Tesla Model 3 Performance refresh, $RIVN earnings, new EV models, and more
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And we are live, everyone, for a new episode of the Electric Podcast. I am Fred Lembert, your host. And as usual, I'm joined by Seth Wintraub. How are you doing today, Seth? I'm good. All right. I hope you are, because we have plenty to talk about this week and a lot of non-Tesla stuff, which should make a lot of our readers happy with things that sometimes we talk a little bit too much about Tesla, which is fair, even though, like I like to say, they still...

on the North American market when it comes to EVs. So that's why we spend a lot of time on them. But this week, we have a lot of other things because it's also like the earnings week for Rivian and Lucid and a few other automakers. So we're going to discuss that. I'm just going to share my screen with you guys so that you can see what's happening here. All right.

But we're still going to start out with some Tesla news. The first one is going to be the Tesla Model 3 performance. So we had a lot of indication lately that the Model 3 Highland performance version is coming soon. This is being tested out in the U.S. by Tesla. So for those who don't remember when Tesla launched the Highland last year in Asia and Europe, it was only the base rear-wheel drive version and the long-range dual-drive, dual-motor version, not the performance version. It was gone recently.

In the US, when it was launched last month, same thing. There's still some all-through performance 2023 out there available for sale in your inventory. It's actually a pretty good deal if you're not on board with the refresh. It might be a good option for you. It's pretty cheap right now.

So it's something to think about. But we're probably going to lose even more value when the new version comes out, though we don't know exactly what's going to be new in the new version in terms of performance. But we know that there's going to be hardware changes, which is quite new for the Model 3 performance at Tesla. For a long time, the Model 3 performance and even like the Model S performance or Plaid or Ludicrous, whatever it was, whenever it was,

It was pretty much the same car with like you slap a spoiler on it, bigger brakes, bigger calipers, and that's it. Like you unlock some software capability in the car, higher top speed, higher acceleration. But the actual powertrain were...

In a lot of these versions, the same. There was a few times with Tesla, different things involved with like a better suspension or not necessarily better, but more aggressive suspension. There was one point also, the Lodacris Model S had like a bigger conductor between the battery pack and the motor. But for most of the time lately, the performance version and the long range dual motor version were basically the same car in terms of hardware.

Now, the engineering test vehicles, so Tesla actually writes engineering test vehicle on those now that were spotted, still have camouflage on the front. So, and based on the camouflage, if you look at the front lip here, I have a closer look here, looks updated. It looks like it's not the same as the front bumper on the refreshed version, which is already new from the older version, but it's again, another one.

And now what's even more interesting on this one that was spotted is that we see these bucket seats in there. So that's something that was first revealed by Green, the notorious Tesla hacker. It was in the app update a few months ago where you could see some what Tesla calls sports seats. So now in the end case that the Model 3 Performance will have both interior changes and exterior changes.

So it's getting us excited. Maybe Tesla is planning something big for the Model 3 performance, and it has also potential further improvements to the performance of the car. Tesla is going to try to beat the 0-60 acceleration of 3.1 seconds for the previous Model 3 performance. Which is crazy fast. Are you excited for the Model 3 performance set? Yeah, I mean, you know, obviously it's not going to be a roadster level, but...

Certainly a great small car. I honestly believe that the Model 3 is the best Tesla for driving. I think nothing beats it. And I've had all the Teslas besides the Cybertruck and the original Roadster. So can only get better, I guess, right?

Yeah, I mean, I would assume so. Tesla doesn't go back ways when it comes to improving its vehicles. And I agree with you completely like that Model 3 performance. I mean, I had one since 2018. It's super fun car to drive. I would agree it's more fun than the Model S because it's lighter, it's more nimble, easier to park to. So for the performance version like this might be like, I guess I know who's excited about this.

Our friends at Unplugged Performance, I'm sure they're excited about that. They love when there's a new top version of a Tesla vehicle that comes out. And I'm sure plenty of people are going to want to get upgrades for this.

All right, this is going to be a shock for some people, but I'm going to say some good things about FSD Beta right now. So we still don't have the wide release of FSD Beta v12. For those people that don't know, the v12 is supposedly another mind-blowing update, according to Elon Musk, to the FSD Beta, even though he said that like eight times, about eight of the 12 updates so far, and it's never been very mind-blowing to me.

But this V12 is supposed to be better because it's supposed to introduce end-to-end neural nets. So now the vehicle controls are also powered by neural nets instead of being hard-coded by programmers. It was supposed to be wide-released last year. It's been delayed a few times. Last month, it was released to a few customers, but really just a handful. This week, it reached a little bit more people, but not that many more. Sorry, it's still not a wide-release.

But one of these new people is a guy going by Arthur from X on X. And he got it in his Model 3 or Model Y, I'm not so sure. And he posted this video that I found kind of impressive. Let me show you real quick here. I don't know if I can. Do you see it like that? Yeah, you see it like that.

I'll cut the sound and I'll fast forward a bit because the interesting part, so the guy, oh, no, so that's fast forwarding a little bit too much. I'll go from here. So the guy puts an alley, a random location in an alley in Sacramento in the car, and you see the car right now driving up to that alley. On the left, the car is going to take a left turn.

Not too complicated. There's not a lot of traffic. It just goes into the alley right now. But the point of the location here is at the end of the alley. And normally what the car would do, right, is what it's doing right now, though it's driving a little bit slowly. It makes sense. There's another car. It's an alley. There's no clear lines of where you can drive.

but it would drive up to the alley to the point where it's written the map to the specific address or where you drop the pin. And then it would stop right about now would be normal where it stops. But instead of stopping, the car slows down, continues a little bit. And then this is where things get interesting. Instead of stopping in the middle of the alley, like you would usually do with FSD beta, it continues. And then look at the navigation system. It updates itself.

And it's right now. And it goes, does a drive around the block. So, Arthur, obviously, is like, what's happening? Why didn't it stop? Why is it going right on the block? And then we're going to fast forward to that right around the block. But then it goes back here in the alley. And then instead of going all the way to the point this time, because it knows there's nowhere to park at that point, it stops right here where there's parking. Like that.

And I was like, you reach your destination safely. Sorry. This is pretty cool. I think this is pretty cool because what it shows, it shows like the car is basically like thinking where it's like, all right, I'm arriving at my destination. I'm going to get as close as I can. And then I need to find a safe place to stop. Couldn't find it.

Did a run around the block and then parked earlier than the point, which would be like what the human would do really in this situation. So this is pretty cool. Like if this is really like neural nets deciding that and not actually being programmed into the car, you gotta admit this is impressive.

Now, it's not level four, it's not level five, self-driving, anything like that. If the car would have hit the curb while trying to park, Artur would have been fully responsible for it. Unfortunately, this is not taking any responsibility. But still, I thought that this was something noteworthy, a little bit encouraging for V12. Do you agree, Seth? Yeah, I mean, that's...

particular example is certainly that way i like i hate to say this but i don't trust people with the blue check marks always that i feel like i have a blue check mark i know i know you though uh so i don't know i like i need to see it myself i you know why not give it to if it's this good then why not give it to everybody um you know the version i have right now is not great so how bad could this be

I mean, I've been saying what we really need is the data, it's actual data to see improvement with disengagement per mile and all that. And Tesla is unfortunately not releasing that. So even if you had it and you experienced it, even that is not good enough. I mean, like even if we were doing it, you get V12 and we do an episode and set comes back, set has been notoriously improved.

Not very positive about FSD, but I come back and like, it's incredible. It's still not as good as actual data. It's still anecdotal. And Tesla is not releasing data. It's annoying as hell. Cybertruck, we have, speaking of anecdotal evidence, we have some anecdotal evidence that the Cybertruck production is ramping up. There was a large fleet that was spotted at Gigafactory Texas.

So as we noted, speaking of Tesla being opaque with its data, they've done something that we didn't appreciate with the latest delivery release last quarter. Now they're not only not splitting up Cybertruck deliveries, they are including it in Model S, X and Tesla Semi all together. So we have no idea like any of these programs are doing overall.

So Tesla is not releasing cyber truck production right now or deliveries. So the best indication that we have right now is these flyovers like John Techmeyer has been doing over at Gigafactory Texas in Austin. And the last one was encouraging. That was on Wednesday. There were over 100 trucks spotted at the staging area for shipping.

With more trucks coming out of the factory than yesterday. Same thing, by the way, it was over 100 trucks yesterday too, with some already going out too. So it would show. I don't think we can say it's 100 per day or something like that just yet. That would be a little bit too early to say. But it is encouraging. And it looks like it's at least a few hundreds per week right now.

which is good. We also have seen more people getting confirmation of like VIN numbers for deliveries, more deliveries every week too. So it's still hard to gauge where cyber truck production is right now. And also it can be up and down also. Keep note of that. But it is encouraging. I mean, I would assume right now it could be probably in the high hundreds to a few thousand cyber trucks already on the road. And Tesla could deliver soon. Like maybe the, maybe the,

I would think the end of this quarter, they might achieve a thousand a week. Really? You think that's too optimistic set? Um, I don't know. I mean, that seems reasonable. Uh, there's certainly quite a few out there. Uh, have you seen one in the wild yet? I guess they're not really in Canada. I have not seen one yet in the wild up here in Vermont, but I was also in New York. Um, I think it's still mostly California and Texas right now. Yeah. I mean, we, we've all, all the ones we kind of reported on have been in that area. Um,

so I don't know like it seems like they're ramping up uh I you know I always question like why doesn't Tesla just you know tell us how many they're selling like what's the big secret it's not like I mean if Ford found out like what what is we're gonna do differently yeah that that has been the uh the thing that has been used but not really by well you know I've already launched that once or twice but it's mainly like Tesla fans pushing pushing that like

The reason why we don't push why Tesla doesn't release information, it's because it could be used, even if it's true information, it could be used by naysayers to attack Tesla. Funny enough, that's the same logic that Twitter use in the Twitter files that Elon exposed. Like when Twitter justified censoring through information,

They said it was mal, instead of misinformation, it was mal information. That it's true information, but that could be used for bad things. Right. Elon exposed that, was very proud of exposing that, but he uses the same logic for Tesla stuff. Yeah, there's no reason. I mean, Tesla is very opaque with its information. It's not transparent with its shareholders, and it should be. There's no reason not to. I'm not a Tesla-ator for saying that. It's just...

like basic logic really yeah and then you have to go through different you know like insurance companies and you know cox automotive and like all these other like not not great sources of information and then you're kind of guessing and then you're going on data that might be skewed just why not just put it out there yeah one more thing on the cyber truck real quick uh is this um

Real-world test of the wait mode. So we talked about wait mode before when Tesla started marketing a Cybertruck. Elon talked about the Cybertruck being waterproof and being able to be used as a boat and go across rivers, especially the river across the South Padre Island in Texas between the SpaceX Starbase and South Padre Island in Texas, which is about 360 meters, 1,000 feet across.

It's not quite there. It's not the first time that he's talked about Tesla vehicle being waterproof and being able to use it as a boat. And Elon and especially Tesla influencers have been very happy to share video of Tesla vehicle going through some significantly deep waters and coming out seemingly unscathed on the other side. And I always have an issue with that, promoting that stuff, because if you actually look at the Tesla warranty,

It says that if something happened after the fact, you avoid it. So it's not something that we should encourage. Tesla shouldn't promote it if they don't warranty for it. Now I thought maybe the Cybertruck is going to be better because they have the weight mode, which says that it can go through water and it pressurizes the battery pack and raise the ride height to the maximum so that you can more easily go through water with it.

But now that someone actually tested it, it's Techrax, I think. Sorry, I forgot the guy's name. I should credit him for this because he probably ruins his Cybridge backward. Techrax is his name. All right, so he went through a few of these. Sorry, I keep putting the sound off and it doesn't work.

um these big bottles of water there in Texas and um the first one was pretty easy it's not a big one but the the other two were were quite deep like you have this this image here that I shared here can you see a significant amount of water though the guy was driving way too fast in that water it created this pressure wave in the front you obviously you don't want that if you

You shouldn't go through water if you can avoid it. If you have to, go super slow because you don't want to create this pressure wave. The water goes just a little bit higher than a bumper, maybe, and now it goes all the way over the windshield. It makes no sense. Don't do that. Okay.

Now, but what I found interesting is that now even the Cybertruck and the wait mode, it's still not warranty if something happened to it. When you activate wave mode, wait mode, you have to activate off-road mode. And in the off-road mode, Tesla says that damage to the vehicle while off-roading is not covered or the warranty. And then when you switch to wait mode, it's...

Same thing happened, it says at your own risk and they give you some parameters to try to be safe, but it's still not covered because you're off-roading technically. Even if the water puddle is on the road, you don't have a big argument because you switched to off-road mode. And when you switch to off-road mode, you'd assume that you're off-roading and it's off-runt in it. So not a bad look. But the guy went through that water a few times.

And the Cybertruck was able to go through quite easily, so that's good, but not without issue because there's two plastic parts that came apart, one on the bumper, one in the wheel well, though it was able to snap those back quite easily, so no big deal there. But also the buttons on the bed that allows you to open the tunnel covers and the tailgate, they stopped working after that. So not without damage, really.

Okay, moving on from Cybertruck. Oh, this I thought was pretty cool. It might sound like small news, but when I started doing the math online, this is actually a good example of how impactful Tesla can be at its current scale.

So for those that are avid users of Sentry Mode, you know that it's quite power hungry. Like it consumes a lot of power. That adds a lot to the vampire drain. Tesla, for those that don't know, the vampire drain is what we call the...

So the energy use that you have when the car is parked, so your car is parked and still use some energy, whether it is from the computers on board when you ping them with the app or the battery conditioning, sometimes depending on the temperature, the battery thermal management system will kick in.

So there's some energy if you leave your car without driving it for long times, without being plugged in, it will lose some power that we call vampire drain. Now, sentry mode, if you add that to that, it contributes a lot to the vampire drain, like several times more. And some people did the math on it and they calculated that if you leave, like if you leave your car parked all day, like 24 hours, and you leave sentry mode on, and for those, I should explain sentry mode real quick. Sentry mode is the

Tesla used all the autopilot cameras around the car to survey your vehicle and to basically record everything that's happening around it and to use an alarm system if there's some suspicious activity, like someone messing with your car. This was introduced when there was an epidemic of people keying cars in San Francisco, keying Tesla vehicles and all that. So it was used for that. It was very good at deterring that.

So a lot of people use that regularly. If you park your car at work and you are in an area that you're not comfortable with, you turn that on and it's great for your ease of mind. But it does consume a lot of power. For 24 hours of use, it consumes about 7.2 kilowatt hours of energy, which is a lot. It's basically 10% of your battery if you have a long range Model 3 or Model Y. It's a lot.

So Drew Baglino, Tesla's SVP of powertrain and energy engineering, was asked about that this week on X. And he said, agreed. CenturyMode power consumption needs improvement. The team is working to reduce by 40% in a Q2 software update. So Tesla is preparing to release a software update next quarter that could slash power usage of CenturyMode by 40%, as much as 40%.

So I did the math real quick with the 7.2 at the scale test last. So obviously, I don't actually have data on sentry mode usage. I'm going to use complete guess. It could be a lot more than that. It could be a lot less than that. But we know there's about 5 million tests of vehicles on the road right now. It's a lot. Like, it's a huge scale. So if you can make improvements, it can have a big impact. Again, this is a new TE software update.

Let's say that 1 million vehicles use Sentry Mode regularly, and they use it about an average of 24 hours per week, just to have a nice round number. It would need 7 gigawatt hour of energy used per week for Sentry Mode across Tesla's fleet. It's massive. It's huge, just for Sentry Mode. So you slash that by 40%, you just save 2.8 gigawatt hour of power.

So that's all the carbon production from that gone. The cost of that gone, like energy is not necessarily cheap. I did like an average of like 15 cents per kilowatt hour, which I think is probably low, would save $420,000 per week. Elon would like that number probably.

So I think it's pretty cool. I think it's a great example of like the scale, the impact that Tesla can have at the current scale. And that scale is just growing, of course. You know, one of our commenters who is perhaps a glass half empty, Carl in San Diego says, found it ironic that years after Elon Musk, who according to himself has done more for the environment than anyone else, introduced a 7.2 kilowatt hour per day electrical waste on century mode is finally fixing it.

So if you look at it that way, you know, Tesla introduced a huge electrical burden

on on the world 7.2 kilowatt hours a day per car and not they just fixed it now rather than okay it's a bit of a cynical way to look at it like this that's the kind of like it was a great solution when tesla came up with it because people don't remember like it was an epidemic back then like there was like every week there was people like showing images of a

their car being keyed for no reason. And it did help. It caught a bunch of people, made the news, so it became a deterrent. So it was a great solution. Yeah, maybe they should have addressed that sooner. Maybe it's not that big of a problem. Maybe I'm completely way off with a million people using it. Maybe it's like 100,000 people. I don't know. By the way, you know who invented that, right? Was that you? That was me.

Oh, that's right. I remember. You did mention it to Elon. I did remember that. No, you're right. Yeah, I came up with that. And then I called it Don't Mess With Teslas. And two years later, it came. And, you know, obviously... Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember that now. Yeah.

There was a cool moment too with me with the Century World. Do you remember that? I went eating with my friends one night and there was a guy that parked his manual car right behind the Tesla in a hill. And then when he went to leave,

His car rolled forward and went to an inch of the Tesla vehicle. So now he didn't want to get in his car anymore because he was afraid of like, he couldn't do the trick with the, or I think his handbrake didn't work that well too. So he was scared of doing it again. So me and my friend went and pushed his car up the hill while he was reversing so it doesn't hit the Tesla. And the sentry mode on the guy was on.

But like nothing, no one touched his car. His car was fine. Like we're successful. So I thought like, there's no way he's going to check out. I went, I went behind his camera. I was like, all good, all good like that. But I thought there was no, he was going to check it because,

It wasn't a super busy street, so probably you got like a thousand alert that night. And if I go back to my car and nothing is happening on my car, I'm not going to check all the footage. But the guy actually checked it out and then posted it to Reddit. And then someone recognized me on Reddit. It's like, I think that's because the guy was like, what's happening? I don't know what they're doing with my car behind. So I was able to explain the guy what happened to his car. Small world.

All right, let's go with Rivian's quarters that they posted their earnings for Q4. And it was not great. It was not a good quarter for Rivian. The main thing that we are looking at with Rivian is gross margin, obviously. So they are selling their vehicle at a loss right now as they ramp up production.

And they had like a crazy bad gross margin. I think it was like minus 138% at one point. I don't have it posted here. So they were like losing like one and a half car per, like the price of one and a half car was like what they're selling a car. And they've slashed that dramatically over the last year down to 36% gross margin in Q3. Yeah.

But then last quarter, there were less deliveries. They changed the deal with Amazon too. Now the percentage of vehicles they're delivering to Amazon is much smaller. And it affected the gross margin significantly where now they are way up again at minus 46%, like 46% in negative gross margin. So it went up 10.25%.

And people were not happy with that. And the, when the, the stock crashed like 15% overnight and then another 10% today. And now it's on the all time low. So I generated 1.3 billion in revenue in Q4 on just short of 14,000 deliveries. So the full year is 4.4 billion, which is pretty cool up 167% from last year.

They are losing still $606 million a quarter. Again, that's not just loss per vehicle. It's also they are expending their service and then sales infrastructure, their chargers and all that. So it's going to be a lot of money going out either way. But yeah, gross margin minus 46% down from 36% last quarter, but still up from last year. Okay, we don't have last year right there.

So now they are losing $43,000 per vehicle. That's a lot of cash. And on loss from operation was 600 million. Net loss for the quarter was 1.58 each. Ouch. But they still have $9.3 billion cash on hand. So technically, they're still good for...

a wild and they still guide uh so that already with the first quarter last quarter of the year done they are guiding for um 2024 and uh they're guiding for a modest gross profit so they're going to turn the plan to turn positive in the fourth quarter of this year so last year they did guide positive gross margin in 2024 but not for the whole year and now they say it's only going to be for a fourth quarter so this is still this this is the um

heart of the battle here it's the positive gross margin and uh going for minus 46 percent losing 43 000 per car to zero or one dollar per car is uh is not easy to do especially that they are reducing their prices like they they are launching like uh cheaper versions of the vehicle and all that so it's not it's gonna be a hard thing to do not impossible but hard to do so hear me out on this one uh

I feel like Rivian wants to get profitable in the fourth quarter. Obviously, that's what they promised. They've been pretty good about not breaking their promises overall. Gross margin, sorry to correct you, but it's gross margin that they are still going to be losing money in Q4. Right. But they want to get to that in the fourth quarter. Yeah. It's possible that they could be sandbagging this quarter and probably next quarter, but

so that they can show a profit in the fourth quarter. If they take a bunch of losses on some stuff and do some accounting stuff, theoretically, then they can show that they're profitable in the fourth quarter if they take some of the losses now. I know generally approved accounting procedures aren't that tight, but I think that Rivian really wants to make the fourth quarter look really good.

So I feel like they're kind of, they're taking the hits now. I mean, they're dropping 10% of their staff as well. Yeah, yeah. We should mention that, yeah. So it's not for fun that they're doing this, but I think that they really want to kind of get to that point. No, for sure. 10% of the staff being off is going to help. But again...

They are aiming for positive gross margin on the vehicles in Q4, not being profitable. So I don't know how much they can maybe do. I don't know if they account for credits, like emission credits in the cost, or if it's just going to affect the overall profits.

Because they could do that. They could stack up on credit for emissions and sell all of those in Q4 to other automakers that need it. Or just account for that. Yeah, yeah. So that could be. But again, I think we need to see actual costs go way down for Rivian. Yeah, I wonder why they're having problems. I mean, the demand's still there, at least for the R1S. Yeah.

they they did lower their prices a little bit but uh not incredibly like why would why would each car cost more to make now that doesn't doesn't really make sense they did say that they have the most popular vehicle for over 70 000 now which uh i i i looked it up quickly and it's i couldn't dispute it so it looks it looks correct which is which is pretty impressive like yeah

It's basically what Tesla did. Like they're following a similar trajectory as Tesla with the small SMX with these, like these are pretty good numbers, especially since they're just North America too. And do you think, do you think that's what wound up Elon a little bit? Elon's been kind of on a, I wouldn't say a tirade on Twitter X. It is more like pointing out some, you know, some scary facts about Rivian's, you know, move to, you know,

roadmap to profitability. So, you know, is Elon pissed off at Rivian or is he, you know, theoretically trying to help Rivian? I mean, trying to help Rivian, I don't know. That sounds like a stretch. I think Elon is on a mood lately that he attacks his rivals. Right, right. Like, you know,

He has an AI company, he's trashing all the other AIs. You could argue that he has legitimate criticism of those, but they are his competitors and he's trashing them. And now he's telling people Rivian is going to go bankrupt.

He said the same thing about Lucid. So Lucid also had a terrible quarter, to be fair. Don't need to go into the details of it, but yeah, it's a similar situation as Rivian, just a little bit worse. And that was a weird one. Elon also commented on the Lucid and he said, the only reason they're still alive is because they have...

their Saudi sugar daddy that's backing them. Which I thought was a weird comment coming from a guy that tried to sell Tesla to the Saudis a few years ago in his take private deal. And his partner with the Saudis on Twitter, he had them roll over their shares. He didn't buy the Saudis out when he went private with Twitter. Saudis have 5%, 10% of the company, whatever it is. Yeah, Twitter's the Saudi sugar daddy or Saudis are the Twitter sugar daddy.

Yeah. So I wouldn't be careful if I was, you know, when I posted that to some of his defenders, he's like,

We're nerds that keep defending Elon when they have no business to. Claim that, yeah, Elon was pro-Saudis back then when Tesla did the deal, was trying to do the deal with Tesla. But then they killed the journalist. Oh, my God. Really? Yeah. And then he backed away from that. Like, jeez. You put a timeline completely wrong, first of all. And why is he still in business with them with Twitter? Like, come on. It's so weird.

Oh man, that's why I say now, like I resisted that for years to calling the Elon fans a cult. But when they are willing to do like misinformation like that, it's like, yeah, that's very culty. All right. This is bad news here. And it is something that we were dreading for a little bit, but we knew was coming.

legacy automakers are starting to do some major pullbacks on their ev plan mercedes announced this week that so before that their plan that mercedes was starting from 2025 onwards they will only release all electric vehicles they will still they would still sell ice vehicles combustion engine vehicles but they wouldn't release new ones only new mills would be electric which we applaud them for i think it was the great move

Now they are backtracking on that this week. They say that they're going to release ICE cars well into the next decade, so well into the 2030s. Bad move, in my opinion. It's a little bit short-sighted. I think they're going to have a tough time. Well, to be fair, also, I think they screwed up a little bit with some of their EV programs right now. I think some of their cars are not on par with their...

internal combustion versions uh they were a little bit late too with that in terms of like they were still using uh bodies from their uh ice cars to do evs just a few years ago now they've invested a lot more with the eqc being pretty cool like us too but you could make the argument that some of those are just not they they seem to be a little bit off from like the mercedes uh

We know Mercedes as being one of the top brands in luxury, and it seems that some of their EVs are a little nudge below that. So it doesn't help them, but it's also super useful now for them to like, "Hey, we're not selling that well, so we need to backtrack on those plans." It's like, "Yeah, you're not selling that well because maybe you're not on par with the rest of the market when it comes to your EVs." And now you're going to set yourself up to fail next decade.

Yeah, that's kind of the thing. You know, a lot of the, like, it's not just Mercedes or GM. You know, they say, like, well, we're, you know, we're kind of late to the EV party, so we're going to actually just be even later to the party. And, well, why not just invest more, build the best EVs, and, you know, take the future instead of, you know, getting the scraps of what's left over and still selling ICE cars and

That seems kind of nuts to me. Yeah. I mean, even like trying to predict like 2030s is...

The world is moving so fast these days, and it's clearly moving the electric ways. So they're calling it ICE tactical flexibility. So that's something that the Germans have been very pushing hard to. I've heard BMW talked a lot about that too, where they're like, yeah, we're being conservative in our approach, but we're very flexible. So we're making ICE vehicle program, but we can switch quickly to electric if we have to. Yeah.

I really need to see that happening because if you look at the volume numbers now, I mean, you have GM this week being super proud of making 200,000 to 300,000 BEVs in 2024. Yeah. Where I thought, based on how they were talking in 2016, I thought they would be there in 2018. Yeah.

Yeah, and they said they were going to pass Tesla and all the other stuff. Yeah, by 2018 or something like that. Yeah, that's why I'm still long Tesla. That's why I'm still a big supporter of Tesla despite my issues with the company and with Elon Musk. Tesla is never going to backtrack. There's nothing to backtrack to. They are all in on EVs.

And you cannot trust the legacy automakers not to backtrack. As soon as the economics get a little bit hard, as soon as the demand is not really there, not necessarily because there's no demand for BEVs, but because the economics is harder right now with the interest rates, with the uncertainty in the economy. There's also a lot of misinformation out there. Like if you're on Facebook, you see so many like weird bots or whatever.

talking about how, you know, batteries are exploding or you need to replace your batteries after two years or just like crazy stuff that, you know, very easy to debunk. But like, you know, most of the world is not terribly, you know, versed on EVs. So a lot of the stuff gets believed and people don't want. Yeah. And you have, you have Joe Rogan, who is probably like the biggest media on the planet right now.

I love a lot of his stuff, but he's not super educated on electric vehicle. And he had this one guy on the podcast at one point that had a big impact on him, which to be fair, the guy was a pretty good journalist and he covered, he was focusing on the cobalt situation in Congo, which can be very awful. Like it's not, no one wants to look at child labor, slave labor or near slavery neighbor, whatever you want to call it.

And then he keeps hammering now. Every chance you get, he talks about all these electric vehicles have cobalt in there. And then you encourage people in the Congo and everything like that, which is a little bit more complicated than that. First of all, you have most of the EVs being produced today are LFP-based batteries, which don't have cobalt in there. If you're concerned about cobalt,

Don't use a phone because all your phones have a lot more cobalt per capita than your batteries in a car. Everything that needs super high energy density, like a phone, like small electronics, have cobalt. There's still cobalt in some cars. I'm not going to lie. Obviously, my car has cobalt.

But it's also not all cobalt that it's mined by slavery. It's near slave labor or child labor, obviously, too. Most companies try to avoid that. All right. But I'm saying I'm sure that has an impact because Jorgen is massive.

We have a few more news items to discuss and then we're going to jump into you guys' comments. So if you guys have questions for us about either what we discussed today or any other topics in the EV world, you can put it in the comments right now and I'll get to it in a few seconds. Mustang Mackie just got some very nice discounts, some price cuts across the entire lineup in Canada and in the US. We're going to focus on US pricing, but similar price cuts in Canada too. Sorry.

between $3,000 and $8,000 price cut. So now the select Revolve Drive, the base version, starts at only basically $40,000, a $3,000 price cut.

You can get the extended range premium rear wheel drive. So the longest range version that you can get went from $54,000 to $46,000, an $8,000 price cut. So that's massive. And then you have, again, $4,000 and $7,000 price cuts across the entire lineup. Even the GT version now costs just $57,400. So this is pretty cool.

Yeah, Ford is obviously feeling it. The Mach-E competes obviously with the Model Y and Tesla has cut the price extensively on the vehicle, so they just have to keep up with the price war at play. The Mach-E is made in Mexico, but it's made with overseas sales. They only get half of the federal tax credit. Yeah. Yeah.

No. Oh, is it pulled? Well, that's the lease. Yeah, the lease. Oh, yeah. Yeah. You can get around that if you get the lease version. Such a weird loophole. I know. It had to be on purpose. Otherwise, it's just too dumb to be not on purpose, right? Right. Yeah. I mean, if you're betting on the government not being dumb, they'll probably be losing it. All right. The ID7 Tourer. Is that how you call it?

yeah that's a weird name for it tour it's a wagon it's an id7 electric wagon they claim it's the first electric wagon um

I think so. I mean, you can, I want to call like the Taiken Cross Turismo, like kind of. I was just going to say that it's, it's the same company. Like, uh, you know, the people at the desk, like down the, you know, down the aisle, they're making, uh, yeah, I don't know. Maybe like people like, and they call something shooting brakes. They are really, yeah. They, they're really specific about their car types and everything. Right. Um, here we basically have sedans and SUVs and,

That's it. And then sometimes we call things crossover, but we don't even know what that means. Yeah, so pretty good looking car. I can look at this. Oh, the gallery changed. Boom. I mean, if you're familiar with the ID.4, obviously the front end is going to be nothing too surprising. But that nice little wagon profile, not for everyone, but very popular in Europe. And very efficient too, you have to admit that. It's getting...

a range of up to 685 kilometers on the WLTP. That's 426 miles. So obviously WLTP is not as strict as EPA, but still, I wouldn't be surprised if you easily get over 360 miles of range off of that thing. Yeah, it's solid. 200 kilowatt charging, 10 to 80% in 30 minutes. Just in Europe, I would assume, right?

Pre-orders expected in Q1 2024 in Europe. Yeah. I don't know if this is coming to the U.S. Maybe give it a shot. Sure. Try it out. ID4, ID3, ID7 tour. Maybe just a little test run in the U.S. would be fun. Yeah, we're still waiting for the bus to finally... Oh, yeah, that's right. Couples forget about that one. All right, BYD. I mean, the Chinese are coming. That's why I'm saying like...

the legacy automakers that are backtracking like you're you're giving the chinese all they're doing is waiting for an opportunity like they they have all these things being thrown in their wheels all these stick being thrown in their wheels with those protectionist approach in north america and in europe too but at one point if you guys are not delivering

People are going to have to turn to the Chinese to satisfy the demand for BEVs, and they are going to be ready for it. So this is the new Dolphin EV from BYD, and it starts out at less than 100,000 yen, which is the equivalent of $14,000 US. Crazy. And it's a pretty decent car. Now, it's a small car, but it's a four-door with a hatchback.

and a small battery pack but because it's so small and so light

You still get some decent range. This is the Chinese CLTC range, to be honest. So maybe slash a 20, 10 to 20% off of that. But still, so it's the base one has a 32 kilowatt hour batch pack, which is very small. I mean, we're getting back to the old days of the Leaf, basically. But they still claim 187 miles, 200 kilometers on this. So I would assume 150 is like achievable because it is smaller than the Leaf too. It has these tiny little wheels, but it's,

pretty nice city car now if you upgrade to the 45 kilowatt battery pack uh it's uh 16 000 it's not that much more expensive and that gets you to 261 miles of range 420 kilometers probably more realistically just over 200 miles range which is pretty good um then you have uh the fashion and night version which i assume have like different packages but they have the same powertrain um so

What else do we have? The charging capacity on this thing. Oh, yeah. The dimensions are just slightly smaller than the ID3. So just to give you an idea. I feel like Mike is going to import a couple of these on a container one of these days. He's just going to have like a yard full of Chinese, $14,000 Chinese cars. I mean, the ID might be in Israel too. Oh, they're definitely in Israel for sure. Yeah.

We should have Micah maybe do a few reviews of these cars. Yeah. All right. That's it for the news today. We're going to jump into you guys' comment section. All right. Let's go right to the big question. Any new info on Musk's desired compensation plan? So, yeah. The ruling, I think Musk's team confirmed that they plan an appeal. So the decision of the judge has been put on hold.

So there's been a lot of misinformation about over the last two weeks because like all the biggest shareholders in Tesla had to report their ownership in Tesla. And so Enon reported his ownership and people say his ownership has increased. It's now 20 point something percent. But that's not accurate. That's it's still 30. Did we lose set? Nope. Not sure what happened. I hope I'm still on right now. But all right. We'll see what happened with set. All right.

Oh, he's back. He's back. Okay. That's weird. My browser crashed. Okay. I thought it was me for a second because I was seeing my connection on the studio going up and down for some reason. But I haven't been cutting off enough. I'll show it. All right. Where was I going with that? Oh, yeah. He still owns 13 point something percent of the company in stocks in his broker's account.

But you still have another extra, like almost 8% of shares that needs to be exercised from that are coming up to be exercised in the future from his compensation plan that has been rescinded by the judge. Now that has been put on hold. So technically right now it has access to 20%. Even then the 20% is not correct because obviously we'd have to sell some of these shares once exercising just to pay the taxes on them.

unless he's like sitting on a few billion dollars that we don't know about, which I doubt because Twitter. But so a lot of people misreported this as like 20% ownership. But now because the Musk team has told Delaware that they are going to appeal to the decision, this has been put on hold. So the deal is not rescinded just yet. And the other parties have agreed to that.

Now, the weird thing, though, is that at the same time, Tesla is trying to move incorporation from Delaware to Texas. So Elon has already done that for SpaceX, and I'm sure he's trying to do it for Twitter. I don't even know where Twitter is based right now. But yeah, so right now that's where we are. There's going to be an appeal and potentially a move to Texas that could change things up.

All right, let's move on. Jean-Michel Boulanger with Model Y made in China 2023. Initially, the car indicated distances in centimeters when parking the car. After an OTA update, no more centimeters display on the screen. Will it be back? I get inches on my display. Yeah, I assume Jean-Michel is from Quebec or France and he's using centimeters, so he wants centimeters back. So...

switch to inches with the OTA update but I would assume in the car you should be able to set it to centimeters because in the car you can switch between metric and imperial system so is it no more centimeters or no more anything maybe saying there's no more like distance yeah that might be I don't know that's weird

Looking at that one, my guess is that the take rate is very bad. So we're talking about why Tesla doesn't do numbers. They want to protect the stock price. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure the take rate is bad when you compare it to the 2 million people that reserved it. They reserved it with $100 stock.

uh refundable fee so it's not a big show of interest then you have also the fact that the cyber truck changed a lot in terms of pricing it's much more expensive since it was unveiled and uh it's not as good too let's be honest like in terms of uh capacity like uh

all the way down to the towing capacity, to the payload capacity is down. And obviously the range restoration without the range extender is also not ideal. So yeah, I'm sure the take rate is not that good, but they don't have problems selling it right now. I don't think so. Like it would be ridiculous. All right. Mike, the car geek says, Yang Wang, BYD U8 SUV has emergency float capability, but it requires the owner to bring their EV for inspection after a water event.

I assume you avoid the warranty if you do not. Oh, that's interesting. At least you have an option. If you bring it right away, then you're cool. Yeah, I'm not sure what they do, if they just put it in rice or how that helps. But sure. We're talking about have we seen Cybertrucks in the wild? Rich Teer says a Cybertruck with California plates was spotted in the wild in Kiloana in Vernon, British Columbia a few weeks ago.

I mean, California plates, it just means somebody's gone on a road trip. Yeah, I saw that before. Carl in San Diego reading Volt Rush right now, and they make the point that automakers assume increasing orders for parts traditionally results in lower per unit cost, but EV battery material mining increased orders results in higher unit per cost. This shows Rivian can't fix bleeding with cheaper car at high volume unless they build a Dacia spring with a 25 kilowatt hour battery. All right.

I'm not sure I'm exactly following. Yeah, I think he's just trying to say you can't really always reach profitability by making more of them. Yeah, I mean, there's a limit to the economies of scales for sure, but yeah, you can make a cheaper vehicle than the R1S and R1T. Yeah, for sure. All right, David Perrin says, electric needs to check out Australasia and the BYD range, quality and value. Tesla shouldn't have to worry, but they should. It's probably too late now in any case. So should they worry or should they not? Yeah.

i mean i'm sure that the quality of tesla vehicles is a little bit higher at this point still but

BYD, you just have to look at the improvement rate. Just a few years ago, it was nothing compared to where they are now. So they're definitely taking the hint. And if they still have room to improve, they could improve. Elon was on Bloomberg laughing, like giddy laughing at the quality of BYD. And now they're outselling. Now he's buying billions of dollars worth of batteries from them. Right, right.

From Facebook, Jake Riddle says, do you see megawatt DC fast charging wireless power transfer equipment becoming common charging practice anytime soon? That's a lot of stuff there. Fast wireless megawatt. I don't know. Megawatt is possible, but I don't think I don't I don't know of any in the megawatt level and wireless right now. But I know it's being worked on. I know like for buses and trucks, it's being more worked on. I'm sure I'm sure there's some use case for it.

That makes sense. And it's going to happen in the future. I don't think it's going to cover any significant part of the charging infrastructure, though, long term. I think it's going to be like more of a niche product that's going to be higher end. But yeah, I think it could work.

All right. Are you all seeing any signs of consumer anti-EV bias being reduced? No one in my family even considered an EV after I showed them how awesome my 2019 Model 3 was. Wow, really? That's... I don't know. Where are you from, KC5GTS? Because, I mean, if you show them your car like that, I've...

I've showed my car to some people that were pretty staunch, like anti-EV people. And at very least, like I opened for them the possibility that, okay, maybe this EV thing is not just a fad. Maybe not like they're going to buy one, but normally that's the way to go. Like I was going to say, like you're not working hard enough on them, but you did show them your car. Did you let them drive it? Maybe that's what you need to do next.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know how anybody buys an ICE car after driving a Tesla Model 3, for instance, or, you know, a Porsche Taycan or any number of EVs. Moving on, let's see, cobalt, we're talking about that a lot. Cobalt is used to refine oil into gas and diesel. I think I saw a video about this once. Yeah, that's right. I think Rich is right. Yeah, it's funny how the anti-EV puppets don't mention that fact.

I don't know how the split is right now in the market, though. I would assume that now batteries use more cobalt than the gas industry, but still a good point. It's an assumption. Don't quote me on that. All right. This is important. Electric is becoming irrelevant by domestic heroicalism. Do you know what that means? Because I don't. I think I do. I don't know. Anyway, China is sweeping across the international markets.

All right. Well, I mean, we're acknowledging that like China's vehicles are definitely getting better. They're selling a ton more of them. And they're there. I mean, we've said for years, like China's vehicles are 80, 90 percent as good as, you know, German, Japanese domestic vehicles. And they're like half the price.

So a lot of people are going to be fine with 80% to 90% of the vehicle at half the price. That's what you get for China. Yeah, I mean, his point is that it's a limited and narrow outlook, especially focused on one local area. So we are for sure focused on the North American market. He's right about that.

And there's no Chinese. There's not much Chinese EVs in the North American market right now. There's some. And look, like Seth said, we are very aware of it. And we actually are taking steps to address that. I'm planning, I would like to go to China this year.

to check out some of the EVs. I'm looking into that. So there's that to start with. I don't know if it's Chinese right now, but it's Asian. I'm going to be testing out the VinFast soon because my parents are getting one. So that's also we are open to that. So yeah, I think we're very open to it. I understand your point, but I don't think we are irrelevant. I am very interested to see. Oh, Simei is getting an island. Yeah.

Just to back up a little bit, I'm very interested to see the experience that your parents have with the VinFast. Because I've heard some good things and some bad things, and I want to see firsthand. We did get to drive a VinFast around LA a couple years ago. Yeah. Those were fine.

They improved a lot. That's what my dad keeps telling me. They improved a lot over the last few years. They listened to customers a lot. They improved. And they give a very good warranty too, like a bumper-to-bumper guarantee for 10 years, I think, which is insane. Obviously, the company needs to still be around in 10 years. So that's my main concern. But yeah, so I'm approaching it with an open mind because my dad does a lot of research, to be fair. But when he buys something, it's not like on the whim. So he did his research. We'll see.

But yes, that's cool. Congrats on the Model 3 Highland. I have to go check it out. I was going to say, you can head over there. Yeah, he lives not too far from me. Yeah, not too bad. Maybe we could do a comparison with my 2018 Model 3. That would be cool. All right. BYD Seal is a compelling car for US to compete with Model 3. I don't know if that's coming. You know, it's weird. They have like a BYD dealership in Los Angeles near where the auto show is.

And they sell like buses. Trucks, right? Yeah, trucks. Yeah. I don't know. All right. Let's see what's moving on. All right. Here's a good one. Mike, the car geek asked, what Tesla events do you expect this year? Investors, deliveries, other? You remember Elon said that as soon as Tesla posts their 10K SEC filings for the year, he's going to do all in on this meeting and publish it on X.

It's been two weeks, I think, since they released the 10K and they haven't. So we're expecting that in the future. But I know Tesla is like, you know, like sixth priority right now after X and Neuralink and XAI and SpaceX and all that. So I'm not super... I'm not holding my breath until that happens. But yeah, what else? Another AI day, I would assume. And the AI day would make sense. Tesla is an AI company. Maybe...

Maybe you can steal some of XAI's engineers to do the AI day at Tesla. That would be ironic. What else? Deliveries. Deliveries of what? I don't know. They should have a Powerwall 3, like just a little event. That would be kind of cool. I mean, it's already been installed for months and officially opened orders last week. Yeah, yeah.

All right, moving on. Yeah, do we have anything else? Cybertruck in Canada Auto Show, and he doesn't seem to be a big fan of it. The Cybertruck reminds me of, I don't know if you've seen the Seinfeld episode where he's dating this girl that looks really cute.

in one light and then in the dark or something she looks really ugly I mean it's a very polarizing truck too so it's like some people love it some people hate it oh we still lost this again

All right. Is the Tesla Semi still a thing? Yes, but it's a very low-volume production thing because the expansion of Gigafactory Nevada... Did you close your browser again? I did. It crashed. I don't know what's going on. It crashed again? Yeah. So, yeah, for the Tesla Semi to ramp up production, they need that expansion of Gigafactory Nevada, and they just...

had a breaking ground ceremony like last month on it. It's been delayed by like a year. So yeah, it's still a thing. It's just way behind production. It's going to happen. OKC's in Pennsylvania, I guess. Yeah, Pennsylvania.

How is Aptera doing? I saw they closed the accelerator program. Well, they closed it because they completed it. They achieved their goal with it. And it's still open within the people that are already in it. You can still compete to get a faster delivery. People that invest the most money get a faster delivery. So yeah, I mean, to full disclosure, I did put some money in Aptera.

And yeah, it's more like a show of faith. I really like their product. I really like the idea behind their product, I should say, because I've never actually tested it. But I'm in the EV space because of efficiency. I love a super efficient vehicle and I love what they're doing. It's that. It's ultra efficiency and

When you have an interoperability, then solar on the car starts to make sense too. So that's fun at the same time. We call it a solar electric car, but it's very much like there's an efficiency beast so much that, yeah, you can put some solar on it. So I like this idea and I hope that the car gets to market because I think it could be really cool. But it looks like you still need a little boost, a few million dollars to get across the finish line, it sounds like.

And then finally, we have Colin San Diego. Thanks, Colin, for listening to the show. I know he's always there. What are you really asking is that will Elon do to distract everyone? What you are really asking is what will Elon do to distract everyone?

I'm not sure I understand the context of that. Oh, I think he's talking about the event. Like, are they going to have... Oh, okay. Yeah, what Smoke Show, what little magic trick is going to do, the slide event trick. Yeah. Before a Tesla event, I would like just give us data on the FSD program. That's really what's missing from Tesla to gain some credibility right now.

Maybe because the data don't look good and wouldn't help the credibility that's possibly to do. But I would like Tesla to be less opaque on that before they do any, again, big demonstration of full self-driving in an event or something like that.

Anyway, that's it for us this week. Thanks, everyone, for listening to the show. We've been going for an hour. If you've been listening to us for an hour, you're a true electric vehicle nut like us. And we appreciate you for it. If you do enjoy this, if you can give us a like and a subscribe, free to do. It takes a second. It helps the show more than you think. We appreciate when you do it. If you're listening on your podcast app right now, if you can give us a five-star review, only if you enjoy the show, of course.

We appreciate that too. Helps the show, takes a second. And we're going to see you same time, same place next week. Bye-bye.