Tesla optimizing FSD routes, Model 3 Long Range RWD, Ford Capri, and more
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Welcome to a new episode of The Electric Podcast. I'm Fred Lambert, your host, and as usual, I'm joined by Seth Wintraub. How are you doing this week, Seth? I'm good.

All right, good to hear, good to hear. Today's episode is brought to you by the Electric American Solar Challenge 2024. It's going to be a very cool event for students to showcase their engineering skill into solar electric cars. They're going to travel to the U.S. Seth is actually leaving for it right after the show, so we're going to talk to you a little bit more about it. And then you can even see Seth there if you want to go check it out. All right, let's jump in. We have a lot to talk about this week. It was kind of...

A lot of news items to discuss, but as we usually do, we're going to also take you guys' input. If you want to comment about the things that we're going to discuss today, you can see them in the show notes right now or just go right along with us. You can comment in the comment section right now. At the end of the show, we're going to go through your comments. If you guys have any questions about any of the topics today or any other topics in the EV industry, we're going to get to it too. The show is live and unedited.

um although we do scroll through the comments so don't before posting them so don't go crazy um all right uh this just happened last night tesla relaunched the model 3 long-range rear-wheel drive uh cool option that was available and then not available i think in 2020 maybe the last time it was available in i should say the us because actually in china

I don't know if it's still available now, but China has had a lot more models than we did, unfortunately. We do.

Until now, because the multi-long range has been relaunched as a 363 miles of range vehicle, starting at $42,490 before incentive. If you're not great at math, it is eligible to the full $7,500 incentive. So if you're not great at math, this is a $35,000 Model 3 for those who are eligible. So, yeah.

It's not a bad deal at all because you look at this, you get 100 more miles over the standard range rear wheel drive. And you get a full second, you shave off a full second of the 0-60 miles per hour acceleration for $3,500 more.

When you compare that to the bump you get from the Model 3 Long Range to the Model 3 Long Range All-Wheel Drive, which is $5,000 more and you lose like 20 something miles of range, it's a big difference. And it's good to have the options because there's plenty of people that don't really need all-wheel drive.

Like in Quebec here, I don't know about you in New York, cause it's similar climate, but people often think like, Oh, I absolutely need all wheel drive, but you don't always need all wheel drive. No, especially if you have multiple cars, you can save the, you know, one or two or three snow days for the all wheel drive car.

Especially depending on like here, even here where we get a lot more than two and three snow days a year, we get a lot of them, but we are equipped to clean the roads. So for the most part, the roads get clear and you don't really need all-wheel drive at all. Even if sometimes it gets a little bit of icy, but it's minimal.

Also, snow tires are much more important than all-wheel drive.

with gravel on it and there's not a lot of sun on it. So sometimes it gets really icy and literally without an all-wheel drive, they have some issues getting up on it. So people like that, obviously, all-wheel drive is probably a must. There's plenty of people that have similar situation that they have a cabin in the woods and they have to go through a dirt road that doesn't get cleared out often enough. Things like that is very useful in all-wheel drive.

But for the most part, a sedan, like we're talking about a family sedan here, you don't always need all-wheel drive. And you get now, you get 20 more miles of range and for a lot less because it's 5,000 difference between the cheapest long-range Model 3, which again is the all-wheel drive version. So this is a pretty good deal. The deliveries are starting now according to Tesla. They are getting this thing in production right away.

And yeah, especially if you're eligible to the tax credit, it's a pretty good deal. All right, moving on. We have a report from Bloomberg that claims that Tesla is about to delay the launch of the... The unveiling of the... The launch is probably not the right word. The unveiling of the robot taxi. Elon announced that it's going to be on August 8th. And we don't know a ton about it. It was first announced.

confirmed to be a planned vehicle in the Tesla product lineup at the investor day the year prior.

Elon said that Tesla plan to build a dedicated self-driving vehicle. He's been saying for years that all Tesla vehicles are going to be capable of self-driving. We're not quite there yet. But now, in a weird move, he decided to create another vehicle that's just specifically for self-driving. The vehicle is interesting for a little bit more than that because obviously it's going to have no steering wheel, no accelerator and pedals and brakes, so completely driverless.

It's also going to be Tesla's now only vehicle that's going to be built on the Unbox vehicle platform that is supposedly going to result in pretty significant cost reduction. This is kind of a gambit for Tesla, a bet on self-driving and also on great cost reduction, which maybe will result in a cost reduction in other vehicles as well, even though the other vehicles that were planned for the Unbox has been postponed.

What we know about it has been in the biography by Walter Isaacson, it was mentioned it's going to be Cybertruck-like. There was this image that is supposedly, again, from the book of an early prototype of the Robotaxi. Is it a three-wheeler or four-wheeler? It could be two covered wheels in the back. I would be shocked if it's a three-wheeler. It would be incredible, but...

it would also kind of mitigate the impact of the unbox platform. Three-wheelers are a lot cheaper to make than four-wheelers. You're like, hey, we managed to cut like 25% of the cost. It's like, yeah, you cut 25% of the wheels too. So yeah, I would assume that it's covered wheels, but you never know.

So yeah, it was supposed to be unveiled in April. So just a few months ago, it was announced that it was going to be unveiled on August 8th. But we weren't putting too much credibility on this because this was amid Elon just coming back to Tesla after not spending too much time at the company for a long time because Twitter and all that.

And also amid his push to solidify his position at Tesla amid the challenge, a proxy challenge around his compensation package. And he came in at this like a wrecking ball, you know, cancel a bunch of program, change a bunch of effort to resources. Oh, my light just literally died right in front of me right now. Yeah, it's fully dead. Okay.

It's done a year and a half or something. These things light up for a long time, so it makes sense. We'll work on it. Moving on. So Elon canceled the two other vehicles in the Unbox, transferred some of the construction resources to the new super cluster that they are building at Gigafactory Texas and to the Robotaxi production lines, and also the design and engineering effort to the Robotaxi. Obviously, if you cancel the other ones, you can focus on that.

And then right away, right after that, he announced we're going to unveil the RoboTaxi in August. So this was a lot of changes in a short period of time. And then Elon putting a deadline on it like he usually does. We also mentioned at the time that they wanted to match in August the launch of the supercluster and the guarantee exists. And when we did our report, we didn't know that some insiders were thinking that this

Probably not doable. So it's also part of a possible delay. Now, Bloomberg came out with a report this week saying that Tesla is delaying its planned robotics unveiling to October from August, specifically to allow teams working on a project more time to build additional vehicle prototypes, according to people familiar with the decision.

So this was a report from Bloomberg. Tesla hasn't commented on it. And when I say Tesla, obviously, I mean Elon. And, you know, Elon's old thing about like media lying all the time and all that. He's generally quick to jump onto some of these stories, especially since it like dropped the stock by like 6% yesterday when it came out. So if he hasn't denied a story yet, I would assume that it is true. Are you shocked, Seth? No.

Yeah, I mean, obviously the remote taxi, like it's unveiled. I'm sure Tesla could unveil something. Well, I was going to say, they're just going to show what they are making. They're not going to, like they don't have to have one on the street in August. But the only thing that I'm thinking on that front is like, if they do get some kind of like geofencing, ride-hailing service deal with a city, it's,

It would be a big change of approach, but a lot of people, ourselves included, have been saying for years that it's probably the approach that makes more sense to start like that, like every other company has done. So especially for regulatory approval, it makes the most sense. So maybe these two or three months, additional months,

could help make a deal like that and they could unveil the vehicle with some kind of actual commercial products behind it. I don't know. It's just two or three months is not a lot of time to do that too, but any day count at this point. All right, speaking of self-driving, one of the things that hasn't been putting a lot of hype around the Robotech C is the fact that Tesla's current self-driving effort, the supervised self-driving effort,

hasn't been going too well like we've since a lot of v12 earlier this year my main we said and i both been impressed by v12 or like this is very this is the most the biggest improvement the most noticeable improvement since fsd beta you know three years ago at this point but my main thing personally has been okay now that they have that we have this and we have elon claiming that uh the uh the state's not compute training compute constraint anymore

So you have V12 and 2L neural nets that, you know, if you train them, they improve. And then you have no restriction in terms of compute power for training. You should see quick,

And that has not been the case. There's a bunch of the V12.3 that, you know, made it to the fleet, was pulled back. Then you have V12.4 that Elon has been hyping up like crazy, going as far as taking it. You will go a full year between intervention, five to ten times fewer intervention than the V12.3. So like huge, you know, hypes up.

And this has been delayed like two months now, this update. So not looking good. It is finally being pushed to the fleet, the wider fleet, because it has been in internal testing for the last few months. Elon kept saying like next week is going to be released and it hasn't been. But now the V12 testoscope, which you know is...

has its software and then a bunch of Tesla so they can track releases of software and based on their population, they can predict how many vehicles are getting a new update. And they see that the V12.4.3 is now being pushed through the 2024.15.15 software update. And from what they see now, it looks like about 1% to 5% of eligible vehicles are getting it. So this doesn't sound like much, but it's actually much bigger than the internal testing that Tesla has.

And the small customer fleet, like the VIPs, which we're going to get to in a minute. So the update is not getting there. I haven't received it yet personally. At least I checked this morning and didn't get it. Didn't get it either, which is a bummer because he's going on a nice long road trip. Could have been some good testing time. Yeah.

But yeah, if you did get it, let us know what you think about it in the comment section. We'd like to discuss it later on in the show, in the second half. But the next thing we're going to discuss is something that we've been suspecting for a while. The Esperanto has been confirmed by Business Insider that has done a report with a dozen current and former Tesla insiders. That's what they said. That claim that Elon has been optimizing full self-driving

on routes that he takes and routes that influencers, test influencers, people that post videos of the FSD drive on social media have been taking. So specifically what we're seeing here, they're talking about the data annotation team. So for those who don't know, Tesla has automated some of that, but at one point it was thousands. Now maybe it's hundreds of people that

Take videos from the fleet, coming in from the fleet, and know the data to tell the neural net what's happening in those data and then feed that to the neural net so that they can gain a better understanding of specific situations, whether it's like corner cases or different...

signage that they haven't seen before, different line markings they haven't seen before. It can be like a weird trailer. It can be things that you encounter around the route and you tell the neural net this is what you're seeing. So deal with it. Now that you know what it is, you can deal with it.

And this is useful. This is, for example, this is why, well, amongst other reasons, other than regulatory reasons, this is why Tesla has launched FSD in other markets either. Because, you know, in Europe and China and other markets, they have different signage and the neural nets need to be trained on those signage. Apparently, that's what's happening right now with, you know, development in Europe and China for FSD, new regulatory approval and all that.

So if you train, that's why we suspected at first that the reason why Elon and some of these Tesla influencers were seeing better results with unsupervised, supervised self-driving is that they are getting more training data in California and Texas where those people are located for the most part. And that made sense to me. They're getting most of the data. But now we're going on like two and a half years since the greatly expanded the FSD beta, now supervised FSD data.

to more regions, so they're getting data from everywhere. But there's limitation on how good this data is based on annotation. And now this report from Business Slider says that these data annotators were given two prioritization categories that were called Elon Musk and VIPs.

So they were prioritizing specifically routes that Elon was taking. And you can check out, we linked in our report, we can check out the business insider report. They give a bunch of example or specific example where annotators were giving like routes from a mention that was known to be owned by Elon to a SpaceX office to more recently a Twitter office too. Then...

Same thing with Tesla and around Austin, I mentioned where Elon was known to stay out of the friend around specifically from that to the Tesla Gigafactory Texas. And then the same thing from some VIPs, which turned out that they would identify as people that post, especially on X and YouTube videos of Tesla FSD driving around.

Which could explain now why some of these people and Elon himself have had a much better experience than I would. I cannot obviously talk about the average experience exactly. I don't have a perfect poll on that. But based on my experience for using it for more than two years, set experience of

of a lot of people that I would call unbiased with the situation. And, you know, these are people unbiased and there are people that bought FSD and wanted to work because they bought it. But, you know, up until that point, if you remove that, they aren't biased about it.

it hasn't been the same experience at all and you even had elon like saying all you have to do is try it all you have to do is watch those videos on youtube of people trying it if you cannot try it yourself and you see how good it is and uh we always been pushing back again that like when you're talking about elon like we've been trying it for years and you know there's intervention every day if not every 15 minutes sometimes

So we haven't been as impressed as Elon to say the very least. And now we have a good idea why is because Tesla is literally optimizing the experience for Elon and those people. So there's a discrepancy that's created between their experience and the average experience, which is not great, obviously. The only devil's advocate that I could play here is obviously he's the CEO of the company and he gives feedback.

You're going to prioritize this feedback. That makes sense. Now, for the influencers, there is some people in that report from some insiders that did argue that some of them are pushing the product a little bit further.

And therefore they were creating some cases that were worth more for the annotation team. So they were doing that. But for the most part, the insiders agreed that it was ultimately just creating a face for a customer facing experience and the marketing experience to sell that. And Elon has been using that to sell it. There's a lot about it that is different from the actual user experience. So obviously there's an argument there too.

So either way, it's not ideal. And I also, I don't like that Elon is just, you know, hyping up the product while not actually having the actual experience behind the product, like the real experience. And he's been saying for a while, like, oh, just try it and it's going to be great for yourself. But, you know, he himself, he should probably go try like a Waymo taxi or something like that, just to open himself up. It looks like he's a little bit, you know, a bit of an echo chamber lately when it comes to that stuff.

And just about everything else too. Yeah, there's an argument there too. All right, moving on from this news. Oh yeah, there was a new Model Y spotted with some camouflage on it, which sparked a lot of interest from people because the camouflage that you see here is specifically on the front end of the vehicle and the back end of the vehicle. And we've seen a lot of these prototypes on the Model 3 Island, prototypes ramping up before the unveiling.

And there's been these rumors about a Model Y refresh called Juniper. And then Elon responded to that, Elon and Tesla specifically. Before Elon even mentioned it, Tesla sent out some talking points to employees to let them know, to communicate to customers that it's not going to be a Model Y refresh this year. And then Elon doubled down on that on Twitter.

So it's been pretty clear that it won't be one this year. And to be honest, even we're seeing though a prototype now, like six months ahead of the new year, we've seen Model 3 refresh prototypes around way longer than that too. So I wouldn't be surprised if it's true that there won't be a Model Y this year, probably next year.

And some of the model 3 refreshes, the features that were refreshed were already in the model Y, for example. So it's probably not that big of a refresh, but it's needed. And Tesla has to be careful with that, obviously, because then it could affect current sales if the refresh is being hyped up a lot.

And obviously, the Model Y is its biggest seller, so it would be a bad thing. Any 10% reduction in demand for the Model Y impacts this entire business a lot since Model 3 hasn't been doing exactly great. And as we reported last week, Model S and X sales are in the dumpster right now.

All right. This is actually great Tesla news here. I always love to see that the virtual power plant in California has achieved 100 megawatt of power yesterday in the emergency response event.

So VPPs, virtual power plants, they are using Tesla's distributed energy system, primarily power walls and solar. Well, the solar is feeding the power walls and the power walls are the ones actually doing the VPP work here. When a specific market, Tesla has deal with electric utilities in specific markets and when they need more power,

which they usually do by activating peaker plants, which are polluting gas plants that provide a little help to achieve a peak power when there's a lot of demand. And so those are costly to turn on and they are, again, polluting.

so instead of doing that they can turn to tesla and say hey can you can you tell all your people that have power walls right now instead of like taking power to send us some power and we'll pay them a lot more than than they paid to get that power if they got it from us in the first place because most of the time they actually combine it with solar so there's solar power they're actually sending back uh and we're gonna pay you uh in the in case of the pg e uh in california northern california was two dollars per kilowatt hour

which to me sounds crazy because we pay like 10 cents per kilowatt hour. But in California, they have some crazy prices at some places. Sometimes it's like 30 cents, 60 cents a kilowatt hour, but still $2 is a lot more. So you make, you're going to make money. And then for a certain period of time, your power wall discharge that power into the, the grid using it where they need it. And that way, um,

They don't have to activate that peaker plan. So even though they pay more for the energy, they still save money. And the Powerwall owner gets some money of that. People have seen between $10 and $60 per event. But the first time we've seen an event from Tesla two years ago, the power was about 1.5 megawatt. Then a few months later, it grew to like 15 megawatts.

Now Tesla has achieved 100 megawatts in the California grid. So this is like a decent size power plant here that Tesla is able to create out of existing infrastructure that's already there. All the power walls are already there. The homeowners use them for the reason to prevent them from power outages to maximize their own solar production. So this is like existing infrastructure is just like basically software we're talking about there. Just a software infrastructure

PowerPlan, hence the name Virtual PowerPlan, obviously. So pretty cool. Like if you do some math, basically 100 megawatt, if the event lasted about an hour, that's $200,000 worth of energy that was discharged into the grid. Sorry, what that was paid to those Tesla Powerwall owners.

Pretty good. And this will keep growing, obviously, as Tesla adds more Powerwall to the fleet and also other markets have it too. We've seen one in Vermont. We've seen one in Texas. There's one in New York, I think, too. It's not Tesla doing it, though. It's the other company. But you're using Tesla Powerwalls, but it's not managed by Tesla. It's not Con Ed, is it? No, that's, well, I mean, it's under Con Ed, I think, as the electric utility. But there's another, like, third party that does the virtual power plant. I forget the name.

All right. Should we talk a little bit about the Electric American Solar Challenge? Yeah. So after the podcast today, I'm getting in the car, the Tesla, and full self-driving my way to Kentucky at the Corvette Museum Speedway, which is in Bowling Green.

north of Nashville, Tennessee. And we'll be there for Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, racing electric vehicles, electric or solar electric cars around a 3.1 something mile track. And then we're going to move to Nashville on Thursday and Friday. And we're going to race those things from Nashville to Casper, Wyoming. So that'll be super fun. Hopefully some of you guys can come out and join us.

And we'll have lots of stories and pictures and stuff on Electrek. So if you can't join us, follow us there. And also go to americansolarchallenge.org for all the latest info. I think my internet is slow now. I tried to load the map, but it's just loading. Oh, there you go. Oh, we have a partnership on the national park with this? Yep. Oh, we updated the whole... Oh, that's real. Way nicer. Yep.

So here you have the whole map to get around if you want to follow through. So yeah, if you're around these areas, let us know in the comment section. If you're going to go check it out, it will be really cool. Joe Baras said Swell Energy. Yeah, that's what I was talking about earlier. Swell Energy. All right. Thank you, Joe. Check out Electric Daily to check out Joe's daily podcast about all the news in the EV world. He's been doing a great job on that. Yeah, he's doing a great job, especially with his thumbnails. He's like killing it with the thumbnails right now.

I like the intro as well. Yeah, the intro is good too. All right. One tidbit of Tesla news before we move to other automaker. We have Ford unveiling this week. We have an MJ Cyber something and more to talk about. The Tesla Gigafactory Berlin had a staff meeting that was reported on by local media in Germany. And apparently it was contentious. There was a lot of tension between different working groups.

And it's specifically, we reported a few months ago, there was a new election because in Germany they have unions, but then they have workers' councils. So within like large company, the workers have their own council that they negotiate.

I don't know exactly how it works because unions can get control of those worker council and then it's like a union negotiating with the management. But then you also have spiritually a workers' council that does that, that is not linked to a wider union, if that makes sense. That's my understanding of the situation.

And they have this giant union in Germany, the IGML, that is like the equivalent of the UAW in North America. And they have been trying to get into this Gigafactory Berlin. And they've been doing that. In that election, they were the biggest group to win. They had 16 seats, but they didn't get a majority. So the majority of employees actually voted against the union. So they're not in control anymore.

of the workers council but they have influence in it and now there was this big staff meeting this week and there was tension between them and and other employees and management obviously so the head of the console is still like is a pro management person but you know he's still getting he knows that some of his um workers that he represent are pro union pro ig metal union

Very complicated situation. And the union IG Medall, they are pushing against Tesla. They say that there are safety concerns at Tesla, that the incident rates are too high. They show certain statistics that show that, and Tesla shows statistics that are contrary. And then they also say that they would want better pay and better job security because Tesla has fired a lot of people at the factory over the last few months, as they did globally.

So, the union is pushing for that and the management was pushing against it. But actually, if you look at the meeting, my headline has been that the union threatened to strike at the Sabadellia for a contentious meeting because I think that was the bigger part of the news. The representative for the IG Metal said,

James Borrett stated that a strike is a possibility amid the tension, though they did say that it's last resort. So they've threatened it, but just introduced the idea of it to put pressure, but they're not saying that they're going to use it just now.

But the thing that actually grabbed all the headlines is Andrew Turek, the plant manager that took the stage at one point. And instead of discussing these tensions that were being discussed as part of the meeting, he complained about the coffee mugs. He said, I'm just going to give you a figure. We bought 65,000 coffee mugs since we started production here. 65,000. Sorry.

Statistically speaking, each of you already has five IKEA coffee cups at home. I'm really tired of approving orders to buy more coffee cups. There's about 12,000 employees at this Gigafactory Berlin. So 65,000 mugs is indeed a little bit weird. So he's accused the employees of stealing the mugs. And he says that he's going to take away... Paper cups. Paper cups. Yeah. He's going to take away the cutlery at the break rooms if the theft keeps going on.

It was pretty crazy. Reminds me of the toilet paper incident five years ago. Very much so. And, you know, we actually were able to confirm that story eventually because you went to the, was it the Monkisco Service Center? And they did not have toilet paper. That was two years after a report was still vindicated at last. For sure. All right. This is a new initiative from the Biden administration.

They managed to take Biden's harm and get this one signs. This is a new deal. Yeah. I'm sorry. It's just, I mean, it blew my mind. You see the thing yesterday with the calling Zelensky Putin, introducing him as Vladimir Putin, president of Russia. You missed that one. It was an insane one. I can't watch any of it. They selected 11 plants that were...

that are currently producing non-electric vehicles, just gasoline cars, and they're going to invest 1.7... Well, they're going to give grants, so that's good. That's free money. $1.7 billion in grants to these 11 selected plants to help them convert them to electric vehicle production. So let me see if we have a list. Oh, we have a list here. Here's the full list of the programs. I know that GM got one, and...

So you have in Toledo, Ohio, you have American Auto Parts, which is part of Mobus. Mobus? Isn't Mobus part of some other... Isn't it not a big automaker that's... No, I think you're thinking of Mopar, maybe? Maybe. Bluebird in Georgia, Fort Valley, Georgia, getting also for the electric bus, electric bus come-ins, electrified power,

They're going to have one in Columbus, Indiana, again for zero emission vehicles. Chrysler, Fiat Chrysler, getting a boost at this Belvedere assembly plant in Illinois. Again, Chrysler getting some money this time for Kokomo. Oh, Kokomo, Indiana. That's cool. General Motors at its Lansing, Michigan plant is getting some money. Harley-Davidson getting a grant for its York, Pennsylvania plant. Volvo.

And then ZF North America, Volvo is getting a lot. One from Pennsylvania, another in Virginia. And then one in MD is Maryland. I think so. MD? Yeah, Maryland. It looks like it's from their commercial trucks division, not their cars. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Same ZF North America is also...

Truck company. So this one is in Michigan. So this is going to help a lot of these companies convert to electric vehicles. Now, I saw a bunch of Tesla fans complaining, oh...

all these legacy automakers getting all that money and Tesla not getting anything. This program is specifically for companies that are producing gas in vehicles to convert their effort to electric. I think this is a pretty good program, honestly. And Tesla has done that in the past and they have gotten a lot of government incentive to do that when they converted the Fremont factory to an electric vehicle plant. But Tesla has kind of stopped doing that now where

They don't like getting existing plants and converting them to LG vehicle production. They much prefer now building their own plant from the ground up just to optimize it for vehicle production, which is a different approach. And it looks to be the right one too because Rivian did the same thing with the Mitsubishi plant in Illinois. And their second plant was they want to build them from the ground up in Georgia. So,

they're not alone in that path all right ford unveiled the capri ev in the european market basically like a fast bag version of the explorer uh with you know some design changes that are arguably not the best the side view a lot of people have seen the side views like the pole star because of the fastback i assume but the front view higher up

No front view here. I don't know what you think, Seth, but... I don't know. I mean, there's only so many ways you can kind of make a SUV, you know, small SUV looking thing look. I don't think, I don't hate it. I don't love it somewhere in the middle. Fastback too is resulting in a little bit tighter storage in the back, but that's, you know, if you want more, you get the Explorer EV. Interior is pretty sleek. I like this a lot.

Yeah, this is nice actually. Interior is nice. Size-wise, it's similar to the VW ID.5. Spec-wise, I have this here. So the Capri Premium. What do we have here? So there's two trims, the Capri, Capri Premium. The rear-wheel drive Capri EV is powered by a 77-kilowatt-hour battery up to 390 miles of range, 627 kilometers, but that's the WLTP.

And then the premium has two more kilowatt hours. It's not a big difference, but it is all-wheel drive though. So you do drop some range, but not too much. 368 miles, 592 kilometers. Again, this is WLTP, so it doesn't account for climate control and all that. So it's...

unless you're someone who drives around without any climate control you can expect a little bit of a drop there's 12 ultrasonic sensors five cameras three radars around the vehicle zero to 60 in 5.3 seconds so that's for the all-wheel drive version it's reasonable yeah yeah so decent uh although ford has yet to officially reveal price the evs expected to cost more than the electric explorer starting at around fifty thousand dollars uh us well

It's not available in Europe, but in the US, it's only in euros. It's 47,000 euros. I should mention, by the way, like the Explorer, this is built on the Volkswagen MEV platform. So this is, you know, Ford is involved in this, but it's a lot of a Volkswagen vehicle too. So basically this is an ID4. Closer to ID5, apparently. Okay. Yeah, that's true. All right.

all right we have one last piece of news to discuss before we jump into the comment section so if you guys have any questions for us put them in the comment section and we'll get to them in just a few minutes uh the mg cyber gts was fully unveiled this week so mg is this british brand but they are now chinese owned and built in china too so this was kind of uh the european debut of the mg cyber gts because i think i think it's been produced in china already

And this is kind of the Chinese foray into the small electric sports car with a foreign brand because MG is, again, British. I don't hate it. It looks pretty good. I don't like the paint job though, but that's not a big deal. Yeah, I think that can be easily fixed. Yeah. So it's a two by two. So four seater. It's available, I think, in a hard top and then a convertible version.

Yeah, both hardtop convertible. Price is pretty good. The equivalent of $44,000 to $50,000 US. So not too bad. But it's not a crazy powerful vehicle. It's a smaller, lighter EV for a sports experience. So the single motor model is 231 kilowatts to 250. I don't know what makes the difference.

And then you can add an additional 150 kilowatt motor on the front. So you have 250 in the back and 150 in the front, which should be like pretty fun to drive. It's a decent 400 kilowatt output, 0 to 60 in 3.2 seconds.

fast yeah very fast man and here's the thing it doesn't have a huge battery it's 60 it was pretty decent it's decent sized battery for the size of the car but it's not it didn't go overboard like 60 kilowatt hour 64 kilowatt hours sorry which gives you 211 miles of range that's a cltc standard so you can expect a little bit less than that but it should be like a 250 mile range car easy

in my opinion. And then you can also get the 77 kilowatt hour version, which start to get a little bit heavier. And you get closer to 360 miles of range, 580 kilometers. You should still be on over 200 miles a car. And that's on the rear wheel drive version. If you want to get the all wheel drive version, Zoll motor, you drop to 323 miles of range. Oh, it has these butterfly doors? Okay. Sweet.

I think this is available right now or in China, but did they say anything about this coming to Europe? I mean, it went to Goodwood, I guess. Yeah. I mean, why would you do that? I say that, but there was a bunch of other Chinese EVs in Goodwood too. And this is very much a Chinese EV, even though it's called MG. All right. We should jump into the comment section. All right.

Our friend Carl in San Diego is back. Tesla's way behind compared to the others for having robo-taxi without a driver. It's not even close. I mean, when you take into account that some people already have driverless vehicles. Waymo's doing that right now. Hedged Hog says, what's with EVgo stock? I actually looked at that. It's up 10%, but there's a bunch of EV stocks that are up like 10% today. I noticed LEV was up about 10%. Rivian was up 10% earlier.

I think it's just a good day for the EV stocks. And has it been doing better like the past few months? I haven't looked long term, but today. Yeah, it's up 39% in the last six months. Well, just 11% year over year today. All right. Dan Oberstay got 12.4 last week. I'd be tricked into thinking I'm an influencer, but Tesla clearly hasn't optimized my routes yet.

it still chooses the wrong exit lane as it has for going on three years um i was driving yesterday uh and i ran a red light jeez yeah fsd it was yellow and i was like you probably should stop and then just went right through it so yeah not perfect there are a few lights around me and a few intersections that have weird light placement that even myself i'm like a little bit confused at times uh that almost did that too but

It stopped at the end. Yeah, it's not great. The path from right now to actual driverless system is just still not clear in my head. And we should note, Elon kind of commented on the fact that V12.4 was late. It is still late because I still haven't. Even though Dan got it, you lucky bastard. He said that now the problem is...

the delays are due to Tesla putting together a new version of the system and not knowing if it's better or not because there's so few intervention. Right. Which I'm going to call bullshit on. It makes, it makes no sense to me unless, unless like he's completely leaving his, in his route optimized bubble, but,

Like, if that's the case, show us the data. And they've never showed the intervention data. Like, if now it's like so good that you're having issues finding problems because there's no intervention, show us the data. Now would be the time. And they're still not showing the data, which is not a good look to me. Like, it's not a good look. Yeah. All right. Carl's saying that we're using past tense about the VIP training. Yeah.

and still going on yeah it could it could very much still be going on yeah trial doesn't have a strong adoption as a paid service it's a toy feature that requires 100 of your attention well currently yes but theoretically at some point it won't uh question does tesla take a cut when vpp is occurring a sort of withdrawal power plant or does all that arbitrage money go to the homeowner i would imagine no i'm sure they're taking a cut yeah i mean actually should obviously

Joe, our fellow podcaster, has the Swell Powerwall we talked about earlier. Bowling Green, where the Electric Solar Challenge is going to be, has to be the original southern car plant right before BMW, Merck, and others opened plants there. We are going to be specifically at the Corvette Museum, and I believe that Corvettes were made there or still made there. Obviously not EVs, but

That's kind of their claim to fame at the moment. And good job on pronunciation. Dan Obersay, do these solar cars going between Nashville and Casper have air conditioning? It's hot down there in July. I don't think that any, maybe one or two or something have air conditioning. The reason is obviously you want to spend all the energy in propulsion and

They do have lots of air intake though. So the drivers who are students are cooled off, especially when these cars are going like 50 miles per hour. So you have a 50 mile per hour wind coming in. Even hot muggy air is going to... Yeah. And they have like support vehicles and all that too. So like if I don't think they can switch drivers, I assume too. Yeah.

Carl asks, if Harley-Davidson spun off Livewire, why is it getting an EV grant or is that just semantics? It's just semantics, I would assume. Even though it has been spun off, I think they're still very much involved. Yeah, Harley, a big part of it. One of the Volvo grants is a Mack truck plant. Yeah, makes sense. Maybe that's part of there. The Ford Capri also looks like a four-door Skyen TC. I'm not sure I remember that one, but I guess...

uh livewire is still built in the york harley plant so that spac was largely performative yeah like they are often uh yeah it looks like a full star too as well and uh it's an id5 we mentioned uh i think the mg cyber gts just broke cover today only the cyberster has been on sale in china huh okay

late land latte land uh tesla needs to stimulate the s x sales could cut prices add useful features maybe a new version does it make sense to try to improve s and x given low max sales ceiling uh i'm all be confused because he says to improve them and then he says it's not worth it it's just yeah i mean you know the numbers are i mean the problem i have with the s and x is that they're too close to the y and three

like the the model 3 is almost as good as the model s i mean obviously there's it's bigger and the model uh x is bigger as well and has the falcon wing doors but for the most part most people who who could buy an x probably want to just get a y for half the price or third of the price or whatever so yeah i think i think tesla was a little bit too optimistic when at first they thought like they would do still still be able to do like 50 50 like 50 000 units of each a year

Yeah. We're so far from that. Like we're like 20% of that right now. Um, but yeah, I think you're, you're mostly right. Cause you, you could make things work with the next, uh, with, with, with the three and the, and the why, you know, even though I would agree, argue that the SNX experience probably a little bit better, but just is it, you know, $50,000 better, which is basically not, maybe not, but like 40,000, $30,000 better.

Yeah. And I would also say like, I think those are very big cars, the S and X they're large. And I don't know that everybody wants them. Like, you know, it's, those are tight in the garages, tight in parking spaces, you know? So, and you know, bigger cars in North America, they do pretty well, but you know, other countries, not as much. So you limit yourself with that too.

Adrian notes that we should let Tesla know that we are influencers. I'm sure they would jump right on that. I want them to improve S and X, but maybe not worth it. Falcon wing doors on the X are not necessarily a sales feature. We have an XC90 we have instead of an X because the wife hates the doors. Yes. Also a lot of other things.

but the doors are not they're not bad like i know they're gimmicky they're flashy but they actually work pretty well like when i owned the next for a year and uh i had no complaints about the doors you had the next for a while too did you ever have any issues with your doors yep

You had issues? We had an early X. We bought, we leased a, like we went in to buy one and they said, Hey, you can get this lease. You know, next last year's one way cheaper. So we're like, okay, got it. And it had like a lot of problems, not just the doors, but everything else.

Yeah. All right. A few more. Unfortunately, the VIP influencers didn't know their interventions were alter adulterating the training. I don't think they were happy to find their experiences now different than anyone else's. I don't think it is better. They cannot complain too much, but yeah.

I haven't seen the reaction of those influencers being, I've mostly seen a reaction of like, yeah, obviously, like, were they going to, you know, work on our thing? People mentioned like Chuck, obviously, Chuck Cook a lot, because we already knew about test optimizing for his route because they kept sending vehicles, their internal testing vehicles there to do it.

But, you know, that I'm not saying that that makes no sense. Obviously, that makes sense. It is, you know, he has a specific left unprotected left turn that is in his area. That is a good challenge for Tesla to to to be basically. So, you know, I'm not saying that. I'm just I'm saying that obviously once Tesla beat that, like this specific left turn is going to work well, but not necessarily all left turn. So you have to keep in mind that.

This optimization for Elon and influencer is not a bad thing per se as long as people are aware of it. Aware that you're watching something that has been optimized by Tesla. Elon is talking about 12v4 being near perfect because it's been optimized for him. So it's not a bad thing as long as you know about it. And thanks to Business Insider, now we know very clearly about it. And not thanks to Tesla.

All right. Well, that's it for us this week, guys. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, if you can give us a like, a thumbs up, all these things are free to do and they help the show a lot more than you think. If you're listening on a podcast app right now, if you can give us a five-star review, that helps a lot too because we've been attacked last week by some Elon fans saying that we were too hard on him. Poor guy, you know. Poor Elon. Yeah.

He needs people to defend him by giving us one star on our podcast show. Anyway, so if you do enjoy the show, please give us a good review. That helps the show a ton. It's free to do and it helps the show more than you think. All right. That's it for us this week. I hope you have a good one. I'm going to see you maybe not same time next week. It depends on Seth's travel.