Tesla plug coming to Ford EVs, Cybertruck interior, BMW i5, and more
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And we are live for a new episode of the Electric Podcast. I'm Fred Lambert, your host, and I'm joined by Seth Winchell coming to us from shiny Florida. How are you doing, Seth? Good. Hopefully I'm not that shiny. No, the state is shiny. All right. Let's jump in and we're going to start, as you can expect, with

the biggest news of the week that came out just yesterday. Surprising, I think for most people, it was surprising for me. And that's Ford kind of boring the lead a little bit with this one, but they came out with this, this meeting between Jim, Jim Farley, this Twitter space really. And,

Oh, this keeps popping up. I don't know if this is the right one. We don't need it. We don't need it. Different browsers. Yeah. Maybe I should try to get Chronic. Some weeks it's working, they get another. All right.

So, Jim Farley sits down with Elon Musk to make a Twitter space. And the way that they phrased it at first, I wasn't sure if it's going to be an announcement or if it was just going to be Elon pushing spaces. It's just after they sent this announcement just a day prior to that. And I thought he was just really pushing hard spaces because he was pushing.

the week before that, after the shareholder meeting, uh, yeah, like a CNBC interview and insisted it's going to be on spaces and everything. So like when I saw that Ford and that Jim Farley is going to have, um, a spaces with, uh, with Elon, I wasn't, I wasn't exactly sure if it was going to be a thing or not. Um, and then I was surprised is they started the announcement saying that, uh,

Tesla and Ford partner to facilitate Ford EV owners using the Supercharger network. And they say, oh, 12,000

the it for dv owners gonna have access to 12 000 supercharger next year's that 12 000 superchargers in north america that's all tesla superchargers in north america so we thought okay so uh it shows that this is going to just keep opening up and they're going to work with ford with that that's nice but then the real news is that right after that they say but in 2025 ford's going to start implementing tesla's well we should try to stop using the

saying it's a tesla plug nax yeah the nax the north american charging standard which is the original tesla proprietary plug but that they opened up to try to make it a standard last year but when they did that we were like it was most people were saying it's just too little too late like that would have been good maybe like five years ago would have worked but now like ccs as one in north america like they did in uh in europe or ccs2 in europe so i'm

Now, it's still alive. The idea is still alive. We'll see if it's going to create a domino effect because Ford has announced that they will integrate it in its future, its next generation vehicle starting in 2025. So that means like the new Ford F-150, that electric that's supposed to come out that's going to follow the Lightning. Yeah.

Now, they didn't say if they're going to go exclusively NAX or if they're going to do a dual charger type of thing. That would be telling. I asked Ford that directly, and they said they're not sure yet. They're not sure yet. Yeah, I don't know. I think you can afford to go just NAX and be perfectly fine with it. And if you go just NAX...

then that puts a little bit more pressure maybe on the others. We'll see if it's going to create a domino effect just yet or not. I think you need one other big one to really make a difference. What do you think, Seth? I agree. I think this is a huge moment in the electric vehicle world. Until yesterday, CCS combo would have been the odds-on favorite to be the standard going forward.

Now it's kind of up in the air. I think Ford might be waiting to see if other, maybe even charging manufacturers jump on. Well, EVO has jumped on. Right.

But like Flow and Electrify America and all the others, are they going to jump in there as well? And then we were talking earlier about some other manufacturers, like will Rivian go and will Rivian move their network over? Or will, I mean, I guess Volkswagen would be the last one to go because they have, I mean, I don't know.

They have American Electrify America, but like you said, they could switch to Electrify America. They're not married to the CCS at Electrify America. It would be a task to retrofit, but they can also just do an adapter that already exists.

So there's a lot of things that can happen. So the thing, the big news with this week, I think, is like it opens up possibly. Like you said before this week, even though there's more Tesla connectors out there than CCS in North America, CCS was the favorite to just take over even after Tesla opened the standard last year. Now, I think they're still favorite just because of the momentum, how many EV makers are favoring it.

But the fact that Ford, which is not a big player in the EV space right now in terms of volume, but it's planning to be. And they have two very good EV models available for sales right now with the Mazda and Mach-E and the F-150 Lightning, which both became a lot more attractive just from that announcement. Just saying this makes those two vehicles more attractive to buyers.

even if right now it would meet using it with an adapter. But that's a big difference. We should go back to the announcement too, because we are very focused on Ford integrating the Tesla connector or the NAX connector into the vehicle. But part of the announcement too is more like immediate. And I assume that's Ford, they wanted that to try to boost sales, obviously, because otherwise people are going to just be waiting for the Fords that have the NAX. Is that...

Right now, Tesla is already – so at first, I was a bit confused by the news because like what does that mean, having access to 12,000 superchargers? Because Tesla is already opening up their supercharger network through the magic dock thing. But what Elon made clear is that actually they're going to offer an adapter to Ford owners. And he said it was going to be like $100, $200, something like that. Yeah, yeah. He mentioned $100, but he didn't like – that's –

As it's often the case with Elon and Tesla, it doesn't seem to be fully baked, this idea just yet, because he wasn't sure about that. Then he was also asked on the call about the charge rate, if Ford owners are going to be limited in the charge rate compared to Tesla owners.

And at first he was kind of skating a little bit on the question, but then he was like, we will make sure that the adapter is not the bottleneck or the supercharger is not the bottleneck. So it's going to be on four sides of things to be able to take the highest possible charge rate. So,

But the way he said it, it made it sound like the adapter is not ready at all. That's what it sounded like to me. But it's a nice idea that Ford owners are going to be able to just buy a relatively cheap adapter and then automatically get access to all Tesla superchargers rather than wait for those magic ducks ones, which...

Now, also, that has implication on Tesla's approach now to opening up the supercharger network to other EVs because are they going to keep going with the magic duck approach or are they going to just sell those adapters not just to Ford but to other EVs too? That's a great question. It's kind of what I was thinking as well. If they can sell a $100 adapter to Ford, why not sell to everybody else? Yeah. And then another question is are they going to change...

When Ford is building their own CCS, and I think Dan Oberstdast asked this in the comments, when Ford decides to build its NACs into its cars, it's going to have to build it into a place where they can charge it. Yeah, so they'll put it probably in the back of the Ford, although that's not great if you're towing. Yeah.

But they'll have to put it on the corner of the vehicle somewhere, which will be much better for... It won't take up two spots at least. Yeah. I mean, there's still a lot of questions here. I'm kind of like, if you can build a $100 adapter and make the adapter pretty easy to use...

I don't know. It doesn't seem like that big. I mean, the magic duck is, I think a better solution in terms of user experience. Cause you, there's no chance of forgetting adapter, which can happen. So you eliminate, you want to make anything as dumb proof as possible. And that's a big one, obviously. And then you very simple to use with the app show up, unlock,

plug it in and it's charging. Very simple to use. So not that big of a difference with the adapter being in the end of the consumer, but yeah, just a little bit, tiny little difference.

Either way, I think it's good news all around. Good news for Ford, obviously, just made all their electric vehicles a lot more useful. Good news for Tesla in the sense I know that Tesla owners are not super happy about – not all Tesla owners, but some of them are not happy about more traffic at the supercharger network. But I think Tesla is going to compensate that with more chargers, period.

And now for Tesla, it's a plus because they are making their supercharged network a bigger business and using that money to grow the network. And that's that's a big thing for Tesla to like Tesla is going to probably like own long distance chargings in the US if it keeps going that way. Yeah.

Now, I think it's also a win for the broader EV market because I think it's going to force these other charging networks to up their games significantly. At least I'm hoping. It's being a little bit hopeful on that front. All right. I'm going to try to share the screen as well. See if I can do that. It seems to be working for you. Yeah. Yeah, because anyway, now we need to see it from the Cybertruck because we want to see the Cybertruck. Yeah.

All right. Drop to the other picture. You see it a little bit better. Yeah, okay. All right. So this picture leak, it looks like it's the Cybertruck prototype that was at the Tesla event.

annual shareholder meeting that we saw picture from the outside, not the inside. And this picture is, has not been well received by the Tesla community for the most part, not impressed. I think the bigger problem, it might be the effect of the camera too. It might be like stretching it out a little bit, but I mean, we knew that the dash was going to be big. We knew just from the form factor of the, of the truck, it's going to have a big dash, but it looks,

almost weird how big it is. It looks like it should be different. Also, if you go up a little bit, people are complaining about the pillar, the obstruction of the view from the pillar. I don't think that's huge, but it also was to be expected because of the form factor. Then we had a good look at the steering wheel of the Cybertruck, the first very good look at the steering wheel.

confirms there's no stock so i mean that's also what i was expecting with the mall s and x that has moved that away we see the use of the force touch buttons again and then it looks like some kind of hybrid between the yoke and the round steering wheel found in the mall s and x basically because it does it does have a top and a bottom unlike the yoke but it is not exactly round either

Yeah, that's going to be a weird thing, I think, for truck drivers to get used to there. It seems strangely small. You're not supposed to drive this truck. It's going to be fully self-driving. Right, right, right. So who cares? Yeah, that's how that goes. Yeah, the entire picture also confirms, well, this seems to confirm that Tesla has given up the idea of having a center seat in the front row. Yeah.

Uh, cause this looks like a, not the one that was similar prototype. It looks like immovable. And, uh, and then there's also some room, uh, in the center console though, in front, like they used to be in the old model as an X, uh, original one where like you can put on your purse there or something. Yeah. So I want to talk about this, uh, dashboard. Yeah. Like, I feel like that is like a front camper bedding area. You could sleep. That's a good, yeah, you're right. Uh, it seems quite large. Actually, uh,

You probably could put a big solar panel down there, like a, you know, like a rooftop, you know, three by five solar panel makes them, makes them electricity. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, it looks like it's not flat. I don't know if it looks like Alcantara material. So I don't know. It's just like sometimes you just put your hand on the Alcantara and it changes the color on one side. But it looks like it's not flat, but the front lifts up a little bit. It's a weird look. There's just no way around it. It's going to take some used to. Again, I think it might be also the point of view of the camera. It might be a little bit weird if they go with the wide lens, but from the top. Yeah.

Well, the good news is that you can't really see that GigaWiper. No. That is kind of off to the side there. So that's good. Carl in San Diego says it's a dog bed. It could be a bed for like a doberman. It's so big. Yeah.

But yeah, but we pulled a little bit around people seeing the pictures and other than like the Tesla super fans, a lot of people have impressed. Like, I mean, it's minimalist, but we, we anticipated that. And Model 3, Model Y, Integra is minimalist, but I think it just works a little bit better than this. And it has to be the form factor is limiting. Like what, what do you do instead of this dash? Like, what can you do? You,

Can you bring the cabin a little bit forward so it's not so... I assume that they brought it as forward as they could, right? There's no way around. Yeah, I mean, I feel like you've got a really... You're starting from a very weird point where you have this triangular cockpit area. And it's hard to make that look, especially with Tesla's minimalist kind of style. It's hard to make this look like anything...

that you're used to or comfortable. Yeah. Cause normally if you had like, you can, they would have to have gone with some kind of like Mercedes Benz type of like full screen all around, like that hides most of it from side to side, but because they stuck to the same screen or maybe it's a little bit bigger in a cyber truck. I'm not so sure, but still it's nowhere big enough to hide that. Yeah. Yeah.

So we'll see. I mean, this is so close to production that I would assume this is pretty much what we're going to see in the production version. Yeah. Uh,

It is weird that usually we get about 50% liking things and 50% not liking things when it comes to Cybertruck. And I feel like this one was like 95% dislike. Yeah, easily. All right, the next news is the hardware 4.0 from Tesla is manaking its way to the Model Y. Some of the Ys have been spotted.

at delivery centers with the 4.0 sensor suite. And in the codes on the inventory, new inventory website, ready for delivery, some vehicles have shown up with AutoWear 4.0. And this is just what's weird about Tesla with not doing the model year thing. And I mean, this is go beyond just not doing the model year. It's just, I think they're just being very shady because they don't want anyone to...

not buy because they're waiting for the car. But at this point, it's been months because we had the Model S and X too that already has the hardware 4.0. Now the Model Y gets it. So only the Model 3 doesn't have it.

And Tesla still hasn't like officially announced anything about it. Elon didn't mention it officially once. He said like, yeah, it's coming and everything. And it's going to be like, he didn't, he just said like, it's going to be certain, like a little bit of some percentage better than, than hardware three. And he still believes obviously that they can deliver self-driving on hardware three, but that hardware four is going to enable some higher performance. Okay. Yeah.

But other than that, everything we knew about it, we knew from seeing the actual sensor seat, the teardown that was done by, was it NGINX or was it Green? I don't remember. But the teardown of the computer that shows that the radar is there. So there's a new radar. There's the...

different setup with the configuration of the camera with the potential to have a third front-facing camera. Now there's only two. There's the new one that are in the fenders and in the back too, it's a different position. Other than that, about the hardware in itself, the cameras, the lenses have been upgraded and the computer itself. Like it was an incremental improvement on the computer side of things.

But that's all from information that we get from teardowns and from seeing the cars. Tesla hasn't even updated their website saying that these new features are available on the car. The radar is not there. If you go into Model S and X, they don't talk about radar. They just talk about the cameras, even though we know that there's a radar in a car. So that's what's a little bit weird about Tesla with these things. They were being very hush-hush about that stuff.

Yeah, and I have to say, like, it'd be kind of a bummer to get, like, if you bought a car now, to get a hardware 3, even though today hardware 3 is going to operate much better than hardware 4. Oh, yeah. Good point. But, you know, going forward, hardware 4 is going to be a little bit better. I would assume, eventually. Yeah.

And then so only the Model 3 now does not have it. I don't know if it's because maybe of the Highland they're waiting because the Highland must be like just weeks to months max away from launch. We're talking about Q3 and we're at the end of Q2 already. So maybe they're willing to launch that with the new hardware. Not so sure.

I would really like to sit down with Elon Musk and talk just about FSD and try to quench some of our concerns about it because there's a lot to be concerned about.

With this hardware stuff, but also like you said that the shoulder meeting about these local maximum that this is reaching and he doesn't, they don't see it. And that's what's creating the delays. But then he's like, now we think we are, we get it. We're getting it now. They're like, what makes you think that you're not in another local maximum? And I'm like, that's what I would like to understand. Cause he was, he explained it very well, but then he didn't explain. So what if we were just not seeing the next local maximum? I don't know.

But, yeah, moving on, we are going to talk about the Model Y coming out right now in Berlin with the BYD blade cells. So that's been something that we've been following for a while, and it's the new form factor that BYD has been doing. It's called a blade cells because it looks like a blade. They're very thin pouch cells, but long, much longer. Normally a pouch cell is about a few inches wide. This one looks like a few feet wide.

LFP also. So a lot of vehicles have been going that way. And now they're producing them out of Gigafactory Berlin. And the interesting thing is that we're already getting some data about the charging speed of it. So we see here the charging curve have been done. And the interesting thing about this charging curve is that while it looks like it's getting the same

charge rate peak charge rate as the catl lfp cells it is maintaining that charge rate for a longer period of time and then as it tempers off it's also maintaining a higher charge rate through an extended state of charge so in this case here you can see um getting to about 100 centi

175 kilowatts all the way through 50% state of charge instead of closer to like 30% state of charge for the CTL cells. So it's just that 20% going to 50 is going to happen much faster. So that's good. And then you can still stay over 100 kilowatts past 70%. Or actually around 70% it starts to temper off below 100, which is also pretty good.

I would invite some timing on that, but I would assume you get from 10 to 80 in under 30 minutes. Easy. Probably 20 minutes. Yeah. Any improvement there would be beneficial. So talk to me about the red line and the green line here. It says BYD 7C 60 kilowatt hour. Yeah. So those two are the two new BYDs, but different like...

Charging station obviously can be affected by a bunch of different factors. I don't know exactly what happened there. It could be temperature. It could be if you entered a charge supercharger in the navigation so they preheated the battery. There's a lot of things that can be affecting it. But you can see the consistent at least from the longer charge rate, even though it doesn't maintain it as high for as long, it's pretty close. It could be a temperature issue. Right. Yeah, that's impressive. Yeah, I was happy about that.

Now, obviously, we want to see how it performs too in the cold because that has been a concern for LFP cells. But I'm going to have to wait until the next winter in Europe for that. Elon had the quick little comments during his interview with the Wall Street Journal at the CEO Council from the Wall Street Journal. I listened to the whole thing. If you follow Elon closely, there was not a lot of new stuff. But he did mention that Tesla plans to probably, of course,

announce a new Gigafactory location by the end of the year. So that's always exciting. And we knew that even though Gigafactory Mexico was just announced a few months ago, we knew that there has to be at least another one, maybe two more announced relatively shortly because not all Gigafactories come online as fast as like Shanghai and maybe Mexico, we'll see, because Mexico already looks to be behind the schedule of Shanghai that they wanted to imitate.

So if it normally takes at least like two, three years to get to production and then to get to volume production and some other two years after that. So we're talking about the most, I think like a five years timeline to get actual like high volume, all of this thing. And from, from signing a deal, I mean, or groundbreaking or however you want to put it. And if the goal is 20 million cars a year by 2030, then,

You got to make these deals soon. And another one is going to come by the end of the year. Now, where could it be? We've heard, of course, Canada has been rumored for a while. I think it could still be in play, though, Canada. At the same time, Tesla looks to also be interested in maybe not a vehicle factory, but a battery factory. Or nowadays, Tesla is also getting into precursors to battery cells production. So we might be seeing that, too. I don't know.

Other than that, India sounds like it's close to a deal and it would make a lot of sense for Tesla to have another factory in Asia. And more recently, too, we've heard France. Elon met with French President Macron and they said that a big investment is likely from Tesla in the future.

And it also makes sense for Tesla to have a second factory in Europe. But yeah, I think India, if it's this year, the announcement, India most likely. And I wouldn't be surprised if Canada is still in the running, though, again, maybe not for a full vehicle factory. All right. The Tesla files. Yeah, that was a weird one. So that also happened yesterday. It's, how do you pronounce that? Endelsblatt? Yeah, I guess, Endelsblatt. Yeah, Endelsblatt. So it's a German newspaper that,

They claim to have insiders releasing 100 gigabits of information from Tesla. And Tesla confirmed it, though they didn't say several insiders. They are talking about a single insider, most likely a service employee that gained access to more information than normally service employees have access to, downloaded it before leaving Tesla.

leaving the company tesla did say he's a former employee and these tesla says they're going to take actions against them because this is stolen information um now endlesblad is keeping that information and they are releasing articles that based on their interpretation of this information and so far i'm just i'm not super impressed by the reporting it looks like they're just trying to like make tesla look back on look back on autopilot they talk about um

like 3000 reports of autopilot failure. And they say like, this is like a huge deal, but honestly, I'm not surprised to hear 3000 reports of autopilot failure like this. Like autopilot, there's been billions of miles ridden on autopilot at this point. There's millions of vehicles, millions, like four, maybe not four, but close to 4 million, um,

Tesla vehicles that are equipped with autopilot and then you're driving autopilot most days, several miles. And so we're talking about billions of miles ridden autopilot. So the fact that there's 3000 incident reports, I'm not surprised by it. Um,

And so the most concerning part of it is probably the leak in itself because it includes apparently confidential information on consumers and employees. So the fact that it happened is not good.

But on the consumer side of things, and that released a tool where you're supposed to check. You can check if your car is part of that leak. And I partnered up with Jason Hughes to check. And he put a script on it. And he checked 1,000 VIN pretty fast. And only 13 came back.

and it's not exactly clear what kind of information they have on these cars. It looks more heavy on the employee side of things. And it is concerning if an employee can easily have access to social security information and salary information for all employees. That's not good, so Tesla should definitely tighten things up. But on the autopilot side of things, I was not impressed on what came out of it.

What I like to post on Twitter, the editor-in-chief of Engelsblatt, he posted an opinion piece where he justified posting the stolen information, which I don't like. It's okay to get sources and post information, but he said this needs to be in the public domain, and then all of the articles are behind paywall. Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. This came out just today. This is new. It's Tesla Electric. So we've been seeing the early days of Tesla Electric, which is a new division for Tesla that's an actual electricity retailer in Texas for now, but obviously they plan to expand to other markets. It's just that they have received approval in Texas. That is a kind of a far west style electric utility market where it's –

um, free for all and, uh, uh, for good, good and for bad, but for good, did I enable Tesla to launch this thing? They announced it earlier this year at the, um, investor day where they're going to do unlimited overnight charging. So the, they have, you get on Tesla's rates, which they posted actually today looks like decent rate, about 9 cents per, per kilowatt hour. And, um,

overnight you can pay $30 a month and no matter how much kilowatt hour that you use during that night to charge, it's $30 a month. That's all it is. So a dollar a day, that's pretty crazy. Yeah, a dollar a day. So charging your car to full capacity is going to cost you a dollar, basically.

It's going to be great for Uber drivers. Yeah, exactly. Everyone that uses their cars during the day, it's going to be great news. And now what they're doing, they're doing a little incentive thing. So it's weird. It looks like they want to both onboard people on that program and also use it because it's also an incentive to buy a Tesla because if you put that process into the cost of ownership and it's going to reduce your cost of ownership, it's

Um, but it hasn't launched. It's launching in July apparently. And, but they are, you can already, we put a link to a tool on the website on, on the, um,

electric regulators in texas where you can check if you are eligible to the tesla electric plan and if you are you can buy a model 3 and say that you're going to get on that plan and they're going to pay for your first year basically overnight charging so your first year is going to be free you're going to charge your car for free overnight so it's basically it's 30 a month that you're going to save for the first year um and that's if you take delivery of the car by the end of june obviously so it's like a little end of uh

end of quarter incentive from Tesla, but just for people in Texas that can be on this rate.

And that can be anyone, but basically you just need to be able to charge your car on your own electric meter. So even if you're in an apartment, but you can plug your car in an electric meter that is connected to your account, you can do it. So that's interesting. Also, you don't need a Tesla connector. Everything is done through the car. You don't need a Tesla power wall. You don't need any of that. Literally, your electricity provider is going to be Tesla.

What's interesting is there's nothing that would stop Tesla from doing this to other EV owners. I think maybe they would need a charger. They would need something Tesla to control the charge rate because that Tesla needs to oversee the charge rates from like it needs to be after 10 p.m. before 6 a.m., I think. Yeah, but you could just buy a Tesla charger with one of those. Yeah.

Yeah, that's right. There's no about I mean, right now they say that they're doing it from the car side. So maybe that's they need to update something on the charger side. Because you see you don't need a Tesla charger even to do it. Yeah. That's an interesting new feature that this is working on.

Oh, yeah, we had the little exclusive this week, 200 Tesla Powerwall 3. We had the exclusive, and it is coming just earlier this month. We saw it was certified by electric utilities in the U.S., but there's still new information about it. Now, an electric reader sends us this information.

PV hazard control system documentation that was under the solar installation documentation that they're about to do. So it looks like this is starting to plan to install those power walls now to a new installation that are linked to the solar system that they sell. And in those, we don't have that much information about the specs of the Powerwall 3, but there was one thing that we knew is the power output. So it does mention the power output of 11.5 kilowatts.

which is higher than the peak power output of the Powerwall+, which was 9.6 kilowatt. However, if I'm looking at those rated power outputs there, it looks like it's the maximum continuous power when it's on the grid. The actual Powerwall have a higher max output if they are off-grid mode.

And it looks like these are on-grid mode. So I would assume that the power output of Powerwall 3 is even greater than 11.5 because that's 7.6, I think, for the Powerwall Plus. So if it goes from 7.6 to 11.5 on just the on-grid, it could be much higher in the off-grid. So that's interesting. Yeah.

That's 7.6 to 7.5. I think that's 50% higher, literally. So it's a big upgrade. Now that's on the power side of things. It's not on the energy storage, energy capacity of it. So currently the Powerwall Plus has 13.5 and that has been the case since Powerwall 2. So we don't know if there's going to be an upgrade on that front.

I would assume if the power output has increased so much, I would assume the energy capacity has increased to now by 50%. I don't know. But I could see something between like 16 and 20 kilowatt hour because that could probably make it a lot easier for the installation where...

I just want to install because now a lot of this installation, I'm installing two of them at a time. Installing two of something will take longer than installing one of something. Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking. 7.6, that's 32 amps. 11.5, that's 48 amps. 11.5 is going to be enough power to power almost every house reasonably. One power wall is going to be

kind of the default yeah because that's the thing a lot of people don't think about when they they think they need a power wall where um they think oh yeah 13.5 is is good it's it's enough for like i lose electricity for a few hours or whatever which is true but the limitation is actually more on the continuous power side or at least it was for power two at five kilowatts like most home needed at least two and even with the power l plus at 7.6

It was also somewhat limiting in 9.8 off-grid. So now it's also a big deal for the discharge rate for those that are using the net metering because if you're sending energy back to the grid, the limitation factor is the power output of the Powerwall. So now if you have one of those events in California, for example, we're talking about

just these few nights in September that's going to pay for your whole Powerwall basically in California under the new rules where you're getting like $2 per kilowatt hour that you have. You're going to put out a lot more kilowatt hours during those two hours if you have 11.5 capacity of power output. Yep, that's pretty sweet. And I would assume that the whole Powerwall 3 is going to be unveiled relatively soon if we're

If you're getting trickling information like that all the time. Oh, the BMW i5 was fully unveiled this week and looks like a nice sedan, honestly. I think people are going to be a little bit more happy with this one than the previous high vehicle from BMW. And the kidney grill has been toned down a bit. Now it looks a little bit more like the versions on the internal combustion engine BMWs.

So I know a lot of people are not a fan of them, but I think these are a lot more palatable. Does that make sense? Yeah. It just looks more like a regular BMW. They don't make it look so much like, hey, look at me. It's electric. BMW has some great design. You don't need to do that. Great design except for those inputs on the interior that we just hate the user inputs inside.

Oh, the dial? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, the dial is just not a great concept. Just give me a good touchscreen or some analog buttons. I don't need that. I don't need a dial. Yeah, so what are the specs on these things? I'm going to need that to see the articles. I don't remember. I mean, the size of it, the size is basically a 5 Series. We know that. All right. Do you see the specs and pricing? Go all the way down probably, yeah.

All right. So the eDrive 40, the base model, is 335 horsepower. Kind of okay. 295 foot-pound torque. Sport mode, 0 to 60 in 5.7 seconds. That's not going to impress too many people. But the faster version is going to go to the eDrive 40 is 295 miles on a charge. 3.7 seconds on the... Oh, yeah. Here we go. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, 0-60 in 3.5 on the eDrive, the M60. So that's the one you're going to probably want to get. 295 miles of range. That's BMW estimated, but that's probably, is that WLTP? Yeah, that's BMW estimate, not EPA. And then the faster one is only going to have 256 miles of range. A little bit of a disappointment there. Yeah.

256 is not horrible, but it's not going to blow anybody away.

Yeah, I mean, this car also, but it sits a little bit more like a different, like a segment that is not super electrified right now. Like these bigger sedans, like these mid-range sedans, it's not like a Model 3. It's not like a Model S. It's not like an EQS. It's not like it sits in between a little bit because the pricing is not horrific on it. It's not like an $80,000 car. I think it starts at $60,000.

Yeah, $66,000. $66,000. Oh, yeah. So it's not cheap because you won't get access to the tax credit on those. Yeah. Yeah. You need to really want one. That's a problem in the U.S., though, with the tax credit. Like if you don't have access to it and you have another card and you have access to it, you're like, I mean, it's free money. I'm going to take the free money. But at the same time, it's not for everyone, obviously, with the income limitations, too. Right. Right.

All right, we have a few more news items we want to discuss before we jump into the comments section this week. So if you guys have any comments for us, please...

please let us know uh if you have any subjects you want us to do this in the navy community we can jump on that too doesn't have to be initially related to uh what we discussed today and if you do enjoy the show uh and also if you're happy about as happy as us with the uh ford deal for the supercharger and the tesla connector uh please drop us a like uh thumbs up uh whatever it is on the app that you're watching right now because we're live everywhere and if you do enjoy the podcast um

On the Apple podcast, you can also give us a five-star review. That helps the show tremendously. We appreciate everything on them. We got two of them last week that we read and we liked you guys' comments. Thank you very much. All right. So Cadillac announces the Escalade IQ, another huge low-volume EV. That last part was my editorial on it. But you know the Escalade is going to have a huge Hummer-like battery. They're not going to, you know,

cut that down at all yeah um gm said basically just this is the name and we're going to announce it later this year yeah but you are you comparing like when you said low volume you mean more about pricing and and the fact that it's going to be a yeah i mean the car or it's gonna be a hundred thousand dollar vehicle i would assume yeah because also you have the fact like you can literally compare it when it comes to cadillac you have the celestic which is like literally like a

hand-built $300,000 car. So I hope they don't do that with the SK because the SK is on the gasoline-powered side of things. It's a fairly high-volume car, is it? Yeah, it's their best-selling vehicle. But Cadillac's not a huge seller of vehicles. But...

you know, and the other thing is when we went to the GM battery day event right before the pandemic, they had an Escalade EV and it was huge. Like it, it, like the wheels were just, everything about it was just a monster. So that's immediately what I conjured up when the announcement came. Um, I, I kind of hope they scale that back. Um, but you know, I don't know if they will, uh,

Maybe we'll see something more about that in the coming weeks and months. But it'll most likely use the same battery that the Silverado is using to get, what, 350 miles of range? And the Hummer EV uses...

200 plus kilowatt hours. It's interesting right now because obviously Cadillac's main competitor is Lincoln and Ford's CEO, who we talked about earlier, Jim Farley, has been talking about huge batteries not being necessary or profitable or whatever. I mean, obviously the Ford F-150 has a pretty large battery over 130, 140 kilowatt hours, but

these are 200 kilowatt hours. Ram is talking about some 250 kilowatt hour batteries. It's interesting that this space right now is pretty interesting. I also had a problem with the EQ, IQ. What's that about the EQ? I understand they did the Lyric and they did the Celestic. That's fine, but then the Escalade IQ sounds like all of Mercedes stuff, which is EQ. I don't know. It just seems like

Jeez. So anyway. What's Cadillac's goal? They want to be all electric, right? By relatively soon. And they said they're not going to announce any more gas cars. Yeah. But they're going to phase out the gasoline powered one. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And then the new generation, there won't be like a new generation of gasoline escalate either. Right.

That came out yesterday. Hyundai and LG are making a deal to produce a very large $4.3 billion battery plant in the U.S. And I think it's coming to Georgia from Hyundai. The Koreans, they love the South for their battery. Not just the battery, their car factories too.

It's not just the Korean manufacturers. The Germans love it too. Yeah, the Germans love it too. And so what's the... Do you see the timing on this thing? I don't remember exactly. I'm looking for it here. Enough 30 gigawatt hour of batteries. Okay, so that makes sense for a $4.3 billion investment. 2025. Right, at the earliest. Yeah, yeah.

3,000 jobs, that's good. Yeah, construction in the second half of the year. It's in Bryan County. I don't know where that is. Georgia, Bryan County. Good news for people there. There's a lot of jobs, 3,000 jobs or something like that. Generally, that's the size for these large factories. All right, let's jump into the comment section.

All right. We had a bunch at the beginning when we were talking about the Ford NACs. So let's jump into those. Dan Overstay, a question. Do you think Ford will change the location of the charge port? We did talk about that a little bit. That would be great if they did. Or maybe they put the CCS in one spot and the NACs in another. Yeah, it depends if they go with the dual chargers or not. Yeah. Yeah.

Probably not economical to do that, though. Did Forges create a nightmare scenario where CCS standard is eroded? I'm concerned that this was a real tipping point towards massive confusion in the industry. It will be CCS regardless because...

NACS is in the protocol. They have written as a standard. Yeah, NACS, I believe, uses the CCS protocol. Yeah, they do. So, I mean, it's just... It's the connector. It's just metal, touching metal. And the connector itself, the design of the connector is undeniably better than CCS. Right. Smaller, easier, everything.

Yeah. But I understand Carl's concern, though, obviously. No one wants to have a different standard and everything. So we thought that Tesla was going to fold. Now it seems to be very much alive. So obviously, you want the best design to win. So you would want the NAX to take over. It could create...

like a hardcore thing for a little bit. Like, I don't know if, let's say that nothing else happened. Like it was just Ford and Tesla versus everybody else on CCS.

is that that huge of a deal like it's just it's not that different than what we have right now uh especially if that adapter is available to everybody else and they just but i think i think like if it stays like that it's just it gives tesla and ford the advantage like you just you have a little bit smoother experience with those two on the supercharger network which is by far the best charging network

So that's really the changing point is like how much better is the supercharger network to everybody else? So how smooth of an experience you want on that. And if Tesla and Ford have the advantage there, that's good. So yeah, I mean, if the others, and when I mean the others, I mean the automakers and the charging networks don't want to get on board with NACs, that's fine. But then they're going to have to hub their game a lot.

to be able to compensate for how smooth the supercharger experience is. Um, so I guess that's the decision they have to make right now. It's like, do we get bitter at what we do or do we fall? They just use Tesla stuff, uh, which is not necessarily Tesla stuff anymore. It's snacks. Um, but, uh, honestly, like this, this is one of those, like, I think that, um,

I know I've seen some of the naysayers at Tesla that are saying, oh, it's just like a money grab because of the money for a charging station for the federal government that requires more than one. If that was just a money grab, there's a lot easier ways to do it. And that easier way is that magic duck thing. Like just do the magic duck and don't care about what other automakers do or don't with their EVs.

So I don't think it's a money grab. I think it's literally the Tesla mission to accelerate the advent of EVs. And if everybody uses the NAX, it's going to help those EVs to sell more. It's as simple as that. So I think this is one of those things where it's actually like Tesla has done the mission thing more than anything else. It's not a money grab. Yeah, I'm convinced. Usually I'm skeptical, but I think... And we've always said that the Tesla...

charger handle is better. There's no question. It's just smaller. You just need to see them. You just need to handle them. There's no argument. All right. Stacey Drennan from Facebook says, absolutely no way CCS wins North America after this.

I think they need one more. I think they need to seal the deal. I think to be a real domino effect, fair to Ford, give all the credit to Ford, the first to do it, takes a lot of courage and all that, and they technically would start the domino effect. But to see it start, I need to see another one fall. I don't think it needs to be like GM or like the huge one, but just one more to make a difference, that would be nice.

Maybe Hyundai or... Yeah, a Korean would be great. All right. Sounded during the announcement that pricing for charging wasn't confirmed either. Yeah, I think we're early days on this stuff, but

it sounded like they were going to be reasonable at least. Yeah. Farley mentioned something about like, not necessarily like per the kilowatt hour, but like some subscription service and things like that, that could be also offered. He said, there's going to be several options. Yeah. I'm all for options. I think, didn't Elon say something like it was going to be the same price for Tesla owners as Ford owners? Oh, I didn't remember hearing that. Maybe I'm making that up. I don't know. I feel like I heard that. By the way, uh,

Twitter space is not the best place to get a news conference. I have to say, like, both of them were pretty bad. And were they even in the same room?

Farley and Elon? No, I don't think so. You don't need to be in the same room for Twister Space. That's the whole idea, though. This one wasn't bad. I know they sent this one before there was an issue and they had to restart on another page than Elon's, but Elon's claimed that it was because there was too many people coming to this page. But to be honest, the

it sounded a lot like you know when Trump said that his inauguration it was record people and all that they kept always like lying about the crowds and everything it sounded a lot like that because like this is huge this is the biggest Twitter space of all time and they were 300,000 people which is nice like it's a lot of people like congrats but it's like that sounds like TV readings to me like it's not that difference like it's TV readings 300,000 sounds like CNBC has probably that like 300,000 people

All right. Uh, Carl and San Diego magic doc will be abandoned. Uh, it is interesting that they haven't kept going with the magic doc. Um,

Just an observation. They rolled out, what, seven MagicDock stations and zero after that. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe they gave it up because of that. And Stacey has a good point. MagicDock is the adapter. I mean, it's basically like one side is Tesla and one side is CCS and it's not rocket science. All right. Let's keep moving through these.

Tesla monopoly and U.S. charging network is a huge bad risk, too big to fail. There's no monopoly at all. Like anybody can build a charger. And they have. There is another charger. There's several, several other networks. It's just not as good. I can't get a blame like Tesla for being better than the others. Yeah, I know. And Electrify America had free money. Yeah.

Yeah. It's kind of on them, really. Looks like there's room to play. Okay, so now we're talking about the Cybertruck. Looks like there's room to play Gooseball on the match of Dash. It's still better than the Yoke. Sylvan says about the... Yeah, well, yeah, that's fair. Yeah, I think the new steering wheel is better. Carl thinks the Dash is a dog bed. Probably not safe for driving, but maybe...

At other times, Daniel DeYoung is opening the network, a net positive or net negative for Tesla? All right, we're back in the – seems very positive for Ford. If you're shopping Mach-E versus Model Y, the biggest factor was charging. Yeah, I mean, it's a net positive on, like, if you want to have a bigger charging business. But, yeah, it does –

It does remove an advantage that you have and that now it's not just you that you have it. You have a competitor that has it too. But again, that's why I'm saying it's a mission move. It's not like a business move, I think. It's very much about the mission. So I don't really care really if it's a net positive or not. It's a net positive for EVs and for consumers in the US. Yeah. All right. Moving on a little bit.

It's not a monopoly. Anybody can use the plug and make the charger. Now it's a better plug anyway. Plus Tesla actually maintains their network to the day at the other. The dash is where you can carry full sheets of plywood. Everybody's been worried about. Okay. Yeah. That was a thing like with the bed, people want to know if they can lay a full sheet of plywood. Uh, do we have any idea how profitable the charging network is for Tesla? I mean, up until recently, it's been kind of a break even. Yeah. And, um,

I mean, Tesla is starting to make some money on that. The thing is that it's in the column in the row about service providers.

And everything else. So I think service is probably the biggest part of it, actual service. But also, obviously, used car business is also in there. That's also huge. So I think charging is not a big one in there, but it did turn positive recently. So it is somewhat profitable. No, we don't know. The answer is that we don't know if it's profitable or not. I think it can be long term for sure. Yeah. Yeah.

All right. Have you ever used an on-route charger in Ontario? They're right off the highway and have both CCS and Tesla adapters, but I don't think Tesla installed their own. I'm not familiar with those. Yeah, those are truck stops, I think, in that way. Solid state, anything new in solid state battery in the EV industry? I'm following QuantumScape and SolidPower fairly closely. I think they are the two that are closest to bringing to production. And they both...

or look like they are on pace for having automotive-grade batteries this year or later this year. It sounds like it. It sounds like they're both, like, around getting close to it. We heard that one before, obviously, so take it with a grain of salt. But, yeah, it looks...

It looks like we're getting fairly close. It's in the next maybe 12 months. Automakers are going to have something that they can test out in their cars. And that doesn't mean commercial production just yet, but at least that's what's encouraging about solid state and quantum scapes is they're not just like labs trying to make prototypes of cells. Their cells are meant to be mass produced. So that's the encouraging part.

All right. So much factory growth in the face of a recession is super risky for Tesla, already facing demand slowing. It's like they didn't notice. I think they've got a lot of cash, though, on hand. Tesla does. A lot of cash on hand. And I think the latest price cut did help a lot on that front. All right. So talking about the i5, it's kind of the same motors as the i4s, but bigger trunk and room.

Uh, his love army. Can you expand on the power of all almost being free? If you are in California, uh, that's, that's getting paid back from those super peaks. Yeah. Yeah. They've been, they've been a change in the, in the, in the net mentoring laws lately is in laws or rules or whatever. Uh, and, uh,

Now, the paybacks are extremely low, disappointingly low most of the time, but super, super high in September, like a few days in September when it's known that the power grid in California needs help. So just those few days, you can make hundreds of dollars every year from having a Powerwall. So yeah.

I'm not maybe not exactly free, but it does compensate for the cost of having a power wall, which then you can use for like off grid if you lose the power because of outages and all that. So you can get all the benefits and having the cost being covered by this these few days that you can make hundred dollars, hundreds of dollars.

Carl in San Diego, I don't think the NAX connector can handle liquid cooling. While I think liquid cooling is overkill, it's where the 350 kilowatt charging was taking us. No, it doesn't. It has liquid cooling. Moving on. Do you think Tesla is giving with a build pit? Yeah, I don't know what that means. Monroe took apart the Hummer EV pack. I didn't check that out. I didn't see any news coming out of that.

Did you watch that at all? No. Okay. Do you think Tesla is expanding its supercharger network fast enough to keep up with demand?

I mean, to keep up with demand, that's a good question. They are expanding it fast. I think so. The keep up with demand part is like there is going to be some bottlenecks at times. But those are generally like in some specific regions. Tesla doesn't skimp on this, at least. When they do deploy a new station, they do deploy at least six chargers, which is unlike most of them. And most of the time, it is unlike most of the other networks. And most of the time, it's way more than six. It's eight.

20, 40 sometimes. So I think we see Tesla now like focusing more on getting those extra charging station to help areas that are bottlenecks. But yeah,

Yeah, I mean, I think Tesla's pretty smart on that. Like, they have all the data to do it. Like, they know, like, okay, like, we... They know, like, a surge of demand in a specific area. They know the capacity of their network there. They have all the data to do it. When this doesn't go right, I think it's more of an issue of, like, there's so many things that can slow down an installation of a supercharger station. There's just so many factors that have to come together at once to make a station happen that if there's a delay on one, then that's when, okay, like...

Then they were back up on the capacity in the region. And then, boom, it's Thanksgiving and everybody is traveling. And then that's where you get those lines happening. Yeah. All right. Moving on. Does the Escalade have a frunk? We know nothing about the Escalade. It's huge. Why not? Maybe it might be hard to reach. It's so big.

So that, that's, uh, the front. Yeah. Uh, when superchargers get four, I have only one spot. The software could show zero available to Ford and other drivers leaving the spot for Tesla thoughts. Uh, that would be not great. Yeah. Yeah. What, what Tesla needs though, is like some kind of like queuing system in the, uh, app for, uh, for when the stations are full, that would, that would take care of some of that. Okay. Uh,

Not a fan of Barra, Mr. Turkinick. I think that's true. Anyway, Carlton, do you agree having Twitter announcement 24 hours after DeSantis announcement was super bad optics for Ford? Musk and DeSantis are both anti-union.

It did sound, so I have to say like Ford kind of capitulating, I would say a little bit, uh, it was a little bit, it just felt like a little bit like, you know, you'll, it just felt like Ford had, and rightfully so they had, you know, their network sucks, their charging network, you know, the Ford network wasn't any good. So they're capitulating. It's going to be better for the customers. So good for Ford for doing it. But,

They're not walking around. Making the announcement on Twitter, I think that's Elon these days. If you want to do some kind of announcement, something with Elon, you're going to have to do it on Twitter space. The guy is flawed pushing Twitter right now. That's what he wants to do. All right, Carl in San Diego, the point about Tesla monopoly is that if every other manufacturer adopts next, then relies on Tesla network versus doing deals with other networks to help them grow. No, no, no, no, no, no.

No, no, that's not the deal. If you adopt NACS, NACS is an open standard right now, so anyone can build a charger also and operate their own networks with the same connectors. That's it. And we already see that happening. We go as the NACS now on some of the stations, and it's growing on more stations. So Electrify America can do the same if they want and so on. So there's not going to be any monopoly. It's not going to be like...

I know the fear on this and the fear like if there was like just Shell has hauled the gas station in the world, then obviously they can control the pricing and all that. And not that there's not be any... What do you call that in English when they all gang together and fix the price? Oh, like OPEC. Cartel. Well, yeah. It's basically cartel. So...

Yeah, there's not going to be that because, first of all, it's not like oil also. The price of the rates of a charging station are so relying on electricity rates that it's all going to depend on who produces electricity at what rates. But the chargers themselves, anyone can build them with a NAX right now. So, yeah, it's not a monopoly anymore.

All right, Sylvain, with the last one, Tesla also announced today that they are opening up chargers in Canada to other cars and creating an Ottawa-Sudbury charging corridor for other brands. Are you aware of this? Yeah, I mean, we did a report on the corridor yesterday.

I think now Tesla is getting onto the deal where they're going to facilitate that by opening the supercharger on those Corredor items. We knew that it was going to happen. We knew that Tesla was just going to open all the station eventually. So I think they just got on board for the specific section that they're opening. All right, cool. That's it. Well, that's it for us today, everyone. Thanks a lot for listening. I appreciate every single one of you. And we're going to see you same time, same place next week.