Tesla news, Rivian earnings, Cadillac Escalade IQ, and more
01:00:17 Share

All right, everyone, we are live for a new episode of The Electric Podcast. I am Fred Lambert, your host, and as usual, I'm not drawing dice at Winshow. It is a reflex. It's muscle memory at this point. But this is another episode where Seth is on vacation right now. He couldn't join me. Hopefully, everything's going to go smoothly. I'm

Last week was not too bad for my first time producing the show because I'm doing the StreamYard and everything. I had some complaints about the shared screen being bigger. I'm going to try to make that happen for you guys today because there's a few things we want to look at, especially the new Cadillac Escalade IQ. Not a fan of the name, big fan of the truck. Never be able to afford it, but that's another problem. All right, so...

A bit like last week, though, it was a bigger news week this week. So we're going to have plenty of news to discuss. But again, without the back and forth between me and Seth, it should be quicker to get through those news items. So we're going to make it a little more interactive. I'm going to be able to answer your questions. So I'm going to remind you of that as more people come into the show.

later on. And I even asked on Twitter if you guys have questions so we can go through, I had some good questions in that Twitter post, that Twitter thread. So shameless plug, by the way, if you want to follow me on, excuse me, I said Twitter. I mean, X, of course, it's now X. Frederick Lambert is my end all. All right.

How do I do this? I do like this. Boom. Okay, we're on. So let's start with a few quick Tesla news here that we're going to get through. Our usual NAX update. So this one is an interesting one. It's kind of a follow-up on the SAE standardization that Tesla has started going through for NAX to make it an official standard, the charging connector here. Now they have, according to Vol-X,

which is a UK-based power equipment manufacturer, Tesla has issued a license to produce NACs to Volex. So I wasn't very familiar with Volex, but I looked them up. It looks like a serious company, pretty big, like 8,000 employees. They do a lot of electronics, wire harnesses, cables, and things like that. So it looks like it's right up their alley. And they say that they are ready to produce this thing right now and to produce the connectors and receptors to OEMs.

So this is great news, obviously, because I think this is another step of Tesla trying to create a little bit of distance between itself and the NACs. Because automakers, there's still a few of them that are holding out in North America before accepting NACs as the standard. I mean, the bulk is there, obviously, for GM, Nissan. I think the others will fall through at one point. And if they don't, at this point, it's them that are in trouble, not the other one around. Even with that new...

That new charging network that was announced, because that will take a while to arrive and then to be up to pace with Tesla. That's going to maybe never happen. And I'm not being pessimistic here. It's just numbers. It's hard to get there. Tesla is already such a big lead in terms of charging infrastructure in North America. But anyway.

One of the old up is that as an OEM, that's your competitor to Tesla, you might feel some resentment to like give on low, the big part of the ownership experience for EV owners, which is the charging outside of the home to your competitor, not just outside of the home, but technically inside of the home too, because if you make it the standard and your own charger too, is going to have a nice connector. So yeah, basically all the charging by, uh,

Making it an official standard, whereas there's some kind of a committee that's behind it other than just Tesla. And now by having people licensed to produce the connector, then you make it some distance between the two. So I think that could help with maybe a few of the automakers that are still holding out accepting NACs as the new standard.

All right, a bit of a surprise earlier this week. Tesla announced that longtime CFO Zachary Kirkhorn is on the outs. There's been a lot of speculation about this news this week because it was kind of happened pretty fast. Like normally when you have a chief officer going away, there's some kind of...

plan or something and it's going to be announced. Okay, they're going to leave this date and everything. And now I know there's been, I'm going to read the announcement because there's been some confusion about it. Some people are not aware how this works, but the announcement was as of August 4th and that's when it was announced. Tesla appointed, I'm going to mess up his name. I'm sorry, Mr. Tanaja, Mr.

As a financial officer, in addition to his current role as chief accounting officer. So now he was already chief accounting officer, now he's also CFO. To succeed Zachary Corcoran, Mr. Corcoran stepped down as August Ford after a 13 years tenure with the company, the last four years of which he has served as master of coin and chief number one.

During this 10-year, Tesla has seen tremendous expansion and growth. Tesla thanks Mr. Kirkhorn for his significant contributions. Mr. Kirkhorn will continue to serve Tesla through the end of the year to support a seamless transition. So when people heard that last part, they're like, all right, well, this is normal. He's staying at Tesla. He's not staying at Tesla. He will continue to serve Tesla through the end of the year.

So he's not there. He's not, I guarantee you, the guy is not there. They don't say it like that when he's not there. Also, they don't announce it where, as of today, he's leaving. That sounds more, Gary Black, actually, on Twitter, a Tesla investor, had a pretty good summary of what most likely happened. And I agree with him based on how I know Tesla works and how I know this position works.

It's most likely that Zach wanted out. The guy did quite a few years as CFO, a decade before that as different roles in Tesla's finance department. The guy has paid his dues and he's made his money too. I think he has like a $500 million worth of Tesla stocks. But

He told Elon, he wants out. He's still super young. He probably wants to do something else with his time, his own thing. I completely understand that. And he probably told Elon and Elon was like, oh, come on. They tried to convince him to stay and everything. And then Zachary came back to Elon later and he was like, no, no, no, I really want out. And then, boom, fired. Maybe not fired, fired, but forced to...

To, like you said, I think the way they phrase it, step down, forced to step down because it's like, all right, you don't want to work here, you don't work here and not to be a distraction for the department and everything too as he's leaving. And obviously Mr. Tanija is already very familiar with the department as being chief accounting officer himself. So at least it should be not too bad of a transition, even though Zachary was very well liked in the investment community for his like no nonsense, clear approach.

But especially, I know it was kind of monotone and boring on the finance call, but that's kind of what you want out of a CFO anyway. And financial performance of Tesla under his leadership, obviously, was through the roof. So congratulations on that. But, you know, people said, yeah.

All the doomsday stuff, like people said the same thing when Deepak Arun just stepped down, who also was the CEO for Tesla for a long time, was very knowledgeable finance guy in the Yoto industry, working at Ford before that, I think. And then Zach came on and Zach was a bigger...

Bet, outside of Tesla, I'm sure within Tesla, he was known to be very good. But outside of Tesla, he was very young to be a CFO of a multi-billion dollar company. But he did very well. So because of that, I'm not too worried about the transition here. Still surprising and you don't want to see a CFO leave. It always makes the investment community a bit nervous.

All right, we had a few exclusive at Electric this week in terms of new hires. So Zach is leaving, but other people are coming in. So we exclusively reported that Tesla hired a new manufacturing expert to be

What's his exact role? Head of Gigafactory Nevada Expansion Engineering and Construction. So it's Mr. Michael Hildebrand. And he's coming from almost three decades as a manufacturing executive in the pharmaceutical industry, more recently at Eli Lilly. So we know that Elon has made some links between

the uh former central industry and like the semiconductor industry about in terms of manufacturing expertise that they kind of want to replicate for battery manufacturing for example and the gigafactory expansion is a lot about battery cell manufacturing the 4680 cell in particular and uh obviously this is a mind that's another thing but

So it looks like Tesla brought someone, especially for managing this giant project. As you can see, it's going to be a giant project because this is the current factory and this is going to be the footprint of the expansion. So it's going to be bigger, much bigger than the current factory. And the expansion was announced all the way back

in January. And even before that, in October, we announced that this section was supposed to be... Tesla has already submitted the permits for this section. And yet nothing happened yet. So I don't know what's happened. A few months later, there was the announcement of the expansion. So that makes sense with the announcement. But that was seven months from now, eight months. Nothing happened yet. So...

Hopefully, this is a good sign now that Tesla has a leader specifically for this expansion. I mean, if the guy has an actual job to do, things should get moving. If the expansion doesn't happen, then this guy doesn't have a job.

And then we also reported on another hire in the manufacturing side from Tesla, Dr. Michael Schmidt, 25 years of experience at Bosch. So he was poached from Bosch, where Bosch, Bosch, I don't know how to pronounce that exactly, the German manufacturing giant and is officially giant in the auto industry as a tier one parts supplier, including parts to Tesla.

So the guy has a very deep experience where he's a doctor in physics too. So that's right up Elon's alley. And he's had leadership roles at a bunch of different manufacturing programs directly heading factories in Germany, China, and Mexico. Gigafactory Mexico, anyone? Yeah.

And most recently, he was chief operating officer and senior vice president in North America in charge of operation and R&D for factory automation hydraulics in Canada, USA, and Mexico. So he was basically leading manufacturing technology and automation in North America. So very good hire for Tesla. Now he's working out of Austin. And we had a source that says that he's going to be working closely with Tom Zutulis

manage a gigafactory operation in North America. So that means the USA and Mexico for now. For now, kind of expect some announcement soon for another location, maybe in Canada, who knows. In other news, in other Tesla related news, Tesla was headed to the used EV federal tax credit this week.

Or maybe that was last weekend. Since the last podcast. Everything is new for us. It's in the last podcast. And so this is interesting. This stuff was not on it when it was first launched because this was first launched with the new reform to the tax credit. Let me just mute. Yeah, focus on this. Sorry about that. That was launched at the same time as the tax credit reform with the new year.

But Tesla was not on the eligibility list for the used one. It was for the new one, but not for the used one. And we assume that it probably was because Tesla did, like, it was hard to...

Even if you put yourself on the list, it would be very hard for someone to claim the tax credit on a used Tesla because of the eligibility criterias that come with it. So there's all the eligibility criterias on the consumer side of the buyer side. For example, like, wow.

All straightforward. I guess that the more restrictive one is modify adjusted gross income was not exceed $75,000 for individuals, $112,500 for heads of a household and $150,000 for joint returns filers. So,

That's on the buyer side. On the car side, it's a little bit more restrictive, especially for an electric vehicle, especially for a Tesla electric vehicle. Have a sell price of $25,000 or less. So that's a big one here. You won't find that many Tesla for less than $25,000. Maybe some older Model S's.

would be around that price. Maybe some very high mileage Model 3s. Model Y, I mean, maybe if someone just went crazy and put like 300 miles on a Model Y. But I mean, I paid more for that. I paid more for my Model X with 400,000 miles than $25,000. I paid $29,000. I wouldn't have been able to be eligible for that. So,

And also it needs to be at least the model year needs to be two years earlier than the calendar year. So that's normal. But again, it's going to be way more than that if it's a $25,000 Tesla. Anyway.

But yeah, now it's been added. So if you do find something under $25,000 in a used Tesla market, all the vehicles have been added to the list. Model 3, Model S, X, Y, and even the Roadster, which you're never going to find a $25,000 Roadster with all the appropriate model year, which is like 2021 and before, basically. And next year is going to be 2022 and before. So if you fill up all the criteria, then boom, you're in for up to $4,000 in

Tax credit, which is pretty good. Speaking of Gear Factory Mexico earlier about the new hire, we had first news in a long time about some progress at the factory site. So Tesla is reportedly still looking to have its permit. That's the last time we reported two months ago. The governor of the state that the factory is in, Nuevo Leon, said,

And the governor said that he's expecting Tesla to get the permit within the next two months. It's about two months now. I haven't heard anything. But at the site, a local newspaper, Millenio, reported some machinery being deployed.

At the site, very close to the road though. So it seems to be more about building up the exit and the road to the actual factory site. It's part of the factory site, but still, this is probably going to have its own private exit there. That would make sense.

So that's some progress here that would point towards Tesla actually starting breaking ground on the actual factory rather than the infrastructure for the site. So let's say that's more about the infrastructure for the site than the actual breaking ground of the factory. But it's progress nonetheless worth mentioning because we're going to be tracking the construction of Gigafactory Mexico closely since Tesla is talking about like a record pace from breaking ground to construction.

to production, to vehicle production. And we know that Tesla wants to produce the next generation vehicles at Gigafactory Mexico, namely the new cheaper Tesla, some of the two people are talking, but the $25,000 Tesla and the Robotaxi, obviously. So some progress there. All right, we have a bunch of done Tesla news that we're going to do now. But while we have more people here watching right now, let me remind you

That we're going to have plenty of time after these four or five next news items to have a more interactive part of the show where I will take your question about whether any of the news item I'm discussing today are a different topic in the EV industry that you want to discuss. So, yeah.

You can put the question in the comment section right now. I see questions from Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn right now while we're live. You can put in the comment section right now, and I'm going to be able to answer you in about 15, 20 minutes max. All right, this was a big news this week. The Cadillac Escalade IQ, which has been teased a bunch over the last year, has now been officially unveiled. We had Scooter, our own electric reporter, Scooter Doll, in New York at the unveiling event.

And everyone, from what I'm looking right now, everyone seemed pretty impressed. Look at the, we see the actual vehicle here. I was afraid that it's going to be a bit boxy.

Which is what kind of GM has been going through right now with its electric vehicles. And it is boxy, but like from something like this angle is not too bad. Like they rounded some things up that makes it not too like it's a cardboard box on wheels here. So overall, I'm like this angle is pretty good. Don't tell me that's not good. That looks like a sleek looking, cool looking electric SUV right there. Big SUV, obviously.

This is cool. I'm liking this. Giant front trunk. This guy has a carry-on suitcase and two, do you call those duffel bags? I don't know if you call those duffel bags, but whatever those fancy bags are. Too fancy for me.

Spec wise, the GM is going all out these days. Like this 200 kilowatt hour battery pack for the Hummer makes it to the Silverado EV and now it makes it to the Escalade. So they have a 200 kilowatt hour usable energy in the battery pack, 24-wheel-to-mode module.

It gives up an estimated range of 450 miles at 724 kilometers. That's going to be EPA too, by the way. So it's massive. With the Velocity Max mode, it's up to 750 horsepower, 785 pound-a-foot torque, 0 to 60 in under five seconds.

800 volt DC fast charging, 0 to 100 miles of range in 10 minutes. I would like to have like the 10 to 80, I think is the best figure to look into. Obviously, your mileage may vary. 800 pounds of estimated towing capacity. So all of these are estimated, so it's not the actual final number.

And vehicle to home, vehicle to everything, basically. That was announced with the Cadillac. A lot of things will come to the GM lineup with vehicle to home, GM announced this week. But Cadillac was going to be one of the first to get it. Speaking of being one of the first, when is the timing on this thing? I don't remember them announcing it. I mean, if they unveil the final version, it's going to be soon.

But for everything I just mentioned, by the way, let's go into what has been grabbing the most headline, which is the actual price of the Escalade IQ. It's going to start $130,000. So that's, I mean, it's packed with features. It has 40 speakers in them with all the latest technology, those giant 50-inch screen. Well, it's two screens actually in the front. Let's look at the interior. Look at that.

It's actually like a 30-something inch screen on the driver's side and then a 20-inch screen on this side. And you have another touchscreen at the bottom here for all the features on top of actual analogs, input with a knob. Same thing with the steering wheel. Look at that. This is a sweet-looking vehicle. Sweet-looking. It's going to have the Super Cruise, too.

And at the back, you have more screens at the back, control screen, access to streaming apps on these screens. Like it's a vehicle that's great to be driven in, obviously. So it's packed with everything, but it starts at $130,000. And my main problem with that is that obviously Cadillac also has the regular Escalade.

which is a big seller and it started at $80,000. So that's the thing people always stick on. It's like, yeah, it's $50,000 difference on the, obviously the number of the people are buying the $80,000 Cadillac. I think the average sale price is closer to a hundred thousand with options and whatnot, but still $50,000 difference on the base price. It's a, it's bad. Like a lot of people, they don't even like in this case, even if I can't think for the,

like the fuel savings like you won't get close to to compensating for it maybe with the maintenance and fuel saving over like a five ten year period like you're starting getting close because that those didn't those escalate those gas powered escalate the uh they do guzzle up some gas um but yeah so it's gonna it's gonna be a problem for a lot of people obviously it's gonna be like lower um volume vehicle

I mean, it's not this Cadillac Celestic level, but still, it's not going to be as popular as it could be in the big SUV side market, which, you know, it's a good market. Like you have right now, basically, the Rivian R1S.

And that's about it. You can go with the Kia EV9 and things like that, but I think most people consider that much less luxurious than the Cadillac or the Rivian. So right now it's in class of its own. But for the price point, there's a few things that are very interesting, like this, for example, this suspension here. They have a magnetic suspension here.

It's incredible. Especially if you look at the first part of the video here, this is the rendering. Look at this here. This is a pretty bad terrain here and it's like nothing.

So, yeah, I'm fairly impressed. I like it. But I'm just a little bit concerned about the pricing strategy here, especially with the Escalade. Gas-powered Escalade would be so much cheaper. A lot of people are going to... If you're interested in Escalade, you're going to want to have the gas-powered one. It's almost a way to generate some attention to the Escalade program and then sell the people the gas-powered one. Almost. I don't know. Maybe there's a... I don't know. Maybe I'm just speculating here, but...

I mean, Cadillac says that they're going to move to all electric too within the next decade. So at least there's that. At least at one point, it's just going to be the IQ and not the gas-powered escalator. All right. We had the Rivian's running this week, and the stock went down after they announced their earnings. And I was surprised that the stock went down because I thought it was by far the most impressive earnings that Rivian delivered over expectation from Wall Street.

And over expectation in terms of the actual earnings and earnings per share and revenue, not that I have much, like $100 million for the revenue and a few cents per share for the actual earnings. But still, the big difference here, where is it? Yeah, right here. Okay. So the big difference that I was looking for, like every time I cover a revenue earning, but Peter covered it here. But I mean, when I go over revenues or earnings, I look at the gross margin and

Because that's been a problem. Like Rivian has been selling their trucks at a massive loss before even accounting for operating expenses. We've been through this a bunch of times, but like there's been a lot of Tesla comparison now.

Tesla used to lose money all the time. It's not a problem. Yes, but Tesla used to lose money on their operating expenses, but they wouldn't make money in terms of revenue from delivery of their vehicles minus the cost of making those vehicles. That would be a positive gross margin. And then when you account for all the operating expenses after that, they would lose money. Not anymore. Obviously, now it's a cash-making business. But...

The problem is Tesla had that at the very beginning, obviously, but then when the ramp up started to come, when Tesla was delivering the same volumes that Rivian was delivering right now, they were already way in the positive, way in the positive gross margin. Now, Rivian is still negative, but this quarter showed a massive increase in gross profit. Still a loss, but that's what you call it, gross profit. So let's go through it here. So at the same time last year,

Rivian was losing 700, let's go with the percentage here, 193% negative gross margin on their vehicle. Last quarter was 81%. So that was a big improvement. The quarter before last, I should say. This quarter, the last quarter reported, and then in June, it was 37%.

minus negative 2037 gross margin. So they went from 193 to 37 in a year and quarter to quarter, they went from 81 to 37. Massive improvement in just three months. Obviously there was a big jump in production from 9,000 units to almost 14,000 units. So the economies of scales are working right now.

Obviously, you're still in the negative. So you're still losing more money because you're delivering more vehicles. So it was the gross profit per unit, negative $32,000. So for every truck they delivered, they were losing $32,000. But they were losing $157,000 last year and $167,000, so the double of that, just three months before that. So...

Then after that, you had the operating losses and everything. And at the end of the day, they ended up losing $1.6 billion. Yeah. They get a free cash flow of $1.6 billion this quarter. So it still hurts, but they still have $9 billion cash. And now they have a much clearer path to a positive gross margin. Now, even when they have a positive gross margin, they're still going to lose money because their operating expenses are still $1.2 billion.

But it's going to go down fast once they hit a positive gross margin. And then once they increase that positive gross margin to, let's say, 10%, I think they said that 20% is their hope.

Obviously, I think it's going to be a lot more difficult as they get to zero and then this big jump. I don't expect another big jump like that next quarter. If they can get closer to, I don't know, I think it's like 20 or I think it's 10, something between 10 and 20, it would be pretty good. Then next year, I think that's when they aim to be a positive gross margin.

But now the path is at least a lot clearer. See, if they were at like 70% right now, it would, negative 70%, I would be a little bit worried. But this big jump show that they're getting their costs under control. So great news.

Still $9 billion in the pockets, but losing 1.6 per quarter, it goes fast. But they think that it's going to be enough through 2025. And by that time, they should be generating more money. And I'm pretty sure they still have some avenues in terms of fundraising too. They have Amazon as a backer, obviously. That's deep pockets right there along.

Lucid unveiled the Air Sapphire. So it's the top of the line Lucid Air that they've been teasing for a while. They already announced a lot of the specs, but they decided to release the final specs this week, which is basically a supercar in a four-door sedan format. So a big competitor to the Model S Plaid, obviously. Zero to 60 miles per hour in 1.89 seconds. So neck-breaking speed, literally.

um a 1200 horsepower sweet um the zero to 100 miles per hour and 3.84 seconds that's my quarter mile under nine seconds top speed of 205 miles per hour uh 900 volt charging technology 427 miles of range so it you lose some of the range because they have a higher range version of that but obviously with the top performance it was up in range

You have all the specs here available on the Nectar. But this is like Lucid. One of the problems with the Lucid Air, I think, is like there's too wide of a gap. And like you can have an 80,000 Lucid Air and you have a $250,000 Lucid Air because that's the price of the Sapphire. So I don't know. It doesn't make much sense. Because like with the Model S, like the Model S Plaid starts at $109,000.

and gets very similar specs here. The Lucid Sapphire is faster, for sure. It's quicker. But the thing is, you get a Model S for $90,000, where you get the long range and everything, or you get the Model S Plaid for $15,000, $20,000 more, and you get the performance. That might make a little bit more sense. For the Air, you can get a bunch of vehicles in the $100,000 range,

And you get basically the same vehicle. I know there's a bunch of other little features, different everything, but it's still the same model with just more performance. But you have to have $150,000 for that price. That's a bit crazy for me. It's hard to market a vehicle like that, in my opinion. I might be wrong, but I doubt it.

All right. Bad news for a fan of the electric Explorer. It was supposed to come at the end of the year. Now it's been pushed to this summer, next summer. Sorry. So about six months delay in the vehicle.

Did they say why? I know that we knew about it from informing the workers at the plant in Cologne where it's going to be produced. But anyway, we're not that excited about it because it's just... Sorry, I'm sure guys in Europe are really excited about it, but it's not coming here just yet. So I don't know if it comes going to be even later. Yeah, I don't think there was a details on citing the global safety rules for vehicle powertrain. So it looks like it's a regulatory issue.

problems that is holding up the Explorer Electric. All right. Last but not least, Proterra unfortunately announced a bankruptcy under Chapter 11 this week. The company better known for their electric buses, but also kind of shifted a little bit more to like powertrain manufacturing, battery pack manufacturing, was supplying the battery packs for Nikola and from a bunch of other companies.

It's still in operation. So bankruptcy is basically to protect you against your creditors. So their debt is out of control. There's too much creditor going after them right now for the capital necessary. So the Chapter 11 basically tells everyone we're bankrupt right now. We cannot satisfy our creditors.

But it protects them to be able to continue operation while they restructure, which is likely what's going to happen right now. They say that they're going to still operate. So I hope they can figure out something and something quick so that the operation can continue because a lot of other companies now are dependent on Proterra. A lot of other vehicle programs from other companies are dependent on Proterra's battery production. So yeah.

And also they have some like a lot of great buses out there. It's just, I think it's a tough business. I think she raised a lot of the money, but they burned through it so fast. Like it was still worth like a billion dollars just a few weeks ago, a few months ago. But the bus business is a tough one. Like it's so dependent on government orders and on incentives and that it can fluctuate a lot. And they just couldn't survive that. It looks like for now at least.

I'm hoping for the best for them, but for now it's at least temporarily set back. I mean, sometimes we've seen chapter 11 being set back and company can come back, but most of the time it's not ideal. All right. Let me go to the questions that I had on Twitter.

And then I'm going to jump into the comment section. I see a couple of questions here, but you can add them right now. If you're watching live, you can put on YouTube, Facebook, or LinkedIn in the comment section right now. You can ask a question or just an easy topic that we should discuss together live on the show today. All right, let me share this tab instead. Boom. My Twitter account, X account, sorry, if you guys want to follow. I tweeted earlier today.

Right here. All right. Aaron, our own electric Aaron manager of social media here. The state of EV companies, which do you think are going to stay and ones that could fold and get acquired? That's a good question. I mean, this is complete guesses for me, obviously. I wouldn't have guessed that Proterra would go bankrupt. But to be honest, I wasn't following them too closely either. So I wasn't looking at their...

looking at their statements every quarter and all that. So I don't know. But all right. So what other companies? I mean, the big one was Rivian that we talked for a long time. But this quarter, it was a big improvement, very big improvements. I'm really hyped about it now. I always thought they were going to survive. I thought the hard times could be harder than people think.

before they can turn around. Now I see a turnaround like next year. Financially speaking, I'm talking because we talk about the finance here. We're not the finance show or anything. We're an EV show, but these companies, they need to be financially sustainable if they're going to survive. We're more of a consumer publication, but

I think in this space right now, you have to look, unless you're buying from the Tesla or from the legacy automakers, and we can go into the legacy automakers too because some of them could fold, in my opinion. But

you have to look into the financial sustainability of those companies because if you're buying a car and you get thinking of keeping it for five or 10 years and that company goes on there during that time, then that's the big financial loss for you. You're going to have a hard time sending that car without the service infrastructure and all that. So it's, it's very important that you look into that. And yeah,

And yeah, so now I'm way more hype for Rivian, way more hype. So I think Rivian is going to stay around. Get it acquired, though it's not out of possibility. I mean, always, especially if you have like this Apple thing that's always going around, though it's going to be harder now with Amazon being a big investor in the company and everything. I think Rivian is most likely going to be its own thing. Lucid.

Lucid, I think, is in trouble because Lucid, we're not seeing the kind of turnaround in the gross margins that we just saw from Rivian. They're losing a lot of money per cars. They just slashed their prices on the air other than the Sapphire. Obviously, it starts at $250,000, but they just reduced up to $12,000 the price of the air per

I think they should have started with the gravity and with the SUV. I think the SUV is saving Rivian right now. The turnaround that we're seeing is because of the R1S, I think. So I think Lucid should have started with the gravity instead of the air. And look, I think Lucid is also pretty safe thanks to the backing of the Saudis. The Saudis are going to want to keep that thing floating. So maybe they're okay, maybe they get acquired, maybe they get sold. That's a possibility too.

But I think it's fold to acquire is like one category that you put there, Aaron. I think it would fall under that category. I don't know if you guys have any other name you can throw at me that I can discuss because I don't know otherwise. Ron said that discuss the...

Rivian R1S, we kind of did a little bit, but to discuss in more detail, we're going to talk a lot more about the R1S in the near future because obviously Seth got one. So once he comes back for vacation and starts to use it a little bit more, I'm sure we're going to be able to talk about it a lot more. Oh, Bastien Theron from Theron Electric ATVs.

You guys should check them out. Says, what do you think about the recent... Oh, okay. He's talking about Proterra. So we already talked about that and what it means for the few partnerships. So yeah. So technically right now they are telling everyone that they're consuming operation. So they're basically... Because they still have money. They still have some money. It's just like they don't have enough money to cover what the creditors are asking right now. So the Charter 11 basically helps them to keep using that money to continue operation while they figure things out.

So right now, the programs that are dependent on the Proterra battery packs are safe, but obviously I'm sure that they are already looking at alternatives as any good supply chain manager would do.

Sean asked about the Cadillac. We already discussed that. Any good body of the data out there on the battery degradation from older Model 3s? Seems like they are getting old enough for us to know what we can expect from modern EV batteries. Yeah, I mean, there are some crowdsources that are out there which are pretty good that points to nothing more than an 80% increase

retention of battery capacity from both vehicles. Some outliers doing a lot better, some outliers doing worse, but not that much worse and not that much better. But for the most part, I'm seeing like 90% on my 2018 Model 3s. I'm not high mileage though. I don't remember. 60,000 miles? Less than that, I think. Anyway, Tesla also released data once a year through its impact report, I think. Yep.

I think it's in the impact report that they do release the data. And it's very similar, maybe a little bit more optimistic. I don't know how they calculate it, but it's very similar. Whether to buy an EV with CCS today or wait until manufacturer changes the part to next. All right, so we've discussed that before, but personally, I would have a hard time doing it just for resale value. It's not a big deal, to be honest. If you really like an SUV, any EV right now that has CCS,

versus one that has next well i mean only tesla has next right now so if you like a non-tesla ev right now over a tesla i would still do it because it's not the end of the world there's going to be adapters so it's going to be just a little small investment into an adapter 100 200 max i think and and and there's obviously other ccs station there's a new

all the conglomeration, the collaboration between all those automakers that was announced to that's going to have CCS. It's going to be a lot more CCS chargers, even beside the adoption of NACs as a standard in North America. So it's not the end of the world, but it's,

I think NAX is going to become the official standard at this point. So it feels a little bit weird to buy a car that's not going to have the charger for the official standard. But at the same time, I'm probably just biased toward Tesla at this point because, like I said, not buying a NAX car right now is not buying a Tesla, basically you're saying. So take everything I say with a grain of salt because CCS is not that bad either.

Rivian Earnings, we discussed. L3X1 says, what's the bus market looks like post-Prothera? I mean, there's other options out there, but they are somewhat limited. I mean, Prothera had some very nice vehicles here. But there's still other manufacturers. There's BYD that makes one. I mean, Prothera was more known for their city street.

buses and they're the coaches kind of type of vehicles uh obviously the uh school bus market is booming right now there's like a dozen company making them like uh leon and and uh julie and blue uh the so i think i think that the market is still gonna be the industry is still gonna be good it's gonna be plenty of players without prothera in it if god forbid that happens

Ben Houtman asks, what the hell V12 being 90% AI means? He's talking about FSD beta here. He's talking, I think, about a comment that Elon Musk has made about V12 being 99% AI. I think what Elon means by that is that the vehicle control, which was not neural net based, is going to be

neural net base, AI base now with V12. So what that means is like on the perception, on the vision side of things, it was neural nets that are perceiving the environment of the vehicle under FSD beta. But the actual vehicle control, like thinking, okay, we're turning right there because of X, Y information.

We are slowing down. Whatever you're doing, the actual control of the vehicles, those were hard-coded inputs based on the information that the computer vision system, which was AI-based, which is AI-based, is getting. So the combination of the two, they're going to be all AI-based now. So that's the big change, the big improvement, apparently, that is going to come with V12, which...

Got me a little bit hyped up, to be honest. It's been hard to hype me up when it comes to FSD. I've been burned too many times. But this does sound like something that could result in a lot of improvement. I think. I might be wrong.

Pale blue is list two new energy products were at least investor speculation. Yeah, I mean, we saw that. I mean, this just looks like the newer Powerwall 3 probably and like in the other, the Megapack XL or something like that. I'm not super hyped about that. If it's the hype, we just discuss basically every range. We discuss every range. All right, let's jump into the you guys comments right now so that we can jump into that.

And by the way, if you do enjoy the Electric Podcast, I know it's a special episode. We don't have set around. It's not the real Electric Podcast. But if you do enjoy the show, if you want to help out real quick, you can just click the like button right now on YouTube, on Facebook, on LinkedIn, on the like button. But anyway, you can subscribe. Hit the notification button. All those things are free to do and it helps the show a lot. It helps propagate on there. If you're listening on your podcast app now, we're at top 10 automotive podcast.

podcast in the US right now, which is awesome. And it's thanks to you guys. If you can leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, that helps the show a ton. Free to do takes a second and it helps the show more than you can think. All right. What are you guys saying?

Guan Co here says, other cars have their charging openings often on the other side, Mercedes, Kia. That's going to be a problem because they will use two spots of the supercharger. Any solution? Yes, the supercharger of E4 is the solution right now. It does have a much longer cable, which should...

solve at least partly those problems. I don't know if it goes all the way to the other side, though you're going to have to park another way. But yeah, I mean, the other companies in that field are better in that because they have the cables that are higher up and they can move it a little bit more. It's not that much of a difference with supercharger V4, but it is a significant one. So I don't know how Tesla is going to address those issues for current V3 superchargers that they are opening up because that's...

That's going to be a problem. Now, with the new Mercedes that are going to be coming out, because Mercedes has adopted NAX in North America, I assume that with the connector that they're going to put on the 2025 model years, when they do adopt NAX, are going to be in the same position as Tesla. I think that would make sense.

Jesse saying, I did a great job last week. I appreciate that. Carl Protero was one of the big EV bus maker and we have been supplying cities with EV buses when bankrupt. Looks like profitability, even when they started selling batteries, was too hard. Yeah, yeah. The cost was all over the place. They tried to expand a little bit too quick with several different factories. So it has, before bankruptcy, they tried to cut costs by putting everything in the same roof.

But it was not enough, obviously. But if they had done that a bit earlier, maybe they would have time. So there's still chances. I don't want to kill hope here. John Lutz says, free society for the working class, all electric, all sustainable, all inclusive, technology sustainable, incorporated cost, and efficient collective under Saudi and Yemen partnership. No idea what you're talking about here. Oh, NEOM. Okay. This is like the city project in Saudi Arabia. Yeah.

i think everything with the green assault what the saudis are doing there like that sounds like uh quite of a mess of a lot of money being poured in there probably not very efficiently create something crazy it's all like line city thing and whatnot i mean it looks cool and everything but i don't know i won't be the first signing up to move there brian bernan said hi there i have design electronic engine battery yes 1.9 volt for starting and four is uh for sell no thank you brian

Carl, Carl in San Diego, a frequent listener to the show. We appreciate you, Carl. Topic, GM seems to have seriously overestimated that cheap batteries will make it easy to build inefficient giant trucks SUV by showing big batteries at them. Is it sure I'm going to kick their asses?

I don't know what you mean by Iseltium going there, kick their ass, but I do understand the first part of your statement. And yes, it is the trend with GM, with the Hummer, with the Silverado Electric, and now with the Cadillac Escalade, it seems to be pretty clear that they are going with those giant battery things. And

it makes sense right now like they're going top market down obviously and they are already producing that 200 kilowatt hour pack for the hummer ev for a while now and it makes more sense for them to do that and to start to low volume until they can get their costs down at the battery level both at the cell level and uh at the module and at the pack level eventually to be able to then transfer some of those cost efficiencies to smaller and smaller battery pack

And then enable those smaller or lower range vehicles. You could put like 150 kilowatt hour battery pack in the Escalade. It would get 300 miles of range. It would still be a very good car. A lot of people would like that. And if you bring the cost on under $100,000, it would be a better seller than a 200 kilowatt hour, 450 miles. You don't need 450 miles for the most part. I mean, it has towing capacity. So I get it for that if you're going to use it like that. But yeah,

I mean, every time I've seen an SLA, this has been like transporting rich people from the airport to a hotel or something like that. So you don't need 450 miles for that. Steve Mohan says, drunks are overrated for... Drunks? Franx? It probably means Franx. For sure, I've won, but it isn't the main selling point. And the battery is way too large, which means heavy, inefficient, and costly to charge. I mean...

Not sure I'm following you. Nico loves the Aptera. I love Aptera too. Not much Aptera news lately. I wish there were more Aptera news. We were really bummed out when they didn't come to the electric sun race. But I mean, I know that they were still having some issues right now ramping up production. Ramping up to production, I should say.

They still need to secure a few tens of millions of dollars, I think, to make things happen. I don't know why some companies are not like just offering them some money and like taking a big stake because I think it could be like a very cool like

testbed for technology there, especially like their solar integration in the car, efficiency, just like, it's basically a lab for making efficient vehicles. So for things like that, I think a bit like Ford did with Rivian, for example, it could be a company investing in that. That would be very cool.

Mike, the car geek says, love or hate this car? IQ, both not an option. It pushed the envelope to a premium EV, but it is big, heavy and could build three Equinox for the same. So that's, yeah, that's the thing that a lot of people have been saying. Like you could just split the battery pack in a few and build a lot more cars, a lot cheaper vehicles. But again, I think that it's more about the strategy that GM is taking here in order to be able to get to those cheaper vehicle profitably.

Because we know that GM has been losing a lot of money pre-incentive, pre-credits. They've been losing a lot of money on their electric vehicles for a while now. So I think that with Altium, they're trying to reframe the situation, not start with a lower-end bolt and instead start with a higher-end, tune in their production capacity, tune in their cost efficiencies in order to achieve those vehicles. I think that looks pretty clear. And I think they're going to get there.

uh carl says front over or a big problem with these suvs they can work still on the iq um okay nick setter says question is anyone expected to make an actual ev work truck with an eight foot bed and a minimal cab size and overall length uh good question on the top of my head eight foot bed is pretty big um i'm sure it's gonna come at some point

Maybe not in the next two years or so, but in the next two years, I almost guarantee you that it's going to be an announcement about something like that. And then it should come within the next three or four years, probably. Victor D says, question, when are we getting official US price for the EV9? Good question. I wouldn't have to get you back on that. We should have that soon, though, because it is coming imminently.

Carl says, I'm seeing a lot of echo chamber in the EV community about how SUVs are necessary because that's the only thing that sells. SUVs literally undermine all of the fuel efficiency averages. Yeah, that is absolutely true. It's absolutely true. But this has been my philosophy here about electric vehicles and about sustainability as a whole here from my own experience. And I'm not...

psychologists or anthropologists that study human behaviors proficiently. I do do it in my own time. I find it fascinating. And from my own observation, and I've been covering this space for a decade at this point now,

So through looking at it for electric vehicles and applying it to other sustainable options, it has become clear to me that changing humor behavior for sustainability is extremely hard and harder to do than having technological solutions that are equivalent or better than the non-sustainable solution. In this case, electric vehicle versus fossil fuel powered vehicles.

It's better to have the sustainable solution be as good or better than trying to solve by changing human behavior, by telling them you should not want this thing, you should want that thing instead because it's better for the environment. Some people will make that decision. They will make the decision that's better for the environment. I know personally a lot of people that do that. I try to do that at times, but myself not. I succumb to...

the pull of the technology. And so I've seen that the only way that electric vehicle get mass adopted, which they are being mass adopted right now, I think we're clearly seeing the momentum

It's because they're better than gasoline cars, period. It's not because people are like, oh, we'll get an EV. You don't hear that anymore. Like you used to hear that at the beginning from the early adopters that were excited about it. But now you know here I am getting an EV because I want to save the planet. You're getting an EV because these are the coolest cars around right now. These are the best, better cars right now. And also in general, because you know there's a feeling around this is the next technology. Like I don't want to buy a horse when the Mumble T is coming out.

you want to buy it in the car. So yeah, I think that's how people are seeing it right now. I do. Your point is still valid. And for the people that, um,

understand that and are willing to make compromises, yes, do it. I mean, I use my bike. You see right here. I use my e-bike most of the time when I can travel with it instead of using my car because it is more efficient than using my car. Even though my car is electric, but it uses more electricity than the bike. You should always use the most efficient way to travel. But people love their SUVs. And I know...

This is a different point, but it does link to it. But it's not just about efficiency when it comes to SUVs. I wasn't even aware of that until recently. Or, I mean, it just clicked in my mind that that's a reason why people like SUVs, like bigger vehicles. But people are bigger in North America. Like, why people love SUVs in North America versus Europe, it's not just like a cultural, I mean, I guess it's kind of cultural to some degree. But it's because people are bigger. Like, 42% of the population is obese in the U.S.,

a bigger vehicle is more comfortable for them. Also, older people complain a lot about like a sedan or a crossover being lower and SUV is higher. It's easier to get in and out. So that makes sense. But I think it's not that bad. But the bigger thing I understand, if you weigh 250, 300 pounds and you have a small crossover or a small sedan with smaller seat,

It's not as comfortable. So that is something to take into account. So now, again, you can see all those people should just lose weight and still buy a beer cart. That goes back to my point. Changing human behavior is more difficult than finding technological solutions. So to the obesity thing, the technical solution would be food that's not so high in sugars, like those carbonated drinks with Zevia in them and things like that, instead of drinking Coca-Cola and...

because you can literally have the same experience, but with something that has zero calories or something like 100 calories. These are the solutions that you have to come up with right now instead of changing human behavior. I'm not saying that you shouldn't endeavor into trying to change human behavior. That's a great endeavor and we should try to do it. But I think the technical solution is literally easier, more impactful because of how hard it is to change human behavior.

I don't even know if there's any data backing what I said. It's just based on my own observation, by the way. So take everything I say with a grain of salt.

I went on a little rant there. Where was I? Polestar. Polestar isn't worse than Tesla was for us. No dealers and no local services. This is affecting their sales and owner satisfaction. I don't know about owner satisfaction, but certainly not the sales. The sales at Polestar have been ramping up pretty well, even without only the Polestar 2, basically, like the Polestar 3, which is another SUV. You're not going to like them. Honestly, when there's a...

When there's a problem with service on an EV, normally we get tons of posts about it. Tons of information comes to us about it. So I haven't heard anything about Polestar. So that's like a lack of data is not an answer, obviously, but it is an indication. So if you have a specific example, I'd love to look into it. That's the kind of thing that we like to report. But so far, I'm not hearing anything is a pretty good sign.

Uh, Stefan says, have you heard anything about Shanghai? I should show over to the hardware for wanting to trade in my model three for a more Y FSD transfer, but one hour for, yeah, we, we, we've been tracking that. We have nothing confirmed just yet. Uh, I know that it's something that would make a big difference for a lot of people. So we'll definitely keep, uh, um, keep an eye on out on that because I, obviously that affects like the, uh,

european and and north american market now it's a canadian market i should say because they don't ship shanghai made more wise in the us but they do in canada now so everyone is looking out for whenever the artwork 4 happened especially with the fsd transfer uh i wouldn't be shocked if tesla wait until q4 to do it so that you force the hands of people switching over before and uh

But at the same time, this is, again, this is a guest on my part. I wouldn't be surprised if that FSD transfer offer comes back in the future. Just a smart guest, I think, for me. All right. A lot of questions today. Appreciate you. It helped boost the show up to an hour now. So we did a full hour. So thank you, everyone, for listening. Again, if you do appreciate the show, if you can give a like, a quick like, takes a second to do, you can subscribe.

Give a thumbs up. Subscribe. Hit the notification button. All these things help the show a lot. They're free to do. They take a second. We didn't even have a sponsor on the show. You didn't even get ads today. So that's great. And if you are listening on your podcast app, on Apple Podcasts and that, you can give us a five-star review. That helps the show a ton. Also free to do. Also take a second. I appreciate every single one of you that do it. Stay safe out there. Have a great weekend. I'm going to see you same time, same place next week.

I think we're set. I'm not sure, but I think we're set.