Tesla NACS continues takeover, new Model 3 battery, Nikola defect, and more
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Bye.

And we are live for a new episode of the Electric Podcast. I am Fred Lambert, your host, and as usual, I'm joined by Seth Wibntrop, but this time coming to us live from Topeka, Kansas. How are you doing, Seth? Good. If you can see behind me, if you're watching, I am at the Electric Formula Sun Grand Prix, which is currently going on. Here comes a car going by that looks like Appalachian State. I don't know if you can see that. A little bit. Yeah, so we're here covering the event, which is

Phenomenal. It's solar, it's batteries, it's students, all of the things we love about technology pushing things forward. Tesla was here, Blue Origin's here, a couple of solar companies, MathWorks, a bunch of other things. So really fun group of people and the competition goes all weekend. So if you're in the Topeka area, stop by and join us.

Yes, we have also an article, Seth posted an article on this earlier this week, or actually yesterday, I think, or the day before, where you can see a bunch of these cool vehicles that these students' teams are coming up with. So you can jump on the electric right now and you can take a look. Here's the whole group together here. Looks like quite a fun event.

Before we jump into the news this week, I want to thank our sponsor, Pedego. For July only, save up to $500 on Pedego e-bikes, including the newest model, the Avenue. You can find a store in the show note right now by clicking either of these links right here. And we're going to have a little bit more to say about them later on the show, so stay tuned for that. But let's jump into the news this week.

We're going to start with a quick overview. As you can see here, there's a lot of these articles here. So we're going to go through pretty fast because this is all about the NAX takeover, basically. We've been updating you every week on what's happening with quite a transformative moment in the EV industry in the North American market, which is NAX kind of almost undoubtedly now becoming the standard. So a few key things that happened this week.

Well, Volvo and Polestar, which basically the same thing at this point, are joining up officially. Same exact deal, basically, as Ford, GM, and Rivian have announced before. Kind of the first...

European slash Chinese companies to join on board. The Germans are still not in yet, but we're going to have a little bit more to say about that soon. And obviously the Japanese and the Korean are also not quite on board just yet, but I think it's going to come. And why do I think it's going to come? It's because SAE,

one of the previous sponsors of the podcast, has announced that it has come to an agreement with Tesla to take over the standardization of the NAC standard. So,

When Tesla first announced that it's opening up its own connector, becoming NAX and trying to open it as a standard, it hadn't gone through the proper homologation process to do that. It was sort of more of an enunciation of it. And then...

Most likely a test of the market to see how it would react and if it was actually interested to do it. And it took a little bit, the time, probably like five to six months to get some momentum, but now it's in. So...

SAE International taking over, basically what does it mean? Is that they're going to do through all the amalgamation and regulation process that comes with making it an official standard? And also it sort of takes that away from Tesla, which is probably one of the last bottleneck that some of the other two makers were not sure about. Now that this is in the end of SAE and they're going to make it, they're going to, how did they phrase that exactly? Yeah.

They had a phrase that they use to develop... Well, they did say that it's going to be done on an accelerated timeframe too. They're going to use a public infrastructure. But basically, it's going to be now more of a consortium of effort and all the different players are going to be able to have inputs into the standard rider than Tesla just giving it to people. And obviously, this is for anyone that had any doubt about

Like Tesla, is there any intention, a hidden intention behind that? Is it trying to just own the entire connector and charging infrastructure? What is happening here? That takes some of it away. Now,

Tesla is obviously behind the whole connector. It developed it from the ground up by itself and all that. And now it's basically given it up to the industry for good reason. Now it's starting to be very hard to argue against Tesla having any hidden intention behind this. It's very much a mission-driven move, in my opinion, at this point.

Yeah, I agree. It's a good thing. You know, I'm not always like 100% pro Tesla's moves, but in this case, I think they have a superior standard. I will say, though, however, this, you know, even if it's open, even if it's, you know, everybody has input. On day one, Tesla is way out in front of everybody else with like, you know, manufacturing the NACs connectors, manufacturing receptacles,

Everything else, like they're, you know, 10 years ahead of everybody else or infinitely ahead of everybody else because nobody else has even started. Pretty much 10, 11 years ahead. Right. So it's not, I mean, it does seem altruistic in a lot of ways, but it also doesn't really put Tesla in a bad position per se. Correct. Yeah, that's fair. They're in a great spot.

situation now they're going to have more charging stations available to Tesla owners eventually which you know obviously it goes both ways and you know they're not going to have to build you know in a couple years like in four or five years nobody's going to have to build adapters because everything's going to be NACs

So, yeah, the adapter market is basically going to max out at some point where everyone that needs one or wants one is going to have one. And then with every new car coming on the North American market as a NAX connector, it won't be...

It won't be written anymore. And it's just, it's going to be a way smoother market in North America. Like right now, you still have Shademo. You have the CCS, obviously, and you have Tesla. And the CCS was seen as the standard, but Tesla was the biggest one with the next in terms of volume. So it was very weird market.

Very not homogenic North American market. It won't be just yet for the reason we just discussed with the adapters and whatnot, but 2025 onward, it's a done deal. So that's going to be way better. A few new, a few other quick next news this week. So Volkswagen, even though they didn't jump on board completely, they did confirm that they are in talks with Tesla. So that's something that we've been discussing over the last couple

few weeks that these stories have been unveiling is um is that tesla is still right now because because a big part of this move is not just it is a better standard a better connector it's access to supercharger network is a big part of this whole thing so that is still tesla's for a good reason they paid for the whole thing they played the whole thing uh right so

Having that access is a big selling point for Tesla and now for everyone getting on board and next. This is the carrot that Tesla is dangling over all these other automakers. And so Tesla needs a deal. The automakers need a deal to do that. They need a deal especially for the adapter because they don't want to say, hey, we're dropping on all next.

All our vehicles starting in 2025 are going to have NACs. It creates, like we talked about, the Osborne effect for every cell before that. So they all need to have this deal with Tesla ahead of time, which is obviously a good thing for Tesla at the same time, or at least supercharger revenue-wise. So they confirmed that, and we assume it's going to come soon. And sure enough, just before they announced that, Electrify America announced that they

they are going to add NACs to their charging station, which we knew was going to come. All the superchargers, all the charging station manufacturer and operator's announcement about NACs are not as exciting because it just makes sense. Actually, it doesn't make sense that they haven't done that before once they actually opened the standard.

in November. Like if I was an executive at one of those companies, I would have jumped on that right away because like, hey, they're giving us access to the biggest fleet of electric vehicles out there. Let's just, and our job is to sell electricity to those vehicles. Like just to stop on that. Now they were a bit slow to this whole thing.

But now they're doing it and Electrify America doing it is a little bit more newsworthy, obviously, because of its affiliation with Volkswagen and all of Volkswagen's brands. So this is the Volkswagen group, by the way, that said that about being in talks with Tesla. And they mentioned that all their brands are involved in that. So you can assume that Porsche, Audi, VW will all be included in the sort of deal that I would assume going to be announced in the next week, maybe two weeks max. Yeah.

So, yeah. And on top of Electrify America, ChargePoint also announced it. Again, don't know what took so long. Blink also announced it this week. Basically, now I think all charging station operator and manufacturer, at least all the major one that are operating in North America have announced it.

We even had the first automaker, Verge, the first electric motorcycle maker, Verge, that announced that for its North American motorcycle, they're going to use NACS. I think we're going to see a lot more of these smaller companies that are not necessarily in the auto business, but in the

in like the off-roading world that you got off-roading road to where they have level two and up. So because some of them don't necessarily even need like electric bikes, for example, like you don't, they're not going to have NACs. You don't need level two, level three charging on those. But for everything that can use level two, level three, I think they're all going to move to that. It's just going to make a lot more sense. Yep.

All right. We're going to move on from next news. I know there was a lot of we went through all of it. I think everyone now is updated on the next takeover. I'm calling it.

If you do enjoy the Electric Podcast, I would appreciate if you can give us a like, thumbs up, whatever it is on your app that you're watching because we're live everywhere every 4 p.m. Eastern time on Friday. And if you are listening to the podcast through a podcast app, Spotify, Apple Podcasts or whatever it is, you can give us a five-star review. It takes a second to do.

It's free and it helps the show a ton to help it up the charts and propagating to more EV fans that want to keep up with all the news in the electrification world. All right, we're going to move to some Tesla news this week. A rumor, but a rumor that sounds very plausible is coming out of China right now about the new Model 3. So we are starting Q3 and that's when we are expecting the new Model 3.

We are expecting it to be produced in Gigafactory Shanghai first, like it's often the case with new Tesla products these days. And there's been a rumor that Tesla is going to shut down all three productions for a little bit in Shanghai in the coming weeks. Makes sense. And now we learned that

So we've been talking a lot about the designs updates, some new features in the Model 3 and all that. But we expect a significant upgrade under the hood with things like the powertrain and the actual chassis of the vehicle. Not exactly clear what those entail exactly. For the chassis, we know it's probably going to involve a bigger casted part and all that, like the Model Y. But in terms of the powertrain, it was not clear. Tesla has been in...

improving its powertrain significantly over the years, especially at the drivetrain level and module impact level. But in terms of cells, other than the 4680, they've been extremely reliant of what their suppliers have been producing, obviously. And in China, CATL has been the main partner for Tesla. And now CATL is bringing to production its new M3P cells, which is a new version of its LFP chemistry. So it leads to iron phosphate I'm talking about.

And there's a report coming out of China right now that Tesla is going to use this new battery in the base version of the new Model 3. And it's going to enable a 10% increase in overall energy capacity. So it's going to go up to a 66 kilowatt hour battery pack. So it should enable a slightly longer range than in the current version of the standard range Model 3.

It should. It's not exactly confirmed, obviously, because we need to see the weight differential and all that. But I would assume that Tesla is going to reduce the overall weight of the Model 3 with this upcoming update. There's also talk of cheaper, the M3P being cheaper than the existing CATL LFP cells, which are already some of the cheapest, if not the cheapest on the market. So,

That is bringing some hope of a lower price for the Model 3 with the update. But at the same time, Tesla has been slashing prices on the Model 3 ahead of the update. And they've been doing it on new inventory vehicle and not on new orders, which we've been expecting that some new orders might come as the new refreshed Model 3. So the oil situation is still up in the air.

All right. This is we knew was coming, but this is finally happening now. Tesla started to run ads, actual paid advertising, and they are doing it through Google right now. So it's some Google search ads. So people have started seeing pop up, especially in the UK.

but also in the U S and the, the, they've seen these in search or when they search for a specific term related to electric vehicles or Tesla, these things are going to come pop up right here. And Google has an interesting ad transparency program. So you can see all the ads run by specific companies. And Tesla was running 18 of them, mostly related to the model Y and model three again in the UK, but also some solar installation too. So Tesla has been doing a push for that. Yeah.

So this is obviously just Tesla dipping its toes in the advertising world. They announced that Elon confirmed that they're going to do it at the investor. Was it the investor day or was the shareholder meeting, I think, earlier this year? And the idea behind it is that Tesla has been relying on cutting prices lately to boost demand. There is an argument to be made that efficient advertising is

could cost less than those price cuts because a lot of people were just not aware of accessibility to Tesla vehicles in terms of pricing, especially in this world right now where the average new car sell price is so high anyway that a Tesla vehicle is not...

that expensive it's not as expensive as it used to be with combining the inflation and the price cuts together you you end up at a sweet spot for tesla that so if people become more aware of that you could increase the market but this is not really i think what most people were expecting in terms of ads like this is very example like

search ads like you can literally see them on the screen right after watching it's nothing impressive i think people were expecting some like tv commercial style things some maybe some banner ads on the website that include some nice graphics or whatnot what do you think seth yeah they're definitely dipping the toes in uh slow here um or you know maybe this is just the quickest they can get something up and then you know the bigger uh tv ads will have to come later after some production value and um

Stuff like that. I don't know. It doesn't seem like Elon's a big fan of ads unless it has to do with Twitter. Unless someone pays him to run them on Twitter. Right. Yeah, and people had said previously that, hey, here's a good way for Elon to get money from his cash volcano of Tesla to...

uh, test or to Twitter and just buy, you know, $10 billion worth of ads, you know, have Tesla buy $10 billion that adds on Twitter. And that's, you know, transferring the money over. But, um, he's not done that yet. Uh,

I don't think that would be a good first place to start if that's a concern at all. No. Obviously, the best place to start is electric. I don't know why we're not wearing Tesla. Everyone is just the most self-serving place possible. Everybody's already got their Tesla or won't ever have a Tesla. Yeah. But it's interesting nonetheless. We're going to keep an eye on that because...

I mean, either way, like obviously I'm joking about Tesla running ads on electric. I don't think that's going to happen, but it's good for us anyway, because it increased the competitiveness of the advertising market for electric vehicle, which obviously we're involved in. And directly because most of our ads are through this, actually through Google ads, like they just mentioned. So we don't have any power actually on what shows up, creating kind of a firewall between the two.

All right. This one is interesting here. It's not that big of a story, but I had to post it because it looks like the story is going viral right now. It's hilarious. You can still hear me, right? Yeah. Okay. Just a little bit of a lag here for some reason, but the story should be running. So we've been talking about this for a little bit now where Tesla basically...

cancel all more s and x orders in right hand drive markets even stop taking new orders all together for the moless and x in some specific right-hand drive market the smaller ones like thailand australia singapore in the uk which is obviously the biggest uh right-hand drive market of

Japan might be bigger. Yeah, Japan or UK, they're pretty big. I think for Tesla, UK is much bigger, though obviously Tesla has never made a big stride in Japan, which is they love their domestic brands there. But

UK was a big deal because a lot of them were waiting for their new orders since the refresh two years ago. So they had their order in for years and now they just canceled them. But in the UK, instead of just not offering new Model S and X at all, they started offering left-hand drive Model S and X to those buyers.

So some of them took Tesla up on that offer and they started delivery this week. And what we learned this week is that Tesla has included the product to, uh, to cancel out the fact that they have a left-hand drive rather than a right-hand drive. And that product is called the Reacher. And this, this, what we're seeing here right now, it is, uh,

a grabbing stick, I'm calling it. I don't know if there's an actual word for this, but you see a lot of disabled people, people with handicaps that are using those to reach distances. There's like a claw at the end to grab it. In this case, I assume that Tesla meant it for people to especially to reach anything that is on the passenger window and

that normally should be on the driver's side. Uh, so you can think about things like park, parking tickets, parking receipts, um, drive-thrus. If you're going to drive-thrus and you want to, you grab your coffee and you just use your little claw and grab it. Yeah. Good thing that Tesla seats are easy to clean. Um,

So, yeah, it's pretty hilarious because Tesla is like, we just cancel all your orders and we force you to if you want. People took offense at me putting forcing in that headline. But, I mean, they are forcing you to get a left-hand drive if you want to have a Model S and X like you. Obviously, you can cancel. You can not buy it altogether. But if you want a Model S and X, you're forced to get a left-hand drive right now. That's a fact.

But Tesla is like, ah, it's okay. We give you the Reacher. The Reacher. The Reacher, game-changing product from Tesla right here. At the bottom, there's the original tweet, and it shows that guy actually using that for, on the top left picture, I think, is him reaching for the keys to open a building or something. Oh, yeah, he can't open direct in Twitter anymore.

Yeah, there you go. But yeah, he's got like his keys and he has to open a garage door or something with that. That's pretty ridiculous. But at the same time, it is a crappy solution to an obvious problem. And it's obviously cheaper than building left-hand drive cars.

Yeah, but that's the thing that people have been saying to some of the more hardcore Tesla fans. I've always used that as a positive for Tesla because of its very minimalist and symmetrical design inside all of its vehicles, really. It's like super easy to make it left-hand drive rather than right-hand drive. I'm like, all right, apparently not that easy otherwise. They wouldn't have canceled thousands of orders. It's weird that they already have it for the Model 3 and Model 4.

And they had it for the Model S and X earlier. It's just weird that they, I guess they just do not make enough of them to rationalize that, I guess. They don't make enough. And I also think that probably Tesla, I mean, we knew that Tesla was sitting on a big inventory in the US and other places. So they might decide to just, let's just try to unload some of that left-hand drive inventory and right-hand drive markets. Because even though we get a certain cancellation rate on those, right?

We do unload a lot of cars before the end of the quarter, which is always an important goal for Tesla. So I think some of that had to play too. And we saw a big drop in Model S and X inventory in the U.S. over the last few weeks. Obviously, that can be attributed to delivery push in the U.S. too. But I wouldn't be surprised if some of those have been sent out to right-hand drive markets.

All right, here's a question. If Elon Musk tweeted out Reacher 499, sorry, 4999 to all of his followers, how many could Tesla sell? Would he sell like 100,000, do you think? Probably. Probably.

Probably. I mean, so many people would just buy 20 of them thinking that it's going to be like some kind of novelty products or something. That's the thing with these. Every time that Tesla has done a drop like that or like the boring company has done a drop like that, it has worked. Yep. Tequila. Tequila. Beer. $40 a can beer, a can or a bottle, whatever. All right. Last Tesla news before moving on to non-Tesla news.

Sorry. We have the consensus from Wall Street about the deliveries for Q2. Sorry.

at Tesla and it's 448,000 units vehicles globally for the last three months. So today is the last day of the second quarter. And Tesla is expected to release their delivery numbers most likely Sunday. Normally it's like two days after the quarter. Those Sundays are a weird time to release that. It's generally the case. Maybe it's going to be different this time because it's a long weekend in the U.S., right? Yeah.

How does it work, the 4th of July? Is it going to be Tuesday, Wednesday? I think they just take the 4th off. I don't know if they're going to. Yeah, I don't know how it works, to be honest. Yeah, it's not a long weekend. No. Yeah, so yeah, it should be normal then.

All right, so 448,000 units, that's up 6% from last quarter, or 422,000 units. That was a record, so this is expected to be a new record. If they do deliver on that estimation, it would put Tesla at 870,000 units.

units delivered for the first half of the year the goal for the year has been 1.8 million so tesla would need to deliver an average of half a million units for the next two quarters in order to uh to get there which seemed very much achievable obviously the discounts have been helpful in the u.s also you've been the new tax credit has been very helpful this year uh so we need to see that going for tesla but there's a new model 3 happening that could revive a little bit the uh

vehicle program that's been outshined by the Model Y over the last few months. So a lot of things are possible. But in terms of deliveries, there's one thing. The market is going to be looking closer to Tesla's gross margin, how they are affected by those price cuts. So that's going to be interesting, but that's going to be in another few weeks when Tesla gets closer to releasing their earnings.

All right, before we jump into the other news of the week, a lot of GM news this week we're going to get into. Let's talk a little bit more about our sponsor, the e-bike maker, Pedego. All right. This week's episode is sponsored by Pedego Electric Bikes, America's number one electric bike retailer.

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I have to say, like, as a side note, you know, maybe like five years ago, I was like, I don't know if I would recommend Pedego bikes. They they were kind of just I would say like, you know, like pretty good Chinese bikes that they would kind of rebrand and whatever. I have a buddy, Riley, who has a Pedego shop nearby, and he's always like really excited when a new one comes in.

the latest bikes that are coming out of Pedego are really solid. And of course his shop is like an Apple store for me because I love e-bikes. So if you know a Pedego shop around, go check it out. They've really improved and the bikes are amazing. And if you don't have an e-bike for this summer, like what are you doing? Like,

You need an e-bike for the summer. It's so much fun. It's so much fun. Get your life together. Come on. Yeah, yeah. It's just, even if you don't like biking, like, you're going to like biking for it because it eliminates the bad, the not fun part of it because, like, oh, you're going to kill yourself on a hill or something. You just, you feel, actually, you feel like a superhero when you're on a hill. It's just like, ooh, if you have, like, a smooth torque censoring on it, it's just so fun.

All right. We have a bunch of GM news to discuss right now, starting with the Chevy Blazer, which we haven't been discussing that much. It's kind of being overshined by the upcoming Equinox EV. It's a little bit more expensive. It's...

a little bit sportier SUV, but it's in production right now. The first, they call it sellable. So the first unit that is, can be delivered to customers have come out the production line and they've been celebrating there at the Ramos Arispe plant in Mexico, where it's being produced. And now it's expected to hit the leaderships fairly soon. And just a little quick note on the 2LT model, which,

Expected to start at $47,595 with up to 293 miles of range. And then you also have the little bit higher end RS model that has 320 miles of range, but starts at around $52,000. And then you have the high end SS model and one that starts at $70,000. This one is not going to come until the winter though.

Um, so while I was at the Silverado event, which I think we'll talk about, uh, they actually had a not, it was one that was actually drivable and it was built at the factory. Um, and they let me kind of tool around in it, but I forgot to, uh, make a post for it. I, well, I just made a YouTube exclusive because it was kind of for the, the, uh, Silverado, but, um, I will add that to the post so that we can,

I'll enjoy that. It's a pretty solid vehicle. I have to say like,

seeing it in person is, it's a little bit nicer than I had. I like it more than I thought I would. And, you know, for me, like I've always had this like love hate relationship with blazers. Cause my, my grandfather and dad gave me a blazer S 10 when I was like 16 years old, which was like sweet. I got a blazer S 10, but it came with like a plow and a mower in the back. And that was basically because I was going to be working all the time with that thing. So yeah,

I basically spent like half of my teenage years like driving that thing around to either mow a lawn or plow a driveway so blue blazer love it poisoning the lift yeah

All right. GM launched the Altium OM charging with three different bundles as part of its GM Energy division. So they are delving a little bit deeper into the charging world and OM Energy storage. And they're doing it, obviously, in preparation for the upcoming launch of this Verado Electric that has vehicle-to-home charging.

capability. So here, I looked it up a little bit. When I read Scooter's article, I was looking for pricing because that was the main thing. With Ford's solutions, so Ford has a similar solution, that's the thing that people have been looking for. Apparently, it's hard to get your hands on one and it's even harder to get pricing on one.

But yeah, what we have here is this little suite of solutions. So you have the GM PowerShip charger, which is a charger that up to 19.2 kilowatt of charging speed. It also enables vehicle to home bidirectional charging capability with compatible GM electric vehicles, of course. Then you have the vehicle to home enhanced enablement kit. So I assume you need both of those together to work. So it's...

Not just one, because I don't think you can just have one enablement kit, but the inverter, home hub, and dark start battery comes with it. 9.6 kilowatt of discharge power capability into your home, sensibly connect to your home and grid.

Okay, and then you have the Altium ARM energy system where you have those two that we just discussed, the power shift charger and the arm and the moment kit, vehicle to arm and the moment kit put together. And you add to that

a separate power bank. So the GM power bank. So it used the old CM battery pack system to create a home storage that is compatible to vehicle to home. And it comes with either a 10.6 kilowatt hour version that have five kilowatts of power output or a 17.7 kilowatt hour version with seven kilowatt of output. So this is going to be GM's power wall competitor. Basically, you can see some pictures of it right now.

And yeah, unfortunately, like I said, the only thing that we don't have is the actual cost of these things, which is important to know because those things are for the most part,

Like it's very much about financial decision because they're going to replace like your generator or they're going to replace a power wall or whatever own battery solution that you have. So it needs to make financial sense on that front. So I think the, obviously the Altium energy package with the power bank would be more for someone that is looking at like some net metering advantage, right?

So you want to do some daily cycling and you don't want to use your vehicle's battery pack too often for that. You can still plug in your own battery pack if you have an extended outage, for example, if you have a natural disaster or whatever, and you want more than 17 kilowatt hour. I assume those are stackable too, but anyway, let's say that you have seven. That's the thing. You don't necessarily need for them to be stackable if you also have the battery in your vehicles to stack.

complemented if need be. So you can even take the smaller one, though the smaller one is also limited to five kilowatt. So that's something a lot of people don't think about that much. They are very focused on the energy capacity of our energy storage solution because they look at like, all right, my house consumes like

30 kilowatt hour of energy per day. So I want to have a full day of it. So I want to have 30 kilowatt hour. But you have to look at how much power you draw at once. So maybe like 15 of those 30 kilowatt hours, you use them in an hour's period of time. So you need that kilowatt capacity to do that.

So that's why I have two power walls here. It's not because I need 28 kilowatt hour of battery storage. It's because I need the 10 kilowatts of continuous output that the two of them put together gives me. Or actually, is it 14? I don't remember if Tesla had to upgrade it into seven by that time. I think it is 14. Now it is, but I don't know if it was by the time I installed those. Yeah. I don't remember.

So yeah, but, and then you have, you plug in your, your, your truck and then you have a 200 kilowatt hour of energy capacity, which is going to last you weeks. So it's, it's, it's pretty fun. It's a, it's a fun concept to have. I just, I really want to see the cost because like this whole thing could cost you like this, the whole old CM home energy system put together. I wouldn't be surprised if, even if you go with the 10 kilowatt hour power bank installed, you know,

$15,000, $20,000, $15,000, $20,000 installed. So big investment. A lot of money, but you get peace of mind. I think this is actually really good. And frankly, I'm surprised Tesla didn't come out with this product like five years ago. They've been talking about it. They never pulled the trigger. Yeah, it's just not a priority for them, I guess. But this kind of seems like the final form because you have...

Your house is good. You have like a cache of energy that, you know, if your car is not at your house, your house is still powered. But the big battery that's in your car can be used in emergency situations that last, you know, a day or more. Or, you know, maybe even a week or a couple of weeks if you have that crazy GM battery. But you need to leave the house for a while and go somewhere. Then the battery is gone.

you know, the stationary battery is now powering your house again. So for me, this is like, if I were clean slate doing something for my house, this is what it would look like. Um,

It kind of frustrates me that I have kind of a piecemeal. I have the solar and I have the battery and everything. And I have the switch off. But I only have two power walls, older power walls worth of energy. And then I have to kind of jerry-rig something else up from my other cars, which obviously not optimal. So kudos for GM for at least laying it out there. We'll see if it's price competitive and how...

how reliable it is. Yeah. I would assume we're going to see that closer to the actual, uh, deliveries of the, um, of the Silverado electric. Um, but, um, but at the same time, they were targeting the end of the year with the RST. And I feel like this was going to be around the same time. Yeah. But at the same time, the, when the, uh,

the lightning came out and we haven't seen that pricing either. So we'll see. It's a big installation thing. So that's why I don't understand Tesla not taking advantage of it because Tesla already has solar installers and electrician and all that doing the work for the energy division. So at least in the markets where those are available, it would make so much sense for Tesla to do that. Even if it's just for...

like knowledge, like just to get some experience with it and see how customers actually use it. Because this is argument with that as often been that customers don't, it's not going to use that that much. Like the Powerwall is a better solution than the vehicle to home, which I agree for the most part. But like Seth said, it's just good to have if you need it. Like if a lot of people are like not preppers necessarily out there, but like there's a few levels between like,

All right. I trust the grid 100% and being a full-on prepper. There's a few levels between those, and I think most people sit in that spectrum. So a lot of people in that spectrum, myself included, would like to have that as an option at the very least. Same. Where did I lose that? Okay, I moved that page right here. Sorry. All right. Still on GM news. The Hummer EV has gone full circle recently.

And that's with this vehicle right here, which is just a prototype right now. But what does that remind you of, Seth? Jeep. I thought you were going to say Humvee. Humvee. Yeah, I mean, the Jeep was the original Humvee, really. But yeah, obviously the Hummer originated as a civilian version of the Humvee, which was a military vehicle.

And then the Hummer went away for a little bit, but came back as the Hummer EV that we know today from GMC. And now it comes full circle because it has become a new military. They made a military version of the civilian Hummer. So really a full four-step full circle vehicle.

And we've been talking about before about the GM defense program going electric as the U.S. Army has announced that they want to go full electric by 2050, which is an ambitious goal because obviously you have like this is a big vehicle with a 200 kilowatt battery pack. But it is among the smallest vehicles that the military operates when you talk about like tanks and helicopters and whatnot.

But it's all very doable. It's just going to take time. And you have to start somewhere. And this is a good start. The armor, it makes sense. It was originally meant to be a military vehicle. And again, like you said, it has gone full circle now through the civilian electrification of it, which makes a lot of sense. The specs are the same. They expect maybe a little bit shorter range, obviously, when you put...

50 caliber machine gun on top and what looks like a bazooka it takes it put on some weight even if you remove the doors or whatnot but yes this is so this was the previous generation of electric vehicles that GM was developing with the army but it had even though they didn't say it was based on the Bolt EV battery pack it had a 66 kilowatt hour battery pack on it which is too much of a coincidence for me I think it was literally just using that

And that's obviously way too small of an energy capacity for a vehicle of that size and that much lack of good aerodynamic performance.

So the armor EV is a much better platform. And sure enough, looking into the program's notes, I found that GM Defense has provided not this. This is like a brand new prototype that is just for show right now. But they have provided a regular GMC armor EV pickup to the U.S. Army for testing right now on demonstration. So.

You can expect some kind of version of that likely being in the super overpriced military program request of proposals soon.

All right. Last piece of news before we jump into the comment section. And I see a lot of discussions in the comments right now today. So appreciate everyone that's discussing right now. But if you have a specific question for us, if you could put the question in front of it and ask it, so it's going to be easier for us to get to them after we're done with the next piece of news, that would be super helpful.

Or if you have any other subjects you want us to discuss in the EV world today, you can put them in the comment section right now. We're going to get to them in just a few minutes. After we talk about this, I spent most of my time working in electric since the fire at Nikola last week was spent on this story here. I spent a lot of time talking to a lot of different people.

trying to figure out what happened. And a lot of people that reached out to me after my article, just because of general skepticism that was in my article originally from Nicola claiming that foul play was involved in this fire that they had last week at their facility in Phoenix where five trucks caught on fire. There was foul play, but there hasn't been any evidence released. They claim foul play, but there was not any evidence released so far. Now,

We found another potential cause of the fire. I cannot say it is the cause because I don't know. I don't have the trucks. The analysis of the fire is still closely guarded. They haven't released anything yet. But I was able to confirm that Nikola had a major battery defect in the battery module that Romeo was making for that truck.

So talking to a bunch of insiders and actually reviewing the actual report about this incident confirmed that when Romeo was producing the battery pack for the battery modules, I should say, for the Trey Nicola truck,

a quality insurance guy on the production line and and this nicola's uh pr team here has tried very hard to shut down the article and their main their main argument was this here so romeo was producing two battery modules for the nicola trey the armis armis amos uh and the legion

The Legion is the one that ended up in the production version of the truck. There's a bunch of difference. The actual architecture of the pack itself, of the module, they are extremely similar. But they changed a few things to be able to have potting inside the module for the Legion. And they also changed the cells, but it's the same form factors and whatnot. And the problem is...

They produced this report on the ERMIS battery modules, which didn't make it to the production version. It was only in the early alpha. Then they switched to the Legion. So Nicolas is like, it's the Legion. The Legion is fine in its inner truck. But I talked to two sources that worked on this specific, on both the ERMIS and Legion modules. And they said that this problem was first identified on the Legion battery module and

This report was produced with the ERMIS for one reason, because the ERMIS is un-potted, like I said, the Legion is. So there's a bunch of potting all over the cells, which hides the connection of the cells, because the problem here that they found is this here. So the laser welding that connects the cells to the battery modules un-potting.

uh would sometimes puncture the cell and if you know anything about battery packs and battery cells you do not want to puncture a battery cell it's really bad news and what they found is that it creates this imbalance in the battery modules and over time this imbalance the delta of the imbalance just increases and that can create a lot of problems in the battery pack even thermal events according to many battery experts

So, all right. So they did take that. And like what I've seen here on the report, they detected it March 28th. Again, from my sources, it was detected on the Legion battery pack, the battery pack that Nikola uses, the battery module that Nikola uses in the tray. Okay.

Nicola, when they talked to me about it, they said if this made it to a truck, it made it to early alpha prototype trucks. However, I have it on this right here that says it was detected on March 28th. They announced that the tray entered production on March 21st.

so they didn't even detect the problem by the time that the truck was already being produced in production so that made no sense and not only that this produces you can this it is report as you can see was produced in uh in june that uh where where they found they kept they detected the discharge problem from the pack so it was visually seen in in march the puncture but

The problem was still ongoing all the way through June. And I've learned after that, that it was still ongoing further than that. But anyway, so between March and June, when the tray was in production for vehicle that goes to customers, they have this problem. So that I can confirm from this. Now, obviously my sources are with Romeo and the way that

Nikola has been defending itself. It's a weird one. They seem in the comments, like I can tell you like what they told me here officially that

And I had a lot of Nikola investors attacking me all week over this. They even go as far as claiming that I made up this comment from a Nikola spokesperson as if I would do that. Like, how is it to get caught doing that? Anyway, so Nikola wrote, for production Nikola vehicles, Nikola requested Romeo not ship known leaking modules. That's a good request to make right there. Don't ship me damaged modules.

When weld issues were identified at Romeo's end-of-line process, a quarantine process was implemented which required performance of a total inspection of every module, including end-of-line functionality check. To our knowledge, and based upon assurance made by our supplier Romeo, Nikola did not put any module with weld issue in our production vehicles.

So there's a few problems with that comment because it's not very reassuring because, like they said, they said, to our knowledge and based upon assurances made by our supplier, Romeo. Well, I talked to people that were at Romeo at the time, and they say different than that. They say that they were shipping products

that were damaged. And they say that the well issuer identified at the end of the line process in quarantine process. So the quarantine thing has been disputed by a very credible source that talked to me that said that they told, advocated with the CEO of Romeo at the time, which was Susan something. Susan Brennan was CEO of Romeo at the time. I requested an interview with her. She hasn't responded yet.

And so the engineering team said we should shut it down. And she said, no, we'll try to fix the

the problem in parallel with production and so that means that production was ongoing so the current that that challenged the quarantine claim and on that they said a toro inspection on every module including end of the line functionality check so at the end of the line there was there's potting on that legion by few modules that they're talking about so that potting hides the connection of the cells so the corrosion would happen within two cycles and sometimes so that's quick um

But you wouldn't see it at the end of the line if there's potting on the cells. On top of that, if you do the functionality check, well, it can take a little bit of a while to see that delta increase in the imbalance of the battery pack. So there's a very good chance that the quality assurance process from Nikola and Romeo, and like I said, it looks like they're putting the blame on Romeo here, to our knowledge, and based upon insurance paid by our supplier, Romeo. The

The weird thing here is that Nikola owns Romeo. It's their company now. They bought it last year. So it's our supplier, the way they say it. But when you say our, you mean we own that supplier. So if they put the blame on them, it's not exactly a great look either.

So we know for a fact that this has been a major problem. I know that people quit at Romeo over this issue and very qualified people, some like people that have been around the industry in terms of battery pack production.

And then at the same time, so these fires happen. So again, I cannot put the blame exactly on the fire. I can just talk about the timing and these can lead to thermal event, these kind of problems. And then you add to that the fact that Nikola recently stopped production of the Trey battery electric vehicle. They claim it was for...

issue, like there was not enough demand for it and that there's more demand for their fuel cell vehicles, but that's another thing. So that also looks bad. Even if that's not the source of the fire, this looks like a major problem and more than anything, talking to Nikola about it, the way that they responded to me and they seem completely lost in this issue and the way that the people that I talked to that worked at Romeo and Nikola involved around this, it looks like a big old mess. Yeah.

Big old mess. You know what doesn't look good in all this this week, Seth? What's that? I didn't put the story in there because I think it's kind of a dull story, but Lordstown also went bankrupt this week. And who invested or at least tried to invest in both Lordstown and Nikola?

Mary Barra. Yeah, GM. So there are two, the dead touch of Mary Barra and GM. The question is, does GM, do they have like the inverse Midas touch or do they just pick bad companies to go after? Like do they ruin companies or do they pick ruined companies to go after? Yeah, I mean, I think it's the latter, but...

But at the same time, it comes more from a place of they felt like they were falling behind on electric vehicles, especially around that time where this shift to the LCM platform created some kind of gap where the combination of the shift to the LCM platform and the Chevy Bolt recall created this gap where GM was like nowhere in EV for a while, even though they were all in. And I believe them, they were all in because they make it.

They are making a huge investment on the Altium platform and everything. And I think there's going to be great vehicles coming out of that, honestly. We just talked about a few. But it created this gap where we need to be able to have some skin in this EV game. And they somehow picked the worst.

the worst possible companies with Lorsan. They managed to whistle the way out of those at the right time though. It was just, so you could see the urgency in this because normally you do your due diligence and you wouldn't do those move like a lot of Nikola investors should have done probably. But now they were like, they did the move and they did the due diligence after and they're like, okay, we're out of here.

Yeah, I guess it's good they left themselves enough contract out space so they could get out of it. Yeah, well, I think in the case of Nikola, though, I think it was a lot on Nikola's side, too, that like, well, I mean, the Trevor thing happened, too. I don't know if there was a cause of kind of like, oh, if you guys have a fraudster for a founder, we can get out. But also at the same time, like that happened.

The whole Trevor thing going down created such a nightmare of a company that they had to cut a lot of programs of the company and Badger, which was the project that they had with GM, was one of them. But I want to keep emphasizing one thing about Nikola for people because I've... Oh my God, the emails and the comments I received this week from Nikola investors telling me that I'm the devil for reporting on this, even though I'm like...

solid on the facts like i the only thing that you can argue with me here is the headline was but i'm still i still back myself up legally here by saying may have cause i'm saying it caused it may have caused i think it's probably a most likely um cause right now but yeah i don't i don't know that i just know about the problem i don't know that it caused it because i don't have a team looking into those trucks right now unfortunately which is literally impossible for us to do but

One thing that I've found is that a lot of Nikola investors are missing is that

Nikola doesn't have core EV competency or hydrogen competency for that matter. Bosch and GM was doing their hydrogen system powertrain and Romeo was doing the battery modules. Now they bought him. So yeah, now they got some of that battery modules, engineering capacity and design components.

from Romeo, but that's what it gives you. That's what Romeo gives you right now. So you can see that they don't have kind of like a strong powertrain level engineering and design capability right now. And I would add to that, like,

uh quality insurance like the fact even if you can blame everything on romeo they should have had something on the nicola side to catch that and not put that in trucks um because that's obviously a giant safety issue and i want to reiterate this like everyone i've talked to regarding this project to this this reporting and myself included the goal here is safety like i i've

I don't think that... I don't have a short position on Nikola. And as far as I know, anyone involved in this reporting doesn't have a short position on Nikola. And the goal of getting this out there...

is to make sure that there's safety in using batteries for electric vehicle because that's going to be crucial in the electrification process of the transportation system. Because that's one of those things that some Nikola investors talked to me about. They said that, oh, this thing was known since March or June last year. How come it didn't come out until now, a year later? Like they should have said something before that.

I'm like, first of all, they tried to internally for months. Like I said, the CEO shut it down.

And the fires happened and they're like, oh, we don't want more of that. They don't want no one involved wants that on their conscience. So some people started coming out of the woodwork and like, hey, this is a real problem that needs to be looked at more because there are still about 30 trucks sitting in that parking lot there that could potentially have this problem. We don't know.

So yeah, this is, this is happening right now. And, and, you know, and to, to Nicholas PR's credit, they managed to shut down all their articles coming out about this. Like, uh,

Because you know how the work set, if someone posts something like that, all the other publication will send it to the PR. It was like, hey, is there... Excuse me, all the lazy journalists are going to do that. Others could do their own research, but most of them are lazy. Most of journalists are lazy, unfortunately. And they will just send that to them. It's like, is there anything to it? And then Nicola would say, no, whatever. This guy is just fishing and whatnot. And then they dropped it because no one else reported on this. The one else just electric eyes it. Yeah.

It's crazy. All right. Let's move on to questions. Yes, sir. All right. Doug Grinberg came in before we even started. Who knows what kind of financial arrangements companies are making with Tesla for supercharger access? Any next licensing fees for car charger companies? I had heard something about this, but the source wasn't reliable enough for me to. And I've heard other things since then. So I don't have any reliable info on this.

I don't have any insider info either. My assumption is that no licensing fee, no financial agreements, none of that is in play. I think in order to get things moving, I think Tesla had to just...

Just let it open everything up with no essence in the field. Just let it go. And in the back end, Tesla is going to get its money from people using more electric vehicle using a supercharger network. I think that's it. Yeah, I think Tesla is going to be a monster of charging now. Not just their cars, but other people's as well. Exactly. All right, Daniel Hayes. Since we were able to charge the Rivian on MagicDock, I wonder how long it will take for an adapter that is available for NACs.

Yeah, it shouldn't take too long. They can probably just rip out a magic dock thing and give it to people. But they have to test it, manufacture it, get it UL listed, all the other stuff. So maybe not as quick as we'd like. And at the same time, it seems like Tesla stopped its magic dock deployment at seven stations. Yeah.

In the short term, it's not going to be any better for charging Rivians, unfortunately. Yeah, they're talking about spring 2024, first half of 2024. It's a little bit late. I don't know what's the holdup.

Maybe they are sandbagging us on this. Yeah, and even if a third party comes in and says, hey, we made an adapter, it's not hard. Tesla still has to enable it at the supercharger because how do you pay for it? You can't just go to a supercharger and pretend you're a Tesla and plug it in and get electricity. Well, you can through these magic docks through the app. So I guess they could just like had...

That sounds more like a switch to turn on. Yeah. They have the option in the software. Passive would have to do that, though. Yeah. You're right. They would have to, but at least it's there. Yeah. And some of the older stations, I don't think, have the CCS communication protocol that they need to initiate a charge as well. So I don't think it works on all chargers. Maybe some need updates or something.

All right, Carl in San Diego, I take your point that SAE working on NACs is a good thing, but I do think that the entire move to NACs from Ford and GM is putting fingers on the scale for Tesla to become a monopoly. Why? Because others have two tiers with separate manufacturers and charge point operators. As has been reported, Tesla can deliver chargers more cheaply. So them taking the Nevi money is not fixing the imbalance of Tesla network domination whatsoever.

These forest fires, I think we'll stop there. All right. So, yeah, I agree with that. Tesla puts itself in a really good position right now in terms of becoming, I wouldn't say monopoly, but dominant in the charging space. And, you know, they did it for they did it.

Because they are better. Like they build better chargers. They invested more money. They invested earlier, like before, you know, every, anybody else did. So like, I kind of, I don't feel bad for everybody else because, you know, but even, even, even that, like, I think that's, that's not even the right question. I think the right question is with the other charging station operator be better off without max. I think that's the only question that matters.

I mean, from a isolation standpoint, maybe because, you know, they have they have a monopoly over the non Tesla vehicles like they have now. Like, why does even Electrify America exist if its only existence is because like, OK, well, I mean, that's why it was funded. But like, nobody would use Electrify America's if Tesla's worked on all charges already.

So, I mean, I have to ask myself, like, if I'm Volkswagen and I know what I have with Electrify America, like, do I shut it down? Like, they might. I don't know. I don't know. Oh, you could sell it. There's still some value in it. There's some good leaders. Like, not saying that people at Electrify America are not good leaders, but there's a way to...

To replicate Tesla's success with charging as a third party. There's a way to do it. It's not impossible. It's going to be hard to close that gap. Like Carl mentioned, yes, Tesla has a giant cost advantage gap. But the thing is, I don't think they are better off if they are isolating themselves. I think they are better off having access to that Tesla fleet. Because...

Yes, for your daily charging situation, pricing is super important. You need that pricing. Yeah, that's one of them. You need that pricing to be good because that's your main source of transportation and everything. But DC fast charging is mainly not for your daily charging needs. It's for your traveling needs. And for that, the best thing is location.

Not necessarily pricing. You're going to stop set at a charging station that's more convenient to you and you would be willing to pay a little bit more for it, wouldn't you? For sure. So there's a way that you can close the gap like that with just putting the right station in the right place. And obviously, long term, you want to have control over your costs. There's no doubt about it. But I think there's a way.

All right. MJ for Kramer. Comment. I was in Aruba for a week in an Elantra. Flexing. Yeah, yeah. Poor guy. One of the biggest cars there. It was nice seeing so many tiny cars. I think that's a Micah person. Saw several ID4s and tons of Leafs, a BAW Pony, and a thousand tiny ICE cars.

Yeah. It's a small island, isn't it, Aruba? Small island. You don't need a lot of range. So, yeah, it makes sense there. I would like to see the U.S. go in the other direction of not getting bigger. Like at least stop getting bigger. Maybe. All right. Will automakers who adopt NACs have to move their charge points to the back of the car like Tesla does?

I'm sure that Tesla recommended that through all their discussion. But that's also like a common sense one. We're already seeing, I think, a little bit more homogenity. Yeah.

Is that which one is right? Homogeneity. On that front in the market, at first, there was a lot of weird ones like the Nissan Leaf. It's like down in the middle, the Kona EV and whatnot. They did some weird things. I think that most people are starting to understand now that you need that on the driver's side, either at the front or the back, ideally in the back. So I think the market was already moving that way. And now with NAX, I assume that Tesla had

was able to with again that carrot that supercharger carrot dangling in the front like you want to use it at work how about you how about you be smart about where you put your connector yep

All right. Carl Sanadio is back question. Have you asked any manufacturers if an existing CCS car will need two different adapters for NACs, one for AC and one for DC? This is because existing CCS one cars don't have AC DC switching. That's a great point. Um, I think the, the magic doc was only DC, right? Cause you know, it only had to live in a DC, but maybe, um, you do get two different adapters, one for AC, which already exists, uh,

There's tons out there. A company called Electron makes them. They're a couple hundred bucks or something. But I don't know if the Tesla one will work for both or how that'll work. All right, general question. Worth waiting for Tesla being vehicle to home or grid? What do you think? Well, what do you mean by waiting? Well, I mean, I think they already confirmed that Cybertruck is going to have the capability to

So if you want that, yeah, wait for that. But if you mean like waiting for like Model 3, Model Y to have that capability, I don't know. Like I just said, I still think that Powerwall is a better solution in general. Having vehicle to home is like a had-on for like longer outages. But like for me, for example, I don't have a problem here with longer outages. But you never know when it's going to happen. Yeah.

For me, it's just not a deal breaker for me. All right. Come on. Hello from Topeka. Hey. Drove from Chicago. It's been really cool so far. Stopped by Rivian, a sprinkle of R1T and R1S and a sea of Amazon delivery vans and a lot. Now I have to find that electric swag. Oh, do you have an electric swag there? Yeah. Actually, it's impressive how much stuff they've put

Like we sent them our logo and they've just put it on everything. Yeah. That's nice. So plenty of swag here. Come and get it.

All right. Yeah. So Daniel asked a couple of questions that we answered. I probably should have put something in the beginning of the podcast saying we answer at the end of the show for the new people. A lot of people who've been here for a while know that. So Daniel, patience. We'll get, we get, we get to your questions. We've already answered yours now at this point, but he's gone. So he won't know. Okay.

Carl in San Diego, Seth, can you interview the solar race teams and see how they view giant EV pickups versus their highly efficient machines? Carl, I think a lot of them will appreciate the efficiency, but at the same time, they all got their vehicles here with huge gas pickups, sadly. So that's the bad news. Almost every single one of them has a huge trailer and a big pickup, so...

But what is so cool about this event is that you can imagine a future where these students now are going to be picked up by a bunch of different companies in the EV world. And they're going to use their experience making a super efficient vehicle and apply some of these capacity to existing vehicles that are not as efficient. Obviously, I don't think none of them are going to be anything close to that.

to what they're doing right now, but every little person and points person, this person pinch point that you can remove off of the drag and the weight and all that from, from these pickup trucks is going to have a giant advantage. Yep. All right. Carl and San Diego. Good job reporting on the Nikola issues, Fred. This helps the industry when transparency allows others to learn from their mistakes. Yep. Kudos to you. Awesome job. And also,

It's so much fun to, not fun, but it's rewarding to do that good investigative journalism. Yes, I try to do my best with that. Appreciate it. Charles Cole, anyone who does not go with NACS will be behind the eight ball. That's true. A question related to the broader green energy transition world. Where would you suggest one look for career opportunities or other areas to get involved in the green energy transition? Yeah.

I mean, it depends on what you want to do exactly. I know there's a giant rush right now to find electricians. We're going to have a huge shortage of electricians from just installing charging stations, installing solar, installing battery storage. We need people that actually have the skills and the certifications also to...

to install those. So that's a big thing. I think you're going to see a big increase in also revenue for electrician. I think there's going to be a squeeze that's going to happen that should elevate that market a little bit. But there's opportunities in everything. You have...

giant companies that the companies that are becoming giant from from that transition that's just taking advantage of it i think a lot of it is to do with software too like there's opportunities to make um

Better user interface experience. There's throughout the entire thing. There's financing too. Like just these projects are capital extensive and you need some smart people that figure out a way to finance those. So there's every step of the way there's going to be opportunities to contribute to the green energy well. I mean, Seth and I, all we do is like on the laptop and we're part of it. We're part of that. Yeah.

All right. Aaron Rudloff, who apparently is around here. Also, we'll be seeing Fred Esteban, which is the Montreal school, is here. They need you. They call it Esteban?

I think so. They keep saying Esteban. I don't know. It's the Polytechnique, the Montreal Polytechnique. Yeah, and they're very like rah-rah, loud. And they also have like I think one of the fastest cars. We had the drag strip yesterday. Oh, good. Well, I gave them a few hundred bucks. So my money is on that team.

No, they don't need me at all. Unfortunately, Aaron, I won't be making it. I had an obligation earlier this week that I had to do. And now with just a few days left on the competition, it would be inexpensive for me to show up. There it is. These Canadian flight tickets are not cheap. You'll fly out of a Canadian airport. All right, Rich Teer. Tesla is already dominant in the charging space. Others adopting NACs just cements it. It's kind of true.

Do we worry about gas pumps at all the same connector? No. A little bit different though. Yeah. Question, where do we find the location of the only 12,000 Tesla chargers that will be opened? That's a question I had as well. Like Tesla has said they're going to open 12,000. I believe there's like 18,000 currently. And then there's another, you know, between now and a year from now when they open up everything.

uh there's gonna be some more like how do they choose which stations are available you know i mentioned before like some of them have the older software and maybe not ccs compatible without an upgrade maybe that's just you know those those older ones yeah that's that's what i was thinking too i mean it's similar to the what they did in europe i guess um yeah in term of opening to non-tesla vehicles

All right, Rich here. Are you guys planning to come to Fully Charged Live in Canada in September? I don't know where that is. I think it's on the West Coast. I think it's like Vancouver or somewhere in BC. I do like Vancouver. Yeah, I don't know. We didn't have any plans, but if they have something cool, maybe we'll send someone. Maybe they'll show up. I love Vancouver. I went there for the first time earlier this year. It was fun.

All right. It feels like Rivian has production and demand problems. They say they are shifting to R1S since they are losing money. And then that's it. We discussed that last week, actually, the shift to R1S issue.

And it's not as, I don't think it's about like losing money because I think they're losing money on both the R1S and the R1T. I think it's, yeah, it's more of a diamond problem where the demand is shifting to the R1S, which I don't know how much of a problem it is because I think the demand is still super strong on the R1S. It's just weaker on the R1T right now. I'm not worried too much about that, but it's definitely something to keep an eye on.

All right. And the last question, Carl's back. And is the 12,000 based on V3 chargers? Yeah, that's probably the issue here. Yeah. All right.

All right. Well, thanks, everyone, for joining in on the show this week. This was it for us on The Electric Podcast. If you did enjoy your show, please give us a thumbs up, a like, a subscribe, hit the notification button. And if you're listening to a podcast app, please give us a five-star rating. That would be super helpful and takes a second to do. And we're going to see you same time, same place next week. Have a good one.