soon as next week.

Nice. Yeah, if there's anything that comes out that we can officially report, it's going to be on electric first. You know it. All right, still on Rivian. There was some news today about the shift to production from R1T to R1S or a more focus on R1S production versus the R1T production.

As Rivian sees strong demand for it, so it came out of Rivian CFO, Claire McDonough, that she was giving an interview at the Deutsche Bank. I think it was like a conference. Well, yeah, a car and environment conference. And she basically explained that the focus from – because the focus had been primarily on the R1T. Do they split their production and deliveries –

Yeah, I mean, that's what she said. She was like, we can...

do all r1ts or we can do our all r1s's we can kind of mix it up depending on what uh what our customers are demanding i will say it does like there's a lot of signs pointing to rivian running low on demand for r1ts um the time period it takes to get an r1t net is now like two weeks or less um they're having that event uh tomorrow i believe in normal

where you basically just show up and you get an R1T. Obviously, you have to buy it and everything, but it's kind of like a car dealer kind of experience, although there's one in the whole U.S.,

And it sounds like from this that they're switching over to R1Ss. I will say, so, you know, this is getting into the personal stuff. I had a R1S that was scheduled to be delivered from October to December. And I got the call yesterday saying, hey, configure your R1S. So I don't know, that's one, two, three, four, five months early. Yeah.

or four or five months early, which is kind of weird for Rivian to underestimate it by that much. And I saw somebody else on Reddit who, or I think it might have Twitter, Twitter,

That also had an early R1S call, but you know, I, I also like I had made a kind of a, you know, I'm driving a R1S loaner right now. And I was at the thing saying, Hey, why are you going through all the, the trouble of getting me a loaner when you could just deliver my vehicle? And also, Hey, I would like to drive a Rivian to the, the electric formula sun event in Kansas. Like,

since you can't get my vehicle to me, can I drive a loaner out there? And they're like, let's see what we can do. So I don't know if I'm getting a favor here, which to Rivian's credit, they've given us nothing, like zero. I mean, you had an order in on day one, Fred, and you're still not

you haven't gotten your truck yet, but that's, I think... I mean, I have my configuration and they can, like, they don't... Well, that's basically because they don't have a service center in Quebec, though, but you would think they would have one by now because they have some in Canada already, just not in Quebec. There was some job postings, though, in Quebec, so it looks like they're working toward it, but the job posting is there until the building... Building a service center is a little bit more than that, so...

for me it's looking like i'm gonna have to cancel it and get this cyber truck because it's getting like too close to it a little bit interesting i'm getting there yeah well i mean i'll have a they could have what i'm saying is like they could have gotten me if they like delivered it sooner basically yeah nobody wants to hear that um but that'll give us an opportunity to do like a tug of war with my ravine in your cyber truck so perfect perfect um and you know what's funny is that uh

When I got the Rivian, I was like, this is kind of nice, but we don't go off-roading super often. And for our family, I think aerodynamics would probably be a higher priority. So the Volvo EX90 is kind of like, that seems like a pretty good trade for R1S. And I thought that was coming at the end of this year.

So I was like, yeah, maybe I'll get rid of the R1S thing. But my wife was like, no, we're keeping the R1S. And we're actually getting this color and not that color. So my wife is now the R1S owner, I guess. I'm going to be stuck with a poor Model Y. No, I'm going to have the Chevy Bolt. That's right. That's how you... Until my kid takes it. Yeah.

All right. We have one more news to discuss and then we're jumping into the comments section. So if you guys have any questions for us, any new subject in the AV world that you want us to discuss or any question about what we did discuss today, put them in the comments section right now. We're going to get to it in just a few seconds because the last piece of news is another great one.

The GM is sort of walking back its promise to change the battery pack to do battery pack replacement over the fire risk recall that happened a few years ago. Now they're doing a software diagnostic instead. Can you explain that to us? Yeah, so when they came up with the solution for the recall, all 2017 to 2019 batteries were going to be replaced. But they kind of left the wording open a little bit

Where they said that bad modules in the 2020 to 2022 models would be replaced modules, not full battery packs. But over the past over a year, they've been replacing full battery packs. And it doesn't have to do with, you know, it doesn't seem to have to do with anything in particular, just like which...

dealers can do it first and had had the room to do it so this news comes out people have been buying and selling bolts with the expectation that they would be getting a new battery pack uh you know i i kind of get gm's side on this because like they said like very small percentage of the uh

the 2020 to 2022 bolts had bad battery packs and they didn't say what percent. So is that 0.001 or 0.1 or 20%? I don't know. But they said a very small percentage had the problem. I offered it, you know, in my great, great, you know, skill set of like, Hey, why not get out in front of it, communicate better,

Offer a warranty like you did get it replaced. So like, you know, if you bought a 2020 and this replacement program started in 2022, offer a warranty starting in 2022. And then the other thing is like this diagnostic software requires a bolt owner to continue to only charge to 80% and only discharge to like 20%.

for another, I think, 6,000 or 10,000 miles. So it's kind of crappy. They should at least give these bolt owners that are affected free OnStar and app usage and all the other little stuff. But no, they're just like, nope, sorry, you're not getting that. You should have thought about it before buying a boat. Yeah, before buying a GM car. Yeah.

You knew what you were getting into. Yeah, it's just not great. It's similar to what Jaguar is doing, though. It's basically a copy-pasted of what Jaguar is doing with the iPaste recall just now. I don't know if GM saw that and was like, hey, if they can do that, we want to do that too. Yeah, maybe LG came up with that and was like, asking it out to all their vendors. That's probably a better theory right there.

All right. That's all for the news this week. We can jump into the comments section. All right. Peter says, which is worse, Toyota saying they will have a 900-mile electric vehicle by 2027? They won't. Or Elon saying we will have full self-driving in two weeks? We won't. I mean, he never said two weeks. That was like an update. It wasn't full self-driving. Right. But I get the joke. Good one, Peter. All right. All right.

Yeah. And, um, Aptera. So we're, you know, we're having the formula sun event in Kansas. Uh, we know that Aptera is going to join us at least last time we checked they are. So, uh, if that's another added bonus, if you want to go to Kansas and see a bunch of solar racers, you're also going to get a chance to at least, uh, check out the Aptera. I don't know if they're going to be giving rides and drives and stuff, but that, that should be fun. Yeah.

All right. Daniel DeYoung question. Does Seth now think Cybertruck looks good and might be a hit with the wraps? You guys have differing opinions on likelihood of success. It's funny you ask that because I tweeted after a long hiatus, I now am liking the Cybertruck design again after seeing the wrap. You're not alone with that.

That other people are changing their mind with the Cybertruck both ways. It's strange. It's such a polarizing design that a lot of people... It's polarizing in my own brain. It's not even more than one person...

I mean, it does something weird to the brain because the CGI and real-life CGI thing is no joke. Like when you see it, I mean, when you see it in person too. Yeah, when you see it in person, it's strange to look at it. Like when I saw that the Peterson Museum, it's still there, by the way. If you're in LA, you can go see the Cybertruck at the Peterson Museum. I'm pretty sure it's still there. It's an experience. Yeah.

Yeah. And I wonder if the wrapping thing is going to be something like, you know, you accessorize your car, like maybe you have a winter wrap and a summer wrap. You know, it's like a fashion thing. Yeah, it's very expensive. But like, you know, you could see that being a thing, especially as wraps get better and cheaper and, you know, whatever. Yeah. Tesla revolutionized the wrap business.

All right. Tony Rossi, I'm new to EVs. Is dealer markup above MSRP pretty common for cars with closed reservations, i.e. Chevy Blazer EV? Sadly, I think it is pretty common with Chevy Blazers or anything Chevy. They don't really have control over their dealers and their dealers are kind of just going hog wild.

I like what Ford is doing on that front. They try to rain that down. They see it coming. They see it happening. So there's a few automakers that have, like Seth said, they don't have the final prices between the dealership and the owner, but they have some kind of incentive or other way around, like punishment that they can do. Like they can...

They can mess with their allocations of vehicles if they get reports that they are being a little bit excessive with that. But then even that, anything over MSRP is frustrating to a buyer. It's like, this is the manufacturer's suggested price. Why am I paying more than that? Because the dealership wants to. So yeah, this is a... Even though we...

we have plenty to say about this as own pricing strategy, obviously it's still at the very least, at least you're paying the same price as the next guy. Well, literally the next guy, maybe, but maybe not like the next day, but the next guy. Yeah. And not only do they just, you know, put, put like markups on, but they'll put it in stuff like, Hey, we, we replaced the floor mats. That's 500 bucks. You know, we put in like, you know, some bogus like security system. That's another 500 bucks. Yeah.

So, yeah, I'm glad that I don't have to deal with dealerships. Yeah. I mean, I have to say the Rivian experience hasn't been too bad in that respect. All right. Question. Shanghai has approved for the land for Tesla expansion, but Beijing has not. This is holding Tesla back from the small car in China, Mexico, and maybe India will be a workaround. What do you think? Well, they already said that Mexico, I think, is going to produce the next generation car. Yeah.

Now, that could be the Robotaxi. That could be the cheap car. We don't know cheaper, I should say. But yeah, I think Elon was pushing for that, though, when he recently visited China. Apparently, that was one of the issues that we were hearing that he was trying to resolve. Because there is this little plot of land that's just a few kilometers away from the existing factory. Because Tesla looks like it's running out of space right now. Pretty fool.

All right. Richard Cool says, Fred, nice job explaining the latest EV charging developments on Fast Money. Are you doing any other TV? I've been saying no a lot of the times for TV spots like that. And to be honest, I didn't like it that much, too. This time, it's just so short.

You don't really have to explain everything. I mean, at least with Fast Money, they're not hiding their purpose of the show at all. It's like, how does this affect the stocks? That's what they do. And I play on the stock market and whatnot. So it's the kind of things I like. So I did say yes for this one.

because I think it's interesting. But for the most part, when they want me to jump on the show and explain a very complex issue in like three-minute segments, it's not great. So I don't do that much. I love podcasts more. Movie. We're doing a movie. I don't know how much I can say about that. But long-form stuff, I perform better at. Yeah.

All right. Daniel DeYoung question. Do you think the recent developments justify the rapid recovery of the share price, charging, price increases, Model 3 refresh, and Cybertruck? I don't know. I don't know about that one. Yeah.

I don't know how much you can, it's just momentum or like that, this charging, this next stuff happening. Cause I don't know how I did post a report today of like Morgan Stanley trying to price the supercharger network into the stock, which was an interesting, um, an interesting exercise, but obviously like he has a scenario at like $12 a stock contribution and one in 78. So it's like, it's very wide. Um,

But, and Elon apparently today said that, again, he's been saying that a lot, that Tesla stock, it's autonomy that's driving the stock. It's the momentum of autonomy and everything. And obviously, on the stock market right now, there's kind of an AI bubble happening. So Elon said,

Throwing that in and keep repeating that Tesla is an AI company and all that, it's probably creating that momentum. But I actually disagree with that. I don't think that if Tesla solves autonomy, yes, obviously, it's going to be the biggest contributor to Tesla stock. But I don't want him to focus on that too much because...

What about selling – okay, let's say that he doesn't believe that Tesla can sell 20 million cars a year without autonomy. That might be the case. But I'm fairly confident Tesla, if they just keep ramping up production and the other automakers are lagging behind on the production capacity with the shift in mindset of consumers that buy new cars towards electric vehicles –

I think they could send 10 million a year. And that's huge. There's no other automakers doing that. That's like giant business. And then you own the charging part behind it. You have the energy part behind it, not just the storage, but the virtual power plants and stuff. Like this is like in a very nice position right now. Autonomy is more like,

Hopefully it happens. And if it does, yes. I mean, it's a trillion dollar company tomorrow and a $3 trillion company within the next three years after the autonomy is solved. But it's a big hit. Yeah. I also think that part of the thing is the NACs charging network. It looks on...

paper like GM and Ford are giving up on Electrify America, and they kind of are. And if Tesla can kind of run away with the charging business of charging all EVs in the US and theoretically beyond, it's going to be...

you know there's going to be a lot of opportunity to make money not just from charging but also from like you know what goes on around charging you have the whole you know gas station convenience store model yeah that's right so you know and right now tesla can make a charger for a fraction of what it takes ea or evgo to do they're on just a different scale they have like

um you know the cables are shorter there's way less uh technology involved it's all done on the back end via apps um they just really you know they're they're ahead they've been doing this longer they have uh they're at different scales so i get why the price is going up it does make sense um yeah but on the charging side of things i was doing something that earlier and uh

So it's hard to, like, so the Morgan Stanley math, for example, they made it too simple where they just like put a percentage of mileage in the US that is electric, and then they give a market share to Tesla. But the market share of Tesla supercharger is,

on the total EV mileage is going to be relatively small. The market share of DC fast charging is going to be huge. I think like most likely majority, maybe like close to monopoly level. Like we don't know exactly, but most people are charging at home. Yeah. So that's the thing. So like, I don't know how big it is. So I kept trying to figure out like, because I don't think the Morgan Stanley model is just works.

So what I did find is the last time, you remember Tesla used to have these superchargers map and they would tell you in real time how many cars are charging a superstation all around the world and they give you the exact kilowatt hour and everything. So the last time Tesla had that was 2019. And at that time, that map told us that Tesla was delivering 72 gigawatt hour a month of electricity.

through the Supercharger network. That was in 2019. So I think right now it's in the hundreds a month for sure. So I can see Tesla easily being at, let's say like 500,000

Let's assume 500 gigawatt-hour a month. It's not a wild prediction. If they were at 72 in 2019, the fleet grows fast. The 2019 fleet is probably at least less than half than it is right now, but then you had now non-Tesla EVs and all that. It's growing fast. At 500 gigawatt-hour a month,

At $0.30, which is low, that would assume that they lower the price. That's $150 million a month of revenue. So that's a $1.8 billion business investment.

It's huge. It's a billion-dollar business, but for Tesla, it's not a game-changer for the valuation. That's what I'm saying. And that's global I'm talking about. But 500 is probably low. If you want to go like 2030, it might be one terawatt a month. I don't know.

It's hard to guess. I'm working on the last time we had the actual numbers of supercharger. So, yeah. I would actually say I feel like Tesla's been doubling almost. Not doubling, but close to doubling every year since 2019. So, 20, 21, 22, and part of 23. It might be already at 500 some months. It's cyclical also. It's obviously cyclical, the charging. Yeah.

So yeah, it might already be at 500. I don't know. That's the problem. That's the guess because it's hard to determine what's the percentage of DC fast charging in the EV community right now. And also, I think it's going to be higher the percentage further down as we move from like right now, it's more people that have garages, that have driveways. But eventually, you can have like some city parking folks that more of them are going to go EVs and then drive.

there's going to be better charging solution for them. That's probably going to involve the supercharger network, obviously. Yeah. Yeah. Important to check out. All right. Uh, more questions, more questions. Uh, Nico D is very talkative. Cybertruck reminds me of Homer Simpson's ideal car design. Oh yeah. Not a fan.

Greg Poland will take a cyber truck in red. And the last question we have, Tony Rossi question in your experience, what are clues? What clues are there to watch for as far as when car makers are ready to be delivering cars? Like generally after your reservation moves to an order picking options.

Well, it depends on the automakers, like those that use the dealership network. Obviously, you're going to get a call from your dealer at one point if you have a reservation with them and they move the information, they send it to the dealers and all that, depending on the system. It depends on the automaker and how they deal with their dealership. But normally, it will move to the dealers when you're getting close to delivery. Then you have Tesla automakers.

Rivian, Lucid, all those direct to consumers. And that depends on now what we're seeing from Tesla a lot and from Rivian now recently is like they are moving more on to like a new inventory type of system. So we can move fast just like what happened with Seth this week. Thought he was getting a car in five months. Now he's getting it like in a week. So...

signs to look out for is the question. I mean, read electric. So if it's a new vehicle program and you want to be on top of when the new vehicle is going to come to production, you can read electric. But for companies like if you're waiting for like a Lucid or Rivian, you have to look out for when they have a delivery service center in your region because they don't deliver until they have that.

All right. All right. Well, that was it for us this week, guys. Thanks a lot for listening to the show. If you do enjoy the show, you can give us a like or subscribe. Hit the notification bell. Give us a five-star review, obviously, only if you enjoyed the show. And we're going to see you same times next week.