Tesla people-mover leaks, Cybertruck body, Elon AI startup, and more
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Welcome to the episode of the Electric Podcast. I am Fred Lambert, your host. And as usual, I'm joined by Seth Weintraub. But coming in from New Orleans this time. How are you doing, Seth? I'm good. All right, let's jump right in. Though we don't have that many articles to discuss today, it was just a slow week. So we're going to have plenty of time to answer your guys' questions or any other topic in the EV world you want us to discuss today. So please put that in the comments section below.

Before we jump into the news this week, let me say a quick word of thank you to our sponsor, Pedego, for sponsoring this week's episode of the Electric Podcast. For July only, save up to $500 on Pedego e-bikes, including their newest model, the Avenue. You can find a store near you in the show notes if you click the link in the notes.

We're going to have a little bit more to say about them later on the show. So stay tuned for that. Let's jump right into the news this week, starting with probably the biggest news of the week. This video of what appeared to be a leak of the actual... People are...

A little bit weird about what you're calling this thing here. I'm calling it a people mover. I think it's the more accurate thing, the less descriptive also. But people are calling it Tesla van, the Tesla subway cart. There's a bunch of different words for it. But it's basically this here that we've been talking about for a while, the boring company people mover that Tesla is supposed to be working on to people.

operate within the Tesla, sorry, not the Tesla, but the borrowing company loops and maybe eventually hyperloops. So right now it's only the Model 3, Model Y, Model X that are being used inside the tunnels under Las Vegas. But there's been a rumor that Tesla was working on a new vehicle for the borrowing company that can transport up to 12 people. This was actually a requirement in some of the project that the borrowing company has been involved in.

And now this week, it was leaked by local video content creator out of Las Vegas, Jacob Horth. He didn't say how he obtained it, only that it was from within the Boring Company headquarters in Las Vegas. And I'm going to play the video real quick here. It's pretty quick. It looks like a very rough prototype, but at the same time, it looks very much like what we're seeing in this image here. So in all glass...

vehicle with what looks like bus or subway benches within the vehicle and what makes us think that it is indeed a tesla vehicle is at one point you can see the the steering wheel and you you can see it's a tesla steering wheel and it would make sense also if it's a boring company vehicle that tesla would manufacture because tesla has manufactured all the boring vehicle to date

But yeah, again, it looks like a very early prototype. Would you agree, Seth? Yeah, I mean, it kind of looks like a greenhouse you would buy at Home Depot or something. But it's interesting that it even has a steering wheel with the full self-driving autonomy stuff and the very closed loops that the Boring Company runs. I'm surprised that Tesla believes that

it will need a steering wheel whenever this thing comes out in whatever amount of years. Yeah, I mean, we talked a few weeks ago, actually, about the last time you went there and you said that

It was the thing where even the autopilot wouldn't work well in the loop so that they really require drivers for the existing Tesla vehicles. So I'm not that surprised that they would need a steering wheel for this one too. And actually, it's a lot more efficient. At least if you have a driver that needs to be there, a lot more efficient. If you can fit a dozen people in there, then it can fit three or four.

Yeah. And also, you know, Las Vegas is quite sunny and hot. I wonder about the idea of building a glass enclosure, if that's smart, if it's going to go outside at all. I don't know if this thing is going to, you know, right now that the cars operate all underground. So I don't know if that's a consideration.

Also, you don't need to worry too much about crashing, hopefully, technically. Maybe you do. I don't know. But having a full glass vehicle doesn't really bode well if you're in an accident. Yeah, it sounds like it's really meant to be operated inside the tunnels. But at the same time, why do you need all glass if you're inside a tunnel? What are you looking at? Yeah.

Originally, the original Boring Company plan was that... That was one of the points when people brought up, like, how is it better than a subway? How is it better than a subway? That was, like, the main question that people were asking Elon. And his main differentiator from a subway is, like, yeah, but you can take them to the final destination. So you can take them out of the tunnels after that and bring them to a specific location, which is a good idea, obviously. But, yeah, and...

For the points that you just mentioned, it's not clear if that thing is meant to get out of a tunnel at all. And especially with regulation on the roads, it made sense when Tesla is using a Model 3, a Model Y, a Model X or whatever, like that is already rated to be on public roads. This thing would need to be homologated for that too. Yeah.

But it's interesting that it looks, I mean, we couldn't confirm that this was obviously from the Boeing company, but it looks extremely likely to me. And the Boeing company hasn't denied it. So it's interesting that Tesla is working on that at least.

All right. We also have an article this week on Tesla's comments to the EPA about the latest emissions rules for 2027 to 2032. So they have been submitted earlier this year and they are about to be approved. But there's public comments that the EPA is taking and Tesla released its own. And they are unsurprisingly arguing for stronger regulations, which

And they are using a number that Elon is very fond of, number 69. So instead of the current proposal, which would ask for a reduction of emissions from new vehicle by 56%, which would translate to 60% of new vehicle being electric by 2030 and 67% by 2032, which

Tesla actually makes the argument in their comment that there's a way to get to 100% by 2030, which I agree with. But I think Tesla is playing like the...

safe card here is like all right and we're not necessarily going to push for 100 because it's not likely to be accepted but they want to push it a little bit harder 67 by 2032 they want to go with 69 i don't know if it's just like two percent more it's not that much i don't know if it's almost just a joke to bring attention to their the possibility to reach 100 by 2030

But which I think is like, I understand why Tesla wouldn't push for that. But I think it's very possible, even though basically every analyst was going to tell you that's not possible. And I understand why, because right now we are about at 8%, I think. Last year, we had the last year number. I put that in there, I would assume. Yeah, we were at 5% last year.

This year, I think we're trending to be at around 8% to 10%, which is a big jump from 5%. Yeah, we double every year. Yeah, if you double every year, you get there by 2030 very quickly. However, it's not as easy as that in terms of the auto industry to just...

build that kind of capacity of building electric vehicles so quickly in the millions of units. It's around 100 million vehicles building capacity annually. And getting that from 5 million to 100 million is extremely difficult. Even though Tesla wants 20% of all that by 2030. So if Tesla can do that, like the rest of the industry can take care of the other 80%. I feel like it's very doable. And by the rest of the industry, I mean like...

five or six of them um will take like the bulk of it then maybe like a few more will take a small percentage and then a few others will just go out of business i think for just being too slow and too too moving into that transition yep but on the people are not even looking at that as the

that it's slowing down, they're getting to 100%. They're looking on the consumer mindset. And I agree that right now the consumer mindset would put it at impossible to go 100% because not 100% of new car buyers want to have an electric vehicle as their next car, though it's close to 50% in most credible surveys. And that's the important part is like you have to be careful with these surveys because they're not super...

accurate in the sense that it's hard to, especially now in this market to find new car buyers, like people that are going to buy the next car is going to be a new car because the market is just a mess right now. We're going to get into it with the, the used car market is even weirder right now because you would, you would think that, um,

Price would be going up for used car as there's more buyers than ever for used car as new car are becoming inaccessible due to financing options. But it's the other way going around. So we'll get into that. But yeah, I think you can go from 8%, 10%. Let's say that 10% I think is achievable in 2023 because of what I just mentioned too. Getting to 100% in seven years,

It's not easy, but this mindset is shifting so fast because people are thinking more and more about, all right, what is the next? It's such a transitional technology that you just don't want to be holding on. You don't want to have the flip phone while everybody has a smartphone. And I would think it's even better.

bigger than that because like at least your flip phone you didn't have to bring it to to every every week to a flip phone place to change the battery pack in it like you like you would you do with a gasoline car you have to go to the gas station so it's it's a mother powering your device here that's completely different so you don't want to be left out and new car buyers are

When you're buying a car, it's the second biggest purchase that most people are going to do in their life other than their house. So you think a lot about it and you take into account things like cost of owning, which include the resale value. And then once you start getting into that, things get a lot more serious fast. I hope I put the used car after that. No, I didn't. But I'm going to get into it right here. So speaking of used cars...

Electric use core value has been dropping extremely fast. And unsurprisingly, that's because of Tesla. It's just because of market share. It's not...

specific to something bad happening with Tesla as a brand but the when you own 60% of the market you're going to drive the market it's just as simple as that and the new data coming from IC cars has put the average resale value of a used model 3 right now at $37,000 and

which is still surprisingly high, even though it's down 30% since last year. Massive $16,000 price drop, but still close to the $40,000 starting price of the Model 3. Of course, this is the average sell price of a used vehicle. I don't know what's the average sales price of a new Model 3,

I would be surprised if it's much more than $50,000, would you think? For a Model 3? Yeah. I would think less. Less than $50,000? So what's the other? So you have them, it starts at around like $40,000, but then after that, what's the $47,000 for the long range? You add a few options. Right. Yeah, probably $40,000. Yeah, you're right. Probably under $50,000.

Probably around the price of the long range, maybe if you have a few options, but then you are dragged down by the rear wheel drive average, which also, again, with some options is over $40,000. I actually just traded in my Model 3 and I got $25,000 for it. So it was a trade-in to Rivian and it was a very early Model 3, like one of the first ones off the line in 2018.

It only had rear wheel drive, but long range. The biggest problem, though, is the paint job. There was a lot of issues with the paint. Just early Tesla paint wasn't fantastic. Honestly, I should have sold it just in the third-party market. I probably could have got close to $30,000 for it. Most likely, yeah.

you know, it's a lot easier just to do it this way. And then I believe the, the sales tax on the Rivian actually goes down by the amount that you trade in. So yeah, that's true. Save money there and, and plates just transferred over easier for insurance, all that other stuff. Yeah. There's a lot of advantages to that, but in term of the value assigned to the car, yeah, it wasn't, it shouldn't have been $25,000. Yeah.

So it would drag down this average actually. But yeah, 30% drop in a year, it's significant. But that's across the board, but not 30% across the board, but you can see for other electric vehicles here, like the Leaf down 19%. Still $22,000 for a used Leaf on average. That seems high.

Yeah. I wouldn't... Especially the older ones that have like 50 miles of range because the batteries have gotten so bad. Oh, they have the E-Pace in there. I don't know if that's... I-Pace, I think. Yeah, I don't know if it's a typo or they actually use the E-Pace in the... There's an F-Pace, though. I don't know if there's an E-Pace. Oh, you're right. Yeah, it was probably a typo then. But $33,000? Is that low? No, it starts at what...

new i think they're over 50 yeah they're just over 50 you yeah well it makes sense but yeah the used car market right now is way down and people find it weird because there's a lot of buyers for new cars not a lot of inventory for new cars so that normally that would put everything high but even though there's a lot of potential buyers because the new vehicle market is not

hot right now because of financing. The interest rates right now are just so high, it's also affecting the used car market where people that would get a loan to buy a new car just cannot afford the loan either. So like $37,000 average used price on Model 3, that's still $37,000 that most people don't have

in their bank account ready to buy that. So they would use financing still for a used vehicle. And Pinterest rates right now, they don't make it a wise decision to buy a new or used vehicle at this point, which is wild.

This week, the state sent an email and added a new warning on its website about potentially, not potentially, likely is the word they use, having a reduced tax credit on some while staying vague, some electric vehicles starting next year.

So the way that they phrased it on the email to customers, here's the $7,500 federal tax credit will likely decrease after December 31st, 2023. For some models, new model 3,000 miles vehicles delivered by December 31st, 2023 still qualify for the full credit. So they say some models, they don't even specify which one. But then on the website, they do add a similar formula.

warning which is reduction likely after december 31st on model 3 model y um so yeah that's uh that's a i called it a self-serving warning obviously because it does create some urgencies to take delivery by the end of the year place another and take everybody in a year but uh it stays vague which also helps to the self-serving part because now you don't know okay is it just applied to model 3 does it apply to which model 3

Now, obviously, we have some kind of idea about this, but we cannot confirm it. It's the fact that Tesla did have the base Model 3 to full tax credit earlier this year, which wasn't the case when the reform of the tax credit happened starting January 1st. And we thought that Tesla at first didn't get the full credit because it was using battery cells from China.

And it's not clear how they gained a few months ago, well, last month, actually, early last month, when they gained the full tax rate on the Model 3. No one knows how that happened because the requirements is pretty clear that you need to have percentage of battery components that are from the U.S. or from countries that have a free trade agreement with the U.S., which doesn't include China. So the...

The most likely thing that happened is that Tesla was like on the battery component parts, which was 40%, I want to say. They put that in there. For the battery component, it's 50%. So 50%, maybe that sounds weird because I would assume that the battery cells account for more than 50% of a battery pack. I mean, it depends how, I guess, they're like if it's by pound, if it's by value. I don't know how they calculate the percentage. But anyway...

Maybe Tesla was right on the verge, but that doesn't explain why it was at first and was not. So maybe like a different analysis of the component or they did change something that brought them right over 50%. I don't know. But this is going up from 50% to 60% of battery components in 2024. And for the critical minerals in the packs, it goes from 40% to 50%. So yeah.

But most likely one of those requirements won't be met by, let's say, some models without specifying which one, which is not really fair. But yeah, I would assume it's at the very least the base Model 3, but maybe others. We don't know. And we still don't know how the base Model 3 is even able to get any kind of tax credit.

Well, they would get half of it. Right. But how do they get the full credit when we know that they're Chinese? Either a different analysis of the battery component that was submitted and then they granted the thing, or maybe Tesla did change. Maybe they were right on the verge of 50%, I want to say, and then they changed a lot of things and that came in. But again, like I said, I'm thinking the battery cells have to account for more than 50% of a battery pack's component, no? Yeah.

Yeah, for sure. I don't understand. It's also a little frustrating that Tesla doesn't communicate about that. But maybe the EPA would know. If we said, hey, how does Tesla's Chinese LFP pack qualify for the full tax credit? Maybe somebody there could tell us. I'm just trying to think how we figured out this mystery. Yeah. Get on the phone. Yeah, get on the phone with the IRS. Yeah.

Always one thing to do. There's been a few leaks in the last few days from the Gigafactory Texas, like people posting from inside the factory. I would assume there's going to be a crackdown on that soon. But there was new images this week of these actually Cybertruck bodies that have been posted to social media. They've been deleted since, but the people at the Cybertruck Owners Club posted

I grabbed some pictures before they were deleted and you can see the Cybertruck's body which looks very similar to a picture that was released a few months ago. And you can see the rear and the front of those giant Giga press parts, casting parts that looks like one big piece on each side which is encouraging.

But other than that, it brings up again the debate of like, where is the exoskeleton? Because Tesla claims that the Cybertruck is built as an exoskeleton, but the traditional description of an exoskeleton is that you have...

external body part that are structural part of the vehicle. And when Tessa said that they had this image here, which shows the external body part. And we are assuming that that's like it has a structural part, but this looks like it. I mean, other than the casting part being giant, it's traditional in the industry that you have these, these parts and then you add body panels to them and the body panels are

or the external part, but they're not the structural ones. The structural ones are what we see here, but none of what you see here should be visible once the truck is completely built. So it's not clear what Tesla means by that. Exoskeleton, they have to have some very creative description of an exoskeleton for it to match that. Do you think it changed a lot during the, you know, making it a mass production vehicle?

I mean, very recently, Ian still mentioned that the Cybertruck is built so differently than anything else that it adds complexity to it. But at the same time, you could say that meaning the Tesla's new next generation vehicle platform manufacturing way that is vastly different and has nothing to do with exoskeleton.

So, it might be meaning that. So, yeah, I think that's a fair assumption that in the steps it takes to bring the vehicle to mass production, it evolved a little bit and became closer to what we're used to. All right.

A little bit news on the Indian front from Tesla. So we've been reporting on that all year. There's a renewed effort from Tesla to enter the Indian market, which is a big market that needs to be electrified and the biggest auto market that Tesla is not operating in right now. They tried to for a few years between 2018 and 2021.

couldn't get into an agreement about importing vehicles. India was really pushing for, you know, you got to produce them there. And Tesla was like, well, we'd like to start with importing and then maybe move to building domestically. But earlier this year, Tesla went and met with officials in the market and they agreed

seem a lot more open to building a factory in the country than last month. They said, no, in May, there was a report in India that Tesla had agreed to build a factory in the country, though Tesla didn't announce anything officially.

Then last month, Musk met with the Prime Minister Modi in the U.S. And after the meeting, Musk said that Tesla would be making an investment as soon as humanly possible. And they will talk about next year, having a factory in India next year. Now, another report from India says that there's an agreement with the Indian government for an investment or there's a proposal for an investment for a factory in

That would produce half a million vehicles per year. And the starting price of the vehicle they plan to produce there would be 20,000 lakhs. Or no, it's not thousand, right? It's RS there is like millions or whatever. Yeah. But it would be the equivalent of $24,350 US. So that would be extremely cheap.

And we assume that it will be built on this new next generation platform that Tesla has revealed in the investor day. Maybe that cheaper vehicle that was teased with this silhouette. Which looks a little bit like a Model 3 or Model Y. Yeah, a little bit shorter maybe. All right. Do you want to say a quick word about our sponsor, Pedego? Thank you for sponsoring this week's episode. Yes, absolutely.

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Yeah, we appreciate it. We have a few more news items to discuss today. But like I said, it was a slow news week. There's not that much to discuss. We have plenty of time to get into the comments. So if you guys want us to discuss something in particular, the EV world, you can put it in the comment section right now. And we're going to get to it in about five or ten minutes. Yeah, the next piece of news we wanted to discuss. Oh, yeah, it's Elon's AI startup was announced this week. So it's been something that's been brewing, has been talking about for a while.

And a lot of people are talking about a very opportunistic move because there's this AI bubble going up and everything. And now Elon has announced his own startup on top of it all called XAI. And it has a very ambitious goal of understanding the universe. And why we talked about it is not really energy vehicle related, but we talk about it because it is somewhat related to Tesla. Yeah.

Because we've talked about Elon launching OpenAI before the AI business. So now it's weird because now he's just launching a different AI startup. So obviously, I think it was the easier reason that was given for him quitting OpenAI other than they didn't agree on the direction that the company was taking. Elon was taking a more fearful approach to AI than OpenAI, let's say.

And then OpenAI did the Microsoft deal, of course, that was... What do they call themselves? They're not a non-profit anymore, but they are a limited profit company or something like that? I mean, the deal they made with Microsoft means that first Microsoft gets paid, then they get paid, and then after everybody gets paid, then they make profit for the non-profit. They make money for the non-profit. So it's a weird world. I don't know how...

But I know they cannot call themselves a non-profit anymore. They are like a limited profit company, which makes no sense to me. But more directly, the way that it affected Tesla, the reason that they gave was still a good one, which was that Tesla and OpenAI were competing for the same AI talent. And that became so real when Andre Capradi, who was the head of AI at Tesla, has recently moved to OpenAI. So,

You can see where the competition is coming from. Now, on top of OpenAI and all the other AI startup that Tesla has to compete with for talent,

Elon is starting one and he hires from Tesla too. I mean, they, they released a small list of the first founding members of the company and there's only one coming directly for, from Tesla, um, Ross Nordin, but it's still one, it's still one too many for, for, for Tesla. Um, and, um,

As part of the company. So there were rumors. Elon has been rumored to be starting an AI startup for a year now. But it was never clear if it was going to be an AI startup standalone or if it's going to be part of Twitter slash X Corp or if it's part of Tesla or whatever. Now they clarified that on their website. They say we are a separate company from X Corp.

But we will work closely with X, in parenthesis, Twitter, Tesla, and other companies to make progress towards emissions. So it sounds like they're going to be working with Tesla. And what capacity this is going to help Tesla, I don't know. Is it going to help them more than if the researcher were at Tesla rather than at another company? I have my doubts. I mean, he's calling it X AI. Yeah. So it seems like it's part of...

X, which is Twitter. This is a separate entity. I'm sure they're going to be using Twitter to farm out the language models and stuff. For sure.

That was a fun one. Republicans try to stop military solidification with mind-bogglingly dumb proposals. This is not colorful language just for fun. It's not clickbait. Once I read the proposal, even if you vote Republicans, you're going to agree with me if you know anything about electrification and electric vehicles. So

The House of Representatives right now is debating this week the National Defense Authorization Act, which is this annual military budget for the Pentagon, basically, which, if you don't know, the Pentagon is the world's largest institutional user of fossil fuel. They burn more fossil fuel than anybody else because they operate a fleet of close of half a million vehicles, I think.

Roughly half of them are tactical vehicles because the Pentagon includes all the military branches. But also half of them are just regular cars too because it's a giant, giant operation and they have regular vehicles for those people that work for them. Yeah, and besides the regular vehicles, most of the vehicles that the Pentagon uses are not terribly efficient vehicles.

uh, vehicles either talking things like in the picture, like, yeah. Not the most, um, but the U S army specifically, um,

I said that they want to go electric and they want to do it. They want to be net zero by 2050. And they have a lot of electric vehicle programs. There's electric vehicle programs to other military programs too, like DARPA. And I mean, even they're testing EVs, electric planes, they're testing everything. And...

As the world's transitioned to electric propulsion, it makes sense for the military to keep a close eye on that and see where they can electrify to. I'm not even talking from an environmental basis here, but a tactical basis. Once you go into a military operation here,

And your supply chain, your logistic supply chain is a critical part of any military operation. And that includes your fossil fuel that you have to keep delivering to those military operations. For example, like the Iraq invasion. I mean, that was about securing also those supplies. But for the actual operation, I mean, once it's refined and ready to put in those trucks,

You have to keep them coming. And of course, people's argument is like, all right, well, if those vehicles are electric, what are you going to do once the battery is depleted? There's no charging station in those war zones. Like, of course there's not. But there are solutions already been worked on that make a ton of sense where the military, instead of having this big supply chains that keeps bringing petrol all the time, you could deploy batteries.

With your bases, your advanced bases, battery pack in large containers like mega packs, and which you already have, you could just have more of them and have solar and you could recharge those vehicles to that instead. And you could shorten your supply chains greatly with that and having to keep having fuel replenished all the time. So there is, there are advantages to it. Anyway, yeah.

At the very least, the army should be looking into those things because it sounds like it's the future for most people. But then you have this group of Republicans here that have suggested a bunch of amendments and proposals to the National Defense Authorization Act.

And they sound ridiculous. I'm going to read them to you. So the first amendment from Representative Scott Perry of PA's Pennsylvania would prohibit any funding for research and development for being used on projects involving electric vehicles, EV charging infrastructure, or photovoltaic technology, which is solar panels.

So the army will not be allowed – any army research and development will not be allowed to touch anything that is involving electric vehicles or solar power, which sounds like ridiculous, like just limiting –

The army's research greatly for no, for no good reason, just for, I mean, I, I looked into Mr. Perry cause he has also another amendment here. Um, the other amendment is that would prevent the Biden administration from invoking the defense and production act to boost EV, EV batteries, EV charging infrastructure, or critical mineral use in EVs. Um,

Which is also dumb because if it is defense issues, like what if something happens and one of these things become a defense issue? Like how – and he would not be able to do it. It makes no sense. It's just limiting. And I tried to look into him and say, okay, is he getting any money from fossil fuel or anything like that?

I couldn't see any significant money coming to his campaigns for fossil fuel. But that's the thing, though. You don't even need... They don't even need to be bought at this point. They just need to have been properly influenced by fossil fuel, by propaganda. And these things happen because of that. It's just as simple as that. He has received money, though, from...

dealerships association, but I don't think the dealership would go as far as suggesting those things. But still. Another one from Representative Lauren... Bill Burt. Bill Burt, okay, from Colorado. Would require the Defense Department to terminate any contracts for electric non-combat vehicles. So not only they wouldn't be allowed to buy new electric vehicles, if they have current contracts, they would need to revoke them.

And that's for non-combat vehicles. So they can be, that's quite a large thing to say non-combat electric vehicle. That's basically any electric vehicle that exists today. Right. So some like, you know, campus Pentagon, like gem vehicle that's, you know, moving boxes around. Yeah. Gotta get that out of there. Makes no sense. It's crazy.

Then the last one is from Mr. Paul A. Gosser from Arizona. Will authorized soldiers and civilians at the U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona to use non-electric vehicles? Why would they need that? Is there anyone preventing them from using non-electric vehicles? Yeah.

This one is the craziest of them all. Like, why would you need a proposal to be written into the National Defense Authorization Act to say, hey, by the way, you're allowed to use non-electric vehicles? As if, unless I'm mistaken, and there is something in the most recent version of the act that says that everyone's going to have to use EVs now. But I think that would have been big news at this point. But,

I don't think that's the case because if I could read you a quote from Mr. Gosar, you're going to gauge the level of intelligence here from the Minister Gosar, from an actual elected official here. The military is no place to experiment with untested technology. This guy has never heard of DARPA before. The combat readiness and training of soldiers and equipment is jeopardized by the compelled use of electric vehicles.

Further, the AC equipment in the EV unit do not work in the desert, constituting a health risk to personal. So guys, just making things up now. Like, ACs don't work in EVs? Like, all right. Never heard of that one before. Like, AC do use battery? Yeah, like, just like it would use energy in the gasoline car, too. Yeah, what AC actually doesn't use electricity? Yeah, it's ridiculous.

But the military is no place to experiment with untested technology, especially in Arizona. They have bases, well, maybe not in more Nevada, but they have the most advanced research out there for untested technology. Also, electric vehicles and electric propulsion existed for 100 years. They're not untested. It's a very...

proven mode of transportation. Now, maybe not in tactical and combat operation, but it would be useful for the RV to be able to test it. Complete nonsense. Meanwhile, in Scottsdale and Arizona, Phoenix, it's been like 110 degrees Fahrenheit for two weeks straight. Records just going. People can't go outside.

And nothing to do with climate change, though, of course. Of course not. Yeah. Just a coincidence. Yeah. If any of you lives in the jurisdiction of this Perry in Pennsylvania, Boebert in Colorado and Gossard in Arizona, I would vote these dum-dums out of office as soon as possible. Nothing to do with like some Republicans to conference. I'm

the way the article was phrased because i call them republicans that's not what they are it just happens that the three of them are republicans and and they wrote these proposals nothing to do with the their their policies as republican it's just they they seem to have been they have fallen for fossil fuel propaganda now and they are writing nonsensical amendment to

You read those at the minute, you cannot trust those people's judgments. It's as simple as that. They shouldn't be elected officials, regardless of your politics. That's right. Quick news on the Chevy Blazer EV. The first shipments left Mexico and they are going to the U.S. So you can expect the first ones to be coming very, very soon. Also, we have a quick update on the production capacity of the Ramos Zip-Tap plant in Mexico.

producing 65 units an hour so that's pretty good but gm gm is like that like we uh where the the production of this thing like started like weeks if not months ago and it'd take a while between the production and the starter deliveries and by the time the deliveries happen they already have a decent production rate yeah i got to take a look at the uh like a production run it was built in

but it wasn't the final production version at the Silverado event. It's a pretty good-looking car, definitely very Chevy-looking. And we got news recently that they're not going to build the super-fast SS version. Right away, they're going to build a lower tier, so probably a little bit less to save people some money, less expensive. Absolutely. Yeah. The Taycan...

is cooling off a little bit. We were a big fan of the Taycan when it first came out. I'm a bit disappointed in Porsche, of course, for not having anything else since. Well, I mean, they have the Cross Turismo version, but it's pretty close to the Taycan. It's still called the Taycan. Yeah, I mean, we were expecting the Macan by now. Yeah, by now, by three years ago. Right, right.

So, yeah, they're pulling a Nissan of having a big gap between their first and second electric vehicles. If you don't count the Nissan ENV, whatever, the van that they had in Europe. Oh, yeah, NRV or whatever. Yeah.

So 2021 was the biggest year for a Taycan, over 41,000 units became one of the biggest vehicle program for the company. But then things went down in 2022 with 34, just short of 35,000 units. And now they are tracking down again in 2023.

And they are 9,000 units in the first quarter, but the second. So the first half, they are at nine units, shorts of 18,000 delivered in the first half of the year. So it's actually not, well, okay, it's striking down year over year compared to the first half of last year. But I mean, if they still go at that pace, they will have 36,000 units, which would be a little bit higher than last year. So we'll see. But yeah, year over year, it is down. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know what's holding on. They need an account as soon as possible. I mean, what's taking share from the...

Is it Tesla's Model S refresh coming out? I mean, there's the Mercedes. In that segment, there's a lot of electric. Like if you're not buying electric in that segment right now, you don't know where you're going because there's plenty of options between the Tesla, the Porsche, the Mercedes, the BMWs. They all have great high-end sedan options at this point. Yep.

All right, that's it for us on the news. Let's jump into the comments before leaving you guys. All right, Mike the Car Geek says, fake engine noise and fake transmission shifts in an EV, terrible or terrific idea? I think Lexus or Toyota is doing transmission noise. What do you think? Oh, there's a bunch of them now. This is not just Toyota.

Honestly, as long as it's optional, I don't care. Make it an option. If some people like it, I take it. Some people don't like it, you turn it off. That's it. Personally, I would not. I want to have the natural noises that comes with electric engine, which exist, which are not as loud as an ICE engine, but still. But yeah, options. I'm all for options.

Yeah, one thing that not everybody thinks about is that the RPMs of an engine, when you hear them and can feel them, it can kind of give you an idea of how fast you're going. You know, if you're going 80 miles per hour, it's a little bit higher pitch than if you're going 60 miles per hour, especially if you're in top gear. And that doesn't exist quite in the same way for electric vehicles, although it still has a noise.

it would be interesting to see if that was an option like instead of just like fake engine noise if you had like a pitch where like all right in the background a low you know pitch that so you would kind of know by the pitch how fast you're going yeah some of them i tried to recreate that i think in some degree but um still should be an option all right carl in san diego says that's just a failed mock-up of the las vegas fiasco vehicle uh seemed kind of real to us here

Dan Oberstay, Mike Karki, if the sound is inside the passenger compartment only and it can be turned off if you don't want it, it's okay. Just not for me. That's kind of our standard. Glenn Stanford question. I want to upgrade my 2020 model three P, but don't want to lose my FSD. Biggest increase in value ever seen in any asset class in history. LOL. Surely this is holding back sales for Tesla. Glenn, we talked about this a lot last week. Yeah.

So go back and listen to that podcast. Yeah, that was last week's episode, basically, you're talking about. We push very hard for Tesla to allow the transfer of ownership in FSD. And I still think that it's going to happen at some point. Tesla's just not going to... There's going to be so many people holding on to their old cars because they don't want to lose that $15,000 investment.

So our feeling, I think I can speak for you, is that Tesla at some point will allow you to take it with you or maybe, you know, turn it. I mean, I hope. I don't know if I think that's the will, though. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah, and going forward, maybe it makes sense if you're buying into the full self-driving, maybe buy in on a subscription basis. If you don't know how long you're going to keep your car. Paul Price, hi. Does anyone know which battery is in the 333-mile 2023 Model 3 long-range all-wheel drive? It used to be 358 miles at the end of 2022. I think we talked about that two weeks ago.

Three weeks ago. Well, whenever it came out, yeah, we weren't sure. It's not clear. It hasn't come out yet. The deliveries should be starting, though. Yeah, we were thinking it might be a chemistry change or something. So this is from LinkedIn. What is big Ting and Tesla and price of Internet down? What is the rumors? I don't know.

No, I'm not sure what you're referring to right now. Oh, in regards to the E-Pace and I-Pace, there is an E-Pace. It's funny, I was actually looking at the website after I saw this comment. It's upcoming and the European model is shown. And actually on the page, Jaguar set has a picture of it charging with an electric vehicle charger. But looking at the specs for the US model, it's not going to have an EV option. So...

Not sure what the deal is. Well, there were plug-ins too included in that chart. Were there? Yeah, there was like the Range Rover and all that. The Range Rover plug-in. All right. So that's right, they're not giving proper evidence that the Model 3 qualified properly. I mean, we have to assume that they gave some sort of evidence to the EPA or the IRS. So I don't know what that evidence would be or what it is, but it's a mystery.

Mike, the car geek, why don't Tesla's qualify for used EB tax credits in the US? They're not on the official IRS list. Does Elon not want to lure people to buy used EB?

What are the requirements for the used car? We had a list of those. You know, it might be that it comes from a qualified dealer. Oh, yeah, that's a big one, yeah. But Tesla has dealership license in most states that it operates in, so it should technically be okay on that. Yeah, maybe it's just not. I don't know.

A question. Could you still buy a Bolt EUV? Would you buy a car not being produced anymore? I'm debating between a Kia Niro, prices have plummeted, or an EUV. You can still buy one. I think GM's going to support it for a number of years, but there's some other compelling vehicles out there as well. You mentioned the Kia Niro. GM's going to have the Blazer and the Equinox pretty soon. Yeah.

Ford's Mustang is a little bit bigger than that, but still quite compelling. Model Y. With your first Bolt EV, did you have a lot of repairs over the years? I had zero repairs. Zero repairs. Well, that probably inserts...

MJ's, what did you Kramer's question? Yeah. I mean, it's funny. I picked it up at the dealership in 2017 and I didn't, I didn't do anything besides a windshield wiper fluid for until, until the pandemic 2020 when I took it back. All right, moving on. Paul Price, let's move on here. Do I just want to know how long my model is?

My 2018 Model 3 will last. I mean, there's evidence right now that some vehicles last as many as hundreds of thousands of miles. Yeah, there's still quite a few 2012 Teslas on the road, including Fred's. I used to have a Model X that had 400,000 miles on it and 373,000 miles on one battery pack. It had a battery pack change at one point.

All right, Joseph De La Fuente, the acid test for the exoskeleton claim of the Cybertruck would be to start cutting large holes in the body panels once you take delivery. Is the car still drivable or does the structure implode? Yeah, I'm going to leave that to you, Joseph. You can do that with your own Cybertruck. Okay.

I'm a, as a car reviewer, we won't be doing that. All right. Stefan is not in happy with this situation with the exoskeleton, just another lie from the company that makes a lot of them. Remember the model S 2012 was promised to have full felt self-driving in 2014. Yeah.

Well, that's not Tesla lying there. I think that's you on this one. I don't remember Tesla making that. 2016, I think, was the first time. Yeah, I have a 2012 Model S. I'm not expecting to have a FSD on that. Yay, e-bikes. Thanks, Pedego. Yeah, thanks for sponsoring. That's a big appreciation there. Paul Price, dual motor, all-wheel drive, long-range trim. So what is the new battery maker and size?

We don't know that. It's kind of weird, the level of transparency right now. People are buying cars. They don't know where the batteries are made, what batteries they're getting. All right. Will we reach out to Fisker for a deep dive on their impact report? They released a lifecycle assessment for the ocean and directly compared it to Polestar in that report. Important news. Something we could look into. I think Scooter would be...

kind of the guy to find out stuff about that. So I'll see how he's. Yeah, he covers Fisker a little bit more, but I mean, the impact report, what do we need? They're not a big player at this point. And also Magnus McBuilding. So our tech man, Rob, question. We know how Tesla FSD is powered by AI. How about another self-driving company backed by Microsoft called Wave? Do some research on Wave, AI powered self-driving car in London. Okay. Yeah.

Well, I think all self-driving cars are AI-powered, but I'm not familiar with Wave, actually. What do people think of Tesla's current voice commands? Have other EVs caught up? Do they need some AI help? Are you a big user of Tesla's voice commands? I'm not a big user of them. Yeah, I do it sometimes. They're pretty good. I would say not as good as Google's, just at understanding and kind of getting context.

Um, probably not as good as Siri either. Uh, a lot of cars have CarPlay or Android auto, so they're not quite in that space yet. Uh, and even like, uh, Mercedes has a pretty good, like Mercedes, you know, rear windshield wiper or whatever. Um, so I would say Tesla's probably middle of the road. Uh, and now we're talking about the, the, uh,

Yeah, the comments from the GOP. Yeah, military stuff. Apparently the GOP haven't heard of DARPA, which is the Advanced Research Project Agency. With an overstay, without a need to protect fossil fuel sources, the U.S. military will lose a majority portion of their mission. It's an interesting take. Yeah, I mean, there is this aspect of the war machine and the industrial military complex. But even then...

It's all about funding money into the military. It's not even cutting the budget. It's just like, can some of the budget go to having military electric vehicles? And it's weird because it's taking the decision-making out of the hands of the experts. So you're saying... I know more than the army. I know more what you need than the army. Right. The idiot Congress people are saying these...

The smartest people in the world who do this stuff are wrong. I'm right. So dumb. And the military is asking for electric vehicles. They want them. At least they want to look into them. They have various programs right now in place to electrify even tactical vehicles.

And they were like, no, you're not allowed to do that. Not allowed. Like little children. Drew Warkinson, the military has often been the one pushing technology forward. So much of the tech we have now came out of military research. It's strange that they're slow to adopt electric vehicles.

I mean, it's not exactly strange because you need people to build them. You need companies to build those tactical military vehicles. We talked about the GM defense last week or the week before that. So these need to happen first too. Yeah. Yeah.

All right. Drew, work on scene. Is there any truth to Representative Gosser's comment about EV air conditioning? I can think of any reason that ICE vehicle AC would work any better, function any different than an EV's? No. Yeah. An internal combustion engine vehicle is using an electric air conditioning as well. What he might be, what I think he was referencing is that if you run AC, you're draining the battery pack faster, right?

Okay, but you also drain your gasoline tank faster. What are you talking about? He doesn't know what he's talking about. All right, here's the weird one. Question, have you ever asked Tesla if they will build electric buses? We need more shared use of mass transit. And Elon's statements about serial killers was counterproductive.

I think he said something about not wanting to take a bus because there's, do you want to sit next to a serial killer? Oh boy. Oh yeah. He's a, he's a genius on this stuff. Right. Yeah. I mean, in my article about the people mover league, I did reference the master plan part to do that. In that, in that second master plan, this law, while Elon mentioned several,

Vehicle, new vehicle program. And Tesla made all of those except for a Tesla bus or minibus that he mentioned at the time. So, yeah, it hasn't always been in the plans. There was a talk briefly about using the Model X chassis to make a minibus. That never came to fruition. But, yeah, it sounds like this weird people mover thing is really something that they are planning to do.

All right, the Hyundai Ioniq 5N, which I think is going around Goodwood right now in England, is the new car that's doing crazy fake shifting and first on a production car. So fake shifting is not Toyota or Lexus, but it's the domain of Hyundai. Nick Cedar, most used Teslas aren't under the $25,000 limit. So that's another stipulation of the IRA for used cars. There's not a lot of cars under the $25,000 limit these days, though.

but my tesla model 3 was yeah all right any studies that show the average mileage because the battery will last for so far i'm not sure what that means yeah oh average battery life before replacement i i don't know if we have an average it's too early i would think to say but look at the warranty more than anything else and the warranty generally covers uh

eight years, a hundred plus thousand miles. So I would look at that more than anything else. Yeah. All right. Well, I think that's it for us this week. Thanks a lot for everyone for listening to this week's episode. If you do enjoy your show, please give us a thumbs up, a like, subscribe, whatever it is on the app that you're listening to, because we are everywhere all the time. We're going to see you same time, same place next week.